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; or, Patriarchal, Nerdy Hatred Against Transgender/Non-binary People, Intersexuality and Drag (feat. Caleb Hart, She-Hulk, twinks/femboys, goblins, and more)

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). This behavior is public record and Caleb has never addressed it at all, let alone in any meaningful sense (source).

—Persephone van der Waard, “Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning” (2025).

Picking up where “Artistic Nudity and Asexual Bodies/Relationships in Art; Gay Artists” left off…

From rape to grievous bodily harm, the Gothic “slums Nadir” as a means of canon or critique, vis-à-vis the troubled Western estate plunged into civil strife, constant shadowy surveillance/paranoia/suspicion/moral panic, wounded trust, and ambiguous unrest; i.e., nadir and revolution as not black and white, but again, “grey” per the cryptonymy process exploring various taboos in praxial opposition; e.g., rape, serial murder and demonized mental illness, etc, in neo-medieval forms that fascism enjoys (through state protection) and which Communism rebels against.

(artist, left: Barbie Edge; right: Caleb Hart)

Here, our continual of this iconoclast trend extends to Greene’s Man Box; i.e., Patriarchal Capitalism and its broad coalition of unholy defenders funnel humans into rigidly prescriptive gender roles—roles that fascists will increasingly police through hate, emboldened by opportunistic billionaires making online spaces less safe for queer people (Little Hoots’ “Elon Musk Personally Banned Me from Twitter!” 2023). We’ll explore the symptoms of trans genocide in Chapter Four. For now, we’ll examine some of the causes in four parts, per popular media and, in particular streamer culture vis-à-vis Caleb Hart, goblins, and more:

“Ontological Ambiguities” (included in this post): Examines some of the ontological, monstrous-feminine ambiguities that prompt stochastic terrorists to attack the queer community and their representations in popular media (commenting on hauntological, Gothic variants wherever applicable).
“Canonical Discrimination in Videogames“: Considers the attackers’ problematic, Faustian education that leads to an attacker’s mindset: through traditional modes of male education learned by weird canonical nerds like Caleb Hart through sexist (monomythic) videogames and gamer “Man Box” culture, which didactically appropriates twinks, catboys/femboys, etc.
“Poison was the Cure“: Takes a breather from canonical praxis and consider a defense that weird queer nerds can adopt when challenging the status quo, specifically my approach to goblins (and videogames) within iconoclastic media as something to synthesize ourselves.
“Obliterating Phoebe: In the Shadow of Pygmalion“: Explores how the world of canonical media—but especially e-sports—has informed bigoted attitudes in videogame culture, including how the elite are currently enabling these attacks in the predominantly male world of competitive e-sports; i.e., as “dominated” by sexist men similar to Caleb Hart obsessed with making their mark as he has: being “the best” in ways that overwrite the history of everyone else (we’ll focus on feminist moderacy and female/queer bigotries in Chapter Four).

There’s a lot to cover. I’ll try and sign-post as we proceed, if only because we’ll jump back and forth between topics (owing to their intersectional nature).

Keeping that in mind onto part one: some of the ambiguities of queer existence that bigots attack (we’ll bring up some other factors in parts two through four)!

Note: Similar to William Goldings’ Lord of the Flies (1954[1]), Omelas is policed by children, We’ll talk about videogames as the neoliberal medium for fascist argumentation; i.e., as the vector for state dogma, under the Shadow of Pygmalion (an idea I coined for this series). Refer to “Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning” for a comprehensive look at such dogma; i.e., per my research on it (and which features Caleb Hart—the dubious “star” of this subchapter—in its own pages).

(artist: palson)

Inside the Man Box, part one: Ontological Ambiguities (feat. twinks, femboys and shunga)

“Nobody owns a world record […] Be proud to be a part of your game’s history even after your times have been beaten. Because unlike a world record, your legacy could last forever” (source).

—Summoning Salt, “The Quest to Beat abney317” (2023)

Note: While I openly identify as trans, now (re: “Coming Out as Trans“), I used to identify as a femboy—meaning for my partner-at-the-time, Jadis (re: exhibit 43d, “Seeing Dead People“). Furthermore, my art website originally was dedicated to femboys and tomboys, originally reading “he enjoys depicting strong women and androgynous men” (source: “My Art Website Is Live!” 2020); i.e., before I changed the website title, thus brand, to vanderWaardart, in 2021. —Perse, 5/5/2025

When the state and its nerd cop pushes against us, we also must push back as nerds; re: weird canonical nerds vs weird canonical nerds, per state vs worker rights; e.g., Caleb Hart (and similar Pygmalions) pimping trans people like myself, which we’ll get to.

Seeing as Gothic Communism explores discrimination in the Internet Age, I want to focus on transgender/non-binary people in videogames—with additional emphasis placed on intersex people and several drag queen sub-classes: femboys and catboys (formerly endangered in Gregg Araki and Dennis Cooper’s queer exploitation work)—glancing at the catgirl drag king subclass (exhibit 91a1) and shunga (exhibit 92a) as well, to be holistic.

Please note: Terms like “femboy” exist organically in marginalized spheres, which host a plethora of specific and generalized definitions. Unlike reactionaries and moderates, gender-non-conforming individuals generally allow for a gradient of different usages to co-exist (satenmadpun’s “The Philosophy of Femboys,” 2022): binary trans, intersex and non-binary femboys, for example (exhibit 91c). This includes paratextual media like videogame fan art, whose own fans go so far as to encourage “femboy” as a unique gender identity while simultaneously discouraging “trap” and various other catch-all slurs that bigots use to exploit femboys (Professor Lando’s “Femboys Explained,” 2022; timestamp: 10:14), often condemning them openly and “chasing” them privately as monstrous-feminine sin to indulge in, mid-gay-panic.

However, this can be dramatized in reality TV shows that explore the open chasing of femboys, such as Ladyboys: Inside Thailand’s Third Gender (2014). The show presents the smiling montage of white, cis-het expat men chasing AMAB femboys and bringing them up out of poverty. It seems negotiated equally and fairly but the reality is, the chasers have a material advantage whose unequal material conditions tip the scales in their favor. They are the prince and the ladyboy is the pauper. Under these “sex tourist” conditions, they are pursuing something akin to sodomy through prostitution of AMAB sex workers.

To that, while sodomy with all sex workers functions through the monstrous-feminine desire not to have children (and to delegitimize accidental children as bastards), the so-called “trap” is historically an AMAB sex worker who “baits” cis-het men into having sex with an outwardly female/femme appearance but doesn’t have any reproductive sex organs. Unlike AFAB laborers, who traditionally are forced to bargain with their ability to have PIV sex and bear children, AMAB sex workers who present as women can make no such offer. So while neither AFAB nor AMAB sex workers actually want children, AMAB examples are often discriminated against by AFAB workers for not having to bear the “same” risks (which ignores the fact that both are doing sex work—a cruel and dangerous profession under Capitalism—just to try and survive). In short, the male faggot is incorrect within a larger punitive hierarchy.

(exhibit 91a1: Model and artist: Bubi and Persephone van der Waard. Catgirls are an identity unto themselves, but one that is canonically supplied to cis women in online streaming circles not so much as drag at all [as the outfit/descriptor “cat” is still quite femme from a hetero standpoint] but meant to cater to heteronormative men in fairly standardized ways; e.g., gamer/e-girls, which come with their own pejorative labels, like e-thots. Catboys, on the other hand, are visibly queer relative to an open sense of non-gender-conformity tied to the coercive emasculation of certain AMAB persons by chaser reactionaries who see “cat” as femme, thus weak [neko/twink being a Japanese word for a gay male bottom—generally someone femme to be dominated by sexist parties, which extends to catboys as neko and cis catgirls across the board; and similar “pet” treatments of fertility animals or servile creatures: bunnies and dogs, too]. In trans, intersex, and non-binary circles, the terms catboy/girl and drag queen/king are obviously fluid depending on how one identifies/performs.)

All sex workers face risk, but these risks vary on traditional notions of sex and gender. AMAB sex workers who present as femme or identity as women face tremendous risks by their customers. If a reactionary cis-het man is expecting a pussy but finds a penis when he and the sex worker go back to the hotel room, he may simply kill the sex worker for having ironic/”incorrect” genitals and invoke the gay panic defense afterward; i.e., he felt “threatened” by the other person’s penis, and “coerced” by an outwardly femme appearance having “baited” the customer into a “dangerous” position: a DARVO grooming accusation that aligns with other recuperated terms like “woke” as a kind of oft-“Satanic” degeneracy or corruption that must be cleansed from society to restore balance (while paradoxically praying on the scapegoat as a compelled fetish, of course; “boundaries for me, not for thee”).

Furthermore, sex with prostitutes is not safe for any worker regardless of sex or gender for several reasons. One, it’s historically criminalized and the victim has no rights (cops will blame them for doing sex work to try and survive despite their material conditions giving them no choice). Two, sexist/transphobic men aren’t interested in a fair exchange; they want to dominate a femme-appearing submissive through violence. PIV sex isn’t even the point; performing toxic masculinity is. To that, look no further than Andrew Tate, a known transphobe who makes a common chaser argument; i.e., that it’s preferable to bang Megan Fox with a dick instead of Hulk Hogan with a pussy because the latter will physically fuck you up if you try to get violent with them (in sex-positive circles, the theatrical “violence” isn’t harmful, displaying power exchange as a mutually consensual and subversive concept that allows anyone to perform whatever role they want; i.e., what they identify as/with, exhibit 91b/91c).

There’s also the stereotype of the affluent homosexual man engaging in pedophilia domestically by “dating from the slums” as the actual, unironic groomers of the cute boys they were predatorily chasing: Brian Singer, Kevin Spacey, Foucault, etc (most predominantly those marginalized with relative privilege: cis-queer white men). Their uneven material conditions parallel men who practice sex tourism to take advantage of an immiserated local population, or slaves who slept with their slaves, etc. It’s precisely this material imbalance of conditions and the uneasy negotiations that occur under duress that we have to be mindful of when considering the iconoclastic depictions of ourselves that are chased after or framed as bait—often by cis-het men, but other transphobic groups comprised of TERFs, cis female sex workers or even trans men/women pitted against one another (myself having been the victim of trans-on-trans violence committed by trans men against me; re: “Setting the Record Straight, Transmisia Experience: 5/26/2023“).

Femboys, ladyboys, catboys, twinks, etc, aren’t “false women” nor groomers. Nor are they automatically AMAB, as proven by binary trans men and trans masc enbys or genderfluid persons subverting roles normally assigned to cis-het men, homosexuals and trans women (exhibit 91c). Regardless of the sex or gender of someone who identifies or performs as a femboy or twink, not everyone approaches these roles sex-positively and their usage remains immediately ambiguous in a visual sense. Iconoclastic depictions of femboys (and the trans, intersex or non-binary people using these labels; exhibit 91b/c) amount to appreciative representation during the context of liminal expression—i.e., a right for these groups to call themselves “traps” as an oppressed class in a systemic sense should they choose to (similar to identifying as a witch in relation to an ongoing struggle against heteronormative oppression and persecution).

Under canonical praxis, artists—or those who distribute or consume their work—will project onto femboys as disposable, presumed-male commodities that “bait” cis-het men with the temptation of a “forbidden fruit”: the “trap” of entirely unreproductive (or gender-confused sex, regarding trans men) as a slur assigned by the oppressor towards the oppressed. This is a kind of desperate or coercive queerness whose internalized homophobia bears reactive, heteronormative roots, and its “chasers” should not use the word “trap” to “joke” about femboys, any more than white metal musicians should “joke” about racism by

putting the Confederate flag on their guitars (with Dimebag Darrell being a privileged, middle-class white boy whose band swapped images over and over until their found their biggest fans: middle-class white boys):

One of the acts most prominently connected to the Confederate flag is Lynyrd Skynyrd, who were known for using the flag as a stage backdrop, on their merchandise and even featured it on the cover of their 1988 live album Southern by the Grace of God. It was legitimately a huge part of the band’s image.

In 2012, Skynryd decided to stop using the Confederate flag. The last surviving original member, guitarist Gary Rossington, explained why during a CNN appearance.

“Through the years, people like the KKK and skinheads kinda kidnapped the Dixie or Southern flag from its tradition and the heritage of the soldiers, that’s what it was about,” Rossington said at the time. “We didn’t want that to go to our fans or show the image like we agreed with any of the race stuff or any of the bad things.”

Essentially, they acknowledged what the flag represented and they didn’t want to be associated with those things. Though I would argue it was never hijacked in the name of white supremacy — it has always been about white supremacy — it’s commendable that Skynyrd took a stand even though it meant they’d lose some supporters.

Plenty of other artists have used the imagery including Tom Petty, Ted Nugent and Kid Rock. Pantera’s late Dimebag Darrell, Ozzy Osbourne’s Zakk Wylde and Poison’s Bret Michaels all had Confederate flag guitars. If you’re interested in reading more about these artists’ use of the flag (most of which have abandoned the use of it) you can check out this piece diving into the genre’s history with the flag by our sister site Ultimate Classic Rock (source: Rabab Al Sharif’s “The Confederate Flag Isn’t a Symbol of Rebellion — It’s a Symbol of Racism,” 2020).

using the Nazi salute (Metal Sludge’s “Rock Stars who saluted Nazi Sieg Heil; Sixx, Hetfield, Ulrich & Bowie,” 2016).

And even musicians of color should be careful using oppressor dogwhistles to code-switch with, lest they become colonizer token puppets/useful fools, canonizing racism on par with Candice Owens, Kayne West or Blair White as “minority police” class traitors; e.g., Kayne’s praising of Adolf Hitler—but also encouraging white people to say the n-word; Donald Glover’s 2012 recollection of it in “Donald Glover Reveals The One Thing Charlie Sheen Did Right” (2021, timestamp: 3:33).

With all of these, nature is—as always—as monstrous-feminine thing to pimp, including male examples like femboys; i.e., in games like Zelda‘s famous Amazon fantasies putting Link on the disempowered end of these exchanges, which we can camp in our own media, on and offstage, as much as people like Caleb Hart colonize. In either case, exploitation and liberation exist in duality inside the same contested half-real sphere:

(exhibit 91b1: Source, left; artist, right: Belka-dog. Some people identify with their birth sex, but play with gender. For example, some femboys relate to Link from The Legend of Zelda series as AMABs [for proof, consider this Twitter clip of Link having jiggly balls in Tears of the Kingdom, 2023] who feel femme but still have “boy” in their gender label. But they subvert gender expectations by having Link play with the role of the damsel-in-distress in an ironic way: the twink-in-peril rescued and defended by Amazon women “enslaving” him [war brides/collaborators]. This example isn’t of cis men playing “dress up” in order to be humiliated by virtue of temporarily surrendering power to female “waifus”; it’s an AMAB femboy being shared between female warriors or otherwise those who identify women with power as something to cherish and enjoy—i.e., a unique form of power exchange and non-binary gender expression between non-heteronormative roles and identities. Non-binarized, AFAB persons could also play the role of the femboy and AMABs could play the role of the drag king in trans/enby circles.)

(exhibit 91b2: Femboys demonstrate androdiversity with tremendous irony. For example, although undoubtedly there are plenty of femboys with smaller schlongs, plenty on the market advertise the slenderest of elfin bodies and the girthiest of members [contrary to heteronormative belief, big bodies—especially ones on inordinate amounts of synthetic testosterone—have shrinking genitals]; e.g., the vacillating throbbers of cuties like Catboi Aoi, Rayray Sugarbutt, Olivia the Robin, Zay Zay, illiteracy4me, Hanyuu, Jaybaesun, etc.

The giant cock, then, becomes something to subvert as a “universal” symbol of rape, becoming a highly colorful exhibit, instead; e.g., Paladin Pleasure Sculptors. Similarly JadeNeedsHugs subverts the fucking Predator as cutesy but also physically imposing. This intersection of the hunter fantasy with cuteness represents the role of the submissive often surrendering different forms/amounts of power relative to their actual bodies and genitals, but also their imagined bodies and performances in fantasy realms.)

(exhibit 91b3: Artist: Two drawings by Persephone van der Waard, touched up for the book: a demon femboy [2021, originally from the ASMR channel, Dark and Twisted Whisper] and a snow elf prince [2021]. The drawings were originally created for Jadis, who was encouraging me to delve into niche categories [that they just so happened to like; i.e., a TERF genderfluid person abusing me, a femboy at the time, to take them femboy porn; re: “Escaping Jadis“]. I also wanted to be morphologically flexible, allowing for different sexualities/intersex and non-binary modes of experience regularly associated with demonic poetics. Also, I wanted to—with these particular demons—illustrate the idea of a “grower-type” penis: one that looks small, but grows considerably between total flaccidity and tumescence.)

(exhibit 91c: Model and artist: Cedar and Persephone van der Waard; artist, far-top-right and far-bottom-left: Sabs. As introduced by exhibit 91a1, the idea of the gender swap isn’t just crossdress from cis men dressing as cis woman or vice versa; it involves gender trouble, parody and play as divorced from the colonial binary altogether. Under these non-binary conditions, then, the word “boy” doesn’t imply a set gender at all, but merely operates inside a flexible performance whose labeled gender roles announce/identify the power exchange on display however people want to present it: a smaller “(fem)boy” protected by a stronger “manly” master. While Batman and Robin are a classic cis-gendered example, the basic operation and its visual markers can utterly thrive in gender-non-confirming circles; e.g., Sabs’ take on Robin the boy wonder as thoroughly androgynous. In non-binary terms, “boymoding” and “girlmoding” refer to dressing like a boy/girl relative to one’s chosen gender—e.g., a trans femme person boymoding when they dress “like a boy” in public. However, this can be as much dressing the way you want to present versus conforming in self-defense to a given idea of gender performance; i.e., within a mode of unequal power exchange whose set role types yield flexible gender components, such as “topping from the bottom” while still doing conventionally girly activities framed as “boyish.”

For example, a trans man can—as a pet-like catboy or servile femboy—be protected by a formidable, armored protector of any sex/gender yet still present an ancient, medieval flavor that feels subversive of the usual depictions within crossdress. By toying with the gender roles in a genderqueer, xenophilic fashion, iconoclasts can subvert the historical-material flavor of fixed gender roles, allowing any gender to enjoy the titles and roles of power exchange dressed up in sex-positive nostalgia as pointedly hauntological, thus intentionally different/at odds with the standards that bigots enforce. In other words, the reinvention is not of the language itself or chronotope, but how it’s used: who can do what within hauntological BDSM regardless of gender. Under these conditions, words like “cave,” “stable,” and “lance” take on very different, playfully sexual meanings that aren’t entirely divorced from their medieval history. Undoubtedly there would have been some form of love between people forced to identify as male in the historical past: knights and their squires as more genderfluid than would have been recorded in official histories.)

As a larger social-sexual system, heteronormativity is multi-registered, favoring a superior group over an inferior group on various levels. For example, while cis women are coded as inferior to men (and have been for centuries), trans people are coded as inferior to cis-people, which intersects with white women’s liminal status as “privileged, valuable” sex objects compared to people of color (F.D. Signifier’s “Conservatives Are Bad at S*x,” 2022). This compound bias (and its subsequent discrimination) is cumulative, compounding if the trans person also happens to be non-Christian and non-white; but also intersex or non-gender-conforming in terms of their identity or dress code. These groups fall into the xenophobic category of fear-fascination through monstrous-feminine xenophobia as a pursuit of coercive sex by the status quo towards scapegoated, objectified parties. “Woman is other” becomes something practiced by cis-conforming groups against trans, intersex, and non-binary persons who refuse to gender conform.

Neoliberals and fascists handle this xenophobic treatment differently. Fascists reject trans person legitimacy outright by aggressively denying them their chosen gender identities. To the fascist, a trans person is “false,” a woman or man pretending to be something they are not, which sadly doesn’t automatically preclude coercive fetishization/”xenophilia” from fascists—again, chasers as a kind of vigilante fascist class. The same goes for intersex and non-binary peoples or drag queens, with known fascist Nick Fuentes chasing catboys in particular (Mo Black’s “The Cat Boy Harem of Nicholas J. Fuentes,” 2020) and femboys being targeted by equally dubious groups (Turkey Tom’s “4chan’s Femboy Blackmail Cult,” 2023).

Meanwhile, neoliberals have historically profited off transphobia (Lindsay Ellis’ “Tracing the Roots of Pop Culture Transphobia,” 2021) by using the “free” market to decide “correct” ideas through “neutral” consumption (“free” meaning privately owned by the elite, whose canon they encourage the middle class to consume and endorsement): serial killer pastiche as a form of criminalized hauntology. So many people can’t imagine queerness as anything other than criminal because the nostalgic, idealized past under Capitalism essentializes queerness as depraved, degenerate, and demonic; but is also something sold to conservatives as a fetishized ghost of the counterfeit, a thing that never quite was until canon forced it into existence:

For example, having never had a relationship with an “actual” woman (The Damage Report, “Proud Incel Nick Fuentes Goes Full Weirdo On Dating Women,” 2022), Fuentes is something of a fantasy “fetish cop,” resorting to a common misogynistic/transphobic tactic: abandoning any attempts to coerce educated cis-feminists and “settling” on crossdressers/trans people as “false/easy” women that he can chase down and dominate in private.

Often previously abused, young AMABs can be further mistreated and discarded with impunity through “necromantic frottage”: sublimated rape; i.e, the predation of/on weird sex zombies-vampires whose own radical beliefs cockblock them in regards to the people they want to sleep with, similar to Catholic priest’s abusing choir boys, Ambrosio stabbing and raping his own sister, or male shunga samurai raping their pages [who can’t consent, exhibit 92b]. It’s master/slave “prison sex” within the system, which leads to a shortage of empowered workers through a perceived shortage of resources, of sex, of jobs and labor alongside actual worker disempowerment and emotional/Gothic intelligence as canonically synthesized, advocating for gender trouble as a weaponizing force against worker agency and representation.

In keeping with Man Box, only “the strong” can get the prize, the sex, the wealth, the glory and material conditions. It becomes a means of exposing the state’s go-to targets of exploitation, permission for fascists to board, rape and mutiny against themselves and for neoliberals to look the other way or encourage genocide in faraway lands. In either case, canon becomes cheap “monster food” that turns workers into killer monster babies, not responsible organizers of effective revolt. A soldier is no good if it can think and feel, so canon infantilizes workers (menticide) or batters them by proxy (waves of terror) until they snap at perceived dangers taught to them by appropriative peril. In the end, everything is euthanized; it’s only a matter of how and by whom.

Fuentes’ “revolution,” power and relationships are all treacherous and false, but also self-defeating under Capitalism as exploitative towards all workers, including its bad-faith, LARPer (witch-cop), bourgeois “rebels”: the centrists, TERFs, Feminazis, et al. It’s merely segregation and menticide for the “privileged” and preferentially mistreated workers: cis-het white men looking for love, but also a scapegoat—someone to make their bitch (a projection for their own unhappy arrangements). They want “maidens” but will settle for “false women,” even children and literal animals[2] to prove/validate their own crisis of masculinity/faith within Capitalism in decay.

In the end, they’re just false “friends of Dorothy”—fake “allies” already lobotomized to genocidal extremes, wound up like toys and aimed at the nearest scapegoat while they enact their forbidden desires through prison-sex wish fulfillment. Cowardly lions (fraidy-cats) who kill mice for the Wizard, they have daggers for dicks and bullets for brains, wouldn’t know mutual consent if it came up and bit them right on the ass. However, this accretion from the same Superstructure parallels canonical serial killer pastiche: the free market’s confirmation and endorsement of fascist fears inside a workforce already scared stupid. It’s “the wages of sin” begot from a cycle of false preaching that starts at the top and trickles down into terminally empty heads.

(exhibit 92a: Incest, bestiality and other forms of chattel rape and canonical pastiche are symptoms of the state defending itself. This oppositional praxis and liminal conflict can be seen in the time, place and media of a given historical period. Consider the abject shunga erotica, “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife” by Hokusai. Its “ancient” hauntology is fairly recent—1814, four years before Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein—but conveys abject realities tied to ghosts of the counterfeit we see in the here-and-now. Just consider Japanese hentai or “perversion,” whose bourgeois rape apologia leads to hauntological bad play as something to not only consume, but defend while attacking sex-positive people conflated with the very rape that fascists obscure and use themselves: groomers. Fascists are the savages—dissociative, duplicitous brutalizers unable to imagine anything beyond their psychosexual urges coded into them by state-corporate propaganda. As such, they abject what is alien in defense of the state, making themselves bourgeois monsters that exploit other workers within the same prison-like structure. If that seems like a stretch, consider the period in which Hokusai did their print—outlined in our partner exhibit below.)

(exhibit 92b: An excerpt from the conversation between my friend Angel [from exhibit 54; re: “Furry Panic“] and myself, shared with permission [the full conversation can be found, here]. Sex workers communicate about abject topics to become more aware about present-day dangers, usually by talking about and consuming monster media. They can then reverse-abject and subvert them while living inside the police state. But they have to learn about and study them during informed, outlawed, extracurricular exhibits. As Angel explains [above] to me about their own research into shunga erotica, “It was a police state until the fall of the Shogunate. Until the late 1800s[ish] Japan was a closed country for over a century. Nobody got in or out.” On one hand, erotica like Hokusai’s “got past political porn censors and would be hung as decoration in homes,” but it was still dangerous. The state could, at any time, kill those creating it, throwing bourgeois stooges under the proverbial bus. To look at and discuss this material at all is anathema, with sex-positive de facto educators and proletarian witches “outed” as pedophiles by the very persons most likely to commit these atrocities unironically in defense of the state; e.g., the revived Shogunate flag of the Japanese Imperium leading into WW2. Marx’s historical-material nightmare can still be challenged, but doing so is always dangerous to revolutionaries. So grotesque modern artists like Junji Ito take their own misdirection pathways to pass off their tyrannical intimations as harmless to the state’s continued hegemony.)

Before we move onto the “prison sex” phenomenon conducted by a gradient of sex pests/fiends, a few final words about those they animalize: femboys, catboys, and intersex people. Historically exploited in pornographic media, intersex people—as stated in the companion glossary—”exist on a biological gradient between male and female, amounting to a variable ‘third’ sex that presents mixed features of either sex to varying degrees; the term doesn’t represent one particular manifestation, but all of them together on a vast, complicated spectrum of genotypical and phenotypical elements”; as explored in Volume Two, they are often depicted as angels or demons in the classically androgynous sense. Femboy, meanwhile, emerged historically as a pejorative label against homosexual men (as did many forms of gay slang such as “twink”). Over time, this label has slowly been reclaimed, going from negative to neutral to positive—an effect largely aided by crossdressing male protagonists popularized by famous videogame franchises like The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy.

Just as catboys use tell-tale outfits to denote a particular mode of male queerness associated with homosexual slang (with “neko,” again, being Japanese homosexual slang for “bottom” or “twink,” amongst other things), femboys denote a linguistically similar arrangement of atypical social-sexual roles/power reversal tied to performative crossdressing. Japanese crossdressing actually predates Western assimilation by centuries (despite crossdressing also happening in Western theatre, especially during the Early Modern periods of Elizabethan/Jacobean theatre) and can be seen in creative resistance efforts to Western occupation through queer Japanese cinema like Parade of Funeral Roses (1969; re: “Room for Both“). This tradition has only continued through the queer, non-Western heritage of Japanese videogames, with Link and Cloud being forced to crossdress to progress through their respective games. One must don a male Gerudo outfit, which the game codes as feminine (a nod to Amazonian myth, which treats men exclusively as conquered sex objects); the other must rock pigtails and a dress to infiltrate a brothel (a drag treatment of the pigtailed female detective).

In either case, we have more than a “cute-boy-in-disguise” situation; we have a “cutie-in-peril” who must improvise to escape a sexualized predicament. Often, these scenarios aren’t overtly sexualized, but still contain sexual overtones tied to excitement, adventure and danger. In particular, fan fiction loves to balloon the implied sexual elements explored through canonical dilemmas, manifesting in fan orthography and art (see exhibit 93a: my Zelda/FF7 fan art from 2019, when my website focused more on twinks and femboys). In response, this ongoing heritage is something laterally endorsed by giant corporations like Square-Enix and Nintendo, who attempt to encapsulate queerness in their own commodified stories, generally as part of a grander, nostalgia-marketing scheme: the ludic past as reimagined, bringing its dated interpretations along with it.

We’ll examine these dated mentalities next; i.e., by focusing on Caleb Hart as someone who internalized the bigoted elements and chose to pass them along to the next generation: by seeing queer culture as “not human,” thus worthy of attack in pursuit of false power in streaming culture. In keeping with cryptonymy and chronotopes during the liminal hauntology of war reverse or furthering abjection, all occupy the same bodies and spaces/surfaces:

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Onto “Canonical Discrimination in Videogames, Including Fan Art and Speedrunner/Streamer Culture“!

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] The same year as Richard Matteson’s I Am Legend, oddly enough; re: the precursor for the modern zombie narrative made famous by George Romero, and one speaking to the woke qualities of rebellion as undead, thus sleepwalking in commonly zombie-like ways (“Police States“). The state makes us braindead—including through games and their Shadow of Pygmalion—then pits us against each other!

[2] Bestiality and fascism go-hand-in-hand. Chattel rape is something foisted onto women and other, less-fortunate groups, including totemic demons, but also literal animals. The mystery of the Nazi furry (the singing Nazi werewolf; re: exhibit 68, “Toxic Schlock Syndrome“) or Nazi Bronies (Twitter thread: Woot Master) sublimates/adumbrates the uncomfortable reality that (some) fascists literally lie down with dogs; not all furries are zoophiles, comrades, but all fascist furries are zoophiles or know/defend something who is. Consider these YouTube exposés if you don’t believe me:

by Archive the Wolf‘s “Tim Win, the Ouroboros of Abuse” (2021)
Toad McKinley‘s “Uniquely Degenerate Part II: Doug Spink and The Zooier Than Thou Podcast” (2021)
Cecil Mcfly‘s “Don’t Mess With Dogs: A Zoosadist Story Part 1” (2020)

If you do, please be careful tumbling down this “rabbit” hole: What you hear about will haunt you. Refer to “Call of the Wild” for a continuation of this research; i.e., in a less haunting manner).