This blog post is part of “All the World,” a sixth 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” (2024), as well as “Make It Real” for Volume One and “The Total Codex” for Volume Zero. Those promotions sought to promote and provide their respective volume’s individual pieces for easy public viewing in single-post form; re: for the Poetry Module, Undead Module and Demon Module, followed by my PhD and manifesto. “All the World,” by comparison, caps off my book series with a promotion for Volume Three; re: my Praxis 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 “All the World’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

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.

Inside the Man Box, part two: Canonical Discrimination in Videogames, Including Fan Art and Speedrunner/Streamer Culture (feat. Caleb Hart, She-Hulk and goblins)

“I don’t have an issue with GDQ putting on this type of event, but I have issues with the ‘attendance.’ If truly all the people attending were indeed females, great. But that won’t be the case” (source tweet: Dagnel RGT, 2019).

—Caleb Hart, attacking the trans community in 2019

Picking up where “‘Inside the Man Box; or, Patriarchal, Nerdy Hatred’ (opening and part one, ‘Ontological Ambiguities’)” left off…

As explored in Volume Zero, canonical videogames are—at least through their intended design—a neoliberal false-power fantasy that lures players inside. Ostensibly to escape, it’s actually a training simulator teaching them how to be violent towards those coded as “different.” The instruction happens while exploring the monomyth as replicated, thus extending the Cycle of Kings another generation between the fiction, rules and real world (re: exhibit 1a1a1a1_a, “Thesis Body“): inside the minds of young men. The lie of Western superiority (the ghost of the counterfeit) furthers the process of abjection by chasing down the corrupt and monstrous-feminine before quite literally putting them to the sword—the hero’s sword, according to its intended use within a follow-the-leader scheme: “Do what I say and I’ll make you rich, famous, powerful. Now find the enemy and dominate them, break them down, make them a trophy and a joke.”

As we shall see, this isn’t a joke at all, but an eerily accurate description of how weird canonical nerds actually behave when taught through videogames in the Internet Age; i.e., by watching sexist pigs like Caleb Hart play them (or Ian Kochinski, but we’ll talk about him in Chapter Four, as well as other forms of war pastiche that sublimate war through false power). He’s a gym bro leaning into the Ozymandias refrain:

(artist: Caleb Hart)

As usual, we want to camp canon, so here are several ways to do so as I have done them, which in turn are become the very false flags that weird canonical nerds will raise to attack us; we can’t be ourselves and avoid a fight, and segregation is no protection, so we might as well out them by having them shit their pants while we enjoy ourselves (for camping the canon, although their humiliation factors into our delight):

(exhibit 93a: Artist, left: Persephone van der Waard; bottom-right: Doctor-G. The emphatic twink subverts videogame canon in ways that weird nerds like myself live for. Weird canonical nerds, on the other hand, will do their best to stamp us out without getting caught. All the same, Link is still coded classically as the wood elf child, less of a “good goblin” and more of a fairy boy/lost boy of the Peter Pan variety [or Oberon the fairy prince, Bay points out]. Ganon, then, is very much a goblin or orc king with his green skin, hulking muscles, dark steed/gear and big nose; i.e., the black goblin knight/regent who—like Dracula or Sauron—returns out of the past like a fascist spectre that must be laid low by a new Hero of Time; and Link—in order to grow up and become a man in the monomyth tradition/rite of passage—must embark on a quest to rescue the damsel from Ganon’s BBC. It’s the same basic idea with Mario, always saving Peach ostensibly from Bowser’s big dragon dong [and Mario’s princess always being in yet another castle]. Pretty girl = reward; ugly girl = hag.

[artist, all: Kukumomo]

There’s plenty of room for gender parody. However, as a neoliberal enterprise, videogames emulate the courtly love of older mediums where male entitlement is ubiquitous amid rape as the ultimatum. Indeed, extramarital sex and female agency is always “unthinkable” within the traditional heroic model [wherein gender trouble is the ruffling of feathers during non-binarization and sex-positive consent-non-consent, etc]. The damsel in distress is always at risk of being raped by a fascist rogue or black male rapist, thus must be rescued by the white knight [with the lady’s rape being far easier to sensationalize than her adult personhood, general autonomy and non-standardized sexual preferences; i.e., a non-maiden purposefully having sex with people other than white men and teenage boys, or not having sex with anyone].

And lastly, the Japanese iteration of the monomyth offers up the ultimate reward in a canonical sense: The closeted sissy chasing female giants to mother them after the quest is complete; i.e., Samus or Tifa as tomboys who prompt, chide or goad the player, but also literally giants like Nabooru, Urbosa or Midna as the tall Japanese mommy archetype [there’s nothing wrong with mommy doms in general, but the enforcement of this towards an entitled group of infantilized boys and men is highly problematic] or Ganon as a Big Daddy archetype, etc.)

Now that we’ve outlined the various ambiguities of trans/non-binary people, as well as intersex and drag royalty and where they hail from/find themselves in videogames, let’s examine those discriminating against them who play these same games. The simple fact is that discrimination is taught and videogames are excellent teachers; or rather, the players of videogames internalize the message as a bigoted worldview they must defend from outside forces attacking from within. All this being said, it can be difficult pinning things down. We’ll give an example, resupply the companion glossary definitions of “weird canonical nerd” and “Man Box,” then examine our man of the hour, Caleb Hart (we’ll also unpack further nuance for addressing and inhabiting these cultural biases at the end of the subchapter when we look the monomyth—e.g., from the Star Wars and Harry Potter franchises, but also She-Hulk as a complex, thus liminal category caught between assimilation and rebellion inside this kind of nerd culture that men like Caleb would endorse).

Part of the problem is how videogame companies appropriate queerness, but even this isn’t constant. Nintendo’s Hyrule has evolved over time to allow for increasingly sex-positive arrangements of unequal power exchange (albeit in an admittedly centrist gaming model of good-vs-evil). Squaresoft/Square-Enix is another matter. The mid-90s weren’t exactly a time of glowing sexual acceptance for gay men, leading to a scene in Final Fantasy 7′s (1997) retro-future city that treated Cloud’s “day in a dress” as comical. While I consistently enjoy seeing Cloud (and the player) willingly forgo the hypermasculine posturing of a twink super soldier, the roleplay is nevertheless temporary. However, the game’s 2019 reinvention reframes Cloud’s crossdress as ignominious punishment: It’s humiliating for him to surrender his agency (and the player’s), made clear by how ashamed Cloud appears afterward, visibly rejecting the entire exercise:

The best qualities of the new Honeybee Inn sequence are embodied by a character that didn’t exist in the original game, Andrea Rhodea. Andrea is the fierce proprietor of the Honeybee Inn, a dancer who oozes equal parts warmth and charisma. He’s an instantly magnetic screen presence, and the scene’s joyous abandon is largely owed to his charm. As he takes Cloud through a thrilling dance number, our stuffy hero seems to open up. It’s a performance so convincing one can practically smell the spilled nail polish, and at the end, Andrea waxes poetic. “True beauty is an expression of the heart,” he says. “A thing without shame, to which notions of gender don’t apply.” It’s a touching sentiment, and a profoundly queer one.

Yet Cloud doesn’t take it to heart. As soon as they leave the Inn, Cloud turns his back on Aerith, facing away from the street. She tries to talk to him. “Please don’t,” he replies, hiding himself. So much for “a thing without shame.” And therein lies the main issue with this whole sequence: Andrea’s message of self-exploration outside the bounds of gender is bookended by Cloud’s total failure to appreciate or internalize that message (source: Caleb Wysor’s “Final Fantasy VII Remake Complicates Its Queer Legacy,” 2020).

In the same hauntological framework, the views on queerness are endlessly dated within the city’s temporally frozen cyberpunk tableau. In other words, the franchised pastiche of Final Fantasy has begun to reject queerness in relation to its own complicated fanbase, a “bury your gays” revival in videogame culture tied to a nostalgic videogame past (“Make Midgar Great Again!”) that weird canonical nerds blindly endorse: the pursuit of strength during a manufactured state of emergency.

My personal definition from the companion glossary (and “Paratextual Documents“) describes weird canonical nerds as

A term I coined while borrowing from and expanding on Cheyenne Lin’s “weird nerds” phrase from “Why Nerds Joined the Alt-Right” (2023), and one I present through my usual dialectical-material approach despite the obvious social components I’m weaving into things: weird canonical nerds vs weird iconoclastic nerds, or otherwise proponents of canon vs camp in popular culture; i.e., anything that weird canonical nerds posit, their iconoclastic brethren challenge in duality.

To it, weird canonical nerds work within a toxic subset of nerd culture. Whereas nerd culture more broadly is for those who present an increased intellectual interest in a given topic—often in literature, but also popular media more broadly as something to consume, critique, or create (with iconoclastic varieties extending such matters into a spectrum of modular activism and counterculture)—weird canonical nerds are those who undermine genuine, active intellectualism; i.e., by exchanging it for dumb, hostile and even bad-faith consumerism and negative freedom for the elite. As something to blindly enjoy/endorse through zealously faithful, uncritical consumption, they celebrate the monomyth and Cycle of Kings as “good war”; e.g., Gamergate, 2014, but also TERFs and their territorial emergence in the late 2010s. Not only are TERFs, and by extension weird canonical nerds, very wide—as a practicing group of stochastic terrorists that encompasses white cis-het male consumers and women, as well as token traitors (of class, culture and race)—but they unironically lead to fascism per the infernal concentric pattern as a holistic enterprise (with Gamergate endorsed by weird canonical nerds into the 2016 election of Donald Trump, and whose neoliberal sentiments’ fascist outcomes were felt throughout the consumption of media and mentality alike as things to practice).

Weird canonical nerds are systemically bigoted, pertaining to Man Box culture as something to openly endorse, or “resist” in ways that do nothing to change the status quo/avoid the infernal concentric pattern/Cycle of Kings; e.g., TERF Amazons, but also proudly “apolitical” non-feminist nerds who embody a particular status within the nerd pantheon of canonical heroes: Mega Man as a go-to centrist male hero, for instance, but also Eren Yeager as the “incel fascist” with mommy issues, or Samus Aran as the Galactic Federation’s singular girl boss/white Indian, etc. All become something to endorse within critically blind portions of nerd culture that ape their prescriptive, colonial heroes within culture war dressed up as “apolitical” (the fascist ideology being secondary to the pursuit and claiming of personal power by changing one’s shape and language to fit those aims; e.g., Reinhardt Heydrich as a fascist war pig [to combine Umberto Eco with Black Sabbath] who would say whatever he could to justify his own iron grip on the minds of the populace: the foreign plot inside the house, once and forever).

To this, the Gothic and its various intersections, contradictions and conflicts are embroiled within oppositional praxis for or against weird canonical nerds, hence depictions/endorsements of different monster types; i.e., that, in the white, cis-het male tradition of privilege, such persons routinely “fail up,” and as success—like a whore/wife or nice house—is something they are taught to believe is owed to them (the promise of shelter and sex). Such betrayals and entitlement extend to token minorities allowed a slice of the pie, post-betrayal, but also must surrender their pie when the time comes (for which the real “Indian givers” are the settler colonist bearing false gifts: the Trojan Horse, aka the Faustian bargain, in Gothic circles).

Capital is a funnel whose wholly mechanical and cartographic approach to the world expresses across all its registers while policing them: a privileged center and sexist, racist, and otherwise bigoted hierarchy of values.

Furthermore, this fortress mentality isn’t exclusive to one game or sport; the same problematic revival has bled into the competitive realm of online e-sports, including speedrunning as a male-dominated enterprise with a small subset of token minorities from formerly or potential activist territories: the nation’s youth becoming toxic, vis-à-vis capital decaying into its usual replacement antics; i.e., capital is a structure of continuous invasion and replacement, which is why tokenism occurs. Under fascism, these tolerances are exhausted, reducing to “pick me” behavior from those with more privilege, mid-toxification increasing state abjection (thus cryptonymy) on all registers!

Exposed to bad educators as financially incentivized under neoliberalism (which profits off division, bigotry and manufactured competition within the manufacture, subterfuge and coercion trifectas), Man Box culture is endorsed through the vast circuitry of professional sports, porn/sexualized media and videogames within nerd culture as “making it weird” in a coercive sense. They root for the hero against the villain, which is always an extension of who they’re supposed to be; i.e., the one to love or endorse as working against those the state wants dead. In this case, the fascist nature of masculinity-in-crisis leads to obnoxiously toxic and terminal death cults feeling entitled to sex with an oft-nationalized flavor as exported through taboo materiel—incels, of course, but also “weeb” culture and its more radical forms of sexual coercion: moe, ahegao and incest culture. These are all symptoms of the unironic monomyth as a kind of Faustian bargain enacted through bad de facto parentage/education; i.e., “boys will be boys”; e.g., like Caleb’s own awful “I’m not a rapist” brand thereof, passed onto other young men across streamer culture.

We’ll specifically touch upon incels, weeb culture and its pedophilic incestuous offshoots more in Chapter Five. For now, I want to examine Man Box as the broader umbrella term that applies to weird canonical nerds as ostensibly not-yet-radicalized to that extent (though when I discuss weird canonical nerds, the synonymous potential is always there and my points about either aren’t mutually exclusive). Our definition of Man Box culture from the companion glossary is from Mark Greene, who writes, re:

For generations, men have been conditioned to compete for status, forever struggling to rise to the top of a vast Darwinian pyramid framed by a simple but ruthless set of rules. But the men who compete to win in our dominant culture of manhood are collectively doomed to fail, because the game itself is rigged against us. We’re wasting our lives chasing a fake rabbit around a track, all the while convinced there’s meat to be had. There is no meat. We are the meat. Our dominant culture of manhood is often referred to as the man box, a phrase coined by Tony Porter of A Call to Men based on Paul Kivel’s work, The Act Like a Man Box, which Kivel and others at the Oakland Men’s Project first conceptualized over forty years ago.

The man box refers to the brutal enforcement of a narrowly defined set of traditional rules for being a man. These rules are enforced through shaming and bullying, as well as promises of rewards, the purpose of which is to force conformity to our dominant culture of masculinity. The number one rule of the man box? Don’t show your emotions. Accordingly, boys three and four years old begin suppressing their own naturally occurring capacities for emotional acuity and relational connection, thus setting them on the path to a lifetime of social isolation (Chu, 2014). The damage is done before we are even old enough to understand what is happening.

Man box culture also suppresses empathy. The suppression of boys’ and men’s empathy is no accident. It is the suppression of empathy that makes a culture of ruthless competition, bullying and codified inequality possible. It is in the absence of empathy that men fail to see women’s equality and many other social issues for what they are: simple and easily enacted moral imperatives. Instead, our sons buy into bullying and abuse as central mechanisms for forming and expressing male status and identity (source: “How the Man Box Poisons Our Sons,” 2019).

To this, weird canonical nerds extends the broader myopia of Capitalist Realism through Man Box culture as a comorbid pair festering within the domestic side of class warfare that can lead to more radicalized right-leaning variants. It bleeds onto feminist groups, converting them within popular Gothicized aesthetics. I’d like to explore how this starts within the echo chamber of cis-het male culture for the remainder of part two; then proceed onto part three’s provision of addressing and subverting it; followed by part four’s concession that the shadow of Pygmalion is something queer culture not only must subsist in, but deal with TERF bigotries that spring out of these broader material concessions (whose “witch cops” we’ll scrutinize in the next chapter).

Onto Caleb Hart.

(source: Big Jeffery’s “Speedrunner CalebHart42 Banned from Twitch for Racism,” 2019)

We’re now going to examine the way famous proponents enact bad de facto education through ludic metaphors and game identity-as-performance; i.e., by connecting both movement and tutelage to stochastic abuse against trans and other gender-non-conforming representation under Capitalism. The “name” we’ll be looking at is Caleb Hart, a weird canonical nerd par excellence because he uses his “dude bro” Twitch streaming platform to materialize, endorse, and teach bad lessons/play through videogame culture as something to be “the best” at in a very hypermasculine, patriarchal sense. The play becomes fearful and dogmatic, therefore isn’t emotionally/Gothically intelligent; its Man Box culture is presented as hip, cool and more importantly, “neutral” thus apolitical. Weird canonical nerds hate politics because they’re bigoted; for them, politics is lame thus has no room anywhere in their media. In truth, they’re just bigoted, but want to act like outlaws outside of politics.

Note: I don’t wish to discourage the enjoyment of videogames or speedrunning. Playing videogames and enjoying speedrunning is perfectly fine, but I still agree with Anita Sarkeesian and marry her idea to Jesper Juul’s own theories in my own Gothic-Communist approach to proletarian praxis [re-play, from the manifesto’s Six Rs]:

“It’s both possible, and even necessary, to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects.” The idea in doing so to understand, mid-enjoyment and critique, that development is not a zero-sum game, “a half-real zone between the fiction and the rules” that allows for emergent forms of transformative play.

To that, the following critique of videogame culture and speedrunning isn’t a total discounting of their potential value. Indeed, to repeat an argument from my manifesto, “I think the grassroots culture and non-profit approach to speedrunning allows larger groups of people to solve immensely difficult problems collectively outside of established business practices”; i.e., speedruns and “ironman/kaizo” challenges that go beyond the prescribed, intended way of playing a game [thus having Communist potential]. And the practice at large doesn’t preclude activism [e.g., Heckin’ Steve’s “DKOldies: Interview with Former Employee Jigsore (Full Interview Uncut),” 2023; or Karl Jobst routinely taking Billy Mitchel—the pinnacle of Capitalism teaching people to lie and cheat others to get ahead—to task: “Billy Mitchell And The Red Joystick Of Destiny,” 2023].

Even so, bigotry and ignorance need to be confronted whenever and wherever they occur (and to allow for gender-non-conforming behaviors outside of “victories first, cry later” mentalities for boys; e.g., Oatsngoats crying like an absolute girl for a [well-deserved] Super Metroid Any% world record, 2023; it’s ok to show emotions, my dude). The “bad luck” of Capitalism is, in truth, endorsed and enforced through white, cis-het male bias [and relative privilege for assimilated groups who play along under their watch]. The only way to lower the odds of abuse is to change the teaching mechanisms that “master” players to “play along” to a particular set of rules tailored to the real world and its linguo-material extensions (artwork, games, porn, etc) as interacting back and forth over time: material conditions. —Perse, back in 2023

P.S. (5/6/2025), Oddly enough, Karl would redeem Billy a fair degree by being the one to try and lie and cheat his way through a lawsuit defense case he couldn’t win (Persephone van der Waard’s “Bell TOLLS for ‪@karljobst‬: Redeems Billy Mitchell by Lying about Apollo Legends!“) and, as already mentioned, being a massive bigot and Nazi collaborator (Persephone van der Waard’s “Karl Jobst Is RACIST in 2025 + Full Evidence!“). Both videos were made in 2025 based on evidence I had written about previously in mid-2024 (re: “Modularity and Class“) and later, mentioned alongside Caleb Hart (re: “Those Who…“).

Historically the videogame business has sexist roots, being made by Japanese companies for American customers: white cis-het boys and men who punch down against those they historically abject, animalize and abuse (with most speedrunners belonging to this demographic). Combined with the transphobic business model of competitive sports (Essence of Thought’s “Refuting The Anti-Trans Pseudoscience On Trans Athletes,” 2019), conservative ludic circles treat transgender, enby and intersex people, but also crossdressers as a particular joke: a source of sexual shame that must be hidden or made fun of.

While Fuentes loves his aforementioned catboys, Caleb—a famous Twitch streamer and Mega Man/FF7 speedrunner known for his transphobic behavior and toxic fanbase (Andrea Rovenski’s “Calebhart42 BANNED From Twitch for Racism & EXPOSED As an Anti-Trans Bigot,” 2019) brings his weeaboo-style bigotry into the world of competitive e-sports, albeit with a traditionally masculine physique implying he’s simply “the best,” therefore an agent meant to police and mistreat others in the Cartesian sense: of cataloging and owning everything through male-assigned labels and theatrics. All of these things belong to men, whether they deserve them or not; in turn, they decide what “women” wear in games—i.e., representations of women and their history as designed/written by men for men. As I write in “Borrowed Robes”; re:

When it comes to wearing clothes in videogames, women cannot consent. Consent requires choice, and female depiction in videogames historically demonstrates a lack of choice regarding character clothing. For women, clothing doesn’t represent actual female players and their wants; it represents desires prescribed to them by men. These serve as a form of control—specifically to female players through their characters. […] Traditional female characters have little to do with female desires in this regard. Instead, these characters are “visual treats” for a male player-audience to enjoy. This logic applies to female game events more generally. The more substantial an event or [heroic a female] character is, the more sexualized they tend to be (source).

(artist: Liang Xing)

This selection—for what women should wear and how their bodies should appear—is not only a decision historically-materially made by men; it’s reinforced by sexist straight men in drag (and TERFs). Drag queens are historically cis, though most aren’t bigoted (some, like Ru Paul, are; source: Marleina Robson’s “The Head Drag Queen is Transphobic?” 2019). Instead, their identity is defined through struggle as an outlier group targeted by the status quo. In relation to dimorphic images of the past—one when boys played videogames and girls played with dolls—Caleb is very much not a drag queen in good faith. Instead, he has routinely teased his mostly-male audience with the prospect of “dressing up” as Cloud does, but also as Tifa Lockhart; i.e., prescribing how a woman should dress to other (mostly white) cis-het men and boys.

To it—and pointedly through competition towards videogames—Caleb treats queerness as something to reject, but also colonize in his own dated gender performances: bad play crossdressing as didactic. Like Fuentes, the point isn’t to celebrate femboys at all, but rather venerate his own hypermasculinity in relation to hauntological notions of the future that leave no room to imagine genderqueer attitudes beyond yoking them. Caleb does this by outwardly rejecting femboys while simultaneously fetishizing them through deliberately bad-faith performances—i.e., the Steven Crowder approach, in other words (which emulates institutionally powerful men like Rudy Giuliani, who’s crossdressed in bad faith for decades: “Rudy Giuliani in a Dress: Will Voters Care?” 2007).

The “strongman” approach to crossdress has different flavors. As a weird canonical nerd, Caleb offers bad education to an entire generation of young men who—often from broken homes and surrounded by Gothic dogma—see themselves as gamers, but also people who think that their education and their teachers are superior to the gender-non-conforming persons; i.e., those whose de facto education the Max Box demonizes as “groomers,” to which Ashley Gavin, channeling her inner Pazuzu, apes her mockeries; re:

What’d they think I was gonna do? Right, like how gay do you think I am? That I’m just gonna bust out, on stage, at the PG show? And be like, “Alright, listen up, kids!” [drags on imaginary cigarette] “How old are you guys, eight? Nine? Alright, so some of you little boys, yer gonna wanna ram a cock down yer fockin’ throat! And some of you girls, yer gonna wanna bury yer face in pussayyyyyyyyy!” [does best Gene Simmons impression] “And some of you sick fucks, yer gonna wanna do both! Now you go run and tell Mommy and Daddy that you heard it from the dyke first!” (re: ” Live in Chicago”; timestamp: 12:00).

Despite being a comedian, Gavin’s background is actually in computer science; she wrote “Girls Who Code,” taught at MIT and fought STEM discrimination:

One of the more basic challenges was that people don’t even know what computer science is. It’s hard when a client really has no idea that computer science is a liberal arts field, and that it’s actually taught in the same way you would teach physics or English and that it’s not a technical field. I mean, it’s technical in that you make technology, but the skills you would learn – you could use them forever, and they are transferrable. For example, the things that make someone a really great computer scientist also make them a really great writer (source: Anulekha Venkatram’s ” A Peek Inside Her Agenda: Ashley Gavin,” 2014).

Gavin’s breakout role as a comedian happened in 2023 (similar to Hannah Gadsby, she had been doing comedy for years). And while Caleb has been streaming for a very long time, he’s also been racist, sexist and transphobic for a long time, promoting this concept as a part of his brand’s double standard by welcoming “healthy conversation” about iconoclasts just like Gavin (who, in their eyes are no different than a trans person: a faggot). They cannot self-reflect; they see enemies everywhere; their singular and heteronormative interpretations are always right, everyone else’s are always wrong—with dude bros collectively fearing the dialogic chorus of anyone who takes up the queer mantle in their own pedagogy of oppressed/cryptomimesis.

In other words, Caleb specifically promotes his emphasis on fitness and physical strength as things to perform and present through his profession as a bigoted, entitled gamer with ties to Japanese ludic exports. “Gamer” is an artistic extension of what defines him and what he endorses: his accomplishments, brand, and body as informed by videogame tropes and stigmas, but nevertheless elevated by his appearance as a successful-looking, white, cis-het male who is utterly jacked (and whose purported “domination” of his field extends the bias to his crusader’s pedagogy—to his body image, to his students, back and forth, on and on—as inherited from the shadow of older skeleton kings).

To this, the human body in canonical art more generally personifies gendered ideas of masculine/feminine strength through “appropriate” bodies; heteronormative personalities in mainstream politics, popular thought, and mass entertainment consistently try their best to personify these monomyth ideals through “correct” performances, including Caleb’s, as carceral-hauntological: cis-het “mega” men with strong-looking bodies who continuously overperform in their lines of work, presumably have PIV sex, “dominate” their sexual partners, and definitely don’t thirst for femboys.

(source)

Tokens aside (we’ll get to them), rape culture is classically white and male; Caleb and other top-performers of toxic masculinity defend Capitalism as forever in crisis; there is nothing beyond it for them and they police their vision of the Free World as the only one that is correct. Anything else is a threat, isn’t the best: girls are dumb and suck at videogames (and science, driving and sports, etc); people of color are “accommodated”; trans, intersex and non-binary people either don’t exist or shouldn’t be allowed to compete—i.e., denied from playing games as a teaching device and as a means to have fun. Indeed, the two are not mutually exclusive, save inside the playpen of Caleb and his school of dumb boys. All of them learned this from somewhere; i.e., the echo of Japanese war trauma and subjugation to a Western power that Japan was trying its best to emulate by reviving the Shogunate in a method not unlike Mussolini or Hilter’s “Roman” palingenesis.

(source)

In other words—and returning to the idea of coercive undead educators from Volume Two—Caleb embodies the Frankensteinian “zombie hulk” who vampirically drains the brains and life force of those around him, turning them into complicit vampire-zombie warriors, but also himself as they collectively soldier for Capitalism in a viral sense. He embodies this in e-sports, quite literally wearing the Mega Man franchise on his sleeve and plastering its zombifying paraphernalia all over his stream, an online all-boys club with posters of Tifa on the walls and nary a trans person, person of color or real girl in sight (save those who align with Caleb and his cronies through trauma or bad education). Everything Caleb says or does through his own metanarrative reinforces the homosocial, incel-level sexism and latent homoeroticism of the primary text, generally through reinvented slogans or insignias associated with Caleb’s brand (on par with Key & Peele’s “Put the pussy on the chainwax!” [2020] but far less funny in an ironic way). In ludic terms, though, dominance often occurs in contests of strength—mostly notably sports as a male-dominated sphere, a kind of “homosocial frottage” where sexist dudes literally and figuratively cross swords through contests of strength that push women (and those perceived as monstrous-feminine) away or force them to assimilate. This extends into e-sports, where fans conflate the breaking of personal/community records with cartoonishly swollen displays of manly virtue.

To use an example other than Caleb, the compliments that Weegee receives from fans during his WR Mario 64 run (“Super Mario 64 120 Star WORLD RECORD Speedrun in 1:37:35″) largely concern his masculinity and genitals (timestamp: 1:33:19) conflating virtuous masculine gameplay to laying pipe. However, speedrunner historian (and bigot; “Still Racist (and Fash), in 2025“) Karl Jobst also describes Weegee as verging on becoming the greatest runner on the greatest speedgame in speedrunning history (“The Greatest Achievement In Speedrunning History Might Happen Soon,” 2023)—all tied to its scope, scale and lucrative nature in the broader speedrunning world as becoming increasingly sport-like, thus gatekept.

By presenting individuals “doing well” in various fields, e-sports—like sports in general—have expanded neoliberally under Patriarchal Capitalism, selling the profitable (for the elite) idea that traditional sports have for over a century: vicarious excellence, specifically and classically white male greatness as a symbol of upward class mobility for the lucky champ (the king-for-a-day promoted by the Don King kingmakers of Capitalism). This enshrines the toxically undead gendered attitudes of the performance and performer as something to platform by the owner class towards a wider working-class audience. In turn, this audience views performative excellence in videogames as “jacked,” an already-dated post-Renaissance notion that assumes anyone who’s buff must be good at literally everything (whereas women and tokens who are muscular or otherwise “built” are good at pleasing/working for men in ways useful to Capitalism; e.g., the pornstar or the black male slave). More false knowledge piled onto war and rape culture dressed up as “strength.”

Conversely this treats visibly non-buff dudes who perform well at sports as “the Man,” usually manifesting in linguo-material, slang-heavy ways like “‘swole giga-Chads” (or something equally cringe) but also muscular, white-washed statues hauntologically associated with neo-classical views of classical art. Think Zeus pulling Metis from his forehead, the Patriarchal “Seat of Reason” that Renaissance thinkers supposedly channeled when rebirthing Civilization, except that concept doesn’t really spring from nowhere and, in fact, was codified during the Enlightenment: Plato wasn’t just the tutor of Aristotle and “a founding father” of Western philosophy. He was a conspicuously muscular man whose immortal name harkens to his halcyon days as a young, strapping wrestler!

Plato was a fighter. This is not a metaphor. The historian Diogenes Laërtius tells us that Platon, meaning “broad-shouldered,” was the philosopher’s wrestling nickname. As a prominent aristocrat, Plato was known for his pedigree and youthful poetry but also for his physique: the muscles of a gifted grappler, who reportedly competed at the Isthmian Games. And for all his wariness of the body and its wayward desires, Plato also recommended wrestling for the youth. In his dialogue Laws, he celebrated the benefits of stand-up grappling. This had a straightforward military use, developing “strength and health” for the battlefield. But it also cultivated character if “practiced with a gallant spirit” [Bay: “Boys will be boys, so let’s put them to use” as an ancient placation/apologia of men’s spirits as indominable, uncontainable, thus unaccountable]. The overall impression is that physical virtues encourage psychological excellence: perseverance, courage, and perhaps a greater sense of autonomy (source: Damon Young’s “Plato Said Knock You Out,” 2015).

While easily parodied, this kind of male privilege socially-sexually translates to “braindead, pushy” masculine personas in the here-and-now that vampirically demand sex from those they deem inferior to themselves—women; or in the case of femboys, “women” (the top being stronger than the bottom, practitioners of these rapacious deeds lying to themselves in increasingly bizarre ways: “It’s not gay if we close our eyes and pretend”—i.e., a sort of “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach).

Furthermore, the havers-of-the-muscles become false preachers with false bodies and powers—king-like Pygmalions to worship and follow as leaders; i.e., regardless of their authenticity or merit (the tissue is “dead,” slathered on like clay to disguise who they were/are) and entirely because of what they represent: ghoulish patriarchal dominance under Capitalism. When they flex, lightning rains from the heavens! Women around them miraculously turn into Barbie dolls with giant, plastic boobs! And when they don’t get what they want, they break down sobbing before destroying everything in a fit of infantile rage. Like Don Quixote, they tilt at windmills, lost in the monomyth’s endless promise of plentiful reward but also savior status.

(source: Fandom)

Indeed, where are all the real women (cis or trans)? In a strange way, these homoerotic warriors become coercively queer—about as gay as Dahmer was, in practice, or Nick Fuentes. These men’s use of women is binarized through the colonial assignment of power relative to each—the master and the slave, one criminalizing the other, but also alienizing and stigmatizing them. Such an arrangement is literally canonized, enshrined within canonical praxis.

As consumers, creators and patrons, the ability of men like Caleb Hart to love others is tremendously flawed by their Man Box mindset, so much so that they disguise they inability to relate to women (or other people besides white cis-het men) with coercive sublimation: fake war brides. This can be Fuentes’ catboys, but also real-life AFAB persons bullied inside canonical works. Radicalized mentalities towards the Call to Adventure stem from trauma, including TERFs with neoliberal/fascist superiority complexes. They must fit in and compete for the war bride whose appearance is advertised through the Japanese waifu. Like Caleb, female TERFs have their own “canonical beards mindset”: marrying warrior husbands that tradwives “settle” for to fit in; or the canonical, “death by Snu-Snu” depiction of an “alpha” Amazon she-wolf taking her own emasculated, “war bride/bussy” husband/wife inside the Man Box in order to feel in control (which Jadis elected to abuse my bussy with minus my consent); i.e., by force (which she will immediately have to surrender when the state enters decay).

We’ve already explored how beards—to roll with the facial hair theme we’re using—constitute a kind of social “grooming” tied to particular body images; i.e., as conflated with intelligence: monomythic “good looks” that broadcast virility in a heteronormative sense (or its token allies), which Communists like Marx then tried to camp:

Previous to the late 19th century, beards were common among the upper classes, the wealthy and powerful men who ran the country. They were a symbol of strength and individuality – a bold statement of one’s masculinity and prowess. / However, as the Victorian era drew to its ebb, the beard once again – as it was liable to do – went out of fashion, at least among some quarters of society. Inspired by their communist leaders, the so-called “bearded radical” became commonplace, marked by their thick, long beard. / No self-respecting communist or anarchist agitator would be seen without such voluminous facial hair. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s and into later decades, the beard became the icon of labor racialism, socialism, communism – and a dozen other “isms” (source: Beard Sorcery’s “Why Did So Many Famous Communists Have Beards?”).

To build on that relative to moderates, a “good, manly figurative/literal beard” means a man/token person is not only intelligent, but “emotionally intelligent,” which is really just a bad disguise for canonical dominance within the Symbolic Order. Already emasculated by the state, nerdy men police nerdy women (or those they code as women) to sublimate their own trauma as “being not manly enough”; they gatekeep them, becoming some faction of the sex pest-fiend gradient that contributes to the state’s reactive abuse cycle in oft-corporatized forms. Propaganda’s propaganda, the monomyth as the narrative of the crypt, the only thing that survives.

A common defense is, “it’s obviously a joke,” except the sexist abuse, brain death and deceptions are quite real. For example, Caleb coerced a former sex partner—Barbie Edge—into having unprotected sex with him (after saying “I’m not a rapist” to her), vampirically gaslit her, then had his parents coerce her into terminating her pregnancy (source: Barbie Edge’s 2020 tweet sharing the link to her story about Caleb on Google Docs). Afterward, he said his judgement had waned, while also treating her like a sex machine, someone to please him when he whined and didn’t get what he wanted, subsequently crying like a baby about his ex (never a good move, my dudes; no one likes being compared to the abusive ex you’re carrying a torch for). More to the point, he lied back then and now about it to fans who absorb this DARVO bullshit like a sponge—younger fans whose brains are still forming (as evidenced by the truly awful fan art, see: above). Called out, some might repeat the same defense: “It’s just a joke.” He’s just playing around, not to be taken any more seriously than Wooderson from Dazed and Confused (exhibit 63b).

Well, joke or not, it’s still sexist, just drawn badly and shown to children. More to the point, Caleb isn’t a teenager and neither are (some) of his fans. Defending their behavior in any shape or form only excuses it. Meanwhile, their material presence lingers toxically in the larger world, emboldening those they teach with bad “parenting” lessons about “better times”: how to treat women as Mega Man does—badly (which radicalizes to more openly toxic forms, like Eren Yeager). Negotiation-wise, these mini-zombies and -vampires don’t take no for an answer, but they do absorb the ability to disguise themselves as not doing anything wrong—i.e, exactly like Mega Man[1] himself, in that respect: a little neoliberal, vampire-zombie robot “boy” working tirelessly for the state.

On the surface, Mega Man’s not just a cop, but “a good guy.” Beneath the skin, he’s a functional gun-for-hire “throwing lemons” (the inside joke, here: Mega Man is throwing “lemons” at Wily. In truth, he’s shooting bullets at Wily’s robots—Wily’s slaves [the word itself derives from re: the Czech word robota, or forced labor, as done by serfs]. This Commie twist leaves us with two aging grandpas in a centrist narrative that reduces rebellion to “foxy” [wily like a fox] fascism as something to put down by Dr. Light as his good boy robo-cop, Rock).

In this sense, canonical “monster pastiche” isn’t just cosmetic (the “poster pastiche” idea from Volume Two); it’s pastiche that yields sex-coercive, zombie-like and vampire-like effects within content creators and their fans (especially war pastiche, whose “warrior undead” and sublimated trauma we’ll examine more in Chapter Four) crying for “free speech”: a desire not to be canceled in “culture war” as a manufactured conflict the elite condone to protect their own material interests; i.e., “Let them fight.”

These coercively necromantic attitudes rest in the sexist hauntology of professional sports. In the increasingly franchised world of e-sports, performers have begun to be viewed as traditional athletes, assimilating pre-existing notions of masculine strength tied to a glorious past: when women were subservient and didn’t do sports (a recent overcorrection of the 20th century that, in the 21st century can be still seen in transphobic sports gatekeepers). These also project onto body images the audience didactically consume through subscriber/tipping models.

Furthermore, these models often come into conflict with the sexual division of labor—Caleb and those like him bitterly deriding female streamers for “cheating” at the game of capitalizing the streaming of videogames: getting high stream counts/tip amounts by showing as much skin as the status quo allows women versus what it allows men (e.g., Caitlin Wright’s “The Favouritism of Male Streamers: Why Are Women Left in the Dust?” 2021). Meanwhile, parallel mantras like “more plates, more dates” become something to dick-measure amid parasocial exchanges—with sexist gamers using their spot on corporate-owned platforms to teach their business customers to internalize the same undead rituals under Zombie Capitalism (with Vampire Capitalism stressing the draining quality that Capitalism teaches its workers to do).

In the spirit of de facto educators, Caleb embodies the heteronormative persona as a sexist hauntological role model for his community to push to sinister extreme. A currently moderate brand whose toxic fanbase belies a conservative core and past, Caleb Hart the person embodies physical strength; Caleb Hart the brand attaches to artistic extensions of itself that personify the strongman: as a ludic, fatherly portrayal of strength coming from the nostalgic Man Box past. The “barbarian” gym bro embodies false power, false preacher and false father who dominates his enemies (anyone different than, or resistance to, the status quo); i.e., through the “prison sex” mentality as something to pass onto future students: cis-het boys (and token persons) that Caleb instructs like a surrogate parent or big brother. He’s literally their daddy/the man to beat for being bigoted.

True to form, Caleb also has a long history with racism and transphobia, but also domestic abuse. According to Barbie Edge, the events between her and Caleb happened in 2016, and by 2019 during their last encounter Caleb still hadn’t changed. For him and his fans, “correctness” only amounts to however heteronormative power and coercion can be adequately disguised—i.e., to whatever degree he requires to become normalized, thus “harmless” at any given moment. Not only are these “innocent” displays bad-faith attempts to hide privilege and predation (a gym bro will “close ranks,” defending the abuses of a fellow gym bro, much like cops and other fascist/neoliberal soldiers do, but also their fans, friends and families; source: Hasan’s “SHOULD YOU APPROACH GIRLS AT THE GYM?” 2023); signs of their use materialize through the wearing of various famous “masks.” Caleb literally “wears” the reinvented Cloud like a skin (exhibit 93b; eat your heart out, Hannibal Lecter) to conceal his toxic politics and former body image behind a moderate guise. He’s the “good guy” because Cloud is good and “everyone” likes Cloud (correction: I like the delicate twink variant of Cloud; I want to dress him up and have tea and peg his “little boy pussy” with my girl-cock).

(exhibit 93b1a: Source: a 2019 tweet by Caleb Hart. Caleb posing both as “swole” and twink-ish, while actually being incredibly sexist and abusive towards women online and in the flesh. Much of this behavior is instructed to young men who look up to him during his streams; i.e., a male authority “preaching to the choir” of submissive boys raised on the monomyth. He’s not just saying “I’m not a rapist” to Barbie Edge, but also these young boys who will become convinced his behavior isn’t wrong despite how duplicitous it comes across; i.e., absolute chudwads dressing up “as women” to mollify women and other minorities coded as other in a monstrous-feminine sense. During a manufactured “battle of the sexes,” they will emulate his inherently bad-faith tactics anyways because “women, amirite?” For them, “twink” also serves a double function: for bigots to wear incognito while resisting sex-positive versions of twink as a grand conspiracy to defraud “real men” by emasculating them/turning them into silly sex slaves; e.g., catboys. Unlike the queer reclaiming of words like twink and faggot [artist: Maewing], weird canonical nerds’ ideas of such positions are inherently sexual and coercively so, framing such individuals as weaker than them, deserving of scorn and punishment, but also mockery within a punitive “prison sex” hierarchy that frames activists [not white cis-het men] as delusional, degenerate groomers [with black men, even cis ones, being accused by white men of sleeping with white women, infantilized both groups]. They are a legitimate threat, thus to be chased after and killed, but also fetishized by chasers living in the closet [Caleb and company see twinks as degenerate, but also work as open “chasers” themselves].

For example, Sabs’ depiction of scary boy flesh, below, illustrates a friendlier version of feminized male sex work that subverts the classical symbols of exploitation and queer identification historically used by heteronormative forces: the vampire, the witch, and the robot as existing under Capitalism and subjected to the power of men—i.e., the male hunter, Satan-as-male, or aged homosexual gentry perusing the flesh market’s “wares.” Sabs‘ work, while still liminal, nevertheless views the past as imagined in a sex-positive way. It doesn’t try to eliminate sex work; it celebrates the twink-in-peril as resourceful and capable, able to navigate the world using the monstrous-feminine powers of cuteness and raw sexual energy in ways that subjugate their would-be killers’ rape culture: topping from the bottom to teach men that sex doesn’t need a violent top “acting like the man” with a knife dick [or some similar device].)

(artist: Sabs)

For the queer people that Caleb attacks, “correctness” amounts to gauche misrepresentations of what is incorrect—with corporations (and by extension fans and content creators) comparing trans, intersex and non-binary people to demonically violent, criminally insane sex pests/fiends, not Caleb. However, fascist and neoliberal discrimination against queer groups also includes inaccurate representation through “correct” bodies and “incorrect” bodies: Normal people have normal bodies, normal sex, and normal genders; queer people do not, are instead fetishized as sexual deviants, criminals and feminine-yet-manly monsters (Buffalo Bill, Norman Bates, Ray Finkle, etc). Disseminated through mainstream media and enforced on a societal level, this binary is ontologically prescriptive and bears hauntological elements; audiences see what they are meant to be—the self as defined by objects the viewer is meant to identify with through a nostalgic view of the sexist past, while also reacting negatively towards objects they’re meant to abject: anything that challenges these carceral-hauntological views.

Another way to look at weird canonical nerds, then, is how they become class traitors through the wider societal emulation of heroic media, whose tremendous complexities I’d like to examine for a moment more before we press on to part three as a means of addressing them, ourselves.

Canonical heroes are designed on crises that emulate class, thus culture warfare; this means that their internalized bigotry affects weird nerds of all types who see themselves in the heroes vicariously. Whether white, black, male, female, or cis/trans, the accommodated and the assimilated identify with the hero who either visually resembles them or who they want to visually resemble, thus emulating their prescribed behaviors and plights. Harry Potter, for example, is a white savior on the good team, the plain-and-tall, Boy-Who-Lived “chosen one” who becomes a cop because someone older than him recruited him to the cause (often an old sage) inside an essentialist scheme. His and similar Vader-esque temptations to darkness is the monomyth in action, its propaganda playing out inside these characters’ fans, who—internalizing the scheme as a bigoted model—is merely the customer turning heel inside the meta-narrative.

To this, even if Harry never fully becomes the zombie tyrant, or Luke Skywalker never joins the Dark Side, etc, they’re still white knights in a centrist, genocidal scheme that downplays the existence of such a side as fundamental to the monomyth as canonical, thus fearful and dogmatic; it is to be bought and worshipped, not dissected and questioned—especially in relation to its effect on how we think, thus see the world.

In turn, this internalized dogma is predicated on anger towards the self as incorrect or flawed; i.e., not manly enough, not white (knight) enough. They become desperate to prove themselves by being the hero, which for fascists is predicated on scapegoats and blind/petty revenge, the shadow of the tyrant looming overhead and threatening to invade. Contrary to what they think, the invasion is already underway and, at times, further along than many would care to admit: Luke or Superman are just one angry moment and bad choice away from murdering “the enemy” in a fit of rage; the same goes for the conquered and their offspring born under the established, monomythic order of things—e.g., She-Hulk, the Jedi, and similar comic-book-type characters and media the Gothic swims in:

(exhibit 93b1b: Source, top-left: Reddit, 2018; artist, mid-left: Claire Leighton; bottom-left: ; top-middle: Takeshi Miyazawa and Rico Renzi.

Heroic self-deception is anisotropic and multifaceted during intersectional bias, as is the fetishization of outsiders. Whereas white cis-het men think they are more disadvantaged than they really are, tokenized minorities think they are more exceptional; and both are overburdened with tremendous insecurity.

Much has been said about Heathcliff’s toxic relationship to Kathy and the criminal-hauntological perpetuation of “Black Irish stereotypes” that Charlotte Brontë demonized behind her own masculinized pen name, Currer Bell:

Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is. But this I know: the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master — something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame. […]

Wuthering Heights was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials. The statuary found a granite block on a solitary moor; gazing thereon, he saw how from the crag might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister; a form moulded with at least one element of grandeur — power. He wrought with a rude chisel, and from no model but the vision of his meditations. With time and labour, the crag took human shape; and there it stands colossal, dark, and frowning, half statue, half rock: in the former sense, terrible and goblin-like; in the latter, almost beautiful, for its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it; and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the giant’s foot [source: Nava Atlas’ “Charlotte Brontë is Preface to Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë,” 2014].

While Charlotte’s compliment is left-handed/racist in an appropriative sense—i.e., “the man who was almost one of us” versus appreciating him unto himself—the reality is that she did not make Heathcliff; Emily did [who Charlotte infantilizes]. The fetishization of the male “other” is, then, a regular tactic of white women and has been for as long as they have held the pen. “I will not allow books to prove anything!” indeed, Anne Elliot.

While anger is vital to revolutionary praxis, it is also a powerful manipulator fascists and centrists exploit to equal measure. Consider how disconcerting it is that Luke is not only pinned between the state and rebellion in black-and-red as utilized by fascists and Communists alike; but also how he and the Jedi—as the good cop power trip being marketed through the white hero’s kayfabe—are stuck within a capitalist ringleader’s game as arbitrarily going either way:

The documentary Empire of Dreams states that George Lucas initially intended to call the film Return of the Jedi, but then changed it to Revenge of the Jedi when he was told by Lawrence Kasdan that “Return” was a weak title. Only a few weeks before the film’s release did Lucas change the title back to Return of the Jedi. In interviews, Lucas said that the reason for the change is that a Jedi wouldn’t seek revenge. There are many though, who speculate that George Lucas had planned to call the film Return of the Jedi all along, and only used “Revenge” as a means to throw off merchandise counterfeiters. It has also been claimed that the reason for the change was because the working title of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was The Vengeance of Khan, and that the title was changed because of its similarity to Revenge of the Jedi. In William Shatner’s autobiography Star Trek Movie Memories, director Nicholas Meyer confirmed that he didn’t believe that 20th Century Fox would allow Paramount to change his film’s title from The Undiscovered Country to The Vengeance of Khan because of the making of Revenge of the Jedi. Nevertheless, all of this potential controversy was erased when Star Trek II was retitled The Wrath of Khan and Revenge of the Jedi finally became Return of the Jedi [i.e., return of the noble king versus revenge of the tyrant]. In any event, the working title was partially reused for Episode III: Revenge of the Sith [source: Wookipedia].

In short, the cultural anxieties inherent in and inherited by white cis-het men and those under them within the monomyth have been proliferated by the Billionaire Marxism of men just like Lucas, a moderate Pygmalion similar to James Cameron and other imitators imitating Lucas as imitative of various older role models including Alex Raymond and Akira Kurosawa.

The same goes for Stan Lee. She-Hulk emulates whiteness by appearing small and meek, to which the other lawyers regard her with equal parts fascination, suspicion and anticipation. For insecure, bigoted men, she is a kind of threat that “white women could never be” even before she transforms; for white women, she’s a threat by “being stronger than they are,” more physically imposing and sexually voracious according to the stereotypes. These mechanisms only amplify holistically when She-Hulk transforms, becoming the kind of “real lady” that white-knight fanboys suddenly pay attention to because she’s “like them”: manly and strong thus must like the same things. This is a form of gatekeeping that serves to further distance She-Hulk from them, but also fetishize her in their eyes.

As for She-Hulk herself, she is torn between wanting to fit in and stand out, her true self the reality of not really being one or the other and both being a threat response/survival mechanism versus her acting as she might if no threat were present. She’s forced to transform in a state of crisis, fitting in to avoid punishment then resenting the system for it. While valid, her “acting out” can be weaponized by those seeking to capitalize on it [reactive abuse] and She-Hulk certainly isn’t exempt from the perils of social-climbing becoming its own Vanity-Fair-level ladder of chaos, leaving her heritage and history behind rung after rung [the perils of the diaspora being that black culture is erased, but also associated with crushing poverty, neighborhood crime, drug abuse and domestic horrors. In the face of that abject criminogenesis, not everyone choses to be a class warrior. Some assimilate out of necessity to become class traitors to varying degrees].

[artist, top-left: Kael Ngu; top-right: Reiq; bottom-left: Jeff Easley; bottom-middle: ; bottom-right: ; middle: source]

The fetishizing of She-Hulk is, itself, tied to inner myths and complex double standards. Insecure white men will feel threatened and turned-on by her as “more manly” than them in a dark, savage way. But her power will be checked by “actual” black men in the same racist pecking order as “stronger” than her [to which she is both the dominator of weaker male/female subordinates who are her “war brides,” while being herself promised to, or otherwise under the power of, a stronger male leader or someone owed sex who sees her a sexual tithe. There is always a stronger man that she cannot second guess or resist]. In the interim, she will be quasi-likened to a black man, thus beholden to the same myths that inform the public imagination; e.g., John Henry of American slave folklore as the “exceptional” freedman whose value was tied up in his ability to outwork machines of industry to prove his value in the Jim Crow era. While Josef Bastian writes in “Tall Tales — An American Tradition” [2022]: 

It’s a tall order to establish a folklore and mythology for an entire country, especially when you’re a melting pot of immigrant belief systems, native cultures, and tribal societies who have been brought here against their own will. In this type of environment, the mythological waters can muddy all too quickly. Most folklore stems from ancient, oral traditions, where stories are shared down from generation to generation. The mediocre ones fade over time, but the better ones get carried forward, morphing and modifying themselves along the way at the discretion of the storyteller.

The American Folklore Society points out that:

“Folklore is our cultural DNA. It includes the art, stories, knowledge, and practices of a people. While folklore can be bound up in memory and histories, folklore is also tied to vibrant living traditions and creative expression today… It is one of the many ways we communicate who we are. Often–but certainly not always–rooted in the past, folklore is one of the ways we share with each other the things we see as vital and important. It is a central, every-day part of life and how we make sense of the world today, and it is at the heart of all cultures–including whatever culture we call our own–throughout the world. Folklore is a fundamental part of what it means to be human.” 

The idea of “better” is subjective relative to settler-colonial bias that effects different bodies in different ways; i.e., the struggle of rememory—to be seen as human amid discrimination—is partly dehumanizing through the hauntology of the superhero as a throwback that arguably simplifies the struggle as a desire to be strong in zombifying ways. It may very well reflect the sentiments of the time, but these need to be recognized as boxed within a colonial model that forces the now-larger-than-life memory of the former slave into a kind of mighty shadow they can never step out of: a big zombie to their little zombie.

[artist, top-and-bottom-left: MARCIOABREU7; top-middle: Giuliana Cabrazia; bottom-middle and top-and-bottom-right: July Bubbles] 

In that shadow herself, She-Hulk is equal parts sexualized as a monstrous-feminine “black man” who tries to assimilate as meek, but the differences between her and Clark Kent or Peter Parker are complicated by a variety of factors. One, her strength is sexualized [the waifu as curvy and soft] or like a man’s [the wheyfu’s brawn]. Two, racial intersection of a slave woman’s physique eliding with slave men and slave food and the white bodies she seeks to emulate. Three, green being the color of stigma [exhibit 94a3] that effects people called “goblins” other than just black people.

All three intersections converge on the same surface image: her large, watermelon-like breasts and buttocks, her chicken-like thighs; or a more muscled or pin-up-style, white-coded Amazon lacking these “non-white,” thicc-bodied traits [excluding the PAWG marketing device in sex work [re: exhibit 32b, “Knife Dicks“]; or videogames like Overwatch that market sex work in ludic narratives, exhibit 73b] while sporting trademark green skin having a kind of fantastical blackface-meets-assimilation fantasy/scapegoat vibe common in centrist narratives [e.g., the Drow and their own complex body politics; re: exhibit 41b, “A Lesson in Humility“]. Yet, more than just skin color, body type, sexuality and gender, She-Hulk and characters like her are also commodified in ways that become simply standard; i.e., the class struggle becomes perennial, thus stuck in a feedback loop that values She-Hulk for the exact reasons that alienate her. Any attempt to liberate her is a liminal struggle, then, one that must reclaim these symbols in ways that don’t feed into the same ever-expanding scheme. It becomes a disguise within a disguise where the surface-level language—like a Gothic novel, metal anthem or comic book— remains largely unchanged and sexual.)

Star Wars is practically synonymous with the monomyth, hence why I dub it “the Star Wars problem.” It’s not the only one to franchise (and pimp) such things; e.g., Harry Potter was poor and made into a prince, but otherwise fits into relative privilege pursuant to monomyth models. The same internalization of white heroism is emulated by token outliers, who become “white” saviors on the inside to try and fit in while lacking said privilege and over-relying on what they do have. All the while, they privately hate themselves even more than those with more privilege do on account of their incongruous, thus monstrous skin color, genitals, religion, ethnicity, and/or perceived femininity not being the white, cis-het Christian male standard—with fascist bigotry generally reducing these margin recruits to black, non-Christian and female/weak or monstrous-feminine/strong.

In other words, the enemy is always both weak and strong and token weird canonical nerds are always of the enemy on account of what the status quo will never let them forget (the classic method being according to what they cannot take off: Even if She-Hulk bleached her skin like Michael Jackson, she would always be black in the eyes of her assumed conquerors). Persons like this don’t fit in by capitalist design and try harder than everyone else to appease their own internalized impostor/conqueror, but in the end will be replaced first the moment they “fuck up.” It’s what happens to white women like Kim Wexler working under white men like Howard Hamlin in Better Saul (2015) or intersectionally She-Hulk as a black version of the same scheme as even more outside than Kim is; the struggles of both are important and valid, but despite their degree and flavor of segregation and abuse are used by the status quo to turn workers against each other—i.e., divide and conquer.

Whoever the mark, it isn’t a chosen failure on their part. Through no fault of their own, they are borne into material conditions that not only assign their physical qualities differently from the colonial standard; it proffers a kind of Heathcliff/Black Knight syndrome, one encouraged by these person’s in-group “peers.” It’s schoolyard-bully tactics, wherein the oppressed are the expendable exceptions that prove the rule; i.e., the first to be affected by blood libel/quantum, rapid onset gender dysphoria, global Jewish conspiracy, and similar fascist conspiracy theories. They will internalize those, too, and use them to abject their fellow oppressed by acting the minority-cop class traitor amid this network of confirmation bias: “See! They’re acting like the poor degenerate [slur]! But I’m not like that!” They become blind to the class, race or gendered character by thinking themselves not just the exception, but exempt. In turn, those with more privilege (which is modular in nature; e.g., white cis-het women versus black queer trans men) do not see the world through these inherited insecurities. They simply have less of them, thus greater blind spots (to which Harry needs and upgrade to his prescription).

We obviously won’t have time to delve into all of these different modularities. We’ll be focusing on reactionary white nerds for the rest of this chapter and regressive Amazonomachia in Chapter Four. But the base mechanisms of assimilation inform genocide as a group effort perpetrated as much by the many kinds of suffering conquered themselves as bought-and-paid for. “Vae victus!” (meaning “suffering to the conquered”) is their Judas refrain (whose context is different than when Legacy-of-Kain-type white boys say it), selling out their fellow comrades for a cheap comic book, monomyth persona; i.e., not something they made themselves, but an extension of the socio-material arrangement of settler-colonialism sold back to them, over and over again. While this assimilation gamut does yield material benefits for some under capital, for the vast majority the concept is simply an illusory consolation prize to retreat into: something to buy. —Perse, back in 2023

Men like Caleb Hart are the blindest of all. Even without tokenized elements, hate groups and corporations encourage heteronormativity by abjecting queer people in front of their target audiences. The resultant biases are lucrative—meaning they’re easy for the elite to produce and for workers to enact, maintaining the status quo for as long as possible through people like Caleb, but also Caleb’s fans/collaborators, including tokens. Capitalism is patriarchal, therefore hierarchical, incumbent on a bigoted language system. While neoliberals deliberately use this system to turn a profit (whether through colonies, corporations, or slave labor) anywhere and everywhere, fascists use the system to colonize itself, inadvertently entering a state of decay (or rather, decaying under crisis). Like a vat of toxic waste, this condition can last for years (the Third Reich lasted for twelve), but remains highly charged and dangerous throughout; centrism is merely the burying of this radiation behind an American flag (to which Lloyd Kaufman gloriously and grossly lampooned).

We’ll examine fascism and nerd culture even more in Chapter Four. For now, remember that audiences who look at bad de facto educators like Caleb Hart will see what Caleb shows them: a fixed, myopic gender binary that rejects alternatives of the already-great past by framing them as less-profitable than what is “superior.” Man Box not only becomes the meta, but looks the meta because it is hypermasculine/white (or otherwise supports the status quo in similar ways; e.g., Marisa or Zarya in their centrist forms).

Furthermore, doing so leads to increased radical bigotry as Capitalism decays and people’s limited imaginations become threatened by a proposed lack: of the very system they hopelessly depend on to give them dated images of dominance that make up who they are; i.e., the naturalization of heteronormativity as virtuous through market-induced profitability (thus naturalizing neoliberalism as the straight state of affairs). Already inflexible, there’s simply nothing for them to fill the void with. The same myopic fragility goes for Caleb’s fans. Though many are young, they grow up to be weird canonical nerds with playful imaginations stunted by their carceral surroundings. They police the wasteland with fear and dogma as canonized, decreasing their own odds at happiness through the empty “success” that comes from exploiting others like chattel.

Before we move onto Chapter Four and the plethora of weird canonical female/feminist nerds that Capitalism engenders beyond just Caleb Hart and his own Man Box behaviors in other men, we have two more subchapter parts to go. I want to propose a jailbreak—i.e., queer people “breaking the spell” by reclaiming the linguo-materialistic components of the prison itself, thus fabricate new “archaeologies” that slowly liberate the mind and end the curse. While this can happen playing with many different monster types within Gothic poetics, the goblin will be our focus in part three of this subchapter.

Note: For even more research specifically on goblins, refer to “Goblins, Anti-Semitism and Monster-Fucking” from the Demon Module. —Perse, 4/21/2025

(exhibit 94a1a: Model and artist, top middle: Lil Miss Puff and Persephone van der Waard. The reference material was taken in three parts: a collab ref shoot, a sexting session between Puff and I where they played the mommy dom, and sex between Puff and their partner—all part of an agreement reached between the three of us before starting.

As for the monster I used in this example, I went with the goblin, as Puff and I are both LotR fans and—reading about Tolkien and goblins—I wanted to subvert the goblin with Puff’s help. The goblin, then, isn’t merely an anti-Semitic symbol, but more a source of romantic/erotic pursuit precisely because it is morphologically different from the Vitruvian, European standard. Those who cherish the goblin in a sex-positive sense do so for the goblin’s trademark plump, diminutive figure that nevertheless can deliver “big mommy energy” in the bedroom; i.e., built for giving [and receiving] enormous pleasure in the same adorable form, using it to nurture their partner/client, while simultaneously giving off quirky ’90s-Goth vibes [or some other monstrous aesthetic/color scheme]. In my case, I decided to place Puff inside an attic, in front of a witch’s window. There, they lay as a kind of discarded toy that evokes a sense of lost childhood, but also dark secrets and forbidden fun.

The location of the attic is deliberate. Lil Miss Puff waits inside a private, secluded space, one classically reserved for hiding or storing things tied to the “memories” of a home: the toy box as a Neo-Gothic metaphor for the brain, revived in hauntological forms—i.e., for the “toy” wanting to escape, but also to play inside by confronting trauma as nostalgic in cathartic ways. The goblin as toy-like can invite people inside to partake, basking in special, hidden delights; e.g., the madwoman in the attic as historically “kept” but also someone to reacquire her agency through Gothic poetics. I specifically use these terms and their queer context when drawing Puff to subvert Charlotte Brontë’s sexist/xenophobic usage of what a goblin in the attic would signify to heteronormative viewers like Jane Eyre: something to fear and want dead.

In doing so, I recognize classical abuses [and their trappings] as things to escape through the same Gothic language during oppositional praxis. The goblin, then, is a liminal expression of trauma by which power and material goods are reclaimed by workers resisting state hegemony during sex-positive BDSM. Sometimes this requires playing into queer stereotypes in magical, cutesy ways that ultimately hoodwink our usual exploiters in dialogs where resistance and power are not simply in the same place, but use the same language [and carnal expression] operating at cross purposes:

Huffslove‘s “goblin” is actually an elf playing into goblin [anti-Semitic and rapacious, below] stereotypes to steal from the rich through the fantasy mode of high adventure. She’s not entirely divorced from the idea that goblins love money [much how Jews were forced into positions of usury in medieval stories] but uses this idea to benefit someone other than the elite. Similar to Deep Space Nine‘s [1993] updated, progressive take on Roddenberry’s Ferengi, there’s room to appreciate and critique what is ultimately an imperfect-but-vital step towards developing society away from Capitalism and its abuses.)

(exhibit 94a1b: Artist: The Sabu. Goblins are commonly seen as tricksy and cruel—dark little monsters that “break and steal,” famously kidnapping[2] elves, humans and other races before taking them underground, where they torture, rape and eat them; i.e., cannibals [which elides the Jew with the person of color and the Irish]. A primary function of their classic depiction is captivity and rape fantasies for white women, a racist “pigmy” slant to the oft-undead/demonic bigotry that incorporates goblin thievery into the “demon lover” archetype of the black male rapist [and the Medusa as “undead” for female goblins] and pirating of the victim’s physical “goods” after taking everything else from them; re: “You have heart; I’ll take that, too.” Subverting this xenophobic composite of the goblin—i.e., as a guilty pleasure of canonical wish fulfillment, rape fantasy and appropriative peril—is important, both for the people associated with them, but also to help the women xenophobically fetishizing them to become more emotionally/Gothically intelligent and have societally healthy rape fantasies that subvert the mechanisms of torture at a monomythically copagandistic level.)

Onto “Poison was the Cure: On Goblins, Being a Weird Nerd and Trans Cryptonymy“!

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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!

Footnote

[1] Mega Man is very much the antithesis of Astro Boy (1952)—i.e., a boy, not a man, who is made by a scientist whose government bosses want to use him as a weapon (the show is actively concerned with injustice and antiwar/-American sentiment). Creating Astro involved giving him a sense of self. This selfhood conflicts with his position as a manmade weapon. Conversely, Mega Man is taught by Doctor Light to have no self by serving the state; i.e., by fighting “evil” as color coded purple and decked in skulls. That series emerged in 1987, thirty-five years after Astro Boy and eight years into neoliberalism’s expansion on the world stage (videogames, as we know them, have almost always—apart from Atari in the mid-1970s—existed commercially under neoliberalism).

[2] This capture vaudeville is often set to music meant to terrify/entertain children [or infantilized women], starting [for our purposes] with Tolkien, a white British man writing The Hobbit for his white British son (re: “Goblins, Anti-Semitism and Monster-Fucking“). Refer to my page on Tolkien research to see more on Tolkien; i.e., than I can realistically cover here.