bianca / nico

very enamored by this creature

(Do remember that this is just my two cents, please! I'm limited in my perspective, and if something else works better for you, ignore any or all of the below advice! <3)

I think one of the most important things with writing mechsploitation is to remember that the core defining element is soul-crushing levels of despair. You don't actually need a bad end - though those are common, because they're a good way to induce that despair - but you have to inflict so much desperation on your reader that it'd make Junko Enoshima blush.

Most of the stories show people who don't deserve it getting their psyches pounced to dust through unspeakably awful torture to a degree where they can't even register that what's been done to them is bad anymore. And then they drag others down with them.

Mechsploitation is about dehumanization, brokenness, trauma, and the question of when it all becomes too much to the point that having your personality utterly erased starts to feel like bliss. It is about being broken down by not just callous indifference, but active malice at the hands of nihilistic fascists for Their own sick purposes. Handlers are people who have whittled Their own humanity away to the degree They can only relate to others by dragging them down into the same empty void that now lives in Their souls.

That's another important point, imo - All Handlers Are Losers. You cannot become a Handler without something being fundamentally wrong with you. The core tension of the Handler as an archetype is that They are so close to being the perfect fascist subject, but They can never reach that point, because at the end of the day, They are still human, and They hate that about Themselves. Steel Jaws shows this very explicitly, but even in WARHOUND, it's obvious - to an extent with Kione (who, tbh, I don't really count as a Handler, Jane Handler WARHOUND purposefully trained her wrong as a joke), but also, more subtly, with Handler. Of course, this doesn't matter too much if you write your Handlers as forces of nature instead of characters, like in early parts of WARHOUND, but even then, it's good to keep in mind.

Of course, Handlers are nothing without Their hounds, and they tend to be the PoV characters of the story, so let's talk about them for a bit. Hounds and Handlers are way more similar than you'd first expect. Like Handlers, they have most (though not all) of their humanity cut out of them. Unlike Handlers, this is inflicted on them, rather than self-imposed.

The humanity of hounds can, I think, best be seen as two distinct layers; a veneer, and a seed. Everything else has been scooped out.

The veneer is what the people around them see, when they're not sent into houndspace with an Off The Leash (or whatever their trigger phrase is). It's the thin layer of pretense that they're still functional people, though it's riddled with holes. Other characters will notice this, often by the empty look in their eyes, or fractions of seconds where the mask slips, and the trauma comes to the fore. RESCUE HOUND shows this well, IIRC. Hounds themselves tend to either be so broken down that they don't notice that they're acting/being treated in ways no human ever would and think this is normal/good for them (as we see in Sartha), or are constantly churning with inner turmoil over where they've ended up (Leinth, to an extent, and the Steel Jaws hounds especially display this well). Which one it is tends to depend on how deeply buried their seed is.

Speaking of seeds - beneath that veneer, deep down, is a seed. It's the core of the person they used to be, which isn't ever fully gone. Handlers can't even totally erase Their own humanity; They certainly can't do it to others. That seed is what lets hounds still experience doubt, fear, uncertainty; think for themselves. It's what makes them interesting as protagonists, because if it wasn't there, there wouldn't be any inner conflict to make the 'horror' part of the erohorror that mechsploitation ultimately is work. This is Sartha's drive to do the right thing, no matter how much Handler has warped her view of what that is, represented by Thezea, and by the nightmare Ancyor that chases her during her psychotic break in SHOWHOUND. In Steel Jaws, it's Belle's World Without Guilt, which - no matter how broken down she is - keeps pushing her to fight for a better future, in whatever way she can.

The veneer is left in place intentionally, to make the hounds malleable. The seed is not. Handlers are often aware of them; use them as the crux of Their manipulations to finally crack the psyche of Their subjects - Handler WARHOUND inverted Sartha's hero drive by cultivating the feelings of exhaustion and burnout with being placed on a pedestal she already had, for example - but They can't fully remove them. It's what can make their control slip, however briefly, at crucial moments. It's often not much, and rarely enough to make a difference, but it's what lets you offer the reader brief glimpses of hope that make all the despair that is the genre's bread and butter bearable. Of course, if you're going for a good end, this is often also what will finally let the hounds break free. When the trigger phrase is given, the veneer is stripped away. The seed is buried - buried deep - but it is never entirely gone. If you're writing a hound, I think the first step is figuring out what their seed is, and how their Handler has used it to break them. They're the crux of the entire character.

On a more general note, I personally tend to see the way hounds are written as extremely textually plural. In community lingo terms, hounds (here meaning specifically the mindless murdermachines that come to the fore when the trigger is given) are introjects, personalities shoved into a person by an external force, grafted onto their psyche. It might be helpful to read up a bit on DID and plurality more broadly, if that's something you want to explore.

Lastly, as mentioned, the genre is ultimately erohorror. Some works lean more towards the ero, others to the horror, and in series or works that are long enough, it can vary which one takes center stage, but I don't think it's fully possible to separate either the erotic hardcore petplay/freeuse/noncon kink aspects or the fucking horrifying torture and deliberate personality destruction from any mechsplo story. It's frankly probably easier to write mechsplo without the mechs than to cut out either of the other parts; Angels of the Killing Hymn is proof of that, I reckon (though full disclosure, I've not gotten around to reading much of that yet). When you're cooking up your story, it's good to take a moment and think how much you want to emphasise these parts. It's okay if your answer to that changes, of course, but it can help you guide your writing. For my own work, I decided I wanted to explore the psychological implications of how someone could heal from having this done to them, and how the people around them would react to that, so I decided to lean more into the horror aspects, with the erotica saved for specific moments. Others will have different answers, and that's part of what makes the genre so diverse. Of course, the erotica and the horror also tend to blend together a lot; a lot of the things are scary because they're a kink turned up to 11 (if not, like, 38,) and have all the ethics and safety concerns you'd expect with that territory gleefully trampled into the dirt.

And ultimately, the last and best advice I can give is - you're not writing 'a mechsplo story'. You're writing your story. If some of the trappings of the genre, aesthetic or thematic, do not fit your story? Ditch 'em! Does your work still count as mechsplo if you do? Fuck it, who cares? If it's a good story, not me, I'll read it! Sure, if you cut out all the fucked up extreme petplay kink and military context, it might be difficult to label it 'mechsplo', but that doesn't mean it can't be a damn good story! If you set out to write mechsplo and find when you're done that that label no longer fits, change the label, not the story.

1. I can learn so much alongside you, you are above me yet allow us to be equal, we are equal only in our lack of understanding of one anothers perspectives, let us become whole together

White Witch in a tarot card

The ferrofluid concept is so cool. I wanted to show it interacting with the environment in a way that reflected its traits.

Check out my other (non-lancer) tarot card illustrations here and here