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“A Lesson in Humility”; or, Gay Zombie Caesar (and His Token Servants) When the Boomerang Comes Back Around (feat. Myth: the Fallen Lords)
They say Alric talked about The Head often, ridiculing The Nine’s belief that it was one of the avatara of Connacht. Connacht was the great hero of the Wind Age, who drove the evil Moagim from the earth, and The Head claims to have been one of Connacht’s closest advisors during this time. Once Alric even spoke of The Head’s defeat by Balor, where it lost its body. But I’ve begun to wonder how one of the avatara of the Wind Age outlived Connacht himself by hundreds of years, to fight Balor in a battle long before the West had even heard of The Fallen Lords.
I have been unable to reconcile this with what I know of history (source).
—The Narrator, “Out of the Barrier” from Myth: the Fallen Lords
Picking up from where “Criminals and Conquerors (opening and part one)” left off…
So far, we’ve explored different kinds of Promethean heroism, ranging from futile revenge, castles, and crime lords. Continuing our imaginary historical catalog brings us to our third example of the zombie monomyth tyrant: not the man-of-reason, or the crime boss, but the warlord master of the field—specifically queer readings of the Zombie Caesar in Bungie’s Myth: the Fallen Lords, as well as Caesar’s dutiful anti-Semitic/monstrous-feminine henchmen (and women) in its Melmoth-style sequel, Myth II: Soulblighter (1998). Each game subsequently has its own close-read:
- “‘Hail, Caesar!’; or, Balor the Leveler as Gay Zombie Caesar in Myth: the Fallen Lords” (included in this post): Explores the man himself in Myth: the Fallen Lords, including the game’s Promethean, fatal-warrior mythos reviving Zombie Caesar on loop (the Cycle of Kings) to uphold Capitalist Realism through the zombie monomyth.
- “‘Hell Hath No Fury’; or, Soulblighter’s Gay Nazi Revenge (and Giants/Female Characters) in Myth II: Soulblighter“: Further unpacks Bungie’s Cycle of Kings (and its various terrorist/counterterrorist double standards) by camping Myth II‘s titular character as a token gay Nazi cop; also considers the franchise’s giant and female elements, while linking everything to Capitalism and the zombie monomyth’s Promethean Quest.
In short, “Hail, Caesar!” introduces the Cycle of Kings per Bungie’s unironic usage of it; “No Fury” focuses more on camping the cycle of violence through our queer interpretation of the sequel’s camp potential (versus what Bungie actually does with said potential, in-game).
As previously stated, zombies denote the existence of repressed, generational trauma according to individuals or groups living through an expanding/shrinking state of exception. As we shall unpack here, recipients or givers of state abuse (“pitchers” and “catchers”) operate in Myth per a fascist, homoerotic cult of death and its zombie strongman aping Caesar’s ghost: Balor the Leveler first returning to empire in a bad-dream time of weakness to seek revenge against those who betrayed and forgot him (the Imperial Boomerang), followed by Soulblighter seeking revenge for his master after said master is dead (the Promethean Quest).
In other words, the zombie warlord can be an aggressor for the state-in-crisis as radicalized, then conjured up anytime the state needs to inspire police crackdowns in and out of monomyth fiction.
A common variant is the literal Nazi zombie, of course, but also the zombie fascist/tyrant coming out of the historical, partially imaginary past (“Rome”) to overwhelm the present as a heroic matter of rememory tied to nation-states’ own short, self-eclipsing narratives; re, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980):
“History is the memory of states,” wrote Henry Kissinger in his first book, A World Restored, in which he proceeded to tell the history of nineteenth-century Europe from the viewpoint of the leaders of Austria and England, ignoring the millions who suffered from those statesmen’s policies (source).
To that, Myth remembers the fallen heroes who suffered, laying down their lives for the perceived “Greater Good,” only to return and seek revenge(which, for our purposes, denotes a process of traumatized feeding and cannibalization—of workers by themselves for the state).
Simply put, Caesar’s revenge becomes “necessary” to “progress,” but remains stuck in a hellish death loop of endless (thoroughly gruesome) bloodshed; i.e., as capital demands profit to continue through such monomythic theatre disguising war as toy-like (cops and robbers, but also Americans and Nazis/Communists). Canon does so while, in the same breath, essentializing a Promethean Cycle of Kings (the finding of self-destructive power rooted in monarchic language). Though the Shadow of Pygmalion’s outdoor infernal concentric pattern, an unironic “Gish gallop” begins to emerge, its casus beli swapping out one tyrant for another as either good or bad; i.e., succeeding themselves through the usual gentrification and decay of Pax Americana putting nature (and soldiers) cheaply to work. Dogma presents the monstrous-feminine “prince(ss/x) in another castle” (next page) as ready-for-the-taking if only the day’s heroes rally for that one final push into home-as-alien.
To it, “taking things home” merely and tragically becomes a matter of dogmatically guiding police violence into all the usual ports, the owners of said ports forced to receive such entry by the victorious dead feeding on them as a predatory means of profit (and which subverting such doom during rape play is generally their only shot at liberation, below):
(artist: Noah Way Babe)
We’ll get to all of this. To spin a thesis statement for this particular seminar’s queer reading of the material, though (indented for emphasis):
Capitalism will always abject its abuses onto its victims. To best recuperate and nullify rebellious sentiment, though, it marries homonormative obscurantism and DARVO to other token elements as needed; e.g., anti-Semitism and Orientalism (with so-called “gay token Nazis” [false rebels] being a thread we’ll tug on throughout this section); i.e., capital decays into a degenerate, fascist, undead form that can be increasingly abjected, tokenized and scapegoated because it is false, illegitimate and reprobate (as gay men generally present as, in canon)—not “actually” Caesar’s ghost (a paradox, insofar as we’re dealing with an idealized, fantasy version) but a “queer” version fielded in the homosocial, ancient language of war hauntologized (“ancient” in quotes): “It’ll work next time, when capital’s Roman homecoming isn’t a gay Nazi-Communist zombie/token slave!”
Such feeding and decay is expected, making the entire appeal a false flag raised over and over. Bungie didn’t “invent” such tactics—are merely aping them somberly through their own morose altar of sacrifice. On it, statesmen make their arguments against perceived barbarians, motivating children of a given imperium to invade and occupy “foreign” lands at home; having no moral reason to do so, us-versus-them is used, instead.
In Myth, the game’s apocalyptic, cis-het vision of capital enriches the usual benefactors (white European men) onstage and off, which requires soldiers to operate, hence arguments like Bungie’s to send them to their deaths wherever they are. This yields the usual anti-war statements, sold repeatedly as rock ‘n roll (which, like Metallica themselves, decays unto profit like punk or anything else does):
Bodies fill the fields I see, hungry heroes end
No one to play soldier now, no one to pretend
Running blind through killing fields, bred to kill them all
Victim of what said should be
A servant ’til I fall (Metallica’s “Disposable Heroes,” 1986).
Rooted in imperial consumption, such things become holy (the Protestant ethic); i.e., speaking to abjection by those who, safe at home, eat their fill of the spoils of war while living on equally stolen, bloodstained land—all while making America’s “foreign” victims (e.g., Indigenous peoples and/or Communists) entirely invisible:
(artist: Don Brautigam)
That’s Pax Americana, for you—a heliocentric worldview inherited from the elite pulling the strings, then routinely passed down by white middle-class men (weird canonical nerds); i.e., like Bungie, stoically paving the way for future iterations of the same old, Man-Box fascination with settler-colonial violence. They’re war merchants weeping out of principle, but turning the meatgrinder’s handle all the same. From Caesar to modern-day warrior poets like James Hetfield, John Romero, Bungie, Mel Gibson, and Sam Raimi, war is for sale—good for always expressing itself as the place to “die like a man.” To die the Roman fool for one’s nation is heroic, even when it becomes undead, vengeful, or campily aware of itself in a blind sense. It’s all badass and cool, for Bungie—something to vampirically farm by conjuring it up as “past,” fueled by revenge and blown up to Atlas-grade levels of fatal hyperbole (e.g., “Achilles’ Last Stand,” 1976), then put repeatedly to work/to the sword as cheaply as possible (re: Patel and Moore).
“Hail, Caesar!”; or, Balor the Leveler as Gay Zombie Caesar in Myth: the Fallen Lords
“Son-of-a-bitch, ball! That’s your home! Your home! Why didn’t you just go home? What, are you too good for your home? SUCK MY WHITE ASS, BALL!”
—Happy Gilmore, Happy Gilmore (1996).
While the glory of Rome is a famous site of romance, comedy and satire (e.g., Monty Python, left: “Do you have a problem with my friend’s name, Biggus Dickus?”), the “Hail, Caesar!” close-read shall consider Myth‘s apocalyptic revival of the zombie warlord unto something a bit more grim: Capitalist Realism and the Cycle of Kings (or Caesars[1], in this case) abjecting queerness through homophobic Nazi revenge; i.e., the shared theatrical tradition of camping and punching Nazis, albeit as performed by white cis-het men whose notion of camp is thoroughly blind (such dweebs generally salivating at the return of “Rome” in some shape or form, extending to its medieval wreckage as a place to “dick ride Caesar”).
A few things before we proceed: First and foremost, Bungie’s franchise is definitely “of its time,” being predominantly cis-centric and heteronormative (re: “white people disease”). Feeling like it was made by a bunch of white cis-het history buffs and fantasy/horror nerds—and owing to the various parent texts it generously borrows from likewise having those qualities (especially Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s dated, closeted, oratory approach to homoromantic affairs in times of war)—the debatable, ambiguously gay elements to Myth‘s many heroes remain firmly rooted in a binarized concept of biology and gender roles; i.e., one sitting squarely between cis men and cis women (all predominantly white except for some of the villains).
With no room for trans, non-binary or intersex people, then, it’s a very cis-het, manly world—the many manly men playing out old, tired monomyth tropes regarding older warlike forms of same-sex attraction and homosocial behaviors linked to imperial forces. As a trans woman who played Myth while in the closet, back in the late ’90s, I shall focus on the homonormative queer elements that do exist, in-game, then provide outside perspective; i.e., when thinking past the game (and its problematic worldview) when looking towards more enlightened horizons.
Keeping with my holistic tendencies, though, I’ll want to mention as much as I can working back and forth; i.e., introducing the Cycle of Kings through Balor in Myth I, then camping it through a queer close-read of Soulblighter in Myth II while examining that games’ outlier/token elements; e.g., Asiatic and non-Christian themes, as well as giants and female monstrous-feminine. Despite accounting for outliers, Bungie still walks in Tolkien’s footsteps, their own warrior planet mostly populated by white cis-coded himbos; e.g., the game’s one woman—Shiver, below—being defeated three levels into the first game
“Shiver fell on the first night in a spectacular dream duel with Rabican, one of the Nine. No one expected this. We have never before challenged one of The Fallen and won” (source: Mythipedia).
only to appear again in the sequel as a Raimi-style hag for the heroes to hunt:
(ibid.)
Again, we’ll focus on what is present, analyzing the game’s queer textualities and themes through my critical models. Per the paradox of holistic analysis, though, there’s simply too much going on to realistically mention everything at work, here; i.e., even when you break everything down to its raw components and devices, Capitalism is still a hyperobject, a quality felt in its abstractions to some extent; re: Bungie’s himbo panoply sausage fest. Instead, I have a necklace or basket of critical elements I’ve chosen to prioritize and stress, this time around: establish the Cycle of Kings as Bungie presents it, then camp it. Ambiguities and dualities regarding Caesar and his men aside, my poetic focus should be clear enough, and should allow you to speculate yourselves towards proletarian outcomes when referencing my close-reads (and adjacent works) yourselves.
Also, seeing as we’re talking about fascism and its heroic cult of death—one that decays towards “Rome” under capital—I strongly recommend that you check out Umberto Eco’s “14 Points of Fascism” (from “Ur-Fascism,” 1995). —Perse
To that, we arrive at Bungie’s videogame series, Myth: The Fallen Lords. It’s an old, obscure RTS game that quaintly crosses Braveheart with H.P. Lovecraft and Lord of the Rings, which my queer reading pointedly considers through the Imperial Boomerang: the devil conqueror Balor the Leveler (and his wicked, degenerate generals, the Four Horsemen of the Gay Nazi Apocalypse) coming home to roost, mid-Cycle-of-Kings. Similar to Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, the shadow of world war (and Western ethnocentrism) hangs over the story—one told in solemn, archivist fashion by the game’s nameless soldier (the Narrator) conveniently keeping score (and lending each subsequent event an air of survivor’s gravitas to rival Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address,” 1863)::
In a time long past, the armies of the Dark came again into the lands of men [note: white, cis-het men; i.e., the status quo]. Their leaders became known as The Fallen Lords, and their terrible sorcery was without equal in the West. In thirty years they reduced the civilized nations to carrion and ash, until the free city of Madrigal alone defied them. An army gathered there, and a desperate battle was joined against the Fallen. (source: Mythipedia).
Bear in mind, such accounts are generally penned by war criminals whitewashing themselves; i.e., because their world was under attack by “evil forces,” thus allowing them to do whatever was necessary to defend the status quo: a tree of freedom, per American Liberalism, to water with the blood of the patriotic dead—sung sermons about afterwards by old powerful executives posturing as “magnanimous” (with Bungie’s Alric bearing disturbing likenesses to Lincoln, at times). Say what you will about individual exceptions, the system seeks only to continue the same bourgeois bloodletting of disposable heroes.
As we shall see, history and myth speak for themselves, in this respect. The whole premise is an apocalypse gimmick, one whose universal expendability (aggrandizing fallen heroes to apologize for war in defense of the state; re, Lincoln: “This nation, under God […] shall not perish from this earth!”) means to make the usual middle-class nerds pearl-clutch and rise to—already insecure from the abjection process—by further policing themselves (workers) for the state; i.e., by punching down at those the state normally exploits the most as “seeking revenge” through bad dreams. It’s DARVO, a strawman the elite have used for centuries to stay in power through the usual expendable (and gullible) buffers; e.g., Lincoln and his own generals freeing the slaves to promptly enlist them to fight for a country that would quickly stab said freed men in the back (meanwhile, women of color would have to fight for their own rights—generally against racist suffragettes—many decades later into Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement, whose own [mostly male] leaders were attacked and ultimately assassinated by state proponents, then mythologized after their deaths to suit state [white cis-het] aims).
The subsequent boomerang effect happens by threatening the Silent Majority with apocalypse-style bad dreams they can die gloriously inside, sans any irony or perceptive pastiche/camp; i.e., to monopolize pro-state arguments and trifectas per the usual qualities of capital—zombie generals and their greater leader strongman, in this case—but really anything and everything that abuses the terrorist/counterterrorist argument to flow power, wealth and knowledge, etc, anisotropically towards the elite in monomythic and Promethean narratives: a grim harvest led by yesterday’s heroes-turned-villains, reapers, cops-gone-bad vs good cops in the same Cycle of Kings (which, anytime I say “cycle” from here on out as a normal noun, I’m more or less referring to): “At my signal, unleash hell!”
Per Foucault, the Boomerang is simply Imperialism coming home to empire, specifically to crown one king after another according to Bungie (and similar authors, as we shall see). Fascism isn’t just Capitalism in decay but empire, which ironically is capital defending itself from labor by pitting them against a rising superman threatening empire (thus profit): Hell coming monomythically home. It requires the elite surrendering territory or position, only to claw it all back; i.e., by putting the Promethean, giant-ized tyrant down; e.g., Hitler or some other myopic, Dracula-grade echo of Caesar (which Balor essentially is). It’s always about moving money and other resources through nature as a matter of industry—a burning war machine pushed by competing forces militarily like Xenophon‘s us-versus-them death march. Spiraling back and forth ad infinitum, it becomes a bit like Prometheus and the eagle. Myth sums all of that up rather neatly—the internalized fear of empire going to seed and pouncing predatorily on itself, mid-revisionism.
(artist: Agnus McBride)
This “dead ringer” is what the villain of the game, Balor, represents (exhibit 39c); i.e., a formerly supreme commander crossing the Alps in reverse, Caesar “pulling a Hannibal” (a rebel commander from Antiquity whose legendary military campaigns against Rome remain celebrated by modern military commanders, including fascist ones). Seeking revenge for being sacrificed to save empire, as Caesar self-purports, Balor makes the tyrant’s plea through his invasion backwards—that he was actually saving the empire from within, from inwards barbarism importing impure (degenerate) external elements that must be purified when the zombie strongman/sins of the father come fearfully home: “We meet again!” to which those in the present are left a bit agape; e.g., Ashley William’s plea to his own medieval executioners, in Army of Darkness (below): “You gotta listen, man; I ain’t even seen these assholes before!” Fealty is a blind oath.
Per Caesar h(a)unting Brutus, Balor does so while accompanied by a fearsome, vengeful band of monster generals (the Fallen Lords, four mighty forces of nature) and the usual military structures descending further down to lieutenants, captains, champions and grunts/minions/fodder. In terms of knights and their heraldry, coat of arms, and castles (similar to Game of Thrones, or any such story with imaginary kingdoms, duchies, great houses, fiefdoms, etc), all serve as a poetic, doubled, half-real way of organizing and presenting power (and its unpeaceful transfer) in medieval, queer-coded language; per Walpole, it’s a popular imaginary exercise speaking to and with the usual myths of Gothic ancestry (“old blood”) inspired by Hannibal among others recuperating his attacks against Rome to be used by those seeking to revive Rome when capital decays: a Gothic double/evil twin of empire that appears, post-corruption, and must then be put down through us-versus-us-as-them apocalypse/spectacle (“fresh blood”). It’s a blood transfusion into the same always-dying tyrant (on a giant scale, or in smaller personified forms of castled bodies or body-like castles).
By extension, Balor’s legions of unthinking dead exist less to threaten the status quo than convert it into a dark, terrorist, rape-play version of itself that cannibalizes the bodies and minds of the local population. This nightmarish revelation is merely a taste of state abuse, normally committed in faraway lands now coming home to roost by way of undead revenge. In turn, a Pavlovian, menticidal desire to be the Good Citizen turns the citizens monstrous, who surrender their rights to the state and attack the state’s usual scapegoats with renewed bloodlust—all in defense of an “ancient,” idealized past (and competing warrior cultures) being party to the same basic problem: the return to a glorious empire’s conquering armies unto an alien Rome, hauntologically revived as unheimlich and drenched in the blood of everyone when a capitol doesn’t recognize its homecoming champion. The imposter is the conqueror reconquering home as pastoral, soft, ripe.
To it, this circular logic of empire translates from novels, to movies, to videogames under Capitalism—spanning from laissez-faire to Bretton Woods to neoliberalism to arrange power in all the usual ways; re (from Volume Zero):
Management of exploitation under Capitalism is tiered, pyramid-style—i.e., the top, middle and bottom; or lords, generals/lieutenants, and grunts according to corporate, militarized, and paramilitarized flavors (which often intersect through aesthetics and social-sexual clout). This “pecking order” translates remarkably well in neoliberal copaganda, whose bosses, minibosses, and minions deftly illustrate Zombie-Vampire Capitalism in action; e.g., Reinhardt Heydrich […] as “middle-management” desk murderers in a bureaucratic sense (which sits alongside the middle class, in a class sense—with both defending capital as a perpetually decaying structure that operates through wage/labor theft according to weaponized bureaucracy during crisis, class sentiment and Faustian bargains; i.e., harmful conditioning whose disguised ultimatums prey on various stigmas, biases and dogma riddled within canon to condition their employees to fight the good fight against the underclass as an advertised threat loaded with connotations of foreign/internal plots.
Erstwhile, as said “threats” are met with waves of terror, vice-character personas, and moral panics, they splash back into these same
paranoid workers; they are slowly convinced to surrender total power to the elite under perceived states of emergency against imaginary enemies, trading basic human rights for false power and genocidal legislation inside the zombie police state (neoliberal illusions of “hollow victory” and Quixotic moral superiority/exceptionalism). It’s a scam, a bad game with only one rigged winner: the owner class franchising war as copaganda and the Military Industrial Complex through war simulators. The illusion, like a franchise, becomes something to grow into and endorse more and more as time goes on; i.e., into adulthood (source).
It’s both business-as-usual and an apocalypse for the middle class to purchase and shudder about, on the usual cartographic refrains (exhibit 1a1a1h2a1).
Indeed, confrontation with “Caesar”—the living dead having access to militarized state positions of power—is generally a canonical worst-case scenario: a zombie police state that destroys everyone, including those tacitly assigned to benefit from its atrocities within the middle class. Viewed backwards, capital marches forwards to eat workers born and bred on neoliberal notions of false power and overcoming impossible odds during medieval regressions (which videogames are made to deliver inside their map-like spaces imitating extratextual examples of said regressions).
In Myth, the living in the present aren’t just invaded by the past, but by the opportunistic “fallen lords” of older victories outlined by their own, undead villainy as something that lives on in the absence of memory during state decay. You’re literally fighting the West’s older legendary past exposed in the present space-and-time as abominable; i.e., eager to colonize the pastoral map said territories have slowly become warlike towards. Unable to reconcile these zombie heroes with what they already know of history and its larger-than-life variants, Bungie’s West becomes ignominiously trapped inside an endless, cannibalistic cycle of war pitting army against army on open ground.
This includes their minds, hopelessly locked in a fragmenting loop that flows on historical-material lines towards the state: a never-ending cycle, shifting back and forth between good and evil kings (which the game describes as the Light and the Dark). As the Narrator explains during the sequel’s epilogue, the best the Light can hope for is inheritance—dominion passing “to men or to monsters,” shifting uncannily across the paradoxical image of their withered-yet-strong heroic bodies; their red-cloaked, Dracula-grade imperium’s zombie dictatorship (“Bad Ash” wearing such a cape when he sacks Arthur’s castle, below); their hags and their conspicuously muscular, hypermasculine giants. All generate echoes of Frankenstein, minus that novel’s Promethean satire or irony while fighting over the fire of the gods through futile heroic revenge: “The book is mine!” and “Do you want a little?” Such blindly campy squabbles (re: Raimi’s silliness conforming to the same basic quest) are no different than wars over rings and crowns, vampirism in this case being a fascist doppelganger vying for power and knowledge as normally locked up in Arthur’s castle, his war chest (Raimi’s, but also Bungie’s “Madrigal”).
As we shall see, all heroes are monsters—their status as good or bad under centrist dogma furthering the same process of abjection in service of empire; i.e., harvesting itself while seeking revenge as monstrous-feminine men (the killer himbo) classically do.
For example, the Watcher, one of Balor’s generals (exhibit 41a1), is a falchion-carrying necromancer obsessed with the Total Codex (nods to the Necronomicon—a book [according to Lovecraft] written by a mad Arab) to cheat death, thus outlive his enemies: the Sauron stratagem, with bits of Evil Dead, He-Man, the Ulster Cycle, Scandinavian mythology, and Hitler’s fragmented approach to bureaucracy all thrown into the same blender with a straight face.
In short, it’s what these older-upon-older dude bros—drunk on ghosts of empire and war—shamelessly read when they build their undead worlds on top of older “Roman” graveyards that never quite existed; i.e., a place to be king, but at what cost? It’s basically the straight, cis-het man’s thorough unhealthy idea of intimacy through demon BDSM/calculated risk reaping nature as usual: death by the sword, before dishonor, but no homo!
In short, Myth is chockful of spectres of Caesar, romancing the Nazi leadership (and Axis Powers) in queer-adjacent zombie language pointing to capital as defended by these jackals; i.e., male-centric doubles of the imaginary past akin to Sam Raimi’s aforementioned Army of Darkness, having zero camp or girls (though Shiver does appear in the second game as a hag):
Army of Darkness is sexist at heart. War is the province of man, and Ash can only be challenged by his medieval counterpart, the skeleton king. Virtually identical, these two rivals are divided by an arbitrary notion: the Necronomicon. They fight over the book and, more to the point, the girl. Yet, when the battle is won, she is forgotten. Ash saves the past, and returns to the present, full of himself (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Army of Darkness: Valorizing the Idiot Hero”).
To it, Myth is literally dead dogma—just the dudes, Quixotically duking it out with their eco-fascist, Lovecraft-grade JO crystals preying on “Europe”; i.e., like Hitler, it’s so much less formidable and more stupid than what those mantled with empire see themselves as, truth both stranger than fiction and somehow married to it to epitomize the shared absurdity (the JO crystal’s “magic” is about as real as the Fallen Lords’ occult practices, exhibit 41a1). It becomes a preponderance of perpetual embarrassment:
(source: Reddit)
In turn, the cryptomimetic cycle grinds its gears, leaving the audience with the usual middle-class, weird canonical nerd’s abject, Man-Box brainchildren, fawning homosocially over the ghost of the counterfeit as manly (or monstrous-feminine; e.g., Shiver or the Watcher) by virtue of Gothic history (real and imaginary) coming back around; re (from earlier in this volume):
Per the process of abjection, the canonical goal is always to kill the past as undead, hence save the future for different in-groups afraid of zombies. But they can’t monopolize the procedure (or its violence) inside the state of exception. Whether for witches, witch hunters, or one disguised as the other (undercover cops/rebels), it’s like a washing machine stuck on spin cycle; i.e., always spinning with us inside it, trying to get clean in the same soapy water as haunted by various inescapable ghosts (of the counterfeit, of Caesar or Marx) [source: “Bad Dreams, part two: Transforming Our Zombie Selves“].
While the genre of Nazi zombies (campy or not) is prolific unto itself, the 20th century is especially productive. Full of such shirtless, testosterone-fueled revivals, Bungie unironically synonymizes sex with war (the naked Greco-Roman wrestlers of yore) to constitute a moribund, wish fulfillment’s hauntological “return to (former, imaginary) greatness” that is functionally no different than Hitler’s or Mussolini’s, but also America and Great Britain’s. The same pro-state reality extends to any fascist or fash-adjacent form insofar as they all play with the same mythology defending capital through undead military revisionism. As something to reinvent inside of itself, the middle class routinely inherit the same basic power fantasy—one where you’re the daddy aping the zombie “original” that, per Plato’s simulacrum, never existed but, as a matter of cryptomimesis vis-à-vis capital’s usual horrors, carries on copying itself through profit!
The moral, here, is that war begets war in Capitalist Realism, thus rape unto profit unto “Caesar” as Satanic Panic and Red Scare (the conflating of Nazis with Communists as “gay”); i.e., the Cycle of Kings’ closeted queerness through open war prone to rejection, self-hatred, dishonesty, anguish, feelings of incorrectness, expendability, damage, frustration, instability, inadequacy and alienation, etc, as historical-material byproducts of capital and its own “stuck” loops: the rise and fall of “Rome” illustrating capital as it exists presently (whose subversion starts with camping the canonical freezing of the tyrant, exhibit 41a2).
Per Myth, the heady toxic masculinity and bigoted, Crusader-style heroism (generally over contested lands; e.g., Jerusalem or the Middle East at large) is literally an undead, old boys’ club tied to profit as a doomed cycle of monarchic fakery and lies (“war is a disease”); i.e., one that borrows from its own quarantine nostalgia’s “promiscuous” (warlike) histories to repeat them, hence the game and the profit motive for which it entails, as thoroughly “queer” in abject language; e.g., the Total Codex a wealth of singular knowledge, on par with Jack Torrance’s book (“All work and no play…”), referring to the game at large as chasing its own tail (the Promethean moral being the Codex contains future predictions about past events revived in present moments—Capitalism-in-small, in other words). Size difference denotes the capacity for infection, lubrication (unto capital and state mechanisms), and psychosexual, egregore-style curiosities about inversion fears/uneven playing fields and what those gigantic insertions feel like (“suffering to the conquered”), etc: “The Watcher has entered Covenant from the north, and his tireless undead are raping the old city a second time; tearing down what few structures stand in their way, and choking the sky with dust and smoke. That he wants the book which now rests at the bottom of my pack is clear” (source: Mythipedia). Said knowledge is already compiled and sought after.
Similar to misogyny and anti-Semitism (or any xenophobia), queerness and fascism are historically coerced as a matter of normative compulsion—to preview through war (“seeing how the other side lives”). War is sex, is rape, is conquest as a undead crime of opportunity speaking to the usual historical-material trends; conquest is “gay” (false, illegitimate, incorrect, imposturous) and straight (true, legitimate, correct, not imposturous) all at once, coming out of the same legendary past (the good and bad team) to repeat its own “himbo comorbidities”—i.e., necrophilic social-psychosexual rituals predicated on homophobic conditions that, per the usual heteronormative distributions of power and knowledge (the fire of the gods), yield a very particular pecking order so common to the monomyth, thus videogames and other popular media forms; re: leaders, officers, batmen/servants (controllable and non-controllable units) dating back to Alexander the Great’s own problematic but tolerated[2] double standards.
(exhibit 41a1: Source: Mythipedia. The Watcher, styling himself “the mad goat of the fens,” is an allusion to Lovecraft’s female entity, Shub-Niggurath [the n-word is literally inside the name, passed off as alien gibberish], aka “The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young” [source: Fandom]. In a story largely without women or feminine men, Myth I pits statuesque, queer-coded men like the Watcher as aping Lord Humongous; i.e., in a wasteland setting previously mapped out for war in all the usual “Roman” ways. Pitted against each other as the promised monstrous-feminine reward, there is always another gay ghost of Caesar to put out on the field, then chase down and challenge. While there are more varied monstrous-feminine in the sequel—e.g. Shiver, the Deceiver and Soulblighter, who we’ll examine in a bit—all the generals you see in the original Myth are jacked, athletic combatants: half-naked melee fighters, as are the barefoot, long-haired, witch-like necromancer units called “shades” [who, apart from their fearsome AoE magic, carry swords]: ass clowns in the same sodomy circus propping empire up!
[source: Mythipedia]
In short, the fears of empire manifest milestone prey haunting the endless graveyards—a safari the player hunts inside, looking for mystical, big-game trophies to debride from empire to restore its straightness, mid-Satanic-Panic; i.e., dreams of Napoleon, fighting man-to-man per the game’s overarching “conquer the conqueror” fantasy “cleaning house”: search, seek and destroy human-sized “power targets” [with one of two exceptions, there are no destroyable buildings, in-game]. Not every level has such a target, but the biggest targets in Myth are always the Fallen Lords [or shades]. It’s nature turned unto empire as “an unweeded garden grown to seed,” but the usual natures [mostly workers, here] are still antagonized and put to work as cheaply as possible by capital; i.e., “pimped out” in order to perpetuate empire—a cycle the game calls “men or monsters”; re: men and non-men, but the non-men [queers] look suspiciously like straight men jacking it to Caesar’s ghost, or Alexander’s: gay meat wizards!
Bungie’s death theatre—dancing with these mighty abject corpses—is surprisingly fun [re: Sarkeesian]. Indeed, the game was one of my favorites, growing up, and as a trans woman, I can still attest to its intoxicating bouquet having seduced me as a child [the expansive, no-nonsense lore inspired my own faux-medieval fictions]. To it, I never questioned Bungie’s problematic mythos [or Lovecraft’s or Tolkien’s] until after I came out of the closet [and learned about Walpole’s rape castles]!
So play with these gay Nazis if you want, but we need to camp them with ludo-Gothic BDSM while doing so. Otherwise, canon simply lynches us fags by roping us in with said “Romans”; i.e., the latter defending America-in-disguise by playing the fall guys they project onto us: punch the Nazi, punch the Commie—same difference to capital.)
“Frailty, thy name is woman!” While a Promethean, monstrous-feminine aspect of death pervades Balor and those around him—i.e., his evil, motley-crew organization of gay meat wizards pursuing merciless vengeance against their good doubles (the ragtag Nine, good wizards called “avatara”)—Balor’s current conqueror status owes itself to a special force inside him/appointed to him: the spirit of the Leveler as something he arbitrarily “found,” which destroys him during Bungie’s nonstop race to the proverbial (and false) finish. Itself a moving goalpost, one designed to keep capital flowing through nature back towards the elite, the Cycle of Kings operates characteristically through black magic, heavy metal, and drug use (often going hand-in-hand as a pulpy [and popular] “brand”; e.g., Black Sabbath’s enduring legacy established by playing with old Gothic devices inside a fresh revival of them), as well as Dracula-style, no-holds-barred (or surrender) reciprocation.
(source: Mythipedia)
For instance, while the Watcher eats his victims and himself alive (a walking fetish/cliché embodying “death before dishonor” but honor is a myth), any such “Achilles egregore” is always strong in appearance, but weak in defeat as foregone; i.e., hiding a fatal flaw that makes him a reliable and easy sacrifice to the heroes exploiting him playing at false rebels. When you kill the Watcher towards the end of the game, he has been turned to stone, completely helpless:
We held Soulblighter at the Gjol long enough to let Alric spring his trap on the Watcher. Turned out I was right about those arrows: Alric had been working on them since we entered the marsh two weeks ago, and they were tipped with fragments of bone from the Watcher’s arm. I sure wouldn’t have wanted to get stuck with one, but apparently they turned the Watcher into stone, leaving him paralyzed and helpless. But he didn’t die. Thirty berserks chosen to accompany the archers tore through the enemy and piled the bodies of the dead at the Watcher’s feet, but all were killed before they could deliver the final blow (ibid.).
This “shrugging of Atlas” Voodoo doll illustrates “the Leveler” as a kayfabe process, unfolding through Caesar’s correct-incorrect likenesses (the general following the leader like Boromir follows Aragorn, only to get “feathered” with arrows, this time fired by the Legion’s “guerrillas” playing white Indians); i.e., aping the man-in-charge as thoroughly mortal, but also reprobate[3].
Like Hitler’s Reinhardt Heydrich, the Watcher’s ignominious killing is the assassination of an occupying army’s seemingly invincible hangman, making the Legion Bungie’s implied, good-guy liberators of “Prague” (from the “golem,” as it were). To it, the Watcher dies not a glorious death, but a pathetic one belonging a larger (and recursive) concentric copaganda scheme; i.e., our Frankensteinian male Medusa being raped as a matter of street justice between cops playing rebels on either side: frozen, then shattered with a taste of his own medicine fired back into him (to that, it’s actually quite satisfying to kick the Numinous statue in the balls while he can’t fight back, but also not very sporting of us[4])!
By extension, the same basic flaws apply to Balor falling unto Alric, whose dubious mantle actually stems from medieval thought—death being the great leveler of kings and peasants alike—but also the modern fascist idea of a historical-material cycle relaid in pre-fascist language (re: the Neo-Gothic). Trapped inside this language (which Bungie depicts on fragments of paper comparable to Hamlet’s commonplace book, itself a volume of revenge), the good guys must quickly pull down and deface all perceived dictators (after doing a double-take to account for their likeness-unlikeness to themselves).
Except, the true enemy (for the proletariat and nature) isn’t Balor and his generals, but Capitalism bombastically dressed up as “past” and projected forwards, again and again across the same “Gothic” wavelength, by rite of feudal succession—of dynastic primacy shoved out of the Gothic castle and onto the fields of endless war and death (which make up the same basic chronotope); i.e., by weird canonical nerds thinking they’re “Vikings” or “ancient Germanic tribes” fighting “Rome” (again, with no girls in sight). All unfold through Man Box “prison sex” rituals, Alric masterminding the latest foray against the echo of “Caesar” he, himself, will one day become (more on this, in “No Fury”).
In truth, fascism serves capital by acting out Rome’s tragic fall, projected onto various DARVO scapegoats (queer or otherwise) for our vigilantes to then seek out with righteous impunity (re: “burying the gay” letting gays be gay so long as they die in service to capital’s continuation: by putting on the zombie fetish gear and damned crown). It’s all castle doctrine—a dialectic of weak/strong shelter and aliens: “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.”
As mentioned at the start of “The Imperial Boomerang” subchapter, historian Bret Devereaux writes, “The quote, from a postapocalyptic novel by the author G. Michael Hopf, sums up a stunningly pervasive cyclical vision of history—one where Western strategists keep falling for myths of invincible barbarians” (source: “Hard Times Don’t Make Strong Soldiers,” 2020). Just as Caesar historically demonized those he conquered—i.e., as terrorist savages fighting dirty from the shadows[5] against the state (not for it as fascists do)—Bungie connects “terrorism” to the embarrassing destruction of what was built by “Caesar” as attacked by his vengeful ghost: senseless destruction, versus the usefully “glorious” propaganda battles of a vandalized past that, through various concentric myths, led and leads to Pax Imperium in its current, glorious (and capitalistic) forms.
All roads lead to Rome; those in Myth occupy both strategies at once, fueling capital in between reality and imagination through liminal expression flowing power towards the state. All throughout, the oscillating rhetoric of fascism’s weak/strong argument pervades Bungie’s gameworld, less hyphenating and more flipping on/off like a light switch (the momentum shift). The balloon-like inflation/deflation of the same basic devices’ hubris and self-esteem is shared between different warring parties (the Light and the Dark) over the same land and titles; i.e., like Macbeth’s own Cycle of Kings.
To that, the soldiers of Myth‘s temporally ambiguous “present day” must be strong by avoiding degenerate weakness this time, thus sacrificing themselves through a giant double implying their eventual doom; i.e., “the way of all flesh”; e.g., the Watcher laid low for the good of “pure” empire learned from hard-fought lessons that are, themselves, regularly forgotten and passed down in absentia/persona non grata (the absentee savior and unwelcome brutalizer one in the same); i.e., the past literally becoming gay to grapple with like Caesar’s ghost through copies of copies of copies trapped inside the same circle of violence (from Balor to Gwyn, Lord of Cinder to Smaug the Stupendous, etc).
The Watcher was merely a chip off the old block, though, Balor embodying said past as lacking the strength to remain vigilant at its highest level. This works as a cycle that never ends. As “true evil” first gains a foothold, then ultimately prevails by destroying Rome from within, Bungie effectively turns strength inside-out and outside-in (the appearance of genocide and rape—normally far-off, during the liminal hauntology of war—gets uncomfortably close to home through Balor). Hero worship is hero worship, though; even when the hero is tragic, fallen, and ambiguously gay (e.g., Count Dracula), killing them is the point, constituting the fascist cult of death the Watcher and Balor belong to, and which Bungie gets off on: war as a candy-like drug made by millionaires in service to billionaires and the profit motive, Willy-Wonka-style, but also rape tied to war per the process of abjection making such things—gargoyleish givers and receivers—ubiquitous.
(source: Mythipedia)
Of course, Bungie disassociates like all canonical authors, presenting this imaginary threat (the ghost of the counterfeit) as a Pygmalion’s shadow of its former self grappling with temptation; i.e., a desire to be recognized. Pride is Balor’s Achille’s heel, imperial death stalled by forcing the personification of death (the Übermensch) to recollect his former, human self before the fall; i.e., in opposition to a foreign, queer-coded menace: gay werewolves (Untermensch)!
“Antagonize nature; put it to work as cheaply as possible.” To it, the game’s lycanthropes are the Myrkridia, a horrific race of ancient, bestial flesh-eaters[6] known for making pyramids of their enemies’ skulls (a historical abjection onto imaginary beings that ancient conquerors have done regarding present atrocities; e.g., Tamerlane to the Pacific Theatre in WW2); i.e., the backstabbing Jews, in this case, being ancient barbarians that Balor’s vigilant past self, Connacht, grew lax about, pursuant to him being owed a prize for having fallen on his sword to save empire from these degenerate aliens to begin with (whose back-and-forth death in the same contested territory is, again, settler colonialism in action).
During their final confrontation, then, Alric has “set the table,” having killed the Watcher (who the Deceiver had previously nearly killed in a famous offscreen duel, before later being flung himself into an icy prison[7]); meanwhile, Shiver is out of the picture thanks to Rabican’s duel with her at Madrigal; and Soulblighter was turned back at the Gjol before the Watcher’s assassination, his present whereabouts unknown.
Having an exclusive audience with the tyrant, then, Alric plays his trump card: he plants the battle standard of the Leveler’s former enemies before Balor, forcing him to remember a time when he was more alive in service of the state and less corrupted by imperial power in a fascist, hauntological way. It’s the best Alric can hope for, his entire army devastated by the unstoppable warrior king (the vast majority sacrificed in front of Balor’s stolen fortress, letting Alric spring yet-another-trap, Gandalf-style, but actually coming from Odysseus against the Trojans [with Athena’s help] if you go back far enough).
The gambit is similar to Top Dollar’s, except it’s more of a stalling tactic, one that lets Alric show Balor a magic stone (exhibit 41a2) called “an Eblis.” Its exact nature is unknown and unexplained, in-game, but it functions similar to the lost seeing stones from Lord of the Rings (exhibit 41a): showing a king his own death, his own false status as undefeated, etc (this particular deus ex machina being omniscience).
But beyond the stone itself is another a clue: the aforementioned battle standard of the Myrkridia, a race of vampire-like werewolf beings that Balor has started to emulate; i.e., the great fortress of the Trow he lords over, Rhiannon (fairy Castle of Queen Maeb occupied by an evil king like what Maligant from First Knight would describe, or Monty Python call “Castle Anthrax”), circled by moats of fresh bloodspill—that of Alric’s sacrificial army! Thus, the story antagonizes empire and puts it to work against itself as cheaply as possible (re: the Battle of the Five Armies, a world war where no heroes or victors exist, but Capitalism still happens, anyways)! When this happens, the land is redivided along fresh settler-colonial boundaries, colonizing itself through the same settler arguments on the same maps: “We were here first!” In the usual settler colonial fashion, the claimants fabricate their ties to the land, then defend said territories in bad faith against a necessary scapegoat (an indigenous element to said land that can be attacked by the colonizer playing the native). To it, state power is a myth that serves itself, not its figureheads!
As such, Alric—the story’s Gandalf—chastises the current tyrant in the Cycle of Kings, one whose head has grown too big in this bourgeois, predatory scheme: “Know your place in the cycle; surrender your crown, thus your head!” (spoke Dumbledore calmly). Balor’s recalcitrance is the entirely the point; he needs to be strong and unwilling so the harvest is plentiful (the plot to Monolith’s Blood, in other words, but inverted to serve the good-coded empire by eating the bad-coded empire as sharing the same space). No one wants to be Jesus (the King of the Jews), rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s; i.e., his just deserts, meaning “deserving reward or punishment” (source: Marriam-Webster).
Here, the punishment is the reward, which Balor balks at (a bit like Mr. Bean’s teddy bear before Rowan Atkinson shoves a paintbrush up its ass). He’s a dick, to be sure, but Alric the seer—the landlord spirit of Capitalism lecturing the gay ghost of revenge (fascism conflated with Communism just as Caesar is to Jesus, no less)—is arguably much worse: an enabler to the petty pace of endless bloodshed, all made in service to profit by hijacking the entire mythos to do so!
Like Caesar or Jesus, the doomed outcome puts brutality on top of brutality in service to capital and profit; i.e., “both sides” do it, but one is conspicuously undead (thus evil and queer), the other functionally undead through a goodly seer using the same witch hunter rhetoric to nobly purge land and home of fascism (and other undesirable elements). It’s a Crusade, one fought to keep empire strong while, in the same breath, excising Communism entirely!
To it, Myth romances the hell out of ritual sacrifice tied to war and empire, and its initial appeal admittedly lies in how seriously it treats the subject matter. There’s none of the semi-campy gallantry that Raimi supplies, nor Tolkien’s gay batman schtick/queer allegory with Frodo and Sam, nor peppy uplifting music to parade your accomplishments. What little music there is usually plays[8] during the narration scenes, sounding quaintly tragic, rueful and grave; e.g., the “Gate of Storms” narration describing what’s in essence a Nazi blitz through the Ardennes: “Soulblighter cannot be stopped. His armies foul the land south of us for half a thousand miles, and his search for The Summoner has left none alive within his reach. The cities of Scales, Covenant and Tyr have all fallen to him in the last three weeks. It seems that too many years of peace have softened the once legendary armies of the West. Rabican, Murgen and Maeldun have been dead sixty years, and today only Alric remains of the great leaders who defeated the Fallen Lords” (source: Mythipedia).
In other words, “I want a hero!” uttered ironically by Lord Byron, becomes “I need a hero!” per Bonnie Tyler without Byron’s irony. “Save us from the evil, gay barbarian foreign plot, King Arthur!” Ghosts of ghosts of ghosts haunt a shared chronotope between monomyth fictions, bearing a Promethean stamp we debate with through ludic interpretations of combat, succession and collapse.
Like He-Man‘s Prince Adam, these himbos of “yore” aren’t strong-thighed bargemen, but well-educated, properly fed princes of the universe. They’re luxurious and privileged—both strong and entitled enough to bend the fulcrum of guilt upon which Alric’s gambit depends, yet hardy and self-centered enough to weather the tree of woe that older weird authors hung Conan on. Assimilation is assimilation, the blood of Caesar no more “real” than Christ’s, yet spikes the context of the tasty Kool-Aid with poisonous circumstance: a Last Supper drip-fed via diminishing returns. Myth ferries such trickle-down ambrosia into players’ power-starved brains; i.e., by middle-class auteurs (re: Bungie) lobbying for the same chase of glory that eluded Lovecraft or Howard, a century ago:
(source: Mythipedia)
Bungie apes the same tyrannical desire; i.e., to be strong enough to die bravely to serve the state’s lies (re: Heinlein’s Competent Man). It’s warrior-Jesus bread-and-circus, cherry-picking the most manly (at times, questionably queer) elements of sacrificial heroism to uphold capital in a half-real, neoliberal sense: the lobotomized, dogmatic status quo turned into little bourgeois action figures. They become the body and blood of Christ, wafers and wine the middle class imbibe and inhabit like a Rabelaisian carnival—a secret-identity martyr grappling with an openly undead mutineer (re: Skeletor, but also Jojo and the Pillar Men), doubling Christ in either respect: “We’ve come to be the rulers of you all!
As such, Bungie really gives it to you straight: the world is fucked and our dying heroes must return just enough to push things out of the current slump (the second game is more politically complex, involving alliances and turncoats, but also token cops, golems and werewolves). It feels more like an endless return to tradition, yearning for the revival of revamped manly spellswords (re: sages and meat wizards, above) through guy-on-guy violence; i.e., so-called “real men” paradoxically being made up—amounting hilariously to “ancient” Nazi frottage the likes of which would make even Cockrub Warriors green with envy (and undoubtedly rub off on them)! Gay and/or Nazi, there’s no avoiding crucifixion (a classical punishment by the Romans); the best Bungie’s West can hope for is dignity in defeat, mid-stigmata:
(source: Mythipedia)
Aping Caesar and Jesus in and on the same surfaces and thresholds (the same bodies fighting on the same battlefields), Myth is simply Capitalism taken to its logical conclusion: a giant zombie eating itself (more on this idea specifically during “The Monomyth” conclusion).
Like Tolkien, there’s also a progression between world wars as Bungie presents them. In Myth I, life is repeatedly stressed as appallingly cheap, in-game (a fiscal strategy of nations trading resources through manpower as efficient profit); in Myth II, such sacrifices are demanded, presuming a miracle rescue unfolding, last-second, on the cusp of total destruction. Such strategies are less “new” and more translated by capital out of older forms hitting on the same cycles; i.e., into cartoon versions of the past with a hauntological flavor evoking capital operating as usual. Everything is solemn and funeral in a richly developed world—one laid to waste over and over through evocations of its own routine destruction illustrating capital in small, mapped out, told through ghosts of “Rome” and “Gay Caesar.” The game (and its palimpsests) are very consistent in this respect, and it’s here we see how things are portrayed from a hypercanonical, nigh-Biblical perspective.
From a dialectical-material standpoint, recall that monsters are poetic lenses that argue back and forth per the dualistic storage (and optional irony) of values, taboos and trauma; they share the same spaces as liberation and enslavement, exploitation and agency. Here, Myth‘s usage/reception is strictly canonical, but also divided in two perfect sides; i.e., Nietzsche’s dialectic of Apollo and Dionysus, unironically blaming degeneracy and ressentiment for the fall of civilization, while resorting to such methods to keep things the same: a hero must die.
Faced with the reality of how far he has fallen inside the fascist cult of death eating empire from within, Balor the former statesman and protector (still wearing his white armor) sees himself as a human that became a zombie—e.g., like He-Man realizing he’s Skeletor—but also a rat, a vampire, an “incorrect” outlaw not-man: queer vermin without prestige, but still a giant to topple/gang rape (exhibit 41a) during the Beowulf-style, master/apprentice’s undead kayfabe momentum shift; i.e., struck with Alric’s crystal logic as its own kind of mirror argument
For all the sorcery that we have told to thee
They call us demons from Hell […]
I’m not burning, look inside
Crystal Logic’s what you’ll find (Manilla Road’s “Crystal Logic,” 1983).
that, as it happened to all his generals, now awaits Balor, too! In short, Alric and the Nine are good doubles—Jedi-like witch cops given total power to police their fascist, wicked-witch, false-rebellious brethren through moderacy and guilt, but also anything associated with them; i.e., anything that isn’t aligned with Alric and the sacrosanct West. Shamed, Balor bowing his head, exposes his neck to Alric as Hitler does to his enemies: the Roman fool falling on his sword through ritual suicide. So does the crown (and its power) fall back into the usual owners’ hands.
It’s important to remember that canon equivocates Communism (and queerness) with such a downfall. These comparisons happen despite overtly Communist stereotypes not existing in the first game (the sequel, as we shall see, explores different avenues for bigotry in its evil, anti-Semitic generals). Instead, the latter is blamed for said decay by design. And why shouldn’t it? Inside a world divided as “the Light” and “the Dark,” nuance isn’t even a thing of the past; it arguably doesn’t exist! Communism takes nuance; Capitalism does not.
To it, the Nine are also tyrants, but “good” ones who gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss (making Balor our himbo girl boss/Wicked Witch of the West). The decay is treated as inevitable; i.e., a Cycle of Kings whose invariable heroes foist the same arguments onto the audience—of good times leading to weak men, to bad times (thanks to gay men giving into “darkness”), to strong men (who reject the darkness)—merely passing the mantle of power back and forth. Its “solution” is merely a circle-jerk, one disturbingly similar to Western liberal democracy under Pax Americana, “aping Rome” per its circular ruins but also its circular tyrants wearing the same crowns: war is bad, then good again (re: Howard Zinn’s “Private Ryan Saves War,” 1998).
(source: Mythipedia)
Bungie’s centrist treatment of war is a cycle, then, one meant to perpetuate itself (thus Capitalism) through tyrants good and bad. In short, no sacrifice is too great to maintain empire’s endless coronations; there is only pure good and pure bad committing atrocity after atrocity against themselves, Alric emerging among the goodly Nine to become a god-king haunted by Caesar as Brutus was: “Once we have recovered the Ibis Crown,” he declared, “Llancarfan will once more be the seat of the Cath Bruig Empire with myself as Emperor. The people will draw strength from me and we will go forth and strike down our enemies. Once they have been defeated we will rebuild the Empire to its former glory” (source: Mythipedia).
Bear in mind, this is from the second game, one where the wise old seer—having formerly chastised Darth Vader in service to empire and the elite—takes up the same mantle of empire; i.e., to overcome the guilt at killing his former friend: Balor a childhood hero out of Alric’s time as a boy that Soulblighter haunts the old man’s dreams with: “You killed my friend!”
To it, Alric the aging monarch lives unusually long like Beowulf or Aragorn do—though less long than Methuselah from the Bible, because Myth treats such lifespans as unnaturally gained; i.e., bad sacrifices, not good ones whose “proper magic[9]” lasts just long enough to let the hero live and die as good, then return from the grave as bad Fallen Lords, wielding evil magics (“and their terrible sorcery was without equal in the West,” source: Mythipedia). These mirror the good while being visibly stronger than them, thus threatening all the genocide Connacht (and his ilk) had to do, once upon a time. It’s imperial DARVO in action, dredging up the past to obfuscate, then rebury it. In time, Alric will return as the Leveler for some other Gandalf to sacrifice (with no attempt by Bungie to suggest state shift, the cycle optimistically going on forever—a blind critique hitting the nail on the head by illustrating Capitalism as well as Bungie does).
As part of the same apologia, this alternate, “legitimate” bloodline is, itself, “ripped off.” Aping Tolkien’s Return of the King by having Aragorn—once a nameless ranger wandering the wilds—miraculously return and restore Gondor and its “legitimate” bloodline[9a] to a former imaginary glory (to challenge Sauron, the ghost of the counterfeit), its inevitable collapse, post-Tolkien, is arguably what paralyzed Balor when looking into Alric’s magic stone: his future death, failure, or both suggested through a meta continuation of the same graveyard palimpsest (re: “all our yesterdays”).
Seeing the Vandals coming for “Rome” once again (with Alric resembling a Khan[10] in his sequel attire, above, and the white-Indian barbarians he sends for “Caesar” triggering the final boss into paralysis), said empire is the shameful result of Connacht’s secret weakness[11] laid bare. Exposed, the tyrant’s DARVO/obscurantist façade crumbles due to an internalized conflict of interest and, like a deer caught in headlights (re: Top Dollar with Eric), Balor momentarily freezes in place. Trapped helplessly inside his armor long enough for the remaining warriors of the Light to behead him, his Brutus-style murderers proceed to throw Balor’s severed head into a giant pit. Similar to the One Ring being tossed into Mount Doom, the volcano scapegoat (exhibit 41a2) constitutes an act of banishment, but also forgetting through live burial. The world is saved and balance restored… for a time.
In turn, whatever power the state presents as terrorist or counterterrorist flows back into “Rome,” the mother country a predatory matter of funneling resources towards its invisible rulers. Myth recuperates fascism, mid-crisis, through vampirism as queer-coded Red Scare, Capitalist Realism blaming Communism by conflating it with Balor’s feral terrorist antics; i.e., per the man and his armies’ Nazi-Communist pastiche: representing Communism by the West’s false, “horseshoe” equivalency with fascism. Thus fascism defends capital and profit/rape while colonizing empire as a profitable (repetitive) matter of centrism and praxial inertia—of balance maintained not just through cops and victims, but “good cop, bad cop” and fascism/Orientalism; i.e., ultimately playing ball for the elite behind the curtain.
To be sure, these uniforms exist in non-fascist varieties (e.g., so-called “gay Nazis” mirroring a “leather daddy” aesthetic). Here, though, Myth tokenizes Imperialism with more steps, leading to the usual historical-material doubles’ liminal, chiastic recursions and collocations echoing the same liminal hauntologies of war and their grim harvests (e.g., the German Reichsadler vs the American imperial eagle, but also Nazi outfits vs fetish-gear “mil spec” and “Scottish” warriors, below); i.e., inside a Cycle of Kings’ outdoor infernal concentric pattern, “I have begun to plant thee and will labor / To make thee full of growing” (source). Since Shakespeare, kings are routinely propped up, only to be cut down, watering the soil of the elite’s countryside with the blood of squashed mosquitoes.
As such, obscurantism’s inherited confusions borrow and combine strongmen from different mythological backgrounds to camouflage capital with. Myth‘s extensive dramatis personae—its four Fallen Lords (not including Balor, Satanic ruler of the Four Horsemen, in this case) and nine avatara (the latter mirroring Tolkien’s nine Ringwraiths, “doomed to die”)—are no different; i.e., both sides make up aging “boners” to grow courageously and “fall” ignominiously as Balor does, all while mirroring Macbeth on par with “shadows of Caesar.” It’s Capitalism with daddy issues and a hard-on for “Celtic” reinvention (re: Connacht, the province of Ireland; Mel Gibson’s Braveheart and imaginary Scotland; but also Macbeth through different performances, above). All operate through Capitalism as the ghost of “Rome” (re: fascism), one whose bugbears frightfully emerge out of an imaginary greatness that never quite existed.
In turn, Bungie’s cathartic, Radcliffean banishing—of the gay Nazi skeleton in the closet—stretches into yesterday coming back around; i.e., a canceled future relegated to the endless, regicidal treachery of an imaginary Scotland well at home in Shakespeare’s “Scottish Play” (and throwing in a smorgasbord of other warlike theatres; re: Tolkien and Lovecraft):
For brave Macbeth (well he deserves that name),
Disdaining Fortune, with his brandished steel,
Which smoked with bloody execution,
Like Valor’s minion, carved out his passage[12]
Till he faced the slave;
Which ne’er shook hands, nor bade farewell to him,
Till he unseamed him from the nave to th’ chops,
And fixed his head upon our battlements (source).
It’s very heteronormative and sadistic, but also flagellative—mortifying the flesh in ways just between “the boys” (no homo): evil Scottish Daddy ≈ Bungie’s doomed Connacht, the same candle to extinguish and castle on Plato’s cave wall (I write, in the dark, with Satie on and the only light coming from my monitor). It’s pervasive—an abusive, sports-style relationship, passing the baton, the crown, etc, where such embedded, convergent disorders (take your pick) express through the “generous,” addictive giving of strength that keeps the battered “housewives” (men) coming back for sloppy seconds: to kill whoever wears the crown, but also those who work with them, cannibalizing workers for the state and billionaires during the usual arterial spray’s formidable range (sanguine ejaculate).
Such doubles aren’t intrinsically “bad”; e.g., I can go walking with the rabbits around where I live to see that side of Zeuhl splintered off from the tyrant they eventually became (they loved rabbits); i.e., we can play with such things ourselves differently than Bungie does.
As for Bungie, their latent homoeroticism flavors a canonical usage of the zombie tyrant’s apocalypse; i.e., as someone to summon and tear apart again through the usual martyred hyphenations. Called to, “Caesar” the appointed sacrifice understandably throws a tantrum, Brutus and the boys wrestling the spontaneous paraplegic to the ground before completely dismembering him; e.g., not just Balor the Leveler but older stories like The Ronin Warriors (exhibit 41a2, next page) riffing on the same tyrant’s fascist rise and fall: evil Jesus (the Wandering Jew)/Lord Humongous linked to capital and to Capitalist Realism dipping the Black Veil to tease absolute ruin among the Gothic castle’s trembling vanishing point. Instead of an explained supernatural (re: Radcliffe), the supernatural (or draconic, vampiric) becomes dogmatic through Capitalist Realism’s undead zombie heroes and tyrants.
In turn, the neoliberal refrain imitates older ones: the fascist in-group’s eponymous solidarity uniting against an “outside” menace re-envisioned by Mussolini, then Hitler aping America’s Hollywood (the Nazis adored American media—inspired both by Charlie Chaplin, leatherstocking tales and cheap spy novels, but also Edward Bernays’ ministry of propaganda): “Unite, thus keep the money (and mythical, dogmatic merchandise) moving while capital enters crisis and decay!” Instead of conceptualizing Communism as an alternate, separate solution to capital’s waves of collapse, it’s easier for Bungie—those under the spell of Capitalist Realism—to immediately visualize the world ending because Caesar and his generals have come home, seeking revenge (think “Revelations” and rapture, except with less angels and more warlords; i.e., a Ragnarok variation of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse).
To it, “the myth of Gothic ancestry endured because it was useful” applies to the elite “culling the herd” through Bungie, the former relying on such banishing rituals by the latter to make children and young adults (usually boys) fall in love with magical warriors once more—the usual sort, sacrificing themselves to save the world from “evil”; i.e., fascism/ghosts of “Caesar” granted all manner of cultural elements that white (middle-class) saviors playing the white Indian fall back on, sold to different age brackets whiling punching spectres of Marx in the bargain.
Similar to Myth, all embody and conscript younger and younger recruits against a demon, Nazi-Communist foe; e.g., grizzled warriors or “teenagers with attitude”; i.e., outcasts during the monomyth having Promethean potential. Like Arthur’s magic coconuts, the Promethean name of the game is archaeological wish fulfillment: “find anachronistic, incongruous armor and weapon; fight evil, get girl.” Evil servants summon destruction, reviving Caesar or Medusa-as-Marx, etc, doubling state hegemons (e.g., Captain Planet vs Captain Pollution).
Then, as Dayman fights Nightman, canon prioritizes assimilation through misfits and in-group outsiders (the fascist recruiter targeting broken homes that still have in-group class and race privilege); i.e., through occult-tinged stories operating in defense of “Rome” from its perceived “evil” self; re: the Wandering Jew having Communist and fascist elements (more on this in “No Fury”). Villains are prolific through profit the same way that heroes are; i.e., comparable to Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces, we have per the Promethean Quest a Villain of a Thousand Faces. The heroes are usually Puritanical and bland; the villains are Nazi comfort food[13]—a buffer or drug to take the edge off.
(exhibit 41a2: The fate of Balor the Leveler and Emperor Tulpa[14] is essentially the same: bodily dismemberment by a team of allies, whose allegiance is not certain [with Tulpa having his own band of dark warlords using the same armor that the Ronin Warriors do—indeed, coming from the same emperor’s body as originally housing all of them]. Per Walpole’s Capitalocene/ghost of the counterfeit, Balor and Tulpa are undead tyrants haunting composite war machines; i.e., giant suits of armor delivering class commentaries on systemic issues/material conditions that speak to particular allegories the commentators [authors] might not be fully aware of, concerning the world around them. Regardless, each follows the myth of Osiris as Promethean, the giant to assemble through mad science [“magic”] and then disassembled through the same methods weaponized by false rebels “saving the world”; i.e., reversing power to a seemingly self-destructive degree, the pilots grow angry to a perceived slight, one that Caesar must pay for in blood, thus whitewash empire: “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!”
Similar to Count Dracula’s revival, the dead king is resurrected in pieces; only by taking him back apart can the curse be “ended.” In canonical narratives, this disassembly requires a military alliance and feats of legendary strength by a host of great warriors, surrounding and not just stabbing “Caesar” to death, but hacking him to pieces through the metaphor of gang rape. To achieve this, they must paralyze him, generally by showing him something he doesn’t want to see; re: his former greatness that he has forgotten, but also fallen from. Like Top Dollar, Balor confronts his humanity on the Aegis, only to realize that he’s lost it and, in effect, poisoned the land and all his friends. He freezes in shame and is beheaded, his armies collapsing as a result [versus Tulpa, who—after absorbing the hero, Ryo—is paralyzed by the spirit of virtue long enough for the other warriors to cleave him to pieces (temporarily embodying the fire of the gods to do so). Lifting the evil curse, the giant armor vanishes and the legendary ronin become ordinary boys once more, Ryo resurrected through the equally-deus-ex-machina power of the Jewel of Life].
By comparison, camping the freezing procedure reverses it in ways that don’t seek to scapegoat anyone; i.e., camp subverts what’s happening as a matter of dogma to expose the bourgeoisie manipulating everyone. Keep that in mind when we examine Balor’s loyal servant, Soulblighter.)
Speaking to the giant’s dismemberment, Myth‘s battles are incredibly violent. “Casualty,” states the battlefield announcer for one death, and “Casualties!” for two (or more). Meanwhile, powerful explosions and chain-reaction spells of fearsome black magic rock the countryside, ripping entire regiments apart (note: the mechanisms of dwarves and shades—Bungie’s appointed demolition experts and self-serving necromancers—have an anti-Semitic and fascist flavor to them). Post-detonation(s), heads soar like soccer balls and severed limbs (and guts) sail and spin through the air, raining blood before bouncing across the ground as shrapnel. And while that might not seem terribly impressive nowadays, back then the rudimentary physics and blood-spattered mayhem were positively ground-breaking (the developers would go onto revolutionize console FPS games [and ultimately eclipse Myth‘s sleeper-hit status] by making Halo: Combat Evolved, in 2001)!
Part of Myth‘s allure is how it puts the player at the helm when the stakes feel so high (thus allowing for feats of great bravery in the face of certain death as, itself, a performance—one reenacted from Beowulf to the Western, the villain generally more fun to watch while “David” beats “Goliath”; e.g., Allan Rickman upstaging Tom Selleck, in 1990’s Quigley Down Under, despite the script requiring that he lose the fight). Like a director and a general, you can view the action from any angle, slowing time down or speeding it up. It’s visceral, glorious and bleak—clearly inspired by Braveheart, two years previous, but also Tolkien and Lovecraft’s own fictions: an uphill battle against the forces of darkness, but presented as abject, gross, and medieval in ways that combine the best of all these authors and their playground worlds. Regular formations generally give way to herding your men into loose groups that adopt a more guerrilla-style approach to things. Leading your enemy into traps is preferable to frontal assaults, where mounting casualties are bound to happen (the trick to victory is avoiding the deaths of men you cannot afford to replace[15]).
To all of that, it’s truly a young (tom)boy’s dream come true (I was eleven when the game came out, playing it for hours-upon-hours); i.e., a chance to be like Mel Gibson or Peter Jackson (who had yet to emerge outside splatter-house circles): directing big-scale fantasy battles, only save the footage, viewing it later to your heart’s content!
The basic problem with Myth (or any such refrain ordering things in military language) is that its centrist conflict falls into Tolkien’s cartographic approach to war, thereby acclimating the player to the role of the general sacrificing his men (or hers—I daresay I spent as much time deliberately blowing up my own troops as I did beating the game): a story between good versus evil that is forever in conflict, dividing things into “pure” evil and good on open yawning battlefields that become bleakly entertaining on further retellings.
For example, Tolkien’s pure-evil goblins[16]—and their misuse of mad science to develop battlefield weapons that could kill a great many people at once—also describes the dwarves that the player controls in Myth; i.e., Tolkien’s abstraction of real-world horrors the author himself experienced during WW1 becoming rehashed first through LotR‘s WW2 allegory and then by Bungie’s own blind parodies of both world wars retold again. Stuffed with more and more fireworks for the crowd, the Battle of the Five Armies becomes Helm’s Deep becomes [insert Myth level, here]: the Promethean Quest becoming a morbid chase for the most glorious death(s) on the field.
Across all of them, though, the undead king—the fascist, now-corrupt skeleton lord—is always coming home, denoting a buried, systemic problem even when things were “good.” Restoring balance and returning things to normal through equal force is entirely the point; i.e., something to canonize and camp; e.g., Walpole’s crumbling of the dark castle like a bad dream to conveniently reveal the fair castle underneath: a fairytale restoration of the status quo to its proper rulers, per the West vs the Fallen Lords aping the Allies vs the Axis Powers carried into similar fictional echoes of past wars that Walpole tuned into, and Shakespeare, and so on, made entirely cartoonish in neoliberal forms; e.g., Castle Greyskull vs Snake Mountain, King Randor vs Skeletor, or the Belmonts vs Dracula, etc.
Like those examples, Bungie illustrates the status quo, in centrism, as being the spectacle of raw theatrical combat, itself endlessly occurring between good and evil’s notably unpeaceful transfer of power between rulers; i.e., the chase of endless profit abusing a finite web of life inside a romanticized, imaginary past—one that distracts viewers from ongoing state abuses occurring in the present. Within this ghost of the counterfeit, there are no moral actions, only moral teams that come from the same source: “good” empire and the ghost of the noble bloodline as something to defend from “bad” empire and the ghost of the tyrant in zombie form “cutting in line.”
This effectively makes centrist narratives like Myth genocide apologia, relegating war to an eternal struggle on faraway lands that curiously resemble Western Europe. It is not a solution, but a mapped form of tired, fatal military optimism that prolongs war by virtue of its mythical necessity and essentialism: “good or bad, war must continue.” So when evil ghosts of the haunted past rear their ugly heads, canonically dogwhistle to marshal the hounds, doing so to “cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war” (a line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, a historical play)!
Point in fact, Myth‘s centrist nature is exposed by it being diegetically aware of this destructive, empire-comes-home reaping—something the sequel expounds upon when “true victory” is threatened once again as it always must be:
There are laws that govern the workings of the universe that have remained immutable for countless aeons. According to these laws, the forces of light and dark hold dominion over the world successively, the land belonging in turn to men, or to monsters.
Each cycle would be presaged by the appearance of a great comet, foretelling the rise of saviour or destroyer. Each golden age would give way to one of darkness, when foul things would stir beneath the earth, and evil spirits would plague the land. In turn, each dark age would fall to one of light; the evil would pass from the land just as the comet from the sky.
The saviours of each golden age were men who had risen to face the Dark and never turned away. They were men of unflinching heroism who would not rest until they had loosened the bloodless grip of wicked things which had dominated their lands. Many of these heroes were doomed to return in the following age as Fallen Lords, destroying all they had fought so hard to preserve (source: Myth Journals).
Such imperial apologia is Capitalist Realism par excellence. Action for its own sake (re: Eco), Bungie—not without a twinge of dry gallows humor—showcases the target audience (white, middle-class men) having fun amid the carnage while dressed up; i.e., through their fantasy avatars celebrating the unlikely winning of every battle, throwing up their arms and cheering as Ash’s forces do in Army of Darkness, but also Monty Python’s after they’re forced to eat Robin’s minstrels: “There was much rejoicing!” followed by a lackluster “Yay…”
The whole ordeal feels like a blind parody—frozen-if-productive (thus lucrative) Gothic history that only lends itself to sequel enterprises with the same kinds of action figures; i.e., regressing to brutal methods of self-preservation, their gory sagas further expounding on the process of abjection, coronating a dark king and a light king per the ghost of the counterfeit as a matter of transcontinental exchange—of world war all over again. This tyranny and regression applies to both sides capital has set up to fight, whose complexities amid simplicity we’ll continue to unpack in Myth‘s sequel, Soulblighter.
Before we do, let’s summarize the Cycle of Kings per Myth‘s unironic execution: Good men must decay and resort to barbarism to fend off the barbarism of evil men; empire must rebuild, a good king chosen to lead the people invariably towards destruction again (the “last” battle, next page); good king must show the bad king the truth of the cycle, thus force him to face the music (re: it’s time for him, the sacrifice, to die) in “a lesson in humility”: “bend over and take it up the ass ‘for the team’; rinse and repeat, keeping power always at the top.” In the interim, workers are ground up like fodder but not before the more privileged nerds among them get to play the false rebel cop, the berserk cartoon being the good king’s dutiful lapdogs, thus “kings for a day” themselves while seizing the day for their chicken hawk liege and—like a prequel to Attack on Titan (a thoroughly fascist show in its own right, reflecting in its creator’s closeted fascist antics[17])—cutting the giant to bits by charging directly at him (the opposite of Tim the Enchanter and the Killer Rabbit[17a]): “Thundercats, ho!”
Now that we’ve dissected Balor himself in Myth: the Fallen Lords, and explored the game’s fatal warrior mythos reviving Zombie Caesar on loop to uphold Capitalist Realism, let’s unpack the above cycle (and its double standards) through the sequel; i.e., Myth II: Soulblighter, whose queer, monstrous-feminine elements are even more obvious (and problematic).
For starters, Balor had a lieutenant called Soulblighter who served with him in life under the human name, Damas. Before they turned to the Dark, both men actually knew of the inevitable corruption that awaited them, going from babyface to heel, kayfabe-style, as time went on:
Damas was Connacht’s lieutenant during the Wind Age and was his closest friend. Thus he was told of Connacht’s knowledge that he would be the next incarnation of the Leveler and so was asked to help destroy or hide away magical artifacts that may help him after he turns. Damas then found immortality through various rituals and other practices, notably removing his nose, lips, eyelids, and multiple things from inside his body (source: Mythipedia).
As we’ll see going forwards, Damas is Soulblighter the same way that Connacht is Balor through the monomyth and its reversal, during the Promethean Quest. But Soulblighter (and similar Conan-style caricatures, below) yield monstrous-feminine elements have their own racist, anti-Semitic/Orientalist flavor that Balor largely does not.
(artist: Dan Dos Santos)
Onto “Myth: the Fallen Lords, part two: Soulblighter“!
Footnotes
[1] “Caesar” being a cryptonym/dogwhistle for “Nazi,” but also a false equivalency for “Communists”; i.e., the horseshoe argument, conflating “czars”—literally a respelling of “Caesar”—for complicated revolutionaries like Lenin and Stalin (men attached to state abuse, but also valid attempts at liberation from said abuse while pushing imperfectly towards development).
[2] As I write in Volume One:
The queerness of someone would have been permitted insofar as they were granted an exception as a person of means; e.g., a politician, general or aristocrat of some kind wouldn’t be taken to task for refusing to follow the canonical laws… provided they didn’t “pull an Oscar Wilde” and make their activities open to the public. For example, as Brent Pickett of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy writes on homosexuality and the ancient world (which involves the canonical codes we’re addressing in the modern world through reimagined forms), “Some persons were noted for their exclusive interests in persons of one gender. For example, Alexander the Great and the founder of Stoicism, Zeno of Citium, were known for their exclusive interest in boys and other men. Such persons, however, are generally portrayed as the exception. […] Given that only free men had full status, women and male slaves were not problematic sexual partners. Sex between freemen, however, was problematic for status” (source, 2020).
Per modern fantasy stories that capitalize on closeted things, Tolkien hinted at bondage, whereas someone like Terry Goodkind has openly pedophilic villains because the horrors of empire are extratextually out in the open; i.e., that openly violate the kinds of moral arbitrations that a global murderer like the Watcher wouldn’t pause to entertain! In the late 20th and 21st centuries, then, evil isn’t a black unspeakable shape; it’s ugly and rarefied in ways Tolkien wouldn’t dare to speak out loud (re: “the love that dare not speak its name!”). Bungie does the same thing as Goodkind, albeit in a videogame format singing praises (the tyrant’s plea) to such undead hedonists and their awful deeds.
[3] Case in point, Shakespeare would call such likenesses “walking shadows,” the heroic history’s routine rise and fall seemingly already written out and commented on rather glumly (to say the least) by Macbeth: “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (source). With Bungie, it’s all the same mixture of witchcraft, prophecy and murder—Hecate (the Fates, relaid as witches) reminding kings, but also “kings” (the middle class), that they’re rather fucked; i.e., dead and dickish: “something wicked!” The Watcher is wicked, but merely a dark reflection that suggests the Legion are, too, and will be again when they rise from the grave!
[4] I.e., by the audience, in general. While I’d say, “all’s fair in love and war” as far as killing the Watcher goes, the target audience (white straight men) is effectively killing themselves and theirs; i.e., on par with Arthur and Mordred, or some such “end times/Second Coming.”
[5] For an illuminating counterexample of such terrorist argumentation (re: counterterrorism reversing the binary in service to workers), consider Robert B. Asprey’s 1994 exhaustive and informative book, War in the Shadows: the Guerrilla in History.
[6] Comparable to werewolves in appearance, a medieval cryptonym for rape, sodomy and bestiality, but also raw, deviant, non-English sexuality as warlike; i.e., anti-Semitism in the flesh; e.g., Alcide from True Blood.
[7] These stories are expressed between the first game and the second. From the first, the Narrator writes,
The Watcher drove his army without rest through the fleeing remnants of Rabican’s forces and into Seven Gates. We are there now, inside the pass, where he then clashed with The Deceiver on his way east. The bodies of the undead are everywhere, melted and broken. It seems inconceivable that anything could have survived. I don’t know why he attacked The Deceiver, unless somehow he found out what was going on in Silvermines.
One of the veterans said that these two had it out after the battle for Tyr, twelve years ago, and that the Watcher barely survived. I have a feeling the real reasons for what happened today go back even farther than that. Whatever the case, while the battle raged only a few miles away and we thought the Watcher was coming for us next, I was glad nobody had asked me to carry his damned arm (source: Mythipedia).
From the second, the Narrator (different character, same voice actor) writes,
Twelve Motion Jeweled Skull says he was last here sixty years ago, fighting alongside the likes of Durak and Turgeis with Burning Steel. They caught The Deceiver and the remnants of his army in this very defile and here destroyed them. Today the Dramus River is frozen solid, but back then it was a muddy torrent of melted snow and ice brought on by the eruption of Tharsis. The Deceiver was plunged into the river and swept far downstream, his scepter sinking to the bottom. I asked Twelve Motion why King Alric believes The Deceiver will throw in with our lot. He explained how The Deceiver has been frozen in a half-death beneath the river, clinging to life through sorcery alone, with no power left to free himself. The King believes that if we were to revive him and return the scepter, the focus of his power, he would no doubt join our cause (source: Mythipedia).
and
Does Soulblighter seek to enlist the aid of yet another of his former allies? It seems unlikely once you consider the intense hatred the rest of the Fallen Lords had for The Deceiver. Only Balor seemed capable of holding them together, and even he was not always successful. Many stories from the Great War tell of open discord between the Fallen Lords. Now we will take advantage of it (source: Mythipedia).
Across titles and matches, the “enemy of my enemy” quality of these stories only compounds, insofar as all share the same space and time, and rely not just on the same characters doubled, but their social relationships marrying reality to legend (as the chronotope does); i.e., pertaining to old rivalries between them as a matter of cross-generational intrigue. It’ methodical backdrop likewise works to get more millage out of footnotes material; i.e., in ways that have it playing out on various in-game registers—the journal entries, but also on the battlefield as an extension of the developers’ imaginations and the players’ controlling the same avatars for their own reasons. They can change allegiance at the drop of a hat, doing so as a matter of history conveyed by us, as cruel gods, controlling them, and they us, in return.
In short, such stories-in-stories invite multimedia speculation by different groups consuming the same basic material; i.e., allowing me to return to it, years afterwards, to dissect and camp Bungie’s built world inside my own book project. Their canon is mine to camp, one author to another.
[8] Victory music does play after each level, but it always sounds like someone died—a dirge for the world’s saddest funeral, one aimed at incels and MGTOW types (who would eventually emerge, in force, to become endemic to internet discourse: during Gamergate, less than two decades later).
[9] It’s worth noting that the magic of the avatara and the shades are virtually identical, color-coded differently like the Jedi and Sith’s famous lightsabers (though in Myth‘s case it’s blue and green, mirroring the ancient Babylonian racing teams: “Bread and circuses, that’s all the common people want,” source).
[9a] Said lineage’s patrilineal descent is feted and restored through the usual medieval, racist, might-makes-might procession of cautionary violence Tolkien worshipped and reified in his own canon; re: Dr. Stephen Shapiro writing to Reddif.com in 2003 about Lord of the Rings, the movies:
Tolkien’s good guys are white and the bad guys are black, slant-eyed, unattractive, inarticulate and a psychologically undeveloped horde. In the trilogy, a small group, the fellowship, is pitted against a foreign horde and this reflects long-standing Anglo-European anxieties about being overwhelmed by non-Europeans. This is consistent with Tolkien’s Nordicist convictions. He thinks the Northern races had a culture and it was carried in the blood (source).
In openly fascist disputes, the status quo cannibalizing itself (usually through outliers); e.g., the Montagues and the Capulet’s “curse on both [their] houses”; i.e., the imposter is projected onto a “false” European, with the good side recruiting tokenized agents to take the pledge to fight to restore things to working order. Such hunger games are carried forward through capital’s hauntological (Gothic) fakeries reviving unironic forms in the present: dragons, kings, crowns, etc, as “legitimate ” yet thoroughly bastardized, forged, imaginary claims/assimilation fantasies unto power exchanged as it presently is arranged, but relaid in abject, cast-off forms.
Whatever the form, it’s a Russian-roulette-style death lottery during capital’s manufactured scarcity—a trial by fire/blood sacrifice when capital decays, enacted out of desperation and entitlement; i.e., a mad monarch through the usual blood oaths and tithes “gone bad”; e.g., House of the Dragon (2022) and Rhaenyra, the tokenized queen (above, channeling Elizabeth Bathory instead of Count Dracula), being a Nazi vampire regent (the scapegoat) tied to these legendary beasts’ superstitious symbolizing of persecution mania and raw displays of power, but also legendary mass/serial killers defending territory to absurd extremes. It’s a massive game of chicken, a regressive, reactionary metaphor for the state eating itself through the rarefied symbol of great houses, passed down as bastardized inheritance like a kind of dangerous pet imprinting onto new, arbitrarily “worthy” inheritance. Whoever wins, workers lose; i.e., “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss!” Same goes for Gondor and Aragorn, the Cath Bruig and Alric, or Omadon the Red Wizard and Sir Peter (re: The Flight of Dragons, another older story about taming dragons and riding to war in the king’s name of home defense), etc. Dragons or no dragons, zombies or no zombies, Man Box is Man Box, tyrants are tyrants, dogma is dogma.
[10] The second game uses “noble savage” Orientalism to tokenize itself; i.e., through a white savior wearing non-white attire (in this case, “Asian”) and calling themselves “avatara” to uphold “pure Western values.” It’s fascist on its face, but presents as moderate; i.e., fascism waiting to happen.
[11] This could technically be guilt at committing genocide, but the game is pro-genocide, instead shaming Connacht for a lack of vigilance.
[12] In this sense, good kings are just as brutal as bad ones, and generally to preserve the status quo as built upon past cruelty that has become known as “good” over time:
Soulblighter has done the unthinkable. With his army scattered in disarray, he fled up through the Eye of Tharsis and into the very bowels of the earth. I can hardly blame him. The sight of Alric hacking his way through the enemy, Balmung flashing in his hand, caused many of our own men to stand aside in awe (source: Mythipedia).
Alric the seer in Myth becomes the giga-Chad in Myth II, the slayer of demons who wakes up and remembers that he is Beowulf and our resident “Grendel” is no match for him: “Brutal, without mercy! But you, you will be worse… Rip and tear, until it is done!” It’s “might makes right,” committed by Pax Americana, Joe Biden projecting onto a fantasy world that looks and sounds like so many other fabrications; e.g., Aragorn and Sauron, Beowulf and Grendel, but also Arthur and Mordred, Henry V and Fortinbras, Paul Atreides and Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, and yes, Alric and Balor.
[13] With varying degrees of camp, vis-à-vis the jester in the king’s court doubling as his black knight/assassin; re: Bulgakov’s Satan and Begemot, Final Fantasy VI’s Emperor Gestahl and Kefka Palazzo, Star Wars‘ Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader, Myth‘s Balor and Soulblighter, Tolkien’s Morgoth and Sauron, Marlowe’s Satan and Mephistopheles, etc.
[14] The latter being Yokai tyrant, but also “tulpa” as a special kind of supernatural being; re (from the glossary):
egregore/tulpa (simulacrum)
An occult or monstrous concept representing a non-physical entity that arises from the collective thoughts of a distinct group of people (what Plato and other philosophers have called the simulacrum through various hair-splittings; e.g., “identical copies of that which never existed” being touched upon by Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality). The distinction between egregore and tulpa is largely etymological, with “egregore” stemming from French and Greek and “tulpa” being a Tibetan idea:
Since the 1970s, tulpas have been a feature of Western paranormal lore. In contemporary paranormal discourse, a tulpa is a being that begins in the imagination but acquires a tangible reality and sentience. Tulpas are created either through a deliberate act of individual will or unintentionally from the thoughts of numerous people. The tulpa was first described by Alexandra David-Néel (1868–1969) in Magic and Mystery in Tibet (1929) and is still regarded as a Tibetan concept. However, the idea of the tulpa is more indebted to Theosophy than to Tibetan Buddhism [source: Natasha L. Mikles and Joseph P. Laycock’s “Tracking the Tulpa: Exploring the “Tibetan” Origins of a Contemporary Paranormal Idea,” 2015].
The shared idea, here, is that monsters tend to represent social ideas begot from a public imagination according to fearful biases that are not always controlled or conscious in their cryptogenesis/-mimesis. In Gothic-Communist terms, this invokes historical-material warnings of codified power or trauma—including totems, effigies, fatal portraits, suits of armor, or gargoyles—projected back onto superstitious workers through ambiguous, cryptonymic illusions. For our purposes, these illusions are primarily fascist/neoliberal, as Capitalism encompasses the material world. It must be parsed/transmuted.
Infinite growth, infinite monsters; capital makes endless varieties to symbolize its usual exchanges!
[15] Troops survive into later battles, letting you rack up kills per unit; the more kills a unit has, the more powerful they become (while also being a possible nod to Gimli and Legolas’ kill count, at Helm’s Deep).
[16] Jadis hated the idea of playing D&D with me because I stated right of the bat, “This game is literally built on racial conflict—of good races, neutral races and bad races.” Saying this, I immediately wanted to play a pacifist, peace-loving Drow—the rare-and-elusive “good Drow.” Yet the rules didn’t really encourage it; the Drow had literally been made to be pure evil—more evil, indeed, than the orcs, which by that point had started to become good enough to ally with the traditional forces of good; i.e., the Men of the West (or some analogue compared to them). Simply put, their aesthetics were evil in a way similar to the post-WW2 depiction of Nazis had been popularized, but also disseminated through various forms of popular media. Instead of the black-and-red BDSM shtick of the torturous “vampire” warrior or something akin to that, you had black and purple, with an association with spiders, the underground, and dark and shady deeds connected to assassination, but also, oddly enough, sex appeal:
(exhibit 41b: Artist, top-left: Jonathan Torres; top-right: King of Undrock; mid-left: Vladimir Mineev; mid-right: source; bottom-left: Yeero; bottom right: Liang Xing.
Tolkien’s inconsistent fear of spiders stretch back to a childhood phobia of them. Nevertheless, he clearly disliked them enough to make two of the series only notable female antagonists [with any active presence in the narrative] female spiders: Ungolliant and Shelob. Both are abject examples of the Archaic Mother as a non-human, bug-like site of grotesque reproduction and Original Sin: the insect or spider broodmother. Yet, this ancient evil force is often personified in ways that has racialized flavors—e.g., the Drow as “evil, dark-skinned spider people” who stab you in the back, live in caves and practice ancient black magic.
Yet, the spider as a stigma animal is often tied to specific kinds of monsters inspired by the natural world. To that, it also could be argued that the concept of the vampire draws inspiration from the spider, which paralyzes its victims with venom before then drinking their life force while they are still alive [unlike many wasps, though, spiders are primarily hunters, not parasitoids; but the archetype is that of a “phallic woman” who tortures her male victims by eating them]. Nevertheless, the canonical idea of “dark skin equals evil” is often subverted in overtly sexual ways—or can be. Often, the granting of European-looking women dark skin, white hair [and fat asses; literally a PAWG—”phat ass white girl”] evokes a kind of “spectral blackface,” but also Fanon’s assimilation fantasy of “black skin, white masks” [e.g., the dark skin and pale hair of characters like Storm from X-Men or Elena from Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike, 1999]. There’s also an Amazonian “death mask” to the aesthetic in terms of a literal “war mask” being worn. Widowmaker’s spider visor helps her locate future victims: “Under the spider woman’s lurid gaze, there is literally nowhere for her prey to hide. She’s a widow-maker, a man-eater and a poisonous temptress dreamed up by horny, frightened men.”
[artist: Luis Salas]
Regardless of how you slice it, whenever dealing with personified stigma animals as weak or strong [the fascist framework], there’s a human connection that needs to be considered. In other words, you’ll need to rescue the animal from its abject bias of a current, ongoing struggle in order to humanize the person being assigned its canonically demonizing qualities. This goes for spiders, wolves, wasps, bats, leeches, snakes, etc; but also rabbits [exhibit 100a5] and prey animals as anglicized/demonized in always useful to the state. Under Gothic Communism, these animals are not sources of profit within a compelled centrist/good-vs-evil order of things; they symbolize a larger struggle against Capitalism’s mass exploitation of the entire living world. Sexual and gender-non-conforming anthropomorphism can recode how animals and humans are viewed in relation to each other—often through complicated satire, but also raw humor and pure, unadulterated cuteness. This ontological irony constitutes a parody of thought leaders, politicians and content creators who, in hindsight, look rather silly [and vindictive] trying to demonize animals simply existing as they normally do. Like queer people portraying themselves as demons that don’t actually harm anyone, the effect is functionally the same with the stigma animals they’re associated with.)
[17] Seldomusings’ “The Possible Disturbing Dissonance Between Hajime Isayama’s Beliefs and Attack on Titan‘s Themes” (2013). Certainly, anyone can point at the death and destruction Isayama depicts and say, “carnage is carnage.” The show still makes an appeal to fascism through carnage; e.g., the forlorn hope, charging stupidly and sadly into death; i.e., a heroic death cult made unironic through engagement with itself on different registers, but especially as a matter of interpretation between the audience and the show. There are characters in AoT who think that the hero, Eren Yeager, is correct, just as people outside the show think he is correct (or don’t care). In the end, Yeager conducts genocide, everything becoming a blood-soaked, thoroughly abject military campaign “debating with Nazis” sans camp. Sound familiar? Myth uses the same tragic sacrifices, siege mentality and kamikaze tactics to push towards a final solution that perpetuates itself. That’s not camp!
[17a] It’s DARVO obscuring things through an “oppression Olympics” that centers all the adversity around the usual side completing for the glory of self-sacrifice: weird canonical nerds. You see it in chess, the actual Olympics/competitive sports, e-sports, and any other field. Like a vampire, banks and other institutions/owners control such lifeblood as a matter of dogma, superstition and knowledge, but also material wealth and resources/employment positions and opportunities; i.e., as something to abject, medicalize and attack based on binarized, heteronormative (settler-colonial, Cartesian) profiles; e.g., intersex athletes (often of color) in the Olympics—with the actual ritual having eugenistic Nazi ties (Some More News’ “The Olympics Are Kinda Bad, Actually,” 2024) that lead to Red Scare and transphobia (Essence of Thought’s “Olympic Transphobia & The Red Scare,” 2024).