erin's site

Hi, everyone. 

There’s been a little bit of grousing in the mechsploitation scene over the last couple of weeks, and I’ve found myself increasingly frustrated with a mix of misunderstandings and bad-faith arguments which I’ve seen made about the genre in that time. To be clear, this whole situation is hardly the end of the world (it’s just a few people saying uneducated stuff online now and then) but I feel that it reflects a troubling pattern that bears addressing.

I prefer not to rubberneck at or encourage social media discourse. For that reason I had initially planned not to post this essay publicly, but just to share it with some friends, but I think that it is worth speaking on. Either way, if you’re reading this and don’t know me, I’m Erin and I wrote mechsploitation short stories ANTIPLUG and PROPYLENE, as well as a couple other things both in (The Bough & the Arbour) and loosely adjacent to (Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: The Girl From Titan) the genre.

My aim in writing this essay is to identify and correct a common misconception by establishing some of the basic facts of the genre and its history, and to shut down a bad-faith argument which arises from that misconception. I intend neither to scold naysayers nor proselytize mechsploitation’s virtues, only to clarify and educate.

What mechsploitation is, and isn’t, and might be

Mechsploitation is, to put it as simply as possible, a genre of transfeminine lesbian web fiction birthed principally (though not exclusively) by Kallidora Rho’s WARHOUND, a horror-erotic short story released publicly in July of 2023. 

WARHOUND, the story of rebel pilot Sartha Thrace beaten and broken into an obedient, bootfucking dog, is written in a sort of semi-mythic register that pops its Handler and Hound into reality as fully-formed archetypes, not merely individual characters from a single short story. Establishing these archetypes and their dynamics naturally invites creativity and exploration, and in my view was a major contributor to the rapid growth of mechsploitation as a genre unto its own. This is visible in the way that these archetypes are used and played with across the genre’s body of work, the assumption being that you already know what a handler is and does, what a hound is and does. Even works that subvert or omit these roles, as many do, tend to do so under this assumption of familiarity.

At the time of writing this, there are approximately 280 mechsploitation works on Archive of Our Own, running the gamut from under 300 words to over 170,000. This is by no means an exhaustive list — much mechsploitation writing takes the form of microfiction, individual posts and threads on various social media sites. WARHOUND itself is ongoing, with a physical book available for purchase and the saga’s most recent entry, SHOWHOUND, published to Kallie’s Patreon earlier this week.

The scene observes no hard rules, and has no central authority; writers and artists in it are bound by WARHOUND‘s ethos, not its literal content. The result of this, and its openness towards new writers and their ideas and perspectives, is a vibrant and varied body of work.

This makes mechsploitation hard to pin down, but core themes persist: as a genre written primarily by trans lesbians, following in the ethos of a horror piece with themes of trans assimilation and instrumentalisation, it trends heavily towards exploring trans womens’ experiences and the dehumanising effects of the systems under which we live. 

The AC6 misconception

To delve any deeper into what mechsploitation is means examining its history more closely, and in the process dispelling a pervasive misconception about its origins and contents. 

A common view is that Mechsploitation is inspired by and based purely on FromSoftware’s Armored Core 6. This assumption is somewhat understandable — a large amount of mechsploitation and sister mechposting does heavily feature many of the aesthetic notes of armored core in general, as well as an explicit version of the handler/hound dynamic suggested by the game being common to many mechsploitation works.

But as understandable as the assumption may be, it is trivially disarmable simply by looking at the release dates of WARHOUND (mid-July 2023) and AC6 (late August 2023), and more crucially erases the array of real influences, from within and without mecha, on both the mechsploitation as a whole and on its defining work.

This isn’t to say that there’s nothing of AC6 in WARHOUND and its daughters. The AC6 story trailer, a short which heavily centers the handler & hound imagery only vaguely present in the actual game, was the catalyst for the idea which became WARHOUND. But it is that word, catalyst, which is key: it was just a single spark, dropped into a container of already-prepared themes and ideas, to synthesise them into something new, and singular, and cohesive.

Key to understanding the history of mechsploitation is Empty Spaces, a community of trans women whose writing, heavily revolving around exploitative power dynamics in archetypal forms (witches and dolls, angels, demons, fae, spiders and moths, and more), explores themes of sex, trauma, abuse and much more. It was this fuzzy-bordered community and its output in the early 2020s that formed the primary inspiration for WARHOUND. Additionally, it and its sister “dollposting” scene had in their own rights developed via the concept of the “combat doll” and associated pieces of fiction such as Funeral into “mechposting”, a still-extant scene which has had a great deal of overlap with mechsploitation since its inception. 

It would also be wrong not to mention Isabel Fall’s Helicopter Story, a powerful 2020 piece whose themes of gender instrumentalization and warfare are clearly visible in both WARHOUND itself and subsequent mechsploitation works. 

The inspirations aren’t solely from outside of mecha. Four Murasame from Zeta Gundam — herself a single, particularly famous iteration of a longer-running mecha anime trope — is a very obvious point of comparison to WARHOUND, as is the more general concept of the pilot as vulnerable, a victim of trauma, as seen in various works across the entire genre. These aren’t mere observations, but real inspirations to which Kallie herself has attested.

Vital to mention, also, is WARSPRITE and the other work of its author, Talia. WARSPRITE and her microfiction developed independently of WARHOUND and are no less foundational to the genre and scene, bringing a distinct set of inspirations and influences along with them. Parts of her mech pilot microfiction circa 2023 were a primary inspiration for my own ANTIPLUG!

There is a lot of other important work I’ve omitted, not to mention the history of other trans lesbian mecha such as Aevee Bee’s brilliant visual novel Heaven Will Be Mine, but my point here isn’t to arrange a comprehensive list of the genre’s influences and predecessors; rather, it’s to bring light to the breadth of those influences. What matters isn’t to justify mechsploitation as mecha, but as art which synthesises many disparate influences and ideas into something distinct, with its own vision and voice and purpose.

Kallie puts it succinctly here, just after the release of the WARHOUND novel:

“umm’d and err’d a lot about if I wanted to describe WARHOUND’s relationship to the genre that way [“the series that birthed the mechsploitation genre”] but tbh I think it is straightforwardly true enough that my reluctance is mostly just weird upbringing-inflicted hangups about ever being anything other than totally humble and self-effacing

the genre has other parents too and I do not want to hog all of the credit but equally for a most of last year I practiced being very self-effacing about it and the primary result was lots of people erasing the fact that I, as an author, even exist in order to peddle transmisogynistic narratives

that whole trend of people on tumblr mocking WARHOUND/Mechsploitation as the product of an amorphous mass of stupid, horny, trans girl AC6 fans convinced me of the importance of standing up and saying ‘no, I wrote this, I am a writer and it is the way it is because of my craft and creative choices’”

Bad-faith criticism and the point of mecha

Downstream of the AC6 misconception — one which is understandable, but incorrect, as we’ve established — is the common refrain that mechsploitation writers don’t understand or respect mecha to begin with. This is a bad-faith argument which simply doesn’t hold water.

Mecha is an extremely broad genre with decades of history and no strict conventions. Besides the essential presence of giant machines there is little narratively, thematically, tonally or aesthetically in common between Zeta Gundam and Patlabor, Lancer and Mazinger Z, Front Mission and The Vision of Escaflowne. For any two works which bear strong similarities to one another, there are countless more which share almost nothing whatsoever. 

We know that elements of WARHOUND can be traced back to classic mecha, and that the mechsploitation scene as a whole draws its influences from all parts of the genre and beyond. It’s easy to point to these connections as a way of justifying mechsploitation in response to these kinds of arguments, the truth is that it isn’t necessary to do so, because mechsploitation does not require justification. Mecha has been a million things over the past 60 years, and none of it was required to pay some sufficient respect to its antecedents just to be respected as art in its own right. The argument that mechsploitation is missing some intangible point of mecha is not merely wrong, but utterly ridiculous on its face.

Toys for boys and transmisogyny

I’d like to be satisfied with just debunking these false impressions and calling it a day, but unfortunately there’s an elephant in the room that bears talking about.

The “mechsploitation writers don’t respect mecha” argument insinuates that mechsploitation is genre tourism; not a vibrant microculture of brilliantly talented writers taking influence from a vast range of art, but just some girls making posts about things they don’t understand. This is the transmisogynistic narrative to which Kallie refers: that a community of dumb, horny trans women have as an aggregate stolen the symbols and images of mecha as mere window dressing for their porn. 

Mechsploitation is, unfortunately, an easy target for this kind of thing. Fiction by and for trans lesbians always is, especially when it’s dark or kinky, and mechsploitation is both. It suffers even more for being a subgenre of mecha, a toys-for-boys sort genre which has relatively mainstream legibility, against which its niche, transgressive theming and content stands out. Mecha is for me, so why isn’t mechsploitation for me? 

At that, despite its apparent reach, the community is still small, so it doesn’t always have shooters when someone comes for it. Since it’s also hard to pin down and explain exactly what mechsploitation is, but very easy to peddle false narratives about it, it’s natural for those narratives to proliferate, unchallenged except on the occasion that they come back into direct contact with the scene.

Regardless of its exact causes, the narrative, stripped back like so — trans women are tourists, not legitimate fans — ought to be instantly recognisable as bullshit to any queer person with an interest in mecha, or in any nerd mediums and genres. But even some trans women, when exposed to mechsploitation via their friends and peers, uncritically repeat the same refrain when they can repackage it to paint themselves as the legitimate fans and the icky trannies with their icky kinks as illegitimate. 

It’s not hard to observe that in these cases, distaste for mechsploitation comes first. Some combination of a disgust response to the genre’s dark themes and kink-heavy content, and frustration that people around them are engaging with and enjoying something which does not appeal to them personally — is lazily intellectualized by whatever bad-faith criticism already exists. It is post-hoc justification to avoid examining their aversion, not “I don’t like mechsploitation, because the authors don’t understand mecha”, but “mechsploitation authors must not understand mecha, because I don’t like mechsploitation”.

That their chosen criticism is wrong, farcical in the first place, or transmisogynistic is not considered. It is an easy line to take which cuts off any need to challenge their initial assumptions, their aversion to these flavours of kink and Bad End, their frustration with not being in on it.

This specific case, the dismissal of one genre of transfem literature’s history and value, is one thing, and perhaps not the grandest cause to rally behind. But to the women who identify with this community and its work, it matters a great deal. Transfeminine lesbian communities — not just in mechsploitation, but everywhere— are vulnerable to narratives that dismiss and erase our sexualities and experiences. The transmisogyny in which these narratives are steeped is baked into broader culture in many ways, and isn’t always easy to identify. This makes it difficult, sometimes, to push back against, yet all the more necessary to do so.