This blog post is part of “Deal with the Devil,” a third promotion originally inspired by the first and second ones I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” and “Searching for Secrets” (2024). The first 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). “Deal with the Devil” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, Demons (the “Searching for Secrets” promotion covered the Undead Module, which is now live). 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 “Deal with the Devil’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!
Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).
Concerning Buggy Images: Sometimes the images on my site don’t always load and you get a little white-and-green placeholder symbol, instead. Sometimes I use a plugin for loading multiple images in one spot, called Envira Gallery, and not all of the images will load (resulting in blank white squares you can still right-click on). I‘ve optimized most of the images on my site, so I think it’s a server issue? Not sure. You should still be able to access the unloaded image by clicking on the placeholder/right-clicking on the white square (sometimes you have to delete the “?ssl=1” bit at the end of the url). Barring that, completed volumes will always contain all of the images, whose PDFs you can always download on my 1-page promo.
Prefacing Tolkien: to Harmony/Concerning Big Black Dicks and Anti-Semitism vs “antisemitism”
“You don’t want go to South Africa.” / “Why not?” / “You’re black.”
—an Apartheid villain to Roger Murtaugh, Lethal Weapon 2 (1989)
Picking up where “Idle Hands, part two: Vampires and Claymation” left off…
Before we start, I want to do two things: dedicate part three to Harmony, and discuss “black” a little more as a poetic device; i.e., concerning Tolkien’s love for big black dicks (and other non-white bodies to penetrate with some kind of dick; e.g., goblin asses, below) in his racist, sexist, and otherwise bigoted blood libel stories: murdering orcs and goblins, en masse, while disguising 19th-century ethnocentrism as post-WWII British High Fantasy escapism. We’ll also discuss the difference between “anti-Semitism” and “antisemitism,” and why I favor the former over the latter in my own work.
(artist: Noaqin)
First, “Idle Hands,” part three is dedicated to Harmony, who not only supported me during the entire writing process, but whose black dildo inspired my critique of Tolkien abjecting black cock; i.e., in ways Harmony and I could subvert by playing with abjected material in sex-positive ways. Like Bay during Volume Zero’s construction, Harmony has been very supportive and kind, helping me see value in my own work, here; i.e., in its critiquing of popular media’s dogma through industry monoliths like Tolkien (who people don’t tend to critique nearly enough).
Whereas Tolkien’s Hobbit begins with, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,” “Idle Hands,” part three started with me seeing Harmony penetrated by a big black dick, and wanting afterwards to recreate the scene; i.e., in equally healthy ways through both of us illustrating mutual consent during ludo-Gothic BDSM. It began, as sex normally does, with smaller things growing into bigger things, but also occurred through tangents into dark, wet, exciting places; i.e., not exactly a “nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell,” as Tolkien describes it, but still speaking psychosexually to the kinds of unironic, canonically essential value judgements he frequently gave to nature, outside colonial orders: stamped as “black” and alien, abjected for hobbit-hole comforts.
We must humanize the harvest in ways Tolkien clearly tried to monopolize/triangulate against nature; i.e., in ways of the underworld that Harmony loves manipulate. Using them to break through such allegories of the English pastoral, she employs her own wanton displays of sexual liberation to camp the canon with; i.e., her own body and toys’ infernal comforts; e.g., her fat goblin ass part of the same strange home for misfit toys that Harmony embodies! “Look on our Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
This entire segment carries that playful spirit of irony forwards, camping Tolkien’s wraith-like ghost in the hopes of shaping a better worldview outlined by Milton, the second-generation British Romantics and some of the Neo-Gothic authors (e.g., Lewis)—one conducive, I should hope, towards Gothic Communism, and towards humanizing all the orcs and goblins that Tolkien killed, one black alien cock at a time! It’s an olive branch.
Second, something “black.” Our focus concerns not just Tolkien’s racism and anti-Semitic tropes viewed backwards (using forbidden sight, but also hindsight 20/20, with darkness visible), but his entire bigotry targeting “black,” in practice. So what is it?
“Black” is anisotropic, meaning it goes both ways but means different things per direction. We’re playing with black to fuck the alien, during oppositional praxis; i.e., in a sex-positive sense, while subverting bigoted forms of Gothic fakery/theatre that Tolkien most certainly did not. For Tolkien and for capital, “black” is a gaslight (“there’s nothing there”), a clear-and-present danger tied to national security (illegal aliens), and a cloaking device/false flag (among other things; e.g., a “gatekeep, girl boss” mechanism). Both rely on a feeling of invasion by darkness through neoliberal military propaganda; i.e., to galvanize home defense in upholding “Rome” and the nuclear model against a perceived Great Destroyer from Elsewhere. Behind the weird-nerd persona of a polite British linguist sits a white moderate printing centrist lies.
Tolkien isn’t just a fascist posing as an ivy-league nerd, then, but the Necromancer himself, tucked behind the Black Veil! Such is the banality of evil, its desk murder going beyond fiscal zones and into scholarly temples. Abjecting his own decay during mirror syndrome onto his black nameless victims, Tolkien loves and fears black dick to conduct genocide with (an abusive spouse raping the Global South through a Black Revenge strawman); never forget that.
(model and artist: Jericho and Persephone van der Waard)
Keeping with Otto’s Numinous and Radcliffe’s Black Veil (the dialectic of shelter and the alien), the Gothic is writ in tremendous obscurity and decay. “Black,” for Tolkien, is alien to abject—while imprinting colonial norms onto hauntological throwbacks, and which help explain his endless productivity and celebration by state copycats: extending capital through complicit cryptonymy/state entropy to best restore British-American monarchism; i.e., a “greater” nostalgia of the imaginary past to retreat towards (the American benefactors, oddly enough, retreating into a false Britain). For us, it’s alien to reunite amid oscillating feelings of the foreign and familiar deciding what to do, during unequal, forbidden exchange. This goes for cocks, or anything attached/relating to them, great and small; e.g., the fat goblin ass or tight hobbit hole attaching to Numinous evocations of nature’s alien, Promethean, monstrous-feminine homecoming with workers; i.e., the fire of the gods, Medusa, and their possible worlds waiting patiently beyond the Capitalocene/Capitalist Realism!
This portion was originally written here, but I have decided to post it separately, on my old blog, given its broader application. To it, I reference an archived video about my grandfather, interviewed in 2005, talking largely about his experiences during WWII: as a Dutch liberation fighter and Holocaust survivor. I didn’t have time to go into the video, here, so I recorded a response video where I think about the interview as a third-generation trans Communist Dutch girl writing a book series on goblins and other anti-Semitic monsters (Persephone van der Waard’s “Anti-Semitism vs Antisemitism: Discussing My Grandfather (a Dutch Holocaust Survivor) w/ My Work,” 2024); i.e., how in writing this preface, I thought of my Dutch heritage overshadowed by fascist oppression, and wanted to examine my grandfather, warts and all; i.e., relative to anti-Semitic myths and monsters that don’t apply to Jewish persecution exclusively. —Perse
Third, a note about Zionism and anti-Semitism. It has been brought to my attention that academics and scholars tend to favor “antisemitism” versus “anti-Semitism.” Holocaust Remembrance explains it as follows:
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) would like to address the spelling of the term “antisemitism,” often rendered as “anti-Semitism.” The IHRA’s concern is that the hyphenated spelling allows for the possibility of something called “Semitism,” which not only legitimizes a form of pseudo-scientific racial classification that was thoroughly discredited by association with Nazi ideology, but also divides the term, stripping it from its meaning of opposition and hatred toward Jews. […] The term has, however, since its inception referred to prejudice against Jews alone. [emphasis, me…] The unhyphenated spelling is favored by many scholars and institutions in order to dispel the idea that there is an entity “Semitism” which “anti-Semitism” opposes. Antisemitism should be read as a unified term so that the meaning of the generic term for modern Jew-hatred is clear. At a time of increased violence and rhetoric aimed towards Jews, it is urgent that there is clarity and no room for confusion or obfuscation when dealing with antisemitism (source).
And yet here I am, using “anti-Semitism,” anyways. What gives?
(artists: Persephone van der Waard and Autumn Anarchy)
The problem is, my work on Gothic Communism doesn’t concern Jewish people, alone; it explores the holistic and widespread application of blood libel (and relative persecution languages) as having gone beyond Jewish people, but which were once applied aggressively-if-not-uniquely to them as a criminalized non-Christian group (don’t forget Muslims during the Crusades, or later on, the Irish Catholics)—i.e., blood libel, sodomy and witch hunts have expanded beyond Jewish people to attack other marginalized groups (often by Jewish tokens, in later centuries); e.g., queer people, women, Muslims and Pagans, Indigenous groups, and people of color all being supplied tropes of a historically anti-Semitic nature: the so-called “bad blood” of slaves and their foregone betrayal as codified “evil servants” (with sex workers and their discrimination being as old as Judaism, for instance). What bigots from older times used to punch primarily down against persons called “Semite,” then, has since been repackaged and sent, tokenized, back into the world.
For one, this speaks to a fundamental historical misunderstanding of race, insofar as “race” as a punitive notion under capital didn’t exist in the Middle Ages, wherein such things focused on religious persecution against competing factions; it emerged with capital developing into itself as a hauntological device that inserted racism into the imaginary historical past. Said past, in turn, is routinely evoked in ways that concern the abjection process tied to different monsters of a Jewish character that has tangled itself among different marginalized groups, fictions and historical events.
In other words, Zionism can’t be separated from non-tokenized forms, which token elements try to emulate and downplay in bad faith. That’s not simply the focus of my work (which it very much is), but something that needs to be discussed regardless of bystanders who haven’t sold out. The word clearly has been weaponized by Zionism, at this stage, and splitting hairs about a hyphen is a bit academic and furthermore, dangerous; i.e., when the word—regardless of its punctuation (and not even changing the pronunciation, while my using of the hyphen serves an academic purpose)—is clearly being used by colonizers decaying the Jewish body to fulfill a Christianized, capitalist agenda, and which the feelings of non-participants in an ongoing genocide is, forgive me, considerably less important than exposing the genocide. Those feelings are still valid—hence my prefacing of the Tolkien critique with any kind of preamble at all—but they should never silence criticism regarding said word’s current misuse, nor the tokenized actions Zionism represents, when doing so.
(source: Suzanne Moore’s “‘Terf’ Is the Ultimate Slur against Women,” 2023)
Just as we shouldn’t invent brand-new phrases to distance feminism from TERFs, nor should we, regarding Jews and Zionism. Zionism is a radical, fascist form of Judaism, just as TERFs are a radical, fascist form of feminism, and each bleeds into fiction, itself, meriting a radical response from us; i.e., to change the course of history on all registers. Radical problems require radical solutions, meaning bigots use DARVO and obscurantism to point the finger at their victims with their own language (witch cops hunting other witches, above). I’m not going to stop using “anti-Semitism” academically just because it offends someone or because I’m not Jewish (academia would cease to exist, if that were the case); the point is how it’s offending others and why—using intellectual movements to scare those who fear intellectual power’s historical ability to change the status quo (versus maintaining it by attacking intellectuals, which fascism does by design).
To that, I don’t “have” to be Jewish to write about Jewish tokenism and oppression going beyond a narrow idea of Jewish people/Jewish people period, any more than I would “need” be to be black to write about Frantz Fanon’s arguments likewise extending to non-African-Americans; my doing so merely happens on my side of the pedagogy of the oppressed, using its relative privilege, oppression and alienation to reach across the aisle, regarding holistic oppression: as a white, middle-class trans woman whose own non-Jewish family (on my father’s side, next page) was brutalized by the Nazi regime in Holland. Nazis don’t discriminate insofar as discrimination goes; they merely swap out scapegoats as needed.
Fascism, at its core, is conservative, meaning it compels speech through selective boundaries and moderate-to-reactionary punishment (re: “boundaries for me, not for thee”). We must contend with such arbitration while also dealing with each other’s respective and collective abuse, mid-liberation; i.e., saying what needs to be said while dealing with others who say what should or shouldn’t be said—all leading to a great deal of unproductive arguing back and forth, instead of systemic, cooperative change (a bit like Gandalf and the three trolls, the latter debating about eating the dwarves and the wizard invading their conversation by throwing his voice to make them delay until the sun came up): “Won’t someone please think of the Jews!” If all they do is lead to singular and myopic interpretations that never move the focus onto stopping genocide, such refrains are infantilizing and criminogenic; i.e., those who say them in bad faith don’t actually care about Jews, save as a tool for discrediting activism.
To it, my giving of hard facts and genuine arguments that Jewish people can respond to is a sign of respect; i.e., towards those I view not simply as human, but adults capable of thinking for themselves, while letting their fellow oppressed get a word in, too. To prevent that would be to logically limit each group only to itself through self-administered gag orders—a Tower of Babel to divide and conquer all peoples raped by capital. No one ever said rebellion was simple or clean(e.g., Gramps, below, was a Dutch* patriot and Holocaust survivor who spoke about Nazi abuse all his adult life, but also loved America/free enterprise, hated Socialism [which he conflated with the Nazis] and would have fought in the War on Terror if they’d let him, and certainly wouldn’t have understood what trans people are).
*The Dutch being historically compared to Jewish people through similar “miser” arguments; i.e., the blood libel argument of essentialized greed being “in the blood,” which my people endure similar to Jewish people: by also being concentrated by tokenized elements appeasing the oppressor! To do so is folly! All arguments for liberation are valid provided they liberate all peoples from capital calling us “sick” for different reasons.
(source: Linda Meloche’s “Henri Vanderwaard Interview,” 2005)
Beyond Jewish trauma, we likewise wouldn’t discourage not talking about rape or sex work, period, merely because it makes some women uncomfortable or because it “only” applies to them; that’s TERF/SWERF logic, which extends to Zionism laterally espousing the various anti-Semitic myths surrounding it, but also the rape (and other harm) those systemically cause—i.e., when one group tries to monopolize victimhood, including demonic theatre as the performative, anisotropic tool, thereof. Silence is genocide, including partial silence. Gothic Communism seeks to raise awareness and emotional/Gothic intelligence to prevent universal rape, which you can’t do if you’re bunkered down in a space disconnected from others; i.e., for fear of being offended to such a degree that you close your eyes (and your mouth) entirely.
So many people that I showed this section to were afraid to say anything at all, for fear of speaking out of turn, or telling me to “ask a Jewish person,” first. And while some caution is merited, and good-faith Jewish opinions are entirely valid, to let overcaution push people into keeping quiet about some fairly obvious connections—like Zionism and racial conflict in Tolkien, bleeding into politics through persecution mania and genocide denial—is a fatal flaw that fascism will happily telegraph and exploit! Fascists aren’t your friends; they’re cops with a license to kill, cheat and steal for the bourgeoisie in bad faith—i.e., power aggregates behind activism painted as “slander” by state litigators playing at false rebellion. They’ll wear the mask until it suits them; i.e., until their victims lower their guard, all but asking for a knife in the back.
If I sound defensive, it’s because I am; I’ve trusted others blindly before and have been burned for it (tokens are vicious in their policing of others). So I’d rather preface things ahead of time, then proceed in good faith when critiquing tokenism going forwards. That’s how healthy relationships work. These arguments, then, are a gallery exhibit in a symposium meant to counteract hate crimes, not foster public harassment targeting minority groups for hateful reasons. Anyone who walks away from my writing and seriously thinks that I’m attacking Jews/trying to harm them is the one with the problem, in that respect. No one is above critique, including victims but especially when they go on to victimize others (whether on purpose or not); i.e., while hiding behind exclusive-victim status. Instead, we should value the voice of victims in a holistic sense, not squander it by policing its potential to the point where any critical bite disappears. If fascism squirms, you know you’ve hit a nerve and should keep at it. Hit ’em where it hurts!
All of this is to say, the selective use of problematic kayfabe language (e.g., orcs and goblins, but also king hippos, left) pertains to the semi-imaginary history I’m referring to, here, which the Gothic essentially comprises at all times. It’s a specific group of disparate historical threads and ideas that remain at play and continue to evolve; i.e., blood libel, sodomy and witchcraft, which have similar historical elements but different applications nowadays through evolved monstrous code (re: goblins, vampires and witches). And the historical elements regarding blood lineage and power that such things evoke, however false they ultimately are, continue being evoked in bad faith by fascist parties of various signatures. Sometimes I call that signature “pre-fascist” or “post-fascist,” according to the anachronisms at work. But the lineage of forgeries nonetheless remain; i.e., as something of world history that, however imaginary it ultimately is, can still be addressed through camp: regarding tokenized violence lampooned by a polity of victims, which bourgeois elements levy against each other during Capitalist Realism. Tokenism is the weaponizing of useful idiots. Except, it’s not Jewish “erasure” to camp anti-Semitism; i.e., to speak to other groups harmed by or with anti-Semitic devices (speaking to a hauntology whose religious, ethnic and/or cultural “other” doesn’t apply exclusively to Jews). They can use it to speak to their unique history and abuse, and others can expand it beyond that bailiwick to speak to theirs, too.
A social element obviously persists. The phrase “anti-Semitic,” unto itself, is known to make many Jewish people feel unwelcome, but as I will go on to argue, it doesn’t apply exclusively to them, past or present. There’s also a historical character to interpret, mid-praxis. Much of that history is real and embellished, and speaks to things that are simply uncomfortable period; i.e., dealt in demonic forms, and something that refers to a specific idea of “past” that is still being used to attack a variety of people from the same source—while also being associated with a narrow section of the population and its tokenized violence, shouting others down!
To be blunt, police victims often go on to police others. The need to discuss Zionism, then (and its monopolies/mirror syndrome), frankly outweighs making all Jews feel comfortable, because there are those among them who—since Israel’s forming by the British empire and the United States—have grown increasingly hostile, vocal and bad-faith; i.e., as a tokenized minority speaking for the oppressor majority through themselves (re: gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss). Hyphen or not, the word is positively radioactive, and the time for polite discussion using it has well-and-truly passed (e.g., climate change, genocide, fascism). In short, we need to prioritize the acknowledgement of the grievous harm being caused, but also the tokenized means of sanitizing itself through mythical language that points away from the mechanisms at work; i.e., I’d rather talk frankly about the history of anti-Semitism and its expanded Venn Diagram of persecution networks right now—using markers of bigotry at play to raise awareness about genocide that some Jewish people have had a hand in—then spend time coming up with comfortable words that fail to cut home.
Anti-Semitism is an ugly business. So is Tolkien’s use of it through his token power fantasies. We need to be able to address that, including the myriad ways in which these devices often go unnoticed precisely for the reasons above. How can I talk about the bigotries at work in any focused way if the language for doing so is forced out of focus and off target? We need to pinpoint these issues, not hold hands (and this is coming from a service top). You might as well ask me to cut down the mightiest tree in the forest with a herring (or use a herring to blow up the Death Star, below). Counterterrorism, from an actually rebellious standpoint, is meant to make tokenism think twice, including those sitting—with relative comfort—on the fence. For many Jews, this idea is unthinkable all on its own, but criminogenic conditions make for strange bedfellows (and no one ever said that traitors weren’t logical in their assessment of the Judas payment). The idea isn’t to blame or police our fellow oppressed, but recognize and address what many do not.
I could say “victims of fascism” to dodge the issue, but then the history and signature (of which victims) would be swept aside—meaning “as it would be” for Tolkien or similar authors (e.g., Lucas, above), who built their careers (and legacies) out of coded racism and other bigotries with false arguments and origins tied to real ideologies; i.e., Tolkien did believe in blood myth, and applied it to Jewish people, but also non-white and monstrous-feminine people period through the same medieval hauntologies; re: orcs, which clearly have an anti-Semitic quality to them that, canonized by Tolkien’s work, go on to disguise that function used against all parties (which is why I think that covering up the lineage is dangerous).
(source: Wikimedia Commons)
Furthermore, any word we could invent would still wind up being used by the colonizer abusing tokenism to obfuscate their own operations! Tokenism and betrayal are both an ugly business—and the obscurantism of oppression is equally vile—but the reality as such needs to be dragged out into the open, not covered up; i.e., that, despite being coded unfairly as “vengeful backstabbers,” some Jewish people do sell out (e.g., Ze’ev Jabotinsky, left), as have any marginalized groups in history tied to different monsters “getting even”; re, Federici vis-à-vis witches: “Witchcraft accusations, in fact, are the ultimate mechanism of alienation and estrangement as they turn the accused—still primarily women—into monstrous beings, dedicated to the [vengeful] destruction of their communities, therefore making them undeserving of any compassion and solidarity” (source).
Empire hides behind its tokens, and Jewish revenge assimilates into Christian revenge (re: the Crusades, which Zionism emulates to kill Arabs for Christians through misguided ideas of revenge). This includes turning a blind eye towards present wrongs concerning past wrongs; i.e., regarding generational trauma, which many Jewish people in privilege are currently doing. If that bothers you when you’re demonstrably not a Zionist, remember that my critique is of Zionism hiding within Judaism as a more radical and tokenized form, thereof. And if you still can’t see past your own insecurities about my arguments “rocking the boat,” then maybe you should let go of whatever’s blinding you to the bloodbath currently happening overseas. While past atrocities can bring marginalized communities closer together, they also shock and isolate them, encouraging as they do willful ignorance regarding larger systemic issues. Sooner or later, that’s what complacency always becomes.
However shameful, disturbing or uncomfortable that feels, then, we have to account for it as it’s happening with blood libel, then reclaim that in light of such embarrassments. It sucks to require that anyone face the shame someone else more powerful in their own group has caused, but it must be done; i.e., such things don’t affect “just the Jews” (as the Palestinians well know, by now), so telling the investigator(s), “stay in your lane” won’t work: Zionism is currently happening and will keep happening regardless if all Jewish people are comfortable or not. Indeed, their fantasies of assimilation (re: Tolkien) often play into the silencing of genocide taking place! If their conscience gnaws at them, so be it; and if they have a bone to pick with me (for valid reasons or not), “lay on, Macduff. The black knight always triumphs!”
All kidding aside, I relish criticism; I relish criticism; it lets me know what to fortify. I also specialize in tokenism, which—if you haven’t noticed—is a tricky subject; i.e., if you don’t belong to the group being tokenized, you’re viewed (with some justice) as an outsider. And yet, we’re all oppressed to some degree (re, Derrida: “there is no outside of the text”). Furthermore, tokenism remains all the same, requiring its addressal, mid-exile, and inside a system of differences; i.e., it needs to be interpreted intersectionally and holistically to acknowledge parties acting in bad faith, and who rely on such selection processes to silence valid criticism outright.
In turn, my usage of “anti-Semitism” is also tricky because it concerns holistic historical abuses speaking to token forces who rely on the feelings of those they blend in with to cover for them; i.e., human shields, those regarding different peoples harmed by/sandwiched between collective and selective bigoted practices, and with language that was formerly used to attack Jews pointedly having expanded elsewhere: by using the same fictitious elements of arbitrary myth-making and application tied to Zionism (frontier capitalism) as something that hasn’t gone anywhere.
Again, I’m talking about monsters, and there isn’t a Jewish monopoly to what has been assigned to (and to some degree accepted by) that portion of the world’s population. The “Semite,” while it historically is centered around Jews, is an umbrella egregore that includes vampires, witches, orcs and goblins leveled at a variety of real-world groups; i.e., at the same time, and to a rising degree of prominence during Jewish gentrification and decay through Zionism (a practice, that through capital, tries to bastardize various inkblots to mean one thing and nothing else; e.g., token orc butts are “Jewish,” in Zionist eyes, and non-token/abject orc butts are “Hamas”; re: the giving and receiving of state violence through bourgeois models of terrorist/counterterrorist violence, per the zombie apocalypse relaid in demonic forms).
(artist: Just Some Noob)
My whole point, then, is how a formerly Jewish-exclusive calumny has expanded beyond Jewish peoples, in recent centuries, and well into the present. Even during the Holocaust, it wasn’t “just” about Jews and how they were affected by that disaster of state machinery run amok (desk murder); other groups besides Jewish people were sent to their deaths to “answer” the Jewish Question, but the popular historical records (fictional or otherwise) don’t mention them, nearly enough. I’d rather discuss things openly to reclaim them from token forces; i.e., as monopolizing holocaust, exile, persecution, bereavement, rape (accusations) and revenge, and whose falsehoods we use the imaginary power of “Gothic” fakeries to subvert. “Semitism” is invented, which means it can be reinvented. So, too, has Jewishness has gone from a religion to a national body that relates to others in ways that necessitate such invention and outspoken shots-in-the-arm. Blame Capitalism, not me, and set your tokenized guilt aside; my patience is frankly at its end, and I’m going to hyphenate different things to form connections useful towards universal liberation (as the Gothic so often does; re: the grey area of its storied poetics; e.g., correct-incorrect). We learn by challenging each other, and my work is hardly the final say in the grand scheme of things.
That being said, I also think we shouldn’t seriously entertain any idea of ranking rape and “oppression Olympics.” There’s no such thing as a perfect victim. Instead, I think all groups need to be considered together in light of state abuse; i.e., versus a great many living in the shadow of one particular group, whose own extinction event has been advertised by American media to prioritize them, first and foremost. This goes for trans people, Jews, people of color or Indigenous people, etc; no one “trumps” anyone else, everyone speaking out against tokenism regardless of who’s doing it whenever such things are out of joint/balance.
Believe it or not, I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes, here, but all the same, we need to get over the idea that holocaust and genocide are strictly of a Jewish character and history (real or otherwise); i.e., while simultaneously recognizing how tools of Jewish oppression aren’t used against them, we can acknowledge the harms caused against them, including holocaust denial. You can’t camp holocaust, but you can camp your own survival, and multiple people can survive the same event to camp it later.
Likewise, it’s not denial to include others in what has largely been framed (in Zionist circles) as a wholly Jewish ordeal. Two (or more) things can be true at once, Zionism doubling Jewishness as capably as Gene Simmons, but for different reasons (see: footnote, next page). Just as Israel and America invent things out of whole cloth behind double standards, we can do the same to spite those standards; i.e., fighting fire with fire and for land back despite the Jewish dogmatic belief of a god-denied, -promised, then ultimately -given homeland. Like Omelas, the point is walking away from Egypt if that means not genociding other people, not towards it! Israel is a ploy to buy cheap loyalty in furtherance to capital’s continued raping of others—Jews included!
This will certainly ruffle some feathers, but I’m a Satanic atheist; i.e., there is no God, only workers vs the elite and whatever deities either fabricates for their own purposes. My doing so happens while speaking to those harmed by refusing to look past matters of a “purely” ethnic character. It was never about “pure ethnicity” but dividing and conquering more broadly using that and other means of persecution through various networks, thereof. Jews don’t have a monopoly on holocaust, and as Zionism shows us, they can tokenize like any other minority group to police nature with; i.e., non-white skin, white masks; e.g., the Inca’s imperial subjugates and the Conquistadors. Betrayal is betrayal. It’s only ever a question of who and why.
Assimilation is poor stewardship. We must do better if we are to survive capital’s effects on us and the planet; we must camp what has become canon, including what Sandy Norton calls “the Imperialism of theory“; re: academics policing what is or isn’t acceptable, thereby granting imperial characters to any discourse beyond academia that, unto itself, desperately needs to shed. Applying Sandy to Gothic studies instead of Foucault, I choose to use “anti-Semitism” because of its speculative richness, not its historical misuse. And if those historically abused by it feel like I’m encroaching on what is unique to them, they are sorely mistaken: witches and “sodomites” were killed in the Middle Ages, followed by the Renaissance, Holocaust, and neoliberal era. As such, liberation politics need to expand to account for changing dynamics of oppression under capital, lest they tokenize and decay as Zionism (and its fanatic territorialism) has done.
No one ever stopped fascism by being polite, and anti-fascism is inherently radical because it challenges state’s rights in ways gentrified parties won’t; i.e., nothing is sacred except basic universal human, animal and environmental rights, and it’s possible to compromise those by doing nothing of note. It’s also possible to work allegory into seemingly vacuous material. Far be it from me to venerate KISS, for example, but if they can camp their own idea of Jewishness and present it as monstrous to get what they wanted[1a], then so can we toy around with ideas of monstrosity that aren’t intrinsically Jewish to find our own pro-Communist voice under capital. Such is the nature of demonic poetics, which camp dogma through itself; e.g., through rock ‘n roll; i.e., not all Jewish representation challenges profit—can be weaponized against Communism just like the Nazis did (re: Israel and Zionism, next page), or at the very least can foster ignorance through overly simplistic approaches: “Keep It Simple, Stupid.”
(artist: Kim Kelly)
So, yes, my statements will doubtless offend some. That is what those in power want. But all the same, my work speaks to an imaginary element of discourse that is, unto itself, half-real; i.e., anything used to attack the idea of Jewishness has well-and-truly expanded into other groups.
And if saying that ruffles some feathers—specifically that I mention inclusive oppression to address the needs of those other groups while keeping the former in mind—said former group needs to remember that liberation is a universal affair and all peoples need to come together to overcome oppression as one; i.e., there is no one group for which oppression exclusively applies, or who has a magical, innately oppressed quality to them/monopoly on oppression. To think otherwise is to deny others a voice, no different than Afrocentrism or similar movements, which only historically decay into a kind of fortress mentality that prioritizes itself over other groups in a similar position.
The fact remains, we’re all in the same boat, and bigotry is built into capital; i.e., “a bigotry for one is a bigotry for all,” built into capital as something to dismantle accordingly. It’s certainly important to communicate our feelings and say when something bothers us; but also, upsetting others isn’t the point of my arguments, which remain true regardless if they are upsetting—re: Jewishness is a weapon, one that state proponents use to limit oppressed outcry to a single specific group of people it can then weaponize against itself and others. As Asprey astutely writes, “Not only can terror be employed as a weapon, but any weapon can become a weapon of terror: terror is a weapon, a weapon is terror, and no one agency monopolizes it” (source). No one has a monopoly on shelter or aliens, mid-dialectic!
So, for example, can the Jewish gentry in Hollywood punch down against anyone who speaks out against America’s token ethnostate[1b]. For them, “Jewishness” = “terror” carried out of the medieval world and into ours; i.e., one whose half-real, historical and imaginary sense of past (the Wisdom of the Ancients) can dominate the proceedings—regardless of class, culture and race, to serve the bourgeoisie through its cultivating of the Superstructure!
Zionism does just that, turning Jews (and Jewish symbols and arguments of persecution and rebellion, victim and oppressor) against Jews and friends of the Jewish while making the idea of “Jewishness” something that Imperialism can hide behind: “We will always suffer and do so exclusively in ways that supersede our victims.” It’s an Omelas refrain, turned into a spear and, as it turns out, a cash cow to milk, mid-genocide; e.g., Judas Priest’s Invincible Shield (2024); re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Judas Priest: Invincible Shield and Zionism” (2024):
as the time-tested tradition of punching Jews became uncool after WW2, Jews became tokenized to punch down; i.e., against themselves and other oppressed groups, thereby serving the same-old profit motive as part of Capitalism out of Antiquity. In turn, Priest seems to have emblazoned their album with such a badge despite the Palestinian genocide happening next door (evoking a party disturbingly similar to Israeli settlers). Despite some bad actors being far more active in ongoing misinformation campaigns, Invincible Shield sadly feels like Priest saying “the show must go on” while using such imagery to line their own pockets. It feels at best, willfully obtuse; i.e., the modern equivalent to selling sugar during British Abolitionism instead of honey despite knowing full well of the Caribbean sugar (thus slave) trade.
All the same, Priest’s commodifying of struggle at the cost of human life is merely the chickens coming home to roost, our metal gods staying silent on what should be blasted from the loudest speakers imaginable (source).
Silence is death[1c]; for Capitalism to work, it needs a victim and a cop for which to buy silence with. To that, victims can become cops through oppressor misuse of oppression language to silence others with; re: DARVO and obscurantism; e.g., the Star of David adorning Zionist war machines and dropping bombs on Palestinians and Lebanese people, while playing the universal savior and victim, and policing anyone who might use their language incorrectly. Different voices need the ability to speak up and out for themselves and others, thus coexist, lest capital divide and disorganize us to keeping doing what it has, is and always will do: rape worlds and the world by sowing division to move money through nature.
(artists: Avram Finkelstein, Brian Howard, Oliver Johnston, Charles Kreloff, Chris Lione, and Jorge Socarrás)
Capitalism is a disease that makes society sick (and fosters diseases like AIDS in those societies; i.e., Capitalism is AIDS). For the colonizer class, the point of tone-policing criticism isn’t to raise consciousness in duality towards an intersectional solidarity resisting capital; it’s to insist in bad faith that we need to respect this one group’s feelings above the collective well-being of those the bad actors are currently destroying in the name of a people they themselves have stopped representing save as a dogwhistle and cloak. And those tactics will likewise be employed among good-faith participants—laypeople and academics alike—who are understandably upset by what is being said on both sides. Those feelings and concerns are valid, up to a point, but desperately need to recognize how they can be weaponized by the state to overlook legitimate criticism against genocide. “Yeah, conflict sucks; but it’s also necessary when escaping the Torment Nexus.” So critique power where it is!
We need to abolish genocide as a consequence of privatization, and for that to happen, we must deprivatize bigotry by discussing it holistically among all groups affected by the same tools differently. This isn’t “just” affecting Jewish people, then, nor is it “only” about them, and we shouldn’t tiptoe around Zionists colonizing those arguments; i.e., to weaponize Jewish discomfort to perjure themselves and others. Rememory hurts and, to a healing degree, reenvisions and reprioritizes the imaginary elements of past history during the rememory process; i.e., to suit all peoples under attack simultaneously by those abusing imagination to suit their needs and historical revisionism for the state (re: Zionism).
And if that hits a nerve, then good; pain is healing. This pain is controlled—is an academic exhibit couched inside a larger book full of trigger warnings. To it, I’m not running to every Jewish person I know or see and saying “anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism!” until they grab a stick and brain me. It’s an academic conversation punching Nazis (which Zionists are) while acknowledging the praxial complexities concerning blood libel as a universal performative device. Anyone can wear a beard and throw a stone (or a can of soup “for our family”), and the house—to some degree—is always made of glass:
Glass-Onion that shit! Have your revenge by demonopolizing the concept; i.e., as normally used by oppressors-in-disguise, who we learn from to do better than while borrowing from. Shakespeare’s Shylock soliloquy from The Merchant of Venice, for example, has tremendous liberatory potential; i.e., as something to act out in spite of its anti-Semitic origins and fixation on Christian ideas of Jewish revenge. Shylock inquires, “Hath not a Jew eyes?” to stress the praxial similarities of oppression and oppressor on token groups who, pushed to their limit, do sell out; i.e., Portia punching down to serve herself and Venice (while dressed as a man, no less), and Shylock converting to Christianity after having his day in court! Nothing is sacred but universal liberation; anything that prohibits said liberation is dogma (often in disguise, above).
So “better the instruction” by thinking outside the box while inside it. Disrupt! Speak out! Discredit your discreditor! Camp dogma to make state defenders uncomfortable, doing so to develop Gothic Communism; i.e., through ironic Gothic poetics and theatre challenging profit, thus unironic rape and revenge! The exercise is one of interpretation through performance. No one agency can monopolize victimhood or revenge, including Jews. And if any try to argue otherwise, remind them of your own oppression linked to theirs (“I see your holocaust and raise you a queer pogrom…”). All roads lead to Auschwitz, after all; the idea is to prevent concentration and extermination to begin with by using medieval arguments “when in Rome…”; i.e., to burn Rome, not people! They’ll blame us for it, regardless.
And yet, if my use of “anti-Semitism” still bothers you, I hear you and understand; I merely ask in return that you acknowledge why I’m saying “anti-Semitism,” to begin with. My aim is not to offend anyone for its own sake, but to expand emotional/Gothic intelligence and awareness by probably offending some people; i.e., as a necessary part of the process. Regarding blood libel, sodomy and witch hunter rhetoric, I shove those, mid-synthesis, towards their actual, total and half-real scope of influence: towards all marginalized groups, including my own, as part of the same underlying struggle that is regularly demonized by capital.
To that, I’m trans and belong to a group of people who were occupied and raped by the Nazis; my grandfather—despite fighting to liberate Holland from the Nazis—was still a conservative-minded man I seldom agreed with. Segregation is no defense and silence is genocide, therefore death. We must solidarize intersectionally—not merely to survive, but break Capitalist Realism (engendered by the likes of Spielberg saving war to maintain Pax Americana; re: Zinn). This means preventing what causes genocide to begin with; it means causing some degree of pain, during ludo-Gothic BDSM. “Hurt, not harm,” babes! You “don’t get a pass” just because you’re Jewish (or queer, non-white, or any other group); doing so would only give capital something to pounce and capitalize on: a human shield from criticism (Jewish or not, the settler colony model favors women and children for this purpose, below)!
If history proves anything at all, it’s that cops come from victims; i.e., those who, apart from desperation and convenience, likewise betray through entitlement. Those who can’t be wrong in their own mind are always right, which—as the Nazis, America and Zionism demonstrate through American liberalism needing fascism to operate—will always lead to the harming of others: by the entitled group, because the others (who are not them) are always wrong! This caveat includes victims who sell others out, becoming cops in the process (stochastic terrorism). And if that stings a little to hear—if it shocks those it applies to out of their useless sense of martyrdom and makes them rethink things, or at least recover the ability to interpret things orthopraxically versus dogmatically—then good! Equally good, though, is it making bad actors to go mask-off (as many Zionists have recently done). Cryptonymy serves multiple goals.
To avoid genocide as a historical-material outcome, we need to kill our darlings during dialectical-material analysis. Said scrutiny includes challenging the terrible idea of an exclusive and innate victimhood tied to a select group of people that—regardless of what traitors think, and however deeply entrenched their dogma is—cannot be reduced to class, religion, ethnicity and/or culture; i.e., a misconception that often stems from popular media; re, bands like Judas Priest:
Being a fan of their music since high school (for over twenty years now), a part of me takes no joy in doing so; but all the same, part of me does. I’ll gladly sacrifice the sacred image of my childhood heroes if it means liberating Palestinians (and by extension all oppressed groups). I may not succeed, but I want to try because it’s worth trying. Certainly I can enjoy Priest while criticizing their pernicious aspects; and, as Anita Sarkeesian put it, doing so is “both possible and necessary.” Otherwise, what are we doing? (ibid.).
The same goes for Judaism or any precious idea, but also any means of spreading it in ways that cause harm; i.e., overcoming oppression, in Jewish culture, is important, but its overprioritization historically leads to communication breakdown/abjection (re: Zionism). Hence, how a device able to heal actually causes more harm in the face of capital doing what capital does: raping nature as monstrous-feminine by tokenizing workers; i.e., anyone acting like the universal, exclusive victim; re: “Haven’t I suffered enough? I know all there is to know about victimhood, because I’m the only victim to ever exist!” To centralize one group and one group alone is to normalize through tunnel vision. We’re in this together, comrades, and the state is the enemy, not me.
I don’t want to hurt anyone purely for its own sake, here. Instead, if you scratch a Zionist, a fascist bleeds, and this goes beyond Jewish culture and identity to spread into other groups intersecting oppression as a state weapon. If ever that occurs, the priorities for self-victimization should be reexamined. The pain in doing so—of getting scratched, mid-debate—will invariably yield new synthesis, thus better praxis pushing away from Capitalism, once and for all! Alienation is bad; it’s also a bridge leading to greener pastures: demonic poetics inventing new uses for old dead symbols! The symbol’s appearance remains, but its function can anisotropically change, mid-duality—on the Aegis, oppositional praxis reversing abjection/worker chattelization to legitimize our struggles and invalidate profit’s (re: per the whore’s revenge, the state [and its rights] incompatible with life/consent, needing cops-and-victims extermination [thus rape, per the profit motive] just to exist)! Subversion of state utility can become normal; i.e., during the cryptonymy process becoming second-nature at a societal level. “We camp canon because we must.”
(model and artist: Blxxd Bunny and Persephone van der Waard)
Gothic Communism is holistic, liminal, dualistic, and ergodic, bringing different voices together to find common ground. My focus is sex work and Gothic poetics (whose nudity and exposure is offensive to a great many people), but it by no means rejects Jewish identity or voices; it merely asks them, “Give us a place to voice ourselves and say what we need to say. Nazis suck, including Jewish Nazis.” Refusing victimization is important, of course, but making victimization your whole identity—meaning to such an unchecked degree that you alienate other oppressed peoples around you, therefore elevate yourself above them/ignore their own opposition affected by tokenism (Zionism or otherwise)—is reckless. Fascism will fash, regardless. Find similarity amid difference and come together to challenge the state and its lapdogs. Liberation transcends national, ethnic and religious boundaries! ACAB! ASAB! AHAB (All Holocausts Are Bad)! Free Palestine!
Idle Hands, part three: Goblins, Anti-Semitism and Monster-Fucking (feat. Tolkien’s orcs and goblins, acid Communism, and SpongeBob SquarePants)
The dwarves’ covetous memory becomes one of unbridled revenge, its call to war against nature sharpening to rekindle better times out of myth tied to artefacts that suggest it to start with: “He was witless and wandering, and had forgotten almost everything but the map and the key” (source).
—Persephone van der Waard, “Policing the Whore” (2024)
Now that we’ve thoroughly covered witches and briefly examined vampires as sex demons, let’s carry demons and forbidden sight beyond “Midnight Vampire” or Lady Hellbender and into other famous forms of blood libel, namely goblins; re: demonic sex as torturous, psychosexual, and playful; i.e., regarding unequal power exchange, whose monster-fucking gives forbidden knowledge back, and once received, turns workers from goblin-killer into goblin-friend!
To do so, we’ll be looking at Tolkien, once more; re: as a patriarchal throwback/neo-Victorian dinosaur worshipped by the public while compensating for his own imperial nostalgia colonizing nature; i.e., by gentrifying war during cartographic refrains, which we deconstruct and subvert during the whore’s revenge. Our aim is simply to attack the validity of Tolkien’s anti-Semitic goblins; i.e., as unworthy holders of nature that others more worthy are tasked, by the author playing wishmaster/god, with carrying out his disguised revenge/ethnocentric arguments: that whores and Jews are classically slaves, in medieval parlance, and goblins are Jewish-coded whores of nature/the underworld to threaten more deserving parties (the dwarves) with different kinds of harm (e.g., rape, captivity and torture)!
In The Hobbit, for example, Tolkien loves to monomythically “kettle” the dwarves before letting them break free—all to genocide the ignoble savages and take their land back for the state (the white Indian argument, but also marginalized in-fighting and tokenization[1d]). Yet, in pimping nature, Tolkien has (through evil, backstabbing Jews and other slaves) created something the state may criminalize, but never fully monopolize as “of nature”; re: a brothel/disco place of revenge where the whore takes back the sex, drugs, and monster-fucking rock ‘n roll that someone like Tolkien always authors in favor of empire, thus capital.
Goblins are whores, like any other monstrous-feminine, thus pimped by Tolkien in ways where his victims have the slave’s black revenge; i.e., by reclaiming the things used to normally stigmatize and colonize them for profit, whose motive and Realism they break through ludo-Gothic BDSM; e.g., the spurious notion that “all goblins” love not just gold, but loot (a kind of wish fulfillment tying them to police violence, below). Porn simply lets us frankly eroticize—or otherwise discuss—such desires through a lens of public nudism; i.e., relative to the stigmas, bigotries, phobias, etc, that we want to interrogate, thus change, through our own versions of these age-old monster-fucking devices.
First, I’ll remind you of some history and arguments about goblins to keep in mind, then walk you through how we’ll apply them to Tolkien; i.e., regarding the man’s anti-Semitic sex demons, and his own harmful monster-fucking dialogs regarding them. After that, we’ll consider how to break the monopoly by playing with them, ourselves; i.e., when using Fisher’s acid Communism through Gothic poetics, subversive monster-fucking scenarios (white-on-black sex), cartoons, and shared labor exchanges. We’ll close the section out by thinking about whores at large—the big scary ones that speak to a palliative Communist Numinous that smaller underling monsters like goblins reputedly serve and/or spring from—before we move onto “Forbidden Sight, part two: the Promethean Quest vis-à-vis Frankenstein (and similar poetic elements) about making demons at large.
(artist: Personal Ami)
Note: This symposium mentions lots of ideas we can only touch on, here; i.e., regarding not just goblins, but also vampires, zombies and Capitalism-as-undead (all of which I’ve written about extensively in my PhD and other volumes. Expect block quotes). Also, in keeping with ludo-Gothic BDSM and the spirit of playing with monsters/darkness, this final portion of “Idle Hands” will be fairly messy and chaotic; i.e., stressing the holistic and intersectional elements of Gothic Communism (and demons/darkness visible), combining anything and everything together to achieve praxial success! —Perse
Tolkien’s Other Sex Demons: Goblins
The state, as undead, thrives on tokenism as a bastard DARVO/obscurantist enterprise. Christianity is a cuckoo religion, then, bastardizing older forms of religion and myth, which the state continues to abuse under capital. Our focus, for this symposium, is predominantly one of service and monster-fucking through goblins (and to a lesser degree, orcs); i.e., acting as bad servants, per canonical essentialism and camped by us: during ludo-Gothic BDSM’s rape-play angle merging with various half-real roleplay scenarios of “homebrew” interracial porn/xenophilia overcoming unironic racism and other forms of dogmatic xenophobic orthodoxy (for all intents and purposes, this section shall use “ludo-Gothic BDSM” and “monster-fucking” interchangeably. The former essentially constitutes the function of rape play, while the other enacts a form of rape play to function as, but their praxial scope is the same).
To it, orcs and goblins are canonically bad—often compared, during blood libel, to a mindless collective of non-white evil children/the spawn of Satan—and from Heinlein to Cameron to Lucas spewing the same centrist bullshit (re: the Star Wars problem), you can absolutely thank Tolkien for that[2a] (and who borrowed his doing so from Beowulf and Grendel’s mother giving birth to monstrous-feminine comparable to orcs and goblins).
Few things are as pervasive or insidious as Tolkien, but especially his cartographic refrain hyphenating colonial sex and force, which it then uses to disguise rape with; i.e., antagonizing nature-as-monstrous-feminine, then fucking it unironically to death “by the sword.” Hence my attacking it, here, during my holistic study of the man and his work, one last time (“Let us be rid of it, once and for all!”). Doing so by having our revenge during ironic monster sex of our own, we camp the canon to humanize the harvest, making goblins gay during ironic monster sex; i.e., by having sex with that which Tolkien considers abominable, white bodies on black; e.g., white girls taking black dick, or acting “non-white” themselves in accordance with their rebellious elements: the respectively brutish and naughty “orc” and “goblin” equaling “terrorist” and “punk” merged, for our purposes, with “criminal/whore” and “zombie.” The idea isn’t to separate things, at all, but engage with them holistically because Gothic Communism is holistic; capital divides to conquer us, and we unify to defy profit raping us.
(artist: Noaqin)
We’ll get to that, this symposium laying out various dots for you to connect, in a fairly-tangential-but-ultimately-connected group of disparate concepts; it’s not really a close-read of specific texts (no Gollum in this one, nor reading into gay ring-bearers[2b]), but a constellation of the man’s broadest themes merged with past elements of my own work—opting for orcs and goblins, this time, instead of vampirism (which we examined from Tolkien’s stories, in Volume One):
- A White Earth: Defending the Realm from Black Rape (Orc Dick or Otherwise)
- Trouble in Paradise: Fantasizing about Black Monster Dick (feat. acid Communism)
- Doing It, Ourselves: Humanizing Orcs and Goblins through Ironic Monster Sex
- How to Play with Goblins-as-Demons, Ourselves (to Have Our Revenge; feat. Bay, Blxxd Bunny, SpongeBob, and more)
- Wrapping Up/the Big Picture
- Moving On: Some Transitional Arguments about Demon Whores/the Big One (feat. Slan from Berserk)
First, let’s explore Tolkien’s worldviews regarding orcs and goblins, including their function in his propaganda fantasy worlds. In a nutshell, he bastardizes the Vikings with a pre-fascist, neo-Victorian stamp, abandoning their indigenous elements and turning them into cops to colonize nature with blood libel, while also fearing its rapacious black, queer revenge: he loves and hates black dick.
Let’s unpack that, shall we?
A White Earth: Defending the Realm from Black Rape (Orc Dick or Otherwise)
White knights classically save damsels from black rape (dragons, ruffians, goblins, gay men, gods, and/or the witch-king’s giant mace); with Morgoth and Sauron, Tolkien frames it as a Numinous, planetary struggle. Even so, it’s one that shrinks, mise-en-abyme, into smaller versions of itself; i.e., the white knight(s) rescuing Mother Earth from total shadowy defilement, one smaller black cock at a time: “Just as Sauron concentrated his power in the One Ring, Morgoth dispersed his power into the very matter of Arda, thus the whole of Middle-earth was Morgoth’s Ring” (source: Morgoth’s Ring, 1993). It’s not really a stretch to see how Tolkien treats the wedding band as defiled by a black “finger” on an iron fist, nor how nature itself is the maiden for him to protect from dark corruption; i.e., Arda’s coochie threatened by a Pagan-Satanic Great Destroyer during blood libel.
Tolkien fetishizes power as “black”; canonizing Milton’s darkness visible (re: Volume Zero), said darkness could have been anything but he chose orcs and goblins/Jewish conspiracy, first and foremost. Though courtly and abstract, the notion likewise remains very apologetic towards Britain, abjecting imperial crimes (of pimping nature) onto a conveniently evil (and distant) supervillain (and said villain’s generals, lieutenants, and minions). To it, the context for Tolkien’s worldview is wholly abusive on a geopolitical refrain, one that bounces back, half-real, into canonical power fantasies executing blood libel sans irony against black rapists threatening the globe (to impregnate the white-owned womb of nature with non-white sperm).
This Shadow of Tolkien (and myth that he somehow “can’t” be racist) can be challenged, which we’ll get to. Unlike the status quo, our jokers, smokers, and midnight tokers use the language of danger and torture for iconoclastic funsies: made from clay to sing and dance, making wild rumpus, goblin-style. Blind faith is for suckers, something we cannot afford while being sucked on by capital’s dead labor (re: Marx). So do we play with these artificial things (dicks or otherwise), breaking the monopolies on display by giving their jester’s vice-character monologues added life through performative allegory and dialectical-material context: something to sell to children, regarding nature’s monstrous-feminine revenge (for having their existence be criminalized by the state and its in-groups)!
Cryptonymy’s all well and good. The problem is, the Numinous is a common canonical brothel pimping out Hell’s usual sluts in bigoted, blood-libel language (of rape and revenge); i.e., down in the dark brought to light to titillate the gentry with stories of exquisite torture, rape and death; re: Tolkien’s anti-Semitic dwarves, executing blood libel against orcs and goblins (the former appearing much more in LotR and the latter much more in The Hobbit): bat-like and big-mouthed, but also swart, savage, and sinister beings[3] occupying the black, demonic side of the settler argument that upholds Capitalist Realism, mid-abjection. They’ll get you, and your little dog, too!
“In caverns deep, where dark things sleep,” Tolkien pimps them out as thieves and whores, slavers and killers-for-hire, scapegoats to dance with during his monopolies of demonic poetry that—apart from overt sex and drugs—very much includes the psychosexual overtures of rock ‘n roll (and similar forms of music/theatre like heavy metal and jazz, which the Gothic embodies through golemesque puppetry’s darkness visible):
Crush, smack! Whip crack!
Smash, grab! Pinch, nab!
You go, my lad!
Ho, ho! my lad!
The black crack! the black crack!
The black crack! the black crack!
Down down to Goblin-town
Down down to Goblin-town
Down down to Goblin-town
You go, my lad!
Ho, ho! my lad! (Maury Laws’ “Down, Down to Goblin Town,” 1977).
It’s all rather… funky, isn’t it? People love monsters because they speak to our alienation and fetishization (thus lack of agency) under capital, which is precisely where we get our agency back (re: the whore’s revenge)!
Except, while calculated risk is a fun way to meet new playmates and regain control of darkness, Tolkien is a weird canonical nerd who canonized Milton’s camp. In doing so, he and his narrow, prescriptive, monomyth methods of playing with darkness were pointedly slumming in service to empire[4]; i.e., through jazzy LARPer refrains teasing the ghost of the counterfeit to further abjection by reinventing terrorism the state can punch down against/with: through prolific, Man-Box-style police violence, killing orcs and goblins to whitewash empire-in-decline/darkened by the Shadow of Pygmalion during the Cycle of Kings/Capitalism as demonic, animalistic and undead.
In truth, Rankin/Bass parroted much of this, and the kids of the ’70s, ’80s and beyond feared-loved it (walking the tightrope between inheritance anxiety and vaso vagal/fight-or-flight, but also dark demonic energies). Tolkien’s bigotry goes over their heads, but in some sense, he inherited the same values; i.e., through goblins and necromancy as drug-like, but also bigotries associated with them to sell canonical vampirism and goblins to the next generation; e.g., their signature greed, but also tendency to kidnap, rape and devour their prey/drink said prey’s blood. It’s a dogwhistle call-to-arms, then, defending capital from its own victims with its own victims; i.e., the self-appointed white, “righteous” hero devouring the black alien per Tolkien’s orcs-and-humans argument, its centrist refrain caging his prey behind an innocuous human mask (the sweet old man) that puts him and his on the side of Good and their victims—of nature-as-alien-vengeful-slave—on the side of Evil (which for the West/Global North is the East/Global South).
That’s what his maps and moral territories are, you see—undead prisons to enter and kill the inmates, moderacy decaying into fascism (when Imperialism comes home to empire), but enacting it behind gobstopper masks; re: state DARVO and obscurantism concealing in plain sight the ugly truth: cops are the criminals outlawing others in demonic language. Doing so to enrich the elite and their rights over workers and nature, class (culture and race) traitors pimp both groups as monstrous-feminine! They’re the bad servants, the backstabber charlatans sucking capital’s dick (and biting on nature’s neck) while flexing whatever credentials they can (e.g., Tolkien’s academic pedigree)!
I’d say there’s no way Tolkien can claim honest ignorance in good faith—not when he was a university professor who was an expert in his field—but doing so would overlook systemic issues in academia, as a whole; i.e., Tolkien was raised in a world that was built to coddle him and instill these pro-British, fuck-literally-everyone-else beliefs into him. Far easier to say is how a) there’s nothing moderate about abjecting the sins of empire onto a gay space wizard/Great Destroyer and his abortive offshoots, nor b) monarchs or genocide existing in perpetuity (signatures of Tolkien’s worlds extending his worldview inwards and outwards). Unlike the Neo-Gothic authors of several centuries previous, Tolkien actually believed a return to the pre-Renaissance past[5] would be a good thing. Like Hell it would!
To it, the usual fascist qualities apply to Tolkien’s world; e.g., the cult of machismo and heroic cult of death, weak/strong enemies, among others (re: Eco). Inside said world, he’s an indisputable god-pimp, punching down against nature as monstrous-feminine by policing it as vengeful property for the state. Being a medievalist, he pointedly does it through Divine Right; i.e., as a false preacher punching down with blood-libel, cops-and-victims vaudeville—literally medieval persecution arguments and superstitions (fear and dogma; e.g. the blood test from Carpenter’s The Thing remake) about blood—doing so in order to aggrandize/avenge his faulty and harmful idea of a better world that, since his death, has become a neoliberal power fantasy weaponizing gullible people (through desperation and convenience) all around the world: of orcs and goblins born evil, and white men (and token cops; e.g., Eowyn) endlessly killing them in all manner of stories and games, all to spill so-called “bad” blood and replace it with “good” blood while policing labor pursuant to profit. It’s barbarism in a dress—Macbeth tilting at Dunsinane but also Dracula in a priest’s robes (and other such dualities canonizing Gothic).
So are Tolkien’s orcs given dark skin, led by a dreaded faceless evil, conspicuously called “cannibals,” bred through sodomy and shadows, living under the cloak of night, and slain zombie-style by white saviors trumpeting neo-feudalism on repeat: capital cannibalizing those it calls “cannibals” while acting high-and-mighty about it. For it, anything “black” is too dumb to serve, eventually attacking a prescribed “better master” and being put down for not knowing “its place” (which unfolds differently per oppressed type; e.g., black men versus trans women, and various intersections): dead vermin walking!
The point, here, is how the orc’s and goblin’s undead function of evil labor/service behaves identically to their demonic function (and whose anisotropic qualities we’ll explore when examining Blxxd Bunny and SpongeBob). In turn, such stories are canonically ethnocentric garbage, apologizing for slavery by flaunting apocalypse; i.e., calling those most targeted by the state “the real slavers” during slave revolt having its dark, whorish, backstabber’s revenge against the goodly colonizers. It’s a white moderate’s false flag selling personal responsibility through inkblot Red Scare long after Tolkien had actually died (take note of the various commonalities Tolkien has with mask-off fascism, Nazism or otherwise).
Compared to Cameron’s clever repackaging of Heinlein in the shooter/sci-fi genre (and Metroidvania) after Vietnam, then, Tolkien’s refrain led to a virtually endless echo of whitewashed fantasy stories after WWII serving the same Pax Americana function into the neoliberal (videogame) era. He became a safe bet, his best-selling and incredibly famous stories a perfect revival (and whitewash) of Manifest Destiny transplanted Elsewhere. No one else comes close, fantasy-wise.
Worse, Tolkien’s systemic good/evil racism, inkblot (arbitrary) menace were granted the airy gentry of a WWI solider-turned-scholar (a made man, as it were). In short, Tolkien’s worlds apologized for racial conflict dressing up ethnocentric dogma as “mere games” (from tabletop to computer)—with the man, himself, becoming the dead-skin face mask for white supremacists to wear in the guise of good faith; e.g., Peter Thiel naming his economic ventures after Tolkien’s stories[6]. Whereas The Hobbit had plenty of Marxist potential (re: “Dragon Sickness,” 2014), Tolkien’s LotR was an opiate for the masses that simultaneously ushered in a return to monarchies[7], while also giving racism (and other bigotries) the perfect place to hide and wage war in broad daylight against Communism (which Tolkien very much despised in favor of Capitalism):
In doing so, the whole planet became an endless property dispute lionizing Divine Right, mid-canceled-future (re: the zombie apocalypse and ensuing wasteland scenarios teasing liberation and enslavement, afterwards; e.g., not just Tolkien’s orcs and goblins, but Fallout‘s ghouls to return to the earth as similar zombie fodder raped by Crusaders: cowboys, versus knights).
As such, Tolkien’s bad-faith, vampire/sanguine sodomy arguments abject any flaws at home onto the black alien/Veil as a temptation to resist, but also indulge in through rape and purity/abstinence arguments; i.e., the civilized man eating the cannibal-coded savage, mid-panic, during mirror and virgin/whore syndrome. While all monsters are dualistic, canon pushes state violence and blame/ritual suicide(-by-cop) towards workers by doubling and demonizing them as evil sons of whores, but also outright demon whores (re: Grendel and Grendel’s mother) tied to dark spectral forces; re: “a spectre is haunting Europe,” which Tolkien spearheads/scapegoats, Radcliffe-style, with a great many of “the help” gone bad under a single monolith’s all-consuming barbarian horde: orcs and goblins waving a planetary banner changing the ownership. Summon old nightmares (the vengeful dead slave as a zombie-vampire goblin); antagonize, put to work, banish nature through a pearl-clutching appeal to tradition, monomyth-style.
(source)
To that, Tolkien’s the Necromancer (what he calls Sauron), a decrepit leech obsessed with greatness and bleeding (Middle-)Earth dry while using DARVO and obscurantism to demonize Jews and other labor groups treated as “Jewish” in medieval, blood-libel language (e.g., queer people during Satanic Panic). Such village scapegoats include orcs and goblins as monstrous-feminine servants of the vague, faceless Dark Lord (and backstabbers of the West), but also dwarves as greedier than humans and prone to greed of a Zionist[8] sort (also backstabbers, but to a lesser [thus more redeemable] degree; e.g., over pettier squabbles of moneylending and property disputes):
J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973) himself had some controversial opinions about at least one race of Middle Earth, writing that his Dwarves were “like Jews: at once native and alien in their habitations.” In a separate interview, he elaborated on this theme, noting that “the Dwarves of course are quite obviously—couldn’t you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews?” (source: Matthew Wills’ “J. R. R. Tolkien’s Jewish Dwarves,” 2022).
It’s the dialectic of the alien, hard at work for the state during the abjection process; i.e., Tolkien playing with blood libel to wage yet-another witch hunt chasing state rape and revenge called “goblin,” fascism waiting to decay into itself (often in token forms; e.g., Gimli is a dwarvish cop) through a contemporary viewpoint: Lovecraft, on the other side of the pond, and his weird, pulpy notion of “horror in clay” (from “Call of Cthulhu,” 1928); re: creating status-quo evils to represent the state’s repressed colonialism/abject juridical process (the state of exception) while its power center is rotting/falling apart. Such is Zombie-Vampire Capitalism, making whatever enemy the state needs out of darkness visible canonized.
Synchronistic of the bigoted American, then, the old Brit was a Nazi in spirit, if not in professed closeness to their core values. Simply put, he gave voice to such police dialogs, his own brand of courtly love a canonical monster-fucking approach killing countless orcs and goblins bourne from the ground; i.e., as endemic to his essentialized moral geography being canonically game-like. I can’t really stress this enough, so here’s me stressing it as much as I possibly can (from Volume Zero):
To this, Tolkien’s refrain [the High Fantasy treasure map, exhibit 1a1a1h2a1] has led to the endless essentializing of war as gentrified through the fantasy mode [e.g., Rings of Power, 2023] but also its science fiction and horror parallels [which we’ll unpack during the “camp map” vis-à-vis Cameron’s refrain: the shooter, of course, but specifically the Metroidvania]. Tolkien’s magnetic, “chaste” warmongering leaves out the psychosexual horrors of war or valorizes them through the slaughter of abjected foes[9], requiring great effort from past writers like Ursula Le Guin to break away from Tolkien’s ghost, thus his trees and pastoral village recruitment antics and moderately xenophobic [racist] war stories. As these are copied-and-pasted along the shared counterfeit, they operate like a formula whose canonical replication centers around the profit motive; in turn, this becomes historical-material—e.g., D&D and its endless official/homebrew campaigns and dungeons—but also the “warcraft[10]” of the enterprising white, cis-het young men of an early ’90s company, suitably titled Blizzard [whose sexist bullshit as a company we’ll discuss much more in Volumes Two and Three]—built entirely around racial conflict [thus endless war and rape] as set into motion by Tolkien himself, whose own orcs are green-skinned, debatably anti-Semitic/cannibalistic savages whose name, “orc,” is Old Norse [from Beowulf’s orcnēas[11]] for “demon”; i.e., functional zombies in the state of exception that heroes invade to kill for the state through parallel legends weaving in and out of fiction and into real life: there and back again not once, but ad infinitum. If these “zombies” aren’t orcs, then they’re spiders[12] or some other stigma animal/vermin-type pest entity who must be crushed by the forces of good in personified forms; e.g., the Drow as “chaotic evil” spider people [exhibit 41b] who threaten nature as afflicted with the same problematic idea of good vs evil as canonically Biblical [versus Milton’s own accidental camping of these pastoral devices through Satanic war].
Simply put, Tolkien’s hopelessly academic view of nature is whitewashed, High Fantasy copaganda—a British tree huggers’ biased loving of the idealized pastoral/picturesque as threatened by outsiders ruining the scene: the map of empire as sacred. It’s a colonizer’s cartoonishly basic aesthetic that demonizes, thus alienates darkness but also death, decomposers and natural predators [stigma animals] as part of nature; i.e., as evil scapegoats tied to wicked, unnatural places, archaic wombs and dark magic—necromancers, but also their fortress lairs:
At first they had passed through hobbit-lands, a wide respectable country inhabited by decent folk, with good roads, an inn or two, and now and then a dwarf or a farmer ambling by on business. Then they came to lands where people spoke strangely, and sang songs Bilbo had never heard before. Now they had gone on far into the Lone-lands, where there were no people left, no inns, and the roads grew steadily worse. Not far ahead were dreary hills, rising higher and higher, dark with trees. On some of them were old castles with an evil look, as if they had been built by wicked people [emphasis: me]. Everything seemed gloomy, for the weather that day had taken a nasty turn [source].
These kinds of Gothic castles were clearly known to Tolkien, though he didn’t focus on them. In The Hobbit, they’re mentioned hardly at all [the word “castle” is used only once in the book]—sidestepped by Tolkien until it comes time to trot out Sauron [also known as the Necromancer] as the unironically Satanic threat to Tolkien’s “new Eden”: Britain by another name, as built by Tolkien’s easily ludologized, High Fantasy scheme[13].
The displacement of British industrialization and slavery is made clear by examining the real-world inspiration for Mordor and Tolkien’s own experiences elsewhere: “the industrial Black Country of the English Midlands, and by his time fighting in the trenches of the Western Front in the First World War” [source: Wikipedia]. Of the former Midlands, Jonathan Wilkins writes, “He based the description of Mordor, home to the evil Lord Sauron, on the Black Country, a region of Birmingham which was heavily polluted by iron foundries, coal mines and steel mills due to the Industrial Revolution. The air in it was so thick with smog and dust it was difficult to breathe and may contribute to the way local people speak today – the infamous Brummie accent” [source: “Birmingham Sites that Inspired Tolkien,” 2020]. Tolkien’s love for home pastoralizes the colonial element by abjecting its theatrical “soot” onto a fictional elsewhere. Places like the Shire and Lothlórien were always green and good and totally “never did a genocide” to get where they are; by comparison, the orcs threatening their naturalized goodness are the colonizers who did all of the bad things. It’s DARVO through British exceptionalism (source).
The game is canonization; re: Tolkien took Milton’s Paradise and drained it of its critical bite. “Evil,” in his hands, doesn’t critique the state by destabilizing and subverting it, but merely serves to maintain the status quo in perpetuity!
No matter how he might otherwise pretend, then, Tolkien’s work is wedded to the Middle Ages and allegory as canonical; the Dark Lord is Tolkien and the goblins his children precisely because he made dark war possible using them—i.e., in ways that long outlived Hitler’s wildest dreams: sucking on the planet’s blood, then blaming it on spiders, goblins and black knights! Oh, my!
(artist: John How Anger)
Not to sell Hilter’s propaganda short, but Tolkien’s copaganda stabilized and gentrified war against evil tied to nature, thus the world and its workers falling on the wrong side of the tracks. Whereas we can present evil as human and delicious, mid-liminal-expression[14], Tolkien only uses the goblin to police (thus rape) others with. It is not played with to confirm the veracity of something under suspicion, but to enforce state rule through weak/strong and black/white binaries, per Capitalist Realism!
Furthermore, Tolkien took this problematic upbringing and turned it into a warrior’s place for bad BDSM, which sure enough, sits alongside healthier forms using the same aesthetic; re: (from Volume One):
In short, Tolkien relied on the vampire legend—but also Gothic castles, BDSM language and harmful arrangements of unequal power (rings and collars)—to dominate nature and those within it. Written in defense of a divided nature in good and evil animal forms, Tolkien’s war stories view the vampire a kind of parasite praying upon the conspicuously vulnerable inside Cartesian dialogs; i.e., both in raw animal terms with Shelob the spider as part of “evil nature,” but also magical leeches like Sauron, whose ghastly projections have become wholly divorced from “good nature” inside dark, undead fortresses that harvest all good, living things from the land (whitewashing Britain’s analogs in the process). Anything else is functionally “dead” (sanctioned for state execution) by virtue of collective punishment. In doing so, Tolkien abjects death as a vital function of nature, but also fascism as a vital function of Capitalism in relation to nature as preyed upon by those behind his undead/animalistic scapegoats: the West. […]
Tolkien wasn’t just allergic to allegory and sex; he policed them greatly in service of empire. His evils are simplistic, unironically dated and vague, and he has a stubborn clumsiness when applying them to his worlds that suggests a very closed-minded way of thinking about his world and ours in BDSM terms. It’s certainly no secret that Tolkien eventually decided to place the lion’s share of the blame on people more so than material conditions or Capitalism and nation-states. He also makes the Ring and then melts it, trying to suggest that everything is somehow “solved”—that “Isildur’s Bane” is somehow to blame for the waning strength of men in the face of rarefied greed; i.e., the dragon sickness of the gold from The Hobbit having been turned into a simple dissociative trinket that weighs on “all men” to the same degree. He seems to understand how rings function as poetic devices while paradoxically lending them a bit too much credence; vertical power is a tremendously corrupting force, but you don’t have to essentialize it, nor reduce it to a shapeless male darkness that employs throwaway female demons and does away with overt BDSM language and, yes, ironic rape fantasies:
(artist: Owusyr Art)
BDSM isn’t just where power is located/stored (e.g., inside the One Ring or Sauron’s tower), but instructions for its use within assigned positions, including rape fantasies as a set of instructions given to the dom by the sub issuing various paradoxical commands: the civilized “princess” and the barbaric “invader” as roles to play with in animalistic ways (e.g., the “breeding”/captive fantasy) that expose and interrogate power as a device of negotiation towards better working conditions and healing from the deep traumas that emerge from settler-colonial violence and heteronormative enforcement. Material conditions play an important role in historical materialism, but power is largely about perception, which cannot simply be destroyed; it must change within society. The catharsis offered by iconoclastic roleplay grants appreciative irony amid Gothic counterculture as surviving under Capitalism. These forms of roleplay aren’t just completely alien to Tolkien, but policed and denied through his own incessant prescription of orcish demon lovers (and Dark Lords); i.e. bad BDSM as a harmful arrangement of power that introduces praxial inertia into the equation. While power can’t be destroyed as we just said, it can become unthinkable according to ways that challenge the usual runs of the mill. Tolkien and Radcliffe have that very much in common, making anything outside of their worldview as shapeless, dark and unthinkable: the incessant, utterly British fear of the outside felt within their own borders, castles, heroes, etc, as hopelessly forged and ever-present.
[…] Tolkien’s origin myths were entirely unoriginal, exhibiting a very narrow, profoundly inadequate idea of what BDSM even was: officers and batmen; i.e., a British officer and his dutiful servant, exemplified by Tolkien’s Samwise the Brave helping his fairly clueless master time and time again out of a bind. It is BDSM, but echoes the British castle of the Imperial Core as something to carry out into the battlefield while enduring Tolkien’s (fairly vanilla) rape fantasies and childish dreams of captivity with which to (dis)empower the sub as male; e.g., Frodo being whipped and beaten in the orc slaver’s tower (the torture dungeons in Mordor conspicuously full of the British tools of torture used by the colonized reimagined; i.e., during the myth of a dark, savage continent populated by evil, violent “children”). By displacing these tools off onto a dark “other” world beyond the land of plenty and light, Tolkien is scrubbing his own and blaming the colonized in the same breath). As a male benefactor of British colonialism, he fixates on faraway war as the exclusive site of power abuse exacted upon white men, ranking their abuse above everyone else (women, genderqueer people and ethnic minorities) and everywhere else (military urbanism). For him, these other things simply don’t exist; abject copies of them do, but their sexuality is largely abandoned inside a chaste, gentlemanly medieval that forces them to address trauma as men were (and are) commonly taught: through lethal force with killing weapons designed purely for harm against state enemies (source).
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
In turn, we Galatea reverse abjection through our own whorish, xenophilic scapegoat language and ironic rape fantasies (acting out Owusyr’s script in our heads, but not to prey on others); i.e., shapeless darkness given shape (cocks or otherwise) and healing from rape by using clay-like things, monster-fucking theatre, and blood libel’s black-magic poetics (with “black” marking slaves per the settler argument; e.g., genitals[15], left): on our Aegis’s danger disco, camping the same infernal concentric territories by occupying and subverting them, then awakening and mobilizing ourselves through the paradoxical reclamation of state-demonized forms taken knowingly into ourselves (above).
The path to universal liberation starts by building trust through social-sexual exchanges that most will prescribe to, in some shape or form. This means monster sex pointing to state alienation and worker liberation through the same pathways! You are what you eat, then, and in medieval language, eating and fucking is a fine line! So is normal/abnormal, per the abjection process and those straddling it; re: “black” = “alien” as something to reunite with workers when fucking the alien; i.e., as a matter of psychosexual ritual. Tolkien’s stories are ritual, and only serve to whitewash genocide and prolong its historical materialism through bourgeois praxis; ours do not—seeking to overcome systemic, generational harm by shrinking any desire to divide and colonize nature (synthesized by those who have differing degrees of privilege and oppression; e.g., white women and black men understanding each other’s rape, not ranking it; i.e., both experience pain that is, to some degree, alien to the other side, and found through a special-and-constant middle ground: imagination).
I want to unpack some of these ideas, next; i.e., encroaching upon uncomfortable territories that Tolkien could only penetrate and purge, with Pagan cremation, and which we divinate through acid Communism (towards the end of the section). Then we’ll consider doing it ourselves, minus the bigotry and genocide!
Trouble in Paradise: Fantasizing about Black Monster Dick (feat. acid Communism)
Black dick is forbidden. Iconoclastic monster-fucking doubles state dogma through forbidden love as a postcolonial device reclaiming terror language; i.e., black dicks (and other genitals, bodies) attached to various taboos; e.g., rape, cannibalism, and “sodomy” normally synonymized with us, and which we camp through sex—especially monstrous, interracial sex during blood libel and other persecutory language—as the most regulated device there is (often through a neo-medieval proximity with penetration, medieval acumen[16] and interracial threats of “torture” [through terror language subverted with porn, but also censored bodily functions like salivation, consumption and digestion, flatulence, menstruation, defecation, regurgitation or male/female ejaculation[17], sexual responses, crying and memento mori gore dissecting the human condition through closely monitored, physiological responses bearing a strong social element, mid-abjection).
Our focus is white-on-black sex, including white bodies fantasizing about black dick but also ourselves designated as “black” regardless of appearance (which expands to green, purple, or any non-white, thus non-human color of stigma; ergo, “black dick” = “green dick”). This includes Tolkien, black monster dick living rent-free in his forever-schoolboy brain. Indeed, Tolkien loves the black dick, needs it for his world to function through his weapons; i.e., so black and big and/or naughty it’s illegal, and policed by state forms; re: Beater and Biter for fucking goblins, which they subvert, David-Bowie-style! We stewards of nature fight for nature as normally raped by Tolkien—people, but also their pets, the environment, everything. Do it, if not for us, then for kitty! All life is precious, both we human goblins and our non-human counterparts; e.g., my cat, the laundry gremlin:
But if you do it for you, remember that rebellion and struggle, however grave, should be fun because there is no afterlife, only this one; i.e., fucking not just to metal, but any fun music when walking away from Omelas while inside it/the infernal concentric pattern; e.g., Shin Hae Chul’s “To You” (1991): “We’re doing it, babe! We’re doing Communism!” Cue the gay rainbows, cheesy music, and multicolor creampies (the joy of cryptomimesis)! The brave do live forever!
(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)
Black rainbows, darkness visible—rebellion relies on emotional appeals and propaganda to work! Furthermore, never trust a philistine because liberation needs paradox; survival is victory and that victory starts with making life something to live for/celebrate in the moment, mid-incarceration (the fag always starts in the closet, even if that closet is society caging someone who’s out)!
So while capital routinely puts a price on the things it steals from, there’s value in all forms of labor in ways they can’t monopolize; i.e., regarding counterterror reclaimed from state fanaticism/double agents through our own curious deceptions. Spectres of Marx, our disco-in-disguise/postpunk often hides in plain sight. Any exchange gives and takes, the usual monopolies threatened by their own daily operations’ cryptonymy mingling with ours, each going hard to upend the other’s attempts. The point isn’t “final victory” in our lifetimes (which Tolkien pushed for), but freedom through said expression; re: the freeness of our minds[18] guiding our actions, however seemingly futile they are, towards a better viewing of things; i.e., those things treated like goblins as Tolkien does, emasculating the “black” side of nature (cocks or otherwise) to stall praxial catharsis through Beowulf-grade inertia!
Sex is expected by capital, but demonized as a common labor form (of terror) that exchanges between functionally white and black workers. By dancing with the ghost of the counterfeit and—just as often, embodying it through demonic self-expression becoming an informed, educated choice versus a desperate last stand—we make ourselves less afraid and more informed, hence prone to making friends with the other demonized groups’ Venn Diagram of persecution networks; i.e., onstage and off, goblins befriending elves to punch up, and real-life consumers identifying with that principle of disparate unity in ways Tolkien always avoided! He’s a monarchist who hates rabble-rousers. For him, then, the only good orc is a dead orc (re: Rearick)—the always-scapegoat in the same-old Omelas refrain; i.e., they “can’t” be sexy and must always be killed (or replaced with something else that serves the same role; e.g., the Drow).
(artist: Danny-Green)
Nothing scares the elite more than intersectional solidarity, which Tolkien’s ilk behind the curtain try to monopolize through Platonic, shadowy echoes of Beowulf and Pygmalion-grade tokenization; i.e., triangulating token fears through rape, engendering monomyth assimilation/divide-and-conquer copaganda pitting the middle class against the underclass and its armies of state-described “chaotic evil”; re: on the Black Veil, a dark leader and their fantastic generals (e.g., He-Man or Myth: the Fallen Lords) commanding the orcs and goblins that make up a garden-variety horde (versus the undead, chaos demons, or some other evil race). Kill an orc or a witch, get Rosie Cotton for a tradwife (the conservative promise of sex); kill a general whore, get a castle and a princess to defend from future black-dick revenge (the prince also tempted with black pussy on the same Aegis):
(artist: Ted Nasmit)
Handing out rewards is the pimp’s job, which Tolkien does through obligation, not enjoyment (e.g., Arwen but also Eowyn, left). “Paradise” equals standard-issue fascism-defending-capital; upselling labor’s various “power targets,” Tolkien’s bad “demon BDSM” happens during orcs-and-goblins blood libel sexualizing state revenge in all the usual Neo-Gothic forms of abject courtly love: storming castles-in-the-flesh, sans irony during the usual mise-en-abyme‘s Ozymandian inspiration (the Promethean visitation of power). Faramir doesn’t get the blonde baddie without facing down an army of orcs (and she doesn’t get him without dueling the witch-king of Angmar). Prostitution is prostitution, which marriage legalizes through state force exercised against state enemies—Tolkien’s vampirism at work, feeding on orcs and goblins to enrich Whitey.
Context obviously matters, here, and there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with playing god, invoking Numinous “inkblots,” or regressing to kayfabe-style, bread-and-circus hauntologies whose medieval language and emotional turmoil express various forms of inequality and trauma through poetic (make-believe) hyphenations of sex and force (e.g., sensations of rape or divisions of power/dueling emotions, mid-psychomachy). Per Sarkeesian, I can even enjoy Tolkien’s worlds, while refusing to endorse their bigoted elements. Indeed, as a medievalist, myself, my dialectical-material scrutiny rescues the Gothic from Tolkien’s abject views (and tokenized fans), the latter reifying and policing the alien through fatal nostalgia/false claims of sovereignty. This includes orcs and goblins of my own design (more on that in a bit, exhibit 44a1b1a), but also recognizing through dialectical-material scrutiny those made by other workers, too (next page). Orcs and goblins are sexy as a matter of dialectical-material context; i.e., because genuine rebellion and subversive monsters are sexy! They were only ugly in Tolkien’s world because his worldviews demanded they be! “Who’s the savage, modern man!”
(art: Amber Harris)
Tolkien’s media is already colonized, and ACAB/ASAB. For Tolkien and those like him valorizing cops and the state, there’s always an in-group and an out-group to the calculated risk, thus a cop and a victim, a defender and an alien invader endemic to home needing its routine whitewash/genocide; i.e., a correct party and an incorrect party pursuant to the usual state mechanisms tokenizing Judas sell-outs. Funny how the incorrect side is literally most of the planet, highlighting capital raping the world by design. They act like they own it, monopolizing and raping it accordingly by unironically fucking monsters—all to decide who loves and who dies inside an inherently unequal and cruel system, one favoring white straight Christian men, who enjoy rules meant to favor them and punish others (through various double standards and preferential mistreatment).
Tolkien privatized nature by pimping orcs and goblins. To privatize nature, then, is to rape it as cheaply as possible; that’s all the state does, and its servants enforce that dominance through intolerance with impunity dressed up as liberal democracy and freedom. It’s a rigged game, the illusion of choice; cops don’t prevent rape, but legitimize it against those the system codes as bad, goblins or otherwise—i.e. in a hierarchy of values linked to physical attributes/accident of birth upholding the status quo; re: in accordance with the state’s monopolies/trifectas and the qualities of capital, whose “sickness” of greed Tolkien abjects onto dragons, but also goblins and dwarves as ultimately “more greedy” than good men, hence more deserving to die by the latter’s grimy hands. Rape does not preclude death; it engenders it, disempowering state victims to harm them for profit.
Such is Capitalism, which Tolkien’s stories illustrate in small: “Kill the pig! Spill its blood!” In the centrist refrain, there are no moral actions, only moral teams; capital, Tolkien demonstrates, assigns portions of the world to die, en masse—piled and burned in Viking-esque romances, yet also used by the West as a weapon of terror and means of disposing the useless, dishonorable dead[19a] (as the Nazis did, in their death camps): burn them before they defile good nature with their black dicks.
In his darkest dreams, then, Tolkien is the open rapist he projects so nakedly onto others—the banal spectre of Christopher Columbus or Cromwell conducting genocide inside the Imperial Core and on its frontiers/satellites. Sublimating unironic monster sex—namely that of nature-as-whore through monomythic language—black rape and racialized territorial conflict are endemic to Tolkien’s worlds, armies and offshoots (re: D&D and pretty much every RPG in existence), making them excellent models for capital and its ideologies literally “at play”: a white-moderate, “woe is me” genocide fantasy—one populated with bastardized lore and languages (literal palingenesis, another fascist trick)—and based on slumming and tokenism, the world is always something to farm, thus harm[19b].
This is what I meant when I said Tolkien gentrified war. For him, nature is a virgin/whore to divide along the same cartographic lines; i.e., abusing the usual terror language/medieval courtship of slaying dragons (and/or orcs and goblins); i.e., in psychosexual language to sodomize the Earth and pin said crimes onto others (re: “good” nature corrupted by “bad” nature). For him—and I really can’t stress this enough—the only good goblin whore is a dead goblin whore. In turn, his medieval shorthand outlines capital-as-hyperobject; i.e., the planet as “giant white ass” for Tolkien’s good guys to save from “giant black dick,” but also—per the usual hypocrisies love-hating anything monstrous-feminine regardless of gender or sex, race or religion—Tolkien threatens with grim harvest; re: monster-fucking as a doomsday scenario to gaslight, gatekeep girlboss workers like Eowyn until they “sign up” (a neo-conservative precursor to Ellen Ripley and similar Amazons, out of Ancient Athens and into the present):
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
Except Hell—along with the demonic, monster-fucking opera of sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, and of monstrous-feminine heavy-metal poetry (thus rape and revenge fantasies during ludo-Gothic BDSM and its palliative-Numinous paradoxes)—is our domain to patrol, which the state can only try their damndest to monopolize, commodify and colonize. Often, this happens by pitting different marginalized “outsider” groups against themselves; re: tokenization; e.g., white women versus orcs, but also goblins versus dwarves (comparable to Arabs vs Jews). In turn, divide and conquer includes the medieval idiocy of marshaling armies to fight for kings to begin with. That’s what Tolkien’s refrain entails, its tokenism a trademark strategy the Allies (and Western powers after the war) use to rape the Global South to this day!
“Dwarves Are Not Heroes,” writes Rebecca Brackmann in 2010[20]; they’re Jewish stereotypes that, in hauntological forms, apply to any foe the state could hope or want to tokenize/rape. The same goes for orcs and goblins. Liberation and exploitation exist on the same stages, wherein we kill our darlings to escape the disastrous ways of thinking Tolkien canonized; i.e., his refrain orbiting around wealth acquisition through monomythic conquest, requiring anti-Semitic tropes (of theft and bad service, but also black rape) to work; re: as scapegoats of capital, these unworthy dwarf lords instigating larger conflicts by stealing the dragon’s gold out of revenge. Our responses occupy the same pornographic visual ambiguities, which ludo-Gothic BDSM and monster-fucking parse through dialectical-material scrutiny when playing with/as goblins (or any race you could possibly want)!
As my older books have already explored (re: block quotes), Tolkien’s BDSM is a ludic power fantasy used at other people’s expense, and generally in service to state bodies per Goldilocks Imperialism (re: “settler colonialism with more steps[21]“). Our ludo-Gothic power fantasies (which again, BDSM largely is) must camp those; i.e., taking the diminutive, abject yet sexually descriptive (shortstack) goblins and other demons of the underground back from old dorks like Tolkien canonizing BDSM. His bad data instructs harmful activities through police dogma; i.e., a fatal nostalgia fetishizing greed attached to racialized bugbears categorized, once again, as bad servants with black rapacious intentions (these “backstabbing Jews” only loyal to wicked masters/dark lords, stabbing their good masters in the back [often over money] or raping them from any direction). It’s a fantasy about black dicks being used to cuckold state power—making the powerful (and their servants, the middle class) only tighten their hold on said cocks! For Tolkien—and indeed the entire Western world—”backstabbing” equals “rape” as something to spread through rumor and canard (whose anti-Semitism became less about Jews, over time, and more about multi-ethnic racism and queerness); re: through the state’s white revenge against black dick (and other genitals, not shown here).
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
By comparison, the whore’s revenge is to fuck whoever she wants, subverting those lies and, by extension, the entire bête noire (re: nature as gyn/ecological and monstrous-feminine, including black men). In doing so, she evokes a common fear of capital (white women fucking black men) that—while it historically evokes parental reactionary violence (re: the Wilmington massacre)—can counteract systemic intolerance/extortion while stymieing profit behind revolutionary cryptonymy’s usual buffers (and going beyond white cis women, to be clear). It’s still a rape fantasy thanks to dialectical-material offers, but one being consciously subverted by the actors involved; i.e., canonical interracial exchanges (which Tolkien’s orcs and goblins present as an unironic nightmare scenario) versus iconoclastic interracial porn. The latter isn’t merely forbidden, by Tolkien; it’s anathema—literally beyond his willingness to imagine! He was incapable of fucking at all, in his stories, let alone monster-fuck (which extended to non-sexual scenarios[22], below)!
(artist: Amber Harris)
Interracial sex is seditious outside state control, and even then it’s still a controlled substance; i.e., one chattelizing nature not just as alien whores, but vermin to exterminate on a ladder of preferential mistreatment. Whatever dalliances that occur through us pointedly offend intolerance, including the ladder of privilege and deserving-to-undeserving violence capital assigns its victims (a task that Tolkien excels at). On its rungs, even the lowliest imp serves a purpose: to be raped with irony or without. Rebellion is when the trash fucks back; our non-white elements and fantasies (about black dick and other traditional forms of rape borrowed from canonical language) rail against capital’s rigged, dare-I-say Faustian, bargains with Tolkien! We recode his rules to spite him, changing the outcomes when playing with such toys; i.e., by preventing holocaust and reversing abjection/the colonial binary’s terrorist/counterterrorist flow of power!
Our combinations corrupt the data to cryptonymically expand the mind, our “goblins'” love for gold (and big black dick/pussy—Medusa having either or both, above) a universal theatre device; i.e., whose camp diverts not just Tolkien’s unironic rape scenarios, but also the kinds of unchecked mammon known to the First and Second Gilded Ages (the same idea goes for orcs and hand-to-hand combat, but also their naturalized sexual aggression). By regressing to a half-real imaginary space-time where such things were formerly allowed—and once-entered again through goblin-type forays beyond Tolkien—we can “swashbuckle” not just with terror and violence during the cryptonymy process, but things controlled through violence; e.g., money and drug use (or drug-like things, which monsters are), which workers safely play with during monster-fucking: to interrogate state arrangements and negotiate towards worker-friendly versions/mutual exchange!
For every theatrical double, there is always an earthly equivalent being treated the same; if we can subvert that at the root of the problem—changing how one side views and treats the other per exchange—we can synthesize good praxis on a wider scale; i.e., as a countercultural movement that celebrates white-on-black love over space and time (of any configuration you could imagine, not just cis-het white girls and black men; e.g., goblins and orcs among themselves, demons and maidens crossing the isle/red line, and so on). Thanks to actual or imagined abuse during criminogenic conditions, many white women are afraid of black men/non-white people (and other minorities treated as “non-white,” per the settler argument); and vice versa, those groups fear white women for having power over them.
That’s the whole point of monster-fucking and ironic fetishization—to camp canon by facing these fears and exposing their ridiculous, alienating qualities alongside uneven socio-material conditions that need to change. The dick shouldn’t scare us; the state’s ability to divide us using it should! “Let Jesus, fuck you!”
(artist: Just Some Noob)
So long as we fear ourselves, the state can divide and destroy us any way it likes. And while opposites often attract, revolution always happens in opposition to state proponents; it likewise needs solidarity—however chimeric—or state power will sever rebellious factions from themselves while fostering non-rebellious ones, then pimp nature as monstrous-feminine whore (afraid of giant black cock during the whore’s paradox; e.g., the nun trapped between salvation and sin, above) all over again!
(artist: NGArt7)
To combat or enable rape, the Gothic works through blood libel, but also cannibalism, adultery and suicide (all cardinal sins); i.e., as equally taboo fears, during the abjection process; e.g., gut reactions, impulsiveness, affairs of the heart, burning passions and chilling fears, etc. The iconoclastic idea is to excite these to control and understand them through playing at dogma to reverse abjection; i.e., camping the canon, thereby emulating persecution to liberate ourselves from fear (through our bodies) as a state weapon. Instead, it can become ours, going where power is to subvert bigoted stereotypes with; i.e., at any point in which relationships unfold (with black women being treated as more sexually aggressive and experienced/seductive than white women[23] but also fetishized differently than them, for example—a quality that extends not just to orcs and goblins, but exotic queens of an imaginary past, above):
(artist: Just Some Noob)
So while exploitation and liberation exist in the same space, the process of abjection (us-versus-them) must be occupied by workers who consciously subvert its materials to reverse harmful boundaries; i.e., generally in alien nostalgic language regarding sex and force. The idea is to cross state boundaries to go into alien spheres, then rehumanize demonized peoples with demonic language (dicks or otherwise). Such synthesis remains uneven, of course, and concerns relative privilege and oppression, mid-courtship.
All the same, Gothic Communism hugs Medusa through fantasy to find similarity amid difference, among the winding threads; i.e., in ways that push towards universal liberation inside capital. Medusa is classically “rape-proof,” then, teaching others not to harm her (thus themselves) through psychosexual martyrdom facing state condemnation colonizing its own populations with its own populations. We must fuck back, using state terror weapons during liminal expression as, often enough, pornographic (e.g., sodomy and interracial sex, below):
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
Such resistance is always violent, to some extent; i.e., like goblins and their own mini-demon counterterror shenanigans, capital cannot be defeated by exclusively conventional means, but through gradual transition away from itself and towards a post-scarcity world; re: using violence during mirror syndrome, our cryptonymy matching Tolkien’s, measure for measure. Gothic Communism is holistic, in that respect, but prides itself in subverting the state’s usual monomythic propaganda (re: Beowulf and the masculine lethal force enjoyed by Tolkien’s mostly-male, non-teenage heroes cutting orcs and goblins, but also hags, whores and evil women, to bits through their version of courtly love); i.e., from any direction, front or back (above), turned anisotropically on its head—monsters but also coveted resources, like sex and drugs. Again, the Gothic values violating pre-conceived boundaries (that further abjection) to generate new ones in similar stories, often centered around monster fucking as “violent.” This includes camping stories like Tolkien’s, giving us tremendous latitude.
Under capital and its qualities, “black” is always abject—is something to view and treat differently than “white”; Tolkien’s stories—of world war and token-yet-racial police violence—imply a black planet raped away from white purity by vengeful dark forces. By equating holistic slave liberation (re: Jews and whores, white women and black men) with total destruction of the Capitalocene (state shift), it has an almost drug-like berserker rage to it (of blind faith, if not drugs, given Tolkien’s Christianizing of the Viking lifestyle): be a man and kill the orc, or the orc will kill you and your whole family before burning your home to the ground! Among these rape-fantasy qualities, then, there’s a drugged element to explore when camping Tolkien.
United we stand, divided we fall; assimilation is poor stewardship of the natural world (which many Indigenous groups did, out of desperation). In turn, praxial synthesis happens through the intersectional solidarity of class, culture and race avoiding normativity and assimilation; e.g., Afronormativity, Hoteps and separatism; i.e., by working not just with what we know, but what we imagine tied to what we’ve lost and try to regain through the rememory process as—sure enough—tied to drug therapy, sex, and artwork often going hand-in-hand:
(artist: NGArt7)
This brings us to acid Communism. The iconoclastic idea of the orc or the goblin speaks to Fisher’s acid Communism, used by me and my friends, but also all peoples to work through demon poetics comparable to the orc or the goblin—i.e., to liberate ourselves through iconoclastic art tied to nature-as-monstrous-feminine, monster-fucking a drug-like activity that broadens our capacity for empathy inside uneven persecution networks; e.g., stoner white girls taking big black dick (slaves of different kinds unifying against capital; re: Zinn) while under the influence to promote universal tolerance, acceptance and emancipation from state myopias:
Acid communism is about ways of imagining a world after capitalist realism, and for Fisher, one of the ways to escape this reality is psychoactive drugs. The programme of acid communism is not to condone psychoactive drug use, but as an example this activity captures the philosophy of acid communism excellently.
To imagine new futures, we have to find ways to break out of our present myopia. Fisher’s acid communism is unique primarily for placing this goal above all others. […] The future has been cancelled because we are unable to imagine anything other than the present. To invent the future, to escape our myopia, we have to go beyond the present bounds of our imagination. This is acid communism (source: Stuart Mill’s “What Is Acid Communism?” 2019).
This freedom to express with forbidden materials contributes to the whore’s revenge, such monster-fucking as Harmony’s tearing down state boundaries during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., to form healthier ones for workers than Tolkien dared, much how tanking profit more broadly does except through our actions witnessed by others: the “witch’s brew” cum macro-dosing inside Harmony’s cauldron-like pussy and stirred by a dark “spoon” (a big “fuck you” not just to Tolkien, but Francis Bacon)! It’s not sexy because it’s abject, but because it showcases mutual consent with fear while subverting state forms of paradise-in-peril (the damsel-in-distress). Mutual consent is sexy as something to illustrate, during various labor exchanges—especially when accepted by one side squeezing the other (regardless of color[24] or size) into their tight little openings: something to watch (voyeurism) and show off (exhibitionism)!
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
Camp is when we refuse to kill each other and choose to make love, instead. So don’t fear black dick, like Tolkien does, and fetish unironic harm and death (which just so happens to be another fascist feather in his cap[25]); be bold, like Harmony and I (who loves big dick)! Dive into Hell, doing so to transform into more-human, less-alien but still-fetishized subjects of power taking said power back while fucking monsters you treat as human; i.e., demonstrating empathy through white-on-black sex, but also through morphological statements that translate through sight, period; e.g., desire, insofar as Harmony spreads her legs to accept as much of the black monster dildo into her naughty white pussy (above). Such is her revenge, delighting such revelry in the face of those who might try to rob Harmony of any bodily autonomy because they “know better” than she does. As if! We decide, not SWERFs, and certainly not old imperial dinosaurs like Tolkien fetishizing our deaths and calling it “holy” (fetishizing objects of power as he does; e.g., swords, crowns and rings)!
We’ll unpack this even more, next.
Doing It, Ourselves: Humanizing Orcs and Goblins through Ironic Monster Sex
(artist: Just Some Noob)
Tolkien’s worst fear is white-on-black sex, whose policing canonizes unironic crusades/fetish charm offensive against nature as “black, corrupt” (the white man’s side-piece/side quest somewhere between the rules and fiction, above). This blood libel targets orcs and goblins (whose green skin is functionally “black,” per settler arguments), but also the white women they threaten with dark desire; i.e., in half-real exchanges that point to real-life versions intimated by imaginary ones, quotidian or Romantic; re, my prior exploration of rape during pornographic expression, in Volume One:
Just as liminality is expressed through conflict within thresholds and on the surface of things, pornography is generally controlled and fought over by those who wish to compel profit through binary sexuality versus those who want to liberate sex and gender from the state’s heteronormative constraints using Gothic expression. The emphasis of these exhibits is racialized; i.e., the gender binary as settler-colonial in ways that stress a racialized character from bodies of different skin colors (exhibits 32a and b), physical types (skinny vs fat, exhibit 32c) and monstrous forms of expression (vampires, exhibit 32d) that speak to Cartesian trauma as something to live with and prevent in the future.
Sex-coercive BDSM actually includes a gradient of impotence echoed in canonical porn pastiche; i.e., not just “knife dicks,” but someone “under” the state worker—a slave or token class traitor (which is basically a slave)—aping the blade: “prison sex” mentality. Under this mindset, an unwilling third can be conditioned to fuck another worker the way the state, thus the privileged worker, wants them to: according to the torturer’s canonical, alien-fetishistic worldview (and fatal promised glory, post-slaughter[26]) handed to them like a knife by the state, then synonymized with their biology as “all they are.” Insect politics.
(artist: Pancake Pornography)
One “card” in the state’s aforementioned “deck,” then, is racialized fetishization through traumatic penetration; i.e., the BBC as an internalized, “fattened” metaphor for phallic implements of state terror by black men against women (and other recipients) but classically white women. Originally on the plantations and colonies of the antebellum American South, the white man’s toxic view of the black man’s “giant animal cock” historically has become slave canon, post hoc—mythologized and repurposed to be turned on white women as a fearful prophecy fulfilled through sex-coercive rituals, then gargoyle-ish abstractions and extensions of those rituals: female gargoyles attacking perceptions of rape inside but also outside white populations, becoming vigilantes during interracial rape fantasies where they embody givers and receivers of sexual abuse in terrifying forms (state terror as a weapon). The cock needn’t literally be black, even—simply “too big” to be considered “white” within settler-colonial models, thus able to cause pain relative to traumatic penetration as something to threaten in oft-Gothic forms: being too big.
(artist: Slugbox)
Echoes of nightly slave abuse, then, have survived into the present—first lauded by powerful men like Woodrow Wilson towards D. W. Griffith’s aforementioned “black, rebellious slaves violate white women” rape fantasy, The Birth of a Nation, followed by Giger’s xenomorph as a postcolonial “lawn jockey” later crystalized by 1980s’ porn hauntologies (below). Something for moderates to preserve and for reactionaries to return to, said porn becomes an unironic product to consume and embody through canonical praxis; and it is precisely this kind of pornography we must de facto synthesize into healthier forms of sex-positive education (counterterror):
(exhibit 32a: Artists: Victoria Paris and Sean Michaels. Since I’m writing about oppositional praxis as liminal expression [the execution of dialectical-material theory within thresholds] in porn pastiche, here’s a collage thereof: the black star athlete enjoying his forbidden prize, the white blonde in wifely silks. They kiss, then begin, him removing her panties and starting to fuck her. From every angle you can think of, the camera is curious and invasive, showing you things normally left to the fearful-fascinated imagination. Literally “sex with the lights on,” the makers have placed these sights behind a canonical paywall; i.e., in medieval language, it’s a Catholic “sale of indulgence” or return to canonical norms. Rejected by Martin Luther and Protestantism during the Iconoclasm, this only led to the Protestant work ethic and Puritanism through American labor during the 20th century—work being holy and sold sex being unholy but profitable. In turn, this oscillating schism remained curiously in place under Reagan’s tenure, a high time of profitability during the latter-end of the “Golden Age of Porn.” VHS offered up a mass-produced, widely disseminated reprieve from one’s holy work through a taste of unholy decadence, laziness and unlawful carnal knowledge: blondie likes that big black dick, not only taking all of it like a champ but fucking back, power-bottom style.)
The above exhibit might seem “harmlessly” cliché, but Gothic canon treats “black” as synonymous with “aggressively violent and racist” according to repressed sexual desires in the 20th and 21st centuries; i.e., black men sleeping with white women as a common source of contention among reactionary white men (and their token subordinates) declaring a state of emergency spearheaded by foreign knife dicks: a crisis of unwanted black penetration against white women. While canonical porn is full of whitewashed appropriations like these, it reaches back to older conflicts in American history we must dig up and confront. Generally uglier things are proceeded by cryptonyms of various kinds, including sex; but sex is generally a part of the problem being discussed in psychosexual bedlam.
For example, before the Wilmington Massacre of 1898, the Reconstruction-era town had black-owned businesses and politicians—until a white-supremacist mob retaliated with violence. This included a local racist editorial printing malicious slander against the black population, saying the latter were the rapists of white women (and implying that having “sheathed black daggers,” the modesty of white women was compromised forever):
Newspapers meanwhile spread claims that African Americans wanted political power so they could sleep with white women, and made up lies about a rape epidemic. When Alexander Manly, owner and editor of the Wilmington Daily Record, published an editorial questioning the rape allegations and suggesting that white women slept with black men of their own free will, it enraged the Democratic party and made him the target of a hate campaign (source: Toby Luckhurst’s “Wilmington 1898,” 2021).
Afterward, the town exploded into violence, resulting in the only successful domestic coup in American history. The massacre included a machine gun-armed white mob targeting and killing people of color and their allies. Sound familiar? Kyle Rittenhouse and the Proud Boys are merely copycats in a long tradition of upholding racist violence in the United States. This is not a glitch, but the system defending itself through bad-faith arguments projecting state rape onto state victims. Any voice of the oppressed must occur through the same basic dialog—in short, because that’s where power is concerned, thus amounts to where people are already looking and surviving.
The blindness of such gazes can be undone through iconoclastic narratives that subvert rape; i.e. ironic or critical rape fantasies that remove the harmful capabilities of the knife dick as a settler-colonial tool. These aren’t always playful in an obvious sense. For instance, the Wilmington Massacre inspired Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Morrow of Tradition (1901), an Austen-style novel-of-manners that devolves into a horrible riot partway through due to escalating racial tensions inspired by a local white supremacist newspaper. This paradigm shift was codified— teased decades later, post-Civil Rights movement, by canonical ’80s wish fulfillment; i.e., of canonical American pornography as a widespread extension of unchecked systemic American racism. The general sentiment stems from Lost Cause, Jim Crow and white supremacy and extends into various future groups like the Proud Boys. This happens through canonical behaviors and sentiments; i.e., coded behaviors taught by porn as incredibly body-centric, but also divisive regarding nature as alien under Cartesian rule.
This brings us to a corporal threshold, one the elite—try as they might— cannot fully monopolize in demon BDSM linked to Satanic morphological expression; i.e., the body and its knife dick (or vagina dentata) as a poetic offshoot of a greater inhuman[27] presence; e.g., Medusa’s snakes, Lilith’s demons; Sauron’s orcs, the alien queen’s insect brood or Dagon’s spawn; Cain’s son Grendel, Dracula’s thralls, etc, that reproduce in non-heteronormative ways (sodomy effectively meaning “non-PIV sex”) to endlessly produce armies of invincible barbarians, which as “forces of darkness/nature-run-amok” (e.g., Alex Jones’ “gay frogs”) must be conquered by state champions during returning “hard times[28]” that demand the knife dick’s resumed employment (which promises a bloody harvest to enrich the state-in-decay to a former glorious position) [source].
Porn, as we’ll see, is a useful means of interrogating bigotry through campy forms subverting canonical ones; i.e., policing the “corporal threshold,” above, and through canonical pornographic violence is what unironic pimps (thus men like Tolkien and his orcs and goblins) always do: control maidens[29] “for their own good,” while treating them like whores (often through doubles; e.g., Shelob): tempted by darkness vis-à-vis weak/strong barbarians threatening “Rome”—all to uphold the Christianized nuclear household/ordering of things, per a Protestant ethic (all the more ironic, given Tolkien was Catholic)!
Capitalism is like a bad parent and/or husband, then, one that naughty little girls must run away from and rebel in order to survive the usual abuses their actual/de facto parents inflict upon them. Like the proverbial tip of the iceberg, we take whatever bigotry moderates men like Tolkien expose during these exchanges and pull them, screaming like a mandragora, out of the ground! Not as vaudeville/a minstrel show, but calculated risk occupying the same stages and using the same darkness visible for campy reasons.
To break Capitalist Realism on yourselves, then, you must turn into sex objects of a theatrical sense; and to do that without harming yourselves or others, you must experiment with yourselves and others, “on the settlement.” Of course, rebellion often has a dysfunctional, exhausting character to it; and whatever we’re pumping—be it cum, blood, oil, drugs, money or power of some kind—this takes work under imperfect conditions complicated by capital defending itself. So do we hook each other up or hook up with each other to whatever degrees we’re able. That ability varies, from moment to moment.
Likewise, smaller simulations of class, culture and race war include battles inside/outside ourselves that attach to those fought on other registers. The less prone we are to attack others, the more we can solidarize, thus humanize/decolonize the harvest and its alien, hellish crop. Keeping with the drug-fueled metaphors of acid Communism, these crops take on a love-in-idleness character that—among orc and goblin bodies—mirrors older faerie ones we’ve already examined; re: Romantic Rose; i.e., a demonic “orchard” whose “violence” of exposed nudity is legitimate in state eyes, so long as they control nature as their whore to pimp, their harvest to dehumanize while raping nature for profit:
(artist: Romantic Rose)
Function determines function; agency is nudity through the whore’s paradox, projecting such power out into the world as something to humanize ourselves with, mid-duality and flow—as monsters to fuck for reasons different than the state’s own policing of whores, of orcs and goblins, of nature as black and alien. This includes when the skin is white (re: all beings treated as women [especially white women] are deemed “corruptible” by an enterprising status quo “counting chickens” per standard imperial practices).
So experiment! Free your mind and join every dimension by pulling this in that direction. Golems—and by extension goblins; i.e., as classic, shortstack, commonly green-skinned mischief-makers, but also whose punk culture/terrorism is decidedly fun (a firecracker)—are poetic placeholders we can hurt, but never harm while embodying sin as something to synthesize during oppositional praxis; i.e., they’re made to take it, and breathe life into dark forces for rebellious, Satanic purposes; re: goblins, witches, black magic, demon resurrection, drug use/acid Communism and interracial sex, etc, aiding the cryptonymy process for workers: forbidden sight during demonic sex and asexual rituals of pain/public nudism with a psychosexual aesthetic! Strange appetite, strange eyes! Defy God and Heaven! Learn what resonates in sex-positive ways and make that your drum to beat! Once introduced, they cannot police it—the brothel, per the whore’s paradox, becoming a place we can reclaim during liminal expression as never wholly acted on by one side; re: “how the state forbids access, yet access happens anyway.”
Life finds a way, as it were. So can workers become free, mid-paradox, to forge our own destinies; i.e., while identifying as we want to, and choose to spend time with those we care about. Even if the feelings don’t last, the intensity of a wild romance—wanting it so goddamn bad the baddie bucks back into you, below—is bound to make a lasting impression: something to ride out, however long it lasts! The whole point isn’t that you control it through pure domination, but working with others who have agency in a shared operation. Sex and romance likewise bear out social components that have their own asymmetrical elements, and whose parties will be treated differently by society under capital, at large! Understanding and appreciation, while you can, is prudent.
(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)
Such chaos is often planned and playful—made by deliberately forming connections that might seem tangential and pointless, but in reality open up new vistas of reflection conducive to development as a whole (the state and its imperialism of theory atomizing thinkers until they no longer can); re: entitled, covetous, white cis-het men (and tokenized people in the Man Box) look at an orc or a goblin and see a “waifu,” whereas we look at them and see “rebels,” “punks” and sexual outlaws who punch up during the whore’s revenge; i.e., exploitation and liberation’s usual liminalities extending to blood libel through orcs and goblins: sex objects fighting back as dirty sex symbols.
To it, “black” is a state of “danger” because forbidden love not sanctioned by the state will be viewed and treated as “terrorist”; it’s not something we’re “supposed” to do, therefore exciting because it speaks to our true alien selves finding some sense of home where we’re treated as foreign, exotic, anathema—i.e., where our power is found by us and policed by the state, flirting with disaster in dualistic, liminal, ergodic and recursive forms! Such arrangements can take many different shapes, but generally reduce to one side of an arrangement being policed differently than another is; i.e., in fractally recursive/concentric formations, but who find similarity in the midst of police shadows assaulting us; re: the pedagogy of the oppressed, healing from rape during monster-fucking theatre: speaking to a desire for intimacy with those we love, yet feeling the classic Gothic push-pull under the presence of dialectical-material dispute and state overreach policing the grey areas of exchange.
(artist: Iron Dullahan)
Everyone loves the whore, for different reasons; everyone loves orcs and goblins as rebellious feisty whores speaking demonically through different dark desires, unequal exchange and radical transformation for or against the state’s monopoly (thus abuse) of such monstrous, violent terror language—e.g., Shrek’s wife, Fiona (next page), but also Harley Quinn* and Poison Ivy as famous bisexual icons (above [with a super-giant tree dick] and below) that, in the pornographer’s capable hands, speak through size difference, gender trouble, blood libel and interracial sex to reverse abjection (thus profit, rape); i.e., during monster-fucking theatre sitting between art and porn, onstage and off: “futa” and other such things for us, not for straight men fetishizing our identities to dominate us with. They rule not through respect and trust, but cruelty and fear dressed up as “love” and “protection.” “What a story, Marx!”
*A little goblin in her own right; i.e., someone who farts in front of the boys to a weaponized degree (“Harley Quinn Farts in the Batmobile,” 2017). At first, Batman tries to act tough, refusing to let Harley out. But the farts are so bad that eventually he concedes defeat! Huzzah!
(artists [top-left-to-bottom]: Ngmi, Amber Harris, and Iron Dullahan)
People—even ace people—relate through Gothic dialogs about sex. Sex-positive demons communicate cryptonymically through non-harmful pleasure and pain to illuminate harm caused by the state; i.e., the whore, through ludo-Gothic BDSM, must reclaim such devices normally used by the state causing harm: to police porn’s subversive, genderqueer elements is to deny GNC people (and other marginalized groups) any ability to a) speak out against their own exploitation where it normally occurs, and b) to their ability to normalize the reclamation of these devices in Gothic (wicked, perverted, reprobate) modes of expression helping workers connect (through hook-ups or otherwise). “You are determined!” Service tops and power bottoms make up much of this, but really any arrangement of power and its seeking you could dream of, their ensuing arguments wrecking the nuclear model (and state ideas of maidens and whores), mid-Amazonomachia (re: battle sex through kayfabe). “PUSSY DESTROYED” by goblin dynamite dick (camping the usual medieval poetic mergers of sex and siege warfare)!
“We camp canon because we must!” Whereas canonical Gothic furthers abjection through monomyth escapism courting the ghost of the counterfeit, Gothic Communism navigates the confusions and excitements that result to guide workers towards a better world; i.e., during a close encounter/brush with death in canonically bigoted phallic/vaginal forms standing in monolithically for the monstrous-feminine (often in Numinous forms; e.g., Pyramid Head, Medusa).
To break Capitalist Realism, then, is to encounter the abject and not die, but merely change/radicalize by realizing we’re looking into a mirror showing us our alien side waiting for reunion. It’s to fuck with black cocks and bodies partially on ourselves—seemingly for a moment but actually for all our yesterdays—to bridge liminality oscillating towards development; re: with sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, but also the haunted house, Metroidvania noir or Western saloon’s danger disco and its cloak-and-danger theatricalities; i.e., though uncanny arrangements speaking to our mutual-if-idiosyncratic alienation and chance to reclaim our shared humanity through said demonizing theatre. It’s not a swan song but a siren song that has the listener not just hugging but fucking the alien while humanizing them!
To illustrate subversive labor action as it commonly occurs, then, I want to exhibit this complicated praxial reality and its descriptively sexual, culturally appreciative synthesis when planned and played out by workers making pornographic art in the real world; re: the creative successes of proletarian praxis; i.e., through the goblin as a genderqueer force during ludo-Gothic BDSM, using acid Communism (and drug use/children’s cartoons) to fuck with Tolkien’s rigid (and sadly popular) anti-Semitic worldview—through the demonic spirit of creative rebellion/unruly slaves, which the goblin so easily represents; i.e., beyond Tolkien’s undead scapegoating of it (and subsequent hierarchy of values), his doing so to maintain imperial hegemony/Goldilocks Imperialism to put Whitey conveniently at or near the top (elves are what men want to be). Rebellion is a shady business, but one filled with galaxies and constellations, their “Big Bangs” lighting the way through darkness with darkness (dark matter)—one planetary castle at a time!
Note: As stated, this portion is a bit messy and holistic and that’s the point [re: ludo-Gothic BDSM and the spirit of play synthesizing praxis]. What we’re talking about here [darkness visible/forbidden sight] pertains to all demons, but these examples focus on goblins going beyond Tolkien’s narrow police use of them; i.e., through dehumanized agents reclaiming their humanity during ludo-Gothic BDSM as a shared, intersectional polity’s pedagogy of the oppressed. We’re all demonized differently by capital; fucking and even rape play are how we monsters relate to one another while being demonized unequally by the state. Anything I present here with my friends, then, I posit that you, yourselves, could generate among your friends; i.e., with furries, dragons, zombies, jinn, etc, or combination[s] of these separate modular elements to have the whore’s revenge. —Perse
How to Play with Goblins-as-Demons, Ourselves (to Have Our Revenge; feat. Bay, Blxxd Bunny, SpongeBob, and more)
(exhibit 44a1b1a: Illustration and outfit by Lucid-01; background, outfit alterations and character design by Persephone van der Waard. Genuine abuse can be subverted, happening through a controlled “call of the void”/calculated risk. Glenn the Goblin, for example, is a formerly anti-Semitic symbol that invades the pre-fascist Christian wardrobe to wickedly play around with the garments inside. In short, she’s taking them back, having her revenge through ludo-Gothic BDSM’s darkness visible. The source of play comes from symbolic, doubled tension; i.e., the metaplay of fan fiction’s paradox of pleasurable pain lying adjacent to perceived threats of harmful pain and its assorted legendarium. On the surface of the image, black is loaded in Western imagery with a variety of conflicting data: the threat of power as a destroying force, but also the color black as thoroughly dimorphized under Western thought; i.e., of presumed subservience [and misbehavior] for women under a perceived medievalized order of existence, the police state-of-affairs signified by black uniforms that hold punishment over those judged as good little girls and bad little girls who live under fear of rape as something to endure and avenge.
Just as canon is all according to design, so is my iconoclasm; i.e., Glenn—as a shapeshifter and Satanic atheist who isn’t much interested in being good, nor being a scapegoat—wants to have danger-disco fun through consent-non-consent by walking the tightrope. The idea is doll-like, undressing Glenn like a doll [implying a similar subversive element of control to the sub being undressed as such, instead of the heteronormative idea of intromission, coitus and creampie; i.e., “Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am!”]: in ways that beg the disco refrain as disarming of unironic harm within a Gothic, BDSM threshold; re: New Order’s “How does it feel, to treat me like you do?”
In Glenn’s case, the question is asked under informed consent; i.e., from two parties who know exactly what they want and are reveling inside the unique, delicious sensations as normally denied to us, under Capitalism: inside danger-disco torture dungeons! Glenn didn’t pick “her” clothes in the sense that she’s a cartoon, but rather did so as an extension of myself; i.e., I chose her to represent my desires: during the appreciative peril you see taking place. Just as I designed Glenn to shapeshift themselves—and me shapeshifting by proxy—the “goblin transformation” fantasy is me being tied up and threatened with “death”/a palliative Numinous.
To set ourselves free, we fags [and other aliens] use ludo-Gothic BDSM communicate through feelings of alienation, stigma, miracles, imprisonment, and exquisite torture, etc; i.e., the tremendously anguished cryptonymy of state boundaries, which we test by threatening them with our power as ultimately greater than any state: catharsis through “rape,” on the receiving end of something great, in control; e.g., “Should you choose to test my resolve in this matter, you will be facing a finality beyond your comprehension, and you will not be counting days, or months, or years, but millenniums in a place with no doors[30].” We wager in strict and gentle forms, but speak to moral trespasses that defy reason, blind our eyes, and steal our dreams through false versions of themselves. Reversing such polarities, we see through/with them while wearing blindfolds and weeping blood: to puzzle over these tactile seekings of “destruction” and temporary bondage during calculated risk as a psychosexual, “martyred” act of rebellion.
[artist: Lucid-01]
Latter-day uniforms, then, become similarly loaded with canonical connotations of torture, treachery and forbidden seduction as dimorphically gendered; i.e., the eliding of angelic patience with Radcliffe’s “black penitent” as a kind of xenophobic caricature of destruction that, under fascist/post-fascist conditions, takes on different meanings for beings perceived as “woman,” but also monstrous-feminine: the regressive in holy garbs, but also the queer BDSM subversive playing at the dark god for heretical reasons of Satanic apostacy and hellish delight. There is an undeniable link to trauma and imaginary history’s constant reinvention; the wearer could just as easily be a Christian missionary on the Oregon Trail or 1800s China, but also a ninja, gun hand or some other operative training in bondage, torture and murder that is nevertheless fetishized in the [classically] white cis-het fantasies of women [or men playing the “heroes” in these narratives]. So do we camp blood libel in ways Tolkien did not.
[artist: Persephone van der Waard]
Like an action hero, we get stronger the less clothes we have on. Such things are torment mapped out and turned into strength, thriving in places the Straights couldn’t dare to dream; i.e., a mascot to illustrate that state dialogs only mirror ours and what we’re trying to say. To it, Glenn indicates of my voice—dancing on my enemies’ graves as a point of praxis [e.g., ribbing Rowling by existing despite her desire for me not to, above]. But any artistic movement isn’t solo; it’s a group exercise and takes a lot of planning to humanize those things normally demonized to serve police goals under state hegemonies. These invigilations of “brothel espionage” generally work inside capital, on different registers: me, the director/promoter and various people collaborating with me and what I invigilate. Teamwork makes the dream work!
[artists: Lucid-01 and Persephone van der Waard]
This planning can occur through Lucid and myself [above]. Or it can happen synchronistically through others; e.g., my partner, Bay Ryan, who normally identifies with the goblin through Gothic play, and which I’ve drawn as such [next page]. Celebrating my Satanic shortstack for their fuckable attitude and grit, I’ve created a spiritual companion to Glenn; i.e., one to play with our respective lost humanities by camping unironic blood libel, together [whose canonical forms we subvert as they happen around us].
Goblins, like golems, are made from clay or things treated like clay. Assembled by different practitioners, they are functionally “dead,” beforehand; i.e., loving inscribed in various occult symbols and clothes that—whatever meaning they once had—only currently have as much granted, post-resurrection, by the sorcerer! In playing with dogma to reverse the polarity of power and virtue/vice, workers can stand up and say as one, “We are not small, wicked, functionally black children[31] for functionally white cops to smash into paste; we have power to expose them in ways that subvert their bad-faith poetry and violence: our Aegis, reminding them of their own cruelty and hypocrisy!”
It’s something that goes beyond Glenn, of course; re: through real people like Bay! Being drawn as a goblin by me, Bay humanizes themselves through our relationship. In turn, I humanize myself in how I depict Bay as human; i.e., as they want to be seen, thus treated, while identifying with things capital treats as alien and worthless. They want to be valued as short, mischievous and fun, but also as persecuted in ways they overcome. Small and big at the same time, Bay’s an imp-like offshoot of a larger Cause, one melding struggle and fun, hence terrorist and party animal, punk and activist, skater and whore, orc and goblin, servant and delinquent, etc:
[model and artist: Bay and Persephone van der Waard]
The whole point, with Bay and I, is to work together to rescue the goblin; i.e., in a sex-positive way that remains sexually descriptive and culturally appreciative regarding Indigenous struggles married to Satanic panic, BDSM and prostitution arguments. Sex workers live and die by making their sex fun, naughty and—for our purposes—actively rebellious in service to workers and nature reclaiming the language of demonic slaves [sex classically being a slave’s work; e.g., that of women].
Except, no one wants to martyr themselves; making revolution fun helps the medicine go down, effectively fetishizing the Gothic without showing bigotry as such. Doing so requires informed labor exchanges, happening between workers who love doing this shit for free/at reduced cost; e.g., Bay and I, but also Harmony and others [exhibit 44a1b1b] having fun during praxial synthesis. Melding sex and war into something memorable, we use old demonic language to become a new way of framing and humanizing labor with. In the same token, we combat dated, pervasive stereotypes about whores, and non-white/queer people, etc, when capital antagonizes nature and puts it cheaply to work; i.e., through a dark revenge dynamic thwarting profit. Canonically occurring through state copaganda, the elite frame nature as a vengeful servant tragically “gone bad” [commonly depicted as lazy or cruel, then blamed during capital’s bust phase through blood libel argument]. We fight fire with fire, subverting state tools in duality.
Goblins are perfect for this—if not the actual aesthetic, then something comparable, during liminal expression; i.e., in a small, tight, mini-demonic package making trouble for those in power [true punk bashing the bully from a guerrilla’s small, disadvantaged position]! Keeping with acid Communism, this rebellion has a drug-like flavor to it; e.g., Black Sabbath’s “Faeries Wear Boots” [1970] suggesting such things as fictitious, but nonetheless making an impression while tied to drug-induced paranoia [the album’s namesake] and the shadow of the Vietnam War felt overseas, in England; i.e., as the birthplace of “Gothic” and heavy metal, alike, but prone to its own signature treating of activism/punk culture like “terrorism[32]” [re: Crawford, and the Gothic invention of terrorism]: “Yeah, fairies wear boots and you gotta believe me / Yeah, I saw it, I saw it, I tell you no lies” [source: Genius].
As Glenn demonstrates, the formerly problematic can be tipped away from its regressive, commercialized aspects—abjuring profit while keeping the medievalized, religious-tinged outer shell—but there will always be ontological tension within a broader dialogic interrogating whatever results transpire. Further fun can be made by chaining her to the pillar but having her grip it with her fingers. At a glance, she appears at the viewer’s disadvantage, but upon closer inspection is actually having the time of her life! She feels out of control, so she regains control during ludo-Gothic BDSM mired in stigma arguments she likewise can face and play with; i.e., a roleplay of false danger, loose morals and dungeon language haunted by overarching state abuse abstracted as such:
[artists: Lucid-01 and Persephone van der Waard]
There’s a charged, stirring sense of improvised chaos, too. Glenn takes what’s on hand—the nun’s habit, the convenient pair of manacles next to the bed; the hot candlewax on her bare, muscled skin; her anachronistic pussy tattoo, In Hoc Signo Vinces [“In this sign thou shalt conquer”] and the massive white dildo—and runs wild with it. She’s not the hopeless impostor-victim, stricken with dysphoria or dysmorphia; these are abusive conditions to redeem through emergent play avenging nature by defending herself from the state through staged impropriety [re: the whore’s paradox/revenge enacted through nudity and exposure]. As such, Glenn at home in her shapeshifting[33] body and herself as “in flux” and at odds with the tyrannical past. Carefully rewriting her own destiny by throwing caution to the wind, she reclaims the prescribed terror instruments of colonial abuse in thrilling paradoxically ways; i.e., the thrill of ritualized violence, minus actual harm, and married to interracial sex [sex with goblins and non-goblins is interracial sex]. I’d say it’s a game where no one gets hurt, but what’s life without a little pain?
Furthermore, this goes beyond “just goblins,” tying them and other monsters [through workers and their exchanges] to a grander process of creation-under-pressure; i.e., one had between many models I’ve worked with, over the years, but also the broader assemblage and chaos for which all creatures of chaos [which goblins are] and Gothic Communism—through acid Communism—collectively speak to, in a highly meta sense. I want to quickly explore this process through one of my models, but also outline the kinds of socio-political, linguo-material elements that converge, mid-assemblage, to adumbrate Gothic Communism:
[artist: Blxxd Bunny]
Bunny is one such person I connected with, during this project; i.e., they’re ace and I’m not, but we can still work through those differences to speak to our collective emancipation: through the monstrous-femininity of the bare exposed whore [rawr]! The left image, for example, comes from a shoot they provided for one of my paintings of them. Compulsion isn’t strictly authoritative, but also encompasses the cathartic pursuit of things that feel good through pain[34] that speaks, in turn, regarding subconscious impulses; i.e., that cross consciously over into our world: from any one monster type and into bodies being the canvas for all of them, combined; e.g., I could easily paint Bunny as a goblin, despite having never done so—yet! Only time will tell!
Yet, the adage, “be careful what you wish for” applies to the sobering reality that harm is not historically-materially divided from pleasure, pain or power exchange; i.e., during social-sexual rituals where all of these things are distributed unevenly, dimorphically and abusively through fetish, kink and BDSM aesthetics. Bunny is my friend, and planning monsters around them and their labor informs my own; i.e., I care about them and often check in with them regarding what I work/feature Bunny on. Such things don’t exist in a vacuum, then—quite the opposite, they float in a more chimeric and chaotic sphere that interrelates imperfectly to produce wildly incongruous but seemingly perfect-for-each-other modulations and synthesis.
[artist: Ween]
This obviously goes beyond Bunny and I meeting at random—doing so similar to Harmony and myself—onto equally-random-but-no-less-special happenstance; e.g., Steven Hillenberg and the obscure ’90s band Ween [above]—the two fitting together like human genitals [themselves a byproduct of millions of years of unchecked evolution and its pressures, and resembling sea animals in their own right] to make something profoundly special unto itself: SpongeBob SquarePants[35].
Relationships, in general, operate as such; Communism relies on that to function, and SpongeBob—like any egregore you could dream of, not just goblins—is a product of the same chaos all poetry springs from: something to play with as children do [with Tolkien ethnocentrically comparing the goblins to children]. “Are ya ready, kids?” Things that remind you of that chaos, while delivering on it anyways, speak to the complicated and endlessly metamorphic/magical forces at work through Gothic Communism playing with darkness. This can be sexual—e.g., Cuwu and I once fucked to SpongeBob’s jellyfish rave—but includes a childlike element, as well; i.e., Cuwu only showed me SpongeBob because they loved it, themselves, and wanted to share its magic with me [and me—loving older cartoons like Ren & Stimpy and Rocko’s Modern Life (1991 and 1993)—delighted at the chance: to feel like a kid as an adult]!
To that, the best things in life [in terms of stimulation and jouissance] come with a dialectical-material element of risk—to love monsters, and each other as monsters, but realize back and forth, how such things are likewise tools for the state abusing us. There’s no way to avoid this, and it can seem a little scary. But without pursuing catharsis, you run the risk of being a slave not just to society’s polite norms, but their hidden, brutalizing ones, too: the snowy bridal gown and the black nun’s habit [or goblin dick, below] intimate the same systemic issues. If they wear a uniform, then it must mean something—with the uncanny possibility of their being a false option or replication that isn’t the intended function. The house of pain becomes, to some degree, ironic.
[artist: Blxxd Bunny]
Again, this can be sex-positive or coercive; it all boils down to dialectical-material context: what is the point of the costume within the piece in relation not to Capitalism, but its core, systemic values, etiology and symptoms [e.g., virgin/whore syndrome]? And more to our purposes, how can these be subverted within the paradox of cathartic, exquisite torture; i.e., in ways that don’t endorse or promote actual harm—thus canonical iterations of something as seemingly throwaway and performative as a nun’s outfit—but whose hauntological mask, costume or role to play brings one joy and other denied pleasures in parallel societies: lost histories and possible new worlds within the half-real fictions of Gothic poetics as de facto education. Blood libel, when camped, speaks to “sodomy” as canonically “unnatural,” vis-à-vis interracial sex. Yet, in looking at it, the images seems to speak, “Come and see, but also do; critique through experience as profound, intense, iconoclastic.” That’s Gothic Communism!
The ludic nature is, like a videogame, divorced from actual harm; the ritual is there, but not the dreaded result, allowing for instruction to occur through repeated, simulated experiences involving the same ingredients. While this can be for or against the state—with fascist parties like Tolkien embracing the heroic cult of death through the slaying of demons with codified arguments—the “slaying” of monsters, in sex-positive language, has a highly specific meaning and desired outcome: rape prevention and the disillusionment of systemic harm.
Within this broader network of opposition, then, denial becomes a powerful ironic device in relation to unironic doubles; i.e., the denial of polite restraint, of compunction and pleasure, but also the denial of correct sex—of orgasms and prescriptive harmful norms, including their forms of compelled restraint, abstinence, ignorance, protection, and penetration: the agency of who we play with and what we put into our demonic, genderqueer bodies [vaginal or anal[36], above or below]! It becomes not a source of sodomy and black fears, per the ghost of the counterfeit during abjection, but a place of new love/unknown pleasures reversing abjection; e.g., Eva Android’s tight femboy’s goblin ass having the whore’s revenge with the same terror tools fucking the alien: ourselves, during sodomy! Squish goes the butt-ass!
[artist: Eva Android]
In short, audiences can get just as invested as performers, their voyeurism and exhibitionism having a vicarious, empathetic-yet-needy component [many thrive by seeing others thrive]. Denial, as such, can expertly raise tension, the pressure climbing until you shout at the screen, “just fuck, already!” So can denial become profound because of gender trouble and parody exploring desired outcomes for either side. Heteronormativity only views queerness as a death of the world [e.g., the 2022 Netflix miniseries for Neil Gaiman’s Sandman selling queerness to the Straights as a kind of morbid death fantasy not unlike Tolkien’s own closeted forms]. For us queers, the goal is crossing over from the Right to the Left, doing so by virtue of reclaiming subversive denial and indulgence; i.e., as a positive vice we perform on a societal level: a world without enforceable sin, but still yielding theatrical conflict—e.g., sexy nuns torn between their service to God and the Devil, or manly men versus hot manly love in a bathroom stall—and almost-holy Gothic pastiche as geared towards euphoric pleasure and pain. All these conversations occupy the same basic shadow space.
The same goes for orcs and goblins as not simply reprobate, but expressing queerness through non-white bodies of different shapes and sizes; e.g., orcs having “bear” potential and goblins stamped not just with a rebellious, “trickster” character [similar to Loki, from Norse myth] but the usual fat asses [above] that so many nowadays assign to the goblin archetype[37]; i.e., taking “punk” back to the exploitative past [as queer slang so often does]: the doll-like bottom for stronger homosexual dominants, but also the sizeable booty to tear up and enjoy during calculated risk by sex-positive agents. In the absence of monopoly, chaos reigns in ways we can work inside.)
Wrapping Up/the Big Picture
That mostly concludes our playing with goblins beyond Tolkien’s blood libel revenge arguments and into Gothic Communism married to acid Communism (save for another two-page exhibit, next page). Keeping that (and the above exhibit) in mind, let’s go big-picture—covering some broader arguments (eight pages), before concluding the symposium (and “Idle Hands”) by talking about Medusa one last time; i.e., as a Big Whore/Communist Numinous to evoke through the likes of tiny beings like goblins: acting as little sex pirates serving Mommy Communism.
The raw sentiment of a moths drawn to the flame isn’t that hard to understand (above)—e.g., the bottom reaching behind themselves to grab the headboard, all while spreading their legs to take the fucking ever deeper and harder—if only because sex (or asexual rituals) happening during power exchange with a cool-looking badass can feel stupidly good. Rapture invigorates us, but also has Numinous elements of torpor/divine stupefaction; i.e., that smash different pieces repeatedly together to communicate through the profoundly absurd effects being had/playing out before our eyes. Often, this is phrased as drug-like, but also tied to conquest and filth; i.e., drugs are kept in a “stash,” called “shit,” and fought over as fiercely as gold is/consumed as “the good stuff” that takes the edge off.
Drugs or not, sex and Gothic aren’t “empty” at all, but whose darkness visible generates meaning through pandemonium to challenge profit (thus tokenization) during the whore’s revenge; i.e., through “rape” and rape taking infinite forms, those forms working in opposition, during liminal expression, and only limited by our imaginations and desires (shaped by our socio-material conditions and grafted onto our bodies, below): to perceive through holistic violence and illusion, but also sex/public nudism!
(exhibit: exhibit 44a1b1b: Artists [from left to right, top to bottom]: Annabel Morningstar, Angel Witch, Harmony Corrupted, Bubi, Blxxd Bunny, Angel, Jazminskyyy, Eldritch Babe, and Roxie Rusalka. All are models I’ve worked with in the past, taking “dark,” usually massive or otherwise “non-white” cock, or a dark body for someone to enter during sodomy’s physical and metaphorical terms. White-on-black, black-on-white, or black-on-black, all involve “black” as something to subvert through itself acted out.
This section, then, has been all about playing with goblins and size difference, but also different skin colors to showcase alien engagement; i.e., of engagement with white/black through bodies and objects that speak to watching or performing medieval arguments, and that likewise merge the goblin as an equally undead and demonic force. “Black” [or purple, green, etc] stands for inhuman, which we reverse during the abjection process by whorishly embracing such devices; re: running with the Devil away from state control, sleeping with the goblin or being the goblin for others to sleep with!
Whatever the arrangement, it’s the call of the void as haunted by abuse/the ghost of the counterfeit, minus actual persecution or exploitation. Exploitation and liberation occupy the same space; forbidden things excite because they’re forbidden, the performers seeking to work within porn stereotypes [the BBC/interracial sex] to subvert them: to excite through consent as something to establish by those who are attracted to opposites/the exotic; i.e., to humanize them during mutual consent, not exploit them as capital normally does [re: with sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll sublimating more rebellious varieties away from marginalized groups and towards status-quo benefactors maintaining Capitalist Realism through controlled opposition/false rebellion]:
[artist: Harmony Corrupted et al]
Harmony and I, for example, shot these photos because we love doing dress-up and roleplaying together to reverse abjection [going so far as to redo a shoot for funsies, above]. It speaks to what is being demonized, and the means with which to play with/subvert it! Our aim isn’t to pacify during the cryptonymy process, but inform, mobilize and cryptomimetically echo while having spur-of-the-moment fun! We copy and echo each other [and our bodies] trapped between trauma and “trauma.” That’s what camping the canon/making it gay is all about! Rebellion isn’t about profit, which pimps police nature to achieve, but in loving what we do in ways that survive the inflexibilities capital relies on to brutalize others. I’m not simply Pygmalion, pimping Galatea to flex on nature; Harmony and I love what we do, doing so together to inspire not just each other but all workers under capital. Staying in control—at least during calculated risk enacted between the two of us—is a virtue that aids in systemic catharsis presenting things that are out of control/needing to be closeted, in capital’s eyes; e.g., the madwoman in the attic, itself an allusion to Jane Eyre‘s woman-of-color Bertha [and who the white heroine calls a goblin[38]].
The same goes for all my friends/muses. We live far away from each other, offstage, but onstage occupy the same land of dreams that all monsters, hence activists, do. We’re a circle of castles—ones we can storm at our own leisure, while denying Tolkien the same privilege.)
“‘Tis a trinket Sauron fancies,” yet ones that hold all the power the world has to offer inside then (re: Blake). A loveless, divided and inactive rebellion is a dead rebellion, and revolution is pageantry without judgement (as a goal, not an obstacle); i.e., infinite value, infinite form, thus infinite ways to fight back using what we got, our stewardship of nature always resisting state domination and control! Yet whatever power we assign to them, goblins are simply people’s various parts, first and foremost; e.g., Harmony’s pussy is her pussy and should be acknowledged as that while ascribing it any other qualities; i.e., while coding it with whatever virtues we espouse, stigmas we condemn, or beauty/status symbols we work with/subvert, onstage and off; re: that of orcs and goblins’ legendary qualities, but also paradoxical (simultaneous) goodness and badness conducive to rebellion: as waged by us against the state demonizing us, saying our ass is theirs. Both things are true, insofar as the conflict is dialectically-materially true/false during liminal expression; i.e., the whore versus the pimp, the being of nature and its harvested labor fighting back upon its own Aegis: “one ass to rule them all…” Sex is a weapon!
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
There’s nothing wrong with worship/theatrical revenge, provided it respects universal basic human rights, and that of animals and the environment. So make connections that help you connect the dots through you own nebulas and constellations; i.e., that reconnect your communities to what capital has alienated so many from! Despite the tweed suit and ivy-league education, Tolkien was a cheap pimp; he could only use the blood libel/darkness visible of goblins to cage his mind and quake before Sauron (re: Capitalist Realism). So expose him by doing better than him/camping his ghost; kill his darling legacy to build a better world beyond Zombie-Vampire Capitalism, one that has the whore’s revenge by setting nature’s monstrous-feminine goblins and black dicks free (or temporarily caging those cocks, should they wish it)! Get in touch by playing with darkness holding everything together! Let the good goblins come out to play/wreck shit to make activism fun and disguise our own naked performing of counterterrorism through drug-like, anisotropic, darkness-visible terror language during the cryptonymy process; be rowdy and watch what the so-called “good guys” do, in response!
The answer is, they’ll attack our doubles and call it “justice.” Did you honestly think otherwise? Doing so often invokes defacement, which normally means taking one’s human element away from where it is seen; i.e., the state defaces its victims, presenting them as dark monoliths to worship and fear during the colonial process (demons and pandemonium tending to homogenize a bit more than the undead; e.g., vampires and zombies, versus sex demons as a whole). Anything we make challenges that, but comments just as well with masks and customs that speak to our scars, injury and defacement as part of who we are, the oasis part-in-parcel with the desert; i.e., the goblin as a kind of mask to wear and camp canon with, the whore prostituting herself as goblin—not to pimp nature/tokenize punk culture, but to self-liberate under oppressive conditions; e.g., this Japanese Edo shunga (artist unknown) encompasses its own spin on “rock ‘n roll”:
(source)
To it, cryptonymy works overtime when reversing abjection—a process that generally speaks to things while not speaking to them through abject, hauntological and chronotopic placeholders. In turn, we have to do what Tolkien thinks unthinkable (fucking the terrorist, the devil, the goblin, the zombie), making his necrophilic, anti-Semitic dogma unthinkable through paradox reversing terror/counterterror with signature, dainty goblin fun and rags-to-riches: speaking of the devil to appear in ways that camps canonical doubles; re: darkness visible, marrying or socializing/sexualizing with those from perceived immor(t)al territories. The world’s biggest coward, Tolkien rapes goblins through lethal force; we “rape” ourselves through a Gothic allegory Tolkien was famously allergic to, fucking to metal/monster-fucking: as a defense mechanism against his chasing of orc BBC and goblin BBW!
It’s certainly a tightrope, and one that occupies the same liminal space/shadow zone that Black Sabbath and Tolkien both did (and so many others, besides; i.e., sex, videogames, heavy metal/rock/punk and horror, etc, gentrifying and decaying through a predominantly white straight male enterprise[39]); re: while fetishizing darkness of all kinds to shrink bigotry and increase understanding and intersectional solidarity as a whole: using monstrous-feminine language in duality/opposition to state variants!
Blood quantum just as mendacious, thus harmful, as blood libel. White, black, or brown; tall/short, able/disabled, Christian/pagan, straight/queer or Western/alien, etc, we want to unite by subverting us-versus-them dogma. The simple fact is, we’re all Medusa’s children—are all orcs and goblins under Communism—but also under capital abusing us in the interim, harvesting nature as monstrous-feminine.
Keeping with castles-in-the-flesh, this grim harvest/liminal hauntology of war includes punishing workers for subverting state mechanisms of fear and difference; i.e., the “goblin” commonly a shortstack white girl with a non-white body or appetite (marked by size, but also the color of stigma), and the “orc” commonly a male person of color with large muscles and a giant cock—both operating under a Jewish conspiracy to unite labor that downplays fascism to attack Communism in the same basic shadow space! Under Capitalist Realism, visions of a better world and a dead world occupy the same Aegis. That’s where power is found—either to enslave/closet workers through monstrous sex, terror and force, but also to set them free by establishing empathy through connection, community and, yes, communion with those who came before (anyone who discourages interracial mingling and play is merely segregating workers, dividing and conquering them through bad-faith and/or misled shelter arguments): riding Satan’s “broom” (the morphology is well-and-truly endless)!
(artist [top and bottom]: Harmony Corrupted and Blxxd Bunny)
So while Communism operates through community and trust upsetting state monopolies (consent is sexy among language of calculated risk, above)—and whose cryptonymic deceiving of the state through “mere play” hides rebellion in plain sight—all remain overshadowed by capital’s usual divisions blaming its own victims through DARVO/obscurantism. Yes, cathartic gradients last and build trust and healthy relationships like Bunny’s or Harmony’s and mine, but coercive examples—if negotiated badly with someone presenting themselves as a sadist in bad-faith—can promptly fuck over the submissive by subjecting them to addictive, fleeting and guilty pleasure under an unscrupulous and/or unwell manipulator’s give-and-take cycle of rapacious power abuse; re: Tolkien, but also Jadis, the latter into Tolkien’s school of monster-fucking they used to rape me with. Caution is important, but it’s hard to be overly cautious when you feel vulnerable and enthralled with a “protector” archetype who has your number and doesn’t mean you well; i.e., they smell the trauma/madness on you and know how to exploit it.
In some shape or form, then, the desire for cathartic fantasies grabs hold and never lets go, because trauma isn’t something you just “get over.” Like a golem (or Glenn), you can only transform it as part of you, once and forever. And yet, self-destruction needn’t be literal; it can be a chance to partake of the forbidden, thus exit Plato’s cave! Except this is generally permanent, and if my life is any sort of guide, one that leaves us feeling marooned by people who—as magical and wonderful as they are—don’t always stick around; e.g., Zeuhl and their postpunk pussy rocking my world, only to elope with an “old flame” and leave me wanting. C’est la vie! I got hurt a ton, afterwards, and harmed/raped a bit, but eventually found better cuties, anyways (though none with pussies as tight, I must confess). I wouldn’t trade my scarred skin and madwoman’s bonkers, castled attic psyche for the world! “Insane in the membrane!” (Cypress Hill’s “Insane in the Brain,” 1993).
And trying to map it as we have here, the process is anything but singular or simple; it’s demonic gibberish trailblazing through our lives as a living document, a closeness to chaos and things alienated/fetishized by capital to serve profit. Truth is ergodic; self-fashioned but hauntological, it takes time and effort to enact. So, too, does the world around us take non-trivial effort to transform; change people and the past (as something to perceive/speak with) and you can change the planet! Free the mind; the rest will follow in time!
To this, the shadow of state force always hangs over us. The uphill battle lies in challenging fatal nostalgia as game-like in ways normative individuals will defend. True to form, “darkness” is something to sell (as sex and gender so often are) but the Gothic isn’t merely a police cudgel to bludgeon the usual suspects with; we walking sex demons become part of a larger conversation, whoring ourselves out in ways that invite humanizing worship through a demonized Gothic aesthetic the state can’t fully monopolize. Everything is political, our captivating bodies and demonic personas inviting forbidden knowledge and exchange through dark promises: of carnal delight and class-conscious eroticism and asexual public nudism; i.e., the whore’s paradox, but also her glorious refrain—the state can’t monopolize monsters or disco!
So come and get it, lovelies, but pay your sex workers! Mommy has needs and stripping is not consent (re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Paid Labor,” 2024)! Mutual consent is badass! Equal rights for all workers, animals and the environment is badass! Doing so through the usual fetish-and-cliché claptrap during ludo-Gothic BDSM is badass! Sluts and whores are badasses! And, as usual, the witch is a pathway to “doom” as transformation through sex education; i.e., canonically through the language of theft, sorcery and secrets; e.g., Adria from Diablo 1 (1996) saying to the hero, “I sense a soul in search of answers!”
Well, mommy’s got your answers right here! Just cross her palm with silver—all to gradually synthesize working concepts conducive to a world without money/privatization; i.e., what use is a wage in a world where everything is eventually free? Rape replaces with “rape,” doing away with industries that normally canonize the former through rock opera; re (from the Poetry and Undead Modules):
Unlike nation-states, corporations don’t care about dogmatic presentation as true to the state; they care about exploitation as something that invariably corrupts, which they can milk while throwing various states under the bus if need be. Profit is always the victim. As such, capitalists will do whatever they can to profit as efficiently as possible (source: “Back to the Necropolis,” 2024).
Whatever the media, rape is profit under Capitalism, which relies not just on predation, but community silence to continue itself in bad copies, falsehoods, and double standards (source: “Transforming Our Zombie Selves,” 2024).
(artist: Marina Dove[40])
All work is sexualized; and forced into a world that makes sex work something to steal from, we become beggars—i.e., in a world that, due to accident of birth, doesn’t let us choose/forces us to balance caring about other workers and merely trying to survive by doing things we’re not proud of (e.g., women’s work, service, retail, etc). This doesn’t instantly make us token grifters or cranks, but that can happen; and while brand and belief can overlap, good praxis is ultimately putting our money where our mouths are. Camp is a fine line, then, and class intersects with culture and race to betray labor as often as not. You are what you eat, and that includes context and interpretation of said context; it includes us triggering under conditions that, per the state preying on labor through its own victims—can dice roll into cops as often as victims wearing the same clothes and speaking the same demonized language. Rebellions are human, therefore flawed and susceptible to the usual devices use to keep us in line; e.g., transphobia and its externalized elements internalized by token workers.
This begs the question: how do we fight profit, thus rape and all the disorders, syndromes, estrangement, alienation, and abuse, etc, that stem from it? These answers and more lie in Pandora’s Box as something to open up: channels and clinics of forbidden, delicious exchange! Witches are more fun, especially black witches and goblins (their surfaces charged with psychosexual power—of rape, of revenge, of ecstasy and the Earth, next page)! Engagement with them amounts to praxis, thus opposition as something to synthesize pursuant to liberation for all.
Yes, weird attracts weird; it should play out in ways that aren’t unironically predatory—i.e., that don’t give detractors of our literal existence ammunition when calling for our destruction instead of the state decaying around them (re, Marx: “capital is dead labor sucking, like the vampire, on living labor”). Far easier to blame victims than systems, Faust’s bargain a death warrant that carries out through rotting numbskulls! Having no brains, they hunger for ours. The spectres of Marx aren’t just Ringwraiths invading home from within (during a foreign plot, below), but the fleshy orcs and goblins that precede them across the same Radcliffean Black Veil; re: something to summon and scapegoat, creatures of the night laid low, Dayman vs Nightman.
For state defenders, it’s “boundaries for me, not for thee.” As such, we’re forever under suspicion and they are not; everything we do is an allegation they’ll leverage against us: to “protect” women and children from “evil sex demons,” thus the West’s nuclear family model and civilization as we know it. It might sound extreme, but that’s how moral panics work, and during the state’s usual boom-or-bust cycle, we fags will be blamed inside a police state; i.e., for being pushed into that marginalized sphere: the Omelas goat to exsanguinate by state bloodletters.
We queers are demonized—among other things—as sodomite pedophiles to scapegoat by village idiots and their “prison sex” mob mentality run amok. This doesn’t put us above critique, but begs those examining us to consider the sobering reality—that the ringleaders and opportunists excoriating us are generally far more guilty but presenting as holier-than-thou to deflect from their own hand in things; e.g., most pedophiles are cis-het men, and even if a trans person is a sex pest, this isn’t because they’re trans, but because the state is punishing them for being trans until they snap (excluding congenital elements like Dahmer’s cannibalism, while attacking what they call “transgenderism” [a term no queer unironically uses] as alien on its face).
To it, such obscurantism and DARVO conflations are standard-issue, hence cover for the state through capital’s monopolies, trifectas and qualities! Sexual abuse isn’t an orientation and reactive abuse doesn’t define us! Negotiating such treachery pleads care and boldness, side by side; i.e., to be seen and heard, but also camouflaged in ways that safeguard us from state antibodies: “A little more caution from you; that is no trinket you carry!” Like Satan, our buffer is “non-existence,” darkness visible all around you, “under your bed, in your closet, in your head!” (Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” 1991).
Keeping with our discussions of “Midnight Vampire” and Tolkien, liberation isn’t intuitive because capital is a giant prison designed to conceal itself; escape requires paradox, which demons are profoundly at home with. From Milton onwards, we turn things inside-out, exposing our captors and finding freedom through our chains; i.e., as shadowy likenesses of the dire originals. There’s no single interpretation for such inkblots, meaning they have whatever power we can dialectically-materially infuse them with. When we come, you come!
Per the cryptonymy process, the revolutionary’s praxial lever is, as usual, their Aegis dueling the state’s in duality. Harnessed by us, it demonically evokes the barbaric past to pay it forward; i.e., by reflecting new potential on sharp obsidian velvet (and other such oxymorons, next page): to take your “soul” by making you cum! Spooky!
Everyone likes to “go to town,” fancies the whore (which historically would have lived in cities and urban-environment brothels put up by enterprising men and madams); goblin queens are best (what Tolkien literally calls “the black crack” per his captive/goblin rape fantasies, Shakespeare’s “the crack of doom,” etc). It’s a disco to transform, informed by the magical, hypnotic past; re, New Order’s “Blue Monday” (1983):
Those who came before me
Lived through their vocations
From the past until completion
They’ll turn away no more
And still, I find it so hard
To say what I need to say [as queer people so often do]
But I’m quite sure that you’ll tell me
Just how I should feel today (source: Genius).
Growth hurts, as do adventures (e.g., blue balls/clit). But also? They feel good.
Tolkien’s goblins were predominantly cis-male; ours, like the Medusa, encompass the entire GNC spectrum. The vampire, witch or goblin is the disco, the Gothic castle-in-the-flesh advertising extracurricular survival and BDSM fun; i.e., shored up in the paradoxical graveyard language of deathly sex, torture and live burial! Back in black, the panties beg to be pulled aside; her necromancer’s lips grip, worthy of a tyrant’s boast that would rival Smaug the dragon’s (“I am strong, strong, strong!”). Darkness visible, she flashes with power! Come play with her! Feel the rapture of ironic rape (“rape” in quotes)! Avenge Medusa by hugging her seductive liminal darkness!
(artist: Kay)
Ridiculed by state proponents, this Hellish poetic refrain endures a position of compelled evolution; i.e., during prostitution arguments, and achieved inventively from exile with which to reclaim our lost humanity under state-straight yolks. Milton coined it while physically blind, yet still being of the devil’s company without realizing it (re: Blake[41]). Per ludo-Gothic BDSM, we consciously take back these chains, labels, and death sentences—doing as we please, a summoning of the whore (and her darkness visible); i.e., to learn from her how best to handle and redistribute power and knowledge—to “do the stinging,” as Bilbo puts it! Monsters are the abstract language of argument and debate, doubled and at odds, inside-out, invasive, plural and oscillating amid the gloam’s coded behaviors. Reality isn’t cut and dry. Goblins aren’t cut and dry! Anyone who argues that shamelessly amounts to Alexander slicing the Gordian Knot. It’s barbaric and, more to the point, inadequate towards escaping capital as a prison. We cannot take it at face value, like Tolkien did!
For us, then, sex is a weapon to break the jail through cryptonymy/forbidden sight (the more “rape” we experience, the more we learn). No different than a vampire at midnight or in broad daylight, the demon’s mouth, fang and pussy all hyphenate—an “ancient” xenoglossic book to spread and read you as much as the other way around: she succ! It’s drug-like, opening the doors of perception through the usual delicious pathways (more on this in “Call of the Wild,” when we look at “acid Communism, “again; i.e., with Mikki’s help, exhibit 60b).
In turn, entry predicates on trust; i.e., if one is worthy of that power that, all the same, resides in all workers’ breasts. The power of cuties like Mikki (next page) is awesome beyond compare; i.e., castles in the flesh holding special secrets, and making the “past” wise once more! Nothing radicalizes (or pacifies) people more than gender and sex; we must tip the needle away from capital, from cops, from sex coercion and its double standards[42] under Capitalist Realism and the Capitalocene. The ticket to doing this lies in Gothic Communism vis-à-vis demonic poetics: our sex (and genders) as a weapon challenging state doctrine in dualistic ways—on our Aegis! Sperm donors learn, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled… is pulling us! “Satan” is a figment of a wider imagination, but we’re quite real; black unicorns straight from Rainbow Hell (“black is ten colors“), we usher in/offer up a poetic Satanic voice to break Capitalist Realism, paradoxically enough, with dreams: “The closer you get to the meaning / The sooner you’ll know that you’re dreaming” (Black Sabbath’s “Heaven and Hell,” 1980).
(artist: Mikki Storm)
Moving On: Some Transitional Arguments about Demon Whores/the Big One (feat. Slan from Berserk)
As our goblin exhibit demonstrates, monsters are made, be that to enforce state power and its flow as Tolkien did, or to critique it; i.e., through the same shared and warring “monster-fucker” dialogs on forbidden love hyphenating sex and force. Moving forward from “Idle Hands” and into the rest of “Forbidden sight,” we’ll continue applying the demonic notion of forbidden sight by making and summoning demons; i.e., its performative irony through demon lovers as things to deal and play at/with darkness visible (chaos) during mutilative courtly love putting “rape” in quotes. To that, we’ll be going beyond vampires or goblins, and towards more obviously demonic, golem-esque effigies and the torturous power and forbidden love they offer (e.g., anal sex); i.e., as attached to larger Numinous forces I want to quickly address, here (two pages).
By tapping into those that fixate and focus less on feeding and trauma during liminal expression, and more on unequal, forbidden exchange and radical transformation through dark desire, we’re touching on the Communist Numinous. Personified most commonly as the Medusa (who we’ve already discussed, at length), it evokes different emotions, mid-rapture: “What profit is it a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his soul?” Well, that depends! What’s on the table, cutie? I’ll take your engorged shaft and raise you a Giger-style black womb[43]! A voluptuous vaso vagal, “She mighty mighty!” A bridge to cross, a castle to storm (or which storms back)! A very kinky girl’s death clam!
(artist: Kentaro Miura)
About that/a BDSM practitioner’s note of caution, as we proceed; i.e., about evoking a Communist Numinous whose taller demonic royalty nonetheless attaches to smaller goblin short stacks [and drug-like feelings; re: acid Communism]: the final planetary “fortress” haunting Tolkien’s own monster-fucker dreams. Slan (and her voluminous smuff, above) is just as good an example as any!
Just as the Promethean Quest is about self-destruction, to play with demons is to play with fire that can burn you. With demon sex and “rape,” then, there is always the echo of unironic rape to likewise learn from. Believe you me, pain is an excellent teacher—but especially in nightmarish varieties evoking tremendous power beyond themselves! The Gothic mode is a dark queen, her aged, throbbing energies felt by many capital has ravaged over time.
When Jadis raped me, for example, they taught me that Nazis and Communists share the same poetic inkblot. Indicating nature as alienated, fetishized and raped by capital, the Gothic-Communist Medusa is a fat, sassy whore; i.e., with stretch marks and a moon-sized cosmic bedonk—and she’s hungry for sweet revenge! It’s precisely that “best revenge” that survivors chase, scarred and longing to heal from state abuse during calculated risk: of a palliative Numinous sort, “crushing” you with more weight! You’ll know it when you feel it—when it has you begging to no one in particular, “Take me, Dark Mommy! ‘Fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty!'” The eye of that angry god, like a falling moon, threatens to collide with your earth, and smash you to fragments. Black holes make everyone’s pull-out weak! Spaghettification!
If there’s any transcendental signified, it’s power and death, babes. So play with demons/torture porn to your hearts’ content! Just remember that power, during ludo-Gothic BDSM, comes from control through informed consent, thus mutual exchange! “Hurt, not harm!” Always keep that in mind, but especially when you lose control or have dominion over those who don’t; i.e., when giving consent, thus permission to go a little wild; e.g., saying to your play partner, “Now step on me, bitch! Fuck me like you mean it!” Safewords, release/passwords, restraint and discipline, pleasure and pain—all go hand-in-hand, built on trust/minimized risk.
The chaos, in other words, is controlled, ironic, and cathartic for both sides, and ultimately not destructive despite the power-and-death aesthetic; i.e., anyone can unironically destroy or play at dark godhood, but it takes a mighty hand and mightier mind to show mercy through demonic union tested! That’s power—and ultimately the non-toxic kind that Gothic Communism is all about: finding the Communist Numinous through hauntological BDSM; i.e., establishing power through selective boundaries and limits where play is mutually established and understood! Rape, for all intents and purposes, is fetishization, hence power imbalance dressed as alien, potent; our Numinous dialectic “rapes” Medusa or has her “rape” you while the surf’s up (an allusion to Joe Satriani’s “Surfing with the Alien,” 1987)! Chase the dragon, boys!
(artist: Kentaro Miura)
And if all that sounds intense (which, to be fair, it is), fear not! Strict or gentle, vanilla or chocolate, metal or mellow—as long as you have safety measures like these in place, then harm/rape is impossible; i.e., she’s just hugging you: a winged, chimeric succubus letting you play with dark, forbidden things (the Medusa being the only Gorgon classically to have wings). Any articulation, as such, is entirely valid when going to the dark gods to break state monopolies with.
I think you’ll like Slan, then, who haunts older stories that we’ll examine in “Forbidden Sight,” part two; i.e., the Cosmic Whore that is Gothic Communism, having the whore’s dark Numinous revenge; e.g., Frankenstein and Alien‘s own horrors in clay. She’s “easy” but strict—will take you to the edge and teach you wonderful things (re: fucking to metal, clapping her big demon cheeks; or having her string you up like a sacrifice). Limitless in shape, size and surface, she can be whatever she wants to be—whatever ghastly playground/dark church/demon brothel you desire when she’s dominating you/giving you sub drop and/or draining your balls (e.g., the xenomorph or cenobite raising hell; i.e., to act between virtue and sin, and similar canonical dichotomies)! Whatever the shape, say hi to her, for me! —Perse
Onto “Forbidden Sight, part two: Making Demons“!
Footnotes
[1a] As Jon Stratton writes in “KISS: Jewishness, Hard Rock and the Holocaust” (2020):
KISS was a hard rock group, one of the most successful during the second half of the 1970s and early 1980s. The group’s two founding members, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley, were both Jewish. Indeed, both were the sons of Holocaust survivors. This article examines the impact of Simmons’s and Stanley’s Jewishness on KISS as a rock group and on its success. One of the most obvious impacts was the drive to succeed which Simmons and Stanley shared. Simmons writes about wanting power, Stanley that he wanted respect. As children of survivors they wanted safety. During much of the 1970s, the Holocaust was not yet publicly acknowledged. However, its trauma is evident in, for example, the stage characters that Simmons and Stanley adopted (source).
[1b] Including wealthy Jews who refuse to toe the line; e.g., Jonathan Glazer’s acceptance speech and admittedly mixed/sanitized approach nevertheless met with resounding criticism from other Jews in Hollywood (re: Tatiana Siegel’s “Over 1,000 Jewish Creatives and Professionals Have Now Denounced…” 2023), versus Sarah Friedland’s own award response, describing the conflict in no uncertain terms: as “the 336th day of Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” upon receiving her own trophy (source: Aljazeera’s “Jewish director at Venice Film Festival Speaks in Solidarity with Palestine,” 2024). Context matters.
[1c] Brooklyn Museum writes,
In 1987, Avram Finkelstein, Brian Howard, Oliver Johnston, Charles Kreloff, Chris Lione, and Jorge Socarrás founded the SILENCE=DEATH Project to support one another in the midst of the AIDS crisis. Inspired by the posters of the Art Workers Coalition and the Guerrilla Girls (both of whose work is on view nearby), they mobilized to spread the word about the epidemic and created the now-iconic Silence=Death poster featuring the pink triangle as a reference to Nazi persecution of LGBTQ people in the 1930s and 1940s. It became the central visual symbol of AIDS activism after it was adopted by the direct action advocacy group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) [source].
[1d] Which extends to literal animals; e.g., the Great Eagles—decked in gold by the dwarves after they help win the Battle of the Five Armies—having seemingly routed the goblins “for good” …until LotR; i.e., evil can never be extinguished (despite Tolkien’s love for propaganda battles), because the state always needs a scapegoat to colonize/profit off of, thus pimp and project its own brutality onto.
[2a] His parental treatment of nature-as-dark comparing the goblins of the Misty Mountains to naughty children punished by a white, all-knowing schoolmaster who killed their king: “Go away! little boys!” shouted Gandalf, in reply. “It isn’t bird-nesting time. Also naughty little boys that play with fire get punished!” (source). Echoes of Prometheus, but also King Kong clutching at white brides only to get machine-gunned.
[2b] E.g., “The Ring” is twink Frodo protecting his bussy from black people. We already discussed that in Volume One.
[3] We don’t focus much on the differences between orcs and goblins, here. But orcs, post-Tolkien, tend to be bigger and fiercer than goblins, which are smaller and craftier/rely on tools and gadgets (often weapons too big for them, or explosives, machinery and gizmos); i.e., versus the orc’s brute strength. Orcs are big minions and goblins, small; goblins are tied more towards greed, and orcs to rape and cannibalism. While such distinctions are far more recent and easily ignored, orcs and goblins remain popular monomythic punching bags/slumming avatars and vehicles of genuine rebellion, alike.
[4] With orcs and other servants of evil speaking a monolithic “Black Speech”; i.e., the homogenizing of colonial prospects to view them ethnocentrically as worlds to conquer by those weeding the globe of monstrous-feminine nature being likewise non-white, non-Christian, and stigma-animal, etc. Per Beowulf and Amazonomachia (monster battles, not just Amazons in particular), they become animalized during pro-state rites of passage; i.e., animals and gods speaking to patriarchal governance surviving presently under neoliberal nation-states and corporations; e.g., Zeus transforming into different animals to rape women, or Theseus vs the Minotaur, etc.
[5] Literally “of the King” and towards a kingdom that would last however many centuries Tolkien had in mind (the Nazis said a thousand years). Keeping with Beowulf, his Golden Age was still Christian, but before the Middle Ages; i.e., an Old-English hauntology laced with settler-colonial argumentation.
[6] “Given that The Lord of the Rings is one of the bestselling book series of all time, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’s inspired a lot of different groups and movements over the decades, with a wide range of politics. Probably the most influential is Silicon Valley, where the top of Salesforce Tower in San Francisco lights up with the Eye of Sauron on Halloween, executives reference its lore to get their vision across to employees, and companies name meeting rooms — if not their whole business — after objects and people from the books” (source: Paris Marx’s “Peter Thiel’s Influence over a Network of Lord of the Rings-Inspired Companies,” 2024).
[7] “the American middle class (so called ‘gamer culture’) would gatekeep and safeguard the elite through videogames being an acclimating device to neo-feudal territories to defend in reality (outside of the game world[s] themselves) as capital starts to decay like usual” (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “‘Monsters, Magic and Myth’: Modularity and Class,” 2024).
[8] Tolkien relies on racialized tokenism to have “lesser” races police themselves, which is what Zionism ultimately is. You see this offstage, too, in Zionist propaganda (Bad Empanada’s “The Appeal to Jewishness Fallacy,” 2024), but such things are always half-real; re: between fiction and non-fiction, working in tandem. Case in point, Tolkien see dwarves as “Jewish” in the way his own home, the British empire, has essentialized “Jewishness” for centuries—which is to say, they’re always victims, thus always to some degree aliens in ways the Crown can exploit. They cannot be heroes because to be a victim—to be weak and prone to betray—is literally “in their blood,” their nature.
The dwarves of the Lonely Mountain, for example, feel constantly surrounded by enemies and betrayed. Abandoned by everyone, they work extra hard to alienate themselves, but also fight exceedingly hard (to the death, in fact) to redeem themselves in Christian eyes. This is Tolkien pointedly Christianizing Viking ideas of the Valkyrie by attaching them to Jewish calumny/the wandering Jew trope: Thorin was weak, earlier in life when he failed to stop the dragon and it destroyed his permanent home, and weak later in life when men killed the dragon while he took all the gold for himself. He has all the markings of station and importance, but also cowardice and entitlement while being stranded from his home.
Eventually while the men of Dale are trying to rebuild, Bard is making a good case for sharing the gold (the Christian appeal to generosity monopolizing charity). It’s here that Thorin not only rebukes him (the moneylender trope, echoes of Shakespeare’s Shylock), but his cousins betray the men of Dale, first chance they get. Yes, the men of Dale were thinking about attacking first, but Tolkien routinely shows the Jewish-coded dwarves acting traitorous; i.e., to emphasize their backstabber nature, thus their inexorable connection with the goblins. To reject that connection, they must kill the goblins even more fiercely than the men or elves would, putting themselves in danger for those who view them as lesser to begin with. It’s a return to good service from bad, a form of conversion therapy that kills the Jew by making him Christian through martyrdom (versus forced penance through ordinary conversion, in Shylock’s case).
To it, Thorin is sicker/weaker from dragon sickness (rarefied cruelty and greed) than the men are. To prove his worth in their eyes, he must throw down the gate and die in battle a glorious death… by killing as many goblins as he can, then sacrificing himself and his bloodline in doing so! It’s a suicide mission, one guided by revenge (which, I should add, the entire quest for the gold has been, but merely taken to its logical conclusion). He is simultaneously fallen and redeemed, but denied a home in this world despite the ultimate sacrifice. In short, he is always a victim, always an alien who is “too violent” to deserve a forever home. Instead, he’s the hero for a second, but ultimately so Dale can re-establish a human foothold in the region and the dwarves return to buried irrelevance.
(artist: Justin Gerard)
Tokenism, then, is a terror weapon, and not one that Tolkien was above using (guilt-free, no less, because it appeals to the “natural” order of things, in his eyes). Tokens are always without a home, always exiled with one foot in both worlds and trying to reject Hell to find their “rightful” place by their good master’s side (e.g., Samus Aran and the Galactic Federation). Tolkien relies on tokenism through centrist dogma, and whose worlds will overcorrect with massive violence to maintain the status quo—by victimizing its token groups!
For Tolkien, the dwarves are something to trot out and destroy as needed, generally by comparing them to goblins (through the same big noses, divided by beards, which orcs and goblins don’t canonically have). This trend hasn’t lessened over time, with future adaptations leaning into said tropes to make Thorin increasingly tragic through them; e.g., Peter Jackson’s Thorin, played by Richard Armitage, humanized in appearance but arguing to Smaug (an imaginary enemy) about Dwarvish lands and gold. He’s “the Good Jew,” arguing for state’s rights dressed up as liberation, the meta tyrant Tolkien dressing the slave up in the language of rebellion, mid-tyrant’s-plea. It’s like Shakespeare, making a Jew to “better the instruction” of Christian revenge, but abjected in Tolkien’s case, onto a Jewish avenger upholding a Christian ordering to the world: a perversion of the Golem of Prague and Jewish necromancy!
[9] Consider Tolkien’s zero-sex policy versus Terry Goodkind’s naked exhibiting of pedophilia, genital mutilation and rape. They might seem like polar opposites, but both constitute Joseph Conrad’s bigoted fear-fascination with the colonized abomination, in The Heart of Darkness (1899): a white, cis-het fear-fascination with the past as restricted to the fringes of the empire, that—in neoliberal media, which brings the colonial revenge to the homefront—becomes “a spell to fall under” (re: Punter) and exorcise, generally through violence. Tolkien’s colonial rape occurred with swords, leveled against metaphors for people “not of the West” he considered “Mongol-types” (source: Tolkien Gateway) whose linguo-material presence would be entirely unwelcome in white areas (effectively gentrification in a real-world village/suburban setting).
Tolkien famously disliked allegory for his own stories (an appeal, then, to singular interpretations that ignored his writing’s racist, thus colonial potential). But even when reduced to “pure fantasy” as he would have preferred, the terrestrial framework and its cartography and colonial model are all obviously there and being put into practice; i.e., world-building and its manmade languages levied for a suitably war-like purpose regardless if Tolkien openly denounced Hilter. In short, he was a centrist to the core, the old sage handing the young hobbit a blade and preaching loftily about morals, specifically of knowing when to kill and when not to—in short, “playing god” in the face of the abject:
Bilbo almost stopped breathing, and went stiff himself. He was desperate. He must get away, out of this horrible darkness, while he had any strength left. He must fight. He must stab the foul thing, put its eyes out, kill it. It meant to kill him. No, not a fair fight. He was invisible now. Gollum had no sword. Gollum had not actually threatened to kill him, or tried to yet. And he was miserable, alone, lost. A sudden understanding, a pity mixed with horror, welled up in Bilbo’s heart: a glimpse of endless unmarked days without light or hope of betterment, hard stone, cold fish, sneaking and whispering. All these thoughts passed in a flash of a second. He trembled (source).
Except this mercy is arguably lacking in the face of those who are physically dangerous (according to white people); orcs, unlike Gollum, are given no quarter despite arguably having a bone to pick with their colonizers: “Show them no mercy for you shall receive none!” It’s tone-policing backed by force—also known as “peace through strength.”
[10] Warcraft: Orcs and Humans (1994) would lead to the company’s longest, and arguably most popular and widespread franchise, beating Diablo (1996) to the punch by two years and going on to establish the company as the successors to Everquest (1999) as the MMORPG to “kill”: World of Warcraft (2004), a globalizing of the pursuit of capital across the Internet. These games successfully applied a tactical, melee-based, roleplay element to the FPS-/TPS-adjacent strategy game (exhibit 1a1a1h2a1), which took on a massive-multiplayer form built around warring team-based combat with one-or-more combatants on either side. And of course, all of this was heavily dimorphized within the heteronormative colonial binary.
[11] (from Britannica): “A different word orc, alluding to a demon or ogre, appears in Old English glosses of about AD 800 and in the compound word orcnēas (‘monsters’) in the poem Beowulf. As with the Italian orco (‘ogre’) and the word ogre itself, it ultimately derives from the Latin Orcus, a god of the underworld. The Old English creatures were most likely the inspiration for the orcs that appear in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings” (source).
[12] Tolkien’s inconsistent fear of spiders stretches back to a childhood phobia of them, but he was annoyingly wishy-washy and non-committal to how he felt about them; i.e., talking through both sides of his mouth (a classic centrist maneuver) [source: Tolkien Gateway].
[13] Tolkien did not exist during videogames as they are commonly thought of (though technically he died in 1973, a year after Pong [1972] was released for American home entertainment by Atari’s Allan Alcorn). Yet, Tolkien was also no stranger to playing games. Indeed, the entire “Riddles in the Dark” chapter from The Hobbit is pointedly a game, with a rather involved discussion surrounding luck, fairness and the following of rules:
He knew, of course, that the riddle-game was sacred and of immense antiquity, and even wicked creatures were afraid to cheat when they played at it. But he felt he could not trust this slimy thing to keep any promise at a pinch. Any excuse would do for him to slide out of it. And after all that last question had not been a genuine riddle according to the ancient laws (source).
In truth, Tolkien’s refrain—the High Fantasy treasure map—would translate very well to tabletop games and videogames, but especially The Lord of the Rings, which despite its immense size compared to The Hobbit was actually far simpler in terms of its treatment of war and wealth acquisition/generation. Everything was divided neatly into good and evil teams that—on the good side—weren’t fighting amongst each other nearly as much as during The Hobbit. In his later novels, the world-war machine wasn’t just suggested, but fully devised and given its own vast world to play out inside. And even with The Hobbit, Tolkien clearly understood the power of song and legends, writing his original story for children to acclimate them towards war and revenge dressed up in songs, fantasy and poems. It likewise had all the starts and stops of a radio serial, putting our heroes out of the frying pan and into the fire (similar to Flash Gordon, 1935) before pulling them out just in the nick of time (the Great Eagles being a shameless deus ex machina [and imperial emblem] that Tolkien would curiously refuse to use with The Lord of the Rings in order to prolong the story and its war for as long as possible).
[14] The human condition works like a golem, as such: to make from clay or stone (orcs and goblins are not made from stone, but live below it, underground. So whereas Tolkien’s trolls turn to literal stone, in sunlight, the goblins merely dislike it); i.e., as a creative process we can map and play out, together—invigilating a shared vision that means different things to different people (from the Undead Module):
(exhibit 37e1: Model: Harmony Corrupted; artists: Lydia, Persephone van der Waard and Jim32. Rebellion is quite literally a craft, one that involves dolls—or likenesses of people, which dolls essentially are—in some shape or form; e.g., action figures/athletes, but also sex dolls [or things akin to either expressed through sex work]. Whatever the exact type, dolls are homunculi; i.e., generally a smaller instance of a larger reference. More to the point, they take work to realize: planning and drafts, a model, and one or more artists working together to accomplish a shared vision’s theatrical production. The main idea is mine, in this case, but it’s still accomplished through teamwork that contributes to the primary demonstration of said idea and goal; i.e., universal worker liberation through iconoclastic art using Gothic media; re: illustrating mutual consent through informed labor exchanges that challenge Capitalist Realism.
To that, Revana is very much my character by design […]. She’s someone I can have stand in for myself, given that I cannot afford gender-affirming surgeries. Even so, she has been drawn by many different artists over the years. In this case, my usual paper doll approach became something to instruct others with; e.g., my friend, Lydia, illustrating a Drow character I later completed on my own and borrowed its wardrobe to dress Revana, Macbeth-style, in borrowed robes [above]. This isn’t someone forced to wear clothes made to objectify her against her will [re: “Borrowed Robes“]; she’s an extension of me, and Lydia helped with that. So did Jim32 and Harmony. All the world’s a stage and we, upon it, had and continue to have a part to play [source: “Meeting Jadis; or, Playing with Dolls,” 2024].)
[15] With “normal” white genitals being monstrous/different than the rest of the body they attach to; i.e., normal dicks being darker than the rest of the body and vaginas having multiple mouths like the xenomorph (the labia major and minor). They also flush with color during sexual desire (from filling with blood, be the genitals male, female or intersex).
[16] Fixated since Antiquity on sex/food and relative bodily functions, war-making and religion/funerary rites; but also classically-male contests of pissing or spitting the farthest—belching or farting the loudest, eating or shitting(?) the most, fucking the longest, etc—during battles of the sexes/the topos of the power of women extending into GNC spheres.
[17] And the stigmatized, four-letter versions of such words, predating the popularizing of their longer French equivalents, post-Black-Death, and surviving into the present; e.g., chew, fuck, spit, shit, puke, etc. Monsters operate through a similar shorthand, but also critical lens of coded behaviors.
[18] Gothic Communism occurs through holistic study regarding a system designed to conceal itself, mid-exchange. The dialectic is as much of shelter as the alien, the prison a game of theft and disguise, of choice shrouded in illusion (the illusion of choice enacted under deeply unnatural conditions) and shadowed by force; i.e., the holocaust/death lottery/prisoner’s dilemma only ends when all prisoners see each other as human; re: by taking the red pill to break Capitalist Realism, not Communism.
Workers, then, always have the power to riot/strike, leveraging capital using the very things the owner class tries to cage and abuse labor with while acting like its friends; i.e., with bald-faced lies as much as not; e.g., the Nazis and the Warsaw ghetto, but also American liberalism in all its forms; re: Tolkien’s anti-Semitic heroism. Capital is a settler colony disguised as a game, then—one using disguise to defend the state vs workers and the planet, versus workers defending ourselves, guerrilla-style, in its crosshairs (for more on this exact topic, see: “The World Is a Vampire“).
Suppression happens by thinking we can play along to survive what is otherwise “forgone” (according to state arbiters). By having slave revolts chattelize, pacify or otherwise divide and conquer their own (fascism is false rebellion), voting is the illusion of choice (and can be manipulated by scarcity and force); to survive and liberate ourselves, we must fight back, making the cost too dear to continue. To do this, we require informed and intersectionally solidarized action, moving power actively towards workers during labor exchange. Anyone who stymies that is a traitor colonizing the homefront, doing so with fascism and the democratic process weaponized against class-, culture- and race-conscious parties (re: Westside Tyler blaming* non-voters, below).
(screenshot source: the YouTube comments for Westside Tyler’s “Supporting Movements Like Uncommitted WILL FAIL EVERY TIME,” 2024)
*I critique his arguments, in a response video (Persephone van der Waard’s “@westsidetyler Is a White Moderate (a Nazi Apologist),” 2024). Few things are as cowardly as a white cis-het man, who at the first sign of trouble, falls back on privilege to punch down against the oppressed—just like Tolkien! Their hearts are hardened, and they resign themselves to capital-as-is.
[19a] “Cremation is reserved for baddies,” Knitting&Death describes. “The Riders of Rohan bury their own dead with honour, but burn orcs as they would dead animals.” Knitting also acknowledges Tolkien’s double standard, going on to add,
Tolkien was a staunch Catholic, and it may be of note that the Catholic Church forbid cremation from 1886 until 1963. While exceptions were made for mass death events and to prevent the spread of disease, cremation was considered a rejection of the possibility of resurrection. Nowadays, although cremation is permitted, scattering ashes is forbidden; the Vatican reasons that “reservation of the ashes of the departed in a sacred place [such as a cemetery or church] ensures that they are not excluded from prayers and remembrance.” That the Riders of Rohan not only burn dead orcs but also scatter their ashes ensures that they will not rise again and that they will also be forgotten the latter providing particular contrast to the mounds where dead Riders are inhumed and that are meant to last forever (source: “What Happened to the War Dead of Middle Earth?” 2022).
Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss; the mass graves and cremation are a hate crime against those Tolkien coded as racially and religiously inferior to his own warrior supermen (the cowboys of an imaginary frontier). Orcs and goblins aren’t just waste, then, but literal fuel for the British war machine (whitewashing its own fascism and ethnocentrism/canonical essentialism through intensely regressive hauntological war games). It’s genocide, glorifying bigotry to serve Imperialism (and hopelessly in love with a once-great Britain afraid, all the same, of endless black cocks).
Gothic without the Middle Ages, Tolkien Christianized Pagan cultures (which the Vikings were) and married them to Germanized Untermensch-vs-Übermensch monomyth shenanigans; i.e., the Rohirrim superior to the Gondordians, but both superior to the “lesser” races. “We will burn like the kings of old.” It becomes his little paradise to protect from outsiders by his surviving fans, but in ways no way, shape or form divorced from the real world; i.e., through overt themes of ethnic cleansing that cover up allegory through monomythic violence and crusader-grade monster sex: sodomy by flame, desecrating the orc and goblin as animal, but also living dead (to fertilize poppies).
Rape is rape, genocide is genocide, and Tolkien goes all out (name me something more fetishized than his stupid swords). He’s a coward, because fascism fears the entire world; i.e., as already haunted by past crimes of empire—and like Hitler and the Reich—uses moral panic of so-called Black Revenge to power his own arguments of expansion and home defense. Through preemptive first strikes committed by an entire hero culture, worldview and language family bastardized by the colonizer against the oppressed, Tolkien wants you to feel like rebels while fighting for old, brutal systems that refuse to change—the might-makes-right return of a pre-ordained, kingdom-style rulership that always decays into “dark” (fascist) versions of itself. Except there’s no Ring (tyrant hot potato) to destroy! Only patrilineal descent remains, the war criminal hiding behind cartoon dictators and Divine Right—forever doomed and in love with itself—punching death as the world spirals towards state shift. It’s a sham, a simulation of war playing out for efficient profit.
[19b] E.g., My twin brother “quad-kiting” of the four dwarven guards outside Kaladim on EQ‘s (1999) Sullon Zek PvP server. For context, the game wasn’t built for PvP, and the evil side—in keeping with Tolkien’s moral territories—had all the continents with “phat loot.” My brother played a druid, which were “OP” because they could “kite” red mobs (anything ten levels higher than you) with speed buffs and “DoTs” (damage-over-time), but also teleport; i.e., letting him corner the market farming Karg Icebear’s cloaks (emergent value through unintended play of an aging game), then sell them to evil-aligned players on the in-game black market (who never killed him because he was their inside man).
[20] “‘Dwarves Are Not Heroes’: Antisemitism and the Dwarves in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Writing.”
[21] I.e., the state lionizing itself through “valor animals” attacking and eating but also exterminating stigma animals: those which the goblin attaches to, namely the rat and other vermin, the state treating itself (and its proponents) as “superior” to nature’s essentialized backstabbers.
[22] Which often leads to sex, to be fair. Except Tolkien’s stories end after the war is won and the warriors wed. He couldn’t be arsed to write about the sex that happens, save as neo-colonial revenge against black nature; i.e., while being manly with other men (a very ancient, homosexual approach to queerness—one that hyphenates sex with harmful violence).
[23] While these qualities are heavily mythologized, there remains a kernel of truth to them; i.e., white women are infantilized by their husbands, and black women forced into single motherhood. Both sides experience criminogenic conditions, but those conditions remain idiosyncratic and unequal on purpose (to better divide and demonize labor with).
[24] Racial considerations aside, black-on-white makes for a nice visual contrast.
[25] Re, Sontag’s “Fascinating Fascism” (1974): a “master scenario” whose purely sexual experience is “severed from personhood, from relationships, from love,” but also the fascist language of death: “The color is black [and red], the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death” (source).
[26] Generally of the hero, but also the hero’s victims, whereupon the conqueror’s death is enshrined in a vault of worship pushing the mythic life-and-death glory forward into new, unsuspecting minds. Or as my thesis volume argues,
In other words, canon (thus Capitalism) is full of ritual sacrifice with a Christianized flavor (crucifixion) or Westernized abuse of paganized forms whose divine right revives the glory of recuperated Roman aesthetics (the Nazi as quasi-pagan); e.g., the sacrificial rooster or lamb, the virgin or scapegoat, as something to bleed out for significance and good fortune, but also stalled demise for the holder of the knife: the Christ-like Herculean warrior as babyface or heel to sacrifice when the state’s crises enter decay while firing up production, which in turn requires more and more sacrifice the hotter the furnace gets. Engorged, the elite need ever more blood to satisfy their hunger as the ultimate parasite, thus demand of their loyal followers, “Defend our land; defend your land from the infidels” (which curiously the elite stole the land from, to begin with). As Hilter put it, “What is life? Life is the nation. The individual must die anyway. Beyond the life of the individual is the nation” (source).
[27] Nature-as-alien canonically achieves demonic power (allegory through transformation) through sexual reproduction tied to an inhuman stigma-animal life cycle; e.g., Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915) but also the xenomorph.
[28] From Bret Devereaux’ “Hard Times Don’t Make Strong Soldiers,” 2020): “‘Hard times create strong men, strong men create weak times, weak times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.’ The quote, from a postapocalyptic novel by the author G. Michael Hopf, sums up a stunningly pervasive cyclical vision of history—one where Western strategists keep falling for myths of invincible barbarians” (source).
[29] I.e., the state survives by telling workers what they want, thus need*; she wants to live deliciously with strange bedfellows, the two (or more) burying the hatchet by recultivating the Superstructure! Revolution so often fertilizes praxis through sex.
*With “darkness” uncontrolled by force seen as “glutinous” (or otherwise sinful, per the Seven Deadly Sins) and whose fearsome temptation would remain something that various holy parties (usually men of the cloth or Crusaders)—ignoring double standards and hypocrisies—must dutifully abstain from, save by raping through unironic force.
[30] Reminded of my exes, I recently asked Harmony Corrupted to “rape” me as we played; i.e., I felt out of control when triggered by the present. Sensing the harmful past, I invoked rememory to regain control during ludo-Gothic BDSM with a trusted friend. It’s a bit counterintuitive on its face, but a vital paradox to counter capital’s rising inequalities and power abuse: rape makes us chase the Numinous. It is a mighty outlet when harnessed by us to heal!
[31] Often coded as “black,” in a medieval sense, and having green skin (or some other spectral blackface) during blood libel argumentation.
[32] Apparently the song was inspired by English “skinheads,” which the band—in true false-punk (and homophobic) fashion—called “faeries”:
This song is about Skinheads. At the time in England, Skinheads were not racists, but punks and anarchists. They usually wore boots, which is how Sabbath got the title. […] The lyrics were inspired by an incident after a Sabbath concert in 1970. The band was attacked by a bunch of Skinheads after the show, injuring Tony Iommi and forcing them to cancel their next performance [ibid.].
Like many rock songs, the band buries the lead/obscures their criticism of different punk groups interfering with their bottom line; i.e., while cashing in on witchcraft, monsters and drug use, themselves (re: the ghost of the counterfeit). The band went on to make millions and lose themselves in drugs, far less concerned with activism than they were exploiting the aesthetics of it while butting heads with those they called “punks” and “faeries.” When push came to shove, they sold out and treated rebellion as “gay.”
[33] I originally devised Glenn as a shapeshifter goblin; i.e., born as one, but able to turn into different shapes, sizes and genders to synthesize good praxis with: GNC poetics I pointedly wanted to “goblinize” while rescuing all aspects thereof from a harmful historical past (one whose queerness and goblins had to suffer under Western pogroms; more on this in Volume Three).
[34] Bunny likes “painal,” for instance—as much for the pain, but also the control it gives them, during sex work. They also have sex with different people, but generally as a form of public nudism/pornographic art (samples from Bunny’s Twitter profile):
(artist: Blxxd Bunny)
In short, they can work with other people, but tend to favor toys because of the unparalleled control those give them; i.e., over their own body and the scenes they’re trying to cultivate. This took time and work to figure out, which shows in Bunny’s extensive catalog. Indeed, since meeting Bunny back in March 2023 when I first drew them as female Ozymandias, they’ve come such a long way and really matured as an artist! And they’ve supported my work a great deal, funding it/supplying subscriptions gratis and being there for me emotionally when others were attacking me in bad faith (re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Setting the Record Straight, Transmisia Experience: 5/26/2023“).
[35] The evolution of this incredibly bizarre-yet-charming children’s cartoon has a surprisingly storied history in its own right. Nathan Evans writes, in “Ween – The Mollusk: How an Album Inspired the World’s Most Famous Kid’s Cartoon” (2020):
In a Facebook post written shortly after the death of Hillenburg in late 2018, band members Gene and Dean Ween told the story of how they were contacted by him, saying that “he wanted to start a cartoon inspired by The Mollusk,” bringing to light what was a truth hidden in plain sight for many years. The Pennsylvania duo was asked to write a song teaching kids how to tie their shoes, which became “Loop De Loop” from one of the show’s most heartwarmingly innocent moments. You could even be forgiven for thinking it wasn’t the same band who wrote “Piss Up a Rope,” but that was part of the Ween magic. In tribute to The Mollusk, the record’s penultimate track “Ocean Man” plays as the 2004 movie’s credits roll.
[…] These sock puppet-like characters feed into the adorably childish comedy of the record, as does their simple Limerick style of songwriting. The very on-the-nose title “Waving My Dick in the Wind” doesn’t hold back Gene and Dean’s silly side, and neither does some of the lines within the cut—though many reviewers have used the word “masturbatory” to describe music, “you should have seen old Jimmy Wilson dance” really is so [a tradition far older than SpongeBob—with Herman Melville using plenty of phallic jokes in Moby Dick to comment both on matelotage but also the whaling industry as a whole].
But that nerdiness too lends itself to another aspect of the lyrics on here, namely with their casual use of head-turning references rooted in the obscure. Throughout, they are constantly sneaking in gentle religious subtext (“The Mollusk”) or a reference to a Rastafarian deity (“Mutilated Lips”) into an otherwise simple affair. Leaving these scraps of scholarly knowledge in a place one would least expect causes an emergent feeling of surrealism, mirroring how Hillenburg and co. nodded to the likes of metal band Pantera, literary macabrist Edgar Allen Poe, and German horror legend Nosferatu. Into a bloody children’s show [another tradition, one used—for example—by James Joyce’s Ulysses or T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and similar stories speaking to the chaos of modernity after WWI].
Ween’s relationship with psychedelics also matches the aforementioned college-band stereotype, as “Polka Dot Tail” and “Mutilated Lips” document these—again, surrealistic—sightings witnessed only through pills, smoke and crystal. Twisted images of flying puppies, malformed human hands and wormlike tentacles lodged inside the brain. Although out of context these lines would appear completely demented, it’s inverted by the tongue-in-cheek sonics behind them. The former is one of several children’s showtunes on the album, and as we all know, there’s a very blurred line between hallucinogenic visions and children’s entertainment (source).
In short, people didn’t like SpongeBob because it turned a profit; they liked it for its artless charm, which capital promptly pimped out. Rebellion, then, abjures profit as such. To it, the parallels between the meta forces at work—and the sheer seemingly-random serendipity of chance meetings, out in the world—go beyond Ween and SpongeBob, Jojo and Walpole, Watterson and Calvin/Hobbes, or Harmony and myself. And yet, in keeping with acid Communism—and the creative reality that anything might combine with anything else under natural and manmade pressures, but still make it work, through Gothic Communism at large—such holistic intra, micro and macro-spection makes for an incredibly interesting journey, all on its own!
More to the point, such eclectic and dialectical-material chaos becomes incredibly liberating the moment you realize you can combine anything with anything to say whatever you need to say to bond with other people under capital. Do it because life is absurd; smile at the gods by making your own, in the present space and time. It is, as Jameson once said, all we have. And as Molly Grue once said, “You have all the power you need, if you dare to look for it!”
[36] Whereas anal can generally fit larger sizes into itself (above), vaginal generally stops at to 6-7 inches, for the average birth canal. Vaginal is often made more exciting visually by “pushing the envelope”; i.e., by playing with pornographic tropes that walk the tightrope between exploitation and liberation; e.g., white women—commonly treated as “modest,” including their canonically diminutive and infantilized vaginas—evoking some degree of rape fantasy when saying to the camera as they take a big dick (regardless of color), “Oh, noooo! It’s soooo biiiiiiig!”
[37] And which pedophiles ascribe to child porn they call “furry” or “goblin,” in bad faith; e.g., Ian Kochinski (more on him, in Volume Three):
(source: the thumbnail for Bad Empanada’s “Vaush P*dophilia Controversy: Disgusting Fans & Orbiters MELT DOWN Defending Him,” 2024)
[38] In a cruel twist, Charlotte Brontë kills Bertha—all so her in-book double, Jane, can marry and redeem the insufferable Mr. Rochester (a slaveholder and adulterer): “Reader, I married him”; i.e., “my marriage was legitimate, and it takes a white WASP to pacify man’s otherwise ‘untamable’ nature.” Small wonder that Jean Rys wrote Wide Sargasso Sea (1966); there was no room for a Caribbean woman in a white woman’s world in a white man’s world, save to be the stepping stone in Charlotte’s bildungsroman. Genocide is genocide!
[39] Rock, for example, was stolen from African Americans (a traditional taken from older colonial models). This includes the term, itself, but also white imitators of famous artists like Chuck Berry and Jimi Hendrix (more on Jimi, in Volume Three); e.g., Elvis or [insert name, here]. The same goes for jazz and the Harlem Renaissance, but also white authors in the Gothic mode commodifying and “slumming” darkness while looking in from positions of relative privilege (re: the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection). Again, the idea isn’t to commodify struggle or alienation, when healing from rape inside the Imperial Core, but learn from it ways that bring different oppressed groups closer together under a common goal; i.e., while surviving police violence everywhere.
[40] The alt text, on Mastodon, reads: “Marina in a hot pink body suit and ushanka and a white fur coat holding a pink sickle and a Hitachi magic wand. they’re posed dramatically to evoke socialist realism” title=”marina in a hot pink body suit and ushanka and a white fur coat holding a pink sickle and a Hitachi magic wand. they’re posed dramatically to evoke Socialist Realism.”
[41] Re: As Jamal Subhi Ismail Nafi writes in “Milton’s Portrayal of Satan in Paradise Lost and the Notion of Heroism” (2015):
According to [Tesky] Gordon, it was Blake who expressed this view most emphatically by saying that Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it. He expressed this opinion chiefly in relation to the portrayal of Satan who, according to him, has been depicted as a character possessing certain grand qualities worthy of the highest admiration (source).
[42] E.g., straight men being Black Penitents protected by the courts with a high burden of proof, versus anyone else slandered and abused under widespread pogroms that extend to these juridical spheres.
[43] In the West, animation through clay comes from Judaism and the Golem of Prague (and older versions); i.e., the power of creation laid into mortal hands, then demonized by Christian forces. Abjection abjects sin and guilt off onto state enemies, which the state then attacks. To that, canonical Gothic relies on the cartoon of necromancy and animation directed at older female/feminized men (servants), non-European and/or queer religions, cultures and identities; e.g., Judaism, but also poetic likenesses that, in the same shadow zone, highlight and scandalize Nazis and Communists; i.e., being seen as heretical, thus of nature/fallen and needing to be purged by blood libel disguised as pure reason, post-Reformation. Manmade things are valorized provided they are made by white, cis-het Christian-coded men. Anything else is abject, but also apologized for through an uncanny similarity to state forces. We come from a sample of one, so “darkness” and “corruption” is dogmatized, fearful of Jewish revenge—of Medusa coming home to roost, thus nature and servants as “black” to settler colonialism’s lily whiteness. Their nadir is our zenith, our sex and their sex echoing in hostile duality.
The Protestant work ethic, per Cartesian thought, treats righteous labor as holy over anything antithetical to that; i.e., as paradoxically required to justify itself through witch hunts: God makes Lilith; she defies him and gives birth to demons, so God makes Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs. But the maiden is overshadowed by the whore’s dark “Jewish,” Melmothian spectre—her evil magic galvanizing the witch hunts that follow. She’s the castle, speaking to hammered witches, Jews eaten by lions, and queers put to death for refusing to have PIV sex, etc. Cryptonymy isn’t just a dogwhistle, but a whistle for labor to blow through the same cartoons; e.g., by Shelley’s Modern Prometheus taking creation (the fire of the gods) to demonize Victor Frankenstein through his work talking back: “giving lip,” or “sass,” as it were (more on this, in “Forbidden Sight,” part two).