Avoa

Some of us truly are burdened by our sentience.

It’s a thought that pervasively dwells within the core of many components of erotic horror, the idea that we’d be better off if we were removed from our higher faculties and responsibilities. The concept that one is, in fact, ruined by their ability for rational thinking, complex emotions, and free will as a whole is likely nightmarish to some, but for others, it provides a gateway to absolution and forgiveness. It’s a pathway to a dull, blissful existence, wherein you hand yourself over to a chosen Mother God, and worry not about if her intentions are best for you, simply that they are.

This conceit sits at the very heart of mechsploitation - the area where i’ve cut my teeth the most writing erotic horror. The Handler/hound dynamic is, at its core, a prime example of this loss of autonomy; after being subjected to ruinous, repetitive conditioning, a pilot eventually hands themselves over to a greater being as a tool for psychosexual warfare. It’s oftentimes harrowing, and involves the pilot’s greatest insecurities, fears, treasures, values, or all of the above being turned inward like a circle of spears before forcing them to give up most of the intangibles that matter to them, reducing them to a trained animal ready to snap and kill at a moment’s notice.

While many stories in the genre have explored this through many differential lenses, the two most popular Houndtype characters remain to be WARHOUND’s Sartha Thrace, and Leinth Aritimis. Both women embody different sides of the same coin; Sartha, a hero who crumpled under weight and pressure, while Leinth, who idolized her, was part of the so-called ‘problem’. Both women suffer tremendous psychological torture in the process of being made into Handler’s perfect pets, and both women eventually suffer entire personality collapses; remade into her ideal dogs.

We’re treated to their continued growth - as assets, and as animals - throughout the chapters following their respective debuts; in time, Leinth becomes a perpetual runner-up, while Sartha shifts from a deified icon to a collapsing mess.* There’s much to be considered about what remains of the fabric of the soul of these two characters; whether or not they can even be considered recoverable, or even human is entirely up for debate.

What is not, however, exists outside of the text; these two have provided a hell of a beacon for burgeoning members of the community to latch onto, idealize, and subsume in place of their own identities. You could drag a hand across Bluesky’s ocean floor and come up with a fistful of wriggling, blonde animals; each special in their own way, each bearing the same name. You’d find less Leinths, of course, as she’s always second best, but they exist too; in the shadows of their more prominent counterparts, perpetually rubbing themselves against whatever discount leathers they can find.

Nevertheless, it is the sheer existence of these template identities - and the vast number in which they have appeared - that has granted WARHOUND a reputation as a certified cognitohazard. As far as the eye can see, stories persist about women who’ve found their partners reading this wretched tome, and thought nothing of it, only to find their beloved entirely overwritten by Ancyor’s pilot; personality-cucked by some dumb blonde dog from fiction. Jokingly phrased cautionary tales abound, alongside other warnings about not feeding your wife to snakes, and minding your spending impulses when you cross through a certain borough of the United Kingdom.

Despite this, I’m not so sure cognitohazard is the right term.

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.

-