A short addendum to my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus , addressing why speedrunning—although still important to my work—is something I, a trans woman an-Com, ultimately walked away from; i.e., while keeping my interest for Metroidvania ( vis-Ã -vis ludo-Gothic BDSM) largely intact; e.g., my abuse and alienation suffered at the hands of the shooter community versus the good treatment I received from Metroid speedrunners. In light of recently compiling and releasing my entire Metroidvania research as one giant document (re: " Debut for Persephone's 2025 Metroidvania Corpus ! "), hindsight denotes a strange and glaring omission: my exit from speedrunning research, as a whole! As such, I wanted to quickly address how speedrunning—while still important to me and making up the bulk of my early research—gradually became less important to me, as time went on; i.e., lasting from 2017 until 2021, before abandoning "pure" game theory in favor of a more holistic practice, and ...
I've just released Persephone's 2025 Metroidvania Corpus as a PDF! I did this to allow for easier accessibility using Adobe's bookmark system and in-text hyperlinks. The new corpus combines the "From Master's to PhD" catalog and earlier postgrad work on Metroidvania, "Mazes and Labyrinths," into a single, larger document (106 pages). The blogpost, below, has my editor's notes, which—apart from giving a download link—also describe the PDF's contents (which are SFW/only about Metroidvania). Patch notes for the most current edition are located below the editor's notes. For a spoken summary of the corpus, refer to its partner YouTube video, " Persephone's Metroidvania Series #4 ," which discusses the 2025 Metroidvania Corpus and its contents; i.e., the title page, patch notes, table of contents, note to Jeremy Parish, several excerpts, and the Further Reading page. Editor's notes , 1/6/2025: As stated above, Persephone...