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 three: Poison was the Cure: On Goblins, Being a Weird Nerd and Trans Cryptonymy as a Monstrous Antidote to Bigots (feat. Glenn the Goblin, Ms. Chalice from Cuphead, Tolkien’s Orcs and Goblins, and more)
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold
are venomous (source).
—D. H. Lawrence, “Snake” (1923)
Picking up where “Canonical Discrimination in Videogames, Including Fan Art and Speedrunner/Streamer Culture” left off…
Note: Goblins are a monster I’ve written about since this piece (re: “Goblins, Anti-Semitism, and Monster-Fucking“), my partner Bay identifies as a little goblin shortstack, and I’ve drawn other friends as orcs and goblins, too. Here, though, I originally explored goblins in a poetic-praxial sense for the first time, making “On Goblins” one of my first monster-themed pieces in the entire series. It’s also another place where I’m flirt with cryptonymy early on, specifically goblin cryptonymy as pointedly trans. —Perse, 5/5/2025
(model and artist: Jackie and Persephone van der Waard)
This subchapter section will get a little trippy. Whereas in Volume Two, we examined trans, enby and intersex poetics as a drug-like means of expanding one’s imagination to include oppressed groups, thereby challenging Capitalism in the process, I now want to further illustrate my own weird-nerd approach to these iconoclastic, drug-like poetics; i.e., in relation to the goblin as a transformative tool to deal with weird canonical nerds: with Glenn the Goblin (we’ll go devote an entire chapter to the concept as it applies to standard/token proponents in Chapter Five, but here I just want to introduce the idea in relation to what parts one and two talked about: Man Box culture in connection to male nerds being the largest group of queerphobic bigots to contend with). To be holistic), we’ll also look at Miss Chalice from Cuphead, Tolkien’s orcs and goblins, and a couple other quick examples that—while not technically goblins—still occupy the same half-real poetic zones playing such things out.
As such, consider the sex-positive goblin as a kind of cryptonym that addresses canonical persecution through queer modes of xenophilic Gothic expression that proudly declare, in some shape or form, “We are the gods now!” We aren’t controlled opposition, but a goblin-esque chaotic force that can tip the scales beyond the state desires, playfully changing the odds for ourselves and other players by formulating the paradigm shift inside our own magic circles of embellishment (the same idea can apply to any ironic monster type you desire). These half-real territories reach well beyond the canvas and into the broader world, yet remain grounded within media as something to inform these creative transitions moving forward.
Before we give into goblins, full-bore, I want to supply a note about cryptonymy as a genderqueer lever practiced by non-assimilated queer people as being weird nerds themselves (sprinkled within a couple additional points about canon’s biggest defenders: our aforementioned weird canonical nerds):
(exhibit 94a2: Artist, left: Elliot Bouriot; middle: Sabs; right: Quruiqing. As explored in the “Call of the Wild” chapter from Volume Two, drug-use as an ontological, demonic-poetic metaphor is something that lends itself well to queer expression: the fawn, fairy or tequila-esque caterpillar infused with mescaline-like properties. “Taken,” these variables symbolize transformation as something with an acutely pre-Capitalist/-Cartesian style to imbibe, then hauntologically revive in the present space and time [usually in highly colorful ways]: a new Dionysus, Psyche or Persephone.)
If heteronormative people lack imaginations—are ignominiously buried alive in Man Box “tombs” that keep them trapped within Patriarchal Capitalism, but also its myopic hauntologies’ coercive social-sexual roles that worship heteronormative supermen as superior to everything else—then trans, non-binary and intersex persons/drag practitioners are kettled by these monomythic wackjobs. As such, the cryptonymic incentive is there for them to either assimilate or become a proletarian form of weird nerd; i.e., the “shapeshifter” Kryptonite of weird canonical nerds and their blind enjoyment, thus endorsement of “apolitical,” uncritical consumerism and subsequent incel-level/weeb-grade fascism.
As we shall see for the rest of Chapter Three and in Chapters Four and Five, defense of canon becomes the canonical site for hostility against marginalized groups for attacking the “owner’s” sacred media. Often, the Man Box reaction is assisted by class traitors of an assimilated, “token” personality type; e.g., TERFs and other sell-outs using DARVO against genderqueer persons for using Gothic poetics for revolutionary purposes; i.e., as Satanic rebels whose beautiful lies must be countered with the usual lies pedaled by fascists and neoliberals. As I shall now demonstrate, We must reclaim weirdness and nerd culture much in the same way as undead and demonic monsters: by making our own.
Not to make a multi-layered pun out of things, but in Gothic theory this Kryptonite’s pedagogy of the oppressed is called a cryptonym—cryptonomy being the creation of “words that hide,” generally in regards to a secret inheritance whose transgenerational curse is gleaned through a surviving narrative: of the crypt, itself. We’ve already covered the term “narrative of the crypt” multiple times throughout the book (as it is one of Gothic Communism’s four central theories), but I want to go over its full definition again (from the companion glossary/”Paratextual Documents“); re:
According to Cynthia Sugars’ entry for David Punter’s the Encyclopedia of the Gothic (2012), this narrative is described by Jerrold Hogle as the only thing that survives—a narrative of a narrative to a hidden curse announced by things displaced from the former cause. Sugars determines, the closer one gets to the problem, the more the space itself abruptly announces a vanishing point, a procession of fragmented illusions tied to a transgenerational curse: “a place of concealment that stands on mere ashes of something not fully present,” Hogle writes of Otranto (the first “gothic” castle, reassembled for Horace Walpole’s 1764 “archaeology”).
The same basic concept applies in the meta-paratextual sense to those “buried” under Capitalism, unable to imagine escaping the larger crypt because its contents have conditioned them to see and combine everything inside in a particular archaeo-hauntological way (solving old puzzles with determined outcomes).
The transgenerational curse adumbrated by so many incarcerated minds, then, is Capitalism itself. Announced by the inhabitant’s procession of dumb, sundered, standardized illusions, the curse is hidden and hides itself into the future by trapping that future inside a cryptonymic, imaginary past. Killer zombie-vampires are everywhere, patrolling the ruin while leashed to it like dogs. Their minds are poisoned by canonical propaganda.
Like Superman’s Kryptonite, this poison isn’t universal. What matters is how it’s applied. To break the hauntological spell of Capitalist Realism, queer people can change or deviate away from normative markers and canonical worship—often through composite, “archaeological” forms that reinvent how language is assembled, but also viewed afterward; i.e., the queer princess wandering through the Gothic castle to escape the tyrant by repurposing the fakery of the structure against its current owner (the latter a person having stolen or inherited the place from someone else within the system and doing their to restore its canonical hauntological medieval function—e.g., the hidden crypt or vault as a stowaway for fleeing kings becoming an underground railroad in rebel hands, a smuggler’s route for rebellious cargo). Once dug up and reassembled in new imaginative ways, these weird, nerdy “archaeologies” challenge the established material order of regular, canonical “junk food”: a trans antidote to a transgenerational curse (I promise I didn’t intend these puns; they practically write themselves); re: Bay being trans and goblin-y.
(model and artist: Bay and Persephone van der Waard)
I’d like to use the rest of part three to explore this in relation to myself as certified weirdo/trans person, including how transitioning through monstrous poetics—specifically the goblin—has shaped the way I think about media through my own secret identify (one I wasn’t fully aware of until quite recently); I’ll then use part four focus on how this improved perspective not only evolved out of older schools of thought, but can identify and address the regression of weird nerds towards canonical traditions/rigged games (and their imaginary pastness)—i.e., as things that teach said nerds to view trans, intersex, and non-binary people as non-existent, thus worthy of compelled discipline and punishment: the colonial binary as an ultimatum within the shadow of Pygmalion (whose praxial double is always monstrous-feminine; i.e., the Galatea as self-aware and making her own art).
Onto my trans cryptonym: Glenn the Goblin.
(exhibit 94a3: Artist, right: Reiq. As we’ve established, the green skin of the goblin [or other colors, like purple Drow or ashen orcs] contains a racialized “blackface” component, but also a degree of assimilation fantasy in canonical narratives; re: Black Skin, White Masks [re: exhibit 10b1/41b, “Prey as Liberators“/”A Lesson in Humility“]. Iconoclastic narratives can move away from this entirely by making non-human colors sex-positive; e.g., Elphaba from Gregory Maguire’s Wicked as a partially humanized vice character or Ester from the Orphan franchise [re: exhibit 13d, “Monster Modes“] but also my own take on the goblin as a strictly “good,” reverse-abject proposition, exhibit 94c1. In this sense, green can represent the color of stigma, bias or oppression as something to live with and survive, but also subvert and reclaim.
It’s tricky because, while there is a racialized component, it isn’t strictly associated with American stereotypes following the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Indeed, the origins of the goblin date back to Christian-Judaic sectarianism, but nevertheless lend themselves well to Enlightenment-era, settler-colonial tropes and post-Cold-War islamophobia: the person of color as wily and undisciplined, similar to how a goblin might be. This makes the reclamation of colors a bit more intersectional and choosy depending on what you wish to focus on, but there’s plenty of room for different pedagogies of the oppressed in the larger Gothic-Communist scheme.)
Something to keep in mind, then, is what weird canonical nerds are: sycophants, to be sure, but also faithful emulations of Man Box culture as sacred. Persons like Caleb Hart evolved out of alt-right videogame culture and Gamergate into the election of Donald Trump two years later. In other words, fascism and reactionary nerds go hand-in-hand, supporting the de facto, bad play education of rape culture by literally policing videogame consumption as an in-group to defend from “degenerate” influences. As Cheyenne Lin points out in her 2023 video, “Why Nerds Joined the Alt-Right“,” not only is white, cis-het nerd culture linked to fascism (which has more moderate forms; e.g., NSP’s “Danny Don’t You Know,” 2018); weird canonical nerds are resistant to change, cannot imagine it and will not tolerate it in any shape or form that threatens the world as it already exists. Changing the odds is “cheating” and cannot be allowed—not by women, queer people, or other minorities; in short, not by any activist period. They must play “by the rules” in ways that please men or keep men on top.
As such, weird canonical nerds police whatever invokes the void in themselves, created by the myopic “crypt” of Capitalism’s bourgeois Superstructure; they project onto the enemies of the state, invoked and identified through weird canonical nerds as “badly educated.” Trans people, for example are alien to them, an ideological other the state teaches them to automatically fear, but also kill and rape relative to what trans people attempt to reclaim for themselves through their own de facto educators: reclaimed monstrous language as already-colonized by canonical media, but especially videogames nowadays as representing games in a symbolic and literal sense (and whose playing of games with those who operate in bad faith, thus requiring revolutionary code/disguise pastiche in order to survive; we’ll examine this idea much more in Chapter Five). “Death to wokeness” is preceded by standard-issue saber-rattling by—you guessed it—white, cis-het men. To that, Benny Johnson’s “Go woke, get smoked!” argument (Hasan’s “Benny Johnson Gives Bud Light Free Advertisement,” 2023) might sound dumb as hell, but the sentiment reminds cagey and real; i.e., a gun-toting false revolutionary associating death-by-bullet with trans people in the abstract: the “woke mind virus” of Bud Light beer cans.
Despite what people like Benny Johnson or Pat Robertson might argue, trans people are always trans, but like butterflies, transform into their genuine selves, shedding the liminal shell before leaving it behind (for a neat textual example of this, watch Alice in Borderland, with Caterpillar). This can involve “help” within art as an altered state whose means of altering oneself to achieve their natural “ground state.” Signs that I was trans, then, can be found in my juvenilia as thoroughly weird, which combined together my many different interests into what I ultimately wanted to be: what I wanted to fuck according to what I consumed through material consumerism; e.g., videogames, horror movies, metal, and erotica, etc; but also what I created by playing god in an iconoclastic-Promethean sense (exhibit 94a1).
(artist: Persephone van der Waard)
In short, to become what I truly am, I had to use the Promethean Quest to destroy that which was heteronormatively assigned to me at birth. I had to, in a poetic sense, become a god to self-determine and self-express beyond what heteronormative society allowed: Satan, Galatea, Lilith, etc, as giving birth to class warriors. It’s not hubris to want to exist and be myself without harming others—to refuse to be shoved back into the closet even if the status quo resents me for it, calling for my head; i.e., not being weird in a poetically heteronormative sense. Proletarian weirdness is liminal, subverting canon; this makes it likely that reactionaries will brand iconoclasts as heretical in popular fantasy stories that, while they lack overtly religious language, still boast the same dogmatic, heteronormative function that organized religion does: the monomyth as holy even when it strays into fascist territories. That is literally to be expected at this point.
(exhibit 94a4: Artist: Naughty Azima. As Cheyenne Lin’s video essay demonstrates, standard-issue fantasy often revolves around weirdness as something to posture by people who want to be seen as outsiders, except they’re very much privileged in-group members. Fascism is built on appeals to white cis-het men colonizing fantasy as their realm; i.e., replete with “weird” stories whose wish fulfillment has a pulpy vibe on par with the original Conan stories published in Weird Magazine, in the 1930s: European-bodied women of different skin colors offered up as rewards in cliché sites of “high adventure” like the saloon, sauna, or whorehouse. And while this can seem all-inclusive, it just as often worships the black knight in post-medieval mercenary groups that threaten a regression into the imaginary past during Capitalism-in-crisis.)
As stated during the introduction, “all deities reside in the human breast.” That includes the teenage trans breast as something that lives under Capitalism and fantastical consumerism, but struggles away from oppression without being fully aware of the broader struggle. That’s what being closeted means; if your closeted, you’re still queer—i.e., if the material world outside of yourself doesn’t match who you are, your art will represent this discrepancy by showing the external world who you are in reclaimed language/Gothic reinvention. As we shall see with my corpus/portfolio, this is true even if you’re not fully aware of it.
For example, while I am a thoroughly weird nerd and have been for all of my life, my weirdness as a teenager took a Byronic, suitably horny form: the goblin as a twist on older models of mischief and prurience. In my case, I wrote ambitious fantasy stories about a shapeshifter goblin named Glenn (exhibit 94c1) that could turn into anything. Just as Ursula Le Guin started with LotR pastiche and evolved into a genderqueer body of work, my works were initially inspired by Tolkien’s fantastical, heteronormatively centrist theatre of war. But my queerness, despite being closeted, still felt precocious (similar to Mary Shelley’s own fictions at 19, mine were equally inventive).
Note: For further discussion about this time in my life, read “Concerning Rings” from Volume One. —Perse, 5/5/2025
In short, I was sex-positive and “out” about my erotica since I was a teenager and used it to humanize the very monsters canonical stories were teaching me to fear and kill. By extension, I was humanizing the animals and chattelized minorities associated with these monsters: Jewish people, in particular, but also non-Christians more broadly and gender-non-conforming men, women [witches and homosexuals, historically] and enbies.
Before we look at my subversion of the goblin myth, below are two exhibits of the goblin in fantasy media less as a wholly positive thing and more as a liminal territory that has developed an iconoclastic branch in recent years:
(exhibit 94b1: Artist, top-left: Avital Dayanim; top-right: xxNikichenxx; bottom-left: JMG Party Bean; bottom-right: Huffslove. In sex-positive media, the goblin—like the orc [re: exhibit 37e2, “Meeting Jadis“] or Drow [re: exhibit 41b, “A Lesson in Humility“]—tends to be humanized through sex as liminal, pornographic expression. The history and continuation of this mode is imperfect, at times reducing the green-skinned monster to that of a reward. While historically the goblin hasn’t always been diminutive, their delineation from orcs has led them to be seen as smaller and more cunning than their retroactively bigger and brawnier cousins [which sex-positive stories often present as cute and petit]. Goblin alliances often have them presenting as uneasy rivals or undisciplined trickster-inventors who love money and gizmos like dwarves do, but aren’t explicitly enemies with humans—with they and the hero able to overcome their mutual differences through shared struggles. To this, the adventure’s undertaking and conclusion are narratively arranged to supply sex as a kind of relief in tension—either partway through, or at the end when the current quest is finished; e.g., Midna from Twilight Princess.
Curiously, some Zelda fans prefer Midna’s short “imp” form precisely because it deviates from the heteronormative standard further than simply “being taller than Link is and having dark skin.” Indeed, Midna’s cursed form is cherished for its morphological variety [short and “dummy thicc”] but also her sardonic personality and curious ability to “ride” Link in his wolf form, taming him the way a rider does its mount. The dark skin adds an element of impurity to a historically racialized dynamic, letting people consciously choose to love others who are visibly different from themselves and treated differently for it within the gameworld’s lore; i.e., as pariahs shunned for being creatures of vice by the status quo.)
(exhibit 94b2: Artist, top-left/-mid and bottom-left: Huffslove. The goblin as a form of liminal expression, ties to medievalized concepts of wealth acquisition—mainly the adventure as a deviation away from polite society—that play on the goblin as a sex-positive, humanized explorer that isn’t killed for its gold, but kills others for their gold. Indeed, the ownership of gold in medieval thought is open to debate, an idea famously enshrined by Tolkien’s Kings Under the Mountain, Smaug the Stupendous and Thorin Oakenshield. In the real world, the Jewish people are endlessly persecuted as the go-to medieval scapegoats of the Christian/fascist West, which Tolkien’s dwarves and cunning dragon emblematize respectively. Tolkien released The Hobbit on the eve of WW2, when Capitalism was in decay on the global stage. As such, his ravenous dragons rarefy greed in medieval language that curiously shirks the idea of Christendom’s culture of generosity or Crusaders, downplaying real-world allegories in favor of a wily vice character. Meanwhile, his dwarves skirt the line between men and goblins, living in darkness and loving gold, but still dealing with elves and men.
Except, Tolkien’s dwarves in particular are on a special quest: one of wealth reclamation tied to a stolen homeland, occupied by a fash-coded dragon. Intimations of “dragon sickness” infected them with a spirit of revenge to land they have no logical claim to, just a feudalistic one; i.e., like the Jews of Israel seeking revenge in defense of their land, the dragon is a fabrication but their greed and the genocide of their invented enemies is soberingly real. In Tolkien’s Middle-earth, the Jewish-coded dwarves corrupt and backstab, the curse of their greed haunting the land in the same shadow space the fascist dragon occupies as the spirit of rarefied greed. It’s victim-blaming and DARVO, but also a broken clock that—per Great Britain’s role in Israel’s formation—would be ushered in by Tolkien and his homeland as profoundly anti-Semitic; i.e., breeding dissent through a vengeful minority policing the land around them: “bettering the instruction” by cutting down those perceived as worse than them by them. It’s blood quantum and libel, the assimilation fantasy forcing Tolkien’s token Jews (displaced to Erebor as “dwarves,” an anti-Semitic trope) to act according to the very biases they normally would try to escape: it’s “their fault” because they’re greedy but also spiteful, subterranean, mean-spirited; i.e., “These are dwarf lands, this is dwarf gold; and we will have our revenge!”
Just as Jackson’s films have highlighted the racial tensions by coding the orcs as savagely black and disrespectful of nature [versus Tolkien’s “good natured” elves conducting Goldilocks Imperialism], his works also play off the original author’s anti-Semitism. To that, each dwarf has sworn revenge in search of their pale enchanted gold, which they intend to steal back from Smaug as being “more greedy” than them, more violent. The moral, though, is no race is exempt from “dragon sickness”—with the goblins, wargs, men, elves, and eagles warring on the same battlefield over the same material things. Indeed, the irony of current geopolitics shows Israel becoming an ethnostate on par with the Nazis—whose dark culture of Paganistic thievery and death is mostly closely mimicked by Tolkien’s goblins and wargs of the Misty Mountains: the wolf is loose. Israel’s fascist regression kind of echoes the dragon sickness of Tolkien’s Lonely Mountain—except, of course, in Tolkien’s world/imagination, that kind of “second player” wasn’t really established. The goblins are vaguely brutal and subterranean; Smaug and Thorin are simply greedy as they take turns sitting on a pile of gold that can’t really regenerate, can only be stolen.
In the current state of things, wealth doesn’t tend to exist as a pile of gold to begin with, but a network of capitalist positions spread all over the planet through global US hegemony to assist in the generation of profit [denying wealth and material conditions to billions of people]. All the same, the metaphor of gold and greed festering inside a besieged “Holy Land” fortress is still quite vivid and apt. Yes, Thorin’s dwarves are superstitious, thinking their number is unlucky enough to merit them hiring Bilbo [a lucky, short person living Under the Hill, whose “Tookish” nature and knack for disappearing evokes the leprechauns of Celtic myth].
Yet, their own contract is hilariously frank and complete. Just as Tolkien was emblematizing medieval practices and stereotypes of usury in fantastical forms that humanized the usual recipients of anti-Semitic ire, these same medieval tropes and money-lending jokes continue to exist well into the present; e.g., the RPG-savvy art of fantasy artist, Huffslove. Their subversive humor and raw sexuality humanize goblins far further than Tolkien bothered, having racially appreciative and sexually descriptive adventures the likes of which Bilbo Baggins and the thirteen dwarves never dared: a threat to the nuclear-familial order through handling money as a medieval slave’s task, combined with a short, class-envious sexual deviator and eater of babies/drinker of blood, etc.)
(artist: Avital Dayanim)
Famous monsters teach those part of the status quo to attack out-groups, a practice that has carried over into videogames and cinema. As we previously discussed, vampires and witches have anti-Semitic history to them. So do goblins, which are often treated as untrustworthy fodder in modern canon. On goblins, Evelyn Frick writes, “I haven’t come across historical evidence which directly states that goblin folklore was influenced by medieval anti-Semitism or perceptions of Jews, or vice versa. Except, of course, in the case of knockers. […] But whether goblins in contemporary culture are anti-Semitic, in my opinion, depends on context” (source: “The Anti-Semitic History of Goblins”).
Note: Frick’s work would inspire me to investigate medieval persecution language in a modern light; re: “Idle Hands.” —Perse, 5/6/2025
To that, the context of my own work was meant to fight against modern bigotries built on older myths. In effect, Glenn was that rare and elusive “good goblin” that was lacking in the materialized imaginations of industry giants like Tolkien or Rowling (with Tolkien’s being more vague and bloodthirsty vs his Semitic dwarves, whereas Rowling’s goblins were painfully obvious in their anti-Semitic regression). Indeed, goblins embody my juvenilia as growing into what I would ultimately become: a shapeshifting slut that reclaims stigmatic myths for sex-positive reasons, while treating my weirdness—specifically my poetic sense of being different—as a source of queer pride. The worship for Galatea remained, a queen made by a queen (and not Pygmalion).
Queer people are punished for being different than heteronormative proponents who chase, embody or otherwise abuse the same basic monster types; i.e., the goblin as the giver or receiver of state abuse (similar to the zombie, from Volume Two). Beware bourgeois goblins who use DARVO to call themselves victims while simultaneously doing the state’s dirty work; it’s fascist victim culture, through and through.
The evolution of my own nerdy weirdness features the goblin as a queer proletarian symbol forged from multiple ingredients. Catalyzed partly by Frog from Chrono Trigger, Glenn had the natal body of a short, ugly (by human standards) male goblin, but chose to turn into a green-skinned human maid girl that the hero (my avatar, of course) got to have sex with. Meanwhile, she retained her goblin strength and raspy voice. The design wasn’t just composite, but hauntologically chimeric, combining She-Hulk’s curvy bulk with Elphaba Thropp’s trademark vocal fry and the deflated troll bodies from Dungeon Keeper (1997); i.e., into a singular, shape-shifting entity out of an assemblage of reimagined pasts. Making it sexy was just a way of achieving my new state through sexual enrichment/expression as alternate pathways.
All in all, Capitalism canonically treats work as “liberating” (which, under fascist scenarios, definitely doesn’t set you free). In truth, we have only to lose our chains, including those supplied by a lack of an emancipatory dialog. Lacking the words and supplying people with canonical images of coercive sex forces them into colonizing boxes with sexually dimorphic gender roles.
I used to think people became trans. Only when I recently thought about Glenn again did I realize that I was and always would be trans; teenage me just didn’t have the language to describe how she felt! In my own “Ode to Psyche” (the goddess of the soul, often portrayed as a butterfly and who Keats chose to worship as an ancient, forgotten deity) I’ve since traced my own evolution backward, recognizing the various terms I’ve used over the years: heteroflexible, bi-curious, gender-fluid, femboy and switch…
While each felt appropriate at the time, “trans woman” seems to describe me best back then and now. This wouldn’t be possible without adequate and flexible, reclaimed language, which I’ve slowly acquired through life-long friendships and romances. Without their valuable lessons, I’d still be in the crypt, lost and confused: Capitalist, heteronormative myopia isn’t just a box; it’s a closet that keeps people straight by shaping how they think in carceral-hauntological ways. Escaping that “prison sex” mentality has taken a lifetime of work, including constant reflection on myself and the world around me. But it’s allowed me to transform through good play as an extension of myself that I feel comfortable with. People are defined by their actions, right? The same applies to whatever lessons they leave behind after they are gone; i.e., good play demonstrated by reclaimed monsters that don’t condone or disseminate rape culture and worker exploitation: dark gods.
(exhibit 94c1: Artist, left: Persephone van der Waard; model, right: Persephone van der Waard. Glenn in their female form; me in mine. Playfulness and reinvention don’t have to represent us perfectly as a concrete statement, but rather as a state of change that, from moment-to-moment, has a mood that might entertain different forms, metaphors or attitudes; i.e., a “devil for a day” approach extending to different kinds of devils.)
I’d like to explore some further ambiguities to gender-non-conformity in relation to Man Box culture, before moving onto part four’s sobering discussion that this step of transformation is weighed against a great “shadow of Pygmalion.” It’s not that Caleb is mighty unto himself, but that Capitalism is Patriarchal, thus heteronormative, thus geared towards business models in sports, porn and videogames that, through the Gothic mode instigate xenophobic biases as structured to award a select number of gatekeepers. Everyone else adopts the enforcer role by proxy of those special few trickling down the dregs of capital: Twitch sponsors Caleb, Caleb promotes his fans, the fans buy the game, and everyone sits in a circle talking shit and hatching plans. Simply put, it’s “locker room talk,” gossip geared towards sexist behaviors and dogma; even if the vast majority of these never come to light, the nature of stochastic terrorism is that it becomes normalized to a degree that people sit around in saloons, coffee houses or their own living rooms, gossiping until someone picks up a gun or knuckleduster and goes to work.
In other words, the same concrete discretion and information scarcity that alienates trans people also deprives heteronormative consumers of their critical-thinking skills. This faulty analysis occurs due to underlying biases encouraged by those in power—in part because mainstream canon is designed to inaccurately represent the everyday struggles, and actual identities of, trans people and other genderqueer groups. Not only are consumers not trained to think critically about canonical media; they’re hauntologically conditioned to react violently towards individuals already demonized within these stories as being a threat towards corporate profit, hence the livelihood of their favorite sexist broadcasters.
This interpretive failure happens on various levels. The author of the image can be sexist, or the gaze of the beholder can be sexist. And generally the author is someone who learned their trade by looking not just at bodies, but transphobic body imagery (a kind of fetish in its own right) repeatedly sold to them through canon: Caleb Hart vis-à-vis Final Fantasy or Mega Man as proponents of Max Box culture. Watching these interactions, viewers of Caleb learn to legitimize themselves by defending Caleb as an extension of canon, seeing trans people either as gender-confused in the process, or as monsters deserving of punishment. This includes fetishizing them as a means of social-sexual dominance similar to how Caleb does, castigating trans people publicly through fetishistic means; i.e., the bad play of “prison sex.” However, Caleb’s moderate transphobia doesn’t stop overt fascists from consuming trans/intersex people and drag queens in private (re: Nick Fuentes and catboys).
(artist: Dærick Gröss Sr.)
The discrepancy shows that the policing of nerd culture/the Gothic mode isn’t homogenous, but it is hegemonic—applied unevenly across various marginalized groups according to the same base concept: enforce the status quo. Under this status quo, trans people are the perpetual victims, the state of exception for which anything goes. They do not exist—becoming either fully invisible or demonized—and anything can happen to them. Like zombies, how they are abjected depends on who’s abjecting them: cis-het white men or women, cis-het people of color, various religious communities with built-in, dated stigmas towards queer people, cis-queer people, out-and-out TERFs; but also professional gamers like Caleb Hart, his fans and co-workers, and their mutual employers as stuck in the same Man Box, bred on its monomyth paratexts.
Nevertheless, trans, intersex and non-binary people are not space aliens; Capitalism just treats us as such, forcing our voices into the void beyond Capitalism Realism. Meanwhile, we share the same physiological and gendered ambiguous components as those attacking us (conservatives sometimes forget they have pronouns), often in popular stories that represent people who could be trans, intersex or crossdressers, but are historically denied this opportunity by defenders of the human body and its colonized genitals and gender roles as affiliated with an idealized past. Consider vaginas. AFABs own vaginas because vaginas belong to their bodies, which are their own (according to natural human rights, anyways). Those in power and seeking to exploit the bodies/sexual labor of others will train society to interpret the human body (which can be naturally ambiguous) and their imagery (which can also be ambiguous) in highly concrete, but ultimately nostalgic ways that lean into a heteronormative bias against trans interpretations and procedures.
Take Ms. Chalice from Cuphead: Though hauntological par excellence, neither the game nor its hauntology can distinguish if Ms. Chalice actually owns a vagina, let alone how they identify (despite being called “Miss,” a title is not explicitly one’s gender, the possible exception being Mug Man—a reference to Mega Man, a highly sexist series whose sexism, beyond just Caleb Hart, tends to survive in paratextual media and its “blind,” Man-Box-tinged parodies, like Jaboody Dubs’ 2022 parody[1] of the Blue Bomber). Then again, short of looking under that skirt and checking for ourselves (which would be rude), neither can we. Rather than allow for crossdressing and intersex persons, the characters are heteronormatively coded as male/man and female/woman according to their performative aspects (their clothes, body language and makeup) as connected to an idealized past coded to assume.
This is less by the game, however, and more by audiences who would abject sexually descriptive alternatives that threaten their particular view of the past. If we wanted to be sexually descriptive in regards to Cuphead, we would need to allow all possibilities to occur, not just prescriptive ones. What if Ms. Chalice was an AMAB trans person, and Cuphead and Mug Man were AFAB trans persons? Intersex? Drag queens? This might seem minor if we change nothing visual about the characters, but it remains inherently deconstructive, thus iconoclastic. To merely change the heroes’ presumed genitals or gender identity in a paratextual sense without changing anything about them in-game would generate a considerable amount of gender trouble all by itself. Sexist norms would be threatened because sexist systems leave no room for nuance, erasing trans people in the process, but also intersex people and drag queens. Reclaiming their right to exist won’t erase Cuphead from existence; it will only expose those who try to colonize it as transphobic.
(artists: Chad Moldenhauer and Marija Moldenhauer)
As we’ve already established, heteronormative thought defines people by presumed genitals within a colonial binary. If Ms. Chalice wears a dress, they must have a vagina; if they have a vagina, they must do their duty (to have babies); if they refuse or don’t have a vagina, they must be a traitor, an impostor. The problem is, impostors can depicted in a plethora of ways: the transphobic trope of the rapacious man-in-disguise, the homophobic trope of the gay pedophile, the misogynistic trope of the man-hating lesbian, the catch all queerphobic label of “trap“ (“The Aesthetics and Connotations of Traps,” 2019). Often criminal-hauntological, these slurs are legion, but all serve the same, underlying goal: Defend the status quo, generally by putting its (often) male defenders of the idealized past into a mental “Man Box.” This brain prison then transforms them into unfeeling monsters with a limited emotional palate: anger, lust, and tears for the (gender-conforming) dead that results in a broader Capitalist-Realist myopia.
Proponents of capital defend sports and industry as heteronormative, thus trapped inside the Man Box as an extension of Capitalist Realism. As previously stated, we’ll specifically explore female defenders (and TERFs of different genders and sexes) more in the next chapter. Before we proceed into that dark zone, there’s another shadow we need to consider—Pygmalion’s. I want to outline the result of Caleb Hart’s de facto bad education as it links to a bourgeois etiology of male-centric transphobia: weaponized male consumers (the next several subchapters will examine men, in particular). While plenty of markets are dedicated to cis-het women, many more retain a historically male-dominated flavor. We’ve already explored the product as a deliberate nemesis to trans representation that Caleb Hart internalized then disseminated only too well.
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
However, the socio-material arrangement between product, producer and consumer also generates a particular breed of weaponized (often-male) web of weird canonical nerd that badly imitates the success enjoyed by lucky (and unscrupulous) men like Caleb Hart: the Shadow of Pygmalion obliterating Galatea as the whore to pimp in perpetuity—a peach to harvest out of revenge. From Medusa to Pandora to the Sphinx, then, nature’s monstrous-feminine “box” is one to cage through Man Box proponents for all time. That’s what capital is, having evolved out of older state models into newer ones stuck in a rut.
We’ll unpack this awful concentrism, next.
Onto “Book Sample: Obliterating Phoebe: In the Shadow of Pygmalion“!
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] For a bit of extra context, Jaboody Dubs parodies tend to hauntologically “blind,” the sexism/racism in their comedy tied to nostalgic media where both bigotries already exist. In their latest video, their homophobic punchline—”Before I swore myself to the badge, I was the butt-clapping ‘captain’ of the bussy patrol!”—is “funny” precisely because it doesn’t fit in ’80s nostalgic worldview on display. Regardless of specific stated intent, however, the context remains homophobic in relation to the ’80s as something to celebrate as a means of telling old, tired jokes: “Cops having butt sex is funny.” I mean, I laughed, but largely because the whole thing felt absurd—especially when delivered by the straight man (excuse the expression) deadpanning his lines! As a trans woman, I could laugh at the attempt if I want; in hindsight, it still felt like I was being laughed at—the same way my high school chums might have said “homo suspicion” in my company decades ago or my brothers telling dick or butt sex jokes until I very recently asked them to stop.