Book Sample: “Medieval Expression, part three: Opening and ‘Out of this World, part one'”

Posted on by Persephone van der Waard

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

Update: Volume Two, part one (the Poetry Module) is out (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 these posts will not have)!

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

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

Picking up up from where “Medieval Expression, part two” left off…

“Welcome to the Fun Palace!” part three—”With a Little Help from My Friends”; or, Out of this World (Opening)

Whence is that knocking?—
How is’t with me, when every noise appals me?
What hands are here! Ha, they pluck out mine eyes.
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red (source).

—Macbeth, Macbeth (c. 1606) 

(artist: Ms. Mars)

Like sex and the Gothic, rebellion is a messy business, but also a theatrical one—bloody and somehow bloodless, singing to war as something referenced in something else, perpetually in fragments viewed backwards (from Venture Bros to Looney Tunes to Holst to Matthew Lewis to Shakespeare to Julius Caesar, and so on). To that, part two explored the relationship between workers and media insofar as we want to revive and enrich Gothic media to hug the alien with, thus speak truth to state forces harvesting nature-as-monstrous-feminine until Medusa strikes them (and us) dead. In short, media is something to befriend to make trouble with, which requires resurrecting it through various troublemakers who—from brat to bitch, dom to sub, mommy to Amazon to Medusa—come in all shapes and sizes; i.e., it takes friends who can literally get up and walk around to synthesize good praxis with, mid-Gothic-poiesis.

We’ve already discussed academic examples and academic ways of relating in part one; and we already have looked at past sex workers I can invigilate but otherwise am out of contact with, in part two. Part three will consider our developing of Gothic Communism through ludo-Gothic BDSM as something to enact between active, healthy friendships—in essence, those we meet at a costume party who refuse to shy away from the slutty costumes, but use them for rebellious purposes! I shall present our ongoing co-conspirators, helping us bring the proverbial house (Gothic castle) down: Harmony Corrupted and Blxxd Bunny! So ferocious!

(exhibit 34a1b2b2a1a1a1: Artist, top: Blxxd Bunny; bottom: Harmony Corrupted. The Gothic generally puts “sex” and “monsters” [“monster sex”] next to/into all medias popular [videogames, novels, cinema, etc] during performance art designed to teach sex positivity as much as subsist under capital; i.e., the Gothic deconstructs canon, camping it through clever workers’ revolutionary cryptonymy to reconstruct into something new, something sex-positive pushing towards post-scarcity as a canceled future that—with a little help from our friends—can come true now in baby steps! From cradle to grave, then, everyone likes playing with monsters and sex [some are just more closeted about it]. Those who discourage doing so are prudes/enemies of workers, women and children, GNC people, racial/religious minorities and other vulnerable groups, thus not to be trusted. Exclude them from your reindeer games; put your trust, instead, in ludo-Gothic BDSM! Children grow up into liking rape play and sex to achieve calculated risk, thus forever questing for a palliative Numinous—looking for monstrous-feminine “echoes of mommy” to top [thus teach] us about Medusa as good, the state as bad; i.e., with costumes and [sex] toys, but also their bodily theatrics and playful-slutty gender parody conveying good demon BDSM. No one is immune to its foxy-wily charms—their Numinous, stacked “cathedrals'” combined awesome might! “Stare and tremble—with mutually respectful boners!” Suck a dick, Coleridge!)

As such, we’ll have to go over performative context as something to articulate; i.e., as a praxial process: with theory to applied through intersectional solidarity (diverse, all-inclusive teamwork) between good-faith actors synthesizing it across multiple, hybrid registers and media forms while dealing with bad-faith actors. To that, we’ll go over how to meet/make friends relative to theory as it exists per ludo-Gothic BDSM: during complex, multi-gradient exchanges informed by stories that collectively speak to our mutual alienation, fetishizing and sexualization (to serve profit/the elite) amid differences.

As a subchapter to “Medieval Expression,” “The Fun Palace’s” last subdivision, “Out of this World,” is actually too big. So I have subdivided it again (a sub-sub-subchapter).

The monstrous-feminine is the domain of canon and camp, something to color through our own performances informed by older ones for us to “fill in”—like a bra! We’ll look at witches and Amazons, next, as a particularly “phallic” hauntology (of war) to use during revolutionary cryptonymies.

(artist, colors: Hellica-Ordo)

“With a Little Help from My Friends”; or, Out of this World, part one: What Are Rebellion, Rebels, and Why (feat. Amazons and Witches)?

“Sir,” she said, “I think you are a very bad wizard.”

“And you,” he answered, stung, “are only a caricature of a witch.”

—Elphaba Thropp and the Wizard of Oz, Wicked (1995) 

Rebellion, as monstrous-feminine, is easily commodified to gentrify capital, so we will need to be careful with how to proceed. As stated, part one will articulate what rebellion is, followed by what a rebel is and why they do what they do—then take a break to discuss modules and criminality (with several performative examples: Samus Aran, but also the Wicked Witch of the West).

As this involves satire as something that is modular and intratextual (diegetic), intertextual, metatextual and paratextual, I feel like we should give an example of that; i.e., the Amazon or the witch as something to spoof, revere and wear like a costume making fun of itself (and its palimpsestuous source materials) all at once. Selected at random, the example I’ve chosen is Venture Bros. (2003):

(exhibit 34a1b2b2a1a1a2: Source, left: Reference Emporium; source, right: Sex ‘n Sexy. Like me, other sex workers are masters of multimedia—specifically of deception and disguise, working on multiple stages with multiple costumes [of the femme-fatale Amazon masquerading as a gymnast] during an endless framed narrative [of people playing as actors, adding to the meta conversation] to fend off unwanted advances and attain elusively consensual and wanted ones through the usual fetishes and clichés of the Gothic as a mode of expression; i.e., one whose serious-to-silly satires can hide class character inside the heart-shaped box worn on the sleeve: “I thought the Cold War was over!” / “It live on in my heart, forever!” Class war is like The Goonies [1987], then: “Never say die!” while gooning[1]. This can be Sontag’s “seriousness that fails”; e.g., Tommy Wiseau’s 2003, great-but terrible The Room. Except, rebellion is actively performative. As such, the actively rebellious satirical idea with Molotov Cocktease is she, as a sex worker, can only go to second base—itself both a) a meta statement on sex workers with others, in real life; and b) clever spoof/parody of the “easy” scarlet woman from James Bond [“Pussy Galore”] but also the Communist “spy” that gives power to workers, mid-performance; e.g., Black Book‘s [2009] Rachel Stein; i.e., through ludo-Gothic BDSM as something performed on and offstage, on and offscreen, having power over big dumb himbos like Brock Sampson, but also likenesses[2] of them.

Aka “topping from the bottom,” you alarmists and “doomers” don’t need to fear it [“There, there…”]: Love can bloom on a Communist battlefield! Just not the one prescribed to us by canon! But rebellion is resourceful, being inventive to incentivize through cheap monstrous [and hilarious means] to get you to pay attention; i.e., to stories full of antiwar allegory amid fetishes and clichés; e.g., Metal Gear Solid [1996] as performed in “five” minutes [scout’s honor] by Mega 64 [and no stranger to ludo-Gothic BDSM: Psycho Mantis knows you play “Castlevania“]. In other words, ludo-Gothic BDSM—like all allegory—is performative and meta.)

First, rebellion. Rebellion, as part two showed, is so commonly reduced to dogmatic caricature in service to profit. So what is actual rebellion? Rebellion is dismantling the state to achieve post-scarcity using Gothic poetics (while fending off weird canonical nerds colonizing the lesson). Except, we only have the past to refer to—from cavepeople’s paleolithic history and Indigenous cultures past and present, to Communists who capital has tried to erase through the usual “vote with your wallets” bullshit: the box office. This erasure’s reversal is easy enough to illustrate. First, we’ll reiterate our previous arguments, then give an example that makes our argument through itself: in the present as a living document (one composed of likenesses we gravitate towards relative to our own repressed feelings and tastes as “never seen,” but familiar through other copies, of copies, of copies).

To reiterate, Communism is already held ransom by cartoon copycats of itself; i.e., canon making the usual bloody “Great Red Spot” of the Communist refrain a big-ol’ target on our back (the process of abjection, which extends to suicidal Nazis using the same color scheme [red and black] to weaponize the fascist aesthetic as a point of practice per cosmetics: the context of obscurantism). Gothic empowerment, then, is rooted in “disempowerment” as something to reenact through ironic forms (the ghost of the counterfeit). This applies to any psychosexual/asexual act doubling as an artistic statement; i.e., our sexuality and its gendered, monstrous expression as something to perform, identify with, and express using: our bodily autonomy and ability to make porn through art (or vice versa) that speaks to these things in defiance of the state dividing them. Except it doesn’t have to be a verbal/orthographic statement nakedly spelled out, because a) camp works through theatre as frequently non-verbal; and b) illustrating mutual consent works through its ironic context at any volume as something that speaks for itself when properly understood—the fact that it, like any (a)sexual exchange, was negotiated ahead of time; i.e., the power thus value of medieval poetics translates to labor value as expressed in highly theatrical forms that, at the same time, meet various important needs; e.g., catharsis through the confrontation of generational/systemic trauma, but also empowerment according to an uncanny ability to voice our concerns (and ability to live without the state) in the process: camping canon. Sometimes it’s a mask, a censor bar, or some combination thereof: teasing the goods but hiding them—social-sexual agency through liberation’s suggestion in the present space and time; i.e., as code to invite playful rebellion; e.g., lipstick and lingerie, etc, exposed as the “scarlet woman” might for those who know to coming knocking about…

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Two, rebels—i.e., what are they (echoing ICP’s amazing “Miracles” [2009]: “Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work? And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist; y’alls lyin’ [the Cartesian creed in action, serving profit] and getting’ me pissed!”)? Volume Zero has already demonstrated camping canon with my friend and muse, Blxxd Bunny. Per the above paragraph, then, I want to demonstrate the utility and productiveness of my arguments using them, but also a different (and more recent) example—not Hannah-Freya Blake from “Medieval Expression, part one,” nor Cuwu or Autumn Ivy from part two, but a sex worker I’m friends with relative to a shared passion project: Harmony Corrupted! Hannah and I might be comrades at face value; Harmony and I are comrades in praxis, getting capital lowkey shook[3] (“You can’t handle the truth!”).

Harmony Corrupted is another of my muses and friends. Just as the Gothic is concerned with shelter and protection, though, this is what Harmony paradoxically provides, mid-rebellion; i.e., per the classic paradox of the Gothic as reanimation, which is acquired through performative-praxial tension of medieval devices and aesthetics: paintings that are “alive,” that speak and move around without actually doing so through warring ideas that don’t stay put; they get up and move around thanks to rebellious workers. It might seem immobile or superstitious, but can move (thus raise) mountains and castles without lifting a finger. Harmony’s “fatal portrait” is one such example. Yet while her presentation is visually immediate in a dangerous sense, her “enslavement” by wearing the collar—and the fetishizing clothing and dark (alien, badass, cool, etc) aesthetic—is deliberate, campy and fun; i.e., the nun-like outfit locked in between sacred duty and secret desire, its owner’s face ahegao (death/rape face) per a choker that seems to “throttle” them only at the quickest of glances (re: Dennis Cooper’s necktie from Frisk):

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

The idea is to protect her (and by extension, the viewer) from the state as Gloria Gaynor does; i.e., through danger disco, by illustrating mutual consent through appreciative peril during Gothic counterculture’s usual medieval tendencies weaponized for workers by workers; e.g., Harmony showing off and me exhibiting her work while explaining it. So, caught between suspended sexual tension and veiled threats of “danger” (for the viewer canonically tempted, and the artist exposing themselves), Harmony seems to skillfully yet artlessly[4] cry out, “Oh, no! I’m naked, exposed and look like a naughty-let-modest slut who’s asking for it, someone who’s already collared and can’t see! Help, help! Just anything could happen to little ol’ me by any ol’ passerby!”

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

This is no accident. All at once, these photos (taken from different sets speaking to a ludo-Gothic BDSM theme) seem to plead against discovery, capture and torture, yet paradoxically demand to be found, to be witnessed “in peril” instead of rescued as already under someone’s power—Harmony’s; i.e., she is in control the entire time: not because the viewer won’t hurt her, but because they literally cannot. “You won’t hurt me, will you?” Harmony seems to goad, playfully teasing further insofar as all of these items (and their present usage) hint and play at something that—under mutual consent—is completely impossible: rape. The above combinations (and prior exhibits) present Harmony’s “rape” (deprivation of power to cause harm) as a classic case of calculated risk to admire for its courage and ability across the Gothic mode. Actionable, negotiated consent is beautiful—is the exhibit hence the point of what we’re trying to say with Gothic poetics[5] when standing up for ourselves against the state: “We don’t need you! Look what could be—a better world, and one without you!” But per the canonical language of war and rape (sex and force), Gothic cryptonymy remains part of a vital need: to lie to the state through Trojan maneuvers precisely because they always operate in bad faith; i.e., consenting to them is consenting to slavery thus amounts to a win-lose (and ultimately a lose-lose when the state dies).

In turn, the vivid language of war—of castles and sieges—paints both a pretty and straightforward picture regarding what to do and not do while also taking the duality of human language into account. Let the right ones into your “castle” and win-win, regarding whatever your combined hearts desire; let the wrong ones in and suffer Capitalism the Great Destroyer as usual, and whereupon genuine consent (and everything associated with it) becomes not just an alien myth (the Medusa) but a forgotten memory. Per the Gothic, its fading dream must be revived in oft-surreal ways while inside capital; i.e., as a rigged game normally weaponizing shelter harmfully against us (we’ll explore this revival more in “Derelicts, Medusa, and Giger’s Xenomorph” in Volume Two, part two), often as literally toy-like; e.g., the derelict from Alien being a funerary dumping ground on par with the Island of Misfit Toys from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer[6] (1964). This crisis must be subverted to expose the true menace, often through the animated miniature: as something to invoke to achieve bizarre comparisons via jarringly non-fatal nostalgia. Such comparisons and conversations only come up if a given miniature (a portrait, effigy or suit of armor, etc) gets up and starts to move around—in short, when it appears where it shouldn’t but seem to have “grown legs” (or, if having them, is suddenly able to use them).

Per my book, the above example of actionable rebellion with Harmony arranges, and is arranged by, two artists working in concert to make a larger pro-worker statement—one authored through informed, routine exchanges of money, permission, labor and materials: as part of a larger ongoing (multi-volume) project meant to encapsulate consent in an actionable mythological refrain; i.e., an artistic movement captured in small, its organized-yet-playful fashion attained with Gothic poetics. Piece by piece, they complement a larger praxial whole that, like a Gothic castle, is built brick-by-salacious-brick, mid-synthesis (through good habits): consent as an old friend made strange (alien) to us by the state. The state, in turn, is mighty and we’re stronger together if we unite against them by inspiring each other in the process; i.e., while routinely asking for permission, thus communicating openly (with each other) as a matter of principle: by collectively synthesizing not just monsters, but intersectional solidarity through an artistic movement actively and consciously progressing towards a post-capitalist world using pre-capitalist poetics (“darkness visible”) in an early-modern (Gothic) way. Simply put, it’s adaptive and cumulative.

Three, why rebel? Me, in response: “As the chicken crossing the road does—to get to the other side (of development)!” The state lies to rape and kill for profit, abusing Gothic poetics to disguise, defend and advertise this fact as process as a complicitly cryptonymic one (and the other canonical doubles during oppositional praxis). That’s all canon is: copies of copies challenging proletarian versions in dualistic (often sexy and “dangerous”) language. You won’t get very far if you don’t learn to recognize and play with that!

(source, collage: Beard Bears’ “Evolution of Dark Link & Shadow Link in Zelda Games (1987-2021),” 2022).

All of this sits at the heart of Sex Positivity’s underlying message, one whose essential subtext supplies the dialectic of the alien—and in turn the fetishes and aesthetics of death, unequal power and alienization—an important air of irony completely absent from state-sanctioned forms; i.e., the bourgeoisie and their proponents functioning as the usual slavers/settler-colonists of nature: posturing in bad faith as “heroic (monomythic) liberators” while marketing (and profiting from) a body’s sexuality as biologically essential, force-linked to gender and made in constant forced competition, scarcity and consent, etc (the trifectas and monopolies).

As such, any “rape/death” fantasies and performance/play that we produce are dialectically-materially ironic, thus actually able to empower the subject by making them feel in control through calculated risk; i.e., psychosexual theatre and ludo-Gothic BDSM as a campy monstrous means of isolating trauma: as something to confront, negotiate and play with/gossip about (angrily or not) without the state’s “help” (menticide). In other words, “There’s no universal ‘other’ that ‘your’ so-called ‘shelter’ needs to protect us from; we make our own to protect us (and our bodies, labor and art, etc) from you, your prison, your lies.” In exchange, the state, will, per its own heteronormative/Cartesian binaries, automatically see us as a threat to the status quo—to the nuclear unit and the sanctioned order of sexual labor—precisely because our unbridled creativity threatens them by merely existing. It is alien to them per their designs, which reflect back onto them through what we show them, and which they will do anything to abject, thus remain in control of what they have no right to. It becomes a meme, borrowed from older images that may have been unironic once (e.g., Venture Bros. was originally a spoof of Jonny Quest (an old [1964] Hanna-Barbera cartoon with white-savior [thus settler-colonial, abject, Orientalist] tendencies) but, in our capable hands, become ironic through performance as hermeneutic, meaning “interpretative ipso facto“: pussy (on the chainwax) hocus-pocus!

(source: Reddit[7])

I want to close out the subchapter with the fun (and important) part: meeting rebels. Again, this includes how to meet them, what inspired us to meet them, and what carries on as all of this repeats into the future (so long as workers and the state exist). To that, I want to give several exhibits that speak to real life as exchanged between and engaged with different cuties—about twenty pages’ worth, concerning Harmony Corrupted to a greater extent, and an exhibit dedicated to Blxxd Bunny (exhibit 34a1b2b2b). Then we’ll proceed onto modularity and monster classes in the next subchapter before ending Volume Two, part one.

Before talking about meeting cuties to rebel with, though, I want to give a Venus-twin (slightly smaller) fourteen-page note about modules and criminality and how it effects all parties involved through two examples of our monstrous-feminine policed under capital as phallic woman/vagina dentata, “walking hysteria castle,” wandering womb, bicycle face, what-have-you (we are legion, motherfuckers): Samus Aran (the Amazon) and Elphaba Thropp (the witch) as “straddling the broom” of oppositional praxis. This is important; Gothic media is generally not something you can divorce from this aesthetic and still exhibit it—in short you need someone to play the whore, the dragon, the knight, etc, during ludo-Gothic BDSM as something to make sex-positive (“‘Contemplate this on the treat of woe,’ nerds”) within capital; i.e., through the usual monster-girl venues of exploitation tied to Halloween as a cyclical cycle of Cartesian profit harvesting and abjecting nature personified (a profitable scheme, such as the monstrous-feminine yields certain go-to favorites; e.g., slutty-badass witch rehashed for fear-fascination with the ghost of the counterfeit, privatizing nature-as-monstrous-feminine as the Art of Elisa does, below): not pussy on the chainwax, but simply in chains (“Yep! I’m the witch! So scary [kill me]…)!

(artist: the Art of Elias)

To that, capital always has things of order and things not of order that, by virtue of Cartesian thought, lump the latter class of oddities together (so-called “emergent beings”) to receive state violence mid-conflict, mid-opposition; i.e., the state is an alien mothership/Great Destroyer insofar as the elite always: a) self-project onto an imaginary displaced alien scapegoat, or b) frame regular disaster as a mystery tied to individual bad actors at home (“bad apples” being fruit from the poison tree). This all applies to monsters being a broader language type, but does (as we shall see) manifest differently and between undead, demonic and animalistic modules that often intersect as alien, draconian beings; i.e., how they manifest and operate, be that feeding, shapeshifting and/or exchanging forbidden knowledge, etc, to speak to sexual/gendered labor concerns under police violence.

As such, capital frames us, the monstrous-feminine, as alien homewreckers that it, the state-as-alien, will punish on principle to exploit nature as required. Anything that challenges this scheme is criminalized; i.e., becomes one-in-the-same with the dragon normally being slain, except token agents are forced to walk the tightrope as sex worker (which is criminalized by virtue of it being monstrous-feminine) and soldier/token cop (so-called “men’s work”); e.g., Samus Aran, but really anyone who fails to perfectly adhere to the “modest” side of the damsel/demon or virgin/whore binaries: Ridley’s a sassy slut, and bitches get stiches (in “boss” language, I liken this to two basic types in Volume Zero: the dragon lord and the Archaic Mother—exhibit 1a1c): except the “final boss” of The Wizard of Oz is a green-skinned “dragon lady” (with Elphaba being an intersex creature who was born under a “bad” sign: the clock of the Time Dragon[8])

By comparison, the work that Harmony and I do subverts sex and force in ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., whose medieval refrains metabolize the usual canonical elements—the damsel, dragon, dungeon, rescue, etc—to yield healthier doubles that, in turn, alter the system as something to perceive differently by changing it and vice versa. To that, someone like Samus provides an interesting counterpoint, insofar as she’s strong in ways the state generally tries to weaponize (the Amazon) in ways that Harmony exudes differently than, which the state also tries to capitalize on (the whore, the demon). Generally the Amazon and the whore are divided by a very thin line, and within a dogmatic paradigm that values psychosexual violence; in short, it eroticizes rape dressed up as “medieval.”

To this, the female actor can actively suit up and, armored, become ready to “play Beowulf” for the state. Except, this remains a problem; i.e., the heroic refrain itself is sexually dimorphic and biologically essentialized—men being central to heroic action as romancing the sword, gun (or some such phallic weapon) as penetrating into Hell: the source of such as something to bring back, along with the woman as rescued; i.e., she’s classically an afterthought, a prize to be won by the state’s masculine step-and-fetch-it playing assassin, rescue operative, retriever of lost goods, territory and so on. The catch, here, is the princess often being a native to Hell as criminalized: a dark queen who isn’t going anywhere, and to which Hell is something she embodies in ways the state can both a) not tolerate, and b) must essentialize to keep the gravy train rolling. For the elite, “sex sells” is “easy money” provided it doesn’t threaten state power as patriarchal; e.g., tokenized lesbians (with Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt, being a classic example); i.e., there must always be a pimp, regardless if they’re onscreen or not.

To that, Samus—a female Great Destroyer (note: always killing planets)—must always answer to a man (and generally was controlled by men and boys as the game’s target audience, trumping tokenized women as a secondary consideration). But, as anything that threatens this monomythic refrain is just another dragon, her position (“job security”) lives on borrowed time insofar as Capitalist Realism relies on girl bosses to serve far more temporarily[9] as enforcer educators/military governesses (e.g., Lady Jessica from Dune [1965] a Bene Gesserit ninja-witch made to coach her poor stupid son, grooming him as the universal super being [the “kwisatz haderach” being a cautionary tale/critique of Nietzsche’s Übermensch as made unironic by fascist forces] to conquer the universe, becoming yet-another-emperor through Orientalist revenge serving white needs[10]). This only lasts until capital decays; re (from Volume Zero):

Under Capitalist Realism, Hell is a place that always appears on Earth (or an Earth-like double)—a black fortress threatening state hegemony during the inevitable decay of a colonial body. Its widening state of exception must then be entered by the hero during the liminal hauntology of war as a repeatable, monomythic excursion—a franchise to subdue during military optimism sold as a childhood exercise towards “playing war” in fantastical forms; e.g., Castlevania or Metroid. Conjure a Radcliffean menace inside the Imperial Core, then meet it with American force.

Threatened, the state always responds with violence before anything else. Male or female, then, the hero becomes the elite’s exterminator, destroyer and retrieval expert, infiltrating a territory of crisis to retrieve the state’s property (weapons, princesses, monarchic symbols of power, etc] while simultaneously chattelizing nature in reliably medieval ways: alienating and fetishizing its “wild” variants, crushing them like vermin to maintain Cartesian supremacy and heteronormative familial structures […] Neoliberalism merely commercializes the monomyth, using parental heroic videogame avatars like the knight or Amazon pitted against dark, evil-familial doubles—parents, siblings and castles (and other residents/residences)—in order to dogmatize the player (usually children) as a cop-like vehicle for state aims (often dressed up as a dated iteration thereof; e.g., an assassin, cowboy or bounty hunter, but also a lyncher, executioner, dragon slayer or witchfinder general “on the hunt,” etc): preserving settler-colonial dominance through Capitalist Realism by abusing Gothic language—the grim reaper and his harvest. [… I.e.,] convince the hero that a place away from home is home-like; i.e., the thing they do not actually own being “theirs” (the ghost of the counterfeit) but “infested” (the process of abjection). Then, give them a map and have them “clean house”—an atrocious “fixer” out of the imaginary past who repairs the “broken” home room-by-room by first cleansing it of abject things “attacking it from within,” then disappearing with the nightmare they constitute (source).

This canonical reality yields a bevy of problems. Not only does Samus’ bulky, castle-like suit/weapons (and similar examples) function in service to capital by crowding everything else out during crisis (similar to castle-sized, fuel inefficient cars in Ozzie during the ’70s Oil Crash leading to fascist escapist fantasies for their expensive toys: Mad Max), but such an enforcer treats anything different as “other”; i.e., a dragon to slay! And to top it all off, once she does, she will be expected, as is tradition, to strip the armor off for a Male Gaze: as lucrative in part of the same genocidal scheme! Kill the dragon; show me your “dragon”/let me into your “Castlevania,” etc.

Except problems always mirror their solutions, in the Gothic. By comparison, Harmony and I (the artist and the muse, the “master”[11] and the apprentice) subvert these harmful dogmatic elements by treating the dragon as something to hug and love amid the presence of unironic slayers trying to rope her (regardless of form) into the same capitalist model: slavery through a monomythic refrain, meaning “nature is other” insofar as the alien fetish is categorized through stigma animals (e.g., spiders, below) that double as undead and demonic scapegoats for state enforcers to mark and slay by proxy—i.e., the marking of Medusa as “bad girl,” generally in every social-material aspect of a woman’s existence. There’s nowhere for her to go, so she must subvert her monstrous-feminine prison by wearing it differently than canon prescribes; i.e., through performative context as something to capture on-camera and metatextually between actors, texts and exhibits: sometimes with clothes, sometimes not, sometimes in between!

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

In defense of ourselves, then, we must take what’s given to us at birth and play with it as Harmony and I do: during ludo-Gothic BDSM, in the presence of settler-colonial/monomythic trauma, as a surface sexually changed with “danger” (rape) as promising the potential for change under duress. This involves written stories, thus technology—specifically language in linguo-material forms—as monstrous, alien; i.e., Gothic poetics; e.g., monsters as dolls, likenesses, food to ingest, lessons to learn through needing to eat, sleep, fuck, survive. Survival requires play to unlearn state dogma given to us as children (“And how do children learn?” Sandy Norton asked me once. “They play!”). To survive and escape capital, then, we must learn to play as Gothicists once did: with ourselves as alien, fetishized, and medieval; i.e., to put things together to see what fits even when they seem like they might not—an act of understanding through assembly that appeals to our basic human rights. Capital sexualizes everything; liberation, I’ve also discovered, occurs through sex as an artistic (thus partly ace) performance. Anyone can do it because we’re all human, can all make art in different forms and functions. All that matters is form follows function as proletarian, thus sex-positive, during ludo-Gothic BDSM.

Something to remember as well—and across all media, not just videogames—is that content doesn’t automatically equal criticism but can still be gay and educational (e.g., Cheese’s[12] “I Ranked EVERY Star in Mario 64. Bad Idea,” 2024); i.e., a subversive potential that overlaps with the regular monetization of speedrunning (and its documentation and closeted-Nazi potential; e.g., Summoning Salt and Karl Jobst[13], respectively) as something to popularize for profit, thus merch, videos, porn. When approached as canon, it becomes blindly self-referential and employed towards unproductive labor fostering praxial inertia. The same concept applies to ludo-Gothic BDSM. There is no outside of the text, meaning we must critique extratextual problems (Capitalism and its genocidal myopia) mid-poiesis as always engaged with media, mise-en-abyme. Per the Gothic, this doesn’t preclude morbid curiosity; it encourages it through play with villains, sometimes literally as them (vice characters) onstage. Under optimal conditions, it enters a flow state; we become like a well-oiled machine, being handed tools and parts by assistants, but also one’s surroundings as assistant-esque (the algorithm); i.e., one’s surroundings become inspiration, weaponized.

Mid-flow-state, our own psychomachic dialogs don’t presume to talk down to others in good faith, but we will happily lecture, embarrass and otherwise hector those posturing as “benevolent” (re: Jobst) or “dangerous” to the Western hegemony (re: Zizek) while, point-in-fact, becoming hopelessly accommodated by them to infantilizing extremes (re: Jordan Peterson) that play the same game turning them into compulsive liars. Every word out of their mouths becomes a lie; cracks start to show in their perfect masks, and they become infantilized and geriatric: violent, fractured, abusive clowns (a nightmarishly Freudian psychosis, like Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet [1986]: “Baby wants to fuck!”); i.e., going to bat for the state (which is why Zizek couldn’t attack Peterson during their so-called “debate”; he was guilty of the same obscurantist/apologetic bullshit). In historical terms, we want to “denude the philosopher,” exposing “Aristotle” as “Alexander” by riding him like an ass, Phyllis-style, but also Diogenes (which had a habit of masturbating in public, it must be said); e.g., in sex-positive doubles of their fictional counterparts; i.e., Elphaba Thropp (Glinda was basic).

Regardless of our age, we can use monsters, castles, and the repetitive, fragmenting language of war (re: mise-en-abyme) to camp canonical, classic forms that lead to genocide. We can build communities to our weirdness and people show up to the ghosts of that and resurrect them (whereas the Straights[14] just try to force people to have sex/make “content” to profit them); these become calls to answer and signs to follow (and follow and follow…) to destinations of an indeterminate origin, time and location, but also duration that builds and rises until it stops, leaving a spectral trail of partial-likenesses and wordy wreckage in its wake (the symbol remains, but in pieces you have to chart again using pilfered gear already stolen).

This pertains to praxis as a half-real affair—of the Gothic as expressed during liminal expression as both made from whole cloth and speaking truth to power (and “truth” from power in response[15]). The best lies mix truth into them; e.g., phobias mixed with witches to hunt, then make into state zombies[16] that triangulate against state enemies through stochastic terrorism; i.e., TERFs serving as something we’ll return to in Volume Three: witch cops saying unironically “I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog too!” When playing as witches, we a) change with the times to adapt with the times, but b) never ever want to be—as the kids say—”mid” (average). Judases are average, and TERFs are mid, posers; we’re the real deal, kids (we hold and hit those high notes/don’t fake our orgasms)!

To free a witch, you must find her and play her yourself, starting with the classics. Speaking of, may as well learn from the best. Let’s take a peek under the OG witch’s brim, shall we? Why is the Wicked Witch zombie green?

(exhibit 34a1b2b2a1a1b: “I may be bad, but I feel good!” Our resident alien/queen bitch [fun fact: the witch in The Wizard of Oz was originally supposed to be Hollywood glamorous (not that I ever thought Margaret Hamilton was ugly—a handsome-ass divorcé, to be sure)—a history you can see in just about any rendition as, pardon the expression, “butterface”: big noses hinting at the anti-Semitic origins of canonical witch myths[17]; i.e., something to subvert musically in shows like The Worst Witch[18] [1986] and gentrify again with the Harry Potter franchise sans music[19]]. Monstrous-feminine are always fash-adjacent and undead because capital will always triangulate them against labor in bad faith.

But luckily we can just reclaim that critical bite through our own interrogation’s iconoclastic, campy performances; i.e., we take the torture dungeon and its aesthetic [whatever the material or color scheme] back from capital and its stereotypical, profit-driven embodiments. Fascists are zombies because the state turns them into unthinking slaves that defend capital in decay; Communists are zombies because we—like Frankenstein’s Creature—live consciously with trauma as a part of who we are [for a recent critique of the zombie story that humanizes it, consider Dominic Mitchel’s 2013 In the Flesh[20]].

To that, people forget [thanks to Capitalism and dogma] that fear is an argument. It needn’t be dogmatic to serve the state by assigning violence [the process of abjection] but can employ the same theatrics’ oscillating binaries to achieve a gradient of monomorphic expression—of undead sexual and gender liberation. This reversal happens through the same theatrical gimmicks as interpretative relative to an audience conditioned to receive them dogmatically or not—in short, through canon or camp working with the same symbols to achieve different, diametrically opposed ends: liberation and enslavement of the zombie, which our Wicked Witch mostly definitely is [though she’s allergic to water for some reason]: a hungry bitch for those ruby slippers [originally silver in the book but red looks better on Technicolor and helps Dorothy literally stand apart from the Tinman—whose heart was also red, of course].

By the same flexible logic, someone can play the witch as the polar opposite of Dorothy [the witch’s name being “Theodora” in Oz, the Great and Powerful: as a Lilith-esque inversion of “God’s gift,” making “Dorothy” Raimi’s “Eve” inside the Baum mythos] to achieve her own desired results with the wardrobe change: exposing the Wizard and his illusions/servants as perfidious and bourgeois humbugs behind the curtain. Non-binarism [and other GNC ideas] generally work within binaries enslaving them to achieve liberation; The Wizard of Oz is a queer classic because its class character is very queer and unconcerned with profit as an accidental result; i.e., the studio tortured everyone involved, but especially Judy Garland, and the film itself was a box office bomb that only saw a revival on television over a decade later to become beloved for its magical realism as queer-friendly by virtue of the interpretative context as staged [a Broadway-style musical with rainbows in it and crossdressing furries] happening between the story and the audience. To that, the rainbow is the curtain; i.e., as something that, through the usual restless labyrinth’s cryptonymies, serve during a group[21] production to hide and show things only as a rainbow can. Rebellions really are gay! 

This wasn’t the first filmed telling of The Wizard of Oz [though it was the first in-color cinematic version] and Frank Baum had written multiple other books at this point. But a rebellious interest in the film took hold here and specifically here because of the story’s queer potential as set within exploitation as a regular mode of expression, for or against its own dogma in popular fiction; i.e., both the movie and the book are essentially a witch hunt [taking another half century before Gregory Maguire, a gay man, would write Wicked from the witch’s perspective—more on that in Volume Three] but it didn’t stop all the people normally treated like monsters [fags] from doing an old theatre-house classic: falling in love with the monsters they saw in front of them [trauma-bonding: “It ain’t easy bein’ green!”]. Is that really so hard to believe? Most queer people are indifferent about Dorothy as the goody-little-two-shoes; everyone roots for the witch [a total baddie with the best lines: “How ’bout some fire, scarecrow!” Fucking metal].

By extension, the usual fairytale escape became the “head canon” of rebellion as something to do in all the usual ways—with makeup, clothes and props, etc, making gender trouble; i.e., to imitate in undead rebellious forms of subterfuge through disguise as showy and vivid: costumes as a kind of gender identity that had evolved to account for trans expression. Except by 1965, said evolution would have occurred during the Civil Rights movement, free love movement/sexual revolution, flower power, anti-war movements regarding Vietnam, as well as the official codifying of the words “transgender” and “transsexual” into medical parlance in ways that started describing people—not as diseases tied to their biology [as “homosexual” would have, in 1870]: “a species and juridical process,” as Foucault puts it in A History of Sexuality, Volume One—but a classification with more sex-positive connotations/potential that kept the monstrous-feminine attire as carryovers from older more bigoted days; i.e., a heirloom “sword” that stopped killing us, instead “slaying” for us, the wretched, like Zorro [that’s my head canon from now on: Elphie is like Zorro—a swashbuckling Amazon whose woman-of-the-people role upends Samus’ canonical one: being the Galactic Federation’s good little war bitch].

[artist: Persephone van der Waard] 

Over time, The Wizard of Oz has become a queer benchmark. Of course, we take all of this for granted now. But back then it was evolving into itself in ways that still aren’t crystalized. In other words, all of this development [as an actionable idea/aesthetic] happened in spite of the elite because they aren’t great and wonderful. Like Baum’s satirical double [the story’s hot-air balloon being a metaphor for Kansas politicians: “full of hot air”], they lacked the kind of control studios have now relative to technology as different. But the same monopolies now are just as impossible relative to the witch as dualistic; i.e., as something that speaks to our struggles even when treated as the usual scapegoat that TERFs love: to see themselves as the universal victim—a zombie attacking other minorities as the state’s good little monstrous-feminine. We want to take the sexually-charged surface of the witch’s green skin and black, badass, Destroyer-themed dress and make it our Aegis to wield, speaking classically to children through music and song to extend our hexes to a very nude sort: nudely rebellious, threatening “rape” but also the temptation [and allure] of sweet, sweet freedom [of sex, gender and everything in between]. Sound familiar? Elphie’s not just Mary Poppins from Hell; she’s the Great Depression’s revived rockstar zombie—a Gene Simmons simulacrum [also a zombie] repeatedly dug up towards the 1990s and beyond. She’s not just a zombie, then, but the hot, forever-single teacher helping little kids who feel gay find closure “over the rainbow.”

Is it cliché and fetishized? Pray tell, what isn’t, in the Gothic? As the place that lives forever inside the Young At Heart—where all queer people retreat to find escape from evil men—Elphie’s been made into a die-hard icon by people like us across space and time [my version, above, combining the Samus-style Amazon with the classic musical form]. She’s our sexy role model—the person we want to fuck and want to be[22] showing us to stand up to singular interpretations of dogma, of ways to exist beyond the normal zombie/witch as toxic [the witch’s green skin isn’t the problem, but the state punishing and hunting her for it]—someone to keep in our hearts regardless of age. To quote Maguire himself: “Elphaba lives!” Long may she reign.)

(artist: Amber Harris)

I’d like to expand on witches as a class of monstrous-feminine, if I may. Witches, like all monstrous-feminine, take many forms. Whatever their appearance, old-school stage theatre is meant to communicate quickly and loudly with purely one’s body, voice and costume; Elphaba is a vice character, meaning her stormy surface is charged with raw, palpable force and unbridled sexual energies, summoning and showcasing immodest exposure of the body and/or feelings as caustic rebellious code; e.g., music that challenges men (Cardi B’s “WAP” [2021] being a good[22a] example of throwing men off-balance; i.e., through the frank, unapologetic discussions exposing the genitals or genital-adjacent topics, normally bedridden [thus invisible] and tied to bodily functions exclusive to uterus-having people to, pardon the expression, rub men’s faces in). Along with the sonic aspects of music are the visual gestures; e.g., a rockstar’s phallic analogs (microphones and mic stands; long fingers, tongues, nails, and guitar necks, etc), tight provocative clothes, and crude hand signs/magic gesticulations (ahegao/funny faces, crotch thrusts, twerking and serpentine wiggling [“playing the cello”] and so on) made not by a male sex symbol but a freaky monstrous-feminine one (for a nice AMAB, non-white version, refer to Lil Nas’ “Call Me by Your Name,” 2021): “love you,” “goat horns,” “hang loose”/”call me” and “the shocker” (“two in the pink, one in the stink, thumb for the clit”).

Vice characters like Elphaba are lightning rods; i.e., inconvenienced by station and accident of birth—indeed, persecuted in spite of them. She’s born different in multiple ways, and similar to the Creature is empathetic through abuse that makes her want for revenge against the so-called “do-gooders” of the world; i.e., those who act holier-than-thou but in truth are merely con men having hoodwinked the public and entrenched themselves in the halls of power (aka establishment politicians)! They’re pulling the strings of persecution mania the likes of which harms Elphaba and her friends, to which she cannot let stand. Point-in-fact, she openly hates them, and with good reason: the Wizard isn’t just an illusionist, but a hypocrite colonizer and tyrant. She’s not really the cute sort of witch, then, but the black, pissed-off sort taking no prisoners!

The man-hating dyke is an old queer classic, and emotions in the Gothic/stage theatre are generally color-coded in ways that survive into comics, cartoons and other popular media types; i.e., color has value and taboo qualities. Except, Elphaba has every right to be angry at men, especially powerful white men (what MLK called “white moderates”). But her anger has an equally volatile, traumatized quality that sometimes causes her to self-destruct/alienate herself (a bit like the Incredible Hulk); i.e., through a burden of care commonly foisted onto her by rebellious men (rebellions are classically nurtured by monstrous-feminine agents).

The color-coded elements have their own origins; “green-eyed monster” came from Shakespeare[22b]—with green skin indicative of alienation, decay and punishment (“to be in a pickle” [also from Shakespeare[22c]] meaning a preservation technique, postmortem, ostensibly from having drunk too much alcohol—a classic coping mechanism while alive under duress) but also to be green with poison, venom, and toxins (with myriad pejorative labels like “harridan,” “battle-axe,” “spitfire,” “bitch, “harpy” and “virago” indicating man’s owed/owned property as very much being against the idea to a monstrous, warlike and animal extreme); i.e., envy and resentment (where green seeks red in less of a crossover with vampirism and more of a shared function: freezing and feeding on one’s enemies and friends). Nietzsche called this “ressentiment,” but he was an elitist cunt; our witch is a cackling fire-starter/pot-stirrer full of piss and vinegar (the “strict” dom) for her enemies and (some) sugar (but mostly spice) for her friends—in other words, all the elements of a disgruntled, sassy whistleblower nakedly and openly challenging male power through female inheritance (re: Maguire)! Elphaba’s literally a walking weapon and bullhorn—a more capable hippy with a flamethrower (the Molotov cocktail being a classic, Communist symbol of armed resistance, the fire-breathing dragon a source of vitality and concentrated, organized military power).

(artist, colors: J-Skipper)

Furthermore, witches are often, per the Male Gaze, sexualized to disempower them. In turn, witchcraft is—like women—classically framed by Western (Cartesian) powers as erroneously having two sides; e.g., a good and a bad, a white and a black, a wild and a tame, a virgin and a whore. As a black witch, Elphaba is very much the wild, bad whore doubling the maiden in the state’s eyes, while also standing in as a fierce, uncompromising enby (trans, intersex) protector of those the state exploits—i.e., threatening to spill her guts to expose their whole operation to save her friends. To that, she’s the classic, natural maverick in the state’s eyes, the so-called “terrorist” with oppositional ties to legitimacy (a rival throne, but wanting to redistribute her power) who’s actually a counterterrorist/activist with anti-establishment goals. Unlike fascists (who Michael Parenti in Black Shirts and Reds [1997] calls [with justice] “false revolutionaries“), Elphie (and her likenesses) look cool, fuck big time, and sit on the right side of history! They couldn’t care less about “making it” (assimilation) or punching down (cliques and so-called “mean girl syndrome”), but instead are prepared to go down swinging at their arch nemesis at any moment: the Man (and his proponents) as fat and happy—completely used to browbeaten pushovers and battered housewives, not little troublemakers who’d gleefully take a baseball bat to their head (when I was a kid, I wanted to be Eowyn or Samus; but the more I think about it, if I could be anyone, it’d be Elphaba).

(artist: Amber Harris)

As such, “compromise” really isn’t Elphaba’s style. She evokes the Destroyer/Medusa persona, albeit with a frank, unyielding aim and wily playfulness to build something less tyrannical (taking the goblin’s playful invention as a commentary on counterterrorism resisting further character assassinations: ducking the so-called “teenage phase” and becoming a way of life that doesn’t preclude Young-at-Heart feelings for even the most pained, ostensibly jaded bitches). As such, she comes from relative privilege but isn’t a black capitalist. Rather, because of her iconoclastic education and stances, she remains ostracized, including by members of her own oppressed group: the weird nerd’s weird nerd. Such a gamut of warring variables makes Elphaba a versatile representative; i.e., she commonly works much in the way of the usual comic book/non-parental role model, but for all peoples who are different—both in terms of sex and gender but also origins (foreigners fresh off-the-boat and multi-generation immigrants/multilingual households), religion, weight distribution, profession (sex work) and skin color. In short, she’s Athena’s Aegis with legs and a bad attitude, reclaiming her oppression to weaponize it (again, similar to black people of color using the N-word, queer people using “faggot” and women calling each other “bitch” to reclaim it).

She’s a paradoxical sum of intimidating, hostile, at-times prickly qualities that apply to all oppressed groups who dare to speak out and own them oppression: an offensive, in-your-face fighter—scrappy, upfront, rhythmic, forward and streetwise (sexually aggressive and crude, but delicious; e.g., a pot of “macaroni” to “stir”); loyal, principled, fed-up fierce, sharp; ready to make a scene, throw down, turn you on, etc; i.e., a diplomat of sex and force for workers, no stranger to interrogating and negotiating with power in its rawest forms: a walking work of art, poetry in motion, a killer/surgeon dissection her patient; a dark momma with needs, appetite, vices, and conviction; someone seeking stability through abrasive combative argument, concerned far less with appearing good (quite the opposite) and much more with doing good tied to a fixed moral position critiquing institutional dogma: rights are sacred, not profit nor their anthems (e.g., “Eye of the Tiger” romancing how boxing is a poor man’s sport that forces black men to be dueling thoroughbreds and women to be sex objects in a kayfabe pyramid scheme: “There can only be one!”). Like the Kurgan, she loves battle—slices, penetrates, overwhelms, shocks, awes, entrances, stuns, dodges and twists her adversaries and friends alike (obviously to achieve different results).

(exhibit 34a1b2b2a1a1b2: “I only like Batman for the villains!” A good villain/vice character should mirror the frustrations of their good double—i.e., the protagonist, but also the audience. Per the Gothic, this retains a castle-like concentrism/mis-en-abyme that expresses equally in stage/comic book language as sharing the same mythic formulas and cosmetics. People treated like clowns, goblins, Medusa, dragon women, cyborgs, outcasts and witches reliably “better the instruction” through success being the best revenge: on and offstage as a performance. Per the hard/soft divisions that trauma entails, there is often a hot/cold element; i.e., “resting bitch face” and “psycho hose beast,” “pixie dream girl” [mania] and other such warring emotional states embodied on the surface of the thespian as an extension of their own feelings, the story’s, the audiences, etc.

In turn, they collectively manifest/communicate in the usual body language assisted by props, special effects, makeup and costumes: sex and force conveyed in the Gothic dividing into fantasy and science fiction; i.e., the posthuman speaking to the objectification that occurs during alienation versus the fight for recognition, while magic is basically wish fulfillment. In turn, the Western [frontier narratives] and postcolonial stories are liminal expressions that speak Cowboys and Indians through a subversive, dark-rebel aesthetic and mindset: guns, girls, and familiars that meld technology cybernetically with nature’s fury conjured up to eject colonial forces like a splinter [unwanted penetration of an organism, raping it]. As villains, they antagonize the forces of good [the state] as false, exposing their own hypocrisy while humanizing the villain’s plight through the usual interrogations of generational trauma in universal languages; i.e., theatrically and musically reclaimed from their Imperial doubles: sex and force. 

Capital makes us afraid, leading to death anxiety which requires death masks to perform. In turn, monsters are modular regarding criminality per capital’s universal alienation, fetishization and sexualization as something to endorse or reject on a gradient; re: “Animals embody the canonical language of power and resistance as something to camp through demonic and undead forms.” The language is hybrid and dualistic per dialectical materialism, resulting in chimeric mouthpieces for the oppressed, but also state scapegoats burying the gay during rape play—i.e., literally raping the Dark Mother [the water witch, aka Grendel’s mother as the ancient enemy of Imperial forces, followed by capital and Cartesian thought built on older Imperialism] by humoring such refrains through harmful penetration; e.g., the hero from The Little Mermaid [1991] stabbing Ursula fatally with his mast [a metaphor for the ghost of the counterfeit raped into silence by the ghost ship of European industry and settler-colonialism dressed up as “exploration,” but also “true love”]:

Such villains are popular with marginalized groups because they resist whatever harmful logic the state forces onto them; size queens in more than one sense of the word [queer actors, give and take], they speak to our oppression and liberation, mid-exploitation—i.e., while getting the chance to talk back, give lip, throw sass, and generally throw one’s weight around while vamping it up with ludo-Gothic BDSM. Per the Medusa and the monstrous-feminine, it’s something people love even when they’re not oppressed [the ghost of the counterfeit] and which the state [and its actors; re: Vivienne Medrano] will try to gentrify, objectify or otherwise discredit, silence and assimilate. But again, this isn’t a monopoly. Through this constantly campy rebel mindset [the Satan persona], anything around us becomes a counterterrorist weapon, a guerilla means of liberation that collocates through reliable one-two punches/good habits; i.e., certain words go together and various functions/forms synonymize to flow power in a given direction; e.g., Jadis loved Batman‘s villains and Ursula, so I turned that into yet-another-object lesson to caution against TERFs, SWERFs, and centrism/neoliberalism: rebel-guerilla, anger-Medusa, reclamation and performance, etc, to take Amazons, Medusa, and herbos away from my crazy, abusive ex. “Playtime’s over!”

The Gothic, even when canonized, is useful to exposing and exploiting the enemies’ flaws—through jester-like, intentionally bad interpretive dances, puppetry and acting; e.g., the Skeksis from The Dark Crystal as bad cartoons of capitalist pigs, Nazis, but also the Communist lurking on the surface; i.e., the witch, as canonized and policed by bad-faith performers acting out of routine desperation [re: Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks]: Seladon [whose name closely resembles “celadon,” or a particular shade of green, hinting at her envious nature]. No matter how edgy or rebellious she seems, her act is to police those who would actually rebel, after which she shamelessly bends the knee to state power [mirrored in real life by Hitler being Western Europe’s mad dog—useful until he wasn’t, which Tolkien used to scapegoat the Nazi and essentialize “Goldilocks Imperialism” in his Middle-earth]. Trying to negotiate with a class of people who have total power over her is delusional, Seladon’s feckless cruelty exposed as a farce by the real predators in the room. “So cold-blooded! You could be a Skeksis!” they respond, delighted by her service but encouraged by her submission as enticing them to accelerate their vampiric war of extermination. Pacification is attained through the colonized policing themselves [which extends to fascist ethnostates in real life; e.g., Israel and its own Holocaust denial and war crimes made ostensibly in America’s name, but really taking settler-colonial theory and radicalizing it in practice to threaten the hegemon it claims to serve].

Apart from a multimedia expert, theatre nerd local slut, I’m literally a BDSM, monster and Metroidvania doctor. That means my theory for witches is well-developed, and comes directly from my PhD work [refer to this footnote[20a] for various salient quotes]. Camping the Nazi is just as important as punching them because they often imitate the language of oppression through the aesthetics of power and death to put workers to heel: witches as victimized cops victimized other witches resisting the state. Like Seladon, the practice can be redeemed through an actual reversal towards functional rebellion, mid-performance. The same general idea applies to Elphaba, Ursula, Hippolyta and any witch/monstrous-feminine as paradoxically being both a Nazi, Communist and otherwise “corrupt”/monstrous-feminine force in the shadow zone.

Psychosexuality and the shadow zone are things Volume Zero establishes and writes about a lot, so refer to it for tons more examples and theoretical elements.)

(artist: Amber Harris)

A witch isn’t just a witch, then, but a curious, modular cross oscillating between a vampire, zombie, and goblin. She loves animals, drugs, confrontation, mad science, magic, heavy metal, civil rights and extramarital sex, toys, and contraceptives (the sexual freedom not to have children and enjoy sex purely for pleasure in defiance of state forces/dogma). In short, she’s a sassy spokesperson for alienation, rebellion, sexual health, and rocking out, and is not above getting her frustrations out for all the world to see (going so far as to haunt her enemies after death, Medusa or Pandora-style: “Not even death can save you from me!”). Like solid bop, she’s straight fire that gets you in the mood (to fuck, fight, or both as something to rile up and drive to higher degrees of intensity and passion: “Fuck me like you mean it!”); like a tornado, she’s a force of nature that cannot be stopped, cannot be contained, defeated, or even killed in the rebellious sense. All you can do is get out of her way.

My kinda girl, to be honest (the kind my productive thesis arguments collectively hit upon, but also the repeating canvases of myself and other artists and/or sex workers invigilated here); my kinda power trip (echoing across the Gothic mode’s music, monsters and theatrical materials from Otranto to Chrono Trigger [1995] to piano recitals [e.g., Animalisa Keys’ “Chrono Trigger – Complete Soundtrack on Piano,” 2023] and some such Gothic performance art in the Internet Age using monstrous sex and force to hint at “danger” [quotes optional] and fun, including immense kinds [state shift, aka the end of life as we know it] as Numinous in a palliative way that isn’t capital’s usual myopic Morton’s Fork/centrist dogma). Everyone gravitates to different monsters to embody not just as “content”/dress up but that as satirical, political, rebellious, GNC, and sexily nostalgic all at once (all concepts Volume Three will consider at length)! It’s a veritable monster party/convention to visit and revisit, time and time again! Dress up as whomever you like; hug or fuck whoever you wish provided its consenting (and take photos for memories; they last longer):

(model: Persephone van der Waard [middle] dressed up as Eric Draven, posing for the camera with two cuties at a convention.)

Per the usual commonplace bestiary method, monsters are fun to compile, categorize, and create, patchwork or in whole; per the laws of Gothic attraction stipulate: make it weird (alien), “dangerous” and sexy, and people will investigate/take part. Capitalists cash in on that through systemic abuse; we liberate ourselves through iconoclastic forms. To that, as long as it’s ultimately sex-positive during the battle and after the dust settles, then no harm, no foul!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

The Wizard of Oz takes the usual monomyth and gives it several key twists: one, the Call to Adventure leaves us wanting to stay in Oz (for a fun inversion, Howard the Duck makes the resident alien decide to stay on Earth after being sent there by a freak science experiment[23a]); and two, the little girl meeting her talking-animal friends help her as they all find their true mettle as largely performative, ceremonial. It’s all a sham, one that flips easily on its head, exposing state illusions during iconoclasm: looking at the witch to see why she’s green (undead, alien, fetish and furiously so), realizing the slippers she so desperately wanted were Commie shoes all along! She wanted a home, to fit in despite her trauma, for someone to believe in her and see her as a person instead of a freak, to be called pretty and not have it be a cruel joke (e.g., Gene Wilder to the Creature: “Hey, handsome!”)—something the Wizard routinely denies her by eventually having her assassinated (the real tyrant, more comparable to Louis Carrol’s headhunting Queen of Hearts, versus Elphie as the rebel challenging state figures and power centers: the Wizard and capitol of Oz). To that, you find out who your real friends are when challenging state power through its illusions. Friends are made through theatrical struggle, then, of which iconoclasm informs future battles and future friends based on old tricks leveled against us that we can take and make our own—the Scarecrow’s brains, the Tinman’s heart, the Lion’s noive, and of course, those fabulous fucking shoes (sparkle, bitches!). It’s very gay and Gothic. Lewis would approve. I certainly do (what fag worth their salt doesn’t?)—by reclaiming and owning that green skin as part of the look, the identity, the struggle, but also the hunger (a prime feature of undeath, as the Undead module shall explore in Volume Two, part two)!

So while it’s true that certain phobias stem at least partially from ancient, prehistoric interactions with deadly animals that could kill us in the wild, conflating this basic biological fact through modern dogma built on capitalist forbears modified for profit is the capitalist name of the game. To reveal these utter frauds, it’s best to focus on their “tells” and expand them (“fear is the mind-killer”); i.e., if someone really is as deathly afraid of labor portrayed as monstrous-feminine (undead, demonic and/or animalistic), it behooves us not just to ask why unto itself, but to take advantage and weaponize it against them through class and culture warfare; e.g., a freeze word or phrase that renders them helpless, mid-duel, but also embarrasses them ipso facto; i.e., grown-ass men not only shitting their pants at mythical “spider women,” but having spent their entire lives abusing antiquated Freudian/Jungian psychobabble to foster Red Scare and other moral panics at queer labor action like the Wizard of fucking Oz. Gotta show the world the man behind the curtain, and that’s generally through what they read into (us) as both essential to their rhetoric and completely antithetical to it. A little flash from the Aegis is really all it takes to send their own stupefying illusions back at them! And this, once cultivated, is like Bruce Lee’s emotional content: “it strikes all by itself,” second-nature, united as one.

(source)

That’s all we’ll really have time for, regarding monstrous-feminine examples in this subchapter (the mode is modular for a reason)! My book, in turn, is a coy little toy chest that—in the holistic spirit of things—is a little too full of toys to play with and a little too short of the time required to explore each to the degree that I could (which I leave my readers to do themselves after they throw this book aside and forget about it); e.g., I’m just as likely to refer to Blue Öyster Cult’s Spectres (1977) as I am Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (again, all manner of monster), but am also granting you the chance; i.e., to yeet or yoink your own favorites, mid argument—to make one too many “weird sex metaphors” (as Christine Neufeld said of my work). But isn’t that basically every Gothic novel ever? Getting laid by slaying dragons and playing dress up? We’re all touching upon something greater and older to lead towards something new as founded on these gloomy paradoxes’ choosy arbitration. It’s a heavy load, one I’ve spent this entire volume (and multiple weeks writing from dusk till dawn since late February) storing up; i.e., “ejaculating” metaphorically[23] onto you as a vampiric passing of essence. Witch bukkake!

Whereas killing dragons without irony is “to do a Capitalism,” we’re doing the nasty as liberated from that cycle (and Maguire wasn’t above witch sex, either). All of this dialectical-material oscillation needs people to perform the parts. Despite all this talk of ghosts, then, a production without actors is just a blank stage; we gotta give these ghosts shape, if you follow me. So onto how to meet rebels, what inspired us to meet them, and what carries on as all of this repeats, repeats, repeats—a jouissance that carries Medusa’s message out of the imaginary past into the possible future.

Except—this will be real quick, I promise (one exhibit, three pages)—this begs the question: “Where did all this metaphorical cum come from?” My friends, it came from the muses, of course—my muses, my friends as people I met along the way! I.e., those who take us to Hell and submerge us there, showing us all the secrets normally alien to human existence under capitalist-colored glasses: by “flashing” us, wearing disguises whose revolutionary cryptonymy shows to hide and hides to show as a proletarian counterterror device. They show us the goods, and we advertise them through our reactions, back-and-forth (mine being to ask Harmony if I could use the below image in my book, while also plugging their stuff as I do—note the subtly red lipstick):

(exhibit 34a1b2b2a1a2: Artist: Harmony Corrupted. Communism isn’t defined by red, but often uses it in subtle ways, mid-cryptonomy [to be fair, the lipstick probably won’t be the first or only thing you notice, here]. Said cryptonymy is revolutionary by virtue of function; i.e., as an agent of circumstance who refused to be a victim, instead working their magic to make their enemies poop their pants in public: fascism being a perception of power and legitimacy that falls apart when exposed to what it hates; moderacy an illusion of status-quo benevolence that also falls apart when tone-policing the usual groups they exploit through dogma—sex workers!

To that, red isn’t “just” the color of Communism [though it often is] nor simply the color of sexual arousal, as Jordan Peterson quizzically[24] purports [from Vice’s “Jordan Peterson Is Canada’s Most Infamous Intellectual,” 2018], but certainly something to incite such arousal, mid-rebellion, as an often-asexual [nudist] act; i.e., gender identity and performance as having the potential to arousal others; i.e., without them wanting to or not, but often in spite of them [with Peterson being a die-hard Cold Warrior extending his Red Scare stupidity into quasi-academic legitimacy purported as manna from heaven by weird canonical nerds of his target age: teenage boys]. It bears repeating that rebellion is generally a theatrical device to get a point ipso facto—by virtue of action, those canonized as “female” will be policed if they wear makeup in inappropriate places; i.e., “not for their husband,” tempting their [often-male] bosses, in effect blaming the victim by calling her a whore in so many words.

So we have to ask ourselves, why would someone do it? Wear makeup and clothes? So they’re… not naked and look pretty? The idea that women only wear clothes for attention is to strawman the very spurious claim that they do it for men [or sex] at all; point in fact, they’re often going it for themselves—i.e., they want to play and feel pretty to make statements that become embroiled in largely politics whether the monstrous-feminine party not just woman, but any incorrect marginalized group] wants it, or not. So agency becomes again, a question of concealment to show what is geared to happen regardless to say something about it through the incensed reactions of weird canonical nerds.

Whores get stoned all the time, we might as well look good while doing it. More to the point, we provoke our would-be attackers because they’re going to attack us anywhere they can; might as well have it happen while we’re behind a phone screen or otherwise “in public” where we’re less likely to be raped and killed for it. To say that either cis women queer people [among all oppressed groups] aren’t somehow aware of this reality is absurd; we know exactly what we’re doing and loving every second of it [“smiling at the gods,” as Camus would put it]. Furthermore, the haze of queer existence speaks to the larger portrait of reality you can see in real time: Medusa being shamed. Even when she doesn’t have literally snakes for hair—is relatively modest—she will be battered for showing anything that threats the nuclear model in a phallic sense; re: the scarlet woman, the temptress, the slut, the Medusa.

The idea, in that case, is to provoke in ways that a) are fun according to what we can handle [some people like being cat-called, for instance], b) safe [always take precautions; e.g., avoid doxing and “flash” under safe conditions], and c) intense certain demographics to oust them in public, showing our peers who they are through something they can’t easily hand-wave: their own actions. As such, we show our friends and enemies who our targets [the state and its proponents] are: fascist. They hide not just in the shadows, but among their friends. And this can be very telling by a group reaction, as well—i.e., if you scratch a moderate, a fash bleeds, including the moderate next to them as affronted. Defending Nazis by proxy [calling it “the free market of ideas”] is trademark obscurantism, but also “boundaries for me, not for thee.” The lipstick wearer generating gender trouble is also a de facto educator showing others to learn from theatre as a multi-register/multimedia spectrum of exchanges.

Under these complicated circumstances, its best to pick our own wardrobe, venue and audience to work with while “slaying”; i.e., working it to make money and political statements to actively demask the fash with, thus castrate the state’s classic vigilante arm.)

Friends are things to protect from those the state misleads and victimizes; i.e., menticided through waves of terror until said persons turn coat, becoming class traitors who obey the state’s decree in monstrous-feminine disguise: “You have heart! I’ll take that too!” I loved Jadis as my black knight until I realized they weren’t being ironic, and a) saw me as the thing to take, and b) also take me from me my friends and they from me—to isolate (thus alienate) us from each other while Jadis sang the praises of Joe Biden, J.K. Rowling and Bill Gates. They did so and colonized my work, my praxis, my performance, my life as something to—if they couldn’t take it by guile or brute force—then at least compel to silence (they were Wormtongue as much as a straight-up bruiser, in that respect: opening their mouth to have their mother’s voice come out). So as friends are things to protect, we must do so with the enemy’s most awesome weapon—the dreaded Darkening(!)—as something not just to bounce back at them and nothing else, but absorb and transmute into an empathetic force that blasts them apart! The gentle ones are always the fiercest when you push them too far. So while I can be a good girl to my friends, as I said, I can be a world-ending bitch to protect them using my Aegis as a rare and fatal gift: “Get away… FROM MY FRIENDS!”

Onto part two, “Meeting Rebels; i.e., What Inspires Us to Meet and All of It Carrying On and On (feat. Harmony Corrupted, Jack Burton, and Blxxd Bunny)”!

Footnotes

[1] Masturbation, both literal and figurative, meta; i.e., Professor Lando’s “Gooning Explained” (2024). During capital’s crises of masculinity, weird canonical nerds (usually cis-het men) feel guilty pleasure insofar as sex = surrendering one’s power (often, cum) to a monstrous-feminine as potentially inside themselves. They resort to wishful thinking as a state of grace tied to fatal nostalgia, projecting onto others/the screen (the top-rated comment from Lando’s comment section): “I miss the times where a goon was just a [villain’s] lackey.” Any predictions on what kind of person feels threatened by open sexuality and non-heteronormative gender expression during ludo-Gothic BDSM. I’ll give you a hint: echoes of Bill Gates. Boys are stupid, Venture Bros. teases (“The Boys Never Died,” 2010), prone to embarrassing accidents taught to them by emulating their heroes badly* (e.g., the Batman costume Hank has on while jumping off the roof with an umbrella). So, you wanna get laid, boys? To find your own Molotov Cocktease? Well, you gotta learn to play the game by our rules, chudwads! So enter our “vaults” of forbidden knowledge, our castle-like dungeons if you dare!

*Essentially a Quixotic, Beowulf-style refrain built around profit as heteronormative, thus male-centric (Persephone van der Waard’s “Army of Darkness: Valorizing the Idiot Hero,” 2020).

[2] E.g., Jadis—an absolutely genderfluid herbo—absolutely loved Venture Bros. but couldn’t stand (for) my Commie interpretation of media; they hid it from me so I wouldn’t “ruin” their singular (centrist) interpretation of it. YOU COULDN’T SAVE VENTURE BROS. FROM ME, JADIS!

[3] Canon is absurd, thus lends itself well to camp, thus outrage. Rinse and repeat, girls!

[4] Dalliance evokes Baldassare Castiglione’s art of the courtier as one of nonchalance: “According to the Count, sprezzatura is the most important rhetorical device the courtier needs. Peter Burke describes sprezzatura in The Book of the Courtier as ‘nonchalance,’ ‘careful negligence,’ and ‘effortless and ease.’ The ideal courtier is someone who ‘conceals art, and presents what is done and said as if it was done without effort and virtually without thought” (source: Wikipedia). This is a) generally a skill earned working close to power in ways that, while they don’t go unnoticed, must present themselves as subservient to kingly forces, and able to woo His Majesty’s rapacious advances along with other male members of the court (or jealous female parties); and b) one honed in domestic modern spaces by people abused by the powerful who, post-abuse, communicate wordlessly to others who have been abused. Trauma is nonverbal; i.e., attracts, recognizes and begets trauma without much being said. So does weird to weird, prey to prey and predator to predator (and all of them to one another).

[5] To omit them in bare “Utopian” fashion (re: Jameson’s dismal of the Gothic) is to not only exclude trauma, but place the cart before the horse. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.

[6] The use of stop-motion to animate clay is a very Gothic idea, as we shall see in the “Demons” module in Volume Two, part two; i.e., secularizing the divine by mocking instruments or fixtures of power between the church and state through puppet shows speaking less-than-charitable interpretations of these public figures and their holiness; i.e., as a social-material statement of power—of being badass/god-like but, projections of the numen aside, ultimately are terrestrial and of a human mind (“all deities reside with the human breast”). Gods are badass, as are anything that seems otherworldly to people; e.g., aliens, angels or demons, Amazons, ninjas, etc.

Also, small aside: Santa Claus is Capitalism enslaving nature for the middle class (those poor reindeer—but also ableism, via Rudolph’s magic red nose); our “reindeer games” gotta do better! How’s that for a “war on Christmas”?

[7] The OP writes,

Context: The illustration was drawn to accompany ‘The Devil of Pope-Fig Island’ from the Fables by La Fontaine (1762). Postcards available from the Vagina museum

The Wikipedia entry for ‘anasyrma’ (lifting of the skirt) has a section on the supernatural power of the act:

“Many historical references suggest that anasyrma had dramatic or supernatural effect—positive or negative. Pliny the Elder wrote that a menstruating woman who uncovers her body can scare away hailstorms, whirlwinds and lightning. If she strips naked and walks around the field, caterpillars, worms and beetles fall off the ears of corn. Even when not menstruating, she can lull a storm out at sea by stripping.”

The same idea plays to revolutionary cryptonymy and flashing those with power, exposing their own bigotries and inner hysteria made external for all to see. It’s not just the medieval topos of the power of women and female witches, though, but any sex worker as monstrous-feminine. Sexist men fear what they can’t understand or control (thank Capitalism for that, and the process of abjection). We gotta reverse that with our “Aegis'” cryptonymic potential!

[8] A theatrical site of androgynous vaudeville, in Maguire’s 1995 novel.

[9] Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) shows how sex and force dogmatically project onto a settler-colonial system as extending into myth built on oppression, which collocates sex and war (force) during calculated risk to unironically synonymize them; i.e., so-called “empowerment” fantasies that not only have a paywall, but uphold the status quo as settler-colonial under Capitalist Realism once internalized. The myopia expands, bringing its menticide along for the ride—a real Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, tilting at windmills; i.e., without the sex-positive ironies that GNC fantasies so often have (which are taken and subverted from canonical ones during ludo-Gothic BDSM’s liminal expression, on and on).

The neoliberalized monomyth’s die-hard adherence to Cartesian rhetoric extends this tutelage into the commerce of videogames: so called “built worlds” spawning out of Hell as a cultural refrain, these remain equally finite and conquerable on cartographic refrains; i.e., maps with open and closed spaces (nature and civilization, rural and urban terrain, forests and castles, etc) being chockful of numerable enemies, objectives and prizes. All operate according to Gothic us-versus-them per nature as unruly and alien, needing to be whipped into submission. This happens through so-called “Goldilocks Imperialism” as pioneered by Tolkien, whose outdoors approach survives well into videogames like Konami’s 1989 Castlevania 3 and its various settings set to heroically (violent) spooky music; e.g., “the Mad Forest,” above. All heroes are monsters, which the state pits against each other to profit on worker/nature exploitation. Viewed externally as a narrative of the crypt, capital’s greed (and casualties) stretch on-and-on in an infernal concentric pattern a given text cannot disguise, only treat as a Mandelbrot-style maze or labyrinth to vanquish (akin to the hero punching the walls that encase him—live burial as driven, per the courtly romance, by promises of sex, of elevation of one’s social-sexual standing during a holy crusade against “evil”).

Such interfaces and their recursive, serialized movement through mazes and labyrinths (my specialty) speak for themselves; pastiche is simply remediated praxis in that respect, of capital moving money through nature-as-alien being something to war against forever (using sex and force as driving rhetorical devices, the carrot and the stick). Each entry showcase a given time given a number—i.e., as an essentialized commercialization of a cycle made holiday ripe for fresh slaughter: the American approach to Halloween suffused with moral panic and psychosexual conquest.

In turn, all collectively translate into various Man-Box biases (double standards) and “point systems” bringing down bigger and bigger game (e.g., Gimli and Legolas literally hunting and counting heads during their own extermination-war-in-small at Helm’s Deep, eventually culminating in Legolas taking down the Oliphant [echoes of the barbarian, Hannibal, crossing the Alps] to aggrandize himself at the cost of nature-in-metaphor): war simulators that mirror extratextual parallels; i.e., “Hell” as a place to enter by means of rhetorical war games extending to games as war copaganda; e.g., such unironically piggish antics like “blondes are worth fifty points, anal a hundred,” and “no means yes, yes means anal,” etc. All constitute videogames as canonically settler-colonial police action between civilians, paramilitaries and military forces against nature-as-monstrous-feminine that translate out-of-text in the so-called “real world” as half-real (again, no outside of the text, my dudes). In short, they’re stochastic training grounds to encourage (more often than not) the conversation of young boys (and token players) into cops that police (thus rape) nature by going to war with it, worldwide.

This being said, there’s a canonical intended gameplay (use) versus an iconoclastic, emergent gameplay at work, here. Metroidvania can clearly be enjoyed independent of the profit motive as holy per the Protestant work ethic, but such pernicious factors should—per Sarkeesian’s adage—be considered. Clearly I can do this and still like rape fantasies, mid-Gothic-poiesis. Mine are simply ironic. Man Box rape play isn’t; i.e., the paradox of playing at rape to embody its actualizing is what they’re all about (a fact they must obscure through American Liberalism and fascist obscurantism working together to stymie Communism).

Sexy enemies always translate to “high risk, high reward” in such police schemes; e.g., succubae enemies, but also “sexy armor having high armor class points,” etc; i.e., combat against “worthy” foes is sexy unto itself as rapacious: “You’re big. I’ve fought bigger!” No matter the shape or size (the form) of the monstrous-feminine, it remains a target for the hero (the cop) to lionize through a Cartesian argument (the function), then take pride in vanquishing it. This yields the usual paradoxes of a witch hunt, the “witch” or “dragon,” postmortem, tragically revealed as no more than a teenage girl or person of color, religious minority, neurodivergent or disabled person, etc—all killed by Brave Sir Robin soiling himself when facing the killer rabbit. Such things are profitable under Capitalism and always have been, abjecting the process to the ghost of the counterfeit as something we must denude and dance with.

In turn, Samus is the state’s answer to being unable to provide actual brides to all its war dogs. War becomes their bride; i.e., their girl, their gun: opting for a girl-boss strategy during state decay that, in the same breath, supplies the quintessential Metroidvania baby formula for recursive (ergodic) motion tied to military objectives Man Box children internalize, menticiding them; i.e., a completionist approach that yields myriad subcategories (from “hundo” to Any%) as, you guessed it, translating to real life: infiltrators that invade a queer space in bad faith* to rape and gentrify it. So keep that in mind regarding what we’ve said in the past about speedrunning solutions needing to go beyond their own text/extratextual solutions; i.e., to collectively challenge capital, not pre-approved texts capital supplies like jigsaw puzzles (we’ll apply this to our own lives in Volume Three)!

*I.e., enshittification; e.g., Berlin, then and now. Built on the backs of sex workers and clawed back for capital by fascist pigs, the latter imitate the hauntological copies they counterfeit—the Roman Caesars and Egyptian Pharaohs, etc—as haunted by our spectres these holy men must exorcise. Except, they cannot—cannot escape their sins and the sin of their fathers, father’s fathers, and so on. The whore and demon cannot be killed anymore than these weirdos can purge themselves permanently of their own perverse/police-style sex drives [that would require conscious thought and effort]. We spectral exiles will be waiting for them—Medusa will be waiting for them—when the Imperial Boomerang brings Imperialism home to empire.

Essentially being unable to pay what it owes workers, the state has given them a proxy bride through a videogame avatar players can control, multitasking mid-performance. I’d almost be impressed if it wasn’t so regressive and submissive of the Amazon myth in obeisance to capital; i.e., she’s in the armor but still curtsying to the Man, is just a pretty cryptonym meant to distract/recruit through sex: The Tube’s “She’s a Beauty” (1983) singing “one-in-a-million girls, don’t fall in love!” to comment on the sex work industry as something that translates just as easily to videogames or any other medium. This isn’t to bash Samus—to punch the Nazi she-wolf (which moderate TERFs are, in disguise)—so much as it is to speak about the larger systemic problem: the recruiting of such figures in copaganda that historically-materially pits Nazis against liberation as something to quell for profit (capital recruits Nazis to punch Commies, then sacrifices the Nazi on the altar of American “freedom”). The more whores in a given complicit stable, the wider the joy division (and its execution and abuse) during collective and selective punishment/reactive abuse.

Such things sell like hot cakes during crisis—doubly so when crisis decays (fear and hunger make people desperate). So we gotta “drop it like its hot,” using our hot cakes” to speak truth to power on the same anisotropic liminal space of power and resistance: the shadow zone as ours to reclaim, our Hell to call and make home.

[10] “Then I will teach you our way of battle!” A conversation with the Gothic mode that wins and loses irony—i.e., Herbert’s original novel as far more critical than its descendants; e.g., his own, versus the cinema and made-for-TV adaptations, etc. Just as Lady Jessica was taught to see opportunities for advancement at every chance—gentrifying the Fremen (a pun: “Free Men”) through her own son, Lawrence–of–Arabia-style—the whole franchise has become, to some degree, gentrified again (the same way that Star Wars did, or Cameron’s doubles of it in his own military-optimistic refrains). Except the Amazon isn’t a monopoly—can be used to reverse gentrification during ludo-Gothic BDSM on all registers (“out of novels and into cinema and Metroidvania,” as my thesis put it).

[11] Contrary to medieval standards, there are no power hierarchies under ludo-Gothic BDSM, just mutually consenting performs offering different elements to a Gothic-Communist performance; e.g., I see in Harmony the opportunity to teach someone the lesson as something they are largely already doing. I just want to make it a conscious one.

[12] Cheese is gay and the video is largely a YouTube cash-grab gimmick that can still teach you about speedrunning as something to apply ourselves however we want. This unfolds according to the Gothic mode’s meta being an intertextual/cross-media and multimedia affair per the verisimilitude of execution; i.e., “how people talk” merging with “how people play” expressing larger ideas though extratextual para-dialogs: conversations about the text merging slang and jargon according to a complicated live performance (thanks to the streaming age of videogames) that adheres to a given media type’s standard execution while also bringing in external elements; e.g., Cheese being a world-class speedrunner who’s very “out” as gay (which inspired me to be more out, too. As Cheese always says, “Love ya, babes!” From one fag to another, right back at ya, cutie!).

[13] Karl Jobst is a good detective, but you can be a good detective/do good acts (e.g., “The Completionist’s Response Is The Worst Thing Ever,” 2024) and still be fash-leaning (remember that Nazis historically cover their tracks according to a costume they can take off; e.g., Hans the Jew Hunter in Inglorious Basterds, 2009). Turns out, ol’ Karl is both, generally a) focusing on people worse than he is to turn a buck (re: Billy Mitchel and Michael Zider), b) pitching Raid Shadow Legends (a 2020 gambling game made by Plarium Games, an Israeli developer) while c) having his own sordid past/alt-right ties he never came clean about and d) sucking our dicks (“Hello, you absolute legends!”)! Woops! But, I mean, just look at the guy! He’s so goddamn white it hurts, and I’m not talking about his skin; the whole unironic “Disney family portrait with matching t-shirts” thing is the stuff of Gothic façade (the fatal portrait): Disney is a horrible corporation you should absolutely not embody with your own nuclear family as the patriarch of—I don’t care how cute the kid is or how nice you all seem! It’s creepy and perfidious!

(artist: Doris Jobst)

Note: This isn’t an invitation to harass Karl or his wife and child, or throw unfounded accusations at them; but he is a public figure, thus merits criticism like any other person. This isn’t the trans witch coming for his wife and kid, but merely her acknowledging how sus he is hiding behind his family (a classic fash trick). I’m not saying homeboy’s a literal Nazi; I’m just saying it’s awfully hypocritical to be bigoted like many other white cis-het speedrunners (e.g., Caleb Hart being staunchly transphobic and cleaning up to protect his image, position and wealth; more on him in Volume Three) and then hide it. Suppression of evidence/refusing to talk about your own shortcomings like they never happened is a form of lying, Karl! —Perse

[14] A metonym; i.e., “the substitution of the name of an attribute or adjunct for that of the thing meant,” insofar as “straight” means to straighten what is queer. “The Straights” also speaks to an ideology attached frequently to a larger group; i.e., synecdoche, meaning “a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa.” For us, “Straights” pertains to white cis-het people who do belong to Cartesian hegemony. If the term doesn’t actually describe you, then it’s not meant for you despite appearing to the contrary. So chill, whoever you are. We’re not your enemy.

[15] Which decays into zombified forms that once spoke the truth but, gentrified, lost the ability to be perceptive satire; i.e., The Simpsons (Dead Homer Society’s “Zombie Simpsons: How the Best Show Ever Became the Broadcasting Undead,” 2012); e.g., Lionel Hutz from The Simpsons explaining “There’s the truth, and the ‘truth!‘” Profit kills criticism for content disguised as “criticism.”

[16] Zombies are classically slaves, including the monstrous-feminine; i.e., essentially Sublime’s “Raleigh Soliloquy Pt. I” (1994): “I don’t give a shit, as long as she sucks me off when I tell her, ’cause she’s my zombie. I captured that motherfucker, and she’s my cassette” (source: Genius).

[17] See Emma Shachat’s “The Anti-Semitic History of Witches” (2020). Because the monstrous-feminine is always fash-adjacent, there is always a fascist potential to all monster types. We’ll explore the vampire and goblin part of the same series in Volume Two, part two; i.e., during blood libel and other anti-Semitic tropes describing them as blood-drinking vampires, baby-killing witches, or flesh-eating goblins (all from Hey Alma’s “Anti-Semitic History of…” series; 2021, 2020, and 2023).

[18] Tim Curry, as usual, owning his musical roots with “Anything Can Happen on Halloween” (1986).

[19] Rule of thumb: the more musical something is, the more camp potential it has. Though this—like any monster dialog*—can absolutely be gentrified, as Wicked: the Musical (2003) shows us, but also Vivienne Medrano’s 2024 Hazbin Hotel, which varies considerably from its original 2020 pilot: demonizing angels, but not talking about God one bit; or as Volume One writes:

A similar tactic to many post-Miltonian works, whose Satanic poetics/darkness becomes blind towards critiquing patriarchal institutions. For example, Hazbin Hotel (2024) doesn’t even mention God, instead treating good and evil as essential, tediously and unnecessarily reformed by a white “nepo baby” hotel (funded by a serial killer, no less). Worse, her iconoclastic parents, Satan and Lilith, have been chained to the nuclear family unit as bourgeois. The white princess’ plan does suck, so her plight—of people not liking her stupid, small-minded idea—is an entirely unsympathetic one built on privilege, not rebellion. Its real-life author’s hard-fought success is likewise a thoroughly gross compromise with a giant mega-company churning out blind, Rocky-Horror-style pastiche. Like Tolkien’s sylvan trees, the author canonizes camp, regressing towards outmoded debates and harmful caricatures (e.g., Angel Dust as the reprobate queer sex worker) while profiting off them (source).

*A tradition probably not starting with Tolkien camping Paradise Lost but certainly the one my thesis volume focused on! When something becomes canon, you gotta camp it back!

[20] Which I had to watch and review for grad school (Persephone van der Waard’s “In the Flesh (2013): Season 1 Review, part 1,” 2018). As a lifestyle, we Gothic Communists have to stand scrutiny by “checking out” after inspections that shed light on our interest in monsters informing our genderqueer identities. Simply put, I have a lot of skeletons in my closet!

[20a] These are absolutely vital performative concepts, but also confusing ones so I’ll include them here for reference (from the glossary, below):

Psychosexuality

The adjacent placement of pleasurable pain and other euphoric sensations next to unironic harm; i.e., rape fantasy or theatre. Just as canon and camp exist in the same shadow zone, performative irony and its absence are equally liminal using the same shared aesthetics of power and resistance, death and rape, heroic (monstrous) violence: the colors of stigma, vice, power and sin. Canonical psychosexuality conflates pleasure with genuine harm, including bigoted stereotypes that further this pathology.

I don’t have a glossary definition for “shadow zone,” but you can refer to the essay “Doubles, Dark Forces, and Paradox; or into the Shadow Zone: Where We Currently Are and Where We’re Going Deeper Into,” from Volume Zero for a good introduction to it.

I’ve also supplied various quotes (again, all from Volume Zero) regarding the shadow zone and psychosexuality/Satan poetics that should prove useful. I can’t list all of them, here (e.g., Metroidvania) so refer back to that volume if you’re curious and want to know more.

Regarding heroic function:

All heroes function and appear as monsters in some shape or form. Heteronormative theatre’s copaganda and Military Industrial Complex binarize monster theatricality in service of capital (thus the profit motive as something to replicate and enforce through unironic Gothic poetics/mimesis). There are “correct” male heroes organized between white and black knights, and “incorrect” male heroes who are “corrupt” in ways that destroy the established order of the athletic/athletic-adjacent conflict as lucrative, thus heteronormative (and vice versa). This historical-material gender trouble extends to female/token heroes, who either are monster girls (exhibit 1a1a1h3a2) of the traditional sort—i.e., the damsel/detective (Gothic heroine) and demon (female Gothic villain) or the foreigner whose heteronormatively assigned power conveniently challenges Western (white, cis-het) men, thus patriarchal dominance—and whose warrior-esque compromises with power are allowed for short-lived gradients: the subjugated Amazon as phallic/”like a man,” but who must eventually conform to varying degrees when the state’s perpetual crises enter decay and radicalize the heteronormative model of war at all theatrical registers on- and offstage. Until the woman or token is closeted/collared, they are afforded the same crisis of position— i.e., the white, animalized, undead/demonic enforcer as threatened by the parallel forces of darkness coming out of the shadow zone. But because women/token minorities are coded as “weaker” by canon, they will corrupt “faster” thus be closeted or buried to prevent the spread of infection (what I call the “euthanasia effect,” which I will unpack more in a moment).

Yet, even if women or token groups submit to their “correct role” in regressive Amazonomachia, segregation is historically no defense from the profit motive. Because there must always be an enemy to fight (a crisis to extend war into forever), a woman or a token minority—even when entirely submissive and bridal/slave-coded—are precious but contested property that can always turn into a “bad demon” at any moment (e.g., the wandering womb, exhibit 1a1a1h3a1a1), thus are always a threat that must be policed, often by members of their own group (cops defend property for the state; for token cops, this means themselves). The historical materialism of canonical Amazonomachia is a train of girl bosses and their witch cop/war boss variants that manifest on- and offstage as TERFs who unironically punch down against people more marginalized than them while performatively punching up against the elite, who they don’t meaningfully challenge during oppositional praxis; kettled, they instead emulate the Man Box (traditional male sexism and other bigotries tied to weird canonical nerds, who we’ll unpack in a moment) as a token assimilation fantasy—i.e., parroting the colonizer (e.g., Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, 1952). As such, they take war brides from the underclass during military urbanism, colonizing the poetic sphere and real world while furthering psychosexual violence, token “white” fragility and employing DARVO—in short, acting like white cis-het men.

Regarding camp as a living process:

In this perennial, dialogic sense, power and death constitute societal gatekeeping and countercultural transformation through theatrical fetishes and clichés (of which the Gothic is positively rife with) that play out in real life: a means of practicing debate as a wrestling tactic inside human language to better prepare us for its harmful, pro-state deceptions between daily conversations (and sex, or both) that we have with other people that look more or less like us; i.e., by recognizing and challenging them through our own sex-positive Gothic subversions that recultivate the Superstructure and reclaim the Base. In doing so, we’re accomplishing Gothic Communism’s chief aim: taking back the critical, class-conscious power of paradox (thus power)-as-performance, specifically that of monsters, on- and offstage simultaneously. It’s chaotic, but knowing how to swim in the void of the shadow zone (the Gothic imagination/mode) and its “darkness visible can be, paradoxically, an illuminating and life-saving affair—i.e., as something to deliberately cultivate for Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism (thus for all workers) by taking back Hell, thus the world, as having been thoroughly colonized; i.e., ever since Milton first wrote Paradise Lost and challenged the status quo (arguably by accident, in his case, and certainly within the traditions of theatre as having been in conflict for far longer—since Hippolyta and the Ancient Greeks, at least). For us, there needs to be a deliberate re-camping of “darkness visible” through our “creative successes” during proletarian praxis.

Of camp as empowering:

Something I will argue repeatedly throughout my thesis (and the rest of the book) is how the greatest power/strength of class-conscious warriors is their deliberately campy “darkness visible” doubling canonical versions (through the Wisdom of the Ancients, though I may not always call it that); i.e., their innate and uncanny ability to camp canon using the same shadowy language/aesthetics that class-dormant class traitors do (whose much touted “greatest strength” is their Achilles Heel, their greatest weakness when the state needs sacrifices). Beauty in “the eye of the beholder” is subjective, but perceptions of power are enforced to a matter of function and objective degree in order to define beauty (and what is “correct” according to basic human, animal and environmental rights as tied to heroic stories) as having a monstrous class character. Everything happens in the shadow zone between dueling hero monsters for or against the state and its profit motive. Meanwhile, state agents are labeled by the state as counterterrorists, calling labor’s agents “terrorists” (e.g., Martin Luther King Jr.) in bad faith; the language can be reversed easily enough, but the function still has to be scrutinized as parsed with a learned eye.

Of said empowerment as dualistic:

Any heroic quest demands a journey into Hell to confront dark forces, and the hero generally presents before the quest as a paradox right off the bat: being of two worlds, one foot in the world of the living and one of the dead, magic/science, medieval/modern, heaven/hell, etc. Their liminal state and privilege of position affords them special education/access to old books (or sages) of wisdom that—as we shall see—can be counterfeited, but work within the same medieval poetics and Gothic mode that can be used for or against the status quo. Our journey (as workers seeking liberation from mass worker exploitation under neoliberal Capitalism) is to bring the campy power of a reclaimed Hell/shadow zone (and its subversive forces of darkness) back with us—to transform the world around us to better allow workers to negotiate for themselves while fighting for their basic human rights (and the health of the planet’s ecosystems and that of animals).

Of camp and Red Scare through animalistic metaphors:

As a symbol shared among the colonized and their colonizers, the symbol of the dog is canonically mistreated as undead/demonic; i.e., a liminal state whereupon it is chimeric, undead, and known for an endless, psychosexual demon hunger that fascism conflates with revenge of a particular kind. So-called “Jewish revenge” is the Red Scare sentiment of anti-Bolshevism shared by the American elite as enacted with impunity until it “crosses a line”—in this case a national boundary into the West by the Nazis:

For four years, numerous Americans, in high positions and obscure, sullenly harbored the conviction that World War II was “the wrong war against the wrong enemies.” Communism, they knew, was the only genuine adversary on America’s historical agenda. Was that not why Hitler had been ignored/tolerated/appeased/aided? So that the Nazi war machine would turn East and wipe Bolshevism off the face of the earth once and for all? It was just unfortunate that Adolf turned out to be such a megalomaniac and turned West as well (source: William Blum’s Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, 1995).

The same idea plays out in displaced, fantastical forms through undead and demonic language. As such, the assorted “ink blot” stigmas elide within the same poetic shadow zone, whereupon the hungry mouths of dead labor’s zombies bear their fangs and collectively shriek and howl. Simply put, they riot, but do alongside state agents opposing them using the same aesthetics of power and death: the fascist, but also the centrist combating both fascism and labor until asking the black “dog” knight to tag team the Dark Queen and her counterterrorist zombie forces. Mid-riot, various pro-state Beowulfs are generated and sent in to quell the slaves as dissident aggressors, called “terrorist” and certainly treated as such. These foils to revolution can be the man, himself, but also female counterparts who sell out and then are “exiled” by surrendering their power after killing the Dark-Mother orchestrator of such perceived uprisings (labor movements are often oversold as these great cabals populated by a furious zombie horde or demonic pandemonium). It’s mimesis that fails to question the process.

Of camp, monomyth and videogames (an exhibit):

(exhibit 1a1a1a1_a: Artist, left: J. Scott Campbell; bottom-middle: Fabián L. Pineda; right: Tom Jung. The monomyth and infernal concentric pattern are traditionally heteronormative, thus sexually dimorphic canon [dogma]; iconoclastic examples can subvert heroic double standards and bellicose, phallic language/rites of passage, but still work from positions of irony that parody heroic conventions and apocrypha [a popular, didactic story generally regarded as fictional; i.e., a “tall tale” connected to folklore and oral traditions] by toying with them during oppositional praxis as dialectical-material. In other words, iconoclasts tend to mutate what is already present according to what the artist knows about propaganda, thus makes and embodies as part of Gothic counterculture.

Consider videogames [my domain]. As a queer, Gothic ludologist and anarcho-Communist, I can attest to how genderqueer poetics would happily poke fun at Link’s “Master Sword” shooting “bolts of power” when “fully charged”—a mechanic borrowed from Star Wars [1977], Conan the Barbarian [1981, which was reviewed as “Star Wars made by a psychopath,” which applies as much to Rob Howard as it does John Milius] and even older palimpsests [such as the legend of King Arthur] copied by Pan’s own “sword” in Hook [1991] or Simon Belmont’s elongating “chain whip” in Castlevania [1986] or Mega Man’s “mega buster” [1987] or Samus Aran’s “beam cannon, missile launcher and bombs” [1986] or, hell, Mario’s “mushroom” helping him “grow” [1985]: canonical war is full of violent, harmful innuendo; e.g., Macbeth’s cycle of war as watered with blood: “I have begun to plant thee, and will labour / To make thee full of growing.” As we shall see, there is always an enemy to kill or secret plot to uncover, thus revealing an enemy from within who “originated” from outside: the ghost of the counterfeit’s false copy of a corrupt backstabber/doppelganger. Instead of an invincible barbarian/enemy at the gates, the white-knight warrior of light faces a corrupt, dark version of himself—a shadow person or Gothic double:

 

[Artist: Gabriel Dias. Keeping with the idea of paradox, the opposition between Link and “his shadow” is both thrown into doubt and extremely dogmatic. On one hand, it’s entirely divorced from material critique in favor of a basic value judgement— literally light vs dark, wherein light is canonized as “good” and dark as “bad”; there’s no in-between or class character because the story has been displaced to a fantasy tableau emptied of earthly history. It’s trope-heavy and mechanical. As we’ll explore later in the thesis and rest of the book, though, class character often comes from gender trouble and parody within canon as thrown into personified doubt [a rather literal embodiment of self-reflection]; i.e., in relation to these prescribed gender roles as “ghost-like” or otherwise undead. Ontologically challenged, Dark Link might not “belong” to Link at all; he might simply be an uncanny simulacrum or likeness that triggers the presumed owner to attack [thus confirm his suspicions by eradicating his fears]. Doing so exposes his own flaws as a self-described “hero,” but also reveals his open-secret intended function: to kill the enemies of the state. The enemy must die, trapping the hero in a frozen state of inaction as they lie caught between their orders and their conflicted sense of identity.]

As a whole, videogames have served as neoliberal, music-heavy copaganda since the 1980s—first, based off Star Wars as franchised, but also Aliens [with the original, self-contained text for each being neoliberal critiques that, in their franchised forms, became operatically neo-conservative] as monomythic canon attached to real-world geopolitics: the American revenge fantasy after a refreeing [deregulation] of the world market post-Bretton Woods under global US hegemony. The common thread to these canonical remediations is a quest for mastery meta-narrative whose videoludic simulation of war helps acclimate the state’s children to endless future war through the Hero’s Journey as forever expanding on- and off-screen: made for bigger and better worlds, but also bigger (thus more phallic), traditionally masculine weapons; i.e., a heteronormative mode of ludic wish fulfillment that routinely sets the player on the path to prescribed empowerment, thus appearing to realize the impossible promise [not the universal fulfillment] of sanctioned sex by a) rescuing the damsel and slaying the cockblocking [ostensibly fascist/gay] dragon/minotaur as something to stab or shoot [exhibit 51d4a1/2] and b) facing off against the monstrous-feminine not just as not-white, female-coded, and non-Christian, but somewhere in between all of these things; e.g., orcs, drow and goblins; Dark Link, Protoman/Zero [exhibit 982b] or Pan’s shadow as the genderfluid, potentially trans, non-binary, or intersex false hero/man, dark twink, “phallic woman,” etc; but also Samus as the phallic woman tomboy acting like Rambo to serve the state, or Odessa from Overwatch 2 [2022]:

“Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,

And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full

Of direst cruelty!” [from Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy].

I’ve spent my life subverting them, treating Samus as having the potential to not be a palingenetic handmaid [exhibit 38c1b] or Odessa/Zarya as something other than unironic girl/queer war bosses [exhibit 100c4/ exhibit 111b] while also having a great deal of fun with twinks in iconoclastic videogame fan art that treats the twink-ish hero as the non-bellicose sub [exhibit 93a].)

[21] As theatre productions always are—from Shakespeare to yours truly—or, as The American Cinematographer writes about Oz, “A cadre of creative minds [similar to Alien] infused MGM’s classic fantasy with a timeless supply of movie magic” (source: “Behind the Curtain: The Wizard of Oz,” 1998). Zombies don’t die; Nazi or Commie, they always come back in some shape or form.

[22] As I write in “Why I Submit: A Subby Gothicist’s Attitudes on Metroidvania, Mommy Doms, and Sexual Persecution” (2021): “I want to fuck what I want to be: sexy. For me, that means a powerful woman like Samus” (source). The same idea applies to Elphie: “I’ve always felt attracted to witches, especially Joan of Arc and the Wicked Witch of the West,” I add:

Though not exactly a knight, Elphie is still a sexy rebel herself. In the musical, she rises from the ground, defying gravity in Icarian fashion while thrusting her broom upwards. Her joy is palpable and orgasmic, and she sings her loudest; she’s also isolated, abandoned by her friends and surrounded by enemies. Elphie’s song is a challenge to them, a “fuck you” to the tyrannical Wizard of Oz.

There’s a tragic element to characters like Joan and Elphie, ultimately hunted by society’s greatest “paragons.” Whether they’re openly racist and sexist, or bad faith allies, these manly abusers lust for the oppressed behind closed doors. Like the plantation owner raping his or her slaves, the misogynist clamors for the witch’s death or the fem boy’s murder, all while jerking off to them. It’s the power imbalance they seek, without which they’re flaccid, impotent; they crave reminders of their own domination over the oppressed. For the witches being hunted, power is gained by taking ownership over their performance from their abusers; their position remains liminal, trapped between the desire for self-expression and unwarranted persecution (see: Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive, by Kristen J. Sollee) [ibid.].

As I’ve grown into and reflected on my own Gothic maturity beyond grad school, I’ve seen more and more how the monstrous-feminine isn’t “just women” at all and never really was; from Shakespeare to Lewis to Maguire to me, it’s always been anything that sticks out to flip the script, fighting for equality for all things different/of nature exploited by capital. Standing up for your rights, for what you believe in despite certain threat of death—to do it for the workers of the world collectively enslaved by evil wizards posturing as good—what on Earth could be sexier than that? Elphie’s metal incarnate, bringing home the poundage one flying undead monkey at a time: by being one, herself!

This isn’t just true for Elphie, but any “phallic” monstrous-feminine; e.g., Xena the Warrior Princess; i.e., naked and exposed, but defiant of patriarchal societies as the Amazons in subversive Amazonomachia have for millennia to ironic degrees of empowering nudism: “You see this ass? You’ll never own it! We’re the queens of our own queendoms, our own destinies to forge through battle!” It becomes a confidence-booster in an asexual sense; i.e., not something to sheepishly protest, “Don’t stare/watch me” (often uttered by women in vulnerable positions of exposure; e.g., in bed or the bathroom) but quite the opposite: “Watch me; stare if you like! I am unbroken, unbowed [what Jadis would call ‘chonk, stronk and ready to bonk!’—the herbo mantra]!”

(artist, flats: Hellica-Ordo)

[22a] Though the assimilation fantasy is a little on the nose: “There’s some whores in this [affluent] house!”

[22b] From The Merchant of Venice: “O beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on” (source). Portia, as a white woman with power, is—per Angela Carter—something of a vindictive cunt forced to play stupid games to survive in a man’s world; but also engages in bigoted deceptions (impersonating a lawyer) that crucify minorities (forcing a Jew to convert) to secure her own hard-fought position: as a married woman in control of a weaker man. In short, she’s predatory (envisioned as such by a bigoted gay man, to be fair).

[22c] No Sweat Shakespeare writes:

“In a pickle” is not an easy idiom to unravel, but let’s try and do just that by looking at the context of Shakespeare’s use of the term “in a pickle,” and the modern meaning of the phrase:

In The Tempest King Alonso’s butler Stephano and his jester, Trinculo, are washed up on an island. Stephano has survived by clinging to a barrel of wine and since landing on the island the two of them have been continually drunk. When they later meet up with the king, Alonso observes: “Trinculo is reeling ripe. Where should they find this grand liquor that hath gilded ’em?” He asks Trinculo, “How came’st thou in this pickle?” Trinculo replies: “I have been in such a pickle since I saw you last that, I fear me, I will never out of my bones. I shall not fear flyblowing.”

In this context, Trinculo means he has been very drunk. He uses the word “pickle” in the sense of pickling being a way of preserving food. He is saying that he is so pickled with alcohol that his body will be protected from maggots when he dies and will not decay (source).

Also, medieval works—I think we’ve safely established—generally tended to combine expressions of food, medicine, sex and death (e.g., to smash/to get smashed as war-like, mercantile [“churn the butter”/”stir the macaroni”] and psychosexually erotic, like the medieval history was and continues to be in practice): the corpse, but also the phallic, green pickle denoting necrophilia and cannibalism; i.e., with “coffin” in Titus Andronicus referring to a pie crust, which is something of a play on words to hint at the reality—I would imagine—of cannibalism/necrophilia during natural disasters spurring food shortages and spontaneous spouse shortages (what Top Dollar would call “a sudden case of death”). For Shakespeare, this wouldn’t have been the Black Death in its heyday (the mid-1300s); all the same, he did lose two children to the same disease, the bubonic plague (source: Robin Young and Allison Hagan’s “Shakespeare and the Plague,” 2020). In other words, pandemics are nothing new and Gothic theatre is a poetic, oft-morbid way of combating death anxiety by encasing it in strange, prandial-sexual hybrids.

[23] A metaphor again being “a comparison between two unlike things”; re: my observation, “violence as something to perform and receive are not the same thing despite often appearing identical,” also being an adage that applies to sex, and violence and sex as [thanks to Capitalism] interwoven.

[23a] A story I always related to through my own experiences; i.e., going to England to meet Zeuhl, who loved me despite how alien I felt. In a way, we were both alien in that far green country (though they had traveled to and from it many times). Oddly enough, Howard the Duck wasn’t a movie we watched until we broke up, but they really enjoyed it, calling it sweet. And now whenever I listen to John Barry’s awesome score or the in-film band Cherry Bomb’s “Hunger City” (1986), I think of Zeuhl and of being in love—of having all that and them leaving my life. It’s easy to feel like I lost them, but if that were the case, I wouldn’t have those good memories and those feelings when “You’re the Duckiest” plays. Instead, I can look back on it all with pride, remembering the many adventures we had (sexual or otherwise) and saying to myself, “Not bad for a talking duck from outer space!” We all fall in love with monsters—with Lions, Scarecrows, or Tinmen. Zeuhl was my little rockstar and I? Not a duck, but a raven: their raven plush. Not everyone can say they’ve loved like that and have something to show for it. Take it from me, babes: ’tis better to have loved and lost than never to have to have loved at all (for real, just look at incels for proof of that).

[24] Philosophers are classically white cis-het men, the vast majority of whom serve the state. There’s a lot of masturbatory self-aggrandize by proxy and hero worship, their equally white, cis-het audiences rising to defend patriarchal figures making incredibly dogmatic and prescriptive assertions of things as basic as women wearing makeup. If a man is angry at a woman wearing makeup, he’s the problem, not her (also known as “protection/transference” in psychoanalytical circles).

This being said, just because Peterson’s arguments are Red-Scare and biologically essential doesn’t mean every cis-het man will agree with him. Consider this reader on Reddit:

Geez, I think this (slightly) extended version makes Peterson look like even more of an obtuse twat, despite the more repeated insistence that he’s not trying to say makeup, or any behaviors, should be necessarily banned, which was not as clear previously though still fairly evident from what he was revealed to have said.

At no point does he seem willing to posit any ideas or even opinions, except (not so) strangely the simplistic idea that wearing makeup is distinctly and totally a sexual display. For a psychologist it’s very odd that he has such unnuanced views of why people engage in certain behaviors. It’s some very pop-evo-psych nonsense to say that makeup and heels exaggerate certain sexual characteristics without considering how those interplay with ideas of professionalism, hygiene and simply looking like a well-put-together person, especially taking into account social norms and pressure.

I think he even has a certain point when saying that women can be sexually manipulative in professional situations, yet he seems to disregard any notions of power imbalances or the fact that this would still entail that it’s the men being driven by their sexual needs over professionalism. Not to get all “tell men not to rape”-y but maybe more emphasis should be put on men to think with their brain, not their dick?

The way he views wearing a negligee and wearing makeup to be on the same spectrum is also frustratingly simplistic, these are all issues regarding how people dress, rather than how they behave (yeah, yeah choosing what to wear is a behaviour in itself, but again it’s stupidly simplistic to compare the two).

So many comments saying how annoying the interviewer is, yet it must have also been very frustrating for this interviewer, trying to coax answers from Peterson that aren’t just ridiculous evo-psych oversimplifications or banal “nobody knows” throwaways. Clearly workplace dress code is dependent on context, yet “men and women working together” is thrown out as some singular activity clouded in mystery. Is NBC’s no-hugging policy not a way of, evolutionarily even, figuring out “the rules”? I hope some people take this interview to show that Peterson doesn’t really offer much in the way of social input or intellectual expertise. Like why would anybody care what he has to say when all he seems to have to say is either egregiously truncated, straight up wrong or just apparently purposefully ignorant? (source: Socratic Voyager from r/enoughpetersonspam, 2018).

Peterson doesn’t care about being right, in the sense that any rationalization is just an argument to make for or against something. The way that all rhetoric power works is through performance, one that people either agree or disagree with; i.e., monsters. To that, Peterson—just like any conservative white man—reliably plays the victim and the charlatan while scapegoating people far more disadvantaged than him, crying like a baby as he does so. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. He’s cooked.