This page is dedicated to my playing and studying Team Cherry's long-awaited Silksong (2025); i.e., stuck in development heaven (that's a first), and releasing for $20 on Steam (which is wild [and awesome] for such a highly polished game), Silksong is finally out after seven years of waiting—with me having asked "is it Gothic" all the way back in 2019; re: "Hollow Knight: Silksong - As a Metroidvania, Will It Be Gothic?" I guess now we'll see just how Gothic the game ultimately is! 

Note: This symposium is a work-in-progress, one that will be completed over time. Its contents will be SFW, either on my old blog or website version.

Furthermore, "Silksong Symposium" is part of my Sex Positivity book series, which continues after its June 2025 finale in small-form content; e.g., essays on and interviews with other sex workers; i.e., I've worked with muses and models beyond those on my Acknowledgments page, whose featured models worked with me while I produced Sex Positivity. To see everyone I've drawn before, during and after said series, refer to my Sex Work page. 

For the Visually Impaired: I'll be reading the SFW version of this essay on my YouTube channel.

Disclaimer Regarding Essay Contents: 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: mild Gothic themes (sexual violence, live burial and incarceration, entomophobia and other fears)

Persephone's Silksong Symposium!

Metroidvania are performative places of power and sin, effectively a videogame "equivalent" of the same chronotope seen in Gothic novels or older still, operas and stage plays: the castle, but specifically a black (non-white) castle/whorehouse/den of thieves, ghosts and pirates' sex, drugs and rock 'n roll.

I use quotes because videogames differ greatly in execution from novels or cinema, but collectively uphold the same basic principles despite these differences: the exploration of tremendous obscurity, power and decay from a disadvantaged (and erotic) social-sexual position, one where a prophesized bastard or whore comes home to roost; i.e., the return of a tyrant or profligate, whose fatal homecoming emerges from a half-formed rogue barbarity/derelict, imaginary past (again usually a castle) as traveling pirate ship! (source)

—Persephone van der Waard, "Metroidvania: What Are They (my definition)?" from Persephone's 2025 Metroidvania Corpus

Hi, everyone! I'm Persephone van der Waard, an independent researcher who wrote her de facto PhD—the core of my book series and written partly for academia, if not peer reviewed there—partly on Metroidvania. If you're curious about my entire Metroidvania work—including a variety of essays analyzing a variety of classics, from Super Metroid (1994) to Hollow Knight (2017) and Axiom Verge (2014)—please look at my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus. This specific piece is going to be a extended writeup on Silksong—from describing my initial playthrough/first impressions to a review when the game is done, followed by various academic-style analyses diving deep into the game's thematic analysis. And "If the mountain won't come to Muhammad, Muhammad must go to the mountain!" (a theme Nietzsche borrowed in his 1883 "will to power" idea, following by Clint Hockings' "seek power and you will progress" regarding ludonarrative dissonance*, in 2007).

*And generally a quest for the Numinous, from Devendra Varma's Gothic Flame (1923) to my PhD (re: "The Quest for Power," 2023).

(artist: Fabian Pineda)

For now, I'm merely starting my journey towards the top of the mountain (versus plunging into the abyss, eight years ago). I'll be giving my thoughts as I do, ranging from controls to characters to music, and whatever else I feel like. Over time, I'll fill out the other areas. Even before I start, I can say the game is Gothic enough to include mazes (re: "Mazes and Labyrinths," 2021) but also Amazons; i.e., of the Metroidvania sort, and in ways distinctly female-coded (from a heteronormative standpoint): by having the Gothic hero be a classic heroine, for a change! So whereas Hollow Knight was a combination of Super Metroid (above) with Zelda II and Castlevania II  (1987), Symphony of the Night (1997) and Dark Souls 1 (2009) bearing a male protagonist, this Muhammad is a bit girly but still badass (re: Creed's monstrous-feminine)! 

In short, there's an Amazon in this maze, and she's both sexy and badass—a huntress, in the classical mythic sense, but one haunted by shady Neo-Gothic counterparts (the Radcliffean female detective, unmasking ghosts; re: "Radcliffe's Refrain," 2025) and subjugated force pimping Gorgons with Athenian offshoots (re: "Giger's Xenomorph," 2025): death and the awesome mystery sharing the same space doubling home and homebody!

(artist: Less, "I Can't Decide," 2021)

I've written about Amazons extensively. Here, I'll be focusing on Hornet as a playable character similar to Samus Aran from the Metroid series (and Hornet's rivalry with other monstrous-feminine characters in the game, above). Given her Wonder Woman vibes (with the silk rope), we'll probably talk about ludo-Gothic BDSM, too.

Obligatory Metroidvania Definition

This is my basic definition for Metroidvania. For the rest of it, refer to "Metroidvania: What Are They (my definition)?" from my Metroidvania page (aka "From Masters to PhD" on my old blog):

Metroidvania are a location-based videogame genre that combines 2D, 2.5D, or 3D platforming [e.g., Dark Souls, 2009] and ranged/melee combat—usually in the 3rd person—inside a giant, closed space. This space communicates Gothic themes of various kinds; encourages exploration* depending on how non-linear the space is; includes progressive skill and item collection, mandatory boss keys, backtracking and variable gating mechanics (bosses, items, doors); and requires movement powerups in some shape or form, though these can be supplied through RPG elements as an optional alternative.

*Exploration pertains to the deliberate navigation of space beyond that of obvious, linear routes—to search for objects, objectives or secrets off the beaten path (source: "Mazes and Labyrinths," 2019; refer to the Metroidvania page on my website for everything that I've written on Metroidvania).

First Impressions (wip)

For now, I'll list these as bullet points:

• Hornet is not a silent protagonist.
• Amazons are not modest; when Hornet heals, her skirt flies up and you can see her naked(?) body (nudity is strength, for Amazons).
• The graphics are definitely an upgrade from Hollow Knight. Everything appears as lush as that game did with its final update, and then some (tons of lighting effects and multiple planes of vision).
• Bone Bottom (this game's town area) has piano music that sounds slightly like Resident Evil's save rooms.
• The Gothic is a site of decayed site of power, including left-behind churches with a carceral feel to them; Silksong speaks to an Orientalist flair of the holy traveler (on silk roads).
• Metroidvania are called "search/action," in Japan, but the same idea applies in American: there's a map; fill it out and find shit. Silksong doesn't just have areas, but objectives.
• Silksong is more of a platformer/vertically designed than Hollow Knight was.

• Said's Orientalism is combined with a bildungsroman (coming-of-age stories) per the warrior detective: lands of a mystical exotic full of warriors; re (from the Poetry Module):

  My own quest for a Numinous Commie Mommy isn't so odd; capital makes us feel tired relative to the self-as-alien, both incumbent on the very things they rape to nurture them (re: Irigaray's creation of sexual difference). I'm hardly the first person to notice this:

  As Edward Said astutely notes in Culture and Imperialism, most societies project their fears on the unknown or the exotic other. This barren land, where the viewers are kept disorientated, is threatening. It is a place between the familiar and the foreign, like part of a dream or vision that one cannot remember clearly. There is always a sense of a lurking danger from which the viewers need protection. Nikita provides that sense of protection (source: Laura Ng's "'The Most Powerful Weapon You Have': Warriors and Gender in La Femme Nikita," 2003).

  I am, however, a trans woman who has gone above and beyond women like Barbara Creed, Angela Carter, Luce Irigaray and Laura Ng, etc, in my pioneering of ludo-Gothic BDSM: as a holistic, "Commy-Mommy" means of synthesizing proletarian praxis inside the operatic danger disco(-in-disguise), the "rape" castle riffing on Walpole, Lewis, Radcliffe, Konami, Nintendo, and so many others. I sign myself as such for a reason—not to be an edgy slut (though I am a slut who walks the edge). Rather, my pedagogic aim is to consider the monstrous-feminine not simply as a female monster avoiding revenge through violence, but a sex-positive force that doesn't reduce to white women policing the same-old ghost of the counterfeit: to reverse what TERFs (and other sell-outs) further as normally being the process of abjection, vis-à-vis Cartesian thought tokenizing marginalized groups to harvest nature-as-usual during the dialectic of the alien (source: "In Search of the Secret Spell," 2024).

• being a churchly "other" land piloted by an Amazon, Hornet steals rosaries from people hypnotized by a foreign peak (nods to Jerusalem or Mecca, perhaps); i.e., maps are tools of conquest, treasure maps to be navigated through theft and force.

Final Review

[to be completed]

Thematic Analysis, an Essay (or Three)

[to be completed]

---

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 multiple 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 learn more about Persephone's academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!