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.

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Thesis Proper: Concerning Canon (opening)

“What would an intellectual do? What would Plato do?”

—Wanda, A Fish Called Wanda (1988)

Note: While this post contains “Doubles, Dark Forces, and Paradox,” said essay comes after the Manifesto Tree and Four Gs (four main Gothic theories), which I cite elsewhere in “Paratextual (Gothic) Documents.” From citation to original, the information they contain is essentially identical—with a small amount of additional content that only appears in Volume Zero. —Perse, 3/20/2025

Picking up where “Notes on Power and Liminal Expression” left off…

This chapter covers what we will be camping: canon. It contains my manifesto tree, four main Gothic theories, essay about the Gothic imagination (the shadow zone whence all doubles come), thesis paragraph, and larger thesis statement/subchapters. Combined, they introduce most of my book’s keywords, manifesto terms and main Gothic theories. Concerning signposts, the Four Gs is mostly a map already and “Into the Shadow Zone” is a mini essay meant to illustrate praxial duality in a self-contained form; the actual thesis statement and “camp map” will outline their respective subdivisions before each begins.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

On Twin Trees; or, “Taking the Trees Back during Oppositional Praxis”: the Superstructure and Base; Tolkien vs Milton; and Our Manifesto Tree

“Things have certainly changed around here. I remember this was all farmland as far as the eye could see. Old Man Peabody owned all of this. Had this crazy idea of breeding pine trees.”

—Doc Brown, Back to the Future (1985)

 

The manifesto tree lists our praxial equations and coordinates relative to the holistic study and camping of canon’s singular interpretations (and subsequent policing) under Capitalism. I will supply several equations, followed by two exhibits on the Base/Superstructure and Tolkien vs Milton insofar as “trees” are concerned. Then, I will consider the twin trees of Capitalism—the Base and the Structure—as things to “corrupt” and reclaim away from Capitalism when developing towards Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism: our manifesto tree of oppositional praxis.

Camping canon, as a whole process, can be summarized with this praxial equation (on oppositional praxis):

Sex positivity happens during oppositional praxis’ class/culture war (class traitors/weird canonical nerds’ class dormancy and betrayal vs weird iconoclastic nerds’ class [thus race and gender] consciousness); i.e., sex positivity vs sex coercion to recultivate canon/the bourgeois Superstructure, thus reclaim the Base (means of production) according to our proletarian tree of Gothic-Marxist tenets and other factors.

and this one (on proletarian praxis):

Successful Proletarian Praxis (recultivation of the bourgeois Superstructure through iconoclastic art creation, critique, or endorsement; the “creative successes” of proletarian praxis) = Thesis Statement + Praxial Coordinates (manifesto tree) + Synthesis (social-sexual habits, emotional/Gothic intelligence, and financial support during worker’s daily lives; i.e., the camp map from the thesis volume and the synthesis roadmap from Volume One) + Poiesis History (the Humanities primer)

(exhibit 0b: Propaganda; that which, Rana Indrajit Singh writes, normally “grows out of the base and the ruling class’ interests. As such, the superstructure justifies how the base operates and defends the power of the elite” [source: “Base and Superstructure Theory,” 2013]—”normally” being the operative word, here. This book isn’t really a fan of what’s “normal” because “normal” for the status quo is bourgeois. Gotta camp that shit. For example, Nazis are “normal” and serve the elite. We must camp them and, like Mel Brooks, make them not just abnormal, but paranormal, too. This oppositional praxis extends to heroic canon; e.g., fostering ironic gender trouble and parody by imagining “Conan with a pussy” or gay hobbits [two favorite examples of mine that we will refer to or imitate in other monstrous forms constantly throughout this book].

Relative to the Superstructure and Base, our two equations apply to a manifesto tree of praxial terms that interrelate and overlap during oppositional praxis under Capitalism.

Before we look at our praxial tree, I wanted to conduct a thought experiment; i.e., to consider trees that illustrate praxis as something to remediate: Tolkien, for which one palimpsest to Lord of the Rings was Paradise Lost, which we just discussed. Except Tolkien took Milton’s campy allegory/potential and gentrified it within centrist war through the cryptonymy of “adventure” as useful to capital in all the useful ways: the creation of an enemy for someone to “go berserk” against, invading their land and “taking it back” (despite having no essential claim to it to begin with).

(exhibit 0c: Artist, top-right: Sebastian Rodriguez; top-left: source; bottom-right: John How Anger; bottom-left: Stefano Villa. Morgoth is like “Evil Thor”—i.e., if Thor was Satan corrupting the Tree of Knowledge and Life instead of Eve directly [but seducing Sauron] while also working in the diffuse shadow space that crams pre-fascism/fascism [“corruption”] and Communism [“the monstrous-feminine”] into the theatrical spaces and bodies involved. Tolkien’s Nordic-Christian hybrid [with him being an expert on Beowulf and Norse mythology[1] as informed by Christian tampering happening chronologically between Beowulf and Tolkien] has Morgoth and Ungoliant camp around the base of the trees and recultivate their superstructure to make a new world that Tolkien—although he didn’t openly like war as a business—spends his entire canon [corpus] to unironically demonize Communist stand-ins as the “end of the free world”: 

“Then the Unlight of Ungoliant rose up even to the roots of the Trees, and Melkor sprang upon the mound[2]; and with his black spear he smote each Tree to its core, wounded them deep, and their sap poured forth as it were their blood, and was spilled upon the ground. But Ungoliant sucked it up, and going then from Tree to Tree she set her black beak to their wounds, till they were drained; and the poison of Death that was in her went into their tissues and withered them, root, branch and leaf; and they died” [source: the eighth chapter of “the Quenta Silmarillion” section within The Silmarillion, 1977]. 

I.e., the Darkening of Valinor is seen as an unironic BBC rape/”dark fellatio” tragedy that canonizes Milton’s camp, his “darkness visible” to Tolkien’s blind, class-dormant “Unlight” of a fat and sassy spider queen and her dark daddy dom in Nazi fetish gear. They both sound badass but I’d much rather have badass camp than canon, especially considering what it serves: Tolkien made the myth, placed it over the palimpsest and passed it off as the truth “found” like an old, lost relic/time capsule. Even if its fabricated nature is brought to light, it doesn’t matter if they have been internalized; his stories are a hypercanonical example of centrist war cartographized.

To this, Tolkien’s refrain [the High Fantasy treasure map, exhibit 1a1a1h2a1] has led to the endless essentializing of war as gentrified through the fantasy mode [e.g., Rings of Power, 2023] but also its science fiction and horror parallels [which we’ll unpack during the “camp map” vis-à-vis Cameron’s refrain: the shooter, of course, but specifically the Metroidvania]. Tolkien’s magnetic, “chaste” warmongering leaves out the psychosexual horrors of war or valorizes them through the slaughter of abjected foes[3], requiring great effort from past writers like Ursula Le Guin to break away from Tolkien’s ghost, thus his trees and pastoral village recruitment antics and moderately xenophobic [racist] war stories. As these are copied-and-pasted along the shared counterfeit, they operate like a formula whose canonical replication centers around the profit motive; in turn, this becomes historical-material—e.g., D&D and its endless official/homebrew campaigns and dungeons—but also the “warcraft[4]” of the enterprising white, cis-het young men of an early ’90s company, suitably titled Blizzard [whose sexist bullshit as a company we’ll discuss much more in Volumes Two and Three]—built entirely around racial conflict [thus endless war and rape] as set into motion by Tolkien himself, whose own orcs are green-skinned, debatably anti-Semitic/cannibalistic savages whose name, “orc,” is Old Norse [from Beowulf‘s orcnēas[5]] for “demon”; i.e., functional zombies in the state of exception that heroes invade to kill for the state through parallel legends weaving in and out of fiction and into real life: there and back again not once, but ad infinitum. If these “zombies” aren’t orcs, then they’re spiders[6] or some other stigma animal/vermin-type pest entity who must be crushed by the forces of good in personified forms; e.g., the Drow as “chaotic evil” spider people [exhibit 41b] who threaten nature as afflicted with the same problematic idea of good vs evil as canonically Biblical [versus Milton’s own accidental camping of these pastoral devices through Satanic war].

Simply put, Tolkien’s hopelessly academic view of nature is whitewashed, High Fantasy copaganda—a British tree huggers’ biased loving of the idealized pastoral/picturesque as threatened by outsiders ruining the scene: the map of empire as sacred. It’s a colonizer’s cartoonishly basic aesthetic that demonizes, thus alienates darkness but also death, decomposers and natural predators [stigma animals] as part of nature; i.e., as evil scapegoats tied to wicked, unnatural places, archaic wombs and dark magic—necromancers, but also their fortress lairs:

At first they had passed through hobbit-lands, a wide respectable country inhabited by decent folk, with good roads, an inn or two, and now and then a dwarf or a farmer ambling by on business. Then they came to lands where people spoke strangely, and sang songs Bilbo had never heard before. Now they had gone on far into the Lone-lands, where there were no people left, no inns, and the roads grew steadily worse. Not far ahead were dreary hills, rising higher and higher, dark with trees. On some of them were old castles with an evil look, as if they had been built by wicked people [emphasis: me]. Everything seemed gloomy, for the weather that day had taken a nasty turn [source]. 

These kinds of Gothic castles were clearly known to Tolkien, though he didn’t focus on them. In The Hobbit, they’re mentioned hardly at all [the word “castle” is used only once in the book]—sidestepped by Tolkien until it comes time to trot out Sauron [also known as the Necromancer] as the unironically Satanic threat to Tolkien’s “new Eden”: Britain by another name, as built by Tolkien’s easily ludologized, High Fantasy scheme[7].

The displacement of British industrialization and slavery is made clear by examining the real-world inspiration for Mordor and Tolkien’s own experiences elsewhere: “the industrial Black Country of the English Midlands, and by his time fighting in the trenches of the Western Front in the First World War” [source: Wikipedia]. Of the former Midlands, Jonathan Wilkins writes, “He based the description of Mordor, home to the evil Lord Sauron, on the Black Country, a region of Birmingham which was heavily polluted by iron foundries, coal mines and steel mills due to the Industrial Revolution. The air in it was so thick with smog and dust it was difficult to breathe and may contribute to the way local people speak today – the infamous Brummie accent” [source: “Birmingham Sites that Inspired Tolkien,” 2020]. Tolkien’s love for home pastoralizes the colonial element by abjecting its theatrical “soot” onto a fictional elsewhere. Places like the Shire and Lothlórien were always green and good and totally “never did a genocide” to get where they are; by comparison, the orcs threatening their naturalized goodness are the colonizers who did all of the bad things. It’s DARVO through British exceptionalism.

[Top-right: My brother’s 2001 copy of The Hobbit, which I’ve had for years and used to cite all of my work on Tolkien, including one of my better[8] undergraduate essays, “Dragon Sickness: the Problem of Greed” (2015). It was also a book that I read to nurse my broken heart, in college; but segued into my planning to go to college to find love (to have lots of nerd sex)—which eventually happened when I met Constance (my first) at EMU and Zeuhl, at MMU, and promptly had an adventure that did not start or end with them, but introduced me to someone whose ghost, for or worse, would stay with me for the rest of my life. I don’t think you can have an adventure without a bit of sex and/or ghosts, by the end of it!

Top-right and bottom: Tolkien’s obvious love of runes and “the West” was shared by his supposed enemies, the Nazis, which reflects a more radicalized trend in cryptofascist groups that currently use the Nordic runes as hauntological dogwhistles.]

The essentialized myth—of Tolkien’s Cartesian-themed treasure map, racist world-building and combined historical-materialism—invoke endless enemies of the state, which generates endless histories that predicate on those material conditions and their dogma [the Protestant work ethic assigning a reprobate quality onto an essential, limitless enemy slaughtered for profit: the crisis and decay of the war machine and its can(n)on fodder]. Post-Tolkien and Bretton Woods, war under neoliberalism has become commodified; i.e., ludologized comfort food during endless crisis: we’re eating it as the state eats us, as we eat each other. In turn, the concept, “there is no ethical consumption under Capitalism” becomes not just normal but hypernormal[9], enforced even though we know it’s wrong.)

Now that we’ve expressed several canonical and campy deaths of trees, we stand before, and look up at, the twin trees of Capitalism: their trees to ours during opposition praxis, for which to “corrupt” as Communists do—which is to say, like Milton and Tolkien but in a progressively campy direction towards anarcho-Communism, specifically Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism as I have devised it.

Please note: All of these terms will be explored later multiple times and in great detail. For now, I just want to list them; re: the engine of oppositional praxis with which to pour our fuel, proletarian praxis.

Also, a note about this list (and really the entire book): Function determines function[10], not aesthetics. Likewise, the parent dichotomies synonymize: canon is unironic, bourgeois, and sex-coercive, attaching everything to human biology (through sex organs and skin color); iconoclasm/camp is ironic, proletarian, and sex-positive, divorcing self-expression from these colonized sites using dialectical-material scrutiny—i.e., biological sex and gender are wholly separate, vis-à-vis, Judith Butler. Each evokes a variety of sub-dichotomies and orbiting factors; e.g., “sex-positivity is sexually descriptive, and descriptive sexuality is proletarian, thus ironic,” etc, and frequently clash in the traditional language of power and resistance: monsters and the military parade. I’ll explain this more when we continue to unpack poetics and mimesis, during the symposium. —Perse

Camp’s assembly and production of cultural empathy under Capitalism happens according to the “creative successes” of proletarian praxis (manifesto terms intersect and overlap; e.g., “good sex education is sexually descriptive”)

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

during ludo-Gothic BDSM as things to materially imagine and induce (often through ironic parody and “perceptive” pastiche) through Gothic poetics; i.e., inside the “grey area” of cultural appreciation in countercultural forms (making monsters)

• the culturally appreciative, sexually descriptive irony of Gothic counterculture’s reverse abjection with sex-positive demon BDSM, kink and fetishization; as well as asexuality and the ironic ontological ambiguities of trans, non-binary, intersex, and drag existence

that, when executed by emotionally/Gothically intelligent workers, use camp to cultivate empathy through Gothic counterculture; i.e., by synthesizing Gothic Communism during oppositional praxis (canon vs iconoclasm) according to our manifesto terminologies and structure—in short, its various tenets and theories

• Re-claim
• Re-union/-discover/-turn
• Re-empower/-negotiate
• Re-open/-educate
• Re-play
• Re-produce/-lease

• our four main Gothic theories (the Four Gs)

• • abjection (from Julia Kristeva’s process of abjection, vis-à-vis Hogle’s “ghost of the counterfeit”)
  • hauntology (from Derrida “spectres of Marx” and Fisher’s “canceled futures,” vis-à-vis Jodey Castricano’s cryptomimesis)
  • chronotopes (from Mikhail Bakhtin’s “Gothic chronotope”)
  • cryptonomy (from Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, vis-à-vis Hogle’s “narrative of the crypt” and Castricano’s cryptomimesis)

mode of expression (and assorted mediums: novels, short stories, movies, videogames, etc)

• monsters
• lairs/parallel space
• the Hermeneutic[11] Gothic-Communist Quadfecta (Gothic, game, queer and Marxist theory, which we’ll unpack more in the manifesto in Volume One)
• phobias/stigmas/biases

creative, oppositional praxis

• the Six Doubles of Creative/Oppositional Praxis

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

and their various synthetic oppositional groupings

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

via camp’s class-conscious defense from canon’s class dormancy and class betrayal

i.e., the moderate/reactionary class traitor’s four basic behaviors

• • open aggression, expressing gender trouble as a means of open, aggressive attack (disguised as “self-defense” reactive abuse): “We’re upset and punching down is free speech[12]” (“free speech” being code for “negative freedom for bigots who want to say bigoted things” to defend the elite’s profit motive).
  • condescension, expressing a moderate, centrist position that smarmily perpetuates the current status quo as immutable, but also optimal: “This is as good as it gets” but also which can never decay.
  • reactionary indignation, using sex-coercive symbols (argumentation) to defend their unethical positions: “They’re out to destroy your heroes, your fun, all you hold dear (code for ‘the current power structure’).”
  • DARVO (“Deny, Accuse, Reverse, Victim, Offender”), defending the status quo by defending the people who enslave them (the elite) by going after the elite’s enemies, thereby defending Capitalism during decay. When it decays, these “gamers” see “their” games in decay and will defend those, seeing human rights as an affordable compromise in the bargain. They see themselves (and the elite) as “victims,” and class warriors as monsters “ruining everything” (like Satan).

to foster empathy and emotional/Gothic intelligence by weird iconoclastic nerds reversing the canonical, unironic function of the Four Gs

• reverse abjection
• the emancipatory hauntology and Communist-chronotope operating as a parallel society—i.e., a parallel space (or language) that works off the anti-totalitarian notion of “parallel societies[13]“: “A [society] not dependent on official channels of communications, or on the hierarchy of values of the establishment.”
  • Note: This was originally written in Eastern Europe to manifest against the Soviet Marxist-Leninist political body/state apparatus, which then collapsed and emulated the West under neoliberal Capitalism/global US hegemony. But by that point the East had already stopped trying to develop Communism and the state reliably collapsed into a capital-driven form. The same idea of “parallel society” can be used to develop anarcho-Communism within the Gothic mode; e.g., the danger disco as a campy “party mentality” to queer existence since Matthew Lewis (exhibit 15b1). —Perse
• the Gothic Communist’s good-faith, revolutionary cryptonymy

On the flip-side, our would-be killers collectively lack emotional and Gothic intelligence; they do not respect, represent or otherwise practice our “creative successes.” As we’re going to establish by looking at the definition of weird canonical nerds (in the thesis statement), their conduct is quite the opposite of weird iconoclastic nerds; weird canonical nerds don’t practice mutual consent; they canonize, thus endorse

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

through their own synthetic toolkits during oppositional praxis. They endorse

• the process of abjection
• the carceral hauntology/parallel space as a capitalist chronotope (e.g., the “blind” cyberpunk)
• the complicit (thus bad-faith, bourgeois) cryptonymy

to further Capitalism’s crises-by-design, hence its expected decay, according to a variety of bourgeois trifectas that lead to the banality of evil’s

• “trident” (the Superstructure)

• • the manufacture trifecta (manufactured scarcity, competition/conflict, and consent)
  • the subterfuge trifecta (displace, disassociate, disseminate)
  • and coercion trifecta (gaslight, gatekeep, girl-boss)

• the “handle” (the Base)

• • owner/worker division
  • efficient profit (through exploitation)
  • infinite growth (through Imperialism)

and vertical, pyramid-scheme arrangements of power and subsequent tiers and punitive exchanges thereof

• top, middle, bottom
• lords, generals/lieutenants, and grunts
• corporate, militarized and paramilitarized bureaucratic flavors

arranged in neoliberal forms inside and outside of the text

• bosses, mini-bosses, and minions
• executives, middle management/content creators, customers/consumers
• waves of terror and unironic vice characters (menticide)

which leads to a surrender of total power during states of emergency that are always in crisis and decay. Empathy is the casualty of the middle class, whose weird canonical nerds are taught to see the underclass as lacking basic human rights during moral panics. In the presence of crisis and decay, people forget then deify whatever’s in front of them that looks powerful. They don’t take the time to ascertain if the giant trees are canonical or campy—in short, whether the swap has been made and the current falsehood is designed to liberate or exploit them. During the bait-and-switch, they’ll follow the leader to scapegoat the usual suspects under Capitalism unless canon can be camped.

To conclude, Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism camps canon (and its trees) to ensure that empathy/apathy and class character (unconscious/conscious) occur in oppositional praxis as a dialectical-material exchange. For workers, the empathy accrued is established during these creative successes, whose solidarized and active, intelligent poetics (a manifestation of reclaimed labor and working-class sentiment) cultivate the Superstructure in ways useful to proletarian praxis: helping all workers by reversing the process of abjection and its canonical historical-materialism (the narrative of the crypt, or echo of ruins). This happens by camping the ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., the barbaric lie of the West told through the monomyth, Cycle of Kings and infernal concentric pattern that drive the process of abjection currently used to exploit workers, resulting in myopic exploitation and genocide under Capitalist Realism while the elite’s endlessly engineered crises enter into, and out of, decayed states of emergency and exception. Rewrite how people respond to elite propaganda and you can rewrite how people think, thus rewrite history by changing its well-trod, profitable (for the elite) and bloody (for us) historical-material track; in short, you can take the state’s propaganda apart, ending Capitalist Realism as you start to develop towards a post-scarcity world (the kind that is wholly antithetical to modern nation-states and their vertical arrangements of power): through the imaginary past and its legion of ghosts clamoring for something better (versus the entitled-yet-incredibly-isolated bully saying “haven’t I earned this?” after having done the state’s dirty work for decades).

Now that we’ve scaled the trees as a potential engine for rebellion, I will now give you the gasoline: the four main Gothic theories. As such, the rest of the thesis proper will provide these theories, then unpack my thesis paragraph/body before the camp map (specifically its finale) will apply them to canon as something to camp.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

The Four Gs: Our Main Gothic Theories

“You have to be careful when you use it in the swamp, and there are warlocks.”

—something I said to Zeuhl in my sleep, while at MMU after playing Hollow Knight and writing about Metroidvania for my master’s thesis* (2018)

*Re: “Lost in Necropolis” (2018). Refer to Persephone’s 2025 Metroidvania Corpus for all of my work on Metroidvania; i.e., from 2017 to the present.

“Gothic,” for our purposes, is the creation of monsters and monstrous spaces (e.g., Metroidvania) for oppositional praxis and dialectical-material analysis. I will extrapolate on both points (the making of monsters, in the thesis statement; and the exploration of their spaces—specifically the “ludo-Gothic BDSM” of the Metroidvania—during the “camp map”) and consider other definitions of the Gothic in the symposium (e.g., Chris Baldrick and Tanya Krzywinska) but for now that will do; the Gothic is, like the West itself, largely made up and retold through a series of violent, monstrous lies.

These four theories (and their dance partners) are not: our four main Gothic theories, the Four Gs, presented in ways that intersect with themselves and my own idiosyncratic research/argumentation. There’s no easy way to present them in this state except as I have (originally written in my 2022 blogpost, “Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion, or Gothic Communism: Manifesto” and ultimately transferred here). I promise it’s a Gordian Knot that we’ll work towards the center of, not simply cut through like Alexander with his sword:

• abjection (from Julia Kristeva’s process of abjection, vis-à-vis Jerrold Hogle’s “ghost of the counterfeit”)

Coined by Julia Kristeva in her 1981 book, The Powers of Horror, abjection means “to throw off.” Abjection is “us versus them,” dividing the self into a linguistically and emotionally normal state with an “othered” half. This “other” is generally reserved for abjected material—criminal, taboo or alien concepts: good and evil, heaven and hell, civilization and nature, men and women, etc. Through Cartesian dualism—re: the rising of a dividing system of thought by René Descartes that led to settler colonialism—nation-states and corporations create states of normality (the status quo) by forcefully throwing off everything that isn’t normal, isn’t rational, masculine or even human, etc. Through the status quo, normal examples are defined by their alien, inhuman opposites, the latter held at a distance but frequently announced and attacked (a form of punching down); the iconoclast, often in Gothic fiction, will force a confrontation, exposing the viewer (often vicariously) to experience the same process in reverse (a form of punching up). Facing the abjected material reliably leads to a state of horror, its reversal exposing the normal as false, rotten and demonic, and the so-called “demons” or dangerous undead as victimized and human: “Who’s the savage?” asks Rob Halford. “Modern man!” Descartes was certainly a massive dick, but the spawning of endless Pygmalion-generated undead and demons scarcely started and ended with him. Instead, it expanded through the ghost of the counterfeit as wedded to the process of abjection in Gothic canon; or as Dave West summarizes in “Implementation of Gothic Themes in The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit” (2023):

In [the 2012 essay] “The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Process of Abjection,” Jerrold E. Hogle argues that the eighteenth-century Gothic emergence from fake imitation of fake work is the foundation of what is defined as modern Gothic today. He maintains that Horace Walpole’s 1765[14] The Castle of Otranto, which is considered as the groundwork of the modern Gothic story, is built on a false proclamation that the novel was an Italian manuscript written by a priest. […] Hogle argues that modern Gothic is grounded in fakery. [In turn,] Hogle’s observation of the history of The Castle of Otranto forms the basis for understanding the concept of counterfeit as a result of the abjection process.

Gothic Communism, then, reverses xenophobic abjection through xenophilic subversion as a liminal form of countercultural expression (camp). Sex work and pornography (and indeed any controlled substance—sex, drugs, rock n’ roll, but also subversive oral traditional and slave narratives) operate through liminal transgression; e.g., subversive monster-fucking Amazons (exhibit 104a), werewolves (exhibit 87a) and Little Red Riding Hood (exhibit 52b) or Yeti (exhibit 48d2), etc. Reversing the process of abjection, these monstrous-feminine beings allow their performers to not only address personal traumas “onstage,” but engender systemic change in socio-material conditions; i.e., by performing their repressed inequalities during arguably surreal, but highly imaginary interpersonal exchanges that are actually fun to participate in: as a process of de facto education in opposition to state fakeries (thus refusing to engender genocide within the common ground of a shared—indeed, heavily fought-over—aesthetic).

(artist: John Fox)

• chronotope/parallel Gothic space (from Mikhail Bakhtin’s “Gothic chronotope”)

Mikhail Bakhtin’s “time-space,” outlined posthumously in The Dialogic Imagination (1981), is an architectural evocation of space and time as something whose liminal motion through describes a particular quality of history described by Bakhtin as “castle-narrative”:

Toward the end of the seventeenth century in England, a new territory for novelistic events is constituted and reinforced in the so-called “Gothic” or “black” novel—the castle (first used in this meaning by Horace Walpole in The Castle of Otranto, and later in Radcliffe, Monk Lewis and others). The castle is saturated through and through with a time that is historical in the narrow sense of the word, that is, the time of the historical past […] the traces of centuries and generations are arranged in it in visible form as various parts of its architecture […] and in particular human relationships involving dynastic primacy and the transfer of hereditary rights. […] legends and traditions animate every corner of the castle and its environs through their constant reminders of past events. It is this quality that gives rise to the specific kind of narrative inherent in castles and that is then worked out in Gothic novels.

For our purposes, Gothic variants and their castle-narratives have a medieval/pre-Enlightenment character that describes the historical past in a museum-like way that is fearfully reimagined: as something to recursively move through, thus try to record in some shape or form; e.g., the Neo-Gothic castle (Otranto, 1764) to the retro-future haunted house (the Nostromo from Alien, 1979) to the Metroidvania (1986, onwards; my area of expertise). Canonical examples include various “forbidden zones,” full of rapacious, operatic monsters; i.e., canonical/capitalistic parallel space. Expanding on Frederic Jameson, the iconoclastic Gothic chronotope is an “archaeology of the future” that can expose how we think about the past in the present to reshape the future towards a Utopian (Communist) outcome. Although we’ll expound on this idea repeatedly throughout the book, a common method beyond monsters are hauntological locations housing things the state would normally abject: the crimes of empire buried in the rubble, but also contained inside its castle-narrative as an equally hyperreal, “narrative-of-the-crypt” (from Hogle: “The Restless Labyrinth: Cryptonomy in the Gothic Novel,” 1980) mise-en-abyme. Iconoclastic parallel spaces and their parallel society of counterterror agents, then, align against state-corporate interests and their “geometries of terror” (exhibit 64c) which, in turn, artists can illustrate in their own iconoclastic hauntologies (exhibit 64b) and castle-narratives; i.e., ironic appreciative movement through the Gothic space and its palliative-Numinous sensations.

• hauntology (from Jacques Derrida’s “spectres of Marx” and Mark Fisher’s “canceled futures,” vis-à-vis Jodey Castricano’s cryptomimesis):

A basic linguistic state between the past and the present—described by Jacques Derrida in Spectres of Marx (1993) as being Marxism itself. Smothered by Capitalism, Marxism is an older idea from Capitalism’s past that haunts Capitalism—doing so through “ghosts” in Capitalism’s language that haunt future generations under the present order of material existence. In Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing, Jodey Castricano writes how Marx, though not a Gothicist, was obsessed with the language of spectres and ghosts—less as concrete symbols sold for profit in the modern sense and more as a consequence of coerced human language expressing a return of the past and of the dead as a repressed force; she also calls this process cryptomimesis, or “writing with ghosts,” as a tradition carried on by Derrida and his own desire to express haunting as a feeling experienced inside Capitalism and its language. The concept would be articulated further by Mark Fisher as Capitalist Realism (2009); i.e., a myopia, or total inability to imagine the future beyond past versions of the future that have become decayed, dead, and forsaken: “canceled futures” (which Stuart Mills discusses how to escape in his 2019 writeup on Fisher’s hauntology of culture, Capitalism, and acid Communism, “What is Acid Communism?”). While all workers are haunted by the dead, as Marx states, this especially applies to its proponents—cops and other class traitors, scapegoats, etc—as overwhelmed by a return of the dead (and their past) through Gothic language/affect in the socio-material sphere. For those less disturbed by the notion, however, this can be something to welcome and learn from—to write with; i.e., in the presence of the dead coming home as a welcome force in whatever forms they take: not just ghosts, but also vampires, zombies, or composites, the latter extending to demons and anthromorphs as summoned or made; but also all of these categories being modular insofar as they allow for a hybridized expression of trauma through undead-demonic-animalistic compounds. As Castricano writes of cryptomimesis

Although some critics continue to disavow the Gothic as being subliterary and appealing only to the puerile imagination—Fredric Jameson refers to the Gothic as “that boring and exhausted paradigm” [what a dork]—others, such as Anne Williams, claim that the genre not only remains very much alive but is especially vital in its evocation of the “undead,” an ontologically ambiguous figure which has been the focus of so much critical attention that another critic, Slavoj Zizek, felt compelled to call the return of the living dead “the fundamental fantasy of contemporary mass culture”‘ (source).

in regards to ghosts, I would argue the same notion applies to all undead, demons and animalistic egregores; i.e., writing with both as complicated theatrical expressions of the human condition under Capitalism.

(artist: Zdzisław Beksiński)

• cryptonymy (from Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, vis-à-vis Jerrold Hogle’s “narrative of the crypt” and Jodey Castricano’s cryptomimesis)

In Cynthia Sugars’ entry on “Cryptonymy” for David Punter’s The Encyclopedia of the Gothic (2012), Sugars writes, “Cryptonymy, as it is used in psychoanalytic theory and adapted to Gothic studies, refers to a term coined by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok [which] receives extended consideration in their book The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy (1986).” Sugars goes on to summarize Abraham and Torok’s usage, which highlights a tendency for language to hide a traumatic or unspeakable word with seemingly unrelated words, which compound under coercive, unnatural conditions (the inherent deceit of the nation-state and its monopolies). For Sugars and for us, Gothic studies highlight these conditions as survived by a narrative of the crypt, its outward entropy—the symptoms and wreckage—intimating a deeper etiological trauma sublimated into socially more acceptable forms (usually monsters, lairs/parallel space, phobias, etc; you can invade, kill and “cure” those. In my 2021 writeup, “The Promethean Quest and James Cameron’s Military Optimism in Metroid,” I call this false optimism the “puncher’s chance” afforded to pro-Capitalist soldiers and de facto killers for the state; the odds suck and are either disguised or romanticized through heroic stories/monomyths). Described by Jerrold Hogle in “The Restless Labyrinth” as the only thing that survives, the narrative of the crypt is a narrative of a narrative of a narrative to a hidden curse/doom announced by things displaced from the former cause: Gothic cryptonyms; illusions, deceptions, mirages, etc. Sugars determines, the closer one gets to the problem, the more the space itself abruptly announces a vanishing point, a procession of fragmented illusions tied to a transgenerational curse: “a place of concealment that stands on mere ashes of something not fully present,” Hogle writes of Otranto (the first “gothic” castle, reassembled for Horace Walpole’s 1764 “archaeology”). In regards to the mimetic quality of the crypt, this general process of cryptomimesis draws attention to a writing predicated upon encryption: the play of revelation and concealment lodged within parts of individual words tied to Gothic theatrical conventions and linguistic functions, but also patently ludic narratives that can change one’s luck within a pre-conceived and enforced set of rules; i.e., rewriting our odds of survival, thus fate, inside exploitative ludic schemes by pointedly redictating the material conditions (through ludo-Gothic BDSM) that represent “luck” as a variable the elite strive to manipulate for profit under Capitalism.

So, yeah, that’s a lot to unpack! A veritable concentric castle with many layers-upon-layers, I slowly built it around a grain of sand into a black pearl. It seems impenetrable, which might tempt us to smash it or pawn it off (which would destroy its value). Instead, we’re going to unpack it all, but like a Gothic castle or Gordian Knot, we can’t do that from outside (where we can only gaze on its glorious façade); we have to get into the thick of it, thus go down into the dark, deep dungeons where the truth of allegory is paradoxically hidden and waiting to be found and brought back up. History is a stage play that only stops on the last syllable of recorded time; until then, the show must go on and so must we in opposition to the state and its liars. We must investigate the past as full of doubled lies and other paradoxes. In short, we’ll have to go “dumpster diving” inside Percy Shelley’s “colossal Wreck[15].” We’ll do that (figuratively) next, and honestly many more time after as the book carries on…

Doubles, Dark Forces, and Paradox; or into the Shadow Zone: Where We Currently Are and Where We’re Going Deeper Into

“I have weapons you would not dare use!”

—Omadon, the Red Wizard; The Flight of Dragons (1982)

This essay briefly considers power as something to perform, thus interrogate and negotiate inside the Gothic mode/Gothic imagination. This paradoxical theatrical space (and its liminal territories/forms of expression) have many names—Hell; the abyss, the underworld, the beyond, or the void, etc—but I call it the shadow zone!

Per the monomyth as explained by Joseph Campbell (someone we’ll return to in the thesis statement), any heroic quest demands a journey into Hell. Confronting dark forces, there, the hero generally presents before the quest as a paradox: being of two worlds, one foot in the world of the living and one of the dead, magic/science, medieval/modern, heaven/hell, etc. Their liminal state and privilege of position affords them special education/access to old books (or sages) of wisdom that—as we shall see—can be counterfeited, but work within the same medieval poetics and Gothic mode that can be used for or against the status quo. Our journey (as workers seeking liberation from mass worker exploitation under neoliberal Capitalism) is to bring the campy power of a reclaimed Hell/shadow zone (and its subversive forces of darkness) back with us—to transform the world around us to better allow workers to negotiate for themselves while fighting for their basic human rights (and the health of the planet’s ecosystems and that of animals). Each time I went into Hell, I came back different—until Hell’s camp followed me and now lives with/within me; I began to see the world differently according to how I always was but didn’t always have the language; e.g., my queer-coded, teenage fantasies and vast dramatis personae of genderqueer players in The Cat in the Adage (exhibit 0a1) showed that I—like Bilbo—just needed a little push out the door to get the ball rolling.

(exhibit 0a2a: The neoliberal gang’s all here; the Shylock vice character and the white wizard and his token brothers. Death omens/magic visions, psychomachia, anti-Semitism, great speeches, light shows—all in The Flight of Dragons are lifted from medieval thought and presented unironically as neoliberal canon; i.e., in black-and-white hauntological language that serves the status quo as it presently existed in 1982 and continues to exist under the current Internet Age; i.e., under the self-same canonical paradigm/distribution of power and its false mechanisms of exchange dressed theatrically up as heroics in cinema and older media forms, but especially videogames as a then-new rising-commodity-turned-mega-business.)

When I was younger, I was always dreaming of dragons and knights and fairies, and darker Gothic things that stole the show. One of my favorite films was (and still is) The Flight of Dragons, where the Red Wizard, Omadon—played by James Earl Jones (the king of vice characters: the Emperor of the Night, Darth Vader and Thulsa Doom—speaks the tyrant’s plea and threatens the naïve and special zone/Garden of Eden dreamt up by his other three magic brothers:

I have weapons you would not dare use. Fear rules men. By summoning all the dark powers, I will infest the spirit of Man so that he uses his science and logic to destroy himself. Greed and avarice will prevail! Turn brother against brother! And those who do not hear my words will pay the price! I’ll show Man how to fly like a fairy! I’ll show him what distorted science can give birth to! And I’ll give him the ultimate answer his science can ask for!”

Jones’ Omadon is “a seducer of darkness, master of that heartless magic the world calls black,” and his villain’s monologue is seriously raining on their parade. So they hire a squad of mercenaries to chase him to his home, kill him, and steal the performative object of his power: the Red Crown. It’s a quest, a monomyth of the usual sort that scapegoats the Satanic force, like Tolkien did; i.e., as usual, in the canonical sense. But it was also penned in the early 1980s, on the cusp of neoliberalism: “Farewell! Can you not feel the world turning in my direction already!” was a warning to the audience of men like Reagan and girl bosses like Thatcher leading to an endless spawning of so many monomythic quests—especially those in ludic forms that would simulate, parallel and disguise the world being divided and rent asunder by Capitalism. Videogames, in particular, were devised during Bretten Woods but codified by Tolkien’s refrain (the High Fantasy treasure map and Protestant work ethic) and disseminated under Neoliberalism—i.e., from 1979 onwards—towards various other refrains, but especially James Cameron’s: the shooter and Metroidvania (we will explore these at length during the “camp map”; for now, just remember that videogames are an incredibly effective forms of theatrical propaganda: the codification of dogmatic beliefs and instructional behaviors [us-versus-them] taught through videogames as an all-too-effective war simulator).

Omadon is made out to be the obvious cartoon foil, and he seems treacherous by default. But the real enemies (in a class-conscious sense) are his brothers, who perceive of a crisis so great that—in the midst of the waning Age of Enchantment and the dawning Age of Science (Cartesian thought, aka Reason, or the Enlightenment)—their only option is to exclude and scapegoat him (the dark faggot clown) and lock all enchanted things away for safekeeping: to be visited “only during a flash of insight or the breadth of a dream.” In short, our dreams and awesome power are increasingly alienated from us; i.e., locked tragically away, put on loan and leant back to us by the elite privatizing them in whitewashed forms that simultaneously stand for the Greater Good. Sir Peter defeats Omadon—and by extension Omadon’s resistance of the privatization of fantasy (“deny me and you deny all magic!”)—by ignoring a paradox: “two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time.” From a scientific standpoint, he’s basically right. From a Gothic standpoint, though he’s dead wrong and this is telling. Sir Peter denies all magic and its critical paradoxes to put his trust in science. For him, science is automatically the Truth and universally good, whereas Omadon’s lies are completely false and bad. This isn’t just naïve, it’s complicit. “You don’t scare me. Nothing so horrible could be real. […] And that’s why Antiquity chose me. You are magic, mere illusion! I am science and the truth!” Dogmatically spouting those equations of “his,” he sounds so blind to the idea that he—a scientist who loves magic—could somehow not be bought and paid for by the same old profit motive that colonizes everything for profit, including white people; i.e., the Imperial Boomerang:

the Imperial Boomerang

“The thesis that governments that develop repressive techniques to control colonial territories will eventually deploy those same techniques domestically against their own citizens” (source: Wikipedia). In Foucault’s own words during his lecture at “Il faut défendre la société” in 1975:

[W]hile colonization, with its techniques and its political and juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself (source: “Foucault’s Boomerang: the New Military Urbanism,” 2013).

Described by Stephen Graham as “military urbanism,” this phenomenon accounts for the legion of dead futures popularized in American canon and its expanded, retro-future states of exception—hauntological narratives that present the future as dead and Capitalism as retro-futuristically decayed; i.e., Zombie Capitalism and zombie police states.

Sir Peter is the cold march of reason that sublimates genocide behind neoliberal fantasies and centrist myths written by dumb white boys who a) buy into the get-rich-quick scheme of saving the world; and b) who dream, night after night, about getting the girl afterward. “It’s normal!” my mother protests, to which I gaily respond: “No, it’s normalized.”

All of this is harmful wish fulfillment, because it not only excludes everyone but him; it demands their slaughter to fulfill Sir Peter’s entitlement as the Chosen One. In the end, he’s a cop—a class-dormant traitor/slave to the grind and nerdy spearhead to the darkest, cruelest magic of all: convincing the world neoliberal treachery doesn’t exist. He’s Bill Gates, the unsexy nerd who commodifies everything through a monopoly that limits what we can imagine by taking what was open source/open domain[16] and privatizing it, effectively selling our dreams back to us through our own stolen labor paid to us in trickle-down wages (also stolen); or rather, he’s a bad copy of Gates, whose allegory of the cave myopically cages the brains of weird canonical nerds who want to be just like Gate’s badly copied form: the class-dormant shadow theatre of false rebellion and controlled opposition (the fascist/centrist device, which extends to token police, of course; i.e., sublimation and recuperation during the monomyth and its vicious cycle, which I call the Cycle of Kings—more on this during the thesis statement).

(exhibit 0a2b1a: Whitey saves the world by killing the Nazi-Communist, token queer/racial minority scapegoat and getting the girl as result. Like Milton’s Satan but canonized, Sir Peter’s scheme for seizing power is set inside an ancient document that is both inside of itself and “found” externally as something to sell to the masses: an “archaeology” whose counterfeit cancels the future as dead. Hint: the finale shot of the film presents the happy presumed-newlyweds standing inside a pawn shop with the word “loan” hanging over the window frame and their silhouettes; their power and connection is a cheap fantasy that has been loaned to them, around which the world is diegetically decaying mid-crisis. The wish fulfillment—for the white guy and his Sailor Moon lookalike [who he made in the image of “everything he desired in a woman”; i.e., “his” fairy princess as actually supplied to him by pre-existing counterfeits]—is harmful because it’s pure escapism. It both asks him to ignore his real material conditions—holding down two jobs as a research assistant that wants to escape by making a game that everyone loves provided he gets the capital to back it up—and ignore the dreadful fact that he played right into the fantasy of colonizing a class, race and gendered “other” dressed up in medieval language, all so he can then return from the shadow zone, get the girl and live like a king! It’s systemic delusion meant to benefit the elite, not him, and the historical materialism plays out soberingly through Omadon’s curse as the cliché of “Jewish Revenge”: laughing while the Roman fool falls on “his” own sword [remember, it’s on loan]. To quote a different wizard, “There are no happy endings because nothing ends.” Regarding Sir Peter as an analog for aspiring weird canonical nerds shouting, “Pick me!” the fact remains that precious few get to inhabit that money-maker role; i.e., “make a killing” for the elite, now and forever.)

Note: While uploading Volume Zero onto its 2025 book promotion, I noticed several things I wanted to add/change. These changes have been condensed into the following four-page addendum, which includes various ideas largely introduced and/or built on after Volume Zero first released, back in October 2023. I’ll mark where it ends. —Perse, 3/21/2025

 We’ll unpack all of this, as we go. For now, simply bear in mind that such fun and games are canonized to incur Quixotic, imposturous results; i.e., in ways that keep power (as something to enjoy and perform) right where it is; re: from Tolkien’s heyday onto the post-1970s resurgence not just of tabletop games played through dice rolls, but computer games as well serving as extensions of capital into fictionalized variants. Dungeons and Dragons first appeared (as we currently know it) in 1974, right after the 1973 Oil Shock (the same year neoliberalism was being tested in South America). By 1982, though, videogames (and the half-real territories they pointedly represent inside-outside themselves), were well-and-truly starting to crystalize; i.e., the Atari Crash happened in 1983, but in 1985, Super Mario Bros. debuted in the United States, and the rest—as they say—was history.

In turn, such things became something to mime and defend, effectively making Sir Peter a cryptonymic, egregoric extension of those who—already privileged enough as it is (white straight men, followed by token parties)—wanted to become what Gates was already monopolizing in the late ’80s: the center of the universe. They would get their chance in the early ’90s; i.e., with companies like id, Value, Microsoft and Blizzard going on not simply to corner the market, but make it in their image by echoing those weird canonical nerds they were already imitating and contributing to larger harmful systems (and symptoms) in bad faith:

weird canonical nerds (versus weird iconoclastic nerds)

A term I coined while borrowing from and expanding on Cheyenne Lin’s “weird nerds” phrase from “Why Nerds Joined the Alt-Right” (2023), and one I present through my usual dialectical-material approach despite the obvious social components I’m weaving into things: weird canonical nerds vs weird iconoclastic nerds, or otherwise proponents of canon vs camp in popular culture; i.e., anything that weird canonical nerds posit, their iconoclastic brethren challenge in duality.

To it, weird canonical nerds 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. As something to blindly enjoy/endorse through zealously faithful, uncritical consumption, they celebrate the monomyth and Cycle of Kings as “good war”; e.g., Gamergate, 2014, but also TERFs and their territorial emergence in the late 2010s. Not only are TERFs, and by extension weird canonical nerds, very wide—as a practicing group of stochastic terrorists that encompasses white cis-het male consumers and women, as well as token traitors (of class, culture and race)—but they unironically lead to fascism per the infernal concentric pattern as a holistic enterprise (with Gamergate endorsed by weird canonical nerds into the 2016 election of Donald Trump, and whose neoliberal sentiments’ fascist outcomes were felt throughout the consumption of media and mentality alike as things to practice).

Weird canonical nerds are systemically bigoted, pertaining to Man Box culture as something to openly endorse, or “resist” in ways that do nothing to change the status quo/avoid the infernal concentric pattern/Cycle of Kings; e.g., TERF Amazons, but also proudly “apolitical” non-feminist nerds who embody a particular status within the nerd pantheon of canonical heroes: Mega Man as a go-to centrist male hero, for instance, but also Eren Yeager as the “incel fascist” with mommy issues, or Samus Aran as the Galactic Federation’s singular girl boss/white Indian, etc. All become something to endorse within critically blind portions of nerd culture that ape their prescriptive, colonial heroes within culture war dressed up as “apolitical” (the fascist ideology being secondary to the pursuit and claiming of personal power by changing one’s shape and language to fit those aims; e.g., Reinhardt Heydrich as a fascist war pig [to combine Umberto Eco with Black Sabbath] who would say whatever he could to justify his own iron grip on the minds of the populace: the foreign plot inside the house, once and forever).

To this, the Gothic and its various intersections, contradictions and conflicts are embroiled within oppositional praxis for or against weird canonical nerds, hence depictions/endorsements of different monster types; i.e., that, in the white, cis-het male tradition of privilege, such persons routinely “fail up,” and as success—like a whore/wife or nice house—is something they are taught to believe is owed to them (the promise of shelter and sex). Such betrayals and entitlement extend to token minorities allowed a slice of the pie, post-betrayal, but also must surrender their pie when the time comes (for which the real “Indian givers” are the settler colonist bearing false gifts: the Trojan Horse, aka the Faustian bargain, in Gothic circles).

For every heroic quest, then, there’s always a compelled sexual reward and victim, thus all the canonical essentialism such things are known for (the Imperium’s sex and force relayed through “ancient” theatrical arguments favoring the state). From Tolkien onwards (and from those he borrowed from), weird canonical nerds like Sir Peter are a fascist/centrist device to identify around (versus subvert)—one whose policing of the world in and out of media extends to token police, of course; i.e., sublimation and recuperation during the monomyth and its vicious cycle, which I call the Cycle of Kings (and which overlaps with the Shadow of Pygmalion). It’s all fake (as the Gothic historically is), but in ways that—per Hogle’s ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection—serve the elite when used dogmatically to endorse rape dressed up: as a map to follow to its logical conclusion, heading back to “Rome” as never having left. Similar to Gates, then, Peter isn’t just a fraud, but a Pygmalion rapist and clown posturing as goody-goody in bad faith—a liar claiming he did it all himself when in reality nothing could be further from the truth (Behind the Bastards’ “Part One: The Ballad of Bill Gates,” 2023). Anything that applies to Gates applies to Peter and vice versa, hence those persons imitating them sans irony through prison-like violence kettling state scapegoats while apologizing for Capitalism (and its Realism). Their revenge serves profit, not universal liberation.

We’ll cover this (and more) during the thesis statement (and expound on many things that it cannot, later in this book series), but think of it for right now as a less-than-peaceful transfer of power in neo-medieval language; i.e., if there’s a crown then it’s for the taking in some kind of monomythic quest/Hero’s Journey robbing Ozymandias (or King Lear/Oedipus) blind:

Cycle of Kings (abridged)

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…

Man Box/”prison sex” mentality

Coined in my own work, “prison sex” mentality speaks broadly to rape culture as a practice; i.e., as a systemically taught and enacted approach leading towards the routine harming of others while maintaining the status quo. It is similar to the Man Box argument by Mark Greene, who—in his 2023 podcast, Remaking Manhood: The Healthy Masculinity Podcast—refers to “Man Box culture” as:

the brutal enforcement of a narrowly defined set of traditional rules for being a man. These rules are enforced through shaming and bullying, as well as promises of rewards, the purpose of which is to force conformity to our dominant culture of masculinity (source: Mark Greene’s “How the Man Box Poisons Our Sons,” 2019).

“Prison sex” mentality exists in quotes because it occurs inside-outside actual state-described “prisons”—said facilities (and their legends) bleeding chronotopically into the nuclear home (and onto those things in the home’s shadow as a fractally recursive extension of the state and its victims/perpetrators). To it, “prison sex” mentality is the same idea as Man Box culture, except it chooses to focus less on men and more on the unequal power dynamics that occur between dimorphized workers of any sort; i.e., as trained by the state Superstructure not just to rape and kill one another in literal terms, but also theatrical language; re: any form of abject (us-versus-them) expression that ties into the bigoted, colonial binary of a divided class of male/female, white/black, good/evil, etc, labor force acting within entertainment (sports and porn), the household, the workplace, and Gothic iterations of any of these things. Any cis-het man that fails to live up to the heteronormative standard of manliness (which is an impossible feat to begin with), for example, must be weak but also strong in a manner threatening towards the status quo; i.e., womanly or otherwise monstrous-feminine. The same goes for anyone in the Man Box displaying “prison sex” mentalities through their actions and output against state targets, who must fight back in duality using subversive doubles of the self-same Gothic language; re: weird canonical nerds versus weird iconoclastic nerds fighting to and fro with the language of monsters [more on these in a bit].

As such, the Hero’s journey and completion is Promethean—chasing Numinous things that, far from being conquered, always return to trouble the world; i.e., during Capitalism and its boom-and-bust hidden behind the same old shadowy illusions sold clear-as-day to fresh children (who grow into adults, have children, and pass all of this down, anew).

Flight of Dragons is hella sexist, then, and there’s nothing particularly “noble” about its Radcliffean, false-flag dismissal of fascism and Communism stuck in the same sphere (with Omadon’s red wizard being an abject storing space/red herring for all manner of capitalist scapegoats; i.e., he literally bloats with them, being full of himself as a kind of strawman to dismiss through Reason, below).

End addendum. —Perse

The paradox, here, is that I absolutely love The Flight of Dragons and its language of magic, fairy princesses, twink-looking heroes, vice characters, dragons, knights in shining armor, board games, etc; I just hate how they’re framed within state monopolies. Sir Peter is treated as “unique,” “having one foot in the world of magic and one in the world of science” while literally working for the Man (Antiquity as male-coded; mysteriously but essentially all-powerful: “Trust the judgement of Antiquity!” / “Good old Antiquity! I knew I could trust it!”). Despite the movie’s flawed framework, all I have to do to “make it good” is to camp it; i.e., “make it gay” in my mind and in my work (which the elite don’t want you to do; they want you to purchase “their” power fantasies given out on loan while you police everyone else as their dutiful, preferentially mistreated labor/wage slaves [the middle class] assisting the profit motive through all the usual ways); e.g., imagine Sir Peter (not Conan) with a pussy or have him getting pegged by Princess Melisandre while listening to KMFDM’s “Megalomaniac” (1997), etc.

This is not so hard to do; i.e., the quickest way to camp canon is through sex (and parodies of sexualized violence). As I am Persephone, my namesake is that of a witchy goddess of death with one foot in the world of the living and the land of the dead (all deities live inside the human breast); by accident of birth, I was born but also made for doing so according to my medievalist education as a profoundly special set of circumstances: I was born trans and exposed to education at home and in school that spoke to my desire to be free. I feel unique but have no desire to pull a Beethoven and boast: “Prince, what you are, you are through chance and birth; what I am, I am through my own labor. There are many princes and there will continue to be thousands more, but there is only one Beethoven” (source: Rick Fulker’s “Why Beethoven Snubbed Princes and Put His Music First,” 2016).

(artist: Julius Schmid)

In all the universe, in all the gin joints in all the world, Persephone walked into mine and made me her avatar. “All deities reside within the human breast,” wrote Blake; yet, I think of the “Jewish revenge” of my marriage of Heaven and Hell as Canon’s tyrannical plea, re-camped by me and billions of other workers actively and/or passively yearning for freedom. Its sui generis format is both “Workers of the world, unite! You have only to lose your chains!” married to “Grant me revenge! And if you do not listen, then to hell with you!” (this second sentiment goes for anyone who taught me or otherwise contributed towards that dark beautiful thing that became what I am today). For Communists wronged by the state, we monsters and what we make are human as Shylock was:

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction (source).

Our revenge, as a simulacrum, only resembles that of those who wrong us and counterfeit our campy legends for their canonical gain (Tolkien’s refrain); our aesthetic is shared but our function is altogether different: class consciousness as uncontrollable opposition relayed in terrifying medieval language that is thoroughly more wise through hindsight; i.e., not just according to Robert Asprey’s paradox of terror (which we’ll consider in relation to state forces decrying labor as terrorists) but  the hauntological paradox of “the Wisdom of the Ancients,” whereupon old forms of monstrous expression have been updated for the modern world and its challenges to accommodate our needs as workers being exploited by Capitalism and its propaganda. That is our revenge—slowly camping the canon, thus the Superstructure, and reclaiming the Base through our monstrous, ghostly theatre as something that once turned on, can never be shut down or destroyed; it can only be repressed in forms that always come back because the elite cannot kill all its workers (not on purpose, anyways).

Shadow theatre and its mythic structure are nothing new. It dates back to Plato’s infamous allegory of the cave and its mimesis as paradoxically haunted by the shadows of class struggle (the spectres of Marx, which in theory did not technically exist when Plato was alive, and yet whose struggles for emancipation include these older slaves that Marx alluded to in “The Eighteenth Brumaire”). Camus may have noted in The Myth of Sisyphus that canonical shadow theatre repeats to an absurd degree; i.e., Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill as punishment by the gods. To escape it, we can’t just smile at the gods like he proposed, but steal “their” fire on our own Promethean Quest! This means camping the canon, which requires repeated forays into Hell and putting the wrong things right at the source: our “darkness visible” and gods as stolen out from inside our breasts and put on the cave wall of Plato’s cave! Tolkien’s refrain/gentrification of war through High Fantasy is darkly echoed in stories just like The Flight of Dragons (which is especially treacherous because it argues moderately—i.e., as the voice of reason from a position of perceived disadvantage). We purposefully must camp the canonical nebula by camping the map as a source of class education through dialectical-material play (which we’ll elaborate on during the thesis statement and “camp map”): oppositional praxis as playing on in shadowy forms dancing on the same cave wall, our darkness deliberate fencing back and forth with the state’s blind canonical doubles like Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood dueling Basil Rathbone’s Guy of Gisbourne:

Something I will argue repeatedly throughout my thesis (and the rest of the book) is how the greatest power/strength of class-conscious warriors is their deliberately campy “darkness visible” doubling canonical versions (through the Wisdom of the Ancients, though I may not always call it that); i.e., their innate and uncanny ability to camp canon using the same shadowy language/aesthetics that class-dormant class traitors do (whose much touted “greatest strength” is their Achilles Heel, their greatest weakness when the state needs sacrifices). Beauty in “the eye of the beholder” is subjective, but perceptions of power are enforced to a matter of function and objective degree in order to define beauty (and what is “correct” according to basic human, animal and environmental rights as tied to heroic stories) as having a monstrous class character. Everything happens in the shadow zone between dueling hero monsters for or against the state and its profit motive. Meanwhile, state agents are labeled by the state as counterterrorists, calling labor’s agents “terrorists” (e.g., Martin Luther King Jr.) in bad faith; the language can be reversed easily enough, but the function still has to be scrutinized as parsed with a learned eye.

Regarding “Hell” as the shadow zone we must delve into during oppositional praxis, here’s something to remember based on what we’re discussed up to this point: Power is historically about perception and invention; i.e., fabricated for or against the state through undead and demonic masks, uniforms, weapons, performers, etc. Power exchange goes in both directions, onstage and off. Canonically speaking, though, the creation and theft of this power is meta, wherein the ludic contract (as a canonical device) steals power in a Faustian sense that doesn’t just master players (re: Seth Giddings and Helen Kennedy) but does so in bad faith; i.e., the promise of false power through a Faustian ludic contract—one whose Quixotic escapism/false hope[17] (a neoliberal weapon/opiate) seeks perpetual “empowerment/strength” to progress through a fictional gameworld that disguises what’s actually disempowering players outside of itself: the elite and their neoliberal illusions as half-real (from Jesper Juul, meaning between “the fiction and the rules” but also real life whose “magic circle” [from Eric Zimmerman] is where the game takes place). Obviously this goes beyond videogame simulations and extends out of and into older mediums that reinforce the meta-narrative of the status quo as part of our daily lives and their mimesis. “All’s fair in love and war” but their battle is expressed across all mediums and life imitating art through our own battles as coded or otherwise informed by these narratives and vice versa. The visible darkness we provide is challenged by the blindness of canon’s myopia (Capitalist Realism); i.e., canonical hell historically-materially becomes a place to give up and accept one’s doom by playing along as a copy of a cop that is thoroughly cynical as Oscar Wilde would have put it: one “who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.”

There’s also the diegetic theft of power by all of these cop-like heroes, stealing it through “the game” (in whatever form it takes) as a training simulator for praxial purposes: the FPS as a military simulator[18]. “Empowered,” the canonical hero learns to rob from an ostensibly fascist, Communist, non-white, non-Christian and/or queer foe; i.e., they—but also canonical moral panics and their campy reclamation—exist (indented for clarity)

in the same outlawed space/shadow zone exemplified by Gothic poetics: forbidden, tempestuous desire and other extreme emotions/mood-swings; the supernatural/occult and bad omens; and confusing or unchecked sin/vice as dark and deadly, disease-like sentiments (revenge, lust, gluttony, etc, as leading to ignominious death, often according to cancer or acute organ failure as surreal, medieval metaphors for “dying of shame[19]“).

Similar to Omadon, we have Count Dracula, but also Mother Brain, Bowser, Dr. Wily and Ganon living in a dark, thoroughly queer-coded shadow realm of medieval, heretical barbarism; sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll; and fascist-adjacent BDSM aesthetics that threaten to turn the white knight’s armor black. All exist in the same sphere of doom for the hero to loot and plunder while assigning punishment as a centrist agent that perpetuates conflict as orderly but also profitable inside the global market: “There are no moral actions, only moral teams”; i.e., good guys and bad guys; re: white knights and black knights and their synonyms/antonyms tied to various nation-states cannibalizing their usual victims on the global stage.

(exhibit 0a2b1b: Artist: possibly Jean-Louis Gaspard. With the likes of Conrad, James Cameron, and Wes Craven, settler colonialism is a fantasy carried out popular fictions to apologize for the ongoing practice during moderate empowerment fantasies. Regarding the historical function of settler colonialism, Lorenzo Veracini writes in “Settler colonialism in the Middle East and North Africa: A Protracted History” [2022]:  

More than other forms of colonialism, settler colonialism is characterized by a “logic of elimination.” This form of domination contrasts with exploitative or extractive colonialisms, where the ongoing subordination of colonized populations is a requirement for the viability of colonial domination. In settler colonies, the very presence of an Indigenous population is sometimes targeted through expulsion or physical elimination. Alternately, settler-colonial powers can undermine the resilience of Indigenous political sovereignty and autonomy. If settler-colonial regimes do not display a uniform investment in outright native elimination, it is because settler colonialism and other types of colonialism routinely mix with one another. Conflicting demands for subsumption and elimination can coexist even if they respond to distinct and, to a certain extent, antithetical colonial logics; all colonial regimes are marked by contradiction. Settlers also respond flexibly to conditions on the ground and to Indigenous resistance and agency. Nevertheless, the objective of a non-settler-colonial regime is the ongoing domination of a colonized collective, whereas the aim of a settler-colonial regime is the reproduction of a settler polity in place of an Indigenous one [source].

In short, the locals are a demonized “other” species/underclass to eliminate, but also harvest in oscillating theatrics that aim to keep them alive [and the Imperial Boomerang away from home] for as long as possible.)

This globalization of settler colonialism during the past several centuries has been tied to a mother territory (America) having naturalized Britain and France’s colonial experiments[20] before reaching into the Global South with smaller ally nation-states and buffer/satellite states during proxy war as both a) carried out during the Cold War (when Russia ceased combating the West and sought to emulate it); and b) after the so-called “end of history” and emergence of Capitalist Realism raping nature full-bore (vis-à-vis Francis Bacon), but also the minds of the public through fear and dogma dressed up as “public relations”: Bernays’ propaganda as relayed through famous Gothic canon; i.e., us-versus-them. Since their inception and initial development during the Enlightenment, nation-states have always been the enemy—the giant cannibalizing zombie-vampire piloted by the elite feeding off workers while teaching them to eat each other from “most expendable” to “least expendable” (compared to the elite, we’re all dogmeat). Under neoliberalism, war as executed through nation-states will not only never end; its proliferation in and out of fiction bleeds into our daily lives as similarly cliché to the pre-existing story’s historical materialism; e.g., my father and (adopted) first-cousin-once-removed fighting over my mother’s honor like two knights dueling at a banquet, except it was two guys in their late twenties wearing dress clothes and trying (badly) to play frisbee football: our figurative Princess Dulcinea and two knights Quixote tilting at windmills during an anniversary party’s novel-of-manners farcical instance of life imitating art and vice versa.

The subsequent canonical synthesis will inform both sides as becoming a powerful meta illusion that the class-dormant will fight for as class traitors who police anyone who threatens the profit motive. Their predication owes itself to various moral panics separating the hero’s reactionary and existential crisis-of-faith/sense of self-worth and self-victimhood from the hero’s victims and their very real grievances: the Red Scares, Islamophobia, Yellow Menace of Orientalism; Black Revenge, and white genocide/replacement inheritance phobias; stigma animals (spiders, snakes, etc) and their anthropomorphized extensions; Satanic/gay panic, but also the automatic, cliché fetishization and commercialization of these things by undercover agents slumming through the conquered, ghetto streets of the colonized as guilty pleasures to peruse; e.g., the Harlem Renaissance or a drag show as a secret lifestyle the rich can get off to. “Seeing how the other side lives” becomes “suffering to the conquered” for those they stare at; i.e., by stealing and appropriating the colony’s culture, industry and agriculture as something to absorb into the mother territory[21] but also engaging in sex tourism while “touching down” on alien soil: moral panics, rape epidemics and drug wars advertised through popular media celebrating these sites as magical and wonderous, like Joseph Campbell’s “region of supernatural wonder” but channeled through the likes of non-immiserated, white metal culture selling rebellion and black culture to white middle-class kids while still keeping black culture on the outside; e.g., Iron Maiden, H.P. Lovecraft and Michael Whelan [exhibit 94c2b] but also female authors like Ann Radcliffe’s murder mystery/true crime (especially “exquisite” torture and “demon lovers”) as cashing in, first and foremost, on xenophobia as a lucrative measure within Amazonomachia. They don’t simply profit from tragedy but from crisis and decay built into capital as a theatrical device across all registers and mediums:

(exhibit 0a2b1a: Artist, top-left: Marie Bunny; top-middle: Nichameleon; top-right: Tay Melo; bottom-left: Alhvida; bottom-right: PedroPerez1973. “The Gothic is… basically Scooby Doo,” Christine Neufeld once said, in my ENG 300 course, at EMU. I thought it sounded funny at the time, but she was absolutely right; e.g., Radcliffe’s pirates stealing stuff from an old castle [Udolpho, 1794] while pretending to be ghosts, only to be foiled by the damsel, detective, servant, hero and/or virgin/whore, plays out in much the same way as the gang from Scooby Doo does: the fight-or-flight reduced merely to flight, thus resorting to their “feminine” wits to solve mysteries; i.e., as the arbiters of domestic disputes dressed up in outmoded [and highly repetitive] Gothic aesthetics and conventions within late-1960s/1970s Americana (Scooby Doo, a talking dog, is a rather blunt metaphor for psychomachy and drug trips; just what’s in those “Scooby snacks”?).

Even so, the show was clearly made for children, but its surfaces and situations are still thoroughly sexualized: sweater kittens, miniskirts; e.g., useless clothes through the paradox of an opaque “see-through” uniform leveled against the Male Gaze [Sarah Vanbuskirk: “The male gaze describes a way of portraying and looking at women that empowers men while sexualizing and diminishing women,” source]. Likewise, the explained supernatural and exquisite “torture”/”demon lover” of the modernized opera are alive and well [and the Black Veil, horror and terror, and other Radcliffean concepts whose spatial, architectural and musicality we will unpack during the “camp map”]. And more to the point, it introduced Radcliffe’s profitable and savvy [albeit centrist] Gothic approach to an American audience in cartoon form roughly two hundred years after the first Gothic novel was written.

Besides Radcliffe or the cartoon “ghosts” of her work, the same Gothic ideas work within pulpier fictions hinted at by our mentioning of authors like Lovecraft or Iron Maiden as doubled by parallel stories set in imaginary recreations of actual locations haunted by the same piqued imagination; i.e., “The Horror at Red Hook” versus “Red Hook in Walk Among the Tombstones [2014]. Lovecraft’s spiel is his usual xenophobia; the latter is a gritty, hard-boiled cop noir set backward in the time of payphones, but built on older stories like The Maltese Falcon [1941] and its faked deaths, double crosses, cliché outfits and endless darkness and rain. But those owe themselves as much to Gothic fiction as much as Cormac McCarthy’s Gothic Westerns do; e.g., Child of God [1973] or No Country for Old Men [2005]. Walk Among the Tombstones is similarly comparable to a Gothic novel: your basic detective story with the hero-as-sleuth, helped by servants and challenged by villains. But as a “noir” in the 20th century, it plays out like Bakhtin’s description of the Gothic novel as a “black novel”; i.e., the black detective novel/Western as a canceled future, a hauntological graveyard. Here, the private eye can take a shot or have a smoke, put on a duster and peer into the imaginary past to then uncover secrets in the present: what’s right in front of us dressed up as “elsewhere, once upon a time.” Like Radcliffe, it yawns into the future with immense pathos.

Neeson is a male action hero with pathos and camp [see: Krull, 1983], and male private dicks like the one he plays in Among the Tombstones are so cliché they don’t need names. They might carry a piece, but rely more on blind luck, quick wits, their gut and a silver tongue [they have to negotiate the ransom but also talk their way out of tight corners]. In short they’re ensconced and disempowered by the chronotope [often beat up; versus women and the threats they traditionally face as detectives: killers can’t hit a girl in a polite novel of manners, but they can make her fear for her life or “modesty”]. The paradox of the story as a truth-telling lie is its gloomy Gothic scenery being explored while disarmed. To this, the paradox of the gun is it can cut through the Gordian Knot instead of solving it. In short, its protection and general utility can backfire [“I wasn’t brave, just drunk”]. But while the same basic space is perpetually rainy, dark, and full of smoke and mirrors, it’s also a space for repressed guilt, revenge, and getting even—i.e., its “ghosts”/simulacra [serial killers, Boogeyman; e.g., Jack the Ripper, Father Schedoni, Buffalo Bill, Michael Rooker’s Henry, etc] squat like gargoyles among the criminogenic conditions, but also prowling.

On some level, they and the heroes they stalk—like the world itself—are meant to parallel the reader’s own complicated desires for revenge as simply being seen: to be heard and felt through historicized passion as supplied to them from older times and… dead things. In short, they’re the “same” as reality but in a doubled sense, separated by theatre’s gulf of Gothic imagination and highlighted by diegetic and non-diegetic mood, method and music; i.e., a “danger disco” to play around inside [the basic idea of theatrical “play” being the stage and its props, music and stories told on and with these things]. In this profoundly playful space, a noir detective often dives into criminogenic conditions like a heroine in the castle does, except they’re more streetwise and less stuck in the medieval imaginary as a site of rape fantasy in the traditionally feminine sense. But in New England, there is crossover [all those churches and cemeteries] and any noir follows the same praxial formula as a Gothic novel when considered as canonical or “ground-breaking.” The rules are conventions that we play with like the characters in the story do—setting and breaking their own boundaries while crossing over the threshold into the shadow space, but also our world as we stare at them; i.e., between the world of the living and the land of the dead as half-real.)

Whether through damsels, detectives or demons (all heroic, all monstrous), canonical proponents of Gothic fiction not only “cash in,” but extend the mystery to likewise prolong people’s anxieties about the structure. Their game of “guess the killer/Gothic cliché” reinforces Capitalism and perpetuating its problems by commercializing them through harmful Gothic doubles that, cleverly enough, offer some measure of false power/hope and catharsis (with Radcliffe touching on some profound truths despite her grift as “the Great Enchantress[22],” or Tolkien despite his centrist schtick/refrain). As class warriors, our best “Jewish revenge” is consciously camping all of this while actively and knowingly being party to the devil; i.e., reclaiming said power from within (and “outside” of the zone; placed in quotes because there is no outside of the text, vis-à-vis Derrida).

Canonical or iconoclastic, the Gothic scheme is emotionally manipulative on multiple levels: “play the audience like a piano.” The capitalist does this so the audience will pay money according to the author’s improv as working them through their pre-existing stigmas and biases. Canon, then, is a bad puzzle told by a liar whose consolation prize is Faustian: “solvable” shadows, their mysteries less a critique of society unto itself and praxially devised to make us feel smart/active in a cop-like sense by beating the author at their own game, all while forcing our heads into the sand; i.e., making us the dupe (a concept we’ll return to in the symposium). It is possible to critique capital anyways, but the iconoclast shall be doing the legwork, not Radcliffe. She’s too busy busking through fear mongering according to stereotypes/criminogenic conditions. Any complicit artist is financially incentivized to lie a particular way—i.e., in defense of the status quo. These are criminogenic conditions, making canon at large criminogenic through the profit motive as endless: the show must go on. The same theatrical imperative applies to Gothic Communists, except our emotional/Gothic manipulations are mutually consensual and meant to develop Communism from inside Capitalism using our privilege as a staging point for rebellious counterterror and iconoclasm (camp); e.g., my own white woman’s privilege used to make a book specifically weaponized against capital. Sure, our methods are seductive and potent (thus resemble the people we’re camping—e.g., our variation of the detective story/danger disco), but they aren’t forced onto others that we might take their money and frighten them into paying more, next time; our sex education isn’t built around structured profit at all, but post-scarcity.

We’ll explore all of this next as we lay out Sex Positivity‘s thesis statement and pieces of the manifesto tree that both lead towards the “camp map” (the means for camping canon) and make up the pieces of the map needed to camp Tolkien’s refrain with, thus ungentrify canonical war by making it conscious class/culture war within a campy Gothic poetics.

Onto “Thesis Argument—Capitalism Sexualizes Everything“!

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About the Author

Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] As Lynn Bryce writes in “The Influence of Scandinavian Mythology of the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien” (1983): “Tolkien did not invent elves, wizards, dragons or magical weapons; these, and concepts like them, are fundamental to Norse literature and myth.” According to Lauri Linask, Tolkien appears to critique Beowulf, but at the end of the day largely emulates the same old patterns:

In his “Beowulf” lecture he undertook to argue with W.P. Ker whom he quotes as to have said: “The fault of ‘Beowulf’ is that there is nothing much in the story. The hero is occupied in killing monsters… Beowulf has nothing else to do when he has killed Grendel and Grendel’s mother in Denmark: he goes home to his own Gautland, until the rolling years bring the Fire-drake and his last adventure. It is too simple…” […] Tolkien thinks very highly of the heroic narratives in Norse, Icelandic or ancient English because their heroes and their embodiments of evil belong generically to the same class as those of Tolkien (source: Influences of the Germanic and Scandinavian Mythology in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien,” 1983).

As we shall see in the Four Gs and thesis proper, this shared love of the imaginary past has led to the furthering of the process of abjection through the ghost of the counterfeit: the commodification (and endless apologizing for) centrist war’s sublimated genocides. Tolkien emulated the old legends in much the same way the Nazis did, albeit in a less radicalized refrain that could eventually be ludologized under Bretton Woods and neoliberalism as it exists today—in tabletop/videogames.

[2] An allusion to Milton’s Satan, breaking into Paradise:

One gate there only was, and that looked east

On the other side. Which when the Arch-Felon saw,

Due entrance he disdained, and, in contempt,

At one slight bound high overleaped all bound

Of hill or highest wall, and sheer within

Lights on his feet. As when a prowling wolf,

Whom hunger drives to seek new haunt for prey,

Watching where shepherds pen their flocks at eve,

In hurdled cotes amid the field secure,

Leaps o’er the fence with ease into the fold (source: Paradise Lost, Book Four).

[3] Consider Tolkien’s zero-sex policy versus Terry Goodkind’s naked exhibiting of pedophilia, genital mutilation and rape. They might seem like polar opposites, but both constitute Joseph Conrad’s bigoted fear-fascination with the colonized abomination, in The Heart of Darkness (1899): a white, cis-het fear-fascination with the past as restricted to the fringes of the empire, that—in neoliberal media, which brings the colonial revenge to the homefront—becomes “a spell to fall under” (re: Punter) and exorcise, generally through violence. Tolkien’s colonial rape occurred with swords, leveled against metaphors for people “not of the West” he considered “Mongol-types” (source: Tolkien Gateway) whose linguo-material presence would be entirely unwelcome in white areas (effectively gentrification in a real-world village/suburban setting).

Tolkien famously disliked allegory for his own stories (an appeal, then, to singular interpretations that ignored his writing’s racist, thus colonial potential). But even when reduced to “pure fantasy” as he would have preferred, the terrestrial framework and its cartography and colonial model are all obviously there and being put into practice; i.e., world-building and its manmade languages levied for a suitably war-like purpose regardless if Tolkien openly denounced Hilter. In short, he was a centrist to the core, the old sage handing the young hobbit a blade and preaching loftily about morals, specifically of knowing when to kill and when not to—in short, “playing god” in the face of the abject:

Bilbo almost stopped breathing, and went stiff himself. He was desperate. He must get away, out of this horrible darkness, while he had any strength left. He must fight. He must stab the foul thing, put its eyes out, kill it. It meant to kill him. No, not a fair fight. He was invisible now. Gollum had no sword. Gollum had not actually threatened to kill him, or tried to yet. And he was miserable, alone, lost. A sudden understanding, a pity mixed with horror, welled up in Bilbo’s heart: a glimpse of endless unmarked days without light or hope of betterment, hard stone, cold fish, sneaking and whispering. All these thoughts passed in a flash of a second. He trembled (source).

Except this mercy is arguably lacking in the face of those who are physically dangerous (according to white people); orcs, unlike Gollum, are given no quarter despite arguably having a bone to pick with them colonizers: “Show them no mercy for you shall receive none!” It’s tone-policing backed by force—also known as “peace through strength.”

[4] Warcraft: Orcs and Humans (1994) would lead to the company’s longest, and arguably most popular and widespread franchise, beating Diablo (1996) to the punch by two years and going on to establish the company as the successors to Everquest (1999) as the MMORPG to “kill”: World of Warcraft (2004), a globalizing of the pursuit of capital across the Internet. These games successfully applied a tactical, melee-based, roleplay element to the FPS-/TPS-adjacent strategy game (exhibit 1a1a1h2a1), which took on a massive-multiplayer form built around warring team-based combat with one-or-more combatants on either side. And of course, all of this was heavily dimorphized within the heteronormative colonial binary.

[5] (from Britannica): “A different word orc, alluding to a demon or ogre, appears in Old English glosses of about AD 800 and in the compound word orcnēas (‘monsters’) in the poem Beowulf. As with the Italian orco (‘ogre’) and the word ogre itself, it ultimately derives from the Latin Orcus, a god of the underworld. The Old English creatures were most likely the inspiration for the orcs that appear in J.R.R. Tolkien‘s The Lord of the Rings” (source).

[6] Tolkien’s inconsistent fear of spiders stretches back to a childhood phobia of them, but he was annoyingly wishy-washy and non-committal to how he felt about them; i.e., talking through both sides of his mouth (a classic centrist maneuver) [source: Tolkien Gateway].

[7] Tolkien did not exist during videogames as they are commonly thought of (though technically he died in 1973, a year after Pong [1972] was released for American home entertainment by Atari’s Allan Alcorn). Yet, Tolkien was also no stranger to playing games. Indeed, the entire “Riddles in the Dark” chapter from The Hobbit is pointedly a game, with a rather involved discussion surrounding luck, fairness and the following of rules:

He knew, of course, that the riddle-game was sacred and of immense antiquity, and even wicked creatures were afraid to cheat when they played at it. But he felt he could not trust this slimy thing to keep any promise at a pinch. Any excuse would do for him to slide out of it. And after all that last question had not been a genuine riddle according to the ancient laws (source).

In truth, Tolkien’s refrain—the High Fantasy treasure map—would translate very well to tabletop games and videogames, but especially The Lord of the Rings, which despite its immense size compared to The Hobbit was actually far simpler in terms of its treatment of war and wealth acquisition/generation. Everything was divided neatly into good and evil teams that—on the good side—weren’t fighting amongst each other nearly as much as during The Hobbit. In his later novels, the world-war machine wasn’t just suggested, but fully devised and given its own vast world to play out inside. And even with The Hobbit, Tolkien clearly understood the power of song and legends, writing his original story for children to acclimate them towards war and revenge dressed up in songs, fantasy and poems. It likewise had all the starts and stops of a radio serial, putting our heroes out of the frying pan and into the fire (similar to Flash Gordon, 1935) before pulling them out just in the nick of time (the Great Eagles being a shameless deus ex machina [and imperial emblem] that Tolkien would curiously refuse to use with The Lord of the Rings in order to prolong the story and its war for as long as possible).

[8] I wrote “The Problem of Greed” in Craig Dionne’s LITR 405 (Shakespeare) course. We had to cross-examine two primary texts with an academic secondary text. I went with Tolkien’s The Hobbit, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1605) and Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904). The essay won me an award from EMU, whereupon the faculty wrote this award letter—to EMU’s Distinguished Student in Literature Award—for 2016:

[My award letter from EMU, MA from MMU, and me in 2018 sitting on a copy of Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human (2011) borrowed from the school library (the photo was taken by my-partner-at-the-time, Zeuhl, for a school project of theirs).]

There was no money involved, but the letter did help me gain entry to MMU (which was a whole ordeal, to say the least; Persephone van der Waard’s Quora answer to “How easy is it to get into Manchester Metropolitan University?” 2019) when I went there for my master’s degree in English Studies: the Gothic, in 2017. In short, I had an adventure where the things gained is largely open to interpretation: “This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, and found [herself] doing and saying things altogether unexpected. [She] may have lost the neighbors’ respect, but [she] gained—well, you will see whether [she] gained anything in the end.”

[9] A term that, according to Adam Curtis’ HyperNormalization (2016), was originally used to describe the “whiplash” feelings of Soviet citizens during the 1980s—faced with the terrifying onset of societal collapse despite Soviet national propaganda having adopted neoliberal shock therapy while insisting that things were fine. The same idea can be applied to the uncanny sensation that things are not fine or even real despite how normal, foundational and concrete they seem; i.e., how they “pass” as normal despite a disquieting sense of decay (worker exploitation, for our purposes).

[10] Yes, this is a tautology (e.g., the sky is blue because the sky is blue), but in this case it’s essentially the gist. Function is self-determined, but not self-evident because art—short of spelling things out, billboard-/graffiti-style—often requires dialectical-material scrutiny to parse if it’s sex-positive or not; likewise, it will take someone who is sex-positive to make sex-positive media in good faith (and not by accident)—i.e., art that expresses sex positivity in ways that either yield sex-positive virtues under dialectical-material scrutiny or, preferably, are more explicitly or obviously upfront through their subversions and transgressions of canonical norms.

[11] “Hermeneutics” being of, otherwise pertaining to, interpretation, especially of the Bible or literary texts; a method or theory of interpretation.

[12] “Free speech” is a common “apolitical” DARVO strategy used by bigots who argue for negative-freedom boundaries that apply to them, but not for others; e.g., “I want to be able to say slurs or profit off manufactured controversies by politically advocating for issues that will never affect me; i.e., punching down at minorities while acting like a victim, myself.” Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences.

[13] Source: Academy of Ideas’ “The Parallel Society vs Totalitarianism | How to Create a Free World” (2022).

[14] Walpole actually published the original manuscript in 1764 under a pseudonym without the qualifier “a Gothic tale” (which he added a year later after people pitched a fit that he—the son of the first British prime minster—had effectively forged a historical document and passed it off as genuine). The story was based off his architectural reconstruction (thus reimagining) of medieval history, Strawberry Hill House (a cross-medium tradition carried on by Gothic contemporaries/spiritual successors—e.g., William Beckford’s Vathek, 1786, and subsequent “folly,” Fonthill Abbey, in 1796—but also videogame spaces inspired by the cinematic and novelized forms previously build on real-life “haunted” houses: the Metroidvania).

[15] Referring to “Ozymandias” (1818).

[16] For a recent example of someone fighting the privatization of their intellectual property by corporate abuse, refer to the actions of Bill Willingham’s “Willingham Sends Fables into the Public Domain” (2023). He described it as asymmetrical warfare, aka guerrilla warfare (which is historically the weapon of the Communist).

[17] False power and false hope go hand-in-hand within fascism, neoliberalism and the capitalist propaganda mill.

[18] Rune Klevjer writes in “The Way of the Gun: The Aesthetic of the Single-Player First Person Shooter” (2006):

the short history of the FPS also includes a different strand, which unlike Doom and Medal of Honor does not grow out of a broad tradition of action-adventure. The so-called tactical FPS (sometimes also referred to as the “squad-based” FPS) draws instead on the traditions of strategic war games and the military simulator. In spite of many similarities (which follow from the common perceptual grounding of the first-person-gun) and in spite of the inevitable ambiguities and hybridizations, the binary of action-adventure versus military simulator has become a significant aesthetic distinction within the genre of the single-player First Person Shooter (source).

and yet, for the purposes of generational trauma and the state’s acclimation of its population towards war (through waves of terror), the male action hero’s adventure story is a standard-issue facet to military propaganda ludologized: squad-based tactics vs a terrorist group in training exercises, and larger-than-life superheroes vs larger-than-life demons in strict propaganda narratives; re: Beowulf vs Grendel and Grendel’s mother. These aren’t “separate”; they’re two sides of the same unholy coin that present war as a business across various mediums, but especially in videogames aping their cinematic and novelized palimpsests; re: Tolkien’s infamous treasure map as a place to take the spoils of war back from demons, undead and nature; re: “having an adventure” is complicit cryptonymy in action.

[19] Father Schedoni from The Italian (1796) ostensibly croaks in this manner. Once had out, he actually poisons himself, whereupon he makes a weird, inhuman sound that terrifies everyone around him: “Schedoni uttered a sound so strange and horrible, so convulsed, yet so loud, so exulting, yet so unlike any human voice, that every person in the chamber, except those who were assisting Nicola, struck with irresistible terror, endeavoured to make their way out of it. This, however, was impracticable, for the door was sastened, until a physician, who had been sent for, should arrive, and some investigation could be made into this mysterious affair. The consternation of the Marchese and of Vivaldi, compelled to witness this scene of horror, cannot easily be imagined” (source).

[20] Historically, an effective method of power consolidation is the status quo’s recuperation rebellions or crises (often shortages) to enable/incentivize regressions. After the French Revolution, the social gains made during the ensuing unrest were branded as terrorist actions by the state and in Gothic fiction (vis-à-vis Joseph Crawford, who we’ll examine, later) and used to regress towards the status quo with new “counterterrorist” measures in place; i.e., the defeating of Napoleon (who was a false revolutionary and opportunist, to be fair) in 1815, followed by the rise of the Victorian Era of the British Empire from 1835 until 1901. After the 1973 oil crisis (aka the Oil Shock), Bretton Woods was impacted and ultimately discarded by capitalist opportunists eagerly in favor of a until-then fringe ideology, neoliberalism, wherein Margaret Thatcher assumed power in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in 1981; both executives lead to the further gutting of the labor movements in their country followed by establishment safeguards for deregulation, which lead to a rise in war, austerity and fascism (not a shortage). In short, modern war developed, expanded and increased, then eventually became corporatized through corporate seizures of direct power on the global stage, working to supersede state mechanisms altogether (Bad Empanada’s “Johnny Harris: Shameless Propagandist Debunked,” 2023).

[21] Often expressed as “the mothership” in science fiction stories; e.g., Independence Day (1996) as a clunky metaphor for the Imperial Boomerang as an alien mass-invasion vehicle visited upon the usual colonizers: America and the Global North (whose big nations eat little notions). During the perceived outsider’s “special military operation,” an occupying army launches from a base of operations with seemingly magical weapons and spacecraft, except it’s displaced onto a dark, female-coded alien force; i.e., “Communists do this, not America!” In turn, this Gothic disassociation of the colonial binary becomes a call-to-war according to unity through neoconservative argumentation; apologetics for the Fourth of July as something to celebrate using the flowery language of American Liberty in defense of the current world order vis-à-vis Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980)

What made Bacon’s Rebellion especially fearsome for the rulers of Virginia was that black slaves and white servants joined forces […] Those upper classes, to rule, needed to make concessions to the middle class, without damage to their own wealth or power, at the expense of slaves, Indians, and poor whites. This bought loyalty. And to bind that loyalty with something more powerful even than material advantage, the ruling group found, in the 1760s and 1770s, a wonderfully useful device. That device was the language of liberty and equality, which could unite just enough whites to fight a Revolution against England, without ending either slavery or inequality (source).

as opposed to Fredrick Douglas’ “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” (1852):

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the “lame man leap as an hart.”

But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn (source).

[22] From Dale Townshend’s “An introduction to Ann Radcliffe” (2014):

The “Shakspeare [sic] of Romance Writers”; “the mighty magician of THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO”; “the first poetess of romantic fiction”; “a genius of no common stamp”; “the great enchantress of that generation”; “mother Radcliff [sic]”: Nathan Drake, T. J. Mathias, Walter Scott, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Thomas De Quincey and John Keats respectively, together with countless other essayists, reviewers and critics of the Romantic period in Britain, praised the writing of the Gothic romancer, poet and travel-writer Ann Ward Radcliffe (1764–1823) in the most superlative terms imaginable (source).

In short, it was a giant wank-fest where these literal jackoffs allowed Radcliffe to trespass because she was polite; they couldn’t get enough. And while I think her fiction isn’t total dogshit (I like her suspense and some of her literary devices), it’s also worryingly and unapologetically centrist/”basic.” That shouldn’t be surprising given the period in which it was written, but in our Gothic times (wherein terribly fitting labels like “TERF island” are no accident), we have to do better than “go down on Radcliffe” just because a bunch of old, dead white people did, two centuries ago (and more recently as living ones continue to suck her toes—no offense, Dale). We have to camp her enchantments and risk the tone-policing she was too chickenshit to face while writing her “polite” rape fantasies, then taking her 30 pieces of silver (more on this, later).