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.

Pieces of the Camp Map (from the Manifesto Tree)

“Moon-letters are rune-letters, but you cannot see them,” said Elrond, “not when you look straight at them. They can only be seen when the moon shines behind them, and what is more, with the more cunning sort it must be a moon of the same shape and season as the day when they were written. The dwarves invented them and wrote them with silver pens, as your friends could tell you. These must have been written on a midsummer’s eve in a crescent moon, a long while ago” (source).

—Elrond Half-elven, The Hobbit

(source)

Picking up where “Thesis Argument—Capitalism Sexualizes Everything” left off…

Our “camp map” camps canon according to the manifesto tree, which comes in many different pieces that, once assembled, need fuel. First, we will lay these pieces out and explain them in more detail than the manifesto tree could, then segue into the roots of camp (and Radcliffe’s tricky tools) in the next subchapter. Both will be incredibly important to understand and bear in mind when we reach the “camp map” chapter itself. As such, each manifesto piece will come with exhibits to try and explain things in visual terms.

Note: The devices discussed here are straight from the manifesto tree, which you can access in the “Paratextual (Gothic) Documents” webpage. Volume One also unpacks the manifesto tree, but at a more basic and conversational level versus a complex and theory-heavy one; you can download the PDF for Volume One from Sex Positivity‘s one-page promo.

The first piece of the “camp map” is oppositional praxis, or the Six Doubles. Onstage and off, staged opposition’s, LARP-level (live-action roleplay) kayfabe is half-real, thus frames canonical praxis quite well; i.e., as something for us to challenge inside oppositional praxis during our creative successes (the inducing and imagining of mutual consent, descriptive sexuality and informed consent, etc). Its Six Doubles of Oppositional/Creative Praxis organize into two groups of three: canonical/bourgeois praxis vs iconoclastic/proletarian praxis, or

• sex coercion vs sex positivity
• carcerality vs emancipation
• complicity vs revolution

and their various synthetic oppositional groupings (meaning “how they are synthesized during praxis”):

• destructive vs constructive anger
• destabilizing vs stabilizing gossip (and abuse encouragement/prevention patterns)
• “blind” vs “perceptive” pastiche and quoting (class/culture blindness versus consciousness)
• unironic vs ironic gender trouble/parody (canon vs camp)
• bad-faith vs good-faith egregores

Both are conducted at the same time by weird canonical nerds and weird iconoclastic nerds in praxial opposition. Sex positivity vs sex coercion, carcerality vs emancipation, etc, operate as simultaneously conjoined with destructive anger vs stabilizing gossip (and other components) sparring in interrelated, intersecting conflicts regarding all of these factors. It gets hella messy fast, but also murky. The doubles of the Gothic are “darkness visible”; we have to deliberately make them campy in a class-conscious way—i.e., deliberately campy doubles of “darkness visible” versus a state shill like George Orwell’s very dumb and very popular idea, “double-speak.” Doubles aren’t simply the language of the state, but a powerful tool for revolutionaries to reclaim; e.g., “I’m Spartacus!” As always, the imaginary past is a potent theatrical device by which to interrogate (and negotiate with) power through hauntological and cryptonymic forms: the Wisdom of the Ancients (and its associate intelligence or lack thereof regarding emotions and the Gothic) as forever in flux.

Doubling is the black mirror in action; its confused reflections invite troubling-but-useful comparisons to alien, unhomely things (unheimlich), showing less about how we’re different from the things we abject, and more how we’re similar (albeit in discomfiting ways). The reflection is both us and not us at the same time. To that, doubling communicates potential, widespread change (and possible worlds) amid uncertainty and chaos on the homefront as something to experience through uncomfortable emotions/psychological effects (of death omens, ill will, invasion and impostors) tied to familiar/familial characters who can’t be ruled out as one or the other but serve as both during nightmare-like experiences; it occurs when sublimation (and boundaries) start to fail inside thresholds and on the surface of images, expressed in a liminal, ghostly fashion—a copy contrasted against the hero as also copied from the world around them through larger viral trends that intimate ongoing dialectical-material tensions (spectres of Marx and fascism).

The mask-like plurality here is complex, messy and legion, which the rest of the book will touch upon throughout its entirety. Is Link a neoliberal twink/twunk or hunk for the state? Against it? What about Dark Link? Is he a Gay Communist or a fascist (same for Gerudo Link and Wolf Link)? Are they “gay for each other” with all that homoerotic sword-crossing? Why are they so fetishized among fans? The disguising role of aesthetics all depends on dialectical-scrutiny and the artist, patron, critic and consumer within oppositional praxis as oscillating mid-struggle. Our job is to make the needle tip towards the successful development of Gothic Communism, then continually drive that point home. This matters because the two forces do not, as canon would lead you to believe, “cancel each other out”; they exist continuously in society as forever in dialectical-material conflict (which Gothic Communism seeks to alleviate by moving away from worker exploitation by the state: subversive doubling as a kind of revolutionary disguise pastiche; i.e., our forces of darkness).

(artist: Charcoca)

Doubles aren’t “just” Gothic fetishes and clichés (though they can be extremely fetishized and cliché when used in “blind” pastiche that reduces them to empty theatre); they’re dialectical-material effects that reify over space and time: the ambiguous personification of ideas expressions in theatrical tension, namely dialogue and melee combat—the psychomachic, psychosexual, psychopraxial dueling of traditional masculine heroics and active violence (with Link and Dark Link the twink variants of this coupling through monstrous-feminine Amazonomachia).

Monsters are made, and they generally fight another other because they represent dialectical-material forces (chiefly praxis) dueling in opposition, dating back to antiquity as an ongoing dialog of power through evolving (and expanding) state mechanisms. In relation to our Gothicist-Communist goals, our Communist “endgame” develops through Marxist theories merged with Gothic theories and a Gothic “mode” of expression whose various “perceptive” pastiches amount to our individual lessons synthesized at the social-sexual level: our creative successes that challenge state hegemony. In turn, the effects of their continued expression can be gleaned through dialectal-material struggles; i.e., as we live our lives as rebellious workers fighting against canonical implementations of monstrous language. This continuation of canon versus iconoclasm amounts to sex positivity versus sex coercion, wherein workers can liberate themselves through iconoclastic art that reclaims the Base and cultivates the Superstructure by camping state canon; i.e., by “making it gay.” Creative praxis works in opposition for or against the state in this respect, its effects doubled as competing linguistic markers in the material world. From moment to moment, then, workers constantly experience and leverage them through Gothic poetics; i.e., the linguo-material expression of emotions, stigmas, and fears as things to experience, which generally manifest as monsters, lairs/parallel space, and phobias to colonize or decolonize through oppositional praxis: the theatrical mode of power as relayed in all the usual (and various) paradoxes and doubles.

Oppositional praxis divides in two. I call the canonical effects of oppositional praxis the “Three Canonical Doubles” or “the Three Cs of Canon” (which you’ll see a lot throughout the book—sometimes all three, but usually one or two, and usually as adjectives):

• (sex)coercion/-coercive: The cultivation (through Superstructure) and production (through the Base) of emotional and Gothic stupidity through bad sex-gender education in general and Gothic canon; i.e., sex-coercive sexualized media, hauntologies, chronotopes, cryptonyms, monsters, phobias, etc.
• carcerality/carceral: A trapping of the mind and Gothic imagination inside Capitalism, killing its ability to imagine the future beyond Capitalism and its endless historical-materialities (fictional and non-fiction, but also their liminalities); i.e., the myopia of carceral hauntology and canonical parallel spaces/societies (chronotopes).
• complicity/complicit: A state of complacency and passive/active apathy towards the State as something to defend; i.e., complicit cryptonyms (which more often than the other theories denote an act of concealment that collaborates with the state through the hidden function of monstrous language).

The Three Cs alienate, binarize (divide) and exploit workers through a heteronormative, settler-colonial scheme. They operate in dialectical-material opposition to their Gothic-Communist doubles, the “Three Iconoclastic Doubles” of Gothic Communism:

• sex positivity/-positive: The cultivation (through Superstructure) and production (through the Base) of emotional and Gothic intelligence through good sex-gender education in general and Gothic canon; i.e., sex-positive sexualized media, hauntologies, chronotopes, cryptonyms, monsters, phobias, etc.
• emancipation: A liberation of the mind and Gothic imagination inside Capitalism, reviving its ability to imagine the future beyond Capitalism and its endless histories (fictional and non-fiction, but also their liminalities); i.e., emancipatory hauntology and iconoclastic parallel spaces/societies (chronotopes).
• revolution/furtiveness: A state of dissident and passive/active empathy towards the state as something to defeat; i.e., furtive cryptonyms (which more often than the other theories denote an act of concealment that conspires against the state through the hidden function of monstrous language).

The Three Iconoclastic doubles de-alienate, unify and empower workers Bob-Ross-style (“Anyone can paint”—i.e., be a Communist through the joy of iconoclastic praxis. In fact, Ross himself converted to a peaceful style after his American air force days, vowing never to yell at anyone ever again and loving animals, but also becoming the de facto “ASMR king” after his own death (ASMR Before Sleep, 2020) with slight touches of BDSM thrown in with that naughty-naughty paintbrush: “beat the devil out of him.” The fact that no one remembers Ross’ military past (we should not forget that about him) is far less vital than the fact that no one tries to imitate that part of him: Antiwar sentiment, communalized art and a genuine love for nature are Bob Ross’ immortal legacy (similar to Howard Zinn being remembered for his antiwar writings, not his WW2 military career).

However, while the dialectical-material outcome of opposition is praxial—canonical or iconoclastic, bourgeois or proletarian—these praxes must still be synthesized through each worker’s social sexual skills and emotional/Gothic intelligence (which we’ll cover in the synthesis roadmap in Volume One) that involve various ways of looking at media through monstrous poetics (whose Humanity “lenses” we’ll examine during the primer in Volume Two). From there, proletarian praxis amounts to our aforementioned creative “successes” in regards to the Six Rs and Four Gs within the Gothic mode (all of which we’ll explore much more in-depth in Volume Three).

Doubles and liminality are a natural/material consequence of praxis-in-action and demonstrate universal adaptability if not a universal appeal (re: to borrow from and expand on Slavoj Zizek, this can be music, but also exploitation media, ghost stories, or performance art, etc). In the Gothic mode, a double (a monster, lair, or theory by which to analyze them) isn’t automatically canonical or iconoclastic. Rather, this must be determined post hoc (“after the fact”), not a priori (“before experience”). However, the Canonical Doubles tend to oppose the other group together as a means of seeing the world. If something is carceral, for example, it’s probably also sex-coercive and complicit concerning our theories and materials; if something is emancipatory, it’s probably also sex-positive and revolutionary concerning our theories and materials (taking liminal gradients/parallel space into consideration of course, which this book will try to do its very gold-star best). This actually makes the Six Gothic Doubles two pairs of three in dialectical-material opposition within the Gothic praxial mode. As we’ll see moving forward, the Gothic mode—regardless of the register—tends to convey praxial conflict in phenomenological, linguo-material terms: a complicated “grey area” of endless gradients.

(exhibit 1a1a1c2: Left: the appreciative peril and liminal merchandise of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure; right: the mysterious and somewhat-creepy Grey Man from LSD Dream Emulator, 1998 [shown to me by Zeuhl, whose own Vaporwave aesthetic/appreciation in their own work was inspired by the game]. Meant to emulate dreams, LSD Dream Emulator is largely generative/randomized in terms of its music and visuals. There are no “enemies,” in the conventional sense; a level ends when you touch a wall. However, the “main villain” of the game is the Grey Man, who can suddenly appear behind you in alarming ways. His unpredictable and immediately uncanny veneer is disarmingly apt (arguably inspiring the leveled-up terror, wandering boss approach and generative musical tactics employed in Alien: Isolation, fourteen years later.)

Let’s briefly reconsider/combine these ideas the way this book does—liminally. Cryptonyms, in economic terms, alter something’s perceived value, but also its appearance and/or ontology (existence) in relation to the state’s concealed abuse of it as something to privatize (this can be a worker, an image of them—their likeness—or chattel animals, etc). In fact, the Four Gs all describe how Capitalism alters something’s perceived value and language through the three bourgeois trifectas in pursuit of state profit within the Superstructure. For example, Samantha Cole reports how deep fake porn—as used by creepy-dude Atric—can easily reduce someone to a cheap, voyeuristic copy without their consent. It’s revenge-porn simulacra, but nevertheless leads to abject exposure along the usual lines of power exchange—operating according to male workers being granted the cheap concession of exacting female worker abuse amid their own exploitation/preferential mistreatment under Capitalism (often in hauntological ways; e.g., applying deep fake to American Psycho’s sex worker scene). During canonical praxis, such replication “lobotomizes” workers, acclimating them to a coerced, hyperreal state: to refuse to fight their abusers when sublimation fails, or to fight other workers to the death (re: class sabotage/worker in-fighting: “They’re killing each other.”). Sublimation’s failure happens during liminal expressions, which make something uncanny (from Freud’s unheimlich, meaning “unhomely”—keep that word in mind; we’ll return to it throughout the book).

In turn, oppositional praxis (and its Six Doubles) leads to the synthesis of oppositional emotions, monsters and social-sexual behaviors (which monsters codify) during times of linguo-material conflict—re: cultivating the Superstructure on a societal level, which is what synthesis is. Canon lowers emotional and Gothic intelligence; the whole point of Gothic Communism is to raise these factors and their catalysts actively and passively using increasingly class-conscious and culture-conscious variations of these things; i.e., things that camp canon, which the state cannot tolerate. As our thesis statement argues, much of this “culture war” happens through code-switching between workers and the material-natural world around them; i.e., disguise pastiche and the mask of Gothic aesthetics as for or against the state and its canonical expressions. Relative to these opposing factors, the synthetic oppositional groupings are bourgeois vs proletarian according to various behaviors associated with weird canonical nerds vs weird iconoclastic nerds:

• destructive vs constructive anger—i.e., possessive or bad-faith, destructive anger’s defense of the state vs constructive anger as a legitimate defense from state abuses; e.g., police abuse and DARVO tactics.
• destabilizing vs stabilizing gossip—i.e., co-dependent, “prison sex” mentalities and rape culture vs interdependent girl talk (e.g., #MeToo) and rape prevention.
• “blind” vs “perceptive” pastiche/quoting—i.e., unironic pastiche and quoting (dogma) vs subversive, ironic quoting (camp).
• unironic vs ironic gender trouble/parody (camp)—i.e., a performative means of cryptofascism vs demasking the fascist-in-disguise, making these imposters self-report by figuratively gagging or crapping their pants (with gender parody being a means of combatting the impostor syndrome of gender dysphoria with gender euphoria and reclaimed xenophobic labels/implements of torture: Asprey’s counterterror in a theatrical sense)
• bad-faith vs good-faith egregores, including xenophilic/xenophobic monsters both as products of worker labor as well as worker identities, occupations, and rankings, which use similar language regardless if they’re bourgeois or proletarian—e.g., the bourgeois Amazon detective (canonical Samus Aran) vs the proletarian zombie-vampire-unicorn pillow princess (e.g., my illustration, below):

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

While we will consider these manifesto-tree ideas, here, we will return to them during the synthesis roadmap in Volume One when we delve more into trauma writing and artwork as a means of synthesizing praxis; as well as during the Humanities primer in Volume Two, and in Chapters Four and Five in Volume Three (the latter two which explore the execution of disguise pastiche in the Internet Age). Until then, please don’t fret; they are meant to be understood fairly loosely and their synonyms can be swapped interchangeably (canonical/blind pastiche) as long as the basic dialectical-material relationship (and its symptoms) are communicated.

“Cops and victims,” for example, often becomes hauntologized, presenting in fantastical forms that mirror real-life examples. A “girl boss” witch or “medusa” can angrily serve the state by being the heroine or the villain in ways that uphold the status quo, making her role functionally bourgeois; a real-life cop serves the state, often LARPing as a death knight while they brutalize their state-assigned, hauntologically abject victims during witch hunts. The same conversion applies to proletarian representations and representatives. To that, egregores personify oppositional praxis, making them fundamentally liminal. This means they’ll invoke power at different registers according to various titles, rankings and positions of status and privilege: e.g., a witch queen, princess, courtier or peasant as a status symbol[1] often expressed in BDSM language or demonic-undead, animalized/animate-inanimate simulacra. Despite her label, a witch queen isn’t automatically bourgeois, any more than making her a zombie and/or demon would. Function (not aesthetics) determines one’s role in oppositional praxis, which must be ascertained through dialectical-material analysis of any aspect of the natural-material world. We’ll do so now through D&D pastiche (orcs and humans), but also canceled futures (the cyberpunk) as something to transmute through our own “creative successes” in response to Capitalism’s usual shenanigans.

(exhibit 1a1a1c3: D&D “homebrew” is a way of escaping the palimpsestuous racial profiling of Tolkien’s High Fantastical gentrification enacted by Wizards of the Coast trying to enforce the racial [thus class and gender] binary—e.g., “mind flayers” always being lawful evil, or Drow always being chaotic evil/”pure evil” inside the state of exception [exhibit 41b] to fill the gap made by the humanized [yet still fetishized] “good” orcs [exhibit 37e]: the exceptional “not bad for an orc” pariah. Tolkien made orcs to be beaten and bitten by swords with fancy-sounding names illustrating the function as simultaneously dressed up and denuded [from The Hobbit]: 

He took out his sword again, and again it flashed in the dark by itself. It burned with a rage that made it gleam if goblins were about; now it was bright as blue flame for delight in the killing of the great lord of the cave. It made no trouble whatever of cutting through the goblin-chains and setting all the prisoners free as quickly as possible. This sword’s name was Glamdring the Foe-hammer, if you remember. The goblins just called it Beater, and hated it worse than Biter if possible. Orcrist, too, had been saved; for Gandalf had brought it along as well […]

At this point Gandalf fell behind, and Thorin with him. They turned a sharp corner. “About turn!” he shouted. “Draw your sword Thorin!”

There was nothing else to be done; and the goblins did not like it. They came scurrying round the corner in full cry, and found Goblin-cleaver and Foe-hammer shining cold and bright right in their astonished eyes. The ones in front dropped their torches and gave one yell before they were killed. The ones behind yelled still more, and leaped back knocking over those that were running after them. “Biter and Beater!” they shrieked; and soon they were all in confusion…” (source).

This function can be reversed, but must occur within the mode of expression; e.g., sexy orc roleplay in Skyrim mods, exhibit 84b; i.e., inside material conditions to avoid praxial invisibility. You have to be able to give it shape inside camp and communicate it to others afterward.)

To this, oppositional praxis during Gothic Communism is less like the discrete, nine-squared D&D Alignment Chart (above) and more like a Venn Diagram of the same components doubled and super-imposed over each other. Hence, why revolutionary acronyms like ACAB (“All Cops Are Bad”) are handy but also why you still have to distinguish between who’s genuine/good-faith and who isn’t/bad-faith during oppositional praxis; i.e., through dialectical-material scrutiny as performed by gay space wizards through whatever “poison” you pick and serve up:

(artist: Ecchi Oni)

For example, an ironic, “strict” mommy dom (and her “dark sodomy castle of gloom and doom”—when executed in good faith—is not a class traitor even if she’s wearing a police uniform or (some other) fetish outfit; aesthetics do not determine function, function does, but obviously first impressions are important. Private exhibits of triggering symbols like swastikas or desecrated American flags (the Thin Blue Line) are far different than public ones, and if you use them in your art during your public exhibit, you have to be prepared to explain why—i.e., as a de facto educator of sex positivity through liminal expression using Gothic poetics. On the flipside, fascists operate through bad-faith concealment; i.e., attacking like undercover cops who awaken and bushwack their foes when they feel threatened (they also join arms with centrists, aggregating with formal power to defend capital against labor).

Code-switching intuition, then, becomes something to develop, like a sixth sense. Is someone a cop/undercover for the state? Are they “for real” or do they mean you harm working for their true boss, the Man (as Deckard the blade runner did when he “retired” Zora in the streets)? The fact remains, whether of Gothic canon or its historical-material parallels, the hidden tyrant trope is often a displaced, bourgeois scapegoat—a “Greater Evil” fall-guy to take the blame for the elite: Adolf Hitler, Victor Frankenstein, Jeffrey Dahmer, or that rich dude from the 2022 Hellraiser remake, etc. Meanwhile, girl bosses are recuperated feminists working for the state; i.e., class-traitor TERFs, who see J. K. Rowling as their god (and whose billionaire status becomes the ultimate carrot to dangle in front of the poor working class[2]/vindictive middle class).

Oppositional praxis materializes in regular people consuming and absorbing these stories in ways that might be bourgeois, thus rapacious, or not bourgeois, thus safe for workers; it happens in our relationships, whatever form they might take. For example, legitimate anger experienced post-breakup/after a honeymoon phase is fine (e.g., Peach PRC’s “F U Goodbye,” 2023, mirroring one of my favorite breakup songs, Scandal’s “Goodbye to You,” 1982). Experimentation is fine (try anal and see what you like, for example). Coercion is not fine. Love—be it serious or casual, closed or open, FWBs (“friends with benefits”) or fuck buddies, extramarital or intramarital—is fluid, seasonal; its “seasonal” boundaries must then be respected by empathetically recognizing the shifting socio-material parameters involved. Someone could be lonely, drunk, homeless, poor, single, cold. However, the situational “fluffery” of a perceived knight-in-shining-armor can quickly become a nightmare when said knight, conditioned by the state to be possessive and duplicitous, love-bombs you in a cycle of diminishing emotional returns; i.e., someone who, through Foucault’s sense of discipline and punish, gaslights, gatekeeps, and girl-bosses you—in short, when they coerce you.

For example, my ex Jadis (who we’ll be talking about a lot in this book—during part two of the “camp map,” but especially in Volume One and Two) was a perfidious, utterly bogus “protector” that I lived with in Florida. We met online, and for two years during the pandemic, they looked after me as an abuser would: through DARVO and love-bombing. They also looked the part, but functioned to a highly abusive degree through aesthetics designed to naturalize what they were doing to me while defending their position as sacred according to what they held sacred: the canonical author and the author’s heroes, but also their orderly (centrist) approach to conflict as a means of assuring Jadis’ (and people who share their views; i.e., the white, middle class) position in the neoliberal pecking order.

The moral, here is that canon can blind you if you refuse to critique it—generally by not listening to commonplace voices that make up the pedagogy of the oppressed: “Most women and minorities live under constant fear of rape and murder—i.e., sexual exploitation and harm.” Moderate “empathy” or “being realistic” is just compromising with the state; radical empathy is needed to liberate those who have been radicalized into chattel slaves by police agents—cops, cowboys, knights, etc. For people like Jadis, the death of the author is death of the father/man and society as we know it in a very Foucauldian sense; in short, it is the end of the world in ways they don’t like to acknowledge because they aren’t the sexy star of the show/can’t just shoot their problems to bits and act martyred about it as they do so. As the extended exhibit below shows, everything becomes commodified and emptied of class character in bad copies of “struggle” (which transport the idea of cop and robber or orcs and humans to the retro-future dystopia):

(exhibit 1a1a1c4: “Bisexuals love the P90” [source tweet: Papapishu, 2020]. It’s not uncommon for genderqueer people to appreciate the revolutionary power of weaponry in popular fiction [e.g., Star Gate: SG-1, 1997]—often through silly gun porn metaphors that “stand in” for the human body. As Solient Art replies to Papapishu: “It’s the ambidextrous design, featuring a bottom-facing ejection port.” To quote Makoto herself, “Of course it is!”

Makoto from Ghost in the Shell looks like a bisexual robot, but she’s not a revolutionary bisexual robot, she’s a cop bisexual robot. She not only works for the state; she gets to shoot the state’s enemies and feel bad about it afterward, and have a cybernetically enhanced body that can crush [most men] to dust. In short, she has to submit to the hierarchy of power largely in a bureaucratic sense, but otherwise can take out her frustrations in the cyberpunk’s neon-lit streets: “kicking” poor people as a cop does, like a de facto owner does its dog [in true Man-Box fashion, the system puts tremendous nostalgic pressure on workers, then promises them fantastical rewards[3] if they “perform well”]. Her conquering of the tech-noir doesn’t investigate the suffering of workers; it humanizes the cybernetic cop while she curb stomps gang members in an undercover unform: the queer-coded sex worker functioning like Judge Dredd’s judge, jury and executioner—”I am the law.” In short, she’s an infiltrator dressed in an increasingly appropriated uniform, one whose sexuality gels through a profoundly intense form of nostalgia: the desire to escape the system by becoming a robot who can never be hurt again. “I am naked, but made of steel!”

One sympathizes. For example, when I was in elementary school, I wanted to be a reploid like Mega Man X—to be made of metal, so my father couldn’t hurt me anymore. While I identified with the codified alienation and desire for revenge, I didn’t like liars and bullies, which is ultimately what X and Makoto canonically are: false rebels lauded with awesome, emotionally gripping music and dressed up in futurist rebellion language; i.e., the Czech word robota, or forced labor/servitude, originally done by serfs now carrying out Isaac Asimov’s laws of robotics to serve man [e.g., “by action of mission of action,” as Bishop from Aliens puts it]. In short, Mega Man is copaganda meant to grow and develop alongside his audience according an endless cycle of war that follows them into adulthood: an arms race within Japanese neoliberalism’s mashing of rock ‘n roll into the Western sci-fi commodity of performative struggle [similar to Nazi Germany’s aping of American Hollywood[4]] through retro-futures that—during the arrival of decay through the appearance of the tyrant’s zombie castle—play out through the centrist wrestler’s theatre punishing the usual scapegoats: evil Communists, Nazis and mad science (with Protoman/Zero being red and yellow compared to Mega Man/Mega Man X’s red-white-and-blue). It’s the good doctor versus the bad doctor making monsters from their centrist doubled castles, not “perceptively” campy renditions making monsters for our revolutionary purposes:

 

The ephemeral nature of war in neoliberal media is commodified in ways that dematerialize old packaging that, after a sale period, suddenly becomes corporately delegitimized and must afterwards be traded through barter [e.g., bottom-left, source: “9 Super Nintendo SNES Cases *NO GAMES*: Mario Kart, Zelda, Metroid, FZero & More,” 2021]. The physical product is corporately abandoned in favor of something that can be wholly alienated from consumers by gating it behind digital paywalls and “merch” they can buy in increasingly fractalized forms; e.g., anniversary collections, t-shirts, or action figures, etc.

In short, there’s no class-allegory during the diegetic/paratextual apocalypse of canonical pastiche and its manufactured obsolescence. For fans of such canon, technological singularity[5] is code for slave rebellion, which cannot be allowed; so it gets swapped out for a false version of itself that weaponizes against rebellious labor as catastrophic: Mega Man 4‘s [1991] “Then one day, the industrial robots all over the world went on a total rampage” tells the story of a boy who willfully surrenders his humanity to become Pinocchio and bring “Dr. Cossack” [and his Russian (Communist) robots”] to justice. There is always a fascist/anti-Semitic imposter to police and uncover by a “good little boy” working for the state. In turn, the new world order’s “end of history” is thoroughly discrete in terms of Cartesian dualism’s highly damaging sex/gender binaries. Everything is canonized as good/evil, man/woman [right image, above: “females”; source: Fandom] during these copaganda recruitment tactics [with women as secretaries to give male soldiers a nurturing female voice to hear before they die out in the field]. Enjoy them if you must, just don’t endorse canonical variants in what you produce, patron or purchase yourself; i.e., I love the music and the “mood” of the reploid persona and often regress to my childhood when listening to certain scenes, but I can still “pull a Sarkeesian” and critique canon when doing so:

[top, source: The Mega Man Network]

For example, Zero saving X from Vile [a reploid “designed to be a war machine,” according to Zero] is engrained into my mind. I loved and continue to love the idea of being rescued by a strong, effeminate “robo-cutie.” But the theatrics still canonically whitewash war by trying to argue that X’s military urbanism isn’t somehow Imperialism coming home to empire: He’s literally a fledgling cop with a kill list. Do you see him “taking any of the mavericks in”? No, he smashes those metal motherfuckers to junk each and every time. And this repeats over and over until, by Mega Man X8 [2004], the ghost of Doctor Light has been replicated not only light years beyond itself, but also Mega Man’s far less bloodthirsty palimpsest, Astro Boy [1952]. In short, the scheme has entered into farce, apologizing for the recursion and acceleration of war enacted along the same profit motive disguising itself [re: “The Eighteenth Brumaire“].

It’s false hope that sounds increasingly empty and decayed, but also sucked of even its childhood nostalgia for members of the “old guard” that grew up on the classic oldies; they paradoxically yearn for those oldies as “better times” while neoliberalism moves the goalpost, chasing efficient profit while taking away more and more of worker rights. The product is progressively sucked of its joy and nutrients, becoming increasingly “shitty” but also unwise as an essentialized past devoid of a class-conscious Wisdom of the Ancients.

The ludic moral is that all videogames simulate reality to some extent through metaphors; canon, in particular, is built on war and conflict, especially crisis and decay as something to embody through one’s avatar as exceptionally “good” or “evil” in the kayfabe sense. But videogame canon is always neoliberal, thus centrist. It’s not as basic as “sending signals to the brain, controlling the mind.” Instead, it’s internalized; i.e., coding the hero to kill the state’s enemies within the state of exception, according to the Protestant ethic/monopoly of violence in broad strokes. “Maverick,” then, can be whatever the state needs to die to serve profit, whereas “kill all fags” narrows things down and goes “mask off” in a fascist sense; e.g., the controversy of Sneako selling overt hate of the state-assigned enemy to children, who drink it up like a sponge [The Rational National’s “Sneako ‘Stunned’ to Discover His Young Fans Are as Hateful as He Is,” 2023]. The same basic idea applies to the narrative conventions of Mega Man as borrowed from older media/mediums. The cop is humanized [not the victim] in theatrical displays of violence and humor tied to the fan’s childhood; i.e., the game, operating as a shared space for them to grow and develop, thus acquire and reify their view of the world as something to recreate:

[artist: Draw Lover Lala]

Often, this plays out in old military clichés, such as disorder within the ranks; e.g., the theatrical dispute inside the chain of command over a woman: the duel, as something Jane Austen wouldn’t have put into words, but only written about in the most hushed of voices:

“Have you,” she continued, after a short silence, “ever seen Mr. Willoughby since you left him at Barton?”

“Yes,” [Colonel Brandon] replied gravely, “once I have. One meeting was unavoidable.”

Elinor, startled by his manner, looked at him anxiously, saying,

“What? have you met him to—”

“I could meet him no other way. Eliza had confessed to me, though most reluctantly, the name of her lover; and when he returned to town, which was within a fortnight after myself, we met by appointment, he to defend, I to punish his conduct. We returned unwounded, and the meeting, therefore, never got abroad.”

Elinor sighed over the fancied necessity of this; but to a man and a soldier she presumed not to censure it” [source: Sense and Sensibility, 1811]. 

In other words, the duel as a hushed affair in Sense and Sensibility is, for Mega Man X fans, much more out in the open.)

To elaborate on what I meant a moment ago by “Foucauldian,” the neoliberal affect of the cyberpunk robocop touches on the death of the hero as a more insidious affair—i.e., happening via the “Utopian, futuristic orderliness of things, which in turn highlights the death of man as “swapped out”; i.e., what Foucault writes about in The Order of Things (1966):

The epistemological field traversed by the human sciences was not laid down in advance: no philosophy, no political or moral option, no empirical science of any kind, no observation of the human body, no analysis of sensation, no imagination, or the passions, had ever encountered, in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, anything like man; for man did not exist (any more than life, or language, or labour); and the human sciences did not appear when, as a result of some pressing rationalism, some unresolved scientific problem, some practical concern, it was decided to include man (willy-nilly, and with a greater or lesser degree of success) among the objects of science (source, pages 344-45).

This birth (and death) of man is something we can go on to apply to the capitalist system of ordering things within heroic manufactured consent, scarcity and conflict; i.e., according to centrist theatre as something that its proponents will fight tooth and nail to uphold through correct appearances, but also arrangements of power through those appearances as designed to “benefit” them more than other people: the equality of convenience by playing cops and robbers or orcs and humans, or reversing the aesthetic but not the canonical function.

(source: Fandom)

First and foremost, canon’s rewarding of the white, cis-het male (or token) audience is vital to canonical praxis; they want their power trip in accordance with a functional lookalike and its punching bag that they can blindly camp to a degree that doesn’t “rock the boat.” In short, they colonize theatre according to their praxis as aligned with the state and reject anything else. Unlike Mega Man, or Makoto/canonical doubles like Bungie’s Konoko (above), they don’t listen to their “ghost” (exhibit 42e); they keep working for “Section Six,” getting their hands dirty for the elite by killing state enemies inside the same-old state of exception. This includes embodying and endorsing the canceled futures that lead them (and others) down the rabbit hole of Capitalist Realism.

In this respect, Jadis was especially false; they “cashed in” after their daddy died, being left with a considerable amount of “fuck you” money/disposable income. They would never have to work again, but acted like they deserved it all as a justification for what came next. Utterly flush, they preceded to abandon any sense of teamwork with me; but the theatre of the suffering and Atlas-level martyr was written all over them and their stoic, but self-tortured posture. They not only saw themselves as Makoto (a superior posthuman entity that was “more human than human”); they honestly seemed to think, thus act, like things would magically just “improve,” buying into the naïve futurism of writers like Ray Kurzweil, whose The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005) sold the (mostly white, middle-class) American public on Utopian bullshit[6]. Jadis openly said they preferred this kind of futuristic optimism to the usual gloom-and-doom, but they were also a white, middle-class woman who secretly had ties to capital: a Gothic princess who, given the opportunity, promptly “pulled a Radcliffe” and fucked right off.  

Doubled costumes, props and conflicts; psychomachy, psychosexuality, Amazonomachia, psychopraxis. It all begs the question: why use heroic language at all if it just leads to confusing doubles? To be frank, heroic theatre is where power exists, so you have to go there to interrogate it; you can’t just ignore it and make up your own language[7] because that’s segregation (and nobody will know what you’re talking about). Segregation just alienates you further from society and closets you (which is a form of genocide: forced conversion). You have to get down in the trenches, weaponizing the awesome paradoxes inside to reach a wider audience through allegory and apocalypse during liminal expression—to speak out and break things that cover up your abuse.

Within this liminal state, the greatest weakness of the class traitor is their complete inability to critique canon, thus become slave to its endorsement by embodying “useful strength” (for capitalists); i.e., as class-dormant weird canonical nerds who uncritically and predictably endorse problematic elements of media while simultaneously condemning their proletarian potential within the Gothic mode of expression/Gothic imagination (monsters, lairs, hermeneutics, phobias) as something to colonize through their labor pitted against ours: what they can police or otherwise take from us for the state through a variety of bourgeois trifectas geared towards profit as structured around sublimated/recuperated, thus “blind,” forms of war pastiche and nation pastiche (indented for clarity):

Capitalism is always in crisis (through the manufacture trifecta: manufactured scarcity, competition/conflict, and consent), so the phrase “Capitalism in crisis” is accurate when describing fascists; however, “crisis” also describes centrists, who require the presence of an eternal shadow-enemy guided by moral panic (e.g., Islamophobia) to prosecute their own wars and hold onto power (which they conceal through the subterfuge [displace, disassociate, disseminate] and coercion [gaslight, gatekeep, girl-boss] trifectas). The primary difference between the two groups is radicality and decay—i.e., once the establishment of centrists weakens to such a degree that the veneer of stability (and neoliberal/capitalist illusions) gives way to echoes of a new dark age amid the threatened collapse of Pax Americana (or emulations thereof; e.g., 1920s Germany) for the middle class (the gatekeepers and soldiers who historically defend capital for the elite): “the enemy is at the gates.” Once this happens, (crypto)fascists can begin to shapeshift away from strictly “apolitical” obscurantist rhetoric (in short, whatever they need to say to achieve their goals; refer to Umberto Eco’s Fourteen Points) to start adopting more and more openly vengeful and genocidal forms. The process is gradual but steady. However, once they seize power for themselves and start running the asylum, Captialism goes from crisis to decay as normalized, entering accelerated decay inside a police state of exception/emergency until the fuel and/or mania are spent. In short, fascism is “Capitalism in decay” or “going from crisis, to decay to death.” It is a death cult whose hideous blaze will utterly eat itself and everything around it, instigated and allowed by centrists (who break bread with fascists, thus being fascists/”fash-adjacent” or otherwise complicit in their schemes) and the elite through the banality of evil: bureaucratic, middle-management exploitation by the bourgeoisie of the proletariat through cold, hard (and boring) economics induced by the handle of our aforementioned trifectas: a systemic divide between workers and owners, efficient profit and infinite growth through frontier Capitalism/Imperialism (and the Imperial Boomerang), desk murderers, as well as any rhetorical or theatrical trick you could think of (disguise pastiche, the Six Doubles of Creative/Oppositional Praxis and their various synthetic oppositional groupings). All operate in concert, becoming—as it were—a symphony of destruction.

This banality isn’t exclusive to Hitler’s Nazis, but an integral device built into Capitalism. As Meghna Chakrabarti responds in “The Eichmann Tapes and the Comforting Myth of the ‘Banality of Evil'” (2022):

60 years later, the banality of evil has been so oft repeated, it’s been reduced to cliché. Just yesterday, a guest on this show used the phrase when trying to explain why so many Republican operatives quickly abandoned their principles in support of the authoritarian slide that led to the Capitol insurrection. So the banality of evil has become a comforting myth we tell ourselves.

Arendt’s idea that evil comes from a failure to think is a popular and powerful way to comprehend how anyone could willingly participate in the unthinkable. But in the case of Adolf Eichmann, we now know that Hannah Arendt was wrong. Because Eichmann said so himself. This is Adolf Eichmann, his actual voice, speaking in recordings made in Argentina in 1957, four years before he went on trial in Jerusalem. And in the recordings, he says, I regret nothing.

Every fiber in me resists that we did something wrong. I must tell you honestly, had we killed 10.3 million Jews, then I would be satisfied and say, good, we have exterminated an enemy … that is the truth. Why should I deny it?

Eichmann’s evil is not a failure to think. Eichmann’s evil is the product of deliberate [emphasis, me] thinking that made him proud to orchestrate a genocide. So it may be time for us to drop our belief in the banality of evil (source).

Sexual coercion through xenophobia (radical or otherwise) is fundamental to bourgeois hegemony—i.e., through René Descartes’ maps of conquests, Tolkien’s own refrain, or their ludologized doubles and theatrical counterparts in the here-and-now relying on the same old ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection: the banality of evil as simply the turning of the handle. This is true regardless if the people doing it are coded as “good” or “bad”; canon-wise, they’re still fighting war in defense of the nation-state as a vampiric entity that needs war (thus victims) to survive.

(exhibit 1a1a1d: Source: top-left; bottom-left. The Hitler Youth and the Neo-Nazi/cryptofascist of America have much in common—i.e., with the German alt-right of the 1920s and ’30s actually being informed by American fascism/Pax Americana, but also Capitalism as something that destroyed both their economies to varying degrees. Fascism was less extreme in America because the elite lived there and didn’t devastate and exploit it during WW1 like they did to the Germans [resulting in merely a Great Depression, which harbored fascist sentiment, but not total realization]. After WW1, the German elite defaulted on American loans used to rebuild Germany following the Treaty of Versailles [similar to the Marshall Plan, or lending money to the people you just blew up, then forcing them to buy your building materials], thereby forcing the German middle class to “foot the bill” after hyperinflation ensued. The Nazi “black knight” reliably emerged, which American “white knights” stepped in to counter through copaganda and the Military Industrial Complex, seeing their own homeland threatened by a copycat neighbor America had “on the hip.” War became “good,” again [an oscillation that continues into the present].

The fact remains that similar crises occur periodically under Capitalism by design and this, true to form, has a monstrous emblem attached to it. Nearly a century ago, Dracula’s unironic castle appeared during Germany’s 1923 beerhall putsch, heralding a liminal hauntology of war that was brought to the Global North sixteen years later. Now that the Reaper is once again upon us, no amount of neoliberal comfort [monster] food will change that unless we wake up and take labor action to counteract fascism and the elite. The “Belmonts” won’t protect workers from the butchery of fascism or elite machinations; as the show itself illustrates and fetishizes, the vast majority of workers will die or be displaced—all while “the good guys” try to take the credit for beheading fascism and “saving the world.” But even if they “win” against the Leveler, he remains a medieval argument for death as hauntologized; i.e., fascist apologetics in centrist monomythic scripts that cannot kill death. It’s merely a reprieve inside a giant system that ensures the tyrant will always return inside the Cycle of Kings; i.e., a band-aid for a wound that never stops bleeding [evoking the cycle of conquers through the myth of sovereignty—e.g., “England” and the “Goths” (who were not the Goths) claiming ownership, thus a post-Roman/early-Teutonic national identity over “land of the Angles,” aka Anglo-Saxons]. Even before the skeleton king comes back, the fact remains that the Global South and its [neo]colonized territories are currently being butchered before the Imperial Boomerang even sails home. Striga’s “livestock” is a bleak displacement and black reflection of our own guilty bloodlust sated by devouring the hidden conquered. It’s not some transcendental signified, but merely cold, hard economics embellished to make the process of capital more palatable to the middle class: eating other humans by proxy/through the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection. Vae Victis.)

(artist: Bokuman) 

State proponents are straw dogs (throwaway effigies)/sacrificial roosters, believing themselves immune to the elite’s gain while the owner slits the faithful worker’s throat sooner or later. Their “greatest strength” is actually what dooms them to an ignominious death: complete alienation driven by a dimorphic connecting of everything to biological sex, skin color and their canonical-monstrous connotations in service of the profit motive but refusing to scrutinize things at a dialectical-material level (willful ignorance/”rose-tinted glasses”). Conversely our greatest strength as class-/culture-/race-conscious warriors is our “darkness visible” doubling theirs through the Wisdom of the Ancients as something to cultivate relative to the modern world; i.e., our deliberate, cultivated ability to critique capital and its agents/trifectas through dialectical-material scrutiny and iconoclastic, campy behaviors that synthesize the Superstructure to our purposes (rehumanizing ourselves by separating from the colonial binary in monomorphic fashion) all while suffering the fools of canonical tragedy and farce within canonical historical materialism. Our aim is to “make it gay” by reclaiming the Base through our Four Gs: abjection, hauntology, chronotopes and cryptonymy—but also our Six Rs, or Gothic-Marxist tenets of Gothic Communism during oppositional praxis as something to synthesize.

As stated at the start of the volume, the Six Rs and Four Gs’ collective idea is to make Marxism a little cooler, sexier and fun than Marx ever could through the Wisdom of the Ancients (a cultural understanding of the imaginary past) as a “living document”; i.e., to make it “succulent” by “living deliciously” as an act of repeated reflection that challenges heteronormativity’s dimorphic biological essentialism and bondage of gender to sex, thus leading to a class awakening at a countercultural level through iconoclastic (sex-positive), monomorphic Gothic poetics:

• Re-claim. Seize Gothic art as the means of emotional (monstrous) production.

• Re-union/-discover/-turn. Reunite people with their alienated, alienizing bodies, language, labor, sexualities, genders, trauma, pasts and emotions in sex-positive, re-humanizing (xenophilic) ways.

• Re-empower/-negotiate. Grant workers control over their own sexual labor through their emotions and, by extension things (most often language, symbols or art) that stem from, and relate to, their sexual labor as historically abjected and privatizing under Capitalism; to allow them to renegotiate their boundaries in regards to their trauma through their sexual labor as their own, including their bodies and emotions as a potent form of power interrogation, re-negotiation and re-exchange amid chaotic and unequal circumstances.
• Re-open/-educate. To expose the privatization of emotions and denial of sex-positive sex/gender education to individual workers, helping them reopen their minds and their eyes, thus see, understand and feel how private property makes people emotionally and Gothically stupid.

• Re-play. Establish a new kind of game attitude and playfulness during development towards Communism, one that dismantles the bourgeoisie’s intended play of manufactured scarcity, consent, and conflict in favor of a post-scarcity world filled with “game” workers who can learn and respond creatively to the natural and person-made problems of language and the material world with unique solutions: (emergent play).

• Re-produce/-lease. To disseminate these tenets through worker-made sex-positive lessons that we leave behind; i.e., egregores, “archaeologies” and other Gothic-Communist “derelicts.” As the oppressed, our pedagogy should be centered around the continued production of communal emotional intelligence as a means of transforming the material world and, by extension, the socio-material-natural world for the better—by healing from generational trauma by interrogating it together.

(exhibit 1a1a1e1a: Artist, top-left: Blxxd Bunny; top-middle: Kayliesaurus-Rex; bottom-left: Quinnvincible; bottom-middle: e.streetcar; bottom-right: source. “Learn to swim,” indeed. Gothic counterculture is sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll as canonically infantilized, shamed for their masturbatory and rebellious qualities, then sold back to a fearful “adult” public as harmful wish fulfillment and guilty pleasure [for when their material conditions feel “too real” and they suddenly need to “escape”/lose control through the orgasm or other privatized euphoria]. From jazz to rock ‘n roll to heavy metal, postpunk, goth rock and industrial, there is a shared antiquation, almost-Freudian vibe to canonical monsters [and their theatre at large] being cryptomimetically evoked—of fatal nostalgia retreating into a lost childhood rememory [re: Morrison, meaning a colonized attempt at reassembling lost culture or buried trauma for cathartic means]: an attraction towards powerful expression that one might feel in control through controlled chaos [which isn’t the same as controlled opposition, insofar as function goes. An iconoclast can easily take a pre-existing piece of canonical media and weaponize it against the state; i.e., reclaiming the “ghost” of Tolkien or Marx from their recuperated or otherwise harmful forms].

Doing so is important, as inheritance fears [expressed through Gothic media] coincide with one’s actual birth as loaded with pre-existing trauma. This includes popular beliefs or codified behaviors that, for better or ill, have been disseminated; e.g., the antiquated, sexist ideas of Sigmund Freud (something of a cokehead and armchair quack). Indeed, birth trauma was actually an idea that Otto Rank, a pupil of Freud’s, challenged Freud on. Freud personally saw the birth itself as painful to the child, thus crippling them with repressed trauma/memories of pain [that stigmatize the mother by blaming her for the birth]. Rank did not, describing the separation from the mother as traumatic, thus representing a desire to return to a “womb state.” For Rank, the revisited “womb” is not a murderous site for revenge at having been raped in the past [canonized in state apologia when the Rambo or Amazon kills the Archaic Mother as a dark double for the TERFs own lived trauma projected onto a state target] but sweet bliss accomplished through reunion as oblivious. As I note with Frankenstein in “Born to Fall? Birth Trauma, the Soul, and Der Maschinenmensch” (2014), this was exactly what the Creature wanted from Victor but was denied time and time again:

Birth trauma is a strong theme in Mary Shelley’s famous novel, Frankenstein – not “physical” trauma, but rather “birth trauma” as Otto Rank calls it, in his famous book, The Trauma of Birth: “…In attempting to reconstruct for the first time from analytic experiences the to all appearances purely physical birth trauma… we are led to recognize in the birth trauma the ultimate biological basis of the psychical” (xii).

According to Rank, birth is, in and of itself, an act – one that separates mother from child and is psychologically traumatic. In Frankenstein, Victor, regardless of his sex, was the Creature’s de facto mother and thus responsible for nurturing it. His failure to is the birth, which severs the link between mother and child. The Creature seems to vow revenge against him, but actually desires to earn Victor’s love and affection in order to revert the birth trauma and “return to the womb” by restoring the link between mother and child. Otto Rank was a pupil and eventual-intellectual rival of Sigmund Freud, and his shift away from the sexual ideas made popular by his mentor eventually resulted in the demise of their friendship. His “birth trauma” focuses on the nurturing relationship between mother and child, not the sexual relationships between the child and its parents. This was a new concept for the time, according to James Lieberman, who states:

…Freud’s psychology was father-centered prior to The Trauma of Birth. Rank was quite aware of this [and his own views set him] apart as the first feminist in Freud’s inner circle. Today… the mother-child relationship [being] crucial in the earliest formative phase of development [is a given,] but [back] then psychoanalytic theory presented a strong father threatening castration, and a mother whose importance was more erotic than nurturing.

As Gothic Communists, our reunion is symbolic and poetic, represented through the reclamation of the vagina as stigmatized, but also the monstrous-feminine at large as something to rescue from Freud’s ghost; i.e., the trans, intersex, and non-binary body in all its andro/gynodiverse—thus non-Vitruvian/non-European—iconoclastic forms having a queer class character/revolutionary potential when coming out of the closet to fight for the Cause [refer to exhibit 1a1c for more examples].)

(artist: Calminvore; or, “baffling Christendom by continuing to live”)

While canonical heels like (unironic) Kain are fetishized and loved for the bourgeois implementation and defense of the status quo, the class character of anyone who functionally challenges the status quo is also fetishized and attacked through the weird canonical nerd; i.e., someone whose Pavlovian/Pygmalion conditioning teaches them to behave in a dominating manner towards state enemies that are chased after like forbidden fruit (that was a gay pun)—re: what Mark Greene refers to as “Man Box culture” in Remaking Manhood: The Healthy Masculinity Podcast (2023); re: “the brutal enforcement of a narrowly defined set of traditional rules for being a man.” This brings us to our second half of the companion glossary definition of weird canonical nerds—their conduct as de facto class traitors that overperform in hypermasculine ways:

Weird canonical nerds are systemically bigoted, pertaining to Man Box culture as something to openly endorse, or “resist” in ways that do nothing to change the status quo/avoid the infernal concentric pattern/Cycle of Kings; e.g., TERF Amazons, but also proudly “apolitical” non-feminist nerds who embody a particular status within the nerd pantheon of canonical heroes: Mega Man as a go-to centrist male hero, but also Eren Yeager as the “incel fascist” with mommy issues, or Samus Aran as the Galactic Federation’s singular girl boss, etc. All become something to endorse within critically blind portions of nerd culture that ape their prescriptive, colonial heroes within culture war dressed up as “apolitical” (the fascist ideology being secondary to the pursuit and claiming of personal power by changing one’s shape and language to fit those aims; e.g., Reinhardt Heydrich as a fascist war pig [to combine Umberto Eco with Black Sabbath] who would say whatever he could to justify his own iron grip on the minds of the populace: the foreign plot inside the house, once and forever). To this, the Gothic and its various intersections, contradictions and conflicts are embroiled within oppositional praxis for or against weird canonical nerds and their depictions/endorsements of different monster types (that, in the white, cis-het male tradition of privilege, routinely “fail up”—as success, like women or a nice house, is something they are taught to believe is owed to them; which extends to token minorities allowed a slice of the pie, but also must surrender their pie when the time comes [for which the real “Indian givers” are the settler colonist bearing false gifts: the Trojan Horse, aka the Faustian bargain, in Gothic circles]).

In turn, canonical xenophobia and xenophilia revolve around the monstrous-feminine as imprisoned inside Man Box culture’s state of exception/monopoly of violence, which leads to a specific mentality of reactive abuse I personally describe as “‘prison sex’ mentality” attached to larger systems of abuse[8]; i.e., of increasingly brutal status-quo enforcement through standard-issue and tokenized muscle: your basic chudwads, but also straight-up incels, TERFs/SWERFs and other class traitors terrorizing minorities through a gradient of vigilante violence deputized by the state, thus designed to escalate and gaslight, gatekeep, girl-boss, but also conduct reactive abuse/Pavlovian conditioning meant to encourage abuse production behaviors (slaps on the wrist, “boys will be boys” or “bitches be crazy”) and class-traitor behaviors (e.g., dogwhistles and virtue signals—we’ll cover these more towards the end of the thesis statement). They become de facto/honorary Beowulfs taught and revived to divide, then rape, kill and otherwise dominate labor through the broadly advertised menace of fascist-Communist-queer darkness (Grendel and his mother).

Because the state is always in crisis, it pushes towards decay from states of normality that yield up new exceptions. During state decline, the threat of the foreign plot internalizes. Darkness becomes something to challenge again and again when decay nears—i.e., during crisis the state decays, consuming itself outwards-to-inwards as the Imperial Boomerang sails to the center. As the state eats itself, those with privilege strip token agents of their mantle, then place them back in the state of exception. In turn, the status quo overperforms to appear hypermasculine, thus dodge cannibalization. They become the proverbial, hypermasculine “teeth in the night” (me misremembering Ray Winstone’s quote from the 2007 version of Beowulf, but “teeth in the night” sounds cooler in my mind than “teeth in the darkness”); i.e., as the warrior’s pre-emptive challenge and self-assured boast, but also martyred eulogy during scripted, momentum-based fights: the comeback and the reversal. The pursuit of power (as we shall see during the “camp map”) is often a fatal one, but is staged upon state propaganda as a false copy of itself. By chasing the veneer of state essentialism and perceived sovereignty during sanctioned kayfabe, the canonical performance becomes one of presumed invincibility as something to tout: the Black Knight’s ignominious war cry, “I’m invincible!” Even if they very clearly are not, the state purportedly lives on through the valorous dead’s noble (and expected) sacrifice; re: Hitler’s “Life is the nation. The individual must die anyway.” To which, Rob Halford demands,

Why do you have to die to be a hero?
It’s a shame a legend begins at its end.
Why do you have to die if you’re a hero
When there’s still so many things to say unsaid?

If you gaze across timeless years you’ll find them always there
And many gods will join the list compiled with dying care.
Hungry mouths are waiting to bite the hand that feeds
And so the living dead carry on immortal deeds (Judas Priest’s “Heroes End,” 1978).

(artist: Hans Makart)

Except, as the Valkyrie’s choosing of the slain becomes normalized, then accelerates, counterterrorism becomes—as always—a war of optics[9] towards testing middle-class resolve; i.e., Ho Chi Minh’s expression, “You will kill ten of us, we will kill one of you, but in the end, you will tire first.” The amount of guns/arms racing won’t prevent them from being stolen and/or simply sold by arms merchants pedaling wares to both sides—the weapons used against the state in counterterrorist measures that, as usual, demonstrate the paradox of terror at work: the stockpiling of arms is a recipe for self-destruction. As part of that paradox, the more the war carries on and the greater the myth/perceived aura of invincibility is, the more costly even a single death becomes. It becomes exponentially more and more expensive to cope with (which for the elite doesn’t matter—as long as money flows through nature; the citizens and enemies of the state are the ones who categorically suffer). As usual, the state’s faithful, loyal and/or self-interested will punish whistleblowers, iconoclasts and the underclass—for speaking out against the patriarchal myth of absolute power through their own performances (the myth of a monstrous-feminine challenge to said power), but also because the state must always be in crisis to justify its own existence; i.e., threatening the image of the castle as a wall built in defense of capital, thus something for class traitors to betray their fellow workers in favor of—Plato’s allegory of the cave.

The allegory’s function remains basically the same since it was envisioned by Plato: defend the castle and the king inside it, no matter how terribly estranged he inevitably becomes from nature, death and his fellow humans; i.e., Bakhtin’s dynastic primacy and hereditary rites wrapped within an awful cycle of European historical materialism in constant rise and decline; e.g., Poe’s “House of Usher” demonstrating the Shadow of Pygmalion as attached to a dying king—Zombie Caesar as the Leveler except the castle stays up; it’s the illusion of the castle that crumbles over and over and replaces itself with a pure-white regeneration (the ghost of the counterfeit, starting with Walpole’s cliché at the end of Otranto). As we shall see during the “camp map,” ACAB (“All Cops Are Bad”) also refers to the castles they defend, illusory or otherwise, and all of the heteronormative operatics that transpire inside of them as mapped out: “All (Canonical) Castles Are Bad”/”All (Gothic) Canons Are Bad.”

In recent times, Plato’s cave was cosmetically updated—during the Neo-Gothic period, followed by America’s First Gilded Age[10] and then again during the Second Gilded Age through the rise of the hyperreal (as brought to a wider public through The Matrix in 1999 and its own vast “desert of the real[11]“) intimating Percy Shelley’s “bare and level sands”: what Capitalism does to everything then covers it up in a monstrous, alienating fakery that sooner or later must let the cracks show (which invades the cartographic refrains we’ll examine during the “camp map”: Tolkien’s treasure map and Cameron’s settler-colonial territories). Though touted as eternal (which is impossible), the patriarchal castle is actually made of sand, on sand as lifelessly fragile and pulverized (which is a fact); but to kick its decaying foundation still invites DARVO, colossal tantrums and denial on top of denial in terms of the genocide it conceals. Such secrecy hides the state’s falsehood, and the punishments for exposing it do not fit the crime: complete and utter destruction by police forces as punishment unto their victims for disturbing even a single grain of sand. It’s Pavlovian but hyperbolic, anticipating the worst-of-the-worst at all times until total obedience (if not total power) is achieved. A massive gulf of apathy and alienation divides class traitors from other workers, the dutiful pack of hounds standing guard around the tomb-like megalith (standing guard even after the master has gone the way of all flesh). At its base, the same old games continue unbated, giving the rewards that state enforcers are trained to expect; the heteronormative kayfabe and its holy bloodsport become their entire world, until even daring to speak out threatens the illusion in front of the castle, not even the castle itself.

As part of the state-is-sacred illusion, these staged melees are meant to immortalize the fighter in a magical, deus-ex-machina-style blaze of glory mid-transformation—e.g., “hail, the victorious dead” or “[those who] ride eternal on the highways of Valhalla, shiny and chrome” as promoting the oddly muscled, underdog wrestler’s scripted, improbable-and-spontaneous comeback from certain defeat for a paying audience (not the dogfall, but the dog having his day/getting a bone): bread and circus, but also the Faustian bargain of false power and harmful, self-destructive knowledge passed down through a patriarchal offer by the conveyer of such things; i.e., the man who runs the show, teaching the young male warrior through Pavlovian conditioning and disguised ultimatums to be violent so the Master can profit off a young, stupid apprentice: “Give me a boy until he is seven and I will show you the man.” It’s a slave’s deal but also, in the Internet era, a parasocial relationship[12] built around the neoliberal concept of false strength as an escapist fantasy of “cutting one’s teeth”: the videogame as a canonical (thus sexist), monomythic teaching device of “cops and victims” (this isn’t the only function of videogames, but it is a prominent one, and exposed to children at a very young age; so it should absolutely be critiqued in spite of its enjoyable aspects; re: Anita Sarkeesian’s adage: enjoy what you consume but also critique it. Enjoy guilty pleasures, but don’t endorse/internalize their problematic material in your daily life).

Meanwhile, the “owners” of said “teeth in the night” (the paying customers purchasing personal property with inheritance, wages and other currencies) aren’t Beowulf- or Kain-like, physically and mentally impervious warrior “studs”; they’re actually toothless and stupid puppies in the Marxist sense that private property has made them hopelessly delusional and scared, thus indiscriminately violent—i.e., bred on a recipe for disaster whose muscles, secret identities[13] and weaponry are on loan from cradle to early grave: imaginary or otherwise, these things are not theirs to own. They thus experience a white fragility/gender envy whose infantilized warrior-death cult is routinely challenged not just by state crises advertised by our (sharp, pointy) teeth as dangerous, but also titillated by what makes us different, thus “weaker” than them: the dated stigmas and biases that prejudice them against us, and the criminogenic conditions that exist alongside the state’s bigoted inventions. These heteronormative myths and legends are informed by kernel-of-truth stereotypes and enabled by neglect, ignorance, apathy and disdain. Our “making it gay” is a threat they must bury.

In other words, weird canonical nerds are taught to uncritically consume whatever is pushed towards them as made to further the status quo through systemic abuse as reliant on heteronormative propaganda: to keep things running as they have been according to a counterfeit/forged ideology that reinforces itself by teaching young men to be suicidally violent towards anyone who is different from the status quo, thus primed to be exploited (through force) for profit. Anything that threatens said profit, illusion and/or status quo threatens the state, the home, the order of things (and its sandcastle/house-of-cards décor), thus must die (which puts us between a rock and a hard place: if we keep quiet, we die no matter what; if we speak out, we can potentially fix things but have to break the spell first, thus guarantee punishment in some shape or form). This process is generally assisted by the opportunistic, cynical and/or psychopathic (e.g., Lieutenant Hawkins from The Nightengale or Archibald Cunningham from Rob Roy, 1995) being glad to do so with pleasure; or by true-believers and their legitimate fear of the unknown/inability to imagine anything beyond Capitalism: fear and dogma. Capitalism isn’t just built on faith, but bad faith, compound fakeries (the ghost of the counterfeit) and abject stereotypes.

Stereotypes are not supposed to be accurate; they’re metaphors (a comparison between two unlike things) that anisotropically[14] reflect popular biases to be confirmed or rejected by audiences—i.e., the Asian person sees Mickey Rooney in Asian-face during Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) and thinks, “I get the feeling this is supposed me/my people but this feels like a bad caricature.” Except that’s canonically the point: to spread the stereotype as a kernel-of-truth that is largely false to make the minority feel unwelcome and correct-incorrect at the same time. The same idea goes for the back-stabbing Jew, the savage-cannibal person of color (an orc) or the queer crossdressing killer, etc, in popular WASP-y fiction. Yet, the same fictions cannot bar the duality of metaphor from yielding subtext through iconoclastic performances of formerly bigoted material; i.e., the desire of the stigmatized to be different than how they’re canonically depicted—to camp the canon via an ironic alter ego/secret identity whose mask-like, muscled persona is both popular in centrist kayfabe and represents a reclamation (or embodiment, in subordinate cases) of their self-hatred and stigma in a dialectical-material sense. Except fans of canon don’t like subtext or camp unless it’s penned by them (e.g., the blind parody of your garden-variety SNL skit). With videogames, a franchise like Zelda is simply about “itself” and nothing else, from the canonical viewpoint; i.e., “pure fiction” or “pure fantasy” with zero allegory or politics (re: Tolkien). But a story without subtext is simply impossible because something of the author goes into the story as having come from other stories and the external world’s historical materialism.

(artist: Frank Frazetta)

For example, Tolkien’s trolls from The Hobbit sound cockney because they’re poor foreign mercenaries emulating a white man’s idea of a poor foreign mercenary attached to a group of poor people from his home country whose class is generally identified by their voice—how they speak according to how they look:

But they were trolls. Obviously trolls. Even Bilbo, in spite of his sheltered life, could see that: from the great heavy faces of them, and their size, and the shape of their legs, not to mention their language, which was not drawing-room fashion at all, at all.

“Mutton yesterday, mutton today, and blimey, if it don’t look like mutton again tomorrer,” said one of the trolls.

“Never a blinking bit of manflesh have we had for long enough,” said a second. “What the ‘ell William was a-thinkin’ of to bring us into these parts at all, beats me—and the drink runnin’ short, what’s more,” he said jogging the elbow of William, who was taking a pull at his jug.

William choked. “Shut yer mouth!” he said as soon as he could. “Yer can’t expect folk to stop here for ever just to be et by you and Bert. You’ve et a village and a half between yer, since we come down from the mountains. How much more d’yer want? And time’s been up our way, when yer’d have said ‘thank yer Bill’ for a nice bit o’ fat valley mutton like what this is.” He took a big bite off a sheep’s leg he was roasting, and wiped his lips on his sleeve.

Yes, I am afraid trolls do behave like that, even those with only one head each. After hearing all this Bilbo ought to have done something at once. Either he should have gone back quietly and warned his friends that there were three fair-sized trolls at hand in a nasty mood, quite likely to try roasted dwarf, or even pony, for a change; or else he should have done a bit of good quick burgling. A really first-class and legendary burglar would at this point have picked the trolls’ pockets—it is nearly always worth while, if you can manage it—, [what kind of sick fuck puts an em dash next to a comma?] pinched the very mutton off the spits, purloined the beer, and walked off without their noticing him. Others more practical but with less professional pride would perhaps have stuck a dagger into each of them before they observed it. Then the night could have been spent cheerily (source).

Tolkien, here, is advocating for theft and murder of the bad team by the good team. The trolls, then, are not human, but a metaphor compared to humans through the analog as like what it otherwise seems to be not; i.e., these non-humans sound suspiciously human of a particular kind then are attributed to a kind of privateer or raider (the barbarian horde) as threatening the land of plenty, specifically the salt of the earth as a homely metaphor for the middle class afraid of violent, poor cannibal warriors from somewhere else (zombies). It’s anti-Semitic (which carries over into the anti-Communist sentiments of zombies during the Civil Rights Movement). But don’t tell fans of Tolkien that. Subtext is often queer and introduces cracks in his peerless effigy—the death of the author (another thing we’re blamed for—i.e., the death of the surrogate father figure) by making canon gay/political, thus ironic (we’ll return to this fear/recuperation of camp during the “camp map” proper when we touch on Joseph Crawford’s notion of “invented terrorism”).

(artist: Genzoman)

Lies, masks and theatrical artifice more broadly predate English as a written language, but spill into its written legends feeding into the canonical myth of male power as “derelict”; i.e., both faked and left behind in a diegetic and meta sense: an old, rune-cover scroll that proves its own legitimacy by making itself up based on older lies that continue the harmful trend as “moon-sized.” It aggregates, building up over time until life without it seems impossible even when it threatens to destroy the world. To that, Beowulf is the oldest, thus first-written male action hero in the English language, the Old-English ur-text/palimpsest for Lancelot, Darth Vader, Aragorn, Heinlein’s Competent Man, James Cameron’s Vietnam revenge fantasy for Rambo in Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), Shakespeare’s Hippolyta, Ellen Ripley in Aliens (the Competent Woman-turned-state-avenger modeled after Starship Troopers [1959] and Henry V [1599] to kill “her” version of Grendel and his mother—the xenomorph and the Alien Queen as stand-ins for a past brush with death, with rape, with the man-in-disguise threatening abject impregnation with a knife-dick). All execute during an arena-style battle of the sexes, but also corrupt/monstrous-feminine us-versus-them as moralized in the state’s favor through good-versus evil value judgments. The judgement/trial by combat is a kind of Amazonomachia or “monster battle,” pitting the heteronormative male action hero against the corrupt (fascist) and/or monstrous-feminine (female, queer) enemy of the state in wrestling code: the kayfabe of babyfaces and heels (good monster, bad monster).

This applies to Tolkien’s trolls, which we just examined. Thorin might not win against the trolls, but he gives as good as he gets fighting from the side of good:

he jumped forward to the fire, before they could leap on him. He caught up a big branch all on fire at one end; and Bert got that end in his eye before he could step aside. That put him out of the battle for a bit. Bilbo did his best. He caught hold of Tom’s leg—as well as he could, it was thick as a young tree-trunk—but he was sent spinning up into the top of some bushes, when Tom kicked the sparks up in Thorin’s face.

Tom got the branch in his teeth for that, and lost one of the front ones. It made him howl, I can tell you. But just at that moment William came up behind and popped a sack right over Thorin’s head and down to his toes. And so the fight ended. A nice pickle they were all in now: all neatly tied up in sacks, with three angry trolls (and two with burns and bashes to remember) sitting by them, arguing whether they should roast them slowly, or mince them fine and boil them, or just sit on them one by one and squash them into jelly (source).

More to the point, Gandalf saves their bacon in the end by turning the trolls all to stone: “Dawn take you all, and be stone to you!” In short, Thorin and his friends survive through deux ex machina; i.e., because God loves them, just like Beowulf.

Canon-wise, all male action heroes are “good” and come from other male action heroes; all enemies of the state are “bad” and come from other enemies of the state; i.e., a quest for dominance between good guys and bad guys flowing out of older media and into newer stories/mediums that repeat the canonical, centrist pattern; e.g., videogame canon’s chips off the old block: their Pantheon of male action heroes/wonder weapons versus the “forces of darkness,” the big evils of a perennial corruption/monstrous-feminine tied to useful geopolitical groups, namely “fascists” and “Communists” as nominal. Advertised to American children as theatrical heels, bad guys (and girls, queers) are classically expressed using two distinct color codes during the blame game: green and purple and/or black and red (the colors of stigma and racism, but also revenge, power and dogma). Queer variants are basically evil clowns/jesters (the trickster archetype) within the same violent process of abjection, which—Hogle argues—is based on the ghost of the counterfeit as a false copy of itself that pushes the myth of state legitimacy, exceptionalism and supremacy forward in Gothic language: good monsters vs bad monsters, through a brutalized raping of the bad monster by the good—i.e., not just monster-fucking as rape, but anal rape and mutilation (trophy-taking, often beheading) of the corpse as a powerless shell of the conquered foe to humiliate in life and in death: “Kill the pig! Spill its blood!” as harmful wish fulfillment and guilty pleasure tied to inherited gender roles within Gothic fictions and remediations.

All the same, the victim and its trauma survive in the same imperiled spaces, too. In or relating to canon, the hunt of the prey becomes a chercher-la-femme cliché rooted in the lived experience of the woman as the sport of men, the latter expected to give chase and “court” her to sate their animal desire; or paradoxically she seeks her own palliative care through psychosexual self-medicative activities: tempting fate out on the dance floor in self-destructive forms. Faced with trauma that scars us, it also marks us and imbues us with prey mechanisms that we aim to check by inheriting anxiety through personal experiences or through reading about it as a warning device that takes on a life of its own. Trauma doesn’t just beget trauma; it recognizes and preys upon it, often through immediate nonverbal language. It’s a very animal experience and you won’t have any idea what it’s like unless you’ve been there yourself—have either been hunted or have inherited the anxiety of being hunted as a surviving element of your culture; i.e., the Gothic as the return to trauma, but also the return of trauma as something that—regardless of how real[15a] it is—is a marker of trauma as something for concerned citizens, police agents (and other abusers) and legitimate victims respond to differently under crisis than state victims. For state proponents, stigma colors convey a presence of trauma on state victims for fear of reprisals regarding past abuses; e.g., the Germans fearing Soviet reprisals after the Eastern Front turned in the Red Army’s favor during WW2. Trauma, then, is generational abuse furthered through compelled revenge and appropriation by the colonizer group towards the colonized.

In my case, I am trans, thus embody a marker of stigma according to my gender as something to identify with and perform; “green” as a symptom of internalized self-hatred, but also something to assigned by police agents. As such, I feel as women classically do in such stories, wherein my lived experience is an attraction to power through strength in ways that sometimes have done me a disservice—i.e., the paradox of wanting to be near power to keep an eye on it, to want a protector or to face ones lived/imagined fears through calculated risk: the vicarious passion or exquisite torture that I call “the palliative Numinous” (a pain-relieving effect achieved from, and relayed through, intense Gothic poetics and theatrics). It’s very Promethean, but expressed through the venues and activities of the (for me) white female domestic: the home, but also the dance hall while being “on the market” as an imperiled, damaged debutante; i.e., drawn to excitement and danger though maladaptive responses that yearn nevertheless for catharsis. It remains an intense, profound release from trauma through “trauma” as an agency that, while effective, can lead to trouble between two or more people through shared interests that camouflage the harmful intent of one party drawn to the other (more on this in Volume One and Two, when I talk at length about Jadis abusing me).

Metal[15b] is one such example—a controlled chaos that, like Gothic poetics at large, can help us feel in control through risk management; i.e., the lyrical and musical advertisement of great enemies or mighty power that can’t actually hurt us/blast us apart, but feels genuine enough to evoke/trigger our panic response. For the traumatized as already marked, this is like manna from heaven: to “fight,” “flee,” “fawn” or “freeze” in controlled “rape play” and surreal, monster-fucker environments to gain agency over our pathologized conditions that are generally represented through monsters that look or sound “green”; i.e., inside spaces that remind us where we were hunted or otherwise exposed, while also helping us work through or otherwise inhabit our psychosexual states without actually harming others (unironic torture porn) and/or self-destructing (scars can heal, but stay with you for life, and mark you for potential abuse by parties trained to feed off your trauma): we can dance with the dead as undead ourselves.

To this, monsters have more in common than they do differences (and these differences generally are hard to pin down). In short, demons offer forbidden knowledge or power and can shapeshift; the undead were formally alive (or appear to have been) and generally feed in relation to trauma (concepts we’ll unpack at great length in Volume Two). As a kind of deathly theatre mask, something else that’s equally important to consider about demons and the undead (and which we’ll bring up throughout the entire book) is that animals embody the canonical language of power and resistance as something to camp through demonic and undead forms; i.e., stigma animals relayed through demonic BDSM and rituals of power expression and exchange that embody hunters and hunted, predators and prey that play out through the ongoing battles and wars of culture, of the mind, of sexuality and praxis as traumatized: marked for trauma or by trauma that parallel our green and purple doubles onscreen.

A book-wide note about animals: Dogs make for effective metaphors regarding heroic stories: protectors, home defense, property defense; territorial dogs and guard dogs, loyal to a fault, but also watch dogs who surveille and lie. All of this showcases another paradox: a dog who can think, thus be taught—i.e., who can learn. In terms of preventative justice, the rehabilitative thought experiment—of teaching an old dog new tricks—obviously invokes dog metaphors. Keeping with the paradox motif, this can apply to Commies (good dogs) and capitalists (bad dogs) as oppositional weird nerds. It’s not essential to think about everything this way, but I’ve found it oddly useful. Historically there’s actually a solid reason for it, too: Dogs and humans evolved side-by-side in recent, recorded memory, and dogs are symbolic through this context in a Gothic sense: discipline and punish; i.e., of servitude, war and the abusive, Pavlovian conditioning of the sort we’ll be seeking to undo. Out of medieval discourse, domesticated animals are also gendered in a sexualized, monstrous sense; i.e., “The Miller’s Tale” from The Canterbury Tales (1392). The dog, as a phallic implement of war, is masculine, loyal, fierce; the cat is “catty” and feminine, as is the rabbit a paganized symbol in particular (spring, lunacy). As a gender-bending exercise, we’ll consider dogs relative to various monsters in terms of dog-related stigmas during the rest of the thesis statement and spottily throughout the whole book: war bosses and victims during monstrous theatre. We’ll look at cats and rabbits more during overt sex work (catboys, cat girls), but also revolutionary cryptonymy (so-called “big cats[15c]“—e.g., tigresses, exhibit 1a1a1a1_c; confuse-a-cat, killer rabbits, Trojan bunnies, etc) and furries/chimeras (exhibit 1a1a1h3a2) as anthropomorphism, which tend to combine cats and dogs with stigma animals of various kinds (wasps, snakes, spiders, bats, etc) to interrogate, but also reclaim animalized interspecies stigmas onstage and off (the “fursona” being a uniform but also a state of being regardless of where one is). —Perse

Predator-wise, the war dog can present as male or female, thus muzzled in ways that are correct, thus normal according to the status quo: the female war boss as correct-incorrect, but still a useful gatekeeper for the elite (a TERF, in other words). In this sense, you get paradoxes like the chimera as both a snake and a dog—with Medusa both a phallic woman and maneater who turns men to stone, and a specific kind of bitch that works for the state as a weaponized victim that is compared to multiple animals at the same time; she is both a snake-bitch, but manly in the theatrical sense due to her penetrative attacks, piercing stare and direct, aggressive behaviors. On some level, the Pavlovian ideal is conditioning for hunting behaviors that misuse congenital or maladaptive prey responses: the hunter becoming the hunted (or vice versa). This can be cis-het men seeking to abuse others to make their trauma stop thus feel safe, or women and token groups.

The same idea canonizes through the male variant as “the beast,” Beowulf’s “teeth in the night” as beholden like a trained mutt to canonical ideas of the animal as prized for its inhuman power in ways that evoke an older rustic mentality—re: “the Miller’s Tale” describing everything in an animalized, sexual way that was closer to nature. Capitalism, of course, commodifies this, and pits the animalized against one another through compelled dogfights: dog-eat-dog in a larger kennel that has an alpha/”top dog” (echoed in the global tableau during nation pastiche and kayfabe, of course; but during heteronormative enforcement at large: there must always be a brutalizer). The language is Pavlovian, leading to its misuse during any confrontation (which waves of terror conflate as a universal fight-or-flight mechanism for any dispute, no matter how trivial or small). We will discuss a myriad of means to subvert animal abuse, including its language, thus address trauma in the body as begot from said abuse as animal, sexual, physical, and mental—all rolled into one composite beast that affects all workers, human or otherwise.

Simply put, crisis sexualizes under canon, whereupon war as a language of power exchange amounts to good play/bad play with animalized flavors: “puppy play” through an animalized warrior that is useful to the state, in canonical examples. The death fetish is dressed up further as a rebel barbarian/Amazon that disappears like a bad dream if their veneer becomes “rabid” and they turn heel. While iconoclastic examples can camp the berserk’s “teeth in the night” through iconoclastic puppy play and war bosses, canonical iterations will not stand for such games. The persona of strength is sacred as a heavily scarred, inked destroyer of the state’s foes. Anything else is effectively ridicule/degenerate and must be muzzled, gagged, and/or euthanized if the debridement (the removing of corrupted or dead flesh) doesn’t stick; re: the euthanasia effect:

Note: Given my extensive work on Amazons, my definition for “euthanasia effect” is “new”; i.e., as of this promotion series (though made from old parts), effectively describing a variety of post-2023 sources written by me (from pre-2023 sources): for you to consider when regarding the token subjugated Amazon and her ancient rival, the Medusa. —Perse, 3/27/2025

the euthanasia effect (rabid token Amazons)

A term, coined by me, to describe the canonical, assimilative qualities of the Amazonian myth (and one whose Amazonomachia has canonized, post-Wonder-Woman, in Metroidvania through Cameron’s refrain and—to a lesser extent—Tolkien’s). It is one where magical, mythical warrior women—as simultaneously virgin/whore animal people (the female* berserk)—are canonically employed to keep men (and the victims of men/token enforcers during “prison sex” police violence) paradoxically in line, mid-panopticon; i.e., a female-coded (usually white, or token non-white) centurion or stentor girlboss who, in between yawping at the men to aurally castrate them (the banshee or siren), “tops” them in hauntological, dominatrix-style fashion, elsewhere outside the bedroom (re: Foucault): “make it through this and I’ll ride you until you beg!” Death by Snu-Snu becomes the traditional hero’s monomythic reward and doom; re: Irigaray’s creation of sexual difference, but tokenized into a kind of virginal warrior Madonna jailor pulled from the Neo-Gothic’s former dungeons; e.g., Charlotte Dacre’s fearsome and “phallic” (stabby-stabby) Victoria (see: Sam Hirst’s 2020 “Zofloya and the Female Gothic” for a good summarizing of that dilemma):

*Canon is heteronormative, thus dimorphic (and settler-colonial/Cartesian). There can be intersex elements, but these will be treated as “phallic,” thus male/female and masc/femme during the Amazon’s struggles; i.e., as a monstrous-feminine entity the state monopolizes by gaslight-gatekeep-girlbossing it. Such things, then, canonically embody the Amazon and Gorgon’s doubled morphological conflict inside-outside itself; i.e., to simultaneously exude the psychomachy’s calm/furious or virgin/whore qualities, such “mirror syndrome” (another term of mine) punching a black reflection where state victims are housed (thus useful to profit pimping nature as alien); re: the postscript from the Poetry Module’s “Following in Medusa’s Footsteps.” Throughout BDSM and Gothic media, on and offstage, you see the euthanasia effect in Metroidvania a ton. To enhance your own ludo-Gothic BDSM (to camp subjugated Amazons with), refer to my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus for some good examples of the Promethean Quest (though my “Concerning Rape Play” compendium also raises some salient reading regarding ludo-Gothic BDSM as a whole). Apart from either of those, we’ll tackle Amazons, Medusa and the monstrous-feminine revenge argument more directly in the “Predator/Prey” subchapters, in Volume One (which explore Amazons and knights). Also consider the Demon Module’s “Amazons and Demon Mommies,” “Vampires and Claymation,” “Summoning the Whore,” “Exploring the Derelict Past,” and “Follow the White-to-Black Rabbit“; i.e., for good examples (outside Volume Zero) of the cop/victim approach in canonical Amazonomachia and how to subvert it to have the whore’s revenge against profit! I also recommend Volume Zero’s “Symposium; Aftercare” for plenty of extra lists and fun examples.

The canonical Amazon, then, is a time traveler TERF meant to serve profit by betraying her fellow oppressed (women or not). Ripped spectacularly from the ancient pre-fascist past and expressed in “ancient” fascist forms during state crisis, Red Scare employs Amazonian fascism and Communism—during the usual kayfabe centrism and anisotropic terrorist/counterterrorist refrains pimping nature on the same stage—through a black-and-red aesthetic of power and death corrupting nature for state aims: to feed on nature by triangulating against state victims “of nature,” per Cartesian thought; i.e., to antagonize nature as monstrous-feminine with nature as monstrous-feminine, during the Capitalocene (from Walpole’s Otranto onwards—per Hans Staats’ “Mastering Nature: War Gothic and the Monstrous Anthropocene” [2016] but married, per my arguments, to Raj Patel and Jason Moore’s idea of Capitalocene). Through these dualistic poetic devices’ assimilative function, the subjugated Amazon is a functionally “white” Indian/whore/savior cowgirl (token) cop who harvests the functionally “black” whore (criminal, alien, etc) during the abjection process (and its bad-faith revenge arguments; e.g., Orientalism). All happen while suffering the usual double standards and embarrassments such betrayals bring on (which camping through ludo-Gothic BDSM anisotropically reverses through the same aesthetic—shrinking profit while sending abjection back towards the colonizer agent/apparatus); e.g., Samus Aran (re: the Poetry Module’s “Playing with Dead Things“) but really a wide variety of such wheyfu herbo monster girls upholding Capitalist Realism: by kettling therefore blaming the whore Archaic Mother*/ghost of the counterfeit. Such blaming occurs ipso facto “for its own genocide” during the Promethean Quest’s infernal concentric pattern (e.g., Ayla or Savage Land Rogue; re: “‘Death by Snu-Snu!’: From Herbos to Himbos, part two“); i.e., an eternal warrior “of nature as hellish” sent back into Hell come to Earth—all to do battle with the verminized, insectoid-chattel, stigma-animal, diseased-and-deathly Medusa on the same Aegis (the liminal hauntology of war): as her dark, Venus-twin half (the long-lost relative, often an evil/false sister or wicked step mother)! The Amazon is a “scab” operatically punching labor as alien hysterical (the wandering womb), but pulled from their ranks to do so inside the state of exception. From Radcliffe onwards, then, the Amazon is a warrior detective who canonically remains a classic pro-state actor fabricating scapegoats; i.e., from older pre-existing legends repurposed for profit now (the settler colony a chronotope danger disco).

(artist, top: ChuckARTT; bottom-left: Arvalis; bottom-middle: Flyland; bottom-right: Pagong1)

*The male version of the Archaic Mother is something I call the Dragon Lord or Skeleton King (re: the Cycle of Kings with vampiric, draconian or otherwise patriarchal versus matriarchal elements the state can scapegoat; e.g., Sauron or Count Dracula). Offshoots of said half-real monarchs are often lesser necromancers, rogues or death knights (re: offshoots of the Numinous tied to the same danger-disco structure’s unheimlich nightmare home).

Being of the Medusa as Archaic Mother (re: the whore’s paradox, from “Rape Reprise“), Amazons endure endless punishment from on high and down below (capital’s “middle management”; e.g., Ellen Ripley); i.e., a classically female Prometheus, they are always treated as a substantial risk/desperation measure, one that must be collared just as quickly lest she “corrupt,” thus take her fellow soldiers along for the ride (and back whence she came, to hellish territories, forever). In short, the Amazon is a token scapegoat witch (vampire, goblin, etc) policing other witches, therefore whores (re: me, vis-à-vis Silvia Federici, in “Policing the Whore“), and does so through modular-but-intersecting us-versus-them, white-on-black (of any sort, not just skin color) and monstrous (undead/demonic/animalistic) abjection: someone virgin/whore who, per these imbricating persecution networks, eventually exposes through Radcliffean state arbitration (demasking the villain); i.e., shown as whore and released shamefully from service (the endless oscillation used to keep such class, culture and race traitors off-balance while conditioning them to ruthlessly punch down, inside-outside the concentric frontier ghettos they patrol, mid-relegation; i.e., “good job today, bitch—kill you, tomorrow!”); re: Ellen Ripley but also future versions of the female Rambo that came after and expressed in different kinds of neoliberal Gothic’s trademark fantasy-to-sci-fi language: a prison colony police agent serving the state as its token barbarian, all heroes are monsters but assimilation is poor stewardship!

(source)

As “A Note on Canonical Essentialism” describes it; re (from Volume Zero):

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

This is how the subjugated Hippolyta do (the queenly protagonist version of the regular Amazon; e.g., Wonder Woman)—a kind of token, monomyth, queen-for-a-day “fallen Pandora” (or Chaucer’s “Thus swyved was this carpenteris wyf” line, from “The Miller’s Tale“), and one whose previously established map and recursive, Quixotic occupants/warmongering we’ll be camping more; i.e., during Volume Zero‘s “Scouting the Field” (rabies is bad for you) but also through revolutionary cryptonymy with subversive Amazons (a concept Volume One‘s “Introducing Revolutionary Cryptonymy and the State’s Medieval Monopolies on Violence and Terror through Animalized Morphological Expression” unpacks at length; re: the predator/prey dichotomy and canonical abuse of animalized language in furtherance to profit, thus genocide, rape and war).

mirror syndrome

Another term of mine, one that occurs through the euthanasia effect; i.e., the euthanizing of token agents, ignominiously attacking their own black reflections’ troubling comparison (which doubles are for). Such complicit cryptonymy happens during the abjection process/state of exception and, in effect, betraying their own interests (and those of their fellow workers and nature) for profit: Roman fools killed mid-apocalypse, during blind parody’s remediated praxis (re: boom and bust).

Nature is an alien whore to rape through token whores. In turn, their ultimatum is delivered to workers by workers through the abuse of animalized language; i.e., the state police (or vigilantes deputized by the police) aggregating against labor through Pavlovian conditioning that valorizes the hypermasculine performance (and its token assortments) as forever besieged by external/internal threats within the home and inside the mind. The psychomachy drives the conflict forward as a psychological form of warfare in ways useful to the state; i.e., internalized self-hatred and bigotry whose psychosexual violence yields statements of a Great Destroyer labor should look upon in stark horror and submissive awe—a deathly trance that robs them of all fight (in copaganda language, she’s a wolf among sheep: unafraid to “cull the herd” during decay-induced harvest times; but also the barbarian fantasy as a similar protector-rapist fantasy via the knight or cop experienced by the battered housewife drawn to trauma through maladaptive survival mechanisms; i.e., abuse-seeking behaviors that can be curbed through “monster fucking” stratagems that fetishize the cop, but also the bandit as one-in-the-same; e.g., Conan the Barbarian, King Conan, or Conan the Destroyer as a theatrical persona who rescues you but could murder you if he was a bad barbarian, which canonically is an incredibly vague and ambiguous [thus apologetic] proposition). In exchange, the combat that results frequently crosses over into gratuitous hyperbole; it’s not automatically torture porn, obviously. However, within the context of veiled threats during class warfare, it intimates torture in unironic ways: from masked to mask-off, but generally somewhere in the uncomfortable middle.

The same basic distinctions go for white, cis-het Christian men as the most privileged group, with this privilege of the de facto warrior class (traitor) decreasing as you remove various aspects about what contributes to them being canonically coded as “superior” to everyone else: their white skin, blonde hair and blue eyes (that “Aryan” look), but also their genitals (the heteronormative mythic structure tying power to skin color/race science and biological sex).

To this, a gradient of tokenized groups can adopt the same harmful mindset as useful to capital: a mercenary mentality that isn’t afraid to kill whatever the state mobilizes against by wearing their collars and becoming canonical dogs of war to “sic” on the class enemies-of-the-state: “Sic ’em, boy/Get ’em, girl!” The language of “puppy play” doesn’t vanish; it’s collaring and treatment of power and resistance merely become sex-coercive, thus designed to mistreat out-group members by in-group proponents and their subordinates during a given apocalypse. In times of decay while the state eats itself (and removes its mask), the female war boss’ spiked collar of war is surreptitiously swapped out for a domesticated collar that “marries the Amazon off.” Betrothed to a state zombie or death, she is shifted away from the canonically male function of war and “death by Snu Snu” gag to be crammed into the bridal gown (or spiked fetish gear—i.e., the bridal variant of the woman-in-black).

Furthermore, the “collar swap” happens under amatonormative modes of sexual reproduction tied to dimorphized biology and gender roles. In other words, state decay forces the regressive Amazon to submit to male power under an always-patriarchal system—its mythic structure and Symbolic Order designed to summon the false copy of the rebellious Amazon when needed; i.e., the blind rage of the Medusa as a black wolf who devours the state’s foes, but also the traitorous Hippolyta as her pearly white double (exhibit 1a1b). One is nastier and ruder than the other but they ultimately serve the same function in canonical discourse: triangulation.

Male or female, black or white, our would-be killers collectively lack emotional and Gothic intelligence; they do not respect, represent or otherwise practice

• mutual consent
• informed consumption and informed consent
• sex-positive de facto education (social-sexual education; i.e., iconoclastic/good sex education and taught gender roles), good play/emergent gameplay and cathartic wish fulfillment/guilty pleasure (abuse prevention patterns) meant to teach good discipline and impulse control (valuing consent, permission, mutual attraction, etc); e.g., appreciative peril (the ironic damsel-in-distress/rape fantasy), invited voyeurism
• descriptive sexuality

As we’ve already established by looking at the definition of weird canonical nerds, their conduct is quite the opposite; weird canonical nerds don’t practice mutual consent; they endorse

• uninformed/blind consumption through manufactured consent
• de facto bad education as bad fathers (function knights) and other role models/authority figures; i.e., canonical sex education and gender education, bad play/intended gameplay resulting in harmful wish fulfillment/guilty pleasure (abuse encouragement patterns); e.g., appropriative peril (the unironic damsel-in-distress), uninvited voyeurism
• prescriptive sexuality

through their own synthetic toolkits during oppositional praxis.

As such, they become stupid chasers taught by videogames (effectively Pavlovian simulators of reward and punishment tied to canonical values) to hunt us down—not to immediately destroy us but dominate as forbidden (expendable) fruit, or to confirm their own suspicions about as gender-envious[16] class traitors. This inquisition is less concerned with whether we’re dangerously deviant/degenerate shapeshifters or not and more invested in assigning an automatic criminal extent to our perceived heresy/sin of “making it gay” according to the action formula as dogmatic (unlike their self-righteous secret identities and shifting shapes, of course; they follow the leader/kneel to vertical power and the leader is always right); like Eve, these “bad doms” blame us for their “moments of weakness,” whereas gentler (usually female) WASP-y [white Anglo-Saxon Protestant] detectives give us the murder-mystery approach and study us under a magnifying glass. For both, we’re either bait, traps, or somehow “asking for it” (aka “blaming the victim*”) as odd specimens that just can’t seem to help ourselves. It’s easier to attack us and our representations than it is to blame and try to change the system (also, the system will regard class, race and gender traitors with [usually temporary] accommodations).

*Seeing as we’re about to delve into Ann Radcliffe’s wheelhouse, I may as well get this off my chest: Forget a bone, I have a whole goddamn skeleton (about nine pages worth) to pick with the true crime/murder-mystery genre (as well the canonical female detective and her servant/sidekick and romance options, etc—all things we’ll return to in Volume Two; e.g., exhibit 47a2). For one, the “twist,” in “true crime” is a forced reality that generally confirms the systemic scapegoat after a revelation by the nosy neighbor (“I knew it!”); i.e., the Scooby Doo villain as borrowed from the centuries-older xenophobia and state apologetics of female Neo-Gothic fiction authors like Ann Radcliffe having carved it out in equally cartoonish forms. Radcliffe lived under the power of men, to be sure, and wasn’t in a position of power like Lewis (a man) was, but the degree to which she used her immense (albeit relative) privilege as a white woman-of-letters is dubious, at best; i.e., not to help the oppressed by writing anything other than what she did, but actively choosing to use her unironically xenophobic (and frankly vanilla) rape fantasies to write moderately bigoted novels. Like Tolkien, Radcliffe’s Gothic moderacy is precisely what makes her stories dangerous to sex-positive workers, because behind their veneer of moderacy lies the same function executed by more aggressive, reactionary forms: to stoke class, race and gender suspicions; i.e., moral panic. For Radcliffe, this meant aristocratic, often elderly white folk, but also racist, jingoistic caricatures and poor, non-white people being unmasked by chaste white women (the nun-like, ostensibly ace/queer-coded private eye; e.g., Velma).

Radcliffe, then, was complicit in a larger scheme her fans would breed into and police on and on down the years. As Top Dollar once said, “the idea has become the institution”; in return, Radcliffe’s fiction has become something to unironically defend from “degenerate” outsiders, turning her books, oddly enough, into besieged fortresses that uphold the material conditions of a particular mythic structure. Her relative stupidity becomes something to not only sweep under the rug but embody through half-hearted or worse, bad-faith arguments (“She couldn’t have been expected to be any different than she was, back then…”)—i.e., praxial inertia expressed through popular fiction at large as married to its public defense and emulation of “presumed ignorance” in real life: propaganda through fear and dogma (which Radcliffe relied on).

Despite its connection to the real world (and vice versa), we’ll start with the fiction, itself. In canonical true-crime fiction, the humanized victims are always the middle class (who count), often wracked with murderous wish fulfillment (the “corrupt”) while poor people and suffering are described as a whole monolith; i.e., a white woman’s damaging idea of various social causes and concerns; e.g., “starving African children” or foreign girls being sex trafficked. The latter is always impersonal, less valuable in an individual sense and more a political cause that can be funneled through fabricated copies to sell as “cracked cases” (which one, don’t “crack” anything and two, create more problems than they solve: the ghost of the counterfeit as a means of deliberately twisting the truth to romance the killer and make them more entertaining [thus lucrative] in a canonically fetishized sense: the story “needs” a villain and a victim to sacrifice for the middle-class audience’s entertainment. Frankly there are far better ways to prevent crime than capitalizing recursively on its “solving”: changing material conditions).

Meanwhile, the scapegoated or exoticized minority is left feeling inadequate, constantly having to prove themselves as something other than false and/or dangerous in the court of canonical dogma: “I am not an animal! A fake! A monster!” For example, whereas American slaves were robbed of their culture during the diaspora of the Middle Passage (then policed during Jim Crow after the Civil War), those still living in Africa (and its surrounding territories) experienced first a colonization then a half-hearted “decolonization” that was overwatched and gatekept by the UN as members of capital overseeing the United States’ usual geopolitical tamperings; i.e., as the mother territory siphoning resources out of colonized lands, which were only ever developed enough to accommodate the colonizer populations. Deeper inside, the raw unoccupied reaches of the colonial territories were ripped apart—forcefully deprived of any sense of community or infrastructure, then invited to be poached and raped by the very indigenous populations the state was actively genociding for profit: rape your land for us. It’s the settler-colonial version of a Faustian bargain enacted by class and race traitors.

Assimilation goes both ways, of course, and for every act of open rebellion there were plenty who refused to rebel due to the expected colonial countermeasures (re: “power aggregates,” from Atun-Shei Film’s “Fighting for Freedom“). In America, the Cherokee tried to assimilate by wearing American clothes and respecting their laws and customs (only to be re-invaded once gold was found in what remained of their nation). In Africa, token agents not only police their own kind by assimilating into and adopting white police structures (vis-à-vis Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks); poachers and slavers made and have continued to make whatever living they can through obscene criminogenic conditions first installed by the colonizer nations carving up Africa not once, but multiple times. This would go on to then be romanced and displaced by white-penned Neo-Gothic fictions of various kinds: white men’s open, settler-colonial bigotry and white-saviorism from the likes of Shakespeare, Conrad, Tolkien, Ridley Scott, James Cameron, Frazetta (exhibit 0a2c) and Wes Craven haunting the gutted castles of a seemingly abandoned colonialism with dark, vengeful spirits exorcized by white heroes; but also the so-called “jungle fever” entertained by white women like Radcliffe, Dacre, Charlotte Brontë and Angela Carter’s fixation on a white protagonist’s idea of rape fantasy inside the castled ghost of the counterfeit, and in the American porn industry at large; i.e., as a forbidden fruit to outlaw, commodify and sell back to middle-class people amid a widespread, systemic punishment of the non-white people associated with the image:

In the U.S. and other capitalist countries, rape laws were originally framed for the protection of men of the upper classes, whose women ran the risk of being assaulted. What happens to working-class women has always been of little concern to the courts. As a result, appalling few rapists have ever been prosecuted—appalling few, that is, if black men are exempted from consideration. While the rapists of working-class women have so rarely been brought to justice, the rape charge has been indiscriminately aimed at black men, the guilty and innocent alike (source: Angela Davis’ “Rape, Racism and the Capitalist Setting,” 1978).

Before the Enlightenment, Late Medieval stories and media from the Gothic/Renaissance period featured less persons of color because access to actual persons with dark or non-white skin was historically less common, thus more exotic (though it did happen; a pure-white medieval period is a fascist myth); as such, the pre-fascist destroyer persona was coded as black in relation to the “non-European” as Jewish, Germanic, or the broader “Eastern” (white-skinned: from Italy to Romania to Russia; non-white groups: China, the Middle East and Africa). Until the Enlightenment period began and started to orchestrate widespread settler colonialism (and modern nation-state formation), race-based slavery largely didn’t exist; so the biases were less about skin color and more about general ethnicity and religion; e.g., evil Italian counts, but also Jewish people as go-to scapegoats for the Romans and the Christians. Then and now, these devils were seen as threats to the heteronormative order of things; i.e., returning to nature, to hell and chaos. As such, the devil became something that actively corrupts the youth and women as always running off with them into the night:

(artist: Ary Scheffer)

In turn the women of these paintings would famously be coveted by the artist and the audience, both an object of intense, primal beauty and a site of ever-present hysteria that might at any moment spring from the canvas and tempt the viewer but also smite them (canonical art treats being woman as a lose-lose: “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t”):

(exhibit 1a1a1e1b: Artist, left: Domenico Induno; right: Rembrandt. Few things are as fetishized and cliché as reclining female nudes; but if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! The problem is, the body positivity and debatably asexual relationship between the woman and the artist [which wasn’t always the case, of course; e.g., powerful male patrons fetishizing women through a commissioned artist] shifted to a colonizing of the body image along racialized lines: White supremacy ties non-white bodies to “gross” [excessive] sexual appetites through racialized Enlightenment tropes, leading to fat-shaming and black fetishization [Loner Box’s “Jordan Peterson and Beauty,” 2022; timestamp: 6:40]. As something to create, the curviness of fat white women became, as it were, a thing of the past [or something to seal away and commodify through Rainbow Capitalism[17] and war bosses, etc] that artists like Rubens did once; the devil inside the women who remained—their “hysteria”—became racialized or projected off onto a racialized “other” blamed by white men and white women alike. White woman, though, still suffered, plagued with a variety of eating disorders [which are incredibly crippling and deadly] and desire to escape their own culture through the appropriation of black culture; and vice versa, black culture often sought [and still seeks] to assimilate their colonizers; e.g., shadism [source: “Black-on-Black Racism Is a Problem,” 2015].)

We’ve talked about embodying Satan ourselves in the Miltonian sense. But there’s also the idea of running off with the devil; e.g., Van Halen’s “Runnin’ with the Devil” (1978). We’ll examine deals with the devil much more in Volume Two, but for now I want to express that it isn’t strictly a bad thing. Yes, the desire to escape is a powerful force, and not always a positive one; but it’s largely speaking a pact. As Anna Bidoonism writes,

We have little recourse but to strike a “Faustian bargain” — we’ve to forge, in other words, “a pact with the devil.” […] According to traditional European beliefs — like those held in the Middle Ages and the Elizabethan Era — such bargains were between a person and Satan and have been linked to the quaint pastime of hunting witches (see: Hammer of Witches). Based on some age-old folklore stuff, such pacts came to form a cultural motif — one of a myriad really that carry over from Europe’s medieval past to today’s globalized world. Pacts may have been entered into under duress but also, we may suppose, voluntarily (out of let’s say boredom or a desire for the darker more debauched modes of worldly gratification) [source: “Faustian bargain”; or “Better the [devil emoji] u no,” 2020].

In iconoclastic artwork and thought, the devil is generally two things at once: the machinations of the elite, but also the rebellious potential of the underclass as a dangerous proposition unto itself. This puts the choices we make in a complicated space weighed against canonical forces.

From a canonical standpoint, the “black persona” is a means to an end: someone to binarize inside the settler-colonial system through the blaming of Capitalism’s usual bullshit on a convenient scapegoat: women, people of color and queer persons, etc, as “responsible” for the middle class’s shitty material conditions and two-day weekend (“Mondays, amirite?”) but also ruining their precious illusions with a black mirror that shows them who they really are—perfidious, cowardly and cruel, but also deeply powerless, spellbound and addicted to a highly fake and cheap, sugary view of the world: mythologized forms of sex and human connection turned into a drug that’s sold back to them in order to treat their alienated condition. Unlike our mirrors, Capitalism’s illusions aren’t about solving problems and making the world a better place through building cultural awareness, community and trust; they’re prone to digging up the structure’s own pre-fascist bugbears and marrying them to fascist and post-fascist ones during moral panics. Obviously the recipients of such stigmas and biases don’t suck blood, stab backs, or eat flesh, but the uphill nature of the pedagogy of the oppressed forces them to defend themselves from absurd positions (the queer in true crime is often the red herring if not the victim or villain) using the same basic language that furthers harmful stereotypes written by the colonizer group, including white, cis-het women as writing (and capitalizing on) an inordinate amount of xenophobia.

In short, the white female authors mentioned above triangulate and direct abuse away from themselves as a protected and victimized class (often while they or their fans deny that their fiction doesn’t represent “real bigotry”; i.e., “that’s not what [insert popular fiction, here] means to me!”). It’s a flagrant abuse of privilege and it happens all the time by “activists” lobbying for equality of convenience by acting as gatekeepers and spies: a “boundaries for me, not for thee” stance while lamenting “is nothing sacred?” to us campy fags “ruining” their stories. Consumption is encouraged, not critique (which is useless to the profit motive as something to emulate by the middle class; to think what could be done with that labor and materials if not wasted on these formulaic, bigoted dramas that play defense for the state; it’s a class-conscious mirage swept up in its own endless romance, patented by Radcliffe and carried forward into the ages—i.e., to keep things the same by refusing to challenge anything in a dialectical-material sense).

Adjacent to the consumption itself, cognitive dissonance leads to authorial punching down for critiquing one’s enjoyment/endorsement as the intended audience (or their procurer of goods bred on the same stories, growing up to emulate them as an author themselves: making their own canonical castles and monsters). All cops are bad because all cops spy for the state as class traitors. It’s literally their job: “report any suspicious activity to the authorities, us.”

This includes Radcliffe as the woman to emulate, but also the de facto queen to apologize for as someone who could “do no wrong”; i.e., mysteriously playing detective as an enigmatic[18] class traitor through her xenophobic stories leading to the rise of an entire school of Gothic fiction (the School of Terror) and bad offshoots, but also thoroughly successful ones (Murder, She Wrote [1984] ran for twelve years, but set in a small town, it sets up a bizarre, Hawthorne-esque premise: there’d have to be as many murderers living in the town as victims—all to aggrandize the heroine). All assign guilt by painting others green; or playing at false rebel by painting themselves green and going undercover (“solving crimes for cops” by writing their own made up ones, grounded on a kernel of truth that spreads harmful stereotypes that paint people a particular way based on the author’s imaginary testimony and Gothic theatricalities; i.e., the female sleuth stirring up trouble by punching down from her “chateau” with a glassful of wine, a pet cat (or some other faux familiar) and her day’s equivalent of a quill and inkpot (“two inches of narrow ivory”). As such, the power hierarchy Radcliffe bowed to/refused to challenge in any meaningful sense has now become “TERF island,” exemplified by persons dreaming of similar service to capital having expanded under global Capitalism; i.e., to be like J.K. Rowling, her day’s variant of Ann Radcliffe except Rowling lived to become very, very mask off in open defense of capital—both with her own stabs at the Neo-Gothic fiction, of course, but also her non-magical detective stories and dubious attempts at anonymity[19]. It’s not a paradigm shift, but a radicalizing of the current settler-colonial paradigm, whereupon the chickens come home to empire, roosting inside their ruined castles.

The larger dialogic isn’t purely a question of white women punching down with the fear-and-dogma triangulation approach to propaganda (which many do, including through inaction and dumb self-fulling prophecies serving as regular paydays for themselves); it operates according to axes of oppression that intersect across various tangents and offshoots. But any canonical detective plays detective in and out of the fiction to regain some sense of agency against her assigned targets, a bevy of go-to scapegoats confirmed through the run of the mill: the Gothic fetishes and clichés concerned with material disputes, but also the false preachers, pirates stealing property and other devils-in-disguise working through the usual suspects in any given castle: twists, red herrings, whodunnits, the paranormal vs the explained supernatural (from Radcliffe), and cloak-and-dagger conspiracies (“they’re all in on it”).

These various fictional gimmicks are utterly at home in the Gothic as a wildly popular middle-class distraction that conventionally lacks conscious class character in a holistic sense. It’s a fear of the outside and the invader from within told through a failure of boundaries—to fail at keeping things separated/outside—coupled with the fear-fascination of/with the perceived abomination of an imaginary exotic and “exquisite torture.” The second is a Radcliffe staple; i.e., profitably navigating her inherited trauma by stigmatizing and poring over the suffering of others: the pressures and unromantic realities of amatonormativity (compelled marriage) turned on its head, if but for a moment: the “demon lover,” the rake from hell, as a mutilative form of problematic rape play (stuck within xenophobic cash-grabs) inside the Gothic castle as a bad BDSM torture dungeon often set to music and confusing architecture, mist and darkness. It’s a more Gothically operatic critique of boring things. As such the engagement ring is a symbol of “commitment” in quotes; i.e., duress through material inequality towards a person (the groom) with great expectations and unfair advantage in various courts (the legal system, the job market, the court of public opinion). Critiques of the husband generally elide with a disdain or mistrust-curiosity of the entire “other side.”

Radcliffe certainly excelled at that, the Black Veil hinting at something dreadful just beyond the fabric (with pirates being metaphors for poor people stealing from the rich establishment). To her credit, she didn’t pointedly expand on the harmful Faustian agreement as an open discussion—with de Sade highlighting the rituals from scratch (thus having no clue what he was doing), and whose own theatre treated the harmful violence as negotiated in pursuit of unironic self-destruction—but similar to our comments about the Faustian ludic contract, also appear within Radcliffe’s own stories as a kind of unspoken, harmful agreement made by a total novice; i.e., between her and the reader before the story even starts: “Enter my castle and experience the pleasures of the dungeon!” Except Radcliffe, again, wrote from a position of near-total ignorance[20], thus (as we shall see) focused on unironic mutilation as a foregone conclusion whose criminal hauntologies demand actual rape and murder (sans contract or disclaimer) to work: it’s bad ludo-Gothic BDSM, pure and simple—and over two centuries before E. L. James wrote 50 Shades of Gray (which at least understood the basic idea of open, written, healthy negotiation [“no vaginal fisting…”]; Radcliffe, like most white, middle-class [thus sheltered] women, does not appear to)! This place of ignorance isn’t a defense; as the moral of the Faustian bargain demonstrates, you can be a total idiot and still bargain; worse, you can create stories that lead to other people doing the same (and copying your stories), which Radcliffe certainly did. Moving forward, we need to interrogate these contracts and castles and transform them during our own negotiations, when dealing with the “zombies of Radcliffe”: our aforementioned TERFs as bad players, actors, negotiators, etc.

(artist: Kay)

Concluding the above italicized rant, we’ve now covered the majority of the manifesto tree, thus have all the pieces of the map/siege machine that we’ll need when camping canon. But we still need to consider the roots of camp and where it started within the Gothic mode. For the rest of the thesis proper, we’ll spend one subchapter unpacking the roots of camp relative to forms of power exchange in Gothic poetics, including older detective fictions and the tricky tools of Ann Radcliffe’s enchanting arsenal meant for the classic Gothic heroine (which I wouldn’t bother reclaiming if I didn’t think the tools were worth it); then another subchapter responding to hypermasculine (traditionally male) action heroes whose hungry psychosexuality can be camped within a complex form of BDSM-themed monster theatre. Our doing so isn’t to highlight their cosmetic differences, but instead to consider how the masculine and feminine constantly interrelate back and forth inside the larger mode in dialectical-material ways: on the surface of things as seemingly fractured, divided, and black-and-white, but also hopelessly liminal, interwoven and chaotic; i.e., through the assorted storages of power and complex commands issued at a glance or gazing into the proverbial abyss.

Onto “The Roots of Camp: Reclaiming Demon BDSM“!

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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). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] In videogame parlance, the queen of a Communist sort of expression doesn’t represent her status of power under functional Communism (we’re all kings and queens under functional Communism, my angels); it depicts a canonical, “high value” target prioritized by the degree to which the state wants them dead; i.e., a price on their head; e.g., Martin Luther King Jr. as vilified and targeted for assassination by the FBI. Similar assassinations occurred all throughout the Civil Rights era, and continue in videogames’ neoliberalizing of theatrical violence; i.e., presenting labor movements as monster hordes piloted by a brain bug controlling the mass: the head on the snake of the revolutionary body. Like Medusa, this becomes something to behead and turn against the mass of seditious workers fighting for their rights. Like, how dare they!

[2] The basic idea could be called class envy, or a desire not to address Capitalism, but instead assimilate to a higher rung by punching down against the class you were born into.

[3] Jetpacks, Stepford Wives/tradwives, and various other false promises capital can never deliver on.

[4] (from the glossary): State propaganda also self-replicates—with Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edwards Bernays, famously applying the principles of political propaganda to marketing in his 1928 capitalist apologia, Propaganda. The book argues for a rebranding of propaganda called “public relations,” one where “invisible” people create knowledge and propaganda to rule over the masses, with a monopoly on the power to shape thoughts, values, and citizen responses; that “engineering consent” of the masses would be vital for the survival of democracy. In Bernays’ own words, he explains:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.

Despite a patent rebrand filled with cheerful Liberalism, Bernays went on to inspire Hitler’s minster of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, but also Hitler himself (as well as American propagandists during and following WW2). Hitler did his best to emulate American media, seeing its coercive value by creating his own Hollywood (see: Hilter’s Hollywood, 2018). Helped from the likes of commercial-savvy artists like Goebbels, he copied Charlie Chaplin’s toothbrush mustache, radicalized Bernays’ ideas on propaganda, and painstakingly toiled over the creation of the Nazi symbol itself (Jim Edwards’ “Hitler as Art Director: What the Nazis’ Style Guide Says About the ‘Power of Design,'” 2018). Behind the illusions, Hitler remained cutthroat, buoyed to chancellorship by the German elite defaulting on American loans, whereupon he promptly killed his political enemies and spent the next decade convincing his nation to fight to the death. In short, he was a bad capitalist (unlike the American elite).

[5] What David Roden, in Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human (2015), calls speculative posthumanism:

The radical augmentation scenarios discussed in the previous two sections indicate to some that a future convergence of NBIC [Nano, Bio, and Information Technologies; Cognitive Science] technologies could lead to a new “posthuman” form of existence: the emergence of intelligent and very powerful nonhumans. In particular, we noted that the development of artificial general intelligence might lead, in Good’s words, to an “intelligence explosion” that would leave humans collective redundant, or worse. Following an influential paper by the computer scientist Virnor Vinge, this hypothetical event is often referred to as “the technological singularity” (source).

In dystopian sci-fi, this is generally a Communist scapegoat; e.g., S.H.O.D.A.N. (exhibit 42f1), the “cyber-Medusa” from System Shock (1994).

[6] The very machinations that Frank Herbert warned about in Dune (1965): “Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

[7] English is a bastard language told through perpetual conquest; i.e., “sex” is a liminal expression that canonically synonymizes sex/rape as associated with the language of conquerors: to fuck (versus longer and less direct Norman-French bastard words). While the two cannot be separated, the canonical invocation of the theatrical paradox deliberately ignores the pleasure of a thoroughly natural and healthy activity (to have sex)—one whose physical complexities (e.g., girls fart during sex, or “fart,” “queefing” when air builds up inside their vagina, especially during doggystyle; also “edging”) have been historically-materially conflated with unironic harm, one and all. Subversions of this linguo-material affect must occur through catharsis as an imperiled position to reclaim what has become unironically violent; i.e., by using the same language as taken back for sex-positive purposes: to heal from lived/inherited trauma and prevent harm in the future, often by reveling in the wicked, bad, naughty theatre of the devil’s position as a praxial underdog who enjoys being the interesting member of the troupe. Invisibility is a prey mechanism, but who wants to be boring (thus inert) when appealing to the virtues of theatrical expression? “The nail that sticks out gets hammered” makes for poor proletarian praxis.

[8] Coming from the idea that sex in prison is generally an expression of power inside a highly unnatural, controlled environment built to exploit people by enslaving them in Constitutional language:

The 13th Amendment, ratified in 1865, says: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Scholars, activists and prisoners have linked that exception clause to the rise of a prison system that incarcerates Black people at more than five times the rate of white people, and profits off of their unpaid or underpaid labor (source: The Westport Library’s “Thirteenth Amendment Loophole: Penal Labor and Mass Incarceration,” 2023).

[9] We will examine this controlling of the war narrative more in Volume One; i.e., American war journalism following Vietnam; e.g., GDF’s “How the US Military Censors Your News” (2023).

[10] “The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim” (source: Gustav Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, 1895).

[11] As Abigail Lister writes in “The Matrix | Explaining Jean Baudrillard and the Desert of the Real” (2023): In his 1981 philosophical treatise Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard examined popular culture and argued that in the new technological world—and I say this in the simplest way—reality has ceased to exist. […] we’ve lost all connection with the real, and instead live in the world of the hyperreal. Reality no longer exists; we aren’t connected to the real world; we live in a simulation. […] When [Morpheus] invites Neo into Nebuchadnezzar’s simulation system to reveal the secrets of the real world, he says “welcome to the desert of the real.” This line comes directly from Baudrillard, back in his explanation of Borges’ 1:1 map: “It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the desert which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself” (source).

[12] A one-way relationship whose interactions occur between the artist and their audience on various registers. In relation to the Internet Age, Essence of Thought describes a parasocial relationship as such:

Though, before we do anything, we first define our terms, starting with what a parasocial relationship is, and to understand that we can take a look at the words of Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, published when they first introduced the concept in 1956. I’d just like to apologize in advance for the unnecessary gendering. Their paper reads:

“One of the striking characteristics of the new mass media—radio, television, and the movies—is that they give the illusion of face-to-face relationship with the performer… The most remote and illustrious men are met as if they were in the circle of one’s peers; the same is true of a character in a story who comes to life in these media in an especially vivid and arresting way. We propose to call this seeming face-to-face relationship between spectator and performer a para-social relationship” [“Mass Communication and Para-social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance”].

They also go on to add that:

“The persona offers, above all, a continuing relationship. His appearance is a regular and dependable event, to be counted on, planned for, and integrated into the routines of daily life. His devotees ‘live with him’ and share the small episodes of his public life-and to some extent even of his private life away from the show. Indeed, their continued association with him acquires a history, and the accumulation of shared past experiences gives additional meaning to the present performance. This bond is symbolized by allusions that lack meaning for the casual observer and appear occult to the outsider. In time, the devotee — the “fan” — comes to believe that he “knows” the persona more intimately and profoundly than others do; that he “understands” his character and appreciates his values and motives” [ibid.].

Now, since the 1950s, parasocial relationships have gone on to establish themselves as real relationships, both in psychology and media studies, they’re just not relationships in the traditional sense, since the flow of information is largely one-sided, moving from the creator to the audience member, something that is known as a parasocial interaction (source: the script for Essence of Thought’s video, “Lily Orchard Sexted A 16 Year Old – 2nd Victim Testimony,” 2022).

[13] To be fair, the proletarian secret identity can allow victims of trauma to face their abusers without exposing themselves to a confessional of public scrutiny and shame regarding taboo subjects (and societal tendencies to blame the victim) but also—with revolutionary cryptonomy—to hide our scars and trauma from our enemies. We can show them what we want them to see while minimizing risk to ourselves (more on this in Volume Three, Chapter Five).

[14] A condition whereupon meaning is determined by the direction of something.

[15a] From a theatrical standpoint, the distinction between reality and imaginary is arguably futile; from a psychological standpoint, “real” is generally a prey’s readiness to fight or flight, freeze or fawn in an instant, which leads to many false alarms that feel “half-real,” in this case trapped between the fantasy and the unironic nightmare as haunting one’s daily life in an uncanny sense. They bleed into each other during a surreal game of tag—one where trauma is both inherited and passed along through the mark as touched by past examples or otherwise susceptible to them; i.e., the seeking of a protector within oneself or through others/vicarious experience that speaks to one’s trauma. Likewise, the subsequent chase of the cathartic variant becomes its own, special madness to revel in; i.e., like a good metal concert or nightclub act, the idea is agency through theatrical or controlled chaos that harms no one. Hard or violence-themed kink such as rape play or monster fucking can seem like black magic or madness, because it generally employs the same aesthetics and many people—at first glance, ironically enough—might not be able to tell the difference. But those who have been through it understand. Maybe not to the same degree, but generally “get” the basic idea as medicinal, validating or otherwise therapeutic and often, yes, profoundly erogenous: the moth to the “flame” as a theatrical gesture to establish boundaries with, thus genuine safety and control.

[15b] Metal can simultaneously sing about great emotions that lack conscious class character—e.g., Axel Rudi Pell’s “Follow the Sign” or Dio’s “Holy Diver” shout loudly about frustration, nightmares (and Space Jesus) but don’t point the finger at the elite; our revolutionary doubles and their cryptonymy need to, including their masks (allegory) but also their apocalypses (revelations) as working through paradox to hide and show at the same time. Even before we do, the anger should be a clue, but also the complex deceptions/doubling and liminal expression during oppositional praxis/psychopraxis (warring theories).

[15c] Lions, tigers, jaguars, etc. Conversely, small cats are generally regarded as “kept” pets that lounge around and look pretty. As such, the cat as a sex symbol is regarded as “small,” its killing implements either removed (the claws) or vestigial through the softening of features that communicate symbiotically with human masters; e.g., the dog’s varied facial expressions versus the tiger’s flat affect (cats in general did not evolve alongside humans, thus tend to have less expressive [by human standards] faces).

[16] Gender envy being the idea that heteronormativity is tiresome and generally something that class traitors take out on gender-non-conforming persons.

[17] Black or white, genuine body positivity and its recuperation is a complicated and diverse subject, something that we shall return to many, many times in the book.

[18] So mysterious, that Robert Miles—writing of Rictor Norton’s 1999 biography of the famous author, Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe—had this to say about her, “Ann Radcliffe was, in her day, the obscurest woman of letters in England. Her contemporaries despaired of learning anything about her, while Christina Rossetti abandoned her planned biography for lack of materials” (source). Well, mysterious or not, her work and silence both speak volumes and for themselves: though a moderate bigot, Radcliffe was still a bigot and belonged to the same slave-owning society that Austen did (re: Said’s “Jane Austen and Empire”). She still upheld the same outdated and harmful institutions of marriage. More than Austen, Radcliffe not only upheld the same society’s fabricated, island-fortress xenophobia; she canonized them to such a degree that Austen threw shade her way and wrote a whole novel camping Radcliffe’s books/castled spaces of interrogating power. Austen > Radcliffe.

[19] Styling herself as “Robert Galbraith,” a historically anti-LGBTQ+ conversion therapist:

But after Troubled Blood (2016) came under fire earlier this week for a transphobic subplot in which a serial killer hunts his victims while dressed in women’s clothing, Rowling denied that the alias is a reference to “ex-gay” therapy. Rowling “wasn’t aware of Robert Galbraith Heath” when selecting the name, a representative said. “Any assertion that there is a connection is unfounded and untrue” (source: Nico Lang’s “J.K. Rowling Denies Pen Name Is Inspired by Anti-LGBTQ+ Conversion Therapist,” 2020).

Whereas Radcliffe could feasibly retire and live a mysterious life when things got too hot during the French Revolution (choosing to write no more than she did, and yet having made enough to never work another day in her life), Rowling lives in the Internet Age, and grew and developed under Thatcher’s England. But even so, Radcliffe’s actions for her time say plenty about her stances, and those were preserved in her works. However well-written they may otherwise be, bigotry is bigotry and she chose to further it and stand by her actions; i.e., her posthumous essay, “On the Supernatural in Poetry” (1826). In the WASP-y British tradition, she spoke with gentle, moderate bigotry as a real-life phantom (and for those of you who might point out, “She’s dead and can’t defend herself!” Radcliffe had over two decades to write “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” I’d say she should have chosen her words more carefully—but I don’t think caution was the problem; her politics were).

[20] The problem extends to many privileged voices as fundamentally white; e.g., philosophy, the STEM fields, theatre (comedy and drama), art, music, the law and academia, etc, operating on the anxious desire to name, dissect and label everything after/about themselves. Yet, those are historically men’s fields (wherein men are accustomed to the notion of self-promotion and a sexist division of labor that didn’t tie them to the homestead). In the rise of women’s literature, the act of novel-writing has for centuries been a female-heavy profession—a white female profession with limited spaces (due to women being pressured to do women’s work, including—you guessed it—having babies).

Like most white women, then, Radcliffe hogs the spotlight instead of sharing it with others. She writes as if the story (and the universe) revolve around her—which, even if you reject overt bigotry and radicalism can still be bigoted if your story dehumanizes other groups or excludes them on purpose (e.g., Stranger Things); or equally problematic, if the story infantilizes these groups through a white person’s idea of other cultures assimilating to her Western way of life—i.e., within a hierarchy that grants her power over them (the servant trope). Radcliffe does all of this, proving: that moderacy during moral panic contributes to the moral panic’s criminogenic conditions, wherein white authors constantly find ways to make themselves the universal victims/protagonists while making other victimized groups targets of state violence; re: triangulation. Her views and ideas of the world were informed by said world as she found it, and her contributions to the world notably contributed to its continuation (graciously leaving us with some incredibly powerful tools that we can use to camp her work while making our own).