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 “Splendide Mendax/Herbos and Himbos, part one” left off…

“Death by Snu-Snu!”: From Herbos to Himbos, part two (feat. Ayla, Weaponlord and Savage Land Rogue; Autumn Ivy and Claire Max)

“My pardons if I disturbed you. You caught me chastising my wife.”

“Seemed to me she was doing the chastising.”

—Jaime Lannister and a bandit, A Storm of Swords (2000)

(artist: Erik Von Lehmann)

Part two of “From Herbos to Himbos” explores feminism and punk in decay through the subjugation of Amazons, but also where they call home under capital; i.e., a playground and stage to perform on by real-life actors.

Before we consider Ayla and Savage Land Rogue, though, we need to consider what drives their dualistic echopraxis. True to form, a monopoly of morphological expression doesn’t exist anymore than those of violence or terror do; i.e., from Jedi to Amazons to Conan-style “meat wizards” (the latter combining orgasmic, shonen-style energy blasts with American nuclear bombs), all become a nostalgic form of research through consumption and performance: chasing Numinous echoes in personified forms—to escape bondage and heal from it with “it.” The same applies to any cavegirl we could think of (and for which diametrically applies to cavemen, too, albeit through the usual double standards; e.g., Fred Flintstone having a “dad bod” vs his shapely Stepford Wife, Wilma).

By extension, and per an American Gothic lens exposing all the usual decaying radioactive elements to Pax Americana, Wonder Woman is something of a wunderwaffe and wunderkind mutant; i.e., a bomb-like super soldier defaulted to by capital at large, but still used in times of desperation and plenty alike. She’s as American as apple pie—cheap, disposable, built on the graves of dead Indians’ stolen land, a beauty-pageant-turned-cop, oscillating between the two. But while bombs and bombshells alike are propaganda weapons, they don’t historically convince colonized lands to ever give up; indeed, they historically become weaponized against capital by Indigenous forces destroying the occupying army from within!

Everything dies, especially police lies and power structures, but the decay goes from pleasantries to clothes to the flesh itself as necrotic. The pearly castles and their “protectors” are the worst, utterly rank with the stink of death. As we saw with Wonder Woman, feminism—like canon’s cops, castles, and wizards (re: Lo Pan)—historically decays into fascist, naked-but-bellicose forms that serve profit (mirror syndrome); i.e., inside a centrist cycle of good cop, bad cop kayfabe playing not just white knight (syndrome), but white Indian suffering from virgin/whore syndrome (and other such heroic dysfunction tied to profit): so-called “strongwomen” who refuse to be trad wives, yet still serve profit as sex symbols of empty rebellion. Their taut, war-like bodies posture strength amid societal collapse while their clothes disintegrate for the status quo as much as themselves: a bikini with a half-life, much like America’s legacy! It becomes something to pass around the blame (forcing workers to join in by virtue of the usual trifectas and monopolies). In turn, the elite take all of the power and none of the blame, and male/token Pygmalions from Radcliffe to R. L. Stine pat themselves on the back; i.e., as self-made doomsayers capitalizing on American cruelty and greed through the ghost of the counterfeit while not challenging the profit motive and its dogma in any meaningful sense. They further the process of abjection, cashing in on it as the white middle class is historically incentivized to always do by the elite: keep people scared but consuming their own bullshit and corpses (of them and their past-to-future victims) as toy-like.

(artist: Tim Jacobus)

Decayed or not, Amazons are toys. Per the duality of language and the double operation of cryptonymy as anisotropic, such playthings serve workers or the state during liminal expression. In psychosexual terms, it can be a snapshot (a quickie) or a grueling ordeal (a marathon), but the trauma is always present, needing to be played with. Furthermore, such decay does so not just on the surface of a given hero (or their clothes), but across the entire site of post-apocalyptic violence she/they/him (accounting for GNC AFAB) and their consumers regress into as capital decays (what I call “fash brain,” or a power fantasy where fash-minded [usually white] people go to whitewash marginalized struggles while also playing the exclusive victim and the hero: “Help, help! I’m being repressed!”). As Volume Two, part one discussed, heroes—like villains and monsters—aren’t discrete in this respect, and their bodies as much as their milieu/tableaux serve to store and engage with cultural values and taboos in equal theatrical measure. The idea obviously applies to herbos and himbos, but for the sake of time (and authorial preference) let’s specifically interrogate it with herbos a bit more, shall we?

(artist: Reiq)

“I am strong, strong, strong!” a fash will always shout before showing off their waistcoat of blood diamonds—their trim torso fed on the sorrow and misery of those they colonize. Whatever the venue, the skull-like imperator insignia will never be far off, nor the banality of evil (acting ownership and exploitation as their “God-given right”; i.e., no matter how hard workers work for the elite—including cops, studios, or anything else [e.g., Yong Yea’s “Microsoft & Xbox Baffle Internet after Shutting down Hi-Fi Rush Dev & Three Other Bethesda Studios,” 2024]—said elite will always claw back as much profit for themselves and then have the middle class blame the usual “suspects”: labor and marginalized groups) as just another neoliberal scheme populated by flesh merchants of all sorts (sorry, Reiq, but if the shoe fits…). State proponents are class dormant—are simply a corpse that doesn’t know it is dead, a public hazard weaponized by capital to repeat, rape, reap ad nauseam. The elite are chicken hawks, space aliens, cradle robbers, grave diggers all rolled into one; we shouldn’t trust them as far as we can throw their old, shriveled bodies!

Apart from convincing people they don’t exist, though, the elite lie through their forces as “skinny-fat,” skinny-dipping into the blood of the marginalized like Elizabeth Bathory did all those poor virgins; i.e., to cheat death, a relationship to nature that can only exist while preying on it to “enrich” the colonial addict in a drug-like way. “White people disease,” “boomer syndrome,” “the white Indian,” or whatever other pathological label you care to give it, Capitalism is radioactive, menticidal—a disease, self-cannibalizing and self-lobotomizing the usual groups to administer and receive state violence (consider this prep for the Undead Module). Corpses never get tired, but they aren’t monopolized by the state, either. So like a giant Caesar, they might seem invincible; but we can strip and sap them of their necromantic potency and swap it with ours. The more they fuck (stake) our rotten bodies, the more we “life tap” their asses, topping from the grave-like bottom! Per the Gothic, this has a postcolonial character but also a posthuman one; i.e., as adumbrated by the likes of Richard Matteson critiquing Victor Frankenstein’s double, Robert Neville; i.e., in a decaying Pax Americana defending itself against the undead as Commie zombie-vampires vs fash nerds playing the state’s judge, jury and executioner. But of course, this goes both ways. So aftercare, lovelies. Aftercare!

“Sure seems to be a lot of death, destruction and exploitation going around, eh?” Decay isn’t always as obvious as a rotting corpse, though; a police state will do just as well, and outwardly presents as comely and forceful. The Amazon, as a historical-material loop, is just another excuse for a) capitalists to undress and display militant/disobedient monstrous-feminine in a peep-show-style, compromising position (for easier access: the peach and both holes denuded, but also paywalled by capitalist veils and quasi-chastity butt plugs, below) during the “conquer the ‘conqueror'” fantasy foisted onto the marginalized barbarian; and b) for punks-in-decay to defect over to capital (or having never left, as America demonstrates); e.g., Lady Liberty turns green with class envy but also straight-up decay as she rots, is left to rot, is raped in all manner of voyeuristic displays turned into the biggest DARVO joke of all: the Fourth of July. It becomes an open secret to string up and tout imperial “invincibility” until the structure finally gives out under its own bloated corpse weight. Death by Snu-Snu, indeed!

(artist: Shane Ballard)

In turn, people respond to themselves in ghostly, often-giant (above) statuesque likeness as “dressed in power” in decay as part of the canonical, moribund image—the uniform-style clothes and muscles/curves, of course, but also positions of status and prestige (re: the Statue of Liberty) that, through the usual dialogs of gatekeeping and carried keys, save themselves from unironic predation as affairs of state in small. It becomes an abstracted game of teamwork, of psychosexual knowledge exchanged in both directions, a pedagogy of the oppressed and oppressor onstage simultaneously in four dimensions (the Gothic chronotope). Per ludo-Gothic BDSM, heroic roleplay becomes a theatrical means of talking about taboo subject matter with a) personas that tend not to be questioned (as heroes seldom are, especially “pretty” ones), and b) in an ostensibly asexual way (combat theatre) that doesn’t preclude sexuality or nudism. Point-in-fact, various stressors build up in ways that demand release; i.e., being “pent up” as a psychosexual “blue balls/clit” known to many people, ace or not. People want their psychosexual climax, conquest, and fireworks show—what System of a Down calls “Violent Pornography” (2001):

Everybody, everybody, everybody livin’ now
Everybody, everybody, everybody fucks [sucks, cries, dies …]

It’s a violent pornography
Chokin’ chicks and sodomy
The kinda shit you get on your TV (source: Genius)

Except, it’s not just a means of unironic exploitation, but a critical voice that puts “rape” in quotes through the usual showmanship turned on its gay little head. Again, we can reclaim such things, but our deathly “disco-in-disguise” (which reverses capital’s hiding of its own decay behind herbo veneers) must occur in the same graveyard of Pygmalion and Galatea’s assorted likenesses; i.e., inside the same the valley of swole, über-thicc dolls!

To that, a bare sword or sword-like body is all at once a sharpened metal bar and a two-sided proposition; i.e., the canonical sheathing in state prey versus a rebellious symbol of power and station unthinkable to those accustomed to total power on all registers: resistance, rebellion, self-determination and self-definition beyond canonical edicts. On either side of this Satanic equation, superheroes are meant to exude power as something to witness but also transfer and ritualize as a psychosexual educational device. It arbitrates as a performance, a plaything to toy with, a symbol that can assume any shape that one might pull out of a hat, in which—per the usual paradoxes and monopolies—becomes “sword-like” as a threat to state hegemons: a form of legitimacy by nature of its threat as terrifying to the elite in ways they can’t control; i.e., where terrorism is both the state and the rebel’s every action a weapon of terror (and vice versa) that challenges the usual flowing of power towards the state. Simply put, it fucks with the bourgeoisies’ fix. Everyone likes the Jester! They’re cool, kooky and probably an animal in the sack!

(artist: Santi-Ikari)

The state has countermeasures, their ability to transform going beyond shape; but the perception of value still weighs against an enemy (to workers) that is eternal, out of time and place: a fascist lord as the hauntological evocation of something that strives to conceal itself, but sticks out like a sore thumb (which moderacy is designed to conceal, like perfume on a corpse). In turn, we can recruit old symbols (crowns, scepters, weapons, bodies, weapon-like bodies, etc) to forge and argue through power’s usual paradoxes; i.e., as someone who has something to offer that tends to have value in societies from time immemorial: sex and force as coded in ways that can be rewritten, but also rewrite other things, reversing abjection through the counterfeit by evoking its vengeful ghost. On and on.

(artist: George Sellas)

This historically is spoiled by craven Judases and sell-outs aping their colonizers (re: Fanon), but also xenophobic scapegoats and superstitions that pit pro-terror against a population to control it through self-policing maneuvers of a stochastic sort; i.e., a gladiatorial, Conan-style refrain returning to a more savage time that never quite existed; e.g., Savage Land Rogue (next page, 1993), but also Weaponlord (above) and Overwatch 2’s (2021) Mad Max rip-off, Odessa Stone (the last of which we’ll talk about in Volume Three). All this variety aside, such prehistorical regressions only becomes a form of revolutionary wish fulfillment if the hero is both a wish fulfilled and granter of them in ways that challenge the paradigm; i.e., like a jinn to rub on her “lamp” and beckon orgasmic pleasure as potent, poetic, and at times, primal, but not fascist.

Fascists love to return to not only a time when things were “great,” but also when “true warriors” fought against mythological enemies: zombies, but also dinosaurs as older reptilian tyrants (as megafauna, some dinosaurs would have probably been warm-blooded, but still wouldn’t have been mammals); e.g., the Tyrannosaurus Rex a “tyrant lizard” evoked by the likes of a white cavegirl duking it out with a black, alien: the fascist “lizard person” (the quoted phrase being code for Jewish conspiracies/vampirism[12]) riding a black tyranno. It’s the usual white Indian narrative, forcing the Amazon to be both beauty and beast for white nerds, but still something with sex-positive potential:

(exhibit 34b3b2a2a1b2: Artist, left: Jim Lee recolor by spidey0318; top-middle: Claw0208; bottom-middle: Akira Toriyama; top-right: Persephone van der Waard; bottom-right: Hinomaru. Such borderline erotica are “wasteland fantasies” that, like the zombie apocalypse, anticipate colonial collapse into a savage place where white people [and those from token nations; i.e., Japan] must survive. Such power trips not only reduce women to Amazonian sex objects who are more wild [and sexually aggressive] than trad wives are allowed to be, but also are made and sold by family men capitalizing on such inventions; e.g., Toriyama, who left a note to his two children while making Chrono Trigger back in the ’90s: “Heeey! Sasuke! Kikka! Pop’s working on games like this! Hey are you guys watching? Isn’t this great?!” [source tweet: Rebecca Stone, March 7th, 2024]. It’s literally “the World’s Greatest Dad” award, self-administered by Toriyama blowing his own horn [a father being a hero figure his children will be less inclined to critique].

A similar code was left behind by a Super Metroid developer during the Draygon fight, Yasuhiko Fujii:

Before the fight with Draygon, the boss of Maridia, there’s a group of Evir enemies that do a little “dance.” Their movements actually trace out the letters of a phrase in English, “Keiko Love!” Keiko was the name of a girl I was dating at the time. I was busy with work all the time and couldn’t see her much, so at night while everyone at the office sleeping, I stole a moment and snuck that code in! [source: shmuplations].

These Amazonian survivor stories aren’t so different from Metroidvania and survival horror at large [re: Mazes and Labyrinths]. They are fun, as are their makers’ BTS shenanigans. Even so, their regressive power fantasies a) have fascist overtones to them, and b) are commonly sold to middle-class children who feel out-of-control thanks to a world that is made unstable to serve profit, per Capitalist Realism. Plenty to enjoy and critique, here!)

As Ayla and Savage Land Rogue demonstrate, Amazon habitats are far older than videogames, but have evolved into them out of older Pax Americana fantasies exported elsewhere (from America to Japan and back again); i.e., a revival of the “white jungle” populated with “big game”: a vacation-type resort for the usual anxious pearl-clutchers looking for Jane and Tarzan; i.e., to punch down at towards the dogmatic threat of a Black Planet: to ease their own inheritance anxieties and fear of a non-white revenge for empire as inherently genocidal, tokenizing colonial subjects like the Amazon to police its own group, mid-Holocaust.

As I write in Volume Zero, the poetic tradition of the Amazon is long and complicated, but also at war with itself in multiple ways:

A kind of Galatea traditionally sculpted by Pygmalion and his imitators, Amazons and their complicated pastiche embody social-sexual conflict during oppositional praxis, hence come in a variety of shapes and sizes. They are canonically war dogs of a binarized character. Most notably is the noble Athena versus the dark Medusa from the female legends of Antiquity [also, Queen Hippolyta]: the doubling of the hunter persona, a white and black wolf. Such war-boss, queen bitches canonically offer good behavior and bad behavior as our proverbial “teeth in the night” meant to serve as man’s best friend in centrist theatre [and whose true rebellion goes against the elite’s profit motive].

However, the lineage stretches backwards and forwards hauntologically through post-Renaissance revivals. For one, there’s the pre-fascist, Neo-Gothic “phallic women-in-black” such as Victoria de Loredani, and the Victorian “madwoman in the attic,” Bertha Mason; the post-Victorian, hatpin-stabbing suffragettes of the early 20th century [e.g., Leoti Baker]; the comic book/action hero treatment starting with William Marston’s bondage-themed Wonder Woman in the 1940s [or Rosie the Riveter] followed by the feral, bikini-wearing sexpots of the 1960s and 1970s [Coffy], as well Ripley and similar “female Rambos” of the 1980s [a neoliberal response to the “final girl” trope of the slasher genre]; various catsuit regressions— sexy spies, detectives, doctors, and BDSM-tinged femme fatales—in the ’90s, 2000s and 2010s; then, an increasingly queer presence regarding the rise of trans, intersex, non-binary and other forms of queer discourse online. If the 20th century constitutes the continuation of first wave, second wave and third wave feminism, then fourth wave feminism’s rise has seen a regression towards the older forms using the same language in oppositional praxis: regressive Amazonomachia and post-fascist gender trouble [the “gender critical” movement] veering backward at fascist and pre-fascist palimpsests versus subversive Amazonomachia and transgressive gender parody. It’s less a question of stolen valor and more of older groups fighting for the equality of convenience by pitting their versions of the “Amazon-as-waifu” [a promised war bride, whose more muscular variants are called “wheyfus” for supposedly being “gym maidens” that consume whey but also can dominate the chaser sissy as a result] against genderqueer variants; i.e., a “mirror match,” in fighting game parlance (source).

(artist: Matt Groening)

This “waifu paradox” is the Amazon as war bride, trapped between dominant and submissive, and where we and TERFs must each go to perform. The difference is dialectical-material function. They police what is acceptable; i.e., how far we can go. Amazon is a fetish, doll, inanimate object to occupy and play with as one might a simulacrum, an imitation, a likeness of the past as fearsome: a “knight,” which is essentially what an Amazon is, but tied to an imaginary queendom tamed by patriarchal forces, their bondage. Like a doll, it becomes something to play with; like armor/the Destroyer, something to fill in and wear/dance with, often through “combat”: play-fighting relaid through prompts, cues, and stage instructions. Think of rape play as a joke, of which the Amazon excels at; i.e., “death by Snu-Snu” (above) as something that is both silly and serious, but also anisotropic; e.g., anal sex being the victim’s “death” that woman are forced to grit their teeth and bear for men, but for which men dread as perceived retribution: when faced with someone monstrous-feminine who is clearly stronger than them, but also sexy in ways that make them want to hug and submit to Medusa. In turn, this becomes a centrist game of compromise whose cosplays can please men, but also frighten them to varying degrees of canon and camp (COD: “crushed pelvises” denoting PIV sex, not pegging as Futurama‘s [1999] own latent homophobia); i.e., in sex-positive ways that challenge profit. This is less of a balancing act, by itself, and more a choosing of one’s battles, mid-balance, to speak as a death god that is, under capitalist schemes, still shacked to men and the profit motive—if not literally then figuratively to those who feel owed their sissy-like due by their martial-to-marital, monster-girl waifus:

(artist: Cutie Pie Sensei)

Per Imperialism and Capitalism, the monomyth has an exogamous character. It yields a variety of war brides that, per nature-as-monstrous-feminine, must be conquered in foreign lands, but remain tempting and siren-like. Some are… strange, like Zeuhl was, but showed me how to appreciate things differently through forms that deviated from the norm (re: The Doom Generation, Jojo). Others were more standard, more cliché, like Jadis wooing me with Battlefield Band’s “The Devil’s Courtship” (2001): the black cavalier to my maiden-in-white. All were divided, imperfect, waiting for reunion as all workers do; i.e., to reclaim what is lost through subversive forms of monstrous-feminine, of “torture,” of power through the paradox of performance and play as a unifying force; i.e., a ceremony to hold and alter (at the altar) as needed.

Whatever ritual is expended, the aim is to not just avoid harm, but prevent it as something to instruct in ironic forms conducive to systemic release, catharsis, and delight. This involves not just illusions and games, but ploys, gambits, bluffs, etc, that serve liberation just as well. Peace-in-chains is not the objective, for it is merely genocide uninterrupted. Subversive Amazons present the state with a lack of peace to unsettle and haunt them, becoming badass in their terrified recollections of us (which make the original heroes seem horrifying by comparison[13]); e.g., as Gays Against Groomers describe us, “Gender ideology isn’t just a neo-religious cult; it is biotechnological warfare in drag, like a multi-headed hydra with claws in every corporate sector” (source tweet: May 2nd, 2024); i.e., gay Nazi DARVO. The fact that such paradoxes are tolerated in fascist circles at all implies fascists haven’t corrupted the white chateau, which—while imperial as always—is held onto by establishment politicians as outwardly moderate, but no less cruel or bloodthirsty than their vigilante brethren.

In any event, Gothic-Communist development requires intersectional solidarity to achieve (the wider, the better); i.e., targeting the Superstructure, which maintains and shapes the Base. Gothic Communism camps these twin canonical trees, supplanting them with campy doubles. This starts with influencing how people think by what they take into themselves using what we got as normally commodified by capital into alien, fetish, sexualized forms: “meat wizards” with gay (thus rebellious) potential, but also police elements that historically-materially weaponize against labor (as herbos and himbos classically do); i.e., nature-as-monstrous-feminine subjugated to serve the state. Such propositions are always loaded with danger and chance; beware those who abstain (e.g., Jedi: “a Jedi craves not such things!” Bullshit).

(artist: Eric Martin)

Per the Amazon (regardless of sex), feats of strength are present in bodies that look curvy and capable (for male bodies, this is often called “the X frame/factor” and female bodies “the hourglass”)—that seem to suggest “the lift” without moving at all—but also upend gender norms that can serve workers or the state: the commodification and liberation of the monstrous-feminine in art as a beautiful, bountiful battlefield of sex and force, “rape” and “war” as things to put into quotes during ludo-Gothic BDSM’s liminal expression (again, regardless of biology). The clues are all present and accounted for, and we’ve looked at yet-another branch of the monstrous-feminine from my childhood: Toriyama’s meat wizards and Carpenter’s Fu Manchu pastiche as doubled by all the usual Amazons. Combined with your childhood’s go-to heroes as things to rescue from capital, we have to be smarter than the past such men fostered while learning from it, making our own future out of the past(retro)-future that Capitalism aborted to serve profit in future-canceling copycats: witch cops.

Where there’s a cop, there’s a victim, thus a potential rebel—sometimes on the surface of one person/archetype. We’ll consider that through in-person forms—actors—with one example of each: Autumn Ivy as the witch cop, and Claire Max as the rebel, or at least, not the cop. Let’s wrap up a few points on praxis before broaching them (three pages).

Amazons, like all monsters, have sex-positive potential that is “nipped in the bud” by capital and its proponents. To address that, we must abort capital and build a better world through ironic variants of so-called himbos like Gohan and Cell, and herbos like Wonder Woman, Ayla and Savage Land Rogue. Except all must actualize through the Gothic as revived for workers’ benefit, not the state; i.e., the totality of Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism—its Four Gs, Six Rs, Gothic-Communist Hermeneutic Quadfecta, mode of expression, and three iconoclastic doubles of oppositional praxis—all used to raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness to the highest and widest degree.

Once Capitalist Realism starts to fade, we can start to dismantle the state and rebuild/redistribute power inside itself, but we must reclaim the Base and recultivate the Superstructure through all possible means. My emphasis is theatre and poetic expression—of starting with the Superstructure to transform heroic, monstrous-feminine violence. It is the half of capital the elite cannot control, fence and capitalize; it is what we play with using ludo-Gothic BDSM, mid-ergodic-motion, to trick our foes and their actual unironic defense of the state. Factories tend to be boring from a theatrical standpoint; herbos and himbos (and their kayfabe) less so.

The capitalist is always fascist, always singular and rigidly dogmatic, vertical, and heteronormative; i.e., as something to retreat into an imaginary past thereof. We haunt that as a parallel society’s horizontal, consensual and humanizing application using the same linguo-material devices: to foster good social-sexual attitudes that lead to post-scarcity as stable, thus able to deal with nature’s usual mood swings far better than capital can. As Bruce Lee said, “The softest thing cannot be snapped. […] Water can flow or it can crash. Be like water, friend.” This can be physical, but also symbolic in ways that are witch-like as the Amazon is; i.e., between worlds, exotic, pulled from the depths of a murky ocean’s darkest wishes as paradoxically… soft, pale, and oh-so-shapely. Its crimson, guilty pleasure mixes with Red Scare, which is where liberation must occur—mid-performance, summoning something that you can relate to, not abject!

(artist: Knut Ekwall; source: Robert Lambert Jones III’s “Mythological Beasts and Spirits: Naiad,” 2016)

In turn, we mirror the state’s bad imitations to expose their limitations and widened capacity for harm. We meet their advances in ways they cannot force. However subjugated and complete the colonization might seem, it is a cycle that capital cannot do without. They must always lose control within oscillating rhetoric; there is always a lapse in agency or judgment (such as they define these things as), which means there is always a chance to escape. We are both thetical to profit and antithetical, meaning again there is always a chance to rebel and push capital’s antithesis as something to synthesize: a unity the likes of which Indigenous cultures did not historically have; i.e., a stewardship of nature that preserves her for all peoples, animals and things: a merging of written and oral forms of communication to serve such a development as monstrous-feminine. And so on. We are the canvas and the code, the data as “corrupt,” the ghost in the shell, the fatal portrait, the doubled castle-like body and body-like castle, a parallel mise-en-abyme, a Shadow of Galatea, a spectre of Marx.

Keep all that in mind as we proceed. You have all the theory (complex and simple) and poetic means to forge your own destiny! To be your own hero in your own pro-worker propaganda narrative (a gayer Star Wars), your own himbo or herbo that hurts, not harms (the colonizer, by comparison, can never rape and kill enough; e.g., The Nightingale, 2018)! This starts with learning from the past as something others have played with already. This includes me looking at my past self (this book was written backwards), and said self looking at older forms revived from older forms, on and on. I’ve played with and learned from so many himbos and herbos, including Marston’s, Toriyama’s, Lucas’ and Cameron’s. Male, female, or somewhere in between, all left something heroic behind that yielded pro-worker allegories. So will I, when the time comes.

For that, whenever I die, do not mourn my passing for I am with you, and together we can challenge the state doubling us; i.e., in all the usual kayfabe, monomyth battles of will staring down the Medusa’s Pygmalion-esque double. Except our Song of Infinity isn’t played to send the moon back to a position where it can fall again (re: Majora’s Mask, 2000), nor one where the proverbial conch shatters, William-Golding-style, and demands that force be relied on to make things right in a centrist manner (Tapion’s flute, above), but a total reversal of the counterfeit’s process of abjection—of weaponizing the Aegis to anisotropically send the state’s doom back to them: images of their own dragon sickness, Darkening and inevitable death felt on the surface/inside thresholds of liminal expression the likes of which Amazons and knights routinely perfect; i.e., personas turning the tables through a shared aesthetic of power and death the state will try to police through workers more marginalized to less. From the first and second waves, feminism and queer rights have always historically had a white-to-token fascist element that haunts the sex positivity and intersectionality of the third and fourth. The Amazon is no less yoked by older Judases, non-binary people just as capable of doing it (re: Zeuhl and Autumn Ivy) as any other marginalized sector.

Such likenesses might seem haunted by the same foregone conclusion: class and culture betrayal spelling the herbo or himbo’s orc-like assimilation and defeat; i.e., the yoking of the Amazon regardless of sex (male, intersex, or female) by capital’s heteronormative order—as something to eat, play at, and pretend in ways that police rebellious forms. To this, the Spartans were pre-fascist nutjobs (Unknown 5’s “How Sparta Manufactured Super-Soldiers – The Spartan Agoge,” 2023), meaning slavers in ways that fascists dreamed about, and which post-fascists (fascists-in-disguise) ape behind various veneers more disingenuous still; i.e., those whose imaginary past becomes something to regress into (re: “fash brain”). Beyond your usual lost boys looking for mother as a warrior maiden, tokenization remains a problem insofar as these men become low-hanging fruit to pick, pick, pick at the cost of good praxis.

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

As such, there’s the parasocial, predatory scheme of female sex workers more interested in milking cis-het men for money and punching down against would-be comrades than doing anything revolutionary (with false rebellion, again, being a fascist tactic); i.e., whoring the streets of Omelas, in uniform, versus walking away from Omelas (Pax Americana/the profit motive) altogether. I’ve crossed paths with such persons before, which brings us to Autumn Ivy as the picture-perfect class traitor dressed in herbo attire: a dumb-looking, thumper meathead deliberately siding with and working for the Man; i.e., another callous stripper aping Hippolyta to play the white Indian, punching down at other oppressed groups. Let’s interrogate the taboos and values of that aesthetic in-the-flesh, its poetry both in-motion and frozen in time. As we do, remember that capital loves plausible deniability and DARVO.

By extension, so do TERFs (cis or not) playing pick and choose, throwing their own Halloween-grade pity party with its own kernel of truth, mid-witch-hunt. Capitalist tokens find the same sweet spot, and speak out of both sides of their mouth, playing both sides having learned from the best to do so while acting more oppressed than they actually are and looking for revenge (as cops always do). Except they’re not Yojimbo, they’re sell-out white folk with an element of oppression turning coat whenever it suits them and they really need to check their privilege, wealth and status; it’s called “poisoning the well” and they (unlike actual Jewish victims) do it a lot: Jewish cops (and other such marginalized groups), witch cops, Amazon cops.

Whatever the sell-out, it’s all cut from the same hypocritical tree, fashioning into false masks of oppression given an air of reality by ostensibly recruiting from the colony streets (assimilation overlaps with generational tokenism: “bury your gays” and “kill the Indian, save the man” merging during class war as a cultural gauntlet of good and bad actors sharing the stage). Unbridled, combative critiques of the concentric veneers of persecution (and self-righteous police violence and ruthless opportunism) is simply required at this stage, but you gotta learn to a) not only not think with your dick (or taco), but b) kill your darlings presenting themselves as superhero cops, herbo or otherwise!

So by all means, beat that dead horse in matters of argument/discourse, which is what representation is/monsters are! Seriously, if someone’s complicit in genocide/playing both sides—from Mark Hamill to Joe Biden to Autumn Ivy—then let the fuckers have it! In a poetic sense, trash their funerals, spray paint their effigies, crash their weddings, to never know a moment’s peace! “Peace” is a white (wo)man’s word; liberation is ours. If they have the means to say something but don’t—not only keep mum, but have the temerity to try play the victim and the cop? Well, hit ’em with both barrels (again, as a matter of argument, of poetics, of monstrous debate and critique), again, again, and again! Let “Conan” contemplate that on the Tree of Woe! “Port to starboard, full broadsides! No prisoners! Make ’em walk the plank!” All’s fair in Fair Use, babes; i.e., in purposes of education, parody and critique, this is my pirate vessel and I don’t suffer fools or fakes!

(artist: Milo Manara)

I’d say I learned from the best, but my exes never ever could handle what they dished out. They didn’t fight fair, either. They took and they took, dominating me but getting the fuck out the moment I pushed back. So did Autumn, truth be told (expensive, but unable to handle a modicum of criticism with any degree of empathy or grace). To you bitches, this is my spice to give back: an object lesson in my usual, pull-no-punches polemic! I’ve been around people my whole life who were like addicts towards me as someone to punch, to use like the party favor or idiot (the twink). And in the past, I put up with it, covered for my own abusers by bailing them out! In any event, I’m not about to sit by and watch some diva who spurned me after my uncle died and Cuwu left me go on to act like they’re God’s gift to sex work. Like, fuck that noise! Fuck it stone dead!

What’s gotten under my theatre nerd’s skin, pray tell? Remember that Gothic Communism is queer-anarchist. So while the state very much is the enemy we need to check, so are cops and castles in disguise as GNC rebels, pirates, rockstars. No one likes a hypocrite flying a false flag. To that, function determines function; i.e., as a flow of power towards workers or the state. For all someone appears as powerful or oppressed, then, they are only as legitimate for rebellion insofar as they actually challenge the state. If they’re so closeted or self-serving that one muttering of the word “sex work” instantly turns them into a colossal diva, then they’re probably not as heroic as they’re posturing.

Furthermore, whatever the form the girl boss takes, one fact remains constant: “Scratch a moderate and a TERF bleeds (which is what trans misogyny is, lovelies); scratch a TERF and a predator bleeds (which is what cops are: liars, cheats, steals, abusers obsessed with their own image as “heroic,” “rebellious”). Queerness is classically closeted to a matter of degree—we are the domain of beards and lavender weddings, after all! Except while predation and pink-wash opportunism takes many forms, this isn’t a statement of Autumn’s actions as something to precisely qualify or prove, but critique from one theatre fag to another. They’re a sex worker and dom, but a bad one. Bitch don’t represent me, and they don’t monopolize Amazons! In my professional opinion and as someone who’s dealt with them as a client, they suck! Know your enemy but also your trade; I’m on them like a nun in a cucumber field!

A note about Autumn Ivy: They are a public figure who markets an image of themselves as “Amazonian,” which I am critiquing as having run-ins/worked with them in the past; as such, they’re a big enby and should be able to handle whatever criticism I throw at them, especially since their abuse of me in the past is true—is something I stand by and can back up. That being said… this isn’t me condoning violence or calls for violence against them. Unless they accelerate their trans misogyny (or any other fascist tendencies) in public—i.e., use their platform to spread active hate, Nazi-style—kindly leave them alone to figure things out on their own. —Perse

To that, Autumn is our resident witch cop playing the “jungle bunny” but functioning as the token (enby) colonizer/fascist strongwoman enby wearing the clothes of a white Indian (the aesthetics of oppression/rebellion): an ostensibly Texan (or similar state) herbo minus the praxial irony or charity of the fictional examples we’ve already examined, and far more enterprising as the usual sort of person who chased Indigenous peoples out of the territories before ratifying them as “secure” for white families on the Oregon Trail to move in. Now that GNC people are the targets of state violence and bad legislation all along the Bible Belt, I really have to wonder how much Autumn’s comic-book, T&A gym-rat fantasies will do anything other than line their own pockets before swanning charity and getting the hell outta Dodge (maybe they do things that further the Cause, but given their self-centered, one-foot-in-the-closet, one-foot-out-the-door approach to sex work, I seriously doubt it. Feel free to prove me wrong anytime, queen). Like Luc Besson’s Nikita, their Pygmalion fantasy is assimilative.

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

Except, unlike white straight people—e.g., Turkey Tom (D’Angelo Wallace’s “I’m Not Sorry,” 2020)—who feel surrounded by and afraid of all things alien while playing the victim/detective capitalizing on said dogma, token fash will generally internalize bigotry/self-hatred and triangulate against members of their own oppressed kind (though fascists will punch other oppressors); i.e., divide and conquer. They take the appearance of themselves as “oppressed” (which may even have some truth to it) and join the state in decay as their hill to die on; i.e., Uncle Toms on the plantation; e.g., Low Tier God (Don Ozzy’s “The Tragic Downfall of Low Tier God,” 2024). The same idea applies to enbies like Autumn and trans women like Natalie Wynn, etc. Moderacy is just another mask they wear to conceal the decay underneath during a disingenuous waiting game (which again, applies to straight white boys acting “reformed” in bad faith while using codewords/dogwhistles like “degenerate” when denigrating and infiltrating marginalized groups; re: Turkey Tom’s extensive “The Degenerates” series muckraking in the name of “edutainment”: putting up a “please don’t attack these groups” disclaimer while treating them as a degenerate monolith to hawk to his vindictive audience known for attacking minorities).

(artist: Bite Bunny)

On either side of the equation, monsters embody disordered thinking (madness) and identity (struggle) as a result of capital doing what capital does; e.g., BPD as something to expose and comment on (vis-à-vis, Bite Bunny, above) but also something I’ve known in past people (Cuwu) and present company as part of a larger dialectic (of the alien); i.e., as confusing us-versus-them by virtue of workers historically pitted against each other through icons revived for capital and labor over and over across space-time. Gothic Communism is based on DBT as poison-made-the-cure: “the dose makes the poison.” As such, there are good monsters and bad, and good monsters putting “bad” in quotes and vice versa (dialectical-material scrutiny tends to avoid moral judgements, but I digress). They portend to collapse and relapse, remission and escape, but the entire rodeo is overshadowed by the state being the biggest pig at the trough. It’s a cynic’s feast, a festival of servants backstabbing perceived runts in service to the kings of Capitalism-as-undead: vampires, zombies, werewolves, whatever.

Through capital, monsters are Elvis and his addiction as something to baby/capitalize on for long as possible; i.e., until the liability can be replaced with a fresh copy of itself, generally from the same vault of abused child stars. It’s a complicated smuggling route we can weaponize while being a victim of it: reoffenders and recidivism, “break a leg” less a quaint theatre superstition and more reifying our own trauma as something to witness, mid-crisis, mid-disintegration, onstage:

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Victims of capital are certifiable and fabulous, put together and falling apart. It’s like watching a toy fairy castle—already held together with duct tape—crash slowly and spectacularly into a rock candy mountain: to shatter into a million pieces, then reassemble like the T-one-fucking-thousand towards tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow… Rehabilitation is rock bottom for those of us rehumanizing ourselves (and our rocky-candy bottoms) already broken; i.e., into a shattered gumball machine spilling its sugary orbs everywhere. As such, we break like little, multi-colored triangles—a skittering of so many edible “billiard balls” across the tiles; i.e., as capital always does to sex workers, sexualizing everything as “monstrous” in all directions among the broken shards of glass (from Volume Zero/”What I Won’t Exhibit”): “Porn under Capitalism is always a liminal proposition, one where canon conflates gore, rape, and general harm with supposed acts of love.”

To that, porn is incredibly liminal, thus able to be camped and canonized within the Gothic to varying degrees of blindness and perceptiveness; e.g., Friday the 13th‘s cycling recursive collage of psychosexual, patently Freudian/unironically violent (re: knife dick) wish fulfillment: a stage of dated white-people Elizabethan/Jacobean theatre clichés concerned with more present (and heteronormative) abjections redoubled through capitalist veins of expression. These, in turn, have been recycled from Radcliffe to Scooby-Doo-style moral panics into what has become a neoliberal loop of fatal nostalgia: a never-quite-was time of instability and surveillance when the black castle (and the Reaper) come a-calling. The land darkens, occupied with reinventions of the man-in-black, the banditti as retroactively coded with racial animus and other colonial hazards during fresh nightmares of class anxiety/critique (of vampiric “old money”) invoking the dialectic of shelter (re: Jameson) versus that of the alien (re: me). Like Shakespeare, it’s often bloody and crude, but also surgical and necromantically poetic the way only gay theatre nerds can be!

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

True-to-form, this well-traveled, shamelessly trashy track manifests in varying degrees of irony or straightforward dogma regarding sex and force, death/rape anxieties as dimorphized, which the queer will always have to camp inside of itself as the main attraction: stuck next to Jason Voorhees, Freddy Kruger and Michael Myers (and other infantilized slashers with Germanic surnames, zero game and endless mommy-and-daddy issues); i.e., the giant, Frankensteinian, incel-grade pre-fascist, to fascist, to post-fascist passing the Oedipal curse along through sheer size difference and knife-play menace. Except we’re just as often the twinkish damsel or helpless slut (above) holding but also becoming the Radcliffean miniature, paralyzing the Destroyer as yet-another-moon to push up like Atlas, to bury alive like [insert Gothic heroine, here]. But such things always come back because capital decays and regenerates, a fascist revenant. Our struggle for liberation oscillates within the same space, its surfaces and scapegoat simulacra—classically a Neo-Gothic (white) fantasy reserved for cheap theatre that we, per ahegao-style calculated risk, can use to face our own demons’ disordered thinking; i.e., as stemming from the usual abject historical-material loop as cycling between (wo)man vs nature in some shape or form.

To this, Rogue’s Savage Land (as discussed earlier) extends to all manner of locales (and their wildlife, human or otherwise) playing an important role in the process of abjection; i.e., one that commonly occurs between the rural and the urban as alienated and fearful towards each other—from Radcliffe’s scary rustics, to the Irish Big-House drama of the fearsome Catholics in a post-Reformation world, to Sam Raimi’s evil cabins in the forest as ripped off from Matthew Lewis’ bandit house (several centuries earlier), to The Hateful Eight or Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (2015 and 2010). In short, the Amazon always relegates to wherever a given heroine finds herself located but also pitted against all manner of creepy-crawly or Jack-London-style, tooth-and-claw things: alienated from her as someone having a foot in each world. She’s not a knight (white or black), thus is always illegitimate, but nevertheless remains canonized in the copagandistic scheme. She’s the stranger and the savior—a “white Indian,” meaning the Pioneer wife-in-disguise, her Winchester Repeater exchanged for a flint spear and the prairie natives transformed into lizard people/dinosaurs or sabretooth tigers! As Metallica sings in “Of Wolf and Man” (1991): “Back to the meaning of life!”

(artist: Ronin Dude)

Regressive or subversive, the Amazon is always the center of attention; i.e., the rape fantasy voyeuristically framed between certain death and the paradox of performance treating her as a meal and maker of meals (out of the animalistic predators pegging her for a “free lunch”): the babe in the wilderness triumphing over “rape” abjected onto evil cartoon wolves, T-Rexes and other such outrageous codes exhibiting the damsel-in-distress as stripped down to her undies (or projections of those on the surface of more modest clothes) and threatened by something jungle-like all around her. Even when these things are not onscreen, she is always threatened by them as lurking nearby—i.e., by almost-certain penetration in ways that cavemen generally aren’t forced to suffer (not straight cis-het ones, anyways): vaginal, oral and anal. It’s the hauntology of rape as a modern business pushed into imaginary dated spheres. In canonical terms, any monstrous-feminine veneer of strength is a façade behind which ghosts of the counterfeit lurk: exploitation and rape through a Cartesian paradigm preying on nature. Both are essentialized as something to reify and survive no matter where you go.

Within that penetrated membrane, rape is a constant threat, but also “rape” in quotes. Except, the monster-fucking rape fantasy as a complicated, often-privileged one depending on who the target of violence is, and who’s the othered object of fear. For instance, white women are coded to classically fear anything that isn’t white, but also fear and submit to their husbands as violent and seeking Neo-Gothic fantasies that put the “violence” in quotes; re: Radcliffe’s demon lover as a historically exploitative fantasy that weaponized lived white cis-het female abuse to uphold the status quo per the usual Gothic readership: white women and their inherited psychosexual (and profoundly racist) dysfunctions triangulating against other groups. Rape fantasies are perfectly fine, even cathartic, provided a colonial effect is avoided.

Except the traditional Gothic readership still echoes Ann Radcliffe’s own half-real “true crime” hauntology getting her jollies at the cost of other exploited groups; re: “pick me” behavior tied to the profit motive while prioritizing and triangulating white cis women against other groups: as the usual victims, gatekeepers, girl bosses of said groups while fetishizing members of the colonizer group as torture-porn princes (a form of elevation, defending and worshipping the rapist/antagonizing the person of color as a de facto sex slave). It’s unironic bondage dressed up as “activism” and “play.” As such monster-fucking being hot/appealing in a sex-positive rape play/consent-non-consent sense because its appreciative peril/irony illustrates consent in Gothic counterculture (a topic for Volume Three) as often intimidating but nevertheless consensual during calculated risk—e.g., “I’d let a Balrog fuck me”—not submission to the usual, white-penned, settler-colonial demon lover tropes!

As such, the Gothic chronotope is a place for the woman (or anyone coded as “woman”) to suffer endlessly inside. It reliably extends the castle (or manor) to the castle grounds as increasingly prehistoric, but also ahistoric inside a monstrous-feminine Gothic imagination: the out-of-doors invading the imperial structure and vice versa; e.g., Faulkner’s cartographic refrain, Yoknapatawpha County, or Lovecraft’s haunted Providence-in-decay pushing synchronistically onto Tolkien’s Middle-earth, The Twilight Zone (1959), wherever Tales from the Crypt (1989) finds itself, etc. It’s an operatic rape space that scared white people deliberately populate with various bogey people; i.e., as scapegoats to stake, but also hunt the unfaithful depicted per the Gothic readership’s usual bunch: middle-class, naughty-and-curious white girls threatened by a faux “Transylvania” with varying degrees of irony and dogma.

A note about non-white tokenism: Afrocentrism is an issue of militant tokenism, too; i.e., slaves/underclass divided against other slaves inside America as a concentric prison colony through divide-and-conquer rhetoric; e.g. American blackness rape ranking Indigenous black culture in other counties facing white oppression through black skin, white masks as a globalized form of such division:

Dear the US, British Australia enforced a decades-long regime of raping Black women & stealing their babies to raise “white” in order to erase Blackness & Indigeneity from the continent Please stop acting like it worked (source tweet, Strewth: May 12, 2024).

Note: I’m currently looking for Indigenous and person-of-color models. If anyone is interested, click here to refer to the project details. —Perse, 5/14/2024

We’ll discuss afrocentrism/shadism more in Volume Three, but Volume Zero has discussed how the dark figure has classically been fetishized non-white since before the Enlightenment

(artist: Ary Sheffer)

Before the Enlightenment, Late Medieval stories and media from the Gothic/Renaissance period featured less persons of color because access to actual persons with dark or non-white skin was historically less common, thus more exotic (though it did happen; a pure-white medieval period is a fascist myth); as such, the pre-fascist destroyer persona was coded as black in relation to the “non-European” as Jewish, Germanic, or the broader “Eastern” (white-skinned: from Italy to Romania to Russia; non-white groups: China, the Middle East and Africa). Until the Enlightenment period began and started to orchestrate widespread settler colonialism (and modern nation-state formation), race-based slavery largely didn’t exist; so the biases were less about skin color and more about general ethnicity and religion; e.g., evil Italian counts, but also Jewish people as go-to scapegoats for the Romans and the Christians. Then and now, these devils were seen as threats to the heteronormative order of things; i.e., returning to nature, to hell and chaos. As such, the devil became something that actively corrupts the youth and women as always running off with them into the night (source).

has since gone onto gain a racialized character through Cartesian rhetoric turning minorities against one another through porn: as a dogmatic and predatory industry that must be reclaimed inside of itself; i.e., contending with a fetishized, often stigma-animalized Gothic dialog that generally has an assimilative character extending into fiction and politics at large as half-real (from Volume One):

(exhibit 10c4: Artist, top-left: Margo Draws; top-middle and top- and bottom-right: Oxcoxa; bottom-left, source tweet: Raw Porn Moments, 2023.)

Taarna runs the risk of chopping off workers’ heads who are normally presented as orcs/zombies, minus the threat i.e., labor movements and/or people of color being called “terrorists” by the state—but it’s arguably a step in the right direction provided we camp Tolkien more than Heavy Metal [1981] did.

More to the point, Taarna isn’t so far gone that you can’t reclaim her from total assimilation and decay [or demonic animalization; i.e., Tolkien’s spiders existing purely within female “chaotic evil” forms of nature as something to dominate by pure-white men upholding the profit motive within Capitalist Realism]. These kinds of Amazonian double standards and intersectional biases elide and roil on the surface of the female body as a) entirely mysterious to Tolkien, and b) a complicated billboard he never bothered with in his own stories: the variable undeath of a white-skinned Medusa as killed by men contrasted against the black-skinned Medusa as killed by men and women, both of them [and orcs] fetishized differently within the same punitive structure.

The genuine struggle—to holistically express body positivity during liberation as an ongoing event—becomes caught up in morphological double standards; i.e., the white-skinned “dark queen” either marketed as “black”—i.e., “PAWG” [“phat ass white girl,” exhibit 32b/41b] as a “Goth” collision that elides black clothing with the “black” body as having white skin: the “big [titty/booty] Goth GF”—or kept skinny to be drawn the way that “most bodies are” [code for Vitruvian enforcement, Oxcoxa]. Meanwhile, black female bodies that happen to be skinny and fairer skinned [shadism] are inevitably perceived as “white” [as if most of them “chose” how they were born]: similar to queerness, skin color synonymizes with body size as a false choice, which complicates fat acceptance and liberation in the eyes of those persons seeking representation as something to escape the shared, internalized shame of white/black female bodies as queer [and male bodies in relation to them, the two hailing from the same savage, imaginary place].

 

(artist: Jazminskyyy)

In turn, the trend of the Amazon or Medusa as a powerful warrior queen or Sapphic monarch can be taken into potentially exploitative spheres, wherein the “Bowsette” crown [also Oxcoxa] famously fetishizes the white girl with an “atypical” [nonwhite] princess body to be desirable for the pandered-to male fans; but also articulates the descriptive sexuality of white or non-white AFABs within Nintendo’s fandom—i.e., those who are simply born with bodies outside the settler-colonial standard, and who want to be celebrated for it via a class metaphor of power and status: the girly crown, suspiciously pink [re: Tirrrb’s “The Yassification Of Masculinity“] but tinged with sexy black “corruption” as a non-harmful aesthetic/function. Within this larger dialectic, a viral trend emerges using the same imagery operating at cross purposes, resulting in various amounts of nuance or lack thereof, as well as [un]irony and cultural appropriation/appreciation when the “Yass, Queen!” crown is worn.

To this, Tolkien becomes a funny hypothetical begging “what if?” in a larger conversation the original never bothered with. When we entertain ghosts of his work through Amazonomachia speaking to a lived experience he deliberately distanced himself from, we play with, thus learn from these misfit toys. Doing so, we uncover the potential for class warriors and traitors emerging in arbitration relative to the public’s use of a largely textual/oral tradition to support popular sentiment for or against the status quo: to let one or two minorities rule in a problematic light like Tolkien’s orcs and dwarves did, or for there to be no minorities and for everyone to be kings, queens and intersex/non-binary monarchs in a post-scarcity world Tolkien [thanks to Capitalist Realism] literally couldn’t imagine (source).

(artist: Nyx)

The point with the above quote is that such things reify and continue within popular culture as something to interrogate through those who consume, creation or patron new Cartesian iterations preying on nature-as-monstrous-feminine. You want to critique power? You must go where it is. As a status/sex symbol, Medusa is often “too big” as white or black bodies, hair and cosmetics, which each come with its own double standards per type that—through tokenization at large—erupt in frustrating forms of assimilation, marginalized in-fighting and fetishization. In turn, iconoclastic forms are thicc fire starters that make trouble using what they got: their sizeable, shapely weight as something to throw around. For further examples, Volume One explores this in the Gothic as pornographic per body types and parts—so-called “PAWGs,” “BBCs,” and “BBWs”—but also regarding canonical fiction as something gradually critiqued in a postcolonial sense that is not without fresh struggles: Jane Eyre to Wide Sargasso Sea to modern people of color all around the world. The only way forward is through intersectional solidarity! —Perse

It’s canonically a cautionary space of institutionalized moral panic, one whose almost-holy dogma regards Medusa or Dracula as both the predatory serial killer from beyond—the freak of nature hailing from a fearsome imaginary past—but also crude elements of sodomy and witchcraft as moral lessons delivered in medieval-style parables: what good little girls are expected avoid (or else) on the same confused surface; i.e., something whose curiosity is capitalized on to uphold the status quo with. As such, the Nazi and Communist spectres remain stuck on the same mirror said girl sees herself on, all parties redoubled in a fearsome, concentric echo. It’s not just a cave of darkness, as Plato would have it, but—per Borges—is a mirror cave trapping the hero in an endless Promethean curse: Aguirre’s infernal concentric pattern haunting the very monomyths Disney has utterly milked dry.

Again, this goes beyond buildings as owned by humanoid tyrants, extending to nature-as-monstrous-feminine (abject) forcing its way into the Imperial Core: a female boss animal or a tyrant lizard chasing down a white, Vitruvian girl even when she isn’t wearing a skimpy fur bikini (so-called “women’s clothes” are generally designed by men to sexualize woman in a dimorphic heteronormative scheme). The very word “bikini” was appropriated from the Bikini Islands and, in turn, has shifted into a commercialized kaiju-style fiction: Gojira (1954) originally critiquing American Imperialism only to be recuperated/gentrified into yet-another-spectacle to cash in on. They do so similar to King Kong (1933) and other captive fantasies sexualizing spaces/occupants outside the Imperial Core as rapacious and black; i.e., vengeful in ways that curiously target white women with rape: through American-to-Japanese neoliberalism as a cottage-grade content mill through how-to-draw-manga and comic book instruction manuals routinely passing off the usual stories as incredibly pulpy and formulaic. Canon fetishizes the statuesque as often Amazonian/pin-up. It’s both completely absurd, but also lucrative; i.e., abusing those white/tokenized folk afraid of capital’s inevitable collapse and the gators coming home to roost!

Regardless of where they originally hail from, such stories classically feature white (or token) women, mid-peril, inside a collapsing colonial home invaded by nature (and its abject reproductive methods) challenging the nuclear family model; e.g., 2019’s Crawl and the monster literally being a hurricane (classically gendered as female) and gators/the wilderness as something to rescue whitey from, but also confuse the two: who’s the swamp kitten, in this scenario? The savage? Whatever the creature being featured, the fiction is neoconservative, hence weaponizes white women as prey animals against nature-as-black, as monstrous-feminine, as invasive, displaced, and hostile to a false “native” human ordering of things; i.e., said girlies surviving cartoon, escalating and superhuman trials-of-Job whose comical mega-damage occurs inside the colonial home rejecting them. The house floods, grows teeth, chews said family up and spits them out; i.e., the imperial formula as something to decay and survive through the Gothic princess as final-girl-turned-presumed-broodmare: the bridling of the Amazon, post-adventure.

Maybe Jameson’s right in that it’s a tad boring and tired, but the old fart still doesn’t account for ironic forms that inject some much-needed fun (and cum) into the mix: weird iconoclastic nerds subverting the paradigm, however exhausted, into something far sluttier and potent in favor of all workers and nature versus canonical (Cartesian) Gothic apologia! The two exist side-by-side in the same mode of consumption; i.e., as something for people like myself and Cuwu to camp in our own homebrew, DYI porn!

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Notably the larger mode becomes something that attracts weird to weird, Cuwu drawn to my drawing of them being hunted, and the two of us hooking up (for a time, left) to make much more art! It helped them face their own survived trauma, and me overcome my trans-woman’s hate of my girl cock—by shoving it repeatedly into Cuwu’s wet-but-thirsty cunt! Before then, I had drawn Cuwu in orange socks (several images back: a colorful homage to Debra Louise Jackson) being stalked by Jason Voorhees; they got horny by the idea—and from our talks about all manner of things, which put them at ease, “scaring” the panties off them. It was incredibly sexually charged before we met, and only led to a lot of fun, kinky experiments (sleep sex, for example) afterwards. I met different sides of them sharing the same body and face—the fuck-puppy high and disassociating and asking for sex, and the little dragon in them taking me for all I was worth: all looking at me with those hazel gold-rimmed eyes. And I don’t regret a single second of it, even as funerary moments like these sometimes feel like I’m digging “Cuwu” up and burying them again. “Here’s to looking at you, kid!”

(source: Fandom)

Amazons or not, the monstrous-feminine repeats in ways we need to utilize as a palliative-Numinous medicine, but also ludo-Gothic BDSM as good praxis. Pastiche is remediated praxis. Repetition is important, then, because fascists (always in disguise—cryptofascists) want us to forget hypocritical things about them; i.e., class betrayals that happened often as briefly as several years ago. To build on Asprey’s paradox of terror, we need to consider the legitimate proletarian function such theatrical devices entertain; i.e., as a vital means of repeating refrains useful to Gothic Communism: to scare children, thus apprise them of actual threats; e.g., Duncan Regehr wonderfully camping the Nazi by playing the fash-coded Dracula (above): exposing those that lurk on the surface of/within costumes and masks worn  on opposite ends of a given iteration of the same-old village scapegoat conversations. As such, this Halloween-style rhetoric works as a collective and warring form of bad theatre (re: “a tale told by an idiot”). Gothic Communists use it during revolutionary cryptonymy—to warn others of fascists serving capital by attacking us behind the mask; i.e., as something to make theirs slip. By comparison, fascists will monopolize terror through complicit cryptonymy—as something to perform, hogging all theatrical devices for themselves and themselves alone; i.e., to an absurd degree as the logical conclusion of exposing their usual obscurantism; e.g., “woke fascism” (The Kavernacle’s “The Rise of WOKE Fascism,” 2024): denude and expose us to attack and kill, ridding the state of another enemy.

To survive, we must put on the mask and dance with other people wearing masks who may or may not want to kill us in service to the bourgeoisie. It’s not about it making “perfect” sense, but subversive workers challenging fascism and those serving its fash-brain regressions as a clever (and ruthless) means for our enemies to hide and still be able to prey on state victims for the state (which we want to stop); i.e., as the usual false-rebel watchdogs of capital acting the monstrous badass and victim simultaneously while spreading Imperialism behind a false flag—in bad faith, bad education, bad acting and bad play. Whatever the venue, they’re craven, sneaky bullies poisoning the well—witch hunters waiting for the next moral panic to put on their spook hats and play victim/cop in equal measure.

Fascists are cutthroat, false impostors. It’s always an opportunity for them: to make money and whip their followers into a lucrative frenzy while punching down as a means of squeezing the usual underclass more and more. They make the persecution gold rush and sell the shovels to dig our graves, so we must expose that ghoulish Capitalism with our own shovels and caskets’ dialectic of the alien: the undertakers of their cruel stupidity turning them upside down, shaking them down. We take what they normally abuse and, per the usual give-and-take of any exchange, weaponize it against them: exposing the killer hiding in plain sight as a pillar of the community (e.g., Salt Baker from Cuphead, below; also, from Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” to Joe Dante’s The ‘Burbs or Wes Craven’s The People under the Stairs, 1991).

Per Volume Zero, fascists will predictably respond with deception and violence; i.e., acting “oppressed” when we “break” (critique/revolutionize) their canonical masks and monstrous toys (all heroes are monsters). As such, weird canonical nerds will respond with Man Box/”prison sex” behaviors tied to the profit motive: open aggression, condescension, reactionary indignation and DARVO. This applies to film critics, speedrunners, cosplayers, and basically any form of content/media you could think of/up regarding consumption, creation or privatization. From straight white guys to queer TERFs, canon defends itself in decay versus iconoclasm as a rebellious means of giving the capitalist game away (in other words, we’re gay Dracula being staked by Van Helsing for breaking centrist icons of so-called “balance”; i.e., peace, law and order, etc): defend the nuclear family mode defend the nuclear[13a] family model by indoctrinating women and children through a forced reproductive order weaponizing family as a fascist spear to plunge shamelessly into genderqueer (other otherwise outsider) forces. Never let them forget by always reminding them by antagonizing them; i.e., segregation is no defense, so fuck with them and guard yourself against reprisals.

Nazis defend Nazis, and Nazis (token or not) defend capital. Listen to the stink they pitch and expose them as you do—with your Aegis! They won’t be able to resist tone-policing or otherwise attacking Medusa out in the open, but won’t be able to harm you if you flash behind buffers (which the Internet provides, sex work being so taboo and commercialized that it becomes hard for fascists [or sex workers] to talk about at all because bare-and-exposed forms aren’t “ad friendly” but, for us, become a place to congregate and confer); e.g., Fired Up Stilettos, below, fighting for the decriminalization of sex work (sloganizing “stripping doesn’t equal consent” and “tip me” through them using their bodies to advertise inclusive graffiti/billboard activism); i.e., actual guerrillas out-maneuvering the clumsy imperial pig playing “guerilla” themselves.

(artist: Fired Up Stilettos)

The latter always colonize from a position of luxury that alienates them from actually being hunted by state forces; we will always be more used to it, more nimble and quick on home turf as something to take back from these lying brutes. They’re about as inventive as Mr. Owl biting to the center of a Tootsie Roll pop after three licks. Per Umberto Eco, there’s a variety of modular aspects to fascists, but first and foremost, they’re anti-intellectual and prone to play with dead metaphors, or metaphors to make dead; i.e., to fashion and wear like hollowed-out masks of their victims (monsters being symbols of persecution and persecutor) they them use to blend in and abuse us; we, in turn, play dumb/dead, freezing them and feeding accordingly or shifting shape and exchanging forbidden knowledge (the core functions of undead and demonic egregores/Gothic poetics) to contend with them (and the state) hunting us (e.g., Jordan Peele’s animal metaphors in Get Out [2015] and his other works: fascists body snatching black people to get close to them as a popular game to hunt within capital by the usual capitalist parasites whitewashing Beaver and the Cleaver clan; i.e., including parodies; e.g., Malcom in the Middle, 2000).

They also posture as representatives thereof. It’s real “pick me” behavior, race traitor, class and cultural betrayal overlapping. Tokenization overlaps among scarcity as criminogenic; i.e., a pauper’s sport where “there can only be one,” sloganized into fatal, effacing nostalgia (the beginning and the end of time, erasing anything before white American history and treating after the ’80s as begot from the same immutable nucleus) vis-à-vis Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” (1982) into Japanese neoliberal nation pastiche per Street Fighter (1987) and fighting games fighting on the usual class/cultural struggles. This sell-out’s hierarchy extends across all marginalized groups, treating black men as race horses/thoroughbreds and gladiators, to butch lesbians and other monstrous-feminine brands tied to a “better time” under capitalist regressions to a free market; e.g., Survivor’s “hey, sailor!” matelotage (that gay little beret) versus the Village’s People’s “YMCA” (1978) having its own cultural appropriation (the Native American chief costume) through schlocky gay pastiche/peak disco and fetish camp. Like with feminism, the Gothic, punk, sex work, etc, such things gentrify and then decay/straighten under capital (e.g., The Correspondent’s “What’s Happened to Soho?” 2011: “Where will all the reprobates go?”), aping Poe’s most famous story and arguably Hawthorne’s: families are always rising and falling in America! For us fags, Halloween isn’t a place to spend dough and punch down, though, but punch up and camp the Straights (not all disco is in disguise)!

Such dogma is hermeneutic; e.g., through a canonical lens, Mike Tyson isn’t kid dynamite exploited by a predatory white system (stolen culture/generations and diasporic culture death) from Gus D’Amato and Don King, but the one black guy who “made it,” became champ, had his own videogame character, etc. Except Mike Tyson’s likeness became something to privatize by Japanese executives into infinity as something to likewise embody by token grifters all across the planet: M. Bison, or “Boxer.” Due to localization in the neoliberal deck, Capcom swapped names for him and the other two archetypes, “Claw” and “Dictator.” Claw became Vega instead of Balrog (a mutation of Zorro as a slasher preying on beautiful women), and Dictator became M. Bison instead of Vega (a fash version of Superman-meets-Francisco-Franco, marrying the real-world dictator with Yasunori Kato[14a] into a bizarre neoliberal hybrid). The same kayfabe BDSM could be seem in other fighting series demonizing BDSM in an abject theatrical sense; e.g., Voldo from the Soul Caliber franchise demonizing (and capitalizing on) the strict BDSM aesthetic like Giger’s xenomorph did or Clive Barker’s cenobites.

No matter how tired or aged the performers, the show must go on. In other words, it’s the usual pyramid-shaped, circus-grade, Red-Scare clichés fostering American exceptionalism—with the money flowing up through the usual assistants and updating of East-meets-West Orientalism: from Bruce Lee vs Chuck Norris to Daniel-san vs Johnny Lawrence onto Ryu vs Ken Masters (from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s) onto The Karate Kid 2018 remake as something we must critique (Persephone van der Waard’s “Class Warfare – Classism, Fascism and Whitewashing in Cobra Kai, season 4,” 2022), onto to Street Fighter 6 (2023), and so on and so on. It’s sex-and-force vaudeville evolving inside an increasingly neoliberal market’s growing profit motive (the trifectas and monopolies) to foster praxial inertia, not a valid pedagogy of the oppressed; i.e., as forever capitalizing on the imaginary past per the same old heteronormative, settler-colonial, Cartesian predation against nature as anti-American, anti-capital, anti-genocide (war and rape), etc. Anything that challenges that will be gagged, and censorship equals genocide dressed up as “peace (and quiet)” for the usual entrepreneurs: Anglicized capitalists aping the colonizer from Caesar to Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden.

The same goes for Marston’s Wonder Woman and Hippolyta, Medusa, and any monstrous-feminine, as “ad friendly”; i.e., that serves profit, not a pedagogy of the oppressed; e.g., sex worker likenesses being weaponized against and stolen from them. The more narrow the tokenization, the more niche the grifter serving the profit motive’s heteronormative hierarchy of power. Same goes for GNC people of any race, religion or gender identity/performance. Amazonian white enby? Eh, class betrayal is class betrayal. It’s kayfabe neoliberal vaudeville, my dudes. While there’s no such thing as a perfect victim (with reprobates [sinners pre-destined for damnation, per Calvinism] and forgiveness being allotted through the usual “boundaries for me, not for thee” schtick; i.e., an equality of convenience that pushes other minorities’ heads under the water but generally from a cis- or white-supremacist stance corrupting feminism and queer movements: bleeding from the usual gentrified/fascist venues into the usual ghettos), but policing and proletarian victimhood become mutually exclusive the moment a victim becomes an abuser for the state.

The problem with revolution and intersectional solidarity is that it isn’t modular to nearly the same degree as monsters/Gothic poetics are. You’re either for workers or the state, the latter of which is the perpetual cop/enemy to the former. Any aesthetic that you can pick and play with functions through unequal power in this respect towards one or the other, not both; e.g., the black Egyptian mommy dom as the usual victim of those who think “big mommy muscles and faux, campy Egyptology alone = rebellion.”

Sadly it takes a little more than that, my dudes (e.g., Marisa is a fash; i.e., Persephone van der Waard’s “Fascism in SF6: Marisa,” 2023)! Feminist and/or GNC, Amazons—like all monstrous-feminine—historically concede societal gains to enjoy policer positions under the Man’s so-called “protection” (to find the Nazi, observe anyone who gets mad/denies your arguments when you point out the obvious fascist presence in kayfabe, Amazonomachia, and/or the monomyth’s usual predatory bread-and-circus); they become unironic whores lusted-after for their subjugated dominatrix’ aesthetic and Amazonian performance, while exploiting and punching down at others less fortunate (and more principled) than themselves. All haunt the same basic herbo-to-himbo gradient, regardless of the exact appearance it adopts: aping the Amazon, the gypsy and/or Cleopatra (all poetics are made up, but those invented to serve the state do so through profit subjugating rebellion as a matter of controlled opposition). “Oh, rare Egyptian!” my ass!

(artist: Shardanic)

To that, my experience with Autumn was ultimately a negative one—someone GNC who looked the part, but functioned as a herbo witch cop; i.e., a person who loves DBZ (and similar pulpy heroism), but used its herbo, meathead aesthetic to police rebellious elements that speak out against capital (me); i.e., during their own centrist, SWERF-style sex work dressed up as “modest.” The usual nudity is very much implied on the surface of that tiny Triforce thong (several images back): the “gateway to Heaven” as Hyrulian, invented. It’s the hidden ham sandwich to sell on the surface of nerd monomythic emblems, while doing a very common SWERF[14] trick: attacking those who show more skin, denying them the right to exist by virtue of valorizing non-naked cosplays; i.e., that get “naked without nudity” while offering “gym mom” wisdom to the same old hopeless dweebs and acting better than those who do get naked to reclaim their bodies, genders and struggles with.

As such, Autumn and their skin-deep, “bare skin mil spec” approach to the mommy dom (the cave woman) is no different than AMAB versions of the same monstrous-feminine wizard class: a meat puppet gym mom passing off a queer subjugate’s dead dogma thereof while acting like a queen action figure (a diva, in Autumn’s case). Just as the female Amazon combines sex and force like the male variant does, it comes with its own female baggage/double standards that Autumn conveys through a dumb, unironic fulfillment of prostituting themselves; i.e., as the female cop-in-uniform made into an Amazonian token: naked and clothed, strong as the male-warrior-made-female in ways that “act the man” per female double standards—the virgin and the whore defending Omelas, the white Indian punching down at other tribes.

And this is me being nice! Either they’re a useful idiot, or know exactly what they’re doing and don’t care. Like all Marvel canon, Autumn does nothing to challenge the war machine/status quo abuse of a statuesque cryptonymy. They’re complicit, pumping iron and making hay as the poster herbo for the state. Yikes!

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

Such things are always object lessons in some shape or form. Regarding Autumn, a cop is a cop, and castles (ACAB) of a pearly “Omelas” sort always regress to rape of an unironic sort that bridles the Amazon (the euthanasia effect); i.e., while expanding the hidden Holocaust. You gotta do way more than flash some skin (and implied genitals) to convince me you’re good faith, my dude. Those tattoos, enby identity and stripper clothes/furry shtick mean fuck-all if you’re still a state proponent, thus an unironic toy for the elite; police work is sex work fetishizing the cop, including in blind parodies that make the cop an undercover agent working for vice in their underwear. That’s you, Autumn—threatening[15] me as such people always do; i.e., the white savior extending to the enby cop policing the AMAB trans woman with all the grace of an unironic cavewoman. Real classy!

(artist: Claire Max)

All the same, Autumn doesn’t have a monopoly on the weird nerd culture of such masculine-heavy monstrous-feminine; e.g., Claire Max is someone who’s frank about what she does, but isn’t a total SWERF and TERF (fash) about it. Her own statements on physical fitness provide a nice counterpoint to Autumn’s decayed, witch-cop antics, Claire’s own life updates overlapping with gym culture

Pretty happy about having a fat ass for the first time in my life, but months of constant lower body work because of my broken arm also mean it’s super plump and round? Good job, me (source tweet: May 1st, 2024)

albeit as something that isn’t regressive and fixated on making money over intersectional solidarity. More than her own reflections, though, Claire doesn’t seem to personify regressive triangulation by token Amazons against trans populations the way that Autumn did with me. She’s a model, but not pretending that she somehow doesn’t do sex work (something Autumn told me repeatedly not to advertise about them; i.e., telling me what to write, but not much appreciating it when I had my own requests. Face it, Autumn: you’re a sex worker and a cop).

To this, the degree to which someone’s skin (and heroic muscles) are showed, implying the genitals, isn’t even the point, nor are any theatrical regressions unto Amazonian spaces and personas like Savage Land or Wonder Woman; it’s whether someone who reaches celebrity status through such iconography starts acting like a class traitor behind the monstrous-feminine guise. Autumn did, and has decayed beneath the paintjob as something altogether rotten; Claire does not, has not. End of story!

Now, take the same idea and apply it to any monstrous-feminine performer under the sun; i.e., not just herbos or himbos (cis or GNC), but various combos of masculine, feminine and non-binary forms of sex work that, through ludo-Gothic BDSM, work within the language of (class) war as something to personify in popular cultural markers/codifiers like the herbo or himbo. Bodies aren’t just lifestyles or goals, then, but punkish class/cultural goals that pass along critical-thinking skills tied to the body as a theatrical uniform; i.e., the flesh as a symbol of strength that can challenge state hegemonies through psychosexual rape fantasies that sit next to trauma, but needn’t actually harm someone.

To that, Claire isn’t just a thuggish strength trainer like Autumn is. Autumn takes thirsty men’s money while “returning to greatness” through an imaginary past that chains the Amazon to the oldest cliché in the book: “acting like a man”; i.e., aping an unironic, Man-Box Goku gender swap, but still keeping a bit of dumb sluttiness to the brawny action figure (sluts are fine; cop sluts, not so much). By comparison, Claire uses what she has to pass healthier lessons along without feeling/acting like a literal, functional cop. It could always happen in the future, but as of right now that’s certainly not the vibe Claire gives off. As Claire’s Twitter bio reads, “Built like a steakhouse, handles like a bistro” (source); she caters, but doesn’t pander to fascist dudes by being the strict mommy dom the state loves (as Autumn does):

(artist: Claire Max)

Claire looks like she hits the gym, but isn’t trying to scam anyone or pander for her own sake:

Influencers who claim you can build an ass in 30 days (if you buy their program!) don’t want to tell you this, but if you want a bigger butt? You have to gain weight. And yes, some of that weight will be fat. And no, not all of it will be in your butt. That’s not how bodies work. You can’t choose where you gain fat and you can’t choose where you lose it from. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that you CAN choose where you build muscle, and with the right training and diet, you can get the results you want (ibid.).

We’re all looking for that special, capable someone to nurture us in different ways: the mad lass who brings a cake and “guns” to a gunfight. In turn, capital is a boomerang that must repeat, repeat, repeat. This time we can reject capital and embrace Medusa as someone to hug, fuck and take on the wider call for liberation from state monopolies and trifectas, but also their class traitors in disguise; i.e., not just Autumn being a dumb, diva-grade meathead, but older forms of Socialism that failed by virtue of an ability to corrupt; e.g., Marxist-Leninism as yet another state mechanism to woo with proverbial “gifts from the colonizer”; e.g., the Skeksis orrery given to Aughra, but also the Trojan Horse onto more recent Amazons that gender swap Achilles as something capitalize on, not challenge the state with. They aren’t avatars of/servants to Medusa, we are; and we, as such, liberate that which capital universally alienates, sexualizes and fetishizes to normally serve profit through the Cartesian paradigm—ourselves. We must learn to play with ourselves according to a power that, once harnessed, cannot be denied, destroyed or prevented, only challenged by those dependent on/accommodated by the state.

In short, there was never a moment when Autumn didn’t treat me like a threat (more on that in Volume One, if you’re curious). Except, we don’t have to keep defaulting to the same old Halloween regressions and progressions inside capital’s “comfort zone” (white moderacy and queer tokenization); i.e., controlled opposition’s predictable, DJ-style oscillations on the same vinyl: back-and-forth while not really going anywhere. That’s how centrism works! To foster actual rebellion, we can—to use a scary bedroom phrase—”take it to the next level” (aka “spicing things up”): to wake up Medusa by trying new forbidden things that, per the same fetishized, war-like language of superheroes, often translate to anal, Medusa, etc, as things to guiltily indulge in. Calculated risk maximizes sex appeal, gender invention and class/cultural character while minimizing the potential for actual harm (risk/rape reduction) behind our Aegis’ cryptonymic buffers.

Except, we’re trying such angles “on for size” to stand for something other than profit, hence better liberate workers (and their labor) from a capitalist mode(l) of domination. We’re not the sharks, though capital often reduces workers to bad caricatures of such things (re: Autumn); i.e., manufactured enemies, feeding greedily on a frenzy of chum. Made by Gothic Communists, such Amazonian statements—from Wonder Woman to Ayla to Gohan, to whatever slutty head canon pops into my head when I listen to the Skyrim (2011) main theme—can challenge the state through bad imitations of medieval “history” as counterfeit, meaning the kind envisioned by Lewis as overshadowed by actual rape, but per ludo-Gothic BDSM becomes a rebellious sex-positive cryptonym; i.e., “just” a sex game, but also more than that hidden in plain sight: during sex as a form of “superheroic” roleplay (so-called “action”) that normally upholds the nuclear family model as castle-esque, daddy’s home and daddy’s girl.

(source: Steam Workshop)

Forgetting Freud’s very repressed homophobia (the so-called “anal phase” something he codified into dogmatic quackery), the fact remains that the anus is a site of settler-colonial humiliation: something to enter and abuse. Except, just as anal is letting potentially harmful things into a very vulnerable and sensitive side of ourselves designed to push things out (talk about reversing abjection, eh, Kristeva?), challenging capital’s particular abjection reflex walks a very fine line indeed (think Skyrim‘s infamous “fus-ro-dah!” yawp, but tied to the fetishes of capital in ways that reduce the monstrous-feminine to an abject reversal, when camped: the thunder-clapping dummy-thicc booty suggested by whatever angle you view its owner from, whatever odor [vis-à-vis JomoKiN’s mod for Muscarine’s “Tusk Profligate” mod, above 2021] or sound, any of the senses)! Again, liberation and enslavement occupy the same space, the same monster-girl bodies, the same fantasies as “for profit” or “for workers.” There is no middle ground, but there is liminal expression per monster modules that frequently overlap!

(artist: Georgy Stacker)

To this, male forms of the monstrous-feminine are to sodomy what female forms are to Amazonomachia, the eroticizing of women (or those forced to identify as women) into a gradient of monstrous-feminine; i.e., the herbo and himbo historically-materially yielding infantilizing scenarios of exchange that—per BDSM in all its forms—must go where power is and playfully critique canon: in the same performative scenarios, uniforms, body language, markets, etc, reclaiming the instruments of rape, bondage, pain, and torture as married to the chronotope of sex through compelled arguments: dynastic primacy and hereditary rites (the virginal blood sacrifice dressed up as the whore to please the male monarch). Campy or not, such a theatre is always haunted, like the Gothic castle is, by old-to-recent historical regressions towards fascist variants from moderate, pearly ones under Pax Americana.

In short, unironic rape, decay and torture (which anal can easily become) are always close by during calculated risk, the token cop eventually forced to take part once closeted and/or shackled, their agency disintegrating like their skimpy underwear. This isn’t a threat made by me towards anyone in particular (may Autumn, for their own sake, eventually pull their head out of their ass) but simply a historical-material fact; tokenism doesn’t pay or last. It’s a shitty existence if you ask me, but what do I know? It’s not like I’ve been abused before and wrote my PhD about it in Gothic form… (obvious sarcasm). If it was good enough for Marston, it’s good enough for yours truly! Except, purging the Nazi Amazon is a bit like anal; i.e., it’s like taking a much-needed shit, only not! Something goes in, something goes out, and you feel better/oddly good afterwards (nothing is sacred when camping the canon)!

If there’s one thing I’ve learned through all of this, it’s that everyone needs a survivor/protector who’s lived it—so that such things become a part of their identity as de facto educator in sex-positive ways—but also who isn’t afraid to let someone else be strong for them (for each other) regardless of the relationship you and they share. This can be regarding live-in situations, but also long-distance/working relations, or even parasocial ones.

(artist: Asura)

To that, let’s go beyond people and media as parasocial, and consider history as toy-like in ways that extend to ourselves and our friends who play with such stories together! Onto “Into the Toy Chest, part one“!

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Footnotes

[12] Lynn Stuart Parramore writes in “Like QAnon’s Capitol Rioters, the Nashville Bomber’s Lizard People Theory Is Deadly Serious” (2021):

The notion of shape-shifting, blood-sucking reptilian humanoids invading Earth to control the human race sounds like a cheesy sci-fi plot. But it’s actually a very old trope with disturbing links to anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic hostilities dating to the 19th century. […] Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” the 1897 tale of a Romanian vampire who plans to take over London using his renowned shape-shifting abilities, also carries traces of this trope. The count possesses a number of reptilian qualities — from his association with the knightly Order of the Dragon, from which his name derives, to his cold-blooded nature and talent for shimmying down walls lizard-fashion. Dracula’s protruding teeth, pointed ears and blood-sucking habits mark him as a species apart, a motif of “othering” read by some critics as code for Jewishness. From this perspective, Stoker’s book is part of the British response to the increasing numbers of Jewish immigrants arriving from Eastern Europe. The vampire is a stealthy invader, passing as a proper citizen but secretly plotting domination and destruction (source).

[13] E.g., Mario as monstrous to Princess Toadstool, from Giles Laurent’s “Mario from Hell” (2010).

[13a] From Rome to “Rome,” the capitalist imperative is constant: defend the nucleus from victims framed as impostors in service to profit, settler-colonialism, heteronormativity and Imperialism, et al. This includes recuperating female avengers punching up against powerful men they castrate as “good enough”; e.g., Lisbeth Salander as punk appropriation (sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll, piercings, tattoos, etc) and, as usual, decay mid-cryptomimesis: the grungy, dark ’90s revival, Industrial-grade vigilante bouncing between likenesses of The Crow, The Matrix, The Cell, Batman, Sense8 and similar monstrous-feminine graveyards pulling up killer dolls like mandragora with or without class/cultural ironies: dragon ladies in skintight catsuits, touched by fire and breathing flames in a perpetual, centrist cycle of trauma and revenge, rape and release.

Anything can be stolen for profit or reclaimed from it, but decay is ever-present. Medusa is a zombie, after all, one haunted by hauntologies of all the same-old fetishes and clichés: chase sequences, heroic vehicles (from nightmarish steeds to Meatloaf’s silver-black phantom bike), femme fatales, masked men/banditti, crime lords, black knights, hackers, spies, ninjas, Nazi Superman disguised as Clark Kent (sleeper agents), etc. Caricatures like Salander (a pun for “Salamander”) always walk a tightrope, threatening to plunge ignominiously into the abyss of class betrayal: gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss; i.e., she is always hunted/haunted by state doubles (“two snakes facing each other”).

In turn, the state always prohibits progressions away from mortification of the flesh, black penitents, gang violence, Pavlovian incest/menticide through rape—you know, the usual medieval gags trapped in a criminogenic, palingenetic historical-material loop in dialectical-material struggle; i.e., between state and labor copycats, returning to routine sites of childhood abuse/middle-class decay and indoctrination. Again, the elite can’t kill Medusa, only drag and subjugate her through daddy’s-girl doubles (the usual Red Scare conflating the Nazi and Communist, horseshoe-theory-style, above) versus the runaway escaping trauma as emblematic of state counterfeits and true rebellions: Red Scare as monstrous-feminine, the hysterical Mad Russian and her castle of nameless goons threatening the West with nuclear oblivion (called “mutually-assured destruction” in Cold War dialogs).

As such, likenesses of Salander are less an anti-hero and more “hero” vis-à-vis one side of the same half-real equation: state lapdogs/dogs of war on leads (a portmanteau of a Saxon and Accept tune) versus the folk hero echoed along likenesses of Robin Hood, Zorro, Che Guevara, Trinity, Chelsea Manning and so on challenging ties to king and country but also corporations. Salander’s a Swiss army knife, only anti-James-Bond when she actually decolonizes the racist/sexist areas of computers, espionage, acting, BDSM, games, etc. The 2018 movie, The Girl in the Spider’s Web, does not, only conflating Salander’s “punk” with her Venus twin’s equally bogus “Nazi-Communist” anti-West cartoon. Ludo-Gothic BDSM is always liminal, struggling between resistance and subjugation in artistic and pornographic forms; its erotic-to-ace skullduggery is always trapped between canon and camp: Salander’s androgynous, tramp-stamp dumper branded for treason, a “renegade maverick” with optional quotes facing her crimson Russian double. “Why did you help everyone but me?” “You chose to stay!” As such, Salander blames the victim to save the world from another spectre of Marx.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

We don’t have to abandon such stories and their tricky dualism, and can keep the architecture/archetypes (in the flesh or not), but the revolutionary class character must become active, not mired down in service to forced allegory and profit aiding the usual white, status-quo billionaires playing “rebel” (the Star Wars problem). We must reclaim the whore, the Medusa and her fat-and-sassy ass’ anisotropic decay to serve ourselves, not the elite framing “giving someone the D” as the universal, unironic, Man-Box solution (the silver bullet).

[14] Scratch a SWERF/moderate and a TERF/fascist bleeds: Autumn is a trans misogynist (from Volume One):

Autumn always acted like the boss, even when they had no grounds for it: a queer boss dressed like an Amazon, but also acting like one of a particular kind; i.e., a SWERF and a moderate strongarm/war boss pushing me around while shoving their own sloganized, superhero merchandise through the market. All the while, our trauma and its means of communicating through mommy-dom/thirst-trap Amazonomachia were competing against each other through monstrous language as something to negotiate: Autumn’s needs and wants trumping mine by virtue of their advertised superiority inside the same oppressed community discussing nerd culture.

For instance, Autumn strongly disliked the label “sex worker” being applied to them publicly because it could hurt their bottom line. It didn’t matter that they had an OnlyFans full of thirst-trap materials that very clearly constituted sex work; any mention of Autumn being a sex worker (calling it like it is) was something they were very forcefully against. And while this might sound okay unto itself, they were also a) only too happy to take my patronage for sex work, while b) stressing their own professional status and using that to tell me exactly how to advertise them in my own galleries and writing (which concerns sex worker rights). It honestly felt pretty bossy of them, but also dense; i.e., invalidating of me as a genderqueer artist/sex worker while constantly advertising themselves as a strong-looking enby who honestly was having their cake and eating it, too: showing less skin (no “ham sandwich,” in their words) and putting themselves on a pedestal above other sex workers while doing the same kind of work: talking dirty and showing off to make people cum; i.e., voice work first, with nudity as a pay-walled afterthought.

The problem here, isn’t selling sex, but that Autumn’s approach became prescriptive and self-important; i.e., a weird canonical nerd smiling their Hollywood smile, getting fake tits to emphasize their female attributes within the Amazon persona, and treating false modesty like a lucrative virtue exclusive to them and their brand: the bogus and incredibly harmful argument that partially-clothed bodies and implied nudity are somehow “worth more” than fully naked ones are. It wasn’t explicitly stated, but nevertheless showed in how Autumn treated me over time: they were always the victim, and I could never be one. Regardless of intent, their trauma, their rights, and their business—all trumped my voice in defense of capital (re: intent doesn’t matter, actions do, and function determines function) [source].

[14a] A Japanese take on Melmoth the Wanderer aka the Wandering Jew as seeking revenge against the Japanese empire: the fascist trope of the backstabbing Jew amounting to a dark shadow knight that occupies the same neoliberal kayfabe shadow zone as the Nazi does. As Timothy Donohoo writes in “Street Fighter‘s Greatest Villain Was Inspired by a Spooky Japanese Horror Novel” (2022):

Created by Hiroshi Aramata, Yasunori Kato debuted in the first volume of the novel, Teito Monogatari. This dark fantasy series tells a story in an alternate version of 20th century Japan. One of the many characters in the stories is protagonist Yasunori Kato, though he also acts as the series’ antagonist. A sort of take on Melmoth the Wanderer or the Wandering Jew, Kato is seemingly a former general in the Japanese army. In reality, he embodies centuries of lost Japanese history, with his malevolence representing the rage of those who had once stood against the Japanese. […]

The cinematic version of Kato went into designing Capcom’s villainous Vega, known as M. Bison outside Japan. A dictator with goals of world conquest, his ambitions are not too different from Kato’s. His costume is almost the exact same as Kato’s, albeit trading out the dark blue/black color scheme for a predominately red one. Even their creepy grins evoke the same imagery, making them both hauntingly demonic in appearance. His facial expression on arcade posters for a version of Street Fighter II specifically mirrors the poster of the animated Teito Monogatari adaptation, Doomed Megalopolis (source).

[15] As I write in Volume One,

Autumn’s abusive conduct [is] part of their selling point: the gun-toting, inspirational gym mom, enby aesthete throwing their weight around pretty fucking hard the moment a little femboy artist like me (still in the closet at the time) inconvenienced them, or talked about her rights or opinions for a change; i.e., trans misogyny.

To be honest, I had wanted to say more during our falling out to clear things up but Autumn was pissed and so was I. The fact remains, I didn’t mention my uncle to them because I didn’t know he was dead at the time; my abusive surviving uncle didn’t want me attending the hospital visit, so I was at home waiting to hear about the results of the incoming brain scan. I didn’t know it, but he was legally dead by the time Autumn and I had our fight. And perhaps it’s unfair of me to hold that against Autumn, so I technically won’t. I’ll just say that their video messages largely concerned them hurling the most thinly veiled insults imaginable at me (and not in a professional manner), informing me in no uncertain terms just how unreasonable I had been to voice my true feelings at all.

Perhaps there was no place for them in Autumn’s mind. Except that’s not how humans (or labor exchanges) work. My uncle was probably dead, I was losing my best friend, and still reeling from my last ex’s abuses. But Autumn? They just couldn’t be bothered to put up with me because their horse had been difficult that morning! Far be it from me to compare a temperamental horse to a dead uncle, or to expect Autumn to have known about Dave; but the fact remains that they were entirely concerned with themselves and I (and my trauma) were a nuisance. It became something to mute, treating me like a no-good AMAB dickhead while lionizing themselves and encouraging me to keep mum (something that all abusers do; e.g., Zeuhl and Cuwu).

Given the terrible timing of things and me admittedly nursing some bruised co-worker/client resentment (for Autumn’s unprofessional, one-sided conduct) on top of what I was going through, it was a perfect storm of self-centeredness from them and denied expectations from me. Shit happens, but there’s a still sex-positive lesson to be learned, here. Specifically I want us to reflect on what transpired between Autumn and I in relation to capital and Amazon aesthetics at large; i.e., as a countercultural means of interrogating trauma during the potential for labor and cultural disputes (source).