A 2025 Foreword: On Volume Zero’s New Edition Focusing on Ludo-Gothic BDSM

Posted on by Persephone van der Waard

This blog post (not a joke, even though it’s April Fool’s) is part of “The Total Codex,” a fourth promotion originally inspired by the three I did in 2024 with Harmony Corrupted and Romantic Rose: “Brace for Impact,” “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil.” The first promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “The Total Codex” shall do the same, but with Volume Zero/the thesis volume (versus “Make It Real” promoting Volume One/the manifesto, which I will release after “The Total Context” completes). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

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

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

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

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

Picking up where “Thesis Conclusion, Symposium and Segue” left off…

Written to mark the completion of “The Total Codex” promotion and release of Volume Zero’s 2025 re-release: with a second edition, this new foreword detailing my thought process editing version 2.0—i.e., tying ludo-Gothic BDSM to my entire book series starting with Volume Zero having coined the phrase—as well as listing many of the changes inside. —Perse

 

A 2025 Foreword: On Volume Zero’s New Edition Focusing on Ludo-Gothic BDSM

Marx argued that Capitalism alienates everything (and sometimes invoked the language of monsters); I argue it sexualizes everything as alien through the language of monsters. Per Hogle’s ghost of the counterfeit, the elite use capital to further the abjection process; i.e., to further profit through the constant Gothic fakery as haunted by a ghost of the counterfeit to attack: spectres of genocide, thus cop/victim. From the original into Pax Americana, “Rome” is full of dead whores and their pimps. Pushed off onto state victims “of nature” by so-called “thinking beings,” the usual benefactors enjoy their status quo’s heteronormative, Cartesian, and settler-colonial paradigm while capital persecutes whores like vermin chattel in and out of fiction, on and offstage; i.e., in between it and non-fiction, during liminal expression. On its surfaces and inside its thresholds, Medusa is always a victim under capital.

(artist: Romantic Rose)

The Earth, then, is a peach for the elite to carve, beat, mark and claim until the end of time, but every Numinous forebear yields smaller offshoots; i.e., a Medusa “in small” who personifies the abuser of the larger suffered by the smaller (and vice versa); re: a castle in the flesh to enact, be it body-like castles the size of moons or castle-like bodies mooning to gain a similar hypnotic effect. The Gothic, through castles, speaks using body language anisotropically and in duality during liminal expression; i.e., to meet different goals, including profit: as a cold and calculating matter of exploiting labor simply for being “of nature,” hence existing as something monstrous-feminine to arbitrate, then pimp (which goes beyond “female,” alone, to include anything not a white cis-het Christian European man to modular and intersectional degrees).

The oldest form of labor is prostitution, making the oldest labor struggle that of the whore versus the pimp as a theatrical exercise (with white straight women selling out during the Neo-Gothic period, from Radcliffe onwards): power is performed on the Aegis, including its paradoxes! And yet, monsters aren’t automatically good or bad; their function—of whether they serve workers or the state—determines by the flow of power (and similar variables) towards or away from workers. This, in turn, results in a dichotomy during oppositional praxis: as a dialectical-material exchange, one where canon versus iconoclasm/camp (or sex positivity versus sex coercion) routinely sees monsters existing inside-outside a given venue. From performance to half-real performance, and per the Protestant ethic, a whore is a monster and all heroes are monsters; the whore’s paradox is to have revenge against profit, achieving universal liberation (no Omelas) while the state pimps them as virgin/whore using varying degrees of monstrous language (the whore being the monomyth hero’s classic foe; re: the Medusa, but also her spawn, female or otherwise).

(artist: Nyx)

In short—be it a witch, vampire, goblin, or some other kind of monster attached to imbricating and arbitrary persecution networks (re: blood libel, sodomy and witch hunts)—the state’s moral panics (and their pogroms) canonically move money through nature, glutting the elite at nature’s expense by whoring it out during the Capitalocene; re: “Antagonize nature as monstrous-feminine and put it cheaply to work through bad-faith revenge arguments (reactionary or moderate).”

In turn, workers living in the Imperial Core’s shadow garner strange appetites (re: “A Cruel Angel’s (Modular) Thesis“): weird attracts weird and trauma begets trauma in monomythic recursion; re: the Cycle of Kings and Shadow of Pygmalion pimping Galatea until she either pimps herself (on a spectrum of preferential mistreatment and tokenized betrayals chasing different normativities), or must suffer those who take state pay to do state work (the Judas silver and ensuing crucifixions); i.e., divide and conquer nature with nature. Traitors are stupid, but they also look and sound like us: alien, albeit as undercover cops recruited from the home country more often than not!

Deception is a powerful tool, as are fear and dogma making “Roman” fools fall on their swords; i.e., including token examples; e.g., black skin, white masks. This includes inmates acting as guards! As such, assimilation is historically poor stewardship, and pushing into post-scarcity with pre-capitalist language requires recultivating a second-nature, society-wide degree of emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness (re: the Wisdom of the Ancients); i.e., to have the whore’s revenge against profit with ludo-Gothic BDSM through ancient forms of theatre (masks, shadows, and costumes, often of animals) revived in “ancient” doubles, thereby reversing abjection as a dialectical-material process with plastic social-sexual elements (re: the Base and the Superstructure)!

(artist: Pokkuti)

To it, these aforementioned appetites aren’t strictly a weakness, insofar as critiquing and shaping popular media (the vector for de facto [re]education) goes. Despite how trauma lives inside the body and all around us—and despite the Medusa canonically being a dark whore to punish by subjugating labor into state proponents during Amazonomachia till the cows come home (e.g., stories like Metroid, above, featuring the Amazon as the West’s oldest class traitor)—liberation and exploitation occupy the same space; i.e., a zone of darkness and play where canon can paradoxically be camped by subverting it through the self-same monster language: as not belonging to any one group. This is ludo-Gothic BDSM as I describe it (and the whore’s revenge; re: “Rape Reprise“), whose informed labor exchanges—from Frankenstein to Alien to Metroid to this book series and beyond—illustrate mutual consent by camping canon’s rapacious language to varying degrees; i.e., doing so consciously to develop Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism with! When defenders of capital look upon us, they look upon the desert of their own Ozymandian grave waiting to swallow them whole! From labor to land back, that is our whore’s revenge; i.e., by reclaiming violence, terror and monsters where they are normally used to harm us, subverting them with ludo-Gothic BDSM “when in Rome” to make empire stateless, classless, moneyless and raceless!

(artist: Bernie Wrightson)

On the Aegis, then, said devices become something to take away from state monopolies trying to exclusively extort nature upon said Aegis and its concentric veneers. They cannot (at least not forever), which means we can take what the middle class (and other state actors) project off onto their victims during abjection; i.e., an alien, fetishized “other” status (the dark criminal scapegoat; re: the Medusa) giving us power because they fear us and our bodies’ labor (sexuality or otherwise). To that, this volume writes, “returning and reflecting upon old points after assembling them is a powerful way to understand larger structures and patterns (especially if they’re designed to conceal themselves through subterfuge, valor and force). It’s what holistic study (the foundation of this book) is all about.”

Such is development; it’s ergodic, meaning Gothic Communism takes constant careful work (“non-trivial effort,” according to Aarseth) amid confusion to succeed—i.e., by synthesizing catharsis with various creative successes warping scapegoats into useful bogey(wo)men: to cultivate good daily habits, mid-praxis, that liberate sex workers (thereby all workers) under Capitalism through iconoclastic art (re: Gothic poetics)! We master theatre to recultivate what the elite can never fully control: the language of mastery and darkness, itself!

In turn, the Gothic is historically obsessed with fatal returns and dark reflection—not once, even, but endlessly and through disintegration and torturous effort (the rapturous, psychosexual embodiment of power and confusion, mise-en-abyme, to navigate): “to interrogate power, you must go where it is.” That is what the new edition for this thesis volume is trying to accomplish! By following its arguments into my newer books—and beyond them, into real life connected to said books—workers can humanize what the state tries to harvest in perpetuity without consequence: exposing the elite’s inhumane treatment of us through their shameless proxies; e.g., us demasking TERFs versus them demasking us; i.e., by reversing abjection through the revolutionary cryptonymy process (and friendlier hauntologies and chronotopes) during an endless chain of such things; re: the narrative of the crypt and cryptomimesis as much being rebels in disguise—playing with monsters to anisotropically liberate themselves in duality—as it is cops acting in bad faith to punch down with against those they demonize. Cops stab us; we “stab” ourselves in ways that showcase our own liberation putting “rape” in quotes (all the better to punch up against cop with, topping from below): “That all you got, little man?”

(artist: Nyx)

“When the Man comes around, show him your Aegis!” I envision this reversal as a matter of developing Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism; re: camping the canon through ludo-Gothic BDSM, which I introduce here alongside my extensive Metroidvania work but not limited to said work; re: it has its own body of work to consider alongside my usual playgrounds (which Metroidvania and Amazons/mommy dommes are).

As such, and in accordance with my 2025 rollout of a new promo series for Volume Zero (called “The Total Codex“), I’ve gone over Volume Zero from top to bottom; i.e., to inject numerous mentions and addendums regarding not just ludo-Gothic BDSM (expanding from 30 to nearly 200 mentions), but many other changes besides! Several of these addendums are substantial, including

Apart from those, however, I’ve also updated the series abstract and rear glossary. Besides those, various other changes have been made to Volume Zero’s entire manuscript—far too many to list here (totaling ~20,000 extra words and ~200 extra images), but often being mentioned and dated whenever and wherever they occur so you can observe them, nonetheless (e.g., a ton of changes/additions being made to the “camp map” finale, thanking Blxxd Bunny for their help).

And for anything I cannot mention in this book volume, I cite inside it pointing to my later volumes, instead. Each one has its own promotion series

  • “The Total Codex“: The book promotion for Volume Zero/my thesis volume, which contains my series’ thesis argument (re: “Capitalism sexualizes everything”) and introduces/unpacks its complex theory.
  • “Make It Real“: The book promotion for Volume One/my manifesto, which takes Volume Zero’s complex theory and simplifies it; i.e., as something to synthesize and instruct among ourselves.
  • “Brace for Impact“: The book promotion for Volume Two, part one, aka the Poetry Module, which concerns the poetic application of monsters (with some historical elements).
  • “Searching for Secrets“: The book promotion for Volume Two, part two/the Monster Module’s Undead Module, which concerns the poetic history of undead monsters (with some applicative elements).
  • “Deal with the Devil“: The book promotion for Volume Two, part two/the Monster Module’s Demon Module, which concerns the poetic history of demonic/natural monsters (with some applicative elements).
  • “All the World” (to be released): The book promotion for Volume Three, aka the Praxis Volume, which combines Volume Zero’s complex theory, Volume One’s simplified theory/synthetic model, and Volume Two’s monster history and application; i.e., as something foster our own creative successes of proletarian praxis with versus the state, which boils down to sex positivity (and liberation) versus sex coercion while developing Gothic Communism (with a huge focus on resisting tokenization; e.g., TERFs).

making citing them (and their individual book segments) a piece of cake! Online, they also exist on a separate Book Promotions page that includes: model interviews (re: “Hailing Hellions“) and all of the purple-and-green posters for my book series’ promo poster program! Here’s one example:

(artist: Angel Witch)

That being said, the full-size PDFs will remain on my website’s one-page promo for Sex Positivity (which includes a wide variety of promotional elements I have heavily expanded on and branched off from, since October 2023); the PDFs don’t update nearly as often, but still remain a good way to possess the bulk of my published material in one spot (and which you can easily navigate with Adobe’s bookmark system).

All this being said, I hope you enjoy this new second edition of Volume Zero; like Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, it was satisfying to return to, take apart and put back together after several years!

Your Commie Mommy,

—Persephone van der Waard, 4/1/2025

P.S., Yes, I know I released the new edition for Volume Zero on April Fool’s! To be honest, I tried to release it yesterday but midnight came and went (that and I think having it debut on April Fool’s is kinda fun)!

Onto Volume One’s promo series, “Make It Real“!

About the Author

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