X Marks the Spot: a Thematic Prelude (and Stable of Monsters to Slay) in Metaquarium's X-Fusion (Summer, 2025)
Concerning the imminent release for Metaquarius aka Metaquarium's X-Fusion Metroidvania fan game, I—a faithful and productive scholar of the Metroidvania subgenre (re: my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus)—want to explore and unpack (to synthesize or fuse) its Gothic themes and monsters with various academic theories most players (of Metroid Fusion or otherwise) probably aren't aware of; i.e., their canonical Amazonian role as upholding Capitalist Realism through neoliberal (videogame) false power fantasies dressed up as "peace through strength," "defense," and "adventure" ("development," "personal growth," "freedom," etc), and whose phenomenologically messy Amazonomachia (monster battle) furthers Kristeva's abjection process: by using monstrous-feminine language, mainly the cryptonymy of Amazons and Gorgons/the Medusa (cops and robbers, pimps and prostitutes). To it, Samus—while deadly and graceful (as female characters classically are)—remains haunted by the abjection process; i.e., the virginal Amazon/goodly Athena foreshadowed by a black, furious, "whore" double on the same surface, mid-genocide. In the Radcliffean sense, it's cops and robbers—both unfolding on a single mirror-like surface whose cryptonymy only reverses in and upon itself (a mirror for the audience to respond to; e.g., a pixelated TV screen as used by Metaquarius to advertise their game).
(source)
To it, while I plan on reviewing X-Fusion when it releases (my money's on early August), here, I'm merely analyzing the debut trailer on YouTube—with people like Oatsngoats having already commented publicly on said trailer in their own react videos. Everyone loves a girl boss (to gaslight, gatekeep). Similar to Aliens, Metroid pits the white queen against the black, blurring the lines between the two; Metaquarius blurs the line between two different games concerning this larger process—a franchise of gorgons and Amazons. Samus isn't a goddess beyond reproach, so kill your darlings! Embrace the Medusa who haunts her, which includes smaller echoes of the Big Evil; i.e., a kind of "space witch" expressed in black-and-red on the TV, above (a bit like Sadako Yamamura, a virus of a witch passed through copies of copies of media; i.e., Castricano's cryptomimesis*).
*From Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida's Ghost Writing (2001).
Note, 7/22/2025: First, this piece is currently a WIP. It's basically "written," but I still have to proofread and polish it, and turn the asterisks into footnotes. Second, this piece combines ideas I've explored extensively in my work already on Metroidvania, ludo-Gothic BDSM and Amazons (each with their own compendium; see: hyperlinks); anything I can't explore here has already been explored elsewhere, my writing here more about combination than extrapolation on singular points (with its focus being primarily on cryptonymy and abjection). Third, I'm by no means asking people to boycott Metaquarium's work—just that people think consciously versus blindly (thus knee-jerk) about what said work represents on a structural level. Per Anita Sarkeesian, you can enjoy something while still critiquing its pernicious aspects; same with Metaquarium, and by extension, all Metroidvania. —Perse
For the Visually Impaired: I will also be reading the SFW version aloud on my YouTube channel.
Disclaimer: All opinions are my own; i.e., as part of my research, conducted alongside my book series, Gothic Communism (2023). The material within is written/speaks about public figures and popular media for purposes of education, satire, transformation and critique, hence falls under Fair Use regarding copyright and free speech regarding defamation.
CW: tokenism, rape*, fascism, genocide, invasion fears, tokophobia, and all manner of Gothic shit; also features censored nudity (with my friend/muse, Hallie Cross)
*As I define it, "'...rape' mean[s] (for our purposes) to 'disempower someone or somewhere—a person, culture, or place—in order to harm them,' generally through fetishizing and alienizing acts or circumstances/socio-material conditions that target the mind, body and/or spirit" (source: "Psychosexual Martyrdom"). Ludo-Gothic BDSM is essentially rape play putting "rape" in quotes during calculated risk (refer to "Concerning Rape Play" for an expanded definition of these terms).
Table of Contents
- Abstract and Old Food for Thought (re: "She Fucks Back")
- Why Bother? Addressing the Haters
- Our Gothic Keywords
- On the Importance of Creed (Concerning Abjection)/Focusing on Female Amazons (and Several Other Points of Business)
- Opening: Cops and Robbers, Amazons and Gorgons (the Basis of Abjection)
- Cryptonymy and Applying It to X-Fusion
- Amazons as Vampires, Demon Hunters, What-Have-You
- Thematic Content, or Essay Body: Amazons Are Abject
- More on Amazons and Gorgons, Including the Cryptonymy Process Reversing Abjection
- Subjugated versus Subversive Amazons
- Amazon Bodies (as Armor and Weapons)
- Amazon Roles (the Quest)
- Abjection as Space
- Amazon Confusion (and Camping Its Troubles for Ourselves)
- "Domination" through Confusion (re: Ludo-Gothic BDSM)
- Haunting the Surface: Liberation while Trapped "on the Aegis"
- Monsters: Fodder for the State
- Conclusion: Fuck Around, Find Out
- More on Amazons and Gorgons, Including the Cryptonymy Process Reversing Abjection
- Subjugated versus Subversive Amazons
- Amazon Bodies (as Armor and Weapons)
- Amazon Roles (the Quest)
- Abjection as Space
- Amazon Confusion (and Camping Its Troubles for Ourselves)
- "Domination" through Confusion (re: Ludo-Gothic BDSM)
- Haunting the Surface: Liberation while Trapped "on the Aegis"
Abstract and Old Food for Thought (re: "She Fucks Back")
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 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!
Why Bother? Addressing the Haters
Televangelis: As someone who did a PhD's worth of research into a subject that I had no former training in (using my background into intel analysis), wrote a book on it that turned out to be an award winning bestseller, and is now doing a compilation PhD via peer reviewed journal articles on the topic to backfill credentials after the fact... don't fucking call it a PhD if a university isn't actually issuing you a PhD. Rigorous peer review processes exist for a reason, and claiming your work as a PhD implies a level of expert review of your work that you haven't actually had. Call it your magnum opus research project if you want to, but the same reason you want to call it a PhD -- latching onto that prestige -- is the reason why you shouldn't if you're going to be an honest person.
Me: I've been open and clear about why I call my work "independent PhD" (regardless if you like the reasons I give); i.e., the work is based on years of research (not an award-winning bestseller), and has resulted in multiple book volumes, one of which is my thesis volume, aka my independent PhD. It's just a way to advertise the amount and quality of work I've done over the years, and give people a idea of what to expect. I'm familiar with the peer review process; I'm also familiar with how the Humanities are under attack by the very institutions hosting them—in effect being shuttered across entire departments by the same greedy universities you're celebrating. The whole point (of my work, as an an-Com) is to do research and share it with people in an accessible way. Quit projecting and find something better to do. :)
Televangelis: "Based on years of research" is true of everyone and their mother. My book, all told, was about 8 years. That doesn't make it a PhD. / "My work, as an an-com" is a hilarious qualifier. A fake PhD for a fake ideology because you won't admit the truth to yourself on any front (you did a cool research project but it's not a PhD, and in practice you're a normie liberal politically but you badly want to think of yourself as a radical).
Our Gothic Keywords
- abjection: us versus them (from Kristeva), or a state of normality created by compelled alienation
- hauntology: retro-future, meaning trapped between the past and the present to haunt existence between language (from Derrida's Spectres of Marx: "haunt" + "ontology"); also refers to canceled futures (from Mark Fisher's cyberpunk, but also acid Communism; re: me vis-à-vis Stuart Mills in "Magic, Drugs and Acid Communism")
- cryptonymy: a double operation (from Hogle, vis-à-vis Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok), one hiding and showing unspeakable things in opaque language (a giant black castle, for example); i.e., "X" marks the spot but also sex marks the spot (often of a warrior sort; e.g., knights, Amazons, and similar ancient-to-exotic mercenaries with a legendary character)
- chronotopes: a time-space (from Bakhtin), the Gothic chronotope being a castle
(exhibit 34a1b1: To give an example that covers all of cryptonymy's relative points [not the Four Gs]: cryptonymy* is settler colonialism shown and hidden by Guile and Blanka as Global North and Global South; cryptomimesis is this tending to repeat and reverse through mimesis between the characters' numerous reincarnations; the narrative of the crypt* is the entire trail and its semantic wreckage; the internal concentric pattern is the stage containing heroism as trapped endlessly in Hell; the Cycle of Kings is every man for himself—meaning in that kayfabe tournament's establishing of heels and babyfaces; and the Shadow of Pygmalion is the heteronormative image of these heroes. Per Juul and us, this is where the game takes place, my ludo-Gothic BDSM entertaining the idea of videogames and BDSM going together readily and easily. If anyone says otherwise, they're a cunt.)
*Both from Hogle's "Cryptonymy in the Gothic Novel" (1980).
On the Importance of Creed (Concerning Abjection)/Focusing on Female Amazons (and Several Other Points of Business)
As an academic concept, abjection was written about, from a cinematic perspective, in 1993 by Barbara Creed (cited, below—we'll get to cryptonymy when we look at Hogle). Creed's work is important, my own research building on its dated-yet-vital scholarship in ludo-Gothic ways; re: ludo-Gothic BDSM as developed by me; i.e., from my master's thesis to "War Vaginas" to my PhD and subsequent book series (e.g., "Modularity and Class"). This analysis continues that trend; i.e., as something that goes beyond my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus (which doesn't really contain essays) and expands on previous Metroidvania work. Partly an exercise brushing up on old go-tos, this piece refers heavily to my past work on Amazons and Metroidvania—both of which are extensive but also, at times, thoroughly NSFW. Apart from the links, above, refer to my aforementioned corpus for more information regarding those topics; i.e., in a more compact and SFW format.
This post is as SFW as it possibly can be, censoring the Amazonian nudity to a Blogger-friendly degree, but still discussing academic erotic-centered topics, non-stop: boobs, and the smart bitches who have them and kick ass. Beauty and the Beast, the brains and the brawn—characters like Samus test the luxuries that (white straight) men take for granted, the latter not being threatened automatically with rape when suddenly "in danger" (quite the opposite, women are often stronger than men, insofar as they endure forces capital shields men from; i.e., while wearing Amazon "skin suits," in outer space and elsewhere). And while camping those double standards obviously includes in ways that express gender trouble and GNC parody (e.g., trans people or crossdressers), here we'll mostly focus on female Amazons; i.e., because Samus is, like the classic Amazon, classically female. In the Cartesian sense, Amazons are white Indians tied to lands of fear—both a territory of conquest (the warrior expressed in cartographic language), and the territory turned in on itself for the Destroyer to fuck the land for the state (the residence expressed in morphological language, a castle in the flesh "armed for bear"). Cryptonymy-wise, she's the X marking the spot and being the spot to mark (for death, punishment, "repopulation," etc), seemingly no more real than Gwynevere, Princess of Sunlight (a sexual illusion) but, in truth, a heroic avatar the player controls to tell a highly specific story: a Gothic Romance (with horror and terror sprinkled throughout). Samus is owned, kept by the elite but given a long leash while they capitalize on her broken childhood.
We'll get to that, but first a couple other opening points, before diving in.
One, the nature of this essay is conversational and broad, dipping its toe-like survey into various academic circles but also popular media for fun and for activism (the two are not mutually exclusive); i.e., while revisiting* "old" spaces that have aged, "time" in Gothic a circular enterprise, and one for which holistic study is tremendously useful; re (from Volume Zero):
Returning and reflecting upon old points after assembling them is a powerful way to understand larger structures and patterns (especially if they're designed to conceal themselves through subterfuge, valor and force). It's what holistic study (the foundation of this book) is all about (source: "Making Monsters").
Capital is comorbid, which we combat through these stories and under their same umbrellas: "hooking up" in the usual neo-medieval (at times, Freudian) ways. Metroidvania and Amazons—like the Gothic, more broadly—are liminal, holistic and anisotropic, existing in the grey "fuzzy" area of stories and language; i.e., in ways that allow for (and encourage) duality (thus paradox), mid-cryptonymy.
*Revisiting stories allows you to not just tell them differently but built on them; e.g., Zelda II: the Adventure of Link versus its recent remake for the PC (PROLEFEED 101's "Zelda II - Enhanced Remake (PC) - Review").
Amazons, then, are between Heaven and Hell that, when Hell comes to Earth, canonically make themselves useful (re: abjection); i.e., in ways we can reverse while making ourselves useful: to Communism, developing it by breaking state monopolies, "on the Aegis." ACAB and ASAB, but Samus is a cop working for the state. What's a girl to do? Nazis and Commies share the same stage-like bodies, using cryptonymy (and oscillation) as required. Amazons—rebellious and headstrong loners denied love (despite the toxic love triangles; e.g., Samus, Adam and the X parasite), bildungsroman—dive headlong into Hell like all Gothic heroines do, albeit as pubescent, virginal-if-sexy tomboys accustomed to gender trouble (and delight): warrior cheerleaders posing and saying "ready!" mid-role-call, then kicking ass to operatically stylish music (and looking good while doing it). These "danger discos" outline not just a rite of passage, but of continuation (time is a circle, each cycle similar but unique): a reconciliation with long-lost mothers of a "mysterious," Walpolean sort (the Medusa a de facto parent to all Amazons, the whore criminal to their virgin/whore cop's semi-Sapphic bloodline).
Furthermore, much of what we discuss here has been discussed far more at length, elsewhere by others and myself (follow the citations). My focus here is poetry—meaning Amazons are warrior poets and sex workers, wherein Gothic Communism thoroughly concerns itself with the vaso vagal, memento mori poetry of monsters; i.e., which it uses to wage class (culture and race) war of a Gothic character that liberates sex workers in Amazonian ways. This character is hazardous akin to Amazons; i.e., they are my protectors, but also my abusers, and I write about their fearsome strength (and strong sexy bodies*) like the Devil's at my back (akin to Robert E. Howard flanked by Conan, sharpening his axe): terrifying as they hack or blast their enemies apart, but also heart-stopping for their androgynous, monstrous-feminine beauty in action. Beholding them repeatedly as I do, I start to realize—now more than ever—that no one's perfectly healthy and we all gotta die of something. Might as well be a beautiful death, you feel me? So "once more unto the breach, dear friends," storming her castle or the other way around! "You wanna live forever?" said Valeria; said I (regarding Metroidvania), "Who wants to play a game without danger?" Invasion (of the body snatchers, or otherwise) is thrilling but also empowering if only for the opportunities it provides to interrogate trauma; i.e., illness reframed as a superpower because it isn't normal—not a disease, but something that distinguishes the oppressed as extraordinary (e.g., pwNPD having cognitive empathy versus affective empathy to bond with other similarly disordered, disabled individuals**; re: "Slurs Aren't Activism").
*To quote James Earl Jones, "What is steel compared to the hand that wields it?" What is a body like steel, Thulsa Doom (whose riddle of steel ultimately cost him his life)?
**With decapitation speaking to both those things, seeking a new body or vessel to fill with the spirit of death, intertwining life and death (re: Samus with the metroid DNA, but also the X-parasite virally aping the host organism versus melding with it: "Typically, the subject being copied is terminated.").
Again, this comes from trauma-as-heirloom; i.e., part of me, Persephone, still burns in Hell alongside my former captor/rapist. Survivors of abuse never fully escape it; they learn to live with the trauma (and its phenomenological confusions). My paradoxical rescuing by placing me in danger remains less about inventing dangers, mid-boredom, and more reacting to otherwise unacknowledged dangers during cryptonymy's proletarian "radical" desire: preventing rape (with victims often creating their abuse alongside their desires, testifying to either by fabricating them; re: "Healing from Rape"). So does power corrupt, corruption the kind of data Metroid speaks to during its own invasion's damsel/demon stories: Amazons "sick" with fascism, but also unknown pleasures (spectres of Communism/the Medusa) demanding exploration under disorder and duress, a joy division stuck in a black hole. We're not in the business of ranking rape, but tokens certainly are—Medusa their Omelas child while they act more oppressed than they actually are (warrior princesses, remember).
In keeping with Metroidvania's alternate Japanese label, "search/action," Amazons quest for Numinous power while being brave and strong enough—to pursue it into Hell, but also having trauma there endemic to the female/queer/non-white experience in less hellish territories: a sense of empathy with the infernal divine that white straight men generally lack; i.e., a sympathy for the devil because Amazons are, and have been, demonized for thousands of years. Aside from the Gorgon, they're one of the oldest monsters of "the West," but also one of the oldest heroes—speaking to Gothic's fatal, retro-future, "space knight/dragon" attraction with liminal beings neither here nor there: those looking death in the eye to learn that, while alien and insectoid, it has a human face (skeletons in the nuclear closet). In turn, home becomes "exit only" but the exit is a lie (as is the treasure "buried" inside). Home is sick, false, and alien, obsessed with conquering old lands anew.
Moral geography and moral bodies, wherein Amazons—like femboys (above)—sit somewhere in the dangerous middle of the pattern (the Gorgon reminding the seemingly invulnerable how they too must die, the would-be "Achilles" walking into an eclipse to brave outer evils found disturbingly at home: the traveling castle something of a ghost ship); i.e., war and sex are vices, making the Amazon—an alien seeker of assimilation—a vice and virtue character at the same time (though their double, the Gorgon, has a far more pronounced "alien" nature that's harder to assimilate; e.g., Professor X versus Magneto, Wonder Woman versus Baroness Paula von Gunther, the Belmonts versus Dracula, etc). While there's no singular interpretation (though dogma does prescribe singularity to dualistic things), Amazons are comfort food whose bread-and-circus easily becomes slop under Capitalist Realism:
Also, while I haven't played the game yet, I'm gonna go out on a limb by saying Samus is still a token cop fetishized for her "wheyfu" qualities (above); I've written my analysis accordingly, viewing her as judge, jury and executioner (state force) as hidden cryptonymically behind sex being the prime euthanizer/cause for suffering of state victims—i.e., presented as "colossal bugbears" (and for which I'll eat crow if Metaquarius proves me wrong. At first I saw AI art in their promo and felt ill [above]. But their own video description reads "AI slop is reproducing by asexual division and threatens the galaxy!" So they're not completely aloof to such things). —Perse
Opening: Cops and Robbers, Amazons and Gorgons (the Basis of Abjection)
Metroid is cops and robbers told through the process of abjection having a sacred-but-haunted police function; re: Amazons and Gorgons being cops-and-robbers terror weapons (Galatea shaped by Pygmalion) but also pimps and whores in practice (ergo cowboys and Indians, virgin/whore, police and pirates, us versus them, etc); i.e., the core function is one of capital versus workers and nature, the aesthetic of the alien dialectical-material.
In classic myth, the Aegis was given to Perseus by Athena to slay the Gorgon, but the Gorgon was "cursed" (with anti-predation qualities) by the same goddess; i.e., essentially weaponized public nudism (which, unto itself, has an "ace" component interrogating trauma); re, Creed:
When Perseus slew the Medusa he did not – as commonly thought – put an end to her reign or destroy her terrifying powers. Afterwards, Athena embossed her shield with the Medusa’s head. The writhing snakes, with their fanged gaping mouths, and the Medusa’s own enormous teeth and lolling tongue were on full view. Athena’s aim was simply to strike terror into the hearts of men as well as reminding them of their symbolic debt to the imaginary castrating mother. And no doubt she knew what she was doing. After all, Athena was the great Mother-Goddess of the ancient world and according to ancient legend – the daughter of Metis, the goddess of wisdom, also known as the Medusa (source: The Monstrous-Feminine, 1993).
Or, as I write:
From a dialectical-material standpoint, the oldest profession bears the brunt of the oldest exploitation; i.e., surviving into the present, Medusa was a rape victim (re: Hadley) and whores are garbage that work with garbage to humanize themselves (re: "Hot Allostatic Load," 2015). The problem isn't that we're monsters but that monsters are dehumanized by capital (re: "Nature Is Food," 2024) [which workers reclaim through themselves and their own labor] (source: "Joy Under Fascism").
To it, Amazons are as trashy as anything else, garbage for the state to dispose of in orderly fashion (videogames once being considered low-brow garbage "for the masses," despite "home entertainment systems" always having a middle-class price tag [and white, straight male bias] barring entry to poorer and non-status-quo players). Abjection is cops and robbers, performed in and out of media to speak to commonplace divisions, under capital as capital demands of profit as a process; i.e., hauntologized through Amazons and gorgons—with Samus' fragile sense of self (tied to the state) incumbent on her catching the bad girl, but said Venus twin being rooted in her own routine exploitation by state forces demanding sacrifice (re: boss keys working like vampirism—more on this in a minute). They simply have too much in common for her to cleanly dismiss and destroy. Her Aegis feels occupied by past dead girls (whose cryptic message is both furious, fearsome and repugnant; i.e., like Japanese spirits commonly are, below).
Said past is comic book as much as storybook; e.g., Samus' Venus twin/dark double (or "other half/dark side") being Mother Brain as the Medusa; i.e., who, when confronted, invites trouble/makes for troubling comparison, mid-Amazonomachia (read: catfight) "on the Aegis." Granted Amazons also double "good" (dutiful, submissive) Athenian women, with the greatest prize (for those with virgin/whore syndrome) being a caged, captured and then dutifully domesticated Amazon (for her exotic but also freakshow strongwoman's character—as a sideshow and main attraction, and novel-yet-lethal, fetishized warlike abilities). Yet, her archenemy is undoubtedly herself gaslighted by the state, the Amazon's kayfabe reflecting that, onstage and off. Abysses aside, "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is another popular Nietzsche quote that Amazons (and their inner rivalry among themselves and actual gorgons) like to fuck with; i.e., sometimes, in the case of either quote, Gothic Communism composes its stories of people treated like monsters. Might as well use it for good, right?
At the very least, Samus—a token cop indebted to/ employed by corporate colonial forces treating her like "waifu" bait—feels cursed in a very fascist way per witch hunt; i.e., she might be the very witch she's tasked with destroying (a classic gaslight the state abuses for profit). So does capital tokenize the abjection process, bringing the classical Athenian propaganda terribly to life in present-day media—a guilt trip tied to her cross to bear, with the crucifix being a Pagan symbol of torture used to publicly display dying criminals sentenced to death by the Romans (effectively making Samus' victims Space Jesus as much as Satan). In similar fashion, an Amazon is a former-whore-turned-cop, an -in-group "maiden" policing out-group "obvi whores" to maintain order and the Protestant ethic. Work is good, provided it upholds capital, mid-abjection.
In turn, the same Puritan ethic polices nature through moral panic as a tokenizing device: "gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss" through colonized puns, wrestling signature emotions (e.g., somber, gloomy and morose, but also bellicose, Spartan, haunted, etc) and extreme animal states of distress and pleasure (e.g., drowning and being "wet" to an improper, "drenched" amount). This temptation by the church of the day applies to any woman in sci-fi—but also onstage or off (e.g., Hallie Cross, above)—as having Gothic roots (ergo anything framed as alien under capital, ergo not a white straight Christian man to modular degrees); i.e., insofar as Gothic crosses resident and residence with Freud's unheimlich, or uncanny to speak to home as haunted by colonial victims; re: virgin/whore, itself a virtue/vice game of "prove it" that various colonial subjects (not just white women) play to survive, generally by policing themselves and their comrades: Samus, like Ellen Ripley before her, is a TERF-style cop with survivor's guilt. Rape is a weapon (specifically a weapon of fear) to use against future victims; i.e., during mirror syndrome, the panic a holy thing to level against future whores by old traitorous ones (which rebellious whores survive by not submitting to in clever ways; re: the cryptonymy process, which we'll explain more, in a moment).
To it, the mode divides and/or undermines the self on the Aegis to speak to Cartesian divisions (with heteronormative and settler-colonial flavors); i.e., us versus them, those "of nature" destroyed by their civilized counterparts through DARVO and obscurantism as Enlightenment weapons persisting under capital's police states. Doubles speak to psychomachy or "mind battle" as tied to the monster battle of the Amazon; i.e., a popular figure in latter-day media (of which the femme fatale has become central, under late-stage Capitalism). Both come from the ancient world (re: Athens), but one further popularized under capital by Scott's singular Alien and Cameron's pluralizing sequel; i.e., under neoliberal spheres before the Metroid franchise ludologized the kill-the-criminal refrain (re: shooters, FPS or otherwise).
The takeaway is that capital always wins, pitting labor (read: nature as monstrous-feminine) against itself. The plight becomes one of routine cognitive dissonance and estrangement—one whose signature, blob-like fragmentation Samus, the resident slime girl, desperately kicks down the road by blasting the evil mass to bits (re: military optimism); i.e., "I'm nothing like you!" Pot, meet kettle—with Lilith tormenting warrior Eve to upend her prescribed (dogmatic) sense of self. It's a similar "help, I'm the monster!" plot twist (above) to Lovecraft's "A Shadow Over Innsmouth"; re, Baldrick's emphasis on Gothic effect (from "Introduction" to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, 2009): "For the Gothic effect to be attained, a tale should combine a fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to reproduce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration" (source). She stares at the Gorgon; she trembles because they look alike, not different! Again, Amazons are terror weapons with various modular elements (which we'll explore deeper inside; e.g., vampirism).
That's our "in," and one we use to sow doubt in the colonizer's mind using Gothic poetics; i.e., useful abstractions of different dialectical-material forces, whores being "paradoxical figures" (re: Jill Suzanne Smith) whose anti-war revenge is paradoxically terrifying the way a Gothic castle might (re: "Joy Under Fascism"): to rise again, echoing if perversely Refaat Alareer's "If I must die / Let it bring hope / Let it be a tale" (source). The way to acquire freedom is to terrify your colonizer until they let go and "bravely" run away. By killing us, they trap us in the very stories that send them running.
Imagine this "in the flesh" or "in small" (through "stacked" fortress-style castles in the flesh) and you have the right idea; i.e., an Amazon or a Gorgon generally embodies something larger she belongs to, and which meld together during the chaos of battle, mise-en-abyme ("to place in abyss" aka "belly of the beast," a recursive pattern whose castle is alive, and which Aguirre calls "infernal concentric*"). Or, as I write in my PhD:
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 [emphasis, me]); i.e., while being "hunted" and covered in rebellious "kick me" symbols and clothing that advertises my true self as naked, colorful and dark, as if to tease the viewer in the shadows to try something (source: "Interrogating Power through Your Own Camp")
*Such patterns explored by those legendarily tragic heroes made of sterner stuff, including Amazons in Metroidvania which Aguirre doesn't mention); i.e., as unmappable insofar as they beget recursively ergodic (non-trivial, chaotic) motion, inside themselves (re: my master's thesis, "Lost in Necropolis"). From "Geometries of Terror":
where the hero crosses a series of doors and spaces until he reaches a central chamber, there to witness the collapse of his hopes; [this infernal concentric pattern has] in Gothic one and the same function: to destabilize assumptions as to the physical, ontological or moral order of the cosmos [… It is like a Mandelbrot set (left):] finite, and yet from within we cannot reach its end; it is a labyrinth that delves "down" instead of pushing outwards. From the outside it looks simple enough: bounded, finite, closed; from the inside, however, it is inextricable (source).
So often, in Gothic, the house is the whore as warrior (a castle). But regardless if that's the case, whores love to torment virgins by threatening their modesty with immodesty (as Hallie Cross demonstrates, two images down): Amazons are anything but demure, obedient (on their surface; under capital, they're canonically attack dogs—on leads, and trotted out to bark at whoever the elite require them to; e.g., J.K. Rowling's followers/subordinates attacking trans folk).
Furthermore, this perverse Amazonian joy can express in military fetishes, open sex work (or both) as educational; i.e., whores are hunted by virgins* under capital as vampirically blob-like, thus hypocritical—a process of abjection the whore survives, cryptomimetically like a virus (meaning in between pieces of language; re: Castricano): by anisotropically warping its guilt trips, mid-interpretation (and penetration). Reversing abjection during ludo-Gothic BDSM through the cryptonymy process is our whore's MO, therefore revenge against the pimp's avenger (thwarting profit; re: "Rape Reprise"): the whore ghost of the counterfeit** Hippolyta cannot exorcise from the nightmare home, no matter how hard she tries or how frenzied her moral panic is. Cardi B's "WAP" speaks to a witch that cannot die, the "brick house" that seeks revenge: "There's some whores in this house!" Always.
*Which Amazons sometimes get pegged as; i.e., virginal huntresses who fuck men up.
**David West's "Implementation of Gothic Themes in The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit" (2023) vis-à-vis Hogle's "The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Process of Abjection" (2012).
Cryptonymy and Applying It to X-Fusion
"All war is predicated on deception," wrote Sun Szu; he didn't know, but this includes Amazons and cryptonymy as paradoxical under Gothic conventions. To it, that is what we'll do with Metaquarium's X-Fusion—by analyzing it (and Amazons) in playfully Gothic (ergo whorish) ways!
Regarding the actual game, the trailer itself is fairly short. So I'll give myself a chance to reflect on some broader themes, but chiefly predator/prey (re: "Predators as Amazons, Knights, and Other Forms of Domesticated, Animalized Monster Violence"); i.e., to make this post a bit longer (and more informative) than it might be otherwise; e.g., the game has monsters in it, many of them returning from the grave to give the class traitor hell. We have, in other words, a cryptonymy at play camping "rape" in quotes; re: which Hogle outlined in "Cryptonymy in the Gothic Novel" describing a "double operation" through places but also objects of concealment; re (from my glossary):
According to Cynthia Sugars' entry for David Punter's the Encyclopedia of the Gothic (2012), this narrative is described by Jerrold Hogle as the only thing that survives—a narrative of a narrative [of the crypt] to a hidden curse announced by things displaced from the former cause. Sugars determines, the closer one gets to the problem, the more the space itself abruptly announces a vanishing point, a procession of fragmented illusions tied to a transgenerational curse: "a place of concealment that stands on mere ashes of something not fully present," Hogle writes of Otranto (the first "gothic" castle, reassembled for Horace Walpole's 1764 "archaeology") [source].
Metroid (and similar stories) promise and promote "strength" while raping state victims; i.e., "peace through strength," aka neo-conservatism through rape epidemics blaming the whore. The paradox, here, is dogma isn't actually rape on paper, but a simulation thereof (with avatars, in videogames); re: "rape"; i.e., that whores may joyously camp to reverse abjection during oppositional cryptonymy (complicit vs revolutionary). As sex objects concealing and revealing different buried realities, Metroidvania simulate war as a direct result of capital acting itself out (essentially copaganda training the next generation); i.e., performed "in small" and "placed in abyss" to speak to other things also under those same conditions, namely the process of abjection; e.g., videogames, whose own maps and characters speak to larger versions of themselves: abjection in small being a simulation of war pimping nature as alien with nature as alien (and which the phrase, "like a videogame," speaks to real-life atrocities through ambiguous, half-real signifiers working back and forth; e.g., the Palestinian genocide, according to Democracy Now! or, in reverse, The Last of Us 2 mirroring the Zionist project. Same idea with Metroid and its titles).
Instead of simply saying those realities out loud, whores more broadly are coded with trauma; i.e., as something to inflict upon them by others and survive said abuse themselves, mid-simulation (re: during ludo-Gothic BDSM as a joyous enterprise haunted by actual persecution and coercive, non-consensual demands for submission our own mutual consent negotiates to undermine; see: "Why I Submit"). Either side hides behind symbols that disguise openly through play with ambiguous vaso-vagal emblems of danger further coded with value judgements and rewards (with Metroid promising its own modest sexual rewards in exchange for holocaust-levels of planetary slaughter), and where total monopolies on violence (terror and monsters) are impossible; e.g., versus the Amazon simply having a strong stomach (constitution), mid-conquest of the sissies involved, the vampire operates like a creature of habit that takes its vitality (which a "metroid" essentially is, below).
In short, we whores are living proof; i.e., surviving to reverse abjection even if capital treats us like undead, demonic, and/or animal cops and victims (the xenomorph being all three): no matter how "pure" your virgin killer-for-hire is, we'll a) corrupt her eventually and live to tell the tale ("I admire its purity..."), and b) turn your world upside-down as we not only survive but thrive! Likewise, by sucking her essence and watching her squirm, we're playing "dead" ourselves; re: our cryptonymy camping "rape" in rapturous, oscillating and wholly neo-medieval forms; e.g., "stabbing" each other by playing at sex and war through "conquering" dialogs reflecting in larger and smaller Russian dolls, ranging from people-to-place: a planet of the vampires whose "Black Dahlia" killer dolls echo Matteson's 1954 I Am Legend, itself essentially an apocalypse (revelation) narrative. We turn the abjection process against the self-righteous abuse(r) normally going on—with whores being far more accustomed to alienation (from a conscious standpoint) than pimps are! "Ahh, you sunk my battleship!"
Dogma treats sex as sacred, but also rape as a regular exercise that cops do. ACAB, and sex should be silly and fun—as a revolutionary/thought-provoking device (monsters are arguments to make, like war and love), but also intense and death-like to camp rape; i.e., burning "Rome" one match at a time (and moving each Sisyphean boulder as one might a couch in a porno). It's not called la petite mort for nothing—with workers playing with the poetry of taboos (and stigmas, slurs, scapegoats, but also nudity and exposure, above) to critique the context of abuse they normally suffer under (which is different than using them unironically to do "activism"; re: "Slurs Aren't Activism"); i.e., the paradox of good, back-and-forth, squeaky-mattress sex operates similar to the call of the void, achieving cryptonymy of a warrior-class character "from space," when Amazons play their part. A cop rapes, a rebel does not.
As usual, the point is paradox; i.e., as a push-pull device loaded with crude Gothic puns—and one that hyphenates just about everything but especially sex and force (called "desire" through war and its "fog" covering such things in mist and darkness)—such matters establish healthy boundaries in historically campy hands: that explore societal taboos in homely spaces, meaning those outside the bedroom (re: Foucault) yet walking cryptonymy's tightrope of "concealed" weaponry (which Amazons essentially are). Made by those canonically meant "to be seen, not heard—i.e., female, GNC and/or non-white people and places with hysterical, "wandering womb" qualities—such bugbears, when left unchecked, will literally stop your heart* (qualities stemming from my abusers teaching me what power a less palliative Numinous has; e.g., Jadis; re: "Escaping Jadis; or, Running up that Hill").
*Or explode out of your chest like a xenomorph, the act of doing emulating a heart attack through memento mori turning the body inside-out.
All heroes are monsters, and whores are the oldest monster there is (at least in Western canon, which has the whore police itself using Amazons; re: as domesticated whores-turned-brides; e.g., Queen Hippolyta). A kind of female/monstrous-feminine Numinous that heroes paradoxically chase, thus earn parentage and protection, Amazons aren't for the faint of heart—outraged and outrageous, they embody creatures who, when viewed, feel both familiar and out-of-this-world; i.e., the paradox of "danger" that feels intense, but per calculated risk, has a palliative-Numinous effect; re: "The Quest for Power" but specifically that of the perfect domme to quest for (a mommy domme, in this case, with strict and gentle qualities). It gets the juices flowing—meaning from a flexible "Destroyer"/fear of rape for fun (during games with rules that prevent harm)—and that's entirely the point; re: (from Volume Two's Poetry Module)
As someone who's been there, done that, the children of today—to defeat Capitalism by breaking Capitalist Realism, thereby liberating sex workers (Capitalism sexualizes everything) with iconoclastic art—absolutely should play with dead things like Metroidvania and Amazons, albeit in a way the state doesn't want us to! So hustle up, kiddies! Time to enter the Crypt of the Necrodancer (think Thriller-meets-DDR but extended to Castlevania, Metroid and so many other counterfeits whose playgrounds can be used to camp dogma with)! Exploitation and liberation occupy the same space, including its hauntologies and cryptonymies for or against the state. The state will perpetuate rape of colonized spaces into their hauntologies/cryptonymies to maximize profit and canonization. To that, such a "black Egypt" is an Orientalist counterfeit we must paradoxically use to free ourselves while strung up with (and out on) its mummy-like bandages:
(artist: Magion02)
Dancing feels good; so does confronting trauma during calculated risk as "cool," familiar but foreign (Castlevania's "In Search of the Secret Spell" [2006] shamelessly sneaking in a disco beat to groove among the pyramids with). Per Matthew Lewis all the way up to me, it becomes the Gothic's usual bad, musical game of telephone, celebrating monstrous-feminine sex and force while turning Imperialism (and its semantic wreckage) into a campy joke of itself. My own quest for a Numinous Commie Mommy isn't so odd; capital makes us feel tired relative to the self-as-alien, both incumbent on the very things they rape to nurture them (re: Irigaray's creation of sexual difference). I'm hardly the first person to notice this:
As Edward Said astutely notes in Culture and Imperialism, most societies project their fears on the unknown or the exotic other. This barren land, where the viewers are kept disorientated, is threatening. It is a place between the familiar and the foreign, like part of a dream or vision that one cannot remember clearly. There is always a sense of a lurking danger from which the viewers need protection. Nikita provides that sense of protection (source: Laura Ng's "'The Most Powerful Weapon You Have': Warriors and Gender in La Femme Nikita," 2003).
I am, however, a trans woman who has gone above and beyond women like Barbara Creed, Angela Carter, Luce Irigaray and Laura Ng, etc, in my pioneering of ludo-Gothic BDSM: as a holistic, "Commy-Mommy" means of synthesizing proletarian praxis inside the operatic danger disco(-in-disguise), the "rape" castle riffing on Walpole, Lewis, Radcliffe, Konami, Nintendo, and so many others (source: "'In Search of the Secret Spell': Digging Our Own Graves; or, Playing with Dead Things (the Imaginary Past) as Verboten and Carte-Blanche").
Of course, such cryptonymy is less literal and more thumbing one's nose at prudes punching down; e.g., Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a straight man, pearl-clutching at rival gay man, Matthew Lewis, but specifically his scandalous The Monk (which eventually would become the latter writer's namesake): for daring camp Coleridge's idea of the sacred... which included "Gothic" as something Coleridge colonized while relegating other peoples' notion of it to critical nadirs; e.g., Lewis' voice, as a gay man, suffering under heteronormative oppression, which they camped by literally "making it gay"; re: Colin Broadmoor's "Camping the Canon" (2021):
It's clear that Paradise Lost left an impression on Matthew Lewis [and Mary Shelley, after him]. As a young man, Lewis frequently quoted the poem in his personal letters. The sexual and bodily ambiguity exhibited by Milton's demons in Paradise Lost serves as the template for demonic bodies and sexuality in The Monk. And Milton's rebel Satan, in Lewis’s hands, becomes the ultimate object of sexual desire—chiseled beauty, down to fuck, with a camp smile on those Luciferian lips (source).
While "we camp canon because we must" (re: my "Camping the Canon" in response to Broadmoor, 2023), evocations of "past" are hunted by generational trauma, but also abuse as comorbid among the living (or the demonic/angelic similar to an Amazon, above); i.e., wherever they call home as it is brought to them by stories whose power speaks through paradoxical stillness. Classic non-magical paintings seem to move, whereas Gothic cryptonymy deliberately offers up literal motion that, unto itself, radiates power that is both still and fully mobilized (e.g., Walpole's portraits getting up and moving around, but also that story's giant suit of armor emblematic of the Anthropocene, ergo Capitalocene; re: me, vis-à-vis Hans Staats and Patel and Moore's A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things). Miniatures are all fine and good, but Amazons convey something more: a kind of former "barbarity" conjured up not to slay outright, but bridle and ride, mid-cryptonymy.
In turn, those who come to our rescue are fearsome and soft in a variety of ways, their fight-or-flight (flop, freeze, fawn) ferocity serving to confuse ambivalent feelings of safety and danger that are, themselves, historically-poetically tied to: graveyards (to "bone") but also the wilderness, and polite society-in-decay obsessed with rape as "rapturous," even holy under the shadow of military conquest and monarchal tyranny (e.g., the convulsionnaires of 18th-century France; re: exhibit 37a2b from "Healing through 'Rape,' or the Origins of Ludo-Gothic BDSM as a Matter of Rememory"). That's what we're camping during a given moral panic; i.e., often describing our own lives in larger-than-life language, but also grandiose historical events intimated by pulp fiction as "frozen in time."
The Amazon, for example, is a classically "pulpy" creation that hints at shadows of oppression and entropy newer than her classic forms, yet older than the present is: a warrior queen in her tomb, ready to rise up and conquer us, for a change. In other words, she's a kind of (sex) doll—most notably an action figure who crosses the idea of passive/active for something akin to a golem, not a vampire. Yes, the vampire is also doll-like, but prone to its own feeding often happening in passive, immobile states that suggest vulnerability while turning the tables (topping from below): "Abashed the devil stood and felt how awful goodness is" (even warriors play dead, including class warriors like Cuwu, below).
Amazons, again, usually skip the foreplay to courtly love (an idea built on lust and conquest)—waking up like a former conqueror, only to grab her weapon, club the unlucky "lover" over the head, and demand to the other's now-silent body before capturing them, "Who disturbs my slumber?" (e.g., Jadis the giantess from C.S. Lewis' The Magician's Nephew). Think Rip van Winkle but pissed-off and vengeful (and smaller than Cthulhu). Yet, both the vampire and Amazon speak to larger epochs whose zeitgeist both hail from, mid-cryptonymy (with the Metroid franchise hybridizing Amazons and vampires with its titular monsters, which we'll get to in a moment); i.e., our X to solve for something of a dark "sweet spot," one whose ceaseless rubbing—like a dark genie's lamp—both summons and "breeds" such monsters: those that workers today would revive to camp in future moments of entropy speaking to present abuse conjured up as "past" (re: Punter). The medicine becomes anomalous, poison the proverbial cure as workers have their revenge against the state by "hoing it up" (as Cuwu used to say); i.e., while it tries to channel this energy back into capital, stealing from us all the while!
For example, Victorian society spoke to a tremendous degree of conservatism after societal unrest that predated Marx (and which C.S. Lewis undoubtedly longer for); i.e., nearly an entire century of British domination under Queen Victoria—the femme fatale as popularized in modern Western canon largely hailing from this period onwards: the avenger (which certainly has existed since ancient times, but in more recent eras evolved to serve capital, in particular). Suddenly, and to a higher degree than ever before, women became vampires, werewolves, and Amazons: to tokenize (as cops and victims) under capitalistic hegemons with deeply regressive attitudes LARPing as "rebellion."
In turn, weird attracts weird, trauma recognizes trauma; i.e., as something alien (read: Numinous) to hide-and-seek, doing so in ways that Amazons under capital default to—meaning tokenized force whenever push comes to shove (read: straight white women, first and foremost, assimilating like Samus does for shelter and Judas pay). Abuse is always a dice roll, cops and victims the usual outcome* that Metroidvania explore through their Lacanian (mirror test) "trolley problems": virgin or whore, cop or victim, pimp or prostitute. Our rebel's ability lies in Milton (and however imperfect he was) to camp the canon, meaning in readily available forms; re: Amazons and gorgons.
*With survivors lurking somewhere in between, both the living and the dead; e.g., Samus from Metroid, Trace from Axiom Verge, or the "little ghost" from Hollow Knight.
We'll get to that. First, some thematic content; i.e., the complex (and combative, cops-and-robbers) meaning behind the Radcliffean shadow play unfolding on Plato's cave walls.
Thematic Content, or Essay Body: Amazons Are Abject
Amazons are abject, which play out in Metroidvania to further abjection. Yet, meaning determines through play's context. So, to avoid being the dupe (re: Gloggins' "Play and Games in Fiction and Theory," 2020), we have to trust the game enough to play with it, thus bend its ludic, monomyth contract in our favor, mid-analysis: games are teaching devices, including by simulating war as something to wage for dialectical-material purposes, mid-cryptonomy. Why not class war? Waged by workers, said war is dressed up to concentric degrees: as gorgons to punch, clubbed repeatedly by "pick me" debutantes, and often, ironically enough, men in dresses; i.e., Manosphere types crossdressing as "Amazons": of a subjugated, TERF-style, second wave (therefore fascist) character. Capital's raping of everything breeds all manner strange appetites (re: "A Cruel Angel's (Modular) Thesis"), including vampirism; i.e., as a thing that Amazons interrogate through their own "nudity is armor" capabilities exploring Hell on Earth, the chronotope canonically tied to creation and destruction of a fascist sort (with Samus opting for a bit of either, depending on the scene); re: "sometimes to create you must destroy." Her structural perfection is matched only by her hostility aping the land as equally hostile—a doomsday tied to planetary release from bondage: nature set free.
By extension, Joy under fascism essentially means to exist by playing with the very language fascism, therefore capital, uses to destroy us through kill-on-sight mantras and mentalities; i.e., it becomes a black (or red, above) vision to turn the abusers vision "black" in ways that stall their actually rapacious, bad-faith advances: "to interrogate power, you must go where it is" (re: "Interrogating Power") but also see through power (therefore illusion) in reverse, reversing abjection mid-cryptonymy! "Stare and tremble," cucks! Capital alienates and fetishizes (rapes) everything for profit; we're reversing that to familiarize you with different forms of rape play than the one capital forces down your throat—through allegory and paradox (darkness visible)!
Capital is a place endlessly invaded by its own past, one whose Superstructure we escape through better education: the pre-capitalistic language of a proletarian past-future, its Wisdom of the Ancients including the very Amazons we reclaim from state arbitration for post-scarcity aims. In short, we help state slaves find release from the torment of constant peace-through-strength (the "true peace in space" pipedream that Metroid offers); i.e., you can let control go, losing it to allow alien forces inside. Thus, the scales fall from your eyes, the cryptonymy we reverse abjection with being the same-old sex, drugs and rock 'n roll Gothic plays with (and canonical Gothic commodifies); e.g. The Scorpion's "Rhythm of Love" (1988):
Let's spend the night together
I know you want it too
The magic of the moment
Is what I've got for you
The heartbeat of this night
Is made to lose control
And there is something in your eyes
That's longing for some more
To let us find together the beat we're looking for (source: Genius).
In Gothic (canonical or otherwise), "passion" speaks to martyred forms hyphening pleasure and pain (re: "Psychosexual Martyrdom"). To that, power is an endless fetish the state can't control, at least not entirely. When they wiggle "knife dicks" (re: the xenomorph, metroid, etc), simply take the same language and use it differently than state harvests do (dehumanizing labor, ergo portions of nature as "evil"). Use it to reify and interrogate power, yourself; person or place, use it to make your dreams come true, developing Gothic Communism by breaking Capitalist Realism on your Aegis! Liberation needs to be universal, making our approach to Amazons a liminal and holistic affair chasing tactical unity for intersectional solidarity—as a pedagogy of the oppressed!
This includes combining different modules together for unique results, Metroid essentially blending Amazons with vampires and bounty (demon) hunters: Samus is a traveling castle in small, but retains the same demonic or vampiric qualities the larger castle does; she wakes up into the nightmare—i.e., as a curse having fallen upon a given homeland (the liminal hauntology of war* when the Imperial Boomerang sails home as viewed in a colonial way)—and promptly goes to work.
*The moving castle, which Metroidvania are—either actually mobile, or which compels recursive motion (castle-narrative; re: me, vis-à-vis Bakhtin) towards, into and inside it: an endless history of war as self-defeating.
Amazons as Vampires, Demon Hunters, What-Have-You
Concerning cryptonymy for the above purposes, poetry remains an exchange of ideas (and stances, which monsters theatrically embody for argumentative reasons); i.e., one that includes demonic but also vampiric (sex demon) qualities indicative of capital working as it always does (vampirism works through the gaze, above). Its daily operations are bad for workers, meaning perfidious but also humiliating before, during and after the task at hand; re: nature as monstrous-feminine effectively policing itself to defend aging Patriarchal structures (from Volume Two's "Policing the Whore"):
Note: The below concept is applied to a real person, JDPlaysMoth (source tweet, vanderWaardart: July 19th 2024). However, it applies just as easily to fictional characters in a half-real dialog (re: me modifying Juul's "half-real zone between the fiction and the rules" [source] to "between fiction and non-fiction, on and offstage"). We're left with a tricky concept to explain, so bear with an extended quote I've written previously on the subject. —Perse
Fantastical or not, there's always some orc to lynch, some whole to fill through revenge; re: the givers and receivers of state violence inside the state of exception, moving money through nature.
Free from scrutiny and indeed, venerated for having exposed a perceived menace through the usual bigotries leveled at the marginalized struggling for in-group status, [Samus] is the fascist ringleader free to feed on her victims with impunity! She's a witch hunter played by the witch—a feeding frenzy conducted by those commonly dehumanized by systemic abuse seeking empowerment through said system; i.e., the policing of others through a matter of dogma, fear and revenge, abjecting members of the same community by triangulating against them for the state: robots policing robots, slaves policing slaves, those of nature policing those of nature as monstrous-feminine with monstrous-feminine. Orcs police orcs, rats police rats (or rodents in general, but I digress) as givers and receivers of state abuse (often fetishized, knife-dick-style, through badass-looking weapons, below—less Excalibur and more an evil, "Soulreaver" version of the same device), dividing and conquering territorially (the essence of settler-colonialism) when capital dies and regenerates through said witch hunts as hazing rituals:
(source)
This includes fiction speaking to non-fiction as married to each other. As Silvia Federici writes in Caliban and the Witch, Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004):
Witch-hunting did not disappear from the repertoire of the bourgeoisie with the abolition of slavery. On the contrary, the global expansion of capitalism through colonization and Christianization ensured that this persecution would be planted in the body of colonized societies, and, in time, would be carried out by the subjugated communities in their own name and against their own members (source).
only to add elsewhere (cited in "Hot Allostatic Load"):
One lesson we can draw from the return of witch-hunting is that this form of persecution is no longer bound to a specific historic time. It has taken a life of its own, so that the same mechanisms can be applied to different societies whenever there are people in them that have to be ostracized and dehumanized. Witchcraft accusations, in fact, are the ultimate mechanism of alienation and estrangement as they turn the accused—still primarily women—into monstrous beings, dedicated to the destruction of their communities, therefore making them undeserving of any compassion and solidarity (source).
In response, the author of "Allostatic" responds
The term witch hunt is thrown around a lot, but let’s look at what it really means. Witch hunts, as discussed by Silvia Federici, were responses to shifts in capital accumulation, as is slavery. To jury-rig the perpetually self-destructing machine of capitalism, huge amounts of violence are required to obtain captive labor (fem and non-white). The effect is to devalue our labor as much as possible, and to destroy the bonds between marginalized people (ibid.).
to argue for a cheapening of nature (re: Moore and Patel) through labor associated with it as recognized inside different marginalized populations conditioned to self-police, thus witch hunt in and out of fiction.
In response to both authors, I would include that capital tokenizes all labor (not just female and non-white) as sexualized, fetish, alien; i.e., something to gentrify and decay inside of itself, moving money through nature to harvest nature-as-monstrous-feminine (thus having masculine elements; e.g., phallic women). Feminism decays for these purposes, as do genderqueer movements, sex work, and Gothic poetics. Cops are also assassins, including vigilante ones recruited from the prison population expressed using such theatrics to embody by Man Box agents as "witch cops"; i.e., "prison sex" mentality selecting the whore and the cop to rape said whore who, regardless of sex or gender, is acting like the colonizer as something they have internalized and dressed up as. This includes whores acting as cops, "undercover" insofar as their tokenized police function is concealed by their marginalized origins worn on the outside in visibly fantastical forms: a robata romance, reduced to the nuts and bolts of class and culture betrayal. Rape is rape, betrayal is betrayal regardless of why you do it (e.g., "I was tired," or "I was raped")!
(artist: Monori Rogue)
The above quote is from an essay specifically about the Radiance from Hollow Knight being raped by a state husk (the game's Amazon actually being Hornet teaching the hero, but I digress). Even so, the same idea applies to Samus, an Amazon "ghost in the shell" (occupied by the player)—one eroding worker goodwill and solidarity while making them co-dependent on a lone white token savior punching down at Medusa, mid-crisis; i.e., as a dualistic quandary in a liminal position we can camp should we actively choose to. Abjection is a struggle, and Amazons are sex dolls classically controlled by men, first and foremost; i.e., that women (straight or not, white or not) must camp inside themselves and their prisons (re: Metroidvania, but also the heroine's armor). Any monster we camp is "under the gun" of those looking to destroy us; i.e., the bubble we're bursting is enclosed, shadows in Plato's cave whose insiders will surround and stab outsiders to death (for "death" is what they see on the surface of their victims resembling themselves)—a bloodsport that historically serves capital sucking us dry (for more of this allegory in particular, refer to "The World Is a Vampire")!
Doing so might seem like fruit from the poison tree, then—the Amazon doomed to betray her fellows by raping the Gorgon as merely her older double. Except, not all that glitters is gold, the vampire's faerie glamour something that speaks to worker illusions fucking with state variants while sparkling in hypnotically gilded ways (and playing with dolls or doll-like things, below). Furthermore (and more to the point), it communicates through play between workers changing things "on the Aegis"; e.g., Hallie and I playing with sex and force, but also art as pornographically educational towards universal liberation:
(exhibit: Like any form of monstrous language, vampirism isn't strictly "bad" save how its used; i.e., for workers vs the state, mid-duality and during liminal expression. To that, consent illustrates mutually through the body as a canvas—one centered around monstrous poetics literally doubling as sex work [therefore exchange; re: "Illustrating Mutual Consent" from "Paratextual Documents"]. The state will frame us as "degenerate," ergo unpaid and expected by men/token agents to fuck them and die for them; i.e., during bad "demon BDSM" encouraging bad habits, versus "hurt, not harm." We upend that, reversing abjection by reminding subjugated workers of our lost humanity in monstrous-feminine language; i.e., that scares them away from dogma: "Look on [our] Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" It's less Ozymandias gets a gender swap and more the Medusa takes their place. Such is cryptomimesis during cryptonymy [echoes of power "lying in state"].
Per Gothic, cuteness and terror overlap in silly-serious ways that, all the same, have all the power needed to move capital away from itself [and generational trauma]: between workers learning through said exchange. Ludo-Gothic BDSM encourages such movement through kink, play and unequal exchange furthering worker rights, mid-poetics. Gothic Communism encourages rape play to prevent unironic rape; by placing it in quotes, we only expand rebel boners [and clits] during "rape" as a historically ironic exercise: "Use me like a doll" not an invitation to harm, but learn how not to harm, mid-calculated-risk [while hyphenating sex and war, mouth and fang as the Amazon and vampire do]. That's what Gothic Communism is. We don't "steal" anything or make value for capital/entitled tech bros; we use our inherent value to challenge profit, ergo divorcing sex from genuine, unironic harm. Simply put, if we didn't have power, then capital wouldn't try to exploit it through Amazon tokenization, and nobody likes flaccidity during struggle [well, maybe total subs do, but I digress]: all workers are sexualized, we whores as much the metroids [vampires] to harvest and train by Amazons as we are the Amazons in that same pecking order.)
All exchanges go both ways (above), vampirism speaking to the Amazon as vampiric per capital as something to reverse the vampirism of (ergo abjection); re, Marx: "Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like lives only by sucking living labor" (source: "The Working-Day"). Very nerdy but whores are nerds, too, and "Love is a battlefield to prosecute class, culture and race war for workers vs the state" (source: "Leaving the Closet"); i.e., it all goes back into the same witch's pot, poisoning the apple of innocence that state barbers sing to themselves before going out to prey on us—with Samus becoming increasingly vampiric as time goes on; re (from Volume Two's Undead Module):
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 (source: "The Monomyth, part one: 'She Fucks Back'; or, Revisiting The Modern Prometheus through Astronoetics")
(artist: Hybrid Mink)
You might not know it, then, but you're fighting back much like past guerillas did; i.e., while aping their colonizers to confuse them—through shadow and invention, the invader's mind their own worst enemy as you do everything backwards; re: reversing abjection by moving at odd angles, smothering the war machine on all registers like an infernal octopus. There are limits to state sovereignty because their power is largely false, their invasions classically brutal but short-lived (with Uhall's astronoetics reflecting the Ozymandian quality [often a technological singularity] where spacefaring colonization mimics earthbound disasters): Samus allowed to be the vampire provided she sucks for the state, but whose betrayals dehumanize her in everyone's eyes. The state discards or otherwise sacrifices her identity for player power to police the world.
To it, state proponents pimp sex, which it promises post-Amazonomachia provided you rape others (with Samus defying the "get the girl" argument to encourage future missions from sex-starved boys and men, versus token girls and women thinking they're "doing a rebellion" by attacking Communism in disguise). The reversal requires emergent play (thus context); cryptonymy (of a revolutionary sort) takes rape fears and turns them on the colonizer in Amazonian language—i.e., during what effectively comes to "land back" arguments (e.g., through Amazons and anal sex; re: "Our Sweet Revenge"): "No matter how much you take from us, you're gonna die; your garden will always wilt, no matter how much blood you water it with!"
Giger's prurience lingers, as well—death pussy swallowing the state's missiles to laugh in their faces (echoes of the Vietnam war being fought with stolen ordinance; re: GDF's "How the Viet Cong Smoked American Soldiers"), the Modern Prometheus tied to ancient or "ancient" forms (re: Paradise Lost and Milton's Satan) having the last laugh in Amazonian and similar GNC forms (again, Milton's Satan, but also Mary Shelley's Creature)! The state demands rape through heroic action; the "weakness" of the hero only becoming clear once "victory" is seemingly "theirs": their dick pulses, the Medusa sucking their power into herself from below!
In other words, vampirism is anisotropic; men who serve the state are dumb (re: Mark Greene's "Man Box") but so are women or any token group also punching down. In challenging them, the colonized prevent theft using the Amazon's subversive Promethean elements—cryptonymically waving a given "knife dick" (or darkness, at large) in front of those only posturing as strong (the fascist fakery of strength to serve and defend Capitalism): the ghost of the counterfeit, mid-dialect (of the alien), coming back to the mortal plane for hugs that drain state powers (re: "Hugging the Alien")! The ghost of the counterfeit is always a tyrant, false preacher or whore taunting the faithful; we paradoxically preach power as "false" (re: "Notes on Power" and "Doubles, Dark Forces, and Paradox"), doing so to expose tyrants and survive their abuse (a profound survival camping our own holocaust at their hands): silence is genocide, whereas heavy silence can break its vows (through said ghost) to expose the state's usual machinery hard at work. Abjection reverses through cryptonymy.
(artist: Gravillis Inc.)
Let's unpack that idea more. Then we'll apply it to Metaquarium's thematic content—specifically of combatting giant bosses—in their X-Fusion hybrid (of Super Metroid and Metroid Fusion, 1994 and 2002, released in late-2025).
Note: This section is fairly lengthy-yet-conversational. To compensate, I've divided it into various sections and subsections. Consider them signposts; i.e., Ariadne's thread, supplied while inside my labyrinth for you to explore. —Perse
More on Amazons and Gorgons, Including the Cryptonymy Process Reversing Abjection
Regarding Amazonian themes, in Metroid, the series is well-and-truly spoiled for choice. Yet, Amazons are cryptomimetic, and I can't help but look on Samus (or similar characters, below) and see the Amazons of the past; i.e., that I've romanticized, my own cryptonymy spurning the monomyth that shamelessly pimps them (and their zombie revivals) to further abjection—as castrating avengers of state rape (abuse) that rape state victims while sharing the same stages (and bodies) that genuine rebels do: the Spartan Crypteia as much as any bottom-heavy kinkster Marston wrote (re: "Our Sweet Revenge" vs Wonder Woman in "On Amazons, Good and Bad").
"Death by Snu-Snu" is apt (re: "Herbos to Himbos" part one and part two), but form follows function, and flow (of power) determines function in ways that are historically dualistic (re: vampiric flow)! Even so, the state demands Amazonian revenge (the angry mother or maiden becoming the Destroyer); we camp that revenge through our "rape" scenarios' ludo-Gothic BDSM—e.g., with bondage, fear of war and death, corporal punishment, captivity and starvation, mad science experiments, black magic, vampirism (sodomy) and witchcraft, etc, as universally advertised through growing states of exception (re: from Agamben*). Medusa (therefore Mother Brain weaponizing nature with the metroids) is a repeat offender in state eyes; our aforementioned Wisdom (of the Promethean sort disempowering canonical heroism) disguises as "mere play" and "madness," mid-cryptonymy (with Nazis on either side of the Atlantic monopolizing the same spy novels and cowboy yarns** that Commies enjoy).
*"A special condition in which the juridical order is actually suspended due to an emergency or a serious crisis threatening the state. In such a situation, the sovereign, i.e. the executive power, prevails over the others and the basic laws and norms can be violated by the state while facing the crisis" (source: State of Exception, 2005).
**Re (from Volume Three's "Witch Cops and Victims"):
Himmler hiring Reinhard not just because of his good looks and womanizer's past in the interwar German Navy, but also because of a shared interest in American pulp fiction that informed other imperial powers and their authors; re (from Volume Zero, "Overcoming Praxial Inertia"):
Heinrich Himmler hired Reinhardt Heydrich because Heydrich looked Aryan and because both men read the same cheesy Americana, specifically "cheap crime fiction and spy novels" (source: Behind the Bastard's "Part One: The Young, Evil God of Death: Reinhard Heydrich," 2023—timestamp: 1:11:48). In other words, their very violent worldview was founded on the same cheap, pulpy ephemera that fueled Tolkien's imagination:
Tolkien's world is certainly not groundless. It is traditional, "borrowing from the power and import of his sources - the 'middangeard' of 'Beowulf,' the grim and brutal cosmos of 'The Volsunga Saga,' the cold and bitter realm of the 'Eddas,' all of which left their traces and worked their sway over his own imagination'" (source: Influences of the Germanic and Scandinavian Mythology in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien," 1983).
This issue, which I have dubbed "the Rambo, Beowulf or Star Wars problem," also effects witch cops (such as Amazons) during mirror syndrome (re: "Always a Victim"); i.e., Nazi Force of Will arguments borrowed from older ethnocentric ones (re: "Canonical Essentialism") that have become ethnonationalist and bled into hauntological corporate media, post-WW2; e.g., Star Wars and the Force alluding quite strongly to Force of Will in neo-medieval, space opera, white-savior arguments. The fact remains, Capitalism is racist, and racism is bad for anyone who does it, but also allows said persons to do bad things until they are killed.
Indeed, there's no immediate visual difference between Nazi girl boss and Amazon (thought generally "darker" Amazons have a gorgon-esque flavor to them)—the function one of power's flow in either direction, and which can only be determined through play. To it, the Amazon is classically a matador for state employers, which the latter waves a red flag in front of to make her pounce (and which Radcliffe's Black Veil effectively is, the Radcliffean heroine—if not wiggling her butt, before the pounce, then at least moving it towards danger of a pirate sort; i.e., which scrappier-if-celibate detectives like Samus Aran [the myth of a smart cop* who solves mysteries versus defaulting to force, each and every time] follow through in their own stories: marrying Velma's magnifying glass [and skimpy clothes] to sexualized violence of a militant [Amazonian] kind; re: "Radcliffe's Refrain" and "The Puzzle of 'Antiquity'").
*Despite what Aliens, Metroid, and similar stories like to argue, it is not "intelligence" to faithfully enact cops-and-robbers violence; i.e., from a position of relative privilege in a police state (the same bullshit Israel does, or South Vietnam did, when punching down against their own populations/other nations populations). Anyone who thinks otherwise is just being a loyal attack dog for the state, little more than the elite's step-and-fetch it. Canonically Samus is a genocidal, bigoted manic, just like Ripley was. Only neoliberalism tries to disguise it, calling her a rape victim (and even if she was, collective punishment is a war crime, the real terrorists the state and the real counterterrorists being those the state dehumanizes; e.g., the xenomorph and metroids, which its cops dehumanize in omni-superstitious dogma, self-roboticizing to destroy nature with total impunity).
This animalized quality (re: "Predators and Prey") makes the canonical Amazon counterterrorist* "froggy"; i.e., to leap away from the elite (capital is a frontier exercise), thereby moving money through nature: by conducting Imperialism (the highest form of Capitalism) in colonial spaces that—during the Imperial Boomerang—bring said militarism home again (re: military urbanism enacted by TERFs in bad faith, monopolizing rape, penetration [which not all rape is] and victimhood for themselves, ergo the state). So we counter them, "just rocking and rolling"; i.e., in the usual cryptonymy that fascists can't easily spot (the merging of oral and written traditions for these liberatory aims); we tie them into knots, enjoying ourselves. This includes enjoying state propaganda differently than intended (which camp functionally is).
*Me, vis-à-vis Crawford's Gothic Fiction and Invention of Terrorism and Asprey's War in the Shadows (2013 and 1975), whereupon abjection reverses by anisotropically reversing terror/counterterror, mid-cryptonymy. The state has its "guerillas," and we have ours—the difference lying in function (flow of power), not aesthetics!
Unlike my creations' emergent-play qualities/approach, canonical Samus is a counterterrorist "scab" (strike-breaker); i.e., one who classically serves the same corporations Ripley did (the merger of corporation and state; re: Mussolini; e.g., the Weyland-Yutani corporation, but also the Galactic Federation); she's not a hero so much as an employee for propaganda purposes (so was Wonder Woman, but also Theseus kidnapping and marrying Queen Hippolyta).
Subjugated versus Subversive Amazons
Furthermore, such subjugated Amazons bear resemblance to their rebellious subversive counterparts; i.e., insofar as all are warriors with bullets, blades and bombs, while also being "bombshells" of the classical female (and genderqueer) sort: something that mutates into human form out of what, from the classic to Cartesian period, viewed as "inhuman" to modular degrees; e.g., women, queer people, persons of color and similar qualities of a larger policed workforce, but especially as "extended beings" tied to nature turned into warriors for the state (recuperating labor action from the world's oldest profession since ancient times, calling it "witch" in more recent eras using hauntological language and cryptonymy to conceal what is, for all intents and purposes, prostitution to a canonical degree): defending home on the cusp of invasion, therefore having grown prison-like under states of emergency (and martial law).
Can you teach an old (war) dog new tricks, reversing abjecting versus furthering? Will X-Fusion, all on its own, spare the Gorgon? I'm not sure save to say that, while we can't synthesize ideas without having material to play with, doing so remains iconoclastic; i.e., I never bought into the Metroid revenge argument Cameron borrowed from Heinlein's "nuke the Reds" refrain (specifically China, though Truman and his goons settled for napalming Korea, instead)—with Fusion releasing shortly after 9/11 during the War on Terror to create further "horrors" to pimp like whores (re: "Outlier Love"). I get the feeling Metaquarius does this, also furthering abjection while treating the Amazon's genderbending as "stuck" (favoring the state*).
*Often by making the Amazon a "feisty" sex pot; i.e., both having the cliché male/masculine-coded muscles and female/feminine-coded curves (e.g., Shadow of the Ninja, below) that, when combined, speak to female invulnerability against rape as a state-authored DARVO argument waving the damsel demon (ninja, what-have-you) in front of the would-be rapists. She's bait, but trained for war while attacking enemies that don't exist (aka victims). In turn, these classic Amazonian gender subversions are merely fig leaves; i.e., for Capitalist Realism, the Amazon immediately banished post-triumph alongside the shadows (of state abuse) she defeats. Magically turning into a bride (or otherwise nubile, defanged maiden to "restore balance" after "getting even"), she's always "on call," the state needing her alter-ego on standby—meaning for future acts of pre-emptive revenge. I'd say it's no different than the Contras from Operation Condor or the Zionist settlers in Palestine, except the colonizer works at home (often a Children's Crusade playing soldier). Either way, assimilation is an ugly business, one the state dresses up as "pick me" heroism: versus crime waves, drug wars, rape epidemics in furtherance to genocide during vigilante (stochastic) police action (ninja, like Samus, are paid under the table). There's always a "next time," ergo a genocide they'll be called to enact: keeping "evil" at bay by patrolling home as alien, canceled (and often by a good bloodline of cops; e.g., the Belmonts or the Chaus, of men or women serving Patrilineal Descent). Trauma is something to face and destroy—in effect denying and burying it alive. Punching death (as alien) is what mirror syndrome is, permanent resolution a thing to deny by cryptomimetic means (fragments of the Medusa).
By comparison I chose to increasingly fetishize the Amazon through carefully rebellious introspection: as a canonically paradoxical, Promethean protector that, in my capable hands, subverts her subjugated role (and its classic gendered elements' subversion for state aims) while wrecking house and home, in-game; i.e., as token colonizer to subvert, thereby reversing abjection on all registers pimping the warrior whore, mid-cryptonymy. We're both chameleons (masters of disguise making war at cross purposes); mine challenges theirs (and their moribund creation stories built on death) through a meta dialog furthering or reversing abjection, through Metroidvania's central Amazonomachia.
The Gothic story concerns the princess as woken rudely up inside an alien house, and escaping its menacing liminalities as the Amazon do—through monomythic force fetishizing nature, pimping the whore per all the usual Cartesian refrains! Liberating the whore happens through exploitative (and, at times, explosive) dialogs, because that is where canon is camped; re: "to interrogate power, you must go where it is," which Metroidvania reify as person and place ontologically out-of-joint and hopelessly interwoven. Simply put, it's my jam, but especially Amazons (which Metroidvania are home to, and whose Amazons canonically serve profit; i.e., offered to players by greedy companies to pacify the latter with, the former doing so using all the Patriarchal language history affords: she-Beowulf avatars offering up "exceptions" that prove the rule).
To it, let's continue exploring Amazons—their abject bodies, quests, spaces, and invariable confusions that invite ludo-Gothic BDSM (rape play) to camp their canonical roles with, under capital; i.e., as something to reverse abjection with, thus profit—during joy under fascism, effectively wearing the same monstrous clothes (therefore arguments) the usual police forces abuse (refer to "Zombie Police States" for a more earthbound example). "Land back" = "sex back," therefore all the things about Amazons that are abject, to start with, which our cryptonymic terror reverses through play as half-real (e.g., fan art, and similar kinds of daily synthesis that good praxis demands, below). Everyone loves monsters (and whores); the Amazon myth becomes much-needed shorthand, her monster-whore status speaking in duality to various concealed/concealing things using preferential code (especially sex and force, love and war).
Amazon Bodies (as Armor and Weapons)
Abject for being monstrous-feminine, Amazon bodies armor and arm the same way that men do, but suffer a double standard; i.e., sex sells, and capital pimps female/feminine sex as warlike in readily recognizable forms, mise-en-abyme: monster girls, waifus, and female avengers—meaning Amazon as derelict, "ancient/neo-medieval" castles in the flesh sold to the usual enjoyers of "castration fears" (routine imperial collapse). "My mommy used to say there are no monsters, not real ones, but there are, aren't there?" She becomes a costume to wear and kick ass with, effectively a return of fascism; i.e., through a Nazi vampire in canonical variants (e.g., Striga from Castlevania, below); re: the "dark" Amazon haunted by the Medusa on her surface, going "rabid" and requiring euthanasia or banishment to deal with (and where rabies and vampirism, but also sodomy historically overlap in medieval thought):
(model and artist: Autumn Anarchy and Persephone van der Waard)
All the same, this blade cuts in a variety of directions, Amazons both classically naked and phallic. Monstrous-feminine = any female/feminine (or GNC, non-white, etc) element the state marries to status-quo masculine properties, including the ability to instruct about sacred things (which war most certainly is, but especially in "defense" of the nuclear household through false flags*); from Sparta onwards, Western society is taught to wage war through its women raising men as pro-state creation stories: to further abjection by chasing sex and having dominant, "queen** of the household" vibes (a trend also observed in Eastern cultures; e.g., the brides of Japanese shogun, during the Warring-States Period, historically defending their husband's castles; i.e., taught in the art of war by their husbands, away at war).
*From Sun Szu: "All war is predicated on deception" (which speaks to the cryptonymy process as one of show and concealment for different class-war aims, generally in monstrous-feminine language).
**Incest is a core Gothic theme; i.e., regarding the home, thus house as alien. While not a topic we have time to explore, here, you can explore such themes in Japanese culture through my books—specifically a subchapter on incest in Japanese culture (re: "Moe/Ahegao, Incest, and Eco-Fascism in Japanese Exports").
If the "clothes" are abject, it begs the question: how do we tell the difference, per wardrobe?
My sweet summer child, it all boils down to what these ghosts of the counterfeit serve—profit or people, state's rights versus workers' (re: "It Began with a Whisper"). A whore is a whore, and whores gentrify and decay under capital (re: "A Cruel Angel's (Modular) Thesis"); i.e., in ways our revolutionary cryptonymy must counteract (there historically being no tenable, long-term monopoly concerning violence, terror or monsters; re: Weber, Asprey and myself; see: "The State: Its Key Tools" in "Paratextual Documents"): "I'm nekkid and 'in danger'; don't fuck with meeeeeee!"
Amazon Roles (the Quest)
Per the monomyth, the hero has a quest assigned to them, a duty to perform that generally requires a "monster" to die (a grim harvest, during the liminal hauntology of war). Speaking of, Metaquarium's own advertisement bastardizes Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil (1886); i.e., just like Metroidvania do, specifically its "gaze into the abyss" refrain: "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster, for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you" (source). Metaquarium, in response, argues "Sometimes the only is way to defeat a predator is to become one." This is the quest, and one where Metaquarium is hardly the first to try—an act done previously by the Nazis* in the 1930s and '40s, but also by James Cameron pimping nature, in 1986. Learning to "love the Bomb" (as a tool of fear that puts butts in seats), Cameron literally quotes Nietzsche in his ostensibly-anti-(nuclear)-war-but-still-Red-Scare movie, The Abyss (1989; re: "Out of This World").
*When emulating American genocide (re: Bad Empanada's "From Manifest Destiny to Lebensraum").
Itself written and shot by a famously punitive and egotistical white centrist (and Pygmalion who married his own starring actress, Linda Hamilton), The Abyss and Cameron's earlier movies all showcase a Cartesian fraud, one flip-flopping aggressively between American jingoism and anti-cop narratives; i.e., depending on which side of the national border his script concerns (the usual "boundaries for me, not for thee" nonsense). It's "billionaire Marxism," which is to say, not Marxism at all except through allegory (thus the "play" of interpretation).
In other words, apocalypse is fractal, but also fractally recursive—Cameron's fabled Amazonomachia pointedly packaged, like a Trojan Horse, in neo-conservative, American liberal disguises: the modest former-whore-turned-savior/naughty nun preaching state salvation while playing at rebel; i.e., a witch cop (re: "Witch Cops and Victims"). The Terminator (1984), for example, feared the whispered assassin, specifically a black knight (with an Austrian name) emerging from another time—a "possible future" now destroyed by Frankensteinian hubris—to attack the present as "not set" (re: "Healing from Rape"); Aliens, by comparison, cements the hauntology to embody the same assassin versus a different Amazon, meaning through the same "found document" approach Walpole founded "Gothic" on (re: "The Puzzle of 'Antiquity'"): fetishizing the conqueror as, in Cameron's case, an Amazon slave trying to re-assimilate a world falling apart (the Avatar franchise speaking to the same ludologist refrain/dilemma that Cameron used to rake in his "fuck you" money).
All this being said, Samus is basically "girl Hercules" (echoing the monomyth); i.e., performing her Labors for the gods (re: the Galactic Federation, aka "Space NATO"), the Promethean story one of the monomyth in crisis, hence decay. It's vital, then, to remember how Samus is a predator, but specifically one to reify through mercenary action sown by forever wars "among the stars" (re: the displacement of current conflicts, here on Earth; re: "Military Optimism"). Mercenaries aren't homebodies, but homewreckers; i.e., bastard, illegitimate, but also "might makes right" whores with an axe to grind. Boldly demanding "Crom, count the dead!" (or some such braggadocio), they ply their gruesome trade; i.e., while guided largely by conquest (the guild "mystery" or trade secret kept secret through force and reputation alike): in furtherance of fame and fortune, glory and revenge as being and bearing the royal "imprimatur" (seal of quality) during latter-day apologia; re: Bakhtin's chronotope concerning history as one "of dynastic primacy and hereditary rites" walked through like a museum (source: The Dialogic Imagination, 1981).
Embodied, per my arguments, by the Amazon-as-castle "played out," we're routinely left with a derelict of ill omen expressed in small—a black castle whose appearance (and exploration during ergotic motion) whispers fearfully of medieval-coded "piracy"; i.e., that which Metroidvania have made, since the 1980s corporate boom, their selling point. Some things never change; a Metroidvania without an Amazon (or at least a gorgon to slay inside a closed space) generally feels like its missing something: the woman behind the curtain (re: Radcliffe's Black Veil classically having a "dead" statue behind it, meaning Galatea slated for prostitution after being cuffed for her "uppity" back talk). The classic quest is the monomyth, after all:
Furthermore, and in keeping with capital, everything described above operates under the Protestant ethic, mid-quest; i.e., as explored by Tolkien towards Cameron's refrain (the treasure map vs the shooter); re: "On Twin Trees." Samus, as such, is an Amazon "raised by wolves" (or giant bird aliens, in her case); i.e., post-colonial collapse, and commissioned for war accordingly during the usual "zero missions" into many more, afterwards: a cycle of generational trauma that regenerates—meaning insofar as capital must always have an alien to pimp, thus exterminate (as vermin) during said dialectic (and all while giving some love to the usual workers [often men] alienated from a healthy sense of motherhood; re: "Hugging the Alien" but also Mark Greene's "Man Box" and, per my arguments, weird canonical nerds vs weird iconoclastic nerds, mid-Gothic).
To it, there's a lot of settler-colonial apologia, therefore DARVO and obscurantism, in Metroid—both during Nintendo's neoliberal (corporate) revival of old ethnocentric arguments (specifically the map of conquest; re: "On Canonical Essentialism"), but also during "indie" fan stories; e.g., like Metaquarium's X-Fusion celebrating the whore: as something of a "Russian doll" to gestate inside (an inversion of the usual breeding kinks yet serving power through the same Amazon power fantasies; i.e., for girls punching down to please their patriarchal masters, and for boys and men "getting the girl": as haunted by her own spectral, tokophobic* fetus, below).
*For more on this topic vis-à-vis Creed and Aliens, refer to my interview with "Mira" (an alias); re: in "Solving Riddles."
Regardless of gender or sex, race or religion, workers divide through accident of birth; i.e., from non-workers—the former born into structures of invasion that, by corporate design, compel us towards (and into) police violence. Monomyth heroes aren't jailors; they don't capture enemies of the state, but kill them outright and without mercy. Per abjection, Samus just another costume for these aims, one whose cryptonymy the state will try to monopolize: until they no longer can, demanding its ritual euthanasia concealing the abortion; i.e., of those outside the womb (the glass screen a black mirror echoing the glass jar housing Mother Brain longing for release; re: Athena's Aegis also Medusa's mirror to further or reverse abjection with, speaking to players also trapped inside).
Corporate dogma gestates inside the brains of workers like Metaquarium, and whose "head canon" treats the entire thing like a return to form (and space of play to retell old stories); i.e., a thing to celebrate for the violence on display but also the dialectical-material context: a fantasy-as-blockbuster smash during state crisis—meaning in and out of the game, reviving "the good-ol'-days" that never really existed, save as fatal nostalgia. So does Samus smash Radcliffean fears of collapse, the player controlling her during rising inheritance anxieties, offstage; i.e., through neoliberal (therefore genocidal, American) force; re (from Volume Zero):
Under Capitalist Realism, Hell is a place that always appears on Earth [or an Earth-like double]—a black fortress threatening state hegemony during the inevitable decay of a colonial body. Its widening state of exception must then be entered by the hero during the liminal hauntology of war as a repeatable, monomythic excursion—a franchise to subdue during military optimism sold as a childhood exercise towards "playing war" in fantastical forms; e.g., Castlevania or Metroid. Conjure a Radcliffean menace inside the Imperial Core, then meet it with American force (source: "Scouting the Field").
Metroid, by extension, speaks to the Imperial Boomerang and military urbanism as bringing Imperialism home to empire; i.e., as capital decays into fascism, losing control of its outer colonies while its inner ones melt down (and present themselves as "outer" to maintain Capitalist Realism, state barbers giving Medusa (the whistleblower) a "haircut"; re: "Toxic Schlock Syndrome"). Indeed, Super Metroid starts with an exploding space station, and Fusion takes place entirely inside one where you also have to escape at the end (with a timer clocking and counting down your mad dash to the finish, killing everything in your way)!
Abjection as Space
Moving through time requires space, which the Gothic makes monstrous; i.e., as something to interrogate for different purposes, mid-Amazonomachia. As a Gothic device, cryptonymy works with clothing and quest to explore the spaces described above to further or reverse abjection. There's much fabrication to observe, and all to sell the illusion as "homely" in a hauntologically monomythic sense: through the Gothic chronotope as a fearsome argument of fake parentage, ergo dead futures the Amazon explores; i.e., per Mark Fisher's own, albeit unfinished cyberpunk work alongside my scholarship on Metroidvania (the latter speaking to a retro-future extermination of the nuclear bloodline, this only restored by state actors after great sacrifice).
Regarding Samus' human parents, the franchise blames their death on "space pirates"; i.e., space fascism and Communism occupying the same draconian veneer (and Ridley being a none-to-subtle homage to Alien's British director)—only for the unlucky army brat to be taken and passed from home to home (a bit like Zofloya's Victora de Loredani, 1806): by a corporation after those "good" alien stepparents, the Chozo, are also killed (themselves effectively haunting the ruins of their own civilization; i.e., laid low by Forbidden-Planet-style* [1956] hubris and blaming the whore—specifically Medusa's spiky brain in a glass jar—for their own colonial ambitions).
*See: "'Men of Reason Suck'; or, Ghosts of Freud in Forbidden Planet" from my Metroidvania chapter, "She Fucks Back." Frankly, the whole chapter is worth a look; i.e., for analyzing not just Metroid and its palimpsests, but also Axiom Verge and Hollow Knight (once the topics for my master's thesis): for the joy of exisiting as something the state calls "monster." The more we move, thus play, the more we learn (the Metroidvania a playground to teach different things, mid-abjection)!
"Whores are made," Diana Russel writes (source: "The Making of a Whore"); the same speaks to Pygmalion and Galatea, but the language that reinforces such things can—during joy under fascism—become a powerful way of separating ourselves from our trauma in theatrically potent ways; i.e., a return to "trauma" in quotes, the heroine exploring taboos through stories writ in disintegration—doing so meant to protect the player and the audience, alike, from unspeakable crimes that demand testimony where speech is absent (e.g., incest, murder and rape). It becomes a game, and games are meant to give players control over themselves and their surroundings; Metroidvania, to do so while trauma is everywhere and nothing is certain—save that control over our trauma is cathartic: a lucid dream with nightmarish flavors!
As always happens (and very much by design), such things rapidly grow out of control; i.e., by escaping a given maze to reinvade the homefront, which then must be recolonized by the would-be mothers of the Imperial Core seeking pre-emptive revenge against straying state secrets; i.e., Beowulf's mother versus Grendel's (or Perseus's versus the Minotaur's), bleeding into future, well, retro-future; re: Cameron's mothers of a canceled future bonding with aliens through war as, itself, a bringer of various wishes: "blown up," canonically like a balloon, to serve state aims—a gross, kayfabe piñata to bash for treats, or give treats to while hyperbolically dying for the Greater Good (re: the baby metroid from Super versus Mother Brain to save Samus—with our heroine expected, sooner or later, to return the favor).
As a process, abjection lingers uncomfortably inside an unstable vacuum—one whose myriad hauntologies hover up the usual pieces; i.e., to administer, like poison, during questionable inheritance pirated by the usual benefactors crying wolf (the elite, but also the middle class they coddle and coerce, menticiding them into cops). "This time, it's war!" Cameron's trailer declared (timestamp: 1:45); Metaquarium returns to similar Promethean zones, selling war the same ways Cameron did (aping Heinlein): "Come on, you apes! You wanna live forever!" It's Starship Troopers (1959) without the irony and all the Hollywood glitz (retro-future swords and sorcery "in space," similar to Star Wars evoking Flash Gordon):
So when Samus "returns," she's an orphan colonist* who does so many times (re: from a ruined past, damned at birth); i.e., going back to an "other" place that bears her second family's seal, but also said family's destroyer having "usurped" said seal as a fictitious "original" (the ghost of the counterfeit being both the act of fakery and various things contained with/within said act—what Matthew Lewis called "an artificial wilderness"). Avenging them, there's a jouissance (read: orgasmic, rapturous) quality to it all, Samus playing the conqueror "rescuing Rome" as much as white Indian/white savior (re: "In Search of the Secret Spell"); i.e., in ways that let her "go native" as Rambo does (a CIA "plant," dressed up as vagabond everyman): a token assimilator triggered by a "native" population the game conflates with colonizer as having seemingly been everywhere in the galaxy. Samus sees "home" as raped, and rapes in kind her employers' enemies.
*I.e., not an immigrant, like Superwoman, because the places Samus goes to are framed as "dead," meaning "free-fire zones" where everything is killed on sight (with possible exceptions to propaganda animals, aka "Good Nature" versus stigma predatory animals like spiders and mantids, who Samus—the apex predator—destroys to dominate the planet on a given quest). She's raised from birth to fight an enemy that isn't real, but whose victims are; i.e., children are victims of propaganda that menticides them into Pavlovian mercenaries who exterminate other victims on command, compounding generational trauma across class, culture and race lines—someone sleepwalking through life (versus conscious; re: Marx), skeptical of anything that isn't the state (re, Eco: "pacifism is trafficking with the enemy").
To it, canonical Samus is a plague—a "creeping death" nightmare that projects onto her victims through a veritable mark of Cain: that of the Chozo household laid low. But in the eyes of those the state has raised to worship (and pilot) her while chasing the Numinous (to pimp it), Samus remains a dream come true; i.e., mid-nightmare (and still being wholly capable of Spartan-esque war "in the buff," below). Idle hands are the devil's workshop, the state busying them to hunt devils down (or survive them, below): weaponizing nudity of different kinds, mid-cryptonymy and mid-moral-panic to a fiery Icarian degree. Many spaces in Metroid (or similar games; e.g., Alien: Isolation, below) are too hot or too cold, our resident Goldilocks surrounded by (space) "bears" seeking food; i.e., while she, the game's token Amazon, seeks shelter from their predation (she's never allowed to "power creep" like Samus is, a ludic quality survival horror has over Metroidvania; re: "Mazes and Labyrinths").
Apart from the cowboys-and-Indians refrain, the "ancient" colonial refrain is awfully convenient—a false flag that fakes its own sovereignty to justify Enlightenment crimes that token Amazons enact on loop. These enable recursive Pavlovian centrism through military optimism—Samus the war bitch forever in chase of her own tail, ergo fictional past; i.e., chasing the dragon, Vietnam-style, to seek revenge against a ghost of revenge, thus do the company's dirty work for them until she goes mad; re: the euthanasia effect, Hogle's ghost of the counterfeit being dragons, space vampires, and the Gorgon/Mother Nature as targeted by a would-be assimilator suffering from mirror syndrome. Violence is classically an act committed by the fearful acting tough, but also the victim needing to be brave to survive those who put her there. Therein lies the refrain (and the rub): she's trapped between being the hero and the whore showing the player her gentials when they do well (a parasite controlling her to parasitoidal degrees). It's a very confused, troubled heroism, but one we can camp, mid-confusion, to reclaim it for ourselves, onstage and off.
Amazon Confusion (and Camping Its Troubles for Ourselves)
While we can camp such matters, "Samus" remains canonically Quixotic—a machine girl tilting at windmills (dragons), mid-gaslight; i.e., one with false memories, implanted by the game programming the player controlling an avatar (often teenage boys reliving a childhood-that-never-was); re: to smash the unheimlich, Radcliffe-style*, furthering abjection during a half-real process, thereof. So is nature pimped, but specifically by whores policing whores, the alien eating the alien; i.e., mercenaries of a bastard, oft-sexualized (or fetish, military) character (re: "Policing the Whore"). It's a catfight, one where the white-to-black, nun's-habit maiden versus the whore as "black," yet also remains haunted by her and those behind her pulling her strings (e.g., Mother Brain, but also the SA-X, metroids and Dark Samus [an allusion to Plato's Cave, similar to Dark Link from Zelda II onwards, below]—as speaking to player control being equally shadowed by state forces [and victims] during the meta operation: "black" = alien, a "mask-like" skin but also simulacrum, or the identical copy of something that never existed; e.g., orcs being the "copy" of some original "evil" to vanquish to maintain state control by threatening maidens with black rape, mid-abjection; re: "Concerning Big Black Dicks"): literally the shadow of doubt, of cognitive dissonance to duel and repression through self-destructive force (e.g., Luke dueling Vader).
*The female detective, but now with a gun, above (re: "Radcliffe's Refrain").
Furthermore, from me, vis-à-vis Seth Giddings and Helen Kennedy (re: "Little Jesuses and *@#?-off Robots," 2008), (video)games canonically master players through coded instructions, including Metroidvania and other haunted-house stories that program through fear (of a quasi "historical" sort; re: Bakhtin's chronotope); e.g., me analyzing The Witch's House in "Our Ludic Masters"; i.e., as capital's echoed dungeon, yet-another-bog to crawl through (and cleanse) for monomyth purposes (false power): chasing down the whore and showing her who's boss! That's what Metroidvania are canonically for (re: "Regarding my Amazon Research," in "From Master's to PhD"): distributing pornographic violence with extreme prejudice that favors the state.
Yet, camp is a curiously medieval affair from Walpole to Monty Python; e.g., "Strange women distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government!" Except, this process can also reverse, becoming actual apostacy whose Numinous challenges the state (re: "I, Satanist; Atheist"). "Power," for the historically disadvantaged (e.g., nuns vs monks, below), reclaims through play as more disadvantaged than it might be otherwise (re: also below, "Help, help! I'm bein' repressed! Come and see the 'violence' inherent in the system!"). Lewis' Matilda was a demonic fraud not just in a nun's habit, but a devil dressed as a woman dressed as a man waging war against Man. A bit like an Amazon, no (though more Faustian)?
So whilst empowerment and disempowerment occupy the same "live burial" spaces and surfaces Gothic conventions* emblematize—meaning mid-liminal-expression (re: "Mazes and Labyrinths")—we Gothic Commies are breaking through boundaries to shatter Capitalist Realism; i.e., with whatever we can, including abusing Amazons (from Metroidvania or elsewhere, above) in suitably iconoclastic ways. Again, we do so through the cryptonymy process camping "rape" in quotes (a ravishing speaking to good sex, also above); i.e., which Hogle described as a "double operation," one that shows and hides a variety of ostensibly "unspeakable" but, in truth, entirely vocal things: closer and closer to a given "vanishing point," hence place of concealment that "censors" itself. Its own "X" to solve, the Amazon does for giving the game away from the outside-in; i.e., whilst framing it, all the same, as "just a game" (the exploring of a house house just that). Within this framed story lurks tremendous obscurity, power and decay that—much to bourgeois chagrin—transfers mastery... somewhere.
*Re: Segewick's Coherence of Gothic Conventions.
To that, an Amazon is a witch, but needn't serve the state through said transfers; i.e., by leading its usual witch hunts away from themselves. Instead, she can camp them "on the Aegis," thus "in echo." Per Castricano, Gothic is cryptomimetic on its face (a façade, in churchly language and bodies, above); per me, this extends to revolution while not just writing with ghosts (re: Castricano, vis-à-vis Derrida), but all manner of monsters, including Amazons exploring monstrous tombs "for the Man." The cryptonymy their embody extends to their subterfuge as performative, ludic; i.e., existing between players controlling avatars for a variety of reasons.
As such, the player accepts a ludic contract—normally Faustian to their detriment—and employs it ironically to deceive others, instead: those foisting it onto the player to start with. In either case, the story contains half-hidden messages; i.e., conveyed, in plain sight and in plainclothes, through an Amazon meta voice that's classically bereft of clothes; re: weaponized public nudism during paradoxical protection through exposure: that can just as easily defy state powers despite being slated for death (the state finding ways to constantly recruit Samus, of course).
Think Radcliffe's "armoring" process, minus the classic swooning when exposed to danger. Amazons don't faint; they kick ass while also being sex symbols—specifically sex objects—in ways white straight men classically aren't; i.e., clothed while nude, or whose "clothing cryptonymy" Amazons specialize in (and Gothic heroines more broadly experience, mid-chronotope). It's a form of projection onto, meaning through the performance being acted out/viewed in a sink-or-swim vacuum of compartmentalized environments (e.g., the separate laboratories from Fusion); i.e., walled-off among the dead metaphors on purpose (which Amazons also specialize in): find a knowledge gap (of the forbidden sort) and fill it.
As far as that goes, sexual frustration historically leads to death by Snu-Snu, and Amazons function as gatekeepers of the Humanities under attack by capital forces calling them, in so many words, "abject." Neoliberalism dressing up role rule as "polite" (a relic of British colonialism) erases the brutality of it all (alongside the myth that fighting isn't violent; e.g., no matter how polite/gentrified Chris Eubank is, war's war and hitting someone is fundamentally violent). The fact is, you don't kill home rule with kindness, and rebellion is always violent, including its performance reclaiming itself from the police! Reversing abjection will be seen as "violent" by killing state heroes—specifically by tarnishing their reputations, exposing their as murders and frauds.
So is agency found—much like the artefacts of power a Metroidvania classically holds—during play through spatial motion and containment; i.e., the sort permitting heroic bodies repeatedly braving its maze-like depths (sexual innuendo very much encouraged by the authors and text, from Freud onwards); re: darkness visible; e.g., faeries of a darker sort abducting the audience through feelings of an "arresting" character that resists perception, mid-spectation, as one of self-reflection run amok: something to chain up, mid-panopticon. Like a savage stolen from faraway lands, said lands nonetheless come "from a sample of one"; i.e., indicating the player's home having become alien, their avatar alien in ways they cling to: like Mommy (which, per Cameron into Metroidvania, has an ethnocentric [therefor racist, Red Scare] refrain to its cartographic and morphological refrain; re: cops and robbers of a black-vs-white hauntological sort; see: "Always a Victim").
Fully exposed, such things will undoubtedly offend modern sensibilities, but nonetheless remain part of a romanticized inheritance stolen from older national characters (and their godly pantheons): as "pagan," therefore alien in ways the Gothic fascinates through chains as paradoxically apotropaic—with the Roman god Fascinus being a literal penis god who protected worshipers from the Evil Eye... by starring at penis-like, or at least "phallic," objects viewed as symbols of virility and health due to sexist reasons (re: Athens, the nuclear family model, male invincibility myths, etc): the Amazon as paradoxical unapproachable and "breedable" through "volcanic" courtly love, something to binge-feed on; i.e., Byron's "I want a hero."
The Amazon, recruited by the state, is both a protector and a nurturer with war-like elements the state can't monopolize. Yet we must reclaim them from the same stories while revisiting them ourselves, the splendid mendax oddly "edible*"; e.g., Ayla from Chrono Trigger (above), envisioned in ways that celebrate her basic design being "good enough to eat" (or eat us, on the same food chain); re: aesthetics don't matter, function does—the classic idea of reversing abjection being to thrive in spite of white straight whiny male nerds acting outraged to pimp you through disgust (e.g., Th3Birdman's "Exposing the Grift: Nerdrotic Lies To You About Ironheart").
*I.e., mid-consumption, though the Gothic does love a good pun/literal take on things; e.g., "This n*gga eatin' his gun!" (Key and Peele's "A Different Kind of Drive-By"). To quote another (classic) phrase from them, put the pussy on the chainwax! I took it to heart (re: "Shining a Light on Things" from Volume Zero, and "Pussy on the Chainwax!" from Volume Three). To reverse abjection is to "do a Communism," and to do a Communism, you gotta "start a thing."
So the Amazon walks the tightrope; i.e., by unfolding a curiously "Spartan" tradition of muscles for clothes, one that translates imperfectly into tokenized forms during reactionary politics—a sign of paradoxically honoring the gods while defying them, and one whose panoply of dark traditions (and older gods), to quote Marx (about the language of war and state, at large), "weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living" (source: "The Eighteenth Brumaire," 1852). Whores wage their own wars, generally for their right to exist. In turn, nightmares are often naked—insofar as we "forget" to wear pants (or some such custom)—and all the while, the plight of the Gothic heroine also concerns her Amazonian potential (and crossed wires): during modesty arguments challenging her purity through weaponized exposure to nude, boiling temptation (of period blood, or otherwise); i.e., as "castled," itself seemingly haunted by spectres of Caesar and Marx but also Medusa, mid-cryptonymy. Per the Gothic, it's masturbatory and silly-serious, the hell-trotting pariah/exile caught between Comedy and Drama, but also powerful warriors known to such spaces' kayfabe cryptonymy for psychosexual purposes.
"If we spirits have offended, think but this and all is mended..." Amazons are "dreamlike," fantastical and far-off—their uncanny ability to pacify and offend useful to slipping the mask of many-a-bad-actor. And furthermore, while so many eyeballs rest on that exposed flesh surrounded by occupied darkness, Amazons appear unsightly under broad daylight. Feared by capital for their whorish, "conqueror" qualities, the state will tolerate Amazons, anyways; i.e., for their policewoman's role, the feeling of otherwordly surveillance speaking to a stately intelligence, and one dressed up as Radcliffe would: as pirates hiding behind "ghosts," the Amazon a ghost of her own conquering turned into state terror language sissies outwardly hate and secretly love. She's a drill sergeant, relegated to army spaces gone to seed—a military cryptonymy (re: the Gothic castle a military space and home for soldiers of a medieval sort: knights, including female knights of a hauntological sort, aka Amazons). The monopoly of dominion is imperfect—something to confuse, camp and play with by either side.
"Domination" through Confusion (re: Ludo-Gothic BDSM)
Amazons are historically confused monsters, and reverse abjection through ludo-Gothic BDSM playing with dominion (rape) at cross purposes; i.e., on surfaces and thresholds, which include bodies and boundaries, the latter commonly expressed as territories previously mapped out (with Metroid games classically having map stations with prerecorded data, the idea borrowed from Aliens' floorplan scenes). And in this tradition "of all dead generations," Ripley (or her clones, above) assume command: "Hudson, just relax!"
In fact, the canonical double standards only crystalize under her newfound clemency and tenure lacking the irony that ludo-Gothic BDSM affords; i.e., Amazons are classically impostors (or treated like impostors who assimilate, punching down to push up at the cost of former community support they abandon, and then police; re: Federici), but again, this cryptonymy cuts both ways, when playing governess to soldiers (Jane-Eyre-meets-Rambo). Furthermore, any camping of said nightmare occurs through play during the narrative of the crypt (and its infernal concentric pattern navigated by heroes of all sorts; re: Aguirre's "Geometries of Terror*," 2008)—and all while dealing in/with illusions the state cannot monopolize; i.e., we're chasing the Numinous to learn from it (thus Amazons) in class-conscious ways: as an epic, "danger disco" disaster of controlled proportions (re: during ludo-Gothic BDSM and its calculated risk; see: "The Quest for Power"). So can workers controlling the Amazon-as-terror-weapon effectively reverse Kristeva's abjection process, doing so per Creed's monstrous-feminine and Hogle's aforementioned ghost of the counterfeit—on the Aegis of a palliative Numinous while the game "fucks" the player (and generally in more ways than one, below)! "Stare and tremble!"
*A narrative of the crypt" that, Hogle describes, is the only survivor—a found document that, like Ozymandian sands or Amazonian pastiche, goes on and on and on, mid-cryptonymy... (and one I interrogate during chaotically "female" space feared and fetishized by Freud's ilk; re: in "Geometries in Terror" from "She Fucks Back"); or, as I write in "Our Ludic Masters": "Initially the player controls the hero thinking they are the hero. Future playthroughs are made by a player who knows they're playing an imposter. Perhaps they think they can defeat this menace by 'really' beating the game: acquiring the 'best ending.' Instead, the game wins, trapping the player inside a foregone conclusion. There is no escape" (source).
Again, all Metroidvania pimp the whore-as-cop, but generally under imposter fears touting the "enemy within"; i.e., as Trojan Horse (the original made by Athena to help sack Troy—the goddess also having cursed Medusa to prevent rape). Each game has a nasty surprise to hide and reveal, confusing the senses to hide the monster in plain sight.
Fusion, for example, differs from older Metroid titles, the X parasite a parasitoid (meaning it kills its host) targeting the very state trying to imbibe it (a plot point borrowed from Alien from Frankenstein from the Promethean myth viewed, post-Cartesian-Revolution, through nature as alien). As such, X is a copycat that—suffering from the usual dualities, per liminality—copies the colonizer as already tokenized and copied on loop; i.e., the SA-X is an Ozymandian, "ancient evil" copy of the state model repeatedly colonizing space, and space trying to return home. The past is essentialized as always having "one more evil" to exterminate, the current astronoetic example more evil than those before (similar to the Drow being more evil than orcs are, in D&D canon), and which the token conqueror goes rabid facing the mechanisms of state laid bare; i.e., as overlapping with guerrilla methods the state will try to take back from native forces (the X being the original inhabitant of the metroid homeworld, SR-388).
Furthermore, per the abjection process, the effect is not unlike a black mirror—one shining death (the argument for state force, mainly capital punishment) back onto the token colonizer as colonized, mid-abjection. "Death" can mean anything the state wants it to, generally through imbricating persecution networks that abjection permits by design; i.e., things state actors (monomyth heroes) use to target nature beyond the traditional targets, and to modular degrees; e.g., queer people and sodomy, women and witchcraft, Jews and blood libel, but able to shuffle any pairing to pit this against that in a cops-and-victims way. Anything goes, provided profit is canonically upheld; re: Amazons are abject, but this plays on in endless varieties that serve one single purpose (for all the state cares): shoot to kill, a given "witch" kill-on-sight. "How 'bout some fire, Scarecrow?" The Tinman needs a heart, the Lion as cowardly as they come.
As such, the witch—already a viral entity—survives between all of them; i.e., on the Aegis, the land indicative of the very "peaches" the state carves up, in small. To survive token Amazons (re: witch cops), witches of a rebellion sort cannot just keep quiet; their enchantments beckon the huntress—bewitched by state pay to eat her own, cordyceps-style—into spaces that misguide her towards a Promethean outcome (reversing power to unmake the monomyth imposter, as Matthew Lewis did to Ambrosio); re: "on the Aegis" of a decolonized grim harvest, still emblematic of the land, but freed from token embarrassment: Satan wins, in the end!
This "fear" (of nature's revenge) describes the larger ethnocentric process that abjection concerns, and which token Amazons stall, under Capitalist Realism. In Metroid Fusion (and its spiritual successor, X-Fusion), the game of cat-and-mouse further confuses, the hunter becoming the hunted; i.e., in a boardwalk time-space that loops in on itself, the Amazon replaced, then exterminated by the newer model borrowed from old parts—parts that reproduce less through viral asexuality and more an asexual, indifferent approach to sexuality (once again echoing the plot to Alien); re: cryptomimesis speaking to imitation on both sides of an ongoing dualistic conflict. Fascism appears when the state is weak/dying by design; death and rebirth speak to actors good and bad (thus Nazi and Commie) occupying the same kayfabe veneers: her armor is confused, hunting Samus inside a space built for slaughter (aka "experiments"). Looks, in Gothic, can be deceiving—with Samus desperately needing to be be confused; i.e., needing to rely on more senses than sight alone in order to survive the labyrinth and its abject monster (and generally by performing various miracles to do so; e.g., laying bombs and rolling up into a ball to squeeze through tiny spaces).
Except, this war is asymmetrical, and during asymmetrical warfare, everything occupies the same shadow's surfaces and thresholds; re: mid-abjection as something to further or reverse; e.g., the SA-X reflects Samus' viral antics back in her face, whose cryptonymy and cryptomimesis are anisotropic but also, again, dualistic. Fascism is when the chickens come home to roost, copying and cannibalizing state workers (re: token Amazons); i.e., while Communism "fights fire with fire" using the same aesthetic to paralyze colonial machinery on all registers: Grendel's mother castrating Beowulf (female or not) through the act of looking (the Aegis a dark reflector similar to Medusa's zombie eyeballs, two images above). All the while, everything ties to sites of routine conquest, ergo heroic motion with an open-to-closed flavor (the treasure map/open world vs Cameron's refrain promoting urban/siege warfare in Metroidvania, below):
"When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer." Videogames are war simulators; in them, maps are built not merely to be charted and explored, but conquered through war simulations. The land is an endless site of conquest, war, rape and profit carefully dressed up as "treasure," "liberation" and "adventure," but in truth, brutalizing nature during endless wars of extermination borrowed from the historical and imaginary past as presently intertwined:
- top-left: Tolkien's refrain, "Thror's Map" from The Hobbit, 1937
—source: Weta Workshop
- top-right: Thomas Happ's map of Sudra from Axiom Verge, 2015
—source: magicofgames
- bottom-left: Team Cherry's map of Hallownest, from Hollow Knight 2017
—source: tuppkam1
- bottom-right: Bungie's map of the West from Myth: the Fallen Lords, 1997
—source: Ben's Nerdery
Though certainly not unique to Tolkien, and popularized in the shooter genre vis-à-vis Cameron, Tolkien near-single-handedly popularized the idea of "world-building" in fantasy by making a mappable world full of languages he invented, but which he tied to the larger process of world war that has been replicated countless times since; i.e., the idea of the map as a space for conquest that paralleled the elite raping Earth repeatedly as translated to the videogame format; e.g., Myth, Axiom Verge, Hollow Knight, above...)
The monomyth (and abjection process) demand bodies and spaces to abject, and which tokenism is a vital part of capital; i.e., on all registers—Metroidvania not just Amazonomachia in small, but genocide in small. The point is, "geography = destiny" is a canonical argument doomed to decay (on cryptonymy as cartographic, above)—with Samus the "Roman fool," specifically an Amazon punching the past to try and make it great again (and again and again and again...). Per the whore's revenge, Medusa comes up from Hell, only for Hippolyta (captured by Theseus) to slice the Gorgon's head free from her shoulders—in effect beheading herself or, at the very least, those like her to "mute" their dark testimony as subjugated, segregated, slotted for orderly disposal. "Peace" is a white man's word spoken by white women through force (the Amazon myth predating racist models of conquest, but surviving and growing into them like a brain in a jar).
This can certainly be confusing but also, as I've said, joyous. As said in a previous essay (re: "Joy Under Fascism"),
To it, Samus is the token Amazon sent to recapitate Medusa; i.e., the female (or intersex, non-white, Pagan, etc) brain in a jar that, once reinstalled (or "rediscovered" by the state inventing her dominion for monomyth slaughter), decapitates her again—all to police her wandering womb for Capitalist Realism: recolonizing a given colonial space out of petty state revenge or denying it (for equally petty motives) to a native population suing for peace/right of return (commonly framed as pirates or pests, but also zombies raped in their sleep, during false flags). When nature becomes unruly thus adverse to exploitation, the state historically retreats from a land they've bombed for profit; in Metroidvania, Samus nukes the planet but, alongside the map she routinely explores, remains haunted by her own crimes and trauma(re: mirror syndrome). Abjection is abjection.
Similar to Rambo, Samus works through stealth and speed—one made or captured by patriarchal authority (re: Pygmalion) that, sanctioned for temporary release/parole, "speedruns" through a given territory to (re)prime it for present destruction and future repopulation; re: per settler-colonial models (with heteronormative and Cartesian elements) that scorch the earth; i.e., as completely uninhabitable, reseeding the pariah land's wreckage to bury state secrets and euthanize/exile the Amazon as Pavlov's rabid dog: by banishing her, post-op, to hang the thief, mercenary, and whore as all-in-one, but also the race car cyborg as conspicuously female/monstrous-feminine, an iron maiden/war bitch. All whores are monsters, but some get notably more attention than others (e.g., white women); the ones capital hates the most are Communist, and which it tokenizes Amazon novelties to destroy while weaponizing themselves during military optimism (and insect politics): a WASP-y parasitoid furthering the Protestant ethic by moving money through nature, mid-genocide (re: me vis-à-vis Patel and Moore).
"Abjection is abjection," I write; snake oil is snake oil. The takeaway is Samus being a canonically toxic stand-in (avatar); i.e., for players taught to punch the alien when Imperialism comes home to empire during cryptonymy as mobile (the Nostromo a flying "castle" swept up in slave* labor, mad science and military abuse, but also the Nightmare from Metroid Fusion, below); re (from "Joy Under Fascism"):
*From Conrad's novel, Nostromo, being about a slave vessel of the same name. This makes the "eighth passenger" from Alien one that Fusion envisions through ubiquitous "body snatcher" or The-Thing-style imitation. Suddenly everyone's a threat in Samus' eyes (similar to Skynet); i.e., in ways whose widespread paranoia of replacement pushes our resident Amazon over the edge. A notorious hard-ass (read: survivor) who initially and reluctantly stays at the station to recover from an overnight "flu" (the "cabin in the woods" motif further occupied by bandits-in-disguise, this latter twist actually borrowed from Matthew Lewis' The Monk), Samus completely loses it; i.e., when faced with the mass hysteria of planetary-if-not-galactic home invasion: nuking the station (code for "home") from orbit, much how Ripley blows up her own ship (and later, the colony on LV-426). The problem is, the X parasite—unlike the xenomorph, before it—isn't modeled after a real organism; it's Cartesian panic for Red Scare hosting all life that exists, the story's meta cryptonymy speaking to Giger's Medusa standing in for Communism "covering the globe" (and other invasion fears; e.g., The Thing from Another World made during McCarthyism, similar to the original Body Snatchers film). No cost is too great, provided it saves the world—nay, the whole universe—from Communism eclipsing Cartesian ideas of "thinking beings" vs "extended beings: "The X mimicked a crew member..." The hypocrisy, here, is Samus does the same thing as "one of the good ones"; i.e., punching down at "Hannibal storming Rome" (which I guess would make her Scipio Africanus, a point we'll reexamine when "Fodder for the State" sees her attacking "the elephant in the room" quite literally). "Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss!"
Amazonomachia is half-real. So we can use the language of monsters like code and disguise to change hearts and minds (thus abjection); i.e., doing so versus abandonment, like Smith did in 2013. Her study of Berlin's liminalities—while certainly fascinating (and obscure) from a purely historical perspective—feels a tad myopic and exclusionary (as third wave feminism does, albeit to a lesser extent than second wave); i.e., by focusing on bourgeois whores who are female, cis and white, but also clothed and ostensibly polite, versus not. Tone-police much? Your prescription historically serves to pacify labor before it is killed (re: Hilter).
In short, when Berlin's battleground returns, like a flying castle, to the dialogs of scholarship and imagination, I find myself recalling Hogle's response to Punter's The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (1980):
In the Gothic from the later eighteenth century on, as David Punter has shown, "the middle class" often does what we have just seen Leroux do in Le Fantôme: it "displaces the hidden violence of present social structures, conjures them up again as past, and falls promptly under their spell" with feelings of both fear and attraction towards the phantasms of what is displaced (Punter, 418). The Gothic, well before Leroux adopts it, enables a growing bourgeois hegemony to be both haunted by and distanced from the "hidden barbarities" that have helped make it possible (Punter, 419)—and hence the repressed uncertainties it feels about its own legitimacy (as in Abraham's "phantom")—by projecting such anomalies into the horrors of apparently old and alien specters, buildings, and crypts (source: "The Ghost of the Counterfeit: Leroux’s Fantôme and the Cultural Work of the Gothic," 2002).
And yet, alongside the heart-stopping power of ghosts and tombs, we find the Amazonian "tomb raiders" of Metroidvania; i.e., caught between not just Hogle's counterfeit (and its ghost, mid-abjection), but Smith's fixation with whores; re: that don't look like whores, meaning monsters to abject. Any refusal or even neglect in that area contributes to the usual voids; i.e., those attached umbilically to punitive cultural signifiers that whores are known for and reach towards the usual panickers out of an imaginary past loaded with actual genocide: hugs from the Numinous patchwork (echoing Giger's xenomorph)!
(artist: Bryton Spurgeon)
Haunting the Surface: Liberation while Trapped "on the Aegis"
However abject they seem, voices matter. To deny the colonized any kind of voice—i.e., using the same kayfabe tools, mid-Amazonomachia, as half-real—is to monopolize these very tools for the state. But here I am, writing on and with these same tools; i.e., with ludo-Gothic BDSM as haunted by the very ghosts of trauma Samus canonically tries to exorcize, and we reverse on the same track. She never can, therein lies our chance to "break free." To liberate the Amazon from her canonical function is to reinterpret her actions, mid-play—meaning to have the whore's revenge, not the pimp's (re: "Rape Reprise"). We must challenge profit, and that happens through play as a means of understanding capital's usual refrains; i.e., to break Capitalist Realism (thus profit) with, not maintain them using Cameron's refrain like Metaquarius does by waking the dead (re: Metroidvania, but also post-Marston Amazons recapturing an "ancient Athens alien" vibe endemic to settler-colonialism, on and offstage).
To do so, we must acclimate to chaos "on the Aegis" we're trapped on and inside; i.e., as a shadowy "Twilight zone" space of play known to Metroidvania and its palimpsests scapegoating its own skeletons-in-the-closet: monsters—occupying and colonizing their darkness visible during the abjection process, which we reverse by understanding what role we're playing in the classic Metroid story (thus expected to carry out, beyond its walls). In it, Samus is always a monster, one Fusion strips down beyond Samus' birthday suit (a "murder hobo," in D&D parlance) to effectively merge maiden with metroid, guerilla with gallantry before antagonizing nature "for profit"; i.e., as a chaotic, biomechanical agent struggling to survive state predation (re: "Nature vs the State"): Samus is a prisoner made to carry war out, regardless if she wants to or not—a being chasing shadows while simultaneously afraid of them (evocations of rape) until she snaps: there is no escape, not at least one than mere force can solve. But Samus takes no prisoners, denying her foes a home to leave herself without one, too. It's akin to seeing a spider under your pillow and responding by burning your house down (white people shit, in other words).
So while I haven't played X-Fusion yet, I suspect it probably serves a canonical function given its bevy of monsters; i.e., for Samus to police, on par with Mega Man or any other male action hero in videogames: war cryptonymy dressed up as victory" through "peace" being forever stalled. Unlike Metaquarius, we must challenge said inheritance (and its faulty dogma) by not falling under the spell of "past" Hogle (through Punter) warns about: "by projecting such anomalies into the horrors of apparently old and alien specters, buildings, and crypts (source: "The Ghost of the Counterfeit: Leroux's Fantôme and the Cultural Work of the Gothic," 2002)." We see these, too, meaning on the surface of gorgons; i.e., staring back at our naked Amazon double on "the imagery of the surface" (re: Segewick): on the surface but also between thresholds the Gothic finds comfort in disturbing "for funsies."
Such is cryptonymy as having a class character waiting to wake up—by playing with monsters, mid-Amazonomachia, as the only way to reverse abjection (segregation is no defense, abstinence a kind of segregation); i.e., we (workers) are monsters, Nietzsche. The problem is capital; i.e., as something to "solve" by playing with said monsters to reclaim them, therefore raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness (re: Samus is a token traitor). That's the joy I'm taking about—not just emergent play but understandings of the text, mid-play, beyond its canonical, lurid and judgmental, punitive tutelage (re: fear of the alien, versus hugging it)! Inside the maze, X-Fusion celebrates a wide variety of monsters to thread with state material; re: by Metaquarius repeating the same-old mission Samus waits for us, on, next time: "See You Next Mission" a come-hither dare/moving goalpost gaslighting the hero to kill more monsters (all Amazons being monsters, who historically assimilate to punch down at themselves, mid-enchantment).
Let's unpack that, then wrap up!
Monsters: Fodder for the State
"The enemy is always strong and weak," wrote Umberto Eco; the state presents its suffering as alien, monstrous and gigantic to permit Amazonian (abject) euthanizers to quell rebellion: as haywire, rapid, nefarious, draconian, etc, per all the usual casus beli as bodies, roles, space and confusion as comically hyperbolic, even absurd (aka Numinous). To it, Samus is a cop who projects Pygmalions fears onto her Galatean vision, which players see the eyes of. In turn, the Gothic and its monsters (Amazons or otherwise) have become grossly popular since its modern inceptions (and certainly since Shelley's "Modern Prometheus" reviving Milton; re: "Making Demons"). This popularity continues under a structure that starves people of connection, then sells it back to them, virgin/whore, but also during monomyth refrains pimping abjection; i.e., of a cops-and-victims Amazon sort, bloodthirsty for elephantine fodder (with heteronormative, Cartesian and settler-colonial elements per cycle); re: Samus is Scipio, killing Hannibal's war elephants (which he marched across the Alps during a legendary surprise campaign). She's also a eugenicist, a walking mass-extinction event rejecting "bad" genetics for "good" (effectively venerating metroid DNA after having exterminated their entire race, going so far as to hold the last metroid hostage forever inside her body).
To this, Samus is an abject novelty pitted, during Capitalist Realism (and its assorted nightmare invasion scenarios), against "bears"; i.e., for the middle class treated like "kings for a day" (or queens, in Samus' case): to achieve glory through battle, specifically of a bounty hunter killing indigenous populations with their own weapons, wunderkind to wunderwaffe gunslinger (of the "Wild" Western tradition, cowboys killing Indians on the frontier). She's a cuckoo wasp designed to kettle state targets; i.e., by triangulating against them, nothing about Metaquarium's impressively hyperbolic bestiary suggesting otherwise: supervillains for a supercop committing domestic abuser against "enemies within." War is baked into her, orphaned and seeking endlessly bigger revenge to feed the state; re, Kevin Sanji: "My hungry ass will eat just about anything!" Samus is the Hound, a ballsy bringer-of-war butcher eating "every chicken in [the] room" (a fox in the henhouse, killing Hell's roosters literally for fun). But it's not "senseless"; it's calculated, their fiercest servant a girl boss glutting capital, mid-harvest (a grim harvest, aka holocaust): she classically takes her prey (or parts of them, anyways) back to the mother country (save for the X parasite, making Samus not just an exterminator but a poison taster).
Forgetting ourselves, for a moment, this "impostor syndrome" takes many forms "on the Aegis": vice characters to lynch, regardless if their opera sings in English or not. Sometimes, "rawr" (or "fhtagn!") will do. Just as the map is endless and the heroine has a thousand monomyth faces (re: Campbell with a genderbending twist), so does her adversary have just as many if not more: Mother Brain's aborted offshoots (of the Numinous) skewered by the phallic woman's beams and missles! Samus' crusade (and crushing paranoia, which the X reflects by copying everything better than she does) never ends, but instead grows and grows to gargantuan size. It feels the bloodlust on the imperial side of the iron wall (not Israel's, but America's).
Aping Aliens' motto for a retro-future Zulu Dawn*(1979), sequelitis demands endless fodder of a Numinous sort—to punch down against during all the usual DARVO/obscurantism the state relies on; i.e., "Heaven rewards hard work" (which "Nintendo" translates to) serving the Protestant ethic as a matter of our aforementioned "head canon." Metaquarium has crammed the liminal hauntology of war (a flying castle, which Alien's Nostromo essentially is) full of bigger and badder monsters (with a bit of Satanic panic thrown in, bottommost-right); i.e., that Samus, their "waifu" persona, can not only curb stomp, but shove missles down the throat of, Baratheon-style (the TERF refrain, attacking the usual state victims dressed up as "rapist," and all to carry out police force through bastardized activist language). Rape = forced entry and the state is always hungry for the task of forced feeding.
*The same year Alien was made, and one that served the usual colonial conquests dressed up as retro-future invasion fears informed by past recreations of historical events:
We set out to make a different type of film, not just retell the same story in a different way. The Aliens are terrifying in their overwhelming force of numbers. The dramatic situations emerging from characters under stress can work just as well in an Alamo or Zulu Dawn as they can in a Friday the 13th, with its antagonist (source: Aliens Collection's transcription of "James Cameron's responses to Aliens critics" from Starlog Magazine, Issue #184, November 1992).
In other words, it's bad BDSM (above)—Nintendo's Amazon aping Cameron to fetishize tokenism and call it "activism"; i.e., through Neo-Gothic but also neo-conservative pastiche, one haunted by fascist and Communist spectres alike, and which our ludo-Gothic BDSM must liberate: on the same stages of exploitation that mad scientists like Metaquarium lovingly reverse engineer. In effect, Metroidvania canon teaches war through monster mommy simulacra standing in as mother, daughter and Stepford Wife, ergo instructor. "Woman is other" extends to nature at large (re: "Nature Is Food"), itself utterly beholden to broader dialectical-materials concepts; e.g., the Male Gaze or creation of sexual difference, mid-abjection, turning the home into a murderous womb (re: Creed), ergo prison known as much for cramped isolation and containment as any Amazonian jailor.
To it, whatever size or shape offered up by Metaquarium, all serve the same sacrificial, boss-key purpose: to be recolonized, the native eliminated per a structure of reinvasion under toxic heroism (re, me vis-à-vis Wolfe: "Toxic Schlock Syndrome"). Per the infernal concentric pattern, such sacrifices are in vain, routinely demanding "more, more more!" from the usual police agents by capital (and always under threat of extermination, themselves). Cryptonymy hides genocide behind the usual apocalyptic veneers promising imperial comeuppance, the subjugated Amazon taming nature/the Imperial Boomerang by punching the Kaiju into submission (a "boss," in videogames, being simply a bigger criminal to demask and catch; i.e., a "power target" that, once exposed, is spanked by state detectives for the reward of excitement, mid-bloodlust).
Yet, such things are home to us camping their complicit cryptonymy with our own revolutionary brand, reversing Amazon abjection; i.e., fuck around and find out!
Conclusion: Fuck Around and Find Out
To that, a cop is a cop, a cop's dream to restore order to/for the state; i.e., through tokenized police violence. Said betrayals imply worker subjugation as useful to state dominance, and which the Gothic, per Alien and its neo-Freudian simulacra, enact in dreamlike language—by thrusting burly (or at least capable) women into spaces of rape: to shield bourgeois cowards from "the rabble," the warrior mommy crushing the Archaic Mother that capital repeatedly scapegoats. In doing so, such stories canonically "blame the whore"; i.e., while policing the whore through maidens that are, to some degree, slightly phallic (ergo capable of revenge, "pulling a Brutus" while classically dressing Caesar up as "barbarian").
To that, Amazons are, again, weaponized public nudity interrogating trauma, and where "fuck around, find out" goes both ways; i.e., dialectically-materially (and with as much love from us as Mephiskapheles loves Bumble Bee Tuna: "This is our tuna!" Same with me and Amazons, but also Metroidvania as my domain). Amazons walk the borderline, like always; i.e., armed for bear, she's a teddy bear to hug and marvel—meaning at while kicking all sorts of monster ass, but remaining a monster herself, thus always uncanny/outsider to a push-pull degree; re: when defending the nuclear home (the cleaning of the house "of whores" done by a has-been whore no stranger to whorehouses, meaning their "mercenary" approach to sex and force aiding patriarchal descent by "phallic" means versus vaginal or net-like spaces and containers, above): less elvish bread and more "hard tack." Amazons are abject, remember? Make 'em walk the plank (also, bodies disposed "at sea" were often wrapped in sheets and dumped overbroad, below)!
Luckily that blade (and its cryptonymy) cuts both ways. Yes, the state wants us to see monster and go "Faster, pussycat! Kill! Kill!"; i.e., while paradoxically viewing such things as "home" and "alien" conducive to profit (or at least "better times" evoked by Metaquarius finding Oz to be "no place like home"). But just as Japanese kayfabe narratives tried to re-emasculate a sense of national pride, post-Occupation (e.g., Napoleon Blownapart's "NEVER DIE - SUPERCUT EDITION") the same is true of many kinds of fiction; e.g., Godzilla, Hello Kitty, Sailor Moon (re: "In Praise of the Great Enchantress"), K-Pop Demon Hunters, the Powerpuff Girls, and Metroidvania; i.e., all these half-real poetic devices serving the same restorative role: through a joy the state can't monopolize, myself enjoying Wonderland, too, but perhaps for reasons not entirely similar or alien to Metaquarius: we were bred on the same virginal destroyers (re: warrior maidens).
So, per the Amazon, is the whore commonly presented as maiden/monster to conquer by bridling and riding her—one whose soft outward appearance commonly sheds to reveal a demon-esque, "whore" alter-ego on the same surface. Indeed, nature is monstrous-feminine, which the state antagonizes by pushing it to colonize itself; re: by having it police itself through a love for such heroines to start with: as neo-conservative, from Ancient Athens into the present—the avenger who castrates state foes and gives the state its mojo back. This goes both ways; re: fuck around and find out, mid-cryptonymy!
In turn, state powers abuse this prostitution terror language to aid in profit (thus genocide); we Commies subvert it—hence the state's disproportionate respond, mid-revenge (which Samus neatly embodies)—to challenge profit during the whore's revenge (re: "Our Sweet Revenge"). In doing so, we breaking Capitalist Realism on our Aegis, all while learning what it is: through all the usual cryptomimesis (and subsequent rememory "playing with dolls"; re: "Back to Jadis' Dollhouse"). "She mighty mighty" becomes not a cop, in function, but a genuine rebel; i.e., versus a false one; re: Parenti, per Metaquarium's hero worship towards a canonical function to camp. Exploitation and liberation share the same stage, workers liberating Amazons from harmful context while preserving what makes them memorable; e.g., adventure and friend, sex and strength—my having accrued so many skills, friends, and skills on making friends/expressing friendship stemming from my belief system; i.e., as praxis synthesized through conscious daily habit, not blind, bread-and-circus consumption (re: "The Basics of Oppositional Synthesis"). What they try to pimp, we resist using what we got—camping the canon to make it gay (and decolonize it of abusers; e.g., as with Sailor Moon, below)!
(artist: Persephone van der Waard)
So play with Metaquarium's revival of the Amazon, if you like. I know I will (shooty-shooty, stab-stab). Just be mindful of its copagandistic qualities while gazing into the abyss (and its ocean of manufactured enemies). Don't banish the spectres haunting Europe, from Frankenstein onwards (which Marx, born in 1818, commented on with his famous cryptomimetic line: "a spectre is haunting Europe"; re: "Making Demons"). Monsters aren't just vehicles to pimp and pilot, like Samus is under a Metaquarius revival, but whose meaning gleans through play as an educational device; said education is dialectical-material, function determined by flow of power through understanding such things while you play with them: for their slightly scary qualities. Children learn by playing. So do adults, and a variety of age-old lessons that further or verse abjection under capital; re: Amazons are terror weapons tied to nature and sex "set loose," hyphenating them, again, as warrior cheerleaders (above) working among status-quo values: to rewire the enchantments at play to reverse abjection.
Men, for example, classically fear nature and those "of it" (re: Descartes' thinking beings versus extended beings), including those acting "like men" versus nature as monstrous-feminine. So use the Aegis to your own advantage; liberate the Amazon while exploring cop-like narratives pimping her out, "killing" the darling to set her free (from Plato's cave while inside it). Don't be a cop or a victim, but a survivor your colonizers will run away from (or towards), screaming "Mommy!" as they do. One sympathizes, save one vital difference: our joy (under fascism) spurns their advances, teaching our own children not to be warlords (or brides for the state to sell; i.e., while bridling ourselves to be ridden by different masters against our will, in different stories); re (from "Prey as Liberators"):
When such a castle appears, it is time to be afraid; the colonial harvest is at hand. Yet, precisely because the state does not hold a monopoly over violence, terror and morphological expression, a demon or castle needn't spell our end; it can represent our sole means of attack, reclaiming said poetics' endless inventiveness to turn colonizer fears back into their hopelessly scared brains (source).
There's always another castle, and Amazons are sex demon warrior pirates to play with. To play is as much to survive as it is to betray a cause, like Samus does. Keeping things Austen as much as Amazon, some girls "spill tea" (meaning "gossip"; e.g., MATRIARCHETYPE's "About Laverne Cox Dating A MAGA COP*"); some play with monsters like Amazons to gossip, shooting their shot (re: me, dating monsters in more ways than one; re: Jadis). Whatever the form, show them your Aegis when the time comes! Paralyze the war machine! Land back, labor back, sex back! Turn Samus feral for workers and nature, reversing her abjection to terrify state doubles (the axe forgets, the tree remembers)!
*Fuck Samus—a fictional character you can effectively rewrite and understand through allegory—all you want; don't sleep with actual cops because they lie for the state and domestically abuse their partners (class privilege overlapping with different axes of oppression, in Cox's case)!
About the Author
Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, Tolkien and Amazon enthusiast, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal, Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!
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