This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

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The Monomyth, part one: “She Fucks Back”; or, Revisiting The Modern Prometheus through Astronoetics: the Man of Reason and Cartesian Hubris versus the Womb of Nature in Metroidvania

“We are now three months into the year of our Lord, 2023[1]. At this moment in our civilization, we are on the verge of terraforming planets undiscovered just a decade ago. We have identified the genetic chain of events behind 98% of cancers—a chain we have broken, effectively curing them. We can create cybernetic individuals who, in just a few short years, will be completely indistinguishable from us. Which leads to an obvious conclusion: We are the gods now.

“I haven’t been struck down. I take that to mean I’m right. We wield incredible power—the power to transform, to destroy and to create again. The question, of course, before us is, ‘What the hell are we supposed to do with this power?’ Or, more importantly, one should ask, ‘What are we allowed to do with this power?’ The answer to that, my friends, is nothing. Rules, restrictions, laws, ethical guidelines—all but forbidding us from moving forwards. Well, where were the ethics during the Arabian conflicts? Why are rules preventing us from feeding impoverished cultures? How is there a law which states, ‘If we build a man from wires and metal—a man who will never grow old, a man who will never feel the heat of a star or the cold of the moon—how is the creation of such an incredible individual considered unnatural?’

“The answer to all these questions is simple: These rules exist because the people who created them were afraid of what would happen if they didn’t. Well I am not afraid!

“For those of you who know me, you will be aware by now that my ambition is unlimited. You know that I will settle for nothing short of greatness, or I will die trying. For those of you who do not yet know me, allow me to introduce myself: My name is Peter Weyland. And if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to change the world” (source: American Rhetoric, Movie Speeches).

—Peter Weyland, Prometheus (2012)

Picking up from where “‘The Monomyth’ (opening and part zero)” left off…

Now that we’ve looked at the futile nature of undead revenge in Mandy and Lovecraft through the Promethean Quest, let’s consider zombie tyrants and those who fuck back against them! Focusing on Metroidvania, “Monomyth,” part one shall examine the man of reason and why he sucks, aka the spoiled rich-boy charlatan smugly playing God through astronoetic means (from Victor Frankenstein to the Wizard of Oz to Peter Weyland [above] to Elon Musk, crypto bros and weird canonical nerds inside the Man Box). Astronoetics are what Michael Uhall calls a celestial, intelligible presence (“Astronoetic Cinema,” 2019). Reframed by me slightly, it is the colonial gaze of Planet Earth in any imaginary scenario, which the Metroidvania commonly portrays as nature vs civilization. Given the common confusion surround the term, I might as well spare you any extra headaches by supplying its assorted definitions, in whole and advance[2] (from the glossary—originally from my early PhD research, “Mazes and Labyrinths“):

Metroidvania

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

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

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

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

Metroidvania are a location-based videogame genre that combines 2D, 2.5D, or 3D platforming [e.g., Dark Souls, 2009] and ranged/melee combat—usually in the 3rd person—inside a giant, closed space. This space communicates Gothic themes of various kinds; encourages exploration* depending on how non-linear the space is; includes progressive skill and item collection, mandatory boss keys, 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).

Also from “Mazes and Labyrinths”:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In essence, when I mention “the womb of nature” and “astronoetics,” Metroidvania is what I’ll be focusing on for much of the symposium. So keep the above definitions in mind as best you can!

Except, Metroidvania also came into existence fairly late in the game; i.e., a form of neoliberal dogma 1986 onwards, one whose history—of finding lost power in the “ancient alien” ruins (and my scholarship attached to it) as predicting the fall of the West back on Earth—took centuries to formalize. First exemplified by Shelley’s Frankenstein, astronoetics crystalized in the realm of relatively current science fiction starting with Lovecraft’s sole novel, At the Mountains of Madness (1936): cosmic nihilism, or the idea of uncolonized space (nature) as indomitable, thus indifferent to Man as a colonial force per Reason raping Earth, then the stars! Other stories include Forbidden Planet and Alien, but also Hamlet, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Castle of Otranto. We’ll mention them all, here; i.e., while talking about Metroidvania as a critical device conducive towards and corollary to ludo-Gothic BDSM as defined by me, built on the above palimpsests; re (also from the glossary):

Ludo-Gothic BDSM

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

The follow-through, here, is that men of reason suck in these stories as a matter of playful critique, one whose hot-potato displacement—of capital passing the buck onto ancient, seemingly alien empires or allegorical, magically reassembled fantasy worlds—dates back to Walpole’s Otranto (for aesthetics, splendid lies, dead giveaways), following Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the Modern Prometheus, exploring the cynical nature of such tyrants to begin with: those who know the cost of everything but the value of nothing as hidden (along with their deep-seated insecurities) behind a perfidious veneer of reason, of the so-called knowing-better good father looking out for his children and the world by “just asking questions.”

In truth, such men can’t love anything but themselves and their own legacy as a matter of embodying Capitalism, which they do quite gladly. They’re literally the poster children of it, enjoying all of its benefits, including always appearing right, good, and correct, hence being able to arbitrate violence against anything that “isn’t”; i.e., by playing god, punching down against the state’s usual targets: nature, workers and the monstrous-feminine, forcing the latter to fuck back by punching up while receiving state harm as something to subvert during rape play (which ludo-Gothic BDSM boils down to) by using Athena’s Aegis inside Metroidvania.

The fact remains that men like Weyland rape nature all the time, but only double their efforts when they—like the system they personify—reliably starts to die (false power). In turn, the state and its men of reason will do anything to preserve themselves, weaponizing their own bloodline against nature, the latter having evolved to resist dominion (thus rape) through counterterrorism and asymmetrical warfare.

As these men begin to die, everything falls apart in one last-ditch effort to hold onto capitalistic godhood; i.e., choking on the very things they eat to remind them of their cruelty and their hubris (not per Freud’s id, but per Marx’s capital routinely projected into Gothic, Promethean language riffing on parental elements that Freud essentialized as a matter of the crystalized nuclear home): “Where’s the robot to pat you on the back, or the engineer? […] There you see, now, how all your so-called power counts for absolutely nothing? How your entire empire of destruction comes crashing down, all because of one. Little. Cherry!”

To such stupid and embarrassing tyrants, I now want to consider nature (and labor’s) indomitability through the monomyth when camped by the Promethean Quest as personally and spatially monstrous-feminine; i.e., going heroically into and staying inside Hell as researched according to my expertise: videogames as Gothic chronotopes connected to the Promethean Quest, per Metroidvania. Going beyond Shelley or Lovecraft and into Metroidvania, I’ll try to stay focused on their connected, monomythic histories that—while older than Cameron’s 1986 refrain, Aliens (which inspired the shooter genre, but also the Metroidvania)—nevertheless attach to capital presently as we inspect the Metroidvania space itself: as something to reify and move through across the centuries and media types (from novels to cinema to videogames; from outer space to European castles, and in between those things).

We’ll do so through several arguments I want to you to keep in mind. I say that because frankly there’s a lot to discuss, this symposium more an opportunity to raise issues for you to confront and grapple with yourselves; i.e., while showing you the cryptonymic, disguise-like qualities to such subversive query and rebellion when faced with Cartesian copycats looking to pacify our stewardship of nature (indented for emphasis):

Per Hogle, the Gothic is predicated on fakery through the process of abjection attacking nature vis-à-vis the ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., nature as alien/monstrous-feminine, colonized by the sovereign West through Cartesian thought. Historical materialism proliferates decay and deception through open secrets (casualties of empire, but also empire in decay expressed in medieval language; e.g., castles) that no one side can monopolize, but for which terror and obfuscation allow either side to partially conceal themselves with, using the cryptonymy process to operate in capital’s wake: to either defend the status quo while wearing its victims and symbols of oppression, or to undermine it through the same basic means.

In short, anytime I say “camouflage” or “disguise,” this is basically what I’m talking about. Furthermore, Promethean space (usually castles) is part of this decay and deception under capital, for workers vs the state (often, as nature vs civilization); it’s something of a “dead giveaway” as person or place—both invented, and restlessly pointing into half-hidden atrocities and subterfuge materializing between opposing forces: on their charged surfaces and inside their dualistic thresholds, asking to be looked into “on the ashes of something not quite fully present.”

That being said, we’ll likewise look at the persons and parental themes involved when capital colonizes said spaces (the womb of nature projected into outer space, or frozen, uninhabitably barren/cold, desert-like territories comparable to outer space), then consider the ways in which all this colonization can be subverted/camped and reversed, power-wise; i.e., with Metroidvania persons and places; re: the dialectic of shelter and the alien enacted canonically through people (men of reason) and places (castles, including Metroidvania) to punch Medusa (indented for emphasis):

That’s what the Promethean Quest effectively encapsulates and discourages, Medusa fucking back to reverse the flow of power and information the monomyth normally supplies in outright parental language, but also monomythic media exposed to middle-class children at a young age; i.e., standing in for absentee parents (videogames, for our purposes): the givers of Cartesian dogma, but also rebellious sentiment through Promethean allegory (the appearance of the black castle/fallen manmade paradise to begin with).

Consider the above indented portions something of twin thesis statements for the rest of “The Monomyth,” part one—arguments, mid-symposium, that we’ll touch upon sporadically as we bounce between parent and palace, person and place; i.e., as parts of the same Promethean stories and their liminal expression conveyed through part one’s looser, conversational style: built to move through and intimate different legendary elements of real life, as the chronotope does.

To it, astronoetics are both a settler-colonial narrative voicing the usual things up for grabs (the nuclear family threatened by mad science in a frontier narrative, left), while also remaining a popular cautionary tale about displaced Cartesian overreach; i.e., by sucky men of science embodying Capitalism and its Gothic consequences and divisions (and whose Enlightenment-style enslaving of nature through retro-futurist language pushes nature-as-robata [slave] to fight back, posthuman-style), then carried forward into At the Mountains of Madness, then Forbidden Planet, then Alien, and finally into videogames but especially Metroidvania! The heroes are villains posturing as good, in these stories (often men of means—white-collar criminals [which men of reason essentially are] acting like blue-collar frontiersmen rebelling against capital, but point-in-fact serving it as usual to a mythological degree; i.e., technologically superior space cowboys)!

We’ll consider such a parental abjection of nature (and its reversal by monstrous-feminine agents) in Metroidvania based, more or less, on monomythic stories like Alien and Forbidden Planet as going all the way back to Frankenstein critiquing capital with Walpole’s prurient, medieval, nigh-raunchy-at-times elements (often via royalty and wealthy persons, which men of reason generally are): a vulgar (common) marriage of sex, terror and force, as the Gothic does, through imaginary conquest per Promethean critiques of the monomyth, of capital, of entitled Cartesian dickwads (we go high and low, Michelle Obama)!

There’s certainly an element of rape play to consider through these things. To clarify, though, our focus will be on Metroid-style (non-linear) spaces or offshoots per the man of reason (or token agent; e.g., Samus Aran as cowgirl and white savior/white Indian working for the Man) and Aguirre’s infernal concentric pattern, not Castlevania or other videogames that seemingly obey the same basic idea[3] of the Hero’s Journey into and out of Hell; i.e., as a space to explore and conquer per the usual cartographic refrains (stab, punch and shoot the monster inside a given map). Here, we’ll just be focusing on the one that best illustrates spatially and theatrically what inspired my concept, ludo-Gothic BDSM, per “Our Ludic Masters” onwards (for the entire catalog of such spaces, refer to my earlier PhD research, “Mazes and Labyrinths“; also, “War Vaginas” provides some good examples of monstrous-feminine space, weapons and heroes).

(artist: Pepe-Navarro)

For our purposes moving forwards, Metroidvania (and its forebears) are defined by Amazonian movement (and battle) through closed space, often a dungeon or a castle of some kind as occupied by Numinous, Promethean power (the semi-abstract presence of rape and dominion fused into the architecture). In turn, any of them invoke the confrontation of difficult truths, which are the first step towards healing from capital’s abuses: nature as alienated from us by Cartesian elements, including death as uncomfortable to face but also rape and abuse relative to nature as normally dominated by patriarchal exterminators going into Hell (standing in for Earth as otherworldly doubles). Alienize, then rape behind the lies, the camouflage, the debris, the records; it’s well and truly Cartesian thought’s raison d’être!

For example, the metroids, above, are synonymous with the gameworld they inhabit, but also the Galactic Federation’s desire to colonize outer space as an older cycle of conquest bleeding into newer ones that ape the same basic pattern in and out of fiction. As such, Cartesian domination ranges spatio-temporally from the faux-Egyptian Chozo as nodding to Giger’s own dark pyramids, such cryptomimesis reaching all the way back to British Romanticism and Orientalism—by Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias” following Napoleon’s raping of Egypt—and all the way forwards to the Federation’s girl boss, Samus, embodying her employer’s frontier vampirism. While all of these things point to real-world abuse committed by Cartesian forces policing nature—essentially conveyed in fictional, romantic language whose people and places mirror non-fictional atrocities—Samus does so through the metroid tied to her as the xenomorph was to Ripley and the Creature to Victor Frankenstein, etc; i.e., as weaponized for Cartesian, thus state hegemony in an astronoetic sense: the tokenization of the monstrous-feminine as increasingly xenomorphic in ways that feel ontologically ambiguous.

(artist: Hybrid Mink)

Per the Promethean Quest (which Metroid most certainly is), nature-as-technology becomes an unnatural predation on itself through the copying of such things via police interference (e.g., “the weapons division,” from Alien, which it looks like we’ll finally see with Alien: Romulus [my thoughts on the final trailer] when a team of robbers break into an overrun science facility run by humans in space, not humanoid space aliens on terra firma). It’s no coincidence, then, that Samus’ suit is generally a stand-in for the monsters she kills but also the state secrets (crimes of genocide) her employers pay her to commit for profit (which the franchise calls “peace in space[4]“); i.e., policing nature while wearing its dead as trophies, Artemis-style; e.g., the Phazon armor from Prime (2002), Dark Samus from Prime 2 (2004), or the SA-X from Fusion (2002), but also the Metroid suit from Dread (above 2021): the white Indian summoned as a neoconservative lullaby cannibalizing the very things that became emblematic of an ongoing war of extermination—one waged by Cartesian men of reason against the womb of nature as something abject to rape (a wild land where the Wild Things Are to make “wild rumpus” in for the state, for men of reason): by our resident TERF furthering abjection, Man-Box-style (the armored maiden punching “nature” as “cosmic rapist”). It’s so fearsome that trying to bond with it is generally seen as a fate worse than death (“Kill me!” from Aliens, being a not-so-subtle reversal of “Help me!” from Vincent Prince’s The Fly, 1958).

In other words, such things are an affront to nature (commonly portrayed as “bestiality”—the part-human, part-animal quality of so many ancient gods) as raped by Cartesian forces playing the tyrant and the white-Indian false-rebel; i.e., disguising the Capitalocene through monomythic likenesses that are passed down, only to be rejected by Promethean stories walking the tightrope. The quiet part is said out loud in Gothic fashion: dancing in the ruins as Promethean, having power hidden inside them, waiting to be found through play with “old” dead things left behind in some shape or form (capital relying on the monomyth’s unironic forms, “Hell” being the past as something to invade in the real world; i.e., the Global North invading the Global South as “past,” where Imperialism, thus genocide and rape, still occur). That’s simply how humans work; no sense in abolishing or poo-pooing such stories (re: Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism and Botting’s “Future Horror“).

(artist: Ayami Kojima)

Except, Promethean stories decay as a matter of function, tokenizing like all things do under capital. As such, it sucks to experience these kinds of abuses in ways that encourage assimilation and reactive violence (starting all the way back with Frankenstein). On the flipside, they become something to grow accustomed towards, thus can be weaponized once more against our abusers as thoroughly unused to seeing such things thrown back at them; i.e., to look on death but especially genocide, and see oneself and one’s belief system, held accountable: as alien, impotent, fallen from grace, the ivory tower and manliness (as they see it). As such, the primary vector for Cartesian downfall via the Promethean Quest is mad science, through which the monstrous-feminine is increasingly non-Vitruvian in its appearance (akin to Milton’s Satan dropping its angelic guise).

For example, while Victor’s Creature was more or less humanoid, Lovecraft’s novelized bogeyman, the amorphous shoggoth, was anything but. Even so, it remained monstrous-feminine in response to a Cartesian effort to conquer the world (abjected onto beings from outer space, of course); i.e., the Archaic Mother (the Medusa) as a fearsome bugbear haunting the inheritors of genocide (the Promethean ruin): the humans who saw it last. They were explorers themselves, feeling their own extinction anxieties peak regarding patriarchal conquest bounced back at them from a dead alien city occupied by rogue technology run amok; i.e., something Lovecraft described as a tunnel, a bottomless well: as fallible thus finite inside a living space built on genocide (re: Le Guinn’s Omelas).

However, instead of Shelley or Lovecraft (the former who we’ll obviously touch on, the latter whose work feels incredibly souless and bare), we’ll introduce all of these devices—the man of reason, the Promethean Quest, bad parentage, people and places, Amazons and Medusa—through cinema (a little bit( and videogames (a lot) as closer to neoliberalism’s remediation of such devices (corporations don’t write novels, at least not to anywhere near the same extent as they produce movies and videogames, because people have to be literate to consume them).

We’ll start with Forbidden Planet, a film that laid the cinematic groundwork, Freudian worship (and wizardly spectacle) for Alien, after which the Metroidvania put the Promethean Quest in the player’s hands (the avatar). From there, we’ll consider how this ludic potential manifests in ludo-Gothic BDSM vis-à-vis castles (and their occupants) in Metroidvania; i.e., a synthesizing of castle-narrative and monstrous-feminine potential to subvert Cartesian hegemony in defense of nature, thus workers and the world at large normally raped by the state and men of reason. In the Gothic, history is a castle whose pieces get up and move around; in short, they interact as the Gothic does, between the space and its legends tied imaginarily to real people and places decaying and regenerating to yield fresh synthesis over space-time. Contradiction is to be expected—is part of the process during the arguments that unfold literally dueling back and forth; i.e., from Otranto to Metroidvania, as the chaff and critique of capital stirring such things up.

For a bit of fun, we’ll actually look at two Metroidvania—indeed, the same two Metroidvania I did for my master’s thesis back in 2018, Axiom Verge and Hollow Knight:

• Part zero, “‘Men of Reason Suck’; or, Ghosts of Freud in Forbidden Planet, and the Gendered Components of Gothic Space (and Its History of Scholarship) as Tied to Capitalism in Disguise” (included in this post): Sets the table. Looks at the history of Gothic expression through people and places, looking at older theatrical works and mythic structures—i.e., about/disguising Capitalism as surviving in more modern examples like Forbidden Planet through which Metroidvania like Metroid operate—then catalogs that history of scholarship (my contributions, some of them) for you to consider and refer back to, when reading parts one and two (the close-reads).
• Part one, “Away with the Faeries; or, Double Trouble in Axiom Verge“: Considers people first, places (and space) second; i.e., the seemingly Freudian, Amazonomachy-style astronoetics (colonial gaze of planet Earth) and parental themes from Frankenstein and Forbidden Planet, translating nicely into the Metroidvania space, of which we’ll consider through a dialectical-material sense pointed at Thomas Happ’s 2014 one-man-show, Axiom Verge.
• Part two, “‘Look upon my Works, ye Mighty’; or, the Infernal Concentric Pattern and Rape Play in Hollow Knight and Metroidvania at Large“: Considers space[5] first, people second; i.e., explores my grad school and postgrad research into Metroidvania, but especially Bakhtin’s chronotope and Aguirre’s infernal concentric pattern in Hollow Knight as informing what eventually became ludo-Gothic BDSM: a means of rape play (whose performative, revolutionary nuances we’ll also unpack).

The sex-positive idea in doing so is to return not just to people and spaces, but headspaces that, since then, have produced important ideas; i.e., regarding Cartesian thought personified to conquer others behind a veneer of reason and benevolent parentage (re: “thinking beings,” per Cartesian dualism). Metroidvania and other Promethean spaces aren’t just places of exquisite torture (re: Radcliffe) per Bakhtin’s Gothic chronotope—or a Freudian playground that Barbara Creed made a career out of—but something vast and hauntological that yielded new GNC ideas of revolutionary play whose Promethean attack addresses old problems (rape, racism and genocide) stemming from Cartesian thought and its monomythic undead elements under neoliberal Capitalism and Capitalist Realism (re: Mandy and Lovecraft). The idea is to leave the racism of actual men like Lovecraft (and fictional ones like Frankenstein) behind when practicing ludo-Gothic BDSM, but keep the Numinous feelings for palliative reasons that actually predate him.

To that, this section specifically combines my postgrad research after writing my PhD (Volume Zero of Sex Positivity), making “She Fucks Back” a culmination of my life’s work on the subject; it’s my Metroidvania magnum opus and I’m very proud of it! “The Metroidvania castle, as far as I’m concerned, is the perfect dom,” I write in Volume Zero. This, as we shall see, is as much the byproduct of an interaction between myself and all that came before: the Medusa as communed with through space and occupant, past and present, scholar and consumer sitting somewhere in between all of them. No one ever said BDSM wasn’t iconic; lost in the Communist-Numinous potential of such fractals, our freaky big girl both struggles to break free, and is something of a rope bunny who digs the paradoxical bondage (of genuine liberation, to be clear) she ropes others into as well: Cartesian gonads acquired.

(artist: VG Yum)

Metroidvania, part zero: “Men of Reason Suck”; or, Ghosts of Freud in Forbidden Planet, and the Gendered Components of Gothic Space (and Its History of Scholarship) as Tied to Capitalism in Disguise

“Doc, is it a male or a female?” / “For me, sir, the question is totally without meaning!”

—”Cookie” to Doctor Ostro, and Robby the Robot’s reply, Forbidden Planet

The “Metroidvania” symposium is all about parents—good and bad—in monomythic stories, which the Promethean Quest reverses while using the same basic camouflage (Capitalism disguises itself as noble and good, but also doomed in an endless loop—playing the victim as mythologized, which Victor does). To that, the man of reason is an Enlightenment idea, from which settler colonialism (rape and genocide) sprang from Cartesian thought dominating nature for profit[6] (from Columbus’ earliest experiments, to Descartes and Francis Bacon’s revolution, onwards), and survived monomythically per Lovecraft and other space-centric follow-throughs of the 1818 original (Shelley loved her big open spaces, whereas Lovecraft leaned into giant alien ruins surrounded by said spaces—a derelict colony, in other words); i.e., as haunted by ghosts of genocide extending from a desolate planet Earth into outer space, both curiously forbidding and inviting like a Gothic castle: technophobia as corrupting the “natural order” of the nuclear family unit. Communist robots bad!

To it, I want to unpack all of that now, in part zero; i.e, by looking at various “ghosts” that haunt the whole Promethean enterprise: Freud and Forbidden Planet, but also Hamlet and other Shakespearean works (and Gothic scholarship) tied to Metroidvania concerning the same struggles between civilization and nature as gendered (whose trappings we’ll both want to escape, and use to our benefit). That way, you’ll be nice and prepared when we get to the close-readings of Axiom Verge and Hollow Knight, in parts one and two!

As Shelley’s Frankenstein demonstrates, the quest for forbidden knowledge is built on the past development of Capitalism during the Enlightenment; i.e., historically a settler-colonial ordeal that abjures past-and-future attempts at post-scarcity—one whose prophesied chickens in 1818 have been coming home to roost for centuries. For those inside the Imperial Core (thus under the protection of its barriers including Capitalist Realism), these threats of long overdue reprisals classically manifest in and of the mind attached to derelict ruins: what Dr. Ostro in Forbidden Planet calls “Monsters from the Id.” They’re dark, ominous and Freudian—an event horizon per person and place pointing to former crimes they have inherited against nature, then try to rationalize away (such obfuscation, as Radcliffe shows with her castles and protracted suspense, is ultimately a skill one can master for different reasons).

It’s all very theatrical (with Shelley arguably camping the Byronic hero through Victor Frankenstein); to that, if you’re wondering why I didn’t just stick with Lovecraft because he’s the logical palimpsest, I frankly think Walter Pidgeon’s Morbius in Forbidden Planet is far more theatrical (the movie being a retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, 1611), but still has the suitably Gothic spaces, sexuality[7] and awesome alien presence (of nature seeking revenge) infringing on the nuclear family unit that came to define Metroidvania out of older forms of similar castles: novels and stage plays.

In short, the movie’s man-of-reason monomyth, per the angry space dad punishing his disobedient daughter (similar to Egeus, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, invoking the right of Ancient Athens), translates better into what Axiom Verge eventually leaned into—vis-à-vis Shelley’s original novel and ironic themes of bad parentage critiquing capital—than what Lovecraft did to not critique capital (whose story has no children, but also appears to lack the performative irony that Morbius and Trace [the hero of Axiom Verge] try to communicate in protest[8] of settler colonialism through astronoetic language): a psychomachy between two (or more) sides of a divided man of reason/mad scientist, the man-in-question still somewhat humane (thus redeemable) despite his tragic-hero hubris (we’ll get to unlikeable men of reason when we close-read Axiom Verge, trust me). He’s a recluse, not a billionaire, his head stuck in his books while he tries to understand genocide as a symptom of capital pushed to the furthest reaches of outer space (and which Ostro blames on the id, Freud’s “subconscious primitive,” not Captialism; i.e., a Frankensteinian return to tradition and superstition by the man calling himself a “doctor” chastising the movie’s rebel figure).

More to the point, the monomyth is tied to bad parents as a theatrical device; i.e., one of bad instruction, for which Morbius wants to punish his daughter for running away with the soldiers. To this, Morbius’ magnetic rise and fall mirrors the Krell before him: an ancient, “great and noble” alien race that stands in for Lovecraft’s aliens before Planet and the Chozo after it. At the height of their civilization, the Krell are attacked by their own brutal past as brought back to life through technology pulling it, Metis-style, out of the their minds. In Gothic terms, this extends to the space for which all tyrants belong to and inherit as part of a larger structure the Gothic speaks to in monomythic language; re, capital (from Volume Two, part two’s thesis): “Capitalism achieves profit by moving money through nature; profit is built on trauma and division, wherein anything that serves profit gentrifies and decays, over and over while preying on nature.”

From the Krell to the Chozo, the Promethean Quest effectively reverses this predation—and the monomyth’s usual flow of power—by showing the audience what Cartesian men are really like; i.e., by recontextualizing genocide: vampiric sires who have their vampire castles, separating along with them from nature and Earth as something that, littered with the remains of older examples, comes home to roost in person and place. Again, it’s a colony whose fruits of genocide are poisonous.

Except, whether from Dr. Ostro or Barbara Creed, we’re really not keen on Freudian psychoanalysis, preferring dialectical-material scrutiny. But we can regard the problem of Freud’s ghost—specifically the essay, “Medusa’s Head” (1926)—as something that speaks to current historical-material tensions felt in present struggles: Medusa’s killing by brave men of reason scared to death of the things they want to control as archaic, older than them and civilization. All of this ties up in monomythic language, which survives in dialectical-material forms that aren’t incumbent on psychoanalysis at all; they’re stories that communicate themes about competing socio-material forces, using the Promethean Quest as shorthand.

This includes movies like Forbidden Planet, of course, but also the Metroidvania that drew inspiration from them and their palimpsestuous forebears to varying degrees; e.g., Athetos and Trace, but also Mother Brain and Samus (and other character from that franchise who abuse said technology against Samus—like Raven Beak, above), M.U.T.H.U.R. and Ripley, HAL 9000 and Dave, etc, as inspired by Shelley’s original novel (effectively the benchmark for the Promethean Quest as a critical device towards capital in all its forms). We shall now outline and survey these parental Freudian devices, while avoiding Freud’s quack, canonical obsessions essentializing the nuclear family unit.

As such, we’ll continue examining how the man of reason functions per the Promethean myth against nature, albeit continuing briefly with Morbius (exhibit 40b) instead of Victor (who we’re reversing for the Demon Module) before quickly segueing into Metroidvania that feature much less sympathetic characters than him. We’ll start with Axiom Verge (exhibit 6b2), then look into Metroid (exhibit 40d1), whose Amazonian histories we’ll tie into Trace and his own ghostly tyrant, Athetos (not just a mad scientist, but a brain in a jar[9]), during the close-read in part one:

(source: Fandom)

As Morbius shows us (exhibit 40b, next page), the main consequence—of attempting to revive the monstrous-feminine for anything other than pro-state means—is death. Though certainly powerful, reverse abjection also invites state violence against its performers. Historically scapegoated as “mad,” reverse abjection is often framed as a “female” delivery mode that regularly bears fatal consequences against anything monstrous-feminine (not just female): self-destruction, insofar as the self is predominantly male, straight, European. By comparison, abjection—despite being entirely menticidal through state-coerced violence—is not only seen as life-saving and normal in canonical narratives, but rationally as male. Indeed, we can see both sides of the process in Forbidden Planet, when man-of-reason Doctor Morbius warns the military men about looking directly into the planetary reactor on Altair-4: “Remember to gaze only into the reflector, gentlemen; man does not behold the Gorgon and live!” Morbius is effectively playing god, here, warning the soldiers like Lot’s wife.

Yet, as is the plight of power and parentage in science fiction since Frankenstein, the rational man of science also fears mad science; i.e., a Promethean Quest where the hero tries to control its chaotic power for himself only to be punished for it. To that, Morbius keeps the wonders of the Krell tucked away from the soldiers and scientists on Earth, fearing their abuse of weaponized science.

Eventually Morbius is forced to confront the invisible, monstrous side of himself that has been terminally enlarged by the Great Machine (a “brain boost,” which the movie discourages; i.e., wanting people to literally be dumber and not “play god” by investigating genocide outside of canonical, Freudian explanations). Forced to look upon his “Gorgon,” the ghostly (and famously invisible) Monster from the Id, Morbius inexplicably dies (seemingly of shame by threatening his own bloodline—a common fate for many fathers in neo-Gothic novels): he’s the movie’s scapegoat, attacking the soldiers for their active “conquest of space[10]” (again, as something to subjugate, to subdue, to colonize).

(exhibit 40b: The psychomachy of Morbius, meaning “mind battle.” The idea stems from older forms of storytelling including the Elizabethan play. A common rendition of it is the angel and the devil on one’s shoulders; another is the Amazonomachy or “Amazon battle,” frequently depicted in classical Greek art—literally a battle of the sexes, with the Amazons being demonized for challenging the status quo as mythological conquerors that emasculate men. Dressed in black, Morbius realizes he’s the vampire dad feeding on his own daughter [the argument made by the solider, of course]: “My evil self is at that door and I have no power to stop it!” Per the film, he’s the vampire, not the state, and they take his findings on the Krell with them after blowing Morbius’ castle up with the planet [a trope that Alien and Metroid would repeat]. It’s capital punishment, Red-Scare-in-disguise.)

Morbius is a detective puzzling over the ruins of a great, seemingly abandoned civilization he has effectively inherited. Devoid of life, all he can do is use the language and bits of technology left behind, leading to a slow, inexorable confrontation with a dark, primitive and ultimately “female” aspect to what the movie, per Freud, attributes to his psyche; i.e., “unlocked” by the wonderous technology of these truant aliens.

Except, the same basic scapegoating—of nature as monstrous-feminine magically causing the downfall of patriarchal civilization—is present in many Promethean narratives; e.g., At the Mountains of Madness and the nebulous, dark shapelessness of its shoggoth imitators (a weaponized biology build to attack rebelling slaves) living in the ruins of a former civilization returning to nature, but also the female Rusalki from Axiom Verge, the intersex xenomorph from Alien (and the Alien Queen from Aliens), or the queenly Radiance from Hollow Knight, Mother Brain, etc. They aren’t simply female, but monstrous-feminine tied to nature rebelling with technology they turn against the patriarch; i.e., as the technology (the robata, the worker-slave) that refuses to obey the profit motive.

Though founded on military conquests behind Enlightenment obfuscation, it’s important to remember the privileged stupidity of the man of reason; i.e., his incompetence. Good or bad, for capital or against it, we’re not talking about Heinlein’s Competent Man; i.e., exhibiting military optimism (a neoconservative return to force) in order to maintain peace, thus recolonize old territories threatened by collapse. Instead, Victor Frankenstein and Morbius are both know-it-alls and thoroughly incompetent men tied to violent structures (which Morbius, to his credit, abjures), but still have the superiority complex and desire to kill as inherited from the same basic ideological structure they abandon for their own scholarly pursuits (with Victor being a “natural philosopher” and Morbius being a philologist, or expert of ancient written languages). There’s a Promethean element, insofar as power is found, not bargained for—a fatal magic for which Morbius isn’t just the story’s Prospero (the wizard from The Tempest seeking revenge against those who wronged him) but its Prometheus challenging state power in ways that movies’ soldiers (and Victor in Shelley’s book) want to salvage for Capitalism.

To that, Frankenstein—and indeed, the Modern Prometheus in connection to the monomyth critiquing capital—is about resisting bad parents playing god for or against the state; i.e., something we’ll explore now, when the man of reason falls prey to embarrassing hubris while grappling with Medusa using his wits (which often devise weapons of a nigh-wizardly sort); re: Icarus (the person) escaping the labyrinth (the space to explore) to crash into the sea after flying too close to the sun, to the gods and their Promethean fire. Generally without weapons, himself, there is always a military presence tucked away in the wreckage (or seeking it out).

Furthermore, through the Metis-style parentage of the Promethean Quest, Victor and Morbius externalize internalized portions of their own selves informed by their socio-material conditions, which they at first deny, then recognize as “other” and proceed to attack (the recipient of these abuses seeking revenge against the colonizer—a topic for the Demon Module). It’s a psychomachy made-flesh, one fought between the wizard’s swollen ego, and the ghost of the counterfeit piloted by the spirit of the colonized into stories like Frankenstein, Forbidden Planet and Metroidvania: to look on oneself as a dark reflection of empire-as-dead by virtue of nature turning technology against the patriarch that one embodies (the plot to Axiom Verge, in particular)!

(artist: Joaquin Rodriguez)

In propaganda terms, this is called “the useful idiot.” Poor Mobius is sacrificed by the movie and gaslit by the soldiers. Victor, meanwhile, is so dumb, so colossally arrogant, that he thinks he not only invented the problem, but that he’s the one to solve it—in essence, that the universe revolves around him. Morbius is more likeable, and even anti-establishment, but still works within the same narrative devices informed by his material surroundings—in short, the castle he inherits.

To that, dated psychoanalysis pits a self-centered rationalization of the benign male scientist as forced to confront an oft-female but always monstrous-feminine aspect of the psyche—a fearsome, at-times-invisible bugbear doubling as black mirror pushing genocide towards the hero; i.e., someone tied to the rational, good, civilized self. The thought process becomes something to inherit, its evils meant to be overcome or slain through force while classically ignoring the Marxist elements: the material conditions. As Gothic Communists, we’re attaching the process of abjection to socio-material elements; i.e., capitalist dogma; e.g., Cartesian thought and capital, which are exposed in the process (to pay attention to “the man behind the curtain,” as he stands in front of it, deifying himself for all to see). Victor and Morbius’ parents are not shown in their stories. As we’ll see with Trace in Axiom Verge, though, the useful idiot can either be manipulated by patriarchal or matriarchal forces, Athetos or the Rusalki; i.e., seemingly on opposite ends of the Cartesian spectrum, but both decaying inside a forever war’s damned, closed-space territory.

As we shall also see when we look at Frankenstein later in the volume, Promethean narratives like Forbidden Planet often present the hero as flawed, but ultimately noble and representing “progress” as delayed (“Your father’s name will shine again!”). In historical-material terms, however, “progress” (through the state) is inherently genocidal, abjecting the slaughter of anyone like Morbius who stands against the elite, the latter capitalizing on monomythic technology as a poetic means of exchange. Facing that reality is traumatic, but also something of a partial surprise, given these giant ruins seldom spell things out; they have to be sifted through, leading to some nasty surprises hidden inside (the movie is effectively a giant strawman/gaslight, putting the argument for Morbius’ death on his own shoulders; i.e., by virtue of him playing god as forbidden by God and God’s rules throughout the galaxy—the elite: “Don’t do Communism, kids! That includes making ambiguously gay robots [the servant trope] and investigating genocide!”).

If all this sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because the cautionary tale of “curiosity kills the cat” was highlighted repeatedly by Mary Shelley’s ur-text, Frankenstein, bleeding into present-day works (from novels, to cinema, to Metroidvania). While scientific curiosity is specifically something Victor Frankenstein warns against after giving birth to his own creation (and which Morbius, shocked to death, advocates by destroying the titular forbidden planet), he ultimately bemoans his own station and rejects the ancient Medusa’s rage; i.e., as a byproduct of concealed, but also embodied genocide attached to Enlightenment thought: the zombie-like children of these men-of-reason as warlike (Morbius’ Robby is patently designed to follow commands and not kill “rational, thinking beings”; i.e., Asimov’s first law of robotics).

As we’ll see, though, the children of a given parent convey different qualities about the creator and their beliefs. Morbius is basically a Communist, so he uses the power of the gods (again, finding it in a faraway magical place) to make a machine—Robby the Robot—that, in turn, can make anything it wants (the Philosopher’s Stone); Victor, by comparison, is a cunt, so he makes something he can dominate and abuse for the state. The violent “offspring” from At the Mountains of Madness likewise serve a shapeshifting military role that is rejected by the hero (who runs away as fast as he can); the Rusalki from Axiom Verge, were made by something faraway and magical, too, survived by the resurrection machines that, once Athetos finds them, he promptly begins to abuse. The Rusalki (and similar Amazons, below) are monstrous-feminized; i.e., in the traditional sense of “repressed” and “chaotic,” reduced to naughty little girls standing in the way of male progress, of daddy playing god (which, per Freud, Morbius’ id serves to enact the same female, irrational side of himself that God—male, all-wise and all-powerful—will always punish for being like a girl: curious and inquisitive as a means of understanding and ultimately befriending nature).

(artist: Devilhs)

The idea is both older and newer than Forbidden Planet, surviving in various stories that came after it. This brings us to Metroidvania, whereupon games like Metroid and Axiom Verge present the Promethean Quest as the fatal discovery that one’s actual or de facto parents suck royal ass, and that one’s home is ultimately doomed because of it (founded on nature as raped by science); i.e., there’s a couple basic ideas about Metroidvania that come from Forbidden Planet, At the Mountains of Madness, and ultimately from Frankenstein (and to a lesser extent, The Tempest):

• a hero is summoned from earthly spaces by the gods to break the stalemate between nature and civilization
• they learn about their infernal, godly parentage (raised by wolves, bird people, or mad scientists, etc); i.e., that they’re Persephone come home; or Alucard, son of Dracula; etc
• the land of the gods is destroyed afterwards; e.g., blowing up a planet, sinking an island, or closing a gate that leads to such places; i.e., destroying evidence and witnesses, but also keeping monomythic mementos (souvenirs) while treating the larger event as dream-like similar to A Midsummer Night’s Dream—something to suggest and dismiss

Science and technology become mythical, even magical, but still comment on our world now in relation to technology and Capitalism “back then” as inherently illusory, manipulative and unstable.

A Promethean story revolves around the child as coming of age while inheriting the past through such discoveries: hell (and the gods, fascism and nature) coming home Their parents are away, asleep or otherwise, and the child (often grown up, like Morbius and Victor, but also Samus, below) must explore the hellish home (the unheimlich) to put the wrong things right. In doing so, the home wakes up, putting the child in danger while teaching them about their doomed past (often through heraldry and statues, below). The past, then, becomes something to inherit and destroy with whatever’s on hand, scuttling the castle, the boat, the giant (or some combination of these things) as having the means to self-destruct built in; e.g., the switch in Morbius’ lab or the Nostromo’s scuttle mechanism, etc.

(artist: MirroredR)

That’s the basic message, mind you. Inside a given Metroidvania, however, the scuttling happens in service to one parent or the other—the father or the mother, which translates to Cartesian powers or powers of nature as monstrous-feminine: Pygmalion vs Galatea, Zeus vs Medusa (or some such Archaic Mother), Victor vs Frankenstein, capital vs nature. To it, we always start and end with the same gladiatorial metaphor for capital canonically recruiting soldiers to its cause; i.e., as something to iconoclastically reverse through its monomythic people and places—its dramas, in other words.

Pertaining to said parentage expressed in monomythic language per the Promethean Quest, I’d like to pause things before we proceed onto Axiom Verge, in part—to unpack some of these concepts in relation to the historical-material struggle between masculine and feminine forces inside Metroidvania; i.e., that my scholarship has struggle to synthesize over time, interweaving during Promethean narratives that feature the zombie tyrant as a man-of-reason, but also the Amazon and Medusa as beings to subjugate and rape, ad infinitum, under his endless lies.

A note about ambiguity and dialectical-material scrutiny as we proceed into Metroidvania: The Gothic is generally ambiguous as a point of practice; the Promethean Quest camping the monomyth leads to repeating cycles (and fractal recursion) that—at least from a visual standpoint—become increasingly ambiguous dialogs about who is good and who is not. This extends from Shelley’s originators, Victor and the Creature in singular human form, onto Happ’s Trace as copied from Athetos for him (the father) and his enemies the Rusalki (the mothers) to debate with (thus the player/audience); i.e., about the ethics of Capitalism, of genocide, of progress. Similar to Shelley’s novel (and any Promethean work), there’s a strong mythological and dramatic flavor to Axiom Verge or Metroid, making either a wrestler’s opera whose dialogs about the transfer of power become much easier to parse (concerning class character); i.e., by virtue of dialectical-material scrutiny and of action (re: flow determines function, insofar as flowing power towards workers is ethical, sex-positive, and iconoclastic, whereas flowing power towards the state is not). —Perse

As my expertise, here, comes from studying Metroidvania as Gothic chronotopes that came after Forbidden Planet, we’ll look at different examples from my graduate and postgraduate work concerned with Metroid and Axiom Verge (and their palimpsests); i.e., in the rest of part zero of the symposium, followed by close-reads of Axiom Verge and Hollow Knight, in parts one and two. All parts also include older research of mine about Gothic stories—including sections of writing from my discontinued book, Neoliberalism in Yesterday’s Heroes (2021)—and the idea of synthesizing fresh growth and healing amid settler-colonial decay remains a common theme. Here in part zero, we’ve already introduced Forbidden Planet and the core rudiments of the Promethean drama. We’ll want to consider some of their unironic elements in Metroid, followed by Axiom Verge doing its best to satirize to these Promethean theatrics.

All the while, I’ll try my best to synthesize points already made in this volume with that of Volume Zero—namely that all roads lead to Rome as a space of nature colonized by Cartesian forces; i.e., a dark, vengeful womb that, in defense of itself, terrifies its attackers and nurtures its defenders through counterterrorist means: a palliative Numinous that isn’t strictly “female” per Beauvoir’s “woman is other,” but nature as monstrous-feminine food for Cartesian forces preying on it long after Rome “fell” (it merely transformed into kingdoms, then nation-states, then capital and corporations). Simply put, parents lie and often pit their children against each other during the divorce; i.e., in terms of Cartesian agents vs agents of nature as monstrous-feminine; e.g., Athetos and the Rusalki, with Trace stuck in the middle (exhibit 6b2, next page).

More to the point, this can be subverted through such characters compared to older variants (re: Samus and Mother Brain), but doing so takes work, and illustrates complicated labor exchanges that cheerfully encourage the Young-At-Heart; i.e., to play with monsters, dolls, faeries, and rape during ludo-Gothic BDSM. If you’re queer, Metroidvania are the places to find out[11] (from Volume One):

Volume One invites the reader to consider investigating power and trauma through theory and praxis as things to synthesize and express; i.e., through active, informed, collective participation; e.g., through shared exhibits like the one below. Said exhibit was created between Roxie Rusalka and myself, with Roxie being informed of my project ahead of time and agreeing to take part. It was deliberate/planned, and took time, money and work to pull off, but also mutual/informed consent:

(exhibit 6b2: Model and artist: Roxie Rusalka and Persephone van der Waard. Instruction occurs through the interrogation of trauma, wherein power is perceived and performed; i.e., through ludo-Gothic BDSM/general Gothic poetics and simplified theories that incorporate a fair amount of former worker history pushing towards liberation. Said history is typically “lost” under state operations and must be repeatedly reclaimed through a liminal pedagogy—the act of reimagining systemic abuse received by workers from state forces. This reclamation very much includes monsters that are historically regarded as treacherous to status-quo agents, but especially regarding men under the Cartesian model; e.g., the nymph or siren as a regular emasculator of traditional stations of male agency and authority. To that, Roxie’s handle, “Rusalka,” refers to a type of Slavic water siren, which Roxie suggested I use as inspiration for depicting her in my book. Seeing as I already recognized the mythology from Thomas Happ’s 2014 Metroidvania, I drew Roxie as a Rusalki from Axiom Verge to instruct viewers with.

My and Roxie’s pedagogy of the oppressed, then, constitutes something that you might recognize from elsewhere; i.e., as having threatened male figures and institutions from earlier hauntologies: the Rusalki from Axiom Verge serving as titanic war machines who—in the style of a framed narrative ripped from Frankenstein—instruct and dominate Trace as an avatar/unwitting extension of the game’s chief male antagonist, Athetos. None of this is strictly “new” insofar as it has already appeared in fiction in some shape or form, but its present resurrection constitutes unique elements amid ongoing struggles.

The game’s narrative installs a psychomachic, psychosexual dialog between all parties, established through play and felt through various positions of ignorance, knowledge and power imbalance. The women of the game are its primary instructors, and teach Trace from a place of darkness: the hellish wellspring of oblivion imparting fatal wisdom and traumatic rememory as much through pain, unequal power exchange and outright lies/subterfuge as they do through open communication. The takeaway isn’t that Amazonian women are inherently treacherous, but survivors of immense trauma working with potential allies who, at times, have no idea who they’re serving: Trace embodies Athetos, whose desire to conquer space/the universe through the colonial gaze of planet Earth [astronoetics] is initiated, embodied and explored through a position of ignorance; i.e., one that thrives through ergodic, monomythic motion and the Shadow of Pygmalion/the Cycle of Kings as something to routinely bring about at the cost of all things.

[artist: Wildragon]

Within this overarching structure, canon classically challenges the ancient female as an Archaic Mother to behead; to reverse this is to foster a counterfeit of Athena’s Aegis that freezes state potential in its tracks: [monstrous-feminine] power as something to behold and learn from through the death of an internalized bigotry and desire to conquer that is often, at first blush, framed as “self-defense,” “progress,” and “empowerment.”)

The reality between such Promethean stories as half-real (reversing power, thus capital, between fantasy and real life) is that sex workers are lumped in with Medusa as some giant being for men of reason to rape and destroy for profit; i.e., labor-as-abject having to lie to survive against a system that lies to further itself: by insisting that Medusa is the threat (the Promethean Quest is a quest of self-destruction, but also self-deception). Wars are messy to begin with; inherited, their dogmatic confusions only compound—vast and overwhelming (as castles generally are) but also pacifying. Such castled instruction, then, is half-real; i.e., in between the text and the world it illustrates (seemingly ex nihilo, however abstract), hence must occur in a liminal sense, as “caught between” two places. We don’t want our students (other workers, regardless of age) to mark us with their flashlight eyes, then kill us as capital prefers; but we’re forced to speak to them as objects trying to rehumanize ourselves out of Gothic fiction into Gothic non-fiction:

(artist: Deuza-art)

All of this Amazonomachy-style cryptonymy relates to the grim harvests we alluded to at the start of the chapter and which we discussed in Volume One: a peach to carve up, which must become an Aegis to paralyse our conquers with; e.g., Trace hypnotized by the Rusalki’s Numinous “enormity” (their awesome power often coming from their eyes, or their voice as told through their eyes: the Radiance’s flashing gaze, or Mother Brain’s terrific rainbow beam paralyzing Samus the invader to then try to eat[12] her). This cannibalism is what Capitalist Realism ultimately tries to hide in its cycle of monomythic violence, and what we want to face, expose and transform using our own Promethean stories’ dark mommy doms as, to some extent, already dead (above). Ours must reflect genocide, projecting it back onto the colonizers trying to displace their own anxieties and misdeeds onto “elsewhere” (the land of the gods).

Again, we’ll get to that. First, let’s lay out the territories, gendered narrative devices, and Gothic theories pertaining to architecture and space that I have contributed to in the past and continue to do so into the present; re: by revisiting my older work on Metroid and Metroidvania for the rest of part zero, then specifically Axiom Verge in part one and Hollow Knight in part two; i.e., Medusa (and her womb) or Medusa’s enemies (men of reason and the cops who serve them) as commonly portrayed in these stories. From there, we’ll sally forth into other exciting zones (open battle, in part two of “The Monomyth”); as we do, always remember the root function such fictions, as ludo-Gothic BDSM, have: calculated risk.

Per the calculated risk, the paradox of danger inside the Metroidvania equals that of the castle lifted from older fictions (and their castles): danger as a performance of thrilling “peril” that can be survived even when the protagonist “buys the farm” (avatar death). The Gothic castle, as I put in Volume Zero, is still “the perfect dom,” because true rape is more or less impossible inside a consensual theatre of imprisonment where the player cannot die (excluding serious medical conditions the game and its data can somehow affect):

The idea is to liberate ourselves with fairly negotiated, thus cathartic, dungeon fantasies that camp canon through counterterrorist theatre to whatever degree feels correct to us; e.g., me in a haunted castle, wandering through the dark, menacing halls while wearing a sexy dress (and nothing under it, my bare body molested by the breeze and the fabric): a hopelessly vulnerable Gothic heroine feeling pretty and desired, hungrily and desperately interrogating the musical, cobwebbed gloomth^[13] while scarcely having anything between me and certain “doom.” As usual, the Gothic paradox allows for intense, oxymoronic dualities to coexist at the same time in the same space (e.g., “sad cum” or “gloomth” or similar and confused degrees of “verklempt” during the castle’s psychosexual, emotional “storm”). Simply put, I want to feel naked and exposed, thus paradoxically most alive in ways that I have negotiated through the contract between me and the media I’m working with (wherein the Metroidvania castle, as far as I’m concerned, is the perfect dom); i.e., while being “hunted” and covered in rebellious “kick me” symbols and clothing that advertises my true self^[14] as naked, colorful and dark, as if to tease the viewer in the shadows to try something (source).

In my master’s thesis, “Lost in Necropolis,” I acknowledge this ergodic motion (that is, motion accomplished through non-trivial effort; re: Aarseth) as something of a natural procedure responding to Metroidvania; i.e., as a kind of maze to discover and then navigate, as the legendary land of the gods: “Metroidvania spaces are so conducive to speedrunning as to make avoiding it an arduous task” (source). In doing so, players improve over time because that’s how playing videogames works; i.e., we’re being taught by the game but also pick up the game as something to master in return; e.g., I struggled to beat Mega Man V for the original, brick-sized Gameboy under nine hours, the first time, but afterwards could beat it under two. Mastery goes both ways.

With ludo-Gothic BDSM, the same idea applies to more than just ludology or Gothic architecture, but the complex (and inherited) emotions and BDSM interactions associated with the Neo-Gothic, retro-future hallways and rooms being braved during Cameron’s refrain (the shooter but also the Metroidvania closed space). We can best these in-game trials (and their famous, ubiquitous tortures) in traditionally masculine or feminine ways (the male or female Neo-Gothic hero; e.g., Emily St. Aubert or Ludovico, from The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794), but still yield fresh, GNC interpretations that challenge capital, profit, rape, and genocide.

In doing so, however, players must always respect such devices, lest they conceal or further genocide outside of themselves; i.e., as something to perform and “discover” by inadvertently fostering heteronormativity as a Cartesian byproduct well at home in Metroidvania that players carry into their waking moments: the land of the gods coming home during the Imperial Boomerang and its subsequent moral panic and apocalypse!

(exhibit 40c: Artist, far-top-left: Paulo Henrique Marcondes; mid-top-left: concept art for Samus Returns, 2017; right: Caspar David Friedrich; everything else: Wildragon. Unlike Samus, who is a tall, strong girl boss in a suit of space armor, Trace is a callow, physically awkward nerd with a gun [re: a spoof of Cameron’s Amazonian shooter]. Moreover, he is continuously dwarfed by his alien surroundings—much like the British Romantic facing the fog of an increasingly alien world beyond civilization, except it’s a patently human cruelty projected into outer space; re: astronoetics.)

Metroidvania, then, are the multimedia continuation of a larger historical-material cycle—one of dark, imprecise, dialectical-material reflection about Cartesian forces and their monstrous-feminine victims. Home to the Capitalocene, such things are impossibly large in scope and scale, strangely difficult to put one’s finger on and yet seemingly everywhere all at once. They move but stay put.

For instance, I note in “Lost in Necropolis” that terrible abuse struggles to map itself, but survives through the player as the next in line:

Across Gothic media, there remains an excessive quality of time that cannot be mapped, or expressed in clear terms. Instead, it pools inside the space. The returning hero is doomed to face the past again and again, a series of doubles. They can subvert old tyrannies by seizing control, but remain trapped or exiled, themselves. For example, Samus is nomadic, without a home; so is Ellen Ripley from Aliens or Victoria, from Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya; or, the Moor (1806). Men experience it is as well, in terms of motion as gendered, but also said motion contested, within a given arc and across all of them. The Knight a wandering warrior, destroyed upon his return; Mather Lewis’ Ambrosio dies an ignominious death. For any hero, it is not simply a call to arms, but a rite of passage wherein the hero constantly infers whatever lies in store for them whilst inside; yet, it is always hidden, revealed too late: they were the destroyer all along. This can be of the space, others, or themselves, and there is no escape from that. One cannot avoid death, or concerns about death relative to growth established through motion; it and Other doubles collect within the space as historical byproducts of motion (source).

In short, the monomythic process is always left behind inside the current castle as echoing older castles (and heroes) tied to Capitalism and its woes across space-time (and its Gothic abstractions).

In turn, this articulation of concealment concerns Enlightenment thought as camouflage, which my PhD and subsequent books would build on (re: “Canonical Essentialism“)—that cartography is a tool of Cartesian domination felt in and across Metroidvania narratives, one operating in service of cataloging conquest in BDSM language; i.e., of the former ruin’s occupation and its past trauma’s reabsorption into empire as a corruption of rewritten memories where power is notably unequal and transferred continually as such (master and slave, dominant and submissive, savior and destroyer).

(source: Hans Staats’ “Mastering Nature: War Gothic and the Monstrous Anthropocene,” 2016)

To it, Gothic castles in Metroidvania are built to be moved through, thus both conceal and catalog Cartesian dogma as a map of itself; i.e., a liminal space, specifically a grave, that was, is, and will be conquered by the mighty ghost of the past again. Classically said ghost is a giant suit of armor that interrupts the husbandry of said dominion; i.e., the giant helmet in Otranto crushing Lord Manfred’s son to death, Looney-Tunes-style, on the very first page:

Shocked with these lamentable sounds, and dreading he knew not what, he advanced hastily—but what a sight for a father’s eyes!—he beheld his child dashed to pieces, and almost buried under an enormous helmet, an hundred times more large than any casque ever made for human being, and shaded with a proportionable quantity of black feathers (source).

Except the ontological uncertainty of the living dead (a zombie), and the suit of armor as animate-inanimate, is a byproduct of a constantly revived medieval working at cross purposes; i.e., one where the organic-inorganic—or bio-mechanical nature of a concentric, mise-en-abyme (the space and occupant as equally castle-like)—yields future liminalities that collectively denote not just the Anthropocene, but the Capitalocene as endlessly swept up in Gothic recursion.

For example, said cryptomimesis conjures up as “castle” that contains, per the Modern Prometheus, the tell-tale xenomorph; i.e., as an abyss-walker ghost haunted by its older counterfeit self (a bit like Hamlet, below) as trapped inside a Gothic castle: a ghost of the counterfeit. Both homely and inhospitable, it remains the usual place to dance and play with such beings during demon BDSM (as the boss music, “Trace Rising,” lovingly shows). Where there’s a castle, there’s a rape, but a ghostly ongoing and vague one linked to Capitalism raping nature under the (dis)guise of divine providence further the process of abjection—one that points to Enlightenment virtues claiming to have moved past such barbarism; i.e., a displaced symbol of current systemic atrocities dressed up as “past” (re: Punter).

For all its “recent” sci-fi trappings, then, Metroidvania are ghost stories much in the same way Shelley’s novel borrowed from Hamlet before it (and Paradise Lost, but I digress); i.e., a hauntological, canceled-future dance party going back to the future of a past moment in imaginary space-time: civilization as conquered by nature as returning from the grave to seek revenge against Cartesian forces several generations removed.

The Gothic castle, then, is the home of fabrication and paradox since Horace Walpole (at least), but one whose place of endless possibilities both resist quantification (colonization) and beg to be played for GNC, postcolonial purposes during Promethean stories (found power and knowledge); i.e., the ghosts of the dead resisting mapping and cataloging only to reappear in the contested burial site, phasing in and out of existence as written regarding great trauma tied to the usual abuses of capital against nature: to terrify people with visions of Hell as attached to the haunted castle grounds! As Hamlet’s father’s ghost puts it:

I am thy father’s spirit,
Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confin’d to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purg’d away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand on end
Like quills upon the fretful porcupine (source).

As we’ll see when looking at Metroid and Axiom Verge, such dialogs are part-in-parcel with Metroidvania.

For example, just as Hamlet talks with his father’s ghost to uncover and participate in revenge (above)—effectively a mad quest linked to his ancestral home as unjustly occupied by imposturous forces—Axiom Verge takes the same basic idea and marries it to Victor’s Promethean dialogs with the Creature; i.e., Trace talking to Athetos through his creations, who want to kill the son for the father because Trace is being led toward Athetos by the faeries (making him the princess inside the castle attacked by the paranoid old man, below): as a matter of self-destructive power tied to the land of the gods as ancestral/soaked in the blood of mutual revenge (this isn’t a “both sides” issue—Cartesian thought is wrong in this case—but both sides still overlap in terms of their shared actions as disguise-like, but also derelict allegories; e.g., “I’m not a revolutionary! I’m just a gay Gothic scholar telling stories!” We kick up chaff to raise issues, but also cloud ourselves in the inky gloom).

Likewise, Metroid depicts Samus as conversing with ghosts, too; i.e., those of fallen gods (the Chozo) belonging to part of the same kind of abandoned homestead she is destined to inherit, investigate, and like Prince Hamlet, ultimately destroy and pass on! History is a game of inheritance built on individual histories disguising one side or the other using the same aesthetics of power and death.

A castle in a Gothic story, then, is a highly specific (and aesthetic) arrangement of space and time, on whose narratives concerning power and death, nature and civilization, are told through motion responding as a story unto itself (a story in a story responding back and forth). As a fundamental part of the Gothic chronotope, Bakhtin refers to the ongoing relationship—i.e., between the space, its historical past/undead trauma, and the people moving inside of it—as follows; re:

Toward the end of the seventeenth century in England, a new territory for novelistic events is constituted and reinforced in the so-called “Gothic” or “black” novel—the castle (first used in this meaning by Horace Walpole in The Castle of Otranto, and later in Radcliffe, Monk Lewis and others). The castle is saturated through and through with a time that is historical in the narrow sense of the word, that is, the time of the historical past […] the traces of centuries and generations are arranged in it in visible form as various parts of its architecture […] and in particular human relationships involving dynastic primacy and the transfer of hereditary rights. […] legends and traditions animate every corner of the castle and its environs through their constant reminders of past events. It is this quality that gives rise to the specific kind of narrative inherent in castles and that is then worked out in Gothic novels.

In turn, I would call this “castle-narrative” regarding Metroidvania for my masters’ thesis. More to the point, I would and will continue to argue that the Radcliffean “closed space” is unmappable as a claustrophobic, “event horizon” (re, Hogle: “a vanishing point”)—a liminal space that requires non-trivial effort to explore; i.e., of trauma tied to the human body and mind expressed in monstrous language (re: castle-like bodies and vice versa, per “Castles in the Flesh“) contained within that the player can sense the enormity of (Capitalism and Communism) as visualized to a woefully small degree: a dark forest (the classic precursor to Hell from Dante’s Inferno and its numerous allusions in later canon) can be giant, but one can only see a small portion of it.

(artist: Missuscrim)

Under Capitalism, Medusa is a tyrant as much as Dracula is; i.e., something to reassemble like Osiris out of disembodied pieces, then abject all over again. Whatever the tyrant, and from doll to dollhouse, such Medusas’ revenge constitute a memento mori that speaks when played with—to Capitalism as a hyperobject that has evolved into itself and is experienced, post hoc, through a narrative of itself, ipso facto; i.e., the narrative of the crypt as filled with paradoxical elements, often viewed in small as a matter of abstraction that translates into more accessible-inaccessible language for the middle class to explore, mid-abjection and monomyth-as-Mandelbrot: labyrinths and mazes that, like Radcliffe’s Gothic castles, denote a cryptonymic, dream-like presence of rape, one that a) suitably phases between person and place (the nuclear family house and home, but also homebodies), and b) can be entered and interrogated, power-wise, by exploring itself and its Gothic decay (and regeneration) in suitably nightmarish ways during ludo-Gothic BDSM.

For example, the paradox of darkness is that it is highly visible; re: Milton’s darkness visible playing out through the chronotopes of Walpole and other Gothic auteurs’ shared shadow zone into their present-day simulacra (cryptomimetically echoing past forms). To this, the Gothic castle is equally enormous and “occupied” by a presence tied to the self as material-but-questionable, related to a tyrant in uncertain ways: one’s history in connection to former occupiers of the space brought to the fore, capital or Communist.

Metroidvania and recursive motion going hand-in-hand is not an idea I coined, but I have taken it further than someone like Paul Martin did towards older Metroid and Castlevania games. Indeed, on the cusp of speedrunning and Twitch’s emergence in 2011, Martin dismisses them:

One such typical journey occurs near the beginning of the game. This takes us, due to various locked doors and impassable gaps, from the alchemy laboratory in the lower left quadrant of the castle to the master librarian, seller of keys, in the upper right, and back. We encounter this kind of recursive movement throughout the game and these movements are executed alongside the recursions of the game’s plot. The recursive movement outlined is by no means unique to [Symphony of the Night]. Many games involve this pattern as a core element of their gameplay. Most obviously, this gameplay pattern, in which a character must go back and forth through a maze which opens itself up as the character collects equipment and becomes more powerful, is present in the early Metroid games. However, I am not arguing here that the pattern is anything more than a videogame convention but rather that when this convention is seen in combination with the specific story and characters that we encounter in SotN it takes on an expressive role that the convention does not necessarily have in other games (source: “Ambivalence and Recursion in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night“).

Unlike Martin, I consider the Metroidvania as something beyond “a mere videogame convention.” Instead, its danger-disco tunnels and rooms wind and confuse the protagonist to symbolize the difficulty of recollection when faced with mind-numbing trauma as a Cartesian symptom, but nevertheless remains infused with a nebulous, funerary doom leaping across mediums that challenges the Capitalocene as such; i.e., Hogle’s narrative of the crypt, or “a place of concealment that stands on mere ashes of something not fully present.” It would become “castle-narrative” as first recognized in my thesis work (re: “Lost in Necropolis“), which would extend to ludo-Gothic BDSM as evolving into itself (re: “Into the Toy Chest” and “Jadis’ Dollhouse,” etc). Now—given Metroidvania is my bread and butter—I want to stress the kinds of ironies that also phase in and out of existence (like the moon, whose lunacy paraphrases capital’s waxing and waning).

For one, such spaces like Sudra in Axiom Verge and Zebes in Metroid are desolate and oddly alive, a proliferate necrobiome replete with history as a work-in-progress, insofar as empire is trapped in decay but looking to clean house and wipe the slate clean (through Samus, by killing Mother Brain). To that, Gothic castles have—since Walpole, Lewis and Radcliffe—assembled from dreams informed by history as half-real, decaying and regenerating back into itself; i.e., coming up brick-by-brick as both gassy and made up, while somehow wholly solid and confirmed regarding capital: death omens where we—both as host, guest and prisoner—feel most alive, have the most power while appearing powerless, playing amid the hauntological language of war as married to the aesthetic/cryptonymy of power and death under Capitalism. Per ludo-Gothic BDSM, our ludic masters are the castles making us surrender unto them, to beg to our captors, “Take me, I’m yours! But don’t hold back!” It’s ontologically uncertain, thus not set as a space of play that, unlike Zimmerman’s magic circle, isn’t so neatly drawn.

Just as Gothic castles, in any media, are built on the endless potential of theatrical violence, Gothic fantasy is all about fantasizing about death and rape through these castled theatrics; i.e., as things to endorse or subvert in cartoonish, dated language; e.g., the Western’s saloon fight or Gothic heroine’s castle crawl (and other hybrids). Per the calculated risk and palliative Numinous, it’s generally more fun to fantasize through these make-believe arenas according to forbidden desire and earnestly whimsical attempts to heal from abuse than it is to actually subject oneself to dead-serious, unironic torture.

Yes, the camp is entirely brutal, at times, but it’s still camp provided irony and play are present (re: Walpole, Lewis); i.e., as something heroic and monstrous (usually a combination of the two) to conjure up and play with in the usual liminal territories thereof (re: doubles, offering conflict on the surface of themselves and inside thresholds to move through). Hero or heroine, movie or videogame, the protagonist is always between a monstrous state of salvation and damnation linked to abstractions of capital’s horrors come home; they are never strictly free, but encased in a claustrophobic (closed-space) world that paradoxically feels more alive because of it:

(artist: Wildragon)

Similar to novels and cinema, Metroidvania castles are more than their bricks or motion inside of itself. Amid this decayed hyperreality (the map of empire as reassembled, but failing to restore the empire to its former glory), the monomyth hero reanimates to explore the disastrous maze or labyrinth to its logical center tied to extratextual elements. By moving through the old castle to try and remember what happened, they confront its lost histories, but also its total, ergodic histories linked to the external world; i.e., the sum of history the space contains and intimates through effort.

My master’s thesis concluded that this process is fundamentally unmappable, try as speedrunners might when moving endlessly through the Metroidvania in pursuit of their own histories inside the ruin. In continuation, I write in “Mazes and Labyrinths” how there’s simply too many ways to navigate the maze, too many ways to communicate power and its resisting as things to materialize, embody or abjure:

“Mazes and Labyrinths” is corollary to my past research on how FPS empower players; it explores how Metroidvania and survival horror disempower players trapped inside their respective gameworlds. They offset the player’s strength, generally to tell a perilous story. This peril stems from varying lapses of power due to a hero’s position—who they are and where they exist within a space (source).

To that, the endless, concentric wreckage is effectively a reoccurring form of historical-material amnesia and rememory at odds, the unironic hero operating on a path of rememory towards individuation through abjection, thus genocide (the Jungian concept of psychological maturity whereupon a young man slays the mother as a developmental roadblock; i.e., the creation of sexual difference, as predicated on the slaying of the mother, but especially the Dark Mother).

By extension, this haunts capital’s abstractions (Gothic castles); i.e., as a process of generating wealth through play without irony/critical awareness, even with seemingly emergent forms that, in truth, limit their critical potential to have races for their own sake. To that, no matter how fast speedrunners go (e.g., MonStahLer’s “[WR] Hollow Knight Speedrun – 112% APB in 2:59:24,” 2023) the story is more or less told, the protagonist’s lack of memory phenomenologically mirrored by the player relearning the space as part of the next in line—on a routine path of conquest, linked to a Gothic chronotope as the hyperreal site of “civilized” development: inside a giant graveyard that is recorded for the next generation to find, on and on.

As part of this castle-narrative, then, memory is always decaying and must be reestablished by recursive (endless) motion; i.e., through the space, making the one who remembers a more efficient and effective killer picking up arms and knowledge. Irony helps subvert canonical potential along these tracks, but violence is almost always the thing to subvert; i.e., slaying the “monster” in the middle of maze: the dragon master or dark queen.

(artist: Gutter Tongue)

Usually a powerful woman/chaos dragon at first blush—or the ghost of a male tyrant—in truth, the greatest monster is actually the hero looking back at an older version of themselves: the history of the conquered and conqueror sharing the same surface, the same black mirror/reverse abjection (what my friend Ginger lovingly calls “Gothic cringe”).

It’s less about a direct bloodline and more a tenuously feudal, vague connection established in relation to the gameworld intimating capital’s horrors and our relation to said horrors; as something whose repeated conquerings teach the player to be increasingly violent during Capitalism’s whispered decay and rise again. Threatened by it, the player regresses to a feudalistic state; i.e., the black knight, the zombie tyrant, the giant ghost (the Numinous) of Caesar returning from Hell. Their sense of self is thrown into question, all while becoming the ultimate thief and killing machine—a “great destructor” that steals and destroys everything (a bit like a crusader in service of the state colonizing its own territories again). There’s plenty of room for irony but it isn’t automatic among the ceremonies and spaces thereof.

(artist: Adam Hughes)

Furthermore, any revelations about capital through the Promethean Quest are hidden—tucked away behind the pomp and circumstance; i.e., the castle grounds, fractals and artifacts, but also the thrill of the hunt, its unironic victory and the (often) beautiful, body of a humanoid, Amazonian princess. No longer the hidden reward of a hidden system[15] inside a space that cannot communicate its ultimate horrors[16] upon a single completion, she’s out in the open. Like exercise, she takes multiple attempts to progress to the highest point (and the best armor, which is often no armor except her birthday suit). From there, our oft-female Icarus can fall the farthest, often further into delusion; e.g., Samus thinks she’s the hero and that her unironic actions will bring about “true peace in space!” In neoliberal terms, this concept is called false hope; I call it “military optimism”:

Just as Alien evolved into Aliens, the Metroid franchise has become increasingly triumphant over time. Abjuring the Promethean myth, it instead offers military optimism—the idea that seemingly unstoppable enemies can be defeated with patience and, more importantly, military resources; the more victories, the more resources there are to use (even if these are little more than looted plunder in the grand scheme).

Samus repeatedly embarks on the Promethean Quest. Over time, this quest has become less cautionary and more professional. The Promethean past isn’t something to fear or avoid; it’s something to shoot. This attitude removes the quest’s cautionary elements, especially where the military is concerned. This creates a franchise much more fixated on Samus as a neutral figure with military ties. Rather than fight them, she does their bidding and is celebrated for it (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “The Promethean Quest and James Cameron’s Military Optimism in Metroid,” 2021).

(exhibit 40d1: Artist, top-farthest-left: Rainarc Rhapsody; top-far-left: Gutter Tongue; bottom-left: Pajarona; top-middle: Phobos Romulus; bottom-middle: unknown, source; bottom-right: Azto Dio. Samus is forever between two worlds: nature and civilization, but also the living and the dead. Undead and demonic, she is composed of various pieces stolen from places raided for empire, becoming forever haunted by these crimes as a colonial survivor chasing dragons [while also having “native” blood inside her from older colonizers, the Chozo, as ostensibly closer to nature but in reality were imperial, themselves]. The white Indian pimped out, she personifies the Western fear of feudal inheritance common in Gothic stories, all at once a knight, golem, giant, tyrant, damsel, demon, detective and military pinup girl [all concepts we’ll continue unpacking throughout the book] as part of a larger sequence, structure: Capitalism and Cartesian thought. Originally a comic-book character with zero identity to speak of, Samus has gone through various revisions that try to distinguish her from the legions of cookie-cutter women in sci-fi pastiche, while simultaneously making her nearly indistinguishable from them.

In the queer tradition, an argument could be made that Samus [and by extension, the audience] is looking at older, heteronormative models—less of themselves exclusively and more of their bloodline as inherently violent, but also tied to the historical-material world as a dangerous, instructional memory shaping workers into state-sanctioned killers; i.e., the Gothic castle as a cursed, familial space, but also an undead, monomythic recruiting ground. As a queer person, transition generally involves moving away from the colonial binary and its heteronormative violence according to a cis-het double or bogeyperson; but doing so requires challenging one’s “own” historical portrait through the Promethean space that contains it in various chronotopic markers; i.e., Bakhtin’s dialogic imagination personified, in hero terms: the physically capable body as castle-like and naked.)

(exhibit 40d2: Artist: Teke. The more queer someone is, the more they retreat from cis-het, “heroic” renditions of themselves. Fearful of the violence those variations perform in service to the state, the most fearsome thing for us gays is that we might be cis-het, which Gothic spaces will intimate through their historical-material reminders of the feudalistic bloodline as fundamentally cis-het: kings, queens, princesses, and sanctioned incest/rape; but also zombie scapegoats, be those fallen kings, madwomen in the attic or mad scientists. By wanting to escape from heteronormative, Cartesian models tied to our own childhoods, queer people want to escape the socio-material prescription of canonical monsters that serve as performatively heroic or villainous roles through a false sense of self. The proletarian goal of the black mirror is to reverse abject these and bring our true selves to the fore, altering the socio-material world in the process.)

Confronting the monster inside this final vault, Metroid communicates a common Metroidvania trope: assimilation; i.e., the hero as biomechanically abject, their weapons generally a part of their bodies as extensions begot of the space they’ve inherited/are stealing from in service to empire and the Imperial Boomerang. Triumphant Metroidvania like Super Metroid don’t reflect terribly hard on the hypocritical violence these weapons commit, then, nor the liminality of their dynastic power exchange and hereditary rites; instead, the game routinely grants Samus a mission to complete for Big Brother and she does it as a physically impressive specimen trained in the art of war—a “space knight” who kills dragons, plundering their hoards in the process, before destroying the site of plunder without irony. It becomes a planet-wide cycle of death, one whose succession glorifies genocidal violence in all the Cartesian ways: serve the Man, punch Medusa.

Despite being female, Samus lacks the capacity to safeguard nature; she’s always blowing it up! Canon frames her as the lost daughter returning home to work out her wild energies, reclaiming the bride as someone to disrobe after she’s “played house” as a token cop regressing to the dutiful sex pot. But because she is, herself, part god, she is always out of reach—is always property for the elite to dangle in front of weird canonical nerds lusting after their own avatar as lost to them; i.e., as alien; re: fire of the gods; e.g., “Fire of unknown origin took my baby way” (Blue Öyster Cult’s “Fire of Unknown Origin,” 1981):

Death comes sweeping through the hallway, like a lady’s dress
Death comes driving down the highway, in its Sunday best

A fire of unknown origin took my baby away
A fire of unknown origin took my baby away

Swept to ruin off my wavelength, swallowed her up
[…]

Death comes driving, I can’t do nothing
Death goes
There must be something, there must be something that remains (source: Genius).

It’s the usual quest of revenge/promise of sex per the Prometheus Quest tokenized for capital, profit and rape—of nature as alien, monstrous-feminine.

Under Metroid, we’re left with the usual quest of revenge against nature; i.e., the promise of sex per the Prometheus Quest tokenized for capital, profit and rape—of nature as alien, monstrous-feminine.

(artist: Viktria)

Except, Nintendo’s lack of irony brings us right to Axiom Verge: the fires of capital raped Medusa! It’s a game whose lovely genderqueer (and pro-nature, above) Promethean ironies we’ll unpack, next; i.e., whose close-read occurs contrary to the ghostly (Gothic) histories of capital we’ve unpacked for you here!

Onto  “Away with the Faeries; or, Double Trouble in Axiom Verge“!

---

Footnotes

[1] The movie was made in 2012, speaking to a time on the verge of reality (as science fiction generally does) whose preface year has already come and gone. This isn’t a far-off place that Scott was speaking to, with Prometheus, but the here-and-now dressed up as “Gothic.” In turn, Weyland isn’t some impossible figure relegated to pure make-believe. He’s a venture capitalist enjoying the luxuries of Cartesian domination, holding the world hostage between his thumb and forefinger.

[2] My master’s thesis, “Lost in Necropolis: The Continuation of Castle-Narrative beyond the Novel or Cinema, and into Metroidvania” (2018) was docked quite a few points simply because I didn’t quickly or accurately define Metroidvania to my graduate supervisors (one, Dale Townshend, saying he’d never played “a computer game in [his] life”) or to my guest reader (also from MMU, though I forget his name). The guest reader in particular pointed out feeling confused because I hadn’t explicitly mentioned Metroidvania until about twenty pages in!

[3] To this, the monomyth concept isn’t unique to Metroidvania, and is expressed in other videogames like Zelda (the open-to-closed space), Mega Man or Contra (the run ‘n gun), Resident Evil (the survival horror), System Shock (the action-adventure), Doom (the FPS), and Mario (the platformer). However, none of them are Gothic as a matter of space that illustrates Aguirre’s inversion of the Hero’s Journey through said space, hence don’t automatically apply to ludo-Gothic BDSM as having been founded on maze-like Gothic spaces (and their monstrous-feminine occupants, within, punching up against Cartesian men).

[4] As the opening to Super Metroid explains, “The last metroid is in captivity. The galaxy is at peace.”

[5] Although maps are a huge part of the Metroidvania world as a matter of conquest, this has largely already been covered in Volume Zero, my PhD (re: Tolkien and Cameron’s refrains). Instead, we’ll be focusing on aesthetics—the motion, appearance and thematic elements that emerge through the exploration of map-like spaces in Metroidvania.

[6] Generation of wealth in or outside of imperial sectors was classically done through conquest, not profit through capital and privatization; i.e., rapine, often through the stealing of gold and other valuable things by force. These things could be mined from the Earth and smelted, but again, this took a labor force (usually serfs or chattel slaves). Trade and things existed but were beholden to the same technological limitations.

Over time, though, capital developed through Capitalism’s ability to increasingly exploit the land through people the state could attack; i.e., not what it could steal from them in a pinch, but occupy and enslave according to the privatization of labor (factories and workers) pitted against an enemy linked to nature as abject: framed as being against civilization because nature was suddenly alien, monstrous-feminine. Doing so combined centuries of dogma, imperial nostalgia (for Rome), and recent scientific advancements granting the state the ability to pit one legitimate population against an illegitimate one with industrialized materiel (moral territories). In short, the state could do Imperialism on repeat, moving money through nature (with advanced weapons technologies) to achieve profit in pursuit of infinite growth per the regular rise and fall of Capitalism’s boom-and-bust mechanism.

Through the monomyth, the canonical Gothic has abjected this procedure to displaced older times, digging said “past” up in ways the state can use as middle-class propaganda; i.e., to remain vigilant lest “our” empire fall, too. The conquest element never really went away, then. It just became privatized, but also industrious/sacred (the Protestant work ethic) and hidden away behind capitalistic illusions that romanticize Cartesian thought as “tragic,” but ultimately something to debate, thus apologize for (and continue to authorize state violence with during Pax Americana under Capitalist Realism). The Promethean Quest challenges all of this by framing the usual benefactors as dickwads, hence the state and its Cartesian dogma.

[7] I.e., fighting over the damsel who, however insignificant she might seem, indicates the larger capitalist enterprise: space as female under frontier Capitalism (the final frontier), but also monstrous-feminine.

So while Zack Welker writes dismissively in “The Lack of Female Importance in Forbidden Planet” (2017)

In Forbidden Planet, one can see that there is only one woman throughout the film. Now, usually one would think since she’s the only female in the film she must have some significance. But that is not the case here. In this film, Altaira (the only female) is treated as an object and a distraction (source).

the fact remains, she is the sole focus, and—more to the point—a heteronormative ritual of pursuit that disguises the ubiquitous Cartesian presence of the soldiers and why Morbius dislikes them so much: the colonization of outer space as seen through their unflattering, predatory behavior towards his young horny daughter.

To it, you could just as easily swap the princess out with the Peking duck from The Pink Panther Strikes Again (“My duck, I must have you!”); the principles of consumption, of propriety and vice (the virgin/whore) vs nature as something to dominate are still going to be at work in such stories (with Gothic canon being obsessed with emulating older morality plays regarding women and the home as beset by wild forces). The movie is Capitalism in small (and the Capitalocene—a dead, mostly lifeless planet; i.e., the absentee Mother), but also Capitalism-in-disguise as borrowed from older Gothic stories under Capitalist Realism: the ending of “other” empires and “their” worlds.

[8] You could argue Lovecraft protests settler colonialism by historicizing its collapse, but he does it self-centeredly and abjectly towards colonized worlds as attacked by barbarians from within (the Caesar conspiracy also abused by Hilter in the 1920s); i.e., as Victor Frankenstein does, so busy “doing science” that he has no time to relate to other people (including his wife, who dies because he’s rearing the fight the monster and forgets about her).

By comparison, Morbius certainly isn’t perfect, but he really doesn’t like soldiers or colonialism. To be sure, he does so to a fault (“the scurry and strife of humankind” sounding somewhat bitter), but the romantic elements have a lot more personality than Lovecraft; i.e., which, in my mind, help make up the usual bleeding heart of the Gothic Romance. Morbius is misunderstood and tragic; Lovecraft is a craven, homophobic bigot with zero pulse. As we’ll see, so is Athetos, sp paranoid of his own son that he tells his “children” (the variations) to kill Trace (the call coming from inside the house, as it were): “DEMON. ATHETOS SAY, KILL.”

[9] A cheeky nod to Tithonus:

Tithonus, in Greek legend, son of Laomedon, king of Troy, and of Strymo, daughter of the river Scamander. Eos (Aurora) fell in love with Tithonus and took him to Ethiopia, where she bore Emathion and Memnon. According to the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, when Eos asked Zeus to grant Tithonus eternal life, the god consented. But Eos forgot to ask also for eternal youth, so her husband grew old and withered (source: Britannica)

More to the point, men of reason (and the states attached to them) are always trying to cheat death by colonizing nature as monstrous-feminine.

[10] Which the narrator of the film openly describes their mission as, at the start of the movie.

[11] Generally the discovery happens as a matter of empathy towards various characters, onstage, the page or the screen; i.e., who do you side with—the old creepy scientist guy or the big gay faeries trying to survive in between fiction and reality? No one ever said being queer was easy! But it is fun! The key to escape, lovelies, is liberation, and that happens inside the text as half-real, between reality and imagination as negotiating power for workers or the state! Don’t fight the ghost of the counterfeit to further abjection; dance with it, and all your dreams will—if not for you, then your children or your children’s children (the future, in other words)—come true!

[12] The duality of monsters and their theatrics lets Communists occupy Samus; i.e., as a vehicle for proletarian (thus subversive) aims. But it doesn’t change the fact that her intended function is a token cop committing genocide for the state by colonizing the old ruin: a subjugated Amazon abjecting its maternal tyrant as both an infernal perversion of nature through mad science (the brain in a jar/glass womb) and the monstrous-feminine enemy of state forces during monomythic forays in to Hell. Per the cryptonymy process, Mother Brains completes the double operation by pushing visions of state abuse onto Samus, who rejects them by beheading Mother Brain. Their status as enemies is naturalized per Capitalism Realism under neoliberal dogma (videogames).

[13] Gloomth (from my PhD) “being the gloom and warmth attributed to Horace Walpole’s gothic villa, and by extension his novel”:

As Dale Townshend writes in Gothic Antiquity:

Rejecting Mann’s suggestions of a Gothic garden at Strawberry Hill, Walpole claims that “Gothic is merely architecture,” and resides in the “satisfaction” that one derives from “imprinting the gloomth of abbeys and cathedrals on one’s house.” The letter proceeds to illustrate the “venerable barbarism” of the Gothic style through another telling description of the Paraclete: “my house is so monastic,” Walpole claims, “that I have a little hall decked with long saints in lean arched windows and with taper columns, which we call the Paraclete, in memory of Eloisa’s cloister.” It is thus through the oxymoronic categories of “venerable gloom,” “venerable barbarism,” and “gloomth”—a compound word formed of “gloom” and “warmth”—that Walpole was able to negotiate the discursive impasse at the heart of eighteenth-century perceptions of Gothic architecture: though undoubtedly an example of Evelyn’s and Wren’s “monkish piles” or Middleton’s “nurseries of superstition,” the ecclesiastical Gothic could be retrieved as “venerable barbarism” when it was enlisted in the service of modern Protestant domesticity (source).

For Walpole, gloomth was a carefully cultivated hauntological expression—of the civilized and barbaric—into something beautiful and unique. Later, his own villa inspired him to write what is arguably considered to be the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (source).

[14] As my true self, I didn’t have to change who I was to fit in, and I could wear whatever I wanted to be myself in the process—if only onstage or on the canvas at first, to slowly acclimate myself to the idea that I wasn’t “asking for it” while paradoxically invoking these inherited anxieties onstage; nor was I a threat to society as I saw it—i.e., I wasn’t a fraudulent “man-in-a-dress” worming my way into “real women’s” spaces (classic impostor syndrome); I was a real woman, and my art and medievalist education slowly bonded more and more to become a way of tangibly presenting that idea to the world.

[15] “Beyond communities that reward speed, fast players are rewarded by Metroidvania when using the same items. Samus, in Metroid, will remove her armor at the end, but only if the game is beaten fast enough” (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Always More: A History of Gothic Motion from the Metroidvania Speedrunner,” 2019).

[16] “To play the game is to invade it, the hero’s body built to receive items that help them destroy the gameworld, but also themselves. They respond to the castle and its grim historical markers; over time, they are conditioned along a system of movement that can be taught, mastered through motion. By entering the heart of the castle, the hero confronts the past, but also becomes the answer to its riddle: the ultimate monster is merely an older, ‘forgotten’ version of themselves” (ibid.).