Mechsploitation and Hekate's Call

I'm pretty disconnected from Mechsploitation as a broad genre. I read WARHOUND, Grasping the Weapon, HUNTING HOUND, and then I started writing. On the timeline of mechsploitation entries I believe I was the first to write fanfiction for WARHOUND, coming in very shortly after the release of HUNTING HOUND part 1 with Hunter's Shadow, followed quickly by Corpse Eater.

Binary System, the first entry in Steel Jaws Speak No Evil, came shortly after and hit me hard enough to shake some feelings loose that I'd never felt before. And then came Loyalty shortly after.

And it was just the three of us for a while, it felt like. A bunch of people started writing somewhere in there, and then it started exploding pretty quickly. Too quickly for me, honestly. I couldn't pretend to try to keep up with everyone's writing, especially in the early days when I was churning out multiple Hekate's Call chapters in a single day.

That’s all to say that with a few little excursions and experiments, my actual time interacting with mechsploitation as both a genre and as communities is really small. I haven’t read WARSPRITE, I haven’t seen the mecha greats (and not so greats) of the past, I haven’t read things that people constantly reference when reading my work. I haven’t read most of the things inspired directly by Hekate’s Call even.

Who am I really to have strong opinions about what goes on in our genre when I’m this far disconnected from it?

Well. Nobody!

So, don’t take anything I say here to heart and curse yourself from straying from the path or whatever fallen sword-saint nonsense you people are likely to do. Don’t let my words stop you from creating whatever you want in the space.

Are we cool on that? We are? Promise? Don’t cancel me or some shit, I swear to god.

Um, actually this mecha is about the pilots…

I’m not going to do a breakdown analysis of WARHOUND. If you want what I gleamed of the themes of WARHOUND and what kinds of stories the setting was build to tell, Hunter’s Shadow is there for you to read. It’s here for you to read.

I can’t think of a good way to gracefully broach the topic, so I’ll do it with the kind of grace you can expect from my writing and my authorial voice generally:

Um, actually this mecha is about the horrors of being a trans woman.

That’s it. That’s the thesis. It’s easy enough to grasp, I think. I’m definitely not the first person to say it. If it were a hopeful or at the very least not a horror genre, the mech might be the idealized self, able to act on forces larger than oneself and life up and protect what you care for, and so on.

Or it might just be a cool robot with cool guns and lasers.

But obviously not our mechs, right? I could go on to describe all the ways that mechs embody the state and societal mandated violence of masculinity. I could describe in pretty words and flowery prose the ways that the pilot’s abuse is representative of the ways in which trans women are abused and objectified as their agency — masculinity — is stripped from them.

Except, I’m not that articulate. I would make a terrible essayist.

I’ve laid the groundwork, though. I’ve made my stance known. Mechsploitation is a genre by trans lesbians about their experiences — as trans people, as women, as disabled people — filtered through specific imagery that makes it all go down a little smoother. And a little bit of “pornography 👍” for the freaks.

I think gatekeeping is fine, actually, when we do it to men.

Too aggressive?

Let’s try, “Any time I have to hear about a man, I should be paid $100.”

How about “I do not care for the plight of men.”

Or maybe, “I’m just a fucking misandrist.”

In my brief little excursions outside of my small bubble I’ve seen people throwing around a lot of ”he” and “his” and a few cis men who got really into the genre and wanted to join in. I even heard whispers of people writing male handlers. And I think maybe we shouldn’t.

I have a lot to say about communities and the “everyone’s welcome” stuff and why I think that’s all extremely bullshit and how we should actually be very specific about the people we let into our communities and what kinds of expectations we have from them. But this isn’t really about communities.

This is about mechsploitation as a genre for and about trans lesbians.

The problem is fairly simple, actually. I think that we really ought to be pretty careful and deliberate about men in our works.

In a genre so foundationally built on examining fascism, systemic power, and trans femininity, I think that tossing men into the pot is asking for questions that I don’t think most writers want to grapple with.

“The only men in this story are getting force-femmed.”

“The male handler in this story dies to further a woman’s ambitions.”

Okay, but how do the men interact and inform the systems of power in play that form the backbone of the horror of the genre? Men are being distanced from power by being force-femmed, by… women – does that make trans women less than women, who are greater than men, in this system? An abusive man is replaced by an abusive women — is this supposed to be girlboss, or are we going to look at what that says about the system.

At some point, by introducing men, we’re just replicating abusive patriarchal systems with women at the top. While I'm all for the double-standard, that really kneecaps whatever you want to examine within the work, doesn’t it?

Which isn’t to say that it can’t be done. It’s just, you need to be deliberate about it and what you’re saying by doing it.

But, you know… really importantly… I just won’t read it if it’s about a man.

I just don’t care about men. I just don’t. I’m just a fucking misandrist and if the plot revolves around a man for any length of time I will get bored and go read something where women are doing violence to each other. Or having sex. Or having violent sex with each other. Read Black And White by Sal Jiang.

You write erohorror? The horror is just rape, isn’t it?

Okay, okay. No more talking about men. What a dreary subject. Let’s talk about something much lighter. Sexual violence and rape! Gods, I hate that word. It makes my skin crawl. It's a sharp and direct word, and I’m not going to use it a lot. You might not believe it if you’ve read Hekate’s Call, but I have a really weak stomach when it comes to sexual assault.

I’ll spoil a bit of Hekate’s Call, the latest chapter at the time of writing, Chapter 46. Ilina is violently raped, mutilated, and branded in the backrooms of Errant HQ. It was a difficult chapter to write, and the chapter that you’ve read — assuming you’ve read it, which I shouldn’t assume, really — is significantly toned down compared to the original intent.

Ilina is relatively passive, reacting too late to each escalation, and dissociating as best as she can. She tells herself that nothing is permanent, Morian can fix it, and that surviving is enough. It is horrifying and bleak and was really difficult to do.

In the original version of that chapter, Ilina was actively resisting once she’d been forced into the room at gunpoint. A beating as she tried to fight her way out. A chipped tooth from the gun forced between her teeth. The crushing inevitability of being physically overpowered by these three. Hunter was supposed to be in that room, not Ilina. Hunter was going to be taught, yet again, that it hurts less if you don’t resist. The last vestige of her will to live bent to its breaking point.

And it was just too much for me to write. I couldn’t stomach it. It kept me up at night, that scene playing over and over again in my brain in vivid detail. How the knife would feel breaking the skin, more a laceration than a proper cut, and how the drop would roll down the back of my thighs. How the scent of blood and grease and sweat would mix with the thick, stale air. How hard it would be to breathe around the gun when your nose started to run as you cried. The pit in my chest as the fear and panic overtook any conscious thought and I just needed to get out. It would be a mercy for them to just put me down.

In the end, I'm glad I didn't push myself harder than I did to write it as I'd envisioned that scene for the last year. Because I think the current version is better for the story. And because I don't think writing something to be violently upsetting should be anyone's goal.

You get that with a genre like this, don't you? It's about violence and power, so we should fit that into our story. The drive to be more of the genre, to be darker, to stand out from the rest.

People have read Hekate's Call and gone on to write really incredible stories that really caught me before dropping in vivid, bloody, and lengthy sexual assaults that still haunt me. And I get why! I see the inspiration from Hekate's Call, following the same beats and setup to that moment, hitting pretty much at the same time as Chapter 6 did in terms of pacing.

It felt bad, intentionally, obviously. It was what it was. Rape. But I don't think it needed to be as vivid or as long as it was to get across the point. It's a choice, and once I respect obviously, especially from those writers. But I've seen some people's attitudes to that kind of violence in mechsploitation communities.

"People are desensitized to violence in these stories so you have to come up with new ways to hurt them."

I don't think that's true at all. And I worry for the people it's true for. I think that stories should have teeth, actions should have consequences, and that you shouldn't shy away from calling a spade a spade. But I worry, looking out at the sea of mechsploitation cropping up while I've been sequestered away writing Hekate's Call, that other people have sort of... lost the plot.

The horror of WARHOUND, of Steel Jaws, and of Hekate's Call isn't the rape. That's the tail end. The most visible consequence. They are a product of systemic power, and reflect the structure and shape of those systems.

"You can be made to hump the boot," as Kallie has said about the themes of WARHOUND.

Which is, a little more poetic than I'm capable of. I'm kind of dense a lot of the times. Mixed metaphors, losing track of what I wanted to say, and that kind of thing. So the expressions of those systems are a lot more plain and obvious in Hekate's Call. Parental abuse. Financial abuse. Medical abuse. Physical abuse. Guilt. Self-worth. Every relationship in it is informed by the various power differentials between the girls.

And every assault, betrayal, and manipulation is rooted in those power differentials too.

That's what gives them teeth. I had to content warn for three chapters in Hekate's Call. Chapter 6, Chapter 43, and Chapter 46. I did it for safety, because I don't want a reader to cut themselves on the sharp bits of Hekate's Call. But I don't think anyone would suggest that Chapter 43 or Chapter 46 came out of nowhere. I don't think that you didn't have an idea of what Krystyn had been through, or what Ilina will inevitably go through, by the time we got there.

Those chapters don't need to be as vivid or detailed to hurt because you've been getting very familiar with the knife for a long time. You knew where the story would put it and you could brace yourself for it, and that gave it teeth. It gave it stakes. You were invested in these girls, so when they were hurt, it hurt to watch it happen.

It's what the first half of the original WARHOUND is for, aside from the worldbuilding, when Sartha is in Ancyor on the battlefield. You're getting to know her before Kallie put the knife in. It's why even now, after Grasping the Weapon, HUNTING HOUND, and RESCUE HOUND, I'm still hopelessly attached to Sartha. Not the traitor Sartha, like Leinth. Not the hero Sartha Thrace, like Kione. Or Sartha-Hound, like Handler. Sartha, the girl from that first section of WARHOUND, doing what she thinks is right and brushing up against all the ways nothing's right, and trying to reconcile the gap. The Sartha that's standing on the pier looking up at Handler and stammering through her sentences like a cute little virgin even though she knows its out of character for her.

What I'm saying is I don't want to hurt the reader. I don't need to brainstorm new ways to hurt you. I don't need to think of niches unexplored in the genre to stick an ice pick in and see if the disembodied audience screams back.

I'm writing about being trans and the way that systems of powers have been leveraged against me and the people I care about. And if you've experienced those things, then you're going to cut yourself on it with or without my malice, aren't you?

Go write your little porn-fic, Mal

My raid leader once jokingly called Hekate's Call a porn-fic and I couldn't stop thinking about how funny that was. Obviously my raid leader has never read it. More than that, Mechsploitation has always trended more horror than erotic for me. Speaking for myself, that's where the real meat of mechspliotation is. Hell, a year or more on the only piece of mechsploitation I've ever gotten off to was chapter 6 of RESCUE HOUND – twice, admittedly, in short succession while beta reading it between giggling fits – for reasons everyone should probably know by now. We don't have to get into that.

But, we kind of do have to get into it a little bit since I'm already here and writing. I was excited about WARHOUND before it even came out, when Kallie dropped the hint she was working on something after the AC6 trailer came out. I love mecha! Kallie had great opinions about yuri! I hadn't really read any of her work before then, because MC and hypnosis wasn't really a big kink of mine. But Fucked-up Pet Play was a strong siren song when it first went up, and I waited so patiently for it to move from Patreon to public so I could read it.

And then it... wasn't. It was certainly fucked up. It had the shape of pet play. It hit plenty of the parts of pet play that made my heart sing. But it wasn't pet play, it was something else. Which I found fascinating and compelling, naturally. If I hadn't, I wouldn't be here talking about it.

I spent a lot of time with WARHOUND, Grasping the Weapon, and HUNTING HOUND, poking at the structure and studying the cadence with which it was paced. It resulted in Hunter's Shadow, something I threw together rather quickly and then shoved out the door with the first dumb title that came to mind even though I wish I'd named it something else as I was hitting publish.

Hunter’s Shadow was nice. I think there’s a lot of little structural issues about it that I would change now, but I don’t think it’s bad. I’m still quite proud of it. I’m less proud of Corpse Eater, but that’s more because I didn’t jive with the specific flavors of medical body horror involved in it. But, I’m glad I wrote Corpse Eater to explore those themes and representations of stuff! Plus we got Morian Kyrnn out of it all.

I sure do spend a lot of words getting to my point, don’t I? I wrote Hunter’s Shadow to better understand WARHOUND, and Corpse Eater to try to explore body horror in some way. I can sit and rotate an apple vividly in my mind forever but I’ll never be able to explain the apple without putting it to paper and doing my best. I write because it’s my way of making sense of things.

I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone that Hekate’s Call is my exploration of sexual assault. Trying to make sense of what happened to me. It wasn’t violent, but maybe it would have been easier to reconcile it if it had been. I didn’t really even see it for what it was until the next time I tried to be intimate with someone else and all these nasty feelings bubbled up. I think that if I explained it exactly as it happened, it wouldn’t sound like a big deal, either.

If you check the word count of Hekate’s Call, you can see that I’ve found sexual assault to be a very complicated thing to unravel. Every time I think I’ve reached the end I find a new knot I have to pick at, a new angle or perspective. Something I overlooked. Another reason why I reluctantly said yes, instead of putting my foot down and saying no.

I don’t have a healthy relationship with sex. Gods below, I wish I did. I think I’m closer to Krystyn, and I’m a little envious of how easy it must be for Ilina to just let herself be taken time and time again. But I get attached to people so easily and always in the wrong ways. Never in the ways people get attached to me, I worry. I could go on and on, and make vague statements you could link to each character in the story in turn.

Hekate’s Call is very personal.

Isn’t horror is the most effective when it’s personal?

We can dress it up with big robots and evil women draped in leather and metaphor. Unreal things that you can see the shape of real things in. As we established I’m not very good at that. Some of my favorite arcs of Monogatari are Sodachi Riddle and Sodachi Lost. What do you do when there’s no ghost or metaphor-monster to defeat? Just broken, hurt people trying to find a way forward.

Well, at least the robots are cool, right?

I guess I should have a proper conclusion, shouldn’t I?

I really shouldn’t end it so abruptly. Or on that sentiment for that matter. At least the robots are cool. It makes no sense as a conclusion and doesn’t tie anything together. It’s not neat and tidy. This whole thing is really quite a mess, full of my frustrations and anxieties and trauma.

That’s kind of what keeps me hooked on writing mechsploitation. Not nearly at the pace that I used to, but I’m still plugging away at it. Hekate’s Call will done before the year is done mark my words. And I’ve already got the first chapter of the sequel mostly written. I have a lot more feelings to explore and trauma to unpack, so I’m not about to stop.

I have a lot of feelings about mechsploitation as a genre and as little community pockets, and I can’t tell anyone what they can and can’t do in it. I know most of mechsploitation has heard of Hekate’s Call. That it’s always on people’s reading lists somewhere. It's a bit of an outlier I feel, despite getting a lot of people who've said that it was their introduction to the genre, in kind of the same way I feel like an outlier in all these little community pockets.

Everyone's takes are very different and there's a few too many men in the larger community for my taste. I think there's plenty of space for mechsploitation that doesn't feature sexual assault for the sake of shock value or a general desire to hurt the reader. But I also don't know that I'm going to read a lot of it and find out at this rate.

I am, and always was, writing Hekate's Call for myself first and everyone else second. I'm not going to be that fussed if it continues to be mechsploitation at this point or if it's eventually ejected from the genre by tumblr or some conclave of people who shouldn't have read it in the first place.

My feelings for the start of things, when I first started writing again and all the improvement I've made since, are positive. I'm glad other people have found communities they fit in with and friends they're close with, the way I did at the start. That's good. Good for them.

Uh. I guess that's it.

Don't you dare fucking start discourse about my opinions, you filthy fucking mutts.