About the Author

Persephone van der Waard is the author of Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). She is a MtF trans woman, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster with two partners. Including her multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her fifteen muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. First and foremost, she is a sex work activist, fighting for sex worker liberation through iconoclastic/sex-positive artwork. To that, she is an anarcho-Communist writer, illustrator, BDSM educator, sex worker, genderqueer/environmental activist and Gothic ludologist—with her (independent) PhD having been written on Metroidvania combined with the above variables; i.e., to coin and articulate ludo-Gothic BDSM as a sex-positive poetic device in order to achieve Gothic Communism:

ludo-Gothic BDSM

My combining of an older academic term, “ludic-Gothic” (Gothic videogames), with sex-positive BDSM theatrics as a potent means of camp. The emphasis is less about “how can videogames be Gothic” and more how the playfulness in videogames is commonly used to allow players to camp canon in and out of videogames as a form of negotiated power exchange established in playful, game-like forms (theatre and rules). Commonly gleaned through Metroidvania as I envision it, but frankly performed in any kind of Gothic poetics—i.e., to playfully attain what I call “the palliative Numinous,” or the Gothic quest for self-destructive power as something to camp.

ludic-Gothic

Gothic videogames. “The ludic-gothic is created when the Gothic is transformed by the video game medium, and is a kindred genre to survival horror” (source: Laurie Taylor’s “Gothic Bloodlines in Survival Horror Gaming,” 2009).

Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism

Coined by me, Gothic Communism is the deliberate, pointed critique of capital/Capitalism using a unique marriage of Gothic/queer/game theory and Marxist ideas synthesized by sex-positive workers during proletarian praxis. Meant to end neoliberal/fascist Capitalism in order to bring about anarcho-Communism, this liberation occurs through sex-positive labor (and monsters) reclaimed by sex workers (which Derrida called “spectres of Marx” in his eponymous book on hauntology as a Communist “ghost” that haunted language after the so-called “end of history”).

She sometimes writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog; or does continual independent research on Metroidvania and speedrunning every now and again. If you’re interested in her work or curious about illustrated or written commissions, please refer to her commissions page for more information.

Click here to read about the entire Sex Positivity book project and download PDFs for its individual available volumes; e.g., Volumes Zero, One, and Two, part one; etc.

Promo Blogs (for my newer volumes): For the new volumes/sub-volumes—i.e., from Volume Two onwards—I am posting them not just in PDF format, but also on my website in piece-by-piece blog format, too. Currently I’m working my way through Volume Two, which divides in three; part one is the Poetry Module, and part two is the Monster Modules, the Undead and Demons. Each module is effectively its own sub-volume with its own release, but also its own online promo series (where you can download the exhibit images at full resolution, access their table of contents, and read the Sex Positivity series disclaimer): “Brace for Impact,” “Searching for Secrets,” and “Deal with the Devil.” For organizational purposes, all sub-volumes are considered part of the same overall volume. When Volume Two is live, I shall do the same for Volume Three.

Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically shared with permission from the original owner(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (re: attached to each series of my blog-style book promotion, linked above).

Concerning Buggy Images: Sometimes the images on my site don’t always load and you get a little white-and-green placeholder symbol, instead. Sometimes I use a plugin for loading multiple images in one spot, called Envira Gallery, and not all of the images will load (resulting in blank white squares you can still right-click on). I‘ve optimized most of the images on my site, so I think it’s a server issue? Not sure. You should still be able to access the unloaded image by clicking on the placeholder/right-clicking on the white square (sometimes you have to delete the “?ssl=1” bit at the end of the url). Barring that, completed volumes will always contain all of the images, whose PDFs you can always download on my 1-page promo.

Sex Work Portfolio:

Persephone has directed numerous photoshoots and sex tapes, long-distance, as well as having performed them in-person and done solo work.

Performed Sex Work 

While Persephone has an OnlyFans, she currently doesn’t advertise it. However, above are some samples of the sex work she’s done solo, or posed for others/performed with them in person (on either side of the camera).

Director’s Portfolio 

Various shots from shoots/tapes that Persephone has directed long-distance; i.e., made with other sex workers to specifically be included in the book.

Gender Identity:

Persephone’s academic journey started when she was 27, in 2014 when she was still in the closet. Since then, she came out as trans in 2022, and hasn’t looked back!

Multimedia and Collages:

Apart from directing (and fucking) models in-person and long-distance, Persephone specializes in multimedia: doing photobashing (combining and painting over images) and making collages of various kinds. Her favorite artist is Bob Ross.

Further Reading by Persephone (on Metroidvania):

Persephone van der Waard completed her BA in English: Language, Literature and Writing at Eastern Michigan University in 2016. She completed her master’s in Manchester, England at Manchester Metropolitian University in 2018. She wrote her master’s thesis back at home, in America, and independently researched her PhD (the thesis volume/Volume Zero) on Metroidvania, which she completed in 2023 with the publication of her thesis volume to Sex Positivity. To that, here is some further reading about Metroidvania taken from her body of work that you might find fun (lifted from two definitions from the Sex Positivity glossary—hence the switch to first person):

Metroidvania as closed space

In the past, my academic/postgraduate work has thoroughly examined the Metroidvania ludonarrative (including speedruns) as a closed/parallel ergodic space; while my critical voice has changed considerably since 2018, I want to show the evolution of my work/gender identity leading into Sex Positivity‘s genesis by listing my entire Metroidvania corpus (not including my entire book volumes, but citing some salient essays from those books):

*Said chapter combines my PhD research after writing my PhD, making “She Fucks Back” a culmination of my life’s work on the subject; I’m very proud of it!

Last but not least, I wanted to share my favorite essay about Metroidvania. Already the culmination of my life’s work, I wanted to cap off my magnum opus [re: “She Fucks Back”] with a fun little announcement, letting you all know the last part of that chapter is now on my website: “Sleeping Beauties: Policing the Whore; or, Topping from Below to Rise from the Ashes” (2024)!

(source: Materia Collective)

Normally it’d just be another post in my book sample series for Volume Two, part two, “Searching for Secrets” (2024). However, “Sleeping Beauties” is extra special because it’s the capstone to my Metroidvania work after my PhD and what I esteem to be my crowning achievement; i.e., I write about rape play a great deal, talking about it outside of Metroidvania all the time (e.g., “Into the Toy Chest, part zero: A Note about Rape/Rape Play; or, Facing the Great Destroyer,” 2024), but “Beauties” complements that work by marrying it to one of my favorite games, Hollow Knight, and its secret final boss, the Radiance! There’s just so much fun academic stuff to unpack (e.g., Manuel Aguirre, Michel Foucault and Mikhail Bakhtin, to name a few)—with me doing so in a way that’s hopefully more accessible, sexy and fun than those authors to read!

To summarize the piece, itself, my website describes it as, “Articulates Aguirre and Bakhtin’s ideas per my evolution of ludo-Gothic BDSM after my master’s thesis and into my graduate work, then considers the Promethean Quest as something that presents the whore as normally hunted by police forces, only to escape their subjugation and imprisonment by acting out her own rape; i.e., as Hollow Knight‘s final boss, the Radiance, does” (source). In short, girl’s a freak, but camps her abuse at the hero’s hands to say something not just about the Pale King, but Capitalism, too, and why it sucks. Maybe in reading “Beauties,” you’ll change how you view not just the game and its approach to sexual violence in Gothic forms, but also the world at large…

In any event, it’s a huge relief to have “Beauties” out there, and I’m very proud of it. Give it a look and let me know what you think!

Though imperfect, these older pieces try to show how the poststructuralist method—when taken beyond its somewhat limited 1960s/70s praxial scope (the ’70s being the emergence of academic Gothic thought)—can be critically empowered in dialectical-material ways; i.e., to actually critique capital through iconoclastic monsters, BDSM/power exchange and spaces in Metroidvania, but also immensely creative interpretations/responses to those variables as already existing for me to rediscover in my own work: speedrunning as a communal effect for solving complex puzzles and telling Gothic ludonarratives in highly inventive ways. As we’ll see moving forward, this strategy isn’t just limited to videogames, but applies to any poetic endeavor during oppositional praxis. —Perse

Metroidvania

A type of Gothic videogame, one involving the exploration of castles and other closed spaces in an ergodic framework; i.e., the struggle of investigating past trauma as expressed through the Gothic castle and its monstrous caverns (which is the author poetically hinting at systemic abuses in real life). Scott Sharkey insists he coined the term (source tweet: evilsharkey, 2023) —ostensibly in the early 2000s while working with Jeremy Parish for 1-Ups.com:

However, the term was probably being used before that in the late ’90s to casually describe the 1997 PSOne game, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night; records of it being used can be found as early as 2001 (this Circle of the Moon Amazon review is from 2003). By 2006, though, Jeremy Parish had a personalized definition on his own blog, “GameSpite | Compendium of Old and Useless Information” (2012):

“Metroidvania” is a stupid word for a wonderful thing. It’s basically a really terrible neologism that describes a videogame genre which combines 2D side-scrolling action with free-roaming exploration and progressive skill and item collection to enable further, uh, progress. As in Metroid and Koji Igarashi-developed Castlevania games. Thus the name (source).

My own postgrad research (“Mazes and Labyrinths”) has expanded/narrowed the definition quite a bit:

Metroidvania are a location-based videogame genre that combines 2D, 2.5D, or 3D platforming [e.g., Dark Souls, 2009] and ranged/melee combat—usually in the 3rd person—inside a giant, closed space. This space communicates Gothic themes of various kinds; encourages exploration* depending on how non-linear the space is; includes progressive skill and item collection, mandatory boss keys and variable gating mechanics (bosses, items, doors); and requires movement powerups in some shape or form, though these can be supplied through RPG elements as an optional alternative.

*Exploration pertains to the deliberate navigation of space beyond that of obvious, linear routes—to search for objects, objectives or secrets off the beaten path (source).

Also from “Mazes and Labyrinths”:

Mazes and Labyrinths: I treat space as essential when defining Metroidvania. Mazes and labyrinths are closed space; their contents exist within a closed structure, either a maze or a labyrinth. A classical labyrinth is a linear system with one set, unicursal path towards an end point; a maze is a non-linear system with multiple paths to an end point [classical texts often treated the words as interchangeable].

Metroidvania, etymology: As its most basic interpretation, Metroidvania is a portmanteau of Metroid and Castlevania, specifically “Metroid” + “-vania.” However, the term has no singular, universally-agreed-upon definition. Because I focus on space, my definitions—of the individual portmanteau components—are as follows:

“Metroid” =/= the franchise, Metroid; “Metroid” = that franchise’s unique treatment of closed space—the maze.

“-vania” =/= the franchise, Castlevania; “castlevania” equals that franchise’s unique treatment of closed space—the labyrinth.

At the same time, “Metroid,” or “metro” + “-oid” means “android city.” “Castlevania” or “castle” + “-vania” means “other castle,” “demon castle,” or “castle Dracula.” The portmanteau, “Metroidvania” ≈ “android city” + “demon castle” + “maze” + “labyrinth.”

Further Distinctions: There are further ways to identify if a Metroidvania space is a maze or not. As I explain in my 2019 YouTube video, “Metroidvania Series #2: Mazes and Labyrinths“:

What ultimately determines a Metroidvania’s maze-ness are three sequences: the start, the middle, and the end. The start is what I consider to be the collection of essential items—power-ups you’ll need to use for the entire game. Mid-game is the meat of the experience. The end sequence makes the win condition available to the player.

I mention item collection relative to these sequences because they are a core element of Metroidvania play, hence determine what kind of space the player is dealing with. In Metroid, for example, the Morph Ball, Bomb and Missiles are essential, and the player can acquire all of them rather quickly. Apart from those, however, there are few items you actually need to complete the game. One of them is Ice Beam, which is required to kill metroids, thus gain access to Mother Brain (the game’s end condition). Large portions of the game can be played without it, though. Like many Metroid power-ups, it is a mid-game collectible.

Item collection allows the player to leave the start and enter the middle. This section, I argue, determines whether or not a Metroidvania is a maze. If the majority of the game allows for sequence breaks, RBO (reverse boss order) and low-percent, then it is a maze; if not, it is a labyrinth. A Metroidvania can be either (source: the original script on Google Docs).

In terms of appearance, a Metroidvania’s audiovisual presentation can range from retro-future sci-fi to Neo-Gothic fantasy. Nevertheless, their spaces typically function as Gothic castles; replete with hauntological monsters, demons, and ghosts, they guide whatever action the hero must perform when navigating the world and dealing with its threats (ibid.)