This blog post is part of “The Total Codex,” a fourth promotion originally inspired by the three I did in 2024 with Harmony Corrupted and Romantic Rose: “Brace for Impact,” “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil.” The first promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “The Total Codex” shall do the same, but with Volume Zero/the thesis volume (versus “Make It Real” promoting Volume One/the manifesto, which I will release after “The Total Context” completes). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Click here to see “The Total Codex’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Zero is already written/was released on October 2023! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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

The “Camp Map”: Camping the Canon (opening)

A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness. If the map could be ideally correct, it would include, in a reduced scale, the map of the map; the map of the map, of the map; and so on, endlessly […] If we reflect upon our languages, we find that at best they must considered only as maps.

—Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (1933)

Picking up where “Overcoming Praxial Inertia” left off…

(exhibit 1a1a1g4: Source: “ORIGINAL Vtg 1982 MERCYFUL FATE Album S/T Record 2ND PRESSING Vinyl RAVE ON EX!!” [2023]. Internal/external crises of morals just as often invoke crises of trauma; these involve repressed desires compelled by state wish fulfillment as something to challenge by walking a tightrope during our own Gothic poetics’ liminal [imperfect] expressions. As the above eBay exhibit demonstrates, the historical-material counterpoint survives in bartered emphera that carry the allegory of resistance within the larger profit motive. In other words, counterculture is communicated through the sale of older goods that have become antiquated but by and large retain their original message: “Think for yourself, push boundaries, play with the taboo and canonically forsaken in ways that lead to a better world.” You have to start somewhere, but it needn’t stay there; it’s a progression built on older relics of the imaginary past.)

With the conclusion of our thesis statement, we’ve laid out the various pieces of the manifesto tree, which forms the map for our twin trees of proletarian praxis; but we still have to pour in our fuel and run the fucker (thus corrupt the canonical site we’re invading: canon’s twin trees, the bourgeois-owned Base and bourgeois-cultivated Super Structure). As we do, keep the thesis paragraph and thesis body in mind, as well as the roots of camp and various hero types to subvert, and the manifesto terms that served to make up the “camp map,” itself. Assembled, the camp map will now discuss camp in four stages—our fuel and running of the siege machine:

• One, “Scouting the Field” (included in this post): Explores camp as a counterterrorist activity in relation to state terrorism, and outlines various monster types featured in its exhibits (e.g., femboys, catgirls, himbos, Amazons, etc). It also outlines the Gothic argumentation of oppositional rhetoric for or against the state when making its own monsters to kill, or kill with, normally in defense of capital but for us through a means of performative resistance; i.e., a variety of reclaimed scapegoats within the process of abjection’s canonical reactions, which reify along the Cartesian Revolution’s criminogenesis of said monsters, but especially within the cartographic ludologizing of Tolkien’s refrain: the treasure map.
• Two, “The Quest for Power inside Closed (Gothic) Space”: Part one and part two explore the interrogation of power in relation to Gothic space (castles) but especially in videogames (shooters, High Fantasy and Metroidvania). It also interrogates Tolkien’s refrain through the conceptualization of Cameron’s refrain (the shooter); i.e., not through the FPS, but the Metroidvania—a particular kind of third-person shooter (TPS)/castle space that (along with the monsters inside) can be camped, but also achieves immense catharsis through honest and profound theatrical evocations of psychosexual trauma: a palliative Numinous and fairly negotiated (thus sex-positive) ludo-Gothic BDSM achieved by remaking Gothic castles, thus negotiating the unequal power lurking inside an iconoclastic castle or castle-like space.
• Three, “Making Monsters“: Considers the making of monsters and goes over more monster types (nurses, xenomorphs and other phallic women) as a creative foil to Ann Radcliffe’s usual unironic rape fantasies. It also explores how to personify labor action through the making of monsters as a reversal of abjection; i.e., through a Satanic poetics whose infernal polity challenges the authority of a heavenly or otherwise sacred establishment, but often in incredibly funny ways; e.g., Key and Peele’s immortal phrase: “Put the pussy on the chainwax!” (Key & Peele’s “Pussy on the Chainwax,” 2013).
• Four, the finale: Puts all of these ideas to the test, executed by my friend Blxxd Bunny and I; i.e., using our bodies, labor and Satanic apostacy to camp the canon, effectively making it gay and Gothic (while keeping the first three sections of the “camp map” in mind).

Similar to the thesis statement, this chapter covers smaller terms lifted from the glossary regarding Gothic academia. They’re more niche and myriad than the Four Gs, so I wanted to take the opportunity to define them here; the “big ones” we can take our time with (and will confront repeatedly throughout the rest of the book).

As Bay says, “Don’t knock the cringe, knock the part of you that cringes.” In that sense, this map (and by extension, the entire book) attempts to reclaim the Gothic mode as deliberately campy since Matthew Lewis (Milton did it by accident, remember); rejecting it because it’s “outmoded” is a paradox and hypocritical because the Gothic has always been outmoded on purpose, employing hauntology and cryptonomy while placing things in quotes that either advance or reverse the process of abjection inside the chronotope. Distancing ourselves from “perceptive” pastiche/parody (camp) is to remove a powerful critical device from our arsenal during proletarian praxis, and instead amounts to us using whatever is given to us by moderates/centrists and the elite: controlled opposition. This is critically inert and will kill things before they start. There must be a chaotic, uncontrollable, impolite quality to what we do or it merely becomes another piece of capital in service of the profit motive.

With that being said, let’s mosey!

Note: As of now, the vast majority of the keywords have been introduced. A few remain, which I will highlight as usual in bold and color code. But the vast majority I have already introduced, meaning I’ll refrain from altering their font any further (apart from emphasizing a given talking point); i.e., because at this point, when originally writing the “camp map,” I decided not to keep doing so (owing to the fact that I was already moving away from said system while segueing into the Aftercare Symposium and Volume One). —Perse, 3/28/2025

(artist: Chin Likhui)

“Camp Map”; or “Make it Gay,” part one: Scouting the Field

“It seems a pretty big hole,” piped Bilbo. He loved maps, and in the hall there was a large one of the Country Round (where he lived), with all his favourite walks marked on it in red ink. He was so interested he forgot to be shy and keep his mouth shut. “How could such an enormous door” (he was a hobbit, remember) “be secret?”

—Bilbo Baggins, The Hobbit

(artist: Victora Matosa)

As we have established, canon is heteronormative; camp camps canon, therefore sex, as “written on the map.” Simply put, sex is the “pot of gold” at the end of the rainbow.

As canon frames anything against the state as worthy of capital violence (summary execution), it’s important to recognize the nature of Gothic camp/iconoclasm as “terrorist” actions the state will put down with extreme prejudice. The draconian nature is disguised in the visual “hurly burly” as summoned from the past and celebrated for its badass, throwback qualities—a retrojection into the imaginary past in search of power according to Tolkien’s infamous treasure map as a continuation of the ghost of the counterfeit leading into more castles, maps, castles, shadow zones and so forth. The canonical search for power is made in light of Capitalism disguising its own exploitive model: a Faustian bargain and Promethean quest to varying degrees for differing purposes depending on the arrangement’s praxis. In canonical arrangements, the elite hand the less-marginalized a weapon and tell them where to put it: in us. It’s a little more complicated than that, but the outcome is brutal enough: tried-and-true “divide and conquer” tactics where the middle class quash rebellions before they can take root, then pat themselves on the back for being “the good guys”; i.e., White Knight Syndrome.

On the receiving end of the white knight’s lance is labor, which incentivizes the various oppressed groups to aggregate against by virtue of them being more prone to rebel: the state’s prerequisite victims for its police to abuse, thus profit from. As part of this marginalized sphere, the queer is shoved into the same dark zone with the “corrupt” and the monstrous-feminine’s animalized undead and demonic renditions thereof. We’ll consider other marginalized groups throughout the book; I’m starting with, and focusing on, queerness to camp canon with because there’s a tremendous genderqueer stamp on the historical process as one of genuine resistance; i.e., ever since Matthew Lewis “pulled a Milton” when making his own Satan to demonize canon with, “playing god” in the process. As Colin Broadmoor writes in “Camping the Canon: Matthew Lewis, Milton, & The Monk” (2021):

In 1796, against a backdrop of deadly state violence targeting LGBT people, a gay teenager anonymously published what has since become one of the best-known examples of the English Gothic Horror. His name was Matthew Lewis and his book is The Monk. Lewis’s graphic depictions of incest, rape, murder, gender-bending, and illegal same-sex desire violated every major taboo of British society and drew immediate calls for censorship and criminal prosecution. Not bad for a debut novel.

[artist: William-Adolphe Bouguereau]

These days, it’s not unusual to find the words “subversive” or “transgressive” nestled within glowing ad-copy or on the back cover of the latest franchise installment. Resistance will, after all, always be commodified—but if we allow transgression to become a mere buzzword, we undermine the revolutionary potential of art, especially art by marginalized members of society.

The Monk represents Lewis’s personal struggle against the sexual politics and constraints of the English literary tradition. As Michel Foucault observed in The History of Sexuality vol. I, sexuality-as-identity did not really exist as a cultural concept throughout most of the eighteenth century, however, by the time of Lewis’s birth those social and legal constructions of sexuality were shifting:

As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life… Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality (Foucault 42).

This transition at the turn of the 19th century from act-as-homosexual to person-as-homosexual was preceded by a dramatic increase in homophobic violence perpetrated by the state (source).

Queer discourse has obviously evolved and come (more) out of the closet since Lewis’ time. Unfortunately so have the monsters as a canonical discourse whose power is largely made-up but enforced regardless. Short of converting and going into the closet, the only canonical recourse we’re given is blame and death: a court of public opinion canonized to be our judge, jury and execution. To avoid the codified abuse that regularly befalls us on- and offstage, we gotta “make it gay” to expose the largely arbitrary nature of patrilineal descent (“Why you gotta make it gay/political?” being the chudwad’s classic refrain). To do this, we have to “camp the canon,” which needs a map all on its own, one we’ve already outlined piece by piece: the manifesto tree terms/map pieces explored during the thesis statement. They constitute the holistic entirety of what we’re working with: the pieces of the canonical castle as something to infiltrate, thus infect the twin trees of capital it guards. You wouldn’t want to invade a castle without having a map of its entire structure, would you? To form the “camp map,” this subchapter will not only assemble the map pieces formerly laid, but outline the whole process through various other germane keywords, and walk through a “siege” of the castle in warlike language (it’s something Capitalism acclimates us to through canon; in short, we all speak it). It’s time to do battle!

(artist: Max Prodanov)

“Why camp canon?” you ask? Because we have to! Canon is heteronormative, thus foundational to our persecution as built into capital out of antiquity’s Drama and Comedy into more recent inventions of the staged gimmick; i.e., of the back-and-forth wrestling match versus the Greek play’s chorus and musical numbers, but also the opera and castle as an operatic site of forbidden, extreme desire, guilty pleasure and possessive love. Capitalism needs enemies to fight who are different from the status quo and we fit the bill. In short, we fags “make it gay” for our own survival. This book’s praxial focus leans into canonical/regressive aka subjugated Amazonomachia as already “mapped out,” meaning if we want to camp canon/”make it gay” we have to recognize how canon functions through its heteronormative assembly as reassembled and ironically performed by us while wearing revolutionary cryptonyms (war masks that hide what we’re up to within the theatre as something that can give our attackers away when we break with tradition): subversive Amazonomachia. To this, canon is the false copy of the castle as threatened by terrorist forces daring to “make it gay”; i.e., a corruption of their “pure, benevolent fortress” into what they consider to be an unironic castle of sin, murder and all-around degeneration (in psychology, this is called projection; e.g., possessive love as something to project onto a racialized other inside a castle of madness). While standard-issue proponents (white, cis-het men and women) will automatically reject this proposition, token forces will often come over to their side, as well; i.e., as straight assimilators who unite under the state’s banner despite posturing as rebels. They unite with their colonizers against a common foe: themselves.

Such concessions are hardly unusual. As Joseph Crawford writes in his introduction to Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism (2013), “terrorist literature” in the late 18th century (the peak of the Neo-Gothic novel in Britain) developed in connection with state fears of worker rebellions labeled as “terrorism”:

The idea of a single Gothic literature of terror, stretching continuously from the 1760s to the present day, imposes a false unity on these early works, which were referred to as “Gothic stories” only because they were set in the “Gothic ages” (i.e. the medieval or early modern period) rather than the present day, and were more likely to be sentimental romances than tales of terror; the preoccupation with evil, fear, and violence, which is the defining characteristic of later Gothic literature, did not become a prominent part of the genre until the success of Radcliffe’s later novels in the 1790s. I thus became increasingly convinced that, although works referring to themselves as “Gothic” had existed since the 1760s, the true roots of the Gothicised rhetoric I had observed in the nineteenth century were to be found not in the anxieties of the mid-eighteenth-century middle classes, but a generation later; in the fearful decade at the century’s end.

It was in the 1790s that Gothic fiction and rhetoric first became truly popular in Britain; it was also in these years that Britain, like the rest of Europe, was struggling with the consequences of the French Revolution. Correlation does not equal causation; but it did not seem accidental that this new literary fascination with fear and violence should have arisen in the same decade that witnessed the Reign of Terror, and the consequent adoption of the words “terrorist” and “terrorism” into English. Several critics, such as Ronald Paulson, Robert Miles, and Leslie Fiedler, have already written on the relationship between the French Revolution and the rise of Gothic fiction, but they have tended to articulate this relationship in terms of an already-existing genre of Gothic terror fiction gaining new relevance and popularity due to its resonances with the events of the Revolution. It is my contention, however, that the relationship between Gothic fiction and the Revolution, “terrorist novel writing” and “terrorist” politics, is more fundamental than that described by Paulson and Fiedler. Gothic fiction did exist in the decades before the Revolution, but its character changed markedly over the course of the 1790s, with the Reign of Terror itself constituting a major watershed in the development of “terror fiction”; and I take seriously Kilgour’s suggestion that Gothic fiction could easily have remained a minor and little-read sub-genre of English literature, or even have dwindled away entirely, had it not been seized upon by writers eager to find new vocabularies of evil in the years following the revolutionary Terror.

In a very real sense, the Revolution created Gothic, transforming a marginal form of historical fiction chiefly concerned with aristocratic legitimacy into a major cultural discourse devoted to the exploration of violence and fear (source)

but also, I would argue, on account that it would potentially condition women to disobey their husbands (the classic Neo-Gothic readership was female) and workers to stop working for the state’s benefit. Those who stop get wacked. To this, recipients of the usual battery can, if not be condoned, at least be understood for their deals with the devil (the state). They’re tired of being the state’s punching bag, and if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

(artist: David Roberts)

Conversely, rebellious attacks are universally framed as “unthinkable” for an obvious double-standard; they don’t serve the elite, thus are demonized for it. As Robert Asprey writes in War in the Shadows (1975):

Terror is the kissing cousin of force and, real or implied, is never far removed from the pages of history. To define (and condemn) terror from a peculiar social, economic, political, and emotional plane is to display a self-righteous attitude that, totally unrealistic, is doomed to be disappointed by harsh facts.

The paradox of terror, so conveniently ignored by English public opinion, particularly middle- and upper-middle-class opinion during the Irish rebellion, is ages old. Celtiberian slaves working New Carthage silver mines must have regarded Roman legionaries as objects “of dread” inducing “extreme fear.” To enslaved minds, the legionaries were weapons of terror designed to keep the slaves in the mines-and apparently they worked very efficiently toward this end. From time to time, these and other slaves secretly rose to attack the Romans, who, upon seeing a sentry assassinated or a detachment ambushed and annihilated, no doubt spoke feelingly about the use of terrorist tactics.

But who had introduced this particular terror to this particular environment? The Romans. Had they other options? Certainly: they could have kept their hands off the Iberian Peninsula, or they could have governed it justly and wisely (as a few officials tried to do). Instead, they came as conquerors ruled by greed, and, in turn, they ruled by oppression maintained by terror. What options did the natives hold either to rid themselves of the Roman presence or to convert it to a more salutary form? Only one: force. What kind of force? That which was limited to what their minds could evoke. Lacking arms, training, and organization, they had to rely on wits, on surprise raids, ambushes, massacres. Was this terror or was it counterterror?

The paradox survived the Roman Empire. The king’s soldiers frequently became weapons of terror, just as did the rack and the gibbet. Feudal government of the Middle Ages rested on force (as opposed to the people’s consent), often on terror exercised through the man-made will of God reinforced by hangman’s noose or executioner’s ax. No student of the period can seriously condemn the protesting peasant as a terrorist, for here, as in the case of Romans in Spain and indeed of most governments, European monarchs and ruling nobility held options of rule ranging from the most benevolent to the most despotic. Their subjects, however, held limited options: submit or rebel. If they chose rebellion, the options were again limited, the main reliance being placed on native wit. But since native wit was often sharply circumscribed, most rebellions were doomed to expensive failure. Whatever the effort, whether a single peasant who in the fury of frustration picked up a scythe and severed the tax-collecting bailiff’s head from his body, or the group of peasants who grabbed pitchforks to stand against the king’s soldiers—the effort, more often than not, was not terror but, rather, counterterror (source).

Divide-and-conquer is a common state trick, generally by pitting workers against terrorist clichés of themselves: zombies and demons who not only refuse to work, but devote their labor towards violent resistance. Yet, the punching down is emotional as well as physical and effects all parties differently, including white cis-het people. More than anyone, they fear a lack of the structure whose genocidal history is known to them and who they consciously benefit from; i.e., inheritance anxiety in the face of the rabble as “getting’ froggy.” In their minds, the apocalypse plays out as Capitalist Realism always does: “Without the heteronormative structure and its sense of us-versus-them, man/woman, and inside/outside, the Cartesian Revolution would utterly unravel and with it the entire fabric of the space-time continuum!” It’s “catastrophizing” according to Capitalist Realism as “dressed up,” which our own costumed campy theatre and bodies walk the tightrope inside; re: subversive Amazonomachia. It gets crowded, fast, and when there’s no more room in Hell, the dead will march out from the state of exception and walk the Earth. Yet, this apocalyptic revelation is merely the breaking of the spell. The state of exception and the state’s boundaries haven’t actually come “from somewhere else”; they’ve been here the whole time (which Capitalism will profit on/recuperate through cancelled futures that simultaneously hide the profit game within its own worlds and violent theatre). To this, here’s a variety of implements that can work for the system or against it:

(exhibit 1a1a1h1: An assortment of collages/collage mise-en-abyme from throughout the book/companion glossary that features various gender roles in the Gothic creative mode. This is only a small taste. For more gender-non-conforming keywords, refer to the glossary’s definitions of “femboys, ladyboys, catboys; catgirls or really [anything] girls; bears, otters, hunks/twunks/twinks; butch/”futch”/femme lesbians; himbos, herbos. Note that cats are generally feminized in a traditional, European sense; i.e., as divorced from the Pavlovian conditioning and language of obedience/disobedience that dogs are known for. Puppy play of the iconoclastic sort fights class war by upending the idea of what a war dog is for [and other animals].

Middle, exhibit 21a2a [abridged from Volume One]: Artist, top left: Silverjow; top-middle: Jan Rockitnik; top-mid-right: elee0228; everything else: Ichan-desu. The athlete is a common physical marker of war personified through the imaginary past as something to evoke in popular media. By extension, social-sexual notions of warrior and strength interlock and “argue” through cross purposes: the body of the Amazon, bear or twunk as ripe for political discourse within the human form as a hauntological expression of power tied to combat sports and military culture. Subversions of this culture include the open fetishizing of muscular bodies with various masc/femme flavors that grapple with and otherwise interrogate double standards concerning the monstrous-feminine; i.e., in the militarized world of contact sports [which extends to the cryptonymy of “adventure” through the sublimation of war and rape].

Top-left, exhibit 5d1[from the companion glossary’s “monstrous-feminine“]: Artist, top-left: Gabriele Dell’Otto; artist, top-left and bottom: Persephone van der Waard and a model who wishes to remain anonymous; I’ll henceforth refer to them as Jericho. When healing from trauma, queerness is often symbolized as abjectly insect-like/uncanny as something queer people are forced into—i.e., a psychosexual, “corrupt,” medievalized ontology whose canonical role they don’t want to play but also desire to escape from using the same language: the queer/sodomite whose gender-non-conformity is synonymized with the “rape” of heteronormativity by the monstrous-feminine and whose beauty is feared by fearful-fascinated straight people conflating queerness as a universal symbol of unironic rape and madness. We do sometimes want to express our own trauma in relation to what we’re made out to be by our abusers, but ultimately we desire to be butterflies unto ourselves: free from trauma, from judgement, from harm.

Top-right: exhibit 5d2 [from the companion glossary’s “chaser/bait“]: Artist, top: Olivia Robin; bottom-left: Kyu Yong Eom; bottom-right: Claire Max. The feminine cock as something to show and hide becomes a dangerous game of undress for many traps; the masculine-feminine becomes an advertisement of “incorrect,” monstrous-feminine masculinity on the surface of female-appearing bodies before the clothes come off [although such bodies are habitually undressed by the Male Gaze; said gaze can be emulated by TERFs policing male and female bodies[1]]. Either liminality is dangerous for gender-non-conforming AMAB/AFAB sex workers, but also workers in general seeking to express themselves as different from, thus in resistance to, the canonical standard and its Symbolic Order/mythic structure. 

Bottom-left [from the glossary’s “Archaic Mothers (and vaginal spaces)“]: […] Artist: Patrick Brown.

Bottom-right: Excerpt from exhibit 56a1a [from Volume Two]: “West Virginia, mountain mama. Take me home, country roads.” Personified by the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, nature conservationism is a theme of conservative Americana, written by those who profit from it; i.e., John Denver’s music, arguably romancing the nostalgia of the highly destructive coal-mining industry. But Denver’s “Mountain Mama” is as much Mother Nature and its empathetic inhabitants who legitimately have a strong bond to nature and are recognized by society as “of nature” in a very Cartesian sense. Within these liminal positions, the thicc, tattooed bodies of cuties like Nyx and Blxxd Bunny are ample, fruit-like and covered in their own “Odes to Psyche[2]“—the butterfly as a hauntological symbol of transformation, death and stigma [the skull and the snake] signifying their body as a welcoming site of currently forbidden pleasures and harmony with the natural world.)

To this, our dangerous game—of making monsters by being ourselves—seeks to rewrite the boundaries and rules of power exchange/pleasure and pain; i.e., within pre-established/already-negotiated versions that do not serve working interests. We’re essentially “behind enemy lines,” effectively skirting the territories of canon’s shadow zone and shadow plays, which have routinely treated the monstrous-feminine as an Amazon “Nazi” (or some such scapegoat) nightmare to summon, battle and conquer (through physical or sexual violence) by a male action hero or subordinate inside Amazon pastiche; re: canonical/regressive Amazonomachia. These Gothic (hence unreliable/unsafe) narrators/narratives are routinely romanced in a very courtly sense through historical-material live burial of one being trapped within enforced theatrical schemes and their compelled gender roles’ harmful, unironic xenophobia/xenophilia towards the monstrous-feminine; i.e., as something to fetishize, pimp and rape as embodiments of the Destroyer persona and its equally cliché and fetishized victim counterpart.

Canon, then, features unironic theatrical violence in a half-real sense, pinned between the fiction, rules and real world as mimicking one another through the profit motive (see Ash, above: caught between the windmill door and the outside world as he tilts at the windmill; i.e., in the belly of the “dragon”). The canonical hero, including its compromises with power, becomes trapped (thus caught) in the act of killing a manufactured enemy forever let they risk becoming one themselves: the damsel or the whore, the detective or the demon, etc. This is less an idle threat and more a crisis-of-masculinity where those who “pass” try harder to blend even more in, thus avoid persecution when the state begins to eat itself. In this nightmare, you don’t wake up, but the canonically indoctrinated at least partially think they can provided they kill, survive or avoid becoming the monster. But like Doctor Morbius’ Monster from the Id, it always comes back, “sly and irresistible, only waiting to be reinvoked for murder![3]”

Luckily this “bad game’s” canonical praxis can be camped—i.e., its harmful/unironic fetishes, kink and demon BDSM rituals, aesthetics, and “strict/gentle” operators—but doing so exists within the same shadow zone, on- and offstage in a half-real kayfabe: to teach good play and ironic/healthy fetishization, kink and demonic BDSM rituals, aesthetics, and “strict/gentle” operators. Canon and iconoclasm operate within the same discursive space; i.e., capital as (when left to its own devices) forever colonizing itself through the state’s profit motive. Our “creative successes” don’t just perform, thus illustrate

• 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

They also supply de facto education as a kind of salubrious regression—of us traveling to sites of imaginary trauma that are not entirely fictional or divorced from our lived pasts as inherited from older times, but also have been dolled up as “fun” by current power structures and their propaganda mills: canceled futures, aka hauntologies (re: Fisher). In a sense, we’re chasing the dragon ourselves, seeking to camp its unironic forms, often through subversive roleplay that engages in cathartic consent-non-consent; re: calculated risk during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., through the conveying of informed negotiation (through the illustrating of mutual consent/the other praxial factors, above), safewords, fair (non-Faustian) contracts and boundary-forming exercises designed to help us heal from trauma; i.e., when seeing state-sanctioned markers of trauma/gargoyles during state crisis (which is perpetual and pandemic/endemic[4a]). It’s aftercare[4b] from an initial devastation stemming from greater devastations that, for us, weaponizes for class war against the state (whose own aftercare is harmful, thus dangerous).

There are dangers to us “acting out” inside this hellish territory but there is no “outside of the text” for us. As mentioned previously, we will be prosecuted for damaging canon, but also blamed for the systemic issues before, during and after breaking its godawful spell: those inside Plato’s cave attacking us rather than the canonical puppeteers duping them. In short, they’re crying “DAVRO!” for the elite in defense of the allegory of the cave’s canonical shadows on the wall—the state’s shadows, not ours.  And yet, the rewards in destroying canonical theatre and its shadowy deceptions far outweigh the risks; i.e., it’s far more dangerous to play along (to do nothing in an activist sense) because Capitalism incentivizes our routine destruction through the profit motive as built around genocide of an imaginary threat: us. We’re already locked into a scheme that renders us into meat for the soldiers to eat, monsters for them to kill and fuck (and often not immune to these same canonical spells and their harmful escape fantasies)—the proverbial chopping block, wedding bed and sacrificial altar as horrifyingly elided to serve one purpose: exploitation through bad instruction.

This includes the treatment of Gothic poetics more broadly as “drug-like,” which I’d briefly like to unpack. First, the privatized sex worker is a “one-in-a-million” beauty to trot out in front of audiences by canonical pimps (or bankers acting like de facto “pimps of pimps[5]“). As such, she appears like an angel descended from Heaven (or ascended from Hell, in a demonic form) to make all your dreams come true and your pain go away. Just don’t fall in love:

You can say anything you like
But you can’t touch the merchandise
She’ll give you every penny’s worth
But it will cost you a dollar first

You can step outside your little world
(Step outside your world)
You can talk to a pretty girl
She’s everything you dream about

[…]

But don’t fall in love
‘Cause if you do, you’d find out she don’t love you
(She’s one in a million girl)
One in a million girl
(Why would I lie?)
Now, why would I lie? (The Tube’s “She’s a Beauty” 1983).

(artist: Kristen Hanes)

Under the rise of neoliberalism, such music and imagery might look and sound cheerful, but something is amiss inside the heteronormative scheme: exploitation. Canonical media is historically-materially vindictive towards, and exploitative of, sex workers who don’t have control over their own bodies (which obviously has shifted somewhat in the Internet Age—a fact we will interrogate much more in Volume Three). During canonical instruction (we’ll consider iconoclastic sex work too, of course), the expected victims are targeted, marked and yoked ahead of time—like a lamb to the slaughter but treated as a kind of opiate for the masses. A “tasty cake” from head to toe and bound with invisible bonds (dogma and material conditions), the sex worker is fetishized against their will to cater to market forces dehumanizing them, or the worker as sexualized for similar dimorphic reasons that suit the state’s profit motive. As we shall see, any attempt to change the structure must occur within it (an absence of material conditions amounting to praxial invisibility).

Beyond normalized sex work through basic, off-canvas prostitution, monsters fulfill a canonical role as sexualized “punching bags”; i.e., under normal circumstances, everything unfolds inside a counterfeit, monomythic action plan—a frequently non-binarized, sometimes-furry homewrecker (re: Volume Two’s “Furry Panic“) and criminal Whore of Babylon (re: the Medusa, also in Volume Two [e.g., “Always a Victim“] but also the entire series). It is one whose routine appearance inside neoliberal (thus heteronormative) copaganda becomes war-like in Fisher’s sense of the hauntological; re: the entire cycle trapped in a “cancelled future,” which I call “dead futures” while synthesizing the idea in Volume Two’s “The Future Is a Dead Mall“: vis-à-vis Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism and hauntological dystopia as conspicuously decayed, thus trapped in Hogle’s conceptualization of “the narrative of the crypt.” This will literally play out in Metroidvania, when we examine that operatic plane (and its history and camp) in “The Map Is a Lie.”

Note: Originally Volume One and Volume Two were part of the same smaller manuscript; i.e., they were much shorter several years ago than they currently are—with Volume Two dividing into three modules totaling nearly one million words all on its own(!). Because of that massive (and previously unforeseen) jump in size, what these sentences refer to, here, would seem to imply closely neighboring ideas. I suppose that’s technically still true, insofar as all belong to the same grand web. Nonetheless, under present circumstances all belong to a constellation reaching across wider gulfs of written (and drawn) material. —Perse, 3/27/2025

(artist: Noah)

Metroidvania or not, such monotonous destruction must be escaped through itself; e.g., the Labyrinth of Crete and its own poor Minotaur hunted to extinction by Theseus being something for us to camp (often through ironically “heroic” bodies that cause gender trouble to develop Gothic Communism with by camping the monomyth, left); i.e., as transmuted from within (cyberpunks are conspicuously populated with ostentatiously dehumanized sex work: the sex robot). Often this “jail break” happens in drug-like ways; i.e., communicated through iconoclastic media as “drug-like” but not necessarily “on drugs” (remember, I wrote this entire book stone-cold sober). As Stuart Miller writes in “What is Acid Communism?”:

acid Communism/canceled futures

Acid communism is not a doctrine of hippy-esque communal living and psychoactive drugs. The commune, and psychoactive substances, have a role to play in the philosophy of acid communism, but acid communism is not a valorization of a hedonistic, hallucinogenic culture. In my opinion, acid communism is an evolution of thought, following from Fisher’s work on the hauntology of culture and capitalist realism. […]

Hauntology [for Fisher] is the belief that the future has been cancelled. Capitalist realism is the belief that there is no alternative to capitalism. […] What does it mean to say that the future is cancelled? For Fisher, it meant an inability to imagine anything new. His work on cyberpunk is a testament to this. The cyberpunk aesthetic we all understand is one that meshes advanced technology with late-stage capitalism. But to build that aesthetic, the familiar yet alien are transposed into the scene: the Japanese culture of Blade Runner, for example, may adorn the futuristic scenery, but its presence is a product of 1970s/1980s American xenophobia of the Japanese economic miracle subsuming their own. The great pyramids, skyscrapers and flying cars are all futuristic, but it’s retro-futuristic. It is how we used to imagine the future [lifted from Frederic Jameson’s “Progress versus Utopia; Or, Can We Imagine the Future?” 1982].

This is hauntology. In a world where the future has been cancelled, where we are unable to imagine new futures (we will get onto why shortly), society and culture is forced to look back onto the imaginings of previous generations (source).

To be a little more bold than Miller is, the recreational use of mind-expanding drugs and communal living is, in my opinion, absolutely fine (and in fact, vital to the process provided they are utilized in a non-harmful or self-destructive manner). Regardless, their experimental nature’s literal or figurative usage will be targeted for expected violence by powerful state forces concerned with a foreign/internal plot: drugs are used as an excuse for the state to police its population through drug wars of various kinds (including sex in general and the Gothic poiesis of monster sex). As John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs, declared in 1994:

You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. […] We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did (source: Vera’s “Drug War Confessional”).

This policing extends to subjugated Amazons; e.g., the TERF acting like a man historically does by becoming the token cop concerned with the foreign plot, thus checking the Amazon’s vagina to make sure it’s natal, thus not “on drugs”[6]; i.e., that she’s a “real, biological” woman and not some stinkin’ trans infiltrator stealing the valor of a real suffragette. This is a sentiment obviously held by TERFs acting besieged, thus requiring us to interrogate Barbara Creed’s observation of female, monstrous-feminine “non-victims” (mostly in cinema, no less) as potentially “TERF-grade,” meaning they’re perhaps a just little too fixated on biology and universal victimhood (exhibit 41g1a2) when deciding who threatens them (exhibit 1a1c) and who they compromise with—e.g., J.K. Rowling or Matt Walsh—when tag-teaming us/locking our asses up for being too “free” and open regarding our identities and self-expression; i.e., as sometimes involving actual drugs, but also just appearing drug-like: anthropomorphism (whose oft-sexualized, talking-animal “fursonas” we’ll unpack at great length in Volume Two’s “Call of the Wild” chapter):

(artist: Miles DF)

The dystopia of the “cancelled future” isn’t just personified on- and off-canvas; it’s summoned and lead to by a canonical (thus heteronormative) treasure map inside of itself, denoting an unironic gender trouble whose equally routine vanquishing (via the termination of the rebellious Amazon, fascist or black castle) is pure heteronormative copaganda engineered inside the Shadow of Pygmalion as a state-sanctioned creative process: the use of the treasure map to reach the Gothic castle as the lair/parallel space of the dragon lord, dragon and mother of dragons before slaying them in one fell swoop. The map also summons them through drug-like[7] ways to appear conveniently as fascist, Communist, non-white/non-Christian and/or queer scapegoats whenever and wherever Capitalism’s crises shift towards decay (fascism being Capitalism-in-decay; centrism being the normalizing of this procedure through moderacy/tone-policing, creeping gentrification, incrementalism, white savior antics, and American Liberalism/exceptionalism; and “Communism” being the universal scapegoat regardless of how nominal or functional it is; i.e., Domino Theory during Red Scare and other moral panics). The appearance of the monster is often proceeded by an ill omen that mirrors the residence as doubled in an uncanny sense: the return of the Gothic castle as a dark reflection of the heroic space having been corrupted by a foreign plot, a backstabber (the “bad servant” trope something we’ll examine during “Goblins, Anti-Semitism, and Monster-Fucking“).

Regarding space, power and theatre’s art/porn and heroes (monsters), the whole affair is liminal insofar as actors for or against the state utilize the same basic language. Within canon, the hauntologized castle suddenly appears, as does its mighty occupant and host of generals and legionaries. However, so does the old sage with the map that conveniently leads the heroes inside to take back what’s rightfully theirs. Everything is counterfeit, the parallel space of the castle, and its reaching the center of, using the map a liminal hauntology of war occupied by the projection of male/token insecurity and masculinity-in-crisis onto a perpetual corrupt/monstrous-feminine scapegoat as coming from somewhere else that looks just like home; i.e., a monstrous liminal expression as forever policed through monomythic copaganda and token gradients: Sting glows blue, meaning the home is under attack and must be defended by brave warriors and holy men to preserve its boundaries, its property (including women) from unholy thieves-in-disguise. The surface of him oozes stigmatized sexual dominance as unironically xenophobic/xenophilic. Through this singular staging and interpretation, our modern-day Count is basically a fish out of water/might as well have flown in from outer space to suction our damsel away with his tractor beam: He comes, he sees, he conquers; everyone else “suffers” in ways that lead to actual suffering:

 

Singular interpretations are dangerous[8] because they enforce the colonial binary through open endorsement and willful ignorance: killing orcs is fine and should never be questioned. The canonical reaction to ironic camp is hostile, reliably leading to our four basic behaviors:

• open aggression, expressing gender trouble as a means of open, aggressive attack (disguised as “self-defense” reactive abuse): “We’re upset and punching down is free speech” (“free speech” being code for “negative freedom for bigots who want to say bigoted things” to defend the elite’s profit motive).
• condescension, expressing a moderate, centrist position that smarmily perpetuates the current status quo as immutable, but also optimal: “This is as good as it gets” but also which can never decay.
• reactionary indignation, using sex-coercive symbols (argumentation) to defend their unethical positions: “They’re out to destroy your heroes, your fun, all you hold dear (code for ‘the current power structure’).”
• DARVO (“Deny, Accuse, Reverse, Victim, Offender”), defending the status quo by defending the people who enslave them (the elite) by going after the elite’s enemies, thereby defending Capitalism during decay. When it decays, these “gamers” see “their” games in decay and will defend those, seeing human rights as an affordable compromise in the bargain. They see themselves (and the elite) as “victims,” and class warriors as monsters “ruining everything” (like Satan).

Shouted with a toxic “well, if I’m angry it’s your fault!” the fantasy—of tilting at prescribed windmills to ward off difficult truths—is precious to uncritical consumers. As something to worship and uphold, sanctioned violence extends to token forms within and outside of the text (the subjugated Amazon; e.g., Ellen Ripley or Samus Aran) as killing the big daddy of fascism (Count Dracula, exhibit 1a1c) but also the big bad bitch of Communism (Archaic Mothers like Grendel’s Mother, exhibit 1a1a1f1; but also the Alien Queen and Mother Brain, exhibit 1a1c) and various moral-panic, usual-target representations, such as the witchdoctor/necromancer or barbarian chief: not just canonical Amazonomachia but regressive forms, whose bloody vaudeville is forever caught up in us-versus-them disputes for the state’s benefit (whose reactionary cultural forms denote the imagery as used during class/culture war as visually war-like [for canon] and camp as an unwelcome act of war that demands a canonical response; i.e., iconoclastic monsters are recuperated inside a canonical casus beli, aka a false flag operation[9]). Simply put, it’s practice for anti-labor sentiment—a military drill relayed through neoliberal simulations of canonical war’s “adventure story” and tactical combat (the videogame, but especially the shooter).

Token or not, “history” whether conceived as “fiction” or “non-fiction” have much in common, including the binaries that emerge during crisis and decay. The vampire never seems to the die, the damsel is always in the distress, and the hero is always primed to white-knight her. “I can’t save you until you’re in danger,” his actions seem to suggest, which intimates the structure at work/play. It enforces itself through intended performances that prescribe meaning through adherence to traditional standards: rewarding those with faith. Yet, historically the biggest criminals are those with faith under the status quo shielding themselves from the foreign menace—say nothing of those plotting revenge by crying “DAVRO!” to project their scheme onto someone else. Both tell tall tales to justify the abuse going on; i.e., the urban militarism and tales of far-off slaughter and devastation (which Tolkien gentrified by removing torture dungeons and open, gratuitous sex from his stories, instead populating his worlds with seemingly “chaste” orcs and men duking it out on the open battlefield).

I know we’ve covered a lot of ground up to this point, but we have a ways to go before reaching the “camp map” finale (exhibit 1a1a1i). Moving forward, I want to cover the reflection of Cartesian dualism/sexual dimorphism in heteronormative language as warlike and divided, as well as the banality of evil tied to this broader legendary process as “map-like” in its own right, inviting all manner of people to chase after its contents while denying the oppressed a chance to speak (silence and denial being a core function of genocide).

First, faith or not, the dialectical-material relationship is ongoing during oppositional praxis, and generates a variety of harmful binaries during work as sexualized/sex work to bring this enforcement about: the virgin/whore, angel/devil, doctor/nurse, damsel/detective/demon, missionary/sodomite, savior/saboteur, colonist/colonized, cowboys/Indians, cops/criminals (victims), forgiven/unforgiven, saved/damned, black-to-white persons and other ethnic minorities, Christian/heretic, skinny/fat, horny/chaste, slutty/modest, fuckable/marriage material, able/disabled, hellcat/shrew, black knight/white knight, predator/prey, the kayfabe of the babyface/heel, cat/dog (neurodivergent/neurotypical, introvert/extravert)—but also monstrous, tokenized iterations of these things that can be used for or against the state; re: Amazon pastiche (a monumental fixture of this book’s praxis; more examples: exhibit 1a1b) through the centrist or abject kayfabe of codified versions battling it out for “supremacy” (code for profit) versus the Satanic, anticapitalistic (thus anti-neoliberal/antifascist) iterations of the same base visuals informing the public mindset through Gothic aesthetics, over and over and over again; re: ACAB, meaning “All Cops Are Bad” but also, as I see it, “All (Canonical) Castles Are Bad” (or capital, but that’s a singular non—ACIB): all canonical castles need kings, cops, and victims (which the elite prey upon through state tools of violence privatizing land and labor until the sun burns out; re: the state is straight, ergo ASAB, APAB, ABAB and so on).

Contrary to canonical depictions (which often pit the criminal against a spectrum of cops), the descriptive sexuality and gender parody of iconoclastic monsters/ironic monster-fucking (and their castles and other lairs) actually yield many different interpretations simultaneously. So while the status quo’s singular and restrictive interpretations are Legion, so are the flexible, chaotic interpretations that Gothic Communists provide; and unlike the state’s singular, braindead tune, our darkness is “visible”/class, culture and race conscious, but unafraid to camp the ghosts of men like Milton and Marx, but also Tolkien and James Cameron’s varied treatments of the monomyth (and its castles) as literally mapped out. In other words, we look after our own by subverting thus transmuting any structures (castles, ghosts, maps or otherwise) designed or recuperated by the elite to parasitically grip, then render us into emotionally and Gothically unintelligent mulch; i.e., “correct” symbols useful to profit, into actual corpses the state uses, discards, or targets during moral panics of various kinds inside the state’s monopoly of violence/state of exception (e.g., the zombie apocalypse). All exist to promote the banality of evil. The greatest lie of centrist propaganda is that Great Evil is one, cool and two, actually the Nazis or some such cartoon scapegoat. The Great Destroyer wasn’t a dragon or a Nazi for the white knight to slay. Nor was Communism the much-touted end of the world (whose development is held hostage by the “mutually-assured destruction” of the elite’s ever-expanding nuclear arsenal and war market[10]). Instead, the Greater of Two Evils is actually powerful, old, white men—men known not for their intelligence, good looks or brawn, but merely their positions within capital.

The elite are the owner class, thus steal wealth behind impressive theatrics; i.e., the false copy as sold to workers who buy into the myth of crisis as “adventure” put on a map. Each time adventure calls, the elite throw the levers of power with a disturbing lack of scruples—i.e., to profit from, thus get their daily dose of blood via wage/labor theft (and other colonizing behaviors). In turn, the system alienates us from them and them from us and us from our labor and each other. War and rape flourish, but also synonymize with heteronormative sex under the profit motive. Meanwhile, the elite roost on systems of wealth generation and accumulation-through-exploitation, letting fascists kill and steal from labor movements, thus hoard their own draconian piles of stolen, non-generated wealth: Tolkien’s Lonely Mountain and the King Under the Mountain’s “pale, enchanted gold” inside a castle disguised as a mountain, but also Dracula’s “Castlevania” as the fearsome, operatic home of the proverbial dragon lord. As these exist, they—like Tolkien’s twin trees from earlier (exhibit 0b)—canonize camp using the theatrical language of war as a treasure map to explore then conquer relative to castles as far away or near. The map is of the castle or leads to it inside of itself. Doing so waters Valinor’s illustrious[11] two towers (oh, the irony) with fresh, perennial blood: the Base and Superstructure as clutched in the elite’s iron grip, but also their Pygmalions; e.g., men like Tolkien mapping war out in a never-ending refrain that defends the white castle, thus Capitalism, from a black-castle scapegoat. Before we can execute our own “camp map”—one that camps the manifesto trees, thus corrupts them towards our purposes—we will have to understand the original as something to transmute back towards developing Communism; i.e., we will have to camp the canonical map (and castle) as a simulator (thus educator) of war that has taken many forms since Tolkien’s heyday.

“There be dragons” is borrowed foreshadowing as resting over a legendary hoard exchanged between those sickened by it: a militarized gold rush charted by a map/”fetch quest” whose empowerment is false (doesn’t change your material conditions; in fact, it endorses the status quo, which worsens them) and whose consequences of blindly endorsing (versus the enjoyment of informed consumption) are felt all around the world as imitated by the copy of the copy of the copy—wars of extermination. Tolkien’s Middle Earth was basically Western/Eastern Europe, which was emulated by virtually all of fantasy canon; i.e., the monomyth as ludologized by Wizards of the Coast with D&D as a tabletop, head-in-the-sand response—canonically speaking—to 1960s counterculture selectively celebrating Tolkien’s novels while also playing around inside copies of them. This “shadow zone” is, itself, Grendel’s cave as a castle to invade and plunder while proving one’s manliness by confronting “corruption,” the monstrous-feminine, and various awesome mysteries that you deny through military optimism/the return of the king and “good war” to scapegoat the fascist tyrant; i.e., as the Greater Good does, defending capital by following the canonical map even when it transforms beyond what Tolkien would have been comfortable with: into an actual castle located on home turf or connected to one’s home turf through indisputable settler-colonial ties.

(exhibit 1a1a1h2a1: “When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer[12].” Videogames are war simulators; in them, maps are built not merely to be charted and explored, but conquered through war simulations. The land is an endless site of conquest, war, rape and profit carefully dressed up as “treasure,” “liberation” and “adventure,” but in truth, brutalizing nature during endless wars of extermination borrowed from the historical and imaginary past as presently intertwined:

• top-left: Tolkien’s refrain, “Thror’s Map” from The Hobbit, 1937

—source: Weta Workshop

• top-right: Thomas Happ’s map of Sudra from Axiom Verge, 2015

—source: magicofgames

• bottom-left: Team Cherry’s map of Hallownest, from Hollow Knight 2017

—source: tuppkam1

• bottom-right: Bungie’s map of the West from Myth: the Fallen Lords, 1997

—source: Ben’s Nerdery

Though certainly not unique to Tolkien, and popularized in the shooter genre vis-à-vis Cameron, Tolkien near-single-handedly popularized the idea of “world-building” in fantasy by making a mappable world full of languages he invented, but which he tied to the larger process of world war that has been replicated countless times since; i.e., the idea of the map as a space for conquest that paralleled the elite raping Earth repeatedly as translated to the videogame format; e.g., Myth, Axiom Verge, Hollow Knight, above [our focus, in the next subchapter, will be on Metroidvania, not the RTS].

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

Threatened, the state always responds with violence before anything else Male or female, then, the hero becomes the elite’s exterminator, destroyer and retrieval expert, infiltrating a territory of crisis to retrieve the state’s property [weapons, princesses, monarchic symbols of power, etc] while simultaneously chattelizing nature in reliably medieval ways: alienating and fetishizing its “wild” variants, crushing them like vermin to maintain Cartesian supremacy and heteronormative familial structures [a concept we’ll return to in Volume One’s synthesis symposium, “Nature Is Food,” including exhibit 30a]. Neoliberalism merely commercializes the monomyth, using parental heroic videogame avatars like the knight or Amazon pitted against dark, evil-familial doubles—parents, siblings and castles [and other residents/residences]—in order to dogmatize the player [usually children] as a cop-like vehicle for state aims [often dressed up as a dated iteration thereof; e.g., an assassin, cowboy or bounty hunter, but also a lyncher, executioner, dragon slayer or witchfinder general “on the hunt,” etc]: preserving settler-colonial dominance through Capitalist Realism by abusing Gothic language—the grim reaper and his harvest. Doing so helps disguise, or at least romanticize [thus downplay, normalize and dismiss] state abuses through their regular trifectas and monopolies; i.e., the CIA and other shadowy arms of state mercenary violence fronted by myopic copies—pacifying the wider public by mendaciously framing these doubles as [often seductive] “empowerment” fantasies.

All the while, dogma becomes “home entertainment” as a palliative means of weaponizing the idea of “home” against those the state seeks to control and exploit on either side of a settler-colonial engagement: the cop or the cop’s victims. Either is sacrificed for the state through its usual operations; i.e., for the Greater Good, except heroes are glorified as monstrous sacrifices serving “the gods” [the status quo] out of Antiquity into capital, whereas their victims are demonized as evil, thus deserving of whatever holy [thus righteous] retribution comes their way. Both are chewed up and spit out, the state’s requisite “grist for the mill” as it uses its own citizens to move money through nature: by defending itself from an imaginary darkness “From Elsewhere.” A fortress’ sovereignty is forged, as are its manufactured crises and saviors, but the outcome is still profit; the castle remains haunted by the ghost of genocide, suggesting the unthinkable reality that the hero is false.

[artist: Persephone van der Waard]

In neoliberal copaganda, canonical heroes are sent solo or in small groups, deployed as much like a bomb as a person; hired by the powerful, these “walking armies” destabilize target areas for the mother country to invade and bleed dry [a genocidal process the aggressor sanitizes with cryptonymic labels like “freedom” and “progress”]. To this, they are authorized, commissioned or otherwise sanctioned by those with the means of doing so; i.e., a governing body centered around elite supremacy at a socio-material level. After infiltration occurs, the agents work as a detective[13]/cop, or judge, jury and executioner—either on foreign or domestic soil, the place in question framed as loosened from elite control, thus requiring the hero [and their penchant for extreme violence] to begin with. This makes them an arbiter of material disputes wherever they are: through police violence for the state in its colonial territories at home and abroad. They always follow orders: “Shoot first, ask questions later and enslave what survives.”

In stories like Aliens, Doom and Metroid, the fatal nostalgia of the “false” doubled homestead is used to incite genocide, thus conduct settler colonialism inside of itself; i.e., through standard-issue Imperialism but also military urbanism; e.g., Palestine abroad[14] versus the death of Nex Benedict at home[15]. This has several steps. First, convince the hero that a place away from home is home-like; i.e., the thing they do not actually own being “theirs” [the ghost of the counterfeit] but “infested” [the process of abjection]. Then, give them a map and have them “clean house”—an atrocious “fixer” out of the imaginary past who repairs the “broken” home room-by-room by first cleansing it of abject things “attacking it from within,” then disappearing with the nightmare they constitute; i.e., purging these alien forces through blood sacrifice or even total destruction of the home itself. The iconoclast can reverse this two-step process, but must protect those queenly things of nature normally persecuted by Cartesian forces and their cartographic schools of violence; i.e., by using counterterrorist language and ironic roles of violence, terror and monsters redirected towards the state: Athena’s Aegis and the dark queen’s chaotic stare of doom, but also literal, manmade weapons illustrated during performative shows of force against state invaders attacking Galatea.)

As we shall see, the map-like aesthetics and centralization of the castle did transform a great deal (vis-à-vis Cameron), but its basic function as a conquerable space did not. The capitalist idea is obviously older than Tolkien, but not as old as Beowulf (though Imperialism and the Master/slave dynamic more broadly dates back to Rome). Somewhere in between, the Cartesian Revolution occurred and introduced the map as the ruthless European’s desire to conquer and profit from nature-as-female through a system of thought (Cartesian dualism) coupled with the map as a settler-colonial technology of conquest that would carry over from Tolkien into Cameron and countless copies of his version of the same basic map:

Cartesian dualism/the Cartesian Revolution

The rising of a dividing system of thought by René Descartes that led to settler colonialism. As Raj Patel and Jason Moore write in A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things:

The inventors of Nature were philosophers as well as conquerors and profiteers. In 1641, Descartes offered what would become the first two laws of capitalist ecology. The first is seemingly innocent. Descartes distinguished between mind and body, using the Latin res cogitans and res extensa to refer to them. Reality, in this view, is composed of discrete “thinking things” and “extended things.” Humans (but not all humans) were thinking things; Nature was full of extended things. The era’s ruling classes saw most human beings—women, peoples of color, Indigenous Peoples—as extended, not thinking, beings. This means that Descartes’ philosophical abstractions were practical instruments of domination: they were real abstractions with tremendous material force. And this leads us to Descartes’ second law of capitalist ecology: European civilization (or “we,” in Descartes’ word) must become “the masters and possessors of nature.” Society and Nature were not just existentially separate; Nature was something to be controlled and dominated by Society. The Cartesian outlook, in other words, shaped modern logics of power as well as thought.

[…] The invention of Nature and Society was gendered at every turn. The binaries of Man and Woman, Nature and Society, drank from the same cup. Nature, and its boundary with Society, was “gyn/ecological” from the outset. Through this radically new mode of organizing life and thought, Nature became not a thing but a strategy that allowed for the ethical and economic cheapening of life. Cartesian dualism was and remains far more than a descriptive statement: it is a normative statement of how to best organize power and hierarchy, Humanity and Nature, Man and Woman, Colonizer and Colonized. Although the credit (and blame) is shared by many, it makes sense to call this a Cartesian revolution. Here was an intellectual movement that shaped not only ways of thinking but also ways of conquering, commodifying and living [… that] made thinking, and doable, the colonial project of mapping and domination.

Finally, the Cartesian revolution was made thinkable, and doable, the colonial project of mapping and domination. […] Cartesian rationalism is predicated on the distinction between the inner reality of the mind and the outer reality of objects; the latter could be brought into the former only through a neutral, disembodied gazed situated outside of space and time. That gaze always belonged to the Enlightened European colonist—and the empires that backed him. Descartes’ cogito funneled vision and thought into a spectator’s view of the world, one that rendered the emerging surfaces of modernity visible and measurable and the viewer bodiless and placeless. Medieval multiple vantage points in art and literature were displaced by a single, disembodied, omniscient and panoptic eye. In geometry, Renaissance painting, and especially cartography, the new thinking represented reality as if one were standing outside of it. As the social critic Lewis Mumford noted, the Renaissance perspective “turned the symbolic relation of objects into a visual relation: the visual in turn became a quantitative relation. In the new picture of the world, size meant not human or divine importance, but distance.” And that distance could be measured, catalogued, mapped, and owned.

The modern map did not merely describe the world; it was a technology of conquest (source).

Tolkien’s quaint treasure map is no accident, then, but a hauntological cryptonym of settler colonialism’s dread function of the map displaced to a faraway “other world/castle” that curiously looks (and functions) a whole lot like Earth does now: “All roads lead to Rome.” In short, the Cartesian function of cartography has become ludologized, and the progenitor for that great disguise was Tolkien and his gentrification of war on a naturalized good-vs-evil: England is naturalized and its nature is good but under attack by unnatural things spilling out from foreign castles, caverns, and the underworld into Tolkien’s “new Eden” (dressed up in elvish reinventions of an imaginary Britain). Being infamously allergic to allegory, Tolkien didn’t want his readers to look too closely during these “baths in Styx.” Instead, the current order and perception of the world (the Cycle of Kings) must be preserved by throwing all of the blame Capitalism deserves onto a far-off double. Yet, his monomythic, warlike refrain, “stab the orc, spill his blood!” was seconded by Cameron’s Aliens as a far more openly Promethean story—one whose weaponized nostalgia presents the slippery nature of power as stolen (and unrightfully so) by imperial forces passing themselves off as “the good guys” inside a hyperreal crypt set in outer space.

In defense of the status quo, Cameron takes Tolkien’s refrain (the treasure map set mostly in nature) and patently applies it to an American revenge fantasy whose monomyth is an infernal concentric pattern relayed through the inclusion of women as heroic (thus monstrous) inside a local castle. For Tolkien, war is the province of man and fought to defend the white castle from the black; inside Cameron’s “shadow zone” of monstrous theatre, his Gothic war story supplies bullets[16] and Amazonian protagonists in defense of a fallen colony from nature (the Archaic Mother) as coming home to roost; i.e., Man vs Nature-as-monstrous-feminine funneled through the transportation of Heinlein’s bombing of “space bugs” of the Bretton Woods era (a chilling and gross metaphor for bombing China, Korea and Japan) to neoliberal politics remediated unto videogames. Like Tolkien, though, Cameron’s use of the treasure map would easily yield a videogame form: the entire shooter genre as a war simulator that echoed Tolkien’s cartographic refrain inside Cameron’s closed space relying on the same codified belief systems and behavioral instructions—one updated for a whole new generation of children via a variety of conqueror strategies styled as “fantasy,” “sci-fi,” and “horror,” but generally a combination during Cameron’s brand of what I call “military optimism“:

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

• • FPS (first-person shooters) like Doom (1993)
  • TPS (third-person shooters) like Metroid (1986)
  • RTS (real-time strategy games) like StarCraft (1996)
  • turn-based strategy games like X-COM: UFO Defense (1994)
  • hybrids (for these, refer to my FPS interview series, but also my Metroidvania PhD research and interview series with Metroid speedrunners, “Mazes and Labyrinths“)

[This research has since me writing “Military Optimism” back in 2021, culminated in my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus. —Perse, 3/27/2025]

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

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

(exhibit 1a1a1h2a2: Cameron’s xenomorph’s take the alien’s acid blood [a defense mechanism] from the first film, and applies it to a creature called a xenomorph that demonizes the Communist stand-ins entirely and presents the marines as the fully-humanized military relief on par with Douglas Hickox’ racist settler-colonial apologia, Zulu Dawn [1979]:

We set out to make a different type of film, not just retell the same story in a different way. The Aliens are terrifying in their overwhelming force of numbers. The dramatic situations emerging from characters under stress can work just as well in an Alamo or Zulu Dawn as they can in a Friday the 13th, with its antagonist [source: Aliens Collection’s transcription of “James Cameron’s responses to Aliens critics” from Starlog Magazine, Issue #184, November 1992].)

 

Whereas Tolkien’s refrain is the High Fantasy treasure map—a false copy of the Earth as something to dominate through the centrist argumentation of so-called “home defense” during the classic monomyth—Cameron’s refrain is pretty much the entire shooter genre set in some kind of castle colony floorplan. But we want to examine Metroidvania, not Doom—in part because Metroid came far earlier and is an obvious videogame double of Aliens (with a warlike, female protagonist and villain, unlike Castlevania) that also happens to be much more about disempowerment than Doom is; but through the tradition of the opera, treats the castle as a physical, emotional and sexual extension of the mind: an exotic, oxymoronic, psychosexual place of madness, passion and music* to an imperiled heroine who suddenly can fight back much more than she was able to during Radcliffe’s day (the Great Enchantress often featuring music in her own castles, though often an eerie, far-off sort threatening to lure the heroine to certain doom). As we shall see, this “Gothic therapy” isn’t a net positive, and generally remains caught between the dampening constraints of societal expectations, stigmas and standards as things to canonize or camp by the heroine; generally her actions remain torn between two sides of herself at war inside the liminal space: being up to no good because a sexually repressed (and toxic) society thinks you are, versus actually doing anything that’s demonstrably harmful. It becomes something to acknowledge and relish in: “We’re totally being so wicked and bad right now!”

*Our focus in this subchapter isn’t strictly the music in Metroidvania, but I heartily invite you to consider its Gothic castle—the performative lands of madness and dark desire [compared to thunder and lightning, darkness and mist] but also duels and possessive, even obsessive, criminal love[17]—as something that is classically rather dance-like, often set to music of a dark and immodest sort (from a white, cis-het perspective; i.e., the appropriation of rock ‘n roll and jazz in Gothic environments (vis-à-vis Castlevania), operating as a kind of cautionary and tempting tone poem (e.g., “Night on Bald Mountain,” 1867) relayed through musical motion[18] inside said space. As with theatre, sex, and all-around BDSM activities of various sorts, there’s a genuine, albeit staged accuracy to how these things play out in our own lives; i.e., music literally sets the tone, tempo, and table, telling us how hard and fast to go when playing in whatever ways we decide; e.g., Trent Reznor’s “Closer” (1989, exhibit 43b): “You tear down my reason / It’s your sex I can smell […] I wanna fuck you like an animal […] You bring me closer to God!”

(artist: The Maestro Noob)

Beyond NIN, such “ludo-Gothic BDSM” applies to fucking, roleplay and/or dancing echoed through paraphernalia (and adult variants: sex toys) of assorted franchises that—unlike Radcliffe—actively help privileged people in the Global North (e.g., white girls) process survivor’s guilt/inheritance anxiety while still learning to think about the world differently through sex-positive kink, fetish and BDSM as “perceptive” Gothic counterfeits/counterculture, not blind enjoyment centered around themselves and their nerdy white fragility as something to buffer. It’s possible to still enjoy material culture during nerd sex as an extension or reclaiming of said culture (with someone or their partner wearing a t-shirt [or some such article] to tout their nerdy Gothic status as one’s trendy object of desire: the big-titty Goth GF as a stamp of, or stamped with, consumer pride that also contains cryptomimetic echoes of generational trauma inside of itself.

Dark desire, then, becomes something to compile and compound within various bondage and discipline exercises that, for all intents and purposes, constitute as “edging”—not the releasing of passion, but its prolonged storage until such a time as release is permitted by the one holding the reins). Indeed, enjoyment isn’t divorced from capital and monetization, but we can develop and raise cultural awareness and interconnectivity in meaningful ways while still getting to be the fantasies that Capitalism normally alienates us from (the unicorn not as a manmade, sequestered entity but one that is hidden behind paywalls, the resultant manufactured scarcity[19] granting it a rare, mythical appearance and appreciating value—compelled orgasms, aka “sad cum”); i.e., established through the artwork we make and games that we play as a second-nature mode of altered existence: self-definition as a basic human right, one that is quickly and readily understood at an intuitive level. It becomes a child-like curiosity and teaching that extends into adulthood, carrying Gothic Communism forward through workers [not the state] dictating the Gothic mode; i.e., their cultivating of emotional/Gothic intelligence with ludo-Gothic BDSM’s praxial synthesis and catharsis (the cultivation of daily habits—a topic for Volume One).

Note: As previously stated, when I originally wrote this volume, “ludo-Gothic BDSM” was only just being formed; i.e., the first deliberate appearance of the term that I can remember is in “The Map is a Lie’s” “Origins and Lineage” subsection (coming up, next). Any usage until that point in this volume is essentially a revision I included after the volume originally went live (many of those revisions actually happening for “The Total Codex” roll out, in March 2025). —Perse, 3/27/2025

Regardless of which shooter type, though, Cameron’s imaginary “Saigon” is the false copy of Tolkien’s refrain with a decayed imperial flavor from the start: a hyperreal site of endless war swept up in recent legends of the Gothic castle as something abandoned to walk around amongst/encounter through staged, quasi-operatic reenactments; i.e., going from good castle to bad castle (with no nature in between). Cameron’s displaced Saigon after the Fall is nuked into dust—if not from orbit the way that Heinlein always wanted (and robbing Star Wars of all its critical power in the process, exhibit 1a1a1h2b)—then from within a colony that was literally built to scuttle/self-destruct the way the company would want if they lost control to the guerrillas fighting them according to asymmetrical warfare. Before the blast, these chronotopes are full of enemies to kill, and take a variety of tiered forms that fit the regimented order of the material world under Capitalism: the lord, the knight, the peasant to the king, the general, the soldier to the boss, the mini-boss, the minion. The hero tracks down these threats; sees, kills and makes a violent example/trophy of them; and returns home with “his” war booty in tow.

Unlike Tolkien, Cameron’s world of warmaking isn’t a boys-only club. Outside of Doom (which has no women anywhere), the monstrous-feminine remains a core component of the shooter’s core design. For starters, Samus Aran and Mother Brain clearly were modeled after Ripley and the Alien Queen. Indeed, Samus follows up Ripley as the aloof, no-nonsense sex object that Scott originally disrobed and Cameron handed an assault rifle; this makes her Nintendo’s archetypal Amazon, a monster girl (exhibit 1a1a1h3a2) of the neoliberal Japanese hauntology that Nintendo would run with—literally. With Metroid, they took Cameron’s refrain six years before Doom and built a (for the time) spatially-unique TPS (the non-linear maze design being foundational to what Metroid-style Metroidvania are). Despite the side-scroller viewpoint, the game is just much a race as Doom is. Yes, the spaces are far less straightforward or focused on the pure killing of enemies, but the game also wasn’t aimed at young men the same way that Doom was. After the hero’s identity was revealed, the game’s military operation yielded a second, hidden function: foreplay and roleplay with a feminine slant. Samus’ actual mission became something of a runner-up to the world’s longest striptease imperiled by Gothic aesthetics and music[20]: the Amazon in a man’s world/montage, and disempowered as much as she was empowered (seriously, the first 1986 Metroid is hard and not user-friendly like the later games are).

(source)

Whether fantasy, horror and/or sci-fi, maps are central to war as something to navigate, thus educate through theatrical instruction. This obviously didn’t start with Cameron; it started (in the 20th century) with Tolkien’s popular use of the map as a disguise for war functioning as usual. Tolkien was also more overtly Biblical and patriarchal than Cameron, his sylvan Valinor giving us a convenient model for the twin trees of oppositional praxis (the Biblical rendition of the Base and the Superstructure being the roots of Capitalism’s typical commodifying of war). In general, we want to camp the trees by pulling a “Satan,” which can either mean making monsters or making places for monsters to exist. As this subchapter focuses on the navigation and interrogation of canonical Gothic space, this means we’ll have to camp the duplicates of our aforementioned treasure map representing the trees in praxis; i.e., what constitutes the Base and the Superstructure within the technology of conquest—its locations and embodiments of power (the castle) expressed in theatrical language when following the map inside of itself to a pandemonium-esque “shadow zone.” Games and theatre aren’t just powerful educational tools unto themselves; they teach us how to communicate as people generally do: through games, play and various staged performances and deceptions that can rewrite belief systems and codified behaviors—i.e., fear and dogma as something to play with on- and offstage during the same basic conversations.

To this, I’m focusing on Cameron (and shooters) for a reason. One, I’m an expert in shooters and Metroidvania. Two, whereas Tolkien’s maps generally require a lengthy trek to somewhere else, interrogating torturous power at the end of a long journey (with smaller, shadowy pockets of Gothic, Numinous power scattered throughout: barrow-downs, Moria, Old Man Willow, etc), Cameron’s war theatre places the Promethean element directly inside the “shadow zone”—right on a colonial site that uncannily resembles home: the castle—the imperial site of power—not just as faded, but abandoned and overrun with ghosts who have a bone to pick with us. In short, we’re already in “Rome” and there’s a much higher concentration of vengeful ghosts to interrogate in a Numinous sense, thus more chances to camp war and rape represented through a pedagogy of the oppressed that reflects on home (albeit through a double of itself, explored onstage). To this Cameron’s use of the black castle acknowledges its updated settler-colonial function both tied to a white castle at home, and the colony being reclaimed by nature in ways that Tolkien is completely hostile towards. For Tolkien, nature is simply good, “of the home” in ways that project colonialism onto a faraway evil site; nature has nothing to say about the West doing these things/acting like Rome. The Ents punish Saruman for his excessive industries, but not the elves, Hobbits, Rohan or Gondor—they conduct “Goldilocks Imperialism”/Bretton Woods; e.g. the wood elf king locking up Thorin and company in his dungeons versus Sauron “taking it too far” (thus being the perfect one to blame when the trees start to die. As usual, Tolkien blames everyone but the state).

So, while we want to camp Tolkien’s refrain, I think the best route in doing that is to make it Gothic the way that Cameron did and then critique that: a site of war that makes much more room for warrior women and monstrous-feminine entities and spaces akin to Grendel and Grendel’s mother haunting the castle, but also its liminal hauntology of war as ping-ponged between a white castle and a black castle superimposed over each other. This is where “Cameron’s” redeployments come in—in part because war involves less walking than it did in Tolkien’s day, but also because Cameron’s infamous story had a female-centric, Promethean element that Tolkien largely did not (Eowyn was the exception that proved the rule; i.e., she had to crossdress as “Dernhelm” to act like a man in secret to defend her lord and her kin, King Theoden[21]). We’re going focus, then, on the Metroidvania as stemming from Cameron’s approach to the treasure map—i.e., critiquing power as centralized in a Gothic sense around the monstrous-feminine castle, not its surrounding countryside: a doubled, liminal space full of Numinous concentrations of power and violence, and whose spirits and monsters are far more Promethean to engage with than Tolkien’s manly heroes and necromancers (shoving poor old Shelob into a pit somewhere). In short, the map as a space to actually explore is far more decayed and troubled by the shadow of war as bound up in whatever the heroes are fighting for being worthy of critique, thus camp. Even so, when executed by Cameron for its intended purpose, or by players of the Metroidvania that followed, the basic function of the treasure map is intact and plays out like Tolkien’s does. Keeping this in mind, we can reflect on Tolkien’s refrain while examining videogames inspired by Cameron’s neoliberal call to war through female soldiers battling against monstrous-feminine Indigenous enemies.

Another reason to focus on Cameron versus Tolkien is his canceled futures (and their ubiquitous offshoots) are tied directly to war as an openly settler-colonial process. Including the shooter genre he single-handled inspired by ripping off Tolkien’s refrain, videogame canon more broadly is neoliberal, thus heteronormative through the ludic scheme of war and its liminal hauntologies; i.e., as fractally recursive in a cartographic sense that feels hyperreal (the real world behind the canonical map of empire as destroyed, which in turn requires the in-text map to decay to hide the systemic exploitation through dead futures). Cameron’s retro-future space world (war in space) is utterly primed to be interrogated for these reasons. Within his complicated mirage, the endlessly concentric offerings of false power and false hope[22] occur through the neoliberal’s Faustian ludic contract as map-like, but also a Promethean Quest (stealing “fire” from the gods) that obliterates the hero once followed to its fearsome and all-consuming central conclusion; re: the infernal concentric pattern (which again, Tolkien shies away from by having the lands of darkness be a temporary stopping point). My master’s thesis and postgraduate writing serve to illustrate that point within Metroidvania; i.e., as closed space, but also a palliative Numinous whose lured “victims” may play around with in a broader sense of ludo-Gothic BDSM—i.e., not restricted purely to videogame play trapped inside digital gameworlds, but informed by them and their torturous content as expanded to the half-real space between the fiction and the rules: Zimmerman’s “magic circle” as expanding outside of the television or computer screen to account for the complexities and indiscretions of games executed/negotiated in practice, not in theory.

This flexibility of theory and play allows workers to playfully comment on larger issues present within their own social-sex lives that are themselves informed by bigger things and counterfeits of those things: castles of castles, maps of maps of maps, across all medium and life imitating said media and vice versa. The next subchapter will divide into two parts that unpack these heady concepts more through the Metroidvania as a germane example of performing power that we can iconoclastically apply to Tolkien’s refrain through Cameron’s echoing of said refrain; i.e., as a parallel, urbanized map/castle floorplan to his own open-world territory of conquest that interrogates power and trauma directly inside a closed space: a castle with an imperial history tied to the so-called “good place.” Unlike Tolkien, Metroidvania are thoroughly Gothic in their liminalities (technically Tolkien’s world is designed to be moved through, but I digress) but need to be camped based on all the argumentation that we’ve already laid out concerning our aforementioned “shadow zone” (the Superstructure): ACAB, thus requiring the canonical variants of a castle (and its arrangements of power) to be camped. Our third subchapter will consider this shadow space as already recultivated/camped by Gothic Communists “putting the pussy on the chainwax” (reclaiming the Base): camping the castle monsters. Finally, the fourth and final stage of our “camp map” (exhibit 1a1a1i) will give a short demonstration, effectively taking our manifesto-tree building blocks (already laid out in the thesis statement behind us, before having assembled them here, in the “camp map”) as leading forward by example into the symposium.

Got all that? Good! Now let’s keep following/assembling the yellow brick road and see where it leads, laying down more steps as we progress using the steps behind us to do so (using canonical bricks to build a campy castle, brick by stolen brick). Onto part two and the Metroidvania as something to outline and camp…

Onto “The Map is a Lie; or, Metroidvania and the Quest for Power (opening and part one: ‘Origins and Lineage’)“!

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About the Author

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

Footnotes

[1] In TERF circles, male gender-non-conforming bodies are classically seen as active; i.e., as “men in dresses” invading “real women’s” spaces, versus gender-non-conforming AFAB persons; the latter are treated as passive—merely “confused,” generally by a Jewish conspiracy that has convinced them not to reproduce for the state.

[2] Allusions to John Keats’ “Ode to Psyche” (1819):

And in the midst of this wide quietness

A rosy sanctuary will I dress

   With the wreath’d trellis of a working brain,

         With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,

With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign,

         Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same:

And there shall be for thee all soft delight

         That shadowy thought can win,

A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,

         To let the warm Love in! (source).

[3] From Forbidden Planet (1956), a sci-fi/horror film about a magic machine inside an ancient, abandoned, alien civilization that once accessed, releases the inner demons of a wizard-like scientist (the film was based loosely off Shakespeare’s The Tempest, 1611—a story about a wizard named Prospero whose magical books lead him to seek revenge against the military men who wronged him).

[4a] Pandemic meaning “spreading to/spanning all land masses/the entire globe,” endemic meaning “native to a given area, or becoming native or naturalized to said area over time.”

[4b] I’m being rather playful with my terminology, here. “Aftercare” generally refers to the “wind-down” or relaxation period following intense BDSM. It’s meant to give the triggered or aggravated party time to destress after a stressful activity that releases the lion’s share of said stress. But in situations of endless crisis, waves of terror are met with canonical violence to try and end the stress causing them. Except they become “bad aftercare” by existing within crises and without trying to end them; they just kick the can down the road and call it “leveling up” (the gaming term for “progress”). For us, “leveling up” is surviving trauma, but also contributing to the Cause by ending crisis as a perceived reality the state forces onto its workers to pit them against each other for the profit motive. Said motive reliably turns people into cops and victims, colonizers and colonized. Those inside the in-group are “the haves” and are lauded for their conquests; those in the out-group are “the have-nots” and are forsaken for being weak, pagan, doomed, etc.

[5] Banks exert tremendous control over sex workers, but also the companies that employ them. As Eloise Berry writes in “Why OnlyFans Suddenly Reversed Its Decision to Ban Sexual Content,” 2021):

So why did OnlyFans (briefly) decide to ban the kind of content which had come to characterize its platform? “The short answer is banks,” said Tim Stokely, the site’s British founder and chief executive. Banks, he claimed, are refusing to process payments associated with adult content. In an interview with the FT, Stokely singled out BNY Mellon, Metro Bank, and JPMorgan Chase for blocking intermediary payments, preventing sex workers from receiving their earnings, and penalizing businesses which support sex workers. He declined to reveal OnlyFans’ current banking partners. This follows similar behavior by payment service providers which have begun to dissociate from the porn industry. After a New York Times investigation found images of rape and child sex abuse on Pornhub, Mastercard and Visa prohibited the use of their cards on the site in Dec. 2020.

In response, Pornhub removed all content produced by unverified partners and implemented a verification program for users. In April this year, Mastercard announced tighter control on transactions of adult content to clamp down on illegal material. The requirements included that platforms verify ages and identities of their users (source).

While the banks’ reason might sound genuine and sex-positive on its face, the material reality is bankers are punishing sex workers for the corporate deregulation of their own labor—i.e., the usual fat cats protecting their own image after the consequences of deregulation’s criminogenic conditions invariably come to light. Meanwhile, the incidental criminality of bad-faith actors within said conditions are not punished; they are sex traffickers and sex pests who already operate anonymously from the shadows. Instead, sex workers are punished when they are denied (often for many) the only means at their disposal for financial independence.

[6] Gender-affirming care includes the injection of synthetic testosterone as a controlled substance (whose usage is selectively policed by those who maintain the heteronormative standard; i.e., looking the other way when cis-het male athletes [and tokens] use performance-enhancing drugs, but cracking down on trans athletes [usually trans women] attempting to transition in the field of sports. “Think of the women!” is argued to abuse trans people and cis-het women for the benefit of the status quo—men).

[7] The Vikings loved their drugs before going on raids, going berserk and killing for the gods by slaying the gods’ enemies; re: Grendel and Grendel’s mother, but really anyone comparable to them using drugs or drug-like poetics in ways that break canon’s kayfabe.

[8] In the words of my friend and mentor, Dr. Sandy Norton, if anyone tells you there’s only one correct interpretation of something, run.

[9] A “special military operation” built on false pretenses; i.e., “they fired first,” to which the “offended” party hits them with everything they have, using that as an excuse to invade and colonize their land. It’s not simply a Nazi tactic, but Imperialism-in-action regardless of who the aggressor is; e.g., America’s “special military operation” into Iraq and its surrounding countries during the so-called War on Terror (a poorly disguised excuse to conduct Imperialism as usual under the façade of “the end of history” by bringing “Democracy” to the rest of the world, aka proxy war or neo-colonialism: they’re the “terrorists” and we’re conducting “counterterrorism.” It’s the usual black-and-white antics of the colonial binary in action).

[10] Re: GDF’s “There Was No ‘Cold’ War,” “NATO Is Risking Nuclear War for Money,” and “No, We Didn’t Need to Nuke Japan.”

[11] Beware any white castle touted as “exceptional”; e.g., Coleridge’s notion of a Gothic cathedral. To camp them, you first have to view them without rose-tinted glasses.

[12] A canonical misunderstanding/misquoting of Plutarch written by neoliberals needing an evil bad guy to chew the fat. As Anthony Madrid writes in “And Alexander Wept” (2020):

Remember Die Hard? I don’t. I saw it right around the time it came out, and all I remember is Bruce Willis, barefoot, running through broken glass. That, for me, was a metaphor for watching the movie. Fans of the film, however, will recall its dapper German villain, Hans Gruber, smacking his silly lips and gloating at some private victory. He puts his fingertips together and says in facetiously tragic tones (clearly quoting something from High Culture and referring with cozy irony to himself): “And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer” [that’s a misquote]. Then he smiles with evil-genius self-satisfaction and says: “Benefits of a classical education.” / Yeah. Except that quote would never come up in the context of a classical education, unless the instructor happened to be taking a jolly detour, nose in the air, to attack a piece of legendary crap that no student of his must ever traffic in. […]

A few facts. The monkeys who wrote Die Hard did not invent that quote. […] It comes up in certain classic English poems from the seventeenth century [e.g., Edmund Waller addressing Oliver Cromwell in 1655 …] The quote is a hash of three passages in Plutarch, first century CE. Two of the passages were made available to English speakers (most notably Shakespeare) in 1579, in the translation by Thomas North. […] Look at this rather nicer version [of Plutarch’s “On Tranquillity of Mind”] by everybody’s favorite courtier, Sir Thomas Wyatt [for Catherine of Aragon]:

Alexander, whan he herde Anaxarchus argue that there were infynite worldes, it is said that he wept. And whan his frendes asked hym what thing had happened him to be wept for: “Is it nat to be wept for,” quod he, “syns they say there be infynite worldes, and we are nat yet lorde of one?”

[…] Alexander is not weeping in sorrow that there are no more throats to cut. This is not a picture of a man at the end of a career of world conquest; he’s at the beginning. “Look at all these throats—and I haven’t even cut one!”

[…] And therfore, seing that his fathers dominions and Empire increased dayly more and more, perceiving all occasion taken from him to do any great attempt: he desired no riches nor pleasure but warres and battells, and aspired to a signory, where he might win honor.

Now that’s from Plutarch’s Life of Alexander. No tears, but definitely the guy Gruber had in mind, the Godzilla he’d heard about in German day camp. Here’s a prince who wants to conquer for the sake of conquering; he doesn’t care whether Macedon comes out on top or not, except insofar as it’s compatible with his personal glory (source).

In short, Gruber’s misquoting of classical history is a kind of bad education that invites the fash-coded baddie in a neoliberal copaganda to steal from the fictional elite, while the real-world elite rewrite the past along these historical-material lines; i.e., neoliberal apologia regarding war as essentialized through men just like Gruber.

[13] We’ll examine the Gothic role of various (often female) detectives in science fiction more in Volume Two, including the sections “The Demonic Trifecta of Detectives, Damsels and Sex Demons” and “Call of the Wild, part one.”

[14] Which is generally something to deny (Noah Samsen’s “Genocide Denial Streamers,” 2024) or debate when, as the Youtuber Shaun points out, there is nothing to debate whatsoever—a genocide is occurring and it is wrong (“Palestine,” 2024).

[15] Persephone van der Waard’s “Remember the Fallen: An Ode to Nex Benedict” (2024).

[16] As per the Military Industrial Complex and copaganda, thanks to Cameron we had yet another genocide on a “savage continent” being led by firearms: the “holocaust by bullet” oscillating between Western forces executing settler-colonial against the usual targets being enacted by a superior righteous force against a primarily melee-implemented or non-Western target of colonial violence; i.e., “kill the Indian, save the man” to gentrify the territories by lethal force. Except now it was projected onto the pure imaginary as something to replicate by anxious colonial inheritors/guilty benefactors being acclimated to war stuck on loop during the end of economic history (Capitalist Realism). Not only was Doom (1993) already a clone of Aliens, but it went on to spawn countless clones of itself associated with young white men and “gamer” culture predominantly told through personal computers (see: Michael Hitchen’s “A Survey of First-person Shooters and their Avatars,” 2011). During its heyday Doom had more copies of itself installed on personal computers than the Microsoft Windows operating system (quite a feat considering Bill Gates’ monopolist approach to computer software):

In late 1995, Doom was estimated to be installed on more computers worldwide than Microsoft’s new operating system Windows 95, despite million-dollar advertising campaigns for the latter. The game’s popularity prompted Bill Gates to briefly consider buying id Software, and led Microsoft to repurpose their Doom porting project into a promotion of the new operating system as a gaming platform. One related presentation, created to promote Windows 95 as part of Microsoft’s Judgment Day event, had Bill Gates digitally superimposed into the game, killing zombies with a shotgun (source: “Doom95,” Doom Wiki).

Doom apes the plot to Rambo: First Blood (1982) without irony—i.e., the AstroTurf guerrilla planted in the jungle and killing every “demon” in sight. Decades after the original game released, the sentiment of trying to escape hell by killing as many demons as possible was stamped in the gamification of the Vietnam War necrometric: victory as literally determined and advertised by kill counts. This is very much the arcade-style points system Rune Klevjer says Doom didn’t have: “Doom had done away with the score-points and player lives from Wolfenstein 3-D, and thereby erased two of the most distinctive characteristics of the arcade. Still, the arcade aesthetic dominated in terms of movement, characters and combat. Over-sized guns and hordes of spectacular enemies went hand-in-hand with a fast-paced, frantic and almost balletic style of play” (source: “Way of the Gun“).

Even as I write this, though, Karl Jobst says in his latest video, “In Doom, there is simply nothing more “alpha” or satisfying than finishing a level and seeing a big beautiful 100% next to kills. There’s just something cathartic about knowing there was literally no more pain you could have inflicted; you are a beast, and every 100% you deliver should serve as a warning to every other demon out there that you’re coming for them and you will not stop until every last one is dead” (source: Karl Jobst’s “Impossible Doom Challenge FINALLY Completed After 30 Years!” 2023). In a word, it’s disheartening because the so-called “gamer mindset” applies victory and winning to everything that qualifies as a demon, including women, minorities or anything else that tries to be political, which that you can simply win against through force or by virtue of the fact that you’re a man, thus always right. Raw numbers is ok if you’re doing it; e.g., the “37 cocks” double standard from Clerks (1994): Dante is simply livid when his girlfriend tells him (under duress) that she sucked 36 dicks before him, but his fucking of 12 girls before her is “no big deal.”

[17] Such romances arguably taken to toxic, theatrical extremes by bored white women—e.g., Wuthering Heights—while also saying something about the awful, highly controlling nature of institutional marriage. I think this duality is often something that is overlooked by white women who consume and expect things of what they call “literature” and “romance”:

The main thing that irritates me about romance in literature is the unfortunate tendency to glamourize adultery.  Interestingly, people in films or television who are adulterous tend not to fare too well – soaps etc are very keen on giving people their comeuppance.  Literature tends to get a bit caught up on the beauty of it all and loses sight of the fact that adultery tends to boil down to an inability to keep your pants on even though you’ve promised that you would (source: Girl with her Head in a Book’s “Top Ten Dysfunctional Couples in Literature,” 2015).

For one, their idea of “literature” and “romance” seem to be highly prescriptive: love has to be amatonormative and healthy as a means of entertainment, first or foremost. But satire can be staged, highly theatrical and ironic. Romeo and Juliet, for example, is a parody of precisely the kinds of stories that were being written in Shakespeare’s day—it’s literally a joke told with a straight face.

In the Gothic spaces we’re examining with Metroidvania, the operative function is Gothic insofar as it is liminal—trapped inside the castle, but also conflicting notions of what is correct and incorrect regarding agency and desire, sexuality and power for persons who generally would have been denied all of these things. They become doubled inside of themselves, arguing not just onstage but in the minds of the audience interpreting them. Keep this in mind when we examine Castlevania and Jojo in part three of the “camp map.”

[18] For a fun example (and personal favorite), consider Metroid’s fan music: “When I think of Metroid 1, I specifically recall its dark foreboding atmosphere. You could hear this in 2000s cover bands like the NESkimoes and the Minibosses. This dark recollection has been erased by Nintendo’s reimagining of Metroid’s past. The threat of war is no longer a shadow that darkens the mood; it’s like riding a bike, only waiting to be picked up. To this, I can’t imagine future generations producing anything as dark as “Norfair Tenement Blues” (2004) or “Kraid” (2000). The caution is gone, replaced with bravado [of a post-9/11 word]” (source: “Military Optimism”). “Norfair Tenement Blues” is a great song—a cross between Nine Inch Nails and Metroid, it really nails the mood, but with a trademark ’90s gloom: war is something to fear.

[19] Whereas Sir Peter’s deal with Antiquity denied all magic by locking it away inside a vault, Peter S. Beagle’s 1982 adaptation presented the folly of this arrangement by having the old king go mad because the only thing that made him happy were the unicorns held prisoner at his castle—not one or two, but literally all of them. Freeing them was a mercy to him and the unicorns, but also proof that sexy monsters don’t disappear after Capitalism is transformed into Socialism and finally Communism; they’re simply spread out and are shared in a system that doesn’t turn you into King Haggard (the ultimate crook/chaser)—i.e., by dismantling the systemic power imbalances that create perceived advantages through unequal, coercive arrangements of power and material conditions; e.g., the ability to “game the system” through its usual methodology of extortion, insider-trading, monopolies, tax evasion, fraud, etc.

[20] The opening music, vis-à-vis the Minibosses’ 2000 version, channels the dark Romanticism of Alien‘s own musical pedigree; e.g., Howard Hanson’s Symphony No. 2 – “Romantic” (1930) as both uplifting and sad, showing a dark side to the cosmos framed within a human drama inside a castle in 1979 relegated to some unknown retro-future date. And let me tell you what, I listened the absolute shit out of the Minibosses (on bootleg CDs, back when I was in high school and they were still playing in bars), but also the Alien soundtrack (especially the 2007 Intrada two-disc set); it just spoke to me and my own life—i.e., the beauty in the dark, gritty side of things as a kind of calculated risk/theatre to make me feel heard but also paradoxically in control while piloting a disempowered heroine who, along with the castle, mirrored my own complex life, feelings and medieval education. Rilke’s poem, “Ich liebe meines Wesens Dunkelstunden” (1899) sums it up well:

I love the dark hours of my being
in which my senses drop into the deep.
I have found in them, as in old letters,
my daily life that is already lived through,
and become wide and powerful, like legends.
Then I know that there is room in me
for a second large and timeless life (source).

[21] A mad king himself, but Tolkien scapegoats the horse: “Snowmane, also referred to as Théoden’s Bane and Master’s Bane, was buried in the hollow where he fell which became known as Snowmane’s Howe” (source: Tolkien Gateway); i.e., a possible allusion to Shakespeare’s Richard the III (1633): “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!” (source).

[22] I.e., the problem of Cameron’s centrist feminism is that it “empowers” the female warrior to uphold the status quo, dooming women at large (say nothing of everyone Ripley attacks to “save the world” by paradoxically blowing it up; or as Metroid put it: “Pray for a truce peace in space!”).