Category Archives: Thaumatophilia

Post-Chapter One Liquid Girl III

So how far back does the whole liquid girl/Apsinthion Protocol thing go?  One of the odd but surpassingly charming aspects of being a pervert infovore is that you can keep finding astonishing antecedents for your own thing.  And wouldn’t you know it but one popped up for me just as I was putting together this little post sequence.

It came from reading Deborah Lutz‘s new Pleasure Bound:  Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism, in a passage about John Everett Millais‘s (1829-1896) painting Ophelia (1852)

Ophelia’s body dissolves into the glittering water that surrounds her.  Woman becomes nature in an epiphanic transformation…With her hands and wrists held above the water in a kind of passive supplication, her parted lips and tilted head show a willingness to be ravished.  Death appears as the ultimate ecstasy, its climax reaching a similar intensity as the sexual orgasm.

You’re not kidding, Professor Lutz — take a look at the painting.

You can click on the image for larger or, if you want lots of detail and have lots of bandwidth, you can find a giant (7087×4280 pixels) version of it here, courtesy of the Google Art Project.

Not only is there dissolution and orgasm going on here, but there’s an awful lot of green…which seems appropriate, somehow.

Something that strikes me as curious, by the by.  The pre-Raphaelites (an artistic brotherhood of whom Millais was one of the founders) would seem to be unlikely candidates for generating mad-science art, given their thematic focus on an imagined pre-industrial (and therefore low-tech) past.  But they seem to show up again and again and again here at EroticMadScience.com.  Must be all that eroticism.  Even before I had the benefit of Professor Lutz’s guidance, I already knew those Victorians were all pervy.

The model in the painting, by the way, was Elizabeth Siddal, who would eventually meet a fate worthy of a second-tier character in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  But I’ll just suggest you get a copy of Pleasure Bound to find that one out…

Metrobay III

There are many artists who’ve worked on Dr. Robo and Finister Foul‘s Metrobay universe, and I am sure that all of them hold to the injunction never to forget Metropolis, but there was one who caught my eye in particular:  Trishbot, and her Metropolis-inspired illustration Retro Brainwashing.

To my eye a most alluring image, presented here by kind permission of the artist.  Click on the image for full size, and you can see the deservedly-laudatory viewer comments at DeviantArt at the work’s page here.

Metrobay II

A favorite thesis of mine is that we kinky people will always be able to find loads and loads of fetish fuel in popular culture, and that since as kids we began getting kinky but didn’t have access to porny stuff (well, usually) most of our early erotic memories are going to be tied to pop-cultural experiences of the “innocent” material we did have access to.

There are two reasons we can always expect this to be true, having to do with the twin facts that we’re all hypersexual primates and many of us are kinky in some way, so therefore

  1. The people who create all this popular culture are going to work their kinks into it, intentionally or not and;
  2. Whether any creator put anything there or not, we will find our kinks in their material anyway.  There’s a reason why there’s a Rule 34, after all.

I wrote the first part of my Thaumatophile Manifesto so that my readers could have a sense of my formative pop-cultural experiences, and naturally when I started corresponding with Dr. Robo I just had to ask whether he could point to a similar class of material in the formation of his own thing for mind control and sexy robots.

Boy, could he ever.  Here are some things he was able to point out to me.

He began with an episode of Gilligan’s Island, of all things, in which Ginger gets mind controlled by a mad scientist.  I can’t embed the video, but you can see it here.  (Well, if you were living on a tropical island with Ginger and Mary Ann, would you fix the damn boat?)

Another example, from the TV series of Wonder Woman, in which a toymaker played by Frank Gorshin builds a life-size duplicate of the heroine.

And another example, the 1982 sci-fi film Android, in which a somewhat mad scientist builds two androids, one of whom is a pretty blonde.

Dr. Robo pointed to some influences he has in common with me, such as Robotrix and The Bride of Frankenstein and also Weird Science, although actually had something in mind from the 1990’s television series rather than the 1985 movie which so influenced me. In the version pointed to by Dr. Robo, a mad scientist tries to drain created woman Lisa’s energy to power his own “bride.” Again, I can’t embed, but you can see the episode on Hulu here. And there’s also a scene in Superman III in which a henchwoman gets sucked into a machine and cyborgized.

But the best overlap we had was Metropolis. You know the scene. Everybody knows the scene.

Can’t see it too many times, and that thought will take us to tomorrow’s post…

Update: Some of the video embeds in this post were crushed by WordPress for the first few hours it was up. I hope it’s fixed now.

Metrobay I

I’ve always thought that one of the cardinal virtues of making your own erotica is that you have an extraordinary opportunity to make friends, and I’m pleased to have a bit of confirming evidence for that hypothesis just recently.

For many years there has been someone else making his own erotic mad science under the handle Dr. Robo.  His core focus is a little different from mine, centered on the themes of erotic mind control and sexy robots (and human beings who’ve been made into them).  Oh, and voluptuous superheroines: let’s not forget that!  Together with his artist and creative partner Finister Foul, Dr. Robo has produced and published a hundreds-of-pages long series of 3D comics are set in a fictional setting called Metrobay.  They got their start in publication from a gentleman working under the handle Jpeger, the proprietor of MCcomix.com (that is, “Mind Control Comix”) and HIPComix.com (that is heroines in peril comix, not hipster comix), and have  since advanced to doing their own distribution. In addition to this principal art, both the series and the setting have benefited from the contributions of a talented group of additional artists attracted to the project over the years, including Trishbot, Uroboros, MCtek, Northern Chill, Akonkid, Dumbtime, and Sir Willoughby.

Yes a little different.  There are no super-powered individuals in the Gnosis College fictional setting, and I’ve touched only a little bit on the theme of erotic mind control (remember Dr. Strangeways’s obscene hedonic machine from Invisible Girl, Heroine?).  There are a lot of sex machines of various kinds, and there’s an A.S.F.R.-related theme often touched on.  And of course, both Dr. Robo and I seem to enjoy working the visual tropes of mad science — of the subject stretched out upon the table, whether volunteer or victim, awaiting some extraordinary offense-unto-God transformation.  Certainly all this was enough to answer Dr. Robo’s friendly hail.

It was time well spent, believe me, for it was a chance to discover still more in common, such as

(1) Origin stories.  Dr. Robo reports that his thing for erotic mind control began when he was a kid.  I experienced the first stirrings of my thing just as early, it seems.  These sorts of things go deep for those of us who really have them.

(2) A common trope:  the tube girl.  I think I might use it more frequently, but Dr. Robo clearly understands its power.  Here is an example, from his dieselpunk-era Metrobay story Original Sin.

(3) And another common trope: the scanner! For me it started with Looker, and I first wrote about Iris Brockman getting scanned to set up some fun personal identity porn. Dr. Robo also knows the trope and knows it well. Consider this scene from another of his comics, Adult Toys:

Yes, I can really relate.

(4) A lust for world-building.  It seems that neither Dr. Robo nor I just want sexy images that reflect our thing, or even characters or stories that reflect our thing.  We want whole worlds, places, fictional universes geared to the logic of what it is that we’re into.  And so we set out to create them.

Main building of Gnosis College, the center of a different erotic fictional world.

(5)  And an understanding of popular culture as a never-ending source of fetish fuel… Well, that’s tomorrow’s post.

But if I’ve intrigued you enough about Dr. Robo’s project (or if you, like he, really like erotic mind control and robots), you can and should show him some appreciation even now.  The Metrobay site at DeviantArt can be reached here, and there’s a whole site called the Metrobay Encyclopedia here.  But probably best of all would be if you were to buy Dr. Robo’s work, which you can do at his Ebay store here.  Happy browsing!

Steampunk Chimera Genesis

Back when I first commissioned the Chimera Genesis image for this site’s first anniversary post, 3D artist Niceman thoughtfully suggested that he could do a steampunk variant on the same theme.  I put that in the mental folder of “interesting idea, must think more about it.”  Chimera Genesis proceeded to storm to triumph, being featured not just here but also in a post by überblogger Violet Blue.  Around that time, Niceman’s proposal swiftly departed the limboland of “interesting idea” for the blessed region of “I’d be a fool not to do this.”  I told Niceman, in effect “I won’t even ask exactly what you’ve got in mind, I’ll commission the steampunk version.”

And I would have been a fool not to have, to, seeing the stunning image Niceman came up with.

(The in-post version really can’t do it justice, so click on the image for full-size version.)Creative Commons License
Steampunk Chimera Genesis by by Niceman, commissioned by Dr. Faustus of EroticMadScience.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

The story here is the same, but the historical setting is different.  Mad science is being used to turn two women into one with the memories and skills of both.  There’s a lot to love about this image:  the fact that a lady mad scientist seems to running the show here, and the shocked “I didn’t sign up for this” look on the faces of one of the experiment’s subjects.  Even the nineteenth-century underwear has a nice fetishy appeal, somehow.

You know, given how much fun steampunk and dieselpunk and all that are, I really ought to do more with the history of Gnosis College.  I mean, as you can see from the college seal (recently worked up for me by Lon Ryden, thanks Lon!) the college was supposedly founded in 1844 (the year that Nietzsche was born and Marx wrote his Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts), and those Victorians could get pretty darn kinky when you looked closely at them.

Must write more…ever more…

Woman and Robot V

And here we get a little edgier still, with a 3D illustration.

It’s a promotional illustration for a site called FuckedByRobots.com, which appears to consist of 3D art stemming from the story premise that the robots invade, take over, and go on the prowl looking for pretty women to have sex with.  This particular illustration goes with the tag “Robots improve their fucking skills in the robo porn lab.”

I guess this is what we deserve for letting computers go on Jeopardy.

Woman and Robot III

The prinicipals in this illustration look like they’re having fun, although I could see it having a bit of a squick-or-squee character.

I’m pretty sure I originally found this at Janitor of Lunacy, but unfortunately don’t recall the original posting time.  As for the deeper image provenance, they style makes me think that this illustration almost must be Hajime Sorayama, although a quick flip through my copy of Sorayama Masterworks didn’t turn it up.

And now, having made a quick flip through Sorayama Masterworks (something I need very little encouragement to do, really) I must retire to chambers.  See you all tomorrow.