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)!

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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.

“I’ll See You in Hell”: Dark Faeries and Demon Mommies

“Your tauntaun will freeze before you reach the first marker!”

—a deck officer to Han Solo, The Empire Strikes Back (1981)

Picking up where “A Paucity of Time“ left off…

Demons are intensely popular poetic devices, which communicate, as people do, through sex and force, but also taboo subjects concerning larger bigotries, phobias and stigmas involving sex and force. In turn, everything speaks to dark wishes, wants and desires achieved through transformation and trade; i.e., few things are used in conjunction more than “fire” and “desire,” but also oxymoron and darkness visible; e.g., “cold fire,” and “Hell freezing over” (the latter being a frozen lake in Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell, for instance). Milton’s Lucifer was, in that sense, the bringer of light with darkness that broke state illusions. I want to unpack that a little more, here.

Our focus remains monstrous-feminine, as usual. And yet, at its most simple, all roads lead to Rome; i.e., the pandemonium all demons and fairies provide takes you to Hell in order to experience what is forbidden or otherwise denied at home, generally through home’s unequal conditions turned on their heads.

Such things historically and dialectically-materially reduce to sex and force, as a result—are highly controlled by canon as such because, with the proper nudge and mindset, they suddenly offer the unique and productive ability to radically change the world in a half-real sense; i.e., starting onstage but hardly ending there, battering Capitalist Realism with proletarian illusions camping the canon to liberate the whore: through a reclaimed (and deliberately subversive) Superstructure. This cycling wardrobe—one of many masks, mirrors and costumes—endlessly yields dark wishes concerning emancipatory sex and force dressed up as “rape,” and whose dark demonic knowledge and power reliably abstract, adjudicate or otherwise convey through whorish revenge as a devilish, Gothic-Communist, impossible-to-control creative act: something to pass down in cryptonymic, anachronistic and extracurricular modes of poetic discourse forever at play (and war) in history’s endless jumble.

“I’ll See You in Hell,” then, divides in two basic parts to consider said jumble with: a continuation of monstrous-feminine revenge “of nature” against profit—a rebellious witch (and not a witch cop) being someone who, pimped by state force, not only refuses to play ball (witches pimping witches, mid-moral-panic), but bends the rules of play through ludo-Gothic BDSM (and its usual historical ironies) in pursuit of universal liberation: the obfuscation of friend and foe through the usual prosecution markers; re: to confuse state threat responses, reclaiming them while humanizing ourselves during the cryptonymy process!

Amazons, already monstrous-feminine, are a kind of witch whose uneven, historically selective qualities of persecution—through blood libel, sodomy and witch hunter rhetoric—we’ll pointedly explore (this time) through a symposium on demon mommies and dark faeries; i.e., as poetic extensions of the Amazon type of witch: the warrior and monstrous-feminine (often female) dominant/monarch. In turn, we’ll consider both as a common, beloved way of working out our state-imposed, us-versus-them differences through the usual language/theatre of difference: the Gothic’s rape/police roleplay scenarios pointedly breaking boundaries but also resetting them through the playful-yet-shock-therapy fantasies of abject reversal (often with a half-real element of pure invention, dead cultures, and real-life doubles; e.g., Skyrim‘s barbarians and cat people, left, practicing cross-species “pollination” to confront and ultimately revert Cartesian, settler-colonial and heteronormative systems of violence, terror and morphological expression: fucking the alien)!

(artist: Gekko)

Remember that I’m merely scratching the surface of a very old problem (re: nature as gyn/ecological, vis-à-vis Patel and Moore); our doing so, here, shall explore the dark, repressed, out-of-sight qualities to daily life felt but cloaked under capital—generally in places too hot, cold, dark, or otherwise inhospitable to regular folk, yet for the queer-and-mighty is exactly how they prefer (and where they take us to better acclimate/expand our horizons):

• “Darkness Visible: Dark Faeries (feat. Annabel Morningstar, Harmony Corrupted, Romantic Rose, The Witch, and more)”: A collaboration between whores. Considers the labor proponents of Gothic-Communist revolution—working together and with Gothic materials, in a staged, meta sense—to demonically give rise (thus shape/voice) to dark places and people; i.e., as dark faerie rulers/regal fairylands where one can explore off-limit feelings and desires conducive to post-scarcity development; e.g., Satan from Robert Eggers’ The Witch, Lavos from Chrono Trigger, and more!
• “Trial by Fire: Demon Muscle Mommies (feat. Lady Hellbender and Hela, The Shape of Water)“: A symposium. Considers the fiery, militant aspect to demon muscle mommy doms, specifically through the postcolonial urge of forbidden love.

Each considers the whore’s paradox, and how it extends to transition as a source of pride, mid-capture and “duress”; i.e., when you go to Hell as Persephone, only to find out it’s not so bad: a paradox of “rape” that, in quotes, can challenge profit.

In doing so, a hostage suddenly gains the ability to speak to their abuse with ludo-Gothic BDSM/calculated risk, while simultaneously reclaiming they and their friends’ humanity with the fun stuff—with sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, but also those monstrous-feminine beings that famously embody them through courtly love’s demonic castle sex and dark (spontaneous, forbidden) desire; i.e., “I would love [to see/do] this or that.” Demons and faeries do so, and generally with Gothic “spice” haunted by actual abuse/commodification! In other words, they (and their Numinous, exquisitely “torturous” homes) are commonly gratuitous, seeming right out of a succubean nightmare, porno mag and/or Gothic novel: mail-order and made just for those dark monstrous-feminine desires (male, female, or intersex) that workers, per the Protestant ethic, aren’t “supposed” to have!

(artist: Slightly Cunty)

In response, unequal power arranges in a courtly manner with a female/monstrous-feminine, home-court advantage: a warrior whore expressing courtly love towards the princess-as-classic-sex-object (sometimes with a gender swap, but not always; e.g., female brats/pillow princesses, above).

Let’s unpack this conceptually for a moment (five pages), then precede the exhibits themselves with a short list of additional boundaries.

To unpack the above ideas from a theatrical standpoint, think of them as regressive therapy told through Gothic adventure stories. Rather than every second of every day guided by alarm clocks, sugar and caffeine flowing money up, the same fictions can reallocate such forces onto new tracks of distribution. To it, the monomyth is the classic adventure story told from a male warrior perspective, the Gothic heroine forced to survive the villainous castle while waiting to be rescued there; it is a Promethean space when reversed as such, the anisotropic variant harboring a fugitive ruler marrying through kidnap by taking Persephone back to Hell: where she belongs because existing there paradoxically sets her free!

People love demons (and dark worlds) for this reason—relish the gateways, but also “battle parties” and warring theatrical tensions (e.g., psychomachy and Amazonomachia), which they so easily represent when traveled to and visited for the length of a dream (versus coming to empire during the liminal hauntology of war); re: as conflicting poetic stances and arguments to access and adopt in praxial opposition, pimping nature or speaking from nature-whored-out in its defense (regardless of sex, species, race, gender and/or religion, etc). “Hell,” then, is classically the site of such raucous, oscillating exchange, raunchy exploitation and taboo exploration; i.e., during the dialectic of the alien. Such push-pull, gruesome revenge and demonic invention aren’t automatically “bad,” but something to dualistically evoke and pursue by two basic sides (workers or the state) meeting in the middle of a shared shadow zone, their parody and pastiche (remediated praxis) playing with such devices at cross purposes!

(artist: yxxzoid)

To it, Gothic Communism turns the world upside-down to voluntarily transform it outside Hell’s caged evocation, camping the canon (and its rape) using our cake and infernal holes (e.g., assholes, left) as dungeons of deep dark desire; the state, to keep it the same, thus prolong genocide raping nature as usual!

At a glance, things might seem discrete; in practice, people and place evoke one another through mise-en-abyme during liminal expression’s Gothic, concentrically morphological expression (re: Walpole’s walking castles [the Capitalocene] expressed as literal fortresses [and giant suits of armor inside said fortresses] but also corporally vis-à-vis my arguments; re: “Castles in the Flesh,” 2024): where dreams, but especially dark, unequal, forbidden dreams (things conspicuously absent from daily life yet advertised everywhere as such) come gloriously alive/true during ergodic, non-trivial playtime (with “truth” being the potential for them to realize outside the Platonic dream space); re: darkness visible; e.g., universal liberation, ironic/unironic murder and rape fantasies, or land back, vis-à-vis liminal spaces (and occupiers of said spaces) that embody such things in praxial opposition on and within the cryptomimetically echoing surfaces and thresholds (often as drug-like; i.e., acid Communism—a concept we’ll explore at length in “Call of the Wild”).

Simply put, demons articulate through chaos as a kind of wicked, horny presence (of death and decay but also change, regeneration and appetite); campy demons—whether people and/or place, be they mommies and faeries of a rebellious monstrous-feminine—use the medieval morphology of the infernal concentric pattern and Promethean space to upset any sense of order (moral, emotional, ontological, etc; re: Aguirre) that capital installs; i.e., by morphologically (and with puns) evoking violence and terror onstage to threaten radical change offstage: to evoke and instill possible worlds that capital doesn’t want to happen. This means worlds without profit, or—paradoxically—masters (despite the mistress argument campily conveyed by dark faeries and demon mommies). In turn, canon offsets camp with canceled futures/retro-future hauntologies (re: controlled opposition), the vultures of the bourgeoisie instilling praxial inertia to continue scavenging labor’s zombie corpse; re: Capitalist Realism holding workers hostage through DARVO argumentation and police obstruction/arbitration of sex and force per the trifectas, monopolies and qualities of capital levied in bad faith: “They [a liberated proletariat] will be a dark master worse than us! Trust in the elite!”

I’d call bullshit, but we are what the elite design workers to fear as “beyond” Capitalism. In short, Communism is gay and from outer space, generally as sodomy arguments known for gender trouble and delight; i.e., we’re a thing to paradoxically chase (more on chasing femboys/catboys and twinks-in-peril, in Volume Three), said chase unfolding on either side of the praxial equation: to plant ideas in our heads that bury the fag or disinter its oddly sexy corpse!

(artist: Jaybaesun)

Despite demons classically being the life of the party, state dogma cannot tolerate anything that functionally threatens bourgeois hegemony. So it treats the function (of genuine rebellion) as party pooping while, in the same breath, robbing our aesthetic of any critical power through bad-faith replication (re: obscurantism).

State alienation, fetishization and control of Gothic poetics (about sex and force) are endless, as are the many ways to challenge them in dualistic forms promoting fearful possibilities the state wants to repress with tokenized variants. As our exhibits will demonstrate, this includes Amazons and Medusa, but also demon mommies of a more overtly demonic and hellish, dark fiery mistress, and/or faerie[1] design; i.e., serving as operatic changeling vice characters giving voice to such things—those creatures seemingly “of another world,” one whose unheimlich, liminal hauntology of war they can take you to as well, making your dreams come true in fantastical modes of expression: to another planet, an underground lake, a fortress, a dark forest, etc, to undergo sodomy as demonic courtship worthy of witch hunts and blood libel in state eyes framing such pleasure as “guilty.”

Under such scrutiny and censorship, these trials by fire are felt through darkness visible; i.e., between resident and residence, seeking less redemption in state eyes and more to rectify state pogroms: a black gate to take you to Hell and back, once opened—not once, but recursively during holistic study of the Medusa’s Numinous peach! If our goal is to humanize the harvest (exposing the state as inhumane), then Hell’s diet grants us the demonic ability to radically change size, shape and composition (as well as perspective regarding such things) to throw the doors of perception wider than Harmony’s painted, glorious ass (and to allow for the interrogation of ghosts, beating them up a fair bit; i.e., during theatrical violence concerned with harm that lacks the capacity to inflict lasting damage[2])!

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Such is the stuff of forbidden love, for Gothic authors and actors; i.e., making tongue-in-cheek love (courtship) to demon lovers and their castled haunts during an evocatively carceral (dungeon-style) reversal of the classic abjection process: a verboten, outrageous, Numinous space (chronotope) of the gods—one whose dump(er) site we invoke with swears concerning taboo subjects, be those forbidden objects, personas or divinities (e.g., “shit,” “fuck,” “What the hell?” “Holy Saint Francis!” or “What in God’s name?” etc). It’s an intense, regressive place that bears out similar energies between God and the Devil, the two mentioned both in the same breath and when alluding to other inhuman(e) dynasties with a Frankensteinian stamp using the ghost of the counterfeit: a world that—under capital’s constant alienation and fetishization of nature—has become alien, but also descriptively and prescriptively vengeful towards the perceived order by the perceived disorder!

In the Faustian tradition, it also becomes like a carnival ride, one made with unequal, forbidden exchange and radical transformation using basic materials (re: clay or something comparable, like dead flesh); i.e., in pursuit of fatal knowledge versus power (two sides of the same dark coin). Promethean or Faustian, it’s gratuitous, egregious, formerly accepted and currently beyond the pale owing to the abjection process—to go to an old, dislocated sphere to see the truth at home with forbidden sight; i.e., by making, summoning or otherwise digging up said truths through derelict archaeologies (the Gothic retro-future/found-yet-forged document) and likenesses: a jilted bride of Hell/the dungeon, a horny queen taking us prisoner for funsies in her anti-home!

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Such sight, in the Gothic tradition, is always dualistic, liminal, concentric, ergodic, and anisotropic (re: castle-narrative), but also morphological and ouroborotic, intimating fearsome-but-desirable things beyond ourselves using ourselves; i.e., felt during a recursive mise-en-abyme, the castle-like whore or whore-like castle (the Medusa) seen pareidolically from the front or the back in ways that—when made, summoned, or found; clothed or naked, kawaii or kowai, alive or slain, unvanquished or ravished, and viewed from all angles like a gleeful parody of Picasso’s arrogant cubism, above—begin to suggest the angry whole of a furious Mother Earth (the wandering womb a traveling castle that, hyperobject, moves in stillness): to conjure up the chronotope’s half-real, hauntological feelings of abjected, monstrous-feminine things, during the cryptonymy process! Policed, the whore paradoxically has her revenge by acting out her rape to revenge (as normally delivered by police violence) from state targets. There’s always more to see, but also a state position to occupy and subvert in dualistic terms!

Blood libel, in that respect, speaks canonically through the monomyth language of persecution, rape and revenge (the whore’s or the pimp’s) afforded to undead, demonic and/or animalistic monstrous-feminine qualities that—in canonical stories—reliably frame, instigate and perform witch hunts inside/outside themselves; e.g., Beowulf, Frankenstein, or Dracula as things to hunt down by heroic forces; i.e., as a recruitment device meant to defend capital from invented enemies “of nature,” the former seeking and destroying the latter onstage and off.

In turn, said execution unfurls in abject territories while abusing unironic forms of DARVO-style terror language, all before ultimately seceding dark ownership of “stolen” colonial gains, thereby restoring a fallen state to its “rightful” sovereignty’s heteronormative reproductive order/the nuclear model: as rescued from the witch tempting the whore’s revenge by exposing her Numinous figure (re: anal sex, but also Amazonian muscle, below). You gotta start somewhere when healing from rape, and we Gothic Communists explore such things to subvert them—to “gang alang” with the devil in some shape or form; i.e., ourselves, often seen wearing animal masks and costumes, but also sporting powerful, semi-to-fully-naked bodies, above and left—walking castles whose war-like fortresses promote “harm” as paradoxically pleasurable: to wage war as sex-positive-yet-fierce, at times being rather literal in its campy morphological puns and playful gallows humor cheekily lampooning abjection as a whole. The bigger the “castle,” the bigger the harvest; the bigger the “threat,” the greater the punchline/payoff.

(artist: Dzenrei Art)

Reverse abjection, then, is still a form of courtship with harvested things—of forbidden monster love (and sex) expressing as unequal, forbidden exchange to explore in people and place as taboo, vulgar and, at times, crude (re: Walpole and Lewis). The iconoclastic idea is the paradoxical threat of “danger” where no danger can occur but which the feeling of danger is abundant, famously evoked through traps, monsters and atmosphere, but also animated miniatures and colossal fakeries suggesting the potential occupation of a ruinous legendary home. Such things can subvert this and reverse that during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., to illustrate power in the hands of the dom or the sub. The classic irony of the dom is they serve the sub under “perilous” boundaries of mutual consent; but power defines through exchange, wherein one is meaningless without the other! Desire goes both ways during oppositional praxis—the Gothic infamously dualistic, hence visually and at times praxially ambiguous!

Concluding our food for thought, I wish to supply several (seven) boundary-setting points before we proceed onto the main exhibits themselves.

First, for the sake of simplicity and time, “See You in Hell” is focusing on faeries and demon mommies (of, again, the “witch” blood libel class); i.e., as functionally dominant during a collaborative exercise/postcolonial debate, but it’s not difficult to turn the tables; e.g., by a sub who tops from below, a dom who bottoms from the top (the “power bottom”), or switches doing either role, etc—they reify not by appearance but through the function of unequal exchange, first and foremost. Said Titania to her faerie train about Nick Bottom, “Tie up my lover’s tongue. Bring him silently” (source). As such, we “enslaved” are quick to agree, surrendering control to please those we love. Demon BDSM has universal application and adaptability in this respect, but again—our focus is on dominant aesthetics through faeries and demons.

(artist: Bottru)

Second, “See You in Hell” was originally just “Trial by Fire,” the former written concerning the postcolonial subversion—and cryptonymic revelation/concealment of—captive (thus rape/death) fantasies through swole’ demon mommies. I’ve since expanded this to faerie queens in a second exhibit, placed first, called “Darkness Visible.” Faerie or demon, we’re essentially talking about femme doms of a gentle/strict variety (often hyphenated to allow for softer visual elements merged with vaso vagal ones), which effectively promote a more overtly hellish, otherworldly and Promethean (“of the gods”) version of Amazons, and employ similar aesthetic devices of terror. This includes their mighty monstrous-feminine bodies, but also the sodomy those bodies promise to inflict during ludo-Gothic BDSM (and its own threats of controlled, operatic, palliative-Numinous regression); i.e., made to camp canon, thus anisotropically reverse capital’s usual terrorist/counterterrorist polarities (re: its trifectas, monopolies and qualities). We’re left, then, with witch-like beings of dark power from powerful places beyond normal perception; re: faerie queens/monarchs the likes of which we’ve written about before, revisiting them again here (exhibit 44a1a1b1), before the original demon mommies exhibit on courtly love, 44a1a1b2.

(artist: Iulaandrea)

To that, while the original exhibit (44a1a1b2) concerns fiery muscular examples to deal in dark desire, I wanted to preface that with some additional non-muscular examples of faerie queens (exhibit 44a1a1b1): kidnapper beings of darkness visible; re: “changelings,” but also goblins, vampires and witches fulfilling a similar doppelganger abduction (alien imposter), blood libel role; i.e., who take their prey—often women and children, but also weaker men—to underwater places (watery graves/sunken palaces) under demon-lover torture scenarios; e.g., presumed cannibalism, bloodletting and rape/revenge play. These happen with Amazons, faeries, Medusa and similar monstrous-feminine as “hysterical” (re: phallic women/Archaic Mothers) that secure some sense of nature’s revenge for workers to paradoxically enjoy when the vulnerable, thus exposed or otherwise adjacent to power as something to embrace, do just that; i.e., when hugging the alien (re: Medusa, but also her avatars like Giger’s xenomorph, above)—namely through proximity with power and death in classically demonic ways (re: exchange, transformation, revenge, creativity [magic/mad science] and desire, etc). Per the vengeful, monstrous-feminine whore, nature’s revenge is the reversal of abjection; i.e., one that occurs generally through the theatrically indecent exposure of rebellious nudity and the feverish, murky embrace of the blood libel, sodomy and witch hunt[3] charges: those that, camped by us, show the state/capital (and its monopolies, trifectas and qualities’ bid for legitimacy/warped notions of justice through us-versus-them argumentation) to be entirely false!

Divorced from state authorship, such faerie monarchs are still categorically violent in light of police violence against nature as monstrous-feminine (or otherwise concern the performance of categorical violence); their campy usage still concerns universal liberation using half-real Gothic poetics about kidnapping and courtly love through impostor dialogs and dark desire interrogating creative bids for legitimacy. Even so, “Darkness Visible” before “Trial by Fire” is less focused around forbidden love through overtly postcolonial rhetoric, and more on ludo-Gothic BDSM (the language of capture healing from rape) that could be applied to such arguments. This faerie encore’s momentum include participants like Annabel Morningstar (who will feature in this exhibit a lot, below) and some of my other friends, who I’ve included to be holistic (and because I frankly love mommy doms and want to expand the umbrella[4] a bit, through their help).

Indeed, I could raise as many cathedrals/castles-in-the-flesh as I—but also my friends and their body parts—want; i.e., my directing of what they ultimately want to articulate during ludo-Gothic BDSM: as powerful, independent, and sex-positive monsters, achieving paradoxical liberation through reclaimed, ironic bondage (and other BDSM devices), but also unironically caged by state forces struggling to contain us (re: exploitation and liberation not simply existing on the same stages, but whose punitive language is used by both sides [workers and the state] to entrap or emancipate nature as monstrous-feminine with nature as monstrous-feminine).

(artist: Annabel Morningstar)

Beyond our doing so in “Darkness Visible,” I wholly expect you to be able to do what I do/raise your own golems, gargoyles and Galatea in the same Medusa refrain (always in Pygmalion’s Shadow); i.e., once critical thought, as a process, is intuitively understood, the ability to observe and/or perform it, yourselves, becomes infinite in form, using the same aesthetics (of power and death, darkness and revenge) to liberate what the state uses to enslave. During oppositional praxis, function determines function as a matter of flow regarding power moving towards or away from workers; re: through our hands developing Gothic Communism, we can throw the doors of perception wide to reveal hidden truths beyond Capitalist Realism—by using darkness visible differently than the state. The trick is dialectical-material scrutiny achieving intelligence and awareness (consciousness) as second-nature, said status acquired through praxial synthesis; re: on a daily level, our variable exchanges cultivating good social-sexual habits through what we create and encourage as extensions of our demonic, rebellious, genderqueer and emancipated selves: the hellish, awesome power of creation setting nature free, the magic outlaw/dark faerie/cyborg freak/rival power running wild by our making of monsters—for workers, not profit!

Gothic Communism, as the ensuing non-fiery examples shall hopefully demonstrate, is a group operation, one that works as much through tactile, wet, vitalistic intuition (concerning deities of dark vengeful nature) as by dry thesis and reinforcement through clinical detachment. But there’s always room to work thesis materials in; i.e., by the reader long after this module is published!

Third, I wrote “Trial by Fire” before writing “Reclaiming Amazons,” but the framed thesis in that portion—about anal sex/general sodomy as a terror weapon couched within the whore’s counterterrorist revenge through the classic poetic function of demons—is still at work in this older writing’s liminal expression; i.e., in between the frame and framer’s Wonderland, shifting incessantly back and forth across space and time.

Everyone loves the whore and her wanton, naughty and at-times-bloody revenge. In turn, rituals thrive on repetition, Gothic Communism developing through frequencies that synapse along active-if-cloaked circuits of data; demons, as the classic granters of forbidden wishes, generally tie to power expressed in places, people and roleplay scenarios that speak to radically altering ourselves, including how power is framed and performed. As we’ll see, this includes Annabel’s dark faerie queen (or my other friends) envisioned by me during a mutual, informed labor exchange and exhibit; i.e., generally through dark, unequal, forbidden exchange (of power and knowledge) that—when used actively and intelligently in counterterrorist forms—thwarts profit through Amazons and anal, whose dark animal tortures dark faeries and demon mommies certainly embody (taking their prey back to their lairs).

(artist: Annabel Morningstar)

In short, they capture their “victims” and take them to dark realms of desire attached to pre-capitalist modes of thought, which Gothic Communism uses to recultivate a cultural understanding of the imaginary past through a rising emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, cultural and racial awareness; re: an intersectional, solidarized pedagogy of the oppressed, illustrating mutual consent (through informed labor exchange and sex-positive art) achieving praxial synthesis on the daily during opposition praxis: using iconoclastic art to achieve universal liberation for all work sexualized under capital, and to become stewards of the natural world we protect from the state as enemy to all life on planet Earth.

Revolution (and its dark cargo and romance) is an exercise in totality. Arbitrated through play and art, its liminal refrain—whose patented break from routine during holistic study and Gothic, monstrous-feminine dualism—seeks to gradually and collectively expose a system of harm designed to conceal itself through sex and force pimping nature in duality. Every monster they make or cage is legitimate through the giving and receiving of state force, ours always illegitimate (re: Weber). Both sides require the language—by them to hunt us and by us to acknowledge we are being hunted, which we can reclaim during genocide and its moral panics/witch-hunt dialogs of persecution, caution and revenge; i.e., through poetic likenesses that hide our function among shared, oppositional subterfuge: the oppression of witches, which faeries and demon mommies essentially are!

We camp canon because we must; we play with the imaginary past through vice characters like demon mommies and dark faeries—i.e., in order to expose what is happening to people currently inside the state of exception, at home and abroad. They lend a voice to canonical fears blowing things out of proportion, worker counterterror exposing state terror through the same dialogs thereof: the witch treated as terrorist by the state looking to control nature with—all of which we subvert using what we got!

For us, such creatures stick out during the cryptonymy process, seemingly to blend in through Gothic as commonplace, vulgar and summoned vis-à-vis Radcliffe’s evil castles/rape anxieties (fears of the ancient/medieval world including incest and pedophilia linked to straight people scapegoating homosexual men for practices that undoubtedly occurred in the historical past, but were committed far more commonly by straight-practicing patriarchs). Under Pax Americana, “Hell is a place that always appears on Earth (or an Earth-like double)”; rape is predominantly a white, straight male/tokenized crime committed against innocent female parties, children, the elderly and people of color/queer people, etc. In turn, rape victims aren’t only not believed but often attacked because they threaten property by being witness to their property-owning fathers’, husbands’ and boyfriend’s (or normalized token) crimes and deceptions protected by state devices: courts, cops, and copaganda. The justice system exists to predominantly engender rape, not prevent it (and movements created by marginalized groups are co-opted and abused by white victims; e.g., #MeToo)! All become things to reconcile; i.e., by relating back and forth through intersectional solidarity’s pedagogy of the oppressed healing from rape in the shadow of all police violence!

(artist: Annabel Morningstar)

Fourth, I won’t have time to reinsert many of these positions into “Darkness Visible” or “Trial by Fire” (and their symposium approach’s conversational style). But you may apply them yourselves as you go; e.g., “Trial by Fire” is about postcolonial monster sex adjacent to Amazonian power fantasies evoked through the threat of campy sodomy and exquisite “torture.” Ergo, it should be easy enough to apply my anal Amazon thesis to demon mommies as a kind of dark monster mother well at home in ludo-Gothic BDSM; re:

The state only tolerates the problematic love of Amazons and anal when their challenge (to the ancient canonical laws) is nominal; i.e., provided they serve profit in canonical terror language. As something to combine, but also canonize in different performances, anal is a place and parlance of trauma to give and receive through tokenized enforcers dressed up as savage warriors—Amazons being a half-real theatrical device forever trapped between genuine rebellion and false, targeting vulnerable body parts in vulnerable areas (e.g., the bathroom). Things like Amazons and anal, then, canonically binarize to best give or receive state force (mainly police violence) pursuant to profit. To challenge profit and Capitalist Realism on and offstage, workers must camp state terror inside of itself—anisotropically with Amazons and anal to reverse terror/counterterror with subversive irony during liminal expression.

[…] Demons aren’t satisfied with vanilla sex; they play with “darker” forms to weaponize them as a form of transformative exchange: an eye-opening experience/revelation, insofar as anal isn’t purely abject, but something to reverse and embrace during the dialectic of the alien […]  to take anal back is to take the land (and labor) back from these performative elements and their associate structures and enforcers by camping them […]: subversive Amazons and anal rerouting the usual flow/ordering of power on the Aegis.

(artist: Annabel Morningstar)

Fifth, the flavor of “I’ll See You in Hell” is closer to my Poetry Module, and will reference a lot of its ideas using a similar style of discourse.

Sixth, I’ve decided to preserve the original parenthetical-italic formatting of each exhibit.

Seventh, the subject of rape play comes up extensively in this exhibit, but especially the dark faerie portion. The performative, didactic idea, as always, is to heal from rape by camping it as the Gothic (and its fakeries) historically do—by helping survivors heal from trauma with “trauma”; re: through ludo-Gothic BDSM putting “rape” in quotes, effectively playing with rape during calculated risk (monsters) to help the traumatized relax, but also fight back by surviving and thriving despite our abusers harming us!

So anytime I mention “ludo-Gothic BDSM,” I’m referring to healing from rape through play (with monsters like dark faeries, who represent rape in some shape or form); and vice versa, “healing from rape” or general faerie/demon poetics and roleplay (often with big toys and a royal-size “dark” aesthetic, below) likewise denote “ludo-Gothic BDSM” as a penetrative death analog (re: ahegao). Tied to Great Change, it’s the whore out in the open—similar to a bean sidhe or Medusa’s snakes except her pussy’s doin’ the talking! Little death, big implications!

(artist: Annabel Morningstar)

In short, each expresses the other and the imaginary willpower of state forces raping nature for profit, whereupon our healing from rape to stymie profit (when illustrating mutual consent behind cryptonymic safety buffers) is the whore’s ultimate revenge; i.e., while paradoxically exposed through vulnerable nudity and dark, semi-naked threats, camping state terror weapons during the cryptonymy process (with Amazonian nudity being invulnerable, to some extent, and “darkness” being clothed and naked at the same time, etc). Through it, roleplayers synonymize playtime and “rape” haunted by actual abuse/token betrayal, wherein our poetic devices help achieve some sense of autonomy. In doing so, they likewise help us acclimate to markers of trauma and abuse, inside/outside ourselves; i.e., as an ongoing lived reality to regain power through theatrical disempowerment, whereupon we “threaten” ourselves with campy psychosexual versions of state abuse; re (from “A Rape Reprise”): “rape is something that demons play with during the whore’s paradox. By extension, ludo-Gothic BDSM is effectively rape play combined with Gothic themes and BDSM practices to avenge state wrongs against nature” (source).

Theory aside (e.g., reversing abjection), the whole point of said “exquisite ‘torture'” is to help past, present and future rape[5] victims heal from the lasting physical, mental and emotional, etc, effects (e.g., the prey mechanisms of rape: fight, flight, fawn, freeze and flop) caused by capital doing what capital does. This means not just by rape’s actual penetrative violence, but by the ongoing threats of imaginary penetration and other kinds of violence besides overtly sexual (e.g., carceral, corporal or verbal abuse), and which the state normally supplies to menticide its victims (extending from single people to entire cultures and places); i.e., before, during and after a given event, constituting an ongoing pimping of nature/policing it as alien whore: to keep raping nature-as-monstrous-feminine, while simultaneously pacifying and antagonizing it through threats of rape causing generational abuse! Rape is torture and terror to keep nature under the state’s boot; emancipation, to rise up from Hell to speak apocalyptically with such things.

(artist: Annabel Morningstar)

The reality of rape victims is that everyone can be a victim under capital, but seldom to the same degree (many simply live under conditions where rape is more possible for them, but not foregone). Furthermore, such things are alien to many and experienced differently per side (re: Volume One’s “Healing from Rape“); i.e., rape is a weapon of terror whose fresh evocation frightens anew, but also carries with it a great deal of shame, self-hatred, fear and secrecy projected onto other victims (many cops, de facto or actual, were once victims, themselves). By extension, rape survivors trigger at threats that are, to some degree, imaginary and lived; being able to control the time and place of these half-real interactions, but also depth, size, speed and relative nudity involved (above and left) can be intensely therapeutic and educational for ourselves and others—can help everyone gain some sense of voice, thus expert testimony through ourselves and our shared labor exchanges, playfully illustrating mutual consent during rape play!

That’s the paradox of rape, thus the whore; to heal from rape, you must evoke it during calculated risk. Normally alienated by capital, but sold back to us in purely exploitative forms, our subversive remanufacture of such things can help us systemically combat internal-externalized fears and stigmas, thus avoid self-destruction while rebuilding trust through tailor-made boundaries (re: Cuwu and dialectical behavior therapy incorporated into Gothic Communism); i.e., while learning to be at peace with our strange appetites acquired by life under capital, using said dialogs of mastery to become self-sufficient. To change our socio-material conditions overtime (thus raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness) requires active, consciously informed consent through teamwork changing the rules of acceptable behavior and discourse; e.g., Annabel and I negotiating everything that went into this exhibit; i.e., reclaiming our collective time and space, but also means of production to think with, poetry to play with, and bodies to control ourselves (thereby reducing the odds of rape, which is all profit really is). That’s what good praxis is all about!

Got all that? Enough foreplay, then! First up is our dark faerie collab—one enacted between myself and different models. Embodying different monstrous-feminine qualities embedded in Gothic, it has been funded by me to endorse our rights (as sex workers) in times of state decay and witch hunts. Consider our work representative; i.e., of wild, unruly nature performing its dark revenge: bringing fairyland home to the conqueror through the campy language of sex and force, our healing from rape (as a state terror weapon) relaid in darkness visible!

Darkness Visible: Dark Faeries (feat. Annabel Morningstar, Harmony Corrupted, Romantic Rose, The Witch, and more)

“Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?”

—Black Phillip, The Witch (2015)

 

Before we start our exhibit on dark faeries, a small tangent on Puritanism and Satan, followed by a few aesthetic notes on dark faeries (about eleven pages)…

As I’ve already expressed, “Darkness Visible” is a collaboration of common whores—one seeking to penetrate, thus escape, Capitalist Realism through transformative theatrical exchange; i.e., as dark faeries do, meaning unequally through sudden capture and rapid transportation, magically ferrying their prey beyond normal spheres and into forbidden netherworlds mirroring the faerie’s diurnal counterparts: a nightly place of dreams (often a cave, lake or forest) housing dark desires that are either entirely naked (as faeries often are) or veiled by an oppressive society that normally forbids them to ordinary folk, but hangs in front of to endlessly taunt said folk with (and hypocritically perjure/scapegoat themselves); i.e., with darkness visible, meaning a paradoxically charged, opaque surface that—per Segewick’s imagery of the surface, but also Radcliffe’s infamous Black Veil (and the forest and castle that house veil and veiled alike)—threatens exposure to hostile alien forces similar to more a diaphanous material. Like a pair of magic panties, our investment pulls this veil aside to show you the goods; i.e., to root out harmful prudes by appreciating what we, as people, have become alienated from by capital and must refamiliarize ourselves with through demonic trade; re: exquisite “torture”; e.g., the faerie’s fat, functionally non-white ass: large, immodest, and succulent—a demon lover’s darkness visible helping us live deliciously!

(artist: Nyx)

In doing so, our interest pointedly lies in faerie rulers, meaning those capable of royal enforcement and divine internment, but also medieval pomp-and-circumstance of a similar grandiose scale; re: courtly love. To it, faerie transformation concerns more than bodily changes[6], but that of otherworldly scenery reminiscent of one’s home made alien by a regal Numinous presence. Transpiring through forced relocation as a matter of unequal exchange that faeries are known for in popular stories, such creatures lead a double life. As you will see, so do we (sex workers often moonlight; survival sex workers toil in broad daylight, forced to suffer judgment by society at large policing whores).

Trotted out in pulp media, the process of abjection likewise reinvents Satan as someone who, once bastardized from Pagan culture[7], must be kept “in check” in Christianized spheres by strip-teasing him; i.e., by abusing the same poetics through pornographic dogma, wherein state Gothic canonically lands the Devil in hot water. “The Devil,” not the state, tempts maidens to prostitute themselves—to disrobe, forsake God and destroy the nuclear family vis-à-vis a Puritan reimagining of Hammer of Witches (1478) and blood libel. Commonly devised to accuse disobedient women of “witchcraft,” such pogroms extend state slander and DARVO into circular myth; i.e., urban legends tarring proto-feminism, queerness and Pagan religions with the same cruel, half-real brush, forsaking these groups into latter-day persecution networks, confessional refrains, and idiotic-but-effective canards; e.g., the drinking of infant blood and eating of their flesh perverting Catholic mass, all while using the leftover fat in flying ointments the witch can lubricate her “broom” with, then levitate through unholy orgasm (and phallic-woman histrionics).

According to the settlers, all this happens in service to Satan; i.e., as something to (de/an)nounce and defame through outrageous innuendo and ghost stories—their counterfeits’ haunting aggrandizing God and Manifest Destiny while beset by the Wild as something to colonize all over again: nature “gone wild,” thus savage, impure, and fallen out of a canonically essential pastoral imposed by moral arbiters “grown lax” and paranoid (thus punished by God through Satanic caricature, isolation, and ultimately Malthusian outcomes: starvation, disease, war and death). Satan is the Puritans’ imaginary friend (there are no Indians, in The Witch, the Puritans talking only to themselves while they slowly go mad/starve to death).

A chaste maiden symbolize state dominance; her liberation, through uncontrolled prostitution, is cataclysmic—i.e., the Devil “wins” the moment the state’s baby factories refuse a prescribed burden of care (and when men abjure the same rapacious gender binary, but I digress). Instead, they’re saddled with outrageous entitlement, yet faced with such vituperative and bogus claptrap since birth. So it should come as little surprise when state daughters frequently go mad from threats of exile, rape and execution—that they spontaneously strip naked and run to the hills, almost eager to sin! Debutantes delighting in sodomy and other witchy things, their criminal’s whispered and limitless debauchery cloaks in the dead of night; i.e., as things partially imaginary to repeatedly assault the righteous with, the latter’s menticided brains visualizing profligates who won’t put out for them (the abjection process, during the dialectic of shelter and the alien, fears nature as hungry for superstitious Puritans, all while allegedly “transing their kids” to hug Medusa: through hauntological gender trouble that ruffles police feathers, centuries later).

For the state and its self-policing populace, faeries amount to a fearmongering of wasted wombs, a binarization thereof that puts the colonizers at the top; i.e., during military urbanism and optimism crusading against invented, us-versus-them evils draining state essence—predominantly the right to control female bodies, but also anything that isn’t a white, cis-het, Christian male in order to maintain patriarchal sway over state territories and populations; re: anything monstrous-feminized by the state pimping nature-as-alien for fear of nature’s revenge in kind. But for workers seeking emancipation, faeries—but especially dark, royal faeries—communicate the desire to not only visibly resent our dominators (and their self-righteous bullshit), but slice them to ribbons; i.e., during the cryptonymy process, bristling with fury the elite cannot hope to contain through the same dark devices’ double operation, showing and concealing a plethora of apocalypses.

“If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” wrote the Bard, but nudity is the whore’s weapon; i.e., as a mode of endless moral panic, “hysteria” compelled through state force—a thing to dismiss and preach in equal measure. Policing it doesn’t historically work, the whore’s glee being a maiden set free while dancing on her captors’ graves: “Get fucked, Mom! Way to go, Dad!” Through the usual Promethean anisotropic (re: Hawthorne), the Puritans were the victims worthy of punishment (the witches hunting the witch hunters)!

In this sense, The Witch is hardly unique in its morbid fascination with a Gothic puritanical, including its fatal-when-viewed nostalgia and sinister two-way applications. Plenty of stories give the guilty a place to go and commit venal sins for or against the state; i.e., through Gothic “thought crimes” walking the tightrope between outright vandal and fascist vigilante; e.g., the tank-like T-800 from The Terminator compelling a similar act of revenge to Egger’s titular witch that, instead of policing the usual groups with state force, animates like Walpole’s armor to blast an entire police station to bits[8]:

Per my arguments, such thoughts are fertilized by revolutionary cryptonymy inside the Gothic mode’s unruly aspects; i.e., as something to witness and foment fresh rebellious sentiment with while reversing abjection (versus posture as such; re: Jameson’s dismissal of the Gothic, who we’ll talk about more towards the end of the module)!

Regardless, whatever devious wish fulfillment transpires with faerie transplants (to have nature’s monstrous-feminine revenge by killing your whole annoying family and oppressive belief system; re: Eggers), these always happen in darkness. Specifically they unfold in darkness visible relaid through the perceived fairy palaces’ royal decree; i.e., faeries are quite often monsters of a patrician standing and prestige summoned by mere mortals during the restless cryptonymy process, but like the more plebian brethren they walk amongst are generally made to express proletarian longing—meaning through things that are closed off to begin with, and desired for that reason by different parties involved: the forbidden sight that darkness visible classically offers generally tied to a time and place known colloquially as “Hell.”

In short, every monarchy has a ruler for which their voice is given more heed (through the dynastic orderings of power) than plain country folk. Such power is often—in the ancient tradition—borne through nudity as a kind of weapon that offends modern sensibilities (with Egger’s witch often being nude, and Cameron’s terminator and rebel soldier both arriving naked, too); i.e., a courting of power as something to take back by getting into the nudist spirit of things. To it, “Darkness Visible” considers ludo-Gothic BDSM and dark faeries through mutual action in pursuit of Hell’s demonic powers; i.e., which my friends and I—Annabel, Nyx, Harmony and Rose (among others not shown here)—pointedly synthesize, wedding performance and labor exchange to the stimulating act of forbidden creation tied to public nudism; re: castles-in-the-flesh, each with its own qualities that I’ll stress when exhibiting them (e.g., Nyx’ ties to nature; Annabel, to cottagecore; Harmony and Rose, to BDSM and healing from rape; and Crow, to genderqueerness)!

(artists [clockwise, starting top-left]: Nyx, Romantic Rose, Harmony Corrupted, Annabel Morningstar, and Crow)

Except our exhibit, like Carroll’s white rabbit, becomes something to follow deeper inside Wonderland acting as Plato’s cave (a displaced, shadowy replica of the real world and its abuses lying in state). Reversing abjection, we strike conservative parties who view us “dead” merely by strutting our stuff with confidence, and all occur within/upon our naked bodies’ “Aegis”: from an oppressed, fateful voice, rising up from the dark corners of the West to resist, thus subvert, its cultural understanding of the imaginary past—all in favor of something more sex-positive taking said Wisdom’s place; re: as a proletarian Superstructure.

Furthermore, our bare-and-exposed contingency demonstrates a collaborative push for a universal meta awareness—one raised through the dark faerie (ruler) aesthetic as its own “bad religion”; i.e., of larger historical-material trends we want to change through ourselves as monstrous-feminine in small, thus monopolized by virtue of sex, itself, being so heavily policed and censored at large. Canonized in ways that crowd the chronotope with a special kind of darkness visible, the nude sex and force of Gothic castles darken with the pitch blackness known to puritanical censor bars (and modest clothing’s obscurantism). In turn, we highlight the absence of said bars on our bodies’ exposure, but also that of state weaponry and bondage surrounding us, which the state generally won’t censor!

The Gothic’s concentric duality is notably crowded. By pushing it in a post-scarcity direction, we make a mockery of our colonizers’ values, thus their upholding of said values through a dogmatic, platitudinal Gothic. This includes its fairytale wish fulfillment’s dubious, disingenuous framing of the world; e.g., “Suffer not a witch to live” something to apprehend by us and—like the Rolling Stones’ immortal song—happily “paint it black” through bean-sidhe dress-up and crossdress shenanigans camping the lot of ’em: “Look at the Straights, scared of a little pussy!” (with Cameron showing his own Amazonian, white-savior conservatism, having Skynet reportedly terrified of Sarah Connor’s unborn son).

In doing so, we not only embody the sheer heights and plunging depths of fairytales through ourselves, but demonstrate the universal applicability of “darkness” during class war told through Gothic overture. Reclaiming its revolutionary power by punching up during the cryptonymy process (and its own infamous reliance on such things), we reify the dualistic language of sin, demon lovers and all-around vice characters through faeries. Playing them as suitably witch-like, thus invented, our collective aim is to exit the bottle[9] dressed as forgeries but also paradoxically naked disguises (with Hell being a Promethean place[10] to escape persecution and upend profit). In turn, this can be done by others, onstage and off, learning by our example; i.e., to give shape to dark places and persons where anyone can explore off-limit feelings and desires (so-called “yums” that many will “yuck”). Commonly expressed as monstrous-feminine, we are queenly and seeking revenge against the state fleecing us; re: wicked stepmothers and monarchs, but also truthsayers speaking in darkness visible: to our profound abuse and survival while naked, thus exposed to rape we must camp.

So concludes the preface on Puritanism, witches and Satanism (six pages, to haunt the remainder with a spectre of persecution). A couple more aesthetic notes, before we proceed; e.g., the intensity and size difference that faeries commonly evoke when performed; i.e., naked or not, their power feels naked in ways that generate a similar Numinous effect (to be bare and exposed before godly forces)!

Reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Tamora, Queen of the Goths, but also Titania the Faerie Queen and Queen Maeb, Milton’s Satan, Galatea of the Pygmalion legend, Hecate, Medusa, etc—which our performances evoke in spirit if not actually their armies of goblins, wild animals, and Jewish-/queer-coded vampires, devils, succubae, etc—my friends and I humanize the harvest as faeries do: as beings of nature antagonized by state arguments into a kind of false tyrant threatening state rule. Often by speaking to repressed desires for liberation, these include counterterrorist action caged in vice-character stigma, bigotry and phobia! She’s not just a whore, but a jinn—a wishmaster trading tit for tat (often with a sinister, evil-and-loving-it flavor); i.e., while carrying a castle-sized aura. Make something “too big” and it becomes titanically estranged, fully inhuman; our resident baddie is big to be sure but still relatively human-sized: a walking castle to parlay with, a dragon lady to slay during monomyth pastiche. She’s a queen of terrors[11] to treat with—up close and personal, during the witching hour/grim harvest’s liminal hauntology of war! Like a massive blaze, but one that doesn’t visibly burn (which darkness visible does not), her presence notably sucks the room of oxygen: a dark faerie with batwings (and probably having a witch’s familiar or two; i.e., stigma animals; e.g., a frowning toad, raven or black cat) emblematizing the whore in a position of power normally reversed for women having men’s babies!

In regards to dark faeries, then, I often find it useful to think of them in parental terms (the Gothic chronotope being concerned with dynastic primacy and hereditary rites; re: Bakhtin). The wicked stepmother trope, for example, is both diegetically and non-diegetically stuck in the past; i.e., as a corporal-architectural means of dispelling present illusions and weaving fresh spells with, mise-en-abyme. It’s a party/disco-like mood in structure’s time and place (the opera) that queer people commonly relate to/with, one that capital claims to be beyond or otherwise above using themselves; i.e., their proponents serve profit, crafting ancient landowner-yet-undomesticated beings of capricious splendor who make war and turn our worlds upside-down, only to be laid low for their monstrous-feminine hubris. An egregore (concentration) versus an origin, the body-like castle (or castle-like body) appears seemingly ex nihilo, threatens, and then as all spectres of Marx do, it vanishes (or disintegrates).

(artist: Evul)

The Gothic is writ in disintegration. Our faerie-like potential (and flesh) works within the same poetic spheres’ palliative Numinous, conveying some degree of enormity and psychosexual power (often height and heels; i.e., size difference and power imbalance beyond our sex organs; e.g., Gwendoline Christie’s curiously chaste-but-imposing Lucifer from the 2022 Sandman adaptation, below—begging Key and Peele’s “She tall, she tall” line from their 2012 “Karim and Jahar” skit). Instead of compelling state order through tragic-hero narratives, we make Miltonic Satanism conscious of the Devil’s party to liberate nature-as-monstrous-feminine with; re: to ravish ironically by putting “rape” in the quotes of a Gothic fake laid bare!

In feudalistic terms, “sovereignty” was something to randomly assign to bodies that were, unto themselves, haunted by impostor syndrome overshadowed by tyrannical revenge, ruthless torture, dishonorable deeds (re: courtly love) and total conquest, but also boastful claims, grand adventure, nude fakery and murderous fantasy (fake princesses, cursed bloodlines, evil castles, pretend inheritance, uncertain ancestors, bastard children, long-lost siblings, and invented family trees, etc). As such, the Gothic historically litigates through fakery to forge sympathy for the Devil in any shape or size, but also configuration. The Gothic castle, then, is a site of alien invasion and pure illusion, one whose vanishing point leads into and (out from) “a place of concealment that stands on mere ashes of something not fully present.” There, ambush and succor are friends, the “ancient” fake a thing to apotropaically ward off evil spirits less through genuine superstition and more through calculated risk acting curses out: the parent something to fabricate and fear in equal measure.

Except the Devil, contrary to popular belief, has no advocate, and is something of an inkblot to qualify in different ways. Like Lucifer from Paradise Lost, dark faeries never fully assimilate/are always rivals challenging state forms regardless if they tokenize (re: “damned if you do, damned if you don’t”); i.e., occupying the same shadow space as Nazis and using the same tumultuous aesthetic of power and death. Our destiny, then, becomes the ability to craft, thus choose, our fate as something to nakedly diverge away from state copies along the same medieval tracks of invented ancestry (re: Madoff).

As such, the faerie ruler is a Nazi-Communist whore (the world’s oldest profession and enemy—the Medusa), but a powerful one—an indulgent, phallic walking fetish/perpetual thorn in the state’s side vengefully taking what she wants when she wants (the virgin and the whore, the cult of the virgin queen[12]), and someone whose anathematic ability to even want anything (female characters in Gothic fiction being historically passive and denied the right to open sexual appetites while surrounding by rape) the bourgeoisie will desperately try to reclaim by gentrifying the idea of desire/carrying it away from slaves (with women historically being slaves, and Christie’s Satan being penned by Neil Gaiman, a sex pest masquerading as a queer ally): a fetish for the sissy to suckle, the female or GNC dom of nature chained to a straight male.

Envisioned by my friends and I, this exhibit tries to break from stage bondage while evoking unironic harm in campy genderqueer body language; i.e., by illustrating the dark faerie as monstrous-feminine liberator through darkness visible beyond its limited, capricious norms. By ransoming those persons holding our rights hostage, we supply a Trojan-Horse feller of empires, splendidly mendacious via the Gothic’s giddy delight at reversing abjection (from Walpole and Lewis, onwards), and where power and trauma exist, hand-in-hand. While forged sanctuary notably contradicts the safe passage of (and through) a military home afraid of outsiders, we take the faerie ruler and flirt with disaster arranged—as it always is—by state instruments: sex as the most policed device in the world, second only to the Gothic and monsters; i.e., as poetic arguments that not only speak to our alienation, but with it to rehumanize ourselves!

Sex is power—doubly so concerning faerie queens as things to express through reclaimed exploitation; re: our labor value, but also our symbolic value through our genders and sexuality qualified through appearance; e.g., skin color and size—with Crow having undeniably pale skin, but also an impeccable shapeliness to them that is anything but modest (next page). Together we trade in nudity and craft, my invigilation of Crow’s assets (and willingness to disrobe for a good cause, below) speaking to subversive faerie monarchs well enough: go big or go home when satirizing our survived trauma! Context matters, as does the ability to explain it when illustrating mutual consent through public nudism.

(artist: Crow)

Except, while dark power’s “denuding” classically threatens modesty in the state’s hierarchy of values, it’s a bit of a silly myth that you actually have to be modest when speaking truth to power! The simple fact is (and one that Gothic stories illustrate, time and time again), you can speak to power with power-as-abstract in recognizable forms of darkness visible disrobed. Chief among those is the human body resembling a castle and vice versa; i.e., the familiar-foreign, psychosexual signature of a stacked faerie residence as much being the stamp of power and home touched by alien elements, versus the actual humanoid shape emblematic to vanity projects. Rippling through the performance of sex, playing house can become deliberately mendacious and truthful, but also mixed in terms of its literal, pun-heavy metaphors; i.e., faerie castles being as much who embodies them with a brick-house, “mighty mighty” physique.

As disco-in-disguise through danger disco, period, the artificial wilderness is one whose paradoxical reinvention of royal faerie nudity happens during ludo-Gothic BDSM between different workers! It’s a bad camouflage that blends into a space where everyone is wearing the same basic disguise: surviving as tricksters treating ourselves (turning tricks), making mischief while embodying it as a matter of paradox, artifice, guile, teasing and relief!

Bodies or buildings, the Gothic classically emerged out of a delicate, exciting time and perfect storm of variables: an expanding middle-class luxury affording Neo-Gothic authors (and later pretty much everyone, as soon as access to such things expanded beyond the probably-gay sons of British prime ministers and MPs); i.e., a sudden, special sense of play and control that, up until that point, hadn’t really existed beyond aristocratic privilege, and simultaneously was diving back into the medieval semi-imaginary past as something to play with. As camouflage to speak to state power/disorder rising to global prominence using the same stuff to hide itself with, such subterfuge became something not to exclusively admonish, but admire: scaring ourselves, but also the state, by reclaiming such devices to help from rape in theatrical doubles thereof.

For the state, it’s a way of sexing up the banality of evil through weird-nerd culture; for workers, a rising intuition acclimated to the spread of power and lies, thus camping the canon through the usual Gothic disclaimers: everything’s fake, but hides rebellious potential somewhere in all those conventions, fetishes and psychosexual clichés; i.e., Faustian transactions transmitting magical devilry through grave danger and serpentine, bandit-style, black penitent treachery as a hauntological, displaced critique of capital growing into itself; e.g., Radcliffe’s Count Montoni or Father Schedoni part of a larger cultural imaginary relegating British atrocities (and aging national identity) to a cultural imaginary always at war with fictional “Italian” doubles and their evil castles: a forever war haunted by a “just business” mentality of gangsters, liars and thieves, but also poison, bad reputations, stolen brides, concealed weapons and private, mercenary warfare.

To this, the Gothic celebrates chaos and confusion during calculated risk acknowledging state decay (and medieval regression) through artifice. A at times nebulous and completely bonkers, Icarian (crash-and-burn) threat to profit/the nuclear family dressed up as “alien invasion” (which faeries represent), it’s one the state will take seriously while, at the same time, giving workers something to enjoy or otherwise empathize with, through disposable and discredited pleasures; i.e., in faerie-like ways that not only exceed, but purposefully violate state tolerances, mid-cryptonymy! A wish to crystalize by first invoking it, to think of the Devil that she may appear helps workers conjure an imposing luminary that, through our aforementioned nudism, outshines its classical demonizing usage! Rape is historically cheap. Our bodies and identity-through-performance, take on fresh life that overwrites state doubles policing the whore! Police this, dickwads!

(artist: Lera)

Often, this awakening (and its active class character) incurs through infidelity regarding extramarital affairs—the Faustian dealings of the state and monarchs behind closed doors. Despite the crown, the dark faerie queen is an anti-monarch in the traditional sense, but works through entertainment as, itself, a kind of paradoxical threat: the act of being sinful, to some extent, unfaithful because blind faith is historically-materially harmful; i.e., unfaithful to the harmful idea that work is holy, per the Protestant ethic, and pushing back against the idea that wish fulfillment is somehow “cheating” (versus working a low-paying job one’s whole life, subject to wage and labor theft, but also sexual theft through compelled marriage). From a proletarian angle, the Devil opens doors the state wants closed—disaster a thing to court through abjected things; re: demon lovers simply whores, versus medieval slayers, the two overlapping or haunted by their own inverted flavors of sex and force through the same Numinous, abjected scheme.

Concluding our pre-exhibit tangent on Satan, Puritanism, and our aesthetic notes, everyone loves whores, if only as faerie weapons to attack with or stand against; re: sex and force as things to respect and understand above else! There’s a method to our madness, a devil in the details. If the state invents whatever enemy it needs to dialectically-materially enforce its will and rape nature (commonly a woman, it must be said; re: “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”), we turn that on its head, fostering a dark mistress/fairy godmother it can never fully pimp, having her whore’s revenge in Promethean worlds (of power older than man, thus profit)! This collab is me and my friends’ fun, conversational attempt to illustrate that, speaking louder together than we ever could alone, our naked fairytale bodies making all manner of wishes come true. Why ask for a pretty dress or the taste of butter when the sky’s the limit? So pay attention, loves; service to Satan is its own reward, and this is what living deliciously (and anti-predation/rape) is all about!

(exhibit 44a1a1b1: Artist: Annabel Morningstar. Annabel is into “cottagecore,” a cottage-industry type of aesthetic that features faeries, and who inspired the idea for this exhibit [though we won’t cover the idea itself until “Call of the Wild”]. Many of the images featured here come from the shoot I commissioned her to produce. 

While demons are whores per the virgin/whore dichotomy, and they communicate as much through pain adjacent to harm during paradoxical revenge dialogs, doing so is a method of social-sexual enrichment in “ace” forms of public nudism; i.e., interrogating trauma and power through Gothic poetics and liminal expression: the booty normally controlled by the state suddenly set free by the natural, God-given owner of said booty—workers! “If you want to critique power, you must go where it is”; demons do that, but equip the interlocutor/participant[s] with the ability to likewise communicate as demons do—through pleasure and non-harmful pain that speak to systemic abuse being an ongoing problem under Capitalist Realism: to bring Hell to Earth, throwing the doors of perception wide on the Aegis [above and below]. Think of it as anal jazz—something to improvise “darkness” with/upon to change/upend state hegemonies; i.e., to profane the sacred in “almost holy” language, where people watch us simultaneously fail and succeed per attempt: on the highway to Hell, loaded with dark power evocative of pre-Christian religions, fertility rites and bacchanal pleasures deemed alien and sinful by the Church, but also pimped by its secularized extensions during the Protestant ethic abjecting the faerie whore’s ghost of the counterfeit [and special weapons, below]!

[artist: Annabel Morningstar]

Of course, Medusa is the basic notion of such monstrous-feminine/demon lover theatrics upsetting state balance; but dark faeries constitute the same idea as the snake-headed original, as do witches, Amazons, or any other classic female example [that extends easily enough to GNC forms]. They double their canonical variants, while still having that evil, Venus-twin look to them; but again, flow [of power] determines function, not appearance. Appraising and addressing that dilemma through demons like Annabel’s dark sidhe design [and peachy backside, below] helps us not only reclaim monstrous-feminine from state tokenism/obscurantism, but distinguish ourselves and blend in during revolutionary cryptonymy when humanizing the harvest with ludo-Gothic BDSM and bare, exposed forces of darkness! Antagonize nature and put it to work for us.

Furthermore, such poetry is robust, holistic—a complete package fine-tuned to reverse abjection on the Aegis; i.e., during the same-old mythological games’ ghost of the counterfeit assisting rebellion, recultivating the imaginary past in all the same language to camp it; re: Marx’s dead generations, but also the man himself, to yield more perceptive retro-futures looking forwards by going backwards to uncover sex-positive hauntologies within fatal, undead nostalgia [and restless dogma/rebellion during the cryptonymy process].

[artist: Annabel Morningstar]

Often, this reveals itself through flesh as castle-like, hyphenating the lavish, sensual language of revenge vis-à-vis sex and war with food and death, shelter and combat, pleasure and pain, religion and release placed in optional quotes [e.g., “impalement” or “sheathing[13]“] to achieve live burial in architectural, morphological degrees; i.e., the queen bound to the castle as a funerary chronotope housing a fugitive derelict’s engines of war regardless of ornamentation; e.g., the faerie queen’s fortress backside acting as opening to the netherworld’s opera space/mise-en-abyme as “belly of the beast,” but also butthole of the beast [or other such orifices and cavities, though Annabel’s asshole is a sight to behold, above]: the house as the monster, liar and abuser but also the monster as “brick house” [re: The Commodores] telling paradoxical truths with taboo, thus attractive elements that feed anisotropically in both directions. So often, women [or those treated like women] are, per the whore’s paradox, forbidden from taking abject BBC/manifesting as such, but expected per the profit motive’s colossal, patriarchal double standards to do just that.

Point in fact, Alraune and similar vampiric heinies—e.g., the Moth Fairy from Bloodstained 2: Curse of the Moon, next page—literally stem from nature seeking its monstrous-feminine revenge against profit, hence rape; i.e., acting as bait while fucking back to hell from rape—lying in wait at the traditional place of abuse, thus revenge; re: the bedroom haunted by the vengeful whore’s phallic ovipositor or vagina dentata, double/two-faced presentation, and Medusa-style severed head eating her rapist through Gothic pareidolia and pseudolimb, mid-liminal expression: oscillating[14] inside a murderous womb’s Numinous, danger-zone/nexus-of-crisis hyphenating of sex and force, human and insect, mouth and fang—the palliative-Numinous, Gothic-Communist mommy to quest for and have her dom you through forbidden sight/darkness visible! Something to see that defies belief, the revenge isn’t petty in defense of private property through monopolized terror devices, but substantial and thrilling in defense of nature and labor! The Gothic—as a storehouse of old recycled tropes, dated fakeries and grimly humorous camp—is a fantastic resource for such premeditated discourse/crass danger-disco maneuvers playfully badass dangers.

[model and artist: Annabel Morningstar and Persephone van der Waard]

Except, the same ideas of the vampire’s undead reversal [of the usual feeding direction] likewise apply to the demon’s revenge being functionally the same; i.e., regardless of aesthetic, the dark faerie operating through unequal trade and transformation has Promethean and Faustian outcomes: the destruction of the usual predators by anti-predation devices [and false bodies/animalized Gothic fakeries working in tandem, part of the same vengeful force, above] luring aspiring rapists [which monomyth heroes are] to their doom! Beheading the Medusa is classic abjection, her castration of patriarchal agents while playing “dead” classic reverse abjection; i.e., “helpless” while tied up. It’s a kind of data, but also code-through-power-fantasy speaking to anxiety and anger in methods where the actors and articles involved can reckon with dark forces that raise intelligence/awareness during the cryptonymy process to reverse abjection and foster Gothic Communism; re: moving power anisotropically towards workers through dialectical-material scrutiny during praxial synthesis, not Freudian psychoanalysis [and mainstays, like Creed, Segewick, Carter and Kristeva, etc]. It might seem like the whore always loses; per the whore’s paradox, she reverses abjection through BDSM played out in Gothic stories: showing the military optimist their own cruelty in desiring to rape nature-as-alien-whore, hoping to defeat Capitalism’s hidden sins through combat.

To it, the Gothic is notoriously indiscrete/prone to push-pull while crossing very fine lines; its chaotic violation of boundaries neatly describes the half-real ways that power and its uneven distributions and boundaries exist and unfold in faerie fun and [sex] games. Whether a castle, occupant, or some castle-in-the-flesh combination, awesome [Numinous] power and obscurity are always close at hand. Weighed down by [and reached for with] ambivalent hands and clouded vision, its cryptonymy affords the wielder tangents with narrow cutting power and broad latitude; i.e., amid solvent [dissoluble] feelings of constant confusion and overwhelming danger. The air permeates with thick dread, but also paradoxical excitement; i.e., insofar as liberation and exploitation [cops and victims, Nazis and Communists] all occupy the same kayfabe umbral zone that faeries do: where the atrocities of present social structures, displaced onto faux-medieval language, return as “past” to fall once more under its powerful spell [re: Punter and the ghost of the counterfeit]—all to further or reverse abjection, time and time again!

The Gothic is obsessed with the return of rape as a matter of nostalgia paradox—to a young state of mind with an adult perspective, confronting generational trauma to not only survive, but defeat it at the “source”; i.e., regressing to progress by going to Hell not elsewhere, but at home displaced to a nightmare, castled state—one common to medieval torture scenarios and state crisis and decay expanding said torture deeper into regular in-groups seemingly under state protection. But such places, as haunted homes, are also semi-imaginary playgrounds of “rape” out in the open, exposed dramatically for those who have survived systemic abuse [and its concealment] and seek to unbury such secrets, once and for all.

These cloaked testimonies and Black-Veil affects confess or otherwise point to unspeakable, widespread and atrocious harm on the homefront, themselves announced by great entropy [disorder and collapse] as something that suddenly arrives or erupts into massive, extreme violence: the unstoppable revenge of the barbaric past unto a possible future, holocaust and revenge housed and confronted in the same zone of play’s exquisite “torture.” Commonly denoted by [and abstracted as] Gothic castles and conquerors whereupon time is a circle, imperial abuse and state consumption under capital abject onto a retro-future space-time loop, the “better future” of a once-upon-a-time endlessly devoured by the imaginary past from Elsewhere traveling through space and time [usually outer space, the ocean, the barbaric past, or simply a space of darkness; e.g., Lavos from Chrono Trigger or Skynet from The Terminator—Toriyama’s concentric purple people eater and Cameron’s technological singularity/police state demonic personifications of manmade extinction abjected onto “unknown” spheres during the liminal hauntology of war]: to catch a predator by responding to pain and anxiety as, at times, thoroughly unreliable data.

In Gothic, pain is a problem [re: C.S. Lewis] insofar as uncanny elements promise death inside the home; i.e., as occupied by something older than us, alien even, but nevertheless part of the place we call home. Trauma attacks memory but also rememory as a process, less making it forgetful and more foggy and fractured. In turn, some things are so awful we want to forget and never speak of them again, but silence is death, pain a data to analyze “on the hunt,” gathering evidence; i.e., intel that resists concrete discovery or dismissal as a kind of always-ringing alarm system gone haywire; re: inside the belly of the beast.

Yet, interpretation and deciphering these cryptic omens is required both to survive and live with peace of mind that we aren’t being pimped by tyrannical forces passed off as fakes: the men behind the curtain’s concentric veneer/gobstopper mask, machinations of state, and inkblot scapegoats. There’s always another castle and tyrant inside, because that’s what capital is: endless installations of figureheads, per the ghost of the counterfeit furthering the abjection process. Vague or crystalized, the story is worth nothing without these creatures and their Numinous, at-times-incorporeal halos; i.e., the threat of awesome change, wrought through generational abuse and cryptonymic release: a wild walking castle appears!

In Chrono Trigger’s case, the canceled future [which a hauntology is; re: Fisher] is declared after a failure to stop Lavos, dooming the entire planet: “But… the future refused to change.” Such is Capitalist Realism—deliberately trading genuine activism for personal responsibility scapegoating nature, the latter dressed up as technological singularity or cosmic-nihilist space reaper! Such territories are well-trod, done to death but deathless because of a need to quell Capitalism’s inheritance anxieties among the middle class quaking before the ghost of the counterfeit: the prodigal son, his chickens come home to roost per the Imperial Boomerang’s grim harvest, its dirty little secret cloned and laid bare as “fantasy”!

State proponents, being incompatible with life and consent, lie by design/about everything[15]. They do so to defend what the elite privatize—a fake, which they perform to maintain profit; i.e., through cryptonymic lies-upon-lies and force as something to enact against the counterfeit’s ghost: furthering abjection for the state during Capitalist Realism, the system having an extraordinary tolerance for menticide. So when the state is strong, its cops and their perfidious illusions feel strong. But when the state is weak, these same enchantments wane; i.e., in ways that demand aggressively conspiratorial and preemptive shows of force from the middle class already conjuring up such Radcliffean bugbears: often against “weak and strong” scapegoats [re: Eco] that trap a besieged Earth inside a fluctuating spell of endless lunacy and death [re: Majora’s threat of the falling moon]!

The instigator is typically absurd, Lavos effectively a castle-like “gun porcupine” whose non-diegetic pipe organs herald a sudden invasion-from-within piloted by a central menace [re: the backstabbing Jew]. For the elite, however, a Numinous scapegoat is still a scapegoat; they go so far as to grant the beast its own alien life cycle, expecting us to kneel before it when it erupts from the ground like a cicada or African rain frog[16], then punch down at ourselves during mirror syndrome—in effect, bypassing the elite [and their well-deserved blame] entirely!

For Gothic Communism, though, the whole point is to subvert these black onions’ escalations of civil war—meaning to recreate such cataclysmic disempowerment in ways that empower workers through awesome doom; i.e., in defense of nature from capital during calculated risk: a near-death experience whose obscured, layered threat rears its ugly head when the “old gods” return to have their revenge; re: Medusa and state shift during the Capitalocene. Per the paradox of rape, their evocation feels good during calculated risk; i.e., a confusing reality the elite [the men behind the curtain] will exploit, full-bore: “Worship the state’s gods of death pushed into neoliberal [videogame] spheres; have revenge on who we dress up as the end of the world—Communism and its spectres of Marx!”

[source]

Like the xenomorph’s messy intimations of Ovid, Lavos is a Satanic gay death fairy from outer space/Radcliffean nightmare about the end the world. Aping Hell, the tyrannical butterfly’s cuckoo metamorphosis turns Earth into a ravenous primordial maw eating Utopia cocooning it [re: the caterpillar and the wasp]. As usual, capital will use such degenerate [queer-coded, Archaic-Mother] cryptonymy [and its faerie-like, phantom-class egregores] to charm the middle class, thus further abjection and destabilize the world pursuant to profit raping nature by chattelizing it: the ghost of genocide personified and displaced through DARVO and obscurantism, tokenized by neoliberal copaganda haunting the sham of Utopia [re: “Rome” as retro-future].

“Progress,” then, is classically the word of Cartesian white men raping nature, who frame Omelas as imperiled on the Aegis to justify policing the whore, post-apocalypse; i.e., capital routinely scapegoats its own inevitable “bust” in astronoetic language, the scapegoat a devious ur-thing to push as far away from capital [with Lavos landing on Earth millions of years in the primordial past, similar to Giygas from the Mother franchise, exhibit 60e2] yet push its child soldiers endlessly towards so they can peel back the layers and pimp the whore all over again: the murderous womb, which stories like Alien[17] made so famous, Creed fantasized about from Freud’s arguments, and I reclaimed in my own work, but which Bacon and the Cartesian Revolution’s mainstays have been “running a train on” for centuries! They’re Lavos pulling a bait-and-switch handing out death warrants; i.e., during us-versus-them, gaslight-gatekeep-girlboss stranger danger punching state-compelled unknown during Capitalist Realism! Divorced from the world, it’s still their oyster to pry open and gut; re: through the usual simulative refrains escalating hyperbolic war against the potential for Great Change: idiots trying to conquer death, therefore nature’s great revenge!

The elite push DARVO onto a capitalist analogy dressed up in Nazi-Communist obscurantism! Mighty spectres of death trapped in time as endlessly traveled, fascism and Communism become things to abort and dread, but always to discourage Communism, mid-kayfabe; i.e., neoliberal monomyth refrains promoting death omens of various kinds by the elite unto all workers: home as Hell to return to, or Hell returning home as Juggernaut, Leviathan or some-such Great Destroyer! Faintly detected by stubbornly imperceptive investigators gentrifying extermination war as “cutesy” in service to the state, the heroes of Chrono Trigger and similar fictions [often women and children; re: Radcliffe’s Scooby Doo palimpsest] hunt these endemic alien monsters down, arriving at a final spectral boss looming menacingly inside the web-like trail’s garden of the forking paths: an evil onion/cocoon, hence duty to discharge or execution to carry out—reversing predator and prey in a layered singularity when others failed and the nightmare of the undying vampire never quite ends [so-called “true peace,” itself, an elusive and brittle lie, under Capitalism]!

Per Radcliffe, demons are classic beings to summon and, pursuant to their final forms, “lovers” to defeat through some kind of challenge offered [often survival or temptation]. While Dracula more commonly fits this role, or something else erotic, plenty of Numinous forms have false bodies [re: Lavos] or no bodies at all [re: Skynet, though it cyberpunk pyramid is preceded by an army of cyborg skeletons]. But such qualities skirt the same lines and territories as faerie rulers and their dark chrysalids—asleep, waiting like Cthulhu at R’lyeh to wake up [no one afraid of Capitalism’s fall more than fascists like Lovecraft, but also those strip-mining cosmic nihilism’s Cycle of Kings, post-Giger]: inside a nightmare that, once awake, cannot be escaped [the realization of our being trapped in Plato’s cave]!

[source]

Whatever the form, the function is unanimous. Such beings are vice characters of some kind or another to scapegoat inside a monomyth center/closed space; e.g., vampires as faeries, often of a genderqueer quality bearing anti-Semitic flavors that—under a more modern Radcliffean—become queer-coded witch hunts during sodomy and blood libel arguments exterminating the moth by burning it with state candles; i.e., “bug hunt” being the dark desire to canonically unfold during the heroic quest: to penetrate home as sick with a foreign insectoid plot, excising the insect to whitewash capital and its castles through incendiary fetes and kayfabe. The lynch mob, as such, is a rite of passage purging the usual suspects, their purification by fire happening at night while the interlopers, the middle class, happily beat the faerie to death to achieve regicide, infanticide and genocide [and to get the girl at the end of the story]. Such is copaganda in totality—the monomyth, cops-and-victims power fantasy turning state defenders’ brains off while acting like they’ve somehow “grown up”; i.e., once ridding Paradise of the seemingly invincible barbarian/Grendel stand-in by doing the state’s dirty work. For capital, all roads lead to Rome; all minions lead to a mastermind who, at the end of the monomyth, can be martyred.

A fight over a woman is classically a fight over a chain of property [dowry] and custodial rights, only one side can’t defend itself. Yet, everyone loves the whore [or has virgin/whore syndrome] and its blackhole sun’s black sunshine taunting oblivion vis-à-vis state-induced death anxiety and similar emergencies. In this respect, the Gothic and its demon-mommy poetry’s recursively psychosexual and emotional [ergodic, concentric, anisotropic, etc] turmoil speaks to curiosity’s magnetic charm making anyone feel more at home in alien places; i.e., writ in disintegration[18] with poison as the cure, at home with duality and paradox, contradiction and conflict, society and sickness, and empowerment through “disempowerment” with and without quotes regarding things normally closed-off and simultaneously commonplace; re: sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, but also the stories encompassing such materiel, talent, and merchandise.

Such meltdowns are what the dark faerie ultimately embodies, thus represents through an antihero’s journey—person and place—to bring such things to light for workers or the state: to see you in Hell. “Hell” isn’t “bad,” in this sense. It’s just, like a fairy’s cocoon, a place of radical change, black light and dark desire, thus rape and revenge as something to address, mid-duality and -stasis; i.e., from multiple angles and holistic tangents developing Gothic Communism through wise, perceptive “torture” buried alive—an ass of the gods woken up to deliver a Wisdom of the Ancients caught somewhere in time, but also on the bodies of those we love; e.g., my friend Nyx; i.e., who, on her formidable physique and persona, traps the viewer between pre-capitalist ideas and a post-scarcity future where the state has been permanently dismantled and billionaires no longer exist! A fortress for friends to enter and “die” inside, Nyx slays capital using capital’s ultimate weapon against them: faerie butts speaking for themselves as taking up arms! Like Lavos, Nyx’s planetary “fairy castle” is armed with “ballistics” [missiles or otherwise]!

[artist: Nyx]

Nothing is policed more. Per the Gothic mode, faeries personify dark spaces of chaos; i.e., the faerie queen’s labyrinth[19] of conjecture to penetrate and enjoy what is forbidden outside, but permitted inside itself and its libidinous, brothel-like casino’s concentric morphological architecture; re: mise-en-abyme the reader surrenders unto. Said surrender happens during an eager virgin [or experienced whore’s] imperiled, overwhelmed mind: the slit-like murder holes[20] of prolonged sieges, ramming the barricades of a hungry and curious-yet-fragile brain that, deprived of experience or having too much of it, conflates sex and harm. Fed on warlike fictions exploring that which everyday life teases and denies, the Gothic was the original trashy escape for bored English housewives to slum with!

Speaking to experience and inexperience in equal, stoked barbarity—that being the desire to fuck, but fearing rape as something that women [or those treated as women] are born into—we non-housewives “surrender it all” for something better felt but for a moment in paradoxically “rapacious” tones: “I’d give it all to spend a night with you”; i.e., gentle mommies to nurture and ward off broad, elusive terrors with their teddy-bear softness and nurturing affection, but also “strict,” dark and or Amazonian/faerie femme doms. Working on a switching BDSM mechanism, they instill a sense of masculine strength [with a feminine veneer] during courtly love: comfort food nourishing through multigender mixtures of sex and force during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., developing Gothic Communism on the Aegis, the dated past and possible future constantly haunted by great pain and pleasure in the same fairy-like bodies closer to nature than many under Capitalism currently are!

[artist: Nyx] 

Again, Nyx is one such body—a fairy godmother “goldmine” whose butterfly tattoos denote a high tolerance for pain, but also poetically evoke the ancient goddess Psyche [exhibit 56a1a2]: as a transformative deity linked to the mind set free through pleasure, including pleasurable pain linked to dead metaphors. Capitalism is a cycle of misery bleeding the land dry for a manmade disaster—one of total privatization pimping nature-as-monstrous-feminine by the state, and where such hoarded resources will do no good during state shift; men cannot eat gold and Medusa always wins, so we might as well listen to her avatars ahead of time!

In turn, the only way to exact our whore’s revenge—thus challenge the state and its brittle illusions, infinite exploitation, gross inequality/Protestant ethic/billionaires, automatic violence, and incompatibility with life having their finger on the pulse of capital—is by tapping into our labor’s infinite value and where it’s stored as, to some degree, alien and fetishized during these endless harvests; i.e., our rights versus theirs, we’re the anti-family to capital’s fucked-up sense of nuclear [erectile] dysfunction, division and devastation; re: to humanize the harvest, exposing the state as inhumane. The closer you get to the heart of things, vis-à-vis the infernal concentric pattern, the more Numinous things become; i.e., a reminder that simple things like fruit [and other cash crops in banana republics] lie historically at the core of exploitation: ass farms, but also an outpouring of dark volcanic sentiment[21] turning regular consumption inside-out, the state [and its colonies] having incurred our baddie’s chonky wrath! Fucking to metal, we smash state minds [those of cops policing us] against our whore’s naughty clapping cheeks! “Stare and tremble” as our “pumpkins” turn into chariots of class war playing out the murder of class traitors! The climax is great, the catastrophe one of sweet, sweet revenge!

 [artist: Nyx]

This crop-like cryptonymy includes Nyx’ portentous faerie ass serving as a restless labyrinth to explore, but also her ties to the land and me, her big heart, and aching love for fantasy artwork and rock n roll; i.e., West Virginia, where she comes from, being a place not simply to preserve, but give back with gusto: to the dispossessed. Often ourselves, but also those around us the state destroys—this means labor towns, the miner’s widows, the ruined land and now-native populations all owned in ways we take back through what we own, away from the boomtown factories, mines and fenced-off processing facilities attached to a naturalized boom-or-bust/circular colony. We camp economics and rebellion, making them sexier than usual; and when primed for it, only take a spark to set us off. Strange fruit sending us down special roads, so does the Gothic, through another of Medusa’s avatars—a Mountain Mama, in this case—send us home!

 [artist: Nyx] 

Simply put, we’re hard to believe, yet, like faeries, here we are; forbidden sight, for us, amounts to believing in better worlds through what others see in and upon us as harbingers thereof. While the state frames us as destroyers from Elsewhere to make said worlds “impossible,” we load Capitalist Realism with a black magnetism that reels our audience back in. We’re a demonic sight for sore eyes, then—trading unequally through forbidden things [violence, terror and sex] to anisotropically achieve radical transformation, and seek to be viewed as increasingly legitimate on all registers; i.e., during liminal expression reversing terror/counterterror! The revolutionary idea, here, is to avoid easy solutions in favor of difficult ones, our faerie glamour targeting systems instead of scapegoats by directing violence away from ourselves, mid-rodeo!

So while challenging profit and Capitalist Realism might sound incredibly boring on its face, in truth this takes many different, faerie-like forms that are anything but insipid! Great power lies in them, thus are precisely what the state aims to own, control and harvest by raping nature on loop during the abjection process; i.e., by building monuments to its own displaced abuse, and worshipped at by the middle class to further abject through cryptonymy [and the other Four Gs] all over again; re: Lavos, and those framed as Lavos, are the ones being harvested by state proponents in bad faith. So does capital demand inequality and total control for the state, framing nature as “illegitimate whore” and terrorist to seek its endless and bloody vengeance against.

In that respect, Capitalist Realism could be summarized simply as a battle for legitimacy amid state monopolies, decay and poetic dysfunction. Those of nature, like Nyx, become forces of nature that smash said monopolies with their kindness and shapeliness: a warrior mommy invoking acceptance and love, but also a willingness to transmute state terror with a harvest its cops can never reap, a dark faerie they can never dethrone! “Your ass is fat n your aura is threatening[22]!” Verily.

To that, the Gothic plays with Numinous things and games to instill a paradoxical sense of control; i.e., through rules and devices that can be handled, thus played with, for different means to achieve monumental leverage, post-abstraction; re: a palliative Numinous through ludo-Gothic BDSM developing Gothic Communism to challenge Capitalist Realism [and state ludologies coercing nature through mercenary force]. Doing so happens through things that are historically-materially very hard to regulate; re: sex and force, but also the Gothic/games on either side of class, culture and race war during oppositional praxis. Like Medusa’s fat pussy or asshole, such “castled discotheques” become something to stab, but cannot die—indeed, loves to “die” during calculated risk thrusting to the hilt!

 

[artist: Nyx] 

In times of crisis, then, sex and war are comfort foods, but also a covert means of negotiating themselves within themselves: the whore speaking cryptonymically and cryptomimetically to harm through things that are normally policed, monopolized and colonized in ways we subvert during ludo-Gothic BDSM; re: by using what we got, thus arbitrate liberation as our revenge—a desire to see the state blown to bits, but in reality being a process of smaller battles infused with activism automatically equated as “violent” by the state [and cops]: the whore, out in the open, flashing the powerful with her mighty weapons. Physically violent or not, we cannot co-exist with the state, and our struggle against the owner class is always legitimate; e.g., the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson sloganized through “deny, defend, depose” on the shell casings [source: Andrea Cavallier et al‘s “Manhunt Continues,” 2024] versus the same liberatory sentiments enticed through our weaponized bodies demonstrating state fallibility just as well: the elite are not all-powerful; they humbugs!

The fertility of such Gothic maturity is the adventuresome ability to discuss intense harm and healing in sex-positive ways that conceal violence in “violence”; i.e., that push towards universal liberation and away from a shuttered, bigoted existence—fucking to metal not simply to breed or sate the middle class, but disabuse them of genocidal blind eyes! The ghost of the counterfeit becomes profoundly medicinal and multipurpose in good faith, as well as holistic interpretations that liberate workers through speculative richness, but highly abused by state forces in bad faith, theoretic imperialism, and singular interpretations expanding the state of exception on the same inkblot; re: warrior women, witches, faeries, and Medusa [and Medusa’s fat ass, above and below] granting protection when facing the unknown during the dialectic of shelter and the alien—and faced, for some, as if for the first time and others, through déjà vu: to meet again, for the first time, an old enemy and friend both at once that, in doing so, makes our wildest dreams come true. As always, this unfolds while reversing abjection to abstain from Judas silver crucifying the rebel; i.e., the bullet with butterfly wings that riles up the rabble, Medusa’s avatar having more cushion for the pushin’! With darkness visible, she takes us to the gates of Heaven or Hell, a place to come to [or on] and stay awhile!

[artist: Annabel Morningstar]

Beyond Nyx, consider Annabel’s toxic faerie queen once more. Tits or ass, thighs or stomach, shoulders or throat—all sides to her speak of a scarcely-contained power viewed from different vantage points, her forbidden sight also speaking to a greater world: the plenty of paradise merged with cryptonymy of rape and revenge, voicing joy during calculated risk, but also genuine pain on the dark side of the moon highlighting curious truths and contradictions; i.e., eustress and confusing the senses; e.g., Andrew Friesen’s “My Cat Likes to Be Hit” [2008]: “If she didn’t like it, wouldn’t she run away?” Quite the opposite, “We eat the night, drink the time, and make our dreams come true!” [The Scorpions’ “The Zoo,” 1980].

Another way to phrase it is that humans are animals, and bound by the same principles of confusion and delight[23]: to reunite with things we are alienated from, primarily our faerie-like bodies and their unknown pleasures. This includes pain, but also their psychosexual theatre speaking to rape through “rape” that—all the same—makes our eyes roll back into our dumb skulls: dummy-thicc vitality and salubrious little deaths preceded or overshadowed by Numinous big death/the torpor of Great Destruction; e.g., the rape of a friend or the death of a loved one, the fall of a country or destruction of one’s home. Exacted through inescapable punishment or debt of some kind, our faerie-ness refers to something we ultimately must confront that—despite Capitalist Realism [and its neoliberal copaganda’s dogmatic, ceaseless military optimism]—cannot actually be defeated; it can only be embraced regarding all sides of itself during the dialectic of the alien: us, and by extension nature, exploited by the state as the ultimate destroyer projecting its harm onto the usual Radcliffean, cops-and-victims scapegoats.

Death and rape are classically things to avenge, canonically being yet-another-way for capital to divide nature and conquer her through dualistic terror language. Our revenge is two-fold—acting revenge out while evoking adjacent harm through play during ludo-Gothic BDSM: comedy and drama through demons [faeries, in this case] as an ancient theatrical device, alongside prostitution as literally the world’s oldest profession. Through them, we tell stories to aid in our survival, thus ability to play and learn, but also recontextualize harm through monstrous theatre’s poetic arguments: accessing a part or side of ourselves that is normally closed off; e.g., anal sex as one form of sodomy that faerie magic and darkness visible radiate. Our demons—thus operatic desires, emotional enormity and bedlam, and hauntological calamities—sit on the same shadowy stage as the state’s own vice characters and apocalypses [the revelation generally shrouded in darkness during the cryptonymy process; re, Lavos: “The black wind begins to blow…” Fate farts in the edgelord’s general direction].

To it, we’re the caterpillar and the wasp, the impostor inside a tasty treat that, when consumed, eats you alive from the inside out! We’re the death of patriarchal thought [and tokenism] that abjures profit in succulent, sweet-and-savory ways; i.e., there is no way to change the status quo without some degree of disguise and pain, but also play through transformative [metamorphic] language that is, sure enough, painfully delicious and obvious. Change hurts, especially when it’s up in our guts, poetry’s forbidden fruit rewiring our brains through “trepanation” in quotes—delobotomy killing our darlings, but likewise fucking us just the way we like: with a raw urgency eagerly tearing off our clothes and getting down to business [often through the dialog of sleep; e.g., Shakespeare’s slutty faeries’ from A Midsummer Night’s Dream having a curious and steady penchant for “somno” sex; i.e., using “love-in-idleness” to make people fantasize about extramarital sex].

In the face of unstoppable death and other symbols of capital, risk becomes something to camp—calculated by us through the whore’s paradox of rape! We point to our own harm, but do so to live with it in manageable forms; i.e., the whore’s revenge, mid-paradox, being a tell-tale smile or set of faerie wings: a safe space to wrestle our demons, but also fuck them/guide them inside us by the hand! Through nearness with “death” as a theatrical, paradoxical concept, we faeries raise the stakes, the dead, a lover’s dick, what-have-you. Consent is sexy—especially in times where it is scarce, inserting it needily into our hungry holes. Gimme!

[model and artist: Annabel Morningstar and Persephone van der Waard]

Everyone likes the whore, the tramp, the vice character as someone to root for/spice things up with Gothic panache; i.e., they’re a secret to seek—a dead thing to play with, a puzzle to assemble, a castle [un]made brick-by-brick, to mount and pin to the bed while setting the tempo. The picture, then, is both crystal clear and sharp as knives, but also vague and fleeting as mist, mid-speculation; i.e., walking thunder that, like the Gothic castle, moves while in place and ties to grander and grander intimations blurring Heaven and Hell: a Communist Numinous relaid in castles and warships, but also bodies framed as such, the likeness [and contrast] of kaiju sovereignty that workers embody on the Aegis; i.e., as avatars of Medusa threatening cataclysm in state eyes drunk on Capitalist Realism [mistrusting anything beyond state vision, but also imaginary history beyond fascist reinvention misinterpreting said past]!

Such playful rapture/exquisite “torture” inserts itself into one’s sleeping and waking moments alike, faerie succubae and incubae invading and incubating inside daily life; i.e., with indelible feelings of chaos to embrace as one does Medusa [during the dialectic of the alien]: an alien abductor “taking us away” but not really going anywhere[24], impossible motion cruising for sex perching on the cusp of disaster [warding off evil while presenting as such, brimming with pathos and desire]! So do we live in Gothic times; i.e., inside dwellings of doom unable to contain their own demonic power on any register or in/across any medium. The dark faerie doesn’t merely sit on its laurels, then, but beckons with darkness visible: “Eat me… if you dare! Conquer my dark temple!” As Wordsworth put it, “Let nature be your teacher!”

[artist: Annabel Morningstar]

Abyssal though it seems, the data isn’t corrupted; the corruption is the data, but it must be deciphered. It shakes things up, but cannot be shook; its dated conventions [and their massive, Walpolean personifications—the Capitalocene] continuously fall apart and reform, the Gothic writ with power and decay to best speak to things beyond Capitalism and its ever-decaying illusions while inside them; i.e., inside various persecution networks [and their concentric labyrinths] while using the language of persecution to camp canon with. In other words, the appearance informs the exchange, but the context is ultimately what defines it from a dialectical-material standpoint. Something to sink into, then, those who do can likewise accept how perception can warp under gravity’s dark attraction; i.e., that such a twisting can happen [at cross purposes] while also realizing how the dialectical-material observation itself is fairly constant.

Activism, then, is predominantly leveraged through said observation as something to perform: an identity [faerie or otherwise] attached to legendary victimhood, then overcome and lived with under what power we do have to control, change and recontextualize; i.e., our own survival as beings of nature harvested by state forces through fiction as a staging point. With a little fairy dust, we might begin to arbitrate/scrutinize sex and force in Gothically mature forms that—classically inundated with suspicion, sadomasochism, bondage, and supernatural-to-earthly menace—grant us special, faerie-like ways to speak, means to hunt, and room to breathe as stewards of nature; i.e., as required by us to best survive state counterfeits playing the victim in bad faith, the cop selling out!

Radcliffe’s exclusively white, cis-het rape scenarios, for example, depict the paranoid havers abjecting other groups, punching up and down. Victimhood [and its emotions, like shame, hatred and guilt] do not define us, but do orbit around us/repurpose them through trauma normally buried[25] in what we inherit between fiction and non-fiction, imagination and objective reality interlocked; i.e., as something to perform and play with during ludo-Gothic BDSM, rediscovering “ancient derelicts” like Radcliffe’s spectral castles to learn from them despite their immaturity [we’ll unpack this during “Damsels, Detectives and Sex Demons”]:

[artist: Carl Gustav Carus]

My dislike—of Radcliffe’s dry modesty but also the army of academic fans licking her mysterious asscrack—is no secret. Then again, she was an intellectual and creative whose writings aren’t completely without merit [refer to my PhD for further discussions about this problem]. So while Radcliffe is a darling to kill, these windows into the past still offer dated ways of thinking we can gleam current-day truths from; i.e., while moving around inside them during ergodic motion to excite faerie-like feelings, which Gothic castles very much were [and are] designed for! This means they’re valuable despite their flaws[26], insofar as they’re littered with playful ways of framing arguments about survival… which again, Gothic castles concern themselves with—to “survive” as relics, but for us go beyond those who harmed us without irony to begin with; i.e., to survive those who, as Gloria Gaynor put it, “hurt us with goodbye.” Forget eternal damnation, ours is endless delight through exquisite torture camping the canon, fawning to feign deference towards those who do not deserve our genuine love or uncritical gaze!

While the Gothic is classically about facing our fears [especially of uncertain, imposturous parentage] by anchoring us in infernal, concentric darkness to survive, it commonly forces people to face things that—like Radcliffe’s unmappable castles[27]—are never entirely imaginary and, worse still, make us doubt reality and imagination. Questioning our sanity and lineage/sense of self in the process, we must acclimate to a state of asking questions useful to our survival under monomythic duress, violence, captivity and alarm, held hostage as prisoners of dark love hunting us; i.e., in a state of probing survival [the rememory process] whose hypervigilance/reliance on intuition goes beyond any single worker or sanctioned action, and instead encompasses what all of us can offer as, to some extent, like faeries and their castles’ forbidden and exotic but also policed elements; e.g., Disney’s “princess” variety promoting assimilation through whitewashed, gentrified castles that put “Gothic” in the hands of a smaller paying clientele seeking a colonized wish fulfillment; re: Radcliffe’s secret princess trope, granting a common girl the bounties of conquest simply by surviving a night in the dastardly place. Whatever camping of the monomyth we do will often be through our bodies as “faerie,” castle-like and genderqueer.

[artist: Mugiwara] 

Mugi, for example, is a survival sex worker/plural trans man; trans men, per the whore’s paradox, are commonly exploited by heteronormative society treating them as unnatural—doubly so for plural persons. Any attempt to humanize ourselves happens through our exchanges subverting such norms by reclaiming said language for liberatory purposes; i.e., our bodies and labor are valid, as are the faerie-like identities attached to them normally invalidated through state doubles and their monomythic violence: likenesses of Medusa, but also each other regardless of gender or sex, shape or size, color or character! Anyone can be oppressed, and anyone can camp the monomyth, hence liberate themselves through the Gothic’s Promethean fairytale; e.g., Mugi, Crow and Victoria’s ample and shared cause through the same pedagogic exhibitionism as Nyx and Annabel, but for expressly GNC reasons:

[artist: Crow] 

With the above and below collages, Mugi and Crow played with me for my 38th  birthday because I liked playing with them [and Crow is one of my partners]. But they’re also two of my muses—and Victoria [next page] is a close friend. More to the point, we’re all trans, and I want to give GNC people a voice beyond just myself while illustrating mutual consent through a shared exhibit’s collective labor exchange. We’re all faeries of a GNC sort, making a case for ourselves using what we got!

Trans people have always been people, and despite blood libel framing us as evil faeries, we’re actually quite good around children. We certainly don’t eat them, and can even have them [e.g., Mugi has a daughter who’s as cute as a bug’s ear]! Simply put, we have families and friends and lookout for each other under state pogroms incited by weird canonical nerds. Our life and labor have value, whereupon mutual aid is not only fine, but just another form of exchange that includes our bodies and labor cast, during demonic/faerie poetics, in a sex-positive light [versus limiting certain groups to caste-style positions; e.g., Jews and usury or untouchables and begging during public outcry/moral panic]. Through ourselves cast as faeries onstage and off, we overcome harmful expectations while allowing for public nudity as a holistic, all-inclusive form of activism; i.e., expressing itself through us, punching up towards universal liberation! “Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light!”

Furthermore, biology is hardly essential when it comes to gender identity and performance, but informs whatever liberty emerges in either case [re: sex and gender as separate from each other and unanchored from biology, yet still relating back and forth on a magical fairy spectrum].

To it, Crow and Mugi are both trans and AFAB; I am trans and AMAB; and my friend Victoria is intersex. All of us are faeries promoting darkness visible, each one a special snowflake [as the chuds so often like to put it]:

[artist: Victoria] 

Each of us represents a genderqueer aspect to existence that abjures heteronormative, thus settler-colonial and Cartesian standards; i.e., to exist despite capital exterminating us, our survival a poetic and revolutionary act of defiance made in defense of nature-as-monstrous feminine raped by state forces.

To it, our whore’s fairytale revenge is to exist in ways of make-believe that—far from being totally fictitious or imaginary—defy total banishment to “pure fiction” by shifting deliberately into half-real territories; i.e., as art that speaks to our lived, GNC realities onstage and off, and that when exposed by us through revolutionary cryptonymy purposefully challenges profit as a structure: in defense of ourselves and our friends emerging from the abject land of faeries [often dark forests, said forest alluding to Dante’s Inferno, but also Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shelley’s Frankenstein and Ovid’s Metamorphoses] to speak to apocalypse. By reversing abjection as dark faeries so often do, we camp the canon; re: punching up at state hauntologies, abjection, and cryptonymy [commonly relaid in monomyth language; e.g., Metroidvania] to break Capitalist Realism to bits! We’re Lavos, but instead of a Greater Destroyer capable of what the state accuses, you have those who walk away from Omelas!

In turn, our wishes are “dark” because they deal in unequal, forbidden trade and radical transformation/desire that upend the current order in pursuit of a post-scarcity world that, while it doesn’t harm others, remains tied to the harmful past as partially imaginary and nebulous; i.e., its plastic, signature poetry sits adjacent to the barbaric historical-material trends of older dead generations [re: Marx, but also the many Gothic castles embodying nature’s dark vitality and demonic desire, power and knowledge]. We faeries camp our own rape, putting “rape” in quotes during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., while highlighting our own queerness surviving campy doubles, said doubles still reflecting unironic copycats felt upon the same Aegis. We are haunted by genocide’s shadows of shadows/castled echo, but camp our profound survival [of these castles] to communicate through Numinous, psychosexual sensation—another sapient trademark the dark faerie subtype excels at! Where faeries are found, castles—usually abandoned—aren’t usually far behind!

This GNC idea of universal solidarity and value through alienation goes beyond Mugi, Crow, Victoria and I; it also includes “non-white” bodies, be those with a different skin color [e.g., vitiligo, in Mugi’s case] but also body type: thicc. We’ve considered this spectrum earlier with Nyx and Annabel—and just now with Mugi, Crow and Victoria—but have yet to explore its monstrous-feminine margins.

[artist: Sinead]

My friend, Sinead, for example, is fat and genderqueer [not a woman, but fae[28]]—much of faer praxial focus centers around fat liberation merged with faerie-style makeup and genderqueer artistic statements altering traditional beauty standards [or shifting to older standards thereof; e.g., the Rubenesque]. Similar to Mugi and I, fae are policed for what makes faer simultaneously forbidden and attractive under state venues: a forbidden fruit that refuses to take the grim harvest lying down! It becomes, for each of us, a “secret self” to de-closet, then camp canon with—having power the state wants to control as “dark,” unholy and “demonic,” during witch hunts stomping faeries.

[artist and model: Sinead and Persephone van der Waard]

Some faeries stomp back. In the poetic language of the Medusa, I’ve drawn Sinead as a fat underwater queen, her tomb a monstrous-feminine place to plunder in the Cartesian tradition: to, in Francis Bacon’s words, “penetrate the womb of nature and torture her secrets out of her.” This translates monomythically to the moving of money through nature in the usual acts, but also sites of conquest: fat and ready for slaughter but also, per Capitalist Realism, presented as abject, Numinous, “asking for it”; i.e., a scapegoat to butcher within endlessly recolonized zones, where men plunge into and prove their manhoods—by raping and reaping nature, which fae and faers Promethean space prevent by fucking back through Numinous anti-predation challenging profit!

As Sinead demonstrates, Medusa isn’t a woman; fae are the dark mother/fat-and-sassy whore whose watery grave [and its riches symbolizing nature’s endless labor value and exploitation] is where stupid, enterprising men go to die the Roman fool [the Gothic operates dualistically through doubles and decay to defeat enemies of nature; i.e., with their own colonizing devices reclaimed for liberatory purposes]! Wrecking ships on theatrical safe “danger” spaces where true death and rape are impossible, the “kraken” takes faer stolen booty back from horny-yet-superstitious plundering idiots—a Great Destroyer striking them ignominiously dead with faer Numinous booty and whore’s revenge! In doing so, fae give rise to a collective mistrust of, and to desire to change, capital’s mistreatment of planet Earth: a Leveler to entreat before it makes good on its name.

To it, fae target the current mechanisms of state as having evolved over centuries out of the ancient world [and Greece and Rome] to exploit nature through the advancement of state trifectas, monopolies and qualities, thus belief systems. Medusa challenges this advancement through artistic statements that evoke the ghost of the counterfeit [through the poetic language of the half-real ancient past] to reverse abjection, thus profit and genocide as things to prevent: showing the state it’s doomed on faer Aegis, and faer own superiority/unfriendliness to profit in the process! So do we become stewards to perform the symbolic death of the state raping us in bad faith, translating through praxial synthesis into activism [thus universal liberation of all work under Capitalism] through iconoclastic art: to make men fear what, for sailors, they are generally at the mercy of. The sea, then, is a cruel mistress who cannot die, but one who properly respected will yield great rewards: not being unironically trapped and isolated by shapeshifting darkness, then buried alive! In other words, quit while you’re ahead!

To it, praxial synthesis is a matter of involvement that leads to development through daily habits cultivating systemic catharsis; re [from Volume One]:

Systemic catharsis requires praxis as conveyed through our extracurricular instruction’s cultivation of good social-sexual habits; i.e., de facto educators relaying a pedagogy of the oppressed through trauma writing and artwork that speak to living with rape under warlike conditions, raising the collective, solidarized awareness and intelligence required towards preventing future abuse (ultimately dismantling the state) [source]. 

However we get involved, universal empathy and resistance to state overtures should be our top priority when triggering the responses we want. In short, we lead by example, advancing awareness and intelligence [thus rape prevention]through our bodies, labor and social-sexual, artistic-pornographic exchanges.

Last but not least, this isn’t always about raw, vaso vagal violence and mutilative revenge [e.g., murder or castration] committed against our abusers; it also includes the whore’s revenge challenging profit [thus rape] by receiving pain in defense of nature-as-monstrous-feminine—i.e., by establishing intersectional solidarity among pain-loving friends, who put “rape” in quotes by receiving pain through what we deliver unto ourselves: as something to delight in because it’s not a terror weapon meant to pacify us, but heal from rape as our revenge by playing with pain in classical ways.

Our shared human struggle, then, includes exposing our pain in ways we paradoxically reclaim in ironically palliative forms; re: through the whore’s paradox, but especially the cryptonymy process: through cheeky “punishment” arguments that show us in control during calculated risk; i.e., through the appearance of impotence, yet deftly wielding things that, exposed as we desire to expose them during ludo-Gothic BDSM, incur the wrath of people who cannot immediately attack us, yet desperately want to in bad faith. Enraging them with our Aegis, our hellish Communist powers occur by outing them, denormalizing their predatory actions [and subterfuge concealing said actions] from safe vantage points; e.g., the buffer of the phone or computer screen, or otherwise physical distance; re: “flashing with power” to those who have it “in spades”; e.g., my friend Rose’s substantial “battlements”:

[artist: Romantic Rose]

To it, faeries are demons, which—while they constitute unequal, forbidden exchange and startling transformation—also morphologically synonymize with habitats whose dark, radical desires upend state control over terror and pain as darkness visible; i.e., in pursuit of post-scarcity with pre-capitalist hauntologies about giving non-harmful pain; re: that of flesh concerned with power and knowledge, linked to buildings; e.g., faerie-castle torture dungeons, appearing to revenge past wrongs but also existing merely to spite genuine abusers! “We can ‘torture’ ourselves, thanks!”

The dark faerie then, becomes someone to perform and savor in the bargain; i.e., “What dost thou want?” as something to act out through cryptonymic activism masquerading as “mere playtime” and guilty pleasure/controlled opposition, yet feels paradoxically genuine in its playful espionage—as naughty but educational in ways that, while they seem wholly doomed/self-destructive, actually prevent rape [cops, by comparison, enforce rape]. Gothic castles are traditionally places of fear and fascination; so when people see a body-like castle or castle-like body on the horizon, they will often be drawn towards it—i.e., as the faerie refrain’s promise of a hell of a good time, including a delivery site to deposit some dark offering or another [and overshadowed by systemic abuse, all the while]!

[artist: Romantic Rose] 

Beyond cum tributes illustrating mutual consent, the prevention of rape happens by one, raising intelligence and awareness to mobilize activism during praxial catharsis; and two, recultivating the Superstructure while simultaneously exposing our attackers in ways they cannot immediately kettle; re: anisotropically reversing the terrorist/counterterrorist argument of monstrous-feminine language during the pedagogy of the oppressed while giving pain during crucial lessons: not all pain is bad, pain is vital towards growth, and pain during sex can enhance the experience[29] and change how we view sex in socialized [ace] forms; i.e., while humanizing those routinely harvested by state forces abusing said language [re: DARVO and obscurantism].

The Gothic, in turn, interrogates trauma and pain through public nudism uncovering dark things/things coded as “dark.” In doing so, it reminds our attackers where such power is normally stored—through workers and their art, but also their bodies and pain as part of the same infernal trade, bouncing back and forth to heal from rape; i.e., by communicating, as people do, in the half-real, castled and demon-fairy codes: of pleasurable pain elucidating repressed, “unspeakable” desires! Whatever investigations of trauma the state impedes, we facilitate through said infernal trading of pain, bondage [the Gothic in love with desensitization and immobilization; e.g., the constriction of one under attack, below] as something they can’t really control: to use at our own risk in ways that lower the odds of actual harm taking place!

[artist: Kingocrsh]

 To it, how would the state begin to abolishing BDSM when it carries such a famous double standard? Furthermore, evocations of rape and harm sit in quotes, thus on the cusp of something Numinous and healing insofar as rape can be healed; i.e., beckoning all who watch, “Come and see!” To the hungry, “Let them eat cake, pudding and pie!” To the combative, “Let them go twelve rounds with the champ!”

[artist: Romantic Rose] 

Romantic Rose, beyond the pre-existing images already shown, deliberately posed for this exhibit—doing so as a dark faerie queen I might play with and illustrate on my canvas to make a larger point about ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., with her massive tits, cute tum, big booty and fat thighs, but also her huge heart and soft words telling me I’m a good girl as we play together! Our joys [and toys] intermingle through the mystery of monstrous-feminine work reclaimed from state alienation and greed in castled forms of courtly love, thereby transforming into something we then show the world as alien to reunite with; i.e., through the demonic creative process purposefully given a magic-faerie stamp about healing from pain by involving it in ways we can control and camp: “her tits were there,” living deliciously in spite of the Protestant ethic [no need for a hasty exit when we’re protected behind a phone screen]! Sometimes, big things are to be used; sometimes, they’re for show—a way to make you wet and/or hard a glance, imagining as you do what is more fun in one’s head than in practice: the anxiety of receiving pain from things that might be a little too big! Faeries of a royal variety tend to be tall; their junk is less reported on historically [ol’ Shakespeare omitted Oberon’s cock size, if memory serves] but often imagined as matching said height in relative length: the carrot-y girth of a hellish botanical’s mondo faerie dong [with many improvised dildos being produce]!

[artist: Romantic Rose]

Keeping with Hell and darkness visible, this generally waits on the cusp of dark, intoxicating discoveries first given shape through games played by a great many users; i.e., through ourselves as controlled pieces of meat, but also our meta performances/playgrounds consciously imbued with dark poetic energies that faeries revel in. We are the witches of our time, the mistress of our own fate—of the universe freed from police abuse, hence beyond what capital orders and exploits for profit—and again, some witches hammer back.

Of course, how they chose to is ultimately up to them, but it usually happens through devices of darkness, power and knowledge recognized by the larger world, under capital—force, yes, but sex through demon BDSM and faerie-like games; e.g., size queens like Rose, above, taking giant artificial cocks for fun—not to please sexist men, but to emasculate abusive parties insecure about them own members and lack of regular sex. In doing so, these behaviors expand beyond what tortures the state permits, our simulacra exposing theirs as dangerous [e.g., death before dishonor] while putting ourselves in performances of “danger” the state will do its best to stamp out. For them, we’re an unweeded garden grown to seed, the state seeking once more to control what it rapes routinely for profit [which is all the nuclear model systemically is]. By stamping the tramp, monstrous-feminine fairy rulers become conspiracies of unironic rape; re: to scapegoat and tokenize through DARVO and obscurantism by state predators, nothing more.

Touched by trauma, survivors of rape always feel somewhat uneasy/off-balance by any setting evoking exploitation and liberation; i.e., on the same dark surfaces and in the same ambiguous thresholds where faeries call home/rule from. To speak to atrocity and feel good as we do is to play under such positions of perceived disadvantage, restless and agitated by otherworldly enchantment and vaso vagal excitement; i.e., unable to fully relax otherwise, even when said disadvantage isn’t obvious and the warning signs are seemingly absent [the violence of the past happening without warning—sudden and extreme at any moment, exigent and warrantless to monopolize such things].

That being said, there is a vestigial and ongoing torturous element, one I’ll keep investigating to conclude the exhibit with; i.e., with Rose a bit more, but also Harmony Corrupted playing the greatest faerie of all—the Medusa!

Trauma is something to live with; for those with a history with or of violence, weird attracts weird, trauma attracts trauma[30] to change the survivor for good. Until the day we die, we feel, like the dark faerie, attuned to self-destruction seeking escape by camping harm; i.e., by cramping their style at the proverbial crossroads, out-fiddling the fiddler with our own faerie glamour as, like all deities according to Blake, residing in our breast! The power to disrupt and offend capital lives within us—not as atomized workers, but a plastic collective whose murky  wisdom reaches backwards and forwards in all directions!

To shake such imbalance, then, and retain our defense mechanisms/”spider sense” regarding hidden dangers, we often “martyr” ourselves together during calculated risk [which public nudism essentially is]—to twitch and moan like convulsionnaires, opening ourselves wide to persecution but also the liberation and acceptance of us as psychosexual beings growing accustomed to a hunted, predated existence we can pierce the fog of war with; re: the faerie’s special sight being the strange, at-times-atrocious appetite for pain acquired under capital raping us for profit, which historically-materially encourage tokenization under criminogenic conditions [re: desperation and convenience]. In our hands, the ritualized administering of pain can happen in ways that are only not harmful, but easy enough to pleasurably control when we otherwise feel out of control; e.g., candle wax poured gently on soft, vulnerable parts of the body like the breasts:

[artist: Romantic Rose] 

If you’re wondering what on Earth might possess someone to try such things, the short answer is “capital.” As such, the female body is classically haunted by pain as something to control under capital’s endless pimping [wax being a medieval sculptor’s analog to human flesh]. To it, Rose takes power as something to subvert and transform into her revenge through things that, generally weighed by virtue of size, become more powerful than her enemies can hope to harvest, contain, enslave or match: obstacles and theatre curtains for them, not Rose [total privacy, safety and consent something of a myth under Gothic’s ongoing surveillance, which provides an odd kind of cloaked honesty in how survival victims often feel: under attack and lied to by home as untrustworthy but without exit[31]]! Per ludo-Gothic BDSM, to heal from rape is to play with rape, and that includes pain and its operatic symbols/decaying rituals honed over centuries; e.g., comfortable discomfort, bold caution, weak strength, honest dishonesty, safe danger and similar oxymorons well-known to people living with trauma not weaponizing it against others.

The perditious, ecclesiastic background remains a common sticking point for Gothic satire; re: Lewis; e.g., the camping of religious rapture and torture-as-canon through psychosexual martyrdom as profoundly tongue-in-cheek, but nevertheless loaded with textual markers [as the Gothic very much is] that allude to actual harm. This extends to those Rose wants to see such things unfold witnessing her emancipation from the weight of survived trauma; e.g., me having Rose pose multiple times in compromising positions [and tortured, penitent outfits of contrition] that, in the wrong hands, might disadvantage Rose, but through us working as a team, weaponize exclusively to our benefit: the faerie queen set free to work her magic on the living world! “C’mon, scrub! Don’t be courteous; slay that pussy! Mommy has needs! Pound me like I owe you money!”

[artist: Romantic Rose]

Shown for my pleasure—but also to make a combined, social-sexual political statement by inspiring me to paint her as a dark monarch afterwards—Rose uses her body to stress our shared agency over such things; i.e., that we, as sex workers, are capable of working together to speak out against genocide for all peoples under capital. We do so by using our bodies and labor through universal liberation; i.e., as active and informed by ourselves contributing to something greater and in development: Gothic Communism. Evoked selectively through monsters—this time choosing faeries that, under a Gothic lens, function as demons do—their hypnotic glamour[32] administers through flesh and the power it holds having an admittedly demonic signature. Ours is the conscious reclamation of demonic poetics during rape play—carefully shaped and positioned to convey the basic human right to exhibit such things however we want; i.e., to negotiate and advertise [sex is power as something to trade through artwork, and porn is artwork that can achieve such activism to a high degree].

This includes rape play as something to champion as faerie-like and demonic; i.e., as a Promethean being to humanize and hug during the dialectic of the alien avenging nature against profit, of which Harmony also volunteered: my Medusa, and someone I engage in consent-non-consent with on a regular basis [next page]. She straight up slaps, but during live burial offers a much-needed boost to keep at it; i.e., when the chips are down and our libidos/anxiety are up inside these hauntological spaces of doom parking atop our usual safe-space residences [the Gothic famously combining cautionary-to-unbridled lust and looming death/rape fears]!

[artist: Harmony Corrupted]

Gothic Communism, then, is something that Nyx, Rose, Annabel, Sinead, Mugi, Crow, Harmony and I do together as friends showing each other off in whatever ways we want to be seen; i.e., as sexy avengers illustrating mutual consent and collective worker action through demonic-yet-sex-positive art exhibits. Rose and Harmony, in particular, grace the cover of several modules for a reason; they are each incredibly kind, honorable and sweet, but also fuckable and fluent in Gothic—i.e., able to work its dated-yet-deathless fetishes and clichés to our collective advantage. When I play with them and my other friends, I feel like I’ve made a deal with the Devil—one whose faerie-like powers set me free, delighting in unknown pleasures couched in prison logic turned on its head. A composite danger disco, they compile a concentric fortress to lose myself in, but also to feel safe from self-righteous, militarily optimistic and tokenized pretenders who hunt us down in bad faith during the liminal hauntology of war/ghost of the counterfeit/Imperial Boomerang’s canceled future [often a vehicle and/or building evocative of an “ancient” tyrant returning to beat us to submission/demand we kneel before them[33]]—someone to believe in when surrounded by so much complicit cryptonymy and neoliberal hogwash.

Keeping with faeries, the idea is informed bliss under Gothic-Communist development; i.e., no gods or masters, just friends who love and protect each other in the struggle to be free from state abuse using the same demon-BDSM language and aesthetic of power and death: what they can’t monopolize, despite stiff competition compelling them to do so! The enemy is unironic oppression and betrayal, thus police actors upholding the state in some shape or form. There is no way to achieve rebellion, thus prevent rape, without resisting and protesting to a meaningful, demonstrable degree; i.e., rebelling against those who uphold these structures, symbolism translating to socio-material change: of criminogenic conditions [and language] towards post-scarcity conditions through medieval poetics reclaimed by workers for those ends. Power aggregates for them, but also for us backfiring their schemes.

Like the Amazon’s fur bikini or nun’s habit, then, there is no way to do this without exposing ourselves to some degree of exposure, thus risk. This vulnerable phrasing includes tracing the anxious spiral of death and decay that breaks how we see the world, whereupon the Aegis becomes something we can use only after the illusions forced onto us since birth are shivered by our demonic theatre, our ludo-Gothic BDSM, magic power and mad science something to behold during the same spaces and personas whose darkness actualizes proletarian needs, not bourgeois ones. Again, such darkness is simply where forbidden dreams [of unequal power and knowledge] come true; re: as a dualistic, dialectical-material matter of revenge through the Gothic’s demonic creative expression, betwixt residence and resident. The idea is to throw aside “no good can come of it” when playing with these notions, and use them to our creative; i.e., to reify what capital denies us: our creative freedom breaking Capitalist Realism paradoxically with darkness; re: something that can be used for liberation or exploitation through discourse about such things, including famous monsters and their lairs: as things to embody struggle with during the abjection process!

Like Egger’s witch, we dark faeries are not waifu. If anything, the power imbalance, stormy disposition, and class character makes that impossible. Instead, through the pedagogy of the oppressed as modular and intersectional, we steer the conversation away from those used to being the center of attention [and always make everything about them; i.e., white cis-het men, or those emulating them, inside the Man Box]. By daring to speak up for ourselves and those less privileged than ourselves in weird-nerd culture, we show strength and vulnerability in equal measure! Revolution is messy but the fact remains, some people are chattelized more than others; those with less privilege will be expected to betray more to elevate, meaning solidarity for and among oppressed groups is incredibly important lest we cannibalize ourselves.

We’re all monarchs under Communism, loves—not defined by skin color or national boundaries but by the bounds we form and make to help one another! Anyone who excludes others to be a king for a day is a traitor and a fool; capital—an unapologetic system of theft—relies on cheap loyalty and quick betrayal to keep the elite in power. No honor among thieves? That’s all capital does, and to not help those in need would be to commit a grave, insurmountable error! We give back to each other by refusing to sell ourselves to the lowest bidders imaginable; we whore ourselves for Gothic [gay-anarcho] Communism: by spitting on Medusa’s trapdoor pussy before we pin her to the wall, lubricating revolution however we can—during explosive combative sex!

[artist: Harmony Corrupted]

Medusa isn’t something that exists in a vacuum, then, nor is it merely a device of police hegemony against criminalized elements who aren’t allowed to resist the state’s sudden and merciless terror attacks; we can take her as a poetic device and embody furious, horny and rebellious aspects of ourselves and our own frustration, yearning and longing the state will only try to rape and repress labor with. Medusa unseals such documentation, herself an “ancient,” found document of the Gothic style.

A new Satanic cathedral, a new master of the universe—us, haunting the counterfeit and abjection process! “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Our fortresses, our operas, our titanic passion something that cannot be contained, silenced or ignored taking us to paradise upside-down [salvation being a metaphor for orgasm that we enact in this life, and pervert in the bargain]! It’s a Gothic castle to give voice to rape by playing with it in “unspeakable” forms/darkness visible we can unpack room by room, at whatever pace we require to heal: to express vulnerability yet gain confidence, self-respect and growth recovering from self-hatred, internalized bigotry and impostor/mirror syndrome, etc, on the same road to Hell; re: the postpunk world-in-decay where rebirth is joyously found, the doomed inside gravitating towards the convulsionnaire’s psychosexual martyrdom and sweet theatrical release promoting better things, mid-infernal-concentric-pattern, mise-en-abyme and Cycle of Kings, etc; e.g., the haunted house, Gothic castle, or circular ruin [see my work on Metroidvania for more examples]: the monstrous-feminine villain of the classic monomyth, reversed through Gothic homecomings to break Capitalist Realism with, inside the same endless loop of dying space-time!

Royalty are fluent in the language of service and bondage; Gothic theatre is a safe, campy space to play with powerful things that people like, including dark faeries that mirror the Gorgon as—above all else—a strict taskmaster and ironically “cruel” mistress [rawr]. Nothing is more powerful or loved/feared than Medusa, a liberated whore reversing abjection on her Aegis; boundless and bare, the dark faerie—suddenly naked—is exposed as mighty-mighty and upon the black mirror’s sleek surface: paradoxically ripe for the taking as she haunts the nuclear model with rape and whose “rape,” during ludo-Gothic BDSM, is haunted by nuclear abuse hunting witches! As Matthew Lewis showed us, we can play and speak to genocide by flaunting pain as an aesthetic linked to sex, but stay able to detach from and camp it with royal aplomb!

To better the instruction and regain control during her revenge against profit, Medusa knows your darkest desires. She’s seen and done it all, only asking that when it’s her turn, you ravish her wrecking-ball ass just the way she likes [with Harmony being agender and fluid in her expression—an avatar of the monstrous-feminine, hence Gothic Communism beyond herself, the war she makes towards liberation seen chaotically on her surfaces and in her dark, wet thresholds]! “There you go! Good boy! Fuck mommy just like that! Mount, now heave to! Ride the lightning all full speed!”

[artist: Harmony Corrupted]

The medieval, faux or not, enjoys marrying popular culture to the language of strength, faulty bloodlines, questionable destiny and weakness [to be weak for someone/show vulnerability around them] that it might adequately speak to larger forces at play/get to the bottom of things [the Gothic loves puns]. Revolution, then, is very much something to get into the mood of through these pernicious elements’ flexible camp and persistently rigid “sticking-to” of our arguments. So push her face down into the bed; stab her demon pussy to humanize the harvest! Fantasies of subjugation/dark mastery go both ways; Gothic Communism brings them [and the dark faerie/whore of nature] out of the bedroom [re: Foucault] and into daily life once more! PRAXIS SYNTHESIZED; Medusa can’t die/always hungers for more cum from gentlemen callers!

More to the point, invoking Medusa’s famous aptitude for punishment [and threshold for pain] becomes an opportunity to let down one’s guard and take homerun-style “power shots” of a controlled and playful variety—to spar more aggressively than you might elsewhere when camping rape with some degree of seriousness! To turn up the heat, mid-kayfabe, Medusa [and her veteran initiative] can give as good as she gets, the exposure of nudity something that bounces pain back less like turtles and more like mating porcupines charging their batteries!

[model and artist: Harmony Corrupted and Persephone van der Waard] 

Something is always given and received per exchange. As Harmony shows us, Medusa is something to perform towards universal liberation by Gothic means and motivations; i.e., by paralyzing capital through rude, alien suggestions of rape putting “rape” in quotes, but haunted by its darker side on the Aegis. So don’t fear the reaper—court her and see what she has to say! Witness, mid-capture, Medusa’s dark castle of unholy butt sex, looming deliciously to devour your misguided sense of piety! To squish your junk and your brain, crushing your stupid, costly preconceptions handed down by bourgeois idiots! To invite you to investigate her tremendous, moon-sized urges and wicked, Kegel-esque palpitations, she’ll have you realize [sooner or later] that all workers are gods waiting to wake up and take back what’s theirs from state pretenders!

Revolution is a duel, and it pays to be awake; a champion galvanizer, Medusa gets your attention and keeps it. So wake up, take hold, and reclaim through faerie apocalypse [revelation]: we can have what we want/need not be careful what we wish for! This realizes during state degrowth, the latter occurring by vacillating chemotherapy—a dark-pulse tone poem pushing forbidden things along while disguising our faerie selves behind earthly “beards”; i.e., as controlled opposition, shrinking the bourgeoisie like a tumor! Animal magnetism sets in among commercialized doubles; we camp canon by doubling it—achieving actual, genuine rebellion that mirrors false, recuperated forms, inside the same Gothic mode. Actual martyrdom haunts nature as our domain, our psychosexual “martyrdom” flaunting our power [e.g., our plunging necklines or short skirts] to fuck with those who can’t rape us short of crossing the lines that we install [re: rape is impossible within boundaries of mutual consent, whose cementing undermines Capitalist Realism and its “boundaries for me, not for thee” nonsense]! Nazis [and liberals/moderates] normalize rape in ways our healing from rape—through the regaining of agency and boundaries, during ludo-Gothic BDSM as a public advertisement—helps prevent!

[artist: Akii Desu] 

Such treatment, and its umbral radiation healing emotional damage with “damage,” requires concentration in multiple turnings of that word; i.e., as a matter of potency and focus, delivered through concentrated forms; e.g. Blake’s corroding fires—to handle with care, but dispense with glee, convincing through the molding of a hellish statuesque by virtue of intense, profound reactions [chemical, physical or otherwise] greasing the wheels. Though merited [and fun] in its execution, the sacking of “Rome” isn’t drama for its own sake, but a performative, collaborative vein of counterterrorist activism; i.e., brothel espionage engaged with and expressed through vintage Gothic theatrics’ opaque transparencies; e.g., bodies, costumes, masks, roleplay scenarios, locations, idioms, medieval nostalgia, bad puns, dirty jokes, hardcore sex and penetration, lewd commentaries, genre conventions and clichés; physiological responses like sexual tension and release, throbbing orgasms, medicinal pain, belly laughter and all-around letting off steam; the assorted emotional thrills, consent-non-consent, torn panties and exposed genitals of courtly love; the Gothic’s obsession with paranormal antics, drama, comedy and all-around mood—all playing with power-as-monstrous-feminine and sex as warlike, stunning and gorgeous. It’s what we’ve been doing for this entire faerie exhibit and indeed, the whole book series: playing with those things that societies the world over value, and which we subvert inside of themselves to help from rape with!

Much of this healing concerns the theft of theatrical devices, onstage and off. Workers steal, cops steal; workers and cops commit violence. Weapons of terror aren’t moral or immoral, then; how they’re used—during oppositional praxis, hence class, culture and race war—is. Less a single exchange [during regular examinations and emergency consultations] and more an ongoing relationship, it’s one that happens as much with mechanism as mechanic on all registers across all groups of workers; i.e., of animals and beings of nature like faeries versus the state and its proponents/doubles tampering with or otherwise intimidating witnesses [through blackmail, extortion, even murder]. One side discourages criminality and rape through doomy language thereof; the other encourages it while reeking like a corpse: a black moon rising but also a string of dark planets seemingly vacant but haunted by Numinous, monstrous-feminine potential!

In turn, faeries are canonically things to be caught, except our beauteous orbs are too big to capture; our praxis, but also our pussies, are wetter and looser than Radcliffe’s probably[34] was, those and other social-sexual implements pulling you under our faerie lakes [drenching spheres] and keeping you there—i.e., during live burial as, per Segewick, a commentary on libido tied to various forces/medieval poetics at work, and which we concern with dialectical-material, not psychological models [again, darkness visible and not the murky and far-less-precise models used by those schools of thought that proceeded Marx, deliberately choosing to ignore the historical-material elements he applied to monsters decades before Freud and company abandoned them]! Pillars of monsters, magic and myth, these dark faeries deliver pleasure and pain to prevent trauma, thus command respect and demand discipline from their bottoms: teamwork makes the dream work, healing from “rape” by playing with it, in quotes. As far as survivors go, we’re preaching to the choir!

[artists (clockwise, starting top-left): Romantic Rose, Sinead, Harmony Corrupted, Nyx, Victoria, Annabel Morningstar, Mugiwara, Crow, and Angel Witch]

 

“PUSSY VANQUISHED” or “PUSSY SLAYER VANQUISHED,” we’ve done this before, but rebellion is repeatedly and collectively seditious; re: a collage-like drum to beat, time and time again, among a polity of co-conspirators [above] breeding rebellion through sex on the brain—as something to chase down/get to the bottom of by restoring the mobility of activism [and critical thought] from its turgid, praxially-inert stasis and shell. We’re not sugar-coating the bitter pill to conceal anything scandalous, but operate through sugar and scandal in faux-medieval to speak to toxic, sinister or otherwise controversial devices that—unobserved and undigested by the picky eaters—can go completely unnoticed. Revolutionary cryptonymy points a big combative sign at genocide to prevent its continuation [often through kayfabe, sex and force duking things out, on and offstage]: a garden of shattered innocence, promoting psychosexual healing through “martyrdom,” cultured intuition, and unbridled passion tethered—if not on actual leads—then through bodies, rulesets, and systems of exchange that ground and facilitate the excitement of such grandiose, out-of-control sensations! So do we go beyond our comfort zones; i.e., seeking satisfaction, we adjust to colder comforts warming our plump godly backsides:

(artist: TMFD)

To it, the Gothic—but especially Gothic Communism—is all about application, practice and informed interactions, not rote transaction; i.e., playing with taboo things that we enjoy camping in non-harmful forms, lowering the odds of systemic harm taking place when dashing Capitalist Realism: through fakery and rituals coded to prevent harm, addressing unspeakable things in ways that give them a language, hence voice to speak out with [which capital tries to alienate us from]. In other words, you are what you eat; we’re a diet of pain prescribed by us, not the state’s harmful, policing varieties! I, for example love sluts and playing with them; i.e., as mommy-like and virally potent, which faeries are, but also, to some degree, make-believe. The cryptonymic, holistic idea is to resonate using controlled substances that, faerie-like and in control, speak to abuse beyond our control that, performed in fake ways, touch on socio-material change through buffers; re: speaking out while protecting ourselves; e.g., we can camp Christianity through faerie-like doubles that—when push comes to shove—let us say to the offended bad-faith parties rattling sabers, they’re “just” faeries; re: the “just play” defense, treating our threats as emptier than they seem, “style over substance.”

While silence is genocide and segregation is no protection from rape—and a bigotry for one is a bigotry for all, requiring universal emancipation—there isn’t a monopoly on dishonesty and the enjoyment of guilty pleasure/demonic speaking through pain, panic and death [dark faeries are death faeries, more or less]. We can lie to protect ourselves, but also be more honest than state proponents with the same lateral, unorthodox devices, enjoying them to endorsing liberation through said machinations [re: Sarkeesian]. In turn, we can be smarter than them when setting up our revelations’ cryptonymic hall of mirrors; re: liberation and exploitation share the same spaces, surfaces and thresholds, but also confused, engorged organs of sight/tools of overall perception and disguise. Forget pocket sand, vivid concealment is the dark faerie’s primary weapon! Borrowed from medieval thought [of torture; e.g., stigmata, below] and inserted into half-real medieval hauntologies and their dark Aegises, we reverse abjection through the cryptonymy process sundering Capitalism Realism with apocalyptic language: to show and behold just that, in the faerie flesh! A Great Destroyer mending through the transmutation of darkness and pain, marrying strict to gentle but carrying the usual otherworldly elements of royal command that dark faeries are known for to escape unironic, non-consensual mastery!

[artists: Romantic Rose]

Milton had the right idea; re: “The mind its own place,” a thing to swell with darkness visible, allowing for expanded consciousness, mid-activism. Faeries, then, make anything possible, insofar as “death” can happen onstage, but also radical wish fulfilment through repressed desires that, sure enough, carry offstage during our aforementioned dark trades; i.e., of darkness visible, which happen through demonic exchange and transformation as an oft-hyperbolic poetic act; e.g., their alter-ego, superhero/supervillain’s too-tall bodies, and too-big boobies [mammoth milkers] and butts’ enormous, immodest implications promising profound, improper revelation while cryptonymically winking sardonic charm/radiating faerie ahegao from the bruised-and-bleeding flesh: about half-real potentialities to tilt towards that, unto themselves, “tilt” [enrage] those of the audience still in Plato’s cave [“If we spirits have offended, think but this and all is mended…”]. The paradox of rape and it’s revenge-made-visible, then—but also the monstrous-feminine as a nurturing-scaring warrior maternal—lies in the immediate visual ambiguity of such reenactments but also the presumed futility in defeating them. Death cannot be conquered, and murder (and rape) always will out. That’s what darkness visible is, and by extension, swole’ demon mommies, which we’ll look at next.

[artist: BS Art]

In this respect, dark faeries [and their infernal castles promoting enormously obscure power] function like Medusa does; i.e., speaking to how rape destroys us [and classically is survived by turning into different objects; e.g., a tree] but, through a radical desire to heal from rape by systemically preventing it in paradoxical ways, becomes the very darkness we’ve been performing this entire exhibit: a world without rape, the power to prevent it in our hands subverting hyperbolic beauty standards by Gothically upending purity arguments! For the capitalist, they cannot foresee such a place; to show such profound and whorish/profane recipients of abuse—out in the open, playing with rape as an exhibit—is to threaten capitalist with a post-rape planet. God forbid, right? The thought turns them to stone.

Like Satan, faerie royals are gods/superhumans. They tower to provide dramatic effect, but also invite troubling comparison; i.e., for recess and relapse, absurdity and surrealism, they double our desires, but also conventional mechanisms of power used at cross purposes during oppositional praxis: curating a reality—one within that classic Gothic half-reality caught between complete fakery and total reality—to engage with through age-old power fantasies, including royalty and their power to change peoples’ lives on a whim [often through ransom and arranged marriages, but also medieval, virgin-queen[35] sex games and all-around Faustian elevation[36]]. And, as anyone skilled in the war of war will tell you, warfare isn’t just on the obvious fields with clear-cut uniforms; it’s a theatre that bleeds into daily life through darkness visible, including sex [especially monstrous sex; re: Amazonomachia more broadly] as something to play out, perform and interrogate while negotiating our rights. That’s ultimately what dark faeries are: a theatre of war through psychosexual weaponry that, true enough, is measured by size and aesthetic, but ratified through sex and force performed among or regarding those devices as demonic, dark-yet-visible; re: Faust and Prometheus.

We’ll examine those devices more, deeper in the module. For now, recall that demons of any kind [not just faeries] seldom stay in churches, and that states [through a Protestant ethic] aren’t overtly ecclesiastical. Nevertheless, there remains a cryptonymic, hidden-visible element of sedition to faeries and their own sense of otherworldly glory making us come [to paradise]—a potential to camp that must be embraced, then crystalized in what we create, playfully developing Gothic Communism using what we got. However we do it—be that armored when nude or nude when armored during the whore’s paradox, through kayfabe as psychomachy or Amazonomachia—we are life and the state is death; the state is ultimately incompatible with us, and we camp its inherently unequal canon from exchange to cryptonymic exchange using our shield-like Aegis to have the whore’s revenge against profit: “No pasarán!” There is always another princess in another castle, the bare and level sands stretching far away as we quest for the Gothic-Communist Numinous, cryptomimetically liberating Medusa during cryptonymy’s praxial synthesis; re: in collaborative exhibits like this one!

So is abjection dialectically-materially reversed through the faerie’s demonic trades, its anisotropic vengeance parsed in cryptomimetic and hauntological arbitration. In turn, such litigation frequently occupies chronotopic spheres [re: mise-en-abyme and castles-in-the-flesh] that freeze our attackers in place with darkness visible. Such oscillating duality and liminality is something to occupy across/upon/within people and place—not to rank rape or justify some variant, but prevent all harm while walking away from Omelas as a group of friends [and friends of friends, of friends of friends, and so on].

Doing show should antagonize and provoke not one, but all: through a similarity amid difference! Found again/for the first time through Gothic paradox and reinvention, we faeries and witches dive into Styx. We do so above water and ground; i.e., out from the forests shrunk by capital and into urban territories made, like Radcliffe’s Black Veil, afraid of such things. Their city streets and night skies clouded with smoke, we make ourselves at home; i.e., when bringing Hell home to ferry you there, too—not as punishment, but invitations one and all calling you back to where you belong! “Hell’s bells, Satan’s callin’ for you!”

So kneel if you want! Just have the courage to step on through…)

“What dost thou want?” Again, the devil is in the details—cloudy from aesthetic but clear as day from a dialectical-material standpoint: challenging profit through the performance of power during ludo-Gothic BDSM; re: specifically that of dark faeries, breaking Capitalist Realism through Satanic (or otherwise abject) wish fulfillment! Their darkness visible promotes a world without end, hitting us where it hurts and pleases to heal from rape. In broaching post-scarcity with medieval pre-capitalist language to have the whore’s revenge, the language of unhappiness can lead to happier spheres, blazing a curious trail in the bargain (not all roads lead to Rome):

(artist: Nico)

So concludes the dark faerie (ruler) collaboration! Next, we’ll examine a no less strict, but openly warrior class of monstrous-feminine (and its fiery and militant examples of the Amazon taken beyond earthly realms)—swole’ demon mommies in a postcolonial close-read about forbidden love!

Onto “‘Trial by Fire’: Swole’ Demon Mommies (feat. Lady Hellbender and Karlach)“!

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Footnotes

[1] Also spelled “fairy,” and referred to as bean sidhe, which translates to “fairy woman/woman of the burial mounds”; i.e., often to a royal degree; e.g., a faerie queen or princess—classically of the otherworld, netherworld, Numinous beyond, Hell, etc. I’ll be sticking to “faerie” for the most part, just to keep things consistent (and because “fairy” often sounds daintier than “faerie”; e.g., fairy princess).

[2] Including verbal abuse; e.g., the speedrunner Bubzia cursing out the boos from Mario 64 during a blindfolded run: “You… stupid, piece-of-shit ghost!” (“I DESTROYED This Blindfolded SM64 Speedrun,” 2024; timestamp: 19:55)

[3] Blood libel, sodomy and witchcraft are all classically criminal charges against non-Christian bodies of the medieval world, which would segue into queerphobia in the 1700s and beyond, under capital (re: “Leaving the Closet; or, a Trans Woman’s Scholarly Contributions to Older Histories of Sodomy and Queer Love,” 2024). So while witch hunts classically targeted Pagan cis women, blood libel targeted Jews, and sodomy targeted homosexual men, these have been reconfigured under neoliberal, late-stage Capitalism; i.e., to select rebellious monstrous-feminine groups in bad-faith, pitting those against good-faith groups using the same aesthetic one is colonizing and the other decolonizing.

[4] Limited by human imagination and desire (for sex, revenge, and other policed areas), which is to say, completely unlimited save how capital shapes our ability to imagine and how we, as workers, challenge that.

[5] Refer to “A Rape Reprise” for my definitions of rape, themselves lifted from the Poetry Module’s “A Note About Rape/Rape Play” and “Psychosexual Martyrdom“).

[6] This being said, Black Phillip is known as a goat who turns into a man; i.e., as the ominous black curtain Eggers torments the audience with and eventually pulls aside, stripping everyone naked. We’ll explore anthropomorphism and “skin-changing” much more in “Call of the Wild.”

[7] The Gothic, as usual, is obsessed with old, vengeful sites/rites of return; i.e., by nature and those “of it” reclaiming the land and the colonial home from current imposters. The reappearance of faerie royals speaks to a postcolonial, hauntological apocalypse where old kings and queens closer to nature, but also their dark gods, come home to roost; i.e., by reminding Christians they never left—that they were never exterminated, thus seek dislocated, aged and alien-faerie revenge from across the sea and into the New World (witches behaving similar to Dracula, but also goblins in this respect, the Puritans having been chased out of England to punch down against older colonial victims: not the Irish and the Catholics or Jewish people, but the witches of Celtic myth borrowed from Samhain and other druidic harvest rituals).

Satan is one such faerie—a dark wishmaster tempting Puritan girls with liberation, till they whither from old age/exposure and become his wicked hags. The harvest is poor for the girl’s family because they’re all on the menu and she, possessed by the bean sidhe* spirit of heretics (the ancient victim/rival of English fanaticism) is killing them, one by one; re: the grim harvest, the revenge of the Corn Lady on those normally holding the sickle!

*Myth commonly occupies a xenophobic track. Bean sidhe—according to English myth demonizing the pre-Teutonic and pre-Norman Celts into the Irish Catholics and secular Irish—were considered a death omen; their shrill, unruly cries, similar to the Medusa’s gaze, were thought to be able to strike the listener dead, once heard! In short, the rage of such ghosts is a black mirror to strike the guilty dead for having stayed silent about rape while alive! It’s a tool of monstrous-feminine revenge, which the colonizer uses against their usual victims; i.e., by turning them into DARVO-style bogeywomen for not killing home rule with kindness! It’s tone-policing tampering with the witness, calling their testimony “poison” to alienate them [divide and conquer].

The purpose of the witch, then, is to carry the Puritan’s guilt of imperial inheritance, which balloons through their own self-righteousness and overdependence; i.e., on invented enemies to aggrandize themselves and rape the land they abject onto their new area of divine providence (whose perceived criminality watches them through the witch’s uncanny animal familiars, framing the American Indigenous in a New England light). The daughter is possessed not by xenoglossia, then, but by anarchist wish fulfillment; i.e., to destroy her family, who she resents as the real criminals; e.g., her teenage brother lusting after her, but also her demented mother slut-shaming her.

In turn, the witch embodies the Sphinx’ Riddle turned on its head, the witch of youthful whore and aged crone hidden inside the mind of an increasingly vengeful maiden evoking the witch at her annoying twin siblings: “But I am that very witch!” She’s a dog soldier guerilla, warring from the shadows; i.e., by changing shape and size, but also age to embody and invoke mass hysteria—the Puritan’s weapon of choice—against them. Lurking in twilight between day and night, familial suspicion convinces her own flesh and blood that she commands nature and dark wishes to turn the Puritans against each other and, in the process, use terror weapons to ultimately undo the bloodline of nature’s enemies; she’s an imposter for what the Puritans call “enemy” (re: Milton’s “arch-fiend”) having chased them out of house and home (the characters—pariahs themselves, banished by a colony of heretics—are often homesick) and denying it to them, here, in a hauntologized, pre-colonial America: the destruction of the nuclear home by its “anti” double changeling.

Per black/white us versus them and the dialectic of shelter and the alien, nature is criminal invading the Puritans’ sense of unsteady home. Satan, in that respect, might seem like Charles Manson and the witch as one of his Manson girls; i.e., bog-standard Gothic, but haunted by genocide as the ghost of the counterfeit. Closer to the mark, he’s a terrorist fighting for land back, dressed up as a gangster/pimp the Puritans can recognize dancing on their graves! Classic centrist projection (of moral teams), and yet the Gothic works through allegory to secret critical thought into viewers’ brains. Eggers stays comfortably inside the Puritan fear space, but despite this semblance of white moderacy devotes the entirety of its runtime to crucify them; i.e., as a black parody of their values, speaking in the language of morality to hoist them on their own petards. It’s a witch hunt, one where the witch hunts the witch hunters. It’s intensely critical of the Puritans, lambasting them in a classic, New-England, Hawthornean polemic obsessed with Salem’s awful reputation and desire for revenge! There are no good witches in Eggers’ film; just black witches having their revenge.

In turn, Eggers’ film is directed at current-day Puritans-by-another-name: Christian nationalists. The victims of the film think themselves righteous, undeserving of violence, but from our perspective they’re the most radical and delusional of them all. They do it to themselves, while those most often forced into monstrous-feminine, scapegoat positions retreat from family life; i.e., as having been designed, from the start, to harm insubordinate, tokenized women, and for which they seek the whore’s black, monstrous-feminine revenge against; e.g., the opening “baby-mashing” scene being phallic and vaginal, the witch’s pestle-like broom and mortar-like bowl an Archaic Mother’s vagina dentata wielded by a phallic woman making chunky baby batter (above) with her enemies’ spawn (terror weapons include horror—to invoke disgust and dehumanize one’s victims); re: Lady Macbeth: “Come to my woman’s breasts, / And take my milk for gall, you murth’ring ministers, / Wherever in your sightless substances / You wait on Nature’s mischief!” It’s an identity and taboo (unthinkable*) act of defiance told through monstrous argument—the land defending itself from Divine Right and Manifest Destiny by reversing abjection at the source: wolfing down the next-in-line! “Stare and tremble!” Matthew Lewis is alive and well (whose novel, The Monk, also features a famous scene with a dead rotting baby crawling with worms)!

*With infanticide DARVO being a classic weapon of settler colonists, who use their women and children as human shields. The witch reduces the baby (whose pregnancy historically embodies a threat of death and enslavement to married and unmarried women, alike) as something to render down and empower her disgusting revenge (death from the skies)! Furthermore, the wet slapping sound of the witch’s broom during the infanticide scene plays later in the film; i.e., when the then-widowed mother “turns,” seeking revenge against the surviving daughter—by accusing her of seducing father and son! Incest and infanticide, Horace Walpole’s Mysterious Mother once again leaps to mind!

So if you find yourself chilled and quaking in the witch’s indeterminate presence and feeling sorry for the Puritans (who are made by Eggers to be as incompetent and unlikeable as possible), it’s merely a reminder of your own privileged position wreathed in ghostly counterfeit, but also the call of the void towards more humane orders of existence couched in barbarity. That’s what dark faeries classically portend, however unsightly they come to us in our dreams (re: like Satan, disguised as a toad to tempt Eve in her sleep): to pour sweet poison in our ears, and cloud our eyes with crystal darkness!

[8] Cameron doing so in the style of the noir and Western, but also zombie film turning the police into a victim of their own abuses come back to haunt them; i.e., from the tech-noir retro-future! Doing so carries a rebellious signature (if not downright conviction, in Cameron’s case) because the slasher’s normal, canonical usage is to scare teenagers into not having extramarital sex; i.e., while being a guilty pleasure that, among couples married or not, is used to excite particular fears and, sure enough, raise libido in times of perceived danger/elevated panic (with the heroes of the movie fucking while on the run from their tireless assassin). Per Hogel, the middle class eats that shit up (re: through various fandoms and refrains, above), driving the process of abjection to feed the profit motive.

[9] E.g., Link, the Hero of Time from Zelda, capturing smaller faeries in bottles, but gaining boons at faerie fountains housing Great Faeries he cannot bottle (re: size difference)!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

[10] One of dark, vengeful, monstrous-feminine gods; re: Creed and Freud, vis-à-vis Medusa.

[11] Darkness and chaos being classically female; re: Jung’s female chaos dragon.

[12] Re: Titania being a stand-in for Queen Elizabeth, a woman who never married or bore children, which Shakespeare, a gay man, envisioned as our aforementioned fairy queen from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

[13] The Gothic loves violent sexual metaphors, which speak adequately to queer hyphenations of criminal sex and force that, just as well, speak to demons and their psychosexuality at large: the faerie ornamentation of violence, but also the its rude slumming (re: gentrification and decay).

[14] A classic Gothic signature, alongside live burial tropes and the decay of state mastery through various fetishes and clichés, and dated, revived conventions stressed for their simultaneous age, barbarity and profound regeneration. These sit in between boundaries concerned with sex as a weakness, but also a death warrant that executes when consumed; re: sex equals death when one’s virtue is “weak.” The Gothic, cloaked in the spectre of organized religion and the Protestant ethic, camps such nonsense inside of itself.

[15] Re: ACAB and ASAB. The state and its traitors (cops) exploit and rape everything for profit, thus control—the two historically-materially going hand-in-hand; i.e. through state illusions and force, thus neoliberal reinvention (mis)using such methods on a regular basis. These include corruption, lobbying and bribes, but also police brutality and various other activities (espionage, assassinations, etc) occurring onstage and off. Less a corrupting of the system and more lubricating it through boom-and-bust with the trifectas, monopolies and qualities of capital, these are things working very much by design. Profit, above all else, facilitates the half-real mechanisms at work, including genocide (war and rape) as a simple consequence of state and corporate operations. They only exist to exploit nature and workers as monstrous-feminine (re: through the usual ethnocentric, canonically essentialist revenge arguments), but that’s all the state is made to perform: divide and conquer for profit, that’s it.

Furthermore, said motive might be haunted by older forms of empire (the ghost of the counterfeit), but within the present state of affairs, profit supersedes these ghosts, which it pimps out in some shape or form; it charters them in the same mapped-out spheres, like everything else. So while everyone likes the whore, the state needs her as something to attack/surrender territory to before clawing it all back: holding a gun to nature’s head, forcing sex in a rush that, turning her into carrot and stick, takes away all choice. Everything is taxable, written up as “the cost of doing business.” Unequal, myopic, panoptic—the state works for one purpose, regardless of scope and scale: to privatize thus exploit and reduce everything to profit; i.e., free enterprise (which neoliberalism is) and negative freedom for the owner class, hence billionaires.

[16] While both animals are known for their cute battle cries, rain frogs are further referred to as “potato fairies.”

[17] I.e., Scott’s film emblematic of Shelley’s Frankenstein novel, both haunted by Red Scare vis-à-vis Invasion of the Body Snatchers from 1956 onwards, the latter inspired by Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” or At of the Mountains of Madness from the 1930s, H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds from 1898, and older xenophobia/Orientalism from Conrad, Poe, and Radcliffe, etc, reaching back into Antiquity’s fear of the legendary guerilla and barbarian general, Hannibal (who Scipio Africanus defeated in battle, only doing so after Hannibal’s famed crossing of the Alps).

[18] Re, Chris Baldrick’s introduction to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (2009): “For the Gothic effect to be attained, a tale should combine a fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration” (source). This, for us whores, becomes something to thrive inside, regenerating like a zombie might, but also a demon; i.e., the faerie, in its chrysalis, changing shape to better suit itself in a hostile environment.

[19] Labyrinths, like any dungeon, aren’t cheap. The Labyrinth of Crete, for example, was designed for King Minos by Daedalus and his son, Icarus. By comparison, Gothic fiction miraculously takes what is normally expensive and lets anyone design any cathedral they wish (often with as little as their naked bodies)!

[20] The slots in castle walls from which arrows, bolts and other missiles were fired from relative safety.

[21] A violent outburst of a given crop preventing holocaust (re: “Disgustipated” and “the cry of the carrots”) by turning the harvest back on itself—with ass being a much-needed spice to revolution! Anyone can be a faerie/use faerie devices as weapons of terror to shock and dismantle the state and state bigotry (as racist, sexist and homophobic, etc). Like the human body as something to advertise, such weapons take infinite forms (and beckon “sodomy” as anything extramarital/non-PIV that stalls state engines with; e.g., oral or anal, but also even more repulsive [to the state] forms of kink I don’t tend to advertise); i.e., Crawford’s invention of terrorism and Asprey’s paradox of terror become, per my arguments, Amazonian devices of terror (re: anal sex and similar sodomy devices) that apply neatly to our work: turning the state—normally hunting and pimping nature through its own monopolies—into something workers and nature hunt in response by showing them our ass humanized under demonizing conditions; re: “darkness” being anything that upends state order by iconoclastic means! To cover up is to segregate and silence, thus sentence ourselves to our fate.

[22] The text featured on Nyx’s Twitter banner image; emphasis, me.

(source)

[23] Including the battering of housewives and similar victims’ confusion of predatory/prey, pleasure/pain, fight/flight and vaso vagal, which other animals can’t experience or perform (for sex-positive or sex-coercive reasons) like humans (and their Gothic parentage) can.

[24] For a good example of this from the Undead Module, consider “Away with the Faeries; or, Double Trouble in Axiom Verge” (2024).

[25] What Horace Walpole called “secret sin; [an] untold tale, that art cannot extract, nor penance cleanse” from The Mysterious Mother (1768); re (from Volume One):

The Western world is generally a place that testifies to its own traumas by fabricating them; i.e., as markers of sovereignty that remain historically unkind to specific groups that nevertheless survive within them as ghosts of unspeakable events linked to systemic abuse. Trauma, in turn, survives through stories corrupted by the presence of said abuse. There is a home resembling a castle, where a ghost—often of a woman—lurks inside having been met with a sorry fate (source: Healing from Rape,” 2023).

That story was about double incest; any reclamation we enact (about rape and general harm) is generally couched within poetry and mythmaking to some extent—if not because what we say is false then because it will be treated as false, mythical, or otherwise make-believe (as faeries are). Paradoxically, the Gothic castle works as a way to process things that will otherwise be denied outright. The effect is less a strict, positive-sounding euphemism, and more a sex symbol that expresses through violence to conceal sexual abuse (and pleasure) behind; re: the cryptonymy process pointing to all manner of things inside the inky charnel house—where such things get up and move around in uncanny (animate-inanimate) miniature and gigantic forms (often suits of armor)!

[26] For the power of speculation as highly developed; i.e., owing to capital being less developed than it currently is; e.g., Radcliffe’s painterly view of the world in a, at times, very literal sense:

One of the unique aspects of Ann Radcliffe’s novels is her emphasis on landscape. […]

Similarly, theories of landscape are tied to particular settings in the novel. The three main settings for the novel are the different “homes” that Emily inhabits: La Valée, the castle of Udolpho, and Château-le-Blanc. La Valée “is a sheltered and highly sentimental world, a version of a Rousseauian ideal community,” (Kilgour, 114) where Emily “receives a moral and sentimental education from her father,” (Murray, 115) St. Aubert. Emily will take with her the moral lessons of her idyllic home to a more hostile landscape, as is captured by the Castle of Udolpho. Thus, La Valée and Udolpho represent the beautiful and the sublime: “[p]leasurable sentiments characterize the first world; sensations of terror characterize the second. Obscurity replaces light, mystery replaces openness” (Murray, 115). Situated on a towering mountain in the Apennines, the castle of Udolpho is “[s]ilent, lonely and sublime[. It] seemed to stand the sovereign of the scene, and to frown defiance on all, who dared to invade its solitary reign” (Radcliffe, 227).  The Château-le-Blanc, in contrast, contains elements of both the beautiful and the sublime; it is a more ambiguous space (an ancestral castle that is modernized by its owner), in which Emily has to negotiate between appearance and reality (Murray, 128).

Like the characters’ relation to nature indicates their moral character, so the setting’s relation to the surrounding landscape reveals the character of its owner (Kilgour, 119). For example, La Vallée is in harmony with its surroundings, reflecting the moderation and virtue of St. Aubert, while Udolpho reflects Montoni’s tyranny by dominating the landscape (Kilgour, 119). In this sense, setting takes on aspects of character, like the Castle in Walpole’s Otranto [source: WordPress, “Landscape, Setting, and Character,” 2011].

These castles embody a particular point of worldview we can embody for the duration of the novel, but take it outside itself to shape our own works; e.g., my books informed, love it or hate, by Radcliffe!

[27] Aka “geometries of terror”/the infernal concentric pattern (re: Aguirre); i.e., with false walls and floors, but also memories about concealed dreaded evils (re: Radcliffe)!

[28] Faers pronouns include: fae/it (any neos/they/he).

[29] Especially when a former victim’s survival mechanism has been damaged, the line between pleasure and pain blurred, but also predator and prey! Simply put, the bigger the trauma, the more usual psychosexual spaces (and their palliative-Numinous evocations) are.

[30] A saying I’ve evoked in the past when writing about trauma as something to revisit:

There clearly isn’t a monopoly on empathy as expressed through monsters, magic and metaphors—including big ones (castles), but also schools of these things playing with the ghost of the counterfeit; e.g., Radcliffe and Lewis’ Schools of Terror and Horror, but also intimations of general-purpose “necromancy” or goth culture as a psychosexual, monomythic (adventuresome) performance with kayfabe elements: “Zombie Marx or Zombie Twain? Choose your fighter!”

Nevertheless, our juggling and balance in whatever contributions we can supply is important. Again, don’t suffer for your art if you can help it. But also remember that trauma attracts trauma, weird attracts weird. The idea is to combine them in ways that alleviate sickness, stress, tension and harm, but also avoid predation by perfidious elements in our daily lives coming from structural abuse: the Gothic castle as a beacon to attract and house the like-minded while the state tries, as it always does, to dominate us through its own victims.

Yet despite having previously discussed martyrs as a powerful form of reverse abjection, it’s not something that should be shot for each and every time. It’s done out of pure necessity and frustration, which we want to move away from. A classic (thus sacrificial) state of grace is no substitute for systemic change. We need to be more constructive and inventive when the options are available; i.e., to offer up enriching poetic gestures that lead to socio-material change without us dying routinely and en masse as a result (as the rats who follow the Pied Piper do). “Magic, myths and monsters” means taking what we need and putting things that seem like they won’t fit together together and passing through barriers that, for the Gothic, is a piece of cake (see, below) [source: “A Song Written in Decay,” 2024].

(artist: Cuwu)

The idea is to learn from our collective but also individual past mistakes; re: “to dominate us through its own victims”; e.g., Jadis dominating me and me revisiting the grave of our relationship to ruminate on our abuse as something exchanged between us, them to me:

Weird attracts weird, trauma attracts trauma. I don’t wish to hide the fact that I loved and made allowances for my abuser because I most certainly did (and still am always reminded of that, through these rememories of them). Nor do I wish to change them, after the fact. That only happens when they decide to (and until then, they simply take and take, having no reason to change). To my most antagonistic abuser (the most Hurtful Abuser Award actually goes to Zeuhl, oddly enough), I merely wish to leave some parting words as we begin our segue into the sorts of monomythical forms you were doubtless inspired by when brutalizing me (source: “Escaping Jadis; or, Running Up that Hill,” 2024).

Only by interacting holistically and repeatedly with the past as “past” can we build devices to play with and prevent the same old mistakes on a systemic level

[31] Escape of the maze, in Gothic, happens inside itself.

[32] The radiative aura that faeries classically exude, used to paralyze the recipient(s) witnessing it. In regal terms, it could be called “majesty” but often likens to a vain, drug-like torpor not unlike vampires and their own seductive charm.

[33] Per the master/slave dynamic, which in Gothic, is often code for more prurient activities demanded by rulers of their slaves; e.g., “kneel” = “suck my cock.” They’ve come to be the rulers of you all!

[34] Though given her secretive nature—and tendency to write what, for all intents and purposes, is torture porn—I’d hazard to guess that ol’ Radcliffe probably experienced more than her fair share of wet nethers!

[35] Extending to royals not expected to produce a male heir to the throne; i.e., aristocratic privilege, romanced in Gothic fiction since Walpole and through the chronotope as saturated with such promises: of sex and force from a dynastic hereditary standpoint (re: Bakhtin). In short, power is measured in space and time through marriage as traceable through motion as much bloodline, the two hardly separate in Gothic stories throwing them into dis(re)pute!

[36] Generally through sacrifice during quid pro quo.