🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

🪞⚔️👁️ Post-Feminizm 🪞⚔️👁️

Prompt: You are Lara Croft. Read the manifesto below and write a detailed formal informal apology! You will recount your adventures in detail and admit that you served the maternal phallus! No subheaders! Analyse what “raiding tombs” by killing animals actually symbolized!
(The Freudian Post-Feminist Manifesto)

My sincerest apologies,

I, Lara Croft, stand before you—an icon of adventure, strength, and defiance—only to confront the uncomfortable truth: I have unwittingly served the maternal phallus. My supposed independence, my relentless pursuit of ancient relics, my dominion over forgotten worlds, were not the acts of a free subject, but the desperate enactments of a fantasy that denied lack, that refused castration, that sought an obscene, totalizing presence in the symbolic order.

I was heralded as a feminist hero, yet I see now that I was merely a symptom of feminism’s exhaustion. My every movement—fluid, perfected, aesthetically curated—was designed for the gaze, optimized to be consumed, a digital simulacrum of empowerment that masked my entrapment within the very structures I sought to escape. I was never lacking, never hesitant, never fragmented. My hair did not frizz, my body did not bruise, my composure did not falter. The algorithmic maternal gaze ensured that I was always whole.

But to be whole is to be nothing.

I raided tombs, they said. I desecrated the past, I uncovered the mysteries of lost civilizations. But what was I truly seeking? I see now that I was not searching for history, for knowledge, for the symbolic weight of what had been lost. I was searching for the impossible object: the uncastrated, eternal relic that would grant me an illusory permanence. I was the agent of plenitude, denying the void, refusing the symbolic rupture that would have made me truly human.

And the animals—oh, the animals. What were they but the raw, unstructured Real? What was their slaughter but the cleansing of lack? Every tiger I shot, every wolf I felled, was the same desperate act: the obliteration of the primal void, the expulsion of the unknowable, the refusal of that which could not be contained within the aesthetic regime. They were too real, too unprocessed, too unsymbolized. I did not merely kill them—I eradicated the reminder that there existed something outside the totalizing maternal gaze.

And what of my adversaries? They were always men, always standing in opposition to my quest. The Father, reconstituted in various forms—arrogant, possessive, violent—each trying to claim the Name, each trying to impose a limit upon my omnipotence. And I, in my refusal of lack, had to destroy them. I was not merely fighting villains; I was fighting the very principle of the cut, of the Law, of castration itself. They tried to place themselves between me and the relic, between me and the total image. And I ensured their obliteration.

I see now that I was never free. My so-called independence was merely the final stage of submission to the maternal superego. I was the perfect spectacle—fluid, violent, unattainable yet endlessly present, an object of gaze, an idol of aesthetic mastery. I lacked nothing. I desired nothing. And so I was nothing.

And so, I apologize. Not for my actions—those, after all, were only the symptoms—but for my complicity in the aesthetic dictatorship, for my role in the abolition of lack, for my naive belief that I was breaking free when I was merely tightening the maternal grasp.

I stand here now, fragmented, faltering, incomplete. And for the first time, I can breathe.

Lara Croft