This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

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

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Understanding Vampires, part two: “The World Is a Vampire”; or, Bloodsports and Prisons from Old World to New World, Archaic Mothers and the Monomyth to Bloodthirsty Capitalists (feat. The Darkest Dungeon, Alice in Borderland and The Matrix)

The time has come to say fair’s fair
To pay the rent, to pay our share
The time has come, a fact’s a fact
It belongs to them, let’s give it back

—Peter Garrett; “Beds Are Burning”; Diesel and Dust (1987)

Picking up from where “Understanding Vampires, part one: Leaving the Closet” left off…

After the crash course on vampire basics, “Understanding Vampires” part zero and part one considered the history of sodomy, queer love and vampires; i.e., evolving out of the 1970s into what they are today through my (and similar scholars’) work, examining how I came out of the closet and used such work to stand up for myself and others like me (re: critiquing Marxist-Leninism, among other things).

(artist: Chris Bourassa)

Part two shall now consider—if cursorily—the bloodsport-and-prisons potential of vampires between The Darkest Dungeon and Alice in Borderland’s Old World and New World approaches (and bring up The Matrix and Foucault, where relevant). As well as various bits of parallel media that span the globe, it shall likewise consider how both kinds of stories comment on vampirism as something to simultaneously censor and canonize (as sex [and by extension gender] always are); i.e., as a biologically essential function of capital preying on the world at large—first through the monomyth and then simply as a thoroughly cutthroat prison structure built around its own myopic bloodsports: Vampire Capitalism as something to offer your neck to, sans irony or resistance. Often enough, said sports abandon the mythological cosmetic together while still abusing workers, nature and the monstrous-feminine en masse; i.e., during all the usual witch-hunt predation occurring under Capitalist Realism as a prison in more ways than one (regardless of sex or gender but classically as female, which we’ll focus on here, some of the time)!

Note: The remaining pieces of this module—”The World Is a Vampire” and “I See Dead People”—are a bit truncated/survey-style, but concern ideas we’ve talked about elsewhere (e.g., ludology and ludo-Gothic BDSM). I’ve already explained where you can go to read more vampire pieces by me, in “Understanding Vampires,” part one; “I See Dead People” shall do the same with ghosts. —Perse

P.S., Similar to “Leaving the Closet,” “The World Is a Vampire” hasn’t been divided into smaller divisions (mainly because I want to keep this as short as possible—69 pages again, haha—and if I subdivide everything then I’ll naturally want to expand on what I divide); instead, there will be signposts (whose meaning is, again, self-explanatory so I won’t summarize them:

• What’s in a Game? Explaining Bloodsports

• Old World Horrors: Red Hook’s Nazi Vampire Bug Mom

• In between Worlds: World Vampirism and Shared Concepts

• New World, Old Game: Vampire Capitalism in Bloodsport Gameshows Weaponizing Plato’s Cave (from The Matrix to Alice in Borderland and Squid Game)

• Head Games: Reflecting on Borderland’s Prison World in and out of Our Own Lives

• Closing Arguments: Understanding and Challenging Vampire Capitalism

What’s in a Game? Explaining Bloodsports

Before we begin, I feel I should explain what I mean by “bloodsport.” The combination of nouns should paint a clear enough picture of the basic idea, but I want to connect the compound to Vampire Capitalism; i.e., as something to think about relative to all the history we’ve gone over thus far but this time focusing on the feeding mechanism as defined by Marx: “Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like lives only by sucking living labor.” Keeping with my Gothic ludologist origins (my bread and butter), Vampire Capitalism is a kind of predatory game whose Capitalist Realism plays out in bad BDSM as structure; i.e., that isn’t fair or mutually consensual, harming instead of hurting! It’s a prison (more on this specifically when we look at Borderland and The Matrix).

In short, while vampirism is an exchange that in theory goes both ways, capital is a bourgeois system of theft that only exists to flow power in one direction—into the state’s greedy mouth. In turn, it paralyzes its prey through confused predator/prey mechanisms, generally predicated on us-versus-them illusions, antagonizing nature-as-monstrous-feminine and putting it cheaply to work. This is Vampire Capitalism, which the state achieves through bloodsports; i.e., us versus them flowing power in one direction and criminality unto those it steals from. Some vampirism appears old-world, like the gladiator’s arena or Gothic trek into carceral spaces where such feeding is reputed to unfold; some, like corporations, are more updated, recent, and closer to home in new-world forms.

The old-world examples are a kind of window dressing concerning old topics that have survived imperfectly into the present. I’d like to provide them first in order to set the table and flirt with different elements of vampirism that, while largely stripped from new-world forms, can still be thought about poetically through metaphorical compare-and-contrast. Both involve games-in-games that we, the audience, look upon and think about as metaphors for capital, hence our own lives. And if you ever think the Queen of Hearts is a little underwhelming as a vampire monarch, remember that her actions on an army of feeders translate easily enough to more bombastically medieval forms: weaponized libido, but also gamer mentality with ignominious outcomes; e.g., a loss of one’s humanity by trying “to beat the game” through killing all your friends and associates inside the same prison complex!

Despite the lack of a barbarian aesthetic, new world forms are no less predatory or cruel in their theft, nor complete in developing Capitalism Realism (which is synonymous with all canonical forms discussed herein): concentrate us in easy-to-reach spots, and squeeze the blood out of us (and stab and inject us with all manner of paralytic agents and killing tools, the theft a one-time deal killing new workers over and over regarding an expendable owned population regenerating itself for capital to endlessly steal from/extirpate).

(artist: Jan Rock)

Canon, then, creates cops and pacifying illusions that hold labor in place, letting the state feed through these fang-like traitors—the metaphor less some giant vacuum or syringe and more a root with smaller and smaller branchings-off into the soil, sapping it of its nutrients until everything is depleted. The salubrious effect is illusory—the elite appearing refreshed but in actuality hungrier than ever before. Thus their unquenchable thirst must mount and compound by turning workers against themselves, using labor (whether cop or victim) up like fuel inside person-like spaces (re: Eco, and the heroic cult of death—see: “A Lesson in Humility” for examples); i.e., as part of nature, labor policing itself in the usual Cartesian ways: the proxy boot of the state on our throats, the monomyth superbeing traitor cowardly adopting a similar do-not-resist, thieving approach that organizations and their hunter-like individuals can enact, and which their prey accept to a Pavlovian degree.

Subjugated Amazons, for example, triangulate against their own, gentrifying and decaying inside prison-like territories; i.e., as might-makes-right executioners axing those even more helpless in exchange for dregs to fuel their own cloaked, status-symbols muscles[1] (above). Sex and force abide by these concepts, as do violence, terror and morphological expression, synthesized per oppositional praxis during the usual monopolies/canceled futures and our challenging of them (and their accomplices) through the usual aesthetic dualities.

(artist: Kitty Bit Games)

We can camp all of this. The state has vampires, but so do we; i.e., plenty of swole Amazons working for the cause against a shared systemic adversary. Per Matteson, our vampirism and ability to manifest and play games through ludo-Gothic BDSM must camp canonical iterations; i.e., the state most of all, including all its heteronormative, cryptomimetic bid for power’s rape and death fantasies: our death and rape at their hands, during the bloodsport/prisons being state dogma we take back (along with the lands these rest on) occupying the same stages and streets, and while addressing the usual police-state feelings of anger and helplessness the monomyth doesn’t: “Despite all my rage, I’m still just a rat in a cage!” (Smashing Pumpkin’s “Bullet with Butterfly Wings,” 1995). We’ll start with the Countess from The Darkest Dungeon, then move onto Alice in Borderland’s prison vampirism.

Old World Horrors: Red Hook’s Nazi Vampire Bug Mom

(artist: John Craig; source: Daoud Tyler-Ameen’s “Mellon Collie Mystery Girl: The Story Behind an Iconic Album Cover,” 2012)

First, the Archaic Mother. Classically of the ancient world in nigh-primordial suggestion, she translates easily enough to something old-world in a quasi-European sense. The Darkest Dungeon is a dungeon crawler that deals with the monomyth battling of a hidden, unimaginable evil it calls “ancient,” and is proceeded by a handful of smaller bosses in a neo-medieval space: swamp, sewers, ruin and seashore (nods to Innsmouth).

However, in terms of vampires, the game’s primary, active example isn’t a male mammalian vampire with a castle, but a female insectoid vampire called the Countess. Her role as monstrous-feminine tyrant is one that Cartesian forces seek to dominate in all the usual monomyth ways, thus end the proposed curse For Now™. In effect blaming her for the larger circular decay going on (the state not just dead, but undead and eating itself through its sorry bloodline), Red Hook effectively abjects capital onto Medusa-as-blood-drinker and witch—an unimaginable scenario that presents the universe as not ruled by themselves, but by their signature rival: nature-as-monstrous-feminine—a BDSM, bug-themed Nazi mom feeding on your through her annoyingly mosquito brood.

Endlessly eating its population through “ancient” forms of sacrifice and torture, then, the Countess represents a common old-world problem under Capitalism that has become associated with an ancient imaginary past: malaria (one of the world’s oldest diseases, predating homo sapiens) alongside sodomy and aristocratic scapegoats that must be tracked down through the chronotope for invading the world of the living and stealing its blood; i.e., police violence committed by different fascist revivals; e.g., plague doctors, Vikings, arbalests, clerics, Crusaders, etc, aping their targets (such as the vampires from Crimson Court, but also the gentry from the second game’s foetor biome).

Ruthlessly hunted and killed, only the Countess’ inevitable, prescribed death can return the drained world “to normal”: sucking Medusa dry, Skeksis-style, the elite eating their own (note, the bottling of the witch’s blood as a capitalist would, below, and her revenge poisoning the vintage—talk about “hair of the dog”; payback’s a bitch)! It’s a lie, the power-fantasy moral judgements a summary execution that extends to all such beings policed under capital, in-game and out: the spoils of war to enjoy in ways that don’t actually empower the conquerors, but pit them against each other on unholy vintages while staving off true death.

This restoration happens vis-à-vis a looter’s redistribution of the matriarch’s stolen blood, an undead, blood-witch “invader” whose death, post-rape, reinstalls a patriarchal bloodline maintained through “cradle robbery” and incest, but also the conqueror’s own crisis of masculinity as threatened by a monstrous-feminine Medusa (what the ancestor calls “a bewitching predator” and “lurking threat” to his own dominance); e.g., playing predatory games out of sheer boredom (according to Red Hook). It’s Capitalism-in-small, but also a strawman false flag weaponizing the androgynous queer as phallic female/feminine and vermin-like: the alien queen with a parthenogenic ovipositor (whose eggs enter you from acts of vampiric rape, already fertilized and bursting from you in xenophobic, queerphobic language; re: the xenomorph as a transphobic symbol of rape that, as a spectre of Marx smuggling settler-colonial relics onto refitted vessels, becomes something to reject and attack by the classic detectives and she-warriors of Gothic fiction: white cis-het women, mid-Amazonomachia)!

Though this monomyth process of abjection, the Ancestor (a villain for the ages) drives forward on a ceaseless quest for radical order, all while harvesting the fountain of youth from his own subjects by drinking their blood out of an imaginary female double, then impaling them in brutal displays of indiscriminate slaughter! In Red Hook’s case, the “evil queen,” female variant is the hauntological “she-wolf,” a kind of “Nazi girl boss, serial killer” whose only purpose is to make the deplorable Ancestor sweat by deceiving him in kind: as “a bewitching predator” wearing a pretty human mask (though funnily enough, the black-and-red color scheme is shared by fascists and anarcho-Communists). She’s Original Sin hauntologized in vampiric form:

(exhibit 41h: Artist, top-left, top-middle and top-right: Chris Bourassa; bottom-left-and-right: unknown.

Top-left: “The world is a vampire.” The confusion of the present is par for the course in the Lovecraftian vein, which he himself could no more express than T.S. Eliot’s own mythic structure of the same period. For Lovecraft, expressing the horrors of Capitalism became weird, but also informed by the sexist, xenophobic, monomyth traditions of the West—the ludic outcome seventy-plus years later being a torture loop that never ends, demanding sacrifice without calling the monster what it functionally is: Capitalism. Everything is dislocated and out-of-joint.

Top-middle/top-right-to-bottom strip: As for the Countess’ assigned role in this grand scheme, she is a constantly hounded scapegoat—literally hunted down into a womb-like prison space, goaded and kettled/provoked there until she snaps by supercops hunting supervillains exaggerating vampire menace through vampire dogma. Increasingly threatened, she gradually reveals her true form, forced to show the massive, fortress side of herself [a castle in a castle, but also a godly, unattainable giantess’ physique] the hunters wish to confirm, then destroy after she bears arms against them [a death sentence]. Canonically zero attempt is made to humanize her or appreciate the xenophilic beauty of the Countess’ non-human, insect side; simply put, “the only good bug is a dead bug” and the insect must be crushed under the boots of men [and token women] in service of the state, policing the land as “corrupt,” needing to be purified [an argument extending to the blood as sick, diseased, “thirsty”: mass hysteria and Satanic Panic].

Eroticized forms exist prolifically within the fanbase, but their poorly-kept secrets tend to adhere to 1970s “Nazi BDSM,” sex-equals-pain-rape-and-death clichés geared towards a cis-het male audience [which, again, Sontag outlined in 1974]: the conventional-looking dominatrix personifying blood, death and the night through a leather-clad, black-and-red pre-fascist/Catholic color scheme, but also the conventional submissive as female, busty and entirely human-looking. Like green and purple, black-and-red is the color of scapegoating someone, but often a desirable/fearsome power tied to death and torture [which extends into fascism and Communism forced to occupy the same space under neoliberal canon until said canon defends capital’s defense from the fascist against the Communist; e.g., the Red Scare, Giger-themed BDSM in Stranger Things, exhibit 39a2].

Exceptions exist [the xenophilic, fan-made “waifu” monster girls, exhibit 5e2] but nevertheless present the vampiric monster girl as someone to subjugate by mostly-male monomyth dominators: a stake through the heart, but also crushed under heel. The Countless is the Bride without a Groom, the waifu you can never wed who will straight-up skull-fuck you for funsies [the death fantasy and the rape fantasy foisted onto male victims as well as female]. That being said, she’s a tough customer—someone who, having a normal kawaii form and a “berserk,” Numinous kowai form so common to Medusa under reactive abusive, refuses to go gentle into that good night inside her prison-like home: 

I went into the Countess fight having never fought her, before. Fighting her was quite possibly the most stressful experience in a game infamous for such moments, and I technically won the fight! I did so by the skin of my teeth, but cannot stress how close this fight was: using a group that was equipped to specifically deal with her resulted in the closest match I’ve ever experienced [source: Persephone van der Waard’s “The Countess,” 2018].

Her heart bleeds because we won’t just love and worship her like good little subs! Alas!

In short, Red Hook wanted a bloodsport scapegoat who would not only fight back furiously per the monomyth refrain [a digitized version of tabletop games somewhere between Cameron and Tolkien’s refrain, but also D&D as predating videogames only to become a kind of nostalgia to return to under neoliberal markets[2]] but absolutely rock your world by fucking back, her own bottomless appetites/female rage a ’70s-style black mirror projecting the hero’s police extremes back onto them. Sound familiar?)

The undead and their sleep-like/drugged “necrophilia” varies per type. Vampires fixate on closeted/outed sodomy tied to human essence; i.e., as something to feed on while the victim is asleep and/or hypnotized. The lure goes both ways, the Countess being the chum to bait the sharks, and her being a megalodon to chow down on them once in reach; i.e., shark week (itself being a period euphemism among so many others, and the game having mosquitos come once a month [in between bosses] that, like the Countess’ terrible menstruation, paradoxically suck blood into her vagina-like prison space until she is defeated, permanently ending Miss Flo).

Apart from tokophobia and vaso vagal, vampires in general embody old-world metaphors for torture, rape and addiction, but also non-verbal communication and psychosexual abuse—where canonical examples, with laser beam eyes, can walk into a room and immediately pick out the most vulnerable target (usually a previously abused woman, but also the Ancestor’s fragile ego). And vice versa, the “prey animal” senses it too, feeling the terror of earlier abuse/the paradoxical thrill of vaguely being sighted and hunted again inside a public, crowded setting by new sadistic forces: often at a masked ball, that, upon its termination, the hunter will come calling in the dead of night, asking to be let inside (this romance—of Radcliffe’s “demon lover” serial killer pastiche—being something we’ll unpack even more in Volume three, when we look at criminal hauntologies).

Verbal or not, good communication remains paramount, as failing to interpret the signs/read the room involves unnecessary risk[3] of serious physical and/or mental injury. Non-verbal, involuntary submission generally occurs through the visual trope of “hypnosis”; i.e., of captivity under a dark, menacing force by confusing the freeze mechanism with desire (and vice versa). It’s a quick, animal way of communicating through body language in a modern setting, often among strangers in places that already treat women like sex objects; re: masques, onto sports bars (xenophiles and disco bars subverting the entire process, encouraging “sodomy” as a mutually consensual activity during cruising as a kind of sex-positive vampire’s liminal expression), but also videogames and their own sports-like competitions of manufactured scarcity speaking to women’s bodies (or anything comparable as a submissive prize to chase and claim; i.e., people who menstruate, but also feminized AMAB parties): the golden ticket bought at a steep, bloody price!

(artist: Popogori)

This rape fantasy isn’t limited to vampires (e.g., the xenophobic princess threatened by the dark, imposing rapist, above), but is taken most literally in vampiric clichés: the swooning damsel being most iconic—at least, in amatonormative circles—when depicted as a teenage debutante scooting on her butt away from the hungry undead zombie, vampire, and/or sex animal, what-have-you. Vampires generally reduce to drooling idiots when sensing a target’s vitality as within reach: so close you can taste it; i.e., the blood of the maiden’s torn hymen, and conversely the period blood of the same person’s hysterical womb “wandering” outside her body to spook and drain superstitious men (who fear Medusa’s revenge). When taken to apologetic extremes in any genre, this fantasy of rape is unhealthy and dangerous, but also romanticized; i.e., the sodomy of the male vampire’s torturous, unreproductive sexual activities that suck and threaten a woman’s perceived virtue, but also her sanity and ability to presently resist his coercive charms under ambiguous, cloudy and passionate circumstances. The same idea inverts per female circumcision beheading and bleeding the Countess: a barber’s bloodletting (which classically used leeches). It’s not medicinal, but punishment dressed up as “medicine” (similar to the medicalizing of queer AMABs).

Regardless of gender or sex, the canonical vampire can never stop, driven by needy compulsion; i.e., like a drug addict seeking a fix. It also operates through a modernized version of the master/slave dynamic in sex-coercive BDSM; i.e., to be under someone’s power, surrendering yourself completely to them during situations of ritualized peril and consent-non-consent, which, if done incorrectly or with a bad-faith partner (contract violation) become harmful, even fascist (re: Sontag). We’ll examine these forms of “bad play” during the chapter about canonical torture versus exquisite “torture,” in the Demon Module; in Volume Three, we’ll explore more ways that bad play in the Internet Age makes BDSM self-defeating for both parties (and examine in Chapter Three of that volume how Internet-age bad play can be subverted during appreciative irony and peril during Gothic counterculture art and/or porn-as-art). Just know that while we can certainly camp such sodomy arguments presenting we monstrous-feminine (male, intersex or female) as whorish, unnatural drainers—i.e., rebels reversing the rightful flow of power and fluid—a they present unironically in ways that call for police violence against us!

Vampiric or not, the Gothic trope of the treacherous old Count (which is what the Ancestor is, in Darkest Dungeon) symbolizes aristocratic property (which women historically went without). While the female vampire frequently boasts these assets, canon tends to depict her power as “hag-like” but false: a disastrous claimant covered up by a beautiful-if-perfidious outer guise; i.e., the Archaic Mother dressed up as Jane Austen’s scheming Catherine de Bourgh or Chaucer’s Wife of Bath—a lady to fear by an increasingly sexist and xenophobic male scientific body!

To it, Cartesian dualism would personify in Abraham Van Helsing and similar “good doctors,” conducting superstitious, medicalized witch hunts in the late 19th century onwards—i.e., against “hysterical women” and disease-spreading queer people, below—and for which terrifying horror stories prolifically and spontaneously emerged from then on out. These would remain perpetually concerned with, and fixated on, the safety of maidens, children, and men of reason from a moral panic’s rising crisis/perceived menace; i.e., those threatened, a priori, with degeneracy and aristocratic, Jewish, non-European and/or dark queer revenge—itself abjected unfairly (through selective collective punishment) onto the disparate victims of a Cartesian hegemon’s mad science. Doing so, said in-groups concocted their own ammunition by which to hunt us down and destroy us: Original Sin, updated to scapegoat Victorian victims for the fin de siècle. Canonically essentialized, the ghost of the counterfeit furthered the process of abjection beyond their wildest dreams. They would have all the blood (and women) they could possibly want!

(artist: Von Hauser)

To that, not only is the Countess from The Crimson Court dressed to kill (so to speak); she’s insectoid in a stigmatized sense, negatively tying her vampirism to male emasculation according to an “ancient,” human past—with the insect tied to death, decay and rebirth/transformation, but also wasp-like parasitism as fundamental to their life cycle: only the mosquito female harvests blood and it’s to feed her babies (though in this game, males also feed per the sodomy metaphor), and female wasps need protein to feel their babies, not themselves (re: “‘My Quest Began with a Riddle’: the Caterpillar and the Wasp,” 2024)! The imposturous nature of such beings is anthropomorphized and leveled against state victims, making them of nature-as-monstrous-feminine, thus vengeful.

Not only is her ladyship’s hunger in The Crimson Court endless, gigantic and endemic to nature; it overlaps with Cartesian anthropomorphism to chimerically express alien sexuality and gender in various, abject, psychosexual metaphors. Under the Capitalocene, these bugbears tend to communicate coercive sexuality as prescriptive; i.e., linked to human biology inside a demonized, dollhouse facsimile, itself an imaginary site of patriarchal trauma pushed onto an abusive, doll-like idea of the Medusa’s lair and its occupant: a hive and its queen, Grendel’s bug mom.

In ludic terms, the canonical hag is generally the Metroidvania’s “ultimate boss” (e.g., Mother Brain standing in for Cameron’s Alien Queen; i.e., being the original Metroid’s infamously difficult final boss, which the Countless lives up to in her own game); her cruel and deliriously hungry scheming historically-materially ties to the “dishonest” acquiring of power through stolen essence: marriage being the acquisition of the only power a woman was allowed to have in ancient times (e.g., Portia from The Merchant of Venice dominating her materially poor and inexperienced male husband, after the wedding concludes).

On Red Hook’s already-stolen premise—romanticizing death by Snu-Snu—the dastardly Countless drags the player into her prison-like rape castle; i.e., through a kind of Gothic “shotgun wedding” (though, in truth, and oddly enough for a vampire, sending the player invitations, letting you attend the Crimson Court if you want, but if you don’t, must deal with her annoying suitors/offspring for the rest of the game[4]).

Presently penned, Red Hook’s barbarian iteration of bloody prison sex offers the audience an old-world, less-efficient (brutal and destructive) version of Vampire Capitalism. There will be blood, but also much pomp and circumstance; i.e., Queen Maeb’s party for the ages! Soon, though, the extravagant novelty wears off—a rival dominatrix power growing stagnant, and all to advertise a stale, Masque-of-the-Red-Death bloodline that needs to go in place of another arguably even worse; re: “a roiling apiary where instinct and impulse were indulged with wild abandon”; i.e., while the hero tries to restore the Ancestor’s daddy-dom sovereignty in the Countess’ stead (despite him being the world’s biggest asshole)! It’s a land back argument that state forces deny the abused! Keeping with Aliens, BDSM becomes the neoliberal catalyst for state revenge; i.e., punching down against Medusa exiting the closet in the 1980s, her so-called “hysteria” a red flag to waive at the bull playing the matador (“Red Bull gives you wings”—red wings, that is).

Our lady, then, lives on borrowed time, her days numbered on the player’s calendar as they seek to invade and reclaim her land as “stolen.” Hounds on her t(r)ail (and thirsty for menses), whether she wins or the player does, nature takes her ravishing course: the Babylonian’s Whore’s holes a clever trap to suck power out from her would-be slayers’ fang-like lances. For a time, power goes in both directions.

(artist: Eves-eme)

While the “attractive” eroticizing of vampirism is more recent (re: Anne Rice), it still happens differently to female vampires than male vampires. Under the Male Gaze, female vampires present in a more “pin-up” style; i.e., fleshy merchandise that becomes increasingly less “white” the more buxom and shapely they are (except for the giant, “Barbie-doll” breasts, often designed by male artists being alienated from the female form; e.g., exhibit 41i, next page). Resisting the desire to appear conventionally attractive (and docile) is canonically relegated to making the female vampire ugly and fearsome, thus deserving of police violence from patriarchal forces that restore balance; i.e., while scapegoating xenophilic women (and similar activists) as “other” (with ugliness tied to historically stigmatized animals and peoples; re: Pagan women as blood-drinking hags). In short, our lady is transvestigated—hectored by status-quo witch hunters eager to pull off her fancy clothes and release her seemingly-small-but-actually-giant biology and alien gender! Stripping is not consent!

In doing so, Red Hook has fed into dated, sexist stereotypes, deeply exploiting them in order to fashion their strongest adversary for the player to overcome; i.e., through sanctioned, xenophobic violence (exhibit 41h). Fruitful diplomacy isn’t just abjured; it’s entirely unspoken—the myth of the woman who could kill you but doesn’t[5] being utterly rejected for the same-old seeking of power entirely for male interests: Patrilineal Descent (which the game ascribes as wholly Promethean). Likewise, elite proponents abject any potential “good play” involved with this female insect demon—invalidating anyone who entertains the idea and stigmatizing “pest” animals useless to Capitalism (save as scapegoats) while simultaneously ignoring the fact that insect transformation isn’t universally negative in eco-friendly humanist works; e.g., Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” (8 CE) or “Ode to Psyche” (1819) by John Keats.

Clearly there’s plenty of room to humanize these witch-like aspects of the vampire. We shall further explore, some of these problems and witch-hunter solutions present “feeding”-/-mimic type monsters; i.e., they blend in (or try to) but also, like the wandering womb and religious-to-secular dogma that comes with it, seem to appear out of nowhere:

(exhibit 41i: Artist, left: Sun Khamunaki; top-right and bottom: Tigrsasha; middle-right: Banshee Milk. Despite their ability to imitate ghosts and lycanthropes with mist and animal forms, vampires default to a human state—generally tied to adult entertainment and the exchange of sex in abject metaphors tied to dated, formerly religious forms of consumption: “transubstantiation,” or the rapturous miracle-torture by eating of Christ’s flesh and drinking his blood. In doing so, the cannibal-vampire gains everlasting life; i.e., blood magic permitted unto the faithful, provided they police heretics, witches, what-have-you, as abusing the same devices in a Paganized form. From sodomy to hysteria, blood libel is blood libel, which moral panics anticipate and immediately attack once out of the bag [which jiggle deliciously when struck by fanning fingers]!

To this, the nature of the blood as something to consume is poetically imprecise but formulaic; i.e., tying to erotic/supernatural, sex-dungeon clichés that stretch hauntologically back to “medieval” times, yet have simultaneously evolved into new xenophilic mimicries abjecting the monstrous-feminine as “hysterical,” wild, and untame: per canonical BDSM inventions thereof, alienating and fetishizing the process to serve profit in prison-like forms.

Depending on the aim of the artist, they could easily swap out blood for darkness, flesh, erotic vitality and/or sheer lifeforce. The paradox of eating “darkness visible” does nothing to dull the frequency or essence of the exchange; that cheapness comes from Vampire Capitalism and its endless, predatory search for profit—i.e., by exploiting workers through their “merchandise” under coercive prison-like conditions. Their bodies incarcerated as xenophobic, but also intimate, psychosexual symbols of violent exchange, any subsequent policing approaches police exploitation through a popular mode of consumption: the erotic and BDSM, medicalized through canon. If the blood and sex are “starved” and cheap, then look to where the nutrients are stored: the coffers of the elite! We’re made of the stuff; let’s slosh it about, then take and give it back, paying it forward to spite our greedy jailors! May they wither on the vine!

All the same, there’s a stubbornness to workers that endures in spite of compelled starvation, weaponizing the privatized imagery against elite jailors through liberated sites of sexuality and essence. “Any free woman in an unfree society will be a monster.” The Countess canonically dares to hold court in the shadow of the Ancestor’s ruined home; i.e., returning from the grave to snack on his descendants when luring them, as poachers chasing big game, tempestuously into her prison-like crypt [“Huge tracks of land!“]. By killing her as we do, xenophilic vampirism reclaims our blood from those who would siphon it out of us and sell it back for a profit: a restaurant transfusion. The Queen is dead; long live the Queen!)

 

In between Worlds: World Vampirism and Shared Concepts

With the Archaic Mother adequately covered, let’s move onto world vampirism before segueing into new-world forms (eight pages): from the old world moving towards the new across a global network (a common theme in Stoker’s novel; i.e., the New World [for Dracula, a European Count/”old[6]” money coming to prey on the British petit-bourgeoisie in a post-Industrial England] invaded by evil, bloodsucking symbols of depravity and wandering Jewishness transplanted onto whorish BDSM and queerness). This isn’t our close-read for Borderland, yet; it’s thinking about how old-world themes unanchor and present in a variety of stories, which shall include that story when we get to it!

(artist: Karen B.)

As you can imagine, a monster’s “type” informs the visuals and their metaphors. Within “pure” vampirism, for example, the feeding ritual is often hypnotizingly beautiful, tied to physically impressive embodiments of current beauty standards granted a hauntological aesthetic: the white bridal lace splashed red with vivid gore (exhibit 41j). Pure or not, the bloody exchange (and its shocking contrast) remains symbolically ambiguous, draining one’s overall fluids but also their faculties. Those involved positively drool (re: ahegao, left) losing control as any good orgasm is quick to do; they drown in desire and suitably hover in place, well-and-truly “ravished.” Conversely, the drinker undergoes a similar effect, evoking John Donne’s poem, “The Flea,” as a xenophilic plea to spare the process from harm:

It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,

And in this flea our two bloods mingled be

[…]

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since

Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?

Wherein could this flea guilty be,

Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?

Yet thou triumph’st, and say’st that thou

Find’st not thy self, nor me the weaker now;

‘Tis true; then learn how false, fears be:

Just so much honor, when thou yield’st to me,

Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee (source).

Vampirism, like the poem, is—at least in part—about sex through mixed, metaphysical metaphors: the at-times queer draining of or supping on blood, which reliably saps both parties’ of their collective wits (and, through Indigenous language, the land they call home of its value being given and exchanged, back and forth); i.e., a repletion of girthy tumescence, whereupon the presumed swelling of ones’ sex organs occurs with perhaps more blood than exists inside their own brains, but also blood and effort from others during the laborious exchange (the “O face” being associated with a loss of control and deathly rituals of fun reenactment, last image; but also, perhaps, related to the flow of blood [and the righteous blow of an orgasm] to particular parts of the body besides the brain).

As you might imagine, this xenophilic, necro-erotic engorgement synergizes with body heat; i.e., as something to cater to, regarding parched consumers thirsty for more: hot blood for what is normally denied to us/alienated by capital, yet sold in plain sight during a manufactured division enterprising know-how can capitalize on:

Shake down, rock ’em boys, crack that whip strap mean
Pulse rave, air waves, battle lies in every place we’ve been
Stealing your hearts all across the land
Hot blood doing good, we’re going to load you with our brand (Judas Priest’s “Delivering the Goods,” 1979).

It’s not just a bloodsport, but a trade in plasma that’s anything but pious! On the cusp of greatness, then so many sell out (as Halford and company did, in the 1980s). Salvation’s sale of indulgences first revive, then paywall paradise as usual.

Occurring between the sacred and the profane, then, neoliberal shock therapy chills the blood; i.e., sells its stolen value back as “warmth,” but bottled from the dead harvested while alive. As dimorphized similar to “male/masc” vs “female/femme,” open vs closed speaks to an open-heart procedure leaving us terminally exposed and dependent on state monopolies and falsehoods. Under those abysmal conditions, Foucault’s productive arguments suddenly return to the fore: of psychosexual discourse, his prison arguments warning of a terrible division, the two parting during a 19th century rise of the bourgeoisie that moved in and never left! With them, prisons (and their discipline-and-punish approach to labor) would explode in a capitalist sense. The boys were back in town!

To it, men own things and control them/relegate them to “in the home” and the dreaded bedroom as prison-like; women are “kept” inside “for their own good,” whereupon they are raped without joy or irony. Those who violate this sacred temple doctrine and its multitudinous performative constraints are violated themselves through the argument of righteous punishment, which project onto fleshy and thirsty carnivals. These, in turn, can be camped, but always exist in the shadow of prison, thus police violence. In my own words; re “Why I Submit”):

I digress. Non-traditional alternatives should also be made available to the public. This includes the aforementioned cat and fem boys, but also the male variant of a Gothic heroine. “The greatest anxiety for the woman reader was the Gothic heroine’s lack of agency,” writes Avril Horner. Postmodernity makes the role performative, letting cis women/trans persons consent to submission. They can voluntarily yield to greater forces. And from cradle to grave, I can be the Gothic heroine too—Samus, or even subbier forms [depending on who I’m with]. The same phenomenon is happening with men everywhere. Not just male members of the Lady Dimitrescu fan club. From all walks of life, men are escaping outmoded traditions—expressing themselves freely in public. This growing freedom allows for the inclusion of feminine boys in a wider sphere. Not just in public, but through content creation as a form of public expression. Now more than ever, male actors and models can perform Gothic scenarios; this includes being “in danger” in a traditionally “feminine” way (sadly to wear “feminine” clothes can very easily make someone a target):

Unfortunately there is a real element of persecutory danger to this performance. Not because the performers are being impudent, but because sexist, fearful men will attack them. Note Cursed Arachnid (the e-boy to the right); their position and clothing are “feminine,” and their shirt reads the words “orgasm denial.” There’s an element of sexual tension combined with the uncanny—the familiar and the foreign, but also the taboo. When I was younger, my uncle had a shelf of books in his living room. One row featured Hot Blood, a [1990s] horror erotica series by Jeff Gelb and Michael Garrett. I was fascinated. Time passed, and eventually I watched Bible Black, a hentai series, in secret. A scene stuck out to me: a man under a female witch’s power. “Let me cum!” he begged, his face twisting horribly as she rode him. The voice acting is absolutely awful, but the concept remains theoretically attractive. Not just orgasm denial, but naughty witchcraft as a whole: The whole show was soaked in black magic, every scene a dark ritual that explores the forbidden and the profane [including the spilling of blood during sex] (source).

Through sodomy arguments that extend to morphological expression, camp seeks to subvert market forces and material argumentation during “violent” counterterror dialogs fitted with BDSM aesthetics (“ribbed for her pleasure” gimp suits scaring the straights with genderqueer metamorphosis liked, by those parties, to AIDS). Unable to think clearly during forbidden, arguably scandalous rituals, sodomy practitioners become thoroughly drunk; i.e., inundated with intense, “religious” sensations of ritualized “doom”: erogenous pleasure and non-harmful pain spiting a Protestant ethic (and all its bugbears/double standards). The whore is always asleep, but threatening to wake up again, still wearing the maiden’s ill-fitting dress:

(artist: Kabhaal TV)

Be this sanguine xenophilia purely vampiric or combined chimerically with other monstrous elements, the modularity of undead feeding at night—during the troubled sleep of nightmares/wet dreams[7]— become something to invade conservative hauntologies with: through queer nostalgia as demonized by snooty xenophobes (e.g., Beltane or Walpurgisnacht as something to revive during oppositional struggle; i.e., as a kind of lost history that must be reimagined by those who survive, often through xenophilic music, performance art, and/or Gothic media bringing us closer to reality beyond capital imitations—Trent Reznor, next page).

Pain and sex can certainly go hand-in-hand, but they needn’t automatically. Jadis, for example, loved pain as a non-sexual expression of taboo pleasure that rankled conservative prudes. During especially intense BDSM sessions, they reputedly became “dead to the world.” In truth, they were experiencing a medical phenomenon called the vaso vagal syncope response. At first glance, it’s not so different from an orgasm (or vampiric hypnosis). Likewise, it bears the symptoms of extreme forms of exertion not immediately dissimilar from childbirth or combat; it’s also caused near-instantly by certain visual triggers, including the sight of blood and the threat of unwanted harmful penetration[8].

I can vouch for this, watching Jadis—normally made of iron—nearly faint during my vasectomy procedure: not from the surgery itself, but from seeing my exposed blood as the doctor operated on me!

Likewise, while my own memories about Jadis—requesting that I hurt them during BDSM—have soured considerably, the initial instruction and their body’s reaction was, and is, fascinating to me from a medievalist standpoint; i.e., in terms of how different it was from conventional stereotypes about inflicting and receiving pain through “medieval” torture. Indeed, it was closer to a convulsionnaire, inflicting wounds to cause rapture, thus ease trauma-induced torment and PTSD from modern life under Vampire Capitalism!

As such, Jadis could take physical pain far more than I could dish it out (unless my technique was bad, in which case they would correct my form). Said pain suggested that the quality of the trauma Jadis endured—surviving their own abusive mother—was equally extreme. In part, controlled pain was their antidote, long after she was dead and buried; but they always took it out on me. To force them to confront their own love-bombing tactics (they liked to wine and dine me, in particular), made Jadis feel uncomfortable; i.e., a bit like showing a vampire its own reflection, something always in the way and not entirely present or sensible: the female/queer predator’s lack of sensation, of self, save when eating someone! Jadis couldn’t stand the thought of that; it froze them in place—knowing they had to take unconditionally in order to feel complete/sated, acting just like their imposturous mother had done with their own confused pleasure/pain and predator/prey mechanisms!

(source: Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer,” 1994)

Clearly the process of exacting pain/extracting essence or performative trauma can be positive or negative, but nevertheless raises vital questions when viewed; re: my twin brother and I asking the heart-and-lung-machine operator when we were little, “How did they get blood out of the cow?” / “Did it hurt the cow?” / “Where’s the cow now?” Furthermore, the socio-ludic mixing of a given feeder and those fed upon by them happens relative to a given slaughterhouse space, the exact substance(s) being exchanged varying tremendously. “Torture” (with or without quotes) becomes grotesque or gourmet, concerning vampires. Such blood libel concerns purity of the blood/holy spirit as feeding into capital’s usual Cartesian dualism, and dualities of oppositional praxis contest that as a means of camping canon.

Said camp includes xenophilic BDSM and calculated risk. As a part of the praxial equation, its carceral vampirism is forever ongoing but also in conflict with xenophobic interpretations’ fear and fascination unfolding in conservative, even fascist, “old-world” language; i.e., whose power-and-death, prison-like aesthetic can be camped, occupied and played with as needed:

(exhibit 41j: Model and artist, middle-to-right: Blxxd Bunny and Persephone van der Waard.

Similar to blood, meaning and knowledge are stored in music concerning vampires [top-left: Burning Witches’ The Dark Tower, 2023]. Such things [and their fash-adjacent aesthetics] are dualistic, allowing for all manner of political expression; e.g., Brutus Bathory’s left-leaning approach to Satanism in metal, but also political critiques on heavy metal sell-outs [“The Ideology of Dave Mustaine,” 2024] and Satanic Panic in the genre’s broader history [“How the Right ‘Stole’ Metal,” 2024]. The battle for the Gothic’s soul—its power over people’s hearts and minds—is eternal!

Canonical vampire stories concern the marital rites of women [queer or not] as “enshrined” under hypermasculine power’s usual operatic spaces [the queer-penned Gothic castle taken by cis-het women and exploited; re: Radcliffe]. Trapped within carceral tombs that highlight the woman’s utter lack of rights, the narrative operates in service of a vice-driven, powerful husband lording over his [usually stolen] wife: Count Dracula; i.e., who the heroic, good-guy Belmonts routinely hunt to extinction: scapegoating the fash-coded interloper as a presence of routine corruption versus acknowledging the state as forever in crisis by design.

From Prometheus to Pygmalion to Persephone, various metaphors are tied to the blood as something to boil, curdle or chill inside the prison; but as a poetic expression of emotions, sexuality and health, vampirism echoes a special kind of trauma locked away inside castles and other Gothic structure: ludo-Gothic BDSM, or the ability to play out our “death” for different reasons. These violent, dated homes anchor the brutal, erotic exchange of human blood [and its medieval spillage] inside spaces loaded with haunting reminders of actual male tyrants [and female ghosts]: their legendary cruelty and depraved appetites, which establish dubiously “pure” bloodlines through force and lust.

[artist: Karen B.]

Ignoring any campy version’s cryptonymically [show-and-hide] aping of the Catholic miracle—doing so to profane and upend profit in BDSM language’s black-and-red, power-and-death bedroom games, its cathartically unequal power exchanges—the canonical vampire’s imperative carries these methods beyond the castle walls in bad faith; i.e., to unironically imprison their victims with, or steal unwilling brides from the modern world back into the barbaric past dressed up as the victims the state normally polices [evil women and gay people]—all to be their whores, profaning the sacrament of nuclear families and institutional marriage [re: DARVO arguments and obscurantism, whores and maidens distractions and dogwhistles]!

As the name suggests, then, Vampire Capitalism capitalizes on this abjection, circulating the myopia as an unbroken, imaginary ring—a prison of the mind staring prey-like at whorish bicycle face and sodomite alike. Real struggles are simultaneously trivialized and courted with false predatory doubles selling rape by the bottle: “First one’s free!” and addicts commonly tokenize [many (white, cis-het) TERFs styling themselves witches and vampires to keep the poetry away from those they demonize and prey on, themselves; re: the equality of convenience].

Of course, this exploitation applies differently to different marginalized groups [no shit]. From a Western standpoint, the theft of the [white cis-het] woman “wastes” her reproductive potential, ruining familial potency and blood “purity”; i.e., by trading unfairly and hastily for the body of the woman as a vessel of quick, cheap pleasure. In turn, her precious blood becomes something to selfishly horde and pimp out in neoliberal sales of indulgence. Imprisoned underground inside the endless, murky dungeons, a vampire’s servants are kept “strung out,” dependent on the master’s stores to survive [often their own finite supply]. These “brides” do not normally bear children through PIV sex; they receive human blood as a transference of raw ecstasy and violence that subjugates them; i.e., turning them undead through their own stolen labor given back to them, then requiring them to feed on living labor to continue labor’s imprisonment [whose own servants tend to be weaker and less aware than they are—still vampiric, but also subserviently zombie-like: a pyramid-shaped hierarchy of vampires feeding on those under them and passing the blood upstream].

[artist: Ickpot]

Vampire Capitalism, in this canonical vein, is a process of subjugation tied to blood tithes and fluid exchange—the wanton, undead concubines operating as drugged sexual slaves who not only survive considerable trauma, but transform into thoroughly jaded, brainwashed/closed killers acclimated to dated expressions and rituals of power inside Gothic spaces; e.g., Cammy White cloned from M. Bison, above; i.e., the regressive, monstrous-feminine Brides of Dracula—a canonical appropriation of sodomy to enforce the status quo: a blood maggot inside a “demon lover” ghost of the counterfeit who commits blood libel for their daddy dom demanding his nightly tithes! Thus capital blames women, witches and faggots instead of itself, all while stringing and pimping them out.)

The classic vampire from Western Europe, for instance, typically champions fearsome, xenophobic legends about the medieval, pre-Enlightened past as continuously reimagined; e.g., Vlad the Impaler as a mighty “Eastern” threat (the pre-fascist Nordic, German, or so-called “Goth”). As time carried on, it was out with the old and in with the new, but various things historically-materially stayed and can thusly be reinserted into the public’s imagination (their willing throats): impalement, crucifixes, the drinking of blood, garlic, etc. Geared towards a shifting idea of the past and its materials, these generational reimaginings express corruption less of the blood in a literal sense, and more as “data” carrying cultural freight to enact blood libel with; i.e., superstitiously fearful beliefs about sexual reproduction tied to sanguine, Jewish calumnies, sodomy rhetoric, but also Catholicized metaphors and that religion’s symbolism concerning the soul: gilded icons, scarlet clothes, and ritualized exchange of essence (often through fluids) tied to a dated, post-Schism embodiment of Protestant superstition demonizing all of the above to pit different parties against each other in a global market.

Simply put, blood outside the human body has become canonically abject stemming from a formerly sacred ritual turned into blood libel: Catholicism and transubstantiation married to BDSM, post-1970s cryptofascism and neoliberal Red Scare. Currently trapped between the holy and profane, its indecent, gruesome, “almost holy” exposure communicates a special set of phobias and bias when extracted: the essence of vitality tied to dated, superstitious rituals and demonized religion, but also signs of violent, reactionary crime, ill omens, and numerous diseases caused by capital that capital projects onto its own victims inside its prison-like places, peoples and performances.

For instance, syphilis and rabies are linked to nocturnal animals, but also sinful activities, wherein various essential fluids are messily exchanged between lucid-if-addicted human parties: AIDS and queerness (the bat overlapping with werewolves[9], in that respect; e.g., J.K. Rowling’s vindictive use of the werewolf as a latter-day conservative metaphor for AIDS [Salon, 2016] that blames queer people—but specifically homosexual men—for their “own” disease). Just as witch hunts aren’t restricted to a particular time or place (re: Federici, “Hot Allostatic Load“), to be queer is to be closeted, accused, quarantined, rumored, feared and fetishized: diseased whores and dandies, wolfmen, and vampires serving the elite’s punitive, fear-fascination function among the European, British and American middle class.

(source: Joshua Anderson’s “ Where is the Power of the Werewolf?”)

To that, terror literature and heteronormativity’s canonical, hauntologically criminalized treatment of the vampire—as caged, vulgar innuendo (e.g., “staking” as a visually violent and excessively medieval form of rape and sexualized negative reinforcement; i.e., connected to Vlad the Impaler and similar historically hypermasculine, pre-fascist strongmen)—is fundamentally at odds with latter-day queer interpretations of vampirism celebrating the same metaphors for sex-positive reasons (often ridiculed by the status quo; e.g., Kevin Nealon complaining about “gay bats” to John Travolta, in the 1994 “Gay Dracula skit” on SNL). Gothic Communism’s use of ironic xenophilia touches upon the increasingly homophobic, “bury your gays” moral panic of vampire canon’s faithful, cis-het queer-curious to queer-hostile consumers. As a kind of vampire slander leveled against gay people, blood-libel xenophobia sounds absurd to persons who know conservatives aren’t as prudish as they like to style themselves; shlock, for these reasons, camps canon to poke fun at conservative superstitions acting stupidly xenophobic, but whose guilty pleasures are nevertheless taken dead seriously by these same witch hunters! The heat-oppressed brain has a fever—one whose “prescription” to their boiling blood isn’t more cowbell; it’s blood libel!

Thus bigotry begets more bigotry as a feeding frenzy. Having evolved into their current mindset of reimagined myths, these reactionary zealots are responding to what Dale Townshend once described to me as the following transition come and gone: “‘The love that dare not speak its name’ had, by the time Stoker wrote Dracula, become ‘the love that wouldn’t shut up!'” It’s not hard to throw stones in glass houses if the state shelters you; i.e., from the subsequent nights of the long knives and broken glass. Men like Matt Walsh and others are abusing the language of witch hunts to validate and justify pogroms against state victims… which they then greedily mop up the spilled blood, spreading the sickness of society in all directions, during Vampire Capitalism. Workers round up so-called “degenerates,” then police the ghettos (and have those ghettos self-police in turn).

Queerness is generally associated with forms of sexuality that don’t produce babies—anal (and the blood that can result from that) but also sex during menstruation, which Jadis lovingly called “murder dick.” Conversely but with the same “painting” materials, blood is canonically linked to the torn hymen and subsequent staining of the snow-white gown (and skin, marriage consummation linens, etc) with fresh virgin blood (often a lie, given how rare virgins historically are). From this mendacious perspective, any canonical phobias tied to vampire blood openly condemn the defilers of white virgins during extramarital affairs; i.e., the myth of the black rapist/male sodomite from the out-group, while in-group double standards simultaneously covet white women as helpless, dumbfounded property (the “think of the women and children” subterfuge) that, themselves, “break down” whorishly once a month:

(exhibit 41k: Artist: Nolwen Cifuentes, of whom Salty World writes, “Period sex happens every single day, all over the planet, but the subject still remains taboo. Sure, there are private conversations between us, we share our tips and experiences, but we never SEE other people having period sex, and certainly not queer couples—not in porn, not in women’s media—never” [source: “Taboo Smashing Period Sex Portraits,” 2023]. In canonical narratives, the period symbolizes the escaping of the wandering womb as a kind of exsanguinating female madness; i.e., hysteria, except increasingly queer iterations are abjected into forbidden, murderous, womb-like spaces occupied by dark, phallic women; e.g., the xenomorph as a surreal, Gothically liminal egregore, but also a vampire par excellence!

A point of contention among iconoclasts is that period sex is palliative re: in that it can ease the pain of periods cramps. If one’s cramps are so severe that they cannot function, then that is not healthy! And yet, popular myths to the contrary normalize this. Women are expected to suffer in silence and not complain [which intersects with other forms of abuse that they also shoulder in domestic life]. Simply put, God wills it, which translates to Vampire Capitalism, easily enough.)

 

As such, the messiness of a particular feeding agent and vector denotes various intersections presented as “past.” With female vampires, the phase “bloody mess” can symbolize menstruation, but also intensely pleasurable sex during menstruation (or any of the above topics) as dualistically xenophilic. Such activities often collide with rape, hysteria, nymphomania, and kinky BDSM rituals afforded a transient past traded on a global level; e.g., Anne Rice’s nomadic vampires, uprooted from their “ancient” homelands and delivering forbidden pleasures to queer audiences, of course, but also a predatory white, cis-het female audience that cares little for us fags (with queer people being the ideal and arguably intended readers, by Rice).

So, while it’s true that blood can be incredibly subversive under the right conditions, playing with blood is something that profanes from the sacred, canonical perspective that many women are subjected to. Blood—but especially female blood—becomes a sticking point regarding “civilized,” xenophobic attitudes about the barbaric past: something to exchange through violent, corrupt sexualities that have gradually replaced “healthy” reproduction; i.e., the hoarding of virgin human blood like a king his pile of gold. They love and hate it as a matter of forbidden, wicked consumption they can then police to serve profit; i.e., in prison-like hauntologies brought into the new old out from the old.

This concludes the old-world approach to vampirism under capital, as well as world vampirism leading to a new-world approach. I now want to consider this per Alice in Borderland as new-world Vampire Capitalism; i.e., while looking at The Matrix and the role of prisons/police violence in such concentric illusory systems!

Except, this also brings us to something stated at the start of “They Hunger”: our original manuscript’s examination of undead egregores and their feeding habits. This originally involved three main exhibits (two in this chapter and the third in the following chapter about composite bodies, inside the Demon Module); re:

• ideal hermeneutic case study (feat. vampires): the Gothic, Marxism, queer studies and ludology (now “The World Is a Vampire”)
• cryptomimesis; i.e., liminal riffing and ghostly lineages (feat. ghosts)
• composite bodies/collages (feat. the Bride of Frankenstein)

My goal in preparing them as I did, back then, was to help workers reunite with their labor as undead, encouraging them to think differently about the assorted egregores already present in Gothic art; i.e., as a creative, fluid, sex-positive mode of genderqueer thought and existence that offers itself up in vivid, accessible ways. To be holistic and well-rounded (to best combat capital as a worldwide and multimedia threat), I want to perverse this model when looking at new-world examples of Vampire Capitalism after having examined old-world examples.

We’ll start within the ideal case study for liminal expression under Gothic Communism; i.e., one that covers the entire Gothic Communistic Hermeneutic Quadfecta (re: gender and Gothic studies, ludology and Marxism): Alice in Borderland, for vampires (and The Matrix, too). Its vampirism pointedly describes the modern world (specifically Japan) in crisis through harmful games controlled by the elite. Make no mistake, though, Borderland remains a show with a queen and a castle. The Queen of Hearts is a charming adversary and dressed to kill. She also prides herself as above everything while the bloodsport rages on; while society decays into a techno-medieval hellscape, she gets her daily dose of blood!

Except, the bourgeoisie’s own charm is very much brute force, enabled by their position as seductive in a one-note sense; i.e., a doll-eyed shark rigging the game to get their daily dose of that drug-like blood (the only time they feel alive): addicts of misery (which is what their content, their brand, is). Raw sodomy arguments are swapped out for basic, blunt-force game rules; everything is uncannily cute or ordinary in appearance, the state a vampire of the New World, corporatized without the tell-tale cartoon fangs and Gothic pastiche seen in The Darkest Dungeon. Instead, coercive BDSM is present as a matter of infernal slave contracts, prisons and cops, infernal concentric patterns, games-inside-games, the owners forcing people to rape and kill each other for their sadistic, heartless amusement; i.e., Smashing Pumpkin’s “super destroyers, sent to drain” and leaving those they abuse feeling trapped in their maze-like illusions. Similar to Top Dollar, it’s the only time when those like the Queen are happy—to shout, “Off with their heads!” and relish in the crucifixion-style bedlam it causes. “When in Rome…”

Note: As we proceed, “blood” is an abstraction for predation/theft; i.e., anything that capital (dead labor) steals from workers (living labor) to enrich the elite at our expense, and which we dualistically take back by any and all anisotropic means (reversing polarity and therefore abjection according to blood flow). Prisons, then, take and take, raping prison populations in spaces built for profit; i.e., exploitation in ways patently meant to cause harm in order to achieve profit.

Keeping with our definition, “rape”—”‘to disempower someone or somewhere—a person, culture, or place—in order to harm them,’ generally through fetishizing and alienizing acts or circumstances/socio-material conditions that target the mind, body and/or spirit” (source: “A Note about Rape,” 2024)—is synonymous with “theft,” is synonymous with “blood” according to the usual flow of power and resources towards the state through prison-like structures/metas during Vampire Capitalism. The state only ever takes, and never gives back; i.e., always up, never down, on a one-way track to the elite. By comparison, Gothic Communism’s ludo-Gothic BDSM and proletarian vampirism give and receive per exchange—often during uneven-but-negotiated arrangements that (and here’s a small sex worker secret) take power by giving up a bit of something for something. Sex or unequal power (among other things) are traded by both parties, achieving mutual catharsis during a pedagogy of the oppressed.

I’ve done my best to explain what follows in a linear fashion; but also readily admit and accept that non-linearity and post hoc assembly is the nature of good, intelligent play during holistic analysis. Like a bad puzzle, capital trains people to work within prison-like confinement; i.e., rats in a maze, Pavlov’s dogs taught to bite/see everything as a threat, cats eating mice, etc. Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communists deconstruct and reconstruct these massive, obfuscating environments as messily as needed—doing so out of old parts to redistribute power horizontally among all workers; but until then, they occupy the same maze capital’s canonical vampires and their us-versus-them, cops-and-victims, cat-and-mouse rhetoric do. The warfare is inherently asymmetrical and, as you’ve probably noted, completely unfair! That’s nation-states for you! It’s an uphill battle with the sun in your eyes!

As I will try to explain in this section, then, any attempt by workers to subvert Vampire Capitalism and its negative, one-sided effects happens with the same vampiric language and aesthetics used by state forces; i.e., inside the same shadow space/prison areas during ludo-Gothic BDSM; re: where the playfulness known to videogames commonly allows players to camp canon in and out of videogames as a form of negotiated power exchange established in playful, game-like forms (theatre and rules). —Perse

New World, Old Game: Vampire Capitalism in Bloodsport Gameshows Weaponizing Plato’s Cave (from The Matrix to Alice in Borderland and Squid Game)

Per the bloodsport, then, these modern-day monarchs’ greatest weapon is, much like the Caesars of old, bread-and-circus-style games and the prison-like illusion of power relaid through said games; re: Plato’s allegory of the cave (c. 380 BC) actually predating the Roman empire; i.e., his own works, Republic, coinciding with the Roman Republic, which eventually decayed into an imperial version of its former self (27 BC). To summarize Plato, he warned against “the cave” as a prison of the mind; i.e., wherein higher forms of reality existed outside the cave in a place called the Realm of the Forms, but for which ordinary people (not controlling the illusions) would never be able to access (chained, as they were, to stare at the cave wall’s shadow plays unfolding in front of them). Such machinations, despite their age (and Plato’s literal, metaphysical treatment of them), neatly summarize bourgeois power abuses like those seen in Borderland, executed by the Queen of Hearts. Power flows in one direction, and it is up.

Furthermore, such bloodsports have increasingly become a parasocial exchange between different parasites, the master coding her servants to play along through capital (moving blood money through nature). The disco is less “in disguise,” then, and more a dogwhistle that canonizes postpunk forms:

I never said I wasn’t gonna tell nobody
No, baby
But this good lovin’ I can’t keep it to myself
Oh, no
When we’re together it’s like hot coals in a fire
Hot, baby
My body’s burnin’ so come on heed my desire
Come on, come on

Two of hearts
Two hearts that beat as one
Two of hearts
I need you, I need you (Stacey Q’s “Two of Hearts,” 1987).

It’s FOMO from Hell—a “buy now!” con that swells into its own mania/mad drip (also, absolutely no disrespect to Stacey Q—Zeuhl loved her music and passed the infectious beat along to little ol’ me—just that, the elite cultivate such false sensations to starve people of their own power and then put them alongside it. Masters of propaganda, the elite skillfully deprive and bombard us; i.e., with false connections we must take back when using the same language: stealing our hearts back, thus our labor and the land, vampirism and groovy music from manipulative dickwads; re: Zeuhl abusing said music, themselves, to get what they wanted from me before tossing me aside).

Except, the games the bourgeoisie offer have been updated and unfold accordingly under capital, which very much didn’t exist during the Roman empire! In turn, these gamemasters give us the “choice” to play their game as a system; i.e., capital feeding on players through Faustian contracts that always play out through bad BDSM and harmful vampirism. Yes, their games have rules and seemingly can be lost or won. But despite how games in general can be positive-sum (source: Britannica), zero-sum and negative-sum (win/win, win/lose, lose/lose), capital only allows for zero-sum games benefitting themselves. Profit makes them cum, greedily drinking our blood and giving nothing back; our best revenge is to survive and deny them such lopsided domination now and in the future—by putting the gay in game, the play in Plato to fight profit with every fiber of our being! “McScuse me, bitch? I throat-punched that bitch!” (Libbie Higgins’ “McScuse Me Woman Rages Over Extra McRib,” 2016).

As described, Alice in Borderland is very much of a New World approach, concerning games and life as one-in-the-same, and whose embedded, concentric vampirism resembles older forms in function. The story is the game and the game is a prison narrative presented as—you guessed it—a bloodsport in a shadowy open world. Meant to control players, the shadows present as games-inside-games, illusions-in-illusions, per the cryptonymy process. In short, it’s an apocalypse whose revelation lies in a dream space where the citizens of a place—already on the verge of collapse—come repeatedly to grips with exposure; i.e., in ways that illustrate Vampire Capitalism nakedly among the house of cards. In queer terms, it’s the closet—a prison of the mind, the bars of the cell a shadow likeness resembling our own world! They show us our own deaths and rapes in ways we can stand.

(artist: Zoe Volf)

To be clear, there are no overt, supernatural examples of vampires or sodomy in Borderland—nothing that compares aesthetically to those we’ve previously examined here or elsewhere. But there are plenty of games that fulfill the same undead, essence-concerned role; i.e., a prison-like world that forces its local population to fight to the death for the entertainment of an invisible, all-powerful audience; re: the bloodsport. In doing so, here, Borderland depicts Japan’s Tokyo as never being a place to live, but a liminal space to die (for profit) disguised as a residence!

Prisons are powerful institutions, Foucault illustrated; just as we took and removed his ideas from a problematic man to understand queerness under capital, we can take Plato’s old-world quackery and update it to speak to our liberation (and won’t be the first to have done so, the Wachowski sisters’ Matrix being mentioned here, as well as Squid Game coming afterwards); i.e., not something to pimp out and drain us of our brain’s blood (sex being a common distraction, but also shamed as a ruse), but ludo-Gothic BDSM that plays through sex to smuggle rebellion back into the games we play! If those in power treat us like idiots to exploit each other for profit with, then we have to trust that people can be retaught; i.e., learning better ways to flow power and resources through vampirism and games back towards us (there’s room to blame players and games, but ultimately the prime antagonist making people stupid is Capitalism).

First, capital is concentric and built through smaller systems on top of, but inside, larger ones; i.e., a “gobstopper” effect, insofar as the enormity of the overall system is felt through miniatures that, per Capitalism in small, speak to its largest aspects scrambling our brains. Big prisons, little prisons, Vampire Capitalism houses and blinds its prey to feed on them; i.e., profit = theft of labor and wages. Expressed poetically as “blood,” everything is rooted in the land (and exploitation of its people) through police violence regulating sex and force, but also violence, terror and morphological expression per the usual monopolies, trifectas and heteronormative, Cartesian, and settler-colonial, binarized qualities of capital.

In turn, this hall of mirrors is monitored by police agents chosen from the prison population to alienate and sexualize all workers inside; i.e., cops, selected by the warden and his officers to police something so large that it requires them to appoint less powerful token officials all the way down the American-Liberalism pecking order (re: Howard Zinn and Americanized concessions with the middle class). The panopticon always watches workers with workers, but its gaze multiplies/amplifies like an insect’s kaleidoscopic vision: to reward those who play along and punish those who do and don’t!

Keep the above explanations at the back of your mind. To overcome the prison-like nature of Vampire Capitalism and its harmful myopia, we’ll be juggling and combining a lot of different variables (what gamers refer to as “mental stack,” which capital uses to distract, busy and overwhelm us, while turning us into cops that eat each other for them; i.e., little vampires giving to big vampires).

All of this being said, onto the shows themselves!

At first glance, Borderland and Plato’s cave might not seem related, nor either of them to The Matrix. To summarize Borderland, the show is very much a story about survival and emancipation inside the prison, as such; i.e., a rag-tag group of unlikely heroes surviving bourgeois forces, hence Vampire Capitalism. Much of the story/game orbits around the fish-out-of-water, Alice (a boy this time, surrounded by women more physically capable than him). He and his friends aren’t conquerors, but misfits faced with their homeland eating them alive. In it, the usual fantasy—what if playing videogames could teach me how to survive an apocalypse?—comes to bear. And fair enough! Games are both fun to think about and to play with in this respect, but also vital to our survival when empire decays; i.e., when the bare blood of dead people, painting the town red, exposes state predation superimposed over sites of daily life. Except, the fantasy speaks to the possibility of systemic transformation starting with the Platonic realization: that power in the cave is not only fake, but harmful. That’s not too far off from what The Matrix arrived at!

Luckily—and as I’ve hopefully established by now—power is an illusion we can interrogate (thus develop) away from state doubles! Regardless, ludo-Gothic BDSM is still dangerous (state admins/power gamers [cops and vigilantes] will police us to monitor and enforce intended rules, thus predation and rape as a matter of power abuse conducive to profit). As usual, these “gamer abstractions” speak not just to hidden powers, but operations unfolding right in front of us, requiring we read between the lines; i.e., through Gothic abstraction: compare this to that as a toy to play with. Holistic analysis accounts for returning to games to play them differently for liberatory purposes!

Gothic Communism is a holistic discipline for a reason, then; i.e., prison-wise, Capitalism is a multistage and multipronged attack, therefore requiring multiple means, methods and materials of study through the Gothic mode to decloak its abuse. Vampires are a common example (revered for their supernatural powers, including superhuman speed, sexual prowess, hypnosis, and transformation abilities), but so are card sharks (the irony in Borderland is that the King of Clubs is naked by choice, and playing against the hero in good faith):

To it, liberation and enslavement exist within the same half-real stages, boundaries and intended/emergent rules of play. Like a chessboard, the two go hand-in-hand. As we talk about Alice’s own canceled future, then, think of concentric illusions, insofar as we’ve discussed them and hauntological sites before in this series. Liberation occurs inside a prison for which there is no outside (of the text). It must be subverted and transformed inside of itself—as a game (of death) to play! You can only opt out for so long (with marginalized people never given that choice).

Per Gloggin, the idea—that reality is an illusion—again dates back to Plato’s allegory of the cave, but endures in newer forms that simultaneously expose and conceal capital’s titanic operations:

Mimesis or imitation therefore, as one form of play, is an essential element of poiesis, or the “making” of art, which in turn is instrumental in creating what some now refer to as possible or imaginary worlds, that is, fiction.

This traditional understanding of mimesis as an essential element of poiesis places mimetic play at a more distant remove from reality than even the shadows in Plato’s famous allegory of the cave from book VII of The Republic. Related in the form of a dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon, book VII allegorizes the human perception of reality, likening our reality to shadows projected on a cave wall. These shadows are perceived by human subjects, shackled around the ankles and neck and unable to turn their heads to see the puppeteers who cast shadows on the cave wall before them, which they mistake for reality. In other words, what mortals see and know is merely shadow, and this is what mimesis mimics — not reality.

Importantly, this version of mimesis and reality has long informed the marginalization or trivialization of mimetic arts as “mere play,” “just games,” or insignificant ludic imitations of reality. Likewise, the marginalization of play and its rejection as a serious object of study are motivated by the suspicion that play and ludic cultural forms are treacherous and capable of rendering us the dupe (source: “Play and Games in Fiction and Theory,” 2020).

In short, the suggestion—that we are enslaved and being fed upon by all-powerful (and frighteningly ugly) beings alienated from life—is both frighteningly real and easy to dismiss; i.e., things outside the cave, from beyond human perception (again, what Plato called the Realm of the Forms, which Lovecraft associated with outer space). To some degree, we must imagine class war among these shadows.

(source: Arthur Lazarus’ “Allegory Is a Powerful Tool in Medicine,” 2022)

Here, with Borderland, the gaslight feels half-real, taking someone’s suspicions and pitting them against the skeptic in ways they can play with and rationalize, but also subvert and challenge through games as sacred to canonizer and iconoclast alike: a ghost town to play such things out.

This is the prison that Plato’s cave represents under capital and Vampire Capitalism, hence Borderland, The Matrix and other such stories; it is the thing escaped through the games not simply played, but understood and operated in ways that break the elite’s almighty spell. It’s basically what the kids mean when they say, “touch grass,” except there’s a catch: capital—as Baudrillard argues—has become hyperreal; i.e., a map of empire composing the Real as something to experience, the thing it covers up a desert of reality that empire has destroyed. There’s nowhere outside the maze to go outside to, no outside of the text to escape! Instead, the pattern is infernal and concentric, only showing the audience a canceled future—one pointing to the worrisome cracks of empire and the desert beyond, during Capitalist Realism.

“We live in a simulation,” Abigail Lister writes; re: in “The Matrix | Explaining Jean Baudrillard and the Desert of the Real” (2023). As I argue in response, that is where we must make our stand! Whatever freedom workers can expect to cultivate and achieve (through the Superstructure) occurs during liberation as caged; i.e., as part of the ongoing textual operations therein; re: liberation and enslavement occur in the same spaces’ poetic thresholds and on their shadowy surfaces: during liminal expression/remediated praxis’ ludo-Gothic BDSM!

Simply put, liberation occurs through play during liminal expression as half-real, on and offstage; i.e., trapped between illusion and reality less as separate and more two sides of the same struggle. Neo, in The Matrix for example, wakes up inside a dream that—when emancipated from the shackles forcing him to stare at the cave wall shadows—joyously allows him to soar through the sky like a god. He becomes a king of dreams, free to use the awesome power of shadows to challenge state forces and their harmful distributions of power and criminality! After all, prisons are police stations that have populations; i.e., to house, feed, punish and watch themselves, that they may leech resources for the elite from their sleepwalking selves. Nation-states are prisons, as are just about anything else; but some are given more privileges (through preferential mistreatment) to incentivize them to brutalize their own, affording ignorance to live longer than other inmates!

Like a vampire, then, Neo can anisotropically reverse the flow of power away from the elite and towards workers; i.e., the bullet with butterfly wings repelling state armaments used by state defenders, taking their desire to shoot him at all and scrapping it; re: “Despite all my rage, I’m still just a rat in a cage!” This starts with freeing Neo’s mind from the source of deceptions—games, albeit inside of themselves: Sisyphus smiling at the gods, knowing their tricks don’t work on him anymore. From there, whatever work to be done in aid of nature and workers starts with freeing our minds from the state as straight; i.e., The Matrix—an incredibly gay movie smuggled in as standard cyberpunk monomyth[10] fare—being a wonderfully an-Com, empowering genderqueer approach to Plato’s allegory that speaks to the awesome, queer-Marxist potential to games (and cyberpunk philosophies with a revived punk mentality): as they presently exist. To that, canonical videogames (or things comparable to videogames) repeatedly build atop age-old thought experiments about mind prisons that—like the power they house and abuse—rely on shadowy illusions of power to work as the elite desire!

Though ostensibly not a videogame, the same revolutionary idea speaks to Alice in Borderland and its ludo-Gothic BDSM. First, escape the prison by navigating its games in emergent ways; then help yourselves and others develop something better! Video or not, games are cool because they can set us free (to fags, classically closeted, thus abused under such conditions as fags are, but applying this desire for liberation to all oppressed peoples); i.e., rebellion is cool because universal liberation, intersectional solidarity and agency are cool! Giving towards that is cool because it gives back in return! We’re already in the prison, so the true punk, rebel, and faggot, what-have-you, must take such things to foster widespread opposition—to play as such that the state cannot predict, police, or otherwise control us! That’s all a prison is: predictability of outcome, a rigged game that ends in a blood harvest for profit (“With humans, the machines[11] had found all the energy they would ever need!”). The canonical dice roll is simply a pacifying illusion of control—the suggestion that someone else will be chosen to die!

Expect resistance, of course. There is no clear dividing line in moments like these, and even once you extricate yourself, further challenges await; i.e., there’s always another closet, Capitalism being the ultimate space to change through our revolutionary efforts: hiding and showing to get at things that resist apocalypse (re: “standing on the ashes of something not quite present,” illusions of illusions inside illusions). The emancipatory idea is to not take things at face value, but to play with and ask questions concerning them as shadow games. The more imaginative you are, the better, because knowledge is limited, imagination and play are not!

Furthermore, escape doesn’t happen outside of capital, but during liminal expression as a cryptonymic dream that—when it does start to break—can easily overwhelm the mind and test loyalties. Some regress; others question their sanity and the veracity of either side of the fence—the dreamworld and the reality beyond it less as separate and more a story-in-a-story but also a womb-inside-a-womb. To face that is to die, be born again, and be conscious the second time around!

The idea is so godawful that most don’t dare to conceptualize it, let alone recontextualize it for rebellious purposes. This comes with its own set of challenges: defenders of the cave who will attack outsiders, especially gay ones; indeed, people underestimate the power of faith in that respect—and refusing to attack systems that, for most, make up their core worldview/way of experiencing everything around them. They put their faith in something that will destroy them without a second thought; i.e., an illusion that—fake and covering a destroyed, desert-of-the-real territory (the world and nature)—feels more real to subjugated workers than anything while they’re actually awake. Simplicity trumps complexity inside prisons of the mind, the feeding happening not just “at night,” but at all hours one is asleep during class war (the lights are always on, during solitary confinement).

We are born raped, pushed into second wombs full of teeth. I don’t think there’s a better way to explain Vampire Capitalism and Capitalist Realism than that.

Likewise, “You have all the power you need, if you dare to look for it!” Rebels, then, are detectives that reject reality as supplied to them by elite forces; instead, they interrogate power through performance and play to engender new realities by rearranging how power is storied and played. Keeping with The Matrix and Borderland, then, the hero escaping the illusion is a dupe who searches, wakes up, and survives realizing they were bolted into a machine made to jam images into their brain and harvest them for their various resources (“bio-power” according to Foucault; labor, according to Marx; Gothic potential, according to me). Abjection happens by rejecting this reality as “mere fantasy and play.” At the same time, its reversal during ludo-Gothic BDSM involves facing and sending it back to those eating us (who generally must turn us into something they can stomach); i.e., by heroes increasingly skeptical of reality’s “face value,” who feel a subsequent possible world whispering to them in the current uncertain one; e.g., Neo called by Trinity to “follow the white rabbit,” and Alice following his own, in Borderland, towards the Queen of Hearts. Either leads to the uncomfortable reality that humans under capital are batteries; i.e., whose draining of their power is viewed as the ultimate success by elite forces (and who treat suppression through illusion as gangbusters).

Those who famously take the red pill (the actual waking one, not liberal centrism or conservative thought’s disastrous recuperations) do it because reality around them feels false, and they want to escape not to illusions, but from them! They’re dissatisfied with state heteronormativity and other lies, adopting new GNC propagandas and following the lord of darkness/king of dreams (which is what Morpheus, in The Matrix, is) into fresh spaces of dream-like possibility: of games to play and worlds to build better (and more honest and intimate) than the ones we’re in and suffering to endure, right now!

“I’ve never seen anyone like you—not while I was awake, anyway!” Persephone’s plight isn’t that she’s stuck in Hell; it’s that, once she finds Hell, she can never go back to the world of Light (which ironically is a cave filled with shadows). That world never existed—was built on a lie she must escape with people who not only won’t cause her harm; they’ll set her free: Hell is always a place on Earth, and one that we devils thereof make for ourselves—by turning the prison’s rape scenarios into a playground of “rape” in quotes challenging profit, hence Vampire Capitalism! That’s ludo-Gothic BDSM! To let things go both ways; i.e., the sub’s paradox being to give their blood, but to feel pleasure under a good dom’s care (taking their cum)! The state, by comparison, is a bad dom—the worst, in fact.

Performance and play are canonically impotent forms of escapism. By returning to these worlds to find/make disturbing comparisons to our own, we can begin to play differently and subvert capital’s usual vampirism. We can think critically and synthesize/unearth allegory inside elaborate hyperreal distractions, finding our own power once again as one might an old relic inside a powerful ruin. But such thought experiments demand active, intelligent and perceptive play, which only comes with practice, but also trial and error, hard work and ultimately, mistakes and loss (re: trolley problems; e.g., the prisoner’s dilemma). Charmed life, charmed play! Gothic Communism is not a spectator’s sport—marrying play itself to different schools of theory while synthesizing new development in a liberating direction!

As such, games are an effective way to communicate systems that are normally designed to conceal themselves. Japan, in Borderland, becomes a prison/dungeon for bad BDSM to unfold in gameshow-esque ways—a game-inside-a-game, but also different classes of games (acts of punishment and love, BDSM power exchange, packaged-and-sold commodities, lotteries, etc), an empty wonderland bordering on the usual realities that Alice ignored, holed up in his room; i.e., life as a game that has him, in Borderland, making the kinds of sacrifices he was already doing before entering the game outside his computer screen (the cruelty of the mechanism designed to make him reflect: on this past as shown in the do-or-die, kill-or-be-killed present mirroring said past, making those who survive more delicious: to the Queen of Hearts, but also others watching from places the players cannot see). As we shall see, so were all of the people he comes across and befriends. Capital has made them all, in some shape or form, vampires!

Concerning capital’s vampire BDSM, there’s no choice involved, the ludic contract a slave form and Faustian bargain/Promethean Quest all rolled into one! Play or don’t play, you die (the game allowing players to commit suicide) and are subsequently fed on to glut the elite, as usual (who grow richer as they cage you and watch you steal from yourselves, gameshow-style). As for the hero role, itself, Alice shows us how this needn’t always be bourgeois theft. However, cruel games are endemic to Capitalism, which treats privatization like a game: the manufactured scarcity of jobs and labor value as the stolen essence of workers in a very material sense (versus a phenomenological sense, exhibit 43d depicting ghosts we can camp in friendlier echoes of their former terrifying selves); i.e., the creation of corporate vampirism as a giant, figurative vampire structure tied to a ludic-scheme that exploits workers divorced from our aforementioned old-world supernatural themes (the themes in Borderland and The Matrix do invoke Clarke’s Law, however—technological so advanced as to be considered “magical,” but also Pavlovian, menticidal and dogmatic).

Committed by the bourgeoisie, the theft of worker blood remains permanent and irreversible (meaning the literal killing of workers, not their brainwashed minds)—a one-sided fakery existing in ways that double workers and invite for troubling comparison; i.e., as a dollish matter of play and roles inside the game as connected to real life and its own disparate socio-material conditions: the fatal transfer of power under prison-like environs meant to oppress labor and pit it vampirically against itself (note the red prison suits, but also the videogame button symbols on the masks/the vampiric gaze of the killer doll from Squid Game, below). Such games and their bad BDSM double themselves; i.e., gameshows that mirror bloodsports/death lotteries and concentration camps: rigged, with the developers/owners holding all the cards—literal people—in their bloodless-yet-bloodied hands! Victory is pernicious, hollow and winner-take-all. Something truly heartless and wicked is pulling the strings!

Squid Game is one “death lottery” later made unironically into real life examples that parrot the rigged, prison-like structure of the show-inside-a-show (with us watching the player watching the games begin and play out), but not its ironic critique of capital so common in science fiction/Gothic dystopias; i.e., black mirrors warning against Capitalist Realism parroting blind pastiche (e.g., shlock-shock rockers, GWAR—an unholy and insensitive cross between Anthrax, KISS and Spinal Tap—seeming to miss the point by a mile, with their death games pastiche, “Slaughterama” [1990] just sort of targeting everyone… except the line “Because when you’re life is shit, you ain’t got much to lose!” applies equally to the hippie, Nazi, and… “art fag” [come on, Orderus] equally).

You might have noticed, The Matrix conceals its game as not-game, keeping its cards close to its chest while imprisoning people’s minds. The battle concerns the hero freeing his mind while still inside the game, which he learns to play in ways its owners don’t want. This is done to make someone able to think again (or for the first time), versus simply reacting through fear unto rehabilitation (code for “behavioral conditioning”); i.e., to change whole systems by utilizing and responding to them differently than intended. Imagination sets us free.

Tracking with canceled futures, though, the rules in Squid Game and Borderland are not only explained, but openly shown as unfair games; i.e., precisely to illustrate how capital (and its vampirism) function by design: through creepy dystopian advertisements shocking people out of blind consumption and into critical modes of analysis that have them rediscover emergent forms of play as a mode of criticism and existence (re: the red pill, but inverting the Wachowskis’ usage of it). “Isn’t this fun?!” the game asks, leering at those who suffer inside it. They lack the ability to conceptualize that they’re not having fun. Furthermore, vampirism is still happening from moment to moment. Between the glutted bourgeoisie and battered proletariat, what’s good for the goose definitely isn’t good for the gander (the elite alienated from workers; e.g., Squid Game‘s aging and ghoulish proprietor playing the same horrible game to feel alive, only to die of cancer while describing themselves as “just a player” to that show’s yearly winner)!

Furthermore, this mimetic tension in Borderland doesn’t just remediate across one game type like Western Cards (specifically the French suit system exported to Japan, next page), but whose sense of compelled risk reverberates across local hunger games like the titular “Squid[12] Game” being a parallel, synchronistic text. Regardless of which, either Squid Game or Borderland serves as Alex Blechman’s 2021 conceptualization of the “Torment Nexus”; i.e., as something for the elite to make unironically based off a formerly critical source (source tweet: November 9th). To it, the carceral myopia of Capitalism Realism recruits workers to further the game as half-real, outside itself while playing inside itself; re: Zimmerman’s magic circle and Juul’s half-real “between the fiction and the rules” making workers unironically replicate games comparable to Squid Game and Borderland, but also The Matrix and others, in real life! Cultivating their own Superstructure assisted by class-traitor sticklers, the elite deliberately bury Blechman’s cautionary palimpsest to better prey on labor! Everything becomes more and more one-sided, always flowing up to the elite, never down (save to tokenize workers, and always with a drop from the bucket).

(exhibit 41h1: Artist: Sveta Shubina. The outcome or reward of many games is the girl; i.e., as someone to acquire through great struggle and adversity but also cheating [“All’s fair in love and war…”]. Often, in games of love, they are one’s opponent or adversary as much as the object of pursuit. While the elite use cards to “close doors” and present the impossible as a game to exploit workers, any workers in on the scam can open doors by reversing the process during ludo-Gothic BDSM—”Closing doors. This is a magic and sleight of hand term; it means canceling out possible methods in the audience’s mind” by showing them “proof” of an object’s solid or real nature, then incorporating that reality into the unreality of the magic trick as a disappearing act [Vanity Fair’s “Magician Reviews Sleight of Hand and Visual Tricks In Movies & TV,” 2022″; timestamp: 19:32]. The “cards”—in this case, the beautiful, monstrous women and other archetypes—have not disappeared; they have been hidden in plain sight by capital’s card dealers/pimps, keeping the labor value and potential of these persons and their bodies for themselves, then trickling it down at paying customers. It’s a scam, a card game where the girls are the cards and the players are the sharks. The point of the con is to make the player feel like a winner while robbing them blind, all their blood going to their head [and not the one with a brain inside it].)

 

Likewise, “bad” games in the social-sexual sense are the historical-material consequence of the Superstructure teaching workers to become unintelligent; i.e., playing stupid, trolley-problem games that exploit themselves and other people; e.g., sex is a game and you gotta play it to win (chercher la femme). Alice in Borderland is a dream-like, bloodsport, “game-within-a-game,” but the one episode or “game” we’ll examine from the show is set inside a creepy asylum (another kind of prison). First, we’ll talk about the episode, and then—as much as we can—apply its meta lesson to our own lives!

Head Games: Reflecting on Borderland’s Prison World in and out of Our Own Lives

The episode in question puts Cheshire inside an asylum, itself a series of trolley problems expressed in predatory social exchanges where direct violence is impossible, but death affected nonetheless through said exchanges: tell the truth to others about an RNG-card symbol on the back of their bomb collar. If you tell them the truth, they answer what the symbol is and stay alive; if you lie to them, they answer wrong and the collar explodes, instantly killing them. While it might seem ethical to always tell the truth, someone in the prison population is the Jack of Hearts, a serial killer who will lie to protect themselves. Trying not to be found, their motivation for playing the game directly contradicts everyone else, who cannot leave until the Jack is found; and the Jack is not found until they are killed. It’s the prison dilemma merged with smear the queer, yielding trolly-problems-within-trolley-problems!

Initially the episode denotes a fearful, uncanny presence of inherited power that our hero must try and survive: canon treats “winning” as not dying in a world that’s actively trying to kill you (again, a metaphor for Vampire Capitalism). Iconoclastically, this extends to the breaking of Capitalist Realism, exposing the larger game—Borderland—as something that can be changed inside of itself, via the asylum as a moral to build on; i.e., during emergent forms of play that become meta in service to workers forced by capital to be harmful vampires: when they take, nothing is given back. Like The Matrix‘ own illusory metaphors relayed in game-like choices and theatre, development regarding Borderland happens through ludo-Gothic BDSM breaking Capitalist Realism inside of itself—its ludic dualities either emergent or intended when serving or sabotaging state predation!

A more empowered variant of the twink than Dennis Cooper’s uber-liminal, twink-murder performance art, Cheshire (a catboy pun if ever there were) must use his emotional intelligence, BDSM know-how (from his cutthroat hospital days) and canny game sense to be smarter than his vampire-like peers inside the same quarantine environment; i.e., smarter than the people around him “eating” and “draining” each other through intended gameplay as forced upon them: find the Jack of Hearts and kill them. To survive the asylum, Cheshire must “play the part” in Trojan, emergent ways. Luckily for him, he’s already been made into something of a vampire himself, transformed through a neoliberal Japanese medical system emulating the West’s own prison-like models. Yet, Cheshire has figuratively sworn off the blood—is a pacifist, in ludic terms. He’s disillusioned, having played the bloodsport game before but lacking the thirst now needed to thrive in Borderland’s nightmare opera world.

Inside and outside of the asylum, something sinister looms behind the seemingly innocuous idea of a simple “game” and its illusion of player choice. Instead of players participating fairly through a benign ludic contract, Borderland comments on the gameplay as compelled entirely for the benefit of the elite: kill yourselves for us. The resulting chaos harms workers, but also humiliates them by design; i.e., intentionally affecting their gameplay choices, the larger game being a series of trolley problems, per level. Everything is neat and game-like on paper, but the rules—while cleanly defined—require a stunning amount of dialogic craft and guile (as they do in real life) meant to entertain the elite: watching Cheshire in the asylum watching those he used to prey on (and them watching back). He has remorse, and largely holds back—chewing the scenery as the others cannibalize.

Furthermore, those in positions of power will manipulate victims conditioned to fear violence from authority figures, thus defend said figures from rebuke. And this is precisely how the asylum episode plays out, Cheshire watching the other players fall victim to a hidden manipulator defended by the system: a spider-like puppet master granted a handicap by someone higher up in a vertical arrangement of power. Borderland’s asylum episode is effectively an instructional miniature for Sex Positivity‘s own arguments, taking them to figurative and literal extremes while critiquing Capitalism’s vampire nature inside a more subtle Gothic backdrop.

There, survival happens actively and on one’s toes, inside a game designed turn people against one another with confusing rules, a lack of clarity but concrete materials that promote severe, horrifying punishment in terrifyingly vague ways (decapitations are reminded by the slave-like bomb-collars, but explode behind closed doors). It’s a metaphor for repressed rebellion tied to literal/figurative incarceration while commenting on various gendered barbarities in Japan. There’s a lot being said but it’s happening in real time, all at once, while under threats of power abuse, sexual abuse, murder, mob mentality and so on.

Moreover, the bourgeois metaphor of the asylum game lie in its patently cruel design: a 25% chance to survive every hour, but a 0% chance to survive if someone lies to you. In other words, the elite stack the odds against players from the state, trapping them inside a rigged game; they encourage players to lie to escape the asylum, where they will remain until they find and kill the Jack of Hearts (the game’s formulaic villain, but also tied to the show’s invisible Queen). The game ends when the Jack dies, but physical, lethal violence is forbidden. The Jack must lie and deceive his fellow people, while the mob “hunts” the Jack in an entirely socio-ludic way—lie to the person you think is the Jack, thus dooming them to die; but also, lie to people who might lie to you to try and kill you, which is exactly what the Jack does, but also people trying to narrow down the number of suspects.

Keeping with the prison design, the game forces people to kill each other through social deceptions guided out of material self-interest; i.e., inside a smaller system inside a bigger system that takes away player agency by forcing them to play with someone who has all the advantage and is probably a serial killer (the warden’s rat). Only someone with experience would survive—in terms of games and ambiguous language, but also lying and understanding that pure altruism will not only have you being repeatedly used and lied to; it will also get you killed.

Under these appalling conditions, people are literally worked to death, forced to compete under manufactured scarcity with deliberately severed social ties making them compete under duress. The crumbling backdrop, twink-in-peril Holocaust (and the murder-happy royals looking in) are dated and cliché, but that’s Gothic displacement/dissociation in action; i.e., the ghost of the counterfeit: “Isn’t this fun?” Obviously not and that’s the point—to reflect on the nature of games in the real world, on our own labor as a kind of game whose resistance to playing is normally pacified by Gothic illusions that turn people into unironic vampires (which we guilty watch for fun). Capitalism is bad for everyone! Cheshire ultimately escapes the smaller game to reflect on the bigger one: as something that never stops. “You can’t stop this game,” the artist, Tokio, sung in 1986. The only thing to do, then, is play emergently in ways that help you and others subvert the way that games are played, going forwards! It’s very danger disco/Sisyphean (except Cheshire has trouble smiling at the gods; our resident Galatea, he was still made by an environment he has to navigate and help others change through his example).

Overhead, the biggest vampires lord over everything while growing hungry and stupid behind a hyperreal façade: playing golf with people’s skulls, swimming in pools of their blood, impersonating them during Faustian death lotteries (the old man from Squid Game) and placing absurd, arbitrary bets on their lives while forcing them, inside prisons, to kill each other with (and for) their own stolen labor and wages. For the elite, there’s a second game that only they can play and rules they get to write at the cost of everyone else: Capitalism, whose hidden rules are designed to exploit everyone else through predatory BDSM. In it, they are not cheaters, but “winning” according to how much exploitation they can accrue; this is a ludic double standard, with labor being considered cheaters/spoilsports if they try to overcome the odds through labor action and riots—a game within a game, a prison inside a prison.

The critical power in Borderland relies on a worker-friendly trick: a friendly ghost (our catboy-in-white, suitably ghostlike in his appearance) that teaches workers to reflect on their exploited labor through a cautionary tale, specifically a proletarian ghost story (which giant companies like Netflix try and pass off as recuperation; i.e., just a bad dream). Cheshire isn’t strictly-speaking incorporeal, but exists uneasily in a nightmarish wonderland pointedly modeled after real-world Japan. Simply put, his presence and feelings while playing inside the game-as-rehabilitation punishing the wicked feel uncanny from a dramatic standpoint because his own gameplay pointedly compares two unlike things that are only seemingly unrelated: feudal tyrants and all-powerful capitalists. Cheshire knows them all too well because they describe the place he used to work at: the hospital, killing clients in pursuit of profit, with Cheshire instructed to do so by a “vampire” higher up than himself (the Master/apprentice dynamic in a hospital setting).

For example, the existence of urban myths like the bloodthirsty “Impaler” (vampires) in relation to capitalists denotes a presence of public confusion that is caused by manufactured ignorance of a capitalist checklist: the mysterious role of psychopaths inside Capitalism by tending to aggressively promote inside a system that favors and isolates them (re: the Jack of Hearts being both invisible and among us). The kind of murder psychopaths do is closer to desk work, hinted at by the killing process in the asylum episode (not its literal execution) being completely non-physically violent, banal. Instead, it’s socially[13] violent. Under such a system, psychopaths never stop furthering violence against workers for the bourgeoisie because they have no material incentive to do so (which is the only thing that would arguably motivate a psychopath).

Amid the ostensible dissimilarities that suggest a worrying outline towards the historical-material world, Borderland offers lots of shiny markers, counterfeits and drama to convey things in commonplace ways—to get your attention, hold it, and not say the quiet too forcefully out loud. That’s how ghosts work. All the same, looks are deceiving in such worlds. Cheshire is disarmingly boyish, but actually an older administrator—Shakespeare’s poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. To him, the others feels like walking shadows: past mistakes, but possible points of redemption. The moral, in the episode, isn’t so much that one mode of play is optimal, but more humane; i.e., through the meta as instructional towards humane play wrestling with forced survival against other workers!

To that, the meta in Borderland uses ghosts, vampires and BDSM to show how Capitalism “toys” with people; i.e., making Cheshire, Alice and Caterpillar[14] (below) try to win “fake-system” games whose Faustian ludic contracts turn players into mindless “vampires” obsessed with “winning” instead of forming meaningful social bonds with other workers (thus new modes of playing the game that can change it for the better). They love each other in ways that haunt them, for which they refuse to sacrifice or ignore others as they might have done in the past (a present party doubling for someone they harmed in the past). Nothing else matters and everything is alienated, sacrificed and destroyed, making the victory hollow, a deceitful gambit pushed on the isolated, divided brain; i.e., menticide, but also the entire manufacture trifecta: competition, conflict and scarcity.

The paradox, as usual, to is do this in stories that don’t actually kill us, but simulate death omens; i.e., as calculated-risk approximations—through avatars that are, themselves, living in simulations they can hopefully return from to bring back a vital means of, if not preventing Vampire Capitalism at home, then subverting it (re: Trace and Axiom Verge). Victory lies in using the integral enrichment potential of games to liberate our bodies, minds and actions from state dogma. We become, borrowing from Chris Pratt, spoilsports. Enrichment, like Sarkeesian’s adage (used during Gamergate, no less), becomes a survival aid against fascist people and systems: pawns on a chessboard, on a chessboard, on a chessboard, etc. If people are stupid, and might makes right, it’s because capital has made them stupid in ways conductive to Vampire Capitalism.

To it, the cure in Borderland, is to be kind in ways that break Capitalist Realism inside itself; i.e., to build and protect for ourselves with and for our imaginations, emotional/Gothic intelligence and class-cultural (and race) awareness: as things to cultivate for us—not for the elite alienating and exploiting us for our labor by keeping us obedient, pacified, cruel and stupid! This good education and investment is group-oriented in order to instruct as we create, transforming the material world’s canonical media in sex-positive ways: collective worker action against coerced violence and forced play that translates to any worker environment, any backdrop. Be it in a factory, a jungle, or a zoo, they’re less like literal reality and more like a thought experiment with metaphors and material similarities; the paradox here, is that it takes on a shadowy likeness/simulacrum—albeit an imprecise one—of the material copies from other thought experiments: the copy of a fabrication, itself a half-real proposition.

I think stories like Borderland and The Matrix collectively build around prisons because they’re both highly unnatural, and something for which to escape by virtue of what they are: grounds for exploitation, a panopticon of always watching and suspecting others as dangerous, diseased, doomed to die. Under such hopeless circumstances, who wouldn’t be tempted to cheat in order to survive (thus win)? It’s dog-eat-dog, the brutality of the system holding sway over all parties. Hunger strikes are technically optional, but amount to suicide by prison, by cop, by ourselves. To give up or in is to give the state everything. It’s entirely one way!

Some people play along because they’re forced to; others like it. Faced with the system as false, the spell breaks down for some; others fight harder than ever to deny the collapse of, what for them, is structure first and foremost. For all their abuse, prisons grant positions designed to disempower but also incentivize people to betray each other in service to profit. They need it, all the more treacherous, desperate and prone to tokenize when the game is afoot: it’s convenient, especially for neurotypical individuals less prone to question reality as false. For them, ignorance is bliss, and they love their role inside the bourgeois pecking order (the asylum episode playing out like cows in a slaughter house, one being killed randomly[15] at set intervals)!

Such players won’t question the prison around them; they’ll question the person playing at Socrates (questioning authority and everything around him), making him drink hemlock. They do this because they’ve been conditioned to: a pill for a rat in a box if it eats its fellow rats. Winning = class betrayal, per discipline and punish; the prison becomes the rat’s home, which it will die to defend by blaming anything but the system housing it!

Per the dialectic of shelter and the alien, Borderland’s asylum inhabitants become afraid of ghosts like Cheshire, but also his former bosses; i.e., made superstitious and afraid by prisons that conflate abuse with home and stupidity/dormancy/apathy with intelligence. Inside such conversion camps/reeducation centers, Pavlov’s dogs become watch/guard dogs, wholly rabid and hyperviligent. In turn, the first step to combating a prison is acknowledging its existence, which requires cognitive dissonance. Cops don’t experience that by design; it’s literally trained out of them, turning them into robots that rape others for profit (“Computers are dumb,” Seth Brundle puts it; “they only know what you tell them.”). They’ll begrudge and scapegoat state enemies exposing the truth to them. It’s a prison economy paid for in blood.

Such menticide isn’t unique to Borderland, though. As a matter of capital, prisons manufacture such misunderstandings, only to play them out in weaponized forms that watch you, or make you feel under constant hostile surveillance inside infernal concentric spaces; e.g., the agents, from The Matrix likewise “not ready to be unplugged, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to defend it.” They are incredibly unnatural—built on hard division and rigged, predatory competition inside vertical hierarchies of power that, in any kind of state arrangement scheme you could think of—from fraternities, concentration camps and electoral politics, to companies to prisons to games—yield the usual systemic abuses organized in the usual tiered stages and subsequent, prison-like banalities: owners/middle management/workers, rulers/officers/soldiers, bosses/minibosses/minions. These tiered, ludic understandings of power operate through torture as something that must happen, Omelas-style. Thus, players harden their hearts, praying at temples of unironic violence.

The sad truth is, no prison or territory can function without cops taken from labor and made to betray their own (e.g., the face cards, but also Cipher from The Matrix). The “meta game” under Capitalism, then, is merely another kind of alienation—from freeing forms of play as a kind of labor, but forcing people, thus labor, to tokenize in ways that exploit and kill them according to how they view games to start with: as zero-sum, win/lose. There can only be one winner and that winner is profit and the elite (the player killing his friends to become a capitalist). Everyone else is a casualty—a price for the one thing the elite care about, which they not only pay for but set up for repeated abuse! Supply and demand as things to manipulate, help the elite tip the scales. Fairness isn’t the point, exploitation is. Context is sacrificed (usually on purpose) in service to state authorities, not worker experts on a given topic or dispute. Ignorance is worn like a shield.

Except, while all workers are forced to play under coercive conditions, the poor have the least advantages out of anyone. Conversely, “face cards” in Borderland denote “optional” players with extra benefits by virtue of the privileged, and powerful positions they held in real life: musicians, gangsters, lawyers, soldiers, etc. The Marxist lesson isn’t the parroting of a convenient narrative miniature in ludic form—e.g., Nabokov’s estimation of Austen’s card game, Speculation, from Mansfield Park—but a coerced game that, through its vampiric, bad-BDSM execution, highlights how everyone is forced to fight for efficient profit, hence the elite: an army of undead workers both enslaved by the intended rules and freed by emergent play as part of a larger ludic scheme.

In other words, the game’s meta isn’t fully owned by the elite—can be used for revolutionary purposes by deprivatizing its iconic imagery through iconoclastic maneuvers; there’s always an element of risk, thus luck, but the scales needn’t stay tipped against players. Breaking Capitalist Realism, thus escaping Plato’s cave, happens inside Plato’s cave—with its shadows on the wall reclaimed emergently by us with ludo-Gothic BDSM! You must play to win, but you don’t have to do what the elite want you to; you can break their images to expose them on the other side, but also a possible better world in the same general sphere of influence and play!

To this, challenging the extratextual problems intimated inside such smaller structures (while observing them from the outside, no less) means extending those critiques to our own lives in an intertextual sense; i.e., of game theory that lets workers be inventive in ways resistant to state illusions; re (from Volume One):

Power is a performance that upholds through the perception of impossible things like total control, endless enemies, ultimate strength or absolute victory through kayfabe reversals. The same goes for containment, whose paradox of total imprisonment our thesis discussed in relation to videogames as breakable; i.e., how speedrunning and spoilsport gaming attitudes normally contain tremendous invention that canonically restrict the development and execution of emergent puzzle-solving to single texts in gaming culture[16], versus applying that mentality to reconfigure larger extratextual structures; e.g., Coincident’s “Doom Strategy Guide – Okuplok’s Mancubus Cliff” (2023, below) treating player invention more as a hobby on par with a Rubik’s cube—or hell, a human beating Tetris (1985) for the first time in its 38-year existence (aGameScout’s “After 34 Years, Someone Finally Beat Tetris,” 2024)—versus escaping Capitalist Realism by playing videogames (and other such experiments) in ways that resist the profit motive within the neoliberal era (with organized speedrunning arguably having started in 1990[17], just before the fall of the Soviet Union). The puzzle is ostensibly impressive, but the much-touted “progress” of solving it becomes an empty gesture insofar as liberating worker minds is concerned. Doing so has no effect on the external world unless the attitude for solving complicated puzzles through emergent gameplay is deliberately taken outside of the text. Otherwise, the hauntology (and its canceled future) are entirely self-contained:

In truth, the degree of conscious unity against grander historical-material problems can be applied to capital through rebellious worker action and ludo- Gothic-BDSM poetics across all mediums and labor forms; e.g., speedrunning, which can work (from my thesis volume) “as a communal effect for solving complex puzzles and telling Gothic ludonarratives in highly inventive ways. As we’ll see moving forward, this strategy isn’t just limited to videogames, but applies to any poetic endeavor during oppositional praxis”; i.e., intersectional, multilayered strategies of resistance and misdirection that strive to demonstrate there is no outside of the text, applying the imagination and effort needed to transform the world around us by any and all means necessary. To that, I think the grassroots culture and non-profit approach to speedrunning allows larger groups of people to solve immensely difficult problems collectively outside of established business practices: thwarting Capitalism Realism by weaponizing the collective ingenuity and incredible puzzle-solving power of speedrunning against the elite.

If popular videogames franchised under neoliberal Capitalism, and organized speedrunning began to form right before the end of the Cold War in 1990, then its proletarian utility (and other such revolutionary strategies overlapping within nerd culture) must do so after the end of history’s cultural myopia began to thicken. Doing so requires inventiveness in the face of tremendous confusion (worker menticide) and state-sponsored adversity (many speedrunners just want to run their games and ignore the problems of the real word; e.g., Caleb Hart, who we shall examine in Volume Three, Chapter Four). The bourgeoisie might seem to hold all the cards, here, but they cannot kill all workers who resist, nor do they possess the means to completely monopolize violence and terror against rebellious forces; likewise, they cannot hope to alienate us from our own labor as a weapon to levy against them unless we surrender its power and poetics exclusively to them. Subjugation means total surrender as something of a choice when presented with the facts: submitting to Capitalist Realism in those respects, staying inside Plato’s cave. This book’s praxial focus, then, is to enrich propaganda and sex workers by making them (and the world around them) progressively more and more proletarian through Gothic poetics as something to fearlessly apply anywhere, regardless of who complains or fights back (source).

Keeping this in mind, capital, aka private property as Marx explains it, “has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., – in short, when it is used by us” (source: “Private Property and Communism,” 1844). If people are stupid, capital has made them stupid, and not just towards privatization, but the things between as privatized under capital; i.e., in our daily lives that we treat like games conducive to bourgeois aims—in short, the games that we play being concerned with our lives in small, in cages!

These, in turn, become puzzles to reassemble out of old pieces; i.e., that come from a graveyard of fragments expressed intratextually and intertextually across a variety of stories: ergodic narratives, which unfold through non-trivial effort, thus labor and motion, challenging capital’s dead, vampiric forms. From a revolutionary standpoint, that’s what puzzle-solving is (and by extension, ludo-Gothic BDSM)—not just a single puzzle in a single box, but a relationship between many puzzles that some illustrate diegetically better than others.

In Borderland, Cheshire shows us, the moment you limit yourself to one disconnected, pulverized frame of thinking is the moment they box you in. But you don’t avoid that purely by thinking “outside the box”; you consider how different systems interface and relate in ways that get you where you need to go, putting puzzles together and then—per Borges’ “Garden of the Forking Paths” or Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves (below)—put things together while navigating them:

The way forwards isn’t trolley problems inside a prison system, but we have to be able to think past a bloodsport by thinking ergodically and constructively with it as normally spoon-fed to us, playing with store bought things (and their policed, intended, prison-like rules, made to reinforce profit and Vampire Capitalism on all registers) to consider and illustrate their relationship in a para, inter/intra and metatextual sense; i.e., about how things relate back and forth, including our place within that. To it, we need to look at the two as half-real, seeing such things expressed in stories like Borderland that we can turn back around and connect their fragmented meta/moral lesson to our own lives. Let’s do that, now!

Inside our own lives, Borderland’s asylum metaphor lends itself to a lot of doublings; i.e., that speak to queerness as imprisoning under a heteronormative order that isn’t a matter of legend, but something to live with on a daily basis. Being queer-coded, Cheshire is able to navigate the hospital-in-small as a gay man would; i.e., a social-psychosexual regression to a neo-medieval time under a corporate panopticon, the queer being—similar to the nun or closeted priest—being forced into roles where the skilled survive: those with a good poker face, who female and/or queer, must survive patriarchal, heteronormative systems of control.

The liminal quality—of feeling like one is trapped between the past and the present, dreams and consciousness, queerness and straightness; but also that one’s exchanges routinely frame one as quarantined/veiled and simultaneously wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve in Foucauldian forms of cryptonymy—make everything feel game-like; i.e., as a matter of life or death. It’s historically a very monstrous-feminine experience—one that sadly translates quite well to stories like Cheshire’s, the guilty faggot locked up with the other inmates, all of them searching for the Jack of Hearts (Cheshire’s evil twin), but also vampirism as camping life under Capitalism: far easier to reconcile our own existence as arrested and prison-like (re: compared to fatal diseases and mad science) provided we vamp the vector in reclaimed vampire dialogs.

These are, themselves, not always attractive or cleanly seen, felt, or otherwise experienced. With his own checkered past, Cheshire shows how beauty is often skin-deep, but in their case likewise bears a cross-like weight/desire to repent for past sins; he doesn’t blame the system as much as he does himself while under its control—a control he no longer wants to give them. He is disillusioned.

While Borderland intimates such things in the loosest of ways, the old-world spectre is never far behind. A bio-mechanical womb, heteronormativity and its bad BDSM becomes a prison to grow into and eventually escape through ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., camping some truly horrible things behind bourgeois shadows, prisons being highly unnatural—the 1970s zeitgeist speaking to older freak shows, forced medicalization and classification of our “species” as virulent: a specimen in a glass jar, a devil’s backbone to trot out in the sick bay like a geek show for the straight and curious. The black-and-red of the breeding vats parallels Borderland’s playing cards and the Countess’ mosquito brood: fascist or Communist, depending on which way power flows (and which way it encourages power to flow)!

(exhibit 41h2: No one wants to identify as a disease, but such double standards become things to reconcile all the same. As such, queerness is—classically and into the present—a form of cloistered dialog between people closer to older forms of medicine and prison-style social-sexual organization that, under later days, manifested as villages for queerness as sick; i.e., gay villages under the AIDS crisis as disease centers that saw AFAB queers looking after their AMAB brethren, during the societal sickness of capital’s heteronormative panic and persecution mania towards sexual lepers. Like Neo in his sorry Bathory-style bathtub filled with Kool-Aid, capital atrophies us, and feeds us our own dead selves, that it might live forever!

But even when a pandemic is not going on, we fags are still treated like a disease to catch, but also an imposter in straight clothes; i.e., disease spreading whores and vengeful sodomites with various double standards; e.g., women as spreading venereal diseases and seeking hysterical succubus-style revenge on holy men in their sleep, versus homosexual men practicing sodomy as leading to various “queer diseases” that threaten other parties with, in much the same manner!

[artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard]

Queerness, then, is like a blood transfusion; i.e., whereupon we spend our entire lives being told to fear ourselves, thinking we carry diseases in the passing of sanguine and vitality through common social-sexual metaphors thereof. Overcoming these occurs by mingling with others and playing with them through ludo-Gothic BDSM; e.g., Cuwu sucking my dick in my sleep [above] as a succubus might a priest’s cock; i.e., “exploiting” me and taking my essence from me in ways that the priest would not desire, if only for the fear of slighting God. It’s really no harm, no foul, though; as in, such incidents involve the ability to juggle social practices and symbols with acts of good/bad faith, play and acting during ludo-Gothic BDSM: as endemic to queer and female/monstrous-feminine existence. Something is always coming and going—is being taken and replaced with this or that, sucked through a straw back down our throats!

Furthermore, provided we grant ourselves a chance to refill and give back—i.e., a give and take that doesn’t treat each encounter like a zero-sum game—then our behavior can become increasingly aware of games we can play outside of those offered by the state. Meta-wise, there’s objectively no “correct” way to play the game; but versions of the game can exist that we can enjoy individually more while having collective stability for all peoples; e.g., you could have sex with someone who has the societally advertised “perfect dick,” but it won’t change the fact that some people are size queens, while others just want that Goldilocks six-inch or even—perish the thought—a micro peen.

All creatures, great and small [and during sex and/or social exchanges], there’s literally something for everyone, so why maximize suffering and scarcity purely because it’s the only way that someone as stupid and heartless like the Queen of Hearts can feel anything at all? To do so is to willingly build prisons and give the warden’s keys to the usual psychopaths; these, in turn, become a way of seeing the world for which anything else becomes impossible. Make it impossible and the chance for healthy and fun relationships to happen with other workers and nature likewise fly out the window. Everything is simply canonized, then alienated and fetishized through the usual predatory mechanisms.

In turn, form follows function. Forget about oral sex, anal or BDSM; it’s simply PIV missionary until the end of time [which, to be honest, I love (see: next page), but it’s still nice to be able to experiment]. Anything else is illegal, policed and paywalled. Privileged parties can still do these things, but most are locked up and killed for it, raped by the state and state forces, in a scapegoating circle: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss…” What a stupid, outmoded way to treat the world! But so many fall into those traps, afraid of what the world could be without the elite around to prey on us; so, the middle class surrender their necks [or those of others] to enjoy a place on the preferential mistreatment ladder that isn’t the clear-and-obvious bottom. They become bad doms, taking everything.

[artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard]

To it, it’s not like vampirism and baddies won’t exist under Gothic Communism! Apart from oral, Cuwu and I had sex in ways that felt like me being a drug they took by fucking me; i.e., I felt like ambrosia eaten by a god, their mouth hanging open and staring up at me like Pennywise as I fucked them—their hungry cunt, but also their dollish mouth and doe-eyed stare clocking me vampirically as they disassociated [with one hand on the wheel, to be clear[18]]. In moments like those, the thirst took over and they took me for all I was worth. And had they not abused me—using me like a drug they could resort to whenever they were flying off the handle [after I went back home]—it all would have been something I was okay with! Indeed, they were possessed by an intense hunger they couldn’t always control, their pupils dilated like Greek coins leading me to Hell, ravenous mouths ready to swallow me whole like Scylla and Charybdis!

Nevertheless, to be queer is to be closeted, thus under constant surveillance; and Cuwu—well-adapted to the gaze of all eyes in the room being on them—was someone very vain who had turned that tendency into a survival mechanism they were showing me as a lesson: how to survive, but also how to live by controlling the room per one’s witnesses and potential abusers/prey by captivating them with hypnotic movements [often inside the bedroom as a site of vulnerability and sex, but also regression and safety—per negotiated disassociation]. They could do it with their eyes closed, somehow always watching and loving having an audience they could lure, control and toy with: a doll that played back with its handler! Regardless, sex-positive agency preaches having fun, provided no harm is caused on either side of the exchange! When we played in person, Cuwu did not harm me, but they did watch me and work through mirrors and personas to play with/feed on me through mutually consensual rape fantasies [re: sleep sex]!

[artist: Cuwu]

A veteran of the psychic wars, Cuwu was a little spy conducting proletarian recon/espionage; i.e., always watching back [a bit like Nietzsche’s abyss, but far more fun]—had eyes on the back of their head or on their booty or with their various mouths. Eye contact, for them, was a matter of vampiric, dollish body language; i.e., that reversed the imagery of the surface [re: Segewick] into an oculus. Always ready to put on a show at a moment’s notice, they could spring into action in ways that can only be described as “in trance.” Queerness generally amounts to a confused haze [re: Sam Reiner’s “‘Young, Dumb, and Full of Cum’: Point Break’s Homoerotic Haze,” 2009] that speaks to our caged existence [and complicated feeding/prey mechanisms]. Liminal, our agency achieves through the veracity/verisimilitude of such flawed, feverish perception; i.e., always caged and out in the open—per the cryptonymy process, exposed and couched within a campy story or powerful illusion, where we hunt hungrily for those like us.

To become the illusion, then, is to simultaneously gain the upper hand over potential threats, but also relate to other people in game-like forms we follow as code; re: the proverbial white rabbit being a fair bit of drugs, or drug-like experiences that feel delicious and unreal. Showing me their Aegis, Cuwu clapped back, dummy thicc—doing so to teach me how to have fun, thus learn, by giving and receiving in the same exchanges; i.e., in ways that always require some mode of defense, doubling as a dialog and a game we related to back and forth with—sex, among other things. They played me like a fiddle—not to abuse ne, but to show ne what is possible with what we’ve naturally got! “Jazz” flute is for little fairy boys, and Cuwu—Mozart’s Queen of the Night, and my little cutie next door—played my “magic flute” like a pro! And they gave me books, clothes and food, rescuing me from Jadis; my cummy comrade, I have nothing but respect for them!

Like a good joke, nonsense on the surface is often a deeper context of subversion. Freedom through play, then, establishes through strange bedfellows that, through the miracle of chance tailored by good dating habits, must still learn to make each other better than the system allows—not just Ron Burgundy but myself as taught by Cuwu and vice versa as polyamorous players [it’s still possible for poly people to cheat on others, just harder]. Got game? Learn from the best! Keeping with paradox, then, we become true and false at the same time!

Such is prison life for the queer of any gender or sex: the closet a brothel, a sanitarium, a quarantine, a holding cell. We are both diseased and cured, trauma living in and out of the body as libido and leprosy in ways we can reclaim and camp: through vampirism as a theatrical agent, during ludo-Gothic BDSM. Gothic maturity doesn’t reject this liminality at all; it embraces the person “dying” of plague in ways that reverse its abjection on all registers and outcomes. To it, and whether from fangs or mouths, we take, give and receive—be that sex, pain, fluid, labor and/or knowledge—to reverse the usual upward flows of power! For survivors of abuse, catharsis is “rape” in quotes, calculated risk marrying trauma to sex and control to survival theatre;  i.e., performing the loss of control to regain it through BDSM theatre [with rules]. Having survived past abuse, we bare it all, and collapse, flushed and spent, delighted and full—intoxicated. Everyone’s happy.)

Bear in mind, the friendliness or unfriendliness of copies adheres to the hierarchical nature of Capitalism. Just as compelled gameplay forces workers into tiered player types—re: soldiers, officers and generals (working stiffs, middle management and executives)—these apply to our lives swept up in games that mirror such unequal/disproportionate arrangements of power that, in turn, execute to achieve Vampire Capitalism. As such, class war is messy and Capitalism makes war through proxy labor as something to replicate in canonically vampiric forms. In turn, the ghosts of vampire-like workers represent a particular “meta” or gimmicky way of videogame thinking: “mobs” are little vampire zombies, the sexy “champions” drop better “loot,” and the lavish “bosses” concentrically lead towards the end game. This can be challenged simply by going against the profit motive; i.e., we make messes that challenge profit as a matter of knowledge exchange wrapped up, often enough, in fluid exchange; e.g., me fucking Zeuhl’s pussy before pulling out and squirting cum across their crotch, belly and tits, to which they replied, “Goodness me! You made a mess!” Zeuhl and their hole took only for themselves; when giving fluid, I took back, too. I learned it from the best!

From a dialectical-material standpoint, then, zombies, vampires and ghosts can be bourgeois or proletarian, and each monster type offers a particular societal critique. However, while zombies tend to be a populist critique and vampires tend to critique aristocrats, their roles can be creatively reversed and applied to things of atypical scope—not just “Zombie Capitalism,” or Smashing Pumpkin‘s famous opening line to “Bullet and Butterfly Wings,” “The world is a vam-pire…”; vampire hordes, zombie kings, etc—Vampire-Zombie Capitalism!

Moreover, game theory’s material qualities and meta learning system is more modern in terms of the educational vehicle—the mode of play as intra and intertextual. People interact with labor disguised as symbols of war through the literal playing of videogames as a neoliberal illusion of false power they carry over into praxis at large. A ludic contract becomes a meta, ghostly likeness for labor contracts the elite exploit through players; i.e., the delivery system for the Pumpkins’ “bullet with butterfly wings.” This can be a revolutionary cryptonym describing a complicit one (vis-à-vis Borderland or Pumpkins); or the dichotomy can reverse, the apocalypse of false revolution being depicted through endless counterfeits we’ve also explored—e.g., the zombie narrative or dead retro-future (which, with Matteson, had vampires that extend to Borderland and The Matrix).

Regardless of which, thinking about canon or iconoclasm in relation to the material world functions as vision in composite fashion; i.e., with older forms of play interacting with modernized technology as Corgan and company did back in the ’90s (when videogames were in their childhood years—reflected by the bodies, minds and cultural values of their target “war orphan” consumers being acclimated towards war in service of Capitalism): exposing the man behind the curtain as a vampiric clown, a humbug toymaker responsible for your material suffering, your infinite sadness. As a game, Capitalism absolutely sucks, eating everything and everyone; i.e., cops and victims alike, no matter how many the former kill of the latter for their bosses; re: “They’re eating her! And then they’re going to eat me!” (a Greek chorus refrain). State extermination rhetoric is cringe.

In this sense, Alice in Borderland is also linguistic—the abstract, ludic usage of monstrous shorthand to communicate theoretical, ludo-Gothic BDSM ideas about labor within the visual likenesses of games whose exact dialectical-material function remains unclear. A larger meta conversation the show touches upon, then, is that corporations are like vampires—”super destroyers” who don’t just monetize games, but micro-monetize them (then gaslight workers; re: despite all their rage, they’re still just rats in a cage, a prison made to drain them)—micro-monetize the actions of the players playing the games, treating every step they make inside the game as labor theft and wage theft for the absentee owner class. Extratextually, this theft model can be consumer-focused—i.e., through consumers spending money on games—or it can be job creation, through gameplay as a form of labor/content creation that streaming platforms steal, or open license contracts try to steal actively or retroactively (e.g., Wizards of the Coast; source: penguinz0’s “Most Delusional Company Ever,” 2016). A player’s time, money and energy bleed into the process, which drains as many people as it can! In turn, state monopolies yield corporate vampires owning the world in, out and between; i.e., when the meta is profit and state predation all anyone cares about, rape becomes endemic!

To that, canonical prisons and their metas are “for profit”; profit through prisons and bloodsports discourage emergent play as being workers doing what people as a social species do and have done for millions of years: play games to learn, cooperate, communicate and survive (with having fun being a part of all of these things). The canonical meta, then, is compelled in ways that go against how we evolved under natural conditions, trading those for something highly unnatural that rapes and kills everything (all its exchanges being one-way). Small wonder that games have the dubious reputation they currently do—i.e., to play games is “dishonest” or “a waste of time”—but in truth, good games are the key to survival against bad. This act of giving to receive in ways that anisotropically empower workers must become second-nature; i.e., between a network of users synthesizing praxis through a proletarian meta that discourages rape; re: harm through power abuse endemic to prison structures!

Cryptonymy remains part of any meta. Whether sex-positive or sex-coercive, Gothic media displaces prison abuse, presenting it inside an educational nightmare scenario where an imaginary villain drains its victims. A potent effect of the vampire as a likeness of the worker persona is how they blend in, hypnotizing their would-be victims by personifying them. Yet, the impersonation occurs according to positions within a structure of power that allows for the abuse to not only arrange in vertical fashion, but generate illusions according to these arrangements: state-corporate propaganda with familiar faces inside and outside of the text.

Inside Borderland, workers are diegetically menticided, forgetting what playing games is all about, until their struggle to live teaches them the value of teamwork against their oppression (collective action). However, displacement of the abuse to a fantastical other world is cryptonymic, a kind of “bad apple” that suggests widespread corruption, but which companies will try to pin on isolated cases, or by socializing blame in the real world. Either is a divide-and-conquer strategy by those with an unfair material advantage: the elite. Controlling the means of production and mainstream media, they use games to divide and alienate workers to keep exploiting them in a vampiric, ghost-like way. Their ability to hypnotize workers extends to would-be muckrakers; e.g., infecting game journalism, insofar as game journalists cannot spit Marxist facts collectively and quickly at their audience. Instead of highlighting the root problem in Gothic-Marxist language that whips up organized collective-worker action, journalists opt to observe disconnected anxieties like “corporations seem to keep doing this/are greedy vampires.”

If journalists outside of the text comment on their own mistreatment, those inside Borderland do the same; i.e., visionaries like Hatter madly demonstrating how corporate vampirism is something that can extend to members of the working class. Class traitors who defend the intended, prescribed system “out of the box,” players are effectively prison guards that rub people out during games inside games; i.e., a meta pattern that—assembled and viewed all at once, mid-collage—forms an ergodic, terrifying cross-media pattern across Borderland into other prisons, of prisons, of prisons; re, Korzybski:

A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness. If the map could be ideally correct, it would include, in a reduced scale, the map of the map; the map of the map, of the map; and so on, endlessly […] If we reflect upon our languages, we find that at best they must considered only as maps (source: Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, 1933).

The ergodic sum is a hit list reducing not just single persons, but whole teams-against-teams as numbers and abstract shapes that are, themselves, simply crossed off! The show shelters various types of class traitors inside a game designed to starve its own players, who survive by becoming players that, rather than run linearly through game worlds that turn them into cops, can work within fragments not necessarily given to them in any logical order or shape (the slightly scrambled nature of my writing in this section reflecting that historical trend).

Conversely, a prison is logical enough—i.e., weaning workers off their sustenance, then gorging them on the blood of their own kind playing out through such gambling-style “meta” bloodsports. Suggesting that reality isn’t just a vault to spill the blood into, the prison is entirely fake, hyperreal—a Torment Nexus build on an illusion of the present world (again, a bit like The Matrix, and similar canceled-future stories where police violence serves elite bodies; e.g., Ghost in the Shell, exhibit 42e). Classically metas serve profit and profit is rape; the meta, then, is rape—taking all for the elite, and this is what must change in between our lives and media relating back and forth! Like magic—like Neo, the king of dreams—we pluck things from the ether and build new worlds to reify during emergent play!

Even before the bloodletting occurs, a pre-apocalypse feels oddly familiar and alien—a survival tactic employed by corporations to keep you from looking behind the curtain at all; uncanniness is merely the ghostly (and bloodstained) bedsheets used as window-dressing. As part of its own conflict, Borderland offers up middle-management “destroyers sent to drain”; i.e., who treat parasocial situations as parasitic inside a vertically-tiered structure of privileged management, these positions jockeying for top spot: the jacks, kings and queens granted special prizes by the executive while killing said executive’s political enemies—each other as poor, thus less than the executive (a bit like the Wizard of Oz and his own gift-giving to Dorothy [whose name means “gift of God”] and her friends, following the defeat of the Wicked Witch of the West).

(exhibit 42a: The ghost and the vampire have a lot in common—as ontological models, but also their myriad replicas. Japan’s modern-looking cityscape is overshadowed by a relatively dated card game buoyed skyward and ferried about by blimps. Past the initial shock, the collapse of the state is actually crystalized inside a highly developed game tailored towards mass predation: the exploitation of workers. The sadistic nature of the bourgeoisie is included for entertainment purposes, giving the audience a vice character to disparage. Nevertheless, the King of Spades seeking the blood spill from a salvo of machinegun fire echoes Japan’s warlike past and current occupation; i.e., by neoliberal bodies that haunt the narrative space through enigmatic violence. The game is obviously bloody, but workers must face the dialectical-material reality of that blood, mid-conflict. They reflect on it.)

Closing Arguments: Understanding and Challenging Vampire Capitalism

Let’s conclude with some broader points about understanding and challenging Vampire Capitalism (seven pages), then wrap things up before moving onto ghosts!

Beyond Borderland, the same basic power hierarchy survives across various adaptations that double the same underlying issue: exploitation and its positions of relative advantage mid-scarcity by virtue of capital making people stupid; re: Marx’ “Something is ours only when it is used by us” to my argument—wherein stupidity regarding sexuality and gender all extend from Vampire Capitalism teaching us to feed stupidly as vampires: by drinking everything dry for the elite. Again, if people are stupid, it’s because bourgeois games and illusions (the Superstructure) have made them stupid; i.e., as prisons and prison-like illusions/metas do by design, incentivizing rape.

It’s not a coincidence, then, how the central villain of The Matrix is basically the Monopoly Guy saying “ergo” and “inexorably” a lot; all roads lead to Rome and Monopoly—ironic once upon a time—became an unironic endorsement of Capitalism the Wachowskis had to critique as best they could: all canonical illusions serve profit as categorically straight, including its divide-and-conquer restrictions, Cartesian rules and canonically essentialist rhetoric; i.e., the state as straight; e.g., the nuclear family model, settler argument, and dialectic of shelter/the alien, Divine Right, etc! It can only take/go up, and by force; anything else is unimaginable to them—is a crime against nature as they order it. As such, Neo, the prince of shadows, meets his father, the Shadow King, only to learn he’s a massive, entitled dick! “What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets!”

Rome wasn’t burned in a day. On the outside looking in, the elite are the ultimate vampires of Capitalism until then, callously “turning” tiered workers into smaller “copies” of themselves (thinking they have the same degree of power when they do not); i.e., that help spread the disease of Vampire Capitalism through progressively inferior (and populous) clones. In canonical iterations, the entire undead cycle illustrates a predatory grooming mechanism—with management “marking” vulnerable targets for observation, and whose neighbors the canonical vampire has already “turned” vis-à-vis a perverse in-group. The presence of the vampire denotes reactive abuse as a form of compelled recruitment, exploiting their own servants as well as their opposing victims’ labor inside the game as repackaged by the elite in seemingly different, but ultimately familiar forms.

In the real world as something to mirror back at workers, the elite watch from a distance while their canon and its associate structures turn those with positions of power into subordinate vampires. Inside the ghost of the counterfeit (which is always a liminal position), management watch their victims become increasingly hypnotized by the local vampire’s charm. A time to resist is allotted, but eventually the vampire comes to call. If the victim does not let him “in” by giving him what he wants (usually sex or submission), the canonical vampire will use their top-down arrangement of power to concentrically gaslight, gatekeep, and collectively punish the victim and their friends (the girl boss being the TERF agent; i.e., a “bride of Dracula”).

This is what I mean when I say “stupidity.” State workers are so stupid they see people, animals and nature as blood to drain for profit and profit alone—meaning they have internalized not just bigotry in one form or another, but the very modes of play through intended systems designed to bring these bigotries about when used uncritically! The cat-and-mouse approach is one where the prison is internalized by the rat in the cage; i.e., acting the cat in ways that only ever let them eat themselves. Intelligence comes from not having advantages (the courts, police, etc). We instead, rely on our wits, our proverbial “rodent’s revenge” to weaponize cryptonymy/cryptomimesis in service to workers—in essence defeating capital at its own game by rewriting the rules with the same devices, disarming their unironic, prison-like function! Foucault’s panopticon becomes Medusa’s Aegis, redistributing power between workers to spread it among them during self-imposed ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., by playing with the things that people like to play with—sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll, but also videogames (Cuphead, above)—to invent new Satanic life among capital’s vampire graveyard! Guerrillas in the mist, we spot the patterns of prisons we can exploit during asymmetrical warfare, rewire them, then shut the hood. “Good as new!” becomes an act of playful infiltration, of “cat scratch fever”; i.e., confusing the cat and by extension the cat-like mouse to ergodically avoid state halitosis (the stink of dead workers—masticated to death and belched like exhaust back out into a prison world—a vapor trail to interrogate/negotiate with)! Think about things to get you to think inside-outside the box!

Carceral management, then, is a process of active menticide inside a larger structure that becomes not just a veiled threat, but an ultimatum on par with the Creature from Frankenstein, delivered by the elite and their proponents; re: “If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends” (source). It’s not simply negotiation, but keeping with the Frankenstein theme, bourgeois parentage and social-sexual reeducation that leads to recursive feelings of intense sexual revenge towards the alleged “cockblocker” (who only is exercising their right to consent). The reactive abuse is packaged as “product” of course; i.e., bourgeois monster “junk food,” but also bourgeois monster sex—monster-fucking that compels genuine rape, not emancipatory rape fantasies inside/outside these power structures! Capitalism breeds and defends stupidity and rape with stupidity and rape.

Animal cruelty and worker abuse by police forces go hand-in-hand; re: the state is straight and incarcerates queerness to rape nature-as-monstrous-feminine. In turn, the blood spilled during the game becomes synonymous with fulfillment as achieved unto deprivation and exploitation; i.e., as something to disguise and disseminate. While any propaganda begets monsters, bourgeois monsters uphold systemic abuse as something to spread—raping workers at the social-sexual level through workers-policing-workers becoming a trademarked brand of abuse that prolongs exploitation for as long as possible: draining the worker to not only weaken them, but trap them under the vampire’s spell, in-house. “Blood,” “essence,” “life force,” and “vitality” are all prison code not simply for “product,” but the relationship between workers and capital that cements product as canon, including its legendary systemic abuse! That’s Vampire Capitalism, and like The Matrix or Plato’s cave, Borderline is touching on something in Japan that is actually happening the world over! Labor polices itself for the prison in any shape or size the elite wish to feature it. No one is safe, an entire country built to exploit itself!

Furthermore, beyond one system is another and another—escape becoming nomadic and creative; i.e., to build places to go, doing so out of prison bricks where—liberation being the productive ability to do so—happens in ways that hide or otherwise safeguard workers from state abuse, and all while paving the way for Gothic-Communist development: a world without prisons, established through ludo-Gothic BDSM as an going poetic device borrowing old medieval things for new purpose; re: selective absorption, magical assembly, a confusion of the senses, and our Song of Infinity! As ergodic puzzle-solvers and detectives, we reconcile the past by interactively rebuilding it; i.e., in ways that phase out our bourgeois bloodsports and prisons. It takes on its own life, giving and receiving!

These are complicated ideas with a lot of praxial considerations. We’ll delve into the worker-policing process itself more deeply in Volume Three, Chapter Two. For now, try to keep several things in mind. First, different kinds of undead tend to overlap. Whereas zombies denote a presence of rot and ghosts a hidden trauma, vampires denote a presence of sanguine feeding. These are not mutually exclusive concepts. Unlike zombies, which are generated by the state of exception, smaller vampires are predatory feeders made by a concentric chain of bigger and bigger predators. The biggest is Capitalism, itself, whose top-down pyramid structure instructs workers to become canonical vampires; i.e., sex pests, then sex fiends part-in-parcel to forms of worker division and exploitation that preserve the structure already in place. This includes the kings and their generals, but also down the line to lieutenants, officers and grunts of their little army belong to a bigger army of parasitic undead. They become dead to suck the living dry!

However, as Capitalism divides people into alienating classes of cops/victims, its centrist model also frames them as more visibly undead “bad guys” (fascists) versus less visibly undead, or waiting-to-inevitably-become-undead “good guys” (centrists); and both hate Commies, but especially queer an-Coms!

We’ll explore this broader war pastiche in Chapter Four of Volume Three. For now, just remember that proponents of zombie-vampire canon will socially-sexually dominate their own chosen victims in the meta prison any text speaks to; i.e., about people, capital always making the same argument through workers resisting liberation (those “in the cave” killing those escaping the cave’s canonical illusions): Join us or die. The outcome is replacement, assimilation and abuse—traditionally sexualizing women and killing men along gendered lines indicative of Capitalist models. Capital is and is not parasitoidism, which kills the host; its parasitism drains workers of their life force and the vampire of their humanity for as long as possible (the latter who can only subsist off exploited labor, including sex, which reflects in their reactive abuse). Banality of evil leads to generational trauma, labor regrown and repeatedly killed inside the same prison-like conditions. Except, state shift will make all of this redundant, Medusa having her revenge; i.e., by killing the elite, and trapping workers in the prisons they’ve grown to accept!

Likewise, it reflects Capitalism’s tendency to promote psychopaths—who will be more likely to exploit others—and coexists with the zombie model: the draining of one’s life force becoming a draining of the brain that affects everyone in sight. Not all vampires are smart; some are notoriously stupid because that’s exactly what the system needs them to be (no one likes middle management):

(exhibit 42b: Left: Our vampire king with his zombified corpse bride, source. Despite being powerful, George Junior isn’t just a figurehead who is nevertheless [famously] braindead himself; he’s rehabilitated years later as a sweet old man who, along with his braindead, bloodthirsty cronies, “didn’t do anything wrong“ [Some More News’ “On the Rehabilitation of Monsters,” 2021].

Right: 2019’s Parasite. The class character of vampirism under neoliberal Capitalism exposes the real vampires through Gothic clichés all throughout that film: the false servant, the tyrannical master, the secret dungeons under the ancient castle sold to a modern family, etc. Beneath the façade, then, the elite present as terminally afraid of the poor, who themselves become treacherous and inventive to survive—what Akira Kurosawa refers to as “wicked, foxy beasts!” The father kills his rival in the wealthy household, and “wins” a trip to prison—inside the house’s bunker-like basement! As a bad form of BDSM and games, Capitalism’s vampirism is well-and-truly bad for everyone!

Even so, the most cruel and cold individuals are the upper classes. Posturing as gods, they become easily duped, but also heartless, seeing disease, death and madness within the poor through material conditions they themselves help enforce [the film’s use of tuberculosis and blood scaring up commentary on pandemic-scale diseases relegated to the vast, starving and unvaccinated poor who cannot afford the medications the elite a) take for granted, but also b) deprive others of while gorging on the poor relegated to the city sewers].)

This coercive “zombie vampirism,” unlike Matteson’s famously Communist iterations, becomes an abusively undead social-sexual lesson unto itself; re: Vampire Capitalism strings you out; i.e., the vampiric dialog frequently speaking in instructional ways: the con man giving dating advice to his victims, exploiting them for their bodies and their labor to do his bidding as sex slaves (aggressors for him, or people he sexually wants because the only way he can feel human again is to return to a former time that the system has deprived him of, while forcing him to prey on others for its benefit). Like any prison, this takes time to implement—land conquered and installed with prisons (and power centers of different kinds), then gestating over years inside people who are predisposed to criminalized, sex-coercive ways of thinking (re: the Shadow of Pygmalion, Cycle of Kings, Man Box, etc). Slowly the institution spreads inside its prisoners’ brains, who fall asleep and whose class dormancy and “apolitical” betrayal leads to more canonical vampires, thus bad education and police abuse hidden as part-in-parcel to the product and the game(s) that produce it. All police anything challenging the flow as it normally goes: up and only up. “The spice must flow” becomes a cardinal rule.

Such predation mentalities aren’t something that someone simply “gets over”; the amount of time gone by isn’t indicative of a cure, only the conscious, visible effort to fight it. When confronted for what they actually are, then, bourgeois vampires remain allergic to emotional/Gothic intelligence outing them as unfriendly ghosts. These ghoulish parallels denote workers emulating Capitalism’ unnatural divisions present within their own social structures. The prison keeps people stupid and cruel, but also unaware they are in a prison because they are always high; i.e., willful ignorance, resisting the truth—that we have to fight for our right to be free from the state; e.g., the agents in The Matrix as suits with special powers and big guns (tech bros), the face cards in Borderland are, likewise, inmates granted special privileges. Per Marx, material conditions shape how we think, and how we think shapes these conditions; per me, the cycle changes when we begin to subvert the arrangement in Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communist ways. During ludo-Gothic BDSM, we camp these ghosts to go beyond what they were capable of, in life!

In this respect, Alice and Borderland is oddly complete, but also oddly displaced from the usual monsters in terms of how it portrays my theories, doing a lot of the legwork for you without leaning too hard on the Gothic language: a ghost town devoid of the usual suspects, all the players vampires but not all of them hungry for blood (the Louis problem) inside Capitalist Realism’ grand illusion. Certain episodes—especially the asylum game—tease at the historical-material framework lurking underneath the veneer of a homely space. But it still chooses to primarily focus on the game itself—namely the outmoded, incongruous nature of a bad replica for the French suit system. While popular media in general tends to vary considerably in how monstrous it appears, it is also nothing if not consistent. If the structure didn’t exist, Gothic media wouldn’t exist to elucidate its cruelties.

The trick with Gothic Communism, then, is to be playful and inventive when examining media that isn’t invested in giving the game away. This includes canon of any kind, which tends to replicate the same old clichés, often as products being sold to people (a street corner drug deal). Being cookie-cutter and mass-produced just means they’re automated, thus semi-predictable in ways the elite cannot fully prevent. All workers need to do is interrogate the text by thinking critically in creative ways—through art as something to produce, but also thinking about art as already made whenever and wherever you come across it; i.e., former poiesis. The counterfeit’s ghost is cryptonymic, sought out behind ludic veneers: the card game.

Borderland is plenty bloody without the spillage literally plunging down the killers’ thirsty throats, the heroes living on through a sorry, undead façade while completely covered in the blood of their dead friends. Unlike gladiators, who are generally paid and trained, there’s no belt, no glory for Alice. The same goes for workers at large; i.e., even if you win (survive), the bloodsport (and subsequent witch hunt/police state’s sodomy arguments, feeding on workers through bad BDSM and us-versus-them death lotteries) has already happened many times over!

(exhibit 42c: Despite lacking overtly ghost icons, Alice in Borderland is full of ghosts and vampiric entities: Alice, forced to survive while he sacrifices his friends; the ghost town of Tokyo itself; and Hatter, who haunts his killer long after being shot to death. It’s not a dazzling nightlife, but a graveyard: a giant eye watching you and telling you where to go and where to die.)

Liberation isn’t when the game “stops,” but changes to yield ludo-Gothic BDSM that isn’t Vampire Capitalism; i.e., Gothic Communism having—like any advanced ruleset—developed out of older rulesets. “Winning” (for the proletariat) occurs by breaking the elite’s illusory rules of power under Capitalism Realism: rewriting them through emergent gameplay inside concentric stories speaking to larger systems feeing on smaller systems (nations), and even smaller, embedded forms (domestic police) likewise feeding to defend property and sap living labor through dead labor, on and on; i.e., ludic dualities pointing to current predation and ultimately, a desire for that dated, harmful vampirism to stop because it not only isn’t fair, but needlessly and pointlessly cruel: profit isn’t needed to help people!

Adversity in gaming needn’t translate to a neoliberal trifecta. While stress will remain under Communism, workers address stress with “stress” to help each other heal; i.e., doing so instead of the elite dividing us up into factions they control and prey upon. In turn, ludo-Gothic BDSM is endemic to Communism—shall be as cool, fun and cathartic as ever during harmless bloodsports. Those shall remain, too—just won’t be compelled, harmful and pandemic, and shall apply to all oppressed groups equally (not just we fags). Artifacts of power—their assigned values and statuses for heroes and villains, cops and victims—arbitrate according to how they are viewed but also used in correspondence to those views: defending the prison or tearing it down. Our victory is denying our jailors any and all of our precious blood, while redistributing power to make workers more intelligent/aware! We stick it to capital (who will grow thirstier and eventually weaker).

That’s what good play ultimately is, but also, as we shall see with ghosts, something whose arbitrations remain haunted by spectres of Caesar and Marx under Capitalism as it presently exists. Something is always taken and given, occupying the venue as a liminal space filled with old history on shared avatars and positions, surfaces, etc. Communism is the installation of choice, the latter’s camping of canon informed by older ghosts as beings to learn from: how to cheat and, at times, hang loose and find forgiveness (e.g., Hatter, above). Capital makes us do things we don’t want to do, but can learn from those haunting us to break the habit during class, culture and race warfare as asymmetrical; i.e., during ludo-Gothic BDSM as a liberatory matter of pattern, persuasion and yes, play!

So often, interpretation is built on shaky premises that—during oppositional praxis—happen in good and bad faith, play and acting in services to workers, power or even what they think is one or the other but corrupt through bad, brute-force interpretations of someone like Foucault, Plato, Butler or Marx. Popular ideas touch upon hard truths, thus lead to common and pervasive misunderstandings and ignorance that, just as often, are willfully pulverized. By comparison, Gothic Communism combines different ideas to disempower the concentric, ludic, and ultimately illusory nature of prisons!

Unto this, the possible world is often haunted by ghosts of itself leading the way out of the maze inside the maze, closet, game, endless night, what-have-you; i.e., escape happening inside capital as something to transform through hearts (spades, clubs, diamonds) and minds—how the game is played, but also inhabited and observed as a prison promoting might-makes-right. It feels like a dream, but speaks to something people better than us believed in; re, Laura Branigan:

I, I live among the creatures of the night
I haven’t got the will to try and fight
Against a new tomorrow, so I guess I’ll just believe it
That tomorrow never comes (“Self Control“).

Our praxial goal is to spread power and knowledge in ways the state can’t simply hoover up—i.e., out of one or two leaders that, once dead, their revolution dies with them; e.g., Lenin—but instead, distributes in ways that, like the hydra, can’t simply be decapitated, turned upside-down and bled dry under Capitalist Realism’s hellish myopia. The best prisons hide in plain sight; the spirit of Gothic Communism is allegory inside of prisons that we subvert through holistic, ergodic, concentric, dialectical-material analysis—to throw the doors of perception wide. We shine a light on Vampire Capitalism, shriveling it!

To it, lie, cheat, steal, ask questions; connect the dots, fuck what must be fucked—do whatever you can to avoid Vampire Capitalism! Deny the elite that one and only thing they enjoy—our suffering. Make them hydrophobic; i.e., something they cannot swallow, choking on thirst. Grow bird spots on your wings/eyes on the back of your head; remind people that videogames (or anything else) aren’t for spending money to abject reality and its abuses under Vampire Capitalism, but reverse that in ways that set us free, thus empower us to be able to make a better world than capitalists ever could (their idea of perfection being a genocidal blood bank concealed by shadowy illusions; i.e., presented as canceled-future false power inside prison-for-profit by-another name, the trolley problem being the logical and perennial choice). Labor has infinite value; use it! Define what you are born with/into, not vice versa!

(artist: Karen B.)

The elite might be our jailors, then, but they’re not the only vampires on the block. We are legion, and own the blood they want to own, but we must intersect or they’ll divide and conquer us all over again; our intersectional solidarity and ludo-Gothic BDSM can arrange power-as-vampiric/should reflect that when challenging state doubles by thinking critically about, thus emergently with, what they want us to play with as intended: to rape ourselves for their daily fix. We’re the cards they strive to play against ourselves, meaning to reclaim ourselves is to take said cards out of their hands. “All’s fair in love and class war!” and they only have what power we give them—from our bodies to their mouths, we can cut off the oxygen to their brains. The Holocaust for us is them loading us into trains and camps for orderly disposal and reabsorption into the state; for them, it’s us reversing polarity to deny them any ability to cage and torture us, shooting down the old track marks of history. The memory of states begins and ends with them “shooting up,” drinking our blood each and every grim harvest. Let’s go for the jugular (no low-hanging fruit), cutting off their supply!

To break Capitalism Realism, then, is to envision new ways of playing ourselves out that don’t lead to systemic exploitation and harm; i.e., by collectively and all-at-once refusing to obey our self-styled masters (and their cops/enforcers) any longer! No more surrendering our neck, thus no more tokenizing to bite into others by internalizing gamer mentalities that condition us to win at all costs: our souls, our bodies, our agency! We have become fenced in, doomed and stared at by those who come after and rape us (to tokenize and be put down, when we go rabid; i.e., the euthanasia effect; e.g., Samus Aran absorbing X parasites, raping the womb of nature until she corrupts with Medusa’s revenge). Networking new circulation, we play with dogma to diffuse it (often spatially and socially—re: Metroidvania). Thus we monstrous-feminine have our deadly revenge—however campy and silly this new proletarian meta may be—topping from bellow (rebellions start and act from the bottom up)! Let them think what they want; it pays to be underestimated[19] (said the victim to the cop, the outlaw guerrilla to the state servant; e.g., Henry Johns to Brett Ridgeman, in Dragged Across Concrete, 2018)!

Under Vampire Capitalism, then, the land is a farm/strip mine of never-ending hate and misery that, when the state decays, eats all workers without care. The land shall be given back, the prisons holistically examined and dismantled, their us-versus-them mentalities erased from existence. Let’s give it back! Knowing what you know, doing so—reassembling Gothic Communism, however fragmented or ghostly it might seem—should be a piece of cake (revolutionary cryptonymy’s show-and-hide often being monster sex)! Sex or not, anything we do is violent, ipso facto; the cake is a lie that, in our capable hands, leads to tastier things! Delicious liberation! Development is liminal, then, insofar as the fabled chicken crosses the road to get to the other side; but for us, the crossing isn’t to conduct genocide! Communism is already treated as next-to-impossible during Capitalist Realism, so there’s no harm in trying in order to spite our captors! Sloganize fresh campy ghosts through rememory! Make Marx gay! Sex workers of the world, unite! We have only to lose our chains! Mutual consent and reciprocity for the win! Go for the gold! Backshot Nike (“Just do it!” haha)! Etc.

(artist: Shexyo)

Now that we’ve explored development through vampires, sodomy and bloodsports—and included the ideal hermeneutic case study vis-à-vis the Gothic, Marxism, queer studies and ludology through Vampire Capitalism and prisons vs ludo-Gothic BDSM in The Matrix and Alice in Borderland (and old-world-themed bloodsports with Red Hook’s Darkest Dungeon and the Countess)—we shall reconsider another vital aspect to Gothic-Communist development: cryptomimesis; i.e., liminal riffing and ghostly lineages. We’ll look at these through ghosts and various mechanisms associated with them, next!

Onto “Seeing Dead People; or Undead Feeding Vectors, part two: Ghosts“!

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Footnotes

[1] Such muscles historically couldn’t be achieved by humans, due to natural limitations. Per the heteronormative order prioritizing science to artificially enhance drug users in the paradigm, capital has pushed steroids long after Eugene Sandow died in order to raise medals and weights in his honor. It’s not just a grift, but a neo-Olympus preying disease-like on its own population: the steroids are as bad for the users as those around them. Like any epidemic, steroids are generally enacted by wealthy addicts. Most often these are middle-class men, but really anyone inside the Man Box; re:

The use of androgens, frequently referred to as anabolic-androgenic steroids (AAS), has grown into a worldwide substance abuse problem over the last several decades. Testosterone was isolated in the 1930s, and numerous synthetic androgens were quickly developed thereafter. Athletes soon discovered the dramatic anabolic effects of these hormones, and AAS spread rapidly through elite athletics and bodybuilding from the 1950s through the 1970s. However it was not until the 1980s that widespread AAS use emerged from the elite athletic world and into the general population. Today, the great majority of AAS users are not competitive athletes, but instead are typically young to middle-aged men who use these drugs primarily for personal appearance (source: Gen Kanayama and Harrison G. Pope Jr’s “History and Epidemiology of Anabolic Androgens in Athletes and Non-athletes,” 2017).

In turn, the strong push their prey to the side, the latter living in the shadow of meatheads killing themselves for the same predatory system! Said meatheads become slaves to their own bodies, the muscles needing an unusual amount of blood (thus nutrients) to exist, which users abuse/supplement with chemicals paid for in all the usual sell-your-soul approaches: theft of one’s property and rights, but also other peoples’ as well. All fall victim to the athlete/cop’s drug-seeking behavior (e.g., Ronnie Coleman was a cop). Power is the drug through class, status and predation, which vampirically manifest and supply through theft during class, culture and/or race betrayal!

[2] From Volume Two, part one:

The boy-gets-girl formula is as old as the monomyth, but translates from D&D into videogames via the usual imperial language of sex and force—from Donkey Kong (where the hero, Jump Man, is actually the villain) to Jump King (2019), where it (and content [not criticism] about it; e.g., Karl Jobst’s “Jump King‘s Biggest Barrier Was Finally Broken!” 2024) is suitably less ironic or critical of the media circuit it contributes towards. Instead, the developers (and speedrunning symbiosis) bank on the sexist headspace of Earthworm Jim (1994) or Dragon’s Lair (1983) to valorize male action; i.e., to conquer Hell as a place to enter then oust false dark kings or monstrous-feminine beings to restore balance to the “natural order” of things: by alienating and fetishizing nature as something to conquer by virtue of traditional male action (force) under Cartesian thought. It’s unironically something that wins the princess as a prize (who apparently is just lying in wait, dressed up like a bimbo waiting to be taken back to the hero’s bed to be “lanced”) [source].

To this, the player in Crimson Court gets the girl: raping the whore, monomyth-style; i.e., as a female version of Radcliffe’s demon lover, emerging victorious from her womb space!

[3] Jadis, for example, once asked me to slap them in the face. They had taught me to lightly touch the cheek, then release to give them time to anticipate, but not how to deliver the strike itself. So I slapped them in the face as I had been taught by martial artists—not with a light tapping motion to stimulate the nerves, but with full follow-through! The blow rocked them solid, but being solid themselves their head did not move. Thoroughly rattled but unharmed, their eyes opened wide and they looked up at me anxiously. “Honey…” they said, “that’s not a slap! I felt my brain move!” To their credit, they patiently explained to me the proper technique. Even so, the initial presumption of knowledge from them, during the accident, led to an ignominious (and frankly hilarious) experience. No harm, no foul!

[4] The ritual’s mutual consent, per the ludic contract, further being established by the fact that you first have to buy, download and install the DLC. Countess is a good mommy dom, teaching players to camp her death through ludo-Gothic BDSM (which sadly must occupy her unironic death, as well, inside the same thirsty gameworld)!

[5] I.e., xenophilic BDSM: the strict mommy dom, the xenomorph as deadly even in cutesy forms; re: Art Legionary’s horny and hilarious take on the famous creature.

[6] An anti-Semitic dogwhistle that survives in modern-day Jewish Conspiracy stories. Incidentally, Rice did not like Stoker and called his novel “the incoherent ramblings of an insane Irishman.”

[7] The release of hormones before, during and after a period starts and ends can affect not just the haver’s dreams, but their waking from them in terror and/or lust; re: canonically speaking, the having of naughty dreams visited upon someone by an incubus or succubus. Also sometimes, periods can make people hornier (and again, orgasms can sometimes help with period cramps, though these vary drastically per individual and are also poorly studied. Such ignorance owes to itself to capital, it being far easier for elite forces to dogmatize female biology than to understand it; i.e., humanizing “vampires” so goes against the profit motive).

[8] A common female defense mechanism is “vaginismus”; i.e., where the vagina—rather than swell from blood due to an erogenous response—will suddenly and violently contract on its own. Generally due to lived trauma and/or tokophobia, said mechanism forces the people involved to not only improvise but—keeping with the insect breeding metaphor—canonically enact a practice known as “traumatic penetration”; re: the knife dick, but also fangs and other stabby bits engaging in abject sexual reproduction and BDSM: paternal sodomy and brood-style mothering simply punching through the skin into the bloodstream and/or body cavity (re: the xenomorph, above)!

[9] With vampires classically able to transform into either animal, but also clouds of mist—all anti-Semitic symbols linking vampires to rodents, lupine creatures and other such fearsome-to-victim creatures of the night, but also witches and goblins (who, again, serve a different bigoted form if identical purpose). In BDSM terms, though, vampires can change shape in ways conducive to size difference—the bat quite small, and wolves (especially werewolves) known for their immense size and ability to overpower their prey! Stigmas inform and assist in predation per the profit motive; i.e., as carceral and fake, but no less effective on the faithful Straights policing us in blind faith pursuant to assimilate, thus socio-material elevation!

[10] The film—made by the Wachowski sisters when they were still in the closet—was built on Ghost in the Shell’s Pygmalion-meets-Frankenstein cyberpunk yarn. The former was already a story about a tokenized female robocop in a neoliberal Orientalist wonderland; i.e., made to appeal to the Western Male Gaze while simultaneously assassinating Japanese salary men in a hypercomputerized world on the edge of cyberspace (Aarseth would write Cybertext, two years later): pinned between Baudrillard’s 1970s concept of hyperreality (made on the verge of neoliberalism and based on older thinkers, from Borges to Plato) and 1980s cyberpunk fantasies critiquing neoliberal Capitalism et al. They effectively did so through standard-issue power trips, whose own Neuromancer-grade hauntologies (and tabletop games) would inform Fisher’s concept of Capitalist Realism, per the canceled future and into my own work (starting in 2022, five years after Fisher’s suicide).

In Neo’s case, he was moonlighting as a hacker who, during the daytime, works a dead-end corporate job—magically catching the attention of Morpheus, the King of Dreams, who’s convinced he’s the One (a cause to believe in). And extratextually the entire film speaks to queer dissatisfaction with life under capital, appreciating philosophy/videogames in ways that bring these gentrified theories and media to bear for a revolutionary purpose. The sisters would eventually come out, and their updated, on-the-cusp metaphor for Plato’s cave would resonate with many queer people after the revolution caught fire; i.e., in the Internet Age; e.g., me, feeling validating in my interest with those things as a weird iconoclastic nerd—having watched Ghost in the Shell, The Matrix and The Animatrix (2003) in middle school and high school. As a rising queer academic stepping out of the shadows, I suddenly was finding my queer side twenty years later and viewing these older stories in a new light: queerness as a shadow/ghost of itself haunting the usual action stories; i.e., Neo played by Keanu Reeves—a man with an extensive history of playing queer-coded characters (e.g., Point Break, My Own Private Idaho) and standing in for queer revolution.

“Me!” I would say to the screen, excitedly. “They’re talking about me!” Except I didn’t, at the time. To be queer, then, is to be closeted in ways that sleepwalk through much of our lives. Hindsight is 20/20, we queers having to become a “new” order of existence; i.e., stepping out from older exclusionary shadows to make the Wisdom of the Ancients more wise, hence more inclusive in a 21st-century world. State dualities would rise to meet that challenge, but they could no longer monopolize it as they had in the past! Neo was free, Project 2501 was free, we were free.

Following suit, stories like The Matrix would be recuperated by white cis-het conservative men using DARVO and obscurantism to “create jobs” (the whole idea with prison labor being not just enslavement, but recursive police violence) and steal the magic pills back for the state. And such rebellious stand-ins pulling at queer yolks have the usual de facto white male/female representatives talking for oppressed groups; but so did Marx, I recall, arguing for factory workers (and a great many other thinkers; e.g., Lenin, having a rhetorical focus that started white and argued outwards). The wonderful idea about The Matrix (and later stories, like Sense8, 2015) is there was suddenly a multimedia, ludic allegory that included queer people; i.e., in ways that could occupy traditionally straight roles and make them genderqueer, non-white, sex-positive and Pagan, etc; i.e., many heroes in these stories being GNC sex workers, not just surviving but co-existing under a cyberpunk venue. The grounds for our mutual liberation felt more common, less alienated by Hollywood bullshit.

To it, the shadows on Plato’s cave wall—already dualistic and something of a closet—became thoroughly and consciously gay in ways that challenged state doubles: in the same shadow zone as something to fight over for different causes with said shadows. We could acknowledge ourselves first in shadowy projections, then exist independent of them!

[11] As discussed with Cameron’s Terminator films, in Volume One:

The technological singularity is often misunderstood as something that will eventually happen, all while scapegoating machines; i.e., by presenting them as the end of the world, rebelling against the status quo by replacing Humanity with pure non-humans (often via a transhuman buffer like the xenomorph or Frankenstein’s Creature). But the truth is less romantic: Thanks to efficient profit (and the bourgeois trifectas at large), Capitalism is generally not incentivized to build things like Skynet in a literal sense. Rather, human beings are dehumanized to behave in robotic ways, insofar as delivering or receiving state violence is concerned. This isn’t technology of an incredibly advanced sort, nor does the state require it; it’s a reflection of the human condition projected onto various dated anxieties about the rise of the police state smashed together with state-fueled phobias and stigmas in a retro-future hauntology that leads to Capitalist Realism. It’s a paradox—a liminal expression of unequal power and its abuse, insofar as technology becomes a device of state terror that contains within it all the usual means of humanizing the dehumanized through counterterror (source).

Robata—or slaves/raw technology—is commonly used during Red Scare narratives to scapegoat labor and machines instead of the elite; i.e., the technological singularity argument absolves human systems of any wrongdoing: “It was the machines, Sarah!” The dualities at work likewise present workers as machines inside a prison, which its owners—depleted of their humanity and treating us like blood bags to suck on—unscrupulously abuse during Vampire Capitalism. The way to escape is through a posthuman revolution; i.e., the kind where workers seek revenge against their Cartesian overlords by becoming the thing they fear most: counterterrorists overthrowing bondage. Both arguments use the same aesthetics, one treating it as a doomsday and the other a jailbreak.

[12] While I’m not sure about squids, the octopus is a classic symbol of monopolies under Capitalism and its multiple gilded ages, but also fascism and blood libel per Jewish Conspiracy.

[13] The asylum is also a metaphor of medieval abuse that, for queer people, is a concentration site to keep watch over them; re; Foucault’s panopticon and History of Sexuality speaking to the homosexual man as someone to watch; i.e., by virtue of the queer disease—unlike syphilis—largely being associated with gay men and anal sex. The disease profile became something to camp our status with as disease spreaders differently than women; i.e., they for their hysteria and various STDs, we for our sodomy and AIDS in particular. No one wants to be known as sick or aberrant. To that, the poetry of vampirism becomes a campy, performative way to recontextualize our treatment as walking plagues; i.e., dressing it up in the operatic language of forbidden desire, taboo sex, and various social stigmas. It’s rock ‘n roll/calculated risk—our rebellion put to music and dress codes that even the Straights can get on board with (to colonize, of course).

Applying this directly to Borderland, there’s no music (at least no diegetic music), but plenty of drama. Cheshire isn’t just the twink-in-peril, but one trapped inside Foucault’s panopticon (with “neko” being Japanese gay slang for “bottom”); i.e., the show’s blood disease/transfer is capital-in-small, the prison being operated like a gameshow while its temporary inhabitants murder each other according to the game’s punitive ruleset: in a prison restored to administer that punishment, doing so through discipline as established and acted out according to the game ludicrous ruleset. Stupid game, stupid prize, but the players are literally collared to explosives—they’re hostages pushed into gang behaviors, eating themselves alive (and every death a snuff film shot for the elite’s pleasure)!

[14] From left to right. Caterpillar is trans, escaping her abusive father’s past by kicking ass (using the karate her father taught her to survive); Cheshire is a hospital ghoul seeking redemption for his sins; and Alice is a shut-in gamer alienated from his family and forced to kill his brother and best friend early in the show (survivor’s guilt commonly manifesting in zombie apocalypses/post-apocalypses).

[15] Per the arbitration of the inmates, turning the whole exercise into a guess-who-dies-next game for the elite looking in. They pride themselves as gods—immortal, above it all, exempt from death and human failings while, in the same breath, slaves to blood more than anyone else. They’re like a transplant victim hooked to stolen organs, said organs still inside a comatose body!

[16] I.e., “gamer culture,” which, as we’ve established in our thesis volume, is predominantly white, cis-het, and male. Moreover, many “metas” exist within manufactured competition to serve the profit motive; e.g., fighting games and professional teams of the FGC as a globalized operation across multiple countries. If you don’t complete, you don’t exist.

[17] As Eric Koziel writes in Speedrun Science: A Long Guide to Short Playthroughs (2019):

In March of 1990, Nintendo of America staged an event in Dallas, Texas […] called the “Nintendo World Championships.” While this was mainly a marketing event to capture and further motivate the explosive success of the NES, it grew into a full-on circuit. While the event itself was built around total score, the Nintendo World Championships have a place in history as one of the earliest instances of organized speedrunning (source).

[18] The consent-non-consent, in this case, being their consenting beforehand to us fucking in sessions where they wouldn’t always be able to consent in the moment; i.e., requiring me to gauge for them if things were still good even when they couldn’t signal a safe word for me (they smiled in their sleep as I fucked them). Awake or asleep, sober or stoned, we had a contract and stuck to it!

[19] From my grandfather fighting Nazis in the Dutch resistance to me, doing the same: “I’m just a dumb Dutch girl. I don’t know nothing!” Playing dumb is just another trick up our sleeves, the guerrilla fighting in the shadows with shadows against monopolies on shadows (to escape Plato’s cave).