In an earlier IEET essay, the term "succubus" was mentioned as a desired fantasy role in virtual worlds. Curious for more information about this, I interviewed Khannea Suntzu, a celebrated Second Life succubus. Khannea was previously interviewed on this and other topics by Le Monde, CGW and Forbes.com, and she's one of the first female avatars at sl-escorts.com. She writes frequently for Acceler8or and hplusmagazine.com, and she'll be contributing to IEET in the near future. She's also an advocate of Life Extension and the VenusPlusX Foundation, and she blogs at http://blog.khanneasuntzu.com/

In this exclusive interview she explains her entrancement with being a succubus, plus she details myriad variations the term encloses, and connects the succubi trope's relationship to transhumanism and future enhancements.

Hank Pellissier Hi Khannea. What's your definition of a succubus?

Khannea Suntsu: The Succubus meme is a very specific set of variables. To understand, have a look at the work of the 3D artist Aery Soul: http://alfaseed.deviantart.com/. These are degrees of prettiness not yet possible in the physical world. But with a little luck they will be, somewhere this century.

Anyone who has ever played an fantasy computer game, an MMO, or has ever dabbled in some of these “world of darkness” RPG’s would recognize that there is a greater range of possible states of being than merely the default human… This kind of exploration is now slowly trickling in to mainstream through lifestyles such as Cosplay and LARP.

These ‘games’ offer a way to visualise what we ‘might’ want to have… Modulating existence by means of the metaphor of 3D imagery ‘slider bars’ and radial buttons (for accessorizing!) allows people to tweak a range of physical (as well as mental) aspects of their state.  

There are many niches for self-actualization.  World of Warcraft allowed millions to make big advancements – many chose to switch gender and they discovered they bloody well liked it. It starts out simple – they prefer to look at a night elf’s ass when adventuring, rather than the butt of a male troll. But then these people start to identify with their avatar and before long they get these nasty fantasies….



That’s how the revolutionary process starts – now there are millions of people out there with specific gender transition fantasies, or “other species” fantasies, or even age/physique change fantasies. Everything goes. People are engineering their mind’s eye view of themselves – this is the precursor stage to engineering the actual physical self.

Hank Pellissier: Very, very interesting. Can you point me towards any… specific…

Khannea Suntsu: Fetishes? Yes. Online look for – Drow. Draenai. Na’Vi, Daemonette.  Troll. Then focus on the sexual side… Look at the Futanari… look at “Furry” crossovers. Progressively more creative, right?

Hank Pellissier: Yes. Very creative.

 Khannea Suntsu: When you're ready ... study the artist’s Dmitry’s work. Extremely sexualized, transgendered, transhumanist and liberating. Also quotidian, where the people engaging in these fantasies see themselves as thoroughly ‘transhumanized’, ‘liberated’, ‘immortal’, but they still engage in sadomasochist power exchange, simulated sexual exploitation and archaic violence motifs of conquest and killing. Imagine that – you're immortal, sexy, superhuman; but your domineering lesbian pimp makes you give blowjobs to orcs in a nearby alley. 

Hank Pellissier: Ick. Well, maybe… that could be interesting. How did you first get involved in this?

Khannea Suntsu: I began exploring these themes with a fervor in the 1970's. I settled in to the female gender, as I found myself consistently (about 75%) referencing myself in dreams as distinctly female. In most of my dreams I have breasts, I am penetrated or ‘used’, mostly by other females. I have never in my life had an erotic dream where I have an orgasm while doing the penetrating.

In my youth I had access to very extreme and arguably unhealthy examples from such fiction and pornography…  In one specific range of erotic works I was exposed to the darker side of things, specifically the vampire and she-devil motif, and something clicked in my head, almost like a slap to the brain. I felt “this is it”. I saw myself as a hyper-empowered female, above the mediocrity of ‘mere’ humans… a supernatural being able to have lots of sex – and in high demand, needing a firm dose of sexual intercourse to sustain herself.

Mind you, the Succubus fetish assimilates the hyper-sexualized feminine, and the hyper empowered predatory state. It’s a bit like a vampire, except that most Succubi can generally sunbathe.

Hank Pellissier: Ha! Ha!



Khannea Suntsu: In 1987 I used my first ecstacy, and to be honest, Ecstacy is a walking, talking metaphor for Succubi.  Ecstacy is dangerous stuff. The rush is so extreme that it permanently changes the existential self-image of what is pleasurable and what is boring. I found that after using Ecstacy once, many users can’t go back to the previous state. They realise, “oh right, this is what life means” and they end up chasing the proverbial banner all throughout Hell.

Ecstacy, the manifested Succubus mental state, it is somewhat analogues to being a very satisfied cat. Look at a well-fed cat in a window, lying in the sun. Everyone knows actual cats are evil incarnate. Cats are murderous thugs and assassins. Cats are so cute they kill and torture and still are found as amazingly endearing to the masses of humanity. Clearly there is a bit of cat in every Succubus.

So that’s where the wickedness starts – gauging just how bloody intense pleasure can be (and I surmise that the Succubi of a truly transhumanist future feel a lot wilder than merely what you and me feel with 200mg of E) and then realizing how selfish and ruthless such extremes of joy makes a person. 

Hank Pellissier: In Second Life are there many succubi?

Khannea Suntsu: Quite a few.  But I only interact often with two (one Colombian and one Dutch). So many Succubi in SL are so unbounded, “showers of blood” that sort of thing. No sense of proportion.  Tower Transylvanian castles walls lined with skulls, fires everywhere.

Hank Pellissier: Are there different kinds of succubus?

Khannea Suntsu: In a world of creativity there will be a million slider bars allowing people to fine-tune and accessorize their preferred succubus state. In my personal fantasies I have assumed discrete supernatural realms and very distinctive and specific lineages of Succubi, much like evolved lineages of otherwise predatory species. I suppose that Succubi would be Amazonian, much like extended (loose) prides of Hyena, with the males (Incubi) living solitary. Most Succubi would have a territory, but rely on a network of sisters to deal with any major challenges or problems.



The functional metaphor would then be choice of physique. If one chooses to be a 2 meter bitch succubus with giganormous breasts, tentacles, huge ram’s horns, a fanged vagina and wings as big as a garage door clearly one inhabits another functional niche than a cute petite little neko succubus that wears a pink little slave collar and crawls around mewling, licking milk from a dish on all fours all day. 

I’d LOVE doing a decades-long meticulously academic study of emerging ‘succubial’ strains of the 22nd century, and never getting the job done.  Someone make me an offer for an advance!

Hank Pellissier: Are there bi, gay, SM succubi?

Khannea Suntsu: ALL  Succubi eat pussy, if only because any spectators would characterize that as hot.  It’s a metaphysical rule, sort of.  Succubi are slaves to their own exhibitionism. They exist to get laid, and to do that they need to inhabit a niche of projected seductiveness, even if it means forcing themselves into threatrical bisexual display.

The obverse of the Succubus is the lesser-used Incubus. Incubi are male, with all the sexual morphism of the Succubus exemplified in to a masculine form. Whereas some succubi are futanari (and have penises) I am fairly sure no self-respecting Incubus would have a vagina. Of course (even if they deny it) the high octane macho Incubi are all bisexual.  They just don’t mind. But the default mode of the Incubus is the Don Juan, slightly rough sexual episode. I bet the bored housewives of the future will prefer Incubi.  Kinda like a Gigolo Joe who plays rough, and forget about monogamous.

Note that the traditional meme assumed that every night a “Succubus” would have to transform in to an “Incubus”. That’s how people in the middle ages explained rape, or whatever.  I don’t see that very often in the Virtual fantasy worlds, to be honest. Most Succubi I engage appear to be fairly fundamentalist about their  outward gender choice.  Once a vagine, always a vagine.

Hank Pellissier: What's the attraction of being a succubus?

Khannea Suntsu: Primarily, being sexy is fun. Being a succubus generally implies having perfect physical measurements, no menstruation, perfect health, superhuman physical abilities and quite often immortality. I regard the succubus path as the perfect starting point where human or transhuman existence should begin.



Everyone who dabbles in this eventually finds, often with an electric spark of recognition, the meme or trope or cliché that works for him or her. My ex-wife was in to the gay vampire thing, the idealized pretty boy.  She was only able to have functional sex (i.e. admit to her sexual arousal...) when she was able to immerse herself in to this fantasy state.  Well guess what, that suited me fine.  We were both heavily in to anal sex, giving and taking, and additionally I didn’t mind that she sometimes fed on my blood. 

Hank Pellissier: In the future, will there be many succubi, in the 3d world?

Khannea Suntsu: I hope not.  Succubi are a very specific adaptation to a world view, to a desire for being alone, for a certain ‘somewhat polar’ sexual set of preferences, a need for autarchy and a hatred for certain aspects of a world that is largely centered on constraints, duties and force.

The Succubus trope is one of independence, to the point of being manipulative, devious and quite often a bit antisocial; sexy anti-heroines and “rogue”.   Quite a few Succubi turn out to be self-centered alley cats.  The emphasis in the Succubus state is quite often “unmitigated bitch”.

Succubi are not overly gregarious beings. Many will go do something else. Many Succubi fit the niche of solitary hunters.  They aren’t people that fit well in a party – they tend to quickly sneak off and have a quickly against the wall. It’s not an easy road to travel on.

Hank Pellissier: What will most humans choose to be in the future?

Khannea Suntsu: In my estimate, the majority of humans will live rather bland, passive, consumerist lives. Most humans are prone to mediocrity and superficiality…  When faced with a range of “fairly abundant” worlds I have just described these people will become passive spectators, and they at best will opt for physiques that are pretty, but by and large unoriginal and “mass marketed”. Only 25% or less will generate any claim or want towards uniqueness or extravagance, or even originality.  Many will be furries. Many will wander around, “trope-hopping” . One month they’ll play-act Klingons, the next month they will emulate a personal interpretation of spider-man or whatever. Bear in mind that the last 25 or so years has generated thousands of tropes.

For instance – Gary Gygax in the late 1980s invented the whole  “Drow” meme.  Right now I could fill a small country with people who are infatuated with being or becoming Drow. Guess what, 90% of those Drow would be female.  My guess.This is a very distinctive meme – Drow are arrogant, extremely feminist, cruel, violent, treacherous and sexually depraved. I conjecture that the typical Drow would “out-kink” the typical Succubus. There are some really twisted Drow out there, and they are competitive as hell. OCD, Bipolar too. 



In the next 25 years how many new existential tropes might emerge? The Na’Vi  trope is new, and it is already a success.  Big-ass blue boys/chicks with barely any clothes living in jungles, skinny as a reed, strong as tigers.

There will be half-breeds too. A whole world of existential mashups; a half draenai, half twi'lek, with some steam-punk cybernetics latched on.  Turned gangrel vampire.  Covered with glowing red tattoos. See how crazy it’ll get?

Compared to the extremely uniform and drab people from  the 1950s, many people in our current age already exhibit comparably infantile delusions of grandeur.  Walk through Los Angeles for a good perspective on this – from a 1950s perspective people in 2012 are stark raving nuts, weird, unshackled, delusional.

The evolution of human civilization must entail an evolution of emancipation from imposed conformity.  Humans must be free to be themselves, whatever that turns out to be.

Hank Pellissier: Can you describe a day in your life as a future succubus?

Khannea Suntsu: If I could delineate a preferred future I’d certainly pick “the fairly optimistic, yet somewhat constrained” GURPS Transhuman space setting…. I’d be a 23-ish year old female.
Pretty tall, with a fairly firm curvature. Blue eyes, very long curly dark hair, small horns, small bat wings, short tail, fairly muscled.  I’d have ridiculously easy access to money, yet I’d find myself wandering the globe doing basically nothing. Write an article, get laid, a non-stop sequence of boyfriends, girlfriends, some minor drama, the occasionally complication. An endless sequence of beautifully granular back-alley scenes, about 1-6 sexual encounters a day, and very few dangerous events. 

No great affluence, no world-spanning plotlines of struggles against Mordor – Sometimes I am on Earth, sometimes I visit a friend on Luna city, a few years I worked a brothel on Ceres. The world around me trudging on, and once every so often someone would say “holy shit you are THAT Khannea, damn girl I met you in Second Life 115 years ago, fancy that”.