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“Hell Hath No Fury”; or, Soulblighter’s Token Gay Nazi Revenge (and Giants/Female Characters) in Myth II: Soulblighter

“I’ll get you, and your little dog, too!”

—The Wicked Witch of the West, The Wizard of Oz (1939)

(source)

Picking up from where “Myth: the Fallen the Lords (opening and part one: Balor)” left off…

Whereas “Hail, Caesar!” focused on Balor as Gay Caesar come home to roost, “Hell Hath No Fury” shall now explore the unshackled antics of his most fearsome and loyal servant, Soulblighter. We’ll do so per the Cycle of Kings’ circular approach to time (and fascism/genocide feeding on nature, workers and—to some degree—the state). Rather than simply detail Soulblighter’s abject, Melmoth-style, Wandering-Jew behaviors, though, my queer close-read aims to humanize our story’s Grim Reaper through medieval camp (while recognizing his role as a token zombie cop); then, we’ll wrap things up, concluding with some larger points about the Cycle of Kings and giants before surveying the female monstrous-feminine (which is largely absent in the franchise, but not entirely).

Before we start, I want to clarify (for about three pages) what I mean by Melmoth/the Wandering Jew per my usage of it: Our reading of Soulblighter is—like Maturin’s novel—a significant deviation from the original medieval trope of the Wandering Jew, the former device having mocked Christ en route to his Passion, and Maturin’s 1820 retelling presenting the character as vaguely cursed in a Faustian sense. His Melmoth the Wanderer returns to seek out those who are not cursed, but who through positions of disadvantage may bear witness to his reprobate state: a sign of the truth and of Christian hegemony where the sign of the cross (often in code) is borne witness towards.

To that, our treatment of “Melmoth/the Wandering Jew” will also deviate from Maturin when attached to Soulblighter’s vengeful ghost (and the other Fallen, who embody fascist stereotypes and stigmas), but this process of deviation didn’t start with us. Let’s outline that, then articulate our specific usage a bit more.

As Lisa Lampert-Weissig writes in “Sarah Perry’s Melmoth and the Implications of Gothic Form (2022): “The Wandering Jew’s actions at the Passion were traditionally regarded as another example of alleged Jewish cruelty toward Christ and Christians. The Wandering Jew’s legendary affront resonated with the charge that Jews are ‘Christ-killers,’ a calumny that informs anti-Semitic myths such as ritual murder accusation and the blood libel” (source). She adds,

The Wandering Jew tradition has been from its origins shaped by Christian supersessionism, the idea that Christianity is the true and rightful fulfillment of Jewish prophecy. As they adapt the Wandering Jew legend, Maturin and Perry both depart significantly from its original details (and from each other). In both novels, however, the dominant function of the Wandering Jew – to serve as sign of a Christian truth – still shapes the narratives (ibid.).

In other words, an overbearing and die-hard Christian bias haunts a partially imaginary presence that is, for lack of a better term, “blasted.”

Except, Gothic media doesn’t clearly define this characteristic or its terminology—save for how it varies in different usage over time. For example,

Maturin’s Melmoth has been cursed through some vaguely intimated Faustian bargain. In contrast, [Perry’s] Melmoth the Witness is cursed for refusing to affirm her eyewitness of Christ’s resurrection. As punishment for her cowardly failure, she is doomed to seek out “everything that’s most distressing and most wicked, in a world which is surpassingly wicked, and full of distress. In doing so she bears witness, where there is no witness, and hopes to achieve her salvation” (37). Because she denied her witness of Christ’s resurrection, Melmoth must bear eternal witness to the endless misery and suffering which human beings bring upon themselves and one another. As did her [wandering] counterpart in Maturin’s work, Melmoth the Witness seeks out those in despair, imploring them to join her in order to ease her endless loneliness (ibid.).

So while the Gothic first established Melmoth through Lewis’ The Monk—the character having a mark of Cain burned into his forehead (the sign of a vampire, though that mythology had yet to fully develop)—the witness of a curse through a ghost story is one of wrongfulness that speaks to the status quo it stands adjacent to: an outsider that personifies a predator/prey relationship to the thing punishing it, expressed in the usual Gothic ways; i.e., reversal and hyphenation; e.g., per the tale and found document of Gothic conventions, but also “the matryoshka-like structure of tales, which Perry connects using epistolary form, rhetorical address and shifting narrative point of view […] as well [the ways in which] ‘gothic conventions’ can be used to ‘exercise’ readers’ imaginations and emotions” (ibid.).

Indeed, we’ve looked at such things ourselves regarding the Metroidvania; i.e., as a ghost story told through the space itself as something to explore, tracking down Numinous signatures and triggering vital rememories during the Promethean Quest as a wandering castle. The same goes for personifications and our relations to them (again, often through Gothic chronotopes).

To summarize, Weissig describes Perry’s exercise of emotions as a study of the Gothic tradition that leads to what Perry calls a more “self-conscious” understanding of one’s creative process as a writer and of the “shared experience of the novel.” I call the same process/outcome “Gothic maturity.” Whatever the label, the idea is one of intimacy with a cursed being that links to a larger system of thought and unequal power exchange—one we (workers) can develop and utilize class-culture consciousness and emotional/Gothic intelligence though a closeness to an alien device that normally plays out through intense emotions and, just as often in videogames, systemic violence linked to Capitalism; i.e., the monomyth and Promethean Quest manifesting through very different forms of the same basic concept (the ghost of the counterfeit).

These, in turn, might seem far-removed from Maturin. Under Capitalism, though, the Christian tale of resurrection appears in Gothic stories, themselves occupied by an increasingly militarized and capitalistic presence of revenge haunted by echoes of Caesar and Marx; i.e., spectres of fascism and Communism through dark conqueror-ghost symbols, all whose ghastly alien reputations proceed them in older forms updated through present circumstances the middle class plays with; e.g., Street Fighter‘s M. Bison, forever cursed to wander the Earth and seek revenge; re: that character inspired by a neoliberal conversation that combines Maturin’s Melmoth with wrestler kayfabe theatre expressed through different worlds and cultures colliding under global Capitalism: Hiroshi Aramata’s Yasunori Kato.

(artist: Hiroshi Aramata)

As Timothy Blake Donohoo writes,

Bison was one of many villains inspired by Yasunori Kato, the main character from the Japanese novel, Teito Monogatari. […] A sort of take on Melmoth the Wanderer or the Wandering Jew, Kato is seemingly a former general in the Japanese army. In reality, he embodies centuries of lost Japanese history, with his malevolence representing the rage of those who had once stood against the Japanese.

A powerful onmyoji, he can summon and control demons to do his will, as well as use his powers to prolong his life. His ultimate goal is to utterly crush the Japanese Empire, beginning with Tokyo’s destruction. He conspires with rival countries in order to do so. His enemies include Yasumasa Hirai as well as several authors and even a physicist, intermingling ancient magic with advanced science and sociopolitical conflicts (source: “Street Fighter’s Greatest Villain Was Inspired by a Spooky Japanese Horror Novel,” 2022).

Where wandering ghosts like Melmoth are near, so is trouble as something to bear witness (and rock hauntologically out[1]) to; i.e., regarding buried truths about Capitalism and its own predatory relationship to Christianity and other religions (re: Weber) comported onto spectral medieval elements of war and the human power structures that “raise Cain.”

In the Radcliffean tradition, the summoning is done to dismiss them in terrifying “geometries” (re: Aguirre) that can’t harm you. More to the point, these recent, “safe space” hauntologies are more or less how we shall approach the character Soulblighter—hence don’t concern the Passion or Resurrection of Christ as something to witness through its Gothic embodiment.

Instead, my mention of “Melmoth” concerns the Christ-like resurrection of Caesar’s ghost, one told through positions of revenge that are overtly anti-Semitic (and Orientalist) vis-à-vis Capitalist Realism; i.e., as linked to Bungie’s Cycle of Kings, itself expressing through the neoliberal monomyth’s (videogame) tyrant as undead: a relationship towards power abjected onto alien expressions of itself coming home and viewed like Melmoth always is—as a painful symbol of truth built upon Christian dogma, which extends to wartime American xenophobia unto Capitalism as it presently exists (and those symbols inside of it).

No one ever said that truth (about Capitalism and the Protestant ethic) was good or easy to bear! For us, that’s Soulblighter—not just a lonesome spirit, but one deprived of a former friend that drives him, a token gay Nazi cop, to hideously self-destruct and, as a consequence of playing the game, be witnessed for it by the player. In seeing it, the system of empire that Soulblighter’s WW2 stereotypes ultimately represent expresses to a Promethean degree of resistance—one felt through a matrix of interwoven space-time across cultures that we often take for granted while their combined freight haunts and inspires us.

As we continue, then, remember that Soulblighter is, like all ghosts, a confirmation-bias caricature of stereotype and superstition, but also a repressed (cryptonymic) testimony to an imperfect survivor’s revenge by those who refuse to completely die; i.e., victims of genocide haunting the ruins of empire, outlasting their conquerors while embodying said conquerors’ worst fears, uniforms and tendencies (to “better the instruction,” as Shylock puts it). —Perse

First, while there are differences between the conquerors in Myth, it’s worth noting Balor and Soulblighter share obvious similarities, too. They were friends in life; in death, they return to plague the West, its defense staving off the barbarian unknown as ultimately the West’s own conquerors come home to roost: as fallen, “death knight” heroes; i.e., Caesar or Melmoth-style wraiths claiming Divine Right in the absence of a Christian dogma. It’s a return of the living dead, but also the return of the king and king’s men (a Second Coming in militarized feudal language) as undead, united tyrannically against the West as it presently stands.

From there, though, things only begin to change. In Myth II, the servant trope inverts, the Cycle of Kings swept up in Brutus’ guilt for killing Caesar by proxy of Caesar’s loyal right hand: “his closest friend,” one who spent a lot more time with Balor than Shiver (wink-wink). Normally, the pattern brings about/restores the return of an undead hungry “Rome” that supplants a Christian Capitalism for a Pagan, non-Western decay into feudalism[2] from Capitalism. Yet Soulblighter is more apocalyptic. Whereas Balor wanted to rule the world as undead, Soulblighter—his token sidekick/queer-coded[3] general and best friend—pushes it to the brink of total Promethean annihilation (the game, especially its cutscenes, are notably less funny than the original’s).

To it, if the Western hero is central to the monomyth, going into and coming back from Hell, then so is the monstrous-feminine slave/war criminal through the generals that codify service to Caesar as a matter of capital. Except the servant is always an outside “terrorist” threat to expose, a menace to police, a mystical occult ploy meant to hide the inherently violent, cannibalistic and coercive nature of the state functioning as normal. As a matter of double revenge (Connacht’s dream and death), Soulblighter aims to reverse the monomyth/Cycle of Kings, bringing about the end of the world through dark Jewish revenge bearing queer overtones (and counterterrorist energies)!

(source: Mythipedia)

As we’ll see, Soulblighter is inherently foreign (note the jinn pants)—Balor’s token friend who feels even more alien because of that; i.e., from a canonical perspective, Balor is still Caesar, thus has ancestral ties to the West per the settler argument, whereas Soulblighter is the tokenized outsider/monstrous-feminine race traitor (re: Melmoth, the Wandering Jew) first working for a fascist ruler to bring about dominion, followed by cataclysm after said ruler’s death. To it, Soulblighter’s not just a token Nazi, but a token gay Nazi warlord.

This might sound odd. However, canon treats such divide-and-conquer contradictions as completely fine provided they serve capital, and nothing is more useful to the elite than a token, Orientalist cop chasing “final victory” after Hitler is dead; few things are fiercer or better at policing a marginalized population, the cop-in-question compelled to love its conquerors and police its own kind: by playing hangman for the elite. To quote Daffy Duck, “he’s despicable!”

We’ll get to Soulblighter in a second. Given his monstrous-feminine elements, though, I’d like to stress some various, sympathy-for-the-devil points about the monstrous-feminine as we proceed—namely their intrinsic value in camping the sorts of things that Soulblighter crystalizes (something we haven’t talked about too much in this section, thus far, but will continue to going forwards). To it, if we want to overcome hatred as a canonical device tied to capital, we must understand how it works; simply abjecting such things (as Bungie does) will not do.

In short, we must empathize with the wretched, asking how someone like Soulblighter can become tokenized to such a profound, point-of-no-return degree that their subsequent alienation could arguably motivate them to commit police violence/genocide against other equally marginalized peoples, or conversely might seek revenge against empire to a suicidal degree that takes everyone down with the ship (“crossing the Rubicon,” to borrow from Caesar’s campaigns); i.e., while camping is not endorsement of reactionary violence, it does require a kind of intimacy that “pure evil” treatments discourage. Pure evil is pure alien, which characters like Soulblighter are depicted as; if we can imagine, thus understand what causes that alienation, we can start to reverse it, hence counteract the forces that turn people like Soulblighter (their real-world equivalents) into spiteful cops.

To this, I’d like to unpack/reiterate a few relevant ideas (about two pages), then give Soulblighter a closer look…

First, regarding heroes or harpies, “corruption” and decay are endemic/comorbid to the same monomyth’s royal cycle: the return of the skeleton king followed by the return of the noble king (and their servants) in a historical-material loop that universally treats Communism as zombie-like (doomed to death), but also conflates it with the ravenous death knights of fascism culling the Amazons, beheading Medusa (or anything else queer) and turning Melmoth into a wandering vampire, etc. White knight vs black knight—good cop, bad cop—both colonize workers as something to internalize; i.e., wrestling for control over the same territory in centrist, good-vs-evil language. The same goes for servants turned into cops, thus cannibals.

In this sense, Balor and Soulblighter make up two sides of the same infernal coin—one that is no different than Athena versus Medusa, or subjugated Hippolyta versus her evil twin; i.e., insofar as power aggregates against Communism written as capital’s bête noire that, in truth, has only manifested fairly recently (over the past several centuries) in response to Capitalism rising out of feudalism’s own mistreatment of serfs and the master/slave dynamic of Rome and other ancient empires. To escape the same “as good as it gets” trap Bungie entertains, workers must critique the value of war as a “great zombie” that cannot hide its own rot—of Capitalism and the nation-state as fundamentally spoiled, but ubiquitous and pervasive through the monomyth and nuclear family unit as fundamentally doomed by design.

Granted, we’ve previously discussed “Rome” as a hauntological façade that valorizes Capitalism’s rot; i.e., while nakedly consuming its own workers at differing speeds (said speeds often determined by racist variables) depending on the Imperial Boomerang’s current location—at home, or fixated on faraway lands like Cambodia, Africa, Gaza, and other such frontiers. Except, life can obviously exist without great manly heroes and kings in the canonical, monomythic sense. In short, it can exist without Capitalism and its military apocalypses, but workers must bravely reinvent what it means to be a hero and a villain (a tragic hero); i.e., by critiquing centrist heroics through camp as a matter of cultivating Gothic maturity per a proletarian Song of Infinity (versus Bungie’s immature, endless, blind parodies and pastiche standing by capital and profit). In broader terms, this means humanizing Medusa—and all sassy fat-bottomed girls (gays and people of color, etc, as colonized bodies)—for their hill-sized fannies’ cracks of doom harvested by capital and Cartesian forces “to the last syllable of recorded time”: an artificial wilderness unable to feed workers or animals because it has become of a means of siphoning everything out of the land and labor into the bourgeoisie’s greedy coffers.

(artist: VG Yum)

However, it also applies to characters like Soulblighter being monstrous-feminine, too; i.e., servants and slaves (which Jews historically are) that “go feral” and traitor in their own ways. To liberate ourselves, then, is to reverse the monomyth’s process of abjection (which normally serves state interests by raping Medusa as a terrorist); i.e., as it pertains to servants like Soulblighter likewise being bred for police violence. You must humanize the harvest Soulblighter belongs to, reuniting alien things to see your fellow tokenized workers as human—all while critiquing the structures that dehumanize victims and victimizers alike. As an instrument of mass torture and exploitation, the state is fallible but effective, purposely devised to exploit labor then lie about it in heroic stories featuring Melmoth as—like a wild animal without a master—trying to destroy Rome to avenge Caesar’s death. This starts by itself, then resurrects two of the other Fallen, the Deceiver and Shiver, to play into/out the same “degenerate” equation.

More than the first, Myth II is about chaos, insofar as Satan is dead and “order” threatened by these jackals unchained. Except, while Soulblighter remains a kind of Jewish gargoyle to scare workers stiff (the Watcher from the original Myth a BDSM cliché, Shiver a witch and the Deceiver a silver-tongued gay man inside the second game’s shared neoliberal gimmick), he’s still a byproduct of the environment that made him—of pain and conditioning shucked off onto a walking fetish. He’s the game’s central antagonist; i.e., literally the name of the game and discussed nonstop inside it—a shell of a man crippled with fear and rage that collectively reflect actual labor’s complicated, dogmatic regressions/repressions under the capitalist hegemon. For the good of ourselves, let’s dissect that.

The paradox of nuance is it can feel alienating unto itself, confusing. Doubles speak to that, invoking the need for both hard stances (e.g., postcolonialism and basic human rights) and flexibility (e.g., searching for allies among the colonizer group) at the same time; i.e., conventions to bend or break regarding different praxial objectives required, mid-opposition, under dialectical-material context. Characters like Damas and Soulblighter account for the usual abject divisions that occur, while forcing fascist and Communist aspects onto the same shadowy body.

The same nuance is an attempt to extricate what is thoroughly entangled to a, some degree, inextricable level, while acknowledging that both sides are, themselves, different warring ideologies. It’s not simple, nor are the feelings associated with it. What we want to avoid is conflation, while simultaneously humanizing what must be humanized to prevent further police violence in the future; I am acknowledging and disarming token stereotypes while occupying and interrogating them (and their power and trauma) through performance and play. That’s what subversion and ludo-Gothic BDSM are ultimately about, as viewpoints regarding a performance we’re both inhabiting and looking into; i.e., punching Nazis by camping them, which is to say, restoring their humanity by removing a capacity for police violence, wherever it is found and however it manifests during the rememory process as half-real, imaginary and historical.

I won’t lie: there will be pain, and facing Melmoth will haunt you. However, it won’t kill you (or I would have died long ago). But heroic transformation (systemic catharsis) only happens when the mirror is repeatedly re-examined and redesigned for workers’ collective benefit, mid-camp and ludo-Gothic BDSM. Channeling a new imaginary past, its social effects on the material world must transmit across space and time by us; re: using the Promethean Quest to camp, thus subvert the monomyth, as—like the black castle that houses the brutal, rapacious tyrant—something that passes to the servant as avenging such mastery to keep capital in line.

This is what Soulblighter embodies in Myth II, the game being his story after Caesar is dead; i.e., the tortured, queer-coded Asiatic Jew driven mad with revenge tied to different terrible things; e.g., black magic and torture, but also animals. To it, Marlowe’s “raven soliloquy” from The Jew of Malta (1590) leaps to mind:

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

Barbara’s monologue/parade of vengeful, cruel, and thoroughly anti-Semitic stigmas curiously mirrors Soulblighter’s abjection; i.e., as penned by Western Christian men, then and now (including gay ones like Shakespeare; re: Shylock). Soulblighter’s their DARVO punching bag just as Barbaras was, but wedded to “Caesar” and the Cycle of King’s Capitalist Realism. Keeping with the grim reaper shtick, Soulblighter’s bloodthirsty glaive (the knife dick, its fang thirsty for good men’s blood, fueling the owner’s wicked revenge) also bears an anti-Semitic, “backstabbing Jew” flavor (we’ll look at the Orientalist side of Soulblighter in a moment; e.g., his links to the Japanese side of the Axis Powers, exhibit 41c1).

Starting with Barbaras’ greed parable, the “evil Jew” trope comes out of the actual medieval period into future echoes felt inside capital; i.e., oscillating towards and away from itself vis-à-vis its muscled Orientalist harbingers (and other monstrous-feminine scapegoats): those standing in (under duress) as Bungie’s vaudeville, their Lord-Humongous-style Four Horsemen aping the same contagious virus borrowed less from the likes of Maturin and more from Hiroshi Aramata and a post-WW2 world. Soulblighter is the strawman Jew/stereotypical Asian made to count himself among Caesar’s four Fallen Lords; i.e., the token symbol for greed abjected onto an alien, easterly Semite that serves capital by emerging to scare the middle class into fighting him, thus preserve capital by eating themselves (a fiendishly clever reversal of the zombie—normally eating the middle class—suffering to be eaten by them, instead).

In reality, it’s all capital’s doing what capital always does: “rape workers and blame it on them to divide and conquer when capital decays and seeks revenge (revealing its own rapacious function as having existed before said decay sets in); put said zombies down and hand the keys of empire back to the usual white knights (cops) and lords (owners).” Dogwhistle, repeat. Clearly Myth II is aware of the cycle it illustrates, but it uses the expendability of its soldiers (and sprawling dogma of its built worlds) to crystalize the loop, hence the status quo as something Soulblighter the terrorist is ultimately against. He’s Shylock: “If you prick us, do we not bleed? […] If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”

Again, the monomyth is baked into capital, commonly inverting as a Promethean, undead cycle of rape, revenge and restoration serving profit; i.e., a zombie tyrant (often a vampire Nazi or Jew) to raise and blame when it feeds, not the system already in place exploiting and antagonizing nature before putting it cheaply to work: raising ethnostates and terrorist organizations (e.g., Israel and Hamas) stuck in the same abject torture loop moving power towards the state exploiting all parties involved. Whatever the destroyer’s form (not just the Metroidvania castle, vengeful husband or mad scientist), our speculative, subversive aim is regicidal and postcolonial; i.e., presenting the zombie as something to critique if it defends the state at workers’ expense: a fearful, muscular and undead golem, vampire, what-have-you, with motives that resist discovery upon examination.

However, if we remain persistent and creative, we can resist the typical fear mechanism or fascinated glory-seeker’s rebuild-the-kingdom antics (e.g., Metallica’s “Four Horsemen” [1983]: “Choose your fate and die!”) normally turning capital’s gears; i.e., choosing instead to inspect, understand and ultimately subvert Soulblighter’s trauma and undead feeding habits, working out what makes him tick, thus lay bare capital’s usual operations through such tokenized vaudeville: the evil child, the Pinocchio from Hell, the Golem of Prague that is both the Übermensch and the Untermensch, the harbinger and the testament to secret sin, open discord and selective memory fueling present struggles fascinated with Old-Testament violence, black magic, and rituals of blood sacrifice (re: Abraham).

(source: Mythipedia)

As Myth‘s Melmoth, Soulblighter looks scary enough—is literally the thing that haunts the bourgeoisie’ dreams, keeping Alric up at night as his extratextual parallels try and scare us with these same things (they fear worker revenge, so they transmute it into dogma). In technophobic terms, Soulblighter is a canonical goblin; i.e., a false mirror/double of reality projecting imaginary bourgeois fears onto his viewers, planted in the Earth and springing up from the clay while composed of it like Nappa’s cybermen. Keeping with Victor’s doomsday scenario, Soulblighter was birthed by the mad minds of those in power alongside his fellow creations—a crass, abject rainbow of disparate monstrous-feminine clichés that fearful middle-class men can LARP against in a fantasy world made, as the monomyth always is, just for them: WW2 in small. Such lies are planted and sown, then take root through assimilation and play.

As widespread and fearsome as Soulblighter sounds, he ultimately remains against empire for reasons that aren’t completely alien to our own counterterrorist cause, provided we camp it a little; i.e., “make it gay” in ways that speak to queer alienation as something that intersects with other forms; e.g., Orientalism and anti-Semitism becoming “Holocaust” in quotes—something that never quite existed, thus permits us speaking to our own survival through its fantasy battles and slaughters. This “rape play” isn’t something the elite can monopolize, meaning we can camp it, too; i.e., just enough to make Soulblighter feel pain, to humanize him (as a stereotypical tortured fag will do) to account for similarity amid difference, hence a pedagogy of the oppressed and its anisotropic qualities reversing abjection by flowing power towards workers through terrorist/counterterrorist binaries we can subvert, synthesize and reverse in defense of those normally policed and tokenized to police labor by state forces feeding through such violence.

For one, it’s a lot easier to understand Soulblighter’s potential love for Balor as a fellow gay man in a fascist regime than it is for him to simply be “pure evil.” People don’t do things simply to be evil unless it’s for propaganda purposes; e.g., the barbaric Jew (re: Barbaras) being evil to make the Christians look good—with Soulblighter being so cartoonishly evil, it defies reason:

If the dam were destroyed, the resulting deluge would kill everything in its path for miles. […] Still Shiver stands between us and Soulblighter, just as she did two days ago on the Ire River. The men who fought there faced an army of thrall meant more as an impediment than anything else. Did Soulblighter plan to wash both the Legion and Shiver out to sea? Truly there is no end to the fiend’s malfeasance” (source).

(source: Mythipedia)

While all’s fair in love and war, the game depicts Soulblighter as a terrorist. Basically he summons Shiver—a literal hellcat—and uses her as bait (all that the game allows her to be); in turn, the Deceiver—wielding a vain, silver-tongued worminess (all queer stereotypes) married to a Grinch-like smile and large nose (anti-Semitic tropes, himself a backstabbing Jew “in the flesh,” above)—is brought back to save the Legion from the battle at the dam; i.e., the good queer servant/dutiful Jew who used to be bad: “He goes to warn the Emperor—moving through odd angles; faster than any man, and if unobserved, much faster than that” (source).

To it, Soulblighter’s acts of terrorism always classify as tokenized Jewish/Oriental revenge, thus are depicted as extraordinary cruel (more cruel than Alric). When these routinely fail against all odds, Soulblighter spirals, picking a fight he cannot win so that he can lure his ancient enemies—literally empire, itself—to a desperate last battle. Soulblighter wants to die and has from the start, but he’s choosing to die by taking the Cycle of Kings with him (the volcano literally being a suicide bomb)! Apart from Shiver (who’s bait), Soulblighter largely does this alone; i.e., as the mastermind with an army of queer-coded Nazi slaves (again, the contradictions are fine provided they serve profit; and liberation and enslavement occupy the same shadow zone, as do Nazis and Communists).

(source: Mythipedia)

Except, Soulblighter can’t resurrect Balor to help out, so he chooses to bring back the Myrkridia—again, more golems, and queer-coded ones linked to sodomy and bad resurrection: a race of inferior-yet-superior (re: “the enemy is weak and strong”) creatures of so-called “Jewish magic” (mad science) and revenge:

The Tain was supposed to be the final resting place of the Myrkridia, but The Summoner has been inside the shattered artifact for five months now, slowly resurrecting their entire race [sort of an evil Genie’s bottle]. To think of it makes me shudder, and even now the Myrkridia spread across the Province like fire across a dry field, leaving death and blackened ruins in their wake. We must stop him now. […] The Deceiver has brought us here to kill The Summoner. The ruin he will bring about if allowed to remain alive is unconscionable. This alone dictates that he must die (source: Mythipedia).

In short, Soulblighter—the avenging Jew that raises the Nazis—finds an evil wizard, cutting ahead through the slower imperial mechanisms’ usual cycle to generate a race of werewolf supermen (a Nazi call to violence, towards the end of WW2, below) that, all the same, bears the tell-tale likeness of dwarvish mechanisms (re: the Tain), goblin phenotypes (an anti-Semitic symbol, above), Japanese Imperialism exhibit 41c1, and “sodomy” (unnatural, queer-coded reproduction). Thus, Bungie blames a Jew for the Nazis in Orientalist language, cramming everything messily into the same evil ghost that wanders the war-torn land; i.e., when the chickens come back sooner than expected (aftershocks).

Cliché though it is (verging on “true camp” in that Bungie have no irony to speak of, delivering the menace with a straight face), Myth II yields a much more involved and fleshed-out plot than Myth I does; i.e., the Summoner turning the bodies of Soulblighter’s myriad victims into what can only be described as “Nazi-Communist effigies”: a DARVO argument by Bungie, treating Soulblighter as Melmoth, and the Summoner as his vague, evil-wizard (director) Goebbels (the order of their deaths being different—the original minister of propaganda committing suicide outside the Führerbunker after Hitler shot himself—but I digress).

Furthermore, the obscurantist mixing of monster myths to conceal the fact that Alric and empire are actually the bourgeois forces, here (with Soulblighter nothing but a fascist mirage with Communist bastardizations), is simply fascism defending capital through the middle class. The Summoner might be the Nazi scientist, in-game, but the story remains a queer-tinged framed narrative comparable to Tolkien’s LotR (re: Ostertag) for which everything is contained in the Narrator’s journal, the latter written by Bungie serving the profit motive similar to Tolkien or Lovecraft (re: Imperialism with more steps). It’s an abject, adult-oriented playground for endless battle against gay Nazi, “degenerate” (foreign, poor and non-Christian, etc) forces, informed by history as half-real and cartoonish, strangely devoid of camp in its medieval, token, He-Man-grade revivals.

For example, after Soulblighter’s blitzkrieg fails, the werewolf legend he invokes unfolds in ways that pertain—ironically enough—to a creatively imaginary homeland aimed at frightened children borrowed from the actual Nazis:

It is said that “desperate times call for desperate measures,” and no one was more desperate than the members of the Third Reich in 1945 during the final months of World War II. Even Adolf Hitler knew the Allies were advancing on Berlin. The thought both terrified and enraged him. Hitler had always been a big believer in the occult, numerology, the zodiac, and more. But by the final months of the war, his belief morphed into a kind of obsession. His preoccupation with these matters was well known to his men. They catered to it by delving into subjects like the existence of the Holy Grail, witchcraft, and werewolves.

Hitler was fascinated by werewolves, but he believed in them the same way Germanic folklorists did, namely that werewolves were merely “flawed, but well-meaning characters who may be bestial, but are tied to the woods, the blood, the soil,” says Eric Kurlander, author of Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich. According to Kurland, Hitler used werewolves and wolves[4] as symbols of German strength and purity against those seeking to destroy them. Hitler co-opted the image of the creatures often. In one instance, he named a plan to destroy his enemy’s supply chain “Operation Werewolf.” He also created a group of paramilitary soldiers – werewolves – to confuse and frighten the advancing Allies and the Soviets, against whom he was losing badly on the Eastern Front.

[from source: “9 March 1945: Goebbels awards a 16-year-old Hitler Youth, Willi Hübner, the Iron Cross for the defense of Lauban. Photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-J31305 / CC-BY-SA 3.0”]

By late 1944, even Hitler and his top men, including Joseph Goebbels, knew the war would soon be over. They realized that they couldn’t pull victory from the jaws of defeat. Instead, they chose to delay the inevitable in the hope that they could devise a more favorable scenario for Germany. Historian Perry Biddiscombe explains in his book, Werewolf! The History of the National Socialist Guerrilla Movement, 1944-1946 that Goebbels came up with the idea to exploit the werewolf legend. In early 1945, Biddiscombe notes, broadcasts began nationwide urging citizens to join the “werewolf movement.” He describes one broadcast in which a woman, posing as a werewolf, says, “Lily the werewolf is my name. I bite, I eat, I am not tame. My werewolf teeth bite the enemy” (source: Ian Harvey’s “Nazi Werewolves? The Secret Nazi Guerrilla Organization,” 2018).

Such a dishonest, uneven, canonical weaponizing of myth—of treating specific, heteronormative/queernormative elements as transcendental signifieds—is not a new trick, and not one exclusive to the Axis Powers abusing child soldiers to refill their depleted slave ranks with fresh Hitler Youth; all empires do this, including America and its allies, but also British, American, and yes, German authors under their umbrellas (re: men like Marlowe, Tolkien and Lovecraft, but also Hitler inspiring companies like Bungie).

Why? Because it’s easy to manipulate, hence profitable! War—specifically war against a monstrous invented enemy (of nature)—historically sells through the abjection process touting the lie of Western supremacy (the ghost of the counterfeit): posture “strength” in opposition to the foe “of nature,” then siphon it out of state workers playing at Ragnarok (the state always takes, but lies to make you feel strong as it drains you). Keeping with the Nazi trick of DARVO and obscurantism, a given warmonger (not just the Nazis) frame themselves as the guerrillas, fighting on the backfoot while trying to convince people of their righteous cause through more and more false flags.

Hitler borrowed such things from America to radicalize American-style settler colonialism abroad (re: cowboys and Indians, with the frontiersmen playing as white Indians to serve the state, but also token Indians selling out their own peoples), as much as Bungie borrowed from the Nazis to enact Pax Americana, in-text; i.e., a Jewish-Nazi revival, whose medieval fantasy world looks suspiciously similar to Western Europe sold back to fearful Americans unused to war on the home front. Propaganda is propaganda, serving profit as usual.

To it, Myth II tells itself through records of old events, lionizing empire Tolkien-style by inventing a Jewish-coded megalomaniac to stereotypically justify its own endless war’s runaway tensions—i.e., occurring on and off the page abandoning workers to such remorseless predation. Keeping this in mind, it might seem easy to write Soulblighter off, treating him as Bungie does: a bad Nazi cartoon with Jewish, Orientalist and queer elements; i.e., “This is what happens when the blindly faithful lose their leader! They need a good parent to keep them in line!” To camp Soulblighter to a proletarian degree, we can’t ascribe the game’s theatrical motivations to him; i.e., the apprentice outperforming the master to be even more evil/unstable than Balor was (the Jewish cop “out-Nazi-ing” the Nazi, itself part of the same bourgeois witch hunt probing the witch’s guilt).

So while “death before dishonor” is entirely possible—with Soulblighter basically being one of “Hitler’s” faux-Caesar generals (ghosts of ghosts) playing out of the Nazi rulebook stolen from American volumes and passed off as “genuine” by Bungie (a canonical variant of Walpole’s Otranto)—the fact remains that it’s far from the only explanation. To it, the speculative variety unto Soulblighter’s internal conflict/old-fashioned moral dilemmas makes for a very different (and more interesting) plight than Balor’s jilted, one-off Caesar schtick; re: “I didn’t man the walls hard enough, thus became the zombie impostor!” By comparison, Soulblighter seems quite aware he’s undead. There’s an outrageous, Melmothian quality to him that demands he be camped (as Nazi ghosts generally do, onstage)!

Expect the usual dualities. On one hand, Damas is a one-note psychopath with zero nuance, which is exactly what pro-capitalist propaganda needs the Wandering Jew to be. On the other, his outsider’s motivations frankly make a lot more sense (removed from capitalist dogma) if there’s a human element. Given the operatic framework already in place, a jilted widower pining for his lost friend feels oddly accurate for Soulblighter (a bit “bros before hos,” but gay in the way that Tolkien is unto Frodo and Sam: Balor is Frodo and Soulblighter his Samwise Gamgee, reversing the monomyth and its ringbearer’s quest). It might not justify Soulblighter’s disastrous actions entirely. But it would explain them in ways that partially humanize him, which we can camp to whatever degree we want (Soulblighter musical, go)!

(source: Myth Journals)

Furthermore, being non-white and queer would automatically marginalize Damas, hounding him witch-hunter-style into a radical direction that normally would lean either to the Left or the Right, but here Bungie conflates “Jew” with “Nazi” to provide the Promethean (self-destructive) element it needs to continue the Cycle of Kings all over again: “Thou called’est me a dog before thou had a cause / But since I am a dog, beware my fangs[5]!” The state routinely hogs and weaponizes paradox through such Orientalist caricature as doubled, cloned, spit out like bullets to coax police-style escalation (reactive abuse) anywhere and everywhere.

Given the West’s complicity with fascism to purge Communism from existence[6], the best Bungie can do, in Myth II, is treat the volcano scene as Red Scare; i.e., through a fascist, ticking-timebomb purge, one speaking to reactive abuse and reactionary sentiment sandwiched together—this time with a real volcano instead of a giant hole in the ground.

Towards the end of the game, Soulblighter invokes the fire of the gods, Bungie meaning to gaslight, gatekeep girl boss Soulblighter until he first tries to take the world with him by summoning the volcano (waking it up); then plunges pathetically through futile, Promethean revenge into the lava like Icarus, but also Gollum (another anti-Semitic character—one whose name sounds like “Golem,” but also who Tolkien has Gandalf accuse of drinking blood and eating babies). Even so, the furious sentiment remains a valid one, insofar as someone queer and damaged might—having been abused enough by a toxic lover or authority figure—simply opt to end the cycle for good; i.e., extinguish the entire bloodline; re: Frankenstein. The villain in that story isn’t the Creature, it’s the man of reason, and the man of reason in Myth is Alric, not Soulblighter.

If you’ll recall, part of the overarching problem isn’t just Nazi pastiche, but the intellectual dominion of old nerdy white men; i.e., contributed to by earlier thinkers like Marx as much as by Bungie and other proponents of capital. Reassembled through our own labor, then, we can reshape the wider Gothic imagination—thus canon and the world—in pointedly sex-positive ways that holistically and inclusively guide future generations out of the Capitalist-Realist nightmare, all while camping Marx’ ghost, too (the original man being anti-Semitic and homophobic, thus exclusionary and prone to scapegoating others to some extent)! Gothic Communism does so by camping stories like Myth II through subversive interpretation, one that builds on imperfect theories while challenging canon at large. In doing so, iconoclasm becomes an intersectional, solidarized mode; i.e., a rebellious act of seeing systemic trauma through counterculture art, including dreamlike implements of ritualized violence that hurt, but do not harm.

That’s what Soulblighter does. He’s literally a wandering ghost, but also a walking wound, and a very angry and outrageous one that lends itself well to camp. This must heal, which requires humanizing the wound through camp. Only then will the true abusers of the world—Capitalism and its inherently unstable, Cartesian-coded Torment Nexus—vanish. Disappearing with it, the giant, Frankensteinian “Caesars” would cease returning from Hell to rape and cannibalize empire, kayfabe-style; i.e., as a matter of “sodomy”—with an unquenchable thirst for human blood and hauntologically big muscles pumped with said blood (whose builds couldn’t have existed “back then,” but did express in statuesque “antiquities” that ballooned under a heteronormative profit motive closer to the present; e.g., Eugene Sandow unto He-Man and Bungie’s good-vs-evil meat wizards and warlocks).

All evoke the same old sagas’ profitable recursions of death; re: their disposable heroes’ Abraham-style altars of sacrifice (“Bred to kill, not to care, the slaughter never ends!”), bearing fearsome tokenized queer elements that challenge Heaven as a matter of ghostly revenge from empire’s past victims married to such stereotypes (a bit like Lucifer in Paradise Lost, but less campy than Milton, or even Tolkien’s Morgoth/Sauron[7]). “Suffering to the conquered” becomes a worst-fear Jewish revenge married to an Asiatic one, each playing the bugbear’s part as a matter of canon-made-chimeric, but also ghostly and impossible: multiple ideas of revenge lurking inside the same spectral cartoon that—like a Radcliffean castle during the liminal hauntology of war—evokes the idea of the grim harvest to scare workers with! Summon ghost of the Axis Powers (and the West’s ideas of their stereotypes and revenge) during Red Scare; witness them; drum up moral panic during Capitalist Realism. Repeat!

(exhibit 41c1: Artist, bottom-left: John Bolton; bottom-right: source. Soulblighter, the chief antagonist to Myth II. Whereas Balor resembles Caesar fallen from grace, Soulblighter more closely embodies Jewish revenge for Hilter [“Caesar”]: “If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”

It’s the usual horseshoe-style Red Scare, conflating Communism with fascism while married to Yellow Peril and Islamophobia; i.e., the Orientalist element of a barbaric non-white savage intent on destroying the West out of revenge for a fellow half-alien, the Nazis [a visual motif echoed during the “Yellow Peril” propaganda in various American wars, but also during the fighting, itself; e.g., on the Pacific islands during WW2’s infamously brutal Pacific Theatre]. So whether it’s the Moors or Arabs, Mongols, Shogunate, Turks, Zulus, or some other barbarian, the same basic process employs DARVO to obscure and hybridize abjection-as-usual, committed by modernity projecting its own barbarism onto other cultures; i.e., Soulblighter renowned for his unusual cruelty among the Fallen, minus the tell-tale, Nazi-grade sadist outfits. Instead, it’s closer to the Rape of Nanking committed by the Japanese side of the Axis powers: 

By all accounts, Soulblighter butchered the entire population of Strand looking for The Summoner. How he knew where to look for him, or even how, is unclear. It is obvious that Soulblighter did not have access to the Total Codex. If he did, it would have led him right to the man. Instead, he tortured and killed nearly every living soul within three weeks travel of that ill-fated city before finding him [source: Mythipedia].

Part Nazi, part Shogunate, part “evil Jew,” Bungie constantly frames Soulblighter as a brute-force, East-meets-West destroyer of the West and more wicked than “builders of empire” like Alric standing in for American forces; e.g., “sixty years is nothing to the likes of a Fallen Lord, and while King Alric was restoring the Province to its former glory, Soulblighter was plotting its infinite ruin” [source: Mythipedia] or “Soulblighter, like Balor before him, seeks not to conquer but to destroy; to be master of the unthinking dead [extended beings] and their blasted lands” [source: Mythipedia]. In other words, Alric tames nature, making it “good”; Soulblighter is a force of nature to put down because it is like a mad dog that cannot be tamed. Corrupted by canonical essentialism to be viewed as “fallen,” Soulblighter is like an orc, witch, zombie, or some other monstrous-feminine; i.e., as inferior nature biding its time against superior Cartesian forces: the horrors of war from a Western perspective, equating their cartoonish enemies/victims’ queer love to “total destruction.”

[source, left: Reddit; right: Mythipedia]

Balor and Soulblighter are both fascists, but they’re not identical in that respect. Combined with a “non-Western,” Yellow-Menace brutality—one that makes a DARVO argument for the West as innocent—Soulblighter’s appearance is conspicuously muscular and Asian, but also skeletal; re: he mutilated his own body in anticipation to his zombie-esque “turning” as part of a larger dogmatic cycle. Forget “total eclipse of the heart,” Soulblighter literally has no heart; he cut it out of himself.

“And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn asks. Seemingly in response, Bungie makes Soulblighter—a resident friend-of-Caesar [similar to “a friend of Dorothy”] who becomes the tinman[8] in the flesh; i.e., achieving eternal life to seek short-sighted revenge while carrying a torch for Connacht.

Solzhenitsyn continues, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being”; i.e., by making someone so unduly heartless as Soulblighter—a being so enraged by the death of Balor that he cuts his own nose off [to spite his face]—Bungie “solves” the problem of appealing to humane peoples by forgetting Solzhenitsyn’s words on purpose. To it, Soulblighter is the tokenized undead witch; i.e., a mad dog seemingly beyond redemption, thus someone for which it is easy to ask others to “mercifully” destroy [and overlook the sins of empire in the process].

Both sadistic and masochistic, Soulblighter’s “zombie Orientalism” and its violence are always illegitimate, but especially when he tries to “end the cycle” by erupting a giant volcano, trying to destroy the world: “We have Soulblighter’s army caught between the Cloudspine, the Ire River, and Tharsis—the legendary forge of the Trow” [source: Myth Journals]. There’s also an element of secret-identity futile revenge to it, Soulblighter actually being Damas, former captain of the game’s “Heron guard” [basically a healer samurai unit]—literally the old guard of a formerly great far-east empire who seek redemption after the fall of their city centuries prior [itself a form of fascist Orientalism: the restoration of the “noble samurai” similar to the noble savage or noble Jew].

Every Fallen Lord has such an identity—generally some kind of nemesis to go with their current evil side out from older times. Apart from such double selves, such zombie warlords are presaged by ill omens in general. One is the comet from Myth announcing Balor’s return. However, there is also the wake of various stigma animals that canon commonly uses to devalue themselves and the non-Western cultures associated with them [re: Shylock being compared to different canine beasts by his Christian overlords].

To that, Soulblighter also has the ability to transform into a so-called “murder” of crows—a magical, shapeshifting act that unfairly associates those animals [exhibit 41c2] with his cartoonishly evil, tokenized crimes [and which anti-Semitism associates with the death of Christians relaid in Jewish vaudeville; re: Marlowe]. Indeed, corvids in general are intensely clever animals, but aren’t anymore cruel than other birds; i.e., certainly not the shrike, which impales its prey[9] on thorn bushes, or the toucan, which is surprisingly brutal despite its colorful, friendly appearance and latter-day transformation into a children’s breakfast cereal mascot: “Always follow your nose!” Like Gandalf to the hobbits, in Moria, I’d say the same regarding Soulblighter’s, but he cut his off already!)

Like Tolkien’s Sauron challenging the West’s sense of divine entitlement, Bungie marries Axis-flavored bugbears like Soulblighter (the game’s Sauron analogue) to a strange, now-alien relationship to nature; i.e., animals and magic that have become forgotten, abject, and cartoonish through the usual canonical arbitrations: Nazgul in small (“death from the skies”)!

To it, Soulblighter is literally composed of crows: “The Deceiver [the game’s gay wildcard; i.e., shaking up the action while shouting “Wildcard, bitches!” and putting on a cowboy hat, like Slim Pickens’ from Doctor Strangelove] boasted of his victory over Soulblighter, clutching a mangled crow and claiming to have captured ‘a part of the murder,’ crippling his former ally” (source). Soulblighter is Big Bird from Hell, a walking “murder” that essentializes nature as evil through medieval superstitions and prejudice (conspiracies) concerning corvids and Jewish people revived in neoliberal fearmongering: the usual cataclysms that Capitalism both threatens/materializes and brings about through its divisions and divided labor force (us-versus-them) forever delaying progress (a lie unto itself, “progress” being a cryptonym for “profit” pushing like Sisyphus towards an unreachable goal; e.g., Mount Olympus denied to normal humans; i.e., the fire of the gods).

(exhibit 41c2: Fable the raven and her pet human. As a stigma animal, ravens and crows are treated as harbingers of death. In part, this probably owes to their trademark black appearance, as magpies—despite being corvids—don’t get the same wholly bad rap; i.e., because their plumage is only partially black [“One for sorrow, Two for joy…” 1780]. However, Christian bigots [and by extension capitalists weaponizing Christian dogma] likewise associate stigma animals such as corvids with manmade sites [and personas] of death and decay.

Furthermore, while decomposers like insect larvae, dung beetles and fungus obviously fall into this group, the tell-tale “murder” of crows and “unkindness” of ravens associate with death through canonical collective nouns; i.e., as something they visibly feed off of as notorious scavenger animals; e.g., cities, but also the battlefield and its endless glut of corpses bringing groups of undesirables to the fore. It’s DARVO blaming animals while conflating Jews [and other out-groups] with their collective punishment in service to profit.

[source: Ben Jonson’s “Tower Ravens[10]“]

By extension, these birds have become canonically associated with tombs and prisons; i.e., as a Neo-Gothic matter of attracting paying customers, generally middle-class foreigners, drunk on the cartoonish idea of a British “medieval” [continuously romanced by writers like Christopher Marlowe and Edgar Allen Poe, but also featured at regal-themed animal rescues; e.g., those pet ravens kept at the fearsome Tower of London, above]. Like the black dog or cat, canon frames the corvid’s presence as an ill omen belonging to a “creature of the night[11]” that emblematizes death through buildings known for heavy atmosphere; i.e., one associated with witches and black magic as something to fear and attack by goodly God-fearing Christians “guarding the church” from barbarians at the gate. Indeed, the idea of corvids serving as dark familiars makes sense, as they are both tremendously misunderstood and extremely intelligent, adorable creatures. The same humane potential goes for their human associates, though the latter can tokenize.

To that, if we can humanize actual corvids and realize their victimization by Western dogma and Christianized persecution through Capitalism unto alien forces, why not Soulblighter?)

The reason for this delay in development is that canon is carceral, its hauntologies deliberately trapping worker minds inside disastrous, illusory and heteronormative lines of thought. Doing so alienates them from themselves and nature-as-monstrous-feminine (with ravens and crows being seen as witches’ familiars heralding dark godly forces[12], similar to black cats); i.e., stereotypical conflations that lead workers (from white cis-het men trickling down a tokenized grapevine) to be violent towards ravens and crows, but also Jews, Communists and queer people, etc. Like an ill omen, we become an Infernal Network to the middle class, a Jewish Conspiracy that—more than Soulblighter and the Summoner ever could—raises pro-state Legions to kill us time and time again (stochastic terrorism).

To it, power is a relationship to consumption through capital. All forms thereof constitute a Great Chain of Being’s nadir being wholly endemic to the same abject, bigoted equation. Whatever abjection’s current form, it’s the routine chase of unequal predatory power amid endless conflict under Capitalism; i.e., with older, mightier forms of the same undead belonging to the same rotting power structures the middle class gladly leverage against state victims during police violence. All constitute a bourgeois matter of calculated risk, one where zombie generals and sacrificial soldiers compete with present-day doubles, themselves budding debutantes directing power anisotropically towards the state and its rulers: Capitalism is the zombie, and a giant one at that (more on this during the conclusion)!

Bungie doesn’t camp any of this in Myth I or Myth II, but we can—doing so simply by acknowledging what the authors are canonically up to: demonizing nature (and the monstrous-feminine through labor) through all the usual tokenizing fetishes and clichés, backstabbing Jews included. Like Garfield the Cat, nature simply becomes something for the middle class to fear and feel suspicious about, thus police the ghost of the counterfeit with through confirmation bias; i.e., one that abjects capital’s appetites off onto small defenseless animals and vulnerable human parties turned into giant, ravenous undead, and more to the point, profitable caricatures of themselves (with Lumpy Touch taking an already lucrative commodity and making it Gothic for those very reasons) that the self-centered middle class can sweat bullets about, Lovecraft-style. It’s all very “woe is me,” the privileged group abjecting nature and extended beings to ease their own tormented status:

(artist: Lumpy Touch)

In turn, this is a multimedia ordeal, translating to novels, comics/cartoons, movies and videogames conversing back and forth. Men become afraid of animals just wanting to eat, persecuting them and those associated with them (what Maynard James Keenan calls “the cry of the carrots[13]“) through a village scapegoat mentality trapped inside Capitalist Realism; i.e., as something that is easier to do instead of face the thoroughly unattractive and unappetizing reality that Capitalism and profit-as-ravenous are to blame for such shortages and superstitions (re: the bourgeoise trifectas and monopolies). Like eugenics and Nazi dogma (which are simply Capitalism and Cartesian thought decaying into radicalized versions of themselves), such things transfuse and pass along like bad wisdom/religion through the middle class on settler colony lands. “It takes a village,” indeed!

Now that we’ve gone over Soulblighter and their abject role to nature, as well as the giant cruelty of normal-sized men, let’s rehash some broader points about the Cycle of Kings and actual giants, then conclude our Fallen Lords close-read by surveying the female monstrous-feminine.

As a tyrant, the canonical zombie warlord is only part of a larger harvesting practice: presenting the future as hopelessly dead, even when trapped in medievalized iterations like Myth: the Fallen Lords and Soulblighter. Unlike the retro-future cyberpunk, the modern-day zombie apocalypse, or the closed space of a Gothic castle, the future of what could be is flung ass-backwards into a new dark age on open ground; i.e., one where the kingdom of the Light is threatened by the forces of the Dark (what Gary Moore, in romantic terms, might call a return to “the Wild Frontier” [1989] the same way that heteronormative young men might excitedly dream about ninjas, pirates, Vikings, and knights, etc); e.g., Braveheart’s own ahistorical celebration of such battles coming out of Lord of the Rings and other settler-colonial propaganda: dressed up as “rebellion” and “home defense” against foreign invaders tied to internal plots of alien, vengeful usurpers (the elite scapegoating labor by tokenizing legitimate feelings of anger against the state, turning those feelings against workers to police themselves with). Whatever the form, all belong to the same dated territory as part of a future image that could easily come to pass and in some ways already has.

Overall, the fantasy genre does more than displace state violence; it dissociates it entirely by framing the fantasy world as “eternal,” divorced from time as a cycle altogether. One need only examine the fascist hauntology of America and Western Europe to know this isn’t true. Like Metroidvania, Bungie’s medieval boneyard is a black mirror of what could happen to our own world, but lies to audiences by portraying the player as the slayer of the Dark through state-sanctioned executioners: the fearsome Legion guided by a loose coalition of powerful manly wizards called the Nine. The Fallen, by comparisons, are heralded by a version of history that doesn’t make sense to its current benefactors, yet whose alternate visions—from an undead Pantheon of great military leaders working against them—belies the base function of Capitalism working as it always does: out-of-control, in crisis and decay as fueling the chaos of competing warlords rising from the grave.

To grapple with the zombie tyrant, a centrist author like Bungie must seek to quell their own inherited guilt/anxiety through police violence; i.e., the token cop Soulblighter policing his own as repressed like he was even when times “were good.” Fear and wonder become powerful levers to motivate the middle class to take part, becoming the very thing they revel in the wake of; i.e., the Second Coming of what they themselves hope to be: conquerors. In turn, the man of reason, crime lord and warrior king each account for some of the male-dominant positions under Capitalism, traumatizing the land through the creation of various undead dilemmas: hauntology as tied to Capitalist Realism, where Capitalism becomes a multicultural, cross-generational tomb for the living to inhabit from cradle to grave.

To it, Myth offers up the usual undead power fantasies, their futile revenge against nature wedded to symbols of cartoon danger you must recognize and attack. Simply put, it’s a trap—the effect of canonical hauntology carceral precisely because it traps consumers inside recuperated, locational markers of Capitalism’s generational abuse; i.e., echoing fascist images of the future as things to defeat through yet-another last-ditch defense of the state from the usual suspects in the past. Its dated, once-upon-a-time remediation, through blank parody and pastiche, yields canonical likenesses continuously devised in cryptonymic fashion; i.e., transformed into profitable, stupefying hypercanon, and whose neoliberal hauntology capitalizes on the “cracked mirrors” of dystopian retro-futures by treating everything as a splintered, repressed cultural mindset; e.g., Soulblighter and his “Nazi” mad scientist antics with a tokenized flavor to them, or Balor before him and a more gradual, less tokenized form of the Cycle of Kings (tokenization being an act of desperation): a sudden Promethean cataclysm, “the lesson in humility” comparable to a nuclear bomb (fire from the neoliberal gods’ “volcano”) to spook labor silent, reminding them who’s the boss.

(source)

Divorced from actual rebellion, the run-down parallel worlds Bungie contributes towards abuse myth for profit’s sake; i.e., Crusader and white-Indian heroism (which the game’s Light units reflect, left) wedded, per Umberto Eco, to the cult of death. In doing so, they have become increasingly mass-manufactured—carceral fakeries that, from the neoliberal point of view, are only meant for apathetic consumers to play around inside while posturing as sexy rebels playing war as usual; i.e., the canceled future and infernal concentric pattern, wherein lies the sanctioned killing of gangsters, bandits, authoritarian cops, rogue AI, mutants, Fallen Lords, and other placeholders that function identically to the out-and-out fascist zombie in postapocalypse scenarios. It’s fear and wonder serving profit, continuing zombie war inside and outside of fiction, galvanized by the process of abjection and ghost of the counterfeit—a red false flag to wave in front of the bull to get him to charge, then reap the whirlwind by destroying nature (versus being stewards to it) through all the usual dogwhistles.

In other words, canonical or not, the story of the zombie is always a black mirror—one whose Melmoth the Wanderer dangerously threatens undead apocalypse as a gigantic, looming threat waiting to feed on workers and nature through state mechanisms. Under these hostile conditions, canonical and iconoclastic variants exist in praxial opposition. However, the latter distinguishes itself by either camping earlier creations (as we have done here, largely by close-reading them), or offering new ones that pointedly uncover bourgeois hauntologies; i.e., they are not incentivized by profit and the inherent, built-in instabilities that state fabrications yield.

In either case, one must work through the catalog. With Bungie, they compile their own material, in-game and in paratexts; in turn, these—like all such built worlds—are cataloged again by their fans (who put such things online for easy access; re: Mythipedia, where I can pull such information up to interpret it in campy ways, which a queer reading essentially is). The fact remains, canon comports those in power as yielding up terrifying visions regarding state abuse (as something to uncover); i.e., the material reality continuously downplayed in favor of the canonical, decayed future and its stupid, easy fun: blow shit up, kick zombie ass—all during the apocalypse as “made for (white cis-het) men.”

As with Tolkien, Bungie and so many others, the complicit cryptonyms of the elite popularize in centrist war narratives (and other hauntological forms like the cyberpunk as a kind of “slumming yarn,” exhibit 41e); i.e., portraying yesterday’s heroes as gigantic and male, fed on yesterday’s corpses; re, the Capitalocene felt through Walpole’s giant armor, which in this case accounts for the stony golem’s flesh of the Trow and those unscrupulous sorcerers who summon them in whatever giant forms/combinations are useful to the state romancing the middle class while stupefying them, too:

(exhibit 41d: Keeping with the centrist, wrestler’s narrative, Bungie’s imaginary past is classically tied to the male body as statuesque, athletic and muscular [a trend we shall see whenever we revisit the game’s Pantheon]. For example, the franchise’s race of giants, the Trow, are tried-and-true mercenaries of the medieval sort; they originally serve the Dark, only to switch sides against Soulblighter[14] in the Second Great War [more Tolkien-style moral geography he passes off as “myth”]. While Soulblighter performs the game’s Melmoth-style vice character [one cutscene (above) granting him an almost baboon-like appearance], the Trow hybridize mythology for a Numinous effect; i.e., suffusing the myth of the Celtic giants with a Lovecraftian backstory releasing similar echoes of “Rome fallen”: the ancient city’s magical and alien statuesque parallel to At the Mountains of Madness [the patrolling Trow in the top-right image, above, storming towards the campfire to, if not eat the soldiers (as giants so often do to male heroes), then like Lovecraft’s scientist aliens, rip the trespassers limb from limb].

To it, the Trow combine the Ancient Romans with Lovecraft’s science-happy Old Ones, resulting in a slave-owning race with golem-like properties [echoes of Victor warning Walton about the Creature; i.e., a former slave being able to reproduce and harness science for a new posthuman race superior to mankind, bearing a grudge to boot]. A byproduct of mad science/Cartesian overreach, their “once-great” civilization has been reduced—as is tradition, per the Promethean Quest—by a massive slave revolt that left them proudly stranded in the snowy wastes of their former nation. To it, echoes of empire and scientific abuse extend beyond just that. Not only do the Trow speak what appears to be Latin—calling the Deceiver a being of “furor poeticus” [source: Mythipedia]—but they play Romanesque death sports, and announce themselves with great booming footsteps; i.e., not unlike the T-Rex from 1994’s Jurassic Park [except the cloned dinosaurs in that movie were all female].)

This brings us to giants. For now, I just want to consider the giant’s aesthetic in relation to the state and stories like Myth sold to workers; the conclusion will consider Capitalism itself as a giant zombie.

That being said, I don’t suppose I really need to explain what giants are—it’s in the name, after all. However, there is some additional context to impart: Myth‘s giants are all mercenaries—so-called “special units” who appear late in the game (suggesting the world-sized nature of the conflict as time goes on). These special units include the Trow as we just examined, but also the forest giants (from the first game, left) and giant Myrkridia (towards the end of the second game). Soulblighter concerns all three, the sort of person who invokes a war of giants as much as men.

(source: Mythipedia)

To it, the forest giants work for the Legion, mainly while defending their home, a giant forested area called Forest Heart, from Soulblighter (then under Balor’s employment); the giant Myrkridia work for Soulblighter after being summoned from elsewhere (another dimension, it would seem); and the Trow turn coat against Soulblighter thanks to the Deceiver’s interference. In short, giants are big and tough, but also somewhat indifferent to the politics of men and their enemies; i.e., they generally have a larger connection to the world itself, and only emerge when properly enticed (mercenaries are paid, and giants require substantial payment). Beyond that, they generally have a Numinous, elemental flavor that anthropomorphizes, speaking to the ways that nature is weaponized and made to fight for humankind in monomyth stories.

This enlarged anthropomorphism/token animism isn’t exclusive to Bungie; i.e., with Tolkien—doubtless inspired by Wagner and ancient myth—having featured the indifferent stone giants in The Hobbit, while also making nature into a goodly police force; e.g., the Great Eagles from the same book, but also with his Ents[15] from The Two Towers obediently breaking Saruman’s war machines before Aragorn and his friends arrive. Instead, Bungie more or less recycles the idea, their own not-so-friendly tree men kicking the everlasting shit out of the forces of darkness.

As for the giant Myrkridia, they’re basically “family-sized” versions of their “fun-sized” cousins. For all giants in such stories, though, they showcase the scope and scale of a conflict blown up to epic proportions; i.e., the epic poems of different ancient cultures often calling themselves home to literal giants of different kinds, but also ancient war machines[16] rising to giant heights; e.g., siege towers. Giants, by extension, embody war machines with a humanoid flavor as connected to nature being normally exploited by state forces.

Similar to dragons, witches or zombies (orcs, goblins and werewolves, etc), giants play a vital role in Capitalist Realism during the monomyth; i.e., as hyperbolic calls to police violence, letting the state feed as a giant might by gobbling everything up around it. Except, the bigger the state is, the more it can eat; the more it can eat, the more it will eat through bigger and bigger arguments of self-preservation against invented enemies—i.e., those the state brutalizes for profit, which bears out its own ladder of preferential mistreatment.

You’d think that Nazis would be low on the list. Except, Nazis generally receive special treatment because they commonly serve state interests; instead, Communists and past victims of enslavement and exploitation cap off the state’s hit list. In turn, the usual austerity politics’ boom-or-bust instability punishes those outside the bourgeoisie, weakening the structure as it tries to glut itself. The more in crisis the state grows/decays towards, more it must prey on workers and nature just to survive. It needs giant-sized arguments, hence giant-sized targets, but also giant-sized idiots to push victims into the state’s giant mouth.

It’s true, then, that fascists make popular scapegoats, provided they’re rabid. But if an out-of-control fascist is nowhere to attack, the state has loyal ones attack state enemies, instead. This escalation of violence happens in the usual police territories suddenly filled with “dangerous game”; i.e., passed off as criminal, but also likened to Bungie’s giant Fallen Lords and aforementioned special units; e.g., trans people, or Communists who use the same aesthetics of power and death as fascists do (not to be confused with flags or insignias, which generally are much harder to assimilate).

Keeping with this section’s central thesis, then, Capitalism will abject its giant abuses onto its victims—often with a queernormative, hyperbolic flavor merged with other forms of tokenization; i.e., teaching a privileged side (us) to blame, dehumanize and attack a monstrous side (them) while abusing DARVO and obscurantism in ubiquitous heroic language: the heroes acting increasingly like giant, entitled assholes against a perceived overblown menace they’re celebrated for committing massive acts of cruelty against; i.e., police brutality dressed up as “bravery”; e.g., Beowulf vs Grendel.

Furthermore, this sea change forces the alien side to adapt and reclaim such implements to survive their bullies. In doing so, many out-group members compromise. Frequently abandoning healthier forms of rape play (which are discouraged already by colonizing forces), the abused often become cops themselves; i.e., when they betray others out of convenience and desperation, puffing themselves up and acting tough. For a time, this renders them immune, seemingly beyond persecution provided their eat their own. But the middle class is always there, looking for new token Judases to fill the role of giant slayer (such sell-outs never last—are always the most expendable).

The whole abysmal process spawned from the canonical monomyth out of Antiquity (a time of giants and gods) into LotR, Star Wars, Harry Potter and Myth: the Fallen Lords (which, among countless other stories bearing the same settler-colonial markers, all contain disproportionately sexist, queerphobic, Orientalist and/or anti-Semitic monsters to prop up the usually smaller but still larger-than-life hero “chosen for greatness”).

Penned by opportunistic, white and politically moderate authors, such massive “threats” codify and catalyze Man Box and “prison sex” mentalities in poetic forms—their commercialized, menticidal dogma and refrains (maps or otherwise) turning the middle class (the usual cops) against domestic lower classes, but also entire foreign populations (the usual suspects) through frontier Capitalism finding the titanic scapegoats it needs to harvest nature-as-monstrous-feminine; re (from Volume Zero): “Hell is always a place that appears on Earth.” Said Hell is populated with “giant” enemies who, killed by posturing knights, suffer the embarrassment of witch-hunter violence against someone who is hardly so massive, powerful or dangerous being bullied by someone who is: the state loves DARVO (again, we’ll sporadically touch on the state as a giant cannibal, here, before focusing on said cannibalism during the conclusion).

By comparison, the Promethean Quest generally subverts the monomyth, but canonically still flows power towards the state when killing the hero (normally felled by a giant implication, if not an actual monster). To that, Bungie demonstrates how this can be done, populating “Hell come home” with fascist, queer-coded, tokenized stereotypes punching down against labor (as a giant might) and nature when the dead walk the Earth (another example being the Zodiac Braves from Final Fantasy Tactics, a game that sends the hero to die in Hell, fighting multiple giants-in-disguise leading to an imaginary Angel of Death without promise of reward, glory or recognition); i.e., peppering Hell/the Numinous with Red Scare elements among the horseshoe fascist overtones.

Be they larger-than-life men with Herculean strength, literal giant humanoids, or hyperobjects (capital, fascism/Communism and Mother Nature), the point isn’t the sacrifice by itself or our aforementioned gigantic forces. All generally connect through the same kayfabe’s distributions of power and status, wherein a given Amazonomachy serves and sends power as a matter of ongoing praxis. Liberation and enslavement, trauma and catharsis, mere men and giants—all exist in the same shadow zone’s contested aesthetics (often with an athletic component).

To it, expect the usual dialectical-material dualities when dealing with zombies, but especially giant zombies, generals and draconian vampires, etc. For one, the Gothic novel began as historical fiction; i.e., that reinvented history through myth surrounding such labels; re: Walpole’s giant suit of armor (an allusion to the French and Indian War, 1754-1763, concluding a year before Otranto was written). During oppositional praxis, then, said myths were plundered from a variety of sources working at cross purposes between authors; e.g., the post-Roman, pro-Christian elements to giants dating back to Beowulf (in written English), extending to an operatic cycle with anti-Semitic elements as old as the medieval period into Wagner’s des Nibelungen (which Tolkien bastardized, and later Bungie). And such language as “You shall not pass!” (from Tolkien) can be heard in praxial opposition through “No pasarán!” (and similar phrases: “Ils ne passeront pas!”) utilized as gatekeeper rhetoric to keep fascists out, but also imaginary “barbarians” kept curiously at bay by fascists aping the raised fist for capital; i.e., serving capital in faux-revolutionary language.

(artist: Nadezhda Tolokonnikova)

This being said, revolution is sexy from an actual rebel’s standpoint; i.e., sex positivity (and general liberation, insofar as Capitalism sexualizes all workers), which unfold during neo-medieval forms of rape play whose ambiguous, mythic theatrics demonstrably synthesize catharsis. All the same, this isn’t what actual practicing fascists[17] do when raising their own fists; e.g., Trump doing so after nearly getting shot by a disgruntled white conservative, but also white liberal authors playing the rebel against fascist elements while—in the same breath—callously punching down against labor movements who think Europe sucks:

When the anti-Putin activist Nadezhda Tolokonnikova [above], a member of the Pussy Riot punk group, was tried for blasphemy in Moscow in 2012, she wore a T-shirt emblazoned with a defiant raised fist and the Spanish slogan “no pasarán“: they shall not pass.

The phrase is associated with the Spanish civil war, which Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has made terrifyingly relevant – especially as volunteer fighters from across the world gather to defend the country from his attack. No pasarán became a slogan for the 35,000 volunteers of the International Brigades who travelled to Spain from more than 80 countries to defend its legal government from fascist-backed aggression. About 2,300 or more set out from Britain and Ireland. Another 2,800 left the US, forming the Abraham Lincoln Battalion – the first racially mixed US military unit led by a Black officer, Oliver Law.

The brigadiers chose the right side of history. Both Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini sent troops to fight alongside the violent rightwing reactionaries led by Spain’s future dictator, General Francisco Franco. Like Putin, they wanted to demolish democracy across Europe. In Ukraine, the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, also wants a volunteer “foreign legion” to join the war. “This is the beginning of a war against Europe, against European structures, against democracy, against basic human rights, against a global order of law, rules and peaceful coexistence,” he said. “Anyone who wants to join the defence of Ukraine, Europe and the world [emphasis, me] can come” (source: Giles Tremlett’s “Anti-Fascist Slogan Takes on New Significance in Ukraine Crisis,” 2022).

Anti-fascism often conflates Communism with fascism, in Western eyes. When raising our own fists, then, we must likewise remember that American liberals/servants of pax Americana (moderates, white in function if not in appearance) will hijack our language, or otherwise write about it in ways that serve capital, including fiction and non-fiction alike. If it serves the powers that be, liberal democracy loves it; if it becomes violent towards the elite, the label becomes a vague incendiary buzzword to hurl against rioters, signaling police forces (actual or vigilante) to attack workers protesting American genocide.

Bringing things back to our aforementioned fantasy giants, however campy and/or otherworldly these invented objects appear at first blush (re: Raimi, but also Bungie), they are ultimately blind and predatory unto others if they employ Capitalist Realism to conceal Capitalism’s predatory nature. Capitalism destroys everything around itself, and generally does so through Promethean hero fantasies in love with killing giants for the bourgeoisie! The enemy isn’t just fascism’s bastardizing of giants and dragons, zombies and witches, etc, to scapegoat Capitalism’s usual victims with (re: gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss)—it’s the elite behind them using liberal democracy/Pax Americana to maintain capital by demonizing Putin (a fascist, to be clear) while cannibalizing Gaza! It’s “boundaries for me, not for thee,” with The Guardian complicit in Gaza’s genocide; i.e., treating the locals and their home like Omelas while calling for Putin’s head (and celebrating themselves for it). Except total war makes, as it always does, for good distractions concerning who the real apex predators are. Hitler and Putin are both war criminals, to be sure, but their crimes against workers and nature pale in comparison to the American elite and their allies in journalism!

(source: Mythipedia)

Sound familiar? Stories like Myth: the Fallen Lords do the same, chopping Bungie’s “czar” down to size while sacrificing an absurd number of people to do so. This includes not just mighty warriors

I am not a coward. I think that my actions over the last seventeen years prove this. Yet I was relieved to not be among those chosen to die. In four hours, just after sunrise, the twenty-two hundred survivors of the Legion will attack Balor’s fortress. Those men will surely die. There are perhaps half a million of the enemy between here and the stronghold (ibid.).

but those presumably under Alric’s “protection”; i.e., both being replaceable provided they win: “Before he left, Alric told us that Madrigal had fallen” (ibid.).

In short, the state can kill whoever it wants, lottery-style, in order to justify its own existence; i.e., capital punishment dressed up as “heroism,” except many who die in our world don’t even get the “luxury” of a hero’s funeral (re: the Gazans massacred as “terrorists,” versus the Ukrainians being seen as valiant). Exploitation is exploitation, rape is rape regardless if you call the victim “hero,” “useless eater” or terrorist,” but some definitely get it worse; Bungie’s game of vengeance and victors obscures the same kinds of predation on helpless populations that Pax Americana does in our world (“Keep your eye on the tyrant…”).

However, apart from the genocidal triage involved, such pick-and-chose diplomacy further mirrors our world, insofar as Bungie presents Caesar’s endless war/rape of the world as a giant old boys’ club, its bread-and-circus scapegoating of the past one that invariably invades the present through renewed states of exception told in all manner of gigantic forms; i.e., kayfabe, undead, queer-coded, oft-tokenized heels that must be defeated again and again by sacrificing oneself all the while: the figurative death of one’s heroes after they fall to the Dark Side, or becoming the giant they were supposed to slay!

Becoming “corrupted” through the cult of death that fascist heroism amounts to, our de facto cops (the Jedi, wizards, warriors, Achilles, etc) transform into deathly almighty versions of themselves; i.e., the death lord necromancer/death dealer black knight and skeleton king or “heel” serving as fallen versions of their nobler selves, which must be frozen through echoes of their own lost humanity before cutting off their heads (with giants classically paralyzed, often drugged or tricked[18]; i.e., being attacked in their sleep during asymmetrical warfare; e.g., Jason and the Argonauts vs the cyclops Polyphemus[19]).

Except this brings us back to the classic problem of what to do with the  head, post-decapitation. Giants have the magical ability to be reassembled after death; the giants in Myth are described as literally taken apart like Osiris, dragged through Hell and revived in new forms that fight what is effectively the Imperial Boomerang coming back around, biting empire square in the ass (the ouroboros/Cycle of Kings). After the memory of fascism’s latest fall becomes distant and finally is forgotten, it returns again (and again) as undead, whereupon desperate times call for desperate measures against giant enemies:

After the Great War, the armies of the Dark collapsed and the Fallen Lords were swallowed up by history. We believed we had entered a golden age, a new era of peace, and our armies laid down their weapons to begin the long task of rebuilding the world. For sixty years we worked our fields and tended our cattle and did all the things that we had fought to defend, until the war became something that fathers told their sons and grandfathers their grandchildren. But sixty years is nothing to the likes of a Fallen Lord. And while King Alric was restoring the Province to its former glory, Soulblighter was plotting its infinite ruin.

The King has decided to fight fire with fire [the fire of the gods, Prometheus-style]. He seeks Myrdred[20], an avatara of the Wolf Age whom Balor renamed “The Deceiver” after bending him to his will. Although The Deceiver fought alongside Balor during the last war, he held no great love for the rest of The Fallen, nearly being killed by The Watcher in a legendary battle at Seven Gates. King Alric believes The Deceiver still lives and is counting on this old rivalry to lure him into joining our efforts to destroy Soulblighter and the Myrkridia (source: Mythipedia).

Like Frankenstein, Bungie’s narrative style is epistolary, dramatic, richly mythical, and well-delivered (the voice actor for the Narrator[21] deserves special praise); but it always defines the human condition as one trapped in endless, toy-like war—with no room for non-zombie queers, women, or other marginalized groups, and too much room for larger-than-life assholes who generally kill everything in sight (the “Tolkien problem,” in other words, but penned by an American studio).

Trapped between the warring gods of capital, then, Bungie only allows for the warrior’s death; i.e., looking super cool as you kick zombie ass, then go to “Valhalla” to sit with Crom, King Ulster or Zeus, etc, as part of the same fascist, Man-Box mishmash: the bad dream of the zombie apocalypse becoming the “last” chance for a “real” warrior’s death, Frankenstein’s monster robbed of its camp, but slave to the grind as robata-style grist for the mill, anyways. The real myth is camp/mutual consent (which I had to introduce through this queer close-read, putting my childhood heroes to the sword; i.e., anticipating and intercepting their canonical, bigoted elements, then making them gay for me to be able to survive the people they unironically represent).

However emotionally compelling it comes across, the prime narrative of Bungie’s centrism (and the monomyth, at large) remains a thoroughly doomed, macho (re: Eco) conflict between two jousting teams, one being morally superior as the Greater Good; i.e., white knights who “go savage” in a cartoonishly grand but also pulpy (re: Lovecraft) and faux-Celtic way (the archers in Myth called “fir bolg,” a race of Celtic giants the first game treats as the Light’s non-giant archer wood elves, a bit like Tolkien’s Legolas[22] but obscured by using different legendary elements and language than Tolkien, a philologist, chose; e.g., with Cu Chulainn, of Irish folklore, famously “hulking out” against his enemies, often against giants or seemingly indestructible foes, which giants often appear to be; i.e., like David and Goliath): the self-important and self-centered nature of fascism’s big-headed soldiers thinking they’re big deals, but also the good guys. They don’t know, understand and/or care that they’re evil!

An assemblage of gigantic myths on either side, then, the West confronts Capitalism in decay abjected onto equally bombastic, undead clichés of all the usual minority groups: giant “undeveloped” kayfabe, but also token cops policing the usual suspects. To it, the game’s berserks are a shameless nod to Braveheart, itself a film about historical revisionism to suit American conservatism and commerce; e.g., David Gemmell’s Rigante series commercializing oppression as wielded by colonizers playing “rebel,” weak and strong as a matter of imperial apologia (with Macbeth originally defeating a rebel faction for King Duncan, before killing Duncan and usurping the throne). It’s Pavlovian—a matter of conditioning that yields what the elite want: war and rape, workers killing each other on both sides, amounting to Macbeth without Shakespeare’s irony (or Rob Roy without the sex). Such big muscles are, themselves, then cut up by the state, ingested, and spit back out.

The trick, for such canon, is fooling the sacrifice into thinking it’s the hero. Vampirically crossing swords with evil barbarians (the mouth and fang hyphenating in all the usual ways, above), said good guys always face the end of the world as perpetually threatened by abject (non-Western) forces trying to “end the cycle” (re: Red Scare); i.e., the restoration of order as not corrupted or undead by endlessly duking it out, back and forth, with fascists who are. It’s the Star Wars problem, extending the conflict indefinitely per Capitalist Realism, then cashing in on it as undead and gigantic; i.e., Zombie Capitalism, reveling in the pointless bravery and cemetery fields of open, unburied gore: war is badass, is endless, is profitable.  Except, the cycle only remains profitable so long as workers dehumanize their enemies, which conversely must humanize to move past the whole police structure and its moderate ploys determining who is cop and who is victim.

For instance, while fascists serve capital, they are ultimately humans abused by the system using the same aesthetics iconoclasts camp Nazis with; i.e., to expose the system urging people to kill one another for the elite, as Soulblighter does out of revenge, and the West doing unto him because he is simply “pure evil” to them: an alien to punish by virtue of reactive violence making him the “pure token cop” (reducing his value to zero). But such absolutes are, themselves, impossible.

Instead, bourgeois dictation and its bloody outcomes under capital haunt the out-of-doors and its warriors there as much as any Gothic fortress; i.e., something to lament yet encourage by virtue of its profitability trapping the would-be-heroes inside a giant prison of the mind, hopelessly seeking glory and riches on and offstage while guarding nations against imaginary barbarians. Trapped in the belly of the beast, the process dehumanizes both sides—of real populations expressed in imaginary ones the elite turn against each other for profit: “Police yourselves! Tokenize! Betray each other! Lash out! Hulk out! Don’t camp it, don’t think about it! Just be violent in ways we can alienate, punish and fetishize, then scapegoat and capitalize on to consolidate our power!”

To it, Soulblighter and the volcano—but likewise any gigantic aspect to Bungie’s world—become a colossal deflection and projection, the real parties guilty of setting the world on fire not being something as exotic and fascinating as a Jewish Nazi or magical giant, but the elite’s banality of evil: doing it all for profit as described. For the elite, becoming rich isn’t something to strike suddenly like a vein of gold, but by exploiting other workers through a system designed to prey on people, animals and the land (wealth accumulation and generation through profit). Even if they’re simply born into the system on top of the pile of gold, acquiring the status and position of capital in the bargain, such material conditions are tremendously alienating because of the class gulf, alone.

The fact remains, ACAB and billionaires own cops, thus giant projections of cops. Billionaires, then, are predatory by design in ways that rival the most brutal warlord; i.e., using capital as installed through settler-colonial violence to continue said violence; e.g., through direct sponsorship of police action, like Thatcher did in Ireland, or by installing fresh Capitalist-Realist dogma in half-real ways—stuff like Myth, in other words, that shifts blame (and various debilitating emotions) onto the usual gaslit victims by the usual gaslighting victimizers in gigantic language.

Furthermore, settler-colonial arguments involve elements of occupation as legitimate vs vacant or invalid, decided ultimately by billionaire landlords. Shelly’s apartment in The Crow is invaded by thugs per Top Dollar’s say-so, and Myth‘s world—similar to Samus and the Chozo, pirates and Galactic Federation—is invaded by warriors who appear whenever the current residents are weak, opening the usual venues for fresh business, battle, and betrayal. It’s barter through manufactured conflict, the ensuing neoliberal shock therapies sanctioned by those with a finger on the big red button, threatening a final countdown, FOMO-style. Amid the usual dog whistles (e.g., “Caesar”), girls will get got, gays will be buried, dragons slain, witches hunted, giants felled, etc. The paradox of death incarnate, here, is its constitution as both reaper and rebel, the middle-class nerd playing the cop in either case.

Pursuant to such games like Bungie’s, land is always contested by arguments that keep war happening and ownership of those under the owner class in doubt, thus eager to bring down big game and prove their manhood anew. Repurposed for profit under capital, capital conjures up all of yesterday’s customs and dead traditions (re: Marx), raising with them faux-feudal arguments of rebellion and invasion, villainy and heroism—all for proving the current residents (the middle class) as “manly” and capable to the gods (the bourgeoisie) on the usual battlegrounds converted into homes, battlegrounds, and homes again, back and forth as a dialectic of the alien: killing the elite’s enemies (workers and nature) to keep profit moving.

As part of this dance of the knights, everything is for sale and all are expendable superstar death dealers made from different past versions (e.g., Hugo from SF3 = Andre the Giant + Frankenstein’s monster) except those not actually on the field (again, the bourgeoisie). Nobody likes the men behind the curtain, but they’re the only ones who win. Everyone else must die, be that heroes, villains, giants, virgins or whores. All are cut up eventually and left out in the cold, the heroes who survive mere straw dogs who will be forgotten after they are dead; i.e., the last war’s heroes replaced by those in the next, joining the same funerary throng. From Nazi Germany to the United States to Bungie’s nameless world aping them, Valhalla is a myth the state uses to keep itself alive!

(source)

Through the usual neoliberal methods of abuse[23] and regression, Myth romances inequity and frames Imperialism and its socio-material conditions as “good,” solely to lock them in place and keep them in place (re: the Cycle of Kings). The volcano, as well as Soulblighter and all of the massive monsters Myth conjures up, are a universal threat to workers, to scare and pit labor against itself; i.e., the middle class against the lower class, and the lower classes against each other and the middle class, while always treating the elite as benign, reaping nature until state shift. Yes, you can scapegoat the tyrant and his generals, servants and ostensible companions and lovers, but there is always a return to order that installs the same old men at the top to rule and control the world through likenesses that acclimate workers to the whole process, inside and out.

To it, everything described in Myth could gradually disappear and—like Rome and Caesar, himself—become a perpetual thing of the past via development protecting nature from the state’s usual cheapening of it; but the elite make sure said past keeps coming back in fresh forms that uphold Capitalist Realism, canonizing the process instead of camping it (which oddly enough, Kevin Smith was attempting to do in 2005’s Clerks 2, albeit badly and from a homophobic perspective that—while it exposes homophobia in the Tolkien camp [“Hey, faggot! They’re not gay, they’re hobbits!”]—is still a homophobic canard delivered spitefully by a straight man written by a straight man to belittle a fantasy story about gay men because it’s gayer than Star Wars is).

As such, the state is a giant that eats its citizens for profit; i.e., by making endless monster war that, through itself, embodies dogma (re: the Military Industrial Complex and copaganda). In turn, the giant puppeteer’s hands and their strings aren’t always visible (removed from the Metallica poster, below), but rest assured, they’re quite present; i.e., the socio-material factors that drive the same stories to play out by conjuring up Marx’ presaging of the same slogans, costumes, and actions of false rebellion. It might weigh on/eat at those on the safe side of the war market, but it sells anyways for exactly those reasons: the ghost of the counterfeit.

Keeping with that, it’s all smoke and mirrors, but somewhere, the consequences of policing said abjection (us versus them) are quite real and straightforward: life is cheap, as is its ending inside canceled worlds; i.e., that treat the end of the world, per Capitalist Realism, as Ragnarok—the final battle of giants that, oddly enough, never stops but also never comes. There must always be war and death, and giant, monomyth heroes to worship precisely because they’re undead, from Hell, seeking futile revenge as thoroughly mythical, larger-than-life, chasing the fire of the gods (Caesar never dies, but always comes back as a shell of the original conqueror). Such things are lionized under Cartesian thought, but also Pax Americana as a Promethean extension thereof reviving Caesar or Melmoth for the umpteenth time in order to let middle-class white men (and tokens) play emperor against labor and nature; i.e., scapegoated/tokenized as usual: genocide dressed up as “war” and hawked to the usual ministers becoming death merchants when empire begins to die and pay fealty to the same-old profit motive (e.g., Rathbone’s “SATANYAHU ADDRESSES CONGROSS! PART 2,” 2024).

In short, war is a seesaw cycle tied to profit, thus rape relayed in the usual zombie apocalypses’ jester-like villains; i.e., those which Myth II theatrically pushes to its logical endgame (from a marginalized viewpoint): the token Nazi burning the house down, said house demanding empire be vigilant against evil extending to marginalized communities who might seek revenge afterwards; re: the seeds of fascism all over again, planted through fortress mentality. There’s always someone to fight who’s more ruthless and powerful than you; the outcome is always self-defeating and alienating as a matter of police violence fetishizing its own servants until they snap. Our own theatricalities—however complex they might seem—must simply and directly confront state variants to anisotropically reverse the flow of power and knowledge, awareness and intelligence towards workers. This happens as much through a Galatean element camping the Cycle of King’s Pygmalion authors as it does monsters in general: weak and strong categorized not just through DARVO and obscurantism to achieve adversity in a theatrical sense, but through gendered language, as well.

Now that we’ve well and truly exhausted the giant side of things, let’s quickly consider the female aspect to Myth‘s monstrous-feminine.

That is, beyond the cycle’s usual male giants, there are non-male aspects to such canon and its subversion. In regards to said servants as scapegoats in the Myth franchise, we’ve primarily looked at cis[24] gay men like Balor, the Watcher and Soulblighter. But Shiver (who mainly appears in the second game, below) was also a character in that story Bungie chose to revive for the sequel! To be inclusive, then, let’s conclude with a few points about her and similar characters (six pages), then move onto to the “The Monomyth” conclusion (which discusses Capitalism itself in undead monomythic terms)!

(source: Mythipedia)

While witch hunts historically punch down against Jews, Arabs and other non-Europeans, the classic monstrous-feminine for the West is actually women (with racial minorities and anti-Semitic qualities emerging during the medieval and Enlightenment periods). As such women like Shiver essentialize to the same equation of profit abusing nature through mythical stories that Bungie riffs on and rips off; i.e., pitting token proponents against each other to further a canonical narrative; e.g., the Deceiver seeking revenge against the game’s resident fag hag: “The Deceiver has been screaming for Shiver’s blood all day [which sounds weird, given how soft-spoken their in-game conversation is]. Alric has chosen five men of unwavering courage to accompany The Deceiver into the labyrinth of ravines where she hides. There they will hunt her down and destroy her” (ibid.). As such, Shiver is basically Medusa having one last catfight with Loki-by-another-name.

Per the Archaic Mother (the Medusa) and the phallic woman (the Amazon), there is always Macbeth’s wild wife, asking to be unsexed. That’s what Shiver basically is, in the end—a giant ageing bitch needing to be put down, hag-horror style (and inside a maze, no less). But again, the monstrous-feminine is anything of nature capital needs one side to police, rape and destroy for profit to happen. Sawing through nature, Myth presents Capitalism as a cycle that never ends, and certainly not one that constitutes embracing nature and the monstrous-feminine as previously raped by the heroic position. Instead, it turns them—one and all—into fascist, horseshoe caricatures of Jewish revenge; per cryptofascists, it’s politically dumb/ahistorical on purpose, defending capital through these spectral abuses of the past made mythical.

This includes Mother Nature, whereupon the Medusa is someone to fetishize and harm—generally abusing nature by removing the agency of those associated with nature. In classical systemic terms, this happens less through Jews, queer men and non-white peoples, and more through AFAB workers (or intersex parties with female dominant characteristics) for heroes to “feed on”; i.e., to feed is to rape, which translates differently to female bodies versus Soulblighter’s male body (the latter a warlock consigned to the flames during an Amazonomachy‘s “bury your gays” witch hunt, not penetration like Shiver and other whorish, Medusa-style succubae; e.g., Lilith, camped by Red Panda, below). Weird attracts weird, trauma attracts trauma; under capital, sex and force synonymize for any recipients/markers of state harm through various “heavy metal” exceptions, nerdy double standards, and all-around stigmas under a straight Male Gaze. Simply put, whores get stabbed, and that’s all Bungie allows Shiver to experience.

(artist: Red Panda Waifu)

In short, hags are generally beheaded, not fucked (though again, their “conqueror” function is synonymous). Even so, while Shiver might not be conventionally sexy from a visual standpoint, she’s still sexualized to receive violence; i.e., by a story that sends a group of sexy heroes to put her down and her alone. In stories similar to Myth, then, Shiver is to Soulblighter what Medusa is to capital: a sidekick or psychosexual fantasy whose only purpose during police violence is to die; i.e., to further the story of the ostensibly straight men involved, who kill her without hesitation. She’s simply “pure evil,” amounting to a rather boring hag that’s given nothing to do but look and act bitchy. Turned on its head inside the same thresholds and on the same surfaces, nature and its fearsome, dark motherly characteristics certainly have the potential to heal through Gothic poetics and demon BDSM (above). In response, canon effectively sweeps these happier alternatives under the rug, always advocating for a police agent pimping nature, pretty or not.

To that, and vis-à-vis Tolkien or Lovecraft, Bungie’s women are entirely offscreen save as monstrous-feminine hags (comparable to the great spider Shelob or the old crone from “Dreams in the Witch House,” 1933). Shiver is Soulblighter’s Evil Lynn to batter—literally Damas’ wife, which the game reduces to a throwaway[25] dummy sacrificed during the Second Great War so Soulblighter (the queer underling trying to one-up a truant Skeletor) can have his final battle at Mount Doom with the boys: “Lay on, MacDuff! And damned be he who cries, ‘Hold, enough!'”

Penned by a gay man, Lady Macbeth fared no better than Shiver did! Instead, the adage “a ‘good story’ requires an effective villain” highlights the fascist’s central role to apologizing for the forces of good and their own genocides, Bungie’s collective abuse of nature eventually banished to the land of the dead after the male commander is killed. Shiver is merely a detour roadblock, a petty obstacle, a smaller objective en route to the man in charge. Comparable to someone like Zangya from the DBZ movie, Bojack Unchained (1993); i.e., a female member of a male dominant group of evil space mercenaries (which the wiki calls “galaxy warriors“), whose dark-skinned, Roma-coded leader gladly murders Zangya because he just has to fight the male hero man-to-man! Medusa is always a stepping step, in that respect—a pussy in a jousting match. Shiver’s fate basically no different.

(artist: Akira Toriyama)

Furthermore, nothing is normally done to stop the violence at its source (which only makes Soulblighter’s attempt with the volcano stand out more), Bungie’s canon displacing the systemic abuses that always occur under Capitalism regardless if any undead—female variants included—are visible or not. Such maneuvers patently aim to manipulate the audience to love and fear a cycle of reactive abusive and escalating violence; i.e., keeping them “oscillating” inside a wrestler’s bread-and-circus narrative that ultimately serves the state by torturing women who basically are only scary because they’re old, thus can’t bear children (the anti-Semitic trope being that they eat children, the Freudian argument of the Medusa being that she castrates men).

As such, the only canonical reason that characters like Shiver exist is to make the manly cis-het hero (for which age is less of a factor insofar as sexual reproduction goes) look good in the eyes of whomever’s watching (usually college frat boys, insofar as the Raimi palimpsest goes, below)—the irony being he’s actually a self-absorbed jerk tilting at windmills:

Regardless of which team one belongs in the monomyth, or the age of the female entities involved, Medusa always suffers the consequences; i.e., there is privilege to being male in these stories, with Soulblighter being the titular character and his lapdog Shiver—Bungie’s Bride of Dracula/Frankenstein—being much more throwaway than her husband is; re: virgins or whores. Despite her age, Shiver is definitely the whore—the object of fatal pursuit doomed to die in order to advance the story as it occurs between men. Soulblighter doesn’t have to beat his wife; his enemies, the Light (and their token homo slave), do it for him!

To it, the ghost of “Rome” and its nuclear family unit haunts everything—with a roster of physically impressive warrior-heroes, kings and one lone queen duking it out for gladiatorial supremacy. Whereas the fascist screams, “the enemy is both weak and strong!” the centrist turns them into a zombie to fight until the end of time. In doing so, they are fighting the buried atrocities of the state, but also its rhetoric as curiously flexible insofar as “strange bedfellows” are permitted; e.g., the Deceiver’s recruitment by the Light, and ruthless diplomatic qualities eventually helping them recruit the Trow (exhibit 41d) under King Alric; re: Alric’s imperial mechanism of fighting “fire with fire” told in heel and babyface, corrupted/uncorrupted language.

Indeed, it’s precisely this tokenized position that Shiver rubs in her enemy’s face, chiding the Deceiver for bending the knee to Alric, and which he rebukes her for in kind (a false equivalency but I digress):

“Well, if it isn’t Alric’s lapdog?” she jeers at him. “Will you bow to anyone who claims the throne of the Cath Bruig?” To which he replies, “The path for retribution does make for strange bedfellows [emphasis, me]. Would you not agree, Ravanna?” (source).

The gay man basically reminds Shiver that she’s working for her abusive ex-husband, to which Shiver responds by raising her snake-like hair and blasting him with magic; i.e., a reckless and ineffective strategy that ultimately backfires when the Deceiver convinces her pet shade to turn coat, letting him trap Shiver in a magical prison that sucks her dry (and whose subsequent explosion blows the Deceiver to pieces)!

And to this, a female character like Shiver is always “lower” than the boys (even the less manly ones, being the only Fallen Lord the player kills without paralyzing them, in either game); i.e., a witch summoned back to life by Soulblighter purely because the game needed a hag to hunt. It certainly reflects the domestic abuse of actual women treated like Shiver is, in-game, and Medusa as classically female. Personally I don’t like to limit such things to simply “female,” and think the game’s battle of the sexes feels binarized along with everything else, therefore dated. As for myself, I generally treat the monstrous-feminine as androgynous, thus male, female, and/or intersex; i.e., in opposition to Cartesian thought’s white, male, European hegemon and tokenized, descending rungs of decreasing privilege. It’s all part of the same heteronormative dogma, the usual stones being thrown in a (very fragile) glass house.

Be they fascist or neoliberal, such mind prisons depict and encourage heroic police violence against nature-as-monstrous-feminine; i.e., as utterly terrifying for its ancient female aspects; re: according to Barbara Creed, which I argue tends to overlook present atrocities by TERFs acting the universal victim while policing people who are even more marginalized. Female or not, such behaviors are critically inert for the state servant. Wrestler narratives, while interactive with the audience on par with Rome’s gladiatorial bouts, are not known for extensive nuance; their canonical zombie eyes, and those of unthinking consumers, have been wholly blinded by a false vision that conceals not just the ongoing militarization of the police, but formerly oppressed groups whose time as cop is rather limited—i.e., like Shiver’s destruction demonstrates, existing inside a pecking order whose tokenized totem pole puts women and effeminate gay at the bottom: the two killing each other to cut to the chase.

As we shall see throughout the rest of the primer and in Volume Three, canon does so not just by making labor fight among themselves, but specifically against any monster-feminine that threatens the status quo through marginalized discord; i.e., Gothic-Communism as something to attack, mid-tokenization (re: Shiver killed by a gay man and vice versa). This being said, unable to look into a black mirror that actually reveals a way out of Capitalism, the same exploitations that befell Shiver and her hysteria continue unabated; i.e., social-sexual trends that lead to worker abuse in everyday situations, announced by canon as something that—if not sexy or cool—is at least “powerful”: when Shiver dies, she explodes, taking the Deceiver with her (“killing two birds with one stone,” as it were).

Cops—including female/monstrous-feminine cops—are generally fetishized, decaying into undead forms working for the state; i.e., the black knight as something to seed with foul, nasty ideas. As the Radiance showed us, in Hollow Knight, this can be camped in ways that pointedly speak to female rape, but the canonical whore is blind in this respect; i.e., her rape theatre largely unironic; e.g., Shiver a throwaway cum dump  who used to be prettier than she is now—a fuckable whore (with giant parts like 2B’s “mommy milkers,” below) instead of a “grotesque crone”:

(artist EXGA)

The franchise is not without the usual consolation prizes. In the absence of a soft body to “till,” the monomyth hero will happily settle for a dragon to slay. Despite being constantly sacrificed, then, Bungie’s Legion are fondly touted as “the legendary army of the West,” the so-called “victorious dead” put through the D&D ringer while gunning for nature as hag-like, as Shiver is, and degenerate like Soulblighter and the other Fallen; i.e., to remain vigilant against them, thus try to survive long enough to tell others how manly they are, then maybe attract a mate: “I guess the worst thing about having a reputation for being a bunch of hardasses is that the Legion always finds itself where the fighting will be ugliest. So we’re up here as the first line of defense against an attack by The Deceiver” (source: Mythipedia). Likewise, Alric’s revival of empire at the end of Myth II is false hope—a kind of neoliberal assimilation fantasy presented by the same old bodies and warlike actions American Capitalism has sold for decades: the Greater Good as constantly recruiting fresh male soldiers into its ranks. Do it; bitches like soldiers!

The girl boss (next page) is a more recent phenomena towards that aim—the creation of a kind of female hero that serves the state in corporate, but also military fashion out of older mythical forms (which we’ll unpack even more in Volume Three, when we examine TERFs). In female terms, there’s little difference (save for cosmetics) between one monster girl versus another in canonical stories; from Amazons to bandit girls to damsels-in-distress, corporations replicate and sell zombifying dream girls, designed to help the consumer feel right at home in a retro-future’s hyperreal, resort-like space. The idea is less overtly undead than the generic rotting corpse, but so was Balor in his armored suit. Their effect on the mind is the same; i.e., to feel comfortable with the zombie apocalypse and what it uncovers about the present world in crisis by piloting powerful, sexy heroes that chase away colonial guilt as forever manifesting within the material world: subjugated Amazons (and their muscles and shapely bodies) distracting through hauntological bread and circus.

(exhibit 41e1: Artist, top-left: Alex Borsuk; bottom-left: unknown [source]; right: Persephone van der Waard.

Apocalyptic fantasies canon veil material condition and abuse with iconic “devastation.” Some provide the Western backdrop as something to return to, while others have a cyberpunk feel. Many more depict the Global South as enriched-but-immiserated under Capitalism as victorious [the “end of history” narrative]: a neo-colony disguised as a tropical paradise tied to a “better” image of the nostalgic, neoliberal past. Whatever applies to the West and the Global North during hauntological fantasies, then, is doubly true for the Global South in this respect. Parenti outlines in the 1986 lecture, “US Empire and Relations with the Soviet Union and Other Socialist States,” a process that is, itself, about four centuries old: “There are no poor nations, only exploited populations.” Likewise, the elite can only offer decayed illusions to hide these exploitations with: the hauntological slum as something to export and harvest, ad infinitum.

In the Western tradition, the slumming heroes would have historically been white and male—posturing less as an invading outsider and more as a defender of staked claims on Indigenous lands [e.g., Powers Booth in The Emerald Forest, 1985, before he turns coat, “going native”]. In the mid-20th century this expanded to allow white women in the second wave of feminism to enjoy the “Amazon” role in service of the state. However, moderate concessions in recent years have affected these rosters to include heroes who not only aren’t men; they aren’t white, either. To this, the hauntological slum of the Global South is forever occupied by the powerful, yet-ultimately servile bodies of various slave groups.

For example, Laura from Capcom’s Street Fighter V [above, right] is canonically tough-but-cute, operating entirely in the hands of the player as something to control in relation to a particular part of the world as something to cover up with a current generation of nation pastiche—i.e., the 2023 sort that treats the population of South America, specifically Brazil, as “bountiful” Amazons to subjugate and leer at, but also pilot in service of a centrist narrative. The decay, in this scenario, happens behind the image, on the actual streets of Brazil which Capcom deliberately conceals behind a false, pretty copy that nevertheless shouts the quiet part inside a ludic tableau: the cities of Capcom’s ageless Global South are perpetually run-down, their material conditions and coercively heroic arrangements fixed in place. It’s pure plantation fantasy—ruthlessly adapted for a neocolonial world by a giant corporate ally to the United States, pandering to the Global North with highly nostalgic, imported displacements of neoliberal hauntology: “Remember when Brazil [and by extension anywhere in South America] was cool; i.e., like Brian DePalma’s fictional Miami in Scarface [1983] as a Cuban drug hub for Americans to conflate with Brazil and South America in general after the Cuban Missile Crisis?”)

 (artist: Teradiam)

So while they clearly favor male varieties, Bungie’s war against nature-as-monstrous-feminine doesn’t preclude strictly female qualities, either. But enough about them and their sinister elements turning women, queer folk and ethnic/religious minorities, etc, into whorish trophies (or watery maidens arming them with swords, left). Whether a male hero or female/monstrous-feminine[26] villain, we’ll consider the larger problem of stalling Capitalist Realism (thus avoiding state shift) a bit more in the conclusion, next; i.e., Capitalism a Great Zombie-Vampire that never stops eating through its monomythic heroes hunting in disguised settler-colonial territories, harvesting some crop or another made abject.

Onto “The Monomyth, part four: “‘That Which Is Not Dead’; or, Capitalism as a Great Zombie(-Vampire)“!

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Footnotes

[1] One of the songs from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997) being “Wandering Ghosts.” Like Dracula himself, his castle is a creature of chaos that takes many incarnations; i.e., those borne from different parties entering and exiting its structure to deviate from past histories (a strategy borrowed from Walpole’s Strawberry Hill House). Just as the game’s music reflects that state of constant reinvention, addressing present allegories retold as “past,” the same goes for Melmoth the ghost as wandering and witnessed by those around him.

[2] The Romans being the famous enemies of Jews and Christians, and the Nazis replacing Christian dogma with Pagan dogma attacking Jews and Bolshevism while Capitalism and the Protestant ethic decays; but not all fascists are against Christendom; e.g., in the Americas, North or South.

[3] I.e., not quite having the same power dynamic as Batman and Robin, but Soulblighter nevertheless being Balor’s submissive, driven to avenge his fallen lover’s betrayal by the West—their eating of him.

[4] In typical British fashion, Tolkien stereotypically demonized wolves in his own stories, commonly presenting them as fodder, but also as wicked stigma animals with shapeshifting counterparts called “wargs” (another name for lycanthropes); i.e., giant evil monsters riding into battle with goblins on their backs during the Battle of the Five Armies, fulfilling Tolkien’s canonical essentialist/ethnocentric view of war in ways that would long outlast him.

[5] Shylock, from The Merchant of Venice.

[6] Re: William Blum, who writes in Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, (1995):

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

This animosity continues to uphold Capitalist Realism in stories like Myth II and beyond.

[7] Keeping with the Tolkien rip-off, Balor is Melkor/Morgoth and Soulblighter is Mairon/Sauron (a play on the idea, with Soulblighter being outwardly hideous, whereas Sauron was an outwardly comely diplomat who initially gave golden rings that bound others to him), but the Tolkien nods don’t stop there; e.g., “the Deceiver” was also a nickname for Sauron. Whilst all seem obvious in hindsight, I frankly never noticed them until just now!

[8] In The Wizard of Oz universe, the Tinman is a common metaphor for queer love. In the original 1900 story, it’s more homonormative; i.e., the Wicked Witch of the East curses a woodman after he falls in love with a girl, the axe chopping his body off bit by bit, while a nearby tin smith replaces all the parts, but forgets to give the Tinman a heart.

In comparison, Myth II reverses the anti-Semitic trope by having Soulblighter “eat his heart out,” his gay body ripped apart for losing the man he served with more devotion than the others did. Obviously it was a toxic relationship (as many gay relationships are under Capitalism), but one in which Soulblighter—having lost his master—conducts a batman’s extinction burst (re: the volcano). It’s bleakly romantic, the dutiful undead slave avenging his king-in-life by destroying the thing that killed Balor in death: empire.

The story—while still loaded with extermination sentiment and self-hating bigotry—yields a human-if-closeted monstrous-feminine element; i.e., one that—for this trans girl, at least—isn’t terribly difficult to understand from a Communist perspective despite its fascist aesthetic: tragic love. To it, Soulblighter escapes into Tharsis like Romeo steals into Juliet’s tomb, except he’s conducting a ritualistic murder-suicide against empire and capital for reasons only he seemingly knows! “Tempt not a dangerous man!”

Personally I think he’s doing it for his friend. Is it over the top? Sure. Is Soulblighter a war criminal? Yes, absolutely. But his revenge—no matter how twisted it might seem, at first glance—remains driven by a deep-seated hatred for the West betraying its soldiers and servants. Of them, Balor ranked highest in Soulblighter’s esteem. And while the game’s logic for Balor’s ire is a deep betrayal by the West forgetting Connacht’s sacrifice, Soulblighter’s motivations are tied to the man he served and probably loved (once upon a time, anyways). It’s not an endorsement of fascism to try to understand their motivations in ways we ourselves can relate to, then subvert.

Furthermore, it’s not exactly a stretch to see the gay elements to this particular Nazi—a human being despite his twisted will—having potential (if closeted) motivations that aren’t totally alien. It’s not any different than Melmoth or Dracula, meaning that—should we choose to—we could camp Soulblighter like any other monster in this book; i.e., like the Nazi or the Communist, on stage; e.g., like Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, what kind of story might Damas tell if given the chance to be more than simply “pure evil?” Makes you wonder…

[9] Not victims, because non-human animals cannot rape each other—at least not anywhere near how humans can; i.e., the latter knowing the consequences of their actions, but also having the capacity to torture instead of killing for shelter and food. In short, non-human animals might play with their food, but not through humans forms of sadism, cruelty and malice. They literally lack the faculties for it.

[10] Of the Tower’s infamous birds, Jonson writes, “It is not known when the ravens first came to the Tower of London, but their presence there is surrounded by myth and legend. Unusually for birds of ill omen, the future of both Country and Kingdom relies upon their continued residence, for according to legend, at least six ravens must remain lest both Tower and Monarchy fall” (source).

[11] Which is ironic, considering that corvids, unlike owls, are actually a diurnal species.

[12] For example, Odin classically kept two raven scouts: Huginn and Muninn, meaning “Thought” and “Memory.” They’re literally his eyes and ears (a concept for anti-Semitic, thus repressed heroic revenge that plays out in The Crow through Eric and his own pair of corvid eyes; i.e., the “foreign” agent hunting in the churchly ruins actually being a man of the West wearing a Halloween costume).

[13] Re: “Disgustipated” (1993).

[14] Maybe for his poor generalship; i.e., in one level from the first game, the player must assassinate four Trow lieutenants, after which Soulblighter traps the Legion in a magical “Chinese box” called the Tain (no relation to the China Miéville 2002 novella, but does combine closed space, giant spiders and Lovecraftian elements for a bit of a tone shift/scene change).

[15] Whose D&D alignment is generally “neutral,” but in truth is simply apologizing for empire by working for those who pollute the world as much as Saruman does.

[16] The irony of war machines is they generally got smaller over time; e.g., a catapult, trebuchet or canon versus a WW1 belt-fed machine gun. Then again, the carriers for such armaments remain as big as ever—an aircraft carrier or nuclear submarine amounting to a mobile fortress housing many weapons and men. Unlike Tolkien, Bungie limits the forays in Myth to guerilla warfare with human units. Hence, why we get giants to literally stand in for ancient war machines (or tools of deception, like the Trojan Horse, but the game has no use for such tactics).

[17]  Often appearing as moderate; e.g., The Guardian and similar organizations, but also George Orwell or Max Brooks, the latter writing World War Z, which used the anti-fascist phrase in French; re: “Ils ne passeront pas!” used against a worldwide plague of zombies. In doing so, Brooks—the Jewish son of famous satirist, Mel Brooks—fails to distinguish between fascism and Communism. Context matters, folks, but do praxial stances.

[18] The Trow, when weakened, turn to stone and shatter to dust.

[19] “Odysseus at length succeeded in making Polyphemus drunk, blinded him by plunging a burning stake into his eye while he lay asleep, and, with six of his friends (the others having been devoured by Polyphemus), made his escape by clinging to the bellies of the sheep let out to pasture” (source: Britannica).

[20] The gods are classically portrayed as giants; Myrdred—while being Jewish-coded, also possesses the ability to talk to giants, alluding to a trickster role comparable to Loki (with actual ravens being able to tug on the tails of predators to get them to fight each other):

Loki, in Norse mythology, a cunning trickster who had the ability to change his shape and sex. Although his father was the giant Fárbauti, he was included among the Aesir (a tribe of gods). Loki was represented as the companion of the great gods Odin and Thor, helping them with his clever plans but sometimes causing embarrassment and difficulty for them and himself. He also appeared as the enemy of the gods, entering their banquet uninvited and demanding their drink. He was the principal cause of the death of the god Balder. Loki was bound to a rock (by the entrails of one or more of his sons, according to some sources) as punishment, thus in many ways resembling the Greek figures Prometheus and Tantalus. Also like Prometheus, Loki is considered a god of fire (source: Britannica).

(source: Mythipedia)

In short, working with a cartoonishly vampish, short-statured, balding and effeminate “double of Loki” against Soulblighter amounts to Alric’s Promethean Quest by proxy, one the Deceiver does not survive. In the interim, though, his ability to negotiate with the Trow makes him the thief of the fire of the gods that ultimately kills him (Shiver’s death raining orbs of white fire down onto him, blowing the Deceiver to pieces); i.e., he “cheats,” and cheats—even if done for a good cause—get punished (also he’s gay and Jewish-coded, making the punishment more automatic).

[21] Bungie’s war narrative is collected as a volume—something traditionally sent to one’s widow or brethren after its owner dies. Here, the Narrator’s archive serves as a record comparable to Tolkien’s accounts of real war told through imaginary war as “ancient history”; re, Molly Ostertag’s “Queer Readings of The Lord of the Rings Are Not Accidents” (2021):

The frame story Tolkien created for The Lord of the Rings was that the tale was simply translated from a much older historical document [like Otranto, minus Walpole’s camp]. This is established in the book’s introduction, where the author describes how Bilbo’s private diary (i.e., The Hobbit) was preserved and expanded by Frodo (and later Sam), becoming an account of the War of the Ring. That volume, The Red Book of Westmarch, was preserved and transcribed, and passed down as ancient history — “those days […] are now long past, and the shape of all lands has been changed” — until it ended up in Tolkien’s hands (source).

The opening to Myth even mirrors Tolkien’s language:

In a time long past [emphasis, me], the armies of the Dark came again into the lands of men. 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. Heroes were born in the fire and bloodshed of the wars which followed, and their names and deeds will never be forgotten (source: Mythipedia).

The irony is precisely that Connacht is forgotten. Furthermore, the homosocial themes are somehow even more repressed than Tolkien, feeling like a Lovecraftian (hence homophobic) version of LotR, whose queer subtext is wholly abject vis-à-vis the Tolkien-style lore and built worlds. Many of my criticisms towards Tolkien and his refrain apply to Bungie’s landmark, if-somewhat-obscure computer game—indeed, if not more so because Capitalism in 1997 was neoliberal and globalized in a way that Tolkien’s own regressions were not (the author critiquing world war in The Hobbit only to essentialize it in LotR).

[22] The dwarves in Myth are entirely ranged fighters; unlike Gimli, they use traps and explosives instead of an axe. The men of the West, however, mirror Tolkien’s great swordsmen and magicians (the shades being the closest thing to Ringwraiths that Myth has): Crusader-like warriors, and the game’s berserks (above) combining a Scottish highlander with a Germanic phrase. It’s fascist soup.

[23] Akin to a bad lover/parent; e.g., like Dennis from Always Sunny—the D.E.N.N.I.S. system effectively being a parody of pickup artists (FX Network’s “Is Dennis a Psychopath? | It’s Always Sunny Running Gags,” 2022).

[24] Who the game all genders as he/him.

[25] To renovate Shiver, I took her namesake, Ravanna, and built my own trans self/alter ego, Revana, around it; i.e., as one of Gothic Communism’s mascots (another being Glenn the Goblin, who reclaims anti-Semitic qualities of the goblin in a sex-positive manner, below):

(artist: Autumn Anarchy and Persephone van der Waard)

To it, humanizing the witch as normally anti-Semitic and fash-coded requires doing what Maguire did with Elphaba, just as we presently did to Soulblighter and Damas; i.e., creating a human side that is haunted by the state’s accusations of the accused, mid-witch-hunt: “And you are only a caricature of a witch!” The trick is to take these variables and make them something the state (and its wizardly proponents) can monopolize to use for its own greedy ends; i.e., flow power towards the state and consolidate it there through police (us-versus-them) violence inside the state of exception.

[26] Remember that Medusa is undead and blamed for Capitalism destroying the world; e.g., the Countess from Castlevania, but also similar monstrous-feminine giving the hero the weapon to slay with; i.e., the conservative reward of sex as force, but also the Original Sin argument: “Strange women distributing swords is no basis for a system of government!”