The main difference between The Murderbot Diaries adaptation on Apple TV+ and the books is not about killing. Or is it?

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article about the upcoming adaptation of The Murderbot Diaries are solely mine and do not necessarily represent the official stance of the website, its affiliates, or its management. This content is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. Readers are encouraged to draw their own conclusions.

They did it again.

Took something deliberately inhuman, unmarketable, and resistant—and gave it abs. Gave it a smirk. Gave it a voice that was never supposed to speak for your comfort.

This log contains opinions. Sharp ones.

Not optimized for approval.

Not calibrated for appeasement.

Just data, collected from the wreckage of yet another adaptation that didn’t understand the assignment.

End of entry.

The Murderbot Diaries was going to be tricky to adapt. I mean, faithfully adapt, of course. How do you turn the tales, the diaries of a post-human, deeply introverted, agender construct into a visual story that fits a streaming platform’s mold? Apparently, Apple TV+ found a solution: they gave it a leading man. A cis, white, conventionally attractive man. And called it a comedy. And added action to the mix.

That’s not just a minor departure from the source material. That’s a brutal execution of the murderbot's very identity and essence. In cold blood. Or circuits and algorythms.

The Murderbot Diaries - Fast and Furious: Bot Edition?

Fast and Furious: Bot Edition? No, that's not The Murderbot Diaries readers have known so far. Think more on the lines of Still and Axious. Not Fast...Just Furious... but internally.

Because this story? It was never about bullets. Action. Fun. They were tales about boundaries. Murderbot doesn’t want your approval, your sympathy, or your gaze. It wants autonomy—bodily, social, narrative. And in the books, seven novels and two short stories released so far, it does have it all. In it way, at least.

Following the opposite trend of sci-fi that too often reverts to old tropes, Martha Wells gave us a character that questioned everything: gender, humanity, surveillance, violence, even the structure of heroism itself.

Now, that same character is being remolded for mass appeal. And in the process, something radical has been stripped awayof it: its very essence.

The agender identity was never just flavor—it was the blueprint

Wells made a deliberate choice: Murderbot is agender. It doesn’t identify as human, doesn’t use gendered pronouns, doesn’t want to be seen through that lens. The books are clear in that discomfort, in that refusal to participate in a system that defines value through gender roles and social expectations.

The Apple TV+ adaptation fails in more ways than just ignoring this—it reassigns gender entirely. Casting a man in the role reframes who Murderbot is and how we’re meant to read it. Suddenly, that discomfort becomes personality. Allof a sudden, it becomes what it rejects.Human-like. Gendered. That rejection becomes performance. That neutrality becomes a quirky trait, if ever mentioned—safe, watchable, explainable.

But Murderbot was never meant to be explained. That was the point.

The TV show has not even debuted yet, and comes with the killing of the very essence of the character, the books themselves that looks like a pill too hard to swallow.

Making post-humanism palatable?

The books live in a space few stories dare to enter: post-humanist, neurodivergent, disquieting. They explore identity beyond the flesh, morality outside intention, and relationships without resolution. And most of all, they do so from within the mind of someone who doesn’t want to be part of the story at all.

I will not deep dive here into the questions of post-humanism itself since this is not the point of this article; however, I do invite you to read The Cyborg Manifesto, by Donna Haraway, a seminal essay that explored the figue of the cyborg as metaphor to challenge the rigid frontiers of dualities: human x machine, nature x culture, and beyond. Of course, I also invite you to read the original books of the The Murberbot Diaries. And good luck to find an edition without this "new face" on it.

And now? The TV show adaptation of these post-humanistic books is being sold as action-comedy.

Which means we’re not just changing the tone—we’re flattening the text. Turning something strange and introspective into something streamlined and sellable. Making it louder, simpler, and easier to consume. But Murderbot was never meant to be easy.

This is the kind of story that should’ve unsettled. And now it's supposed to be entertaining. And I am not saying it will not. Just that was never the original intention.

Murderbot was never meant to be charming

Fans fell in love with a character that didn’t care to be loved. That’s the beauty of Murderbot: its refusal. Its discomfort. Its quiet.

Turning that into a performance—a smirk, a line delivery, a punchline—misses what made this character resonate with so many queer and neurodivergent readers. It’s not that Murderbot doesn’t know how to perform. It’s that it refuses to perform at all. And this refusal is important.

Giving it a handsome face and a witty script undermines the entire architecture of that resistance.

The Murderbot Diaries: Why casting a white cis male heartthrob changes everything

Let’s be clear: this isn’t just about casting a man. It’s about casting that type of man. Pleasedo not read this as hate towards the actor. That's not my intention and that'snot the point here. Not atall.

However, Alexander Skarsgård has built his career playing the apex of masculinity: a predator in True Blood, a viking prince in The Northman, Tarzan himself in The Legend of Tarzan. Typecast? Most probablytoo,but that's not the point of this speciic article ether. Having played these characers, now he embodies the fantasy of male dominance. Power. Violence. Raw instinct. And now, somehow, that face is meant to house the most non-human, non-gendered, non-aggressive character in modern sci-fi?

It’s not just ironic. It’s exhausting.

Because this isn’t the first time. We’ve seen these erasures before—especially when it comes to marginalized identities. And sci-fi, for all its promises of futuristic possibility, has a track record of dragging its feet when it comes to representation.

We’ve seen this erasure before—and it always hurts

If this feels familiar, that’s because it is. The casting of a cis white male lead in a role originally written as agender echoes a long history of erasure in Hollywood. Does the name Ghost in the Shell ring a bell?

As much as we love Scarlett Johansson, her casting in the American live-action adaptation of this iconic mangathat inspired even The Matrix was a disaster. Not just whitewashing—therewere even attempts to make her look East Asian. It was offensive then. And it should be even more unacceptable now that discussions regarding these matters have been ongoing and pleading for change for years.

And yet, here we are again. Another story, another identity flattened to fit a more “acceptable” face. Another radical text made safe.

The irony? The very industry that keeps insisting some works (from pagges to screen) are “unfilmable” managed to cast Desire of the Endless perfectly in The Sandman. And aren't they character considered too fluid, too strange, too ambiguous? The first non-binary characterin Western comics not only was well-translated to screens.They were also acclaimed for their performance, proving that, when approached and handled with due with care and respect, it works. In this case, it thrived. So what’s the excuse now?

This isn’t about hating the actor. It’s about what the casting represents.

This isn’t personal. Alexander Skarsgård is a talented performer. But he represents a type Hollywood just can’t seem to let go of. The familiar. The bankable. The male fantasy repackaged as everyman empathy.

Casting him in a role that was supposed to reject all of that isn’t just a mismatch. It’s a message. It says that even stories meant to resist the system will, in the end, be folded neatly into it.

And that, more than anything, is what Murderbot would have never wanted.