What Murder Drones Actually Is
Murder Drones is an animated web series created by Liam Vickers that premiered on YouTube. It follows Disposable Ugly-074, known as "N," a worker drone sent to the abandoned planet Copper 9 who gets entangled with Absolute Solver-powered Disassembly Drones. The show deals with themes of existential dread, artificial consciousness, and body horror wrapped in a sci-fi premise. It gained a massive following quickly, and with that came an enormous amount of fan-created content. The fan fiction surrounding Murder Drones spans everything from lighthearted alternate universe stories to genuinely disturbing interpretations that take the show's darker elements and push them well beyond what the source material presents. Some of it is fine creative writing. A lot of it isn't. The disconnect between what the show does with mature themes and what certain fan writers do with those same themes is where things get complicated. I've been reading and moderating fan fiction communities for over a decade across multiple franchises, and Murder Drones represents something I've seen repeat across different fandoms but with particular intensity here. The show's visual design and lore create a specific kind of narrative vacuum that certain writers fill in ways that are... notable.
The Fan Fiction Ecosystem
Murder Drones fan fiction exists primarily on Archive of Our Own, FanFiction.net, and various Discord servers and Tumblr blogs. The AO3 tags system makes it somewhat easier to filter content, but the tagging culture around this fandom has its own problems. Content warnings are frequently inadequate or missing entirely. Tags that should indicate explicit violence or non-consensual themes are sometimes omitted because writers assume readers will figure it out from context. The most common categories I see fall into a few buckets: general AU stories where characters survive events differently, character studies focusing on either N or J, romance pairings (the most popular being N/J or N/V), and then the darker material that takes the Disassembly Drones' killing nature and explores it in increasingly graphic detail. There is no official download link for Murder Drones fan fiction because fan fiction isn't distributed through official channels. It lives on hosting platforms. If someone is offering a PDF compilation or a paid download of Murder Drones fan fiction, they're likely aggregating content without permission from the original authors, which is a separate ethical issue worth considering before engaging with.
What Makes This Fandom Different
One thing people don't always discuss about the Murder Drones fandom is how the show's setting creates unique narrative opportunities that other franchises don't offer. These are robots. They don't need to breathe, eat, or sleep in the traditional sense. They can be disassembled and reassembled. Their bodies are modular. The show uses this for horror and comedy, but fan writers have taken these mechanics in directions the show never intended. I spent considerable time tracking down workarounds when I was trying to compile a resource list for readers who wanted to explore the fandom but needed to avoid certain content types. The problem is that AO3's search algorithm doesn't always catch cross-tagged content properly. A story tagged as "General Audiences" might still contain scenes that violate someone's boundaries if the author forgot to tag additional content appropriately. This happens more often than I'd like to admit across the entire platform, not just in this fandom. The workaround I settled on was building a personal filter list using AO3's advanced search with multiple exclusion tags, then manually checking the first five chapters of anything that matched my interest criteria before committing to a full read. It adds maybe ten minutes to the discovery process, but it prevents the much larger time cost of having to stop reading something distressing halfway through.
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The Darker Side
Without getting sensationalistic about it, the Murder Drones fan fiction community contains a subset of content that explores extreme violence, non-consensual scenarios, and psychological torture with a level of detail that exceeds what appears in the show itself. This isn't unique to this fandom. Most fiction communities develop these undercurrents. What makes Murder Drones somewhat distinct is how the source material's existing dark tone provides cover for writers who escalate content beyond reasonable interpretations of the source. The show is rated TV-MA for a reason. It depicts violence and psychological trauma. But there is a measurable difference between fiction that examines dark themes with narrative purpose and fiction that exists primarily to depict those themes for their own sake. The fan fiction community, like most unmoderated creative spaces, contains both, and the line between them is subjective enough that reasonable people disagree about where it falls. Another issue I've encountered is the tendency for certain popular fan theories to harden into accepted canon within the community. When a theory about a character's backstory or motivation gains enough traction, it influences how writers approach those characters, which then influences what readers expect, creating a feedback loop. This is true across all fandoms but tends to be more pronounced in communities built around shows with sparse but dense lore like Murder Drones.
Navigating the Community
If you're looking to engage with Murder Drones fan fiction, start with the tags. Learn how AO3's filtering works. Read the comments on highly-rated stories to gauge the community's general tone. Some fandoms are collaborative and supportive. Some are competitive and hostile. The Murder Drones community skews toward the former, but individual works and individual writers exist across the full spectrum. Keep in mind that creative fiction, even dark fiction, is a legitimate form of expression for many writers. The existence of content you find distressing doesn't make it malicious, though it's completely valid to avoid it. The friction in these communities usually comes from people treating their personal content boundaries as universal standards, which creates unnecessary conflict. For the show itself, Murder Drones is available on YouTube through Liam Vickers' official channel and has been picked up for broader distribution. Season 1 is complete. Season 2 has been announced. The official content is relatively contained compared to what the fan base has produced in the same timeframe.
