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)!

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

Overcoming Praxial Inertia: Straw Dogs and Canon’s Teeth in the Night

“She’s a very freaky girl, the kind you don’t take home to mother!”

—Rick James; “Superfreak,” on Street Songs (1981)

(artist: Doc Zenith)

Picking up where “The Roots of Camp: Reclaiming Demon BDSM” left off…

Note: This section touches on the idea of Grendel’s mother and Beowulf—a monomythic idea functionally identical to Perseus and Medusa in terms of policing the whore; i.e., in service to profit (re: nature as alien/monstrous-feminine). For more on this concept than is introduced here, consider any of my writings on Metroidvania; i.e., a series which pits offshoots of the subjugated Amazon against the Medusa; e.g., not just Samus and Mother Brain, but also the tabula rasa hero from Hollow Knight (re: “Policing the Whore” from my Undead Module, 2024). I also recommend the Medusa chapter from my Demon Module, “Always a Victim” (2024). —Perse, 3/24/2025

Praxial inertia is the resistance to/mistreatment of state-sponsored scapegoats in monomythic stories, the oldest written example in English being Grendel and Grendel’s mother. The gears of war and rape must forever turn, and their gentrified slaughter (no one says “fuck” in Tolkien’s polite rapes of the underclass) helps grease the wheels and deaden the mind to its humanity in service of capital. While this is the girl boss/war boss’ refrain in defense of capital, it is also a common sentiment of “Jewish revenge” interrogating power in the Gothic mode’s acknowledgment of these things as hopelessly indiscrete[1]; i.e., revenge of the zombie underclass rising up from hell to revisit their black revenge on the usual white (skin and moral superiority) conquers of them and theirs—on the trenches of reality reflected in Gothic tableaux:

…Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature’s mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry ‘Hold, hold!’ (source: Macbeth).

Within these complicated spheres, a woman/monstrous-feminine acts like a man for many reasons; for the state, there is only one: she is evil and must die. Rain or shine, that’s what the men who run the show want; “And the bands played on…[2]”

(exhibit 1a1a1f1: As Hamlet famously said about his mother, “Tis an unweeded garden grown to seed. Things gross and rank in nature possess it merely.” Despite the Prince of Denmark’s flagrant sexism, there is awesome power in the monstrous-feminine as a revolutionary force; as Archaic Mothers with archaic babies, they throw a wrench in the proverbial works according to a variety of ways [strict/gentle, damsel/demon]. Yet, as something to canonically “embrace,” the male hero views nature as the perpetual victim/terrorist that threatens business-as-usual—i.e., embodied as monstrous-feminine, thus correct-incorrect according to her not being a man but also something for men to possess and dominate according to ancient doctrines: anything not the [white, cis-het, male Christian] hero is his by divine right. The ancient enemy of the classical West was Medusa through witches or Amazons, but also her “wandering womb” as the primordial site of disorder/chaos; i.e., Pandora’s “box,” whence the demons of nature spilled into Man’s domain. Mother Nature is both a slut and a demon, something to fear and treasure but also slay and possess by a conqueror as the reaper slashes the harvest—i.e., as mere property to control and do with as he pleases, synonymizing sex with harm, with violation, with parasitic impregnation. This means killing anything that resists or is different: Grendel, but also Grendel’s mother, the bride of Cain as an Amazon guerrilla, a hysterical backstabber whose wandering womb is heretical to his God-ordained might: He’s literally the strongest because God said so, and it plays out in a very deus-ex-machina kayfabe narrative:

Grimly biding time, Grendel’s mother,

Monstrous hell-bride, brooded on her wrongs.

She had been forced down into fearful waters,        

The cold depths, after Cain had killed

His father’s son, felled his own

Brother with the sword. Banished an outlaw,

Marked by having murdered, he moved into the wilds,

Shunning company and joy. And from Cain there sprang[3]

Misbegotten spirits, among them Grendel

The banished and accursed, due to come to grips

With that watcher in Heorot waiting to do battle.

The monster wrenched and wrestled with him

But Beowulf was mindful of his mighty strength,       

The wondrous gifts God had showered on him:

He relied for help on the Lord of All,

On His care and favor[4]. So he overcame the foe,

Brought down the hell-brute. Broken and bowed,

Outcast from all sweetness, the enemy of mankind

Made for his death-den. But now his mother

Had sallied forth on a savage journey,

Grief-racked and ravenous, desperate for revenge. 

/ 

She came to Heorot. There, inside the hall,

Danes lay asleep, earls who would soon endure

A great reversal once Grendel’s mother

Attacked and entered. Her onslaught was less

Only by as much as an Amazon warrior’s

In less than an armored man’s

When the hefted sword, its hammered edge

And gleaming blade slathered in blood,

Razes the sturdy boar-ridge off a helmet.

Then in the hall, hard-honed swords

Were grabbed from the bench, many a broad shield

Lifted and braced; there was little thought of helmets

Or woven mail when they woke in terror.

The hell-dam was in panic, desperate to get out,

In mortal terror the moment she was found.

She had pounced and taken one of the retainers

In a tight hold, then headed for the fen.

To Hrothgar, this man was the most beloved

Of the friends he trusted between the two seas.

She had done away with a great warrior,

Ambushed him at rest[5].    

/                     

Beowulf was elsewhere (source: Beowulf, translation: Seamus Heaney).

[artist: A Baby Pinecone]

The historical-material reality of Grendel’s suspiciously Satanic-sounding mother is ordinary people being placed into the out-group by the in-group—i.e., less hag-horror in the sense of actual withered hags [the furies] and more the ancient mother goddess [the Archaic Mother] as embodied in AFAB persons and viewed fearfully by men as devious shapeshifters that could be anywhere, inside-outside anyone [a killer impostor that is instantly fatal upon encountering; e.g., the T-1000 disguised as an innocent housewife]. While the stigma applies to anything remotely female or incorrectly male, the redhead classically evokes the presence of pagan power and Sapphic energies. She embodies nature, and nature is something for Beowulf’s hauntologized clones to kettle/box-in, then rape and kill for “their own” God-given glory in bread-and-circus-type stories [with her predictable revenge—at becoming like them for the death of her family and loved ones—being seen as cowardly and illegitimate in the eyes of the state and its kayfabe monopoly of violence; i.e., the back-and-forth cycle of reactive abuse]. It’s not just “boys will be boys”; the pussy looks like a cave to conquer by men according to men during rites of passage that have been baked into our culture as fundamental to capital. It’s Manifest Destiny in action—challenged by the simple fact that God is an invention, a cruel joke to abuse others with through the rise of Capitalism’s Cartesian Revolution and resultant maps of conquest [exhibit 1a1a1h2a1]. It becomes not just a scribble of Old-English runes, but a harmful game spawned into endless copies of itself: the power fantasy as Warrior Jesus’ perennial resurrection, raping and killing the world as monstrous-feminine, “gendered at every turn” according to cartography as a technology of conquest that fits into the ludologized scheme:

[Francis Bacon, the father of modern science,] argued that “science should as it were torture nature’s secrets out of her.” Further, the “empire of man” should penetrate and dominate the “womb of nature.” […] The invention of Nature and Society was gendered at every turn. The binaries of Man and Woman, Nature and Society, drank from the same cup. Nature, and its boundary with Society, was “gyn/ecological” from the outset [source: A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things].

The kingdom is threatened; call Beowulf [or the Ghostbusters] out of the mythical past to slay what ails the king and the land, the uncanny home as “rotten” [as Hamlet put it, in Shakespeare’s parody of the hero/murder mystery] and needing to be restored through great destruction [sold to the masses, of course]: 

Uncanny

From Freud’s unheimlich, meaning “unhomely,” the uncanny actually has many different academic applications. One of the most famous (and canonically outmoded) is the liminal/parallel space (the “danger disco/cyberpunk,” exhibit 15b2; the haunted music video, 43a; the Nostromo from Alien, 64c). Another common example is the uncanny valley, which—while generally applied to animation techniques—can also apply to ghosts, egregores and other Gothic imitations (the unfriendly disguise/pastiche, exhibit 43b; the friendly, iconoclastic variant 43c) or humanoid likenesses that fail to “pass the test” (for a diegetic example of this concept, refer to the Voight-Kampff test from Blade Runner, 1982). In the Gothic sense, the animate-inanimate presents the subject as now-alive but once-not, but also faced within bad copies they cannot safely distinguish themselves from; e.g., the knight from Hollow Knight (exhibit 40h1) but also the xenomorph (exhibit 60d) and living latex, leather and death fetishes (exhibits exhibit 9b2, 50b, 60e1, 101c2), or golems/succubae (exhibits 38c1b/51b1), etc, as one subtype of animated miniature whose ghost of the counterfeit is historically-materially abject. The intimation is one of death in proximity with sensations that we are merely clay simulacra within the Gothic spell and that, at any moment, the spell could end and our dancing in the ruins suddenly stop as we cease to be once more; motionless we become, as Monty Python puts it, “ex-parrots.”

To preserve the image of male hegemony, modern-day heroes will inject themselves with whatever serum they require to manufacture an edge over women as a false binary [e.g., the ghost of Eugene Sandow and his imaginary antiquity, exhibit 7a]. This mad science is what Robert Matheson and Mary Shelley mercilessly lampooned in Frankenstein and I am Legend [1954] as the fearsome and outdated legend of the rapist-murderer presented as a scientist of cold, “benevolent” reason [or infantile sports goon grown in a test tube; e.g., X-24 from Logan, 2017]—who is, in truth, just an entitled, cruel nerd. Manufactured conflict under Capitalism involves compelled performances of anything and everything [masks, uniforms, weapons, handcuffs and other binding implements, labels of power and its delivery from cops unto victims, etc] that weaponize weird canonical nerds through projection—i.e., onto various theatrical personas: sexy or profoundly hideous killers, detectives, warriors, or doctors.

[artist: unknown]

Class/culture/race war is a messy train of parody and pastiche, whose remediated praxis develops endlessly on either side; i.e., a timeless, bottomless domain of paradox and hyperbolic fetish and cliché, where manmade monsters from beast factories have been built to guide the discourse for or against the state [the Base]. It is canonical praxis and its proponents that revolutionary undead [Shelley’s Creature and Matheson’s zombie-vampires] reject inside the Gothic Communist’s doubled scheme/competing castle of camp; i.e., as operative posthuman entities who also reject Renaissance Humanism and Cartesian dualism in favor of a more humane world for all life viewed unfavorably as undead-demonic [we’ll return to these ideas frequently in Volume Two]: the weird iconoclastic nerds’ reclamation of the medieval torture device in all its forms. Performed by two or more parties that know each other, their invigilation is patently meant to progress away from its essentialized, harmfully unironic police function [and the universal function of assumed roleplay and consent] and towards catharsis/informed consent displayed in ironic forms of “rape” and “violence” [which we’ll unpack more during the symposium].)

Obviously, our aim is to camp Beowulf, thus “make it gay” (e.g., Chris Hemsworth’s Thor as a dumb, happy “golden retriever” himbo whose hammer—the violent source of his hypermasculine power—is called “the destroyer” as a rather surreal, dumb metaphor to his penis that obviously can be lampooned; as is the idea of his strength stored in his muscles, unspent semen or long flowing hair). Beyond human examples, camping Beowulf includes making hum cute in ways weird canonical nerds would cry foul as “emasculating” (e.g., this little bat as the real teeth in the night; source skeet: Keira Queerhouse, 2023). This will take many forays into and out of the shadow zone’s more womb-like areas; i.e., lots of naughty-naughty demon sex, but also just kink and/or sex with atypical arrangements of power as it is commonly envisioned:

(artist: Guilty Merchant[6])

In turn, roleplay becomes campy and descriptive sexuality becomes something to appreciate for its performative irony in silly-but-sweet dialogs (“I think I’m “succeeding” right now!” / “Are you sure? Maybe you’ll have to fuck mommy’s pussy a few more times!” / “Good idea; better safe than sorry!”—based off an actual conversation that Jadis[7] and I had in bed during sex).

And yet, praxial inertia so often gets in the way of a beautiful friendship. Said inertia is, as I envision it, the resistance to socio-political change in relation to Pax Americana‘s “greatest” heroes. Though it stems from a far older tradition before global Capitalism, this hero worship encapsulates us-versus-them as an eternal, essential conflict presently expressed in neoliberal forms (especially videogames and their parallel cinematic counterparts) between good and evil. The common thread is a heteronormative, hypermasculine/monster-masculine versus the corrupt and the monstrous-feminine as coming from hell, the void, the shadow zone (“the Almighty’s enemy” being classically a Christian’s heretical foe, but really anything “corrupt” or demonized as monstrous-feminine in the eyes of the status quo; i.e., that which followed the “fall” of Rome and the various continuations and reformations of old power structures in order to preserve themselves). Hell spawn, deviants and witches—it’s the male action hero’s endless job to send them all back and keep the kingdom “pure” (all in service of the state and the elite, of course); or, as the image below reads, “They are rage, brutal, without mercy… But you, you will be worse. Rip and tear until it is done!”

I’m fully aware that the original line was from a terrible Doom comic[8a] (source: Patrick Klepek’s “Doom’s Got A Reference to a Comic Book Meme from 1996,” 2016); i.e., “just a joke” that has since replaced itself with a more serious neoconservatism that—four years after Doom 2016—became conspicuously stupid like the old Doom comic, but fascistically[8b] so (on- and offstage). This subchapter will look at several notable examples of the unironic Beowulf—be that largely straightforward, or silly but nevertheless an endorsement of the status quo—as well poring over double standards present within token minorities and victims of the hero class as expendable assets (straw dogs tied to a larger valor-centric structure); we’ll also consider the palliative function when reclaiming psychosexuality as a complex, monstrous mode of expression that frequently revolves around sin, hunger and the chase of power and control in some shape or form (for canon and iconoclasm, both).

First up, let’s consider our manly heroes and their insatiable bloodlust for “demons” to kill: “Die, monster! You don’t belong in this world!” As shall hopefully become abundantly clear as this book continues, rape and death are essential to Capitalism and Imperialism (the highest stage of Capitalism[9]). Whereas Capitalism invokes the monomyth through centrism and centrism is Capitalism in crisis, fascism is a hero warrior cult centered around death[10] or Capitalism in decay. It is Imperialism brought home to the empire, the proverbial chickens come home to roost during the Imperial Boomerang’s return. Except, as we shall see, it/they never left, nor did their hypermasculine rituals of death, theft, and rape.

(exhibit 1a1a1f2: The male action hero and his hauntologies are incredibly dumb on purpose, but still have room for problematic elements and their endorsement. Indeed, weird canonicals nerd cherish the loud stupidity and strange inability to say anything of substance beyond “It’s a movie!” while venerating the privilege of their [frequently white, cis-het male] heroes as a kind of protected class in its own right: the right to prove one’s manhood and get the girl by killing the big bad monster during or after a siege. Generally they have help, but the final duel is always between the hero and the villain, man-to-man. We’ll critique three in this exhibit and the next that I enjoy and grew up with, but do not endorse: Predator [1987], Army of Darkness [1993] and Contra [1987].

I’m happy to rain on the target audience’s parade because their panoply of sexism and xenophobia constitutes a foreign plot handled by priviliged, entitled men who “look the part” and love “badass stories[11].” To this, Predator is essentially a neoliberal retelling of Beowulf with bullets. Set in the Global South, a group of hypermasculine mercenaries encounter a Grendel-esque monster. Described as “the demon who makes trophies of men,” the hunter makes short work of our seemingly invincible “Spear Danes,” promptly picking them off, one by one [the Austrian Oak plays Dutch, our own Arnold Schwarzenegger emulating the squint-eyed stare of Clint Eastwood during the movie’s infamous salvo scene].

It’s an understatement to say the movie’s violence is hyperbolic. Yet “perceptive” parody requires more than big explosions or an awareness of action tropes and Predator has little else to offer. It doesn’t critique the us-versus-them violence in any sex-positive way and its over-the-top carnage makes zero antiwar hard stances; in short, the film is nothing but unironic war and American revenge. The Americans call themselves a “rescue team, not assassins”; but the moment they see one hostage killed, they massacre as many brown and Russian people as they can, all without taking a scratch themselves [the ghost of the counterfeit to entire Vietnam villages being massacred by American soldiers]. All in all, the Americans are the good guys, and the CIA raises some eyebrows but otherwise gets a pass; fuck the Guatemalans and the Russians: you kill one of ours, we’ll kill a hundred of yours!” In other words, it’s business-as-usual. Then, a foreign plot proves their hyperbolic violence necessary: the imaginary monster in a never-ending arms race.

Predator is blind parody/pastiche—a big, dumb “apolitical” cartoon that translates perfectly to the “run and gun” videogame format [Contra, below] but also similar settler-colonial stories set in other medieval/uncivilized locales [other than the jungle/Stone Age’s myth of the dark savage continent].

To this, the same over-the-top blindness goes for Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness. Taking place during a siege, Raimi—and by extension his hero, Ash Williams—abandon any attempt at serious or torturous horror [which isn’t always sex-positive, to be fair]. Together, the director and his star lampoon their own franchised formula; i.e., a spoof of itself that emulates the larger-than-life braggadocio of the male action as inspired by Beowulf, but also contemporaries of Beowulf such as King Arthur [originally a Welsh legendary hero from roughly the 7th century onwards] and serious/campy stories that came afterwards: Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote and various Neo-Gothic novels like Matthew Lewis’ The Monk [1796], Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya [1806] or Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey [1817]; Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court [1889], The Adventures of Robin Hood [1938] with Errol Flynn, and The Princess Bride [either the 1987 movie or the 1973 novel, by William Goldman].

Considering the bevy of palimpsests and obvious cultural inspirations, there’s nothing “new” in the film. This includes the entitled sexism of its male hero. As I write in “Valorizing the Idiot Hero” [2020]:

By refusing to punish Ash, Army of Darkness rewards the idiotic hero. Ash is simultaneously mocked and adored by his “subjects” (the fans). Amongst them, his sexist behavior can be delivered with impunity. Impunity is the apex of privilege. I say this in regards to consumers whose Ash-worship is perpetually reinforced by spiritual successors […] This kind of escapism reinforces sexist views conveyed elsewhere—by impressionable young men who grow into “kings,” courted and controlled by their own power trip. / That’s ultimately what Raimi offers. He certainly doesn’t use the material to critique Ash’s misogyny. Instead, he’s helped perpetuate it [source].

Raimi’s film is sexist, loud and self-aware, but also annoyingly “apolitical” in ways that valorize Ash. A tremendously stupid Don Quixote, he’s in love with his own scripted legend and celebrated for doing what has been prescribed to him and other boys since Beowulf: getting his way while being incredibly incompetent and impossibly perfect at the same time [the film even has a windmill for him to tilt at]. Simply put, Ash gets to be a sexist pig and total dumbass, yet still lives out the boyish idea of the monomyth as “self-made.”

In truth, Ash “fails up” like Errol Flynn did: through scripted success delivered with a wink as it coasts on by. He “kills” the monster and “saves” the world, getting the girl for no other reason than he was chosen according to legend—because he was a man. It’s standard-issue wish fulfillment, with legions of young men laughing out loud and saying, “He’s so awesome!” while secretly [or not so secretly] wishing it were them. The enjoyment is vicarious, a cuckold’s fantasy that touts its ancient double standards all over the place: He’s Donald Trump with a gun, a sexual predator handed everything on a silver platter—i.e., the harmfully silly paradox of the sexual predator as a parody of their former selves.)

Such heroes are romanticized in the oral, medieval tradition, but express a great, animalized hunger that conflates coerced sex and actual violence with powerful berserk behaviors; i.e., whose colonizer as pitted against a weak/strong dangerous animal-colonized’s own appetite/”teeth in the night”: dog-eat-dog.

(exhibit 1a1a1g1: Source. Connecting Beowulf to videogames, Contra is pure neoconservative/neoliberal propaganda “seriousness that fails”; i.e., designed to emulate/disguise Operation Condor’s “AstroTurf guerrillas” [“contras” being South American fascist squads funded by the CIA[12]], the Iran Contra Affair and various other war crimes committed by Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan and the state/Global North against South America, the Middle East and the entire Global South. The poster advertises false rebellion as essentially rotoscoped[13] onto Arnold Schwarzenegger’s body [the ’80s male action hero] from Predator in order to turn workers into killer children; i.e., enfants terribles that evoke an ancient, “archaic baby” force that mythically destroys the castrating mother/chaos dragon but historically-materially does this for the state, thus enables the male hero to “individuate[14]“: Beowulf’s aforementioned “teeth in the night,” but also Cú Chulainn’s freakish ríastrad[15] or “warp spasm” [similar to the T-1000, exhibit 83b] as a shapeshifting demonic mercenary/killer-for-hire whose medieval “barbarian/berserker rage” literally turns him inside-out: 

The first warp-spasm seized Cú Chulainn, and made him into a monstrous thing, hideous and shapeless, unheard of. His shanks and his joints, every knuckle and angle and organ from head to foot, shook like a tree in the flood or a reed in the stream. His body made a furious twist inside his skin, so that his feet and shins switched to the rear and his heels and calves switched to the front… On his head the temple-sinews stretched to the nape of his neck, each mighty, immense, measureless knob as big as the head of a month-old child… he sucked one eye so deep into his head that a wild crane couldn’t probe it onto his cheek out of the depths of his skull; the other eye fell out along his cheek. His mouth weirdly distorted: his cheek peeled back from his jaws until the gullet appeared, his lungs and his liver flapped in his mouth and throat, his lower jaw struck the upper a lion-killing blow, and fiery flakes large as a ram’s fleece reached his mouth from his throat… The hair of his head twisted like the tange of a red thornbush stuck in a gap; if a royal apple tree with all its kingly fruit were shaken above him, scarce an apple would reach the ground but each would be spiked on a bristle of his hair as it stood up on his scalp with rage (from Táin Bó Cúailnge, translated by Thomas Kinsella[16]; source: Ray Girvan’s “Warp Spasm!” 2012).

 

[artist: Heavy Metal Hanzo]

And if the Gaelic poetry seems like it might be operating under poetic license, artwork generally tends to side with a fervent endorsement of the monstrous transformation. In short, this is not an exaggeration; the transformation is hideous and frightening in ways that evoke Princess Mononoke‘s [1997] own demonic force [above] as a mad, furious chaos closely linked to the natural world:

(artist: Glenn Fabry)

 Transformation is generally implied in Beowulf but openly embraced with Cú Chulainn’s rudeness as a warrior utterly unkempt to the point that his body is unrecognizable. Both roles’ hypermasculine spearheading of privatized war remain thoroughly antithetical to the proletarian Gothic poetics of Milton’s shapeshifting Lucifer, Giger’s xenomorph, or current-day gender-non-conforming persons with their own self-determined sigils; i.e., Itzel‘s sigil, designed by them and illustrated by me [exhibit 45c1[17a]]. The kill order for a bourgeois berserk, then, is generally just that: a command given to an unthinking, manmade brute/dog-of-war who serves the elite; e.g., “DEMON. ATHETOS SAY, KILL,” exhibit 40f. Alienated, alienating and alienized, the Pavlovian cur is an expendable-asset straw dog who kills the enemy with “Excalibur” before saying the catchphrase, “I am the badass, not you!” to prove the state’s legitimacy through force as the prime negotiator; i.e., “might makes right” as a popular neoconservative tactic under neoliberal Capitalism.)

Following our continual animal logic, the neocon’s call to war leads to state decay that makes the dog “rabid,” but also increasingly enraged, inhuman, and difficult to control or relate to; and yet, famously egged on by the Valkyrie, literally “the chooser of the slain[17b]” asking the frenzied hero, “Do you want to live forever?” In this sense, pussy is tacitly promised to the greatest warriors of all, generally by “lesser” female warriors victimized by the overall scheme:

(exhibit 1a1a1g2a: In the 1981 movie, Conan the Barbarian, Valeria says to Conan, “All the gods they cannot sever us. If I were dead and you still fighting, I would come back—back from the pit of hell—to fight by your side!” This plays out quite literally in the movie’s penultimate scene. Conan kills one of Thulsa Doom’s henchmen, Thorgrim, with a trap, but the other man, Rexor, ain’t having it and sneaks up rather rudely on Conan [who isn’t paying attention because he’s teasing Thorgrim]. Conan is thrown onto his back and all seems lost, only for an angelic figure to block Rexor’s killing blow and blind him with a strike of light to the eyes. Temporarily disabled, Rexor falls to his knees—granting Valeria enough time to ask Conan: “Do you want to live forever?” Conan does a double-take and Valeria is gone. His strength reasserted seemingly by the gods, Conan picks up his sword and goes to work; he breaks Rexor’s stolen sword [using his own stolen weapon] and cuts him to pieces, paradoxically granting the older warrior an ignominious and glorious death [it’s a thin line, to be frank].

The kayfabe is full of theatrical clichés. For one, all of the cast were played by actual athletes. Apart from Arnold, Rexor was played by Ben Davidson, a Hall-of-Famer who played for the Oakland Raiders; Thorgrim was played by Sven-Ole Thorsen, a prolific and wildly successful bodybuilder, strongman, actor and stuntman. Next to the men, Sandahl Bergman was a dancer and six-foot tall, but arguably gives the best performance in the movie [alongside James Earl Jones] despite being nowhere near as muscular as they are: She won a golden globe for her role, and is physically and emotionally captivating largely because she’s clearly having fun with the material. In other words, she embraces the open, tomboy sexuality of the ’70s Amazon that originally started with Rob Howard’s writings of a personal wet dream that looked conventionally “hot,” but acted “like a man”:

She was tall, full-bosomed, and large-limbed, with compact shoulders. Her whole figure reflected an unusual strength, without detracting from the femininity of her appearance. She was all woman, in spite of her bearing and her garments… Instead of a skirt she wore short, wide-legged silk breeches, which ceased a hand’s breadth short of her knees, and were upheld by a wide silken sash worn as a girdle. Flaring-topped boots of soft leather came almost to her knees, and a low-necked, wide-collared, wide-sleeved silk shirt completed her costume. On one shapely hip she wore a straight double-edged sword, and on the other a long dirk. Her unruly golden hair, cut square at her shoulders, was confined by a band of crimson satin [from Rob Howard’s “Red Nails,” 1936; source: Fandom].

As usual, we see an actress allowed to upstage the boys, only to then be required to die for them. Even here, though, Bergman does it with style, stealing the wind from Conan’s sails by reminding us how he “won”: he had help from a ghost.)

Even with canon, clearly the performance allows for a degree of undead/demonic language, but if the infection or transformation is deemed “permanent,” it becomes useless to capital (who needs to disguise its genocides). In the tradition of persecuting undead and demonic monsters, the Great Destroyer is scapegoated; in the canine sense, the rabid dog is put down—i.e., a straw dog that is trampled and forgotten until the next ritual when someone new takes up the mantle of “world’s strongest.” Generally speaking, all of this is built into the monomyth and its various offshoots and theoretical devices as patriarchal; i.e., Caesar falls from grace, and a new Call to Adventure pits the mettle of a current youth against the skeleton king as someone to defeat for the status quo, debriding the royal mantle of its rotted tissues. Even in blinder versions of warrior camp, you can hear echoes of Beowulf in the kayfabe monologues: Instead of Ray Winstone’s “I am Ripper… Tearer… Slasher… Gouger. I am the Teeth in the Darkness, the Talons in the Night. Mine is Strength… and Lust… and Power!” you get “I am the hope of the omniverse! I am the lightbulb in the darkness! I am the bacon in the fridge for all living things that cry out in hunger! I am the Alpha and the Amiga! I am the terror that flaps in the night! I am Son Goku and I am a Super… Saiyan!” (Team Four Star’s “Dragon Ball Z Abridged: Episode 30 Part 1,” 2012). In wrestler’s language, it’s the catchphrase Beowulf spouts before he rips off Grendel’s arm, a Mortal Kombat fatality preemptively executed each and every time (the monster being the corrupt tyrant and the monstrous-feminine on the same stage).

This is an old boys club, so naturally therein lies a double standard: Even a male rabid dog is useful to the state and generally made to fight to the death[18] (far away from polite society, of course). They’re warlords, thus can fuck and kill whoever they want whenever and however they want (when you’re that powerful, no one’s gonna tell you no, or check to see if you’re following the ancient canonical codes). Conversely the token, often female “war dogs” who “go feral” tend to be put down more quickly through the “euthanasia effect” as a double standard regarding their highly policed bodies. Through a kind of morphological tone-policing[19], woman’s bodies are often “crushed” in ways that cater to the Male Gaze (the first casualty of the female body in heteronormative pin-up art is her pelvis and ribcage[20]). Conversely, she is not allowed to transform herself in ways that ruin that “polite” female image. A possible exception includes the “nerd rage” scene from Evangelion 2.0: You Cannot Advance (2009):

(exhibit 1a1a1g2c: Mari Makinami’s trademark is literally her glasses: “Before her actual name surfaced, Mari was known exclusively among fans as ‘Glasses Girl’ […] She caused a furor among fans after months of teasing and her ultimate reveal” [source: Fandom]. Similar to Velma, or pretty much any female character ever made, glasses = nerdy, chaste. This sets the stage for subversion, allowing the nerd to “disrobe” by acting in ways that are thoroughly not expected from a traditional standpoint on the surface. In reality, the nun, nerd, secretary or scientist is a girl in a man’s world, and generally expected to fulfill one of two roles: the Virgin or the Whore. On the science side of things, the Whore is generally represented through the mad scientist as classically over-the-top, which Mari combines with the naughty schoolgirl as ostensibly chaste but irrefutably nerdy in a pointedly deviant way. She’s a baddie, but one made by men [or tokenized Man Box proponents at large] to serve men of an increasingly older and younger age [no different than nuns serving a Catholic priest through the prioress, except the pimping mechanism is Protestant; i.e., operating under the Puritan ethic pimping the whore through the holiness of militarized sex work serving profit through veiled prostitution/false modesty and purity arguments]: if you can’t have it, you can watch token examples of it outperform you [while punching down harder than you, doing so to please master/avoid reprisals themselves; re: for selling out, or—in the case of those born into this life—per accident of birth landing them inside a police-state mech as their mechanical womb]!

[source]

Note: Per the Shadow of Pygmalion, the Amazon is a feral, animal-woman avatar for the usual benefactors of the state; i.e., to directly pilot, or for token workers to project onto/embody and pilot in ways that benefit emasculated men that—despite such ostensibly lowerings on the pecking order—still benefit from a subjugated warrior-whore, from cradle to grave, punching down against nature as monstrous-feminine: abjecting Medusa while still having beastly warrior qualities married to virginal nerdy ones. The fantasy is one of temporary or perceived disempowerment, only to eventually bridle the Amazon “as is”: “She will be mine.” It is to have one’s cake and eat it, too, acting out Amazonomachia‘s ancient assimilation fantasy [from Ancient Athens to Japan, a hauntology fearful of the Spartan woman who wields greater latitude than her second-class Athenian counterpart, while still blaming her (not the male hero) when things go belly-up; re: the euthanasia effect. In Japanese media, such gratuitous wish fulfillment invokes the mad science trope enveloped within kawaii and kowai tropes.—Perse, 3/27/2025

Mari is clearly moe fan service for older men stuck in arrested development, but openly owns the above scene as a throwaway tomboy who happily pushes herself to the limit, shedding her delicate feminine side, if for a moment. Seemingly through invisible injections given to her robot “womb” capsule, she transforms like the butterfly does, pushing herself to the edge [thus limits] of sanity and right over into the thoroughly fucked-up as a weird, caterpillar-themed mech [a reverse metamorph]. Her female body inside the suit doesn’t change very much [the green eyes evoking a cat’s, on par with Arthur Hilton’s Cat-Women of the Moon, 1953]; but her external appearance, the suit, transforms a great deal [and whose movements mirror her own]. Her human body isn’t allowed to change, but her mech body can [the fact that its stolen lends the whole thing a delegitimatized feel/unsanctioned science experiment; e.g., Herbert West stealing lab equipment except it’s military-grade]. The transformation is both a gentler human sexual fantasy to leer at, and a fierce, alien sexuality/monstrous-feminine that thoroughly embraces Cú Chulainn’s “warp-spasm” as an avatar of war for the Japanese eco-fascist’s desire to not be the traditional man; i.e., to have someone else do it, but still somehow embody the role as a spectator’s sport that caters to them and their conflicted sense of self regarding the mother persona as dubiously sisterly[21].)

Exceptions aside, a powerful woman/monstrous-feminine will canonically always be scapegoated to defend the white, cis-het male status quo; e.g., the feral slave or property as a rebellious “bitch in heat”/disobedient hound that “bites the hand that feeds it” (Mari, above) or is loyal to a fault (as Valeria is with Conan, exhibit 1a1a1g2b). All of this intense, vice-driven theatricality occupies the same liminal zone of darkness that theatrical markers of “fascism” and “Communism” do, meaning the stigma animal qualifies the ill omen as something to anticipate and “deal with”: the black dog as a symbol of death linked, in the modern sense, to state crises as decayed. The treatment of this ghost of the counterfeit is the usual fear-fascination with any monster, but there are male and female variants beyond just the knight in armor being stereotypically violent in ways that conflate the dog with the vampire, the zombie, the werewolf, the demon; i.e., a dog-like female zombie (an undead she-bitch) operating for the state as its prescribed demon killer in a dream-like sense, or vice versa inside the same state emergency presented as a bad dream: the stuff of nightmares but also bellicose, us-versus-them English theatrics whose belligerent apocalypse revels much amid the masked din:

(exhibit 1a1a1g2c: “Nuns have no fun,” but bad boys and bad girls do; i.e., “war is a game and it should be fun by looking fun,” meaning “sinful.” The Hound vs the Sith gender swap [artist: Miss Sinister] are feral dogs of war as hungry unto themselves, but also appealing to the consumers’ dark or voracious appetites; i.e., the Sith are way more fun/seductive than the Jedi, and the Hound’s immortal line, “I’m going to have to eat every fucking chicken in this room” delivers the goods of power-and-death aesthetics, but also does good on Sontag’s fascinating fascism; i.e., as a “master scenario”—a purely sexual, Nazi-as-alien experience “severed from personhood, from relationships, from love.” It’s worth noting, however, that not only does Sontag leave out healthy forms of sadomasochism [as well as bondage or discipline]; her examples of coercive sadomasochism are conveyed through torturous acts of sexist violence committed by executioners of a particular look: “The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death” [source]. In short, they ride on the same stylish aesthetics of death and power that Hugo Boss pioneered for the uniforms of the Nazi regime [see: Yugopnik’s “Aesthetics of Evil,” 2021]. This isn’t a problem if it’s campy, thus class-conscious in a sex-positive way. Even canonical sex is blindly campy and taps into the medieval aesthetic—of flagellation and cathartic pain and sex as intertwined [a potent combo when dealing with inherited anxieties and displaced traumas around us that make us feel out of control/alienated from others and ourselves]—but this kind of calculated risk/risk reduction exercise needs to be conscious and informed to avoid accidents or outright abuse from bad-faith parties; e.g., the unwitting sacrifice within cultural abuse patterns that punish the monstrous-feminine through various minority groups.)

The idea of sinful hunger as animalized is nothing new (the Gothic novel conflating raw animal instinct with human behaviors through vice and courtship and extreme emotional responses; e.g., “loved to death,” or cancer caused by guilt). There’s also the dog as associated with the zombie as an anti-Semitic dogwhistle (excuse the term) used in the Early Modern English period; i.e., Shakespeare’s use of the animal as a Christian pejorative that is curiously reclaimed by Tolkien as a 20th century medievalist canonizing war in his own parallel spaces. As I write in “Dragon Sickness: the Problem of Greed”:

Beorn is not wicked, like the wargs or the dragon, nor does the “dragon sickness” infect him like it does the Master or Thorin. He is both man and animal, and his link with nature and resulting lack of greed seems to be Tolkien insinuating that greed is predominantly a human trait (excluding wargs and other monsters, which humans imitate when they turn greedy). In The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare’s approach to animals is quite different. He has Shylock compared to an animal, either a wolf or a dog, many times: “You may as well use question with the wolf / Why he hath made the ewe bleat for the lamb” (4.1.72-3); “Thou called’est me a dog before thou had a cause / But since I am a dog, beware my fangs” (3.3.6-7 ); “O, be thou damned, inexorable dog!” (4.1.127) and “You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog” (1.3.107). Shylock is an animal in the eyes of the Christians, is not of their kind, the Christians’ kind, because they see themselves as human, therefore exempt from greed; their acts are not greedy but merciful. To the Christians, Shylock is but a dumb beast that cannot be reasoned with. Being compared to an animal is an extremely pejorative and degrading thing in The Merchant of Venice, but in The Hobbit, the animals are the only creatures capable of seeing reason. They do not fight over gold the way that men, elves, dwarves, and goblins do [excluding the Great Eagles, who are metaphors for human valor but also war machines: “death from above”] (source).

The notion of dragon-sickness bleeds together with the stigmatized Jew as ancient scapegoat tied to ancient labor and animals that are enslaved: the perceived dog that speaks truth to power (and is forced to convert in order to survive) as old, dated, lending itself to the undead and demon’s critical power as stemming from the fact that it predates Capitalism (a Wisdom of the Ancients).

As a symbol shared among the colonized and their colonizers, the symbol of the dog is canonically mistreated as undead/demonic; i.e., a liminal state whereupon it is chimeric, undead, and known for an endless, psychosexual demon hunger that fascism conflates with revenge of a particular kind. So-called “Jewish revenge” is the Red Scare sentiment of anti-Bolshevism shared by the American elite as enacted with impunity until it “crosses a line”—in this case a national boundary into the West by the Nazis:

For four years, numerous Americans, in high positions and obscure, sullenly harbored the conviction that World War II was “the wrong war against the wrong enemies.” Communism, they knew, was the only genuine adversary on America’s historical agenda. Was that not why Hitler had been ignored/tolerated/appeased/aided? So that the Nazi war machine would turn East and wipe Bolshevism off the face of the earth once and for all? It was just unfortunate that Adolf turned out to be such a megalomaniac and turned West as well (source: William Blum’s Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, 1995).

The same idea plays out in displaced, fantastical forms through undead and demonic language. As such, the assorted “ink blot” stigmas elide within the same poetic shadow zone, whereupon the hungry mouths of dead labor’s zombies bear their fangs and collectively shriek and howl. Simply put, they riot, but do alongside state agents opposing them using the same aesthetics of power and death: the fascist, but also the centrist combating both fascism and labor until asking the black “dog” knight to tag team the Dark Queen and her counterterrorist zombie forces. Mid-riot, various pro-state Beowulfs are generated and sent in to quell the slaves as dissident aggressors, called “terrorist” and certainly treated as such. These foils to revolution can be the man, himself, but also female counterparts who sell out and then are “exiled” by surrendering their power after killing the Dark-Mother orchestrator of such perceived uprisings (labor movements are often oversold as these great cabals populated by a furious zombie horde or demonic pandemonium). It’s mimesis that fails to question the process.

As this longer exhibit below shows, such displays play out in dreamlike narratives bent on a liminal, otherworldly affect with torturous overtones rooted in echoes of echoes of real-world trauma inside the narrative of the crypt. Inside these shadow zones, the fearsome cryptomimesis—or trauma hidden inside language and its pieces—can suddenly appear like a black mirror that, when viewed, makes the de facto torturer/enforcer both recoil in fear and stare at in rapt fascination (a tremendously useful iconoclastic device that Gothic Communists can use when saving ourselves from the states’ blind Achilles or subjugated Hippolyta; i.e., by showing them their Achilles Heel: themselves and their false power and lost humanity told in Gothic language):

(exhibit 1a1a1g3: “Make me feel, make me scream” sings the diegetic song in the above scene; it mirrors the events and setting onscreen, but also Trent Reznor’s “Closer” from a year earlier [exhibit 43b]. The revisiting of trauma includes the revisiting of the procedure as full of dated concepts stacked on top of themselves only to become dated all over again. The demon or the angel, then, occupies a kind of social get-together whose dancing is cryptomimetic; i.e., a calculated risk that minimizes harm but mimics the feeling of being out of control through the process of cryptonymy [hidden trauma displaced from its cause]. Historical materialism is, itself, an “inkblot” of interpretations that haunt the basic scheme. The dancing means different things as Freudian, but also Dante-esque or Miltonian metaphors/allegories. In short, they can be campy or canonical to varying degrees that, unto themselves, are informed by the trauma of the viewer and the artist as interwoven on the canvased experience as “half-real.” It’s like a bad dream that isn’t completely made up but feels impossible, absurd. But within this Gothic surrealism, the awesome power of terrible truths can be revealed through the apocalypse of stereotypical monsters and their complicated signifieds.

The palimpsest for Silent Hill, Jacob’s Ladder [1900] pits its white, cis-het male protagonist against the background noise of a dying mind haunted by the Vietnam war bleeding into a crumbling rememory of an event that never happened but is composed of things that did exist, or are known to the victim seemingly from another life, another time, another place. These internal/external crises include intimations of immortality and morality as psychomachic “crises of faith” told through traditional objects of fear and fascination known to churchly sites as embattled [e.g., Milton and Dante]. For the Vietnam soldier “back at home,” this means people of color stigmatized inside a mini “nightmare Harlem”: invading the man’s apartment like an occupying army of sexy zombies. The entire messy assemblage of simulacra is a loose, plastic, phantasmagorical representation for the chaos of a fading dream; he’s dying and the sequence informs that terror according to what he’s been conditioned to kill and fight—the Vietnamese, but also domestic examples of the abject “other” through people of color as canonically associated with sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll during moral panics; “Satanic” raw hysteria and untapped [non-white] female desire through fetishized cliché and outmoded psychoanalysis; and rape epidemics and drug wars associated with criminogenic conditions in the state of exception as a liminal space for us to pass through; e.g., heavy metal, videogames and other media forms smashing gloriously together [i.e., “bumping uglies”].

The demon/angel dichotomy pattern is not unusual or even incongruous, here; abuse manifests differently per person relative to congenital and environmental factors [which are often accident-of-birth]. To this, the hero’s abuse-seeking patterns are framed as a fever dream depicted as the psychomachy [re: “mind battle,” the classical example being the angle and the devil on one’s shoulders]. This can help the dialog divide to address and interrogate pre-existing societal binaries such as pleasurable sensations that confuse the binary in misinformed ways—i.e., pain as paradoxically “pleasurable” relative to cliché stigmas about BDSM as colliding with legitimate grievances and abuse-seeking behaviors at the same time. Pain can simply feel good, except in outmoded conceptualizations of BDSM they are presented as psychosexual and unironically violent in a harmful sense; i.e., the ritual is “the demon lover‘s” bad BDSM/play in that it is bigoted and harmful and spreads pejoratively [and demonstrably false] stereotypes about BDSM as not able to be a safe and healthy practice when performed correctly. “Correct,” in canonical circumstances, is incorrect; i.e., pathological, or self-destructive sex through hard kink that is often racialized.

For many people who have lived with trauma inside of and outside of themselves, sex-positive BDSM is a myth. Yet, psychosexuality can be a genuine plurality begot from abuse and extreme trauma that confuses the pleasure response to seek out harm unironically—re: extreme abuse-seeking behavior—wherein these kinds of outmoded conversations and attitudes are still useful to recognizing these patterns through popular stories’ musical theatricality and spaces for play as performative extensions of real-life issues. For them, hard kink amounts to spifflication [“to treat roughly or severely; to destroy or to overcome or dispose of by violence”] less as a throwaway fantasy and more as a legitimate desire to be badly harmed. Correctly applied without harm, the psychosexual fantasy can be medicinal for them by speaking to their trauma in theatrical, doubled forms. This isn’t a disease to “cure,” but a condition to live with and accept.

For instance, my hard kink is actually the palliative Numinous sensation [exhibit 39a2] as a “religious experience” of total obliteration; i.e., no bodily torture in the flesh but still evoking it in a visual way that, for a second, I mistake as genuine peril. To put things into perspective, I have been abused and the theme of religious-esque, metal-themed “passions” help me experience catharsis by facing my internalized fears to transform my trauma as having scarred me for life; but also empathizing with other victims on a non-verbal level [again, trauma begets trauma, but also recognizes it at a glance: something where the hunted liken as animals to each other but also to their potential hunters; i.e., as dangerous persons to face who were likewise hunted themselves in the past, becoming feral as a result]. For me, this medicine is more asexual, but could be considered sexualized through violence in a Christ-like way.

For example, I especially like The Passion of Joan of Arc or Alien for this, but not Martyrs or A Serbian Film because the torture of Joan left her with some semblance of dignity facing her tragic end as boyishly genderqueer, thus seen as in touch with the devil [one sympathizes]. Likewise, Alien‘s Gothic Romance hits that sweet spot of voyeuristic peril without spilling over into straight-up torture porn; its raping of the wallflower Lambert “works” because I can expose myself to trauma without being harmed in real life, nor dehumanizing/celebrating the woman’s offscreen rape. Conversely, the kind of “martyr pastiche” that trots out the full-on gore and dismembering without any sense of the Numinous, camp, empathy or irony just feels pointless and gross; e.g., The Passion of the Christ [22](2004); i.e., canonical torture porn with zero honesty or medicinal value—just a seeking power unconsciously through ritualized self-destruction and the paradox of sex and violence as a widespread cultural phenomenon.

Canon’s rape culture and epidemics of moral panic are swept up in commodified romances that simultaneously profit off persons seeking a false [thus safe] “danger” feeling that relates to their lived trauma. The problem is, it generally does so through the canonical bigotries of the middle class; i.e., their genuine desire to be in control, thus establish agency regarding any prey-like conditioning [fight, flight, fawn or freeze] they might experience on the day-to-day. It can be very hard to interrogate trauma if you lack control when afraid [“fear is the mind-killer”].

All the same, the paradox of seeking power that “destroys” you is that it can actually relieve post-traumatic stress, panic and anguish, but also “armor” you to future trials should a similar portent of trauma come knocking [warning: it can also be weaponized by the state to recruit future soldiers with, including women as weaponized through their trauma to attack state enemies]. To this, Jacob’s Ladder plays out like a bad fever dream or spiked drugs [a plot point in the film: the dying man’s nightmare is a result of weaponized drugs having been used on American soldiers by the CIA].

As we’ll explore in Volume Two, the reclaiming of empathy is undead/demonic and dream-like, meaning its lucidity occurs while we are trapped in a state of decaying crises ourselves; i.e., stuck inside the body of the state as informing how we think according to far-off wars tied to the trauma in our own lives. The battles we face within ourselves are supplied the means and materials that we dream about as coming from outside, but granted further malevolence and gravity according to far-off calamity we hear about but cannot see. In turn, these internalize as fetishes manifest of our stigmas and biases; i.e., as things to canonize or camp, to prove or disprove in either case through apocryphal language thus end the feeling of chaos as outside of our control. For the Gothic Communist, chaos is something to embrace, accept and transmute, not kill, destroy or subjugate through the canonical forms whose dated ephemera haunt our dreams as supplied to us by the linguo-material world’s trauma-laden historical materialism, its slew of ephemerate gargoyles: the comics, the pulp, the occult as haunted by the spectres of fascism and of Marx, which we camp to hell and back. This starts with consuming them, ourselves; i.e., “going to Queen Maeb,” as Mercutio puts it.

[Source: Rachel Handler’s “Harold Perrineau Answers Every Question We Have About Romeo + Juliet,” 2020. The 1996 film version of Shakespeare’s stage play presenting Romeo’s doomed pal as non-white, very queer and very drug-oriented in his escape from society’s restraints—i.e., echoing Stuart Mill’s “What is Acid Communism?” (2019) as a spiritual successor to past forms of druglike poetics (whose demonic poiesis we will touch upon in Volume Two’s “Follow the White-to-Black Rabbit“).]

In this sense, both versions of the zombie or the demon haunt us while we’re awake and sleep, but we can reclaim them by humanizing what we see as empathetic to the oppressed, including ourselves, as automatically and coercively demonized as fallen creatures of vice and sin. The ghost of the counterfeit is conjured up as “past” to spellbind the viewer speechless; yet the party that terrifies the hero needn’t be such a bad thing if it’s a calculated risk relayed through informed consent[-non-consent]. It can still be “fucking metal,” just not something that’s harmful [some of the best sex I ever had was with someone who was demonic, into metal as something to seriously embody through BDSM as a “hell party”—Jadis]. It’s normal—that is, human—to be drawn to prescribed sin to see how the other side lives but also to see how they fuck; as long as it isn’t dogmatic or self-destructive/destructive towards others in a prescriptively sexual sense that furthers the process of abjection through the ghost of the counterfeit—well, then it’s all good, man! But we have to go beyond Sontag’s mere fascination and make monsters ourselves that camp canon’s prescriptive dogma. “Hurt, not harm,” my dudes; Satan loves you.)

The dreadful, nightmarish symbiosis—of the male action hero or token counterpart’s great expectations within the theatre of war as an undead, globe-spanning world police—isn’t just “on the canvas” or relegated to a separate barrel of “bad apples.” All stem from the same trees of canonical/bourgeois praxis, or one half of oppositional praxis and the one that I want to conclude on before we end this subchapter of the thesis statement, thus the thesis statement itself (we’ll unpack the second half, iconoclastic/proletarian praxis [and its aforementioned trees] during the “camp map” chapter).

The point I want to conclude on is this: As canonical praxis is sex-coercive towards labor/sex work, it is historically-materially prone to bad actors; i.e., those who act in bad faith according to their material conditions, hiding their murderous intentions using these conditions as having dogmatized their behaviors to begin with. As such, they collectively utilize obscurantism and cryptofascism/canonical disguise pastiche while speaking in a variety of codes: virtue signals, lip service, queer bait and dogwhistles (indented for clarity):

Capitalism-in-decay leads to a revival of old DARVO [“Deny, Accuse, Reverse, Victim, Offender”] schemes dressed up in new dogwhistles during the Internet Age while history repeats itself: “Cultural Bolshevism” and Jewish conspiracy theories become “Cultural Marxism” and “globalism,” while “social justice” becomes “social justice warrior” as a continued demonizing of pro-labor labels, similar to “Communist,” “antifa(schist)” or “woke” (which translate to “corrupt”/monstrous-feminine in neoliberal copaganda); i.e., when cornered or in doubt, the state and its defenders blame the Left but also demonize them in ways that coercively fetishize them as targets of psychosexual violence during state emergencies. Then and now, reactionary politics and the centrist moderacy adjacent their open radicalism is capital defending itself by following the leader to create enemies of the state through codewords and foreign/internal plots:

While the SS, prior to the seizure of power, mainly occupied itself with protecting the party against internal and external enemies, Himmler and Heydrich focused on all sorts of enemies of the state in the meantime, including in particular the Jews. Despite his mother being a strict Catholic and his father a member of a Free Mason Lodge, Heydrich recognized much evil in this religion and philosophy as well. “In reality they don’t fight fairly for preservation of religious and cultural values (these are not at all at stake) but they continue their old and bitter struggle for secular dominance in Germany,” he said about the Catholic faith. In his opinion, Free Masons were “the instrument of Jewish revenge.” Should the Free Masons gain the upper hand in their struggle against Nationalsocialism, they would cause “orgies of cruelty,” which would make “the sternness of Adolf Hitler appear very moderate indeed by comparison” (source: Kevin Prenger’s “Heydrich, Reinhard,” 2016).

In order to devalue basic human rights, state proponents negotiate the process of abjection/ghost of the counterfeit through brute force, coercive rhetoric, intended gameplay/bad play (prescriptive abuse patterns), revenge arguments, and toxic self-righteousness. The same goes for all of the heroes, damsels and undead/demonic, oft-animalized monsters that exist unironically within said discourse (which compounds into complex disguises, which I call “concentric veneers[23]“) as “already mapped out” through Tolkien’s refrain and similar counterfeits borrowing from his formulaic gentrification of war.

This concludes my thesis statement. We’ll explore how to deal with canon’s mapping out of things by making our own map, next.

Onto “The ‘Camp Map’: Camping the Canon (opening and part one)“!

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About the Author

Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] Conversely the infamous discretions of Academia waste a surprising amount of time commenting on all of these matters as separate from each other (requiring us to remake the connection in our own work: there is no outside-text, nerds); i.e., to be polite when talking about rape, murder and death and refusing to apply them to our own lives in any shape or form (I will give some examples of this throughout the book, especially in relation to my time spent at MMU).

[2] From Saxon’s “And the Bands Played On” (1981):

Just before dawn in the cold light
We came out of the night
A great expectation from the man who ran the show
Will it rain, will it snow, will it shine, we don’t know
Are there clouds up in the sky

We sat in the sun, woah-oh-oh
And the bands played on (source).

The white, cis-het, “heavy metal Viking” of the NWOBHM (New Wave of British Heavy Metal; e.g., Iron Maiden, Saxon, Angel Witch, etc) was shamelessly aped and pilfered by countless imitations of the status quo through its usual instigators: the white cis-het man, specifically the WASP, as profiting off the same imaginary dialogic (which Spinal Tap would make fun of in the mid-1980s. To be fair, some bands were worse about it, especially Iron Maiden as shamelessly capitalizing off Satanic Panic with The Number of the Beast, 1982—i.e., as the persons least likely to be effected by it).

[3] The authors(s) of the poem seem to be of two minds about Grendel—both birthed from his mother but also coming directly from Cain, vis-à-vis Zeus pulling Metis from his godly forehead.

[4] In short, Beowulf is like Doomguy from Doom using cheat codes (the invincibility code literally called “god mode”).

[5] “While they’re praying, sire?” / “Best time” (source: the Peter the Great [1986] TV miniseries). Entitled men forget that all’s fair in love and war. Notice how they only cry “foul!” when the game isn’t fair for them—i.e., when the enemy invents a guerrilla tactic they cannot safely anticipate and check ahead of time (save by pre-emptive strikes, of course; i.e., Imperialism and false flag operations by which to play out Beowulf on the global stage).

[6] The above image uncannily showcases the kind of relationship that Jadis and I had, when it was good: Me, them, and their ex living under the same roof—with me fucking their mommy pussy while our metamour calmly went about their own business in the background. Jadis very much used sex to establish control, and cosmetically I was their “little artist boy” (still being in the closet at the time) who they cherished for my “stockings” of leg hair that stopped right before my shapely buttocks (similar to Lilith, from the Bible).

[7] Jadis loved this particular quote I would always make before/during sex: “Good call!” It was originally from a Lisa Ann/Johnny Sins porno called “Rough Rider” (2007) where Johnny’s wife can’t handle his giant cock, so it’s Lisa the cougar to the rescue! By the time Lisa says the line, she and Johnny had already been having sex for about thirty minutes. After a variety of positions, he lays her on the bed and eats her out. Ready to have another go, suddenly Johnny stands up and says, “I just wanna make sure she’s properly lubed”; to which Lisa replies, “Good call!”

Lisa—bless her—not only sounds kind of “surfer bro,” here, but is built like an absolute tank that clearly can take everything that Johnny (fairly chiseled and hung like Peter North, minus the hair) can dish out. For all the shit Jadis did to me, this little inside joke is something I can look back on and smile about.

[8a] “The Doom Comic” (1996):

Sometime in 1996 a couple of guys got together and smoked what was apparently a large amount of crack and then injected pure heroin into their eyes and then proceeded to create what is now known only as “the Doom comic.” Say those three words (in that order) to any Doomer and they’ll probably respond with one of the many taglines made famous by the comic [“blind” vs “perceptive” quoting* in action]. Throughout its sixteen pages of madness the main character (the Doomguy) utters many inane phrases while killing various hellspawn without so much as a second thought. Why he feels the need to talk to himself the entire time we’ll never know, but I’m guessing he was smoking what the authors of the book were (source: Doomworld).

*Doomworld’s more-than-likely white, cis-het male audience show their true colors when discussing the point of the comic through anything other than dumb reverence:

One of my most favorite parts in the comic is when the marine inadvertently falls into some radioactive sludge and suddenly, in the middle of a massive killing spree, starts to preach about how humans are ruining the environment and how we’ll be leaving a destroyed planet to our children and our children’s children. The whole panel is such a random segment from the rest of the comic, which provides wholesome family fun (in the form of killing shit) and then goes off on a tangential environmental crusade, albeit a pretty half-assed one (source).

The mistrust of whitewashed environmentalism, insofar as the alt-right’s mistrust of the establishment is not misplaced (Bad Empanada’s “Why Liberals Can’t Counter Conspiracy Theories, 2023). But they’re still genocide apologists, themselves (and the marine is absolutely right, you chudwads; piss and moan more about him breaking the fourth wall, why don’t you?).

[8b] As I write in “Doom Eternal (2020) Review: No Girls or Trans People Allowed”:

In these latter days of nostalgia mania, Doom Eternal shamelessly panders to an older audience. I don’t mean that in the sense of gore and violence; I mean it’s literally made for an audience that craves an older time. Not just demons and castles (though it has plenty of those), but those from the 1980s and ’90s. Those decades were a time of fixed gender assignment, where men were heroes and girls were damsels-in-distress. […] However, there are no damsels in the game. In fact, there are no women period, save the Khan Maker, the Whiplash and Dr. Ellena Richardson. […] Ellena is completely off-screen. There, she renounces her position as a scientist to essentialize the Slayer as a god—one whose strength is necessary for the survival of civilization. This is hardly “neutral.” Instead, traditional roles are reinstated through times of imaginary crisis. In Doom Eternal, the one human female character is an invisible cheerleader lusting after the protagonist while enforcing traditional gender roles. She might as well be an uneducated housewife kissing her husband on the cheek before he marches off to war (source).

[9] From Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism” (a placeholder title, 1916; source: Marxist Internet Archive).

[10] Umberto Eco’s 11th point: Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death” (source).

[11] E.g., Heinrich Himmler hired Reinhardt Heydrich because Heydrich looked Aryan and because both men read the same cheesy Americana, specifically “cheap crime fiction and spy novels” (source: Behind the Bastard’s “Part One: The Young, Evil God of Death: Reinhard Heydrich,” 2023—timestamp: 1:11:48). In other words, their very violent worldview was founded on the same cheap, pulpy ephemera that fueled Tolkien‘s imagination:

Tolkien’s world is certainly not groundless. It is traditional, “borrowing from the power and import of his sources – the ‘middangeard’ of ‘Beowulf,’ the grim and brutal cosmos of ‘The Volsunga Saga,’ the cold and bitter realm of the ‘Eddas,’ all of which left their traces and worked their sway over his own imagination'” (source: Influences of the Germanic and Scandinavian Mythology in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien,” 1983).

[12] From Rough Diplomacy’s “The Bloody Hand: Operation Condor” (2019):

Operation Condor used [the Monroe Doctrine] for a slightly different purpose in the Cold War as a larger operation to recruit and use security forces in countries around Latin America. This was done to make sure these countries stayed friendly to US interests, and out of the orbit of Moscow. This work mostly happened with the help of the CIA. It began with ideas drawn up at the infamous School of the Americas. Declassified documents show a meeting occurred between different officials from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. The idea was to coordinate their efforts against “subversive targets.” It sounds like it’s trying to stop guerrilla fighters, but moreover it meant anyone who threatened these dictatorial regimes that took over all the countries listed earlier plus Brazil from 1954, to 1976. The first actions were for the support and direction of groups called death squads.

A death squad is an armed group that conducts extrajudicial killings or forced disappearances of persons for the purposes such as political repression, assassinations, torture, genocide, ethnic cleansing, or revolutionary terror. They’re about as nice as the name implies and are basically teams that execute extrajudicial killings, as an act of terrorism in order to repress a population or commit genocide just like many authoritarian regimes such as the Cheka in revolutionary Russia as a preamble to the gulag system. Their first targets were political exiles living in Argentina. Anyone associated with the old governments or anyone displaced for being socialists were now finding themselves victims of these squads. Estimates are as high as 80,000 people died in these killings (source).

[13] The chimera approach to cartoon/rotoscoped heroes; i.e., featuring a face, body and voice of often different persons; e.g., Gozer and Jessica Rabbit (exhibit 95c), but also Amanda Ripley (as having a voice actress, face actress, and digitized body model):

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

[14] “[Carl] Jung defined individuation, the therapeutic goal of analytical psychology belonging to the second half of life, as the process by which a person becomes a psychological individual, a separate indivisible unity or whole, recognizing his innermost uniqueness, and he identified this process with becoming one’s own self or self-realization” (source: Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion, 2013); i.e., the end-result of the Hero’s Journey. It’s prescriptive bollocks—misogynistic “get the girl” arguments that demonize (thus pimp) nature as monstrous-feminine to serve profit (and for which Medusa has the whore’s revenge against profit by subverting the monomyth; re: “Policing the Whore” and “Rape Reprise“).

[15] From Sarah Erni’s “‘Inside Out… and Upside Down’: Cú Chulainn and His Ríastrad” (2013):

Yet, while at first glance Cú Chulainn appears as the archetypical defender and saviour of his province and the text openly celebrates his martial heroism (Ó Cathasaigh, Sister’s Son 156), a close look at this unique heroic figure reveals a more complex picture. Of course, Cú Chulainn lives up to his name, “The Hound of Culann,” by assuming all the protective qualities usually assigned to guard dogs in early Irish literature. But because of this canine connection, he at times also appears as an exceptionally challenging figure which borders on the animalistic and evades total control. Nowhere is this more apparent than when he is in his ríastrad, a battle-frenzy which has most poignantly been called “a visual reflection of disorder” (Moore 158). When distorted, Cú Chulainn undergoes a spectacular bodily metamorphosis and begins to attack both friend and foe because he loses the ability to distinguish between them. At these times, he consequently poses a threat “to order on both an individual and a social level” (Lowe, Kicking 199) and shifts from stabilizing his social network (by defending his province and his people) to threatening it from within (source).

[16] The Tain: Translated from the Irish Epic Tain Bo Cúailnge (2002).

[17a] From Volume Two’s Demon Module:

Model and artist: Itzel and Persephone van der Waard. As a transmasc, genderfluid person, Itzel has cultivated a xenophilic demonic identity with their own demonic sigil. This expression is not separate from their daily life, wherein they partake in Pride as a lifestyle to befriend others with during seminal events—those meant to be shared by like-minded persons: friends, lovers and fellow sex workers united under the same banner using demonic xenophilia as a popular means of spearheading the movement; i.e., by giving it personality and humanity mid-struggle (source: “Whores and Faust: Summoning the Whore/Black Penitent”).

[17b] The idea James Cameron valorized in Aliens is something that Ridley Scott would Gothically parody with Alien: Covenant (2017). In my 2017 writeup, “Choosing the Slain, or Victimizing the Invincible Heroine, in Alien: Covenant,” I emphasize David’s posturing as a Valkyrie or “chooser of the slain”:

Aliens introduced us to an exceptional heroine, but also an absurd one: Ellen Ripley. Onscreen, she’s depicted as an invincible force of nature, single-handedly dispatching hordes of alien monsters while simultaneously carrying Newt to safety. She quite literally cannot be stopped. Alas, the monumental warrant officer makes such a lasting mark on audiences that three decades later they still yearn for that kind of presence onscreen, one more time. Alas, in Alien: Covenant, we see Daniels, the ostensible heroine befitting that archetype, become the fool, the victim. Audiences, as a result, cry foul, deploring her stupidity (despite how Scott cleverly reveals her weak spot, early on) while simultaneously yearning for the unstoppable Ripley of yore.

In Covenant, there’s a lack of the heroic payoff Cameron got us hooked on, in 1986. Since then, we’ve come to know and expect it, based on what the series delivers, each and every time. In general, I don’t think audiences like to be played with, and this can leave people feeling cheated when a movie fails to give them what they want: in this case, a true predecessor worthy of the Ripley crown. However, with Scott, I enjoy his deceptions. While he misleads me, I don’t feel lied to. Rather, I’ve come to expect and enjoy how he takes old ideas and puts a different spin on them, so what we get isn’t simply more of the same. […] David takes and turns upside-down so many ideas and symbols. This isn’t unusual in the series, at large, though: In Alien, Ripley reversed the role of the last man standing by making it the last woman; and in Covenant, the heroine becomes the victim, while David reverses the gender of the Valkyrie, which were traditionally female [agents] designed to lure male warriors to their doom. In this case, the warrior lured to her doom is Daniels, a woman (source).

[18] Eren Yeager (who we’ll look at more in Volume Three), undergoes the warp-spasm of a fearsome “non-Roman” warrior out of the imaginary past’s false rebellion communicated through the mech as a memento mori linked to Japanese eco-fascism; i.e., the white Indian in bad faith. Like Cú Chulainn, this older form of ancient heroism is terrible to behold, but in Eren’s case is primarily internalized inside an outwardly comely incel who feels owed so much; denied that, he goes cataclysmically feral and spitefully brings about Ragnarok. In centrist stories, such heroism and its uncomfortable relationship to the alt-right is generally disguised in more palatable forms; e.g., the “warrior porcupines,” the Saiyans (whose bodies don’t transform to nearly the same degree as Cú Chulainn and whose hearts aren’t nearly as twisted as Eren Yeager’s fascistically incestuous entitlement; and whose Western counterparts tend to bury said incest a little deeper).

[19] The same tone-policing happens with Indigenous peoples “hulking out” in good faith; i.e., rioting actively by refusing to speak English or otherwise assimilate (e.g., the Irish Republic) and otherwise protesting the colonial order in counterterrorist ways that make white moderates uncomfortable (often showcasing an animalized sexuality/comfort in themselves that figuratively but descriptively exhibits the ass, genitals and taint—also known as “mooning”)… whose class callowness can also be made fun by ostensibly white rioters protesting as allies; e.g., Jack Karlson’s magnificent and immortal “This is Democracy manifest! Get your hands off my penis!” when simply trying to eat a “succulent Chinese meal” (with Karlson having spent time in prison, protesting the cruelty of the system through theatre; see: Lawrence Bull’s “His ‘Succulent Chinese Meal’ Rant Became a Classic Meme but the Arrested Man Has a Complicated Past,” 2022).

[20] For many vivid (and hilarious) examples illustrating these “anatomy casualties” through gender swaps, consider The Hawkeye Initiative (2013).

[21] We will consider this nationalized, eco-fascist condition of the Japanese male psyche in Volume Three, Chapter Five; e.g., Terry McCarthy’s “Out of Japan: Mother Love Puts a Nation in the Pouch” (1993):

Satoru Saito, head of the sociopathology department at the Psychiatric Research Institute of Tokyo, doubts that mother-son incest is any more common in Japan than elsewhere. But, he says, “emotional incest” between mothers and their sons is almost a defining feature of Japanese society – “the entire culture has this undertone” (source).

[22] For a thorough polemic attacking Mel Gibson’s torturous anti-Semitism, consider Renegade Cut’s “The Passion of the Christ” (2017).

[23] “Masks within masks,” a kind of compound disguise pastiche we will examine when discussing how to counteract centrists, TERFs and other cryptofascists/”fash”-adjacent bad actors in Volume Three, Chapter Four.