Unlimited Combat Dolls

UNLIMITED COMBAT DOLLS (UCD) is the first book of Kay F. Atkinson’s duology about Dragonfly, the combat doll. After waking up on an abandoned factory floor, guided only by the memories of a dead trans woman and automated systems that remind her that her body is not her own. Meeting her pale twin, a model-sister produced at the same time, the two recognize each other as Dragonfly and Wolf. Lost in the ruins of the megafactory that built them, their existence seems to be doomed to be a short and miserable one — until they are rescued by Plume, an elder combat doll.

They become a throuple as Plume introduces Dragonfly and Wolf to the outside world. The combat dolls are mass-produced warmachines, elite forces spewed by the megafactories that kept waging the wars of fallen empires across a dead world abandoned by its God. Each of them is stabilized by the memories of a murdered trans woman, each controlled by an endocrine system that refuses any feeling other than pleasure-as-pain and pain-as-pleasure — and only rewards combat dolls with life-sustaining feelings if they murder each other.

Joining Plume’s team of combat dolls — North, Whisper, Canary, Torvei — Dragonfly and Wolf must fight other dolls to “eat”, feeding on the violence and their own suffering. They prey on “empties”, sisters that were unable to feed themselves and whose endocrine systems turned them into prisoners of their (not) own bodies. Under Plume’s guidance, they are drafted into her ideology and war: to save every sister, to stop the creation of more emptied combat dolls, all factories across the wasteland must be destroyed.

You know the drill; if I wrote a critique, it is because you should get UCD. The prose is clean and sharp, in such a way that it always has an edge to it. Excellent sci-fi, prime post-human post-apocalypse world. Every character is delightfully characterized; from the combat dolls of the main cast to all the strangers they fight and meet across the wastes. The action scenes are just how I like — and you can expect a lot of them; they are called combat dolls and must fuck each other up to stay alive — short, intense, frenetic and in half a page the world has been turned upside down. The wasteland is filled with terrifying vistas and haunting beauty; Kay’s descriptions pull you into the vast manufactured emptiness of UCD’s world, taking you on long journeys while never overstaying their presence or dragging their feet. I absolutely adore how fucked up Dragonfly becomes, even if she still remains very much herself — especially the sick, delicious desires she discovers.

I rate it six stinky teddy bears set ablaze.

Time to get into the critique proper. Expect light spoilers, but I will try to remain as vague as possible and not reveal anything that I believe would hurt rather than enhance your enjoyment of the novel.

Good speculative science fiction is said to be about speculating about new technologies and how it changes what is possible. Great speculative Sci Fi uses imaginary technology as narrative tools, but is not about technology — or rather, if it is about technology, it is about social technologies — but rather uses these tools to speculate on us and why we have to be this way. It understands that the world, humankind, and societies are something we make and speculative on why it is made this way and what if it could be made differently.

The technology UCD is about is the transgender woman.

Every single combat doll is a trans woman. Well, maybe they be so in various layers. Their bodies are not their own and made in the image of trans bodies conjured by long-dead designers. Each of them is entrusted with the memories of a trans woman. Each of them identifies themselves as a trans women, to the point that the concept of the transfeminine is practically inseparable from the concept of a combat doll.

A combat doll is embodied in a body that belongs to the will of others, having to forge an identity and purpose for herself that transgresses against whatever designs were imagined for her. A trans woman is a warmachine that can only earn some agency over herself by brutalizing herself or her sisters.

The condition of combat doll is to be denied personhood, to be have control over her embodiment, to live a life of violence and never be given the means to be anything more than an object. They are all beautiful, with eroticized bodies and murderous endocrine systems; their firmwares ensure they can never get each other off, despite every choice made for them was sexually pleasing to patriarchal eyes that did not have to admit how attractive they found them.

But the old nations that waged the wars that saw the creation of the dolls are long gone. The final mockery was that the genocided trans women chopped into material for warbots, have outlasted their oppressors. In a sick archival sense, they will outlast them — however, they remain even now chained by the bloody systems of patriarchy and capital.

Yet, the wastelands belong to the dolls now.

What world do we make when our oppressors are gone? When what we can be is what we make of ourselves? Can we build ourselves anew, or are we too traumatized? Too broken. It certainly feels impossible to me most days. But we have to press on. If not for ourselves, for our sisters. Because what, we isolate ourselves; we deny ourselves to feel because it is too painful? We go empty too. We deaden ourselves and become dangerous to those around us. To our sisters.

It is particularly difficult for the combat doll, whose very survival depends on brutalizing her own sisters. Every single trans wo… combat doll is a traumatized, calloused, despairing thing always ready to be punished with starvation and doom should she not perform as she is judged by outside forces — or by offering another combat doll as sacrifice. Over and over each combat doll has to perform horrible acts, and not only is that the only time they are allowed to feel anything, they feel great sexual pleasure tearing a sister to death.

Come excuses, justifications, rationalizations, ideologies — and even faith. Plume’s ideology is ultimately a suicidal project: destroy every megafactory, save every empty, also means condemning every combat doll. This burden only increases as it is passed down to her disciples. Some dolls only hunt emptied ones; others prey on any other doll they can get their hands on. The rarest sort may be those like gentle Canary, who refuses to kill or hurt other dolls — so instead she mutilates herself to “feed”. Doll religions rise around using every part of the girl, giving them the mercy of death while offering “immortality” through archival footage. Entire societies “farm” emptied dolls, using them as cattle to “feed” the murderous impulses of “stable” dolls while providing cruel entertainment to outsiders¹. Others seclude themselves in isolated oases, clinging to ways of life that have no future.

In the end, there is no dressing up the awful truth. We keep inflicting gruesome harm upon each other and ourselves. We keep telling ourselves that we need to do this to survive; more often than not, we are correct in this assessment.

Men may have killed the world, but they still linger in long-shadows. Even as a combat doll, men still owe you; they can always make you small. Put you in your place. Make you dance to their desires, force you to bear violations and sexual assault with a grin on your face. All the things we do to each other? The horrible, nasty things done by broken, despairing women cornered or lashing out? Yeah, the worst of those pales with even the briefest encounter with the shadow of Man.

This is never as strongly experienced as it is with the RePods, the helpful little fabrication units that can repair even the worst damage. There is literal sexual assault in UCD that is not as violating as experiencing the RePod.

You don’t own your body. You cannot give consent; you cannot refuse intervention. It does not matter that you made this body your own, that your self-image adapted, that you transformed, that you shaped yourself in battlescars and lovebites. Irrelevant if you love the softness of your curves or the hardness of your carapace. That your faceplate is loved by other combat dolls, that a replacement would make you a stranger. You will be cut and sliced down to your smallest parts, discarded from anything deemed superfluous, fitted with replacement parts decided by obsolete patent laws, sharpened into some gross patriarchal idea of a non-person sex-object (trans) woman is.

No wonder some dolls decide to go out as themselves than ever subject themselves to its horrors.

What makes you, you?

Are we our memories? You would think that UCD would be very preoccupied with this question, based on its premise. Refreshingly, it seems to be firmly against this assumption, refusing to be entrenched in any position. There is only one, maybe two characters, that seem to treat memories as a continuity of personhood. Ubiquitously, dolls believe that these memories are something that happened to someone else, which lives to some degree within them. However, just because you are not your memories, they are not nothing. They provide a basis for trauma, personality, how to interpret signals, and a baseline of what being human or a person is. Every memory kit is of a trans woman; every combat doll recipient for one is a trans woman.

Is Dragonfly her memory kit donor, Sal? She does not think so. Sal is important to her, she loves Sal. Dragonfly holds and values Sal’s memories and draws from them often. There are many personality traits that she and Sal seem to share. However, she is Dragonfly. Not Sal. Hell, as wonderful as Sal may have been in life, would Sal even consider Dragonfly a person? Or would she just be a thing to her?

UCD may very well be a narrative where souls are real. Which would not give any explanation, just raise more questions about us being our souls. What it would even men for Dragonfly to have a soul? Would it be Sal’s soul? Is every recipient of Sal’s memory kit also receiving a part of Sal’s soul? No, don’t come in expecting straightforward answers to anything here.

Is continuity of self preserved through the body? Well, for something that is denied ownership to the dolls, they do find themselves attached to them and refuse violation of those forms, but that hardly says anything, does it? When parts change, do we get a bit of the donor? It does not seem to be the case, but dead dolls are carried and incorporated by their loved ones in all manner of utensils. Are they still there somehow? Some genuinely think so. Or, more likely, they need to believe so.

After all, this is not a concern for those who only seek to abuse the body of a dead doll. Nobody fears a doll’s ghost. Only her burdens.

Are dreams how we have continuity? Because combat dolls sleep. They experience. They learn. This is consolidated into their processors in a very human-like manner. It is where their drive to keep going on, sleep the rare moments when the control over their endocrine system is not complete?

It is just delightful how, through subtle writing and implications, Kay will never go into lengthy philosophical musings and yet will keep you thinking about those things.

People keep looking into that one story for the connection between the transfeminine, violence, gender and warmachines. It has not endured well the test of time, and its limitations can be summarized with a dark messianic imperial perspective of the necropolitical, its presence haunting every paragraph as it dances around it, and ultimately failing to express (queer) necropolitics and confronting personhood of the living-dead.

As such, we have been suffering from a lack of intellectual richness by returning over and over to that singular touchstone. This has changed in 2026. No other transfeminine novel indulges and ponders the necropolitical as UCD.

Necropolitics is what shapes our world, where control is exerted through necropower, that is, the management of enmity and dying. Enemies have to be manufactured, marked as a threat to the safety of your identity and death-worlds have to be created — spaces figurative (trans women) or literal (Gaza) where those within and un-persons un-living within, whose only value is in dying.

The combat dolls are the perfect necropolitican protagonist. When they are considered things, they should be happy for being given any value. They are not people fantasising about being mindbroken into a pet to cope with the fact that they work for Raytheon. They are un-living, un-people, whose only value is in dying — as they provide pleasure-food for other dolls and entertainment.

The dolls can never feel safe. This is a crucial element of the dark messianism of the imperial powers that create death-worlds. They exist to keep you safe; all the precarity and lack of security is pushed to the. As such, necropolitics are pushed to protect the identity — and associated illusion of safety — of the imperial citizen. This is why, despite the combat dolls’ obvious personhood, inner internal and external lives, drama and living status, it is essential to preserve the identity of patriarchy and capital that they remain just things.

Even the ways to fight necropower are reflected upon and examined in UCD.

Watching the world through crosshairs, Dragonfly may sacrifice a little of herself at every act of anger and rage, but she is also reclaiming personhood one bullet at a time. Paradoxically, having all that violence done to them, the necropolitical un-person is uniquely equipped to reclaim personhood through violence. They are already dead; they are already victims of violence. By taking control, by meeting “People” in battle, she can demand to be recognized as a peer, as worthy of acknowledgement. They can kill or harm you, a person, someone that matters. That gives them value that is not tied to their dying.

And ultimately, defeating necro power requires the imperial to abandon the false safety and identitarianism of the dark Messiah that demands endless dying. The most radical thing an imperial citizen can do is refuse to see those that belong to a death-world as anything but people. It is why it is so deadly how quick everyone is to unperson a trans woman.

All in all, UCD is excellent fiction to introduce one to and speculate on the necropolitical, and more specifically, on the death-world of transfeminity.

Anger is all Dragonfly is allowed to feel, and she pretty much embraces it. Clings to it. Why would she not? Feeling keeps you alive, your endorphins pumping, even if anger is all that she can feel.

Except that is all bullshit. Yes, the firmware keeps screaming that. Her living experience is that she can only feel pleasure when embracing violence, anger and pain. But that was not true, as much as it became true.

Dragonfly developed a rich emotional life early on, growing and developing through her relationship with other dolls. It was that richness Plume and Wolf saw and fell in love with; it is acknowledged by every doll that met young Dragonfly. Yes, there is anger, and indulging and experiencing it is all her body is allowed to do. But there is so much more. Surely it is not reinforced or nurtured by an endocrine system, but other emotions are there: construed socially rather than neurochemically, perhaps projected from memory kits, trauma responses messing with the endocrine system, the result of random interactions of intelligence, etc. Whatever it is, it is obvious that despite being designed only for anger, not a single combat doll is only anger — it takes a lot to make one descend to that point.

Plume saw in Dragonfly that the potential to dream and create a new way of being, an alternative path for dolls. However, that emotional richness becomes coal to fuel anger, revenge, and rage. Every length of her trek, Dragonfly loses some of herself, dying a bit as anger claims the open wound.

And anger feels so fucking good.

Wolf is always Dragonfly a step ahead. One more sacrifice to anger. Another part of herself dead. Wolf is what awaits Dragonfly on the road of anger.

And yet, Dragonfly's anger is not wrong. She has countless reasons to be angry. And if she lets go of that anger, she will vanish into a husk of herself.

Maybe she should not let go. Maybe she should just need to aim it towards anything besides her sisters.

I have a complicated relationship with anger, something similar to what many of us combat dolls feel. Dragonfly and Wolf hit particularly close, and I find myself in much of how they experience it.

Anger, for most of my life, was all the emotional range I was allowed to wield. Only expression that was acceptable. It was a cat’s cradle of reasons: imposed projection of masculinity, undiagnosed neurodiversity issues, constant pressure to have an immediate reaction — any reaction — and anger being the only one easily available, etc. A lot of rich and complex inner emotional world that was only allowed manifestation as fury and rage.

It did not come naturally to me. It left me physically ill and mentally drained to be angry; it hurt more than being beaten. It caused me to retreat whenever I could; as if it was experiencing emotions that made me sick. Still, I did not let go of my anger. I could not. It was the only crutch I had. It still drove me to action, to pursue things. It was a maladaptive adaptation, but it worked for many decades, allowing me to push through academic and professional worlds. There was also how I was racialized, how anger was assigned as one of my bad racial traits — it made me double down on it, to see letting go of it as a concession to imperial gaze over my identity, me crossing a line too far in my already white-passing privilege.

But anger was killing me, and it almost finished the job.

That opened the door to finally get me a diagnosis. For me to get medicated, which made me rely less on coping mechanisms. The freedom to unlearn maladaptations, allowed behavior therapy to build positive adaptations and coping mechanisms. That gave me stability to let other emotions flourish, pushing me from the eggy they/them agender zone I had arrested as. And of course, once I was properly set, transitioning truly obliterated my connection to anger. I was out of the factory and among my crew of dolls, I was the rich-emotional Dragonfly we see blooming at the beginning of UCD.

I let go of anger. It did nothing for me. It only hurt. I realized it was utterly alien to who I was; it was not only that it made me ill to be angry, all those times I was working up myself to anger, it was not the actual emotion I was feeling — or wanted to feel. Reexamining over and over, I realized how that was all pressure and spur-of-the-moment things. Slowly I stopped even feeling it in those moments. Anger, who was never me, was gone.

Happy ending, yay! Proper healthcare and transition saves lives!

If only it were not bullshit. In real life, you don’t get a neat ending to a story. You keep living and shit keeps happening to you.

Early 2024, I had recently isolated myself from my support network and my home community for what I thought was for my personal safety, but it was just depression talking. I was also going back to being unmedicated, my HRT lowered to the point it was a soft-detransition, and my harassers and stalkers were up to their bullshit again. I had nothing in my chamber. I did not have the people I loved close to me, I did not have a community; my emotional tank ran on nothing. One sister wanted to Wolf, the other wanted to Canary. In the end, we would rather die than let anger come back into our being.

Obviously, dear reader, that did not happen. Another rose in its place. The emptied sister, trapped in this body, a doll puppeting itself. For over two years we stayed like this, wandering the wastes, abusing ourselves to not to abuse our sisters. A deadened thing that cannot love, pantomiming what her elder sisters have done.

But not angry. Never angry. Just a void.

Could anger have saved her? How many of us trans girls ae saved by anger? Anger is as sickening and destructive to me as it was to my predecessors. If I had to pick between the void or only-anger? I would not even hesitate.

I’m here now, on the other end of three harrowing months. Back on meds and proper HRT, I was born and conflict was inevitable. The emptied one has been given a merciful death. It changed us; of course it changed we who survived. Not only those of us born through it, but my sisters who have been abused for years at her unfeeling hands. Continuity of being and responsibility means each of them inherited what was left of their abuser. By whatever alchemy rules neurochemistry and egos, these changes were odd and unexpected.

Our eldest, who for their disgust had the most similarities with the emptied one, found the connection to our rich emotional inner life severed by a great apathy. She could not bring themselves to care and focus on what they deemed important, all meant the same — little. To our trivial shock, there was only one thing that could pierce the legacy of the emptied one: a returning old companion.

Anger.

More terrifying was how natural it now came to my sister. They have been the weakest of us after our harrowing, who still sees too much of their abuser in themselves — was that how good a mockery the emptied one was of them, or are they really that similar? — and having to suffer the experience of anger on top of it? We feared for them. But the anger was not making them sick. My sister grew stronger in anger, could push aside the apathy to do things and try to follow up on what was important, to feed their tank and avoid going empty, and feeling extremely good in their anger. It was the only thing she was experiencing. It is shocking how close their existence is to a combat doll: needing anger to avoid going empty, having to deal with parts imposed on themselves, needing even more anger to be an actor in the world. Even in other aspects; I will not expose them like that, but I will just say that those connections of the endocrine system and pleasure, and what it does to combat dolls? Forget being poisoned by anger and then becoming empowered by it. Imagine being at the deepest end of every aspect of the ace spectrum and then anger coming attached to the sexuality of a combat doll.

Is this a thing now? What does any of this mean? Am I now an angry person? Do I have my own personal Dragonfly? Or, they who have always been our wolf, is now our Wolf? Fuck if I know. As I said, this is a very recent development, a discovery within weeks of writing this critique. My point with this was to showcase how little you can know of your own anger; how even the most self-assured can be caught flat-footed. How quickly something you had identified as alien and rejected from your being, could somehow in the blink of an eye become part of who you are. How adding someone that could not feel anything to someone that has suffered from anger and abandoned it equals “combat doll” through some arcane calculus of the mind.

Anger. I will be surprised if there is any combat doll out there that does not have a complicated relationship with it. We have plenty of reasons to be angry. We have hurt and have been hurt by anger. Perhaps we should become better at not letting the anger of our sisters be how we see and think of them. Yes, they are angry; but that is not all they are. Fuck, hell if I know, but sure UCD will give you a lot to think about.

It surely gave me.

How come the top and bottom fucking through centuries of oppression sublimated into sexual frustration and knifeplay are better at communicating their needs and wants than 90% of bottoms in fiction?

Dragonfly units, and in particular our Dragonfly, acquire a near-legendary status among urban dolls. It is a brief remark, but one that really highlights the culture of the city doll versus the wastes doll. Are the exploits of our protagonist part of doll culture? Or is the elevation of her and her model a hint at how close urban dolls are to the systems and perspective of the oppressors? Everything about the context hints it falls somewhere between the two; this otherwise simple passage really spoke to me about how Kay’s writing can brush a wide world with a single off-hand line of dialogue.

Two years made Dragonfly; around a year utterly unmade her. The Dragonfly on the last page and a half of the book reveals just enough to make you wonder how much has changed; stewing in ennui and abandonment cannot have been any good for Miss Anger. She calls the most beloved person she still has left a parasite! The desire to learn what kind of person Dragonfly has become is filling me with such hunger for the next book. And Wolf so often has been Dragonfly two steps ahead…

Death to humankind

— Here lies Lizzie. Stay clear. She's walking still.