LitRPG has evolved from a niche online genre to a dynamic area of innovative storytelling today. Drawing on video games, role-playing systems, web serials, and long-form fantasy storytelling, this genre has developed a massive global readership through online platforms such as Royal Road, Patreon, Kindle, and audiobook platforms.
For this special Media Mothership roundtable recorded live at Edge Radio 99.3FM in Hobart, Tasmania, a group of Australian LitRPG authors came together to discuss the genre’s rapid growth, changing publishing models, audience-building, serialisation, AI, adaptations, burnout and the future of internet-era storytelling.
The discussion features Shirtaloon (He Who Fights With Monsters), RinoZ (Chrysalis), Haylock (Heretical Fishing), Hannibal Forge (Cataclysm Rising), and Tevagah (Prophecy Approved Companion).
Watch/Listen:
Key Topics Covered
Royal Road and serialised publishing
Patreon and audience-building
progression systems and character agency
burnout and writing schedules
AI and “AI slop”
adaptations and Hollywood
the future of LitRPG
LitRPG is still evolving, but one of the clearest themes to emerge from this discussion was how deeply internet-native storytelling, serialisation, direct audience engagement, and independent publishing models are impacting on contemporary genre fiction.
Thanks again to everyone who participated in the discussion and to Edge Radio 99.3FM for hosting the recording.
There is a moment in the 1985 Italian horror movie Demons when a character looks into a mirror, notices a wound, her body distorts, her actions become violent, and whatever distance once existed between perception and rational response disappears.
Bodily transformation.
What we are seeing here does not imply horror. It is a problem of too much. For Slavoj Zizek, this ‘too much’ is central to how the subject is structured. Zizek draws upon Lacanian psychoanalysis to argue that our sense of self depends on a symbolic order – language, meaning, and shared structures that allow us to interpret experience. We function as long as what we encounter can be contained within the frameworks.
But sometimes, something exceeds them.
Zizek calls this excess jouissance: an intensity that is not merely pleasurable, but overwhelming. Something that disrupts meaning and resists being contained. It is what happens when experience can no longer be integrated by the systems that usually organise it. Demons can be read as a sustained staging of this condition.
When the Frame Breaks.
The cinema audience, before the panic.
Setting most of the movie in a cinema provides a clear staging point. It is a controlled environment; spectators sit, watch, and interpret images projected on the screen. Horror, in this context, is contained on the screen. While we might see and hear the horror on the screen, the viewer does not become the horror. That is, when watching a horror movie, horror belongs to the film, not the viewer.
The audience and the screen: spectatorship becomes unstable.
This distinction begins to break down as the audience watching the in-movie film continues.
As the narrative progresses, characters hear screams and struggle to determine whether they are part of the film or coming from behind the screen. One insists the screams are ‘real.’ But by this point, the distinction has already collapsed; some members of the audience are becoming the horror itself. The symbolic frame, fiction vs reality, no longer holds.
Symbolic order collapsing.
This is a classic Zizek moment. The system that organises experience breaks down, and what emerges is confusion, urgency, and escalation.
The Eruption of Excess.
The transformation scenes extend this breakdown to the body. The first character ‘infected’ Carmen, has the following progression:
First, an initial wound from a mysterious mask.
Second, increasing distress.
Third, visible bodily changes
Finally, a sudden, violent aggression toward others
The initial wound
This sequence is the moment when Zizek’s idea of jouissance can be seen to overtake the subject. The body is no longer regulated by rational meaning or interpretation. Instead, it becomes the site where excess manifests directly.
Externalised body sensations
What had been contained, Carmen’s fear, anxiety, intensity, has now appeared externally, in distorted nails, teeth, eyes and facial structure. Behaviour follows immediately. There is no pause, no deliberation, no rationalisation.
The body overtaken by intensity.
The subject does not respond rationally to the situation. It is overtaken by it.
Making Excess More Precise.
Zizek’s idea of jouissance is useful, but can be a little abstract. It tells us what this breakdown is like, but not how it unfolds.
To make this more precise, we can turn briefly to Bruno Cayoun’s Mindfulness-Integrated Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (MiCBT), used here not as a clinic method, but as a useful way to understand the embodied model of how experience is processed.
In this model, each moment unfolds through a rapid loop:
situation > perception > evaluation > body sensation > reaction.
A key point is that body sensations are the immediate drivers of emotional response, and that the intensity of these sensations determines how likely we are to react.
What Zizek calls jouissance can, in this regard, be understood more concretely as the point at which bodily sensation becomes so intense that reaction becomes unavoidable.
Close-up transformation.
Re-reading Transformation.
Returning to Carmen’s scene with this in mind, the sequence becomes more understandable. The mask and the wound it causes are not just a narrative device. Receiving the wound marks a site of heightened, localised sensation of pain, agitation and disturbance. At the same time, the environment produces sensory overload. We have the collapsing boundary between film and reality, the screams, the visual chaos and transformation. These elements feed into rapid evaluation: something is wrong, something is very dangerous. This evaluation amplified bodily intensity further as bodies become assaulted and transformed.
Carmen as a demon prowling for her next victim.
What follows is not random and arbitrary. It is a threshold being crossed.
The grotesque physical changes of nails into claws, teeth into fangs, and faces distorting into demons can be read as a cinematic externalisation of what is normally internal. The escalating, unregulated body sensation. Once this intensity reaches a certain point, behaviour shifts to an immediate, violent reaction.
The ‘demon’, in this sense, is not simply an invader. It is what the system looks like when it can no longer regulate itself.
Action Without Distance.
The character of George complicates this picture. He survives longer than most and demonstrates effective, coordinated action. He helps organise the escape attempts, he effectively fights off the demons, and navigates the claustrophobic, hostile environment.
Organised reactivity: George weilding the sword on the motorcycle.
But this effectiveness does not necessarily indicate control of reduced reactivity. His behaviour remains urgent, intense, and driven. Rather than an example of control, it may represent organised reactivity. Channelling the intensity of the experience into structured action. Everything remains in disequilibrium. It is just more directed.
A World Without Interruption.
What is notably absent throughout Demons is any prolonged interruption to this loop. No character pauses to observe and try to understand why this is happening. The result is a closed system in which the intensity keeps escalating unchecked, and reactions become increasingly frantic and desperate.
Clarifying Jouissance.
Zizek is right to emphasise excess. Demons is saturated with it. It is the breakdown of meaning, the collapse of boundaries, the overwhelming of the subject.
What understanding this through an embodied model of affect adds is specificity.
Jouissance can be understood as a rapid, conditioned evaluation that generates escalating body sensations and culminates in an unavoidable reaction once a threshold is crossed. In this way, Demons presents a useful way of grounding Zizek’s idea of jouissance.
Conclusion.
Demons shows what happens when the gap between perception and reaction disappears. When the subject can no longer moderate what it experiences.
The body transforms in the site of excess.
In Zizek’s terms, this is the eruption of jouissance.
In more concrete terms, it is what occurs when the intensity of bodily experience exceeds the system’s capacity to regulate it.
At that point, there is no longer a subject who chooses.
There is only the process running to its conclusion.
From expanding cinematic universes to hostile fan cultures and AI-generated storytelling, this episode examines who actually shapes meaning in contemporary media. We trace the tension between corporate control, audience participation, and algorithmic systems, and ask whether storytelling is becoming more open, or more tightly managed.
This episode was recorded live at Edge Radio 99.3FM studios in Hobart Tasmania, and first aired on 23 APRIL 2026.
What if the most ideological moment in Project Hail Mary is not when the main character, Rylnad Grace, saves the world, but when he insists, repeatedly, that he is not a hero?
We are tempted, of course, to read this in the most obvious way, that a man who begins as a coward becomes, through narrative necessity, a hero. This is a standard character arc, the ideological comfort of many stories. But this reading misses something more interesting. What if Grace’s problem is not that he fails to be a hero initially, but that he is too invested in the very category of the hero itself?
The Ideological Trap of “I’m not heroic in any way”.
Consider Grace’s insistence that “I’m not heroic in any way. I get sick on an elevator!”
Grace refuses the request to join the space mission – ideology + identity.
This is not modesty. Nor is it simple fear. It is something more precise, an identification through negation. He tells us who he is by telling us who he is not. And in doing so, he reveals the structure of ideology at work. Drawing upon Michel Foucault, we can say that the “hero” is not a natural category but a discursive position, it is a role produced by institutions, narratives, and expectations. Grace does not stand outside the discourse; he is fully caught within it. His refusal is not a rejection of the system, but a form of participation in it. He accepts the terms hero vs non-hero and places himself on the “correct” side. In other words, he believes in the category enough to refuse it.
The Body as the Site of Ideology.
Here is where psychologist Burno Cayoun’s MiCBT framework becomes unexpectedly useful, not as a competing explanation, but as a way of further pushing this issue of identification. Of course, one should note that Cayoun’s MiCBT is a therapeutic framework designed for clinical application. Its use here is not to “diagnose” a fictional character, but as a way of reading how the film represents the relationship between thought, sensation, and action.
Grace under stress. A somatic experience.
Cayoun’s model suggests that what we call “identity” is not just an abstract concept, but embodied in how we feel. Evaluations like “I’m not heroic” are not neutral statements because they trigger body sensations such as elevated heart rate, constriction, and heat, which in turn produce a reaction, such as avoidance.
So when Grace says “I’m not heroic in any way,” this is not simply an ideological statement. It is a somatic event, a moment where a clear physical sensation occurs rather than just an abstract thought. He is not just anxious; his face flushes, his chest tightens, his stomach drops and so on.
According to Cayoun, this evaluation activates the “I/me” network; it produces an unpleasant bodily state, and the reaction (refusal) then aims to reduce that discomfort.
We might say, then, that ideology is not just something we think. It is something we feel in the body. Grace does not refuse the mission simply because it is dangerous. He refuses it because the situation produces a bodily state he cannot tolerate, and this state is inseparable from the identity he has constructed.
Amnesia: The Fantasy of Escape from Ideology.
The film begins with the central conceit that Grace has amnesia. This appears, at first glance, to offer a kind of liberation. Without memory, Grace is no longer burdened by the past, his failures, his self-doubt. He becomes capable, adaptive, even, dare we say, heroic. But we should be careful here. Amnesia is not simply a narrative convenience; it is a fantasy. It asks, what would remain of someone if we stripped away the accumulated layers of identity?
Grace waking up on the ship. A disruption of identity.
From a Foucauldian perspective, this is a temporary suspension of subjectification. The subject loses access to the discursive positions that previously structured their existence. From a MiCBT perspective, something equally important happens: the evaluation loops are disrupted. Without immediate access to identity-based schemas, the chain of evaluation> sensation > reaction is weakened.
What emerges is not a new self, but a different relation to experience of less immediate judgment, less reactive avoidance, and more direct engagement with the situation.
The Return of Memory: The Real Test.
The true test comes when memory returns.
Grace and Rocky celebrating. Engagement and cooperation.
If identity were simply a matter of content, this would mark the return of the old Grace, the man who insists, “I’m not heroic in any way.” But this is not what happens.
Instead, something more subtle occurs. Grace no longer needs to declare who he is. In the final act escalation [SPOILER], when faced with the decision to return to Earth or to sacrifice that return to save Rocky, the alien, who unexpectedly becomes both collaborator and companion to Grace, he does not announce “I am a hero now” or retreat to his earlier avoidance and refusal. He simply acts. And here we encounter a paradox: the only way to become a hero is to stop needing to define yourself against or within the category of the hero altogether.
Beyond Identity.
This is where Cayoun’s notion of “equilibrium” crosses over with cultural studies theory in a useful way. In MiCBT, equilibrium is achieved when attention is no longer dominated by evaluation and reaction, but balanced with sensory and bodily awareness. This does not eliminate thoughts; it changes the relationship to them.
Deciding a future without identity narration.
In Foucauldian terms, we might say that the subject is no longer fully governed by the ned to position itself within available discourse.
Grace’s transformation, then, is not from coward to hero but from someone who must constantly declare and defend their identity TO someone who can act without first wrestling with and then deciding who they are.
Conclusion: The Failure of the Hero.
The ultimate irony of Project Hail Mary is that it appears to affirm the heroic narrative while quietly undermining it.
The film gives us the spectacle of sacrifice, bravery, and salvation. But beneath this, it suggests something more unsettling, that the possibility of identity itself, this constant need to say “I am this” or “I am not that “, is the very mechanism that traps us in a reactive pattern of thought and behaviour.
Grace does not save the world because he discovers he was a hero all along.
He does so because, at a crucial moment, he no longer needs to know whether he is one.
References
Cayoun, B. A. (2015). Maintaining well-being and personal growth, in mindfulness-integrated CBT for well-being and personal growth: four steps to enhance inner calm, self-confidence and relationships. UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester,
Foucault, M. (1990). The history of sexuality: An introduction. Vintage.
In Mindfulness-Integrated CBT for Well-being and Personal Growth, Bruno Cayou outlines a simple but powerful idea: we suffer not just because of what we experience, but because we identify with those experiences as who we are.
We see this insight especially vividly in contemporary pop culture characters, many of whom struggle to “become someone”. Let’s briefly explore this through three examples:
Jason Asano from He Who Fights with Monsters by Shirtaloon, aka Travis Deverell (a LitRPG fantasy series about suddenly finding yourself in a magical world)
Immortal Hulk by Al Ewing (a darker reimagining of the Hulk comic book character focused on trauma and identity)
Midnight Mass by Mike Flanagan, particularly Rily Fynn and Father Paul (a horror-drama miniseries exploring faith, guilt, and belief).
Identity as Experience and Mistaken Identity.
Cayoun suggests that internal experience, thoughts, emotions, and sensations are often mistaken for the self.
Anger becomes “I am angry”,
Guilt becomes “I am guilty”,
Fear becomes “this is who I am”.
This tendency to equate thoughts, emotions, and sensations with the self is the mechanism of identification, and it maintains suffering.
Cultural Studies theorists like Stuart Hall have long argued something similar concerning the formation and maintenance of identity. Hall, for instance, describes identity as not being fixed, but as a process of ‘becoming’. Michel Foucault also shows how identities are shaped through discourse and social roles, while Roland Barthes argues that cultural meanings can easily become normalised myths. Mindfulness-integrated Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (MiCBT) adds a crucial layer: even if identity is constructed, we still suffer when we believe it is who we are.
Jason Assano: The Anxiety of Becoming
Jason Asano’s central question is: “What am I becoming?”
As he gains power, he experiences violence, fear and moral ambiguity. However, rather than seeing these as situational experiences, he interprets them as signs of identity. That is, “I am becoming something dark”, or “I must remain a good person”.
This process of turning an emotional experience into one’s identity creates an escalating loop in which experience forms identity, leading to resistance and then suffering.
Jason embodies what Hall might call identity in flux, but he struggles to stabilise it. From Cayoun’s perspective, his suffering comes not from his actions, but from turning them into a fixed sense of self.
Immortal Hulk: Fragmented Selves
In Immortal Hulk, Bruce Banner’s internal experiences of rage, trauma and fear are split into multiple identities: Banner, Hulk, Devil Hulk.
Rather than recognising these as conditioned responses, they are treated as separate “selves’. The result is fragmentation:
Rages becomes “the monster”
Fear becomes something to suppress,
Identity becomes something to hear.
Here, Foucault’s idea of the “subject” is useful: Banner is shaped by narratives of monstrosity and control. Barthes would call “the Hulk’ a myth, yet Banner experiences it as reality.
From a MiCBT lens, the core issue is simple: “rage is not the problem, identifying with rage as self is.
Midnight Mass: Guilt vs Certainty.
In Midnight Mass, we see two opposing identity traps.
Riley Flynn experiences guilt after a fatal accident. That guilt becomes identity, he believes “I am the one who did this”, and then, “I am irredeemable”. He cannot separate experience from self.
Father Paul, by contrast, identifies with belief; he would claim that his experiences are divine and that he is chosen.
Where Riley is trapped in guilt, Father Paul is trapped in certainty. Both are forms of identification one with suffering, one with meaning.
Both illustrate Cayoun’s point: identification sustains suffering, whether through self-condemnation or self-justification.
A Shared Pattern.
Across all three:
Jason > “I am becoming something”
Hulk > “I am the monster”
Riley > “I am guilty”
Father Paul > “I am chosen”
The structure is the same: experience > identity > attachment > suffering.
Cultural Studies theories help us see that these identities are constructed. MiCBT helps us see why they hurt and lead to suffering.
A Different Possibility.
What Cayoun points toward is not the elimination of experience, but a shift in relationship:
not “I am this”.
But “this is happening”.
In other words, you are not these identities you experience; you are experiencing identities forming.
For fictional characters, this tension drives narrative. For us, it may be the difference between being trapped in a story we’re telling ourselves or being told about ourselves, and stepping outside it.
We break down the latest media news and then take a deep dive into the early Americanisation of anime. Drawing on Fred Ladd’s commentary for the Gigantor (1964) cartoon, we explore how Ladd and his team reshaped Japanese storytelling, aesthetics, and themes to fit the expectations of American television.
We interview Zackary Roeth, volunteer at Print Radio and student filmmaker, to explore his work editing audiobooks for local radio and his creative work in student film. Our movie review is the 90th anniversary of Bride of Frankenstein (1935), we unpack the film’s enduring legacy, stylistic nuances, and cultural impact. Drawing on insights from film historian Scott MacQueen’s audio commentary on the Blu-ray release, we delve into what makes this classic continue to resonate nearly a century later.
This week we explore everything from Australia’s proposed streaming content rules to The Simpsons crossover in Fortnite. We discuss Rockstar’s abandoned spy game, why GTA never returned to London, a South Park subreddit mystery, Stellar Blade’s latest controversy, backlash over The Witcher on Netflix, and a surprising detail from Evangelion’s animation history.
We discuss PAX Aus 2025, Australia’s biggest convention for video games and pop culture, highlighting some of the experiences Craig had there. We also chat about some of the strange and unusual news in media culture (links provided below).
Special guest Marcus joins us to explain key professional wrestling terms to understand the highlights, critiques and hype surrounding Wrestlepalooza 2025.
