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 four: Obliterating Phoebe: In the Shadow of Pygmalion, or the Weird Nerds’ Canonical Praxis at Large (feat. Sepultura, Steven King, Eren Yeager, Harley Quinn, and Kefka Palazzo, etc)

I too awaited the expected guest.

He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,

A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,

One of the low on whom assurance sits

As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.

The time is now propitious, as he guesses,

The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,

Endeavours to engage her in caresses

Which still are unreproved, if undesired.

Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;

Exploring hands encounter no defence;

His vanity requires no response,

And makes a welcome of indifference (source).

 

—T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land” (1922)

Picking up where “Poison was the Cure: On Goblins, Being a Weird Nerd and Trans Cryptonymy” left off…

(exhibit 94c2a: Trapped between titanic forces, the weird canonical nerd desires to fight the forces of evil and prove his manhood. Centrism, like fascism, equates manhood with the state, the status quo. As such, centrist nerds tell themselves considerable lies in order to justify that a] their violence is good, thus legitimate; and b] that their enemies are always bad, thus illegitimate. The idea is very popular in neoliberal war pastiche like The Ronin Warriors, which we will examine more in Chapter Four during the “Kento’s Dream” subchapter.)

Note: The Shadow of Pygmalion/Galatea and Pygmalion/Galatea effect are concepts that crystalized in Volume Zero (re: “Thesis Body: Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism vs the State; or, Galatea inside the Shadow of Pygmalion“). It’s a tremendously important idea—one that relates to Amazons and the Medusa, femboys, the Rusalki from Axiom Verge (and frankly almost anything in Metroidvania; re: “She Fucks Back“), and witch cops, etc. Here is where it got its start; i.e., Caleb Hart was the model for Pygmalion in Sex Positivity but one which we’ll examine similar or at least later characters. —Perse, 5/5/2025

As a bad educator of transphobia and adjacent bigotries, Caleb is a vigilante that polices canon from degenerate influences. Simply put, he’s a vigilante within a larger pecking order. As we discussed in Volume Two, vigilantes defend capital for the state in neoliberal and fascist narratives. Coded by these monomyths through videogames and other popular media as “under attack,” weird canonical nerds become de facto policers of their own imperiled masculinity as exported to them—i.e., by “defending” the temples of this holy instruction from outside, degenerate forces: we fags as weird nerds that camp canon as Galatea did, come alive.

So before we delve into TERFs and fascist, monstrous-feminine “witch cops” committing queer genocide in Chapter Four, I want to conclude Chapter Three by discussing the shadow of Capitalism that hides and extends the usual suspects; re: white, cis-het men and their vanguard leading into bolder deceptions and attacks against different targets they often overlap with; e.g., Harley Quinn, Eren Yeager and Kefka Palazzo, Sepultura, etc; i.e., fascist feminism’s Dark Mother vs centrist Amazons “good version” of the same “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll” hegemon that operate in the state’s interest, abusing Gothic: in the Shadow of Pygmalion as exemplified not just by Caleb Hart, but Steven King (videogames vs books).

First, a brief summation of what Pygmalion’s shadow even is: The shadow of Pygmalion is the monomyth/Cycle of Kings. From skeleton to noble, it travels around and around in a Patriarchal loop perpetually afraid of the monstrous-feminine: the “Pygmalion effect” (re: exhibit 12 and Steven King, “Challenging the State“) as afraid of the monstrous-feminine as thinking for itself, a great statue of Galatea that doesn’t just come alive but whose very existence challenges the status quo passively and actively. Our shadow of Galatea, then, is challenged by the usual handling of power through the mechanisms of the state; i.e., not as a democratic progress that doesn’t exploit workers, but the go-to mode of exploitation. As such, it become the mise-en-abyme of great men that—whether fascist or neoliberal—perpetuate the status quo through an inability to take hard stances against the state. The state is always right and war is always good because without it, the state would not exist; to keep existing, the state must police bodies to rape nature on schedule: virgin/whores, nature as monstrous-feminine through bad demon BDSM (which our ludo-Gothic BDSM camps through the cryptonymy process to reverse abjection with all the usual aesthetics, below).

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

This leads to a variety of offshoots imitating the larger structure as perpetuated by older forms of media that are adapted into new forms of media, and new generations of given media types that romanticize the barbaric, monomythic quest through the ghost of the counterfeit in a grand narrative of the crypt. Horace Walpole writes a novel two-hundred-plus years ago; Steven King puts his own spin on things, which then is adapted into a videogame, streamed, consumed by the streamer’s chatroom, endorsed through a variety of material goods that codify and ferry the overarching xenophobia inside popular culture as thoroughly bigoted.

The shadow is the Patriarch reviewed and revived through what is now being called Man Box culture. It’s the shadow of the skeleton king refusing to die, but also his “good” counterpart apologizing for the tyrant’s overtures and desolation; ghost-like, never alive nor dead, both are constantly revived and transmitted during cryptomimesis in favor of centrist dead—what, in Volume Two, we called the Cycle of Kings in relation to centrist kayfabe (re: “Perceptive Zombie Eyeballs“); i.e., the return of the tyrant and his undead, fascist host, followed by the return the noble king and all that king’s men in response, or emulations of either force in assimilated minorities (e.g., Amazons): paladins versus death knights in the performance of normal skirmishes inside the orderly conflict inside historical materialism’s good-versus-evil, both sides united staunchly against anti-capitalist forces as the End of All Things (often scapegoated as female or at least monstrous-feminine; i.e., the Archaic Mother [re: exhibit 1a1c, “Symposium: Aftercare“]—a paradox given Communism was envisioned as a critique of Capitalism and its token cops piloted by straight boys-to-men, Caleb Hart onwards).

Capitalism, then, is something to defend from the spectres of Marx through false reconciliation; i.e., centrism is merely a perpetuation of the same destructive cycle through counterfeit paladins, death knights and the foreign idea of chaos-as-female/monstrous-feminine sitting squarely outside their orderly duels of good-versus-evil. To this, powerful men like Steven King become replicated as profitable foils to the obvious skull-and-crossbones baddies. They reap the rewards of things staying the same, but enjoy the label of being “liberal” or “progressive” as a badge of honor differentiating them from Caleb Hart and even worse grifters. They’re not different in function, though, but by degree according to the purpose: exploitation through stereotypes that become endorsed through a collective societal inability to challenge the Cycle of Kings and its twin male shadows keeping Gothic-Communism’s queer poetics anathema, damned.

We’ll get to Steven King in just a moment. First, let’s consider the larger sex, drugs and heavy metal/rock ‘n roll machinery that he and Pygmalions like him lord over (themselves millionaires pinned between the billionaires of the world at the top and everyone else at the bottom).

(exhibit 94c2b: Artist: Michael Whelan. Sepultura come from Brazil, their older music [that is, before their fame gave them a means of escape] reflecting the sense of unreality to their living conditions; i.e., their individual homesteads placed within the nation as home, but thoroughly sickened by a greater plight that effects everything inside of it: a sepulture, or burial. The live-burial, in this case, is being born dead inside an undead nation on a continent so thoroughly and infamously exploited by the United States. Under this shadowy influence of mass exploitation is a complex web of lies and covert paramilitary maneuvers that evoke a distant, brutal time out of the West’s own backlog: the medieval collapse after a former greatness. It could be said that things were “better” before the conquistadors came, but the Aztec, Mayan and Inca empires weren’t perfect; however, they also weren’t Rome. The cycle of antiquity butting up against modernity is a Capitalist illusion engendered by global capitalist venues feeding money into the mother country stolen from its neighbors in the Global South. “Fed through the tube that sticks in me, just like a wartime novelty”—places like Brazil are recursively visited by nightmarish scenarios whose abject realities are completely unimaginable and, indeed, medieval to the Global North. Our worst nightmare is literally Tuesday for these people and their immiserated lives, all of which could be entirely prevented if the shadow of Pygmalion were dismantled. It’s not just a threat that “could happen,” but intimates behind a barrier hiding the living hell required for the elite to glut themselves with piles of stolen generated wealth in the global economic system. Contrary to the return of a nightmarish past, this is a doomsday that has never existed before ushered in behind evocations of former hells through inherited survival’s guilt: Sepultura’s breakout album features the cover art of sci-fi/horror artist, Michael Whelan:

“I discovered Michael Whelan from a series of paperback H.P. Lovecraft books that I found in Brazil,” Cavalera says. “I suggested to Monte that we should try and get in touch with this guy for the cover. Then when Monte got a hold of Michael, Michael sent him a bunch of different paintings, including Beneath the Remains.” While the Whelan artwork Cavalera initially wanted to use was nixed by Roadrunner (and eventually used for labelmates Obituary’s 1990 album Cause of Death), the singer ultimately agreed that the label’s pick — a surreal red-and-black skull painting titled “Nightmare in Red” — “fit the record better” [source: Brad Angle’s “The Story behind the Cover Art,” 2020].

The album was also the band’s desperate, last-ditch effort to break away from their home country and establish a larger audience:

“You only get so many shots in this life — and you gotta make it count.”

Sepultura‘s shot came in 1988. And founding singer-guitarist Max Cavalera was dead set on hitting his target. Back then, the Brazilian band was a rising extreme-metal force with two albums under their bullet belts — but little recognition outside of their home country. Thanks to Cavalera’s boundless ambition to break out, he marshaled all his resources, called in favors and worked his tape-trading connections to score him a plane ticket to New York City and face time with industry tastemakers and label reps. His hustle paid off when Roadrunner Records’ Monte Connor offered his band a record contract. The new deal meant that Sepultura’s music would reach a lot more people. For the then-broke act from Belo Horizonte, the stakes couldn’t have been higher.

“We knew in our heart it was our shot — a make-it-or-break-it album,” Cavalera continues. “If we would have released something shitty and nobody cared that would be the end of it. Done deal. We needed to step up on the music side, and we did” [ibid.]. 

 This, I would argue, wasn’t simply Sepultura pandering to metalheads across the border but an earnest attempt to convey their own frustrations living in a place so obviously exploited compared to customers abroad who were better cared for [and who could afford to pay for their music and merchandise]. Behind the story of their collaboration with Whelan and his artwork, the struggle against capital is told—rather fittingly—beneath the remains not just of their material, but across a revival of dead kings, of kings, of kings; not just of the hidden kings of the present under Capitalism, but the spectral monarch of H. P. Lovecraft revived the 1980s [whose work until this point was somewhat obscure]:

Del Rey Books asked Michael to do 2 paintings of horrific images they could use on 7 volumes of H.P. LOVECRAFT stories. He didn’t have to illustrate the stories, just create images that conveyed the mood. This and LOVECRAFT’S NIGHTMARE A form his only real diptych—1 artistic image created on 2 panels and the paintings can meet side by side either way with one flowing into the other. They are featured in MICHAEL WHELAN’S WORKS OF WONDER, his second art book, and they are hugely popular with heavy metal bands and fans [source: “Lovecraft’s Nightmare, B”—MichaelWhelan.com].

Concerning Lovecraft and the American metal scene, Pygmalion’s shadow yields some curiously broken clocks, or those that “wind down” [fear being a lucrative scheme; people pay a great deal amid waves of terror to feel in control; i.e., by telling themselves through the Gothic fiction that it’s “just” a nightmare, thus could never happen to them]. For Sepultura, they—like Lovecraft’s contemporary, Louis Borges—came from somewhere else where the nightmares were actually real. While they eventually “grew up,” their music mellowing out somewhat as they acclimated to fame and success, the band always retained a knack for critiquing power begot from their origins—origins being outside of the charmed life that metal giants like Metallica, Iced Earth or Judas Priest lived, each band eventually selling out to a comic book spoof of their former selves, pandering to a comic book narrative/audience that dubiously trademarked “Fucking Metal!” that echoed Lovecraft’s pulpy, Weird-Tales magazine vibes dreaming fitfully about the collapse of the West while failing to realize such devastation was happening elsewhere already [and indeed capitalizing on that fear]. However misplaced, such conspiracies often come from a place of truth as obscured, which the so-called “good guys” of Pax Americana cannot explain away [Bad Empanada’s “Why Liberals Can’t Counter Conspiracy Theories,” 2023]. They’re basically the dad from The Ice Storm [1997] angrily telling his daughter [the magnificent Christina Ricci] to be quiet when she not-so-subtly mentions genocide during Thanksgiving: “Dear Lord, thank you for this Thanksgiving holiday. And for all the material possessions we have and enjoy. And for letting us white people kill all the Indians and steal their tribal lands. And stuff ourselves like pigs, even though children in Asia are being napalmed.”

The reality of death is that it walks in our footsteps, haunting patrilineal descent until the fatherly household crumbles to dust; in the interim, the first-born son is coddled—in my family’s case by the pants-wearing matriarch—until she herself was confronted by the riddle of the Sphinx as a kind death-bringer: the madness of the monarch slowly approaching death as a womb-like state of non-existence, the decay of memory something to experience towards one’s own demise but also inherit from the family line as doomed. In my grandmother’s case, I could see her haunted by the proverbial spectre of death just as she herself once saw death in other things.

For example, when my mother was younger she had a golden retriever named Prince; when she broke up with a lover who had erectile dysfunction, the man poisoned Prince; when my grandmother got home from work, she saw Prince in his doghouse and thought, “I saw him and he was dead; he wasn’t at that moment but he was dead,” to which he died the next day seemingly out of the blue; when I saw my grandmother five years ago I could sense a change her that I likened to an inversion to Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Mortality” [1807]—intimations of death; and as that feeling has worsened in a very tangible degree, she has become more like that frightened little girl who used to read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Hound of the Baskervilles“: the black dog is coming ever nearer and she, ever more child-like, fears her own death until she can no longer describe it in words. Such is the fate of all the West and its monarchs, their futile desire to conquer death only leading to tremendous suffering, confusion and desolation: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player who struts [their] hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.”)

We have already considered how kayfabe is the language of espionage for or against the state inside the Gothic mode (often by using the language of war as an athletic competition that fetishizes war, death, lies and rape); i.e., fascism as the conclusion of one revolution of the infernal concentric pattern, which is whitewashed by lovers of “good war” using the language of American Liberalism (centrists) and the future as a dead mall, but also a war zone. But obviously it’s more complicated than two basic sides.

There’s also paramilitarism and guerrilla warfare. Employed within either facet of this ongoing power exchange, the functional difference between a cop and vigilante becomes rather vague and largely non-existent under fascism, whose police state operates on enforced surveillance and rogue cops policing a wider and wider group of people during persecution mania as enabled by centrists (who protect property, not people). Denial is always part of the equation and generally performed by the “better” side against a perceived menace (the theatrical “shadow enemy” attacked by the state’s own terror agents—the CIA, of course, but also class traitors of various kinds: the paramilitary and its witch-cop vigilantes and token subsets).

Regardless, the state is always perfect/can never be wrong yet is always under attack, thus forced to compromise with calls to ancient destroyers: mercenaries from another barbaric time used to putting in the kind of hard work to keep Capitalism intact. Alarm fatigue and waves of terror indoctrinate children, arming them with a live-or-die mindset against an insurmountable, unknowable foe; it’s the process of abjection taken to regressive extremes, breaking the state apart under its own axiom as deputized by self-colonizers hunting their own population with vigilantism tacitly/temporarily legitimized by the state (whose own, direct violence is always legitimate). These lynch mobs rise out of xenophobic moral panic and various manufactured crises, including masculinity as threatened, but also something that can never live up to its own hype; the imposter is the performer knowing they aren’t Conan or Red Sonya. The result is a culture of callow, bigoted, superstitious, and thoroughly conspiratorial bullies who—reared on dogma inside thoroughly broken homes—think they’re rebels, pirates, Vikings and the like, but also feel profoundly insecure amid their own cis-het gender dysphoria and body dysmorphia (these conditions aren’t exclusive to queer people).

(artist: Madame Tussaud)

In truth, fascists are delusional, armed thugs who defend capital, which takes advantage of their own exploitation and monomythic bad education under Capitalism. In following a violent, stupid leader whose ideology they refuse to question in relation to themselves, they become smaller versions thereof: ostensibly perfect and invincible, but in all actuality are flawed beyond repair and wholly undercover inside their own lies; the deceit becomes self-consuming/Quixotic.

This being said, While all cops defend property instead of people, centrist veneers offer the myth of “good cop, bad cop” in war-boss language minus any semblance of sex-positive irony. All Cops Are Bad, but centrists officially refuse to take hard stances on their political platforms—i.e., compromising with and debating fascists, while actually aggregating with them to hate leftists for their hard stances against the state (which includes sex-positive irony during BDSM, kink and demonic/undead, Gothic counterculture art). Fascists, meanwhile, take aesthetically hard stances for the state and capitalists, invoking the police state as badass/radicalized under Foucault’s Boomerang to invoke the state of exception; i.e., against the Left as targeted for zombie-apocalypse levels of violence (which again, tacitly positions “badass” and “cool” solely within false activism.

To reactionaries or moderates, then, Leftism is merely a terrorist gesture in centrist eyes, hence not actually badass like fascist death knights are). Fascists commit genocide during the infernal concentric pattern and centrists apologize for it (while committing genocide themselves, raping the mind with Fisher’s hauntology—i.e., carceral hauntologies such as the cyberpunk or medieval regression); the point isn’t accountability but coercion and enforcement in fetishizing language while repressing proletarian sentiment and praxis. According to the state and its allies, we’re the imposters, the devils-in-disguise, the Archaic Mother threatening Patriarchal hegemony (to be fair, we are, but many of them believe we mean them harm in the process, when our aim isn’t harm but transformation towards a post-scarcity world devoid of state abuses).

Weird canonical nerds, as we’ll continue to explore, are cops-in-spirit if not actual, formal authority under Pygmalion’s shadow. Indeed, they become de facto deputies, whose xenophobic, incel-level Man Box vigilantism during gender trouble is largely ignored but tolerated by the “real” boys in blue. The same likeness is seen reflected across the surface of various mercenaries defending capital: cops, war bosses (male or female) and other paramilitaries who LARP, or LARPers who consumer what they want to function as—to rape and kill the alien, the radical, the enemy as something that looks like them and their fetish gear (with Batman dressed all in black in cahoots with the commissioner by waging a forever war against the “degenerate” scum of Gotham, instead of giving away his vast fortune/family money to end poverty thus crime).

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

This is no accident. From the historical-material dreams of various Pygmalions come the historical-material monsters of men toward their own, manmade insecurities: Gay Medusa—the Big Whore let out of their box—is coming for them and theirs by threatening the cycle of war as good, thus being the perfect scapegoats for the infernal concentric pattern. Whatever form the scapegoat takes, the praxis is canonical, but can be resisted and escaped the same way it came in: through the images themselves and the eclipsed revolutionaries making them (women, queer people/persons of color and religious minorities, etc).

Already touched upon with Volume One when we looked at Stieglitz’ Pygmalion-esque patronage of O’Keefe (re: exhibit 24c1, “The Basics“), we’ll look at some of these sexist shadows now—of the powerful men behind the curtain in horror media—then apply our findings to the sexist, usually male proponents of capital/the state during the Internet Age: weird canonical nerds and how they suffer from the canonical praxis/comparison of their own bad education as internalized: the more visible, hypermasculine action heroes in monomythic media (of which these students crafting their own masks in imitation can never measure up to; becoming insure, killer babies in the bargain, they’re always gagging at/dumbly chasing the abject or crapping their pants at labor activists before running in guns blazing like a dumbass.

The basic cryptonymy idea is to let slip the mask; i.e., in ways that expose and disarm the fascist as false, but also the centrist—covering for them and the state through action-hero, TERF kayfabe—as hollow, two-faced, and impotent behind their own concentric veneers).

(exhibit 95a1a: Artist, top-left: unknown, source; bottom-left: Katy DeCobray; top-middle and middle: unknown; bottom-middle: unknown; right: Frank Miller. Batman is the posterchild of vigilantism. Coded as noir and medieval, his antics promote both the myth of the useful billionaire and the false rebel tied to child soldiers coded through the monomyth to serve the dark knight [Robin and his or her many iterations working under the same ol’ Bruce Wayne]. He is awash in Gothic splendor tied to old family wealth, white privilege, entitlement, and bad life choices. Not only does he get police protection, but he’s lauded for being “hunted” by the cops while living a double life: the aristocrat and the thug who’s owed sex and yet whose horrible plurality explodes into pathetic blubbering and psychotic, Don-Quixote-level violence against the poor who he blames for killing his mega-wealthy parents [the cause for these criminogenic conditions to start with]. By extension, his enemies are generally queer-coded and his imitators are basically fascists in practice—i.e., the schtick minus the capital, but the same level of emotional health and broken childhood homes.

To this, similar characters generally reflect a fascist tendency within their makers, with Hajime Isayama being an unapologetic genocide denier/Japanese fascist. Seldomusings writes in “The Possible Disturbing Dissonance Between Hajime Isayama’s Beliefs and Attack on Titan’s Themes” [2013]:

Hajime Isayama, the 27 year old author of Attack on Titan, supposedly expressed these beliefs in June on his private Twitter account @migiteorerno, but this rumor has only recently been circulating the Internet. June was also when South Koreans (some fans of the manga and anime, some not?) discovered a post on Isayama’s official blog from 2010 where he said the character Dot Pixis was based on historical figure Yoshifuru Akiyama, who Isayama called frugal and respectable. Because Akiyama was a general of the Imperial Japanese Army who contributed to the colonization of Korea and the commander of the army stationed in Korea under Japanese occupation, Koreans commented on the post in disgust and anger that Isayama would admire someone considered a war criminal, going as far as death threats.

The @migiteorerno account is private, but some tweets are visible on the site Favstar that organizes tweets by number of times favorited and retweeted. One that has been spread across South Korean news articles to various blog posts apparently reads “I believe that categorizing the Japanese soldiers who were in Korea before Korea was a country(??) as ‘Nazis’ is quite crude. Also, I do not believe that the people whose populations were increased twofold by Japan’s unification(??) of the country can be compared to people who experienced the Holocaust. This type of miscategorization is the source of misunderstanding and discrimination.” @migiteorerno dismisses how Japan’s imperialist war atrocities are often considered the East Asia equivalent to the Holocaust, instead giving credit for Korean’s modernization to Japan’s colonization. The blogger behind Ask a Korean acknowledges the complications of Holocaust comparisons in this post and Korea’s resulting modernization in this post, in both explaining better than I could how it does not excuse Japan’s past actions and present avoidance.

Attack on Titan fans have found connections between @migiteorerno and Hajime Isayama that point to it being his private Twitter account, such as @migiteorerno mentioning seeing movies right before Isayama’s official blog did, Japanese fans on 2ch treating @migiteorerno’s tweet about the official Attack on Titan video game as Isayama’s words, and @migiteorerno communicating with and following Isayama’s professional associates. In addition, how @migiteorerno’s tweet ignores Japan’s war atrocities to instead focus on South Korea’s modernization parallels how Isayama ignored Akiyama’s war crimes to instead focus on his life as a countryside school principal after the army. The latest Attack on Titan official guidebook Outside Kou has also confirmed that heroine Mikasa Ackerman was named after the Japanese battleship Mikasa, a flagship of the Russo-Japanese War over control of Korea [source].

The secret identity of the tweets aside, the especially telling part is—like Killing Stalking—there exists a blank refusal by either author to take a hard stance against canonically fetishizing crime, war and various groups. In Isayama‘s case, this includes straight-up fascists. Since 2013, the show’s conclusions and central hero are undoubtedly fascist-coded, and more than a little like the alt-right weebs/weird canonical nerds who worship him for basically being an incel god-king/edgelord who unironically destroys the whole world through his de facto avatar, Eren Yeager.)

(exhibit 95a1b: Eren Yeager is like a sad, fascist clown; i.e., full of cis-het pathos towards the marginalized while posturing as one himself. Unlike the Joker’s ironic variant, his canonical criminality arguably lacks any queer subtext at all and instead stems from a self-victimhood that is imposed at all times. Clowns are hella queer but especially the villainous kind in popular stories. As Zina Hutton writes in her 2018 master’s thesis, “Queering the Clown Prince of Crime: A Look at Queer Stereotypes as Signifiers in DC Comics’ The Joker,” the Joker isn’t just queer-coded, but a threat to the hero and his extensions:

[historically] encoded with stereotypes about queer masculinity that are then used to create a pervasive perception of the Joker as a villain whose queerness serves as a subtextual threat to Batman – and his fans. 

The Joker is one in a long line of pop culture villains whose queer-coding appears to come from a place of unquestioned and casual homophobia and that requires serious assessment as the Joker has set the mold for multiple other villains. As superhero comics increase their impact on other forms of media (such as young adult novels, video games, and films), it is important to analyze the way that media creators working in these industries construct narratives around characters like the Joker whose identity comes with loaded messages about what queerness looks like for their audiences. Messages that serve as signifiers – signals about something intended to reach the audience. The most relevant example is that of the queer signifier as it is supposed to denote queerness and/or a queer identity in a character. These signifiers may take the form of literal signs such as the handkerchief code of the seventies or the use of certain kinds of slang (i.e., ballroom and queen slang as seen in the documentary Paris Is Burning). In this context, a queer signifier is supposed to signal the character’s queerness. Signifiers need not be stereotypes, but may take the form of stereotypes in media that are homophobic and/or anti-queer. 

Queer readings of the Joker come about because he pays Batman a little too much attention, because he wears makeup, and because he’s seen as incapable of and uninterested in having relationships with women. Additionally, the Joker is read as queer because he chases after Batman – when in the same vein, queer readings of the Batman usually don’t center on his relationship with the Joker or their unending game of cat and mouse. This distinction matters because this relationship, while having a mirror reflection of each characters’ focus represented, only acknowledges the Joker’s interest as one that could be read as queer. Batman’s fixed following of the Joker is seen as pure, just, and absolutely heterosexual while the Joker’s fixation on Batman is presented as deviant [source]. 

The irony of the incel as an edgelord is the person who could never establish meaningful social-sexual relationships with other people, yet who constantly insists that they aren’t gay. In other words, they aren’t closeted queer people or even criminally queer people like Jeffrey Dahmer was; they’re straight people acting out against the things they want but hate: anything perceived as weaker than their idea of strength, including women

[Artist, bottom-left: Harlisleys; top-right: Fabian Monk; bottom-right: TomatoSoup13. Our fag-hag Harley Quinn is a canonical bisexual according to Gayety. She’s the comics’ go-to unicorn, except Batman prefers Catwoman and her femdom catsuit. For us, she’s Galatea potential, a campy queen clown to delight in and emulate in our own odes to Galatea.]

but also monstrous-feminine male groups that they chase through self-hatred [Robin, obviously]. They fetishize Batman as the unironic the billionaire cop and Joker as the super-straight edgelord, either lacking the vamp-camp of older versions that subverted the cultural homophobia surrounding the Joker or making Batman the object of ridicule and fun. And while camp is [at least according to Sontag] “seriousness that fails,” there’s nothing funny about the real-life violence that unironic Jokers and Batman imitators perpetuate. They suck all the joy out of everything. “Camp” is less queer people “making it gay” and more making it our own by reclamation our stigmas and trauma.

The same effect applies to shonen anime as locking horns with its Western counterparts—with Frieza’s space-alien, clown-like persona evoking an unironic fascist desire for dominance when he’s on top [Frieza’s name and behavior rhyme a little too closely with Caesar’s] and causing a great deal of chaos when he’s reduced to the sideshow act. Similar to Dio from JoJo, Frieza can be a great deal of fun in ironic forms, but like that character is incredibly mean-spirited, the queer persona kettled into godlike, narcissistic, patriarchal extremes [see: Kefka Palazzo, below] instead of speaking for the oppressed through camp; i.e., the jester in the king’s court, the Loki to Goku’s Thor that desires to be Zeus, Caesar or Odin, but then—being queer-coded—can never reconcile with the system he has acquired top position inside. Simply put, there’s nowhere for him to go, no one for him to share it with or identify with, inside [even more so than straight men, but even straight men would grow restless—itching for yet-another-fight].

This is why the Saiyans don’t kill Frieza at the end; like Batman or any other “good” guy” you could think of inside superhero canon, they need him to justify their own position within Dragon Ball‘s centrist kayfabe. He’s the trickster in a straight scheme, and their debates and disputes are—in the shonen style—highly destructive; i.e., settled through force, but also heteronormative displays of strength with no quantifiable metric, just the recursive, straw-dog logic of “here comes a new challenger”: the statuesque body as swollen with traditional masculine power and Ragnarok-level glory in the face of possible defeat. The self-aggrandizing conflicts are manufactured, never-ending and doomed, with zero room for anything but raw physical violence and its incessant deification. These displays become the games of the gods, while around them the lives of ordinary people under ordinary material conditions, are blasted apart [Frieza destroyed the Saiyan planet for laughs, killing more than just the warriors on there, but all life].)

Before we proceed, then, here are some things about weird canonical nerds I want you to keep in mind as we move into Chapters Four and Five (which will discuss fascism/centrism as performed not just by white, cis-het men, but by male/female feminists, cis women and cis-queer/token trans, intersex and non-binary people; and how to challenge these Man Box assimilations and ideas of “correct” rebellion [bourgeois, “waifu” Amazonomachia, exhibit 98a3] during proletarian subterfuge [thus subverted, proletarian Amazonomachia, exhibit 111b] and extracurricular de facto education).

First, their class-dormant/class-traitorous hostility towards sex workers manifests in our four basic ways (re: “Scouting the Field“)

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

according to their canonical synthetic groupings (re: “The Basics“)

• destructive anger—i.e., possessive or bad-faith, “destructive” anger and defense of the state.
• destabilizing gossip—i.e., co-dependent, “prison sex” mentalities and rape culture as abuse-forming patterns through worsened (coercive)/missing social-sexual education and material conditions.
• “blind” pastiche/quoting (dogma)—i.e., the remediated praxis of unironic pastiche and quoting.
• unironic gender trouble/parody (camp)—i.e., a performative means of cryptofascism whose gagging or crapping their pants amounts to reactionary violence against out-groups during moral panics/the state of exception.
• bad-faith egregores that personify/disguise the bourgeois proponents’ frustration and pre-emptive aggression during said struggles.

I won’t have time to address each of these in turn; they’re more basic concepts I expect you to approach intuitively as we move forward.

Second, there are some underlying comorbidities that affect fascists/centrists to different degrees as weird canonical nerds (again, things to keep in mind as we proceed through the rest of the book):

• As we approached in Volume Two’s zombie section, fascism and vigilantism leads to mass alienation, disembowelment and ignominious death; i.e., the siding of vigilante and cop as similarly dehumanized in protection of the status quo. When defending property before people, the conscript’s sense of belonging is overwritten by a conditioned desire to attack and kill that which is different: the other. As we shall see, this Promethean outcome applies to male and female proponents, including weird canonical nerds, TERFs (girl-boss Amazons, Medusas, etc) and witch cops, etc, as stuck in the Man Box, acting like men. As power aggregates, the call to assimilate deepens. Former activists of convenience become afraid of change, of self-critique, of difference, which leads to their own destruction, but also the destruction of other people: the Promethean pursuit of traditional, masculine power through the monomyth.
• False power and insecurity. In fascist terms, power is false, self-destructive, Faustian. The hero, despite appearing strong, becomes fragile, ignorant, callow and doomed; their loneliness compounds, seeking a sense of community and belonging from a xenophobic con that ultimately drives them apart—i.e., the power trip becomes a death omen, fantasy and cult, fiddling while Rome burns. The only solution they have/acquire is to become stronger within this metric, which only disassociates them from the trauma they inflict on themselves and others. Death, rape and exploitation through toxic masculinity becomes cool, cherished for its Ragnarok-level endgame. The genocidal outcome/call to war is endlessly glorified. In wrestler parlance, the kayfabe becomes meta, embodied inside the text as imitated by life and vice versa. Back and forth, the Gothic villain—a tremendously flawed, emotionally stupid archetype—is supplied with the mantle of absolute power, to which he cannot imagine a world beyond Capitalism, thus being conditioned to “solve” its problems through mandatory holocaust. Only the mission matters, ending with the practitioner committing suicide; until then, they’re the ultimate slave—a heartless, unthinking drone utterly devoid of humanity and empathy. They bury their trauma, then bury and burn the world on an altar of perceived strength and defeatist, meaningless glory.

(artist: Jed Henry)

• Damnation and impotency. Again, and as we shall see, the same prescribed lack of choice can be said of Achilles or Darth Vader but also their real-life equivalents: incels, dude bros, TERFs, etc. Moody stoics like Eren Yeager are closer to Andrew Tate (or Sneako: D. Signifier’s “Anime Fans Deserve better than Eren Yeager,” 2023; timestamp: 1:38:18) than his own self-inflated sense of importance, while Conan was written by a weird, dorky loner who feared pretty much everything (and eventually shot himself for fear that Conan would eventually murder him). These lost boys never change or use their brains; frozen in time, they follow their chicken hawk leaders like zombies, shuffling to their doom. Indoctrination generally targets youthful trauma and desperation for acceptance for this reason, but some accountability needs to be had or fascists become blameless. They are not, desperately needing to recognize their own privilege as spoiling their satisfaction while alive, too busy chasing glory in death and the afterlife through a “there can only be one” mindset (a casualty of the mind through war/nation pastiche). Yet there is always someone stronger than them—or rather, something. Capitalism always wins, sacrificing its strongest heroes and personas for the state, first and foremost, forever.

For now, our focus is on canonical men’s arrested development and fragile ego (specifically their inability to take criticism) as something to manipulate by the chicken hawks poaching them; i.e., ringleaders with a far-reaching shadow that treats those inside like child soldiers longer after they grow up. Darkness abounds as persecution mania within the broader dark is exacerbated by the smaller shades lurking inside. Marginalized workers—even when reduced to white, cis-het women in a colonial binary—are eclipsed by men. In 1929, Virginia Woolf likened this eclipse to a shadow in A Room of One’s Own:

But after reading a chapter or two a shadow seemed to lie across the page. It was a straight dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter ‘I’. One began dodging this way and that to catch a glimpse of the landscape behind it. Whether that was indeed a tree or a woman walking I was not quite sure. Back one was always hailed to the letter ‘I’. One began to be tired of ‘I’. Not but what this ‘I’ was a most respectable ‘I’; honest and logical; as hard as a nut, and polished for centuries by good teaching and good feeding. I respect and admire that ‘I’ from the bottom of my heart. But—here I turned a page or two, looking for something or other—the worst of it is that in the shadow of the letter ‘I’ all is shapeless as mist. Is that a tree? No, it is a woman. But…she has not a bone in her body, I thought, watching Phoebe, for that was her name, coming across the beach. Then Alan got up and the shadow of Alan at once obliterated Phoebe. For Alan had views and Phoebe was quenched in the flood of his views (source).

As Woolf notes, this took centuries of “good teaching” and “feeding”—a kind of creative husbandry shepherded by dudes. I would argue it’s a curse, one drunk on its own terror and splendor and grappling with its interminable bugbears. The weight of their deeper heteronormative, capitalist implications is felt on the surface, where it breeds weird nerds through recursive canonical pastiche; i.e., bourgeois nerds.

Furthermore, the sum of this canonical praxis is designed to exploit workers inside a punitive system for the elite’s benefit: Patriarchal Capitalism and its accommodated “kings for a day.” For capital to work, it must—to a degree, anyways—surrender power in frontier territories it can police on loop. This goes for James Cameron’s liminally praxial nightmare vision of the retro-future and recuperated military scapegoats, which we’ve already discussed (re: Metroidvania, “The Quest for Power“). However, it also applies to other kings of the mode and their name-branded visions; re: Steven King (for once, pun not intended, but I’ll welcome it).

(artist: Justin Hillgrove)

Yes, Steven King is a weird canonical nerd—profoundly “weird,” but generally playing it safe and not very Marxist-Leninist (let alone anarcho-Communist). Hollywood just loves his monsters, but he profits off them far too much and says far too little in Marxist language to be considered a useful ally. The same goes for James Cameron. As I cite from this manuscript during Volume Zero (re: “Interrogating Power“),

Even at his most critical (when he was poor) he still pushed the girls around and called the shots; now he’s just a billionaire Marxist franchising “war” as activism but having no shortage of racism against Indigenous Peoples following the 2009 original and its 2022 sequel, The Shape of Water. Much of this has to do with Cameron’s blue-washed, white savior/Indian mentality for his own endless “war,” which ultimately lacks critical bite but makes white-owned companies billions of dollars:

In 2010 Cameron said something that did not exactly help his cause. He had been protesting against the building of the giant Belo Monte hydroelectric dam in the Amazon. The dam’s construction threatened the way of life of the Brazilian Xingu people. While speaking to The Guardian, he said, “A real-life Avatar confrontation is in progress. I felt like I was 130 years back in time watching what the Lakota Sioux might have been saying at a point when they were being pushed and they were being killed and they were being asked to displace and they were being given some form of compensation. This was a driving force for me in the writing of Avatar – I couldn’t help but think that if they [the Lakota Sioux] had had a time-window and they could see the future… and they could see their kids committing suicide at the highest suicide rates in the nation… because they were hopeless and they were a dead-end society – which is what is happening now – they would have fought a lot harder.” Many took that to mean that he was suggesting that the Lakota should have fought their colonizers harder (source: “Native Americans boycott James Cameron,” 2022).

All that money and Cameron can’t say the quiet part out loud—just lots of fancy effects and big explosions (“full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing!”). It’s what Communists say about their works that leads to iconoclastic praxis. So while King and Cameron are garden-variety centrists, their own canon is still productive when transformed. We can stand on their educated, giant, artistically-savvy shoulders to clamber out of the manmade well (that as a Ringu pun).

Unlike King and Cameron, I’m a profoundly weird, highly educated and artistic nerd (if this book is any clue) but deliberately choose to use my horny weirdness and classical education in actively iconoclastic ways (my definition, not King’s): in defense of the marginalized, specifically their basic human rights as things to fight for in demonstrably revolution—not the false revolution and empty hope of “popcorn monsters” and movie magic (sanctioned violence against women, black people and other marginalized groups) that historically puts white butts in seats (expanding the audience only intensifies the sacrifices that remain).

To quote Akim from Conan the Destroyer (1984): “There’s a better way to handle a wizard!” With a sexy-gay-Communist wizard of course! We’re not cops at all, bitches; we’re gossipers with perceptive pastiche and constructive anger that deescalates genocide by dismantling the state apparatus through transmuted propaganda! Our “trap cards” (that was a femboy pun) totally make you gay as fuck!

(exhibit 95a2: Artist: Virus-G. The anti-vigilante is someone who doesn’t work for the state or the status quo, but rather subverts it through iconoclast media that pokes fun of the monomyth; i.e., the wizard doesn’t tell the cis-het hero what to do, they steal the spotlight. That’s what Galatea does, overpowering Pygmalion as a mighty queen of camp.)

I’m not selling you a ticket, just asking you to think about the ones you buy yourself. Watching Steven King movie adaptations or reading his books is not revolutionary praxis; you have to say or do something with it, making monsters that challenge what is frankly cheap, bigoted slop (to varying degrees of moderate and reactive abuse) thus make food or other products taste better for everyone (though tummy aches and so-called “refeeding syndrome” often socio-politically manifest in those conditioned to subsist on brainless, uncritical/”apolitical” garbage; Zizek’s self-disparaging jab, “I already am eating from the trashcan” except it applies to outright enemies of workers; e.g., Jadis loved fast food and centrist media/interpretations equally). While the compelled guilt of neoliberal Capitalism is feeling bad about eating food that actually tastes better than anything the elite provide—i.e., AAA dreck, fast food and storebought brands-it is possible to make products taste good without committing genocide: living under Capitalism isn’t a zero sum game. This includes ourselves, our bodies and our reclaimed culture and Gothic poetics as the product. We make things taste better because profit above all else isn’t our endgame. Everything is more colorful, pleasurable and hard-hitting (the sweet, sweet demon-wizard-unicorn sex by gay space Communists and Satanic rebels).

By comparison, weird canonical nerds unironically use their weirdness to defend heteronormative canon as a sacred extension of Capitalism—i.e., something to wolf down, ask for seconds, then emulate. Men like Steven King and uncritical consumers of King’s work keep the market “free” in neoliberal terms, but also for its sexist symptoms to flourish (implying efficient profit and infinite growth, but repressing the violence of either of those things). Their behavior amounts to neoliberal hero worship at the billionaire level, but also among various “working class heroes” like King. He may have been relatively poor (for a white dude) once; striking oil, he’s just another accommodated “intellectual” trying to emulate the owner class and spread their harmful ideas amongst their own fans. Even when he’s sexist, the guy can do no wrong in their eyes precisely he makes money having formerly come “from nothing. Aja Ramano’s praise is nigh endless:

It’s nearly impossible to overstate how influential Stephen King is. For the past four decades, no single writer has dominated the landscape of genre writing like him. To date, he is the only author in history to have had more than 30 books become No. 1 best-sellers. He now has more than 70 published books, many of which have become cultural icons, and his achievements extend so far beyond a single genre at this point that it’s impossible to limit him to one — even though, as the world was reminded last year when the feature film adaptation of It became the highest-grossing horror movie on record, horror is still King’s calling card. […]

Born in 1947, King grew up poor in Durham, Maine, the younger son of a single working mother whose husband, a merchant mariner, abandoned his family when King was still a toddler. A lifelong fan of speculative fiction, King began writing seriously while attending the University of Maine Orono. It was there, in 1969, that he met his wife, Tabitha. By 1973, King was a high school English teacher drawing a meager $6,400 a year. He had married Tabitha in 1971, and the pair lived in a trailer in Hampden, Maine, and each worked additional jobs to make ends meet. King wrote numerous short stories, some of which were published by Playboy and other men’s magazines, but significant writerly success eluded him.

Tabitha, who’d been one of the first to read Stephen’s short stories in colleges, had loaned Stephen her own typewriter and refused to let him take a higher-paying job that would mean less time to write. Tabitha was also the one who discovered draft pages of what would become Carrie tossed in Stephen’s trash can. She retrieved them and ordered him to keep working on the idea. Ever since, King has continued to pay Tabitha’s encouragement forward. He frequently and effusively blurbs books from established as well as new authors, citing a clear wish to leave publishing better than he found it. Meanwhile, Tabitha is a respected author in her own right, as are both of their sons, Joe Hill and Owen King. Carrie, which King sold for a $2,500 advance, would go on to earn $400,000 for the rights to its paperback run (source: “His Legacy Is So Much More Than Horror,” 2018).

(exhibit 95b: Source: A Call to Men: “Healthy, respectful manhood means valuing and respecting women, girls, and LGBQ, Trans, and nonbinary people — and respecting and valuing oneself by striving to live authentically.” Keep “authenticity” in mind when we examine Liver King in Chapter Four, exhibit 98b1; his marketing of an authentic life as something that only non-degenerate persons can perform; anyone else is sub-human, but especially critics.)

Assimilation fantasy and class character aside, consuming Steven King’s false hope of neoliberalism alongside neoliberal/fascist personas of strength like Caleb Hart gradually makes consumer culture uninformed, passive and bigoted. Beyond cis-het men, even, Man Box culture affects seemingly rebellious, but actually subservient groups and their regressive cultural markers: the Amazon, Medusa or dominatrix as subjugated, their replicated aesthetics turned away from their proletarian critical function in service of the elite behind the mask. Another “brain crypt” myopia, Mark Greene (a leading proponent of Man Box theory and cis-het allyship) rightly points out how man box culture leads to any bigotry you could list, including misogynistic, “rape culture” subtypes: incels, nice guys, neckbeards and gamers (the identity having colonized the profession it comes from) but also TERFs and feminist bigots. Trapped inside a sexist mode of thought, these persons fall victim to older inhabitants who, incredibly bad in bed, have already fallen under its hypnotic spell:

• reactionary grifters like Andrew Tate, who—conflating sex and penetration with war and rape (the penis is a knife or a bullet)—casually hawk toxic masculinity as a poor, dip-your-toes-in-the-water “disguise” for real-world sex crimes and pyramid-schemes-for-dummies. In either case, Tate is a “bad lover,” using the lover boy” to dominate and compel women to make money for him by deceiving, isolating and pimping them out, then selling this technique to other men disguised as self-help advice (Hasan’s “Lawyer DESTROYS Andrew Tate,” 2023).
• Moderate shills like Caleb “I’m not a rapist” Hart, who preach their own sacred education tied to personalized sexist brands that worship the sexist past, while sweeping systemic abuse of working women, people of color and queer persons under the table.

Either facilitates fresh bricks for the mind prison, a monster factory whose reassembled Confidence(tm) turns men into weird, unfuckable nerds with zero “game,” girl talk, social awareness, or critical-thinking. Yet, they “trigger” when they feel threatened—”threatening” for them meaning an end to the Matrix jar of illusion goo that their little, fragile brains float inside. The bind is quixotic and Promethean; the nerds don’t think themselves monsters, working for the cause until it inevitably destroys them.

To prevent rehabilitation, fascism discourages self-reflection despite the feelings of doubt. However, so does Capitalism, the hypermasculine sophistry extending to a gradient of neoliberal moderates like Steven King or Caleb Hart, who don’t realize (or care) how much their bad instruction contributes to the rise of fascism within societies already decaying towards that outcome; i.e., through Man Box culture, Pygmalion-esque doubles and neoliberal war/nation pastiche. More likely they hide their true intentions behind various masks and personas. That’s literally the whole point of bad faith—to blend in, then attack with bad intent, often as “lobotomized” creatures of habit. Bad habits, bad education, bad play; low emotional/Gothic intelligence, canonical praxis. It’s something that survives not just in the men we’ve examined so far, but those who LARP as being more progressive and outspoken than they actually are—e.g., Ian Kochinski (a real piece of work; more on him in Chapter Four).

(exhibit 95c: Top-far-left: Cus D’amato and Mike; middle-far-left: Ryunosuke Tsukue; top-middle: Gozer from Ghostbusters: Afterlife, 2021; middle: concept art for that film; bottom-far-left: Kairo; bottom-middle: Vladimir Tytla, Disney’s animator for Chernabog [Fun Fact Film’s “The Origin of the Chernabog,” 2020]; top-right: Betsy Brantley, the human stand-in for cartoon Jessica Rabbit; button-right: Heidi Klum as Jessica Rabbit.)

Women’s role—if the Woolf quote was any clue—are left disembodied, without any subject of themselves. Either they are outright victims the likes of which King rehashes for a quick paycheck, or they are the scapegoated workers of their own death warrants—forced to reify “kick me signs” with their bodies, their voices, their labor as stolen from and commissioned by powerful men with a canonical worldview in mind. This Symbolic Order takes time, effort, and work to maintain. Heidi Klum’s costume, for example, took nine hours, rubber eyelids and a fake plastic butt (similar to Quigley’s “Barbie doll crotch” from Chapter One). For any of these she-devils, this special-effect, “plastic reality” (re: Julie A. Turnock) is deeply heteronormative—with limited wiggle room for anyone but cis-het white men to say anything. The woman, then, is destroyed, along with the past she represents (re: Picasso). This includes white, cis-het women, who are more privileged than any other AFAB group. Even they become “ghosts” that men fear in truly bizarre and sad ways; i.e., Matthew Lewis’ Bloody Nun behind which an awful crime has been committed, over and over and over.

Many more, as we’ll see, become furious monsters: killer ghosts, but also Amazons, Medusas, succubae working for the state by leveling the gaze at the easiest to blame: those they can punch down against—each other. That’s the transgenerational curse, in Marxist terms: labor theft as demonized, bricked over by gruesome, “whitewash” cryptonyms—the living burial of rape culture tied to power structures dotted with hauntologized, Gothic threats of systemic violence: gargoyles. Not only was the albatross vision of Gozer thoroughly colonized by female bodies and workers made to do a male patrons bidding—re: O’Keefe and Stieglitz—but in true chimeric fashion, 2021 Gozer was the byproduct of three different women to produce a fetishized female bogeyman that generates whatever “arbiter” moral panic men want to evoke: a “hag in disguise” to protect the women and children from [and venerate the image of childhood heroes like Bill Murray and his creepy onscreen counterpart, Dr. Venkman]. All the same, the face, body and voice of Gozer are made with real women—Olivia Wilde, Emma Portner and Shohreh Aghdashloo—who, in this Commie Mommy’s opinion, worked hard to make Gozer something other than a punching bag.

Like Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West, the most intriguing thing about the film (from a Gothic-Communist/gender studies perspective) is the witch herself. It’s same ghostly creative tradition that enchanted Chernobog from Fantasia, 1940; Jessica Rabbit from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, 1988; or Kairo‘s creepy-as-fuck, dancer-performed ghost walk (Spikima Movies’ “Anatomy of the Scariest Scene Ever”)—not just the ghost of the counterfeit, but in the counterfeit and on its surface, its chronotopes and hauntology through famous proverbs and oral traditions. From a Western perspective, the past becomes a bad copy of itself, one whose fabled atrocities hold Cartesian proponents in thrall. It becomes like a bad dream, one that never seems to end.

Somewhere inside, though, there’s lurks the potential for a revolutionary Trojan to emerge, to wake up: a feisty Galatea. This awaited return is not like Lovecraft’s dead Cthulhu—who the author prophesized through Islamophobia; i.e., the “mad Arab” scribbling about the Great Old one dreaming at R’lyeh—but a counter Numinous whose banshee scream terrifies the death knight, paladin and pope, as well as Lovecraft and similar scholarly Cartesians like Dr. Goody (whose ruins of Ca’n Dar evoke a similar inherited genocidal/survivor’s guilt) to death: “That is not dead which can eternal lie, / And with strange aeons even death may die” as a reclaimed old wives’ tale, assisting labor rebellion and class consciousness as a continued negotiation through undead/demonic poetics.

In short, as monstrous-feminine having our revenge, we faggot whores are Galatea, hence the thing they fear most; i.e., for having wronged in the past, present and future through capital’s rapacious profit motive. Armed with the knowledge that the state cannot be trusted, then, parallel societies may hijack the shared boogeyman’s mantra/zombie tyrant’s refrain: “In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.” In turn, it can be used to revive a hauntological Dark Mother that challenges the Cycle of Kings’ inexorable march towards total genocide. No more Pygmalion kings, good or bad; no more elite or state; something whispered about but resurrected afresh can revive out of a Gothic imagination once camped by Mathew Lewis, James Whale, Ann Rice and Cassandra Peterson. Now it shall be camped by us as taking up Galatea’s mantle—to kill capital’s darlings on the Aegis:

(exhibit 96: Artist, right: Jean-Léon Gérôme.

Left: The “false deference” and female rage of Sadako Yamamura, the ghost of the counterfeit from Ringu. While she can be parodied into friendlier forms that are still sex-positive [re: exhibit 41g2, “Understanding Vampires“], here she emerges from the viral VHS tape [which is a poor medium for copying as VHS tapes decay when copied, but whatever] and kneels threateningly before the hero detective. Her fingernails are missing [a sign of torture, but also live burial—of trying to claw one’s way out]. She pursuits him into the other room and parts her black veil [eat your heart out, Ann Radcliffe], striking him dead with her baleful gaze. Her MO is the petrifying gaze of female revenge, shaming the accommodate male detective to death. It’s a Gothic trope, but an iconoclastic one if we consider the source of the shame: him confronting that she was raped by men just like him. Brain reverse-raped! His death is symbolic of the death of the patriarch in its unwitting servants: dude bros.

Right: Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “Truth Coming Out of Her Well to Shame Mankind” [1896]. As Ariela Gittlen writes in “A Brief History of Female Rage in Art”: 

Academic French painter Jean-Léon Gérôme’s take on the allegorical figure of Truth (specifically, the philosopher Democritus’s aphorism: “Of truth we know nothing, for truth is in a well”) differs from contemporary interpretations in a number of ways. A beautiful nude woman emerges from a well, an open-mouthed shout of anger on her face and a whip in her hand, rather than the usual mirror. Although she is nude (a blunt reference to “the naked truth”), she looks ready to charge straight for the viewer in a full-throated battle cry [source].

Both Sadako the ghost and Gérôme’s Truth are cryptomimetic, echoing hidden atrocities buried within art during oppositional praxis.)

We’ll continue exploring female monsters as recuperated and subverted entities in Chapter Four. To close out Chapter Three, let’s apply the bad education of Pygmalion’s shadow to our weird canonical nerds, da boys, as a symptom of the Pygmalion effect (re: exhibit 12, “Challenging the State“). Right off the bat, you can practically hear it in the defenders of canon: “Láthspell I name him! Ill news is an ill guest!” For example, Rob Ager aka Collative Learning smugly declares, “Most people in the world, or about half of them by my count, don’t want to live in so-called ‘reality'” (source: “12 Delusions About the Future of Humanity,” 2020). But he really has a hard-on for Capitalism—all at once unable to define it, but confidently asserting it reductively as “trade.” It’s the “all rectangles are squares” conflation, with the “end of Capitalism ‘delusion,'” as he calls it, being a cheap “Gotcha!” moment: “Exchange of labor will exist “after” Capitalism, therefore Capitalism hasn’t ended!”

Wrong. Provided we don’t all die first, Capitalism and its histories will end by Capitalism evolving into structures of labor exchange that abolish privatization: Communism and its stated goal, according to Marx. It’s not mystical, but I suspect Ager doesn’t know enough about Marx to comment. Instead, he sounds like a calmer version of John Cleese gnashing his teeth at international Communism (“Bicycle Repairman,” 1969)—with Ager offering his own smug psychoanalysis in the bargain; i.e., a kind of armchair critic “talking down” to that “half of the world” he was referring to. Care to guess who he’s talking about (hint: not men)? “Even if you do nationalize an industry, that doesn’t end the monopoly. Sometimes, a state-run monopoly can be worse than a market-based monopoly.” While I am an anarcho-Communist and think that Marxist-Leninism is historically imperfect, it’s still light years ahead of neoliberal Capitalism. Ager’s gambit is Red-Scare jargon and neoliberal apologetics; i.e., keep the market “free!”

However, it’s also profoundly sexist, with Ager worshiping his own education and canonical praxis through his endless reviews; he thinks that films were better when “men were men,” but also Capitalist. He’s a gold-star standard for Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism; he can count the number of pubes around Stallone’s asshole, but can’t imagine a world beyond Capitalism. In other words, not so different from Oliver Harper’s In Search of the Last Action Heroes (2019). Search all you want; their disappearance is only expanding to evolve beyond men as the universal client/distributer of state sanctioned, dimorphic violence. Forget “This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions” (with poor Gozer from our sample essay being hectored and boxed up like Pandora by an old sexist dinosaur like Bill Murray and his den of grandpa pussy thieves); this is a learned behavior that has already been learned and canonized at the cultural level by smug cis-het white dudes just like Ager closing ranks on various registers (see: Todd Grande defending Jordan Peterson; source: Shark3ozero’s “The Most Cucked Jordan Peterson Fan Ever,” 2023). Power aggregates, embodying MLK’s infamous condemnation from the Birmingham jail of the white moderate as a class enemy for all exploited workers. Worse, it becomes something to emulate by various assimilated token actors.

(exhibit 97a1: We’ve already discussed action heroes as vigilantes in Volume Two; this fucking poster celebrates vigilantes of a neoconservative, fascist sort under neoliberal dogma. It’s so sexist, so jingoistically lobotomized, vampiric and in love with itself—just look at those phallic rockets, blasting off orgasmically to the thought of neoliberal war and its sweet, sweet profits [the kind defended by Joe Takagi, the neoliberal from Die Hard, 1988, and which Hans Gruber, the movie’s recuperated fascist leader, tries to steal by threatening profits through false revolution, hypocritically lecturing the corporation’s “legacy of greed” while pilfering their pockets for himself and throwing his conspicuously expendable crew of warrior-mercenaries under the bus]! The ’80s hero worship, revenge fantasy and worker exploitation dressed up in retro, war/rape apologia—may they never come back. Note: As a filthy Commie, I certainly enjoy many of these movies, but I don’t endorse their neoliberal worldview. It’s poison for the brain. Also, where’s my boy toy from the future at, Kyle Reese? Why are there four fonts for the title? So many questions!)

You know the back-handed compliment, “Behind every great man is a woman?” Well, behind every “great” man is a bad-faith master—a structure and its dogma that teach the next in line like dogs to bite. To cite Jonathan Banks, this isn’t a master/slave dynamic where consent happens in negotiated[1] good faith, though; it’s the false father of gladiatorial sports and corporate sharks swimming in the treacherous waters of Capitalism. Think of it as Ryunosuke Tsukue from Sword of Doom (exhibit 95), a serial killer samurai who’s unorthodox style “lures” would-be challengers into a false sense of security before he murders them quickly and mercilessly. Then combine that with Cus D’amato’s toxic advice to Mr. Dream himself, Mike Tyson (also exhibit 95): “Throw punches with bad intent.” Neither Tsukue nor Tyson was a brutish, sluggish “ham and egger”; they were coached and classically trained by older men within their own times and places to deceive their opponents and show them no mercy in competitions of warlike strength. In Tyson’s own words, he tearfully announces:

I’m a fucking student of war; I know all the warriors, from Charlemagne, Achilles the number one warrior of all warriors. From there Alexander and Napoleon; I know them all, I read them all, I studied them all. I know the art of fighting, I know the art of war, that’s all I ever studied. That’s why I was feared. That’s why they feared me when I was in the ring, because I was an annihilator that’s all I was born for. And now those days are gone, it’s empty, I’m nothing. That’s the reason why I’m crying, because I’m not that person no more, and I miss him. Because sometimes I feel like a bitch, because I don’t want that person to come out, because if he comes out; hell is coming with him (source: Mike Tyson’s “Sugar Ray Leonard | Hotboxin’ with Mike Tyson,” 2020).

Cus wasn’t a sweet old man, you see; he was a powerful old man who famously coached poor, starving athletes that he recognized for their “talent”—useful to him as something he could turn into a money-making champion. In the 1950s Cus coached Floyd Patterson, who Sonny Liston (a meaner Jack Johnson and hardened to fight in the US penitentiary system) promptly ate alive (Rainy Day Boxing’s “Boxing’s Most Intimidating and Unwanted Champion,” 2021). In the 1980s, Cus scooped a teenage Mike up off the streets, then worked him like a dog until Cus up and died, leaving Mike to fall into the hands of Don King. Eventually Mike was manipulated by those around him into exposing his heel’s aura of invincibility (that sports fans love and which Mike played the “black knight” of sports to a tee: the centrist language of the “indestructible” heel personifying fascist warriors of older, medieval times), fucking up on his own accord when he went to jail for rape and aggravated assault. Cus is to blame. He didn’t teach Mike how to be a good person; he taught him how to fight and more to the point, to fear Cus. Cus used Mike and prepared him for failure later in life: a warrior Jesus “patsy” on part with Link from Blood Father.

Note: Refer to “Back to Necropolis” for further discussions of Afronormativity; i.e., that include Mike Tyson’s replicas in videogames, but also black Nazis in stories like Castlevania and Star Wars. —Perse, 4/21/2025

As discussed in Volume One, Mel Gibson’s Link illustrates the perpetual victim of men like Cus (re: exhibit 25, “War Culture“): the titular Preacher as a smaller chicken hawk in a circle of progressively bigger ones—a patriarchal pecking order that leads up to men like Caleb Hart, Steven King and upwards higher to heads of state, church oligarchs, billionaires and other ghouls of capital. Link’s myth of the redeemed gunslinger is useful if only to showcase the flaws on Capitalism in ways that hit hard. War takes our sons and fathers, no matter how streetwise; its war and rape culture takes our daughters, love, labor and brains and uses them up, burns through them like fuel. If Link was the dad I never had, I wept for his death onscreen using tears I have inside for my own lost father. Dad never listened and society wouldn’t help him; his blood and kin wouldn’t listen to me decades ago, and I have no desire to beat a beat a dead horse that refuses to drink (a double horse pun). But I see so many badly trained people fighting like dogs in defense of the very structure that makes all workers its bitch (a double-dog pun, with a third pun tacked on).

This concept—of fascist/neoliberal, Pavlovian “dog training”—is a facet of Pygmalion’s shadow, which menticides male workers, fucking over in many different ways, and breeds generations of weird canonical nerds, who breed weird canonical nerds, on and on. Sisyphus 55 notes a lack of intersectional safe spaces for white men (the most privileged group exploited by the bourgeoisie) to discuss social issues (“Journey Into The MANOSPHERE,” 2022; timestamp: 20:25). Deprived of conservative guarantees amid declining Capitalism, they instead turn to perceived strongmen for answers, garnering a sophomore, “wise fool” status through the acquisition of cheap, easy knowledge that confirms their birthright worldview—i.e., stupid nerds who think they know a lot, when their behavior is really more about enforcement of neoliberal canon, treating videogames as a colonized pedagogic sphere under Patriarchal Capitalism. In turn, the dated views they uphold extend to their own bodies and personal property as instructional to everyone around them. Overcompensation aside, they project their insecurities onto a dated worldview they must defend at all costs; their strength is a complete lie and they’re nothing without it.

Capitalism’s hauntologies aren’t just mind prisons that closet people; they’re fortress mentalities that make soldiers. Not only will employees and their fanbase close ranks to defend heroes of neoliberal Capitalism (including their employers and owners) through what I’ll call “parasocial “docking”: where two men “dock” by having one wrap his foreskin around the exposed head of the other’s penis. Why a queer metaphor? Simply put, I’m using it for comedic effect; i.e., to shame the super straight “tech bros” who are not only up on Elon Musk’s hog 24/7 but frankly—as mentioned during the manifesto—do some pretty awful things to normal working people, including artists (re: drawslaves and paint pigs). As a whole, neoliberal Capitalism tends to defend bigoted consumers and content creators/grifters in order to preserve itself as a system. Bans do happen to notable figures/sizeable channels like Kanye West, Andrew Tate, Low Tier God (Joon the King’s ” My Cyberstalker NEEDS to be stopped,” 2021) or Sneako (J Aubrey’s “The Decay of Sneako,” 2022). However, their corporate de-platformers tend to be conspicuously lenient, only dropping the hammer after these men go “mask-off,” offering the usual “red pill” grift to “escape the Matrix” (the usual fascist snake oil, in other words). Growing comfortable with open acts of fascism, all were banned for refusing to dogwhistle, promoting various criminal behaviors denounced by mainstream media—anti-Semitism; sex trafficking and domestic abuse; and child porn—or copying someone who promotes these activities. And even when it’s obvious that someone is a predator, like Ian Kochinski or Low Tier God[2] are, it’s very rare that anything is done to address these matters at a system level (which would interfere with the profit motive).

Again, money is the point and takes priority as it did and continues to do with Steven King or Caleb Hart. It doesn’t matter if they ruffle some feathers; they just have to be “mask on” about it. But even the more radical are privileged by virtue of the situation, poor businessmen who can continuously fail, even when the bad grift radicalizes them to the point of jailtime, temporary exile or constant ridicule (re: Low Tier God, Sneako, and Andrew Tate; to Donald Trump; to Adolf Hilter’s  Nazi party to Radcliffe’s Count Montoni; etc). They can always return and be welcomed a sizeable portion of the room because Capitalism is geared towards such behaviors; i.e., profit through unethical controversy and cheap, unscrupulous destruction masquerading as “speaking truth to power” and other forms of false rebellion. False rebellions fail until they don’t and then fascism drops the mask.

(exhibit 97a1: Source, bottom: MoistCr1TiKaL; right: Turkey Tom’s Instagram [tombutdark] in 2023 [nice shirt, dumbass]. They have all the smug, shonen-esque confident of someone who’s never actually been oppressed by consumes a million stories about it; i.e., Zuko from The Last Airbender [2005] except terminally obtuse [closer to Eren Yeager in that respect]. When their backs are against the wall, then, people like penguinz0 and Turkey Tom are bad allies/fair weather friends. In short, they’re white cis-het boys with Instagram accounts who use their platforms to move merchandise and treat social activist and reactionary regression as the same thing: content to farm. They’re not activists, but centrist profiteers who, in appearance, are a category removed from being like Andrew Tate Logan Paul. In truth, they’re functionally the same except Logan’s a bigger asshole in public about it and Tate says the quiet part out loud. It won’t take much for them to turn heel, but even if they stayed babyface they’d still be centrist, thus oppressive to actual minorities.)

The problem is, this “mask on” (or at least partially on) abuse has existed for years, corporate tolerance allowing the shared Man Box message to germinate far wider than it would otherwise. Centrists finger wag at reactionaries and leftists alike, but continued to waste their platform making a great deal of money that isn’t geared towards changing the system in any meaningful way—i.e., doesn’t change material conditions or take hard stances that would lead into the changing of material conditions.

For example, penguinz0 telling iDubbz not to apologize for being a bigot (D’Angello Wallace’s “Charlie and the Hot Take Factory: Wrong About iDubbbz,” 2023); Turkey Tom defending Low Tier God[3] by not calling out his bigotry for what it is, choosing instead to “roast” him for content, instead (“Low Tier God Roasted Me (my response),” 2023); and NBC’s refusal to hold its abusive men accountable despite a veneer of elevated propriety (Georg Rockall-Schmidt’s “The Allegations That Could Destroy NBC,” 2022) or using the loudness of weird, toxic incels/fascist men like Andrew Tate to profit off controversy instead of challenging their views in ways that would actually scare off future weird canonical nerds just like him (Georg Rockall-Schmidt’s “Andrew Tate and the Lost Boys,” 2023). Such apologist refrains are frequently made by those who, short of total war and/or nuclear disaster, will never be immediately affected on a systemic level by the dialog they’re tone-policing: white, cis-het men.

As a whole, Capitalism is designed to function like this. By shielding its chosen foils from criticism and punishment—but also financially incentivizing their toxic, duplicitous behavior by allowing them platforms—the structure and its proponents helps bigots make money and spread fascist ideas under its banner. On par with normalizing Nazis within centrist theatre, the elite’s tolerating of fascism in the “free” marketplace of ideas belies an elaborate, multimedia distraction: ubiquitous, orderly battles of good-vs-evil that drain the public’s ability to use their imaginary potential to critique structures of power through their socio-material extensions that lead to genuine material suffering (a ghost of the counterfeit that Steven King is only too happy to exploit). While centrism commonly manifests in popular media (more on this in Chapter Four), it parallels real-world establishment politics—i.e., American Democrats funding alt-right groups whose socio-political authoring pens yet another “greater evil” to grapple with the “greater good” (Second Thought’s “Why Are Democrats Funding The Far Right?” 2022). All to fortify the status quo, this only leads to fascism in the long run.

Sex-positive individuals, then, are faced with a colossal problem: Canonical bodies belong to an institution that colonizes everything around it, discouraging iconoclasm in favor of so-called “perfect” bodies representative of perfect masculine ideals inside a perfect top-down structure that promotes a perfect “past.” This means that whatever utopian paradigm shift we want to impose has to occur within the disguise-like means and materials of society as it exists presently (we’ll examine this concept briefly for the moment, then examine it more fully in Chapter Five): We must confront the monsters of Capitalism that artists, producers and consumers invoke, reeducating these individuals through sex-positive variants to reimagine/restructure the world. Only then can these old, tired tropes vanish be laid to rest and the narrative of the crypt finally end:

(artist: Elena Berezina)

The canon of the present uses ambivalent hauntological imagery that I, as an iconoclast, seek to alter. I don’t want to ban the use of monster sex, for example; I want to change how it’s perceived through the Superstructure by making not just shaping-shifting “good” goblins, but revolutionary Amazons, Medusas and other monstrous-feminine Galatea that challenge the scores of false rebels that Pygmalion centrists like Steven King either produce themselves, or refuse to challenge in any hard sense when a straight-up TERF like J.K. Rowling writes Troubled Blood under the penname of a gender conversion therapist. No, the unironic kayfabe is good for business, and King would rather wag his finger than say the quiet part out loud. Despite being old as dirt and a multi-millionaire, he’s an operative framed as a king with a mighty persona, pulling all manner of things from his forehead. As this book has so far illustrated, the historio-material function of these complicated symbols—specifically when utilized by state agents and capitalists forging American propaganda—is regularly transphobic. However, it doesn’t need to be. Even so, we’ve yet to explore in greater detail how moderacy treats iconoclastic alternatives. This judgment includes those who corporations historically pander to: cis-het men who, if they’re really lucky, get to grow up and be just like Steven King or Caleb Hart (which is more likely for cis-het men, but still not a given; Capitalism only lets so many people have wealth).

Even among the lucky few, there’s a tremendous amount of regressive sentiment. Sexist men are the obvious, traditional example. While male gamers function as entitled clients targeted, shaped, and groomed by the system, weird canonical nerds become defined entirely by what they consume and personally own, not how they think. For them, “knowledge” isn’t tied to intellectual analysis; it’s linked to a reactionary consumer model whose worship of naked financial success and proud apolitical indifference scapegoats social-sexual activism: “Go woke, go broke.” In believing that videogames are made exclusively for them, Gamergate types become accommodated, bred through pure consumption to think that videogames should be made just for them. Whenever they aren’t the center of attention, they act slighted or betrayed by companies who dare to cater to other demographics in search of profit. This includes corporate appropriation through Rainbow Capitalism. Whether male or female, fascists literally can’t tell the difference between moderate feminism and genuine sex-positivity (with many more trying to confuse the two, as we shall see).

The reason for this conflict between fascism and capital is that neoliberals have capital, thus care about profits, first and foremost. History is a living document they rewrite to suit their needs as capitalists; i.e., the conquerors, having won and assumed control, using the means of production to make AAA, big-budget illusions: “The state fashions its propaganda not about what is happening in the present and what will happen in the future; it also fashions propaganda by re-writing the past” (Renegade Cut’s “Who Won the Space Race?” 2021; timestamp: 12:59).

In keeping with capital, this requires the creation of enemies by those in power to distract and divide from the fact that workers are being sucked dry by a system controlled by a small number of incredibly influential and ruthless people with their hands on the levers of power and human-looking masks over their shriveled ghoul faces: State power aggregates against opposing aggregate forces within the working class, but it also dehumanizes the elite and their smaller vampire servants through an endless pursuit of profit and disguising of genocide as an integral part of this process, to which deception is also integral. Any vampire fears exposure—the gay man because he will be staked during moral panic; the bourgeoisie because they will be outed as liars, but also weird, pathetic liars who literally only care about money and nothing else—mega vampires who hide in plain sight, wearing expensive, Wall Street suits and Chanel makeup that can’t quite reach their souless, doll-like eyes:

(artist: The Meme Industrial Complex)

Our exposé on neoliberalism and strategy to recultivate a bourgeois Superstructure through Gothic poetics obviously effects the elite, but they are sheltered by a massive class divide. You won’t bump into the elite, who are too busy bombing a foreign country by satellite, marshalling the CIA against them, or embargoing them into oblivion (“all displays of soft power”) while getting their nails done to frankly be bothered with the local riff-raff. However, they are terrified of organized labor, thus will orchestrate pollical movements that serve as a convenience counter mechanism: to control labor solidarity as outside of their material influence (re: “Why Are Democrats Funding The Far Right?“)—i.e., outside of the written word. To this, they become distanced, thus alienated from the fascist/centrist police who invoke total/good war and street-level crackdowns to do their bidding (“displays of hard power”). Class traitors are closer to home for the everyday worker so the everyday worker must worry about them more (and their stochastic terrorism-for-the-state-as-controlled-opposition to labor movements)—i.e., at the level of word-of-mouth while face-to-face in the streets. Simply put, the fascist and the centrist are the ones who gets their hands dirty and keeps the money flowing up.

Fascists desire power but do not have it; they view profit as secondary to the means of population control by currently rewriting history through violence acts of revenge committed by vigilantes and state paramilitaries moving towards control as something to consolidating around a strongman and his strange den of goons (who centrists challenge in righteous, babyface violence): rigid social hierarchies that control sex and gender as promises of power by working in concert with the elite. As such, weird canonical nerds aren’t Nazi “punks” counter-protesting labor movements like Kyle Rittenhouse. Many of them are grifters acting as mini-leaders or centuries through the misinformation pipeline feeding these moral panics. As such, they not only vote with their wallets through canonical indignation; they perform the conservative online grift of acting besieged, fostering attitudes surrounding canonical media and who should be making it. This goes beyond Hilter and Goebbel’s state propaganda, or Germany and America’s Hollywood as a means of coercive, anti-labor public relations nearly a century ago, and includes a vast network of (mostly white, middle-class) grifter reactionaries leading into the present state-of-affairs.

For example, Jeremy Hambly’s proud, ephebophilic overcorrection of Rainbow Capitalism and corporate appropriation with She-Ra (exhibit 97b) coercively fetishize the girl boss by turning her into a hypersexualized return-to-tradition: a teenage sex worker that pleases male clients in the most cartoonishly way possible (Thought Slime’s “A Video About One, Weird, Horny Tweet,” 2021). Far from unusual, Hambly’s gross entitlement mirrors the pedophilic tendencies of ’90s cartoonist like John Kricfalusi (re: blameitonjorge’s “John Kricfalusi: An Open Secret,” 2019), himself part of a larger “open-secret” policy towards industry men like Kevin Spacey, Bryan Singer, Roman Polanski—defended unironically by creepy “foot guy” Quentin Tarantino in 2003 (“He didn’t rape a 13-year-old. It was statutory rape… he had sex with a minor. That’s not rape”; source: “When Quentin Tarantino defended Roman Polanski in an interview with Howard Stern,” 2022)—and many, many others supported by Patriarchal Capitalism as the status quo:

(exhibit 97b: Artist: Linkartoon. The point of She-Ra: Princess of Power was to be LGBTQ-inclusive with a “herbo”—i.e., a female “himbo,” meaning a big, strong, meaty girl who’s probably queer to some extent; drawings like Linkartoon’s pointedly regress these mentalities, but especially when defended unironically and blindly by fervent, sexist reactionaries like Hambly as nice guy/incel material. Linkartoon’s She-Ra is not physically strong at all; she’s doll-like in a very Barbie-like way specifically to appeal to white, cis-het men [with the removing of actual bones in a cartoon pastiche evoking an invisible corset whose vice-like grip crushes the victim’s ribcage and pelvis into oblivion].)

Another tragedy of Capitalism, then, is that even “Golden Age” porn (from the 1970s/’80s) can be carceral-hauntological, leaving weird canonical nerds like Hambly completely unable to imagine anything beyond how female characters in any medium were historically sexualized just like this. For them, this is a return to the glory of the past, which is both gross and sad (this being said, sex-positive pornographic expression is totally fine, and I’d happily celebrate more artistic treasures like Andrew Blake’s Night Trips[4] [1989] being hauntologically invoked in emancipatory fashion).

However, fascist men aren’t the only source of reactionary angst. Neoliberalism allows feminists nerds to be sexist, too—moderate, “mask on” TERFS, but also a variety of centrist artistic slogans and symbols of “equality” to channel bigotry-in-disguise: appropriated feminism as a kind of mask/beard, wellspring and stonewall that yields a variety of capitalist bastardization. This Amazonian lineage of moderate deception, proliferation and inertia can be reviewed across older generations of feminism, which were (and are) regressively more racist, homophobic and transphobic. Transphobia is prejudice plus power through relative institutional gains; moderate transphobe victories are also fraught with “minority police” compromise—lukewarm concessions that ideologically reject positions more radical than themselves, worshiping their own past as something to marry to the status quo and fetishize into pro-state doubles: the minority cop as an Amazon gatekeeper that furiously polices, thus punishes those under her.

While neoliberalism is already genocidal on the world stage, its moderate concessions with fascists groups reliably lead to overt genocide in domestic areas. Generally this happens through liminal hauntology as something to invoke and weaponize in a variety of ways—less about righting genuine ethical wrongs and more about donning masks to “cull the herd” during times of perceived identity crisis, scarcity of materials and all-around hardship.

We’ve already examined fascism’s evolution into itself in Volume Two (e.g., “Police States“), followed by Chapter Two of this volume’s discussing a notably general-approach aestheticism existing in a post-fascist world; i.e., one that’s quickly regressing under neoliberal Capitalism towards overt and expanded genocide around the planet (as opposed to the lived, cloaked reality of the genocides in the Global South committed by the Global North). So now that we’ve examined primarily the male side of nerds and fascism—re: through a bad-faith adoption of the witch as a conservative, DARVO, Pygmalion stratagem in Chapter Three—we’ll explore fascist nerd culture as it appears under token feminism (male or not): as something to camp, using revolutionary cryptonymy to separate the “good” witches from the “bad” TERF-y ones (again, male or not) during oppositional praxis as cryptonymy! For every mask the enemy wears, we meet them in duality with our own. We’ll show ’em how it’s done, but also how they challenge us with their own bad mirrors!

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Onto “Praxis Volume Outline, part two + Chapter Four: Bad Faith (opening and ‘Ladies First; or, the Grift of False Rebellion’)“!

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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] In his 2020 writeup, “Consent and Master/Slave Relationships,” Jonathan Taylor’s supplied definition of consent is:

Consent is the explicit indication, by written or oral statement, by one person that he/she is willing to have something done to him/her by one or more other persons, or to perform some sort of act at the request or order of one or more other persons.  In terms of sexual consent, consent may be withdrawn at any point, regardless of what has been previously negotiated orally or in writing (source).

Per my own work on ludo-Gothic BDSM, consent is something people consciously agree to that historically-materially reduces risk of rape at a system level.

[2] Low Tier God’s grooming of minors has been an open secret for years, as has Kochinski’s pedophilia. Even with Shang Tsung’s excellent exposé investigating Low Tier God’s grooming tactics (“Low Tier Groomer – the TRUTH behind LTG’s lies EXPOSED,” 2024), and Kochinski accidentally revealing his private lolicon (and horse) porn collection to his streaming audience (Bad Empanada Live’s “Vaush is a P*dophile (CONFIRMED),” 2024), it is unlikely that anything will be done about either person unless the backlash forces corporate to respond. Until then, these incidents—for the men involved—merely serve as dogwhistles for other community predators and grooming mechanisms for the young adults (often men) in their audience bases to attack critiques; or as Shang Tsung warned when I praised his video and wanted to mention it here: “I appreciate that but I’d caution you that he (LTG) usually goes on the offensive against anyone that criticizes him, so just be aware he may try harassing you” (source).

Furthermore, such persons are generally awarded some degree of exposure as, despite Tsung’s scathing exposé and years of foreknowledge regarding Low Tier God’s abuse, Low Tier God was allowed to present at the 2024 Stream Awards (Maximusls2400’s “Low Tier God Gets Booed at Streamer Awards,” 2024). As I commented myself in that video, “A groomer and bigot still has a place at the table, it seems. Basically like Hollywood; i.e., it’s an ‘open secret’ what kind of man LTG is and yet they still have him present the awards.”

[3] Turkey Tom says, “I don’t want to cause a big moral issue over this, because I think he’s really funny.” I think Turkey Tom means, “I don’t want to take a hard stance.” Seriously my dude, we can laugh at Dale’s bigotry and still point it out; the fact that Turkey Tom won’t preface his response to Dale with this simple truth constitutes apologia regarding Dale’s abuses, but also Turkey Tom’s hand in things (his “degenerate” YouTube series feels rather vindictive in a white savior way—i.e., it lacks a lot of nuance, failing to point out how the abuses that occur within certain communities like the furry fandom don’t apply to furries at large).

Note: I wrote this before I understood how shitty Turkey Tom was; i.e., his racism, furryphobia, and white supremacy, which “Furry Panic” explores at length. Turkey Tom sucks ass. —Perse, 4/21/2025

[4] Fun fact: Blake’s film won a silver medal at the 1989 WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival, specifically in the “Non-Theatrical Release” category. This makes it the first porn movie to win a medal at a major international film festival. Refer to exhibit 1a1a1i1 from “The Finale; or “Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n Roll” to see me analyze this wonderful film.