Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of ableism, mental illness, and cursing.

“What you think she is—it’s all made up. Life is short. Fortune is fleeting. Fame is just swirling dust. 

[…]

What matters is family. Without family, you’re nothing.”

The novel opens with Chinyere, who establishes the importance of family over fame and fortune. This foreshadows the larger theme of Navigating Challenging Family Dynamics by stressing that the fame and fortune that Zelu will receive as a published author will wither away. Zelu must ultimately confront her issues with her family to resolve her character issues in the novel.

“But when she finally just asked him what he believed the story meant, he’d said, ‘Why don’t you tell me? What I think of my own work doesn’t matter. The reader decides what it’s about, right? Isn’t that what you said “death of the author” meant?’”

Zelu is fired after she insults an arrogant student, who uses Zelu’s own words to abdicate responsibility for his work. The student’s words become a self-fulfilling prophecy, foreshadowing the ways Zelu’s work will grow larger than her intentions around it. This leads to a parasitic relationship between herself and her readership, who demand that she write more, regardless of how she feels about the way the perception of her work is evolving.

“Stories were the greatest currency to us, greater than power, greater than control. Stories were our food, nourishment, enrichment. To consume a story was to add to our code, deepen our minds. We felt it the moment we took it in. We were changed. It was like falling. It was how we evolved.”

Part of the world building in Rusted Robots revolves around the Humes’ reliance on stories for a greater sense of purpose. Their feelings reflect Zelu’s need to tell stories to engage with her circumstances and the world around her on an emotional level. In this way, Zelu’s act of world building also becomes a metafictional technique, commenting on the power of writing through a piece of writing.