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.
Stand to Fight, then Raise Your Fist and “Bow” to Duck the Imperial Boomerang: Further Expressions of Ironic Girl War Bosses, Sexy War, and Gender Irony
“You know, hostility is like a psychic boomerang!”
—the waitress from Howard the Duck, 1986
Picking up where “Rockstars: From Rock ‘n Roll Fans and Jimmi Hendrix’ Penis to Horror Movie Special Effects” left off…
To be against capital is to be against war and rape. We’ve examined base cryptonymic concepts for revolutionary purposes: of “flashing-style” nudism, voyeurism/exhibitionism; death-fetish aesthetics with a war-like countercultural function; the eco-fascist symptoms of the nation state’s culture of rape/Man Box as something to pander towards the badly conditioned with: moe, ahegao and incest; and rockstars, metal and horror media as a countercultural level to these harmful effects of Capitalism. Now I want to delve into more examples of revolutionary cryptonymy with which to protest through war-like imagery and riot. While open rioting is an entirely valid form of rebellion, our focus is on art, gender trouble and prolonged resistance through creative acts; i.e., that give voice to constructive anger and perceptive pastiche as a cryptonymic means of punching up through representations of an already popular symbol: the raised fist as indicative of worker activism.
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
In other words, now that we’ve looked at “flashing” and “borrowing robes” as a means of speaking out against fascists, then, let’s look at some more of what we’ll be borrowing that isn’t strictly TERF nor revolutionary but takes a fairly close look to parse as friend or foe (thus help us decide what to put on): uniforms, irony and good manners/Austen-style polite italics when dodging the Imperial Boomerang but also the raising of the fist through non-violent protest.
(exhibit 108b1: Artist: unknown. The Enchantress, unlike Ann Radcliffe the “Great Enchantress” of two centuries previous, is a far grungier and outwardly troubled character. She might be furious enough to want to destroy the world, but she also represents the scarring of trauma by said world. Indeed, my friend Mavis identifies with that character, desiring to be strong enough to not only survive, but overcome her trauma by becoming the Great Destroyer. In other words, appreciative peril can be the fantasy of revenge towards ones oppressors as something to recognize and value as a teaching device, specifically a dispeller of neoliberal illusions.)
Irony and weaponized politeness was a common, delicious tactic of Austen. Women, in her books, had no other means, had to use what they had while being forced into their lanes. We, in ours, must use what we have, wherever that may be on this battlefield of love and war where all’s fair. For this sexy bitch, that includes the war-like language of my past, speaking to the boys in their own language, but also to the language of other queer people like me who grew up similarly only to escape the closet.
Keeping that in mind, this subchapter examines traditional and more recent examples of ironic girl war bosses in The Boys, The Rings of Power (2022) and Sense8, as well as revisiting TERF girl boss Ellen Ripley from Aliens (again). It also examines the revolutionary cryptonyms of queer bosses and how to use critical (sex-positive) queerness to kneel a bit more cleverly than Dolph Lundgren’s He-Man did (face-tanking Skeletor’s eye lasers): to subvert the fascist and neoliberal traditions present in famous, warlike bodies (all of the above, but also Conan the Barbarian) with iconoclastic forms whose new persona short-circuits and rewires the zombie-vampire brain under Capitalism: class war as wage by allies from different walks of life breaking rules, thus punching up, in fantastical modes that verge on disaster as something to flirt with in highly romanticized ways (again, the allegory of the quotidian merged with the story of high imagination, which is what super heroes effectively are—i.e., a hyperbolic throwback): the commodification of sex as something to challenge the status quo with.
(exhibit 108b2: Artist: In Case. I’m not familiar with this exact story but I recognize the clichés: a Lady Chatterley type and her “strong-thighed bargeman”—their shameless tryst commenting on the material advantage of a small group of aristocratic women leading up to the age of property-owning women as a widening class. The fantasy expands with the times as increasingly literate, but prone to looking backward at halcyon bucolics. For our pleasure, In Case has granted them a trans flavor—the country bumpkin of this illustrated roleplay being strong-thighed indeed, but also buxom and well-endowed. It’s potentially just a roll-in-the-hay with the stable owner but nevertheless allows for a chance to mingle in ways that would have granted the cis women of the renaissance an opportunity to escape the drudgery of their daily lives but also interact with different classes to formulate a dialogue of rebellion/empathy for those with lower material conditions.)
About that. As we’ve established, neoliberals and fascists operate in conjunction, serving as the good and bad teams under Capitalism. Whether they’re profit-obsessed elites, or power-hungry individuals seeking elite status, both are sexist salesmen of war that abhor resistance. Each sells war through empowerment, specifically the framing of “boss” positions as elevated under Capitalism. There’s only so many times the lie of “A New Dark Age!” or similar war platitude can be spoken aloud before they start to become cliché and threadbare, exposing the game. Unlike TERFs and other bosses aligned with capital, then, sex-positive artists promote universal basic human rights while discouraging sexism with their own playful disguises. They raise their fists to “punch” Nazis and neoliberals—not literally in the face, but up into their dogmatic, canonical propaganda. This raising-of-the-fist occurs by retooling war as an act of rebellion against bourgeois tyranny. Artistic activists own the act of punching up as a conscious form of informed rebellion, directing worker solidarity against normalized violence and those who encourage or perpetuate said abuse—i.e., to show the world what fascists and neoliberals really are: complicit abusers who try and divide and discourage the love that holds rebellions together.
First, the provocation of the raised fist itself. As Nicola Green demonstrates, there are many, many variants of the raised fist in art (“Struggle, Solidarity, Power: The History of the Iconic Raised Fist,” 2021). Its historical purpose is antifascist—pitting true rebellion against “fake rebellion” by reifying an emancipatory cause as something to sloganize: “punching up” through body language:
The fist was used by the United Workers of the World labor union in 1917 and by anti-fascists in the 1930s during the Spanish Civil War. Students raised the fist in Paris in 1968 in mass protests against French President Charles de Gaulle. If you’ve seen an image of the fist on a sign or a shirt, it’s almost certainly an uncredited version of a design by Frank Cieciorka, whose woodcut print of a disembodied black fist on a white background adorned posters for Stop the Draft Week in 1967. Cieciorka had seen the fist while participating in a socialist rally in San Francisco (source: Christopher Spata’s “What does a raised fist mean in 2020?”).
Nonviolent resistance articulates that which the elite historically frame as violent: worker solidarity, but also counterculture displays of active, prolonged resistance. Art prolongs resistance by holding up better than fleshy bodies do. More to the point, when treated as acts of rebellious strength, they lift people out of violent ways of thinking while still living inside oppressive systems that encourage mental imprisonment.
(exhibit 108b3: Source: Christopher Spata’s “What does a raised fist mean in 2020?” Originally viewed in exhibit 1a1a1i4; re: “The Finale.” Picket iconography is something that can emblazon protest and counterprotest for or against the state; those who use these symbols need to reclaim them from state proponents by committing their usage to movements that ultimately do not become recuperated, thus ineffective at inducing genuine socio-material change; e.g., Che Guevara on a t-shirt [re: exhibit 8b2, “Introducing Revolutionary Cryptonymy“] doesn’t automatically equal rebellion; it has to leverage collective worker action/solidarity against the state in ways that do not automatically preclude violence: striking and rioting. They’re not safe, but they historically work, which is why the elite use neoliberalism to quell rebellious sentiment—re, Thatcher’s neoliberal refrain under neoliberal Capitalism to achieve Capitalist Realism: “Economics are the method: the object is to change the soul.”)
Using de facto reeducation to punch up, sex-positive artists bridge gaps—seeking to change indoctrinated people by bringing them over towards a more humane and egalitarian way of thinking about sex, including its Gothic, campy forms. By speaking to sexist people in variants of their own language—chiefly through the boss as a symbol of performative strength—the iconoclast promotes a specific kind of gender trouble: gender irony (called “parody” by Judith Butler). For example, strength iconography includes physical displays of action personified—war-like bodies, but especially boss-like bodies. Iconoclastic variants undermine canonical norms through ironic gender performances regarding strength: ironic girl bosses, queers bosses, and masculine champions.
Second, the heroes raising their fists with ours. We’ve examined some as made by me for this book. However, there are popular forms in mainstream media, as well. On a surface level, these ironic counterparts can pass for canon. This is useful within social activism, but also traditional modes of neoliberal consumption, which activists subvert. Centrist audiences “tune in” more often if an action hero postures equality by presenting as female and capable—a scrappy tomboy who can “handle her shit” by being violent, or rather, by looking violent. The problem is, no space is truly parallel, requiring ironic heroes to exist perilously close to their toxic, violent predecessors.
Art imitates life in this respect: In The Boys, the show’s Nazi posterchild, Homelander, isn’t just a danger to America’s enemies (who die far away from the cameras); dressed up in fascist American regalia, he’s a clear and present danger to everyone working near him, a perpetual rapist, xenophobe, and murderer. Meanwhile, Starlight—the materially-elevated, cis-het tomboy—is forced* to wear girly clothing (the “taming of the tomboy” trope). She’s clearly not butch, deliberately selected by Vaught Enterprises for her “ability” to pass as femme once inside her uniform through a naturally “femme” appearance (conventional biological markers being arbitrary coded as femme by the elite).
(exhibit 108b4: Homelander is the fascist, killer child super soldier made by neoliberalism; his fascist desire to be badass is covered up by the paraphernalia of American Liberalism; i.e., Pax Americana as fascism-in-disguise. Starlight is the middle-class refusal to play her part—not just as Homelander’s “waifu” girlfriend, but as the corporate mascot replacement for Homelander’s corporate-American elite expected to perform onscreen and off within a larger meta stage/arena kayfabe. In resisting both, Starlight becomes a class warrior/white ally to the oppressed. It might not be something all class warriors can do, but privilege should be used in class war for the betterment of all workers; e.g., Said’s postcolonial defense of the Palestinians.)
Starlight isn’t the most victimized character, but she is the most visible. Because she’s less marginalized than the show’s people of color (foreign or domestic), she isn’t automatically killed on the spot like they are. Instead, she’s the Gothic heroine, forced to survive under Homelander’s “loving” gaze. But despite having privilege, the show also acknowledges Starlight’s genuine, lived abuse, contrasting her mother’s abusive stage instructions to Homelander’s. Both consciously violate Starlight’s consent, favoring ideas they promote through false pageants: the pretty child, the perfect girlfriend, the power couple.
Homelander’s fascist persona and origins comment on the very social conditions that give rise to him in sexist art. While both are manmade, Homelander represents heroic media as monstrous. Already aberrant, he becomes increasingly dislocated, a confused extension of his patriarchal makers’ warped psyches. In terms of arrested development, equally undeveloped audiences are exposed to killer baby they can not only project onto, but emulate. Moreover, Homelander’s violence isn’t limited to himself, the product, or even his faithful, apathetic fans, the consumers; it pours from the ubiquitous worldviews that make either of them violent: the cult of strength and the cult of profit.
From cradle to grave, these mentalities dehumanize workers long before they set foot inside the workplace. Fascism embodies strength as dogmatic, using symbols of strength to imply gender performance as a kind of show of force. Dichotomized, these displays force anything unmanly into the state of exception. This includes women (cis or queer), but also people of color, atheists, non-Christians, sex workers, drag queens, immigrants, the mentally ill, autistic persons, the elderly and ethnic minorities. Obsessed with profits, neoliberals expand the purview of sales, granting cis-het, cis-queer and trans women the right to push minorities around; re: “gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss.”
Working under Capitalism, The Boys is relatively iconoclastic. Its cis-het heroine, Starlight, is the show’s ironic girl boss. Originally working for Vaught Enterprises, she wears their costume and puts up with Homelander’s open-secret abuse. However, she eventually rejects her girl-boss role as Homelander’s co-worker, rejecting neoliberalism’s attempts to commodify fascism by presenting it as “harmless” through Homelander as something to sell full-tilt. Whereas Vaught tend to ignore Homelander’s frequent (and heinous) workplace abuses, Starlight speaks out, becoming a social activist in the process, an ally of the oppressed working from a position of relative privilege.
(exhibit 108c: The wild-eyed state of Maria Falconetti is a result of trauma—of her being tortured by the director to achieve the look she is celebrated for today. Similarly the actress from Rings of Power is wild-eyed from her own tortures at the hands of orcs [though to my knowledge she wasn’t tortured by the directors to nail the look].)
In a meta sense, Starlight also uses her “star power” (sapped from Vaught’s studio cameras) to achieve a brief propaganda victory over Homelander, knocking him head-over-heels in the season 3 finale. Had the cameras actually been rolling, they could’ve filmed him running away like Richard Spencer, thus breaking the fascist spell of an invincible, besieged superman tucking tail. Alas, Homelander’s material advantage is frightfully real. His superpowers may be a metaphor for male privilege, but his “star power” headspace is violently infantile. He’s bought into the theatre, thinking himself a god among insects, many of whom worship the ground he walks on because if they don’t, he’ll fly into a rage and kill them: Starlight cannot defeat all of them alone.
Unlike Starlight, Vaught only speak out against their prize creation when profits are threatened. But they only provide empty lip service, not genuine criticism. They can’t abolish fascism because they rely on fascists to survive; hence, their moderate allowances are generally at “half-odds” with fascism, which gatekeeps minorities through an attempt at racial purity that hypercolonizes canonical works. That is, fascist fandoms enact Foucault’s Boomerang by scrubbing already-famous works of any minorities, strawmanning their long-dead authors with fascist dogma in the process.
For example, fascist fans tried to gatekeep people of color and queer people by review-bombing The Rings of Power
For the past week, I’ve been bombarded with messages of hate, called the N-word, told to go back to Africa, and called on to be executed. The reason? The Lord of the Rings. It would almost be laughable if it wasn’t so profoundly sad. A wealth of stories, and a willingness to believe in wizards, Balrogs, giant spiders and magical swords. But allow people of color to exist in Middle-earth? Well, that is an affront to all that’s good and decent. At least that’s the primary argument for those ruinous trolls apparently review bombing and harassing fans of color over Amazon’s Rings of Power series (source: Richard Newby’s “A Racist Backlash to Rings of Power Puts Tolkien’s Legacy Into Focus,” 2022).
However, the show’s own mixed-bag of problematic content[1a] and broader marketing strategies demonstrate how fascism and neoliberalism go hand-in-hand: the selling of strength to oscillating demographics. Amazon depicts Galadriel as a total girl boss in the neoliberal sense. She’s gaslit and gatekept by her fellow men, stubbornly show them up by stomping the seemingly invincible snow-troll. Lobotomizing it with her dirk, Galadriel presents wild-eyed and driven, a girl boss haunted by trauma.
Note: Again, read “Concerning Big Black Dicks” from/alongside “Goblins, Anti-Semitism, and Monster-Fucking” for an extensive look into Tolkien’s racism (and its wide-reaching effects). It’s also what most of the shoot featuring Harmony with a big black dildo was used for (to camp the canon, above)! —Perse, 5/5/2025
(artist: Sveta Shubina)
Unlike Joan of Arc—a victimized figure of peace who refused to wield a sword (exhibit 108c)—Galadriel’s trauma is fascist because it constantly pushes her towards violent displays of force tied to crisis and revenge. By proving her assigned enemies to be weak and strong (and Sauron as that invisible terror she uses to justify her continuous, totalitarian hypervigilance), Galadriel achieves the coveted girl-boss persona by swinging a sword, but also by slaughtering her mighty adversary with graceful, twirling movements that thoroughly outclass the boys in terms of raw kill count and enemy size (“That still only counts as one!”). Like Xena the Warrior princess, these dancer-like attacks achieve traditional masculine results. However, Galadriel’s victories are far more bloody and vindictive, making her less like Xena and more like Conan, daring Crom to count the dead.
Though plainly murderous, Amazon’s Galadriel is neoliberal by simply being a soldier woman (something out-and-out fascism wouldn’t allow). She’s also conventionally attractive in ways that promote spurious emancipation under a neoliberal yolk. Not only is Morfydd Clark a dead ringer for Cate Blanchett (tall, blonde and pale); she’s also granted license to be sexy in ways denied to Blanchett. This makes her an Amazon (excuse the pun) ripped straight from the 1970s, closer to Frazetta’s Eowyn than Jackson’s towering queen. Yes, Galadriel’s masculine, full-body armor (and tough-girl persona) evoke Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth desiring the power to rape “the way that men do it”—not as a sex-positive fantasy that “avenges” wrongdoings in the mind to give agency that heals; it’s about coercive violence, control and power abuse, including fantasies in response to these things in the material world, re: Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy asking her to become like a man:
Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose (source).
All the same, Galadriel’s her seawater-soaked dress breaks the spell, showing us the soft, sexy, female body (and elf bush) underneath that armor:
(exhibit 109: The Frazetta Illustrate is one of my favorites, but also Tolkien’s Amazons; e.g., Eowyn being a topic of medieval courtly love narratives concealing cryptonymically through literal duels [re: the Tolkien exhibit at the end of “Medicinal Themes and Advice“].)
Note the faint suggestion of elvish pubes(!), but also Galadriel’s complete indifference towards the male gaze (the actor’s and the audience’s). More than traditional “Nordic/ethnic” beauty standards idealized (exhibit 9b0/109), Galadriel doesn’t give a fuck, is emotionally unavailable towards a coded love interest. Like a Conan paperback, this “sexing up” of Lord of the Rings feels hauntological, ripped from an earlier time that never quite was: the neoliberal girl boss. It’s also a billion-dollar “gamble,” one designed to pressure consumers into watching the only big-budget LOTR spinoff in town. Amazon manipulates the market through privatization, appropriating the neoliberal notion of marrying female softness to “manly” strength unironically.
While masculine female strength within soft bodies can certainly be something to appreciate through iconoclastic praxis, it can also be unambiguous sexist apologia. I certainly value strong women, including Amazons. I’ve researched them independently for academic purposes (“Standing in Athena’s Shadow”), have written about them outside of school (re: “War Vaginas“), and explored them extensively in my artwork and fantasy writing. However, while I do like Frazetta as a guilty pleasure that—like an aging Gandalf towards a younger Bilbo—helped give me a much-needed push out the door, the tagline for my erotic art website literally reads “Hard Women & Soft Boys in Videogame Fan Art” for a while (now it reads, “A Place for Queer Expression in the Gothic Imagination”). Then and now, the tagline is iconoclastic because it specifically advocates for sex-positive female/feminine strength (and genuine sexual expression through pornographic displays; re: “My Art Website Is Now Live!”) in ironic genders, not just cis women.
By comparison, The Rings of Power showcases sexist female masculinity—the toxic notion of “acting like a man” while crystalizing the woman as a heteronormative sex object, but also a military marketing strategy. As the bourgeois authors of this narrative, Amazon are selling the military through heteronormative sex. This perpetuates a cycle of dehumanization, one that historically turns cis-het men (and cis women in neoliberal stories) into hypermasculine killers bent on “insect politics” (re: “Military Optimism“) and toxic gender views more generally.
Equally hostile, Galadriel sees everything orcish in front of her as “pure evil,” deserving of state-endorsed murder. As Amazon’s gorgeous poster girl of war, she markets empowerment through a position of state-certified strength, specifically the license to kill as coldly beautiful, but also female. This girl-boss mentality appropriates multiculturalism more broadly by spearheading tolerant recruitment standards with Girl Power™ (source: “Rings of Power Cast Slams Racist Threats Against Performers: ‘Middle-Earth Is Not All White,'” 2022).
In short, “Anyone can join and be ‘hardcore'” (even Bubbles from The Powerpuff Girls). Iconoclastic strength would criticize this view by actively trying to end the cycle of abuse as profitable to the elite, exposing the hideous unethicality of Galadriel’s mercenary violence being tied to men with deep pockets and vested interests. To this, ironic strength is its own kind of performance, one that undermines the status quo through sex positivity as something to present to normalized consumers (anyone accustomed to canonical consumption) post hoc.
Sun from Sense8, for example, is strong despite patriarchal adversity. Not a furious sexpot, she’s a small, capable boxer, one the system and her family punish for daring to fight because she enjoys it (not to serve the state). Sun is an appreciative and sex-positive character, granting women (cis- or queer) the option of doing things purely for themselves. Viewers conditioned to appreciate martial displays of force can learn this about Sun, thus question the very performative violence sold to them through canonical media like The Rings of Power.
Equally ironic is how Sun lacks any pre-existing trauma that drives her towards quests of mad, endless revenge. She desires revenge, to be sure, but it comes later in life. Meanwhile, Galadriel appropriates Amazons in the standard neoliberal fashion as a victim of childhood angst, specifically the weight of familial death heaped upon her fragile mind. This neoliberal call to war coercively recruits abused women into violent soldier roles, generating an army mentality against whatever target the state seeks to exploit under Capitalism, specifically Imperialism. “Build me an army worthy of Mordor,” except it’s Galadriel stubbornly recruiting a host of bloodthirsty elves. She’s a hawk, not a dove.
Patriarchal sexism historically presents peace as “womanly,” making Galadriel not just a hawk in dove’s clothing, but a hardened killer inside a soft, womanly body. The Rings of Power borrows this “return to war” strategy from James Cameron, whose Aliens has an equally beguiling Ripley as its heroine. First, Vasquez calls Ripley “Snow White,” denoting her relative outward softness when compared to Vasquez. Cameron writes Vasquez as a Latin street criminal hardened by poverty (a consequence of Capitalism, not Communism):
Like Drake, Vasquez is younger then [sic] the rest and her combat-primer was the street in a Los Angeles barrio [a Spanish-speaking sector of an American city, generally with a high poverty level]. She is tough even by the standards of this group. Hard-muscled. Eyes cunning and mean (source: the movie’s original 1985 script).
He also hectors Vasquez through the platoon loudmouth, who teases her for being a bit “too manly”:
(exhibit 110: Artist, left: Kalinka Fox. The Amazon is both a maiden/whore—with Scott’s Ripley more chaste but also white than Cameron’s Vasquez [essentially Mexican vaudeville played by a Jewish woman, Jeanette Goldstein].)
Despite how either physically appears, Ripley and Vasquez remain women in a man’s world. Their place in this world is deliberately neoconservative: Both are furies who bring about an American return to tradition, waging righteous war against America’s past geopolitical enemies, the Reds.
As the companion glossary states, “neoconservatives are liberal hawks who, exposed to propaganda over time, despise war protestors and promote peace through strength, including neocolonialism and proxy war.” A common 20th century example originated out of the 1960s with Vietnam; Cameron merely revived them by selling Reagan’s America bloody revenge set in outer space. Unlike Star Wars, Aliens frames America as morally good, the colonial marines retaliating against the wicked xenomorphs, who are ultimately blamed for starting the war. They draw first blood, viciously sacking Hadley’s Hope (the fictional counterpart to Saigon) and cocooning the colonists (an abject metaphor for Communist re-education, purposefully tied to an insect lifecycle that “kills” its victims); the brutality the marines visit upon them afterwards is just deserts, quite literally “the punishment one deserves.”
In general, traditional superheroes
- tend to be warlike and vengeful, even if their original authors were not: “Superman’s original creators, Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, were children of poor Jewish immigrants,” Sarah Newgarden writes. “Siegel’s father was Lithuanian, and Shuster’s family were from Kiev in Ukraine. Shuster and Siegel, two shy, bespectacled science-fiction enthusiasts growing up in an era of anti-Semitism, understood well the conflicts facing refugees” (source: “Superman, a Refugee’s Success Story,” 2019).
- treat war as attractive
- are sexy but also ubiquitous in mainstream markets designed to sell superheroes
By returning to tradition through neoliberal propaganda, Ripley is a traditional superhero who metes out state-sponsored retribution. When unironically portrayed, such “war bosses” demonstrate coercive heteronormative gender performativity. In particular, they market traditional female gender roles as “strong,” thus sufficient for even more masculine-performing cis women: Be superheroes, ladies… by having babies, or protecting them as “natural caregivers” (sublimated sex work). Ripley certainly did, with Cameron retooling neoliberal critique (Alien) into neoliberal pastiche by making our intrepid space trucker a bonafide killer-for-hire, but also a champion for “correct” motherhood (unlike that Commie “broodmare,” the alien queen; such a slut).
Ripley’s reformation easily outshined her original pro-labor role because it aligned with hegemonic corporate interests. This “decision of the market” (strategic manipulation by the elite passed off as mounting prosperity through deregulation) helped spawn endless waves of war pastiche that Americanized fans popularized in movie theatres; they also brought this pastiche into an exciting new medium: videogames, specifically the shooter (re: “Military Optimism“).
(artist: Joel Herrera)
Obviously this proliferation of a gun-toting, pro-life superhero poses a serious problem for anyone pro-choice, anti-gun, and antiwar, but especially for people who ovulate in any of these camps. They don’t want to be “powerful” in the traditional, sexist sense; i.e., bearing children, but also defending the practice to the proverbial death by becoming an Amazonian girl boss like Ellen Ripley.
It’s not the Left you have to convince, though; it’s the pro-lifers, the future fans, the war-hawks-in-the-making. When pressed, they’ll describe videogames like fireworks: loud, but harmless. Such media acclimates the consuming public to war as nostalgic, but also omnipresent—the celebration of an indifference to war because its universal presence has become not just normalized through neutral, benign theatre, but holy. To bridge the gap, you have to retool pre-existing visual language through sex-positive counterparts specialized to show audiences an alternative more ethical than fascists, but also centrists and their neoliberal fantasies: an escape from tradition through a gentler Ripley—not the state’s badass, dragon-slaying paramilitary agent, but a Marxist virago who combats the true big evil: the bourgeoisie, sexist warts and all.
This comes with risks, mind you. Jadis threw me out over my political views (a rather punishing maneuver given I was financially dependent on them). This might seem isolated from politics, but it’s not: Jadis is a relatively well-to-do neoliberal TERF/SWERF who defended the likes of J. K. Rowling, Bill Gates and Joe Biden[1b] over the course of our relationship. Jadis also looked down at sex workers and erotic art (including mine), claiming this “erased feminism” by having women cater to a sexist male audience by prostituting their bodies in a “normal” way (Jadis was fine with sexual expression as long as it appeared bad-ass or monstrous; i.e., monster-fuckers; e.g., the Yeti, exhibit 48d2 from “Dissecting Radcliffe“).
(exhibit 111a: Artist, left: Bob Wakelin; artist, right: Derek Laufman. As we’ve discussed throughout the book, cis sexuality and heteronormativity historically treats the xenomorph as a xenophobic symbol of rape, a dark mother/Medusa to be conquered by a “Hippolyta” or Amazon queen. The irony is that Ripley basically becomes Beowulf to reinforce her traditional female/feminine role as a good mother (also, the movie is basically Vietnam revenge porn, making the Alien Queen re: a Communist metaphor on par with Starship Troopers); in psychoanalytical models, the queen can be a metaphor for abject female rage—i.e., “she mad,” a “black mirror” for the woman’s own “hysteria” or wandering woman to be faced, fought and defeated inside a psychomachy or “mind battle” where the heroine faces her own trauma. But the reality of queer life is that women like Ripley are usually weaponized through their own trauma survival to attack conservative political targets that are alien, are coded as rapist; i.e., the trans woman as a false woman in disguise/imposter alien.)
And yet, despite liking tentacle dildos (re: exhibit 38a, “Meeting Jadis“), Tool music videos (re: exhibit 43a, “Seeing Dead People“), and Rammstein (whose allegory and social critique they felt was moderate enough to be legitimate), Jadis deemed my writing “masturbatory.” “You’re not George Orwell!” they loved to remind me. Jadis went on to describe me as “indulging in fruitless academic exercises to pointlessly self-aggrandize,” taking serious contention with me daring to critique heroic narratives—as if those demonstrate meaningful change for legitimately oppressed groups! Trans people will still be oppressed as regardless of how many times Ripley bitch-slaps the Alien Queen; xenophobic genocide is not sex-positive because sublimated genocide is not sex-positive, it’s tokenized oppression delivered by a weaponized sell-out.
Writing about monsters and queerness as Communist entities that are often attacked by cis folk has being an interesting perspective to explore. For all its military bombast, it’s interesting how subtle Cameron’s allegory could actually be. Early in the movie, Ripley says she isn’t a soldier, even being referred to by Lieutenant Gorman as “just an advisor.” Writing about Aliens for years, I already knew Ripley was a paramilitary agent. However, I didn’t pointedly notice the advisor codewords furtively signifying this position until several months ago [meaning back in 2023 when I originally wrote this. —Perse, 5/7/2025]. This is fitting enough: Vietnam advisors generally functioned as covert mercenaries through the Phoenix Program, coding themselves as peaceful. Meanwhile, their pseudonyms helped them violate international law by infiltrating warzones and committing war crimes.
These crimes were hardly accidents; they specifically demonstrated American hegemony as something to continuously reinforce, specifically their monopoly on violence as globally criminalized through the duplicitous and manipulative language of war. Using these tactics, American “advisors” served bourgeois interests through the CIA manufacturing state-sanctioned killers—either by murdering communist agents directly or setting up a US-sponsored regime in the south of the country (a base of operations). Behind this theatre of opposing forces with discrete, unambiguous roles were the elite, shamelessly exploiting millions of people for profit. The entire cause was treated as righteous, tied to wholesale destruction of a pure evil by a pure good without the cloak of neoliberal cinema as codified by Reagan’s tenure.
Eleven years later, Cameron whitewashed Reagan’s own abuses by reinventing the past. This retro-future revenge fantasy repackaged the state-authored deceptions of yesterday as neoliberal propaganda to consume in the present. Instead of overt “anti-communism” fanfare, Cameron gave the 1986 public a bugs-and-marines pastiche ripped from 1959[2]—literally us-versus-them rhetoric, with the good guys struggling to colonize empty space (the space bugs having no valid claim) until Ripley caps off the propaganda victory in spectacular fashion: defeating the communist leader in a grand, whirlwind duel.
As the girl boss to root for, Ripley is central to Cameron’s spell, but also under it. She’s easily the movie’s most violent character, but also its most celebrated—a more sexualized and violent Rambo serving the same basic canonical role: “just” killing bad-guy enemies-of-the-state the way that traditional males soldiers do (something Nintendo would replicate with Samus Aran[3a], a traumatized female “war orphan” pushed into radical positions of colonial Amazon violence by her colonizers). She’s also the most delusional and emotionally confused, never seeing herself as working for the big bad company despite her becoming their greatest champion: the warrior poster mom who kills everything in sight. Simply put, she was the baddie of the ’80s (meaning “an aesthetic primarily associated with Instagram and beauty gurus on YouTube that is centered around being conventionally attractive by today’s beauty standards”; source: Aesthetics Wiki).
However, Ripley is also the movie’s biggest lie to us, the audience: Her so-called “empowerment” stems from antecedent trauma, caused by an abusive parent company that recruits her through brute-force coercion: gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss. The board gaslights Ripley by denying her testimony and calling her crazy. They gatekeep her by taking away her license, which forces her to work menial labor until she cracks. Then, after she signs up out of sheer desperation, they transform her into a girl boss. Transformed, Ripley explodes, an instrument of pure xenophobic vengeance whose Promethean Quest eventually leaves her homeless, unemployed, and by the third film, utterly bereaved.
(source)
In other words, Aliens Ripley is no less freed of the company’s abuses than Alien Ripley. It’s an empty concession where the elite surrender nothing. Not only is the power Ripley “gains” heavily scripted and fake; it’s also standard-issue recruitment fare: false hope that romanticizes U.S. foreign policy and its treatment of women in the military (the men in the movie fare far worse, ground to a collective pulp, something marketed to pro-military dudes everywhere: the myth of the beautiful death): the Amazon as a kind of feral jungle bunny to pimp, as usual—pitting her against the Medusa (re: all of my research on Amazons).
Having grown up on Aliens and Super Metroid, I felt comfortable in critiquing either franchise, consuming them ironically. Alas, deprioritizing the unironic consumption of neoliberal theatricality was entirely unthinkable to Jadis (despite being the one to introduce me to Ken Burn’s 2017 antiwar documentary, The Vietnam War). They loathed my Marxist reading of popular media specifically because it denuded the neoliberal spell covering everything Jadis consumed (they refused to call Aliens neoliberal propaganda, categorizing it as a “bad metaphor”). Without their toys to distract them (including D&D, which is heavily structured around racial conflict), they might have to actually acknowledge the material inequalities enforced by the ruling class on everyone else, including James Cameron.
Simply put, Jadis was the middle-class “Karen” who endorsed Cameron’s neo-conservative grift. Conflating materials goods with the means of production, they favored Ripley the unironic paramilitary “advisor” over Ripley the exploited space trucker because Cameron’s version was “as good as it gets.” Never mind the absolute chain of recursive tyrannical subterfuge begot from this moderate, xenophobic worldview. George Bush Sr. described it as “the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order, a world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations.”
Spearheading this continual lie is a pantheon of heroic personas: powerful-looking men and women, but also token minorities. For Cameron, this included not just girl bosses, but queer bosses—butch lesbians or bisexual warrior women like Zarya, the Russian weightlifting soldier from Overwatch (2016) as beings that iconoclasts can subvert through their own ideas of marriage and homosocial behaviors, but are discouraged from doing so:
(exhibit 111b: Artist: Persephone van der Waard. Top-left: As stated during our master’s thesis, making love is class/culture war insofar as subversive Amazonomachia challenges the status quo’s heteronormative profit motive. These are attempts by me to subvert canonical [thus regressive] Amazonomachia.
For example, Zarya as a federated Russian, post-Soviet commodity in Blizzard’s team-based arena-shooter, Overwatch. I like sex, but not centrist/fascist sex, so my Amazonomachia redrafted her as such to convey my idea of a “hard woman”; i.e., not someone who fought others for the state, but who would protect the people from the state in all its harmful forms as a kind of “killer rabbit” death knell to state apologia: “teaching an old dog new tricks” by guiding the symbol away from its Pavlovian approach towards something that doesn’t lead to euthanasia; i.e., the gentle mommy dom and her monstrous-feminine sodomy not as exceptional, but as identity under struggle that shouldn’t be commodified but presented as a human right to exist. Granted, I did this drawing in June 28th, 2022—about a month before coming out. Only revisiting the drawing a year into writing and illustrating my book did I write this particular exhibit around the drawing itself.
Obviously videogame centrist Amazons are very popular, thus can be used by cosplayers to reclaim sexuality and gender in iconoclastic performances; e.g., Zarya might be a “thigh queen,” but Chun Li is another popular character that has her arguably beat in that department, and has been around for several decades (and is an INTERPOL cop). Whereas the sub is always unwilling in centrist or fascist sports portrayals, art allows us to remove the sporting, skullduggery nature of the sports athlete and use their femme-masc crossovers in genderqueer ironies; i.e., the sub/bottom suddenly able to win by being a brat “spoilsport”—an alien approach to competitive sports but a sex-positive one that divorces the athlete, the cop, the war boss, from the sport’s traditional nexus of exploitation. Athletic activity and fiscal action are still “on the table”; they’re just not enforced for the sake of heteronormative values as an engine for elite hegemony and profit.
The same idea applies to I-No and Chun-Li, both also fighting “waifus” in fighting game franchises that sexualize their female characters disproportionately compared to the male fighters [the feminizing of female warmakers], but also appeal to the genre at large as a sport through a heteronormative dynamic across the board; sexuality is often stressed through key body parts, but especially the ass, thighs or breasts as “for men.” Obviously the inclusion of muscles into the beauty scheme allows a great spectrum of expression for the Amazon to appear and function as, relative to the norms they’re subverting.
Likewise, queer performance/gender trouble can grant male queer stereotypes to exist, as well, operating through non-binary femboys/catboys and catgirls, exhibit 91c; non-binary gender trouble with a gradient of Amazons “monster moms”—tough but nurturing OCs “[non-bigoted] Conan with a pussy” characters like Ileana, Revana, Siobhan and Virago; exhibits 7d, 37f, 37g, 61a2, 84, etc; and fanart like Corporal Ferro, exhibit 85—Sabs’ use of these things in femboy art, 112a/b; or Zangief as a gay Russian “bear.” In other words, there’s a small number of ways to make something straight [and endless examples of the state doing so] but no shortage of ways to make something gay that’s wonderfully not devoted to sports, to policing and legitimate forms of state violence [“I’m a lumberjack and that’s ok…”]. It becomes revolutionary by virtue of being a “spoilsport” who plays their own monstrous-feminine sodomy games rather than simply guaranteeing the money always flowing up through the perpetuation of various heteronormative [thus coercively violent and warlike] stereotypes; the prescribed waifu becomes class-conscious by serving a cause that fights for her rights within a grander conspiracy of collaborators—of media as a broader context gleaned between two or more participants conveying an at-times veiled pedagogy of the oppressed that runs countercurrent to public opinion.)
(artist: Stephen Gorman. Interviewing Gorman, Dan Epstein writes,
working on the piece, Stephen, who was working as an illustrator in Munich, Germany, at the time, already knew of the perfect “model” for the cover. “The statue reference was based on the Lady Justice statue that stood atop of the High Court in Frankfurt,” Stephen Gorman told Unbuilt. “It was the most feminine and sexy version that we could find of the statue.” Stephen further amplified the statue’s curves — even exposing one breast for, er, titillating effect — before doing some additional local research in order to accurately depict the crumbling of the album’s statue. “I was working in Munich and there’s a great museum in the center of the city called the Glyptothek which is crammed full of disintegrating Roman statues,” he told Unbuilt. “These were my main inspiration for the fragmentation process for the painting” [source: “Metallica’s …And Justice for All: the Story behind the Iconic Cover Art,” 2019].
[source: Lucius’ Romans’ “Ancient Statues Show Their True Colours,” 2016]
Roman statues were originally painted in a colorful design, but in fascist, white-centric/supremacist times have famously been whitewashed. Simply put, it’s purity argumentation—the enforcement of the colonial binary through statuesque bodies in decay through the inheritance of the world with a structure whose illusions are falling apart under neoliberal hegemony [and indeed, were falling apart before them under earlier forms of Capitalism; e.g., laissez-faire]. Of course, Metallica’s seemingly iconoclastic music has become yet another canonical dystopia largely celebrated by American white boys [or their offshoots]. Their Amazon was the sacrifice of a former glory as something to lament, instead of saying, “Good riddance!” and making a better Amazon [without the sword, unironic fetishization and blindfold], they promptly sold out two years later and have been milking the industry dry ever since.)
I’m not for terminating hero fantasies outright. But I am an iconoclast, humanizing various outlier groups by framing traditional heroism (and its archetypal, badass bodies) as thoroughly dubious when irony is performatively fleeting or arguably vacant. This framing requires ironic girl and queer bosses to contrast with. For example, I can generate a lot of gender trouble simply by drawing someone who is fem and masc, who isn’t a superhero—or at least, isn’t acting like a superhero; i.e., they aren’t murdering everything around them. Maybe just have them peg a femboy consensually instead? Make love, not war, people (except class war, amirite?)!
Iconoclastic artwork like mine uses ironic gender trouble to open people’s minds to a new kind of queer struggle/existence, one generally consigned to the nadir of xenophobia in American society (or anywhere that sexists call home); the destruction of statuesque icons through irony is viewed as violence, specifically illegitimate, subversive violence against state control. It specifically happens through reverse abjection, granting the victims of sexual and gender division the right not only to exist, but thrive. To reject sexism by throwing its harmful divisions back in sexist people’s faces. This can potentially change minds; it’s certainly not a given—and it certainly didn’t work with Jadis—but I’d argue it’s still worth a shot. Or as John Lennon “Imagine” famously implores,
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
[…]
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one (source).
Clearly Lennon’s imagination is limited by his own sexism, obscene material advantages and internalized homophobia, but at least he tries:
Of the four Beatles, it was John Lennon who seemed to be the most ready to use antigay slurs, make nasty comments, and even become violent on one occasion, when he was very drunk at a party and a friend made a joke about him and Brian Epstein – he nearly beat the guy to death. He later commented that it was his own repressed attraction to men that caused him to lash out, and he later told Yoko Ono that he would have been bisexual but claimed to have never met a man he was intellectually attracted to enough. There are many other clues in interviews/writings of his that he was attracted to men to some degree. So his apparent homophobia was not only part of the times in which he lived, but also his own personal self-defense mechanism (source: Preman Tilson’s Quora answer to “Were The Beatles in any way homophobic?” 2022).
To be fully transparent, here, Lennon was a violently homophobic man earlier in his life and even at the so-called peak of his “powers,” his Jesus-like appeals to immateriality as a millionaire buoyed by his time in the Beatles are pretty tone-deaf—re: Tom Taylor’s 2023 writeup, “Steely Dan vs John Lennon.” —Perse, back in 2023
(artist: John Lennon)
Despite Lennon’s shortcomings, the value of imagination is vital to political change. Extending beyond material things, let’s extend the notion to gender trouble: Imagine Conan with a pussy. It’s not hard to do, but gonadic alteration still leads to a great deal of gender trouble in heroic art. Or rather, purist Conan fans can’t imagine him with a pussy any more than Christofascists can see Jesus as a person of color. “Conan’s a guy!” they’ll cry—i.e., he has a penis, he must have a penis. Never mind that I can draw Conan with a pussy faster than you can blink. For added fun, I can even have him identify as a trans man(!). Or keep the penis and have Conan gay or identify as a trans woman. The sky’s limit, really. All of this ties to older histories of straight myopia—of a constitutional inability to imagine the trans existence through canonical language as something to subvert.
To change, sexist people must learn to expand their horizons through the boss-like bodies they witness, create and consume. However, this must include ironic (re: sex-positive) gender performances. Not only must Conan promote descriptive sexuality through any of the morphological alternates listed above; they must foster empathy by advertising mutual consent and cultural appreciation. Their desire to kill must be replaced with a desire to love—not just sheathing literal (and figurative) swords, but hammering them into ploughshares. In turn, sexist audiences are granted the chance to change: to watch Conan enjoy getting consensually ploughed and love it just as much.
The radical creativity and consumption of an ironically gendered and sexualized Conan not only flies in the face of the original author, Ron E. Howard, who was racist and sexist; it insults those who uphold his fascist ideas: his fascist fans (it’s possible to like Conan and not be bigoted, but those who actively defend Howard’s sexism are bigots). These bristling reactionaries will defend Howard’s problematic canon by beatifying the very hero that personifies his hyperbolic gender norms—their gender norms.
(exhibit 112a: Artist: Sabs. Conan with a bussy, in this case—i.e., the same gender-bending/non-binarism as imagining him with a pussy [which we explored with femboys/catgirls, etc; exhibits 91a, 91b, 91c]. Sabs illustrates this bending of gender performance while subverting another hypermasculine hero: He-Man helping Skeletor with his “boner.”)
(exhibit 112b: Artist: Sabs. Sabs’ gender-non-confirming themes apply not just to fascist/neoliberal staples as things to subvert, but a transformative, non-binary [i.e., gender fluid] process that reclaims cute boys in a variety of classical scenes of unbridled hedonism; e.g., the rapturous angels-and-demons dichotomy of a Renaissance Europe, the bucolic pleasures of an imaginary Antiquity or fantastical tableau, and the appreciative peril of various urban legends with a dated, hauntological feel to them [often involving totemic demons].)
Generally this stance is ontological—i.e., “Conan is cis-het!” Such claimants likewise abject alternatives by treating them as anathema. To these persons, I’m not an iconoclast (which to acknowledge would belie their adversarial function as canonical gate-keepers oppressing me); I’m just a silly person who gave Conan a pussy (which is different from Red Sonya, who represents the ’70s, Marvel comic book idea of a patriarchal girl boss: conventional eye candy and warlike in ways that uphold[3b] the status quo). Conan needing to have a penis will quickly eclipse anything else about him, and erase alternatives by shading them as inherently vile, twisted and demonic.
No disguise mid-cryptonymy is foolproof. The iconoclasts who author these ironic, sex-positive alternatives during revolutionary cryptonymy are generally scapegoated; i.e., by fascist warmongers, whose lethal abuse mid-cryptonymy neoliberals downplay through moderacy. We’ll explore this concept next, going “over the rainbow” to understand why persecuted groups choose to identify as witches—especially famous ones like the Wicked Witch of the West—which invariably leads to collective punishment and reactive, transgenerational abuse beyond what workers normally experience under Capitalism.
(exhibit 112c: Artist: Persephone van der Waard. “It ain’t easy bein’ green!” Whereas Frank Baum envisioned the witch as a small, fairy-tale obstacle, Elphaba Thropp was pointedly written by Gregory Maguire as a kind of sympathetic vice character. Not only is she arguably trans, non-binary and/or intersex; she speaks truth to power in relatable-yet-moderate ways. To that, Elphaba regrettably retreats into cliché as the story progresses, Maguire ultimately sacrificing in the “bury your gays” tradition. Like Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha, then, Elphaba simply becomes the madwoman in the attic, her humiliating relegation assigned by Maguire through the stigmatizing trauma of her green screen: she becomes radioactive. In doing so, Maguire serves the bourgeoisie instead of defying them [which would require writing Elphaba as something other than a historical victim of the state—a bit like a zombie with her green skin and kill-on-sight punishment by Oz’ executive].
By drawing Elphaba as I have, I posit that Oz’s most famous witch needn’t be reduced to a sacrifice or catchy musical number to inspire people; she can be depicted as a sex-positive, death fetish rebel who—like that undead musical number “Defying Gravity” but with actual irony and Gothic counterculture—soars to majestic heights; i.e., pushing back/punching up against Rainbow Capitalism with borrowed robes [Idina Menzel’s blouse and hat, and Mercy from Overwatch‘s wings, boots/gloves and baton] thus illustrating a new kind of rainbow [queer solidarity] that raises class consciousness, affecting the proletariat’s ability to imagine a better world for all workers.
[artist: Harmony Corrupted]
Ludo-Gothic BDSM is always risk to calculate in the midst of suffering whatever witch hunts the state dishes out. In turn, the same idea pertains to any “broom” you might ride to make a point with [above].)
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
[1a] Tolkien may not have been openly racist; his post-WW2 novels still laid the us-versus-them groundwork that neoliberals use to whitewash war, including fascism (a topic that Volume Zero would explore at length per Tolkien’s refrain; re: “Scouting the Field“). Even if the potential for sex-positive interpretations exists, these must still compete with sex-coercive ones. Think of it as competing dialog tied to symbols without intrinsic meaning. Charlie Chaplin treated his mustache as part of himself; Hitler famously copied it to give himself momentum; and Charlie eventually made fun of Hitler for it by playing Hitler (The Great Dictator, 1940). In other words, Hitler’s cunning use of propaganda eclipsed Charlie, forcing Hitler’s American idol into a competing dialog with fascism: the mustache as colonized. The same logic applies to Tolkien’s orcs. Even if they were author-intended dogwhistles or not, fascist fans will be treating them as such.
[1b] I once told Jadis that if Biden wanted to actually do something meaningful, he should pass a Constitutional amendment that legitimizes trans and non-binary people instead of opting for executive orders that can simply be undone in the next election cycle: “Trans men are men, trans women are women, non-binary people are valid.” Jadis hated this idea, calling it “impossible” and telling me, “Well, at least he’s doing something!” They also thought that Rowling as the first billionaire author (and female author, to boot) somehow merited praise, ignoring her TERF politics; and lauded Gates for his billionaire philanthropy while ignoring his privatization of the 90s computer market and his dubious connection to Jeffery Epstein.
[2] As previously mentioned in Volume One (re: “War Culture“)—and explored in my writing from “Military Optimism” (2021) onwards to any time I look at Aliens (e.g., “Scouting the Field,” “Understanding Vampires,” “On Amazons, Good and Bad,” “The Puzzle of ‘Antiquity’,” etc)—Robert Heinlein’s 1959 novel, Starship Troopers, framed communists as a pseudo-arachnid hivemind species, the author pushing for nuclear war against Communist China through the usual ethnocentric (thus Cartesian, settler-colonial, and heteronormative) veneers that neoliberalism translated into videogames (see: “Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning” for a 2025 encapsulation of this facet of my research).
[3a] Refer to my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus for the entirety of my work on Ripley and Samus.
[3b] A sex-positive Amazon from comic books would be William Marsden’s Wonder Woman, whom Marsden specifically crafted in ways that undermined the Amazon as a patriarchal tool. While the inevitable subjugation of traditional Amazons warned Athenian women not to “act like men,” Marsden’s protagonist demonstrated women as sexually empowered—i.e., to socially elevate themselves, but also serve as counterculture icons using less-than-subtle BDSM tendencies (April Baer’s “The Not-So-Secret BDSM History Of Wonder Woman,” 2017).