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.

Instruction: Trauma Writing/Artwork, or Surviving and Expressing Our Trauma through Gothic Poetics

“When he was nearly 19, my son Eddie died. Of course, I was very, very sad, but I didn’t really talk about it a lot. For quite a long time, it was bottled up inside me. I was caught between two feelings. I wanted people to know that I was sad, but, at the same time, I didn’t know how to say it. So, in a funny sort of way, I didn’t want them to know, because that feels kind of weak. One day, a child said to me: What become of the Eddie in your poems? I suddenly had to say what happened to [my son]. So, in front of a big audience, I said: “Eddie died.” And the moment I said that, it gave me the courage to write the things down. And so that’s what I did—I just wrote down how I felt. I even drew a picture—a funny, squiggly picture of me grinning like this, saying “This is me looking sad.” Then, I just wrote straightaway and that turned into a book. In a funny sorta way, I felt better. I could feel good that I said that I feel bad. I know that sounds weird, but that’s how I felt. So maybe if you wrote something down about how you feel, and maybe if you showed somebody that, that way we can help each other.”

—Michael Rosen, talking about his son’s death (2017)

Picking up where “Monster Modes, Totalitarianism (menticide) and Opposing Forces: Oppositional Praxis” left off…

(artist: Less, “I Can’t Decide,” 2021)

We’ve reached the end of the manifesto, which has effectively summarized the manifesto tree from my thesis volume. As the latter constitutes the entirety of this book’s primary ideas—i.e., its theories to apply and execute during ludo-Gothic BDSM—this means my thesis volume has been somewhat light on catharsis resulting from good praxis, which I want to conclude Volume One exploring through a more simplified approach: instruction. Now that this approach has been theoretically outlined, its application through de facto education (a creative success of proletarian praxis) concerns something we’ve already hinted at inside both works: trauma writing and artwork as potent and utterly essential teaching devices, but also existing and operating in conflict in a variety of ways. As Cuwu taught me, showing your heart to others can be profoundly intense and relatable, but also needs to be mindful of a healthy outcome when shared through the usual Gothic fetishes and clichés.

Note: As stated during the volume opening, “application” is effectively synonymous with ludo-Gothic BDSM as I envisioned it; re: first as theoretical idea with “The Quest for Power” and as a prototype in the “camp map” finale with Blxxd Bunny. But also in the pages ahead; e.g., the postscript initial draft with Cuwu, which formed the basis for what I went on to return to and synthesize with Blxxd Bunny in Volume Zero, then finalize by publishing Volume One on Valentine’s 2024 (rough a year after meeting Cuwu and six months after we stopped being friends). Simply put, the work here—however simple it might seem—formed the bedrock upon which Volume Two went on to expand so much thesis work (culminating in the Demon Module’s “Rape Reprise“), and Cuwu was central in that. —Perse, 4/2/2025

(artist: Cuwu)

Simple doesn’t mean basic; it means that we’re viewing things as simply as we can, mid-conflict. We discussed psychosexuality in the paratextual documents and examined some smaller personalized trauma writings inside the thesis volume; e.g., the palliative Numinous and my relationship to Cuwu (who we’ve already discussed in this volume, too, and who the postscript is dedicated to). Because the remainder of this volume, and indeed the entire book, is dedicated to trauma writing and artwork through monstrous poetics, we’ll be considering anecdotal trauma (and oppositional praxis) much more directly from here on out:

• The postscript (included in this post) discusses learning about the trauma of others to help someone process their own in lieu of state abuses (through the police and their deputized terror tactics in stochastic forms): with heroes and monsters.
• The sample essay offers a small reprieve while we examine Ghostbusters: Afterlife through a postcolonial lens, vis-à-vis Edward Said.
• “Paid Labor“ briefly discusses an important refrain to solidarized labor under sex positivity: sex work is work, which needs to be paid. Furthermore, it explores how many different kinds of work constitute sex work, insofar as Capitalism dimorphically sexualizes all workers, and that intersections of art, porn, prostitution, and writing must collectively negotiate and express worker rights and boundaries through intersectional solidarity.
• The synthesis roadmap is a symposium that considers trauma as a Cartesian enterprise, treating nature as food. As such, it discusses a means of synthesizing praxis, thus interrogating and processing Cartesian trauma (war and rape) in our own daily lives in opposition to state forces harvesting us. It provides a lengthier sample of synthesis than Volume Zero’s camp map finale, but still constitutes a taste of what we will discuss and propose even more thoroughly in Volume Three; i.e., when we explore proletarian praxis at length. The roadmap comes in four parts, which we’ll unpack and signpost more when we arrive. Monster-wise, though, it explores generational trauma during Gothic poetics in relation to nature-as-monstrous-feminine; i.e., exploited by Cartesian thought to canonize, thus facilitate, unironic war and rape: Medusa, but also forbidden expressions of the Medusa through Georgia O’Keefe, H.R. Giger and more recent, less infamous auteurs. It also examines Cartesian arrangements of state violence and resistance according to Heinlein’s competent man and Kurosawa’s Western. Keeping with the Medusa, though, the roadmap will also explore Amazons, phallic women/traumatic penetration, and various abject morphologies policed under Cartesian binaries during pornographic expression; e.g., racialized tropes, but also fat people at large.

To that, the writing in these areas will be messier and heavier than it might be in purely theoretical forms (even simplified ones), because it directly attempts to speak to our experiences as conveyed in the creative output that we generate as extensions of, and dialogs about, our own survival under capital. So please take whatever precautions are required before proceeding into the pages ahead. You will see pretty things in relation to traumas that normally go unsaid, but haunt the beauty on display as inextricable from them: rape and war as foisted upon workers from all walks of life, but especially women and other minorities as synonymized with rape and war (which likewise synonymize); i.e., as their most regular victims under male/token Man-Box enforcers (who also, let it be said, also suffer under state crisis as perpetual brutalizers choosing to work for the state).

(artist: Sophie Jane)

Rape and war are two sides of the same coin; Gothic Communism seeks to prevent both (and Capitalist Realism) through worker intelligence as something to raise well beyond canonical, Cartesian standards. Trauma writing/artwork, then, are vastly important insofar as they grant workers an awesomely potent means to speak out against the state and its normally myopic dialogs on rape, war and death: Gothic poetics as a counterterrorist device, by which to regain control over portrayals of our own trauma, thus lives; i.e., by reclaiming the ability to perform and play with these things imagined for ourselves, seeing possible worlds beyond Capitalist Realism’s endless rape and war. Women (and all monstrous-feminine “non-men”) are food whose harvesting serves a Cartesian profit motive.

To that, it’s actually quite common for heroic canon to include trauma, but not to process it in any meaningful, healthy sense; i.e., of actually stopping its criminogenesis by recognizing and subverting these coercive material conditions and linguo-material factors in reclaimed language and iconoclastic, Gothic theatricalities. Even seemingly polite white moderates like Tolkien generally isolate trauma as something centered around the white cis-het male agent (or token person) as tied to state mechanisms that cast most other groups into the state of exception to varying degrees; the centrist hero’s journal of war and its usual brutalities, then, tend to concern the normalizing of state monopolies on violence, terror and morphological expression. The most effective (and final) form of genocide is silence; the best way to combat its execution is to speak out in ways that highlight our trauma in recognizable forms.

For the state, trauma is something to extend into the future as a foregone conclusion: embodied by monstrous language as something for the state to abuse, selling it back to the middle class while alienating them from nature and sex. For workers, trauma is embodied by devices that can be reclaimed from the state; e.g., monstrous language, but also sex work as a means of personifying personal, psychosexual trauma as something that haunts a given worker from moment to moment, but can also empower them with an actual humanized voice when challenging state dialogs. Rape and war become things to prevent through various praxial mechanisms during the warring class and cultural value of workers educated to varying degrees, including in Gothic poetics—our aforementioned weird nerds as canonical or iconoclastic.

(exhibit 14b: Artist, top-far-left and middle-center-left: Ohno Justino; top-mid-left: melkteeth; top-mid-right: Scarlet Love; top-far-right [cat]: Draculasswife; top-far-right: Raichiyo; middle-far-left: e.streetcar; middle: Loretta Vampz; bottom-far-left: Ota Goth; bottom-mid-left: source; bottom-mid-right: Lusty Comic; bottom-far-right: Whisp Will.

Trauma is something to live with, insofar as people embody it in some shape or form. Doing so can highlight aspects of the human body that are normally targeted for trauma in sexualized ways, but also something that can express said trauma through a reclaiming of the Gothic poetics associated with it and the natural world; i.e., to express your own unique sexualities, genders, performances [and sale of these things] through your own artwork, body or both as a complex performance that synthesizes trauma in various forms. Whether “tasteful/sophisticated,” “pornographic/vulgar,” or some combination of the two, trauma becomes a subversive way of expressing your own identity as having formed under Capitalism, either by swapping out various pieces of yourself, or by making something normally foreign to who you are [or a part of you that has become alienated from you] a fundamental part of expressing your own rebellious, outspoken position: a robotic limb or pair of horns; one’s bodyfat, hips [and other bones] and curves, but also genitals as sites of abuse/stigma as things to reclaim and/or accept as they currently are; i.e., to raise awareness about, while simultaneously achieving a newfound sense of self-worth, healing and discovery towards a sex-positive existence that has been permanently altered by trauma insofar as one’s self image is concerned. Power in the face of trauma includes turning the abuse of nature and sex back towards one’s abusers—as a survivor would.)

Regarding trauma writing and artwork at large, Sex Positivity (and Gothic Communism) offer a counternarrative to heteronormative dealings with nature as alien and traumatic—one that deliberately concerns praxis as a means of processing trauma and healing from it: through the personifying of monsters, despite knowing this will expose us as having survived state trauma, thus constituting a specific kind of threat they cannot tolerate: a witness. Partly this narrative is based autobiographically on my own abuse (as Gothic fiction often is); it’s also based on partially asexual[1] reflections of sexual abuse experienced by other workers that I feel an empathetic connection to (which queer people often do—collectively punished by the state and its moderate/reactionary defenders).

In the interests of preventing trauma for other sex workers, then, I want to be thorough (the same way Paulo Freire wanted to prevent world hunger after personally experiencing it); I want to include an illustration of praxis as something to absorb from our surroundings—not just canon, but our friends, family and fellow workers’ trauma and intimations thereof, including animals and the environment to which we give thanks and try to heal through ourselves. You should already be familiar with this idea from Volume Zero and earlier in the manifesto, and the roadmap will cover trauma-bonding at length. However, I’m highlighting it here in honor of those more oppressed than myself as something this book gives special focus to. Even though I was abused, I also have considerable privilege as a white trans woman (who only came out at 36 years of age); my experiences working with other sex workers have taught me that we can always learn from them as mutually oppressed workers—from their pedagogy of the oppressed felt in opposition to state forces: cops.

Manifesto Postscript: “Healing from Rape”—Addressing “Corruption,” DARVO and Police Abuse with the Pedagogy of the Oppressed in Ninja Scroll and The Terminator (feat. Cuwu)

“‘Kill poison with poison,’ he said. He said [that] if you make love to me, you’ll be free from poison; mine will destroy it.”

—Kagero to Jubei, Ninja Scroll

At its most basic level, rape is a violation of basic human, animal and environmental rights enacted through Cartesian power abuse; this postscript concerns the complicated process that healing from rape entails—i.e., its corrupting presence through codified trauma, wherein the surviving of police abuse becomes something to relate to others through Gothic stories that constitute radical empathy as a thing forever out-of-joint: the attempt to empathize with alien experiences to gain new perspective. Such empathy needn’t concern both parties equally and its Gothic dialogs concern intense, poetic liminalities still bearing an intense potential for disguise that is haunted by the shadow of police forces; i.e., it is where ludo-Gothic BDSM may camp trauma, doing so through cryptonymy as pushing towards what it cannot always achieve.

Note: This section reflects heavily on past experiences between Cuwu and I. I’m including a visual reference, here, but wherein the original section actually didn’t have any images of Cuwu to speak of; re: me not deciding to start featuring Cuwu and myself visually until the volume was nearly finalized (and diving into the idea, come Volume Two). —Perse, 4/7/2025

(artist: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu)

Even so, the postscript aims to showcase such a dialog and its phenomenological complexities; i.e., one held between two or more people relating through their interpretation of various texts they are either intimately familiar with or at the very least recognize the tell-tale arrangements of power and performance through traumatic markers: heroes and monsters as a liminal proposition to find catharsis inside the oscillation of. Our featured dialog involves The Terminator and Ninja Scroll as having been relayed between Cuwu and I; my accounting of that relationship will be more conversational and messy due to its intensely traumatic and taboo nature: they experienced rape fantasies that stemmed from a history of sexual abuse, of which I—having been physically beaten and emotionally abused, but never sexually raped—could only relate to through fantastical stories about such things. But I was drawn to such stories through someone knightly who had abused me all the same: my dark Amazon, Jadis.

Before we delve into such heavy grounds, I want to prepare you with several disclaimers/reminders. One, while it might be tempting to prioritize abuse to a matter of degree, I would caution against it. Rape isn’t something to “rank” or trump others with; most people have some kind of trauma to endure, and generally this is how we relate to others, mid-oppression. Rape is a thing to heal from, which generally involves traumatic revisitations during ludo-Gothic BDSM that are themselves corrupted by awesome forces; “corruption” isn’t an immediate falsehood, in Gothic stories with heroes, villains and damsels, but semantic entropy and proliferation amid the presence of complicating factors. Facing an eventual understanding of said trauma requires facing the trauma of others by their side, which can be profoundly traumatic and disheartening unto itself—if purely because we discover (often by accident) how someone we care about was hurt in ways that are difficult to fathom. This injury can even compound should we learn just how mistaken we were about what we could and could not see.

Trauma is both shared and intensely private, something to interpret in popular stories that bridge the gap. For survivors of rape and other warlike violence, then, Gothic stories either concern trauma as something that is understandably difficult for them to share—like Kagero from Ninja Scroll despite Jubei having witnessed it firsthand—or that they were traumatized in ways we can scarce imagine even if they did share whatever we saw ourselves; i.e., sometimes, this trauma cannot be perfectly understood, even when it is told to us in thunderously intense forms: our trauma overlaps, but is simultaneously unique from both vantage points—that of the hero and his lady to rescue, except he’s also traumatized. When Sarah Conor tells Kyle Reese, for instance, “Your world is pretty terrifying!” her idea of his world is a dream, a mere shadow of what he actually survived when trying to see through his eyes (and he hers):

All the same, Kyle cannot fully process her trauma as a female domestic who, at one point, feared him as the killer gunning for her (and doubles bearing her name) being announced around the clock during a 24-hour news cycle: he looks human, but she sees a monster (failing to recognize the actual terminator in the bargain). The shared trauma, in both their cases, comes not from its strict accuracy but from the painful realization that one’s own life is simultaneously charmed and false on either side of a breakthrough, but nevertheless surrounded by trauma that impairs you through the people you meet and care about. Such confusions becomes commonplace even during vicarious, imaginary dialogs under more operatic settings that, thanks to state interference, aren’t always under our control. Indeed, they are made under conditions that inspire feelings that take us seemingly out of control (through heroic language) to process an exit strategy inside colonized spheres of entertainment: the Gothic disco as dangerous precisely because it speaks to abuses we are drawn towards in theatrical forms that are closely monitored by police agents listening in, but also walking amongst us.

To that, we’re going to examine my empathizing with Cuwu as two traumatized workers formulating a combined pedagogy of the oppressed; i.e., through the sharing of The Terminator and Ninja Scroll to communicate performative arrangements of unequal power amounting to at-time-times painful conversations about trauma. The aim wasn’t to torture ourselves purely for its own sake, but to understand things outside our own realms of experience during calculated risks (re: ludo-Gothic BDSM): sometimes the damsel doesn’t want to be rescued, but “raped” (except no danger is actually present).

Shared between us, these therapeutic stages helped us achieve (a)sexual catharsis through trauma bonding in psychosexual rituals/expressions of war and rape that speak out against the state and its police agents; i.e., as frequently disguised in the very markers of abuse, resistance and power that drew us towards them to start with. It becomes something to perform and play with, sometimes literally (we’ll give an example of this briefly when we examine Doki Doki Literature Club [2015]—a videogame example of the same basic rape fantasies that The Terminator and Ninja Scroll illustrate). Cuwu was entirely clear (and incredibly outspoken) about how they felt; they hated cops but loved performing these complicated fantasies, which led me to think of the above examples when relating to them through my own trauma as something I was drawn towards with Jadis as their Gothic princess. After escaping Jadis’ “castle” (a run-down Florida duplex), Cuwu played mother (mommy dom) to me and I was, at least part of the time, their dominator and willing pet. Even so, the vector for this continuous swapping of dominant/submissive roles partly involved the same stories we shared between ourselves.

So before we delve into my admittedly complicated relationship with Cuwu through Gothic media, we’ll want to consider the nature of Gothic stories as chaotic liminal spaces; i.e., stages to share and process trauma together over time, which are themselves simultaneously occupied by corrupt, liminal markers of trauma: monsters that, when abused, half-disguise and half-advertise class betrayal. State subterfuge cannot monopolize such language, so it thrives on sowing doubt through the presence of a potential invader who simultaneously polices other members inside a seemingly besieged fortress. As something to cultivate within the theatre of such places, radical empathy can shape our own views about canon as something to reclaim, informing personal/collective boundaries and lines in the sand to draw up future agreements and conditions with. This includes questioning the canonical veneration of state paramilitary agents as undermined with what they abuse—i.e., police exceptionalism and tokenized agents of self-policing minority groups wearing revolutionary uniforms in bad faith; e.g., TERFs acting like Amazons: out from a dark and savage “past,” they return to said “past” once rescued and rape it all over again inside the present space and time:

(artist: Luigiix)

Before we proceed, let’s also briefly reconsider state violence at large, seeing how it’s largely what we’ll be focusing on through our own stabs at radical empathy through Gothic stories and heroic-monstrous language. As we’ve already explored in our thesis, but also manifesto (“Critiquing Amazons as Liminal Expression”), and will explore in Volume Three (especially in Chapter Two), cops are not your friends; they serve the state and the state is the enemy. In turn, the state and various multi-media networks and corporations churn out badass monstrous “copaganda” that justify/fetishize police “corruption” and monopolize state violence against workers and nature through monstrous-heroic canonical language. They combine against a demonized, infantilized population of reprobate victims that aren’t allowed to fight back or defend themselves (which, in reality, is the state functioning by design, not by accident or flaw). However nice your local sheriff may be, the state monopolizes and glorifies police violence (and uniforms) while treating the violence of you defending yourself as a death warrant. When threatened or feeling threatened, cops will empty their magazines into you (as their “warrior” training tells them to), then go home and hug their wife; if pressed, they’ll invoke DARVO—or cry “corruption!”

Skip Intro—re: the maker of an extensive YouTube series on copaganda—calls this relationship a Faustian bargain, one enacted between the audience and the police through copaganda. As the state is always in crisis, it always needs a victim, making bargains with it extremely dangerous (Promethean). Yet, police canon is also black-and-white, with any forays into grey area reinforcing the status quo through manufactured tensions between different worker groups. It uses fear and dogma to menticide the audience, effectively lying to them to enable the state functioning as intended: through our aforementioned bourgeois trifectas, monopolies and profit motive. Class traitors wearing increasingly fascist uniforms monopolize violence, terror and morphological expression against other workers. The degree to said betrayal is a Morton’s Fork (meaning the outcome doesn’t change): worker exploitation, generally at the hands of other workers preventing solidarity while posturing as heroes.

(source: Facebook)

State abuse/police violence is a very broad topic, and we’ll continue to cover its Gothic execution and countering throughout the rest of the book. As we do, keep this in mind as we move through the postscript and onto the synthesis roadmap: heteronormativity and the colonial binary synthesize police behaviors through canonical praxis, which uses Gothic poetics to condition dimorphic sexual violence through a Cartesian, settler-colonial mindset:

• men (or beings acting like men) become violent, taught to show force and masculine dominance—to make war and rape, then lie about it in heroic-monstrous language; to be hard, rigid, infantilized penetrators competing against civilians (and nature) in an us-versus-them game of regularized, life-and-death confrontations over everyday things.
• women (or beings treated “like women/as feminine”) serve as chattel slaves that receive systemic male abuse within a bizarre paradox: the monstrous-feminine. Women are both demons and damsels who seemingly can’t be strong or create (works of art), yet must also a) look after men who—despite their brawn—cannot care for themselves nor establish meaningful relationships outside of systemic coercion, and b) spawn and raise the male bloodline while men busy themselves making war against women/monstrous-feminine, nature-aligned agents who do challenge the settler-colonial status quo.
• Trans, intersex, non-binary and otherwise gender-non-conforming beings internalize tremendous amounts of guilt, self-hatred, and imposturous/unwelcome feelings; i.e., as corrupt and monstrous-feminine, but also something for state agents to blend in with, mimicking rebellious factions occupying the same complicated shadow zone; e.g., subjugated Amazons serving as state infiltrators to dominate nature anew.

From a canonical standpoint, these gendered categories have moderate and reactionary variants, in which moderates encourage and enable reactionary behaviors whenever canon is camped: open aggression, condescension, reactionary indignation and DARVO. In turn, these behaviors happen according to the class/cultural tensions of competing synthetic oppositional groupings during oppositional praxis’ Six Doubles and their Gothic-poetic mode of expression (the means, materials and methods of study). Regardless of the exact proponents, the dimorphic, heteronormative/Cartesian nature of canon has a profound impact on how its associate violence is viewed and carried out simultaneously within Gothic theatre. Precisely because it is liminal—and liminal expression relays through oppositional praxis—engagement with the Gothic mode must be considered as potentially compromised; i.e., vis-à-vis the potential for various betrayals.

For example, men in/through Gothic canon see women (and other monstrous-feminine) as soft and fearsome (“the enemy is both weak and strong”) but also alien (undead), animal and demonic—doubly so if they stand out, let alone refuse to comply with authority (castration/emasculation fears). Meanwhile, the presence of dislocated, counterfeit rape denotes a ghost of the counterfeit that female/feminized workers want to survive and heal from. This includes whenever they encounter a perceived threat: the state as fearsome—the police as false protectors or people associated with the police, generally as victimized subordinates—but also workers conveyed as fearsome through state propaganda; i.e., the good, the bad, and the ugly of oppositional praxis when preventing rape and war as things to tolerate or reject. Its execution becomes a liminal, messy ordeal, which means that healing from rape through Gothic expression is equally liminal and messy insofar as these stories are shared and experienced through a tenuous, and at times incredibly fragile, pedagogy of the oppressed.

We’ve discussed how power and resistance operate through Gothic poetics in the same doubled, paradoxical spaces. A kind of conversational theatre, the dialogic is disjointed but ubiquitous. Genuine rape and violence exist everywhere in America and Americanized countries; they’re also doubled in Gothic canon, made fun of in blind parodies that ultimately serve as little more than rape apologia. At the same time, the paradox of ironic rape fantasies is legitimately proletarian—i.e., affording gender trouble as a parodic, psychosexual means of subverting stereotypes, exposing enemies, and expressing our trauma, dysphoria and euphoria by putting “rape” in quotes. Under such liminal conditions, something as striking and immediate as torn stockings (and a cummy vagina) can become empowering insofar as they challenge the simple commodifying of these areas through canonical media’s targeting of them for heteronormative violence:

(artist: That Hoey Vegan)

Considered through a dialectical-material lens, such an evocative image demonstrates the complicated ability to empower oneself through forbidden expressions of sexuality that are objectifying but nonetheless aid the model in finding some measure of catharsis, thus empowerment through psychosexual exhibits of various kinds:

• “flashing” exhibitionism (exhibit 53)
• private/public nudism (exhibit 101b)
• “breeding” kinks (exhibit 87a)
• rape play/consent-non-consent (exhibit 46d; re: “Dark Shadows“)

These forms of revolutionary cryptonymy and other “ravishing” games intimate (a)sexual catharsis through Gothic boundary-setting exercises that reassure traumatized workers they are safe from social-sexual violence as an ever-present threat; i.e., sensing the constant advertisement of nonstop crisis and societal decay through “gargoyles” that, when viewed, promise compelled boundaries (segregation) and unironic power abuse sanctioned through state dialogs and executed through various proponents of tacit-to-explicit state mandates; i.e., those lurking in the working class, the media, and the paramilitary/military sectors of a given population.

The pedagogy of the oppressed is formed in opposition according to heroic language, configured under duress amid suggestions of state infiltration: oscillations between hero and villain, but also savior and rapist. Opposite the class-conscious worker and their poetic, cryptomimetic sculpting of sex-positive egregores (and their subsequent, partially-buried trauma), you have the false-conscious, bad-faith efforts of the class traitor as wearing masks (often, as we shall explore in Volume Three, of famous monster types while also posturing as activists; i.e., gobstopper masks and disguise pastiche of state impostors/parasites—exhibit 100a3). These traitors are a socio-materially diverse group that include standard-issue “weird canonical nerds” and white, heteronormative reactionaries, but also fetishized minorities (token police, including hauntological iterations like the witch cop—something we’ll examine in Volume Three, Chapter Four) and assimilated activists.

For example, TERFs adopt assimilative rape fantasies, but also facilitate them for those in power—e.g., Ghislaine Maxwell for Princess Charles (Dreading, 2023). Girl bosses also exude “phallic” (traditionally masculine and bellicose) tendencies stemming from penis “envy” and rape trauma having become weaponized by ubiquitous torture porn constantly triggering them to behave in ways useful to the state; i.e., by triangulating against state enemies (which is a stressful activity for all parties involved, leading to nothing but stress and harm) through subjugated forms of rebellion. Meanwhile, straight men have gender envy and war/rape fears, which both groups project onto their assigned bourgeois subordinates/proletarian victims: the “prison sex” mentality. Once funneled through them, pro-state propaganda becomes Marx’s aforementioned nightmare “dressed up”; re:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language (source: “The Eighteenth Brumaire,” 1852).

“Like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” It is a sobering concept whose dangerous re-investigation requires bravery and caution: Under Capitalism, the notion that people do remarkably awful things to each other is a historical-material fact, one induced by Capitalism as a structure. Do not rely on the better angels of peoples’ natures, especially empty heroic platitudes and veiled/non-empty threats administered by reactionaries, moderates or cops (actual or figurative)!

Historical materialism is very much a vicious cycle of monopolized state violence, terror, and morphology stuck on repeat, including its nightmarish ambiguities, liminalities, egregores and deceptions. As police states oscillate between neoliberal and fascist forms, police agents go from sex pests to sex fiends in service of the state—dutifully attacking the state’s enemies by becoming soldiers, but also soldiers-in-disguise: cops, detectives, good Samaritans, etc, as undercover through monstrous-heroic costumes. On a shared stage of Gothic poetics, the state’s bad-faith contributions spill out and into a messy civil war of spies, police and infiltrators who exchange their ability to love for their ability to protect the state from its assigned enemies. DARVO becomes common, labeling labor/antifascist movements as “terrorist” organizations. In turn, this plays out in fantastical, brutal forms that intimate state abuse as lurking close by through Gothic displacements that disassociate war and rape as committed by “foreign” police agents; e.g., the black penitent, blackguard, succubus, or death knight, etc.

(artist: Ayami Kojima)

Whether to illustrate or perform, neither tactic is strictly a state instrument. Indeed, for the rest of this postscript, we’ll ping-pong between two genres of the Gothic that employ heroic misuse in ways we can reclaim by using Gothic consumption to relate to each other in stories haunted by the consequence of risk, but also inaction as something to temper with fresh courage: the dark fantasy of Ninja Scroll and the dystopian, technophobic science fiction in James Cameron’s Terminator (and assorted offshoots) as a complicated step in the right direction. Cuwu was clearly the inspiration for this postscript; i.e., according to a shared but unevenly experienced and understood sense of domestic abuse when presented by me to them in Gothic stories covering war and rape in more outlandish and intensely imaginary forms. As such, there are elements of my close-reading style present in the remainder of the postscript, but these are meant to highlight various concerns that would have been on my mind when sharing said stories with Cuwu (and people like them); i.e., those who ultimately were more traumatized than I was, and whose pedagogy of the oppressed was communicated through the trading of psychosexual, operatic stories passed back and forth. There’s a constant, hyperviligent sense of weighing in regards to what is being considered, performed, or otherwise conveyed, but also an overwhelming desire to relax and let one’s guard down (doubly so for those who disassociate facing trauma).

Victims of past trauma, then, become drawn to paradox—as trapped between performances of pure hero and pure villain, wherein “rape” makes the damsel feel more safe through calculated risk than strict black-and-white scenarios of total safety or danger do. The latter two become untrustworthy and uncomfortable, whereas ludo-Gothic BDSM becomes an effective means of managing complicated feelings; i.e., of control in the presence of uncertainty as something to put “on the hip” through active performance and play. Doing so more accurately describes how the performer feels from moment to moment in relation to the world around them as duplicitous vis-à-vis the shadow of police corruption. Being “raped” via the baton or “lance” becomes the best way to confirm. And all of this becomes the pedagogy of the oppressed as a communal form of investigative power exchange.

As we proceed, I want you to consider is how my present thinking was shaped; i.e., in relation to my sharing of these stories with other workers: as a communal healing process informed by a learned mistrust of their surroundings, but also fed on them as things to later return to and subvert while surrounded by potentially harmful copies. Or as my thesis argued, “Returning and reflecting upon old points after assembling them is a powerful way to understand larger structures and patterns (especially if they’re designed to conceal themselves through subterfuge, valor and force). It’s what holistic study (the foundation of this book) is all about” (source). I cannot begin to overstate how messy and painful healing from rape/power abuse is; it and the pedagogy of the oppressed are a tremendously fragmented and at times even erratic process. And both are motivated by theatrical mechanisms of force that if not inherently harmful, certainly have the potential to lead us into dangerous spheres of influence. Not all workers take the noble route, or have good intentions; except the oscillation between friend and foe only remains, intensifying according to complied hero fantasies that interrogate power through “rape” as something to execute.

About that. Before I discuss Cuwu and my relationship with them through these stories, I first want to consider how these stories molded my own thinking when shared continuously between myself and many workers; i.e., how I think about rape and violence in Gothic media as an ongoing exchange that is hardly set or safe. My examination of these stories, post hoc, isn’t to simply consider their repacking as something to sell back to us then imitate through the ghost of the counterfeit (the falseness of state power but the lingering of its abuses through alien sensations), but to entertain how this dark reimaginating allows them to exist in popular culture at all; i.e., to ask how its tangibility grants the distribution of police trauma as something to share, discuss and reflect on, insofar as it concerns all workers living within state territories as affected in a variety of ways.

Rape and disempowerment were certainly things Cuwu and I discussed in types of theatre normally policed in relation to those who have survived what some workers (myself, in this case) can only speculate on through Gothic poetics. That is, the stories we shared weren’t so different than them having me fuck them a particular way during rape fantasies we collectively decided on; e.g., choking or sleep sex. Prior to those rituals’ deliberate negotiation and gingerly execution, sharing a moment of Gothic peril can bridge the gap through a shared audience; i.e., by inviting dialogs between them about sexual violence that Cuwu and I eventually entertained in a more participatory and playful fashion. I can say without shame that I was the instrument of Cuwu’s “rape” as informed by popular horror stories we consumed separately (Cuwu loved Lucifer, 2016)and shared together for inspiration. Some, like Ninja Scroll, were rougher than others:

(exhibit 15a: Genma from Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s Ninja Scroll—in disguise as the Lord Chamberlain, having his way with a palace concubine. As leader of a brutal gang of rogue ninjas, Genma is our recuperated Nazi. He rules from the shadows with forbidden magic using fear and dogma; his power is literally necromantic resurrection; his fascistic, thieving violence is deceptive, but also standard-issue—for the actual “warring states” period, but also its many reincarnations in late 20th/21st century popular media.)

Rough or not, such dialogs remain incredibly vital, insofar as their official discouragement (and subsequent silence) only leads to harm on a genocidal scale. Behind closed doors, for example, cops underreport their own “chattel rape” abuse towards those allegedly under their “protection”—with “to serve and protect” and similar slogans embossed on their prowler doors being constitutionally for the state, not the people (or nature). Cops can marry you, then kill you and lie about it and nothing happens; they can do this in public and get off with paid administrative leave before getting rehired somewhere else. It’s literally protocol. Meanwhile, damning data such as “40%[2] of police families experience domestic abuse” or “1 in 5 women are raped” is a gross underestimation, wherein decades-old studies hampered by or actually performed by the police use language that limits the ability to even express what violence and rape are. It’s misleading. The real numbers are far worse, but also unknown—fudged to keep the image of the state strong but also squeaky clean (a phenomenon performed by neoliberals and fascists alike).

Clearly people need to be able to interrogate their own trauma, but also negotiate with it vis-à-vis ludo-Gothic BDSM as divorced from state power. The problem is, various forms of potentially sex-positive BDSM, kink and fetishes are regularly appropriated, reducing their critical awareness/teaching potential through assimilations of rape theatre (controlled opposition). Coercively sublimated in ways that uphold the status quo through bad play’s guilty pleasures, these domination bids threaten servile emotional manipulation and internalized reactive abuse (which we’ll examine more thoroughly in Volume Three, Chapter Two). For minorities and queer people, assimilation fantasies become a deadly and embarrassing game of compromise: tokenism through class, race and culture betrayal. The game-in-question offers a magnified form of exclusive (rare) promotion, limited to the “special” slaves; i.e., any self-policing Judases working within the minority group(s) wishing to escape reactive abuse for self-preservation and comfort. Such illusions hide the reality behind a screen: that things are somehow better for everyone, when in reality they are provided to a small group of elevated slaves afforded special positions. In spite of these disparities, the system as a means of division and exploitation is still very much in place. So are the urges to interrogate trauma, albeit using imperfect forms that leave much to be desired.

In spite of these praxial complexities, such oscillating subterfuges bring us to Gothic illusions that—through tremendous romance and Gothic reinvention—still communicate inherited anxieties regarding the present. For example, Cameron’s Terminator yields a very dystopian translation of the American police. Their hyperreal, posthuman quality in the film speaks to the replacement of the human with a “human” counterfeit tied to a devastated map of empire that lacks even the rudiments of humane programming. As the Imperial Boomerang flies home, its goal is simply to deceive—a highly advanced infiltration unit hiding in plain sight in the places where people usually gather to let off steam, but also seek out forbidden, psychosexual pleasures that serve a decidedly medicinal function:

Like Cameron’s ill-fated Tech-Noir disco, popular media at large can often feel infiltrated, but also forgone—despite its necessity—to be corrupted by the presence of trauma as a paradoxical healing agent. In Ninja Scroll’s imaginary Japan, the demons are everywhere, but look oddly human. In such an uncertain and dangerous world, a woman’s lived reality is that Jubei appears (at first glance) as much a threat to Kagero as her rapist does; the same goes for Sarah and her own “love triangle.” To that, Ninja Scroll offers up a careful balance in Jubei Kibagami. Precisely the kind of hero prayed for persons who are normally subjected to state abuses, he’s Superman, but more rugged and conspicuously surrounded by a world that is far less perfect than his relatively polite warrior’s code:

In Byron’s words, though, “I want a hero” sadly becomes as much a Judas’ refrain as it does a call to rebellion when no such hero is actually present. Oppressed workers consume the stories, but they often submit to state mandates through various concessions, especially when they have been denied the ability to experiment; i.e., in ways that go beyond Jubei’s patently sexless approach. Indeed, oppressed groups don’t rush into danger so much as they aim to negotiate with theatrical doubles of “danger” through optional sexuality amid Gothic theatrics: there is often an asexual component, insofar as psychosexuality exists adjacent to harm in ways that treat sex as a performance of death, violence and, yes, rape. Ludo-Gothic BDSM camps that, too, by playing with it, which can be stressful.

This becomes yet another reality under Capitalism, one to interrogate through the opening of sexualized channels of performance common in Gothic stories; i.e., experienced as much through open forms of “rape,” “murder” and frank, intense BDSM as through run-of-the-mill damsels waiting to be rescued. Relying on the rescuer too completely can be an issue, but likewise the dungeon fantasy demands a degree of moderation, lest it become a dark romance presented as blind comfort food: shared between parties where trauma is fully repressed (e.g., Radcliffe). Because praxis and its synthesis live inside Capitalism, it behooves us to look at the structure as it lives and breathes, including anyone trapped inside its mechanisms as things to recreate in theatrical forms. When workers synthesize praxis, they cultivate the Superstructure inside Capitalism; this happens between workers and the natural-material world operating in continuum. This “sticky” relationship needs to be considered in its totality for iconoclastic praxis and worker solidarity to occur.

In other words, it’s entirely worthwhile for us to ask how different people (with their traumas) relate to Gothic stories, but especially their monsters, heroes and haunts as things to consume, create and perform ourselves. For any who have been raped, a hero (or heroine) will generally be monstrous in ways that might seem alien to those who have never experienced trauma themselves; but bonding through trauma is generally lopsided to some extent. While the Superstructure shapes material production through the Base, proletarian praxis through allows workers in uneven arrangements of trauma to shape, acquire, and learn from the world in ways that aim to stall, if not outright prevent regular abuses under Capitalism—real abuses, but also (re)imagined abuses as wrought through iconoclastic Gothic poetics of differing flavors; e.g., Jubei’s hypermasculine violence versus the Eight Devils of Kimon in defense of the ninja girl, Kagero; or Kyle Reese vs the terminator to defend Sarah Connor from a gruesome death: “He’ll wade through you, reach down her throat, and pull her fucking heart out!” Regardless of the time and place, demon lovers (and sex) in Gothic fiction classically synonymize with unironic harm—not just rape but murder and disembowelment as staged, granting a sense of relief not unlike our aforementioned danger disco. To it, ludo-Gothic BDSM and camp are often strict:

Think of it as the Western saloon. Extreme violence isn’t simply expected in such dark, erotic, musical places (many serving as brothels for settler-colonial agents); it’s entirely the point and serves a profoundly (a)sexual function: wish fulfillment and guilty pleasure; e.g., the punishing of the rapist after a rape-like performance that clearly has room for degrees of accuracy and poetic liberties. For any oppressed who historically endure rape, the hero and the villain of Gothic stories help open up cathartic channels of conversation concerning everyday perils that remain overshadowed by heterosexual enforcement amid settler-colonial guilt (usually with various other anxieties woven in).

For the state, the dehumanized cops-in-disguise work as gargoyle-esque replicas meant to scare us into submission; i.e., by either introducing an infiltrator into oppressed venues where rape is discussed, or suggesting one. Regardless, it walks among us like a mirror that reflects the state’s hidden-yet-visible workings on our vulnerable, developing minds; like Macbeth’s question to the dagger of the mind, we’re not sure if we even see a threat—i.e., if it is directed at us or if it is even real:

“Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight? or art thou but

A dagger of the mind, a false creation,

Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?” (source).

Strong and brutal as he already was, Macbeth wasn’t even sure what he was looking at when going to kill King Duncan. Neither was Kyle Reese, Sarah, or us completely sure when swimming inside the shadowy back alleys of Cameron’s Los Angeles. A murky-yet-glistening dislocation of state power and artifice, The Terminator gives rise to Skynet, an invisible, legendary foe meant to surveille citizens using a camera lens disguised as a “human” face, berserk dressed up as a false animal; i.e., “metal, surrounded by living tissue” as a mass-produced product “grown for the cyborgs.”

As such, the Imperial Boomerang comes out of the future of what is now our own past (re: Jameson), colonizing its own subjects through hyperreal decay and paranoia as charted through a variety of “pasts”: mise-en-abyme relayed between fictions like Ninja Scroll and The Terminator having a similar flavor of rape fantasy despite their obvious spatio-temporal discrepancies. Both worlds are filled with violent killers and spies foisting themselves on those merely trying to survive, but especially women as historically vulnerable entities under such conditions. Whereas Ninja Scroll feudalizes Japan in an openly magical past, Cameron’s take on the Gothic Romance (and liminal hauntology of war) updates the technological singularity for a 1980s, post-nuclear world, one where the legacy of artificial intelligence and the Manhattan Project have doomed the present. Atomized and scattered, many different “possible futures” loom over those living on the other side of the Pacific—a war for survival decided in a series of nightly combats not once, but over and over again. As I write in “Gothic Content in The Terminator/T2” (2019):

Gothically, a reoccurring theme in the Terminator franchise, from 1984 onward, is survival—outliving an unavoidable “past,” in the present. A death omen, Cameron’s nightmare is Orwellian; set in 1984, L.A. (and by extension, civilization as we know it) is invaded by “one possible future” (a “past” version of itself that has yet to materialize). Cameron populates his world with standard Gothic fare: the animated miniature or statue. Centuries prior, these would have been Horace Walpole’s subjects, literally walking out of their own paintings; or, suits of armor walking around, without a human body inside. In The Terminator, the likeness of a human is grafted into a walking suit of armor […] Given eyes of their own, they look back at us—at least, we think they do. What post-human horror lurks behind that carmine sphere? (source).

Even when Arnold Schwarzenegger’s terminator is reprogrammed “for good,” the reoccurring nightmare lies in the state’s untrustworthy (and inherently violent) nature, its territory shrouded in darkness but also piercing observation lights:

Skynet isn’t a dumb-machine, but “a new order of intelligence” founded on militaristic, human ways of thinking and conquering the world: “It decided our fate in a microsecond. Extermination.” Capitalism is Skynet unabstracted in totality—the metal eye of conquest steering Cartesian thought on auto-pilot, conquering all of nature versus simply part of it. An abstraction of capital, Skynet provides smaller abstractions[3] begot from a local police state: patrol machines built in automated factories, but also paramilitary machine men with glowing-red camera eyes that spy for a secret police department during military urbanism run amok: “During the vision, everything is smoky and dark, but also a ruin of present-day L.A.; the giant machines have red-and-blue lights. Comparable to present-day police cars, their purpose is war-like, out-of-control” (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Textual Elements in The Terminator,” 2019).

Vis-à-vis my thesis critiques on Botting and Jameson, it’s incredibly important not to supply special credence to a particular genre’s time and place. To that, Kawajiri’s imaginary feudal Japan (and army of psychosexual ninja demons) are also abstractions of capital; i.e., produced nearly a decade after Cameron’s world and in a decidedly antiquated approach. Yet, both he Cameron conjure up the shadow of a medieval, castle-like police state that entertains Gothic rape fantasies that serve an operatic “release valve” in times of socio-material uncertainty and collapse. Whereas Skynet kills the state’s enemies in the shadow of a former nuclear menace that mirrors America’s current war games, the Devils of Kimon posture as a fascist force that remains in Japan to this day. “They look human!” Kyle says of the 800 series; so do the Devils. In either case, the direction and location of the threat has become abstracted, oscillating inside a circular ruin shared between authors across space and time. This is done less to terrify the occupants of the present than explain their complex feelings from moment to moment, story to story; i.e., the terror once felt by victims of state abuse during Pax Americana now inflicted on everyone else to a higher degree than ever before. In a nice, postpunk twist, Cameron’s hauntology has another trick up its sleeve: disco-in-disguise; i.e., our aforementioned “danger disco” as an obviously musical place, one to go to and partake in psychosexual indulgence presented in all the usual formulas: a gun fight.

To that, I’d like to focus on Cameron’s more musical approach through the danger disco of the 1980s, then end the postscript by focusing on my relationship to Cuwu through Ninja Scroll and Doki Doki Literature Club; i.e., as more openly erotic and fetishized stories centered around sexual violence to camp, which informed the traumas in our own daily lives as we interacted back and forth during ludo-Gothic BDSM as a burgeoning idea that had yet to come to fruition.

Returning to Cameron’s excellent sleight-of-hand (and police-light pareidolia), his commentary on neoliberal hegemony is already a perilous ordeal, requiring allegory to disguise it as something other than a direct query (which would translate to worker solidarity and direct action); the subterfuge calls for a musical space for play inside that yields monstrous, nostalgic elements: the danger disco as a venue for persons seeking treatment regarding past run-ins with power abuse through liminal theatrics that provide an operatic backdrop; i.e., a place of sex and sin to consolidate and execute calculated risks in heroic-monstrous language.

Tech-Noir (and similar establishments) are where the police-in-plainclothes infiltrate as undercover shadow agents, surveilling citizens in parallel societies that try to escape the weight of an oppressive state by having fun, but also conspiring in plain sight within surveilled spaces: the café, disco, jazz club, bar/dive, church, brothel, music hall, theatre, library, etc, as heavily policed/forbidden sites of taboo entertainment, education and congregation (the closing of such places being a common colonizing tactic: the intelligencia purge). Postpunk, then, becomes a revolutionary façade within tyrannical, dishonest worlds that are already falling apart over and over inside themselves (the infernal concentric pattern). Here are some examples inspired by The Terminator or in the same vein of canceled future common in noir stories, cyberpunk dystopias, and Gothic retro-futures; i.e., of the hauntological operatic variety shared since Antiquity with various mixtures of music, theatrical combat, heroic deeds, monstrous sensations, storybook apocalypse scenarios (the fate of the world hanging in the balance of true love, mid-invasion and mid-occupation), and kayfabe tropes:

(exhibit 15b1: Camp is something to “play out” during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., as half-real, onstage and off. As such, the cyberpunk/tech-noir’s slow-motion, disco-lit “danger zone” is a common, potboiler trope of the game-like risks present within daily life.

Furthermore, as something often expressed through ritualized love/death inside parallel space, these expressions of the human condition and its uneven socio-material conditions become infused with an updated hauntological spirit of darkness well known to Gothic tales [which, out from the disintegration of the John Ford Western and its brightly-lit chase scenes and saloon brawls, survived in the “noir” genre from the early 20th century before updating to a technophobic, neon-lit variant during the 1980s. Such variety codified into both the monster-rock vampire’s Neo-Gothic castle of Castlevania but also a form of cyberpunk/tech-noir pastiche stretching into the 2010s]. Their own presence indicates class war as remediated through popular story types told in praxial opposition. Infiltrators/imposters remain an essential part of the code, contributing to the uncertain feeling of vague, alien, ubiquitous danger for the oppressor/oppressed group facing off on the dance floor.

Historically the oppressed group of Gothic fiction would have been white cis-het women reading about themselves in Gothic novels, but they would have always had relative privilege for being white and cis-het. When future groups fought for their rights—and queer discourse started to emerge from the shadows in the 1970s, in particular—the mantle of oppression would extend to various minorities voicing their abuse during moral panics committed by token oppressors. Indeed, said panics would be commonly imposed by white cis-het women gatekeeping more marginalized groups; e.g., queer identities and sex workers targeted by white Christian women, but also second wave feminists during the Satanic panic of the 1980s also attacking people of color and religious minorities.

Similar to other monstrous language, “Satanic” symbolism is generally a stand-in for various out-groups that have become romanticized—by in-groups, but also by themselves using reclaimed language whose liminality extends to queer symbols like the rainbow as something to enjoy but also potentially endorse when no hard stance is diegetically present. Doing so is not uncommon, the context of queer self-preservation occupying the same discourse as a heteronormative desire for profit:

For example, TWRP’s “Starlight Brigade” [2019, above] arguably straddles the fence because its parallel music video/collab by Dan Avidan—and Knights of the Light Table [the latter’s animation inspired by Roger Dean, Hayao Miyazaki, and Moebius for all of their visual inspiration]: producer Patrick Stannard, director India Swift, and art director Michael Doig—presents a reinvented nostalgia as something to enjoy for all audiences; i.e., without saying the quiet part of queer oppression or resistance out loud. Instead, its mixed message defaults to the monomyth of a centrist, good-vs-evil tale: an anxious young man teaming up with a group of misfits to save the world from “pure evil” [of the Sauron sort]. Their combined success and miraculous destruction of vaguely fascist war [reduced to basic geometric shapes] occurs through self-belief that serves to further a kind of “wishful thinking.” Faith is rewarded with material change, the warships standing in for psychomachic sentiment; i.e., representing a figurative struggle like Star Wars does.

Whereas some iterations of Star Wars communicate how rebellions and violence go hand-in-hand [with Andor in particular showing how uprisings are historically armed with stolen weapons, ships and equipment, exhibit 21b], TWRP’s music video lacks a spoken dialog on this subject. It doesn’t even call the good guys rebels; they’re just child soldiers, ostensibly of a “paladin/good soldier” class [which Voltron deliberately called themselves, the babyfaces policing “outer space” by cleansing it of monstrous-feminine and “corrupt” forces—capped off by “punching the Nazi” to qualify their war as “good”].

But even if the makers of the video were clear about the dialectical-material status of their heroes, the “Voltron problem” would still persist: an absent material critique, one where many different creators [not just TWRP, Knights of the Light Table and Dan Avidan, a cis-het man] aim to recruit queer groups through the inclusion of a queer potential that can serve the status quo when a vocal resistance to power is not present. When non-queer creators do this, it’s queer bait; when queer authors participate, it’s assimilation. But sometimes, the desire to voice one’s oppression is told through common stories; i.e., by reclaiming the language of the oppressor class [which, yes, includes Voltron pastiche]. However, that subversion still needs to involve a process consciously driven by a desire to alter socio-material conditions: to push away from the status quo and its exploitation of workers behind the usual groups benefitting inside these stories and in real life. Queer allies, especially well-to-do ones, need to be mindful of this in regards to peace and tolerance in the face of deplorable socio-material conditions; e.g., Tom Taylor’s 2023 writeup, “Steely Dan vs John Lennon,” reporting how John Lennon’s “Imagine” [1971] came across as more than a little naïve according to Steely Dan’s “Only A Fool Would Say That”:  

Their 1972 track, “Only a Fool Would Say That” was written in response to Lennon’s parade of peace. It looks at idealism through the practical eyes of folks on the street. “You do his nine to five,” they sing, “drag yourself home half alive, and there on the screen, a man with a dream.” And with that, you get a sense of how grating and vacuous they thought that Lennon’s “Imagine” campaign had become [source].  

In other words, it can’t be vague or mixed in its messaging. For resistance-in-solidarity to work, it needs to be direct, informed and conscious [of class, gender, religion and race as intersecting forces].

Vagueness is a shared problem among children’s cartoons and Gothic fiction. Often only the basic language [of an alien aesthetic of paralysis] is present—incredibly expressive from a visual and emotional standpoint, but still having to be occupied by warring groups during class struggle as a liminal outcome. Indeed, liminal expression is a regular occurrence in Gothic discourse, existing in shared parallel spaces using the same contested language’s emotional turmoil. French New Wave’s “Darkwave” subgenre, for instance, has the potential for critical power but also critical blindness. Their mutual potential within hauntological expression threatens the present as something to examine through an at-times-unreliable critique: ghosts of the counterfeit that yield a musical signature, which—as Derrida hints at through Spectres of Marx—has become something to listen to during hauntology[4] as a Gothic revival; e.g., French New Wave music appearing in videogames that consciously imitated older forerunners: James Cameron’s take on the imperiled, “tech-noir” discotheque borrowed from ’70s technophobia and older British counterculture given a fresh coat of hauntological paint in 1984, before reappearing decades later in Drive, 2011, then Hotline Miami, in 2012; on and on.)

(exhibit 15b2: Just as Cameron was inspired by Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner spearheading a whole train of older Gothic stories into the 1980s, each outing depicted a blood-splashed opera announced using outrageous violence, gloomy visuals and dated music. Even so, the sheer ultraviolence of the 1980s became its “own” style to emulate as a dark mode of critical expression during oppositional praxis; i.e., free for auteurs to interpret differently by reinventing the allegorical mask of attractive fatal nostalgia. 

For example, Nicolas Winding Refn’s homage to Cameron cheerfully drops his own masked vigilante inside the same Hollywood setting: Los Angeles. This time, the hero is a cold, seemingly unfeeling protector of women and children; he resembles Sarah’s handsome, human protector while using similar tools for the job that Kyle Reese did: the trusty shotgun and stolen getaway vehicle, but also the mask as a metaphor for the persona as something to either discard [or wear] during criminal mayhem.

The fun lies in the cosmetic differences from older works, including the masks. Refn’s “terminator” can’t take off his mask-like face, but wears a Hollywood “crash double” mask on top of a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. He’s cold and precise, calmly driving robbers to and from crimes while dodging the cops. Conversely, Cameron’s terminator wears a human mask made of actual flesh [whose bad special effects during the eye surgery scene are actually closer to Ryan Gosling’s studio-grade mask of a policer officer] meant to hide a cybernetic vigilante killer inside the Gothic ball. One commits crimes to enrich covert thieves to the state’s detriment; the other works for the state by pointedly killing women, being identified by the police as a “one-day pattern killer.” Across both stories, the disguise pastiche maintains a thoroughly Gothic flavor.

Whereas Cameron’s material critique lay in the culture of fear surrounding serial killer mania, military urbanism and Cold War anxieties, Refn keeps much of the same violence, pathos, setting and hauntological music, but comments on the “cold-blooded nature of the hero” as a killer-by-design who can still help the usual damsels-in-distress; i.e., as the College song goes, be “a real human being and a real hero.” Within this borrowed spell of nostalgia, there lurks a degree of madness that utterly revels in the opera as nostalgic through the aesthetic bloodbath, but also the music as a means of teleporting “backwards” to a chronotope where such discourse is both welcome and expected. This would be parodied a year later by Dennaton Games, treating the hero’s violent quest as a drug-fueled rampage with less-than-noble intentions. Though undeniably fun, such parodies are prone to become blind, their pastiche “stuck on repeat” while worshipping the reimagined, cryptomimetic past as a product, first and foremost. They can be enjoyed, but should not be endorsed without understanding their deeper context.)

(artist: John Cordero)

So while Cameron’s story is a Gothic fairytale centered around rape, its now-iconic, achingly musical techno-Gothic mythos was still informed by the undeniable presence of concealed, state-level nuclear abuse and decay hidden behind American neoliberalism:

Sarah’s night terrors cannot stop until Skynet is crushed. For that, both [the T-800 and T-1000] must die. Killed, they melt into harmless goo; Sarah faces the shapeless future with a sense of hope. Will Skynet return, regardless? […] I ask this ignoring Cameron’s terrible alternate ending. In it, everything is spelled out—in Utopian fashion by a much-older Sarah; [her son] John becomes a senator and advocates for peace. That’s all good and well. However, it betrays the franchise’s greatest strength: fear and doubt [as a deliberate means of raising class consciousness to combat class dormancy and class traitors]. Our current political climate should prove the future is not set, and in the hands of political agents and military men, Skynet, “a computer defense network built for SAC-NORAD by Cyberdyne Systems,” could always “return” again. The dream never ends, because the fear—of being alive in an uncertain present [within unequal, exploitative media control and material conditions]—is continuously preserved through the things we build and leave behind. That includes Cameron’s fabulous Terminator movies. Rediscovered in the present, these relics come to life, invading us from all directions (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Gothic Content in The Terminator/T2 — part three: Textual Elements in T2,” 2019).

As part of this “dark ’80s” nostalgia, Cameron’s Gothic hauntologies rely on technophobia that is both surprisingly dated, but curiously translates to current misconceptions[5] about technology as a veil for state abuses that we can still discuss in cartoonishly theatrical forms; i.e., the very sorts of theatre overshadowing the lived traumas that individual workers have survived due to systemic implementations that are too grand to easily illustrate. At times, the explanations channel through inherited confusions by which to funnel our pedagogies through. Strict accuracy isn’t the point; the point, from a theatrical stance, is the communication of intense, fearful emotions that progress towards healing from rape inside the darkness as a lived state of mind: to provide the kinds of lived realities that are, themselves, built on shady foundations grasping at hints of the truth through their adjacent falsehoods and phobias.

Despite Cameron treating computers like black magic, his own abstractions don’t serve the state; they convey a presence of unaddressed trauma that sits within confused dialogs that, try as we might, cannot be avoided. The paradoxes become part of the performance, conveying the lived experience of those living within state territories that cast very long shadows. If the Gothic offers anything of value, it’s the ability to express the human condition according to never-ending struggles within an oppressive system’s historical past. As something to reconcile with in dated, inaccurate imaginary forms, one is left juggling perceived impostors with actual persons or entities that mean us harm in connection to the state as a great factory for such deceivers: frauds and conmen, but also assassins and parasites of a more active and directly cutthroat nature. As the prey mechanisms of the heroine project onto the male agents of unknown allegiance, her own fears are informed by the combined alarm fatigue from larger and smaller struggles: inheritance anxiety and survivor’s guilt as a post-WW2 American citizen living in somewhat-distant fear of the Bomb being granted the inconveniently immediate warning of a “one-day pattern killer” broadcast about her on ’80s television: “You’re dead, honey.”

To that, Sarah is clearly a Gothic heroine of the Neo-Gothic (white) sort updated for the late 20th century—i.e., the middle-class “secret princess” with a hidden destiny delivered through a dream-come-true protector. True to form, her fear of rape is fused to then-current-yet-also-dated superstitions (of Cold-War rhetoric scapegoating AI as a rapacious metaphor for unfettered market greed[6] and the Military Industrial Complex that boils over into predatory fears about nuclear Armageddon during peacetime; e.g., GDF’s “NATO Is Risking Nuclear War for Money,” 2023) and alleviated through a psychosexual shock to the system meant to keep her (and us) going. To this, the movie might seem like a total mess borrowed from older sources, one where Cameron patently emulates the threat of nuclear war from earlier apocalyptic science fiction; e.g., The Outer Limits of the 1960s and ripping off Harlan Ellison in particular (David Brennan’s “The Harlan Ellison Dispute,” 2008), Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) and Star Wars‘ legendary Death Star bombing foreign populations (as well as Mary Shelley’s The Last Man [1826] beating all these Pygmalions to the punch). Yet, such anxious homages are par for the course under shared material conditions yielding a dark channel of communication; i.e., a shared Gothic nightmare where power and resistance play out on the same disco floor in all the usual ways. Market forces are inherently unequal under Capitalism and lead to tremendous suffering and anxiety but also theatrics as a liminal sphere of expression.

Simply put, the Gothic is where we retreat to interrogate our trauma (and relative guilt, desire, anxiety and other repressed emotions) in relation to other survivors; i.e., to trauma-bond through the usual displays of music, violence and sex. However imperfect it can seem under a magnifying glass, The Terminator is as good a story as any to achieve this end: to broach radical empathy with varying degrees of privilege and oppression among like-minded persons with similar experiences that intersect and diverge. Indeed, I often shared it with others to relate to them through the characters onscreen, but also sponsor activism as something that manifests imperfectly in stories that—through the pedagogy of the oppressed—could speak to our collective troubles inside police states. This includes Cuwu as someone with whom such sharing felt natural, but who currently isn’t a part of my life anymore (their ghost is, exhibit 16b). At times, it really is like dancing with ghosts. While I have been beaten and mentally tortured, for example, I have never been sexually raped; I am AMAB and the odds are simply far lower by any conceivable metric that I would be. However, I know many workers who have been raped. Listening to them has helped radically change my systemically privileged views, but also reflect on my own lived trauma and complex emotional abuse compared to theirs.

For the remainder of the postscript, then, we’ll examine two such workers: Mavis for a quick moment, followed by our star-if-slightly-delayed (off-screen and sporadic) attraction, Cuwu.

Mavis is someone I haven’t mentioned until now, but will mention more throughout this book. They have had countless experiences with rape (dissociation makes you forget or “block out” the trauma, which makes it hard to remember). According to Mavis, rape is awful, but it’s also over quick and you can dissociate (something that plurality allows for); also, according to Mavis, they’d rather experience rape than prolonged mental abuse, the latter which can go on for years like a war of menticidal attrition—including threats of rape amid diminishing returns of genuine care after the initial “love-bombing” phase (say nothing of the historical-material variants if you’re living in someone’s family estate, or equally bad, being shamed, neglected or ignored by what Melissa McEwan calls “rape apologia” or “rape ranking” amid rape culture, 2013).

Speaking from my own experiences, it’s the kind of thing you can’t block out. Over time, this abuse can be “buried alive”—hidden in plain sight all around a “cursed” location littered with markers of power, but also illusions-of-illusions (crypt narrative) of normality that broadcast imprecise ambivalence. It’s precisely these iffy phenomenological disturbances and partial disconnections/connections that one relates to in continuum; i.e., being a part of the space-in-question, the broken home that is nevertheless one’s poisoned wellspring and haunted library of nostalgic storybooks. Trauma lives in the body but also the chronotope as something the body absorbs things from—the haunted house as returned to, feeling uncannily familiar and alien, but also already-occupied by something close-at hand during uncertain, liminal, feudalized ownership (which we’ll discuss more at length when we examine friendly [and unfriendly] ghosts in the Humanities primer, but also the King Diamond rock opera in Volume Three, Chapter One): the fear of inheritance; i.e., Walpole’s idea of a “secret sin; [an] untold tale, that art cannot extract, nor penance cleanse” from The Mysterious Mother (1768). Except incest isn’t a “pure myth” relegated to Gothic fiction, but precisely the kind of thing experienced by Mavis, Cuwu and people like them (who extrafamilial predators will mark as having survived, and try to exploit them for in the future; i.e., trauma lives inside you, but also follows you like a curse).

Note: In my opinion, the following paragraph is of the most important writing in this volume, if not the whole series. —Perse, 4/7/2025

The Western world is generally a place that testifies to its own traumas by fabricating them; i.e., as markers of sovereignty that remain historically unkind to specific groups that nevertheless survive within them as ghosts of unspeakable events linked to systemic abuse. Trauma, in turn, survives through stories corrupted by the presence of said abuse. There is a home resembling a castle, where a ghost—often of a woman—lurks inside having been met with a sorry fate. But undeath is something that can be felt through echoes of ourselves that aren’t diegetically spectral; they feel spectral through an uncanny resemblance, like standing over our own graves. This becomes something to play with during ludo-Gothic BDSM, akin to an (at-times) humorous, even trashy gallows theatre rife with dark, forbidden language: sin, vice, violent sex, all-around death, and other taboo subjects discouraged by privileged (and unimaginative) moderates who historically frame the Gothic as a puerile, good-for-nothing backwater while simultaneously suffering from conservative delusions of privilege and/or tokenism (re: Jameson). In other words, the pedagogy of the oppressed faces its classic foil: tone-policing.

Cuwu was one of my exes, and the sole one living with rape trauma of a sexual nature. As stated earlier in Volume One and in Volume Zero, our relationship was far from perfect. Even so, listening to them about their trauma still changed how I felt about older media, hence the world. When Cuwu and I watched Ninja Scroll, for instance, I knew I was sharing a movie that I had watched for years—had grown up on, in fact. However, I didn’t realize until after how limited and stuck my point of view was; with it, I had never noticed the deeper nuances of the film’s rapacious violence, which could only be seen from a different, ultimately asexual point of view. Being different but also no stranger to rape, Cuwu noticed them immediately. As we watched the movie, I gave Cuwu trigger warnings for the upcoming rape scenes (for which they thanked me). Those bothered them far more than the “manly” violence did, the rape making them “go blank” and dissociate.

After the film was over, we talked about it from Cuwu’s point of view as someone I related to in both sexual and asexual ways. Doing so frankly opened my eyes to what, for them, was an everyday experience: living with the trauma and threat of rape as something for you and others to behold, often as voyeurs, but also as BDSM practitioners fetishizing our own survived abuse in psychosexual, Gothic forms. Many of the fantasies that Cuwu and I played out reflected the sorts of unspoken abuses generally granted some kind of voice in Gothic fictions. The choking hand is, at its most basic level, meant to relieve stress from having seen something stressful that reminds you of an abuser who won’t follow your commands:

For the non- or less-abused, it generally doesn’t register that we are, in fact, watching a rapacious ceremony when we look at eroticized material; and sometimes we see what we think is rape only to be mistaken. Regardless of which, historical materialism has Cartesian dualism, the Gothic chronotope, and the colonial binary reflecting in porn as something to lament, parody or relish in paradoxical ways. “Hardcore” porn, for example, is generally emblematized by penetration as adjacent to violence—if not within the text, than the mind of someone who has survived abuse and seeks it out in some shape or form; this book considers monsters and erotica as part of a larger equation where violence is implied, including artwork and sex work where consent is a seemingly tenuous proposition.

As outlined in our paratextual documents, this book contains no illegal material—no revenge porn, child porn, snuff porn—but it does examine things generally thought of as porn that are unironically violent. It does so in ways we might fail to recognize because canonical porn has been made so normal to us, including humiliating displays and threats of capture and violence. In Gothic stories, these threats become something to play with as a psychosexual means of calculated risk; raw sex and rape fantasies are a common playground for the abused that tries to help us see what they see (and try to express) every day of their lives:

(artist: Babie Biscuittt)

As our thesis argues, this goes well beyond cinema and into videogames. Rather than point to Metroidvania, the example that mostly immediately leaps to mind for me—and one that actually matches the “hard R” approach to rape fantasies seen in The Terminator and Ninja Scroll—is Doki Doki Literature Club. In the holistic spirit of this book, I wanted to mention it quickly as it happens to match both Cuwu’s psychosexual fantasies, but also their intense desire to explore and talk about these things. Then we’ll conclude the postscript by examining my relating to Cuwu through Ninja Scroll and the various things that resulted.

Doki Doki Literature Club has a particular performative focus: the unheimlich, but specifically the ghost as relayed through a particular Gothic meta; i.e., one where sublimation fails and we look at something that isn’t diegetically consensual nor original, but replicated in ways that have become self-aware: a dating simulator that protests its own exploitation (exhibit 16a). Yet the paradox of Gothic rape is that it is “half-real”—written to convey the unspeakable as a fictional event to view voyeuristically from the outside; it also is conveyed by cosplayers, illustrators and other creators who communicate the thrilling proposition of transgressive sex as a kind of “buffer.” Made for them to express themselves with, their liminal expressions violate societal norms to convey alien forms of sex that are actually sex-positive through iconoclastic praxis. Gothic Communism can reunite us with these forms through what we create as acquired by studying older works, voyeuristically flirting with the boundaries of the real and the imagined as constantly reimagined in our favor.

(exhibit 16a: Top-left: source; top-middle: Two Bratty Cats; everything else is from Nisego’s Twitter timeline. “Fun” fact: to beat Doki Doki Literature Club, you have to go into the game’s code and delete Monika, the game’s “Satanic” protagonist; i.e., “killing” Monika in ways that go directly against the game’s “coding” of the player through normalized instruction.

This mastery of the player by the game is common in game types that disempower players for trying to master the game; e.g., horror games, but especially Metroidvania. As I write in “Our Ludic Masters”:

Game mastery is a large part of my research. However, I’m interested in players being dominated by the game, not the other way around. Seth Giddings and Helen Kennedy touch on this in “Little Jesuses and *@#?-off Robots” [2008]. They write:

conventional assumptions that players learn the game system to achieve mastery over it—and that this mastery is the source of the prime pleasure of gameplay—is in fact an inversion of the dynamics and pleasures of videogame play. Games configure their players, allowing progression through the game only if the players recognize what they are being prompted to do, and comply with these coded instructions [13-14].

According to them, the game prompts the player. My argument is less interested in games at large, and more in the relationship between players and Metroidvania [source].

The same scrutiny and invention applies to games like Doki Doki Literature Club, which likewise treat mastery and consent as existing between a shared [and unstable] ludic contract by players and the game.)

The game’s dark, steep eroticism might seem hyperbolic, but its dating-sim unheimlich was par for the course for myself and someone I felt connected to: a haunted text that spoke to shared trauma replicated inside Gothic media we could share and talk about, but also perform. Cuwu was intensely erotic, but also politically outspoken in ways that gelled with my usual analysis of said stories; our consummation of their taboo fantasies involved someone who reminded me of my younger twenty-something self, but also was their own person: a self-declared Marxist-Leninist who seemed equally drawn to me and my traumas through stories that I consumed in an almost voyeuristic manner. My voyeurism was no secret to them, but also was informed by my upbringing as something I explained to Cuwu.

To that, I am a consensual voyeur by virtue of a rather complicated set of ingredients; i.e., I always ask for permission and seek out my fantasies through negotiated boundaries between me and those I play with. This was less taught to me and more something I picked up on my own journey through life involving a variety of educational factors loaded with their own contradictions and nuance.

For one, I was exposed to sex at a very young age. Dad would leave porno tapes in the VCR player and I saw part of one when I was four (my mother racing out of the bedroom to rip the tape out of the player when I cried, “What is she doing?” from the living room). I also was fascinated by his collection of Playboys and would sneak into my parents’ bedroom while Dad wasn’t around (which he generally wasn’t—he was off having affairs with many different women around town: basically the village man-whore being sampled by all the bored housewives). My mother didn’t want me to consume such stories until I was “of age,” but couldn’t watch me all the time, either (they did catch me looking at the Playboys once and told me to stop, but I didn’t listen).

Rather than act like a helicopter parent, Mom taught me to respect women… except her notion of “women” was informed by stories that mirrored her own lived experiences: stories like The Terminator and Ninja Scroll, where women are damsels who sometimes get raped by men; where men are rapists unless they’re the heroes like Kyle Reese or Ryan Gosling’s titular Driver (or Liam Neeson’s many doubles of himself, as we examined in Volume Zero) who use their inherent, monstrous capacity for lethal violence to save women as Gothic antiheroes famously do; and where women consequently put out to reward good men for saving them from bad men. The exchange of sex for protection was an absolute, sacred fact in Mom’s mind, and one that informed my upbringing and interrogating of said texts, myself.

(model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Since I was small, I always pondered about appropriated violence and rape fantasies, though I didn’t know that’s what these things were. Eventually I learned, meeting Cuwu as someone who liked to ponder about and transmute these stories into transgressively sex-positive forms. A lot of proletarian-minded workers do, male or female. But Cuwu taught me that getting “ravished” can be incredibly fun, thrilling and/or hilarious. Likewise, “ravishing” someone who’s high, asleep or both can be super fucking hot provided it’s mutually consensual in advance (someone can’t consent after they’re drunk or asleep). Cuwu taught me that. To play with sex is to play with power through sex.

Cuwu also taught me that appreciative, sex-positive rape fantasies are not actually rape (they loved the show Lucifer and would fantasize about being “taken” by the actor of that show as someone sexy and strong but also a little dangerous). I learned this while having a previous understanding that appropriative, canonical rape fantasies function as rape threats at various registers; e.g., “be a good girl and don’t have extra-/premarital sex or Jason Voorhees will cut your head off with a machete!” As it turns out, unironic and ironic rape fantasies and demon lovers are tremendously common, but so is their eliding during liminal expressions that seek healing from rape through “rape.” Such ubiquity comments on state abuse as ever-present, but denied, displaced, dissociated—abject.

(artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Spending time with Cuwu, I learned how to reverse this through our own stab at ludo-Gothic BDSM. We could play around with “rape” as a form of theatre, involving many of the usual cliché activities (choking [above] and sleep sex, but also BDSM commands and unequal power arrangements; e.g., Cuwu being my mommy dom): Gothic fantasies invoke the heroic person as capable of murder and rape, but choosing not to. In sex-positive iterations, the fear mechanism assists the calculated risk to heal from rape during echoes of state abuse. Perfect for the damaged damsel seeking a Gothic antihero! Yet, we weren’t always actively aware we were camping our own rapes; it was more child-like, yet driven by adult desires:

(exhibit 16b: Model and artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard. The painting is a meditation on trauma; i.e., healing from abusive partners by painting them as friendlier ghosts of their former likenesses, thus capturing how I fell in love with them but omitting the abusive elements [to haunt me with a palliative spirit, not a crippling one]. It also considers how those who have been abused can teach us how to heal from trauma, while relating to them face-to-face. Generally, there is a fair amount of overlap between victim and victimizer, and Cuwu, while having been abused themselves, was also a prolific and lengthy abuser. Needless to say, they taught me a great deal about healing from trauma through consent-non-consent rituals, but also surviving from trauma perpetrated by them against me.)

Furthermore, whether autobiographical or not, traumatic artifice is informed by our immediate surroundings: what we see and consume, including stories like Ninja Scroll as a reflection on the past, but also a guide into future forms of a cultural understanding of the imaginary past (the Wisdom of the Ancients); i.e., through interactions just like the ones Cuwu and I shared, hashing out the Otranto of what became ludo-Gothic BDSM as a theoretical model built on said fumblings. As Gothic Communists, this becomes a strange relationship to the voyeuristic ritual of psychosexual violence; i.e., as cathartic in ways that allow for sex-positive wish fulfillment: of “killing” one’s rapist while also not hurting anyone, or being “raped” by someone who cannot harm the “victim.” This negotiates a future boundary—to draw in the proverbial sand, should we become threateningly triggered during our day-to-day relationships, but also enthralled.

To this, people don’t often see their abusers and just “let them in.” Like vampires, murderers come to you with smiles; they trick you based on disguises pulled from canon. It’s what Jadis did, sweeping me right off my feet as a sexy black knight. Sometimes, then, the only way to avoid abuse is to learn from those who have been abused—abuser personas and pluralities included. Often, this education is through the consumption and shared processing of trauma adopted from less unironic, bloodthirsty forms:

(exhibit 17a: Ninja girl Kagero fights the stone-skinned, fascist-coded Tessai, a brutal, seemingly-invincible monster who works for the mysterious Shogun of the Dark. After Tessai kills her crush and rapes her, Kagero “uses” the poison in her body as a passive revenge against this stupid, violent man. Post-rape, the male hero, Jubei Kibagami, distracts Tessai long enough for Jubei and Kagero to escape. Once they’re safe, she hardens; Jubei takes the hint and skedaddles, but after he’s gone, Kagero sobs. The quiet anguish she feels is denoted as animalistic, closer-to-nature like the breeding fireflies all around her. It’s not something Jubei could really understand.)

Note: Similar extended collages of Ninja Scroll are exhibited vis-à-vis ludo-Gothic BDSM camping the Gothic (specifically while dissecting Radcliffe); i.e., in the Demon Module’s “Demons and Dealing with Them“! —Perse, 4/3/2025

It was tremendously eye-opening to relate to Cuwu through Ninja Scroll adjacent to our psychosexual experiments. Despite Cuwu abusing me (and others; discussed in Volume Zero), seeing what they saw through their eyes helped me see boundaries before that I never knew existed, but also dangers; I felt differently about the violence I had grown up enjoying as a kind of voyeuristic peril—saw rape in ways that made me empathize, but also identify with, the victim through my own complex abuse: Cuwu, but also myself, with my forgotten egregore, Alyona. Without really intending to, my own pedagogy and oppression had linked with Cuwu’s. After that, I wrote a small piece about Ninja Scroll. I haven’t shared it until now, but want to in order to demonstrate how profoundly my views changed when hearing a survivor’s testimony with empathetic ears despite having done my best already to change. If this book is any proof at all, genuine ideological change takes serious fucking work.

My thoughts on Ninja Scroll, written May 10th, 2022 (written the day my Uncle Dave died, which will become relevant in the roadmap):

Erotic and violent, tremendously illustrated and animated—Ninja Scroll demands to be seen. It’s also a very much a film about looking. Specifically, at the ninja girl, Kagero. “Look how beautiful she is!” the movie seems to ask, a byproduct of its ’90s Male Gaze. The Male Gaze, in academic terms, applies to a specific point of view, one fostered by media that caters to a male status quo—sex and violence, generally. This view is often literal, the screen filled from second to second with objects, subjects and moments that inform a compulsive heteronormative stance. Think of it as “audience-coding behavior.” What is seen remains afterward inside the mind.

I’ve seen Ninja Scroll many, many times. However, it [wasn’t] until very recently that I understood a key moment in the film: the antidote scene. I never fully grasped why Jubei and Kagero hesitated. She seemed to be attracted to him; he admitted that both of them were comrades. Why hesitate to save his life in what should, at first glance, be an alluring proposition? The answer lies in context, something the movie adequately provides but never spells out: Both the young man and young woman are being forced to have sex by a government spy called Dakuan [exhibit 17b]. This lecherous old can “watch” by asking Jubei about it later. While there’s nothing wrong about watching provided it’s consensual, in the case of Jubei and Kagero, it’s not: Dakuan has poisoned Jubei (obviously without his permission) knowing full-well that only Kagero can save him.

The movie mentions several times that one kiss from Kagero’s mouth is poisonous enough to kill someone—let alone vaginal penetration, phallic or otherwise. So, coitus with Jubei isn’t actually required. It is, however, the one option that Dakuan repeatedly demands of Jubei and Kagero. “Did you make love to the ninja girl?” he asks Jubei, over and over. However, Dakuan also knows that each will be hesitant towards helping the other. Traumatized on- and offscreen, Kagero fears closeness (for men only bring her pain). Jubei understands this, respecting Kagero too much to subject her to that kind of anguish, even from a kiss.

The tragedy is that Kagero wants to help Jubei, but remains understandably conflicted. Apart from Hanza, who dies during the opening battle, Jubei seems to be the one man in Japan Kagero actually wants to sleep with. She knows the full extent of her poison as well as anyone, and she wants more from Jubei than kisses; but for Jubei, even a kiss from Kagero is asking too much. This conflict is incredibly useful to an unscrupulous man like Dakuan, who use the comrade’s growing friendship-amid-turmoil to sexually exploit them.

(exhibit 17b: After Jubei leaves Kagero, she is forced to report to the Lord Chamberlain, who—unbeknownst to her—is really Lord Genma in disguise. To add insult to injury from our point of view and Kagero’s in different ways: a) the “chamberlain” is rude to Kagero while fucking his murder victim’s concubine and b) is lying to us as non-diegetic voyeurs. Meta! Following that, we meet Dakuan, the government spy. Kagero doesn’t like him and frankly he’s a duplicitous old creep [still a backstabber but more willing to bargain with Jubei than Genma is]. Dakuan constantly leers at Kagero, watching her and Jubei grow closer. Eventually he plays “coercive matchmaker,” trying to force them to have sex so he can hear about it. Jubei, ever the gentleman, merely gives Kagero what she’s wanted from the start: a hug. Ace!)

Similar to Jadis, my relationship with Cuwu did not last, but they did teach me lasting lessons about how to perform, play with, and exchange stories of psychosexual trauma through Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM. The takeaway moral with Cuwu and Ninja Scroll (and The Terminator and similar Gothic stories) is that it’s tremendously important to learn from more disadvantaged groups when you occupy a dominant position, even if we have lived through trauma ourselves and regularly consume voyeuristic peril. For example, the critic Chris Stuckmann—despite escaping from a Jehovah’s Witness commune and having difficulty addressing his own trauma (2021)—still likes to call Ninja Scroll “blood and boobs… and more boobs—boobs, boobs, boobs.” He seems to notice the presence of boobs far more than what’s happening to the owners—that all of them are being undressed, raped and otherwise exploited by the diegetic narrative for the film’s target audience: cis-het men, but especially white American men. Stuckmann never once mentions rape in his brief review—merely that his mother wouldn’t let him watch it because the parental advisory label read “absolutely not for children or anyone under the age of eighteen” (a rape-porn paywall, essentially).

When reviewing Ninja Scroll, Stuckmann clearly understood one form of abuse, but came off incredibly tone deaf about another. However, some traumatized people can go on to clearly draw lines in the sand, whereupon they deliberately punch up and down from—swatting at low-hanging fruit while also attacking groups lower than them in willful tone-deafness (so-called “middle-aged moments”). This applies to the veneer of generosity we mentioned earlier—re: “We have done nice things; therefore, we can do no wrong.” Known atheist and ex-Mormon, Jimmy Snow, did this against Essence of Thought, tone-policing them for critiquing a fellow member of the atheist community (Rhetoric & Discourse, 2021) despite Jimmy having critiqued Mormons for doing the same exact thing. It’s a “boundaries for me, not for thee” scenario, but also pulverized solidarity/equality of convenience being weaponized against different activist groups, which the elite financially incentivize to prevent direct, collective worker action and solidarity when opposing the state.

Put a pin in that for now; we’ll return to it later. For now, just consider that when someone refuses to change once exposed, this becomes an informed compromise between negative freedom (freedom from restrictions) and positive freedoms (freedom for oppressed groups); doing so harms worker solidarity by negotiating with power towards a shrinking state of exception (which we’ll see when we examine TERFs, but also NERFs and atheists/secular reactionaries in Volume Three, Chapter Four). Ideally there should be no state of exception, vanishing the bourgeoisie and spreading power horizontally in ways that abolish privatization and nation-state monopolies through direct, intersecting worker solidarity geared towards preventing war and rape by using Gothic poetics to worker’s emotional/Gothic intelligence in their daily lives. These ideas are central to proletarian praxis, which Volume Three is entirely about, and which our synthesis roadmap will introduce beyond what the postscript could merely suggest. The artwork bellow constitutes further examples of such solidarity made in collaboration with myself and other sex workers:

(exhibit 18a: Top-left, model and artist: Venusinaries and Persephone van der Waard; top-right and bottom left/right: Scarlet Love and Persephone van der Waard. The above reference material and artwork were drawn back in 2022; i.e. before I had written most of Sex Positivity and before I was commissioning sex workers to model for me, to nearly the same extent I am, now. To it, said artwork was based off these sex worker’s publicly available material—their Twitter feeds, in both cases—and drawn as fan art.

By comparison, the models featured on the next page were commissioned this April 2025; their material was commissioned specifically to be part of this book series, thus was negotiated as such [which the addendum in “Paid Labor” will go over before we jump into the synthesis symposium]: to embody from start to finish, top to bottom, what ludo-Gothic BDSM is in practice: praxis to synthesis through negotiation as a form of paid mutual exchange!

[artists (from top-left to bottom-right): Tyler and husband, Rae of Sunshine, Rhyna Targaryen, Vera Dominus, Kaycee Bee, Moxxy Sting, Cupid Kisses, Monster Lover, Delilah Gallo and Feyn Volans]

Beyond these recent eleven, though, Sex Positivity has commission over sixty models since 2022; i.e., as a habit of offering, negotiating and paying that happening slowly over time before invigilating it, post hoc.)

Gothic Communism prevents “rape” by putting it in quotes. Doing so is built on systemic catharsis, which results from good praxis camping the canon with ludo-Gothic. Let’s take stock before we delve into the synthesis roadmap, then, which simplifies theory to synthesize praxis within a collective teaching approach that touches on ludo-Gothic BDSM as something to instruct; i.e., how to process and interrogate trauma in our daily lives. Combined with the thesis volume and glossary keywords, the manifesto and its postscript provide you with every main theoretical idea used in this book.

To it, everything that comes next concerns applying ideas taken from them, insofar as navigating and expressing trauma are concerned. Originally, there was no thesis—just the manifesto as a sketch of it, and a great many ideas I wanted to introduce after it; i.e., inside the roadmap and in Volumes Two and Three. I had also devised a “test” to see what readers would know before reading the rest of Sex Positivity and discovering these ideas: a small sample essay that utilized the sum of my books’ theoretical devices. Purely in the spirit of fun, I’ve left the essay in the book for you to test yourselves with—i.e., to see what you’ve learned after reading my thesis volume and manifesto/postscript. Provided you’ve read and processed those, this should be a piece of cake.

(artist: Rae of Sunshine)

Onto “Sample Essay and Paid Labor“!

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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] There is a tremendous asexual facet to Gothic poetics when negotiating trauma. We will explore this at length in Volume Three.

[2] For a more recent examination of this oft-disputed statistic, consider Renegade Cut’s 2023 video, “How Many Cops Are Domestic Abusers?”

[3] Abstraction isn’t simply the reduction of detail down to basic geometric shapes and color (though Skynet, when it is visually conveyed, appears as a cybernetic pyramid, often in black and red, or silver-blue and purple); smaller iterations or offshoots of larger complicated things are also abstractions. On par with Rudolph Otto’s ghosts serving as abortive offshoots of the Numinous, they and Skynet hint at something neither can fully describe: Capitalism and Capitalist Realism.

[4] As TheScientist writes for ” RYM Ultimate Box Set > Hauntology”:

The discourse developed around Jacques Derrida‘s concept of “Hauntology” (in 1993) and its application to music in the minds of writers and bloggers like Simon Reynolds, K-Punk and Adam Harper as a philosophical and aesthetic musical idea emerged in the music world in 2006. Derrida’s original use of the phrase can be linked to a sense of “threading the present through the past,” or a ghostly re-imagining of the past defining our existence both in concept and in art. But in its musical sense, Hauntology has been used to describe a gathering of disparate artists dealing in “haunted” sonics; music resonating with the emotions and feelings of past analog, and digital ghosts (source).

[5] The technological singularity is often misunderstood as something that will eventually happen, all while scapegoating machines; i.e., by presenting them as the end of the world, rebelling against the status quo by replacing Humanity with pure non-humans (often via a transhuman buffer like the xenomorph or Frankenstein’s Creature). But the truth is less romantic: Thanks to efficient profit (and the bourgeois trifectas at large), Capitalism is generally not incentivized to build things like Skynet in a literal sense. Rather, human beings are dehumanized to behave in robotic ways, insofar as delivering or receiving state violence is concerned. This isn’t technology of an incredibly advanced sort, nor does the state require it; it’s a reflection of the human condition projected onto various dated anxieties about the rise of the police state smashed together with state-fueled phobias and stigmas in a retro-future hauntology that leads to Capitalist Realism. It’s a paradox—a liminal expression of unequal power and its abuse, insofar as technology becomes a device of state terror that contains within it all the usual means of humanizing the dehumanized through counterterror.

For the state, Skynet is a recuperative scapegoat for, and elaborate distraction of, Capitalism that once conjured up sows mistrust of technology while making threats that are anything but guided by actual non-humans; for us, the singularity is merely the waking up of those framed as inhuman by the state. Skynet is a mirage; police abuse, genocide and nuclear violence are not, but the state’s control on violence, terror and bodies are not absolute and can be reprogrammed. Generally this happens by fighting back within hauntological myopias to see state orchestrations behind so-called singularities like Skynet, but also reclaiming such hyperbole to disarm canonical technophobia in service of Gothic theatrics that assist workers: ironic technophobia and technophilia treated as monstrous in relation to computers as immensely powerful devices that can serve worker needs on and offstage in very Gothic ways. Their summoning should raise our awareness of state abuses, including its effect on our minds; i.e., what we’re afraid of as authored by state forces or otherwise in service to them (more on this in our next footnote).

[6] NATO’s fictional double—SAC-NORAD and Cameron’s technophobic genesis of the technological singularity—lends far too much credence to the idea of thinking machines being responsible for the planet’s devastation (and the end of Capitalism) through state shift. Indeed, Cameron both uses the singularity’s spontaneous rebellion to shift blame away from capitalists (essentially arguing that rebel computers nuked the planet versus climate change) and appears to misunderstand, or at least thoroughly abstract the nature of what AI is in practice. Even by current standards, AI as it is marketed by capitalists, is an algorithm within a search engine that steals data:

An AI is like a gigantic word sifter. It can structure sentences in ways that seem related to the topic at hand, which is why, if you ask it for a court case, it can generate text “[proper noun] v [proper noun]” as a formatting concept — like how Excel will see you type in $1.00 and know that further entries in the column are likely also dollar values, so it will change the formatting of that column to the dollar value type.

But the AI will not actually search for existing court cases, nor will it understand what’s in the court case — because it has no ability to understand anything, as it is not intelligent. Instead, you press a button, and the sifting machine starts spinning, and since you said, “court case,” it will output a string of text that is formatted to look like a court case (source: Doc Burford’s “Using ChatGPT and Other AI Writing Tools Makes You Unhireable,” 2023; also consider Naomi Clark’s Twitter summary).

The takeaway here is that it’s the illusion of thought capitalizing on people’s stolen information, their livelihoods (the theft of which giant companies have been doing for decades). “AI,” then, is a tremendous misnomer because it implies the device has the ability to think for itself or might suddenly “come alive” and kill everyone like a fascist maniac or furious slave. That’s… not how computers work. This isn’t T2. Human decisions are not removed from strategic “defense” and Skynet won’t begin to learn at a geometric rate. Instead, the structure is designed to profit the elite in ways they don’t need to make. It might happen anyways. However, predictions by people like Stephan Korn [a New Zealand CEO fixated on “innovation”—big ol’ red flag there, dude] are not only guessing but calling the software something it isn’t—intelligent. Yes, Capitalism could design some kind of sophisticated super-agent and overlord system to surveille its citizenry with through various ungovernable forces that lead to a theoretical boiling point:

Like it or not the power of AI will attract at least 4 distinct motivations that are hard to regulate:

• • Profit motive – companies gaining significant competitive advantage through the use of ever more advanced AI
  • Control motive – intelligence agencies / counter-terrorism units wishing to use more sophisticated versions of AI to provide a level of security for their citizens / countries
  • Power motive – any individual or group wanting to use AI to manipulate existing systems (such as democracy / governments) to gain an advantage
  • Disruption motive – criminals and terrorists using AI to further their causes

At least one of the above will be completely resistant to legislation / regulation which means there will always be someone working without governance / control on more sophisticated versions of AI systems (source: “Skynet Is About 3 Years Away,” 2023).

But the reality is, the elite already have a stranglehold on the world and operate through brute force, efficient profit and market deregulation that colonize its populations at home and abroad (name me something that’s more brute-force and clandestine than nuclear war and police states under neoliberal hegemony); “Skynet” is already here: the dehumanized elite, coldly exploiting the world to the brink of nuclear war and arguably beyond.

Despite Western prosiness of the futurist Utopia, science fiction is rooted in the Gothic critique of Cartesian thought and Western settler-colonial hegemony and has been since 1818. Cameron’s white-savior take on “tech-noir” thoroughly bastardizes Mary Shelley’s Modern Prometheus. People forget that Shelley had Victor make a monster he could abuse in order for her to make a postcolonial critique of men like Victor—not a testament to Victor’s creative ability or the Cartesian Revolution’s merits! Whether Cameron would want us to or not, the same idea applies to Cameron’s Terminator movies. The film isn’t meant to entertain the idea that such a machine could actually exist because those in power would never actually make it, could never actually make it; state science serves the market and the market is guided by human decisions predicated on illusions, not genuine scientific advances. It’s in their best interests to keep machines/slaves stupid—to keep us stupid and afraid of a false threat overshadowed by a very real one.

To this, Cameron’s critiquing of the elite’s desire to dominate and control coming home to roost is stowed away in popular phobias (while simultaneously profiting off the same narrative to enrich the elite by making his own white-savior fantasies come true on screen—self-aggrandizement, in other words). And, if we want to be charitable towards Cameron (who has profited considerably off these stories), we could argue that Skynet represents as much the repressed desires of the downtrodden, the wish fulfillment of the Global South guiding the nuclear missiles home towards the colonizer mother country like some kind of token police agent—a tinman who finally got a heart and destroyed its slavers. Except, the great machine has no body and there is no dialog like Frankenstein; comparatively Scott’s 2017 Alien: Covenant is more discursive and upfront about presenting David, that movie’s villain, as a Satanic rebel in opposition to state power (more on this in Volume Two; re: “Dissecting Radcliffe“).