Previously I mentioned that I had written a three-part chapter on Metroidvania for my Sex Positivity book series, "She Fucks Back" (2024). Already the culmination of my life's work, I wanted to cap off my magnum opus with a fun little announcement, letting you all know that the last part of that chapter is now up on my website: "Sleeping Beauties: Policing the Whore; or, Topping from Below to Rise from the Ashes"!
Update, 1/4/2025: I've decided to release the entirety of my work on Metroidvania in one single place: "From Master's to PhD (and Beyond): My Entire Work on Metroidvania" (2025). This includes my master's thesis and early postgraduate work (re: "Mazes and Labyrinths"), my PhD (released in 2023), further essays released after my postgraduate work in my larger book series, Sex Positivity. You can also ask me questions about Metroidvania on the r/Metroidvania subreddit: "From Master's to PhD (and Beyond): My Entire Work on Metroidvania" (2025).
Normally it'd just be another post in my book sample series before Volume Two, part two goes live in the next couple of months. However, "Sleeping Beauties" is extra special because it's the end to the capstone to my Metroidvania work after my PhD and what I esteem to be my crowning achievement; i.e., I write about rape play a great deal, talking about it outside of Metroidvania all the time (e.g., "Into the Toy Chest, part zero: A Note about Rape/Rape Play; or, Facing the Great Destroyer," 2024), but where "Beauties" complements that work is by marrying it to one of my favorite games, Hollow Knight, and its secret final boss, the Radiance! There's just so much fun academic stuff to unpack (e.g., Manuel Aguirre, Michel Foucault and Mikhail Bakhtin, to name a few)—with me doing so in a way that's hopefully more accessible, sexy and fun than those authors to read!
To summarize the piece, itself, my website describes it as, "Articulates Aguirre and Bakhtin's ideas per my evolution of ludo-Gothic BDSM after my master's thesis and into my graduate work, then considers the Promethean Quest as something that presents the whore as normally hunted by police forces, only to escape their subjugation and imprisonment by acting out her own rape; i.e., as Hollow Knight's final boss, the Radiance, does." In short, girl's a freak, but camps her abuse at the hero's hands to say something not just about the Pale King, but Capitalism, too, and why it sucks. Maybe in reading "Beauties," you'll change how you view not just the game and its approach to sexual violence in Gothic forms, but also the world at large...
In any event, it's a huge relief to have "Beauties" out there, and I'm very proud of it. Give it a look and let me know what you think!
