This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.
Click here to see “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!
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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.
Metroidvania, part two: “Look upon my Works, ye Mighty”; or, the Infernal Concentric Pattern and Rape Play in Hollow Knight and Metroidvania at Large (opening)
“Vegeta, Vegeta! Remember that bug planet?” (source).
—Nappa, “Dragon Ball Z Abridged: Episode 9″ (2009)
Picking up from where “Away with the Faeries; or, Double Trouble in Axiom Verge” left off…
Part zero of the “Metroidvania” symposium outlined the Freudian, parental character and dialectical-material elements to the Metroidvania, in effect exploring the Promethean reversal of said parentage (and power) relative to capital’s usual monomythic outings: Hell coming home, versus the hero leaving home to go into Hell. Part one considered such Ozymandian hubris and collapse by close-reading Axiom Verge (and its various parent texts—with Metroid, Alien, Forbidden Planet and At the Mountains of Madness reaching back to Frankenstein), exploring the rise and fall of its persons double-operating through cryptonymic deception to survive tyrannical elements (dead giveaways); i.e., overcoming a former great leader/de facto parent who succumbs to an indomitable monstrous-feminine power like those before him did, capital’s decay letting new iconoclastic stories take root inside the same venues: camping the medieval interplay to move power towards workers, nature, the Medusa (and her toothy tentacles, below), et al.
Part two now takes the spatial elements of a decaying gentry into consideration, examining the sleeping but restless tyrant’s castle in Hollow Knight as mysteriously fallen to ruin; i.e., records that partially survive, decaying in the presence of restless power as fought over by hidden forces during rape play (of a faux-medieval sort), and which regeneration through camouflage (the cryptonymy’s endless wreckage) whose base elements cannot be created or destroyed is the Promethean attempt to survive: what Capitalism ultimately is and what it sells—a mighty place occupied by dragons of some kind or another, which the centrist, corruptible hero must hunt down, face and cleanse.
In short, there’s a myth of greatness that’s forgotten itself, the urgency in finding the culprit—getting to the bottom of things, as it were—winding down inside a former paradise that’s clearly gone to pot (seemingly overnight, although it only feels that way because you’re visiting the ruins after the fact). Nature has won, but that doesn’t mean things are obvious. There’s just a ruin, one waiting for the knight to enter and explore.
Note: While both Axiom Verge and Hollow Knight were topics of study in my master’s thesis, Hollow Knight received more focus. This is my first time revisiting it since 2018, letting me really go wild. As a result, this is a longer section/close-read than the Axiom Verge close-read was, but stays fairly consistent in its pursuit and arrangement of the subject matter. Being something that grew into itself upon repeated reflection, we’ll talk about the history of my formulating ludo-Gothic BDSM as rape play (and furthermore what you can do with it as a subversive psychosexual device). Even so, everything stays tied to Hollow Knight (and Tolkien, simply to give a monomythic example that Hollow Knight camps). —Perse
“Metroidvania,” part two is divided in two:
- Part one, “Geometries in Terror; or, Traces of Aguirre and Bakhtin in Hollow Knight‘s Promethean Castle World” (including with this post): Outlines Bakhtin and Aguirre in relation to Team Cherry’s Numinous gameworld; i.e., its oddly homely and relaxing setting as something to explore and understand Gothically (through the chronotope and Promethean Quest) as both largely devoid of people while simultaneously being overridden with decay regenerating into different potential outcomes.
- Part two, “Policing the Whore; or, Topping from Below to Rise from the Ashes“: 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.
Geometries in Terror; or, Traces of Aguirre and Bakhtin in Hollow Knight‘s Promethean Castle World
The realm of sensibility, passion, fear provides a major theme in Gothic, but clearly this theme is not just a matter of cognitive import to characters and readers. Rather, it wills itself a perlocutionary act; it aims no less than at changing them and us […] This is where “form” directly determines “meaning,” and spatial coordinates elicit mental states (source).
—Manuel Aguirre, “Geometries of Terror” (2008)
Unlike the Promethean Quest, the monomyth traditionally aims to restore the land or castle; re: Tolkien or Cameron’s refrain, either an outdoor or indoor paradise, per the dialectic of shelter and the alien, canonically falling apart (versus Milton’s camping of the sylvan scene and its artificial wilderness). Restoration is to a former glory after Hell returns home (a metaphor for pirates, but also monstrous-feminine rivals to a patriarchal status quo—Mother Brain and her dragon captains, Ridley and Kraid, but also the Radiance and her minibosses standing in for nature, Communism, and fascism per Red Scare): “Hell,” Volume Zero argues, “is always a place that appears on Earth,” the monomyth hero a merciless exterminator cleaning house through Americanized police violence (us-versus-them—stab, shoot, punch enemies inside stages, levels, rooms and worlds) dressed up in the usual Gothic forms to move money through nature. Life cheapens, the cycle repeating to serve capital during all the usual decay and regeneration of the state threatened by imaginary enemies tied to nature. It’s a power fantasy that offers up false power and hope in all the usual neoliberal forms (videogames).
(artist: Fabian Pineda)
Just as Samus reexplores old things to dance with dragons, back-and-forth, part two of “Metroidvania” peeks once more into the other primary text from my master’s thesis, Hollow Knight. We shall revisit this cute, psychosexual and frightening bug world to explore my grad school and postgrad research into Metroidvania; i.e., as a matter of navigable space, by applying Aguirre’s infernal concentric pattern to reverse abjection, such camp informing what eventually became ludo-Gothic BDSM as I devised it (a practice of rape-style roleplay that involves spaces and players inside those spaces, regardless of the media type). This isn’t so much to do with maps (mapping being a process of colonizing such spaces), but movement through space and its Gothic architecture and cosmetics yielding Promethean themes similar to the personable ones we looked at in part one with Axiom Verge; re, Bakhtin:
the traces of centuries and generations are arranged in it in visible form as various parts of its architecture […] and in particular human relationships involving dynastic primacy and the transfer of hereditary rights. […] legends and traditions animate every corner of the castle and its environs through their constant reminders of past events.
This past is one of open-secret power and trauma as something to exchange in cryptonymic ways (re: dead giveaways—the dead both unable to speak, but doing so through the space) that operate per the Promethean Quest’s “disempowerment,” not the monomyth’s “empowerment,” to ultimately expel old harmful ideas (“My uncle’s work was do-do!”) and replace them with fresh, altered copies that transcend profit and rape; i.e., by piloting capital’s dying shell.
(artist: Niall Skinner)
Simply put, it’s good praxis, but also good camp; i.e., Hollow Knight is full of cute bugs that, all the same, rape and eat each other as part of a larger dying organism inside another and another to mimic (double) capital and, like a zombie, survive all over again in tiny little pieces of a larger persona: an obliteration of the self, the human, the kingdom, the castle, in dark fairytale language (re: Kerascoët’s and Fabien Vehlmann’s 2014 The Beautiful Darkness, showcasing a presumed raping and open rotting of Alice in medievalized forms [the dispersed homunculi], but also William Golding’s wild-child apologia, Lord of the Flies, 1954). In the Promethean style, it suggests that all this decay and growth occurs from fighting gods warring behind the scenes, less poisoning the Cartesian home and more exposing its self-destructive qualities that, like Athetos did to Sudra, rape nature as usual. We’re the byproduct of that, making us—in effect—rape babies of mad science (many children of the gods in classic myth being the byproduct of rape; e.g., Heracles or Merlin).
Childhood ruined, right? Maybe, but maybe not; the paradox of nature is that life and death occupy the same Gothic’ spaces condensation of old death and hauntological decrepitude inside nostalgic pictures of home—as a paradoxical safe space that speaks to endless inherited anxieties tied to capital; i.e., the kind regularly immortalized in different media forms, including music:
Here in this prison of my own making
Year after day I have grown
Into a hero, but there’s no worship
Where have they hidden my throne? (Deep Purple’s “Pictures of Home,” 1972).
Gothic spaces revel in that decay as something to play with in order to communicate less-than-pleasant realities tied up in such comfort foods as both silly and tragic: “Is this a school for ants?”
In turn, Hollow Knight‘s little animals houses are cute, rapacious (insofar as we anthropomorphize them in lieu of our own trauma under Capitalism) and—like the xenomorph (an egregore based on parasitoid wasps)—is very, very gay in terms of exploring trauma in small, in Gothic abstract but also duality, juxtaposition and contrast: the “ancient” Romance and the modern novel (re: Walpole). To this, the Gothic is written in the disintegration of power redistributing itself (the kingdom is property that the knight, a cop, seemingly defends). The more access you have to differing perspectives, then, the more holistic, faithful (loving) and truthful the representation (with Hollow Knight containing inside its hollow shell two warring sides reduced to spectres haunting the concentric necrobiome: Capitalism and Communism). “Gothic maturity intensifies conflict as a matter of entropy,” contributing to a Song of Infinity speaking to such grappling forces.
Furthermore, our little hero’s form follows function, one of many beetles crawling among the dung and the dead (re: genocide’s fertilizer), breathing into them fresh life (one dies, then like Walpole’s empty suits of armor, gets up and walks around once more inside the dollhouse, the puzzle, the crypt as both incomplete and simply needing to be played with). It’s both a lovely poetic cycle and historical statement speaking to the natural and man-made as—like Athetos’ fallen kingdom—staked and claimed by he who called it “first,” slowly being reclaimed by a patient, almighty queen: murder will out, the criminalized faeries coming out on top against the cops robbing and victimizing them—eventually! Some things are so big they take forever to die—to transform—into other things (this can be fascism, yet again, regressing to a former medieval; or it can be Communism, provided intersectional solidarity is maintained against profit).
Whatever we find out will happen through ludo-Gothic BDSM as a matter of conceptualizing and navigating space to interrogate power. Per the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection (the West built on the lie of sovereignty), the motto of the Gothic might as well be, “Fake it till you make it.” So when I envisioned ludo-Gothic BDSM as a matter of scholarship and history that bucks Cartesian trends inside and outside of fictional worlds, I founded it on spaces mastering the player (re: “Our Ludic Masters“), but especially the Metroidvania. This, in turn, borrowed from Manuel Aguirre’s “Geometries of Terror”
[…the infernal concentric pattern has] in Gothic one and the same function: to destabilize assumptions as to the physical, ontological or moral order of the cosmos [… It is like a Mandelbrot set:] finite, and yet from within we cannot reach its end; it is a labyrinth that delves “down” instead of pushing outwards (source).
as something my supervisor, Paul Wake, recommended to me, and stuck with only to evolve into my work as it presently exists (which Paul refused to comment on or partake in because of its “contentious” nature—the words of an accommodated intellectual, if ever there were).
So while I had been flirting with these ideas in 2018 with my master’s thesis, “Lost in Necropolis,” said thesis was only the starting point; my understanding of them through a BDSM framework (whose holistic approach my British teachers hated/avoided like the plague) actually came years later in 2021 (again, “Our Ludic Masters“), of which I eventually formed ludo-Gothic BDSM to critique capital with, as a matter of Gothic Communism: a giant to challenge another giant, borrowing medieval thought to do so; e.g., Alice in Wonderland, Gulliver’s Travels, The Castle of Otranto, etc, which Hollow Knight plays on with its bug-sized ability to marry life and death, big and small (exaggeration is often seen as an increase in size, but the inverse is also true), with medieval poetics[1] and their reliably Numinous feelings attached to a palliative Gothic space that speaks psychosexually to capital’s abuses outside of itself felt inside of itself. Big feelings, big spaces, taboo yummy exchanges occur in between: a teacher of harsh truths and magical pleasures.
(artist: VG Yum)
To that, we’ll examine the source of my scholarly ideas as they started to lean in that direction with Hollow Knight—a game that truly took Bakhtin’s chronotope to heart: a castle space caught between reality and legend, insofar as time in the narrow sense of the word—that of the historical past—was thoroughly obsessed with hereditary rites and dynastic primacy as things to backtrack and endlessly explore (to do them as the Gothic lovingly does—backwards to go forwards); i.e., the dogma of Cartesian Revenge against nature (the Medusa, here, cast as the fearsome giantess Radiance—a Galatean force to challenge a Pygmalion fascist’s Apollonian status: “Praise the sun[2]!”) as bug-like in both directions: the insect as linked to death and decay, waste and nutrients (fertilizer) that, in the same breath, speaks to the brutality of Kafka-esque “insect politics”; mad science, queer love and irreversible transformation (on par with Cronenberg’s The Fly [1986] and Seth Brundle); cute and terrifying animals that illustrate Capitalism in small; and so on. All become something to reunite with, upending capital’s usual Cartesian, heteronormative, settler-colonial divisions and abuses: profit as rape dressed up.
(artist: Alaine Daigle)
Jadis was an entomologist and taught me to appreciate bugs, but we simply don’t have time to list and count such things. Keeping with space as something to explore, then, Hollow Knight—similar to Axiom Verge—puts multiple sentiments inside the dollish hero inside the doll house: the spirit of exploring different sides of the world as increasingly dark and hostile—not strictly to conquer it (though that is the hero’s built-in, monomythic purpose) but to appreciate and explore something that is dying and regenerating at the same time. It has, at times, an innocent, child-like, sing-song quality to it, but one whose fairytale world has (again, like Axiom Verge and all Metroidvania, more or less), two godly parents appealing to the child send by one to kill the other as a matter of capital: the Pale King and the Radiance. As we saw with Axiom Verge, sometimes the mother visibly wins during the final confrontation inside-outside the hero; here, the father “wins,” only to be bested by Mamma Bear anyways. Nature always wins.
As such, the Pale King is essentially a mad scientist by proxy waging a heteronormative proxy war against nature-as-monstrous-feminine (queer) and death; i.e., treating his people as disposable insects while slowly going mad inside his fallen castle, alienated from death and scapegoating Medusa for it. While funding others to conduct his awful experiments and conquer death as flooding his once-great city during state shift, the king and his men, but also the Radiance (the whore) are all alien dead of different sizes, classes (taxonomy and in Marxist terms) and positions (stances).
If you think about it, the senility of the king is not so different than Joe Biden currently losing his decrepit, overcooked mind on national television[3]; there’s always a real-world equivalent to a fictional one, and vice versa. The tyrant and their castle’s rise and fall stands in for Capitalism; i.e., its own historical-material gentrification and decay serving profit, per the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection. Decay and death simply denote change, whereupon the king’s cowardly refusal to change (and proliferation of violence inside the ruin) is simply him being stubborn and “bravely” running away from his problems, his secret sins: a “sundowning” King Lear refusing “to go to bed” and simply be worm food (thus release the secrets he’s been keeping inside himself and his monuments). There’s nothing preventing him from doing so other than his mind and belief in himself as a god. But the real sovereign is nature—the force he’s hijacked for his own purposes, forcing him to face the music through his death and that of his kingdom, his people, his legacy.
In turn, his entourage drags pathetically along with him, cravenly keeping the rose-colored memory of the king alive (thus burying his secrets alive) after he’s died; per the usual undeath and live burial, the labyrinth remains restless, those long-buried things equally stubborn as they crawl to the surface to—at times revoltingly—claw free and out from His Majesty’s rotting corpse. The hyperreality begins to fly apart, the sordid truth coming to light as a matter of rememory. The king has been gagging Medusa for so long, she’s a ghost, too (and maybe was never really alive; i.e., of the counterfeit). Relegated to the same spectral zone of Gothic performance and play, such revivals and reassemblies becomes poetic speculation, both half-real and imaginary to some extent.
Even so, such things remain vital as far as the pedagogy of the oppressed goes; i.e., as a matter of corroborating what historically is quite hard to prove in a court of law (which exists to uphold the status quo) but also of public opinion tied to capital[4]: rape and police abuse per the process of abjection.
The point of monomythic fantasy stories like Axion Verge and Hollow Knight is that eventually such things can’t be ignored, the victims of rape echoing a gossip-style chorus (re: the basics of oppositional synthesis being gossip/anger, monsters and camp) that builds and builds inside the usual kingly echo chambers speaking extratextually (a bad echo that speaks to the buried, ostensible truth of things). Either you believe rape victims while they’re alive, or the voice of them will rise from the alien grave to destroy the myopic legacy that you (and Capitalism) have worked so hard to build behind the usual heartless lies: the Pax Americana family as anchor but also dogma to hammer the witch, drown and rape her to death, burying the gay alive. As we shall see, systemic catharsis is at least, in part, cryptonymically bringing those atrocities to light; i.e., the hole as something to fill itself (a campiness we shall unpack through the Radiance’s own doing so): “Oh, god! You’re totally conquering my castle, right now!” Restless pussy of doom eats Excalibur and farts in Arthur’s face.
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
Apologetic, canonical illusions aside, rape play (and its cryptonymies) become a clever, ironic way of exploring history in our own daily lives; yes, it blurs the boundaries between pleasure and harm in the moment, but paradoxically never crosses over into genuine abuse—is only haunted by state atrocities while playing ironically with taboo subject matter as something to act out, thus raise awareness towards unironic forms (re: incest, murder, rape, etc). Conversely, the shock-and-awe of police abuse predicates through unironic enforcement, repressing play by making such things impossible to play with; the “rape” loses its quotes, the vampirism (exchange) going one way towards the state (and not both ways between workers)—all to flush bourgeois cheeks with stolen blood. The theft becomes an aphrodisiac for them and their defenders, a holy one to dress up in exceptionally good heraldry that decays over time: “Policemen are hiding behind the skirts of little girls. Their eyes have turned the color of frozen meat!” (Blue Öyster Cult’s “Joan Crawford,” 1981).
Amid the cheering of the self-appointed heroes lurks an uncomfortable quantum silence: that of the once-girl victims, Wicked, Bad, Naughty Zoot mischievously but also earnestly screaming on the surfaces and inside thresholds of such graveyard pastiche. Good or bad, such Gothic allusions and darkness-visible intimations of power (of allegations, of secret crimes) are a historical-material effect. They paradoxically never leave us, never stay dead; they become impossible to control, to police, to rape, because all deities reside within us (re: Blake), and it will take more than that to silence a god. As such, these stories are not “escapism”; not even Aguirre’s Mandelbrot can contain them, escaping the event horizon (and the knights buried alive there) to echo into the wider world like solar wind: the macaroni-stirring sound of a wet, squelching cunt. Medusa’s putting the silent scream on blast!
White or not, where there’s a castle, there’s a cop, a rape, a genocide (re: ACAB) as unfolding to conceal itself with the usual “medieval” vanishing points: feudalistic inheritance (“A hall to die in, and men to bury me!”). Said points need to be camped for workers to survive the abuse canonical workers (and extensions) regularly entail and repress: “Help, help! I’m being ‘repressed’ (code for ‘rape’)!” with or without quotes. Said quotes—and the dialectical-material scrutiny that comes with them during oppositional praxis—is the key to unlocking the door of praxial, thus cathartic, synthesis (which is illustrated, above, through added context: Harmony and I acting out a rape [specifically incest] for fun. Playful, silly sex [through calculated risk] is the best sex)! Belief, in turn, is illustrated through the context of action, through such poetics—the people, but also the spaces dressed up as “abusive” to speak to abuse in ways that grant closure and power while searching for secrets that, as the Gothic does, spill out everywhere.
To that, let’s go over some common (thus repetitive) elements to such spaces we can camp, then dive into Hollow Knight‘s own castle space.
To paraphrase Hawthorne, “Families are always rising and falling in America.” The same notion applies to Gothic counterfeits that speak to Capitalism-in-decay haunting its own canceled retro-futures; i.e., the rise and fall of a tyrant—his dynasty tied to a failing lineage whose own presumed greatness has long since been eclipsed by a restless labyrinth he cannot control, the illusions becoming see-through, tired, run-down (re: the desert of the real, the map of empire run bare). In effect, the castle as place—specifically a closed space to move through—becomes an ontological statement at war with itself: a psychomachy of different great powers rivaling and mirroring each other using the same contested puppetry and aesthetics for trials-by-combat and purification, but also liberation (not just clones, like with Trace, but the knight as an empty doll to pilot for different purposes, Trojan-Horse-style).
As such, the castle is an extension of the king and his systemic abuses as falling apart, promising the same reward to that one lucky knight who slays the dragon (the fairy queen). Inside it, the king’s undead men wrestle with Medusa, having internalized his dogma; also trapped inside, she rebels against said entourage through a revolutionary cryptonymy that shows and conceals her rape. In doing so, she subverts the monomyth, per the ghost of the counterfeit, to reverse abjection inside the king’s house of cards.
In turn, the decay conveys patriarchal revenge as foregone and futile, its message-in-a-bottle, trap-like iteration of the infernal concentric pattern something that—like Capitalism—goes ever on and on; i.e., rememory by virtue of recursive motion inside the Metroidvania space (to reshuffle the deck): castle-narrative, which occurs through reassembly of arrangements as a calculated risk to experience their history in motion, in small, as doubled, as mirrored. As the Rusalki show us, this can be to look at, but also look with; i.e., a one-sided mirror per the cryptonymy process: to confuse our enemies as potentially our friends, given the right push! “Watch and learn” becomes as much the context of the image—its covert, revolutionary cryptonymy (the double operation)—as it is the image, itself, and whatever likeness it purports at first glance/double take:
(artist: Gregory Manchess)
In Gothic stories, the nuclear family is a battleground of fear—a dead home of great-if-obscure power and alarm pushing past horrors (of rape, above) forwards again, into fresh tombs the living (usually the middle class) inherit from the dead. The subversive idea is to play with them, an ability that has existed since Otranto (a stage play warning of incest).
The Gothic castle, then, isn’t useless anymore than the past is. Imaginary or not, it becomes something to play with as a matter of preservation, interpretation and survival by its usual victims; i.e., “to play” in Gothic has an inherently sexual character through euphemism (“we played”), but also ludic descriptor vis-à-vis the means of sharing and interrogating power as a matter of history-in-the-making being an integral part of Gothic spaces. This always happens through play with those spaces, which generally has a cryptomimetic quality to its genesis, its hybridity and recursion: to pass along what has become forgotten as a commentary on its own forgetfulness (“They say this land was green and soft once, but the moment Haggard touched it, it became hard and grey!”) and navigating such spaces standing in for our own repressed abuse (and their degraded memories).
(artist: No Eye Yolk)
Like with Jadis’ dollhouse or Alien, kawaii or kowai (re: the postscript from “Meeting Medusa,” 2024), the area of play is a small (in this case, bug-sized) dream-like arena—of suddenly waking up as an adult, finding one’s former home viewed as nightmarishly imperfect, combative, and instructional (through the information on the walls around you, the heraldry and statues). This not only constitutes a naked regression towards childhood as flawed when viewed from an adult lens (requiring them to “armor up” to survive rape and murder promoted by the space); the parental figures become things to love and defend but also survive, feared for their dastardly lies and parasitoid, insect-like qualities (a childlike defense of the home as harmful, sick).
From Lord Manfred to Victor Frankenstein to that titular character from Mad Father (below), the king is a bad parent, but also a mad (scientist/conqueror) father who looks gigantic (from a child’s point of view) that harms his kids, then blames Medusa for it (“It’s your mother’s fault!”). Run as fast as you can and regress as much as you want, there is no escaping that abuse; like the chronotope, it only becomes a literal, historical part of the world—an installation that, like a secret renovation or occupant thereof, quietly invades your dreams bleeding into your waking moments. Per capital, the nuclear home is made to rape workers and nature by dividing the former into male and female variants with mythic-to-ordinary qualities seemingly breaking with convention only to endorse them all over again (on the state side of a dialectical-material struggle): Walpole’s campy rape castle a very genderqueer joke to lampoon the nuclear family and Western fabrications of superiority under capital now, regardless of what the old fag meant, two centuries ago (when capital was younger but still decaying by virtue of aesthetics)!
To that, abusive fathers aren’t scary only because they physically (b)eat their children, but because they rape the children’s mother as an extension of the child belonging to the same feudal owner holding onto power as folding in on itself: a foregone defeat, from one empire (of violence dressed up as Divine Right, but also reason, a cryptonymy for conquest) to the next. It becomes a war of dolls that extends into actual war as turning the child into the doll, the proverbial hollow knight haunted by both parents in a state of crisis, decay and moral panic leading paradoxically to a continuation of itself, mapped out through inward-facing conquests (the Mandelbrot) speaking to Capitalism’s boomerang effect.
In tokenized language (and per the incestuous histories of the castle), the king sends his next-in-line to fight a losing war in Hell against Medusa (during “the divorce”), to which the increasingly young child soldier grapples with a doll-like lack of memories and overabundance of mommy and daddy issues that, in totality, summarize the inner workings of capital/the monomyth; i.e., against nature-as-monstrous-feminine yielding ambiguous/ambivalent outcomes, but also appearances fighting as a matter of straight knights vs gay ones: canon and camp, capital vs Communism. Good to bad bleeds into the same mulch, grist for the mill as capital moves money (the knight) through nature (the space) and nature promptly resists the whole process. Built on a lie of a lie of a lie, playing Amazonian soldier (thus rapist) for the king as Prometheus, his children pay the price for his hubris: he’s a drain on them and the land around them, trying to keep himself and his legend/bloodline alive.
We’ll get to the Pale King and Radiance in a bit, talking about how the latter as a Promethean agent subverts the former as a monomythical agent (and even talk about Tolkien a little bit, in that respect). Now that we’ve covered some of the historical ideas fundamental when playing with/out Metroidvania space, let’s start with the city itself where the king’s presence is ultimately felt (the absentee father haunting the venue)…
Note: As we proceed, remember that this section is built on many older workers of mine, including unreleased ones (re: Neoliberalism in Yesterdays’ Heroes) and things not included here (e.g., my Prometheus fan edit[5] or old YouTube essays like “Close-reading Gothic Theory in The Babadook,” 2018) that can still be felt in a continual nerdy love for the material and spirit thereof. Simply put, I’m a weird old queer medievalist that, like Walpole before me, likes to play with rape as a matter of telltale Gothic spaces. There will be fragments of many things coming together for new synthesis, new scholarship built on the past as my own and of a larger imaginary history that invites contradiction; i.e., as a matter of returning to old places to right old wrongs, through ludo-Gothic BDSM’s holistic ingredients, my formal and informal [de facto] education on such matters.
Consider this spate of play made in the spirit of fun, then; i.e., an inventive continuation of my Strawberry Hill being yet another tryst-like jaunt into the disinterred spaces of my sex-filled college days—all to dig up fresh wisdom as a cross-cultural, at-times silly exercise performed by a vulgar, campy whore (while Harmony and I are most recently attracted to each other for these reasons, the fact remains all of my lovers have enjoyed my Gothic nerdiness/randiness [and contributed to my work] in some capacity for those reasons). You might get lost, but that’s all part of the fun! —Perse
I want to start by stressing a previous point, mainly that a chronotope is a liminal space; re: designed to be moved through, but specifically to encounter time in Bakhtin’s “narrow sense of the word”: a marriage of the ordinary and legendary as a matter of architecture that speaks organically to the occupants’ states of mind as swept up in their dreadful inheritance. The trauma is written on the walls, but is still secretive (more on this when we look at Tolkien, towards the end of the section) and assembled and watched in secret (above) as a more-than-a-little nerdy act: the fake historian playing monastery scribe.
Part of the coin-flip’s secrecy and revelation, then, a Gothic space—a castle, generally—very much plays a vital role in the larger story’s moral, but also Gothic aesthetics that comment on said moral: a coverage that both comments and conceals, per cryptonymy as usual. It lies and tells the truth at the same time. It’s also a kind of rape game told in Gothic lingo—code, clichés, and bric-a-brac—as seemingly “empty” of substance:
Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto of 1764 is still accepted as the “father of the Gothic novel,” yet most observers of this novelette see it, with some justice, as a curiously empty and insubstantial originator of the mode it appears to have spawned. It is understandably regarded as thin in more ways than one, as a stagey manipulation of old and hollow stick-figures in which tired conventions from drama and romance are mixed in ways that emphasize their sheer antiquity and conventionality (source: Jerold Hogle’s “The Ghost of the Counterfeit in the Genesis of the Gothic,” 1994).
Hollow Knight is very literal, but also nature-themed, in this respect. Bakhtin likened the Gothic chronotope to an organism, its legends and realities of the historical past eliding as a kind of memory death; i.e., whose decay amounts to a collective and unequal struggle to remember what it was even all about. The experience is different per occupant depending on who, when and where they are. In Hollow Knight, the castle is an organism; there are many false knights, least of which is the avatar the player controls (who confronts a false knight mirroring his own emptiness and fake courage tied to a false king). All belong to the space housing them as animalistic, but also “fallen” as a matter of Gothic reinvention.
As I write in Volume One (speaking about Tolkien) “The paradox of the crumbling homestead (and its spoiled bloodline) is that familial decay is announced by its own crumbling markers of sovereignty within the chronotope” (source). I go on to add:
a creative desire to reinvent the past, one described by Mark Madoff in “The Useful Myth of Gothic Ancestry” (1979) as follows:
A myth of gothic ancestry did not simply mean bad history. Those who perpetuated the myth obeyed a stronger call than that of accuracy to historical evidence. The ancestry in question was a product of fantasy to serve specific political purposes. Established as popular belief, the idea of gothic ancestry offered a way of revising the features of the past in order to satisfy the imaginative needs of the present. It floured in response to current anxieties and desires, taking its mythic substance from their objects, its appeal from their urgency. By translating such powerful motives into otherworldly terms, gothic myth permitted a close approach to otherwise forbidden themes (source).
Madoff concludes, “The idea of gothic ancestry endured because it was useful,” and I’m inclined to agree. Except I would extend this utility to Gothic Communism as something to fashion through the same myths of ancestry found in the usual haunts; i.e., mirroring the unspoken but still advertised material conditions of Pax Americana that Tolkien’s “empire where the sun never sets” was suspiciously covered in shadows and bathed in blood (source).
The same, we shall see, applies to the Pale King’s kingdom as swept up in its own magnificent decay. A site for play, in-game, Hallownest is, frankly, a FUBAR shithole. A colossal wreck in a very material sense, it’s crumbling and infected with a strange orange fungus and perpetual banditry (think Where the Red Fern Grows, but hostile to the boy and his dogs). Things are bad now, so they must have been good back then, right? …Right?
Again, we’ll get to that. For now, said collapse illustrates the Cycle of Kings leading towards Promethean hyperreality quite well. The king actually sucks, and everything is fake (with everything beyond or behind the kingdom a vast uninhabitable desert that feeds back into the little oasis). Many portions are physically littered with the giant bodies of false gods—”false” because they are dead, and “god” because they appear mighty even in death: empty and somehow full at the same time (re: darkness visible).
Similar to a knight, a beetle dies to leave its armor behind. In connection with the dead giants’ suits littered about the place (a theme borrowed from Alien‘s Space Jockey scene, though it goes all the way back to Otranto‘s giant suit of armor), the kingdom denotes a historical regression to an imaginary time before the order of the king: ancient chaos, the time of the Titans. The space itself is eponymously “hallowed,” or sacred, but also a graveyard imbued with mighty death and heavy time: the spirit of the dead Pale King and the lurking, angry presence of a female “hysteria” that is mightier than civilization, but also covered up by the endless male effigies and semantic wreckage gone to pot.
In ludic terms, the world is fairly standard Metroidvania the same way that Gothic cinemas are standard:
Critics have often remarked on the choice of the exotic, the foreign, the barbaric as the background for and source of Gothic thrills. In other words, the Gothic castle is the world of the Numinous. As David Durant notes, “the ruined castles and abbeys are graphic symbols of the disintegration of a stable civilization; their underground reaches are the hiding places for all those forces which cannot stand the light of day” (source: Audronė Raškauskienė writes in Gothic Fiction: The Beginnings, 2017).
As we’ll see with Tolkien in a bit, such massive photophobes are a puzzle that appeals to the same monomyth; i.e., as haunted per the ghost of the counterfeit as abject, sold to children taught to war, lie and rape through exploration sating natural and great curiosities: “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Echoes of Ozymandias, then, promise that something big and mean (a mysterium tremendum, to borrow from Otto) killed these Numinous giants—and, by extension, laid low the mighty king—but the answer isn’t as clear as a dragon on a map (any more than it is in Alien, Axiom Verge, Forbidden Planet, At the Mountains of Madness, or Otranto). The short answer is war (among all of these works). Except, the narrative of the crypt, here, is always gargantuan and crowded, utterly loaded with moribund language covering things up, but also the presence of actual death as huge, building-sized, unheimlich (as intimated cryptomimetically across an imperfect, imitative series of Metroid-style Metroidvania such as King’s Field [1994] or the Dark Souls franchise, whose blacksmith/currency system made its way into Hollow Knight‘s maze-like graveyards).
Keeping with the Gothic, the Hollow Knight gameworld conveys Chris Baldrick’s “fearful sense of inheritance in a time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration” (source), which Caryn Coleman sums up as a definition of “Gothic” being “three things that inter-relate: 1) tyranny of the past 2) stifles the hopes of the present 3) within dead end physical incarnation” (source). In short, it makes for good BDSM, in the right hands, minds and spaces. As with Jadis, the memory of a dying bloodline becomes a means of salvation, of escape!
Per my conceptualization of the palliative Numinous, then, the Skeleton King’s tomb is something to bask in the rotting splendor of/rock out to, Castlevania-style as borrowing from older excessive models utilizing the Gothic chronotope as channeled into the future through constant bad echoes, spatial-temporal stamps (re: the Orientalism of the “black Egypt”; e.g., “The Black Reliquary” mod for The Darkest Dungeon) and tone-poem musical cues; e.g., Children of the Reptile’s “Halls of the Skeleton Lord,” 2017): “It is our time… regain what’s mine!” Big danger, big camp potential in the shadow of tremendous obscurity and cryptonymy (and all the usual hero-rapes-dungeon monomyth shenanigans). The Pale King extends that idea, except the king is dead and replaced with a rapturous avenger that survived him only to be imprisoned by his jailers inside the home converted into a tomb: the Black Egg and ritual sacrifice of boss keys[6] (themes of rot and cryptonymy tied to the space’s Freudian elements, thoroughly dating it): rape the dark womb of nature (the thing to map out a route to and eventually find a way inside—paradise as fallen, spurning the hero for their laborious, roundabout efforts, backtracking through the same maze).
Courtesy of a broader assemblage of palimpsests, Team Cherry’s Gothic ruin is also full of weapons and mad science, wherein it invites users to play among the ruins—to bask in their treachery and gloomth to find new significance and meaning among the graveyard as a reminder of tyrannical material conditions that haven’t gone anything (e.g., the post punk attitude under Thatcher’s neoliberalism). While the imagery of these giants is hollow—an illusion of power designed to affect the player—it can still attack the player. Piloting a hollow shell themselves, the player fights the false knight, who is the game’s first boss (the imposter in a stolen suit of armor evoking shared themes of parasitism and mimicry like the xenomorph in Alien, aka the eighth passenger). Over the course of the game, they fight many other shells, the skeletons of dead insects piloted by vengeful spirits leaking everywhere.
Eventually the player learns about their own monstrous origins: serving as a weapon meant to preserve the false power of the Pale King’s own vengeful ghost. As the Pale King dies, the memory of the city (the king’s giant, castled “body”) dies, but only partially. Instead of totally dead, it lingers in pieces, so many of which are dangerous or incomplete: the knight’s incomplete memory as the Pale King’s ultimate weapon[7]: the ghost of the counterfeit, which the knight—holding a shade inside itself—is.
Despite the concrete perseverance of the chronotope—its hauntology and cryptonyms—nothing in Hollow Knight is what it seems. On their own quest, the player re-remembers the past as something to discover in ways that invert the monomyth closer to the center of the puzzle. In doing so, they knock down walls, interrogate ghosts, and lay the dead to rest (the exorcism of Marxist spectres by a fascist ghost). But Team Cherry’s treatment of concentric space hides one ending behind another. The first ending is only a goal post that moves to the second and the third; and from there further trials emerge. Meant to display the hero as awesome, the pantheon of the gods is helmed by the ultimate foe, the Absolute Radiance. The ultimate version of this boss is hidden away inside the mind of a giant insect that is, itself, locked in a box; the box needs a key, and the key is squirrelled away on the opposite end of the kingdom. None of this is explained, and presents itself as a mystery to solve through equal parts wit and violence. Puzzles and combat serve as trials to the hero coming home; their return seems familiar, but in a hauntological manner (re: ghosts of Caesar). This isn’t Sudra or Zebes, but an uncanny resemblance cannot be denied.
And finally at dead center of it all, the horrible truth is revealed:
(exhibit 40h1: The game’s final, “ultimate ending” is the wish fulfillment of slaying the supreme female Numinous, opening her eyelids and blinding her petrifying gaze. And yet, per Capitalist Realism silencing the “madwoman in the attic” releases the agonizing shadow of a repressed, genocidal guilt, but also the looming spectre of fascism, back into the living world: the return of the zombie tyrant, their undead horde and all the chickens coming home to roost as brought about by the hero the entire time. The psychology of these fantasy lands might seem totally dislocated from our world, but is nevertheless bolstered by the real world as a parallel, liminal space told through the Gothic romance; i.e., as a kind of disguise that offers the player false, Promethean power. When Medusa is dead, Caesar will eat Rome; when he does, she—darkness visible, surviving amid decay as a kind of echo that never dies, but rather lives on as queers always do—will be smiling.
To that, once reframed on the global stage of planet Earth, colonial fears frequently manifest as vengeful ghosts in opposition to the Nazi zombie, but also the neoliberal powers that give rise to fascists, echoing Derrida’s Spectres of Marx; e.g., Ward Churchill’s thoughts on the September 11th counterattack into Iraq:
For instance, it may not have been [only] the ghosts of Iraqi children who made their appearance that day. It could as easily have been some or all of their butchered Palestinian cousins. […] One hears, too, the whispers of those lost on the Middle Passage, and of those whose very flesh was sold in the slave market outside the human kennel from whence Wall Street takes its name. […] The list is too long, too awful to go on. No matter what its eventual fate, America will have gotten off very, very cheap. The full measure of its guilt can never be fully balanced or atoned for (source: “Some People Push Back,” 2005).
The more oppressed someone is, the more virulent and violent, but also seditious their pedagogy is framed by the status quo—impolite by centrists and a menace by reactionaries. Churchill is Native American; Fredrick Douglass was Black and Native American; Edward Said was Palestinian, etc.)
Hollow Knight’s gargantuan, shadowy outcome falls more on the Axiom Verge side of things than any pro-state outcome. It is Promethean, but with a Gothic twist—rape and live burial (which part two of this section shall explore the subversive elements to)! The churchly mise-en-abyme stretches into delicious, crumbling infinity through a smaller suggestion pool whose Numinous vibes can be enjoyed by persons of any political persuasion:
- The first ending traps the Radiance inside the protagonist, making them the next hollow knight (the concept of knights and insects denoting an insect politics approach to the cycle; i.e., an imprecise, unscientific series of “bug knights” covered in the hard outer shells of drone-like killers; e.g., Tarran Fiddler‘s evocation of Gwyn, Lord of Cinder [below] as a dung beetle on par with Team Cherry’s Dung Defender)
[exhibit 40h3, holding heaven in a wild flower]
- The second ending traps the knight and Hornet inside the same tomb together.
- The third ending destroys the Radiance and the knight, but spares Hornet.
- The fourth ending destroys the Absolute Radiance, but turns the knight into an even greater monster that Hornet must fight on her own.
All of these trials involve a melee weapon[8] told through a fatal quest for power and wisdom that stalls resolution as a symptom of capital abjected onto displaced, imaginary realms. To this, the heroic quest is tied to a monomythic space that promises combat; the combat misleads the player by offering power as tinged with decay and malice, that ultimately triumphs against the hero upon the story’s conclusion. There is no way to win, no matter how many power-ups are acquired, or how many upgrades the nail is given (which functions like a vampire’s fangs, stealing essence from the gameworld and its current, ghostly occupants to power the hero’s healing spells and magical attacks while simultaneously exorcizing the once-hallowed tomb of its unwelcome “guests”).
A similar, settler-colonial fatalism awaits Dark Souls players. Awash with gloomth, the hero’s quest traps them inside the world as part of a grander cycle; i.e., historical materialism and the return of fascism littered with small clues: the real-life Nazi SS (sun rune) and “Seig heil!” meaning “hail, victory!” but also “hail, the sun!” (the sun being a transcendental symbol of power in different imperial cultures; e.g., Ra and the Ancient Egyptians; Apollo in Greece; and the Shogunate and Shintoism [the fascist side of Buddhism] in Japan; etc) vis-à-vis Dark Souls‘ in-game phrase “Praise the Sun!” becoming code outside of it and back into it when the game space is colonized by weird canonical nerds.
This fascism in Dark Souls carries into a “death before dishonor” Gothic curse that mythically essentializes a rise and fall of sun-like greatness that thinks it will always return during fiery purification, warrior-Jesus rituals that worryingly ape the original problem; i.e., there is no god, just people killing each other on loop, mortifying their own flesh (and that of others) while shouting “Praise the Sun!” or “Deus Vult!” It’s a playground for them—a time in the sun during the dawn of the dead—but also a heroic death cult tied to profit; i.e., an excuse to rape, kill and otherwise harm others but also themselves as part of nature, mid-cataclysm. Except, there’s a limit to what the Earth will take, the soil souring when robbed of its nutrients; Medusa bides her time, but eventually pushes back, putting the predatory Patriarchy underground for good—proving as she does the illusory nature of state power (and its mimetic code) during state shift.
To that, Gwyn is a fallen strongman like the Pale King is, their kingdoms trapped in endless states of decay and dishonor around each ruler lying state; i.e., a fungal spectrality that never stops eating itself—is always restless, vengeful, doomed, blind, etc. The dishonor lingers, so the death lingers in a funeral pall, a Gothic curse of the castle and the land that an undead hero must lift by regaining their humanity inside the infernal concentric pattern. Per Aguirre, the monomyth begins and ends in Hell, upending Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces (1949). It becomes the tyrant’s plea, but one that Team Cherry (which came after Dark Souls) chooses to double with Medusa by virtue of troubling comparison: feeling sorry not for the king or his rapist undead soldiers, but a wronged queen visiting her revenge upon them in return!
The final conclusion is Ozymandias with amnesia. Inside the Painted World of Ariandel, the doomed quest of Slave Knight Gael is completed by the player-avatar, the Ashen One. At the end of the quest, the hero confronts Gael, who is inexplicably transformed. Sped up to the last syllable of recorded time, Gael and the hero fight inside an hourglass, surrounded by thunder, darkness and wind; but also sand.
The concentricity doesn’t end there. The entire climax sits inside the mind of a sleeping princess called Filianore, herself trapped inside the painting. Crypts within crypts; more cryptonyms along and within the same gross narrative. After a long series of violent quests, the hero’s crusade comes to Filianore and is seemingly presented with hidden power. The egg she holds falls apart, and the hero is transported to the end of all things. Here, the “truth” of the cycle is foretold: Through a fatal, ceaseless drive to attain power and wisdom, Gael has consumed the blood of the Dark Soul, which the hero takes from him by force; i.e., two vampires fighting over diminishing returns in the bone-dry crypt of Capitalism feudalized. Its transmutation is all but useless to the victor.
Nor does Gael’s death “beat” the game; it merely offers the hero with arguably their greatest trial by combat. But the ending of the game remains; the soul of cinder remains, as does the endless, kaleidoscopic city looping in on itself. And whatever challenge the player seeks is coded through violent, dream-like exchanges inside the ringed city as a kind of circular ruin, haunted by the viral pathogen staining the aesthetic: a looping Promethean Quest for greater glory and satisfaction inside the collapse of the feudal-capital order and subsequent desert of the real, the hero fighting the simulacrum to replace them inside the viral chain behind the illusion of a healthy and prosperous Imperium that, like a zombie apocalypse, is strangely devoid of non-zombie life. All that remains are empty suits of armor piloted by unseen forces.
In Dark Souls’ case, it is the death knight cannibalizing his greatest foe as undead and gigantic: himself as risen and fallen. Any pretense of greatness (nobility) has long been forgotten, replaced with limitless, rusted barbarism. He’s the senile old man, the rabid cop inside the police state attacking other cops:
I’m of course referring to Lodran proper, and the proximity the hero faces through the combat itself. Told through Numinous chants, hideous threnodies and sorrowful dirges, the “call-and-response” of combat (The Game Theorists’ “The SECRET Rhythms of DARK SOULS!” 2017) is one with depictions of fatal portraits, black knights, demons, and giant suits of armor. These and many other icons weren’t simply ripped from Walpole’s famous novella; they have survived across the years as a reliable form of tremendous feelings—what, in videogames like Dark Souls and Hollow Knight, evokes Percy Shelley’s bare and level sands beyond the ruins of Ozymandias through a “ludic sublime”: “a boundless expanse, suggestive of near-infinite possibilities for exploration and constituting a whole beyond” (source: Daniel Vella’s “No Mastery Without Mystery: Dark Souls and the Ludic Sublime,” 2015). This sense of the beyond and the quest for power inside it collides in the here-and-now just as the Romantics did with the Gothicists of that period, smashing a sense of sanitized greatness against the feudal tyrant as darkly romanticized, to which Aguirre’s latter-day calling of the phenomenon “geometries of terror” was what Bakhtin once described as “chronotope,” specifically the Gothic story of a hundred-and-seventy or so years previous.
Vital to this general sensation of decay is a slipping grasp of the imagination in the face of awesome power (what C.S. Lewis attributed to a “shrinking” feeling before the Numinous). The key to the closeness of such feelings is the sword in the player’s hand. A closeness with death—as something to paradoxically embrace and revitalize, even if the quest never ends—is attained through combat with the fringes of the sublime, the Numinous, the Gothic tyrant as replicated, on and on and on, inside the narrative of the crypt. Upon its mise-en-abyme, a swordfighter (or some other melee-to-ranged combatant), is invariably going to lock arms with the fatal past; it is their life force, chasing what all warriors in the crypt chase: essence through the replication of conflict in a Gothic aesthetic. But the spellcaster is someone who needs distance and time to prepare a response.
So while the ranged combatant is viable within the game, the truest practitioners of combat (especially in PvP circles) establish dominance as a kind of “fencing” for sporting purposes: to “dunk” or “clown” on their adversity as the holiest of sports maneuvers—the show of force during the usual bread and circus[9] (exhibited between underdogs, bullies, golden boys and goons, babyfaces and heels, etc). This “fighter’s distance” is not simply the correct, prescribed distance to attack and defend from; it is the place where combatants feel most powerful, most alive during the dance with death. It’s certainly possible to avoid combat (Happy Hop, “Dark Souls Trilogy – No Hit Run, 2918) but leads to increasingly obsessive and absurd levels of one-upmanship: a warrior corpse that does not know that it is dead, still trapped in Hell as something to rape.
Such is capital, displaced. To that, Hollow Knight and the Soulsbourne series are Promethean insofar as they both illustrate a similar fascination with the warrior’s path as fated inside a warrior’s cave; i.e., with no recourse for escape from the ghost of empire as “striking back” being a matter of capital (moving money through nature). But some keys to power are far less shady and far more glorious: a hero dies but once, only to live on forever (we’ll explore this problematic immortality for the rest of the subchapter)! It’s a militarily optimistic escape from the concentric pattern’s abyss; i.e., via the usual monomyth’s deus ex machina raping nature.
In the hands of the military optimist (the cop), melee weapons are the key to power as “theirs” by defeating nature encroaching on civilization as male, manly and brave. This power includes two basic types: combating evil and feats of strength. Part of this power is the promise of never-ending glory. Traditional heroes are immortalized by slaying the great evil or performing the strongest deed, and this, in turn, has a profound bubble effect on how they are viewed afterwards. With combating evil, the melee weapon serves a vital role: a means of fighting up close, thus having a higher risk of death. Sacrifice in the face of a dangerous enemy is encouraged through a myth of invincibility (re: the berserk). And if the hero falls in combat, and the countless bodies are strewn around all him, there is no graveyard; the victorious dead are generally burned, hailed as righteous in the never-ending struggle against evil before entering Valhalla (or some equivalent warrior pantheon at the presumed center of the sun).
We’ve laid out the players, spaces and ideals of the Modern Prometheus and its Cartesian/astronoetic devices. Per Aguirre, I next want to examine how the Gothic likes to dissolve this glory in an infernal concentric pattern that overwhelms the hero as someone rather full of themselves, putting the ball in Hell’s court: a home court advantage that buckles the champion’s knees in the presence of Mother Nature as monstrous-feminine; i.e., Creed’s notion of the ancient castrating mother inside a man cave that, prior to its clearing out by Beowulf, harbors an older female presence that haunts the space currently in decay after Beowulf the legend is replaced by the reality of old age, madness and death. Faced with the gorgon, the hero becomes eclipsed by an older power that dims the excellence of his male sovereign through ludo-Gothic BDSM as a matter of rape play. Schadenfreude is orgasmic, but so is liberation when the patriarch-of-the-day is proven wrong—by showing him to be a rapacious brutalizer whose empire won’t last. Delicious!
(artist: Wildragon)
Courtesy of Clint Hockings, a common mantra of videogames is ludonarrative dissonance: “Seek power and you will progress” (source). Promethean stories fuck with that, BDSM-style, by fucking with the hero’s ability to progress, mastering them inside Zimmerman’s magic circle as something that isn’t clear-cut, and whose mastering of the player can yield different outcomes in the future; re, me, vis-à-vis Seth Giddings and Helen Kennedy’s “Little Jesuses and *@#?-off Robots” (from the glossary):
In other words, the ludic contract is less a formal, rigid contract and more a negotiated compromise occurring between the two; i.e., where players have some sense of agency in deciding how they want to play the game even while adhering to its rules and, in effect, being mastered by it.
In Metroidvania, this mastery is theatrically conveyed between the player’s avatar and the persons and places he encounters as lying to him, but also dominating him to communicate difficult truths about heroism by reversing the monomyth (re: “Our Ludic Masters“); i.e., by giving him an embarrassing victory that seems to stall him in place, or undoes monomythic heroism altogether by subverting Cartesian ideas through the Promethean Quest, ipso facto.
Such campy instruction can frankly be a humbling experience, one whose ludo-Gothic BDSM speaks to the individualistic pride of Western canon that turns heroes into useful idiots but treats them like conquering emperors (so-called “made men/great men of history”). Such tutelage results in people who generally don’t like to be viewed as idiots, but also subs under a dominant’s power. But Medusa’s “exquisite torture” is paradoxically good instruction, insofar as it avoids the usual rapes committed in monomythic language pursuant to genocide under Cartesian paradigms (which is what neoliberalism [through videogames] is: the same old raping of nature-as-monstrous-feminine to serve profit. You have to short circuit the exchange inside of its usual spaces, with its usual instructions; re: The Merchant of Venice).
Also like an orgasm, then, “death” is overwhelming and not always entirely pleasant (delicate) or controlled; re: as the Rusalki show us, it can be thoroughly rough. Except, this isn’t simply the passage of time, nor an accident of the mode; overwhelming isn’t a failure to communicate, but a means of communicating that speaks to the cyclical truth of things and its effect on the human mind as tied to a generational space.
My expertise lies in the Metroidvania, so that is where our focus continues to lie; i.e., as we plumb the murky depths of the castle as a murderous womb that, stamped with “female/feminine” as a death sentence and curse by male brutalizers, seeks its revenge by humanizing those who might follow in Perseus’ footsteps; e.g., the more Trace follows in Athetos’ vengeful footsteps, the more he becomes vampiric, warlike, shooter—a fascist warrior seeking “greatness,” above—to which the same applies to the hollow knight filled “toe to top full of direst cruelty”: the middle class bred on such legends to reify them as an avatar’s conceptualization that bleeds into reality off of the page and into it (especially videogames, per Cameron’s refrain).
First, just as the Gothic overwhelms binaries and their boundaries, a Gothic space defies easy quantification to communicate difficult truths through questionable methods (again, parents lie to their kids—not to punish them, but teach them); i.e., meant to entrap and overwhelm the user to, through access to fatal knowledge and power, rip them apart. Sometimes this literally happens, but often its sensory and ontological (re: Trace the conqueror weaponized against his father by the battered housewife). In the Gothic-Communist tradition, though, it grants those already occupying a genocided position inside a settler colony’s state of exception a palliative, hauntological means of confronting and interrogating generational trauma; i.e., to reclaim monsters and their spaces, hence our power through ludo-Gothic BDSM: an end to the genocide behind the illusion making society sick and blind but still undead, unheimlich.
The ticket is the castle as a site of reclamation and forbidden operatic pleasure that, in unironic hands, is built to seriously torture those inside, pacifying them through fear of the outside/nature, of barbarism with the space, of decay and disintegration, etc. Get too close and one’s understanding of a perceived order of things is challenged, along with one’s sanity. Ironic “torture” exists in quotes, making an iconoclastic hauntology ethical through class and gender war as prosecuted in favor of workers to upset the status quo. To critique power, you must go where it is; i.e., the monomyth as something to subvert per the Metroidvania’s Promethean Quest, bathing in the Numinous as palliative (what Seth Brundle called “the plasma pool”). It’s a calculated risk that goes into Hell and stays there: Persephone, Satan’s wench, as becoming her own boss (she don’t need no man, especially a man of reason pimping her out, mid-witch-hunt)!
(artist: VG Yum)
Whereas Volume Zero has examined the palliative Numinous per the Metroidvania, and this section has already discussed the Metroidvania castle-narrative as something monstrous-feminine regarded fearfully by patriarchal colonizers (exhibits 40f/g), now we’re going to contribute to healing as scholars do: through contributions to knowledge banks that, when accessed, can assist in the subversion of, and deviation away from, Cartesian norms. You can’t kill these feelings through scapegoats (re: “Military Optimism“), only play with them in ways that synthesize catharsis by camping witch hunts.
In the interests of continued scholarship, then, I want to use the rest of the “Metroidvania” symposium to synthesize these points regarding castle-narrative and nature-as-monstrous-feminine; i.e., as tied to ludo-Gothic BDSM as I have since defined and expressed it throughout this book series. We’ll briefly go over the whole process’ evolution, next, before exploring rape play in Hollow Knight and Metroidvania: as policing the whore during unironic witch hunts, which she must liberate herself from during the Promethean Quest—by camping her own death (and rape) in ironic ways!
Lovecraft (and offshoots of him) denote such conclusions as comparable to Slave Knight Gael at the end of the world: confronting the pure meaninglessness of the larger space and its mechanisms as asleep, waiting like Cthulhu does, to awaken. But this needn’t be something for Beowulf to punch, proving his manhood by raping death as monstrous-feminine (slapping the bear per settler-colonial rites of passage that aggrandize him through acts of futile revenge playing out the Roman fool’s logic: a warrior’s death as infinitely useful to Capitalism); it can be tremendously joyous and healing. Such catharsis generally occurs through rape play as camping one’s rape, as well as the system (and fatal, medieval-grade manliness) attached to said rape as one of the Medusa and nature getting back at their abusers. Until then, she sleeps, buried in the black heart of a rape space whose beautiful dragon only waits to wake up, emerge and turn the patriarch’s world upside down.
Onto Hollow Knight, part two, “Sleeping Beauties: Policing the Whore; or, Topping from Below to Rise from the Ashes“!
Footnotes
[1] Re: a confusion of the senses, selective absorption, magical assembly and a Song of Infinity. Hollow Knight does this all with Gothic architecture (the Promethean Quest), ludology and insects speaking to kingly decay (the state) as something to inherit then challenge or conform to profit as part of: “a stately pleasure dome” burst like a bubble, laid low by royal arrogance (again, a displaced metaphor for bourgeois forces).
[2] Re: Icarian grandeur as a matter of double standard. The king cannot stand being outshined, so he sends his soldiers to extinguish her glory as monomythically “unequal” to his.
[3] “He is mega cooked […] Any word you could come up with that denotes some form of cooking […] that’s what happened!” Kyle Kulinski puts it (“Breaking: Press Conference Disaster for Biden,” 2024).
[4] E.g., D’Angello Wallace’s “An Uncomfortable Conversation about Cody Ko” (2024). Such effects happen by virtue of the law and society until quite recently treating women as property. These monuments of Justice (and their societal extensions in everyday conversation and media) exude praxial inertia by virtue of serving profit, but also gender roles and sexuality, crime and punishment as historically-materially rigid. The elite don’t want them to change, so they abuse these structures to manipulate people into triangulating against the usual survivors: cops and victims.
[5] Persephone van der Waard’s “Maculate Conception: The Making of My Prometheus Fan Edit,” 2021).
[6] The usual heroic hitlist employed by white knights/white Indians like Samus Aran, which the knight to some degree emulates.
[7] A Gothic, Dracula-level twist imitated by Still Indigo’s medieval, (admittedly cis-)Sapphic Amazonomachia/fascist-flavored love story: “Scorched Earth” (2023)—an all-female Romeo and Juliet through the medieval language of the state, romanticized similar to a kettling of Queen Dany in Game of Thrones in that she doesn’t become the state’ bitch; she burns it all down through indiscriminate hysteria fanned by reactive abuse: the Patriarchy’s fulfilling of their own apologia by making a monstrous-feminine/rogue girl boss they can crucify.
[8] I.e., one generally overcompensating as a place or position—a vain, phallic monument—also does; e.g., “the emperor beetle stands in for my penis!” said the insecure man of reason, proudly and unironically reasoning his own place in the universe versus nature (and the monstrous-feminine’s own ability to “joust” back, mid-Amazonomachy).
[9] Conversely a proletarian allegory (which Star Wars is known for), will not simply bank on class sentiment, but foster it consciously. More franchised variants—the Lucas prequels—lack this allegory in favor of more campy (and dumb) theatrics, and others—like The Clone Wars (2008) or Andor (2022)—have it in spades, throwing their weight around insofar as class war is concerned..