This post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second book sample series originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact“ (2024). That series was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two’s assorted chapters and its twin modules, the Undead and Demons. As usual, this promo series (and all its posts) are written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

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

Click here to see “Searching for Secrets'” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

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

Picking up from where “Into the Toy Chest, part two” left off…

Back to the Necropolis: Reflections on Mastery as Backwards; i.e., When Camping Myself as More and More Gay (feat. Black Nazis and Castlevania)!

“Oooooh! I love the look! Especially the monster fucking me! That’s hot!!”

—Drooling Red, to me regarding their drawing (2024)

We’re about to enter the second half of Volume Two, which—per my usual backwards approach—I wrote first and put last. Indeed, I wrote this second half of the volume before my PhD, revisiting it only after finalizing Volume Zero and Volume One, then writing another half to Volume Two that has since gone online before this half has! To that, we’re entering an old territory with fresh perspective: as someone who has mastered her genderqueer self and area of scholarship she trailblazed outside academia; i.e., to help liberate all sex workers through iconoclastic art! Though not entirely “necessary” towards understanding the Monster Modules, I’d nevertheless like to offer a quick roadmap for the hermeneutic waltz described (and an extended exhibit on black Nazis, TERF vampires, and Castlevania: Nocturne, 2023). It harbors various block quotes and collages, assembled this time as a particular lament configuration (minus Barker’s problematic elements, but haunted by them): a frame of reference when grappling and consuming my ideas, but also ruminating and hopefully improving on them in your own lives. “Truth” is less a thing universally acknowledged, then, and more the expression of rebellion as sex-positive in so many different campy, very-gay forms upending older histories with fresh nightmares: “Once more, but with rainbows!”

(artist: Drooling Red)

Mastery is a puzzle, insofar as calculated risk puts traditional notions of “empowerment” and “disempowerment” in quotes, thus on their heads; it becomes something to fuck with in ways that master monstrous language as a holistic theatrical mode. Except, one does not simply achieve mastery after a single day and night, deciding they like to fuck monsters. One becomes “rapaciously” masterful in ways that trap them in the middle, post-trauma, as something to recreate “trauma” in quotes; i.e., between ignorance and knowledge, but also knowing what to do with knowledge once you’ve got it. So many would-be intellectuals sell out, but keep the aesthetic minus its irony, mid-cryptonymy.

No one is immune from power as a structure in service to the elite, but it can be resisted in service to labor. However things reduce, division serves profit, and anything that serves profit, while predatory and unequal, can be critiqued per the elite’s usual trifectas, attempted monopolies (violence, terror and monsters), and qualities of capital (Cartesian, settler-colonial, heteronormative); i.e., as it sexualizes everything only to gentrify/tokenize and decay over and over and over while defending the state. Per Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism, intersectional solidarity does not serve profit regardless of the variables at play (an inverse of the listed qualities, above). There’s several dialectical-material binaries, but loads of grey area. The only way to distinguish this from that between the constants and variables is to play with them in ways that distribute as a matter of privilege and oppression; i.e., what we’re born into: prisons, settler colonies, empire.

Foucault wrote on prisons all his life, a man of academia as a matter of privilege that won him with the ability to help or abuse those around him (re: pedophilia). He chose both, making him a state puppet in the end; i.e., poisoning the well by arguing for pedophilia through words and actions. Similar to Simone Beauvoir or Jean-Paul Sartre, the guy raped people, specifically children (often non-white, per his sex tourism: Bad Empanada Live’s “Michel Foucault Was a Pedophile – The Evidence Is Clear,” 2022). As this volume shall demonstrate, his ideas challenging empire are still useful, but they must be taken with a grain of salt—of critique that extends the right of challenging empire to all parties, not just Foucault having his cake and eating it, too (a real French imperialist playing the rebel; i.e., “boundaries for me, not for thee”)! This “salt” can be supplied by figures with systemic power regaining their humanity in ways Foucault never got the chance to (he died of AIDS in 1984).

For instance, Dennis Challeen—a judge, himself—wrote in the poem “Prisoners” (2012) of such power as a judge might be able to oversee; i.e., from the outside looking in, as someone with power over others generally does:

We want them to have self worth,
So we destroy their self worth

To be responsible,
So we take away all responsibility

To be a part of our community,
So we isolate them from the community

To be positive and constructive,
So we degrade them and make them useless

To be non-violent,
So we put them where there is violence all around

To be kind and loving people,
So we subject them to hatred and cruelty

To quit being tough guys,
So we put them where the tough guy is respected

To quit hanging around losers,
So we put all the losers under one roof

To quit exploiting us,
So we put them where they exploit each other.

We want them to take control of their own lives
Own their own problems and quit being parasites,
So we make them totally dependent on us (source).

Justice isn’t monopolized by those with privilege, though, and point-in-fact requires those with less privilege (thus power) to assert and affirm a pedagogy of the oppressed that speaks truth to power as a matter of resistance, not status-quo consolidation; i.e., that has decayed over time (with older writers like Shelley or Hawthorne being far more critical of power through their privilege than many more recent thinkers, like Foucault).

Simply put, power aggregates; we, in turn, must aggregate—as comrades, masters, students, et al—not with the elite as Faustian backstabbers (e.g., Lando Calrissian and Darth Vader) but against the elite and their prison-like profit motive, their us-versus-them, their monstrous-feminine, their Aegis as a darling to kill and reclaim while not throwing the baby out with the bathwater (re: Foucault’s ideas, not his reputation). Reclaimed by us, their loss of humanity is our dignity and power to regain by learning from history in all its half-real, imaginary forms:

I am the ruler of these nether worlds
The underground, whoa yes
On every wall and place my fearsome name is heard
Just look around, whoa yes (Van Halen’s “Atomic Punk,” 1978).

(artists: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu)

I am a white girl with many strange and wonderful friends, falling for all manner of dark, delightful cuties. Let it never be said I compromised my arguments while doing so! Poor in money though I am, I am rich both in spirit and the love I share for workers and nature; i.e., as things to rescue from the state by fucking with monsters as a Promethean, Numinous means of mastering the seemingly abominable (emblems of rape and death fantasies) to dominate our tyrants (the bourgeoisie): making monsters that speak to our trauma and free us from it by humanizing us through the alien as a condition we all find ourselves on different sides of while interrogating sex and force; i.e., seeking pleasure (and pleasurable pain) while avoiding harm as a matter of triangulation—the sell-out playing the victim. I only became gayer as time went on; i.e., my past took on a life of its own: not to betray my cause but remain polyamorously faithful towards it!

(model and artist: Drooling Red and Persephone van der Waard)

Though they cannot be fully divorced from it, monsters aren’t completely emblematic of subjugation by state forces. Iconoclastic subversion is the means of turning the tables on our overlords. They normally drink our blood as something to harvest under capital as a well-oiled machine, at this point. We must reverse—as Daniel Day-Lewis would put it—the drinking of the milkshake, sucking their power through the same socio-material implements (the straw) according to how such things came into their possession: through Gothic poetics!

Power cannot be created or destroyed, in this respect; it can only be transferred from workers or the state through oppositional praxis, which pastiche remediates to varying degrees of irony during liminal expression’s conflicting surfaces and thresholds. As always, resistance and exploitation exist in the same space, canon and camp operating in the same shadow zone where Nazis and Communists coincide; i.e., as fodder for Pax Americana kayfabe copaganda, including videogames and their painfully neoliberal and fun adaptations weaponizing marginalization.

Such tokenization is fractally recursive in service to the state, with modular elements that complicate liberation. To that, we’re talking about decay in lieu of me having written three books since I wrote Volume Two, part two, over a year ago at this point. We won’t have time to go over all the possibilities, here, but I do have a fairly niche example we’ll exhibit cursorily over the next fourteen pages (and one the Undead Module shall expand upon extensively in the following chapters); i.e., one that encapsulates marginalized intersectional tokenism: normative* Afrocentrism-as-undead through a hauntological black queer Nazi—Castlevania: Nocturne (2023)!

*As in Afronormativity punching down against other marginalized groups while playing the universal victim through a decayed fascist form of pan-Africanism. The practice was originally a liberatory device and can still be used in that fashion provided it avoids an exclusionary segregational function; i.e., works towards intersectional solidarity instead of isolationism (which is just another ghetto to fence/nation to sanction and embargo by imperial forces). Except historically Afrocentrism is just that—centralized predominantly around the struggles of a singular group of black ethnicities and cultures that didn’t primarily integrate with other non-white groups/struggles beyond the African continent and its descendants; e.g., Native Americans, Māori or Aboriginal groups, etc; i.e., decaying into a person-of-color middle-class gatekeeping mechanism on par with white indentured servants originally accepting the yolk, per Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980). We’ll unpack these considerations after the close-reading of Castlevania: Nocturne, and give a brief holistic examination of fascist tokenization in other Japanese neoliberal works: Capcom’s problematic Amazons in their Street Fighter franchise!

(exhibit 34b3b3a3: Castlevania: Nocturne falls victim to the usual pitfalls of neoliberal hero escapism, but there remain lots of Gothic fetishes and clichés to consider for actual revolutionary purposes. Even so, these have to be rescued from the usual kill-the-Medusa dreck [fun dreck, but dreck nonetheless]: the Countess.

For one, the show’s Great Destroyer—a “black Egyptian” spin [as Castlevania loves to do] on the Elizabeth Báthory legend—ties vampirism to a pre-Western regression; i.e., a 21st century hauntology demonizing Communism as state shift per Capitalist Realism: a vengeful Medusa as daughter-of-Ra, an equation of hysterical “terror” conjured up again. In other words, it’s Joseph Crawford’s invention of terrorism through French state decay vis-à-vis Napoleon letting British and American forces hold onto power in their own territories and power centers: through a counterfeit, girl-boss death god used to keep the elite in power now much as Radcliffe did [versus Matthew Lewis’ queer camp] when the actual French Revolution was underway! In other words, bread and circus.

Fast-forward two centuries, and the so-called Devourer of Light [a black hole exemplified by the Apep-style eclipse eating Ra] is fascist DARVO on the state side of things; i.e., with a Japanese neoliberal [videogame] Shintoism ultimately defending the light, the sun, through a Western cop [our very own Richter Belmont] punching Nazis and Communists conflated per centrist dogma on the show’s signature Medusa. This includes their rhetoric, aesthetic, costumes, masks, etc, as canonical monstrous-feminine she-wolves and fags [e.g., Orlock] as expendable bad bitches, their lieutenants, bosses and gods all wrapped up in the same anisotropic scheme for the state. Or as our resident queen’s token black Mephistopheles, Doltra, delightfully says, “They’re revolutionaries, father. We’re here to crush them.” She’s literally a black Nazi, thus Afrocentrist by virtue of psychosexual, biomechanical decay—a gargoyle, an undead puppet to shock the masses with.

Corporations love to milk and tokenize Nazis through these kinds of paradoxical compromises. Just like Amazon did with Obi Wan in 2022, Netflix is fetishizing the Nazi as vampiric in 2023. It doesn’t get any more cliché than that, except it’s heavily tokenized in ways that didn’t quite exist two centuries ago! Again, it’s Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks [1952] injected into a corporatized Gothic imaginary [with each monstrous-feminine having a calm state and an agitated, “hysterical” state; i.e., the latter increasingly more slutty and pissed-off than the former] relying on Afrocentrism to sell to a target marginalized demographic running interference for the writers playing the white moderate: “Okay, you can play the Nazi!” This is not progress unless irony is present; there is none in Obi Wan and very little in Nocturne as we shall see.

Whatever their race, Nazis lend themselves well to camp, but corporate schlock generally has about as much irony as Darth Vader* originally did [except here it’s Bubblegum Nazi Punk; e.g., Obi Wan‘s Reva Sevander, above]. That being said, moderacy is, itself, a form of false rebellion serving profit [which is what the blood and black-and-red aesthetic signifies through a Marxist reading of the text]. Whether gay, female and/or black, such things reliably decay under the allure of capitalist trinkets fighting Red Scare with cartoon Nazi scapegoats; i.e., Faustian bargains, preying on others the way white women historically have done in the Gothic mode since Radcliffe: as guilty as the false priest, seeking the token’s fix as psychosexual “liberation.” It’s predatory but one that occurs differently depending on whose preying [a holy conflation synonymizing “pray” with “prey” in such poetic schemes].

*Also a black Nazi; i.e., voiced by James Earl Jones and later echoed in Giancarlo Esposito’s Moff Gideon, per The Mandalorian (2019) as a decayed, Sith-like form of Samuel L. Jackson’s Mace Windu.

Mind you, there’s a billion-and-one monster girls, and they either serve profit or they don’t as a liminal, paradoxical expression: a slutty Halloween costume to fight over during oppositional praxis. When it’s that time of year and she—knocking ‘rap rap rap—rap!’ on your chamber door like The Terminator [with Brad Fidel riffing on Beethoven’s famous coda of fate a-knockin’ in the 5th Symphony’s opening section, 1808]: the vampire as the predatory visitor coming out of the imaginary past to tempt us with destruction as something—per Capitalist Realism—to express as Nazi-Communist monster-girl kayfabe.

Again, this canonically serves profit, thus the state while furthering the process of abjection through the ghost of the counterfeit as something to fear and attack during the Shadow of Pygmalion’s Cycle of Kings and their royal decay as tomb-like, populated with whores useful to Cartesian edicts. Such reversals [and their context of mutual consent] exist inside spheres of monstrous rape play with Radcliffean demon lovers abusing Lewis’ ironic Matilda [originally profaning the Madonna to castrate the rapacious Ambrosio]. They’re hardly cut-and-dry from an immediate visual standpoint; i.e., exploitation versus empowerment-as-sex-positive walk a tremendously fine line, indeed!

[artist: Lera PI]

White women, for example, classically feel trapped between virgin and whore, ashamed as they look to use their power as a taste of blood normally restricted to men in the same positions; i.e., triangulating against and feeding on the vulnerable until they are euthanized, closeted, beheaded, etc, under a fascist feeding scheme; i.e., the undead feeding mechanism servicing the state, whereupon Capitalism in decay is the state regressively cannibalizing itself to survive; i.e., any undead and their famously abject foods; e.g., blood, brains, or flesh as complicated psychosexual statements with anisotropic functions. Per Jameson, the privilege of the middle class invokes the dialectic of shelter to defend “itself” [the elite] from, as I argue, the alien dead—the non-middle-class undead—in effect raping said dead and abjecting their legitimate suddenly-visible grievances; i.e., slave revolts; e.g., The Birth of a Nation except tokenism pointedly weaponizes black culture against itself through a tokenized middle class punching down; re: Jordan Peele’s Us.

As we shall explore more, deeper in the volume, Zombie-Vampire Capitalism pointedly turns women into cops, then back into housewives, and black slaves into black cops then back into black slaves, etc. The mouth of the state is always hungry but it becomes horrifyingly visible during a zombie apocalypse: when fearsome, animalistic, nocturnal feeders—normally relegated to the dead of night or the pits of Hell—suddenly appear at daytime on Earth, feeding psychosexually in broad daylight as a means of genocide a) exposed as a regular state function disinterred, mid-apocalypse [meaning “to uncover”] and b) something to resist through the same poetic means of feeding as a proletarian counterterrorist role; i.e., the return of the living dead seeking revenge for the elite’s usual giving and receiving of state violence.

[artist: Zdzisław Beksiński]

White or not, the middle class are the gatekeepers of capital and its nuclear-familial design, and allow for various marginalized concessions of “representation” that eventually disappear when fascist power is formally attained; i.e., the state finally entering a “rabid” state only to be put down by another state not yet in decay to the same extent; e.g., America vs Nazi Germany [this problem becomes a matter of suicide per the Mother Country dying as America is, which we shall explore in the Undead Module proper]. At home and abroad, American Liberalism [and the middle class] always decay fascistically into darker versions of itself that self-defend until total collapse trying to decay into fresh forms of the same-old inequality under Imperialism—i.e., America’s true purpose [Cartesian exploitation] projected onto Nazi Germany as the “only” Nazis in town, despite America being the breeding ground for fascism having inspired others since the late 1800s: as the global economic superpower!
China’s recent developments are changing this hegemony and the chickens are already coming home to roost; i.e., token, corporatized arbitration of Imperialism-in-crisis in ways America cannot stop, no matter how many female and non-white girl bosses they turn into unironic Amazons, vampires, Medusa, etc! “Home” as a fatal portrait will decay until it eats itself, specifically the next-in-line [above]. Our rights are stripped down and eaten by the state [often retrojected/hyphenated as a ruinous hungry vampire-castle or castle-vampire] until our right to exist becomes anathema, zombie-like. Then the state dies. Until then, the state is always “in danger” as something to abject onto labor threatening the nuclear families of the middle class; rinse and repeat.

Like, as if, bitches! Angela Carter famously argued, “Any free woman in an unfree society will always be a monster”; i.e., TERFs; e.g., Amazons, which are already tokenized and have a fascist element as such, but compound through black/non-white girl bosses and GNC/BDSM elements. Except such women transform into token-style witch cops precisely by virtue of turning heel to serve the usual pimps, aka fighting for scraps. Token assimilators do so as the state’s Amazonian war bosses, their subjugated Hippolyta and Medusa playing out through different forms of tokenized “rebellion”; e.g., Wonder Woman and her Nazi counterpart stooges’ white-Indian rhetoric performing the same bad, half-real theatre on the same planetary fields of domination: Indigenous lands mapped out, invaded, and raped in-text and out.

Starting with Radcliffe, British and American feminism has decayed to become increasingly complicit in this global predation. However they need to, then, each assimilator shall ape the whore that society “needs” to be behead once she invariably breaks bad; e.g., Dany Targaryen from Game of Thrones [2011] “coached by Hilter” per the actress watching actual videos of the old dictator to obey the show’s writers telling her to play the female version thereof [source: Desiree Murphy’s “Emilia Clarke Says She Watched Videos of Hitler to Prepare for Game of Thrones Finale,” 2019]! Dany goes rogue; the usual dudes put her down to further a centrist, Star-Wars-style scheme: patriarchal, Pygmalion-grade dominance in a capitalist system dressed up as “medieval,” billionaire-Marxist, centrist; i.e., good guys and bad, good cops and bad. Except, ACAB. It’s all Pax Americana apologia; i.e., lionizing profit in ways that, at times, feel incredibly forced [which is what the Force from Star Wars canonically is: centrist dogma weaponizing the monomyth against labor by putting “rebellion” in quotes]. From girl boss to black Nazi to white knight, whatever forms of class betrayal that emerge are still betrayal—is Capitalism, through and through as Afrocentrist, white and cis supremacist, and homonormative to varying degrees of concession with profit as heteronormative, Cartesian, settler-colonial!

Like all Nazis tend to be, such exchanges and alliances are admittedly fascinating to watch. But systemic abuse does get old, the same-old paradigm exhausting if irony isn’t present. The bitch is simply drugged, then bashed through the usual morality plays designed to keep rebellion in check; i.e., by white/tokenized moderates and mutilative sex as a fatal lure: through toys. To subvert them, we must take their ludic/performative context and alter it beyond canon’s usual weaponizing of such things; i.e., camping demon BDSM and unironic rape fantasies made to canonically justify violence against the monstrous-feminine, thus serve profit! Profit equals rape. We must camp rape to end profit and achieve post-scarcity through intersectional solidarity.

Except, the state loves to weaponize the home against whatever perceived barbarians are “at the gate”; i.e., “think of the women and children” as settler-colonial agents presented as “native.” This extends to such figures conjured up, Radcliffe-style, and ceremoniously raped before tossing them back into the proverbial bin. Per Irigary, the mother is always something to rape; per Creed, she refuses to be a victim; per me, such predation within the profit motive is something we must challenge and subvert inside of itself—by playing with it from one series of toys to the next! From feminism to Afrocentrism to the 1980s, nostalgia decays, finding an oft-modular jouissance [for or against the state] inside itself; e.g., Vaporwave, but also the stripper disco girls of Castlevania and The Darkest Dungeon. As Nina says in “80s Girl” [2018]: Don’t let the past hold you back!” Take these things and make them functionally proletarian again; i.e., defending Medusa as someone to hug who, yes, has rape trauma, thus fantasies of an oft-hauntological sort [Gothic roleplay always sits between the present and the imaginary past as violent]:

[artist, top-left: Persephone van der Waard; bottom-middle: PawznCupz; source tweet, right: Cottontail, March 30th: “Got to voice plant mommy~ check it out!”] 

What can I say? Per Sarkeesian’s adage, I can enjoy what I critique; e.g., the black “Egypt” of the Japanese neoliberal imagination; i.e., a site of regular abject psychosexual power fantasies. On the GBA and DS, I’ve played with such portable, hand-held cultural exports—of monster rape and play—since I was a little girl well into adulthood; as a professional, though, I’ve pointedly critiqued Castlevania‘s monster moms before [Persephone van der Waard’s “Sex in Castlevania, season 3,” 2020] and have lovingly reified them as a sex-positive mode of being. Simply put, I love me a good, Sontag-grade BDSM/rape-murder fantasy—monster girls [above] but also a strict-class Archaic Mother who, for once, actually feels strong! And I mean really strong. Think Jadis, minus the actual abuse, or Lewis’ Bleeding Nun but ostensibly able to avenge herself in ways Carmilla wasn’t, in the original Netflix series. Sign me up, babes!

Unlike sex-positive forces, regressive proponents—meaning conservatives, reactionaries and moderates—will use Amazonomachia to project their darker sides and deep unspeakable desires onto an “other” place they can attack and claim exclusive victimhood as a false flag operation; i.e., that lets them rape unironically with impunity while using DARVO tactics to accuse labor of being the ones causing harm! In quotes or not, “danger” and excitement are an effective means of shocking the system when system shock is already unfolding [again]: calculated risk that has imaginary elements with a historical flavor as dogmatic-to-iconoclastic. It’s often problematic for this reason; e.g., the Castlevania Belmonts’ utter love for whipping the whore with their hand-me-down slaver’s tool [which is precisely what a whip is, but also an anti-Semitic torture device used, through salting the leather, to inflict pain against unholy forces, mid-witch-hunt].

 

Yet, all are things to reclaim inside of themselves, finding liberation alongside lost/stolen generations and their systemic harm. Like Ann Rice’s vampire, Doltra becomes something to interview by virtue of critiquing her show-stealing masochism. The production’s admittedly rather literal black penitent, she’s the little pink neon sign pointing to herself and shouting “Nazi!” in whorish squeals, mid-mutilation: “I’m a bad girl, daddy! Whip me!” It’s “WAP” with no irony at all, the black knight stripped bare and whipped like any classic slave. Doltra is the victim of bad play having learned to love harmful pain and unequal power arrangements; i.e., the Shakespearean Moor as something to not only stare at but punish as reprobate. In short, she’s a fatal sycophant zombie self-flagellating but also serving as literal food for the master if need be [which the show offers as a dated critique of older systems of repression through its critique of the Catholic faith’s blood sacrifice—the lamb sent to Abraham—and by extension, transubstantiation]! The difference between a lobotomized corpse and a drug addict is scant, insofar as such feeding predicates on predation of the servant serving the master forcing undeath upon them; Doltra was probably groomed early on to view the Countess as a god—i.e., of the “might makes right” sort, the skeleton queen!

False or not, revolution gets messy fast. As such, Doltra is the token slave, the stylish and shameless house n*gro whoring herself out; i.e., as the Nazi-grade monster mom’s dutiful lapdog assimilating for a white predatory mistress: profaning the Western household to ultimately uphold it through false rebellion, disguised as a second wave feminist bogeywomen scaring the Man. Frankly such role reversals are par for the course in neoliberal tokenism; i.e., making Nazis blacker than they would have been allowed by the German [or American] state in decay while a given extermination carries on, all the while. She’s a Hugo-Boss style paper doll: the fashion model method weaponizing the help to punch down against the poors. At best, she’s a black capitalist, but her job is literally the enforcer for someone even worse; i.e., the usual fash MO: kiss up and punch down, but always, always look stylish!

[source: Alucarddaily]

Unlike nation-states, corporations don’t care about dogmatic presentation as true to the state; they care about exploitation as something that invariably corrupts, which they can milk while throwing various states under the bus if need be. Profit is always the victim. As such, capitalists will do whatever they can to profit as efficiently as possible [visually compromising ideologies useful to capital while still, somehow, propping them up, CIA-style] but especially DARVO and obscurantism through bad-faith centrist yarns framing capital as the victim dressed up in false rebellion as fascist and moderate. In turn, tokenism happens, but this He-Man-grade cronyism, per Doltra and the Countess, is still entirely Rainbow Capitalist [the character is fun in a pure vice-character sense, but she’s smug precisely because her belief in the Countess is blind zealotry the audience not only roots for, but expects].

Earlier we also mentioned moderacy—i.e., something to challenge inside of itself. Such a glutton-for-punishment like Doltra’s obedience-in-decay is countered by perhaps the show’s nicest surprise: Annette and Edouard. To be completely honest, I don’t know a lot about either persona, save that Annette was originally white [a move similar to the 2017 show making Isaac black]. Some people predictably hate this for reasons of “historical accuracy” [uh huh]. Fascists gonna hate, but personally I see this as a theatrical route to fresh voices to enjoy and critique: Castlevania isn’t sacred; it’s a trashy, campy place to profane sacred things. The show uses it to talk about revolution in ways that give it a multi-racial flavor [which others appreciate, as well; e.g., La’Ron Readus’ “Why Annette is Black,” 2023]. Cool, but let’s interrogate that!

I have enough experience reading Nella Larsen, R. Charles Johnson, Michelle Cliff, Jean Rhys, Toni Morrison or Zora Neale Hurston, etc, to recognize the value in such perspective; re: the pedagogy of the oppressed as non-white, but in-development. Still, corporations are generally heavy-handed; Castlevania: Nocturne feels a bit “punch the plantation owner” as written in ways that lean closer to Django Unchanged [2012] versus MLK’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” or Fanon’s aforementioned Black Skin, White Masks: going after an overt cartoon of such realities versus criticizing white moderacy [and Afrocentrism] as the historical-material enemy of progress in Americanized lands and legends. The show just doesn’t have the incentive to say those things, because those things challenge profit. Still, I liked the class differences between Annette and Edouard, and Edouard’s role as a queer person-of-color trapped in a demon’s body while singing operatically from beyond the grave to literally challenge the earliest iterations of fascism: on the plantations, much as slaves always did—through singing as a kind of rebellious code. Except he’s actually an opera singer born free and helping those not born free escape through music as a revolutionary front [“the creatures of the night; what sweet music they make!”]. Neat!

However, while I appreciated Annette’s refusal to stoop to such self-defeating tactics as Doltra did, the show still isn’t as radical as it comes across through its non-white faces; i.e., making black-and-white arguments that—while they refreshingly critique the French Revolution as overlooking black slaves—aren’t always very nuanced unto themselves; i.e., its own Afrocentrism stating “evil is evil” or “the sun will outshine the darkness” while not really thinking about struggles outside their own plantations. To that, Indigenous groups aren’t really being mentioned or included as “black” if they aren’t tied to the current genocide being committed by the French. This being said, Orlock does briefly mention a Mohawk boy he loved, once, in the American colonies. Indeed, the word “colony” is something he stresses, albeit in ways that ultimately mistrust the fascist Countess without extending that critique to the white American gentry as ultimately complicit in settler-colonialism. The show picks and chooses quite liberally who to bash. Except, that’s the problem. You gotta bash all the fash, lovelies, and before they inevitably decay!

[artist: François-Auguste Biard]

In short, Nocturne offers the usual problems of divide and conquer being relegated to voodoo and Caribbean slaves being the only dissenting non-white voice Netflix offers; i.e., as a moderate force upending the “natural order” of masters and slaves, of so-called Divine Right while not really speaking to anyone but the French as imperialist. I get the basic idea, but a little dualistic integrity and holism would have helped critique capital as a current problem without reducing black culture to a singular monolith that excludes Indigenous peoples at large; i.e., while vital, challenging the master/slave dialogic is a bit antiquated, as capital fosters so many different kinds of class betrayal in centrist stories. Afrocentrism, in this case, projects onto island slave revolts [e.g., the Haitian Revolution] exacted against French forces to appeal to an African American audience monopolizing victimhood by projecting themselves onto Caribbean slaves speaking Creole. Similar to Bram Stoker’s gentrified anti-Semitism as a bigoted Irishman whitewashing British atrocities, eventually Afrocentrism becomes just another form of gatekeeper rhetoric that leaves far too much out; i.e., reducing “black” to American citizens and recuperating rebellion as “black and queer,” but leaving anything Indigenous out [e.g., Māori as “black” within the settler colonial argument despite having relatively fair skin[1]]: outside of an African survey that focuses on a lack of unity back then to serve profit now. These are old tactics that sadly work all too well.

Even so, watching everyone at war with each other mid-revolution was fun. The French Church, the queer-coded Arab beefcake topped by Orlock, the French [white] middle class—there’s so many Gothic tropes on display in Nocturne as mixing with class-cultural considerations; i.e., fitting into the kinds of half-real discourse that was actually occurring centuries ago, except it’s being relaid through a modernized, corporate retelling: the videogame adaptation as racially inclusive to a moderate, Afrocentrist degree! “Look. We have black Nazis and black cops! How diverse, right?” Like Macbeth minus the irony, it crams them into borrowed robes[2] to serve the state; e.g., Doltra’s hoof-shaped, thigh-high stripper boots.

More to the point, such middle-class, gatekeeper fictions further the process of abjection as racially expanded by presenting the ghost of the counterfeit as “threat”; i.e., something to burn in a purifying ritual in defense of the West looking backward, shrouded in Capitalist Realism: “Once she conquers Europe, you will guide her to America.” Won’t someone please think of the poor settler-colony? The Countess/Sekhmet is literally canonized, here, as the ghost of fascism seeking revenge against moderates [the West] and slaves alike; i.e., the indiscriminate lioness as redhaired, an Archaic Mother set up to take the fall when all’s said and done: a ringleading devil-worshipper Melmoth, coming home to roost, mid-Amazonomachia. Like the usual Nazi tricks, it puts “rebellion” and “Jewish revenge” in quotes. Doltra, by extension, is merely a stepping stone to whitewash America displaced as 18th-century “France”: by diverse cops, but cops nonetheless keeping the peace against Red Scare through extinction/extermination rhetoric, mid-DARVO, marking the Medusa [and the black Amazon] for death.

Any settler colony needs cops and victims; i.e., the creation of an imaginary enemy/menace, raison d’être, call-to-arms/casus beli and so on. The most privileged within capital’s cycle of abuse and hauntological argument are generally the most scared, angry and violent on and offstage, acting tough and afraid at the same time, abusing oppressor/oppressed rhetoric for purposes of capital, especially settler-colonialism; i.e., Joseph Crawford’s invention of terrorism; e.g., Zionists[2a] [Thought Slime’s “Zionists Are Crybabies,” 2024]. This does not preclude tokenism; it demands it, on both sides of the argument [from the oppressor perspective, of course]: black cops, black Nazis [“black” meaning anything non-white, per the settler-colonial binary].

Or in the words of Malcolm X in 1963, 

The white liberal differs from the white conservative only in one way: the liberal is more deceitful than the conservative. The liberal is more hypocritical than the conservative. Both want power, but the white liberal is the one who has perfected the art of posing as the Negro’s friend and benefactor; and by winning the friendship, allegiance, and support of the Negro, the white liberal is able to use the Negro as a pawn or tool in this political “football game” that is constantly raging between the white liberals and white conservatives.

Politically the American Negro is nothing but a football and the white liberals control this mentally dead ball through tricks of tokenism: false promises of integration and civil rights [source: Digital History]. 

This plays out onstage, many decades after his and MLK’s death, among many other members of the Civil Rights Movement who were also killed, tokenized or otherwise subjugated as black capitalists decaying into persons the likes of which embody Doltra in real life; e.g., Candice Owens or Barack Obama. Those who can be turned attack their own kind more viciously in service to white moderacy as the world order then and now. But criticism to that order burns now as it did in 1963 when Malcolm X was still alive: “A liberal is someone who opposes every war except the current war and supports all civil rights movements except the one that’s going on right now” [source tweet: Eyeball Slicer, November 23rd, 2023].

Sekhmet’s double is the furious Wandering Jew and Nazi ghost, a great Eater of the Dead and the Light, insofar as the state is dying and must be saved by punching the Nazi: our black hole sun, eating the light as an argument for patriarchal domination’s revival. It’s a bait-and-switch gimmick, our false Egyptian standing in for Communism, mid-Red-Scare, conflated with fascism as an American phenomenon projected onto non-Western places as ghosts of Caesar and Marx. It all becomes something to banish alongside any crisis and decay as merely a predatory means to restore the state during the liminal hauntology of war [the castle, in this case, is Sekhmet threatening to cannibalize the state per a rebellious-yet-fascist transfer of power dressed up as a faux-Egyptian Archaic Mother]. It works as Castlevania always has; i.e., American-style obscurantism, through the kayfabe monomyth, post-WW2, in neoliberal markets doing Goldilocks Imperialism during Capitalism Realism: by defending the usual empires [and their cartographic refrains] from a Nazi strawman/straw dog—a queen bitch, in Nocturne‘s case. The only solution is force and it must be righteously administered by the good guys against the bad until the end of time.

Afrocentrist or TERF, the state defends itself, including when regressing to false preachers dealing with the bourgeoisie disguised as “the devil-as-monstrous-feminine.” All their paradoxes, kayfabe, contradictions, and temporary alliances/strange bedfellows—their language of the past, their queerness and non-white, turncoat aristocrat representation—serve the state [the Star Wars problem]: to buck the unironic Whore of Babylon. It’s dogmatic, thus needs to be camped in ways that weaponize the language of hellish rebellion for workers. It must camp what has become blind as one staring into an eclipse, into the eye of confusion existing as the flavor-of-the-month; i.e., a lunatic daughter of Ra to worship as yet-another-boss-style sacrifice for the monomyth to present to our heroes as “big sacrifice”: raping the Nazi whore as “extremely fuckable” in ways we can harness to achieve systemic catharsis and redistribution. We’ll unpack all of this stuff in the Monster Modules proper. So keep it handy!)

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

This concludes the assimilation exhibit, but we still have a few more quotes and focal points to stress before the Necropolis returns for us to play around inside.

First, the harvest that any fascist/moderate (and their concentric veneers) invoke, ipso facto, occurs as a tolling refrain: “The harvest is here! Pity those with a place at the table!” To that, Netflix shamelessly cashing in on the Castlevania monster girl might seem to suggest a monopoly on such psychosexual poetics, doomed to police us during the liminal hauntology of war stuck on repeat; i.e., to produce tokenized, succubus-style, monstrous-feminine traitors alongside the lily-white, modest ones; re (from Volume One):

Such a castle’s nightmarish presence denotes potential mayhem tied to one’s habitat; i.e., through the liminal hauntology of war colonizing nature and those tied to nature. When such a castle appears, it is time to be afraid; the colonial harvest is at hand. Yet, precisely because the state does not hold a monopoly over violence, terror and morphological expression, a demon or castle needn’t spell our end; it can represent our sole means of attack, reclaiming said poetics’ endless inventiveness to turn colonizer fears back into their hopelessly scared brains with counterterror (source).

As such, the presence of unironic rape, possession and imprisonment in Gothic castles is generally accepted. Except, this isn’t exclusively tied to profit and Capitalism as something to defend (re: Radcliffe) through childish regressions into escapist dark-fantasy castles. I relied on unironic interpretations in the past, but eventually learned to include irony in my own castle-narrative and scholarship. Provided a given relationship/performance challenges the socio-material factors that normally lead to such abuse, though, there’s nothing wrong with sexiness and rape play as a sexual-to-asexual Gothic commentary on psychosexual harm and predation.

To varying degrees, then, all workers possess the means to subvert canonical monsters during rape play as consent-non-consent forms of calculated risk bending the optics; i.e., in what we make and leave behind, over and over (e.g., my Castlevania monster girl drawing revisited today as of writing this, above, originally from 2019): the operatic “danger disco’s” hauntological “torture” dungeon, but also its sexy monstrous-feminine as a collective, shared statement of our daily struggles reclaimed from state tyrannies doubling our monstrous selves! Per the usual mise-en-abyme as concentric, we’re always in the middle of someone, somewhere and/or something that inspires us through castle-narrative to move towards a decaying likeness of what they’re ostensibly turning into (frozen in time): half-real beings pointing towards a better world dancing with the imaginary past as a future event unfolding always in the present space-and-time! Disco decays. When it does, we feel “raped,” thus strong as desirable for our scars, our exploitation as something that, like all monsters, can be reclaimed during a pedagogy of the oppressed resisting police violence! It’s crude and violent, as the Gothic always is. The slave is generally a zombie to fuck.

(artist: Ottomarr)

Except, such praxial synthesis and catharsis is less a crystal ball and more something historical-material, insofar as history is predicated on material conditions having a social element that—per Marx—shape and maintain each other but cannot be monopolized by us or the state. It’s a wrestling match that demands intersectional solidarity to weaken the prison inside itself; i.e., putting the elite “on the hip” not as an event but a counter structure that takes their power away in the vital moment: “Call your dogs! They can feast on your corpses!”

We succ, something always given and received during any poetic exchange of essence, of power and vitality (what do you think sex is? See: above): siphoned towards us with a little help from each other towards a common cause reversing abjection, thus profit as a structure. So whenever Medusa’s feeling pissed off, instead of getting hung up on the usual moral ambiguities, sexy bodies/clothes, Amazonomachia kayfabe, or blind camp (e.g., the Dread Pirate Roberts from The Princess Bride, 1973), ask yourselves why that might be; i.e., why the usual monomyth needs black Nazis and a Whore of Babylon’s cataclysmic Big Revenge for the white knights/good cops to unite against for the state’s continuation: rape apologia is state/capitalist apologia.

To that, feelings of total annihilation and domination don’t come from nothing! They’re informed by socio-material conditions for or against the state as occupying the same theatrical spaces of rape; i.e., something to canonize or camp! Everything decays under capital. Napoleon, like the Nazis over a century after his defeat, decayed rebellion and its slogans, to serve capital by becoming the elite’s scapegoat to consolidate power right where it was. Marx hinted at this with “The Eighteenth Brumaire” (1852); whether Nocturne will or not remains to be seen, but I doubt it. It’s set up like a videogame, with Medusa as the boss, not Napoleon or the bourgeoisie; i.e., it’s a disco with monsters, but decaying in ways useful to the elite now.

As the undead, the demonic, the animalistic, we oppressed live for that shit, encapsulating its give-and-take as forbidden, begging to yield up fresh regeneration and revival away from state decay and genocide:

Now you are mine
In my control
One taste of your life
And I own your soul! (Judas Priest’s “Love Bites[3],” 1984).

State continuation, by comparison, yields the usual horrors, which requires escape through paradox as something to invite and enjoy once taught; i.e., the likes of which a vampire has been done to death but never really gets old—to be powerful when feeling weak, weakened by our usual predators while appearing fearsome and alluring to them! They’ll want “their share” (all of it), which we’ll have to deny when returning from and to the grave as the scene of the crime; i.e., while playing the part as something we can camp to degrees that would make Matthew Lewis or Tim Curry blush with pride and ghoulish delight!

As such, put “rape” in quotes, lovelies! Avoid singular or exclusionary interpretations whose centrisms and normativities (e.g., Afro, hetero) remove those quotes to serve profit, as the fascist (regardless of skin color) always does when capital (and everything inside of it) decays! Moderates and pearly castles are merely waiting to darken and devour workers and nature, starting with the monstrous-feminine but eventually eating everything else, too. Capitalism is unstable by design; when it enters a fascist state of decay, it only disintegrates faster than it would otherwise. Moderates know all of this and choose to lie about it; Nazis embrace the idea through fatal heroism and the cult of death. Good cop, bad cop.

We’ll return to these models and pieces repeatedly in this volume, but also all of these monstrous poetic modules as proletarian in function; i.e., gleaned as a historical-material device that we can improve upon not once, but over and over as feeding time appears and approaches—the vampire, but also their spectral crypt a place to take you in, bury you alive, and feed on your old self as something to reinvent out of old, dead things: necrophagy as a transfer of power where you feed on old dying things/funerary rituals releasing their power in psychosexual ways that aid workers! Nutritious corpses well-fed on a Gothic maturity’s Song of Infinity are useful to this reversal through the same mouths feeding on a better poetic wisdom—of the Ancients!

Remember that decay is anisotropic, thus can be for/towards state power or against/away from it (“away from Omelas”). In short, we want to decay (then regenerate) away from fascism and capital defending itself, not towards the same exploitations it whitewashes with non-white agents; e.g., as liberatory circles like Afrocentrism have historically done per tokenization, which expresses in problematic media like Castlevania: Nocturne; i.e., as pointing to older betrayals unfolding again, black Capitalism being black liberation in decay towards profit and division (divide and conquer). Oppressed groups historically sell out, regardless of their exact skin colors; in turn, a complicated, psychomachic resistance occupies the same haunted veneer as a theatrical device: a mask.

Like monsters, masks aren’t monopolized by any one group. For workers, praxial success onstage and off requires revolutionary cryptonymy making these kinds of performative and theoretical distinctions relative to “black” as inclusive beyond African bodies (American or otherwise); i.e., while recognizing the coded roles of cosmetic non-white physical elements (e.g., black skin) and various elements of non-white identity that allow for communicative nuance in terms of oppressed groups speaking out. I certainly don’t use the label “black Nazi” lightly or in bad faith; I’d like to unpack that a bit.

The larger issue of communication remains representation among divided groups that, per various islander/Polynesian communities and Indigenous groups overall, do sometimes choose to identify as black even when not physically or descended from Africa. Indeed, the “black” aspect isn’t tied to one group and its oppression alone, but operates per non-white entities needing to unite against capital together. Otherwise, it’s just Obama syndrome; i.e., “We have a black president” or a Native American representative, or whichever token you want to think of. These will divide, decay and eat themselves, mid-crisis, because tokenization leads to brutal in-fighting as much as with other groups: “prison sex” mentality (more on this in Volume Three).

Moreover, claims of fascism against liberatory movements is a common one by bad-faith parties (re: “black Nazis” versus Nazis and Communists sharing the same theatrical shadow space in American kayfabe); e.g., Ian Kochinski calling Professor Flowers a “black Nazi[3a]” in bad faith, all to discredit her arguments while distracting from the fact that he’s a sex pest and white supremacist pedophile LARPing as a white “progressive” (e.g., Essence of Thought’s “That Time Vaush’s Career Should Have Died” [2023]. We’ll critique Kochinski much more in Volume Three, trust me).

Similar to feminism and biological sex, skin color shouldn’t be the sole focus of oppressed validation because it always essentializes per fascist rhetoric. It’s fine to say “I have black skin and am oppressed” but tools of oppression will turn a certain dark shade into the only signifier of oppression, excluding others per divide and conquer as a kind of “reverse shadism”; i.e., you’re not black enough, which classically identifies by sight. Ultimately rebellion has to allow for nuanced oppressed identity expression while taking a unified, intersectionally solidarized stance against state power in all its forms, tokens included. We identify by action, as comrades, mid-duality and with a fair degree of flexibility in our terms (forced narrow definitions are generally a cloak for oppressors to hide their abuses behind, and to attack from; e.g., a special definition for genocide instead of a generalized one: John the Duncan’s “Does ‘Intent’ Matter in Genocide,” 2024).

For example, I don’t think it’s “bi-erasure” to use “pan” instead of “bi” when talking conversationally about academic topics and/or monsters. Indeed, there’s an incredibly small difference between two or more genders versus regardless of gender when put to practice.

All the same, if someone wants to use whichever feels more accurate or true to them, then that’s valid! It’s effectively the same idea with “black” vs “non-white,” insofar as either should ultimately resist the state as a white force within the settler-colonial project that is America, capital, and Capitalist Realism (and all that entails). Of course, I do my best to remember that certain friends identify as non-white, but also a) am still learning and b) working within theories that recognize settler colonialism as black-and-white, because of its binarized design; i.e., there’s white thinking beings and then there’s everything else as black/non-white extended beings to be harvested (re: the monstrous-feminine). Tokenism tries to forget that by splitting hairs, but in reality they’re merely drawing straws to choose the Judas and scapegoat. All are victims, in the end (no honor among thieves, which is what capitalists are).

Similar problems emerge with Zionism i.e., Jewish people should be the first to speak out against their own oppression, but anti-Zionist Jews also get called “anti-Semitic” by state proponents; e.g., Holocaust survivors being censored and discredited by Zionists of all walks, colors, ages, classes, etc. In the end, the struggle reduces to the state and capital versus labor against capital and capital’s defenders (token or not). The idea is to acknowledge our similarities amid difference while healing from rape as power abuse committed by state forces; i.e., a pedagogy of the oppressed where we’re all raped differently by state power via police agents.

Again, this rape varies per its execution, but the singular aim is to disperse, disempower and discredit proletarian synthesis/catharsis. I wasn’t sexually raped, for instance, but I was emotionally tortured for years. Even writing that makes me feel weak and imposturous. Like, what am I? Just a posh white bitch, I suppose. I know better than that, but these conflicts of identity still emerge when fascists muddy the waters while attacking state enemies, and not all fascists are white people. Just as often, token fascists and moderates use terror to instill fear and doubt among the colonized, including through marginalized in-fighting. They have to or empire as we know it would be impossible; but conversely, we can return the favor while liberating ourselves, and nothing terrifies the elite (and their servants) more than intersectional solidarity serving a black function in a postcolonial model moving towards post-scarcity—on our raft of Medusa!

(artist: Théodore Géricault)

No comparisons are perfect; doubles invite troubling comparisons, often through sex as something—however far-fetched—to buy, hook, line and sinker. Through rebellion, it becomes a fresh start, a subversive means of regeneration into something that replaces capital inside itself. Development is a constant cliffhanger treading towards new boundaries to form, uphold, rewire, oscillating as the Gothic does: on the Aegis. Afrocentrism is not exempt from this, any more than feminism or queer politics are.

To this, black Nazis become a sobering reality seen in neoliberal fictions, which we must critique and challenge at all times. Doltra’s fun to watch, sure, but problematic nonetheless, and this extends to our daily lives outside Castlevania as informed by its dramatic aesthetics. To that, some oppressed groups may identify as black or not, but a black function still expresses a universal non-white class-cultural character against capital as functionally white; e.g., if an individual or section of peoples from the Aboriginal societies of Australia identify socially and politically as black—i.e., as a struggle against settler-colonial powers, even when their skin appears physically white—versus someone Māori potentially identifying as “non-white” politically for much the same reasons.

Regardless of exactly how such groups choose to identify against the state, it will always be some degree of non-white, regardless if it’s cosmetically or linguo-materially “black” or not; e.g., red (skin or politics), brown, Eastern/non-Christian (Orientalism) or anything else. Just as there’s no limit to capital sexually exploiting and dividing/fetishizing everything to serve profit, there’s no monopoly on rebellion as something that often overlaps various factors thereof, mid-liminal expression during ludo-Gothic BDSM to challenge profit. Each speaks individually per their unique identities belonging collectively to a shared non-white struggle; i.e., where identifying as “black” is a linguo-material device that has cosmetic socio-political elements. This isn’t about ranking rape per a singular special word, but expressing it in all its forms as part of a shared undertaking. And per Gothic discourse, class and culture do affect the conversation/poetics in various dualistic ways we don’t want to reduce to a singular marginalized group, ethnic or not.

(artist: NGArt7)

Simply put, duality must be considered and played with because monsters are dualistic regarding society as sick in ways that aren’t a congenital disease, but a socio-ideological one; i.e., white and black having different meanings depending on the context and use through monstrous language; e.g., black people are classically depicted as orcs, zombies, or some such element inside the state of exception, including as Nazis during camp as having performative irony or not. The takeaway remains constant, though: having a shared postcolonial function (which canonically operates as black- vs-white in ways that treat anything non-white as “black”) that doesn’t tokenize for the state; e.g., blaxploitation as something to camp with various amounts (or dearths) of irony—Black Dynamite (2009) hilariously riffing on Shaft (1973) while often leaning problematically into the same bigoted tropes. It’s always a tightrope.

In regards to non-white tokenism (Nazis or otherwise), I’m ultimately talking about normative Afrocentrism and pan-Africanism in decay by virtue of its rising false-revolutionary character as half-real; i.e, not relegated to a given type of media or its target audience (usually an American or British one), but extending to all peoples under capital between fiction and non-fiction across the Gothic mode: the world as something for the elite to carve up on all registers, across all media refrains (re: Tolkien, Cameron). It’s less black skin, white masks as an exclusively theatrical appearance and more a fabrication of exclusive false rebellion using black aesthetics in a literal sense: black skin in black Nazi uniforms decaying “socialism” as obscurantist tokenized DARVO. It sells out for a slice of the oppressed group acting the oppressor against other marginalized elements while internalizing bigotry/whiteness with a cosmetically black cop/”rebel” façade. Eventually the mask drops and the white function takes over to brutalize the oppressed policing themselves.

Dress it up however you want, then, but class and race betrayal are class and race betrayal, ipso facto. Flow of power determines function; we’re talking about Afronormativity per Afrocentrism being used as a tokenized rotting mask pushing power towards the state, but it applies to any in-community policing by tokenized agents that—while they have legitimate grievances—choose to kiss up to state power and punch laterally against their own kind/comrades (or down, depending on their privilege); i.e., I experience as much discrimination by cis-to-GNC AFAB sex workers exuding trans misogyny[3b] as I do white cis-het men; but also from black actors calling me a “white theorist” as a means of discrediting my work as functionally non-white. I won’t condone or defend that, but instead will out and express it as a form of decay that needs to be acknowledged and discussed in response to my work as a group effort, thus group to protect from class and race traitors/useful idiots serving capital:

Revolution is a group effort, one where my friends are people to protect from tokenized agents; i.e., like this individual, who until this moment seemed friendly enough—effusive towards my work, even—but after reading this piece suddenly started to ignore my boundaries while attacking my friends. Call me “honky” if you want, but go after my friends? Unacceptable!

(source: MegaGFilms’ “UNACCEPTABLE,” 2013)

Whatever can be said about my work or my snow-white skin/privilege, my function is non-white. I’m really not the enemy here, capital and the state are, but also their various defenders; whatever the form—from the Native Americans[3c] to pan-Africanism—tokenism (re: Fanon) and decay towards capital (which is what fascism is) remains a historically self-defeating practice. Doltra dies at the end of Castlevania: Nocturne, and until then she is utterly alone, made into the Countless’ dutiful lapdog: if you scratch a token Nazi… a Nazi still bleeds!

(artist: MthS)

Regardless if a given group’s claim towards emancipation is valid, excluding others and muddying the waters for no other reason than to attack radical liberation is folly. Subjugation is segregation and segregation is no defense from the engines of capital against its usual targets; the only way forward is intersectional solidarity towards universal liberation from capital and its fascist defenders (white skin or not; e.g. Richard Dreyfuss interviewed by Bill Maher talking about incest[3d], two white men definitely in decay). The dead become something to eat insofar as we can decay away from capital and regenerate towards a higher form of life hinted at through the imaginary dead as one less decayed in a fascist sense. But our forms of cannibalism and vampirism—however vital, will always be haunted by active fascist elements threatening to lobotomize and consume us (and our friends) for the state. Reclamation occurs in spite of that, using the same theatrical devices:

(model and artist: Blxxd Bunny and Persephone van der Waard)

In the spirit of passing into new territories within old ones, then, I’d like my readers to briefly reconsider this flowing of power and knowledge through its coursing within me into these bloody pages. Regard how my thesis sentence from Volume Zero—”Capitalism sexualizes everything”—became something to synthesize through ludo-Gothic BDSM as later developed and explored; i.e., as a concept that I introduced when discussing Metroidvania in the thesis volume, but having invited readers through later volumes to consider well beyond videogame analysis or performance moving into the half-real space of all Gothic poetics: the critique of power wherever it (and state dogma) are found.

Per the sexual dimorphism operating normally within capital, “strength” and “battle” divide along an enforced sexual/gender binary (canonical biological essentialism); i.e., as “strong” in ways that serve profit as something to perform in ways that until quite recently did not exist (within the past several-thousand years): nation-states. Now they’re everywhere, as are their war and rape canonized through the paradox of strong and weak (a fascist binary) but also clothed and nude as a monstrous-feminine fighter of the usual sort; i.e., the Amazonomachy‘s virgin/whore as sexy and tough in ways that serve profit during capital’s ups-and-downs, its decay. She operates as a hauntological gladiator remediating in various sexy spectacles that marry raw strength to feminine displays of vulnerability and eye candy for paying male customers first and foremost (e.g., Rainbow Mika’s infamous butt slap, above—Capcom are shameless in their pandering to the status quo, but also do make a good Amazon).

Whatever the form, sex and force serve profit under capital. Apart from “chasers” of a GNC sort (more on them in Volume Three), though, gamer culture is sexist, unable to make GNC distinctions at all. As such, they tend to see the monstrous-feminine predominantly as female; i.e., its strength something to “buff” or “nerf” vis-à-vis gratuitously sexual displays “for men.” From literal toys to staged, show-style fights, all sell the female demon lover as fash-coded, regardless of skin color while defaulting to white; re: fatal nostalgia weaponizing the white female protector through island-fortress mentality that can tokenize to non-white forms (re: Doltra)! It’s territorial inside a neoliberal market selling protection as “Amazonian.” We’ve discussed the token fascist as black and female, then, so I may as well be holistic and look at white mean girls (we’ve done that tons throughout this series, but I digress).

Let’s stick with Capcom and the Street Fighter franchise. As the ancient heel demonstrates, theatre junkies love a presence of decay in heroic figures (which store cultural values and taboos). In modern kayfabe, this accounts for fascist elements in post-fascist wrestling language as a complicated dogwhistle; i.e., the black knight or dark Amazon, which applies black as “corrupt” in a fascist aesthetic in ways that historically don’t rely on skin color more so than cultural markers of “other” that have ethnic elements (e.g., Jews, Moors) among progressively Eastern or non-British national flavors (e.g., the manufactured, abject prurience of the French or backstabbing “nature” of Italians) but rather express through Gothic poetics as “black” across toy-like media: foreign, taboo or decayed in a non-racialized degree; i.e., regarding white as “default.” There’s still a racial element, it’s simply not stressed as much as the white figure’s “corruption” is, her forced militarization.

(artist: Arman Akopian)

For example, Cammy White—a white poster girl for dated-thus-decayed British Imperialism (the skull insignia echoing Germanized variants of military symbols: the German Reichsadler and death’s head unit, but also lightning bolts/seig “sun/victory” runes) as weaponized by a Japanese heel, M. Bison, playing Melmoth’s double—accounts for a continual fascist presence in Britain under Pax Americana through Japanese neoliberal (videogame) kayfabe; i.e., a sexy female assassin, already suffering female double standards, curiously sports SAS attire (the telltale beret and military greens) attached to an retro ’80s calisthenics leotard/gym bod while working for Shadaloo… as an evil global organization of super villains (the Jewish conspiracy conflated with Nazis, but also historically complicated by Zionism): a white non-American femme fatale haunting and hunting the videogame stage in ways that, along with Doltra in Castlevania, become the Nazi to camp; i.e., to enjoy for its sexiness and “bad girl” flavor but critique for its fascist potential.

(source: Manush Monitor)

In this case, Cammy’s literally the brainwashed puppet, bad British cop and sex symbol/sex slave made into a toy in more ways than one; e.g., the killer sex doll; i.e., “for the boys,” but also TERFs who claim such Amazonian theatrics for themselves alone. In short, tokenism (and its escapist, dogmatic tendencies) might complicate under recent globalization and post-WW2 markets, but all such nation pastiche—and their anthemic music as something to universally capitalize on; e.g., 331 Rock’s “Super Street Fighter II Meets Metal – Cammy” (2024)—serve profit and state hegemony onstage and off.

White or black, we want to remember something vital about tokenization per the Nazi as monstrous-feminine. Capital recruits from marginalized spheres when it’s in decay but once fascist secures formal power will put people who menstruate/give birth into the kitchen; i.e., keep ’em barefoot and pregnant. Such brides will always be put on a pedestal and the whore will always be chased as the bad bitch who is fun to fuck, but must—like the Fox and the Hound—maintain the nation-state kayfabe to keep up appearances. It’s a joy division (refer to Volume Zero for more examples of the euthanasia effect):

(artist: Wolf Skull Jack)

No matter how carefully they walk the tightrope/wear the thong for the boys while kicking ass, then, subjugated Amazons decay and fascism is bad for everyone but the elite; i.e., regardless of how well the intended audience (white cis-het men, tokenizing outwards) seems to be “eating good”: on waifus/war brides denoting a capitalization on, and sickness towards nature-as-monstrous-feminine (which again, has non-white components that can tokenize like Doltra does). Nature-as-monstrous-feminine is always expendable first; re: the euthanasia effect.

(artist, top: Fireband-3D; middle: Edayan; bottom: Fireband-3D)

This ties into the profit motive as not only Cartesian, settler-colonial and heteronormative, but something that reflects in the usual warrior performers who—per all of these things—serve the profit motive by treating nature as monstrous-feminine on any register and in any format: rape and kill Medusa, torturing her secrets out of her to consolidate power around the usual patriarchal nuclei buoyed by capital on top of older imperiums. Canonically the motive always reduces to a pyramid point scaled by standard (white)/tokenized people harvesting nature as monstrous-feminine; e.g., Chun Li as the self-proclaimed “strongest woman in the world”; i.e., both anti-thetical to state forces and thetical to the state as needing to prey on the very things it abjects: through the ghost of the counterfeit as something for the middle class to attack, conquer and harvest in any and all forms, but especially the monomyth during neoliberal refrains (videogames) inside the Imperial Core fighting back and forth, centrist-style: no moral actions, only moral teams; i.e., neoliberal, Anglo-American exceptionalism.

All of this is traditionally dressed up in sexist ways (re: “Borrowed Robes“) that, per capital, serve profit as heteronormative, settler-colonial and Cartesian as a neoliberal spectre we must interrogate, mid-play. Fans of canon, though, generally treat such heroic clashes as escapist, bread-and-circus entertainment; they won’t want to critique their strong-and-sexy heroes as built to service their needs tied forever to profit expanding to compromise said needs. In short, there’s always a monetary value to these exchanges, whose predatory transactional costs abuse labor as always flowing up; i.e., in ways that disseminate capitalistic dogma and its harmful values and historical-material effects back down onto entitled Man Box consumers and their victims (more on this in Volume Three).

(source: Sabitsu’s “ED (Shirtless) vs CHUN-LI (Alternative) – Street Fighter 6,” 2024)

Quick refresh: Along with all the double standards, “Amazon” theatrically equals “monster love” as something that canonically synonymizes sex and rape, but also struggle and submission: courtly love, the dragon and the knight (the Medusa and the Hippolyta) wherein monstrous-feminine is always sex object and alien fetish. Metroidvania apply this to the operatic castle space as one to move through, generally set to music: castle-narrative; fighting games focus on the combat area and chaotic dance of one-on-one combat; etc. Whatever the form, actual non-harmful love’s sex and emancipation exist in the same danger space on the same surfaces and in between thresholds.

This is where ludo-Gothic BDSM as a means of subversive monstrous-feminine argument (sex and force) begins to really translate not just to Metroidvania like Castlevania, but to any kind of Gothic poetics at war on and offstage as musical, dance-like, safe; e.g., Street Fighter, above (Ed as the Nazi avatar in decay and Chun Li as the female token good cop); i.e., only becoming a revolutionary means of critical thought when the egregore—any egregore—offers up an abstract, accessible, fun (combat sports) critical lens/ontological statement that approaches and combats something tied to various historical-material symptoms of profit: the unironic monomyth’s Shadow of Pygmalion, Cycle of Kings, infernal concentric pattern and narrative of the crypt.

In short, it’s the dialectic of the alien made in our favor by camping anything and everything in ways that kick ass while sporting a big ass. We put “predation” in quotes, but acknowledge the pain and harm of a system chasing said ass as something to harvest for profit-as-usual: our Aegis a shield that bounces damage back at our would-be-destroyers (while helping us relieve stress/get our jollies during our “death/rape,” no less)! Hypnotic illusions don’t tear people apart, but Pavlovian conditioning can when someone thinks they’re Akuma: “Your body assumed it’s proper form when my fists tore it apart!” To be honest, I think people like that are compensating for their lack of humanity (and impotency) in the bedroom! Unironic fighters for the state excel as making war, not love!

(artist: Auxtasy)

Capitalism sexualizes everything and American militarism loves sexy military recruiters; i.e., poster girls. But sex and pain (especially monstrous examples) are excellent teachers for or against the state. To that, proponents of either will catch more flies with honey than shit, the former which allows for an open, honest enjoyment of an Amazonian statuesque alongside non-standard beauty norms. They’re not mutually exclusive, but liberation and profit are.

Rule of thumb, then: whatever a monster’s shape (size difference) or modular class (undead, demonic, animalistic), if it challenges the profit motive, it’s probably sex-positive; i.e., doesn’t instruct through unironic sexual coercion and rape, but through good BDSM is often haunted by patriarchal state abuse (re: Man Box, which we’ll pointedly interrogate in Volume Three); e.g., the disordered thinking of narcissistic women abusing their own children and servants: trauma begets trauma. We can subvert that, using our scars as a strength it was never intended for by state forces preying on us. The idea is to fight fire with fire, recruiting through sex as a flamethrower-style can opener for the closed-up brain. The rebellious power of monsters is enormous, off the charts. But it must be harnessed and used as such, not recuperated by state forces only to decay again; i.e., sloppy seconds.

In either case, instructors are often massive, dark and threatening but tied to pleasure and non-harmful pain, etc, as non-white in a Cartesian sense: the pedagogy of rebellion, of the furious dead, demons, nature, et al, externalizing matters of vice and virtue as things to corporally liberate from state forces, from profit; i.e., whenever state decay lets us work our magic in response to their bullshit as fully exposed for all to see. All booties—regardless of sex, size, gender, race or religion, etc—shall be free.

(artist: Ddaniii45)

In the interim, strength as a means of sexuality and gender expression-as-performance and gender identity are staged in a half-real sense: everywhere we are, among each other and how we relate and interact as friends and comrades waging class and culture war through our art, our bodies, our funding of such things; e.g., my friend Jackie paying me to draw them as “a badass bitch,” and for me doing my best to represent them while adhering to my project’s core values to achieve creative success, mid-praxis: sex-positivity, descriptive sexuality, informed consumption, and cultural appreciation, etc, illustrating mutual consent as a labor exchange and psychosexual dialog invigilated with pride:

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

The Gothic is crude as often as not, not-so-subtle and yet prone to subtlety through dualistic exchanges playing with doubles. Praxis remediates through pastiche like a bad echo, thus oscillates across the surface of such things. This includes fugitive, hunted bodies of all kinds threatened by alienation and predation, prejudice and persecution both things to enact and elude through the usual opposing cryptonymies.

If you’ve read my books thus far, you’ll know that Castlevania or not, there’s a nigh-endless number of waifu and wheyfu in the world, on the market—of Amazons and mommy doms, Medusa and succubae, etc, to “battle” with in various schools (of Terror and Horror) and crossovers. Regardless of their fame, the reliable casualty of such hurly-burly in service to workers is so many dead darlings: so many monsters to humanize as proletarian while preserving the sexy aesthetic of monstrous battle clapping those “dummy thicc” ass cheeks; i.e., as stewards of nature to shield from capital’s ravenous decaying maw/fascist feeding mechanisms (which the Undead Module will expensively unpack). Per Edward Said’s pleasures of exile, home must become foreign to you, must become hostile/alien as a means of sex-positive transformation!

Beauty standards are always arbitrary but arbitrated under different conditions for different reasons. Profit standardizes beauty as “rebellious” to serve profit through the Amazon as cop-like, thus prone to decay. As such, sex workers are born under duress, reclaiming their bodies, labor and performances from exploitative models (the monomyth) while being exploited. This isn’t “optional,” but required insofar as subversion is done unto canon, capital as foisting itself onto labor as something to alienate, fetishize, pimping it out to receive its regular beatings from good cops attacking bad cops to defend capital as both decaying and regenerating over time, but also seeking revenge; i.e., when capital decays and blames the monstrous-feminine as usual: the Destroyer as weak and strong in ways that serve profit—the dark mistress, the whore, the boss/dragon lady’s forbidden fruit, cut up and served on a plate.

(artist: Brendan Corris)

Mind you, this isn’t just marginalized groups. White women tokenize, too (albeit from a liminal staging point), praying on others through their ability to gatekeep fantasies of exploitation to suit themselves; and white men are the standard oppressor decaying from white knight to black, the loyalty of the American middle class playing their own form of slavery unto the elite, being their white Indian as undercover cop: the colonial servant, formerly indentured. Anything that can decay assimilates in this fashion unless other options exist as made available to potential class traitors by rebellious, sex-positive workers.

These tricks occur in the same spaces, stages, cryptonymies, mimesis. Per the undead, the Gothic announces the arrival (and fear) of decay as a historical-material current within capital-in-decay that can be challenged; i.e., through what we feed on/with using what we got, our Aegis as anisotropic in terms of processing trauma, mid-poiesis, challenging moderacy and fascism: either keeping the peace through different rates of decay and abuse, instability and power. Decay needn’t exclusively promote genocide, but may likewise grant an offering of untried change into something new emerging from an old dead thing: a chance to seed the Earth with fresh life fertilized by a dark “rotting” peach. The spirit of revenge is there, only the best kind laid bare—not survival, but success!

(artist: Mei Minato)

To this, ludo-Gothic BDSM yields a dualistic, anisotropic function that reverses the process of abjection by dancing with the ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., doing so through the Four Gs, Six Rs, Gothic mode of expression, Gothic-Communist Hermeneutic Quadfecta and iconoclastic doubles of oppositional praxis. Dialectical-material scrutiny is vital, then, to synthesizing good praxis and systemic catharsis; praxial synthesis and catharsis occur on all registers/poetics when the dialectic of the alien (something I coined when revisited Volume Two and getting it ready for publication) is approached with the specific and conscious intent of challenging profit and all the decaying operations involved in its continuation: fascism/centrism in games, art, novels, media, onstage and off—everywhere.

As such, I would extend my PhD’s thesis-volume arguments to Volume One’s synthesizing of praxis in simplified forms that cultivate good social-sexual habits; i.e., raising the emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness needed to apply ludo-Gothic BDSM to monsters’ liberatory devices only when holistically examined over time, and with other people offering oppressed perspectives contributing to a continual pedagogy of the oppressed: through the dialectic of the alien reversing the usual canonical function of monsters, hence the flow of power towards workers to hug and humanize Medusa as perpetually harvested by the state during neoliberal Cartesian dogma.

Just as their old theories updated under new conditions, my analysis took ideas that emerged after my PhD to say things that I would expound upon after crystalizing Volume One. In short, my theories—already unique and robust—began to mature and comment on themselves in practice; i.e., as something to express in continuum leading me to say things that I couldn’t say without having said something previous, and something before that. Except, Gothic Communism is communal, reverse abjection something that requires a holistic perspective assembled amongst an informed and active polity united against the state.

This required me to introduce these concepts to future people who influenced my work as forever-in-progress (from Volume Two, part one):

Monsters, then, become something to express the human condition with insofar as all of these things are in flux. I wanted to express all of this through my personal experiences having built gradually upon my entire body of work—my initial radicalization and further pushing towards the Left by virtue of myself: a) as a closeted trans woman who fell in love with a non-binary person, a BDSM predator and narcissist, and a borderline Marxist-Leninist; and b) a steady progression towards my current position as an an-Com ludo-Gothicist by virtue of my work being shaped further by falling in love again, this time with a Indigenous GNC an- Com. Our views are shaped by those we meet and fall in love with in sequence and upon reflection, who we see as human by virtue of common ground and interests amid differences—a pedagogy of the oppressed relaid in Gothic poetics as recursive, concentric, anisotropic, and ergodic (endlessly tiered and self-contained, determined by flow and non-trivial effort); it’s about tearing down harmful boundaries and installing healthy ones through different points of view like teaching, medicine and the medieval, but also selective absorption, a confusion of the senses and magical assembly to add to our Song of Infinity (all specialized poetic devices the medieval prep section will explore further). In our hands, ludo-Gothic BDSM is a potent means of establishing and negotiating boundaries—to perform and play with power (and trauma) where it exists, in the shadow zone.

Friends are made through communicating boundaries and being open with those we connect with while living in situations that require us to use code to portray our human condition but also oppression and rebellion. In short, we identify as monsters who love and see each other as human in spite of those who, one way or another, side with the colonizer group; e.g., overt statements like “Stay in your lane!” or shows of solidarity with the oppressor class when the oppressed class is speaking out against systemic issues.

This is often difficult to express and yields ease of access through abstraction—metaphors. If someone says “black lives matter” and someone says “white lives matter” in response, you have an argument that can be reconfigured into a poetic form; e.g., cats; i.e., “black cats matter” vs “white cats matter” when the underlying dialectical-material reality is black is functionally alien/oppressed (them) within capital and white is functionally human/privileged (us) by virtue of being the colonizer position during the dialectic of the alien as something to invoke through the Gothic mode. Issues of class intersect with culture, which require us seeing these things in ways that simplify it without reducing it to one or the other but both engaging back and forth. It becomes something of a dance, whose normal perception of “cat” desperately needs to be confused (echoing Monty Python’s absurdist 1969 skit, “Confuse-A-Cat,” as able to take itself seriously enough, in the proper hands, to reverse the usual flow of power as directed away from the state for once).

In terms of cats or lives or anything else, these all constitute arguments through different devices that try to raise awareness about not just the raw mechanics of oppression, but cognitive dissonance as a matter of experience. They reduce to oppressed vs oppressor regardless if you use the underlying signified or its myriad signifiers, of which cats are but one example. Us versus them. Beware those who fight against liberation by telling you to stay in your lane directly or ipso facto, by virtue of action speaking for them as dogmatic. Negotiation, then, is as much reminding people where power lies and how to use it mid-argument (source).

The agglutinate and cumulative nature of such holistic expression has led me to expand on Volume Two, writing the Poetry module as something whose ideas about ludo-Gothic BDSM and ergodic motion (castle-narrative) I would master as an expression of myself relaid as much through art and friendship as scholarship:

I am visited by ghosts of my rapturous design, the empress of my fate, the queen of a universe shared with seraphs the likes of which I can hardly describe; “no coward soul is mine” (ibid.).

I didn’t know exactly what to do with it—not at first, but eventually I started to dial it in, figuring out what mastery can be used for regarding proletarian concerns:

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

(artist: Ariel Zucker-Brull)

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

So forget Luke Skywalker boldly declaring to the Emperor, “I am a Jedi, like my father before me!” Bitch, please—I’m the Medusa (and “Jedi” are Sith waiting to happen) and I’ve worked too hard for too long and survived too much to just lay down and take any more of it! The Earth is my home; Hell is my home as something I design, and I will fight to defend it and my friends from the usual fear and dogma, cops and sell-out academics, et al. […] Protests are always violent because the state always treats liberation with violence. To that, we must become a pandemic to the elite—united on every continent, a collective thorn in the side of empire-in-disguise. As such, I provide not just my book or this chapter, but my song as unbroken and unbowed, raising my fist with my friends all around the world (sung despite my fear mechanisms telling me not to, for fear of angering Jadis’ shadow haunting me)! (ibid.).

(model and artist: Persephone van der Waard)

In short, “mastery” as I developed it became something to imbricate/enmesh with my living scholarship as one of reassembly and rememory time and time again: “Returning and reflecting upon old points after assembling them is a powerful way to understand larger structures and patterns” (from Volume Zero) segued into “The shape doesn’t matter provided the function (and flow of power) is consistent” (from this volume); i.e., as synthesized amongst my friends, lovers, muses, fellow sex workers and I challenging the profit motive together as one, across many life times: our Song of Infinity having—like the zombie, the vampire, the demon—many shapes to assume and power to play with! The state will always try to monopolize our pedagogy to serve their aims; i.e., to recuperate what we use to release stress and confront trauma in palliative-Numinous forms:

(model and artist: Mikki Storm and Persephone van der Waard)

“And in strange aeons, even death may die.” My friends and I continuously place “death” in quotes, our collective ludo-Gothic BDSM a parallel, slutty “could-be” history challenging bigotry as a Cartesian, heteronormative, settler-colonial effect; i.e., one we challenge through Athena’s Aegis as reclaimed by Medusa as us, our sexy Amazonian witchcraft (and all its undead, demons and animal forms) camping the canon in ways the state thoroughly abhors: making the straightforward harvesting of us by the state and its proponent agents/sell-outs something to tie into knots. It’s a part of the experience and not one to simply slice through as Alexander the Great did, but find paradoxical liberation in knots (Amazonian or otherwise):

(artist: Evul)

Through a thoroughly chaotic, non-linear mise-en-abyme, Gothic Communism camps canon, making empathy where apathy has existed for so long. This happens by using our dark forces, our Satanic wizardry to self-define away from capital as something to camp inside of itself. To that, we camp the twin trees, fashioning a Hell on Earth to suit our designs (from “Concerning Monsters”):

This historical-material arrangement is profoundly ubiquitous, requiring workers to reclaim monsters (undead, demons and totems) away from the usual state monopolies of violence, terror and hellish morphological expression; i.e., during our own pedagogy of the oppressed—our anger and gossip, monsters and camp—having evolved into itself: a dialectical-material process whose oscillating interrogations (and myriad interpretations) of trauma took centuries while monsters were already evolving into state implements and canonical, singular interpretations thereof. Iconoclastic monsters, then, become flexible and productive critical lenses that raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness as something to “turn into”; or, as Volume One argues:

Contrary to Pygmalions and canonical weird-nerd culture, monsters aren’t just commodities; they’re symbolic embodiments of speculative thinking tied to larger issues. You don’t simply buy and consume them (commodifying struggle) but use them as a means, if not to put yourself directly in the shoes of those being oppressed, then to think about things differently than you might normally. It’s an opportunity to empathize with the oppressed and contribute to their pedagogy in ways that, to be frank, make you less stupid, nasty and cruel (source).

Monsters are often seen as “not real” or “impossible,” relegated to the lands of make-believe and pure fantasy. Except this isn’t true. In Gothic Communism, they constitute a powerful, diverse, and modular means of interrogating the world around us as full of dangerous Cartesian illusions meant to control workers by locking Capitalism (and its genocidal ordering of nature and human language) firmly in place. Good monsters become impossible, as do the possible futures they arguably represent. Instead of saying “in a perfect world,” then, we should say “a possible world”; i.e., in a better possible world, nudity (and other modes of GNC sexual and gender expression) can be exposed and enjoyed post-scarcity and not be seen and treated as inhumanely monstrous (a threat; e.g., bare bodies being a threat to the pimp’s profit margins). Rather, the monstrous language remains as a voice for the oppressed to flourish with;

All this being said, this is an older part of the book, and one for the sake of time (and my sanity) I won’t be updating quite as extensively. Some changes are already in place vis-à-vis Volume Two, part one—and I will be expanding on things and signposting to make sure what I have already feels more attached to my published material, including talking about ludo-Gothic BDSM in relation to these older histories—but there will no brand-new monster essays from scratch if I can help it (no promises)! As such, I won’t be going over this area of the book with quite as fine-tooth a comb, but will add exhibits, epigrams, definitions, visual aids and the like. The same, if not more so, goes for Volume Three (which has seen some changes since I wrote the majority of it back in early 2023) because I want to preserve its grain-of-sand quality that the rest of this book series has built around like a pearl. To that, you already have complex theory and simple theory to work with (re: Volume Zero and One), as well as my aforementioned synthesis of those combined aspects with Gothic poetics (re: Volume Two, part one) to achieve new useful conclusions building on my foundation. And yet, just as I argued with the ghosts of others to raise my cathedral, you will have to learn to debate with spirits yourself to raise your own, mid-segue.

As such, for Volumes Two, part two and all of Volume Three, you will be debating with my spectres; i.e., the oldest sections of my castle, but some of the most raw and earnest regarding sex-positivity as a liberatory Gothic poetic device whose essence remains intact, regardless if the language had yet to fully form. Per my usual backwards approach, I’ve actually done this before (from Volume One):

If you’ve read the symposium from Volume Zero (and the end of the manifesto), you’ll have an idea of what to expect, moving forward; I didn’t want to change things too much despite having written this second symposium well before my thesis. Like the thesis volume’s symposium, it represents a point when I was still figuring things out, and I think it serves as a good thought experiment insofar as it will represent a middle stage in your own thinking that will match up with [the Monster Modules. Their older partially-formed historical qualities] might speak to you better as you interpret and grapple with these ideas yourselves. And if you want increasingly more complete forms of theory that spell things out as much as possible, there is always the manifesto and thesis (ibid.).

Keep all of this in mind as we proceed into the Undead Module. We will meet again, our darkness visible a choking force that drives you, mid-penetration, towards post-scarcity’s unknown pleasures! Medusa’s fat undead pussy “feeding” as a war-like, indiscreetly poetic-yet-still-rebellious psychosexuality (re: our specialized Gothic poetic devices-made-flesh)!

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

Onto the Undead Module and “A Cruel Angel’s (Modular) Thesis“!

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Footnotes

[1] A kind of “reverse shadism,” omitting and ultimately policing these oppressed groups for not having dark enough skin despite both groups experiencing oppression by the colonizer.

[2] For a good illustration of this per the Male Gaze/profit motive in games, refer to “Borrowed Robes: The Role of “Chosen” Clothing — Part 1: Female Videogame Characters” (2020): “This two-part series examines the historical lack of choice regarding character appearance in videogames—namely clothes.”

[2a] Fascists are historically given free reign, in this respect; i.e., double standards for the mad dog; e.g., the Zionist project a Nazi-grade Jewish state endorsed and enabled by the US like all fascists are. As such, the same outrageous double standards apply to any fash token that can theoretically exist, funneled through the same geopolitical considerations, copaganda and Military Industrial Complex. Onstage and off, canonical kayfabe weaponizes Nazis against Communism for capital.

In other words, while Communism must historically endure flag flags that lead to occupation and genocide—entire countries being invaded and overthrown in defense of capitalist hegemony—any fash can bite the hand that feeds provided it ultimately is brought to heel; e.g., the Gulf of Tokin incident that led to the US invasion of Vietnam versus the 1967 Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty (GDF’s “How Israel Cucked the United States,” 2024) that America’s political elite/machinery stayed quiet about in service to the usual atrocities serving vertical power as enslaving so-called “great men” to itself—”slave to the power of death,” as Iron Maiden would describe it, “Powerslave” (1984) displacing as the British love to do, unto an imaginary site of colonial abuse: “Ancient Egypt” (“I’m a god, why can’t I live on?”).

Regarding the Liberty’s abuse at the hands of the Israeli state, the only people in power who griped out loud were those who felt fascism’s sting against themselves projected onto an image of American domination, not America’s usual victims; i.e., “boundaries for me, not for thee”; e.g., Thomas G. Abernathy (then-U.S. Representative, on the floor of the House of Representatives, 29 June 1967) near-singular critique at the time of the incident (and still failing rather spectacularly to say the quiet part out loud; i.e., merely acting the hawk feeling bruised for American soldiers):

The Liberty ship incident – and indeed it was more than an incident – has been treated entirely too lightly by this Government. To say the lease, too little has been said about it. This useless, unnecessary and inexcusable attack took the lives of 34 American boys, wounded 175 others, and left many others in a state of horrified shock, to say nothing of what it did to a flag-flying vessel of the U.S. Navy. How could this be treated so lightly in this the greatest Capitol in all the world?

I have heard Members of this House, and many, many others, say that if this had been done by others, the leaders of our Government would have moved in with sternness and appropriate action demands or even retaliatory action. These men at all times are entitled to the strong backing of every citizen of this land or every race and every creed. They are entitled to and should have the strong arm, as well as the strong voice of their Government and their people behind them. And who has spoken out in their behalf from this land since some of their number were so suddenly shot down and others so severely wounded on the Liberty ship?

What complaint have we registered? What has Washington said? To tell you the truth, this great Capitol as well as this great Government – if it can still be called great – was and is as quiet as a tomb regarding this event?” (source: Honorary Liberty Veterans’ ” Quotes by Contemporary Experts on the USS Liberty”).

As such, state power defends state power in all forms, including undead aspects conditioned to give state force to state targets. To that, fascists exist because they are useful to capital, thus can get away with murder when Communists are killed merely for existing. Fascists become bold and insufferable, but in service to the American state/capitalist war machine as the ultimate destroyer they begrudgingly answer to.

The pearly castles are the worst, then; i.e., white moderacy and American exceptionalism acting affronted when they get hurt, not the state’s usual victims: nature-as-monstrous-feminine. Yet they enable the fash anyways because the white knight needs the black to function; they are central to the same illusion, which immediately and instantly falls apart unless they cooperate towards profit by attacking labor as undead.

It’s both “You leave Jack Burton alone!” from Big Trouble in Little China and “He who controls the spice controls the universe!” from Dune (the 1984 adaptation). Like House Atreides from the latter franchise, American proponents think they’re the light—the heliocentric, all-important center of the universe—and everything else is darkness as something to fear and kill, but also lament the coming of: anti-Semitism (“rats,” witches, water vampirism) and Orientalism (the Fremen, messiah propaganda, jinn), of which the Harkonnen are the purveyors of the same fash rhetoric whitewashing the Atreides’ doom as the unthinkable collapse of America and of Capitalism. Except Capitalist Realism loves to threaten destruction to maintain the peace: through revenge (re: the Star Wars problem predating Lucas or Herbert with The Birth of a Nation and older Orientalist narratives).

To that, Frank Herbert was another Pygmalion with white people disease. Americans love self-absorbed importance, whatever form they take under whatever markets (e.g., laissez-faire, Bretton Woods, neoliberalism) and displacements of dogma, of sectarianism, of faith: white savior, white Indian, white Arab, white Amazon, white knight, white cop, white master. This includes black knights, cops, and castles having decayed to a fascist undead form: the paradox of black-as-white, versus black as resisting state force and hegemony (thus profit).

Anything that challenges this centrist, good-vs-evil cycle is alien, insofar as the West is conditioned through its people/tokens to think they are the hero, the savior, the one who can never be wrong in any way. As such, they are most prone to decay. They are parasites, impostors, exempt from the very trifectas and monopolies they enforce for the state; i.e., more cognitive dissonance/estrangement and disordered thinking resulting in more syndromes, delusions, blindness, madness. They project this onto the Harkonnen Gigeresque, the infantile Freudian recuperating the xenomorphic Nazi-Communist BDSM to punch, mid-duel, while playing the victim, the Indigenous and rightful heir.

The white and black princes are two sides of the same imperial coin–all controlled to serve the state as self-serving and invested, but dependent on things they cannot fully control: bread and circus, monsters, shows during war-as-a-business; e.g., feminism in decay through the Bene Gesserit as a cult of warrior-nun witches solving material disputes for princes, kings, dukes, houses, emperors; i.e., yet-another-coven of monstrous-feminine to blame for the usual harvesting of nature, with Paul eventually drinking the blue Kool-Aid to seek petty revenge against the entire universe while simultaneously “being realistic”: Jewish conspiracy grooming the warlock, the One (the monomythic protagonist, minus The Matrix‘s irony and feeling sorry for the fall of the Great House Atreides) as a patriarchal tool when all’s said and done, a non-Miltonian Satanic, a fanatic colonizing the desert of the real: “I am Paul Maud’dib Atreides, Duke of Arrakis!”

This is fascism, pointedly weaponizing a myth of a white superhuman to reclaim the colony! They weaponize nature to do so, no matter the cost (“desert power” a stand-in for American foreign policy and domination)–all to put a new emperor on the throne. It’s a chronotope, the planetary desert realm the same site of hereditary rites and dynastic primacy through propaganda battles proving strength, thus correctness: “Your father was a weak man!” Re: Hard times make strong soldiers. It’s fascist dogma, might-makes-right, transferring power through the incestuous refrain, the plot to Henry IV (1600): the duel for the girl, the dream of white sovereignty with a legion of obedient harem dogs. “Lead them to Paradise!” It’s white-savior Islamophobia poisoning the well, while insisting there are no sides. Wrong. There are workers vs the state (and its cops)!

As such, our princely mirror syndrome announces the white side seeing itself as a fascist counterpart on the same glass-like persona: “We’re Harkonnens!” This and the prophecy’s white hubris deifying said savior—they’re all part of the same hawkish, genocidal warpath defending Capitalism; i.e., from counterterror and fear with state terror and fear acting the rebel, the guerrilla weaponizing natives (the myth of the invincible barbarian) and nuclear weapons against Communism through fascism as the mad dog to eventually put down. It’s business-as-usual, adapting to survive amid decay as something to deny and stall: “May the wings of Liberty never lose a feather!”

[3a] There are different accounts of the debate; e.g., Professor Flower’s own: “On My Debate with Vaush” (2022), whereupon Flowers was heavily criticized by members of her own community for speaking on these topics at all (which has its own sexist/tokenized considerations).

[3b] From Persephone van der Waard’s “Setting the Record Straight, Transmisia Experience: 5/26/2022.”

[3c] Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (2014):

More specifically, I argue that the expression of Indigenous anticolonial nationalism that emerged during this period forced colonial power to modify itself from a structure that was once primarily reinforced by policies, techniques, and ideologies explicitly oriented around the genocidal exclusion/assimilation double, to one that is now reproduced through a seemingly more conciliatory set of discourses and institutional practices that emphasize our recognition and accommodation. Regardless of this modification, however, the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state has remained colonial to its foundation.

Karl Marx, Settler-Colonialism, and Indigenous Dispossession in Post–White Paper Canada

What do I mean by a colonial—or more precisely, settler-colonial relationship? A settler-colonial relationship is one characterized by a particular form of domination; that is, it is a relationship where power—in this case, interrelated discursive and nondiscursive facets of economic, gendered, racial, and state power—has been structured into a relatively secure or sedimented set of hierarchical social relations that continue to facilitate the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of their lands and self-determining authority. In this respect, Canada is no different from most other settler-colonial powers: in the Canadian context, colonial domination continues to be structurally committed to maintain—through force, fraud, and more recently, so-called “negotiations”— ongoing state access to the land and resources that contradictorily provide the material and spiritual sustenance of Indigenous societies on the one hand, and the foundation of colonial state-formation, settlement, and capitalist development on the other. As Patrick Wolfe states, “Whatever settlers may say—and they generally have a lot to say—the primary motive [of settler-colonialism] is not race (or religion, ethnicity, grade of civilization, etc.) but access to territory. Territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element” (source).

In other words, settler-colonialism has had to routinely and progressively adapt against rebellious voices to assimilate them; i.e., adopt new assimilation policies that allow for an expanded breadth of tokenization, thus decay as something to continue facilitating oppression through oppressed groups that likewise decay accordingly.

[3d] Jacob Stolworthy writes,

“Making matters even more strange was the fact that Maher seemed unperturbed by this, and that it took place while the pair were discussing incest.

Maher asked Dreyfuss who he thought about when he “masturbated” growing up, and the actor replied: “I never thought about my mother – and I never thought that if I had thought of my mother I would be thinking incestuous.”

When Maher asked him if he thought it would have been “incestuous” to think about his sister, the actor said: “In the early years, I thought about very little else.”

He later asked Maher: “Did you have a sister?” adding: “Did you ever give her what we called a movie actor kiss?” Maher replied: “No! Oh God, please – I love my sister, but…”

Dreyfuss then asked: “Did she ever ask you?” to which Maher said he didn’t get on with his sister when he was younger (source: “Bill Maher Viewers Left Baffled after Chaotic Richard Dreyfuss Interview, 2023).

[3] The song uses the same Death-knocks rhythm that Fidel’s Terminator did, either example being a harmful demon lover asking to be let in! I.e., the one who knocks, the danger!