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.

Monster Modes, Totalitarianism (menticide) and Opposing Forces: Cataloging Oppositional Praxis

“People have given us many names: ghouls, ghosts, night wanderers, vampires, werewolves, and so on. But we are all members of the same family; tormented souls who must return forever to the scenes of our lost humanity. You may hang garlic or a crucifix above your bed, prepare silver bullets to shoot us, call in holy men to exorcize us from your home, but you cannot defeat us. Our name is Legion, and we are too many for you because we are the forces of evil that reflect the evil within your own souls.”

—Michael Page, The Encyclopedia of Things That Never Were (1985)

Picking up where “Challenging the State’s Manufactured Consent and Stupidity (with Vampires)” left off…

This chapter concludes the manifesto by cataloging monsters, menticide, and oppositional praxis (canon vs iconoclasm, the Six Doubles, the bourgeoisie vs the proletariat, etc); i.e., as something we’ve already discussed in Volumes One and Zero, but want to compile before moving into second half of the volume (and into Volumes Two and Three). We’ve already looked at gargoyles, Amazons, and knights as visual, menticidal reminders of state violence and terror, and vampires as vitalistic monsters of sin, seduction, vice and power exchange (with Roddy being utterly terrified of his own dark reflection as something he sadly felt he needed to stake; but that’s the ’80s for you: a time of re-closeting the queer while simultaneously comparing them to cis-het male serial killers). As we carry on, remember that all monsters are liminal; liminal expression involves pastiche and doubles in opposition, which is what monsters primarily are. This expression requires the remediated praxis of pastiche, the double’s failure of sublimation, and liminality’s conflict on the surface of the image inside the Gothic; i.e., as a culture of weird nerds fighting for or against the state: oppositional praxis and ludo-Gothic BDSM camping the canon as a structure—older queers haunted by the state’s hatred of them.

For example, vampires are beings of vice, power and appetite through the nerds consuming them; they can be reclaimed by iconoclasts, but canonically announce and express considerable fears, doubt and anticipation about the trauma and the vitalistic, feeding nature of ourselves relayed in abject forms: an expectation and eagerness to do battle with the vampire as a primarily undead force, but also something demonic; i.e., a seductive shapeshifter from which to learn forbidden things from or prove one’s worth against. Both types are summoned up and destroyed by canonical benefactors and inhabitants; or conversely are embodied as part of a non-colonial, genderqueer struggle that challenges state hegemony (and heteronormative division and assimilation) by lingering inside or near the state of exception.

Furthermore, as part of this exchange, guilt, anxiety and menticide likewise become things to deal with and act out during oppositional praxis allowing for camp during ludo-Gothic BDSM. Regardless of the monster type, then, oppositional praxis is tremendously chaotic, intersectional and complex; so the Humanities primer in Volume Two is entirely dedicated to covering the historical usage and evolution of our three main monster types: the undead—zombies vampires, ghosts and composite bodies—as well as demons and animalistic “totems,” chimeras, sentient animals and their associate reanimating magics, feeding mechanisms and forms of power exchange. Here, we’ll mostly be listing all of them, and going over some of their base, shared functions as part of oppositional praxis’ Gothic dialectic within weird-nerd culture.

To be as thorough as I can be, here are most of the monsters this book has already explored in Volumes Zero and One or will explore in Volumes Two and Three (with cited exhibit examples of some of their canonical critical functions being in parenthesis):

Note: Rather than go through and give links to all of the individual exhibit numbers, I’ll provide the final exhibit number per book volume; i.e., to let you know which volume to download and Crtl+F the exhibit number you’re trying to find. Volume Zero ends on exhibit 1a1c; Volume One, exhibit 33a; the Poetry Module, exhibit 34b3b3a3; the Undead Module, exhibit 43e1; and the Demon Module, exhibit 60e2. Volume Three is anything past exhibit 60e2. —Perse, 4/7/2025

zombies (the state of exception, exhibit 34d)
werewolves (furries; symbols of rape, madness, and primal lust; exhibit 87a)
vampires (the aristocracy and venereal disease, exhibit 41h; the dragon lord or Archaic Mother, exhibit 1a1c)
aliens (xenophobia, abduction; exhibit 13a, below)
clones (assimilation, doubles; exhibit 13a, below)
reanimations (dead bodies, statues, golems, suits of armor, etc; exhibit 40h2)
Mother Nature (natural disasters, plagues; exhibit 35b)
orcs, goblins and Drow (the state of exception, tokenized conflict, settler colonialism; exhibit 37e, 41b, and 94a1b)
stigma/”plague” animals: bats, snails, snakes, wolves, bears, hounds (of the Baskervilles), Rodents of Unusual Size, killer rabbits, etc (the wilderness, vermin; exhibit 10c1)
Amazons (subjugated or rebellious, exhibit 8b2 or exhibit 1a1a3)
knights/cops (sanctioned rape/violence, exhibit 24a)
black knights (fascism/centrist caricature, exhibit 1a1a1h)
composite bodies (Frankenstein’s Creature, exhibit 44a2); but also cyborgs,
robots and golems (exhibit 42e), including silly ones like Mr. Stay-Puft from Ghostbusters (1984)
gargoyles (exhibit 6b4b)
ghosts (the uncanny/unheimlich, exhibit 42d2)
wendigos/imposters (exhibit 45d)
mythical warriors (ninjas, knights, samurai; exhibit 39c1; Beowulf, exhibit 1a1a1f)
mythical artists (mad musicians, painters, etc; exhibit 105a2)
plant/pod people (clones and alien invasion, mad science, etc; exhibit 13a, below)
chimeras (anthropomorphic, like mermaids, exhibit 54; or not—the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Cú Chulainn, Lucifer’s non-angel forms in Paradise Lost—exhibit 51a)
demons (forbidden knowledge and power exchange, exhibit 45c1/2)
hags (aging but also ancient power, exhibit 84a2)
witches (vice characters, pagan/non-Christian rituals; exhibit 83a)
headless monsters/revenants of state executions (the Medusa, the headless Buddha, fallen warriors, feudal-secular terrorist-cell violence, etc, utilizing the severed head as a dialectical-material means of condemning or venerating the execution through beheading as vividly abject and often blindly furious; exhibit 41a and exhibit 11b5)
Archaic Mothers (ancient, abject, really pissed-off vice characters; e.g., the alien queen from Aliens or Mother Brain from Metroid, exhibit 1a1c)
archaic babies (the spawn of the void; e.g., the xenomorph, exhibit 60d; but also Giygas “the mighty idiot” from Mother 2, 1994, exhibit 60e2)
killer, manmade babies tied to patriarchal mad science, patrilineal descent and pre-fascist and anti-Semitic revenge stigmas (again, the xenomorph or Beowulf, 1a1a1b; but also Cell and Broly from Dragon Ball, exhibit 39c2; the Creature from Frankenstein; and Homelander from The Boys, 2019, exhibit 108b4)
phallic women (the monstrous-feminine of the xenomorph and similar liminal performances, but also violent women “acting like men” from a traditional, canonical viewpoint—i.e., though generally in response to patriarchal structures with an air of female revenge that leads to TERF-induced rape culture; e.g., Lady Macbeth from Macbeth, 1606; Victoria de Loredani from Zofloya, 1806, exhibit 100b2; Rumi from Perfect Blue, 1997; and Ripley/Samus Aran from Aliens/Metroid, exhibit 71)
space bugs (Communism; see: Archaic Mothers)
hybrids (vampire-zombie witches, clown ninjas [Worthikids’ “Wire,” 2021] and Zombie-Vampire Capitalism’s Zombie-Vampire Voltron—e.g., Mega Man X, 1993, and The Ronin Warriors‘ 1995 neoliberal pastiche; exhibit 98b2a and 39c1/94c2a)

Allowed by the elite to flourish in canonical forms, monsters uphold the status quo; in iconoclastic forms, monsters work as doubled theatrical masks or costumes that can be subverted by the person wearing them for proletarian purposes during oppositional praxis (whose complex subterfuge and presence of trauma [revolutionary cryptonymy] we shall examine even more in Volume Three). In either case, these performances are literally Legion. So, I may have missed a few in my scrapbook bestiary above (on par with Prince Hamlet’s commonplace book, which compiled knowledge as he came across it and guided his revenge moving forward). However, I wanted to try and cover all the bases as best I can to give you a comprehensive picture of their canonical effects within the ghost of the counterfeit, which generally are xenophobic, horrifying and disempowering/paralytic inside a decaying scapegoat sense of inherited home invasion (re: “Demons and Dealing with Them“):

(exhibit 13a: Assorted still images from Fire in the Sky, 1993; The Blob, 1988, The Fly, 1986; and Body Snatchers, 1993. All deal with alien invasions or mad scenes of foreign, irrational space, technology and occupants foisted onto an American setting. While there’s a healthy degree of splatter, the genuine sentiment is abject horror/xenophobia within the ghost of the counterfeit’s moral panics; i.e., stranger danger, but from beyond the stars! “Watch the skies!” indeed.)

Next, I’ll list some of the infamous lairs/parallel space that monsters call (or make themselves at) home, which we’ll also explore (albeit always in relation to monsters, whose sex positivity remains our hermeneutic/praxial focus):

castles
churches (and other ecclesiastical structures and their Neo-Gothic forms)
danger discos
caves
condemned buildings
industrial sectors or disaster areas
crime scenes
alien landing sites
giant insect burrows/animal dens
abandoned factories, but also ghost towns and other derelict settlements (or giant vehicles; e.g., ghost ships)
haunted houses
graveyards (official or improvised; e.g., mass graves)
creepy basements
sex dungeons (rape fantasies, which intersect with other space types)
spooky mansions
Metroidvania and to a lesser extent, other videoludic spaces like the FPS, RTS or JRPG (for this one, refer to my aforementioned PhD research on the subject, in “Mazes and Labyrinths” as discussed as length in Volume Zero, though we will analyze Metroidvania more in Volume Two and in my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus)

Fictional monsters and their lairs/parallel space in media constitute localized phobias, stigmas, fetishes, and biases, the basic mediums of which include: movies, videogames, novels, theatre and musicals, etc. However, the basic Gothic theories (the Four Gs) can be applied to different mediums through different medium-centric schools of thought (and genres, which we’ll keep exploring as we go, but also crossovers—e.g., Samus Aran in Axiom Verge, 13b).

This requires another list, which I’ll call our Hermeneutic[1] Gothic-Communist Quadfecta (tailored after my education background, in this case; also, I didn’t want to have two lists of four called “the Four Gs”):

Gothic theory
ludology (game theory)
queer theory
Marxism

Apart from our thesis volume, Gothic theory has been outlined in “The Six Gothic-Marxist Tenets and Four Main Gothic Theories” paratext towards the start of the book, and throughout the manifesto in practical, executable forms; the latter three methods have already been outlined during the section, “Essential Terms, a priori,” in the paratextual documents.

As we’ll see when we push into the Humanities primer, my approach is thoroughly hybridized, as I think it’s more accurate to a post-scarcity world sans privatization to allow for creations that aren’t hidden behind artificial barriers. You don’t have to wait for corporations to make multiverses. All deities (and worlds and demons) resides within workers—are their tools to express themselves with:

(exhibit 13b: Artist: Persephone van der Waard. My crossover illustration of Samus Aran in Axiom Verge, purposely revisited to be more sex-positive and “Laborwave” [and which reappears in “Away with the Faeries“]. To this, the idea was less about being faithful to a previous visualization of either series and more about re-drawing it playfully in ways that give room for my arguments and theories represented through Samus herself as transformed: no longer a servant of the state [the Galactic Federation] but an errant traveler finding herself in strange, new, colorful worlds. Gender trouble aside, the parody of heteronormative standards also allows for pure ontological joy unto itself.)

In praxial terms, workers familiar with these objects and methods of study can start to think critically through whichever theories help them process media (and psychosexual trauma) in an emotionally/Gothically intelligent sense; i.e., one that also helps our Gothic-Communist goals materialize as praxis synthesized. This includes sex positivity vs sex coercion (we’ll get to the other doubles of oppositional praxis in a moment) as historically-materially generating an oft-liminal “monster pastiche,” or other kinds in connection with monsters: poster, war/nation, rape, porn, disguise, etc, which we’ll pointedly associate with monsters, lairs/parallel space and their relative phobias as things to rehabilitate and weaponize in our favor as rebellious workers. Over time, proletarian praxis leads to “friendly doubles”: de facto, sex-positive, educational forms whose means of encouraging critical thought are tied to commonplace things workers can quickly spot, recognize and think about as they express (and liberate) themselves with iconoclastic art. In doing so, they can decolonize the Gothic mode and grant it their own humanizing power as part of a larger artistic movement; its steady iconoclasm/reclamation is how sex workers liberate themselves from canonical, heteronormative bondage—often using an asexual lens to appreciate social-sexual expression beyond compelled sexual reproduction and its state-sanctioned violence, trauma, and manipulation:

(artist: Dejano23)

When starting this book, I chose to focus on Gothic theory, monsters and media because of their ubiquity under capital, but also their widespread effects. To that, canonical forms of the “fearful” Gothic imagination invite sex-coercive, social-sexual behaviors that alienate workers from nature and sex, turning them against each other to serve the profit motive; iconoclastic forms utilize the same regular fixations during proletarian praxis, thus applying them in a sex-positive fashion according to common fears (moral panics) normally exploited by those in power for their own Base ends (that was a pun):

the unknown (death, nature; the dark, beyond, alien, other or different)
shameful conduct, but especially fatal hubris (the ignominious death)
the impostor, especially a betrayal by a false friend, family member, lover/spouse or authority figure (cops, priests, husbands, coaches, teachers, etc)
the tyrant and enslavement
incarceration and live burial
abandonment and identity erasure; cultural amnesia, genocide
violence; including physical, emotional and sexual abuse
impotence; a loss of control, including of one’s mind—madness, paranoia, brainwashing and gaslighting, etc
isolation
emotional, mental, spiritual or physical vulnerability
disease
prurience, sexual deviancy and appetite
strange combinations of these things (e.g., the Japanese kappa, anus balls and ignominious death helping compose Sekiro‘s (2019) hidden boss, the Headless[2]—a hidden, headless warrior married to the kappa, quizzically stealing the hero’s essence from their butt, but also relegated to the embarrassing-yet-terrifying forgotten grave: For a Japanese warrior to be beheaded, then left to rot, their honor and glory would be completely forfeit—utterly extinguished along with their name and identity as tied to violence. This would literally be a fate worse than death for their kind)
cats and dogs living together
mass hysteria

These canonical fears work as “starting points” that iconoclastic praxis can transform in highly flexible ways—first analyzed by Gothic theory to describe and critique the material world through art; then, used through future artistic generation to reeducate the societal Gothic imagination, slowly turning it into a sex-positive force; re: the Base and the Superstructure. This mounting power can then reshape the material world, all while preserving and remembering the barbaric past as it gradually turns into something new along liminal pathways.

(exhibit 13c: The cover image for Thomas Leatham’s “Identity Crisis: The Curious Connections between Perfect Blue, Persona and Black Swan,” 2022.)

In other words, Gothic Communism crystalizes harmful behaviors into a Gothic moral that doesn’t shy away from the dialectical-material complexities that emerge during oppositional praxis. Yet, our praxial focus always remains on a practical outcome informed by simplified theories we cultivate ourselves—of emotionally and Gothically intelligent, cultural-savvy workers (sex or otherwise) who have access to the entire manifesto checklist: our manifesto tree’s Gothic-Marxist tenets, main Gothic theories, Gothic mode of expression (its means, materials and methods of study), doubles of oppositional praxis/synthetic oppositional groupings and the creative successes of proletarian praxis: illustrating and imparting mutual consent, descriptive sexuality and informed consumption/informed consent through de facto social-sexual education that likewise conveys cultural appreciation through appreciative irony in countercultural forms; i.e., sex-positive fetishes, kinks, BDSM and Gothic counterculture; e.g., sex-positive (thus ironic) rape play.

From moment to moment, the mind can only hold so much. So now that we’ve catalogued the Gothic mode of expression, I want to spend the rest of the chapter (and the remainder of the manifesto) reloading yours: compiling and summarizing a variety of theoretical arguments that need to be understood holistically before we segue into the instruction half of the volume; i.e., a selection of items I think you should take with you—lifted from your own knowledge stores (as filled from my lessons) and placed into your current “basket” before we resume. These will be things the manifesto has already discussed, which I now want to holistically stress their various class/cultural functions during a preface-of-sorts to the second half of the volume’s primary topic: oppositional praxis as a “war for synthesis.” Think of it as a chance not just to reload, but reflect on what I’ll loading your basket with.

I want to start with three points: their medieval flavors in relation to capital, including vice characters; a totalitarian, menticidal function attached to dialectical-material arguments on either side; and opposing material forces with a societal element manifesting through Gothic poetics.

First, the medieval character of our liminal ploys work against the state in complicated ways. We’re not just breaking icons or swimming in the grey area for funsies (though it is fun); we’re fighting the state’s trifectas and monopolies on violence, terror and morphological expression through a variety of disguises that work as complex, oft-ambiguous code. Our revolutionary cryptonymy focuses specifically on sexual violence, as it intersects with other forms of state abuse as financially incentivized by those in power (the elite), with power (neoliberals) or seeking power (fascist) as normally afforded by capital. Capitalist Realism, then, stems from greed as a cultivated mindset—one informed by a revived, half-real medieval sitting between fiction and the rules, reality and imagination.

As previously mentioned, I’ve coined this incentivization “the problem of greed” in my own academic work, writing about Weber’s Protestant work ethic in Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice; the problem of greed (and its addressal) takes different forms (of vice character) depending on who’s involved:

I’ve tabled these points using things my thesis discusses at length. Some of the terms are included in the glossary but I’ve also tried (for your convenience) to cite relevant snippets from my thesis volume. Refer to it for extended sections on terms like “banality of evil” and “desk murderer” in relation to my arguments. —Perse

For neoliberals, the problem of greed introduces the banality of evil[3]—chiefly the dragon (medieval operator) as a symbol of rarified greed—to a current-day myth: the useful billionaire, aka billionaire “philanthropy/Marxism.” Capitalism cultivates the dragon’s “hoard of gold,” which makes the “dragon” gross dividends under neoliberal Capitalism. The owner class, meanwhile, grows more and more alienated from their own wealth-as-abstracted, but also other humans (workers) and sex/nature, preying on them or turning them into predatory devices (vampires) under their thrall. Owners see workers as a means to an end: moving money through nature; to achieve this, they exploit workers, including by callously bribing them through loans, subsidies and lobbying disguised as Christian/secular generosity (which align with the Christian tradition of worshipping capital in ostensibly secular forms; e.g., Reagan’s America being an extension of virtually every American executive before and after having been a Christian in some shape or form—mostly Protestant Christians, as Aleksandra Sandstrom notes[4]; re: Weber’s Protestant work ethic being an Americanized phenomenon).

Ethically billionaires should not exist, yet neoliberal culture hero-worships them like gods—banal dragons with draconian positions, not literal piles of gold to hoard (unlike fascists). They posture as the Greater Good, often in TV shows and other forms of popular media deliberately framing the elite as exceptional and benevolent (Renegade Cut’s “An Anarchist Watches The West Wing,” 2021) in order to hide what they really are: vampires and desk-murders-in-disguise, killing more than fascists can through Americanized bureaucracy as an ongoing and disguised form of state power abuse—deregulated but enabled to accumulate as much wealth as possible for those out-of-touch ghouls at the top. Doing so, neoliberals intentionally create criminogenic conditions, all while blaming the poor, stepping up policing and pushing austerity/personal responsibility rhetoric[5] (this includes “charitable” organizations asking poor people for one dollar instead of asking billionaires for one percent of “their” money while also treating the Protestant work ethic as sacred/modest—divorced from excess and useful to the elite). While this historically-materially translates to genocide, war and rape, etc, as displaced/dissociative violence, it also extends to remediation as canonical sublimation via content creators who posture as “generous” while generally profiting off worker exploitation behind various “fronts”; e.g., Bon Jovi’s restaurant accepting donations and labor while branding itself and its products as a non-profit[6] with neoliberal taglines (e.g., “Hope Is Delicious!”); The Open Hand Charity stealing fans’ money for ten years while claiming “it’s for dementia research“ (Karl Jobst, 2023); or Mr. Beast’s “poverty tourism” miraculously helping the blind, then using this as a shield his fans levy against criticism (The Kavernacle, 2023); i.e., “he did good works, so he can do no wrong” thus should be allowed to exist free from criticism (negative freedom for the elite and their proponents).

For fascists, the symptoms of Capitalism’s disease manifest differently. For them, the problem of greed reintroduces an older form of wealth acquisition—raw material theft through direct physical violence and conquest—the return of the Skeleton King or dragon lord roosting on the literal pile of gold (re: hoarded stolen material wealth—the piles of goods taken from the Nazi death camps) inside a castle during the liminal hauntology of war. It is the partial collapse of the state to install new leaders in the vacated/emptied offices, vying to restore them to “their former glory” during an internalized foreign plot; e.g., Reinhardt Heydrich’s busy campaigns[7] at all points of his career under Nazi operations. Desk murder under fascist bureaucracy is performed through a weaker form of government centered around open piracy and medieval power abuse, with similar-if-less-effective results. Despite their badass façade, fascists perform grandiose displays of perceived strength (“I am strong, strong, strong!”) through a weakened power structure resting on a cult of the strongman. Nazi Germany, for example, was materially capable of far less harm and damage than what America has globally achieved through US hegemony worldwide. US warmongering has slowly become automated, turning into endless bombings, occupations and drone warfare driven by bourgeois human greed through neoconservative arguments (“peace through strength”). In turn, these faraway forms are further displaced, dissociated, and disseminated through neoliberal propaganda. A common bread-and-circus form is popular sports, especially the combat sport (and its centrist kayfabe) as useful in conveying the competitive, individualistic models that are so central to neoliberal propaganda. These gladiatorial, ranked rituals “prove” which male workers/exploited groups are “superior,” meaning “the best at being useful to the Faustian elite in violent ways,” like Mike Tyson for Cus D’Amato or Don King (Rummy’s Corner, 2023). Women in these arrangements are reduced to de facto prizes for poor fighting men to scrap over, normally enjoyed exclusively by the elite. “To the victor go the spoils (which, as a non-battered, cis-het/non-heteronormative AFAB is not a flattering concept—women [and gender-non-conforming people/minorities] don’t really want to be reduced to pretty baubles that cis-het dudes fight over). As you might guess, this extends to military urbanism when Imperialism comes home to empire (roosting chickens).

For those predating neoliberalism/fascism, or working through a medieval lens that potentially critiques either ideology and its practitioners, the likes of Shakespeare and Tolkien critiqued greed through their own displaced fantasies/ghosts of the author taking on a life of their own; i.e., inventing an imaginary Venice and Middle-earth to critique their respective presents’ problems of greed in medieval language (re: “The Problem of Greed“). Similar to Blake’s “dark Satanic mills[8]” (or Kafka’s potentially bourgeois critique in his own demonic spaces compared to Charles Dickens[9], Tolkien’s “black country” was a displaced critique of the Industrial Revolution and capital (as later heard in British metal stalwarts Judas Priest surviving Thatcherism, but also in Victorian authors like Charles Dickens living under empire, etc); so was Shylock the xenophobic scapegoat of greed during mercantile Capitalism and Smaug’s rarefied greed being of the medieval, fascist (relatively small, vengeful and imaginarily “ancient”) sort directed at a post-Catholic, 20th century West. Such allegory is not so different than condemning a foreign dictator for similar abuses committed by one’s own leaders—not just elected officials, but the men behind the curtain pulling strings of various sorts (the British elite, in Tolkien’s case). You also see the same tactic employed by powerful men like George Lucas or James Cameron, whose own successes become franchised, turning them into billionaire Marxist “Pygmalions” with far less critical power as time goes on; i.e., the wider their appeal, the less potent their message insofar as it serves profit first and foremost. Of course, allegory exists for a reason, but “mainstream activism” is disempowered by the mere virtue of it being diluted for the masses. Genuine applied activism (synthesis) needs to be direct, rough, and clear—less canon like what Star Wars became after 1977 and more incendiary iconoclasm like Andor (2022, which we’ll explore in the synthesis roadmap).

Whether campy or canonical—neoliberal, fascist, or Communist—medieval expression generally requires a queer-coded[10], often-animalistic vice character who must either a) be cleansed or purified to whitewash the structure, or b) send it all crashing down (a metaphor for violent systemic transformation); i.e., the hyperreal of no white castle actually waiting behind the Gothic double—simply the castle, thus the system, as harmful and illusory by design. ACAB.

As previously discussed, we can camp the castle by doubling it ourselves, but also its queer-coded, animalized vice characters. And yet, just because someone is queer-coded doesn’t mean they are actually queer in a functionally sex-positive sense (nor are animals automatically a healthy view of nature; i.e., scapegoats). As stated during Volume Zero, fascism and Communism (as well as nature, the monstrous-feminine and corruption) generally occupy the same shadow zone until the canonical dialog requires a hard stance against the true enemies of the state: Communism (and Indigenous people) as the ultimate threat to Cartesian thought, heteronormativity, the nuclear family/colonial binary and any other “normal/natural” or “realistic” state of existence one could present the audience with (versus the false rebellion and actual defense of capital/assimilation fantasy that fascism represents). During oppositional praxis, this plays out historically-materially through fascism-as-unironic and queerness-as-ironic flavoring the same basic code.

As a result, vice characters come in all different shapes and sizes: Shakespeare’s Shylock, Monty Python’s killer rabbit (to give a nonverbal example), Tolkien’s Smaug the Stupendous, Lucas’ Darth Vader, King Diamond’s Abigail, etc—the killer, fun villain as campy or straight, but also human and inhuman to varying degrees. As such, they embody the “root for the bad guy” jester who speaks truth to power as unironic or ironic to varying degrees. Overt “clownish” examples include Kefka Palazzo from Final Fantasy VI (1994), Captain Hook from Peter Pan (1953), and Joker from Batman (exhibit 95a1b) as being stereotypically violent for the closeted gay man, but also various Disney villains literally being talking animals (e.g., Lion King‘s [1994] Scar, above, being an “evil animal” on par with Tolkien’s nefarious spiders) who often are fascist-themed/queer-coded themselves (with Ursula from The Little Mermaid [1989] being based on drag queen legend, Devine, writes Jack Coleman, 2022).

(artist: Ken Barr)

Whatever the shape, the vice character denotes a sense of the disgruntled alien, often having non-white, Orientalist/fairyland “changeling” components coming from a black planet as something to fear or return to, hence nebulous wish fulfillment for or against a white status quo: Something is not as it seems, but the audience quickly finds themselves cheering for the vice character in an ignominious and oscillating affair promising Jewish, female, queer or black revenge; i.e., the corruption, then total destruction, of the “good” family patriarch and his “noble” bloodline (with The Lion King being based on Hamlet, Scar standing in for Uncle Claudius). This doubling takes a variety of personified/animalized forms, of which we’ve already considered quite a few and will consider many more throughout the rest of the book. For the moment, we’ll swiftly examine two more: Ester from Orphan: First Kill (2022) and the killer lion from Beast (2022).

(exhibit 13d: Ester doesn’t have wings or non-white skin, but still denotes the Orientalist phobias of a “changeling” that steals one’s child and assumes their identity for material gain. To make their skin a color other than white would draw attention to the conflict as racialized, thus visible, which commonly occurs in fantasy narratives with non-human races like orcs, elves and Drow but also fairies. Ester shows us that in the absence of dark skin, other features—such as the eyes, hair and “spirit”—will be used to depreciate a scapegoat’s origins within settler-colonial models [and Cold-War anxieties, in Ester’s case]. The practice actually dates back to British settler-colonialism; e.g., Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights [1847] being the dark-haired foster child; i.e., being treated like a fairy-like outsider based on his physical appearance despite having white skin. As Beast demonstrates, the target of in-group animus doesn’t even need to look human—merely be something that stands in for institutional violence against out-groups commonly associated with nature as something to “tame” by colonial benefactors; i.e., like Idris Elba’s Americanized family man conquering the nightmare lion of Africa’s settler-colonial past in order to assimilate: by protecting his cubs.)

Orphan: First Kill (the second in a lovely horror franchise) covers transplant phobias on home soil. Ester is an adult woman with a rare medical condition that, due to a short stature and youthful appearance, lets her pass as a pre-teen girl to an American family looking to adopt… after she escapes from a mental hospital in Eastern Europe! But in this case, Ester isn’t being adopted by fresh parents; she’s passing herself off as a bereaved couple’s long-lost daughter, who went missing years prior.

Orientalism par excellence, the movie concerns xenophobic anxieties about disempowerment through interactions with “children” from beyond America’s borders; i.e., the estranged, cuckolded dad from First Kill subversively becoming “the child” of the family when he’s trapped unwittingly between two dueling false parents: our “lost child,” Ester… whose original double was secretly murdered by that girl’s femicidal mother, the husband’s own wife! Just as Gothic stories make the location of the predator difficult to predict, Ester has gone and fallen into an unexpected trap, marking her the prey!

Operating as the other parent within this murderous exchange, the mother is both wise to Ester’s tricks and smugly boasting about her own “superior” Mayflower heritage versus Ester’s inferior foreign blood; i.e., disguised colonizer pride while the dutiful wife (and her corrupt, equally treacherous son) look down on the counterfeit adoptee as less good at violence and lying than they are. Amid the delicious turmoil, a common ghost of the counterfeit is also dug up, explored and (re)buried: incest (specifically the Oedipus complex—with Ester very much a moe figure trying to seduce her new father to keep her safe from the wicked stepmother). All the while, out-of-joint trauma exists inside a picture-perfect home rife with intrafamilial discord. Also, thanks to Ester not having killed anyone at the film’s start (and having been sexually abused back in Europe), the audience is meant to side with her and dislike the white American family. It’s classic Gothic oscillation/push-pull, wherein a displaced/dissociative, personified critique plays out in highly cliché ways: misplaced faith and a failure to sublimate, wherein the unheimlich gradually subverts while we spectate “bad guy” Ester being made into a relatively sympathetic con artist; i.e., by a transgenerational curse intimated by the wicked mother of the canonical bloodline. “A murder most foul,” indeed, and lots of complicated, oppositional wish fulfillment happens here. It’s oddly fun, but also playing a classic Neo-Gothic trick: critiquing the present in dated, counterfeit forms.

Beast applies the same complex, settler-colonial trauma and wish fulfillment overseas. During the opening scene, a family of all-black poachers kill a pride of African lions, only to be wiped out by the surviving father lion; i.e., an animal metaphor for the pro-colonial wish to kill people of color who poach, despite them only doing so because of colonial territories like Africa being raped and pillaged by the West well into neocolonialism, then mythologized for it (satenmadpun’s “Pre-Colonial Africa and the Myth of a Savage Continent,” 2020). From here, Idris Elba embodies the wish fulfillment of Afronormative cops—similar to homonormativity’s emulation of traditional binary-gender roles in that a token, person-of-color father figure must defend his family as superimposed onto the white nuclear model for Elba to police. As a standard, man-versus-nature yarn, it works on par with Jurassic Park’s (1994) neoliberal sleight-of-hand: humanizing the colonizers. Whereas Beast focuses on a single lion and black dad, Spielberg’s blockbuster populates of an entire tropical island with female killer dinosaurs (the Archaic Mother trope) being exploited by the all-white family defending themselves from both a recuperated evil corporation, but also the sweet bumblings of an old white colonizer who “just wanted” to build an amusement park for rich white kids (with him calling the “blood-sucking” lawyer the opportunistic one. Pot, meet kettle).

Unlike these two examples, Gothic Communism avoids commodifying worker struggles and alienation in favor of a basic-if-valuable lesson with far-reaching results: “Embrace vice; just don’t be an emotionally stupid, uneducated sex pest or giant asshole as taught by canon/Capitalism to abuse workers and marginalized groups by animalizing or otherwise preying on them and the natural world.” Self-destruction is the end result of Capitalism, to which “Zombie-Vampire” (a concept we’ll examine more in Volume Three) describes Capitalism’s Promethean effects felt through the minds of workers within the canonical Gothic mode: vampiric, but also zombie-like (“lobotomized”) workers functioning as obedient parasites who exploit themselves and others, brainlessly consuming till the cows come home. For them, blood becomes not just the stuff in our veins, but a medieval form of expression hauntologically revived in the present to pacify workers: by raping their minds.

This brings us to our second point: totalitarianism as a menticidal device. By compiling it here, I want to stress how Capitalism is a factory of canonical simulacra whose likenesses serve as customary warnings meant to condition workers through dogmatic stigmas, monsters, lairs/parallel space, etc: “gargoyles.” As we’ve already discussed them in an earlier chapter (re: “‘Rome,’ Gargoyles, and the Bourgeois Trifectas,” exhibit 6b4b), I’m not talking about the literal stone statues on churches, but anything that can be looked upon with fear as a dogmatic source of instruction; i.e., any theatrical performance from the giant list of monsters and their lairs where the assorted phobias (and other sources of moral panic) can be instructed by them as something to behold by workers, who then sheepishly toe the line through codified instructions with power as Gothically totalized in the elite’s favor (not its interrogation of, and negotiation with, these same repurposed implements).

The aim of these statues is to have subservient, predatory workers prey parasitically upon rebellious or noncompliant workers for even bigger parasites (the elite, utterly without shame and superficially charming like canonical vampires are; e.g., James Fallon’s “pro-social” psychopath[11] within a grand parasitic system that makes everyone ruthless, cruel, and dumb according to canonical Gothic poetics. Said canon and its poetics incentivize those without remorse to thrive by commodifying basic human rights/essence (and cultivates impostor syndrome and paranoia through monsters that feed—especially the undead—in a disguised/uncanny form).

Simply put, canonical praxis leads to workers preying on each other through a menticidal scheme; i.e., weird canonical nerds; e.g., Autumn Ivy preying on me by seeing me as a threat to them. The resultant profit is horded “blood” (exploited labor, bodies, workers, etc). Those at the top feed on those beneath them as placed there by a structure that naturalizes the abuse, but also hides it in Trojan forms that paradoxically stick out; it treats poorness like a disease, a contagion the rich will despise, but also rely on to get ahead while feeding in the dark. They lengthen their lives, sipping greedily on “blood” they can no longer produce themselves behind closed doors, but nevertheless advertise their superiority through the freeness of the market, of Capitalism, of themselves as embodiments of capital and privilege: their castles, their profit, their right to do as they please. As such, their humanity is sacrificed in pursuit of a bloodthirst they—like the classic vampire—can never quench; their veins dry up and they become alien, shriveled up, divorced from nature while aping it in horrifying babylike ways (source, Tumblr post: depsidase). Like Brian Froud’s Skeksis, they resort to hideous abuses to chase off an infantile death of their own making. This souless inhumanity within the “castle” is a Gothic metaphor for harmful material conditions, making Dracula’s quoting of the Bible in Symphony of the Night an apt one: “What profit is it a man who gains the whole world, but loses his own soul?” (we’ll continue examining the ideas of sanguine and other pre-fascist vampiric textualities and hauntological medieval themes, in Volume Two).

Gothic Communism works in opposition to state artifice, confronting and transmuting the canonical “gargoyle” (and castles where these various kinds of monster statues call home) as continuously remade and executed by state authors between fiction and reality through the monomyth, Cycle of Kings and infernal concentric pattern; i.e., cultures already stricken by two basic totalitarian ideas lifted from Joost Meerlo’s The Rape of the Mind

menticide, or rape of the mind
waves of terror

I’ve already introduced and applied these concepts earlier in the manifesto; in the interests of compiling them here, I want to supply their full definitions:

menticide

The variety of human reactions under infernal circumstances taught us an ugly truth: the spirit of most men can be broken; men can be reduced to the level of animal behaviour. Both torturer and victim finally lose all dignity […] The core of the strategy of menticide is the taking away of all hope, all anticipation, all belief in a future [which aligns with Mark Fisher’s “hauntology,” or inability to imagine a future beyond past forms supplied by Capitalism; i.e., a myopia]. It destroys the very elements which keep the mind alive. The victim is entirely alone (source).

waves of terror

the use of well-planned, repeated successive waves of terror to bring the people into submission. Each wave of terrorizing cold war creates its effect more easily—after a breathing spell—than the one that preceded it because people are still disturbed by their previous experience. Morale becomes lower and lower, and the psychological effect of each new propaganda campaign becomes stronger; it reaches a public already softened up. Every dissenter becomes more and more frightened that he may be found out. Gradually people are no longer willing to participate in any sort of political discussion or to express their opinions. Inwardly they have already surrendered to the terrorizing dictatorial forces (ibid.).

Apart from these, there is a third variable: thought crimes/venial sins (all-seeing governments or authorities in secular/religious forms; e.g., Santa Claus) that outwardly manifest as occult “markings”: gargoyles not just as dated, humanoid curios, but vanguards of the state’s monopolies and trifectas through various commodified refrains (e.g., Tolkien and Cameron’s) in neoliberal media and responses to said media as something to endorse or critique, mid-enjoyment.

Gargoyles are classically installed on high places to watch over as much territory as they can: to look out for various problem topics or areas by teaching people to identify what to look out for—to become the eyes and ears of the state during endless crisis, moral panic and decay. For instance, canonical monsters often symbolize venereal disease marked to mortally sinful activities/cardinal sins worthy of capital punishment toward marginalized groups: death and reactive abuse through selective punishment. The state decides what’s innocent in the eyes of the law as emblematized by “gargoyles” as a means of seeing and establishing punishment, vis-à-vis Foucault. This amounts to thought-crime personas of vice that are depicted as being canonically against the state, thus receiving state punishment/exploitation as righteously delivered (often by token agents). Even with iconoclastic liminality there’s a thin line between pleasure and pain, virtue and sin: “It hurts so good,” indeed (and remember the BDSM mantra: “Hurt, not harm“)!

Gothic Communism is anarcho-Communist, thus meant to be generally applied to many different things; i.e., highlighting the destructive lessons that canonical art teaches through the same Gothic academic theories in reverse: iconoclastic doubles of said “gargoyles” that challenge the state’s rape of the mind and totalitarian use of waves of terror/vice personas that lead to war at home and abroad, thus rape and genocide, but also mental, imagination, and social death for workers endlessly exploited by the elite at the state-corporate level and dressed up in the same language, but appropriated to disguise the implementation of “cops and victims.” Whether said victims are depicted as harmless, as scapegoats or as murderers (which regularly appear in the state of exception against the state’s protectors), all become trapped inside Capitalist Realism; there’s nowhere for them to go except into the executioner’s arms.

For neoliberals, this amounts to the good team brutalizing the bad team, “cops and victims” relayed in humans or tokenized monsters (orcs, demons, bugs, etc) versus their unironically evil counterparts in nerd culture (especially videogames being endemic to neoliberalism as “home entertainment[12]“); for fascists, this amounts to the village scapegoat, the open and radicalized target of revenge (which we’ll explore more heavily in Volume Three, Chapter Two). In oppositional praxis, all of these things are doubled in both directions: for or against settler colonialism, worker exploitation and genocide; for or against the status quo and state abuse of workers, sex and nature. State abuse includes a gradient: open/grim fascist harvests versus more oblique/veiled, neoliberal forms of exploitation (total war versus sanctions)—i.e., good cop, bad cop represented as centrist vs fascist; e.g., Dirty Harry’s 1973 Magnum Force but also Tolkien’s village pastoral intimating the neoliberal market for the kind of good war his Bretton-Woods power trip exemplified in videogame refrains.

Neoliberalism disguises the fact that all cops serve the state, not workers. In praxial terms, cops are class traitors; they lie about their own hyperbolic, inhumane violence being performed in service to the state, turning everything around them into a functional prison they deceive citizens to preserve. In defense of the state, cops lie and conduct surveillance against anyone who isn’t a cop; they do it all the time because it’s literally their job (Renegade Cut’s “Cops Are Liars,” 2022). In short, they’re the “gargoyles” watching out for evil as codifying in state canon. Giant corporations also protect them, making it difficult to even report on their abuses; e.g., Leeja Miller’s “Why Are US Police So Bad?” where she remarks, “This video has been edited from its original form. Police in the US are so problematic that we struggled to get this video past YT’s community guidelines and limitations. In my 3 years on YT, I have never struggled this much to get a video past YT’s restrictions” (2023). The surveillance worsens according to the number of paranoid eyes, evoking Foucault’s panopticon (or Tolkien’s Cartesian eye of conquest) as sung about by Chuck Schuldiner in “1,000 Eyes” (1995):

To the left and to the right

From behind – they’re out of sight

Plunging into a newfound Age of advanced observeillance

A worldwide, foolproof cage

Privacy and intimacy as we know it

Will be a memory

Among many to be passed down

To those who never knew (source).

The same goes for Michael Parenti’s notion of fascism as a false revolution, its reactionary defenders and fortress-mind practitioners of the neoliberal/fascist “cop” and its gradient of action hero/vigilante offshoots: the “prison sex” of war orphans and their bad-faith “beards” and other heteronormative disguises—and token queers, TERFs and other marginalized subordinates—dogwhistling sublimated coercion, but also false recruitment promises that groom future killers through menticidal, Pavlovian conditioning. This “schooled predation” builds future literal/figurative prisons and “prison sex” mentalities under Capitalism: the heteronormative Man Box offering the same-old solution of so many monsters to kill. The promise, then, reads like Uncle Sam: “We want you! ‘Enrich’ your character and become the exclusive badass; i.e., the havers of sex, power, guns, intelligence, muscles, etc” (we’ll explore this deception historically when we examine zombies and demons in Volume Two, and consider its present application in Volume Three). In short, become the center of your own hero pitted against nature, promised all the white women and black slaves for simply being male and white (thus been given respect due to their station, not having to earn it; i.e., self-centered threats of violence where the partner isn’t threatened with violence, but self-harm committed by the man: “If you don’t have sex with me, I’ll kill myself!” as a very common and patriarchal guilt trip committed by male histrionics treating the man as the center of the universe):

(artist: Frank Frazetta)

This brings us to our third point to revisit, here, and one already discussed during an earlier chapter (“Operational Difficulties”): revolutionary cryptonymy and opposing forces during liminal expression and ludo-Gothic BDSM. Here—and in light of this chapter’s holistic examinations—I want you to consider these devices as things to synthesize mid-opposition to state actors. As you do, I will introduce a variety of fresh terms relevant to synthesizing praxis that we have yet to explore (and which the instruction portion of this volume will tackle for its entirety).

Disguises remain incredibly important for iconoclastic praxis—aliases, alter-egos and egregores camouflaging oneself from heteronormative reprisals by blending in using the same masks, uniforms, and positions of Gothic theatre to interrogate power but also negotiate with it according to our own trauma, knowledge and lived realities. This means that exposure happens sooner or later at a societal level; it must or we’re all just in the closet. The beard is “shaved,” the lavender marriage exposed, the Trojan outed or accused, the gay threatened with burial, the token rejected, etc. We have to take that power in order to expose and turn it against the unironic, bad-faith actors triangulating against us, doing their best to continue the Gothic commodifying of sex and sin through our exploitation. Both are effective means of personifying trauma in relation to nature, thus treated as highly controlled substances, and their regulation is strictly monitored in ways that serve the profit motive under capital:

(artist: Didi Lune Studio)

These exchanges aren’t simply where we survive, but fight back and slay with vampy abandon: reckless camp, wild sex and style. Embossed with Medusa’s severed head (or the skulls inside all our heads), our aegis must show those who seek to uncover and attack us the truth of who they are: dumbasses having surrendered their necks to capital, beheaded by the state and glaring with blind rage at anyone the state needs dead (to serve the profit motive). Holding that up at them, and in essence showing them their own doom through the same liminal pathways, can be an effective means of disarming our attackers; i.e., a shared humanity told in the theatrical language of vice, power, jealousy and death stamped on the surface of the usual human billboards: worker bodies fetishizing sex (and the animal, the alien) through Gothic theatrics.

Something to keep in mind, then, is how our interrogations require us to share the stage with bad actors, players and educators, mid-negotiation. TERFs, for example, are sublimations of state violence relayed in rebellious markers that have been recuperated to subordinate trauma under reactive abuse; i.e., the Amazon recuperated through the “prison sex” phenomenon, becoming violent or submissively co-dependent towards power (there’s always a stronger man, always a weaker woman, etc). In turn, the blank slate or tabula rasa of Capitalism is a false/bad parent; it’s all that reactionaries can understand. Through unironic, state-centric warrior and rape culture, all bourgeois-minded workers become slaves to those in power telling them how to think regarding those they must exploit, rape and kill. Once triangulated, the Amazon kills (or otherwise antagonizes) her fellow victims by becoming the state’s victimizer towards them (and nature).

Beyond TERFs, those in power or aligned with power—be they warlords, dark lords, neoliberal statesmen, or desk murderers—are “chicken hawks” making workers fight amongst themselves. This involves recruitment of soldiers at different tiers of management along the chain of command in its various parallel forms (the state, the military and the public, etc). Whatever the form, iconoclasts under Gothic Communism must resist all of them (and their disjointed, knotty goals) to be successful anarchists, generally through clever disguises and doubled Gothic language (which proletarian workers interpret and recreate in oft-liminal, subversive ways): our revolutionary cryptonymy that, like Athena’s Aegis, turns the state’s suspicious gaze (thus its theatrical violence on and offstage) back towards itself—the facing of settler-colonial guilt, inheritance anxiety and gender envy by the closeted thug. These are tremendously disempowering sensations, which we can use when arguing for our own humanity in the face of those who seek to destroy us as having sacrificed their own. They become increasingly undead, demonic and predatory for the state, transforming in defense of canon as their fortress to defend from iconoclastic agents intent on camping their vertical, coercive arrangements of power and the historical-material consequences of said arrangements when left uncamped, thus unchecked: rape, war and endless police abuse.

We’ve already defined oppositional praxis in our thesis and reexamined it at the start of the manifesto. From here on out, I want you to consider it more as you would in your day-to-day lives: in simple oppositional terms; e.g., sex positivity versus sex coercion. It’s not that you would use those exact terms yourselves, but that you probably have an unspoken understanding that is usually present outside of what is normally said or taught: abuse is wrong and should not be allowed. But to which groups of people said boundaries normally applied is arbitrated by the same forces; i.e., the enemy of empathy as something to envision according to canonical interrogations of, thus negotiations with, power as something to relay in Gothic poetics’ paradoxes and doubles: power is something to perceive through performance and play as the Gothic mode normally goes about it.

To this, canonical iterations of essentially compelled stupidity relay through Gothic dogma, which its workers see as the end-all, be-all. Vis-à-vis Capitalist Realism, there is nothing outside of this current paradigm; anything else is death to them, meaning they will fight to the death to protect their so-called “saviors,” the elite—treating the Gothic mode as an extension of the state’s will. Any enemy of the elite and the elite’s profit motive, then, becomes an enemy to them, leading class traitors to weaponize Gothic poetics against worker interests at large. Us-versus-them leads to doubling as a historical tragedy insofar as workers are demonized through various moral panics that frame them as “terrorists” in bad faith; i.e., by state agents of terror who crack down against labor movements’ counterterror during military urbanism as unironically demonizing both sides: the abused in ways that make them targets of state abuse using the same language, which state agents adorn themselves with as abusers. Paradoxes do not matter insofar as state sovereignty is (more or less) upheld, but clearly there is room to upset the balance:

(artist: Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri)

Beyond what you might normally expect, there is considerable nuance to these disturbances. But if you want the full definitions to oppositional praxis, please refer to the thesis volume, which provides them all and in full. Moving into the synthesis roadmap, we will merely be considering smaller fragments of the manifesto tree, but especially something relevant to the trauma writing and artwork we are going to unpack once the manifesto concludes in several pages: the synthesis of abuse prevention and risk reduction as challenged by state (Cartesian) forms of Gothic media designed to make workers not just apathetic, but utterly violent against nature/the monstrous-feminine cheapened in ways that increase said abuse and bad odds; i.e., weird canonical nerds policing weird iconoclastic nerds; re: Autumn Ivy and I.

Cops, at their most basic level, are class traitors who police themselves; this extends to culture war as something they meet through heteronormative, settler-colonial action: state terror relayed against those inside the state of exception, determined to monopolize terror by keeping workers submissive or afraid, but also prone to attacking each other in ways that keep them stupid, dormant, petty and short-sighted, etc. “Cops and victims,” then, becomes something to perpetuate through bad theatre, but also to challenge in no uncertain terms during iconoclastic poetics camping the canon through rebellious, even titillating forms of reanimation. The revival of dead tissue and materials is certainly nothing new, nor is it exclusive to state monopolies and Pygmalions; indeed, Galatea might resurrect suspiciously similar scenarios during her cathartic, orgasmic rituals (whose gender-non-conforming and asexual functions we shall likewise expand on throughout the book):

(artist: Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri)

I think we can all agree rape is something to prevent, but camping canon through psychosexual, psychomachic and psychopraxial dialogs isn’t actual rape because they aim to prevent harm through good education; harm is enforced through the state’s bad education, which decries camp as “degenerate,” thus to blame for the state functioning as it always does: through endless crisis and cyclical decay. Clearly my use of the word “rape,” here, extends the definition to include all manner of abuses beyond what is commonly envisioned in canonical workers: the sexual rape of women. Functionally there is no difference between the stabbing of a man with a knife versus a woman being raped with a man’s penis (or some other foreign object) insofar as both supply vulgar displays of power that maintain the status quo. Clearly we want to upend said status quo, and will do so according to where it generally takes place: through dialectical-material opposition during liminal expression while struggling to communicate our own traumas. If any of this ever seems hard to understand from a theoretical standpoint during said communication, just remember that these ideas are meant to be understood fairly loosely and their synonyms can be swapped interchangeably (e.g., canonical/blind pastiche) as long as the basic dialectical-material relationship (and its symptoms) are communicated.

Moving on, since our focus moving out of the manifesto and into the roadmap will be oppositional, it behooves us to reconsider the manifesto tree from our thesis in oppositional terms. Everything has a functional opposite to gradient degrees. While camp’s assembly and production of cultural empathy under Capitalism happen according to the “creative successes” of proletarian praxis, these are checked by the implied “successes” of canonical praxis. Either are things to materially induce and imagine though parody and pastiche according to Gothic poetics; i.e., inside the “grey area” shared by cultural appropriation and appreciation during liminal expression’s canonical/countercultural forms (the making of monsters):

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

the culturally appropriative, sexually prescriptive lack of irony during Gothic canon’s abjection with sex-coercive demon BDSM, kink and fetishization; as well as asexuality and the unironic ontological ambiguities of trans, non-binary, intersex, and drag existence

These are executed either by emotionally/Gothically intelligent or unintelligent workers, using canon or camp to cultivate apathy or empathy through Gothic poetics; i.e., by synthesizing Gothic Communism or Capitalism during oppositional praxis (canon vs iconoclasm) according to our manifesto terminologies and structure—in short, its various tenets and theories (the Six Rs, Four Gs) but also mode of expression. As per our gradient approach to praxis, these binary opposites contain between them a spectrum. As we have already discussed, people are not generally completely stupid or intelligent; they have blind spots, but also competing objectives that lead to various degrees of cognitive dissonance—of ideological combat through allegory and revelation.

The praxial sum, for our purposes, could be called “creative/oppositional praxis.” The Six Doubles of Oppositional Praxis (re: exhibit 1a1a1c3) and their various synthetic oppositional groupings (we’ll examine them more during the synthesis roadmap) manifest as camp’s class-, culture- and race-conscious defense from canon’s class, culture and race dormancy and betrayal; i.e., braving the moderate/reactionary class, culture and race traitor’s four basic behaviors (quoted from the thesis volume):

open aggression, expressing gender trouble as a means of open, aggressive attack (disguised as “self-defense” reactive abuse): “We’re upset and punching down is free speech[13]” (“free speech” being code for “negative freedom for bigots who want to say bigoted things” to defend the elite’s profit motive).
condescension, expressing a moderate, centrist position that smarmily perpetuates the current status quo as immutable, but also optimal: “This is as good as it gets” but also which can never decay.
reactionary indignation, using sex-coercive symbols (argumentation) to defend their unethical positions: “They’re out to destroy your heroes, your fun, all you hold dear (code for ‘the current power structure’).”
DARVO (“Deny, Accuse, Reverse, Victim, Offender”), defending the status quo by defending the people who enslave them (the elite) by going after the elite’s enemies, thereby defending Capitalism during decay. When it decays, these “gamers” see “their” games in decay and will defend those, seeing human rights as an affordable compromise in the bargain. They see themselves (and the elite) as “victims,” and class warriors as monsters “ruining everything” (like Satan).

In historical-material terms, we have one side of the spectrum fostering universal, post-scarcity empathy and emotional/Gothic intelligence in the face of the opposite end of the spectrum: state actors operating with bad intent, neglect, and willful, taught ignorance (or some combination of these variables): “You can’t convince yesterday’s colonizer that today’s colonizer is wrong.”

(artist: Anolea)

And yet as we shall discover moving forward, these divisions—while far from cut and cry—tend to divide more discretely behind the immediate theatrics; i.e., many so-called “activists” (normally white moderates and token subordinates) are false revolutionaries weaponizing/fetishizing labor movements and their monstrous, counterterrorist language for state aims. Conversely, many who appear as open harbingers of death actively challenge these aims through a complex dialog of theatrical reclamation; i.e., revolutionary cryptonymy’s assorted masks, uniforms, bodies and weaponized props.

Again, it’s weird iconoclastic nerds vs weird canonical nerds, one reversing the canonical, unironic function of the Four Gs (through the Six Rs) and the other endorsing the process of abjection through the ghost of the counterfeit to uphold Capitalist Realism: to further Capitalism’s crises-by-design, hence its expected decay, according to the bourgeois trifectas that lead to the banality of evil (from the manifesto tree in Volume Zero)

as a vertical, pyramid-scheme arrangement of power and subsequent tiers and punitive exchanges thereof

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

arranged in neoliberal forms inside and outside of the text

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

which leads to a surrender of total power during states of emergency that are always in crisis and decay. Empathy is the casualty of the middle class, whose weird canonical nerds are taught to see the underclass as lacking basic human rights during moral panics. In the presence of crisis and decay, people forget then deify whatever’s in front of them that looks powerful. They don’t take the time to ascertain if the giant trees are canonical or campy—in short, whether the swap has been made and the current falsehood is designed to liberate or exploit them. During the bait-and-switch, they’ll follow the leader to scapegoat the usual suspects under Capitalism unless canon can be camped.

For all you closeted types, the death of the author and all their darling monomyth heroes, monsters and castles swapped out for campy gay ones during ludo-Gothic BDSM can make you want to scream, “Oh, my god!” like Grandpa Jojo. But like that show demonstrates (with campy aplomb), the life of these things lives on through paradoxical theatre and the monstrous performance of power as something to reclaim from the state during liminal expression. Short of a mass-extinction event, the Gothic imagination isn’t “going anywhere”; its praxial function merely changes in ways that raise class consciousness and empathy during class/culture war’s pedagogy of the oppressed tackling Capitalist Realism, one monster at a time.

Onto “Trauma Writing/Artwork (opening and ‘Healing from Rape’)“!

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] Meaning “concerning interpretation, especially of the Bible or literary texts”; or, “a method or theory of interpretation” (source: Oxford Languages).

[2] Ewan Wilson’s “The Folklore Roots of Sekiro‘s Anus-Ball Snatching Enemies” (2019).

[3] (from the glossary): “originally a term used to describe* the fascist bureaucracy of the Third Reich during the Nuremberg trials, desk murder goes well beyond Adolf Eichmann; it is destructive greed minus all the gaudy bells and whistles: the men behind the curtain (canon).” Or as my thesis volume argues, “The ensuing chaos [of state privatization] is the paradox of efficient profit: the state eating itself as the ouroboros does its tail, caught between an endless police state of regeneration and cannibalization (desk murder)” as a tiered enterprise:

Management of exploitation under Capitalism is tiered, pyramid-style—i.e., the top, middle and bottom; or lords, generals/lieutenants, and grunts according to corporate, militarized, and paramilitarized flavors (which often intersect through aesthetics and social-sexual clout). This “pecking order” translates remarkably well in neoliberal copaganda, whose bosses, mini-bosses, and minions deftly illustrate Zombie-Vampire Capitalism in action; e.g., Reinhardt Heydrich or Ian Kochinski/Caleb Hart (the latter two who we’ll discuss in Volume Three’s Chapter Three and Four) [source].

*”60 years later, the banality of evil has been so oft repeated, it’s been reduced to cliché” (source: Meghna Chakrabarti’s “The Eichmann Tapes and the Comforting Myth of the ‘Banality of Evil,'” 2022).

[4] “Biden Is Only the Second Catholic President, but Nearly All Have Been Christians” (2019)

[5] John the Duncan’s “Neoliberalism: Class War and Pacification” (2021).

[6] America is a tax haven for the ultra-rich (Georg Rockall-Schmidt’s “How the Super Rich Avoid Taxes (Legally),” 2021) and rely both on non-profits as go-to tax dodges (Felix Salmon’s “The Ultimate Billionaire Tax Dodge,” 2022) and PR stunts meant to sanitize billionaire reputations as “squeaky clean” (Second Thought’s “Why Billionaire Philanthropy Won’t Solve Anything,” 2022) and, hilariously enough, “of the people” (Adam Conover’s “Why There’s No Such Thing as a Good Billionaire,” 2022).

[7] “While the SS, prior to the seizure of power, mainly occupied itself with protecting the party against internal and external enemies, Himmler and Heydrich focused on all sorts of enemies of the state in the meantime, including in particular the Jews” (source: Kevin Prenger’s “Heydrich, Reinhard,” 2016).

[8] The Guardian’s “Notes and Queries: What Were William Blake’s Dark Satanic Mills?” (2012).

[9] David Spurr writes in “Demonic Spaces: Sade, Dickens, Kafka” (2012):

Kafka is close enough in spirit to Dickens, to his sense of the uncanny and to the ghostly presence of the dispersed baroque […] But the obvious difference in style is symptomatic of a more substantial difference between Dickens and Kafka concerning what might be called the ontological condition of the demonic. For if Dickens has transported elements of the premodern baroque universe into the modern industrial world, he does so in order to redefine the demonic in terms of the inhuman social conditions created by that world. There is an unbridgeable gap in Kafka between material form and doctrine, and this accounts for the sense of impenetrability that Kafka rehearses as an element of his fictional universe. In contrast to the figures that inhabit Dickens’s work, however ghostly and uncanny they may be, Kafka’s fictional universe implies a much more enigmatic relation of the demonic to the human and object worlds (source: Architecture and Modern Literature, 2012).

Spur notes how “Kafka often described his own writing in architectural terms,” concluding on a destructive mayhem that seems to have been designed to speak for itself: “The demonic in Kafka consists, finally, in its demolition of human value, perhaps in the name of a more secure edifice toward which his writing gestures but for the construction of which his strength, like ours, fails” (ibid.).

[10] Or at least foreign challenging of so-called “correct” forms of institutional, Christian marriage; i.e., “true love.”

[11] The World Science Festival’s “The Moth: Confessions of a Pro-Social Psychopath” (2015).

[12] I.e., compared to Atari home units, whose market crashed in 1983 and lacked the technology to sell its bloated library of same-looking games; or arcade smashes like Donkey Kong (1981) or Pac-Man (1980) as being public entertainment systems, comparable to a fair or carnival attraction. By comparison, the Nintendo Entertainment System (in the US, 1985) was a home entertainment device that caught on and has stayed popular (through corporate domination) to this day. As such, its dogmatic potential should not be ignored; e.g., the sexist elements of Zelda, Mega Man, Castlevania, Metroid or Mario, etc.

Note: For follow-through on this specific scholarship, refer to “Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning” (2025). —Perse, 4/7/2025

[13] “Free speech” is a common “apolitical” DARVO strategy used by bigots who argue for negative-freedom boundaries that apply to them, but not for others; e.g., “I want to be able to say slurs or profit off manufactured controversies by politically advocating for issues that will never affect me; i.e., punching down at minorities while acting like a victim, myself.” Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences.