folk tune stan account

This overfamiliarity - and, seemingly, lack of caring toward the *person* beyond the online persona - is a killer in communities like this, and impacts both sides of the power-dynamic spectra. I’ve seen both dominants claiming dominion over free-range submissives without as much as an intentional conversation around it, eager submissives throw themselves at the feet of dominants with heaps and heaps of saccharine affection and usage of unearned titles, and all sorts of odd shit between the lines.

When it happens - especially in a public forum - it oftentimes puts the impacted individual in a difficult situation, and without a properly-developed communication skill, it becomes difficult to get out of. Questions manifest; ‘am I an asshole for not humoring this person?’ or ‘did I lead them on by playing into their bit?’ or ‘did I say something that I didn’t mean?’ As a community of (predominantly) transgender women, it becomes easy to turn our thoughts inward and scold ourselves for something that is, at the end of the day, not our fault.

For some, it becomes easier to lean fully into it, to ‘play the game’ out of fear of whatever reprisal may occur if you do not.

In a primarily-online, primarily-kink forward erotic horror space, we lose a lot of the safeguards against things like overfamiliarity that exist in meatspace. It’s harder to vet and feel someone out when you’re judging them off an oftentimes limited online presence, and even harder when you branch from occasional comments to further, more charged engagements. When interfacing with younger queer folks online - like much of Mechsploitation seems to be - you also run the risk of differential levels of development, struggles with emotional intelligence, and a lack of boundaries stemming from a variety of different causes. This is, generally speaking, somewhat uncomfortable, and it may seem easier to appease those involved; to engage in ‘pick-up play’ on occasion, without committing to anything beyond a few exchanges.

However, even casual play or entertainment - if you’re not genuinely invested in it - can lead to further issues. It reinforces parasociality and overfamiliarity as acceptable behavior, and potentially tethers a person to you. This, very quickly, can lead to overextension; if you spend all of your time trying to engage with everyone who wants your attention at a given time, you quickly run out of time to spend on those who matter most to you, chief among them being yourself. It may seem attractive to have a great many play partners, or to be able to exert your will over a number of women on a given day (or vice versa), but without careful attention to energy expended and your own capacity, it can very quickly devolve into something that eats you alive. With only a finite amount of energy and focus in a given day, trying to cater to everyone (along with everything else you have to do) will kill you faster than anything else.

So, how do you avoid such a thing happening?

First, consider your own boundaries; what kind of engagements are fun for you? What’s only fun when it’s with certain people, and what don’t you want to happen at all? You don’t need to write these down or keep them formal, but have them in mind. If someone pushes them, let them know, and potentially move along if you’re not interested in continuing. Don’t be afraid to hold them strong; no is a complete sentence, and if someone you’re engaging with pushes against your boundary, you are entirely empowered to pause an engagement for re-evaluation, or cut it off entirely.

Second, consider your capacity; how many play partners can you realistically keep track of? Are you interested in having multiple submissives and dominants, or do you want to keep things small? What’s your plan if you realize that you’re overwhelmed, and what’s potentially suffering as a result of having to do massive personnel management on a recurrent basis?

Third, consider how to break things off if necessary; what does a disengagement conversation look like? Is there anyone who you’ve told to stop contacting you who keeps reaching out, and what does it feel like to reaffirm your boundaries to them? What point does it reach where a block or mute is more in order?

While these things are all predominantly online-focused (as is the point of this particular essay), it’s important to note that proper and strong communication skills will help in engagements offline, as well - both kink-related, and otherwise.

Above all else, however, it’s important to remember that anyone behind a screen is as real a person as you are; they have lives, and capacities, and a thousand other things pulling at their commitments regularly. Boiling someone down to the importance of their online persona primarily and everything else secondarily is harmful, and more often than not has the undesired effect of becoming overfamiliar - or worse, exploitative. That’s not to say that you *can’t* flirt with or engage with someone; rather, keep in mind when things cross a line from being friendly or flirty to something beyond that, and make sure to give people their space when they need it.

While i’m not one to diminish the threat level of my dear sister (she’s plenty capable of girlruining en masse), I think there’s something else to the way that people have flocked to identifying as Sartha Thrace, to becoming her and embodying her. Sartha is, at her core, a victim of autonomy loss; in her weakest state at the end of RESCUE HOUND, we see her unable to discern thoughts posited by herself earlier in the conversation as her own, or thoughts that Handler fed to her. She is, in effect, a puppet for a better woman, a semi-sentient megaphone, a dog-shaped carrier pigeon. Her higher faculties are more or less eroded entirely, and even if we see her with a bit more cognizance later on, she craves the dull feeling of that utter annihilation in any moment of adversity or stress, as seen at the end of SHOWHOUND.

It was at this moment that I really saw the appeal of becoming Sartha Thrace; when pressure gets high and push comes to shove, you can beg to sink into the mud and become nothing again, dark and dead as the day you were born. It is, of course, likely far more complicated for most than just this reason; it likely intermingles with the burnout from trying your hardest endlessly, and the expectations thrust upon our collective whole to even receive a modicum of the respect that cisgender folks take for granted. To embody Sartha Thrace is to look at the body of one’s work and all of the laurels that should have come with it, and say, ‘enough.’

A blissful non-existence is better than trying (and failing) to earn the respect of those who will only ever see you as aberrant.

In a prior essay, I wrote at length on my thoughts about Leinth Aritimis, and why I (along with many others, I’d assume) take her as our patron saint; I won’t dredge those words back up here, but I will stand by them as they are. Leinth’s existence is, partially, about an inherent wrongness or misdeed, a cardinal sin in continuing the deification of a golden calf that wanted nothing but to be allowed to be average. Leinth is a bad dog, craven and guilty and, at times, violent; she needs absolution, which she is eventually given by Handler, even in the face of repeated, perceived failures. She is allowed to fail, allowed to underperform, allowed to suffer - no matter what she endures, her Mother God will tell her that it was worth it, that she is forgiven, that she can live unburdened by all that she’s done.

Wouldn’t that be nice; eternal forgiveness in exchange for the low price of a sapience that, more often than not, weighs us down?

In looking more thoroughly at mechsploitation as a whole, loss of autonomy is a common fate for a great many characters occupying various places on the power scales. For instance, WARHOUND’s own Kione Monax gives up her freedom as a mercenary - and is implied to have given up more in ARCHON - in exchange for a position of ‘superiority’ under the Handler-General. Steel Jaws Speak No Evil’s Handler Delta suffers a similar near-unmaking in the process of reaching her own apotheosis; multiple times, she’s left to dwell with Sigma’s hounds, and multiple times, she nearly falls to their level, while Hekate’s Call’s Elisabeth Crater is shown at a point to be little more than a vessel for beloved bad-girl Morian Kyrnn’s thoughts and desires. Even MYRMIDON - which strays a bit away from the traditional path of mechsploitation - sees its protagonist, Mel Heydari, eventually lose her last bits of humanity to the evil Lotus-beast in her mind.

Yet, these characters don’t evoke the same response; there aren’t a horde of Craters or Deltas or Heydaris banging on the bay door to lose their own identity in place of another. It’s certainly not for the quality of their writing, as the above works make up my personal formative foundation for writing mechsploitation as a whole; rather, I think it has to do with the way that these characters manifest within the literature, and the way the dregs of their autonomy retained as Handlers or superiors still allow them to play pretend. Alternatively, in Pilot One’s case, their loss is portrayed as so grave and so vile that it is somehow worse than keeping one’s cognizance.

There is, of course, a limit to it all; to be so blissfully unaware that you lose the ability to discern what real harm actually is, to be beaten so severely that the endings of your nerves cease their functioning, to stare into the eyes of the one who holds you and let her tell you that you’re okay before you even have to think about it.

In some of mechsploitation’s cruelest writings, these, too, are out of the realm of possibility.

Mechsploitation is a predominantly transfeminine community, with many stories carrying the lived experiences of those contained therein in some form or other. For me, even the darkest and most depraved pieces of mechsploitation fiction - from my own hand or the hands of others - have aligned with certain events from my past, or thoughts I’d been too afraid to vocalize up until the point that they were ripped from me through narrative. We see our suffering splayed out across pages and pages of erotic fiction, and in some cases, we see an end to that suffering close at hand.

It’s understandable to me that mechsploitation has gained popularity in a time when Christo-fascism is on the rise in a world superpower, and in a time where other world governments are aggressively cracking down on or attempting to criminalize the existence of transgender people at their core. Escapism comes in many forms, and in its recent increase in popularity, the creativity in the mechsploitation niche has blossomed right alongside it, with topics covering a wide variety of settings and scenery. It’s been said that the genre’s flexibility as a whole - in being a story loosely involving mechs, predominantly focused around erotic lesbian hypnokink - was one of its strongest suits, and I tend to agree.

Through its flexibility, people are provided various avenues of escape; through its flexibility, if one story and setting won’t work, another may. Readers may find themselves drawn to characters that more thoroughly resonate with the core of their souls, or lived experiences, and find a better avenue for escape through them, or a pathway to rest.

With life being as hard as it is, it’s no wonder that so many of us want to simply have the lights put out for good.

It’s one of the things that’s struck me as being missing from many of the critiques of mechsploitation as of late; that it’s an avenue to create a set-dressing around which to write petplay, or a way for transfeminine individuals to play out their desire for the acceptance of an abuser, or simply a gateway to more depraved kink scenes. In a way, I can see where these critiques are pulling these thoughts from, but think that they miss the larger point.

At its core, Mechsploitation is about handing over the keys to your autonomy to a Mother-God and hoping for the best.

That Mother God could be anything - a leather-clad Handler, an apparition of a demon-mech in a lake, a vast and boundless hyperintelligence - so long as it carves out the vestiges of what a would-be hound once called a soul, and replaces it with something wholly and entirely manufactured, purpose-built for endless obedience and the completion of orders conferred unto it. It still exists in a shithouse, awful, collapsing world wherein we see fascism enshrining itself at the top of the foodchain, but then again, so do we.

Therefore, if we have to share this world with the architects of our own destruction and breathe their air, we’d rather be utterly unaware of the whole of it.

To take a brief sidebar, prior to my current job I used to work in healthcare access for transgender and nonbinary individuals, working with students on an individual basis to try and navigate their insurance systems and seek approvals for medication, for primary care providers and endocrinologists, for surgeries and authorization letters and documents of support. This was a gigantic pain in the ass, and more often than not, companies would wait as long as they possibly could to deliver notices of denial, or to inform patients that they were missing documentation, and thus their surgeries would be postponed if they couldn’t afford to pay five-to-six figure costs in full on their own dime; surgeries with waitlists that spanned months to years.

More often than not, these meetings ended with students in tears as we tried, desperately, to bridge gaps wherever we could, and I had many difficult conversations around the reality of having to push a surgery off when a hail mary failed. At this time, the government was not actively seeking to harm transgender individuals seeking medical care in the way it is now, or criminalizing their existence to such a vast extent; in more than a few ways, doing that same work now feels like it’d be nearly impossible, and that was with a hefty bit of support behind it. To try and interface with those same systems in this day and age, alone, is nearly insurmountable.

Really, interacting with any system as a transgender woman feels nearly insurmountable, especially early on in one’s transition. Many individuals within Mechsploitation’s primary community spaces, like Bluesky, tend to trend younger as well. They find themselves facing a horrid wall of harmful legislation, hateful rhetoric, and legislative forces that seek to push them out of public life - or existence entirely - through whatever means are necessary.

To that end, I find it hard to criticize individuals who find some level of warmth or comfort in the identity of another, especially if that identity originated in a space where the very real concerns of our day and age are simply pushed out of focus in place of deeper, more prominent existential horrors. If a girl is to find comfort in the idea of being Sartha Thrace, even if she’s one among many, what harm is she truly causing? If someone’s to find enjoyment in kayfabing themselves into an eminent, domineering presence, so long as they’re playing safely, does allowing them to do so cause damage?

I’d argue that it doesn’t - and further, I’d argue that these works bear no inherent responsibility to be important, to have a call-to-action, to meet the moment. Writing can be a potent tool for enacting great, sweeping change, but it doesn’t always have to be; the point of the smut can just be that it’s smut, rather than having to carry some grand message along with it.

In this day and age, I’m not going to be one to flay someone for finding escapism through it, or enjoying porn for being porn, as it’s far better than the alternative of collapsing entirely on oneself in the overwhelming onslaught that we find ourselves buffeted by on a daily basis.

Instead, I acknowledge the material reality of our world, which sucks ass, and evoke the idea that we should find our escape while also working to better what we can in our lives. I can’t solve every issue that faces our community, or even my local community, but I can damn well try to make the lives of those around me better, even marginally. I fight like hell each morning to tell the people that I love that I love them, to make sure they know that I’m in their corner, and so long as I’m doing that, I can fuck off and play evil rabbit on the timeline forevermore.

I invite you to find what you fight for - however small - and take care of yourself outside of that, however that appears.

It’s the best thing we can do.

-

While i’m not one to diminish the threat level of my dear sister (she’s plenty capable of girlruining en masse), I think there’s something else to the way that people have flocked to identifying as Sartha Thrace, to becoming her and embodying her. Sartha is, at her core, a victim of autonomy loss; in her weakest state at the end of RESCUE HOUND, we see her unable to discern thoughts posited by herself earlier in the conversation as her own, or thoughts that Handler fed to her. She is, in effect, a puppet for a better woman, a semi-sentient megaphone, a dog-shaped carrier pigeon. Her higher faculties are more or less eroded entirely, and even if we see her with a bit more cognizance later on, she craves the dull feeling of that utter annihilation in any moment of adversity or stress, as seen at the end of SHOWHOUND.

It was at this moment that I really saw the appeal of becoming Sartha Thrace; when pressure gets high and push comes to shove, you can beg to sink into the mud and become nothing again, dark and dead as the day you were born. It is, of course, likely far more complicated for most than just this reason; it likely intermingles with the burnout from trying your hardest endlessly, and the expectations thrust upon our collective whole to even receive a modicum of the respect that cisgender folks take for granted. To embody Sartha Thrace is to look at the body of one’s work and all of the laurels that should have come with it, and say, ‘enough.’

A blissful non-existence is better than trying (and failing) to earn the respect of those who will only ever see you as aberrant.

In a prior essay, I wrote at length on my thoughts about Leinth Aritimis, and why I (along with many others, I’d assume) take her as our patron saint; I won’t dredge those words back up here, but I will stand by them as they are. Leinth’s existence is, partially, about an inherent wrongness or misdeed, a cardinal sin in continuing the deification of a golden calf that wanted nothing but to be allowed to be average. Leinth is a bad dog, craven and guilty and, at times, violent; she needs absolution, which she is eventually given by Handler, even in the face of repeated, perceived failures. She is allowed to fail, allowed to underperform, allowed to suffer - no matter what she endures, her Mother God will tell her that it was worth it, that she is forgiven, that she can live unburdened by all that she’s done.

Wouldn’t that be nice; eternal forgiveness in exchange for the low price of a sapience that, more often than not, weighs us down?

In looking more thoroughly at mechsploitation as a whole, loss of autonomy is a common fate for a great many characters occupying various places on the power scales. For instance, WARHOUND’s own Kione Monax gives up her freedom as a mercenary - and is implied to have given up more in ARCHON - in exchange for a position of ‘superiority’ under the Handler-General. Steel Jaws Speak No Evil’s Handler Delta suffers a similar near-unmaking in the process of reaching her own apotheosis; multiple times, she’s left to dwell with Sigma’s hounds, and multiple times, she nearly falls to their level, while Hekate’s Call’s Elisabeth Crater is shown at a point to be little more than a vessel for beloved bad-girl Morian Kyrnn’s thoughts and desires. Even MYRMIDON - which strays a bit away from the traditional path of mechsploitation - sees its protagonist, Mel Heydari, eventually lose her last bits of humanity to the evil Lotus-beast in her mind.

Yet, these characters don’t evoke the same response; there aren’t a horde of Craters or Deltas or Heydaris banging on the bay door to lose their own identity in place of another. It’s certainly not for the quality of their writing, as the above works make up my personal formative foundation for writing mechsploitation as a whole; rather, I think it has to do with the way that these characters manifest within the literature, and the way the dregs of their autonomy retained as Handlers or superiors still allow them to play pretend. Alternatively, in Pilot One’s case, their loss is portrayed as so grave and so vile that it is somehow worse than keeping one’s cognizance.

There is, of course, a limit to it all; to be so blissfully unaware that you lose the ability to discern what real harm actually is, to be beaten so severely that the endings of your nerves cease their functioning, to stare into the eyes of the one who holds you and let her tell you that you’re okay before you even have to think about it.

In some of mechsploitation’s cruelest writings, these, too, are out of the realm of possibility.

Mechsploitation is a predominantly transfeminine community, with many stories carrying the lived experiences of those contained therein in some form or other. For me, even the darkest and most depraved pieces of mechsploitation fiction - from my own hand or the hands of others - have aligned with certain events from my past, or thoughts I’d been too afraid to vocalize up until the point that they were ripped from me through narrative. We see our suffering splayed out across pages and pages of erotic fiction, and in some cases, we see an end to that suffering close at hand.

It’s understandable to me that mechsploitation has gained popularity in a time when Christo-fascism is on the rise in a world superpower, and in a time where other world governments are aggressively cracking down on or attempting to criminalize the existence of transgender people at their core. Escapism comes in many forms, and in its recent increase in popularity, the creativity in the mechsploitation niche has blossomed right alongside it, with topics covering a wide variety of settings and scenery. It’s been said that the genre’s flexibility as a whole - in being a story loosely involving mechs, predominantly focused around erotic lesbian hypnokink - was one of its strongest suits, and I tend to agree.

Through its flexibility, people are provided various avenues of escape; through its flexibility, if one story and setting won’t work, another may. Readers may find themselves drawn to characters that more thoroughly resonate with the core of their souls, or lived experiences, and find a better avenue for escape through them, or a pathway to rest.

With life being as hard as it is, it’s no wonder that so many of us want to simply have the lights put out for good.

It’s one of the things that’s struck me as being missing from many of the critiques of mechsploitation as of late; that it’s an avenue to create a set-dressing around which to write petplay, or a way for transfeminine individuals to play out their desire for the acceptance of an abuser, or simply a gateway to more depraved kink scenes. In a way, I can see where these critiques are pulling these thoughts from, but think that they miss the larger point.

At its core, Mechsploitation is about handing over the keys to your autonomy to a Mother-God and hoping for the best.

That Mother God could be anything - a leather-clad Handler, an apparition of a demon-mech in a lake, a vast and boundless hyperintelligence - so long as it carves out the vestiges of what a would-be hound once called a soul, and replaces it with something wholly and entirely manufactured, purpose-built for endless obedience and the completion of orders conferred unto it. It still exists in a shithouse, awful, collapsing world wherein we see fascism enshrining itself at the top of the foodchain, but then again, so do we.

Therefore, if we have to share this world with the architects of our own destruction and breathe their air, we’d rather be utterly unaware of the whole of it.

To take a brief sidebar, prior to my current job I used to work in healthcare access for transgender and nonbinary individuals, working with students on an individual basis to try and navigate their insurance systems and seek approvals for medication, for primary care providers and endocrinologists, for surgeries and authorization letters and documents of support. This was a gigantic pain in the ass, and more often than not, companies would wait as long as they possibly could to deliver notices of denial, or to inform patients that they were missing documentation, and thus their surgeries would be postponed if they couldn’t afford to pay five-to-six figure costs in full on their own dime; surgeries with waitlists that spanned months to years.

More often than not, these meetings ended with students in tears as we tried, desperately, to bridge gaps wherever we could, and I had many difficult conversations around the reality of having to push a surgery off when a hail mary failed. At this time, the government was not actively seeking to harm transgender individuals seeking medical care in the way it is now, or criminalizing their existence to such a vast extent; in more than a few ways, doing that same work now feels like it’d be nearly impossible, and that was with a hefty bit of support behind it. To try and interface with those same systems in this day and age, alone, is nearly insurmountable.

Really, interacting with any system as a transgender woman feels nearly insurmountable, especially early on in one’s transition. Many individuals within Mechsploitation’s primary community spaces, like Bluesky, tend to trend younger as well. They find themselves facing a horrid wall of harmful legislation, hateful rhetoric, and legislative forces that seek to push them out of public life - or existence entirely - through whatever means are necessary.

To that end, I find it hard to criticize individuals who find some level of warmth or comfort in the identity of another, especially if that identity originated in a space where the very real concerns of our day and age are simply pushed out of focus in place of deeper, more prominent existential horrors. If a girl is to find comfort in the idea of being Sartha Thrace, even if she’s one among many, what harm is she truly causing? If someone’s to find enjoyment in kayfabing themselves into an eminent, domineering presence, so long as they’re playing safely, does allowing them to do so cause damage?

I’d argue that it doesn’t - and further, I’d argue that these works bear no inherent responsibility to be important, to have a call-to-action, to meet the moment. Writing can be a potent tool for enacting great, sweeping change, but it doesn’t always have to be; the point of the smut can just be that it’s smut, rather than having to carry some grand message along with it.

In this day and age, I’m not going to be one to flay someone for finding escapism through it, or enjoying porn for being porn, as it’s far better than the alternative of collapsing entirely on oneself in the overwhelming onslaught that we find ourselves buffeted by on a daily basis.

Instead, I acknowledge the material reality of our world, which sucks ass, and evoke the idea that we should find our escape while also working to better what we can in our lives. I can’t solve every issue that faces our community, or even my local community, but I can damn well try to make the lives of those around me better, even marginally. I fight like hell each morning to tell the people that I love that I love them, to make sure they know that I’m in their corner, and so long as I’m doing that, I can fuck off and play evil rabbit on the timeline forevermore.

I invite you to find what you fight for - however small - and take care of yourself outside of that, however that appears.

It’s the best thing we can do.

-