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.

Volume One is already written/was released on Valentine’s 2024! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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

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

Manifesto: Simplifying Theory

“One night during my accustomed visit to the neighbouring wood where I collected my own food and brought home firing for my protectors, I found on the ground a leathern portmanteau containing several articles of dress and some books. I eagerly seized the prize and returned with it to my hovel. Fortunately the books were written in the language, the elements of which I had acquired at the cottage; they consisted of Paradise Lost, a volume of Plutarch’s Lives, and the Sorrows of Werter. The possession of these treasures gave me extreme delight; I now continually studied and exercised my mind upon these histories, whilst my friends were employed in their ordinary occupations.

—the Creature, Frankenstein (1818)

Picking up where “Volume One, opening and preface” left off…

Dearest Reader,

This is our revolution’s manifesto. I originally wrote it before the thesis volume, making it more relaxed in its argumentation. So while it’s more academically formalized than Volumes Two and Three, my manifesto supplies a thoroughly simplified approach to my core theories. In doing so, its actionable curriculum aims to apply the grander ideas of my thesis to one’s own teaching approach as flexible; i.e., to learn from the trauma of oppressed groups when dealing with our own abuse. All happen while synthesizing praxis and overcoming systemic harm together, using a variety of monstrous expressions to cultivate sex-positive habits to teach others with. These habits generate through Gothic dialogs, whose monstrous theatre constitutes a pedagogy of the oppressed that, when synthesized during ludo-Gothic BDSM, aids in the development of Gothic Communism for all. As its name suggests, the manifesto unfurls the manifesto tree of oppositional praxis; understanding this tree is required for when we discuss synthesizing theory and confronting interpersonal trauma through Gothic instruction in the second half of this volume. So learn it well, but take your time. Rome wasn’t burned in a day and healing from its vast crimes takes not simply one lifetime, but many in endless succession; i.e., while past abuse lives within and around us and generational trauma is slowly dismantled on a systemic level through Gothic paradox.

Love,

—Your “Commie Mommy,” Persephone

For centuries, Gothic stories (and more-recent-but-dated psychoanalytical models in Gothic academia) have warned of vast, indistinct dangers seemingly removed from everyday life yet at the same time frighteningly relatable and close. I argue this myopic division stems from Capitalism, whose elusive, illusory exploitation of sex workers (and sexualized workers) happens through Capitalist Realism; said Realism damages the cultural mind, but also its artistic output as something to relate with and respond to in Gothic terms. In turn, this has had a wide range of far-reaching effects in the material world felt through the Gothic imagination: “Something is rotten in Denmark!” This manifesto formulates an active, practical, countercultural process; informed by a collection of assembled theories and research, said process articulates sex-positive activism and education in a series of vital, interconnected things: the mission of Gothic Communism; its goals, theories, and mode of expression (the means and materials of production: monsters, lairs/parallel space, hermeneutics—the means of study—phobias, and mediums); and creative expression through praxial synthesis.

At its inception, our manifesto began essentially as one chapter divided into six subchapters. After it gives our mission statement, it lists the majority of operational coordinates that occur during oppositional praxis: our aforementioned manifesto tree. The goal in listing them, here after we’ve already discussed them much more deeply during my thesis argument, isn’t to provide their complete order exactly as it was examined in Volume Zero; it’s to provide them in a simplified form that can be applied through a taught, semi-anecdotal approach. The content is essentially the same, albeit more basic and conversational, thus accessible:

• “The Gist“ (included in this post) gives our mission statement, then outlines the entire manifesto (the manifesto tree of oppositional praxis) list by list.
• “The Nation-State“ (included in this post) and “An Uphill Battle” part one, part two and part three outline the many pressures and forces existing during the struggle to synthesize praxis and unify workers using monstrous poetics; the three monsters (and their trauma style) we focus on are gargoyles, Amazons and vampires.
• “Monster Modes, Totalitarianism and Opposing Forces“ revisits oppositional praxis, lists all the monsters, lairs and phobias we will explore in Volume Two and Three, and outlines menticide, a form of brainwashing that the synthesis roadmap explores more thoroughly.

Similar to my thesis volume, there is some mention of trauma writing/artwork in the manifesto itself. While interrogating trauma isn’t the main focus of the manifesto at first, it gradually becomes more and more prevalent until the manifesto postscript kicks off the second half of the volume. From there, “Healing from Rape“ constitutes the initiation of catharsis through learned instruction as informed by traumatic anecdote; i.e., ludo-Gothic BDSM expressed through lived experience and emotional content. It addresses police “corruption,” DARVO and general abuse with the pedagogy of the oppressed as a means of preventing trauma, but also healing from it by listening to those already traumatized on a daily basis: sex workers and workers sexualized by capital as people who can teach us through their own catharsis to be better instructors through the same mode.

Following the postscript, the synthesis roadmap discusses how to synthesize praxis directly within our daily lives, thus prevent war and rape as a Cartesian byproduct; i.e., by forging social-sexual habits of emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness through what we express, create or otherwise personify and leave behind for others to discover and learn from: our collective, intersectional trauma as previously informed by the trauma of others, including the shadow of state abuses against nature felt across time and space. The complex, difficult emotions that result (fear, doubt, insecurity, superstition, paranoia, psychosexual attraction/repulsion, etc) become things to negotiate with through our poetics having a lasting Gothic footprint that challenges state dogma.

(exhibit 6b3: Artist, top-left, top-mid, and bottom-mid: Blxxd Bunny; bottom-left: Juice of Yellow; right: Leeza. Their squishy bodies serve as a powerful, Gothic means of educating others about confronting trauma and healing from it, but also preventing successive abuses against such bodies in the future.)

The manifesto is modular and holistic, having many moving parts that work on their own and in unison, often intersecting in some shape or form. Point in fact, they’re meant to be studied, approached and applied intersectionally insofar as expressing trauma goes. However, I’ve tried to write them in such a way that you can get the gist of certain points before I get around to explaining them (which, to be frank, I’ve done far more exhaustively in Volume Zero). So regardless if you’ve only skimmed Volume Zero, all of these devices are central to iconoclasm during oppositional praxis; we absolutely need to cover them in some shape or form before we can delve into Gothic poetics as something to historically understand and learn from in Volume Two, then apply through our own work in Volume Three—i.e., when we “play god” and self-fashion/self-determine in Gothic-Communist terms.

The Gist: Our Gothic-Communist Mission Statement and List of Oppositional Praxial Coordinates, Including Our Tenets and Main Gothic Theories

“But Louis B. Meyer wouldn’t be Goebbels’ proper opposite number. I believe Goebbels sees himself as David O. Selznick.”

“…Brief him!”

—Lt. Archie Hicox and Winston Churchill, Inglourious Basterds (2009)

First and foremost, our mission statement is, “As Gothic Communists, our mission is to protect you!—to expose Capitalism’s perfidious design as a structure, thereby protecting all workers (sex or otherwise) from Capitalism by teaching them to liberate themselves through iconoclastic art!”

Note: This is where the title of the book series comes from. As time passed, though, I would start to express universal liberation per ludo-Gothic BDSM having the whore’s revenge; i.e., by subverting monsters through revolutionary cryptonymy to reverse abjection, thus profit. Even so, these aren’t discrete categories, sharing the same Aegis. Here, though, my emphasis was less holistic/focused around the dialectic of the alien (re: “Some Prep When Hugging the Alien“)—through the whore signifier/signified (sex work being the root of all abuse under capital abusing Medusa)—and more a broad, pick-and-choose argument; re: oppositional praxis stressing different qualities in a more singular-and-atomized fashion (which frankly is easier to write); e.g., saying “heteronormative canon” versus “canon is heteronormative, Cartesian, and settler-colonial” (which Volume Zero would do, but again, I wrote it after the manifesto).

(artist: Kaycee Bee)

Frankly the entire volume is written like this—with Volume Two growing more focused on universal liberation through holistic liminal expression that, all the same, focuses on the whore’s side of things during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., generalized but also specialized to achieve liberation through preferential code; re: focusing less on the primality of the Medusa/Aegis “alien” argument and more on its dialectical-material continuation through ongoing struggles when sexualized by capital; e.g., with Kaycee Bee and I working together more recently in ways I wouldn’t have, when this manifesto first came to be (for I was still working out the process). Other forms of poetry and labor are equally valid, of course; they’re just not the focus, here, because “here” is meant to be as broad and unbiased as possible while sticking to sex work and its poetic extensions. This makes sense, given this is a manifesto, one speaking introductorily to all forms of poetry and labor having infinite value, thus infinite shape: to exploit or liberate during oppositional praxis.

To it, the volume’s theories started simpler (manifesto first draft), grew complex (PhD), simplified again (final manifesto), and applied themselves historically and poetically during Volume Two leading into Volume Three’s making new history. You’ll see the manifesto tree, here (from Volume Zero), but it will make a return once Volume Three arrives. —Perse, 4/4/2025

Capitalism conceals its own Promethean (self-destructive) nature through heteronormative canon. To critique its abuse of workers through Capitalist Realism, I want to focus on Gothic poetics; i.e., using them in a sex-positive, Marxist way that intersects with other schools of thought. These intersections obviously help us address the many ways that Capitalism sexualizes workers; but given Marx’ admittedly dry (and straight) nature, we also want to spice things up: camping canon/”making it gay” by synthesizing communal (anarcho-Communist) emotional/Gothic intelligence as a sex-positive alternative to canonical, thus bourgeois, teaching methods. This reversal during ludo-Gothic BDSM requires our manifesto tree from my thesis statement; i.e., an assortment of goals, Gothic academic theories, Gothic mode of expression (monsters, hermeneutics, phobias) and praxial effects, whose lists I will now give in the order I have chosen:

Note: I am stressing a certain priority in what comes first, but the exact order given doesn’t really matter as everything is modular and holistic. None should be neglected, and all are integral to achieving Gothic Communism. This being said, there are several smaller subfactors from the manifesto tree that aren’t listed here (though we will touch on them later in the book). For the most comprehensive and in-depth look at all of the manifesto tree ideas, refer to Volume Zero. —Perse, back in 2024

• the six Gothic-Marxist tenets of Gothic Communism (the Six Rs)
• the four main Gothic theories (the Four Gs)
• monsters*
• lairs/parallel space*
• the Hermeneutic Gothic-Communist Quadfecta* (Gothic, game, queer and Marxist theory)
• phobias*
• the Six Doubles of Oppositional Praxis

*the Gothic mode of expression (its means, materials and methods of study)

Of the Six Doubles, these divide into two lists of three: the “Three Canonical Doubles” of Capitalism and bourgeois praxis versus the “Three Iconoclastic Doubles” of Gothic Communism and proletarian praxis (all shown in descending order):

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

and their various synthetic oppositional groupings

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

I’ll get to each of these in turn, starting at the top and steadily working my way to the bottom across this manifesto’s six sections. This means we won’t cover the Six Doubles until nearly the end of the manifesto; we’ll introduce the synthetic oppositional groupings during the manifesto, but explore them more during the synthesis roadmap (several essays between Manifesto and Instruction will also analyze the BDSM elements of “Gothic” per ludo-Gothic BDSM’s modular elements). Certain related factors, such as the canonical reactions to camped canon

• open aggression
• condescension
• reactionary indignation
• DARVO (“Deny Accuser Reverse Victim/Offender”)

will be unpacked more, as well. These will either be summarized or abridged quotes from the thesis volume, and I will be resupplying them piecemeal as we go.

Since the Six Doubles of Oppositional Praxis are last on our manifesto list, I’ll give a little extra information about them up front; re (from Volume Zero):

While we will consider these manifesto-tree ideas, here, we will return to them during the synthesis roadmap in Volume One when we delve more into trauma writing and artwork as a means of synthesizing praxis; as well as during the Humanities primer in Volume Two, and in Chapters Four and Five in Volume Three (the latter two which explore the execution of disguise pastiche in the Internet Age). Until then, please don’t fret; they are meant to be understood fairly loosely and their synonyms can be swapped interchangeably (canonical/blind pastiche) as long as the basic dialectical-material relationship (and its symptoms) are communicated.

“Cops and victims,” for example, often becomes hauntologized, presenting in fantastical forms that mirror real-life examples. A “girl boss” witch or “medusa” can angrily serve the state by being the heroine or the villain in ways that uphold the status quo, making her role functionally bourgeois; a real-life cop serves the state, often LARPing as a death knight while they brutalize their state-assigned, hauntologically abject victims during witch hunts. The same conversion applies to proletarian representations and representatives. To that, egregores personify oppositional praxis, making them fundamentally liminal. This means they’ll invoke power at different registers according to various titles, rankings and positions of status and privilege: e.g., a witch queen, princess, courtier or peasant as a status symbol often expressed in BDSM language or demonic-undead, animalized/animate-inanimate simulacra. Despite her label, a witch queen isn’t automatically bourgeois, any more than making her a zombie and/or demon would. Function (not aesthetics) determines one’s role in oppositional praxis, which must be ascertained through dialectical-material analysis of any aspect of the natural-material world. We’ll do so now through D&D pastiche (orcs and humans), but also canceled futures (the cyberpunk) as something to transmute through our own “creative successes” in response to Capitalism’s usual shenanigans.

(exhibit 1a1a1c3 [re: “Pieces of the Camp Map“]: D&D “homebrew” is a way of escaping the palimpsestuous racial profiling of Tolkien’s High Fantastical gentrification enacted by Wizards of the Coast trying to enforce the racial [thus class and gender] binary—e.g., “mind flayers” always being lawful evil, or Drow always being chaotic evil/”pure evil” inside the state of exception [exhibit 41b; re: “A Lesson in Humility“] to fill the gap made by the humanized [yet still fetishized] “good” orcs [exhibit 37e2; re: “Meeting Jadis“]: the exceptional “not bad for an orc” pariah. Tolkien made orcs to be beaten and bitten by swords with fancy-sounding names illustrating the function as simultaneously dressed up and denuded [from The Hobbit]: 

He took out his sword again, and again it flashed in the dark by itself. It burned with a rage that made it gleam if goblins were about; now it was bright as blue flame for delight in the killing of the great lord of the cave. It made no trouble whatever of cutting through the goblin-chains and setting all the prisoners free as quickly as possible. This sword’s name was Glamdring the Foe-hammer, if you remember. The goblins just called it Beater, and hated it worse than Biter if possible. Orcrist, too, had been saved; for Gandalf had brought it along as well […]

At this point Gandalf fell behind, and Thorin with him. They turned a sharp corner. “About turn!” he shouted. “Draw your sword Thorin!”

There was nothing else to be done; and the goblins did not like it. They came scurrying round the corner in full cry, and found Goblin-cleaver and Foe-hammer shining cold and bright right in their astonished eyes. The ones in front dropped their torches and gave one yell before they were killed. The ones behind yelled still more, and leaped back knocking over those that were running after them. “Biter and Beater!” they shrieked; and soon they were all in confusion…” (source).

This function can be reversed, but must occur within the mode of expression; e.g., sexy orc roleplay in Skyrim mods, exhibit 84b [re: Volume Three]; i.e., inside material conditions to avoid praxial invisibility. You have to be able to give it shape inside camp and communicate it to others afterward.)

To this, oppositional praxis during Gothic Communism is less like the discrete, nine-squared D&D Alignment Chart (above) and more like a Venn Diagram of the same components doubled and super-imposed over each other. Hence, why revolutionary acronyms like ACAB (“All Cops Are Bad”) are handy but also why you still have to distinguish between who’s genuine/good-faith and who isn’t/bad-faith during oppositional praxis; i.e., through dialectical-material scrutiny as performed by gay space wizards through whatever “poison” you pick and serve up:

(artist: Ecchi Oni)

For example, an ironic, “strict” mommy dom (and her “dark sodomy castle of gloom and doom”—when executed in good faith—is not a class traitor even if she’s wearing a police uniform or (some other) fetish outfit; aesthetics do not determine function, function does, but obviously first impressions are important. Private exhibits of triggering symbols like swastikas or desecrated American flags (the Thin Blue Line) are far different than public ones, and if you use them in your art during your public exhibit, you have to be prepared to explain why—i.e., as a de facto educator of sex positivity through liminal expression using Gothic poetics. On the flipside, fascists operate through bad-faith concealment; i.e., attacking like undercover cops who awaken and bushwack their foes when they feel threatened (they also join arms with centrists, aggregating with formal power to defend capital against labor).

Code-switching intuition, then, becomes something to develop, like a sixth sense (source: “Pieces of the ‘Camp Map’“).

To summarize, bourgeois and proletarian praxis function in opposition, working for or against the state and its heteronormative propaganda; i.e., canon vs iconoclasm through sex positivity versus sex coercion (and nerds for one or the other during the battle for universal liberation). Proletarian praxis recultivates the Superstructure and reclaims the Base in ways that redistribute power and wealth in iconoclastic language; i.e., in horizontal arrangements that encourage degrowth in favor of stability and worker rights, while also doing away with vertical authorities outright: an anarcho-Communist challenging of the state in ways that Marxist-Leninism historically did not; re: with the Gothic mode and queer theory.

(model and artist: Blxxd Bunny and Persephone van der Waard)

The basic concept revolves around the “creative successes” of proletarian praxis during oppositional praxis, synthesized into proletarian forms by workers operating within their own daily lives; e.g., Bunny and I, over the years (above); i.e., not just as workers, but de facto social-sex educators detached from state mechanisms—indeed, in opposition to them (never forget: the state isn’t just the proverbial enemy but the great destroyer of the planet). The Gothic, then, yields class character amid a warring culture of weird nerds: weird canonical nerds vs weird iconoclastic nerds. The two clash regarding the sexualized abuse—and liberation of—our bodies, identities and performances under capital; i.e., produced by our labor with taboo, stigmatized language as something to endorse or reclaim, and with it, the revelation of various comical truths: nerds are both weird as fuck and like to fuck in ways that are certifiably weird; e.g., public nudism as an ace mechanism that interrogates canonical sexuality as harmful.

“Weird” means vastly different things depending on one’s class/cultural position. The praxial goal, for weird iconoclastic nerds, is to teach good play during ludo-Gothic BDSM in sex-positive art, chiefly the interrogation of power/trauma and its negotiation in theatrical, paradoxical forms. Proletarian praxis, then, revolves around camping canon, which goes something like this; re (abridged, from the thesis volume’s manifesto tree as cited in “Shining a Light on Things“):

Note: The “camp map” finale aims to camp canon through ludo-Gothic BDSM; re: per Tolkien and Cameron’s refrains, while making monsters ourselves/putting the pussy on the chainwax as outlined and discussed through the prior elements of said map mapping out my thesis argument; i.e., as something to argue through our own labor versus labor theft; e.g., AI (source tweet, Shad M. Brooks: March 28, 2025). Challenging profit’s monopolization and abuse of monsters is what Blxxd Bunny and I will—by disrobing the Medusa to whatever degree we decide (a Numinous strip tease, below)—effectively be demonstrating in the finale with our ludo-Gothic BDSM, so keep these ideas handy (and refer to all the Paratextual Documents if you feel the need to)!

—Perse, 3/29/2025

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

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

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

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

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

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

• • reverse abjection
  • the emancipatory hauntology and Communist-chronotope operating as a parallel society—i.e., a parallel space (or language) that works off the anti-totalitarian notion of “parallel societies[1]“: “A [society] not dependent on official channels of communications, or on the hierarchy of values of the establishment.”
  • the Gothic Communist’s good-faith, revolutionary cryptonymy

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

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

through their own synthetic toolkits during oppositional praxis. They endorse

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

to further Capitalism’s crises-by-design, hence its expected decay, according to a variety of bourgeois trifectas that lead to the banality of evil; its vertical, pyramid-scheme arrangements of power and subsequent tiers and punitive exchanges thereof

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

arranged in neoliberal forms inside and outside of the text

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

which leads to a surrender of total power during states of emergency that are always in crisis and decay. Empathy is the casualty of the middle class, who are taught to see the underclass as lacking basic human rights during moral panics.

In summation, Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism ensures that empathy/apathy and class character (unconscious/conscious) occur in oppositional praxis as a dialectical-material exchange. For workers, the empathy accrued is established during these creative successes, whose solidarized and active, intelligent poetics (a manifestation of reclaimed labor and working-class sentiment/counterterror) cultivate the Superstructure in ways useful to proletarian praxis: helping all workers by reversing the process of abjection and its canonical historical materialism (the narrative of the crypt, or echo of ruins). This happens by camping the ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., the barbaric lie of the West told through the monomyth, Cycle of Kings and infernal concentric pattern that drive the process of abjection currently used to exploit workers, resulting in myopic exploitation and genocide under Capitalist Realism while the elite’s endlessly engineered crises enter into, and out of, decayed states of emergency and exception. Rewrite how people respond to elite propaganda and you can rewrite how people think, thus rewrite history by changing its well-trod, profitable (for the elite) and bloody (for us) historical-material track; in short you can take the state’s propaganda apart, ending Capitalist Realism as you start to develop towards a post-scarcity world (the kind that is wholly antithetical to modern nation-states and their vertical arrangements of power).

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

So, now that we have our various big-but-basic lists, keep ’em handy and I’ll use the rest of the manifesto to conversationally walk you through them one at a time, doing my best to connect them with explanations in between.

Before we start, though, I want to give a couple of small reminders that you should keep in mind:

• One, I want to reassure readers that this manifesto is more academically granular in its flavor and structure than Volumes Two and Three, if only so I’m clear and comprehensive in following and responding to my overall thesis argument (which is the most academically granular text in our book). After this, I swear things loosen up a bit (except for the sample essay, which chucks you into the deep end head-first).
• Two, while the word “praxis” is common but has many synonyms/adjectives (creative, oppositional, bourgeois, proletarian), I also don’t see the need to exclusively call something “praxis,” since all four volumes ultimately concern praxis and something being praxis is arguably why I’m mentioning it to begin with.
• Three, despite covering sexual expression and working with sex workers, this book isn’t really structured around giving dating advice (though it does include bits of advice/personal anecdotes scattered throughout); it’s a labor guide that teaches workers not to be dicks to their friends, who they might be able to sleep with if everyone’s DTF (down to fuck). However, if you wanted to apply its concepts to your own sex life, I can assure you, these are tried and true methods. Trust me, I learned from the nymphs (re: ludo-Gothic BDSM and Cuwu)!

(source: “Be Not Afraid!” 2010)

Also, while we’ve had a chance so far (during the preface) to discuss the ways in which Gothic Communism’s anarcho-Communist design works in opposition to state mechanisms (which includes Marxist-Leninism, though it’s obviously preferable to Western models of capital, but nevertheless remains prone to its own abuses), there’s actually a social, therapeutic component to Gothic Communism that relates to our Gothic-Marxist tenets and four main Gothic theories; i.e., as things to interrogate and negotiate in our own lives.

The idea actually comes from dialectical behavioral therapy models introduced to me by a former friend (Cuwu, who we introduced in Volume Zero; more on them during the “Uphill Battle, part three” and “Healing from Rape” subchapters). DBT is designed specifically to prevent self-destructive behavior at a societal level; Gothic Communism as I’ve conceived it applies this to sex workers, preventing destructive behaviors against them from other workers who are loyal to the state. It achieves this by combining dialectical-material analysis of Gothic stories with four Gothic literary theories (the Gothic being largely concerned with sex in popular monstrous media) to achieve a Gothic hybrid of traditionally Marxist goals—all in service of furthering sex positivity through well-educated, emotionally and Gothically intelligent sex workers who can “live deliciously” as a form of proletarian praxis from moment to moment. No Promethean junk food for us! Only the best, but we must learn to make things taste delicious again while subsisting on canonical, plastic garbage that we dialectically-materially scrutinize. Dialectical-material analysis, then, is something to embody in our own lives, specifically through our consumption habits, labor and poetics as extensions of our bodies, sexualities and gender expression having been reclaimed by us.

Reclamation operates through our manifesto coordinates. Starting at the top (as listed here), we begin with the Six Rs and Four Gs. We’ve already discussed these a great deal in the thesis volume (and will discuss them a great deal more as we continue). For now, I just want to list the tenets and theories and to briefly explain their relationship to each other and to oppositional praxis; i.e., as something for workers to enact during Gothic Communism’s camping of canonical forces. As stated during our abstract, our tenets’

collective idea is to make Marxism a little cooler, sexier and fun than Marx ever could through the Wisdom of the Ancients (a cultural understanding of the imaginary past) as a “living document”; i.e., to make it “succulent” by “living deliciously” as an act of repeated reflection that challenges heteronormativity’s dimorphic biological essentialism and bondage of gender to sex, thus leading to a class awakening at a countercultural level through iconoclastic (sex-positive), monomorphic Gothic poetics.

Because they are provided in full at the start of every volume (and are explored at length in the thesis volume), I will only list the six tenets:

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

I call these tenets the Six Rs, or six things to reclaim from Capitalism through the Gothic imagination. Underpinning these tenets are four central Gothic theories, the Four Gs (outlined in their entirety during the start of every volume; re: “Paratextual Documents“):

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

Unlike the Gothic mode—which tells of legendary things (undead/demonic and anthropomorphic monsters or places) with, as or within Gothic media as things to perform, create, or imagine/reimagine, wear, inhabit, occupy or pass through (we’ll explore all of these variants in this volume)—Gothic theory explains the process behind all of this as it’s going on, has gone on, will go on.

(artist: Kaycee Bee)

Guided by these theories, then, the re-education of sex worker emotions achieves the Six Rs through instructed critical analysis of sexualized art; be it their own, someone else’s, or something to become, its sex-positive lessons are designed to teach emotional intelligence through a Gothic mode whose cultural imagination, when used in an iconoclastic sense, becomes a vulgar display of counterterrorist power in defiance of the state’s own terrorist/menticidal antics (re: Meerloo’s “waves of terror” and Robert Asprey’s “paradox of terror[2]” versus Max Weber’s monopoly of violence and Joseph Crawford’s invention of terrorism through the canonical Gothic mode).

Once materialized, iconoclastic displays can reopen worker minds that, once open, fluently drink up good information like a thirsty sponge and leave bad information out while nevertheless remaining aware of it (a bit like Drake). This results in creative, proletarian-praxial displays—and those who prepare and make them—that offset their bourgeois counterparts to engender emotional/Gothic intelligence in regards to canonical monsters as already being historical-material outcomes in this sense. Our aim as Gothic Communists is to engender proletarian antics/iconoclasm through praxial synthesis; i.e., the daily and informed, intuitive cultivation of

• sex-positive monster porn (monsters are generally dimorphically sexualized in canon, which spreads the complicated, awful lie that porn is paradoxically forbidden and available—peddled furtively to people like a bad drug whose “pushers” promise this is the only place you can get it from instead of, you know, making it yourselves)
• safe, trusting spaces
• reasonable forgiveness, preventative justice, and a pedagogy of the oppressed as delivered through a reclaimed language of the oppressor class that normally shames the proletariat’s reimagined past

The prime directive of Gothic Communism, then, is to reverse-abject the re-remembered past away from the Western tradition. Though ostensibly “superior,” the West is actually Promethean—not simply exploitative, but historically doomed to fail and repeat its Icarian mistakes to the continued detriment of workers everywhere. Eventually the owner class will die, too; it just takes longer. As they burn everyone around them like fuel, the Earth is reduced to a sprawling necropolis of ashes and bones—all to glut the bourgeoisie, who prey on our imaginations like mind-flayer vampires; i.e., by weaponizing manufactured fears of cartoon fascism, general “corruption,” xenophobia (the monstrous-feminine) and nominal Communism against workers in cryptomimetic forms. Fuck that. We can make our own subversive ghosts/spectres of Marx, our own parallel Superstructure kings and queens, hammers and sickles, cyberpunks, and Vaporwave/Laborwave corporate mood (exhibit 42d1; re: “Seeing Dead People“) that challenge and dissipate the skeleton king of Zombie Rome, the Shadow of Pygmalion, and the boogeyman tyrant of nominal Communism (all of them being endlessly evoked by the state to pacify us).

(artist: Thomas Cole)

Fear not the Fall of Rome; look forward to its ideological transformation. Canonical Rome absolutely sucks ass/is not to be trusted. For one, Rome is, by modern standards, hauntologized (utterly fake; re: the ghost of the counterfeit). The original lasted for centuries in various forms, but was effectively a city-state; nation-states, by comparison, emerged during the Renaissance formation of national identities, followed by the Enlightenment’s settler colonialism appealing to the pre-fascist (Neo-Gothic) hauntology of “Rome” as unified post-fascism—one nation, one army under “God,” or some other vertical bourgeois authority (secular or religious) that endures after the “defeat of the Nazi” (the details of their death have been greatly exaggerated; Nazis were copying American fascism, which is alive and well). Nation-states normalize Imperialism, thus genocide, rape, war and worker exploitation through canonical Gothic praxis. They compel sexual reproduction through heteronormative, amatonormative, Afronormative, and queernormative lenses, etc—are built on a settler-colonial binary that yields an imperial, dimorphic flavor in everyday language: good vs evil, black vs white, us vs them, “the creation of sexual difference” by Luce Irigaray, and so on.

For our purposes, this binary is canonically remediated within the Gothic mode to communicate Western glory as something to synthesize through pro-state propaganda as coercion personified: the fetishization of war, deception, rape and death linked to the hauntology of the state apparatus as a lionized conveyor of traditional Western virtues. Within the Western hegemon, all of these virtues are unironic and coercive; like gargoyles[3] perched on church spires, their monstrous cultural affect is seen and felt everywhere—in pastiche but also the real world as informed by said pastiche and vice versa (a war happens and someone makes a novel, movie or videogame to capitalize off it in a series of palimpsests; i.e., Tolkien or Cameron’s refrain; e.g., Starship Troopers, Aliens, Metroid or Doom). As such, they yield a “trident” of bourgeois trifectas

• manufacture
• subterfuge/deception
• coercion

with a neoliberal “handle”: the profit motive; i.e., infinite growth, efficient profit (meaning value through exploitation, regardless if it is ethical or materially stable) and worker/owner division as disseminated through the three tines.

(artist: Rae of Sunshine)

Note: These trifectas (and the monopolies and qualities attached to them—of violence, terror and morphological expression/monsters, and Cartesian, settler-colonial and heteronormative) are tremendously important/foundational to my thesis work before/after Volume Zero; i.e., they are the very tools the state uses to police, thus antagonize, nature as monstrous-feminine during the dialectic of the alien; re: through all the usual revenge arguments state proponents make to move money through nature as cheaply as possible (raping the world to sustain itself at nature and workers’ expense): nature—female and white-skinned or not—is a whore to rape, which we must subvert “on the Aegis”; i.e., as a backdoor into Hell as something to remake on Earth; e.g., Rae of Sunshine, above, having the whore’s revenge against profit within and upon their cake and pie. I would go on to solidify and crystalize these arguments when finalizing the manifesto in late 2023, and they became so influential afterwards that I would readily quote-and-promote wide sections of “The Nation-State” and “Revolutionary Cryptonymy” in my later books, but also paratexts promoting said books. I used the latter to provide the most succinct and distilled summarizing of what these tools are; i.e., to people unfamiliar with my work; re: “The State: Its Key Tools; re: the Monopolies, Trifectas and Qualities of Capital,” which is a paratextual document per volume PDF but also a separate subsection in my Paratextual (Gothic) Documents webpage that readers can access independently, online. —Perse, 4/3/2025

Understanding these mechanisms is fundamental to navigating state abuse through our own praxial synthesis camping the canon with ludo-Gothic BDSM; said BDSM aside (and the camp process for which it and its instruction are synonymous with), we’ll introduce the mechanisms (and their gargoyles) next.

(artist: Jacques-Louis David)

The Nation-State: Remediating Modern-day “Rome,” Gargoyles, and the Bourgeois Trifectas; also, Critiquing Amazons as Liminal Expression (feat. Autumn Ivy)

“I have seen much of the rest of the world; it is cruel, brutal and dark! Rome is the light!”

“And yet you have never been there! You have not seen what it has become!”

—Maximus Decimus Meridius and Marcus Aurelius, Gladiator (2000)

Rome and its many ghosts are built on conquest—on war, death, rape, and lies, but also profit as fetishized expressions of authenticated power in medieval language (aesthetics) and devices (function): the forged performance of sovereignty through gargoyle-esque installations. We’ll unpack gargoyles for a bit, then introduce and explore the trifectas themselves for the remainder of the chapter. This chapter also discusses how subterfuge encourages tokenized coercion under manufactured conditions during liminal expression inside weird-nerd culture; i.e., Amazons, and the praxial synthesis of that particular monster type as “gargoyle-esque” when personified by weird nerds. The example we’ll explore occurred between me and called Autumn Ivy, a non-binary sex worker who abused me during our own labor exchanges: as weird nerds working in praxial opposition, them a whore policing me—another whore—using the same language of the underworld (which Gothic poetics essentially are). We camp it, Autumn does not, but aesthetic is the same (the key difference being dialectical-material context and scrutiny parsing duality during liminal expression—with Amazons being classic “two-world” entities, with one foot in heaven and Hell).

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

Note: The following piece with Autumn is one which I would cite repeatedly in Volume Two; e.g., the Poetry Module’s “Death by Snu-Snu!” I likewise consider my work with Autumn tremendously formative even though they treated me poorly. —Perse 4/2/2025

Before we proceed into canonical “Rome” and its genocidal remediation through these gargoyles, be forewarned (from my thesis statement):

Capitalism is a hyperobject, a structure so big that you can’t directly observe it, and whose descriptions through ultimately simplistic metaphors are abstracting at best (for more information on hyperobjects, consider Timothy Morton’s 2013 book on the subject). You can only talk about Capitalism in pieces, from a particular point of view about something you yourself disinterred and reassembled over space and time. Needless to say, the point of Gothic-Communist abstraction isn’t abject confusion, nor is it to pull something out of thin air. Rather, it’s meant to achieve altered perspective for enhanced appreciation of truths concealed by capital; e.g., abstract art that isn’t tied to having an obvious point, purpose, or monetary value/function under Capitalism.

Unlike iconoclasm and ludo-Gothic BDSM, canon is financially incentivized to naturalize itself through Capitalist Realism and bad demon BDSM; i.e., to “vanish” by virtue of workers’ “ordinary” perspectives unable to imagine anything else: what they are meant to see (and endorse) by those in power showing it to them through the usual means of production and heteronormative/settler-colonial propaganda enforcing the profit motive through canonical fear and dogma; re: Amazons as the oldest tokenized traitors of the West and its labor struggles.

To this, canonical gargoyles are cops, thereby serving as installations of terror to instruct the public with and reflect it endlessly back at them; re: Autumn, who often presents themselves, a non-binary person, as a monster mom/Amazon of sorts. In keeping with my whore’s paradox argument, they didn’t have the whore’s revenge against capital/profit, but became a whore policing whores—to pimp them for profit, essentially! Betrayal is betrayal, a whore becoming an angel/devil pimp (madame) of the worst sort: a witch cop. In short, monsters are—in a theatrical, therefore half-real (on and offstage) sense—a performative, thus instructional means of argument for or against the state; i.e., in a dualistic sense during liminal expression, which determines through function as flowing power in different directions. No matter how “oppressed” someone seems, then, to flow power up towards the state is to tokenize one’s position. A demon is a fetish and to fetishize something is to give power or take it, mid-cryptomimesis (re: the Demon Module’s “Of Darkness and the Forbidden“). A Judas is a Judas, ipso facto; i.e., functionally pacifying its audience through controlled-opposition bread and circus (re: the white savior and white Indian problem; re: Autumn in “Death by Snu-Snu” and Samus Aran in “Search of the Secret Spell“).

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

We’ll get to Autumn. For now, let’s consider the poetic devices at work. Regardless of their physical form, such outlets routinely celebrate and codify coercive arrangements of power vis-à-vis sexuality, gender identity and performance; i.e., the clichés and fetishes of the state machine operating as normalized, thus invisible regardless of the open decay exacted upon people, places and the environment (e.g., cyberpunks). Challenging these bourgeois illusions and their legitimized violence and terror is less about saying random “magic words” (and hoping for the best) and more about combining or crafting the correct word(s) to achieve the desired counterterror effect through oft-abstracting means. Our emphasis will be on Gothic poetics, of course, but it can be likewise be attained through abstract art in general, of which cartoons generally are—e.g., like Bill Watterson deliberately does in exhibit 6b4a, below (a far less commercially-minded but more thought-provoking man than Jim Davis, let’s be frank; though, as I point out in my own writeup, Garfield is definitely Gothic):

(exhibit 6b4a: Artist, left: Bill Watterson’s 1985 Calvin and Hobbes; right: Jim Davis and his immortal, inoffensive cat. I read both as a little girl and loved each for different reasons. The joke of “07/27/1978” [lasagnacat, 2017] lies in how Garfield is blank parody; it’s normally empty of critical thought and requires someone else to do the work, but even then, the results are generally a farce. Intentional or not, both authors—when their works are dialectically-materially examined—offer something about our material world that we, as Gothic Communists, can learn from and pass along to the next generation. Farce isn’t useless towards Gothic Communism, provided it assists in its development.)

You’re also aiming at a moving target when critiquing capital; like a gargoyle, Capitalism seems stationary but is actually alive and evolving on many different registers—a hopelessly complex assemblage of material and natural objects, whose dialogs convey competing schools of thought in statuesque “silence.” Further joined by living agents informed by the gargoyle’s fear and dogma, this includes the bourgeoisie and proletariat, as well as the many allies and traitors to class and culture warfare enacted through a working class joined with/pitted against neoliberals, fascists and gradients of these things. All of them interact back and forth in real time over space and time more broadly—inside a cryptomimetic marketplace of recycled ideas that communicate furtive morphological prescriptions that can be challenged, but also engaged with through fiscal exchanges channeled through gargoyles as installations of terror/counterterror that become instructional fixtures in the public imagination once installed; i.e., as mouthpieces and selling points to heavily implied, but nevertheless vivid arguments regarding hidden trauma, power and knowledge vis-à-vis workers as colluding with the state or warring back and forth with it to stymie profit, hence exploitation:

(exhibit 6b4b: Artist, top-mid-left: Otto Marr; top-right: ikerellatab; center-right: Deuza-art; bottom-mid-right: Funboy; far-mid right: Heartz MD; everything else: Lera PI.

Stemming from medieval thought, gargoyles are classically a type of “golem” that constitutes bodily values through a symbolic order as overseen and protected by them; i.e., as things to prescribe and sell, but also challenge through liminal expressions attached to Numinous architectural space: threatening immodest morphological freedom as a privileged ability to enjoy forbidden things, express trauma, or survive/enact state-mandated abuse through actionable offenses; e.g., sodomy represented through the clay as something to dress up and treat as “flesh” depicted by non-flesh and vice versa: stone, clay or metal, etc. To this, gargoyles represent socio-material standards of acceptable trespass within fetishized models of sin and indulgence, which can be subverted through an iconoclastic queering of medieval expression during ludo-Gothic BDSM.

[artist: Lera PI]

Meanwhile, the material, inanimate stuff can be shaped into whatever outfit, position, or bodily arrangement one so desires/imagines; given horns, wings, tails, claws, halos, ears, feathers, or scales, and dressed in leather or lace as part of the usual damsel/demon [or virgin/whore] dynamic; can seemingly be summoned by magic or otherwise assembled to provide “otherworldly” desires that are normally denied to workers. Through canon, workers and representations of pleasurable activities and power dynamics become alienated from each other, the latter barred from ordinary existence and intentionally hidden behind paywalls that must be invoked during oppositional praxis; i.e., if not to endorse unironic cash transactions for one’s pound of flesh, then to survive under capital’s synonymizing of pleasure with harm, while trying to subvert state language during liminal expression as oft-being pornographic, torturous and monstrous: the identity and relative struggle as commodified, and at least partially transformed through venues of commodification within countercultural channels. Imagination is normally constrained by Capitalist Realism, thus must be regained through reclaimed engines of monstrous production, psychosexual eroticism, and equally complex morphological/gender expression and tension.

[artist, top-left, bottom-left and top-right: draken4o; top-mid-left and bottom-left: Taran Fiddler; bottom-mid-left: Omuk; bottom-right: Lera PI; top-mid-right: Atom Cyber]

At the same time, gargoyles also constitute complicated [liminal] positions/threats of violence—i.e., as beings to fear, hunt and/or summon/make dealings with in regards to institutional, corporal punishment and flagellation known to dated[4] places famous for such dealings [churches as regelations and assignments of guilt and release]—when proletarian liberation is suggested; e.g., the triangulation of angelized/demonized minorities against each other when one side “rocks the boat” and becomes uncontrollable, thus must be put down during canonical Amazonomachia: Hippolyta beheading “Medusa” for her unseemly hysteria. This systemic violence is often felt or suggested through bodies that are rendered as animalistic and prey-like/chattelized (or collared/tame; e.g., the euthanasia effect), or otherwise helpless-looking through fetishized Gothic outfits that either paint them as executioners of the state’s will, or present them as targets, thus limit their speed, status [as property for men/Man Box proponents to own and use] and/or movement. Sometimes, the bodies are dimorphically sexualized as heteronormative enforcers relayed through a Gothic aesthetic/pastiche tinged with more recent nostalgias; e.g., Gargoyles[5] [1994]. The commodified legends of today stamp the imaginary past as eternalized backwards and forwards under capital as blinding consumers to the potential of anything beyond the text currently being retreated into. The regression and its values are presented through the gargoyle as both at home in the structure, and foreign to it—a guardian and invader simultaneously fearful and fascinating amid the ghost of the counterfeit/process of abjection: correct-incorrect, inside/outside, authentic/forged, etc. This can be packaged and sold to pacify workers; or it can embody worker struggles for those trying to dispel, thus escape, Capitalist Realism using Gothic poetics.)

In other words, the state relies on fetishized material reminders of terror and violence to get its point across, sanction itself, and maintain Capitalist Realism—which is then conveyed through menticidal perspectives that—through waves of terror endlessly exhausting worker minds during state monopolies—frame the material world as a displaced, Gothic commentary on the present: as informed by an imaginary past (“Rome”) that leads into itself, over and over. It normalizes crisis and decay, incarcerating workers inside their own imaginations as informed by state dogma. Liminality during opposition complicates an already formidable and busy equation, and in such a garden of the forking paths, there’s no way to cover everything. Instead, I will do my best to field the constant factors whose incessant remediation fosters an ocean of plethoras: artistic creations with a Gothic flavor using Marx’s notion of dialectical materiality inside historical materialism as something to shift in a better direction. Specifically defined by Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter (2010) “as economic structures and exchanges that lead to many other events” (source), I contend historical materiality involves workers’ constant relations to inanimate things between the natural and material world as “come alive” through praxial synthesis as artistic expression: the gargoyle (synonymous, for our purposes, with the egregore/simulacrum) as a dialectical-material force.

Seeing as we’re talking about Gothic doubles, the sensation “it’s like this, but different” will occur regularly throughout this book. Identify these constants as part of a larger system whose fragmented, oscillating variables indicate glacial systemic change within the whole over time—i.e., for or against the status quo as it presently exists. As mentioned during the heads-up, I’ve done my best to connect the dots in a plethora of interconnecting synonyms, but it would be foolish (and completely impossible) to try and connect them all. That’s not the point. Rather, take this manifesto—and indeed, the entire book—as a manual of completed and half-completed sex-positive thoughts. Pursue what I have pursued to your own sex-positive conclusions, authoring derelict archaeologies, oppressed pedagogies, queer camp, and Satanic poetics that transform the world. —Perse, back in 2024

For our purposes, a gargoyle is a statue that sees and is seen—a watcher/sentinel made to symbolize a particular value not just through fear and dogma, but witnessing propaganda as a living document; i.e., according to workers’ cultural understanding of the imaginary past as something to view looking back at them: the Wisdom of the Ancients given form out of the past as literally set in stone (regardless of that stone’s actual age; age is perceived and performed just like power is). State propaganda is historically violent and continues to be, but the process of fashioning such things is not limited to their poetics; like the chain, whip, slur or fetish outfit, we can reclaim the torturous golems, vampires, and Amazons, etc, for ourselves. We’ll cover these pesky gargoyles’ synthetic role during the synthesis roadmap (and its complicated poetic history in Volume Two). For now, we merely want to address how canonical media is gargoyle-esque through the bourgeois trifectas and profit motive. In short, how do nation-states and corporations use gargoyles to abuse workers with—their bad instruction, coercive likeness and myopic vigilance serving the profit motive; i.e., there are good knights and bad knights (cops) who serve the state, and other monsters that—whether they want to or not—also serve the state: as things to scapegoat, kettle and sacrifice, justifying state arrangements of power and language.

(artist: Waifu Tactical)

To do this, we first need to recognize how the state uses linguo-material implements (with language being a natural feature of humans that distinguishes them socially from other species through the material world) that are inherently deceptive. While this strongly indicates cryptonymy as a feature of concealment regarding state trauma, that feature of language is not exclusive to state operations. So we’ll focus more on cryptonymy in a bit.

In a more immediate sense of coercion, consider how state language sublimates violence through canonical praxis, leading to a fatal cycle of historical materialism; i.e., one tied to a Promethean oscillation between neoliberalism (a return to market freedom through state power, personal responsibility rhetoric and austerity politics as a means of coerced reformation) and fascism (a fracturing of the state bureaucracy—but not its elimination—during Capitalism-in-crisis/decay through brutal strangleholds on information, power, and human rights) working hand-in-hand. These twin fractals are not democracy manifest (to once again borrow Jack Karlson’s famous phrase); they’re Capitalism as an inherently unstable structure built around vertical power, whose construction leads to global instabilities within itself and among its splintered bodies. This regenerates an imperial cycle where power remains at the top, trapped inside the Imperial Core while workers are exhausted, exploited and exterminated at slower or faster speeds depending on where/what they are; i.e., on which side of the fence, and how the state assigns violence to them as a role: giver or receiver.

The operation of Capitalism through the state-corporate apparatus, then, requires varying degrees of bourgeois manufacture, subterfuge and coercion; i.e., commodified extensions of our aforementioned trifectas: canonical “junk food” that children acquire (from Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theories of the LAD—the language acquisition device—and universal grammar) and infantilized adults must unlearn—by consuming new things, but also critiquing what they consume through consumption as a means of retailoring itself. Gargoyles, then, constitute personified extensions of a given structure, of which canon is adopted by people who watch; in turn, they view statuesque performers watching back, tied theatrically to a belief system that bounces between both. Each fearsomely feels unalive during state crisis and decay yet somehow can move and instruct through that paradox; i.e., as something to see and adopt as part of a seasonal operation: sex and violence under regular conditions of state control, held in place by blind pastiche and praxial inertia.

(artist: Waifu Tactical)

Except, anyone—not just the state—can make a god (or god-like statue) and instruct with it. For our purposes, it’s better to get ’em while they’re young. Children see and adopt what is notable in their surroundings, then remember and reenact these sensations when approaching adulthood. Regardless of their age, workers make art in response to art (mimesis). Given the proper push, they shape and maintain the linguo-material order as something to change into something else; i.e., a post-scarcity world, versus keeping it the same in terms of its current, albeit ever-widening disparities. Regardless of its exact measurements, a gulf is still a gulf. To that, our stated aim as Gothic Communists is to iconoclastically rewire the Superstructure’s bourgeois coding with Gothic poetics: to resynthesize what the state feeds workers, changing its diet (art and other forms of information) into something that isn’t harmful; re: camping the canon (from our thesis argument) using monstrous instruments made from stone (or similar materials). Stone and its symbols deliver meaning according to how they are viewed, thus understood, so that is where class and culture war must take place.

Of course, the elite own the means of production, thus can corner the market of fear and dogma as something to cultivate through imperfect monopolies on terror and violence—their supply and demand, but also people as the product (and the recipients of said product) that go on, in some shape or form, to reproduce it and the material conditions that routinely bring it (and profit) about: the good (centrists), the bad (fascists) and the ugly (states of exception) within the orderly operation that is neoliberal Capitalism (which recuperates genocide). Their control isn’t total, but is enough to bring seminal tragedies about, which themselves become immortalized by new generations singing about older abuses they never lived to see but still feel the effects of: generational trauma.

To sublimate Imperialism as Capitalism’s highest order of operation, the elite (vis-à-vis Raj Patel and Jason Moore) have made Capitalism as cheap as humanly possible—have made “Rome’s” remediation/pastiche cheap. In bourgeois terms, if something is cheap or even “free,” we’re the product/propaganda. However, this coding calls for a particular kind of propaganda: heteronormative canon—a “junk food” made by state-corporate bodies, but also tied to a “trident” of trifectas driven by the profit motive (the handle): linguo-material strategies used by the bourgeoisie; i.e., the men behind the curtain standing “behind” us, less pulling our strings like a banal wendigo and more distracting us with fearsome gargoyles arranged in all manner of didactic terror scenarios (think Ferdinand from The Duchess of Malfi, commissioning “dead” wax sculptures of his sister’s family to frighten her with). Their canon becomes what we predominantly experience all around us; i.e., our consumption, hence education. We consume, thus embody what we see, eat, fuck and fear, etc, through an elaborate orchestration of manufacture, subterfuge and coercion that leads to Capitalist Realism. Given time, we turn to stone, playing the part in highly repetitive (thus predictable) ways.

The first bourgeois trifecta is the manufacture trifecta:

• Manufactured scarcity. Not enough resources, space, sex, etc; cultivates a fake sense of supply/demand, but also fear of missing out (FOMO) through exploitative business maneuvers that, in turn, engender fragile, deregulated markets; e.g., games—micro transactions, live-service models, phone games; manufactured obsolescence (Hakim’s “Planning Failure,” 2023), hidden fees, privatization—i.e., pay more for less quality and/or quantity and so on.
• Manufactured consent. From Chomsky’s book Manufacturing Consent (1988); cultivates a compliant consumer base, but also workforce confusion, obedience and ignorance. Chomsky’s theory is that advertisers are beholden to their shareholders, aiming consumers towards a position of mass tolerance—tacitly accepting “negative freedom” as exclusively enjoyed by the elite exploiting them: “Boundaries for me, not for thee.” In Marxist terms, this amounts to the privatization of the media (and its associate labor) as part of the means of production. They shape and maintain each other.
• Manufactured conflict/competition. Endless war and violence—e.g., the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, the Jewish Question, assorted moral panics, etc; cultivates apathy and cruelty through canonical wish fulfillment: “the satisfying of unconscious desires in dreams or fantasies” with a bourgeois flavor. To this, nation pastiche and other blind forms encourage us-versus-them worker division, class sabotage and false consciousness/mobile class dormancy (“somnambulism”), not collective labor action against the state by using counterterrorist media to rehumanize the state of exception.

Through the manufacture trifecta, neoliberals appropriate peril using economically  “correct” forms, socializing blame and privatizing profit, accolades, and education as things to normalize the way that neoliberals decide; it’s about control—specifically thought control—through the Base as something to leverage against workers through bourgeois propaganda: “War and rape are common, essential parts of our world; post-scarcity (and sex-positive monsters, BDSM, kink, etc) is a myth!” Fascists de-sublimate peril in incorrect forms, going “mask-off” yet still running interference for the state; i.e., in defense of the status quo until their true radical nature becomes normalized: the black knight.

Eternal crisis and cyclical decay are built into Capitalism and the nation-state model; the state is inherently unstable and leads to war and rape on a wide scale, but also politically correct/incorrect language selecting state victims for the usual sacrifices that profit demands: the grim harvest. These are dressed up through a particular kind of cryptonym: the euphemism. For the state, political language becomes synonymous with whitewashing or otherwise downplaying the usual operations of the state with inoffensive, sleep-inducing phrases; e.g., “extreme prejudice” and “military incidents” (false flag operations) as directed at the state’s usual victims. The state, but also pro-state defenders and class traitors, reliably use these and other linguistic manipulation tactics (e.g., obscurantism) to routinely make war and profit from it; i.e., by raping or otherwise exploiting workers like chattel.

(artist: Seb McKinnon)

As a site of tremendous cryptonymy (trauma and linguistic concealment), the Gothic castle symbolizes the function of the state doing what the state always does: lie, conceal and destroy. A swirling accretion disk of husk-like chaff orbits ominously around an awesome, concentric illusion: an illusion of an illusion, a fakery of a fakery whereupon the closer to the center one gets, the more entropic the perspective. Like a spaghetti noodle, one is stretched out (and ripped apart) by how perfidious and unstable every step is; the floor becomes eggshells, a flotilla of chronotopic trash surrounded by danger and oblivion, gravity and shadows, but also gargoyles whose exact function remains to be seen.

This presence of tremendous obscurity inside the infernal concentric pattern/narrative of the crypt’s mise-en-abyme brings us to our second bourgeois trifecta: the subterfuge/deception trifecta

• Displacement. Conceal or dislocate the problem.
• Disassociation. Hide/detach from the problem.
• Dissemination. Spread these bourgeois practices through heteronormative canon.

through which neoliberals maintain the status quo by concealing war as a covert enterprise that has expanded exponentially since Vietnam into the 21st century’s own wars and lateral media (copaganda). Whereas that war failed by virtue of showing American citizens too much, war has increasingly become a fog through which those in power control the narrative by outright killing journalists, but also “failing” to report where their mercenaries operate (GDF’s “How the US Military Censors Your News,” 2023). In other words, neoliberal illusions involve outright skullduggery and lies to keep their hegemony intact. Much like the lords of old, they rule from the shadows, but have more material power and control than those former monarchs could dream of; i.e., a mythologized existence hinted at by the displace-and-dissociate stratagem of neoliberal copaganda; e.g., Lethal Weapon‘s 1987 “Shadow Company” reflecting on the very-real Phoenix Program and so-called “advisory” role of the CIA: “We killed everybody.”

By reflecting on the recent military abuses of the state during Vietnam, Lethal Weapon presents police corruption as a late-’80s cartoon. Mercenaries of privatized war have conveniently distanced themselves from both the CIA (which the film makes little effort to mention) but also the American system’s “true function”; i.e., something bad happened once, but only because weaker men “gave into” the alleged temptations of war abroad: the drug trade. In doing so, these cutthroats have defiled the very thing that the good cops at home normally represent: a perfect society that has—through the routine failing of greedy, unscrupulous men—fallen from grace. Apparently they’re to blame for the American atrocities at home and abroad, not the state or its arm.

Like pieces on a board, these gargoyles dance to tell a particular story useful to state aims; i.e., as hollow suits of armor inside a castle that chills the viewer in place, but also whose forged sovereignty is in decline. As such, the structure merely becomes a house to clean, to purge of dark forces using benevolent enforcers that resemble the fallen (think Milton’s warring angels and demons, minus its rebellious class character but nevertheless utilizing the same powerful principles of animation). But this, too, is a lie, a ghost of the counterfeit whose inheritance anxieties about the Imperial Core can be explained away through outrageous theatre forging the solution; i.e., vigilante state violence with—in this case—the badge as a false flag operation levied against invented scapegoats: ghosts of the imperial past whose actions are, themselves, exorcised through the run of the mill.

In true Gothic fashion, the entire operation adopts an explained-supernatural guise, which it then uses to explain away the current militarizing of the police force at home. Riggs and Murtaugh “need” those guns to shield us from the bad cops (who all look like Wall Street yuppies, apparently). This is police state apologia 101, and the very school of Gothic moderacy used to justify a continuation of normal state operations: apologizing for its own actions through Radcliffean spectres—a timeless Eurotrash banditti conjured into the 20th century by Richard Donner (equally fearsome is Mel Gibson, whose own violence supersedes theirs. Simply put, he’s a killing machine).

When the state’s manufacturing of theatrical deceptions cannot be concealed in relation to imperial abuse (wherever it occurs), the name of the game is sublimation through state terror as normalized; genocide, rape and war essentialize through fascists as theatrical heels, appropriating war/nation pastiche as useful to the elite: “Get strong and fight the enemy” like a soldier would do, training all their life for that one moment to “actually overcome adversity” (not to be confused with fairness, which atheists like Rationality Rules use when attacking trans athletes; Xevaris, 2019).

The statuesque advertisement, then, is a ghostly call to service, not a haunting of generational trauma; i.e., crafted by the elite for workers to fear and obey without question, but also adore and worship: to be the best in a quixotic sense, imitating recreations of the imaginary past as “strong” and obedient, but also a blinder to the kinds of traumatic visions intimated by spectres of Marx. Through this manicured self-delusion, a defender of the homeland (and its liege) participates in ranked contests of martial, sports-like strength modeled after conspicuously chiseled gargoyles that, at times, lack the overtly metallic armor of the medieval knight, but whose stone-like bodies denote a physical regression whose “body armor” serves as more literal and antiquated sort; e.g., the Z Fighters from DBZ (or its frankly jaw-dropping[6] fan animations) or He-Man, Lion-O, and their respective friends’ struggles within the combat arena as extended to the entirety of the globe: “all the world’s a stage.”

Here, Shakespeare’s passage describes a battleground to lose oneself—in combat but also worship of godly actors fulfilling a special bourgeois role when set loose: the celebration of dated organizations of power in neoliberal hauntologies[7]; e.g., the Japanese cultural fascination with, and imitation of, Western kayfabe and hegemony post-WW2 as something that survives into recycled variations of itself:

The above image is tellingly summarized by the maker’s own synopsis:

Given diplomatic orders by the Grand Council, Vegeta, now king of the Saiyans, sets out on an interstellar assassination mission. TARGET LOCATION: PLANET EARTH / OBJECTIVE NO.1: ERADICATION / OBJECTIVE NO.2: PACKAGE RETRIEVAL / For his life, all his training has led to this. Now, Son Goku will learn the true meaning of the title, “LEGEND” (source).

In short, Vegeta’s status as a conspicuous (and braggadocious) monarch falls into place under a globalized world order that places him beneath the elite; he’s their lapdog and put to heel, obeys their commands through a common method of instruction: “sic’ em!”

Keeping with the kayfabe arrangement, he feels threatened by Goku and wants to be “top dog” while both men work together to defang Broly: a demonic hound on par with Cú Chulainn’s fearsome ríastrad; re (cited in “Overcoming Praxial Inertia“):

When distorted, Cú Chulainn undergoes a spectacular bodily metamorphosis [the ríastrad] and begins to attack both friend and foe because he loses the ability to distinguish between them. At these times, he consequently poses a threat “to order on both an individual and a social level” (Lowe, Kicking 199) and shifts from stabilizing his social network (by defending his province and his people) to threatening it from within[8] (source: Sarah Enri’s “‘Inside Out… and Upside Down’: Cú Chulainn and His Ríastrad,” 2013).

The thing that bears repeating is that all the Saiyans are monstrous dog soldiers, albeit to varying degrees that serve state aims. The state cannot exist without the good cop, bad cop, and scapegoat as dog-like (the exact nature of Broly varies, but he is effectively the invader mechanism whose corrupt/monstrous-feminine elements demand a euthanizing call to violence against him). In turn, their dogfight becomes something to watch and imitate as left-behind: monsters from “another planet” that curiously evoke a human imaginary past on a local, earthly stage.

It bears repeating that said past is sewn with conflict and confusion—not because it is old, but because its ownership is challenged. Its monsters—and the various instructions they supply as gargoyles—are generally at war with themselves, mid-lesson; i.e., psychopraxis, psychosexuality, psychomachia, and Amazonomachia through doubles and paradox amid liminal expression as things to view in ways that remain ambiguous. As my thesis argued, “Doubles invite comparison to encourage unique, troubling perspectives that “shake things up” and break through bourgeois illusions.” Gargoyles, like all monsters, double people and their conflicted sense of humanity but also supply them with various inhuman qualities that likewise exist within dialectical-material opposition. During oppositional praxis, then, they effectively “go to war.” Praxial stances also double through gargoyles, and grow increasingly ambivalent during the maelstrom. It’s a war of optics, but also of perception linked to one’s state of mind as thrown worryingly into question near positions/statements of power and trauma. Said statements seem both concrete and oddly fluid.

Even so, oppositional praxis allows for a proletarian function to gargoyles, which we’ll get to; and the general aesthetic can obviously vary a great deal between variants. However, the canonical function (for the elite and their proponents) remains constant: to pacify and police workers under Capitalist Realism—to stare and tremble at what are, for all intents and purposes, killers for the state; i.e., knights and gladiators, but also cops penned up in castles whose owners trot them out for the viewing public to cower before or worse, emulate (re: ACAB—canonical cops and castles). Subversions of these stony replicas are liminal, thus complicated (we’ll explore this more as we increasingly delve into trauma as something to write about and illustrate). Through the profit motive, however, these simulacra amount to corporatized war clones, offering up good war and sacrifice as valorized through the veneer of freedom, equality and justice; i.e., the façade of American Liberalism and its endless platitudes/canonical praxis as formulaic to an automated degree.

(artist: Deuza-art)

The degree of automation varies. For example, the AI boom and its recent proliferation of so-called “art” (theft through search-engine algorithms) highlights the same aesthetic’s blind approach enacted through its usual benefactors: white, cis-het men. Automation abuse makes bourgeois-minded workers stupid, but also expendable in regards to labor as something to cheaply replicate and consume; or as Sean Collins tweets on January 30th, 2023:

The heart of AI is contempt—contempt for artists, for writers, for sex workers. The user wants to get what they get out of art/writing/porn but they can’t stand feeling like they owe anyone anything for their enjoyment, so the artist/writer/sex worker has got to go (source).

The horror of the hyperreal is that there are no humans behind the digitized simulacrum; they’re simply gone. The lived reality is far more bleak, with middle-class consumers being entirely divorced from creative labor as a critical-thinking skill while actively advocating for enslavement, neglect and genocide; i.e., behind the image as a desert of the real, where real humans are still alive but won’t be for much longer.

Automation can be tailored towards Gothic Communism and its development, but the means of production must still be geared towards horizontal arrangements of power and wealth that don’t automatically reduce everything to soulless privatization. Divorced from nature, empathy and workers-as-people, the paradox of automated art is that it quickly becomes worthless—even to capitalists—if viewed in bulk; there needs to be a human worker to manipulate and appeal to by other humans in ways that don’t flood the market with inhuman, hopelessly cheap fakeries. The unchecked flood gives Capitalism away (what the kids call “self-reporting”). Work, in artistic terms, is human labor, which gives art its value for Communists to defend and for capitalists to exploit (the labor theory of value versus the monetary theory of value). “Tech bros,” however, defend Capitalism by seeing value in exploitation (efficient profit), not labor as valuable through its human relationship to the natural-material world. According to Arfu, they see themselves as “free” and other workers as “paintpigs” or “drawslaves,” having bought into the illusion that—by turning their thinking over to machines—tech bros/weird canonical nerds have successfully liberated themselves from the working class (the illusion of the middle class). Quite the opposite; those who tech bros worship as gods (the bourgeoisie, billionaires) have trained them to police other workers around them, but especially the rebellious ones.

All at once, pacification becomes active subjugation via the triangulation of assimilated workers against labor at large; i.e., local colonization performed by people who look like you do, and misuse the awesome class-conscious potential of Gothic counterculture poetics for continued state hegemony as merely a commodity to package and sell. Sex and lethal force overlap with state politics, until the decay is not only impossible to ignore; it’s an essential part of the image and paradox: unironic death and murder become sexy unto themselves—gargoyles that kill for the state’s endless (and bloody) resurrection.

(artist: Darek Zabrocki)

Whereas the elite and their moderate supporters, liberals/neoliberals, only care about profit and capitalistic hegemony (a public mindset that decays into nightmares of itself; e.g., AI Lost Media’s “Pizza Nuggets Ad 1993,” 2023), fascists do their part by playing a dirtier version of the same game. Through open xenophobia, slashed throats, and medieval, rapacious calls for “pure,” open violence, they preemptively administer draconian countermeasures relayed through state propaganda.

Both they and neoliberals play “bad games” for the bourgeoisie; so do TERFs/girl bosses, queer bosses and other token offshoots whose Man Box/”prison sex” forms of bad play really don’t take geniuses to function—just fear, lies and cruelty to varying degrees that are taught through canonical propaganda and consumption. All further bad faith, bad acting and bad play as a criminogenic cycle stuck on loop. To survive, revolutionary workers must change the system that repeats the cycle; to change the system, they must become game and clever in ways that scare the bourgeoisie and their proponents; i.e., by subversively altering bourgeois propaganda, thus the education, iconography and bad play[9] that stem from its various entry points; e.g., “thirst traps” (exhibit 7a-8c, next page, but also the furry “mom bod,” exhibit 65—from Volume Three): subjugated Hippolyta as a bad-bitch girl boss (the virgin and the whore, but also the demon) as a reliable selling point and educational fulcrum within these larger dialogs—the monstrous-feminine.

For the next few pages, I want to exhibit the monstrous-feminine, then use it to explore how subterfuge segues into coercion; i.e., as something to enforce through tokenized agents turning themselves to stone. Adopting hard, rigid functions in defense of capital, these performers often posture as “protectors” of the gargoyle sort: medievalized cops roped into roles that are poisonous to them, insofar as they act like class traitors/rabid dogs who will eventually be closeted, put down, and/or married/carted off. “I am woman, hear me roar!” isn’t good praxis by itself, because praxis isn’t defined by rebellious posturing and “think-positive” attitudes, alone; it’s defined by liberation through an altering of socio-material conditions inside nerd culture while at war with itself: weird canonical nerds and their iconoclastic counterparts.

One of the most famous monstrous-feminine (from the Western perspective) is the Amazon; i.e., a “thirst-trap” girl boss canonically sold for sex, but also touted as warrior muscle that executes the state’s will while acting the rebel. All the while, subjugated Amazons simultaneously caution against mommy doms who fail to meet these muscular-servile standards, but nevertheless cow men into equally submissive positions. Said positions are temporary and staged—meant only to incur status-quo wrath and punishment against the monstrous-feminine; i.e., as something that, regardless of its presentation, is eventually exposed as hypocritical or untame, then dealt with accordingly by heteronormative forces:

Note: This brings us to Autumn Ivy. First, a disclaimer about my criticisms of Autumn; i.e., from working with them in the past; re (from “Death by Snu-Snu”):

A note about Autumn Ivy: They are a public figure who markets an image of themselves as “Amazonian,” which I am critiquing as having run-ins/worked with them in the past; as such, they’re a big enby and should be able to handle whatever criticism I throw at them, especially since their abuse of me in the past is true—is something I stand by and can back up. That being said… this isn’t me condoning violence or calls for violence against them. Unless they accelerate their trans misogyny (or any other fascist tendencies) in public—i.e., use their platform to spread active hate, Nazi-style—kindly leave them alone to figure things out on their own (source).

This is more a precaution from me, in case Autumn feels vindictive. Then again, Volume One has been up since Valentine’s 2024 and the Poetry Module (which “Death by Snu-Snu” is from) since May 1st, 2024. Still, I want to be crystal clear about how I feel; i.e., that Autumn is a scummy person, practice-wise, but this is by no means a greenlight to go and harass them; re: short of them being an active TERF and SWERF on their platform who openly furthers genocidal rhetoric, don’t antagonize them. So while Autumn exhibits SWERF-y vibes, they also are selective about these vibes and still do sex work of a particular kind, themselves; i.e., they’re no longer on OnlyFans (though many of their ads are still up, below)

but do have a personalized Fleshlight online, for example:

So even without the sex toys branded after them, Autumn is still a sex worker because they make money through modeling (a kind of sex work), but especially “spicy Amazon thirst traps” (above). Regarding this push into non-nude content, they’re still an underwear model who—at least until very recently—took money to take their clothes off (and even if they kept them on, underwear models are still sex workers. Also, their “voice acting” credit historically includes doing JOI material; e.g., the “Strange Bedfellows” erotica I wrote for them to record, on 1/28/2021). As we’ll see, Autumn absolutely hates being called a sex worker, yet very much remains concerned with what others think they do;

(source)

i.e., as “not” being sex work, effectively pinkwashing the trade (re: Autumn is non-binary) while punching down at GNC hardcore sex workers (re: me).

Not all that glitters is gold, then, and Autumn very much wants to have their cake and eat it, too; i.e., to look like a superhero warrior and enjoy the sex appeal of a prostitute (which superheroes classically do), while still punching down at sex workers, SWERF-style (re: me). In short, they’re a sell-out and a cop, in that respect (very much like She-Hulk herself is, below)

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

and their abuse of me shall be shown in the following pages through my usual “fuck with me, get made into an object lesson” approach: a victim’s testimony of their mistreatment of me. A bigotry one is a bigotry for all, and Autumn patrols Omelas for the Man.

As we proceed into my critique of Autumn, then, my thesis argument regarding them—re: as a gargoyle whore policing whores—comes from first-hand experience, and boils down to: “Autumn Ivy is a token, subjugated Amazon and acts like one, on and offstage.” To it, Amazons are muscled sex workers who tokenize and decay under capital (re: “A Cruel Angel’s Thesis“); i.e., into subjugated, cop-like forms that essentially punch down during mirror syndrome through Amazonomachia assimilation fantasies. Said fantasies have the pimp’s revenge in bad faith—i.e., until those token parties performing them are ignominiously collared by the elite/relegated to the state of exception once more through the euthanasia effect—and which we must challenge on and offstage on the same Aegis: during the dialectic of the alien through subversive Amazons having the whore’s revenge against token traitors taking state pay! Furthermore, the above keywords are being provided here, on this online version, whereas the PDF version supplies them in its own self-contained paratextual documents (re: “Rage over a Lost Penny”). That being said, these terms and others relating to them (e.g., Tolkien and Cameron’s refrain) can also be found in “Paratextual Documents.” —Perse, 4/4/2025

the euthanasia effect (rabid token Amazons)

A term, coined by me, to describe the canonical, assimilative qualities of the Amazonian myth (and one whose Amazonomachia has canonized, post-Wonder-Woman, in Metroidvania through Cameron’s refrain and—to a lesser extent—Tolkien’s). It is one where magical, mythical warrior women—as simultaneously virgin/whore animal people (the female* berserk)—are canonically employed to keep men (and the victims of men/token enforcers during “prison sex” police violence) paradoxically in line, mid-panopticon; i.e., a female-coded (usually white, or token non-white) centurion or stentor girlboss who, in between yawping at the men to aurally castrate them (the banshee or siren), “tops” them in hauntological, dominatrix-style fashion, elsewhere outside the bedroom (re: Foucault): “make it through this and I’ll ride you until you beg!” Death by Snu-Snu becomes the traditional hero’s monomythic reward and doom; re: Irigaray’s creation of sexual difference, but tokenized into a kind of virginal warrior Madonna jailor pulled from the Neo-Gothic’s former dungeons; e.g., Charlotte Dacre’s fearsome and “phallic” (stabby-stabby) Victoria (see: Sam Hirst’s 2020 “Zofloya and the Female Gothic” for a good summarizing of that dilemma):

*Canon is heteronormative, thus dimorphic (and settler-colonial/Cartesian). There can be intersex elements, but these will be treated as “phallic,” thus male/female and masc/femme during the Amazon’s struggles; i.e., as a monstrous-feminine entity the state monopolizes by gaslight-gatekeep-girlbossing it. Such things, then, canonically embody the Amazon and Gorgon’s doubled morphological conflict inside-outside itself; i.e., to simultaneously exude the psychomachy’s calm/furious or virgin/whore qualities, such “mirror syndrome” (another term of mine) punching a black reflection where state victims are housed (thus useful to profit pimping nature as alien); re: the postscript from the Poetry Module’s “Following in Medusa’s Footsteps.” Throughout BDSM and Gothic media, on and offstage, you see the euthanasia effect in Metroidvania a ton. To enhance your own ludo-Gothic BDSM (to camp subjugated Amazons with), refer to my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus for some good examples of the Promethean Quest (though my “Concerning Rape Play” compendium also raises some salient reading regarding ludo-Gothic BDSM as a whole). Apart from either of those, we’ll tackle Amazons, Medusa and the monstrous-feminine revenge argument more directly in the “Predator/Prey” subchapters, in Volume One (which explore Amazons and knights). Also consider the Demon Module’s “Amazons and Demon Mommies,” “Vampires and Claymation,” “Summoning the Whore,” “Exploring the Derelict Past,” and “Follow the White-to-Black Rabbit“; i.e., for good examples (outside Volume Zero) of the cop/victim approach in canonical Amazonomachia and how to subvert it to have the whore’s revenge against profit! I also recommend Volume Zero’s “Symposium; Aftercare” for plenty of extra lists and fun examples. 

The canonical Amazon, then, is a time traveler TERF meant to serve profit by betraying her fellow oppressed (women or not). Ripped spectacularly from the ancient pre-fascist past and expressed in “ancient” fascist forms during state crisis, Red Scare employs Amazonian fascism and Communism—during the usual kayfabe centrism and anisotropic terrorist/counterterrorist refrains pimping nature on the same stage—through a black-and-red aesthetic of power and death corrupting nature for state aims: to feed on nature by triangulating against state victims “of nature,” per Cartesian thought; i.e., to antagonize nature as monstrous-feminine with nature as monstrous-feminine, during the Capitalocene (from Walpole’s Otranto onwards—per Hans Staats’ “Mastering Nature: War Gothic and the Monstrous Anthropocene” [2016] but married, per my arguments, to Raj Patel and Jason Moore’s idea of Capitalocene).

Through these dualistic poetic devices’ assimilative function, the subjugated Amazon is a functionally “white” Indian/whore/savior cowgirl (token) cop who harvests the functionally “black” whore (criminal, alien, etc) during the abjection process (and its bad-faith revenge arguments; e.g., Orientalism). All happen while suffering the usual double standards and embarrassments such betrayals bring on (which camping through ludo-Gothic BDSM anisotropically reverses through the same aesthetic—shrinking profit while sending abjection back towards the colonizer agent/apparatus); e.g., Samus Aran (re: the Poetry Module’s “Playing with Dead Things“) but really a wide variety of such wheyfu herbo monster girls upholding Capitalist Realism: by kettling therefore blaming the whore Archaic Mother*/ghost of the counterfeit. S

Furthermore, such blaming occurs ipso facto “for its own genocide” during the Promethean Quest’s infernal concentric pattern (e.g., Ayla or Savage Land Rogue; re: “‘Death by Snu-Snu!’: From Herbos to Himbos, part two“); i.e., an eternal warrior “of nature as hellish” sent back into Hell come to Earth—all to do battle with the verminized, insectoid-chattel, stigma-animal, diseased-and-deathly Medusa on the same Aegis (the liminal hauntology of war): as her dark, Venus-twin half (the long-lost relative, often an evil/false sister or wicked step mother)! The Amazon is a “scab” operatically punching labor as alien hysterical (the wandering womb), but pulled from their ranks to do so inside the state of exception. From Radcliffe onwards, then, the Amazon is a warrior detective who canonically remains a classic pro-state actor fabricating scapegoats; i.e., from older pre-existing legends repurposed for profit now (the settler colony a chronotope danger disco).

(artist, top: ChuckARTT; bottom-left: Arvalis; bottom-middle: Flyland; bottom-right: Pagong1)

*The male version of the Archaic Mother is something I call the Dragon Lord or Skeleton King (re: the Cycle of Kings with vampiric, draconian or otherwise patriarchal versus matriarchal elements the state can scapegoat; e.g., Sauron or Count Dracula). Offshoots of said half-real monarchs are often lesser necromancers, rogues or death knights (re: offshoots of the Numinous tied to the same danger-disco structure’s unheimlich nightmare home).

Being of the Medusa as Archaic Mother (re: the whore’s paradox, from “Rape Reprise“), Amazons endure endless punishment from on high and down below (capital’s “middle management”; e.g., Ellen Ripley); i.e., a classically female Prometheus, they are always treated as a substantial risk/desperation measure, one that must be collared just as quickly lest she “corrupt,” thus take her fellow soldiers along for the ride (and back whence she came, to hellish territories, forever). In short, the Amazon is a token scapegoat witch (vampire, goblin, etc) policing other witches, therefore whores (re: me, vis-à-vis Silvia Federici, in “Policing the Whore“), and does so through modular-but-intersecting us-versus-them, white-on-black (of any sort, not just skin color) and monstrous (undead/demonic/animalistic) abjection: someone virgin/whore who, per these imbricating persecution networks, eventually exposes through Radcliffean state arbitration (demasking the villain); i.e., shown as whore and released shamefully from service (the endless oscillation used to keep such class, culture and race traitors off-balance while conditioning them to ruthlessly punch down, inside-outside the concentric frontier ghettos they patrol, mid-relegation; i.e., “good job today, bitch—kill you, tomorrow!”); re: Ellen Ripley but also future versions of the female Rambo that came after and expressed in different kinds of neoliberal Gothic’s trademark fantasy-to-sci-fi language: a prison colony police agent serving the state as its token barbarian, all heroes are monsters but assimilation is poor stewardship!

(source)

As “A Note on Canonical Essentialism” describes it; re (from Volume Zero):

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

This is how the subjugated Hippolyta do (the queenly protagonist version of the regular Amazon; e.g., Wonder Woman)—a kind of token, monomyth, queen-for-a-day “fallen Pandora” (or Chaucer’s “Thus swyved was this carpenteris wyf” line, from “The Miller’s Tale“), and one whose previously established map and recursive occupants/warmongering we’ll be camping more; i.e., during Volume Zero‘s “Scouting the Field” (rabies is bad for you) but also through revolutionary cryptonymy with subversive Amazons (a concept Volume One‘s “Introducing Revolutionary Cryptonymy and the State’s Medieval Monopolies on Violence and Terror through Animalized Morphological Expression” unpacks at length; re: the predator/prey dichotomy and canonical abuse of animalized language in furtherance to profit, thus genocide, rape and war).

mirror syndrome

Another term of mine, one that occurs through the euthanasia effect; i.e., the euthanizing of token agents, ignominiously attacking their own black reflections’ troubling comparison (which doubles are for). Such complicit cryptonymy happens during the abjection process/state of exception and, in effect, betraying their own interests (and those of their fellow workers and nature) for profit: Roman fools killed mid-apocalypse, during blind parody’s remediated praxis (re: boom and bust).

Amazonomachia (Amazon pastiche, subjugated/subversive)

(exhibit 1a1b [from Volume Zero‘s “Symposium: Aftercare”]: Top half’s artists, top-far-left: Michel Dinel; top-mid-left: Jiyu-Kaze; top-middle: Viviana Vixen; right: Edu Souza; bottom-middle: Nunchaku; bottom-mid-left: Edwin Huang; bottom-far-left: Frederico Escorsin. Bottom half’s artist: Mika Dawn 3D.

A kind of Galatea traditionally sculpted by Pygmalion and his imitators, Amazons and their complicated pastiche embody social-sexual conflict during oppositional praxis, hence come in a variety of shapes and sizes. They are canonically war dogs of a binarized character. Most notably is the noble Athena versus the dark Medusa from the female legends of Antiquity [also, Queen Hippolyta]: the doubling of the hunter persona, a white and black wolf. Such war-boss, queen bitches canonically offer good behavior and bad behavior as our proverbial “teeth in the night” meant to serve as man’s best friend in centrist theatre [and whose true rebellion goes against the elite’s profit motive]…) 

Not a term I coined, but one I certainly expanded on (to speak on subjugated, reactionary, TERF-style forms and subversive variants, mid-duality). “Amazon battle” is an ancient form of classical, monstrous-feminine art whose pastiche was historically used to enforce the status quo; i.e., Theseus subjugating Hippolyta the Amazon Queen to police other women (making regressive/canonical Amazonomachia a form of monstrous-feminine copaganda). With the rise of queer discourse and identity starting in arguably the late 18th century, later canonical variations in the 20th century (e.g., Marsden’s Wonder Woman) would seek to move the goalpost incrementally—less of a concession, in neoliberal variants (every Blizzard heroine ever—exhibits 45a, 76, 72, from “Making Demons” and Volume Three), and more an attempt to recruit from dissident marginalized groups. The offer is always the same: to become badass, strong and “empowered.” In truth, these regressive/subjugated Amazons become assimilated token cops; i.e., the fetishized witch cop/war boss as a “blind Medusa” who hates her own kind by seeing herself as different than them, thus acting like a white, cis-het man towards them (the “Rambo problem”): triangulating nature against nature, pimping itself for the state. In the business of violent cartoons (disguised variants of the state’s enemies), characters like Ripley or Samus become lucrative token gladiators for the elite by fighting similar to men (active, lethal violence) for male state-corporate hegemony. To that, their symbolism colonizes revolutionary variations of the Amazon, Medusa, etc, during subversive Amazonomachia within genderqueer discourse.

(exhibit 7a: Left: Evil Lyn from He-Man: Revelations [2021] or Carmilla from Netflix’s Castlevania [2017]; middle, artist: Persephone van der Waard of Autumn Ivy as Striga [the strongest, most fascist-appearing vampire sister from Castlevania]; bottom-right: Autumn Ivy; bottom-left and bottom-far-right: Katie Brumbach and Laverie Vallee. This exhibit will unpack each in turn.

First, as explored at length in the thesis volume, the Amazon is monstrous-feminine, a type of liminal expression that is often pornographic, but also heavily conflicted and contested within market forces. Castlevania season three, for example, is basically pure queer bait, but had they actually continued with the mommy-dom setup, it’s a tremendously devilish love letter to queer acts of sodomy that speak to that “freak on a leash” in all of us: “You have only to lose your chains [unless you want to wear a dog color for sex-positive reasons.]” I loved season three’s Gothic sex dungeon as an operatic, classically sinful place to submit to guilty pleasures supplied by powerful women [even if they are framed as inherently duplicitous; i.e., the deceptive faggot [cryptonomy] that is trotted out of and back into the closet over two seasons—real original, Netflix]. As I write in my review of season three [2020]: 

So much of Camilla’s conquest is logistic in nature. This might sound dull, but every decision plays out through wonderful dialogue, abetted by the simple fact that each sister has a unique personality and position: the genius, warrior, analyst, and diplomat. Two of them are even lovers. Still, they talk as family members do, knowing full well what games the others get up to (or don’t). Their realness comes not from a checklist of outrageous traits, but how these play out realistically inside the fairytale castle.

Smack dab in the middle is Hector, the gullible forgemaster. Once bitten, twice shy, he must be convinced to make [monsters] for Camilla’s army. No easy task. This falls to Lenore, the sexy diplomat. The fun lies in her attitude. She’s not doing it because she’s told; she’s having fun, and plays her part superbly. The battles between her and Hector are generally fought with wit and words; they still hold their own against the scrappier melees had by Trevor and Sypha, or Isaac. The style of each makes it distinct, and adds to the show’s overall variety.

When they first meet, Hector mistrusts Lenore, and rightly so; by comparison, Lenore is disarmingly soft—a fact she coldly reminds him of after beating him to a pulp. Her job is to make Hector (and us) forget what she is by being herself. She lies to Hector with bits of truth, giving him what he’s always wanted. It speaks to her talents that she isn’t wrong in this respect. Hector’s second deception belies an underlying desire: to be told what to do. It’s arguably why he served Dracula to begin with. Lenore simply uses it to her advantage.

This does involve a bit of sex. When Lenore uses her body to distract Hector, though, he’s already bought into the scheme. But so has the audience—at least in the sense that they’ve been groomed for a narrative climax. Consider what’s happening elsewhere: Trevor and Sypha storm the church; Isaac rides into Barad-dur v2.0; and Alucard is molested by his new, horny friends, Taka and Tsumi. All comprise a collective build-up reaching its promised conclusion. Not all promises are kept, but herein lies a lateral pleasure, the chagrin of coitus interruptus offset by something comparably delicious to an orgasm: schadenfreude.

 

There’s definitely a strict element to the show’s mommy doms, and making Hector the “little bitch” [a small, effeminate dog on a leash] is one way to do the Amazon scenario. Aside from genderqueer BDSM apologia, though, the Amazon is essentially a freakshow circus act that has become appropriative in regressive, current-day forms; i.e., whose Pavlovian variant of “I am woman, hear me roar!” obeys state mandates through canonical, regressive Amazonomachia. Failure to comply during state decay leads to draconian punishment, including the euthanasia effect’s double standard: either the tomboy is shoved into a [cis-het] wedding gown and married off, or she is put down like a rabid dog for refusing to conform [unlike “rabid” men, who are generally prized for their violent outbursts]. Collared by the state, the “queen bitch” is a war boss who ultimately fetishizes the state’s will, including its historical-material effects: the ubiquitous celebration and female personification of statuesque war, death, lies and rape in a fascinating but ultimately “lesser” form: a lady cop, gladiator and/or reaper in tokenized spaces.

[source]

This appropriation took time, starting with a literal circus persona that fixated on the strongwoman as a dated curios tied to an imaginary past not ruled by men; e.g., late-1800s strongwoman Katie Brumbach. Similar to rockstars, pornstars and various other “stage bunnies” of the 20th/21st centuries, she had a stage name: Sandwina, but also “Lady Hercules.” People tend to forget that heroes are monsters. Hercules was a monster that Sandwina combined with the woman as a classical monster type: the monstrous-feminine by virtue of having manly strength and female attributes. Her naturally strong female body dwarfed the men around her [thus threatening the heteronormative order and literally personifying the suffragette movement]. As such, people like Sandwina were regarded in their time as oddities but also potential threats; or, as Betsy Golden Kellem writes in “The ‘Trapeze Disrobing Act'” (2022):

for a long time, unusually strong women were regarded as aberrant curiosities, described with wonder in the same breath as bearded ladies and living skeletons.” They were literally circus acts—magnetic ones that, Kellem continues, “not only destabilized the white-male basis of physical culture, it challenged popular ideas about female ability, all while showing a discomfiting amount of skin and startling muscle mass (source).

Meanwhile, the likes of Eugen Sandow [future icon of the Mr. Olympia organization] would represent an “imaginary antiquity” that suspiciously came with the statuesque, rippling muscles of a patriarchal hauntological past—a historically sexist tradition carried forward by “Pygmalions” like Conan author, Robert E. Howard, and famous Conan illustrator, Frank Frazetta. Famously Frazetta started his career in 1944, a time when readily-available synthetic steroids did not exist. Women, at this point, had been largely excluded from professional sports [for beating men]; the subsequent 20th century domination of weightlifting and bodybuilding through the weaponization of science against women [and later, against trans people by gentrifying cis women against them; re: Rationality Rules vs trans athletes] occurred specifically through the systemic and escalating abuse of steroids in these sports [Natty Life, 2023] while pointedly excluding marginalized groups from participating. These drugs became not just connected, but essential to the hypermasculine overperformance needed to argue for male superiority[10] in the heteronormative sports world, and by extension, any embodiments of patriarchal strength on- and off-stage.
Another way to look at this cultural regression towards sexual dimorphism, then, was the enforcement of a specific, idealized body image perpetrated through an abuse of technology—specifically medicine—to maintain the status quo/profit motive and Capitalist Realism through body imagery under global Capitalism as “set in stone.” Steroids were originally devised to assist the elderly and the injured, whereas puberty blockers were originally designed for cis children. Eventually the queer community coopted blockers to assist themselves, whereas the Patriarchy fought this measure by demonizing them; the same establishment also coopted hormones to keep cis-het, white men in the most lucrative positions, while also reinforcing those positions under Capitalism to benefit the elite through a homogenized, hauntological male image of strength; i.e., a return to the reimagined past through the cultivation of “beasts” whose war-dog bodies are pumped full of drugs to try and embody the canonical personification of strength to satisfy the profit motive. This double standard extends to tokenized groups; e.g., the “wheyfu” as a warlike, “queen bitch” gargoyle who is simultaneously worshipped and feared for being “not a man” and “acting like a man.”)

(artist: Frank Frazetta)

Now that we’ve revisited the monstrous-feminine, I want to illustrate such an exchange through anecdotes that communicate interpersonal and systemic trauma (a theme that will be become increasingly relevant as we push into the second half of the volume). Before we get to the third-and-final bourgeois trifecta, then, I want to give an anecdote about “thirst traps” and “girl bosses” through my own artistic dialogs; i.e., collaborating with artists playing the part. Thirst traps are canonically scapegoated—punished categorically for being “bad girls”; e.g., Carmilla and Striga (exhibit 7a). Both characters’ shows queer-bait some actually-interesting (non-heteronormative) “mommy dom” archetypes—the Gothic Amazon mom and vampire dominatrix—before putting Pandora back in her box. Netflix forces Carmilla to commit suicide (a bury-your-gays sendoff with lots of fireworks) and shames Evil Lyn for her own “insane” desire to move past the universe as founded on really-boring centrist muscle-dudes duking it out for eternity in Eternia: nation pastiche dressed up as displaced good-vs-evil fantasy narratives, personified by white, cis-het male wrestlers hogging the stage. All the same, subverting these kayfabe narratives by interrogating them within themselves obviously requires working within colonized material and factionalized workers. This process doesn’t always “work out,” resulting in predictable disputes between marginalized groups, which the elite rely on to remain in power (divide and conquer).

For example, I once drew Autumn Ivy as Striga from Castlevania (exhibit 7a, bottom-right) in order to reclaim said character’s monstrous-feminine qualities for sex-positive reasons: the strict-looking dominatrix wearing medievalized fetish gear extending to their naked body as weaponized. This is a complicated process for two reasons: one, purely from a theatrical/ideological standpoint; but also because it involves representations of two artists that aren’t automatically in harmony. Indeed, their relationship to the state (as something to support or resist through nerd culture) may cause them to fight about the Gothic as something to express; i.e., weird canonical nerds vs weird iconoclastic nerds.

We’ll get to that when I describe working with Autumn in just a moment. First, though, the theatrics and Gothic poetics of such a dialog are incredibly liminal. Striga is actually a pretty fascist character in the show’s canon—a black knight carving up “livestock” with her stupidly giant sword (exhibit 1a1a1d; re: “Pieces of the ‘Camp Map’“) as a member of the ruling elite, but also the delegitimate ruler of a hauntologically reimagined Eastern Europe; i.e., the classical domain of men being threatened by crazy vampire moms from an older made-up empire threatening the entire West as white, male and eternal: Nazi vampire she-wolves! All-in-all, Striga is thoroughly colonized—a fascist scapegoat made to ideologically defend Patriarchal Capitalism inside a neoliberal production: “Feminists are age-old hypocrites.” It bears repeating that token concessions with power are always made under duress to some extent; but also that iconoclastic negotiations away from these concessions require certain theatrical paradoxes: a strip tease using fetish gear and athletic, soldierly bodies as weaponized alongside their actual guns, swords, shields, and spears, etc.

(model and artist, left: Autumn Ivy and Persephone van der Waard; right: Sleep Depravity)

Iconoclastic homages to the Dark Amazon, then, aren’t blind masturbation but dialogs of unequal power exchange reversed through codified stigmas and behaviors that subvert the thirst trap’s usual dogmatic instructions; i.e., sex-positive variations that are patently designed to humanize the insect-like brood warrior as a sex-positive thirst trap instead of merely advocating for her unironic, female-coded destroyer persona. Doing so grapples with canon’s ordinary utility/function of the war-boss monster girl; i.e., continuously reducing the female variant of a “boss” character to a fearsome “cum sponge” and call to war that triangulates the same-old reactionary violence towards the usual groups inside the state of exception. These harmful (and ignominious) outcomes can be challenged, but this requires resisting the profit motive, which token agents will do not do; instead, they punch down, attacking members of their own group from “besieged,” self-deceiving pedestals given to them by older state proponents. In-fighting is taught and enforced by people who, if not initially rigid, become inflexible inside a prison-like structure; i.e., to sell out and sacrifice others in the bargain, while acting like the sole, exclusive victim that other minorities are somehow “against.” The worker assimilates, whitewashing the church while serving as an appropriated member of its phalanx of returning gargoyles when Capitalism decays.

For instance, white women/AFAB persons famously facilitate genocide as a protected class along a cis-to-queer gradient, the state granting them diminishing concessions by virtue of their faithfulness to, or breaking from, gender forms. This class betrayal’s Faustian bargain certainly includes cis TERFs, inspired by the delicate female novelists of yore penning kernel-of-truth anxieties of an incredibly bigoted, xenophobic nature that calls for outright police violence against queer people in the future; e.g., echoes of Ann Radcliffe spouted by J.K. Rowling (and others) shaping Britain into a 21st century police state: the unironic Gothic castle but also the equally unironic female knights inside triangulating against state targets. Beyond cis women, queer people can also play cop and cops make for excellent thirst-trap mommy doms. As we shall see with Autumn, intersections of generational abuse and comprise lead to tokenism, thus praxial inertia; i.e., through minority police needlessly complicating labor exchanges and worker action by bullying other workers to enrich themselves within state hegemony.

Despite these grander miscarriages enacting the Amazon as a harmful monstrous-feminine symbol, I want to stress that the idea of the female knight (white or black) can be reclaimed by subverting it away from its canonical, unironically brutalizer function (the militarized fetish). Indeed, it’s incredibly sexy to abjure Capitalism’s regressive Amazon as a police weapon of state terror and violence/power abuse while keeping “the look,” precisely because counterterrorist rebellion uses torturer aesthetics to liberate workers from the same old canonical legends of control through non-harmful sex; i.e., those that present “uppity bitches” as unruly monsters deserving of punishment, going from before William Marsden wrote Wonder Woman, into future interrogations of the sort he prompted regarding the canonical Amazon as something to negotiate, thus transform, into an increasingly sex-positive force: through iconoclastic[11] means that maintain the fearsome aesthetic amid changing class/cultural functions during ludo-Gothic BDSM. But these ongoing negotiations still happen between two (or more) people who are often of two minds about the very symbols being used; forget the aesthetics, the people utilizing them might disagree and even fight over their correct usage if one side has been conditioned to (whether consciously or not) serve the state!

This brings us to our second challenge: worker solidarity and intersectional unity/education threatened by competing labor dialogs mid-exchange; i.e., theatrical disputes centered around material and ideological disagreements tied to our own bodies, gender identities/performances and trauma during liminal expression—embodying monsters inside nerd culture as a form of socio-political discourse. To usher Marsden into the present-day struggle of Gothic-Communist development, I based Striga off one of Autumn Ivy’s publicly available shoot images (left). Personally I thought they were perfect for the role (they certainly looked the part), but didn’t fully realize or address our incompatibilities as artistic collaborators—that our shared generational trauma could divide us due to competing and oppositional aims within capital. Despite me being a trans woman/anarcho-Communist and Autumn a non-binary sex worker and both of us living with trauma under capital, we didn’t exactly “get along.” Point in fact, our voicing of trauma using and regarding the same Amazon aesthetics generally clashed during Gothic liminal expression and I’d like to explain why.

Before I start, though, I want to say that I don’t advertise any of this about Autumn out of sheer spite; nor do I want to apologize for their harmful actions towards me while telling the truth about them as an abusive nerd. As such, I want to achieve praxial catharsis by confronting their abuse of me to accomplish two intersecting aims: a) to make a point about the bourgeois trifectas, and b) acknowledge that they abused me as a client of theirs both looking for a mommy dom and someone who, as a fellow artist/sex worker, aimed to venerate thirst traps by working with Autumn. Given that exposing abuse is a key function of this book, I want to educate readers for the purposes of artistic critique that aims to highlight the factionalized complexities of these kinds of uneven working arrangements that happen “in the wild.” What happened between Autumn and I fits that to a tee: generational trauma begetting interpersonal trauma owing to capital as the divisive element through Gothic poetics. To critique power is to go where power is, and Autumn embodies that well, albeit as someone who abused me during our various exchanges.

First and foremost, Autumn is a headstrong and controlling person; i.e., their desire to be in control tended to overlook my considerations within our business arrangements. Even when trying to uphold their requests, they tended to walk (and talk) over me while making it seem normal. And yet, despite how their requests seemed fair at face value, they tended to be a one-sided ordeal insofar as my thoughts, feelings or rights were concerned. Autumn always acted like the boss, even when they had no grounds for it: a queer boss dressed like an Amazon, but also acting like one of a particular kind; i.e., a SWERF and a moderate strongarm/war boss pushing me around while shoving their own sloganized, superhero merchandise through the market. All the while, our trauma and its means of communicating through mommy-dom/thirst-trap Amazonomachia were competing against each other through monstrous language as something to negotiate: Autumn’s needs and wants trumping mine by virtue of their advertised superiority inside the same oppressed community discussing nerd culture.

For instance, Autumn strongly disliked the label “sex worker” being applied to them publicly because it could hurt their bottom line. It didn’t matter that they had an OnlyFans full of thirst-trap materials that very clearly constituted sex work; any mention of Autumn being a sex worker (calling it like it is) was something they were very forcefully against. And while this might sound okay unto itself, they were also a) only too happy to take my patronage for sex work, while b) stressing their own professional status and using that to tell me exactly how to advertise them in my own galleries and writing (which concerns sex worker rights). It honestly felt pretty bossy of them, but also dense; i.e., invalidating of me as a genderqueer artist/sex worker while constantly advertising themselves as a strong-looking enby who honestly was having their cake and eating it, too: showing less skin (no “ham sandwich,” in their words) and putting themselves on a pedestal above other sex workers while doing the same kind of work: talking dirty and showing off to make people cum; i.e., voice work first, with nudity as a pay-walled afterthought.

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

The problem here, isn’t selling sex, but that Autumn’s approach became prescriptive and self-important; i.e., a weird canonical nerd smiling their Hollywood smile, getting fake tits to emphasize their female attributes within the Amazon persona, and treating false modesty like a lucrative virtue exclusive to them and their brand: the bogus and incredibly harmful argument that partially-clothed bodies and implied nudity are somehow “worth more” than fully naked ones are. It wasn’t explicitly stated, but nevertheless showed in how Autumn treated me over time: they were always the victim, and I could never be one. Regardless of intent, their trauma, their rights, and their business—all trumped my voice in defense of capital (re: intent doesn’t matter, actions do, and function determines function). Thus, instead of overcoming systemic adversity within monstrous language, Autumn actively contributed to it through a coercive heroic-monstrous persona: a moderate Amazon “gym mom” selling strength as a motivational[12] idea—a “feel-good” pill to buy from them while they sought to dominate the market (and its manufactured crises, contests and shortages) through queernormative kayfabe poetics; i.e., monsters that shut down proletarian praxis by being “the best.”

Abusive parties will generally sell themselves as paragons, something to aspire to while exploiting others around them. To be blunt, Autumn’s exploitation stems from commodifying rebellion, recuperating it with Gothic poetics as something to regard with fear and dogmatic worship (violence and terror). They value “positivity” over liberation, a toxic mindset that reliably yielded material and societal effects between us linked to stigmatic language: an expensive price tag (their photoshoots weren’t cheap) and an abusive working relationship regardless of my oppressed status while competing over marginalized, nerdy language. There’s certainly nothing wrong with charging whatever you want for your work, or deciding how much skin you want to show while doing it; but it was the manner to how Autumn controlled me as an erotic artist that rubbed me the wrong way. Anonymity and aliases are one thing but they wanted to be in the public spotlight, clearly doing sex work while telling me exactly what to write about them as the Amazon/victim; i.e., telling people they weren’t a sex worker while capitalizing on a profound double standard that left me feeling cheated, but also threatened. I’m sorry but that’s absurd and unprofessional. “Professional” means more than making money, hand-over-fist; it means treating your clients/co-workers with respect (the two are not mutually exclusive). Not only did Autumn not do this, they treated me solely like a client; i.e., I wasn’t a sex worker but an artist—in short, to “stay in my lane.”

To continue being blunt, Autumn was prioritizing themselves with a self-imposed monopoly informed by pre-existing heteronormative market trends: to, like a gargoyle, be seen and feared through visual instruction, but also open intimidation as a weird canonical nerd. So while there’s certainly nothing wrong with looking Amazonian as a part of your own public image and using that image to fight for the rights of enbies worldwide, Autumn was a rigid negotiator who prioritized themselves in pursuit of their own livelihood. This reflected not just in their treatment of me through veiled threats, but also their framing of the Amazon as a brand image—not as something to teach workers to liberate themselves with, but something for Autumn to treat as a reliable paycheck while marketing themselves as “queer enough.” Their open moderacy bled into their private, professional conduct in ways that frankly felt rude and unprofessional towards me as an artist and genderqueer person invested in sex worker rights; i.e., their business image trumped my own socio-political voice as a weird iconoclastic nerd, who they constantly treated as a threat to them. In short, their socio-material struggles took priority over mine, to the point that it made working with them oddly stressful.

For example, after Autumn had agreed to pay me for a short story that I had written for them to perform, we ran into some basic logistic issues; i.e., they were initially unable to pay me for the services being rendered. This shouldn’t have been cause for great concern. However, when I merely wanted to know what was going on, they begrudgingly said they had lost their PayPal account, but went on to insist I was being unprofessional for asking them to begin with; i.e., trying to secure a means of payment before I submitted the story in question. Per their usual approach, the whole thing felt one-sided—with me being the unreasonable party for asking basic questions and them being well within their rights to take whatever measures they saw fit to protect themselves and their business interests; e.g., their overall business conduct, but also their automated, no-nonsense business contracts when vending their costly sex-work photoshoots. To say they ran a tight ship would be an understatement; that fucker was hermetically sealed.

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

While I certainly get Autumn’s frustration at losing their PayPal account, it still wasn’t an excuse for them to lash out at me; i.e., by acting like a subjugated version of the Amazon they were constantly touting themselves as. And frankly I wouldn’t have cared had their rough treatment of me not habitually coincided with their discrediting of what I was about as a sex worker and erotic artist (we all lash out; it shouldn’t be a regular occurrence tied to one’s brand, however). So while I can certainly understand not wanting to be called a sex worker because sex workers are discriminated against, Autumn’s overcontrolling and inconsiderate treatment of me veered at times into SWERF territory dressed up in rebellious symbolism; i.e., me being pushed around by another marginalized sexual worker in the LGBTQ community who not only does sex work by my book (fucking literally in this case), but also isn’t exactly hurting financially (owns horses and uses them to sell their own merchandise, above) and is thirst-trapping to gym bros with “Amazon/gym mom” gun[13] porn (see the eroticized loading of the “love gun”; exhibit 7b, below). Like, you do you, boo, but maybe respect me a little more as a fellow oppressed worker and weird nerd? Except weird canonical nerds don’t do that; they police and attack iconoclasts, seeing them as threats to the canonical order people like Autumn hardwire to through the profit motive. Despite posturing as rebellious, their performance becomes a pretense eclipsed by the structure controlling their income as expressed through Gothic poetics, which Autumn polices through subterfuge and coercion.

(exhibit 7b: Artist: Autumn Ivy. Despite the presence of masculine strength and Autumn identifying as non-binary in a subversive Amazonian gesture, there remains a thoroughly regressive, cowgirl component that leans into the raw business side of things. In other words, their precious brand recognition and dissemination is hardly subversive enough. Nothing about Autumn’s aesthetic indicates a hard leftist/anti-fascist/anti-corporate stance; indeed, many elements indicate a centrist position appropriating countercultural forms [the tarot and monster tatts] for a police/settler-colonial function with Man Box applications: acting and looking like a tokenized cop in service to patriarchal structures and status-quo clients [cis-het men thirsting after queer-coded cowgirls] while prioritizing themselves as an AFAB sex worker [itself a form of transphobia towards AMAB sex workers].)

My point, here, is that the unresolved and uneven class tensions between us eventually reached a breaking point. This means that when things finally did fall apart, it was actually over something seemingly stupid and small: I had been supporting Autumn fairly regularly—and trying to be a good patron and respect their wishes [e.g. asking permission to show them my cock]—when suddenly I received an impersonal-sounding message from them while I was in a bad place: “I can’t respond right now. Please respect my time.” It sounded prerecorded (and in hindsight, it was), but I was already frustrated with them and going through some heavy shit on my end: a messy rebound right after a tremendously abusive relationship, the temporary banning of my OnlyFans account after sharing artwork on there, and my uncle being hospitalized overnight from a sudden, acute heart attack (the second one in less than a week). In short, I was going through the same kinds of problems that many sex workers go through. Sensing an air of exceptionalism, I spoke my mind and said that I thought Autumn’s message sounded rude.

God forbid, right? Needless to say, the ensuing conversation was not a productive or pleasant one. I thought Autumn was rude, they thought I was rude, and despite the two of us agreeing that it was a giant miscommunication (tied to an automated message, no less), there were some pretty bad vibes present between us. I tried to apologize about being in a bad place but Autumn just had to get their licks in because I’d called them unprofessional; they acted like they looked: loud and assertive, sending some choice words over two short video recordings telling me to basically go fuck myself (“I could tell you TO GO FUCK YOURSELF but I’m not going to!”). It was a very offended performance, one where they could do no wrong and I was a dick for daring to suggest that their conduct or place in the universe was somehow in dispute. Clearly I’d hit a nerve, but it only illustrated how things normally were, albeit to a more incensed degree: their way or the highway spoken from both sides of their mouth. In short, it was queer-boss behavior and I wasn’t really in a state of mind to turn the other cheek. Autumn was right and I was wrong and their picture-perfect smile spoke for itself. Except its message suddenly felt incredibly fake and harmful to me.

 (artist: Autumn Ivy)

I’m mentioning all of this because our dispute was informed by a brand image they were acting out; i.e., as something to protect through tough-guy posturing that generally informed how they treated me as a fellow artist and sex worker when things “were good.” Obviously there’s no clear divide between theatre and real life, but Autumn made no bones about having an image (and livelihood) to protect from my conduct. I think their conduct and my response represents just how messily these miscommunications can get when they happen between workers; i.e., how their resultant hang-ups and ripostes are generally informed by various socio-material factors not entirely or even partially known to both parties. So I mean it when I say there’s no hard feelings between us. But there is a sex-positive lesson to be taught about worker rights during artistic solidarity and expression, and one that concerns Autumn’s abusive conduct as part of their selling point: the gun-toting, inspirational gym mom, enby aesthete throwing their weight around pretty fucking hard the moment a little femboy artist like me (still in the closet at the time) inconvenienced them, or talked about her rights or opinions for a change; i.e., trans misogyny.

To be honest, I had wanted to say more during our falling out to clear things up but Autumn was pissed and so was I. The fact remains, I didn’t mention my uncle to them because I didn’t know he was dead at the time; my abusive surviving uncle didn’t want me attending the hospital visit, so I was at home waiting to hear about the results of the incoming brain scan. I didn’t know it, but he was legally dead by the time Autumn and I had our fight. And perhaps it’s unfair of me to hold that against Autumn, so I technically won’t. I’ll just say that their video messages largely concerned them hurling the most thinly veiled insults imaginable at me (and not in a professional manner), informing me in no uncertain terms just how unreasonable I had been to voice my true feelings at all.

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

Perhaps there was no place for them in Autumn’s mind. Except that’s not how humans (or labor exchanges) work. My uncle was probably dead, I was losing my best friend, and still reeling from my last ex’s abuses. But Autumn? They just couldn’t be bothered to put up with me because their horse had been difficult that morning! Far be it from me to compare a temperamental horse to a dead uncle, or to expect Autumn to have known about Dave; but the fact remains that they were entirely concerned with themselves and I (and my trauma) were a nuisance. It became something to mute, treating me like a no-good AMAB dickhead while lionizing themselves and encouraging me to keep mum (something that all abusers do; e.g., Zeuhl and Cuwu).

Given the terrible timing of things and me admittedly nursing some bruised co-worker/client resentment (for Autumn’s unprofessional, one-sided conduct) on top of what I was going through, it was a perfect storm of self-centeredness from them and denied expectations from me. Shit happens, but there’s a still sex-positive lesson to be learned, here. Specifically I want us to reflect on what transpired between Autumn and I in relation to capital and Amazon aesthetics at large; i.e., as a countercultural means of interrogating trauma during the potential for labor and cultural disputes. The handling of the Amazon/mommy dom aesthetic becomes something to improve upon during complex labor exchanges/negotiations while understanding what made Autumn so attractive to me and my work: their brand of Amazon aesthetics as something to reclaim from its owner’s bourgeois antics, and indeed valuing what Autumn has to offer while healing from their parasocial abuse. Per Sarkeesian’s adage, I can enjoy their powerful body and critique their abusive behavior as something to both recognize as part of their person and a thing to separate from the aesthetic: Despite how Autumn absolutely looks the part, they do not play it in ways that help workers at large; we can do that for them by analyzing and learning from what Autumn puts into the world.

Writing this section has been stressful, and appreciating Autumn’s creative output and striking presentation helps me relax in ways that grants me agency having survived to speak on their abuse: fetishizing and enjoying the ghost of my abuser as something that can prioritize healing from trauma through a likeness that isn’t the original (a tactic that will come up repeatedly from here on out; e.g., Cuwu, exhibit 16b). The takeaway isn’t so much that Autumn was an apathetic, high-control diva who was actually pretty awful to work with (they were, to be clear); they and I eventually fought about it and haven’t engaged with one another since. Instead, I want you to consider their pulverized solidarity and idiosyncratic stupidity (meaning in the Marxist sense of privatized labor stupefying workers) as connected to their complicated brand image leading to praxial inertia during liminal expression: the weird canonical nerd/enby girl boss (a queer boss acting cis to serve the profit motive) defending their thirst-trap image in blunt-force, centrist, dog-eat-dog ways; i.e., “I am strong and right, you are not” embodying class dormancy in favor of the status quo. It’s punching down by an enby emulating those who normally punch down: white, cis-het men. By acting like one, enbies like Autumn perform and present as cops, often while wearing a mask-like smile as part of their public image.

The moment I introduced even a modicum of tension in defense of myself and my rights, Autumn ditched any sense of manners and doubled down on their usual performance as a veiled means of attack: defending their home and uniform as besieged by little ol’ me. That’s generally how moderates work, you see; they’re polite until they’re not. It was like arguing with someone who had fallen in love not just with themselves, but specifically their own sculpted image as a centrist comic book hero. It was, in a sense, a self-deception on both ends (despite my trauma, I could have spoken up sooner), but one whose complicated subterfuge led Autumn to coerce me in service of the profit motive; i.e., they didn’t give a toss, as long as they got paid and looked good doing it, upholding the current linguo-material order of genderqueer language under capital by acting like a canonical gargoyle. To that, I was supposed to keep quiet, but I won’t and it feels cathartic to speak out.

Now that we’ve gone over Autumn as a kind of “queer boss” in the wild, keep them in mind; we’ll explore similar dialectical-material tensions in regards to other workers and their own complicated praxis/trauma throughout the manifesto and remainder of the book. For the moment, let’s move onto the third bourgeois trifecta—the coercion trifecta that results from these kinds of manufacture and subterfuge:

• Gaslight. A means of making abuse victims doubt the veracity of their own abuse (and their claims of abuse).
• Gatekeep. A tactic more generally employed by those with formal power, denying various groups gainful employment (thus actual material advantage) or working platforms that allow them to effectively communicate systemic injustices perpetrated against them.
• Girl-boss. Tokenism, generally through triangulation: of white, cis-het or at least cis women towards other minorities.

This trifecta is used more liberally by neoliberals (or centrists, vis-à-vis Autumn), as fascists tend to default to brute force. However, deception and lies—namely fear and dogma—are commonplace under fascism, as are token minorities (though these will swiftly disappear as rot sets in).

As Gothic Communists, our aim is deprivatization and degrowth—not to abolish everything outright, but move consumption habits gradually away from the neoliberal “Holy Trinity” within Capitalism’s fiscal end goals

• Infinite growth. Pushing for more and more profit.
• Efficient profit. Profit at any cost.
• Worker/owner division. A widening of the class divide.

as disseminated through the three bourgeois trifectas. Rejecting all of these, Capitalism becomes something to transmute, proceeding into Socialism and finally anarcho-Communism through Gothic poetics. This isn’t possible unless sex work becomes an open discussion, not a private means of enrichment and control. As Autumn demonstrates, said enrichment and control are things to embody and live by according to a brand image; i.e., an aesthetic with a bourgeois function tied to individual workers punching down with zero empathy inside a dog-eat-dog structure. It’s precisely that kind of thing that monstrous aesthetics need to challenge, not support as Autumn does (while encouraging them to charge through “constructive criticism” guided by sound theory).

(artist: Nat the Lich)

To stand against the bourgeoisie and capital is to resist their trifectas and financial end goals, thus stand against “Rome’s” self-imposed, endlessly remediated glory as inherently doomed to burn by design (the strongman’s toxic stoicism a mask behind which madness historically reigns; and elsewhere, the elite under American hegemony sit far away from the flames). However, like Rome itself, even that activity of resistance by us is far more complicated than it initially appears. The basic concept involves our “creative successes” that occur during oppositional praxis, synthesized into proletarian forms within our daily lives as workers; i.e., according to how we treat each other as weird nerds who can come to blows over the confrontation of trauma, but also its interpretation through Gothic poetics, mid-exchange. Rebellion isn’t simply refusing to obey the state; it’s being kind to each other as a means of monstrous instruction that camps canonical renditions of sex work as monstrous. Doing so liberates workers from systems of socio-material control by first allowing people to imagine the changing of these structures, then implementing said changes in highly inventive ways that are respected and upheld during intersectional solidarity.

(artist: M Leth)

While such poetic strategies double within the liminal expression of oppositional praxis (the Six Doubles), they are canonically denied to labor movements or otherwise recuperated from them to serve state interests. Often, “resistance” is heroically performed—limited to half-real, simulative spaces of containment regarding worker ingenuity as controlled forms of monomythic opposition; i.e., descending into Hell with a militarized avatar whose warlike gestures embody state aims vis-à-vis Cartesian dualism: nature (and the Global South) as something to conquer through hauntologized force under neoliberal Capitalism. To that, Cameron’s refrain (shooters) limits monsters to “scored points” achieved through projectile-based combat against an endless army of zombies, demons and/or anthromorphs inside an obstacle course/shooting range through military optimism: holocaust by bullet. These overtures of state violence manifest in a variety of videoludic exchanges, be that an FPS, TPS (run ‘n gun, Metroidvania, platformer) or RTS with shooter elements, and so on. There are no shortage of enemies to educate players (often young men, but also blindly parodic Man-Box proponents that appeal to these men; e.g., waifus/war-bride avatars, above) to kill unthinkingly for the state, regardless of where the Imperial Boomerang and states of exception are (e.g., Doom II: Hell on Earth, 1994).

Note: This section is very important to my ludology scholarship, and would go onto be cited in all of my book volume’s afterward, as well as “Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning” in my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus. —Perse, 4/4/2025

Power is a performance that upholds through the perception of impossible things like total control, endless enemies, ultimate strength or absolute victory through kayfabe reversals. The same goes for containment, whose paradox of total imprisonment our thesis discussed in relation to videogames as breakable; i.e., how speedrunning and spoilsport gaming attitudes normally contain tremendous invention that canonically restrict the development and execution of emergent puzzle-solving to single texts in gaming culture[14], versus applying that mentality to reconfigure larger extratextual structures; e.g., Coincident’s “Doom Strategy Guide – Okuplok’s Mancubus Cliff” (2023, below) treating player invention more as a hobby on par with a Rubik’s cube—or hell, a human beating Tetris (1985) for the first time in its 38-year existence (aGameScout’s “After 34 Years, Someone Finally Beat Tetris,” 2024)—versus escaping Capitalist Realism by playing videogames (and other such experiments) in ways that resist the profit motive within the neoliberal era (with organized speedrunning arguably having started in 1990[15], just before the fall of the Soviet Union). The puzzle is ostensibly impressive, but the much-touted “progress” of solving it becomes an empty gesture insofar as liberating worker minds is concerned. Doing so has no effect on the external world unless the attitude for solving complicated puzzles through emergent gameplay is deliberately taken outside of the text. Otherwise, the hauntology (and its canceled future) are entirely self-contained:

In truth, the degree of conscious unity against grander historical-material problems can be applied to capital through rebellious worker action and ludo-Gothic-BDSM poetics across all mediums and labor forms; e.g., speedrunning, which can work (from my thesis volume) “as a communal effect for solving complex puzzles and telling Gothic ludonarratives in highly inventive ways. As we’ll see moving forward, this strategy isn’t just limited to videogames, but applies to any poetic endeavor during oppositional praxis”; i.e., intersectional, multi-layered strategies of resistance and misdirection that strive to demonstrate there is no outside of the text, applying the imagination and effort needed to transform the world around us by any and all means necessary. To that, I think the grassroots culture and non-profit approach to speedrunning allows larger groups of people to solve immensely difficult problems collectively outside of established business practices: thwarting Capitalist Realism by weaponizing the collective ingenuity and incredible puzzle-solving power of speedrunning against the elite.

If popular videogames franchised under neoliberal Capitalism, and organized speedrunning began to form right before the end of the Cold War in 1990, then its proletarian utility (and other such revolutionary strategies overlapping within nerd culture) must do so after the end of history’s cultural myopia began to thicken. Doing so requires inventiveness in the face of tremendous confusion (worker menticide) and state-sponsored adversity (many speedrunners just want to run their games and ignore the problems of the real word; e.g., Caleb Hart, who we shall examine in Volume Three, Chapter Four). The bourgeoisie might seem to hold all the cards, here, but they cannot kill all workers who resist, nor do they possess the means to completely monopolize violence and terror against rebellious forces; likewise, they cannot hope to alienate us from our own labor as a weapon to levy against them unless we surrender its power and poetics exclusively to them. Subjugation means total surrender as something of a choice when presented with the facts: submitting to Capitalist Realism in those respects, staying inside Plato’s cave. This book’s praxial focus, then, is to enrich propaganda and sex workers by making them (and the world around them) progressively more and more proletarian through Gothic poetics as something to fearlessly apply anywhere, regardless of who complains or fights back. As part of nerd culture as something to reclaim, we become “awakened,” hence emotionally/Gothically intelligent weird nerds aware of class/cultural struggles in relation to each other in continuum. The rewards of gradual, uphill emancipation outweigh the risk of state violence committed by class traitors like Autumn playing it safe inside nerd culture (segregation doesn’t prevent genocide; it enables it).

We must not only avoid such incidents, thereby rescuing the Gothic aesthetic from a menticidal function that maintains the status quo; we must interrogate and confront our own trauma through similar incidents that occur regularly between workers when interrogating power using Gothic paradox. To that, we must gradually become our own dark agents, including killer-rabbit, “Trojan” bunnies who tell splendid, very-gay lies (exhibit 7c and 7d in a figurative sense; 100a4 [from Volume Three] in a more literal sense) and—as sex workers with subversive fetish props, kink and BDSM—weave our own elaborate strategies of misdirection, thread-by-thread, into the praxial fabric of “acceptable” sin, rebellion and vice, but also power, prestige and strength personified: Hell as something to rule over collectively by reclaiming the monstrous language that Capitalism uses to commodify our struggles authored by the system. The state markets and sells Gothic poetics all the time. We just have to deprivatize their canonical transactions and framing during our own creative actions; i.e., in Gothic-Communist ways that champion monstrous worker solidarity as fundamental to the development process, deconstructing harmful binaries while encouraging anti-heteronormative Gothic expression through iconoclastic monsters, locations and rituals of unequal power exchange.

(artist: In Case)

So put aside the elite’s cheap, coercive garbage and work for something better to consume that we make for ourselves. If “you are what you eat,” then become something darkly delicious whose consumption actually makes the world a better place; i.e, by openly talking about trauma through Gothic poetics, whose frankly paradoxical performances and play become utilized in spite of the risks to constitute something that moderates like Autumn (and other weird canonical nerds) cannot stand: a pedagogy of the oppressed that alters societal and material conditions. Its engagement occurs between complex, liminal expressions of power in submissive and dominant forms—but also undead, demonic and animalistic avatars—that provide a potent, playful means of voicing things that embody or otherwise speak out about systemic trauma; i.e., as something to express in monstrous, paradoxical language, normally receiving it from similar-looking entities that ultimately serve the state.

To it, we must subvert them  during ludo-Gothic BDSM—meaning in far more openly transgressive/dissident language than Autumn dares to (they’re a cop); we must “make it gay” by rebelling in revolutionarily meaningful ways, thus achieve liberatory catharsis and release during praxial synthesis—camping the canon through our own identities, labor and bodies, whose Gothic poetics consciously challenge heteronormative (and tokenized, queernormative) standards. It becomes joyous and orgasmic, but also a form of asexual public nudism whose statuesque presentations make our canonical foils sweat:

(exhibit 7c: Artists I have worked with or commissioned, or whose creations have inspired me when making my own sex-positive work. Top-right-to-mid-left: Filmation’s 1987 The Emperor of the Night; top-far-left: Natharlotep; mid-top-left: Nya Blu; low-mid-left: Songyuxin Hitomi; bottom-left: Bokuman; bottom-middle: Zayzay; bottom-right: Luna Seduces; upper-far-middle-right: Ronin Dude; middle: Playful Maev. All embody something rebellious in the Satanic sense; i.e., through Gothic poetics, stressing a morphological personal expression that is outside the Cartesian, heteronormative standard. For example, Playful Maev was gynodiverse in terms of the labia she drew in her work; indeed, I specifically commissioned her to draw my OC, Ileana, for that reason!)

(exhibit 7d: Top-left artist: Persephone van der Waard; top-middle: Miss Misery; top-and-bottom-right: Tatsuya Yoshikawa; bottom-left, artist: Persephone van der Waard; bottom-right, artist: Persephone van der Waard. Queens of hell are things to fashion; i.e., great and fearsome witches and demons. The top-left is Miss Misery drawn as a great ruler of Hell; the bottom-left is Ileana, my sex-positive witch queen who uses her tremendous magic powers [and chonk] to fight against evil kings for the rights of all witches; my OC Pickle [bottom-left] was envisioned as a kind of queenly demon in her own right; and Yoshikawa clearly loves their oni and spirits. All embody the sort of queenly entities that patriarchal men demonize and fear but also sing about and commodify in rock ‘n roll forms; e.g., Carmilla and Striga, but also Witchtrap’s 2012 “Queen of Hell” being the “queen of her kind!” opposite Helstar’s rendition of Dracula/Orlock declaring, “I am the king of my kind!” in their 1989 guitar showcase, “Perseverance and Desperation.” You gotta take that entire process and turn it on its head: “Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.”)

While making monsters yourself (thus being a weird nerd), remember how class and culture warfare start with imagination as something previously informed by state-corporate propaganda and its Faustian pacification: “Better to serve in Heaven than reign in Hell” amounting to a kind of “false service” where they eat you (a bit like the old Twilight Zone episode, “To Serve Man,” 1962). All the while, the elite want us to forget how all deities reside in our breast, that we are the devils of the world and the Gothic imagination is our workshop. The world, then, can become one where non-privatized dreams and nightmares come true—that have the collective power to liberate sex workers from bourgeois tyranny and avoid the repeating of older historical materialisms currently unfolding during Capitalist Realism as it presently exists: weird canonical nerds like Autumn, who maintain these structures as they currently function—scaring people through Hell as a monopolized threat of state violence, not creative empowerment. We can all be kings, queens and intersex/non-binary monarchs under a New Order where vertical power arrangements become an awful legend of the tyrannical past; i.e., on par with Richard Matheson’s Commie Zombie-Vampires finally(?) laying Cartesian dualism to rest in I am Legend, 1954 (according to Debora Christie, anyways; source: “A Dead New World: Richard Matheson and the Modern Zombie,” 2011).

Essentially the above exhibit is where I coined the idea of “the monopoly of monsters/morphological expression” vis-à-vis Weber’s monopoly of violence and Asprey’s monopoly of terror (re: “The State: Its Key Tools” from “Paratextual Documents“). —Perse, 4/4/2025

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

So, while “Rome” and its proponents of the Protestant ethic pimping nature (re: Autumn) absolutely gargle non-consenting balls, it’s completely inadequate for Gothic Communists to say that “‘Rome’ sucks and so do Capitalism, neoliberalism and fascism.” That won’t work. Not only is it stating the obvious, but far too many workers defend marriage, war and the state itself as sacred—its ritualized sacrifices in all of these fields; i.e., “People die, abuses happen, wives get raped, but the state is sacrosanct, sovereign, above judgement.” Instead, the hauntological and abject nature of canonical, heteronormative devilry must be critiqued in relation to what pro-state proponents already dominate: the ghost of the counterfeit as an ongoing lie that serves the elite through the process of abjection. As Autumn demonstrates, said process turns potentially unruly workers into stupid backstabbers whose concept of ownership isn’t just raw utility for the state, but sublimated exploitation in alienizing/alienating ways. This completely-fucked situation calls for subversive transformation and black magic during liminal expression; it calls for successful proletarian praxis through our creative successes and dark forces—our darkness visible achieving praxial synthesis in opposition to the bourgeois trifectas (and proponent gargoyles like Autumn using them to keep dissidents in line; re: gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss)!

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

Volume Zero thoroughly discusses power as a paradoxical performance, which denotes both nuance and difficulty in its execution as a liminal proposition: on the surface of and inside thresholds that remediate praxis. Like wrestling or boxing, Gothic-Communist development is an uphill game of gradual pressure and inches from both sides cultivating the Superstructure. But rebellious decisions have to collective, second-nature and informed, or they ultimately serve the state. For the next two chapters, then, I want to outline the operational difficulties present within oppositional praxis when challenging the state; then go over the Gothic mode (and its many lists) in detail, accompanied by my original examination of the nuance present during oppositional praxis (and its various lists).

Onto “‘Revolutionary Cryptonymy’ opening, and ‘Predators and Prey’ part one“!

---

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

[2] From War in the Shadows: the Guerrilla in History (1994): “Not only can terror be employed as a weapon, but any weapon can become a weapon of terror: terror is a weapon, a weapon is terror, and no one agency monopolizes it.”

[3] I.e., “egregores/monsters” as codified in visible, emblematic forms whose function (not aesthetic; e.g., golems) is to communicate heteronormative dogma when viewed. My emphasis on “gargoyle” as a state tool of menticide was more of a conversational focus in this upcoming chapter when I first wrote it. I’ve since decided to preserve that rhetoric, even though it doesn’t appear too much elsewhere in the book (again, the term is more or less synonymous with monsters, simulacra and egregores).

[4] “Dated” being a paradox, insofar as the abjection of systemic abuse puts it in perceived ideas of the past as in “not now, not here”; e.g., saying corporal punishment happened “back then” before applying that exception globally throughout the entire empire except for certain areas dedicated to colonized or otherwise oppressed groups: prisons and ghettos as reliable sites of torture committed by the corrupt, the monstrous, the other. Even outside the state of exception, material reminders of the historical past are all around us in Gothic forms, which condition or otherwise encourage unironic versions of these painful behaviors in present evocations of canonical barbarism; i.e., whose counterfeits synonymize pain with harm instead of granting calculated risks that actually reestablish control for all workers (and not just those in the Imperial Core fearful of abuse from their assigned destroyers and “protectors”; e.g., white, cis-het women).

[5] The series is not without its own fan-made porn; e.g., this animation by Hammy Toy of Brooklyn fingering his own asshole.

[6] Fan animations, unlike canonical works, tend to reject efficient profit. For that, compare this 2022 DBZ fan project by Studio Stray Dog to the animation and art in Dragon Ball Super (2017). Night-and-day difference!

[7] The gargoyle is a hauntological figure insofar as it becomes a humanoid being to relate to out of the past while still belong it.

[8] I.e., the internalization of the foreign plot in fascist thinking.

[9] A small note about “good/bad” in ludo-Gothic BDSM language: To be dialectical-material throughout this book, I will be consciously referring to bad/good monsters, witches, education, food, parentage et al as bourgeois/proletarian (or canonical/iconoclastic). This being said, while the qualifier “good/bad” can become incredibly obfuscating during oppositional praxis, “bourgeois play” also sounds incredibly funny and terrifying to me in BDSM parlance. To preserve my sanity I’ll stick to good/bad play whenever broaching that subject, as it frankly rolls off the tongue better (and fits with the BDSM idea of shame and praise—e.g., “good girl, bad girl!” etc). Praise and intimacy don’t have to be sexual at all; heteronormative canon automatically and coercively sexualizes everything in sexually dimorphic, incredibly abusive/sublimated ways. Despite the binarized roles in BDSM, iconoclastic praise reduces stress for both sides (e.g., me saying “good girl!” to my computer when it doesn’t crash as I write this book).

[10] This superiority is a harmful body image that is sold to younger and younger people, taught to visualize and connect said physiques as linked to commercial gain under capital at the sacrifice of longevity and physical health (Dr. Chris Raynor’s “Sam Sulek: Recipe For Disaster?” 2023); or as Gen Kanayama and Harrison G. Pope Jr write in “History and Epidemiology of Anabolic Androgens in Athletes and Non-athletes” (2017):

The use of androgens, frequently referred to as anabolic-androgenic steroids (AAS), has grown into a worldwide substance abuse problem over the last several decades. Testosterone was isolated in the 1930s, and numerous synthetic androgens were quickly developed thereafter. Athletes soon discovered the dramatic anabolic effects of these hormones, and AAS spread rapidly through elite athletics and bodybuilding from the 1950s through the 1970s. However it was not until the 1980s that widespread AAS use emerged from the elite athletic world and into the general population. Today, the great majority of AAS users are not competitive athletes, but instead are typically young to middle-aged men who use these drugs primarily for personal appearance (source).

[11] I.e., an iconoclastic concept I’ve explored in my own graduate/postgraduate work; e.g., “What an Amazon Is, Standing in Athena’s Shadow” (2017) written when I was still in the closet, followed by my subversive train of Amazon artwork throughout the following years: exhibit 7a, but also subversions of Frazetta’s artwork with exhibit 0a2c and exhibit 102a1; as well as my OCs Ileana, Revana, Siobhan and Virago in exhibits 7d, 37f, 37g, 61a2, 84, etc; classical myths like the Medusa, 23b; and in subversive movie/videogame fanart like Corporal Ferro, Marisa, Chun Li and Zarya in exhibits 85, 104a2, 111b; etc.

[12] A huge part of Autumn’s market is motivational speaking/positive thinking with T&A during workout sessions. Think Richard Simmons, but sexier (no offense).

[13] Settler colonialism, whether American or not, goes hand-in-hand with romanticized, but also fetishized weapons as displays of terror (the fascist cult of machismo/weapons). For a melee variant, consider the straight-up TERF queen/war boss, Odessa Stone from Overwatch (2016), which we’ll explore in Volume Three, Chapter Four.

[14] I.e., “gamer culture,” which, as we’ve established in our thesis volume, is predominantly white, cis-het, and male. Moreover, many “metas” exist within manufactured competition to serve the profit motive; e.g., fighting games and professional teams of the FGC as a globalized operation across multiple countries. If you don’t complete, you don’t exist.

[15] As Eric Koziel writes in Speedrun Science: A Long Guide to Short Playthroughs (2019):

In March of 1990, Nintendo of America staged an event in Dallas, Texas […] called the “Nintendo World Championships.” While this was mainly a marketing event to capture and further motivate the explosive success of the NES, it grew into a full-on circuit. While the event itself was built around total score, the Nintendo World Championships have a place in history as one of the earliest instances of organized speedrunning (source).