This blog post is part of “The Total Codex,” a fourth promotion originally inspired by the three I did in 2024 with Harmony Corrupted and Romantic Rose: “Brace for Impact,” “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil.” The first 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). “The Total Codex” shall do the same, but with Volume Zero/the thesis volume (versus “Make It Real” promoting Volume One/the manifesto, which I will release after “The Total Context” completes). 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 “The Total Codex’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
Volume Zero is already written/was released on October 2023! 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.
Picking up where “The ‘Camp Map’: Camping the Canon (opening and part one)” left off…
“Make it Gay,” part two: Camping Tolkien’s Refrain using Metroidvania, or the Map is a Lie: the Quest for Power inside Cameron’s Closed Space (and other shooters) [opening]
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—”Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away” (source).
—the speaker of the poem, “Ozymandias” (1818)
(model and artist: Blxxd Bunny and Persephone van der Waard[1])
First, a six-page 2025 addendum: This portion of the thesis volume is about the argumentation of my thesis argument’s, well, arguments. Think “Metroidvania” as something to apply in a praxial sense; i.e., to history as a living document inside-outside these troubling texts (versus the dead compiling of history, as someone like Jeremy Parish would do). The point of the “camp map,” then, is to camp canon, thus use Metroidvania to escape the historical-material myopia of Capitalist Realism from within; i.e., during the annihilation of the endless desert sands from “Ozymandias” not by sweeping them (and their hypnotic illusions) aside, but from turning them on their head to serve us (workers and nature) using our own levers and peachy globes to do so (re: Archimedes)! Except we can’t really camp the infernal concentric pattern—that of the monomyth/Cycle of Kings resulting from Tolkien’s refrain as having carried over into Cameron’s echo of the Gothic castle (the narrative of the crypt)—until we illustrate Metroidvania as a more consistently Gothic variety of treasure map; i.e., a counterfeit that deliberately puts the map (a technology of conquest) over a double of the good castle explored by a Gothic heroine: the dreaded black castle as the now-lost territory to reclaim through monomythic settler-colonial force (and all the state’s tools) camped by us and ours.
(artist: Blxxd Bunny)
Campy or not, the Gothic loves fakes, thus communicates through the ghost of the counterfeit (which the Medusa is); it also loves golems and animation of the inanimate (or vice versa) as uncanny and built palimpsestuously on top of each other during live burial (re: the giant suit of armor). This copycat ruin isn’t the site of some faraway Dark Lord, then; it’s a double of our own home being exposed as imperial, but decayed: a ruin of a ruin of a ruin, often told in flesh as much as stone (above). The point isn’t simply to paint things black, nor is it to merely compare our world to the dark castle as “elsewhere,” but also to poke fun at whatever canonical lessons are imparted through our own creative responses camping the canon (and its Radcliffean Black Veils/demon lovers).
For example, we can see ourselves in Ripley while also camping her through our deviations from her warlike, TERF-y stances: vis-à-vis Numinous power as something for us to interrogate on our own Promethean Quests embodied; i.e., to turn the castle not simply into a white or black counterfeit in the Western, heteronormative model, but a functionally Communist (thus iconoclastic) castle’s highly figurative (and operatic) theatre space: played upon ourselves as the danger-disco maze to liberate inside-outside itself; re: during ludo-Gothic BDSM summoning such things through ourselves.
So do we become the method, form following function but function determining the flow of power through a corporal aesthetic speaking to castles in the flesh serving as better stewards of nature than past workers demonstrably have: heaven in wildflowers to exhibit the monstrous-feminine upon our own surfaces and within their poetic thresholds, mid-liminal expression; re: “Exhibiting the Monstrous-Feminine Ourselves” (there’s a lot of poetic ideas being tossed around in this addendum, so I recommend checking out the Poetry Module)!
(artist: Crow)
Note: This subchapter is the birthplace of “ludo-Gothic BDSM” as I conceived it, in 2023; i.e., vis-à-vis Metroidvania, the palliative Numinous and similar terms useful to camping the canon (with so much of Western media being about pimping nature as alien during the dialectic of the alien). Here is a starting point we have led back around to, from what became my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus. —Perse, 3/28/2025
The above drawing with Bunny makes for a quick, fun example; i.e., by showing how ludo, or “game,” isn’t restricted to videogames, yet applies a similar “game mentality” (and entropic “pull”) that is nevertheless informed by what make up videogames: their aesthetics and rules of play (with control established through play as something to grant and dress up—meaning during informed labor exchanges calculating risk to illustrate mutual consent, mid-Gothic). As things to negotiate in the material world, these can be adopted outside of the actual game screen; i.e., used for our social-sexual, dialectical-material purposes (re: cultivating the Superstructure, mid-synthesis, during oppositional praxis) by workers employing Goetic poetics wherever the magic circle can be determined: in duality and mid-oscillation (through doubles) to better critique Capitalism vis-à-vis these smaller videogame castles tied to human bodies (and their surrounding territories, from time to time; e.g., the overworld from Zelda, left).
Just as they came from non-videogames, retro-future castles like Metroidvania can be influenced by the artwork we create as interacting back and forth over space-time on multiple registers; i.e., with the imaginary past as half-real. As campy and dungeon-like, unto ourselves, all are informed by past ideas of the retro-future (which Metroidvania have become, on and offstage). Per these holistic bodies, a great deal of poetic (re)invention and transference occur when taking something from a particular visit to a particular place and putting it in one’s own exhibit; i.e., dressed up as a place unto itself (re: the unheimlich) through Gothic placeholders/dead metaphors. Such hauntological borrowings provide a cryptomimetic methodology that is commonplace in the Gothic mode—with Gothic novels being inspired by actual Gothic castles, but also novels inspiring real-life buildings in the same tradition as reversed (e.g., Walpole’s Strawberry Hill and Otranto). So we’ll definitely do the same when camping canon ourselves: from Metroidvania to our own bodies’ emblematizing ludo-Gothic BDSM “on the Aegis.”
Simply put, all the world’s a stage, including the bodies of the workers of the world. We camp canon/make something gay because we must, and doing so remains easy enough to do when necessity mothers invention; i.e., to camp canon, make a porno—or at least what the modern world would consider “pornographic,” despite ancient/medieval standards being arguably far different than our own. Rape and disempowerment are likewise common themes, in ancient art (or art evoking “ancient” times). So the best way to challenge profit (thus have the whore’s revenge) is to put “rape” in quotes, playing with it (often with some degree of comedy, however dry). But in keeping with darkness visible, exploitation and liberation sit cryptomimetically inside the same sphere’s larger cryptonymy process, thus hauntology and chronotope informing abjection as something to further or reverse, mid-kayfabe; e.g., Giambologna’s “Rape of Sabine” statue (1540): quite the dumper on that damsel (Gaia’s giga ass)! Wrestle this!
(source)
Our focus, here, will be on Metroidvania, but such biomechanical morphology is not discrete between resident and residence (or media types concerning such matters). Such subversion, then, extends to any media (and monomythic qualities to said media) you could think of; i.e., heroes are monsters and men are typically rapists in classical art; re: versus nature as monstrous-feminine being something to embrace or reject in ironic and unironic voices: the state is straight, and blames women (or those treated as women) like “dark” and chaotic, corruptible whores to subjugate into dutiful virgins through force (re: the pimp’s controlling of sex through force to maintain the state as a patriarchal body with female elements, which capital as a concentric structure literally builds over).
Furthermore, Metroidvania (and most media) include some element of Amazonomachia as being a classic blame game versus the Medusa; re: kettling the whore and blaming her for her own rape. Regarding said gaslight, Amazonian propaganda (or really any copaganda) relies on displaced rape threats to codify state cops/victims through DARVO and obscurantism pacifying the populace (often women and children, but generally the state’s middle class as it would have existed inside different historical periods and between them; re: gentrify and decay rebellion through strange appetites tokenizing such beings and their causes for concern). Reversing abjection involves cryptonymy highlighting rape; i.e., as being common knowledge since ancient times, but repressed in ways that—per the Medusa into her present-day offshoots—have only recently started to come to light regarding monomyth apologia for rape without quotes (re: Elizabeth Hadley’s 2024 “More than a Monster: Medusa Misunderstood,” which I cite in “Always a Victim“). The whore’s paradox is exposure; i.e., to speak out against genocide while armored through theatre as a voice that reduces the societal risk of rape over time (with canonical versions of the whore being things to catch, cage and kill by the hero as much as villain: the alien novelty to rape for propaganda purposes).
So when the Man (and his Box) come around, show him your Aegis! Testify to rape through fabrications thereof; re (from Volume One’s “Healing from Rape”):
The Western world is generally a place that testifies to its own traumas by fabricating them; i.e., as markers of sovereignty that remain historically unkind to specific groups that nevertheless survive within them as ghosts of unspeakable events linked to systemic abuse. Trauma, in turn, survives through stories corrupted by the presence of said abuse. There is a home resembling a castle, where a ghost—often of a woman—lurks inside having been met with a sorry fate (source).
Become the thing that cannot be raped—a symbol that, per Creed’s terrifying Gorgon, strikes fear into the hearts of men and, per me, pushes during revolutionary cryptonymy (and its buffers; e.g., phone screens/camera lenses, next page) into the hearts of token forces imitating said men in bad faith: vis-à-vis the Protestant ethic, demonizing the marginalized in pursuit of profit across all modular territories; e.g., Jade Retrograde, a cis woman, attacking me, a trans woman, in bad faith (source skeet, vanderWaardart: March 28th, 2025)! So did I have to call for aid, which answered from people I’ve worked with before:
(source skeet, reupload, vanderWaardart: March 28th, 2025)
In short, it’s harder to attack us when we’re united against bad actors (and their spurious monopolies). So use your labor and poetry to your advantage, having learned from older forms (re: the Wisdom of the Ancients); turn that anger into something didactic, mid-liminal-expression; turn it into a Pandora’s fortress that reverses state terror/counterterror! Medusa cannot be killed, only transformed (re: “Psychosexual Martyrdom“), and her Communist Numinous regularly reflects in paradoxically smaller avatars: Galatea punching up into Pygmalion’s balls! “Put your mysterium tremendum in my Uncanny Valley?” BALLS DESTROYED! (set to music; e.g., “331Erock’s “Robin Hood | Prince of Thieves Meets Metal,” 2025). The paradox is to be “ravished” by something stupendously awesome, but not actually dangerous; re: our de facto education teaching mutual consent through its playful temptation and paradoxical “breaking” of rules made to be broken, mid-illustration (a highly productive idea evoked playfully from Burke’s Sublime onto Otto’s Numinous, Lovecraft’s Weird, Camus’ Absurd, and so on)! Medusa lives, choking canon blue through a reclaimed body language of mastery! Take such things back; make it your power by making it using what you got: Medusa’s orchard the state wants to harvest by dehumanizing you through the language of monsters! Don’t let them; map out such “lands” to conquer them (or be conquered) as thou wilt! The Earth is yours to transform back into Hell! Don’t tempt the Fates; become them, giving Medusa hugs!
(artist: Melkteeth)
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First, we should probably define what Metroidvania are more than we already have. At their most basic level, Metroidvania are Gothic castles that you map out and conquer not simply through Faustian bargains, but in search of Promethean power that has little good to say about power in the classical, heroic sense (which makes them an excellent place to search for iconoclastic potential/reversals). And yet they are also famously misunderstood and ubiquitous, a label to slap onto nothing or everything and then fuss about while getting lost inside. Before we do the same, I’d like to go over some specialized research terms, so you’re not just relying on personal anecdotes (and images of muses and friends, above and below).
(artist: Temptress Vera Dominus)
The volume has already supplied the definition for ergodic (“nontrivial effort being required to traverse the text”; i.e., “more than one route, or way to traverse well-trod paths”). Here are some more terms besides, including the full definition for Metroidvania (and various interrelated terms already introduced in “Essential Terms”):
ludo-Gothic BDSM
My 2023 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 with any kind of Gothic poetics, ludo-Gothic BDSM playfully attains what I call “the palliative Numinous,” or the Gothic quest for self-destructive power as something to camp (the Numinous, per Rudolph Otto, being a divine force or numen tied less to the natural world [the Sublime] and more to civilization as derelict, dead and alien; re: the mysterium tremendum): a Communist Numinous/the Medusa per Barbara Creed, but not tokenized (re: the Amazon) while dancing with Hogle’s ghost of the counterfeit to reverse abjection (thus profit) and shrink the state!
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 (abridged)
Coined by me, Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism is the deliberate, pointed critique of capital/Capitalism and the state using a unique marriage of Gothic/queer/game theory and semi-Marxist (an-Com) ideas synthesized campily by sex-positive workers during proletarian praxis: developing systemic catharsis, mid-liminal expression during praxial opposition, using ludo-Gothic BDSM and palliative-Numinous dialogs (e.g., Metroidvania) [refer to “Paratextual Documents” for the full definition, as well as all of the core Gothic theories I use].
the palliative Numinous
A term I designed to describe the pain-/stress-relieving effect achieved from, and relayed through, intense Gothic poetics and theatrics of various kinds (my preference being Metroidvania castle-narrative vis-à-vis Bakhtin’s chronotope applied to videogames out from novels and cinema and into Metroidvania; re: my master’s thesis).
the closed space
A self-contained, claustrophobic, Gothic parallel space—generally a site of seemingly awesome power, age and danger (usually occupied by something sinister, if only the viewer’s piqued curiosity/imperiled imagination): churches, abbeys, monasteries, castles, mad laboratories, (war/urban crime scenes), insane asylums, etc.
The term is reworked from Cynthia Griffin Wolff’s concept of “enclosed space” from her 1979 essay, “The Radcliffean Gothic Model: A Form for Feminine Sexuality”
Now a Gothic novel presents us with a different kind of situation. It is but a partially realized piece of fiction: it is formulaic (a moderately sophisticated reader already knows more or less exactly what to expect in its plot); it has little or no sense of particularized “place,” and it offers a heroine with whom only a very few would wish to identify. Its fascination lies in the predictable interaction between the heroine and the other main characters. The reader identifies (broadly and loosely) with the predicament as a totality: the ritualized conflict that takes place among the major figures of a Gothic fiction (within the significant boundaries of that “enclosed space”) represents in externalized form the conflict any single woman might experience (source).
in that I’ve extended it beyond the purely psychological models (and psyches) of a traditional Gothic readership (white, cis-het women) and now-outmoded school of thought (the Female Gothic of the 1970s). I do so in connection to how the Gothic mode generally employs deeply confusing and overwhelming time-spaces (chronotopes)—what Manuel Aguirre, in 2008, referred to as “Geometries of Terror” (exhibit 64b/64c)—that, along with their ambiguous, perplexing inhabitants (exhibit 64a), phenomenologically disrupt the monomyth in pointedly deconstructive, hauntological ways: the Promethean (self-destructive) hero’s quest as something that undermines patrilineal descent and dynastic power exchange/hereditary rites in a never-ending cycle of war crimes, lies and blood sacrifice (a fearful critique of medieval feudalism).
(source)
Metroidvania[2] (abridged)
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, backtracking 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: “Mazes and Labyrinths,” 2021).
Our basic aim for this subchapter is to camp canon as a mapped-out space for simulating war in a theatrical sense. This includes Tolkien’s refrain as having gentrified war through a “new Eden,” and Cameron’s refrain inside the Metroidvania, modeled directly after Aliens in Metroid. Seeing as both maps translated quite well to videogames, we’ll be focusing primarily on videogames ourselves as an iconoclastic space with which to do (or at least inspire) our work. We’ll also highlight some differences between the two types when deciding what to investigate and what to leave alone.
For example, Tolkien’s refrain was generally an open world mapped for conquest, usually treating the dungeon as the final step towards the quest for power as something to acquire. Except we want to start inside the castle dungeon and focus on the quest for power as something to interrogate through the seeking of performative trauma. Our means of interrogation is camp; i.e., camping the monomyth/Cycle of Kings that emerged from Tolkien’s refrain in the classic Gothic tradition: the castle. Serving as parallel space/capitalist chronotope, canonical castles are filled with rape play that we camp through our own performances and recreations. As such, we’ll be using the closed space of Gothic castles that split off with Cameron’s refrain from Tolkien’s: a particular kind of abortive offshoot[3a]—the ergodic, closed space of the Metroidvania, but also what it contains—to play at rape (and war) through ludo-Gothic BDSM, castle-narrative and the palliative Numinous; i.e., in campy ways that translate back and forth to any medium as a healthy means of negotiating unequal power exchange while also interrogating its historical-material forms. We’re camping the canonical performance (thus function) of the castle, making it gay from within; i.e., by going where power when summoning it in castle-like ways; re: castles in the flesh being as much castle-like bodies versus body-like castles, mise-en-abyme. Either can be camped, letting us interrogate power through the Metroidvania as a simulation of a Gothic castle (the Medusa and her utterly stacked and delicious body takes many forms, next page)!
(artist: Rae of Sunshine)
To interrogate power and trauma, you either must go where it is, or bring the mountain to Muhammad by personifying it in a Gothic, palliative-Numinous sense to then interrogate (re: the mommy dom, but also her cake and pie[3b], above). So we must first give it shape, however that may be: “She might mighty.” Once personified or otherwise morphologized in castled anisotropic body language, the critique must become second-nature—a way of existing through the most direct and human (thus efficient) ways of communicating the powers that be: (a)sexuality, gender, music, theatre, and so on, during ludo-Gothic BDSM. We’ll be camping the quest for power where power is centralized, which Tolkien largely tried to sidestep on his own questing formulas and maps and which Cameron jumped headlong into. As previously stated, this will take two parts to accomplish: one to unpack my own real-life quest to understand power as something to map, reassemble and interrogate (so you can understand my thought process and what guided it towards where we are now), and the other to apply this playing with power to our poetic camping of the quest in our own lives, our own creations/performances that interrogate power on maps/castles that resemble Tolkien’s or Cameron’s (on paper) but play out very differently in practice.
Onto part one!
“The Map Is a Lie”: the Quest for Power inside Cameron’s Closed Space—Origins and Lineage
“Ah, you think darkness is your ally? You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, molded by it. I didn’t see the light until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but blinding!”
—Bane, The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Similar to other heroic adventures, the Metroidvania is about exploring powerful spaces and their monsters, but the similarities begin to diverge insofar as the Metroidvania is less a shooter strictly about killing monsters and more of an interrogation—of unequal power exchange as something to perform by a female hero inside a futile, decaying proposition of itself—that lacks any sense of certain victory normally achieved through a run-of-the-mill male rite of passage. Obviously we’re aiming to camp Metroidvania, too, but we need to be aware of what makes Cameron’s closed space unique: less outdoors and Sublime and more indoors and Numinous. There can be a wide shot establishing the castle exterior and location (normally at the very beginning before braving its interior), but most of the story takes place inside the castle walls:
(artist: François Baranger)
Before the thesis proper, my essay “Notes on Power” discussed the paradox as being the performative nature of power doubled, including monsters but also their decaying lairs as monumental sites of immense, god-like power dressed up through the Gothic language of the imaginary past; the Metroidvania is a Gothic castle full of Gothic monsters, but also Gothic ghosts (echoes) of older and older castles reaching out from novels and cinema into videogames. Regardless of the medium, though, Clint Hockings’ adage, “Seek power and you will progress” (source: “Ludonarrative Dissonance,” 2007) means something altogether different depending how you define power as something to seek, including unequal arrangements thereof. As a child, teenager and woman, I sought it through the palliative Numinous in Gothic castles of the Neo-Gothic tradition carried over into videogames (which I learned about in reverse: videogames, followed by the Numinous/mysterium tremendum as introduced to me by Dr. David Calonne[4]). Of these, I explored their Numinous territories in response to my own lived trauma and subsequent hypersexuality—i.e., as things I both related to the counterfeit with and sought to reclaim the counterfeit from as a tool to understand, thus improve myself and the world by reclaiming the castle as a site of interpretative Gothic play (of kinks, fetishes, and BDSM); i.e., this book that you’re reading right now is a “castle” to wander around inside: a safe space of exquisite “torture” to ask questions about your own latent desires and guilty thoughts regarding the “barbaric” exhibits within as putting the ghosts out from my past on display (the Gothic castle and its intense, “heavy weather” theatrics generally being a medieval metaphor for the mind, body and soul, but also its extreme, buried and/or conflicting emotions and desires: a figurative or sometimes literal plurality depending on the person exploring the castle).
This intense, life-long process started when I was young and continued into adulthood. So I’d like to chronicle it as such before we dive into Metroidvania themselves (whose application of this academic theory and history I’ll be responding to in part two of the subchapter):
Before we proceed, take heed: This portion of the book is written in defense of my own studies, but also to voice the academic struggles and frustrations I faced while trying to combine the Gothic, speedrunning and Metroidvania—a then-cutting-edge proposition hindered by academic big-wigs[5] living in their own little worlds and interested more in carving out a name for themselves (through “their own” ideas and theories) than giving me a leg up. Surrounded by the shadow of these self-interested giants and their all-important work, I found academia—especially at the graduate level, on the British side of the pond—to be a thoroughly lonesome, smothering affair: not a friendly place of shared ideas, but of guarded, medieval competition. In short, I absolutely loved the research and subject matter, but increasingly came to hate where it took place (thus, why I wrote this book in a room of one’s own). Take that as you will.
Also, this “instructional detour” contains some lengthier quotes from my undergraduate/graduate/postgraduate work; with them, I broke Craig Dionne’s rule about long-ass block quotes, but I’m also citing books that a) most people outside of academia probably do not own, and b) include sections that are incredibly germane to the entirety of Sex Positivity. —Perse, back in 2023
First, childhood. Our journey started when I was small. I watched Alien when I was nine and fell in love with the heroine in the castle alongside the monster, the alarms, the smoke, the figurative and literal chaos of it all. Its Numinous spoke to the hidden girl inside my closeted childhood self as “on a ledge” (re: the “call of the void”): paradoxically most alive, most in control during a theatrical case of calculated risk-reduction (versus actually suffering for my art or standing on a cliff in real life) that lies adjacent to personal suicide ideation and revenge/rape fantasies stemming from childhood abuse. Therein lies the tightrope of medicine and dogma that Gothic spaces and monsters provide in equal measure (a bit like Zofloya’s poison). Classically the diegetic heroine’s perfect past is doubled by the Gothic castle as an expression of power beyond just her or her sense of self and home. As Audronė Raškauskienė writes in Gothic Fiction: The Beginnings:
The castle, Bakhtin remarks, as a literary reminder of an ancestral or Gothic past of “dynastic primacy and transfer of heroic rights” [actually, it’s “hereditary rites,” though I do the same thing in this book, too] is overlaid or criss-crossed with meanings from legend, fairy-tale, history, architecture, and an eighteenth-century aesthetizing discourse of the sublime. Montague Summers’s note that the real protagonist of the Gothic novel is the castle emphasizes a very special feature of that structure: in a sense, the Gothic castle is ‘alive’ with a power that perplexes its visitors. It tends to have an irregular shape, its lay-out is very complex and mysterious, whether because of an actual distortion of the whole structure or because a part of it remains unknown. In Manuel Aguirre’s words, “this basic distortion yields mystery, precludes human control and endows the building with a power beyond its strictly physical structure: the irregular mysterious house is, like the vampire, a product of the vitalistic conception of nature.”
In addition to this, Radcliffe’s setting (the castle) derives its claim to sublimity also from its being “not-here, not-now, an Other place, an Other time.” 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.”
In Radcliffe’s novels the Gothic castle is in the first place an anti-home, a nightmare version of the heroine’s perfect past, in which many of the elements of her home are exaggerated and replayed in a Gothic form. The Gothic space, which provides a scene for the most dramatic events in the novel, is totally different from the other spaces – indicating heroine’s home. The gigantic size of the castle is opposed to smallness of heroine’s home, its labyrinthine confusion stands in opposition to the elegant and tasteful arrangement of her home, dark and dim castles replace cheerful and full of sunshine homes, the feeling of constant danger and lack of security in the castles is contrasted with the feeling of safety in heroine’s home, etc. The heroine’s parents are replaced by Gothic substitutes or Gothic opposites. The castle hides some family secret the revelation of which usually helps the heroine to disclose her own identity. At the same time, the Gothic castle is the place of confinement in a literal and figurative sense. Moreover, the castle may be interpreted as the image of the body and, eventually, as the heroine’s secret self (source)
but Alien never shows us the Radcliffean perfect home because its retro-future is canceled in a suitably antiquated Gothic unlike Radcliffe’s: the flying castle as the revived palimpsest for the imaginary past of the Utopian sci-fi it is eclipsing. Its dark sphere is a suitably neoliberal critique/allegory of workers being fucked over by the company. Ridley’s impactful movie wasn’t a videogame, but its castle-narrative would become a popular-if-recuperated refrain in the general Metroidvania corpus:
(exhibit 1a1a1h2a3: There’s a Gothic academic critic I was forced to read at MMU who wrote a piece called “Future Horror (the Redundancy of Gothic)” [1999] that argues for the “redundancy” of older Gothic forms because he has a fear-boner for futurist ones. By his wacky logic [and complete misunderstanding of the Gothic and especially its (gay-anarcho) Communist applications] Alien should be completely “redundant” [god, just reading that word next to Alien pisses me off]. Except, the movie hasn’t aged a day. Indeed, in spite of its seemingly Freudian pastiche, it is suitably “timeless” as a Gothic-Communist work because its tremendous Satanic potential [of the campy, Miltonian sort] has only continued to appreciate in value during the Internet Age; e.g., the xenomorph not as a cosmic rapist, but as a thoroughly trans, intersex, non-binary deity announced by the doubled castle itself as a tremendous allegory and revelation for genderqueer sentiment [something we will return to incessantly in Volume Two and somewhat in Volume Three; e.g., exhibits 38b4, 51a, 51b2, and 64c]—i.e., our existence as “sinful” in the eyes of the very people conditioned by Cartesian dualism to fear and kill us, but also present us as dehumanized, unironic sex demons.)
To be entirely honest, I loved Alien and Aliens’ operative, Gothic spaces, as a child (and their Metroidvania doubles), but as I grew and matured, I decidedly fell out of love with Cameron’s unironic adoration for the TERF-y, cop-like double of Ripley (and white-savior “worshipping” of the dark monarch/Medusa-esque Alien Queen as her evil double—two mothers on the operative stage forced by Cameron to catfight in defense of a cis-het woman’s God-given right: not to have romance or sex, but to have surrogate “good babies” for the state) and decidedly camped myself within Scott’s far more Communist/Satanic variant. Because 1979 Ripley emerged on the neoliberal edge and not in its dead center (when videogames were experiencing a renaissance post-1983’s Atari Crash), that variant always had more potential to critique neoliberalism by creating its heroine as doubled in future Gothic spaces (videogames[6] or otherwise): our revolutionary doubles (who have the same dislike for the company as being like a giant bank of stolen profit, thus more inclined to rob it, Robin-Hood-style; i.e., the Western or the detective-story allegory* of unsanctioned redistributions of wealth from the elite to the poor). My focus is Metroidvania because it’s what I grew up with and mastered/wrote this book adjacent to/partially around: the immense and powerful lie of revolutionary doubles (versus Orwell’s harmful, pejorative double-speak, written by a fascist apologist who betrayed members of the British Communist party in service of the Imperium; in short, he was a government snitch, mole and cop).
*Akin to the hero with pathos but revolutionary class character and culture—e.g., Liam Neeson’s soliloquy from Honest Thief (2020): “Something to fight for, not for money or an adrenaline rush, but a desire for love”; except, it’s framed in the Gothic at large as an evocation of reality as tremendous, over-the-top. Neeson himself continues, “I lied (about the bank jobs) but not about what I did for you, for us.” Something of a Gothic antique himself, he’s like a throwback from another time that was and wasn’t; i.e., like Walpole’s simulacrum castle of the marriage between the Ancient Romance and novel (a story of everyday events):
As Walter Scott pointed out in the critical introduction that he wrote for James Ballantyne’s 1811 edition of the novel, the connections between Otranto as narrative and Strawberry Hill as building are manifold: in the former, “Mr Walpole resolved to give the public a specimen of the Gothic style adapted to modern literature, as he had already exhibited its application to modern architecture.” Just as Walpole the architect had taken care to combine the requirements of modern convenience with “the rich, varied, and complicated tracery and carving of the ancient cathedral,” so, in Otranto, it was his aim to combine the “imposing tone of chivalry” and “marvellous turn of incident” of the ancient romance with the “accurate exhibition of human character” to be found in the modern novel. To read Otranto, Scott concluded, was to experience the same degree of supernatural awe and terror that one felt when spending a solitary night in an old, tapestry-strewn Gothic mansion. Walpole’s ingenuity lay in his extracting in Otranto the sensations of melancholy and supernatural awe that, though easily elicited in truly ancient piles, were “almost impossible” to evoke in “such a modern Gothic structure” as Strawberry Hill, thus “attaining in composition, what, as an architect, he must have felt beyond the power of his art” (source: Dale Townshend’s “Horace Walpole’s Enchanted Castles” from Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance and the Architectural Imagination, 1760-1840, 2019).
Such Gothic in-betweens aren’t restricted to a particular genre/subgenre; it echoes well into the present; e.g., not just Liam Neeson’s many alter-egos that, somehow I think, reflect his streetwise life, but also James Cameron’s Terminator (and Metroidvania, which I promise we’ll get into shortly). His self-titled “tech-noir” is a Gothic Western, which combines Spielberg’s truck chase from Duel (1971)/non-stop killing machine from Jaws (1975) with the John Ford Western, Stagecoach (1939), and the damsel-in-stress-turned-hardboiled-detective inside the 1980s version of a Grimm fairytale, “black detective story”/”black novel’s” masked ball; the danger disco of the Tech-Noir dance floor occupied by the white damsel, the Germanized demon lover and the dashing-but-slightly-rugged banditti hero (exhibit 15b1); i.e., as a renovated, technophobic opera, updated for the present space and time (the fear of nuclear war and post-WW2 inheritance anxiety experienced by white people as the most privileged class worked within the ghost of the counterfeit).
In other words, it’s your usual Gothic “timelessness” that swaps out aesthetic and musical styles, borrowing from the larger Gothic tradition to emulate[7] similar architectural and praxial liminalities in the author’s idea of a musical, thoroughly dramatic and dream-like Gothic space: for Cameron, a double of 1984 Los Angeles interacting with it until the two become hopelessly mixed (vis-à-vis with themselves, but also older reflections like Alien [exhibit 1a1a1h2a3, above] as having gone into the same melting pot). Power is summoned and interrogated in the usual Walpolean sense: its seeking inside of itself as cobbled together out of old parts to evoke the Numinous.
(exhibit 1a1a1h2a3a: I don’t really care what Fred Botting says. The Terminator is Gothic par excellence, and evokes a profoundly transformative and critical power within Cameron’s nightmare zone while punching through the membrane to inform other mediums. As I write in my critical review of Botting’s “Future Horror” [footnotes from the original essay]:
Botting confidently asserts that, in modern times, ‘the terrors of the night are replaced by the terrors of the light’[8]—as though this is an idea exclusive to that temporal region. Yet, Lewis or McCarthy both seem perfectly happy exploring those naked realities Bottling attributes exclusively to our own present.
In The Monk, Sister Agnes and Father Ambrosio exemplify this. The former describes the unveiled horror of a present moment, not some obscurity of the long-dead past, when she says, ‘…often have I at waking found my fingers ringed with the long worms which bred in the corrupted flesh of my infant’[9] Likewise, the latter, tortured by the Inquisition, tries to deny the existence of a God, but laments, ‘those truths, once [my] comfort, now presented themselves before [me] in the clearest light’.[10] Manifest in said light, there is always some present horror for any writer to explore. These respective anxieties aren’t in the future. There’s no linear progression leading to a bright, over-exposed annihilation. Gothic fiction isn’t redundant because the past and future are in the present, and always have been.
Thus, I can hardly agree with Botting when he writes, ‘the future produced in the void of the present [is] both horrifying and thrilling. But it is far from Gothic’.[11] In her book, The Rise of the Gothic Novel (1995), Maggie Kilgour writes, ‘the gothic is thus a nightmare vision of a modern world made up of detached individuals [… where] “normal” human relationships are defamiliarized and critiqued by being pushed to destructive extremes’.[12] By calling Gothic redundant, yet championing the skeleton under the endlessly exchanged ‘skin suits’, Botting simultaneously abjures and evokes the same Gothic tenets recognized by Kilgour.
Furthermore, the Gothic mode has always addressed present anxieties with ‘timeless’ aesthetics. It’s not as though corpses, skeletons and ghosts are confined to a specific century or retrospectively-defined era. Ghosts exist in our minds, and thus can plague us from any direction; whether hailing from the past or future, this fear will be felt in the present, regardless. Afraid of the skin-trading skeleton, Botting is like Lewis’ Sister Agnes ‘Shuddering at the past, anguished by the present, and dreading the future’.[13] She has her potion to swallow. So does he: ‘…peel off the artificial skin and there is no organic substance [nor history] to the sexy killing machine from the bright light of the future’.[14] Yet, his metal, terminator skeleton is still a skeleton, and ‘[falls] into the region of time and suffering’.[15]
Since both past and future live together in the present, and always do, it’s a gross misstep for Botting to extricate necrophobia from the so-called ‘redundant’ past of conventional Gothic fiction. After all, one could just as easily interpret a skeleton to be an omen, suggesting what Fredric Jameson might describe as ‘merely the future of one moment of what is now our own past [… yet whose] multiple mock futures [transform] our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come’.[16] Whatever the future is, it certainly doesn’t exclusively constitute Botting’s idea of the conventional past he desires, in order to make his point. Real or imagined, skeletons—ghosts or otherwise—aren’t readily consigned to man-made realms; they ignore boundaries [source].
Similar to Frederic Jameson but even more so, Botting seeks to discount the “boring and exhausted paradigm” of older fictions in favor of something seemingly glitzier. For one, did he ever watch The Terminator? It’s not exactly shiny and bright [courtesy of Adam Greenberg’s dark and gritty night photography]. Botting has always irked me because his arguments as an accommodated Gothicist seem oddly married to Jameson’s boner for de-Gothicized science fiction; i.e., divorced from their critical power by excising a huge amount of the aesthetic/nostalgia, thus its critical power in proletarian forms. This obviously includes Metroidvania’s crumbling castles and their palimpsests, the Krell’s abode from Forbidden Planet [1955], Hadley’s Hope from Aliens [1986] or the Luminoth’s Sanctuary Fortress from Metroid Prime Two[17] [2007] as previously inspired; i.e., by the same creative, operatic mode whose musical, fairytale-meets-mad-science “rape castles” Ridley Scott, Ann Radcliffe or Horace Walpole worked within:
Much of what Botting would try and colonize through his own academic claptrap just so happens to be my expertise. So yeah, no, dude. I think you’re dead fucking wrong about “Gothic redundancy.”)
The Terminator, Metroid, Alien(s) or any of the above stories (and their mediums) might seem “unoriginal,” except originality really isn’t the point because the problem nor its potential solution (Capitalism/the Gothic) isn’t original. Despite its explosive and apparent falsehoods, the Gothic at large is more honest this way than dividing them to tell doubled, canonical variants, whose class character is passively and actively dormant. And like the explicitly Gothic variant of the Western or noir, none of this is clean inside our own praxis and poetics; i.e., our own lives remain full of fictional stories that rub off on us (and our own work) but also speak to our inherited and lived trauma as something to express through borrowed conventions, locations and aesthetics: their twists and turns, double crosses, ambushes, dying of shame, true love, black pearls (toxic wealth), big explosions, and tremendous, fortress-sized/-shaped fabrications (e.g., the corrupt FBI agent from Honest Thief is a big clue to the rotten structures of their time relayed in theatrical form, just as Radcliffe’s Father Schedoni was a clue to her status quo’s corruption: the intentionally displaced corruption of an authority figure—i.e., he wasn’t a “real priest, a real cop”; he was from “Italy[18]“). Somewhere in this Gothic mess is the truth, meaning “a poetic way out of the bourgeois’ nightmare myopia”: its fictional extensions of real-world Capitalism’s scarcity and death, harmful lies, unironic war and rape. If we want to escape Capitalism, we have to alter our material conditions (reclaim the Base); this starts with the Superstructure as something to recultivate through our own Gothic poetics—their iconoclastic, multimedia expressions of unequal power as sex-positive and class-conscious. This means we can’t just to go into Gothic castles for pure, escapist fun, but must do so to retrieve/reify what is useful when synthesizing proletarian praxis as something to disseminate back into Gothic Communism, the movement; i.e., anything useful to camping canon stolen from Metroidvania and its cinematic and novelized forebears (re: Aliens and The Hobbit, Otranto). We have to learn from the past by transforming its canonical depictions to avoid repeating Capitalism’s unironic genocides.
This brings us not just to my adulthood but my postgraduate work on ludo-Gothic BDSM, which in 2017 was met with its own barriers. Working under David Calonne, I was only just learning about the Numinous vis-à-vis Rudolph Otto and H.P. Lovecraft and came across an article by Lilia Melani, “Otto on the Numinous” (2003), citing the Gothic as the quest for the Numinous: “It has been suggested that Gothic fiction originated primarily as a quest for the mysterium tremendum” (source). Something about it appealed to my then-closeted kinkster as have previously been titillated by Cameron, Lovecraft and Nintendo (there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write), but also the videogames I was playing at the time: Metroidvania[19] (shortly before I went overseas, my best friend Ginger recommended Axiom Verge and Hollow Knight to me, which I eventually made the topic of my master’s thesis). Eager to go to grad school and learn more about this exciting thing called “the Numinous,” I looked for places that taught “the Gothic” and was directed by various educators to MMU. Upon going overseas, I swiftly collided painfully against various cultural barriers when trying to express myself (and my inherited, lived trauma) through the Gothic mode as something to relay in academic language. The whole ordeal became counterproductive and traumatic in its own right, requiring me to voice my concerns regarding said baggage in connection to the larger systemic traumas I was seeking to express and overcome; i.e., by facing my own painful past in its totality. This meant coming up with a solution through ludo-Gothic BDSM, which in turn meant forming it into a teachable method for this book; but I first had to deal with my unprocessed trauma from my brief, invalidating stint in academia (four years, from 2014 to 2018, not including submitting to academic journals, attending conferences and applying for PhD programs, which lasted another year).
For me, Gothic media more broadly is cryptomimetic (writing about the ghosts between words), but also whose undead mode of expression is embroiled within academic areas of study that yield hermeneutic limitations due to recency biases and disdain for a holistic approach by academic bigwigs. For instance, I noticed these limitations myself when trying to marry the Gothic to videogames in my own graduate work as cutting-edge. It was a tactic my supervisors and academic superiors resisted, simply because videogames were either totally outside of their realm of experience, or “Metroidvania” wasn’t something that had been academically connected to games within their own fields. That is, speedrunning as a practice/documentary subject was just taking off online in 2018 (Twitch had only existed since 2011); likewise, “ludic-Gothic” wasn’t even a decade-old term at the time, was something that ambitious academics strove to stake new claims within while leaving much to be desired.
For example, the same year I wrote my thesis on Metroidvania, Bernard Perron would sum up the broader Gothic rush in videogame academia in The World of Scary Games: A Study in Videoludic Horror (2019) sans mentioning Metroidvania once:
Horror scholars such as Taylor, Kirkland, Niedenthal, and Krzywinska have therefor come to contextualize videogames in the older tradition of the Gothic fiction, “one of survival horror’s parents,” as Taylor states in “Gothic Bloodlines in Survival Horror Gaming” (2009). Furthermore, the latter even coined a new term to highlight this origin: “The ludic-gothic is created when the Gothic is transformed by the video game medium, and is a kindred genre to survival horror” […] Video games remediate many aspects of Gothic poetics: [the prevention of mastery, obscured or unreliable visions, scattering of written texts in typical Gothic locations and their lost histories, the encounter and use of anachronistic technologies, etc] (source).
Not only does Perron make no mention of Metroidvania at all, neither do any of the other scholars he cites; nor did my supervisors know what Metroidvania were when I was researching it (nor I, with me finally settling on a concrete definition in 2021; re: the “Mazes and Labyrinths” abstract). Indeed, Metroidvania—despite being an older genre than survival horror[20]—remains a thoroughly underrepresented area of Gothic videogame studies, and Gothic videogames remain ripe for continued study within our own lives. Indeed, I had to connect the two myself when recognizing a knowledge gap regarding Metroidvania as cryptomimetic media within videogame studies at large; and I have continued to do so as a postgrad writing about mazes and labyrinths in Metroidvania; i.e., as a niche area of study to expand upon within my own daily life beyond academia—by writing about or illustrating Metroidvania outside of conferences, but also interviewing Metroid speedrunners for fun in my “Mazes and Labyrinths” compendium (which we’ll give an example of a little deeper into the subchapter).
Note; re: For a full, up-to-date history of Metroidvania and my formulation of it after Covid’s lockdown period, refer to my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus. —Perse, 3/28/2025
(exhibit 1a1a1h2a3b: Artist, top-right: Alessandro Constantini. Bo Burnham [top-right] demonstrates how reflections on the world involve an endless creative process, one whose mise-en-abyme fits comfortably within cryptomimesis as a meta-reflection on Gothic poetics and its narrative of the crypt: my undergrad/graduate/postgraduate academic work as something to revisit, think about, and reapply to the real world beyond just conferences [bottom-left and -right: papers for Sheffield Gothic and the International Gothic Association] but also interacting with Metroidvania themselves being remade by artists like Constantini—i.e., older “ghosts” to chase down and interrogate, including ghost of ourselves.
For example, when writing this exhibit, my partner and I watched the video presentation for a 2019 conference paper I wrote and recorded for Sheffield Gothic’s Reimagining the Gothic with a Vengeance, Vol 5: Returns, Revenge, Reckonings: “‘More My Speed’: The Tempo of Gothic Affect in a Ludic Framework.” I hadn’t watched the video since I uploaded it, but doing so reminded me of some useful ideas I hadn’t thought about in a long time. It was also like beholding a younger-looking but ultimately older version of myself:
[source: Me in the accompanying video to “More My Speed,” which I sent to Sheffield Gothic because I couldn’t fly overseas.]
As I haven’t written academically for years, it felt a bit surreal [and fun] to investigate a “ghost” of my former self and listen what it had to say:
Inside the gameworld, on-screen, different speeds are displayed by player motion relative to the gameworld and its creatures. There is speed of confrontation (horror) and speed of the reveal (terror) […] There is speed of action, which includes exploration, combat, and escape; these are tied to the style of the game’s design. There is also speed of death: As Raškauskienė writes, “for Burke, terror – fear of pain – was a terror mixed with a paradoxical delight. Ostensibly, this was because the sublime observer is not actually threatened. Safety in the midst of danger produces a thrilling pleasure” (18). Survival is a question not of actually dying in Metroid or Castlevania; the player cannot die. What matters is being in the presence of simulated “near-death” for as long as possible. This can be monsters, like Ridley and Kraid, in Metroid; or Dracula, the Mummy or Medusa’s head, in Castlevania. The player is next to them, or “near” them by being inside a world that promotes them. Kraid’s Lair advertises Kraid; Castlevania promotes Dracula through a series of monsters. Whether any are onscreen or not, the player anticipates them non-stop [source].)
Processing my troubled academic past, my reflections on Metroidvania as a tomb-like, ludo-Gothic space/torture dungeon have become thoroughly enmeshed in my own sexuality and gender-formation beyond what was heteronormatively assigned to me at birth; i.e., what was naturally assigned and what I had to reclaim through my own work’s seeking and expressing of power as something to find inside particular performative arrangements: the “ludo-Gothic BDSM” of the Gothic castle as a powerful “female-coded” space (which Volume One would extent to nature as monstrous-feminine; i.e., anything not a white cis-het Christian Western European man). Its palliative Numinous expresses C.S. Lewis’ so-called “problem of pain” (1940) through mutual consent; i.e., as a kind of ludic contract that promises paradoxical thrills through the aesthetics of harmful power but also unequal power exchange in the contractual sense as rich food for thought: it changes how we think about the world. As I write in “Revisiting My Masters’ Thesis on Metroidvania—Our Ludic Masters: The Dominating Game Space”:
Metroidvania players consent to the game by adopting a submissive position. Most people sexualize BDSM, but power is exchanged in any scenario, sexual or otherwise. This being said, Gothic power exchanges are often sexualized [in appearance]. Samus is vulnerable when denuded, her naked body exposed to the hostile alien menace (re: the end scene from Alien). Metroidvania conjure [up] dominance and submission through a player that winds up “on the hip” (an old expression that means “to be at a disadvantage”). Another way to think of it is, the player is the bottom, and they’re being topped by the game.
[artist: Sarah Kate Forstner’s “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” (2017); source: Michael Uhall’s “A Specter, a Speaker: ‘Whistle and I’ll Come to You’ (1968)”]
With any power exchange there’s always an element of ambiguity and danger (doubly so in Gothic stories). The participants have to trust one another. In this sense, I trust the Metroidvania not to hurt me, but the castle is always somewhat uncanny. I know the gameworld can’t hurt me because it’s a videogame; it can no more kill me than a dream, or C. S. Lewis’ mighty spirit:
suppose that you were told simply “There is a mighty spirit in the room,” and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of danger [of the tiger]: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking — a sense of inadequacy to cope with such a visitant and of prostration before it — an emotion which might be expressed in Shakespeare’s words “Under it my genius is rebuked” (The Problem of Pain).
Nevertheless, the paradox—of near-danger in videogames—mirrors the plight of the Neo-Gothic heroine. 18th century women read these stories to feel danger in a controlled sense, but they still submitted to its Numinous “perils.” By comparison, the Lovecraft junkie submits to cosmic nihilism[21], and the survival horror enthusiast seeks danger of a particular kind. So do Metroidvania players (source).
This power exchange through the palliative Numinous has always appealed to me amid Gothic aesthetics, spaces and cliché, fetishized thrills; i.e., inside castles when I have far less dominant power than one might think, but also more subby power in ways that feel asexually profound but never fully divorced from sexual peril’s aesthetics: the disempowered hero in a very Gothic sense, according to my unequal relationship to/negotiation with a female[22] “rapist” space that feels mightier than I am by virtue of the dungeon (rape) aesthetic, but also our power arrangement being stacked against me:
She’s mighty-mighty, just lettin’ it all hang out
She’s a brick house
That lady’s stacked and that’s a fact
Ain’t holding nothing back (source: The Commodores’ “Brick House,” 1977).
That’s the whole point. I seemingly “can’t win” because the space’s ergodic potential is fundamentally stronger than I am; but it still sits within that performance of unequal, harmful power as a paradox: the sub’s power through the pairing with a dominant whose power flows through them like heavy metal thunder. In that sense, I actually win and lose at the same time (what ludologists call a positive-sum zero-sum game: a win-win[23])! Replayability and endless backtracking amid dungeon aesthetics are a core part of the Metroidvania appeal: to feel mastered inside the ludic contract despite its inherent flexibility.
Furthermore, as I write in “Why I Submit: A Subby Gothicist’s Attitudes on Metroidvania, Mommy Doms, and Sexual Persecution” (2021), this doesn’t just stay in the gameworld; for me, it translates to how I live and think about my life relative to my abuse as survived but also played within in Metroidvania safe spaces:
I have male friends, but most of my friends are women or trans people. Most of my partners have been trans or gender-fluid. The same goes for the women in media I relate to or am inspired by. For me, a powerful woman or female space is captivating and educational, especially the “mommy dom” and Metroidvania.
I’ve always felt attracted to female power—be it in teachers, heroines, or videogame characters. But female power is usually androgynous, having pre-conceptions about male power mixed in. I admire Joan of Arc and Elphaba, but also Ellen Ripley and Samus Aran: tomboyish girls, female knights. I especially love the Metroidvania—a chaotic, “female” stronghold to lose myself inside, but also the focus of my PhD work. There, I can explore myself sexually in relation to power and trauma. This is why I submit. When I do submit, I submit to “mommy doms.”
In a BDSM framework, the mommy dom is a powerful female figure, one with the power to punish and nurture inside a consensual framework [of exquisite “torture”]. Just remember that I’m a switch; I’m not submissive all the time. However, when I am, I submit consensually. It’s not for everyone, and it shouldn’t be. That isn’t the argument that sexist men make, though. For them, only women can or should submit. Men who submit are weak, or impossible. Clearly they’re not impossible, but homosexual composer Tchaikovsky’s words on submission (towards a young servant) were nonetheless treated as impossible—his amorous words furiously repressed by the Russian state: “My God, what an angelic creature and how I long to be his slave, his plaything, his property!” (source).
Obviously my connection to the imaginary Dark Mother “ravishing” me (through ludo-Gothic BDSM camping rape) is tied to my own abuse, and led me down a very dark road: frustrated with academia and dumped by Zeuhl for their decade-long secret flame, I dated online; I encountered Jadis through Gothic roleplay on Fetlife; we hit it off and I quickly moved in; they worked their magic, abusing me emotionally during the pandemic, and raping me through total financial control, as well (re: “Escaping Jadis; or, Running Up that Hill“).
All of that might seem like a mistake/panic attack waiting to happen upon revisitation in small—a bit like my own deal with the devil (running off with a devil-in-disguise in the harmful, self-destructive sense of that phrase). Except I not only survived; I learned some important lessons that school would never have taught me (and which I could pass on through this book as my own sex-positive castle of sin). One such lesson was that I inadvertently realized how much I enjoy the ironic rape fantasy[24a] of sitting at the foot of the dark queen’s throne, “trapped” in her castle and “kept for sport.” Such a lady is the teeth in the night and might “slash me to ribbons” if I’m not careful; but vis-à-vis Wolff, she’s also a part of my divided self (a less extreme, operatic/phenomenological version of an actual plurality)—the ghost of myself and my counterfeits that I’m debating with right now as I revisit these older writings of mine (all my yesterdays) to say something bigger and more definitive about Metroidvania (and by extension, Capitalism). It’s like looking into a window of the past and seeing my younger self, but also not my younger self at the same time (Castor Troy from Face/Off [1997] put it best: “It’s like looking into a mirror, only not”).
There’s always a bit of our parents and their congenital/inherited pasts in ourselves (or counterfeit “parents”), and there’s always a bit of us and ours in our own babies. As part of this book (which is my baby), we can take my experiences, congenital inheritance and compound education to convert Tolkien’s refrain (and Cameron’s) through iconoclastic refrains of our own: castle-narrative of a particular kind—sex-positive castle BDSM (an alternative name for ludo-Gothic BDSM that didn’t stick) that allows us to inhabit but also critique, thus reclaim and negotiation the future role of the Gothic heroine’s more “Amazonian” doubling in ways that we can also rescue from TERF praxis by re-raiding the tomb/rereading the tome ourselves (the italicized bit isn’t so much a keyword as a phrase I invented just now that combines a variety of keywords we’ve already discussed and whose assemblage[24b] we will be discussing now). It can be an exhilarating way to camp the bigoted past of white saviors and profiteers, albeit inside a sexy avatar surrounded by “peril”: the Gothic heroine stuck inside her own sexy body “asking for it” (through the Male Gaze), but also the Gothic’s inheritance anxiety boiling over amid a circular state of return to past trauma/fatal nostalgia revived in joyously hauntological forms (“Lost in Necropolis” as my master’s thesis would call it—a phrase I actually borrowed from Mark Shelton’s 1983 song of the same name)! There’s no place like “home” turned upside-down, paradoxical salvation occurring mid-exposure!
(artist: Devilhs)
Note, 3/28/2025: I would go onto comment on this idea many times (from the Demon Module, no italics):
Intratextual messages speak to extratextual solutions; a house of cards is a place to hide, wait, and bide one’s time while seemingly stripped bare, the visuals seeming to support a narrative of peril, but also feel and play out of joint with its instructions inside a safe space’s revolutionary cryptonymy. Whore and rape go hand-in-hand, then, but lend the verb quotes easily enough. There, we whores relieve stress for other workers and ourselves, playing out our own deaths and rapes per all the usual sexist, or otherwise storied, bigoted fetishes and clichés on and offstage: little deaths, but also just deaths, period; re (from the Poetry Module):
My own quest for a Numinous Commie Mommy isn’t so odd; capital makes us feel tired relative to the self-as-alien, both incumbent on the very things they rape to nurture them (re: Irigaray’s creation of sexual difference). I’m hardly the first person to notice this:
As Edward Said astutely notes in Culture and Imperialism, most societies project their fears on the unknown or the exotic other. This barren land, where the viewers are kept disorientated, is threatening. It is a place between the familiar and the foreign, like part of a dream or vision that one cannot remember clearly. There is always a sense of a lurking danger from which the viewers need protection. Nikita provides that sense of protection (source: Laura Ng’s “‘The Most Powerful Weapon You Have’: Warriors and Gender in La Femme Nikita,” 2003).
I am, however, a trans woman who has gone above and beyond women like Barbara Creed, Angela Carter, Luce Irigaray and Laura Ng, etc, in my pioneering of ludo-Gothic BDSM: as a holistic, “Commy-Mommy” means of synthesizing proletarian praxis inside the operatic danger disco(-in-disguise), the “rape” castle riffing on Walpole, Lewis, Radcliffe, Konami, Nintendo, and so many others. I sign myself as such for a reason—not to be an edgy slut (though I am a slut who walks the edge). Rather, my pedagogic aim is to consider the monstrous-feminine not simply as a female monster avoiding revenge through violence, but a sex-positive force that doesn’t reduce to white women policing the same-old ghost of the counterfeit: to reverse what TERFs (and other sell-outs) further as normally being the process of abjection, vis-à-vis Cartesian thought tokenizing marginalized groups to harvest nature-as-usual during the dialectic of the alien (source: “In Search of the Secret Spell,” 2024).
It’s a bit ghoulish and Numinous, demons generally oscillating between such earthly-to-divine qualities inside a given shadow zone/danger disco (commonly a white woman’s idea of castle or ballroom; i.e., authored for those fearful of the nuclear model’s sexual marketplace, reifying and playing with the Gothic’s operatic rape castle doubling domestic abuse and, by extension, colonial abuse).
All in all, fear spaces (and bodies) are informed by pre-existing biases, phobias and stigmas, which means they exist as much to announce/expose a given comorbidity as to relieve stress resulting from it. If we summon these spaces and their fears ourselves (often concerning our bodies), we can learn of repressed feelings attached to their likenesses and begin to counteract them through our own constructions (source: “Rape Reprise”).
(artist: Devilhs)
Furthermore, such simulative castles like Metroidvania evoke greater feelings inside-outside themselves; i.e., as castles in small—with hyphenated elements of the flesh and not-flesh (a gargoyle appearing fleshy but made of stone); i.e., as spaces to evoke Radcliffean and Lewis-style feelings of terror and horror rape fantasies we, inundated with capital’s criminogenic conditions for such bad dreams, in and out of sleep/on and offstage, become palliative spaces of play across different registers reaching hermeneutically for systemic catharsis (re: the Gothic-Communist Quadfecta: Marxism, ludology, gender studies and Gothic theory). More on hermeneutics and oppositional synthesis, in Volume One. For examinations of the castle/capital in small, consider “Back to Jadis’ Dollhouse” in “Transforming Our Zombie Selves (and Our War-like, Rapacious Toys) by Reflecting on the Wider World through the Rememory of Personal Trauma” from Volume Two’s Undead Module! —Perse, 3/28/2025
For all its ergodic, liminal, anisotropic, concentric recursion housing Medusa, the Metroidvania is merely one such construction—not just a haunted house, but one—in keeping with Walpole—populated with “ancient” warriors whose disturbing (and wonderous) presence, mid-chronotope, excites signature “Gothic” emotions increasingly hauntological and alien in modernity’s atomized present space-and-time.
Whatever the form—i.e., Amazon/Medusa or not, and their protective and nurturing feelings amid ambiguous “inkblot” ones of danger—the aesthetics of danger can certainly be thrilling in a variety of ways. So can our tearing up of the usual ludic contract in search of different forms of mastery than what the game codes players to do, but still reliably “has its way” with us by accounting for these emergent forms inside of itself. Contained inside the aesthetics of ruinous, exotic death, the ludic function of the Metroidvania supplies a cathartic “punishment” that at times verges on endless madness; i.e., the recursive motion of the player chasing the record for that better and better time, while the power exchange of a thoroughly vampiric and Gothic-coded space sucks the runner of their sanity and lifeforce; but also doubles them. This complicated relationship on- and offstage becomes something to interrogate not just of the castle by the player but by spectators interviewing “runners” of a particular castle. Each is going to have their own feelings about what they’re exploring and contributing historically towards.
For example, during my interview[25] with CScottyW (a WR holder for all categories in Metroid Fusion [2001] and many in Metroid: Zero Mission [2004]—source: Speedrun.com), I had a chance to pick his brain about what I called the “Quest for Mastery” (which the Gothic’s Numinous and Prometheus Quest generally try for):
Persephone: The speedrunner’s challenge is a kind of metaplay informed by the gameworld’s coded instructions. The more runners move, the more they record; the more they record, the more history the space accrues.
Despite instructing the player to map them, there’s an ostensibly “unmappable” quality to Metroid gameworlds. Do you feel like there always one more map to fill in? For example, you’ve played Zero Mission for hundreds of hours and are still surprised by it. Does this sense of elusive mastery ever make you feel disempowered because always one more map to fill in? Or do you enjoy it for precisely that reason?
CScottyW: I enjoy being able to keep improving, even when it’s difficult. Others have responded differently and would say things such as “no matter how good your time is, you will never be satisfied.” I may agree with this to some extent, but I don’t think the sentiment is necessarily negative either!
So I suppose, yes, I do enjoy it because I can just keep playing the game, and I enjoy playing the game.
Persephone: Do you feel constantly drawn back to the maze, thus unable to escape, because it’s somehow “greater” than you are? For example, speedrunners dissect games, but games give them the tools to do so. Metroid in particular introduced many staples to the speedrunning practice: a maze-like, deconstructible world, and hidden, time-based reward system helped lay the groundwork for speedrunning as a practice.
CScottyW: The game rewards you for playing fast, and it is internally rewarding to play fast. That seems like a pretty deadly combination to me to keep someone doing something. I have taken a break from running these games many times, but I do always return for some reason or another. Sometimes it’s to participate in a tourney and other times it’s just because I feel like playing the game. Maybe the latter occurs when I’m simply drawn back into the maze. I wouldn’t personally say that it’s because the game is “‘greater’ than me” or because it has some power over me, but does an addict say that their addiction has some power over them if they are not trying to quit?
(artist: u/mr_merns)
Persephone: Is the past you’re struggling to defeat essentially yourself, mainly your personal best? Do you ever visualize this former, past record as being represented by Mother Brain or the SA-X? Effectively a historical marker to run against, that only grows more and more powerful over time?
CScottyW: Yeah, I’d agree with that. I’m always trying to overcome myself at my best. I certainly may have different stress levels fighting these bosses as a result of my personal best, or what my pace is going into those fights, but I don’t consciously refer to them as a representative of it (source).
CScottyW’s answers were unique to him, of course, but clearly the space between life and death is a fine line to walk in Metroidvania. As doubled by the player and the gameworld as interacting back and forth, the proximity to power but not quite having it is what makes Metroidvania players—despite the live burial’s constant procession—feel most alive: the chase of power and closeness to death as not entirely one’s own inside a Numinous space built from older maps, conventions and aesthetics that parallel the larger futile gesture. CScottyW certainly has his own feelings on the subject, and in the speedrunning tradition treats it more like a sport (specifically the race), but so do I as a casual[26] player of these same games:
As a Metroidvania enthusiast [to say the least], I submit to the game’s castle-narrative. Like a Faustian bargain, this exchange is part of the game’s ludic contract. This is not quite how Clint Hockings describes it, in “Ludonarrative Dissonance“: “seek power and you will progress.” Rather, on some level, the player plays Metroidvania to be dominated. Progression may appear to conquer the space. In reality the space conquers back, and fairly often. I experience these sensations when I control the avatar. However, the vicarious nature of this relationship can become even more framed (concentric): I can watch other people try to master the game, and watch them be dominated by the space. Not even speedrunners can escape this embarrassment, their blushing faces conjoined with the statues already screaming on the walls. How fleeting a victory like Shiny Zeni’s is, when it will eventually be bested. Or buried.
These symptoms and the choices they inform are endemic to Metroidvania. The space is comorbid, boasting a variety of disempowering symptoms. All result from the way the game is played. This play is deconstructive, the player not only invited, but tacitly instructed (there are no explicit tutorials) to blast the world apart: bomb walls, missile doors, and [mini-bosses to kill] for even bigger keys. Not only this; the hidden functions of the gameworld include a reward system: Beat the game quickly enough and you get to see some space booty.
(artist: Urbanator)
A person motivated by sex is hardly in control. Not to mention, the sex historically offered by Metroid is fraught with peril. The entire drive is illustrated by gameplay conducive to speedrunning at a basic level. The same strategies employed by the best runners are executed by regular players. You play the game and begin to play it faster. In some sense, this “maze mastery” is involuntary. The player cannot help but play the game faster as they begin to re-remember the maze. The game exploits this, repeatedly leading the player towards self-destruction and domination.
These feelings are orgasmic, but differently than the Doom Slayer’s own attempts at conquest. They’re a Gothic orgasm, a kind of exquisite torture. I say “exquisite” because they occur within the realm of play [as partially emergent]. For Metroidvania, this jouissance is ludic. But sometimes a game can blur the lines. [… Be this in Metroidvania, or similarly “strict” spaces, players] are expected to revel in the game’s sadism, deriving pleasure from “punishment” while the game, for lack of a better term, bends them over and fucks them (source: “Our Ludic Masters”).
My specific approach isn’t purely because the race through a give space was something to partake in, full-throttle, but a “death race” inside a particular kind of track where speed, though important, sometimes takes a backseat to the scenic route: death theatre as something to soak in and play around with.
Simply put, if you’ve been abused in real life, it can be tremendously medicinal to be held down by a seasoned pro and taken to that edge without ever being in harm’s way. The same goes for a dungeon that keeps you inside of itself while threatening you with exquisite “torture” of a profound, Numinous sort. It’s hard to explain, other than the paradoxical threat feels vital to achieving catharsis because of the trauma that lives inside me as normally making me feel out of control. Working with Metroidvania in this negotiated capacity, then, is like working with the best dom on the planet because it cannot, by design, harm me; and I cannot harm those I request to be “imperiled” who occupy the same space (non-playable characters that I “kill”). Like knife play done well, they look “in danger” which can be tremendously exciting to watch, but it’s, for all intents and purposes, completely risk-free. Sometimes, you have to fight fire with “fire”; or in the words of David the android quoting Peter O’Toole in Prometheus (2012): “The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts” (except for us, the trick is inverted: not minding that actual harm is completely impossible but feels on the cusp of actualizing at any given moment; e.g., acquiring literal “sanity damage” when playing a Lovecraft-themed horror game). The appeal of Metroidvania is feeling “at home” in the dark castle as our pandemonium that we negotiate for ourselves: a “wicked” place whose “safe space” is wreathed and wrought with the fascinating markers of the imaginary medieval past (and retro-future) brought into the present to critique the present’s harmful illusions (not preserve them through the same old unironic rape fantasies and stereotypes).
I’ve clearly thought about this subject a lot over the years, and my feelings about ludo-Gothic BDSM haven’t really changed. If anything I feel like the argument of my master’s thesis—that the deconstructive, speedrunning nature of Metroidvania synergizes neatly with the Gothic aesthetics’ meta-narrative—has only been reinforced by further investigations like these. Explorations of an angry and traumatized gameworld can be immensely cathartic in ways that confront the trauma in our own lives, giving us the means to address systemic abuse present in seemingly empowering fantasies[27]; i.e., maps and spaces that resemble Metroidvania in aesthetics, but not function. That’s largely the problem with Tolkien’s refrain but also Cameron’s: they treat unironic war as a means to an end, not as something that’s actually part of the problem. In short, war is forever, naturalized as empowerment while doing the state’s dirty work.
All the same, while Metroidvania aren’t perfect—indeed, can often fall into the trap of surviving and killing monsters just like Tolkien’s heroes do—their tenuous arrangement of power during liminal expression is far less optimistic and far more openly Promethean than Tolkien’s fantasies tended to be. War is not good, in Metroidvania, nor are its monarchs or castles places to defend. Instead, their combined mirror is black, which it very much needs to be insofar as class consciousness is concerned; you have to see things in ways that are honest about trauma’s manifestations within and outside of ourselves, and in naked dialectical-material language: the yawning dead expressed in potent nightmares that yield clarity instead of abject confusion beyond the realms of death (as Judas Priest might put it). The world is a vampire now but it needn’t always be—not if we work towards a solution that calls for the humanization of orcs (not their heads) and the unmasking of the state’s killers (and their dungeons) as inhumane: ACAB (castles and cops). It’s not something to be meek about, but to take further and further towards sex positivity through iconoclasm as a happy result; i.e., whose visible excitement stems from the proverbial tightrope as something to shrink during dark indulgence, but also “expand” through jouissance (a potential asexual intellectual ecstasy tied to artistic nudity[28] as an oft-asexual undertaking with an sexual visual element) as a mutually consensual enterprise: “the first expands the ‘soul,’ and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life,” amounting to an exquisite “torture” minus Radcliffe’s (or Tolkien’s) operatic bigotries and harmful stereotypes. Now that’s what I call a win-win!
(artist: Thirstastic)
Gothic-Communist development isn’t zero-sum, but established through play, mid-opposition. Concluding part one’s rather hauntological and uber-nerdy trip down memory lane, we’re arrived at our next destination: part two, or the Metroidvania as a closed space for us to reclaim, and use to reclaim, class character from Tolkien’s refrain using the ludo-Gothic BDSM and other devices from Cameron’s refrain to interrogate power’s assembly and performance, expressing it ourselves in iconoclastic variations.
Per Lilia Melani, the Gothic is classically viewed as the quest for the Numinous. We’ll be doing so inside the Metroidvania’s shadow zone as more than just a game to play but a theatrical space to play on whose chaotic gameplay can radically shape how we think about our own lives in a Gothic-Communist sense; i.e., in relation to power and its complicates symbols according to castles and monsters as flexible theatrical devices whose sites/citing of power can be camped in the Gothic tradition: not strictly the Monty Python approach[29] (though there’s a place for that; e.g., the Black Knight, the Bridge of Death, the Rabbit of Caerbannog [“that rabbit’s dynamite!”] and Castle Anthrax, etc), but just as often a semi-serious death theatre whose gradient of camp allows for outright silliness but also a fair amount of gravity onstage even when things aren’t pitch black (a Gothic castle can be composed entirely of Tim Allen’s face from Home Improvement[30] [1991] if the effect is still Gothic in some shape or form). We’re also fighting to reclaim the symbolism of all monsters inside these castles, after all:
(artist: Renthony)
Onto “Metroidvania and the Quest for Power, part two: Interrogating Power through Camp“!
About the Author
Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!
Footnotes
[1] The above drawing was inspired by a photo of Blxxd Bunny. Their booty made me think of Percy Shelley’s famous poem, so I decided to have fun with it. I based the drawing off “Ozymandias,” but also the aspiring conqueror’s desire to appear mighty (e.g., “Bonaparte before the Sphinx” [1886] echoing the Western tyrant’s desire to be like the conquerors of old—refer to exhibit 40a4 for all the visual materials). I wanted to play around with this idea, subverting the canonical warlord’s refrain as echoed through the historical-material world: the mighty ass of a good friend that I was simply in awe of. In my iconoclastic game of telephone, I even fucked with the poem for funsies:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—”Two vast and shapely buns of stone
Thrust up in the desert. … Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a peerless visage sighs, whose smile,
And pillow lip, and smirk of warm delight,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that enjoyed them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, Queen of queens;
Look on my Ass, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away” (originally altered 3/16/2023).
[2] Similar to ludo-Gothic BDSM, my work on Metroidvania has expanded considerably since October 2023; re: to see the entirety of it, refer to the full glossary definition, my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus, or the Metroidvania page on my website.
[3a] Rudolph Otto, in The Idea of the Holy (1917), described the ghost story’s appeal as denoting an inferior intimation of the numen, or presence of God, which he described as the mysterium tremendum; i.e., divine wrath as something to seek out for the purposes of religious experience: the sensation of self-destruction in the face of something greater than oneself. Compared to the Sublime, which focuses on the awesome power of nature, the Numinous is more urban, civilized and manmade; i.e., found in man’s domain through the presence of the Gothic castle as abandoned and occupied by a divine, otherworldly presence that parallels the awesome might of nature but ultimately is its own kind of supreme force.
[3b] Something I will continue to stress throughout this series is the medieval’s hyphenation of sex, food, death and war (among other things). The same goes for the Neo-Gothic, including Metroidvania and things evocative of the same overarching mentalities and poetry in motion/the flesh. Infinite power, infinite form (a concept the Demon Module will return to; re: “Of Darkness and the Forbidden“).
[4] Under whose independent tutelage (LING 499) at EMU, I wrote the paper, “Method in His Madness: Lovecraft, the Rock-and-Roll Iconoclast and Buoyant Lead Balloon” (2017), which inspired me to pursue the Numinous (as a subject of study) to the faraway, magical city Manchester, England.
[5] E.g., Bernard Perron, Ewan Kirkland, Catherine Spooner, Tanya Krzywinska, etc. Some of these persons I have already mentioned; some I will mention later—during the symposium, but also in Volume Two’s subchapters “Bad Dreams, part 3” and “Seeing Dead People.”
[6] E.g., Alien: Isolation (2014), which told Ripley’s neoliberal odyssey through her daughter’s eyes: Amanda (who Cameron merely used as an excuse for the mother’s revenge 28 years prior in the real world, but somewhere between 57 years before Ellen Ripley’s reawakening after Amanda’s death, in Aliens).
[7] Which videogames would simulate through player-controlled avatars that, in turn, spill back out into the real world, affecting the Gothic imagination as a continual oscillating process: through any poetic device a worker might express themselves with informing other devices, on and on.
[8] Botting, p.140.
[9] Lewis, p.303.
[10] ibid., p.311.
[11] Botting, p.153.
[12] Maggie Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel, (London: Routledge, 1995), p.12.
[13] Lewis, p.309.
[14] Botting, p.153.
[15] Ann Radcliffe, The Italian, ed. by Frederick Garber, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 32.
[16] Fredric Jameson, ‘Progress Versus Utopia; Or, Can We Imagine the Future?’, Science Fiction Studies, 9.2 (1982), pp.151-152.
[17] Whose own gameworld was doubled inside of itself: the light and dark world duality borrowed from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1991).
[18] Having about as much understanding of the actual place as Tolkien did of “the East.”
[19] As I write in “Mazes and Labyrinths“:
“Metroidvania” was effectively the combination of two IPs owned by different Japanese companies, Nintendo and Konami. For that reason, the term was almost never printed in any official capacity during the 1990s and early 2000s; it was purely a grassroots term. In fact, it wasn’t until the mid-2010s that “Metroidvania” saw wider use in the Internet’s indie market: PC Gamer (Tom Senior’s “The Best Metroidvania Games on PC, 2022), Engadget (Richard Mitchell’s “‘Metroidvania’ Should Actually Be ‘Zeldavania,'” 2014), Game Developer (Christian Nutt’s “The Undying Allure of the Metroidvania,” 2015), Giant Bomb (“Search Action*,” 2024) and Wired (Bo Moore’s “An Anime-Inspired Platformer…” 2015).
*The Japanese term for “Metroidvania,” demonstrating how—even in 2024 (the last time Giant Bomb updated their post)—Japanese audiences and authors avoid using the term.
Simply put, the genre exploded in popularity in the mid-2010s, becoming a smash indie success on Steam and continuing to be wildly popular to this day.
[20] Metroid and Castlevania are both older than Sweet Home (1989).
[21] This idea was coined by a supremely bigoted white man—one whose tottering regressions towards fascism forever hang over the science-y heroes he constantly tortures in his stories; i.e., threatening them with insignificance in the face of mightier things:
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little [speak for yourself, whitey]; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age (source: “The Call of Cthulhu,” 1928).
“Oh, no! I’m not the center of the universe?” I think old Lovecraft could have seriously done with some “flexibility training” insofar as acclimating himself to chaos, meaning there’s more to life than the myth of male power deflated. His empty outlook, in my opinion, is very much him projecting his own privileged shortcomings into the power vacuum of an impenetrable void (that isn’t, you should know by now, outer space). He’s basically Peter Weyland gazing solemnly into the abyss and seeing nothing because, for him, there is nothing worthwhile to acquire. It’s the trembling that he enjoys. He’s very much like a child afraid of the dark, whose prescribed unapproachability is a kind of “backtalking from the sub”: “You’re hideous, Cthulhu; now step on me.”
[22] Or intersex, but also classically “woman is other” in Western society (which has alienated GNC elements outside of a dimorphic approach). The gendering of spaces is not usual; sailors would do it with ships, gendering them female as they cut through the equally female sea. A giant, hostile castle isn’t so odd, then—with Scott’s “space castle” (and its Gothic matelotage) sailing through the murky darkness like a ghost ship haunted by an older copy of itself.
[23] Versus a negative-sum game: a lose-lose; e.g., Capitalism (because the elite will lose in the end due to climate change).
[24a] Jadis used to buy me nice clothes and underwear to highlight my physical features, and make me appear more feminine and desirable to them (a genderfluid person who identified and performed as “masc”): skirts, fancy shirts and corsets, but also skin-tight briefs. I loved wearing these—loved feeling feminine during my fantasy as the Gothic heroine; feeling out of control being with Jadis, the fantasy became something I could weaponize: a means of controlling the abuse they inflicted through lucid dreams I was well-versed in. As we shall explore in Volume Two, these ludic-Gothic BDSM fantasies became the very means of my escape. In turn, I hypothesized that if they could help me escape Jadis (a loud and proud neoliberal girl boss), then maybe I could retailor them to help others escape Capitalist Realism through the Gothic mode.
[24b] Which, again, crystallized into ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., as a potent means of camping rape through such dolls (the trauma side being unpacked extensively in Volume Two’s Undead Module; e.g., “One Foot out the Door; or, Playing with Dolls to Express One’s Feeling Undead“).
[25] From our 2021 interview, “Mazes and Labyrinths: Speedrunning Metroidvania – CScottyW,” which was conducted as part of my then-PhD research on Metroidvania, “Series Abstract: ‘Mazes and Labyrinths: Disempowerment in Metroidvania and Survival Horror.’”
[26] As per my master’s thesis, all Metroidvania players are conditioned to map a Gothic castle
Metroid introduced numerous staples for the subgenre, including exploration in an [isolated scenario]: the Gothic heroine lost in the castle. As Samus Aran, the player must navigate the hostile Zebeth underground, hunting the Metroids (an indigenous species of vampiric jellyfish) using relics found inside the ruins. […] Limitations are determined by the player’s equipment. However, few items are needed to explore the entire map. The game is not timed, has no in-game map system. Its world is a giant map that can be explored, in-game, but also charted out-of-game by the player. In Super Metroid (1994), an “automap” feature would be introduced. However, from a narrative standpoint, this merely illustrated what the player was already doing themselves (source: “Lost in Necropolis”).
but also speedrun it to greater or lesser degrees:
Narrative in a Gothic text cannot be divorced from the exploration of space; however, Metroidvania spaces are so conducive to speedrunning as to make avoiding it an arduous task. Simply put, speedrunning is playing fast as possible. At its core, however, the exercise requires continual exploration and repetitive motion. This cannot be separated from space, provided to the player as maps, strategy guides or instruction booklets. The player is always mapping in some sense, because the space forces them to. Some kind of map will always be consulted, if only the space, itself, as memorized. […] Whether wending or sprinting through it, a player will still map the space. […]
Mastery is indicated not by items, but the player’s mnemonic agility inside a space as a series of ever-changing routes towards the same end. Maps and items become increasingly useless, the less a player relies on them. Even if a particular route is mastered, endless alternatives reveal themselves through experimentation. Regardless, the basic objective remains unaltered no matter which items or maps are used; this potential has always existed, allowing for hybrids without compromising the core functions of the subgenre. Despite being designed to evolve, Metroidvania have not, over the course of thirty-two years, really changed all that much. Instead, the feeling—that more remains to explore and record, hence master—remains (ibid.).
[27] The sex-positive paradox of disempowerment is it can open our eyes to our Pavlovian condition as killers for the state through Metroidvania aping Cameron’s “peace through strength” tack: “Eat this, and grow up big and ‘strong’ like Ellen Ripley!”
[28] A complicated asexual relationship between artist and model making art with nudity that encapsulates (for them) an asexual relationship (something we will unpack at length in Volume Three, Chapter Three).
[29] Peter Jackson’s An Unexpected Journey (2012) has a strangely Python-esque feel to it, camping Tolkien a fair bit, but also having scenes of boyish innocence; i.e., where Bilbo runs through Hobbiton trailing the dwarves’ contract behind him like a kite while a) gayly shouting, “I’m going to have an adventure!” and b) relying on the old sage to impart wisdom upon him (war is a foregone conclusion, Tolkien argues, but one where you can still learn from the past of former soldiers). Jackson, like Tolkien, also suffers from an islander’s fortress ignorance of anything beyond his shores, their two bigotries combining to make for a very poor view of goblins as suspiciously cannibal-like captors; it reads like a bad 1800s potboiler.
[30] I’m not making this up. From my thesis:
Another implication—that the space is the monster in which one is effectively trapped—is terrifying, and one seen in other titles, like The Darkest Dungeon (2016); or, an Ultimate DOOM (1995) mod (a modified version of the original software) where everything about the game, including the player’s weapons and items, has been replaced with Tim Allen’s face and voice (fig.17). The affect is unsettlingly kaleidoscopic, and one’s sense of self obliterates—a horror in how the Other is not only potentially human, but also oneself (source).
Figure 17. “Aeuhhh???” by Marisa Kirisame (2016), from Tom Hall’s Ultimate DOOM, (MS-DOS, 1995)