Hips do lie: an examination of SIGNALIS' treatment of the female body

Rule 512

Picture the scene: a two and a half metre woman, legs knowingly tilted to make her hip prominent. Penetrating red eyes, electrifying self-confidence. In her right hand, a brutal-looking pump action; in her left, an equally loud stun gun. Her armor wraps her body in carmine-red straps reminiscent of apparatus you've seen in tacky downtown sex-shops. Another woman behind, raw violence of her revolver off-frame, livid red eyeliner under a riot shield, womanly menial task under repressive semi-transparency. Sicherheitstechniker-Controller-Replika. Avatars of sexualized violence. Biomechanical circle of Eros and Thanatos.

A quick stroll through any Signalis fanart compilation will reveal a level of thirst that's comparable to any other game with women in it. Signalis, however, is broadly recognized as "a game about lesbians". Surely there's no shortage of instances of male-gaze sexualization that, personally, don't appeal to my tastes, as much as there's depiction of tasteful sexual encounters and quiet intimacy between women by lesbian fan artists themselves. There's archetypes for every taste: quiet, greasy loner in the Ara unit, savage dominatrix in Storches, stoic elegance in Star units, friendly traditional womanhood in Eules, fantastico-spectral beauty in Falke. Whatever distinctions the fandom makes for their own sexual gratification however, interest me little, since anything with women in it is ill-fated by internet determinism to produce a respectable amount of fanmade porn. This is not an analysis of the overtly sexual, that is, the pornographic, but an analysis about what I find interesting about Signalis' handling of sexuality by itself. If I make a reference to the amount of sexualized material that's been made out of the game, it's to prove a point.

The all-encompassing lesbianism of the game doesn't make the characters themselves less sexual. Their short hair and steely attitude may be a sort of lesbo-confusion of traditional male-gaze aphrodisian standards, but between that confusion of short haired blood and gory butchness paired up with rococo hip-to-waist ratios, I think Signalis' character design choices are profoundly libidinal and worthy of an analysis on why they fascinate the community, and myself, beyond tired old robot-fuckery.

Goreified Asexuality

It may be hard to analyse Signalis' vision of sex and sexuality since the game itself is, by all superficial means, entirely sexless. Ariane and Elster's relationship has been portrayed online in many different aspects that "fandom" rarely talks about. Sometimes it's seen as abusive or dependent. While that's not my lens here, it's an extremely interesting angle to analyse. However, rarely do serious comments on it touch its sexual aspect. Reason being, there is none. Star and Eule never mention sucking and fucking either, only the stars above Sierpinski with a hint at a melancholic past. Outside of all that sleeps the realm of r34.

I find it particularly ironic that the game begins with a quote by HP Lovecraft, who was famously, a very asexual, very conservative man. There is a terminally online joke to be made about how the man most superficially associated with tentacles and slime, two of my favourite pillars of internet debauchery, was himself asexual. His stories deal with the radical meaninglessness of the universe and his characters are, merely, vehicles to express it, as meaningless as the message itself. That's why I don't think Lovecraft's exclusive writing of male protagonists is a sign of anything else besides the spirit of the time and his own experience as a man himself, salted heavily with a dose of narrow-mindedness.

This doesn't mean that Lovecraft's influence has resulted in sexless stories. Most famously, horror masterpiece and lesbian culture cornerstone Alien deals with pregnancy, abortion and childbirth, its terror inflicted by a rape-happy macho cock monster. Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation certainly drinks from the cosmic and the pulp found in Lovecraft's work, yet it is also full of sex, from the depressed perspective of a woman who found a husband back, depersonalized.

Lovecraft is one of the great authors of all time because you can call something Lovecraftian. Much like Kafkian is a term. He set a new paradigm of horror that was, to that day, still unexplored. And with time, Lovecraft has only expanded and adapted, his ideas used and morphed to deal with modern malaises. Alien is about a pro-life Shambler From the Stars; Vandermeer's work revolves around the destruction of nature. And Lovecraft himself, his original writings remain to me more of a proof of concept than an independently interesting body of work to analyse. Signalis therefore takes this proof of concept and it drags it into a modern malaise: an analysis of lesbianism, women's bodies, and systemic solitude.

Signalis' character design is, without a doubt, very sexually attractive. The game employs extremely idealized female bodies for its designs, biological and biomechanical. This is mostly seen in the Replikas' superhuman hip-to-waist ratios and the prominence of their chests and legs via color coding. The game even takes this to territories where it is logically unwarranted, such as Ariane's perfect beauty even while rotting in an irradiated hellhole. And behind the superficial sexiness of the character designs, I think Signalis' lore and visual design is trying to convey a double-edged, paradoxically matriarcho-sexist mechanism of control that the characters of the game are either immersed in, suffering from, or trying to escape.

Two lane road

I. (Bio)mechanical Turk

Migrants are coming for our women is a rancid sentiment that's been growing in European right-wing parties recently. An almost terfish faux appropriation of feminist concerns with spurious goals. A concern for the national woman. For our women. The possessive statement brings down the entire house of cards.

Thus, the woman becomes a political pawn. A Nigelfaragian super-object but object none the less, a return of a fucked-up sort of medieval chivalry.

Use her up. Stop the boats. She won't complain.

Thus is born submissive femininity. The housewife archetype.

At the most basic level, one can define patriarchy as a reduction of women from subjecthood to objecthood, an exclusion of their participation in the human story as a mechanism of cultural control. This is a painfully basic tenet of every feminism branch, yet it is still worth mentioning since the world of Signalis seems to be by all means matriarchal. Authority figures are all, without exception, women, and the only two men found in the story are explicitly behind, physically speaking —the primary field in which masculinity is asserted over femininity—, of their female companions. Naturally, this is mostly a result of the game being a lesbian-first experience, talking about lesbian-ness from the perspective of lesbian devs. And these lore bits, could be argued, directly conflict with the idea that the Eusan nation is patriarchal. Instead, I would argue that Eusan is only matriarchal in a heavily aestheticized manner, while materially reproducing some of the most traditional forms of culturally patriarchic enforced submission.

This aesthetic can be most evidently seen in Eule units. Eules are, by far, the units forced to engage in the most traditional forms of womanhood. Their demeanor is always social and outgoing, they're obliged to put on a happy face, and the tasks they handle are almost exclusively menial or social. Teaching, cleaning, administration. The pretty face of the Nation.

They are, in turn, the ones most subjected to deindividualization. As the Nation seems to pick up specific types of personalities to embody their android replication programs, it seems obvious that they would choose Eule's personality to be the single most widespread visible face of the Nation, since Eule units have the most traditionally feminine personalities out of every single Replika. It's not a secret that female voices have been widely used in AI programs and real-life robots such as Amazon's Alexa. They're perceived as agreeable, friendly.

While in the other propaganda posters showing off AEON units most Replikas are presented indeed sexually, Eules are uniquely presented both sexually and displaying two specific traits: submissiveness and mass (re)production. This is the most evident form of de-subjectification seen in the game's Replikas, the most direct, the easiest to analyse from this specific angle since their sexualization, or rather sexual conditioning, is the most traditionally seen in the real world. A woman as a tool, the women as an entity.

Due to general internet-induced gringo-ness, Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale comes to mind, but if I'm allowed a bit of national and linguistic pride, I'd like to cite Mercè Rodoreda's In Diamond Square as an example of this historical patriarchal submission. Both novels emphasize the agonic boredom of the woman de-subjectified and thus separated from the adventure of human experience. I think about Natalia's excruciatingly boring routines in Diamond Square and a bored bureaucrat Eule comes to mind. The prominence of the hips, the demure gaze, the sir-yes-sir gesture. You're not watching people, not even models posing for a picture; you're watching Eule: a tool. A tool you tell what to do. A pure object of order processing.

For the uninitiated, Mercè Rodoreda is a sort of Catalan Virginia Woolf with a body of work almost exclusively centred on the internal monologues of women trapped in dramatic situations. In the book I cited, the protagonist Natalia marries Quimet, a very sexist man who ignores her real name and decides to call her "Colometa" (Catalan for "Little Dove"):

One day, in Rambla de las Flores, amidst a maëlstrom of smells and colors, I felt a voice behind:

—Natalia...

And I thought it weren't for me, so used as I was to hear "Little dove", "Little dove".

-In Diamond Square, Mercè Rodoreda

Natalia is turned into a tool throughout the book by a simple trick of language. She might as well be an android, unable to reach individuality without the duality implicit in her marriage with Quimet. The novel subjects the reader to that agonic monotony I have mentioned —which is also employed as a meta-narrative tool in Atwood's magnum opus— to make them feel the chokehold of the woman's situation, dominated by an external power into toolhood. The greater horror, to me at least, is that In Diamond Square doesn't happen in Gilead, but in a very real country and a very real time of history: 1930s Spain. Natalia's situation might as well be a documentary. And maybe the ultimate horror is the happiness of the ending, since Natalia's freedom comes by marrying another man who just happens to be nicer. I've seen these women in wrinkled faces countless times sitting around moth-covered lamps in Spanish streets, betting at 9pm like a sort of mob.

But the Kinder Kirche Küche of submissive femininity Eule seems to be subjected to doesn't limit itself to their usefulness as fulfillers of a specific social role. One thing that's particularly striking about their poster is that it's the only one, out of all the Replikas, in which they're presented collectively. Three of them, one after the other, in the same pose.

This could be an allusion to a sort of social reproduction of femininity.

To go back to my dear patriotic examples, this idea reminds me of a 1953 manual taught to young women in Francoist Spain, courtesy of Pilar Primo de Rivera, highest ranking girlboss in Spain's equivalent to a sort of rebranded female Hitler youth. It's called Manual de la buena esposa (The Good Wife's Handbook), an offensively kitschy read trying to imitate Americana as ineptly as Spanish culture has always been at trying inauthenticity.

The panel above reads:

Look beautiful!

Rest for five minutes before his arrival, so he may find you fresh and shining. Touch up your makeup, get a ribbon in your hair and look as best as possible for him. Remember he had a hard day and he only has been dealing with his coworkers.

The emphasis on the husband's perspective evidences, again, that process of de-subjectivization of women in Francoist Spain. Their condition as observers of politics and not active participants in the process. Their supportive rather than heroic role in the national-catholic narrative. An Eule unit is the beautiful face that receives you, the body devoid of life, made decoration. To quote a national saying: a flower-pot woman. And most importantly, both documents, the fictional and the tragically real, emphasize a socially enforced reproduction of those goals. In the case of Signalis, technology itself —bioresonance— acts as the reproductive social womb, rather than a passé fash crash course.

Outside of the rancid national-catholic reference I couldn't help but include, one thinks of capitalist societies, even to this day, having created and then exploited desires for specific brands of womanhood. It's no mystery to anyone that clothing brands and beauty magazines use social conditioning into shame to compel women into certain shapes of consumption, which is, though significantly less violent, an objectification of the female body, a form of control by the system, an imperative to be sexually desirable, now with the nobler objective of monetary gain rather than the multiplication of meat-grinder destined babies via womb-fuck use and abuse. This by no means imply the system doesn't emphasize specific types of socially reproductive masculinity, usually gained through the conscious and loudly announced opposition to the same forms of femininity it promotes, but that, as a system, capitalist extraction only engages with existing cultural norms so as to profit off product selling. Sometimes, it actively modifies individual and collective desire for the same purpose. The 50s Americana that permeates Primo de Rivera's horrid work wasn't born naked and natural.

Certainly, Signalis' Eusan system can't be, in my opinion, categorized as fascistic, or at least not in the traditional sense. And even though historical communisms had its fair share of macho homoeroticism, they tended to be friendlier to feminist tendencies than fascism. New Soviet Woman; Half of Heaven. Eusan might have the aesthetics of communism, but Signalis never struck me as anti-communist as much as an over-exaggerated take on what your uncle thinks communism is, which leaves me doubting if the intention was parodic or simply irresponsible representation. And certainly it doesn't involve a strictly capitalist system despite traces of it being hinted at in some instances, such as the Itou's familial business, which implies a certain survival of traditional familial structures and private ownership. It's a mishmash of both parodic and crushingly serious systems of oppression aesthetically based off a melting pot of totalitarianisms that limit the vital horizon of individuals to a cartoonish degree. Capitalism doesn't want you to be an artist, Stalinist communism doesn't want you to paint anything besides metalworkers, and fascism will catch you painting a cubic face and you'll be forever Entartete.

Signalis is trying to be a tool for a message about the core of desire itself being crushed by circumstance, rather than a lore-rich soil for fan speculation —despite its maybe accidental and very welcome richness— or a serious political critique of a specific system, current or space-age, even though it's evidently using the aesthetics of red scare communism to pull off a political message that may run through all political systems tried and tested.

Whatever the case, since Eusan is a radically, irreparably aestheticized society, it doesn't matter that the rulers are two women, nor does it matter that the police and armed forces are too, nor does it matter if, in a funny twist of headcanon, it's a world ruled by violent misandrists and Nikolai Nguyen has to get pegged every morning like Winston Smith woken up by that one woman screaming through the teleprompter. Eusan exercises a level of control and homogenization to its women comparable to historical patriarchal regimes and the traditional submissive view of a woman's duty, despite the guise of girlbossery coating their structures of government. Just like the average British woman didn't benefit from Thatcherism's predatory nature, the average female Gestalt doesn't seem to have positive life outcomes besides getting blown to bits in Vineta, selling cheesy books or ending up in a frozen McGulag.

The Eule example, however, isn't unique. There are other examples in which both the submission and rebellion to the traditional feminine standard previously described result in negative consequences for the characters in the game.

Isolde Itou might be the most evident example among Gestalt population. Isa is a profoundly damaged woman, and one could argue her biggest limitation is how her traditional femininity clashes with a world so grotesque. She is physically and emotionally delicate, dresses in a single piece dress with almost scholarly thigh highs, can't engage in physical or long distance fights if not by subterfuge. Yet she has a mission and pushes on. In the end, this weakness induced by submissive behavior, her dependence on others, her hesitation and fear, traits all associated with traditional femininity, result in her needing to be saved by those more capable, and ultimately, these weaknesses culminate in one of the most horrific in-game deaths. Particularly striking is the scene in which Adler, a man, corners her in a lonely room, reassuring her that everything's under control. I've been cornered by men reassuring me it's all fine. The scene hit me like a spade through the belly.

To this point, I have only focused on the traditionally patriarchal view of women. Obliging Eule, miniskirt Isa. But this aspect of Signalis' instrumentalization of the female body is minimal compared to another —and more interesting— lane the game takes to assert the exploitation of its women.

May just be kink.

II. Strapped and Fucked

While the archetype of the Americana housewife is the most evident form of sexism to identify and analyze, it's certainly not the most common appearance of women's instrumentalization in the world of Signalis. Nor is it the manifestation of sexual energy that haunts its large proportion of NSFW fan artists and the many online followers who enjoy their work.

There is a very obvious usage of the woman-turned-object in the books referenced previously —notoriously, Handmaid's Tale—, yet sometimes the least obvious path of analysis is the most interesting. This second part focuses on the objectification of women as symbols of power, of their sexuality not as a canal through which patriarchal (or matriarchal) power is enforced through repression, but as a tightly controlled pseudo-liberation of sexual prowess that is deliberately linked with state power, with the objective of making said state power appealing.

Though Signalis' society is, again, matriarchal, there is also historical examples of this sort of girlpower usage in relatively patriarchal ways. An example that comes to mind often is this recruitment poster from the 70s, in the midst of Rhodesia's Bush War:

There is an undeniable sexual undertone to the message being transmitted, and to anyone familiar with the Internet, it's no strange thing to hear that such sexual undertone resonates still in some of its most repulsive communities. There is no shortage of lovingly crafted anime drawings of cute girls holding FAL's donning Rhodesian uniforms, and most have a desperately horny aura to them. I can't fully analyze the entire scope of Rhodesian anime onanism online because most of its dynamics hinge on white supremacy, while here we are only talking about sexism, but there is still a point to be made. To these young men in these communities, and maybe to the young men high up enough on lead paint to join rhodesian forces back in the 70s, the women being depicted are by no means equal to them, nor should they be in any way, be it politically, physically or psychologically. These women are, again, a tool, an object, and ironically, no more object, no more tool, than the lead-high Englishmen persuaded to join the war just for ZANU and ZAPU to blow their legs off. Because even if these societies were quite patriarchal, quite oriented towards oh-how-resonating family values, sexualisation of women doesn't limit itself to the heightening of their submissiveness, but to some extent, it is possible to find contradictory views of women as inherently submissive but capable of outwardly displaying symbols of power. Not a real display, not an inner belief that the display can be, in its most literal meaning, realized, but a display for the sake of spectacle itself. A display for the man. Having absolute control over a woman might be sexy to a sexist, but so is a woman in a USA bikini holding a big fucking gun. A recent picture of American politician Kristi Noem visiting a maximum-security prison in El Salvador comes to mind, tightpants and Mar-a-Lago face overlayed on rows and rows of dehumanized tattooed men. New Americana: it's dominatrix now.

This brand of girl power but not too much sexism reminds me of a relatively known thesis by cultural critic Walter Benjamin, the Aestheticization of politics. In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin defines one of the keys of fascism as channelling the energy of the oppressed masses through spectacle. It is surprising that Umberto Eco's definition Ur-Fascism, while containing traces of it, doesn't include a strict analysis of the spectacular element in fascist movements, considering it was written in 1995, and Benjamin's Ur-Famous work was written in good old '35. 90 years ago, he was able to predict Little Dark Age edits. These 70s Rhodesian propaganda posters merely apply spectacle to the female form. To say it along Bifo Berardi, the erotic becomes extremely semiotic.

When it comes to linking this specific idea to Signalis, I'm reminded of the first scenes of Olympia. Leni Riefenstahl is usually remembered, especially within the context of the Aestheticization of politics, by Triumph of the Will, but Olympia links that topic with the presentation of Signalis much better, since it is, at its core, a movie about the body. Olympia was a 1938 Reich propaganda film about the Berlin Olympics, and a lot of its fascistic charm relies in the glorification of the human form. It shows the body at its peak, a peak of rationalistic, numeral performance, of raw power, an explosion of Marinetti's machinery into frail human flesh, shaped first for exposition. The first scenes seem to draw a romantic parallel towards the imagined Greco-Roman past, in which this praise of the body for the prowess of the body itself was a cultural staple as strong as wine and tragedy. The spectacle reaches so deep it even colonizes the body. The only thing it can further colonize, is the mind.

Of course, Signalis is neither rhodesially patriarchal, nor does it depict literal nazis, and it's very much not straight. It's a profoundly queer game made by queer developers of backgrounds quite different to the sort of men who would find the previously described attractive. It's also, as mentioned, a game with a relatively lively NSFW fanart scene, and a lot of it consists in the sexualization of their women as powerful. Elster and Star units being heroic and sexually dominant seems to be a running theme. Among most parts of the queer community I've been to, this form of sexual expression for women is, properly, an expression, a form of freedom, a liberation, since traditional heterosexual womanhood demands sexual submissiveness, and queer people are, generally speaking, more open to sexual adventurism and forms of sexual expression outside of tradition. This, of course, doesn't mean there doesn't exist a risk of objectification similar to that of heterosexual society. It simply means this injection of power into women does actually view women as subjects, and not mere objects of desire, canals of violence, or tools for ejaculating propaganda. I, in my own sexual experience, have taken this role specifically for the purposes of humanizing myself. What Signalis does, is show off the opposite.

Signalis takes this objectification of the wonder-woman to create a very strong visual identity for a lot of its Replika units, not linking the queerness of the game to an inherently liberating force in its world, as previously stated, matriarchy by itself means nothing for the common woman. Think about those marble white statues in Olympia while observing these posters:

The STCR unit's poster may be the most evident showcase of this. She looks authoritative, imposing, brutal. She's holding two weapons at the same time, as if she's overflowing with power. Most importantly, her pose is very intentional, as she's holding her hip slightly outwards and leaving some weight to melt off her left leg. Leisurely, secure, sexy. Stronger than you. Statehood made body.

The ARAR unit poster engages in a slightly downscaled version of what's shown for STCRs. Her pose is more heroic than leisurely or powerful, but still maintains a level of collected coolness, further emphasized by her framing, targeting the wideness of her hips. One may remember profoundly homoerotic —and terribly kitschy— posters of Stalinist worker realism. The blondie metalworker happens to be a greasy butch now.

In both of these, none of the units are shown working their rough and tough roles, but in an explicitly aestheticized manner, much like those Rhodesian women in the poster fitting a perfect composition. The exception to this is, surprisingly, the poster for the STAR unit, which despite having the most openly beautified mugshot of them all, shows her in the middle of an action.

Ara's design is relatively practical, but there has always been something about Stars and Storches that has fascinated the community sexually. Their designs not only very much emphasize their height, which is an object of desire in a sexually dominant partner, but are also riddled with paraphernalia that, while not seeming very practical, beautifies them in a distinctly kinky way. Those red straps and bands all over their bodies, especially around their waists. Naturally, I know nothing about the nature of this choice, but I do know that for some people, myself included, it comes across as extremely provocative. And analysis is more interesting than authorial intent.

On this sadomasochistic attraction, which could be broadly applied to kink in general, American philosopher Susan Sontag has a particularly relevant quote:

The rituals of domination and enslavement being more and more practiced, the art that is more and more devoted to rendering their themes, are perhaps only a logical extension of an affluent society's tendency to turn every part of people's lives into a taste, a choice; to invite them to regard their very lives as a (life)style. In all societies up to now, sex has mostly been an activity (something to do, without thinking about it). But once sex becomes a taste, it is perhaps already on its way to becoming a self-conscious form of theater, which is what sadomasochism is about: a form of gratification that is both violent and indirect, very mental.

-Fascinating Fascism, Susan Sontag

I think this is what fascinates most of us interested in sexual depictions of these characters: the theatrics. As sex becomes something that can be exciting, rather than a social duty or a social ill, the door of adventurism opens, and what before was mechanical can now become something further. Internet made this exploration of kink significantly easier, and Signalis' brand of tippy toe sadomasochistic robot fucking is simply another part of this puzzle. Life is tedious, fiction is exciting. Life is disorderly, fiction has a point. Therefore, the theatricality of sex adds a layer of excitement —the most sought-after feeling in anything erotic, as Sontag says— that enriches the activity for a lot of people. It's no mystery a lot of queer people are furries, which I'd argue is a form of exercising an affirmation of your own queerness as something cute, something to be proud of, by embracing monstrosity instead of being shamed by it. So is the desire to be a robot, or to fuck one. Signalis doesn't use this as a liberating force, much like Sontag doesn't seem to either.

To this effect, relevantly, Sontag writes:

There is a general fantasy about uniforms. They suggest community, order, identity (through ranks, badges, medals, things which declare who the wearer is and what he has done: his worth is recognized), competence, legitimate authority, the legitimate exercise of violence. But uniforms are not the same thing as photographs of uniforms— which are erotic materials and photographs of SS uniforms are the units of a particularly powerful and widespread sexual fantasy. Why the SS? Because the SS was the ideal incarnation of fascism's overt assertion of the righteousness of violence, the right to have total power over others and to treat them as absolutely inferior. It was in the SS that this assertion seemed most complete, because they acted it out in a singularly brutal and efficient manner; and because they dramatized it by linking themselves to certain aesthetic standards. The SS was designed as an elite military community that would be not only supremely violent but also supremely beautiful. (One is not likely to come across a book called "SA Regalia." The SA, whom the SS replaced, were not known for being any less brutal than their successors, but they have gone down in history as beefy, squat, beerhall types; mere brownshirts.)

-Fascinating Fascism, Susan Sontag

In some flashbacks, Signalis hints at practical war uniforms from the carnage in Vineta years before the events of the game. In one shot, Lilith holds her bleeding eye, and she can be seen strapped in a similar chestplate as star units wear. But what the Nation decides to display in posters aren't those crude Gestalt units. They're exclusively the carefully designed sexy biomechanical law enforcement units, none of whom are ever suggested to partake in war. As war is something that happens far away, in a distant ocean world, a red desert and a palace above toxic clouds, the practical design of the uniforms shouldn't concern the civilian. Law enforcement is something they will encounter, and therefore, the practicality of Lilith's flashback armor gives way to a bombardment of carmine red straps and red eyeliner straight out of Lady Vengeance. Thusly, the Replika's designs more suited for direct repressive violence are also the most elegant. The power of the state channelling itself through sexual power. Civilian numbness caused by kinky uniformity. The most disingenuous form of tough love.

There is a remarkable number of kinky drawings featuring Replikas as inseparable from state power, and certainly there is a certain fascination with uniforms within kink communities. Signalis itself, very directly, very unsubtly, puts its focus on the presentation of these women as inseparable from state power, as the highest pride of Eusan, Wunderwaffen unserer-Nation. And I think the game is employing this sexual allure to trap these characters into the role of sexy oppressors. Their sexual appeal coats the Solar System's very real brutality in a haze of kitschy hyper-aestheticization, a simulacrum of a person-non-person physically designed to sexualize, and thus minimize, the terror it's about to inflict on you. Politics made sexy, politics made a theater, politics made a spectacle. Storch beating your sorry ass.

Do you feel liberated?

The most fascinating part about Signalis is that it's full of characters who are desperate to escape that same form of sexual instrumentalization. As much as a lot of the fanart emphasizes the dominant sexuality of Signalis' biomechanical units, it also sometimes does something that, to most of us at least, is inescapable if we ought to find the Replika sexually attractive: separate her from her role. A lot of the art features the Replikas and Gestalts openly disobeying Nation standards. For a lot of the fanart, the source of dramatic effect is that same rejection. The straps and makeup of the meanest units fades into the background as we slowly begin to see their womanhood as an unfortunate accident merely used by external forces. As we discover their inner desire to escape object status.

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

The emotion that drives most of Signalis' most interesting characters is an uncontrollable need to escape and disobey.

This is not exactly a hard boiled point of analysis, since it's the exact leitmotif that drives both Ariane and Elster.

A richer look comes from observing the entire cast's reactions to the extremely strict demands of Nation-mandated morality. While Ariane and Elster's story is the centre of this solar system of characters that is Signalis, the other components offer a microcosm of this same emotion that keeps raging below the tone of the game: a need to escape.

Star units are, judging purely by their technical description, dangerous and violent towards their own. Their patterns seem to have been resonated from the mind of a military or law enforcement woman with unresolved internal conflicts about hierarchy, and thus the Nation sees in this tendency towards violence an opportunity. While the notes on her character emphasize the need to keep her violence under control, that same violence could be seen as a tool to keep the hierarchy in check.

This contrast would not hold too much weight if the Star unit we saw in game wasn't, at least to Elster and her Eule partner, easy-going and generous. It's jarring to meet her directly, through experience, and meeting her after, through cold information.

I find her death in the mines in particular the moment in which her will to become subject finally reaches climax. Surrounded by the corpses of her comrades, having disobeyed orders both of standing still, like her commander Sieben, and of not entering into relationships, she finds herself at the side of the woman she was looking for. A lover. Someone not to be controlling towards, someone equal. Tiny, frail frame crying, holding onto her body armor, and not a shred of will to hurt inside it. Instead of falling into despair, like Eule, she speaks one of the most tender lines in the entire game:

Hey, listen. I'll let you in on a secret. I can remember my name, from my old life. Isn't that funny? (...) It'll be okay. Wherever it is I'm going. I'll wait for you there.

I believe, despite the lack of voice acting, that Star is being genuine about her lack of fear, not because she is a fearless veteran that's seen it all, but because she realizes this is the moment she, to quote the game, can become whole.

The violence is over, the hierarchy is over, the Nation's oppression is over, and she died for what she loved, not for what she was told to love. She isn't a sexy cop beating Gestalts to a pulp no more. When no eyes are on her, she discovers she can be tender, she can be loving, and thus she finds peace. That she can experience and not simply be informed of. Maybe if the game wasn't that polygonal, we'd see a smile. Maybe it's the first time she ever felt the need for one. Because her life didn't end there, her life was affirmed. She escaped. She thinks.

The Ara unit we find in the tunnels below the Storch dorms, in typical Ara fashion, has a more dispassionate view of her own need to escape. Unlike Star, she doesn't reach an emotional turning point, but a cold conclusion after studying the obvious. She seems to have gathered information after her reclusion during the S23 accident, and while she reacts within expected personality parameters, unlike Star's unexpected tenderness, she still beats the Nation in her own way. Her escape is quiet, "I'm not going back to work".

I find the ARAR unit's innate indifference particularly amusing in one note by an ARAR-S2305, nicknamed "Fünf":

Service Status: Electronics reset key is nowhere to be found. I set up a lock picking kit but management bumped the elevator engines up in priority, so next shift will have to pick the lock. It's just trial and error at this point. Find me if you need a key to open the service hatch (or ask management, whatever) - Fünf

That "whatever" at the end seems to suggest that, while Ara units seem to be the most numerous, they are also some of the most conscious —and indifferent— of the Nation's correct functioning, and therefore, the world. Maybe they're the most robotic of units that are, essentially, robotized humans only in looks. Maybe their working class appeal is their numbness while inside they want to burn the place to the fucking ground, like we all do behind the cashier.

The Ara in the tunnels is escaping her oppression with a minimal amount of emotion, yet there is some palpable sense of frustration, almost contained fury, in her lines:

So much talk about Persona and Stabilization... In the end, they just want us to shut up and work until we die. What a joke.

Yet, her fury is never outwardly displayed, neither verbally nor destructively, much like Star's inner tenderness is displayed without a shred of shame. She doesn't want to be the greasy worker with the big hips, the fucked up distortion of a We Can Do It poster. Ara escapes, but she escapes in silence. Star is a dying lover full of poetry but Ara is dull ol' Mr.Bartleby and she is no scrivener anymore. She would prefer not to.

The Mynah unit found in the tunnels is, however, a complete turnaround of the reactions these other units had in the game.

Mynah units always fascinated me because of how their personality clashes with her methods of persona stabilization. They seem, at a first glance, the most mentally stable of all units, and to use a very intentional term, the most adult. They have tough jobs, they toil and they conform to what must be done. They don't have major avenues for degradation, and their technical description even describes them as "motherly". Yet, they are stabilized with stuffed animals, something exclusively associated with children.

The lines spoken by the Mynah in the tunnels, Beo, are particularly lacerating. She isn't burdened by Storch's anger issues, by Eule's need for music and high intensity socialization, by Adler's endless needs for stimulation, by Star's arbitrary need for hierarchy, by Kolibri's need for a huge library full of books. Beo is, again, an adult in the room. But she is utterly incapable of imagining a world beyond the Nation, like some of her peers could.

I'd help you, but one of my Hydraulics failed and I can't move. I'm pretty much done for so you can just leave me here. There's no point repairing an old unit like me, so don't worry about it, okay? It'd be a waste of resources (...) Don't worry about me. There are many replacements. We're just Replikas after all, right? In the end, what's one drop to an ocean? When I die they'll just make another.

It is, again, hard to speculate much without voice acting, but she seems to take her death not with a sense of duty, but of conviction. She isn't saying she will be replaced because she has to say it. She is saying it because it's the only thing she knows. When she says she is a drop to an ocean, she's not softening the blow of her own loss with poetics. She's being completely sincere.

Mynah's love for plushes comes back in this scene as a reminder that these units, while outwardly, aesthetically, acting like the adults in the room, are sometimes, deeply infantile, in need of authority.

Beo's tragedy is that her death, unlike Star's, or Ariane and Elster's, or maybe the Ara in the tunnels from starvation, is of no significance to her, because she is incapable of seeing beyond what she is told to be. Incapable of seeing the rear of those spectacular unit posters. While the other two units can, in the end, transition from object to subject, Beo remains trapped to her very end, an end which at least has the mercy to be peaceful.

There could be some further analysis about Sieben's inaction, for example, but it's better to limit ourselves to the protagonists until the end, Ariane and Elster.

Both of their stories are defined, at almost every single point, every single event, by disobedience. By a need to become their own. A subject. Ariane begins young, by painting instead of tending to the Nation's brutal schooling system. I'm quite sure half of the people who will ever read this know the feeling well. This is rewarded with her being sent to the military, and even in those conditions, she finds a twisted escape by enrolling in the Penrose program.

Elster doesn't intend to escape. There's not much that can be said about her life as a Gestalt, whether she is Anna Huang or Lilith Itou, but her first cycles in the Penrose, and even her technical description, paint the picture of an extremely submissive woman. She tries to keep Ariane at arm's length, and Ariane does the same, even expressing frustration in her diary about Elster's presence. Those barriers slowly begin to fall, and thus both Ariane and Elster reach, for a brief number of cycles, away from the limits of the Solar System, in the Oort cloud, away from Leng, Rotfront, and all the almost Boschian hellscapes of Vineta, their own subjecthood. No more is Ariane a soldier, nor an albino, nor a target of bullying, but a painter, a companion, a lover. No longer is Elster a soldier, a Replika, a copy, but a dancer, a protector, a lover. Bodies touching each other, that become people.

And the most violent breakage of the chains of the Nation's sexual dominance is achieved by Ariane and Elster, and Star and Eule. Stars are higher in rank than Eules, and they even have an internal rank system that allows for controlling violence. Elster is merely "the maintenance unit" and Ariane is the captain. Elster reports to Ariane. But in the moments they are together, all these women involved begin to see each other as equal, which is the most basic condition for true love.

The posters, the controlling sexual energy, the submissive sexual appeal, all point to an emotion of looking up and looking down, of reproduction and control. Yet both of these couples don't feel the need for control, nor are they placed in a socially reproduced role. Elster dances sweetly with her lover, Ariane doesn't follow military orders, Star is allowed to open her softest side, Eule can cry all she wants. Life ceased being work. Elster isn't a machine anymore, Ariane paints, Star and Eule don't have to pose, hips rocking out, perfect makeup, sir-yes-sir. That control remains away, somewhere in a titanic city in the surface of Heimat, under the rings of Saturn. These women negate themselves the humiliation of being tools and, some literally, some figuratively, reach for the stars in a fatal, but languidly beautiful search for affirmation.

A languid one none the less.

Uranium Fever

There's few that are familiar with Signalis that don't know about the game's particularly brutal endings.

Recently, I have been replaying the original Hellblade, by studio NinjaTheory, a game very dear to me, and have felt pulled back into thinking about the first time I tried Signalis.

Superficially, they're similar games: a very capable woman goes to hell on Earth —one to literal Hell, the other not even on Earth—, sees some abysmal dogshit, finds her lover deep in the pit. But Hellblade is both an intensely personal and optimistic story. Signalis is explicitly political and pessimistic.

Signalis' setting is extremely intentional, but Hellblade is purely inspirational. The runes Senua sees are an outwards expression of her mental illness —or blessing, depending of who asks— but they don't speak anything about 8th century Viking or Pictish society. They're not symbols of the northmen's society and what they did to Senua, as much as they are Senua's own projections into the world.

Signalis' political system is, one could argue, as vague as the Northmen's in Hellblade, but it is an all-encompassing force that acts externally onto Ariane and Elster, an existence, to put it like that, rather than an emanation. A thing that presses, and a thing that tears apart. I find it particularly telling that Hellblade's depiction of the Vikings is influenced by neo-pagan aesthetics of cool-factor-over-authenticity that makes bands like Heilung, Skáld or Wardruna interesting. A projection. A certainly cool one at that. Signalis does engage in fictionalization, yet it still chooses the flag of a real nation to make its Nation.

Senua certainly suffers from Viking external violence, yet most of her violence was struck on her by her own father and people, those living in Orkney with her. Viking mythology acts as a canal through which very serious themes of trauma, parental abuse and mental illness are explored, but it's always overtly symbolic and exclusively rely on Senua's ability to see the world as a subject without any force that abstracts her. In Signalis, the Nation is all over and around Ariane and Elster, and it's the single reason they are where they are. It shapes them in such a choking way as to never let go until the end. Senua was birthed from a mother, but Elster was —quite literally— made from scratch. The person inside her robbed, built from zero, at least intentionally.

Perhaps that's why Hellblade ends up with a promise that will be carried into Hellblade II, a very literal ray of hope at the end and a nice indie song. Senua has accepted herself and now the fight is over. She overcame herself because she could. Signalis starts with a promise, and once it's revealed, it's as dark as it could ever be. Ariane and Elster could never overcome themselves. They never stood a chance. Faced with that external threat, while, ironically, Hellblade's motto is "the toughest battles are fought in the mind", Signalis comes to a fatal conclusion: the elimination of the self is the only way for it to not be controlled. Senua's self is affirmed at the end of Hellblade, but everyone in Signalis either dies or has to accept death as an escape from the Nation, from the outside. Senua's suffering is complex and multifaceted, but Elster keeps quiet and Ariane's conditions are all byproducts of Eusan supremacy.

Senua's malaise is tackled in an individual —and extremely interesting— way, but what everyone in Signalis suffers from is intensely political. And who's there to fight with you? There's not even a fight to do. Maybe the wisest thing then is do nothing. Become nothing. Elster and Ariane are far less complex characters than Senua, against their desire.

This is, ultimately, the tragedy of Signalis' women. I've spoken about how they manage to escape, but the escape is as languid and powerless as it can be. They're only quiet in death. They're only subjects once they can't be.

It's an almost misanthropic conclusion the one our two lovers made right after that dance to Schubert's Serenade. Maybe revolting against the Empire was once a noble cause, but the ferocity of mankind has won again, this time branded red. It got to us, Ariane.

The promise was their way to victory. To escape control. To not become a tool. To not become a sexy plumber in a propaganda poster, a uniform-donning lapdog into the stars.

Was it really a victory?

I find it ironic that Ariane and Elster's depiction in-game can be read as conformist and hetero-adjacent in form, rather than explicitly queer. At the end of the cycle, Elster is a short haired butch looking for a long haired girly girl in a dress. I'm reminded of how Shadow of the Colossus uses the girl's white dress and Wander's lack of heroics as a parody of traditional folktales. One could say Ariane and Elster failed to transgress.

I find it ironic that the most powerful unit of the Nation, a wonder-weapon called Falcon, is the single, most traditionally feminine of all the Replikas. The only one displaying such a romantically aesthetic view of womanhood. The boss, the one you're meant to look up to, is the idea of woman itself. But both her conformity and her ability to perform physical violence become, in the end, a stertor and a confused death on red sands she doesn't understand.

I find it ironic that Star dies heroically in armor with Eule crying at her side, like a prince and a princess from a bedside tale I'd hate as a kid.

Was it a victory that the only escape Ariane and Elster could engage in was, itself, a military project by the same Nation that made them into the tools they never chose to be?

It almost feels like one can hear the Nation's laugh, in the red desert behind the gate.

Maybe, when there is no Me to retreat to, when not the world, but all worlds, have been swallowed by humanity's ferocity, a dying smile in a deep hole, away in a frozen planet, is the best one can hope for.

Maybe a simple "thank you" before Schubert plays one last time. A last gasp of personhood escaping, surrounded by the steel that provided containment in the guise of an escape.

Maybe you think you won. It's not like you'll ever know.

But you know love.

I wanna express my deepest thanks to the proofreaders that helped me navigate around common mistakes I usually make while writing in English, my second language. These are:

The Art Devil https://bsky.app/profile/theartdevil.bsky.social

KLEO https://bsky.app/profile/kleocchi.bsky.social

Revenger210 https://bsky.app/profile/revenger210.bsky.social

And:

References, inspirations and recommended reading

Fiction

In Diamond Square, Mercè Rodoreda

The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood

H.P. Lovecraft's complete works

Annihilation, Jeff Vandermeer

The King in Yellow, Robert W. Chambers

Non fiction

Fascinating Fascism, Susan Sontag

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin

Eternal Fascism, Umberto Eco

DDR Posters: The Art of East German Propaganda, David Heather

Various essays from ILDISERTORE, a blog by Italian philosopher Bifo Berardi

Movies, video and audio

Alien (1979)

Triumph of the Will (1935)

Olympia (1938)

Well There's Your Problem Podcast. Episode 109: Rhodesia

A video essay about Alien's themes of abortion and control over women's bodies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSZLnLolKm8

Videogames

SIGNALIS - Rose-Engine

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice - NinjaTheory

Shadow of the Colossus - Team ICO

Thank you kindly for reaching the end. This was a project I've wanted to do for over two years now but I've found myself in the depths of some of the worst moments of a seven year long depression that I still fight navigating between prescribed medicines, alcohol and pure will. I decided to finally get to work on it, for the love of the game. I rewatched some bits from the great late Bill Hicks, those that influenced my comedy as a clueless teen who still wanted to write. And I found his monologue about fear and love. And I wrote, 'cause it's all a ride he says, and I chose to see the ride with eyes of love, because appearances are deceiving, and I still happen to enjoy writing like a maniac deep into the night, stream of consciousness, wondering if anything I made even makes sense.

I sincerely hope it was an enjoyable read.

Much love,

Helena.