Originally part of an undivided volume—specifically Volume Two of my Sex Positivity (2023) book series—this blog post now belongs to a promotion called “Brace for Impact“ (2024); i.e., that went on to become its own completed module in Volume Two: the Poetry Module, aka Volume Two, part one. The Poetry Module was primarily inspired by Harmony Corrupted.

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

Further Reading: Volume Two actually divides into three modules/sub-volumes, each with its own promotion and release. “Brace for Impact” is the first (re: Volume Two, part one), but there are also promotions for Volume Two, part two’s twin Monster Modules, The Undead and Demons: “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil“!

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

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

Concerning Buggy Images: Sometimes the images on my site don’t always load and you get a little white-and-green placeholder symbol, instead. Sometimes I use a plugin for loading multiple images in one spot, called Envira Gallery, and not all of the images will load (resulting in blank white squares you can still right-click on). I‘ve optimized most of the images on my site, so I think it’s a server issue? Not sure. You should still be able to access the unloaded image by clicking on the placeholder/right-clicking on the white square (sometimes you have to delete the “?ssl=1” bit at the end of the url). Barring that, completed volumes will always contain all of the images, whose PDFs you can always download on my 1-page promo.

Facing Death: What I Learned Mastering Metroidvania, thus the Abject 90s (feat. Kirby, Marilyn Manson and Maynard James Keenan)

“‘Life is precious,’ Yanos discovered, as it was torn throbbing and bleeding from his own body.”

—Kain, Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen (1996)

Picking up up from where ““The Medieval: Modularity and Class” left off…

The Gothic is queer and has been since day one. In the usual holistic manner, I wanted to revisit and reflect on this dark odyssey as it exists for me; i.e., the smaller journey I’ve been on for the past several months (the clerical slut in her latter-day abbey, dutifully engineering the Poetry Module like a machine listening to machines[1]), but also my entire life.

“We’re living in Gothic times.” Keeping with that dire track, we’ll look at critiquing power from one’s past as monstrous; i.e., in ways you can master using a sex-positive lens. We’ll start with my academic past, then use my current expertise to look further backwards. All in all, we’ll dissect my failed academic career and scholarly contributions, per Metroidvania, then turn right back around and apply them to two cadaver childhood friends: the final boss fight from Kirby’s Dream Land 2 (1995), and rock ‘n roll “rebellion” as it was being packaged and sold to the nation’s youth (me) around the same time; i.e., “childhood rebellion” as lucrative dogma vis-à-vis Maynard James Keenan and Marilyn Manson. The ’90s were darkly magical; they also sucked, but I had to “die” first and be reborn (as trans, Communist) before I could see that for what it was, for what I was—abject, alien, stupid.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

As Top Dollar said, “Childhood’s over the moment you know you’re gonna die.” Well, that side of me has been dying for years! From closeted maiden to mighty Medusa, I started off like Bilbo did—closeted; i.e., a spring chicken bred on music that made me feel invincible, but point in fact was just as much a curse (of blindness) as a gift: I look at me in 2014 and see such a spineless bimbo, a late-bloomer who would go on to conquer my fears and become Medusa.

“Death changes you,” I’ve discovered; my familial abuse and extrafamilial abuse—Zeuhl, Cuwu, and Jadis stuck in their ways of causing harm to others, the posers—you don’t just experience something like that and walk away unscathed. It stays with you, lives in you, including in the work that you do as challenging what has you in its grip—the experience, but also the socio-material conditions at large. Even so, I don’t think I’ve fully appreciated the significance of that in my work until diving in and playing with it myself; i.e., getting in touch with my teaching side, my medical side, and my medieval side to better understand my work’s poetic elements: as someone who survived heinous things, sees them everywhere, and chases their Numinous signature on the Neo-Gothic edge of existence—the fringes of reality and cusp of Hell as something to experience while alive.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

My blood pressure seems to go up higher when I write and reflect extensively on my past (but also haven’t actually orgasmed much these past several months). I feel buried alive, my chest tight like I was suffocating—less from a hand choking my throat and more a bodice around my heart. It feels, suitably enough, like someone who chases “death” and “stays under” for a bit too long—stuck there, unable to return home, or home no longer recognizable to them; i.e., haunted by their trauma as something to chase and recreate in pleasure and pain as confused, their crossed wires activated during psychosexual responses in a given place and name:

Skyrider, you supersonic flyer
Nightdriver, you demon of desire
Spinesnapper, you tried your best to break us
Throatchoker, you thought that you could take us

The fright of your life, the fright of your life
The fright of your life is here guaranteed
This is no illusion, confessing confusion you’re freed
Lashings of strappings with beatings competing to win

Oh, what a mess I am blessed, dominations set in

Now we are taken unto the island of domination (Judas Priest’s “Isle of Domination” (1976).

Everyone has their own form, their own name for Death; but like porn, you’ll know it when you see it if you’ve felt it before (it marks you for life, and only in death releases you). The presumption is that in the “Free World” we are free and no harm is caused, that we are protected.

Wrong! America is a settler colony and run by the Great Destroyers of the Earth, safe behind their illusions while the rest of us either feel invincible and beyond reproach (the status quo) or closeted, damned, beyond redemption in this Hell on Earth. Faced with its “new normal,” we become infused and forever obsessed/fascinated with death; i.e., an endless call of the void seeking its epitaphic medicine of sweet escape[2] again, and again, and again. 99 times it goes off without a hitch through respectable but ordinary attempts; then, on the 100th something goes awry… Or rather, something wakes up, speaking extraordinarily through a collective repressed desire: to be free felt psychosexually among differences, through a ghost of the counterfeit preparing to rebel. There for a moment and gone in the blink of an eye, it stays with us all our lives—something to chase into Hell as made right here on Earth: damnation as a nail to hit, square on the head—not once, of course, but over and over as one might the devil’s doorbell (“C’mon, Old Scratch! Pick up! Mommy wants to play!”).

(source)

“Death is where we feel most alive/see our loved ones again.” I know the music and the clichés; we all do, and recreate its tolling bell again and again (e.g., goth-oracle band Scavenger’s Beyond the Bells, 2024—”In the heat of the night, witches fly!” a fleshy parade of clichés and fetishes marrying sex and war to find beautiful release). But I didn’t understand its Gothic riddle maturely until I lived it, experienced it (fucked to metal, pounding Cuwu’s tight little pussy to Annihilator’s “Death in Your Eyes” [2008] or Jadis’ or Zeuhl’s to some similar, whiplash-inducing tune[3]), processed it, and then did all of that consciously through hindsight (“Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.”). Faced with that dark reflection, something woke up in me and I felt at home with death as something to embrace through the honest intimacy of other cuties also searching for denied connection and forbidden love—to be dying for it like a beggar of thirst, and begging for more until we’re satisfied. How long until that is depends entirely on us developing Communism to end scarcity once and for all. In short, “When it’s done!”

Believe it or not, this moment of clarity actually stems from monitoring my vitals and observing my body’s various reactions—almost outside, looking in at myself as a doctor does a patient, and all while writing this book and thinking about “death” as a tradition to perform: a call of the void (from Shakespeare to Ridley Scott to li’l ol’ me—a bit like speed balling minus the hard-drug crossfade); and all the while feeling the classic Gothic push-pull of “danger” as a paradox rooted in my actual body as not really in much danger but secretly telling my 37-year-old self to hold together while fucking around. Something might actually be wrong with me!

Newfound appreciation gleans through reflection on things I always enjoyed, including my life as something to reappraise. Yet, doing so has likewise shown me that I’m not entirely sure what ails me—if it’s psychosomatic or psychosexual posttraumatic stress, a more prominent and permanent medical condition. Probably a bit of both, but I recognize the feeling—the actual physical feeling—from before I started thinking actively about my health, and before I was able to go to the doctor and get checked out: when I returned to my mother’s, and experienced separation anxiety with Cuwu after Uncle Dave died. Doing so again, under more controlled and informed circumstances, has rekindled my drive but also a renewed interest in medicine: in regards to me as the test subject, experimenting literally on myself through the playfully scandalous Neo-Gothic fantasies of death, rape and murder. You know, the best kinds!

We become bred on such things, accustomed to death as medieval language we conjure up for the thrill and salve it provides us with; e.g., the devil dragon from Flight of Dragons (1982) the deliverer of all our paradoxical delights. Like a pizza for a bitch in heat, a mommy pregnant with lust (as fat as the dragons in that movie, but especially that fat fuck—an absolute unit of a death chonker):

I see the dragon in my mind and hear the sleeping princess’ line: “No, father, one dragon yet remains, Bryagh. Omadon’s hold on him is stronger than Lo Tae Zhao’s. He has death on his mind and can take them all!” I think in response, Good; now gimme, motherfucker! My command is gentle (the dragon is my childhood friend, someone I love), but it’s still a command: “Don’t stop until I tell you to stop! I shall rewrite you through my decree, a Queen to your King I challenge thee” (from Volume Zero, my fucking with Percy Shelley’s famous poem to immortalize Blxxd Bunny with my drawing of them:

And pillow lip, and smirk of warm delight,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that enjoyed them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, Queen of queens;
Look on my Ass, ye Mighty, and despair!”

As something to face beyond us in present forms that evoke the beyond, reflections on death can be healthy or unhealthy—can drive us mad or “mad.” Poets, who love the sound of their own voices (“one good turn deserves another—from one poet to another”), think by reflecting on things through creation (which is always expanding [cock-like] into delicious pussy-like new forms). In challenging capital, meticulous and informed, I’m a Renaissance girl who suddenly finds herself feeling like a naughty child playing with dead things; i.e., like Jeffery Combs’ Herbert West, dryly asking the other doctor with a straight face/flat affect, “What will they do, embalm us?” Talk about hard kink!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

In a way they already have, and as a zombie the likes of Richard Matteson’s, I find myself—having thrust into the void repeatedly—suddenly smiling with a new lease on life (the trans woman, turning as the fags always do, to Gothic media as a therapeutic, rape-play opera expressing the unspeakable as loud as we fucking can); i.e., like Barbaras’ omen from the Jew of Malta (c. 1590):

Thus like the sad presaging Raven that tolls
The sicke mans passeport in her hollow beake,
And in the shadow of the silent night
Doth shake contagion from her sable wings (source).

Though I am just a raven, behold my pretty plumage (weird, to be sure, but bitches like weird; it’s like they are)! Observe how I am at peace with myself and my trauma as something to show off the pain and pleasure of all my ghosts; i.e., with my queerness as beautifully tainted by capital, but burning urgently and hotly with a corpse-like desire that feels oddly fresh, revitalized, ready to take on the world (something to tentatively show and then, post-hesitation, open greater and greater “wounds” that flaunt it all with reckless abandon—my dick not in the book, but in a pussy): scrambling to express what I’ve learned about “death” before Death (the cruel, delicious, thick-thighed bitch) takes me at last. When it does, my tombstone—a fragment of all that remains—shall be peered at, and whose bizarre reply shall thrust, confounding and glorious, back at the same prying eyes: “Her tits were there.” My spirit has fled, but they’re not going anywhere. Remember that as you live and love those close to you!

The Great Tree bemoaned to Deet when passing her its knowledge, “Whether a gift or a curse I do not know!” Likewise touched by Death—to have felt for a second its sweet sting as melting into so many others—I don’t know how long I have. No one does, till suddenly our brief candle (and walking shadow) snuffs out, collapsing never to rise again. But I have questioned the value of my life until now with more fear of death than I currently have (“nothing ventured, nothing gained”). Now that said fear has been lessened by learning something new about myself, the ghost of Epicurus is rapping on my head to remind me: “Death is nothing to us!” Except, the idea of a “corpse” that experiences symptoms, a church of the dead that haunts us while we’re awake out from the imaginary past that returns to our world? It’s all just pretend… isn’t it? Then again, maybe not. You tell me, sweeties!

When someone fucks with you, document everything. But also, play/fuck with your abusers by putting their “ghosts” in quotes—to speak truth to (state) power by going where power is. I have been near power all my life; i.e., that which threatens “death” as a state of constant, painful change, often with alien components haunting familiar ones. Death, then, isn’t the end, but something to face regardless of whom you’re critiquing. Here’s what I learned in doing so—as a failed-academic-turned-Gothic-slut who weaponized her baggage and mastered Metroidvania at the same time (so, Contrapoints but without the trans gentrification, assimilation fantasies and veiled enbyphobia; more on her in Volume Three, part two)! As we proceed, remember as always to take modularity into account: Metroidvania are modular like monsters are, and the two go hand-in-hand; i.e., a castle has monsters in it and is monster-like, and monsters have castles in them/are castle-like, concentrically and dualistically and anisotropically. In other words, they are composite; i.e., you can remove elements of the Metroidvania/monster and it will continue to function/relate to these elements separately and/or together, mid-crisis onstage.

Under capital, Cartesian thought sexualizes, fetishizes and ultimately harvests nature-as-monstrous-feminine; videogames instruct this through neoliberal dogma—household war simulators, whose monomythic formulas must be reclaimed by the real stewards of nature (us) from the usual privateers (capitalists and their proponents). From Freddy Krueger to the final, hidden boss in Kirby’s Dream Land 2 (exhibit 34b2a1a1, 1995) to the Wind Fish in Link’s Awakening (1991) to Ripley rescuing Newt by scapegoating the black queen when the colony falls apart (shooting the Numinous ghost of settler colonialism’s vengeful victims) to the Radiance in Hollow Knight, we’re all Dokken’s dream warriors, masturbatorily punching Tim Curry’s demon clown. I say this while being completely silly and dead-serious at the same time, and this isn’t my first rodeo, my dudes; I’ve given symposiums as an undergrad[4] and written my thesis on this (“Lost in Necropolis“), and finally my PhD in independent form with Sex Positivity, Volume Zero (and if that devalues it in your eyes, remember that T.S., Joshi—one of the world’s foremost and most-cited contributors to independent Lovecraft scholarship—isn’t a professor, but a philosophy major dropout); I’ve lectured about this at the IGA multiple times, on multiple continents[5]; I’ve given talks in-person[6] and on video[7]; and I’ve used the symbols and methods of invigilation to talk about shared patterns and imagery in ways you’ll doubtless recognize from me and elsewhere. There’s gorgons to slay us and “gorgons” to “slay” with, babes; true to my arguments (since my thesis, no less), these exist in the same magic circle/shadow zone (the elite monopolizing darkness as a weapon[7a] against Her Majesty’s radiant numen):

Healing takes reflection and reflection hurts regarding a past that is always being buried or dug up. To that, I’d like to inspect my academic past (above) one more time to make my point; i.e., what I’ve learned facing the death of it (and rebirth). I’ve previously acknowledged which professors I like and which I don’t–you know who you are—but the fact remains that academia as a structure is a den of sycophants suckling the dicks of Reagan and Thatcher’s ghosts; i.e., a nest of shameless schmoozers and utter brownnosers by design (“the money flows up, the shit rolls down”). They have their own thin line to colonize students with, and take a certain pleasure closing ranks and flexing on them. So yeah, it’s personal for me; I have something to prove and don’t like bullies, especially established bullies acting like their shit don’t stink. As we shall see, reversing abjection is a shitty business—one as vast and rank as the single-day cleansing of the cattle stables of King Augeas of Elis (“the Labours of Heracles“; source: Britannica).

For instance, Lucy Burke once told me, “You couldn’t step on my toes if you tried [emphasis, mine].” The Brits really love their Austenian italics. Regardless, the school went onto delete my old email and account (demonstrating the empheral, predator/prey nature of our relationship). In the interim, Lucy went onto flunk half of my postgrad module for mentioning my undergrad pedigree as a point of reference, telling me it “had no bearing on the topic at hand” (though they magnanimously gave me an A for the transcribing element—damn straight); Lucy Burke was also a total cunt whose class sucked absolute donkey dick (and whose tenured helper told me to my face that the Gothic was a waste of life—he was a cunt, too). So fuck her (and fuck the peer-reviewed twats who arbitrarily rejected my paper proposals for being “too repetitive/conversational[8],” or—in several cases—for being too sexual. It’s one thing to be rejected by a romantic interest; in this case, rejection equals censorship, which speaks louder than words)!

As we proceed, my teaching moral is as follows: Don’t be afraid to speak your truth, even if that truth is angry with the establishment (and its settler-colonial profit motive)! Be loud! Wreck shit (if you’ve seen Glass Onion [2022] then you’ll know exactly what I mean)!

Maybe I’m onto something. Some of my instructors certainly thought so. As my teachers at undergrad wrote of me (from my original award letter, above),

Nicholas excels as an attentive and nuanced reader of literary texts and expert sleuth of textual histories. He has an impressive ability to synthesize disparate material, making surprising connections between wide-ranging ideas and experiences. Nicholas, one faculty remarks, “is not afraid to take tangents or draw comparisons that at first look random but end up opening up a new vista for reflection.” We have been equally delighted by the fine scholarly essays and research papers Nicholas has produced in our classes. Faculty describe his writing as “eloquent, carefully organized,” “astonishingly adroit,” comparing, for instance, Tolkien’s image of greed with Shakespeare’s reflection on Shylock’s materialism, via a close reading of Max Weber’s idea of rationality and modern notions of money as status [hi, Craig!].

We anticipate a bright future for Nicholas and wish him the best for his future scholarly exploits. Nicholas is most deserving of the Distinguished Student in Literature Award, and we are grateful to have him as a student in our department. We’ll be reading Nicholas’ writing one day, and probably teaching it [above, originally featured in Volume Zero].

I don’t know about that, my dudes; I messaged many of you for years and rarely heard a peep (a couple responded—to that, I give thanks)—certainly not to the degree of engagement such effusive praise would seem to suggest. Maybe I didn’t deserve all of this? Maybe I was just that dunce of a slut I always felt like?

Looking back, I still get echoes of that doubt. But true to form, I had to go elsewhere to find what I was looking for (the monomyth, but a gay Gothic one that turned me from “Nicholas” into Persephone: “It was I, Dio!”).

I felt that way at the time, too—was terribly depressed and told Christine Neufeld as much in her office, post-award-ceremony. She replied, “We don’t just give this award to anyone, you know! It’s a big deal! You struggled at first [she gave me a C+ in her English 300W course, saved by me writing “Frankenstein essay—Born to Fall? Birth Trauma, the Soul, and Der Maschinenmensch,” 2014] but you pulled through; with these grades and this letter of recommendation, you can go anywhere you want!”

There was some truth to that (others were more honest: “Don’t pursue grad school unless you want to be broke/are independently wealthy!”); I could go wherever I wanted, provided I found the school and the backing (a whole Byzantine circus to thread, which we’ve already gone over but I’ll cite again here[9] in case Quora takes a shit). I’m white and middle-class, so I had friends and means. Sandy Norton gave me a place to stay after my efficiency was canceled. In turn, I basically had to graduate twice; i.e., once in ceremony and once after I met the full, Faustian-grade[10] requirements for the school (which hounded me for overpriced graduation photos for years, afterwards).

If the above example (my Gothic past and quest for power/the Numinous by coining ludo-Gothic BDSM through my scholarly works and slutty adventures) is any proof, facing one’s past repeatedly is painful, but also vital to understanding our place is a wider world; re: “Returning and reflecting upon old points after assembling them is a powerful way to understand larger structures and patterns (especially if they’re designed to conceal themselves through subterfuge, valor and force). It’s what holistic study (the foundation of this book) is all about.” To that, glibly sloganize the skeletons of your past if it means liberation from tyranny (and if they aren’t tyrants, they’ll let you voice your grievances in public; i.e., the “free” marketplace of ideas). Fuck the king! Fuck Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan! Fuck the schools I went to if they get in my way! Antagonize them! Become the thing they fear most; become the ironic counterterrorist exposing them as frauds—with your Aegis (ass or otherwise): “And no one in all of Oz, no wizard that there is or was, is every gonna bring me down!”

Speaking of skeletons, let’s give it a shot; i.e., with something other than my failed academic career (but still bourne from it)! Kirby? You’re up, babe!

(exhibit 34b2a1a1: When playing this game as a little girl, in the fifth grade, I always noticed the patterns and they always struck me as odd. I felt the drive to conquer the darkness as the game taught me. Perhaps if I did, I thought, then my shitty real father would turn into the man I always wanted him to be [alas, that never happened]. A part of me also to wanted, like Hamlet and the freezing palace guards [“A part of him”], to explore the darkness as a presence to talk to—in short, to ask it why it’s there, to make friends.

In other words, why is the false king false, the sword always there to purify his “corruption,” and send the monstrous-feminine hellspawn back to the dark corners of the Western imagination?

As such, there’s always a priority/Great Chain of Being to neoliberal copaganda in videogames. The male hegemon is sick, possessed—a false king with a false claim [the counterfeit] that must corrected through the usual heteronormative “medicine” [usually force, in videogames, because sex is for adults who take it by force, post-indoctrination]. Tolkien [and his cartographic refrains] framed it as exorcism [Gandalf to Theoden, drawing Wormtongue out as “poison is drawn from a wound”—kinky!] and death by flames [Denethor: “We shall burn like the kings of old!”]. In turn, videogames like the Kirby franchise offer routine protagonists who function, like all language, in dualistic ways. Except the canonical embodiment of the avatar remains bourgeoisie; in turn, the monomythic concentrism, anisotropic motion, and climactic [violent, Promethean] revelation are swept aside in the usual Radcliffean fashion: the horrors of the “past” apologizing for the Divine Right of Kings as having evolved into modern forms that remained, post-nightmare [which Walpole ultimately suffered from, too—the white castle emerging from the black. ACAB, kids—except gay campy ones].

That is, King Dedede is possessed, you see—trying to smite you with his hammer because a dark vague force has “corrupted” him! This counterfeit is both the Western lie of sovereignty it uses to maintain its power structures, and the very thing antithetical to them that we must reclaim and synthesize. In Metroidvania fashion, once the hero collects some of the objects of conquest, he gets a partial prize; collect them all, and he receives Excalibur—the ostensibly noble blade haunted by dark, bloodthirsty revenge to do battle with the Russian doll. That is, inside the American monarch [a feudal displacement of the game’s empty critique of the wider world around it] lurks a shelled series of monsters common to neoliberal canon: the warlock/witch, vampire or goblin [all anti-Semitic tropes] indicative of the Nazi and the Communist in the same amalgam. Per American kayfabe as emulated by Japan, its cultural exports have Kirby [the babyface] whack the Nazi with his sword, the two dueling to expose why the Nazi “broke bad”: the shapeless void—Communism! Red corrupts red.

[source: Zelda Dungeon]

These warring artefacts remain dualistic, mid-duel, but the canonical side/function of their conversation remains clear enough: a witch hunt, one where the Nazi was the nation-state possessed by national Socialism! I.e., it’s always the Communist’s fault! Of course, we all know this to be an obscurantist lie—one furthered by neoliberals [and their pocket academics] profiting off Red Scare—but the fact remains, the so-called Pale King and “Hollow Knight” [see what I did, there?] are likenesses received in praxially-inert symbolic exchanges; e.g., Ganon vs the Hero of Time [above] to pacify workers with, regardless of the labor they put in; i.e., that which preserves a semiotic standard [from Ron Cobb] to uphold a capitalist dialog and its monetary value through Cartesian violence against nature-as-monstrous-feminine.

All of these tropes and contradictions are a historical-material byproduct of those state monopolies and trifectas warring against our doubling of them during counterterror dialogs, engaged in the meta dialog as dialectical-material; i.e., by virtue of me—burning the midnight oil [having done it many times at EMU and MMU]—able to artlessly summon up old ghosts [of Marx] to camp canon with. To that, my childhood locale remains haunted by the object of capitalist fears pushed into the usual myopic shadow zone by Capitalist Realism. The elite cannot hide genocide and police violence in totality after history purportedly “ended” within the established economic order as classic “New-World” shenanigans; so instead, like Radcliffe, they conjure up evil castles and kings to scapegoat. It’s modern-day blood libel, the price paid in all the oceans of children’s blood[11] Kirby’s Dream Land 2 leaves out, but lurks behind the rotting image on its surface. The darkness is the rot, and beyond its disintegrating veneer is the desert of the real.

Plato’s cave is full of those hopelessly reliant on the system’s dogmatic false hope, becoming agents of our and their destruction by maintaining the spell that cannot survive state shift. But boy, oh boy, they will fight like hell to resist that; i.e., by dismissing and attacking us through disguises that announce who they are: corporate cops in suits—spooks of a CIA sort, but internalized/externalized by state proponents; e.g., like The Matrix and its Agents touched upon, so aptly [“That is the sound of inevitability, Mr. Anderson; that is the sound of your death!”]! In that same shadow zone’s half-real space, then, we must use our own ludo-Gothic BDSM’s castle-narrative to infuse better habits; i.e., to synthesize praxis based on the things that were coded into us as children by videogames. “Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.” No one ever said it was easy to kill our darlings—both because it is dispiriting on some level, but also because it’s work! Topping is work! No cap, fuck-starting Kirby’s face has me dead tired, y’all!

In all seriousness, the takeaway here is the hero, after his final duel, has slain the fag, the Commie, the Medusa, the person of color—to fall from the sky at the shock of seeing himself in Athena’s Aegis [a black blob with a single eye to Kirby’s two—the singular panoptic/myopic gaze of conquest, but also the one-eyed monster capital frames Communism as; i.e., the cyclops giant to blind and kill, empowering patriarchal forces]. He descends from the heavens like a heroic star/constellation [Orion, perhaps] while a cleansed pastoral/Garden of Eden looks on [the artificial wilderness “cleansed,” America-style and mirrored in the Japanese neo-Shogunate, of so-called “impurities”; i.e., through a fascist/strongman return to “might makes right”; e.g., the way of the fist, of death by the sword, of Shintoism and bushido as “brutal” sold to Americanized kids drooling over Akuma representing who they want to be, but also the time they want to return to: the Sengoku Jidai or Warring States period’s return of the demon warrior/the black knight. In fascist thinking this is the “hard times” quadrant of the four-stage cycle; re, from Bret Devereaux’ “Hard Times Don’t Make Strong Soldiers,” 2020): “‘Hard times create strong men, strong men create weak times, weak times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.’ The quote, from a postapocalyptic novel by the author G. Michael Hopf, sums up a stunningly pervasive cyclical vision of history—one where Western strategists keep falling for myths of invincible barbarians” (source).

Whether it’s Akuma, Batman or Meta Knight, white male weebs want to become the Great Destroyer and kill weakness as “degenerate,” impure. It’s like sex to them—how they relate to each other—but it’s unironically harmful, destructive, sadistic, inhumane. There’s no “convincing” them through empathy because they argue through force, not consent—the way of the warrior as an endless battle for territory and dominance. They are quintessential xenophobic meatheads—anti-intellectual, obsessed with death, conspiracy and the remaining fourteen points Umberto Eco mentions. In short, they’re like American colonialism continues to be—self-righteous and macho, but paradoxically afraid of everything around them, which they rape because of it. Smart people scare them, women scare them, fags scare them, etc; yet they want to fuck us, are secretly incel cowards looking for mommy.

It’s all a lie, one that continues into Dream Land coming from older histories in and out of the text: Kirby—startled and scared from his dream—wakes up and finds himself with his monomythic treasures by his side. He has the power, per Joseph Campbell’s uncritical lens, to make the world in his image; i.e., by pacifying the current ordering of things by making nature orderly again. It’s standard-issue Goldilocks Imperialism/neoconservative, with Kirby’s foreshadowed by the sword spearheading the harbinger of capital falling to Earth like a comet, a fallen angel, an incubus of the state, a “gift” from the bourgeois gods [that, like Mega Man, steals its enemies powers and shape]: to make peace through strength, by bad-faith diplomacy, by the sword, Power-Rangers-style [the sentai rainbow]. This tracks. After all, the translation for “Nintendo” is “Heaven rewards hard work”—except “work,” in this case, is the same old ghost of the counterfeit being used to further Capitalist Realism via the process of abjection; re: “The myth of Gothic ancestry endured because it was useful,” leading to the same-old Jewish conspiracies, tokenization, and genocide. White knights become black, good cops become bad because ACAB—all [canonical] cops [and castles] are bad. They swords are bad. Their cute mascots are bad.

[model and artists: Blxxd Bunny and Marlon Trelie/Persephone van der Waard] 

Luckily for us, they ain’t got a monopoly on that shit, and there’s always one more square in the collage to fuck with and lead to a better sequence; i.e., inside the infernal concentric pattern [re: Aguirre] during ludo-Gothic BDSM [me; e.g., above, having collaborated with Bunny and hired Marlon to make our own collective statement; i.e., the Dark Magician Girl (my OC, in disguise) fucking “Medusa” as yet-another-performance]. Kirby’s false rainbow is something we fags can camp in earnest, giving its black-and-white some actual color and sparkles. The end of the world, according to the Bible, is when men hammer their swords into ploughshares; we must do this by challenging capital’s Cartesian treatment of labor during the monomyth and all its usual fear and dogma, medieval poetics, etc. The state will always default to lies and violence, policing sex and force through dead dogma dressed up as fatal nostalgia; we can camp all of this and turn it upside down and back around at them—paralyzing them but also making their masks slip. The more people are aware, the more conscious they become to class and culture war as something to wage; re: emotional/Gothic intelligence as something to synthesize through violent resistance fought on the streets of our childhoods, of the Gothic imagination, of a middle finger to academic shortcomings. We’re taking it back. Submit to our monstrous-feminine cenobites [not Barkers, the sell-out; come at me, Sorcha]—not to enslave your bodies, minds, labor and identities, mid-struggle, but to set them free from the usual capitalist [fascist] pigs.)

I am literally a monster and Metroidvania doctor (the monstrous-feminine, in particular)—a monster mom for whom exhibits like these are as easy for me to make as breathing is while fucking (that gets easier, the more you sexercise). I have a nose for bullshit, and can smell a Nazi/spot a TERF a mile away (no matter how many disguises they have on). As little Kirby shows me (and I show you), Communism and fascism sit in the same shadow zone (from Volume Zero, but also “With a Little Help from My Friends“). The difference, for Galatea vs Pygmalion, is the existence of performative irony and critical bite regarding any darkness visible (re: Milton vs Tolkien/Cameron, vis-à-vis me). For Gothic Communists, our bleak sardonic projections twist the knife and smile at the gods, our hellish Aegis upending the heroic narrative to replace it, mid-Mandelbrot. This isn’t a canceled future that, mid-crisis, decay and duel defends capital; we’re the clowns in the king’s court, the chaotic dwarf from Twin Peaks (1990), but the ghost of the counterfeit remains us, buried or not; i.e., that which waits for you, leering wickedly at the end of a black rainbow, coming forward and speaking the truth in dialectical-material language (throwing pure psychoanalysis and postmodernism in the bin): like Saturn devouring his son, capital is eating us. So we “eat” you during calculated risk, hopefully waking your stupid asses up! Eat ass, kids!

(artist, left: Franciso Goya; right: Jordan Peele)

Sometimes, this means eating your own bullshit (aka, eating shit, crow, humble pie, etc). The present is always remarked upon as haunted, grim. It’s all been said before, and cashed in on by hypocrites, too; i.e., those weaponizing your angry childhood as a product against you, a lucrative dogma enriching fascists playing at false rebels. I call this “white people disease,” and as such have looked at people like Radcliffe in the past. This time, I wanna stick to the ’90s; i.e., we’re gonna practice what we preach and hold my childhood accountable in a holistic sense; re, Xavi: “The ’80s weren’t a magical time!” Neither were the ’90s! Keeping that in mind, don’t get too attached to things; i.e., “never meet your heroes; they will always disappoint you,” except there’s a catch: heroism divorced from a capitalist idea of struggle and money value can rescue this conceit from itself. But you gotta be the bitch, the harridan, the angry oracle “no one likes” because they’re always calling out peoples’ heroes (Socrates had that problem; the state prescribed hemlock). Now let’s turn our Medusa’s masterful, withering gaze onto rockstars of a more musical sort: Marilyn Manson (and Maynard James Keenan, footnote)!

“Your world is an ashtray! We burn and crawl like cigarettes; the more you cry the more the ashes turn to mud!” sung shock jockey (and sex pest), Manson[12]. I (and many people my age) grew up on that shit. Like all splendide mendax, the profit motive doesn’t negate the allegory’s liberatory potential; it just capitalizes on it. Just because Manson was an abuser (or Jadis) doesn’t make me one; quite the opposite, rape prevention by exposing abusers during good praxis/synthesis (e.g., telling reactions to revolutionary cryptonymy) is my book’s raison-d’être, hypocrites and abusers (or their enablers, on all registers—e.g., bad-faith/accommodated intellectuals) my bête noire.

Let me rephrase. The way I see it, the world is a toilet, and little girls are made to fear the bathroom as a place to hold their urine, lest they get raped. Doing so is not protection, as Nex Benedict showed us (re: “An Ode to Nex Benedict,” 2024). There’s two takeaways I’ll provide, regarding that: a) view something as a toilet (covered in piss and shit, full of shit, etc) so you actually clean it, and b) we’re already in Hell, so bring the fury to them (our abusers, the elite) with all the piss and vinegar you can muster (we’re all monsters under capital; be an Amazon, warrior, mother, detective, Medusa for workers)! Take your time and make it memorable, too. Don’t “smile more” (“You found me beautiful once!” “Honey, you got real ugly!” Damn straight, you sexist pig!); skull-fuck them (I’m being figurative, of course: the mind fuck)! Freud might be a bad joke, little more than a trope at this stage; we monstrous-feminine, from cryptonym to cryptomime, pull a black rabbit out of a hat, the cat out of the bag—not to harm the rabbit or the cat (the poor things historically used as lab rats, now free to proliferate on Bunny Island or some such place), but expose capital’s usual illusions relegating us to the underworld. We’re the final (hidden) boss of Capitalist Realism each and every time. As Gamma Ray once said, “rabbit don’t come easy!” Well, we do (we got a wand and a rabbit) and our “hat” is our Pandora’s Box, pulling all manner of dark, hellish secrets out of itself.

(artist: John Keaveney)

Under Capitalism, childhood and innocence are lost at birth, replaced with harmful copycats. But fret not! Duality distinguishes “corruption” as defined through context, and a baddie is different than a bad cop; even if both are wearing the same witch costume, their function is determined by where their rhetoric/antics on and offstage send power a-flowing: towards workers or the state (which is why iconoclasts can camp Nazis and still be rebels in disguise, and why TERFs are still Nazis despite appearing as witches). The same goes for their lairs, their castles as slapped together and used to express largely systemic issues; i.e., on the classic site of queer angst (the stage) given voice among a pedagogy of the oppressed that can be used by all marginalized groups. I call it “Metroidvania,” but that is just one name among many for the Gothic castle as something to reclaim with ludo-Gothic BDSM—with revolutionary cryptonymy and castle-narrative (ergodic motion) during the liminal hauntology of war as something to survive. Cops are the enemy in that instance, as are their hungry fortresses; our bodies become ours reclaimed from them within these prisons’ danger discos. Or as Grendel’s mother basically said: “I’m not trapped in here with you, you’re trapped in here with me!”

The same goes for me and anyone who thinks they know more than me about Metroidvania! I am peerless in that respect, both a) the master of the field in a field where no experts exist (as of coining my work, anyways—British academia was allergic to portmanteaus and cross-media disciplines), and b) a holistic instructor who takes this knowledge and applies it through ludo-Gothic BDSM (my brainchild, my academic concept) to synthesize good Communist praxis outside academia, for the workers of the world to do in kind; i.e., in ergodic motion (my master’s thesis) as a pedagogic metaphor that both describes and aids the teaching process: to all workers (nature and the environment) sexualized, fetishized and alienated by capital (my PhD argument) and the profit motive’s harmful canon, its fatal nostalgia, its pocket experts hired in expert testimony for the state/the prosecution.

In short, Jedi mind tricks don’t work on me (e.g., Kirby and his cute animal friends aping Captain Planet, doing the little victory dance with neoliberal jingles anthemic of war against “darkness”; i.e., hardly a monolithic refrain, but a diverse polity administered by monomythic dogma—one that clumps Nazis and Communists together but always, always prioritizes the Communist), and I can break any dark (capitalistic) spell meant to stupefy its recipient(s)!

So forget Luke Skywalker boldly declaring to the Emperor, “I am a Jedi, like my father before me!” Bitch, please—I’m the Medusa (and “Jedi” are Sith[11a] waiting to happen) and I’ve worked too hard for too long and survived too much to just lay down and take any more of it! The Earth is my home; Hell is my home as something I design, and I will fight to defend it and my friends from the usual fear and dogma, cops and sell-out academics, et al.

Like Smaug, every sassy bitch has its boast, every dog its day. To that, hear mine: Jadis was an impostor who scared children (ate them, per the usual dogmas)—could only tap her foot or toss her head. I am the Queen of Charn:

“Stop,” said the Witch, just as he reached the door. “Do not dream of treachery. My eyes can see through walls and into the minds of men. They will be on you wherever you go. At the first sign of disobedience I will lay such spells on you that anything you sit down on will feel like red hot iron and whenever you lie in a bed there will be invisible blocks of ice at your feet. Now go.”

The old man went out, looking like a dog with its tail between its legs (source).

Not just of Charn, but the queen of my kind (we’re all queens under Communism, but I digress), the top dog making the magician my bitch (from that story’s uncle, to its author afraid of naughty girls who know what they want)!

As Bay shared with me, “Kiwis are bird rats”; i.e., Nature’s idea of Jewish revenge hunted by the likes of smug men like Karl Jobst or Christoph Waltz (the former sucks in real life, the latter sucks onstage):

Their steady song of the Earth is our Song of Infinity to take up ironically with Gothic poetics against the colonizer posturing as “benevolent” (which includes Jewish ethnostates and their proponents simultaneously denying the Holocaust and reenacting it; i.e., the establishment “Good Jew” instead of those like Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi as the mythical Jewish unicorn the state doesn’t want you to know about but cannot stop [because their power is a lie, an illusion]: a Socialist anti-Zionist Jew and journalist). Moderates, including token moderates (e.g., Obama) and their elitist, bought-and-paid-for yes men (The Humanist Reports’ “Politicians, Pundits, & Celebs Get a Brutal Reality Check at Elitist Circle Jerk,” 2024) try so hard to control the coverage and paint themselves as good, but they’re the biggest cunts of them all (re: MLK’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” 1963). Luckily there’s one thing that moderates (Jewish or otherwise) can never hide: which side they stood for—no, sung for—when the going got tough. We can’t afford to keep quiet or toe the line, because that’s what genocide is: dying in darkness alone, or ignoring those who do while kissing up to capital, to the elite. We’re together when we’re heard, warning predators off and organizing against them through intersectional solidarity (diversity is strength); i.e., kettling the cops, turning a kettling attempt on its heel (encirclement, but also a kayfabe pun); e.g., the American-Israeli ambilocal complex/academic establishment to sever ourselves from: “University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne protesters have encircled police using reinforced banners & signs” (source tweet: Escalate Network, 2024) is one, but also the students of Harvard (an establishment school if ever there was one):

(source tweet: Harvxrd Palestine Solidarity Committee)

Protests are always violent because the state always treats liberation with violence. To that, we must become a pandemic to the elite—united on every continent, a collective thorn in the side of empire-in-disguise. As such, I provide not just my book or this chapter, but my song as unbroken and unbowed, raising my fist with my friends all around the world (sung despite my fear mechanisms telling me not to, for fear of angering Jadis’ shadow haunting me)! Here goes:

Quoth the Raven (death from the skies, rebellion writ on napkins), “I’m thought and rememory! Full of trauma, appetite and rage, my spells are orgasms! My hexes reek of power that can peel paint, strip peaches of their skin—to send your toenails growing inward, you mess with me! I shapeshift and impart fatal knowledge! I am Ileana, hear me roar! I am Revana, strong and brave! I am Persephone, daughter of Melody, granddaughter of Ellen, great-granddaughter of Mildred, the teeth in the night, the Queen of the Night, Titania and Tamora, and you do not scare me! ‘I feel the universe within me; I am a part of the cosmos, its energy flows through me […] AND I AM THAT FORCE! I AM THAT POWER! KNEEL BEFORE YOUR MASTER!’ (Frank Langella ain’t got nothin’ on me, babes)! I eat capital, fart incense (cinnamon) and shit rainbows! My nipples are like weapons (that lactate ironically), my clothes are see-thru, my thong small (and cute), my legs hairy with Lilith’s “stockings.” I play with dolls and swords, make Zelda butch and Link gay! I am the femboy you wish you had! The pillow princess* you’ll never top! I have survived Majora’s moon and through it wield a power too great and terrible for you to imagine, cursing you with madness and confusion! I am the weirdest boner! The pain in the ass (that you like)! Touch me and I touch you back—become glass, darkness visible, a quagmire to envelope you and expose your greatest flaws (a lack of compassion, game, dress sense, etc)! I am the spectre of Gay Marx, a black swan getting you and your little dog, too! I’m disco-in-disguise, from The Beach Boys to Joy Division to yours truly! I’m rock ‘n roll, Satanism, Metroidvania, the pussy on the chainwax! You’ll never own me, never exterminate me, incels; I’ll never rule the universe with you, I’ll fuck your wife and make her gay! I’ll trans your kids and make them disobedient! You killed my mother, prepare to die! Wind, fire, all that kind of thing! Abra-fucking-kadabra, bitch! Get dunked on!”

*E.g., Zeuhl, in grad school—horny but wanting me to fuck them and lying back as I gently gave them a “medicinal injection (of hot sweet love”): “I was soooo sick!” they’d remember the event, “but I wanted you to fuck me anyways!

“There are only so many rhymes”; i.e., so many ways to say to a Nazi, “Fuck you, I’d rather be hunted for being myself than ‘safe’ like you and those of you that suck up to the state, Judas!” This rat-bird mischief manifests in the natural-material world—from Matthew Lewis to Ridley Scott to me, dunking on Kirby and saving the little fucker from people like Marilyn Manson, Maynard James Keenan and people who police their platforms and the world as exclusively their place to make art; i.e., as a socio-political statement upholding the status quo in small.

This includes the serious risk of standard-issue Liberals masquerading as “progressives” to hide their own fascist elements; e.g., Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posturing as “radical” to make her presence felt, but then rubbing elbows with Biden. She’s saying “eat the rich” but then eating with them: to have her cake and eat it, too. It dilutes movements, gentrifying radical politics the way that establishment politics always do (recuperation). But likewise, you don’t have to be a full-time activist who dies for the Cause (re: Che Guevara) to do a rebellion. You just have to call the President and his ilk for what they are: immoral, Israel-coddling imperialists—the irony of Biden getting elected being that Liberal-presenting power structures stalled rebellion as performed by American progressives on campus and elsewhere in the middle class.

As usual, it’s a proletarian Children’s Crusade—the wide-eyed college kids doing the work, not the adults[8a] in the room (e.g., these Poly Cal kids fighting shield-to-shield to with the cops, holding onto each other so the pigs don’t pull them away from the group [source tweet: Call Walsh, April 29th, 2024]. Its protection from the state’s zombie enforcers—an echo of the undead taking to the streets, from The Monk to Les Miserables to The Passion of Joan of Arc). The kids aren’t alright because mommy’s browbeaten and daddy’s a rapist, but also a cop who starves, imprisons, and beats his own children for “being naughty”: “They stand should to shoulder for as far as the eye can see. The very Earth must be crying out from the damnable weight of them!” It’s eugenics, of the Imperial Boomerang coming back around, dressed up as parent/schoolteacher played by undercover cop (de facto vigilantism except universities are official institutions with established socio-material ties to the state and the elite). They take and take and take, at the cost of those who serve them as much as those who don’t; e.g., Prince Vegeta’s dying declaration, “He said he would kill my father if I didn’t obey him; we did everything he asked and more, but he killed him anyway!” The state always takes from positions of extreme advantage—of ultimatum and lies. It is the abusive parent made hyperreal, a cruel god lording over the Earth. Sound familiar? The Greeks predicted the future with that one!

If this isn’t proof that the American government needs to be dismantled and replaced with an anarcho-Communist horizontally arranged form (“land back”), then what is? Saturn will devour his young—is devouring his young—so Medusa needs to come forward and kick the old fucker in the balls; i.e., to strike them where their power is consolidated: soft power and the Superstructure, which—wouldn’t you know it—is just my game! You want someone loquacious, or someone who’ll throw down for you and watch you back when it counts? I gotchu, babes!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Like Meatloaf, it’s all very bombastic, repetitive and loud—a rap battle of the sexes (and gender), no? But all the world’s a stage, and the half-real stage is where we always make our stand! Capital manufactures conflict through false binaries; humanizing monsters through ironic calls to arms remains an appeal to those who dehumanize us on a regular basis. To that, Capitalism isn’t something you can defeat through dumb force, lovelies, but clever transgression and subversion that looks and sounds “dumb” (I’m just a dumb Dutch girl, I don’t know nothin’! Right, Grandpa van der Waard?); i.e., changing how people see the world through yourself as a tremendous altering force.

We must remember that empathy is only radical—only a “myth”—because the state (and Capitalist Realism) treat it as such. The most vituperative, bloodthirsty and self-righteous/self-deceiving person isn’t the fascist, then; it’s the American Liberal as someone we must challenge with our own fire to fight theirs with. What are they silent about? We must expose and put that on blast, “to start a thing.” Our cake is moist and we go to Rebel Town (civil war splitting us into doubles against each other by state). We’re the sum of existence, wouldn’t change it if we could (the butterfly effect ‘n all that). We find our companions in the killing fields, speaking through torment, anguish and peril, but also twinkling glee and delight: to break the Torment Nexus as the state’s Precious Thing to smash to bits.

This includes hysteria as a teaching agent/chaotic source of pride and monstrous self-worth healing from patriarchal instruction: kill the alien; e.g., the cordyceps virus from Hollow Knight being both neoliberal dogma (a threat to overcome by monomythic force) and Mother Nature’s revenge (the Archaic Mother) against the Pale King (the Man) for conducting genocide against something that capital, by virtue of profit, cannot afford to understand. Per Cartesian edicts, nature is always monstrous-feminine, is always the zombie, is always furious; but the panicked system’s purging of any harmful waste (shit) is the planet trying to heal itself, aided by its symbols and stewards that canonizers will always try to colonize, and which per the infernal concentric pattern must be entered and faced by exposing the usual hero as the Great Destroyer’s little bitch, their blood sacrifice who thinks he’s bad. This “one simple trick” is the Aegis reclaimed by us, something the elite (and their proponents) can never monopolize: “You and your kind are dust, and you only have yourselves to blame!”

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

We can reclaim our childlike joy and connection to such things; i.e., from the heart, but through expertise, through/of the monstrous-feminine as nurturing towards our wounded/missing empathy and humanity (our impostor syndrome and piece-of-shit’s lack of value in all directions)! Forget me; there’s a dark slutty wizard in all of us, and the best magic is the practical, sexy kind (“the blackest magic, my soul swims in it”)—e.g., our bodies as abjected by others and which we reclaim (with our “dumpers”); i.e., liberation through iconoclasm a psychosexual act of mind games that titillate through sexy androgynous showmanship: the dark mistress, the detective, the Amazon, the whore, the Medusa, the mommy dom (my own character, Ileana Sanda, may have been Queen of the Night and specialized in spatial magics—in warping space-time—but she loved stage magic). And that, like everything else, becomes something old that we can reinvent (above) as the Gothic does: parthenogenically through backwards (retrospective) fertilization (fusion) and division (fission)—my writing style, in other words, synergizing sex, work and synthesis for funsies (fucking during a self-induced fugue state).

(artist: Noe-Leyva)

Keeping that in mind, let’s face a couple smaller reflections before Volume Two, part two opens grave-like before you (Shakespeare’s “maw of death”); i.e., when we dive into our first Monster Module: the Undead (good things come to those who wait)! In other words, let’s sleep on it (only a catnap, I promise)—ruminate, and then watch what dreams may come. To move forward, we must face the past again (we just did, but what’s next is a transitional segment, not a symposium, so calm your tits). Onto “Halfway There: Between Modules!”

---

Footnotes

[1] With Zeuhl once waking up in the middle of the night, in England, to find me sitting at my laptop—in the dark with my back to them, staring at “ASMR – Alien: Isolation – Nap Time near a Computer Console” (2018); i.e., dreaming while awake, in-tune with a movement they helped introduce me (ASMR) to and would, at times, observe me as I slept, jotting down the weird things I said in my sleep: “And you have to be careful when you use it in the swamp, and there are warlocks!” To think how funny it is that something said by me in passing while I wasn’t even awake—after playing Hollow Knight on my laptop (which Zeuhl would accidently murder like Companion Cube, spilling Uncle Ben’s rice sauce on the old machine to thoroughly “brick” it)—would become a de facto slogan for a passage in my book (specifically in Volume Zero, I won’t say where). All our yesterdays…

[2] The call-and-response, rise and fall of queer-drenched ecstasy—as something to orgasmically croon, mid-rapture, then come down from and into the lonely grave that is life in America and Great Britain. Like a bath of hellfire, the call of the void becomes something to tempt through morbid curiosity and observation, mid-session.

[3] E.g., Constance and I fucked to Slayer’s “Black Magic” (1983).

[4] At my alma mater, Eastern Michigan University:  “EMU 2017 Symposium Script: Frederic Jameson and the Art of Lying.”

[5] For the 14th IGA conference, in Manchester, England: “IGA 2018 Script—All that We’re Told In the Eternal Shadow (within Shadows) of the Hypernormal, Worldwide“; for the 15th IGA Conference, in Chicago: “Always More: A History of Gothic Motion from the Metroidvania Speedrunner” (2019).

[6] For Sheffield Gothic’s Reimagining the Gothic with a Vengeance, Vol 5: Returns, Revenge, Reckonings, 2019: “More My Speed”: The Tempo of Gothic Affect in a Ludic Framework.”

[7] The video I scripted, recorded and edited for “More My Speed,” which Sheffield Gothic played in my stead.

[7a] In true settler-colonial fashion, the white savior is a badly disguised arms broker and fashion statement: “a family defending ‘his’ home from ‘alien’ forces” while aping videogames as a liminal enterprise; i.e., copaganda and the Military Industrial Complex inside a police state when the Imperial Boomerang sails home. It’s the false-flag casus beli for chudwads everywhere—a deception (and profit margin) for weird canonical nerds to aspire to, not critique: stochastic terrorism as an opportunistic product/content brand—one that apes the age-old monomythic, “might makes right” Imperialism to serve Patriarchal Capitalism by policing its Realism with violence (sex and force). Such kingly xenophobia is both dogmatized and very, very lethal.

(source: 1ShotTV’s “BEST Home Defense Shotgun Ammo??? (BIRDSHOT vs BUCKSHOT vs SLUG),” 2024)

I hate men like these guys but I hate the ideology (and Capitalism) more; i.e., profiting off moral panic and persecution mania by opportunistically selling guns during a gold rush, one of us-versus-them (again, we’re the gold: as recipients and givers of state violence, mid-collapse). As Helen Slater said in The Legend of Billie Jean (1985): “You’re a pig! You don’t even know what a pig you are!” Fuckin’ oath, sis!

[8] The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies and Dr. Niall Gillespie (dick): “Survival-Horror in Blood (1997): the Weaponized Affect of the Gothic FPS” (2019).

[8a] There are exceptions; e.g., Caitlin Johnstone’s April 28th tweet (abridged, 2024):

This world is so sick because nobody takes responsibility for the things that are happening in it. The rich and powerful shore up more and more wealth and power while offloading the responsibility for it onto others. They destroy the biosphere while offloading the consequences onto ordinary people, while telling us we just need to ride our bikes more and consume less in order to fix the problem. They start wars and back genocides abroad while refusing to provide for the needful at home, and if you complain they tell you you just need to vote harder next election. They take all of the power and none of the responsibility.

We can’t have a healthy world until we reverse this dynamic, and like all matters concerning responsibility that means it begins with the face in the mirror. We all need to step up to the plate and take responsibility for turning this catastrophe around, and in 2024 that means starting with the genocide our own governments are actively facilitating.

We need to unite arm-in-arm, internalizing not just the rhetoric, but the emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness such praxis synthesizes. Silence against genocide isn’t just self-destruction, but complacency leading to complicity in genocide.

[9] From a screencap, because I want an image of the webpage, for proof; re: Persephone van der Waard’s Quora answer to “How easy is it to get into Manchester Metropolitan University?” (2019). Access the original file on my Google Drive.

[10] From EMU milking me for more credits, forcing me to do an independent study by finding a free instructor (ol’ Neufeld turned me down, as did several others); i.e., with David Calonne that pointed me towards Rudolph Otto and The Idea of the Holy (1917) as eventually leading me to write “Method in His Madness: Lovecraft, the Rock and Roll Iconoclast and Buoyant Lead Balloon” (2017). In turn, the acquisition of a research supervision at an undergrad level—and the making of our own class rubric, research goal, and executing it—was actually a lesson unto itself: my graduate program in small, prep for grad school. None of this was structured in any logical, orderly way, of course. All the same, it led me down a long road I’ve already talked about in this book series (from Volume Zero):

This brings us not just to my adulthood but my postgraduate work on ludo- Gothic BDSM, which in 2017 was met with its own barriers. Working under David Calonne, I was only just learning about the Numinous vis-à-vis Rudolph Otto and H.P. Lovecraft and came across an article by Lilia Melani, “Otto on the Numinous” (2003), citing the Gothic as the quest for the Numinous: “It has been suggested that Gothic fiction originated primarily as a quest for the mysterium tremendum” (source). Something about it appealed to my then-closeted kinkster as have previously been titillated by Cameron, Lovecraft and Nintendo (there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write), but also the videogames I was playing at the time: Metroidvania (shortly because I went overseas, my best friend Ginger recommended Axiom Verge and Hollow Knight to me, which I eventually made the topic of my master’s thesis).

Eager to go to grad school and learn more about this exciting thing called “the Numinous,” I looked for places that taught “the Gothic” and was directed by various educators to MMU. Upon going overseas, I swiftly collided painfully against various cultural barriers when trying to express myself (and my inherited, lived trauma) through the Gothic mode as something to relay in academic language. The whole ordeal became counterproductive and traumatic in its own right, requiring me to voice my concerns regarding said baggage in connection to the larger systemic traumas I was seeking to express and overcome; i.e., by facing my own painful past in its totality. This meant coming up with a solution through ludo-Gothic BDSM, which in turn meant forming it into a teachable method for this book; but I first had to deal with my unprocessed trauma from my brief, invalidating stint in academia (four years, from 2014 to 2018, not including submitting to academic journals, attending conferences and applying for PhD programs, which lasted another year).

For me, Gothic media more broadly is cryptomimetic (writing about the ghosts between words), but also whose undead mode of expression is embroiled within academic areas of study that yield hermeneutic limitations due to recency biases and disdain for a holistic approach by academic bigwigs. For instance, I noticed these limitations myself when trying to marry the Gothic to videogames in my own graduate work as cutting-edge. It was a tactic my supervisors and academic superiors resisted, simply because videogames were either totally outside of their realm of experience, or “Metroidvania” wasn’t something that had been academically connected to games within their own fields. That is, speedrunning as a practice/documentary subject was just taking off online in 2018 (Twitch had only existed since 2011); likewise, “ludic-Gothic” wasn’t even a decade-old term at the time, was something that ambitious academics strove to stake new claims within while leaving much to be desired.

For example, the same year I wrote my thesis on Metroidvania, Bernard Perron would sum up the broader Gothic rush in videogame academia in The World of Scary Games: A Study in Videoludic Horror (2018) sans mentioning Metroidvania once:

Horror scholars such as Taylor, Kirkland, Niedenthal, and Krzywinska have therefor come to contextualize games in the older tradition of the Gothic fiction, “one of survival horror’s parents,” as Taylor states in “Gothic Bloodlines in Survival Horror Gaming” (2009). Furthermore, the latter even coined a new term to highlight this origin: “The ludic-gothic is created when the Gothic is transformed by the video game medium, and is a kindred genre to survival horror” […] Video games remediate many aspects of Gothic poetics: [the prevention of mastery, obscured or unreliable visions, scattering of written texts in typical Gothic locations and their lost histories, the encounter and use of anachronistic technologies, etc] (source).

Not only does Perron make no mention of Metroidvania at all, neither do any of the other scholars he cites; nor did my supervisors know what Metroidvania were when

I was researching it (nor I, with me finally settling on a concrete definition in 2021; re: the “Mazes and Labyrinths” abstract). Indeed, Metroidvania—despite being an older genre than survival horror—remains a thoroughly underrepresented area of Gothic videogame studies, and Gothic videogames remain ripe for continued study within our own lives. Indeed, I had to connect the two myself when recognizing a knowledge gap regarding Metroidvania as cryptomimetic media within videogame studies at large; and I have continued to do so as a postgrad writing about mazes and labyrinths in Metroidvania; i.e., as a niche area of study to expand upon within my own daily life beyond academia—by writing about or illustrating Metroidvania outside of conferences, but also interviewing Metroid speedrunners for fun in my “Mazes and Labyrinths” compendium (which we’ll give an example of a little deeper into the subchapter) [source].

In the end, as I shall demonstrate, here, I became more knowledgeable about Metroidvania in my thumb than Perron, Krzywinska, and Taylor, et al, were in their whole body of research. I am the Metroidvania master, motherfuckers! Is that arrogant of me to say? Fuck you, I’ve earned it, at this point! Anyone who says otherwise can kindly eat a dick.

[11] As Ward Churchill writes in “‘Some People Push Back’: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens” (2005):

The problem is that vengeance is usually framed in terms of “getting even,” a concept which is plainly inapplicable in this instance. As the above data indicate, it would require another 49,996 detonations killing 495,000 more Americans, for the “terrorists” to “break even” for the bombing of Baghdad/extermination of Iraqi children alone. And that’s to achieve “real number” parity. To attain an actual proportional parity of damage – the US is about 15 times as large as Iraq in terms of population, even more in terms of territory – they would, at a minimum, have to blow up about 300,000 more buildings and kill something on the order of 7.5 million people (source).

The establishment is centrist, meaning it perpetuates conflict as orderly. There must always be an American and a Nazi, a white knight and black, but also a Communist to conflate as a Nazi to obscure class war. There’s lots of syndromes at work, here—mirror and compartment, but also virgin/whore and white knight. In short, the state’s moderates introduce and arbitrate a paradox of politeness that offers empowerment fantasies that are unironically  violent and class dormant/traitorous. They uphold the status quo’s genocide, rescuing a false equivalency (a fallen paradise) from its own rape as something to routinely bring about, arrive too late and then redeem through revenge. It’s Marx’s tragedy and farce, our parody and pastiche oscillating between degrees of irony and faith.

[11a] In short, the moderate can speak the truth through hilarious gags, but must always reel things in; e.g., Dragnet‘s 1987 camping of police shows and moral panic (“P.A.G.A.N.S.! People Against Goodness and Normalcy!” doing the goat dance and having sex with the Virgin Connie Swail!) before regressing to copaganda itself (with a community scapegoat: the false preacher). This can become aware of its own empty loop, too—e.g., Gloryhammer’s “The Unicorn Invasion of Dundee” (2014)—but this merely outlines the same historical-material cycle inside one phase of itself:

Down from the mountains
And across the river Tay
An army of undead unicorns
Are riding into the fray

Fireballs and lightning are raining from the sky
Chaos and bloodshed while all the people die
In this epic battle begins the final war
Tragedy will strike this day, prepare thee for
The unicorn invasion of Dundee

The townspeople had little hope
They were not ready for war
Fireballs make everybody die
And buildings collapse to the floor

The beautiful princess was raped
And taken to prison with cry
Angus McFife swears a mighty oath
“I will make Zargothrax die!”

The forces of darkness
Are invading proud Dundee
They must find a hero
To save its destiny

[…]

And an ominous shadow fell over the battlefield
As the evil wizard Zargothrax rode in the once mighty city of Dundee
Atop an undead unicorn of war
To enthrone himself as its new dark master! (source: Genius)

Instead of challenging the state, such blank theatrics become the myopic order of business—something to repeat and cash in on by de facto cops doing what cops always do: defend property for the elite; i.e., in all media forms utilizing the modern-day monomyth’s various cartographic, us-versus-them refrains to benefit the colonizer group playing the stage wizard, the critic, the victim. Again, it’s white boy disease, through and through. They let the princess get raped, then swoop in, “rescue” her (from their friend-in-disguise, playing the fascist) to marry her off. They all suck, but the paladin is the worst because he’s hypocritical and genocidal, rapacious—the false friend.

[12] From “The Reflecting God” off Antichrist Superstar (1996). Produced by Trent Reznor (to give the music its industrial sound). When Jadis and I listened to this, Tool’s Undertow (1993) and similar music, we looked on such nostalgia fondly. It’s possible to do both—proven by me and Jadis enjoying the high as children do, but also survivors of abuse: “Each thing I show you is a piece of my death!”

That being said, capitalizing on being a cynic, as Maynard from Tool does in “Ænema” (1996) should be wholly discouraged:

Some say the end is near
Some say we’ll see Armageddon soon
I certainly hope we will
I sure could use a vacation from this (source: Genius)

This is fascist rhetoric delivered by white priviliged men, seeing the “end times” as a “vacation” that is anything but a natural disaster (though Capitalism profits off manmade interference assisting in so-called “natural disasters”); it’s an apocalypse to shoot “zombies” with until things “go back to normal.” Except they won’t during state shift, and the fascists and moderates will eat each other (unable to farm or tend the land around them, much like the original American colonists/so-called “Pioneers” were unable to). The only imbeciles who would say this is a self-centered cunt who paradoxically thinks it doesn’t apply to them; i.e., a white boy’s charmed life posturing as doomsayer and preacher cashing in on their own Kool-Aid to sell to the kiddies:

Fret for your figure and
Fret for your latte and
Fret for your lawsuit and
Fret for your hairpiece and
Fret for your Prozac and
Fret for your pilot and
Fret for your contract and
Fret for your car […]

Fuck L. Ron Hubbard and
Fuck all his clones
Fuck all these gun-toting
Hip gangster wannabes […]

Fuck retro anything
Fuck your tattoos
Fuck all you junkies and
Fuck your short memories […]

Here in this hopeless fucking hole we call L.A.
The only way to fix it is to flush it all away
Any fucking time, any fucking day
Learn to swim, I’ll see you down in Arizona bay (ibid.)

For Maynard, the whole city is the same, no distinction between Ron Hubbard (a cult leader) and junkies (a condition, not a disease—generally one experienced by the poor). It’s an incredibly cynical and reductive baseline—not intellectual at all, but the sort of dreck pitched by Hubbard, of all people. The irony is very thick and lost entirely on Maynard (who didn’t know or didn’t care at the time): they’re singing about themselves. Straight white guy disease, I tell ya—now that’s a disease, alright. It’s menticide and apathy to the rotten, eugenicist core!

Case in point, Genius’ annotation writes,

The word Ænima is a portmanteau of the words Enema and Anima.

An enema is a procedure of introducing liquids into the rectum and colon via the anus. Metaphorically, it could refer to a cleansing of another type, such as the nationwide purging described in this song.

The anima refers to one of two primary anthropomorphic archetypes of the unconscious mind in Carl Jung’s school of analytical psychology. In the unconscious of the male, this archetype finds expression as a feminine inner personality: anima; equivalently, in the unconscious of the female it is expressed as a masculine inner personality: animus. It is an archetype of the collective unconscious and it is said to manifest itself by appearing in dreams. It also influences a man’s interactions with women and his attitudes toward them and vice versa for females and the animus (ibid.).

See that “could mean” bit? That’s called “plausible deniability.” Tool doesn’t teach people to read in between the lines; they dogwhistle—i.e., the problem with this is Jung was a quack who hit on a grain of truth that became dogma, all the more likely with such voices airing a very particular kind of dirty laundry in public: genocidal sentiment. Slapping “Jung” on it and vouching for him is a classic academic red herring/disguise, one that generally happens while saying “We’re just exploring our dark feelings”; i.e., as something to commodify and posture in equal measure. The way that Tool is doing it with this song is frankly incredibly reckless and opportunistic, but also gross. This is the epitome of privilege, of posing, of false rebellion (re, Parenti: fascism).

(source)

That moment when you realize that Tool are Nazis (a more recent version of Hawthorne’s Puritan polemic “Young Goodman Brown,” 1835). Fuck me, dead, but also—is it really so hard to believe? Like, for real. You see many black or gay rock bands in the American circuit (for a nice counter-example, listen to King’s X’ 1989 Gretchen Goes to Nebraska—an album with real critical bite and frankly better music)? Just a lot of white “rebels” doing “Roman” salutes, right? The same applies to Maynard (and whoever the other guy is).

I mean, just look at them: faux-intellectuals (I don’t wanna mention the bald head, but so-called “Nazi punks*” are a thing and very much need to be ousted from parallel societies being colonized/gentrified by middle-class white boys) cashing in on fash aesthetic/obscurantism as much as critical thought, calling it wisdom, and bashing their critics all at once (from another song off the same album, “Hooker with a Penis“):

I met a boy wearing Vans, 501s
And a dope Beastie tee, nipple rings
New tattoos that claimed that he
Was OGT, back from ’92, from the first EP

And in between sips of Coke
He told me that he thought we were sellin’ out
Layin’ down, suckin’ up to the man

Well now I’ve got some
Advice for you, little buddy
Before you point the finger
You should know that I’m the man
I’m the man and you’re the man
And he’s the man as well
So you can point that fuckin’ finger up your ass

All you know about me is what I’ve sold ya, dumb fuck
I sold out long before you’d ever even heard my name
I sold my soul to make a record, dip shit
And then you bought one (source: Genius).

Speak truth to those with fragile egos and sometimes the mask slips. In this case, it’s “prison sex”/DARVO mentality (that “boy wearing Vans” really hit the nail on the head, sheesh). Worse, it’s literally a couple hipsters dressing up homophobia (re: “Hooker with a Penis”) and Sodom-and-Gomorrah (re: “Ænima”) rhetoric they think their customers are too stupid to notice (Jadis** loved them, hahaha).

*According to Bay, and I agree, “Johnny Ramone is a boomer who cast off his punk status. Born into the post-war late 1940s, his punk pathos/veneer of world-weariness having none of the legitimacy of his punk brothers and sisters [shortly after 9/11, he said at his 2002 Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame acceptance speech: ‘God bless George Bush and God bless America!’]. To the credit of his wife, he was also a card-carrying Republican.” They go onto add, tangentially, “Russell Brand is apparently attempting to change his name, post-baptism, to escape public scrutiny for his alleged sex crimes; i.e., very similar to Marilyn Manson doing the same—which should speak volumes about what the Church historical does for men!” This, I would argue, includes rock stars as, oddly enough, modern-day versions of what’s known in the Gothic as the Black Penitent, or powerful male figure given protection by the Church as a means of the latter’s saving grace and the former saving face by taking in a powerful lost soul. “Let Jesus fuck you!” indeed.

Of course, the dogma has been subtly updated by Christo-fascists, the latter then and now “calling the cops” (the angel of death) on gay people—i.e., a Satanic-panic hauntology that reinvents the Bible and roll ‘n roll sophistry. These guys, like all fash, know exactly what they’re doing. They don’t say it in plain English, they code it; i.e., in dated psychobabble and thinking they’re clever while pandering to the lowest common denominator—themselves, dogs working for—you guessed it—the Man. I can’t speak to Tool in 2024, but in 1996? Sweet Jesus, they were total fucking posers straight deepthroating capital’s knob (that’s right, Jadis. You couldn’t save Tool from me, either)! Tool are tools without irony!

*The city was smote for refusing to stop idolatry and worship God, not because they had non-missionary sex (though the two are still related, 100%).

**They’re the ones who taught me about Tool to begin with, and the one who fucked off/regressed to their brutal, neoliberal side when they got their dad’s “fuck you” money (so-called “monetary reductionism”—spending money within capital is no more class warfare on its own than a boxing match is).

Don’t be afraid to critique your heroes, kids. Get mad and (always with class consciousness) straight up kill your darlings; kill ’em all (again, figuratively speaking and per Sarkeesian’s adage, of course)! Fuck their legacy and their image! Be forewarned, though: get ready to lose friends. You find out real quick who your friends are when breaking icons (as much through trepidation and angst as rage)! But if that happens, also fear not! Nazis are cunts and you don’t want them as friends anyways. When an abuser leaves you, it’s like taking a big shit: almost always a good thing (I’m channeling Kristeva—roll with it, haha). More to the point, when you stand up for yourself and have boundaries/respect for yourself and others, the real cuties will notice, start to trust and approach you/respond if you approach them. Trust me, babes; I learned from the nymphs!