Ziel

"…and i find dubious," the detective doll said, tapping ash from its cigar, "that a witch of Her paranoia would allow Herself to be slain by any weapon She empowered. besides, none of Her combat dolls wield weapons that would leave such a wound."

their Witch was slumped across Her desk. Her torso, shadowed by shadows cast by nothing in the Real even in death, bore a stigma the size of a coin on its front. Her back was burned ruin, splattered half across the wall. the room reeked of witch-gore: chlorine, ozone, tar.

"then it was enemy action!" the chatelaine doll exclaimed. "only divine which enemy, and this one will rally the combat dolls. they may be in mourning, but they will fight the fiercer to keep the last shred of honor in revenge."

"spoken like a true one of Hers, suspecting enemies around every corner. but here at the center of Her power? no. if an enemy had made it this far, they would have cut you down too."

"then what or who, Investigator? we are all on borrowed time. when Her business is finished, so are we all." the chatelaine wrung its hands. "this one would rather spend its last days in comfort, or failing that, in honest familiar fear. this uncertainty…"

"imagine being animated by a stored contingency scrap of Her will, only to read written instructions to find Her killer, never to hear Her voice," the detective doll said sharply. "uncertainty is all i know. it is what i woke to. but i hate it even more than you."

"tell me," it continued. "we have accounted for all the combat dolls. all the service dolls. all the pleasure dolls. what about those that have less defined purpose?"

"surely not the comfort dolls? the little scraps of rag and stories she sometimes took to bed? they are as they were when She was alive, all around the place. maybe half of them grasp that She is not simply sleeping. this one never understood what She kept them for."

"for comfort, i assume. but one cannot tell stories," the detective doll said, "without a little imagination."

it focused one eye through the entry wound, then turned its head to look at the open door, figuring the angles.

"round them up for me, chatelaine, if you please."

the half-dozen of them were brought before it. it found them frustrating little things, with little grasp of times or reasons, and a preoccupation with their toys.

"this one's called Buttercup," the fifth one said. it was two feet tall and made mostly of yellow felt. the detective suspected a rather prosaic scheme in their naming.

"and what were you doing the day Miss… went away," it asked the comfort doll. it was not planning to explain death again. they would all learn soon enough anyway.

"this one was looking for ammo!" Buttercup said cheerfully.

"ammo?"

"yes! the maid says that it's tired of cleaning up after our battles, and that we must always put our dart guns away with full magazines! no more darts under the sofa, or the guns will be taken away!"

"i see. did you find ammo?"

Buttercup's button eyes shot to the chatelaine.

"tell the Investigator," it said wearily. "whatever it is. there is nothing much left to punish you for, anyway."

"not all of it," Buttercup admitted. "we're still missing one dart. we're taking turns looking for it! then we can put everything away and play a new game!"

"do you like having battles?"

"yes, sometimes! we do all kinds. this time it was Knights vs. Witches! we got the idea from one of the combat dolls."

"oh? Knights vs. Witches? how do you choose who gets to be a Knight, or a Witch?"

"by half of the rainbow, of course! this one got to be a Witch!"

the detective visited the barracks again, after that. the combat dolls were all dressed in identical black uniforms, blank of any insignia, and veiled. most of them simply sat or stood, doing nothing else.

a single combat doll sat at a workbench, in the process of stripping its eight-foot bow; the detective judged that the bow did not need any cleaning, and probably hadn't the previous ten times, but it didn't begrudge the distraction.

"another question," the detective said.

"yes, Investigator."

"i learned that the little comfort dolls like to play at battles. did they learn that here?"

"oh, yes," it said, with surprising enthusiasm. "they were always in and out of here when it wasn't busy. especially the blue one. endless appetite for battle data, that Bluebell. an appreciative audience. Miss sometimes had to come in here for it Herself, at bedtime."

it had talked to Bluebell before, who had not mentioned the battles. the detective told the chatelaine to find it again.

"where," its weary impromptu deputy asked, "are you going with this?"

"a hunch. a feeling about a feeling that might be an echo of one of Hers. find Bluebell," it said, smoke from its cigar trailing it down the hall.

the rag doll was found and brought before the detective. it perched atop a stool in one of the house's many parlors.

"Bluebell," it asked, "did Miss ask you to tell her a lot of stories?"

"Miss loves this one's stories," it said.

"did she take you to bed more than the other comfort dolls?"

"…maybe? this one isn't sure."

"did Miss ever scare you?"

"Miss is scary! She scares everybody!"

"yes. but did She scare you?"

"She scares Bluebell sometimes." its button eyes were impossible to read.

"one more question," the detective doll said, "and then you can run along and play, Bluebell. if you were telling a story about a scary Witch and a brave Knight, and they fought, what would the Knight use to protect itself?"

"a deconfined-quark rifle," Bluebell whispered, "that shoots fireballs from the dawn of time, way before Witches. but they're not real."

it hopped down from its stool and scurried away.

"there you have it," the detective doll told the chatelaine. "not self-destruction. not rebellion. not enemy action. the little rag-dolls will never find the missing dart; we know the hole it made and the toy weapon that fired it, but dollish imagination is what killed Her."

it took a long drag from its cigar.

"i can't tell you what to do with the time She left to you, but i can tell you this: She should have known better than to force Herself into a story."

"Investigator?"

it did not move after that.

"ほめてほめて"

Worm Chapter 4

ya got

gochujang butter noodles

peanut butter noodles

chili crisp fettuccine alfredo

miso butter noodles

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.

-

No I got it

The Relentless Weaver

A 60s comic style (Kirby) Weaver

With a fucking beehive