This blog post is part of “Make It Real,” a fifth 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). “Make It Real” shall do the same, but with Volume One/the manifesto (versus “The Total Codex” promoting Volume Zero/the thesis volume). 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 “Make It Real’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

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

An Uphill Battle, part two: Concerning Rings, BDSM and Vampires; or the State’s False Gifts, Power Exchange, and Crumbling Homesteads Told through Tolkien’s Nature-Themed Stories

“Fool! Be still! No other witch in the world holds a harpy captive, and none ever will. I choose to keep her! I can turn her into wind if she escapes or snow or into seven notes of music!”

—Mommy Fortuna, The Last Unicorn (1982)

Picking up where “‘Book Sample: Prey as Liberators by Camping Prey-like BDSM” left off…

This subchapter examines rings within the Gothic mode as famous symbols of power and power exchange. One such example is, of course, Tolkien’s One Ring and that is what we will be focusing on, here. Something to pass from person to person, it is as much a vampiric mantle of corrupting power in its more vertically arranged forms as it is a mere giving of material goods. The former function means rings are generally devices to be feared—not for their weight in gold, but for the power they signify through their giving and wearing: problematic alliances, but also the raw function of power when arranged in vertical, capitalistic ways.

Note: We’ll quote some of my Tolkien scholarship, here. For all of it, refer to the Tolkien scholarship page on my website; e.g., “Goblins, Anti-Semitism and Monster-Fucking” from the Demon Module; i.e., which examines Tolkien in terms of the queer coding and Radcliffean elements (re: the Black Veil) but leaves various ideas for future essays that—among other things—include Tolkien’s homophobia in animalized language: the cat-like, twinkish master/apprentice seducer that Sauron and Morgoth represent, each pimping nature through Tolkien’s displaced DARVO arguments/obscurantism having regressed to Beowulf in the 20th century and passing such things down through a bad cycle of demon BDSM. —Perse, 4/6/2025

Continuing this chapter’s initial focus on animals but shifting more towards power abuse, we’ll examine power as Tolkien expressed it in relation to nature as something to conquer by proxy—an invented other. In short, Tolkien relied on the vampire legend—but also Gothic castles, BDSM language and harmful arrangements of unequal power (rings and collars)—to dominate nature and those within it. Written in defense of a divided nature in good and evil animal forms, Tolkien’s war stories view the vampire a kind of parasite praying upon the conspicuously vulnerable inside Cartesian dialogs; i.e., both in raw animal terms with Shelob the spider as part of “evil nature,” but also magical leeches like Sauron, whose ghastly projections have become wholly divorced from “good nature” inside dark, undead fortresses that harvest all good, living things from the land (whitewashing Britain’s analogs in the process). Anything else is functionally “dead” (sanctioned for state execution) by virtue of collective punishment.

In doing so, Tolkien’s BDSM isn’t playful, but dogmatic; i.e., his abjects death as a vital function of nature, but also fascism as a vital function of Capitalism in relation to nature as preyed upon by those behind his undead/animalistic scapegoats: the West. All (canonical) Castles Are Bad, insofar as the grim harvests they bring about (during Capitalism-in-decay) harm nature and those of nature. Meanwhile, death becomes alien, fetishized, badass, and cool, but also necessary within these Capitalist-Realist configurations; i.e., Aragorn (and by extension, Tolkien) needs Sauron to disguise his own tyrannical state.

Keeping this in mind, we will unpack the settler-colonial trauma Tolkien’s furtively Gothic tools and mythic animal symbols aided and abetted, but also the adjacent dialogs that worked within Tolkien’s closeted queerness to undermine his own black-and-white Pax Britannica within Bretton Woods and beyond.

First, the Ring itself as a tempting vampiric device and consolidation of unequal power that preys on nature. While Sauron’s special ring has the ability to turn persons invisible and theoretically binds those who wear it to the original maker as removed from the physical world, said maker is largely non-existent; rather, his vampiric shadow is felt through exchanges of power that bring out the worst in people who are visible within nature. The Ring, then, is exchanged from person to person like a curse, symbolizing total power as something that can never really be destroyed provided the structure it connects to remains intact.

Tolkien’s oversimplification is a neat storytelling device, but also (as we shall see) an incredibly basic way of explaining away settler colonialism in traditionally Gothic ways: a ghost or past anxiety that is conjured up and swept away during the same ritual, often stigmatizing wolves, spiders, bats and similar “evil” animals in the process. It’s a cheap parlor trick that tries to separate Capitalism from capital, displacing the system’s current atrocities not just to an older time and faraway land, but a talisman that seemingly has a will of its own. In short, he rarefies greed, minus the dragon; apparently it’s the old male[1] necromancer’s fault that the West isn’t prosperous—i.e., isn’t normal (meaning an absence of tension, not genocide)! Tolkien might as well have blamed Apep for swallowing Ra’s canoe for all the causal sense it makes. He makes up a shapeless devil, then spends three novels chasing him down. Indeed, Tolkien (not Sauron) is the necromancer filling the world with orcs (“…if you became a shogun, there’d be nothing but devils in this world!”): through his spin on the ghost of the counterfeit (made from stolen parts) furthering the process of abjection. The Ring is merely a buck to pass, often with a fair amount of guilt by those who know (“Don’t tempt me, Frodo!”).

Again, as we have noted in Volume Zero, this falls to the Eye of Sauron as seemingly described by Raj Patel and Jason Moore in A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things:

the Cartesian revolution was made thinkable, and doable, the colonial project of mapping and domination. […] Cartesian rationalism is predicated on the distinction between the inner reality of the mind and the outer reality of objects; the latter could be brought into the former only through a neutral, disembodied gazed situated outside of space and time. That gaze always belonged to the Enlightened European colonist—and the empires that backed him. Descartes’ cogito funneled vision and thought into a spectator’s view of the world, one that rendered the emerging surfaces of modernity visible and measurable and the viewer bodiless and placeless. Medieval multiple vantage points in art and literature were displaced by a single, disembodied, omniscient and panoptic eye (source).

Volume Zero described that eye through the map it looked upon; re: Tolkien’s refrain enacted by Sauron as simply a dark reflection of the men of the West (and other good races) as colonizers: “There is no life in the void, only death!”

Up to this point, we’ve discussed the problematic nature of the ghost of the counterfeit when used as a canonical device through the treasure map as a colony under attack by “outside” forces. However, the power of Gothic reinvention isn’t strictly canonical, and at its most proletarian (re: Milton, Walpole) deliberately profanes the sacred to cut through an inability to critique what is in front of us; i.e., slicing through Tolkien’s silly trick by using the same rings (or ring-like devices) to counterattack what was ultimately a centrist daydream: “melt the Ring, save the world.” This requires using rings in ways that other Gothicists wouldn’t have thought twice about, but which Tolkien generally couldn’t stomach… or could he? It’s certainly true that Tolkien’s refrain (the treasure map) gentrified war through a canonizing of Gothic poetics and allegory (from Milton to Tolkien) that only intensified over time; the more Tolkien moderated his own invented world (again, made from stolen parts), the more the Ring ultimately became a regressive device that simplified his medieval critique of capital from The Hobbit (which presented the Ring as a simple but convenient way to help Bilbo out of a bind, the real issue being the gold under the mountain). But the guilty exchanges of the Ring still offer up some fairly genderqueer BDSM interactions inside a traditional background, all while seemingly holding Gothic poetics (and women) at arm’s length.

This being said, there are several basic forms of vampirism in Tolkien’s world: the corporeal and incorporeal. His fleshy vampirism is foisted onto female and anti-Semitic entities. There is the great spider Ungoliant and her spawn, of course—female vampirism’s parasitism, phallic stinger and paralysis being animalized in relation to nature; i.e., hysteria and the womb of nature as something to fear according to an Archaic Mother goddess as androgynous. Then, there’s Gollum and the goblins/orcs. We’ll get to orcs in a second (and Drow later in the book); Gollum is effectively Tolkien’s most overt homage to Beowulf—i.e., a slimy creature of darkness living in an underground lake, through which the hero, lacking physical strength, must beat the creature at its own game: cheating. After The Hobbit, Gollum is unmoored from the Misty Mountains, seeking the Ring as his lifeblood; and it is here that Tolkien, in 1954, evokes the anti-Semitic language of the vampire legend in The Fellowship of the Ring:

The Wood-elves tracked him first, an easy task for them, for his trail was still fresh then. Through Mirkwood and back again it led them, though they never caught him. The wood was full of the rumour of him, dreadful tales even among beasts and birds. The Woodmen said that there was some new terror abroad, a ghost that drank blood. It climbed trees to find nests; it crept into holes to find the young; it slipped through windows to find cradles (source).

Both examples are tied to monstrous-feminine arrangements of power exchange: Gollum craves the Ring like a vampire thrall does its master’s blood—Gollum’s blood as absorbed into the greedy artifact as synonymous with the Dark Lord (true to legend, the vampire master is an almighty patriarch who hoards vitality within himself, offering those under him only enough to sustain themselves through their own nightly feasts).

The second form of vampirism is the incorporeal kind, and here is where Tolkien pulls a trick. Although Sauron functions like a vampire, he isn’t called one and has no body to speak of, no phallic penetrative device tied to the sexual exchanging of power and essence in animalistic metaphors. In turn his invisibility robs his vitalistic feeding of its corporeal elements, and him of a tangible, visible status as Master operating through a physical appearance but also a physical, eroticized relationship to others. He’s simply vampirism in the abstract, a telepathic eyeball, “the Dark Lord on his dark throne / In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.” Meanwhile, women—the classic targets of vampirism in Western canon—are nowhere to be found.

Instead, our thirsty ghost is largely announced by a precession of kingly wraiths (death knights) and bat-like fliers that likewise are purely black, lacking any obvious sanguine appearance. Perhaps this paring down of a cardinal-red visual owes itself to Tolkien’s Catholic background and harboring a grudge for the anti-Catholic sentiments of the Neo-Gothic period; i.e., scapegoating the Protestant’s pure black in the Catholic’s place (“I see a red door / And I want it painted black…”). But Tolkien’s Master of the Black Castle morphs Vlad the Impaler into a vague, shapeless force operating entirely through rings (sans any Freudian slips, when involving the placing of rings onto fingers) and a pure reduction of BDSM roleplay told entirely in militarized medieval language; i.e., minus much of the monstrous Gothic poetics and centering on the positions themselves in a black-and-white, good-vs-evil framework that scapegoats Nazis for corrupting nature vis-à-vis the Christian West. But the traditional framework is still there, “sexiness” being reduced to Sontag’s dehumanization of sexuality through the horned death fetish, a living weapon in service of the Dark Lord; i.e., the bad dom who takes everything for himself through these extended, somewhat abstract phallic devices.

As we’ll examine throughout this subchapter and the next, I’d say that I think a more fleshed-out darkness (and more adventuresome BDSM aesthetic) might have done Tolkien some good—if only to make his evil more nuanced and less vague in relation to human characters and their physicalities (though I was still magnetically drawn to these dark forces due to my own psychosexual responses); but I think he did so on purpose: he was an anti-Communist Oxford professor who venerated mythical variants of the British monarchy in his work. Smacked with the effects of fascism defending Capitalism, his already bigoted (sexist, homonormative[2] and racist) worldview became increasingly basic, white and regressive over time, as if nothing after Beowulf ever occurred; i.e., black-and-white, but also vanilla, losing its Marxist critique as The Lord of the Rings eclipsed The Hobbit (a far superior work, in my opinion, due to its critical bite) but fixated universally on the militarized exchanges of power between cis men on the battlefield. There’s something to be said for and with that lens, but it still remains incredibly narrow and myopic; i.e., it’d take someone like me (an anarcho-Communist trans woman) to dream up Gothic worlds that filled out the things Tolkien couldn’t help but leave out in defense of capital, himself: my own castles and rings, but also allegory and Gothic theatrics that were anything but invisible.

To that, Tolkien wasn’t just allergic to allegory and sex; he policed them greatly in service of empire. His evils are simplistic, unironically dated and vague, and he has a stubborn clumsiness when applying them to his worlds that suggests a very closed-minded way of thinking about his world and ours in BDSM terms. It’s certainly no secret that Tolkien eventually decided to place the lion’s share of the blame on people more so than material conditions or Capitalism and nation-states. He also makes the Ring and then melts it, trying to suggest that everything is somehow “solved”—that “Isildur’s Bane” is somehow to blame for the waning strength of men in the face of rarefied greed; i.e., the dragon sickness of the gold from The Hobbit having been turned into a simple dissociative trinket that weighs on “all men” to the same degree. He seems to understand how rings function as poetic devices while paradoxically lending them a bit too much credence; vertical power is a tremendously corrupting force, but you don’t have to essentialize it, nor reduce it to a shapeless male darkness that employs throwaway female demons and does away with overt BDSM language and, yes, ironic rape fantasies:

(artist: Owusyr Art)

BDSM isn’t just where power is located/stored (e.g., inside the One Ring or Sauron’s tower), but instructions for its use within assigned positions, including rape fantasies as a set of instructions given to the dom by the sub issuing various paradoxical commands: the civilized “princess” and the barbaric “invader” as roles to play with in animalistic ways (e.g., the “breeding”/captive fantasy) that expose and interrogate power as a device of negotiation towards better working conditions and healing from the deep traumas that emerge from settler-colonial violence and heteronormative enforcement. Material conditions play an important role in historical materialism, but power is largely about perception, which cannot simply be destroyed; it must change within society. The catharsis offered by iconoclastic roleplay grants appreciative irony amid Gothic counterculture as surviving under Capitalism. These forms of roleplay aren’t just completely alien to Tolkien, but policed and denied through his own incessant prescription of orcish demon lovers (and Dark Lords); i.e. bad BDSM as a harmful arrangement of power that introduces praxial inertia into the equation. While power can’t be destroyed as we just said, it can become unthinkable according to ways that challenge the usual runs of the mill. Tolkien and Radcliffe have that very much in common, making anything outside of their worldview as shapeless, dark and unthinkable: the incessant, utterly British fear of the outside felt within their own borders, castles, heroes, etc, as hopelessly forged and ever-present.

To that, Horace Walpole was absolutely right to lampoon weddings and marriage like he did, presenting incest, live burial and rape as commonplace things inside his obviously Gothic castles. He cut to the chase, as it were, playing with taboo things that he could suggest, conceal, or uncover as he pleased; i.e., in tangibly Gothic language that spawned monsters (from other authors who came after him, to be fair) that at least part of the time carried far more critical power than Tolkien’s usual replications of “pure evil” (which Ursula Le Guin, and by extension myself, would have to escape by camping Tolkien’s own problematic escapism in our own ludo-Gothic BDSM fantasies): via their ability to directly and quickly speak to reader’s lived traumas, versus the imagined/inherited anxieties of the status quo speaking “for everyone” according to an Oxford language nerd.

Tolkien’s origin myths were entirely unoriginal, exhibiting a very narrow, profoundly inadequate idea of what BDSM even was: officers and batmen; i.e., a British officer and his dutiful servant, exemplified by Tolkien’s Samwise the Brave helping his fairly clueless master time and time again out of a bind. It is BDSM, but echoes the British castle of the Imperial Core as something to carry out into the battlefield while enduring Tolkien’s (fairly vanilla) rape fantasies and childish dreams of captivity with which to (dis)empower the sub as male; e.g., Frodo being whipped and beaten in the orc slaver’s tower (the torture dungeons in Mordor conspicuously full of the British tools of torture used by the colonized reimagined; i.e., during the myth of a dark, savage continent populated by evil, violent “children”). By displacing these tools off onto a dark “other” world beyond the land of plenty and light, Tolkien is scrubbing his own and blaming the colonized in the same breath). As a male benefactor of British colonialism, he fixates on faraway war as the exclusive site of power abuse exacted upon white men, ranking their abuse above everyone else (women, genderqueer people and ethnic minorities) and everywhere else (military urbanism). For him, these other things simply don’t exist; abject copies of them do, but their sexuality is largely abandoned inside a chaste, gentlemanly medieval that forces them to address trauma as men were (and are) commonly taught: through lethal force with killing weapons designed purely for harm against state enemies.

Excluding the fact that nonharmful sex is frankly a pleasurable activity whose complete erasure feels very odd and forced, this complete lack of sexual dialog is a serious problem for a second reason: BDSM and kink are regular outlets for sexual healing from trauma as women would experience it (rape, pregnancy and shame), but also men—especially black people who are generally raped in some shape or form by white colonizers. Tolkien provides zero representation, intersection, or even basic acknowledgement of anything other than white men versus the entire rest of the world as something to rape and sacrifice (with white women given a few moments to highlight their societal domestic roles in these men’s shadows: marriage[3]).

As such, the problem becomes an incredibly simple one: kill your problems to empower yourself; or in the words of Michael Brooks (regarding Israel and Palestine, though this extends to settler colonialism at large): “It’s not a complex issue. It’s super simple. There’s one group with enormous power. It acts on another population of people with total impunity and is never held accountable for anything” (source). This is bound to create and offset tremendous amounts of trauma that Tolkien, through his British emulation of American fascism (state apologetics) simultaneously marks, mischaracterizes and buries all at once; for him, the orcs (and other monsters) are pure evil synonymized with rape that must be cleansed from the world through ritualized, self-righteous violence, but they’re also humanoid and reminiscent of things he couldn’t (despite his best efforts) explain away in any satisfactory manner. The lie is the West is somehow besieged by these “invaders” at all times, or the peace of the West requires their death. The empowerment of the West, then, is a false flag built on a total fakery that makes Aragorn the paladin and his holy company seem incapable of revenge and settler-colonial violence (retreating to their islands after losing imperial control overseas, and falling victim to Isolationist paranoia), but in truth is exactly what they’re made for.

(artist: Exodus Is Near)

It’s important to remember that “orcs,” like other color-coded monsters, aren’t a singular stigmatized group used strictly for purposes of state terror and nothing else; counterterror and sex-positive cultural appreciation (Gothic counterculture) within the orc aesthetic are totally possible, putting “rape” in quotes in light of state atrocities to communicate the “undead” sensation of state victims; i.e., those living with animalistic trauma inside or alongside the state of exception as a compelled and predatory habitat. The problem with Tolkien is that he does it exclusively through an unironic jailbreak, seeing Britain as exclusively white and straight. In the process, he constantly imagines (and has others imagine) white British captives escaping from the prisons of dark-skinned people in settler-colonial fantasies that murder and dehumanize these non-British (non-white) performers during a British (white) cis-het nerd’s inadequate, dogmatic idea of unironic BDSM, then acts like that’s “good enough.” Anything else is ignored, amounting to a strangely detached form of white knight syndrome.

Like Coleridge, Tolkien’s Gothic cathedrals are made of grace and light, except he’s granted his own an elvish reinvention to displace some of the Teutonic flavor with (and over time, his wood-elves became high elves, assimilating into the pinnacle of the Western spire and shedding from themselves their merry and silly side that Tolkien had clearly given them, pre-WW2). Tolkien whined when people compared his fantasies to the real world; e.g., self-reporting when a critic compared Sauron to Stalin. Faced with that, Tolkien just had to play British schoolmaster and slap down the interpretation as “incorrect” because it’s not what he designed: “There is no ‘perhaps’ about it. I utterly repudiate any such ‘reading,’ which angers me. The situation was conceived long before[4] the Russian revolution. Such allegory is entirely foreign to my thought” (source: The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 2006). Of course it was; he was a British monarchist!

To be frank, Tolkien’s the worst sort of author in that respect: the one who acts immortal, demonstrating the most rigid, inflexible ways of thinking by someone who was utterly accommodated by the status quo in service of said status quo. By playing dumb, digging his heels in and adopting singular interpretations, Tolkien stayed bigoted and acted like God; i.e., his word was the law of a very British, settler-colonial sort. And many (white people) continue to take his side by acting like allegory (and iconoclastic interrogations of power) suck.

Indeed that’s generally how internalized guilt works; you deny it any way you can, saying “that’s not what I meant!” But intent doesn’t matter, material conditions (and consequences) do, and the fact remains that no amount of professed ignorance regarding Tolkien’s displacement and disassociation with settler-colonial violence can change the fact that his worlds are utterly populated with disposable enemies of a dark racialized “other” that carried over into remediations of the original fantasy that defend a global Western superiority. Anything that supports that is legitimate within the usual state monopolies and trifectas, and anything that resists it is relegated to the state of exception.

Dogma is the tool of empire, and Tolkien wasn’t shy about using it, his stories not just full of cops, castles and victims but acting as a steady excuse to turn off one’s brain as being over half a century old at this point; i.e., Neil Isaacs’ introductory essay to Tolkien and the Critics (1968): “since The Lord of the Rings and the domain of Middle-earth are eminently suitable for faddism and fannism, cultism and clubbism… [its special appeal] acts as a deterrent to critical activity” (source: Anderson Rearick’s “Why Is the Only Good Orc a Dead Orc,” 2004). Clearly it’s a sore spot in academia as accustomed to looking the other way (not a surprise, given how accommodated intellectuals behave), a sign of institutional guilt tied to the castle and those who live there as coming out to commit colonial horrors. The worst castles are the pearly ones; or as I said in my thesis, ACAB: All (canonical) Castles Are Bad. Indeed, the only difference between people like Tolkien and the Nazis is a matter of degree. Regarding the operations of their mythic structures, both worked in service of the status quo; e.g., Gondor is worse than Barad-dur because it will last and continue committing genocide. Again, Tolkien believed in the state, even with reduced powers, and the state is the ultimate foe.

For example, as Dr. Stephen Shapiro wrote to Reddif.com in 2003 regarding Tolkien’s racism in Jackson’s adaptations,

Put simply, Tolkien’s good guys are white and the bad guys are black, slant-eyed, unattractive, inarticulate and a psychologically undeveloped horde. In the trilogy, a small group, the fellowship, is pitted against a foreign horde and this reflects long-standing Anglo-European anxieties about being overwhelmed by non-Europeans. This is consistent with Tolkien’s Nordicist convictions. He thinks the Northern races had a culture and it was carried in the blood. While Tolkien describes the Hobbits and Elves as amazingly white, ethnically pure clans, their antagonists, the Orcs, are a motley dark-skinned mass, akin to tribal Africans or aborigines. The recent films amplify a “fear of a black planet” and exaggerate this difference by insisting on stark white-black colour codes.

Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings because he wanted to recreate a mythology for the English, which had been destroyed by foreign invasion. He felt the Normans had destroyed organic English culture. There is the notion that foreigners destroy culture and there was also a fantasy that there was a solid homogeneous English culture there to begin with, which was not the case because there were Celts and Vikings and a host of other groups. We have a pure village ideal, which is being threatened by new technologies and groups coming in. I think the film has picked up on this by colour coding the characters in very stark ways. For instance, the fellowship is portrayed as uber-Aryan, very white and there is the notion that they are a vanishing group under the advent of the other, evil ethnic groups. The Orcs are a black mass that doesn’t speak the languages and are desecrating the cathedrals. For today’s film fans, this older racial anxiety fuses with a current fear and hatred of Islam that supports a crusading war in the Middle East. The mass appeal of The Lord of the Rings, and the recent movies may well rest on racist codes (source).

Of course, Tolkien’s racism is something Tolkien himself did his best to deny in displaced vampiric terms. Apparently he wasn’t racist because his black-and-white settler colonialism isn’t planet Earth, it’s Middle-earth. Well, that’s fucking stupid, and a rather weak defense. If his stories were really so anti-racist as he claims, they a) wouldn’t be hinging entirely on intent, and b) wouldn’t populated by racist things and racist reenactments: us-versus-them scapegoats. Slaughtered during the British man’s defense of home—including said man’s love for king and country—orcs are whatever Tolkien needs them to be[5] to argue for the superiority (and continuation) of the reimagined Western monarchist hegemon; i.e., through his chiefly British refrain, including D&D and videogames, where heroic progression and empowerment is entirely incumbent on racialized slaughter on open ground with melee weapons (versus James Cameron’s Americanized refrain, with bullets inside the videogame Gothic castle; e.g., the Metroidvania). As the perceived outsiders’ blood and gore continues to pool and pile around the alter of a crumbling Victorian empire built on settler-colonial genocide, this “pest control” mentality is what haunts Tolkien’s world well into the present. Awfully telling that he pushes all of it off onto the colonized group. Very Cartesian, old boy.

(artist: Boris Nenezic)

History, as usual, has been written by the conquerors inheriting old spaces, including the games that white people need to process their own inheritance anxiety mid-genocide: orcs and similar stigmatized animal groups that you frame as undead (doomed to die), then kill and endlessly steal their shit while writing your ascendancy in their spilled blood (with Drow being a chimeric, demonic-undead hybrid of vampires, witches, spiders and orcs: subterranean cannibals, practitioners of black magic, ritual sacrifice, blood libel and so on).

As usual, the Western brutalizer is intimated through the monomythic language of displaced conquest, and its routine purging becomes fetishized in a centrist refrain taming nature into acceptable “good” forms while maintaining the cycle of war inside the monomyth as an altar of sacrifice; i.e., killing “bad” vampire animals and those associated with them, from the lowliest savage orc to supernatural, alien extremes of shadow demons who have no bodies to speak of.

Except, even when the meat on the bones is gone, ritualized death is still “sexy” (desirable) by virtue of the colonizer’s fearful-fascinated seeking of unequal power exchange relative to it; re: Sontag’s Nazi death fantasy as bad BDSM par excellence, stemming from a fundamental misunderstanding that leads to cyclical harm by the Western party towards everyone else. Tolkien’s chaste gentrification of war can’t change that; worse, his complete lack of sex just pushes rape to the margins, meaning we can’t interrogate its presence. It’s simply anathema… except this doesn’t change the fact that the West is a giant vampire that kills and rapes everything around itself; Tolkien’s monomyth is clearly meant to disguise or censor that fact, including his incessant defense of it as a silly white nerd acting like the First Mover redacting the Gothic tradition towards a pure village pastoral: make Britain Beowulf again. There’s nothing polite about genocide, no matter how posh he sounds. He’s just toeing the same-old lie of the Western lie in medieval revivals thereof, his BDSM lacking camp, thus irony.

In other words, to deal with Tolkien’s bullshit we have to try and humanize the pre-fascist, oddly vampiric monsters he created and relied upon in his post-fascist stories. This includes through sex as a terror device we transform with ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., into a counterterror device that interrogates Tolkien’s harmful configurations of unequal power exchange: to challenge the Shadow of Pygmalion (the patriarchal vision of those knowing-better “kings” of male-dominated industries) that Tolkien contributed towards. He’s dead, so fuck what he thinks; do a close-read and see what you find! Or contribute to his world by making it your own. If Tolkien didn’t have the balls to make his hobbits openly gay or the Drow sex-positive, do it for him. Let the old fucker turn in his grave while you desecrate his orderly cathedral, his island fortress’s unironic death and rape. He’s not God, so tear his corpse a new asshole. Show him just how gay his world can be using his own queer potential; i.e., grant him an ignominious death: hoisted up on his own petard as his fans give Tolkien away with their indignance and bigotry[6] boiling over on his behalf.

This is what negotiations of power-as-performance are ultimately about: knowing who you’re bargaining with and where they stand. Getting under their skin and inside their head is important, including what they think about power as existing in the blood; i.e., the surprisingly Gothic notion of pre-colonial inheritance that Tolkien relied on in his incessant worship of heroic bloodlines as something to return to; e.g., Thorin, son of Thrain, son of Thror, but also Aragorn of the Dunedain gifted with long life due to his special blood—a cursed bloodline, I might add, tainted by the folly of Elendil’s son, Isildur, giving into the curse of the Ring. The Ring, then, serves as a blood curse that, when destroyed, purifies the blood and the people and places associated with it. It’s not the destruction of all rings (and marriages) that is required, merely the One Ring and its false line of shadow kings tied to a wraith-like patriarch Tolkien outlines vaguely as “corruption.” Faced with the quandary of the Western vampire, he conjures up the ghost of the counterfeit to exorcise it, washing the West of its blood by scapegoating Sauron and his Ring for the crimes of the West having preyed on everywhere else.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard and Lydia)

The paradox of the crumbling homestead (and its spoiled bloodline) is that familial decay is announced by its own crumbling markers of sovereignty within the chronotope; e.g., “Ozymandias,” but also the chapel from Diablo 1 (1996) looming over the grim-looking and solemn-sounding Tristram: “The sanctity of this place has been fouled.” Even Tolkien had his own mad king inside Rohan, but he soundly tip-toed around the campy sort of Gothic sexuality that Horace Walpole was far more game to experiment with. Incest is terminally common, so much so that Walpole can scarcely be credited with inventing it. But his arrangement of the Gothic castle was the first of its kind that is widely recognized:

Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto of 1764 is still accepted as the “father of the Gothic novel,” yet most observers of this novelette see it, with some justice, as a curiously empty and insubstantial originator of the mode it appears to have spawned. It is understandably regarded as thin in more ways than one, as a stagey manipulation of old and hollow stick-figures in which tired conventions from drama and romance are mixed in ways that emphasize their sheer antiquity and conventionality (source: Jerold Hogle’s “The Ghost of the Counterfeit in the Genesis of the Gothic,” 1994).

In short, he made it all up and was pretty open about that. Gothic invention, then, was a creative desire to reinvent the past, one described by Mark Madoff in “The Useful Myth of Gothic Ancestry” (1979) as follows:

A myth of gothic ancestry did not simply mean bad history. Those who perpetuated the myth obeyed a stronger call than that of accuracy to historical evidence. The ancestry in question was a product of fantasy to serve specific political purposes. Established as popular belief, the idea of gothic ancestry offered a way of revising the features of the past in order to satisfy the imaginative needs of the present. It floured in response to current anxieties and desires, taking its mythic substance from their objects, its appeal from their urgency. By translating such powerful motives into otherworldly terms, gothic myth permitted a close approach to otherwise forbidden themes (source).

Madoff concludes, “The idea of gothic ancestry endured because it was useful,” and I’m inclined to agree. Except I would extend this utility to Gothic Communism as something to fashion through the same myths of ancestry found in the usual haunts; i.e., mirroring the unspoken but still advertised material conditions of Pax Americana that Tolkien’s “empire where the sun never sets” was suspiciously covered in shadows and bathed in blood. To touch on those, you often have to go somewhere else when formulating your own critiques (the monsters, psychosexual predicaments, and lairs of various kinds). This can seem purely ahistorical, but generally the goals of any historical play (re: Shakespeare) or historical Gothic novel (re: Bakhtin’s chronotope) utilizes some degree of invention and informative chaos (re: Aguirre’s geometries of terror) amid the displacement and disassociation: crafting your own histories and bloodlines that reverse the process of abjection in a very Gothic way—through the ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., the fake blood of Gothic horror for sex-positive reasons made in the spirit of fun, but also interrogating trauma by camping it during ludo-Gothic BDSM

This doesn’t take an Oxford scholar. For example, my older brother once invented his own Eastern European leader for a third-grade assignment and called him “Mr. Kazakhstan” while using a picture of Stalin; despite how this would have been right around the fall of the Soviet Union, my brother’s teacher didn’t recognize the photo and gave him an A+ (angering my mother to no end). Keeping in line with the same family tradition, and informed by my mother’s bringing of Russian and Eastern European history home to us kids, I wrote my own fantasy story in the early 2000s where an incestuous tyrant called Bane (the name comes from Weaponlord, 1995, not Batman) forces his half-sister, Sigourney, and half-brothers to wear magic rings that keep them bound to the family castle. When Sigourney cuts off her finger and tries to run, her half-brother forces her to wear a collar instead. Over time, she gives birth to Bane’s rape child: an incredibly intelligent/latently powerful witch named Alyona. Alyona is kind and book-smart—with her non-rapey uncles and her pet ravens there for her as friends (and also Ileana, who trains Alyona to harness her dormant powers to escape Bane’s clutches). Eventually Alyona goes on to defeat her own father-uncle and save her family from certain destruction (with their help, as she cannot defeat him alone).

To be honest, I hadn’t thought about this character in years; I used to think she was modeled after my mother and the abuse she and my uncles experienced during their own childhoods. But then, shortly before Valentine’s Day of 2023, I realized that Alyona (and her siblings) were arguably closer to me than my mother (though functionally the psychomachy offered up a liminal combination of myself and my entire family unit to varying degrees of reality and artifice). To my current, updated knowledge, while no one in my immediate family is a literal product of incest, there is sexual abuse in my family’s history and this history clutters our current ancestral home as one that was only in our possession for a single generation: the house my grandparents eventually bought. Yet the abuses that proceeded its ownership have stubbornly plagued them well into the present, tottering on the edge of the American middle class like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables (1851): “They had taken that downright plunge which, sooner or later, is the destiny of all families, whether princely or plebeian” (source).

“Families are always rising and falling in America”; i.e., the myth of the American middle class is a kind of Gothic lie waiting to crumble. Hawthorne’s historical materialism arguably stems from his own cursed bloodline: the Hathornes. Donna Welles writes how Hawthorne’s ancestor, William Hathorne, was one of the judges of the Salem Witch Trials, which Nathaniel desired to escape from, but still write about. He did so by critiquing America’s own Puritanical heritage—felt on a social-sexual level through all those damn linguo-material reminders of former, fallen power, just daring to return but somehow already-here.

(artist: William A. Crafts)

Gothicists generally fear a harmful barbaric past, but especially its prophesied homecoming within the counterfeit residence as a fearsome site of tremendous lies, decay and abuse speaking to the actual doubled home as equally false. The same applied to me at nineteen during my own displaced writing concerned with power abuse as tied to the “gift-giving” of rings and collars operating as BDSM symbols of psychosexual roleplay. It might seem quaint or invented, but then again, rings don’t tend to do much on their own. It’s how they’re viewed and applied during a given iteration that matters. In short, the writing for me was therapeutic, but also transformative: nearly twenty years before I identified as a woman, my story about Bane and the rings showed me the girl inside of myself as echoed by Tolkien’s fictions. Such a shame Tolkien a) didn’t have the guts to come out of the closet regarding his own stories, and b) recognize what they said about him and his home as something he tried to erase, albeit in favor of the colonizer through a purified village aesthetic to retreat into.

This isn’t always a conscious decision at first (though Tolkien’s denial/stubborn refusal to change, honestly reflect, or leave the closet would have become more deliberate, near the end of his life); as a child, I don’t remember thinking about any of my own family’s trauma or at least consciously reifying it as castles, collars or rings. We certainly talked about these experiences often, but much of it was jokingly passed around like a hot potato (a bit like Bilbo’s ring in that no one wanted to hold onto it). The exchange became an absurd game—with my mother and two uncles joking as teenagers that our bloodline would meet the same end that Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) did: “the fall of the House of [our family name].” The predictable rise and fall of our bloodline through socio-material decay is the very stuff of Gothic cliché. It was only later I consciously learned and started to understand how badly my mother had been abused—hurt by many different persons to such an appalling degree that exact quantification is impossible. This goes for the abuse, but also the degree of shivering someone or somewhere into fractals—a phenomenon in behavioral therapy called multiplicity or plurality. But like Gollum, there is often an exchange of power relayed in some shape or form that leads to the division taking place. This needn’t be a ring or a vampire. Sometimes, it can be a contract; or in the case of Lenore’s betrayal of Hector from Castlevania (exhibit 7a), it can be a vampire ring that works like a harmful BDSM contract when worn a particular way during a particular roleplay scenario: during sex as a dangerous distraction inside a Gothic (vampire’s) castle.

For a good example of a slave contract without an obvious “ring” being visibly worn (or a vampire), consider the late ’90s (thus early-Internet) Japanese anime thriller, Perfect Blue, and its own dissociative, gaslit depictions of a mind horribly fractured by trauma, but also surrounded by it:

Madness is central, in Gothic stories. Generally manifesting through a kind of palpable affect, the monstrous is an experience felt through horror and terror. Presented to the audience, this charge is stored either inside a location or upon its imagery. Viewed, the promoted surfaces compel specific responses—either from victims trapped inside, or those who feel as such (the audience). Call it a “shared gaze,” if you will; the madness remains vicarious.

In blander terms, Perfect Blue [1997] is a psychological thriller, one that concerns shared psychosis, or folie à deux. In Gothic terms, its madness is not limited between two people, but an entire location—what I’ll call chez folie, or “mad place.” A haunted house is more than the heroine and killer, inside; it involves a great number of moving parts, all cooperating to produce a madness exhibited. Once cultivated, this insanity is channeled through a pointed, liminal gaze, often the heroine’s. Under attack, her sense of reality crumbles. Is she mad, or is the killer merely hidden, concealed within the mist? This affliction extends to the audience looking through her eyes; when the killer is near, reality starts to break down (a familiar notion for those acclimated with Silent Hill [1999] or H. P. Lovecraft) [source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Gothic Themes in Perfect Blue,” 2019].

The story is over-the-top, but conveys an oft-buried truth under Capitalism: trauma can splinter the mind into pieces, leading to different outcomes in the material and natural world. All the while, the vampire hides behind the mirror inside the reflections of other people’s faces and bodies:

In my case, my poetic division, displacement and disassociation amounted to Alyona as something I materially created in a barbaric, pointedly antiquated offshoot of my family home informed by Tolkien’s imaginary one: a castle filled with psychosexual counterfeits talking about my abuse as arranged chronotopically around me; i.e., Bakhtin’s dynastic primacy and hereditary rites speaking in the usual fatal portraits, suits of armor and coats of arms, but animated by the endless legends occupying the same space through its past-and-present inhabitants. In the case of my mother (as well as my romantic partners who had histories of complex trauma), division involved aspects of their fractured personalities manifesting before my eyes inside a natural mind and body affected by the socio-material environment around it. And with all of us, the curious use of dated Gothic language was never far off. It was baked into the jokes we told ourselves, the games we played together as haunted by the ghost of the counterfeit. But it was still an effective device at speaking to the things that normally went unsaid. The paradox, here, is they were singing to us through the language of the imaginary past as something that shaped our own thought.

Historical-material trauma is utterly entropic, but built with bricks and stones that come apart and fly back together like magic. Always close at hand, it feels palpable but strangely elusive and distant—like Marx’s nightmare, but also Doctor Morbius’ from Forbidden Planet (1956): “Sly and irresistible, only waiting to be reinvoked for murder!” Whether abusers and abused, then, all of my family has been hurt by the family structure itself—all of its monsters hiding in plain sight through familial, dynastic forms: the gargoyles, fatal portraits and other chronotopic elements. For my grandparents, these became sources of shame to hide behind symbols of pride, including Tolkien’s world as an adjacent source of pride to retreat inside. My folks buried everything they could, but I always felt it emanating all around me, like Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart” (1843) underneath the floorboards, but also inside Middle-earth and my copies of it (my teenage self unafraid to use Stalin and Eastern Europe as a palimpsest). In short, the trauma was buried alive within me as I existed inside my own Gothic-familial space; i.e., littered with traumatic bleeding into Gothic stories as something to messily pass down, but also pass off as not somehow connected to our own generational curse.

I’ve since become utterly detached from it all, feeling bereft of anything that might have been promised to me (including by Tolkien’s magical worlds). Per Said, I feel exiled, but on some level, pleasurably composed of my home as foreign to me. For instance, as a young girl and teenage woman, I had acquired then projected my osmotic absorptions onto a singular egregore: Alyona. Bane had bred her for war and revenge, a kind of fascist wunderkind/wunderwaffe he had predicted in the family bloodlines then imposed through his rapacious will. Alyona not only contained the awesome power of future generations; she contained a summation of my family’s combined, complex trauma existing inside her own Gothic home as having inadvertently doubled mine; i.e., carried away to distant lands and enchanted castles and (more importantly) the ability to change one’s problems in a way I never could: with rebellious magic inside my transwoman’s duplicate of the Gothic rape castle. It strikes me as both simplistic and precocious—a maturing mind bred on fantasy stock coming to her own conclusions (not Tolkien’s) inside a trans egg that finally cracked, decades later.

I was a teenager when I started writing these stories (and drawing them). Even so, my interrogation of capital was still far more frank than Tolkien’s own, his elves effectively anglicized faeries, his men of the West an imaginary pro-European Teutonic, and his vampiric Necromancer reducing the shadow of the fascist past to a dark, abstract, “pure evil” shape disconnected from sex and nature altogether (with his own impressive mythos badly echoing Paradise Lost—Satan, Beelzebub, Pandemonium—and Ursula Le Guin taking several books after A Wizard of Earthsea, 1968, to really hit her gay stride). Still, Tolkien’s own writings on the Ring of Power—and the infamous plurality of Gollum (and Gollum’s triangulation pitting Frodo against Sam)—speaks to everyone’s exploitation under the state’s heteronormative arrangement towards power long before Sauron shows up; i.e., the wearing of rings as a BDSM roleplay minus the Gothic kink, and simply being the Ring as the sole focus: “One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.”

Do you honestly think the “men of the West” routinely fall for “the Ring” because they’re not tall, fancy elf-ladies or gay wizards played by Shakespeareans? No, they’re groomed to be susceptible before, during and after Sauron’s fall by the West as a corruptible bloodline—under the spell of state-sanctioned marriage and heteronormative, institutional love; i.e., amatonormativity. Unable to explain fascism, Tolkien just naturalizes and solves it… with old-fashioned monomythic (thus heteronormative) violence and marriage, but also echoes of the Gothic cathedral—Ringwraiths in his case—as tied to the Gothic presentations of blood exchange he pointedly made bloodless. Sauron’s bad play—his all-consuming vampire contract through the wearing of the energy-sapping rings—has totally withered them. Doomed to die, the traitorous kings’ fearing of death was so great it had them playing Faust, only to become death by imitating his titular deal with the devil—not as a genderqueer entity but a giver of false knowledge and power invented by Christian men to uphold the status quo:

(exhibit 10c3: Artist: Anato Finnstark. Their rendition of Weathertop assembles Tolkien’s Gothic cathedral in ways he would have been embarrassed to openly do himself. Yet there they are, standing around Frodo (a dead ringer for Bilbo) like suits of armor possessed by the Shadow of the Skeleton King: a male tyrant reduced to mere shadow and scared off by something as basic [and lazy] as torchlight. Yet Frodo swoons before them as any Gothic heroine would, enraptured by their Numinous might. One sympathizes.)

We’ve already taken Tolkien to task in Volume Zero for gentrifying war (and canonizing Milton’s Biblical critique); e.g., “Tolkien vs Milton” and “The Quest for Power“; re: in his own High Fantasy refrain regressing towards Beowulf and a pure, non-Gothic bloodline. Right now, I want you to try and consider how his inadequacies as a writer didn’t wholly prohibit critical potency of a strictly BDSM, queer-Gothic sort in his stories. In short, I want you to help me  save him from his own dumbass self.

Yes, Tolkien was a philologist (an expert in ancient written languages) and Beowulf aficionado—basically an old, dusty scholar who was well-versed in the Scandinavian legends of dragons, war and plunder. As such, he undoubtedly appeared as totally lacking in the language of women, ethnic minorities (the East is a dark place for him) and gay people. And yet similar to Milton, he had his devilish moments, and similar to my crafting of Alyona, there existed a tremendously secret, divided self waiting inside Tolkien’s own psychomachic dialogs about his own dissenting opinions; i.e., the shadowy spaces of a deeply troubled man who, as we’ve already established, was at least publicly allergic both to the Gothic and allegory as a theatrical device. Despite these disassociative (arguably posttraumatic) aversions and paucity of accurate genderqueer labels, he clearly authored his own imaginary castles but also Gothic power exchange scenarios to go along with them (the Ring is basically a portable torture device that transports the wearer, if not directly to Barad-dur, then at least to feel trapped inside the fortress dungeon; i.e., surviving the dumb, brutal goblin jailors’ whips, chains, prison bars and infernal torture devices; re: the Westerner’s paradoxical chasing of the captive fantasy in order to embody the thinking captive’s righteous indignation and escape from the brutish, unthinking[7] captor). They might seem even more far-removed than usual and that’s on Tolkien, but the usual genderqueer antics are still there provided you know what to look for and have a bit of patience (to be clear, you don’t have to rescue Tolkien’s actual reputation, just his “ghost” as something to camp during ludo-Gothic BDSM).

It all goes back to rings as classical symbols of status and power exchange. Rings are given and worn; the Ringwraiths (and their rings) are smaller abstractions of the Faustian bargain manifest through the wearing of Sauron’s rings as harmful symbols of power but also power exchange as having a torturous effect on one’s ability to relate to others; e.g., of Frodo to Sam. The magic becomes a metaphor, a kind of BDSM shorthand—re: not just our hobbits, but also similar acts of gift-giving that famously involve the ring as a kind of contract that is worn, generally in a variety of roleplays (which, for Tolkien, were primarily chaste in their execution—excluding the raw, lethal force of dead orcs, of course).

Tolkien stole this idea for his counterfeit much like he did everything else (excluding his languages, but who on Earth complains about those?). We mentioned Lenore and Hector for the second time, a moment ago. Let us consider a likely inspiration for their own power games and Tolkien’s that I have already examined myself in the past[8] (and which we now return to for a second look): Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (c. 1598):

(source: Pinterest)

In a similar medievalist fashion centered around rings, bloodlines and Christian apologetics, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice seemed to ask, “who is the titular merchant by the end of Act Five?” It would seem to be Portia, as the exchange of power and wealth through the wedding rings have gained her the most social capital in a Christian sense; i.e., the argument of mercy and bargaining through displays of charity that are displayed and worn in public. On paper, her husband has acquired her manor and inheritance, but she maintains the ability to gamely negotiate and navigate these spaces far better than he. As Karen Newman writes in “Portia’s Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice” (1987):

The governing analogy in Portia’s speech [to Bassanio] is the Renaissance political commonplace that figures marriage and the family as a kingdom in small, a microcosm ruled over by the husband. Portia’s speech figures woman as microcosm to man’s macrocosm and as subject to his sovereignty. Portia ratifies this pre-nuptial contract with Bassanio by pledging her ring, which here represents the codified, hierarchical relation of men and women in the Elizabethan sex/gender system in which a woman’s husband is “her lord, her governor, her king.” The ring is a visual sign of her vow of love and submission to Bassanio; it is a representation of Portia’s acceptance of Elizabethan marriage which was characterized by women’s subjection, their loss of legal rights, and their status as goods or chattel. It signifies her place in a rigidly defined hierarchy of male power and privilege; and her declaration of love at first seems to exemplify her acquiescence to woman’s place in such a system.

But Portia’s declaration of love veers away in its final lines from the exchange system the preceding lines affirm. Having moved through past time to the present Portia’s pledge and gift of her ring, the speech ends in the future, with a projected loss and its aftermath, with Portia’s “vantage to exclaim on” Bassanio:

I give them with this ring,

Which when you part from, lose, or give away,

Let it presage the ruin of your love,

And be my vantage to exclaim on you.

Here Portia is the gift-giver, and it is worth remembering Mauss’s description of gift-giving in the New Guinea highlands in which an aspiring “Big Man” gives more than can be reciprocated and in so doing wins prestige and power. Portia gives more than Bassanio can ever reciprocate, first to him, then to Antonio, and finally to Venice itself in her actions in the trial which allow the city to preserve both its law and its precious Christian citizen. In giving more than can be reciprocated, Portia short-circuits the system of exchange and the male bonds it creates, winning her husband away from the arms of Antonio.

Contemporary conduct books and advice about choosing a wife illustrate the dangers of marriage to a woman of higher social status or of greater wealth. Though by law such a marriage makes the husband master of his wife and her goods, in practice contemporary sources suggest unequal marriages often resulted in domination by the wife. Some writers and Puritan divines even claimed that women purposely married younger men, men of lower rank or of less wealth, so as to rule them (source).

If Shakespeare’s game approach to labor and wealth was relayed via imaginary Italy in the proto-Gothic tradition, Tolkien certainly took his own jaunts into similar territories using queer analogs.

First, there was the initial male bachelor playing at various games to escape battle with the goblins: speaking in riddles. Indeed, Bilbo not only cheated at the riddle game; he cheated at combat, using a magic ring that he arguably stole (though it didn’t originally belong to Gollum) in order to sneak out (all while Bilbo’s manly friends had to heroically fight through tiers of goblins serving the evil master using the only language Tolkien’s Nazi-esque[9] scapegoats understood: brute force). Surviving into old age, Bilbo was followed by a second younger double, Frodo, who—when he puts on the Ring and goes (for but a moment) over to the dark side—would have been the same exact age as his spitting-image uncle when the older hobbit first found the Ring in Gollum’s cave.

If I made Alyona and my own gay-penned torture castle to interrogate a Gothic living situation through precocious ludo-Gothic BDSM theatrics (and in response to Tolkien as someone to camp), then I don’t think it’s really much of a stretch to see Tolkien doing the same with unironic demon BDSM (of the Radcliffean sort) to canonize the Gothic; i.e., his borrowed bestiary gnawing at the back of his own mind about the imperfections of the heteronormative West and its own imperfect bloodline. Except for him, the abstraction of the Ring was something to offer up during a ritualized sacrifice that, once invoked (using a volcano, no less), defeats fascism once and for all, letting things “return to normal” after the glory of Gondor’s white castle is restored through the same-old monomyth purifying the blood through a trial by fire into Hell (versus already functioning normally through the endless cycle of war and false hope under Tolkien’s brand of Capitalist Realism apologizing for nation-states). In fact, it’s hard not to see a queer-if-closeted (what Tolkien might call “Tookish” or fairy-like[10]) side of the old man, curiously mirrored on the surface of the twinkish Frodo; i.e., a little, confused and perpetual bachelor swooning before the prison-like assemblage of churchly stones, the kingly spectres and their awesome threat of hellish bondage pressing through the golden nuptial band gripping Frodo’s hand.

As I said, if you know what to look for then Tolkien’s closeted, scapegoat nature of Gothic antics (despite their typical displacement, disassociation and gaping shadow where women and good “orcs” should be) are as plain as wearing the Ring yourself: the threat of dark, vampiric bondage. It’s precisely what drew me to his work because the presence of Sauron spoke to my trauma as a queer person. The truth of things ties up in the Ring’s existence while under its power as something to paradoxically seek. The same palliative-Numinous logic applies to Sauron’s offshoots, our riders in black, as unspeakable evocations of power that can be interrogated while under their fearsome spell:

To that, the ghost of the counterfeit adumbrates settler-colonial guilt, even when pushed away through a refusal to connect it with home, instead declaring it as “pure darkness” from “elsewhere.” The wearers of the black robes aren’t women, spiders or even orcs; they’re old, white bandit kings from the West, on par with the sort of duplicitous, “Gothic” backstabbers stared at with fear and wonder by someone not accustomed to the paradoxes and doubling inside the shadow zone. Conjuring up a canonical iteration of darkness visible, Tolkien had taken the British empire’s long shadow and projected it off onto faraway castles, alien lands and exotic battlefields of unprecedented carnage, but also crumbling ruins much closer to home: the barrow wights haunting nearby funeral mounds, and dark forests of enchantment populated by evil talking spiders. Corporeal or incorporeal, Tolkien’s vampires greedily sap the lifeforce of good living people until they become just as wicked—growing unthinkingly hungry towards “good” nature like Ungoliant or Morgoth draining the twin trees of Valinor (exhibit 0c).

Tolkien wasn’t an out-and-out Gothicist because he rejected the title and the open function of actually being one (far more than even Milton did, whose accidental celebration of Satan isn’t an unpopular concept); yet Tolkien’s necromantic black mirror is still on full display here, even if he can’t really bring himself to say the quiet part out loud: Sauron cannot exist in a vacuum. There is no “Big Other” troubling the West from outside, merely the West (and Capitalism) acting as it always does; i.e., like a giant vampire reinventing its own bloodline and simultaneously conjuring up Nazi “homebrew” and banditti-grade warlords from within itself, inside/outside, but also inventing “evil” labels for its own prey and chasing after them into settler-colonial territories dressed up as “home defense.” Evil returns during the class nightmare, whose inheritance anxiety must be banished each and every time through the seeking of power and attaining of all the usual relics thereof—by entering Hell, looting its vaults and “conquering death,” Joseph-Campbell-style (again, Imperialism with more steps, and dressed up in rather preachy white-savior and white-martyr language).

Likewise, the potential to bring out a Gothic queer criticality was still very much present in Tolkien’s works, albeit from a largely male, novel-of-manners perspective. Blame Peter Jackson for toying with canon and “changing things,” if you want; but I don’t personally think Jackson really changed all that much of Tolkien’s notion of power exchange when examined through a queer Gothic lens.

Consider how the titular characters, Bilbo and Frodo, are both canonically 50-year-old bachelors in the book (they are, in fact, cousins who share the same birthday: September 22nd); both inherit a house full of nice clothes and parties but never go out and never get married or have children (with Bilbo begot from Belladonna Took, and Frodo being adopted by him after the younger hobbit’s parents were killed in a tragic boating accident). In other words, both characters echo Tolkien, whose “diary” embodies the High Fantasy pastoralization of a closeted dandy ringed by Gothic shadows and counterfeits he utterly despised: the “finding” of a historical document that legitimizes a true bloodline and outs a dark bloodline as false. It’s about as Gothic as anyone can get and I always knew the Tookish, repressed side of Tolkien wouldn’t let me down.

I don’t think Tolkien was strictly as fanciful or devilish as Walpole was, let alone Lewis, but the notion of historical reinvention with ahistorical fictions was certainly present in his village scapegoating of evil. Abjection aside, Tolkien’s fantasies helped him discuss impolite topics through Gothic allegory as a Platonic, shadows-on-the-wall device the author openly decried, but was still guilty of using. Maybe that’s why he kept quiet. Nevertheless, Molly Ostertag writes in “Queer Readings of The Lord of the Rings Are Not Accidents” (2021):

The frame story Tolkien created for The Lord of the Rings was that the tale was simply translated from a much older historical document. This is established in the book’s introduction, where the author describes how Bilbo’s private diary (i.e., The Hobbit) was preserved and expanded by Frodo (and later Sam), becoming an account of the War of the Ring. That volume, The Red Book of Westmarch, was preserved and transcribed, and passed down as ancient history—”those days […] are now long past, and the shape of all lands has been changed”—until it ended up in Tolkien’s hands. This frame is evident through the book in bits of old lore scattered through the story, footnotes on the quirks of translating languages like Elvish and Orcish into English, and in the extensive appendices that lay out Middle-earth’s history before and after the story.

When a book is presented as a primary source rather than a work of fiction, it’s an authorial invitation to look between the lines and search for hidden truths [oh, the irony]. The narrator becomes part of the fiction—history, after all, is recorded by specific people with their own motives—something that Tolkien, as one of the world’s foremost Beowulf scholars, would have intimately understood. It was a conscious choice on the part of “Frodo” and “Sam” to include the many moments when they express love for each other, and it reads much in the same way people from the past delicately referred to their same-sex relationships: wanting to acknowledge their truth while obeying the conventions of the time.

Heterosexual romance is sparse in the books, and discussion of sexuality between the characters is absent (the One Ring can be seen as a metaphor for lust and temptation, but that’s a whole other topic). But Tolkien was not averse to romance. In a letter to one of his sons, he wrote about chivalric romance as the height of romantic love: “It idealizes ‘love’ […] it takes in far more than physical pleasure, and enjoins if not purity, at least fidelity, and so self-denial, ‘service,’ courtesy, honor, and courage.” This is the relationship between Aragorn and his elf-love Arwen; between Eowyn and Faramir; and it is, to a T, the relationship between Sam and Frodo (source).

(artist: Molly Ostertag)

Open confessions aside, the Walpolean tradition of Gothic Romance lies in Tolkien’s story as utterly haunted by what it limits to the periphery: fascism, the monstrous-feminine and queer love as projected onto an imaginary easterly plain by a thoroughly white, cis-het, British male imagination reared at the end of Queen Victoria’s reign (thus the collapse of British settler colonialism). Contemporaries of Tolkien certainly made no bones about diving more honestly than he did into deathly shadow spaces and rapey castles; re: James Whale, an openly gay man later imitated by bisexual activist, Vincent Price, as well as 1970s camp; e.g., The Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Phantom of the Paradise (1974). All were channeling a monstrous-feminine idea that reaches back before Tolkien to Oscar Wilde’s aesthete (the author of the 1890 novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray) and the “sodomic” dandies of the 19th and 18th centuries, including horror auteur, Matthew Lewis. And if the Gothic isn’t currently being helmed by gay men, then its icons certainly have been inclusive of the demonized in ways that happily don’t entirely preclude Tolkien, or at least his ghost as something to camp during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., by shining a spotlight on the queer elements that were present in his own work.

Yes, Humphrey Carpenter wrote in 1977, “As to homosexuality, Tolkien claimed that at nineteen he did not even know the word” (source: J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, 1977). And yet, as with Walpole, Lewis, or even me when I was a teenage girl, it really doesn’t matter if Tolkien lacked the words to spell out his queerness in no uncertain terms; it’s still very much there for us to comment on—and frankly as clear as day in all the Gothic scenarios he swoops in to frighten readers with, but also himself. As someone clearly bothered by the shadow of the West (and British settler colonialism in decline), Tolkien conjured up this shadow as the stories’ metatextual wizard: he’s the necromancer and the Britannic queer of the story because the titular Lord of the Rings, Ringwraiths and hobbits all come from inside him and his culture as apologizing for itself through Gothic poetics dressed up as anti-Gothic; i.e., Tolkien’s vault of treasures, but also his trademark dark forces without which his grand conflicts would be utterly meaningless (though unlike Milton, he is defending God and God’s twin trees [the Base and Superstructure] and the Christian West as things that are exceptionally good, thus above critique). All encompass the “moral geography” of his famous treasure map and its prolific, endlessly replicated xenophobia (the creation of orcs and humans a standard function of nation-states carried into videogames through Tolkien’s earnest, ubiquitous Orientalism: us-versus-them arenas and killing fields dressed up in made-up languages, their many names memorized by the faithful escaping into them to do battle with Tolkien’s various scapegoats).

(“J.R.R. Tolkien in his study, ca. 1937, black and white photograph”; source: The Morgan Library & Museum)

 

Beyond Tolkien’s ambiguously gay (male) hobbits, he nevertheless interrogated war through the classically dated, homocentric approach.

Given his dusty academic interests, the complicated/warring bigotries of Great Britain, and the Nazis’ destruction of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institution of Sexology in 1933, we can perhaps understand if not condone Tolkien’s ignorance regarding trans, non-binary and intersex people when he started canonizing his fantasy stories. He was nearly Bilbo’s age when he wrote The Hobbit, thus unsurprisingly stuck to his white man’s gentlemanly idea of a heteronormative, “civilized” world; i.e., the usual kind of white men fighting for white women in the usual Cartesian division and violence against nature that results. Tolkien’s fabrications were moderately bigoted, but still bigoted in all the usual ways you could expect of a moderate from those times of waning British superiority under an increasingly globalized capitalist network. And yet, similar to Radcliffe or any other non-radical British person of the Gothic tradition, Tolkien used his privilege to draft a ghost of the counterfeit that was arguably far more dangerous than the open bigotries of the Third Reich (what Martin Luther King Jr. warned about in “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” in 1963: the white moderate): Sauron thrived in Tolkien’s black-and-white universe, as did the imperial murder machine grinding up so many “orcs” to reclaim the lost valor of the West. Blood for blood, a truth universally acknowledged through wedding bands in the end (minus Austen’s irony).

We’re clearly not here to apologize for these persons, but to expose through our arguments with their ghosts (of the counterfeit) anything that is useful in their work towards developing a post-scarcity world that isn’t quite so fixated on biology and blood. And sitting alongside Tolkien’s painfully Anglicized lords and ladies was that curious group of “little people” who fall short of the towering men, gilded elves, and anti-Semitic dwarves of the West: hobbits.

To that, Tolkien’s Middle-earth is an imaginary theatre of medieval jingoism (re: the Cycle of Kings; i.e., the titular Return of the King during the rise and fall of fascism, restoring Capitalism to an undecayed state) serving as the usual place where forbidden love occurs: Gothic castles. Even so, it remains largely devoid of active, gender-non-conforming (and especially non-white) women and utterly chockful of nationalized imagery tied to Capitalist Realism: orcs, vampires, and bad BDSM, but also hobbits. As something Tolkien contributed towards using these queer little creatures, hobbits worked as a debatable analogy for himself and his countrymen before, during and after WW1[11]. Tolkien felt dwarfed (so to speak) by the presence of global war around him, becoming prone to homoromantic feelings that wouldn’t have strictly been allowed by his peers: Bilbo never married and neither did Frodo, but both characters were clearly cis men who loved other men. But Tolkien could never really stick the landing. He (and his son) were/are too busy refereeing Tolkien’s own stories, in effect robbing their own house to maintain the lie (the Divine Right of Kings and British sovereignty) while also doing their best to appear as boring and unassuming as possible within the American capitalist model. It’s very British.

In short, it would take someone other than a debatably closeted British man in love with his own painfully English war poems, dying empire and European legendarium to give female persons a place inside the Gothic dialogic, in effect articulating what is perhaps Tolkien’s greatest shortcoming of all (aside from his demonizing of people of color and celebration of Capitalism/the West through a blood purity narrative): his exclusion of women, especially their trauma as undead (with him being paradoxically terrified of talking to the dead in a Gothic way—cryptomimesis).

This is a giant omission, but also mischaracterization by Tolkien; i.e., his women largely operate as virgins or whores, damsels or demons. Simply put, they aren’t people so much as monsters to be killed (usually spiders), princess-like property to be fought over, or—in the case of generously neoliberal interpretations of The Silmarillion—Amazonian girl bosses[12] like Galadriel who advocate for open genocide; e.g., the “good war” rhetoric of Rings of Power (2022) being Tolkien’s chickens coming home to roost (melting that ring down didn’t do shit, dude): the endless escapism/chasing of war and orcs, goblins, and Drow, etc, as beings of darkness to subjugate, fetishize and dominate by the vampiric forces of good acting like far worse doms than Sauron (and whose stately abuses extend towards any monstrous-feminine force by state actors—more on this in Volume Three when we look at the ontological ambiguities of femboys and other chased groups). In short, Tolkien’s idea of pure evil abjects the state’s brutality onto a basic, clumsy scapegoat; it’s seemingly tame, but intensely harmful towards nature through the myopia it generates in defense of the state as preying on the natural world by redefining those in connection with it.

(artist: Kyu Yong Eom)

To that, Tolkien’s biggest problem was his pure escapism into an idealized reality versus an experienced once; it became his canon, fear and dogma to—through a particular cultural mythos—uphold the status quo, alienating himself and others from sex and nature while fetishizing settler-colonial violence in horribly vampiric ways. I’d like to spend the rest of the subchapter examining how an experienced reality—and its Gothic BDSM fantasies not being divorced from trauma—lead to an iconoclastic worldview that made me far more openly queer and sex-positive than Tolkien, but also his supporters; i.e., those who would deny voices to presumed property of the state: the rape of women or beings treated like women in some shape or form. That, as we shall see, was my ring (or cross) to bear (minus Tolkien’s sense of Christian guilt).

As our thesis argued, such stories’ reclamation generally relies on some degree of Gothic poetics, including intense emotions, music, sexuality and monsters. It bears repeating that Tolkien even preserved a lot of this through his rings, swords-with-names and battlefields, but also his Beowulf-grade poems and songs, which appear to have no idea how women actually work, let alone gay people, persons of color or Indigenous peoples. Even so, the legends really meant something to the old man; they helped him process his trauma by literally conjuring it up and fighting with it through stolen armaments. While the basic idea isn’t that different from ludo-Gothic BDSM, the arrangement of power is; my idea of the palliative Numinous is generally relayed through a feminine recipient of power inside Gothic castles (re: Metroidvania)—all to critique Capitalism and its generational trauma in ways that Tolkien’s stories largely couldn’t.

Again, for all his love of traditional and fantastical reinvention, Tolkien largely abandoned his Marxists critiques in favor of toeing the line through a centrist refrain built around heteronormative men and their pure bloodline (and token queer hobbits): the men of Numinor granted superhero powers by virtue of their noble parentage and staked claims on fancy elf princesses. A conservative treatment of sex lingers inside, but also of settler-colonial violence; i.e., not subversion, but segregation and enforcement of the usual bigotries told through a courtly romance (minus the usual medieval lust) centered around a small effeminate humanoid coded in various traditional ways; e.g., war and songs, but also knights and monsters that, through the ghost of the counterfeit, further the process of abjection through Capitalist Realism.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

As a Gothic-Communist trans woman, my stories have sought to camp Tolkien’s ghost in jokey ways: making it openly gay with ludo-Gothic BDSM. To that, my Sigourney (left) is imprisoned at her evil half-brother’s castle, but she seems to have something of a Mona-Lisa smile/approach, playfully daring the viewer, “Speak[13] ‘friend’ and enter!”—in short, to “raid” her “dungeon.” The aim with our calculated risk is to reverse Tolkien’s canonical usage (and facilitation) of war and darkness towards a more Miltonian treatment (thus corruption) of dialectical-material forces (though my stories featured giant stone pillars, not twin trees, they were still ruled over by magical women, not a singular godly patriarch).

My doing so has centered entirely around representations of things that largely went unspoken by Tolkien: women like Sigourney as actual persons with their own opinions, senses of humor and lived trauma; i.e., shackled to the dark, rapacious castles on display as a profoundly effective means of voicing their own trauma to reclaim what was taken from them by the usual abusers. Finding (a)sexual meaning in their own lives would likewise actually help anticipate Capitalism’s historical materialism leading to all the usual genocides (and their alien commodification) centered around bloodlines, war and marriage—i.e., interrogating and negotiating power in ways that go far beyond Tolkien’s limited, boys-only purview while he was alive to challenge the torchbearers of his complicated settler-colonial legacy after his death. His exclusion of women was clearly meant to gag them, but also the things these tokenized ladies would triangulate against: people of color and stigmatized elements of the natural world exploited by capital.

Compelled love regularly happens in neoliberal stories that prepare female workers for fascism’s re-entry—Beauty and the Beast (1991), for example; i.e., trad wives “fixing the abuser” and faking orgasms (the latter of which is easier for AFAB persons to do, though I can personally attest to AMAB people faking the enjoyment of sex with an abusive partner). To be fair, unequal positions and behaviors—such as having one side be the primary breadwinner or an ace person and non-ace person becoming romantically involved—can be negotiated under boundaries of mutual consent. Fascism doesn’t allow for mutual consent because it is radically heteronormative, overcorrecting the colonial binary to self-destructive extremes; by extension, centrism cannot stop fascism, making it fascism with more steps. Tolkien’s fringe homonormative undercurrent ultimately returns to the heteronormative, courtly arrangement of a white, purified Britain-by-another-name; i.e., destroying nature more slowly by leading to Sauron, but also covering up their own hand in things as “Saurons to a lesser degree.” After all, a nature preserve without Indigenous peoples is simply genocided land; the same goes for elvish woods without goblins or orcs, the latter crammed into a ghetto-like underworld like the Misty Mountains. Tolkien’s wishy-washy naturalization of a good/evil binary in the natural world is criminogenic.

Likewise, general slavery—normally veiled under neoliberalism—is more overt under fascism, but exists to varying degrees in centrist stories (whose paladins differ from death knights to a matter of degree, not function). This includes marriage between compelled heteronormative sex; i.e., women’s labor, which is historically unpaid/forced through veiled threats of destitution and harm. Under manufactured scarcity and conflict, marriage becomes a ritual of convenience-under-duress: a compelled means of financial security for those who historically have no rights, including owning property—not just cis-het women (which canonically are fought over by men vying for the widow’s gold, marriage bed and status), but queer folk who wear beards and have lavender weddings just to survive. Meanwhile, old genocidal adages from sublimations of America’s Manifest Destiny break through the façade: “Kill the Indian, save the man” becomes “kill the orc, save the princess.” Be they Indigenous peoples, persons of color or other minorities, token police scramble to save their own skins; they try to assimilate, offered a brutal and cruel “last chance” by their future slavers-once-more. Courtesy of Tolkien’s refrain, war becomes an addictive, brutal game—not just a ring to wear but a vicious, regressive cycle overshadowed by older variants of the Ring less remembered than Tolkien’s famous epic; e.g., Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876) by Richard Wagner.

(source: Legendo Games)

We’ll return to the game show as a metaphor for exploitation later in the book. Until then, consider the ways in which violence-as-a-game is, itself, a pyramid scheme: “There can only be only one!” The Highlander (1986) sloganizes this concept, evoking a violent, imaginary past that only the good Macleod—a white, male savior—can save the white women of the present from: the rapacious Kurgan. Apart from the hero, heteronormative fantasy canonized by Tolkien’s High Fantasy schtick regularly segregates intersecting groups into a colonial binary that radicalizes towards the domestic center or repels away from it during state decay and restoration. Under fascism, everyone is forced to be hyper-cis-het inside a faux-medieval, hauntological framework; black and white are radically divided and token minorities police those within the state of exception to the detriment of nature. Under Bretton Woods’ embedded liberalism, relative freedoms are “given back” to a working class threatened with fascism, provided sacrifices are made against a conveniently evil force… which neoliberalism makes into an idealized reality built on harmful, dogmatic illusions; i.e., made to conceal its own economic regressions that lead the cycle to repeating itself under Capitalist Realism.

The whole exploitative cycle between fascists and neoliberals is only derailed by two things: state shift, or the intersectional solidarity of workers fostering an experienced reality that camps Tolkien’s idealized one.

State shift is the Anthropocene/Capitalocene as thwarted by Mother Nature herself effectively kicking Tolkien in the balls. Payback’s a bitch, but it will be a terrible end—one met with slow, Promethean brutality. Genocides don’t happen overnight or with the fall of nuclear bombs, which—unlike the monopolies of violence, terror and morphological expression—are too hard to control for the elite should they be used at all (as they rely on material reminders of their power not being blown away by nuclear fire); genocides take time so the rich pigs can soak up all the blood and digest it like greedy vampires. Yet, while total annihilation is neither “instant death” nor a foregone conclusion, it also cannot be salvaged in one’s own lifetime (the burning of “Rome” takes centuries). We all have our own traumas to handle, whereupon you can do as I have done when camping Tolkien and other centrist narratives with your own darkness visible; but you have to keep your ear to the ground and try (unlike Tolkien) to view darkness as something to perceive, interrogate and negotiate with in iconoclastic ways that belong to us.

(artist: Earth Liberation Studio)

This experienced reality includes the people you meet and relate to outside of your family circle or village base. Whereas Tolkien’s social interactions were largely (for the hobbits) built around a village pastoral, escaping said pastoral myself—”pulling a Le Guin,” as it were—was vital in my subverting of Tolkien’s centrist apologetics for Capitalism. In my own family life, I directly recall an abusive father and stepfather hurting me, but I also sensed trauma everywhere. Long after I wrote and forgot about Alyona, my grandmother observed my pain and thought me odd (despite being a “grave chaser” who recruited my little brother to help her track down family tombstones); my grandfather saw my gloomy beard and thought it looked good, but unlike me seemed constantly sated by Tolkien’s bloody pastoral refrain. Indeed, the more I lived and experienced the world, the more I saw trauma in Tolkien’s chronotope—how he largely ignored the traumas of women as I experienced them, or saw them happening in my friends’ lives, or the natural world as exploited more and more under Capitalism despite “Sauron” having been vanquished—and wanted to give those things a voice. Defending them was far more important to me than preserving Tolkien’s idealized worldview.

In other words, the only dream here was Tolkien’s premature victory and I soon outgrew the artificial wilderness he yearned for. Eventually I branched out, “leaving the Shire”: I went to college a second time, fell love with several women, reading The Hobbit in between breakups and writing about it for school. Eventually I met a girl called Constance who broke my heart (more on that in Volume Three); then I went to England, met Zeuhl, fell in love again, and came back—always to the same place. Over several decades, I started to feel bound to my ancestral home, desiring to escape but feeling trapped by the same forces that rooted old Hawthorne where he was. I felt doomed, left behind by various persons, but especially Zeuhl[14] as someone who, like a ring-bearer themselves, had me wrapped ’round their little finger: something to wear then discard when the time came. Unhappy with home and past forays into the unknown, I kept trying on rings and collars, camping their canonical use as I read about it in books like The Hobbit. Escaping that closet, I grew increasingly convinced that a simpler kind of love wasn’t for me; I liked the darkness and its Numinous inequality of power as something to inhabit as the sub, but I still needed to find someone who wouldn’t fuck me over as Sauron did to his victims.

The Promethean moral, here, is fittingly subversive, but also lived. The cyclical revolutions and seemingly anchored position made me desperate to buck fate, which largely thanks to Zeuhl’s stupid bullshit—i.e., their car-crash-in-slow-motion-of-a-breakup and constant gaslighting of me—put me on the path to accidental self-destruction as a campy means of eventual catharsis and healing once I crystalized ludo-Gothic BDSM with Cuwu. I don’t want to “hand it to them” nor abdicate my own hand in things, but I never negotiated to be abused by Zeuhl or by the person who came next (and the person after that person); despite being drawn to trauma as an abuse-seeking behavior at first glance, my lived reality was that catharsis and BDSM overlap in liminal territories using a shared aesthetic. Vis-à-vis Tolkien of all people, this helped me interrogate the usual centrist distractions of the world more effectively—i.e., when I was out of the closet, I didn’t want to go back into Tolkien’s sad little cupboard. I had tasted far more delicious fruits, and his came from a poison tree having grown tremendously after his death.

To this, it’s true that former victims seek out the theatre of abuse as something they can reclaim in a panoply of ways; i.e., through canon or camp. This includes the Gothic theatre of courtship, but also Amazonomachia as a well-trod territory Tolkien was even more shy about than male-centric bondage scenarios (come to think of it, he very much liked those); e.g., Queen Taarna’s angrier (and far bloodier) parade of the monstrous-feminine than Tolkien ever dared to dream (and would have blanched at seeing—for the sex and retro-future aesthetic, not the beheaded orcs). To defend myself, others, and the natural world from Tolkien’s myopic refrain, I’ve devoted my life (and this book) to exploring the kinds of monsters and power exchange scenarios he routinely skimped on:

(exhibit 10c4: Artist, top-left: Margo Draws; top-middle and top- and bottom-right: Oxcoxa; bottom-left, source tweet: Raw Porn Moments, 2023. My study of the Amazon and BDSM has yielded a variety of truths alien to Tolkien. For one, the devil-in-disguise is often couched within crossdress and paradoxical strength as having evolved over space and time within a library of discourse. As Bay notes, “Taarna is built for the Male Gaze while simultaneously subverting its expectations”; i.e., she reverses the role of the Medusa, chopping off men’s heads as if to ask, “How does it feel, assholes?!” She also provides a complex, visually violent version of the postpunk disco/club music refrain: “How does it feel, to treat me like you do?[15]” [a query as much to someone’s guilt or position of giving as well as them on the receiving end of ironic “violence” versus actual harm]. Of course, Taarna runs the risk of chopping off workers‘ heads who are normally presented as orcs/zombies, minus the threat—i.e., labor movements and/or people of color being called “terrorists” by the state—but it’s arguably a step in the right direction provided we camp Tolkien more than Heavy Metal [1981] did.

More to the point, Taarna isn’t so far gone that you can’t reclaim her from total assimilation and decay [or demonic animalization; i.e., Tolkien’s spiders existing purely within female “chaotic evil” forms of nature as something to dominate by pure-white men upholding the profit motive within Capitalist Realism]. These kinds of Amazonian double standards and intersectional biases elide and roil on the surface of the female body as a) entirely mysterious to Tolkien, and b) a complicated billboard he never bothered with in his own stories: the variable undeath of a white-skinned Medusa as killed by men contrasted against the black-skinned Medusa as killed by men and women, both of them [and orcs] fetishized differently within the same punitive structure.

The genuine struggle—to holistically express body positivity during liberation as an ongoing event—becomes caught up in morphological double standards; i.e., the white-skinned “dark queen” either marketed as “black”—i.e., “PAWG” [“phat ass white girl,” exhibit 32b/41b; re: “A Problem of Knife Dicks” and “A Lesson in Humility“] as a “Goth” collision that elides black clothing with the “black” body as having white skin: the “big [titty/booty] Goth GF”—or kept skinny to be drawn the way that “most bodies are” [code for Vitruvian enforcement; re: Oxcoxa]. Meanwhile, black female bodies that happen to be skinny and fairer skinned [shadism] are inevitably perceived as “white” [as if most of them “chose” how they were born]: similar to queerness, skin color synonymizes with body size as a false choice, which complicates fat acceptance and liberation in the eyes of those persons seeking representation as something to escape the shared, internalized shame of white/black female bodies as queer [and male bodies in relation to them, the two hailing from the same savage, imaginary place].

In turn, the trend of the Amazon or Medusa as a powerful warrior queen or Sapphic monarch can be taken into potentially exploitative spheres, wherein the “Bowsette” crown [also Oxcoxa] famously fetishizes the white girl with an “atypical” [non-white] princess body to be desirable for the pandered-to male fans; but also articulates the descriptive sexuality of white or non-white AFABs within Nintendo’s fandom—i.e., those who are simply born with bodies outside the settler-colonial standard, and who want to be celebrated for it via a class metaphor of power and status: the girly crown, suspiciously pink [re: Tirrrb’s “The Yassification Of Masculinity“] but tinged with sexy black “corruption” as a non-harmful aesthetic/function. Within this larger dialectic, a viral trend emerges using the same imagery operating at cross purposes, resulting in various amounts of nuance or lack thereof, as well as [un]irony and cultural appropriation/appreciation when the “Yass, Queen!” crown is worn.

To this, Tolkien becomes a funny hypothetical begging “what if?” in a larger conversation the original never bothered with. When we entertain ghosts of his work through Amazonomachia speaking to a lived experience he deliberately distanced himself from, we play with, thus learn from these misfit toys. Doing so, we uncover the potential for class warriors and traitors emerging in arbitration relative to the public’s use of a largely textual/oral tradition to support popular sentiment for or against the status quo: to let one or two minorities rule in a problematic light like Tolkien’s orcs and dwarves did, or for there to be no minorities and for everyone to be kings, queens and intersex/non-binary monarchs in a post-scarcity world Tolkien [thanks to Capitalist Realism] literally couldn’t imagine. For him, there were only gay-curious hobbits standing in for absentee maidens, and the white-knight heroes protecting them from savage orcs [mythical black rapists] and their masters, the thoroughly vampiric-yet-wholly-spectral dark lords.

[artist, top-and-bottom-left, top-middle, and bottom-right: Wondra; bottom-middle: Persephone van der Waard; top-right: Red’s References]

Just as fascist and neoliberal evocations draw on the imaginary past to prevent scarcity’s termination, the possible worlds of Gothic Communism draw upon incredibly old and pervasive myths based on lived experience; i.e., whose ancient caves, Amazons and monstrous-feminine hauntologies can be recognized closer to the present, thus used to empower current labor movements through mythical solidarity as an informed and educational exhibit. This includes the voluptuous Easter, the statuesque Hippolyta, Schwarzenegger gender swaps [my loving 2016 attempt at gender parody] and other androgynous types closer to the present, but also their assorted clothing [admittedly optional; e.g., my omitting of the T-800’s “death biker” schtick]. A set sex, gender or orientation/performance isn’t even the point; rather, our aim is to merge non-heteronormative ideas of these things into semi-recognizable-yet-distinct forms of power and resistance as class-conscious. While such consciousness clearly takes many forms, “different” from a sex-positive standpoint isn’t a commodity to be branded by Rainbow Capitalism in Tolkien’s refrain; it’s decided by workers resisting routine exploitation [of themselves and nature] through subversive, even transgressive media speaking to their lived realities challenging idealized worlds built by homophobic[16] Pygmalions like Tolkien.)

 (artist: Niki Chen)

Tolkien’s idealized reality spoke to his lived experience relegating healthy psychosexual expression to the darkest of margins, including its abuse among a variety of persons and their bodies. During their hellish parade as brought into the light, a complicated worship occurs, of these and other “strict/gentle” symbols of corrupt/monstrous-feminine power and persecution; e.g., the “gentle dom” fetish aesthetic of Marina, the objectified “Medusa”/girl of color (a kind of “zombie Medusa” [above] that elides assimilation fantasies within the state of exception) as fetishized in society at large—not just by a given artist and their legion of thirsty fans—while also having femme qualities in a nun-like submission that might erupt in masculine violence. Unfortunately this subversion of the standard Promethean Quest marks the searcher as vulnerable to actual predators, who—often abused themselves—see similar trauma in others they covet for their feminine vulnerability and exploit it through suitably Faustian means; they’re drawn to them like a vampire to blood (or a Ringwraith to hobbits). And those of us seeking healing might foolishly offer our neck if our trust is betrayed by a convincing and/or hypnotic act.

Enter Jadis.

“You really do have a beautiful body” were Jadis’ first words to me (they loved my ass, in particular). They are ex number three (not including one-night stands, online relationships and FWBs, etc) proceeded by Zeuhl and Constance. However, while you gain and lose something with every partner, I lost more than usual with Jadis and learned some hard-fought lessons; i.e., like Frodo on Weathertop (except unlike Tolkien through Frodo, I learned how to process my trauma and express myself in a queer fashion). Simply put, Jadis was the most actively abusive partner I’ve ever had—a malignant narcissist who worked off my maladaptive survival response when courting me: to fawn (the other three being to fight, flee or freeze—the last one also called “oscillation” in Gothic circles). Unlike my dad or stepdad, Jadis never physically beat me; they still coercively brokered the power exchanges between us, teaching me to suffer in ways I’d only ever read about in stories like The Hobbit or The Castle of Otranto. Like Tolkien’s stripped-down, all-black vampires, Jadis literally collared[17] me and “took me to Barad-dur” and drained me of my wits; it seemed fun at first blush, but very quickly ceased to be—not due to the aesthetics, but Jadis’ strange faithfulness to Tolkien’s canon as something to act out unironically in real life: the ghoulish necromancer built on bad-faith bargains by someone as stubborn, clumsy and inflexible as he was (moderates are polite until you push them).

By taking my own risks during psychosexual experiments, I accidently became a Gothic princess in ways I didn’t negotiate (the irony of me, the desperately gay Communist/closeted trans woman, walking headfirst into a neoliberal SWERF/TERF and then falling in love with them is not lost on me; to be fair to myself, Jadis did not advertise themselves as neoliberal, and when they eventually called themselves as such, I tried very hard to explain my point of view—more on this in Volume Two). I wanted material things and the ability to play wife; but I exchanged my own power to a genuinely Faustian, psychosexual charmer who clocked my trauma and love-bombed me, then took me far away from anyone to continue torturing me (cycles of abuse that only ceased when I stopped seeing Jadis as a protector and removed their collar). But I still learned from it. As said in our thesis statement, trauma doesn’t just beget trauma; it recognizes it and preys upon it, often in nonverbal, vampiric language. It’s a very animal experience and you won’t have any idea what it’s like unless you’ve been there yourself, unless you’ve been hunted or have inherited the anxiety of being hunted as a surviving element of your culture (e.g., the animal themes in Jordan Peele films in relation to racialized violence).

For me and my survival vis-à-vis Jadis and our competing interactions with Tolkien’s work, my biggest takeaways were how the state (through Jadis as a state proponent) desires power but also disguises it in self-righteous yarns. So do narcissists, and the former enables the latter in historical-material ways, generally informed by state apologia. Jadis loved Tolkien and D&D as a kind of war pastiche their TERF-y personas could run wild inside. But this also spilled out into how we interacted during our day-to-day lives as informed by Tolkien’s worldview as something Jadis undisputedly upheld for their own reasons: the female orc warlord (what I call the war boss).

(artist: Just Some Noob)

While some narcissists provide and others receive, a provider or patient who is narcissistic will coerce and control their mark in highly manipulative ways. To this, Tolkien’s refrain pushed the dialogic forward in ways that remained closed and primed for abuse. While the angel/devil dynamic of unequal power abuse plays out in a wide variety of historical-material ways, Tolkien’s dialogic played out through legends and games that carried his limited and praxially inert exchanges into Jadis’ life, thus mine. He became something for them to flaunt and cherish, looping my neck in orcish ropes; it was literally our roleplay to bind and torture me, but in ways Jadis—like Sauron—used to deceive me with; i.e., with traditional positions and artifacts of power tied to providing from a male/female position; e.g., not just the warrior archetype Jadis and I enjoyed, but the medical[18] profession. My seeking of such trauma was a kind of theatre, but my caretaker was acting in bad faith.

To this, Jadis provided for me on paper and through a negotiated aesthetic, but abused me in practice; i.e., “Tolkien in reality.” Indeed, the negotiation seemed honest, sincere and beneficial: to be their conjugal worker—”a live-in bussy” who learned to cook, clean and do things that, as a closeted trans person, I tended to avoid. While I actually value acquiring these skills and the novelty of service (which can be fun if it isn’t abusive—e.g., cooking as a means of saving money on food labor costs, while also giving me control over how my food tastes as I prepared it for me and those I love), I quickly discovered that no one likes to be compelled and threatened by an asshole who acts like they know (and own) everything/are better than everyone else. Indeed, while Jadis was a genderfluid AFAB, they still coerced, gaslit and threatened me constantly despite playing the victim; they “knew better” than I did about Tolkien, and wanted me to keep my opinions to myself (and resented my attempt at constantly subverting the D&D racialized chart and manufactured conflicts, scarcity and consent; e.g., my attempt to make a good Drow who lived in daylight and loved others to challenge Tolkien’s bellicose worldview but also ludology).

In this regard, the best lies are built on truth: Jadis’ mother had abused them, resulting in Jadis having more sides to their personality than most people do. And while these fractals would flash across their own surface during confrontations, I couldn’t always tell them apart or verify them because Jadis was inherently dishonest and manipulative.

For example, Jadis liked to cry whenever I accused them of acting like their mother or just calling them out for “DMing” me in real life. They had described their mother well enough and certainly reminded me of them. Yet, Jadis’ reactions always made me feel guilty for “making” them cry despite what they were doing to me! It wasn’t just a pivot; eventually I started to feel crazy for standing up for myself (not “crazy” as “in love” in a sex-positive sense, but “crazy” as “gaslit” by an abuser). I slowly became reluctant to fight back, being worn down by attacks I couldn’t always see but could always feel; i.e., like the pull of the Ring ’round Frodo’s neck. I had a little crown and a pretty dress, but was still owned precisely because I was delicate, pretty and vulnerable. Like an orc queen with a little war bride, Jadis could have their way with me; and under their vampiric thrall, I became increasingly undead and started to doubt my own education and expertise, but also ability to camp fantastical stories. As they loved to say themselves, “You have heart, I’ll take that, too!” And boy did they ever!

(artist: Sabs)

We’ll examine the plurality of Jadis’ bullshit more during Volume Two, including how I bested them in the end (and went on to write this book series in spite of their efforts to police my work). For now, just remember that their “conditional” offer of financial “security” as my would-be mommy dom absolutely withered alongside their pure condescension and abuse of me; both made the joy of cooking for them, caring for them and fucking them an absolute nightmare. At first, it was like Tennyson’s poem, I their Lady of Shalott and they my Lancelot:

A bow-shot from her bower-eaves,

He rode between the barley-sheaves,

The sun came dazzling thro’ the leaves,

And flam’d upon the brazen greaves

Of bold Sir Lancelot.

A red-cross knight for ever kneel’d

To a lady in his shield,

That sparkled on the yellow field,

Beside remote Shalott (source).

In the end, though, a horny bitch like me couldn’t enjoy sex with Jadis because they utterly terrified me. It wasn’t impossible to cum, but I still forced; i.e., trapped inside Tennyson’s Camelot as slowly becoming an unironic Gothic castle the likes of Sauron’s fortress (except when it appeared, I was already inside it).

To say that I faked orgasms wouldn’t be entirely accurate. For one, the ejaculation wasn’t fake (it either happens or it doesn’t, for AMABs); as for my enthusiasm, it wavered, but I wanted it to be genuine in order to please Jadis despite it feeling worse and worse for me to keep trying. Regardless, I didn’t want to have sex with Jadis because they had ceased to be the dark, handsome knight I fell in love with. Once wooing me with Irish ballads like “The Devil’s Courtship” (2001) by Battlefield Band or “The Two Sisters” (2010) by Emily Portman, they became someone I wanted to get far away from: a source of torment that more or less looked the same as before.

Even now, though, I remember how their power leveled me when I was under its spell—no longer, thanks to my friends’ help and my own courage (thank you, Cuwu, Ginger and Fen; you saved me that night). I escaped, and if this book is any indication, things are going well enough without Jadis in my life. Such is the lot of someone as lucky as myself to have a place to go (a secret, safe place). Writing this book in my peaceful idylls is the least I can do to help others—to cathartically pass on what I have learned for myself and for the world and nature after I am gone. So please, learn from my adventures; avoid the emotional/Gothic stupidity that Capitalism historically-materially foisted upon me through my own cursed bloodline, and which my own camping of Tolkien’s Gothic (and his rings and collars) eventually saved me from my own harmful vampire.

To that, we’ll be taking Tolkien to task once more. Onto “Challenging the State’s Manufactured Consent and Stupidity (with Vampires)“!

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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] Always male-centric, Tolkien primarily codifies darkness as male, his largely peripheral treatment of the monstrous-feminine relegating Ungoliant to the footnotes.

[2] There is a queer element to Tolkien’s hobbits, but they ultimately serve the British empire’s heteronormative (male-centric) view of the world. They crowned Aragorn.

[3] Arwen is married off without a fight; Eowyn, to Faramir after she kills the Witch-king.

[4] Note his invocation of the imaginary past to suit his needs; i.e., “his” view of things. This is a fascist tactic, evoking the apocryphal past to justify dogmatic arguments in the present space and time (which are generally attached to systemic abuses of various kinds).

[5] For many examples of why Tolkien thinks orcs suck, consider Jeff LaSala’s “Tolkien’s Orcs: Boldog and the Host of Tumult” (2021). The guy’s like a broken record.

[6] Read Richard Newby’s “A Racist Backlash to Rings of Power Puts Tolkien’s Legacy into Focus” (2022) to see what I mean.

[7] Re: Descartes’ disastrous notion of “extended beings” exemplified in Tolkien’s refrain. Thinking vs extended, or white Europeans versus everyone else.

[8] I.e., in Volume Zero (2023) when I inspect my own 2015 essay “Dragon-sickness: The Problem of Greed” close-reading The Hobbit, The Merchant of Venice and Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904).

[9] Tolkien’s goblins occupy a centrist shadow space; i.e., filled with general corruption and monstrous-feminine theatrics of the Western kayfabe: cartoon Nazis, Communists, and racial/genderqueer minorities. They’re all things for the good guys to chase down and slay to restore the West to its former glorious state (fascism, Imperialism and genocide, except with more steps).

[10] Tolkien’s faeries aren’t changelings or dark sexual monarchs, vis-à-vis Titania and Oberon. Even when he wrote The Hobbit, the elves are merely silly and gay or wild; but they aren’t psychosexual; they lock up Thorin because he refuses to say why he and his friends are on elvish land—for suspicion of trespassing, in other words.

[11] In a letter to his son, Michael, Tolkien wrote, “From Rivendell to the other side of the Misty Mountains, the journey… including the glissade down the slithering stones into the pine woods… is based on my adventures in Switzerland in 1911” (source: Jim Dobson’s “How a Trek Through Switzerland Inspired J.R.R. Tolkien to Create a Magical Middle-Earth, 2022). If The Hobbit was based on Tolkien’s passage through Switzerland in 1911, then it’s hardly a stretch to see The War of the Ring as based clearly on WW2 and Western Europe; i.e., being beset by the fascist, half-eastern territory of Mordor in centrist hypercanon, but also a variety of special military units on either side; e.g., the Great Eagles and the Nazgul both being death-from-above stand-ins for the rise of nationalized air forces during this conflict, and the orcs and Easterlings being seen as weaponized slaves on par with those used by the Nazi war machine during Lebensraum.

[12] I can provide a partial exception to Eowyn because, even though she says, “You stand before my lord and kin, and if you touch him I will smite you!” Yes, she says in the same breathe that she is not a man, but does act like one in defense of Tolkien’s bloodline; yet she is also someone who only ever fights a single Nazi stand-in, and to that, the king of Sauron’s generals. So, while it could be argued that she is just as bad as everyone else, we do not get to see her “pull a genocide” and argue for it like Jackson’s Eowyn or Amazon’s Galadriel. She’s not a white knight who has the chance to darken, and remains idiosyncratically subversive of the Valkyrie legend in genderqueer ways. Again, she’s not perfect, but remains one of Tolkien’s finest moments; i.e., she—not Bilbo or Frodo—inspired me on my own genderqueer adventure!

[13] A mistranslation by Gandalf in The Fellowship of the Ring (the actual line being “say friend and enter”), demonstrating the aging wizard’s inability to get into dark, deep holes.

[14] When Zeuhl left me, they jokingly said it was “for an old flame in England”—i.e., a person they treated like their soulmate even though they said they didn’t believe in such things. Instead of simply telling me that, they “unicorned” me, keeping a bisexual cutie in their pocket by not wanting sexual interactions between metamours while standing among us (or similar interactions happening with Zeuhl in front of other people). Simply put, they were incredibly controlling but also fooling themselves—i.e., were selectively poly until they weren’t and were again, shifting in and out of a poly headspace whenever it suited them. It made me feel taken advantage of, so much so that I broke down crying in front of Dale Townshend in his office at MMU: “I feel used,” I told him, like I was being lied to (despite Zeuhl insisting that they, like Jadis, could never tell a lie; instead, it was always my fault for making them feel crazy despite me merely trying to communicate). His response, “Nicholas, this sounds like bullshit!” regarding the way I was being treated. Bless you, Dale, for saying that; you were right.

[15] From New Order’s “Blue Monday” (1983).

[16] Yes, homophobic. Tolkien flirted with homoromantic feelings, but the raw mechanics of the story—its socio-material conventions, redistributions of wealth, and unequal power exchange—are ultimately heteronormative. Aragorn must marry Arwen and become King of the West as a straight, white place. Bilbo makes bank following the Battle of the Five Armies, but grows alienated from the Shire for not marrying (a bit like Walpole, in that respect). Eventually he and Frodo are carted off to Heaven (a bloodless variant of “bury your gays”) and Sam marries Rosie, arguably loving her but ultimately keeping up with appearances by sending his precious male master away for good. After this, hobbits more or less eventually go extinct, their magical bond/closeness to nature going with them.

[17] It was a pink leather collar with a little bell on, like a cat. I loved the collar but grew to fear and loathe the person who placed it around my neck.

[18] E.g., the nurse, doctor, psychiatrist or orderly appearing benign but acting malignant, often through needlessly corrective and harmful surgeries or procedures often, in horror stories, being treated as the stuff of nightmares: forced isolation, euthanasia, lobotomies, electro-shock, medically induced psychosis, queer conversion therapies, or genital-corrective surgeries on intersex infants (exhibit 3c), etc.