This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.
Click here to see “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
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Concerning Buggy Images: Sometimes the images on my site don’t always load and you get a little white-and-green placeholder symbol, instead. Sometimes I use a plugin for loading multiple images in one spot, called Envira Gallery, and not all of the images will load (resulting in blank white squares you can still right-click on). I‘ve optimized most of the images on my site, so I think it’s a server issue? Not sure. You should still be able to access the unloaded image by clicking on the placeholder/right-clicking on the white square (sometimes you have to delete the “?ssl=1” bit at the end of the url). Barring that, completed volumes will always contain all of the images, whose PDFs you can always download on my 1-page promo.
Metroidvania, part one: Away with the Faeries; or, Double Trouble in Axiom Verge
“I’m going to the one place that hasn’t been corrupted by Capitalism!” [dramatic pause, tries not to laugh] “…Space!” (source).
—Tim Curry as Premier Anatoly Cherdenko, Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 (2008)
Picking up from where “‘She Fucks Back’; or, Metroidvania (opening and part zero)” left off…
Part one takes the canonical histories we unpacked during part zero and inverts them per the iconoclastic ones we also outlined (and are contributing to, here). First, we surveyed Freud and Forbidden Planet, as well as At the Mountains of Madness, and Shelley’s Victor and the Creature in Frankenstein, as all part of the same Promethean Quest. After that, we
- highlighted several key points surrounding Promethean narratives in terms of the performative spaces associated with them: the hero is summoned to the ruinous, dormant land of the gods, where they learn about their shitty parents, and then fights for one side against the other before scuttling the space-in-question.
- looked at the history of scholarship (re: my graduate and postgraduate work) and the stories connected to that scholarship as haunting capital out of the imaginary past splintered into copies, of copies, of copies regarding nature vs civilization, Cartesian men vs Medusa.
Last but not least, we discussed irony as something that can be removed or added in one iteration versus the next, giving Metroid as an unironic example of the Capitalocene that Axiom Verge subverts in a lot of campy, very gay ways: Trace is Shelley’s Adam turned against Victor by Mother Nature—gay space faeries!
(artist: Dejano23)
Now that you have all of that, part one is our close-read of Axiom Verge, exploring how its Promethean story about trouble in paradise (a hellish pastoral ain’t no picnic) treats the mission as one ironically delivered to a clone of the ultimate foe; i.e., the player as inheriting the larger Promethean scheme having already been subverted by our resident gay faeries. The game doubles Metroid, but also its own characters and spaces pointing to Capitalism/the Capitalocene normally disguised by doomsday narratives that Samus would shoot without a second thought. We’ll explore this “double trouble,” now, commenting on different apocalypse qualities of it before ending on a cathartic, sex-positive note.
Following the basic pattern of the Promethean Quest, Trace wakes up naked and alone. Trapped in a world that is falling apart (or ready to fall apart), the faeries have called Trace from sleep to brief him; i.e., telling him where to go, what to do—his mission objectives, essentially. Over time, he walks around, not exactly alone insofar as there is life present, just not human life. The place is a ghost town, lonely and plaintiff as Satie’s “Paris,” not Beethoven’s (the latter crossing Napoleon’s name out of the Emperor Concerto[1]). Keeping with the Metroidvania tone poem, eventually the music picks up; Trace fights monsters, and learns he’s not only created by a mad scientist called Athetos (whose name means “without place”), but he’s begot from the other man!
(artist: Wildragon)
That’s not usual in Promethean narratives. The problem is, Athetos isn’t like Morbius; he’s a genocidal maniac abusing the fire of the gods to aggrandize himself! To it, Trace is effectively this story’s Creature with a twist—there’s a bit of the inhumane patriarch inside him, giving him a human appearance tied to someone and something truly heinous. As we shall see, this is where the trouble starts. But it’s also where addressing Capitalism (and its disguises) begins to take shape; i.e., the mighty Rusalki being the faeries that Trace is away with: troubling comparison (through doubles) leads to irony critiquing and subverting what’s effectively an ironic version of the Metroid-style Metroidvania.
Athetos, then, is this stories’ copy of Hamlet’s father’s ghost; i.e., the catalyst for revenge against Mother Nature. Untrained in combat, the “hero” is actually Trace, the unwitting doppelganger/useful idiot cloned from Athetos and used against him by the Rusalki (a bit like Skynet and the terminators, which the resistance reprograms); i.e., to not act like Samus and her violent, militarily optimistic salvos attacking the planet and its occupants: as simple pirates and dragons to slay.
In other words, Trace is a clone of himself as less warlike (and self-righteous). Both he and Athetos are strangers to Sudra, the game’s alien homeworld. The difference is that Athetos is entirely foreign to Sudra and trying to colonize its ruins (which are that way because of what he did to the Sudrans), while Trace feels alienated in Sudra on account of the memories inside him that were written before his birth on Sudra; i.e., to defend from his conqueror side (the creepy old man/mad scientist who rapes everything around him): he is filled with revenge, only to discover it was authored by his mothers, not his genocidal dad (the two ideas at war inside Trace’s head). Is it embarrassing? Eh, sure, but pride is the root of the problem—one the Rusalki have no bones about solving by lying to Trace and, sometimes, spanking him a bit. The world is corrupted by hideous creations they expect him to “mop up” on his way to the Wizard of Oz. It’s still something of a purge, but the “corruption” is manmade; i.e., one of fascist science, versus Metroid’s X parasite simply being tied to the land, itself, as wild: needing to be colonized inside the state of exception, a priori.
The Gothic generally puts “harm” next to harm as felt, like a ghost, across generations (the chronotope and its various ghosts). For the rest of part one, then, I want to focus on the complex, imperiled, BDSM-style interactions Trace has with the Rusalki, the game’s Frankensteinian war machines as primarily telepathic and spectral. Not only do they arm him with (stolen) weapons in the guerrilla style; their veiled, “torturous” instructions compel him towards rebellious violence using deliberately faulty intelligence to survive Cartesian genocide.
Throughout the story, the Rusalki keep Trace in the dark. Guilty as charged. But also, theirs is an act of Amazonian desperation, one whose drive to survive a human menace leads them to act increasingly human against the spectral highwayman. Beyond the same, fourth-dimensional walls of sleep, the Great Faeries[2] prod Trace awake, sending him knowingly into “danger”; i.e., when he dies, the so-called “old machines” revive him. But he retains his memories each time, until confronting Athetos’ variants finally forces him to come to his own conclusions about what he really is in relation to his father as a likeness he embodies: the conqueror mad scientist, the Nazi quack.
These troubling revelations only compound further when Trace encounters a pathogen that makes him hallucinate: a bioweapon released by Athetos to genocide the Sudrans, ravage the environment and trap the Rusalki in a sleep of death (a very eco-fascist maneuver). This fever dream is also a crossover vision, one that reverses the role between him and the monsters he’s systematically slaying. While the resurrection pods provide an uncertain “cure,” Trace retains memories of the dream that his Amazonian bosses cannot see. Instead, their drones carry him to safety.
(exhibit 40e: Artist: Wildragon. Axiom Verge is effectively a Promethean narrative of fighting fire with fire. Athetos uses bio-weapons to kill the Sudrans and trap the Rusalki; the Rusalki use cloning as a means of weaponizing a clone of Athetos against himself; and Athetos tries to convince Trace at the end of the game that the Rusalki are not to be trusted despite making Trace from Athetos’ body. Instead of Frankenstein‘s singular parent-versus-child narrative, Axiom Verge gives Trace a scientist male father and host of Amazonian, biomechanical female mothers who made him from mad science to fight mad science; both are fearsome, commenting on the tyrannical nature of mad science as always having a human face—i.e., Prometheus, bottom-left. It’s like a really fucked-up custody battle—one where the parents pit the child against either side while reminding it that it comes from them: the human side, but also the alien side lurking beneath the surface as fundamentally human relative to nature.)
When Trace comes to, he witnesses two Athetos variations. Both are effectively mush, but one nonetheless resembles Trace (above). Horrified, Trace shoots it dead (exhibit 40e). This spurs an argument between him and the Rusalki, who begrudgingly tell Trace his origins. Their deliberate omissions anger him. When he refuses to cooperate, the Rusalki “kill” him; he respawns, only to find himself being chided for his foolish rebellion.
As such, this torturous, shared phenomenology makes for a very different story than Doom‘s or Metroid’s heroic refrain (shoot the alien inside the fallen colony space). Rather than ignore or overlook death, Trace’s demise is a fundamental part of the story Thomas Happ wants to tell: you can’t shoot Medusa to death because she’s your dominatrix, a guardian of nature using you for those ends through stories inside stories, lies inside and upon lies. Per Plato, the nature of allegory is that it isn’t outside the cave (or the text, as Derrida would insist).
For instance, a player normally remembers “dying” but their avatar does not. Trace is not only aware of death; it teaches him some sorry truths:
- He is being controlled by giant, powerful entities.
- These entities are alien, god-like bio-machines, but also masters of war.
- As masters of war, they continually lie to him, telling him only what is needed to complete their military objectives.
- These objectives involve the killing of the hero’s older, “wiser” self, leaving the younger survivor in a constant state of ignorance and confusion.
His experience uncannily mirrors the mind of the player going through the same ordeal, raising troubling queries. Is Athetos the villain or the seemingly-made Creatures (robata) that he seeks dominion over?
To that, we’re left asking the same questions Shelley raised, except it’s through the Promethean myth as punted into outer space; i.e., in a move similar to Alien, Forbidden Planet and At the Mountains of Madness—transplanting the fire of the gods, versus having Victor make it, “homebrew.” The point isn’t who makes the technology but what is done with it. The Rusalki use it to protect themselves; Athetos, to kill everyone in a genocidal tantrum because the big ladies won’t let him into their womb space. He’s the incel tyrant nerd, ipso facto, and it’s completely ok to lie to him spectacularly (re: the splendide mendax) and his baby-like clones (which Trace is) if it means preserving themselves to spite his rapey hubris (the killer doll being something Hollow Knight plays with, albeit in reverse: the knight killing Medusa to avenge the king by raping his monstrous-feminine foil, the Radiance).
Though never fully clear, Trace’s cloudy vision becomes comparatively more lucid as time goes on. He finds a series of cryptic journals. Some are literally gibberish the player must decode using cyphers. Some are from the Sudrans; others from the Rusalki, even Athetos (who signs the documents “—Trace”). So many elements of language fail to communicate anything at all, forcing the player to search for the truth, memento mori. But all the same, a deliberately oblique story seemingly bars the way.
Not entirely. Even Athetos hints at the truth: “If I tell you too much, your captors will have to kill you.” The fact—that both sides are lying about a struggle between themselves to a curious third party—mirrors Shelley’s framed narrative in Frankenstein (1818) giving rise to homicidal rhetoric: “DEMON. ATHETOS SAY, KILL.” Danger, Will Robinson! Danger disco!
(exhibit 40f: Artist, left: Wildragon; right: Bernie Wrightson. Promethean arguments of revenge concern capital vs nature. In these dream-like spaces, spectres of Marx and spectres of Caesar and “Rome” aim to control the same “dolls” [citizens, workers]. In the case of Enlightenment dogma, the female presence of nature and chaos historically-materially stands “in the way” of male leaders, but also makes them anxious of a phallic, enraged monstrous-feminine Numinous/nation; i.e., the Amazons versus King Theseus, Queen Jadis versus Aslan, Mr. Rochester vs Bertha, Morgana versus Arthur or Medusa versus the Greeks, etc. In many instances, the striking of the king blind with forbidden, female-exclusive wisdom is the Gorgon’s best weapon; in Axiom Verge, the Rusalki are more a class of warrior gatekeepers using the same brutal methods to keep Athetos, thus Humanity through Capitalism, from advancing to a position where they could do greater harm to nature: through their cryptonymy as a matter of war masks, deceptions, and ultimately fighting back against male tyrants through those outward-facing half-deceptions.)
Axiom Verge and Frankenstein, despite being centuries apart, touch on the same basic concepts through an ambiguous framed narrative about demons (we’ll return to the “demonic” aspect in the Demon Module): memory and knowledge as compromised by Promethean struggles to “advance.” In Shelley’s novel, the pursuit of knowledge was guarded by Victor, but also the Creature stalking and methodically torturing him (emulating his creator in that respect: the scientific method). And driven to the ends of the Earth, a dying Victor relays with utter conviction that his man-made creation is a “demon” to be slain; but the same animus is projected onto Victor by the Creature. Their mutual audience is left to decide who is right, but a case can be made for either side. Clearly Victor is a villain, but the Creature cannot be wholly redeemed, either. There’s innocent blood on his hands, spilled in futile revenge against capital’s daddy.
The same dilemma is present in Axiom Verge. Athetos did not create the Rusalki; he merely attracted them through his own pursuit of forbidden knowledge by genocidal means. However, machines also don’t evolve like organics; they are made, generally in the pursuit of power or wisdom. Just as Victor pursued the Wisdom of the Ancients as a “natural philosopher,” Athetos’ scientific endeavors led him down a similar road. On it, both men encounter a biomechanical humanoid race, their mutual confrontation instigating a merciless fight to the death: Humanity versus itself in a process of abjection against nature; i.e., demonic persecution divided dualistically in two and set upon itself.
To this, the relationship between the past and the present is the exploration of science in ways that do not die, but simply wait to be found and resurrected once more. While this stymies progress, so does the fear of the process itself. The Sudrans (according to Athetos) feared their technology and refused to invoke it. Instead they worshipped it (thus the Rusalki and nature). Athetos despised this worship and released a disease to kill them all, thus gaining access to the Breach. Beyond lay the path to true power, true wisdom. With it, Athetos could make disease, war, famine and death “things of the past” (again, according to him). But the past was waiting for him in Amazonian forms. As an instrument of nature designed to protect itself in war-like ways, Athetos would have to defeat its avatars. In turn, the Rusalki (a kind of water fairy in Slavic lore) would have to dig deep, drawing on their own worst impulses to prevent a deeply flawed and predatory man (and, in effect, Capitalism which he embodies and enjoys always leading to genocide according to profit) from entering paradise: king wants, the gods deny passage and ascension.
(source: James Jordan’s “The Met’s Stream of Wagner’s Ring,” 2020)
Despite the Frankensteinian ambiguities, things have class character that we can determine through dialectical-material scrutiny. To that, let me remind you of the dualities at work, here, of which the differing factor is one of class-and-cultural character, not appearance. For example, such denial of paradise by the gods is a common Promethean theme, the fascist element of false rebels clamoring to return to paradise (the good graces of the elite) since Wagner’s 1857 Ring Cycle opera (a composer who was notably anti-Semitic[3]). But not all gods are Nazis, either.
So while this was a theme alluded to in At the Mountains of Madness, followed by Scott’s Prometheus—and later more clearly in Alien: Covenant, with David playing “Entry of the Gods into Valhalla,” returning to a superior position[4] while simultaneously pointing out that gods are both fake and used to justify and achiever power to create new beings with (the xenomorph being a Satanic tool of rebellion, but more on that in the Demon Module)—Happ in 2014 was riffing off the same denials of entry and seeking of power by those who have and those who don’t: Athetos vs nature-as-monstrous-feminine; i.e., the one “without place” being a king without a kingdom as a matter of capital under Cartesian thought raping nature as impressive, as big and fearsome, as having things to take (ultimately materials, but also power and forbidden knowledge as a social-material arrangement—the raw and nebulous essence of people, of class-to-race-to culture war, of Foucault’s bio-power, Francis Bacon the father of modern science [a palimpsest for Victor] appealing to rape nature, etc).
Actions (and social-material conditions) speak louder than words. But it’s equally important to remember the dialectical-material confusion between genuine proletarian rebel—which a character like Satan represents challenging God and canonical forces in Milton’s epic—and someone like Weyland or Athetos, who embody the usual entitlements of capital and who pitch murderous fits against nature when they don’t get what’s “theirs”; i.e., as a matter of Cartesian dogma. One is the middle-class white man, promised ascension and denied it by the bourgeoisie through abjection; the other—the Rusalki, the xenomorphs, the monstrous-feminine—are the usual recipients of state violence who are actually rebelling against systemic violence as a matter of abjection through police brutality (with Victor using the courts and flash mobs against the Creature). Pointing a finger at the Rusalki and saying “they have much” only to invade them is to, as the Cartesian paradigm always does, point the spear at nature/the monstrous-feminine: a false flag to rape it with.
To cut through the Red Scare confusion, then, let me also remind you that the fascist, she-wolf (vampire) visual elements to the Rusalki cross a shared aesthetic of power and death over with the Communist elements occupying the same shadow zone that both inhabit. There is no singular interpretation, save what capital tries to colonize Gothic territories with. So call the Rusalki “Valkyries” or “space vampires” if you like; I see them as Grendel’s giant mother—big-ass Commie faeries more versed at warmaking, mimicry and all-around survival as actual rebels (counterterrorists) than Athetos was, a state terrorist playing the rebel (something to bear in mind when we take these historical lessons and apply them to our own lives, in Volume Three; i.e., learning from the imaginary past as informed by a historical one as equally half-real—the chronotope). Thus, they are able to get back at the Cartesian, Übermensch mega-nerd this time (touché, as it were).
Scott does the same to Weyland with his own dark angels, the Engineers ambiguously angry at a man whose own stabs at godhood are promptly smacked down by David’s disembodied head (an act of destroying maker and creation in one fell swoop): godly bonk, smiting the godhead with his little head (David being Weyland’s resigned servant for most of the film). It’s divine judgment, a gavel swung from the wrath of gods that, fake or not, have the power to wipe Humanity out. It’s a kind of guilt trip, a literal journey through and towards past wrongs against the natural world in the name of weaponized science. No one ever said the punishers of the proud were always fascist or Communist; it frankly depends on the critical voice being used!
To this, our resident big girls in Axiom Verge ruthlessly manipulate Trace, the useful idiot, in defense of a Communist paradise from the billionaire Nazi; i.e., the womb of nature (and its secrets that Cartesian men desire) being part of a forever war between Earth’s men of reason and otherworldly Amazonian forces, one they’re just getting started with all over again (forming a pretty pattern in the game that speaks to real life; re: like Miss Crawford’s cards, in Mansfield Park (re: Nabakov) but in matters of war, not love[5]). It’s mad science in both ways, nature radically using the same wonderous technology (the fire of the gods) against a fascist agent who is distanced from Earthly Capitalism but still remains a part of it; i.e., by taking him from Earth and putting him on Sudra to begin with.
In turn, Gothic castles are saturated with rape as a matter of investigation and materialization, hunting the hunter to avenge the abused from different points of contention: workers or the state. Axiom Verge has Pax Americana playing out on Sudra; in absence of an American flag or corporate logo (e.g., the Weyland-Yutani corporate merger from Alien), it is here the faeries and Athetos do battle through the child of the future taken to the ruins of a once-happy world laid low by Capitalism. In other words, it’s hauntological in terms of space; i.e., caught between past and present space-time.
To give Athetos his rude awakening inside the chronotope, the Rusalki condition the innocent child figure; i.e., cloning Trace through the resurrection machines to betray Athetos, his fatherly likeness[6], who is likewise trying to abuse the power of resurrection to conquer space. The Rusalki aren’t just better parents than Athetos, but scientists, too! It’s poetic justice, for sure, but a brutal one; i.e., “taking candy from a baby” according to an army of such enfants terrible (as the Heavy from TF2 says, “What sick man sends babies to fight me?”). This happens fighting fire with Promethean fire, babies with babies, masks with masks, mirrors with mirrors (e.g., Trace mirrors his father’s appearance but his mothers’ quest), cake with cake (re: charming lies to put in one’s cake holes to motivate revenge; e.g., poison to pour in Hamlet’s father’s ear and, by extension, his paranoid son).
As such, the Rusalki are framed as gods of nature by people like Weyland or Athetos; i.e., Cartesian men of reason playing god to lord over nature and take from it whatever they want, as a matter of Capitalism destroying as a matter of profit: the fire thereof. Any counterterrorist defense—no matter how rude it seems to bored middle-class folk snacking on such stories—is entirely justified, in that respect.
This being said, the Red Scare elements to Scott’s story (which Happ borrows from, the Rusalki being Slavic female vampires) project the fascist elements of capital onto an ancient-alien civilization (similar to Lovecraft) before threatening “the Earth” (now Westernized from top to bottom) with genocide as a fear of collapse: “It’s carrying death!” There’s an element of pearl-clutching present, one that happens through abjection forcing the Engineers and Rusalki into the same theatrical space: the city of the gods, a portentous ruin that precedes their return as fascist or Communist to threaten capital with. This happens the same way that it did with Victor, two centuries ago: through visions and dreams, and of dark, gigantic bodies twisted by mad science (the difference being the Engineers became cops, the Rusalki, rebels).
Apart from godhood, the chief difference between gods is the harm caused during oppositional praxis; i.e., the Rusalki, in a dialectical-material sense, are reprogramming the child soldier, Trace, to kill its abusive father as having harmed all parties (removing them like obstacles): killing him is a mercy to everyone, but is, like everything else in the game, always “in between,” liminal (whose operatic spaces are where fags always are, always call home despite being treated as fantastical, as incorrect: the fairy closet a prison we reclaim through Gothic hauntology from Shelley onwards).
Moreover, these are big problems tied to big persons and places as passed down, like a castle, from father to son, but also mother to child (depending on which side of the fence one falls on). Eventually the Rusalki win, probably knowing that Athetos will seek revenge against Trace. Except, the patriarch is a ghost, and ghosts can’t actually hurt you (re: C.S. Lewis). Rather, the true horror for Trace is that he’s a pawn in a bigger game, one whose victories are seldom clean; but also, that it’s all a dream, thus not real in ways that can actually harm him (the Gothic paradox). The silver lining is that, while being used, he is destroying the tyrant to prevent genocide against nature in the future—of the faeries, the older queers, having more experience and materiel to wage war against god-like forces, weaponizing Athetos’ Creature against capital (and maybe helping him out of the closet, a bit): by waking Trace up while inside Capitalist Realism (re: Plato’s cave, which Sudra stands in for).
(artist: Wildragon)
Rest assured, Medusa’s head haunts Sudra as a victim of Cartesian hubris, one whose Galatean element of Numinous energies lead to a Titania-grade worship by our resident Nick Bottom[7]. Said worship—of technology as god-like—originally kept the Sudrans inside an Indigenous state of grace that Athetos destroyed out of spite (their former greatness something hinted at when Elsenova seemingly[8] kills Athetos). “They barely remembered who they were,” Athetos recalls (our story’s Pygmalion, making Trace in his image and falling in love with himself: as master of the universe); i.e., the warriors he wanted them to be. Rooted in the past, then, what seems an interminable catastrophe that shut the Breach and robbed the Sudrans of their lives was all thanks to Athetos, not the Rusalki—a genocide he blames on them to convince the son that daddy is right.
(source: Fandom)
Of course, the Rusalki remembered, but they had previously left Sudra behind for undisclosed reasons (on par with Lovecraft’s ancient aliens, or Ridley Scott’s derelict, etc, piloting “ancient” castles doubling as giants, as ships, as avatars). Athetos made them return, but from a specific place: “the greatest nation ever envisioned.” They return from a Communist place of post-scarcity threatened by manufactured Cartesian scarcities, Athetos’ keeping the evil king alive and twisting the Rusalki into war machines to protect themselves from his weaponizing of nature against itself. Mid-Amazonomachia, they fight to a standstill, the Rusalki losing their bodies (above), and Athetos, his ability to walk on land. The fight continues inside Trace’s mind while exploring the ruins his parents made; i.e., Athetos’ inversion of “female castration” per the faeries’ severed heads haunting his dreams according his desire for a young body to pilot. As such, Medusa’s head chases the ghost of the father to Trace’s subconscious. Psychomachy or Amazonomachy—all happen for the same territories hitherto described: capital vs commune.
As for the nation, itself, it’s precisely such a place that Athetos wants to enter and destroy—to install himself in its place (and take all the credit while preying vampirically upon it) after forcing the Rusalki to return and protect their babies, who now are all dead and converted into zombie cyborgs remade to serve Athetos’ growing revenge and hubris: his towering folly!
Athetos’ mounting regression has its own conservatism during futile revenge: a better place, a nostalgia, to which any sacrifice is justified against the rebels (and by extension, nature). Trace is the Omelas goat, but his death and/or corruption is not guaranteed. Nonetheless, the Rusalki are protecting their own boarders (and avenging their slain children) from the opposite direction as having sent genocide towards them in Cartesian ways: through scientists. Superior in form (or at least size), the giant water witches are nearly destroyed by the biomechanical agent they call a Pattern-Mind, or “someone with the ability to manipulate matter.” Athetos integrates the fire of the gods into himself to keep prosecuting his mad war against his eternal enemies (next page, exhibit 40g1); in turn, he forces them to.
Hardly an accidental tourist, Athetos does so ruthlessly to carry himself forward through the plague-ravaged maze; i.e., even after his actual body has become too frail to move around. His policeman’s brutal and cold-blooded colonizing of the land and its legends must occur through Trace, who—removed from the Rusalki’s careful watch—could easily fall victim to his evil father’s reasoned arguments; i.e., the tyrant in love with his own image as tied to capital’s dominion over nature as a manmade ordeal: Sudra turned into a prison for the Rusalki to try and escape through their adopted son as someone to liberate the mind of from their unwanted husband’s advances.
As such, Athetos’ boundaries to enjoy and impose on others (negative freedom, aka freedom from consequence) is, itself, no accident, and one that travels and lingers in future repetitions whose memories are starting to degrade; i.e., the ghost of the king haunting the carceral space through Trace being the one actually walking through it (as a ghost of Athetos, sharing fragments of his father’s memories, which he must reassemble from the wreckage around him). Trace becomes, to some extent, the vain wreaker of Cartesian havoc, which the Rusalki must turn back—Aegis-style—against the original captain. Seeking his owed home, Athetos is always rationalizing genocide (and the requirement of an enemy to rape, mutilate and pillage through Cartesian thought) by using the son as his revenge-by-proxy against the Rusalki and nature: as having not only dared to disobey him, but having denied him what’s his by royal decree dressed up as “scientific reason.”
Liberation is holistic, requiring us to consider how all these stories-in-stories (and stories that borrow this and that) collectively fit together on all registers. Athetos’ inherited hierarchy of values attaches to a capitalistic worldview that always alienates him from nature, including his own children (manmade for not); i.e., as tools for him, the divorced dad, to use and cast aside as needed. He sucks, but so does the ideology that turned him into an emotionally-fragile-yet-somehow-unfeeling monster working for the state. For all his contradictions, then, the man of reason’s self-centered policing of nature—from Victor to Weyland to Athetos—remains remarkably constant: a tyrant who always returns seeking revenge against women and children, but also the natural world!
(exhibit 40g1: Artist, top-left: Wildragon. Resembling the skeletal Immorton Joe from Fury Road [which came out a year before Axiom Verge] but also, oddly, Jacques Derrida, Athetos is Happ’s “writing with ghosts” by evoking the heteronormative spirit [and cartographic tools of conquest, exhibit 1a1a1h2a1] of the old, Enlightenment tyrant/con man Wizard-of-Oz, Peter Weyland. As the vain owner of everything around him, Weyland becomes desperate to cheat death, yet only discovers the Leveler on his own Promethean Quest: “A king has his reign, and then he dies,” his daughter, Mary Vickers, explains to him[9]. “That is the natural order of things.”
In defiance of this natural order, Peter lives in a glass shell, but also lies and exploits everyone around him in order to become a god. His leech’s rejection from paradise comments on Humanity as “unworthy” but also the gods, in this case, as false: lying to him because he sucks. Neither the Engineers nor the Rusalki are seemingly any better—a comment Weyland’s posthuman child, David, will make when he plays god in a fashion similar to the Rusalki. Except the dark mothers are stewards to nature, which Athetos—like Weyland with David—wants to invade through his children as slaves to his will [the tyrant’s plea being that if only they let him inside, sickness and death will end—more Capitalist Realism, blaming the whore]. Again, Athetos can’t love anything; he can only harvest or manufacture it for his own self-serving ends, because he embodies Capitalism peeled back to its Cartesian spearhead: the good weapon thrust into nature’s womb to tame it “for mankind.” To it, everything is expendable, including his children [or those he infantilizes and cuts up into zombie war machines—workers].)
Axiom Verge‘s warring liminalities (the verge of war) constantly present a curious kind of weapon to the player/audience: written language, specifically lies used in good faith and bad, that, unto themselves, contain things pursuant to different secret quests (a theme we’ll examine in “Metroidvania,” part two, when we compare Tolkien’s Hobbit [and Thror’s key and map] to the heroic quest in Hollow Knight). These fragments/traces also decay over time across larger systemic operations left behind (re: similar to Morbius the philologist poring over the derelict Krell language in Forbidden Planet that he might decipher its author’s mysterious disappearance); i.e., cryptic journal fragments written by increasingly delusional, Saturnine tyrants and desperate slaves, assembled afterwards (re: the mechanical Amazons and both parent’s tablets) and translated by Trace as he converses with different ghostly pieces.
Keeping with the Promethean theme of futile revenge, these reassemblies remain indicative, Hamlet-style, to the home and mind being not only destroyed as part of the same unit (with Hamlet lead by his “father’s” ghost to kill his whole family on a hunch), and linked mid-decay[10] to the same basic upheaval across space-time: “Something is rotten in Denmark!”
For example, the Rusalki lie to Trace, BDSM-style, to preserve his humanity to an imperfect degree while killing Athetos (and by extension, Capitalism-as-astronoetic); i.e., instead of Medusa inside-outside Trace (a reversal of the monomyth and its bad parentage on both registers). Such labels are cryptonyms of a repressed struggle between different, mighty forces: “Rusalki” and “old machines” and “Sudra,” but also “Athetos” as codewords during an ongoing war thereof. Simply put, the entire gameworld is a lie.
This lie unfolds on several levels. As the player follows the coded exchange borrowed from Metroid, Axiom Verge is telling an altogether different story. The player arms themselves by moving around; the Rusalki furtively arm Trace. Every victory the player earns weakens Athetos, seemingly trapping Humanity on Earth by letting Pandora out of her box. For all their posturing as great machines, the Rusalki appear to gatekeep Humanity through equal savagery. They lie, kill, and steal. The whole nebulous tragedy plays out like a waiting game—one where Athetos’ zombie agents mindlessly guard the corridors with outwardly ugly bodies; Trace embodies the body and mind of the player as controlled by alien machines that (according to Athetos) hold Humanity captive; i.e., keeping them in a dream-like, infantile state from beyond the Breach, thus unable to colonize space.
But the real villain isn’t Medusa defending herself—our Communist Galatea challenging yet-another Cartesian Pygmalion in a centrist, decaying Cycle of Kings—it’s capital defending itself through mad science decaying into fascist forms that apologize through the usual tyrant’s pleas dressed up as “rational”; i.e., the rockstar, too-radical man of reason trying to pimp Medusa through Trace, asking his own son to rape his mother (and her peoples) for the father as the father (akin to Luke and Vader) until the end of time.
The ensuring dialog occurs on a precipice—the usual great calamity having indeterminably befallen a paradise in the past (or rather a liminal space leading to paradise): the queendom of the Rusalki and nature, of which they are its fearsome stewards. Laid low by a male invader having its former greatness something to hint at, said invader has twisted the entire world to serve him and Capitalism, which he represents. Now when he is conquered, the old man is uncloaked but still dangerous, reasoning with Trace (there is nothing reasonable about genocide, but that’s still what capital does: reasoning with itself through its labor force).
To this, the game is the monomyth in small, telling a story that critiques it by virtue of disempowering the hero through what he sees, but also the faeries whispering in the ear of the king’s lineage warning them of such heroism as bad faith. Eventually, it becomes a matter of equalization—not of might makes right, but skillful, guerrilla-style maneuvering through the application of force as part of a larger struggle of liberation and resistance winding the clock back.
(exhibit 40g2: Forget “First do no harm”; Athetos does nothing else. First, he releases the plague; then, he clones himself to survive outside his glass jar in order to finish off the resident queens, forcing them to fight fire with fire just to survive—the literally broadsides of their weapon-like bodies, but also through the kid, Trace, who must watch the destruction of his state of innocence tied to the home finally disintegrate [the music that plays here is suitably titled “Apocalypse“]. Forced to come home and realize his dad’s a Nazi and his mom’s a Communist whore, Trace the inheritor remains caught between them [the game summed up as a Promethean custody battle, one where two gods—one of capital, fascism and mad science; the other of nature, rebellion and the Medusa—fight over the hearts and minds of workers at large: their “children”]. Then, he watches Mom kill Dad, Medusa getting her body back before putting the aging vampire down in front of the boy like Old Yeller… if Old Yeller were a crazed Nazi scientist obsessed with conquering the universe [no one ever said the gods were subtle]!
The prodigal son’s arrival takes time. In the interim, he explores the war-torn world as a child might, the Rusalki queendom appearing to Trace: one, as if for the first time [re: “It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being; all the events of that period appear confused and indistinct”] and two, corrupted by Nazi revenge [re: “If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends”]. Happ has reversed the position of the one making demands, the Creatures in a position of relative, unconquered advantage versus our fallen king having laid both parties low. He’s an abusive father having damaged the mother’s home, trying get at her through the children: Trace, the last, made from the bodies of the other dead kids. Brutal!
In turn, all mommy can do is try and survive along with the last surviving child; i.e., using her adopted son in reverse during the divorce from the alien dad, but ultimately seeking not to harm Trace: by teaching him that, yes, rebellion isn’t polite, and it’s ok to server bonds from your father if he’s a Nazi devouring his own lineage [re: Goya]. To that, the story has different morals playing out as a matter of dialectical-material argument: Shelley’s theatrical dialogs, mythic structure and aesthetic dualities [of power and death] warring inside framed narratives.
When the likeness of the father encounters the father’s first line of children, we see the first degrees of infiltration at work; i.e., force and total war, followed by assimilation; e.g., Skynet’s bare-bones terminators, followed by those with rubber skin, and ultimately “blood, hair, sweat—grown for the cyborgs.” As a matter of complicit vs revolutionary cryptonymy, the zombie children recognize the more refined and human Trace and see in their sibling an element of the mother, who they are supposed to destroy.
As such, the paradox of violence, terror and morphological expression is that Athetos cannot monopolize them; nor can he abuse technology in relation to nature as something to monopolize. In making Trace more human to blend in, Athetos makes a less-expendable child [an heir] who is able to see his mother’s side of things, sealing the wicked father [and Capitalism’s] fate. The battle with the flower tank [left] is simply a formality in that respect: exorcism to critique capital, not Communism!
Furthermore, if Athetos’ singular manufactured genocide against the Sudrans was cruel for an instant [which it wouldn’t have been, that many people dying hardly happening overnight, below], it was both an act of revenge for being unable to send “technological advancements” [with “progress” being a cryptonym for genocide] into space, and one informed by the countless genocides under Cartesian thought that predated Athetos on Earth [and feudalistic enterprises surviving inside Capitalism’s various fantasy worlds]: “Who’s the savage? Modern man!”
All bleed into this half-imaginary [dream-like] realm; i.e., one of the damned, where Trace—following in his father’s footsteps—climbs the mountain of unburied dead Athetos left in his wake. Trace climbs innocently towards paradise on the bones of daddy’s victims, only to run into older copies of the father’s twisted will, which his own seamless copy conceals [they literally compose him]. Regarding all of them, Athetos abused the technology of the Rusalki—in effect, the fire of the gods—to achieve godhood in a capitalist sense through those he created. Cannibalism and madness overlap into a sad tolerance for itself: echoing inside the same child’s head, mid-chronotope.
Shortly before Athetos’ death, he and Trace exchange words inside the old man’s robot womb, as much between a politician to a citizen [Caesar being a warlord and statesman] or corporate propagandist and consumer as it is between father and son. Except, there is no reasoning with such infantile, self-superior persons; they are simply wrong as a matter of basic human, animal and environmental rights [also, bear in mind, Athetos has been trying to kill Trace this entire time: “Athetos say kill”]. By recognizing that vicious entitled streak in Athetos, the Rusalki gatekeep him through the son, using him to buy time until they can swoop in and stake the fascist Dracula for good. They do so to keep capital [thus fascism and genocide hidden behind Cartesian arguments] out of the rest of the universe, returning Trace—heartbroken and confused—to a Sudran state of ignorance [the sleeping rebellion speaking to the allegory of Communism as hunted down and invaded by Capitalism].)
Meanwhile, the cruelty of the Rusalki only applies to any who wish to cross over into their “greatest nation,” keeping paradise “pure” by virtue of policing outsiders through themselves having no other choice. They’ve been hurt before, thus must stay on their toes (Cartesian men embody capital as a Cartesian, thus settler-colonial force)! Athetos gassing the Sudrans is him failing the test as a matter of impatience and bad faith; he was always a conqueror and the mask slipped (an act he later explains away to Trace, but only when Elsenova has him on the hip). To equivocate his deeds with that of the Rusalki is DARVO and obscurantism, two devices that reach back—as usual—to Shelley’s novel: “I’m not bad, just misunderstood! They’re the genocidal maniacs, the hairy wild things!” says the genocidal maniac.
(artist: Quinnvincible)
More to the point, it all stems from Capitalism as embodied by men like Victor as echoed by Weyland, Athetos, Trace, and anyone else (from Earth or not) attacking the monstrous-feminine (re: “wicked, bad, naughty Zoot” and her grail beacon). Beating everyone to the punch, Mary Shelley touched upon and critiqued capital as an operatic matter of oppositional, dualistic dialogs unfolding Gothically (as endless counterfeit “past,” echoes, ghosts) through framed narration (exhibit 40g2); i.e., stories inside stores across stories, which again, Axiom Verge ultimately is—Victor and the Creature extending to the rotting (fascist) Cartesian tyrant and rebellious, monstrous-feminine slave each playing a swan/siren song to lure Trace with: heroes in opposing, dialectical-material struggles experienced across history as half-real. It is one which Gothic expression—its cryptomimesis echoing trauma in between fragments with a medieval, earthly flavor (“hawk tua, spit on that thang[11]!”)—tells and retells such vast, opposing forces neatly enough (the young-at-heart getting it, the old and divorced-from-nature left not just scratching their heads, but attacking such youthful, slutty impudence to try and closet it once more: “Those kids and their pesky videogames[12]!”).
Shelley’s novel is several centuries older than Happ’s videogame (with Bakhtin, in the middle of them, introducing theories of the chronotope that Shelley perhaps intuitively grasped, but Happ had full access to). As such, hindsight is kind of 20/20. Rather, Gothic maturity intensifies conflict as a matter of entropy (whose perceptive zombie eyeballs parse the chaff that stirs up in the wake of such warring elements). All heroes are monsters, but canonical iterations always have the monomythic twat punching down against the monstrous-feminine Prometheus (re: not Victor). Pity the fool if these bitches decide to break bad (water nymphs or otherwise), freezing him in his tracks:
(source: Opera Australia, “The Ring Cycle,” 2023)
In Promethean fashion, then, our aforementioned themes of contested godhood remain present. That’s what creation is, both sides doing so at cross purposes (tyranny vs liberation, capital vs Communism). Compared to the Rusalki, then, Athetos executed those who were complacent under the rule of what he deemed “false gods” (re: to take what was theirs for himself and those like him). In rejecting them, Athetos not only incurs their motherly wrath (versus the Engineer’s paternal rage); he’s effectively playing god himself, but in a fascist sense. Or as Alex Holmes writes in “The Philosophy of Axiom Verge” (2019):
As we discussed at the start, axioms are not able to be proven. They are necessary to ground any rational system so that ideas within the system can be evaluated, but are never themselves provable even if it was empirical evidence that causes us to create a new system. […] So imagine Athetos’ frustration, his anger, when after an entire career of ridicule despite public notoriety, he finally achieves a functional way to demonstrate the usefulness of his [axioms: the] world of Sudra, existing in a state of liminality that enables one to breach into these other worlds. What he finds instead is a society that has abandoned this potential out of fear, precisely because it was dangerous […] Nothing could have been more slighting.
Still, committing total, biological genocide by weaponizing your own cells into a mutating virus just so he can say, “I told you so” to the nerds who bullied him is a little heavy handed [or a critique of fascist megalomania, perhaps]. The personal message to take away from this story: pursue your goals without being consumed by ego (source).
Notions of godhood and demonstrating “progress” aside, we’re left with unequal arrangements of power, the weak rebelling against the strong as parental (which, again, goes all the way back to Frankenstein—to appeal any argument to those under capital in easy-to-understand language: rebellion and critique, passed along as “corruption” from mother to child in opposition to patriarchal hubris, technology[13] and exploitation).
As we’ll see in the Demon Module, Weyland’s child, David, had a similar problem (“Who doesn’t want their parents dead?”), except he was never human. Even so, he loved “Ozymandias,” an 1818 poem about a mad king whose mad reach for power leaves behind a “colossal wreck.” No record of how it came to exist survives, or who Ozymandias really was. In continuation, this trend of civilization eating itself was exemplified in Scott’s other Alien movies, which, in turn, inspired Metroid and other Metroidvania like Axiom Verge (or crossovers); i.e., Promethean, inverted-monomythic stories about fathers conditioning their children to kill their mother as monstrous, making her an extension of nature dominated by Cartesian thought.
Characters in stories like Frankenstein represent more than just themselves. Axiom Verge is all at once a story about an evil father controlling his kid to kill his mother, but remains connected to all the others, in and out of fiction, speaking to The Modern Prometheus—less as a single work and more an ongoing theme, a mythic code that can be used by either side. The Gothic, through this myth, routinely predicts disaster by flinging the fatal, one-possible future into the fearsome past seeking revenge against nature-as-alien, as monstrous-feminine.
For example, as the clock winds back to the here-and-now for Trace, the faeries return him to a world where Pax Americana‘s presidents (and their abuse of mad science) bear a disturbing and frightening partial likeness to Athetos—Biden and Trump, but also America versus nature; i.e., as monstrous-feminine, as Communist, per anxious stories like Axiom Verge, The Dark Crystal, The Terminator and At the Mountains of Madness, but also confidently militaristic ones like Metroid, Aliens and Starship Troopers (whose ultimate solution is always nuclear war and planetary destruction—genocide).
To avert and avoid the crisis that happened in Sudra—a world that has already been destroyed by hidden powers decaying them—the righting of the ship must be done in our own place and time as part of the same larger Garden of the Forking Paths (which Sudra—and indeed, all Metroidvania—intimate inside themselves); i.e., as already mapped out and destroyed in likenesses of itself: the Rusalki having won, in the end, their world devastated similar to John Connor’s war-torn L.A. after the nuclear war in that film. Sudra’s genocide—its great decay—happens through power as obscured, but also buried into the world like a thorn, but also a radioactive bullet. It is a post-apocalypse vision, its doom given by the faeries (the oracles) to Trace as “chosen” by the gods—one that needs to be prevented in our world while already moving towards the same end game that befell Sudra; i.e., committed by the same powerful men of reason and the monomyth as something to camp through the Promethean myth: returning from Hell not with plunder but the predatory knowledge of one’s homeworld (under Capitalism) heading in a similar direction!
Fascist or Communist, the gods are hardly silent, then; they predominantly live inside-outside us, across media hybridizing fantasy and science, just as Shelley’s Gothic did, over two hundred years ago: on the walls of restless castles communicating time, devastation and revenge as a cryptonymic circle, looping in on itself through decay as something to recover power from, in order to regenerate out of the dead material. As we’ll see with Hollow Knight, Capitalism will take everything from the world; but no matter how destroyed a world appears, we’re not quite there yet.
That all probably sounds bleak, so let’s conclude part one by reflecting on the positive side to some of its parental creative themes—i.e., as a matter of praxial catharsis—before moving onto part two and Metroidvania space in decay and regrowth, rape and reclamation.
To this, the Gothic can seem like a bad dream stuck on loop (no one wants to be told “good luck” while reconciling with capital vs nature as fraught with mimicry and fabrication). Axiom Verge certainly feels this way. But it also shows that each time a story is told, the past grows, leaving behind artifacts that are increasingly begot from imagination (the cryptic writing crumbling to dust, the faeries moving in); i.e., as not only haunted by patriarchal ghosts, but spectral patriarchs anxious about the fragility of male power—its tendency to fragment into senility away from lucidity when threatened by nature and time categorized as an ancient, monstrous-feminine force: the Archaic Mother as an immortal, undead, and very pissed-off spectre of Marx. In short, such tyranny is fleeting and far from absolute. Writing decays, meaning canon does, too.
While memory is so often a casualty when such decay happens, it also lies in service to one side or the other when things, to some extent, regenerate inside the necrobiome’s fractal recursion (which Axiom Verge‘s jousting, Borges-style epistolary [ruins and mirrors] superbly demonstrates—the memories backtrack across the map, while the player more or less goes in a single, unicursal path); i.e., matter cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred and reshaped; e.g., like a flower tank echoing Eliot’s “Waste Land” (1922):
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain (source).
(artist: Persephone van der Waard)
This yields unto us an awesome power—that of the gods as genderqueer and monstrous-feminine, holding heaven in a wild flower that can regrow in the face of Cartesian domination’s own false gods!
As nature’s current guardians, we can harness such curse-like gifts to banish Cartesian dickheads (and their raping of nature) from the Breach, making them an awful thing of the legendary past (to learn from, as the future waiting to happen yet again)! Hauntologized, rebellion becomes the ultimate genderqueer playground, one where our reclaimed labor (and Gothic stories’ mise-en-abyme) can truly set us free! It plays with the decay (the fertilizer of genocide) to enrich our reckoning and return: Don’t fear the reaper! Fuck them!
I suppose it is all a bit neurodivergent, gay and bellicose! I’d also say excuse the drenched messiness and vertiginous, tangential repetition of this particular symposium, but that’s how divorces (and history) generally go (with Axiom Verge a war between gods and their children sharing the data—indeed, consciousness itself—as written down, but also cloned inside a shared, fought-over chronotope goopy darkness).
The fact remains, we want to make rebellion joyous by acknowledging our place in its splendid lies/dead giveaways. Queer people exist in a perpetual state of change, thus decay and rebirth as hinted at in Metroidvania tied to Cartesian abuses. Sooner or later you can’t afford to be passive (or non-violent); the joy comes from finding our voice (one that is generally marginalized and discounted by STEM-field-types and other state proponents monopolizing Gothic poetics for themselves—gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss). Concerning liberation through revolutionary cryptonymy, there’s simply too many things to address[14] all of them, ourselves—but at least you’ll be spoilt for choice!
(artist: Bay)
As something to grow into out of contested stories, queer people built ourselves out of old dead parts to defend nature and progress towards “the greatest nation” (Communism), not abuse and rape it like Athetos does with Trace (who looks human, but is actually a Frankenstein’s monster made from genocided corpses). The game lies to the player to expose Athetos lying to Trace, to us, to workers! This rebellious lying continues through our labor and games, our playing with Gothic poetics to kill Nazis in-text in order to challenge fascism (thus moderates and profit) extratextually. In turn, love and genderqueer catharsis bloom on that battlefield, resisting capital while trapped inside its hellish marriage to the land it poisons and steals from (camouflage goes both ways, as does sex, force/violence, bodily expression, masks, mirrors, etc)! Axiom Verge‘s notably decayed language, memory and world (all one-in-the-same data as “cards to play”) transform because they are used under disproportionate stress (asymmetrical warfare), yet stay flexible in regards to said stress in ways that Capitalism historically is not.
To play Axiom Verge, then, is to both play inside a settler colony that is dying and a dying land that is trying to reclaim itself (with both memories stored inside-outside the same avatar experiencing them). Capitalism (and by extension, its paragons) are brittle, frail, and prone to flaking and fragmentation, but also paranoid hostility because of their weakness as something to feel; re, what Chris Baldrick writes in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales:
For the Gothic effect to be attained, a tale should combine a fearful sense of inheritance in a time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration (source).
As such, capital digs its own grave by making the land (and workers) unstable, who then emerge through the same player/play space to joyously overthrow Capitalism according to the very whirlwinds it cannot survive. All capital can try and do is wait Communism out until the world ends (as Athetos does in his sorry bubble), convincing itself it can somehow escape to other planets (e.g., Elon Musk in our world, and Weyland in Scott’s, etc).
Summarizing our symposium thesis argument through Axiom Verge, Happ showcases the popularity of the monomyth (re: Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces, 1949) and it’s “empowerment” (the knight rewarded with the damsel after slaying the dragon) as offset by the Promethean Quest’s “disempowerment” (the hero is cuckolded by the dragon, princess, Disney-style vice character, what-have-you); i.e., critiquing capital through the same spaces (and their abjection) in reverse: a fight to survive in spite of capital, camping the canonical medieval as it exists presently (e.g., Trace in a bikini, mothered by dragon fairy ladies).
Except, to merely call my developments “exciting” would betray the reality of discovering a fatal knowledge that is hard-won (as Promethean knowledge generally is): a) one’s home as displaced unto a territory that is discovered to be just that, but also one’s grave; and b) the home as built on genocide presenting itself as correct, righteous, all-knowing and so on (my father enjoyed universal acclaim simply for being my father). Faced with Athena’s Aegis, it’s not long before standard-issue military optimism exposes itself as the fool’s errand, tilting Quixotically at colossal, moribund windmills (dragons). Inside Trace, there’s a sense of Cartesian longing to dominate such things (taught to him by patriarchal forces in defense of Capitalism), but also submit to their power as weaker than a decayed greatness[15] starting to heal but still rotted (taught to him by matriarchal forces, in defense of Communism).
Even so, Elsenova’s dick is still bigger than his (giving an altogether different meaning to “size difference,” next page); she could crush Trace without a second thought! Indeed, she fucks back, the fabled Great Destroyer that every insecure patriarch fears: a spectre of Marx giving the fascist hypocrite a taste of their own medicine; i.e., by lying to his pupil, but also instructing him truthfully as a strict mommy dom, adopted parent/found family overcoming Cartesian family ties by camping them (“Whose mommy’s little destroyer? You are!”): a Satanic behemoth (what Mikhail Bulgakov would call “begemot,” the Satanic, hellcat servant [literally a giant talking cat] from his 1940 novel, The Master and Margarita).
Returned to working order as an act of waking up (the old gods return, “going woke” to challenge profit making workers broke[16]), Elsenova has evolved to brace herself against Athetos’ bullshit, literally taking up arms against him after emerging from her deathly chrysalid (from the corpse of empire). She does so, while Capitalism stays stuck in its inferior glass version (again, being too brittle to adapt and survive when Medusa topples it but also something of a sitting duck that becomes increasingly transparent during class war—a glass onion when workers rise up and break shit: they only have what power we give them). “Do you fear me?” she victoriously asks the hero, decked out in the clothes of gay class war while having the hero join her in a shared pedagogy of the oppressed; i.e., one resisting police violence (with Athetos’ hallway zombies serving as cops that attack Trace for his rebellious signature). This happens through ludo-Gothic BDSM teaching a vital lesson: life and death as part of the same rotting and growing equation, among the corpses and the shit (“They don’t sing about how they all shit themselves; they don’t put that part in the songs!”).
(source)
As “Bad Dreams” showed us with zombies, rebellion and apocalypse can be incredibly scary (a force of nature whose hurricane shakes shit up—more on this when we look at the Radiance). But they also represent the potential to be something great that, until this point, has been stunted by Cartesian forces. In Gothic BDSM language, the Rusalki offer a palliative-Numinous balm to capital’s deleterious effects, but also an ontological statement extending rebellion in and out of imagination: both who I want to be, and the found family I replaced my absentee parents with—someone strong and capable, but beautiful in ways that reflect their own bionic, genderqueer survival, liberation and cathartic enrichment. Before it, Trace the useful-idiot lab rat simpers dumbly as part of a death cult—one whose revolutionary cryptonymy robs him of his ability to rape Medusa, encouraging him to glaze (dick-ride) her, instead:
(artist: Wildragon)
Sort of. This happens without harming Trace. Only his foolish pride—tied to the nuclear family and its Hamlet-style tendency to decay while moving endlessly through the map—is wounded (which will recover in service to things better than weird canonical nerds); i.e., the Rusalki reborn embody a threat display (not unlike Princess Mononoke’s wolf mother from that film: a girl raised by wolves versus a boy raised by faeries) that signals the hero to bask in her campy glory (also like the Radiance). Doing so breaks canon to save nature from its usual monomythic destroyers and dogma: “the castle [as] the perfect dom,” person and place oscillating between both categories through the same-old Gothic mise-en-abyme, fairytales and ghost stories’ cryptomimesis (re: “po-tay-toh,” po-tah-toh”).
Axiom Verge is a story about a divorce the father loses, but where worlds still collide for the child. Except, the story of evil or questionable, Hamlet-grade parentage wasn’t new when Happ made Axiom Verge or even when Shelley wrote Frankenstein, nor are evil fathers dominating their children somehow restricted to “pure fiction”; i.e., playing god to one’s battered kids, passing oneself off as “God”; e.g., Shang Tsung’s “Low Tier God Is a DEADBEAT Dad to a BIOLOGICAL Daughter,” 2024); re: Victor and his ilk being low-tier, bargain-bin, absentee dads to their own kids (biological or not) and to nature as something to respect, not rape and harvest (what the kids call “divorced dad energy”). That being said, history is a document forever rewriting itself (re: Marx), dipping in and out of fiction and non-fiction, lucidity and oblivion, as game-like using maps (re: me).
As Axiom Verge and Frankenstein show, it can go either way. What matters is how you play with its lingering (and, at times, incredibly confusing) poetic instructions (which this book is very much a defense of—to develop Gothic Communism in ways more inclusive than Percy Shelley’s own 1821 “Defence of Poetry“); i.e., to move power and understanding in one direction (the state) or the other (workers and nature as monstrous-feminine) whilst inside the midden.
In short, the crux of the larger argument is intended play vs emergent, cowards following the leader by doing what they’re told, the bravely gay bending the rules to survive by outplaying the cop inside the trash heap. We empower workers by camping canon; re: making it not just gay but gay as fuck; e.g., gay space dragons[17] (above), observed by ordinary-looking queer people—as being in the closet or pushed towards it on the verge of things (as I was, once upon a time): a nerdy pirate roped into various, spacefaring adventures (Gothic matelotage) on the wild seas of outrageous fortune.
Grand poetics aside, it’s incredibly germane because our closeted nerd, son-of-Caesar is, through the resurrection machines, both born in the Caesarean style (“from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d”) and divorced from his father’s evil influence. Raised by the Amazonian wilderness, he becomes free to challenge the gods of capital to—however impertinently they might describe his actions—lay them on, allowing him to choose his own destiny as not set; i.e., as not monopolized by either side (rebellion is optional, as far as choices go, but so is submission). Instead, the Shelley-style ambiguity lingers as a matter of ongoing class and culture war during the Promethean Quest as an everyday event (Capitalism vs Communism)—one to navigate, interrogate and express the ambiguities thereof in abstract and in small: the fabulously gay camping of monomythic language and motion (castle-narrative) through the draconian opera; the infernal, inverted monomyth; the danger-disco Gothic castle, theatrics and cryptonymy (masks, mirrors, poetry and puppets, etc)! All become spells, but also dialogs to uphold or resist bourgeois arguments, hence illusions.
To that, if the princess is the Call to Adventure in monomythic stories (videogames or otherwise), then Elsenora is Trace’s princess playing parent to discourage the nuclear family model (re: campy themes of incest [so-called “Lolita syndrome” with irony, unlike Beauvoir raping her students] never being far off in Gothic spaces, any more than insanity or cannibalism are; re: Walpole’s Mysterious Mother and its double incest plot); but she’s not the only one: under the thirsty hero’s blood-red lab coat (vampire pirate “rizz”) is an equally sanguine bikini (crossdressing, in Western culture, dating back to Shakespeare, at least).
(artist: Wildragon)
To survive, then, is to preserve amid the chaos of capital destroying us, with queer forces—from Walpole to Happ—hijacking the language of war and sex through weird metaphors/medieval hybridity that speaks naturally to queer audiences rebelling against capital’s de facto, symbolic parentage; i.e., even if the authors of these stories weren’t actually gay! “Actually” is just an argument to deny us a voice through the same liminal mode of expression; what matters is function and flow using the same aesthetics—the same heroes and stories—interpreted by us (and our dance partners) through any manner of campy medieval rape play we want, parody or pastiche, to produce cathartic irony (which is what the Promethean Quest ultimately is: camping the monomyth-as-medieval in present times).
To that, Axiom Verge is actually pretty limited as a Metroidvania; i.e., the gameplay being linear in order to critique capital (say nothing of the clunky controls), versus non-linear to move money through nature, as Samus does (who controls excellently like the Big Bad Wolf: “Better to eat [nature] with!”). But as something to aesthetically interpret, its GNC potential for catharsis is virtually endless, making Happ’s odyssey one of my all-time favorite Gothic genderqueer stories (also, props to Wildragon for the amazing fanart); i.e., the ability to converse with gods in order to move mountains, thus liberate ourselves from capital’s Cartesian edicts: throwing us in chains and eating us, undressing us, making us seek out a big-sister or mommy-style Amazon to nurture us, but also embody our dark matriarchal revenge.
In other words, Axiom Verge is a story about the value of such monstrous mothers—not as TERFs uphold the status quo (re: Ripley and Samus) by triangulating against Communism in abject forms—but as protectors of the weak and vulnerable as prone to be robbed from by Cartesian dogma teaching them to both surrender their power to capital (re: “candy from a baby”) and punch down against labor as monstrous-feminine. To that, the Gothic is predicated on decay and deception through open secrets, laid bare like a sexy mommy to teach you naughty-naughty knowledge (the raw nudity or the unequal power arrangements of rape play—the charged surfaces, thresholds, etc): Eve challenging God, teaching other workers (male, female, or intersex) to do the same!
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
Such things might seem too bold and overly exposed. In truth, we rebels are often quite shy in person; on the canvas, though, we can be bold, protected by barriers through our cryptonymy! To expose such things without fear of actual harm (castration, as Freud would insist), alienation and eternal punishment (re: the gods’ fate for Prometheus)? That’s the best revenge of all: more happy relationships working through our mommy and daddy issues to leave better patterns/fractals, less Cartesian knobs like Athetos (re: “Pattern-Mind”) aping Victor Frankenstein and Hamlet’s dad (and their likenesses) to try and pass both themselves—and their mapped, automatic predation of nature—along.
Shelley dreamt of such catharsis, swinging for the fences by stamping seemingly inexpressible things (a tramp stamp) in ready accessible language (a parental drama with monsters[18] who look and act human); so can we, in and out of transformation and lucidity as part of a shared dream: annihilation and reformation—rebirth.
Per the infernal concentric pattern (up next)—and really just queer existence under heteronormative control, in general—the above things as they manifest in Axiom Verge and other Metroidvania go beyond simple closure, catharsis and resolution for monstrous-feminine entities. Thwarted by an overhanging tension, strain, and confusion—i.e., the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, flung from those you think are all powerful, but aren’t (even when you want them to be)—such things are made and expressed in grand Shakespearean emotions: the hope of a better world, one free of Cartesian trauma for all gay bitches, developed inside allusory dollish copies of itself, of itself, of itself as overwritten (and decaying as it does, like a VCR tape, coming out of it like Sadako Yamamura to achieve tangible socio-material effects).
We’ll continue exploring the Cartesian function of playing god during the “Forbidden Sight” section, in the Demon Module. For now, we’ve merely laid out the gendered actors and their parental, Promethean actions (creation that destroys monomythic structures). For the rest of the symposium, we shall more deeply examine the castled stages all of this unfurls on; i.e., the maze, the labyrinth, as a ruin of Civilization full of itself, but also a particular arrangement of unequal power-as-parental and Promethean, a continuation of the same colossal struggle: the chronotope as home to giants, Amazons, fallen warring gods (those of capital and Communism), and all manner of Gothic “tortures” (the state in crisis, for which anything goes).
To that, before we can synthesize castle-narrative and Communism’s triumphantly matriarchal homecoming—one that concludes a current chase of the palliative Numinous as monstrous-feminine during ludo-Gothic BDSM—we shall explore the Promethean role inside the colossal wreck, insofar as heroic progression (re: weapons and power) is concerned: Hallownest and the Promethean hero’s journey into their own tomb, in Hollow Knight!
Onto the opening and part one for “‘Look upon my Works, ye Mighty’; or, the Infernal Concentric Pattern and Rape Play in Hollow Knight“!
Footnotes
[1] John Clubbe writes, in “Beethoven, Bryon and Bonaparte”:
On May 18, 1804, the French council of State declared Napoleon Emperor of the French. Upon hearing the news, an angry Beethoven crossed off the Eroica‘s first inscription to Bonaparte. (11) “So he too is nothing more than an ordinary man,” he cried out. […] At the top of the first page of the completed work Beethoven wrote the name of the First Consul, “Sinfonia Grande / Intitulata Bonaparte.” Beethoven later crossed out these words. Near the middle of the page, he wrote his own name, Louis van Beethoven. Below it, he wrote in pencil “Geschrieben / auf Bonaparte,” “written for Bonaparte.” These words he never erased. […] It is “Bonaparte” here, not “Napoleon,” because for Beethoven, as for Byron, there was a difference. “Bonaparte” meant for Byron and Beethoven the young conqueror of Italy, the dazzling leader who scuttled monarchies and symbolized liberal hopes for a new order (source).
[2] Advanced technology being indistinguishable magic, Clarke’s Law brings Shelley’s myths and magic back around; i.e., of the 21st century thrust into a fantasy space once more.
[3] Deryck V. Cooke writes,
That Wagner harboured anti-Semitic sentiments is both well-known and uncontested within the realm of musicological inquiry. The composer openly articulated his views in a number of publications, most notably Judaism in Music (Das Judentum in der Musik; 1850), in which he identified Jewish musicians as the ultimate source of what he perceived as substanceless music and misplaced values in the arts as a whole. What has remained a controversy, however, is the extent to which Wagner’s anti-Semitism informed his musical compositions.
On the one hand, many have contended that Wagner’s anti-Semitism was no more significant to his musical creation than was any other peculiarity of his personality. Indeed, the composer regularly found a scapegoat—such as the Jewish population—to account for his personal and musical misfortunes. Moreover, because Wagner lived during an era of widespread resentment toward Jews in Europe, it is not unusual that his dramatic works would contain anti-Semitic nuances (source: Britannica).
To what exact degree Wagner’s anti-Semitism affected his music is a matter of debate, but the fascist elements he presented (using pre-fascist, mythological language) have a class character to them similar to Milton or Ridley Scott, albeit in a conservative direction; re: the false rebel, versus Scott’s David having a Communist element to his radical counterterrorism.
[4] Something of a Valkyrie himself, camping the invincible heroine; re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Choosing the Slain, or Victimizing the Invincible Heroine, in Alien: Covenant” (2017).
[5] Granted, the ideas generally are combined for monstrous-feminine; i.e., love is a matter of survival through love and war as combined to various poetic degrees; re: the language of sex and war, dalliances, food, knowledge, and whatever else synonymize during a given exchange between two castled essays into the same contested territories.
[6] A mimetic effect seen with all tyrants, grooming their own kids by making their sons (or their obedient labor force at large) in the father’s statuesque image (re: Pygmalion); e.g., Dracula and Alucard, to which Victor failed in Frankenstein, trying euthanize his child afterwards. In Trace’s case, he looks exactly like his dad, to which the other man tries to salvage him through reason (replacing Robert Walton with the Creature as being one in the same, for Happ).
[7] With the above illustration by Wildragon showing Trace prostrate before Ophelia, the name of Hamlet’s sister, who drowned (a fate shared by Shakespeare’s imaginary sister, “Judith*,” in A Room of One’s Own, 1929). In Jungian terms, allusions to water and darkness coincide with dreams that speak to patriarchal abuse through a pedagogy of the oppressed; e.g., Sadako Yamamura climbing out of a well to seek revenge against her death (and that of other monstrous-feminine) by men having killed and taken their essence—their life force—to begin with.
*As Woolf writes, “Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross-roads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here to-night, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed” (source).
[8] The story has multiple interwoven timelines, interacting with one another not unlike Borges’ “Garden of the Forking Paths” or Cameron’s Terminator films: across space-time in decay as a matter of Gothic drama.
[9] Their conversation occurs shortly before he goes to meet his maker—with Scott’s Engineers being as vain, fascist and genocidal as Weyland is; i.e., zombie tyrants, themselves, being further along than he is. When Weyland dies asking them for help—when he’s forced to confront what he hopes to aspire to as being as cruel and heartless as himself—he realizes that’s all his life was: “There’s nothing…” It’s basically Scrooge seeing his fellow bankers piss and moan at his own funeral.
Keeping with Dickens, the irony’s so thick you could cut it with a knife. It’s quite brilliant, if you ask me, because it highlights the futility of such cruelty—that it, Capitalism, was all for naught. For precisely that reason, stories like Prometheus don’t sell nearly as well to American audiences as Cameron’s neoliberal Red Scare nonsense does (see: Persephone van der Waard’s “Outlier Love: Enjoying Prometheus/Covenant in the Shadow of Aliens,” 2019)!
[10] This decay reflects in the game’s visual style, which is suitably glitchy by way of remembering those old NES cartridges being prone to “glitch out” to begin with (similar to Forbidden Planet being in 4:3 aspect ratio and Frankenstein published on paper); in revisiting that, it becomes a kind of fatal nostalgia that speaks to Capitalism in decay through an indie-developed gameworld revisiting the Metroidvania of the past. Rather than break down, queerness emerges from decay to thrive in a very liminal way (a state of becoming something new that Capitalism fears from of old stories). The Gothic—and by extension queerness as Gothic (from Walpole and Lewis onwards)—is written in disintegration as a means of fresh building blocks assembling away from tyranny (afraid of its own death).
[11] The domain of women/monstrous-feminine is generally of compelled prostitution, shoved unceremoniously into the gutter by patriarchal forces pimping nature; i.e., the world’s oldest job—one that is both incumbent on rape, and baked into Cartesian thought as a pro-Capitalist creation myth the modern Promethean Quest camps by design. Simply put, it’s a lived reality that defines us as much by the things we reclaim (sex, labor and force, etc), mid-struggle.
[12] No different than the rise of terrorist literature making the Victorians afraid (re: Crawford).
[13] With technology (writing and written accounts, especially maps) leading to forgetting (re: Plato) as a matter of Lear-style genocide to reassemble (re: Morrison); i.e., as a matter of playing with old dead things in Promethean forms (re: me) as Shelley once did: through journals, the likes of which Axiom Verge presents to the player as written by multiple monarchal parents lying to him (see, also: Myst and its blue and red pages) in order to achieve sex-positive or sex-coercive end goals: deny or gain entry unto power through deception and force (the pussy and the penis divorced from biological essentialism [and gender from sex, per Judith Butler] but paradoxically “fencing” during the usual battle of the sexes being one over gender and labor tied to people’s bodies).
[14] I.e., to acknowledge and localize them, like a haunted house pointing to its own abuse; re: the restless labyrinth’s cryptonymy further complicated by the duality of Gothic poetics, during oppositional praxis.
[15] Such dark, BDSM cybernetics suggests a fascist element of greatness to these biomechanical Amazons, not unlike Lovecraft’s aliens from Mountains or the Chozo from Metroid (e.g., Raven Beak, from Metroid: Dread, as basically Caesar Chozo).
[16] Profit isn’t just rape, but labor and wage theft that endorses rape as an abject commodity and comorbidity (criminogenic effect) under capital’s monopolies, trifectas and qualities.
[17] Spoke Prince Lear of the unicorn, “Unicorn, sorceress, mermaid—no name you give her could surprise or frighten me. I love whom I love.”
[18] Contrary to what you might have been led to believe by capitalists, the villain of the story is not the Creature; it is the maker of the Creature and the system for which all belong. Like Athetos and Trace, Victor tries to internalize this mentality into his childlike slave (though, in Trace’s case, to get him to help the evil father seek revenge, versus Victor trying to kill the Creature); the slave refuses to obey the evil nerd, listening to a maternal presence that admittedly was rather absent in Shelley’s original novel. Given a mother to listen to who isn’t tokenized/completely passive, Trace has the chance to grow up and not repeat the mistakes that Athetos, the capitalist, did before him: the sins of the father linked to a genocidal system (of material conditions)/system of thought.