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

Click here to see “Deal with the Devil’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).

Concerning Buggy Images: Sometimes the images on my site don’t always load and you get a little white-and-green placeholder symbol, instead. Sometimes I use a plugin for loading multiple images in one spot, called Envira Gallery, and not all of the images will load (resulting in blank white squares you can still right-click on). I‘ve optimized most of the images on my site, so I think it’s a server issue? Not sure. You should still be able to access the unloaded image by clicking on the placeholder/right-clicking on the white square (sometimes you have to delete the “?ssl=1” bit at the end of the url). Barring that, completed volumes will always contain all of the images, whose PDFs you can always download on my 1-page promo.

Trial by Fire: Demon Muscle Mommies (feat. Lady Hellbender and Hela, The Shape of Water)

Some people say my love cannot be true
Please believe me, my love, and I’ll show you
I will give you those things you thought unreal
The sun, the moon, the stars—all bear my seal

—Ozzy Osbourne; “NIB,” from Black Sabbath (1970)

Picking up where “‘I’ll See You in Hell’: opening and part one (dark faeries)” left off…

Whereas “Darkness Visible” concerned dark faeries and their subversive ability to get what they want through the aesthetic/collaboration of psychosexual force, their reenactments sometimes had a gentle femme dom character to them. By comparison, “Trial by Fire” considers the fiery “swole'” aspects of the monstrous-feminine that lean towards a stricter side of things: the demon muscle mommy’s staunch command over nature, and notable intimidation factor during deals; i.e, as whorish, illegitimate traders in lethal force that threaten others in Amazonian ways, and whose revenge (against profit) burns with sulfurous hellfire. It’s more blunt and less ambitious, brute force a bit easier to define than darkness visible/the controversial voice of the royal damned; i.e., such matchmaking is short and to the point, these hellish, brutish herbos burlier and more direct, action-packed contenders than their glamorous, brawl-averse faerie cousins. With their taut, muscular bodies, these sexy warlords barrel headlong into danger as something to reenact and wrestle with—a compelling argument of psychosexual force they catalyze/visit on others during the dialectic of the alien’s faux-medieval monster-mom battle sex!

(artist: Ellie Maplefox)

Before we dive into the exhibit, a short explanation on demon mommies themselves, followed by their relationship to the imaginary medieval, ending on several distinctions between them and dark faeries (about eight pages):

Demons muscle mommies (which we’ll shorten to “demon mommies,” from here on out) speak to candidly smutty subject matter (and a classically female readership) that denotes a male/GNC female submissive fantasizing about a monstrous-feminine dominant. Such are Amazons, and by extension, demon mommies as an arguably more criminal, hellish variant (our emphasis again being the royal variety—the bandit queens); it’s a performance to do for themselves, but still have a broader audience that evolves and changes over time. They are demon whores and lovers courting prey-like mates through classic kayfabe shock and awe, but also sex and force relaid as a kind of sacrificial “tease”; re: of rape and revenge (often murder) suggested through paradoxically Faustian trades that, as usual, threaten rape as a bread-and-circus matter of capture (unequal power and harm); i.e., as something to normally distance ourselves from, the bargain tearing the recipient limb-from-limb (deals with the Devil are seldom healthy or fair): a childless monarch unchained from reproductive sex, yet one who obviously knows her way around prurient courtship and its horny terror language endemic to underworld locales. To say there isn’t some kind of theatrical tension because of that is to have seriously tuned out during the original story!

Faust aside, “Trial by Fire” specifically operates through a postcolonial urge of forbidden love: to have our whore’s revenge, doing so through Lady Hellbender (and similar militarized, conspicuously muscular beings—Karlach and Hela, but also male demon lovers, to be holistic; e.g., the merman from Del Toro’s 2017 The Shape of Water). Our emphasis explores gladiatorial violence among such locales; i.e., not so much in the act of poetic creation, itself (through darkness), but the iron-grip wielding of unequal power during ludo-Gothic BDSM. Dominants, bondage and collars—the sub wears the dom’s yoke during calculated risk/a palliative Numinous to paradoxically perform unequal power and relieve stress from past abuse as poetically inherited from total history’s real and imaginary factors; e.g., demon-mommy muscles threatening castration and forced sex, emasculation well-at-home in a Neo-Gothic faux-medieval whose retro-future menace acts as a wraith-like infiltrator of the present space and time: the cushy-yet-recent Western idea of safety and privacy!

To relax, the middle class—who, fearing the deprivation of recently-granted rights by a decaying state apparatus (sticking its assassin’s head into seemingly safe spaces like the bedroom, actually still haunted by rape, of course)—began, back then and now, to dread the ghost of the barbaric past (and its shakier foundation’s unheimlich notions of ownership, illegitimate force, violent sex and brutal revenge). Whenever and wherever they perform these things, their privileged fantasies seek to sever danger from harm by faking it; i.e., in ways that can bring informed workers closer to nature as something they subsequently fetishize with the hauntological aesthetic of medieval acquisition and consummation: the princess dominated in bed extending to the entire castle, except per the demon mommy archetype has classically swapped genders!

Furthermore, the “castle” during the liminal hauntology of war is a normal home (or person indicative of the home; e.g., a housewife or housemate) adopting medieval intimations. “Home,” in the medieval, was a place where sex didn’t happen in the bedroom alone (re: Foucault), and whose taboo, aristocratic violence reliably attached to powerful structures (and their infamously cruel rulers) passed down onto more ordinary-looking people and places. Surviving bourgeois hegemony that decays back into older violence caged by capital, these same people—having received the chronotope’s oversaturation of displaced, fearsome legends (about raw material and sexual exchange)—may speak to one another during the cryptonymy process about such abuse happening around them; i.e., by showing others that we live in Gothic times: the Destroyer on the surface of smirking whores! So can our playtime put “rape” in quotes and a cap on actual harm; i.e., any caused by the bourgeoisie.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

The Gothic plays with rape made alien by capital, flirting with chivalry-as-dead brought back to life; i.e., as Walpole once did with glee. Beyond castles, then, its bastard, danger-disco husbandry includes brutal trades during ludo-Gothic BDSM that speak to the ravishing character of older times, minus the harm. They involve the whispered reprisals of banditti henchmen, but also those who typically paid them; i.e., the unscrupulous ladies and lords, but also their classic sites of pretend, questionable, yet ultimately enormous power (re, from Volume Zero: power is something to perform). This means their long-lost castles, deep dungeons and stolen rituals, but also fabulous riches, treasure, and loot overshadowed by blood-money conquest and a disturbing knack for skullduggery (often through gratuitous shows of force; e.g., defenestration).

All encompass power through the law as literally tied to their dubious bodies and bloodlines—crowns and scepters, to be sure, but also the Amazonian idea of warrior culture and strength of a conspicuously athletic sort: the wrong side of the law something to administer in our favor that, all the same, rules/fuels through violence, lust and fear (medieval sovereignty backed up through force)! Experienced diplomats in might-makes-right, demon mommies are bandit queens and black hell knights who let their fists (and thighs) speak for them, doing so that others might defer to their legendary expertise—as judge, jury and executioner!

In short, “the medieval” is a place to fear returning to the present (the return of the assassin, phantom, rogue, tyrant, etc), but also where a great deal of control might be found by reversing state terror weapons in ways that Walpole himself famously did, through counterfeit and camp; re (from Volume One):

While Baldrick also argues how the likes of Walpole use this dichotomy to both erode the presumed “superiority” of classical culture and to fear the medieval world as a dark and brutal place amid this ghost of the counterfeit, I posit that Baldrick is astoundingly incorrect in assuming that

Unlike “Romantic,” then, “Gothic” in its literary usage never becomes a positive term of cultural revaluation, but carries with it […] an identification of the medieval with the barbaric. A Gothic novel or tale will almost certainly offend classical tastes and rational principles, but it will not do so by urging any positive view of the Middle Ages (ibid.).

Yet, this incorrectness stems from the invented, imaginary past as “medieval” in ways that potentially rewrite the conventional wisdoms regarding said past… which Baldrick conveniently ignores. Indeed, the kinds of stories Baldrick is writing about were predominantly written by white, cis-het men and women centuries ago, when queer discourse was in its infancy and racial bias was phased out of the conversation through regressions to a pre-fascist 15th century that was more interested in enjoying one’s privilege and playing silly pranks.

This brings us to Horace Walpole, the writer of the first Gothic novel and an ostensibly homosexual (or ace) man who devoted most of his relatively long life to making Gothic not just a label to describe the medieval period, but literally a specific style of campy fakery used to embellish the present space and time through intentionally a historical reinvention: the castle where such oddities could be found and observed (source).

This same silly-serious idea extends to the people of castles, which demon mommies easily qualify as: queens of Hell if Hell were a neo-medieval wasteland.

To it, ludo-Gothic BDSM is supposed to be thrilling and fun, but also adequate in ways polite discourse seldom is; i.e., by recreating a crude return to the tyrannical home suddenly doubling one’s own through larger dialectical-material forces, but closer to a frank medieval voice that, akin to Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale,” is completely vulgar and bananas[1] but invested in the closeness between sex and death, food, and a variety of other poetic devices. When playing with violence and sex as people from the Gothic or Neo-Gothic periods actually did, a reunion with things capital has tried to alienate workers from/with can be a struggle but also a game to delight in; e.g., like Monty Python in the 1960s, but also more recent media getting into the same Walpolean spirit—smiting a dragon (the Capitalocene) about the bollocks!

(artist: Tony Sart)

The Gothic, though historically reviled, critically panned and treated like crude garbage by prude snobs, was and is absurdly popular—not because it was counterfeit or counterculture alone, but inventive, hilarious and badass in equal measure; i.e., graveyard sex through fetishes and clichés, miracles and mad science (staged battles through popular binary arguments’ threatening contrast: good vs evil, reason vs madness, big vs small, tight vs loose, nature vs civilization, men vs women, virtue vs sin, us vs them, black vs white, cops vs victims, etc), but also bluffs, gambits, fakeries and bastard shams delivering clarity through confusion as something of power/power-adjacent to perform and perceive; e.g., fake funerals, marriages, bloodlines, duels, scandals, servants and sidekicks, etc, but also demon castles summoned/sought out for their naughty reputations (of vaguely “dark” monster sex), then traveled to in order to temporarily lose control/radically transform into or in relation to demon mommies!

The adventuresome thrill of the castle’s opera/danger disco—steeped in bogus superstition, demented emotions, and a hellish charge (adjacent to generational abuse, but also a Gothic potential to shift away from Capitalism)—is both larger-than-life and largely the life and point of Gothic argument (to have power over others and vice versa), but also its vector! “A girl can dream,” as the saying goes, and there’s nowhere we’d rather be (a home away from home to let off steam with, but also consume canonically forbidden ideas, letting our hair down); demon mommies denote a statuesque presence of strength that reflects classic forms of violence back towards the usual givers of it by the usual receivers; e.g., from women to men! If the dark faerie is the queen of terrors through darkness personified, the demon mommy (as we’re expressed it, here) is the champ when it comes to brute force, complete daring and physical, heated persuasion (unequal power and dark desire expressed through a sexualized form of combat theatre; re: kayfabe and Amazonomachia).

Several more distinctions, then, before we dive in (three pages). There’s an undeniable element of fabrication with demon mommies, but one attached to real people (versus something completely artificial, which doesn’t have rights). A byproduct of the tawdry and salacious gossip of enterprising-yet-bored housewives (which Radcliffe most certainly was), they’re queens of firepower versus darkness. Even so, both demon mommies and dark faeries embody a kind of abject alter ego that plays out the alien, repressed feelings of oppressed groups, onstage and off: generational anger and revenge, desires to assimilate—even murder and rape! As such, they (and their organs of violent perception) remain prime candidates; re: for forbidden love as a postcolonial device told playfully through Amazonian terror language coming from Hell, especially wrestler’s kayfabe. Except, whereas a dark faerie might barely lift a finger to get what she needs, the demon mommy—while certainly no dummy in her own right—will happily do all the heavy lifting (a total thigh queen, below) while hunting for heads, herself[2]!

(artist: Ickpot)

Whereas the dark fairy is commonly femme and enchantingly mysterious (marking her prey with ropes, teeth, glamour and darkness), the demon mommy is shrewd, spicy, masculine and firm; both can capture their prey but she takes hers by force—i.e., direct and without guile, opting to smash and grab through underworld might versus stealth and overtly/exclusively feminine sex appeal (said femininity always occupied by an alien masculine [monstrous-feminine] element). She’s competent and battle-tested, a firebrand freak of nature (from a traditional, heteronormative standpoint) whose hauntological, faux-medieval qualities patently evoke “strict” versus gentle domination; i.e., psychosexual, vaso vagal, and predator/prey[3] confusions of danger and protection the Gothic (and its imaginary warrior-queen cavaliers) are known for, and which genuine abusers—e.g., Jadis or Zeuhl—don’t have a monopoly on!

To it, the demon mommy comes from a house where peace is a stranger and war a welcome friend—a survivor of assassins, vendor of malice and purveyor of strict therapy through lucid nightmares lending the Amazonomachy‘s already medieval, military and hostile gravitas an extra hellish bent. She’s a vice character of sorts—bare and naked, an imposing “tank girl” distraction that roars loudly in ways unbefitting the Western maiden/state modesty argument, but presents precisely for those reasons in canonical circles: the femme fatale/sexual weapon/monster to love, but also routinely defeat and cage because she’s on-fire with hellish energies; i.e., too hot to handle, thus assimilate! Medusa, in this case, is always an antagonist to some degree, because the state requires one to exist and project their own police abuse onto. For them, Galatea is always Pygmalion’s bitch, the warrior whore trapped in his endless shadow and blamed for state shift; re: the Medusa bogeywoman.

Of course, everyone loves the whore; canon does so because her summoning becomes a euthanasia refrain to maintain the status quo with during times of crisis. The Nazi leader and Communist queer inhabit the same kayfabe space and bodies; e.g., Zod and Faora (the latter a Nazi werewolf woman, warrior whore and knightly wet dream for Zack Snyder’s neo-conservative superhero vehicle) appear menacingly in Man of Steel (2013); re: during the liminal hauntology of war… only to be bested and defeated after chewing the scenery and kicking absurd amounts of ass; i.e., during the usual copaganda displacements of controlled opposition/false rebellion. Every Radcliffean scapegoat needs a cop to bury them—a rugged, phallic jester dancing in the king’s court, these usurpers brandish a black mirror to suggest state fallibility (only to have a dashing hero sweep these feelings aside, breaking the mirror [and the oracle] in the process). Through fascinating fascism, the enemy is both weak and strong!

Sex and force, then, can produce/cater to remarkable tension and/or release, but the demon mommy is often relaxed, in this respect; i.e., she’s done this before, at home with the language of masters and slaves, aristocrats and serfs, which she combines through herself. Certifiably queenly but still putting in work, she’s not above dirty jobs—an expert jouster happy to take the reins and get down; a strong-thighed Queen Bee at Castle Sodom, her reputation for extreme behavior proceeds her (and whose poetic maneuvers excite similar emotions through vulgar puns[4] and, in case it wasn’t already obvious, heroic-villainous body language)!

She’s also hungry and ambitious, possessing a ravenous royal appetite formerly known to kings that—among a female/partially feminine body—is unequivocally monstrous-feminine. Demonstrating that appetite, she runs the risk of passing traditionally manly qualities onto helpless maidens exposed to someone other than their promised husbands! In short, she’s temptation incarnate, but works through a kind of gender swap importing the Amazon style onto more recent medieval hauntologies; e.g., castles, servants and unequal, nigh-scandalous breeding scenarios; i.e., a window into an older and scarier but also fascinating and partially imaginary world! Of knights and damsels, but also ladies bearing less virtue and more lust, such spaces turn regular life under capital inside-out; i.e., a Rabelaisian carnival where the exploration of what is normally denied becomes, itself, boldly normal: ringing the Devil’s doorbell!

(artist: Bold Vid Studio)

It might sound odd to white, straight, middle-class women in the Imperial Core nowadays, but women hardly more than a century ago were considered property by the state, of which having extramarital sex (or fantasizing about it in monstrous language) was a common mode of recourse/revenge for these kept persons: to “violate” ourselves, but also the state-assigned boundaries caging us that older authors projected onto a foreign exotic or dated imaginary. What, for older generations, was a push towards liberation for some (fascist feminism), we want to push towards universal liberation. This happens through the Gothic mode, including the consciously ironic language of alienation, scarcity and discord that subversive demon mommies represent; i.e., working towards regular shelter and comfort (often sex), their paradoxical protection realized through such tantalizing “Beauty and the Beast” what-ifs (the marriage of the Ancient Romance and ordinary novel to escape past barbarities, once summoned; re: Walpole’s vague castled forgeries).

To it, the Gothic and its imaginary medieval is the quintessential site of rape play waged by the middle class (and other workers, upper and lower) for different reasons (often at odds); mutual consent during rape play/deep passion is good praxis, provided the “rape” is actually in quotes. The concept is to tantalize with excitingly “dangerous” roleplay scenarios, the use of a threatening “lance” inviting the size queen’s warrior boast during rough, suitably passionate sex, “That all you got, motherfucker? C’mon, fuck me like you mean it!” Hair down, pussies out, girls (who’s fucking who—the power of knowing the courtly exchanges per network—something to arbitrate through girl talk’s anger/gossip, monsters and camp)!

(artist: Sasha Khmel)

So again, this makes the usual blood libel, sodomy and witchcraft accusations something to level against demon mommies! Like the earthbound Amazon or dark faerie, they are beings to canonically fear and tokenize, embodied by subversive agents in much the same manner that we’d camp in more earthly forms. Keeping the anal Amazon thesis in mind—that agents of terror are subverted through reclaimed terror language, including psychosexual acts of domination tied to areas of dominion (e.g., duels for property and honor, enacted by spontaneous brutal violence and fireworks, at or around castles)—let’s get to the exhibit, itself. Reflecting on demon mommies’ grim extortion of others to prosecute their own wars, it concerns the whore’s paradox as equally a paradox of rape reversing such terror devices to achieve a postcolonial effect/reversal of abjection with demon mommies; i.e., how we usually get your attention: through playful, fatal-nostalgic threats of “rape” during ludo-Gothic BDSM’s regular theatrical distortions of state “truths”! When performing unequal power to rebel against state arrangements—i.e., by using guilty pleasure relayed through unlawful carnal knowledge and sinful desire—the best defense is a good “offense” (such indomitable master/slave language often played for effect through exquisite “torture,” left).

(artist: In Case)

That’s what forbidden love ultimately is, in this case; i.e., the audience falling for scrappy harlots, slutty Valkyries, and avenging angels—our resident queens having fallen from Heaven, themselves, only to punch up from dark, foreboding places during the dialectic of the alien; i.e., by playing at war and sex’ intoxicating spells of “rape” to humanize ourselves (and nature-as-monstrous-feminine; re: Medusa) with postcolonial arguments: red-hot rape fantasies, burning with forbidden desires that demon mommies in particular specialize at during calculated risk! “Hell,” for Gothic Communism, is a theatrical place to go to and settle our differences, bravely speaking out in ritualized “violence”; i.e., with a corporal punishment rhetoric endemic to medieval, ecclesiastical institutions; e.g., naughty nuns (above), the complicated genderqueer disguise of churchly crossdress—re: Matthew Lewis’ Rosario/Matilda/the Devil—carried forwards from the ancient and medieval world into a stereotypically outmoded (operatic), predatory/prey caricature of the Amazonian underworld’s traditionally female[5] warrior!

Note: While our focus remains largely on demon mommies like Lady Helldriver and Hela, their function as postcolonial demon lovers remains part of a Gothic-Communist operation. To be holistic (as Gothic Communism generally demands), we’ll divert some energies towards other demon lovers, too—e.g., Del Toro’s aforementioned merman—and consider the complicated ways that privilege and oppression manifest and overlap; i.e., during an intersectional, solidarized pedagogy of the oppressed. —Perse

(exhibit 44a1a1b2: Artist: Persephone van der Waard. Lady Hellbender from Guardians of the Galaxy and Kalach from Baldur’s Gate 3 [2023] exemplify the demon muscle mommy archetype; i.e., they evoke the Amazonian threat of “capture, rape and death” put into optional hellish quotes—of DARVO Amazonomachia speaking to evil, demon slavers from nature, whose dire revenge canonically must be challenged through battle [when Hell comes to Earth or vice versa] but also fetishized [re: death by Snu-Snu] in ways we monster-fuckers humanize: during ludo-Gothic BDSM, camping the monomyth using postcolonial gender[queer] identity and performance!

To it, Gothic camp loves the muscled, bodybuilder guerrilla-as-demon, treated by the state like statuesque criminal hysterics and token, cop-like whores under settler colonialism’s black/white binary married to virgin/whore! They’re warriors and whores from Hell, the monstrous-feminine straddling the fence insofar as spine-tingling terror [and other body parts] require a bit of visual ambiguity, brute strength and token menace! Hell and its militias aren’t for wimps, save to torture them with irony or without!

Like kayfabe in general, demon mommies are physically very demanding and involved, but also govern liminal shows of force that translate to godly levels of inequality and doubles; re: faces and heels, heroes and villains, but also kings and queens, castles and forced marriages franchised by capital. In that sense, it’s no different than the Wild Hunt, Apollo’s chariot, or the death coach [vehicles of death and war]—flying gods speaking to latter-day UFO abduction and rapturous, Radcliffean capture tied to the ghost of the counterfeit [“back from outer space“]: moving castles and their dark-disco, giant, castle-like bodies [re: the liminal hauntology of war] taking us away and making an operatic show of it, then having their way with us in the safety of upside-down homes mocking Western variants! Such are vice characters, demon mommies a kind of Amazon “from Hell” that takes their prey [of any gender they want] back to Hell as an infernal, postcolonial territory!

[artist: Jessica Nigri]

Capital divides by design, always through predator/prey in service to profit. From a Cartesian standpoint, then, the state wrongs nature, gendering it as female/monstrous-feminine in “ancient,” canonically essential ways it can pimp once antagonized; nature responds by revenge-stealing state brides [often by gender-swapping them, turning men into brides] during reactive abuse. In short, subversive Amazons anisotropically camp the monstrous-feminine as terror language normally used to sodomize nature-as-monstrous-feminine; i.e., when empire decays per capital’s usual boom-and-bust cycle, turning nature into terrorist the state counterterrorist [often a token Amazon] can incarcerate, rape or otherwise execute the state’s will against; re: geography as destiny along moral territories and iconography that must routinely be cleansed of evil/natural “corruption” through state arbitration and heroic precedent debriding said decay while gentrifying war all over again [re: Tolkien and Cameron’s cartographic refrains during the monomyth: punch, stab or shoot nature-as-whore, above].

Whatever the form, state binaries are false, harmful, and unnatural as a matter of function pimping nature as criminal, incorrect, and abhorrent; i.e., per Cartesian thought, heteronormativity and/or settler colonialism. Christianized us-versus-them violence stems from Beowulf vs Grendel; from Columbus onto the Cartesian Revolution and beyond, nature is something to pimp, anything not him and his men being “extended beings” for “thinking beings” to pimp, enslave and destroy by cheaply moving money through them. This great theft [which money is] translates neoliberally into Tolkien and Cameron’s refrain, a dubious arrangement of false power per light/darkness that calls for genocide in God’s name [more on Tolkien in a bit]: “For in its presence, all darkness must flee.” A blanket of the mind, such Capitalist Realism always dresses up as divide-and-conquer territory disputes happening between man/the state-as-straight and nature-as-monstrous-feminine; re [from Volume One]:  

The state’s various religious/secular ingroups associate entirely with exclusive ownership and universal coercion under state territories over state-assigned out-groups: to belong/to have belongings versus to be owned or used by someone or marked for systemic mistreatment, even death if you fail to be useful to them (the paradox being your death is useful to profit). Here, the state of exception provides the most basic function of capital: exploitation and genocide in service of the profit motive; i.e., the state eating its population according to heroic arrangements of theatrical power tied to bodily expression as dimorphically gendered [source]. 

These, in turn, codify with older monomythic language borrowed from the means to inspire royal fear and awe, but also lust of a hauntological sort; e.g., scarred and tattooed barbarian women passing for “Vikings” or “Picts” who spit, fart, swear in four-letter words, get mad and “smash”; i.e., doubling as sexual rewards in a time when the state emasculates its own men to sexually frustrate them, then sell them cartoon copies of their biggest wet dreams.

While women, as a whole, remain “lesser” in the pecking order’s Great Chain, standouts serve to enforce classical ideas of male dominance; i.e., in a female body that bullies lesser entitled men [sissification]: per a “prison sex” mentality conforming and adhering to patriarchal force inside the Man Box’ weird nerd culture. Keeping with Athenian Amazon propaganda, they canonically inspire compliance, not rebellion, as muscled; re: subjugated Hippolytas! Per the euthanasia effect, tokens [not just women, but any traitors] are tolerated so long as they uphold the current order through sex and force: calls to yield/submit and ultimately disperse!

While stating the obvious is an option, a common path for poetic recourse is fighting fire with fire, myth with myth. Speaking of the aforementioned charioteers themselves, such formidable demon lovers—strong enough to defy the “natural order” by crossing over into the civilized world but weak enough for the state to cage them [re: Eco]—are Galatea built-to-thrill when consumed, but also teach through experience alongside; e.g., size difference; i.e., calculated risk during ludo-Gothic BDSM. They’re killer dolls that consist of darkness—as flavored through particular accents that code and qualify the Amazonian proceedings of either text: muscle and fire [versus Amazonian earthliness or faerie darkness]. There’s nothing objectively “wrong” with demon mommies; they’re simply ways to rarefy and transfer power in-the-flesh: “Your chariot awaits.”

Amazons, like other warriors and cops/criminals, have a white and a black side, which demon mommies act out in “hellish” ways. They tend to manifest less as binarized, dimorphic halves and more as moods, good and bad; i.e., inside a monomorphic entity whose base function doesn’t change; re: Lady Dimitrescu being a constant “phallic” whore who becomes outwardly furious when threatened, but also turned on: wanting to fuck her attackers to death. In demon-BDSM terms, these categories are not only not discrete, they are excessive and hyperbolic; i.e., nymphomania being an out-of-control “hysterical” libido informed by systemic, externalized trauma that confuses predator/prey mechanisms during calculated risk.

To it, Lady Hellbender is made of shadows and flame, as such—the staged power of unequal strength, of dragons and rarefied cruelty [similar to Count Dracula] that has the desire for company but not the manners; i.e., she tends “flare up” when excited, singing her guests [who, it must be said, sometimes prefer that]. In the demon-lover tradition, then, she demonstrates how forbidden desire is given in ways that distribute power unevenly. According to Hellbender’s damned construction, she burns, she dominates; her victims burn, dominated by her as Big Strict Whore[6] [re: “She tall, she tall”]! She is the curious byproduct of an environment both “stuck” and seeking to change. Said change, in turn, occurs inside-outside itself, through poetic cliché; i.e., said conventions being “how people talk,” but for her amounts to an oscillating fluency thereof: both through tackiness and lack of tact, a holistic-and-liminal ontological statement encompassing the entire masked ball [the original site of forbidden romance and home of the demon lover invading civil spaces of exchange becoming alien again]!

As such, “burning with desire” is a common febrile metaphor describing blood flow and body heat, but also adrenaline when desire climbs and predator/prey confuse in disco-like ways; i.e., the female side of the operatic experience, but turned into a demon-lover version of itself whose confused location jumps between bodies, all operating inside the hauntology/chronotope’s shared fever dream; e.g., The Tryanglz’ “Burning in the Third Degree” [1984]:

Hypnotize, see the flicker gleaming in your eyes
It catches me
Oh, I take it and you’ll never let me go
I’m your prisoner
I feel the heat of your desire
I just can’t face the fire [source: Genius]. 

The phenomenology of the danger disco is paradoxical; i.e., two [or more] things true at once, camping and canonizing the notion of female hysteria and desire. Either make survivors “break down” when triggered, but which they—often involuntarily and without guidance—seek out in ways that accurately describe the disorder of their lived experienced/menticided state informed by external factors; re: gargoyles.

In turn, everything moves in hypnotic slow-motion to speak to complicated feelings; re: the perils of dated courtship threatening the current space and time, a given survivor feeling hunted and desired simultaneously because—for them and their trauma—the difference is never clear-cut. All merge on the same surfaces and within the same thresholds, onstage and off. So, too, does the demon mommy [of a more humanized sort] embody the cowering maiden, demon lover and knightly savior all at once: “chercher la femme” a common female experience that has become, to some degree, hauntologized and myopic [focused prominently from a white, middle-class cis-het female gaze for centuries, left: “I’m being hunted!”] but also a chance to occupy an experience that, for many people, is totally alien to them: to step into someone else’s shoes!

In Gothic, these heavy-metal fan favorites survive outside their respective texts to enable praxial synthesis/generate fresh momentum. As things to rebuild like Frankenstein’s monster [minus the Cartesian dogma] through fantasy/sci-fi trash, they reify in culturally appreciative, sexually descriptive forms and high/low feelings; e.g., a golem’s desire to be loved, or a desire to be protected by someone “forbidden” you nonetheless desire; i.e., through desperation and convenience, unfolding under capital’s oppressive conditions! They unfold regardless, and whose mythical lovers take many forms beyond what is normally allowed; re: the demon mommy’s Amazonian, incendiary and tank-like body something to canonize for a heteronormative freakshow’s Male Gaze, but just as often can exist independent of that: a psychosexual gargoyle/Galatea trapped on the same shared stages while camping canonical superhero beauty standards and heteronormative shows of force—with captivating non-standard showmanship likewise trapped inside various degrees of repetitious convention interrogating myth with myth!

[artist: Marco Turini]

To it, monopolies are illusions, which the state can still argue through its carousel monstrous appeals/menticidal sex symbols, and which we target using the same dream-like aesthetics, left and next page]! By carrying the Gothic’s theatrically flippant, monstrous-feminine traditions into the present, such tours des force aren’t always costumes, but speak to/for/with our bodies and naturally assigned/state reassigned characters as, to some degree, xenomorphic, thus customizable like costumes.

Butch women want to appear strong and desirable, for example, but do so as much for themselves as they do a paycheck from male [or token] bosses—allegorically inside texts that may appear to support deviations from the nuclear model, but in truth often ultimately endorse the same-old status quo [re: Pygmalions like James Cameron shoving Amazons into chaste “armor” versus openly whore-like uniforms, pimping them all the same]. “Hell” is always a brothel—a restless place of cryptonymy to subvert/play with such things without fear of immediate punishment. To it, sex/women’s work extends from art, to porn, to art-as-porn or vice versa; i.e., threatening the center of man’s universe through castration fantasy as something to rock out to, onstage; e.g., Jane Tricka gliding her adventuresome mitt up Wayne Brady’s leg and past his vulnerable junk [note his surprised facial expression, below]: the queen of the stage “threatening” the male damsel-in-distress [there being an unscripted, improvised element to the gag as it unfolds, in real time[7]]!

[source: Whose Line Is It, Anyway? Season 5, episode 21; timestamp: 1:40] 

Tin women and dragon ladies, capital alienates those who are different and molds them into forgeries of themselves trapped in metal and other demonic materiel. In turn, these freakshow strongladies seek to reunite themselves with the audience regardless of profit and its associate dogma; i.e., specific members of the audience, while all eyes are upon them, the opera-in-question seeing them as alien main attractions. To grow is to less to escape arrest, then, and more to establish control, mid-stasis. Like the phantom of the opera, both sides of the creative/performative equation search for companionship, these articulations inverted and rife with various double standards and exceptions. Gender-bending and swapping are just other forms of play—ones that humanize those accused of rape, and those wanting “rape” [classically white women] in ways that meet the needs of each without turning either into cops. They skillfully reverse and/or blur the roles of power in ways that include not just dom and sub, but also the gender identity/performance of that, and the legitimacy and terrorist/counterterrorist status of each, etc.

Mommy or not, demons are like music, then; they’re chosen for contrast by whoever’s arbitrating them. Jazz, blues, funk, bebop, operatic tritones—in music, devilish elements are used for flavor [e.g., flat 5s, 7s and other dominants, diminished chords, Major 7s, etc]. The same goes for Gothic poetics personified, their overtones speaking pointedly to rising class, cultural and racial tensions existing between formerly ecclesiastical institutions bearing out a Protestant ethic; i.e., the eternal war between God and the Devil one that can be used to recruit both entities against workers for capital, or to reclaim either in service to them while walking away from Omelas [and selective bigotry/emancipation].

Such is the case with demon mommies like Lady Hellbender and Karlach’s own sodomy/problematic love. As warrior whores threatening medieval dominion—with “medieval” mil spec attire, vaso vagal sexuality and all-around size difference classically associated with masculine strength—they speak through anger and lust to hyphenate reaping and revenge in multiple directions, but always “from Hell”; i.e., for different groups, for different reasons, using courtly love.

Furthermore, this demonic, monstrous-feminine vector can tokenize for the state, policing the whore with the whore; or it can abject in reverse, workers reveling in these infernal feelings during psychosexual martyrdom: as harmless to all except the bourgeoisie and their strangleholds on moral panic; i.e., what for many is the Man Box [token women unironically acting like men, as TERFs do] and punching down, mid-witch-hunt, but which can also become the endearing [and sincere] appreciation of stacked, capable bodies playing at Hell and its go-to tortures, mid-kayfabe. In a world that increasingly recruits demonic muscle for state, hence colonial, purposes—i.e., tokenizing for fear of total alienation/exile—we want to accept demon mommy candidates/make them feel at home: to have our would-be abusers abandon the triangulation of unironic “prison sex” mentality/Satanic panic [and actual us-versus-them sticks-and-stones genocide] to instead make love through “war” as ironic hurly-burly hanky-panky!

[artist: Word2]

Thick-and-juicy cuts of dark [thigh] meat, they’re less beefcakes topping from below or bottoming from the top and more promising hellish sodomy and total dominance [a Faustian flavor of “torture,” except subs live for such strict service]. But, because it is a performance, there’s always room to camp rape and add a nurturing and self-fulfilling element to Hell; i.e., our strong lady from Hell protects us and smashes our enemies, but she’s got a smile that melts your heart, and brains to play games, sing songs, and clap cheeks that goes with all that molten, luscious brawn!

In other words, she’s the Green Manalishi with the two-pronged crown; i.e., the indulgent, dualistic succubus-incubus of an anisotropic class character—one whose “almost holy” melding of disparate cultural and racialized elements pointedly upset heteronormative [thus setter-colonial, Cartesian] sex and gender norms; re: to have the whore’s revenge against profit and the elite/their cops as straight. All happen vis-à-vis dialectical-material arrangements of demonic sex and force, of the libido—of our aforementioned “Pound Town” being staged, like always, as a gay dark place of dreams hovering near the surface [with Judas Priest’s own queerness being obsessed with such things]:

Now when the day goes to sleep
And the full moon looks
And the night is so black that the darkness cooks
Then you come creeping around
Making me do things I don’t want to do [Judas Priest’s “Green Manalishi,” 1979]. 

The classic Gothic demon is reconciliation with one’s home, thus legacy as fallen, rotting and doomed. Keeping with older writings of mine, “demon” refers to something you often fight to overcome/defeat, mid-exodus; i.e., as unconstrained by human limitations and all at once consolidating them. The word often refers to psychomachy as tied to a location, specifically a chronotope; e.g., Jason Lee’s demon from Dragon [1995] forcing him to look upon his grave to reflect on a cursed, concentrically trapped bloodline [above]. Capitalism reflects onto him, maintaining its Realism during mirror syndrome: courting the demon lover by making love as warriors do—through battle!

By extension, demon mommies aren’t mere fun and games of a light-hearted sort; they’re death omens—forcing us to look ignominiously upon flaws and hubris in our own lives, but also to reenact in playfully psychosexual, abstract ways. Haunted by genuine systemic, thus generational trauma, we play with endless demonic forms; i.e., any that can better alleviate/counteract the myriad harm said systems perfidiously cause: to rise up from the street in Hell’s gutter ballets/castle narratives popularized by Neo-Gothic trash and their painful cryptonymies. Monsters in mazes, demon mommies love to tease; i.e., by beckoning you with demonic pull into the infernal concentric pattern for where liberation must occur [re: Plato’s cave]! There is no outside of the text, loves; there is only change inside a system of differences pushing towards one where these differences aren’t punished [re: me, vis-à-vis Derrida]! Silence is genocide, so make some fucking noise!

Breaking the historical-material cycle, then, happens through mentalities and intuitions that aren’t second-nature, but become that way through good play overwriting bad in Gothic “safe spaces” built to explore demonic things; re: during calculated risk. “I’ll storm your castle!” she jeers, threatening psychosexual violence. To which I would happily respond: “Yes, storm it, mommy! Storm it! Depredate my bussy!” But always, a part of me still burns in Hell, sitting at the canonical Dark Lord’s throne—not my playtime fantasies and submission-by-choice under a competent femme dom, but the shadow of actual abuse I survived and which haunts the venue long afterwards [re: Jadis]!

The fact very much remains: you can’t hug the alien, thus familiarize yourself with Medusa/the unfamiliar [to normies] without seeing all sides of existence under state, thus police violence; i.e., its serialized/episodic historical materialism through demonic pastiche: retelling the demon mommy as a kind of superhuman folk hero! Reifying human qualities and structures in small, but feeling larger-than-life, they emblematize war personified in ways that we, when camping the canon, need to avoid neoliberal false hope upholding Capitalist Realism; i.e., not to recapture the financial success of state [super]models and mythical, never-actually-existed Golden Ages, but to camp them and break their Superstructure to bits using superhero shorthand; re: with alter egos and abject doubles, but also Hollywood glamour and regressive power fantasies unable to monopolize on terror weapons, hence props, makeup, costumes and roleplay!

Demon mommies are whores and the whore is always a threat—one to canonically revive, post-boom, and blame for capital’s inevitable bust period. In canonical terms, the line between superhero and villain, then, is notably razor-thin, the language frequently comic book in its centrist temptation arguments; e.g., Superman and his extraterrestrial superpowers, Batman and his endless gadgets, or Thor and his magic hammer—all conveniently threatened by a dark and/or queer-coded monstrous-feminine, if not equivalent to the hero, then a “close second” Venus twin emasculating hero and home alike: a Promethean scapegoat inkblot for their weakness/flagging reserves, and per the creation of sexual difference, a monomyth dragon they slay once more to prove their doubtful manhoods; e.g., Hela—the god of death, below—quite literally withering Thor’s manhood [erectile dysfunction] while having one hand behind her back, deftly emasculating him/throwing his power into question to bring Hell home to roost[8]. She doesn’t just measure up, during a dick-measuring contest; she puts the boys to shame:

Despite the state-imposed death sentence and bad rap, the demon mommy almost always enjoys her job: one, because she reliably “kills it,” confidently slaying her enemies’ will to fight while kicking self-righteous ass, mid-sermon; and two, the men appear as scared puny weaklings. Suitably overreacting against a sexy-and-stylish dominatrix, the former bemoan the latter’s strict sense/aesthetic of power and death rhapsodizing state shift. In Hela’s case, she isn’t strictly muscular in her physical appearance, but she nonetheless performs strength as something that is muscular/masculine in how she wears it; i.e., owning it while gleefully saying to her would-be owners, “Imagine a world where you weren’t cops, but kneeling before me!” She’s a butt pirate, a Radcliffean sex bandit to conjure at the story’s start, then banish again by its end.

Despite state authors framing Hela as the Nazi-Communist tyrant[9] whose “farming” they can repeatedly sanction through her prescribed, essential illegitimacy—meaning as a feminist bugbear for cops to attack, much like any unruly whore—Hela lives on, post-execution; i.e., as the phantom, terrorist, monstrous-feminine avenger/ghost of the counterfeit that peoples of different socio-political persuasions can happily get behind [or vice versa, to have Hela thoroughly peg them out[10]]! She’s a Radcliffean strawman/fairy godmother to raise and burn, her victim’s invasion fears snuffed out by her bastard’s coming into [and going from] the Imperial Core’s forgery of paradise: a colossal homewrecker/monumental-if-gorgeous fake who does so with pleasure and flaring hysteria, calling the heroes to the void lurking at the center of their bogus castle! Bury her alive, if you want; this Bleeding Nun/faggot witch always rises from the grave, her own cryptonymy speaking vengefully through blindfolds and gags to Medusa’s usual silencing!

Keeping with Orientalism and other persecutory schemes, it’s possible to modulate such intimations without defaming and segregating other cultures. Even so, our demon-mommy wish fulfillment needs to occur in ways that overlap with daily life: the enormity of forces that grow to seemingly endless size, and overshadow not just our own lives, but those who came before and after us; re: death translated into anxieties of inheriting one’s place in empire. Such demons adopt a hungry desire to destroy not just the individual, but the entire bloodline because capital demands it and liberation requires it; re: Hawthorne’s American families always rising and falling in America [the expendability of the middle class, gatekeeping assimilation/safeguarding the elite]. We must challenge this, and do so through the pulpy inkblot language of the imaginary past speaking to buried atrocities, per the ghost of the counterfeit hiding in plain sight: the bad parent cryptomimetically haunting all replication/the panopticon.

While vital to growth, pain is an acquired taste that can motivate power to flow towards workers instead of the state. Doing so happens per ludo-Gothic BDSM playing with passivity and aggression, masculine and feminine, etc, to foster not simply gender trouble, but parody! Self-styled terms like “butch” or “mommy dom” aren’t simply applicable to Lady Hellbender or Hela as demon mommies; they speak to agency over our bodies and avataristic extensions of our bodies, sexualities, gender identities and performances, which the state will try to tokenize and prescribe back as controlled opposition—i.e., the common parlance of those who traffic in sex and courtly love, playing the victim and blaming us as victim, again per DARVO and obscurantism! We protest in duality during oppositional praxis, gender-swapping such stories but still threatening to take our admirers with us through paradoxical theft; i.e., not for profit, but back to Hell where we belong! Free from state bondage, forbidden love might yield a postcolonial effect [female or not, left]:

Such demonic courtship is often cute and slow, but guided by forbidden feelings that threaten to explode and expose the maiden as whore-like; e.g., the fairy princess [or some such submissive] experiencing a sudden desire for raw, extramarital sex; i.e., anything outside state-sanctioned models, thus treated as “from Hell,” animalistic, etc.

These, in turn, commence with the coded expressions of interest/maid-and-butler dialogs that—as the night follows the day—routinely guide the audience away from any novel-of-manners approach and towards naughty sex slumming it with monster lovers; i.e., in spite of the dangers and societal judgements stigmatizing both differently during the dialectic of shelter and the alien: the princess opting for the monster—not to damn or exploit them, but humanize them, mid-risk, while disavowing any state-approved, nuclear forms of “coupling” in the process [re: Radcliffe’s male heroes/good guys, which the heroine “gets” after surviving the demon lover]! She abjures state propaganda to wed the outlaw!

In turn, all can mean different things during the abjection process, and generally all at once. Monster love stories like Persephone and Hades, Beauty and the Beast or The Creature from the Black Lagoon [and similar stories rehashing the same basic concept, above] commonly portray the princess as never from Hell, but per the Gothic, yields a second trickier explanation; i.e., a reunion with one’s lost home: the secret princess and her buried feelings tied to Hell’s imaginary ancestry! Hell is a choice, and a useful one.

Of course, not everyone enjoys such “gimmicks”; e.g., Pallavi Dandamudi, who writes in “Here’s Why the Ending of The Shape of Water Doesn’t Work [2019]: 

If Eliza had been similar to the amphibian man all along, then her love is no longer a statement on the human capacity for compassion. The depth of Eliza’s character lies in her ability to love something that most humans would be scared of or repelled by. The plot portrays her as a simple yet courageous, silent yet powerful human being. This ending just takes away from that, it makes her like any other biological species who is attracted to another member of her species [source]. 

But these loaded, messy and combative representations of human and inhuman still poetically address eugenic/ethnocentric ideas of superior/inferior caused by capital and felt during a captive fantasy about forbidden love/dark desire; i.e., one that struggles to escape its own haunted history while forging new healthier myths/power fantasies using the same stuff.

Whatever the form, these liminal engagements mix danger with protection to yield our postcolonial effect; re: mid-terror-language, demon mommies [and similar sexual outlaws] protect those who feel small and/or vulnerable regarding the other ends of a given love triangle; i.e., as a prolonged and uphill battle, one where class, culture and race war wage for workers by workers, not traitors [cops] upholding the status quo! If such in-groups and tokens use monster love to abject the usual out-groups with, we upset the state’s dogmatic orderings of nature through these self-same stories having two worlds collide!

Except, whether going into Hell or bringing Hell back to Earth, we must do so without permanently regressing towards the very systemic modes of animal survival [e.g., Alien and the cat] whose unironic “jungle fever” capital endlessly relies upon! Instead, we must inspire post-scarcity while attaching its emphasis upon those we help liberate, mid-fetishization: to set free, not banish or limit to a wordless role that prioritizes one group over another [and which The Shape of Water admittedly does; i.e., outlawing the girl for loving the monster she speaks to through sign language, but for whom itself seldom gets a word in. It is always alien in ways Del Toro doesn’t let the creature speak to power with[11]]!

In short, there’s always a foreign element of fascination and fear to such curiously fatal attraction [re: the ghost of the counterfeit]. And yet, monster love stories opine on a scarcity of connection [sexual or otherwise] under capital, and the complicated realities that love triangles afford; i.e., where the privilege and oppression remain unequal for everyone involved, and speak in popular-but-dated forms of murky translation involving lopsided arbitration; e.g., the princess having material and social power over the monster [who she can report to the authorities, should she choose] while the monster often has physical power over her with its raw animal strength! Demon mommies, by comparison, classically keep the strength and reputation known to all demon lovers, but also retain some medieval degree of affluence and lordship over their chosen prey [regardless of gender though often male, insofar as Amazons classically target men; re: to feminize them].

Regardless, the collective road to salvation [and emancipation] requires finding common ground; i.e., in stories that frequently gentrify one side and treat the other as sexually exploitable through mixed metaphors, and whose tricky mixtures of power imbalance we must camp inside themselves; re: in Hell as it can be found on Earth, any demon couple intimated by an earthly double and vice versa; e.g., The Shape of Water evoking the unironic moral panic seen in Birth of a Nation or survived during the Willington massacre, but per Del Toro’s Mexican roots, pits a non-princess ethnic minority [and her token friends—a closeted gay painter and a woman-of-color co-worker] against someone even more alienated by the same white straight state! The balancing act is avoiding predation by one side against another while collectively punching up through the wordless power of forbidden love!

Such stories’ longing and nagging emphasis on love language [and language gaps] orbit conspicuously around a shared-if-uneven desire: sex and companionship of different kinds. You wanna really get laid/make friends? Make the unsafe feel safe again, acting as you do in good faith. Show us restraint, control, and understanding with those big capable mitts of yours; or, if you have the means to persecute us and our demonic elements, don’t! “Be gentle!” we ask, then tremble as you “ravish” us [or spare us]. Parry and thrust in ways that—while they can inflict pain—do so in ways that ultimately feel good and are encouraged/adored for their sense of similarity amid difference, healing from rape during a given pedagogy of the oppressed: 

I don’t want to tame your animal style
You won’t be caged
In the call of the wild [Scandal’s “The Warrior,” 1984].

The Gothic specializes in crossovers, committing the everyday offense of daring to see the demonized not just as human, but desirable in a postcolonial world. Yet, such presentation is still liminal, everything doubling and mirrored on the same surfaces, inside the same thresholds. While love-as-theatre commonly marries sex to force in martial forms, empires use it to pointedly instill fear and pacification using demon mommies; i.e., through shadows of police abuse and slave revolt, the former genuine and the latter greatly exaggerated by conflating land-back arguments with actual police brutality dressed up as rape epidemics, drug wars, and crime waves, etc.

Beyond demon mommies singing to release tension, it bears repeating that such DARVO-grade, vae victis [“woe to vanquished”] overtures classically manifest as demonic awakenings that prescribe genocide. Faced the popularity of setter-colonial “musicals,” postcolonial rebels of different kinds camp what has become blank parody/”camp” in quotes [re: Jameson]—doing so to pointedly and perceptively humanize all state victims; e.g., of white pioneer women towards Indigenous Peoples, normally tokenizing against them through rape fears that blame state targets instead of state structures; i.e., in half-real spaces of play and politics, the idea of monster love something to navigate and survive with an animal dance partner we’re drawn towards, but don’t wish to prey upon as the state desires [with white women expected to quickly use, then discard, non-white slaves as disposable sex objects]!

While inequality and preferential mistreatment generally see one side punished far more than the other is, rape ranking isn’t productive or really the point. As a matter of the pedagogy of the oppressed, privilege should assist in undermining such structures to achieve intersectional solidarity against the state; i.e., in holistic ways that people actually relate and respond to. Hence the monster and love story anisotropically addressing a shared-if-uneven human condition under state mechanisms: calumny and stigma, retaliation and remorse. Women fear rape and those branded as rapists fear accusation, the two playing these out on either side of a given exchange that allows for demon lovers of all kinds [not just mommies; re: Del Toro’s demon daddy topped from below by the movie’s spunky-if-unassuming heroine, their roles changing back and forth as things escalate/progress].

In turn, to even think of the other as “equal” becomes treason, sedition, a thought crime in canonical doctrine. So it must be disguised in ways that point to the trauma being discussed during ludo-Gothic BDSM. Anything the state can poetically combine to divide along the usual persecution networks, we mix-and-match; i.e., during the cryptonymy process, using it [and demon lovers] to cross boundaries and tear such cordons down; e.g., with demon mommies, but also mermen from the black lagoon. The boundaries that banish either to Hell are the apex of conspiracy abused by those with privilege; i.e., to enrich themselves on an individual level as much as systemic ones, working as much with ordinary things as not; e.g., Rebecca Watson’s “How Dave Grohl & Foo Fighters Put Actual Lives at Risk” [2024]. As they go hand-in-hand, so must we, but in reverse of what amounts essentially to glorified misinformation. We mustn’t hesitate to check it, and cement our own arguments in the mold.

In turn, these cryptonymic appeals to segregation or intersection sit inside pioneered discussions, they and their alliances couched in dated, hauntological fantasy rhetoric during liminal expression; i.e., as normally dominated by Cartesian orderings of the universe, which our holistic offerings offend on purpose. Paradox is to find one at odds with such paradigms, subverting their language to offer up visually similar but functionally alien alternatives: the golem-esque Amazon queen “man-spreading” her hairy bear snatch on her animal-print power chair while lording over her little, always-was goblin cumslut [captured, taken by force and kept for pleasure, below]. To reverse abjection is to play with its stigmas and taboos, its threats of capture, bondage and torture speaking to Persephone trapped in Hell in more ways than one!

 [artist: Flare Fox]

For better or worse, such things carry weight and instigate consequences we control; i.e., through monstrous dialogs about control. “Rape” enters quotes onstage and off, then—a way of life that yields liberatory sentiment through “torturous” castration aesthetics [re: the Archaic Mother/phallic woman]: xenophilic art of couples profoundly happy with the dominator’s humiliating arrangement as designated by them [an anisotropic reversal of the nuclear order’s polarity of husband and wife, but also girl-on-girl love, interracial[12a] relationships and other such canonical “unspeakables”]! As with demon mommies, it’s seen as embarrassing and guilty to enjoy such things—and indeed, there are pernicious aspects we must critique of the demon mommy rape fantasy while enjoying it—but to swear them [and monster battle and rape] off entirely is foolish.

Postcolonialism needs empathy as found among monsters; i.e., during the dialectic of the alien, the latter’s ubiquity owing to its popularity and age. Allegory, androgyny and monster-mommy kayfabe are as old as demons are—as old as acting is, thus masks, costumes, and muses; sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll; martial arts, stage performers and prize fighters [often mixing onstage and off as half-real spectacles; e.g., with Muhammed Ali loving wrestlers and monster movies, calling his infamous opponent, George Foreman, “the Mummy” on account of his long-guard defensive style[12b]].

To it, personification is equally old, as are comedy and drama in kayfabe, told with shadows and flames as popular high/low forms of discourse about war and rape, but also vulgarity at large; i.e., cartoonishly monstrous like Amazons, their statuesque bodies made-from-clay and infused with that mysterious spark of life; re: the fire of the gods as seen with Victor’s demonic Creature. The stuff of con men, grifters and charlatans, but also communicators, thinkers and actors, all stem from the ancient world’s bread-and-circus combat flowing into medieval varieties, followed by modern nostalgic forms of either [and other] time periods.

All heroes are monsters, meaning demons [mommies or otherwise] can be whatever we need them to be that represents ourselves and our struggles, not the state; i.e., to experiment and figure out what we prefer [with orientation and gender conformity or nonconformity often having a congenital element, similar to phobias and kinks]. All the same, no one is exempt from duality and paradox per nature and language. Exploitation and genuine harm sit adjacent to parody in ways that cross over during reprisals; i.e., us being attacked by reactionaries for speaking out through theatre, blending comfort and discomfort as demon mommies generally afford. Through them, we look “under the hood” to see what we’re made of and how we tick, but also to express ourselves in posthuman ways tied to the imaginary past [and its usual poetic indulgence] walking around:

[artist: Jan Rock]

Individual examples spent, I now want to spend the rest of the exhibit articulating demon mommies and postcolonialism through a more “big picture” lens. To it, kayfabe is liminal. Whatever its form, the fighting happens as much offstage as on; i.e., as much between the state and workers at large as between two performers being viewed. Like demons lovers overall, such things walk the line between reality and make-believe, madness and method, ancient and modern, masculine and feminine, total bullshit and pure truth, and male, intersex and female; in turn, class war weds to culture and race, all while the stage and its lovely inventions, props, stunt people and special effects become ours to use. While magic “isn’t real,” belief and perception are; as a matter of stage magic, then, great power lurks inside illusions and entertainment, the larger-than-life character of stage heroes [and their bodies] bearing out tremendously persuasive and representative, but also smuggling potential. While power is an illusion, we might as well use its splendid lie to assign our values to such startling and potent beings; i.e., rescuing their “Trojan Horse” function from police institutions, to instead become folk-hero role models for those who have no voice in the world [stand-ins until they find their own ways to speak out]!

All the while, it’s possible to subvert canon while raising concerns about popular media’s culturally appropriative/sexually prescriptive elements. Descriptive sexuality can likewise be conscripted through Rainbow Capitalism, which—along with everything else—we camp during ludo-Gothic BDSM using demon mommies. This camp serves multiple purposes, including outing our enemies. As I argue of revolutionary cryptonymy through heroic expression [from Volume One]:

[revolutionary cryptonymy] remains an utterly vital aspect of proletarian praxis—one that challenges state monopolies through the very things they try to control: morphological expression through monstrous and heroic performance, but especially animalized, hauntological examples like the Amazon or knight, as well as the more famously operatic, feudal sites of sexual danger to which they represent and/or navigate—Gothic castles as killing grounds for a state predator’s prey-like designations.

To that, […] revolutionary cryptonymy invokes liminal expression as a cosmetic, conspicuous means of useful disguise within state monopolies of violence, terror and in connection to those dated things, bodily expression. Together on antiquated stages, the deliberate use of dated masks, costumes, props and other performative elements hide activism’s sorties imperfectly within the trauma of canonical Gothic language and its complicated territories of expression; i.e., as a means of rebellious camouflage, useful for blending in and revealing the bad-faith nature of state proponents in shared, thus policed, spaces and dialogs. On said stage, reactionaries and moderates wear masks to hide themselves in common monstrous language; but when they respond to our Athena’s Aegis having doubled their mask, said mask slips from outrage defending state monopolies within nerd culture [source]. 

But apart from striking fear into the hearts of our enemies, the practice is admittedly self-satisfying and -serving. Insofar as power and demons are simply fun to play with, singing and theatre feel good. So does wearing costumes and acting out forbidden desire [sex or otherwise] become fun to watch; i.e., to defy the state as demon lovers, including mommies, happily do during monster love stories [often for the drama, but also the pornographic elements, below]!

Aside from toys, then, a huge appeal to BDSM lies in surrendering power as, oddly enough, its own kind of power [to become like a kid again, while playing with adult materials]. This aesthetic can involve someone big that—herbo or not—acts uncharacteristically gentle with someone they could visibly break, as much as someone small surrendering to a larger dom, or a dom aesthetic lending an element of “taming bears” to it [or a sub as strong as a bear]. It also speaks to asymmetrical warfare; i.e., as something to communicate/relate to and with during ludo-Gothic forms. None are “superior” insofar as challenging the state goes, but do utilize preference during monstrous code; i.e., demon lovers, whereupon demon mommies may assume a variety of dated cryptomimetic positions and embodiments, which echo trauma during the cryptonymy process: to best show and hide things that rebellion needs to destabilize the current world, putting a postcolonial one in its place!

[artist: Jan Rock]

Any way you slice it, great power is something to relate to in ways that historically threaten rape; i.e., someone looks strong enough to cause harm, as demon lovers generally do. Here, though, such rape-fantasy counterterror is not only not harmful, but paradoxically empowering and fun because it occurs within boundaries of faux-medieval play where both sides rewrite and reinforce the rules [thus reestablish mutual consent]. Fear of the alien is inherited by workers born and bred inside colonial bodies, then rewritten in postcolonial terms, onstage and off. When indulged in—and even by ace parties and their public nudism, playing with psychosexual trauma—such forbidden fruit becomes fuel that gives us [and our revolutionary engines] straight fire: to turn the frogs gay!

Whatever the gender[s] being explored, monsters contain a class character among the gendered elements; and while Imperialism perpetually makes the lives of others their business, the fact remains you only need that special someone [excepting polycules] to make you happy! In turn, the myth of the rape epidemic/dark slaver tries to suggest women [or those treated as women] don’t want dark things/actually desire state-assigned mates and nothing else. Yet, per the whore’s paradox, they so often do, and not because the state sells nature-as-alien back to them, mid-genocide! Down to play [and fuck] during ludo-Gothic BDSM, they humanize what the state can only dehumanize; they endeavor reclaim and hold onto the very language of “darkness,” mid-consumption. So does ethicality become a matter of informed consumption [a notion we’ll return to, in Volume Three].

The princesses of revolution don’t care to trap the demon lover inside an abject “slumming” role; and ideally the dom doesn’t want to brutalize us in reality during calculated risk. We want to let off steam and enjoy unequal power together as a shared way of life; i.e., one doubling as a teaching device that can show people how not to act like cops despite the power imbalance and shadow of police rule [with cops raping others through fetishized power imbalance that has a gendered character to it; re: Man Box/”prison sex” mentality and TERFs].

In truth, there’s so much room to play with power through demonic language’s literal and figurative crossfade. Trans or not, some men want to be manhandled by demon mommies; some women want to be “ravished” and taken into captivity [to sit by a dark throne]. The monster lover fantasy is generally a fleeting one—often more fun in one’s head [or in half-real spaces of demon BDSM where some irony is present]—but not because it is objectively wrong and shouldn’t happen; the empheral quality to demonic desire and reunion speaks to repressed, delegitimized arrangements of power the state can only pimp and police, not practice in good faith. “Hell” in reality is generally safer than state ideas of paradise, which its pimps aggressively sell to semi-frightened but equally-interested and curious women pining for “the other side”; and those treated as women [or “black, of Hell/nature,” etc] remain informed by Gothic opera and fairytales—i.e., where the woman falls in love with the monster as being more human than her assigned white knight!

Taken a step further by Pagan/GNC/non-white authors and actors, our additional dimensions and cracking eggs make a Heaven of Hell or vice versa, thus can reverse/swap already-gendered roles; re: by using demon mommies to say things about our oppression/desire in uniquely trans, intersex and non-binary morphological forms that intersectionally solidarize with other struggles: to love and be set free from state abuse/control when allegorically transforming their demonic language, ourselves; i.e., humanizing our allies during the same shared struggle, punching up from Hell! So while Amazons are classically AFAB, AMAB princesses likewise have their own “come hither!” poise, doing to beckon those treated like prey by the state: “Don’t be shy! It’s safe[13] to play with me!”

[artist: Julian Michaels]

Queer or not, everything happens through ludo-Gothic BDSM, reclaiming the neo-Victorian bedroom to turn it [and its Protestant ethic/process of abjection] inside-out. In turn, power is like a force field, phantoms or pantomime; it’s largely imaginary/subjective but shaped by objective forces. Sex and force elide as much as collide in medieval poetics. In a territorial, settler-colonial sense, the state looks to demonize those already “under fire”; i.e., treating native parties as hellish outsiders [suffering lasting damage/generational trauma]! Some will sell out through desperation and convenience; others are more principled, holding onto their values while different movements decay.

Power is all how you frame it, then. So when they’re circling the wagons and playing white Indians and saviors, use your wagons against them! It’s not “ceding ground” to own the demonic role; i.e., in ways that undermine capital and state authority by presenting power in ways that appear cop-like or tokenized, but actually flow power towards workers through demon mommies [often marrying them; re: death by Snu-Snu, below, colliding the medieval language of sex and war into readily consumable forms]: by helping others imagine alternative arrangements to reality and bonding with nature-as-alien. These fugitive unga-bunga refrains become conducive to Gothic-Communist development when such Great Destroyers demonstrably break state monopolies and cut their legs out from under them! “She smash!” Chonk, strong, and ready to bonk! It’s clobbering time, motherfuckers!

 [source]

Power is something that is perceived, thus subject to the usual forces of theatre; e.g., someone can be made to look younger than they actually are, or stronger than is humanly possible. Demon mommies are born of fire, but also made of it [re: Hellbender’s volcanic red hair and Karlach’s burning heart]. Burns hurt like hell; for us demons, love hurts and Hell [and Hell’s heartache] is our paradise, but a plastic one our forced immigrants’ poetic contributions help make and redefine power [and boundaries, trust] in order to shift away from state abuse; i.e., achieving equity under dialectical-material scrutiny and [s]exercise! Hot as hellfire, a monster “ass queen” awaits, as does her Numinous booty’s infernal fitness and demon-dumper glory! We are but priests praying at her temple of almighty fire! Baby got back, a bottom-heavy cathedral whose abyssal end is one to plunge repeatedly into [to fall in love with/make that pull-out game weak]! She even does anal, pegging her “victims” while preaching the benefits [re: using sodomy not as an unironic terror weapon against different marginalized targets, but to cause “terror” as a matter of spicing up sex; i.e., in lands of darkness/disputed ownership challenging state owners]!

[artist: Forest the Rotten] 

Granted, worship is an ancient human function. Except, whereas state religions organize to enslave “the unknown” for profit, ours remain entirely devoted to emancipatory worship; i.e., of a secularized, Satanic politique that actually respects nature. As its monstrous-feminine stewards, our threat displays challenge the state-as-straight pimping nature as monstrous-feminine; e.g., Angela Carter’s white cis-het Female Gaze preying on such things without rehumanizing anything. As such, nature’s revelatory bodies become inspirational temples, rebuilt by us doubling the original’s chonky profane; i.e., during crisis, and within the vein of Gothic fetishes that were already done to death/painfully cliché centuries ago. So does Gothic Communism resurrect long-lost feelings of rebellious frisson that break capital’s counterparts, having the whore’s revenge against them. In the usual language of victory and defeat, they’re the sore losers who remain scared of nature and death!

Nothing is more covetous or afraid than a cop, than imperial defenders, than Pax Americana leery of unruly spoilsports subverting Cartesian gender norms [androgynous, Mother Nature fucks back]. From size difference to size deference, Medusa is straight intergalactic metal, and you can’t kill the metal any more than colonize outer space! A forsaken fane of devilish flagellation, fornication, and flatulence [it happens], she always comes back, reclaiming colonial territories before leaving just as quick: an impure thought, a cosmic whore, mountain mama, female Hercules, bat outta hell! From art to porn, let’s blaze new trails that lead away from Cartesian abuse, taking ourselves home [and to town]! Camp canon; ravish ironically by putting “rape” in quotes during ludo-Gothic BDSM! Every fortress of doom has its greatest soldier!

Beyond demon mommies, there’s so much language for sex and violence when it comes to postcolonial liberation; i.e., nature treated as queer/alien/female, etc, much of it understandably animalized and medieval per a demonic courtly love’s pornographic style. Whatever the form of the art/performance, capital paywalls nature and pimps it out to rape or otherwise exploit it. Gothic-Communist calculus factors in monetization/privatization of monsters and their liberation under capital; i.e., sex work is paid only if said workers fight for it; re [from Volume One]:

our socio-political positions are vulnerable and often associated directly with our bodies and identities as things to control through monstrous forms during Gothic theatre […] Such forays into pretend worlds amount to an imaginary liberation that challenges Capitalist Realism through avatar-like vehicles; i.e., places to put ourselves and occupy for a time, to better learn how to frame our own experiences (and bodies) in a situation of make-believe. But within that invention lies the ability to think critically about our surroundings, thus interpret the stories already present within our lives that shape how we think, thus act [source].

This goes for us defying the state animalizing us, their idea of “tribal,” “savage” or “primal” challenging workers; i.e., inventing variants to some degree appropriative or appreciative regarding older struggles against empire; e.g., white Indians vs allies to Indigenous groups [with sex being a pacifying or mobilizing force in demonic forms; re: Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks (2014) something of a pun regarding issues of demonic representation[14]]. While [from Volume Zero] 

animals embody the canonical language of power and resistance as something to camp through demonic and undead forms; i.e., stigma animals relayed through demonic BDSM and rituals of power expression and exchange that embody hunters and hunted, predators and prey that play out through the ongoing battles and wars of culture, of the mind, of sexuality and praxis as traumatized: marked for trauma or by trauma [source].

likewise [from Volume One] 

the medieval character of state violence and terror cannot be destroyed during morphological expression, only subverted or contained through linguo-material “traps” we put into motion during revolutionary cryptonomy as an essential means of counterterrorist liberation; i.e., by throwing the setter-colonial character of heteronormativity into dispute through a rebellious medieval, postcolonial imaginary. 

[…] emotional turmoil is very much at home in the Gothic. This includes anxieties about physical bodies and their hauntological uniforms as often having a sexualized, animalistic, psychological element that overlaps with half-exposed, unburied trauma acquired generationally under state domination. This domination occurs within regressive, medievalized positions of crisis and decay that defend and uphold the status quo, but can be reclaimed by proletarian agents within weird-nerd culture; e.g., workers embodying knights to reclaim their killing/raping implements inside the state of exception, while simultaneously dealing with state infiltrators fighting to recapture the same devices back for themselves and their masters; i.e., Amazons and furries, etc, as forms of contested morphological expression that can assist or hamper gyno/androdiversity within Gothic poetics under state monopolies. To that, heroes are monsters, and monsters go hand-in-hand with animals being for or against their own abuse to varying degrees.

The resultant middle ground of this duality grants words like “demon,” “zombie,” or “animal” a double purpose […]: predator and prey. […] Domestication invokes a sense of the wild that is reclaimed by state forces to serve the profit motive, which rebellious agents must challenge and reclaim while being animalized [source]. 

It also extends to demons “of nature” combined with a less earthly plane that points back to nature again; e.g., Hell or extraterrestrial worlds; i.e., places where women rule and men are cucked in the usual Amazonian rape/death-by-Snu-Snu wrestler fantasies that—appearances of domination aside—canonically uphold state power through token/undercover police violence.

Decaying rebellious potential, Red Scare abuses whores in demonic language to better give the Straights “scare boners”; i.e., with “non-white” body types that speak to their mommy issues towards nature during Gothic vaudeville. Compelled dominance servicing straight males sissies per the nuclear/settler-colonial model whoring nature-as-monstrous-feminine, it’s something to “slay” in the usual, unironic monomyth, and which sex-positive workers may camp using what they got: as mommies who cannot die when “slain”!

[artist: Nyx]

Demon or not, it’s no secret that Amazons are farmed by the state to cater to cis-het weird nerds chasing non-natal mommies; i.e., the usual monster peach to cut up and harvest like moist evil cake. But GNC parties humanize the harvest for postcolonial purposes, challenging profit [and its freakshow chattelization] with similar demonic poetry during ludo-Gothic BDSM [re: Nyx, above]. Not ones to overlook a good myth onstage, we use them to our advantage through ourselves; i.e., to teach one another through Gothic theatre and its many, many ways to tell stories about monsters by personifying them. In doing so, we challenge deep-seated beliefs with things rising to the surface; i.e., that we can alter on or around ourselves, all to make larger harmful structures go down in flames. If Communism is a myth, then so is Capitalist Realism, our cryptonymy fighting fire with fire [as demon mommies do]—to best burn Rome to cinders and rise from its fertile ashes!

Revolution, as such, truly is a piece of cake—one that takes as many forms as demonology holistically allows! We are legion, but whose myriad, intersectional solidarity often can be summed up in single images; i.e., any that indicate similar acts of muse-like defiance, expressed in ways openly happy and animalistic, but also educated [thus intimidating to the elite, left]:

[artist: Mercedes the Muse]

We’re not just a pretty face or fat piece of ass, then, but operate through poetic argument, and whose preference with those poetic devices [often metaphors] reclaim by us to better steer our agenda with; re: by using what we got, our Aegis and its forbidden fruit/darkness visible offering up forbidden sight/a deal with the Devil!

As such, demonic rebellion [muscle mommy or otherwise] scuttles or commandeers this vessel or that, jettisons or smuggles any and all cargo, inside; it commonly combines seafaring metaphor with other performative means, often relying on medieval language, but also gut animal skills in animal situations of survival—i.e., where you communicate through scowls, smiles, puppy dog eyes and sounds, but also body language and pet-training BDSM exercises [speaking from experience, here]. It’s definitely a skill, and one that can save you in a pinch. The immediacy of danger and naked exposure demand it, which calculated risk is all about. There is no “true mastery” of such things, only a desire or need to change through practice to escape hostile conditions of false mastery by altering those conditions; happening by any and all means, development [of Communism] happens when those conditions change: using Gothic poetics [and its prolific language of mastery vis-à-vis demon mommies] for the betterment of all!

Whatever our individual preferences and postcolonial inclinations—be it Amazons or cat women from the moon—we queers and other marginalized groups collectively love demons; i.e., because their unequal power/forbidden knowledge/dark desire and transformative potential all speak to our alienation as having a human face we can ringlead: descriptive sexuality and gender as morphological freedom [to express violence and terror] towards liberation—not positive thinking and “peace” [a white man’s word, but also used by cis-het feminists] fetishizing token cops, be they good or bad, white or non-white, skinny or [more often than not] thicc during state monopolies! Waifus are waifus, betrayal is betrayal, cops are cops, but liberators use the same aesthetics [and bodies/colors of stigma] as those who sell out during asymmetrical warfare!

[artist: Angel] 

All workers are demonized to some extent. The postcolonial difference is, rebellious workers operate as universal freedom fighters; i.e., who consciously choose our own roles, despite whatever positions or lot we’re born into. So while profit is moving money through nature as cheaply as possible, our revenge is channeling such things towards ourselves; i.e., by redistributing them but also their capabilities to generate, which we opt of out in favor of a post-scarcity world. This includes demon mommies, but really any form of monstrous theatre you could think of. We’re not just arm candy used “for looks,” then, but sweet the pot through our labor exchanges, including our bodies and what they represent; i.e., at the time, but also over time, reviving such devices as needed to remind people what we and our movement is about; e.g., my friend Angel and their contributions to the book [from an old, commissioned shoot, above] but also Ebonnyy [from a more recent commission, next page].

Something to reclaim inside state monopolies, then, our guerrilla’s strange appetites/diabolical inclinations under capital advertise to whet the curiosity of spectating onlookers! Vulnerable parties, however strong they appear or behave, are framed as demons: to be hunted down and killed like animals. Any appeals to the contrary sit within the same complicated language. Amazons and similar demons are sex warriors—gladiators that promote power as something to witness in all aspects of itself [the home, weapon, body and vehicle, etc]. They play out in highly conventional ways that normally enact cops-and-victims violence to reinforce the status quo; but our imaginary bondage is like Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth: speaking to oppression through “oppression” acted out by subversive agents. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ’em all, but each flower among the larger hellish bouquet remains special, unique, powerful. Helping instead of harming others despite having power over them—that’s our immortality!

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

To it, monster-fucking theatre and its abstraction on the Aegis is one of paradoxical struggle—not just of mitigation and reversal during liminal expression, but of upset while turning workers on [eroticized class awakenings, getting down and in touch with our wild sides chattelized by the state]: the vulnerable as normally preyed upon by predatory agents thinking they’re saving the world from evil, the former overcoming the latter emboldened by state forces to harm nature; i.e., by abusing trust, violating boundaries and limiting victims control over their own lives. We fags camp that, merging demon love with adrenaline; i.e., through fight-or-fight operatics that purposefully excite our cathartic energies challenging capital’s usual qualities. If cops are criminals with badges, calling their victims criminals before unironically raping them, postcolonial demon mommies motivate systemic catharsis by camping said rape, time and time again.)

So concludes the symposium and “Idle Hands,” part one. Now that we’ve covered Amazons, dark faeries and demon muscle mommies in the blood libel/witch class vein, I’d like to consider a different aspect to such predators and prey, in “Idle Hands,” part two; i.e., through a sculpted, claymation quality to nature-as-monstrous-feminine and its revenge: hunting and vampires! Amazons often do this, but theirs is territorial in ways that are guarded as “home”; re: for which to bring captured, smaller male mates back to for breeding purposes. But “death by Snu-Snu” has another hunter function that just as often yields kawaii vibes in a modern demonic; i.e., inside an urban setting haunted by monstrous-feminine rage (and patriarchal abuse) vis-à-vis transplanted blood libel tropes—vampires unwelcome in a homely space, yet compelling precisely for the demon-lover violence they promise to visit upon others/suspicion they arouse during courtly love.

For that, we’ll be looking pointedly at Takena’s “Midnight Vampire”! For her, death is a party—a disco to dance inside, Matthew-Lewis-style! Gird your loins!

Onto “Idle Hands, part two: Vampires and Claymation“!

---

Footnotes

[1] For further examination of this, consider “Back to Jadis’ Dollhouse, the Birthplace of Ludo-Gothic BDSM” (2024) from the Undead Module.

[2] Doing so evokes Artemis and similar goddesses of war/the hunt, but also Hippolyta and her ilk. In either case, their collective “virginity” occurs by killing men outright (for trespassing on their land, hence home) or by forcing men to marry them and have their children (the shoe on the other foot; re: death by Snu-Snu)! There’s certainly a long history of white-Indian tokenization* to Amazons as “man-eaters” in this respect (the humiliation of men by Amazons part of the latter’s ancient copagandistic function; re: as a patriarchal mythical device treating Athenian women as second-class citizens). Even so, it can easily be reclaimed during the dialectic of the alien, and applies equally to demon mommies essentially being “Amazons from Hell” (often two-world people, one foot in each).

*E.g., Samus Aran; re: “‘In Search of the Secret Spell’: Digging Our Own Graves; or, Playing with Dead Things (the Imaginary Past) as Verboten and Carte- Blanche” (2024)!

[3] For more writing about Amazons and knights apart from here, refer to Volume One’s “‘Predators and Prey’: Predators as Amazons, Knights, and Other Forms of Domesticated, Animalized Monster Violence” (2024).

[4] “Spread ’em, mount ’em, pin ’em” as Jadis’ lepidopterist friends loved to recite.

[5] It’d be easy enough to treat the Amazon as male or intersex through GNC performance (the whole idea already centers around crossdress), but we won’t be doing so, here.

[6] Size difference is a common way to compensate for not leaning into the emotional aspects; i.e., the “Napoleon” persona versus someone who is strong and silent—though frankly there’s no “correct” way to go about this. The best actors combine different elements at their disposal to achieve the desired effect (whatever that is) per case; i.e., regarding those being subjected to their talents and services! To that, Lady Hellbender carries a strict flavor of femme dom (the Amazon), one that plays out through her demonic aesthetic during ludo-Gothic BDSM; but gentle femme doms likewise exist and can use the same/different aesthetics to achieve their own desirable outcomes; e.g., Harmony Corrupted and I.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

In other words, erogenous pleasure, non-harmful pain and other euphoric sensations determine by context, during ludo-Gothic BDSM. Such performances are generally works-in-progress, tailored to fit the different players working in concert; i.e., I have trauma and want to work through it with Harmony, who doesn’t want to harm me (the mark of a good dom). So we work through it, step-by-step, session-by-session, until we figure out the best way to work such rough play into our psychosexual games and theatre.

But rest assured, while many people have one “speed” with which they normally play things out, switches like myself prefer the ability to adopt different fantasies—thus demonic configurations of “fatal” desire, knowledge and power—when playing with excellent cuties like Harmony Corrupted “on the go/fly.” It’s a place of magical pleasure, a Twilight Zone of our defense, addressing how we feel:

I’m falling down a spiral, destination unknown
Double-crossed messenger all alone
Can’t get no connection, can’t get through, where are you? (Golden Earring’s “Twilight Zone,” 1982).

Such things are a part to play out during cryptonymy and calculated risk, their darkness visible making actual harm impossible and catharsis all but guaranteed; i.e., a party to perform between different players having fun through exquisite “torture” yielding to individual preference.

In turn, we rock ‘n doll in danger discos of our design, divorced from profit and made to help us heal from actual abuse/systems thereof! Genuine exploitation sits adjacent to palliative-Numinous feelings, all existing in the same shadow zone. Those marked by trauma seek “trauma” out in quotes: as made weird in ways that, true enough, seek weird out as something to relate to with; re (from Volume Two, part one):

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 likeminded while the state tries, as it always does, to dominate us through its own victims (source).

So do we make our bones, our own friendship and marriage counselors, during ludo-Gothic BDSM.

Demon mommies reify not just combative emotions, then, but socio-material conditions as “plastic through play.” In doing so, they give us a powerfully compassionate voice to subvert, thus counteract, state forms with; i.e., during liminal expression doubling our abusers, onstage and off. Any syndrome (mirror, compartment, virgin/whore, white knight, impostor, etc), disorder (eating, personality, body and/or gender), or monopoly we’d want to interrogate, we may do so; i.e., in a half-real sense. State influence sits in between reality and imagination as informing each other according to state designs upheld or turned upside-down in said territories’ total spheres; i.e., desk murder and state atrocities, at large, versus rape play of a campy sort, the latter punching up while arguing for/administering critical thought and dialectical-material analysis as second-nature, over time: through actual Satanic rebellion repeatedly “taking temperature.”

Doing so means parsing fake rebellion/witch cops, en medias res (re: Milton)—with state proponents and labor proponents looking the same, but whose cryptonymy functions differently! Function determines function, and rebellion is always anisotropic; i.e., its reversal of polarity concerning power and knowledge operate through imagination and desire, either requiring such “sea legs” to navigate the inevitable confusions that occur when occupying and navigating a constantly changing world flooded with pre-existing trauma; re: its darkness visible.

[7] Note how Brady, visibly intimidated by Tricka, falls back on various bodybuilder stereotypes once triggered; and how she—suitably emboldened by the stage as a kind of safe space to push the envelope—happily fucks with him a bit; i.e., taking him to Pound Town, if but for one frightening moment written all over his face. The crowd (including the other performers, right) loves it.

[8] The plot of Thor: Ragnarok (2017) being to foist Asgard’s imperial sins onto Odin’s evil daughter (evocations of Virginia Woolfe’s “Judith,” the fictional sister of Shakespeare from her 1929 novel, A Room of One’s Own); i.e., that women “can’t have power” because they’re “hysterical” and always seek revenge against the Patriarchy pimping them; re: gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss.

[9] The character was originally written by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, thus echoes many of those writers problematic attitudes about American heroism on the global stage.

[10] A double pun; i.e., to “peg” as in, fuck with a strap-on, and to “peg out,” meaning to kill. A classic double whammy that Medusa revels in!

[11] I.e., the James Whale problem, a queer director taking away the Creature’s voice: as it was normally expressed—the way Shelley intended—against Cartesian men.

[12a] Such things can be performed with other people, or with poetic extensions of them; e.g., sex toys that—through size, color and shape—represent things outside our normal experience as much as anything ordinary or “realistic”; re: the classic Gothic juxtaposition of the everyday “novel” versus the Ancient Romance extending to roleplay and toys:

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

The gimmick transforms through context; re: by illustrating mutual consent through playing with forbidden elements. To that, such spaces let workers change clothes and colors of different kinds, but also offer various openings in a tantalizing gesture of exposure and invitation, as well as exploration of and for different kinds of people looking in on the fun. White girls are classically “threatened” by BBC in traditional porn, for instance, but through their own pornography can illustrate mutual consent simply through selection; i.e., the ability to put whatever into their holes that they want (a nightmare scenario for straight white men who want to control said women; i.e., in every aspect of their lives, including who they have sex with or who they fantasize about/perform with).

[12b] John J. Raspanti quotes of Ali vs Foreman:

“George Foreman is nothing but a big mummy,” Ali said. “I’ve officially named him, ‘The Mummy.’ See, you all believe that stuff you see in the movies. Here’s a guy running through the jungle, doing the hundred-yard dash, and the mummy is chasing him. Thomp, thomp, thomp. ‘Ooh, help! I can’t get away from the Mummy! Help, help! The Mummy’s catching me. Help! Here comes the Mummy!’ And the mummy always catches him. Well, don’t you all believe that stuff. There ain’t no mummy gonna catch me” (source: John J. Raspanti’s “Forty-Nine Years Ago,” 2023).

The fact remains, people love monsters, and frequently turn up at shows like those to see monsters do battle (often men of color), and because these performers rarefy politics and bloodspots tied to specific places and warring geopolitical forces; e.g., Ali and Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire, their event billed “The Rumble in the Jungle.” Indeed, boxing is commonly called “war personified,” the fighters involved representing different countries and peoples whether they want to or not.

To his credit, though, Ali was staunchly anti-war (outside the ring, anyways), going so far as to refuse the draft even if it cost him his license and landed him in jail:

On June 20, 1967, the great Muhammad Ali was convicted in Houston for refusing induction in the U.S. armed forces.

Ali saw the war in Vietnam as an exercise in genocide. He also used his platform as boxing champion to connect the war abroad with the war at home, saying, “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs?”

For these statements, as much as the act itself, Judge Joe Ingraham [through a blatant act of judicial legislation] handed down the maximum sentence to Cassius Clay (as they insisted upon calling him in court): five-years in a federal penitentiary and a $10,000 fine (source: Dave Zirin’s “When Muhammad Ali Took the Weight,” 2011).

In turn, activism and theatre often go hand-in-hand—not just for Ali, but for all performers and consumers of monsters, onstage and off; re: of demon lovers, mommies included!

[13] This goes both ways, with trans women being seen as “traps.” We’ll explore this more in Volume Three.

[14] I.e., “a seemingly more conciliatory set of discourses and institutional practices that emphasize Indigenous recognition and accommodation” (source). Betrayal is betrayal.