This post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second book sample series originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact“ (2024). That series was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two’s assorted chapters and its twin modules, the Undead and Demons. As usual, this promo series (and all its posts) are written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.
Volume Two, part one (the Poetry Module) is out now (5/1/2024)! 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 the original blog posts will not have)!
Click here to see “Searching for Secrets'” 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 shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer at the bottom of the page.
Picking up from where “Volume Two, part two: Opening and Outline” left off…
“In Search of the Secret Spell”: Digging Our Own Graves; or, Playing with Dead Things (the Imaginary Past) as Verboten and Carte-Blanche (feat. Samus Aran)!
First off, there’s nothing critically “redundant” about the Gothic in its more dated looking forms […] ignoring the paradox of the retrofuture’s own hopelessly outdated anachronisms, the wizard, knight, demon or damsel, etc, well as their various stages of performance: their castles, spaceships, graveyards, cathedrals, laboratories of mad science, and other cultural sites of phobias, stigmas and urban legends; i.e., haunts that can all yield creative successes (of proletarian praxis) through dialectical-material roles as determined by function (the aesthetics is just the allure and appeal of power/playing with dead things); in short, they can all be gay as fuck if done in good faith, thus sex-positive/iconoclastic by camping canon with seemingly wizardly power […] Indeed, the foxy flexibility of guerrilla war (emblematized by the fox, but also as thoroughly sexy in how we resist capital in animalized forms—more on that in a bit) isn’t mutually exclusive, as Capitalist Realism teaches the faithful (rewarding these Crusaders with damaging illusions and prophesies of a glorious afterlife). Instead, the guerilla can challenge the seemingly all-powerful, proving just how fragile the power of the elite is: their mighty fortress is a sandcastle, a house of cards (source).
—Persephone van der Waard, Sex Positivity, Volume Zero (2023)
(artist: ChuckART)
The Gothic loves excavating forgeries of old legends; this chapter considers the complex role of the Amazon as one such “dead” thing—dug up and played with like a circular ruin that springs paradoxically to life, its liberatory routes superimposing over the same track as covered in bloody footprints spilled for the state. The classic Gothic heroine is forever facing ignominious death from lack of military equipment or skill; i.e., when curiosity kills the cat. But we must be curious and play with dead things that deliver us from state illusions through the same moribund theatrics reclaimed for sex-positive reasons. Divorced from state control, they remain haunted by sex and force less as discrete agents (above), and more as a singular monstrous-feminine Valkyrie that “chooses” the slain for an ignominious death dressed up as “glorious”: oddly buff, equally magical spellswords of some kind or another to pass trade secrets along to an apprentice, a squire. Such naked (“in the buff”) “meat wizards” neatly encapsulate Freud’s idea of “Medusa’s Head” (1927): the male patriarch’s authority as something to simulate through war theatre and games as testament to such strength as proof of itself, ipso facto.
The meta/multimedia argument, here, is that men are stronger than women under an implied dimorphic scheme (“the battle of the sexes,” Amazonomachia) because it dates back to Antiquity as something imaginary under present schemes that weird canonical nerds, per neoliberal monomyths, will try to regress back into (the fascist return to a past greatness). Videogames are war simulators which invoke war hauntologies for different, often color-coded sides; i.e., copaganda with a deliberately antiquated, imaginary flavor symbolizing power as fought for/over between two group-like armies, two dueling one-person armies, or some variation of these two basic ideas; e.g., the Reds and the Blues, in “50x ICE GIANT vs EVERY GOD – Totally Accurate Battle Simulator TABS” (2023). Except, Freud argues, notions of ancient female goddesses ultimately precede and—per Creed—supersede males ones as fearsome-fascinating arbiters of sex and force against imperialist (and later, capitalist) supremacy during what I call the dialectic of the alien.
Such an idea, I argue, hasn’t really gone anywhere. As I write in “Doom Eternal (2020) Review: No Girls or Trans People Allowed” (2020):
Though technically well-made, Doom Eternal feels like a nostalgic old boys’ club. Everyone’s a male beefcake flexing at each other. To draw from Umberto Eco’s 14 features of fascism, it’s action—specifically strength—for the sake of itself. A perpetual casus beli that grants men total power in society and abroad. This imperium regulates everyone, though, including men (source).
Threatening the regular balance of power as maintained through the buying and selling of such war games will—if the backlash to my writing is any indication (read the comments)—be met with tremendous excoriation by status quo defenders. Any form of subjugated Amazonomachia really is the same old boys club, then, filled with all the usual double standards and token compromises. Just watch Cheyenne Lin’s “The Women of the Big Bang Theory” (2021) to get an idea: If you’re a girl, you belong to the club because you keep the usual white, nerdy benefactors at the top (and token lieutenants in parallel subservient structures aping the colonizer) and otherwise serve them as eye candy and mouthpieces; i.e., as inaccessible sex objects they can grumble about but still ogle at, or enjoy the sexual benefits thereof. Such is the lot of the conquered. Make your bed and sleep in it.
Unlike Freud or Creed, my arguments include the oppressed in a postcolonial, GNC scheme using the same aesthetics of monstrous-feminine power and death. As such, my Amazonian apologia amounts to ludo-Gothic BDSM that goes beyond Freud and (1993) Creed’s limited praxial scope to actually acknowledge and attach trans, intersex and enby peoples (and all oppressed groups) to the monstrous-feminine as a liberatory device; i.e., as likewise seeking liberation under Cartesian, neoliberal shackles in the Internet Age. After all, I took Shiver from Bungie’s 1997 Myth: the Fallen Lords and transformed her for a genderqueer purpose. Originally called, in the Dark-Souls-boss-style naming scheme, “Shiver, Loveless Child of the Unwed Dawn” (meaning “she an ice queen in need of a good humping!”), I instead made her Revana Mireille; i.e., my trans avatar who—hybridized between Joan of Arc and Red Sonya—was rescued from rape at the destruction of her home village, only to become a great warrior and savior of future children: a warrior mommy I wanted to be and enjoy the protection of on either side of a dom/sub relationship.
(exhibit 34b3b2a2a1a2: Artist, top-upper-left: Toroyo911; top-mid-side-left: Sparkie the Artist; upper-center: Harmony Corrupted; bottom-center: Dcoda; everything else, Persephone van der Waard. The monstrous-feminine is constantly trapped between enslavement and liberation, but also alienation, fetishization and sexualization as something to recognize as strong [and fruit-like] in ways that can be harvested through such propaganda battles, but also reclaimed: the juicy ass claps back. Classically the man or state proponent has—like Beowulf—the blessing of the gods and hurls their lightning-esque implements as an extension of his own body serving as an extension of the gods’ will. He always faces giant-like or siren-esque threats—i.e., echoes of Grendel and Grendel’s mother—but comes out on top for the state; but this desire to be nurtured and raised for war can be subverted in proletarian Amazonian forms that use the same palimpsests to foster an emancipatory-revolutionary character to their hauntologies/cryptonymies, thereby reversing the process of abjection inside a Communist chronotope’s staged battleground: the liminal hauntology of war where tricksy workers hunt for proletarian agency.
[source: Giant Bomb]
Per the usual mise-en-abyme as a framed narrative, the Amazon’s monstrous-feminine body becomes the “castle” as something to invade into and from, but also relay counterterrorist propaganda that aids in proletarian sentiment, mid-combat. Instead of the patriarchal proponent [male or female and GNC tokens] striking the state target dead, said target—similar to Deet from Age of Resistance—reverses the direction of the awesome spell; i.e., sending its destructive effects back at the hexer while vampirically siphoning the vitalistic energies anisotropically towards herself and all workers/nature: “She succ!” The usual dynastic primacies and hereditary rites of such a chronotope can become inclusively matriarchal as a matter of fresh history challenging the West’s New World Order.)
Per my PhD, all heroes are monsters, thus have the capacity to wage war through elements of terrifying sex and force as instructional/instrumental; i.e., during a toy-like theatre. This jives with Asprey’s paradox of terror as a guerrilla agent of asymmetrical warfare: “Not only can terror be employed as a weapon, but any weapon can become a weapon of terror: terror is a weapon, a weapon is terror, and no one agency monopolizes it” (source: War in the Shadows: the Guerrilla in History, 1994). From Achilles to John Wayne to Rabican of the Nine (above), all are echoes of Zeus, but also avatars of such authoritative gods warring in ways that have existed since war as a practice emerged; i.e., since battles over territory were codified by acephalous tribes, chiefdoms, and city-states, at least. Campbell really wasn’t kidding with his 1949 title, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Our focus remains the monstrous-feminine, so we’ll consider these mechanics as dogmatic and ironic, using Samus Aran as our trademark Hippolyta: the Metroidvania herbo we have to rescue from state teachings, but also ourselves; i.e., by digging a new grave-like site of Gothic play for us both to inhabit (we’ll examine Wonder Woman deeper in the chapter, followed by La Femme Nikita and others).
People love monsters and sex (drugs, and rock ‘n roll, etc); inheritance anxiety inside the Imperial Core yields the paradox of a particular call of the void—dancing with the dead, aka cryptomimesis (my generous and inclusive extension of Jody Castricano’s definition as originally “writing with ghosts,” vis-à-vis Derrida). The cliché of the white girl—a child playing with dead things, fearlessly peering over the likeness of the pyramid—is her glimpsing the decay of the empire she inhabits as displaced, per the ghost of the counterfeit, onto sites of past colonial abuse that remain in the present as equally far-off but felt close by. The canvassing of the imaginary pyramid is an Orientalist trope for good reason, but we can camp it to dance with the ghost of the counterfeit in a sex-positive sense: in search of the secret spell that liberates us with ludo-Gothic BDSM/ergodic motion as a sexy means of dancing (and fucking) with death through music, nudism, costumes (and other things) as classically asexual interrogations that, true enough, overlap with overtly erotic subject matter and performance.
(source: DarkStalker90Gaming)
Monster girls or not, capital treats nature-as-monstrous-feminine and monstrous-feminine as something whose infinite gradient of sex-to-gender expression the state cannot monopolize. It becomes camp-adjacent, at the very least, thus an extracurricular school of counterterrorist education in the same shared playground: to learn from those we see ourselves in as simultaneously human and monstrous, policed and liberated; i.e., “monstrous” as something to reclaim from its unironic master/slave argument and criminogenesis in the broader dialectic of the alien. This requires using what we got—our bodies, labor value and Gothic rebellious potential as veiled (cryptonymic)—as often playful, sexy and in control while seeming out of control; i.e., calculated risk during ludo-Gothic BDSM as a theatrical performance of/playing with state trauma as normally codified and sold to us: through toys, music, and games, etc, but also monstrous-feminine examples of these things by which to “better the instruction” for or against state forces.
The state values unironic punishment as the reward (raping the Medusa). Through a proletarian Aegis, sex as monstrous-feminine becomes a proverbial “wild thing,” a hell cat that a) the state can never fully control and b) sexualized workers can reclaim mid-exploitation as a psychosexual liberatory device: a rarefied drug-like being to paradoxically worship and give tribute towards as always partially exploited in criminal hauntological forms we must double and challenge, mid-cryptonymy—all while outing the state as the recruiter whitewashing such things (e.g., Nancy Drew, no matter how naughty or nice, is canonically a veil to conceal the state’s hand in things). Sometimes revenge isn’t just success within capital, but showing the scars of capital on one’s charged, hellish surface; i.e., as animalistic code for those who know—not to count the cost (necrometrics, per Cartesian rubrics and application) or sell out as past marginalized groups have historically done, but form transgressive and subversive exchanges of trauma and knowledge during liminal expression that yield powerful, pro-worker boundaries: the Amazon as a spirit of exchange that transmutes capital’s usual bullshit into an effective means not just of survival, but praxial, creative success as formidable, confident, full.
(artist: Amirah Dyme)
All this being said, the Gothic is historically very white, thus tends to struggle with canonization per “white people disease” and various associate syndromes and eating disorders, including white knight syndrome, but also white Indian; it tends to regress while offering up problematic hybrids of the warrior and the nurturing mother (who sell out due to concessions with colonial powers). Amazon or not, all monstrous-feminine have their feet in two worlds: the world of capital and the white man (and token police agents) and the world of the dark, the Satanic, the other as something of nature (“extended beings”) to conquer by Enlightenment chudwads (“thinking beings”). There’s so many possible forms and descriptions that can potentially reverse the flow of power away from state forces; e.g., a “cougar vampirism” to become the “beautiful death” that puts on her spotted robes to go a-huntin’ for scared Big Men with little hearts that break easy! It’s a complex idolatry with a settler-colonial past that, like the classic ’80s slasher, refuses to die, but instead chases the titular (so to speak) final girl to the final act.
This brings us to Metroidvania and Samus—my domain.
In the neoliberal spirit of things, this capitalist scheme has, since its inception, recruited liberally (so to speak) from feminism’s historically neoconservative side, pitting the vengeful white woman’s reactionary creed against the local Commies-in-disguise; i.e., a female Rambo displaced to a magical far-off land to play—as Star Wars did—the white rebel, Indian, what-have-you: “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away….” The profit motive always tokenizes just enough to rake in profits, warning against fascist regression and Communist development as one-in-the-same (a false equivalence). It does so while simultaneously recruiting from fascist elements of the local, domestic and gentrified populations; i.e., to play at being more marginalized than they often actually are: slumming as “two-world people,” with one foot on Earth and one in Hell. The promise of pastoral bliss is always-and-forever preceded by an endless monomythic game of “kill the Indian, save the Man.” This is what Samus fundamentally is: a white Indian.
Except Samus—the phallic, subjugated Hippolyta sent by the Man—answers to the Man by destroying the entire area she approaches as “lost”; i.e., denied to the American double in outer space (or anywhere else): “If my bosses can’t have it, you can’t either!” This foregone conclusion neatly adumbrates the limited lifespan of any colony, the castle-in-question literally a ticking timebomb that, per American copaganda, pushes its own exploitation onto imaginary pirates to then seek revenge against. It’s an exorcism haunted by the ecstasy of gold inside the counterfeit as equally gilded, a launderer of the usual blood monies tainted by a cycle of conquest, a wedding band and Faustian bargain as ring-like: “I have a poison of the soul of which only gold can cure!”
(artist: Josef Axner)
Samus demonstrates this ipso facto. She is the colony brat “raised by wolves” (or giant bird aliens, in this case—the Chozo aping a benevolent Indigenous waylaid by cruel pirates, but also their own Icarian hubris) seeking revenge against the same old dragon who killed her dad and adopted family, only to revive again and again as an undead/robot version of itself, mecha-kaiju-style. In turn, Samus plays with power as men so often do in these stories, serving the state in multiple ways; i.e, a tokenized Amazonian colonizer robbing the dragon of its hoard (similar to Tolkien weaponizing Semitic symbols in 1937 to illustrate dragon sickness in The Hobbit, ultimately a bigoted tactic that critiques capital but also upholds it, like Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice did—through a Protestant work ethic[1]) and stripper “robbing” men of their paychecks (from Volume One):
Volume Zero extensively explored how rape is a triangulation device employed by state forces in Gothic media; i.e., of Amazonian women raping state enemies/targets: the state’s chosen female war bosses giving police, “prison sex” violence to nature-as-alien. Biological similarities and differences aside, their xenophobic function is identical to men’s—an assortment of gun, war, and rape pastiche through a co-opted, centrist Amazon: the good monster woman, Ellen Ripley, furiously slaying her evil double, Medusa, in service of the state [who redirect her rage at their abuse of her in the first movie towards whatever target they want killed next: destructive anger]. The neoliberal, neoconservative “revenge fantasies” of Aliens and Predator [1986-87] are rape fantasy in that regard, as are their videogame offshoots: “Rape the Communist; kill the pig, spill its blood!”—all in service of the owner class back at home posturing as righteous, but also displaced by neoliberal “arms merchants” like James Cameron and John McTiernan […]
Just as the shared, us-versus-them rhetoric owes a symbolic debt to Beowulf’s post-Roman treatment of monsters inside a Christian hegemon that survived in future English forms, neoliberalism’s prime videogame mode—Cameron’s refrain, the shooter—owes its own abject warrior symbolism to earlier stories putting future ghosts of Beowulf in seemingly unusual environments like outer space [whose dark hostility emulates Grendel’s mother’s underwater cave]: Starship Troopers.
Beowulf’s various offshoots survived into a retro-future copaganda whose military optimism contributes to the ongoing myopia under Capitalist Realism in male and female videogame forms; i.e., “Conan with a gun” aping Rambo [the white savior playing guerrilla] and Amazonian, Hippolyta-in-spirit Beowulfs like Samus Aran doing the same. Both offer a de facto “good” parental role to challenge the bad parentage of corrupt and/or monstrous-feminine entities [the evil double of the hero’s homestead and its occupants]. Conjured up, Beowulf aborts the spawn of Cain and Grendel’s mother on their illegitimate home turf encroaching on colonized lands; Samus crushes her own tall, hideous enemies using her own armored body and superior “phallic” weaponry. He’s the Great Destroyer shooting Red Falcon’s biomechanical offshoots to dust; she’s the Medusa, as strong as the Earth as she cuts Mother Nature [and her draconian offspring] down to size [below].
Per the kayfabe clichés of wrestling monsters, it’s not long before both hero types get naked, reviving binaries from Antiquity stressed post-Renaissance—he, stripped down to stress his masculine “invulnerability” and she, her feminine “vulnerability” during a recent creation of sexual difference. Within this settler-colonial trend, they pointedly denude towards a native, “white savior” state, mid-combat, which then regresses back to nuclear family roles after the action lulls: Hippolyta, the if-not-bridal-then-at-least-maternal role, playing house/mother while Beowulf goes home to be a family man… until the fight begins anew [which it always will under Capitalism; if there’s no one left to fight, the elite will make new enemies to confront based on Cold War kayfabe archetypes: the Nazi or the Communist as a bad parent to the hero’s good parent] (source).
Samus armors up and then strips as she always does, becoming monstrous-feminine as something maternal-warrior to endure the Male Gaze while becoming synonymous with rapist and false Indigenous (from Volume Zero):
Under Capitalist Realism, Hell is a place that always appears on Earth (or an Earth-like double)—a black fortress threatening state hegemony during the inevitable decay of a colonial body. Its widening state of exception must then be entered by the hero during the liminal hauntology of war as a repeatable, monomythic excursion—a franchise to subdue during military optimism sold as a childhood exercise towards “playing war” in fantastical forms; e.g., Castlevania or Metroid. Conjure a Radcliffean menace inside the Imperial Core, then meet it with American force.
Threatened, the state always responds with violence before anything else. Male or female, then, the hero becomes the elite’s exterminator, destroyer and retrieval expert, infiltrating a territory of crisis to retrieve the state’s property (weapons, princesses, monarchic symbols of power, etc) while simultaneously chattelizing nature in reliably medieval ways: alienating and fetishizing its “wild” variants, crushing them like vermin to maintain Cartesian supremacy and heteronormative familial structures […] Neoliberalism merely commercializes the monomyth, using parental heroic videogame avatars like the knight or Amazon pitted against dark, evil-familial doubles—parents, siblings and castles (and other residents/residences)—in order to dogmatize the player (usually children) as a cop-like vehicle for state aims (often dressed up as a dated iteration thereof; e.g., an assassin, cowboy or bounty hunter, but also a lyncher, executioner, dragon slayer or witchfinder general “on the hunt,” etc): preserving settler-colonial dominance through Capitalist Realism by abusing Gothic language—the grim reaper and his harvest (source).
Samus is like Superman, then—the small-town girl surrounded by farmland (a space colony, in her case) owned by a small group of men stolen from the Indians, thinking she’ll go off and fight the evil empire, only to become said empire’s whitewashing girl boss: “Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound! What’s that in the sky? It’s a bird, it’s a plane? It’s Samus’ spacecraft given to her by the man to go play Cowboys and Indians!” As such, Samus has Superman’s strength, agility and super speed, but also his X-ray vision; she has to settle for a miraculous arm cannon that shoots missles and beams, but can roll up into a ball and lay bombs like a some kind of fucked-up bird robot! She even has the same S logo as Superman does, but is worryingly shaped like a lightning bolt (a Nazi dogwhistle: a single “Sieg” rune)! By the time she reaches her ultimate prey (the Medusa), Samus has killed everywhere on-site—is the skinny-thicc Amazon/white Indian having donned the European’s suit of medieval retro-future armor!
As the Amazon, Samus is the part-human, part-alien enforcer who plays the cop and the victim, but is always functionally white, aping the monomyth to skirt the line of the hidden princess made through Shakespearean violence (with Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley channeling Henry V in Aliens) to push the story forward, only to then bridal the Amazon and strip her of any sort of castle at the end. Even so, she will always try to fit in, pleasing daddy with bigger and bigger conquests. But she always is stripped of everything and starting from scratch, going from place to place as an unironic Traveler/Destructor (Gozer without the irony). She never promotes—is always a fledging recruit bossed around by men; i.e., chasing the dragon as a monarch-like status symbol the state will always keep from her (“no crown for you”).
Instead, they feed her crumbs while making her chase crumbs; i.e., a kill-list that takes on the form of the enemy she must destroy to progress (“seek power”) as Promethean, Faustian, colonial, horseshit:
Exploring Metroidvania is incredibly destructive. Forbidden areas often require sacrifice to access. Far-removed from the site of murder, the sacrificial altar is often the shape of the [victim.] Sated, the statue will either dissolve or physically move to open, reveal or create a door or bridge that the hero might use to progress, literally into the beyond, to face the Other. […] The returning hero is doomed to face the past again and again, a series of doubles. They can subvert old tyrannies by seizing control, but remain trapped or exiled, themselves.
For example, Samus is nomadic, without a home; so is Ellen Ripley from Aliens or Victoria, from Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya; or, the Moor (1806). […] For any [Metroidvania] hero, it is not simply a call to arms, but a rite of passage wherein the hero constantly infers whatever lies in store for them whilst inside; yet, it is always hidden, revealed too late: they were the destroyer all along (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Lost in Necropolis: The Continuation of Castle-Narrative beyond the Novel or Cinema, and into Metroidvania,” 2018).
Escape from Metroidvania is as mythical and performative as Samus’ power is. It’s a feeling that asks the player (usually a teenage boy) to ignore what’s going on while piloting the Amazonian avatar as his reward, mid-game and at the end: the speed and strength of Artemis, stripping her for a split second before she shoots you in the face!
Instead, the Golden Statue Room becomes a grim, haunting nod to idolatry and blood sacrifice, hinting at Samus’ thirty pieces of silver when turning the statue to stone. This chimeric totem’s bogus exorcism—built on the forged lie of Western sovereignty enacted through force (“the Galactic Federation” married to “Indigenous” revenge against an invented pirate that in real life, would be the Federation) happens, piece-by-piece, when she kills one miniboss at a time; i.e., the one-woman-army that targets a local population’s elements of resistance (so-called “power targets”). Once all of them are dead, Samus goes to the nucleus of the rebel fortress, the maternal brains of the operation, and strikes the proverbial Medusa dead, beheading her. Then, she takes off and nukes the site from orbit. She’s literally war fetishized, a walking bomb/starship trooper, the fucking Death Star in the flesh. It reduces to Cameron’s billionaire Marxism—the Liberal white man drooling over Heinlein, his own Competent Woman’s military optimism[2] making what didn’t happen during the Korean war a reality after Vietnam; i.e., in a fictional what-if world neither quite here nor there.
Similar to Volume Two, part one’s “Brace for Impact” (2024), Volume Two’s second half will also have a book sample series (“Searching for Secrets,” 2024) that releases one piece of the volume half at a time until, once the puzzle is complete, the way to the next adventure opens and the next! In Metroid, this is called “boss keys,” successfully implemented as a statuesque gate that cannot be crossed until all the “pirates” are dead; i.e., a casus beli (false flag) enacted by alien invaders calling a local Indigenous population “pirate” before sending in an infiltrator to blend in and destroy the locals from the inside, out. Such dogma is no way to live (and works out badly for Ripley and Samus), but we gotta subvert it within and/or from itself as a work-in-progress, much like workers (and Communism) are, from moment to moment. In the spirit of Gothic subversion, then, I want you think of part two’s table of contents as an inversion of the classic capitalist “hit list”; i.e., Samus’ golden statue as something to modularly cross off, one-by-one, until we proceed to Volume Three (where TERFs await).
This progress should intimate our critical-thinking abilities instead of our dogmatic faith in peace-through-strength. I have loved Castlevania since high school (especially the DS and GBA handhelds) and Metroid since 1994. I’ve made artwork that celebrated the Amazonomachia of our infamous heroine, battling statuesque beasties akin to a Theseus the minotaur (or any other dude-bro with magic and a sword killing for the ancient city-state):
(exhibit 34b3b2a2a1a: Artist: Persephone van der Waard. I drew these a year out of high school, identifying Samus as a human who sought down time and R&R in between the colosseum-style duels with walking animal statues. This didn’t just ape Greek myth—i.e., like the Japanese post-Cold-War neoliberal of the mid-90s—but mirrored my own life during the War on Terror as still ongoing back then and now [Biden wouldn’t pull out of Afghanistan until 2021, but the US isn’t leaving the Middle East anytime soon, and is still funding Israel as their foot-in-the-regional-door as of me writing this]. I listened to The Minibosses on CD[3], but also Grant Henry’s Metroid Metal [2003] as something to listen to online through the QuickTime plugin, and order over the mail by check. It seems both like yesterday and light years ago. I was nineteen, just writing characters like Revana, Ileana and Alyona in spiral notebooks with no.2 mechanical pencils and lined paper.
[artist: Edwin Huang]
So much time has passed since then. I would lose my virginity several years later, but wouldn’t have my first real-life partner until I went back to college the second time around, ten years later when I was twenty-nine. I wouldn’t meet Bay for another eight years after that, and would have multiple abusive partners in between. And even now, I remember Samus as the person young men could control—to be warriors, and then, if they were “good” enough and killed and explored and destroyed fast enough [speedrunning Rambo-style settler colonialism through CIA-style shindigs], she’s let them touch her boobies. It doesn’t take much to convince those in the Man Box to go and kill non-white people overseas; Samus, it turns out, was the perfect blend of masculine-feminine hawk: a monstrous-feminine recruiter/poster girl thrown into relief by an exploding planet—a pinup girl on the side of the Enola Gay and undressed by fallout, pushing down her billowing skirt like Marilyn Monroe [or as I originally wrote by accident, Marilyn “Manroe,” to which Ginger told me: “Best drag name ever!”] from The Seven-Year Itch. People hand-waive it all like it’s some cosmic coincidence, but it’s no more a gaff than Walpole’s giant falling helmet in Otranto or Hamlet’s father’s ghost: war as destiny by dressing the scene and guiding its action every step towards imperial hegemony.)
As someone who’s been there, done that, the children of today—to defeat Capitalism by breaking Capitalist Realism, thereby liberating sex workers (Capitalism sexualizes everything) with iconoclastic art—absolutely should play with dead things like Metroidvania and Amazons, albeit in a way the state doesn’t want us to! So hustle up, kiddies! Time to enter the Crypt of the Necrodancer (think Thriller-meets-DDR but extended to Castlevania, Metroid and so many other counterfeits whose playgrounds can be used to camp dogma with)! Exploitation and liberation occupy the same space, including its hauntologies and cryptonymies for or against the state. The state will perpetuate rape of colonized spaces into their hauntologies/cryptonymies to maximize profit and canonization. To that, such a “black Egypt” is an Orientalist counterfeit we must paradoxically use to free ourselves while strung up with (and out on) its mummy-like bandages:
(artist: Magion02)
Dancing feels good; so does confronting trauma during calculated risk as “cool,” familiar but foreign (Castlevania‘s “In Search of the Secret Spell” [2006] shamelessly sneaking in a disco beat to groove among the pyramids with). Per Matthew Lewis all the way up to me, it becomes the Gothic’s usual bad, musical game of telephone, celebrating monstrous-feminine sex and force while turning Imperialism (and its semantic wreckage) into a campy joke of itself. My own quest for a Numinous Commie Mommy isn’t so odd; capital makes us feel tired relative to the self-as-alien, both incumbent on the very things they rape to nurture them (re: Irigaray’s creation of sexual difference). I’m hardly the first person to notice this:
As Edward Said astutely notes in Culture and Imperialism, most societies project their fears on the unknown or the exotic other. This barren land, where the viewers are kept disorientated, is threatening. It is a place between the familiar and the foreign, like part of a dream or vision that one cannot remember clearly. There is always a sense of a lurking danger from which the viewers need protection. Nikita provides that sense of protection (source: Laura Ng’s “‘The Most Powerful Weapon You Have’: Warriors and Gender in La Femme Nikita,” 2003).
I am, however, a trans woman who has gone above and beyond women like Barbara Creed, Angela Carter, Luce Irigaray and Laura Ng, etc, in my pioneering of ludo-Gothic BDSM: as a holistic, “Commy-Mommy” means of synthesizing proletarian praxis inside the operatic danger disco(-in-disguise), the “rape” castle riffing on Walpole, Lewis, Radcliffe, Konami, Nintendo, and so many others.
I sign myself as such for a reason—not to be an edgy slut (though I am a slut who walks the edge). Rather, my pedagogic aim is to consider the monstrous-feminine not simply as a female monster avoiding revenge through violence, but a sex-positive force that doesn’t reduce to white women policing the same-old ghost of the counterfeit: to reverse what TERFs (and other sell-outs) further as normally being the process of abjection, vis-à-vis Cartesian thought tokenizing marginalized groups to harvest nature-as-usual during the dialectic of the alien. Like any good videogame OST, it repeats, throbbing and dancing orgasmically mid-live-burial: right in that little “garage” as simultaneously haunted but incredibly small and tight (claustrophobic/philic) and filled with a big present-like presence of Medusa; i.e., the drug mule, “packed and ready” as doubled by our orgasmic, passionate cries thereof: “Medusa” and her church-like melon-like orchard as yours for the taking. Clean those pipes!
Such fruit (and its forbidden knowledge) needn’t be denied, but its continued expression needs to be mutually consensual and otherwise sex-positive to thwart Capitalist Realism, thus save us from Medusa’s feral revenge (state shift). Doing a Gothic Communism is riddled with jouissance and camp—the sort where we stick our tongue out, mid-ahegao, at capital!
(artist: Persephone van der Waard)
To that, these books have been a continuation of my own struggles to quest for a palliative Numinous that can, with proper love and care, become a Communist one (from Volume Zero):
We have to learn from the past by transforming its canonical depictions to avoid repeating Capitalism’s unironic genocides.
This brings us not just to my adulthood but my postgraduate work on ludo-Gothic BDSM, which in 2017 was met with its own barriers. Working under David Calonne, I was only just learning about the Numinous vis-à-vis Rudolph Otto and H.P. Lovecraft and came across an article by Lilia Melani, “Otto on the Numinous” (2003), citing the Gothic as the quest for the Numinous: “It has been suggested that Gothic fiction originated primarily as a quest for the mysterium tremendum” (source). Something about it appealed to my then-closeted kinkster as having previously been titillated by Cameron, Lovecraft and Nintendo (there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write), but also the videogames I was playing at the time: Metroidvania (source).
Playing with the imaginary past can feel, at times, like chasing one’s own ghost as blended with the camp-to-serious ghosts of ghosts of ghosts during a shared mise-en-abyme. It’s all part of the fun, babes!
- “Splendide Mendax: the Rise and Fall of ‘Rome’ as Built-in(to Us)“: Outlines the problem of the Achilles Heel as built into any canonical heroism, including the tokenized monstrous-feminine, as meant to rape and harvest nature at the cost of one’s humanity and freedom; further divides into
- “‘Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’!’: From Herbos to Himbos, part one (feat. Dragon Ball Z and Big Trouble in Little China; Wonder Woman)” (included with the “Splendide Mendax” post, above): Outlines the idea of history as toy-like through Gothic action figures: the herbo and himbo (aka the Amazon and the knight).
- “‘Death by Snu-Snu!’: From Herbos to Himbos, part two (feat. Ayla, Weaponlord and Savage Land Rogue; Autumn Ivy and Claire Max)“: Explores further examples of the herbo as pro-state or pro-workers, and gives two real-life examples.
- “Into the Toy Chest: Picking up Where We Left off; or, Gothic History as Toy-like Amongst Ourselves”: Considers the monstrous-feminine as a ludo-Gothic BDSM historical device that operates in relation to ourselves and its effect on us.
As Fishtopher and Friends eloquently puts it: “Untethered optimism is simply escapism. We must use our optimism to create realities we do not need to escape from” (source skeet: May 4th, 2024). To that, we must learn from the past in small—to learn to prevent rape-by-capital by camping rape as the Gothic does; i.e., by cryptonymically “crying wolf” (a Gothic mega-nerd pun: vis-à-vis Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s 1986 The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy) in quotes: “Help, help! I’m being ‘ravished’ and I’m a zombie!” People will definitely check out that “car crash”! Onto the graveyard of Pygmalion and Galatea, but also all of their zombies and zombie-like strudel, cake and pie, cream puffs and other treats! Put “necrophilia” (a kind of rape) into quotes; mix and match, but dive into it and see what you learn! Or, what you’ve learned from the Amazon mommy dom helping you dig your own (or someone else’s) grave!
Onto “Splendide Mendax: the Rise and Fall of ‘Rome’ as Built-in(to Us)“!
Note: I’ve gotten a little bolder showing myself off, lately! My past lovers (the ones I have permission to show) will appear in here, but so will my bare, exposed and hard junk, mid-coitus (lead by example ‘n all that). Think of it as a hidden boss inside the temple, dungeon, ruin, what-have you! Per Gothic poetics, the language of sex and force merge with the body language of war as something to camp; e.g., “Oh, yeah! Put your big fat torpedo in my tight little… tube?! Flooding! Prepare to fire! So much ‘sea men’!” —Perse
(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)
Footnote
[1] Re: Persephone van der Waard’s “‘Dragon Sickness’: The Problem of Greed” (2015).
[2] Re: Persephone van der Waard’s “The Promethean Quest and James Cameron’s Military Optimism in Metroid,” (2021).
[3] And even put my favorite version of “Kraid” by them, the 2000 version, up on my first YouTube account: Nicholas van der Waard’s “Kraid, Minibosses 2000” (2014).