This is ninth part of “The Medieval; or, Monsters, Magic and Myth.” Originally part of an undivided volume—specifically Volume Two of my Sex Positivity (2023) book series—this promo post now belongs to a large-but-redundant sample series called “Brace for Impact“ (2024); i.e., that went on to become its own completed module in Volume Two: the Poetry Module, aka Volume Two, part one. The module was primarily inspired by Harmony Corrupted and divides into over thirteen posts, whose collective chapters/subchapters compile one half of the larger total volume; i.e., Volume Two has three modules—one bigger module for part one (re: the Poetry Module), and two slightly smaller modules (the Monster Modules) for part two—for which the volume halves are roughly equal in size (subject to change).

Update, 5/4/2024: I’m starting a similar book sample series for Volume Two, part two: “Searching for Secrets“ (2024)!

Update, 5/1/2024: Volume Two, part one (the Poetry Module) is out! I wrote a preface for the module along with its debut announcement. Give that a look; then, go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the full module (which will contain additions/corrections these posts will not have)!

Click here to see “Brace for Impact’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically ally shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).

Picking up up from where “Medieval Expression, part three/’Out of this World,’ part one” left off…

“With a Little Help from My Friends”; or, Out of this World, part two: Meeting Rebels; i.e., What Inspires Us to Meet and All of It Carrying On and On (feat. Harmony Corrupted, Jack Burton, and Blxxd Bunny)

“You know what ol’ Jack Burton says at a time like this?”

“Who?”

“Jack Burton! Me! …He says, ‘What the hell?'”

—Jack Burton and Thunder,  Big Trouble in Little China (1986) 

To reiterate, “Out of this World,” part one articulated what rebellion is, followed by what a rebel is and why they do what they do—then took a break to discuss modules and criminality (with several performative examples: Samus Aran and Elphaba Thropp). Part two shall now explore how to meet rebels, followed by what inspired us to meet them (hint: them, but also their sexy costumes), and what carries on as all of this repeats, repeats, repeats. Friends are people to meet, fall in love with and care for while shielding them from harm. In doing so, we change before the hypothetical clash, ready to take a bullet for them, should the need arise. Some things are worth fighting for. Some, dying[1] for (“some things eat at a man worse than dyin’!”).

Such sword-crossing push-pull is a kayfabe classic, reducing dialectical-materialism to a simple, visually impactful loop: the duel/wrestling match of pure will converted to thrown energy (from DBZ to The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance to Howard the Duck, etc). It touches on historical materialism as an endless cycle of war that—per Marx—is also the stuff of pure spoof as a result (from tragedy to farce):

“Dayman…” / “Ahhhhh!” / “…fighter of the Nightman!” / “Ahhhhh!” / “He’s a master of karate!” / “And friendship!”

But the shield (and the satire: “Gohan, dodge!” making fun of DBZ, but DBZ touching on fight or fight as also including the freeze/oscillation mechanism) goes both ways: We shield friends from harm, and they shield us from harmful influence; i.e., through the power of friendship, of love, in all its forms, friends make us better and we safeguard them, in turn. We are each of us friends and spies engaged in class/culture war. Historically this includes student revolts (e.g., Kent State) but also sex work as another side of the struggle. We’re sex pirates challenging the same-old imperial forces colonizing and privatizing sex (thus nature) as monstrous—for our own sake, but also the planet’s!

Such things often, like a trail of breadcrumbs (on purpose or not) lead like-minded souls to us: dancing like weirdo Birds of Paradise in our little art spaces (“Let me play you the song of my people!”). Like birds, this can attract mates; unlike birds, this overlaps with asexual artistic expression (nudism) and political maneuvers tied to the social-material world.

(model and photographer: Persephone van der Waard and Jadis)

Note: I often self-reflect relative to emotional experience, but this section delves into a more overtly philosophical area: ontology per experience based on knowledge as something that is difficult to quantify relative to oneself doing so (“the wisest man being the one who says he knows nothing at all,” so said Socrates… because women were inferior to men and trans people didn’t exist). All this being said, I’m not a philosophy major and also don’t put much stock in philosophy as a whole (most of it a lot of white boys saying really stupid shit like their conviction will make it true). But for once, I think it will come in handy making me the object lesson, requiring I go outside of myself to do so. Let’s give it a shot!

My philosophy starts and ends with Ghost in the Shell (1995) and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. As we proceed, then, I want to avoid the Cartesian dualist trap of the mind and body as separate: “Have you ever seen your own brain?” being the question of someone largely dislocated from what makes them human. For me, I don’t operate like that anymore; i.e., I operate through a monomorphic system of thought that focuses on what I can observe, experience, create and interrogate/understand through Gothic principles in connection with the material world. So “brain” for me isn’t the grey stuff in my head, which is hard to quantify and not something I can play with; “brain,” for me, equals castle-narrative as both history all at once and a learning process comfortable with paradox (especially ghosts, which Volume Two, part two will examine at length).

In other words, it’s the kind of shit Cartesian thinkers absolutely fucking hate. But we are considering me from when I was younger, before I acquired the knowledge that would turn me into who I am. So regressing to a position of ignorance through the adoption of a way I don’t think about the world anymore is a good starting point (thought I will marry this to ludo-Gothic BDSM, of course).

Fourth, meeting rebels. Rebels are covert, but espionage happens in plain sight. So how do you meet a spy? Well, first you spot one—not as a totally-concealed object blending into the background like the Predator would, but as someone advertising the work that they do (as often having a class character that, on top of the images, has a bio that includes pronouns and other markers of socio-political belief; e.g., GNC flags or political slogans). That should be enough to show you the door. From there, getting your foot in (or other things) is straightforward and complicated. I’ll explain how in my usual style—through exhibits concerning popular media—but also include Harmony Corrupted and I as orbiting said media while making socio-political statements through ludo-Gothic BDSM as long-distance compatible (sex and nudism classically are).

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

I get it if you feel anxious and/or confused, though. The damsel is generally the thing you have to save the world to “get,” or kill a dragon (or your mother); i.e., to do a quest, which is work and dangerous (she could reject you after it’s all said and done/doesn’t want to be rescued by some white knight who acts like she isn’t already married and happy where she is). But also, she’s monstrous-feminine in ways that evoke a Gothic energy and potential to disempower her attackers by making them empathize with her as classically hunted, kept, and killed under capital. Often, this manifests in attraction that oscillates between virgin and whore, but also overtly Gothic-coded (through appearance) images and context.

Just as “Gothic” is determined as much by context as aesthetics, function is determined by flow of power through these things; maturity of Gothic expression is both the ability to tell it apart as the audience, and garner a second-nature reaction through de facto extracurriculars (“art is love made public”) that engender systemic catharsis through labor and propaganda as something to reclaim and weaponize for worker aims: camping the canon to alter the Base and Superstructure as fundamentally linked, but shifted over to proletarian likenesses through revolutionary cryptonymy reversing the process of abjection (through parallel chronotopes and emancipatory hauntologies, etc). To that, Communism is generally defined by absence as haunted; re: the ghost of the counterfeit as “danced with” cryptomimetically during ludo-Gothic BDSM—all to make cryptonymic statements that thrive under (or at least resist) genocide; i.e., in spite of the usual Pygmalions telling us to go to the box office while playing rebel themselves (re: Lucas, Cameron). And usually we fags are in the closet it for most of it, not always exiting in a way that is immediate and or memorable.

The key is through likeness of childhood that, like a Gothic castle, promote change on the surface of themselves.

For example, I was in the closet until I was 36, leaving it slowly and then all once. I had been thinking about doing it for a long time—a process reflected in my artwork of myself and characters I enjoyed (the exhibit, next few pages)—but hadn’t really entertained the idea seriously until I started writing Sex Positivity as an extension of myself and my current knowledge base as being to evolve and change to ever new-and-improved Pokémon. Then, I thought about Cuwu encouraging me to experiment should I feel like it, and the experimenting I had already done with Zeuhl, and it suddenly made sense. I don’t have the slightest idea what I was doing when it “hit” me; i.e., like Martin Luther minding his own business when a lightning bolt suddenly struck the ground near him and he swore to become a priest afterwards. Instead, it just sort of “popped in there,” and from that point onwards I became a trans woman instead of my previous femboy (and all my other costumes)—not as a job, but way of existing tied to theatre and creative expression united under my banner. Nicholas was toast and Persephone rose from the ashes—not completely different, but like a caterpillar having emerged from its chrysalid as its perfect form (a bit like Cell, but less muscular and grim).

But now that I look at it, my past self had left me plenty of clues leading up to the big sudden change; i.e., a process I wasn’t always consciously aware of, but nevertheless showed me playing with myself over space-time: transforming before my very eyes now and back then with friends, even though I felt alone.

Let’s look at that, then see how I approach art and friends vis-à-vis popular stories now, shall we?

(exhibit 34a1b2b2a1b1: Artist, Persephone van der Waard: top-left, top-right, bottom-left, bottom-right. Two or more things can be true at the same time. I was a sexually precocious child who both experienced and understood the world through Gothic media. In turn, my art a) was always as much “of me” by proxy as it was of other people I paid to model for me, or who paid me to draw their various OCs/avatars, or who I paid to draw my OC as a reflection of me [and so on]. I felt alone, but even at my most isolated, I always found friends to relate to through my work. This includes high school and early college crushes I’d draw to express my affection and attraction towards them. However, it was also based off the videogames I played and the art I subsequently made and consumed as having a similar complicated milieu—of the feminine and masculine warring back and forth between characters, but also on the surface of a given character who may or may not represent one’s identity beneath the persona: as more than a mask or temporary disguise or performance, but a morphological statement described through masks that projected myself onto various dead ringers/simulacrum.

In videogames, an avatar is someone you control who is and isn’t you, who is both sexy and tough as an asexual and sexual form of personal expression as half-real; i.e., in between fiction and non-fiction, but also the rules as enforced by the player and the text; e.g., Samus as someone who is played by cis-het men who’d sooner be caught dead than in Samus’ underwear and makeup, but which the game routinely has them stripping and exposing them as damsels in distress. Except, for me, I wanted to be tough like Samus was, but vulnerable—to fuck her and wear her clothes in a way that was much more a parody of traditional gender norms and indicative of the way I felt as a closeted trans person. When I was a young girl/teenager, I gravitated towards powerful maternal warriors like Ripley and Samus, but didn’t fully understand what about Amazons, mommy doms and Dark Mothers during ludo-Gothic BDSM appealed to me. Maybe one made sense or the other, but I loved all of them for different reasons under a common thread that eluded me: the monstrous-feminine during unequal power exchange and non-heteronormative gender expression haunted by queer elements [or vice versa].

I definitely had a type, but even this was complicated. I liked shapely and feminine, but also with martial/masculine elements to the body that were dressed up in girly clothes that had “dark” elements in the Gothic sense; i.e., they exuded Numinous power as vice-like, castle-in-small, fearsome but not. I saw Red Sonya [1985] as a kid and studied French in middle school and chose to draw a redhead named after a hag from Myth II: Soulblighter [1997]—not to condemn any element of this odd chimera, but because its hybridity was something I both looked up to, wanted to paint, dress up, exist as, and fuck. It reflected both my desire to transform and control fearsome aspects of my own abusive past through sex and gender expression. I didn’t realize it, but this was my latent identity forming before my eyes out of nearby things I took into myself.

[artist: Persephone van der Waard]

I was fearless about it, too [rawr]—never afraid to mix this with that. Because of the monomythic refrain in videogames—but especially Metroidvania as inspired by James Cameron’s cartographic refrain; i.e., borrowed from older conservative science fiction authors [thus thinkers] to regress the Gothic retro-future in a neoconservative direction—such stories merge sex and force more nakedly with the openly warlike theatrics of a kayfabe exchange and neo-medieval hauntology. Samus, like Ripley before her, was generally pinned against ladyhood and demonic whoredom as something external to argue with through literal combat.

But instead of being deterred by this, I felt like it best described my mind—both how it worked and how it felt relative to my trauma and desires, my values in relation to my personality. As such, my ideas of strength weren’t simple, but context-driven; i.e., through BDSM themes within a Gothic aesthetic [of power and death] except I had exactly none of the academic language to analyze what I was doing [and wouldn’t until 2014 or so]. Instead, I just had images of “me” in quotes: likenesses that always looked ready to fight and be “conquered” in ways haunted by actual rape/disempowerment, but also guilty eroticism. It felt a bit like an out-of-body experience, but I was lucid, there were no drugs involved, and I was always ostensibly working on someone else. In a way I was because my style was always changing, thus my point of view. But it was always and forever moving towards what I am now [in ways that feel entirely unsurprising and bee-line, given my neurodivergent nature].

[artist, Persephone van der Waard: top-left, top-right, bottom-left, bottom-right]

In hindsight, it was always something else’s birthday but I seemed to be hinting at my own future genesis years before it came to pass; i.e., I was putting myself in clothes and giving a part of me, dressed up by proxy, to my friends. I wanted to be included, but also be the pretty/sexy gift both as something to look at and the “cake” to “eat”! Capitalism treats birthdays as very selfish affairs, but also discourages introspection. Self-reflecting at my own messy past, I can see trends—of me doing birthdays to begin with, but also them being a logically temporal progression where I aged along with my work as leveling up while trying on new clothes [or birthday suits]. Eventually I ditched what didn’t fit and grew into my own dark slutty self. Except I was always thinking of others while doing it, mid-exchange. I guess I was a bit vain without realizing it, but also sweet [I’d like to think] for being such a good present. I didn’t have money to give, but generally could spend as much time, thought and labor as I wished making myself up as my best possible self to give to others; i.e., as I envisioned it at that moment in time.

I’m generally accustomed to taking my sense of self for granted [aren’t we all?]. So it can feel rather uncanny thinking of oneself in the abstract like this, from the outside looking in—i.e., like watching someone from another life [a bit like O’Keefe] grow up and change before me. But uncanniness aside, it is illuminating to how much I’ve not only survived but changed for the better [“And if you survive, you will not be the same!”]. Keeping with Bakhtin’s chronotope and our other three main theories, I think my self-poetic cryptomimesis exemplified the Gothic’s core delivery methods: oscillation and potential—of the self as repeatedly redefined through monstrous tension, not a vacuum. I was always working with dolls I wanted to have sex with and dress up in positions of vulnerability that I paradoxically saw as empowered despite the aesthetic of rape. There was something paradoxical at work and I couldn’t quite place it, other than remark that I was always putting myself into this kind of mise-en-abyme; i.e., as something to revisit while viewing it as an extension of myself, but also fragments of myself given to other people as gifts [the drawing below was made for my friend Lydia’s birthday that I redid several times over the years]: pieces of my personality but also simply how my mind worked, turned inside-out for all the world to see, including me.

[artist: Persephone van der Waard]

It felt like I was speaking to things inside myself that were roiling on the surface of a mirror that was and wasn’t referring to me. The secret to how my mind worked lay in how I made art to understand the world and myself, but I couldn’t fully make sense of what I saw. I had to master my craft first and then dissect it as my own gallery critic—model, invigilator, artist, writer and sex worker, etc. Eventually I’d call this process ludo-Gothic BDSM, but that was years off. For me, this puzzle was just as much a thread to weave in elements of my secret self. I played with these games like a doll would—to a doll, but also moving towards the dark, villainous ones in concentric space-time [on and offstage at the same fourth dimensional moment] I generally wasn’t allowed to control, in-game.

[artist, left: Persephone van der Waard; right: Dcoda]

Instead, I made those in my art to acquire some sense of agency over my own expression; I played dress up through a paper-doll approach that often retained a “mil spec” flavor with Revana’s beret, but also had her as my strong-soft trans avatar wearing more feminine clothes: “slutty nerdy tomboy” something I directed others regarding whenever they drew my character for me [a present to myself, while paying others for their work]. Regardless of who was holding the pen, I was always the creative director. As such, I played with cosmetically girly things; i.e., gaining agency through normally policed elements like flowers, makeup, and ribbons, groomed public hair and body piercings, etc. I merged bodily elements that were both masculine and feminine onto AFAB bodies/outfits I felt attracted to, but also saw my doing so—of trying these things on for size—as a creative outlet for its own sake [soft and shapely versus hard and muscular as something to hyphenate]. I combined both of these things with textual elements of fantasy and science fiction the way the Gothic normally does: with monsters, magic, the elements, and medieval-flavored rape fears and “torture” aesthetics; i.e., threatening a palliative Numinous regarding my own repressed queerness adjacent my childhood abuse and psychosexual frustrations I could let breathe through art.

Birthdays [a measurement of time] came and went, and I inherited myself from past copies brought forward less in decay like old diary entries and more through metamorphosis within a living document. This probably explains why I wasn’t afraid, as Baldrick might argue: I wasn’t sick of myself—didn’t feel like I was decaying or cramped but able to spread my wings and move towards a dark state of authentic existence. Given that kind of freedom to experiment and try new things without shame, I enjoyed the process, picking up new ways to think through different kinds of media interacting together to become my eventual current approach; i.e., a multimedia critical poetic that included imitating past artists; e.g., me drawing comics to partially imitate Jim Davis and Bill Waterson, but also rephrase my own past statements [action beats as much as comedic ones]: “If you’ve ever tried this, it’s like that…” I loved it every step of the way!

But also, I still felt lonely and had trouble making real-life friends—feeling like most of my friends were: invisible. I did my best, though—hosting more birthday parties for my clients and friends, all while taking my fluid, at times disassociative/dislocated, idea of “self” apart before putting it back together again; I frequently envisioned myself in various BDSM-tinged sexual fantasies that were as much about asexual gender expression as getting laid. The two often over-lapped as an endless attempt to return to old childhood things to express myself with; i.e., learning from my past as built on older hand-me-downs that, through the Gothic mode, assumed new form at a corporate level, which I took and transformed over and over again: by playing with dolls, having tea with myself as the Mad Hatter might.

[model, left: Mei Minato; right: Blxxd Bunny; artist: Persephone van der Waard]

Sometimes I felt horny and/or pretty in relation to the avatar as its own thing. But just as often, I was identifying with other people [models] as role[model]s to step into and out of again while wearing an imperfect likeness of Samus; i.e., Revana as my creative-ontological statement when encountering Samus, which had the same effect in reverse moving forward, and so on. It influenced how I dressed myself up, my friends, myself playing of/with myself as my friends superimposed over each other [Samus being my friend/playmate in an [a]sexual way as much as Blxxd Bunny [right] or Minato Mei [left] were: as model, avatar, gender role, theatrical foil, holistic mirror and personified desires, fears, shames and so on.

I don’t think such a trend of self-discovery is unique to me, though [the whole point of the Gothic is that there’s always something in the closet we take out and cavort around with when we feel enough safe to do so; i.e., alone, or with people we trust]—but my individual path is a unique combination of elements in this given cycles’ multiplayer ergodic. Fun!)

So, yeah! Having friends and relating back and forth over space and time with artwork made me the woman I am today (whatever you want to call it); i.e., having the poetic, interrelating system of thought I developed, acquiring knowledge through trying new creative and inspirational things with more and more diverse people expanding my understanding, thus capacity for empathy towards others; e.g., drawing them like my French girls long-distance, or making love on cramped student housing beds [or on the kitchen sofa when our roomies were out] in-person. As such, I learned after so many times the value in relationships, mid-poiesis: explaining things to others or relating to them through artistic abstractions of our selves/our other side (re: monsters) according to what was constantly exchanged back and forth as both separate—sex, food, BDSM, and music/other media, but also the various motives, means and materials during an exchange—and combined into new things; e.g., Jadis feeding me Wendy’s baconators because they both a) wanted to wine-and-dine me with fast food, but also because they unironically loved gas station food working as a Florida exterminator (they were a neoliberal, remember). Whatever harmful elements there were to their love language, I took it all into myself and—per the Darkening as something to transmute—made it into something harmless: “The dose makes the poison,” but also the combination, and sometimes “poison” is the cure!

That’s… both incredibly random and seriously complicated? Yes, it is! Welcome to real life! To date is to do a Communism insofar as anything else (the nuclear family model, often via monomythic endorsement) is genocidal in some shape or form. You’re either for the Cause, against it, or on the sidelines; except, standing by is to stand idle while people, nature and the environment are made into monstrous-feminine targets to shoot, kill, rape and reap for old men to count the cost: the banality of evil. Romance is basically up against anti-romance sold as Romance™ and passed off as activism and/or bread-and-circus. We have to do better! We have to do a Gothic Communism now… all without—as directors of our own wacky projects—acting all creepy and weird like Charlie Day does in “The Dayman Cometh” (an unironic Mad Hatter, below, 2019), or being victimized, vindictive and self-obsessed like Sander Cohen, trapped in his own fun house with his former jilted protégés: (“The Iceman fucking cometh, Sander!”).

Beyond all that (which we’ll keeping inspecting as we go), the verb “to meet” would seem to suggest that you can “just do it,” just find a unicorn (again, like Arthur’s coconuts). But there’s an element of chance that capital—in service to profit—treats as an opportunity to prey on others within the same old mythic structures. The classic unicorn myth is the bait of innocence; except I reached out to Harmony with neither of us having much of that! Instead, I had a project I had been working on for some time (my books) and simply asked if they’d like to be involved; i.e., “Hi, I’m working on this project and I like your stuff. Here’s my card.” And a dark goddess like them saying “Yes, hell yes!” isn’t supernatural, though it might seem as such under capital (which frames such girls-of-your-dreams as relegated to media prisons you must pay to access; i.e., good old-fashioned pimping through a commercialized Gothic mode): someone who, once you both agree, will happily accept your dick for their own reasons.

The context is what makes something sex-positive, including BDSM as Gothic by virtue of the castle we’re all trying to escape: liberation through iconoclastic art as not chained to a given approach, but often conveying popular themes by virtue of popularity and/or frequent; i.e., the unicorn’s “horn” being as much her manufactured scarcity as it is the dildo she inserts into herself as something she reclaims, action-wise, through cross-media exchanges that illustrate mutual consent and treat livable sex work (that earns a living wage) not just as a commodity but a basic human right that speaks to the rights of all peoples, animals and places raped by capital to serve profit. We’re not trying to exclude Gothic aesthetics at all; I just want to explain the context of the shoot, its actors, and the gallery agenda before we dress up in the “clothes” everyone tends to like—monsters, sex, kink and BDSM, as generally tending to show up by virtue of historical-material ubiquity and necessity.

Put in more direct language, people need food, shelter and other such things; they also need enrichment, to not feel alone; i.e., whose psychosexual play is generally ludo-Gothic BDSM as camping theatrical scenarios that, per historical materialism and dialectical-material arguments, mid-oppositional-praxis—yield a “nightmare” that weighs on your living brain (though not for the reasons Marx was referring to): the proverbial weirdest boner is that of empathy and love through rebellious theatre; i.e., the rebel is someone who sees the rebel in you and will let you fuck them to make a collective rebellious statement. In that sense, we are never alone because the past is with us, but also because we are each of us part of a larger whole, flowers in a field. Each flower is the same species (for the sake of argument) but each is beautiful. The whole point of diversity is we can bond despite being on a gradient, relating through difference to shared oppression as uneven. And purely from the idea of enjoyable activities, each person will do the same basic activity very differently.

By extension, no individual body is the same compared to its older self or others, including the pussy and other holes but also how these various pieces are used and how the person feels about using them. Zeuhl loved oral and made me appreciate cumming down their throat; Cuwu, somno; Jadis, rough sex and roleplay but also masochism; and I fucked them all missionary and doggy in PIV (only anal with Zeuhl and Cuwu).

Rather than play favorites in some kind of sex pyramid, I discovered I liked each for how they make the same activities feel special differently. And this hinges on circumstances that color the experience. Sometimes the warmth of their “blankets” is welcome, the imagery of their surface fun nostalgic, what-have-you. Sometimes it’s too warm, forcing you to disrobe, too dated (making you remove the blankets); or, it’s otherwise too safe in ways that make you lose respect for the ostensible rebel falling victim to gentrification (re: Zizek, Zeuhl, Lucas, Medrano, etc)—an effect that goes over their own heads, making them believe things that aren’t true but commonly passed off as truth for various reasons that aren’t always intentional—i.e., the Mandela effect, meaning the notion of false memories tied to the proven function of memory assigning actual images to things that didn’t actually occur but remain related to things that did: trauma as a generalization the mind tries to isolate through different abstractions (the Gothic castle/monster).

I repeat: not better than others just different (it is possible to be bad at sex, but the idea is to help each other improve or understand what you like/don’t like while having fun, not being an unironic robot/drill sergeant about it)! Sex and friendships are a lot better if you don’t put them on a pedestal. You’ll only psych yourself out and make the other person feel objectified. You can still be head over heels in love with someone and not reduce them to a homosocial life goal/notch in the belt: “Wake up and smell the roses,” as the saying goes; i.e., the one in front of you, not one from years ago that’s living in your head, rent-free. No one likes an absentee partner hung up over an ex, and relationships aren’t supposed to make your life harder. Instead, they’re supposed to enhance what’s already there and help you experience things differently than you would without someone; e.g., doing laundry versus fucking someone and then doing laundry (for that little extra pep in your step).

It’s honestly not that hard to get laid, either. You just gotta figure out what you want, state yourself clearly and openly, and maximize your odds while treating the other side like a person. Honestly, if you’re clearly available and interested, have okay hygiene and have more personality than a cabbage—i.e., don’t give off superior, desperate and/or creepy vibes—then you should do ok. In sex-positive scenarios, cuties will appreciate honesty and open communication (the less ambiguity, the better). All of these combined with someone whose confident in themselves, not an asshole, and (in my experience) sweet, loving and eager (but not desperate) to please—will do alright for themselves. But you gotta get over yourself, first, and realize the world doesn’t revolve around you; there’s another person involved, and you have to account for them making a decision based on how they feel. No one wants to be reduced to/rated unironically on a shallow-ass number system and discarded for it, nor have their agency removed during a given interaction; i.e., creative expression by illustrating mutual consent is largely what agency between people is all about: teamwork, acknowledgement, empathy.

For example, combined with the above variables, I’ve gotten laid just from having a nice smile and a ribbon in my hair (some of us we like to look nice unto itself as a form of enrichment, but if it helps you get laid, then more power to you)—i.e., someone likes what they see, they’ll act on it. Trust me. Bitches like sex; we’re human just like you are, my dudes. But there’s not perfect situation that works every time because people aren’t predictable unless you coerce them through fear and dogma, which is abusive and wrong. But even then, there’s a reason virgin/whore syndrome is a thing. Morality aside, compelled sex is boring. But removing the subjective element, it’s also unethical in ways that lead to transgenerational abuse (the dick measuring of rape and bodily damage, kill counts, etc).

We need to challenge capital in small, not embody it! So, learn what tends to work. Then, when something does happen, don’t just enjoy it, but make it a night to remember! Learn from it, but also turn it into memories whose material reminders pass better lessons on! Fuck a horror nerd/gore hound, goth cutie, or metal head, then showcase why human, animal and environmental rights matter!

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Think of such penetration as an exchange between bartering parties offering up a combined record given back to the world; i.e., as tribute to a symbiotic relationship whose mergers are far more common than once-in-a-billion years (source tweet: Sailorrooscout, 2024). They get cum and attention, you get to cum—win-win! preserving ourselves as living effigies whose hard out shell scratches/loves the easily-upset to expose their bad-faith antics, thus true intentions. Sex Positivity isn’t a self-help book with the promise of easy answers through minimal work, then; quite the contrary, things only become easy when we’ve put in the work to make them seem easy (thought once things are on good terms, the tolerances increase, allowing for more to be said that will work; i.e., to such a degree as you can be very silly with your work choices—e.g., “I love you my bacon sandwich with provolone cheese”—and it will work because humans communicate as much through context, symbols/shorthand/slang and tone of voice/body language as they do words. They animalize each other in sex positive ways that, sadly, can become Pavlovian; e.g., dogs being man’s best friend, conditioned in ways that uphold capital through all of the above linguo-material factors (something we talk about quite a bit in Volume Zero; I recommend you check it out).

It’s why people can fart or swear in front of other, or talk dirty during sex… which again becomes its own arbitration process regarding sex and force; i.e., as put in quotes by trustworthy people who make us feel comfortable/relaxed and vice versa to fart or swear, thus show vulnerability around and agency towards). But as always, there are no guarantees in life, save that people are both unique and members of the same species of flower, all of which are beautiful in their own way. I love all of my muses, friends, and lovers; they’re this queer bitch’s extended found family. Diversity is strength, and there’s always someone who knows more about a particular subject matter or area, or someone who has unique input through a different perspective about a similar topic, etc. all are valuable and welcome, provided they’re sex-positive. This includes—per Lewis, Hannah-Freya Blake and I—palimpsests; i.e., “bad” impressions (what John Carpenter’s The Thing would call “imitations”) that constitute the learning process ever present in human language as a series of poetic exchanges.

In turn, Dorothy needs friends, and she and her friends need a wizard to pimp them out with all the tricked-out luxuries of Emerald City life, they need (dualistically speaking) a wicked witch with flying monkeys, ruby slippers, Munchkinlanders, tic-tocks, and so on. The Grinch had Max, Frankenstein had Igor (a hilariously cartoonish version of Henry Clerval from the book: a step-and-fetch-it in both cases). A knight needs her armor, her horse, lance, lady and lady’s favor as a sometimes-literal-but-often-figurative extension of each other/collective solution to capital’s one-size-fits-all approach of unironic sex and force to serve profit. There’s no “hierarchy of value,” in that respect. Some people are serious (the straight players of the bunch), some are silly (the jokers); all matter provided it goes towards something sex-positive. And yes, this extends to token cis-het friends, too (every queer person has at least one; e.g., a fag hag to watch their backs/to keep tabs on/with regarding the larger world of the Straights), but also popular media as often having a straight bent that queer make gay in hindsight—not by altering the text, but seeing in differently and changing the performance ourselves in our own work.

Five, what inspired us to meet rebels. The answer isn’t just them, of course, but the media we all grow up with giving us courage and ideas (the naughty sort). It’s always a chance, reaching out to new folks on the figurative Yellow Brick Road (and coming out to them to help us all relax better); they might act weird (some have[2]), but just as often they’re not interested for one reason or another. All you have to do is ask; the worst they’ll usually do is say no. Like with all of my partners and muses, though, Harmony said yes. “Going for it” is less about having “all the answers,” and simply rolling with the punches to be “heroic” in different forms; i.e., heroes are capable (“No one laughs at a master of quack fu!”), but also kind of bumbling; e.g., like one of my favorite childhood/John Carpenter films, Big Trouble in Little China (1986):

(exhibit 34a1b2b2a1b2: I’m not normally a big fan of movie kisses, but this one from Big Trouble in Little China takes the cake! Kurt’s the perfect cocky himbo and Kim’s makeup and marriage getup is straight fire [the green contacts are fun, too]. Okay, okay! I’m biased; I can’t help it! Mom saw it in theatres when she was preggers with me, and I saw it many more times on VHS, DVD and online. But I’m not blind to its flaws; the movie as a text is problematic—i.e., straight ’80s fantasy schlock [originally a Western with magic in it] set in San Francisco Chinatown as an odd form of half-serious Orientalism.

To that, Miao Yin is the classic damsel-in-distress—beautiful but passive, nearly entirely without a voice [saying six words in the whole movie: “Yes” and “I don’t belong to you!”]. Compared to her, Kim’s Gracie Law is the usual white girl Nancy Drew admitting to everyone [and the audience] that she’s always sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong while enduring a classic settler-colonial problem: she was born into a settler colony [“This is my neighborhood!”] and wants to do good [“You sleep in your office?”]. So, yeah, the film’s “of its time,” ostensibly a statue [or bride] with blind eyeballs:

From a meta standpoint, though, Carpenter’s movie speaks to the ways in which love can bloom in between text and performance as shared across space and time. The production we see isn’t how the actors probably felt, 100%, but there is some element of it captured onscreen, nonetheless; likewise, through all the chaotic fun, we need to remember that what we’re seeing isn’t an actual arranged wedding [the elevator kiss] but a performance of one that gives the actors [and the people observing them] some room to work and convey things with their eyes, their body language, their chemistry as a means of relating back and forth with us. This isn’t meant to steelman the Patriarchy in perpetuity or anything. Is Sex and the City a terrible show? Yes. Is Kurt Russel always playing bigoted creeps later in his career? Yes! Is this kiss still ontologically its own thing and representative of the chaos of real relationships spoken in a play-within-a play—i.e., actors playing characters dressing up in the story to play a false wedding that leads to a true one that could, somewhere in real life, come to play out in similar fashion? Hell-fucking-yes, babes! So many times I’ve found myself experiencing profound and uncanny déjà vu: standing in that elevator asking myself the same question—not in an actual elevator [or standing up] but a figurative one enjoying the company of some big-lug Amazon or diminutive minx melting my heart [and milking my girl dick] while I gasp: “Oh, my god! Is this really happening! My hero!”

In other words, life is like a bad play that can be approached with a certain amount of skill, mid-rarefaction/mimesis to get you—yes, you—very laid [or flush in whatever social-sexual engagements you prefer]! You just gotta acclimate yourself to the process and not be a world-class creep; i.e., nothing scares cuties off more than desperation, and you need to be happy with whatever friendships that you and said cutie[s] are comfortable with/openly negotiate as adults. Harmony and I are FWBs, Bay and I are life partners, and we [and all my other muses and business partners] are routinely some combo of art/porn. As such, we’re all happy as clams… doing clam stuff. So find your people, then make a production out of it! Jack says, “It’s all in the reflexes!” but wouldn’t have lasted two seconds without Wang. In turn, Wang and Jack were best buds, but Wang was hopeless without Miao Ying [to the point of codependency, one could argue]. But what matters, here, is they work together as a group of friends to solve a massive problem: a general and his videogame-grade lieutenants and henchmen magically appearing literally out of thin air [and later inspiring Ed Boon’s Raiden from Mortal Kombat, 1993].

To this, the usual debate—of that problem constituting the same old ghost of the counterfeit/process of abjection—doesn’t change the fact that teamwork is important; swap Lo Pan for capital and you’re golden: “The Wing Kong Exchange? The most dangerous cutthroat den of madmen in Chinatown? You can’t just waltz in and out of there like…” / “Like the wind! Yes I can, Miss Law. My mind and my spirits are as one!” / “As two, I said I was coming!” It’s not supposed to be taken seriously which is why I think it works; the spectre of racism is very much felt but also not the point. Wang is the hero, Jack is his sidekick, and the villain of the movie—while worryingly Asian and projected onto the far-off Orient like some demon warlord mob boss—is punished not for being of Asian descent, but for being a sex predator. By comparison, Cameron’s monomythic canards in Aliens make such friendships impossible. You see Ripley making friends with any xenomorphs? Thought so.)

Despite how wacky and monomythic such a story like Big Trouble in Little China can seem, it and stories like it do mirror my own life as seeming to follow the same-old Hero’s Journey: go into Hell, conquer death, get girl (the vanity of the monomyth also synonymizing these things—except again, you can’t kill nature or death any more than you can kill Medusa or make someone love you who doesn’t). Except it’s neither that simple nor that binary in the movie or my case (or most peoples’, if we’re being honest); i.e., we relate to partial likenesses of all our yesterdays that we—our sum of internal [neurons, DNA] and external [childhood events, media, choices] elements factor into a collective sum: as passed along in fragments of itself, becoming objects instead of subjects but haunting the former with the latter as shared. This means that whatever patterns we see in others—no matter how different they seem to us—can still apply to us and vice versa.

First, Jack evolves, finding his courage. Returning to our epigram, “What the hell?” is what he says after drinking the magic potion (a symbol for “leveling up” in gamer lingo); the opening line before his Hero’s Journey is much more craven and in line with his character up to that point: “When some wild-eyed, eight-foot-tall maniac grabs your neck, taps the back of your favorite head up against the barroom wall, and he looks you crooked in the eye and he asks you if ya paid your dues, you just stare that big sucker right back in the eye, and you remember what ol’ Jack Burton always says at a time like that: ‘Have ya paid your dues, Jack?’ / ‘Yessir, the check is in the mail!'” This is the classic line given by men late on their child support—a dude who isn’t ready for commitment or heroism who suddenly finds himself, like Bilbo, having an adventure (“Dread nasty things! Make you late for dinner!”). In Jack’s case, he’s a vagabond and they steal his horse; he has to get it back. And by the end of the movie, he loves and leaves Gracie for the truck!

Despite the movie playing out like a videogame (monomyth), Jack’s behavior shows preference beyond dogmatic standards (or rather among them: “She’s trouble[3]“)—i.e., people aren’t videogames (which the neoliberal model generally provides under); they’re persons you treat with respect, meaning the courtesy of permission and agency of saying no, mid-contract[4], and not being hounded for it. As such, characters like Jack Burton are larger-than-life and down-to-earth in ways we often feel reminded of regarding people we have the hots for—cuties like Harmony Corrupted, for instance, who seemed ripped from a (Gothic) fairytale themselves!

To that, I very much used to be like Jack before his adventures; i.e., afraid but acting tough. Eventually I faced my own challenges, grew as a person, and become my true self as comfortable knowing what I want informed by the world around be as shaped by past examples of itself in small. By that same token, Jack took the power of the world (the magic potion) into himself, thereby learning what he wanted (or thought he did, anyways) by the end and kept at it, able to go his own way (without the MGTOW vibes). So did I, the two of us having common ground despite our mutual differences—a bit like him and Wang in that respect! Yeah, we’re ultimately very different people and its expressed through equally fragmented, abstract means (again, monsters), but similarity amid differences is felt across shared stories relatedly to differently during a pedagogy of the oppressed made up of unique experiences to alienating factors. Point-in-fact, it’s what Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM are all about!

Also, despite my evolution, uncanny reflection and confidence earned in spite of that doesn’t just apply to myself; it also involves my current friends on similar journeys. Knowing what I know, I want to clue them in on my magic potion as something to exchange through comraderie in all its forms (sex or otherwise) and hopefully continuing learning and growing myself as a person, too. Friendship is us sharing drinks to exchange whatever is needed to overcome ancient problems carried into the present moment and its systems; i.e., Imperialism and capitalism, in our case. When relating to others who faced the same problems, we tend to forget that what we’re relating to is not a living person, but a likeness of one we recognize and relate to during an object lesson at different points in our lives (itself rather tricky as we’re always in the present—find it impossible to image what it will like to be old when we’re young but cannot return to a state of grace after we’ve grown up), which goes on and on; or, as The Scorpions so aptly put it, “Life’s like a sea without end!” (“Life’s Like a River,” 1975).

(model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

“To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” People are both not cakes and are cakes, in a sense; i.e., a byproduct of different ingredients tied to different thought processes gained as much through trial-and-error mishap as following the recipe. Sometimes blind faith is bad; sometimes, details/repeat exercises become “stim toys” that feel good and help us rest, relax and reflect (absorb and retain, reload and repeat)—to digest, fart, laugh about, then fuck (to metal, of course), play videogames, cuddle, go for a walk, on and on; e.g., Zeuhl and I fucking to Tangerine Dream, then me going to write a grad-school essay to Sodom’s Agent Orange (one of YouTube’s best recommendations, 1989) or the OST to Bomberman Hero (one of Zeuhl’s best recommendations, 1998) while Zeuhl went to make a music video about nature twinks, a Twitter boy bot, or Tarot minigame loosely dedicated to Oscar Wilde, etc.

Eventually we get an eye for such things as something to capture in art of all kinds. We start to envision the process as able to potentiate all cakes through the creation of one suggesting all others (on the surface, per the Gothic); i.e., we acquire the intuition through what to avoid and what to try as a means of engagement as much as singular events—which, again, can all become acquired and maintained at a cultural level relative to the Wisdom of the Ancients: as a second-nature affair relaying a reflexively investigative and poetic pedagogy of the oppressed moving privileged people out of their comfort zones.

Ultimately this should be the middle class, relating to aliens by going native “on Mars” (or some other analogy for “other”). It is both childlike and mature, written and oral, and we should always prepare to be able to create to assist in this transition as enriching and weaponizing our labor value through our reclaimed bodies; i.e., like Hamlet and his writing desk; e.g., like me with my portable “writing desk”: my phone and Google Docs always on me, for whenever I get inspired. The guide for life is a concentric maze unto itself, less leading you out of the ever-changing corridors, and more making the maze (and its monsters, items, power-ups, and other devices) your fearful home to play in; i.e., the monsters are your friends, BDSM/dance partners; e.g., like Castlevania or The Crypt of the Necrodancer (2015). The music takes us back not just to the text, but an earlier time in our lives that we look back on according to everything attached to it brought forward (e.g., Godsmack’s “Moon Baby” [1998] reminding me of when I was eleven, playing Half-Life [1997] for the first time).

The trick is to meet similar people as having a transformatively positive effect on us, but sometimes through different complements; i.e., an element of stability to lend the chaotic elements a sturdy foundation—not because the person is stable through their personality alone, but because they’re learned to find balance regarding who they are in relationship to you and the world; e.g., Bay and I, but also Saul Goodman and Kim Wexler. They grow together, then apart, then reunite in the end for one last rekindling of the old flame—in short, they “colorize” our black-and-white lives, teaching us to see in color as something to make again ourselves with others (when Kim is gone, Saul will continue to help the oppressed inside the prison system; i.e., he never stopped being a lawyer):

(exhibit 34a1b2b2a2b: Model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard. “But cubism!” Hannah Gadsby joked, regarding Picasso as a sexist pig who burned women’s portraits on purpose: “To destroy the past she represents.” In response, we should do the opposite—capturing all sides of someone to showcase the best parts; i.e., what Houston calls “A Lifetime in a Moment” [2022]: “Senorita, you’re still on my mind! And I hope that life has treated you kind!” All the possibilities in the world existed, and continue to exist in those fuck-puppy eyes—beckoning you to come inside, to “embrace eternity” [that was a Mass Effect reference] together! In doing so, you can discover some semblance of Cuwu in others; i.e., “other” as in this ghost of them I have left behind, mid-exhibit [from a song they’re sing as we fucked, or after]:  

Bought a chain, get another
With the bands from your mother
Dropped out of school, misfit in trouble
Misfit, misfit in trouble

Queen shit, queen shit level
Misfit, misfit in trouble
Misfit, get the fuck on my level
Bad bitch, queen shit, icon 

Eat spit, get dicked with the lights on [Slush Puppy’s “EAT SPIT!” 2021]. 

They were and continue to be the spirit of adventure for me—of getting into mischief [and into them] as an eye-opening/mind-altering experience: the slut to summon and expand your mind through your other organs of perception, of thought, of creation as hopelessly intertwined.)

 

“I love how your mind works!” Craig Dionne told me once, said mind coming from a family of certified weirdos. I became determined to find others like me (unicorns) that shared Craig’s enthusiasm. In terms of us as living documents and the world reflecting us and vice versa, we should be able to update not just our entries, but entry modes/coding input as we go. This adaptability and creativity will reflect in the world as an extension of us and vice versa; i.e., what we put into it and vice versa, there and back again: “as you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you,” except sex-positive monstrous poetics are vital to our surviving of state criminogenesis (Nietzsche throwing the baby out with the bathwater in Beyond Good and Evil[5], 1886). Learning is taking from others what you apply yourself and/or with them to make the world a better place; it’s to learn to laugh and not take ourselves too seriously but also juggle and be serious in silly ways, camping canon as essential reading by virtue of us fucking with it.

The social takeaway is to find people who accept our good, non-harmful qualities and challenge us to change our bad, harmful ones—to think through monsters and cartoons[6], heroes and moral dilemmas, but also not judge us for our quirks, odious habits (excessive snoring, accidental farting or other things we can’t control[7]) and past mistakes provided we’re willing to change (regarding the more serious ones); and all while, they’re silly themselves in response—e.g.,

• lighting our junk up while singing Electric Six’ “Danger! High Voltage” (and showing us the amazing music video [2002] as ludo-Gothic BDSM par excellence—”danger” + excitement)
• farting long and loud in a pink unicorn t-shirt/white panties while engaging in a staring content with us (that one’s a keeper)
• wiggling out of their clothes, pressing their butt into your crotch while in bed and saying to you, “What are you waiting for! Warm my ass up!”
• threatening “torture” and death through psychosexual theatre as cathartic and educational, but also a brand to advertise within capital forcing people to adopt its system to survive (as sex workers must, like all workers; i.e., Medusa becomes a brand, a joke, a product, with a commentary inside and upon its surface)

(artist: Midna Ash)

Positive or negative, these might all seem like trivial, little things; but per Robbie Hart and Eric Draven, nothing is trivial; i.e., when Zeuhl left me, I was both shocked and not shocked: by the little things suggested but not openly communicated. As such, I still felt bothered by how they acted like things were fine while obviously having planned their escape for some time. I learned from this, and used it to my advantage with Jadis and Cuwu. All their likenesses became a part of me—like the blue Jedi ghosts from Star Wars, but sexier and/or funnier and self-referential (“I am the butt ghost; I am going to eat… your butt…“).

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Genocide is incumbent on eradication—not of one portrait of the imaginary past alone, but all of them through the ability to play with said past during liminal expression/gender trouble (sex and gender as radically separate/detached from biology but interrelating back and forth) as anathema to the church of profit, of Cartesian thought and heteronormative expression, etc. Development is liberation, which becomes the past as something to reclaim within historical materialism (time-as-a-circle); i.e., it always involves play during ludo-Gothic BDSM to synthesize praxis (me, reclaiming my older art as something to feel more pride in now than I did back then).

Think of meeting people and becoming friends like solving puzzles, then. To that, games are an effective way not just to play but to learn between the games we play together as distributed across all registers. This can be intended play or emergent play. The difference with some humans versus, say, all bees (Ze Frank’s “True Facts: Bees That Can Do Math!” 2024) is that humans can do both intended and emergent, but also emergent to challenge profit, and all while still having fun! Unlike bees, we’re potentially better at multitasking because our brains are so much bigger. The problem is, most people not only don’t use most of their brains (the old 15% argument) but devote games, play and mastery towards monopolizing emergent play in defense of profit (which bees have no concept for—”For me, sir, the question is totally without meaning!”).

This includes our species-unique abilities to communicate and learn: to lie/conceal, act, and rape, but also consent; i.e., camp canon as something only humans can do/create: putting “rape” in quotes by illustrating mutual consent, while also compartmentalizing trauma as a linguo-material device with complex (symbolic) social functions (the flow of power towards or away from the state) that frequent Gothic (monstrous) forms. These, in turn, achieve multiple functions at the same time—pleasure through play as an oft-imaginary means of social-sexual enrichment, learning and rebellion through gender identity and psychosexual struggle: at cross purposes with the state and the elite; i.e., both of us existing as separate, oppositional classes of existence within capital by design. Drama, comedy and satire are all unique to humans as part of a bigger world; so are games in this larger paradigm we want to liberate ourselves from with, meaning through sex work making iconoclastic art (through nudism, dress-up and sex, etc).

(artist: Nuclear Wasabi)

All games teach something. Our undead, demonic, and/or anthromorph BDSM costumes—our potentially satirical, ironic exchange rituals—happen uniquely during games as subversive coding behaviors (forbidden knowledge) and unequal distributions of power that educate people about trauma through social-sexual engagement; i.e., as a sex-positive, iconoclastic teaching device. In short, we can lie, act, tell jokes, and camp/canonize on a gradient of social-sexual expression that is more or less unique to humans, but which doesn’t unilaterally affect us and nothing else. Humans involve the rest of nature in their silliness, making us the slavers or stewards of our jungle friends.

Not only is the state a superorganism guided by abstract forces (the Shadow of Pygmalion); but certain workers become very good at convincing themselves and others the state is the only way forward; they adopt ruthless, cunning and brutal methods to keep others in line: concentric veneers, premeditation and lying in wait (ambush) to gentrify labor and its art/games. Except their infiltrators don’t have monopolies on violence, terror and monsters any more than the elite and its trifectas do. Their enforcement of terror vs counterterror can be reversed through the natural duality of human language as anisotropic.

By comparison, Gothic Communism is a superorganism that arranges power horizontally. It does so by recognizing the class character of warring relationships between games and players in ways that can be used—per ludo-Gothic BDSM and liminal expression—to learn through emergent play during multi(p)layer, linguo-material, social-sexual interactions across space and time; i.e., as games to play to process historical-material (complex) problems in the abstract, either solo and together, through ergodic (non-trivial) means: through negotiated, half-real ludic contracts where games master/code (re: Giddings and Kennedy) players but for which players can likewise work within this paradigm (me: ludo-Gothic BDSM) to achieve mutual consent, post-scarcity and liberation (This is where I’d say “Yeah! Science, bitch!” except I much prefer the Gothic and natural philosophy [re: Shelley] as liberated from Cartesian edicts of dominance and submission).

To conclude this sidebar on games as social-sexual creative exercises, I’m always playing and creating with other people as a means of practice; give me a blank page and it becomes an opportunity to fill up with new useful information and play (what do you think these volumes are)? To that, I could continue this poetic ramble, but let’s put a pin in it for now and proceed! C’mon, everyone! Let’s mosey!

(model and photographer: Persephone van der Waard and Jadis)

I turn 38 in less than two months, but feel like I’ve already lived so much—and while I’m not exactly Gandalf, Mr. Miyagi, King Kai or Yoda—I still feel excited to pass my knowledge along (as a poetic, Gothically critical system of thought) to all of my friends, but especially an eager younger person like Harmony Corrupted, who will undoubtedly retain and carry what I impart forward to help themselves and others when I am gone. Students like that are rare, but don’t have to be challenging in the difficult sense. More so, they’re always intrigued and interested, which in turn pushes me to be a better teacher! So, sure, it can seem impossible just how cool and hot Harmony is, but also how smart—not because “Capital tells me that AFAB people are naturally stupid, so wow! You’re really ahead of the curve!” but rather, that Harmony is just smart, sexy and hot unto themselves; i.e., as a comrade I feel lucky to spend time with (similar to when I spent time with Cuwu and would say “I’m so lucky!” To which they would respond, “You’re so special, Nicholas!” before booping my nose and squeezing my dick with their cunt).

Bakhtin classically defines heroism in the Ancient Chronotope as one of motion through vast space-time expressed in oral, poetic shorthand—”the road,” he calls it. As such, you meet enough people and get fucked over/treated well enough, you have enough triggers to warn you of danger but also skills to work through your baggage and communicate yourself to all manner of cuties who will treat you right; i.e., as you roll the dice for the umpteenth time, navigating risk through educated guesses, acquired intuition, and learning from past mistakes and successes (it is all in the reflexes!): to spot green and red flags amid doubles, counterfeits, a hall of monsters, mirrors, what-have-you. But this remains a gradient unto itself—one with a tremendous amount of luck involved; i.e., a liminal space whose magical realm of infinite possibility is moved through to encounter special events and peoples in tenebrous membranes—not “Hell” as elsewhere, but right here on Earth as merely alienated from us in all its usual forms: “Be where you are; otherwise, you will miss most of your life.”

Turns out, I was off in my own little world for much of it, but one I’ve thankfully discovered I can make with others and share together with the world; i.e., as an actively sex-positive process. Along with my other muses, Harmony and I can celebrate each other’s birthdays while offering each other gifts that include taking off each other’s clothes while still making art that speaks to who we are as people, as friends, as activists! And, per any kind of activity with someone you care about (though especially sex), you don’t wanna rush it, but make it last—not just to enjoy it (though that’s a huge part of it) but to contribute towards something special that you both leave behind for others to discover and learn from!

That being said, there’s a lot of pressure to meet, perform, do well, and not blow it, especially surrounding sex (so called “first-date anxiety” and the desire to meet someone who fucks; i.e., on the first date[7a]). Finding theatrical, artistic (ace) ways to relieve the tension[8] can not only help you relax and perform better in bed; it can enhance the experience through ludo-Gothic BDSM and build on the social side of things (the ace bonds, gender expression isolated from sex, which is important for support groups); i.e., by including elements of calculated risk that help you function better and face your respective, overlapping and surrounding trauma—in short while figuring out your boundaries, your yums, your yucks, etc. It becomes not “What would I do?” having never done something before, but the same proposition speaking from experience.

This is called learning, which is what knowledge is. Except people aren’t born knowing what they want (thus know in the future); they have to figure it by meeting their future self through the looking glass (re: monsters, likenesses). If you want to draw cuties and make sex-positive art through social-sexual exchanges, you must go where these can happen (maximize your odds) while experimenting to figure out exactly what that means for you (trial and terror) learning from past examples (media, people or both).

Americans tend to underestimate the value (and harm) of what we put into the world; i.e., our creative, pedagogic legacy as pro-capitalist (sex-coercive), or pro-worker (sex-positive). This neatly mirrors the kinds of pressure we feel to meet others expressed in popular stories similar to Big Trouble in Little China (or rather, to the monomyth at large, which Carpenter’s film follows rather faithfully despite its apparent wackiness)—the attractions that happen to us whether we want them to or not:

(exhibit 34a1b2b2a2b: Artist, left: Trey Barks; right: Akira Toriyama. Capital has a tendency to sexualize the Amazon [and other monstrous-feminine] as war brides/waifus for the emasculated guy who will never live up to the great heroes of Western canon; e.g., Krillin and Android 18, above, but also Samwise Gamgee and Rosie Cotton, whereupon the female agent’s “agency” is canonically determined by sexual function-as-action [a pre-1700s sexuality, per Foucault] and the hero, much in the same; i.e., to rescue her by virtue of saving the world, thus deserving pastoral bliss: getting to enter and “water” her “garden of paradise.” For the more awkward nerdy men, this means overcoming the threat of a dominant feminine “tomboy” type to conquer by putting in a wedding dress, then impregnate [the surrendering of power and wealth Radcliffe’s novels fell victim to].

To that, the commercialized monomyth synonymizes sex and relationships with “saving the world” as a means of upholding Capitalist Realism through heteronormative canon’s amatonormative narrative arcs [extortable “shotgun wedding” systems]. In turn, young AMAB people conditioned to be boys, per the Man Box, develop “prison sex” mentalities that trap both them and AFAB people in the same dimorphic scheme. It puts a lot of pressure on both, but also fosters anisotropic resentment when the dogma becomes harmful or fails to live up to what it promises.

The liberation, as usual, lies in Blake: 

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower 

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 

And Eternity in an hour [source]. 

People are precious, and to save one is to save the world entire. But “saving” isn’t through great deeds; it’s through subversion of oppressive dogma as something not just to recognize but perform in opposition to, from every waking moment in our everyday lives. People like being respected, but not having their asses kissed [or kicked] in a way that makes them feel like they aren’t people/that they don’t have a choice, right or say in things: a pedestal for a glass menagerie. Except, the reality is much more humbling. Men are generally quite fragile, and women are generally made of sterner stuff per the historical-material system forcing them to be; i.e., during social-sexual engagements. During social ones [which canonically predicate on sex as something to control in a wider market through a novel-of-manners], women are the gatekeepers, the navigators through matriarchal skill, not patriarchal decree. During regular old sex, a pussy is very hard to break, but the person topping [male, female or intersex] will generally tire much faster!)

In short, it’s easier to meet people and make friends of all kinds, not find that perfect “silver bullet” to answer all your problems with, fairytale-style (which is unfair to ask of anyone, but also canonically violent). Meeting cool people can seem daunting given the size of the world and the sheer astronomical odds of something happening or not. Such rationalizing isn’t really productive, though (“a watched pot never boils”). Just relax, keep an open mind, guard yourself but don’t be weird, be cool, put your best self forward, know what you want, communicate what you want, etc, and see where things lead. Then, when you’re locking lips (or bumping uglies) with a god or goddess in a weird underground dungeon you both built, you can gasp, think “My god, is this really happening!” and then just enjoy it! Keep building friendships that make social-sexual exchanges quick and easy but deep and profound.

To that, Harmony’s awesome, and I love our friendship exactly as it is—the princess who doesn’t need saving (“Into the garbage chute, flyboy!”) and the other princess who can work with her during ludo-Gothic BDSM to raise the rights for all workers. To Harmony, I can only gush at your subversive power (the topos of the power of women, in medieval thought): “My hero! A dragon and a damsel, a mommy dom and a comrade, my Medusa-smirking at Perseus. You’re the best!”

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

God, what a weirdo! you’re probably thinking. Guilty as charged! Except, the presumed audience for this book is weird-ass adults reaching for a Gothic maturity to better the world with. This brings us to the sixth (and last) step we’ll examine, followed by what carries on as all of this repeats, repeats, repeats:

Sixth, rebellion; or, doing a Gothic Communism. This constellation of smaller points weighs the Song of Infinity as something to grapple with, but also welcome and teach, facing the void. This will include meeting all manner of people and puzzles on the road. Except keeping in tradition with my older volumes, we’ll present our examples in a more symposium-esque, messy and road-like way to surprise you with (if you’re surprised at this point, you haven’t been paying attention); not all roads are mapped and why spoil the fun, eh?

The idea isn’t so much to “make it weird” at all, then, but embrace what’s already weird as something to “make gay” by camping canon as an obscured future cloaked by the fog of war as released as much by ourselves as our enemies. We’re all fucking weird, thanks to Capitalism; the key to praxial success (thus happiness) is thoroughly non-linear and obstruse, amounting to “building weird beacons (castle or otherwise) to attract like-minded folk and start a movement of fellow weird nerds having weird nerd sex, weird nerd babies, weird nerd ideas” (often revisiting them and building “in the dark”; e.g., me and Metroidvania). The results might seem odd, but I assure you there’s a method to the madness. For all the darkness and doom they posture, if you build a Gothic castle, we will come (or cum, maybe both), meaning they’re the one place GNC people feel like we can be ourselves—can strut our stuff, slay and not be judged or attacked for it; i.e., a safe space of “danger” that paradoxically sets us free through asexual play regarding sexual topics (another Gothic paradox), and one whose ludo-Gothic BDSM hides itself as “a midden of trash” our enemies forever underestimate: an “old” messy tom(e/b) to romance, hence learn to think differently while camping the ghost of things inside the castle as ongoing (again, we’ll continue exploring this train of thought in “Derelicts, Medusa and Giger’s Xenomorph,” in Volume Two, part two). In short, nothing is sacred except our rights, including the ability to make fun (thus disempower) “sacred” things by “making them gay” (ambiguously[9] or otherwise):

(artist: Hark! A Vagrant)

As for my “castle” and its sequential role in things, clearly modesty and poetic restraint are not its strong suits (thought I have tried my best to clamp things off for you, here—to make the mess of this survey in excess quick and manageable). I could go on all night (and, in fact, have been writing this section for weeks); I want to, eager to say more, to give “enough” examples, but feel like I’ve covered all my bases plentifully[10] to speak on larger dialectical-material forces (and have taken enough “cum” from enough donors showing me their amazing booties).

It’s all here and the book, my biomechanical fortress and its mutually negotiated context, should honestly speak for itself. Memento mori are why gorehounds like me watch horror movies. But as the writer of this section who loves it to the extent that I liken it to an orgasm (a temporary loss of control likened to “death”), I have to choke its growth and switch codes a bit, lest the gushing arterial flow drown me and you (to let the soupy metal cool and harden, lest I play with it forever); but as is, my “sum of emissions” remains yet another child and one that I’m just as proud of—my favorite volume, in fact. Don’t merely use it to your advantage as you wander around inside; take what’s useful to open your minds and your hearts (so to speak). Drink of the yummy jizz and feel your mind expand tumescently (swollen with love, pregnant with knowledge, engorged with—ok, I’ll stop); let it loosen strict, rigid minds so they become liquid enough to swim around the very stuff that leads to the kinds of “stepping stone” conclusions we need to escape Capitalist Realism with.

As for the rest, then, someone else will undoubtedly make use of its heaps of rubble—to build with their own liquid (whatever that is) that hardens the structure enough to give it shape, but maintain its generative effect on future burgeoning minds wanting to raise their own structures forever forwards—not a single person beating a dead horse, but a popular idiomatic contagion built up to inoculate us beating an army of drums (or horses, whatever makes racket or raises Cain[11], etc). That is, this book’s exhaustive (and erotic) medieval bag of tricks (treasure trove, art gallery or kitchen, etc) offers copious metaphors useful for speculative thought in “ancient” (Gothic) forms; i.e., it consists of ancient things like magic, myth, and monsters used in relation to Capitalism, a recent phenomenon and a far more cartographic, panoptic/myopic one that thrives on alienation, on policing bodies and medieval expression through unironic force and sex. It’s all there for you to find, based on a life like mine as one full of cuties, monsters, sex and adventure the likes of which dreams are made of.

Any healthy relationship takes work when it evolves, and has its share of growing pains. Relating to other workers (or at least considering the idea), I invite you to consider yours in connection to capital: a disease that takes everything. Surviving it requires a certain give and take but also daring invention and creativity to arrive at a healthy (thus stable) juncture. Development of Gothic Communism, then, must contend with linguistic duality insofar as prescribed modesty is moderation for those persons who frankly don’t have to deal with settler colonialism affecting them as much as those for which modesty (silence) is a death sentence. Those with privilege can afford to settle, thus groan, at poetic clichés like the Gothic’s, calling them masturbatory and inadequate. Don’t settle for that or tolerate it. Instead, try to understand that a) connecting all the dots at once is not only impossible, but says nothing of value; while b) connecting different, incomplete patterns of them in sequence over time is a dialog that says a great deal (re, Volume One: “I’ve done my best to connect the dots in a plethora of interconnecting synonyms, but it would be foolish (and completely impossible) to try and connect them all.”).

So add my work, however you find in the wild (a bunny perhaps, below), add it to your own contributions to capital as a larger problem. Learn from it. Draw your own conclusions, connect your own dots, chart your own constellations in the stars, Hell, the void as something to defend from enterprising capital by using what you got: your body as you fortress, your suit to brave the depths and pressures (around you and between your legs) until your skin burns. Plumb the depths of forbidden knowledge, its hallowed vaults surrendering untold power and pleasure combined. Pursue it to the degree you are comfortable, dipping deep into the oblivious delight of such abyssal spelunking for as long as your body can take it/as long as you can hold your breath before sputtering and gasping with pleasure and exhaustion (sex is work, having fun[12] is work); or, keep at it until the stormy passion leaves you and the fire at last burns itself out:

(exhibit 34a1b2b2b: Artist, top: Blxxd Bunny; bottom: Joachim Beuckelaer. This book be full of riddles, but especially mixed metaphors to playfully gorge yourselves with, choosing different ones at its leisure; e.g., food, plagues, clothes, comfort/sex, shelter and bloodshed, but also oxymorons of these things that, per medieval thought, invite a pre-capitalist way of viewing things to critical capital’s defenders with: the body as essence, food, sanguine, shelter, etc, that isn’t to be harvested by capital, but enjoyed by taking control over such things to liberate ourselves; i.e., away from the state greedily marketing us as sacred/forbidden “produce” to hoard for themselves. We must place this back in our hands. As such, our bodies, though still described as poultry and produce, become our meat to market, our vegetables to sexualize [e.g., the cucumber being an all-time classic] as ordinary and extraordinary while we kick Malthus [and neoliberal proponents of scarcity and austerity] right in the canonical balls [Medusa’s pussy has “lips that grip,” holding onto power as a carrot and a stick useful to worker aims].

With the Internet, the world is literally at our fingertips—with me able to befriend an ace cutie like Bunny and stumble across Beuckelaer’s artwork on a whim through the same search engines. Use technology and poetic history to your advantage; use it to fight censorship, thus extinction, by taking control of what you have access to. You should before the state invariably rescinds your rights; it always wants to, so do what you can now to stay in control of what the state tries to monopolize—violence, terror, monsters, poetic expression, food, BDSM [death and rape theatre] but especially combinations of these things through ludo-Gothic BDSM. Use them to combat scarcity as a myopia, a famine. Worker ownership does not equate to starvation, enslavement, destruction. That’s Capitalist Realism talking [more on this specifically in the “Call of the Wild” chapter in Volume Two, part two]. Time is of the essence, but take your time and enjoy yourselves. Your art will thank you for it.)

This is an operation that goes on and on; i.e., I wrote this exhibit and “Monsters, Magic and Myth” as a grain of sand, alluding to Bunny before I met Harmony and wrote the pearl-like Poetry Module around it. Both Bunny and Harmony show us that all monsters are metaphors (often sexual ones, thanks to Capitalism) that comment through cryptonymic nudism on alienation. Except they also reflect things mid-synthesis that aren’t so easily defined as of one or the other but instead a bit of both. To that, Capitalism must be escaped from within, but also with the help of those who inspire[13] us at different points in the process. As cryptonyms, monsters speak to obvious trauma as obscured by things that point to yet also conceal it: the forbidden, surreal knowledge hidden between language, inside the grey area, as something to track down in obvious forms we don’t want to escape at all, but lose ourselves inside to find a hidden truth contain between the narrative, the castles, the obvious fakes obviously speaking to obvious problems as concealed badly by capital and concealed by us from capital to survive while critiquing it; i.e., cryptonymy and camp; e.g., Giger’s Gothic surrealism, the xenomorph (more on that, later). It’s often right in front of us, staring us in the face while written all over our face as “our” face to face. Monsters are everywhere, donating a wider problem concealed by its own data commercialized.

As always, the Gothic is rife with massive[14]-but-useful paradoxes. Fatal knowledge isn’t a detriment or a deterrent, then, but happily sought out for fun as a means of rapturous and creative solutions built on older attempts. “Escape,” for workers, isn’t to bury our heads in the sand, then, but enter authored sites of paradox/dens of confusion (the infernal concentric pattern) to play with cryptonymy as deliberately leading to healing of the home as sick with Capitalism. “Madness” was the cure, accomplished through vehicular adventuresome roundabouts, through off-road fun as a means of suspending disbelief while also solidifying it; but also through birthing as one of intense exertion, pain and work (heavy lies the “crown”—I’ll see myself out) suffered through Oracles as a classically female, and by extension, monstrous-feminine position regarding poor Cassandra struggling to express ignominious truths: the home is hungry and eating us (“They’re eating her… and then they’re going to eat me! Oh, my godddddddddddddd!“)

To that, sometimes the quickest path to “escape” (development) the maze isn’t a straight[15] line, but an ergodic, non-linear one that eventually (over many lifetimes and lives) leads to the exit (a condition of systemic healing inside the home) as stuck within the maze: something to renovate and allude to better and better versions thereof, not destroy or banish like a nightmare (more on this life-long quest in Volume Two, part two: “She Fucks Back”).

In turn, it becomes something to disguise as “mere” fun that defenders of capital won’t abject (throw up) when we try to change the scenery normally fed to them (a bit like sneaking medicine into dog treats). But we’re not force-feeding anyone; we’re presenting them with mazes (and other popular learning devices—music, videogames, movies, theatre, etc) that contain allegory the audience can interactively stumble upon as people normally do: mid-engagement—with a given puzzle of “Antiquity.” Full of obviously serious-silly and often loud, dumb things (“sound and fury, signifying nothing”), even when they fail to stick the landing[16] during a given outing, in total combination over space and time in-text and out will still say something while leaving something out each time, too; i.e., like a sequence of concentric illusions but also a mandala, written in the same Ozymandian grains of sand—erased and written and erased again—inexpressibly expressed through lack as something to uncover and solve, repeatedly absent but forever there on the tip of our tongues, “on the ashes of something not quite present.” Like a Borges-style hall of mirrors, positioned to reflect light[17] all around in dazzling brilliance; like Pinocchio’s nose stretching onwards, forever caught in a lie pointing to the truth. That’s cryptonymy!

(exhibit 34a1b1: To give an example that covers all of cryptonymy’s relative points [not the Four Gs]: cryptonymy is settler colonialism shown and hidden by Guile and Blanka as Global North and Global South; cryptomimesis is this tending to repeat and reverse through mimesis between the characters’ numerous reincarnations; the narrative of the crypt is the entire trail and its semantic wreckage; the internal concentric pattern is the stage containing heroism as trapped endlessly in Hell; the Cycle of Kings is every man for himself—meaning in that kayfabe tournament’s establishing of heels and babyfaces; and the Shadow of Pygmalion is the heteronormative image of these heroes. Per Juul and us, this is where the game takes place, my ludo-Gothic BDSM entertaining the idea of videogames and BDSM going together readily and easily. If anyone says otherwise, they’re a cunt.)

The liberation through this plastic, vapor-like confusion really needs to be experienced, not stated (for if it could be easily stated, no one would ever write anything down—make porn/art, videogames, movies, etc). It happens repeatedly as I have shown by meeting my friends who help me make something I could not do alone. I could have released Sex Positivity in late 2022, but it would have been a shell of itself, a grain of sand. Now it’s a pearl necklace, each a Gothic cathedral, a Heaven in a Wild Flower.

So, in the monasterial spirit of exploration, experimentation and revival, let’s try a small poetry experiment to end the subchapter with. Bear with me and this empheral slab of mental runoff…

An echoing dislocation—nay, an echolocation of dislocated castles, of ruins (the narrative of the crypt)—their string of ghost towns write with/written in disintegration (death, vis-à-vis cryptomimesis) as roads only ostensibly to nowhere; i.e., building sand castles standing in for Communism as the elusive “princess in another castle” but also Capitalism as the intimidating dragon holding her prisoner (or the white woman collaring the dragon, but I digress) as a synthetic (thesis-to-antithesis) plurality of conflict that yields different forms and functions in the same sand: a “collective something-something” that, no matter how far we run, walks (shambles) faster than we do: the return of the living dead as speaking for itself regarding the colossal wreck before, during and after its decay—the hyperreal map of empire hiding something that is already decayed and for which the map is crumbling. Dreams inside dreams, not sure if you’re awake. Per Meatloaf, we can build an Emerald City with this grain of sand that doesn’t lead to a humbug. Look on our works, ye Mighty and despair! Operatic, theatrical, poetic, half-real; a cyclone of wild second winds whose idioms are borrowed from Baum and those before and after, all palimpsests. Every grain a world, every castle made of them to provide a world of world of worlds, mixed metaphors, of tears and blood; a coffin and a cradle; a wedding bed and a slab, a site of infinite bravery, complete futility and total meaninglessness, of wealth and riches to scoop up with diamonds in pockets to small, a cup that runneth over[18]. The endless power of imagination something to survey then pick and choose from, caught and trapped inside dialectical-material conflict and liberation as make-believe, oscillating interrelationship expressed by poets like Shelley, popular authors like Lewis and Baum, and mega-nerds like Jane Bennet (“round and round it goes, where it stops, nobody knows”). In and out, a simulated disorder until the end of time, captured in a rock opera’s outrageous, bombastic moment of courage, brains, and heart… The beauty of language is a paradox: infinity through brevity as optional. It just depends on your aim, and what you want to try. Many deconstructive forms, like the collage or Walpole’s glue-this-to-that approach to a pseudo-Gothic eventually became just “Gothic.” So while it’s all been done before, try whatever works to do something new.

I don’t want to tire you (or me) by doing more than a page of that, and I think you get the point (if you don’t or want more, go read Danielewski’s House of Leaves, 2009). Arbitrarily concluding this necropolis’ improvised stream-of-consciousness (our castle-narrative), we’ve only temporarily exhausted the bottomless hourglass (all the toothpaste squeezed out of the tube, as it were), and well-and-truly your finite patience. So let’s tighten things back up quit this freestyle (free falling) carnival’s noisy chamber to digress (thankfully) to less tempestuous spheres… to put down our fanciful quills for more restrained ones.

As we do, just remember the Gothic loves big feelings, using the siren-like power of the monstrous-feminine (the classic “girl in a man’s world” taken to GNC extremes) to speak to different abuses haunting the counterfeit; you’ll feel things you never felt before when falling in love—like you’ve gone mad. Simply put, it’s cliché for a reason.

For a start, it’s good to trust the pros with matters of the heart; e.g., Heart as offering up stone-cold classics (and marvelous arthouse outfits mirroring Stevie Nicks) like “Barracuda” (1977), “Crazy on You” and “Magic Man” (1975) that gradually shifted (thanks to their desire to stay relevant in a neoliberal rock market) to become less ironic and campy through unironic commercialized refrains. Even so, they remained haunted by their past, fairy-like selves, as well as the spirit of rape delivered through a trademark Gothic aesthetic; i.e., per the usual sylvan surfaces charged with veiled, psychosexual energies—of force and sex sold to you by dark fairies to make your lives under capital suck marginally and nominally less: “I feel bad so ‘how can I get you alone?‘” It’s a common sentiment—one emblematized by millions of views and record sales. But it’s only the beginning. We—you guessed it—gotta make it gay.

To that, sooner or later you’ll have to voyage out into brave new worlds, seeking what matters to you in ways that songs—however awesome they might sound—can never fully deliver on (the relationship through content ultimately a parasocial one); i.e., because they’re guilty of capitalizing on angst to do the usual white-woman bullshit since Radcliffe: self-reinvention to cash in on societal fears (of being alone). However fabulous and immortal, then, we gotta move past the “Mom rockers” of yore and chart our own fae-like destinies—moving out of their seductive shadows while fostering our own to swallow Capitalism with. No one’s immune from criticism (and adoration), not even these two queens (nor their defenders; e.g., Jadis telling me as much [“You’re not (insert famous person, here)!”] only to go to bat for capital, time and time again themselves):

We’ve largely exhausted “Monsters, Magic and Myth,” “the Fun Palace” and by extension, “Medieval Expression” and Volume Two, part one’s Poetry Module from a holistic standpoint (at least, as a survey we have). But there’s still a few distinctions and closing points about modularity and class that I’d like to make before we move onto the monster modules proper in Volume Two, part two! We’re on the cusp; brace yourselves!

Onto “Modularity and Class“!

(artist and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

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Footnotes

[1] Self-sacrifice is a common and touching theme in such stories; e.g., Where the Red Fern Grows (1961), Ravenheart (2002) or T2: Judgement Day (1991) as protecting the master, lover or child from bodily harm by fighting an enemy the protector cannot hope to defeat. The hounds throw themselves at the mountain cat to save their owner; the giant outlaw shields his lady from the firing squad after defeating the colonizer’s champion in battle (“Come feel my hammer, little man!”); the older reprogrammed terminator is devastated fighting the shapeshifting T-1000. Per Hemmingway, such stories are meant to prioritize feelings of bravery and significance amid futility and meaninglessness; we’re the ones that give that struggle conscious class and cultural character!

[2] Re: me, being dogpiled by cis and queer AFAB sex workers (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Setting the Record Straight, Transmisia Experience: 5/26/2022”).

[3] This could be sexist, or it could be people feel differently about each other. Gracie and Jack had sexual tension because their energies weren’t equal. She grew to love him, and he teased her, and they kissed; but at the end of it all, she was the reporter and he, the cowboy in love with his horse more than settling down: “The only way it could work is if…” followed by “Sooner or later I end up rubbing everyone the wrong way…” followed by “God, aren’t you even gonna kiss her goodbye?” followed by “Nope!” Talk about rapid-fire negotiations!

As someone who’s had to (literally) say “Here’s to looking at you, kid,” multiple times, there’s no “correct” way to do this, provided no one is harmed or walks away pissed off. Just communicate your boundaries and get through it. Jack, of course, acts like Mr. Cool, and she takes it on the chin, her accidental hero walking out into the sunset with his worse (three’s a crowd, in that scenario).

[4]  In ludological terms, this is called a ludic contract; i.e., as something to entertain on the field of play as both half-real—meaning “between the fiction and the rules” (re: Juul) but also “between fiction and non-fiction” (me)—and, to some extent, stochastic (what the kids call “RNG”—random number generation). The classic argument is that of ludo-narrative dissonance (from Clint Hockings; see: Pat Healy’s “Ludonarrative Dissonance: What It Meant and What It Means,” 2018): “Seek power and you will progress” effectively describing the monomyth in videoludic form. Except, per Metroidvania and my research into Ludo-Gothic BDSM, there is always the abject element of decay during a Promethean Quest that rapes (disempowers) the hero through self-destruction; i.e., making the ludic contraction an openly Faustian one (versus a furtively Faustian one under more opaque power fantasies. This is not a canonical attempt at transparency—merely a canceled future to expand infinite war and profit [thus rape] inside).

This would seem to abjure the idea of heroism in the Western model, which is always foretold by a presage of destiny delivered by the gods. Instead, the praxial idea of ludo-Gothic BDSM is this playfulness between players and games isn’t just between games as separate from players, but players as playing games with texts and other players on all registers that includes, but isn’t limited to, videogames’ classic “magic circle” (re: Zimmerman): the television screen (or some such oculus) of a home entertainment system. Despite how capital would have it, friendships are no more relegated to that then sex is to the bedroom (re: Foucault). That dislocation and randomness are what make the process as fun and beautiful as it is (what ludologists generally call “emergent gameplay”).

[5] “Apes don’t read philosophy!” “Yes they do, Otto, they just don’t understand it!” We can see this all the time in dickheads dogmatizing media and people, gentrifying classically rebellious things. Whether this is deliberate (the cynic who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing except profit) is moot. Praxis is praxis, pastiche an extension of that, satirical or otherwise. For us, Gothic Communism can prove that self-actualization needn’t be genocidal, while borrowing from older historical-material language to suit our revolutionary aims.

[6] Anyone who says that cartoons “can’t be smart” either hasn’t seen the non-gentrified episodes of Animaniacs, Ren and Stimpy, Doug and SpongeBob, etc (watching them while the nuance and inside jokes/adult-grade humor goes over their heads*), or thinks that Mel Gibson the actor and his characters are the same person. They’re the dad from Holy Grail telling their son “No more singing!” or T-Bird’s gang of hoodlums raping Shelley instead of treating her like Eric, her boyfriend, does (Jadis would discourage me from being myself; Zeuhl sometimes would tickle me until I lost control and then stop, etc. To both of you, I say in response: “Your hemorrhoids are inflamed because you’re dumb!“).

*Cuwu introduced me to SpongeBob and explained a lot of the classic episodes’ inside jokes (e.g., “My legs!” and “Pinkies up!”)

[7] Jadis, for instance, would judge me for snoring but not themselves; they’d also make me feel guilty for getting sinus drainage to the point that I’d gag and have to spit constantly at the sink (a feeling I’ve since described as “the Invisible Man jerking off into my mouth”).

[7a] All the more ironic since I generally don’t date, in the classic sense. I just find people I’m down with and we get down (what they called “loose,” “easy” or “fast,” in the old days); i.e., plenty of romance (and sex), but no stupid capitalist hoops to jump through!

[8] Per the Gothic and medieval theatre, these generally involve death fantasies that ease the tension in various ways; i.e., from purely violent ones (e.g., James Harriot to David Gemmell) and psychosexual ones that merge the two (sex fantasies, but also rape fantasies that oscillate between you raping someone or them raping you).

[9] I would argue there’s ambiguity in any relationship (“They love me, they love me not!”). Those who say otherwise have arguably never been in one. And to those who would discourage questioning our world through relationships or vice versa, doing so is how we learn about/with one regarding the other. Always back and forth, in yawning paradox and reflection.

[10] Think of it per the medieval idea of power exchange: gift giving. Then reflect on the paradox of “too much of a good thing” per said system; e.g., I Am Ninja lamenting the gift of something black: “Something black. Giving a ninja something black is like giving crazy to Angelia Jolie; it’s like giving guns to Master Chief, boobs to Dolly Parton—we already have plenty!” (“Question 14 ‘Ninja Gifts,'” 2008). On one hand, we need to announce systemic issues by speaking through consumption as indulgent to the point of psychosexual excess. Like sex, it can overstay its welcome, but yields the classic problem of “just one more.” Just as addiction is an issue, so is being starved of something to make one behave in acute, pleading demands: “More, more!” E.g., Cuwu demanding urgently as such; i.e., that I fucked their tight little pussy until being told to stop (which generally only happened once their pussy became too sore—unpleasantly instead of pleasantly*—for them to continue). This historically led to problems because they were borderline and couldn’t stop.

The fact remains, having plenty of something is to be spoilt for choice, thus to have options. That’s historically a good thing (to take them away is to infantilize and disempower workers). Also good is taking the opportunity to explore them; i.e., to partake of substances that aren’t immediately and acutely addictive (when presented in healthy forms) like Gothic poetics and sex. Ignoring outlying medical conditions, you can’t really have too much sex; i.e., you can’t die from it, meaning we’re free to explore trauma through medieval poetics/exchange as much as we damn well choose. If it’s just to say obvious things like “shit happens” or “people like to fuck,” then oh well; but if it stumbles on systemic trauma in the process (deliberately or otherwise) then mission accomplished! Such an outcome is only bad for capitalists, making its (crypto)mimesis nothing but good for us. “Capitalism bad” is true and needs to be broadcasted regardless if exclusionary dumbasses try to stall things any way they can. So keep saying it no matter how much of a joke/tired topic it becomes:

*There is such a thing as “too sore,” but it rides a fine line regarding one’s preferences. For AFAB people, this means searching for the right fit; i.e., “Goldilocks dick” (not everyone’s a size queen). It’s a suitably Gothic idea in its own right: pussies that want to be fucked to the edge of genuine pain; i.e., the curious secret of skirting destruction while “hurting so good” as a pleasant reminder after the deed is done: to be taken to the edge but not pushed over its lip and totally destroyed (“spiflicated”).

Regardless of the size, though, too make sex can make people hurt in ways they like or don’t like. Yet, just as the Gothic employs cryptonymy’s double operation (“showing to conceal”) to hide things, it can also reverse them to speak to hidden truths announced by seemingly vacuous cathedrals (which emblematize “too much sex” in a very literal sense). Doing so states the obvious with the obvious (again, with a big-ass castle that’s hella fake) to discuss an obvious thing that is hidden; e.g., Capitalism, genocide; i.e., by weird canonical nerds smarmily playing ball to uphold Capitalist Realism because anything else makes them crap their pants. Medieval comedy, then, is as much about stating the obvious—the jester in the king’s court—and watching Roman fools act like total dumbasses; i.e., giving themselves away to our advantage during cryptonymy as a dual deadly game of show-and-tell, but also concealment for workers and the state as diametrically opposed. Don’t be like them, ignominiously misled inside; change “inside” for the better!

[11] Iconoclasts, after all, are disruptors with a purpose, including their monsters.

[12] I.e., exposing the state through Gothic poetics—to concentrate on fucking juicily or focusing on a headspace of some kind that, embellishments aside, remains poetically concerned with fucking and violence (as stories like Alien primarily are) to deliver a superior project that appears inferior and out-of-focus: focused enough to be, at times, deliberately vague, yet whose own concentrated acid easily and ignominiously burns/eats through the state’s fortified illusions. The state can’t control something like that, only try to monopolize it (“They must have wanted it for the weapon’s division”).

Like sex, headspace is a huge part of the Gothic and its roleplay scenarios, including in bed: focus as something to gain and lose; to help someone concentrate, cheer and encourage (“there you go…”) when someone gets hard and starts to work; to praise them, or to be understanding when failure happens (for manly warriors, it’s not an option, but there’s only so much blood to work with), and supportive and loving in a traditional female/feminine way that translates to classic male counterparts, too: the dutiful servant; e.g., Tolkien’s batmen. There’s also dirty talk (definitely not Tolkien). The idea is to act when the mood strikes (a thing the soldier will be trained to suppress; i.e., “Mood is a thing for cattle and love play, not fighting!”). Headspace aside, sex and war overlap in regards to general human language, but also crossovers of actual physical labor and strain, too; e.g., sweat, elevated heart rate, body odor (“scent” is generally the more accepted term, due to its more positive connotations) and pulled muscles, etc. That being said, the act and language of denial and traditional bellicose/imperial language likened to sex as for sexual stimulation is a real (and hopelessly common) aphrodisiac that works* well enough, but it shouldn’t be used as an unironic war device for capital.

*Volume One talked about Amazons and knights as wild, animalistic heroes, of which “it’s perfectly legitimate for nerds (or those who otherwise indulge in nerd culture) to desire protection from anyone who gives off ‘big daddy/mommy’ energy as tied to an animalistic, dream-like aura—or even wanting to fuck these incredible, otherworldly persons” (source). Part of this certainly owes to the uniform as a “mil spec” (military gear) fetish with a fantasy flavor that translate neatly to BDSM (for harmless fun, but ideally to challenge the nuclear family unit for something more stable, healthy and reliable for workers; i.e., “it takes a village” being the sort capital has alienated and domesticated/chattelized workers from).

The language of conquest takes how people talk and play in regards to popular and widespread activities that overlap, like war and sex first colloquialized by kids using slang to mess with the Gothic affect; i.e., the Amazon is a bruiser herbo who thumps people, with taut capable buttocks, echoing John Webster’s “strong-thighed bargeman” from The Duchess of Malfi, 1614; e.g., the Amazon “fucks” with a “big dumper” that teenage boys want to make their waifu. Second, it happens during Gothic roleplay that generally involves encouragement of one side to “take” the other as one does in battle; i.e., to get rough and push to the finishing line; e.g., to batter the “enemy’s” gate down with a giant, massive battering ram. Jadis used to encourage me to do that all the time, their jet-black eyes glittering with masterly pleasure as I flooded their mistress cunt with hot seed. Frankly, I loved those games we played; it was hot as hell, being told how to fuck an orc-like tank of a woman like them. The only problem was, it became unironically harmful and I no longer wanted to play (we’ll explore this more when Volume Two, part two talks about Jadis in “Transforming Our Zombie Selves“).

[13] I.e., mythically like Ariadne’s thread, except we’re not escaping the labyrinth and killing the minotaur. We’re teaching it to be our friend and make the labyrinth our home (the same concept applies to orcs, xenomorphs, or any other copagandistic notion of us-versus-them canonically essentialized by neoliberal dogma; e.g., videogames). Classically this requires “a woman’s touch,” and in more ways than one; e.g., booties—Harmony and Bunny’s rev my engine and its numerous facilities. More than that, they’re nice to me, their inner/outer beauties awaking enormous passions and connections, so that ideas magically come to me (nightly visitors, taking me to the land of my dreams, or heaven and hell, etc), make my heart race, my mind hot with ideas to get, and my body pulse with fresh energy (and my cock throb with cum, etc). I feel like a quivering troubadour, pressed in trembling exaltation against their body heat, their soft warmth when the world is a cold place. I feel where I belong, imagining my cock inside them where it belongs. There is a transactional nature in the sense that things are exchanged, but it needn’t be reduced to cold, mechanical and lifeless, or bereft of intimacy and closeness despite physical distance. Closeness is a feeling, first and foremost. Per the Gothic, such companionship can traverse any gulf and fill any hole.

[14] While the Gothic speaks of, to, in and with gargantuan totalities, or tries to hit or touch upon them as frustratingly near and far off, the key to expressing totality isn’t to penetrate or list everything (very Cartesian, raping the space beyond one’s own), but something that hints at the whole, a sum greater than that of its parts; i.e., the proverbial elephant in the room. In the capitalist sense, “heaven” is alienated, fetishized and projected onto a space for sex-deprived soldiers to kill and rape—to fulfill their various “needs” as harmfully psychosexual; re: Foucault’s A History of Sexuality and the relegation of sex to the bedroom, with most soldiers not being married; i.e., a virgin and amatonormative stochastic terrorist linked, per usual, with home (state) defense: the pussy as paradise rewarded to good little soldiers for “conquering Medusa and Hell” (nature-as-monstrous-feminine

[15] Even if you could do it with a straight line, there’s no guarantee it will work, and it’s best to rely on all media to raise our chances. It’s always a gamble, but more options engaged holistically better our chances per risk. Likewise, the archer’s paradox means arrows don’t fly straight or true anyways. You can’t just “kill” Capitalism any more than Zeus or Medusa, because it’s a structure, not a person. You have to alter it and that takes time—at the very least a battering ram repeatedly slamming into a given entrance. But I would argue the quickest path to success is being direct in ways that account for boundaries to respect and ignore as required to maintain a healthy relationship with other workers. To that, it isn’t one delivered straight to capital’s beating bionic heart, but a much more roundabout path through multiple parts of its maze-like body directed at the human sentinels. Hearts and minds. Things like Zeus and the language of war and sex generally denote the widespread presence of rape tied to capital as canonically essentialized—literally mythologized, in this case—by patriarchal figures like Zeus, but also those under his thrall through threats of violence; e.g., Hippolyta or Medusa as unironic victims of capital triangulating against labor through a pro-state aesthetic of power and death, of demon BDSM, of witch cops and war bosses, monster girls, et al.

People tend to worship their heroes, not question them, a code of silence around the peerless often staying that way through threats of force against “rats” (omerta); so it behooves critics to examine not just taboos, but what society values in relation to those (re: “Sex, Metal, and Videogames“)—not simply to isolate our own biases, but also identify them in society at large through popular media’s assorted blind spots. The Gothic-as-iconoclastic actively upends canon, the sacred, as sinister and false; this includes heroes-as-sacred, as statues to blemish and take down a peg (e.g., Homelander from The Boys, 2019). Blemishes, in good faith, aren’t even bad, they’re simply different (though often are exoticized; e.g., red hair, green eyes and freckles). But understanding the relationship across a variety of media forms (as the Renaissance person does and which the Gothic mode travels) is the key to thinking critically (thus being sex-positive): where the light gathers and the darkness, then running that through a dialectical-material lens; i.e., dancing with the ghost of the counterfeit to reverse the process of abjection.

We want to ask what’s present, what’s left out? E.g., popular media doesn’t tend to rock the boat (the profit motive), but still has allegory (their better angels). Where are the politically informed metalheads? Investigate that, and so on…

I’ve learned over the years that analyzing popular media critically pays dividends; re: it’s where people’s values are stored as well as their crimes (where the bodies are hidden—in short, what stinks). Being a good critic is like being a good journalist, then; you gotta muckrake, but also provoke and stage things that expose what’s lying beneath the surface—i.e., an ironic version of Jake Gyllenhaal’s Louis Bloom from Nightstalker (2014) or Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman from American Psycho (2000), etc. The Gothic excels at that by focusing on detective stories, but also highlighting forbidden societal taboos among ostensibly sacred things; i.e., in relation to each other.

As we discussed in “My Quest Began with a Riddle,” detectives and actors—like all performance roles—are perfectly fine provided they don’t serve capital (therefore aren’t class traitors); the same goes for heroes, who represent the desire for strength in idealized forms: the oft-traditional forms of dimorphic beauty placed adjacent to Cartesian standards, wherein heroes are strong when people feel weak, fallible, easily fazed, fallen, etc. Unlike a parody of such things, the classic Western hero is the opposite of that (while also emblematic of idealized images of empire—i.e., whitewashing; e.g., Superman). Per Sarkeesian’s adage, we can critique these ideals and still enjoy the non-pernicious aspects to them; e.g., Thought Slime’s “GIVE ME SUPERMAN’S UNDERWEAR, I AM NORMAL” (2023).

[16] I.e., to be “better than the sum of their parts,” insofar as they touch upon something awesome and great that we need engage with in serious and silly ways.

[17] A scintillate burst whose prismic “ballet” offers many different points of view regarding the same function and goal to reflect on, mid-reflection. Luminary.

[18] When I’m vibing it’s very repetitive, and letting some jewels go doesn’t mean we won’t catch more ideas later. But we can’t hold them all right now. How could we? We’re devils, not God.