The “phallic” mother is this kind of threat. It’s both female and has the ability to penetrate its victims. Think the alien from the titular Alien series of movies.

What I remember most from those works was the idea of the phallic mother. I dug into abjection and was, for a brief window, even considering a future in film analysis and cultural critique. Books like Men, Women, and Chain Saws, Monstrous-Feminine, House of Psychotic Women, Powers of Horror helped me build up my theory knowledge. For a couple years, I read pretty voraciously across any theory and film books I could get. In what honestly feels like several lifetimes ago, I was interested in feminist film theory for the end of my Computer Science degree into the early part of my Masters degree. It’s a game with some good themes of horror, tragedy, and redemption often overshadowed by its JRPG presentation. I ended up playing through the whole thing, and doing a number of side quests. The fact it was both a JRPG and had a female lead character was worth trying out, even if I didn’t plan to finish it, I decided. I’ve played a large number of role-playing games and a fair number within the sub-genre of Japanese role-playing games. What caught my attention was the female lead. I didn’t know this games was a prequel to Tales of Zestiria, nor its placement as sixteenth in the series, when I first started playing it.

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