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 Demon Module) is out (2/14/2025)! 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.

Picking up where “In Measured Praise of the Great Enchantress” left off…

Call of the Wild; or Sex Education: Trans-forming the World through the Trans, Intersex and Non-binary Mode of Being

[the xenomorph is] a classic Gothic puzzle borrowed from medieval thought reimagined in a serialized poetic trend; i.e., looking backwards and proceeding forwards through a malleable, writeable Wisdom of the Ancients. That’s what the creature is/the castles are—spectral, deathly evocations of a world before Capitalism, thus possibly one after it; i.e., death-as-radical-change […] We can reunite, thus use something so awesome (and forgotten) to help liberate our minds from Capitalism and its barriers; but, again, it will be a shock—medieval, foreign, alien, abject (source). 

—Persephone van der Waard, “Derelicts, Medusa and H.R. Giger’s Xenomorph” (2024)

(artist: Jérémy Pailler)

Last chapter, we looked at composite or occult demons and playing with them; i.e., during unequal exchange through manmade and summoned demons: interrogating state trauma and its strange appetites, during the Faustian bargain/Promethean Quest! Now I wish to examine transformation serving a similar poetic purpose as the outcome/goal of said pursuit; i.e., a demonic return to what is alien: per a more natural, totemic and chattelized sort that (thanks to Cartesian interference) often has undead flavors (frozen in torment, being fed on) versus demonic (giving and receiving unequal, forbidden, and dark-and-alien power).

The natural egregore is often anthropomorphic, though, which is why I’m including it in the “Demons” section of the volume; i.e., tied to magical, drug-like factors that convey nature and the material world as interacting back and forth, often erotically and to transformative extremes concerned with changing the identity but also the shape of the human body as demonic with undead potential. I don’t think the distinctions are clearly made and I don’t want to stress them too much. Instead, I want to provide them somewhat loosely to keep things organized; i.e., inside a book portion that remains a loosely anemic, truncated and nebulous survey of what we don’t have time to do more than scratch the surface of. I’ll write that chapter on little mushroom men, someday—just not today!

Under capital, nature is part of human parlance as abject; i.e., “call of the wild” and “nature calls” disguising taboo subjects made unspeakable by Capitalism but also speaking to things that are quite common[1] and difficult to control: equating human anatomy (often sex organs) to animal organs as a form of religion; e.g., “horse cock” as divine or monstrous[2] but also something to identify as such, then own and dominate (“A horse, am I? A horse, indeed!”). Everyone likes and responds to animals and sex, but these are dominated by the state through its bad (Cartesian) education; i.e., towards regular human behaviors that combine the two through ancient theatre and more recent persecution language (re: blood libel, sodomy and witch hunts): animal costumes and sex, aka anthromorphs and anthropomorphism as an aphrodisiac, state of grace, and educational device we must liberate in drug-like ways/struggles; i.e., the state is straight, antagonizing nature as queer to pimp, thus put it to work in police, us-versus-them models.

So if “Forbidden Sight” concerned the Faustian bargain and Promethean Quest—i.e., where home is alien calling to us alienated from nature and from ourselves as afraid in all directions—then “Call of the Wild” concerns said call back to reunion with the alien as something to hug as a matter of shelter and exchange: when nature pushes back against the colonizer in ways that transform them!

And if “Forbidden Sight” also focused on exchange to upset the sense of abject (us-versus-them) vision the state needs to profit off of/pimp nature, then transformation is what we’re focusing on, here; i.e., to have the whore’s revenge as an alien mode of existence—not as something to punish during live burial, but to propose a question before crossing over in new orders of existence tied to older ones: “to be or not to be. That is the question.” It camps Radcliffe’s fear of the Black Veil as something to cross, but also what lies beyond it (and Capitalist Realism) as inside the chronotope, mid-cryptonymy (with “black” representing the alien whore per state rhetoric); re: “on the ashes of something not quite present.”

Things only become more hauntologized as time goes on; i.e., any pulling of the veil aside meant to calm the colonizer and tell themselves there is no Medusa on the other side! Doing so only “works” because they can’t see her/have blocked her out to exorcize their sense of division and possession of nature, abjecting it through DARVO obscurantism. But the classic Gothic moral is that Medusa is still there at the end, waiting patiently for reunion or (for you) to literally die should you continue to block her out. Yet “death,” being dualistic, is also a fulfillment of deep, dark desires that constitute—as always—a sanctifying of things the West tries, ever and always, to pimp: “You’d be surprised what you find out there if you go looking.” I did, and have brought Hell and its Numinous pleasures back with me, to Earth; i.e., during the liminal hauntology of war (the revenge of the Medusa)! This nightmare is just beginning! “I saw the booty on the Aegis and thought, ‘Chick’s got an ass like an onion!’ [next page]” To set the whore free is to release something the state can never fully control: men (or anyone in the Man Box) are weak/fear what they don’t understand through unironic domination, and if you want to critique power, you must go where it is stored. “Your Majesty! Hail to the Queen,” Avenged Sevenfold! I got your “Man Box” restraining order, right here! “Nice fuckin’ model!” We take the cake and back it up, fucking to metal!

(artist: Cheekie)

This chapter will be far more fragmented than the others—layered with thick clumps of exhibits that survey possible examples of the natural class of monsters; i.e., a bestiary whose compendium demands additions. Nature is far too complex to list entirely across multiple surveys, let alone all at one. Instead, this penultimate chapter offers a thorough-but-incomplete survey of something whose diversity we suggest as much by what’s left out as not; i.e., nature as something awesome and massive to commune with through “past” visions of itself grappling with Capitalism as equally hypermassive.

Specifically keep the modular thesis in mind, as I won’t have time to set it up and stress it neatly per monster type as either undead or demonic animals; re:

Capitalism achieves profit by moving money through nature; profit is built on trauma and division, wherein anything that serves profit gentrifies and decays, over and over while preying on nature. Trauma, then, cultivates strange appetites, which vary from group to group per the usual privileges and oppression as intersecting differently per case; i.e., psychosexual trauma (the regulation of state sex, terror and force) and feeding in decay as a matter of complicated (anisotropic) exchange unto itself, but also shapeshifting and knowledge exchange vis-à-vis nature as monstrous-feminine: something to destroy by the state or defend from it using the same aesthetics (source).

As such, bearing pain and feeding or transformation and knowledge/power exchange is anisotropic in animalized forms of monstrous-feminine body language.

In turn, the traumas of capital make workers decay/corrupt into Communist or fascist (token or not), albeit in ways that cause said transformers to develop undead/demonic feeding habits that are, to some degree, sex-positive and/or sex-coercive. It’s seldom clean; i.e., lurking in the odd “Twilight Zone” grey area of the theatre stage, and inside the monster costume, on and off said stage. Nor are these forces unique to neoliberal Capitalism—with past poets closer to death, rape and raw sexuality in ways modern (usually middle-class) workers have been alienated from; i.e., owing to technological advances/estrangement and different degrees of intersecting axes of privilege and persecution (save in fetishized forms that serve profit). Hauntology lets us brush up with the past as nostalgic in ways that never existed and push towards Communism as aborted by capital/the project of abjection (and other Gothic theories).

You’ve probably noticed the expanding of said thesis to include undead and demonic elements over the course of the volume. This trend will only continue when we look at the creative successes of proletarian praxis (and sex, gender and identity-as-performance in Volume Three when combating tokenism).

Our general focus, here, is learning from nature about violence, terror and sexual morphologies; i.e., as controlled by state monopolies silencing proletarian ones (censorship equals extinction); i.e., queer-transformative elements that feel magical, xenophilic and drug-like (during acid Communism) but also controlled, forbidden, and chattelized: as a potent and hauntological, sex-educational means of escaping Capitalist Realism to become better stewards of nature than Capitalism is (which only rapes nature). “We murder to dissect,” Wordsworth declares, in “Tables Turned” (1798). “Let Nature be your teacher” (source). Our stewards must challenge the state’s, including whatever drugs and magic (actual and/or poetic) we put into our bodies (“You are what you eat” confusing the sex/senses regarding sex in a highly medieval way—i.e., “eating” = sex in undead circles, which can jump over to demonic and/or animal ones; e.g., Bowser, below) to encourage healthy appetites versus canonically alienating ones.

Again, power is performance, mid-praxis, and everyone loves the whore (female or not; re: Bowser is a man-whore to Peach’s wifely and canonically female one) and prostitution goes both ways; i.e., moves state terror language back towards police terrorizers when taking such things back, ourselves—land, laborer and work—the guerrilla turning kingdom anisotropically upside-down, mid-duality during liminal expression: you can’t exist without raping us; we can thrive without you, terraforming the colony into a Hellish space that idiomatically chokes our colonizers dead/summons friends (up like mushrooms) to our side on the Aegis! Sweet sodomy, humanizing the harvest while it claps back! “That all you got, motherfucker? Can’t kill me! All shall worship and fear me. Ahegao or not, HERE’S TRUE POWER!” To be someone’s pet but not be owned by them; or vice versa, to master someone you cannot own, chattelize or harm. Such is ludo-Gothic BDSM:

(artist: Justino)

The idea is revenge against profit while eating their treats to subvert them, our “going to pound town” and enjoying ourselves just icing on a fat, tasty cake (or whose frosting is the cake? Take your pick)! In any event, revolution is relative as a matter of time and application; i.e., while a watched pot never boils, eventually it happens very slowly and then all at once. Like an orgasm, then, revolutions concern sex discussed in quotidian forces that have ancient healing properties per the Gothic Romance speaking to the reclamation of old lost things; e.g., monsters, cooking and sex, but also poetic hyphenations of those things celebrating the haunted process being something to reclaim: exchange back and forth is power in ways that enrich workers versus state weirdos, the latter trying to send everything up to the Man while raping their own minds to do so!

(exhibit 51b4a1a: Far-top-left: snoozedboi on r/okbuddychicanery[3]; far-bottom-left: Persephone van der Waard’s cooking pot; left: Dr. Pepper Vixen; middle: Delanie; right: Patrick Gañas; far-top-right: Moon; far-bottom-right: Medusa. The Gothic admits happily that “death” is funny during live burial “punishing” the wicked, who restlessly dig up powerful bone[r]s during graveyard sex. Good sex often sounds like bloody murder but isn’t. Yet such things tie to the home as historically loaded with trauma and exploitation; i.e., as paradoxically liberating when camped; e.g., my cooking pot glows red, this little pot-stirrer stirring up trouble [and making chicken stock, but I digress]. Doing so combines with sex, food and class, culture and race war raising awareness and emotional/Gothic intelligence towards universal liberation; i.e., leading to payoffs that are as much the journey [showing ourselves off during the cryptonymy process] as the penetration/destination [reversing abjection]!)

To it, there’s no argument the state could make that would make us voluntarily surrender that power once we’re conscious of it; i.e., in ways that expose their chicanery (and our delight in doing so)! Mortal after all!

As such, the chapter divides into three parts:

• Part one: “Hunter and Hunted; or, Nature vs the State” (included in this post): Will outline the different animal types (separate from undead and demonic) and revisit their broader settler-colonial relationship to the state as something to challenge; it then provides some examples of medieval sexualized expression/poetic devices (from the Poetry Module) and labor that, while fun, we won’t have time to explore beyond briefly exhibiting them (nature is simply too diverse[4]).
• Part two: “Dark Xenophilia; or, ‘Far Out, Dude!’ Monster-fucking and Magic Girls Helping Foster Dark Radical (Communist) Empathy During Healthy Sex Education (for Children and Young Adults into Adulthood)”: A subchapter that divides in two, each half roughly weighing the undead “ace to ass” side of the animal monster equation (furries and furry panic) and the demonic side (drugs and acid Communism, but also children’s sex education going from young adults into adulthood; e.g., Sailor Moon, The Last Unicorn and Giger’s xenomorph) i.e., when raising dark empathy tied to the natural world as alien under capital, and reunited through Communism’s good sex education tied to dark xenophilic monsters and drug use: as a poetic, awareness- and intelligence-raising device versus fascism and capital’s polar opposite of that (re: the state is incompatible with life, thus empathy and consent, pimping nature as monstrous-feminine).
• Part three: “Saying Goodbye: Onto Better Times Ahead (and Harder Ones)”: A small antechamber/liminal space between “Call of the Wild” (included with that chapter) and the closing section of the module; i.e., where we say goodbye to the black rabbit and prepare to face what’s ahead without them: heading into the known-unknown cryptonymy of dead capital (malls or otherwise)!

So carry on, my wayward children! Our target is fostering radical empathy through dark, drug-themed sex education tied to nature-as-alien; i.e., Medusa’s calling for you! Nature is monstrous-feminine, and historical materialism’s a bitch, but “I knew right from the start, you’d put an arrow through my heart!” (Ratt’s “Round and Round,” 1984). “I’m gonna make you mine!” Topping’s hard work; so’s being a mother! Time to pay the Devil her due, and her fatal nostalgia as something to return to! Let’s get blasted!

(exhibit 51b4a1b: Artist, far-left [all commissioned by Odie of their OC, Donni]: ; far-left: Persephone van der Waard; left-top:; left-bottom: Roe Mesquita; right-bottom: Gabo Caricaturas; right-top: Sensaux; right: Lucy Fidelis. Medusa is the classic power bottom topping from below. So while it classically sucks royal ass to be the snake the state hauntologically wants to pimp and behead during the abjection process, we canonically essentialized whores can reclaim what has since been used to disempower us to reclaim our power and poetry, mid-exposure: a strip tease that fosters mutual consent, making rape impossible but speaking to past histories of it haunting the cryptomimetic collage. The above theme is flexibility/yoga, non-white black skin and snakes. Pick your own and go wild restoring empathy as whores do—through their bodies! Reap the whirlwind!)

“Call of the Wild,” part one: Hunter and Hunted; or, Nature vs the State

“Revenge! The King under the Mountain is dead and where are his kin that dare seek revenge? Girion Lord of Dale is dead, and I have eaten his people like a wolf among sheep, and where are his sons’ sons that dare approach me? I kill where I wish and none dare resist. I laid low the warriors of old and their like is not in the world today. Then I was but young and tender. Now I am old and strong, strong, strong, Thief in the Shadows!” he gloated. “My armour is like tenfold shields, my teeth are swords, my claws spears, the shock of my tail a thunderbolt, my wings a hurricane, and my breath death!”

—Smaug the Stupendous, The Hobbit

(artist: Kardie)

Whereas Volume Zero encapsulates a variety of theories regarding Cartesian domination (re, and not for the last time: “Animals embody the canonical language of power and resistance as something to camp through demonic and undead forms,” source), and Volume One’s “Predator and Prey” considered “the theory of revolutionary cryptonymy through morphological expression when using animalized Gothic aesthetics” (source), part zero of Volume Two’s “Damsels, Detectives and Sex Demons” has already examined the natural world (and by extension, workers); i.e., as defended through the Medusa cryptonym and dualistic revenge’s death-and-rape theatre (for us/for the state) with memento mori stand-ins.

Now I want to outline the natural class of monsters, explain their educational role in relation to the state at large (and the whore’s transformative revenge against it; i.e., by effectively turning into a castrating “Valkyrie” avenger, above), and intersperse/conclude part zero of this chapter with some extraneous (but fun) exhibits (our aforementioned fragments being breadcrumbs on a fable I expect you beautiful queens to finish).

Reversing Fred Dekker’s weird principal guy (“I smell like the ’40s!” next page) from The Monster Squad, “I used to think science was cool—and well, I guess I’m just a big kid because, my dear readers, I think monsters (whores, and nature) are cool; I DIG IT, MAN!” Monsters (of mad science/weird magic) are real and cool; i.e., because they live within us and represent our struggles in ways we can recreate and decolonize from state cryptonymies and abjection: tied to the natural world being victimized by Cartesian madmen of reason, including us becoming cops and/or victims! Trauma and assimilation are always a dice roll, and weird attracts weird in ways we can challenge (re: Socrates questioning authority versus Plato’s cave speaking to Aristotle cementing authority as a mirror problem).

To it, kids aren’t stupid, and while my audience isn’t strictly children, there’s a child-like glee and open-mindedness I want to speak to, as we proceed. I don’t want you to tell me what you think I want to hear from you; I want you to learn how to think for yourselves in order to set your minds and bodies free—by reuniting both, as monsters do, and doing so as to make new monsters yourselves that speak to those in power abusing you (re: the principal being the principle [so to speak] abuser, above)! Motivate through ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., as a poetic means of universal emancipation while playing with the past, not selective endorsement, conversion therapy and bigotry that—through the usual process of abjection and cryptonymy visiting blindness historically-materially on the middle class, during boom-and-bust—only yields Omelas orphans, in some shape or form (eat your heart out, Oliver Twist)! Con men suck, and no one’s more predatory (and false, self-righteous) than high school principals (a continuation of priestly predation [on young boys and other children] into a Protestant ethic, under neoliberal Capitalism’s New World Order). Surviving them and abjuring profit is our revenge!

The problem is, there’s just so many monsters to work with (re: “So Many Monsters, So Little Time”); i.e., we can only outline them, here, and point all of you—workers of all ages—in the right direction and let you take it from there. “But thou must!”

First the natural class’ various distinctions:

• totems: “a natural object or animal that is believed by a particular society to have spiritual significance and that is adopted by it as an emblem.” In other words, the animal reifies a particular quality associated with human society and virtues/vices; e.g., the dragon as a symbol of cruelty and strength.
• lycanthropes/furries: a shifting class of animal demon; this transformation can be total, but generally is anthropomorphic, thus in-between totally human and totally animal. While “furry” is the common term and generally refers to hairy animals, it also involves non-mammalian animals such as reptiles (e.g., the Argonians from The Elder Scrolls franchise, exhibit 84b), insects, and fish. Rule of thumb: the less pleasurable the reproductive cycle, the more abject or “strict” the BDSM for this furry type will be; e.g., parasitoid wasps or lampreys (so-called vagina dentata) or “feral” furries that feature animal genitals other than human (which is common with monster dildos bearing out fantastical/animalized qualities; i.e., that feature “a ghost of the” counterfeit flavor—exhibits 37b1 from “Healing through Rape,'” 37c1b from “Transforming Our Zombie Selves,” and 38a, from “Playing with Dolls“).
• chimeras: a blend of different stigma animals into a single monster, either through composite mad science or magical forces.
• sentient animals: animal[5] demons or familiars, often associated with a practitioner or embodiment of magic attuned with the natural world; e.g., the witch’s cat, but also a bond with nature that is biomechanical (e.g., the brim of a mushroom hat, below, as much a part of the witch’s body as she is a part of the world she stewards/is the dark virgin/whore mommy of what the state only wants to pimp, police and rape for profit; re: capital merely a system of patriarchal control combined with various persecution languages and token Man Box/”prison sex” elements abused by weird canonical nerds and challenged by weird iconoclastic nerds synthesizing catharsis).

(artist: Jessica Nigri)

First, let’s remember what I said in “Damsels, Detectives, and Sex Demons,” part zero:

settler colonialism is built to spread its dogma across all the media it can, escalating towards extermination from an initial position of ostensibly being wronged. Be it a novel, movie or videogame, the exterminator then goes into Hell, monomyth-style, to right said wrong and defend Capitalism from the “end of the world” at the “end of the world”; i.e., Capitalist Realism… (source).

Such dereliction versus the discharging of expected duties (the abjection process) requires seeing “Hell [as] a place on Earth…” through franchised material that jumps from medium to medium.

Except, we’ve already looked at Medusa and wars of extinction (and their more moderate Neo-Gothic bigotries). So now we’ll briefly return to, and look at, the franchised videogames Cameron’s refrain inspired (nine pages); re: to execute Cartesian rhetoric and uphold Capitalist Realism regarding all the natural world as something to possess and repossess in dialectical-material opposition—in drug-like nightmare scenarios sold to children into adulthood: the apocalypse of Metroid and Metroidvania, but also Doom and the entire shooter genre as extending to reinsert itself into and out of videogames, at large; i.e., those texts that want for a policeman/token hero under settler-colonial conditions, yet poach nature for profit to serve the state by making children afraid of nature (who, as we said, grow up to commit atrocities for the state; re: the Monster Squad loves monsters so it can selectively punish and kill them during moral panics; e.g., exhibit 34c1a2a2a:, from “Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse“). From there, we’ll expand this dichotomy to nature at large; i.e., something for us to reclaim and liberate through dark empathy on the same drugged, acid-Communist stages of performative monstrous exploitation (whose poetic mode of thought—and sex education for children conducive to dark empathy—part two will explore).

Simply put, our doing so raises a question of reeducation relative to Nature as something to defend from Society per the Cartesian mode and vice versa; i.e., good education (for workers) vs bad vis-à-vis canonical (thus Cartesian) essentialism relative to a pair of warring Numinous hyperobjects and their smaller extensions and abstractions. Time and time again, Capitalism maps out nature to conquer it; i.e., through a Manifest Destiny argument extending to those defending nature from capital through various divisions they must survive and reclaim, under fire; e.g., male and female (a false binary given how world biology monomorphic). This goes beyond overt, vivid examples of settler colonialism “back then” (the Indian Wars, which are still going on) or “elsewhere” (e.g., Palestine) and applies to day-to-day life inside America; re: as a settler colony whose project thereof extends neoconservative dogma into official educational sectors (schoolteachers) and de facto ones (monomyth stories, including videogames, next page).

Regardless, those defending the profit motive will act said motive out; i.e., against those who challenge the mechanism in and out of itself, meaning the state is classically by definition against workers and nature, but also any Gothic poetic expression it abuses to further profit during mirror and virgin/whore syndrome: nature is alien whore raped back into a maiden (for a time); rinse and repeat during the Capitalocene until the sun goes out (state shift)! Such is capital expressed faithfully through dogma of all kinds!

Anything that challenges the state is criminal, then; i.e., a dragon to be slain (thus uphold Capitalist Realism) by hunting them to extinction while silencing their pedagogy in favor of state voices. Doing so becomes classy and cool, the baroque raping of the abject (often set to Bach as much as ’80s rock songs’ recuperated sex, drugs and rock ‘ n roll—thus writ in Latin, or some such pompous-and-divisive bastion of the West embarking on carving things up and naming[6] them); i.e., becoming what weird chudwads “need” to survive, to get laid, to give their sad little lives meaning: “I wanna go home/there’s no place like home” as the state envisions it, provided you play along with their bullshit!

Such heroes condition as much like Pavlov’s cats (or Schrodinger’s, I suppose) versus his dogs, the bourgeois fat cats starving the middle class’ bulimic quacks, then shining a laser pointer while directing them/herding cats into the usual kennels to feed, feast-or-famine; i.e., to devour fresh monstrous-feminine food during half-real escapist power fantasies, which they then carry in their stomachs back to the motherland for subsequent regurgitation: to nourish the elite in a neoliberal escapist racket that goes on and on and on, from one generation to the next, until the end times!

In short cops must always be raping something (re: “taking away its power to harm it”). Nature becomes something to harvest and—because it is alien and criminal—guiltily spit out in disgust for the elite to siphon into themselves. It’s a very disgusting affair—unhealthy appetites that are taught by what is offered ad nauseam, and anything unwelcome being viewed as shit, vomit or some such discharge to reject yet guiltily seek out (the world is a toilet during Zombie, Vampire and/or Demon Capitalism). Clearly workers must change the predator/prey dynamic at large; i.e., what is made and how it is consumed and digested (thus ruminated on): war simulators canonically essentialized as monomythic, which we have explored extensively already with videogames throughout this series:

(exhibit 51b4a2a: Per Tolkien’s hauntological medieval/refrain, dragons reify cruelty and greed, but also monomythic reward; i.e., to steel one’s nerves and steal back from [for the state turning you into its heroic assassins]. In the unironic quest for mastery during videogames, the monstrous-feminine is something to stab; re: the proverbial dragon to slay as one of the many “forces of darkness” that has tremendous queer potential/drug-like references to older American anti-war counterculture, when camped. Any who canonically support this illusory refrain will be welcomed like “Caesar” into “Rome”; any who challenge it will always be victims of Capitalist Realism by its usual enactors framing such iconoclasts as unwelcome invaders thereof. DARVO is DARVO; from Anita Sarkeesian to us, Gamergate is Gamergate inside a larger fortress mentality gamers defend from whores.)

In this respect, my area of expertise is videogames. For example, Squaresoft’s 1987 Dragon Warrior (above), features an early example of the JRPG system being set to the violent mapping of a given space; i.e., mapping and invading it, then plundering the area of its contested resources by stealing those from the most powerful of its enemies: “hoarders” framed as unrightful claimants to a stolen or false castle, thus taking the kidnapped princess from the evil dragon “boss” to restore Patrilineal Descent through the Divine Right of “Good” Kings.

Historically this ordeal tends to be very “grindy”—with the hero “leveling up” by “farming” these resources many, many times over during a single quest, but also multiple quests and sagas; i.e., a series of level-like crusades meant to conceal neoliberal exploitation during present structures through a ghost of the counterfeit; re: one that acclimates state youngsters towards a heteronormative path of war and exploitation as thoroughly nostalgic, but also numerical and topographical (re: exhibit 1a1a1h2a1, from Volume Zero/”A Note About Canonical Essentialism“).

Per the map of conquest as Columbus framed it—and which Tolkien revived in his own uber-racist worlds (as noted by China Mieville and later by me as far more critical of Tolkien than Mieville was[7])—each outing can be logged, charted and competed against for higher and increasingly lauded “arcade-style” numbers (the map being fundamentally unmappable insofar as its castle-narrative is a meta enterprise tied to profit; re: “Lost in Necropolis” and Volume Zero). Levels, minions, lieutenants (mini-bosses), and bosses; rape the scapegoated Nazi-Commie whore rocking out at the center of the maze (the Dragon Lord or Archaic Mother), then rinse and repeat; i.e., a manhood to prove not once, but over and over ASAP for the pick-up artist cryptonymically half-disguised as a wolfwhistling and dogwhistling “gamer bro”: a chronotopic, now-tokenized rite of passage and succession that Tolkien helped canonize/apologize for with—among other things—abject racism, rampant sexism, bad BDSM, and Zionism-in-disguise (re: “Goblins, Anti-Semitism and Monster-Fucking“)! He’s a cunt cop, and anyone who doesn’t acknowledge that immediately and aggressively (re: Melville) is also a cunt cop!

(exhibit 51b4a2a: Artist, left: c:\user\elaine; everything else by Persephone van der Waard. Harmony Corrupted as model, top-right; ink for middle and bottom-middle by Dacoda. The avatar is, in canonically monomythic terms, always an Amazon to subjugate vengeful whores to destroy by following their siren song on the Promethean Quest, and maiden-in peril from some monstrous-feminine. But per Creed and myself, our revenge can be during the same abjection process reversed against Pygmalion’s avatars grooming Galatea to be his pedophilic master/slave. What the colonizer can’t restrain and manipulate, they’ll resent having the same genitals rubbed in their faces in ways they can’t use for profit; i.e., “Here comes the airplane…” 9/11-style [and before anyone American acts morally outraged, how many tears did you shed for the Iraqis, Afghanis, or any other victims of American Imperialism, before, during or after that point?]!)

As always, the hero triangulates against nature, becoming the elite’s chosen champion—their exterminator, destroyer and retrieval expert dutifully bringing lost territory and property back to them by playing “guerrilla” during the monomyth; i.e., Tolkien and Cameron’s refrain as a Faustian bargain with Promethean results. Money moves through nature, and nature is alienated and fetishized to serve profit in an endless cycle of settler-colonial, Cartesian, heteronormative violence; i.e., Capitalism is a cancer that grows inside people, teaching them to devour nature for the elite until the world as we know it dies (which, per Capitalist Realism) is easier for them to imagine than a world without Capitalism. In turn, the post-capitalist potential of pre-capitalist poetics is emptied for a simple ludic refrain: the monomyth as half-real, discouraging the likes of critical expression by reaching for a pre-capitalist nostalgia; i.e., Cameron fans hating on Scott’s latter-day films (re: my “Outlier Love: Enjoying Prometheus/Covenant in the Shadow of Aliens,” 2021), thus allergic to ambrosia as a poetic means of transforming capital to help workers.

This intended gameplay isn’t limited to fantasy JRPGs, but any neoliberal fantasy that displaces neocolonial violence through Capitalist Realism limits where the imagination can even go through cliché, lucrative theatrics; i.e., Final Fantasy never being final, any more than Halloween, Metroid or LotR were.

In the 20th century, this co-opting of science fiction arguably started with Heinlein’s Starship Troopers or Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, which provided the ideological bedrock for Cameron’s Aliens, and which, as I remark in “Military Optimism” (and cite in our thesis statement):

(artist: Adam Hughes)

A widely successful and canonical work, Aliens‘ influence on the videogame industry is profound, inspiring the entire shooter genre. This includes:

• • FPS (first-person shooters) like Doom (1993)
  • TPS (third-person shooters) like Metroid
  • RTS (real-time strategy games) like StarCraft (1996)
  • turn-based strategy games like X-COM: UFO Defense(1994)
  • hybrids (for these, refer to my FPS interview series, but also my Metroidvania PhD research and interview series with Metroid speedrunners, “Mazes and Labyrinths“)

Most shooters are sci-fi, but even fantasy outliers like Heretic (1995) were inspired by Doom. Shooters generally give the player guns to use against “alien” enemies—either from outer space, hell, or underground (aliens, demons, zombies). Strategy games are a bit more niche, and don’t focus on tactical reflexes, but the sentiment—of shooting bugs with guns—remains the same: “Die, monster! You don’t belong in this world!”

The idea—that anyone can shoot their problems—is a soldier’s fantasy. Although videogames shrink them into human-sized demons, we can’t kill our problems in reality. But a great many people seem happy with the fantasy because it feels empowering. Alas, this attitude doesn’t stay inside videogames. Fans of the shooter genre are often fans of real-world guns, and of war (source).

Before we proceed, a word about the oppressor mindset and modular nature of survivor trauma living in the shadow of state violence; i.e., regardless of monster type or media. Per Marx, “dead labor feeds on living labor”—with the undead stuck in the middle, and demons classified as scientific failures; e.g., composites or robots of “mad science,” or existing entirely outside of civilization as part of nature or an occult, supernatural plane. Either type must be destroyed according to Cartesian thought making players feel like champions; i.e., even speedrunners, when they treat the puzzle-solving as pure escapism, but also places to crow their own accomplishments inside puzzles made for them by capital[8]: the maze, shooting gallery and ancient, marathon-style race merged with kayfabe, the monomyth, Amazonomachia and the dialectic of the alien to move money through nature using the monstrous(-feminine) hero as the avatar to make this possible; re: the centrist cop/undercover operative in neoliberal refrains, onstage and off!

(artist: Moonshen)

There is, however, a third option that also communicates state trauma as something to face in popular media, but especially videogames: a demonic-undead option tied to the natural world; i.e., as John Carmack envisioned it when he and John Romero made Doom in 1993: “demons versus [mankind’s] technology” as a spiritual successor to Aliens (source: Fandom) and the abject, undead, bio-mechanical rage of that franchise’s “xenomorphs.” In Doom, the undead factor is ever-present during an imperial scheme; i.e., as the 1994 sequel, Doom II: Hell on Earth, sees the Imperial Boomerang returning to its settler-colonial origins: home base (exhibit 51d4a2, four pages down). Under such echopraxial circumstances, the desire to solve one’s material problems, phobias and pent-up emotions through undead-demonic slaying metaphors can be cathartic in the abstract; just remember what you’re “shooting” at, mid-apocalypse/-invasion and to prevent the persecution of those habitually demonized during moral panics, outside the text—i.e., anyone marginalized by capital through those who tend to benefit from it; re: Samus is Boba Fetta working for the Evil Empire!

(exhibit 51d4a2b: Artists: CScottyW, Behemoth87, Shiny Zeni; source: Persephone van der Waard’s 2021 “‘Mazes and Labyrinths’ Q&A, Interview Compendium!” Pilots of Samus. You don’t have to be a massive twat to be a member of the colonizer class. All three men are of said class, and likewise have white, male privilege, to boot. Having interviewed each of these Metroid franchise WR holders for why they run these games, it’s largely in-text and about competition for/with other gamers; i.e., which historically-materially means other gamers “like them.” It’s not to raise awareness—nor demonstrably help anyone oppressed systemically by capital—but to aggrandize themselves and themselves alone by competing endlessly for personal glory and wealth, thus bragging rights, per game.

And these ostensibly chill dudes might not appreciate my academic conclusions about them, four years after the interview series petered off [similar to Jeremy Parish pitching a fit about what I wrote about him; re: “Modularity and Class” and “From Master’s to PhD“] but them’s the breaks; i.e., they’re white, middle-class straight boys making money and only making money during an open genocide inside a system designed to cater to their needs since its inception: from the tabletop games of the ’60s and ’70s, to videogames from 1973 onwards, ’86s Metroid and ’93s Doom pioneered by Cameron and id Studios using Gates’ computers, into an Internet privatized after the early 2000s around the same kinds of men; re: Twitch being a platform run by a Yale graduate entrepreneur/venture capitalist and known for protecting men who fail up/conduct pedophilia; e.g., Doctor Disrespect, who the system protected for as long as it possibly could; re: burying his reports and paying him out in 2020, banning him, then letting him return a month later and sitting on the case for years.

The usual benefactors tend to “forget” this, but courts and companies exist to protect the powerful and the in-group [white straight men] and always have; i.e., despite Joon the King insisting “There Is No Comeback” for Doctor Disrespect in 2024, he’s already been remonetized [Cyprian(Cyps)Draku’s “DOC Gets Monetization BACK!” 2025]. Canceling is a myth for straight white boys doing what they always have done under capital, and which they accuse others of doing through DARVO arguments; i.e., exploiting vulnerable parties from positions of power and privilege since at least Catholic priests; e.g., “the trans women are pedophiles, not us!”

To that, Doctor Disrespect is a black penitent literally wearing rapist glasses[9] and a porn ‘stache—and who straight up admits to having “inappropriate messages with a minor” [Double Toasted, 2024] while also cheating on his wife [who protects him because he’s the breadwinner]—yet continues to thrive in a system that has only expanded to/tokenized through other venues of conquest; i.e., per the Protestant ethic and neoliberal Capitalism during the Internet Age under Capitalist Realism. Protecting people like Disrespect is literally protecting capital, and extends to Mel Gibson, Bill Gates, Bill Cosby and anyone else seemingly made of Teflon. They’re not “correct”; they’re protected by a system that literally lets them get away with rape, murder and any other crime for anyone but them! Trump pardoned the January 6th insurrectionists; what’s another rapist/adulterer like himself?

In turn, white male privilege carries with it white male fragility but also golden handcuffs, and not once have I seen any of these people [the speedrunners above and their friends] discuss anything but games; i.e., as things to play “without politics.” As such, Gamers™ who stream and speedrun [for the reasons listed above] are the heroes in a tale told by/for idiots; i.e., activism/political action doesn’t tie to their existence, because their existence is already secure provided they toe the line! That’s what “fair and balanced” means to them: intended play/emergent play so long as it upholds the status quo. This includes an omerta [cone of silence] regarding open industry abuse, but silence is genocide and golden as a matter of genocide; i.e., they’re complicit!)

To that, speedrunners reflect the settler colony model, hence tend to be white, straight and male; and the dark whore they’re constantly kettling is both a false flag that presents the state’s victims as stronger than they actually are (weak/strong with castles to invade), desires genocidal revenge more than they actually do (re: DARVO obscurantism), and needs to be policed in fetishized ways that justify endless war on the homefront out into the stars, onstage and off: dark whore makes Lieutenant Gorman’s pullout game weak (“37, simulated!”)!

This becomes a question, then, of changing course before it’s too late. Much of the world (outside or inside the Imperial Core) has already become a dated hellish thing to “solve” through nostalgic force policing nature and sex: to shoot (stab or club) as various offshoots of classic heroes and how they would, from Hercules to Beowulf to Doomguy. All have been recruited during the Neoliberal Age to serve profit; i.e. Capitalist-Realism-meets-military-optimism, or the childish, brutal confidence that occurs when gamers take on the state’s problems (the creation of enemies), then shoot them with immunity from prosecution to move money through nature: a license to print money by raping and killing.

Videogames simulate war perfectly for these aims; re: recruiting children (especially straight white boys) to take on the killer’s mantle as something to acclimate them towards future wars and rape, thus profit as a settler-colonial enterprise waged from the mother country outwards; i.e., “Hell is always a place that appears on Earth,” and there is always a whore to fuck and murder at the end of the adventure: “rape the whore; go back to princess what’s-her-name.” Furthermore, as my extensive work on Metroidvania and speedrunning and its systemic bigotries show, there is no end to this process; there is merely an endless accelerating Arms Race between functionally white/token moderates and r(e)aping the whore faster and faster for profit!

(source: Shiny Zeni’s “[WORLD RECORD] Super Metroid – Any% Speedrun in 40:22,” 2025; timestamp: 40:31)

For example, Shiny Zeni just got Super Metroid‘s Any% WR (40:22, 2/1/2025), but this process will never stop because there’s no logical endpoint to capital exploiting nature—with him piloting Samus to rape Mother Brain and then go home to his wife, offstage; re: Samus is a white Indian/savior commonly performed/embodied by white cis-het men fighting for the nuclear family (re: Zeni is friends with Oatsngoats, who apologizes for Caleb Hart—a transphobe and sex pest; re: “Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning“).

To it, Zeni’s the whore[10]/black-penitent acting as white knight; i.e., a soldier-of-fortune killer-for-hire practicing dogma as something to insulate his audience to the cruelties of the wider global practice inside the Imperial Core’s foreign and domestic states of exception (an idea we’ll unpack in Volume Three when we inspect Caleb Hart under a microscope): settler colonists using themselves—their entire family model, in fact—as human shields to penetrate the land around them during the cryptonymy process furthering abjection; i.e., not to walk away from Omelas, but enjoy its perverse rewards, Heinlein-style, until climate change burns “Rome” to the ground! It’s suicide!

(source: “Super Metroid Speedruns – Any% World Record Attempts,” 1/31/2025; timestamp: 9:09:33)

And more to the point, this is what Zeni chooses to do, onstage and off: facilitate genocide while ignoring it by escaping repeatedly into a likeness of it that disguises what is happening all around him. Don’t be fooled by his media training and nice-guy demeanor/silly “Oh, you betcha!” act (which Oatsngoats and Caleb Hart also do, unironically imitating William H. Macy’s villain, Mr. Lundergard, from Fargo, 1996); it’s Capitalist Realism 101, and he’s a cop in that respect: always trying to make as much money as he can, while saying as little about actual genocides at home and abroad as he can!

In short, the canonical Gothic victim is always a witch/monstrous-feminine whore scapegoat of some kind or another challenging profit (female or not, Federici), and the villain is always a cop (token or not), thus is always an impostor acting in bad faith; i.e., by abjecting their victims through DARVO obscurantism triangulating state force to police nature and sex, thus labor at large! But this is still dualistic, prostitution an older form of emasculation that reverses abjection (thus power) like trans emasculation does; re: with monstrous-feminine avatars saying to our enemies: “Oh, sweetie, I don’t like you because you’re smart; I like you because you make me look good by comparison!” In capital’s eyes, Communism is always hard kink—one whose yum they fuck and then yuck after fleecing the dark queen without paying!

The Gothic’s classic questing for the Numinous, then, is also dualistic, in this respect; and while the axe always forgets, the tree always remembers: the Numinous ghost haunting the counterfeit (from Antiquity into the posthuman era—echoes of S.H.O.D.A.N., left)! Time for your medicine (re: cancelling is a myth, under Capitalism, but closeting and lynching is not)!

(artist: c:\user\elaine)

In turn, monsters of all kinds are produced in factories, onstage and off; i.e., laid low by white Indians to produce kill counts, Vietnam-style, these necrometrics (embraced by the Doom franchise) repeating—literally a system for killing attached to the veneer of American Liberalism seeking revenge against a seemingly infinite number and form (from Giger to Sophocles to Baptist fire-and-brimstone to John Romero and company’s infamous cyberdemon, exhibit 51d4a2b2). But there are only two basic functions—for or against the state—and only a finite web of life treated as monstrous-feminine to endure such grim harvests; i.e., by the usual Cartesian rapists colonizing imaginary territories to whitewash their doing so towards actual ones; e.g., Palestine, Darfur or Cambodia as laid low to child friendly songs (chip tunes aping American rock ‘n roll pastiche), all of the above making the whole grotesque practice comforting: “The disposal units ran night and day. We were that close to going out forever!”

Eventually, though, Medusa will simply snap, and no amount of displaced imperial abuse (obscurantism and DARVO rhetoric), guns (or similar boyish killing toys) and wacky obstacle courses will save the soldier from himself; i.e., from the state cannibalizing him and the world through divide-and-conquer dogma: effectively pulling on the tiger’s tail, guerrilla-style, to antagonize him against his brethren (thus assist in colonization[11]), only for capital to eat them and for the world to eventually eat capital. When the chickens come home to roost for good, Medusa will take the Aegis away from its abusers; i.e., using her Kegel-esque pussy tremors to send her evil killers to Hell once-and-for-all (returning the favor per Creed’s murderous womb, getting even for Francis Bacon’s Cartesian Revolution many times over)! Just like Metroid, “true peace in space” is a myth, and the dark whore always wins, in the end (re: “Ozymandias,” Frankenstein, Axiom Verge, etc)!

In short, nothing lasts forever and such wanton bloodshed becomes something than cannot be atoned for (save as total annihilation during state shift). Eventually the fascist spectre of “Rome” just “runs out of lives” and Medusa has her way with him; i.e., clapping back as such people always do (re: Ward Churchill). Game over! Death by Snu-snu, the ghosts of all Medusa’s children have their revenge when the middle class furthers abjection for too long. So perhaps we should listen to those who are closer nature and suffering under it—not my cat, guarding my potatoes from some unforeseen menace, but something akin to that who, like Medusa being policed and raped, those eager to learn from may turn to and plead in total submission to Her Excellence: “What do your monster eyes see, great one? Are you a potato warding off the police? TELL ME YOUR SECRETS!”

(exhibit 51d4a2b1: Model and photographer: Baby the Great Potato, One with All Other Potatoes; and Her humble and faithful servant, Persephone van der Waard. Garfield is a second-rate Great Destroyer compared to you, Ms. Kaiju!)

It’s like a puzzle, then, and you can’t solve it with state-sanctioned deception, ignorance, apathy and force; its solution instead demands our cryptonymy and Aegis moving power towards workers and nature before everything falls apart for good—with Medusa, the planet, either regenerating afterwards, or going to sleep for good; but whatever happens, we will not survive. So let’s consider the in-text pieces thereof as the usual Promethean warning signs, in advance; i.e., as a ludo-Gothic BDSM means of subverting bigotry and crisis, onstage and off: doing so to prevent the seminal catastrophe as an entirely Cartesian, manmade one!

In turn, every demon killed on Earth (during mirror syndrome) only sends our heroes closer towards their own self-destruction; i.e., the monomyth is, well, a myth, but one (of neoliberal false power) that can be speedrun by the usual (wannabe) Pirates of Silicon Valley! Except, there’s no Mars to go to (and if there is, it’s literally drawing straws/a death lottery because people policed the whore until she snapped and killed all life on planet Earth)! All of this is entirely preventable, but history repeats itself thanks to Capitalist Realism and the middle class since Columbus onwards: “kill the Indian, don’t save the man!”

(exhibit 51d4a2b2: Artist: Gerald Brom. In the unironic quest for mastery against nature as demonic, Doom portrays its own Communist monstrous-feminine [the game was an Aliens reskin, remember] as something to shoot for its brazen, hideous “nature”; re: thinking beings vs extended beings, cops vs victims.)

Beyond videogames like shooters and Metroidvania, then, Imperialism is made at home and has been since Ancient Athens, Sparta and Rome; i.e., home base as the state nucleus, the hauntological center of the Cartesian Revolution’s domination of nature during Red Scare; re: chasing spectres of Medusa/Marx from a localized source—one that evolved into itself as eventually under attack (“home” as sick) and needing American Liberalism/fascism to defend itself; or as Jason Moore and Raj Patel write in A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things:

The second law of capitalist ecology, domination over nature, owed much to Francis Bacon (1561-1626), a philosopher generally credited as the father of modern science. Bacon was also a prominent member of England’s political establishment, at different times a member of Parliament and the attorney general of England and Wales. He argued that “science should as it were torture nature’s secrets out of her.” Further, the “empire of man” should penetrate and dominate the “womb of nature.” […] The invention of Nature and Society was gendered at every turn. The binaries of Man and Woman, Nature and Society, drank from the same cup. Nature, and its boundary with Society, was “gyn/ecological” from the outset. Through this radically new mode of organizing life and thought, Nature became not a thing but a strategy that for the ethical and economic cheapening of life […] a normative statement of how best to organize power and hierarchy, Humanity and Nature, Man and Woman, Colonizer and Colonized.

In other words, natural demons/undead are classically female and monstrous-feminine-coded beings that canonically hide on the edge of the world; i.e., by subsisting at the frontier as guerrilla warriors besieged paradoxically on home turf. Yet, as so often is the case, these resistance fighters—like those in Vietnam (GDF’s “How the Viet Cong Smoked American Soldiers,” 2023)—are canonically demonized by the West; re: as “beings of darkness” (with guerrilla warfare being something that historically has been waged in the shadows of Imperialism; re: Asprey’s War in the Shadows). As such, they evoke a supernatural aura tied to Hell and damnation (from the Western perspective) in neoliberal copaganda (videogames); i.e., fear and dogma as a copagandistic means of provoking American soldiers on the front line, onstage and off, to kill the enemy with extreme prejudice wherever they show themselves—or where the elite choose to have them appear while incentivizing the same settler-colonial violence[12] anew!

In equal measure, what exists in videogames extends to nature as demonized (for good or for profit) across all media forms and stages of performance; i.e., the “demons” fight fire with fire, but anisotropically as revolutionaries (re: Nelson Mandela). Grafting the oppressor’s stolen ordinance to their bodies, they become cybernetic to the point of self-flagellation (a new class of alien barbarian/”soldiers of Hannibal or Medusa” that capital will recuperate: obscuring its own abjection through canon’s bad telephone game/the Mandela effect). Not only does the bio-mechanical, coercive-BDSM metaphor echo Giger’s xenomorph—as a kind of cybernetic, zombie-demon chimera tied to transgenerational trauma—but it exudes the historical-material tendency of American foreign policy to overarm its assigned enemies as part of a weaponized cycle of endless exploitation; i.e., even during the displaced revenge fantasies of the usual half-real make-believe in Pygmalion’s Shadow (re: Aliens, Metroid, and Doom). A factory of death’s panopticon will work until the end of the world.

Furthermore, supplied by the colonizers through an Imperial Boomerang whose flight always starts from home, the myth of a technologically superior demon hoard is incredibly dissociative; i.e., obscuring the giant role played by American arms manufacturers and war contractors. These privatizers continuously supply both sides with the means to wage war forever—always asymmetrically and perpetually corrupting nature through the a(nta)gonizing presence of human weaponry fused to demonic organics becoming bait; i.e., “It’s a trap!” and “60% of the time, it works every time!” Facing the weird canonical nerd with virgin/whore syndrome, Medusa chews off their dick with a woodchipper pussy! “Joan Crawford’s risen from the grave!” (Blue Oyster Cult, 1981). So eat up, you little monsters!

(artist: Magic Moon Arts)

Black Veil or not, the usual brutalities and moral panic/superiority that result are symptomatic of a project that invades media to spread its dogma across all mediums; i.e., Aliens and similar works operate through the Cartesian model, which unfortunately goes beyond videogames and back into a half-real position: one between fiction and non-fiction, alike, governed by parallel standards and rules of play shared between the two (re: the infernal concentric pattern/narrative of the crypt, and similar devices)!

Cartesian thought, then (and Gothic narration devices, thus rules of play from Radcliffe onwards), globally demonize nature through mad science, but also discourage any creative alternatives, from an egregoric standpoint; i.e., beyond the orderly binary of the Western world, any scapegoats normally sought out by the usual Radcliffean heroines (and male variants) testifying to their own slaughter by said actors.

For example, the minotaur and similar monsters of the Greek imaginary past work “by extension” and association; i.e., linking Humanity to the natural world in “magical” or drug-like ways they have in common with more recent hauntologies (such as blue cat people, below)—not to a Christian Hell (or otherwise carceral, manmade space that traps humans inside), but something and somewhere that we can decolonize through our own stories featuring monsters trapped in here with us and vice versa: as written using reclaimed technology (fire of the gods) and Gothic poetry to subvert monomythic action; re: the anal Amazon thesis having the whore’s revenge to fuck the alien in a healthy way (without harming either side) during ludo-Gothic BDSM. Both sides are alienated and restored through camp.

To that, the classical labyrinth historically and deliberately serves as a manmade prison from the original Greek legends; i.e., a spatial didactic role that carries over into videogames like the Metroidvania or FPS (and their own mazes and labyrinths‘ empowering to disempowering effects): the home of the kept enemy monster as something to survive in redlined ghettos—often through combat, but just as often courtly love, thus kidnap/captive and rape fantasies (re: camping Cameron’s Avatar series, left, therefor its racist white savior narrative)! The castle—including the chattelized castle-in-the-flesh—is historically the perfect dom, and the hero is historically the perfect sub receiving that Numinous gift from the demon:

(artist: D8)

However palliative, the Numinous and fear go hand-in-hand with psychosexual catharsis and athletics, during calculated risk. In short, there’s always a fear of the alien/outdoors for those alienated from nature, but also a guilty surrendering to it; i.e., to have “its turn” in ways that bring both sides closer (re: Reznor) amid an ongoing and multi-tiered system of differences’ unequal privileges and oppression. Often demonized as wild, unsophisticated and barbaric, but also animalistically rapacious and mind-altering through controlled substances (above), we and our ludo-Gothic BDSM seek to one, dispel the many violent, sex-coercive myths orbiting these groups in their “evil,” canonical forms; and two, stress the various playful ways in which iconoclastic totems operate: as a poetic “ambrosia” that can transform the world directly through monstrous self-expression relating between two or more parties (also above)!

Artistic and drug-like, this naturalized, magical class works to further good Gothic sex education; i.e., one where fairies, furries and “magical girls,” etc, represent sex positivity as a kind of forbidden knowledge and aphrodisiac drug tied to nature, but also historical-material fears orbiting performative capture and rape: alien expressions of sex and gender education, but also identity formation through the poetic struggle of the animal side of the Cartesian model; re: formalized as a puzzle of “Antiquity” like what we wrote about earlier with Giger’s xenomorph:

[a] writeable Wisdom of the Ancients. That’s what the creature is/the castles are—spectral, deathly evocations of a world before Capitalism, thus possibly one after it; i.e., death-as-radical-change […] We can reunite, thus use something so awesome (and forgotten) to help liberate our minds from Capitalism and its barriers; but, again, it will be a shock—medieval, foreign, alien, abject.

Just as a patient is like a corpse under the surgeon’s knife, the idea of the home and the human share this unsettling distinction. We must occupy it as a particular kind of surgeon and corpse: a love doctor whose wild surgeries—similar to Giger’s drug-fueled, psychosexual art—play passionately in a field where “death,” “rape” and echoes of their unironic forms haunt the theatrical landscape. (source: “Giger’s Xenomorph”).

Except, it’s not just “the xenomorph” pimped by Whitey at all—with the Na’vi being Cameron’s shameless, hyperreal/digitally simulated and Afronormalized vaudeville, commodifying the just-as-old Indigenous struggles inside a functionally white-savior underage power fantasy as tokenizing multiple assimilated groups against nature and those of it: both the Irish (Jake Sully) and people of color to literally speak for/play in Cameron’s AI, tech and gamer bro “leather stocking” simulacrum (itself merely a repeat of the French and Indian Wars passing for “activism with amnesia”; i.e., technological asymmetricity is baked into setter colonialism, so nothing about Avatar is impressive, any more than with Aliens‘ own Rambo pastiche).

Ergo, the double standards seen on and off those stages likewise extend to any popular form of Gothic poetic expression; i.e., in regards to a stewardship of nature that, as we’ve shown, historically aims through ludo-Gothic BDSM to reunite and bond with nature as alienated from us by capital’s regular power trips (with Cameron’s Avatar taking a videogame approach to cinema, and all to paint himself as a god/Omega Man performed by Jake as his avatar to those he deems ethnocentrically inferior to him—what a knob, and everyone who works with him is also a knob).

We’ll see as we proceed, then, how this cryptomimetic subversion actually has a drug-like, acid Communist flavor that, all the same, combines demonically with mad science and occult magic; i.e., per the Promethean Quest and Faustian bargain regarding nature as chattelized, but also the various undead elements (of generational trauma) that crop up during the rememory process, too: reversing abjection (thus profit) during revolutionary cryptonymy’s holistic modularity!

To that, remember Radcliffe and the others: When the British Romantics and Neo-Gothic revival were active, nature was closer at hand but being pulled away by a burgeoning system already several centuries old. Now that alienation is further along but not complete, the Gothic’s fixations with expressing alienation by bypassing boundaries is invaluable. As such, we may use any poetic distinctions, creative instruments and schools of thought (whatever works) to make ourselves felt, seen and heard as human stewards of nature: “There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves”; i.e., to make Capitalism something more stable than it is, but also returning to nature as something we can inhabit in ways that improve the quality of life for all (workers, animals, the environment): the use of technology in ways that didn’t exist in the past as a predominantly oral society.

Beyond more recent scientific technologies (re: Shelley’s “Modern Prometheus”), this applies to pre-capitalist examples to poetically write down for post-capitalist reasons. This includes Giger’s pet monster hauntology but also the various ones he took and made (more) surreal; re: Blake’s devilish acids (“corroding fires”) for his printing blocks, and Marlowe’s Faustus speaking hauntologically to times before mercantile capital. Using Gothic poetics at large, we can play around with these ideas ourselves provided it serves to defend nature from capital and its own bad education’s fatal nostalgia: a Valley of the Satanic Dolls!

Per Blake (or Giger), every attempt is unique/sui generis (“in a class by itself”). Yet diversity is strength insofar as all of them contribute endlessly towards the whole’s Song of Infinity across space-time; i.e., as something to suggest at an obscured glance: one that takes on “madness” as a mythical life of its own we are not totally masters of; re: the forgotten, seemingly magical ability[13] to move through barriers and distinctions that might otherwise hold us in place through acid Communism’s oubliette’s of mist while in defense of what we hold dear as threatened by impending catastrophe. The ground around us turned to eggshells, magical assembly (more on the other medieval poetics devices, in a couple pages) lets us stitch or madly assemble whatever we need or want to further the Cause; i.e., including what friends provide, but also frenemies (re: Cuwu) and enemies (re: Zeuhl and Jadis) we know and political friends and foes we don’t. The Enemy has many spies; so do we! Ours give back fatal-yet-vital knowledge on the Aegis as shared between both sides!

This concludes outlining nature versus the state as a dialectic, by and large. That being said, I’d like to spend the remainder of part zero going over some medieval poetic countermeasures/supply some fun extra exhibits, at the end!

For starters, there’s no “perfect” approach to developing Gothic Communism. Just that, once you have a knack for it, you won’t need to solidarize those eggshells, but instead can walk on clouds (soaring through the hair like an eagle or sky-bound witch). Able to move through boundaries at will (or make our own), workers can freely embrace calculated risk as something to embellish and erect. Homo erectus, “it’s pronounced win-gar-dium levi-O-SA!” (“STAHP IT, RON! STAHP…“).

(artist: Oney Cartoons)

In turn, jouissance and its constructive frenzies yield impossible things that should not stand but do. Gay as Hell, they defy reason as a social-sexual contract/construct, but can be made by anyone “primed” for it. Under the right conditions, then, you might be surprised what campy cathedrals your orgasmic tornados can raise on the bones of canon (and who will show up afterward; re: “weird attracts weird”): gargantuan castles-in-the-flesh making your mo(i)st beautiful, succubean nightmares come true, mise-en-abyme! So when the Man comes around, show him your Aegis, Galatea; better yet, come out swinging (so to speak)! “If you built it, they will cum!”

(artist, left: Magic Moon Arts; right: Zdzisław Beksiński)

Like any orgy or church, though, it’s a group effort, and one geared towards our collective survival instead of deifying the state; i.e., in all its historical-material forms; re: corporations, churches, and nations-states, etc. This involves working together to respond to the holistic poetic value harbored in and across each other’s bodies (and bodies’ labor) to do together what is impossible alone/divided.

As a pornographic invigilator and historian, I cannot stress enough, then, how utterly important inspiration and collective solidarity are to labor action as a group exercise; i.e., one that routinely faces state predation tempting workers with assimilation (re: bourgeois Faustian bargains), thus how utterly unable I would have been to write this book without the likes of older works (and workers) to inspire me, but also the friends drawn to it who took interest in what I was doing tied to a shared past. This took time; re (from the Poetry Module):

To this, a director is precisely fuck-all without a muse to blow up, and a model often needs a platform to work their magic. As such, Sex Positivity was and always will be a group effort, its total collective statement on/with artwork and sex work entirely impossible if not for all my muses, models, partners (currently friendly or antagonistic) and friends (sexual or platonic) working in concert. Nor is ours the first. Like the patchwork group of (mostly cis-het male) art nerds who made Alien, celebrating the monstrous-feminine in Gothic panache, my cuties and I don’t own each other while raising temples to our own dark gods.

Instead, we’ve worked together to contribute to a diverse, inclusive labor of love that we can all feel proud of; i.e., a dark progeny begot from enthusiastic, heartfelt teamwork. It’s an orgiastic journey to document and leave behind, a procession of memories to learn from (as Alien very much is). Or as Scott himself put it: “It takes an army of dedicated people to make a feature film—and on Alien we had a marvelous army” (source: American Cinematographer’s “The Filming of Alien,” 2017). So did I (source).

Ridley and Ripley together and separate, I walked in the footsteps of Pygmalion and Galatea, realizing I was praxially gayer than either of my forebears.

Furthermore, without my aforementioned army of muses’ incredible booties pushing me to begin—and their ongoing friendships’ challenging of my privileged biases’ understanding of stigma and bigotry as a whole inspiring me to keep at it (as part of a back-and-forth process)—I would never have bothered to lay the first brick! My Gothic maturity (such as it is) merely sits in the middle of a long and winding stretch of Yellow Brick road; i.e., occupied by friends of all walks and dispositions, it’s a real Canterbury Tales—a rough-yet-colorful stretch, yawning ever onwards through a medieval “past,” made in the present space and time, anticipating future attempts concerned with older ones; re (from the same section):

Per the Humanities, such marbled dialog is not set-in-stone, then, but sculpted in our own caring gestures cheering others up and looking out for them; e.g., wagging “tails” manifesting as a simple “How are you doing?” (capital makes us forget to breathe, thus ask, thus think—waves of terror—so we must regain a prompt ability to think on the fly less as “total recall” and more as being quick on the draw). The more they learn, the more they can change the world provided they learn things that allow them to. In turn, this requires someone who will seek answers out, not take things at face value, including with things that interest them. They’ll enjoy them, but call them out if they’re pernicious, and invent curious solutions to hornswoggle/trick the state and its proponents (e.g., my older brother’s Mr. Kazakhstan; i.e., [Madoff’s] useful myth of Gothic ancestry) [ibid.].

Whatever its form and ingredients, though, Gothic poetics (and the Wisdom of the Ancients as a whole—a poison to pick and make your own ancestry as you see fit) is a powerful voice we cannot afford to discount. Diversity is strength, so diversify!

To quote one of my favorite problematic films, The Flight of Dragons (1982): “If mankind is to surmount the insurmountable, there must always be magic to inspire him; magic cannot die!” Except, I would deliberately extend the Green Wizard’s neoliberal pipedream beyond straight men/tokenism to “Medusa cannot die,” and whose die-hard longevity inspires monsters and GNC people (thus all minorities), at large, to punch up at the state’s weak point: its lack of empathy. Yet, between all of them, wild incessant creativity is nothing but a good thing when it flourishes; i.e., a creative mind is healthy insofar as it develops creations that support nature, thus workers, as adapting against the state: as the Great Destroyer of the Earth! Capital always eats, more and more, until it dies from eating the world, effectively cannibalizing itself!

In short, the state is sickness, is what the canonical Gothic announces vaguely as “trauma” in ways our ludo-Gothic BDSM and its cryptonymy cryptomimetically fuck with; i.e., doing so to whisper loudly and scream softly (and similar such oxymorons and paradoxes) to perform power in medieval poetic forms; re: as alienated in ways that rebels can return to through said performances under unique current conditions: primed for release from older bondage and harm as something to camp, during holistic and universally liberating calculated risk. Navigating the usual dualities, mid-performance, “It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations if you live near him,” and capital as a process of propaganda is full of dragons that our roles—from tops and bottoms to doms and subs—must continually subvert to defend nature from; i.e., those who pimp and police nature as monstrous-feminine, thus alien. We must, or we will not survive, because capital will rape us to death; re: segregation is no defense (and silence is death). So let’s get this party started!

(artist: Xiao Tong)

Of course, a mind is its own place; and sometimes to prevent rape, you have to tap into your animal side during psychosexual theatre (the side your abusers can’t monopolize); i.e., as extending from onstage to off and vice versa. As always, dialectical-material context (and flow) are key to development, without which, we’re back to the harmful nostalgia of unironic rape/wifely duties to canonize, except now these divisions have been hauntologized to serve profit under capital; i.e., it will be worse this time, because profit will demand it happen over and over while gaslighting the usual virgin/whores to assimilate and keep up appearances; re: gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss. No one “wins” under capital except those behind the curtain, and even then, they’ll lose too when Medusa kills them all! Exploitation and liberation exist on the same stages, capital disguising the former as the latter to perpetuate said cannibalizing for everyone it alienates from (and fetishizes for) everyone else.

As described in the entire “Medieval” section from the Poetry Module, those who contribute unto capital and its sickness through the usual performative tools are profoundly uncreative in that respect; i.e., only able to devise tools of actual, unironic torture and enslavement—of scared, closed minds shrinking during Capitalist Realism, the latter having menticided the former into gargoyles for the church of capital and the Protestant ethic. Innovation disappears, replaced with blind faith in a brutal system that survives through “prison sex” mentality (re: Plato’s cave, known today more casually as the Man Box). Canon is canon, the illusory effects the same; re: “The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim” (source: Gustav Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, 1895).

Capital is a glass onion, and it’s a grave mistake to see said onion and think its Aegises are wholly transparent. Instead, these mirrors operate in reflective ways (the albedo measurement of a given surface, during remediated praxis); i.e., that serve a dualistic (anisotropic) role. To it, such prisons—and their myopic insulation under canon—are recursively concentric and fractal in their neoliberal divisions; i.e., a prison in a prison in a prison, hiding the truth in fabrications of “the truth”; re: the ghost of the counterfeit, abjecting “dead labor feeding on living labor” into the usual states of exception (the half-real frontiers of Gothic theatre, on and offstage).

While liberation is a game of mirrors, our elaborate strategies of misdirection (as splendide mendax) are asymmetrical alongside those who think themselves besieged by us; i.e., those they prey on during mirror syndrome. Faced with oubliettes as they see and utilize them during the cryptonymy process, agents of capital hoist up on their own petards to use them as intend by capital; i.e., to fear a perceived world where capital is gone, thus unable to give them the hyperreal structure of solid prison walls (re: the canceled future). Canon becomes Jameson’s class nightmare; i.e., when the Black Veil is pulled aside, and one which—when threated with the destruction of its walls—our class traitors all but lose the necessary devices to operate in any healthy way without. They live in a bubble and fear its bursting to the point of easy betrayals, and freeze, clam up and sit in anticipation; i.e., for the usual, historical-material boom-and-bust patterns that, for them, is the new normal to return to, from time out of mind, into echoes of echoes of echoes on the same old cave wall shadows!

Deprived of those shadows, the usual proponents of capital police reality while pining for revenge; i.e., to reachieve said normal (the Gamergate refrain extending into all canon, mid-moral-panic); e.g., from The Republic to Toy Story to The Matrix (“to infinity and beyond!”). Bursting such monomyth bubbles by reversing abjection during revolutionary cryptonymy is our King of Dreams’ chief and steady aim: “You’re not the One, Ne(r)o! Now put away that fiddle and help us dismantle the state!”

Workers versus the state, then, is a battle that never ends (the state is always the enemy) but giving up is not an option short of suicide; i.e., to betray is to concede defeat to our overlords; re: the state is incompatible with life, and mutual consent is a learned activity that pushes back against systemic rape as also taught: from an older and more barbaric model of exploitation built on male, then white, racial supremacy and other modular bigotries swapped in and out as needed!

To avoid that fate, I would happily use my active, awake brain however much is required to penetrate the seemingly impenetrable; i.e., to become that “monster from the Id” and burn through the doors of minds who try, try, try as they might to shut me out: “I am the Medusa, and you not only raped me, but raped yourself as well!” As Matthew Lewis shows us, a rapist always destroys a piece of their own heart in the process; i.e., closing their mind and their body to the very sorts of empathy we seek to rebuild among the Ozymandian wreckage!

To that, I’ve gone on to write nearly two million words (at this point), as well as make hundreds of collages and dozens upon dozens of illustrations (well into the triple digits, too); i.e., happily doing so in conscious-and-willing defense of the planet (as a sustainable home) than say however many with a sleeping greedy brain that leads to its inevitable destruction. Indeed, I would happily revisit the same book (and ouroborotic fugue state) for the rest of my foreseeable life under house arrest, letting it bleed me dry if it adds to the Cause by enriching monsters; i.e., no matter how maddening that might feel (a part of me loves it, of course—again, see my foreword to Volume Zero) or how many estranged weirdos tell me to “touch grass.”

Okay, but what is grass? How do you define grass? Welcome to the desert of the Real, motherfuckers! “Anywhere in the galaxy this is a nightmare!” Yes, but one with the power (on the Aegis) to set us free! Liberation always starts with the mind, a door to walk through that—unless you’ve seen it for yourself, faced with your own Great Destroyer turning you into a battered housewife for capital, in small—there’s really no way to conceptualize that horror and make total sense while doing so. How could it? Easy solutions, explanations and nostalgia are the stuff of unironic chattel, idiots and Don Quixote.

Instead, there is always a buffer between us and the wheel of fire—a shadow on the cave wall to help us process what we’re currently surviving under duress; i.e., capital is a problem to solve before it kills us, and that is something to—far from lose hope regarding alien vampires eating us—instead becomes a paradoxical source of excitement when chasing the (magic) dragon/ Numinous; re: through creation as something to canonically fear during the Promethean Quest, but for us is the fire of the gods to liberate ourselves (starting with our minds) through iconoclastic art breaking canon inside canon: “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!”

Verily, the whore’s revenge speaks through fabrication—the taking of pills (red or not), in keeping with acid Communism, actually being a freeing of the mind through trance-like illusions of druggedness; i.e., as something to bend reality (and its prescribed owner class) to our will! It is fundamentally unpoliceable, hence why I stress applying knowledge through game-like modes of expression! Not for making us “the dupe” (re: Gloggin), but to expose those calling us the dupe being dupes themselves, and the ones acting in bad faith for the elite (e.g., Cipher from The Matrix, below, or Andrew Tate passing himself off as “woke” to grift a select group of white, straight, male, middle-class idiots while fleecing and mobilizing them against actual oppressed peoples)!

 (source: “Why Cypher Made the Right Choice in The Matrix According to Joe Pantoliano[14])

I live to teach, but also recognize the so-called worse and best students depend entirely on context, mid-struggle; i.e., who question reality as a criminogenic premise to grapple with: the allure of class, culture and race betrayal as tempting (see: footnote). Murderers come to you in smiles, and traitors are recruited from their own populations to maintain the panopticon as the world decays behind the illusion (with Baudrillard’s hyperreal being a concept the makers—two trans women—were very aware of when camping the monomyth during the Promethean Quest/Faustian bargain; re: Morpheus’ famous pill problem for “Neo” to recursively solve; i.e., an appeal to the Straights by two directors working within the system to subvert it).

As such, cryptonymy remains dualistic/prone to liberate/tokenize, as do all the main Gothic theories and facets of oppositional praxis on the Manifesto Tree (which I wrote to allow for said dualities, during dialectical-material struggle as something to perform and account for in iconoclastic art; re: “Paratextual Documents“). Like all modes of praxis synthesized in opposition, they can go either way—and The Matrix has, as much as Plato or the word “woke” (Pissed-off Bartender’s “Let’s talk about the word ‘woke’ and why I hate it,” 2025). Rebellion and regression occupy the same mirror games’ linguo-material tug-o’-war as simply being a matter of repeating in ways we must anticipate, mid-cryptomimesis.

Medusa’s testimony (and by extension, ours) speaks through the infernal concentric pattern; i.e., in ways that challenge capital and its profit motive, thus its raping of the mind as part of nature to rape during the Cycle of Kings, inside the Shadow of Pygmalion, part of the narrative of the crypt, and so on. It’s—for lack of a better term—a long game, and a zero-sum puzzle that is (at least for me) far more interesting than simple military optimism leading to brain death and, by extension, rape and death, period. The more you deny them as real, the stronger they become; same goes for us!

By extension, birthing monsters and renovating castles in the Gothic style[15] is my passion, my raison d’être because Capitalism is my bête noire, my dragon to slay and replace with my own; i.e., the former is unstable by design, thus unsustainable—must be put down and replaced with something that will last that doesn’t cheapen life through settler-colonial fear and cartographically monomythic dogma; re: a peach to harvest on and across all registers!

In other words, sex-positive education concerns a constant-and-vigilant defending by us of the things that Capitalism attacks; i.e., which it seeks to dominate by closing them off by design—nature, but also as inextricable from nature thus “of it.” Be they peoples, places or things (food, clothes, contraceptives and other items), any poetic license or device employed by them that you could possibly imagine will canonically become a means of enslaving nature, thus workers and sex, through a heteronormative, settler-colonial scheme; i.e., a means of denial-of-access by raising disastrous barriers to defend itself while punching through our safeguards to kill us by any and all means necessary (evoking the Krell’s “Monsters from the Id”: “your machine will supply that monster with whatever power it needs to reach us!”).

In keeping with the usual persecution devices and qualities of capital dividing workers, it’s the state vs workers, male vs female, the Straights vs the Gays, etc; e.g., faeries, werewolves, ambrosia, collars, magical forests, mushroom kingdoms, etc; i.e., in at-times-transgressive forms of cuckold/possession-and-relinquish fantasies that intersect with various marginalized groups who hypnotize out of necessity as much as revenge, but likewise camp such things within liminal expression’s transgressive elements owing to that transgressiveness as a matter of compelled and inevitable alienation that must be reclaimed from the same system to reverse abjection, thus hug the alien while enjoying the bursting of any aforementioned bubbles: “Glory to the Hypnotoads!”

(artist: Magic Moon Arts)

Few things are as confused/confusing or brutal as token cops, who cannot see beyond their own bubble as made through acts of bad will (and faith) towards those they betray inside/outside their own gated communities. To it, our collective and holistic function must challenge those bad forms of sex education with dialectical-material opposites, generally on the Internet (whose rapid-fire search engines can parallel our brains, but also be used when our brains are working overtime to solve complex problems; e.g., speedrunners). So build your own cathedrals; size doesn’t matter if you nail the combo and make something that lasts throughout the ages to lead onto better things. Barring that, there’s no shame in contributing to the Cause at a meta level; i.e., one brick in a larger wall, one star in a grand constellation, all charting a collective, concentric path: one where you can freeze the enemy or have them scratch “cuckoo” their heads (all so long as it inspires them to think critically for once).

(source: Caroline Kee’s “This Guy Is ‘Protecting’ Graffiti Penises With Condoms,” 2017)

Keeping with The Matrix, the state maintains control through monomyth (cop) threats of violence that, once imposed, destabilize to a vertiginous extreme; i.e., Capitalist Realism as a systemic, all-encompassing means of throwing people phenomenologically off-balance. Yet if the state imposes madness to disempower us through traitors (re: Cipher), our subsequent (and subversive) empowerment lies in ironically acclimating to their withering spells; i.e., during ludo-Gothic BDSM, “doing it raw” as places to reclaim and swim around inside without fear or effort; re: Neo flying through the sky at the end of that film. “Rock Is Dead” (Marilyn Manson gaslighting his audience and profiting off them) but Rage Against the Machine, anyways! Futility is part of the struggle, Sisyphus smiling at the gods through Numinous rapture (making the rock he’s chained to his bitch like Prometheus did the gods’ hungry eagle).

Is this spurious or special? Both, because revolution is a city of paradoxes. Like Neo as the newly-crowned King of the Underworld having been paradoxically liberated by Morpheus the same way Hades might liberate Persephone and then Persephone (me) liberating you through echoes of those characters/the Medusa, the sinking pit in one’s stomach can magically replace with sheer joyous euphoria; i.e., as one takes to the abyss/mise-en-abyme like a fish to water (or the skies). Despite seeming well-and-truly out of our element, we adjust and acclimate to what is normally weaponized against us—taking monsters back, thereby taking Hell and making it our domain, not the state’s:

Flight is something we humans dream of. It represents a conquering of earth’s gravity, and a release from our confinement to earth’s surface. In the moment when Neo is shown to have superpowers, the writers chose flight as the best embodiment of this. It goes to show how powerful verticality is for us, and what we think of when we consider a character to be superhuman (source: James Botham’s “The Matrix and Verticality,” 2020).

Doing so is always a tightrope to walk, because Neo is using the same monomythic power fantasies the movie diegetically affords to the Agents’ own spurious monopolies; i.e., as working against these interests inside the same system, but partially estranged/unplugged from said system to—like 2011’s Sense8 (a text we’ll examine more, in Volume Three)—eventually reunite those the system has pulled apart: ourselves and nature as something rebuild while dancing in the ruins of nostalgia as canceled (the one cancelling myth that is true). This happens through illusions of false gravity that, nonetheless, speak to dialectical-material forces that are anything but false, and who the elite can sell back to us: in forms of controlled opposition we can then subvert through performances of wizardly power and knowledge; i.e., if we choose to understand an aesthetic (coded, argumentative) means of enjoying but not endorsing the feelings that go along with canonical varieties; re: “I know kung fu!” Show me, young padawan!

The only difference, as usual, is dialectical-material scrutiny as a part of praxis, synthesized for catharsis; re: gods are cool, as are monsters more broadly during Amazonomachia being things to dig up, summon or otherwise fashion: speaking to the same old Modern Prometheus showcasing the Creature emblematized between simulacra of simulacra; e.g., Icarus, Medusa, Elphaba and Mercy melded together by me (next page), existing in a similar struggle that fights illusory fire with illusory fire: the exposure of her superheroic body not one of tragedy alone, but glory for defying the gods of the state to resurrect the Medusa as the only thing the state wants/fears, thus pimps! What they pimp, we clap back with. Short of a bullet to the head, how can they stop us? And even then, you can’t kill Medusa; Elphaba lives, motherfuckers (a raised fist evocative for its symbolic social value tied to material resistance; re: reclaiming the Base by recultivating the Superstructure)!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

That being said, what is the difference between witch rebels and witch cops? Dialectical-material function, of course (re: flow determines function, which we’ll examine more alongside witch cops in Volume Three, Chapter Four); i.e., sex positivity as unfolding during informed consumption, descriptive sexuality and cultural appreciation vis-à-vis Gothic counterculture poetically serving those aims! Praxis is merely mind over matter, babes! Let it take you over the rainbow (of Gothic [gay-anarcho] Communism), making your dreams (and everyone else’s but the elite’s because fuck them) come true! Set Medusa free, thus your mind through what you create representing a freer world than the state’s one-and-done map of empire! Make Mark Fisher proud (and avenge his death)!

Our combined (re)education, then, must address a tricky paradox: fighting fire with “fire,” madness with “madness”; i.e., establishing healthy boundaries and lowering harmful ones, deciding through selective absorption, magical assembly and a confusion of the senses (all from our various Gothic/medieval bag of tricks we talked about in the Poetry Module’s “Medieval” portion): our own calculated risk, and by extension what we eat during ludo-Gothic BDSM, in order to survive by raising not just ourselves, but emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness for all workers; i.e., to prevent rape as a matter of performative risk, thereby embodying ourselves as monsters that will be attacked and eaten; re: our Song of Infinity becoming holistic and fourth-dimensional labor shared with all class, culture and race warriors recultivating the Wisdom of the Ancients‘ complicated dualism! Shazam!

To this, “good education” means sex positivity as an eagerly liberatory device; i.e., utilizing popular linguo-material devices to re-teach workers not to feel afraid, first and foremost (“to let ‘I dare!’ wait upon ‘I would?'” As if!). As The Matrix shows, fear can drive workers to cage, brutalize and collar other workers “of (thus with) nature” for the state; they require assorted barriers that we set up once we’re able to move on unstable ground, ourselves. Such buffers can be the poetic ones we’ve mentioned comprising our emotional/Gothic intelligence, but it can also be more literal, physical and exact; e.g., condoms (three pages back), which the state will deny as fascism rises to crack down on nature (eco-fascism).

Whatever form it states, the state is a cop, not your friend; it will kill you to protect itself, but like a cancer will eventually die as all empires do—of its own sickness. Until then, it will make absurd Capitalist-Realist arguments projecting genocide onto others; i.e., those fighting to prevent it again; e.g., “They’re coming for your women, your cheeseburgers, your comfort, your rights (etc)!” States rights attack worker rights through “scab” workers arguing for the bourgeoisie (Cipher was an undercover cop). All are arguments of scarcity that double as threats against labor fending for itself; i.e., to achieve post-scarcity using pre-capitalist (feudalistic) poetics in a Neo-Gothic fashion (as Neo does—Superman but also the Creature in ways that go far beyond Keanu Reeves’ loveable otter).

Take it from me, capitalists hate that shit; i.e., as do their proponents (re: Jadis), greedily hoarding the ambrosia less for themselves (to free their minds) and more to cynically prevent others from eating it and escaping the mind prisons that capital affords; e.g., Jadis loved being in the cave—in effect, taking Cipher’s blue pill before my very eyes, yet passing themselves off as “wise” and “rebellious” when, point-in-fact, they were just another GNC TERF punching down at me/tilting at pharmaceutical windmills (re: Cervantes’ metaphor for dragons, but also the mechanisms of capital to thrust at: through our own dangerous delusions punching the membrane on the Aegis like a drum). Here, the Gothic castle (and its Numinously trippy sensations, below) is, again, an odd paradox: a “prison” that frees your mind to envision better worlds than Capitalism allows, but will allow if they think your harbor for rebellion is “just another castle” (whose princess is, per Mario, in another castle elsewhere, elsewhere, elsewhere…). Beyond Jadis, as someone like Elon Musk shows, the number-one fear the elite have is being left behind!

(artist, bottom: Departedart)

Death-as-memory is a paradox, per the Gothic; i.e., insofar as its endless warring castles and monsters-in-writing repeat with disturbingly chimeric variations bleeding into each other over time: the trauma of struggling to be heard, those that struggle to remember themselves correctly during cryptomimesis, let alone the Numinous as something grander (and monstrous) to suggest! Except therein lies the difference: what the state reproduces through compelled reproduction as something that eerily and hungrily watches us[16], GNC people (and other oppressed rebels) do through what they build from older buildings; re: as a community to leave behind and inspire others towards: first a castle, a stage, a song or a Metroidvania, etc, as paradoxically “empty” and full of not-so-quiet secrets that—as a constellation of worrisome and ambiguous signposts—become our aforementioned Song of Infinity leading us on towards Communism through “bad echo”; i.e, by letting us know each and every time that we are not alone/that Hell is all around us, its monsters becoming our friends to keep us company (and warm/full of cum, below) mid-struggle against the state’s ravenously Cartesian ones (above):

(artist: NOBM666)

This company (and struggle) routinely changes shape into familiar-foreign forms, and takes back what the state uses to hide itself; e.g., Chernobog from Fantasia (1940) complementing this transfusion: both us playing with our toys, and a ghost of the counterfeit the state abjects. Thus, when threatened with the titanic unseen forces we’ve described throughout this volume, monsters like Chernobog-as-doubled and his poiesis doubled yield a plethora of myriads[17]. For us, they conjure up to reunite in defiance of the state; i.e., assembling and changing shape through each ritual, thus cathedral, as a one-time affair that shows up and sputters out again per attempt—from fire girls to animals or anything else that’s required. Is there anything more Romantic and Gothic than that?

Monsters are merely poetic devices arguing through preferential code and instruction. Vis-à-vis the state and us, such threats (and their rejoinders) are incredibly common; re: everyone loves the whore/monstrous-feminine, and people learn through popular things because popular works (to commodify or defend nature) and is tied to our survival on a daily basis; i.e., what we eat as monstrous, magical, mythic, etc. So we must go where that power is and critique our diet as normally controlled, then reclaim it on the Internet (and elsewhere) for our own liberatory purposes by taking it into ourselves (sexually and/or otherwise; e.g., going to Queen Maeb, below); i.e., we must go to nature as a vivid, delicious commodity to liberate monsters of nature from their settler-colonial role, thereby returning it to an older one before Capitalism that could be again under Gothic Communism; re: as a unique, stronger (note: less cancerous) development than Capitalism (which is cancerous by design).

The pleasures of nature and its poetic extensions won’t be denied to us; they’ll remain in delightful (and silly, below) forms that speak to workers’ shared and uneven desires for connection—i.e., by using “what they got” as counterterror does to, through guerrilla warfare, liberate itself as much through humor and camp as strict, psychosexual rage and angst (of the xenomorphic sort): an exchange of essence in medieval language to make a modern point with preferential bias towards the language of the past as something to perform; e.g., some people would prefer to be the blueberry princess, and others the gnome. All are valid provided they yield praxial catharsis during the whore’s revenge; i.e., by campily reclaiming the terror of underworld sex by making it fun through land back pastiche as ludo-Gothic BDSM: taken from behind and ravished by a mighty midget!

(artist: Steven Stahlberg)

“All the world’s a stage!” and such monumental endeavors afford lackadaisical nonchalance (the idylls of the Fairy Queen) during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., they involve nature as something to express its own endlessness beyond gnomes and nymphs as notorious spirits of the earth and the forest, but also Pagan fertility Rites of Spring that can become unironically like Stravinsky’s strident offerings: “Glorification of the Chosen One” (1913) both making your hairs stand on end and your lips twist in Grinch-like smirk with the above image in your head (essentially This Is Spinal Tap‘s Stonehenge scene decades before 1984[18]).

The fairy monarch, for instance, remains a common method of gendering as an alternative to the heteronormative standard; i.e., the fae, faer, and faers neopronouns as something linguistically new (the trans movement of the 20th/21st centuries) tied to something quite old associated with drug-fueled methods of expanding[19] the mind tied to the imaginary past: the dark, drug-fueled forests of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but also Keats “Ode to Psyche”

“Yet even in these days so far retir’d

From happy pieties, thy lucent fans,

Fluttering among the faint Olympians,

I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspir’d.

So let me be thy choir, and make a moan

Upon the midnight hours;

Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet

From swinged censer teeming;

Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat

Of pale-mouth’d prophet dreaming.

Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane

In some untrodden region of my mind,

Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,

Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind:

Far, far around shall those dark-cluster’d trees

Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep;

And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees,

The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull’d to sleep;” (source).

being something to carry into the present through new hauntologies; e.g., “The Cult of Dionysus” (2006)

Yesterday I heard you say
Your lust for life has gone away
It got me thinking, I think I feel a similar way
And that’s sad (that’s sad)
That’s sad

So let’s make a decision, start a new religion
Yeah, we’re gonna build a temple to our love
Orgiastic dances, nymphs in trances
Yeah, we’ll be the envy of the gods above

I’m feeling devious
You’re looking glamorous
Let’s get mischievous
And polyamorous
Wine and women and wonderful vices
Welcome to the cult of Dionysus

We could take a Holiday in the month of May
Run free and play in fields of flowers
Pass the hours, making love is how we’ll pray (source)

likewise being neither here nor there, but something in between/without set place resurrected in the Internet Age; i.e., by using old, repurposed language for fresh, nuanced purposes: a “zombie fairy” if you will (or demon, ghost, whatever).

In keeping with the battles for such devices during the banality of evil/desk murder (re: Coleridge, footnote), such creative prurience might seem “excessive” relative to traditional, Western (Cartesian, settler-colonial and heteronormative) conventions; i.e., about sin and vice relayed as “ancient” derelicts to leave behind and find again (druids all the way down). But it isn’t self-destructive the way the state commonly portrays inside the sphere of Capitalism’s harmful influence; i.e., their idea of the silly kid’s sex party until “reality sets in” (a false “waking up” that kills conscious class character in favor of “acting like an adult woman or man according to the WASP/nuclear family model as something to restore). Instead, it’s the envy of the “gods above,” meaning the elite, who can only feel human when drinking more and more blood siphoned from workers against their will. So often, the traitor is a cuckoo assimilator raised in human captivity and reintroduced back into the wild (as Cipher was, among many others).

To that, let’s provide some extra exhibits (six pages’ worth) before giving sex education a deeper look: from the Aegis to the Medusa, neither came first but evolved into themselves and their current echopraxis!

(exhibit 52a: Artist, left: Persephone van der Waard. The model wishes to remain anonymous. I’ll call them Brutus. Fairies had a variety of spellings, such as “fairy” as much as “faerie,” but also ties to a group of peoples and beliefs constantly under attack; i.e., struggling to survive genocide or resurrect themselves as zombies from it. From its earliest days of empire well into the present, then, the West has attacked and assimilated Celtic cultures [which includes their Paganized, Bacchanal pleasures; i.e., their festival variant of the disco, party or orgy]. The Romans raided Britain and fought the Picts; the English demonized the Irish; and the remainders of Celtic mythology survived in popular forms that were canonized or reinvented by English-speaking authors after the native languages and cultures were destroyed in their natural forms. In short, they became romanticized, either through pure sexual escapism aimed uncritically at an endlessly consuming middle-class audience, or displacing it to a faraway fairyland to critique the actions of evil kings against a group of nature-dwelling peoples with magical powers [re: abjection].

During oppositional praxis, though, faeries also retain a “tricksy” nature; i.e., one assigned to them by the colonizers for being poorly behaved, but also vengeful; re: for not killing home rule with kindness. “Changelings” steal English babies and replace them with poorly behaved imposters that assimilate the conquering group out of desperation and spite. Some—like the bean sidhe “fairy woman”—are generally feared as a specific type of hag: a death omen to rehearse, then seduce/scare our enemies shitless [or at least enough that they don’t rape us]!

[source: Christian Death’s Catastrophe Ballet, 1988]

Such omens generally pervade Western canon through a canonical imagination that workers must reimagine inside of itself; i.e., from the fear-blinded eyes of terrified white straight women, onto trans versions and other intersections of privilege and oppression [Brutus was a trans man who stabbed me in the back]. Fascinated with the dark, savage past of an imaginary island that isn’t strictly “theirs,” these women see “their” home as occupied instead by dark animal spirits also popularized by men in a collective xenophobic effort; e.g., Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1902 “The Hound of the Baskervilles” or Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 invention—through her famous protagonist, Jane Eyre—of the fictional “Gytrash.” The “black dog” is an archetypal death omen; in regards to Brontë’s dog demon, Mimi Matthews writes, the Gytrash is “a goblin or spirit which takes the form of a horse, mule, or large dog. Typically found in the North of England, the Gytrash ‘haunted solitary ways’ and often surprised unwary travelers as they journeyed alone in the dusk” [source: “Jane Eyre and the Legendary Gytrash,” 2015]. Similar ideas of the “lycanthrope” roadman can be found in Indigenous Cultures of Turtle Island/the Americas; i.e., with “dog soldiers” becoming a demonized source of fear for American colonizers, then and now.

In other words, the spirit of death, magic and vengeance characteristically haunts the frontiers of the “civilized” world from the Western perspective. This abject tradition certainly wasn’t “new” by the time Brontë adopted it; Shakespeare had already demonized the Welsh enemies of Henry IV in his first [of many] historical play of the same name—i.e., infusing those outside the rapidly-forming English national identity as old, magical and dangerous, but also superstitious and backward, during us-versus-them; re: Harry kills his Welsh double.

In turn, the poetic duty of anyone subverting those mythologies remains the same: to avoid the ghost of the counterfeit’s canonical usage; re: as an alluring fear of the imaginary past, while presenting nature to the modern world—not as something utterly alien or fearsome, but a liminal kind of self-expression with a variety of linguo-material forms speaking to alienation and fetishization serving worker interests during the whore’s revenge. During ludo-Gothic BDSM, these can subsequently present as neopronouns, art, or both—and include myriad ways of seeing the world; i.e., as something to transform using older things that have since been reinvented in service of the oppressed or the oppressor dialectically-materially back and forth.

(exhibit 52b: Artist, top-left: Miles DF; top-middle: Temporal Wolf; top-right: Olexy Oleg; middle-left: unknown; middle: unknown; middle-right and bottom-right: Art Vagabonda; bottom-left: Abigail Larson.
The various styles of furries is infinitely broad, diverse, and ancient. Even in the Western world, legends the likes of chimeras, centaurs, satyrs and fawns date back to Ancient Greece—with “nymphomania” being tied to female sexuality as pathologized by Western men of reason [similar to “wandering womb” as a means of infantilizing female desire; re: by tying it to abject bodies, hysterical minds and fickle emotions]. These ongoing oppressor mentalities [and their ancient canonical codes] may be reclaimed, commonly serving as a mode of existence and “Satanic,” thus Paganized self-expression; i.e., that identify one-and-all with nature in visibly anthropomorphized ways: as its gay Gothic stewards!

Such rainbow flavors are thoroughly hybridized—can be militarized, fantastical, cutesy and/or alien. Indeed, many white women—trapped between the role of dutiful servant and benefactor of colonialism—will quickly turn to the nearest form of nature-as-alien to perform acts of rebellion against, as subjugated Amazons always do; i.e., the Christian devil actually being an abjecting of the alien colonized; e.g., Black Phillip from The Witch [2015, below]: “What dost thou want?” [re: “Darkness Visible: Dark Faeries“]. Again, demons are the classic granters of dark wishes, including a desire for revenge by living deliciously that liberates marginalized groups “of nature” from their overlords[20] by reclaiming sodomy as a weapon of terror that their self-appointed rulers cannot govern the ungovernable with. To bear our Aegis as whores do is to riot against them—its call of the wild as a gloriously uneven gesture of veiled-to-unveiled compatibility!

[artist: Persephone van der Waard. The model wishes to remain anonymous; I’ll call them Siobhan]

As yet another hauntological Cartesian boogey[wo]man of the Western frontiers, more moderate forms of feminism have straight white women using demonic imagery to piss off their male overlords, versus trying to venerate or clear the names of the usual symbols/recipients of stigma; i.e., defending their virtue from, or surrendering to, the idealized form of evil during a conventionally sinful exchange [which translates to secularized forms during the Protestant ethic].

Yet, by simply existing in the material world, these same “suspects” invariably threaten Christendom and the West, thus can be specifically reclaimed as such by gender queer movements; i.e., transgressive as well as subversive, and patently designed to make the “good Christian, American” uncomfortable during their own moral panic. By making bigots “self-report” while overriding canonical stigma and bias, we read the room; i.e., by asking an audience we’re seducing according to their own idea of rebellion as reclaimed by us, mid-seduction: “What dost thou want?” In turn, we respond to them, “To be the thing that my enemies fear while also enjoying myself as something dark, sexy and badass.” Such is Bottom’s Dream, and it paradoxically has and has not a bottom!

[artist: Siobhan]

To it, when I first approached Siobhan for my “Black Phillip” rendition, we played as one might in a grove with the fawn. Then I—struck with the fawn’s dark love spell, afterwards—built a temple to their generous loving of me: to a dark god I didn’t know but felt connected to, anyways! The model unfortunately disappeared shortly after the shoot, but they gave themselves willingly at the time; i.e., towards a cause I am proud to feature them inside, “as is.” Truly their ass and pussy are the envy of the gods above! So fuzzy and wicked, we make Marx gayer and consciously visible by shedding Freud and his ilk [re: Lacan, Zizek, Creed, etc]!

[artist: Siobhan]

In other word, natural demons—as well as their secularized, so-called “Satanic” proponents—are GNC devices of sin, vice and guilt; i.e., that, in our campable hands similar to Matthew Lewis’ own Matilda camping the canon—can threaten the heteronormative order to varying degrees of camp!)

(exhibit 52c1: Model and artist: Drooling Red and Persephone van der Waard. Dark forests also include swamps or lagoons [Grendel’s mother living in an underwater cave beneath a lake] with which to engage with forbidden, oft-female or at least monstrous-feminine water spirits/nymphs. The habitats are dark and forsaken by God and God’s cops, but also granting forbidden knowledge and pleasure offered up by nature-themed demons facing the cop and controlling them through sex: something that is invaded, chased and hunted by Cartesian agents looking for the sh[l]ock of that tight Numinous squeeze.)

Body horror is a horror of nature and change in ways the state conditions people to dread. But through experiencing that change myself as concurrent with others I have played with undergoing similar events, I can attest to the joy of such things; i.e., to be a god and know it, as Siobhan and Red showcase so happily. But also, we do it to have boundaries; i.e., setting those up during the cryptonymy process: as suitably revolutionary in our gay Satanic hands, a play-within-a-play (camped since Shakespeare’s rude mechanicals, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream).

I’d say Percy Shelley would approve, but I’m not sure he’s gay enough! The fact remains, Satan is cool, and all who fear us also love us in bad faith; i.e., in ways we can rub in their faces, meaning behind barriers they can never cross: flashing those in power with power as they try to pimp the devil they’re dancing with! Except, if you can’t empathize with us, at least we can fleece you before returning to outer space after cruising for sex (or food, money and other things)!

To rebel, then, is to showcase mutual consent when giving up a piece of the pie; i.e., doing so in ways they can’t actually taste or take, save in ways that sex workers control behind barriers that give them the ability to play and have fun: while getting what they need to survive! All are sexy when challenging profit during the whore’s revenge in spite of persecution mania! “If we spirits have offended,” then good; fuck you, hahaha! Furthermore, such things speak to development as a liminal task, one whose work is never done! Gods have to fight for their recognition, and they love tributes (cum or otherwise), mid-transformation and -exchange!

(artist: Siobhan)

To summarize Cartesian revolution and nature vs the state as we have covered it here, the entire natural class of monsters—furries, chimeras, and fairies, etc—can teach us forbidden or denied ways of thinking about sex that don’t harm anyone, but are invariably framed as “dangerous” by the status quo; re: “sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll”; i.e., according to their queer/pornographic elements as sexually animal-like, primitive/transgressive, undead and/or demonic, and drug-themed opiate bread-and-circus for the masses:

• mutually consensual “breeding” (the threat of impregnation without the consequence, but also with forbidden mates)
• “flashing” (to show that which is taboo, thus dangerous to expose)
• and HRT (exhibit 52g) as a kind of “potency boost” to the body/mind and the sex it has as animalistic

To play with fire, in the Faustian or Promethean sense, then, is to canonically threaten getting burned unto the demonized, thus blaming the whore as they’re policed for Original Sin (“sex is perditious, but also, humans are reprobate and supposed to deny gratuitous excess; i.e., in pursuit of a Puritan ethic,” which the whore’s “almost holy” temple severs the bond between man and God to liberate by communion with dark forces that transform us back into what capital stole from us). Yet, play as a riotous element can paradoxically induce/control labor (so to speak): as something to regain orgasmically through the same anisotropic mode’s epidural. Such is ludo-Gothic BDSM minus the big fucking needle to the back!

Whatever the form, all speak to/with that primal, Numinously rough stuff that can make the sex absolutely out-of-this-world; i.e., anatomy lessons tied to our animalized selves haunted by medicalized trauma, including our body and bodily fluids—our cum, saliva and lubrication, etc—but also our body hair and sex organs as innate parts of our biological selves theatrically worshipped in “monster parties” set to rock ‘n roll/metal: as something to fuck to, Salem’s lot abjected by Cartesian thought save as ghosts of the counterfeit (most men have no idea where the clitoris is or how to stimulate it, for example; e.g., in grad school when I was still in the closet, Zeuhl literally had to grab my hand and “stab” their clit with my fingers like a fucking treasure map: “This is where my clit is. Right. Here!” How seditious).

Now that we’ve looked at some extra examples of animalizing sex work, remember that our focus remains on humanizing sex workers through the Gothic mode’s decidedly queer lens. This chapter addresses trans, non-binary and intersex chattel stigmas during oppositional praxis—pointedly its sex education as good and/or bad relative to nature as something to damn or rescue; i.e., “groomer” panic as something to defend ourselves from while identifying with various stigma animal combinations like the snake, wasp, spider and bat, but also the minotaur (or something akin to a minotaur) as something for manly heroes to canonically slay during a warrior’s rite of passage we subvert, onstage and off (exhibit 51d, next section): mid-furry-panic.

As such, we shall also consider how trauma can subvert the heteronormative mythic structure when expressed by demons of the natural world; i.e., as walking castle-in-the-flesh elements of chaos—especially when merging totems with undead and demon language: as a chaotic force, death being a part of nature, but also having an expressly material function in human culture as aligned with or against nature; re: in hauntological, drug-like forms during acid Communism fostering radical empathy as a matter of dark reclamation towards what has been lost. If fascism is radical apathy through its own Gothic poetics (monsters, magic and drug use), then Communism is radical empathy (towards the alien) upending such devices by reversing abjection—all to reclaim everything capital takes from us in the bargain by stressing an animal connection from start to finish!

Furries, for example, are a recent attempt by those in the modern world to find a sense of shared togetherness, humanity and common aims; i.e., inside a material existence expressing the natural world as something to reunite with based on older animal mythological standards that, for all intents and purposes, are functionally extinct in their native forms.

(artist: Evul)

In turn, the same reunion with, and revival of, the past as bound to nature as a monstrous-feminine alien fairy whore—which already includes space aliens (e.g., the Twi’lek from Return of the Jedi, left, being something to fuck after Luke kills the monster and for which she takes his power)—also includes all the totemic demon forms we shall outline/examine moving forwards. Just as the elite transform the natural world, animals and chattelized workers to suit their class material interests, human workers can reclaim this power of animalistic expression and transformation to move beyond Capitalism; i.e., as the Great Destroyer not just of workers, but of the natural world and everything inside it (no classic reductionism, Marx).

To it, Capitalism is unstable by design; it decays and rapes by design, sexualizing and alienating everything. We challenge that on the Aegis, having our monstrous-feminine revenge, including its violent, terrifying sex and shapes forcing capital’s hand, in the bargain; i.e., it can’t compete with our labor if we take said labor back from them. They obscure their fetishes as a means of prolonging capital, covering up what translates in feudal language to impostor syndrome haunting the family tree; we expose those in ways that thwart profit and validate us independent of such structures: no assimilation. Instead, the trauma they give us becomes a weapon we give back; i.e., like the Skeksis and Deet, Kagero and the tornado golem, or Victor and the Creature, and many others. Issuing hot discharge/Santorum, only to abscond with their vanity/diminish their capacity to cause harm and leave them with a hot mess to clean up!

For something the state rejects, then, Hell is what they need as a matter of argument; i.e., as something to reject yet claim while rejecting it in a subjugated state of grace. Requiring their students play in it to pimp it, they go into our traps eager and blind, and that is where we get them good (with pussies like steel traps, below). She succ, the green fairy woman clapping back to drink your milkshake, Captain Kirk! “You’re terminated, fucker!” But also, so veiny in its tumescent vacillation! A palliative Numinous to impulsively plunge into! Macaroni in a pot!

(artist: Evul)

Onwards to “Call of the Wild,” part two: Dark Xenophilia (opening)“!

---

Footnotes

[1] Meaning “anecdotal”; i.e., BDSM as common; e.g., Cuwu responding to pet play and ultimately running away with a dog trainer at work (tragic and sad, but also hilarious).

[2] We already discussed this in the Undead Module (exhibit 37b).

[3] Who writes, “Due to the existence of this scene it is my working theory that Hank is uncircumcised. Without foreskin it would be quite difficult for Marie to masturbate him the way she did without lubricant, and it would be much harder for Hank to achieve an erection in the state he was in.” The plot thickens/therein lies the rub! (ibid.).

[4] Diversity is strength, beating singular perceptions of strength that, through Cartesian domination, try to hold onto power to everyone’s detriment.

[5] These various groupings can be extended to plants or fungi (e.g., dryads or mushroom men), but our focus in this section will remain on fauna, not flora. We also won’t be focusing on the traditional gay male language of otters or bears, for instance, but I freely admit (and encourage) that such mentalities could easily work within that framework—e.g., “bears” and “cubs” in a figurative sense, describing a male dom with a burly, hair body (versus their smaller, subby counterpart); or, the same idea but the parties are presented in fursona language: a bear and his cub from a visual, animalized standpoint. Similar to femboys (exhibit 91a), the notion can also be non-binarized; i.e., with enby AFABs calling themselves “bears” if they feel particularly masc (versus the lesbian gradient, between the butch and femme pole, with “futch” in the middle), etc. Point in fact, I mention this precisely because I don’t personally have a lot of cis-queer friends, and the history of the language is frankly cis. It’s still available and valid; I just won’t be using it or focusing on it.

[6] E.g., Hannah Gadsby’s skit about the Pouch of Douglas; per Cartesian thought and Capitalism, science at large catalogs nature to immortalize enterprising men of science (which mirror Cartesian men of reason, in Metroidvania, but also subjugated Galatea/Amazons like Samus).

[7] As Mieville responds when interviewed by Mark Bould:

MB: Since the 1960s fantasy has inevitably been cast in the shadow of J.R.R. Tolkien, and consequently there has been a widespread perception that fantasy is engaged in a nostalgic embrace of the idiocy of rural, hobbit life. But your novels are resolutely urban fantasies: both King Rat and The Tain offer vividly imagined versions of London; London is also visible through the sprawling city of New Crobuzon in Perdido Street Station; and despite setting The Scar almost entirely at sea most of the action takes place in a vast floating city called the Armada. What is the attraction of the city, and of London in particular?

CM: The nostalgia for rural life in Tolkien and all his innumerable grandchildren is politically very problematic. There are two things I’d want to say about that, though. First, although I’m on record at tedious length about how much I don’t particularly like Tolkien and have all sorts of problems with him, we should not dis Tolkien for the crimes of his epigones [emphasis, me], who came after and are immeasurably worse and less interesting and more straightforwardly reactionary than he. And second, the fact that a reactionary—contradictorily but, I think, broadly reactionary—impulse is evident in his writing, his aesthetic, is not of course a reason to dismiss him. There are plenty of writers whose politics do not stand in the way of their creating brilliant literature –most famously Balzac for Marx, but also Louis-Ferdinand Céline or, within genre fantasy, Gene Wolfe—and their politics is so embedded in their prose that you cannot simply get away from it either, you have to engage with it. The problem with Tolkien is that the prose itself, the form of the writing, intersects with his reactionary aesthetic so as to create what is, for me, very flat literature (source: “‘Appropriate Means’: An Interview with China Miéville,” 2003).

As I insist, twenty years later (and know I’m right, because Tolkien was taken and replicated unironically in hundreds of thousands [at least] of videogames, films and printed media [novels, short stories and comic books] after China’s interview):

First, power’s interrogation happens through class war in popular media; for the Gothic, class/culture war is monster war—a battle of the mind, the monster and the method as codified beliefs and behaviors during a shared stage: the “shadow zone’s” map and various environments, but especially the castle as a sex dungeon, my own extensive and ever-evolving research in Metroidvania examined how cross-media mimetic patterns are shared between Tolkien’s refrain and Cameron’s as ludologized. Their relationship is actually cryptomimetic, involving and describing a ludic meta-pattern/contract shared across a variety of genres out from older mediums and into videogames (“beyond the novel or cinema and into Metroidvania”): whether from Tolkien’s built world or Cameron’s it’s all from the same basic legends, but the aesthetic, context and function during class war (as something to adopt) is different when we examine and camp these authors ourselves; i.e., canon and camp of a suitably “Gothic” kind that announces itself (or forgets to).

It’s all drawn off the same basic map and theatrical function of the map, albeit at cross purposes relative to class function: Gothic doubles that challenge the pure, aching goodness of Tolkien’s gentrified war and Cameron’s white-savior variant of the cis-het Amazon. The Metroidvania map might be a lie wrought from similar legends as Cameron’s ordinance-heavy updating of the Tolkien refrain, but its cartography needn’t serve the state if the double is iconoclastic, thus campy in ways that Tolkien was allergic to (re: allegory and apocalypse) and which various accommodated intellectuals are in no hurry to express in their own work, especially in relation to their own lives; re: “the infamous discretions of academia waste a surprising amount of time commenting on all of these matters as separate from each other (source).

The example I gave after that quote was actually my MMU professors, but I think Mieville is going way too easy on Tolkien; i.e., “Tolkien sucks, but he was still an intellectual and not reactionary ‘enough!'” Bitch, please, he built a hypercanonical ludo-narrative model aped by legions of copycats built on racial conflict designed to uphold Capitalist Realism in perpetuity! As Malcolm X put it, the fox is more hypocritical and dangerous than the wolf, and Tolkien was most definitely a fox. You shouldn’t apologize for genocide, Mieville, and are a bad Marxist if you can’t stop glazing Tolkien’s asshole; i.e., we should “dis” Tolkien for the crimes of his epigones, because they were imitating him, you stupid fuck!

[8] We’ve discussed the importance of taking speedrunning invention outside of the text and into extratextual spheres; i.e., in order to apply speedrunning ingenuity to larger systemic issues. That being said, while the expectations of the shooter hero as classically being a racecar loaded for bear*, this liminality can still be enjoyed as an entertainment vehicle per Sarkeesian’s adage. But this doesn’t change the fact that the monomythic framework and neoliberal refrain are incredibly pernicious; re: Tolkien’s High Fantasy treasure map as followed by the shooter being inspired by Cameron’s Aliens having ripped off Starship Troopers and LotR‘s own “spectres of Beowulf” to make a female war boss in the neoliberal era (with Cameron basically aping Eowyn vs the Witch-King of Angmar in Return of the King [1956]—the white Amazon versus Darth Vader before Darth Vader appeared, twenty years later and was then pimped by Cameron, nine years after that); i.e., military copaganda meant to acclimate children to future war amid Capitalist Realism: “kill all enemies, become the strongest, and advance to future stages that encourage and repeat infinite military conquest in defense of home in-decay and threatened from within by a foreign plot that turns Indigenous occupants into demon zombies” (givers/receivers of state force per nature as fetishized and alien)! Rinse, repeat!

*Whose weapons click on other beings, like a laser-guided bomb drop: maximum damage, minimum effort. And bombs = money for the elite to pitch at states relying on imaginary enemies. The same idea applies to guns as sold in real forms treated like toys (e.g., 1ShotTV’s “How LETHAL is a 12 Gauge Mini Shell??? (Shockwave 590s vs Human Torso),” 2024) and vice versa (copaganda) through a shared constant: treat anyone who isn’t white cis-het and male as game to kill as quickly and machine-like as possible (the hunter’s paradox: infinite growth in a finite web of life).

[9] Re: Jon Lajoie: “Ladies love the bad boy look, and you can’t get much worse than a rapist.”

[10] If you doubt me, watch a stripper hang around tipping Johns, and compare that to the effusive praise that videogame streamers give their donators; i.e., all work is sexualized per a division of labor that treats male work as more worthy of pay/unworthy of stigma versus women’s work in the same professions. Such double standards are endless because labor division and exploitation are endless; i.e., inside capital monopolizing violence, terror and sex per the Gothic mode.

[11] In-fighting is built into Doom‘s gameplay loop, so much so that it becomes a means of solving special emergent puzzles; i.e., in fan-made gauntlets putting players to the test; e.g., Coincident’s “Okuplok. Ultra-Violence. 1 Save“ (2024).

[12] Re, my thesis argument regarding Tolkien and Cameron’s refrain:

Under Capitalist Realism, Hell is a place that always appears on Earth (or an Earth-like double)—a black fortress threatening state hegemony during the inevitable decay of a colonial body. Its widening state of exception must then be entered by the hero during the liminal hauntology of war as a repeatable, monomythic excursion—a franchise to subdue during military optimism sold as a childhood exercise towards “playing war” in fantastical forms; e.g., Castlevania or Metroid. Conjure a Radcliffean menace inside the Imperial Core, then meet it with American force.

Threatened, the state always responds with violence before anything else. Male or female, then, the hero becomes the elite’s exterminator, destroyer and retrieval expert, infiltrating a territory of crisis to retrieve the state’s property (weapons, princesses, monarchic symbols of power, etc] while simultaneously chattelizing nature in reliably medieval ways: alienating and fetishizing its “wild” variants, crushing them like vermin to maintain Cartesian supremacy and heteronormative familial structures […] Neoliberalism merely commercializes the monomyth, using parental heroic videogame avatars like the knight or Amazon pitted against dark, evil-familial doubles—parents, siblings and castles (and other residents/residences)—in order to dogmatize the player (usually children) as a cop-like vehicle for state aims (often dressed up as a dated iteration thereof; e.g., an assassin, cowboy or bounty hunter, but also a lyncher, executioner, dragon slayer or witchfinder general “on the hunt,” etc): preserving settler-colonial dominance through Capitalist Realism by abusing Gothic language—the grim reaper and his harvest. [… I.e.,] convince the hero that a place away from home is home-like; i.e., the thing they do not actually own being “theirs” (the ghost of the counterfeit) but “infested” (the process of abjection). Then, give them a map and have them “clean house”—an atrocious “fixer” out of the imaginary past who repairs the “broken” home room-by-room by first cleansing it of abject things “attacking it from within,” then disappearing with the nightmare they constitute (source).

and my follow-up Volume-One argument:

Canonical heroes triangulate against state targets, then, becoming the necessary exterminator of the settler-colonial model, but also the sexy destroyer and superheroic retrieval expert during the monomythic fetch quest (hyperbole and state heroism go hand-in-hand, exaggerating the menace, emergency and rescue to equal measure); i.e., a budding flower of war and larger-than-life tempter-of-fate (and the audience) walking the tightrope between Heaven and Hell, life and death, protector and aggressor, child and parent, but also wild and tame, pleasure and pain, black and white, strong and weak, invincible and vulnerable, good and evil—all while delivering state subjects (and the nuclear family unit) from evil, chaos, death, darkness, Hell, etc: the dark chronotope as a false copy whose hellish architecture and monarchy (the medieval bloodline) threatens the perceived legitimacy of the West’s own forgeries (while also haunting them). A school of canonical violence, then, the liminal hauntology of war predictably emerges, summoning the hero to occupy then suppress a prescribed “disorder” during an orderly chaos/Amazonomachia that breaks and repairs the symbolic home; i.e., over and over (a narrative of the crypt, circular ruin, infernal concentric pattern, Cycle of Kings, etc).

And since we’re focusing on the monstrous-feminine, here, I consider the most famous of all modern phallic women to be Hippolyta-married-to-Theseus: James Cameron’s neoconservative, “feral mother” take on Ellen Ripley serving as a warlike, parent-themed mentor for the children of the present (or those who, thanks to waves of terror, regress to child-like states). She’s the housemaid with a gun, facing the barbaric imagery of the imaginary past mirrored by actual colonial abuses, upholding the latter by banishing the former to benefit the elite—in short, by playing out a heroic story much in the same way that modern versions of Beowulf would: through sex and force, rape and war expressed in theatrical language that maintains Capitalist Realism (source).

To escape Hell, you must subvert its regular joy divisions while inside them; i.e., during ludo-Gothic BDSM’s liminal expression—with art through sex work being incredibly liminal; re: exploitation and liberation share the same spaces (e.g., the same cruiser’s bathroom stall, above).

[13] This kind of distinction can be made by either side of a dialectical-material struggle; e.g., Myth II and the Deceiver fighting like hell to save the West from sudden destruction (the Fallen, per Bungie’s arguments, known to instigate “natural” catastrophes like volcanoes or floods—thereby foisting other woes of Capitalism’s onto an imaginary scapegoat):

The scouts told us that Alric and nearly three thousand men from the Legion have come from Muirthemne to face Soulblighter. Unfortunately, they were met by Shiver and her army in the valley about two hours downstream from the dam. If the dam were destroyed, the resulting deluge would kill everything in its path for miles.

Upon hearing this, The Deceiver shook his head, his face twisting in anger. He moved slowly through the crowd, commanding all those present to defend the dam, insisting that he would punish those who allowed it to fall. Without another word, he headed downstream.

I asked one of the Black Robes why The Deceiver had not stayed to help us and he tersely replied, “he goes to warn the Emperor – moving through odd angles; faster than any man, and if unobserved, much faster than that” (source: Bungie).

Unlike the Deceiver’s token assimilation, we don’t work for the emperor in defense of the West. Yet, our powers inside Capitalism’s shadow zone will prove just as useful defending us from Capitalism; i.e., by letting us—through the Gothic—intimate and critique grappling hyperobjects using poetic abstractions: great, powerful Destroyers manifesting as giants, castles, suits of armor and so on!

[14] Playing devil’s advocate (I mean, just look at that goatee), the actor for the character (who historically plays the sell-out) makes a compelling point; i.e., not to justify it, but highlight—me playing defense for him, a bit—that the state’s unfair advantages do make people sell out, and furthermore, is a historical-material fact. We need to recognize and portray said fact when going up against the state and its proponents’ lies, ourselves, in real life; i.e., the useful idiot as someone to challenge when challenging us—doing so according to deceptions being half-real on both sides, each going back and forth between fabrication and reality (a bit like the characters in the movie):

The Matrix is now back on everybody’s radar thanks to the upcoming sequel, and with that brings forth the questions that have plagued all of our minds ever since we first gazed into the artificial world way back in 1999. One such question regards actor Joe Pantoliano’s character Cypher, a member of the heroic crew who betrayed the rest for another chance at being “plugged in”. However, that is not exactly how Pantoliano sees things, with the actor having recently defended Cypher’s actions.

“I always have arguments with fans of that movie because they look at Cypher and they say ‘You were a traitor.’ And I, being years in show business and having to dissect and having liberal vision of the character I’m portraying, I’m always arguing on his behalf. On Cypher’s behalf. Like, who wouldn’t take that deal? If you were given an opportunity and a choice and then you decided you made the wrong choice. “You take the red pill, the girl that you love is in love with somebody else.”

“You’ve gone through six or seven ‘Ones’; Neo is just another guy that’s gonna get his ass killed. And he’s going, ‘I’ve made a terrible mistake! Ignorance IS bliss. Why shouldn’t I go back to a world and pick the person I want to be. Pick the career I want to have and have no memory [re: Plato’s “writing is the death of memory” argument]. I’d betray anybody, I’d kill anybody.'”

So, much like everything else in the world of The Matrix, things are a lot more complicated as they initially seem. Joe Pantoliano reasons that Cypher is so unhappy with his choice to wake up in the real world that he has no other choice than to make a deal and return to a world of blissful ignorance (ibid.).

Cipher’s the jester-pimp in the king’s court. Having already duped himself, he speaks to the audience in ways that let them realize how—after Cipher is ignominiously dead—still remains a man (or echo of a man) that made the wrong choice… yet also remains sympathetic insofar as we’re facing the same Faustian dilemma he once did; i.e., versus a shadow of a devil that was once a man and still might be: as something to learn from according to his caged rhetoric being part of the film’s central lesson. However “stacked” the deck seems, then, said choice historically-materially predicates on the same criminogenic conditions conjured to our service in duality (not just for the state, Marx, but workers, too)! A mirror (and its arguments) can always go both ways!

[15] Meaning “in the dark, with set Gothic-Marxist tenets but not a hard plan” (again, as I did with this whole book). This might seem less-than-conducive but “form follows function” really applies, here; i.e., trying to build something that, like a Metroidvania or Gothic castle, builds itself in a meta sense using ergodic motion: as a statement of longevity through application. Trying to stay lose and flexible enough to replace and encourage those post-scarcity results is all part of the fun; i.e., an adventure partially obscured; re: “Like Communism, a Gothic castle is always incomplete, in continuum but seems to suggest its full potential as a powerful, unmappable suggestion each and every visit” (re: “A Song Written in Decay“). In short, you can pick a spot to build Gothic Communism, but you can’t have a set plan because it needs to be flexible, hence creatively inventive enough to survive and subvert Capitalism ipso facto, occupying the same space. Once you’re primed, you’ll know how and learn to recognize the feeling. You’ll respect it, letting it work until what’s done is done. Let Medusa cook.

[16] Privacy and intimacy as we know it

Will be a memory

Among many to be passed down

To those who never knew (Death’s “1,000 Eyes,” 1995).

[17] The Gothic is serialized, and creatures of chaos yield many interpretations per moment and over space and time as looping back around. For example, as NOBM666 (above) writes,

The personalities for me can go two ways. First they are anew, fire [succubae] with one sole purpose, to please Chernabog. The second, they remember what they were before but they focus on what they are now as their purpose is surely the same, to please Chernabog. The latter point holds a richness of torture to the original forms of these creatures forced into something new and to the forms they hold now, tainted by their ugly past self’s and all the profane acts they have done. There is richness to this point also regarding the sex change and admittance to the cause, where ugly male demons are made beautiful females, where all they can do is just accept or risk destruction, where they are forced to act sensual and shame themselves in an erotic show to please their master. This humiliation and confusion adds a depravity to it all, one I imagine Chernabog relishes.

Now I can get carried away with the many themes and ideas suggested but I will end on a bonus thought. The demons made the fire which shapes into alluring maidens but when their fire is put out by Chernabog are they changed into to a pig, wolf and goat OR are they just revealing what was beneath the flame all along? As the flame burns out revealing bestial feet working up the body in a grotesque way, it makes you wonder were those dumb barnyard animals the fire maidens all along, gifted the forms to express their purpose to their master who cruelly took back the gift? (source).

My own interpretations of any monsters (and their masters) are a bit more dialectical-material, but the spirit of the discourse is very much the same: the chaos of interpretation, versus canonical order squashing the pedagogy of the oppressed haunting the shadow of police violence (and vice versa).

[18] “An ancient race of people… the Druids… No one knows… who they were… or what they were doing… but their legacy remains!” (source). Camping not just the Gothic, but Marx, this 1984 tour-de-farce repeats past tragedies in ways we can camp; i.e., with the same ghosts of the counterfeit, coaxing these Marxist spirits out of their hiding place like Disney’s own Paganistic lord, on Bald Mountain. But it can be very funny as we do it!

All the same, humor and rebellion aren’t mutually exclusive. Instead, they separately or together speak to an alienation with nature through the imaginary past we’re questing for Numinous reunion with; re (from “Composites to the Occult to Totems of the Natural World”):

demons embody poetic exchange—as unequal/forbidden, and with transformative linguo-material devices (re: power, darkness, knowledge; if I mention a particular noun in this module, it’s because I’m stressing it). As such, they are classically made, summoned or found, and argue dualistically (through doubles) along these circuits of poetic discourse; i.e., by creating something out of clay or summoning it into a clay-like substance (or dead flesh, possessed victim, graveyard soil, etc): to deal/treat with power in all its forms, including of nature and death as old, haunted, anathema and ubiquitous. Knowledge is power and vice versa during such exchanges; i.e., as dark, anisotropic.

Couched in “darkness visible” as a poetic, xenoglossic device, we can make not just voices, but also bodies that speak cryptonymically to taboo, illusory and paradoxical things, injecting them with fresh poetic life (trans people are poets of identity and the flesh, above); i.e., a half-real, checkered combination of violent, terrifying and hellish morphological freedom of expression, existing in andro/gynodiverse defiance of state monopolies, trifectas and qualities of capital, hence Vitruvian medicalization and genocidal apathies (re: the Shadow of Pygmalion as white/xenophobic, fearing things not of the West [“not of this Earth!”] and bastardizing them as abject, alien evil, forgotten; i.e., reimagined with asymmetrical/guerilla powers exploited by the state but not monopolized by them)!

(source: Testament’s Dark Roots of the Earth, 2012; artist: Eliran Kantor)

Per Hogle, the ghost of the counterfeit furthers abjection through the middle class upholding status-quo arrangements of power and knowledge through Gothic fakeries; i.e., viewing colonized land as dark and alien, vis-à-vis Cartesian thought and heteronormative language demonizing older forms of culture connected to nature, life and death, having become alien in ways that uphold capital (and its black/white colonial binary argument). Under Capitalist Realism, something is “dark” if it ostensibly moves anything of value (re: power and knowledge) away from the status quo. Generally this darkness is associated with the vengeful imaginary past based on buried historical atrocities, the latter paradoxically twisted by the former to keep control right where it is (among the elite). Anything that challenges this paradigm is canonically framed as dark, evil, profligate; i.e., nature as vengeful whore, which capital takes revenge on through DARVO-style police violence/obscurantism, witch hunts, tokenism and moral panic […]

Rebel power/knowledge, then, becomes ontological in highly dark, Satanic, and “archaically” poetic ways; i.e., through iconoclastic abstraction and impression, but also hefty substance, sensitivity and savory deliciousness regarding the natural world as funerary and wild (as forbidden fruit generally is): “death” as an extant state of constant radical change, made by those “of nature” the forces of light deem ethnocentrically “lesser” or “accursed” while conveniently abusing the same language of the imaginary past’s priestly and funerary necrobiome, themselves (always in service to profit/a Cartesian paradigm raping nature as whore, Pagan, black, the latter closer to life and death through reimagined death gods, post-genocide—above). And yet, all monsters are linguo-material devices, hence exist in anisotropic duality during oppositional praxis; i.e., in dialectical-material struggle, moving power towards workers or the state. This further complicates by a give-and-take approach to what is being exchanged. Whereas the undead take essence when they feed in relation to trauma, demons give knowledge to transform themselves and others into demons when they teach (source).

True to form, then, the Gothic (and its kissing cousin, the Romantics) routinely wrestled/wrestle with Numinous/Sublime size difference, mid-fetish and convention/cliché; i.e., doing so in ways that people respond to as a conscious (to not-so-conscious) recognition of its own silliness and seriousness likewise forever being at war!

To it, the music in Spinal Tap‘s “Stonehenge” actually sounds—in this old metalhead’s opinion, anyways—pretty fucking great instrumentally alongside fairly rote (on purpose) lyrics:

Stonehenge! Where the demons dwell
Where the banshees live and they do live well
Stonehenge! Where a man’s a man
And the children dance to the Pipes of Pan

Hey!

Stonehenge! ‘Tis a magic place
Where the moon doth rise with a dragon’s face
Stonehenge! Where the virgins lie
And the prayers of devils fill the midnight sky

And you my love, won’t you take my hand?
We’ll go back in time to that mystic land
Where the dew drops cry and the cats meow [mew goes the void kitty]
I will take you there, I will show you how (source: Genius).

It’s not so different from Rush’s “Xanadu” or Witchfynde’s “Leaving Nadir” save that it’s pointedly camping—”into the living rock,” mid-Satanic-Panic—Coleridge’s 1816 xenophobic-philic “Kubla Khan” (the latter romancing the conqueror and fetishizing nature while seemingly disavowing the Gothic as Coleridge loved to do). But also, the entire glorious mess can be enjoyed for the “true camp” of the dancing little people around the Lucky-Charms-sized monolith; i.e., one that both shrinks said Numinous per the usual liminal hauntologies at war and expands them through a different force than earnest worship (or horror/terror): a sincere ribbing of the whole counterfeit that still flirts with the ghost of said counterfeit as something to tease. “I think that the problem may have been that there was a Stonehenge monument on the stage that was in danger of being crushed by a dwarf, alright? That tended to understate the hugeness of the object!” Or, as Terry Gilliam once said, “It’s only a model!”

Yet, like “Ozymandias,” such things don’t cancel each other out during the call of the void/wild (and its various interpretations; e.g., Lovecraft’s fascist xenophobia)—can, in the same breath, be enjoyed separately and together in ways that don’t worship the usual altars that self-serving men like Poe, Conrad, Lovecraft, or Scott, etc, did; i.e., the fearing of “druids” by knocking on wood to keep them at bay… or to invoke their ghostly memory and dance with them in the present space and time (those treated like druids right now). All part of the fun, kids! But also, there’s a science behind it to appreciate, too:

Stonehenge might have not actually been an arena to watch guys in hooded robes and glitter eyeshadow act all otherworldly, but it did have killer acoustics. At least the way it was recently found to have been configured to amplify sound but still keep it inside defies the notion that no one knew how to achieve special effects during the Stone Age. University of Salford professor Trevor Cox and his research team worked backwards — instead of building a scale model of a future concert hall, they used the prehistoric gathering place to create such a model. The Spinal Tap-size Stonehenge they created could literally speak (or sing) of its secrets (source: Elisabeth Rayne’s ” Stonehenge’s Unreal, Real-Life Acoustics Would Have Impressed the Guys of Spinal Tap,” 2020).

(ibid.)

Huh, no shit! “Yeah, science, bitch!”

In any event, canon retreats from the present to resist the learning of new things as detrimental to its canonical value; i.e., its ability to control workers. But for the iconoclast, this only enhances the experience, thus praxial potential we can work with, in the future! “Sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll,” babes! It’s our Trojan Horse mirroring theirs save in function! Engagement and application to synthesize praxis are what matter! We’re literally playing with the past to camp it, working with dead symbols, nerdy pretensions of grandeur and metaphor (“to break my fast on honeydew” speaking as much to sex and drugs as separate versus together); i.e., to achieve the only things that are sacred: universal human, animal and environmental rights! Give ‘Em Hell, indeed, we’re walking away from Omelas and into a stately pleasure dome Coleridge couldn’t envision, no matter how much laudanum he took!

[19] Coleridge took laudanum; I get high on people, friendship, and sex. The virgin loser versus the Stacy trans an-Com!

[20] The film releases the daughter from Puritan bondage; i.e., by destroying the nuclear family model, but all while fearful of and fascinated towards the witch of the forest as a profoundly abject being: kill your family first, then live deliciously out in the dark forest beyond Capitalist Realism/Lacan’s Real treating Marxism as contained in a post-Freudian Black Bubble!