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.

An Uphill Battle (with the Sun in Your Eyes): Operational Difficulties and Revolutionary Cryptonymy

“Only fools buck the tiger. The odds are all on the house!”

—Doc Holiday, Tombstone (1993)

Picking up where “Mission Statement and Remediating Modern-day ‘Rome’” left off…

This chapter concerns the operational difficulties that emerge during oppositional praxis from a predominantly theoretical standpoint; i.e., canon vs iconoclasm. It divides into three parts.

• Part one divides into three pieces:

• The intro (included in this post) introduces the problem of state monopolies through violence, terror and morphological expression, and how to fight back as a state victim through revolutionary cryptonymy by using animalized Gothic poetics.
• “Predators“ (included in this post) considers the state’s monopoly of violence (and terror) as told through its animalized soldiers, but also their bodies as things if not depicted in heteronormative ways, then policed as such; i.e., by the Amazon and similar monstrous-feminine entities as relayed in ways that generally “corrupt” and triangulate against/prey on other minorities.
• “Prey“ considers those who hide like, and manifest as, animals in the shadow of unironic Gothic castles (whose initial formation and campy subversion we will also examine, vis-à-vis Horace Walpole and Matthew Lewis).

• Part two concerns arrangements of power that are shared and worn: namely rings and collars of the Tolkien-esque sort, and in various roleplay settings but especially the Gothic castle and vampirism as something to summon and evoke.
• Part three takes these praxial factors and considers them in relation to the state’s authored stupidities; i.e., as things to challenge through our own Gothic poetics’ creative successes when interrogating trauma ourselves.

A small (three-page) 2025 addendum: Whereas “The Nation-State” discussed the trifectas of capital, here we get into the uphill battle of monopolies; i.e., challenging profit through the whore’s revenge with ludo-Gothic BDSM during the dialectic of the alien reclaiming such things. Such abstractions are basically Communism and Capitalism in small, whose theatrical subversions will be seen/treated by cops as “violent” (terrorism) no matter how we frame them. And frame them we must, in order to survive; re: the state preys on us by pimping us, and silence is genocide!

So be on your guard, but use the Aegis to protect you and yours from bad actors infiltrating your ranks; i.e., by speaking out behind cryptonymic buffers that reflect the enemy’s bad-faith falsehoods back at them! To hug the Medusa (and her Communist palliative Numinous), we must embrace the “woke” elements that Gothic (and its modular poetics and hermeneutics) praxially entail; e.g., as John the Duncan argues in “Universalism & The Anti-Woke” (2025), “Rather than celebrate the death of woke, I say we revive and herald it” (source); re: to raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness, mid-camp. “To critique power, you must go where it is” inside and outside of workers, on and offstage; re: when the Man comes around (to pimp you), show him (and his token servants) your Aegis and its holistic pedagogy of the oppressed giving such things shape: during asymmetrical warfare pushing for universal liberation that walks away from Omelas together (no appeasing the colonizer through token normativities gentrifying and decaying into themselves)!

(ibid.)

As such, Gothic push-pull (oscillation) plays with the natural “fuzziness” of human language; i.e., during ludo-Gothic BDSM; re: Gothic Communism is a holistic discipline that takes everything dualistically into account: mid-liminal-expression while arbitrating dialectical-material scrutiny in favor of praxial catharsis (and its pro-nature/-nature synthesis working in opposition to state doubles). Whatever we make, they will double, but in doing so must contend with our cryptonymy reversing abjection versus theirs at the same time! Monopolies are a myth!

By extension, any counterfeit the state authors—meaning whatever dark fens or temples of confusion they erect during the liminal hauntology of war and its chronotopes (re: Metroidvania and similar structures embodied by different whorish performers)—we will haunt; i.e., lurking on its half-real, spectral surfaces both inside-outside the decaying and tremendous obscurity (and consequently untapped power) of its labyrinthine thresholds (next page)! The Gothic is writ in decay and parsed through dialectical-material scrutiny (re: flow determines function, not aesthetics), and no one group can monopolize the aesthetic (and function) of the violence, terror and monsters home to such things.

This, whereas capital and its traitors (cops) alienate and sexualize everything for profit, we whores do so in praxial opposition; i.e., while undermining Cartesian thought, heteronormativity and setter colonialism: to liberate universally during intersectional solidarity using preferential code (e.g., dark gentle mommy dommes, below)—our Numinous castles in the flesh! Witness and worship what you see, but also, learn from it to recultivate the Wisdom of the Ancients by anisotropically camping the canon: abandon all hope, all ye who enter here! Then calculate whatever risks unfold to speak idiosyncratically through dualistic struggle; i.e., by healing from rape together through relative privilege and oppression, both being simultaneously foreign and familiar to both sides differently through stolen, repurposed language (we’ll unpack “similarity amid difference” and rape play more during the manifesto postscript, “Healing from Rape”)!

(model and artist: Vera Dominus and Persephone van der Waard cz)

Power lies in performance, and everyone loves the whore; per our pedagogy of the oppressed, we survivors of rape will make rapists (which cops are) fear us and our paradoxical chambers (of Mazarbul or otherwise)—i.e., in ways they already do, but which we will control to our advantage. . As the Archaic Mother haunting the state’s profit motive, then, Medusa cannot be killed; she—thus we as her little offshoots serving each other through a veneer of domination set loose upon the Earth—have evolved to divide in unity (stochastic counterterrorism versus state terror), her head still a part of the body and land/residence it’s cut from. Breaking state monopolies to splinter Capitalist Realism on our backsides, so do workers use whatever’s on hand to summon the Big Whore: to conjure up a post-scarcity world inside the chronotope in the flesh and its pre-capitalist language (our overgrown, castle-like peaches, above)! Hell is our home!

Labor back, land back; violence, terror and monsters back—and all during revolutionary cryptonymy reversing abjection (thus its monopolies): nature as monstrous-feminine sitting on capital with a colossal Ozymandian dumper! To introduce an element of play over something is to camp it; i.e., to give control over canon by playing with it, placing it in quotes; e.g., “rape” and similar avenger language surrounding the harm such play sits adjacent to. That is our apocalypse/deal with the devil, trading in the subversive power of sin—a dark, uneven, forbidden force whose Great (fungal[1] butt) Pirate Queen and her “booty” during ludo-Gothic BDSM the state and its proponents can never fully harvest and ingest, thus pimp and police: through perfidious copies turned against us and our dark poetry’s cryptomimesis (the echo of trauma as camouflage during a war of deception through the Gothic  language of sex and force playing out, on and offstage)! Her power is naked, clothed or not—a dark threat to tease out paradoxical joys and terrors (re: “Psychosexual Martyrdom“)!

(artist: Lady Melamori)

To it, oppositional praxis yields a two-way war of mirrors, and Medusa always fucks back to corrupt such implements; i.e., by punching up from Hell to turn the monomyth into a Promethean Quest that empowers the chattelized: through the usual languages of persecution that Medusa has embodied out of the Archaic Period into the West’s own self-dug graveyard! Along with reclaimed sodomy and blood libel, witch hunts will wither our enemies, but also—as this volume shall explore—the avenger dialectic of Amazons and knights in animalized predator/prey language!

An Uphill Battle, part one: “Predators and Prey,” or Introducing Revolutionary Cryptonymy and the State’s Medieval Monopolies on Violence and Terror through Animalized Morphological Expression

And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. The fear and dread of you will fall on every living creature on the earth, every bird of the air, every creature that crawls on the ground, and all the fish of the sea. They are delivered into your hand. Everything that lives and moves will be food for you; just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you all things.”

—Genesis 9, “The Covenant of the Rainbow” (c. 400 BC)

“If you became a shogun, there’d be nothing but devils in this world!” said Jubei Kibagami, criticizing Genma Himuro, his immortal foe in Ninja Scroll (1993) for being the worst-of-the-worst (and in the warring-states period, that’s really saying something). Jubei wasn’t a samurai, you see; he was a ronin. Freed from Japan’s class structure, ronin were bereft of materials and land—like Jesus, but more brutal. In the tradition of the Western genre, Jubei retools his formidable warrior skills to help those less privileged than himself: impoverished small clans, but also women. He’s the tyranny of evil men trying to be the shepherd, a bad motherfucker who chooses not to be a dick like Genma does. Unlike Jubei, Genma is a class traitor and lying sadist who only cares about gold as a means to an end: achieving his police state by becoming the “Shogun of the Dark,” ruling through menticidal waves of terror (re: Meerloo) and violence from the shadows. Hell is monopolized by the state and summoned anew, generally through power structures like castles.

This section explores Ninja Scroll—a film which “Healing from Rape” will return to, but also “Demons and Dealing with Them” from the Demon Module. —Perse, 4/6/2025

A fog on the brain, this darkness harbors state monopolies of violence, terror and morphological expression that apologize for police brutality in the present, regressing towards ever more antiquated[2] (and fearsome) forms amid new invasions; i.e., through a fatal nostalgia that consigns the worker mindset to all the usual (and ignominious) dooms within capital’s leveraging and structuring of power inside itself: rape, torture and death while systemic racism (and other aspects of Cartesian dualism) invade the imaginary past (having never existed in the historical medieval period at a systemic level). All sit inside a planned, apocalyptic structure to return to greatness with, one filled with the brutal enactors of state abuse built around the traditional sites of regeneration for state agents—castles and knights being classic BDSM devices expressed through the cryptonymy mechanism linked to abjection.

To that, Genma uses endless treachery and lies during the liminal hauntology of war (the summoning of the reimagined Gothic castle and its hellish abuses as things to move through) to recruits greedy warlords to him—the bourgeois devils Jubei warns about during their final duel. In the end, Jubei cannot kill Genma, so he buries him alive—trapping his savage nemesis inside a golden prison of his own design: “There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.” As this subchapter will establish, the medieval character of state violence and terror cannot be destroyed during morphological expression, only subverted or contained through linguo-material “traps” we put into motion during revolutionary cryptonomy as an essential means of counterterrorist liberation; i.e., by throwing the setter-colonial character of heteronormativity into dispute through a rebellious medieval, postcolonial imaginary. Taking Hell back while doubling its colonial forms.

This subchapter primarily considers the theory, revolutionary cryptonymy, through morphological[3] expression when using animalized Gothic aesthetics (with undead and demonic elements too, of course). To that, I want to quote a snippet from our thesis volume that will prove germane as we proceed:

As a kind of deathly theatre mask, something else that’s equally important to consider about demons and the undead (and which we’ll bring up throughout the entire book) is that animals embody the canonical language of power and resistance as something to camp through demonic and undead forms; i.e., stigma animals relayed through demonic BDSM and rituals of power expression and exchange that embody hunters and hunted, predators and prey that play out through the ongoing battles and wars of culture, of the mind, of sexuality and praxis as traumatized: marked for trauma or by trauma that parallel our green and purple doubles onscreen (source: Volume Zero’s “Pieces of the Camp Map”).

So when I say “animalized” vis-à-vis Gothic aesthetics, this is predominantly what I mean and primarily what we will inspect in parts one and two of this subchapter. Before those begin, I want spend the next ten pages introducing you to some important concepts on which our investigations are founded.

As something that predictably rises during material instability and societal unrest, emotional turmoil is very much at home in the Gothic. This includes anxieties about physical bodies and their hauntological uniforms as often having a sexualized, animalistic, psychological element that overlaps with half-exposed, unburied trauma acquired generationally under state domination. This domination occurs within regressive, medievalized positions of crisis and decay that defend and uphold the status quo, but can be reclaimed by proletarian agents within weird-nerd culture; e.g., workers embodying knights to reclaim their killing/raping implements inside the state of exception with ludo-Gothic BDSM (camp), while simultaneously dealing with state infiltrators fighting to recapture the same devices back for themselves and their masters; i.e., Amazons and furries, etc, as dualistic forms of contested morphological expression that can assist or hamper gyno/androdiversity within Gothic poetics under state monopolies. To that, heroes are monsters, and monsters go hand-in-hand with animals being for or against their own abuse to varying degrees: on the same spectrum and its territories.

The resultant middle ground of this duality grants words like “demon,” “zombie,” or “animal” a double purpose for which the rest of the subchapter is divided: predator and prey. As we shall see, either classification works as an insult or compliment depending on who’s using them, where and why. The fact remains, the differences between them are not clear-cut, especially during medieval expression as something to revive during oppositional praxis. As such, we also need to remember and revisit an idea from my thesis regarding animals and the medieval: “Out of medieval discourse, domesticated animals are also gendered in a sexualized, monstrous sense; i.e., ‘The Miller’s Tale’ from The Canterbury Tales (1392).” Domestication invokes a sense of the wild that is reclaimed by state forces to serve the profit motive, which rebellious agents must challenge and reclaim while being animalized. The larger struggle involving animalization constitutes an uphill battle that obscures one’s vision in the same crowded sphere. Inside it, space and time become a violent circle, one where endless war over state nostalgia constitutes ongoing dialectical-material struggles to keep with, or break from, current historical materialisms under Capitalist Realism: state violence dressed up as dated “protection/shelter” during our aforementioned emotional turmoil (stemming from criminogenic conditions; i.e., manufactured shortages, crisis and competition tied to images of the decaying fortress and its unholy armies).

While we’ll only be introducing revolutionary cryptonymy in this subchapter, it remains an utterly vital aspect of proletarian praxis—one that challenges state monopolies through the very things they try to control: morphological expression through monstrous and heroic performance, but especially animalized, hauntological examples like the Amazon or knight, as well as the more famously operatic, feudal sites of sexual danger to which they represent and/or navigate—Gothic castles as killing grounds for a state predator’s prey-like designations. To that, this subchapter considers how revolutionary cryptonymy invokes liminal expression as a cosmetic, conspicuous means of useful disguise within state monopolies of violence, terror and in connection to those dated things, bodily expression. Together on antiquated stages, the deliberate use of dated masks, costumes, props and other performative elements hide activism’s sorties imperfectly within the trauma of canonical Gothic language and its complicated territories of expression; i.e., as a means of rebellious camouflage, useful for blending in and revealing the bad-faith nature of state proponents in shared, thus policed, spaces and dialogs. On said stage, reactionaries and moderates wear masks to hide themselves in common monstrous language; but when they respond to our Athena’s Aegis having doubled their mask, said mask slips from outrage defending state monopolies within nerd culture.

Consider the hero we just mentioned, Jubei. He’s a larger-than-life character whose heroic image appeals to our aims as something to interpret away from canonical forces. Doing so unfolds during warring interpretations of the character as a matter of discourse that is not set; i.e., one that yields revolutionary cryptonymy precisely when our enemies disagree with us about the character’s mythical applications. Although Jubei amounts to the invincible class ally as mythical in function, his larger-than-life status represents a particular kind of splendid lie: the redirection of brutal, animalistic force away from state targets, which the state will thoroughly abhor and, more to the point, complain about in some shape or form. So while Jubei is terrifyingly violent, iconoclastic interpretations of the character emphasize how soldiers must learn to turn their weapons away from the state’s monopoly of violence, precisely because state proponents will openly hate it (thus out themselves as class traitors).

Violence, terror and sexuality converge during these exchanges. Weber’s maxim states “a state holds a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence within its territory, meaning that violence perpetrated by other actors is illegitimate” (source). Combined with Asprey’s paradox of terror and Crawford’s invention of terrorism through the Gothic mode, the monopoly of violence is sacred to state defenders; i.e., Western canon maintains its monopolies in hauntological perpetuity by abjecting “terrorists” as prey to hunt and kill, which we must reverse-abject during guerrilla, asymmetrical maneuvers. We must, because the ghost of the counterfeit is the Gothic lie of state sovereignty presented as a convincing or at least consistent fake; e.g., Tolkien or Cameron’s refrain promoting or otherwise assisting fascist palingenesis to essentialize heteronormativity’s sexual-gender dimorphism assisted by centrist forces; i.e., through forceful, toxic compulsion—often physically but certainly mentally as well—relayed by polite and impolite actors. This is the sticking point where we can incense them to our benefit, doing so on and offstage.

Outing bad actors is vital. Whether reactionary or moderate, neoliberalism and fascism repeatedly attempt to monopolize terror (which Asprey notes is impossible for any one agency to achieve) and by extension Weber’s aforementioned monopoly of violence. Said monopolies automatically place state targets inside Agamben’s state of exception, bombarding them with waves of terror with a human face; i.e., calling class/culture activists “terrorists” vis-à-vis Crawford’s invention of terrorism through the canonical Gothic mode: labor is a zombie horde to shoot (more on this in Volume Two) or dark nation to bomb (exterminate, loot and enslave) through the delivery of said payloads as a business of wider horrors intimated by fantastical stories (e.g., alien invasion scenarios standing in for imperialist powers). As such, it really doesn’t matter if such totalities can be practically implemented long-term (efficient profit guarantees that colonies die young), merely that the structure utilizing their apocalyptic, rapacious rhetoric argues towards total power for the elite through the bourgeois trifectas.

As Richard Overy writes in The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia (2004), “‘Totalitarian’ does not mean that they were ‘total’ parties, either all-inclusive or wielding complete power; it means they were concerned with the ‘totality’ of the societies in which they worked.” This goes well beyond the Nazi or Russian governments he had in mind, and applies to the elite (and any nation-state they operate from) controlling worker bodies through force. It’s literally how they organize power according to Gothic poetics: service to the profit motive through morphological expression as heteronormative. Power and materials go hand-in-hand, then, as does the propaganda associated with them as something to cryptonymically “fence” with; i.e., Gothic poetics as the pacifying and subjugating instrument of the elite and (subordinate) middle class, which we turn back at them using Athena’s Aegis: showing them our ass, thus where to “stick it.” Such is ludo-Gothic BDSM.

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

What I mean by this is, our socio-political positions are vulnerable and often associated directly with our bodies and identities as things to control through monstrous forms during Gothic theatre. The state’s various religious/secular in-groups associate entirely with exclusive ownership and universal coercion under state territories over state-assigned out-groups: to belong/to have belongings versus to be owned or used by someone or marked for systemic mistreatment, even death if you fail to be useful to them (the paradox being your death is useful to profit). Here, the state of exception provides the most basic function of capital: exploitation and genocide in service of the profit motive; i.e., the state eating its population according to heroic arrangements of theatrical power tied to bodily expression as dimorphically gendered. Cultural markers include the conspicuously/flamboyantly queer person (the token hairdresser with a lisp, the interior decorator, etc) as a sign of monitored compliance but also surveilled rebellion versus the subtle/normal-looking gay person as a kind of ordinary (homonormative) disguise to hide from power in a liminal sense: within thresholds/on the surface of monstrous imagery as conveyed by castles, knights, damsels, and demons, etc, but also the enormous trauma they frequently impart; i.e., through linguistic detachment, thus concealment, by standing in between viewers and the resultant terrors both are connected to—cryptonymy.

At the same time, this liminality also pervades other groups affected by the state during shared performance and language; e.g., women and the conspicuously slutty whore vs “the angel in the streets/devil in the sheets,” etc, as occupying the same danger zones. To avoid the state of exception, thus be preyed upon, imperiled workers cover up but also paradoxically semi-expose themselves when powerful men compel them to—enough to “play along” when one is punished for being sinful/disobedient, while simultaneously hiding one’s mark as a member of the state’s chosen underclass(es). Submission is tiered within levels of punishment and reward provided one obeys their compelled arrangement by presenting as submissive through marketed exchanges:

(artist: Wet Little Sub)

For example, beings forced to identify as women/monstrous-feminine are taught to wear skimpy clothes, thick makeup, animalized props (cat ears, tail butt plugs) and uncomfortable shoes (their revenge being to do it for themselves, of course): designed by men to be canonically diminutive, animalistic, impractical (no pockets) and cutesy/form-fitting—i.e., frilly panties, not pants (which Romeo and his companions make fun of Juliet’s older governess for not having: “A sail! A sail!”). Wearing these de facto, chattelized uniforms, marriage becomes like a prison and prisons—especially American prisons—are synonymous with rape, something to threaten those who steal things that are already owned by the elite, by patriarchal capitalists, by men, and people acting like men: women’s own bodies and identities as “dolled up” in traditionally submissive ways, but also prey-like, monstrous-feminine ways (which extend to tokenized Man Box/”prison sex” mentalities). The paradox lies in how the doll takes its coerced, animal sense of self as something to reclaim; e.g., historically battered housewives would have been expected to wear makeup, but also adopt passive, obedient body language and facial expressions—to cover up their wounds, but also tired eyes from lack of sleep/substance abuse from having to live under an oppressive husband’s roof; i.e., the keeping up of appearances for the husband’s sake, including playing dumb as a survival prey mechanism for the wife’s (a blinder as well as camouflage/a mask). They also would have been expected not to labor for themselves, but adopt Mr. Darcy’s so-called “female accomplishments”: sewing, drawing, piano-playing, sitting down and looking pretty (and being quiet), etc. In short, acting like someone’s obedient pet.

Even when doing so is forbidden, such a concept can be interrogated by re-illustrating the same-old disputes from a different heroic perspective; e.g., a girl who likes how she looks, but not how she’s controlled, decides to run away from home, retreating into the imaginary past (and its oft-animalized[4] forms) to try and find some sense of agency regarding her own body. The Wisdom of the Ancients, then, amounts to a constant, ironic interrogation of the current cultural understanding of the imaginary past; i.e., negotiations with said past through its aesthetics of trauma that guide workers towards a better state of existence by bringing what they find back with them as something to fluster the status quo with: a hellish bodily expression regained from state forces by bonding with nature in Gothic ways. The point of the iconoclastic Hero’s Journey is how the Call to Adventure doesn’t uphold the status quo upon the hero’s return; it subverts and transforms it into a post-scarcity world that isn’t beholden to the same old heteronormative devices and prey-like abuse of animalized workers. Instead, it lives and abides by a different set of tenets: our Six Rs and their underpinning of Gothic theories. They support and maintain each other as part of a larger movement branching off from the original prison. It’s a jail break, insofar as bodies can become prisons for the people inside them when their presentations are compelled, marking them for violent roles: givers or receivers, predator or prey.

Such forays into pretend worlds amount to an imaginary liberation that challenges Capitalist Realism through avatar-like vehicles; i.e., places to put ourselves and occupy for a time, to better learn how to frame our own experiences (and bodies) in a situation of make-believe. But within that invention lies the ability to think critically about our surroundings, thus interpret the stories already present within our lives that shape how we think, thus act. I want to spend the remainder of this subchapter exploring various ways that cryptonymy can rebel against state forces through animalized bodily poetics, including where these poetics originated.

We’ll get to Horace Walpole in a bit. I want start with my own fictions as inspired by an older imaginary past, one built on earlier nerdy stories arguably informed by Walpole and his predecessors’ medieval, animal-centric palimpsests: Madikken the Milkmaid.

(artist: anonymous)

Madikken belongs to a project I originally worked on for someone else, but came to inherit the character after the original author abandoned her (see: exhibit 8b1). Adventuresome and foolish, Madikken’s an eighteen-year-old girl who runs away from her wicked stepfather to find some sense of agency and belonging in a dated imaginary place; i.e., one populated with talking animals and inanimate things comparable to those from The Wizard of Oz (1939) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1605): the immortal Dorothy Gale and her Cowardly Lion, Scarecrow and Tinman; and Hermia’s supernatural, drug-fueled encounter with the forest folk: queer camp playing with the medieval, which is the essence of what I envisioned ludo-Gothic BDSM as.

(exhibit 8a: Artist, left: J-Skipper and J. Scott Campbell; top-right: Robb Vision; bottom-right: John Simmons. Fairytales classically consider a child’s confrontation with an adult world, oscillating between innocent, asexual depictions of idyllic bliss faced with troubling positions of monarchist authority and force: the parental figure, often portrayed as saintly or wicked while compelling the child’s coming-of-age to fulfill a sexually reproductive role within a crumbling homestead[5] [their stern or lax demeanor accounting for a patriarchal slant, of course]. Even so, the same child-like relaxation is afforded to regal agents, enjoying luxurious lives while consuming all manner of mind-altering substances; and party to their tempting celebration are artists taught to capture and appreciate the human form as forever overlapping and partying with adjacent animal forms during antiquated festivals.)

Magic—as a colorfully potent, if trippy means of communicating with forbidden things cut off to us by the modern world—runs rampant in both stories, and served to inspire me in mine when exploring my own closeted self through Madikken. It wasn’t literal drugs, but themes of drugs (what Stuart Mills calls “Acid Communism“; re: “Dark Xenophilia“) dating back to an imaginary antiquity that yield fresh knowledge about one’s place in the world as uncertain. Whereas Baum’s poppy fields famously imply drug use experienced by the Young-at-Heart, Titania’s servants dutifully drug people like Nick Bottom into a sleep-like, suggestible, BDSM state(!)—one housed inside a dark, magical forest filled with animal familiars and inanimate things that get up and move around. It emerged through Shakespeare’s Renaissance-era work as inspired by the likes of Ovid, and carried on towards Walpole, towards Baum, towards us. As such, the animal-Dionysian aesthetic and potential for chaotic change endured, carried into the present as something that grew old when viewed backwards by us as trapped in its own configuration of the imaginary past.

In other words, the past and its animals are not set, but can change profoundly per resurrection as something to reflect upon when reviving them ourselves. Each affords new important lessons about similar policed subjects using Gothic poetics; e.g., sexuality and gender expression conveyed through animalistic, fairytale language. The language is the door to things that, in daily life, often go unsaid. So, just as I learned from and transformed Shakespeare away from the unironic rape scenario (marriage or death[6]), I propose we learn from Madikken’s curious descent into Hell—not as punishment (as being turned into an ass might denote), but a place of forbidden, animalistic pleasure and knowledge we carry back with us; i.e., into our black-and-white lives under state hegemony. I’m not evoking Dorothy or Hermia through Madikken to endorse a futile surrender to that black-and-white life (one where our magical friends stop talking and become ordinary once more). Rather, I want to alter the canonical promise of eventual submission through my own take on the female runaway as transforming home into a more colorful (thus less oppressive) place; i.e., through the Gothic’s animal, transformative potential found in fairytale language as musical, urgent, transportive and fleeting[7] but somehow “timeless” and captured in a special, precious moment:

(exhibit 8b1: Bottom-left and top-right, artist: Persephone van der Waard; top-left and bottom left: photos of the 2016 graphic novel I originally translated, co-edited and helped design front-to-back—with thanks from the original author/illustrator. After a disagreement, they and I reached a private written agreement signing the character rights over to me, as well as the full rights to any future project featuring Madikken provided I do the artwork and writing myself.

The drawings included here have been updated from their 2020 versions, which I originally designed as proof-of-concept exhibits within the original legal document: Revana [my alter ego, top-right] and Vallen, two characters from my unfinished fantasy series, The Cat in the Adage. I did not design the original concept for Madikken [top-left] but always enjoyed her for her pastoral, “summer flirt” setting and attitude, but also her prominently beaky nose, lolita maid design and magical-animal friends. Coming up with my own look for Madikken [and fabricating matching designs for Revana and Vallen] while preserving these fairytale qualities about Madikken was a fun challenge. Likewise, she’s a symbol of sex-positive expression who literally runs away from her creepy surrogate father in pursuit of her own sexual empowerment—on par with Hermia running away from Egeus in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As my website reads: “Inspired by stories like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), my novel follows Madikken, a young milkmaid, who becomes lost in an enchanted forest. There, she meets all manner of strange characters; she also begins to explore her deepest, darkest desires. Woefully inexperienced and starved for love, Madikken throws caution to the wind and tries to make her wildest dreams come true…”)

(model and artist: Angel Witch and Persephone van der Waard)

For me, Madikken was someone I wanted to fuck, but also perform as/identify with according to closeted aspects of myself. The more I put myself in Madikken’s shoes, the more I discovered the two concepts overlapped. I wanted to be like someone I thought was strong in ways that toyed around with strength as something to embody in gender-non-conforming ways; i.e., beyond traditional notions of predatory force and its cliché delivery through go-to anomalies; e.g., your standard-issue, cis-het tomboys running the monomythic gamut. Madikken was certainly girly and Gothic, but her rousing and happy escape from an abusive home life (the home as alien) still happened; i.e., by updating the imaginary past away from masculine violence and avoiding Radcliffean bigotries. As such, her iconoclastic, prey-animal forays into Hell preserved the original, adventuresome spirit of Gothic expression, while simultaneously updating it for a wider and more inclusive audience.

Keeping with the spirit of inclusion, then, I want to use part one of this subchapter to project such a freeing mentality back at the things Madikken’s tale omitted—towards more warlike, predatory and Amazonian heroics, as well as knightly presentations with some animal characteristics, before part two concludes the subchapter by humanizing the increasingly animal, prey-like morphologies shared amongst all iconoclastic forces victimized by the state during its hellish monopolies. The overall procedure requires understanding where both arguably hail from in Western fiction, which part two will explore: Horace Walpole and the queer tradition of the Gothic as something that informs current-day revolutions through cryptonymic expression; i.e., the Gothic castle not simply as a hauntological burial ground, but a reliable site of queer, faux-medieval “rape” whose implements of campy trauma and otherworldly occupants (undead, demons, and anthromorphs) survive well into the present, where they double, hence challenge, state monopolies during ludo-Gothic BDSM: playing with the half-real, partially imaginary past.

(artist: Richard Corben; source: Bill McCool’s “In Praise of Meat Loaf’s Ridiculously Awesome Bat Out of Hell Album Covers,” 2022)

“Predators and Prey”: Predators as Amazons, Knights, and Other Forms of Domesticated, Animalized Monster Violence (feat. James Cameron)

As Edward Said astutely notes in Culture and Imperialism, most societies project their fears on the unknown or the exotic other. This barren land, where the viewers are kept disorientated, is threatening. It is a place between the familiar and the foreign, like part of a dream or vision that one cannot remember clearly. There is always a sense of a lurking danger from which the viewers need protection. Nikita provides that sense of protection (source).

—Laura Ng, “‘The Most Powerful Weapon You Have’: Warriors and Gender in La Femme Nikita” (2003)

Continuing our theoretical examination of state monopolies, we arrive at predators, a class of monster often celebrated within contests of strength.

For example, when Bonnie Tyler sings, “I need a hero,” she specifically mentions Hercules. Except, heroism isn’t strictly about size or strength, and its mythical qualities denote animalistic displays of predator and prey that are frequently associated with classic animal archetypes; e.g., Hercules and the Nemean lion, but also Madikken and her talking lamb, Casper. As prized possessions useful to patriarchal institutions, heroes are monsters whose Gothic poetics animalize in competing dialogs during oppositional praxis. Doubles of antiquated, warrior-class arrangements of status and power appear within settler-colonial models, to which animals become reliably subjugated status symbols emblematic of state force and its conspicuous givers and receivers inside state land: cops and victims. Both fulfill their animal potential as class/culture/race character arranged in different physical forms, and whose vivid, poetic nature reliably triggers animal responses indicating broader socio-material struggles: fight or flight, but also hunting and sex, captivity and release.

The state cannot fully regulate these applications, so it grants their dated symbols positions of weakness and strength; i.e., linked to material factors like shelter and protection whose animalistic qualities—like a dog with a bone—are fought over in terms of what they represent, and more to the point, for whom they ultimately serve: workers or the elite.

Part one, “Predators,” will consider two popular arrangements—Amazons and knights—as “sexy beasts” whose conspicuous animal strength either serves worker needs by protecting them during state crisis, or pits them against each other to enrich the elite as usual. First, we’ll consider their basic, classic forms, then explore how the Gothic works of James Cameron continuously interact with more fantastical (and cosmetic) iterations regarding modern-day police abuse (which part two, “Prey,” will subvert).

Before we proceed, a note about cops; or rather, a quote from our thesis volume concerning Amazons in relation to cops that also applies to knights:

regarding activist hindsight as cultivated by workers, consider the Amazon. While Amazons are a classic Greek monster and the word Amazonomachia literally means “Amazon battle,” Gothic Communism applies it to any monster in heroic discourse where competing notions about sexuality and gender are “duking it out.” This includes the heroes themselves as enforcing or resisting the hierarchy of power in heteronormative theatre (there is no functional difference between a hero and villain insofar as canonical heroes are concerned; all canonical heroes function like cops and “All Cops Are Bad,” not just the ones that look “evil,” because they universally victimize everyone else for the state). All heroes are monsters, thus liminal expressions that are sexualized and gendered (source).

As such, Amazons are monstrous and can be cops, especially in monomythic stories that rely heavily on black-and-white kayfabe language; the same goes for knights, whose domesticated, animalized monster violence becomes something to subvert during ludo-Gothic BDSM or endorse in regards to a state’s monopolies and trifectas (the pimps of the state).

Our thesis talks extensively about cops in relation to Amazons and knights in general, and Volume One has so far already discussed the trifectas; here, we want to focus on the monopolized violence, terror and morphological expressions that occur during worker struggles, insofar as animalized Gothic aesthetics factor in. Keeping that in mind, we’ll start with Amazons’ animalistic qualities, weighing them against Cameron’s work before considering various things about knights relevant to oppositional praxis: as an uphill, predator-vs-prey battle for rebellious workers employing revolutionary cryptonymy to protect themselves with and attack the state’s mimetic means to destroy them through shared, contested language.

(artist: Emery EXP)

First, Amazons. Coming out of ancient, oral, animal-themed traditions promoting or contesting state fears, Amazons remain a complicated mythological figure. Far be it from me to discount the value of a strong sword arm in service of workers, but I generally consider workers to be threatened by state-sanctioned variants of such persons; e.g., the girl-boss Amazon cracking down on dissidents, then spouting neoconservative platitudes about equality for her kind (usually white, cis-het women): achieved through feats of territorial strength against an invented, dogmatic enemy that tokenizes the monstrous-feminine versus camping it. The same goes for knights, wherein class-traitor versions of either monster posture as cop-like “protectors”; i.e., who predatorily defend property by policing people the state already treats like prey/property (abusing their Gothic aesthetics to do so in modern times).

Police functions aside, I absolutely adore a subversive Amazon/strong mommy dom, but after further experimentation discovered I really like inhabiting the idea of subby power as juxtaposed against dominant forms with their own animalized signature. Over time, my prey-like preference became something to foster within a liminal space also occupied by Amazons to camp with ludo-Gothic BDSM: bravely reshaping the world while standing in the presence of a hunter-like strength by showing others how I want to exist, and be treated, in spite of the animalized differential; i.e., like Madikken in her fetishized milkmaid outfit (and accompanied by her talking lamb sidekick) bumping anxiously into Revana as a far bigger (and stronger) “cavewoman” who probably enjoys eating lamb (and pussy); re: death by Snu-Snu!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Relating to capital through nature-themed language is an important means of survival, except its exercise (and real-world counterparts) are increasingly endangered and replaced by harmful copies that blend in with our camouflage against theirs. As such, I deliberately portray Madikken traipsing about a dark forest (one filled with figurative lions, tigers and bears) while presenting like an animal of a particular kind: a lamb. Ripe for “slaughter” within the ancient pastoral framework, I’ve updated both to account for modern struggles. While Madikken is a sexy girl in a pretty dress, she feels entirely vulnerable if only because modern society is conditioned through animal metaphors to own and dress her up for themselves—in short, to unironically prey on her once the costume is in place. And yet, she’s someone who can bear it all by acting slutty but not be automatically killed for it; i.e., by teaching Amazons like Revana to handle power in animalistic ways that don’t serve the profit motive while retaining the exciting predator-prey dynamic during theatrical, BDSM tensions (which ludo-Gothic BDSM interrogates through play): service to the sub as someone to treat well, not actually prey upon, thus harm. Putting “predation” in quotes like this demands discipline and restraint, but also trust and boundaries; building these takes time, because you generally have to subvert what’s already present through a different kind of Gothic counterfeit—one that fosters empathy towards historically preyed-upon groups.

That’s ultimately what Madikken became; while the original author treated her as a guilty pleasure to trot out, then discard, I took Madikken and treated her as a subversive, Aesopian agent—a fabled white rabbit to follow into the future of the imaginary past as geared towards Communism. It might all be a fantastical lie, but can still transform the world by breaking from tradition in subtler ways that a) don’t segregate us from the awesome power of Gothic poetics (which was Frederic Jameson’s big mistake, of course); and b) don’t get us chucked off a cliff like poor Aesop. Powerful people, or those aligned with them, tend to do that when they feel threatened—not as a question of morals tied to human rights as things to practice, uphold and fairly defend, but according to unfair positions of material advantage the elite want to protect from workers; i.e., within a medieval, barbaric system built to exploit most of the planet for the betterment of a very select (and cruel) group of persons:

(source: Dr. Lauren Ware’s “Why We Punish“)

Appreciative, iconoclastic forms of Gothic stories (friendly magical animals, exhibit 8a) come from appropriative forms, but also liminal, salvageable forms (rebels, exhibit 8b2) to reclaim during socio-political debates whose poetics weigh the upholding of structures against human, animal and environmental rights. So while neoliberals, for example, famously discourage the welfare state[8], they’re constantly exploiting all workers under normalized, invisible (meaning “undisputed, ubiquitous”) conditions that have a similar myopic effect on the perception of the exploitation taking place. In short, everything becomes veiled by neoliberal canon, which conceals its own function as bourgeois propaganda but also projects said propaganda everywhere in animalistic dogma. Animals (and their subsequent terror and violence during morphological expression) are monopolized by the state in “polite” forms of the Amazon as a police agent—not just a dog to guard, watch, and hunt with, but a steady, war-like harvester who preys on chattelized, vulnerable workers herded[9] together for easy access within the state’s self-sanctioned food chain (with the elite at the top, cops in the middle, and everyone else at the bottom).

Such doomsdays might seem to verge on hopelessly cliché, thus can be discounted in the Radcliffean sense as a nightmare to summon and dismiss just as quickly. During Gothic times, however, the harvest becomes grim and visible, an order of operations for which orderly extermination becomes its chief goal: “The disposal units ran night and day.” This fascist return-to-conquest/tradition (and shivering of the state into barely-contained fragments ran by joint-chiefs/warlords) outlines a convenient map that already exists: the state itself as a new territory of colonization over an old crime scene, one ripe for raw plunder (and animal slaughter) as Imperialism comes home to empire. Ruthlessly exacted by the police agents currently inside, state watchdogs prey on its citizenry as freshly undead targets during new episodes of an ongoing genocide. The state victims and enemies become one in the same.

In other words, the state cannibalizes itself, but also defends the elite through heroic narratives bent on debriding the castle of its current “corruption.” During this culling of the herd (and its black sheep), cops still defend capital; but this time they roll in with tanks, burning “infected” and uninfected alike. Crushed under armored vehicles and knightly bodies, all are rendered obsolete in the face of those killers best able to preserve power and capital as threatened: the arm of the state as radicalized, covered in trauma as something to behold through a medievalized regression; i.e., inside monopolies of violence and terror as rotting the bodies (and minds) of workers, sadly soldiering for skeletal kings come back to haunt the world of the living. The Amazon decays, as do the sheep she pounces on; like Cú Chulainn, she “begins to attack both friend and foe because [she] loses the ability to distinguish between them,” except its very much by design. Healthy relations to nature with animal aesthetics and anthropomorphism are traded for pro-state, weaponized variants, their humane potential impounded in favor of territorial forms of aggression.

(artist: Bruh the Sinner)

Such radicalization is normally relegated to the distant frontiers of faraway lands (a crusade). Except when Capitalism enters decay as a matter of routine, state-sanctioned violence becomes an open cycle of glorious revenge in the domestic sphere; i.e., military urbanism triangulating class traitors and “rabid” token assimilators against the usual victims of state violence. Pitted against the pulverized working class, the police force of the imperial homeland treat said land like Cameron’s refrain: an automated grounds for loot, rape and genocide; it becomes a dead garden of stolen, inedible goods (the pirate’s curse: men cannot eat gold; only lie, cheat and steal it, except this shortcoming spills over into every aspect of their lives; e.g., sex and love. They can swallow it, but not digest).

In the same death-rattle, the us-versus-them mentality becomes something to promote in wholly Gothic forms; i.e., to “save the world” from a dark menace, which unfolds in Promethean, self-destructive ways. Already a watchdog put to heel, subjugated Hippolyta becomes a complicit, braindead zombie, but also the Medusa: a girl boss counterpart baring her own fangs (and furious gaze) at false promotions of former abuse; e.g., trans people. From Victoria de Loredani to Ellen Ripley or Samus Aran, reactive abuse (and its moderation) push TERF-y, Man Box violence onto much more recent (and populous) iterations. In turn, the state teaches future Amazons to attack its enemies for it, seeking power at the cost of their own humanity.

(artist: Virgo Vain)

I need to stress a state-vs-worker function, here, because Amazons don’t exclusively belong to the state; they are recruited by the state to police their own members within state monopolies. Canonical Amazons, then, are a token monster group that, once subjugated, can be scapegoated (through the euthanasia effect) when they frantically lash out against state targets, chasing them down and brutalizing them through fetishized violence. This traitorous, self-loathing behavior is Pavlovian—conditioned and executed through a medievalized position where subjugated Amazons serve a hauntologized police role: a knight whose pure, “white” status becomes wracked with “black” generational trauma and guilt, but also instructed apathy in the face of prophesized adversity. Black or white, the police function remains constant when fealty to the state is sworn; but it decays during crisis towards increasingly violent forms.

In the Pavlovian sense, canonical Amazons function as cops or victims; subjugated Amazons are cops who trigger to respond to state crisis through bourgeois implementations of force. Per the trifectas, this vicious cycle has manmade components, intimated by neoliberalism profiting off manufactured disasters (Second Thought’s “How Capitalism Exploits Natural Disasters,” 2022); e.g., FEDRA from The Last of Us (the 2023 version, which we will return to throughout this book) being an eco-fascist metaphor for Blackwater and other mercenary groups since WW2’s frogmen and Vietnam’s “advisors” from the Phoenix program. These watchdogs of American Imperialism obey the elite, violating international laws on command; i.e., through dog whistles. When those are “blown” through historical-material factors, subjugated Amazons execute on par with pre-Enlightenment mercenaries defending king and kingdom; i.e., through a re-privatization of war that exists entirely outside the democratic process: war as commodified through corporate seizures of direct power on the global stage, superseding state mechanisms altogether (Bad Empanada’s “Johnny Harris: Shameless Propagandist Debunked,” 2023) with older forms of neoliberalism having relied on the abuse of state power as something to conceal through neoliberal illusions: superheroes like Amazons exhibiting the theatrical, performative strength and qualities of animals, not people; i.e., dog soldiers.

While rebellion and its recuperation are animalized, pitting “tame/semi-tame” state defenders against “wild” rebels and labor movements, there is a familial, Gothic consequence to this settler-colonial arrangement beyond classic iterations. Faced with these privatized brutalizers or even shadows of them in the appropriative peril of canonical, pre-apocalypse “daydreams,” women or other victims of state abuse (who are closer to nature) cozy up to anyone stronger than them in order to survive or feel safe with during Gothic times. Such protectors include ostensibly good-but-actually-bourgeois variants like Ellen Ripley (the James Cameron version), but also bonafide rebels who reject the state in totality as out-and-out, dyed-in-the-wool Communists; e.g., Jubei, but also real-life characters like Che Guevara that billionaire Marxists like George Lucas and James Cameron would mime in their own questionably rebellious[10] work:

(exhibit 8b2: The moderate “anarchist, Amazon warrior moms” of James Cameron are paper tigers. Their anger against the state is all flash, no substance insofar as universal equality is concerned; i.e., they’re predominantly white, Rambo-style Amazons, with varying degrees of class character married to more dubious aspects; e.g., Ellen Ripley is a TERF punching the Archaic Mother and exterminating her brood for being an intersex bogeywoman of settler-colonial guilt, trauma and bias. To that, Cameron’s refrain is a ghost of the counterfeit that demonizes colonized territories and anti-capitalist resistance movements/guerrilla forces in favor of white saviors from the Imperial Core protecting the usual wards of the state: white children. Sarah Connor’s son, John, is yet another example of that, except his plight addresses military urbanism on home soil instead of Red Scare overseas. There, the warrior mother furiously protects her white child from the LAPD as a famously corrupt, and well-documented police force[11] while simultaneously terrorizing the [admittedly wealthy] family of Miles Dyson, a tokenized black man, before letting him brutally die. The class character is fascinatingly murky but the stereotypical racial tensions remain, nonetheless.

In doing so, Cameron acknowledges the inherently racialized and incredibly violent function of American police present since their inception, but in a worrying trend carried over from Aliens, choses to focus on the violence against, and survival of, white maternal victims for the film’s duration [effectively pitting white and black mothers against each other]. Cameron does this while also showing that Amazons like Sarah are not exempt from racial tensions and class betrayal—Sarah hysterically treating her white child as more valuable than Dyson’s. As a whole, holistic solidarity is not Cameron’s strong suit. Quite the contrary, he foments worker division, pitting different marginalized groups against each other [white women and people of color] while prioritizing white agents during said exchanges wherever they occur.

Even so, Cameron’s caricatures are founded on real-world heroes. For instance, Che Guevara’s constructive anger toward legitimate material change has been appreciated by real-world revolutionaries and appropriated by state proponents, including moderate ones like Cameron. In pursuit of profit and status, Pygmalions like Cameron de-fang Che’s revolutionary potential by turning him into “just” a t-shirt [similar to MLK]: an inert, sloganized version of the former folk legend through the Amazon [monstrous-feminine guerilla] as a sloganized brand. This dialectical-material tension can be felt during settler-colonial disputes, comparing human actions to animals as an emblematic, theatrical device; e.g., “crafty like a fox” denoting animalized oral traditions tied to native peoples and their land as simultaneously occupied by an invader force that remembers them as foxlike in opposition to the state: being hunted, but eluding the self-assigned [white] trapper as a systemic, colonial force.

Cameron’s Amazons appropriate said tension—either applying useful predatory and prey-like qualities exclusively to white women reversing the role of hunter and hunted while avoiding captivity and abuse, or applying them to women of color embodying Afrocentrist qualities within other racialized groups; e.g., Bailey Bass, a biracial black actress, playing Indigenous women like Tsireya [from The Shape of Water] who are then fetishized for their exotic, non-white, “huntress” qualities being promised to white men “going native” within the savior fantasy as a predatory means of sleeping with the colonized princess—sex tourism dressed up as “activism.” Whatever transgressive bite they have becomes toothless, but also oddly chaste insofar as nudity in horror is framed as an invitation for open violence; i.e., utterly incapable of open, honest, adult forms of interrogating generational, psychosexual trauma that likewise let trans, intersex and non-binary forms of morphological expression exist under [thus navigate] settler-colonial duress; e.g., the woman of color or female Indigenous person having abject androgynous qualities that can be reverse-abjected during captor/captive fantasies that speak to living in captivity as a hunted, animalized group: facsimiles of rape and cop/victim fears explored through the middle class [or those inside the Imperial Core versus outside it] interrogating “fuck the alien” fantasies through iconoclastic art. The Gothic is a great resource for such things, if only to camp the West’s rape fears more than the usual Pygmalions bother to try!

[artist: Glacial Clear]

Such stances are closed off through complicated psychological positions of fear-fascination from both sides—the colonizer class and colonized classes, but also various intersections insofar as sex, gender, race and religion are concerned—and must be encroached upon through liminal re-engagements with the animal; i.e., as something that is not an actual threat despite feeling threatening in a multitude of ways: that one is a monster and/or monstrous for wanting to sleep with those the state and its proponents either collar and pit against you; or label as monstrous in animalistic ways to likewise make you afraid, thus desire protection from by appealing to the collared, subjugated variants. In turn, these wicked fantasies mustn’t get hung up on the ghost of the counterfeit, but instead be used to bring systemic socio-material change by critiquing praxially inert forms merely by existing: white women sleeping with people of color.)

The animalized rebel, as a genuine proletarian agent, is a regular casualty of centrist stories like Cameron’s. Pandering to white, cis-het people/token personalities who have been conditioned to enjoy their starring role (much to the chagrin of minority groups), his “billionaire Marxism” plays both sides: reverse-engineering the wagon chase, John-Ford-style, to centralize Sarah Connor as a white, female avenger of settler-colonial, “slasher-style[12]” trauma directed at North Americans, not the Global South (not to mention appealing to conservative values will reliably sell more tickets by widening your consumer base). Meanwhile, Ellen Ripley’s original form as a neoliberal foil (courtesy of Ridley Scott) becomes its fiercest, girl-boss protector in Cameron’s Rambo-esque, Vietnam revenge fantasy against the Reds (displaced as killer space bugs and capped off with the dissociative, white-mom-vs-black-mom “catfight”). It’s pretty shitty of Cameron in hindsight, appealing to the psychosexual fears (and similar pent-up emotions) of domestic state victims—women and children—by pitting them against classic state scapegoats to achieve praxial inertia, not momentum, during cliché situations[13] against cliché targets: nominal Communists, and assorted “corrupt” and/or monstrous-feminine entities existing in the same shadow zone as cartoon Nazis. At first glance, they’re hard to tell apart, but like a dominatrix wearing fetish gear starts to distinguish herself through inferred function; i.e., through dialectical-material scrutiny according to an informed audience capable of critical thought, hence class/culture/race analysis.

Some of these monsters (and their animalistic qualities) intimate our proverbial spectres of Marx and ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., the camped imagery of state-sanctioned doppelgangers yielding Communist potential during ironic analysis and application. Of course, many more reduce to bourgeois caricatures of anything resembling actual Communism (which, to be clear, Stalin stiffly veered away from during his own cult of personality after Lenin’s death and later during WW2 and the Eastern Front; but those labor plans [and their various successes and failures: their defeating of the Nazis at Stalingrad, but also the Holodomor famine[14]] were begot from reactive abuse/constant interference from Western parties, including Hilter as the United States’ intended destroyer of the Bolshevist spirit). Purely on the Russian side, these Soviet cartoons—from Lenin, to Stalin, Gorbachev to Putin—have become increasingly boiled down, condensed by neoliberal hegemons into a vague, constantly threatening punching bag well into the present: the boogeyman of “Communism” waiting outside the myopia of Capitalist Realism.

These invasions are canonically marketed as coming “from beyond,” wherein current-day reinventions of the Gothic past disrobe inside intensely xenophobic nostalgia; e.g., seasons two-through-four of Stranger Things (2016) churning out their own variants of an evil banditti tied to moral panic: Red Scare at home. To that, the show’s interdimensional aliens and serial-killer general, Vecna (as well as the Russian goons worshipping the Demogorgon), serve as a giant, messy Red-Scare metaphor threatening Pax Americana for… yet-another-doubling of Ann Radcliffe’s Scooby Doo gang facing off against the indominable Nothing through nostalgia on top of nostalgia as the “antidote” to Capitalist Realism (an increasingly neoliberalized commodifying of Michael Ende’s 1979 novel, Die unendliche Geschichte). Eleven is that show’s Amazon—a crisis actor isolated and abused, hence conditioned, to bite very the cartoon shadows authored by the state during regular moral panics; i.e., Netflix reviving the fatal, lucrative nostalgia of Satanic panic to prime the current youth for an upcoming struggle.

Any way you slice it, Eleven is a child soldier (note the Stormtrooper vest and Kubrick-esque panopticon) who grows into a violent monster who can only justify her actions if Vecna is real; he’s not, but his triggers are, as are their harmful, historical-material effects embodied by formerly preyed-upon girls just like Eleven becoming predatory (she’s a stand-in for state recruits that only allow for proletarian forms if we consciously critique her canonical function).

Note: We’ll return to the Zionist and Red Scare elements of Stranger Things more in Volume Two; e.g., the Poetry Module’s “A Song Written in Decay.” —Perse, 4/6/2025

Of course, there’s room to enjoy all of these things, but neoliberal pastiche lionizing second wave feminism (and its fascist qualities) shouldn’t be endorsed and consumed without thought; it should be transmuted through iconoclastic praxis into appreciatively ironic, “perceptive” forms when confronting and concealing oneself with symbols of state abuse: through what artists cultivate (synthesize) themselves using productive, accessible intricacies (not endless detective-story mysteries or the sports-like competitions that, while intricate, do nothing to meaningfully challenge the state; e.g., Cameron’s Amazonian kayfabe). These elaborate distractions invoke something already noted in my thesis (and earlier in this subsection); re: “Out of medieval discourse, domesticated animals are also gendered in a sexualized, monstrous sense.” New forms of discourse that invoke Gothic poetics allow us to convey more than rebellious slogans like Cameron’s, but socio-material foils to state-animalized hero-monsters and victims: as strong as a horse or bull, but as sleek and randy as a rabbit or mink. The theatrical potential is all at once incredibly old, and waiting to be tapped (so to speak) during fresh morphological queries that interrogate animalized stigmas and trauma applied unevenly to workers under settler-colonial systems:

(artist: Akira Raikou)

So while it’s perfectly legitimate for nerds (or those who otherwise indulge in nerd culture) to desire protection from anyone who gives off “big daddy/mommy” energy as tied to an animalistic, dream-like aura—or even wanting to fuck these incredible, otherworldly persons—it’s equally important to remember that Ellen Ripley and Sarah Conor (and similar Amazons; e.g., Urbosa, left) are not your actual parents[15]. So, whereas state nostalgia drifts towards a coercive, social-sexual arrangement of these things, sex-positive scenarios administer the potential for regressively therapeutic rituals: unequal power exchange scenarios brokered between an iconoclast’s artistic exhibit and those taking part as the expected audience; i.e., between mutually-consenting adults whose iconoclastic, socio-material arrangements and depictions of predator and prey pointedly challenge the nuclear family structure as unironically medieval beneath the rot (which Cameron does not do).

By extension, subversive Amazons undermine compelled marriage as leading to manufactured consent, conflict and scarcity (which includes systematic war and women/child abuse among those inside the state of exception). As such, sex-positive regression—and the oft-subconscious selection of a “Big” to safeguard someone who feels “little,” in age play terms—is conditional; i.e., informed consent. Conversely the historical materialism of the state (and its own myopic regressions) are conservative in nature, meaning they are canonically unconditional, forcing the socio-material arrangements that exist between violent enforcers doubling as parental figures in conspicuously neo-medieval structures (exhibit 8b3) fostered during state collapse. Haunted by the older Neo-Gothic period’s pre-fascist occupation of the late 1700s, such heroes return to a medieval (and Gothic) that has never quite existed but predicates on older fascist forms that bleed into new post-fascist ones: flirting with power imbalance and size difference (cops and robbers roleplay) taken outside the bedroom (re: Foucault).

(artist: Glacier Clear)

Abuse victims often regress or disassociate, clamoring for protection in complicated, theatrically “dangerous” forms (the calculated risk). Indeed, to shrink in the face of ambiguous power and harm is understandable, as is pursuing healthier variants that still feel dangerous; i.e., capable of protecting us from trauma by helping us paradoxically regain a sense agency while feeling out of control when confronting trauma as something that lives in and around us, but—as we have seen—can also, like a gargoyle, come alive and attack us. People who feel victimized (or otherwise faced with uncertain destruction) generally desire a return to one’s childhood as “better” in connection to a heroic force—a good parent that rewrites what, for many children, is a time of shattered innocence. For better or worse, it’s also normal to feel attraction towards psychosexual power and violence (more on this in part two), and to trauma-bond when you feel frightened, hence infantilized. Indeed, a common regressive fantasy is the myth of the white knight; i.e., a psychosexual force that returns from the hauntological past to save the current world as threatened by ancient monsters during the vicious cycle of Capitalism: the monomyth, Cycle of Kings and infernal concentric pattern, etc. All operate as cryptonymic forms of calculated risk and reward, their canonical heroic instruments apologizing for the state by offering up a noble-yet-sexy parental sacrifice: the paladin. In turn, neoliberalism uses the false hope of the white savior to achieve future Faustian bargains, preserving Capitalist Realism for as long as humanly possible. Nothing else matters.

If you want to critique the state and stop the cycle, go where its heroic power is centered: nostalgic spaces. In these spaces, the ending of genocidal nostalgia requires retraining any soldier of Capitalism and dislocating them from the structure itself, as Jubei is. While some knights are good/bad in entirely centrist terms, he was not. Except, this revolutionary cryptonymy can be dressed up in ways besides the Amazon or Jubei—knights.

In canonical terms, knights are often marketed as protectors, but actually defend property for the state. Reversing this function is not straightforward, and takes many different forms depending on the genre. Posthuman stories, for example, literally reprogram knights from the imaginary retro-future as something to revisit in sequel, franchised outings; e.g., the Terminator movies (and their various paratexts). Here, there may seem to be no animals in the future, but the idea of the Gothic berserk—a warrior dressed in animal skins—is not lost on Cameron. While the original Terminator (1984) inverts the classic knight’s metal exoskeleton for an endoskeleton that serves the same purpose (concealed force), the sequel reverses the class function of the same disguise while still having humans be the animal whose skins are worn(!). So whereas the first dad, Kyle Reese, was a skittish, white, prey-like survivor of automated genocide coming home to roost, Arnold is a Germanic lone wolf—a cybernetic predator reprogrammed by rebel forces to protect the children of the future by ultimately sacrificing himself. Doing so lets the Amazon, Sarah, finally lay down her arms and get to mothering John. The familial element (and its dimorphism) are preserved.

The parental themes seem noble enough, but also inventive insofar as Cameron’s Pygmalion fantasy deftly reverses the binary gender of the statuesque protector/sex object multiple times. Except Cameron pointedly ties the Amazon and knight’s shared quest to a Roman, thus problematic, concept: the nuclear family as something to defend within capital by martyring its statuesque, surrogate-father figure through childlike platitudes divorced from state critiques: “You can’t just go around killing people!” John says. To which the terminator asks, “Why?” Cameron can’t connect the moral to anything resembling material conditions, so he demonstrates it through something of a dog-training session: stand on one foot. Obey.

This basic, rigid argument sums up Cameron’s “revolutionary” character. Not only is it incredibly moderate (thus passive), but the nuclear unit’s harmful relationship with the Gothic, zombie-like West makes Cameron’s vision a compromise with undying conservative values: the state as something to protect through the family unit. Despite its infamous price tag and anti-police persona, T2 merely offers a half-measure dressed up in Hollywood glitz. All the same, Cameron isn’t stupid. He understands how a stable household appeals to the victim in all of us. T2 certainly resonated with me as a little girl, wishing my father was around instead of cheating on my mother and beating me. As a child bred on Gothic fiction, Cameron’s fantasies became something of a haunted house to me: something to retreat inside in order to find better copies of my actual parents (or representatives of them, in my mother’s case—love you, Mom). The same idea—of wanting monsters to make me feel safe in my own unsafe household—extends laterally to parallel structures Cameron is less likely to attack.

Like I said, it’s complicated; despite my open endorsement of cool monster parents, I’m still leery of Cameron’s expensive compromise (and skilled emotional/psychological manipulation) depicting the Western cycle of marriage as something to salvage through a cliché, and horribly dated, advertisement: parental, centrist automation. His “good parent vs bad parent” doubling shtick and “cyborg dads of the retro-future!” gag collectively endorse current political structures by refusing to take them to task, instead putting the blame on everyone: “It’s in your nature to destroy yourselves.” In the same breath, he replaces “the would-be-fathers who come and go” with a perfect robot dad who never gets tired, never gets drunk and hits John, thus can learn how to “not go around killing people.” The lesson inexplicably motivates John to build a better future for his own kids… by joining the suitably brutal and robotic institution, Congress.

This alternate, final ending is a huge red flag and both why I hate the director’s cut and distrust Cameron’s dubious vision of the imaginary future; it was his cut, thus his decision to endorse the magical rehabilitation of establishment politics. Except a single politician acting like a good parent historically doesn’t work, either because the person is killed, replaced, or made to conform to the usual antics of such a place. I call bullshit, but Cameron likes the idea so much he’s resold the movie (and his cut) time and time again. If it wasn’t how he felt, he wouldn’t sell it; more to the point, his intent doesn’t matter if endless war is what the movie ultimately promotes through bad decision-making. As part of the Military Industrial Complex, Congress makes war on purpose; it’s a business for them and always has been. To that, Cameron’s abuse of rebellious language conceals state predation, his white-savior antics meant to restore the public’s faith in the system being redeemable “as is”; i.e., something that can miraculously change through established procedures that serve the elite first and foremost. By whitewashing Congress, Cameron smugly implores viewers to imagine a world where the nation-state doesn’t exist to capitalize on genocide. Please! If John Connor tried to stop that, he’d simply get outvoted or shot like JFK.

The fact remains, while the rehabilitation of state killers is a pleasant-enough fiction, Gothic stories like Cameron’s scapegoat crooked, false cops (the T-1000 as a serial killer) and marry workers to monstrous parental force (Sarah and the T-800) in defense of the state as a heteronormative, thus settler-colonial, structure. No matter how much adventure and pure, psychosexual mayhem occur in dreamland, there’s no place like home as it currently exists.

Likewise, the problem merely compounds when you consider actual parents through compelled marital roles that play out in light of Cameron’s figurative ones. Compelled marriage generally sucks major ass, especially if the human is a cop (a trained killer and class traitor). At best, it’s a procedure of convenience. Even so, it effectively sublimates rape and child abuse—a coerced bargain/forced negotiation whose quid pro quo is dressed up as “love” with accidental children had by parents far-too-early paying the price. Often, the reality aligns with the female side regressively seeking material advantage by adopting femme, vulnerable performances (the damsel or the princess) and submitting to the male “protector” side chasing possessive, courtly love; i.e., homosocial tourneys had by knights, cowboys, et al dueling in jousting fashion, with kids (and wives) being caught in the middle (often incestuously abused by their fathers/male role models as false fathers, protectors, friends, etc). It’s standard-issue Man Box culture, which means you can’t just tap your shoes and sloganize good parentage; you have to synthesize it in ways that change the system, hence prevent genocide as a symptom of Capitalism.

Gothic poetics paradoxically grant a voice to discuss unspeakable trauma with, doing so through taboo subject matter (rape, murder, torture and incest, etc), while simultaneously existing in contested, doubled theatrical spaces. In Gothic stories, the lover, villain, parent and protector all occupy the same uncomfortable living space (the castle) in animalized forms: predator and prey as confused symbols and mechanisms from moment to perilous moment. Something to remember about Arnold in this reversal is he serves the role of parent, lover and protector in the perfect sense for a battered single mom: the asexual machine. Conversely the T-1000 is a villain through a great duplicator status that intends familial destruction through homicidal cryptonymy—the stolen identity of past serialized rape victims, including John’s foster parents, Sarah’s guards, and even Sarah herself (the same mimicking of a parental figure the original terminator did to get close to its victim as a “one-day pattern killer”). “He” and “his” rapacious falsehoods are a facet of state corruption, of the evil within as part of an internal plot invaded by those already inside (a confusion of inside/outside, correct-incorrect, etc) that expands in all directions when the shadow of medieval abuse covers the land.

The rebel’s gambit is to send a friendly predator to protect Sarah’s son, one who looks like a former abuser of Sarah’s and attempted killer of John; indeed, he’s the same model, therefore physically identical to the 1984 assassin. While the 1991 terminator is also an assassin, his class function alters insofar as he fights to preserve the family unit through hypermasculine violence; i.e., the good parent, lover and protector versus the bad. Cameron’s rehabilitative goal is one of complete reprogramming—of a past state soldier to serve a rebel cause attached to the family model. Indeed, they are inextricable, and haunted by the kinds of violence that the T-1000 (and other versions of the T-800) represent: of violent murder and rape through phallic devices, namely bullets, brute strength, and “knives and stabbing weapons” delivered by a perfidious, male, and physically imposing slasher agent serving an ultra-radicalized police state chasing and hunting its usual benefactors: white straight women and children (the nuclear model in crisis).

(artist: John Cordero)

In other words, Cameron locks the morphology and familial roles firmly in place, as well as the roles of predator and prey in centrist ordeals. They exist on good teams and bad revolving around the heteronormative family unit and its legendary defenders, destructors, and methods of domesticated, animalized monster violence, terror and morphological expression. For Cameron, all of these things tellingly manifest as white men who help or harm white (or functionally white) women and children in the domestic sphere. He sticks to his guns despite being all too familiar with the Gothic flexibility of Amazons and knights, but also cops as dishonest, dehumanized, shapeshifting (demonic) agents recuperating those symbols through acts of rape that double for the putting on of stolen appearances (for us, cryptonymy is a disguise of “rape” designed to prevent its unironic forms). As Rebecca Keegan writes in The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron (2010):

a central theme in both of the Terminator movies [is] how people, especially those in violent jobs, like soldiers and cops, can become barbarized. “The Terminator films are not really about the human race getting killed off by future machines. They’re about us losing touch with our own humanity and becoming machines, which allows us to kill and brutalize each other,” he says. “Cops think all non-cops as less than they are, stupid, weak, and evil. They dehumanize the people they are sworn to protect and desensitize themselves in order to do that job” (source).

And yet despite his own less-than-stellar view of the force, Cameron can’t bring himself to think outside the box. His fantastical nightmare is trapped in the Shadow of Pygmalion’s myopia—stuck inside a very limited, male, criminogenic view of the world even though he understands “to serve and protect” is a lie the state regularly tells. More to the point, the language of anger is gendered in ways that enable singular police agents and groups of them (versus similar numbers of state targets: herds of prey versus packs of hunting animals), but also in official and unofficial capacities[16] to enact systemic violence through predatory familial likenesses and their relations: the infiltrators disguise themselves as family members during rape.

It’s important, then, to remember the Gothic mode contains contested language; i.e., the campy revival of medieval dichotomies that remains tremendously useful to navigating the enormous emotional pressures present under unequal material conditions; re: during ludo-Gothic BDSM. But with that, we must also say quiet, unspoken things from just as loud a critical standpoint, versus things that sound loud but are critically inert, like Cameron does (e.g., his standard-issue slasher/rape scenarios). The intense feelings of predator and prey are useless unless they can raise awareness towards the socio-material conditions that bring them about, not enact a routine breaking down of civilization towards barbarism. Land and home are both treated as separate and overlapping in conflict, resulting in foreign vs domestic, wild vs civilized, etc. Animals, then, are used in times of state crisis and decay to crack down against workers with workers using animalized language as a delivery method for administering the abuse required to pacify workers with; i.e., out from pictures of home as corrupt, medieval: the liminal hauntology of war.

To that, the Gothic is a return of the fearsome imaginary past, often as a literal castle composed of old dreadful legends and unspeakable deeds. In Gothic-Communist terms, it is the state decaying towards a new imaginary past through the castle as something to summon. Out of it, many monsters may emerge besides just terminators (“they were the newest and the worst”); each swiftly becomes antiquated while attached to the unspeakable horrors it abstracts, shuffled and drawn anew during future revelations. To see the castle is to visit one’s mortality as consigned to a grander doom: an ignominious death tied to a space and time that travels without moving (a hyperobject, remember) and appears seemingly without warning or resistance.

(artist: Don Ivan Punchatz)

The ghost of the counterfeit nurtures the anxiously privileged through nightmares to summon and banish again in relation to their colonial inheritance: our ancestors were conquerors, but so were our “parents.” Except, these fears (and their associate material conditions) aren’t unfounded. Whatever form it takes—a European castle, an Egyptian-style pyramid, or a basic, corporatized logo composed of the building materials of such things—the castle is both a concentration of decaying state power and a fortress-minded condition of waiting for the Imperial Boomerang to swing back ’round, doubly maddening for a nation that hasn’t faced a land invasion in over two centuries, and has never been bombed (nuclear or otherwise) from a foreign power. In short, it is like trying to imagine genocide from those who have never been on the receiving end in modern times, shielded by the Imperial Core as slowly disintegrating around them. Its grim historical materialism invokes the Leveler as a future testament to Capitalism’s past, present and ongoing potential for self-destruction: the medieval brutality of the West having not gone anywhere, while its grim harvests demand fresh blood on a scale impossible to imagine. Sooner or later, monsters will spill out of the structure, preying upon everyone through a war of extermination, “not just those on the other side.”

Beyond Cameron’s quaintly heteronormative, “mom ‘n pops” yarn and financially predatory fixations in Gothic rape scenarios, the fallen home as intimating cataclysmic medieval characteristics is commonplace. By extension, canonical fantasy stories more broadly consider the normalization of class immobility as something to endorse through enforced morphological expression being central to the family unit, thus the state, represented by castles as implacable; i.e., the moderate stance that changing one’s material conditions is already framed as otherworldly and Quixotic, especially insofar as it deters morphological arguments that enable systemic change through gender-non-conforming bodies and identities as somehow “excessive.” Without any transformative bodily aspects, then, the hidden princess threading the Gothic castle’s hyperbolic nightmare (e.g., Sarah, inside a ghostly Los Angeles) is an already-alien proposal for moderate audiences, her harrowing story of survival filled with apophenic reminders of tremendous sexual danger tied to a fantastic place and time threatening a conservative bodily expression and social-sexual arrangement: cis-het girlfriends/wives (“better than mortal man deserves”) and marriage, bridling the savage Amazon as warrior woman and nature as monstrous-feminine (female or not, white-skinned or not).

Note: Abduction and rape—i.e., by a “vengeful dark queen” during ludo-Gothic BDSM—is a concept we’ll return to in the Demon Module’s “I’ll See You in Hell” (which looks at dark faeries and demon mommies during forbidden love fantasy scenarios). —Perse, 4/6/2025

(artist: Just Some Noob)

Meanwhile, anything that remotely challenges that body and gender expression—e.g., the pirate or demon searching for stolen gold or a lost homeland—is treated as an animalistic rogue, owing to their alien body and identity as foreign, often acquiring wealth or status through theft, trickery and conquest, but also non-marital sex.

Our Gothic-Communist critiques, then, seek to change systemic material conditions through subversive fantasy stories, which criticize the inherent, systemic violence that reactionary and moderate Pygmalions threaten when controlling bodily and gender expression; i.e., as an autonomous means of communicating non-heteronormative struggles in weird-nerd culture when marginalized groups are actually allowed to perform and express themselves, mid-trauma and in honest, unmuzzled animalistic language. Except, these feral alternatives and their pedagogy of the oppressed are often muscled out of the grander market equation by more standardized, cis-het, human-looking forms of Gothic morphological expression; i.e., those echoed by men like James Cameron, enforcing harmful industry standards around the world through heroic-monstrous cultural exports: the cold man of steel and the warrior woman with maternal, erotically subservient aspects (a wheyfu, biomechanical warrior bride/girl boss for the obedient state sissy [sub] to collar per the Pygmalion fantasy)!!

(exhibit 8b3: Artist, top-left: Flying Pen; top-right and bottom-left: Kook; bottom-right: Yoracrab. Neoliberal pastiche in Japanese media typically yields male knights who are effeminate but nevertheless armored, whereas female knights often tend to be at least partially nude and presented as dominant and subservient; i.e, beholden to a sexualized, animalistic, maternal role that, in some shape or form, serves child-like effeminate men [whose incestuous aspects endemic to Japanese culture we shall revisit in Volume Three]. As Cameron argues through his work, and lifestyle[17] in connection to his work, women [and AFAB persons at large] must always return to the heteronormative mother role: a sexualized nurturer who can fight when she needs to, but only to protect her children from alien forces. It’s fan service to weird canonical nerds, but also an instruction guide [vis-à-vis the Gothic Romance] for how girls should behave and present themselves in Cameron’s eyes.)

Heteronormative enforcement champions protectors whose bodies (and killing methods) are morphologically standardized: male knights, or female knights (which Amazons basically are) acting like men in Man Box culture or otherwise submitting to male needs; for them, the imaginary past becomes something to love and defend as a heteronormative stomping ground; i.e., by men like Cameron robbing the Gothic mode of its perceptively campy elements through all the usual canonical violence towards the usual victims of state abuse; e.g., Tolkien’s Beater and Biter directed at “goblins,” or Beowulf’s wrath tearing Grendel apart in similar base, animal-grade humiliations[18] mean to demean an already downed, prey-like foe: “Men like you thought it up.”

To that, I want to conclude part one by looking at another element common to the knight and Amazon as a fixture of Gothic poetics, regardless of the performance or genre: torture and psychosexual harm. Due to Amazonomachia being a dialectical-material phenomenon, we’ll introduce its canonical function, here, then devote part two to subverting it through our own uphill expressions of settler-colonial trauma in animalistic language. The canonical knight is commonly “phallic” insofar as he, she, they or it are armed with a penetrative implement of violence standing to, in, and for patriarchal enforcement as something to recognize by the harm it teases synonymizing with sex through romanticized rituals: the duel over the damsel or the child as both over her/them and about the two men measuring and crossing swords. In the heteronormative scheme of courtship through violence, size definitely matters insofar as its shows off more at first glance (swords, unlike penises, do not tend to “grow”; they unsheathe and seek out new bodies to serve as improvised “scabbards,” but the Gothic hyphenates such things in neo-medieval forms):

(artist: Kentaro Miura)

So whether good or bad in centrist stories, armored/weaponized male/tokenized duelists operate through “insect politics,” enacting “traumatic penetration” against their targets and/or collateral damage (J.B.S. Haldane once quipped that if a god or divine being had created all living organisms on Earth, then that creator must have an “inordinate fondness for beetles.” However, if there is a loving god, then why-oh-why is Gwen Pearson’s “stabby cock dagger” a thing? Cosmic-nihilism-in-action). In terms of wives or girlfriends, but also sexual reproduction as symbolized by knights in connection to real life, PIV sex is the standard, canonical point-of-entry for our “overprotective” (rapacious) predators. Failure to uphold it results in psychosexual violence. Not only will the knight (or more to the point, the person emulating the knight) historically-materially “stab a bitch” if she eyeballs them wrong (or if she’s trans), but they—the most powerful and loved-feared family member (usually the father or boyfriend, but also police agents)—will exploit her and the children as routinely vulnerable by design. That’s what the state does and wants.

Centrist kayfabe portrays various good/evil teams using lances or bullets as “phallic” implements of rape that universally threaten obedient cis women as beings to corral and hysterical women, racial and ethnic minorities, queer people and/or children (e.g., queer children, who tend to have neurodivergent qualities that present comorbidly through abuse targeting them as children, queer and neurodivergent) as corrupt/monstrous-feminine things to execute/retire for not being useful to those in power—i.e., not useful to the fathers, but also the state for whom they serve. Of course, there is utility insofar as genocide serves the profit motive, but it achieves this through a limiting of what is morphologically correct and an expanding of what is incorrect. Cis-het men are violent and canon teaches them (and tokenized agents) to be violent in abject, morphologically standardized ways that chase, attack, and sexually dominate non-standard forms on and offstage: the “useless eater” as a useless animal hogging resources, but also an alien to fetishize[19] while persecuting it.

This is hardly the first time I’ve acknowledged this. In “Why I Submit: A Subby Gothicist’s Attitudes on Metroidvania, Mommy Doms, and Sexual Persecution” I write,

The majority of violent murders, rapes, and murder-suicides are committed by cis-het men; the majority of their victims are women; and less than one percent of the total United States population openly identifies as trans/non-binary. Roughly 1.4 million adults in the United States openly identify as trans. Out of a population of 328.2 million, that’s less than half of one percent. The actual number is undoubtedly higher, but obscured by fear. Not everyone comes out because of potential abuse: murder, wrongful termination from employment, homelessness, and so on. Women are pushed into the periphery by sexist men, and trans people don’t exist at all; if they do, they are generally demonized, even killed, their murderers protected by sexist, transphobic laws, aka the gay panic defense (source).

Under this spotlight, queer people hide their identities because they can. Setting aside the extramarital violence committed against them, other marginalized groups—people of color and AFABs—are disproportionately targeted for what they can’t hide: their skin color, genitals and bodily functions as animalized. Under Cartesian dualism, they are automatically sighted[20] and targeted as “of nature” and treated as chattel to varying degrees; i.e., as bodies of discourse that are monitored and controlled to acceptable levels of resistance.

Yet, the oppressed also speak out about morphological standards that convey their oppression as something to reclaim through the usual devices of torture and extermination being used more boldly than Cameron dares. Unlike him, we must haunt the state’s territories—both out of the land they seek to dominate, but also through the policed heroic-monstrous agents as more and more alien, but also unkillable regarding their rebellious usage. Historically bombs and bullets don’t work, and the state’s demand for an aura of invincibility when exploiting an occupied territory compounds to such a costliness as to sink them after a handful of deaths. These break the spell, and open the floodgates of counterterror. Once-proud state proponents ignominiously humor mortality and defeat; taunted by us, they envision themselves as conquered, growing sick with the threat of their own abuses promised by the smallest of failures, including a crisis of masculinity that gives into forbidden, genderqueer pleasures doubling as disguises that perform Athena’s Aegis. Tasting of that, their spirit and their nerves break and they become afraid of shadows “coming to get them,” but also the state to punish them for their “moment of weakness” by sleeping with “chattel” (whose animalization is associated with appropriated cultural markers; e.g., the Pride rainbow):

(artist: Torture Chan)

The problem lies in white, cis-het Pygmalions like Cameron moderating rebellion through antiquated language as something to emulate, thus conceal, state abuse through vivid descriptors of predatory agents. Except similar situations to queer existence are felt through an adjacency to systemic abuse that overlaps with one’s own morphology as policed by and large. Alongside queer people, then, sits the combined struggles of other groups whose identities and bodies are controlled through the same state monopolies—violence and terror as a means of enforcing particular forms of morphological expression using Gothic poetics. Native Americans were largely displaced, segregated and killed (even those who tried to assimilate) through colonial methods presenting them as monstrous wild animals, while people of color and other ethnic minorities have likewise been exploited for centuries through similar industrialized maneuvers (today being disproportionately imprisoned by the American judicial system enslaving them for petty offenses according to Ashley Nellis’ “The Color of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparity in State Prisons,” 2021); e.g., drug wars being an old, borrowed tactic that preys upon chattelized groups using predatory maneuvers learned from past settler-colonial abusers (and embodied within capital by privileged groups; i.e., generally white cis-het men like Tyler Oliveira[21] grifting against vulnerable groups including homeless people, who often use drugs to survive under systemic criminogenic conditions).

To that, more recent American executives borrowed the War on Drugs from older bourgeoisie and their preying on the Imperial Core’s spectrum of ethnic minorities and dissidents trapped inside the state of exception; i.e. coming out of the Opium Wars (source: Extra History, 2016) into Nixon’s abusive campaigns against his own population; re: as John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs, declared in 1994:

You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. […] We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did (source: Vera’s Drug War Confessional”).

Unlike strictly demonized groups, white women who aren’t Amazonian are also preyed upon, except their predation complicates due to their vertiginous treatment as liminal victims; i.e., both a precious property promised to settler-colonist men and killed and raped by them under their so-called “protection” inside spaces of sin comparable to Madikken’s own medieval forest refuge (a concept we’ll explore throughout this entire book, but especially in Volume Three, Chapter Two): those perceived both as feminine and weak, but also wild, hysterical and dangerous—witches reduced to safe/dangerous chattel, thus deserving to be hunted down and preyed upon through preemptive DARVO abuse by patriarchal forces defending heteronormativity through hauntological forms of the settler-colonial model.

(exhibit 9a: Frazetta’s “Castle of Sin” [1986]. Commissioned by Playboy magazine, Frazetta depicts our unsuspecting “hero” being led to his doom by three sexy witches [the same number as the Gorgons, aka the Fates]. In other words, the knight and his armored chastity are being absolved and the fleshy women are being cast as Original Sin capturing him; i.e., they [and their bodies] are entirely to blame for everything that happens to the “poor, defenseless[22]” knight inside the castle as an operatic place of “almost certain temptation.” Never mind that he’s armed for bear and armored from head to toe: the unironically fetishized executioner of the state whose medieval abuses and deathly persona are constantly emulated by state police acting as “good cop, bad cop,” but also “white knight, black knight” against their own citizens; i.e., as beings to reinvade through an assigned, entertaining site of crisis within state grounds: the danger disco.

As we explored in Volume Zero, Frazetta’s hauntologies generally objectify women and glorify men; i.e., operating through fetishized power imbalances that nearly always have the woman being offered up as a naked, idealized prize to powerful [usually white] men, and presenting people of color as violent rapists or powerful, eunuchized harem guards. I love Frazetta’s technical prowess, but his products were definitely “of their time,” channeling the same kinds of unsubtle bigotry as Robert E. Howard, but also the magazine that published him: Weird Tales [which also published H.P. Lovecraft]. Both men worked in a racist vein of the Gothic mode, their pulpy stories overflowing with occult flavors that obsessed constantly about a return of calamity as something to counter by heroic, hypermasculine/Cartesian forces: the brains and the brawn. Frazetta illustrated both heroics in a very Pygmalion way that serves state monopolies in all the usual territories: wild, open land, but also castles as dreamlike sites of violence and rape perpetrated by cops afraid of demonic, otherworldly influences that might undermine the purity of their status and position.)

Faced with crisis, state heroes routinely fail to measure up. The most privileged (and craven) group are cis-het, white Christian men. Scared of anything different/of nature (e.g., The Great Outdoors, left: our two Quixotic heroes afraid of a squirrel in their rental cabin) while simultaneously fetishizing it (the way Beowulf’s Spear-Danes would have feared Grendel’s vengeful mother while pegged her for a woman), they become infatuated, possessive and lusty as they fight over often-literal maidens (teenagers); i.e., as child-like, defenseless property that one man shall not covet if it is already owned (with “problematic lovers” often chased into the state of exception using racist/transphobic sodomy tropes; e.g., the rapacious black man and the killer “false” woman-in-disguise, aka the “trap”). That didn’t/doesn’t stop property duels from being enshrined in romantic canon, however (nor does it prevent tokenism through the existence of TERFs acting like cis-het white men, internalizing their bigotry as self-hating dykes, unicorns and tomboys: the monstrous-feminine as something to imprison, abuse and weaponize against various groups even when no threat is posed or conveyed; e.g., twinks).

Erstwhile, the legends themselves become conspicuously homosocial—at times homosexual, even pedophilically homosexual (a knight’s squire, exhibit 92b; rape culture as something to subvert but also endorse, including by the LGBA, exhibit 100c2c—both in Volume Three). All of a sudden, there are far more men fighting over unwilling women than women (cis or queer) who actually want to sleep with the men involved, leading to pedophilia and chattel rape (neither my father nor stepfather sexually abused me; however, while both beat me, my stepfather once hit me in the head so hard with a plastic phone receiver I thought he wanted to kill me). Already covertly genocidal, neoliberalism is a gateway to fascism, which in turn is a gateway to all of these things in the domestic sphere: “prison sex”/Man Box mentalities where cis-het men tend to masturbate to penises going where they ought; i.e., into the vagina, but also the unwilling bodies of those deemed weaker than they are as animals to chattelize.

In other words, any show of monstrous hypermasculine force becomes unironically masturbatory when conducted against state enemies whose morphological arguments “rock the boat”; i.e., undead, demonic and/or animalistic poetics that challenge the usual utility and ubiquity of the penis/phallic object. This means anything that is androdiverse, gynodiverse and/or anthropomorphic constitutes a threat that must be checked in all the usual ways; but just as often, these diversities are erased by heteronormative agents like Cameron canonizing camp, or chased after by them within coercive, reactionary arrangements of power that enable the chaser to extort coerced pleasure from their victims to assuage their own unhappy existences. Through the profit motive, the enforcer is alienated from pleasure, and generally envy the pleasurable closeness to nature and the human condition (sex and gender) that gender-non-conforming practitioners exhibit and communicate through all aspects of themselves; i.e., monstrous expression as a profoundly non-Cartesian/non-Vitruvian morphological statement with profound implications of rebellious gender identity expression, mid-struggle (animals, it must be said, are farmed and devoured[23] under Capitalism): genitals and the prey-like animalized bodies they’re attached to as coming out of the same Walpolean, Gothic imaginary that parental, sometimes-predatory Amazons and knights do.

We’ll explore these in part two, next. Onto “Prey as Liberators by Camping Prey-like BDSM“!

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About the Author

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

Footnotes

[1] Gothic beings embody power and death as cryptomimetic instruments of great change—generally by overlapping different kingdom taxon of life and death: plants/animals of life, and fungi of death, hybridizing the two as demonic and/or undead (which Volume Two will unpack; e.g., xenomorphs; re: “The Puzzle of ‘Antiquity’“).

[2] Because the state cannot conceal its medieval regressions, it monopolizes its usual violence and terror through Gothic romances; in turn, these incarcerate worker minds in crypt-like hauntologies of endless, brutal suffering (e.g., the infernal concentric pattern, Cycle of Kings, Shadow of Pygmalion, Torment Nexus, etc).

[3] I’m specifically focusing on morphological expression, here, because state forces will try to control it in relation to other variables; i.e., in monopolized opposition to workers’ manifestations of monstrous bodies during countercultural dialogs that stand up for their basic human rights (and that of animals and the environment). While we obviously want to separate human biology from sexual and gender expression (and allow sex to divide from gender during said expression), it nevertheless remains tied to them during morphological expression as part of overall worker struggles; i.e., to liberate themselves from capital in morphological language that challenges the heteronormative standards normally proliferated in canonical Gothic stories.

[4] Animal masks in theatre are some of the oldest in the world; i.e., totems (a topic we’ll introduce here, and expand on greatly in Volume Two when we examine lycans, chimeras and sentient animals).

[5] The chronotope yields a fearsome character of inherited decay tied to a doomed bloodline; e.g., The Darkest Dungeon‘s (2017) opening query to the player: “Do you remember our venerable house, opulent and imperial, gazing proudly from its stoic perch above the moor?”

[6] Hermia is owned by her father, Egeus, and must either marry his chosen suitor or be destroyed vis-à-vis the “ancient rites” of an imaginary Athens: “As she is mine, I may dispose of her” (source) like chattel. This submission is challenged by Hermia running away like an animal into an imaginary space—a rebellion that is quelled at the end of the story by Shakespeare having Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, marry her male conqueror, Theseus. As usual, evocations of an unruly female past are teased through the same language used to quell it; i.e., Picasso’s destruction of the painted woman: “Each time I leave a woman, I should burn her. Destroy the woman, destroy the past she represents” (source: Marta’s “The Women of Picasso,” 2023). Queerness, then, is hauntological and seditious, and whose Gothic, animal poetics become something to monopolize by the same-old state forces.

[7] E.g., the female singer’s lines from Meatloaf’s “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)” (1993):

Will you raise me up? Will you help me down?
Will you get me right out of this godforsaken town?
Can you make it all a little less cold?

Will you hold me sacred? Will you hold me tight?
Can you colourise my life, I’m so sick of black and white?
Can you make it all a little less old?

Will you make me some magic with your own two hands?
Can you build an emerald city with these grains of sand?
Can you give me something I can take home?

Will you cater to every fantasy I got?
Will you hose me down with holy water, if I get too hot?
Will you take me places I’ve never known?

Meatloaf, likewise, is no stranger to horror and camp; e.g., Rocky Horror (1975) but also “Pelts” (2007) from Masters of Horror (re: “Furry Panic“), as well as his various music videos; re: the one for “I Would Do Anything for Love.” To it, monsters and music go together like sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll (a campy tradition out of Shakespeare’s medieval revivals revived, themselves, in the present space and time; e.g., my interviewing of modern-day Shakespearean horror directors, Kailey and Sam Spear, in my “Alien: Ore” series: “On Shakespeare“)! In keeping with cryptonymy process, the fun is the danger disco in disguise!

[8] The Welfare Mom is a racist trope that scapegoats women of color for manufactured scarcity’s generating of criminogenic conditions for those in and outside the state of exception; i.e., divide and conquer for the state.

[9] A common segregative metaphor is the sheepdog—a canine guardian that controls chattel, bloodlessly keeping them in place by obeying but also doubling the shepherd; i.e., guarding his flock. Whereas these cryptonyms conceal the state abuse normally taking place under such segregation (domestic abuse), a black dog symbolizes death, but also works as an attack animal to a higher degree than their fair-furred, babyface counterpart. Both are capable of state violence and indeed are bred for that purpose.

[10] Lucas explained how Star Wars famously took anti-totalitarian/anti-American ideas and communicated them to an American audience (source: AMC+’s “George Lucas on Star Wars Being Anti-Authoritarian,” 2018). In turn, Lucas inspired Cameron with the Star Wars movies to make The Terminator films, and later, the Avatar franchise. Except the allegory of resistance, per the billionaire-Marxist approach, is regularly obscured by the pursuit of profit (franchising the struggle) and telling it from an exclusively white, American, Pygmalion (male king’s) imaginary perspective; e.g., Lucas famously telling Carrie Fisher “there is no underwear in space” (Hamish Kilburn’s “George Lucas Made Carrie Fisher Act in No Underwear in Star Wars,” 2016) and Cameron capitalizing on rebellious activities by relegating guerilla warfare to humanoid space bugs in Aliens, or to white saviors who, according to him, do the job better than Indigenous populations (Kshitij Mohan Rawat’s “Native Americans Boycott James Cameron,” 2022).

Furthermore these Pygmalion tendencies would be counteracted by Lucas’ then-wife, Marcia Lucas, editing the original trilogy (source: Elisa Guimaraes’ “George Lucas Created Star Wars, But This Person Gave It Heart,” 2023). A similar Galatea effect also occurred with Mad Max: Fury Road (2014), as Rhiannon Thomas writes: “The success of Mad Max: Fury Road wasn’t just because Margaret Sixel was a female editor. It’s because of the magical combination of her female perspective, and her non-action-movie perspective, and her unique world perspective, and her immense talent and hard work and dedication” (source: “Mad Max and The Female Editor,” 2023).

This being said, such stories are still written by white women, hence make their saviors and Indians white, too (re: the “Rambo/Star Wars problem” and, by extension, the whole monomyth’s military optimism and cartographic ethnocentric refrains). Most videogames are separate from actual physical space (versus phone games; e.g., Pokémon Go); anytime a game attaches to the real world and/or profit motive, it becomes not just limited by real-world space, but defined by it: as dogma that introduces an ability for the player to die by either playing the game simulation (re: Pokémon Go) or taking the simulation into the real world (re: Doom and Vietnam-style revenge, post-Aliens, at home and overseas, during the Imperial Boomerang and its various nightmare scenarios on and offstage; see: the Undead Module’s “Police States, Foreign Atrocities and the Imperial Boomerang” and “A Vampire History Primer“).

[11] The LAPD’s abuse stretches back over seventy years, as discussed in Max Felker-Kantor’s Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD (2018):

When the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts erupted in violent protest in August 1965, the uprising drew strength from decades of pent-up frustration with employment discrimination, residential segregation, and poverty. But the more immediate grievance was anger at the racist and abusive practices of the Los Angeles Police Department (source).

Such abuse had already been going on for decades (source: Rocio Lopez’ “LA Police’s History of Brutality” 2020), thriving in the shadow of Jim Crow and the orchestrated failure of Reconstruction following the American Civil War (which sowed the seeds of neo-slavery and neo-colonialism within the US).

[12] The terminator is an infiltrator-style killer that, in the ’80s, fits snugly in with the serial killer “slasher” craze, but also police brutality with a friendly human face carried into the early ’90s (during the L.A. riots). In the slasher genre, cultural anxieties personify scapegoats regarding the dimorphic qualities of heteronormative society. Men are always big and strong and dangerous; women are always vulnerable damsels, in danger to men, surviving them and eventually surrendering their power to them in the end. In the school of Ann Radcliffe, the danger of a “slasher” story is always sexy and vice versa, stirring up giant feelings of being stalked, hunted, trapped, captured, raped, tortured, and killed by a shadowy, ever-present menace (“like an animal” under such conditions); Cameron links the same fatal dimorphism to the family unit as something to uphold in unison with these destabilizing “homewrecker” threats: “bad home, bad family” versus “good home, good family” with monsters in between (the classical dilemma being one of genuine fidelity and of good faith, versus acting in bad faith). The imagery of home is present, but faded, treacherous, wrong.

[13] E.g., the damsel-in-distress; i.e., fight or flight, of feeling prey-like in relation to predators: constantly being hunted, naked and exposed, on the run, kept from thinking about or otherwise doing things that might change our material conditions when confronting state trauma in Gothic forms that, in canonical terms, keep people afraid of the socio-material arrangements, versus changing them.

[14] I say “famine” because the event is not generally considered a deliberate genocide by modern history scholars in opposition to Cold War standards; e.g., Robert Davies and Steven Wheatcroft, who write in The Years of Hunger (2009):

Our study of the famine has led us to very different conclusions from Dr Conquest’s. He holds that Stalin “wanted a famine,” that “the Soviets did not want the famine to be coped with successfully,” and that the Ukrainian famine was “deliberately inflicted for its own sake.” This leads him to the sweeping conclusion: “The main lesson seems to be that the Communist ideology provided the motivation for an unprecedented massacre of men, women and children.”

We do not at all absolve Stalin from responsibility for the famine. His policies towards the peasants were ruthless and brutal. But the story which has emerged in this book is of a Soviet leadership which was struggling with a famine crisis which had been caused partly by their wrongheaded policies, but was unexpected and undesirable. The background to the famine is not simply that Soviet agricultural policies were derived from Bolshevik ideology, though ideology played its part. They were also shaped by the Russian pre-revolutionary past, the experiences of the civil war, the international situation, the intransigent circumstances of geography and the weather, and the modus operandi of the Soviet system as it was established under Stalin. They were formulated by men with little formal education and limited knowledge of agriculture. Above all, they were a consequence of the decision to industrialize this peasant country at breakneck speed (source).

For more examples (and the conflicts that emerge between them online), consider Bad Empanada’s “The Holodomor Genocide Question: How Wikipedia Lies to You” (2023).

[15] This being said, grooming an heir and incestuously rearing the next-in-line from one’s sire by said heir is a common fear/fascination inside the ghost of the counterfeit—of one’s liege having forged, yet enforced, parental qualities suggested by the decaying scenic fabric and faded decorations of the medieval homestead as harmful and false. Such disintegration echoes state variants through more advanced forms of capital that feudalism would evolve (and regress back) into: fascism and the defense of an imaginary feudalistic manor amounting to a marriage towards the fearsome, regal likeness of one’s parents.

[16] I.e., vigilante-style “deputies” during acts of pro-state stochastic terrorism (a concept we will explore thoroughly in Volume Three); e.g., incels.

[17] Cameron married and divorced Linda Hamilton as a perceived double of Sarah that didn’t measure up to his Pygmalion fantasy as he envisioned it:

“I think what happened there is that he really fell in love with Sarah Connor,” Hamilton said. “And I did, too.” Cameron didn’t object, telling the Times, “I fell in love with her initially because I thought she was a little closer to Sarah than she actually is, but that doesn’t mean that much once you get to know somebody” (source: Alexia Fernández’s “Linda Hamilton Says She and Ex-Husband James Cameron Were ‘Terribly Mismatched,'” 2019).

[18] I.e., bodily dismemberment and bodily functions as the barbaric fulfillment of inhumane threats by inhumane force; e.g., “I’m gonna rip your head off and shit down your neck!”

[19] State proponents chase after those they dehumanize—a complicated reality illustrated by another telling Cameron movie quote (this section is full of them): “She thought they said, ‘illegal alien’ and signed up!” “Fuck you, man!” “Anytime, anywhere!”

[20] Police and police adjacent factors identify reductively by sight to put you inside one of two basic categories: “a male” or “a female,” but also predator or prey.

[21] Thought Slime’s “I Investigated the Biggest Scumbag on YouTube” (2024).

[22] Knights ride down their prey and violate them through an amalgam of metaphors and actualities: actual rape versus “rape,” and animal metaphors for these things; i.e., through their steed, their lance, their armor as a part of their entirety insofar as it paradoxically threatens and excites their would-be victims.

[23] The butcher’s paradox amounts to an animal that is cute, but calmly slain and sliced up by the handler’s knife. As much as possible is done to ensure a minimization of pain, but death and pain are nonetheless unavoidable; e.g., Chef Wang Gang’s “Stir-fry Bullfrog” video (2023) graphically demonstrating the upfront butchering and preparing of cute bullfrogs. There is a frankness to the confronting of such slaughter to meet a basic, biological need, but also an endorsement of it as a business by a wider culture (Asia) having already suffered greatly at the hands of American Imperialism. In the presence of great trauma (and food shortages), life becomes cheap and delicious, but the fragility lingers in uneasy dialogs (Google-translated YouTube comments from Wang’s video): “Such a cute frog tastes so delicious” and “How cruel it looks from the front is how delicious it looks from the back,” etc. Such statements acknowledge the turning away of the victim and its inevitable killing from behind to make a meal, while nevertheless adopting a kind of executioner’s pride heaped on the chef as a proud master of his craft. The animal quickly becomes an easy casualty in us-versus-them rhetoric, one that slides easily into animal abuse through a system that, for all intents and purposes, rapes nature and its unlucky inhabitants to fill owner and worker bellies with.

Try to imagine and apply this same mentality (and brutal outcome) vis-à-vis animalized workers and their egregores; then try to understand their collective, humanized plight to survive inside a system that prioritizes worker butchery for profit through the heteronormative language (and its negotiation) of animalized monsters: to be bred for slaughter—farmed for meat and sex as grossly conflated under abusive socio-material arrangements; e.g., “thicc” prized by the sex pest who feels entitled to regular “meals,” which he carves up with his dick not as a euphemism for modesty’s sake, but a cryptonymic means of concealing rape. Said entitlement isn’t to fulfill an attempt to bond with others, but to dehumanize and consume them for his own status and insecurities within the profit motive. Through Capitalist Realism, the prison-sex mentality extends into a myopic and inescapable slaughterhouse that, through the ghost of the counterfeit, becomes something to eat through the process of abjection: the delicious suffering of others mid-chattelization. Such “erotic butchery” is endemic to capital, which shapes our experiences; i.e how we inhabit, but also see and understand the world. All of this must be fought and resisted during iconoclastic expression that continues to acknowledge the uncomfortable reality that humans are animals who not only kill to survive, but enjoy and savor their food as oft-sexualized inside a larger system exploiting these overlapping mechanisms for profit.