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"Mazes and Labyrinths" Q&A, Interview Compendium!

This is the compendium of all of the interviews in "Mazes and Labyrinths," my Q&A series with speedrunners and Twitch streamers. I ask them about disempowerment inside Metroidvania and survival horror games, specifically how mazes and labyrinths, along and their historically "heavy" contents, are used to disempower players. 

This compendium contains all of the interviews for the series, as well as relevant links to my work on Metroidvania, FPS, and other videogames. For more information on my exact research goals for the series, and on Metroidvania and survivor horror and what they are as genres, please refer to the series abstract.

Note: When new interviews go live, this compendium will also be updated.

The Interviews

CScottyW: A speedrunner with world records in Metroid 1, Fusion and Zero Mission. Read our interview here.


Behemoth87: A speedrunner with world records in Metroid II, and previous records in Super Metroid. Read our interview here.

ShinyZeni: A speedrunner with previous records in Super Metroid. Read our interview here.

SBDWolf: A speedrunner with world records in Castlevania 1, Donkey Kong Country 2, and Cuphead. [interview coming soon]


Posts on Metroidvania

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

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

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

(source: Materia Collective)

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

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

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


***

About me: My name is Nick van der Waard and I'm a Gothic ludologist. I primarily write reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews. Because my main body of work is relatively vast, I've compiled it into a single compendium where I not only list my favorite works, I also summarize them. Check it out, here!

I'm an artist and a writer. If you're interested my work and are curious about illustrated or written commissions, please refer to my website for more information. If you want to contact me about a guest article, please use this contact form or reach out to me on Discord (vanderWaardart#5394)!

If you want to make donations, you can directly support my artwork on Patreon and my writing on Ko-Fi!

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