This blog post is part of “The Total Codex,” a fourth promotion originally inspired by the three I did in 2024 with Harmony Corrupted and Romantic Rose: “Brace for Impact,” “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil.” 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). “The Total Codex” shall do the same, but with Volume Zero/the thesis volume (versus “Make It Real” promoting Volume One/the manifesto, which I will release after “The Total Context” completes). 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 “The Total Codex’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Zero is already written/was released on October 2023! 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.

Thesis Volume (Volume Zero) [volume opening]

The Absurd[1] is the conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life, and the human inability to find any in a purposeless, meaningless or chaotic and irrational universe.

—Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)

Capitalism is a giant graveyard, but a shared one to “rock out” inside. For Gothic Communists, the crypt is a place to dance within, while those who pale in face of Capitalism eating itself punch the skeleton (or giant suit of armor) as a scapegoat. Unlike them, we’ve acclimated to chaos because we’re the underclass (to varying degrees of intersecting privilege and axes of oppression); they’re the mythical “middle class,” given pretty baubles thus thinking they have the most to lose: “land back = white genocide.” My silly fools, unite (with us against the state); you have only to lose your chains!

Chaos isn’t meaningless, but an invitation to make your own meaning by cheating death in a ludic sense—i.e., tearing up the Faustian ludic contract of Capitalism by being a “spoilsport” of sorts. The thesis volume, then, contains my expanded author’s foreword and thesis proper on Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism, as well as the “camp map” and symposium, which together summarize and articulate its broadest and most common arguments and key points (e.g., the Gothic, monstrous-feminine, Amazonomachia). The author’s foreword explains the various “pregnancies” I had in order “to give birth” to its respective volumes (my not-so-little demon babies), as well as thanking my prime Muse[2] involved in its insemination: my partner (and cover model for this volume), Bay.

(artist: Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri)

The foreword also outlines the cultivation of a broad and far-reaching concept—the Wisdom of the Ancients—which later in the volume (and rest of the book) will be applied to various related ideas; e.g., class consciousness and “darkness visible.” Following that, I will conclude the foreword by discussing my thought process in making the book; i.e., how its making shaped my thought process, moving through the birth canal and towards the finishing line.

Author’s Foreword: “On Giving Birth,” the Wisdom of the Ancients, and Afterbirth

…in assuming [this book] as the basis of a work of fancy, I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors. The event on which the interest of the story depends is exempt from the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment. […] I have thus endeavoured to preserve the truth of the elementary principles of human nature […] The circumstance on which my story rests was suggested in casual conversation (source).

—Mary Shelley, “Preface to Frankenstein” (1818)

(model and artist, left: Mary Shelley and Richard Rothwell; model, right: Persephone van der Waard)

Pregnancies are seldom planned. This book, Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion, or Gothic Communism, isn’t just a big-ass porn catalog full of cool, “thirsty” art, nor is it just my little trans demon baby and pure, loving brainchild made with those who passively or actively contributed to its pages; it’s me, a trans woman, consciously reverse-engineering my own creative process as having been ongoing for years (thus why I have so many exhibits from my own work—I had already drawn them years ago). For the better part of fifteen months, this complex reification’s trial and error has happened in starts and stops after long nights at the desk, sleeping on my increasingly regular musings and waking afresh with new queer epiphanies—to keep things straight in my own head, much like Sarah Connor kept journals for herself while figuratively and literally giving birth to rebellion (and doing my best to avoid coming off as a white savior). Just as an expected child is fueled and shaped by its mother’s diet, my book was inspired by the process of older poetics/poiesis (meaning “to make,” specifically a production of that which has never existed; i.e., the simulacrum, or imitation fashioned through   mimesis). The idea of Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism wasn’t just subversion, but reclamation of what was lost to fight back against capital as Einstein’s fish might: to learn not what made me feel stupid for being unable to climb a tree as my prescribed “betters” could, but swim in water as I was always meant to through a cultivated emotional/Gothic intelligence linked to my inherent neurodivergence and queerness as useless to capital (outside of moral panics).

We’ll continue to unpack “Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism” at length during the thesis paragraph/statement. For now, it is class/culture war relayed through monstrous poetics that actively and class-consciously subvert their canonical norms’ etiology by recultivating the Superstructure and reclaiming the Base. I devised the concept to process systemic trauma through ironic monstrous poetics (the making of campy monsters) and thus have written/illustrated a book that is full of what I love: sex positivity, catharsis and of course, monsters. It was originally an attempt to heal/recover from academia and my inability “to make it” as a trans woman/neurodivergent person; as well as my exes and what they did to me, but also a constant reflection on the dialogic Gothic imagination of the larger world and dialectical-material expressions of trauma within its historical materialism. For example, last December I tried very hard to use my manuscript to relate to an ex of mine named Zeuhl[3], taking an idea they leveled against my argumentation and expanding on the pushback I received; i.e., I wanted them in my life and the book was at least partially an attempt to keep them as close as I could. This did not last and three years after they unexpectedly broke up with me in 2019 (while overseas with “an old flame,” as they put it), we finally fell out for good. Undeterred, I continued writing my book, whereupon I met one of my current partners, Bay. Bay’s enthusiastic participation led to a profound expansion on my book’s ideas; i.e., through a shared desire to communicate these academic notions to a wider public by refining them. We didn’t want to reduce them to the accommodated intellectual’s granularized, academic “word soup,” archaic paywall system, all-around gatekeeping and cognitive estrangement, but instead focus on practical, holistic expression as publicly synthesized; i.e., amongst all workers in intuitive solidarity against the state as our ultimate foe.

palimpsest

“A manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain”—common in Gothic stories, which amount to a cycle of lies; i.e., historical materialism: bourgeois history is unreliable, treacherous, like a Gothic lover or a concentric chest/midden of unreliable materials (cryptonyms). It can apply to a variety of media or formats: sculpture, music, clothes, videogames, etc (exhibit 5b, 43a/43b).

Gothic narrators/narratives

For its hero, narrators, spaces and speakers, a Gothic tale regularly involves unreliable/conflicting artificers and imposters, but also the patriarchal bloodline or castle as invented; i.e., as a series of concentric, sedimentary palimpsests. In the canonical sense, everything is fetishized, valorized and disseminated, then spread far and wide to cover up the ghost of the counterfeit (the circular lie of the West) with more ghosts that further the lie. Iconoclastic variants challenge this myopia with their own counterfeits’ opposing class character inside a shared, contested midden.

Gothic doubling

The black mirror of historical materialism’s all our yesterdays. It is the fated, ominous premonition of endless circuituity—that everything has already occurred before, or things that have already occurred will occur again from the same materials that occur out of what has already occurred; i.e., for everything that exists, there must (somewhere in the universe) be a dialectical-material “shadow” whose coinciding status as former-or-future counterfeit is actually historical materialism’s circular approach to space and time felt in the current moment: everything that has ever existed will exist again or things that will exist have already existed in ways that offer up a prior version’s dialectical-material opposition to it—a castle or soldier as “evil” twin, uncanny and undead, replicated like an echo, a virus, a shade; the civil war of black infinity. There is no automatic moral character, merely the presence of infinite possibility amid crushing gravity and decay.

the Gothic heroine

The oft-female (or at least feminine) protagonist of Gothic stories. Classically a passive sex object/detective/damsel-in-distress, which became increasingly masculine, active and warlike in the 20th century onwards (though Charlotte Dacre beat everyone to the punch in 1806 when she wrote Zofloya, having the masculine-yet-trammeled Victoria de Loredani stab Lilla, the archetypal Gothic heroine, to death[4]). Unlike their male counterparts, who tend to default to soldiers or scientists (violent/mentally fragile men of war and reason with—at least in America—closeted ties to Nazi Germany and parallel conservative movements wearing a liberal guise), women within the colonial binary are relegated to spheres of domesticated ignorance; i.e., “Something is wacky about my residence, my guest, my wardrobe, etc. Guess I’ll go investigate (exhibit 48a)!” Ann Radcliffe treated the protecting of female virtue as an “armoring” (exhibit 30c) process that commonly worked through a swooning[5] mechanism; though somewhat problematic on its face due to its pro-European origins, the idea of armoring one’s virtue still presents the notion of feminine flexibility as facing monstrous-feminine things that male, or at least “phallic,” heroes cannot rationalize or stab/shoot to death; i.e., the paradox of terror as something to reclaim through counterterror devices that, yes, include a fair bit of rape, taboo sex, and murderous stereotypes. In other words, it’s entirely possible to have the Great Destroyer persona without being bigoted, but you have to camp it, first.

Star Wars (1977) famously presented the Death Star as something to blow up during a canal chase bombing run, flanking Luke Skywalker with fascist hounds; Battlestar Galactica (2005) inverts the canal chase into a head-to-head, one-on-one dogfight, putting the hero, Starbuck, on a paradoxical collision course with herself but also all our yesterdays: the female knight/Gothic heroine jousting with her own dark reflection as one narrative in a series of endlessly foretold collisions. The nightmarish reverie holds her in trance, bringing her close enough that we see the whites of her eyes—to stare into her very soul. As we do, we’re invited to project onto the screen, seeing a “reflection” of ourselves upon Starbuck; i.e., not just as a dramatic vehicle for cheap, quick “feels,” but the uncomfortable sensation of mistaken identity that this has all somehow happened before—is all happening again right this very second; it becomes an undead phenomenology to freeze under and stare at, but also a communion with all the dead generations who preceded us/will proceed after us. As part of this cathedral, we are merely “in the middle” of a never-ending struggle:

For workers, then, this book is about harnessing the awesome power of the Gothic double—of cultivating a Gothic counterculture useful to liberating sex work from capitalistic bondage, thus requires camping canon through holistic study of the larger aforementioned cycle; holistic study is the returning to, and reflecting upon, old points/dated expressions after assembling them in a powerful, fractally recursive way to understand larger structures and patterns’ own divisions and replications across space and time, but also representations of space-time (especially if they’re designed to conceal themselves through subterfuge, valor and force). Camping canon, then, is the profoundly chaotic challenging of singular, thus harmful interpretations (and their reactionary responses) through the commodification of power and resistance as the ongoing (and hopelessly messy) struggle between colonizer and colonized; i.e., “nothing is sacred” (except human rights and the health of ecosystems and the humane treatment of animals) vs Capitalism’s this is old, not new, not something that is sold as “fresh,” ignoring old theatrical devices like medieval puppet shows and bad-on-purpose voices, asides/speaking to the audience, wrestling super moves, theremins and Scooby Doo [1969] running sound effects, Greek Choruses, Kabuki masks, and Jojo’s “tension” katakana and terrible (thus lovely) puns, etc. Capital is always trying to commodify, thus colonize, the antiquated oral traditions of theatre/folklore, but through the inexorable drive of capital these invariably become outmoded as discarded hauntologies/cryptonyms that we can reclaim from canon as it crumbles and seeks profit elsewhere. Canon can always be camped, and relies upon old theatrical stratagems and Gothic hauntologies, but also “talking funny” or incorrectly to achieve its campy Jester’s affect.

(artist: Frederick Richard Pickersgill—taken with my phone while I was visiting the Manchester Art Gallery with Zeuhl in 2018)

Before I continue, the amount of influence Bay has had on my book cannot be easily quantified, so I will simply say that I have a profound gratitude and appreciation for their boundless, substantial contributions. I wanted to summarize that in a brief but heartful and sincere message to them:

Bay,

As neurodivergent and non-binary yourself—and struggling to find purpose and value in academia like I did—you said it makes you feel valuable and seen in an “encompassing way”; i.e., kindness without judgement, and written/illustrated to share with the world what makes you special in my eyes. As such, you said that you want me to not just process trauma but fill this book with love (our making of love). Thanks to you, I have acquired the means—the awesome power—to be able to do that. I have many muses, but you are my Muse, and this foreword and every volume has a dedication to you at the start for a reason. You are the light in my storm, the pulse to my heart, the ghost in my castle; and this book is our shared “stim toy”/song in the night. “The creatures of the night, what sweet music they make!” May our song in the night bring other workers peace and love, and our spectres of Marx—the ghosts of all the dead generations—revive and weigh on the brains of the living, terrifying the elite senseless as we make the ghosts of men like Marx campy, thus sexy and funny according to our Wisdom of the Ancients as we dance with ghosts (with Marx’ memory already rather dry and caricaturized—i.e., of their own “ponsed-up” masculinity [as you put it] relayed through their pointy beards, overinflated egos, and overbearing intellects; and ironically enough, through his debatable anti-Semitism[6] later weaponized by bigots).

Love,

—Mommy

(source: Zelda Dungeon)

The idea with this book isn’t just to camp canon and the Shadow of Pygmalion[7]/ghost of the skeleton king and his madness (the bigoted historical materialism of the status quo that anchors gender roles and identities to biological sex within the colonial binary) by dancing with them, but also Marx’s ghost (which famous thinkers like Max Weber had to argue with in their own work). Marx wasn’t gay enough for my tastes, thus could never camp canon to the amount required. In camping him, I’m obviously doing this through the Gothic mode, specifically its making of monsters—their lairs, battles, identities and struggles—through a reclaimed Wisdom of the Ancients that represents ourselves during shared dialectical-material struggles that take what Marx touched on before going further than he ever could:

the Wisdom of the Ancients

A cultural understanding of the imaginary past. The past is always imaginary to some extent, but through less wise forms reliably leads to genocide and tremendous suffering; i.e., Marx’ prophesied tragedy and farce[8]:

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue (source: “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” 1852).

or according to structures of power that preserve themselves through blind pastiche, parody and canonical art. These foolish forms operate according to structures of power that preserve themselves through blind pastiche, parody and canonical art: pure evil and pure good as an essentialized struggle divorced from material reality—simply the forces of light versus the forces of darkness, respectively of good and evil: not of Milton’s humanized, revolutionary Satan, but the Biblical Satan as a vicious backstabber embodied in Beowulf (c. 700) and echoed in future written forms through the canonical monomyth endlessly mimicking itself in heteronormative forms of gender trouble and gender parody.

In turn, canon essentialize Capitalism’s vicious cycle and cataclysmic arrangements of the imaginary past as something that is simultaneously Malthusian, but also paradoxically “as good as it gets” and threatened by the doomsday myopia of nominal Communism that Capitalist Realism affords. As their sense of agency and certitude collapse with the world around them, workers—but especially the middle class—are left feeling cheated or lied to, and either blame the system or scapegoats. Scapegoats are historically easier because you can shoot or kill them, implying the solution is a simple, straightforward one. It’s the “tried-and-true” “wisdom” of the Roman fool, falling on their own sword while Rome burns not once, but over and over. Such “wisdom” is not wise, but a false power, which Gothic Communists seek to reclaim through our own doubling of the imaginary past—its monsters, castles and battles—as a kind of “living document” that can reclaim the Gothic imagination, thus our ability to think; i.e., through lost forms of knowledge retailored for the complexities of the modern world—its warring mentalities, sexualities, monsters (codified beliefs and actions) and praxis during class and culture war.

Something important to consider is the inherently fictional or theatrical nature to history as fabricated in some shape or form by good-faith and bad-faith actors (to which, the stage is merely a place to communicate ideas in theatrical language). Napoleon himself—a famous propagandist inundated with the image of the past as a means of self-deification—once said: “History is a set of lies that people have agreed upon. Even when I am gone, I shall remain in people’s minds the star of their rights, my name will be the war cry of their efforts, the motto of their hopes” (source: PBS’s “Self-Made Myth”).

For Napoleon, and many others like him, the truth is something to bend, but also present in theatrical forms invoking the imaginary past; i.e., a means to hide their true intent in bad faith. By comparison, it isn’t inherently dishonest for a sex-positive person to “lie” in a theatrical sense if it means protecting oneself from bad-faith actors. In other words, good-faith actors rely on theatre and performance to relay the truth in fictionalized, wildly fantastical forms. The aim isn’t misinformation, but a form of acting on- and offstage in every register available to question the so-called legitimacy of people just like Napoleon in the present day—i.e., so-called “revolutionaries” who ultimately used the awesome power of propaganda to manipulate workers towards inserting them into power before reneging on the rights of these same persons while acting out their Romanized fantasies (a trend Marx touches on in the above quotation, regarding Napoleon’s ghost on the post-Terror politics of the mid-1800s: “The French, so long as they were engaged in revolution, could not get rid of the memory of Napoleon”). We live in the state’s shadow of acting out its own lies(-upon-lies) to preserve itself through a ghostly procession of men who-would-be-Caesar similarly becoming ghosts of themselves along the pro-state meta-narrative. Theatre—including its popular, romanticized sites and participants—is a dangerously delicious proposition that can have far-reaching consequences:

(artist: Spencer Devlin Howard)

The thing to remember is that acting, music, poetry and theatre are all powerful ways to communicate, but also a time-tested means of survival against bad-faith actors (the above photo is a cosplay of the villain Salieri, who supposedly poisoned Mozart to death. Regardless if that’s true, Mozart wasn’t exactly hard to attack; an infamously vulgar[9] man, he died penniless in a pauper’s grave—”hoisted on his own petard,” as it were). People act all the time for a variety of reasons; many more “lie” at particular places where lying is expected (e.g., the postpunk disco) as a means of getting at the truth in ways designed to help others (thus policed and infiltrated by undercover state agents).

As I point out with the likes of Frederic Jameson, Edward Said and Luis Borges, this is not uncommon, but indeed involves a shared transgenerational/-continental conversation about persons who know they aren’t “being honest” insofar as official histories are concerned:

Fredrick Jameson is a Marxist critic not without opinions on the science fiction and fantasy genres. For example, he writes, “[science fiction’s] multiple mock futures [transform] our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come” (152) and yet “Fantasy remains generically wedded to nature and to the organism […] Nature thus seems to function here primarily as the sign of an imaginary regression to the past and to older pre-rational forms of thought” (64). Whereas SF addresses the unaddressable―the Utopian ideal, through an imagined “future,” which is really just our present in disguise—fantasy happily engages in the practice of magic and mystical beliefs, which are non-materialistic and affiliated with Antiquity and older, less-modern concepts. What we have here is Jameson describing his view of these genres—their perceived function, according to him, rather than their true, objective, universal function, if there is such a thing. I say, “according to him,” because Jameson writes what he sees, like all writers. Keeping this in mind, I’ll choose authors at random to make my point: What does he have in common with Wolfgang Iser, Jonathan Swift, Plato, Jane Austen, Edward Said, Thomas More and Ursula Le Guin? They are all liars.

Swift was an 18th century Irish satirist; Plato, a Classical philosopher from Ancient Greece; Austen, a 19th century English novelist; and More, a Renaissance writer who wrote in Latin. Excusing the fact that the rest are modern writers and thinkers, each still comes from a different time—that is, the present, which is unique to each. So while Jameson, Iser, Said and Le Guin are all 20th century writers, Jameson is still an American Marxist literary critic; Iser, a German literary critic; Said, a Palestinian, post-colonial literary critic; and Ursula Le Guin, an American fantasy/science fiction novelist. They distinguish themselves in the same broad profession[: lying to get at the concealed truth] (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Jameson and the Art of Lying,” 2017).

When asked by a symposium-goer what my point was in acknowledging that everyone lies, I was a bit long-winded. In hindsight, I’d like to reply some six years after the fact: “People lie, but lying isn’t strictly speaking a means of concealing the truth; rather, it can help us get at the truth, generally by acknowledging the shortcomings of a given academic or author revered for their special strategies.” As we shall see, these past figures weren’t gods, and I certainly won’t hold back when taking the likes of Jameson or Ann Radcliffe to task (especially Radcliffe). Indeed, we should fucking wail on them and see what comes out (for analysis but also for therapeutic[10] reasons) Yet, I will do so while also doing my best to take what’s useful from their own body of work and injecting it into my own. People lie, so it’s good to ask why and in service to what; i.e., who says what about them and why.

For example, Mark Dooley writes of Derrida,

What I saw in Derrida was a man of equal genius whose affirmative understanding of home redeemed French thought from its obsessive oikophobia.

There is one element of my existence which often perplexes many people. How is it that I—Sir Roger Scruton’s intellectual biographer and literary executor—should have written extensively on his arch-nemesis Jacques Derrida? Derrida was, after all, one of those upon whom Scruton regularly poured abundant scorn. He was a high priest of “Nothingness” whose soulless alchemy had corrupted the foundations of intellectual life. Generations of students had fallen under his spell, their minds having disintegrated in the process. This wizard of gobbledygook had earned himself a global reputation, but he was nothing more than a purveyor of “nonsense.” That, at least, was Roger’s interpretation of Derrida until, later in life, he softened his stance in response to my view of the so-called “father of deconstruction” (source: “The Surprising Conservatism of Jacques Derrida,” 2020).

Preservation of “the home” as threatened by the nonsense of a—let’s say, Neo-Gothic fear of colonial inheritance—is, for this dude, peppered with a pure dismissal of those pesky Marxists:

The fact remains, however, that Derrida was not one of the “fashionable frauds” with whom he is often associated. Scruton believed he was a genius, something he confessed in my home in 2010. Both men, as it happens, were arrested, beaten, imprisoned, and expelled from Prague at the height of the communist era. Their crime was daring to address underground seminars for those brave democrats who would eventually emerge from the catacombs to lead their country to liberty. For all their endless talk of the “other,” you can be sure that neither Jacques Lacan nor Slavoj Zizek would not have done likewise. That is because, unlike most of the French Left, Derrida was neither a Marxist radical nor someone who sought to repudiate his own society while simultaneously enjoying its benefits (ibid.).

The publisher, The European Conservative, should be a big fat clue, as should the title of the article: “surprising conservatism”—almost as if it hinges on the particular interpretations of a man who didn’t have as many hard stances as say, Karl Marx! Yet, Daddy Derrida also gifted us with the profoundly anti-conservative (and entirely oikophobic) Spectres of Marx in 1993. Indeed, it provided the groundwork for the likes of Mark Fisher’s hauntology and creative movements like Vaporwave (and later, Laborwave) to flourish. To use a phrase not my own, he was “of the devil’s party and didn’t know it” (more on this in a bit) so it’s up to us to bring his ghost over to our cause. But we first have to be willing to write with ghosts[11], but also dance with them. This includes making fun of them:

(artist: Existential Comics)

In the absence of hard stances—and generally living within the contradictions of a person’s total sum—we have to take what’s useful and leave the rest (Derrida and Foucault took some incredibly iffy takes, which we’ll broach in a moment); the quantifiable value of such a person, then, becomes an act of salvaging their ghost. Derrida may not have been a self-identified Marxist™ like Sartre was (who raped his own students with Beauvoir’s help), and his prose is absolutely fucking dogshit, but out of the perceived “nothingness” of his body of work, I can easily go in and isolate some real winners. The same goes for Foucault, even though—as we shall see—calling him a “Marxist” is a dubious proposition unto itself:

the crux of the matter is that in the social humanities, Foucauldian approaches — which have far, far weaker explanatory power than more materialist approaches like Marxism, and therefore are more often than not nearly inert when it comes to confronting actual concrete power — have fully taken over. This at the expense of not just Marx but the whole broad Marxian tradition that once was the bedrock of social theory and also held a formidable presence in philosophy, literary studies, anthropology, the early stirrings of feminist academics, and other humanisms. There’s a place for Foucault: but his pedigree has, like the suitors in the Odyssey, well overstayed their welcome and gobbled up more than a fair share, considering Foucauldianism’s flawed and downright reactionary implications relative to less discourse-focused and more concrete forms of social and political analysis.

Obviously it benefits the powers behind the academy not to ruffle feathers on class issues the way that Marx and Marxists do. Foucauldian people may speak freely of identity, but their project both has no class analysis and no concrete material demands. It’s always a deferral — the answer is always a deeper dive into the text, forever. Every essay I’ve ever read by Judith Butler[12] — a consummate Foucauldian — ends with some version of “now is the time to begin to begin thinking about theorizing a new conception of…”

Compare this to the threat of student and staff unions and radicalization along lines that actually lose money for the powerful and it’s not hard to see why Foucauldianism is looked upon with much more favor in the humanities than Marxism (source: Elliot Swain’s “Why I Think Foucault Is Basically Entirely Wrong and Bad,” 2021).

We’re not salvaging the reputation of a particular man (or woman, whoever) or their reputation, but their ideas. There’s a difference between the two, even if they seem inextricable at first glance. People who cannot separate the two or think critically about them should be viewed with skepticism.

(artist: Henry Fuseli)

“Embrace chaos,” Zeuhl once said to me. And through the chaos of daily life and the libraries of “books in the wrong section” contributing to the absolute serendipity of chance meetings that eventually leave us talking—if not to ourselves, then with ghosts of past things that continue to shape our lives as giving them structure and meaning long after the originator has flown (a ghost is as much language—i.e., someone’s language and ideas—as it is the person themselves having died and become a reputation; all exist in the present moment as something to converse with, as Prince Hamlet does with his “father’s ghost,” above).

For example, Zeuhl recommended Foucault’s A History of Sexuality: Volume One (1980) to me while we were at MMU, and took great delight in the fact that Foucault once said in a 1993 interview with Edmund White that, “In a sense, all the rest of my life I’ve been trying to do intellectual things that would attract beautiful boys” (source). Zeuhl also specialized in “twink academia” and introduced me to Dennis Cooper and Gregg Araki. But they also seemed oddly uncritical/apologetic of Foucault as a person. I laughed when they jokingly said to me once, “I ride and die with Foucault,” but the degree to their joke was tested, and utterly thrown into question, by their abhorred and thoroughly dishonest treatment of me later on. Towards the end of our friendship, Zeuhl didn’t bat an eyelash when I showed them the Elliot Swain article and likewise mentioned Foucault’s predatory sex tourism (Bad Empanada 2, 2022) and public, official desire to abolish age of consent laws in France (The Living Philosophy’s “Why French Postmodernists were Pro-Paedophilia in the 1970s,” 2021). All at once, it made their fascination with Cooper and Araki’s “twink[13] exploitation” material seem dubious in hindsight. In fact, when I wasn’t so in love with them (for a variety of reasons—the wonderful [and frequent] sex we had, but also because they were far kinder to me when we were at school together), it became disturbingly easy to spot the flaws I had deceived myself of while we were an item[14] (“love is blind” ‘n all that).

People lie; some people lie in good faith to challenge a state-provided universal truth, but just as many conflate “pure honesty” with “total transparency” insofar as hard political stances can’t somehow be embedded (in good faith) in theatrical forms like allegory and apocalypse; they absolutely can. As a set of widely-agreed-upon lies or performances, the Gothic—when used by good-faith actors—amounts to two keywords from Jameson that I’ll introduce here (which we’ll then unpack in our first essay before the thesis proper): elaborate strategies of misdirection and “archaeologies of the future.” Both are told by liars; i.e., splendide mendax[15] who then use them to reinvent the official histories of the status quo’s past; i.e., in good faith through their own Gothic “archaeologies” that challenge universal “truth” as a dubious proposition, one that—when taken at face value from state proponents by uncritical audiences—can lead to great harm when unquestioned; or, to quote Derrida, not only is there is no transcendental signified[16], but nor is there is any outside of the text[17]!

Canon is more simple in its tack, preserving ghosts and reputations that uphold the status quo. In canonical works, the mimicry of the past is divided along Cartesian thought, according to its profitable binaries. Anything non-heteronormative is alien, “pure darkness” that challenges “pure light”; in truth, canon alienates workers from themselves and from nature inside the material world. Said alienation—of our bodies, labor and ability to self-express according to our sexuality/gender/power, etc—occurs through Capitalism’s profit motive; someone has to kill someone else according to be “correct” or not. Anything that upsets this orderly tension (and its profit for the elite) is gender trouble in ways that cannot be permitted; in short, it instills gender trouble as a kind of chaotic, uncontrollable opposition: iconoclasm through “perceptive,” class-/culture-conscious gender parody. Sex positivity is iconoclasm because it camps canon by default, thus provides us the means to escape the eternal, Promethean nightmare of Capitalism looping in on itself: war is everywhere and in everything; rape is everywhere and in everything. They synonymize inside the profit motive, and their shared ubiquity happens through labor within capital as universally sexualized—all because the profit motive is deliberately built around them as a continuation of history as somehow “ended.” Quite the contrary, it merely becomes replaced with an eternal battle where everything has been sexually dimorphized within the colonial binary. It’s a rigged game, one meant to enrich the elite by exploiting us. Like the fangs of a great vampire, everything suffers to feed their ravenous maws; but it’s presented as “natural,” argued in the essentialized language of good versus evil, darkness and light:

This canonical mimicry has always been constrained by written media as something to disseminate. From the 1980s onwards, however, the spread of all media became easier and easier to ejaculate across what is now the Internet Age. As a result, neoliberal stories like The Legend of Zelda (1987—and its cinematic palimpsest, Legend, 1985) have essentialized the historical-material cycle of a pure good and evil divorced from history (“the end of history,” you might call it). It’s not dialectical-material, merely dialectical, whereupon the past is devoutly imagined in ways that that essentialize Capitalism’s vicious cycle; i.e., cataclysmic arrangements of the imaginary past as something that is simultaneously Malthusian[18], but also paradoxically “as good as it gets.” Manufactured, the stunted plateau becomes a fortress, endlessly threatened by the doomsday myopia of a nominal (queer, non-white) Communism that cannot, must not (according to canon) be challenged by guerilla forces.

As the indoctrinated become hopelessly rigid, they also become the state’s greatest defenders. Waxing nostalgic[19] on their own diminishing conditions while isolating inside their raped minds, they become unable to imagine anything outside of Capitalism; the space beyond its arbitrary boundaries becomes a pure, harmful black filling them with dread (“waves of terror”). They’ll theatrically adopt any mindset or performative role to chase away its terrors, but also destroy them on sight, on- and offstage. In short, they’re bullies, afraid of everything around them. In turn, the cycle of warding off this darkness is sacred, but so are the moral judgements afforded to either side within its operation. Except the cycle isn’t divorced from material conditions at all; the ensuing woes are blamed on “darkness” as Capitalism decays under crisis. As their sense of agency and certitude collapse with the material world around them, workers—but especially the middle class—are left feeling cheated or lied to, and can either blame the system or “backstabber” scapegoats. Whereas Captialism is simply too massive[20] to accurately conceive within theatre, scapegoats are historically far easier to blame because you can shoot, stab or otherwise kill them; such theatre implies the solution is a simple, straightforward one: a dragon to slay instead of a hydra. Point out the decay behind the illusion and they’ll simply shoot the messenger/rape the oracle. Worse, they’ll do it as an act of faith in a system built to deceive them.

Doing so is the “tried-and-true” “wisdom” of the Roman fool, falling on their own sword while Rome burns not once, but over and over. Such “wisdom” is not wise, but a false power, which Gothic Communism seeks to reclaim through our own doubling of the imaginary past—its monsters, castles and battles—as a kind of “living document” that can reclaim the Gothic imagination, thus our ability to think; i.e., through lost forms of knowledge retailored for the complexities of the modern world—its warring mentalities, sexualities/genders, monsters (codified beliefs and actions) and praxis during class and culture war critiquing capital. As you can’t critique capital without camping its monsters, once more unto the breach, dear friends!

(artist: Drew Struzan; source: Justin Norton’s “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath: The Story Behind The Artwork,” 2016)

First off, there’s nothing critically “redundant” about the Gothic in its more dated-looking forms (see Fred Botting’s very dumb arguments about so-called “Gothic redundancy” on exhibit 1a1a1h2a3); ignoring the paradox of the retro-future’s own hopelessly outdated anachronisms, the wizard, knight, demon or damsel, etc, well as their various stages of performance: their castles, spaceships, graveyards, cathedrals, laboratories of mad science, and other cultural sites of phobias, stigmas and urban legends; i.e., haunts[21] that can all yield creative successes (of proletarian praxis) through dialectical-material roles as determined by function (the aesthetics is just the allure and appeal of power/playing with dead things); in short, they can all be gay as fuck if done in good faith, thus sex-positive/iconoclastic by camping canon with seemingly wizardly power (versus the canonical orc or Drow as a middle-class version of false rebellion or slumming through fantastical “blackface[22]“). Indeed, the foxy flexibility of guerrilla war (emblematized by the fox, but also as thoroughly sexy in how we resist capital in animalized forms—more on that in a bit) isn’t mutually exclusive, as Capitalist Realism teaches the faithful (rewarding these Crusaders with damaging illusions and prophesies of a glorious afterlife). Instead, the guerilla can challenge the seemingly all-powerful, proving just how fragile the power of the elite is: their mighty fortress is a sandcastle, a house of cards. The globalization of capital—thus war and rape and their widespread sublimation in fantastical, “opiate” forms—cannot function unless the icon remains intact. We’re going to break it, proving an enemy only has images behind which he hides his true motives. Break that and you expose the man behind the curtain not just as a humbug but a terrible, bloodsucking monster devoid of any empathy and obsessed with profit.

As guerillas throughout history have proved, doing so is not a zero-sum game. We can fight back, exposing and releasing the tremendous pressure capital puts all of us under every waking moment: “perform better and faster and stronger”; or worse, “Grow up[23]!” Simply put, all monsters are instructional in terms of how to act and behave during times of war and peace as forever in crisis under Capitalism; i.e., canonical crises of culture, but also of sexuality and gender as endlessly imperiled by an outside-inside force, the scapegoat for Capitalism’s hidden function: exploitation and oscillating cycles of failure that grind workers to paste (the gears of war). This canonical “blame game” becomes myopic, directing workers to kill the Monster threatening the Kingdom from all angles and dimensions—the vague, shapeless thing trying to separate human biology (sex, skin color) and gender within the colonial binary (the essence of gender trouble and gender parody but also mass-exploitation tied to the profit motive). Like Plato’s allegory of the cave (c. 380 BC), state proponents from inside the Man Box[24] attack class/culture warriors (attacking the status quo from outside the same box/cave) instead of the system, whereupon the ensuing dreams and nightmares of canon uniformly become an invented lullaby whose tragedy and farce—and utter blindsiding by convenient adversity and set, doomed roles—are all “part of the plan”: retreat inward, into childhood as an execution of state maxims that lead to profit. “Become the destroyer the world ‘needs.'”

In other words, canon (thus Capitalism) is full of ritual sacrifice with a Christianized flavor (crucifixion) or Westernized abuse of paganized forms whose divine right revives the glory of recuperated Roman aesthetics (the Nazi as quasi-pagan); e.g., the sacrificial rooster or lamb, the virgin or scapegoat, as something to bleed out for significance and good fortune, but also stalled demise for the holder of the knife: the Christ-like Herculean warrior as babyface or heel to sacrifice when the state’s crises enter decay while firing up production, which in turn requires more and more sacrifice the hotter the furnace gets. Engorged, the elite need ever more blood to satisfy their hunger as the ultimate parasite, thus demand of their loyal followers, “Defend our land; defend your land from the infidels” (which curiously the elite stole the land from, to begin with). As Hilter put it, “What is life? Life is the nation. The individual must die anyway. Beyond the life of the individual is the nation.” But Hilter’s Nazis were merely radicalized, accelerated variants of their American capitalists cousins’ own bastardizing of settler colonialism[25] from the British, whose New England counterfeit/colony expanded used the same imperial model to make their own genocidal apologia (the myth of the West’s exclusive sovereignty and ownership as forged from the start and ever since; i.e., a fakery of a fakery[26] all the way down: England, “land of the Angles,” reestablished through old feuds fought out in mercenary violence revived under Neoliberal hegemony centuries later). Within this paradigm, everyone’s on the chopping block (except the elite, of course). Gothic Communism aims to camp canon through the sacrifice ritual, lampooning the killer’s false power when sitting on the same chopping block as them (Christ on a cross); it accomplishes this through a fake “sacrifice,” one whose gender trouble puts the warlike ritual of “rape” or “murder” in quotes. Doing so causes the so-called “kings” of capital to collectively lose their minds, outing them and, by extension, the elite and their machinations (which leads to class consciousness).

Canon is classically framed as immutable, eternal—literally “outside of time”—but it isn’t. It can be altered, changing history through the wider interpretation and genesis of popular legends, but also the material conditions that respond to them and vice versa (the Base and the Superstructure). Capital historically-materially alienates owners from workers and workers from each other and themselves through Cartesian dualism (with owners being collectively afraid of the poor and siding with “their own kind” as the persons they are born growing up with; i.e., other rich people they identify with and see as friends): an entire system of thought as built around the essential binding of sex and gender to each other and human biology (skin color and sex organs), which is coded to have various “correct” qualities (such as “Christian” or “cis-het”) when utilized in the “correct” fashion: towards the profit motive. There is an ostensible “other” who is murdered instead of the state defender killing them, but in truth, the soldier is completely expendable. Everything sits within a cycle of imaginary history that plays out through an endless, genocidal mirroring that must, if it is to cease, be met with mirrors:

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

These particular mirrors (and their reflections’ visions) become a way of seeing the world that isn’t Promethean; i.e., they upend the infamous hubris of the Patriarchy without joining canon’s process of abjection:

When Perseus slew the Medusa he did not—as commonly thought—put an end to her reign or destroy her terrifying powers. Afterwards, Athena embossed her shield with the Medusa’s head. The writhing snakes, with their fanged gaping mouths, and the Medusa’s own enormous teeth and lolling tongue were on full view. Athena’s aim was simply to strike terror into the hearts of men as well as reminding them of their symbolic debt to the imaginary castrating mother. And no doubt she knew what she was doing. After all, Athena was the great Mother-Goddess of the ancient world and according to ancient legend—the daughter of Metis, the goddess of wisdom, also known as the Medusa (source: Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine, 1993).

In short, Gothic Communism goes further than Julia Kristeva or Barbara Creed. Our “Medusa” doesn’t play into the elite’s scheme of weaponized trauma; i.e, the TERF surrendering her neck and, once beheaded, staring blindly and furiously at the underclass (dressed up to shock the formerly abused with a disingenuous threat of rape, of the shame of unwanted pregnancies projected onto a racialized, genderqueer “other”: the man-in-a-dress, or their murderous, womb-like haunt). Nor does she segregate and “play ball” through compelled modesty/invisibility and tokenism of various doubled kinds.

Instead, our complicated monster heroine uses dialectical-material scrutiny to parse which is which, combining the awesome power of her reclaimed body and its labor to actively petrify the profit motive while blending in with it (e.g., Morry Evans’ lovely gender-bending of the knightly romance[27]). In doing so, she utilizes the bizarre, recycled conventions (anyone who says, “truth is stranger than fiction” has never read a Gothic novel before) to actively encourage/incite degrowth—i.e., a so-called “Jewish revenge” against fascism and the state by borking its profit motive, in this life or the next: through a sex-positive counterterrorism that exposes the state’s usual terror weapons and fictions (a concept we will touch on in the “camp map” when we examine Joseph Crawford’s “invented terrorism” versus Robert Asprey’s counterterrorism historically used by labor). All the while, our Medusa has some semblance of safety because she will be viewed as human behind the looking glass (which serves as a buffer between her and the audience), being seen as something her would-be-killers will not sacrifice because they love her. If slowly taught “good play” in a sex-positive sense, they will not chase her at all; they will embody her by seeing themselves in her—a shared humanity that, like Milton’s “Narcissistic Eve,” happily ignores God’s will. While Capitalism’s universal alienation makes people tremendously lonely and sexually frustrated, this loneliness can be reversed in ways that don’t put all the pressure on sex workers or sexualized workers acting in a Pavlovian sense; instead, we become a social species again, working together to enrich our understanding of the world as we move away from a horribly archaic and medieval system. This includes its gross devastation of the world, nature, and the human condition through rape and war inside the profit motive as synonymous with themselves and with us when we obey like menticided[28] fools. We have to shield our minds, our bodies, our labor as demonic forms of expression that paradoxically must expose themselves enough to communicate the message.

Per Arthur C. Clarke, sufficiently advanced technologies are indistinguishable from magic; per Mary Shelley, they become suitably useful allegories for the titanic forces around us, whose structures are mythologically baked into our lives as besieged by god-like forces. In trying to reclaim our power like Prometheus, we are chained and tortured without end; but we are already chained and tortured before the gods “lay eyes on us” (that is to say, actively—they are always passively watching through state surveillance apparatuses, and active surveillance is generally leveled at the underclass and/or known enemies-of-the-state). “Gods,” in this sense, are less personifications of various emotions and more the caprices of actual persons of a particular class that did not exist in Plato’s day. Instead, the ancient canonical codes and positions of power offered up sodomy as something the elite could do as they wished and condemn everyone else to not: through actions that—vis-à-vis Foucault’s A History of Sexuality, Volume One—eventually became identities associated with the rise of the bourgeoisie. But the same hubris and double standards were present inside a commodified heteronormativity that had started to expand and dominate the Earth. As this expansion has continued, the atrocities of the elite have continued under their cloak of darkness, the “fog of war” perpetuated through a fear of the outside associated with the state’s usual enemies: the underclass.

The elite certainly act like gods and have such powers the Ancient Greeks would have described as god-like: bombing salvos (death from the skies) like Zeus’ thunderbolts, nuclear weaponry like God’s judgement of Sodom and Gomorrah, and giant vehicles that pull them across the sky like Apollo’s chariot. But they aren’t gods; they’re men, thus fallible to the tremendous alienating mechanisms Capitalism has given—if not birth to, then certainly rise to in grander and grander forms. The greater the mechanisms, the greater the hubris, but also the inability to feel anything except when hording more and more stolen essence from everyone else; eventually these kings age and go mad, then—like Saturn the titan—devour their son/”sons” before poisoning the land or setting it on fire[29] (“They say this land was green and soft once; but the moment Haggard touched it, it became hard and grey!”). Obviously the metaphors mix, with the madness of the geriatric human body being expressed through aging billionaires; yet, the madness of the king is also a mentality that has nothing to do with extreme age, but rather a curse of entitled owners (and subordinate workers) being driven to premature madness by the ideology of a brutal, sadistic system: an internalized fear of the monster that compounds until one’s offshoots go mad before their time, infantilized like children afraid of the dark… and equipped with the means to “silence” it during the apocalypse[30] (revelation) of the dead walking the Earth.

The ensuing chaos is the paradox of efficient profit: the state eating itself as the ouroboros does its tail, caught between an endless police state of regeneration and cannibalization (desk murder). And all the while, the terrifying power of the gods is less a metaphor and more a description of actual events: the battle of the gods, of angels and demons, that leads to the ignominious fall of Icarus into the sea, but also the Promethean, planet-sized fireball of Capitalism’s crucible spilling over when it flies out of the elite’s control. Like the demon core[31], they want it as close as possible to release radiation, but not critical mass—except the drive for profit has pushed them and all of us to the brink of extinction more than once (GDF’s “There Was No ‘Cold’ War,” “NATO is Risking Nuclear War for Money,” and “No, We Didn’t Need to Nuke Japan,” 2023).

Inside this larger tug-o’-war sits our Satan or Prometheus, trying to take back some of this power for ourselves. All must be done whilst being aware of the bourgeois regression through canonical reverence for state power and decayed superstition towards state enemies: as unironic demons from hell. For us, godly language is “the enemy of Reason, but there is something enticing about its form” as a paradoxical means of empowerment by rejecting Cartesian thought (exhibit 51a). Unlike Mako from Conan the Barbarian (1981) cowering before the fearsome gods of a blasted ruin, we can play with the same language in ways that perform class-conscious theatre: It’s less “the spirits of this place exact a heavy toll” or “The wizard! I told him would pay the gods!” and more the conjuring of demons of Communism as the revenge of Capitalism’s innumerable megadeaths: not “of getting even” as Ward Churchill notes in “‘Some People Push Back’: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens” (2005)

The problem is that vengeance is usually framed in terms of “getting even,” a concept which is plainly inapplicable in this instance. As the above data indicate, it would require another 49,996 detonations killing 495,000 more Americans, for the “terrorists” to “break even” for the bombing of Baghdad/extermination of Iraqi children alone. And that’s to achieve “real number” parity. To attain an actual proportional parity of damage – the US is about 15 times as large as Iraq in terms of population, even more in terms of territory – they would, at a minimum, have to blow up about 300,000 more buildings and kill something on the order of 7.5 million people (source).

but a Jewish revenge of all those poor souls manifesting in workers who—suitably possessed by the spirit of wiser Ancients—will not bend the knee or do the will of the gods of capital anymore. In our current age, the state is utterly reliant on labor to function, but also the illusion that they aren’t monsters (e.g., They Live, 1988; exhibit 0a2b1b2); and while military urbanism and stochastic terrorism always pose an issue, they aren’t things that can happen at a mass scale until they’re normalized, which requires a great deal of theatre.

In other words, Capitalism cannot function if workers won’t kill each other in the state’s name (whose brutal, stupid[32] vengeance knows no bounds: the arms race of more murder, more death, more prisons, more witch hunts, more genocide not in spite of state laws but because of them). This refusal to destroy ourselves isn’t Freud’s “monsters from the Id”; it’s called labor action and it requires solidarity to work in opposition to the state’s coded instructions (often videogames, which are literally built around worker genocide; i.e., the exploitation of the Global South by the Global North through the greedy rhetoric of infinite growth according to state-sanctioned [thus hyperbolic] revenge that’s “too far gone” to stop, but also has become naturalized through a centrist order of things, vis-à-vis Tolkien). Theatrical expression and monstrous poetics obviously play a tremendous role in cultivating solidarity as being the usual targets of state abuse: according to them, we’re the terrorists, thus deserving of eternal punishment. The paradox is, escape is generally achieved through the same performances as camped.

(artist: Henri Fuseli)

So, while the basic-yet-giant, god-like tensions built into Capitalism (and its neoliberal copaganda through videogames’ recursive avatars of war) can be explained incredibly quickly through prescribed monsters “self-reporting” the larger scheme, their Promethean torture loop can also be subverted, thus undone by applying Gothic theory (thus mythical monsters in warlike language; e.g., Shelley’s “Modern Prometheus,” aka Frankenstein) to Marx’s ideas: fight terror with “terror” through Robert B. Asprey’s paradox of terror[33]. Becoming a kind of “Athena’s Aegis,” the one-two combo of our black mirror turns the heteronormative attacker’s aggression back towards their own monstrous sense of self[34] in the same terror language they use; i.e., the reversal of the process of abjection as ordinarily prescribed by famous legends; e.g., The Legend of Zelda: “Will Link still rescue the damsel if he’s gay?” (the franchise remains one of my favorite stages to camp because it frankly offers so much genderqueer potential for doing so: Link’s not just canon’s twink-ish warrior of light; he’s simultaneously the “power bottom” wrestling against Capitalism, Amazon bait, and a damsel-warrior given pause by his own double, the “twink-in-black” as a thoroughly non-binarized double of the woman-in-black: Dark Link, exhibit 1a1a1a1_a). Doing so is automatically campy because frankly the camped dialog of warlike negotiation over fairly mundane things (sex and the division of labor) in medievalized monstrous/dungeon-themed language sounds funny as hell: a) it camps “correct,” unintelligent discussions of these matters, and b) it camps Marx in the bargain because it occurs in Marxist academic language that sounds funny in this particular context; i.e., Monty Python’s “Constitutional Peasants” (1969) skit remade by us not just in Zelda, but any manner of dialogic imagination; e.g., Frankenstein‘s autonomous, zombie robota, of course, but also this far more recent gem:

(source tweet: Sidhe-Her, 2023)

A common facet of Communism is polyamory and open communication vs serial monogamy (and abuse) through heteronormative, but also amatonormative stories that prioritize marriage between one cis-het man and wife; i.e., the colonial binary as centralized within canonical narratives about love. It’s obviously important and holistic to discuss other things besides sex, of course, but sex and labor coincide and intersect with socio-economic factors, and our emphasis on Marxist analysis focuses on sex work’s demonization under Capitalism according to these matters as heteronormatively constrained. Our focus is sex work; we will talk about labor and theatricality more broadly but generally inside the Gothic mode of expression, which tends to have a sexual element to it (e.g., sin, vice, passion, desire, rape, torture, etc). Camp is generally sexual, because sex as an element of propriety is constrained to the bedroom (again, vis-à-vis Foucault’s A History of Sexuality, Volume One). To camp canon, for Gothic Communists, is to bring sex back into the public sphere in a sex-positive sense; i.e., by humanizing the monsters who have cropped up there in a sex-coercive way. Those bad counterfeits are reclaimed through what people consume as fed to them: through sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, and our art and labor as alienated from us and fed back to us in harmful, cheaply-made forms (from factories). Their reclamation starts with poiesis as made/cooked up by us, not the elite and their recuperated proponents’ profit motive; i.e., the bourgeois pimping of workers out as unironic sex demons and zombies treated like bad junk food/fruit from the poisoned tree.

The poetic moral, here is learn to cook, yourself, because you are what you eat, and the elite want you remove that ever-important comma—i.e., to cook and eat yourselves following their bad recipes (and grammar). To acquire new ones, you must learn to swim in the darkness of oppositional praxis’ shadows on the wall (more on that in the thesis proper, specifically the subdivision, “Into the Shadow Zone”) and give birth to your own monsters; i.e., as someone who is undead and demonic enough (in a sex-positive sense) to reproduce in this way. While miscarriages and unwanted, illegitimate or terminated pregnancies are a deep, painful and secret source of shame for AFAB persons (thus hidden from judgmental parties; e.g., Abigail, from King Diamond’s 1987 album of the same name), the fact remains that lived trauma and power abuse (rape) isn’t just the domain of AFAB cis-het women; the poetic license of the hideous progeny takes shape in many different secret shames and guilty pleasures that we can rebirth through our own special expressions. The axes of oppression overlap through biological sex, race, class and gender expression for us to convey through these unique births; i.e., the figurative kind produced in art isn’t something to hide but comment on what is normally hidden/unspeakable. In turn, this zombie’s demonic pregnancy takes a reclaimed diet of artistic expression with which to give birth to new Communist monsters and contribute to the grander prandial-praxial cycle (“prandial” meaning “during or relating to the eating of food”): a pregnant mother will eat just about anything but gets cravings. To rebirth a wise Wisdom of the imaginary past, our diets need to be paradoxically “picky.”

In terms of cooking for ourselves, we’re obviously talking about (and committed to) Gothic poetics at large. But food-as-metaphor and -commodity often overlap in the grander market of power exchange within monstrous poiesis and theatre; e.g., the monster as a metaphor for hunger regarding sex and vice, but also Halloween candy or cookies (for kids) whose “cake” (for adults) is a lie that serves elite aims. Ginger’s pork chop (below) is actual food that represents a challenge to the food deserts of the world, seizing the means of production through food production as artistic self-expression that likewise fills their belly with yum-yums: a delicious reunion with their labor as reclaimed from a former state of alienation.

But “yuck” and “yum” obviously pertain to human appetites and appetite as thoroughly medieval; i.e., pinned between ongoing debates about restraint and excess as “the wages of sin,” told through modern-day Sales of Indulgence, albeit through a Protestant work ethic that canonically attacks Gothic poetics: as monsters/food through undead/demonic metaphors. Their feeding and magical knowledge and transformation amounts to forbidden fruit with animalized, stigmatic flavors and cosmetics; e.g., the vampire drinking “sanguine” as essence tangled up in all manner of connotations and statements for or against the status quo: “Eat of my flesh, drink of my blood and live forever.” Also known as transubstantiation, this can be applied to reactionary rhetoric/moral panics that stigmatize Jewish people (and other minorities) through revived instances of blood libel and quantum, but also simply food as literally the stuff we eat and media as the stuff we consume that contains representations of food/food-like monsters and their respective preparing and presenting to us; e.g., Ruben’s infamously obsessive depictions of flesh as “food,” the main attraction that might have been sexual:

Rubens was obsessed by flesh; young flesh, old flesh, men’s flesh, women’s flesh, dead flesh, damaged flesh, the flesh of children and angels and saints. His paintings are packed with the stuff. […] This was Rubens’ genius. He got in among our basic desires and our raw physicality and he gave them form. In this specific case it is flesh and sexual desire, but this preponderance of flesh in Ruben’s art wasn’t always erotic. More often than not the flesh was just there, distended and bloated or stripped or lean. We can see the blood coursing through it, we can see its folds and its scars. The painting of the “The Last Judgement in the Alte Pinakothek” is surrounded by other paintings by Rubens full of jowly fat men with distended paunches, muscular naked warriors, fat babies suckling on bloated breasts, sinewy saints, twisted martyrs and dozens and dozens of plump women with big bums (source: Ian Walker’s “Sex, Violence and Big Bums: Rubens and the Birth of Modern Europe,” 2017).

but of course many, many others besides. The depiction of such things has become complicated by modernized, Enlightenment carryovers onto the global stage. For example, the white body but especially the white female body would become a storing ground of shame, rage, hunger and non-white appetites (exhibit 1a1a1e1b): fat-shaming mixed with slut-shaming and various other intersections of self-hatred imposed by dogmatic forces equating fatness with sin, the devil, and non-white culture, but also rebellion (“fat and sassy”). The best way to deal with dogma is to return to a pre-Enlightenment, Rubenesque updated for a post-Capitalist world that doesn’t commodify the struggle of these persons to serve the profit motive—i.e., through all the usual bigotries and stigmas—but rather celebrates their humanity and bravery while framing their larger/alternative body types as a positive thing to love and accept amid changing material conditions.

The poetic idea is a queer nostalgia that undermines canonical forms of said nostalgia; i.e., a hauntology that becomes flexible, inclusive and linguistically fluent in modern struggles and terminologies that didn’t quite exist during the Renaissance period. There was always a queer presence, but it was associated with actions, not identities within society and its cultural markers. If society and language are rigid, then words and symbols can mean only one thing. Worse, singular interpretation becomes associated with shame and control, which will never change because they are policed. We’re not shooting for fat positivity and acceptance as a personal option/opinion, but a basic human right whose larger societal mechanism—fat liberation—happens through the language and legends associated with said bodies; i.e., just like with other slurs such as “faggot” or the n-word, the word “fat” becomes something to reclaim through monstrous poetics: faeries and demons, but also their succulent physiques pegged as “wild” through the ghost of the counterfeit. Canon frames these bodies as repulsive and magnetic, which means any iconoclastic act reclaiming them must reverse the process of abjection through the same bodies and language as gorgeous, voluptuous and loveable. This holistic package deal utilizes the human body tied to persons who identify a particular way through their body as an extension of their entire selves—their gender, orientation, and performance, etc—as prone to legendary hyperbole with a sex-positive inclination: the goddess of the harvest, the fairy queen Maeb, Easter and so on. It becomes not something to eat, but a fleshy conduit to exchange various things; e.g., essence, materials and knowledge; fertile minds, spirits and appetites.

(artist: Sinead Rhiannon)

Under Gothic Communism, sex positivity is body positivity and body positivity includes fat bodies expressed in Gothic language to consciously liberate us by reclaiming the Base and recultivating the Superstructure. Fat bodies aren’t inherently bad; what is bad is universally pathologizing/fetishizing their image in popular media while prescribing all the usual canonical, heteronormative standards that lead to eating and mood disorders inside a capitalistic model; e.g., skinny female bodies, but also hypermuscular male bodies pumped full of drugs. The double standard with male bodybuilders is how they aren’t seen as medically obese because they are “successful” personalities that make money for big companies (and sell their supplements and drugs); heavier women/gender-non-conforming AFAB persons are seen as products first, people second, and generally are judged far more for their physical appearance even when said appearance is actually healthy. As Mainely Mandy points out in “Good Fatty vrs Bad Fatty” (2021), BMI is an antiquated, racist concept, one that leaves the owners of (often female) fat bodies feeling trapped between how they are actually viewed and commodified versus how they want to be seen and treated—i.e., minus the stigmas while being accepted and loved for who they really are. Often, as we shall see and explore throughout the book, these feelings of self-love and self-shame intersect between various groups of marginalized peoples with various European/”Vitruvian” body expectations foisted onto them: black men with BBCs/muscular bodies (exhibit 10b2), or white women with “modest,” slender bodies versus heavier pornographic bodies that denote an “immodest” type of commodity associated with sin and vice as things to indulge in; i.e., a deal with the devil to achieve forbidden pleasure sold back to us post-theft (exhibits 32a, b; v1) which can be reclaimed through subversive and informed labor exchanges (exhibits 32c, d; v1)

(exhibit 0a1a: Artist: top-mid-left: Juan de Juanes; top-right and bottom-right: Jeremy Anninos; bottom-mid-right: Draculasswife; bottom-mid-left: Nat the Lich; bottom-left: source. It’s human to eat, to fuck, to feed; or [in the Humanist tradition] to poetically compare and contrast unlike things that serve a similar purpose: the body as a canvas, relayed through the medieval idea of miracles; e.g., crying statues weeping blood—i.e., the woman as a sex object whose animation and fleshiness can be conveyed in deliberately outmoded ways to touch upon present stereotypes and structures that haven’t voided themselves of canonical, harmful versions of these [often silly] superstitions; e.g., the “Carmilla” vampire lady trying to drink the blood out of Jim Carrey’s penis in Once Bitten [1985] to steal his “essence” [cougar sodomy]. Tied to capital, unironic forms appear as “sustainable,” meaning lawful and sanctioned to varying degrees towards commodified sin, vice, and appetite, with a middle-class fear-fascination towards these variables. All must be liberated from the shackles of capital as having pilfered the medieval vault of its plentiful nutrients; reclaim your monstrous “meat,” “cake” and “fruit” [quotes optional] to feed each other through your labor as yours, not the elite’s. Despite the AAA stamp of the Second Gilded Age’s return of the mysteries [a medieval name for trade guilds], they want us to blindly “wolf down” their garbage as cheap, low-grade dog food/slave drivel. Defecated by them onto our plates, we’re eating the bourgeoisie’s already digested food, also known as shit. It tastes like imitative honey but its cheap and fast, robbed of its nutrients.)

That concludes the concept of “giving birth” and the Wisdom of the Ancient’s Communist Renaissance (rebirth). Onto the afterbirth: reflection on what came out of me and that which I helped raise to maturity.

Clearly the book has changed much over time. When I started writing Sex Positivity in 2022, I was mainly wrestling with the idea of illustrating mutual consent and combating/exposing TERFs while also working on my PhD/postgraduate work (on Metroidvania[35]—”Mazes and Labyrinths: Disempowerment in Metroidvania and Survival Horror” [2021]—which I still wanted to complete but now have absorbed into this book*). Eventually I called it “Gothic Communism” and wrote my manifesto[36], but that was certainly not the first step (this work having been the combination of my postgraduate research, having been in school for years and researching independently for years after I left).

*Which has now been expanded on, in my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus/extended Metroidvania research. —Perse, 3/14/2025

At our current juncture, my original blogpost has become a Ship of Theseus, where nothing from the original published material is contained within; furthermore, what was just the manifesto and the book became the manifesto and Humanities primer as one volume and the rest of the book a second volume, until suddenly I made the Humanities primer its own volume, resulting in three volumes (the third of which I wrote first)! As such, I wrote the preface and signposted while sharpening my ideas about Gothic Communism, then decided that I needed to write a foreword that talked about things more generally. “Gothic Communism” became “Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism” and I designed its logo. As the publishing date neared, I decided to make the foreword my thesis statement/symposium and the preface my basic reasoning as to why I went with a Gothic variant of anarcho-Communism (as opposed to Marxist-Leninism, for example)—all while signposting throughout the book and rewriting the abstract, and so on and so on for the reader’s convenience (and my own satisfaction). As I am a being of chaos, thus acclimated to holistic study as a chaotic process, this occurred through a process of fractal expansion as guided by a former academic’s desire to “please master”/neurodivergent desire to make a good first impression: little idea, big idea; small book, gargantuan book; thesis sentence, paragraph, statement, symposium, preface, manifesto, other volumes, etc.

For the entire changelog this summary is describing, refer to my website’s 1-page promo for the book. —Perse

In other words, as the publishing date neared, I found myself increasingly haunted by the ghosts of my teachers. I reached out to them to share my work, but suddenly felt a burning desire to write a thesis statement they would approve of, but also that I would in relation to them. My desire to please myself is inextricable from pleasing the ghosts of my academic pedagogues. I knew they would expect it, but also thought it was vital because the vast majority of my arguments could be hammered into something piercing and sharp to then embark on a more leisurely and scenic quest after the trial by fire. I wanted the reader to be as well-equipped as possible when grappling with my complex and myriad arguments. So I went about it, forging for them a healthy “dagger of the mind” as a monster mother would: by giving birth to Sex Positivity’s thesis statement in a Gothic, intersex manner—i.e., by playing out the messy birth/with the afterbirth and ejaculating it as a roiling parthenogenesis of mixed and mixing metaphors (all in the spirit of fun, of course).

(artist: Miss Upacey)

Like a witch’s cauldron, this dark and soupy creative process emerged from having written most of my book from top to bottom, over and over already (about 500,000 words [now nearly two million, after four volumes]). The entire time, its “labor” back then wasn’t something for which I was fully in control, but identified with when I had written my master’s thesis[37] five years prior while burning the midnight oil night after night at MMU’s student library while watching the magpies dance in the trees through the window next to the computer loaned out to me (and thinking of Mary Shelley’s dark progeny when she had “birthed” Frankenstein); and (then and now) with Emily Brontë making Heathcliff:

Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is. But this I know: the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master — something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame. […]

Wuthering Heights [1847] was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials. The statuary found a granite block on a solitary moor; gazing thereon, he saw how from the crag might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister; a form moulded with at least one element of grandeur — power. He wrought with a rude chisel, and from no model but the vision of his meditations. With time and labour, the crag took human shape; and there it stands colossal, dark, and frowning, half statue, half rock: in the former sense, terrible and goblin-like; in the latter, almost beautiful, for its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it; and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the giant’s foot [source: Nava Atlas’ “Charlotte Brontë is Preface to Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë,” 2014].

The book, then, has been a series of “births” dragging the hellish child up from the depths of my own making and design (my own infernal concentric pattern, perhaps; i.e., the repeated plunging into the abyss while stuck inside it: mise-en-abyme). After the majority was written, I desired to summarize everything as pithily as I could into our aforementioned thesis statement. I didn’t have to; I wanted to, treating it as an educational device according to how I had been taught. Through the benefits of a classical and campy education, I once again “fell pregnant,” this time by myself with myself, but also with Bay who—like a slutty incubus from afar—had filled my slutty cum dumpster long distance. Now “full” of the dark swirling material as having been written and refined many times (many creampies), from toe to top full of these joined ideas, theories and plans, I had to give birth once more and set about it. While unsteadily “pregnant” with this saturated material, I pulled and manifested the entirety out of myself as a comprehensive stab at mapping and summarizing everything that I (once again) had to organize and refine over and over. I clearly want to document the process to you, the reader—to grant you an exhibitionist’s idea of what it was like for me, a trans woman, to create as I have been taught and how I view it. Work isn’t fun unless it’s playful, I think; it should be fun, regardless of its importance (and this work—helping myself and other sex workers escape harmful bondage—I consider to be of the utmost importance).

(artist: Gerard Pietersz van Zyl)

As Galatea resisting Pygmalion by shyly but with great determination making her own work in the gloom, my own statue was born out of the darkness as threatening to take shape, then continuing to grow and develop into something more fully realized after it exited my body. First born, the thesis statement grew as I slathered more material onto it. Unlike Victor Frankenstein, I had done this many times and took joy in its hideous, beautiful monstrosity:

How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful (source).

I was a monster mother making a smaller copy of the original monster she proudly gave birth to from older copies from other mothers and loving it just as much the umpteenth time around (maybe I’m a glutton for punishment; i.e., the grad student’s paradoxical flagellation).

To put dates and numbers on it (as of 9/10/2023), by the 31st of August, this saturation point exploded, my thesis statement going from ~5,000 words to another 20,000 on top of that in the next six days followed by another two days’ worth of (currently uncalculated) prose and exhibits produced in two ten-hour periods (followed by me writing all of this down today, and writing the “Notes on Power” section, too) and even more writing* after that. As such, the thesis statement’s initial draft was supplied more keywords, and given the manifesto terms towards the end, laid out like bricks then ending in a “tree” of the manifesto as a whole route and structure for which oppositional praxis is run (the engine to supply our “fuel” inside), and the “camp map” as a small exhibit of its praxial execution. Then, I expanded the “camp map” into its own section, moved the manifesto tree to the start of the thesis to plot out the individual manifesto terms I had laid out already and explained in my thesis statement, and then refined that. From there, I decided to reorganize the thesis statement as its own “mini” volume that precedes the other three, which freed me up to expand my comprehensive argument in ways that felt adequate, holistic and well-paced; i.e., my little vampire’s lips blushed blood red. I took my four main Gothic theories (the Four Gs) out of my manifesto proper and placed them before my thesis statement as a “Gordian Knot”; i.e., central to everything I’m talking about in regards to monsters, but a “tough nut to crack” and one that I would take the entire book doing so (not just the thesis statement). After this, I added even more definitions from the companion glossary into the thesis statement (such as “monopoly of violence” and “state of exception”) until I had included all of the keywords and Gothic terms in the thesis statement, “camp map,” and symposium when discussing how to camp the canon. Then I wrote “the notes on power” section. As I did all of this, I signposted throughout the rest of my book, referring back to my thesis statement, and I added more exhibits (and more after that).

*As of 9/13/2023 (six years to the day I arrived in England to study at MMU), the thesis volume’s renovations (not including the symposium, which was mostly written at this point; nor the disclaimer, “What I Will and Won’t Exhibit,” which is new but not restricted to the thesis volume) now clock in at 74,445 words. That is, from 8/31 to 9/6 to 9/13, my thesis statement went from ~5,000 words to ~25,000 to ~75,000, or nearly an additional 70,000 (and 102 images, ~40 of which are full-fledged exhibits) in two weeks. It feels superhuman, but also—fittingly—like a Gothic dream, one I wrote while awake but possessed; i.e., not by drugs, but my own education and labor has having taken hold in a comfortable pattern, day after day. The contractions.

Comfortable or not, I wrote like an absolute demon, animal, werewolf and frankly am in complete awe of the massive, Godzilla-sized crater left in my own wake: “Did I do that?” And there’s still more work to be done! No rest for the wicked, I guess.

• As of 9/22/2023 (the beginning of my final proofread, which will continue until the end of the month): the thesis volume wordcount (not including the first disclaimer, title page, abstract, symposium and glossary) is ~112k words, and 165[38]
• As of 10/4/2023, the proofread is mostly done, totaling ~177k words and 226 images. I had to write several sections to fit the glossary back into the book (to be able to use the heading system to link to keywords I didn’t have time to define); I also would finalize and add in fun bits as I went—e.g., roasting Ann Radcliffe in a hypomanic fit.
• as of 10/8/2023, the final proofread is completely finished, as are the last of the last-minute changes. The final thesis volume wordcount (again, not including the first disclaimer, title page, abstract, symposium and glossary) totals ~191k words and 250 images.

All the same, my ability to do this isn’t supernatural; I didn’t sell my soul to the devil, but was raised on good foundations that come from tremendous privilege as a white, AMAB trans person. That is, I live in a situation where I can take my time, enjoy a stable life, and throw whatever I wish into the crucible: movies, novels, and videogames, etc. In medieval terms, I may as well be living in Merlin’s tower. But that’s still true now as much as it was, back then; I live in the Global North, and from where I am in a room of one’s own, the Global South may as well be the Stone Age (courtesy of American bombing runs). I want this to change using the privilege that Capitalism gave me to write and illustrate this book as my contribution to the struggle.

Like Ariadne’s thread woven from my spinner (as a Gothic spinster), the abacus of my fractal-recursive calculus oscillated. Following its attenuation (and at a point when I think the creation of this final thesis volume has mostly run its course), my book now has a fully-formed thesis volume that is organized like the other three volumes are; it is comprehensive, detailed and educational to the best degree that I can provide regarding the entirety of Sex Positivity. It may seem dense at first glance and that is a fair criticism, but is meant to include every keyword, map and argument in their logical order as something to unfurl and explain once, then again at a much slower and lengthier pace throughout the rest of the book: Volumes One, Two and Three (if I gloss over a topic in this volume, rest assured another volume will cover it in far greater detail).

(model and artist: Persephone van der Waard)

In the past, I have tried to write many books[39], and have had many creative projects I poured energy and effort into (see exhibit 0a1b1, on page 118); but my magnum opus is something I couldn’t have written ten years ago, or even five. Sex Positivity‘s thesis volume is easily the hardest thing I’ve ever written but also something I’m proud of in relation to the giants whose shoulders I stood on—both my Karate Kid (1984) moment when I show Mr. Miyagi “wax on, wax off!” and one where I include all of my friends in on and the moment. On the academic side of things, Linnie Blake—when asked—once told me that I wrote like an angel, and Christine Neufeld made note of my “weird sexual metaphors” nearly ten years ago when writing about Frankenstein (“Frankenstein essay—Born to Fall? Birth Trauma, the Soul, and Der Maschinenmensch,” 2014). Combining those two sentiments, I worked arm-in-arm with various comrades—fellow artists and sex workers who modelled for me to be included in this book. I may have put in the lion’s share of the overall work, but it was still a group effort and one that I’m proud of and thankful for as demonstrating our arguments; i.e., a collective statement of sex positivity and worker solidarity honed by years of artistic/academic training and otherwise useless (to capital) critical analysis and Gothic specialization (refer to the acknowledgements section to see everyone who was directly or tangentially involved in this project’s genesis, synthesis and completion).

At its full size, Sex Positivity is four volumes, ~742,000 words/2427 pages and ~1096 unique images (subject to change after the final proofreads for those volumes are complete, but I don’t plan on adding much new material to them; i.e., no footnotes for the first editions of Volume One, Two and Three). Though only a fraction of that grand total, this volume is still substantial: ~198,000 words/602 pages and ~260 unique images (not including the paratextual documents). Because there’s so much to cover and unpack, the abstract, table of contents and summaries we’ve provided so far aren’t really enough; we’ll have to summarize the thesis volume itself and what it contains per division, subdivision and sub-subdivision.

We’ll do this, next.

(exhibit 0a1b1: Artist: Playful Maev. Ileana Sanda, the Queen of the Night, is a character I created for a fantasy series called The Cat in the Adage [from Macbeth, 1606] that I started writing when I was nineteen. I never completed it as a full story but the characters live on in my work. As my website reads,

[The Cat in the Adage is a] fantasy novel I worked on extensively after high school. Back when people still used printers to edit manuscripts, and iMac G3s were popular […] partly inspired by Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain and Myth: the Fallen Lords, the story had a lot of dark fantasy elements, but also a fair amount of sex. Here’s a concept piece I had drawn up [featuring] one of the characters from the story [source]. 

“The story” was something of a queerer version of Tolkien’s refrain [the High Fantasy treasure map] than Ursula Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea series was. The Cat in the Adage camped the heroic quest, telling the story of a magical princess named Alyona living in a faraway easterly* castle. Bred for war by her evil uncle, she discovers that Uncle Bane is actually her father! He had traced the family’s magical bloodline and predicted he could produce an exceptional wunderkind/wunderwaffe if he sired a child with his sister! Alyona is the byproduct of that dreadful abuse, and must be trained by Ileana, queen* of all witches, to resist the patriarch, face her trauma, and rescue her battered household from certain doom.

*My mother specialized in Eastern European Studies at the University of Michigan, so I grew up right after the fall of the Soviet Union learning about the czars, Peter the Great, and Vlad the Impaler (my little brother wanted to change his surname to Țepeș: Joe Țepeș, or Joe “the Impaler”). When I commissioned Maev to do the drawing of Ileana seated at her throne of magical pillars [modeled after the pillars of Nosgoth from Legacy of Kain], I asked her to cover the pillars in Cyrillic symbols; from what I recall, asking Maev what she wrote, she replied that the Cyrillic symbols were selected at random.

[“A painting of Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia (1431–1476), also known by his patronymic name Dracula (patronymic meaning a name based on that of a male ancestor), and posthumously dubbed Vlad the Impaler due to his brutality. The name of the vampire Count Dracula in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897) was inspired by Vlad’s patronymic” (source: British Library).]

Something I realized later was that Ileana and Alyona—in a psychomachic/psychosexual sense—were medieval divisions of me told on the page. As a closeted trans woman, I lived in trauma that was real and imagined, both the lived abuse of my household and my internalized self-hatred and dysphoria/dysmorphia as a neurodivergent trans person who didn’t know she was either of those things. I lacked the knowledge to express that, but I felt it. So I used what I did know to express my unspeakable trauma and trans woman’s existence in the language that was given to me; e.g., the “Stan Lee” approach to superheroes and psychomachy through plurality

plurality/multiplicity

Generally demonized in Gothic canon, “Plurality or multiplicity is the psychological phenomenon in which a body can feature multiple distinct or overlapping consciousnesses, each with their own degree of individuality. This phenomenon can feature in identity disturbance, dissociative identity disorder, and other specified dissociative disorders. Some individuals describe their experience of plurality as a form of neurodiversity, rather than something that demands a diagnosis” (source: Wikipedia). It’s not automatically an ailment or begot from trauma, though it will canonically be presented as such (the same goes for asexual/neurodivergent peoples).

but also the Hero’s Journey as something for me to camp. We learn through sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, but also oral traditions and folklore as a means of storing our culture inside; anyone who thinks otherwise is deceiving themselves. But camping is important because these things [their Gothic poetics] can be weaponized against us; i.e., by turning off our ability to think critically while the profit motive colonizes everything in pursuit of elite hegemony [destroying our culture in the process and replacing it with bad copies that serve the profit motive]. We must not treat such poetics as a means of escape that is purely a numbing opiate; i.e., one that blinds us with its supposedly “visible” darkness; we will need all our wits and linguo-material tools—our “dark forces” of reclamation/reinvention—if we are to escape the myopia of Capitalist Realism. Rest assured that all the sexy monsters will remain, as will their forbidden fun and games [even the dumb shonen crap]; they’ll just be doubled as sex-positive [thus class, race and gender conscious] during our dialectical-material scrutiny’s asymmetrical/guerrilla warfare: by not being anchored to biological sex, skin color and their various heteronormative functions within the colonial binary and its mythic structure/Shadow of Pygmalion’s bread and circus.

That, as I shall explain in my thesis, is our greatest strength.)

Onto “Notes on Power and Liminal Expression“!

---

Footnotes

[1] The Absurd sits adjacent to the Sublime, the Weird/cosmic nihilism, the Numinous, and astronoetics, all of which we’ll touch upon throughout this book at various points. The thing to note is, meaning is attained in relationship to these spatialized devices as a form of unequal, dare-I-say Promethean, power exchange; i.e., power and its complex, paradoxical performances formed in relation to us and things that seem (at least in appearance) to be far older and more powerful than us.

[2] For all of my muses, please refer to the Acknowledgements section.

[3] An ex I met in grad school, overseas. Said person has been given an alias (as have all of the exes I talk about, in this book), whereupon we mutually decided for me to call them “Zeuhl”; i.e., after the obscure-but-totally-awesome musical subgenre (Jim Allen’s “There is No Prog, Only Zeuhl: A Guide to One of Rock’s Most Imaginative Subgenres,” 2020). I don’t owe Zeuhl shit, but to be blunt, they’re very self-centered and socially hypochondriacal, and I’m not really interested in outing them in this book despite how they abused me. At the same time, I also don’t want to actively protect them or clean up after their mess by scrubbing every aspect of their mentioning from my online profile and various websites. But to be honest, there isn’t (to my knowledge) any public mention of them and their full name outside of my private socials (unlike Jadis, another ex who is publicly mentioned outside of this book because—fuck them, they hurt me bad and frankly shouldn’t be allowed to date anyone). This being said, I do talk about Zeuhl’s abuse of me (and the abuse I received from other exes) in ways that tries to be frank and educational. What they did was shitty and I’d like to help other people by offering them the chance to learn from my adventures, “happy accidents” and all.

[4] A trick employed by the state called triangulation, or pitting one group against another for one’s own benefit. A common method is weaponizing abuse victims’ prey mechanisms, making them scared and angry and then handing them a weapon. In the case of Victoria, she’s literally “pulling a Brutus” except it’s against a small, defenseless woman; as we shall see with TERFs later on, they triangulate for the state to act just like Victoria does, except it’s against the state’s manufactured enemies: trans people and labor movements. Keep this idea in mind; we’ll return to it often through the entire book (especially when examining Victoria, Hippolyta and Medusa, or offshoots of these archetypes).

[5] For a fun visual guide on swooning, consider Adam Frost and Zhenia Vasiliev’s “How to Tell You’re Reading a Gothic Novel – in Pictures” (2014). Also, the idea isn’t complete bullshit; the xenophobia is an abject counterfeit, but based on a kernel of truth: how the body responds to perceived trauma, aka the vasovagal response:

When I first started reading romance novels I used to snicker at the idea of fainting from shock, thinking it a silly, overblown invention by authors to accentuate the delicate feminine sensibilities of their heroines. And then, to my utter surprise, it actually happened to me. I happen to dislike needles. As in, really dislike needles. The idea of getting a shot has always given me the heebie-jeebies. But I simply ask to sit down when getting one, and it’s okay. One time, though, I must have been stressed about by other things, because I rolled up my sleeve, and then remember starting to breathe a little weirdly. The next thing I knew, the nurse was patting my cheek gently, and looking horribly distraught. “I—I hadn’t even touched you yet!” she stammered. “And you just keeled over!” How embarrassing to find out I’m a flighty peagoose straight out of an Ann Radcliffe Gothic novel! However, I’ve learned that’s much more common than you think” (source: Andrea Penrose’s “Why Do Regency Heroines Swoon?” 2021).

I can attest to this, my ex, Jadis—normally made of steel—fainted at the sight of blood (my blood, no less) while watching me get my vasectomy!

In other words, Radcliffe wasn’t totally full of shit, but she did use the physiological effects of swooning to contribute to some very harmful psychosexual myths, stigmas and BDSM stereotypes stemming from her fictions (we’ll discuss camping these throughout the volume).

[6] (from the “Karl Marx in the Ludwig Rosenberger Library of Judaica,” 2006): The son of Jewish parents, Marx was baptized at the age of six. While he had no Jewish education and embraced atheism, he continues to be identified as a Jew, and his Jewish ancestry influenced his thinking. Marx’s writings about Jews and Judaism, which identify Judaism with capitalism, are nearly all hostile […] It is also not clear if Marx believed the negative qualities he saw in Jews were inherent traits or rather the result of historical circumstance that forced them into specific roles and activities. Whether or not he was himself anti-Semitic, his Jewish origins and his writings have been used by anti-Semites in linking Communism to a Jewish conspiracy; and his remarks about Jews continue to influence the reception of his other writings (source).

[7] (from the glossary): The Shadow of Pygmalion or “Pygmalion effect” is the patriarchal vision of those knowing-better “kings” of male-dominated industries, wherein “Pygmalion” means “from a male king’s mind.” Male “kings” author imaginary visions of the past, present and future, including the monomyth/Cycle of Kings, infernal concentric pattern and its heteronormative legion of monsters, invasion scenarios and escape fantasies; their reasoned, Cartesian treatment of women is heteronormative, thus abjectly hysterical.

[8] E.g., Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon (2013): “It is the near future… The apocalypse has had an apocalypse!” (source: Gamespot’s “Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon – Reveal Trailer” 2013); or, Gloryhammer’s Return to the Kingdom of Fife (2023); or Tropic Thunder’s (2014) Tugg Speedman: “The one man who made a difference five times before… is about to make a difference again, only this time it’s… different!” All are dumb nostalgia on top of dumb nostalgia as a running gag that runs the risk of repeating itself until it loses steam (critical power).

[9] “Vulgar” meaning “common, plebian.” Consider his “Leck mich im Arsch” (1782)—literally “lick me in the ass” (while it’s not strictly fetishized, but rather closer to the Americanized “kiss my ass,” one could fetishize it).

[10] In the past, I struggled greatly to critique monoliths like Radcliffe, the so-called “Great Enchantress.” I’ve since discovered that going after them and their problematic memory is like kicking a punching bag with their face on it (until it starts to look like Doomguy’s when his health is low). When hitting something made to look like someone you dislike, the sensation is oddly satisfying. But also, it’s for a good reason: Radcliffe ‘s a bigot and a moderate one at that; for the good of us all, she (and the legion of copycats she inspired with her School of Terror) needs to be taken down a peg or two (we’ll get to all of this is good time, I promise). This can be by kicking her corpse, but also dancing with her ghost, turning it into something better in the process!

[11] Vis-à-vis Jodey Castricano’s Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing (2001), or “the play of revelation and concealment lodged within parts of individual words” (source). As I unpack it later in this volume, “Castricano further describes this process as ‘writing with ghosts,’ referring to their nature as linguistic devices that adhere the sense of being haunted in domestic spaces: the house as inside-outside, familiar-unfamiliar and inherited imperfectly by the living from the dead” (from the “Notes on Power” essay) and “In regards to ghosts, I would argue the same notion applies to all undead and to demons—i.e., writing with both as complicated theatrical expressions of the human condition under Capitalism” (from “the Four Gs” section).

[12] To be fair to Butler (who long outlived Foucault and Derrida), she doesn’t mince words when it comes to TERFs:  “The anti-gender ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times. So the TERFs will not be part of the contemporary struggle against fascism, one that requires a coalition guided by struggles against racism, nationalism, xenophobia and carceral violence; one that is mindful of the high rates of femicide throughout the world, which include high rates of attacks on trans and genderqueer people” (Emanuel Maiberg’s “Why The Guardian Censored Judith Butler on TERFs,” 2021).

[13] A slur directed at homosexual men/gender-non-conforming AMABs, who are fetishized/coercively demonized by cis-het men during gender trouble when the nation-state cannot provide them heteronormative sex (“war brides”). Often, queer fiction comments on this exploitative side of the “bury your gays” trope through an abject, queer damsel-in-distress: the twink-in-peril, perhaps articulated mostly nakedly (with raw exploitation, but also exceptional nuance) in Dennis Cooper’s Frisk (1991) or Gregg Araki’s The Doom Generation (1995). Gentler, less-brutalized versions of this monstrous-feminine can be found sprinkled all throughout popular fiction, including Cloud-in-a-dress from Final Fantasy 7 (1997) and “Gerudo Link” from the Zelda series (which we’ll explore more in Volume Three, Chapter Three, exhibit 93). “Traps” in quotes is something that could be supplied to AFAB workers, whose appearance beyond heteronormative standards leads them to becoming demonized as a queer “bait,” or trick (no pun intended) that leads chasers down queerer and queerer rabbit holes.

[14] This isn’t written to devalue the love that Zeuhl and I had. Quite the contrary, I absolutely cherish the memory of what we shared and want it known how special all of that was. But given that they have zero desire to be affiliated with me and my work, I likewise am bound by the code of my own honor to relegate them to that shadow zone they were so keen on being inside after they broke up with me. If said desire seems odd, know that I felt exactly the same way in 2019 after they left me for their future husband (and future “side pieces” despite telling me the breakup was because they were in a “mono” headspace). Simply put, it smacked of Picasso: “Each time I leave a woman, I should burn her. Destroy the woman, destroy the past she represents” (source: Marta’s “The Women of Picasso,” 2023). Well, sorry, but I won’t be party to such vandalism in service of someone whose treatment of me shows they only cared about themselves in the end (whose mind flipped “off” like a switch when they wanted nothing more to do with me in person). I want to preserve the memory of what we had and why it mattered—not for Zeuhl, but for me.

And if my ghostly recollections of them irks and/or saddens them, know that I gave them every possible chance to avoid the present state of affairs. To Zeuhl: You chose to hide down in that rabbit hutch of yours; you can stay there as far as I’m concerned, but you will do so knowing that you were the primary cause of our broken friendship, not I. Maybe it won’t haunt you, but know that your haunting of me is something I have accepted and am living with in my own cathartic healing process. We met in a disco-like space and it was a hell of a good time, but I survived the hell you put me through, after the party (and the sex, love and kindness from you) stopped.

[15] (from the glossary): The teller of splendid lies; e.g., Jonathan Swift and Gulliver’s Travels (1726); also applies to self-aware weavers of various genres of fiction, from Oscar Wilde to Luis Borges, but also non-white/American authors who have to reinvent their own cultures’ lost histories—e.g., Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Michelle Cliff’s Free Enterprise (1993) and Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage (1998), etc. Furthermore, concerning bourgeois lies vs proletarian splendid lies, Gothic stories are concerned with recycled clichés in either case.

[16] From “Structure, Sign and Play” (1966).

[17] Translated from French: “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte.” From Of Grammatology (1967). A handy way to think of it is as, “There is no outside-text.” For further reading, I suggest Harish’s Notebook’s “Deconstructing Systems – There is Nothing Outside the Text” (2020), which explores Derrida’s (famously difficult) idea nicely.

[18] “Pertaining to the ideas of Thomas Robert Malthus.” Malthus was an English economist and all-around horrible person, who—faced with the biblical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Conquest/Pestilence, War, Famine and Death)—dispassionately argued for the genocide of poor people to combat “overpopulation” (an eco-fascist dogwhistle that continues to conspicuously play out in popular narratives; e.g., superhero stories, vis-à-vis Renegade Cut’s “Thanos Was Wrong – Eugenics and Overpopulation,” 2019).

[19] E.g., Apone from Aliens (1986): “A day in the Marine corps is like a day on the farm—every meal a banquet, every paycheck a fortune, every formation a parade! I love the corps!” Never mind that no one likes the cornbread, many openly hate the job, various characters like Vasquez and Drake are penal conscripts (a prison battalion, essentially), and the enterprising greenhorn lieutenant basically gets everyone killed because he sends the squad into an ambush without weapons (“What the hell are we supposed to use, man? Harsh language?”). Apone’s blind love speaks to the warning of the Black Abolitionist: “We love our country but our country doesn’t love us” (Atun-Shei Films’ “A Black Abolitionist’s Drastic Response to the Fugitive Slave Act” 2023); e.g., the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment cut to ribbons at Fort Wagner during a forlorn hope with stars in their eyes (dreaming of a country that loves them).

[20] Capitalism is a hyperobject, a structure so big that you can’t directly observe it, and whose descriptions through ultimately simplistic metaphors are abstracting at best (for more information on hyperobjects, consider Timothy Morton’s 2013 book on the subject). You can only talk about Capitalism in pieces, from a particular point of view about something you yourself disinterred and reassembled over space and time. Needless to say, the point of Gothic-Communist abstraction isn’t abject confusion, nor is it to pull something out of thin air. Rather, it’s meant to achieve altered perspective for enhanced appreciation of truths concealed by capital; e.g., abstract art that isn’t tied to having an obvious point, purpose, or monetary value/function under Capitalism.

[21] From Jerrold Hogle’s “Leroux’s Fantôme and the Cultural Work of the Gothic” in The Undergrounds of The Phantom of the Opera (2002):

By now, we should not be surprised that Gaston Leroux’s conflicted social vision and its disguised exposure of cultural “abjections” appear most fully in a novel deeply rooted in the “Gothic” tradition. Over the last two decades, the study of the Gothic as a mixed and unsettling mode in fiction, theater, film, and other media has increasingly revealed how the archaic spaces and haunting monsters that loom before us in performances we call Gothic provide methods of “othering” that have definite ideological and social, as well as psychological, functions. In the Gothic from the later eighteenth century on, as David Punter has shown, “the middle class” often does what we have just seen Leroux do in Le Fantôme: it “displaces the hidden violence of present social structures, conjures them up again as past, and falls promptly under their spell” with feelings of both fear and attraction towards the phantasms of what is displaced (Punter, 418). The Gothic, well before Leroux adopts it, enables a growing bourgeois hegemony to be both haunted by and distanced from the “hidden barbarities” that have helped make it possible (Punter, 419)—and hence the repressed uncertainties it feels about its own legitimacy (as in Abraham’s “phantom”)—by projecting such anomalies into the horrors of apparently old and alien specters, buildings, and crypts (source).

As we proceed into the book, keep this in mind when we discuss monsters and spaces, and the middle-class fear-fascination with them.

[22] This idea is obviously complicated, as Hell and its undead/demonic occupants can denote intersectional stigmas that aren’t explicitly connected to race; e.g., green or purple as a color of stigma/trauma afforded to people who adopt it for different reasons; i.e., the witch as the vice character who upholds the status quo by playing into widespread stereotypes, or appropriating colonization unto a group that historically only benefits from Imperialism (relative to the Global South); sure, there are degrees of relative oppression experienced by white women in the Global North versus white men, but these woman (and other token groups) can still perform in bad faith by adopting the rebel’s persona, shouting “for the Horde!” and punching down at trans people (or whoever the state needs them to attack) also dressed up as “bad” demons, undead, and/or stigma-animal chimeras to stab, shoot, crush and kill. Keep this in mind when we look at “fantasy blackface” in Volume Two (orcs, exhibit 37e; Drow, exhibit 41b)—not as strictly “of race,” but of class, race, gender and religion as generally emphasized to varying degrees during a given performance depending on who’s playing the role and during which production.

[23] A hideous inversion of the oft-conceived idea of “Peter Pan syndrome”; i.e., the adult is the childish one. The paradox of the heteronormative adult is they are the most entitled and childish of all, albeit without an actual child’s nascent ability to imagine anything except the incredibly narrow set of rules, behaviors and beliefs (thus stigmas and biases) they have internalized. Suitably “grown up,” the weird canonical nerd becomes easily frustrated, conditioned to rape and kill and the drop of a hat, but also lie through bad-faith deceptions. In short, they are useful to capital.

[24] From Mark Greene’s “Man Box culture” in Remaking Manhood: The Healthy Masculinity Podcast (2023); i.e., “the brutal enforcement of a narrowly defined set of traditional rules for being a man.”

[25] Source: Bad Empanada’s “How the USA Inspired the Nazis – From Manifest Destiny to Lebensraum” (2022).

[26] Jerrold Hogle’s ghost of the counterfeit, which we’ll explore at length during the Four Gs section.

[27] Like many artists that we examine throughout the book, Morry’s work pointedly revives the Wisdom of the Ancients according to the Neo-Gothic tradition: a marriage between the Ancient Romance’s “larger-than-life” and the ordinary novel’s sense of the quotidian, the mundane stuff of the everyday. And Morry’s work (exhibit 51d2) is fairly tame on the larger gradient, paling in its subversive power compared to someone like Sabs’ far more erotic (and twink-centric) romances (exhibit 91c); i.e., the “Sapphic” is a cliché often weaponized by second wave feminism and the LGBA.

[28] The tragedy of Beowulf is most men can be broken, conditioned like dogs to serve the state without seeing the damage done to themselves or others; i.e., it has been internalized. Per Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605), this is called “tilting at windmills.”

[29] What better way to illustrate madness than the need for profit by destroying as many people and environments as possible? It’s a kind of chasing the dragon/”dragon sickness” by bloodletting entire nations on stolen, privatized land.

[30] As defined by the Online Etymology Dictionary (2023):

late 14c., “revelation, disclosure,” from Church Latin apocalypsis “revelation,” from Greek apokalyptein “uncover, disclose, reveal,” from apo “off, away from” (see apo-) + kalyptein “to cover, conceal” (from PIE root, kel-) “to cover, conceal, save.” The Christian end-of-the-world story is part of the revelation in John of Patmos’ book “Apokalypsis” (a title rendered into English as pocalipsis c. 1050, “Apocalypse” c. 1230, and “Revelation” by Wycliffe c. 1380). Its general sense in Middle English was “insight, vision; hallucination.” The general meaning “a cataclysmic event” is modern (not in OED 2nd ed., 1989); apocalypticism “belief in an imminent end of the present world” is from 1858 [source].

[31] A pair of radioactive materials that, when held together, would near-instantly release fatal levels of radiation to anyone near the core (see: Alex Wellerstein’s “The Demon Core and the Strange Death of Louis Slotin,” 2016).

[32] There’s nothing quite so dumb or cruel as threatening workers with death—as if the elite could offer us the means to cheat death when they cannot do it, themselves! The cruelty is, they’re offering people the basic means to survive after cornering the market.

[33] From his War in the Shadows: the Guerrilla in History (1994): “Not only can terror be employed as a weapon, but any weapon can become a weapon of terror: terror is a weapon, a weapon is terror, and no one agency monopolizes it.” In other words, the state’s monopoly of violence—Max Weber’s maxim, “a state holds a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence within its territory, meaning that violence perpetrated by other actors is illegitimate” (refer to our thesis statement for the full definition)—can be challenged.

[34] When confronted with their true selves, most men might not run away screaming but they often freeze up, disenchant or self-report (all of which are usual responses for us to use against them).

[35] An oft-misunderstood term and my area of expertise. We delve more into its full definition and sex-positive application during the “camp map,” but for now here’s the short version (abridged, from the glossary):

Metroidvania

A type of Gothic videogame, one involving the exploration of castles and other closed spaces in an ergodic framework; i.e., the struggle of investigating past trauma as expressed through the Gothic castle and its monstrous caverns (which is the author poetically hinting at systemic abuses in real life).Metroidvania are a location-based videogame genre that combines 2D, 2.5D, or 3D platforming [e.g., Dark Souls, 2009] and ranged/melee combat—usually in the 3rd person—inside a giant, closed space. This space communicates Gothic themes of various kinds; encourages exploration* depending on how non-linear the space is; includes progressive skill and item collection, mandatory boss keys, backtracking and variable gating mechanics (bosses, items, doors); and requires movement powerups in some shape or form, though these can be supplied through RPG elements as an optional alternative.

*Exploration pertains to the deliberate navigation of space beyond that of obvious, linear routes—to search for objects, objectives or secrets off the beaten path (source: “Mazes and Labyrinths”).

[36] In this 2022 blogpost, “Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion, or Gothic Communism: Manifesto,” which has seen numerous revisions since July 22nd, 2022. When it releases in early 2024, Volume One will contain the manifesto, but also a variety of other documents and changes not included in the original blogpost.

[37] “Lost in Necropolis: The Continuation of Castle-Narrative beyond the Novel or Cinema, and into Metroidvania” (2018)

[38] In short, I was averaging ~5000 words/~15 pages and ~7.5 images per day. Compared to my past blogging efforts, that was essentially a full-size blogpost with pictures and citations (which normally I would write over a week, sometimes longer) every day for 22 days straight (without drugs, I feel I should emphasize—that includes coffee/alcohol or other over-the-counter stimulants/depressants). It’s funny because I remember Paul Sheldon—Steven King’s autobiographical protagonist, in Misery (1987)—giving himself a martyred pat on the back when he said he was writing 5 pages a day (King even italicized it, if I remember correctly) while his “muse” was torturing him. Like, that’s really cute, my dude (though props for doing it on a typewriter, holy fuck)!

[39] One book was produced when I was in high school, and remains unfinished; another graphic novel was finished but is out-of-print; a commissioned novella that is mostly-finished but on hiatus (refer to this page on my website to access descriptions for each). Also, there’s my 2018 master’s thesis, “Lost in Necropolis: The Continuation of Castle-Narrative beyond the Novel or Cinema, and into Metroidvania” (on Academia.edu) and various amounts of commissioned short stories/erotica (on my website).