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

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

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

Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).

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

Thesis Statement: the Gothic Mode and Its Reclamation

“What do you mean?” he said. “Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is morning to be good on?” 

—Gandalf, The Hobbit

(artist: Martin Sobr)

Picking up where “Book Sample: Thesis Proper Opening and Essay—Doubles, Dark Forces, and Paradox” left off…

I have divided my thesis statement into five pieces:

• the thesis paragraph: Contains my entire book’s central argument, distilled into one paragraph (and provides the full definition of heteronormativity).
• the thesis body: Summarizes Gothic Communism’s primary foil, the state—specifically its monopoly of violence, state of exception and Protestant work ethic in relation to the historical materialism of the state’s propaganda (canon); i.e., canon’s monomyth, Cycle of Kings, infernal concentric pattern and narrative of the crypt amounting to the Shadow of Pygmalion.
• “Pieces of the Camp Map (from the Manifesto Tree)“: Unpacks the main sections from the manifesto tree in relation to oppositional praxis; i.e., canon vs iconoclasm (camp).
• “The Roots of Camp“: Examines canonical demon BDSM and Radcliffe’s fiction/tricky tools as popular literary devices that desperately need to be camped (with ludo-Gothic BDSM—a concept we’ll introduce during the “camp map” and explore much, much more in Volumes One, Two and Three).
• “Overcoming Praxial Inertia“: Explores some popular examples of canonical, monomyth Beowulf-style heroes and the threat they represent as also needing to be camped (re [from Volume One, onwards]: to have nature’s monstrous-feminine revenge—specifically the whore’s [from Volume Two’s Demon Module]—against profit and the state pimping them).

Note: While preparing this volume for its 2025 promotion, I decided to write a small reprise preceding the thesis paragraph. Composed of new and cited material (totaling ten pages), its design accounts for the undeveloped portions of my thesis argument. To it, said reprise deliberately covers the work I wrote after my thesis volume was completed (whose argument I would steadily build on across four-going-on-five additional books, especially regarding ludo-Gothic BDSM and its tremendous utility when challenging Capitalism). —Perse, 3/22/2025

Two Years Later (give or take): Returning to My Thesis Argument after Five Books

Have you ever talked to someone
And you feel you know what’s coming next?
It feels pre-arranged

—Bruce Dickenson; “Deja Vu,” on Iron Maiden’s Somewhere in Time (1986)

This reprise seeks to revisit things I’ve written before, and which I cannot entirely change, but nonetheless want to expose and frontload you with hindsight I lacked, back then; i.e., the fact that my work on camping the canon through Gothic poetics would go on, across five books, to focus extensively on Metroidvania (to a lesser extent) and ludo-Gothic BDSM and the palliative Numinous (to a greater extent). For further information specifically on ludo-Gothic BDSM, refer to my new webpage cataloging the subject and its history as coined and synthesized by me. A similar page exists for Metroidvania. —Perse

(artist: George Roux)

History (therefore time) is a circle; in Gothic, it’s a structure that—like Dracula’s castle—can magically reappear again and again to be entered and explored in search of power and knowledge (therefore radical change through intense healing when facing trauma; re [from Volume One]: “If you want to critique power, you must go where it is”). Per the chronotope, space-time becomes familiar and alien in hauntological and cryptonymic/cryptomimetic forms, having a Numinous, therefore portentous (and often psychosexual, above) signature. All the same, it’s surprisingly easy to take the past and its slogans for granted, then, which is why when reversing abjection we want to self-introspect as much as reflect upon the work of others on the same shared Aegis (to avoid Marx’ tragedy and farce while, at the same time, camping his ghost). As I will write towards the end of this book volume, “Returning and reflecting upon old points after assembling them is a powerful way to understand larger structures and patterns (especially if they’re designed to conceal themselves through subterfuge, valor and force). It’s what holistic study (the foundation of this book) is all about.” So that is what this short reprise will do!

Please note, the thesis paragraph situated directly after said reprise is my book series thesis argument as written in late 2023. Therefore, it is broader and more complex in its language than my argumentation would become, in later books of said series; i.e., which narrowed their own arguments down to focus more heavily on ludo-Gothic BDSM to achieve systemic catharsis, deliberately healing from and combatting rape through oppositional synthesis (daily habits): by illustrating mutual consent through informed labor exchanges; e.g., through Metroidvania and the palliative Numinous (which this volume does introduce and explore). This expansion also included working more and more with other models (which we’ll get to, in a moment); i.e., each of us ghosts to dance, in smaller form, with the Medusa—as something Communist to invoke through whatever shadowy monstrous-feminine likenesses we leave behind before we die; re: the Gothic chase of the Numinous, fearing the “Gothic” past (from Walpole onwards) to, through such blatant fakeries, proceed to camp the ever-loving shit out of it. For me, that’s a dark mommy domme (of the gentler sort, below): a “castle in the flesh” whose half-real morphology invokes the same transformative qualities that an actual Gothic castle might (more on this, deeper in)!

(artist: Nyx)

In Volume Zero, our focus is mainly “canon vs camp,” whereas Volume One goes on to isolate and identify nature as monstrous-feminine (while also articulating the state’s various tools—re: its trifectas, monopolies, and qualities of capital—to exploit nature with); i.e., as something for the state to dehumanize and harvest for profit (thus genocide through rape and war).

In turn, Volume Two would begin to expand on ludo-Gothic BDSM in the Poetry Module (especially towards the end, in its preface), followed by the Monster Module’s own thesis argument:

Capitalism achieves profit by moving money through nature; profit is built on trauma and division, wherein anything that serves profit gentrifies and decays, over and over while preying on nature. Trauma, then, cultivates strange appetites, which vary from group to group per the usual privileges and oppression as intersecting differently per case (source: “A Cruel Angel’s (Modular) Thesis,” 2024).

From there, the Undead Module would explore this idea vis-à-vis the undead and the rememory process per ludo-Gothic BDSM, but the Demon Module would really crack things open; i.e., with its own establishing of the whore’s paradox and whore’s revenge against profit, thus rape. Before it could do that, though, I would need to define rape much more clearly than I had done previously in Volume Zero or One; re (from the Poetry Module):

I want to define [rape] as something broadened beyond its narrow definition, “penetrative sex meant to cause harm by removing consent from the equation.” To that, there is a broad, generalized definition I devised in “Psychosexual Martyrdom” (2024), which will come in useful where we examine unironic forms of rape, but also “rape” as something put into quotes; i.e., during consent-non-consent as a vital means of camp during ludo-Gothic BDSM:

martyrs are generally raped by the state, which we have to convey mid-performance without actually getting raped if we can help it (“rape” meaning [for our purposes] “to disempower someone or somewhere—a person, culture, or place—in order to harm them,” generally through fetishizing and alienizing acts or circumstances/socio-material conditions that target the mind, body and/or spirit) [emphasis, me]: finding power while disempowered (the plight of the monstrous-feminine).

Rape can be of the mind, spirit, body and/or culture—the land or things tied to it during genocide, etc; it can be individual and/or on a mass scale, either type committed by a Great Destroyer (a Gothic trope of abuse of the worse, unimaginable sort, rarefying as a person, onstage) of some kind or another as abstracting unspeakable abuse. It’s a translation, which I now want to interrogate with the chapters ahead. So we must give examples that are anything but ironic before adding the irony afterward as a theatrical means of medicine; i.e., rape play challenging profit through the usual Gothic articulations in service to workers and nature at large.

Simply put, to be raped is to be deprived of agency facing something you cannot defeat through force alone (rape victims are often brutalized for trying to fight back)—capital and its enforcers, pointedly raping nature and things of nature-as-monstrous-feminine by harvesting them during us-versus-them arguments according to Cartesian thought; terror is a vital part of the counterterrorist reversal humanizing Medusa during activism as a psychosexual act of martyrdom. There is always damage, even if you survive, but there is a theatrical element that lets you show your scars; i.e., during consent-non-consent as an artistic, psychosexual form of protest through ludo-Gothic BDSM: having been on the receiving end of state abuse as something to demonstrate and play with for educational, activist purposes—generally with a fair degree of revolutionary cryptonymy (showing and hiding ourselves and our trauma).

By comparison the state uses masks, music (and other things) as a coercive, complicit means of cryptonymically threatening us with great illusions. These rape our minds without irony in service to profit. Such proponents are generally people in our own lives who don the mask/persona of the Great Destroyer to frighten us into submission; i.e., by threatening us with total annihilation as a force of unreality that feels shapeless and overwhelming yet humanoid. This is no laughing matter, nor is subverting it during rape play, both of which the rest of this volume (and Volume Three after that) will explore at length (source: “A Note about Rape/Rape Play; or, Facing the Great Destroyer,” 2024).

From there, I would write on my website, several days ago (concerning my work and rape as something to camp through ludo-Gothic BDSM, which I wanted to update on my one-page promo for the entire series):

[…] In short, to establish healthy grounds for humor and play during Gothic and camp is to give workers control over things over things normally out of their control; i.e., putting “rape” in quotes during calculated risk, which ludo-Gothic BDSM essentially treats as activism when developing Gothic Communism to break Capitalist Realism; re: (from the Demon Module):

try to understand how demonic desires are shadowy and repressed, given form by oppositional poetics in dialectical-material argument. So when I say “revenge” from here on out, I do so with concerns to the usual us-versus-them, cops-and-victims language that demons manifest as/relate to us with (and we them) while pinned between nation-states/corporations and nature growing increasingly turbulent; i.e., said revenge had by one against another pursuant to worker or bourgeois needs. Rebellion through demonic poetics happens through a particular thesis to counteract: nature is monstrous-feminine (re: Volume One)—a whore under state control, which the elite rape for profit, and for which both sides seek revenge before, during and after structural abuse. The exploitation is endless because profit and labor value (of nature) are endless!

(artist: PiMo)

Demons, then, are whores under Western (Cartesian) dominion opposite virgins, but also are virgins depending on the circumstances; e.g., subjugated Amazons like Psylocke, left. This need for state control and dominion introduces a paradox from which a new thesis can arise during ludo-Gothic BDSM (for this chapter/module, indented for emphasis):

Ludo-Gothic BDSM has many theoretical definitions[1a] and applications. In practice, though, I frequently utilize it through rape play that paradoxically achieves catharsis; i.e., by putting “rape” in quotes, thus healing from rape without quotes. Often by rape survivors, such people classically find power/agency through theatrical reenactments of unequal, unfair or otherwise rapacious treatment and conditions; i.e., by relying on a concept I’ll heretofore call “the whore’s paradox.”

(artists: Ray Sugarbutt and Sammy Stocking)

The paradox is simple: demons are maidens and maidens are demons, but both are virgins and whores, and each finds power (and knowledge) according to how the state forbids access, yet access happens anyways; i.e., (de)valued, mid-exchange, thus used to humanize or dehumanize the demonized through performance and play. Per Marx and myself, Capitalism alienates and sexualizes everything. Nature is monstrous-feminine as such, “empowerment” applying to any aspect of our life, bodies, violence and terror the state wishes to monopolize/control, and any trope, convention, cliché or fetish that might be used to degrade, humiliate, rape or otherwise demonize/dominate beings “of nature” per capital’s qualities (re: settler-colonial, heteronormative and Cartesian); i.e., that we can reclaim during ludo-Gothic BDSM, hence through unequal power letting us “get a leg up,” topping from a position of normal disadvantage to have our revenge: perceived disempowerment becoming a paradoxical, interchangeable means of escape, regarding universal worker liberation onstage and off (versus equality of convenience inside the text).

(artist: ALT3R4TI0N)

To do so is to break capital’s hold on all things demons, darkness and nature they stole and monopolized, in turn smashing their own abjection against them and breaking Capitalist Realism with our Aegis—to deny capital’s dead labor and language feeding on living labor and language according to what power and knowledge we exchange to and fro. The whore’s revenge is to break the profit motive by making a world for which it (and rape) are no longer possible using these methods; i.e., by using the same demonic and slutty language capital does, but at cross purposes: to hug the alien—not demonize it to receive state violence—thereby (ex)changing how the world is seen to begin with. We aggregate power differently than state forms, outlasting and outperforming them to dismantle their harvesting mechanisms, social and material, foreign and domestic.

Nature, then, is always a whore who punches up against state pimps to end profit as an endless structure of genocide. History more broadly could be described as whores vs pimps, hence workers vs the state; i.e., something the seemingly cannot die, but whose aforementioned whores are as imperishable as Medusa despite being beheaded.

That’s basically the gist of the whore’s revenge during the whore’s paradox (source: “A Rape Reprise,” 2024).

Furthermore, I would also reflect on the entirety of my series (doing so after having just tried to explain it to someone who had never heard of my work before); and this is what I would write (and post on the same promo page):

Sex Positivity is non-profit/entirely funded through donations and commissions; i.e., I am unemployed, and any money I raise goes towards helping the people I work with. You can donate directly to me through

• • my PayPal, but also Ko-Fi, Patreon and CashApp
  • written and illustrated commissions

as well as through any of the donation links attached to the individual model promotions; i.e., those found on the Sex Work page specifically or on the individual webpages built for my muses; e.g., Nyx’ page and the various details it contains: an Aegis for where power is found, stored and expressed!

(artist: Nyx)

Concerning what these donations and commissions ultimately go towards, this entire project is the result. Sex Positivity seeks to raise awareness and engender activism towards and from all workers, but especially sex workers and the marginalized more broadly (many of whom turn towards sex work to survive); i.e., I do sex work, myself (see: “About the Author“), and the vast majority of sex workers I operate alongside are marginalized in some shape or form. To it, the overarching goal of my work is to humanize the dehumanized by reclaiming monstrous poetic tools of dehumanization; i.e., during informed mutual labor exchange, using the dialectical-material context (and social-sexual factors) of every exchange separately and together to vividly demonstrate protest: through artistic invigilation and expression, one whose holistic, intersectionally solidarized cooperation unfolds during a larger pedagogy of the oppressed (and its modular axes of privilege and oppression synthesizing praxis, mid-duality and -opposition). Those who walk away from Omelas, we seek to amplify and mobilize our cause using what we got—to unite and stand against the state, profit and capital’s various traitors (cops, which pimps are, token or not) by reclaiming not just our bodies, sexualities and genders, but our labor and its holistic performative value: developing Gothic Communism through stochastic means and de facto education. The state from the beginning is a pimp, one that antagonizes nature as monstrous-feminine to put it (and those of it) cheaply to work; i.e., by pimping it genocidally through imbricating persecution networks guided by pre-emptive revenge labeling workers (and nature) as “terrorist,” “black,” “alien,” “witch,” and “other,” etc; e.g., Amazons and the Medusa—with Athenian women tokenizing to attack themselves and the natural world they (and other workers) belong to. In turn, sex work is the oldest profession, hence the oldest form of labor exploitation through rape (which is all that profit, hence wage and labor theft, is); the oldest form of worker revenge is the whore’s against profit, which sex workers (and by extension all workers) attain through collective protest raising emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness on all registers: reversing the terrorist/counterterrorist refrain (thus abjection process) through ludo-Gothic BDSM (see: footnote, above) cryptonymically playing with power as it is understood in society at large (re: Gothic poetics and the dialectic of the alien). We not only heal from rape as something to survive by playing with it; we seek systemic change and universal liberation by playfully putting “rape” in quotes, showing and hiding various things during the cryptonymy process, mid-paradox (refer to “Paratextual (Gothic) Documents” and “Audience, Art and Reading Order” for further summaries of these terms and arguments). To accomplish this, we must endure shameless tokenization, unchecked police brutality and widespread decay in the interim. Sex workers are offshoots of the Medusa, which the state has exploited since Antiquity into the present space and time; i.e., from Athens, Sparta and Rome into the First, Second and Third Reichs leading into Capitalism and Pax Americana as it currently exists. Labor has infinite value, and the elite only have what power we give them in that respect; i.e., monopolies are impossible, provided we fight back any way we can; re: by showcasing our humanity on the very fruit the elite want to harvest. On our Aegis, Medusa speaks through us, our peachy cakes and pies freezing capital Numinously in its tracks, breaking Capitalist Realism. “Stare and tremble,” indeed! (source: “My Book: Gothic Communism”).

(artist: Nyx)

Concerning this reprise, that’s the gist of things I want to supply you with, moving forward; i.e., less with actual foresight, and more the ostensible clairvoyance of someone having been here before (multiple times) and written about it (also multiple times). So, if things seem a bit structurally confusing ahead and you suddenly find yourself feeling lost in the Labyrinth, consider what I just supplied as Ariadne’s thread—not to lead you out of the labyrinth, but rather to furnish you with the clarity needed: to proceed and transform, thus subvert said maze (and its monsters) from within according to where power is stored, meaning as something alien and fetish (fearsome). Take back what they try to pimp as alien (from my abstract, modified while writing this reprise):

Simply put, Gothic has that mood, that cool factor to do the trick; i.e., by subverting monstrous language, which normally dehumanizes workers and nature through popular stories furthering abjection (us versus them): to suitably humanize the harvest, which capital (and its Realism) can only pimp out when vengefully raping nature as monstrous-feminine whore. The whore’s revenge against profit, then, is to fuck back on the same Aegis; i.e., when the Man comes around, show him your Aegis. When done correctly, its paradoxical, cryptonymic exposure will set you free (re: silence is genocide), but reversing abjection must happen together as one—per intersectional solidarity healing from rape through a shared pedagogy of the oppressed: walking away from Omelas and towards post-scarcity while becoming better stewards of nature than historically have ever existed (assimilation is poor stewardship)! Medusa demonstrates there is power in what they try to control; take it back by using it in ways they can’t steal from you! Become the Gorgon!

(artist: Nyx)

To it (and to conclude), exploitation and liberation exist paradoxically in the same half-real territories (on and offstage). From capital in small to the world at large, then, universal liberation all starts with our bodies and the labor attached to them, but also what we make as part of something bigger you can read about in these books (writ in disintegration, but living impossibly on in undead, demonic, Ozymandian versions of themselves)! Capitalism sexualizes everything but it cannot monopolize that process nor its smaller-to-bigger imbricating labor exchanges (and their modular-but-intersecting polities’ privilege/oppression). Turn said process (abjection) anisotropically against the elite; become Medusa to remind our jailors of their own colossal hubris—re: by breaking Capitalist Realism on your Aegis, humanizing the harvest to expose the state (and its proponents) as inhumane! “From cops to states to billionaires and Pygmalions, ACAB, ASAB, ABAB, APAB, etc; re: the state is straight, thus heteronormative, settler-colonial and Cartesian” (source: “Rape Reprise”)! We don’t need them; in fact, we’re better off without them!

Your Commie Mommy,

—Persephone, 3/22/2025

Thesis Paragraph: Capitalism Sexualizes Everything

“Enthrall me with your acumen.”

—Hannibal Lector, Silence of the Lambs (1991)

After deliberating about the keyword format, I’ve decided to keep them bold and color-coded to illustrate their presence in the thesis statement in a very graphical way. Many of these will have been defined already. I’m highlighting them again to show their usage as a group of interrelating terms. —Perse

(artist: Jessica Nigri)

This book wasn’t written/illustrated for Academia, but if it were and I was seriously treating it as my PhD to defend, I would argue that it addresses a knowledge gap regarding the synthesis of Gothic theory with anarcho-Communism, gender studies, ludology and Marxist argumentation (my thesis paragraph, indented for emphasis):

Capitalism dimorphically sexualizes all work to some degree, including sex work, resulting in sex-coercive media and gender roles via universal alienation through monstrous language; this requires an iconoclasm to combat the systemic bigotries that result—a (as the title reads) ‘liberating of sex work under Capitalism through iconoclastic art.’ Gothic Communism is our ticket towards that end; i.e., developing anarcho-Communism, hence a post-scarcity world without nation-states and their built-in, thus historical-material, genocide and exploitation of workers. My teaching approach stresses oppositional praxis according to sex positivity vs sex coercion when reclaiming the harmful language of stigma, bias, control, fear and hate from our colonizers (capitalists), but also power exchange and resistance as a cultural means of social-sexual catharsis and theatrical disguise; i.e., cultivating emotional and Gothic intelligence through a reclaimed Gothic mode of artistic, thus political collective/self-expression (monstrous poetics and applied Gothic theories). Capitalism sexualizes everything for the profit motive using canonical (dimorphic/Cartesian) monstrous poetics to brainwash workers and pit them against each other during Capitalist Realism (core argument); i.e., the Shadow of Pygmalion‘s monomyth/Cycle of Kings and infernal concentric pattern: unironic rape and war are everywhere because Capitalism rapes everything for profit, including people’s minds, according to a profit motive that synonymizes all of these things. Utilized deliberately by Gothic Communism, subversive Amazonomachia‘s ‘dark forces’—its famous, Miltonian paradoxes[1b] and manifesto coordinates: the tenets, theories, and means and materials of expression, fetishes and clichés, etc—can revert Capitalist Realism’s doomed narrative of the crypt by putting “rape” and “war” in quotes, recultivating the Superstructure and reclaiming the Base during class/culture war’s camping of canon. The asymmetrical nature of guerrilla warfare obviously covers of an extremely wide range of artistic possibilities, but generally focuses on sex work and its canonical, dimorphic sexualization, or work in general as similarly sexualized, and heteronormative enforcement/the colonial binary established through regressive Amazonomachia as something to camp; i.e., through ironic kink, fetishization, and BDSM rituals/aesthetics (of psychosexual power and death, stigma and revenge, but also catharsis and transformation, etc) with demonic/undead poetics synthesized through the ‘creative successes’ of proletarian praxis as a class-conscious, ready-for-war response to/critique of capital.

Heteronormativity is obviously something to critique through our thesis argument (and its bevvy of resources), so I want to give its full definition before we proceed into the thesis body:

(from the companion glossary’s exhibit 3b: Author/artist: Meg-Jon Barker from “What’s Wrong with Heteronormativity?” featuring their 2016 book, Queer: A Graphic History.)

Heteronormativity is both highly unnatural and normalized by capital. It is the supremely harmful idea wherein heterosexuality and its relative gender norms are prescribed/enforced to normalized, institutional extremes by those in power—i.e., the Patriarchy. In Marxist terms, capitalists and state agents own, thus control, the media, using it to enforce heterosexuality and the colonial (cis-)gender binary through advertisement on a grand scale (re: the canonical Superstructure). This influence reliably affects how people respond, helping them recognize “the social world of linguistic communication, intersubjective relations, knowledge of ideological conventions, and the acceptance of the law”—re: Lacan’s Symbolic Order. Acceptance of this Order when it is decidedly harmful is manufactured consent, leading to basic human rights abuses perpetrated by the state and its bourgeois actors. Pro-bourgeois abuses happen through various concentric lenses of normativity—heteronormativity, amatonormativity, Afronormativity, homonormativity and queernormativity, etc—that appeal tokenistically to the same colonial binary and its heteronormative mythic structure; i.e., that which conflates human biology (sex and skin color), thus sex and gender roles within a transgenerational curse: the king saw the black, queer and/or female monster and went mad because he had been alienated from them and himself. The curse of the castle and the Shadow of Pygmalion, then, is reliable decay and socio-material madness felt through this engineered tension as being ultimately profitable for the elite and detrimental to everyone else (whether they’re defending the institution or not). Heteronormativity doesn’t just explain away ignominious death, but essentializes and endorses it; i.e., the hallmark couple looks happy so the system must work, right? All you have to do is conform, consume and obey…

(exhibit 0a2b1b1a: Artist, left: Devilhs; middle: Pat Benatar; top-right: Doruk Golcu; bottom-right: Angel Witch. Hysteria [also called “the wandering womb,” exhibit 1a1a1h3a1a1] is commonly portrayed in the monstrous-feminine “Medusa” hairstyle[2] as immodest; i.e., lacking decency or virtue by being visually “loud” [making unironic admonishment of such descriptive sexuality/gender a form of tone-policing: “Hush, darling!”]. But in the same breath, anxiety more broadly is a symptom of society whereupon women [or beings perceived as women] are made by men into what men want to see: a damsel who is sexy by disempowered, or “threatening” in ways they can “kettle” [to surround and attack, a police anti-protestor tactic]. This nuts-and-bolts approach gives little space for the woman to classically voice her concerns, so it surges forth from her Frankensteinian body like ghosts and lightning—a tall, imposing, undead passion of suggestibly orgasmic release that men classically view as “weakness” [which they then sexualize]. Losing control isn’t just a symptom, then, but a means to addressing larger historical-material concerns in the self-same language hijacked for proletarian dialogs: “Fuckin’ metal!”)

Please note: The thesis statement focuses more on canon itself, whereas the “camp map” is about camping everything we talk about here. The remaining ~137 pages of the thesis statement, then, are dedicated to unpacking my thesis paragraph in relation to the “Notes on Power” and “Shadow Zone” essays, the Four Gs, as well as listing most of our keywords and unpacking the core components of the manifesto tree. —Perse

Thesis Body: Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism vs the State; or, Galatea inside the Shadow of Pygmalion

Guilty as charged, but dammit, it ain’t right
There’s someone else controlling me
Death in the air, strapped in the electric chair
This can’t be happening to me
Who made you God to say
“I’ll take your life from you”?

—James Hetfield; “Ride the Lightning,” on Metallica’s Ride the Lightning (1984)

From videogames to music, movies, novels, performance art and open sex work, my base argument (thesis paragraph) is the same: that functional anarcho-Communism is queer and Gothic because it uses grassroots worker solidarity and collective labor action to cultivate horizontal (anarchistic) arrangements of power. Once internalized, said arrangements automatically and intuitively challenge heteronormativity‘s vertical arrangements of power through democratic/non-establishment participation at the linguo-material level (the Gothic has always been queer and inclusive of the demonized to varying degrees; just look at Matthew Lewis, but also Oscar Wilde, James Whale, Clive Barker, Ann Rice, Cassandra Peterson/Elvira, Susan Sontag or Vincent Price—Price in particular being a bisexual icon and famous advocate for LGBTQ+ rights and the rights of Indigenous Persons and a strong challenger to the Pygmalion ideal of a subservient Galatea (e.g., Dr. Frankenfurter and Rocky from Rocky Horror Picture Show, 1975—builder and “built,” if you know what I mean): Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism being the process of countercultural Gothic poetics as a creative rebellion against a Pygmalion-esque status quo/Shadow of Pygmalion and its profit motive and disastrous paywalls on basic human necessities (Lemmy.world: “Capitalism is the paywall of life,” 2023); re:

the patriarchal vision and subsequent shadow of any knowing-better “kings” of empire, thus capital; i.e., of male- and token-dominated industries inside the Man Box, wherein “Pygmalion” means “from a male king’s mind,” but frankly extends to all traitors (male or not): upholding profit/the status quo raping nature for profit (and those treated by the state as “of nature” for those reasons);

i.e., a profit motive challenged by Galatea herself as come alive and making her own media as a gender-non-conforming idea splintering into countless monsters spawned from a transgenerational/-continental, public Gothic imagination: the shadow of Galatea through oft-horny and very gay simulacra of sex-positive egregores, tulpas, and Yokai. We’re taking these dark forces back by “making it gay“; i.e., “camping the canon” (which the “camp map” will explain further after we’ve laid all the “map pieces” out about canon).

For the state, we are the proverbial “forces of darkness” threatening its “perfect, eternal, natural” existence (through various campy paradoxes; e.g., sexy Marx/nerd sex); for the anarcho-Communist, the state is the enemy (meaning the nation-state, but also the historical-material status quo) that exploits everyone through colonized and colonizing monstrous poetics and its arbitration by police forces. Often, these forces are hauntologized as knights and other male action heroes, or token persons inside the same Man Box as arbiters of justice; i.e., wearing the badges of state agents and de facto vigilantes that serve the status quo and enjoy its rescindable benefits, which play out in various durable stereotypes: “boundaries for me, not for thee” illustrating a double life whose alter ego/persona (secret or open) unites with the wearer’s mask-off identity to torment the underclass. It often manifests through false generosity and protection. As such, The strings attached to charity are a noose for class traitors to hang themselves with; inside a framed narrative—that is, a narrative that is both thoroughly unreliable and frames persons. Somewhere is the real killer but more than that is the structure that produces more chaos the killer can manipulate and control. Cops like to fuck us over for the state; we lie to preserve ourselves in the face of their deceptions.

In other words, Christian “charity” can manifest as class guilt and betrayal towards the go-to sacrifice by the slightly less expendable as sometimes-sacrificed when the state eats itself; i.e., owner zombies smaller than the state (the Big Zombie) buying away their systemic problems as tied to older clichés and dead metaphors. Reassigned to power as it exists currently in theatrical iterations, these self-deceptive acts of cannibalization manifest in thoroughly domesticated affairs of the heart regardless of actual theatrical potency or charm; e.g., Bill Gates (who materializes through the master of the old manor’s inheritance anxiety as a hopelessly old throwback that critiques the bourgeoisie in outmoded language: Count Dracula, or “Gates” but sexed up and/or openly ghoulish far more than he normally appears).

(exhibit 0a2b1b1b: A modern-day retelling of “Young Goodman Brown” [1835], Ari Aster’s Hereditary [2014] chillingly presents the Gothic home as devouring of the blind who, despite their Herculean efforts, are sacrificed inside a castle, inside a castle, inside a castle. Their combined, recursive downfall is a great lie built on lies, assisted partly by their inability to effectively or honestly communicate with one another towards unveiling systemic issues. The mother thinks herself freed of the former matriarch’s tyranny but through her “objective recreations” merely apes the larger scheme: the more she fights, the sweeter she tastes.

In turn, Queen Leigh [pronounced “lie”] is part of that same scheme, serving a patriarchal “top dog” as his queen bee. As such, the movie—similar to The Witch [2015] or Rosemary’s Baby [1968]—is sexist; i.e., it demonizes corrupt and hellish female forces as naturalized around patriarchal power—a male hegemon who gives orders to lesser female witches to do his bidding as the great witch of all: “Service to Satan is service enough!” It critiques Capital through the harvest without having anything good to say about witches or the harvest. In short, it scapegoats them and blames Capitalism on witches. Aster’s witch hunt stokes the middle class’s fearful fascination with the harvest through bastardized versions of itself, specifically to apologize for the grim avatars holding the sickle handle under Capitalism: the witch cop as a black rabbit or cat slicing as the Grim Reaper does the through the proverbial “wheat”; i.e., themselves and their own bodies, their own necks to lend to the blood spill’s dark harvest—an obscene perversion of paganized rites married to the Western lie of the Gothic castle’s own chronotope: the castle is the vampire [or the “mommy dom,” as I argue for Metroidvania, in the “Camping Tolkien’s Refrain using Metroidvania” subchapter].

[artist: Art Spiegelman]

“And where they burn books, they will burn people.” Most of the time, it will never affect the [non-token] class traitor to the same degree, but it is still incredibly abusive to condition someone to think they have power by putting them in positions of coercive domination over others [often by working off them through their lived trauma/criminogenic conditions]. In a world where everyone is lying, Gothic Communism conducts rebellion on the same stage, in the same costumes and masks; i.e., it doubles these perfidious black bunnies and other animalized demons and performative undead through “Trojan” variants that camp the grander canon, often in druglike ways: “Follow the white rabbit” but also the black rabbit, whose function determines their dialectical-material role during class/culture war, not aesthetics [we’ll unpack this much more when we look at Acid Communism in Volume Two’s “Call of the Wild” chapter—exhibit 56a1a1].)

Whether a lord, sheriff, queen bee, or his or her deputies, canonical praxis amounts to team cop vs team victims. Trauma, in turn, lives in the body but also the estate as an extension of personhood; i.e., inherited, hereditary trauma expressed through the historical Gothic’s site of dynastic primacy and hereditary rites: the castle intimated through the old manor or high-rise. In these places, abuse begets abuse (the father or mother abusing their children), and fascism recruits from the broken home as criminogenic. In turn, the elite’s gang of undead demon thugs cannibalize the latter through DARVO/reactive abuse: “You’re the zombies, not us!” (which will only intensify when the state crisis enters decay—i.e., throwing the state of exception ever wider and eating the workforce from the outside inwards like a piecrust towards the precious center). Not just a war on drugs, but a war with drugs and the stuff of drugs tied to smaller conflicts fenced inside larger conflicts trying to make sense of them. In the end, Capitalism is a giant lie, where fascism is one side of a murderous chameleon—not guilty of accidental confusion but deliberate deception; unmasked, they drop the mask’s friendly affect and, like Father Schedoni, have a flat affect underneath. We must expose them and this requires masks, but also a silly sense of humor tied to sex and drugs as things to camp:

(artist: Devilhs)

As Gothic Communists, we share our battlefield with these thugs and their material condition’s historical materialism. That is, our shared stomping grounds are the Gothic imagination (and its language, drugs, aesthetics and materials) on all registers, our own campy doubles subverting the usual double standards of our would “protectors” (who serve the state and protect property before people): the blood-soaked battlefields of Vietnam and other killing fields as music-tinged (the drugs, aesthetics, and music[3], etc, all yielding what Slavoj Zizek—from A Pervert’s Guide to Ideology [2012]—would call “universal adaptability,” whereupon function is determined by function/dialectical-materialism, not sloganized aesthetics); monsters and drugs are not exclusive to the elite and their dogs of war. Nor are their canonical “magic glasses”—to see the world through, hiding what the elite and their proponents are—the only prescription. We can change the prescription with a different set: dialectical-material analysis, but also enjoyment of our labor as re-seized. When worn we can see the elite and their proponents according to how they function: as vampires from outer space, brainwashing the rest of us to consume and obey until the end of time. Eventually, we won’t have to wear the glasses to see how the world works; it will become second-nature.

(exhibit 0a2b1b2: Artist, left: Luke Preece; top-middle: manedpizzawolf; bottom-middle: Patrick Connan. Plato’s allegory of the cave is primarily a visual metaphor that, under Capitalism, describes how the profit motive is guided through vicarious experience and brainless consumption that codes our behaviors. Capitalism alienates everything and everything in monstrous, heteronormative language. As I write in a now-discontinued book that has been absorbed into this one, 

The survival of neoliberalism hinges on the neoliberal’s ability to remain invisible. For example, John Carpenter’s They Live turns class theatre-going nostalgia on its head, illustrating the elite’s panoptic, ever-present desire to invade and control others through what we consume as tied to how we see the world as something to eat. This turns them into giant parasites that codify rather fittingly as vampiric aliens from outer space, and their victims into brainwashed zombies/smaller vampire offshoots. The moment this spell is broken—say, by putting on a pair of magic glasses—the elite’s power vanishes/is revealed to be an illusion. The problem is, those “still in the cave” will refuse to put the glasses on; the reason being they are so hopelessly dependent on dogma to supply their structured worldview that anything else constitutes the apocalypse [a grand revelation] as the literal end of the world. They literally cannot imagine anything beyond Capitalism, even when shown its harmful effects [source: Neoliberal and Fascist Propaganda in Yesterday’s Heroes, 2021]. 

The basic idea could be called Zombie-Vampire Capitalism, whose business-as-usual operations we’ll provide a full definition of a little later in the thesis statement. For now, just know that the concept of challenging Zombie-Vampire Capitalism has been absorbed into this book through the creation of “special glasses” that, oddly enough, are often based on the accidental perceptive elements to people who weren’t always aware of what they were doing—e.g., Milton or Radcliffe’s accidental critique of Captialism. All the same, the state-apologetic elements in their famous media results in a thoroughly “rose-tinted” “prescription” that not only blinds workers, but turns them into zombie-vampires that devour for the state through various means; i.e., by embodying the pro-state damsel, detective, demon, or dutiful, tokenized scapegoat, etc. In other words, we have to update the prescription by embodying the monstrous underclass as something to not just identify with, but see through the eyes of in order to conduct dialectical-material analysis [a concept of “monster vision” we’ll explore quite a bit during Volume Two’s Humanities primer].)

From all walks of Gothic queerness, then, labor movements treat class/culture war as something to express in monstrous language that challenges canonical Amazonomachia (“monster war,” but often with a monstrous-feminine flavor) as a heteronormative enterprise; i.e., by evoking the apocalypse to uncover and expose the division of labor as sexually dimorphic in ways that normally reward white, cis-het Christian men first and foremost, but also turn them (and their tokenized subordinates) into regimented abusers who rape and kill for the state’s profit motive: the Protestant work ethic enacted through a monopoly of violence/state of exception where said violence is always possible (from Max Weber and Gorgio Agamben, below)

• Weber’s maxim regarding the state’s monopoly of violence: “To fully rule a territory requires the authority to violently control it if necessary. This is the source of Weber’s well-known maxim: a state holds a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence within its territory, meaning that violence perpetrated by other actors is illegitimate” (source: Matthew Farish and Timothy Barney’s “Maps and the State,” in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2020).
• Weber’s notion of the Protestant work ethic: “that Protestant ethics and values, along with the Calvinist doctrines of asceticism and predestination, enabled the rise and spread of Capitalism” (source: tutor2u regarding The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism); this extends to the demonization of the Catholics, the Puritans and various Protestant outlier denominations, and obviously Islam and pagan/non-Christian religions (with Communism often regarded as secular thanks to Stalin).
• Agamben’s state of exception: “A special condition in which the juridical order is actually suspended due to an emergency or a serious crisis threatening the state. In such a situation, the sovereign, i.e. the executive power, prevails over the others and the basic laws and norms can be violated by the state while facing the crisis” (source: State of Exception, 2005), which we apply to any marginalized group the state targets during crisis, moral panic and decay.

and whose steadfast practitioners, during Amazonomachia, are always putting in holy work as male action heroes (or heroes acting like cis-het men).

(artist: Andreas Marschall)

All heroes function and appear as monsters in some shape or form. Heteronormative theatre’s copaganda and Military Industrial Complex binarize monster theatricality in service of capital (thus the profit motive as something to replicate and enforce through unironic Gothic poetics/mimesis). There are “correct” male heroes organized between white and black knights, and “incorrect” male heroes who are “corrupt” in ways that destroy the established order of the athletic/athletic-adjacent conflict as lucrative, thus heteronormative (and vice versa). This historical-material gender trouble extends to female/token heroes, who either are monster girls (exhibit 1a1a1h3a2) of the traditional sort—i.e., the damsel/detective (Gothic heroine) and demon (female Gothic villain) or the foreigner whose heteronormatively assigned power conveniently challenges Western (white, cis-het) men, thus patriarchal dominance—and whose warrior-esque compromises with power are allowed for short-lived gradients: the subjugated Amazon as phallic/”like a man,” but who must eventually conform to varying degrees when the state’s perpetual crises enter decay and radicalize the heteronormative model of war at all theatrical registers on- and offstage. Until the woman or token is closeted/collared, they are afforded the same crisis of position—i.e., the white, animalized, undead/demonic enforcer as threatened by the parallel forces of darkness coming out of the shadow zone. But because women/token minorities are coded as “weaker” by canon, they will corrupt “faster” thus be closeted or buried to prevent the spread of infection (what I call the “euthanasia effect,” which I will unpack more in a moment).

Yet, even if women or token groups submit to their “correct role” in regressive Amazonomachia, segregation is historically no defense from the profit motive. Because there must always be an enemy to fight (a crisis to extend war into forever), a woman or a token minority—even when entirely submissive and bridal/slave-coded—are precious but contested property that can always turn into a “bad demon” at any moment (e.g., the wandering womb, exhibit 1a1a1h3a1a1), thus are always a threat that must be policed, often by members of their own group (cops defend property for the state; for token cops, this means themselves). The historical materialism of canonical Amazonomachia is a train of girl bosses and their witch cop/war boss variants that manifest on- and offstage as TERFs who unironically punch down against people more marginalized than them while performatively punching up against the elite, who they don’t meaningfully challenge during oppositional praxis; kettled, they instead emulate the Man Box (traditional male sexism and other bigotries tied to weird canonical nerds, who we’ll unpack in a moment) as a token assimilation fantasy—i.e., parroting the colonizer (e.g., Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, 1952). As such, they take war brides from the underclass during military urbanism, colonizing the poetic sphere and real world while furthering psychosexual violence, token “white” fragility and employing DARVO—in short, acting like white cis-het men as the prime colonizing force in polite and impolite (moderate and reactionary) forms: the white and black knight.

I’ve provided the most central keyword definitions (monster-wise) after a short list of undefined ones, below, but please consider the glossary for the undefined ones, as they are all important:

• tokenism/assimilation fantasy/minority police
• war brides (submissive class traitors/collaborators)
• TERFs and SWERFs/NERFs^[4]
• punching down
• punching up
• white (cis-het, Christian male) fragility
• gaslight, gatekeep…

…girl-boss (tokenism)

A popular moderate MO, girl bosses are usually neoliberal symbols of “equality,” a strong woman of authority who defends the status quo (an overtly fascist girl boss would be someone like Captain Israel; source: Bad Empanada 2’s “Marvel’s Israeli Superhero ‘Sabra,'” 2022). This can be the female “suit,” in corporate de rigueur, but also Amazons or orcs as corporate commodities (war bosses). Suits present Capitalism as “neutral,” but also ubiquitous; Amazons and orcs (and all of their gradients) centralize the perceived order of good-versus-evil language in mass-media entertainment. Queer bosses are the same idea, but slightly more progressive: a strong queer person of authority whose queernormativity upholds the status quo. When this becomes cis-supremacist, the boss is a TERF—an assimilated war boss who regresses to a war bride herself when decay sets in, removing token privileges from most-marginalized token to least-marginalized (canonically speaking).

witch cops/war bosses

A class, gender or race traitor dressed up in the heroic-victimized language of warrior variants of past victims. Their baleful gaze is diverted away from the elite, instead punching down at their fellow workers to break up their strikes, unions and riots; but also to tease disempowered women with the “carrot” of active, physical violence they’re conditioned to use against the state’s enemies… [abridged].

reactive abuse

Systemic/social abuse that provokes a genuine self-defense reaction from the victim, whereupon the expectant abuser “self-defends” in extreme prejudice through DARVO. Reactive abuse correlates with reactionaries defending the state—i.e., reactionary politics being a form of white, cis-het fragility (moderacy being a veiled form of this).

In Gothic terms, this threat of animalistic/chimeric and undead/demonic possession (and composite reification) is theatrical “fact” complicated by the ghosts of Marx seeking “Jewish revenge” versus members of the middle class inheriting the anxiety of their own accidents of birth haunted by the shadow of revenge manifesting through the spectre of the skeleton king as threatening to return and level everything (a concept called the Leveler, which we’ll unpack more in a moment). Cryptomimetically everything haunts the same shared oral/written language as opposing Destroyers: the “kaiju” principle.

(artist: Nunchaku)

Because the state historically-materially rejects democracy through medieval abuse, it will advertise anarcho-Communism’s subversive Amazonomachia as “dangerously different” in an animalized, undead-demonic sense, thus threatening to the canonical idea of men and women and its canonical, regressive Amazonomachia; i.e., an abject, monstrous-feminine “woman is other” (Julia Kristeva, vis-à-vis Barbara Creed and Simone Beauvoir) courted and cowed through harmful xenophobia/xenophilia—in short the slaying and fucking of monsters to various harmful degrees in the same theatrical space:

xenophobia (sex-positive or sex-coercive)

Monster-slaying. A fear of the unknown as something to exude or endure, which may take sex-positive or sex-coercive forms. Inside Gothic circles, theatrical xenophobia sits between fear of and fascination towards “the other” as a social-sexual construct; i.e., inherited either by privileged workers acting out unironic gender trouble, or minorities surviving it through their own ironic variation of gender trouble and gender parody in monstrous forms… [abridged].

monstrous-feminine

A term lifted from Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine. While Creed focuses on the desire for the cis woman not to be a victim, thus terrifying men in abject, monstrous ways (which are often then crucified by heteronormative agents, including token ones like Ellen Ripley), the fact remains that the monstrous-feminine extends to a much broader persecution network; i.e., of any “feminine” force that falls outside of what is acceptable within the Patriarchy’s heteronormative colonial binary. I have placed feminine in quotes to account for anything perceived as “feminine” thus “not correctly “male”; i.e., “woman is other” expanded to trans, intersex and non-binary persons (and the animals associated with them: bunnies, butterflies, cats, dogs, foxes, etc). This can be a male twink or vampire; the cis-queer bear’s expression of tenderness and love towards another man (or whoever they’re intimate with in whatever way constitutes intimacy for them); a female Amazon that rebels against the state, whether cis, or genderqueer in binary/non-binary ways. The possibilities for heteronormative conformity are narrow and brutal inside a vast historical-material tableau of the same-old patterns; gender-non-conformity’s ironies go on endlessly.

xenophilia (sex-positive or sex-coercive)

Monster-fucking. A love of the unknown as something to exude or endure, which may take sex-positive or sex-coercive forms. Whereas harmful (sex-coercive) xenophobia bleeds into harmful xenophilia, the sex-positive reversal of abjection and canonical xenophobia/xenophilia resists state power through covert, proletarian means; e.g., “Trojan” monsters and monster-slaying/-fucking rituals that hide revolutionary intent during liminal expressions of oppositional praxis as oft-pornographic. The monster isn’t simply someone to fuck (though it can be); it’s also someone to potentially love asexually as an “ace” friend/co-conspirator—e.g., Nimona (exhibit 56d2). As such, cathartic xenophilia extends to empathy for the wretched, whose medievalized trauma often overlaps with their sexuality and gender but doesn’t synonymize with it; indeed, cathartic xenophilia seeks to understand their rage at, and medieval alienation by, state powers (the xenomorph being a queer icon we shall examine many, many times throughout this book, but especially in Volume Two’s “Demon” section of chapters).

Monsters—specifically their killing and fucking[5]—sit within liminal expression as something to reflect on with various degrees of irony. As such, the monstrous-feminine’s prescribed, “correct[6]” devilry can take a million different “incorrect” forms—from Amazons to bears, twunks and twinks to vampires, zombies or werewolves to xenomorphs, etc—and whose mere existence intimates the practice of “sodomy” (non-PIV/extramarital/interracial sex) as a direct challenge to the (settler) colonial binary/standard, thus worthy of exile, of capital punishment, of genocide: carried out by the sexually dimorphized roles of monogamous, white, cis-het Christian warriors and wives (and their token subordinates) within a vicious-yet-sacred propaganda cycle, which I call the Cycle of Kings; i.e., part of the Shadow of Pygmalion (which we discussed earlier) and various interrelated terms (embedded for emphasis, the full definition this time):

the Cycle of Kings

Another term of mine, the Cycle of Kings is the centrist monomyth, or cycling out of good and bad kings (and the occasional queen), which extends to all the kings’ white cis-het Christian men or those acting like these men, thus warrior-minded good cops and bad cops (weird canonical nerds) apologizing for state genocide through Man Box and “prison sex” mentality arguments; i.e., within hauntological copaganda dressed up in medieval language; e.g., TERFs but also other token groups in-fighting for profit, hence dressing up in bad faith. Trapped between the past and present according to “spectres of fascism” and “spectres of Marx” (which grapple, mid-kayfabe, in anachronistic language, thereby having an emphasis on the imaginary past/retro-future, aka Fisher’s “canceled future,” vis-à-vis Jodey Castricano’s cryptomimesis), these dark reflections often trouble persons of the heteronormative persuasion versus those of a genderqueer persuasion. Either struggles to identify with themselves in relation to canonical propaganda dictating how non-standard deviations from canon must die; i.e., someone is always a cop or a victim, but generally with some sense of overlap, imposter syndrome and internalized stigma, bigotry, guilt and shame, etc. To it, Capitalism is always in a state of emergency/exception, and this relies on the creation of monstrous enemies (and related qualities; re: internalized stigma) to turn workers against each other (the in-group and its tokenized proponents). Doing so during state decay and regeneration (feeding vampirically on workers and nature) serves to keep labor too busy to effectively challenge the elite; i.e., by warring with one another and inside-outside themselves. In turn, these inherited confusions, guilt and mistrust are used by the elite to justify their hold onto vertical power as a structure, whereupon the calamity of war-as-an-apologetic-business—of canonically whitewashing class, culture and race war (e.g., the battle-of-the-sexes or civil rights activism)—personify in theatrical wars that extend offstage, as well as total war and shadow/proxy war on the global, non-diegetic stage (or its return home via the Imperial Boomerang/military urbanism). All collectively reek from Capitalism’s zombie-like bulk, its hellish orifices release Promethean “exhaust” during offshoots of the infernal concentric pattern.

the infernal concentric pattern

Described by Manuel Aguirre in “Geometries of Terror” (2008) as the final room, or rather a room that, per my arguments, conveys finality through the exhaustion of military optimism[7] in the face of an endless, yawning dead;

where the hero crosses a series of doors and spaces until he reaches a central chamber, there to witness the collapse of his hopes; [this infernal concentric pattern has] in Gothic one and the same function: to destabilize assumptions as to the physical, ontological or moral order of the cosmos [… It is like a Mandelbrot set (left):] finite, and yet from within we cannot reach its end; it is a labyrinth that delves “down” instead of pushing outwards. From the outside it looks simple enough: bounded, finite, closed; from the inside, however, it is inextricable. It is a very precise graphic replica of the Gothic space in The Italian […] Needless to say, the technique whereby physical or figurative space is endlessly fragmented and so seems both to repeat itself and to stall resolution is not restricted to The Italian: almost every major Gothic author (Walpole, Beckford, Lee, Lewis, Godwin, Mary Shelley, Maturin, Hogg) uses it in his or her own way. Nor does it die out with the metamorphosis of historical Gothic into other forms of fiction (source).

i.e., the infernal concentric pattern is the smoke of the ignominious dead used as a myopic screen of arrogant, Americanized Capitalist Realism—one that hides the obvious function of the free market and exploitation as an irrefutably man-made, but nonetheless brutal Cartesian, heteronormative, and settler-colonial model: profit, by any means necessary (often through a Protestant work ethic whose post-Enlightenment era of “benign” Reason demonizes medieval markers in ways useful to the state and its Radcliffean thieves; e.g., the Roman Catholics, but also the paganized Romans before them and the selectively-religious fascist “Romans” after them, etc: the First Reich, Second Reich, and Third Reich, aka Holy Roman Empire, Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany).

Furthermore, such patterns are generally archaeological and architectural in nature, speaking to the medieval idea of mise-en-abyme (“to place in abyss”) and Numinous occupations with palliative therapeutic and harmful potential, alike; re: canon vs camp, during the demonic, ergodic, concentric, anisotropic, entropic and gigantic recursions at work; e.g., Metroidvania and similar Gothic castles (or otherwise haunted mighty homes’ signature castle-narratives, mid-chronotope) relayed through endless inheritance and doomed heroic motion: death from the house birthing and eating you while exploring it through fatal homecomings. Furthermore, as things to generate and play inside for different reasons, such spaces suggest profit as normally concealing itself during the cryptonymy process; i.e., showing things normally hidden/opaque through unresolved systemic/ontological tensions, exquisitely torturous emotional distress, total imprisonment, taboo subjects, raw aggregate power, paradoxical healing and tremendous obscurity (re: darkness visible, the Black Veil, etc). The pattern, then, is Capitalism (and its deliriums) in small, hence conducive to ludo-Gothic BDSM (and calculated risk) at large when played within miniatures expressing those hypermassive/quantum things felt beyond and inside themselves.

Not only does this profit motive incentivize the state to aggregate[8] against labor solidarity‘s mere suggestion at every possible register; its resultant cycle—of state power relayed through monomythic stories that quell labor aggregation as its primary opposing force—becomes something to rescue from its own seminal tragedies of self-cannibalization (these will be mentioned in many different forms throughout this book, enough that it may be hard, if not futile to point out each time I do: “this is an apocalypse!”): the monomyth is a cryptonym[9] that disguises and apologizes for state-sanctioned genocide; i.e., all the Jedi (not just the Sith) are hauntological cops by virtue of a shared centrist function: to kill younglings before handing the sword and the magic spell (the mind trick) to the next-in-line to repeat the monomyth cycle as disseminated far and wide. Obi Wan was projecting when he said, “Only a Sith deals in absolutes!” (which is, itself, an absolute—George Lucas’ Hollywood-Marxist allegories earning their keep).

(source)

The above dissemination happens according to the monomyth being prolonged under Capitalism according to ancient theatrical traditions revived in the present in hauntological forms: the staged combat, wrestling match or team-based engagement with heroes (monsters) who appear “strong” in the dimorphic, heteronormative sense: through the sport of war with opposing teams (armies/contestants), often at an unfair advantage[10]. As mentioned a moment ago, all heroes are monsters, and any of them can “turn heel” at any moment. Always threatening to “corrupt” the whole in a theatrical sense, there are myriad double standards (and doubles). White male heroes are built to “defend” in a pre-emptive sense, thus can always become the Great Destroyer who must be “put down” after “going feral/rabid,” but are automatically given the benefit of the doubt/expected to kick a certain amount of ass (an ass-kicking quota, to serve the profit motive). Meanwhile, female/token heroes always threaten to “turn”; i.e., to revive the vengeful spirits of the colonized dead under Imperialism, which possess and take hold of them, thereby breaking the narrative (thus cycle) of war as a business. Class-war sentiment cannot be prevented, which means that token monsters/vice characters are passed off as “absolutely fine,” provided their jester’s speech (speaking truth to power) ends within sacrifice or conversion; i.e., controlled opposition. Until then, the usual suspects are squinted at suspiciously by a leery eyed Conan (classically an intolerant sexist thug who solves his problems through banditry and open violence). Through the mechanisms of capital, historical materialism predicts that the forces of darkness will always rise from hell, requiring their anticipated exorcism and smiting. Shoved back into the pit, the underclass has been scapegoated, restoring order by returning things “to normal.”

Also called the Hero’s Journey, the monomyth is a normalized rite of passage whereby a (traditionally male) child finds himself offered the “rare” opportunity to elevate through the seemingly divine provision of a sword or some such masterful weapon (which the Gothic frames as a doomed quest for mastery through the Numinous during the Promethean Quest and/or Faustian bargain—more on this deeper in the volume and later in the series). There’s many steps and moving parts following the Call to Adventure (often categorized between twelve and seventeen), but the basic gist is: offer adventure, refuse, change mind, get sword, cross boundaries, overcome trials and ordeals, kill the (corrupt, monstrous-feminine) monster, return in some shape or form changed by the quest, save the princess (from getting raped by the villain)/get the girl. Joseph Campbell is more prescriptive and optimistic, writing in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949):

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered, and a decisive victory is won: the Hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man [“bros before hoes,” I guess].

Personally, I find this whole notion incredibly dubious; i.e., harmful wish fulfillment/guilty pleasure that is generally trapped within a space chockfull of prescribed war and rape cryptonyms (not a genocide, but an “adventure”), thus meant to instruct (through prescriptive sexuality and bad education; e.g., sex education and prescribed gender roles) coercive, harmful sex as medievalized rape fantasies/appropriative peril built around the Gothic/wrestling theatrical formula as dimorphically “at war”: someone who is simultaneously “biologically female,” mentally stupid (“emotional”), and conspicuously weak must be in danger of being raped at all times so the white knight can rescue them from the black knight (who’s always supposed to lose). It’s systemic entitlement and apologia for “good” men against “bad,” as usual, but also (as we shall see) the structure that produces them as ubiquitous, lucrative and instructional inside and outside of the kayfabe‘s contest of arms, the staged combat/duel: the centrist “good war” of good cop, bad cop; babyface, heel; (boring) hero, (interesting) demon lover/vice character; American, Nazi, etc (they’re functionally in cahoots, hence no “vs”). Furthermore, there is no escaping the narrative space/structure and its didactic conventions, wherein the fear of colonial inheritance also runs deep in Neo-Gothic fiction: the chronotope as historically communicating the fear of rape, incest and murder as doomed[11] but also treacherous, committed at the hands of men who are supposed to be our protectors (the usual suspects).

(exhibit 0a2c: Artist, left: Frank Frazetta; right: Yukiko Hirai and Emika Kida. Frazetta’s girls are always animalized as intensely erotic sexpots who are being threatened by various forms of captivity by equally eroticized male power/death fetishes. The pre-fascist monarch keeping her chained and naked by his throne; the dark male rapist springing from the shadows to drag her off or, worse, her choosing to run off with him; or her [as princess or warrior-princess] acting as a performative “hyena” that submits to Conan as the visible “stud,” alpha/top dog [thus chief performer in the heteronormative hierarchy] when all’s said and done—all are fetishized/fought over, forcing the woman-as-property into an unenviable position where she is constantly naked, imperiled and animal-magnetic/chimeric, thus somehow “asking for it.” It’s the skeptical cop’s smug question, “Well, what was she wearing?” followed by the pissed-off retort, “Whatever the artist forced her to [often nothing]!” Stripping is not consent, but you wouldn’t know that from Frazetta’s work. For him, it’s normal, our Pygmalion deliberately blurring the lines between consent and refusal, thus “yes and no” through incredibly bigoted, thus harmful/sex-coercive, psychosexual stereotypes [versus cathartic ones during sex-positive forms of monstrous liminal expression, exhibit 1a1a1g3].

 Worse, these become something to mimic by imitating “the master” himself as a seasoned professional. Frazetta was a child prodigy who worked in comics since he was a teenager, and painted for decades after that. But his “style,” with all its sexist/racist baggage, is largely unchallenged in videogames [Dragon’s Crown, 2013; above] and other mediums in Gothic [thus popular] poetics today. This aesthetic can be taught to any artist, regardless of their gender or sex; e.g., John Kricfalusi’s pedophilic tendencies reflecting in his art, but also his abusive relationship with underage female artists that he worked with to draw in his problematic, nostalgic style [blameitonjorge’s “John Kricfalusi: An Open Secret,” 2019]. Things don’t stay “on the canvas,” and Ren & Stimpy [1991] was a children’s cartoon[12] full of inside adult jokes penned by a literal, confessed pedophile[13]. The same osmotic qualities extend from older palimpsests that inform culture—its consumers and commodities—as forever interacting back and forth, mimetically shaping the way that heroes, as monsters, are used to communicate, thus teach, emotional and Gothic intelligence through popular hero narratives; i.e., how monsters should appear and behave as indicative of industry-wide “open secrets.”

People love monsters; they’re the ultimate comfort food to Capitalism’s systemic bullshit, but also the ultimate didactic device from a canonical standpoint: com panis, or “with bread,” as had by companions during panis et circenses, which translates to “bread and circuses, a somewhat derisive term for food and entertainment offered by a government to soothe public discontent” [source: Merriam Webster]. It’s Pavlovian, the carrot to the stick by trotting out various spectacles that commodify struggle and resistance as heteronormatively coded in hauntological/cryptonymic language whose capitalist time-spaces further the process of abjection.

As stated earlier, games master players by coding them to act towards stigmatized enemies with heroic violence. Seth Giddings and Helen Kennedy touch on this in “Little Jesuses and *@#?-off Robots” [2008] when they write:

conventional assumptions that players learn the game system to achieve mastery over it—and that this mastery is the source of the prime pleasure of gameplay—is in fact an inversion of the dynamics and pleasures of videogame play. Games configure their players, allowing progression through the game only if the players recognize what they are being prompted to do, and comply with these coded instructions [source]. 

But in truth, this applies to any game/struggle, theatrically and dialectically-materially speaking.

[artist, left and right: Persephone van der Waard] 

Per Anita Sarkeesian, this canonical mastery can be challenged with critical thinking skills and still enjoyed despite the problematic elements: “It’s both possible, and even necessary, to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects”. And indeed, I absolutely love Dragon’s Crown and Frazetta, but after I camp their unironic waifus/wheyfus [a kind of monster girl, exhibit 1a1a1h3a2] with my own subversive Amazonomachia/thicc warrior mommies. But doing so challenges the profit motive, thus historically is met with suspicion; i.e., the foreign plot; e.g., Gamergate, as per weird canonical nerds. In their eyes, I must be up to no good, “having an agenda” or “making things political.”)

Through camp’s questioning of canonical monomyths, we can spot disempowering patterns beyond that of canonical, Faustian empowerment (false power) tied to unequal material conditions and dogma: the Cycle of Kings as a both a “bad bargain” that destroys those who take part and a Promethean Quest where theft from the gods (the elite) leads to self-destruction: the invented hero is both fetishized as both a “good-vs-evil” bringer of death against a foreign enemy/plot (we’ll explain how in a bit) and expendable by design (wielding Excalibur[14] and wearing the crown is fatal to him). Simply put, it’s profitable to the elite and conducive towards disguising their aims to cycle through kings and soldiers during monstrous poetics as mask-like, imbued with temporary theatrical power (thus leading to more copaganda in the domestic sphere; re: military urbanism/optimism and the Military Industrial Complex).

As part of this grand, obfuscating cycle of self-destruction, the state exploits workers to recruit soldiers they either send abroad and commit genocide, or use to (re)colonize the homefront (re: the Imperial Boomerang) in the name of the father and one’s bloodline through patrilineal descent. A common historical materialism, then, is the collapse of said descent; i.e., the endless/circular ruin’s castle-narrative as the fatherly ghost of the counterfeit/narrative of the crypt, meaning “a false copy of the barbaric past” that seemingly goes on forever and survives all living things as a viral, souless copy of itself: “A narrative of a narrative to a hidden curse announced by things displaced from the former cause.” This narrative structure and cycle was later identified by me in videogames during my own graduate work/master’s thesis on the Metroidvania‘s chronotope (a story told through recursive/ergodic motion [endless and performed through non-trivial effort—from Espen Aarseth[15]] through a Gothic castle, which we’ll examine more in during the “camp map,” but also in Volume Two when we look at Team Cherry’s 2017 Metroidvania, Hollow Knight, exhibit 40h1/i).

While queer intersectionality is important during mise-en-abyme/framed (concentric, unreliable) narratives, the gendered politics of the canonical imaginary medieval tends to frame the monarchs of the castle as male and female (which so-called “Male Gothic” explores through direct confrontation and combat, whereas “Female Gothic[16]” gingerly investigates through a process called “armoring” lest the effeminate detective swoon and perish); i.e., the male skeleton king, dark-skinned barbarian horde, or dragon lord and the female “phallic woman“/Archaic Mother:

phallic women

The cock of the state. A monstrous-feminine archetype predicated on active, penetrative violence (or scapegoated for it; e.g., the trans woman as a “woman with a penis” trope). Canonical phallic women are female characters, villains, and monsters (often Amazons, Medusas or something comparable) who behave in a traditional masculine way—though generally in response to patriarchal structures with an air of female revenge; e.g., Lady Macbeth from Macbeth… [abridged].

(artist: Patrick Brown)

Archaic Mothers (and vaginal spaces)

The womb of nature. An ancient, monstrous-feminine symbol of female/matriarchal power. In Gothic stories, the Archaic Mother (and her space) is generally something for the canonically male/phallic woman to slay and rape (as per the Cartesian Revolution)—e.g., Samus being the “space” variant of a knight or Amazon, specifically a subjugated, TERF Amazon killing Mother Brain, the Dark Mother, in service of the Galactic Federation and “the Man” (the entire Red Scare’s class character dialog being displaced to outer space) [… abridged; see: “War Vaginas” for more on Metroid’s vaginal spaces].

One of the most famous Archaic Mothers is the Medusa, but she takes many similar forms: the transgenerational undead preserved as living latex, leather or clay that comes alive like a gargoyle to seek indiscriminate vengeance against the living for having been wronged by proponents of capital, Cartesian thought, patriarchs, etc.

Archaic or phallic, either monster traditionally belongs to a heteronormative mythic structure/Symbolic Order, both of which Gothic-Communist poetics lampoon, of course (exhibit 1a1c): the hero-monster as something to fear and kill, but also to romance in a dated courtly sense—i.e., to worship, serve and fuck, but also belittle and mock through private/open schadenfreude (evoking taboo sex in the process: mythical rape, sodomy and incest, but also the enigmatic kink of torturous/exquisitely “torturous” sex during demonic BDSM rituals that can be camped during ludo-Gothic BDSM, but not by default; e.g., Ann Radcliffe’s “demon lover” as something originally devised for/mass-marketed to privileged white women; i.e., to puzzle over when navigating their own trauma as a protected class inside abject operatic spaces: the recycled fabrications of the musical castle and its paradoxical panoply of rape, forbidden desire, taboo sex and Certain Doom). Angela Carter’s adage[17], then, proves that such unironic practices (and the anachronistic residents that call them home in dated locales) haven’t gone anywhere; the Gothic—as much as it ever has—remains very much alive in our own imperiled sphere, including the monomyth as thoroughly haunted by the profession as cautionary in different directions. This can be a moral panic, but also camp as an ironic pedagogy of the oppressed reclaimed through the same basic schtick to unlearn shame, self-hatred, and dysphoric/dysmorphic incorrectness as taught through Renaissance canon onwards. “We [are living] in Gothic times,” either way.

(exhibit 1a1a1a1_a: Artist, left: J. Scott Campbell; bottom-middle: Fabián L. Pineda; right: Tom Jung. The monomyth and infernal concentric pattern are traditionally heteronormative, thus sexually dimorphic canon [dogma]; iconoclastic examples can subvert heroic double standards and bellicose, phallic language/rites of passage, but still work from positions of irony that parody heroic conventions and apocrypha [a popular, didactic story generally regarded as fictional; i.e., a “tall tale” connected to folklore and oral traditions] by toying with them during oppositional praxis as dialectical-material. In other words, iconoclasts tend to mutate what is already present according to what the artist knows about propaganda, thus makes and embodies as part of Gothic counterculture.

Consider videogames [my domain]. As a queer, Gothic ludologist and anarcho-Communist, I can attest to how genderqueer poetics would happily poke fun at Link’s “Master Sword” shooting “bolts of power” when “fully charged”—a mechanic borrowed from Star Wars [1977], Conan the Barbarian [1981, which was reviewed as “Star Wars made by a psychopath,” which applies as much to Rob Howard as it does John Milius] and even older palimpsests [such as the legend of King Arthur] copied by Pan’s own “sword” in Hook [1991] or Simon Belmont’s elongating “chain whip” in Castlevania [1986] or Mega Man’s “mega buster” [1987] or Samus Aran’s “beam cannon, missile launcher and bombs” [1986] or, hell, Mario’s “mushroom” helping him “grow” [1985]: canonical war is full of violent, harmful innuendo; e.g., Macbeth’s cycle of war as watered with blood: “I have begun to plant thee, and will labour / To make thee full of growing.” As we shall see, there is always an enemy to kill or secret plot to uncover, thus revealing an enemy from within who “originated” from outside: the ghost of the counterfeit’s false copy of a corrupt backstabber/doppelganger. Instead of an invincible barbarian/enemy at the gates, the white-knight warrior of light faces a corrupt, dark version of himself—a shadow person or Gothic double:

 

[Artist: Gabriel Dias. Keeping with the idea of paradox, the opposition between Link and “his shadow” is both thrown into doubt and extremely dogmatic. On one hand, it’s entirely divorced from material critique in favor of a basic value judgement—literally light vs dark, wherein light is canonized as “good” and dark as “bad”; there’s no in-between or class character because the story has been displaced to a fantasy tableau emptied of earthly history. It’s trope-heavy and mechanical. As we’ll explore later in the thesis and rest of the book, though, class character often comes from gender trouble and parody within canon as thrown into personified doubt [a rather literal embodiment of self-reflection]; i.e., in relation to these prescribed gender roles as “ghost-like” or otherwise undead. Ontologically challenged, Dark Link might not “belong” to Link at all; he might simply be an uncanny simulacrum or likeness that triggers the presumed owner to attack [thus confirm his suspicions by eradicating his fears]. Doing so exposes his own flaws as a self-described “hero,” but also reveals his open-secret intended function: to kill the enemies of the state. The enemy must die, trapping the hero in a frozen state of inaction as they lie caught between their orders and their conflicted sense of identity.]

As a whole, videogames have served as neoliberal, music-heavy copaganda since the 1980s—first, based off Star Wars as franchised, but also Aliens [with the original, self-contained text for each being neoliberal critiques that, in their franchised forms, became operatically neo-conservative] as monomythic canon attached to real-world geopolitics: the American revenge fantasy after a re-freeing [deregulation] of the world market post-Bretton-Woods under global US hegemony. The common thread to these canonical remediations is a quest-for-mastery meta-narrative whose videoludic simulation of war helps acclimate the state’s children to endless future war through the Hero’s Journey as forever expanding on- and off-screen: made for bigger and better worlds, but also bigger (thus more phallic), traditionally masculine weapons; i.e., a heteronormative mode of ludic wish fulfillment that routinely sets the player on the path to prescribed empowerment, thus appearing to realize the impossible promise [not the universal fulfillment] of sanctioned sex by a) rescuing the damsel and slaying the cock-blocking [ostensibly fascist/gay] dragon/minotaur as something to stab or shoot [exhibit 51d4a1/2] and b) facing off against the monstrous-feminine not just as not-white, female-coded, and non-Christian, but somewhere in between all of these things; e.g., orcs, drow and goblins; Dark Link, Protoman/Zero [exhibit 982b] or Pan’s shadow as the genderfluid, potentially trans, non-binary, or intersex false hero/man, dark twink, “phallic woman,” etc; but also Samus as the phallic-woman tomboy acting like Rambo to serve the state, or Odessa from Overwatch 2 [2022]:

“Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty!” [from Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy].

I’ve spent my life subverting them, treating Samus as having the potential to not be a palingenetic handmaid [exhibit 38c1b] or Odessa/Zarya as something other than unironic girl/queer war bosses [exhibit 100c4/ exhibit 111b] while also having a great deal of fun with twinks in iconoclastic videogame fan art that treats the twink-ish hero as the non-bellicose sub [exhibit 93a].)

(source)

Fascism and centrism are two sides of the same coin, wherein the fear of the outsider as outside becomes a fear of the outside within: the imaginary inside/outside infiltrator as correct-incorrect, becoming uncanny as per Jodey Castricano’s cryptomimesis as an extension of cryptonymy that also connects to the narrative of the crypt as a Gothic chronotope during the process of abjection. Inside-outside the narrative of the crypt as a half-real, parallel time-space that doubles the real world and vice versa, the state’s target audience is conditioned through canonical media to forget the invincible barbarian enemy[18] from elsewhere, which is suddenly viewed as the traitor “among us” (the status quo) having formerly come from outside before stabbing the in-group in the back; i.e., when Capitalism’s perpetual crises start to decay and fascism takes root, these play out through the process of abjection as making monsters and killing them in and outside of media/real life. But because there is no outside-text, all of this happens within the home as inherited, full of peril and anxiety exacerbated by capital’s creature-factory of extenuating circumstances: more and more complications equal more and more war and rape, thus profit. The graveyard becomes a mine.

We’ll continue unpacking the nature of these structured crises and their mire of paradoxes. For the moment, know that it creates a vicious cycle of historical materialism predicated on the posturing of masculinity as threatened: the spirit of the Leveler. This presence actually stems from medieval thought—death being the great leveler of kings and peasants alike—but also the fascist idea of the historical cycle: “‘Hard times create strong men, strong men create weak times, weak times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.’ The quote, from a postapocalyptic novel by the author G. Michael Hopf, sums up a stunningly pervasive cyclical vision of history—one where Western strategists keep falling for myths of invincible barbarians” (source: Bret Devereaux’ “Hard Times Don’t Make Strong Soldiers,” 2020). Just as Caesar historically demonized those he conquered as savages fighting dirty from the shadows against the state (not for the state as fascists do), videogame companies (and other mediums) use canon to connect state crises to the embarrassing destruction of what was built—i.e., senseless destruction of the warrior’s hall, versus the “useful” battles of the past that led to Pax Imperium in its current, glorious form (for us, Pax Americana): the soldiers of the present must appear strong by avoiding degenerate weakness and sacrificing themselves; lacking this strength, “true evil” first gains a foothold, then ultimately prevails by destroying Rome from within. The white knight becomes black and that’s apparently why we’re all dead and fucked.

Of course, it’s not nearly that simple (the myth of the shadow play is that it is devoid of meaning; the myth of monsters/duels is that they are “just” spectator sports that stay onstage/on-canvas):

(exhibit 1a1a1a1_b: Bottom-middle: source [“Chuck Wepner: Meet the Heavyweight Boxer Who Inspired Rocky,” 2020]. The duel sits in the shadow zone to perform power with monsters, sexuality and paradox; the doubles and their trademark violence/”violence” glide between fiction and reality on- and offstage diegetically and during para- and meta-textualities that conceal class character as active or repressed [Wepner sued Sylvester Stallone for basing the 1975 Rocky screenplay off his life; they settled the case outside of court]. Life imitates art and vice versa through [crypto]mimesis of a particular kind: war personified in the traditional masculine way—through combat.

Yet, in the Gothic model there’s plenty of room for canonical/campy gender trouble and gender parody according to Gothic devices that “spice up” the monsters doing battle: terror and horror, the Black Veil, the surface of the veil, the explained supernatural, demon lovers; and various class, race and gendered stigmas in their animalized, undead/demonic chimeras, composites and ghosts. The resulting mise-en-abyme might see like Shakespeare’s bad play, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” but therein lies the paradox: the battle as meaningless, doomed and significant at the same time [i.e., Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1940]. People love sex and violence for a variety of reasons; the theatre is one place where these monsters—and their tremendous energies, paradoxes, and vitalities—run well and truly wild. To “pull a Frederic Jameson” and ignore these spectacular sites/sights of campy combat and their profoundly artistic deceptions is to ignore much of their allegory and the larger conversation being had in the language of the vulgar [common] masses and the elite, the plebian and patrician. Amidst the oscillation of the stage, we’ll have to tune in, but also contribute, if we want to recultivate the Superstructure and reclaim the Base; you’re sure-as-fuck not going to do it with fancy essays that no one reads except academic eggheads[19].)

(exhibit 1a1a1a1_c: Artist: Jeso. “Did he who make the lamb make thee?[20]” The Amazon is a tremendously complicated monster because it is both seen as untamable and hunted by man, but also tamed through the wearing of “maiden armor” that fetishizes her “maidenhead/bride price” as “scrappy.” It panders to the wet dream of the tomboy as animalized, the tiger an anthropomorphic “metamour” shared between viewers but also class, gendered and racial strata for or against the status quo during liminal expression. She is “phallic”-thus-manly at the same time as she is traditionally feminine, baring her tigress “fangs” to symbolize her “combative” potential [erotic energies; i.e., “fight like a tiger, fuck like a tiger” or maybe the opposite: “tiger in the streets, mouse in the sheets,” etc] while fighting tooth and nail and showing off her female warriors’ “assets” in, for all intents and purposes, an “actual [meaning ‘asexual’] duel” between her foil, the black-and-red dragon. But no duel is ever fully “ace,” nor canonical; there’s always something being fought over/resisted. A tremendous amount of innuendo, thus cryptonymy, is available for revolutionary purposes if the artist is of a particular socio-political leaning. Communists like monster sex and violence, too; we’re just sex-positive about our nostalgia and use it as de facto educators to raise the cultural bar regarding emotional/Gothic intelligence, thus class consciousness.)

And yet, crisis, exposure and vulnerability (above) is part of the paradox of power inside canon: the duel as the lingua franca[21] of the masses (indented for clarity):

Our psychosexual exhibit explored overt sex work and BDSM presentations that stage various forces, presenting them as “dueling” one another in “live” performance art; i.e., practiced rehearsals that codify societal values that exist chaotically between monsters adjacent to violence and sexuality as blurred/”at war.” It’s controlled chaos, walking several tightropes at once during a larger balancing act. In pugilistic media, a good duel between knights follows the same theatrical paradoxes using the same monsters for the same reasons of allegory (concealment) and apocalypse (revelation, often violent). It should make you forget its staged nature during the ensuing bedlam. Even the classical gladiators were well-trained and expected to put on a show, not kill each other. The idea is to make you forget it’s staged, without killing both men. Throw in a bit of theater (two or more masked men dueling over a woman or some such honor) and just the right amount of blood, sweat and tears, and everything should come together to walk the tightrope between fantasy and reality.

Of course, the paradox remains that it’s an unsafe event, but the expectations of violence are managed within the colosseum circle as the place where the magic happens, or the “squared circle” of the 20th century boxing ring. In the case of contact sports, there’s a variety of rules and judging thrown in, but sometimes you just have a white horse and a dark horse utterly wailing on each other and staying up by mere magic. That can go either way and is the kind of “theatre drama” that sports fans love (the vicarious reconciliation of physical, fetishized violence in society told through theatre’s captive honor and sanctioned bloodletting per theatrical sacrifices: the matador and the bull as “sexy beasts”). Granted, the “truth” of it is still a distraction from everyday life, but in kayfabe war narratives the allegory of these shadowy caves can speak to various dialectical-material truths hidden among the lies;. i.e., the paradox of truth told with lies, often bigoted ones: the kayfabe stage language of the American vs the Nazi, Communist or racist caricature, but also the white knight/god versus their dark “double” fighting within the perilous language of swordplay as color-coded, animalized, sexed-up: the fencer’s cryptonymy of the bind, the trap, the feint hiding and exposing class/culture war simultaneously on the imagery of the surface of the veil (if you see a furry artist, they probably have increasingly NSFW versions of their characters; their characters denote hidden struggles and desires regardless of how clothed or naked they are):

(artist: Jeso)

The praxial role of centrist theatre is designed to make you forget that either knight is a killing implement useful to the state, in unironic forms, but also whose tightrope can be walked by ironic performers camping the same theatre props to sneak in an antiwar narrative—often through the underdog trope; e.g., George Lucas’ 1977 Star Wars. But this can just as easily become franchised and swing the other way using the same contested iconography (the paradox of camping Capitalism is that we must do it within capital, thus using the same dark forces but for proletarian purposes; re: “darkness visible,” and deliberately so).

In the canonical sense, state power and its inventions must be threatened in order to hold onto itself and acquire glory (often in a blaze thereof; e.g., Davy Crocket’s “remember the Alamo” as played by John Wayne or some-such doofus). “Armor” is both the exposed spot for the arrow to go into and the unpierceable midsection, Smaug’s waistcoat of unbreakable diamonds. As such the proliferation of counterfeits become their own place of concealment and displaced trauma within the transgenerational curse as the power fantasy’s shadow zone, desperately haunted by unironic tyranny reaching out of the aforementioned vanishing point to choke us with its mighty rock ‘n roll fist. Men seemingly can do as they wish, here, playing around inside while the roles of everyone else appear to be extremely limited. In truth, gender trouble and gender parody are potent weapons that allow the iconoclast to fuck with the formula through their own reinventions of old falsehoods (my favorites, again being “gay hobbits,” but also “imagine Conan with a pussy”). The idea is to break canon ourselves because it’s not going to break by itself; e.g., Mad Max as a cowboy of the postapocalypse (-revelation) showcasing our white savior duking it out with a stand-in for Australian Indigenous Peoples dressed up in psychosexual fetish fear. And yet, George Miller would camp his own canonical ghost of the counterfeit with Fury Road (2015), decades after The Road Warrior (1981) “found” an oral recording of the hero addressing fears of societal collapse tied to real-life fuel shortages (manufactured scarcity): “Fury[22]” Road being the virago Furiosa breaking free from bondage and spelling the old tyrant’s doom (fittingly played by the same actor from the 1979 original; i.e., a perennial scapegoat).

(source)

Therein lies the rub: Capitalism isn’t “corrupt” or faulty when exploitation or bigotry happen; it’s working as intended, creating crises and bigotries as needed in order to exploit workers through theatrical war. The infernal concentric pattern during the Cycle of Kings is the merely monomyth as stuck within itself, denying escape through live burial and trapping the hero in a hell of their own making but also one that was passed down from father to son, Star-Wars-style. Like that story, the origins of patrilineal descent (and its much-touted collapse; e.g., Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” 1839) date back to Antiquity (the “Fall” of Rome being a colossal lie; re: fascism) and like Antiquity valorize the masculine implements of war as “doomed but glorious”: the sword as a sexy-equals-power-and-status symbol that promises promotion and material elevation through ritualistic conquest/combat: the duel as being fought over sexy-looking “helpless” monsters (the damsel, a kind of “non-male” monster in her own right) by sexy-looking “good” monsters (male action heroes) killing “bad” monsters (medieval, pre-fascist black knights, but also people of color as dark, marauding barbarians, thieves, pirates, mercenaries/blackguards, rapists, and tricksters): demonic and undead masks that hide power levels and intent during theatrical exchanges written on their surfaces that also give the wearer some sense of plausible deniability—i.e., they’re “acting” out forbidden knowledge/power exchange with “demons” and communicating trauma and decay with the “undead.” In all of these cases, the Gothic, per Segewick, sexualizes its surface imagery.

Another name for this “Cycle of Kings” and its operatic sexiness is the Promethean Quest/awesome mystery (from Mary Shelley’s “Modern Prometheus” and Rudolph Otto’s Numinous/mysterium tremendum); i.e., the search for sword-like power as self-destructive (the Roman fool’s sword to fall upon). Whereas the monomyth unironically fetishizes[23a] the sword and its kink-like usage (denoting unusual or theatrical sexual activity) as a phallic passing-of-the-torch, the infernal concentric pattern treats the whole ordeal as thoroughly doomed within the grander chronotope (re: a time-space, from Mikhail Bakhtin; used in his sense of the “Gothic chronotope” or castle and its castle-narrative): the skeleton king as one’s ultimate doom fated by the writing on the walls (or voices coming from inside the walls), but also the sexual imagery on the surface of things dueling back and forth (which, in the Radcliffean tradition, operates as a Black Veil inside a closed space of terror and horror for the Gothic heroine and demon lover to wander around inside, or the disempowered/emasculated male hero; e.g., the Lovecraftian scientist. We’ll unpack these Gothic terms when discussing Metroidvania’s “ludo-narrative BDSM” during the “camp map”). In this sense, the popularity of the monomyth during seminal get-togethers like Star Wars remains entirely haunted by “Darth Vader” as the fascist “death father” who threatens to turn the young knight errant, “Luke Skywalker,” into a false copy of the black knight instead of a white knight as also being a false copy (exhibit 93b1b)—the horror being there is no escape from the death knight because white knights serve the state, thus conduct or assist in genocide during the return of the good king/revenge of the bad king but also the white and black knight/medieval cop as a zombie/vampire class traitor to a matter of degree, repeating Conan’s classic answer to “What is best in life?” in bad faith: “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women!” In the neoliberal, hyperreal[23b] sense, it’s the imaginary past come back to haunt the position of the hero as something to swap consumers in and out of for profit, but it’s still the ghost of the castle as inherited; it’s just forged in a neoliberal sense, meaning privatized, digitized: the treasure map as fake, but covering up the destroyed reality behind itself until it starts to (in the Gothic sense) denote the decay behind itself within or upon itself—i.e., the canceled retro-future. As part of the ludic scheme between the player and the gameworld (or the power/values shared through any vicarious relationship between customer and story as action vehicle), the feudalistic power trip conveys dynastic primacy through said scheme as doomed.

Capitalism is always in crisis/policing itself through class-dormant nightmares that assist the profit motive, but the degree to the crisis and its decay determines the degree to how “corrupt” a hero appears; i.e., how demonic/undead and heartless they look on the surface of themselves as a kind of theatre mask belying the myth of male power. The greater the crisis, the more Capitalism’s bloodless, pure-white façade begins to decay towards a dark, medieval one, its pre-fascist veneer announcing a hidden function of it and the state, Zombification/Zombie-Vampire Capitalism:

Zombification/Zombie-Vampire Capitalism

The death of ethical parody and its replacement with “blind” forms; e.g., Zombie Simpsons. In “Zombie Simpsons: How the Best Show Ever Became the Broadcasting Undead” (2012), Dead Homer Society writes,

By almost any measurement, The Simpsons is the most influential television comedy ever created.  It has been translated into every major language on Earth and dozens of minor ones; it has spawned entire genres of animation, and had more books written about it than all but a handful of American Presidents. Even its minor characters have become iconic, and the titular family is recognizable in almost every corner of the planet.  It is a definitive and truly global cultural phenomenon, perhaps the biggest of the television age.

As of this writing, if you flip on FOX at 8pm on Sundays, you will see a program that bills itself as The Simpsons. It is not The Simpsons. That show, the landmark piece of American culture that debuted on 17 December 1989, went off the air more than a decade ago. The replacement is a hopelessly mediocre imitation that bears only a superficial resemblance to the original. It is the unwanted sequel, the stale spinoff, the creative dry hole that is kept pumping in the endless search for more money. It is Zombie Simpsons (source).

Zombification results from people living under Capitalism, a system that discourages them not to think for themselves, but also to violently attack people who try. Zombie-Vampire Capitalism is when Capitalism becomes “feral,” entering a fascist state of decay—whereupon violent, pro-state zombies suddenly appear and attack rebellious workers, “eating their brains” (symbolizing an attack on the rebellious mindset). Being the target of the state in this manner means you have fallen into the state of exception—disposable zombie fodder even more useless to capital than the zombie heroes[24] the state endlessly sends after you.

This decay is Capitalism defending itself; i.e., through a radicalizing of the feeding process in order for the state to survive.

The centrist, then, is the good hero—a canonical version of the “himbo” (or herbo) meathead who, even when faced with doubt at the old sage’s orders, remains canonically heroic by preserving the fascist’s essential role in disguising what Capitalism is: a giant vampire/zombie that makes smaller vampires and zombies to serve the will of all-powerful old men (emblematized in the Jungian/monomythic sense as good wizards/sages and evil wizards/necromancers). This evocation of the fascist in pre-fascist language is a kind of post-fascist rhetoric; i.e., made after the fall of the Third Reich, implying a cartoon version of the quintessential bad guy for the good guy to stomp onstage and off. It becomes blind pastiche/parody (from Fredric Jameson’s “blank parody[25],” meaning it lacks a conscious class character), but also a factory designed to make good guys and bad guys that acclimate future children to the larger indoctrinating process: of endless wars’ cops and “criminals” (victims) working in tandem/cahoots as class traitors against the state’s real victims, the underclass (cops are class traitors who, generally from the middle class, betray the class interests of the working class/proletariat for the owner class/bourgeoisie; refer to Howard Zinn’s discussion of this principal in relation to slavery under American Liberalism in A People’s History of the United States); i.e., the middle management of a neoliberal pecking order of staged theatre and its class argumentation as thoroughly armed, muscled and aggressive (indented for clarity):

Management of exploitation under Capitalism is tiered, pyramid-style—i.e., the top, middle and bottom; or lords, generals/lieutenants, and grunts according to corporate, militarized, and paramilitarized flavors (which often intersect through aesthetics and social-sexual clout). This “pecking order” translates remarkably well in neoliberal copaganda, whose bosses, mini-bosses, and minions deftly illustrate Zombie-Vampire Capitalism in action; e.g., Reinhardt Heydrich or Ian Kochinski/Caleb Hart (the latter two who we’ll discuss in Volume Three’s Chapter Three and Four) as “middle-management” desk murderers in a bureaucratic sense (which sits alongside the middle class, in a class sense—with both defending capital as a perpetually decaying structure that operates through wage/labor theft according to weaponized bureaucracy during crisis, class sentiment and Faustian bargains; i.e., harmful conditioning whose disguised ultimatums prey on various stigmas, biases and dogma riddled within canon to condition their employees to fight the good fight against the underclass as an advertised threat loaded with connotations of foreign/internal plots.

Erstwhile, as said “threats” are met with waves of terror, vice-character personas, and moral panics, they splash back into these same paranoid workers; they are slowly convinced to surrender total power to the elite under perceived states of emergency against imaginary enemies, trading basic human rights for false power and genocidal legislation inside the zombie police state[26] (neoliberal illusions of “hollow victory” and Quixotic moral superiority/exceptionalism). It’s a scam, a bad game with only one rigged winner: the owner class franchising war as copaganda and the Military Industrial Complex through war simulators. The illusion, like a franchise, becomes something to grow into and endorse more and more as time goes on; i.e., into adulthood; e.g., child soldiers charging from Mega Man into Mega Man X as an increasingly adult take on the forlorn hope (the military expression for a suicide mission/death charge):

(exhibit 1a1a1a2: Continuing with the Star Wars pastiche, Mega Man—after miraculously “saving the world” with a big explosion [on par with the Death Star]—becomes a general, being “rewarded” with a conspiracy that extends the conflict indefinitely through an imagined cabal of dark rebellious forces. Touted as a “rebel,” he and his “freedom fighters,” aren’t rebels at all because they’re always acting like cops in service of the state; i.e., class traitors hunting down their opponents using a kill list. Simply put, he’s the mercenary who bought into his own whitewashed legend: that he is a goody-little-two-shoes and not actually a robotic hitman treating the state’s enemies [called “Mavericks”] like disposable, worthless scrap—a payday stuck on loop, game after game in-text but also across an entire series of similar excursions.)

As “green biker dude’s” ignominious death becomes a meme (mirroring the X-wing fighters dying next to Luke during the canal chase), X becomes desperately valorized as the Great White Hope/one last chance—i.e., Star Wars minus the antiwar allegory of the first film and all of the musical/visual bombast of the sequels. The indoctrination becomes a giant lie built on older lies: the hero’s destiny as a walking robot corpse foretold by the most exciting[27] fantasies of a child’s life (nostalgia-wise) used to assuage their growing fears about war and death all around them, but also their material conditions as threatened by the much-touted “end of the World,” Communism. The label and its prescribed manifestations must be fought tooth and nail during a never-ending shouting match (or throwing of “lemons,” in Mega Man’s case). Its ubiquity and regressive lack of irony (thus dormant class character) is sobering and doomed. You gotta camp it, because the cheap comic-book-grade lore and legendarily awful voice acting are practically begging for it.

As a part of this state-sanctioned wrestler’s kayfabe, the fascist is the heel—a “corrupt,” bad cop who the good cop (the babyface) normally scapegoats to help the state save face during staged, deus-ex-machina combats. In turn, their combative, bread-and-circus spectacles continuously shape public opinion regarding war as legitimate, but also as a business at home and abroad that colonizes (thus drains) both sides.

There’s even a failsafe: In times of extreme decay that threaten the state’s existence, the state and its rulers allow the white knight and black knight to team up during the cycle of war dressed up in the language of the Crusades; i.e., giving the disgraced cop a chance—if not at total redemption, then one last deputized hurrah before they’re banished, exorcized and/or killed to prove they’re not a heretic (the sacrifice of the anti-hero to defend Capitalism; the redemption of the fallen, tragic hero); i.e., a bad, vigilante maverick to help tag-team, thus gang up against and destroy the one thing that can actually take power away from the elite: Communism, aka labor presented as the monstrous-feminine, the person-of-color zombie or queer vampire inside the state of exception/emergency (and various other stigmas we’ll unpack throughout the book). It’s death by conversion therapy (which is genocide). All of this happens by design/is built into the state’s Superstructure as groomed by the elite (who control the Base, thus can afford to build expensive illusions). The middle-class surrender their power to the elite, who groom the class traitor into a dehumanized state thug that is a smaller version of them, a legitimate arm of the police state (the good cop) and a vigilante homunculus (the bad cop) sculpted to exploit others in order to survive but also experience pleasure: to eat their flesh and drink their blood (dressed up as a religious experience tied to familiar organized religions; e.g., transubstantiation).

As a small, obvious vampire, the fascist becomes the perfect scapegoat to hide the state’s vampiric/zombifying design behind: a smaller, displaced parallel and vindictive sellout who criminalizes and bleeds everyone dry around him; i.e., a false revolutionary that serves old money behind the veneer of false rebellion[28], thus false power/guerrilla warfare as stolen through murder (commonly symbolized as blood or sanguine through the execution of blood libel/quantum by a fascist Count) but also acquired/kickstarted by Faustian bargains (that is, it is offered to them by someone instead of found/stolen from the gods like the Promethean Quest is—i.e., given/accepted in a self-destructive sense from a treacherous old man/necromancer Master to a dumb, deceived and self-deceiving apprentice; e.g., the Emperor from Star Wars to Anakin Skywalker but also Mortanius from Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen to that game’s titular hero). Tempted with revenge, the white knight becomes become the black knight: blind, feral and cruel, their pearly Excalibur twists into a dark Soul Reaver/Great Destroyer version of itself that—along with the rest of their altered appearance—echoes the dragon lord/skeleton king’s vengeful wrath during a dark, perennial, orgy-of-violence Grim Harvest/killing time (a perversion of paganized harvest and fertility rituals; e.g., Halloween and Easter):

And the angel of the lord came unto me
Snatching me up from my place of slumber
And took me on high and higher still
Until we moved to the spaces betwixt the air itself
And he brought me into a vast farmlands of our own Midwest
And as we descended cries of impending doom rose from the soil
One thousand nay a million voices full of fear
And terror possessed me then
And I begged, “Angel of the Lord what are these tortured screams?”
And the angel said unto me,
“These are the cries of the carrots, the cries of the carrots!
You see, Reverend Maynard
Tomorrow is harvest day and to them it is the holocaust!” (Tool’s “Disgustipated,” 1993).

Jokes aside, when the proverbial Dark Lord does return, Caesar the Just becomes Caesar the Tyrant/Zombie Caesar, and his fellow men must put him down to save the leader (and them) from himself. Like a vampire, they stab him to death, but also betray him and steal his power with a proverbial stake through the heart; like a zombie, they cut him to pieces (mirroring the ancient legend of Osiris). In short, the hero’s staged fall from grace embodies the infernal concentric pattern that revives and reassembles the pieces of the puzzle that revive the dead tyrant. Instead of a simple guardian, they become “fallen,” the anti-hero as a bonafide reaper who threatens total cataclysm by slowly becoming the Leveler (the medieval death-incarnate) as the decay not simply occurs, but expands and accelerates. The closer to death the state is, the more destructive the hero—the more mad, dark, and glorious. He’s the ultimate badass, but also the ultimate scapegoat to blame, thus sacrifice (the medieval-grade village assignment of blame/veneration taken to a macro level). Cut off his head, apologize for his actions (never blame the state), rinse and repeat. The world is “saved” from Kain thanks to the Belmonts… for now.

(exhibit 1a1a1b: The vampire/necromancer is both an anti-Semitic and pre-fascist trope that informs post-fascist rhetoric concealing American fascism festering under neoliberal illusions. The evil wizard gleefully has Kain killed, then offers him revenge and liberation from torment: “You will have the blood you hunger for!” All he has to do is kill the necromancer’s enemies for him. No biggie! It’s a combination of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus [1604] and Jew of Malta [1590], presenting the Jew as a scheming bloodletter who a) trades his soul for forbidden knowledge, per Faust; but also whose b) sanguine usury is ultimately quelled by killing the Jew. In fascist myth, the Jew is the backstabber of the Germanized soldier—i.e., an act of betrayal that justifies demonizing both sides, but having one be sacrificed to the “benefit” of the other. “Benefit” is in quotes because vampirism of this sort is a disease that strikes the subject with xenophobic madness and bloodlust. Their theatre is unironic and mean, a “suffering to the conquered” brought back around through a false-rebellious war cry from Kain: “Vae Victis[29]!” Whereas the unironic queer vampire is code for “sodomite”/sexual heretic as targeted by the state to be exploited, the hunger of the unironic fascist vampire is to exploit the sodomite as someone who [in their eyes] “drew first blood.” It’s standard-issue revenge fantasy [which elides with camp during oppositional praxis as patently reclaiming these labels, similar to the zombie, mad scientist, Medusa, etc, by ironic performers].)

From start to finish, the whole ordeal becomes inert, heteronormative dogma stuck on loop—our “Pygmalion effect” as part of the broader Shadow of Pygmalion, which zombifies worker brains to not simply accept these moon-sized tortures through Capitalist Realism, but embody them as menticided soldiers and victims (men—specifically our aforementioned holy men, the Belmonts—and their trusty frenemy the paladin-turned-death-knight, Kain/Dracula. Women, meanwhile, turn into subjugated “herbo” Amazons, but also infantilized “Barbie dolls,” exhibit 1a1a3; aka, tradwives[30]/war brides). The two exist simultaneously within various offshoots of the colonial binary under the Shadow of Pygmalion; i.e., as a harmful mythic structure enforced by the gender trouble that weird canonical nerds experience; i.e., their rape culture‘s heteronormativity-in-crisis being pitted against the campy gender parody of weird iconoclastic nerds (whose campiness generally occurs in response to gender trouble, or the making of gender trouble through campy parody to expose abusive parties and structures; i.e., “self-reporting“). As per the first half of our companion glossary’s definition, weird canonical nerds are

work within a toxic subset of nerd culture. Whereas nerd culture more broadly is for those who present an increased intellectual interest in a given topic—often in literature, but also popular media more broadly as something to consume, critique, or create (with iconoclastic varieties extending such matters into a spectrum of modular activism and counterculture)—weird canonical nerds are those who undermine genuine, active intellectualism; i.e., by exchanging it for dumb, hostile and even bad-faith consumerism and negative freedom for the elite.

Weird canonical nerds, then, are tasked with executing stochastic terrorism from the shadows[31] when queer-baiting/pacification fail; i.e., the “bury your gays[32]” trope (attacking the queer and putting them back in the closet, but also underground in more ways than one), but also purity argumentation (e.g., blood libel/quantum) that leads to the very creation of sexual difference the colonial binary is known for (exhibit 1a1a1h3a1a1; from Luce Irigary: “Only one form of subjectivity exists in Western culture and it is male,” source). They rape and kill everything they see, measuring embodiments and feats of strength (their dicks) as they operate like a hostile alien tank (with good/bad variants): a bulldozer’s war of movement/sheer momentum (the wrestler’s economy of motion), special moves and bodies (wunderwaffe and wunderkind), an occupying army‘s fortress mentality and enforced division/false rebellion to assist elite profits (which trickle down to them, the always “imperiled” middle class).

(exhibit 1a1a1c1: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living” [“The Eighteenth Brumaire“]. To this, the oral traditions of the stage play can be especially medieval, thus plastic and vivid. Macbeth’s fatal vision isn’t just “A dagger of the mind, a false creation, / Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain” [Macbeth], but a copy of a copy of a copy in an endless nightmare loop. The yawning hall of kingly mirrors shadows him as shown guilt and revenge of a smiling past victim that somehow is all around him, having already won. The psychomachy [“mind battle”]—of this reunion with the past by the anxious, sleeping mind—imitates the Gothic Communist’s own futile grappling with the monomyth, Cycle of Kings and infernal concentric pattern as a narrative of the crypt that outlives us to haunt future generations with, putting potential class warriors to sleep. The imagery is the same, but the context is altered through the performance as a meta-narrative: 

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing [ibid.].

Macbeth’s notable lack of cheer at the prerecorded nature of history needn’t be prophetic, provided the nightmares are reclaimed and used by us to awaken future workers to a class-conscious approach within Capitalist Realism; i.e., an altering of prior historical-materialisms [and all their fatal crypts, tyrants and black knights] as something to collectively escape through an actively reclaimed Gothic imagination/”darkness visible.” History is predicated on material conditions and propaganda; rewrite them and you rewrite history and avoid the cataclysm/seminal tragedy again [until the last syllable of recorded time]. But you must learn to commune with witches, ghosts and monsters—the spectres of Marx [re: Derrida, meaning Capitalism as haunted by Communism after the Cold War‘s so-called “end of history”] as friendly to the Cause of developing Communism away from the bloody death omens of characters like Macbeth and Kain. In short, you must acquire the Wisdom of the Ancients in the modern world; i.e., to learn to swim in dangerous waters, thus make your own monsters in the darkness while able to tell these apart from state doubles, masks, uniforms and weapons inside a shared aesthetic.)

All at once, the revenge fantasy of Pax Americana kayfabe is the source of the class traitor’s greatest strength/treasure as false/on loan, an Achilles Heel whose “dagger of the mind” puts them to sleep; i.e., a heteronormative killer on autopilot blinded by canonical “darkness visible,” wherein they deliberately or accidentally (usually a combination ruled through fear and dogma) cling to class-dormant illusions and sacrificial theatre whose imaginary “ancients” are continually not wise to greater and greater degrees of tragedy and farce; e.g., George Orwell’s highly unimaginable and callow “double-speak” from 1984 (1949) as a Red-Scare dogwhistle coined by “the son of a British colonial officer from a wealthy landed family who began his career as a British imperial official in South-East Asia—basically an imperial cop” (source: Hakim’s “George Orwell Was a Terrible Human Being,” 2023). As such, the class traitor cannot scrutinize dialectically-materially. They are also a gender/race traitor whose false power—their theatrical “sword”—is also their greatest weakness/castrating source of impotency for the Roman fool to promptly fall upon (indented for clarity):

The greatest weakness of a bourgeois-minded worker/class traitor is their collective inability to critique endless war as an acclimating force; i.e., of them, towards manufactured illusions where the chosen hero does one of two basic things: a) picks up the false (imaginary) sword, mask or death edict and fends off or an imaginary enemy of darkness, or b) where someone else picks up a real weapon and conducts state-sanctioned violence through military imperium and paramilitary stochastic terrorism (vigilantism against agents of the Left or perceived “Left” labeled as “terrorists[33]“). Either way, the end result is a class-dormant inability to critique the system’s alienation of ourselves from our true potential as workers. By virtue of a hypercorrect, biologically essential, sex-equals-gender approach, the ensuing knee-jerk reactionary’s violence becomes an ultimatum during the state’s decaying crises: Anything that isn’t correct must die/is a threat to the fortress they’ve build around themselves through the state’s supplied dogma. Yet, the half-real dagger works as Macbeth’s dagger of the mind would: also in his hand but something he does not own (“I clutch thee but have thee not”). Used unironically in copaganda and the Military Industrial Complex, such a weapon operates in conjunction with the meta-narrative as rigged, thus entirely out of the player’s control; i.e., through the ghost of the counterfeit to further the process of abjection as lucrative for people who aren’t us, playing by their own set of rules that leave us with as little power as possible: not paying their fair share, but taking as much for themselves as they can through a parallel ruleset that steals our labor and pacifies us through marginalized in-fighting. The exact nature of the illusion—a fatal vision or fatal deed—doesn’t really matter if the material consequences and bad intent are combined in ways that are good for business. It becomes a vicious cycle of tilting at windmills (as Don Quixote does); i.e., generating and slaying real victims thought of as dragons, or “averting one’s eyes” through escapist illusions that disguise the mirrored murders displaced to somewhere else. “Out of sight, out of mind,” except there is no outside-text; the illusion is always there, “the handle toward our hand.” The black knight is always there, lurking like a shadow. Tied to the class traitor’s body and actions—he is the ideologically rigid, notoriously cruel doppelganger they can never outrun, a dark reflection mirroring their own evil deeds/compliance as one class traitor of many inside the profit model. His eyes are blacked out, showcasing his lack of humanity through state-issued blinders: a dark warhorse (the color of death, the fetish, the weapon, the gun, the Nazi/zombie Roman) waiting to sacrifice them, too.

As such, the hero-turned-heel is figuratively hallucinating while acting like a coercively fetishized, “killer man baby” and class traitor/ghost of the counterfeit the rest of the middle class can stare at with equal parts fear and fascination; i.e., towards and of the imaginary medieval as serious (or campy vis-à-vis iconoclasts); e.g., “demon BDSM” via Nazi vs “Nazi” (“camping the Nazi”; e.g., Mel Brooks’ A History of the World, 1981) or rape vs “rape” (the liminal expression of Gothic rape play) vis-à-vis Susan Sontag’s “Fascinating Fascism” (1974): the “Nazi” mask as a fan-favorite in ironic and unironic kayfabe circles (exhibit 1a1a1g2). Canon-wise, the bloodthirsty crowd loves a good fetishized and powerful monster but isn’t really taught to question how or why that might be while drinking up the fake blood as reminiscent of real-world atrocities (which they dub “apophenic[34] conspiracies”). Instead, power is accepted as genuine in order to enjoy the spectacle as an apocryphal-yet-reverential event. Despite the paradox, canon is simply sacred and unironic, whereas functional, “perceptive” irony is generally heretical to the centrist worldview (and whose ensuing conflict assigns or removes class character as a performance that is heteronormative or genderqueer).

There’s no long-term benefit to keeping quiet in the face of systemic oppression. Even so, it’s dangerous to camp, so the performer weaponizes the joke in favor of class war as a kind of tongue-in-cheek disguise: the antiwar allegory as equally magnetic, but dressed up in the same aesthetics like a kind of mask that’s very much worn on purpose. Unlike the male warrior’s Max Box “armor” and false power/hope, this effeminate “armoring” is not “true Camp” in Sontag’s sense or Radcliffe’s; i.e., that our seriousness fails without our knowledge or consent to protect our fragile minds. Rather, we know exactly what we’re doing and commit to the bit for two reasons: a) to avoid being attacked and killed while b) getting our life-saving (thus necessary) message across; i.e., to raise sex-positive awareness through emotional/Gothic intelligence as a “woke,” active process—one whose conscious class character is developed during oppositional praxis. Funnily enough, it’s not so different from Radcliffe’s “archaeologies” during her own dereliction, post-Italian—i.e., they’re left behind for us to repurpose when some people don’t have the guts (I’m looking at you, Radcliffe[35]).

We’ll unpack all of this during the “camp map” chapter after the thesis statement concludes. Until then, we’ll need to explain some manifesto terms: the pieces to our castle map as something to assemble, then fuel up and use to besiege the enemy’s fortress (the castle we want to take back by “making it gay”). The exact order of the terms’ explanation is less important than explaining how they interrelate. By the time we get to the “camp map,” we’ll “mount a siege,” explaining how to camp canon in relation to these terms and why that matters (reversing the process of abjection tied to the ghost of the counterfeit as a false copy of itself in monomythic canon, the Cycle of Kings, and the infernal concentric pattern as a souless, viral copy—i.e., the narrative of the crypt as the historical-material wreckage left in Capitalism’s wake, covered up by Capitalist Realism).

Onto “Pieces of the ‘Camp Map’“!

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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

[1a] The word as I coined it has several definitions. One (from the Six Rs):

games occur along Gothic, liminal routes, wherein workers playfully articulate their natural rights in linguo-material ways between reality and fabrication that go beyond games as commodities but are nevertheless informed by them as something to rewrite; i.e., through play as a general exercise that involves a great many things: a reached agreement of power and play in Gothic terms, whose luck/odds are defined not through canon, but iconoclastic poiesis that can be expanded far beyond the restrictive, colonial binary and heteronormative ruleset of the elite’s intended exploitation of workers to challenge the profit motive and all of its harmful effects in the bargain; e.g., genocide, heteronormativity and Max Box culture. The sum of these concepts in praxis could be called “ludo-Gothic BDSM.”

Another (from the glossary, abridged):

My combining of an older academic term, “ludic-Gothic” (Gothic videogames), with sex-positive BDSM theatrics as a potent means of camp. The emphasis is less about “how can videogames be Gothic” and more how the playfulness in videogames is commonly used to allow players to camp canon in and out of videogames as a form of fairly negotiated power exchange established in playful, game-like forms

As I’ve moved through this series, though, the definition has narrowed, according to my focus on the term specifically to play with rape as I define it; re (from the Poetry Module’s “A Note about Rape/Rape Play,” 2024): […]

To that, rape is something that demons play with during the whore’s paradox. By extension, ludo-Gothic BDSM is effectively rape play combined with Gothic themes and BDSM practices to avenge state wrongs against nature.

[1b] Gothic doubles but also theatrical perceptions of power (“darkness visible”) as liminal expressions/elaborate strategies of misdirection/”archaeologies.” For example, not everything that is black and red is a fascist, but is treated like a fascist (and various other things at once) until the level of decay affords the usual centrist compromises between white knights and black knights against the Communist variant of the corrupt, the monstrous-feminine, the pedagogy of the oppressed coming out the same Gothic imagination’s shadow zone.

[2] Classically the entirety of the female form—its sexuality, gender identity/performance, emotions, etc—is sexualized by men for men. As such, Medusa’s big hair synonymizes with her “phallic” snakes; i.e., her “dickhead” literally as a headful of penises or symbolic of a phallic, masculine foil to traditional male heroes’ own power source: their singular penises (though the head and the hair are classically seen as a storing site for potency—e.g., Samson from the Bible). The idea of female body hair as “phallic” is certainly not out of the blue, either—with the pubic area (especially its unkempt versions) being synonymized with “incorrect masculinity”/an extension of the clitoris as “phallic-like”; i.e., an offshoot of the “correct” penis’s legitimate violence, thus violent in a delegitimized, rebellious counterterror form. Keeping in this spirit, I jokingly in the past referred to Zeuhl’s pubic hair (which was especially full and thick) as a “hair penis.” Heteronormativity would treat these “exceptions” to the Vitruvian, European standard as anathema, but in truth, they are incredibly common; they’ve just been abjected into a state of exception that weird canonical (art) nerds can police with impunity.

[3] Antiwar tends to combine sex, drugs, and roll ‘n rock at cross purposes with state hegemony—e.g., opposing the American Vietnam soldier’s pulling of a modern-day variation of the Viking berserk’s war ritual: getting high as fuck, then fucking shit up and otherwise raping everything in sight. The antiwar/anti-capital activist might use the hidden, ironic function of “White Rabbit” (1967) or “99 Red Luftballoons” (1983) to ferry a message to other collaborators; i.e., anyone who is against war as a business (and all that entails). It becomes a graveyard shift, embracing the communication of such counter codes; i.e., disco-in-disguise, on par with the Mancunian postpunk movement and assorted mimicries in the years ahead.

[4] Sex work/non-binary exclusionary radical feminists (we’ll explore all three groups extensively in Volume Three).

[5] For canon, fucking is synonymous with rape regarding monsters: fuck the monster (up); for iconoclasm, fucking is cathartic, including ironic appreciations of rape theatre that put “rape” in quotes—i.e., calculated risk/informed consent that helps targets of generational trauma (including rape) feel more confident about their bodies, identities and ability to at least laterally confront their abusers: by theatrically performing inside a safe space about what happened to them.

[6] Correctness is tricky. As stated during the “Regarding Hard Kinks” disclaimer, correctness can mean “what is right, or universally ethical—i.e., pertaining to basic human rights (and the health of the planet’s ecosystems and the humane treatment of animals)”; or it can mean “socially acceptable—i.e., correct according to the ethical beliefs of a specific group,” which under Capitalism systemically favors the in-group historically-materially exploiting the out-group for the profit motive. This means that as long as profit occurs, fucking the monster (xenophilia) or killing it (xenophobia) is acceptable under Capitalism in harmful, sex-coercive forms (aka efficient profit).

[7] (from the glossary): “A term I wrote for a discontinued book series, Neoliberalism in Yesterday’s Heroes, military optimism speaks to the half-real ‘gun-happy optimism of Pax Americana—i.e., that one can always shoot away the state’s enemies and problems’ (source: ‘The Promethean Quest and James Cameron’s Military Optimism in Metroid,’ 2021). This includes any scapegoats that exist in and out of media/the Superstructure and society’s public imagination; i.e., between fiction and non-fiction, onstage and off; re: during Capitalist Realism antagonizing nature as monstrous-feminine, pimping it through abject (us-vs-them) revenge before repeatedly summoning and banishing it, Radcliffe-style.”

[8] The verb, “to aggregate,” referring to “Power aggregates”—a phrase I lifted from In Range TV noting that “power aggregates” against potential/actual revolt in Atun Shei film’s “Fighting for Freedom: The Weapons and Strategies of the 1811 Slave Revolt,” 2021; timestamp: 20:55).

[9] Re: a word that hides, part of a larger linguistic process called cryptonymy whose pattern of concealment and trauma attach to Gothic spaces and echo inside their train of ruins, vis-à-vis Hogle’s “narrative of the crypt” and Jodey Castricano’s cryptomimesis, or mimicking dead language and undead things trapped between said language to evoke Marx’s “spectres.”

[10] E.g., Conan’s “two stood against many” argument (arguably stemming from the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae).

[11] Meaning “fated/foretold,” but also “inescapable and ominous”; i.e., “to meet one’s destiny.”

[12] We’ll examine children’s literature, talking animals, and cartoons’ sex-educational potential in Volume Two during the “Call of the Wild” chapter.

[13] “Robyn Byrd and Katie Rice were teenage Ren & Stimpy fans who wanted to make cartoons. They say they were preyed upon by the creator of the show, John Kricfalusi, who admitted to having had a 16-year-old girlfriend when approached by BuzzFeed News” (source: Ariane Lange’s “The Disturbing Secret Behind An Iconic Cartoon: Underage Sexual Abuse,” 2018).

[14] “To kill and be king, Merlin?” “Perhaps not even that!”

[15] (from the glossary): As defined by Espen J. Aarseth in Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997): “During the cybertextual process, the user will have effectuated a semiotic sequence, and this selective movement is a work of physical construction that the various concepts of ‘reading’ do not account for. […] In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to traverse the text,” meaning effort beyond eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages; spatially there is more than one route to take, or multiple ways one can take the same route to complete an objective or series of objectives (which in Metroidvania, are generally unspoken; Super Metroid is famous for its lack of narration, open-ended world, and non-linear fragmented narrative).

[16] From Ellen Moers’ Literary Women (1976). The term is rather outdated, similar to Beauvoir, Sontag or Wolff (and any of the other 20th century Gothicists we examine, to be frank).

[17] “We live in Gothic times,” from “Afterword” to Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974); source: “Carter, Angela,” Encyclopedia.com.

[18] For many an illuminating counterexample, refer to Asprey’s War in the Shadows: the Guerrilla in History. Labor fights dirty because we’re given no choice: not terror but counterterror to state forces’ usual brutalities: “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” (source).

[19] Whose pay-walled gnosis (“hidden knowledge”) adopts a kind of medievalized “trickle-down” to everyone else.

[20] A line from William Blake’s “The Tyger” (1794), part of his Songs of Innocence and Experience collection (1784); the poetic opposite of “The Tyger” is “The Lamb” (1789).

[21] “A lingua franca also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, vehicular language, or link language, is a language systematically used to make communication possible between groups of people who do not share a native language or dialect, particularly when it is a third language that is distinct from both of the speakers’ native languages” (source: Wikipedia). The bridge, within globalization and Capitalism, is war and rape; i.e., “violence is a universal language where ‘might makes right.'”

[22] In classic Greek myth, the Furies, much like the Fates or the Medusas, are traditionally depicted in groups of three, and generally are “gifted” with the power of foresight (a “female” quality also attached to the Oracle or the Sphinx).

[23a] As established, to make something a fetish is to objectify it, often within a ritual of unequal power exchange, BDSM, and kink (with a Gothic flavor of deathly aesthetics and power); re: what I call “ludo-Gothic BDSM,” giving something power (or taking power from it). Fetishization becomes harmful when canonized because canon is prescriptively sex-coercive towards women or beings forced to identify as women, while also turning men into sex pests with zero humanity/impulse control during scenes of appropriative peril, uninvited voyeurism, and unironic rape play. Psychosexuality becomes normalized within this theatre, conflating sex with harm according to popular (often-Gothic) tropes: incest, but also moe and ahegao (the fetishized child aesthetic and “death/rape face” anime/manga tropes, which under neoliberal Capitalism, have begun to develop eco-fascist tendencies that are traded back and forth across the global market; i.e., in a negative feedback loop between America and its allies, but especially Japan, that ramps up canonical xenophobia, war and rape in monomythic forms). In other words, abuse begets abuse, trauma living in the body and society as interacting back and forth psychosexually over space and time: a social-sexual criminogenesis that leads to intersectional forms of segregation/discrimination and overall carceral violence and harm with sexualized flavors. Criminogenesis and palingenesis (re: national rebirth, historically tied to fascism/Capitalism-in-decay) go hand-in-hand as canonical ghosts of the counterfeit that feed the process of abjection during climate crisis and masculinity-in-crisis as used to stoke the fires of war and rape, thus profit the elite through businesses centered around these things: the Military Industrial Complex and copaganda, whereupon “killing is their business, and business is good.”

[23b] (from the glossary): A distillation of Jean Baudrillard’s broader notion of the simulation representing things that do not exist, yet, over time, have become more real than the reality behind them, which has decayed into a desert the hyperreal simulation has replaced in the eyes of its viewers—i.e., has covered it up. Baudrillard’s hyperreality comments on similar historical-material issues that the egregore or simulacrum do as occult creations and copies of older likenesses or illusions. The preservation of the illusion as Capitalism turns the natural world into an uninhabitable desert could be called hypernormal. As Nasrullah Mambrol writes (exhibit, theirs):

Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality is closely linked to his idea of Simulacrum, which he defines as something which replaces reality with its representations. Baudrillard observes that the contemporary world is a simulacrum, where reality has been replaced by false images, to such an extent that one cannot distinguish between the real and the unreal. In this context, he made the controversial statement, “The Gulf war did not take place,” pointing out that the “reality” of the Gulf War was presented to the world in terms of representations by the media [as inherently dishonest …]

4) There is no relationship between the reality and representation, because there is no real to reflect (the abstract paintings of Mark Rothko).

According to Baudrillard, Western society has entered this fourth phase of the hyperreal. In the age of the hyperreal, the image/simulation dominates. The age of production has given way to the age of simulation, where products are sold even before they exist. The Simulacrum pervades every level of existence. (source: “Baudrillard’s Concept of Hyperreality,” 2016).

[24] E.g., Metallica’s “Disposable Heroes” (1986): “I was born for dying!”

[25] (from the glossary): In Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Frederic Jameson writes,

“Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs” (source).

Personally, I think Jameson’s “normality” echoes Nietzsche’s or Freud’s. As such, I envision pastiche and parody as likewise having bourgeois and proletarian qualities, much like sublimation does. They can be blank under bourgeois (centrist) forms. Likewise, though, “perceptive pastiche” can adopt the appearance of a false “blankness/blindness” (see, above: “Vaporwave,” a hauntological subgenre) in the face of power—a tactic vital to revolutionaries’ continued funding from different sources, as well as keeping them safe from violent reactionaries.

[26] E.g., Ion Fury (2019) as a cyberpunk policed by Shelley Bombshell (exhibit 84a1), who we’ll discuss more in part two of the “camp map” and in Volume Three; i.e., Persephone van der Waard’s “Neutral” Politics: Feminism, the Gothic, and Zombie Police States in Ion Fury” (2021).

[27] I can’t get behind X’s politics, but will always adore the music attached to his adventures. Sure, it’s tied to nostalgic drama as an unironic escape from boredom, but I can always treat that as a rememory of its former self; i.e., by writing this book while listening to the very music whose genre/Call to Adventure the book happily critiques via the “universal adaptability” of music.

Rememory

From Tony Morrison’s 1987 novel, Beloved, to which Morrison herself shares in a 2019 interview, “as in recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past. And it was the struggle, the pitched battle between remembering and forgetting, that became the device of the narrative [in Beloved]” (source).

[28] “Fascism is a false revolution. It cultivates the appearance of popular politics and a revolutionary aura without offering a genuine revolutionary class content. It propagates a ‘New Order’ while serving the same old moneyed interests. Its leaders are not guilty of confusion but of deception. That they work hard to mislead the public does not mean they themselves are misled” (source: Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds, 1997).

[29] “Vae victis is Latin for ‘woe to the vanquished,’ or ‘woe to the conquered.’ It means that those defeated in battle are entirely at the mercy of their conquerors and should not expect—or request—leniency” (source: Wikipedia). Kain translates it to “suffering to” not “woe.”

[30] E.g., after Trevor Belmont kills Death in Castlevania season four (2021), Sypha—previously coded as the nerdy bookworm—gives up her academic/asexual pursuits to become Trevor’s dutiful housewife, full-time and on autopilot. In short, she’s biologically essentialized to obey Trevor’s every whim once the big villain is vanquished and she learns he’s “conquered” her—i.e., knocking her up and her hysterics taking over to build a nest “purely by instinct” (I’m really not kidding. The show plays all of this for laughs, but still treats it as Radcliffe’s “happy ending” gimmick; i.e., the promised marriage/compelled sex awarded to the male hero after the black castle crumbles; e.g., Emily St. Aubert giving her entire inherited fortune to Valancourt—who conveniently gambled away his entire fortune while in Paris as she was kidnapped by the evil Count Montoni and forced to survive at his treacherous castle, Udolpho [source: Shmoop Study Guides]).

[31] I.e., as a kind of pro-state shadow war—i.e., “AstroTurf guerillas” like the Contras of South America (exhibit 1a1a1g1) except fought on home soil by the middle class against the underclass; e.g., fascist ninjas or Vikings (which historically were raiders).

[32] (from the glossary): …the “bury your gays” trope (defined and explored by Haley Hulan’s 2017 “Bury Your Gays: History, Usage, and Context”). / The heteronormative sublimation, violence and moral-panic scapegoating of anything that doesn’t fit the colonial binary model. Historically this would have been homosexual men (with queer cis women appropriated by cis-het men as exotic sex toys existing purely for male pleasure); however, it extends to trans/non-binary people or gender non-conforming persons more broadly (with various minorities being assigned heteronormatively atypical, gendered qualities, like women of color being seen as more masculine and sexual voracious/aggressive than white women, for example).

[33] Something to keep in mind when we examine Joseph Crawford’s introduction to Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism (2013) during the “camp map”: the state’s agents of terror see themselves as the counterterrorists—with the state somehow being unable to turn them into monsters to do the elite’s bidding. In their own eyes, they’re pure and good, thus uncorruptible; in truth, they’re infantilized monsters, afraid of everything and conditioned to kill at the drop of a hat.

[34] A pejorative label attached to critical thought; i.e., “to see patterns in random data,” whereupon nothing is connected to anything else and suggesting otherwise is “political,” hence mendacious, misinformed, even seditious.

[35] After writing The Italian in 1796, Radcliffe stopped writing and traveled abroad, enjoying the luxuries of her “fuck you” money (out-earning her husband’s government job) while the French Revolution raged and she conspicuously distanced herself from it. Indeed, she never wrote again, effectively spending the rest of her days not just in luxury but in hiding (this lent her a mysterious air we’ll continue to critique throughout the book).