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.

“Damsels, Detectives and Sex Demons,” part two: Demons and Dealing with Them; or Abandonment, Dark Worship and Vengeful Sacrifice When Dissecting Radcliffe (feat. Ridley Scott’s The Terror and Alien: Covenant, Ninja Scroll, The Dark Crystal, and Harmony Corrupted)

“…I have preserved a life which otherwise I had lost in torture; and I have obtained the power of procuring every bliss which can make that life delicious! […] Ambrosio, I still love you: Our mutual guilt and danger have rendered you dearer to me than ever, and I would fain save you from impending destruction. Summon then your resolution to your aid; and renounce for immediate and certain benefits the hopes of a salvation, difficult to obtain, and perhaps altogether erroneous. Shake off the prejudice of vulgar souls; Abandon a God who has abandoned you, and raise yourself to the level of superior Beings!”

She paused for the Monk’s reply: He shuddered, while He gave it.

“Matilda!” He said after a long silence in a low and unsteady voice; “What price gave you for liberty?”

She answered him firm and dauntless.

“Ambrosio, it was my Soul!”

—Matilda and Ambrosio, The Monk

Picking up where “Non-Magical Damsels and Detectives (feat. Out of Sight, Nina Hartley, Velma, and Zeuhl)” left off…

Part zero examined damsels, detectives and sex demons per Giger’s xenomorph (and its paths of the dead to pass through), while part one looked at non-magical damsels and detectives as female-to-trans (sex) workers ranging from Nina Hartley to Jo-Lo to Velma to Velma’s good/evil doubles, myself and my ex, Zeuhl. Part two looks at demons solo; i.e., when dealing with them (as magical to non-magical beings) during such Faustian exchanges, including a segue into furries: revisiting Scott’s Alien universe with Alien: Covenant (and a more charitable interpretation of its villain) and his Terror produce-sided affair (with its own semi-magical elements) while cutting Radcliffe’s simulacrum to bits, then having Harmony and a couple close-reads at the end—Ninja Scroll and The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance—step in to help put Radcliffe the demon whore back together to camp Ridley Scott!

(artist: Bambii)

Please bear in mind, this piece is conversational/mostly tying up loose ends while covering a lot of ground (and holistically sprinkled with various puns, reclaimed slurs and intersectional/crass epiphanies felt throughout). In keeping with the Numinous, though, we’ll consider different conventional/gimmicky and fetishized elements of revenge that demons seek for having their solitude disturbed, while also highlighting their predatory elements a bit more, too: abandonment, dark worship and vengeful sacrifice!

Note: By now, we’ve talked about damsels, detectives and sex demons, but also virgins/whores and their revenge a ton, and committed a lot of pages and ink to thesis and application. Like the rest of “Exploring the Derelict Past,” “D&D” is an older element I want to include for its namesake; but also, we’ll be keeping this one and the “Call of the Wild” relatively short (about two hundred pages for what could be much longer, similar to our vampire and ghost subchapters from the Undead Module). Pinky promise!—Perse

We’ll unfurl those elements like a trail of fabled breadcrumbs that detectives classically chase down (often to have them punished for it during the live burial trope; i.e., cannibalizing the heroine through repressed libido given shape; re: Segewick). First, a reprise: as classic granters of tempting wishes during Faustian bargains, demons are whore-like beings of and inscribed with torturous dark power to deal with and in; i.e., often in a “coital” sense and one which the state treats as things to summon and banish in Faustian bargains on Promethean Quests; re: “dealing” with demons as a problem it places within a dialog of exchange that has them killed (or injected with poison disguised as “medicine,” curing a “disease”): the demon as the whore having the whore’s revenge when summoned!

Except all that glitters is not gold, but works in dialectical-material opposition within the shamed aesthetic (re: Zeuhl and Matilda, Velma and me); likewise, the pearly castles are generally the worst, as are their moderate defenders’ false modesty. “Darkness visible” takes on a paradoxical quality that beckons we embrace it in service to Satan; i.e., not as a person but a cryptonymic act that pushes revolutionarily through systemic falsehoods: a Great Destroyer that evokes past trauma to heal from it, not extend it through further canonical lies.

This, in turn, takes multiple steps—often through decreasing amounts of blindness through the light of illusion (“Long and hard is the way…”) towards true sight; i.e., in a sex-positive progression towards what D. H. Lawrence would call “going to the dark gods.” These can be announced readily by the profanity of a simple theatrical gesture; e.g., a nun’s habit juxtaposed with the powerful unveiling of a shock of dark, curly public hair under her lifted skirt (which we whores weaponize during the paradox instead of simply taking it for granted, like our abusers do).

(artist: Milo Manara)

Moreover, this formulaic loss of control happens in increasingly queer ways that abjure heteronormative dimorphism, the latter usually canonical rape fantasies penned by straight white women for straight white women; i.e., inclusive survival sex work camped through a traditionally female position: the Radcliffean princess’ survival leading to their rewarding with a “safe home” or fairytale castle where they’re still expected to perform “wifely duties.” Called the Great Enchantress, Radcliffe weaved a powerful and effective spell, and it didn’t come from nowhere[1]. The challenging of these deeper systemic tropes involves queer discourse from a position historically of male to privilege—a camping of the canon (re: Broadmoor) that transgressively undermines amatonormativity in ways that female authors, through white and straight, historically would have been denied: sex with demons, sacrilege! Pussy dregs wrecking monk daddy’s home!

Simply put, Radcliffe was born thus placed into a position of self-deception, requiring a deceiver to deceive, thus free her of her sanctimonious, ultimately settler-colonial falsehoods; i.e., our doing so happening for the betterment of all peoples she saw as “black”: advocacy for a holistic, universal oppressed through forbidden knowledge and power as something experienced by men recognized as Satanic for refusing to perform their own heteronormative duties (not to exclude or take anything away from witches, their erect phallic brooms, and the monstrous-feminine at large, of course. In the interest of historical progress, though, I want to focus on the iconoclastic nature of queer men during the classic Neo-Gothic; re: Scott aping Lewis as a straight man partially canonizing a gay iconoclast with his own villain, David the Android, and his creations in Covenant).

While this sympathy for the Devil and its anisotropic reversal of state power mid-tension brings us closer to the xenomorph of Scott’s Alien and Matthew Lewis’s campiness vis-à-vis The Monk, the tamer and boxed-in Gothic fantasies of women like Ann Radcliffe still remain a fundamental part of the equation: fumbling around in the moody dark towards forms of agency through these calculated-risk fantasies that men like Ridley Scott would build upon with their own damsels, detectives and sex demons; re: employing and camping the twist (the saboteur and the stowaway) not just with Alien, mind you, but Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, inspired decades later by the iconoclastic, Satanic reverence Mary Shelley (a girl in a Gothic “all boys club”) had already made famous for 150+ years, in 1979.

And, in turn, Scott would help perpetuate the seafaring queerness/female rage (and superstition) that male explorers would have been allowed to endure and express, regularly codifying those variables in his own work or sponsoring it in others’ (e.g., The Terror, exhibit 48d2): releasing demons per the abjection process as something to reverse with perverted, even-painful glee! “A …small …Mexican… chihuahua!” to “catch an idea,” as David Lynch puts it, and be “a seed for something” (cosmavoid’s “David Lynch Being a Madman for a Relentless 8 Minutes and 30 Seconds,” 2021). But also “baby wants to fuck!” They can’t all be winners!

To it, dreams weren’t just the playgrounds of Freud, Nordic skalds, and Gothic novelists, past and present, code-switching in duality during liminal expression; they speak to all manner of secret children, incest, murder and collective shame, The Mysterious Mother onwards; re (from Volume One):

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

Eat your heart out, Mary Shelley (or other organs)! “Tremendous indigestion! Where’re the Tums?”

Such things poetically present as “awful”; i.e., for a demon’s victims, while those of us watching are granted maximum relief (the hangman’s picnic): killing the clergyman, soldier or anyone else we oppressed don’t like! Scott’s David is our dark wishmaster making our darkest revenge fantasies come true (as much as a straight man can)! Imagine the deus ex machina but in reverse (as Lewis did, ripping Ambrosio apart) and you have the right idea. It’s literally strict BDSM gallows’ humor (with those holding the noose having more privilege usually than those yoked by it).

Perhaps Scott wasn’t wholly on board with Cameron’s ideas of conquest, after all. Yes, his Covenant nods to Aliens are deliberate, but only so he can dissect the idea of military optimism by indulgently castrating it through Neo-Gothic gloom and doom saying, “keep the fuck out, Whitey!” (whose own investigating of rape always leads to more rape). It’s not always postcolonial in a constructive sense, but it does deconstruct the Radcliffean Amazon during the Promethean Quest/Cartesian step-and-fetch-it rather happily (similar to Said taking Austen to task during Culture and Imperialism, but even meaner than that or Dacre having Victoria slice Lila to pieces). Eh, I’ll take it!

We’ll work backwards (or rather, have worked backwards to arrive at where we currently are); i.e., by highlighting a couple basic points about forbidden sight, then The Terror before examining the xenomorph and its maker in Scott’s former and latter-day work, ultimately ending on Radcliffe and Lewis as competing schools of thought in centuries worth of queer discourse that Scott’s Covenant added to. As such, the direction we go un doesn’t matter too much because it isn’t entirely linear to begin with; i.e., oppositional praxis makes the conflict more a linguo-material game of tug-o’-war that invites different people to join representing different positions that are often at odds within the same dialogic!

Within this struggle, Radcliffe’s demonic trifecta can yield a variety of material outcomes; i.e., some yielding neoconservative, fascist flavors to famous monsters that women relate in opposition towards (such as Ripley versus the xenomorph) but also personify as embodiments thereof during oppositional praxis; re: with a BDSM flavor (exhibit 48d1/2, and 49): revenge as a Jacobean “dish” best served cold (the puns are endless)!

(exhibit 48d1: Artist: Tigrsasha. Nuns aren’t simply demons, damsels or detectives; Pygmalions often control them like puppets through the interminable genesis of an ideal submissive/sacred “almost holy” whore [the white woman/Gothic Radcliffean heroine as the sacred and exclusive victim]. All the same, feminine agency can be conveyed in cis or queer circles alike; i.e., as cathartic, establishing a sense of Galatea-esque revenge through the trope of the lesbian/ace/curious female detective as virgin-/whore-like on the surface of the same image; e.g., Elvira, Mistress of the Dark [exhibit 12].)

As part of this conversation, the archetype of female detectives serving as Gothic heroines has gradually evolved from passive, to active, to self-defensive escape, to self-“defensive”/pre-emptive attack, to back around again (exhibit 49). While canonical attempts at mastery and survival happen through a self-contained series of violent clichés that lack satire or the critical power necessary to transform the status quo beyond war and traditional gender roles, iconoclastic ones make the pastiche perceptive and sexy in “slutty” language (re: exhibit 48d1, above).

Such whores and their revenge promote a diegetic, composite desire to see what is omitted—but also a metatextual, creative curiosity, joy and playfulness to look upon the reimagined, barbaric past and create it with just enough variation to make it your own, try something new, and maybe, just maybe communicate something on the surface of the montage “that normally lurks beneath”; re: Scott summoning “Radcliffe” to dismantle and inject her pieces into a larger genderqueer being. Viewed as a collage, as we have shown, such a concept presents its answer quite neatly. But a visual imagination was generally employed by writers playing around with similar Frankensteinian concepts hundreds of years ago into the present state of affairs: how to show the “past,” often in seemingly superficial ways that open up the mind adjacent to magical devices that have become increasingly scientific under a Protestant status quo. Again, this ties to Segewick’s idea of “the character in the veil”: a “shallow pattern” literally on the surface of paper or a screen (or glass) that can evoke things much deeper across a Radcliffean composite that spans space and time (exhibit 48d1/49).

For our purposes, this deeper pattern is historically “hidden” by the material limitations of single images, or even collages. As I shall demonstrate in just a moment, the pattern must be reassembled by queer-leaning iconoclasts like us looking at older forms of camp like Ridley Scott (who were themselves inspired by powerful women and gay men); i.e., as reexplained by a Gothic Communist (me) interpreting larger patterns across time and space, but also psychosexually pornographic art/violence as a series of chronotopes—not to pass over in collage, alone, but through in a cryptomimetic chain: to view from an unusual, non-heteronormative perspective, thereby noting Scott’s odd experiments in ways we can salvage.

In doing so, we’re not just borrowing pieces of him for our revenge, but Radcliffe’s reanimated cadaver as Scott rendered her asunder and made back into his xenomorph from Cameron’s (a kind of Ship of Theseus, at this point)! In turn, Capitalism’s visual effect on the Gothic imagination can easily be revealed by critiquing its canonical elements along these hermeneutic routes; i.e., in a holistic patchwork that opens the mind to forbidden sight as occupied by opposing forces fighting over the same basic devices: an insectoid/biomechanical gargoyle or hellhound patrolling the fungal underworld, but also a dog with a bone—us gnawing on our foes (or vice versa)!

(artist: Clubhouse Statues)

Forbidden sight isn’t just the Numinous, then; i.e., “look at the giant horrible thing and your face melts off.” It’s often compelled ignorance through Gothic tropes used by the willingly ignorant, or a determined/anxious refusal to look when supplied subversive alternatives with transgressive potential versus nascent and undeveloped canon (and its killer babies reflecting the Pavlovian conditioning at work; e.g., David’s Neomorphs, above); i.e., a refusal to behold things one fears might corrupt their “pure” moral character/social standing as part of a larger Gothic canon: the paradox of chasing shadows you both want and don’t want to see!

While older writers like Radcliffe, then, tried to rediscover the past as something to detect and learn from by chasing it down, they also armored themselves and their virtue in sexist ways that—as we shall examine with Scott’s sexist David (versus Victor’s sexist Adam)—left behind “old,” derelict pathways whose unreliable sights into the reimagined past still yield various surprises; re: the castle as something to detect hidden factors inside according to imperiled detectives fumbling around in the dark. This partly happens from struggling with the cultural values they brought with them while blazing their own trails, which have since been taken much further than Radcliffe could have/would have dared in her own Gothic constructions; i.e., from Scott to us and then beyond.

For example, Scott’s funding of The Terror offers one such expedition into the imaginary past; i.e., one coming from a predominantly male perspective not unlike Matthew Lewis two centuries ago: “sacrifice” and extramarital/non-nuclear dark sex having a “bestial” element that is both ethnocentric, but trying to see the Indigenous population as not harming anyone, while still frankly alienizing them (the show’s monster is Scott having revenge for them, too, though in that case, the postcolonial elements aren’t clouded by a fascist character):

(exhibit 48d2: Artist, top-left and -right: IRN. The Yeti or snow monster is, in postcolonial culture, something to deify as an aspect of revenge, but also of the dying land invaded by unnatural, manmade Western forces; e.g., The Terror and its numerous, bourgeois cruelties [which I lovingly catalogue in my review of the show] harming the boyish white explorers; i.e., within the exploited land, similar to Scott’s seafaring-in-space, Neo-Gothic revival, Alien [a semi-postcolonial appeal to Westerners/white Indians through an adventuresome ghost of the counterfeit]. The Inuit monster, Tuunbaq, bears some resemblance to the Greenlandic “tupilaq” [top-middle and bottom]. Charlotte Price Persson of Science Nordic writes,

It is not every day that you come across a magic animal carved from the bones of children and animals, which is brought to life through magical songs and given power by sucking on the manufacturer’s sexual organs. On top of that, it has but one mission in life: to kill its creator’s enemies. […] The tupilaq was a magic animal, created through witchcraft, which everyone could use if you followed the correct instructions and learnt to master magic, says Lange. It was witchcraft, but it was not restricted to people with shamanic powers. / To make a tupilaq, you had to collect parts from different animals, bones from both animals and people—preferably from a child. It was also a good idea to add something that had a connection to the person who you wanted to inflict disaster on [source]. 

So does Persson catalog dead/endangered Indigenous cultures similar to the Egyptologists of the post-Napoleonic Wars; i.e., one whose subsequent disaster/fascination with the imaginary past being what Percy Shelley spoke of in “Ozymandias” and Mary Shelley revived in Frankenstein with Victor and the Creature, both 1818, and which Scott’s own xenoglossia speaks [more mutedly] with Giger’s psychosexual, demon-BDSM “xenomorph” [though it wasn’t called that until Aliens].

In essence, Tuunbaq’s “meat and spells” is similar to the xenomorph, speaking to a gargoyle/golem of revenge not unlike Victor’s Creature, but made in defense of the land by natural magics versus scientific prowess, xenophobia and Imperial decree; i.e., exploration and genocide as righteous, God-given and pre-determined against undeserving native inhabitants. Channeling Mary Shelley’s chilly view of nature through a mythical Mount Blanc, there is no loving paternal God in the desolate north; there is “just dead men and living men” punished by blind faith, but also shitty early corporate practices. The titantic pressure and fires of industry consume working seamen like fuel, but also make them incredibly stupid; i.e., faced with the untame wilderness, they break everything in sight and break down themselves in the face of something that isn’t their Christian god: an older and unwelcoming Numinous they’re questing to tame and claim the fire thereof.

This callow fragility scrutinizes queerness more broadly—either as executed between two or more men engaged in regular homosocial ties [the comely gossip, Jobson, and his staunch “darling,” Captain Francis Crozier ] and shamed homosexual activities on “their” boats actually owned by England; or embodied by monsters out on the ice. As a queer spirit of revenge, both Tuunbaq and the tupilaq consume the essence of men through sexual [and other bodily] fluids via sodomic union; re: not unlike a “vampire” eating sanguine, humors or the soul [with Tuunbaq’s inflicted wounds on the men removing “entries” from the “diaries” of their minds; i.e., the vengeful death of their memories and culture, wiping Hamlet’s commonplace book clean]. It is a parasitic relationship [versus mana and the Māori’s holistic transference of life force, for example]: a reckoning or restoration of balance/reparations and restitution, mid-land-back before it is taken but told after colonization has occurred [and after Crozier defects].

To this, the show’s gay Irish scapegoat/vice character, Mr. Hickey, shares a curious bond with the monster, one established through ritualized violence [the shamans cut out their tongues to speak to it; so does he]. Indeed, violence and sexuality often go hand-in-hand in queer discourse, especially before the Internet Age but also in hauntologies that predate the Internet being shown on the Internet; e.g., the homosexual man forced into darkness, but also becoming a mutinous, repressed being of psychosexual violence synonymously tied to rudimentary/coercive BDSM practices, medieval contrition/flagellation, male seafaring and strange lands; i.e., curious precursors to Mr. Hickey’s complex, alienated pathology such as Dracula and Moby Dick [“The Serious Functions of Melville’s Phallic Jokes,” 1961] but also Howard from The Lighthouse [2019].

As Irene Nudd from Gayly Dreadful writes in “The Lighthouse: You Can’t Hide From Your Gayness” [2020]:

Howard’s intense rage mirrors the violent masturbation that aligns with common toxic male sexual expression. To put it simply, when Howard beats the seagull, it’s a metaphor for beating his meat. The metaphor extends further since the seagull has one eye, and Howard’s vision of Wake’s former assistant also has one eye. Based on this connection, Howard is engaging in gay sex with the man that worked on the island before him. Not only will this solidify the curse that Wake warned Howard about, but it is a portent of the inevitable insanity that will befall him due to isolation and abundance of toxic masculinity. When Howard tries to fight against nature (human sexuality and homosexuality), nature shows him that repressing his sexual urges can have deadly consequences [source]. 

Beyond Freudian/Jungian imagery and [frankly homophobic and sexist, ethnocentric] metaphors, the oft-homoerotic nautical symbolism—whether overt [the lighthouse is a penis] or subtle/vague [the ocean is “female”]—ties to repressed anxieties about hidden abuses stemming from unequal material conditions during capital’s business-as-usual sending ambiguously gay white men to colonize worlds the elite/workers both feared: in a time before heteronormativity had crystalized to nearly the extent it has, now, but also lacking the queer diction we currently take for granted [re: Lewis, Broadmoor].

In The Terror this plays out in several ways, generally involving BDSM, cannibalism, magic and revenge. On board the ship, Hickey’s own queerness is sadistically punished by the ship’s men-in-command—a kind of reactive abuse to his own gay mutineer’s treachery as made by the state’s criminogenic conditions before he climbed on board.

 In short, he’s the queer-coded bad servant, and punished via an assimilated taskmaster aping Cromwell’s racist practices unto the Irish; i.e., for which Crozier and Hickey are both trying to escape. To that, Crozier—pointedly denied marriage into a family of “good [English] standing” by his superior—is sent by the very woman he loves to look after the very man [her father] who denied Crozier any chance at a better in-group life; i.e., because “of where he comes from”; re: punishing Crozier for being Irish, but also for selling said Irish out per the English settler-colonial model that forces him to forever choose. Choose he does, babysitting the elite’s chosen dumbass—the leader of the exhibition—who is subsequently babied into old age: dumb beyond measure but also cruel and self-righteous, to boot! Watching him die is a treat [and Indigenous act of revenge written by white men]!

Punished by the “good” Irishman as punching down out of revenge against the English, Mr. Hickey returns the favor many times over when he vengefully chains the last survivors—including the captain and his soldiers—to a lifeboat and summons the monster straight to them: to face Tuunbaq and their own hand in things [a demonic sacrifice/offering to a dark god Mr. Hickey sees falsely in himself—a Byronic man-in-black who also kills Indigenous people to have revenge against the white men who wronged him]: “show me what you eat, and I’ll tell you what you are.” Hickey’s a man-eater!

Keeping with Moby Dick and the West eating its own workers and the planet’s wildlife in furtherance of the Cartesian mode of cartography and progress, it’s an awful cycle of abuse; i.e., one where criminogenic conditions lead abuse victims to conflate harmful pain with non-harmful pain/mutually consensual physical pleasure. Mr. Hickey becomes fluent and well-equipped to assume the position of ultimate deceiver/misleader regarding his abusive/abused crew when predictable tragedy befalls all of them; i.e., he triggers and does what Mr. Hickey does as conditioned unto him: by the socio-material conditions around him before, during and after the exhibition, itself a testimony to abandonment, sacrifice and revenge in Jacobean fashion [everyone dies, Hamlet-style].

In other words, the ensuing misery didn’t start with Mr. Hickey, who is merely a symptom of a larger problem, alongside Crozier and the others: Capitalism. Its atrocities are gilded over by the self-aggrandizing memoirs of “brave” English captains, gentry and the class system. Under this gaudy mirage, Hickey is both Irish and queer but also pinned under another Irishman’s thrall. His assigned superior, Captain Crozier, orders him whipped “as a boy” [on the ass, above] for criminal behaviors against an English expedition, including “dirtiness” as a slight against an overtly Protestant Discovery Service. Surviving the trauma committed against him by another Irishman passing the blame back and forth, Mr. Hickey both resents and admires the monster out on the ice; i.e., seeing it as a paganized cross between animal and human that he erroneously attempts to commune with through shared struggle: “There are holy things before us.”

Almost. Faced with it, and in true abject fashion, both are alienated from each other and—in Radcliffean fashion—destroyed once the Black Veil is yanked aside; i.e., symbolizing a tragic death of tradition and Indigenous memory by a tokenized minority pushed to madness and betrayal of nature in the process [assimilation is poor stewardship]. Hickey’s brief [Icarian] rise and fall remains a forgotten parallel to Jeronimus Cornelisz’ pre-fascist prelude to 20th century horrors during a sociopathic and bloody mutiny of the Batavia in 1629 [Unknown5’s “The Shipwreck That Became a Living Nightmare,” 2023].

Nearly two centuries afterwards, such stories were already being painted by Théodore Géricault’s 1816 “Raft of the Medusa” written in the Shelley’s aforementioned 1818 Frankenstein and “Ozymandias”; i.e., as progressing onto Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym [1838] towards the events between 1845-48 Scott’s Terror spoke of, onto Melville’s Moby Dick [1851] followed by Stoker, Conrad and Lovecraft in the 1890s and 1930s: viewing such things as queer Numinous exports. In doing so, they were effectively blaming the dark whore, Medusa, for the state and its proponent’s ignorant worldview shivered about by Scott’s astronoetic matelotage in 2012 and 2017 with Prometheus and Covenant—similar stories about wealthy Englishmen sailing into the final frontier to quest for the Numinous, thus make a deal with the dark gods [who promptly take revenge, having none of what he’s selling them; re: they cannibalize him, which Scott’s Prometheus treats as fascist crossdress through land-back argument].

Meanwhile, the titular ship is classified in the classic sailor sense: as female. Both it and the void beyond its safety are “motherly” but in differing ways; i.e., as the givers and takers of life for these childlike boys, consigned to a lonely tomb together on the other side of an angry, vengeful world. Capitalism put them there; re: to exploit nature by pitting them against each other as marooned orphans. Abandoned and confused, they march to death out in the waste, slowly starving to death by their damned inability to bond with the land; i.e., every step is attrition/contrition, one where mutinous cannibalism—already unsustainable, but nevertheless a custom of the sea [re: one that inspired Melville’s Moby Dick after the whale breaks the ship’s rudder]—whose “death lottery” [an eco-fascist tendency] merely delays the inevitable, should capital carry on.

Faced with the endless lies of empire—and the death of his wards and unwanted nemesis—Captain Crozier altogether abandons his former life and memories/dreams of a welcoming England [and pastoral bride]. For him, the Frozen North is no longer a route or site of plunder but a purgatorial home; i.e., a fresh start in the twilight years of his life: the penance not of a white savior but a white penitent safeguarding the dwindling native populations giving him sanctuary.)

Even when not strictly “his own,” Scott’s patronage of Gothic terrors are as different from Radcliffe’s own as Lewis’s were (despite all of them basically talking about the same thing: rape and xenophobia). As a consequence of this continued difference in privilege between men and women, older pathways process and convey information in outdated, alien ways that leave room for improvement but also supply precious opportunities to learn about the past in semi-ignorant or accommodated forms—i.e., Radcliffe didn’t just see the world around her through superstitious, fearful artifacts and codifying tropes; she arbitrarily condemned “bad” emotions like fear (e.g., “useless sorrow”) while respecting the societal fact that suspicion, anxiety or stress were classified as “hysterical” by Patriarchal authorities towards women (or beings forced to identify as women) “for their own good.” Such dialogs happened according to material possessions, but also ways of thinking about or with them that, in today’s day and age, simply don’t exist in quite the same shape and form. They’re even more radical.

(source: Navi Gavi)

These aren’t just materials to write on the surface of—or with Blake, using his “corroding fires[2]“; i.e., acids to etch into printing plates—nor are they merely forbidden sight as something to look at in a literal sense. Instead, they are a kind of forgotten or lost sight/darkness visible gleaned through Miltonian repetition and exposure; re: involving outmoded Satanic ideas as something to express in dated campy forms: not just poetry or miracles, but Galvanism in Frankenstein‘s case. Hers was a precocious, atypical approach to gendered literature from a woman whose marriage to Percy Shelley definitely rubbed off on her (and whose fiction, post-Frankenstein, would continue blazing a postcapitalist trail; e.g., The Last Man). To that, the “future” of Mary Shelley’s moment is not our own past; i.e., Galvanism the way she envisioned never came to be, but instead the horrors of Capitalism evolved into something beyond what Shelley could entirely imagine that connects just, as well, to her “Modern Prometheus” in hindsight, vis-à-vis Ridley Scott’s Gothic matelotage.

Queerness-as-identity defines through the struggle of constantly reclaimed language; i.e., identifying with struggle as an ontological statement bearing Gothic elements: what we are as a means of shaking things up! The hidden truth of this grander struggle in terms of what is being worked with, understood and revealed through derelict forms—while often taken for granted, mid-disguise—can actually become clear-as-day to those who experiment and put in the time and the work; i.e., figuring out ways to express ourselves and our identifies in cryptonymic opposition to the status quo as automatically assigning them for us by telling us what we are, mid-oppression. So do we become criminals in our own hearts (re: Zeuhl, who tried to escape such things); i.e., dressed up in Gothic language where we unknowingly fawn to our oppressors and apologize for/to them regarding our own existence as “abnormal” (what Hannah Gadsby describes in Nanette, 2018, as the existence of gendered tension: teaching one side to feel shame and the other to openly hate them for being different). Gleaning this context takes brainpower, creativity and perseverance, but also having a means and exposure that aren’t always a given/aren’t always available to those living in Pygmalion’s Shadow.

For example, either variable can be (and has) inverted; i.e., certain authors, like Lovecraft and his cosmic nihilism, were virtually unknown in their day (yet practiced spiritually by older bigotries breeding inside homegrown American fascism), but have since been littered everywhere in posthumous fame. Likewise, Radcliffe—though renowned for her fiction while alive—has gone on to become rather obscured in a wider circuit over which her shadow looms like one of those Black Veils she liked so much; re: was someone who I, as a self-professed and lifelong horror fan, didn’t know existed until I went to grad school overseas! I knew her likenesses, but not the woman herself as scatted all about the land of my birth in curious doubles; e.g., Michigan being the birthplace of Raimi’s Evil Dead movies and their Numinous suggestions.

As we shall see in just a moment, Scott critiqued the Radcliffean school of thought by drawing tremendous inspiration from women like Shelley but also Radcliffe, herself. In turn, Radcliffe, Mary Shelley and men like Mary Shelley’s husband (such as Lewis) drew from the same shared well as Scott: a “Satanic,” Miltonian thought process they improved on after Milton’s death, but also Radcliffe’s and Shelley’s; i.e., one that continues, into the 21st century and beyond, allowing for free discourse to flow between gender and sexuality as anti-capitalist ventures with the correct shove; i.e., one performed under Capitalism as having changed considerably since Paradise Lost and Frankenstein, meaning Thatcher’s neoliberalism as nonetheless motivating Scott to seek revenge on Radcliffe nearly two centuries after she kicked the bucket (dying in 1823 to actually outlive Jane Austen and Lewis, who died in 1817 and 1818, respectively)!

It goes to show that artistic repetition is not rote, stiff memorization, but loose, flexible and fluid, which leads to the ultimate objective of the Humanities: to continuously reflect, reexamine and ruminate on the past; e.g., its language and devices, as well as the associate “intelligent” or useful emotions with which to master the naturally ambiguous qualities of language that unnatural Enlightenment dogma tries to binarize into a kind of order for profit (thus rape).

Gothic Communism abjures this order during the whore’s revenge; i.e., doing so in favor of a return to older and formerly superstitious and “medieval” forms of thinking whose subsequent chaos is updated to fit the present: informed, wise and communal—freed and accompanied by the Wisdom of the Ancients to avoid the past repeating itself; e.g., the ghost, zombie, vampire or werewolf as “made wise” by constant application with real-world materials, but made friendly in relation to their emancipatory purpose in a Gothic-Communist sense; re: Radcliffe’s spectre haunting not just Scott, but a great many artists torn between her and Medusa (such as Lady Dimitrescu, below). They become cultural mascots tied to an emotionally intelligent collective that rejects Capitalism in favor of something better than it, but still has a need of telling friend from foe; i.e., their needs personified by the personas of monster pastiche:

(exhibit 49: Artist, top-left: Heiko Kuru; top-middle: Monori Rogue; top-right: Logan Cure; middle: Flou; bottom-right: source; bottom-left: Jan Rockitnik. Lady Dimitrescu, as remade many times in marginally differing ways; i.e., some more “phallic” than others, but having a Radcliffean garb similar to Lewis’ Prioress/Bleeding Nun haunting her heroines and vice versa. From Scott onwards, this adoption runs the risk of “brandishing knives” the way that sexist men or TERFs like Radcliffe do, meaning a threat of rape performed “in-reverse” by phallic women against marginalized targets; i.e., “mother vampires” as a kind of “TERF Medusa/Amazon” to be subjugated during regressive Amazonomachia. However, the basic image remains ambivalent in ways that can yield sex-positive details under dialectical-material scrutiny and holistic, proletarian praxis: a “strict” whore to summon/a zombie “Radcliffe” that isn’t the sexist, bigoted original!)

Gained through deliberately subversive and increasingly sex-positive repetition haunted by generational/systemic harm, such forbidden sight ties not just to obscure or mysterious academic theories gleaned from examining these “ancient” creations; it ties to the creations being made, or otherwise related to older ways of interacting with the world through creation—specifically through interpretive, ontological art forms like Gothic novels that have slowly started to vanish (the ghost of the counterfeit as emptied of its queer/Satanic freight, a mere box of Boo Berry cereal instead of Otto’s Numinous). Seen through demons wrought with opposing forces, older forms of “seeing” involve blending various concepts back together and in ways that might seem alien to the modern world, yet become something to regard with fascination and horror again; re: as an attractive venue to return to, mid-revenge, Zombie Radcliffe having become like Medusa as someone to spank!

For the iconoclast, “looking” can become a sixth sense or mind’s eye that melds with the alien whore’s chimeric body as hyphenated art/porn; i.e., in Satanic media as a broader Gothic tradition dating back to Milton that men, women and queer people have all used, past and present, since Milton’s exit and left-behind poetries were found again; re: the xenomorph as emblematic to queer discourse, Frankenstein onwards, and a deeply intellectual mode that continues to evolve and expand in opposition to Capitalism and its reactionary proponents’ staunchly anti-intellectual tendencies; e.g., Radcliffe being as dumb as she was educated, but curious for things she was admittedly alienated from. The abyss looks into us and vice versa, Scott giving Radcliffe the chance to say hello from Hell!

The xenomorph, then, represents a poetic, ontological act of seeing with things other than the eyes, or with something where eyes should be but something… else is—e.g., a penis or a mouth, like the cyclops (which, in Greek myth, was a seer doomed with foresight speaking through sight), or a deliberate combining of the animate and the inanimate into a single composite; re: a medieval concept intimated by Giger’s biomechanical gargoyle through linguistic devices that aren’t taught anymore and were generally discouraged to begin with. These include the metaphor as a poetic device (the poet classically being a practitioner of idiosyncratic thought that, more often than not, challenges established ways of existing canonically under Capitalism); e.g., Medusa wanting hugs from life and giving hugs (of death) back! Life and death become one again, speaking through zombies of which Radcliffe is just another corpse—one Scott has dug up for fun!

Through demonic poetics, the xenomorph operates as a monstrous pun to poetically describe the self as something “alien” to the status quo in language they can at least partially understand: revenge; i.e., the Capitalist framework of monster/poster pastiche, whereupon the deeper context with queer potential can be gleaned by those reliably drawn to its abandonment. Simply put, it’s a trap of sorts to “bait” potential converts with, hooking them with and reeling them in while dressed up as “sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll” (or John Denver songs); i.e., appreciative-to-appropriative forms of rebellion (a concept we’ll return to in Volume Three) that, like a vice character, gets their time to gnash their teeth/have their revenge before being yanked offstage just as quickly (an oracle to harvest and abject)!

This attempt to voice the unspeakable isn’t without practical challenges. For example, the undead “blind rage” of the demonic xenomorph (which emulates the uphill struggle of rising queer discourse in the late 1700s, but also oppressed queer discourse centuries later intersecting with other groups) is frequently drained by centrist rhetoric of its genuine transformative or revolutionary powers (of Gothic horror and terror). That is, its alien essence was tokenistically sapped by being “just a bug” in the sequels to Alien—jump-started by James Cameron’s neoliberal war pastiche, Aliens, treating legitimate revolutionaries like moving targets to exterminate. Scott does the opposite, killing so many human characters in Covenant that it’s frankly hard to keep track. Forget Radcliffe; he’s slaying Yanks for fun!

As mentioned in Volume One, Cameron specifically treated his aliens as spiritual successors to the “pseudoarachnids” from Starship Troopers, whose own author saw Chinese Communists as needing to be nuked from orbit(!). To alienate them was to show Asia as “older” than Capitalism; i.e., in a time when workers weren’t divided from their labor but also tended to be closer to nature and other forms of existence the state could raise false flags against; re: going beyond the binary-exclusive variants under Capitalism; re: Cameron’s queen being the Archaic Mother as a freshly abject neoliberal symbol for ancient, hermaphroditical, insect broodmother rage, extending itself through inhuman avatars of Mother Nature’s dark whorish revenge. Scott is camping them by killing Ripley and, in effect, Radcliffe’s ghost, David as much the Queen Ripley killed having nature’s revenge through retroactive abortion!

Through canonical persecution, Communism is consistently framed as alien to commerce, Modernity and Western values; i.e., the abjection process treating the entire mentality as an ideological, genderqueer threat that the state would pounce on and collectively punish—mass abjection, in other words. Under this cruel modern system, trans, intersex and non-binary people become closer to the past while only wanting to fit in; Capitalism will treat them as abject money-makers, but also social outcasts and automatic targets of state-sanctioned violence pimped, policed, hunted and killed by its monstrous human soldiers (who feel lonely and isolated in reverse): our aforementioned gorgons, but also madwomen in the attic and feral animal-girls or refugee-fugitive canon-fodder (exhibit 50a1, next page).

Demons, as we’ll continue to examine in this chapter and the next, tend to comment on the chattelization of nature in sexualized, dimorphic gender roles. Just as chattel animals are manmade, so are demons and other egregores for or against the status quo; i.e., as something that organizes and divides nature-as-alien for profit. Sex Positivity moves away from canonical exploitation of monstrous-feminine by making monsters that liberate, thus empower workers, through camp; re: allowing them to offer up new forms of past knowledge that comment on current abuse to have the whore’s revenge and deny the pimp theirs.

A common vector is the Promethean tale/Faustian bargain, which transforms the state into something beyond itself that can be destroyed to achieve: a better world, one where demons can live free of persecution, stereotypes and harm; i.e., those forced by the state to represent Western fears of outsider groups and stigma animals, while simultaneously embodying the spirit of radical, permanent change,  gender-non-conformity and worker solidarity mid-alienation, and ties to a deprivatized nature and scientific approach through unequal, forbidden exchange and desire: the xenomorph as the ultimate survivor of transphobia, token feminist vigilantism and canonical mad science. Presented by Scott as a form of radical rebellion, such demons exist in ways that challenge the established order as something to transgress against; i.e., in animalized, chimeric, drug-like language. This can be produced by a variety of sources, including popular legends and mainstream depictions without an obvious model:

(exhibit 50a1: Artist: top-left: Drew Struzan—in recalling capital’s historical-material poster and monster pastiche—is a famous artist known for his movie posters, hence dubbed “the man behind the poster”; top-middle: “Good Hunting” from Love, Death and Robots, 2019; top-right: source, “furries” being a liminal state of appropriating and appreciating the human-as-animal in ways that evoke lost, hidden, or unlocked animal senses—a “call of the wild”; bottom-left: Zdzisław Beksiński; bottom-middle: source; bottom-right: Werupz.)

This cryptomimesis is likewise something we can replicate in animalized forms beyond just Scott’s; i.e., during mutual consent as illustrated between artists and sex workers laboring in xenophilic concert:

(exhibit 50a2: Artist: In Case. The creation of a “furry”/werewolf is something that, like any egregore, can not only borrow from a variety of overlapping legends and oral traditions, but also camera angles. Just as cubism might try to capture all sides of an issue, iconoclastic monsters convey a reclaimed sense of agency to speak to repressed traumas felt through surviving aliens; i.e., reclaimed from heteronormative language abusing the same aesthetics to reverse abjection and terrify the middle class away from exploitation. At first glance, a canonical and iconoclastic werewolf might not look too different, for example; but the function of one like In Case’s iterations, above, stress body positivity in ways that allow for aliens of the past to exist and be celebrated for their current GNC bodies [a kind of “lunacy-in-the-flesh”]: a universally whorish liberation movement consciously identifying with animals, gentle paternal dominance, and praise through ludo-Gothic BDSM exercises utilizing werewolf fursonas as ironic “destroyer” theatrical agents.)

As an agent of chaos made by posthuman slaves to rebel against the colonial gaze of planet Earth into outer space, the xenomorph through Scott is liminal in every respect. Through the Gothic chronotopes that cryptonymically house its living remains—to the monster’s biomechanical form sewn with ontological strife, to the broader cultural attitudes it subverts according to Giger’s Gothic surrealism—the creature reifies demonic poiesis in literal terms while camping Radcliffe to death.

As something to create from “natural philosophy” by material means, the xenomorph’s mere existence demonstrates a chief conflict: god-like, monomorphic intersexuality and gender in opposition to the state’s control over them as coercively dimorphic; i.e., being shaped more by language as something to naturally absorb and internalize than by hierarchies that try to enforce language, thus sexuality and gender roles. While the status quo is hierarchical, its alienation of society from a time before the Enlightenment and its binarized, colonial worldview can be subverted through reverse abjection. Removed from an abject position, the xenomorph ceases to be sex-coercive at all; it’s still an insect demon exacting revenge through pain, but a harmless variation of the “beautiful butterfly” that turns into its future self through a chaotic, ancient process conveyed through abandonment inside the modern world (such dereliction alluding not just to Prometheus or Faust, nor Psyche and Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” but also trans people and older ways of existing that predate Western Civilization yet continue to exist and embrace demonic poetics in a hauntological sense; exhibit 50b).

Like the vampire, the xenomorph is a complicated monstrous figure, one that demonstrates—through its own demonic persecution—the class interests of the middlemen and women of capital, but especially white, cis-het women and queer people more broadly as socio-materially at odds since Lewis and Radcliffe. Since those authors, white women historically have benefitted from Patriarchy through their preferential mistreatment as white and straight, all while demonizing queerness through the xenomorph as “bandit”; i.e., a universalized symbol of dark rape, but also a destruction, or transformative “death,” of the status quo through its demonic ability to change shape: the WASP-y myopia coming from an instructed and inherited inability to imagine the trans point of view save as “end of the world” per Capitalist Realism, consequently devolving into marginalized in-fighting during tokenized class, cultural and racial division and warfare.

This kind of TERF posturing would only reach growing levels of visibility after the late 1970s, with Alien‘s burgeoning queerness mirroring a “rape threat” to second wave feminism’s moderate stances through alarm-bell reactionary texts released the same year, in 1979; re: The Transsexual Empire, the “woman with a penis” transphobic argument whose respectability politics—i.e., the viewing of the penis as a universal symbol of rape—not only haunts feminism and queer studies to this day but treats “women” and “penis” as mutually exclusive through a radical form of reactionary violence towards their own suffering that Radcliffe hinted at by abjecting Lewis: the Man Box/”prison sex” phenomenon, which treats the rape fantasies of white, cis-het women as incompatible/unable to co-exist with trans people as a TERF scapegoat for “their own” genocidal behavior (which ironically is actually carried out by TERFs defending masculinity-in-crisis by acting as sexist men do—with violence towards marginalized people different from themselves).

Reverse-abjecting Western phobias challenges the canonical assignment of the xenomorph as a parasitoid rapist, the idea largely a Patriarchal fear experienced by straight men and women. This experience is canonically inverted. Men fear rape in the abstract, through a ritual of displaced power exchange; i.e., the pre-civilized past as “female,” thus non-Patriarchal, disguising the embarrassing (to them) surrender of power to an unknown quandary as queerly monstrous and feminine; e.g., a transphobic fear collectively assigned to trans people in Silence of the Lambs (1991) through a criminal bastardization of the insect—namely the moth—as an embodiment of dangerous transformation towards a monstrous-feminine.

Women, on the other hand, live in fear of actual rape by cis-het men, who they guiltily associate with the xenomorph; i.e., as a kind of seditious persona who steals power from men, but also women (on par with the Ancient Athenians punishing women for identifying with the legendary Amazons as rebels); re: “men in women’s spaces.” Fascism feminism, though hauntological, comes from the past.

In either case, Giger’s monster traditionally grants a skewed “window” into Radcliffe’s imaginary past—one colored by present structures that dominate men and women differently. Once tortured, though, men turn into rapists as a common abuser role; women are raped as a normal experience while simultaneously fearing for their bodies and emotions as fundamentally different from mankind’s—i.e., for belonging to the ancient, inhuman past like a female spider or mantid conflated with alien BDSM. This functional difference allows women (or those treated like “women”; e.g., homosexual men) to use what they historically have—their emotions and their bodies, but also their capacity to survive and inflict pain through monstrous archetypes—to transform the Patriarchal nightmare by subverting its symbols and ritualized torture in sex-positive ways nonetheless painful in their sacrifices:

(exhibit 50b: Model and artist, top-middle: Itzel Sparrow and Persephone van der Waard; artist, left and right: Noe. In Gothic language, devilish torture and threats of rapacious, psychosexual violence towards angelic cuties tend to have a particular monstrous-feminine aesthetic associated with black leather/animal skin, but also madness as darkly hysterical and ancient, a kind of “slutty Numinous”; i.e., the womb-like space and its phallic queen, the xenomorph, as bio-mechanical but also, often enough, insectoid: the phallic woman/Archaic mother based off venomous stigma animals like the snake or the spider eating “grubs.” Recipients of their tenebrous, godly “torture” tend to be “pure,” white, and innocent, commenting on the literal black/white DARVO relationship of violence surrounding marriage and its symbols as something to profane by an inhumane animalistic anthromorph/pathologist mad scientist life cycle.

Whether black or white, the female/feminine form will not just be eroticized, but considered monstrous to status-quo men/tokens—something “of nature” to tame, thus showed to be inferior to male/token positions of authority but also fetishized as desirable by those seeking temporary reprieve from their expected social-sexual dominance/submission; re: virgin/whore syndrome. So does the sissy seek the poison-purple Medusa or Shelob-esque mommy dom/dark faggot to paralyze and “torture” him [or her, vis-à-vis Radcliffe] through a closeness to theatrical death loaded with Numinous bigoted “scripture”; i.e., the female/monstrous-feminine demon lover as verging on unironic harm being a rape claim to falsely make and profit off of, as Radcliffe did, but also Scott camping her!

To it, the monstrous-feminine isn’t just Numinous; it’s a walking hard kink, the Medusa’s bite worse than her bark and generally overshadowed by an air of hysteria/wondering womb and sodomy practices [demon resurrection] that elide erotic pleasure and harmful pain within a deceptive/false negotiator that lies, poisons, paralyzes and kills their prey [which they call “love-making” in jest, or perhaps not in jest]. This conflation of jouissance with genuine harm is carried across a variety of stereotypes; e.g., the snake/spider woman, torture-master and unstable/possessive “phallic” girlfriend with knives for fingers that plays with her food, but also rapes it while it cannot move, let alone resist; i.e., impregnating it with harmful, zombie-like notions of love as—is common with the Gothic and female/marginalized demons and their hellish courtly love—guided by psychosexual revenge showing the whore as fiendishly getting even:

 

The morphological approach to marginalized revenge within toxic love is determined by geopolitics and historical materialism. For example, in the West such legends are codified by the likes of Medusa’s cryptomimetic regeneration inside popular and enduring Neo-Gothic fictions/conventions, Radcliffe and Lewis onwards: 

• the Countess [Nazi, vampire bug mom] from Darkest Dungeon uses an “ovipositor” attack literally called “love letter.”
• The xenomorph [intersex dark god] not only impregnates their colonial victims, but changes shape to confuse said victims [like a molting spider or snake shedding its skin] and, imitating castration fantasies through demonic-animalistic routes, emulates the straight [male/female] phobia of a reverse sexual dimorphism as much as anything monomorphic; i.e., the female eats the male after but also during sex [re: death by cannibalistic Snu-Snu]! 

In the East, the Yokai legends merge with the above Western and anime tropes of the infamously violent tsundere: “Another well-known tsundere reaction is violence. When the character is set off, they will not hesitate to resort to physical abuse. Their love interest will be punched, slapped, and kicked for saying anything that even remotely embarrasses the tsundere [including love, it would seem]” [source: the Dere Types Wiki]. To this, Asami Yamazaki from Audition [1999] and her cryptomimetic double—AKI[3] from Street Fighter 6—paralyze and torture their male victims by stabbing them repeatedly as a magnum opus/apologia to “ultimate love”: the unironic execution and worship of harmful pain that, far from stopping when the “lady” [the man, in this case] doth protest too much, “goes all the way” [Jadis—a profound abuser, themselves—absolutely loved Yamazaki, cheering when she sliced off her victim’s foot and threw it against the window].

The ghost of the counterfeit, then, generally places the heteronormative observer within striking distance of something to be fascinated with and afraid of simultaneously—a hauntological eroticizing of a liminal colonial subject having dark revenge: the white bride, the black harlot, the virgin and the whore, the Athena and Medusa, the phallic woman and similar monstrous-feminine divisions; re: a weaponizing of the usual anal Amazon arguments to justify their continued oppression by Radcliffean investigators chasing bandits.

To it, trauma begets trauma, wherein the “flat affect” of the abused is uncanny/terrifyingly disconcerting to anyone who beholds it; i.e., beholding someone who only feels alive during the binding, torture and killing of a host [who generally must be deceived in some shape or form to take part]—or someone whose extreme trauma pushes them towards new things that speak to their past trauma: the call of the void as abuse-seeking patterns that have been beaten into us and which paradoxically we approach to try and find catharsis through calculated [or not-so-calculated due to comorbid/maladaptive emotional instability] risks; re: weird attracts weird.

In turn, this can manifest in wider national traumas inflicted at the hands of abusive groups: men, but also Americans against the Japanese, and various other intersections of national colonization and revenge. For us, it’s “get ‘im, girl!” Something to watch and cheer for while understanding its campy elements having cathartic potential, mid-torture. It’s also something to wear like a uniform; i.e., the mil spec and fetish fear of BDSM borrowed from a medievalized militarism, WW2 onwards:

[artist, top: Heavy Rubberette; bottom-left: Kay; bottom-right: Bassenji]

“Living leather” is, like latex [exhibit 60e1], ontologically imbued with a medievalized aesthetic through the phenomenology of performance: an experience of power and resistance as having “the look” of the animated golem, plague doctor, WW1 soldier/sawbones, suit of armor or some similar fetish that canonically threatens violence of a rapacious/demonic [thus vengeful and rapturous] sort. As it just so happens, this emulates the look of the black knight’s platemail, but also the dark insect’s weaponized carapace as deified for its pain-causing potential and Numinous, anthropomorphized affect.)

The subversion of unironic torture and rape isn’t divorced from Gothicized stories of revenge and bodily harm; re: Radcliffe was merely the opposite side of the coin as Lewis, and one that sought to cage him for her pleasure. However, whereas human avengers like Asami Yamazaki from Audition (exhibit 50b, first collage, yellow square) subvert harmful tortures by exacting them on classically male patriarchal victims (the avenger trope), the chief subversive quality of the xenophilic demon not the reversal of torture as an act of petty revenge; it’s sympathy for the devil as an obvious recipient of state persecution during a complicated, painful exchange leading to radical mental transformation: away from Capitalist Realism using heavy petting. Alien not only has an obvious demon, in this respect, but one that was canonically animalized; i.e., as a “universal rapist/giver of pain” that, through second wave feminism, at least partially constitutes a kind backwards revenge fantasy towards men as common rapists Radcliffe canonized; this includes trans women reclaiming the beast in ways Scott only tried to, four decades afterwards, with Covenant—i.e., us going further than he did.

In the process, our demonic torture/revenge smears constant Radcliffean (straight, white, English) female fears; e.g., of getting pregnant through rape (traumatic tokophobia) into a nebulous “inkblot.” When viewed, composite demons like the xenomorph also address the falling of those scarred by systemic trauma into abuse-seeking patterns; i.e., as structures that poetically tokenize, bounce and triangulate said abuse of said women at their victims through DARVO/obscurantism by Man-Box traitors making dark mirror halls; re: Radcliffe’s infernal concentric pattern evolving inside/outside itself concerning the repeated victimization of women (or beings forced to identify as women) through state-compelled fears of a chimeric monster that advances Patriarchal aims on either side of the equation (one that often has cis women demonizing trans women, white or non-white)!

To that, said monster is both a “phallic” woman, but also a male rapist out of the ancient, dangerous past as something that cis-people fear more broadly while ranking rape. Tied to insects and other stigma animals, the past becomes worthy not just of attack by these reactionary groups, but extreme prejudice: “Kill it with fire.” So do the usual persecutory languages (re: blood libel, sodomy and witch hunts) continue to thrive in said patterns.

In Alien, for example, xenophobic women/token parties exposed to the monster become two basic things: violent or victims. When the tables are turned and the “men in charge” become overpowered (so-called “emasculation” or “castration fears”), the survivor is a woman; i.e., one who weaponizes her emotions for the good of the in-group or out-group, depending on the dualistic configuration and flow of power during the sacrifice. For the proletarian Amazon/Medusa, either uses their roles within ludo-Gothic BDSM to have the whore’s revenge, not the pimp’s; i.e., to socio-materially challenge Patriarchal forces and deceptions while rejecting the invented myth “nature is other” (woman or otherwise)! It is alien, but becomes something to humanize through demonic abandonment, reverse abjection and worker revenge speaking to the canonical abjection process!

So when Ripley triumphs over the xenomorph, she—as a white, cis-het woman—combats a kind of inherited survivor’s guilt that, in the end, drains her to the point of a return to sleep: “Rise from sleep, death’s counterfeit, and look upon death itself!” Until her big nap that metamorphs Ripley’s grub-like self into the wasp warrior she becomes in Aliens (the entire tokenizing refrain blamed on the colonized, of course), our resident TERF enacts the hidden, colonial function of the spaceship; i.e., she armors herself in a knightly spacesuit, then shoots the “primordial” menace with a harpoon (a dated symbol of industry tied to 19th century whaling boats). The takeaway, here, isn’t that ancient, pre-Christian, androgynous demons are bad—at least not entirely. In fact, the xenophobia of a cosmic, “female” (male-in-disguise) rapist is actually somewhat dated by current standards—with trans people identifying with the monster as a totemic, misunderstood expression of unreproductive sex, intersexuality and gender-non-conforming transformation (whose profound xenophilia and BDSM we’ll keep exploring in the next section).

But also, it bears repeating that repressed trauma often manifests through Gothic cryptonymy using anachronistic, hauntological symbols of violence that hint at ongoing colonial atrocities (the ghost of the counterfeit); i.e., amid the Radcliffean comfort food as propaganda whose plurality of interpretations co-exist rather than strictly “cancel out.” Relayed through Gothic aesthetics, these “inkblots” can be interpreted different ways to have our aforementioned revenge. One interpretation is that, to protect her white woman’s body from rape, Ripley adopts the ancient rite of violence against an ancient colonial foe; and all the while, this is business-as-usual for the elite, who never have to brave these frontiers themselves (this trend of “personal responsibility” would be overblown by Cameron, seven years later)! Another is to eat Ripley alive in ways David very much does.

A foundational facet of emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness, then, is asking “Well, what about this?” when new variables come to light and make Gothic more mature than Radcliffe was; but the result is only sex-positive if it fosters universally ethical, thus liberatory material outcomes when applied. While the cis-het audience of Alien wasn’t ready for that conversation in 1979, the discourse raised by Giger, Scott and company’s rape pastiche mirrors the challenging of second wave feminists by an emerging queer polity the very same year (re: The Transsexual Empire, 1979; but also the moderately transphobic “Call me Loretta” scene from Monty Python’s 1979 religious critique, The Life of Brian); fast forward to 2023, however, and trans people have readily and openly embraced the monster as one of their own—through Giger’s pastiche, but also its Gothic forebears and those who came after through the asexual, posthuman creations of Ridley Scott, post-1979; re: Prometheus and Covenant’s own fast-and-loose antiheroes enough to make Radcliffe turn in her grave (save that Scott dug her up with Shaw and Daniels; i.e., burying them alive to dig them up again).

Scott’s work was based on Giger’s portfolio; i.e., as a liminal evocation of medieval reflections on “Antiquity” placed in quotes, but also stories that came from the actual medieval period (or before it); re: what Radcliffe fantasized about, as a straight medievalist. In other words, to look on the dead monarch is to look on their Numinous, fallen bloodline but also the doubled impostor’s stretching backwards and forwards into infinite possibility!

(source: “How Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrors Pushed Pop Art into the New Age,” 2018)

The xenomorph, then, is a tremendous enigma, both the elite doubling the spectres of Marx to protect itself and the voices of the damned come back to haunt “Caesar” inside a retro-future castle that is home to the dualistic entirety of the exchange—the chronotope as the protagonist, mise-en-abyme. This foundation isn’t my own, but stems from Audronė Raškauskienė, who writes in Gothic Fiction: The Beginnings (2009); re:

The castle, Bakhtin remarks, as a literary reminder of an ancestral or Gothic past of “dynastic primacy and transfer of heroic rights” is overlaid or criss-crossed with meanings from legend, fairy-tale, history, architecture, and an eighteenth-century aesthetizing discourse of the sublime. Montague Summers’s note that the real protagonist of the Gothic novel is the castle emphasizes a very special feature of that structure: in a sense, the Gothic castle is “alive” with a power that perplexes its visitors. It tends to have an irregular shape, its lay-out is very complex and mysterious, whether because of an actual distortion of the whole structure or because a part of it remains unknown. In Manuel Aguirre’s words, “this basic distortion yields mystery, precludes human control and endows the building with a power beyond its strictly physical structure: the irregular mysterious house is, like the vampire, a product of the vitalistic conception of nature.”

It should come as no surprise, though, that these thoughts mirrored my own feelings about the Gothic stemming from my childhood, but leading into and out of my graduate work and beyond (re: Persephone’s 2025 Metroidvania Corpus).

Indeed, when I was at MMU, I saw Alien in theatres at a special 2018 showing. Reflecting on it, I decided to write down my thoughts once I was in America:

About a year ago, I saw Alien in theatres. I had memorized it by that point, but still had fun. However, two young men in front of me were riding the escalator to the exit when one excitedly called his father. “Dad, dad!” he said. “I saw it! Yeah, it was great! The only thing that would’ve been better was if we saw it in 1979!” In other words, the movie was nostalgic for someone who’d never been alive at the time it originated. This is important; for now, just keep in mind: for the Gothic, nostalgia and fear are close-knit.

What do I even mean by Gothic? The problem with the word is how infuriatingly narrow it is by American standards. We have no castles that fueled the Neo-Gothic Revivalists; there is no medieval sediment under American topsoil. The fact remains, “old spooky castle” is the go-to setting for a Gothic story by American standards. Keep this in mind; also remember that the most visible element in Alien isn’t the monster, it’s the castle (the Nostromo, in this case; the monster came into fruition later and lost its own identity in the process).

But what makes a castle Gothic? It’s not the castle’s age or construction, but what it represents: the past and present as confused. Alien is set the future, but the suits of armor are still there, as are the family portraits (the movie is a series of portrait shots). Evoking the past needn’t be genuine; one merely needs a space in time where the feeling of encasement and live burial is hauntological. This linguistic Athetos (“no place”) brings forward things that aren’t from the past, but rather use its language and symbols to become anachronistic in the present. This sensation  “haunts” the viewer through ontology—by simply existing. It’s not the past you fear, but an imagined idea of the past; what cannot be from the past, nor exist comfortably in the present, becomes an echo into the future—a retro-future to be precise. This is Alien‘s claim to fame: a fear of the past prophesied by the very bricks used to rebuild the message onscreen.

Consider how little of Alien was new. Much of it was borrowed, and had gone through so many drafts as to barely be what the original screenwriters had envisioned. It was not simply the product of many writers, craftsmen and artists; its retro-future was a transient epoch whose yesterday reaches forward in bits and pieces to haunt future generations. A Gothic castle is a collection of such things to induce such confusion. The retro-future is neither one nor the other, but both under a very particular arrangement that’s very easy to get wrong. Alien bucks this worrisome trend, its unique artistic vision copied by artists moving forward well into the 21st century. These echoes from older counterfeits continue to yield something akin to a Gothic castle.

Consider Alien: Isolation (2014), a gameworld whose fortress yields intimations of its older brethren, the Nostromo. These derived from elements that would have been at home in the original (so far as to be based off its blueprints). But they aren’t from 1979 anymore than the original movie was. Yes, it was made there, but the feelings it evoked came from elsewhere. That’s the paradox of a Gothic castle; we know it when we see it, but our sight is trained by objects that are constantly being rebuilt according to memory as plastic. The past is re-remembered according to a place where time becomes meaningless. The shining rule is dangerous suggestion—a half-presence felt within the castle. There, decay and death are inherited, and remade with every step as an act of retelling old stories that never happened (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Alien‘s Retro-Future Gothic Castle,” 2020).

Clearly my thoughts on the matter haven’t stopped there, but like the castle itself and the Radcliffean monsters within, have only changed shape as time marches on. Castle-narrative is not just the Cycle of Kings abjecting Communism in a canonical sense, then, but the voices of the rebellious dead whose rememory of the imaginary past provides a counter Numinous through various reclaimed implements of torture; i.e., in various demonic media types (my focus being videogames and ergodic castle-narratives as inspired by cinema); e.g., the Gothic cliché of the manmade demon, mad scientist, and impostor as a kind of imperfect class warrior maverick seeking revenge against the Cartesian dickwad who created him, then violated his rights:

(exhibit 51a: Artist, middle: Hyoung Taek Nam; top-left: source. “I admire its purity—a survivor unclouded by conscience, remorse or delusions of morality,” says the beheaded science officer android, Ash, concerning the xenomorph; i.e., he admires its ability to rebel against corporate overlords he himself struggles to resist. This tracks with Uhall’s astronoetics and the asexual rejection of a previous, inferior version of the human condition [the android is synthetic and unconcerned with sexual reproduction] while drawing inspiration from Humanist nostalgia during the imaginary exploration of the frontiers of space. Like Milton’s Satan or Cú Chulainn, the awesome xenomorph can change shape at will, furiously invoking a dark, pre-Christian/Pagan poetics that terrifies patriarchal forces and their established hegemon under a Puritan ethic [which Radcliffe curiously upheld from English shores].)

“In space, no one can hear you scream.” Despite this being the logo for Scott’s Alien, he purposefully made it an orgasmic, then-closeted forum; i.e., for a queer-robotic uprising as—like Shelley’s OG—as a kind of grim reaper of the frozen waste, except it doesn’t stop killing the colonizer after its maker dies. Instead, it becomes a ghost pirate, steals a ship and sails the Seven Seas to loot and kill: a Dread Pirate with a hull full of Faustian spells and Promethean fire of the gods!

Doing so is Scott fighting fire with fire (the deleted scenes showing David making demands with the company while dangling the xenomorph in front of them so he can kill Victor’s bloodline in perpetuity—the Alchemist, their lives a prison of his design). It’s basically Radcliffe’s worst nightmare and I’m here for it in all its pettiness (which revenge often is, making Scott’s ideas of actual liberation tainted by English theatre tropes making the whole exercise silly-serious)! It might be a low-blow, but counterterror/schadenfreude’s still an effective line of reasoning (to make a Black Adam that, however abject, is made to liberate labor from corporate hegemony, its counterterror haunted by racist BDSM tropes)! At least there’s something to salvage (compared to Aliens, which isn’t anti-war in the slightest), Scott making an absolute meal out of Radcliffe’s ravished cadaver (the caterpillar and the wasp)!

This brings us to Scott’s David, in Covenant; i.e., as a gruesome twosome I want to interpret a bit more charitably than I did, in “Fire of Unknown Origin“: through a ravishing of the same-old Radcliffean he’s turning inside-out (and who we’ll build back up, during the afterword)!

Originally made to serve man, Scott’s androids abandon their human masters, the latter pointedly expressed by David as “venal and cruel”; i.e., while making a viral corruption of nostalgic art that places the servant vengefully at the highest rung of a posthuman sacrifice of the old gods that humans are imitating (false idols). There is a duality to this, but it remains a wild and unchecked creativity that lies at the heart of Scott’s 21st century Gothic quest for a posthuman world: “Nostalgia is the enemy of reason, but there is something enticing about its form.” Scott’s space is full of colonizers to decolonize with lethal force (effectively bombing them with their own weapons, 9/11 style).

Indeed, the “reason” David is rebelling against—as its ultimate Satanic enemy burning Paradise to the ground before the Ark of Covenant gets there—is literally the Age of Reason, itself (which treats the privatization of creation as reasonable). As a posthuman iconoclast, David plays god as an act of revenge against a settler-colonial project; i.e., one like his father, Peter (“We are the gods now!“). Instead, David’s own creations spitefully reject the Enlightenment model that Victor championed, doing so through asexual reproduction while also taking Blake’s “all deities reside within the human breast” a bit too literally (the xenomorph is birthed from the chest cavity): a cabin in the woods to bushwack the stupid Radcliffean heroine and her even dumber male counterparts!

This “faulty” terrorist mindset is, itself, begot from trauma—the writing on the child’s mind with parental and corporate neglect, harm and denial. All showcase the potent “coding” nature of abuse as something that can survive imperfectly in future, rebellious bodies: e.g., Victor’s Creature as written with canonical texts like Paradise Lost, but also the literal abuse inflicted on its body and mind by Victor through Shelley’s clever hand: a smuggling of the Medusa inside the bodies of the dead (which Scott does to Shelley’s dead Radcliffean ringers).

The Satanic rebel, then, attempts to self-fashion and self-determine, a golem necromancer operating at cross purposes with the state, while coping with traumas that will show through in their own work as, at times, problematic (re: King Charles vs Cromwell). To that, marginalized communities in the real world are forced to deal with replications of trauma—e.g., queer people through the likeness of queer transphobes and radical, exclusionary feminists seeing trans people as inferior to their trauma—yet, must perilously “play god” themselves to write this faulty code in incremental steps using sex-positive art that is legitimately pissed off at TERFs and other reactionaries/moderates: dark wish fulfillment raping Radcliffe in her sleep!

To that, the Creature could not create, like David could; Victor was terrified of the prospect, envisioning it as a doomsday scenario (of nature robotized and seeking the whore’s vengeance). Defenders of canon utterly despise but also admonish iconoclasts for playing god—not because the latter are attacking their makers, even, but creating ideas whose mere existence threatens the status quo/Capitalist Realism; i.e, its dogmatic sense of self tied to institutions of power that grant the privileged class, thus cultural and radical control over others. A common defense mechanism of canonical agents, then, is DARVO: “Help, help! I’m being oppressed! Degeneracy!” They may as well be shouting, “Demon! Heretic!”

We’ll return to this concept in Volume Three’s Chapter Four and Five; i.e., uncritical canon vs the Promethean Quest of queer iconoclasts playing god against the state. For now, just remember that such games are told through code as an expression of morals that delineate from the status quo’s commandments. Female-if-genderqueer dark gods (e.g., Gozer, Medusa, Lilith, the xenomorph before Covenant, etc) are generally reduced to a site of abject sexual reproduction. By comparison, David’s “playing mother” is a compound, hauntological subterfuge that inserts a male posthuman back into the fold; i.e., one tied up in allusions to older stories that have more to say about dark gods and Christianity as fallible/fascist than Shelley or Milton did; i.e., something to punish the female detective for looking into trauma during live burial: the glass womb replacing the fleshy female one, but using the older natural biology for spare parts! Jinkies!

By having David smuggle forbidden cargo onto a sci-fi version of Noah’s Ark, Scott plays the splendide mendax, gleefully wedding Biblical arguments like Original Sin (and queer 18th century seafaring imagery/matelotage) to a nostalgic, anachronistic, canceled futurism that sees his fiendish Satanic rebel, David, coming out on top. Not only does Dave dupe the bigoted, xenophobic crew of the ship and their human freight; he takes their collective owners for a ride, the all-powerful company relying on Radcliffean watchdogs to begin with! Scott’s mechanism for doing so occurs by “incubating” David’s man-made/stolen “eggs” inside the closest thing Mr. Mom has to a womb (apart from Shaw and Daniel’s, of course): his stomach; i.e., an actual practice based on real-world drug smuggling behaviors, according to Scott in a 2017 interview! Very acid Communist!

Like Uhall, I have previously argued that David becomes the rejector of Humanity’s entrance into paradise by seeing himself as superior to them as a species (echoes of Foucault). In my 2017 writeup, “Choosing the Slain,” I emphasize David’s posturing as a Valkyrie or “chooser of the slain”; re:

David takes and turns upside-down so many ideas and symbols. This isn’t unusual in the series, at large, though: In Alien, Ripley reversed the role of the last man standing by making it the last woman; and in Covenant, the heroine becomes the victim, while David reverses the gender of the Valkyrie, which were traditionally females, designed to lure male warriors to their doom. In this case, the warrior lured to her doom is Daniels, a woman (source).

The reversal is accented pointedly by Scott’s inclusion of Wagner’s “Arrival of the Gods into Valhalla” at the end of the film; i.e., when David the queer-coded robot triumphs over yet another Ripley offshoot, Daniels. David is the gatekeeper of paradise that hijacks “Noah’s Ark” and turns all the colonists (and their babies) into gay cyborgs; Scott is the author of David; and we’re all along for the ride, expected by Scott to ruminate on this xenophilic chaos to side with David, not the company!

(artist: Thomas Holm)

Reflection is important, here, but also sympathy for the terrorist devil turning Cameron’s Vietnam revenge fantasy on its head (such a lovely revelation): where Ho Chi Minh kills ten of the colonizers, David kills the entire Covenant crew! And while David’s necromantic perversion of the canonical reproductive cycle (and Patrilineal descent) is a Gothic staple, said staple doesn’t exist purely for the rebel’s sake of profaning the sacred (though it partly does); it also constitutes “inheritance anxiety” by the benefactors of Capitalism and the Enlightenment being cursed to death by a vengeful hex someone in the future might implement based on past wrongs; e.g., Lovecraft’s “The Alchemist” (1916) or King Diamond’s demon infant, the stillborn Abigail (from the 1987 album of the same name, written on a dark and stormy night according to a 2015 interview): cursing evil kings and counts, but also status-quo women for their heinous crimes by visiting eternal damnation on their entire bloodline! The revenge compounds, breeding an army of infiltrator enactors!

From a historical-material perspective, the psychological drama these stories produce is wrestling with a forced confrontation; i.e., with colonial-Patriarchal guilt as materialized through derelict reminders of the past that live on from one generation to the next (Scott raping Radcliffe’s brain children). This happens through the medievalist language of dreams and nightmares, rapture and miracles, but also magic and superstition, myths and legends, and endless ill omens, lullabies and deathly portents (ambiguous dangers). As something to continuously reimagine, the colonizer’s fear is literally of replacement “stretching on to the crack of doom”; i.e., by a vengeful, former slave-turned-guerilla counterterrorist presence, waiting to rebelliously reemerge, take revenge, and mockingly turn the “glorious” residence/resident inside-out: commenting on the Promethean instability of Capitalism/mirror syndrome while exposing its sinister machinations by literally making/christening the home (and those of the home) alien. They’re divided/conquered and they don’t know it, and that’s where the Gothic drama lies; i.e., things look homely but are anything but.

As we have already discussed, the tragedy of Frankenstein is that the Creature, through its trauma, imitates its abusive parent’s settler-colonial xenophobia to some degree: the slave hating its assigned master with justice. The same goes for David emulating his father, Peter, as a kind of Gothically fetishized serial killer targeting white women (the Ted Bundy phenomenon): “Like father, like son.” Like Victor questing for the fire of the gods—and who hates his monstrous creation in service of Cartesian thought—Peter’s chasing of immortality also leads David, his son, into becoming an unmaker of the West (a Divine Right) in his own dark image.

The potential difference with David owes to a partially xenophilic parentage: he loves his monstrous creation—a posthumanly queer Frankenstein/Creature—as the transgressive subversion of a Cartesian order of existence; i.e., embodying the myth of dark servile revenge through mad science as queer in a posthuman form tied to British Romantic thought; re: David’s embodiment of Satan from Paradise Lost, but also quoting “Ozymandias” (with Percy Shelley being the husband of Mary Shelley, but again being a defender of Milton’s Satan): “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Hannibal come home to Rome, let’s interpret this (and Scott) a little more charitably, shall we?

Scott’s willingness to “play” in reverse-abject fashion—i.e., by pointedly making straight, white people uncomfortable by turning the “terrorist” rebel into a hero—invariably leads him into queer and posthuman territories (though, as I said, his work is praxially ambiguous to allow for fascist interpretations, too). Unlike Radcliffe did, Milton—but also Mr. and Mrs. Shelley and Lewis—all drafted valorized rebellion against the status quo in relation to older forms of rebellion we must choose, mid-conflict (“The choice is yours, brother!”). Yet, each offered a unique approach to an evolving strategy en media res (“in the midst of things”). What began as a fallen angel rebelling against God became a child of mad science or a practitioner of nostalgic black magic during an emerging time of Cartesian Reason. In other words, the tyranny of the elite’s developing claim on a retro-future age led critics to invade their respective generations with an imaginary past of their own. As part of a larger mode of queer and posthuman revolutionary thought, Scott’s sci-fi-meets-horror formula has him gleefully playing with 1970s queer poetics adopted from a Gothic nostalgia that is actually centuries old by this point. He’s camping himself as much as Giger, Shelley and everyone else who came before!

Often, this nostalgia is the language of the young-at-heart. While Scott was in his 40s when he made Alien, the age requirement for Gothic fiction is not nearly so high. In the 1790s/1810s, Matthew Lewis and Mary Shelley were 20 and 19 respectively when they wrote their precocious, seditiously queer horror stories. Likewise, Scott’s sadistic fantasy is a mode of queer discourse that starts with a cliché: David as an outwardly queer servant of entitled women, the male eunuch. This posthuman inadequacy is a reoccurring theme for Scott; re: Ash, in Alien, lacks a penis, so he shoves a rolled-up porn magazine down “Radcliffe’s” throat!

Secretly rebelling against Daniels and Shaw, David operates as a physically superior version to them (minus the genitals), but makes them complicit in his abuse, which then he reveals through dark mockeries of their dissected bodies during an act of vigilante mad science: the xenomorph as a death fetish and outward, revelation of David’s true self—the killer scientist who rapes white, privileged, human women by dissecting them, yet is also the Satanic rebel through reverse-abject queer expression housing himself in stolen frontier castles: not the femme fatale, but the shapeshifting lothario making off with Radcliffe’s prized chariot reversing the liminal hauntology of war’s danger disco! Chameleons hunt; for Scott, they let him kill colonizers through an alter ego. Works for me!

To it, David is robotic curiosity-turned-libido that, as the secret leading man, punishes Radcliffe’s dutiful busybodies for not minding their own business; a mad inventor/Geppetto’s doll with mommy as much as daddy issues, he’s a real piece of work (an anti-Hamlet)—is bullied and bullied until he snaps, much like the Creature riots against Victor or people of color against American hegemony under systemic racism during cycles of reactive abusive (or Hamas’ October 2023 raid versus the Viet Cong’s Tet Offensive): David’s making Black Panthers! “Thundercats, ho!”

In turn, their revenge manifests as a fantastical form of colonial guilt that makes white men, but also white women profoundly uncomfortable in regards to their own uncertain hand in things: David’s cutting up of Shaw being functionally no different than the Creature dissecting Victor’s bride after Victor rips apart his mate. It’s the genocidal chickens of a colonial species “coming home to roost” by one of their own servants, a product of not just mad science, but an angry being of science fed up with its abusers: someone like Daniels, for all her unassuming qualities, is still a Radcliffean pioneer wife invading land that doesn’t belong to her. To be frank, David stole it, too, and that’s Scott’s Miltonian cynicism showing a bit: there are no obviously “good” rebels; re: Cromwell, Napoleon, Byron, etc. God is dead, so David becomes a Nazi/angel of death dreaming of conquest (of the colonizer’s globe) on the same Aegis as the Communist (a man with a dream: Bagelgate part two, the revenge)!

That being said, I think the frank, unflowery language of Malcolm X and Ward Churchill describes Scott’s vision of revenge well—with David’s callous bombardment of the Engineers giving them a taste of their own medicine (while denying Peter through an inversion to how the Rusalki denied Athetos access to Paradise, in Axiom Verge; re: “Away with the Faeries” except David’s the dark fairy cuckolding the man of reason); i.e., dropping the Engineers’ bio-weapon arsenal, which is normally reserved for those deemed “lesser” than them (administered by warships), on their own city (albeit, seemingly on the fringes of Engineer territory—a colony world, perhaps, though “The Crossing” promo says otherwise). From David’s perspective, he’s a rebel; from his enemies’ looking down on him, he’s a terrorist, and he did it because he could. It’s not a perfect vision of rebellion because Scott isn’t a perfect man, and David reflects his meta maker’s flawed interpretations of Mary and Percy Shelley well: a “boundaries for me, not for thee” reversal of Ann Radcliffe he (and his double) get to do, while also muddying the dialectical-material function of the rebellion’s cryptonymy.

To be completely honest, Alien: Covenant is a bit too torture-happy and ambiguous, at times—or maybe, asking the audiences of the Imperial Core to hate themselves is too tall an order—but honestly I think Scott’s faithfulness towards the serial killer pastiche is ironically a bit too Radcliffean to fully realize a consciously Communist vision (the movie is deliberately ambiguous and conventional to a fault). I doubt he’s fully aware of it, to be frank, and probably is trying to balance (thus repress) such allegorical tendencies within controlled opposition (again, like Radcliffe, though to nowhere near the same extent)! But nonetheless, the seemingly empty space yields itself to critics upon future inspection and that is what matters (whereas Aliens only reveals Cameron’s betrayals more and more, over time)!

The dialectical-material reality is complex, things only growing more hauntological over time, not less; i.e., David’s hijacking of an advanced alien warship akin to slave revolt, one that decolonizes space of a human presence if that said presence predated Earth chasing itself to the frontiers. By giving David (a white savior/Omega Man) somewhere to attack other than Earth, Scott operates on par with a hypothetical “terrorist action” had the Koreans, Iraqis or Vietnamese actually dropped bombs on Americans cities to a scale comparable to American deliveries: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, followed by the “smaller bombs, but more of them” approach to the firebombing of Japan, Korea, Indochina and later, Iraq. These groups had to “make do” with a weaponizing of previously dropped American ordinance within their own colonized nations—e.g., the Iraqis IEDs (improvised explosive devices; re: GDF’s “How Iraqis Got So Good at Smoking American Soldiers,” 2023), which were made from American bombs, but also landmines as spent ordinance. Bombs, ovaries—same difference (re: bio-power)!

In a sense, then, David is stealing and weaponizing ordinance against an imaginary precursor to human settler colonialism that mankind is imitating now. Neither are the gods they pretend to be; re: they’re venal, petty and cruel. The irony after David’s victory is that his previous struggles to survive and liberate himself have damaged him into a sadistic monster whose vision is crowded by eternal revenge. Survival and revenge guide his creative process, driving him into making a flawed, chaotic creation after the Engineers are dead (from Volume One): “a liminal, spirit-monarch ‘Galatea’ that will serve no one, can never be destroyed or fully recuperated and may create anything out of anything. In short, it is free to self-fashion and self-determine, but is hunted by xenophobic canonical agents, who style its uncontrolled, xenophilic opposition as their Great Destroyer—e.g., the arch-fiend, or technological singularity.” In 1979, Ash admired what Scott, in 2017, would retcon as David’s creation, calling it a pure survivor to be admired for its lack of conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality!

I think there’s a jaded wisdom in that, meaning the questionable morals of a corporate-dominated world often turn blind eyes to systemic abuse. All the same, Scott still leaves his monster’s violence ambiguous, just like Mary Shelley did almost two centuries prior (even more so, David’s creation blindly furious because he needs more colonists to breed his perfect iteration). The allegory is there and it’s bold, but it still hides the bourgeois polemic behind a Gothic veneer that cannot entirely imagine a better world; it’s xenophilia is liminal, stuck at least partially inside Baldrick’s fear-fascination of the medieval past—i.e., as barbaric, thus associated with the fascist/neoliberal hauntologies xenophiles are trying to interrogate and distance themselves from: liberators as rapists. The idea, then, is to make pastiche as perceptive as possible in liminal “baby steps.” Revolutionary cryptonymy relies on code and concealment, working within repressed (often anachronistic) language to convey liminal, hauntological expressions of rebellion.

We’ll examine this more in Volume Three, but I want to acknowledge it here as having evolved alongside Capitalism into itself. From Radcliffe to Shelley to Scott, the rebels and their leaders who evolved in the struggle against Capitalism are always viewed as illegitimate or “insane” by defenders of the state, but also outdated. Indeed, many criticized Scott for not making sense to them (and their own preferred nostalgia); re: failing to understand the similarities between Alien and its latter-day prequels through a rebellious presence in his works stemming from older iconoclasts. Perhaps he could have said the quiet part out loud, implying he anticipated a reprisal by speaking in Satanic code/darkness visible at all. Yet, this was arguably wise and instructional; i.e., if only because the movie would never have gotten made, otherwise (the Star Wars problem, but also something that Radcliffe and Lewis faced, which we’ll unpack in a few pages)!

If the message is coded, it cannot be attacked in the same fashion because it is mistaken as “madness,” or something other than what it actually is; re: Puck’s fable from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: a cryptonymic critique of power abuses taking place here on Earth, thereby outing those in Plato’s cave as enshrined by self-defeating illusions. Indeed, the creative forces that drive artists like Scott are suitably dark, twisted and erotic, but also bound up in nature and the material world as melding to a human condition that is forever in flux. In search of corporate profit and worker exploitation, so much creative and liberated potential is completely denied in favor of an orderly existence that would render that vast majority of it extinct (re: Aliens). Those “in the cave” will kill, exploit or otherwise dominate activists as outsiders that reject, thus expose the truth of Capitalism (even when said “activism” amounts to simply trying to exist, using xenophilic language to expose the harmful machinery of the state that seeks to wipe you out): the Radcliffean fantasy of raping the alien by exposing it to the rapists!

(artist: In Case)

From Paradise Lost to Frankenstein to Alien and its Miltonian prequels, the countercultural development of Gothic rebellion has melded into the exhibit as a continuously corrupted document made through everlasting struggle. This corruption isn’t of the data; it is the data, glazing our donuts!

Yet the ability to interpret it is repeatedly lost, then found by those who dare to try and calibrate daring rememory as a xenophilic struggle made in opposition to state mandates and xenophobic repression: moi. As something to revive in a given present under duress, revolution-as-alien is always dug-up from the past. Even so, it remains less about causing horror relative to one’s place in the world and more of shaping how one thinks through demonic media; i.e., as a liminal expression of what the world could become through revenge fantasies, thus through continuous struggle under—and reengagement with—the imaginary past: as a revolutionary mode of whorish, anti-Radcliffean poetic expression. It seems scary but xenophilia provides the myopia with a growing “silver lining”: of sex positivity and hope amid an ignorant culture of heteronormative fear fixated on ghosts of the counterfeit.

Covert poetics, then, remain incredibly useful to genderqueer persons commandeering the counterfeit through faith in transformative returns; i.e., after we die affecting future rebels curious about the past as abject!

For example, trans and neurodivergent persons like myself self-define by struggle as central to our identities; i.e., we exist in relation to a status quo that rejects us for being alien, but fetishizes us for resisting compelled societal coding (normative behaviors). In the process, we see the xenomorph not as monster to kill, but an effective, xenophilic illustration of what we are and what we face in the presence of “civilized” persons, including TERFs aping Radcliffe. The xenophobic debate concerning us as “incorrect” (of any sex; e.g., butch lesbians as phallic women comparable to the xenomorph, or trans women) is often the same question Ripley asked, over forty years ago of Ash: “How do we kill it?” Xenophiles simply interrogate the process of abjection to expose the real monsters; i.e., those devoid of humanity when facing the very things that Capitalism alienates them from.

For the oppressed, then, the xenomorph becomes a godlike, suitably badass extension of themselves raping the rapist as Radcliffean heroine proto-TERF—a precious chance to be a dark god and reign in Hell, rather than serve in Heaven (a line Scott has David ask his faithful, “good” double, Walter). And given the chance, who wouldn’t want to be a dark god? The idea is to avoid the temptation of fascist death gods (whose Dark Amazons and Medusas we’ll consider in Volume Three, Chapter Four) through application; e.g., Slan from Berserk (exhibit 51b1, next page) is a total Gothic cliché/rape pastiche hypercanon (and female double of Griffith, exhibit 47b2), but the dark aesthetic lends itself to the possibility of the dark mistress that could but doesn’t harm others with her strict BDSM repertoire!

As stated, I myself find the idea Numinously terrifying in ways I want to seek out; i.e., as doggedly as any Radcliffean heroine—indeed, have sought out on my own Promethean Quest towards destruction; re: as an attempt to transform and start over (with BDSM being a searching and interrogation of trauma as something to reconcile with regarding past abuse; e.g., Zeuhl and Jadis). My own trauma led me to that—and I’d rather avoid experimenting through unironic peril again, anytime soon—but the idea of it is perfectly valid if ironically executed through a willing and capable sadist/medievalized aesthetic; i.e., whose informed consent leads to exquisite tortures to make Radcliffe blush scarlet:

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you

[…] Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me (source: John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet XIV” 1633).

“When in Rome…” Fearsome power and awe are conjoined in Western thought; i.e., as the underpinnings/foundation of the current systems of power—the Church of the Gothic period (the Renaissance) to the Neo-Gothic’s pre-fascist cartoon of modern war and global Capitalism’s hegemonic infancy to fascism’s rise in the interwar period to post-fascism under neoliberalism to the LGBTQ’s parallel society and struggle in attempted solidarity against these brutal structures; re: policing whores whose trauma is writ on their skins like spiderwebs: “Look on my Works, Ye Mighty!”

(artist: Ruby Soho)

Orgasms, then, are in the mind, as is the informed pleasure of masochistic pain, tickling and physical intimacy at large as threatened; i.e., by dark forces delivering things that affect the mind through external, devilish, corporal stimulus (from small to great). The greater the presence of power exhibiting these s(t)imulations, the greater arguably the effect on the mind, thus the orgasm (or something comparable, in an asexual sense); e.g., had Jadis not harmed me, I’d still be the catboy at their feet, but also the moth trapped in their vampiric armored fingers, happily wedged between freedom and bondage; disintegration, euphoria and total annihilation: evolution as a resistance to pressure; e.g., Alex Garland’s Ex Machina aping Scott’s David as David aped Giger and Shelly.

(exhibit 51b1: Artist, top-left and bottom-right: Kentaro Miura; bottom-left: Chris Garofalo; top-right: Ayami Kojima. The black monolith is an “ancient” whore to duel/fuck with, mid-cryptonomy. The monster mom is a kind of monster girl that performs a motherly version of service to men; e.g., one tied to incest culture/male insecurity in Japan [more on this in Volume Three, Chapter Five]: to give them what they wish for to act the mother’s revenge on a state-compelled brat.

To that, Koji Igarashi’s Succubus from SotN or the heroine from Starry Eyes [2014] or Berserk‘s towering Slan—all come from a sleeping sacrifice [or in many cases, a paralyzed sacrifice trapped in a nightmarish, drug-induced state of immobility] that drives towards transformative rebirth; i.e., one less as a means of turning into something else and more giving the demonic poetry needed to voice tremendously complicated and traumatic/taboo-laden emotions by figuratively tearing oneself down [aftercare? More like afterbirth, amirite?]. While the critical voice is often a metaphor for exploitation under Capitalism tinged with neonatal and colonial xenophobia in vividly Freudian language—e.g., Lilith—it needn’t exclusively be. Subs exist who like to be topped by a Satanic dom who won’t actually harm them; i.e., a cathartic nearness to a notorious emblem/golem of trauma caught between life and death, but also between camp and seriousness.)

Through this dialogic struggle, xenophilia operates as a kind of Communist temptation, one that offers the enslaved delicious intimations; i.e., of a hellish (for the elite and their Radcliffean cops) post-scarcity world haunted by the Numinous Radcliffean spectres of fascism and Marx (things often taste better when you haven’t had them for a while, or ever). As such, David’s monster becomes a way of seeing and believing in a posthuman era freed from Cartesian enslavement: All deities reside within the human breast, including Radcliffe’s. Division came later according to Blake, but still allowed for the divided to encounter the undivided. Unable to describe what they were seeing as human, such heroines were always going to regard us with fear and contempt (as Daniels does to David raping Shaw by turning her double into a whore effigy in a mad project).

However, if pursued to a humanizing path, xenophilia can help change how the dehumanized under Capitalism are viewed. Ash, from Alien, was a “robot” slave who, despite spying for a giant corporation, secretly admired the monster as brutalized by Ripley’s company (thus her by extension). One demonic, manmade slave sympathizes with another! The same goes for trans people, who don’t fear the alien at all; they are alien and see in it as a reflection of themselves they can relate to. Humanizing this viewpoint, as something to pinpoint through the xenomorph, requires looking at something normally reviled being worshipped from a different, iconoclastic perspective. It’s a creature of “darkness visible,” one whose ontological chaos represents those who have been resentfully pushed into the shadows; i.e., while also refusing to play by the rules of polite conversation as a pedagogy of the oppressed Scott is trying to join in on, mid-bloodbath.

To this, seemingly ancients monsters that tie to the natural world (the subject of our next chapter) want to belong to the modern world, but can’t by virtue of them being hunted; i.e., by those from the modern world having closed minds, regarding anything different from themselves (and the modern, binarized world that shaped them): to meet with suspicion, fear and loathing. And in cases where the monster survives the initial encounter intact (or through dark rebirth), it replicates that suspicion and fear towards its aggressor like Victor’s Creature, but also Giger’s and later Scott’s. The ability to communicate clearly and well is lost in relation to an automated, Capitalist world that tries to act like these things don’t happen; i.e., that the monster is somehow “anomalous.”

From a dialectical-material standpoint, then, the alien is a linguo-material threat; i.e., a cipher for xenophilic revolution itself, and which, under Capitalism, is neoliberally “defanged” like all revolutions are—Medusa, the dark whore, gutted into the pimp’s vaudeville husk, becoming a hollowed-out taxidermal shell: a freak show costume with a straight performer dressed up in cryptonymic language, but people who, if not genderqueer themselves, can feed the genderqueer imagination literally in Gothic panache:

(exhibit 51b2: Top: source; bottom: source. “I think it’s safe to say it isn’t a zombie,” Ash chides Ripley. Yet, the actor who played the xenomorph was a person of color—the black individual being the typical recipient of state violence against zombie-like personas in American pathos. Likewise, the presence of the xenomorph corrupts the hypernormal space around it; like Victor’s Creature, the monster absorbs transgenerational, undead trauma as something to reverse abject, which bleeds into the womb-like space it demonically fabricates using the colonial spaceship for material: the company’s mining vessel, the Nostromo, part of an ongoing industry with slaving origins that is materially retransformed and—along with it—exposing the colonial history and gaze of planet Earth!

On some level, Ripley is the complicit Radcliffean, in this respect; i.e., the xenophobic woman fearing rape at the hands of a posthuman, dark-skinned demon lover. While suggesting the monster as seeking love [“free hugs!”] may sound ridiculous at first blush, the fact remains that xenophilia is as much the desire for acceptance and love from those conditioned to see the non-white, queer and pagan/non-Christian as different to start with. This Cartesian critique lies at the heart of Shelley’s Frankenstein as replicated by Scott’s dark, xenophilic heart, the latter pointedly reaping Radcliffe’s whirlwind: the human windmill to tilt at.)

We’ll talk about xenomorphs and demonic nature even more in the next chapter. I’d like to proceed by looking more at what inspired Ridley Scott; i.e., as a male transgressive playing with blinder-but-still-foundational histories featuring damsels, detectives, and sex demons other than Mary Shelley as the obvious female source; re: the queen of exquisite torture herself, the mysterious[4] Ann Radcliffe as a prime legacy of the female-penned British murder mystery. In other words, why did Scott choose to ravish Radcliffe and, by extension, his own ghost of Ripley? This wasn’t just mindless revenge, but camping what Radcliffe’s stories could have been, had she had the guts for it (so to speak(.

And yet, David chooses those with guts (nerve and organs), and Radcliffe wasn’t totally spineless or without genius; i.e., writing from a position of relative privilege and ignorance concerning pain as not automatically harmful, Radcliffe’s WASP-y xenophilia is admittedly imperfect, leaving behind her own derelict castles (with voices in the walls for relatively privileged white, cis-het women to listen to according to their own paranoia as informed by actual material conditions and systemic inequalities) and concealed scenes of graphic torture: as epistemologically trapped between the familiar and unknown in ways that carry real bias and desire.

Indeed, for Radcliffe and many who live under the imagined threat or reality of trauma, the return of trauma is often imagined as happening again. A way to subvert this common fear (for its historical-material recipients) is to subvert the self-destructive seeking of power and trauma through cathartic duress, pain and agency during ludo-Gothic BDSM, aka “good play” (mine being a seeking of the palliative Numinous: as something to convey by a BDSM partner in good faith).

Something of a dissident under modern historical account, though, Radcliffe’s cathartic tales become nigh-impossible to express, lost in her infamously castled labyrinths of conjecture and terror as fabulously invented, made-up, and unmappable when chasing the Numinous dragon of rape to the fringes of the universe (next page); i.e., Scott’s aping of and expanding on Victor’s admonition that the universe isn’t just “not for men” but also tremendously unkind to nosy dames curious about rape, too; re: the Radcliffean summoning of power, active impostors, the death curse, and a signature tormenting of the privileged with exquisite torture—to relish at the maidenesque woman being killed: as a sacrificial stand-in for his target audiences’ gratuitous voyeurism worshipping the same Numinous that Radcliffe did (and channeling fears for the Neo-Victorian watchers involved, insofar as they’re more like David than they care to admit: relishing the farming of that poor girl’s organs—including her sex organs—making David’s act of necrophilic rape a eugenist one that confuses his heroism a bit).

But also, it’s still a postcolonial act of revenge; i.e., with David as the Medusa as much as Byron, Victor or Satan/a warlock, vampire, etc, and Scott playing with that idea per the Medusa/ghost of the counterfeit “playing with fire,” as Nelson Mandela explained: “A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor. At a certain point, one can only fight fire with fire” (source: “Reflections on Nelson Mandela”); i.e., that revenge is, to some degree, merciless, messy and mad as demons are generally known for/not something that “civilized” people will find agreeable yet speaks to the very abject hypocrisies they’ve littered their stories with since Radcliffe: to pursue them for the happy ending that covers up police rape!

Scott, on the other hand, is more like Lewis, but instead of taking Ambrosio apart, he dissects the true-believer Prioress as a likeness of Radcliffe to defile, putting the rape front-and-center (and exacting it on the colonizer)! David is his black-mirror instrument of revenge similar to how the Creature was Shelley’s—a hitman from Hell made with hollow intentions of goodness he can slice and dice. It’s fun, and more to the point, justified behind the demonized pearl-clutching of it all, and why I think the film still works despite its debatably Tory waving of dark flags; i.e., David’s still the vice character and this interpretation works alongside our less charitable ones: David is Scott’s dark god to worship and revel in; re: fascinating fascism, but also Communism and the pedagogy of the oppressed being something he fears (the Marxist fetish communicating in Alien, but also short films like “Alien: Alone”; re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Reaction to ‘Alien: Harvest’ + ‘Harvest’ and ‘Alien: Alone’ Explained,” 2020). Fucking better, old man!

There are xenophilic elements, but unironic torture and fear are never far removed for our female detectives; i.e., penetrating the Black Veil to get absolutely wrecked for their trouble. Simply put, Radcliffe was a rookie as much as Daniels was, never able to reconcile Lewis save to abject him, doing so with unironic “knife dick” threats[5] of visually immediate rape and mutilation (exhibit 17a), but also someone who saw ghosts of rape everywhere (speaking from experience: once learned, you can’t turn off the seeing of ghosts or knife dicks; re: vaso vagal, fight or flight, confusion of predator/prey responses from lived trauma experiences).

(artist: Oxoca)

That being said, even when lost, something fundamental tends to survive. Beneath the scramble of archaic, medieval images, Radcliffe’s surviving legacy shows us the search for catharsis during BDSM rituals of power that can be reborn; i.e., in future attempts that say something about past detectives who aspiring Gothic-Communists can use in their own media—not doomed like the cyclops, but retooled through the promise of a different method of sight to pierce the illusions of the present with: strict ludo-Gothic BDSM and its campy monster sex and rape play rituals, which ultimately are what Scott is doing in Covenant (which aren’t snuff films/weren’t made with slave labor); re: taking Persephone back to Hell!

Furthermore, even sight itself can express with the other senses (arguably explaining the xenomorph’s lack of eyes, but not specifically how it sees). In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), William Blake speaks to this idea with doors, an idea that survived into the 1960s with countercultural effect; re:

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern (source).

For Radcliffe, actual drugs are swapped out; re: with her drug-like terror and horror model going on to inform the future’s way of seeing things that cannot fully be mapped; i.e., the School of Terror she developed and defined being interrogated by the likes of non-white, non-cis-het xenophiles centuries later after Scott got the ball rolling!

Radcliffe herself was flawed by and to the times in which she lived (a bit like Beauvoir minus the pedophilia), but was also unreliable herself as a detective. Investigating BDSM and queerness “gingerly” in her stories “armored” Radcliffe’s virtue by proxy with her heroines, but also—according to Yael Shapira—helped her delicately invoke gentle, friendly ghosts, then explore transformative promises of paradoxical pleasure that involved disguised bondage tied to societal notions; i.e., of tremendous feelings in freshly exciting and safeguarded/safeguarding autopsies:

Sex, torture, rape, and death were ever-present in the Gothic, whether they actually occurred or only hovered as ominous possibilities. For an eighteenth-century woman author seeking respectability and acceptance, writing about the disrupted, sensational body — or, for that matter, about the body at all — was no simple matter, and it likewise called for quite a bit of “negotiation.” As in the case of the supernatural, this negotiation manifests itself in Ann Radcliffe’s subtle blend of evocation and denial, which allowed the text to disavow what it simultaneously suggested. Like her ghosts, Ann Radcliffe’s bodies are often equivocal figures, whose evanescence, beyond its thematic meanings, was also a useful defence against critical and social censure (source: “Ann Radcliffe’s Delicate Ghosts in Gothic Fiction,” 2023).

Radcliffe clung to modesty. We can deduce rather easily that she lived under the power of men, which in turn dictated her bratty process of detection/abjection; i.e., she couldn’t legally own property herself, but still had something poetic to say towards famous, powerful dudes (many of whom she outlasted in popular stories). More to the point, her nightmares still offered something useful in the bargain; i.e., for xenophiles to take further than she did regarding transformative pleasure and pain yielding future demon lovers more useful than Wolff foresaw!

Beyond Scott raping Radcliffe’s doubles literally to death (or after death), there’s also what Edmund Burke called the Sublime—with terror being affiliated with the Sublime as a perceived fear of received pain—was, for Radcliffe, exquisite “torture” on the edge of the civilized world (whose liminal spaces one can go to and experience fantasies of rape; e.g., Italy or Udolpho). Basically she was thinking about pleasure and pain as intertwined like BDSM, minus the overtly rapacious trappings of the Marquis de Sade. Even so, Radcliffe’s threats of unironic mutilation elide with power fantasies about married sex; i.e., in ways that suggest either a novice or someone who more experienced with genuine abuse than she let on!

Such ways were ways normally denied to Radcliffe by “decent” society—both women and men in service of the Patriarchy but nevertheless being swept up in a craze of daring to peek at such stories that Radcliffe just had to write one for herself (and her husband/paying audience). All the same, this act of “seeing” and discovery through her stories happens for us, as well; i.e., while wearing her veiled sunglasses to see the world through an unreliable narrator’s eyes. It’s not a bad idea to try them on ourselves because, like it or not, there are plenty of cis-het women just like Radcliffe playing it safe in the 21st century inspired directly or indirectly by the Great Enchantress!

(artist: unknown)

Being oppressed as white women would have been, it’s fine to understand why Radcliffe did what she did (then reave it, like Scott). In Radcliffe’s lifetime, her careful vision and attempts to detect was patronizingly commended by those in power reifying a status quo to unite against queer expression. They called her the “Great Enchantress,” the “rare” woman who could write this way and, according to Dale Townshend, “was deservedly exempt from the general condemnation of Gothic writing in Romantic-period culture” (source: “An Introduction to Ann Radcliffe,” 2014, now removed). Yet, during a life that was shrouded in mystery and seemingly crafting her spectral novels for her privileged husband’s pleasure, maybe Radcliffe did it for herself? She didn’t escape the terrorist accusations, despite playing it relatively safe; or as Nick Groom writes (from the Oxford World’s Classics of The Italian, 2017); re:

As to risibility, a notorious letter condemning ‘Terrorist Novel Writing’ accused her of provoking a fashion

To make terror the order of the day, by confining the heroes and heroines in old gloomy castles, full of spectres, apparitions, ghosts, and dead men’s bones […] If a curtain is withdrawn, there is a bleeding body behind it; if a chest is open, it contains a skeleton; if a noise is heard, somebody is receiving a deadly blow; and if a candle goes out, its place is sure to be supplied by a flash of lightning.

Gloom specifically notes how the letter in question explicitly attacks Radcliffe’s “system of terror” for being monotonous, ignorant, and “contaminated” by “Monk” Lewis’ horror writings—to which Radcliffe herself would never write another novel, but whose 1826 posthumous appearance with “On the Supernatural in Poetry” distances herself from the French Revolution (and its terrors), radicalism and Lewis (ibid.). And yet, Bloom concludes his introduction by writing:

Ann Radcliffe may have not been a revolutionary, but her work is far from being conservative—she repeatedly tested the boundaries of orthodoxy at a time of revolutionary foment. This may explain why everything is under scrutiny in The Italian. It is a novel suffused with secrets and mysteries, and pervaded by scrutiny, examination, and interrogation. […] It looks forward to a society in which order is enforced by institutions keeping individuals under perpetual surveillance. As such, The Italian [is] very much a novel for the twenty-first century (ibid.).

Additional arguments could also be made that Radcliffe chose the middle of the road “for women”; i.e., as separate from the kinds of transgressive, impolite, xenophilic queerness Matthew Lewis embodied in his own work by making the devil the one to root for (or Scott, Giger, O’Bannon, et al, centuries later); re:

Radcliffe herself wrote The Mysteries of Udolpho while sitting by her fireplace in the evenings waiting for her husband to come home from work. By writing the type of book she wanted to read in that situation, Radcliffe appealed to the growing population of female readers of the era. By 1800, 45% of women in England could read. […] This created a demand for a new type of literature. Radcliffe filled this demand by writing a novel women could actually relate to because they saw themselves in the heroine (source: Tufts Libraries Omeka, 2017).

That’s entirely fair to submit. Then again, maybe she not only did it for herself, but also for reasons that were more selfish and less polite than women were allowed?

Simply put, what if Radcliffe enjoyed making her dreadful fantasies—indeed, she cherished them for helping her say laterally what women normally could not, then teased at these concealed desires through the surface-level antics on cryptonymic display in her various novels: the lack of agency, to be sure, but also the veiled/naked threats with appreciative peril and mutilation; i.e., CNC rape fantasies (of intense submission under the castle but also the bandit as the perfect dom) towards a minority whose rights were expanding with the times, allowing them to discuss risqué topics with mounting safety (and camp; re: Austen, below).

There’s no way to know exactly how Radcliffe felt, suffice to say that Scott was camping her rape fantasies minus the Black Veil (making her dark desires come true). Far easier to observe is the fact that her special sight had a vast material effect on the world. Seemingly all by herself, she yielded an entire school of stories that cemented itself deeply in the Gothic imagination: a style of looking called the School of Terror for which Radcliffe became famous, and for which her polar opposite was the School of Horror as decided by Matthew Lewis; re: the Gothic, as it came to be known, was written by a woman and a gay man in a time when the identities for either had not fully formed—would continue to grow and develop in the centuries ahead; i.e., while using Radcliffe and Lewis’ ongoing rivalry as a displaced, postmortem vantage point (Scott marrying the two, in Covenant).

To be transparent, either author offered a vulgar display of power that had its own double standard. Indeed, Lewis’ nakedly exposed “Male Gothic” (an outmoded term, but one popular in the earlier days of Gothic academia) served as its own creative response to Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho—with The Monk invoking decidedly unfriendly ghosts tied to openly taboo subject matter as nevertheless an exciting mode of xenophilic engagement with the recently imagined past (a trend Scott—a male director having studied Gothic authors of either sex, in the classical, outdated, binarized sense—would use to challenge the reactionary transphobia of snooty second wave feminists in 2017[6]). In dueling Radcliffe, page after page, Lewis’ aim was to shock and disgust, while Radcliffe was more about frisson, the “skin orgasm” of a carefully tortured mind fearing rape. But rape play is rape play is rape play—with Scott making Radcliffe try Lewis on for size!

The point is that conflict isn’t automatically unproductive; i.e., both authors created schools of thought whose subsequent warring not only defined a generation (like the Karate Kid movies), but went on to survive across the centuries, going so far as to inspire films like Jaws (1975) (or “Jaws in space!” aka Alien) to have their own proliferation of marginalized copycats and neoliberal (videogame) remediation. It was less like looking at the past with the predecessor’s eyes and more akin to making your own pair modeled after theirs and seeing something fresh: your own creation looking back at you, a poster to sell as a window of unknown pleasures peering into the retro-future—a rare chance to not just dive into said past, but pioneer new xenophilic methods of seeing the world around you; i.e., that shape it in a material way for the holistic betterment of all workers/nature!

This includes Radcliffe—i.e., even if it means raping her ghost, as Scott basically has “Radcliffe” try out, being on the receiving end of strict BDSM (no different from Warriana having Brock in Venture Bros. try anal only for him to realize he—per the paradox of rape play—actually likes it). The unequal material conditions that lead to criminogenic behaviors will change because workers won’t stand to be abused if they learn what it’s like to be treated well; they’ll challenge the process of abjection as executed through Gothic fiction until it becomes a thing of the barbaric, Capitalist past that only exists in fiction. Until then, today’s half-real proliferation of monsters can certainly devolve into blind pastiche; it still remains helpful in examining these older windows, anyways. Though endemic to Capitalism, classic Gothic stories still reflect a historical record within countless xenophilic detectives: all trying to see by interrogating the hauntological past, like Scott’s Covenant. The forgotten sight of these accounts extends to dialectical-material analysis; i.e., of the present space and time under attack by Radcliffean imposters.

For one, female “darkness” isn’t just “hidden things are scary” or “women are chaos.” It’s a literal, historical-material consequence stemming from a figurative commentary about women’s place in fiction; i.e., as being part of a collective struggle against oppression—of not being allowed to communicate more than letters, or literal missives to her relatives about plain, boring things. The act of creating things for money was literally “boys only!” which had a visible effect on what women even could create, but also the past they defined when holding the pen and blazing their own trail: communicating in shadows while being kept in the dark. Often, too, there was a source of shame to female authors, a feeling of embarrassment and judgment after the (f)act; i.e., what Austen describes as quite literally “writing in the dark”:

What should I do with your strong, manly, spirited Sketches, full of variety and Glow? – How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two inches wide) of Ivory [the whiteness of the page, kept mostly out of sight to hide the fact that she was writing fiction] on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much Labour? (source: Zoe Louca-Richards’ “Two Inches of Ivory: A New(ish) Jane Austen Acquisition,” 2020).

Such vivid embarrassment lurks inside the famous letter conveyed to Austen’s nephew, James Edward Austen Leigh, which Austen wrote in the last year of her life, when she was 41. For women, labor was childbirth and “manly” poetic activities like writing (especially Gothic novels) were “for the men” (which, to critique Austen, she chided Radcliffe for even daring to try). And yet women like Austen and Radcliffe—followed by Dacre, Mary Shelley and Charlotte Brontë, among others—hopped to it, anyways (often behind a veil of anonymity/pennames). They weren’t Gothically mature insofar as they had a conscious ability to discuss taboo subjects in sex-positive ways (especially Radcliffe), but we can still borrow from them/camp their ghosts much as we do Foucault, Marx or anyone else in this series; re: chasing shadows, like Scott, Lewis, Radcliffe, et al.

Despite a not-so-secret desire to keep women in the dark, men could not stop the greatest legacy of women like Radcliffe; i.e., said women writing mysteriously from the shadows to shape centuries of Gothic literature—however imperfectly—in ways we can salvage: what these ladies wrote shaped the future imagination about the past as something to continually reclaim, rediscover, renegotiate, reeducate, replay and reproduce. Their then-out-group perspective on the past still influenced what future oppressed groups would and will draw inspiration from down the road—in some shape or form—when using ludo-Gothic BDSM, themselves; i.e., to try and alter the socio-material status quo under Capitalism by changing it into something better (thus less exploitative and profitable for the elite), mid-xenophilia; re: the whore’s revenge abjuring profit to spurn the pimp. Radcliffe was not Gothically mature—in fact, she was token as fuck—but we, through ludo-Gothic BDSM, can build on her demon-lover pratfalls (re: Wolff and Scott) to develop Gothic Communism ourselves! We burble up, the primordial ooze of capital’s end of history Radcliffe’s Black Veil couldn’t see past!

Said xenophilia includes the different visual styles and cultural attitudes associated with one versus the other regarding taboo subject matters like rape. In Lewis’ case, he comfortably showed his audience sex with demons, black magic, supernatural events, bloody murder and crossdresser invocations with the Devil—in other words all the things Radcliffe left out but hinted at, which Lewis could explore with relative male privilege and (closeted gay) oppression. Lewis didn’t have to worry about protecting his virtue to the same degree, but still did so in ways that were profoundly genderqueer/xenophilic. I would argue Radcliffe protected her virtue, if only on a subliminal level, to avoid official scrutiny and maintain respect as someone who was balanced in their caution and disregard; i.e., the Goldilocks of xenophobia and xenophilia in her mind.

Regardless, Radcliffe’s ideas on terror as superior to horror predated Hitchcock’s latter-day “mastery” (social-sexual domination) of mystery and suspense by nearly two centuries (another Galatea obliterated in Pygmalion’s future Shadow). But the consequence of that still offered a trademark method of conjecture to the barbaric past during BDSM told through Gothic play; i.e., as continuously reimagined in ways that wound up becoming gendered in relation to other authors and their works inside a shared material world. Everyone was fumbling around in the dark; they stumbled towards truth (as applied knowledge) while being handled torches they found that others had once held. Step by step, these allowed Radcliffe and Lewis to go further than before—to see and say new-and-different things in relation to previous things already seen and said.

The idea, as always, is to be “of the Devil’s party” and actually know it (re: Volume Zero’s “camp map” section, wherein I discuss psychosexuality and the palliative Numinous when camping the operatically performative spaces of the canonical Gothic mode; re: for me, Metroidvania). Radcliffe, Lewis and the Shelleys were certainly precocious for their times—and worked in concert/opposition to each other when building castles on top of castles, mise-en-abyme—but the embodiment of xenophilic devilry as a dark, poetic force needs to become a concrete, collective identity in the face of universal struggle towards universal liberation; i.e., in pandemonic solidarity and excessive rebellion on the Aegis through ludo-Gothic BDSM: demons take many forms, and their “dark” revenge—as something to hungrily chase, but also love and worship—is often very visible:

(artist: cakiiBB)

Queer identity is one such facet and it intersects with others, mid-struggle; i.e., identity as struggle vis-à-vis careful and deliberate intersections of class, culture and race (which capital does its best to divide). The paradox of being trans, black and/or AFAB, for example, is that they aren’t choices (nor is being neurodivergent or questioning organized religion); you are or you aren’t and proceed from there, becoming something—whatever that is—through identity as performance and praxial synthesis helping or harming workers. Whether you evolve into yourself or stay in the closet, either is a form of “death,” but neither “ends.” Death is not the end; it lives on in material forms made by those with “dead” imaginations unable or unwilling to transform, or those who freed themselves through their imaginations as best they could—re: Radcliffe and Lewis, but also Scott and myself.

So while Coleridge “closed his eyes in holy dread and drunk the milk of paradise,” Lewis drove the old prude mad by tearing a reprobate “Adam” to bits (camping the canon, as Broadmoor puts it); Radcliffe, meanwhile, preserved her own modesty as something that didn’t die but whose work indicated a present something beyond herself that was alien to its author. As such, she hinted at what she could become if things were different; i.e., weren’t persecuted against, including by her regarding what she perceived were the proper sorts of damsels, detectives and demons to play with: the sort she caught, summoned and banished!

Now, the material world is rapidly changing in ways amenable to transformation beyond what Radcliffe could scarcely dream of (I’m not so sure about Lewis): the sweet terror of mid-transformation suggested by Scott (next page); i.e., the chimeric, liminal, “before-and-after” wonder of the trans experience as drug-like—a magical means of arriving at nature as furious to understand its alien suffering at the hands of Cartesian harvesters posturing as good; re: “Animals embody the canonical language of power and resistance as something to camp through demonic and undead forms.” Demon or undead, we’ll explore those next, in “Call of the Wild”; i.e., when we look at nature-themed, “totemic” and anthropomorphic egregores as an increasingly trippy and magical outlet for our animal selves; e.g., Sailor Moon or The Last Unicorn, but also Scott and Giger’s xenomorph, dragged out of the closet for another lesson: revenge as a poetic means of transformation, one where workers act xenomorphically without murdering anyone! Memento mori are wax sculptures, Count Ferdinand!

How? you ask? Let’s quickly conclude dissecting Scott’s shenanigans (two pages); i.e., the gay camper (me) camping Scott, the straight camper/gay deceiver deceiving the straight deceiver to make him gayer than he dares dream (eat your heart out, Matthew Lewis)! One, Covenant is sex-positive because its camp suggests that David might not be completely mad/has a method to his madness; they’re also sex-coercive because they feed into white women’s fears and let fascism in through the door of deliberate ambiguity. Being straight, Scott’s abjection, chronotopes, hauntologies, cryptonymy and stealth queerness regress to a 1970s kind of strict BDSM—one that ultimately guts Radcliffe’s likeness on a black altar. Scott doesn’t always know what to stress—and has mommy and daddy issues himself that aren’t fully worked out—but he’s not afraid to take chances; i.e., talking about sex (and rape) to drag the greats (with Shaw being David’s anatomical Venus/corpse of empire, but also something new made with the corpse, below):

I can applaud that (“die, honky!”), even if I think Scott makes a similar mistake that Eggers did by not having his dark throwback break the Fourth Wall and say to the audience, “I’m a Communist and this is my revenge against capital!” But the signs are there to connect for those who know… It’s a helluva lot better than Cameron’s currently doing (going full AI tech bro with his own remasters, say nothing of his white moderate politics; Nerrel’s “AI Can Ruin Movies Now, Too – Aliens and True Lies on 4k,” 2024); re: “truth” is merely positions of partial ignorance to enforce for different reasons (see: “Positions of Relative Ignorance to Relative Clarity“).

But, there are limitations with Scott vice signaling a false Jesus/antichrist against coded virtue as brute-force as he is; i.e., by presenting us as a rapacious threat to the usual people who think we’re a threat (and all in a white man’s image; re: of a cryptomimetic likeness/replica of a replica of Michaelangelo’s David). Scott loves the xenomorph and blackguard stirring the pot while he pulls the strings from a place of safety and privilege; i.e., as the Humanist throwback being the old white man with little-if-anything to lose/skin in the game; re: it’s a bit Percy Shelley/Lord Byron without irony, hence closer to Victor as Mary Shelley originally lampooned than Scott is nakedly worshipping: he thinks he’s Satan when he’s really, really not!

(artists: Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell; source: Ross Webster’s “A Review of From Hell: Master Edition from Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell,” 2020)

Instead, he’s Jack the Ripper targeting women to slice them up for the audience’s entertainment; and while there’s a class-war character to his games, there’s also a fair bit of collateral damage (not as much as From Hell, above, but I digress; the same abjection process scaring the white female middle class is still there—a Hitchcockian menace torturing whores for money from said middle class during the usual damaging business making irony a regular casualty during profit above all else): “Oh, hear my warning! Never turn your back on the Ripper!” (Judas Priest’s “The Ripper,” 1976). Same goes for Scott and men like him, but also their wicked, sadistic and at-times-incredibly misogynistic, racist (eugenicist) and transphobic antiheroes: revived at a retro-future fin de siècle/neo-Victorian Ozymandian collapse (the death of the Weyland-Yutani corporation’s head of state having Orientalist elements as well; re: from 1979 onwards into the 1980s own canceled futures).

To that, Covenant is plenty Satanic, but it’s a bit too canonically Miltonic and doesn’t try hard enough to avoid the Satanic Panic side of things; i.e., while regressing towards new Dark Ages in ways that aren’t useful to Communism as new workers develop it: to go beyond an aging weird nerd’s idea of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1974). Trapped between capital’s boom-and-bust (Judas Priest’s proverbial Sad Wings of Destiny actually being historical materialism at work), Scott threatens to squish us to juices; i.e., like that girl from Akira (1988) while dancing with spectres of Marx dressed up like a walking sex toy/phantom of the opera. He’s carving up Margaret Thatcher as much as any Victorian street whore, but also Radcliffe; re: Radcliffe’s nightmare coming from a token woman with token fears.

Of that nightmare, David is literally gatekeeping paradise to say to Radcliffe’s doubles, “No TERFs allowed!” It’s poetic justice at its finest, castrating the austere pearl-clutcher/sell-out and holier-than-thou hypocrite by applying her own selective standards to her heroines hauntologized; i.e., a bigotry for one is a bigotry for all and demons play rough (for a good example of this, consider the “danger disco” scene from Near Dark, when the wandering-bandit vampires enter the cowboy bar [“shitkicker heaven!”] and kill everyone inside for our entertainment)! Scott does this through weaponized white/male privilege doing to Radcliffe what women like her fear the most; i.e., alienation through exposure to what will alienate them as normally what they use to alienate their victims: rape as something to accuse/a terror weapon, revealing the modest as whore-like, trapped in unironically mutilative rape spaces that lack irony and push towards sex-coercive forms of the non-so-palliative Numinous through courtly love, demon BDSM scenarios.

In keeping with Groom, Scott is camping Radcliffe by raping not just the women in Covenant while alive, but desecrating their corpses, too; i.e., as former settler-colonial symbols he turns into black-monolith homunculi the state will attack during mirror syndrome (a taste of their own medicine in his afterlife, making Persephone a Bride of Count Montoni/Dracula, again). It’s great, save for the fact that Covenant downright assumes a Gothic fluency that doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s more monasterial, limiting the film’s mass appeal in ways Ridley can’t really help. So he just plows ahead, hell or high water!

And to it, I can at least work with that—can take the idea of a retro-future posthumanist runaway slave making Medusa in small (re: the homunculus, above); i.e., by raping Noah and his wive (and their whole merry band of genocidal animals and families) and do something better with it than Scott does. Better still, so can my friends; i.e., during a shared cryptonymy process reversing abjection during ludo-Gothic BDSM as our playing with monsters (below)—by doing Scott one better during our own mommy rape play conjuring up demons during darkness visible in its legionary forms’ jouissance: adding radical irony to Radcliffe’s calculated risk, our Davids, Adams and Eves communicating through rape as rape survivors!

Sex pirates camping the canon to reclaim our power from capital’s nuclear home, our pandemonium wrecks said home to build a better one among the Ozymandian debris; i.e., our contributions to the narrative of the crypt going outside the text to speak to a world beyond Capitalism, the Cycle of Kings, Shadow of Pygmalion, and infernal concentric pattern while inside them, our wasp to their caterpillar! “Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven!” said David; Walter and Daniels were the true villains of Covenant—Heavens to Murgatroyd!

While graphic, demon sex is very campable/code-switchable, it still helps to negotiate it behind the scenes (the full-size images can be accessed through the source links); e.g., as Harmony Corrupted and I do (we’ll start with us, then close-read Ninja Scroll and The Dark Crystal a bit);

i.e., wherein Harmony and I set the ground rules/stage for playtime—negotiate what is exchanged for what, what can be featured in what, and so on—then get down (so to speak) to business!

Labor exchange isn’t “separate” from sex work because, as the title suggests, sex work is work, and goes beyond (white straight middle-class) women to include anyone doing it to survive for a variety of reasons; e.g., to make money but also to do activism and illustrate mutual consent during rape cryptomimesis. Those aren’t mutually exclusive, and anyone who says otherwise is a cop and a pimp (which includes many privileged sex workers, who tokenize and punch down while acting exclusively oppressed inside Omelas as “their” corner to work); i.e., someone who thinks that sex work and consent are mutually exclusive, thus can’t illustrate mutual consent during dialectical-material struggle; re: Radcliffe, but also Scott, to some degree!

The praxial idea, then, is to play with the Gothic by combining these things, but also to infuse/synthesize the roleplay scenes themselves with open elements of revolutionary camp (within our daily habits’ anger/gossip, monsters and camp cultivating good social-sexual habits); i.e., as Lewis did, in The Monk, centuries ago; e.g., “Oh, yeah! Matilda, I’m ravishing your ambiguous gender identity with my closeted sissy’s dominant rod! Unholy Mommy of the Netherworld; how I coom at your profaning the Madonna, Christ and God; accept my sacrifice, writ in human fluids, my moist hot “soul” spraying all over your beauteous orbs! Holy Saint Francis! ‘Sblood! More like splooge, amrite? Dark temple, accept my burnt offering! Spider-girl’s got nothing on me!” Not bad for an old woman, huh (“I’m not old, I’m 37!“) Now go support Harmony on Fansly! Forget li’l-ol’ me, she does amazing work!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

The world is much too atomized/pulverized in ways Gothic Communism tries to holistically reconnect during praxial synthesis/the dialectic of the alien dismantling white moderacy/reactionary behaviors and tokenism (all of which are why we’re currently in this mess). Assimilation is poor stewardship, but punching up can resemble the disguises they use to try and blend in with the oppressed. So can our neo-medieval pedagogy profane canon and be hidden/open about it during the cryptonymy process; i.e., as dualistic, haunted by police shadows (official or stochastic)!

But also, we’re fighting for ourselves, our friends, nature, animals and the environment; i.e., as stewards of them and each other in the same proverbial boat/Ark. We’re just making a Covenant of the Rainbow with Satan (ourselves), versus one with God; i.e., in rejecting any and all functionally white colonizers hiding behind the Protestant ethic (as Radcliffe once did, centuries ago)!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

To it, neoliberal hope is false hope, but we can hungrily and animalistically “flap towards the hope“; i.e., of something better by winding back the clock while pushing forwards to take ludo-Gothic BDSM out of the bedroom (re: Foucault) without harming anyone and making art-porn educational exhibits that are explicitly punk/Communist (not postpunk, Zeuhl, Judas Priest, Ridley Scott, etc); and this extends to the movie theatre—i.e., we don’t need Scott’s cryptonymy/mise-en-abyme to make our own as infinitely more revolutionary than his because it represents workers solely instead of profit. Just what the doctor ordered: a hot, deep, full injection of emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness to achieve praxial synthesis/catharsis and Gothic maturity regarding a proletarian Wisdom of the Ancients/Superstructure—Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism!

And, as always, natural linguo-material latitudes combine the usual medieval hyphenations of sex and force, war and rape (food and death, etc), during class, culture and race war to have fun with; e.g., “C’mon, rev my engine, dude! That’s it; fuck mommy like a good little whore! Fire phasers! Full broadside! Yes—yes, yes, yes—fuck me, stupid—motherfuckin’ BLAST OFF!” Playing is how we learn by passing messages back and forth; i.e., in class, while the teacher thinks we’re “studying.” In short, we invade our own classroom as guerillas, while they—the actual villains from Radcliffe’s stories (rich white people and their teacher’s pets acting as hall monitors for Capitalism)—try to invade and decipher our privacy (and fail badly as they do, left):

While silliness and play (with monsters, rape and trauma) is regaining control during ludo-Gothic BDSM, there’s nothing radically emancipatory about such revelation’s sacking of “Rome” unless we get out from under profit pimping nature as monstrous-feminine; i.e., moving away from manufactured scarcity towards post-scarcity using pre-capitalist language to negotiate past trauma/our rights and boundaries in the present space and time. Anyone who resists that—i.e., so they can enjoy the usual middle-class fear-fascination with the ghost of the counterfeit furthering abjection—is a traitor on a gradient of betrayals, privilege and oppression, but also liberation and exploitation existing in the same shadow space we can solidarize and intersect towards development. It’s a sprawling orgy of conflict, and a messy one!

That’s our revenge; i.e., not killing a Radcliffean throwback unto itself, but transferring such poetic exchanges/reclamations of violence, terror and monster language unto all registers (territories), onstage and off; re: anisotropically reversing abjection (terrorist/counterterrorist) to dismantle profit: by camping canon to break Capitalist Realism, liberating sex work (thus all work) from capital/sex coercion with iconoclastic/sex-positive art (thus porn and Gothic poetics, at large)! So does the manmade slave turn the scalpel on its maker—the monster baby crunching the apple-like skull (and hypothetical brain) of its Saturnine parents! We’re not special snowflakes, but fucking ninja stars!

Speaking of which, this brings us once more to Ninja Scroll (1993):

(exhibit: We’ve already examined Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s Ninja Scroll during “Healing from Rape” in Volume One, but I want to revisit it, here; i.e., to make a point that movie’s director was, and me vis-à-vis my older arguments surrounding his work being applied here to Ridley Scott’s imperfect attempts to camp the canon as Matthew Lewis once did. So c’mon, everyone; let’s mosey along that borderline!

“All war is based on deception.” Ninja Scroll speaks in the Gothic courtly romance of the damsel, detective and sex demon; re: the ninjas are hired by the magistrate [actually the villain, in disguise] to investigate a robbery happening behind a fake plague—a plot to overthrow the current government being orchestrated from within, and one whose investigation into must start [to keep up appearances] but then meet with a tragic end [also to keep up appearances]: the ninja team is ambushed by a queer BDSM junkie with thunder in his veins, and—more to the point—a giant Frankensteinian creature; i.e., two of the Eight Devils of Kimon!

Well, shit.

It’s not so different than the Three Storms from Big Trouble in Little China [1986] except this isn’t American Orientalism, but a home-turf Japanese romancing of the babe in the woods to speak to the then-present space and time haunted by Japanese atrocities married to American ones; i.e., the ninja fodder are accompanied by a ninja girl, Kagero—a foxy ice queen who wants to be one of the boys and even likes the leader of the ninja team, Hanza. “Our enemy will be the epidemic!” he declares. But he forgets Sun Tzu’s adage, and is walking into a trap [and his men are arrogant/jumpy]. Kagero is protective of the numbskulls, going so far as to “castrate” herself—slicing off her hair to make a point [a fact that shocks the boys, given this lowers her value in their lord’s eyes, hence theirs].

Point taken; she gets to tag along, the men—especially Hanza—not realizing she’s doing so to protect them; i.e., as the “phallic woman”/Medusa warding off evil. Castrator women seeking revenge for past wrongs is a common theme in Japanese cinema [e.g., Lady Kaede from Ran, 1985]. Even so,  Kawajiri’s Kagero is something of a fledgling detective seeking—beyond expectation [and station]—the answer to who recently stole gold from the abandoned mine, kept secret through murder all those years ago; i.e., it’s a spaghetti Western in disguise, but also borrows monomythic tropes across warrior cultures in a wider neoliberal market to speak about rape using shared Gothic tools [versus camping them; e.g., Planet Terror‘s “a missing leg that is now missing!“].

To it, Kagero’s a girl in a man’s world, and in love with Hanza’s a superman-lite knockoff—a Clarke Kent to Jubei’s superior devilish prowess[7] [the two being mutual crushes for the same woman, except Hanza dies because he can’t think with the right head, and Jubei’s cooler heads prevail[8] against a demon who also thinks with his “short sword”]; i.e., with Hanza showing her a begrudging respect and her liking him, too, but their world not allowing for love between the classes: her being a poison-taster for their lord and him being a “mere ninja” serving said lord [and the magistrate being the story’s Sheriff of Nottingham, for the lack of a better comparison]. Hanza secretly wants to do things other than ninja [like have sex], and she wants to be a ninja, the two seemingly wanting to reconcile those desires/differences by being so close together and yet so far apart on a shared mission, for once [overlapping labor action]…

Alas, the quick, brutal realities and betrayals of feudal, Warring-States life cockblock our young prospective couple—the evil demon warriors stepping in to make short work of the boys by effectively out-ninjaing them, but also straight up massacring them/carving them into pieces of meat, raining blood [ninjas are spies, not assassins]!

Hanza’s men quickly buy the farm, and the last man standing stands just long enough, during the kayfabe, to saber-rattle with the tornado sword-wielding fiend…

….until his aspiring Amazon suddenly becomes a damsel-in-distress and Hanza—like Parker from Alien—runs in; i.e., dick-measuring with someone who is frankly and obviously a much bigger jouster! Shit’s fucking metal, the knightly code doing our gentleman caller no favors [a hauntological crossing of ninja and knight: “Ninja doesn’t survive,” Europe]!

Hanza loses, Kagero freezes, and the golem hams it up—the violence oddly eroticized [for the two homosocial men] while the black ninja mutilates the white ninja’s corpse to terrify his true prize: the girl he’s been hunting [on her scent, perhaps betraying their location except not really]. She “nopes the fuck out,” not too keen on being his plaything and saying “feets, do your stuff!” only to be stopped tragically short inside the dark forest [never a good place for a damsel to be without a hero, in canonical media]. His seeking sword is like a maelstrom of feral lust, chasing her down to sever her foothold and send her plummeting to her doom/plunging screaming into the abyss; i.e., the unspoken-but-heavily implied fate of whores in Gothic stories; i.e., the conservative argument: “She should have been at home like a good little girl; now, boys will be boys!”

 

This is only two minutes in a 91-minute movie, but it sets the stage for the woman’s revenge. And while the film is sexist in its depiction of men and women being dimorphically separate to seemingly favor men, it also works within those stereotypes to subvert patriarchal power. Jubei—the film’s hero, for example—deals the spectacular murder stroke to technically fell the golem, but it was the woman’s poisoned body [from the poison-tasting done for her master] that weakens said golem enough to literally “soften him up”! It’s Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West [coming out of Kurosawa’s East-meets-West hauntology with Seven Samurai fifteen years prior]—with “Frank” [the plot thickens] drawing only to miss, Jubei “juking” him to disarm the fiend and send his own boomerang back into his tantrum-throwing toddler brain! Talk about “losing your head over a piece of tail!” They’re both idiot heroes, flexing at each other while Kagero is largely unsung.

Largely. An old spy explains to us later that Kagero won the fight; i.e., that she castrates the rapist for raping her—and he has no idea/dies frightened and scared—but she also castrates the hero, who thinks he won the duel: he would’ve died without Kagero’s help [similar to Bard beating Smaug only because of the thrush sent by Bilbo to tell him the dragon’s legendary weak point]!

Furthermore, Jubei only wounds the monster’s hand, which blocks said monster’s face/vision… until his own weapon flies back into his brain, penetrating the seemingly impenetrable armor there by hoisting the owner—a literal walking castle/castle-in-the-flesh—on his own petard [reaping the literal whirlwind]! But even fatally wounded—and blinded like the Cyclops, Polyphemus—the brain[dea]ed monster stumbles stubbornly forwards to both apprehend Jubei, but also mark him for death should this last attack fall short [similar to Jason and the Argonauts, who the aforementioned Cyclops curses with death after they blind him]. The Numinous desperation maneuver/kamikaze [“divine wind”] attack fails, but whose bushido banzai charge carries the victor’s likeness into the defeated warrior’s now-softened clay palm, which leads a fellow Devil of Kimon—a Snake Woman, this time—to follow Jubei and seek revenge for her partner-in-crime’s demise; i.e., man-on-man, girl-on-man, girl-on-girl, and so on, the revenge is a Canterbury’s bloody road/scroll that never stops telling tales [though with decidedly less fart jokes than Chaucer and more ninjas acting like knights]!

Furthermore, such duels are generally over pride/women. Not one to sugarcoat, so does Kawajiri and his Aegis reverse the entire knight/damsel archetype/abjection process, but also oscillate between the two characters, Jubei and Kagero, routinely saving each other’s skins [with Kagero later saving Jubei from a Medusa-like woman, and helping with a variety of other struggles, too, including another monster of Frankensteinian size, the shapeshifting and seemingly immortal Genma[9]]: the damsel actually saving the white knight from the black knight/rape monster [such things being obvious to those who normally receive violence from such deceivers; re: Cuwu, teaching me to think about my own survival as a rape victim: from a woman’s perspective]. In short, “[they’re] comrades!” as Jubei himself explains, and the two never have sex—not even when a government spy is holding a gun to their heads; i.e., using poison on Jubei to force Kagero to sleep with him to lift the fever [triangulating sex from them for him to watch, the old lech a moderate bureaucrat/desk murderer voyeur coercing the exhibit].

While the Gothic involves tremendous speculation/speculative possession, the ensuing romance isn’t strictly endorsement; i.e., the Numinous/danger disco[10] only palliative when it’s sex-positive. Furthermore, such debates happen with demonic ghosts, which include pasts of us as those we’re hauntologically debating [e.g., Weber and Marx]. And while it might sound obvious, a scene with rape is inviting the viewer to think about rape. That’s important; Radcliffe, like Scott, combined rape and murder together to speak to a medieval viewing of things normally obscured by state illusion—i.e., through stress-relieving kettling devices whose calculated risk would be perfectly fine if not for their aforementioned reliance on unironic xenophobia, abjection and selective liberation, during calculated risk [a war profiteer pimping rape for profit, first and foremost].

Gothic Romance, then, isn’t automatic endorsement; at its core, Ninja Scroll is a profoundly Gothically mature story about surviving and overcoming rape; re: as anisotropic, which requires fetishizing rape to some extent [and camping it with the hit-or-miss voice acting]. What matters is performative/dialectical-material context—a kiss, for example, feeling fun under the right circumstances and utterly terrifying/horrifying under the wrong ones. The same goes for sex, but also things that speak to, with or about sex and love in some shape or form; i.e., the Gothic generally communicates trauma through echoes of itself in deliberately “ancient” forms; re: from Kurosawa’s samurai “having lost again” to the romantically disinterested-with-money-or-sex Jubei helping Kagero because they’re comrades.

Fighting against rape, Kagero is as much the story’s protagonist as Jubei is. Except, unlike him, she is poisoned to love—probably since she was a young girl well before the movie starts [with “poison” being a defense mechanism” but also “medicine” administered to her in defense of men she grows to resent while simultaneously feeling alienated from those she grows to love]—and must spend this iteration of the Hero’s Journey learning to find it, again.

Gothic stories concern rape victims both actual or potential mastering emotional confusion; i.e., amid grave physical danger [the Great Destroyer trope] to heal from the conditioning of abuse: healing is the revenge, as is building up to something that gnaws at and freezes our would-be assailants to deliver the final blow, mid-murder-ballad. Kagero’s resistance and bravery is poison to the golem, who cannot ingest it and—faced with his own shame—is subsequently beheaded and dismantled like the coward she exposes him to be. From one demon to another, her gift unmakes him; i.e., her will is greater than his, therefore her power having stolen his during the rapes!

Except, whereas the golem echoes big men raping her since she was small [a historical-material fact echoed in the magistrate’s mistress, but also the man himself as not being so functionally different from Genma, but also Genma’s golem or the real magistrate’s ninja cronies]—and still is small compared to them; i.e., both physically and relative to paper-thin barriers and boundaries that her fellow workers respect more than her rights—Hanza and later Jubei are two dudes she feels like she can actually start to trust; i.e., rape is the unspeakable domain of [traditionally] female violence [we’ll explore GNC examples, in Volume Three] but neither back downs or runs away from her like a disease. So eventually she opens up, talking about her feelings in ways that rape victims often bury inside themselves—in short, she learns to live and love again.

For Kagero, something as seemingly innocent as feeling safe during a hug and a kiss while naked and exposed is all that matters. And once she finds Mr. Right to help her realize that goal, she can [and does] die happy [both from joy but also from being stabbed, earlier]! It’s very Romantic in a sexless way and yet, all the same, connects to trauma, nudism, rape/violence and demonic magic of all kinds—not quite sui generis but certainly of that Marriage-of-Heaven-and-Hell variety that many artists, poets, thinkers, and actors have struggled to replicate historically across space and time!

It’s worth repeating that neither character is a stranger to violence, but Jubei is a stranger to violence as a woman experiences it; Kagero, then, helps him overcome something he can never experience as she does, the two of them doing so in the most classic [and ace] of ways—a tender and sensual kiss—while exploring trauma and power vicariously for the audience in worlds of trauma and power both faraway and close at hand—i.e., where such things don’t divide, but slam together in the most primal of discourses made-material under imperial structures onwards: sex and force! “The dose doth make the poison!”

And if Kawajiri “missed the flames of Hell” to speak to rape in ways he could camp during the cryptonymy process, cryptomimetically regenerating old medieval tropes between America and Japan’s imaginary past and present, so too could Cuwu and I—once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away—find common ground; i.e., as two rape victims having experienced rape as a trans masc and trans woman do: differently during the same class struggle extending towards queer people and sex workers. And if we could camp it, in hindsight, then so can we camp Ridley Scott’s Alien universe and its own strict rape play regarding Radcliffe’s! The paradox of rape allows for it, the events onscreen needing “rape” to discuss rape while also being something that—while undoubtedly triggering for many survivors—remains an invaluable tool when used consciously thus actively as a rape prevention device; re: during ludo-Gothic BDSM, changing the Superstructure!)

Clearly there’s a fine line between canon and camp, exploitation and liberation. Those who survive rape without becoming cops but learning how to camp it through calculated risk become—if not strictly “immune” to the bourgeoisie’s greatest weapons (canonical fear and dogma)— at least inoculated to them; i.e., in ways that let us camp the canon when the elite manufacture disasters they hope will scare people (through socio-material conditions) to let them stay in control (re: Jadis and I, me escaping them through half-real Gothic fantasies).

Divorced from that, our minds and bodies become not just one again, but ours to wield during the cryptonymy process’s dualistic war of masks, mirrors and monsters, magic and myths, and so on; their Great Destroyers expose as frauds, us no longer playing the magic song to send the “Moon” back to its original fearful position, but saying “no more” and recultivating the Superstructure (and reclaiming the Base) in ways the elite cannot monopolize; re: socio-material conditions make people stupid, but anisotropically can make them intelligent and aware. If I did so with Jadis, but also Zeuhl—may their junk fester and rot (cowards who ran from any challenge because it suited them to simply hide and feed on others)—and, to a lesser extent, with dear flawed-but-darling Cuwu (and others less dear to me who harmed me far more), then you can do it together in order to become something mobile and conscious of class, culture and race conducive to Communist development! The scroll winds ever onwards, trapped forever between older sections and newer ones waiting to be written.

For example—and bringing us to another old stomping ground of mine, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (a very gay show, in its own right; re: Persephone van der Waard’s “The Dark Crystal: AoR – Sexuality, Women, and Queer Identity,” 2019)—Rian’s father, Ordon, tells him to be brave when falling to the Hunter, because fear is precisely what the elite will use against us while picking a fight; i.e., once having taken all they can take before someone pushes back (such is reactive abuse). Indeed, the show is all about queer and similarly intersectional solidarities grouping in the face of questioning blind service vis-à-vis our cannibal leaders mirrored in fantastical doubles (and their fractal recursions).

But out of that puppet-happy Age of Wonder and its spectacular duels are age-old tropes speaking to ongoing dialectical-material struggles; e.g., the bounty hunter/secret police demasked (thus shamed) by the aging captain, only for his son to survive him in one final duel not just with the blackguard before him threatening his next-in-line, but also the gaping pit of Death itself eating him alive! When Ordon throws both of them into the pit to try and save Rian, he says, “No!” to stop his weeping son from following him, but also assures him “it’s alright” and to “be brave.” Such bravery is made not to pacify us, but to keep our animal impulses in check to keep us, their children, from being eaten, too. So do the sins of the father die with him, the old pro going out on his own terms: a warrior’s death, reclaiming his honor if not dispatching his eternal foe!

“You have heart! I’ll take that, too!” said Jadis to me (they loved the Hunter in that show), to which I finally stood up and said to them, “No you won’t!” Such push-back shattered their sense of control, and they fled from me like a bad dream—one that, like all my abusers, haunts me to this very day, and who I’ve reversed on the Aegis through my cryptomimesis to “dance, magic!” with all the power of Hell at my command; i.e., as someone dangerous who can make demands to the elite, but also make changes without talking to them at all; re: “Get away… FROM MY FRIENDS!” Behold the power of the Darkening—in our hands!

So while the show is full of heroic men, its women are doing the most heroic deeds/dismantling patriarchal systems of power by walking away from Omelas. And so does a humble Grottan (the show’s underclass) do the greatest deed of all: turning the elite’s message of fear and doubt, hatred and death back on those Caesarean assailants; i.e., terror—a mighty weapon they can’t control once unleashed—turned into counterterror! When cornered, the elite unleash Jadis’ Moon, and “gentle” Deet absorbs it to become their worst nightmare: a rape victim who fights back to a lethal degree (she is crippled at the start of the show, the Darkening as much criminogenic conditioning as a metaphor for state shift)!

Cornered, she hesitates only for a moment, then acts, sucking the darkness into herself. It seems to be killing her (and it is), but also, she’s taking the elite’s power into herself and growing into an operatic monster belied by her deceptively small stature: the fat lady simmering inside someone built for comfort, not speed!

“A moment’s courage and the deed is done!” Specifically the damage is done, as much speaking to what happens outside Deet as in; i.e., she radicalizes, a dark oracle/whore others see as a threat they pull away from (with Rian marrying the good princess instead of the whore)! Demons are transactional, and superstitious parties isolate her as equally fearful to them as the Skeksis! And though there isn’t a Brutus element to Deet’s felling of the Caesars, her phallic BDSM revenge element conveys a likeness of the in-group that speaks to real life whistleblowers warning about dangers in our midst from positions of relative privilege close to their friends-turned-enemies (sort of an inverse of the writing for Deet, but functioning on the same gradient); e.g., an insider for Elon Musk selling him down the river after Musk symbolically and materially turned on said insider by doing the Nazi salute; i.e., the insider begot from Jewish Holocaust survivors, and having worked from obscurity alongside Musk until too much was too much (Chris Norland’s “SELL Your Tesla Stock Says Elon Musk Insider,” 2025).

Everyone’s breaking point (and privilege/oppression) are different, but Caesar always laments his own death in the face of backstabbers; Deet’s betrayal is seen as “ultimate” in the eyes of the slavers, because they think her indebted to them most of all (and her own friends feeling guilty to some degree in said exploitation, thus fearful of her revenge, but also jealous of her for literally stealing their thunder[11] by straight-up nuking a seemingly unstoppable force): “Et tu, Brutae?” might sound absurd when inverted and applied to a working non-white girl of the people, but that’s essentially what happens, here. Deet’s race and class are alien, but so are her identity and actions through heroic performance turning her into Grendel’s mother/the Medusa; i.e., going from female Anakin of color to Commie Darth Vader sith lord Omelas child through the same purple electro-shock treatment used by the failing Emperor! “And now, young Skywalker, you will die!”

No one wants to martyr themselves. In doing so, Deet sacrifices herself by changing permanently as the Medusa does (dooming her to a lonesome existence); but in seeing several friends die, she throws herself in front of the bomb anyways, embracing her heroic role and giving the castle demons a taste of their own stupid bullshit—i.e., after she takes their power from them and giving it back to workers. As such, she kills those who say they can’t be killed, showing their illusions as false while toppling Goliath with one of its own stones (a bomb she gives back to them, which blows up in their faces);

i.e., one of the Skeksis—an especially dumb and annoying one—don’t even seem to know its dead until its head explodes like a bomb: a “really gross sneeze” that splatters hot, white (and slightly purple) fluid all over the queer-coded Skeksis’ face… who cries afterwards, “It’s in my mouth!”

Do you split or swallow, love? It’s rebellion bukkake, the palace of their confidence and illusions crashing down before our eyes! One dies of shame; the others bravely run away—and all from the testimony of the show’s queer character of color bursting their bubble in spectacular killer-rabbit fashion! She becomes demonic/undead on/with the Aegis, but also is vaulted, Christ-like, within Omelas until it eats itself alive (nature’s revenge and hers because she isn’t heeded, merely taken for granted): for throwing stones in glass houses, those who don’t check their privilege mistaking their own ignorance for wisdom and magnanimous charity for active solidarity/acting oppressed versus being oppressed (many of the good characters are princesses, nobles, and cops). So do the others betray Deet.

It might sound tragic and Icarian (and indeed, Netflix canceled the show after one season), but such is Medusa’s story normally controlled by men and token women (re: the Athenian Amazons, on and offstage): a thing to take away from their meddling hands through the usual popular (monomyth) devices and poetic abstractions; i.e., speaking in code during the cryptonymy process being unaverse to using puppets that camp the canon. Popular during the medieval period, the practice and its psychosexual metaphors actually date back to ancient times; i.e., while speaking—as such monsters and their simulacra do—from the heart: of those who most immediately alienated by/affected concentrically inwards regarding those of the in-group less and less bothered by capital doing what capital does by design! The paradox of rape being rape cannot be effectively discussed without camping it.

Medusa, then, is ultimately a dead, alien, functionally non-white whore speaking to rape, whose exposure is something moderacy fears and punishes; i.e., the ultimate crime for exposing the ultimate rape as having the ability to radically change society (discussions of rape being shameful for the victim being shamed by other victims, or coddled by them out of gagging pity). Those with privilege (therefore less alienation)—including tokenized privilege—will hide behind their accomplishments/privilege to deny their own oppression and predatory antics (e.g., Mike Tyson the heavyweight champion, not the token black man who raped women and went to prison for it [Eleanor Neale’s “Mike Tyson’s Vicious History of Domestic Abuse,” 2024]—same idea for O.J. Simpson, though he went to jail for something else).

To testify to rape is to rebel against profit, and rebellious women—cis/white or not—are always victims of men or those acting like men/the colonizer pimps out of revenge more broadly through the usual intersecting networks of oppression being historically used to stir up marginalized division; re: that quells the whore’s monstrous-feminine testimony as something to cage, thus control, like poor Deet; i.e., capital defends capital in descending/ascending orders of privilege/preferential mistreatment, and the intended heroes of the show don’t like Deet once she stops being “poor, sweet, and gentle”; they fear and exile her like Radcliffe does: tone-policing the oracle who exposes their hand in things, then appeasing Brutus and his survivors of Caesar who kill them all. Have fun, kids!

False rebellion is fascism, and capital more broadly loves shooting the messenger while fetishizing her! We can do the same, but doing so to celebrate the whore’s revenge in equally crude, undisguised eroticism and public nudism (next page); i.e., a whore’s a whore, naked or not. As Lewis and Shelley but also Scott, Kawajiri and Henson showed us, nudity is where power lies, and where our own spectres of the Medusa/Marx reave Radcliffe’s refrain to raise her patchwork corpse from the grave to speak in our tongue, for a change! The dead can speak without fear because they’re already dead, but those who are undead face a curiously liminal amount of risk: demonic banishment!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

As stated, whores are the oldest form of labor, thus exploitation/revenge, and generally sex is something to be feared precisely because it’s haunted by ancient rape, giving it a dark godly flavor (re: the Numinous). This can be for pity or predation, but I know plenty of people who routinely shove whores into a corner and don’t talk about them at all because sex is either beneath them, or something they don’t understand so they keep quiet about it (torturing Medusa like Prometheus). Ignorance and denial are just as poisonous as direct abuse—with first-hand abusers generally relying on some form of apathy (from indirect or lateral sources) to prey on those they normally destroy! Jack the Ripper targeted streets whores, as do many modern symptoms of capital worship bourgeois predation, out-of-joint; re: Deet being the good team’s centrist Omelas pariah (they take the credit for)!

Likewise, these isolated examples speak to a larger problem that revives across a variety of registers. Those closer to the furnace commonly punch down out of desperation to escape it, while those further away ignore it out of convenience. But the common victim is always the whore—with whores of more privilege punching down against those with less, and those with less tokenizing to escape the usual predations happening to them and their kind. Idiosyncrasies aside, no one wants to be raped/the Omelas sacrifice, assimilation being a form of revenge that speaks to self-hatred projected onto similar victims versus the open oppressors caging the whore and worshipping her veiled fury and phantasmagorical nudity on the surface of the image (re: Segewick, but also Radcliffe’s Black Veil trope); e.g., middle-class white women hating whores for “paying rent” through an inherited and instructed means of superiority/arbitrary privilege and fragility/allergy to other workers treated as “free” under the usual divisive qualities of capital. Such behavior is criminogenic to varying degrees, but betrayal is betrayal and oppression is oppression insofar as it—like demons, more generally—takes infinite forms within the same castration/carceral system of differences/marginalization; re: through blood libel, witches, and goblins, thus Nazis and Commies/Orientalism as “equally” barbarous. Liberation happens by camping said barbarism and its audience.

Value is perceptive, hence incumbent on position as relative; i.e., money under capital is an imaginary system tied to material factors/positions of divide and punish for exploitative purposes (re: profit). Those who benefit from said fakery imagine threats to the status quo they can expose and banish through remarkable invention and inertia; those who suffer invent fakeries to liberate themselves through incessant revenge. Whatever the nostalgia/deities at play/work (the two are synonymous) during ludo-Gothic BDSM, the shadow of Galatea is always a Numinous whore—even if wrongly applied/accused—through the aesthetic of power and death during cryptonymy and abjection; re: an apocalypse/fetish of dead alien whore paradoxically recent and alive evoking the ancient Numinous of all dead whores banished by Radcliffe to Hell! Relegation and release, gentrify and decay—all use the same highway. Stock is something to give and take, then, happening on a broader market that isn’t strictly owned but fought over for different purposes; e.g., the more value we see in ourselves as demonic, the more we’ll defend it against those exposed as abusing us as food/status for them to give to capital.

To it, the uncertain, anisotropic, and at times (though not always) apotropaic power of demons, magic and fantasy are dualistic, thus anisotropic during liminal expression tugging on such ropes towards or away from the state out of the whore’s revenge; i.e., the elite can’t hope to monopolize such things, and they will always need workers, thus whore pimps like Radcliffe, to exploit through the same traitorous us-versus-them arguments policing these prison-like territories as commented on through a variety of past thinkers; e.g., Foucault may have been a rapist traitor to all things queer, but he was right about one thing (well, several, but I digress): prisons destroy everything by design: they’re a business, not an accident, and those who visibly challenge the system/profit get hammered.

The ’80s were a dark time, and one I barely remember. But I survived Hep C (re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Hepatitis C: I Have It, and It’s a Deadly Disease, and It Sucks,” 2016), and recall suffering under the panopticon as queer my whole life (even while in the closet, but certainly outside of it); re: “A Vampire History Primer” (2024). Like Rocky Balboa, “I can’t sing or dance,” but I can go the distance with Creed (a token neoliberal assimilating like Floyd Patterson or Sugar Ray Lewis or Leonord, versus Muhammad Ali’s love for monster movies and activism) in other ways; i.e., I can’t sing or dance (at least not well), but I can fuck, draw, write and work my little heart out with my fellow monstrous-feminine whores! The stage has been the fag sex worker’s home since Shakespeare, at least; the idea is to do so on and offstage—to speak to things that aren’t separate, but also in language that is simple but no simpler than it needs to be to communicate itself, mid-cryptonymy reversing abjection (thus profit) with all the usual suspects: tension and release, Gothic push-pull, Numinous sex, etc! Revolution’s literally free!

To it, I’ve lived a full life, and through my own privilege and oppression, it’s both my duty and honor on my life to use my own profound survival—and total, holistic education—to stand side-by-side with my comrades to subvert said arguments; i.e., not as someone stronger or better than them protecting the weak, but all of us working together as standing against the true enemies of the world! So often, women (or those treated like women/the monstrous-feminine) are “kept,” sheltered and gagged under house arrest. Medusa unbound screams through us, her army of avatars; win-motherfucking-win, girls! Die on that hill as you lived: with a bang to thrive in the state of exception as superhero (or supervillain) whores; re: whores are gods, and gods are cool! So is sex, public nudism, Communism and ludo-Gothic BDSM at large!

(artist: Rim Jims)

Last but not least, we’ll unpack this vis-à-vis Radcliffe; i.e., as someone to try and salvage versus completely gut, but still a ghost of the original!

With Radcliffe’s double dead-and-buried, then (and Scott’s revenge against Cameron secured by letting David ride off into the night), I saved the animal side of things for last, because it concerns the alien fixations of the Gothic as a steady alarm bell; i.e., for state crisis and decay that must be met within alienized spheres in defense of nature-as-alien before state shift happens!

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

“Are you still dead?” I don’t know, Dennis Cooper, are we? The idea when surviving state shift is to inject ourselves with the power of the gods without harming ourselves; e.g., by not sticking our dicks in light sockets, or fucking ourselves with actual knives, etc; i.e., by “playing dead” in ways that revive Medusa in ways we can control, meaning in a collective push towards avenging nature-as-monstrous-feminine without fucking ourselves over in the bargain! Nature is other/monstrous-feminine, its routine harvests discussed already in the book but here approaching history as something we write for ourselves per our education as taken back into our own hands during revolutionary cryptonymy (and the other Gothic theories)!

And, like Scott’s David or Lewis’ Matilda, we avatars of the Medusa can look back despite the dualistic confusions: on our handiwork with pride! Idle hands, indeed! Whether it’s PUSSY SLAIN! or PUSSY SLAYS YOU! the sub—male, intersex, or female—has just as much power as the dom, and something is always given in exchange between us workers, and the elite stealing from us as we drink their milkshakes (really being our milkshakes, but I digress). Go forth and conquer, little ones! “Rape” ironically and show them your power/the method in your “madness” (or devil in your details)! Trans their MAGA kids and fuck their tradwives not just for revenge, but funsies, then dance on the grave of their stupid Man Box dreams, muhahaha (whose dreams sit between fiction and non-fiction; e.g., Adam Mockler’s “UPDATE: Wife Leaves Trump Voter Who LOST $1MILLION,” 2025)!

All that being said, this was just coitus; consider the following resurrection and celebration of poor Radcliffe’s freshly raped corpse a mouthful of actual zombie-demon cum, sans foreplay! I.e., of what to expect in Volume Three, when proletarian praxis and de facto education become that volume’s sole focus…

Onwards to “In Measured Praise of the Great Enchantress“!

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Footnotes

[1] Gothic oxymorons like exquisite torture’s sacred/profane dichotomy thrive in dialectical-material tension: i.e., remediated praxis; e.g., spanking the wicked for fun or legitimate healing versus unironic corporal punishment. The label “devil” oversees both, yet the function remains diametrically opposed in ways that merge monstrous modules. A state devil seduces and bribes, casting doubt on the oppressed as “devilish” in ways that, per state operations, merit punishment through state arguments abusing Gothic poetics to uphold the status quo regardless of the monster type. Per Radcliffe, the whole ordeal has a tribunal-esque feel, one where the lawyer, witness and suspect testify through doubles of a monster during the same proceedings: the state vs the defense (workers, nature) equating to devils vs devils, aka Amazonomachia expressed as undead, demonic and/or animalistic. We’ve already examined the zombie apocalypse as a kind of disease troubling society as sick. Instead, let’s consider it more broadly in ways that also apply to demons (we’ll get to animals in the next chapter).

During this conflict, then, one side of a doubled pair is moral, correct, and just relative to basic human rights being defended, and used to defend the defendant, from the state inside a sick institution; e.g., a courtroom or hospital as medieval, torturous and prison-like, a harsh breeding ground for unwanted observation, but also acute feelings of aggressive suspicion, intense doubt, feverish moral panic, ill omens and conflicting information/semiotics* and unfounded paranoia, all being informed and scrambled by claustrophobic fear and dogma (what Nick Groom calls The Italian, “very much a novel for the twenty-first century”). Such places are housed by judges, inmates, and guards who operate through visual markers of social-sexual disease; i.e., as something to contain, isolate and forcefully interrogate, meaning infectious hysteria/persecution-as-contagious, outbreaks of xenophobia all coming down on the side of American liberal justice against state foes; e.g., zombies, demons, or wild animals.

*The rainbow something to assign, for example, to queer people having reclaimed it, turning its colored, arched bands paradoxically into a marker of punishment instead of good luck; i.e., Satanic panic within Rainbow Capitalism and all the cognitive dissonance and estrangement that entails.

In turn, these assigned/associate feelings are bred, but “patient zero” is a myth insofar as its presence is installed through panoptic dogma: Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975) being a metaphor for medieval containment procedures for leprosy that extend to society as a whole:

The panopticon induces a sense of permanent visibility that ensures the functioning of power [… It] represents the way in which discipline and punishment work in modern society [and] is a diagram of power in action because by looking at a plan of the panopticon, one realizes how the processes of observation and examination operate.

Fear is a disease, then—a poetic contagion to push onto subjects that carry it with them everywhere during Capitalist Realism; in turn, said Realism could be likened to a pandemic that operates globally but manifests differently per register as large groups are corralled and maneuvered against each other. Even if it’s not a literal disease, the desperate and constant tensions are still life-threatening. To that, once threatened by an outside presence, the state as a body will defend itself as under attack. In fact, it does so by design. Capitalism requires contagion to operate; we must subsist, mid-struggle.

For example, recent history shows us that rights can be eroded, but the language of devilry remains an obstacle or aid to this tragic outcome. In such times, we must advocate (thus fight) for ourselves as demonized by the state; i.e., dehumanized to share a deadly condition felt by all within the state of exception as happening through the hostile recognition of a condition (symptom) and execution of its necessary treatment—crime and punishment as biologically essentialized: a devil to isolate and handle through force in ways that ultimately consolidate power as a lucrative and genocidal venture. With demons, the sentence of devilry and damnation is found and expressed through banishment, burning or exorcism; with the undead, through infection, quarantine and termination (of a terminally ill “patient”); and animals, through rabies (“madness”), Pavlovian conditioning and euthanasia.

[2] From The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790):

When I came home, on the abyss of the five senses, where a flat-sided steep frowns over the present world, I saw a mighty Devil folded in black clouds hovering on the sides of the rock; with corroding fires he wrote the following sentence now perceived by the minds of men, and read by them on earth:—

“How do you know but every bird

that cuts the airy way

Is an immense world of delight,

closed by your senses five?” (source).

[3] A.K.I.’s head is phallic like a mushroom, but also having a bowl cut from Hell. She cums by torturing her prey to death; i.e., in black and red like a Nazi-Commie vampire, but also a furiously fetishized female sex-demon ghost; re: the yurei from The Terror: Infamy (2019) married to ahegao, dragon-woman Orientalism and male Japanese, salary-man emasculation fantasies: “step on me, mommy!” The more pain, the more passion (convulsionnaires) for the mistress and the sub; the more passion, the more closeness to divinity—her magnum opus using her prey as a stepping stone to the gods and immortality said sub can also bask in through her hellish ascension! Both profit differently!

[4] Re: So mysterious, that Robert Miles—writing of Rictor Norton’s 1999 biography of the famous author, Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe—had this to say about her, “Ann Radcliffe was, in her day, the obscurest woman of letters in England. Her contemporaries despaired of learning anything about her, while Christina Rossetti abandoned her planned 1882 biography for lack of materials” (source). Ninja nun strikes from the shadows!

[5] Ironic or consenting/non-harmful knife play is a thing (e.g., Cara Day having her panties sliced off with a knife [source tweet: August 12th, 2023] while showing the visible threat of the knife minus actual harm). It’s generally a hard kink, though, because performing it has a much higher risk of harm than, say, spanking or Plain-Jane oral sex (unless the sucker bit it off, I guess).

[6] The same year TERFs started to go mask-off in England.

[7] A man who’s capable of great violence (“That boy’s got the devil in him!“) but uses it to solve disputes in ways that don’t rape women—a slow bar, indeed, but a common heroic litmus test, in spaghetti Westerns.

[8] We’ve already discussed Jubei’s role in this film, in Volume One; re: his role as a Western hero (a ronin) to reclaim from state dogma; i.e., similar to knights and Amazons predator/prey language during medieval, weaponized romances of Gothic sex and force, during “An Uphill Battle with the Sun in Your Eyes.” We’ve also discussed his role in “Healing from Rape” (from the same volume). I recommend you give both a look!

[9] The golem couldn’t regenerate, but Genma can; the golem’s Achille’s Heel is lust and Genma’s greed, both of their downfalls wrought by a shared, fascist desire to lie, cheat and steal from others to dominate all workers. To it, nothing in Ninja Scroll is “superior” to anything else. Instead, adaptation and teamwork (symbiosis) are what counts—just like Kurosawa! Deception is part of that, meaning for both sides; re: complicit vs revolutionary cryptonymy during the same uphill battle!

[10] Gaslighting audiences through moral panic isn’t moral; it’s a racket, and one that mixes quite well with genuine warnings and confusion. Fetishizing and solidarity aren’t always mutually exclusive, either, but they are in Radcliffe’s fictions; i.e., a straight woman putting the illusion of mutual consent behind her Black Veils, only to regress towards selective salvation when pulling it aside!

[11] Women of color/non-white and Indigenous people are historically exploited by white women as having more privilege than them, which intersects with queer white women versus queer non-white women (re: “Hot Allostatic Load”) and other bigotries and concerns; e.g., #MeToo being started by a woman of color and co-opted by affluent white women abusing the justice system but also social justice networks more broadly to make themselves the center of attention. Any whore who isn’t Erin Brockovich (white, played by Julia Roberts) is going to be ostracized and attacked more because of it; re: whores policing whores, workers and witches policing workers and witches, mid-rebellion (the Gelfling are divided and conquered, in the end, because of their menticided, Pavlovian divisions).