“All that I am, you are.”
Slavebreaker Winter, devoted servant of the Highmothers, has at last captured and brainwashed her rebel nemesis. That should have been the end.
Gothic horror in a science fiction hat. Mind control erotica in a lesbian supremacist world, with brainwashed knights in armor, phallic alien parasites, and the transgender antichrist. 23k words.
Heavy content warnings for: fascism, genocide, sexism, transphobia, forced detransition
Here is the fun corner of the website where I assign your homework; this list is composed of both art that directly inspired Slavebreaker and art that is similar in nature (as you’ll see, two very different things). I won’t really be specifying which is which. Use your imagination :)
The intial concept for Slavebreaker was going to be more of a mid-century Flash Gordon-esque pulp pastiche. Then I saw this piece by Haematinon and I loved it so much I completely pivoted.
Their work is deeply indebted to the early days of science fiction, the "scientific romance" era enamored with new technologies, Atlantis, our solar system, ex cetera, but it is equally new & & thrilling & gorgeous. This is the aesthetic vision on which Slavebreaker is built.
The Heaven bemoaneth too much the Androgyn born,
Near heaven humane blood shall be spilt,
By death too late a great people shall be refreshed.
Through sheer coincidence, I have read two separate early-20th century novels that feature, for lack of a better description, a sympathetic transgender Antichrist (the other novel is Black Magic by Marjorie Bowen, which I won’t talk about here but I also recommend).
The Woman on the Beast is a sort-of proto-literary fiction, three separate stories connected by theme and the recurrence of the Antichrist– a genderfluid character referred to in the prologue as “he-she”. The theme of the book is the old adage that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and the third story is about a dystopian future ruled by the Antichrist (who does not seem to know that he-she is the Antichrist).
You can read it on Project Gutenberg Australia!
A woman enslaved to an Amazonian society willingly and eagerly betrays Earth. A mass hypnotizing Siren Song puts an all women’s college under thrall. There are tubes. I love when stories put a lady in a brainwashin tube. This is candy to me. Love it sm.
And speaking of trilby else–
“I like you, Joyce. I’m sure that frightens and confuses you even more, but I also think you understand. There’s an old story, ‘Black Thirst,’ by a woman named Catherine Moore—what I would have given to own her . . . she wrote about a controller, of a sort, with a large harem, and of them all, the one he’s obsessed with is not even the prettiest, or the most submissive, but the one who somehow tries to fight him. There’s something fascinating, exquisite, inside her, and he can’t take it if he kills her or flattens her soul, as he could. Perhaps should.”
– Watering Hole, trilby else
You fucking bet the moment I read this passage I started frantically googling for Catherine Moore. I love weird pulp. Weird pulp written by a woman? With mind control themes? This was bait for me and me alone. Trilby else, my twin flame.
“Black Thirst” is a story born from the Weird Fiction tradition, now most known through the mythos of Lovecraft. In an era where secularism was steadily superseding Christian homogeny, horror writers were made to contend with what frightens in a world with no God and no devil.
It is a story that steeped in orientalism, though only through the lens of fictionlized space cultures, the mythology of the eroticized harem. Beauty is portrayed as a curse, a force that can be bred and cultivated and used as a blunt force weapon upon the psyche. The descriptions are super unsettling and the overwhelming psychic domination is hot as fuck.
The story can be found in The Best of C.L. Moore & Weird Tales, April 1934 (though content warning for some rancid racist imagery on the cover)
Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.
Tragically I am the sort of person to read a hateful manifesto incessantly splooging vitriol all over the page and think, “Damn, this would make for some good worldbuilding for a science fiction story.”
On Archive.org
Maximally Gothic descent into madness, iconic diaphanous white nightgown and candelabra moment. A protagonist so consumed with her own evil that she projects it onto her own surroundings and attempts to call it forth. She wants to force the children to confront the wickedness that has taken them — because she loves the children, she says. She says, over and over and over again. Fantastically subtle movie about repression; how do you say it without saying it?
Tragically I am the sort of person to read a horrible scientific romance about an evil lady with a mind control potion and think, “This would make some great worldbuilding for a fascist society that doesn’t know it’s fascist.”
Wrote a whole essay about this one on Tumblr!
It can be really hard to figure out what media to put on these lists; inspiration is a fickle thing, and it’s not something you can really control or quantify. My work constitutes thousands of little bits from thousands of little things, most of which I could never consciously place. Moreover, the act of listing them here (and, implicitly, recommending them) makes me feel a sort of weight, an ownership, that compels me to focus on things that are overlooked, forgotten, or “good”.
But who gives a fuck. Here’s a mainstream big budget merchandised-to-hell-and-back movie musical adaptation. Yeah the overtness and intensity of the rivalry angle was a direct result of their loathing song. What if a girl who defined her life through embodying the status quo because she cannot dare to confront her inner deviance met another girl so reviled by society that she found power in being what they most feared? What if they hated each other and then fell in love over it? Only true yuri warriors can see the truth.
Hello, do you like this pornographic novella? Might I suggest a nine minute entirely sample-based story-song portraying the narrator’s death rattle after a fatal car crash? Cannot overstate how often I listened to this while writing. Like a lot. A lot.
