This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). 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 “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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.

The Rememory of Personal Trauma, part two: Escaping Jadis; or, Running up that Hill (feat. Stranger Things, Majora’s Mask, and Wuthering Heights)

“You’re not really here!”

“Oh, but I am, Max! I am!”

—Max and Vecna, Stranger Things (2022)

Picking up from where “Meeting Jadis, part two” left off…

Those who cannot learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. In this sense, we are indebted from the lessons of former abusers, insofar as we can learn from the harm they caused: how to survive and be better than them. This means liberating ourselves and others by subverting the abuse we survived; it means camping our own rape as something to play with and out in dollish, theatrical ways. Part one explored my attraction to Jadis through our mutual weirdness and trauma as doll-like. Living through their abuse eventually led to my forming of new scholarship; i.e., my coining of the academic term, “ludo-Gothic BDSM.” But to reremember Jadis, first I would have to survive them, and that was easier said than done. As Robert Burns once described, “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley.” It was in his poem, “To a Mouse” (1785). In similar fashion, Burns’ lines were on my mind as I prepared my escape from Jadis: I was the mouse under their power and couldn’t simply disassociate to get through it[1]. Escape would not be easy, but an uphill climb made by a doll with her strings cut.

We’ve already talked about uphill battles, of course, and poor Sisyphus endlessly pushing the rock uphill. The rememory of personal trauma, we’ll see, is more akin to a Christly passion. Part of the difficulty wasn’t because I was under Jadis’ control so much as I felt like it; i.e., their doll to do with as they saw fit. To that, no one is immune from conditioning. Even when it starts to break, you can still feel its effects on you. Once my escape was materially and mentally prepared, though—and once I reclaimed my devices from Jadis to the extent that I could, back then—I confronted them.

To be clear, this wasn’t done without some trepidation; i.e., abuse tends to intensify drastically when the victim tries to escape (re: extinction bursts), insofar as their presence normally reinforces an abuser’s addictive possessiveness. I didn’t attack Jadis, though; I gradually hinted at their abuse, partly because I was scared out of my mind, dreading what would inevitably transpire once the cat was out of the bag. My fears were not unfounded; once I said the words, “I think your behavior is abusive,” Jadis threw me out on the spot. I had my friends on call when it happened, so Jadis could defend themselves from my “aspersions.” I told Jadis so; they literally hid in the shadows and whispered accusations at me—that I had “weaponized” my friends against them (the DARVO tactic: Deny, Accuse, Reverse Victim, Offender).

To Jadis’ “credit,” they released me from bondage and didn’t physically harm me. But they also never spoke to me again. After a seventeen-hour car ride to Cuwu’s (we rode in relative silence despite me trying to break the ice), Jadis accused me of burning the bridge (“nuking it from orbit” were their exact words) before driving away. I haven’t heard from them since.

Note: I originally wrote this section over a year ago, and am revisiting it now as I prepare to finalize its release. Primarily I’m including notes about ludo-Gothic BDSM as it evolved on these earlier reflections to what ultimately amounted to my scholarship’s formative years. —Perse 6/25/2024

This might seem open and shut, except then I had to deal with Jadis’ ghost haunting me. “Leaving Jadis” is my attempt not to deny and bury that ghost, but turn it into something different; i.e., that takes their lingering hold on me and turns it into an object lesson: something to help me and the world heal from the forces that turned Jadis into yet-another-tool for the state.

As such, this book was originally written to commemorate my escape from Florida and eventual healing from what Jadis did to me—a kind of monstrous rebuttal where I humanize monsters (and monstrous toys) through my own work; re: my formulation of what eventually would become ludo-Gothic BDSM. And yet, this rebellious healing is a slow, time-consuming process—not just this book and figuring out my past through it, draft-after-draft, but building up to its inception before I’d written a single page or drawn a single image (not including older works that I’ve since renovated for the book).

(exhibit 39a1a: Models, top: Mom and Persephone van der Waard; bottom-left: Uncle Dave. Artist, top and bottom-left: Persephone van der Waard; bottom-right: Cuwu.)

To this, my usual creative outlets evolved into a deep healing process—to deal with what had happened in Florida, but also to cope with several other developments afterwards: Directly after Florida, I rebounded with Cuwu, which promptly fell apart after six months. During that time, Uncle Dave suddenly died, killed by a heart attack (re: Volume One). Dealing with both events, everything was constantly interacting back and forth inside of and around me, so I decided to double these traumas with my own sex-positive creations; I drew Dave’s portrait and another picture for my mother (a hauntological, liminal space, inspired by Edward Hooper’s “Night Hawks,” 1942) who had already lost her fiancé to Covid six months prior (I came out, two days later[2]). Built up inside of me after Florida, the inspiration was less like a spark bursting out of thin air and more like a dam breaking under pressure.

Said deluge happened after watching season four, episode four of Stranger Things. I related to Max’ own predicament (exhibit 39a1b) under the knife-fingered spell of the villain; my empathy during their moment on the cross touched me through a shared connection with trauma and due to my own psychosexual urges tied to said trauma—i.e., seeking the palliative Numinous by envisioning myself in Max’ Christ-like shoes.

After watching her barely escape, I positively bawled. Doing so gave me the desire to live; moreover, I felt inspired to “release” my own trauma by giving voice to a larger historical-material struggle: liberation. Expressed through Gothic poetics as a matter of oppositional praxis, I drafted an egregore; i.e., whose dialectical-material presence denotes a recursive, dualistic sense of old traumas tied to present, centuries-old structures: capital as made for profit, thus the raping of nature as monstrous-feminine on all registers. I envisioned the subverting of capital as universal to all workers affected by it, hence for the young and old of any sex, gender, religion or inclination to return to and play with—to confront rape itself, but also to consciously make that informed choice (thus consent) when dragged down by such forces themselves.

The moment the episode ended, I went downstairs and instantly drew a picture of Jadis and myself: a great black shape lording over a princess in a white dress (exhibit 39a1b, next page). This creation had spawned from an attachment to past abuses from my own family circle, but also my own life as filled with markers of parallel trauma: the echoes of Cambodia, Nanking or Nazi-occupied Holland, intimated by videogame “zombie” violence marking the state of exception. It all felt connected because I—more than usual—felt connected to the world around me, for better or for ill. That’s how radical empathy works! Except, now I realize that I had—like said world—been raped as well.

For the rest of this section, I shall exhibit Jadis’ abuse of me in ways I hopefully can convey to you a) through other stories, and b) through exhibits of Jadis that partially censor identifying factors; i.e., with their face scratched out of the photo to keep them—along with their codename—as anonymous as I can do at a glance. Originally, I wrote of them behind their codename while conveying them as a simple black shape (next page), but have since decided I wanted to convey them a little more corporally (exhibit 39a2b) than a fatal portrait or Nick Castle homage.

To be absolutely clear, records of Jadis can still be found in my broader material histories. I will not take the time needed to entirely expunge them, partly because Jadis isn’t worth effort, but also because I want proof of their abuses and their actual existence—including the love they coerced from me—to remain after I am gone, without provoking them overtly while I am still alive. That’s their immortality as far as I’m concerned. As such, this book would not exist without their abuse of me, nor ludo-Gothic BDSM as a scholarly idea; i.e., that became entirely devoted towards avoiding similar abuses in the future! —Perse

(exhibit 39a1b: Fatal portrait, top-left: Jadis, whose “beautiful” memory I will replace with the truth of what they were—an abused person who went on to abuse others; artist, top-right: Persephone van der Waard, who came out a month after illustrating her abuser’s true form and her own: “Somebody new, I’m not that chained-up little person still in love with you” [Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” 1978].)

A common Gothic trope, then, is the restoration of sentiment through the material world: the collapse of the Gothic castle like a nightmare, the transgenerational curse of its perceived, mighty undeath swept away like a bad dream and repealed with a benign counterpart (which Hogle would posit is, itself, a mere counterfeit that serves the material interests of the elite; i.e., the Cycle of Kings [more on this idea in the “Monomyth” subchapter] exemplified through the whitewashing of the regal home—the castle itself and its surroundings haunted by what is normally abjected). However, these stories more broadly denote a continuous healing process—of oneself and the sick home (or land around it) as part of the socio-material world that occurs through the pain of existence unnaturally affecting a natural process: the fusion of memories, artistic ideas and trauma together in nightmarishly beautiful ways. As such, I had intimately studied them already in my own graduate work, writing about Hollow Knight‘s poisoned land, but also poisoned memories per the rememory process; in turn, my postgraduate work involved my surviving of rape as something to study and camp more than once.

Pregnant with these sensations under Jadis’ “care,” I dutifully wrote the story down after they threw me out (Persephone van der Waard’s “Setting the Record Straight; My Ex’s Abuse of Me: February 17th, 2022”). I did so at the time in order to get it straight in my own head, but also communicate my exodus in language I thought others would understand (rape is alien to many people, but Gothic stories less so); then, after Florida, I drew Jadis despite knowing the image would chill my blood at every viewing.

I had put off doing so for months, afraid of the agonizing “birthing” process but also of its dreadful completion. Eventually I could no longer keep them inside me and released their abuse onto the canvas (and later these book volumes). My aim was not to vent or self-torture, but bravely educate and inform future would-be-victims in language that speaks to them and their own assorted traumas and socio-material experiences. This book and its artwork are a logical continuation of that vital trend, as is ludo-Gothic BDSM a rememory-style means of revisiting such events; i.e., to recreate them in a variety of increasingly playful forms.

To that, these rather sober historical exhibits form the starting point for the subversion of martyrdom, which ludo-Gothic BDSM speaks to: as practitioner of it who became more and more playful, regarding the overall process.

What comes next is a passion of mine, in the religious, Numinous sense of that word; i.e., the “rough stuff” we alluded to in “Monsters, Magic and Myth” (2024), from Volume Two, part one. Tread lightly but also know that this book, for all its heavy weather, is still a safe space.

That being said, writing about these experiences and illustrating them, then editing and proofreading them again and again, I’ve had to go back repeatedly to a very dark place and dig up these bones; and it’s weird, because a part of me loves it—i.e., the thrill, the profound sense of annihilation and live burial, post-disinterment; it’s a madness that touches you and never lets go, haunts you for the rest of your life.

But I lived to educate you as matter of pride in my work. So if I ever feel small and weak, if I ever break down and cry because of it, I can remind myself that I survived; I didn’t break, I didn’t give in; I fought back and I lived. Whatever sickness drove Jadis to hurt me, I didn’t let it get me, too. And whatever money their father left behind for them, and all the material things that come and go for them as a result, I will rest easy knowing none of it can possibly fill the void in their heart, the sheer inability for them to relate healthily to others. Destroying things is easy and over in a heartbeat. Healing from trauma takes constant work; it takes courage the likes of which a villain like Jadis could never hope to match. —Perse

(exhibit 39a2a: For all its self-indulgent and fatal, carceral nostalgia, Max’s thrilling liberation from Vecna is Stranger Things‘ crowning achievement. Yes, it occurs from a Red-Scare, cis perspective that, as always, gives BDSM a bad name; the analog for trauma and abuse is both profound and applicable to any situation thereof. Ignoring but re-remembering the xenophobic nature of Vecna as the cartoon killer of white, cis-het, American children, the reality is that Max is an imperfect stand-in for any victim under capital: the plight of the heroine needn’t be gendered at all, but merely the portrayal of someone without power being gaslit by an invisible killer from the shadows. While Vecna is male—coded similarly to Malcolm MacDowell’s Alex from A Clockwork Orange [1971] just “Singing in the Rain” as he goes about his gruesome work—the reality is “killers” needn’t be so overtly rapacious in a physical or male sense.

The truth is, abuse but especially rape takes many forms and can use the same psychosexual language of unstable/unequal power as a dialogue between them; i.e., the victim and the audience relating back and forth, but also the predator and prey or multiples of each: the mark of trauma that communicates nonverbally[3] but also is told through widespread forms of psychosexuality tied up in demonic, Christian-torturous imagery popularized by Dante and revived in other mediums [e.g., Jacob’s Ladder or Tool music videos, exhibit 43a]. It becomes a paradoxical chase of the nurturing force as powerful and god-like, but also the aesthetic darkness as speaking to you in potentially harmful ways. When touched by a massive trauma that scars you, then, catharsis is paradoxically swept up in bad copies of the original abuse. You’re drawn to its dark intensity and gravity to face your fears, but also transform them and your trauma as something to hopefully camp and transform.

Simply put, it’s a prey mechanism and at times an intensely maladaptive one that brings new targets to an abuser hunting its prey [we’re taught not to self-conceptualize as animals; except we are animals, and few things are as intensely animal or ancient as fight, flight, fawn or freeze]. Prey fear predation but also seek protection through likenesses thereof that won’t harm them; i.e., less checking under the bed for monsters and instead inviting one inside to keep a former victim safe. The paradox of psychosexuality is the victim’s erotic desires often become pluralized, a strong urge from emotional scarring potentially leading them to conflate sex and harm through these maladaptive behaviors.
For example, my mommy kink is the seeking of a protector other than men [who have abused me all my life]: “Mother is the name for God on the lips and hearts of all children.” Indeed, my supposed rescuer was Jadis, who having conversations with me that my family could not see [thought I told them plenty] spirited me away to Florida. There, they worked their magic, doing their best to awe me with a shared psychosexual connection; i.e., drawn to my trauma and my seeking of the palliative Numinous as useful to their abusive machinations.

At the time, I thought Jadis a victim like me who was abused in ways that would bring us together to each other’s benefit. But as a harmful demonic persona, they were victim who had been operating as an abuser for years, one who forsook me in my time of need and pushed me to madness and suicide ideation:

Father, into your hands
Why have you forsaken me?
In your eyes forsaken me
In your thoughts forsaken me
In your heart forsaken me [System of a Down’s “Chop Suey,” 2001].

Like God unto Jesus, Jadis became my destroyer [their mother acting like a man, in that respect, hence them playing the TERF whose tokenism would go on to inform Sex Positivity‘s entire critical voice[4]]. They tried to sever all bonds of friendship and family I had, so there would be only them. They would fret and strut about the house in fetish gear and knife heels, hypnotizing me as their prey. And my friends and family either did not know, felt unable to reach me/powerless to intervene, or some combination of these inadequacies [and in Cuwu’s case, they rescued me only to prey on me, themselves].

Likewise, Max’s friends paw desperately at her body as her eyes roll into her skull and she falls upward; i.e., less like a balloon sailing away from them and more like Christ on the cross severed from gravity itself. The killer had targeted her for her trauma and worked from the shadows, hunting her without her knowledge until finally making himself known.

[artist: Theremin Trees; source: “‘Unconsciously’ Seeking Abusers? | bogus therapy,” 2022]

While the show treats Vecna’s reveal as strictly torturous[5], the truth is, killers aren’t just two-faced, but many-faced. First, they generally approach you with two basic masks: a dark side and a light side, and doubly imposturous, they oscillate between them to confuse you while also often having several on at once [concentric veneers] and borrowing from a vast store of expressions [above]. They tell you lies to keep you close, intimating cheap rewards and brutal punishment as if to say, “Stay here with me; it’s the only choice you have.”

To that, Vecna doubles Max, offering her a Faustian choice, a psychosexual martyrdom similar to Owen from The Night House. Like Beth from that film, Max is jostled by her friends to reject this fantasy at the critical moment. As such, she recovers and runs away from the killer whose spells are, themselves, mere illusions; i.e., unable to harm her to the degree that he’s suggesting: that he somehow has total power over her. The socio-material truth is more complex; i.e, those with power over you always have the capacity to commit real violence and harm, but the method to evoke this as a means of rooting you in place until they can have their way is fallible. In short, they cannot monopolize you anymore than capital can at large.

To this, Netflix’ overall metaphor for Numinous destruction is apt, the psychomachy suitably operatic as Kate Bush’s infamously spectral voice swoons and sighs some forty years after its debut. Max frees herself, suddenly able to move, and she desperately makes her escape. Running through the dark forest of her mind, the thunder of the music drives her onward while the dark wizard’s spell swirls chaos all around. But her prey-like desire to be free drives her on, until finally the spell breaks and she falls back to Earth, reunited with her friends and leaving the thin-skinned, fragile and lonely predator isolated and alone. “I’m still here,” she says, having chosen to live instead of give into Vecna’s devilish offer [a Faustian bargain that conflates genuine love with non-consensual, harmful pain; re: false power as self-destructive].

For all Stranger Things‘ Gothic panache, the concept is hardly unique to strictly Gothic language. For example, when regarding my own childhood trauma as exacted my father and step father, a particular film speaks to that abuse; i.e., to a similar degree to Stranger Things‘ own psychosexual narrative—with similarly abusive, thus unequal power exchange and subsequent outlets of escape, without the overtly monstrous visuals: one of my mother’s favorite films that we used to rent on VHS, Immortal Beloved [1994]:

In the film, Beethoven stands on the stage, old and deaf thus unable to hear his own music; he hears it in his mind, the Ninth [1824] supplied to us as he might have heard it. He remembers every single note while likewise envisioning his drunken father coming home at night; unable to comfort himself with drink or non-consenting women, he mounts the stairs like a shadow, pursing his own son with phallic intent [the father’s club extending seemingly out from his crotch, suggesting a psychosexual nature to this abuse: raping his son to control and dominate him, no doubt in response to criminogenic abuses capital visited on the father and father’s father, etc].

As I have bourne witness to, there is no difference between a man climbing such steps and a demon in the eyes of a child; Beethoven expects the fiend, waiting almost patiently while gazing out the window at the stars, longing to be free under them instead of imprisoned within his father’s fallen home.

Seemingly at random, Beethoven takes a chance: He climbs out the window and hides in the shadow of the roof while his father screams his name. Then, he climbs down the storm drain and runs for it. He runs like his life depends on it, sprinting through the forest, between the trees, with the twinkling stars looking down from on high. And reaching a secluded lake, he disrobes and climbs inside the paternal waters, floating in the womb-like darkness of a Maternal Sublime[6]. Revived in 1994, Beethoven’s Ninth, in 1824, echoes Coleridge’s sentient from 1818; re: “…the Gothic art is sublime. On entering a cathedral, I am filled with devotion and with awe; I am lost to the actualities that surround me, and my whole being expands into the infinite; earth and air, nature and art, all swell up into eternity, and the only sensible impression left, is, ‘that I am nothing!'” [source].

Like Max, Beethoven was freed from his father’s abuse, but is forever haunted by him, the power of music as a cathartic, creative force keeping the devils seemingly outside the cathedral at bay [in truth, they are everywhere, and not all of them mean workers harm (re: Spectres of Marx), but I digress]. The same concept applies to my art [and ludo-Gothic BDSM] as a poetic, scholarly extension of myself, but also the abuse and friendships I’ve had throughout the years; the latter saved me from former.)

Per ludo-Gothic BDSM, praxial synthesis and catharsis are a matter of calculated risk while returning theatrically to old traumas during the rememory process. Except, returns to childhood-as-harmful are always traumatic. For the abuser, they become manna from Heaven: a tool to leverage against their unhappy victims the way they, too, once experienced; i.e., the mask of the destroyer and savior something to swap in and out, and which to survive Jadis I had to learn to do the same in opposition (which led to my developing of cryptonymy as a revolutionary countermeasure).

To be thorough, here are some more examples of Jadis’ abuse I’ve decided to document and include. —Perse, 6/23/2023

(exhibit 39a2b: Models: Jadis, all, and Tim, top-right; photographer: Persephone van der Waard. Jadis liked to control their prey through treats. In short, if I was good, I got fed. Or, as I write in “Setting the Record Straight Again; Accounting My Ex’s Abuse of Me to Another Victim, August 30th, 2022” [2024]:

Jadis always had all of the material power. They signed off on everything. And eventually it became toxic to me. I stopped wanting to have sex with them, but also to have breakfast with them. And they, in turn, stopped offering me any semblance of agency. I couldn’t decide where we ate or where to buy groceries. Hell, they almost didn’t buy me those books when the three of us went to that giant used bookstore. But they were perfectly happy spending hundreds of dollars on cute sexy clothes for me to wear because they liked me in them (but also didn’t want me wearing them all the time, and kept all of these articles when I moved out). In short, they not only treated me like a pet, but a doll they could objectify in ways they found sexy by dressing me up in expensive clothes they paid for, but also owned. Nothing was a true gift with Jadis (except for my phone, which they let me keep, and a couple of old Metallica t-shirts) [source].

The books-in-question, but also photos of a trip of ours to the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia. The treats, then, extended car rides; i.e., to where they wanted to go [the museum was pretty awesome, to be fair]:

 

[artists: Jadis and Persephone van der Waard]

Clothes Jadis bought for me [and took back after I stood up to them, including the pink kitty collar]:

[artist: Persephone van der Waard] 

Everything Jadis did had a purpose, specifically to threaten and control; i.e., as something they could give and take away if I was bad. Jadis took after their mother, in that respect, but also the music they listened to under their mother’s abusive roof; re: Tool’s “Stinkfist“:

Show me that you love me and that we belong together
Relax, turn around and take my hand

I can help you change
Tired moments into pleasure
Say the word and we’ll be
Well upon our way [source: Genius]. 

This became something I noticed over time, but especially at the end. I was always bad and Jadis, like a goodly parent, was always correct; or, as I write in “Setting the Record Straight; My Ex’s Abuse of Me: February 17th, 2022” [where I refer to them under a different alias, “Jack”]:

I spent our entire relationship trying to make things work, doing my best to communicate and prevent toxicity. I stayed by Jack’s side during their rocky grad school tenure, but also their father’s illness and eventual death. I cooked, cleaned, and made love to them. I made art for them. I did everything I could to make things work, including talking to my friends about what I could do to become a better partner for Jack. I worried until my heart was sick.

In the end, I was Jack’s live-in cock, a conjugal cook and maid. I did everything to please them; they “rewarded” me with constant emotional abuse and neglect. This torment worked at a glacial pace. Jack love-bombed me early on, then slowly turned off the tap. I rationalized this any way that I could: When their [masters’] research dried up, I blamed their fruitless workload, not them; when their ex refused to talk to them, I blamed their lack of closure, not them; when their father died before they could have the fabled heart-to-heart, I blamed their arrested development, not them.

Jack had derided me on various past occasions. In particular, they criticized my academic expertise and research on neoliberalism and the Gothic, but refused to read my work. I was simply “wrong” in their eyes. No matter how hard I tried, they refused to talk with me at all. While I eventually gave up, I always felt like Jack despised me for my political beliefs from there on out. The walls went up and stayed up, isolating me from them [source].

Isolation and DARVO were two of Jadis’ favorite weapons, using them to triangulate me against Tim and, I presume, the other way around:

When Jack and I first met, they were going through a divorce. Their ex—I’ll call them Tim—was someone Jack constantly complained about, calling Tim an irresponsible man-baby. They said I was so much better than Tim, so much more helpful and fun to be around. But Jack was also estranged from Tim and wanted my help in patching things up. They wanted closure.

This seemed simple enough to me. So I decided to help. If Tim was really so bad to Jack (when all Jack had done was try to care and provide for them—again, according to Jack), I figured a simple apology from Tim was in order. Eventually Tim apologized to Jack and things began to improve between them. They talked more often and even signed the marriage dissolution papers. Hell, we even had a threesome [to mark the occasion]. I wanted to help make things between all three of us [better]. I wanted a polycule.

Time passed. Jack and I were preparing to move. Being of a poly mind, I suggested that Tim move in with us. He seemed fun, a totally new person. I asked Jack and they agreed. So I made plans to facilitate Tim’s insertion into our new living arrangement. The polycule was becoming a reality.

This entire time, though, it never occurred to me that Jack had been lying about Tim. So later, when Jack started accusing me of being irresponsible and “a bad person, unlike Tim,” I asked Tim for his side of the story. Tim called Jack an abuser. But here we were, all under the same roof. It felt strange because Jack had no excuse to be playing these kinds of games. But here they were, playing them anyway.

Now that I am away from them, I sincerely believe Jack wanted me gone, thus allowing them to abuse Tim—a person they’d abused in the past (for nearly a decade)—with impunity. Recently divorced from Tim, Jack needn’t worry about any legal repercussions; their name was on the lease, they had their father’s inheritance, and they could leverage the fact that Tim needed their help against them in any dispute. All they had to do was wear me down [ibid.].

[artist: Tim]

In the end, Tim was a victim, too [Jadis making you think the only way you could have anything in life—including self-expression—was under their control, their domination]. Sometime after I left, Tim and I spoke about all of this, but eventually the talks stopped. I don’t know what ultimately happened to them, but I hope they’re safe).

Please note, I really haven’t touched this subchapter too much, in order to preserve its accuracy and immediacy at the time of writing it, but will simply say that returning to it is like going back into Hell; i.e., feeling the dark seduction of Jadis as a master manipulator working me over with their masks, their weight, their power as seemingly greater than mine.

As always, I think of Jadis like a black shape, haunting me. I know it’s just a corpse from my past, but that it (and its trauma) will never truly die. All I can do is face it vocally as a sex-positive lesson for others to learn from, dissecting my past as much a corpse of myself and my trauma living ever on: something to return to, while reifying ludo-Gothic BDSM as something that ultimately came afterwards—is always coming after a return to the past as something to reassemble and convey in serious-to-silly forms: things to play with and relate to as people do.

Even now, though, the venue remains haunted; i.e., I feel beckoned as much by likenesses of Jadis, but also myself as confused by virtue of the kinds of attacks they levied at me with their Aegis, their masks. “I’m not a bad person,” Jadis told me, underestimating their own cruelty while insisting all the while that I was the one victimizing them. It’s hard, then, not to look at the dark shape and see myself on it: owned by someone who took me for all I was worth and never let me go. It hurts, but the wound has healed; these paradoxical feelings remain, as if to spite my progress. Jadis was my Weathertop, stabbing me with a Morgul blade (wrought in the city of their past abuse, which they turned against me: as yet another threat for them to police).

(artist: Keith Macmillan; source: Kory Grow’s “‘That Evil Kind of Feeling’: The Inside Story of Black Sabbath’s Iconic Cover Art,” 2020)

In short, Jadis’ spell worked as a false promise of protection, the usual Man Box nonsense relayed in a TERF form. Through Jadis, this has become something for me to reify and revisit as a theatrical, doll-like device; i.e., to reclaim through ludo-Gothic BDSM as a perpetual work-in-progress: the black knight—the lurking threat of parental, spousal, and/or community abuse—attached to police violence defending profit through weird nerds failing up. All become something to recognize in small; e.g., the trembling and vulnerable side of myself, playing with dolls I pulled out from within: to place in front of me, thus better control and camp Jadis’ raping of me.

I’m not plural—I don’t front as such when triggered—but I can still recognize the scholarly and practical value in such protectors, and in conjuring out dark abusers in theatrical forms; e.g., John Kimble vs the abusive mother and father, Sarah Conor vs the abusive cop, and so on; i.e., someone to see me freeze, look at the dark abuser (who often looks perfectly normal, on the outside), then take me aside and say, “It’s ok, I got this” before confronting the destroyer in suitably theatrical fashion (through Cameron’s mirror test, below, was used to capitalize on audience fears of police brutality at the time):

In the absence of actual protectors, we create our own, psychosexually recontextualizing trauma (often through an asexual, dollish interrogation of rape) as something that generally lives inside and around us. It’s simply how humans operate. In revisiting this section to polish it, then, ludo-Gothic BDSM has become the theory for such operations put to practice long before I knew concretely how to express it. Although again, it already had started to with my postgrad Metroidvania work[7] as built on older fabrications reversing abjection; i.e., on older instances of survived abuse as something to camp as a matter of capital looping in on itself. Time is a circle, of which our abusers come back around in ways we can control: by making them into dolls (and dollhouses) that are very much haunted by the echoes of trauma. With Jadis, I’ve made them into something to play with—unable to rape me ever again but teasing me with the pain of such passions threatened by such destroyers-in-small.

(model and photographer: Jadis and Persephone van der Waard)

They weren’t always small, and generally had a variety of tools to leverage against me (e.g., sex, left). For example, my exit letter was written at the height of Jadis’ abuse—where I had become a frightened, pretty bauble on par with Haggard’s unicorns (when we watched The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, one of Jadis’ favorite lines came from the Hunter: “You have heart; I’ll take that, too!”). Inside the letter, I likened my home life through the toy-like language of children—as what I had to work with, but also because it made sense. In short, speaking through toys and games was comforting because I could play with them to solve the puzzle of Jadis raping me; i.e., to Majora’s Mask (1998) because it felt like being threatened with the moon night after night. Eventually the only way to escape was to summon the moon and expose the monster, breaking the spell they had over me:

I liken [Jadis’ abuse] to Majora’s Mask. In that game, the villain, Majora, curses the moon to fly into a [double of Hyrule called Termina]. While the player can return the moon to its original position using a magic song, the residents of Hyrule are still trapped inside a cruel time loop. Faced with their impending doom, they stew in their own fear. The world around them slowly falls apart—not just once, but over and over and over again. It degrades their sense of reality until nothing but madness remains. Majora uses this madness to control the [doubled] Hyrulians through fear, distorting their very perception of reality. This mind-prison is what Link ultimately escapes. The paradox, here, is the method: He doesn’t escape by playing the song and stopping the moon. He escapes by exposing the tyrant controlling the “moon” to begin with.

Like Link, I could not escape by playing the song. Every time [Jadis] threatened me with anger or Instant Breakup, they were abstracting the consequences of my actions so much that I felt like the floor was eggshells: Any wrong step might send me hurling into the void. I felt the shadow of the falling moon in their words. A glance, a heavy sigh, a tapping of the foot, a laborious roll of the eyes. They had mastered me. I thought love through win out, that [Jadis] would change if only I played the song enough. But as our living conditions improved, my happiness worsened. They began to reject me, doting on [their ex], instead. I felt trapped. If I confronted them, they would throw the moon at me. If the moon came, I would play the song to save myself. And the whole cycle would repeat. So now I hid from the falling moon and became what they wanted me to be: their little artist boy. I did not please them, but they seemed oddly content with this arrangement. I knew it wouldn’t last, but I couldn’t say for sure when it would end. Terror was everywhere and madness reigned within me (re: “My Ex’s Abuse of Me“).

As said letter proves, but also the artwork and writing that came later, putting myself in my own shoes from an outsider’s perspective and reimagining my own trauma (as a Gothic heroine, exhibit 39a1b) was central to me understanding what had already happened and what was going to happen. At the time, I really wasn’t sure how it was all going to play out. Nevertheless, the more I creatively processed my trauma, the more that imaginary hindsight slowly became Gothic insight and emotional intelligence, but also undead-demonic release through the wearing of my own mask and acting things out.

Unbeknownst to me, this had also conveyed the mask-like “brave faces” that I wore for Jadis, secretly (or perhaps not so secretly) frightened of them; and they for me, in treachery and bad faith. Indeed, masks are vital to survival, but also swept up in cathartic and harmful Gothic dramas concerned with parasitic imposters (Jadis, in full control, pulling me around on the dance floor): the Amazon as a protector of children that, like our childhood bugbears, also follows us forward as something to summon up again—to be our Medusa when we feel small and scared in the face of things that remind us of (and indeed act out) our past abusers.

While we’ll explore the concept of performative (and cryptonymic) masks more, in Volume Three (especially concentric veneers as something to destroy our enemies’ through our own survival maneuvers), here is a quick example below of me reifying my survival as dollish:

(exhibit 39a3: Artist: Persephone van der Waard. Revana is my alter ego, a “mask/costume” warrior mommy the likes of which I always wanted to keep me safe [my mother, through no fault of her own, could not]. I drew this the same day I drew Jadis as my Great Destroyer [exhibit 39a1b]. The idea was to show the plurality of trauma as divided by my feminine side having different qualities to it; i.e., that I could embody as separate from myself—both desiring to be strong yet still wanting to be a trans-woman princess. That is what Revana means to me: a warrior and protector Amazon who can step up and throw down when someone sees my soft, feminine side and wants to take advantage as I regress; i.e., the female/trans femme hero out of popular stories I grew up with and dined on after I was fully grown; e.g., Eowyn from LotR or Sarah Connor from T2, but also Mercedes from Pan’s Labyrinth [2006] saying to Vidal: “Don’t touch the girl, motherfucker! You won’t be the first pig I’ve gutted!”)

The cathartic effect of such rememory was almost orgasmic, feeling strangely good through my tremendous tears laid on the canvas, the page—not because I was a glutton for punishment, but because I reveled in my own profound survival. I had wanted to escape punishment by facing whatever Jadis had in store, but also was trying to understand it while steadily moving forward onto better things. Also, I learned ways to recognize abusers attracted to, and feeding off, my trauma, which would come in handy with future partners; e.g., Cuwu’s draconian shenanigans, but also having the arsenal for bullshit after that, like bigoted female sex workers trying to bully/pimp me (re: “Transmisia Experience: 5/26/2023”), which we’ll discuss in Volume Three.

Contrary to canonical exhibitions thereof, subversive Amazons like Revana denote something we can use to feel capable, without turning into Charlotte Dacre’s Victoria from Zofloya or Ellen Ripley killing Communists for the state (re: James Cameron’s white-savior billionaire Marxism). Even so, they are undead, and constitute a painful revisiting of one’s personal trauma in order to face and reform it into a better lesson: that I had some hand in my own abuse. Here at the end of things—as I turn Jadis into a doll (to make them easier to handle) that I and others can play with to camp our own survival of rape—I shall be honest and confess my hand in my own rape.

Before I start, a couple things to bear in mind: One, per the zombie and its apocalypse as a kind of demon lover come home to, this is ultimately what ludo-Gothic BDSM and good rape play were founded on: the survival of rape as something to keep playing with, raising healthier Gothic castles built on former tyrants who, as they cannot be escaped (silence regarding them leads to rape returning home), become part of the castle-narrative; i.e., the thing we can play with inside to avoid rape in the future whenever, wherever and however it occurs.

To that, Jadis has become—as I alluded to, a moment ago—my haunted house; i.e., a dark place of play whose spirit of playing with the half-real past means facing said past (and my hand in it) as always coming back around: to scoop us into the halls of older histories the future learns from (until it also becomes past); re, “Baby, You’re a Haunted House“:

And your heart will stay forever
When your last remains are few
In the dark, we dance together
And I’d like to be waiting with you (source: Genius).

It would be a lie to say that I didn’t and don’t love part of Jadis still: the likeness of them that I can fashion, then play with to heal from the original’s dreadful abusing of me (which was also doll, in bad faith). Except, it’s less about who they were and more who they could have been, if things were different. I was raped, and not just by Jadis; but Jadis was the one who did it despite everything I did to make them happy. A part of me knew that, and it took time for me to escape the trap I had knowingly, on some level, entered of my own accord.

The best revenge for me, then, wasn’t letting them know that they could have had all the sex they wanted, or good food, or whatever else I could have given, because the only thing they enjoyed was preying on me exactly the way they did. Instead, my success—my escape, if you want to call it that—is having survived them to turn them into a sex-positive lesson that will make such police-like antics of theirs a thing of the barbaric past. The survival of police violence is generally “cops or victims” as a matter of survivors becoming either moving forward. If we build a place where people can play with rape as an educational device geared towards rememory as a healing process, confrontations with the past become honestly cathartic; i.e., by changing the state through society as veering away from its usual dogmas and hand in things.

And that is ultimately what I’ve done with Jadis: turning them not just into a playground, but a harmless likeness of what they were that spells out their raping of me and my hand in that; i.e., while seeing them as someone human that, for all the harm they exacted upon me, I will always love that gentler side of them—the side that, as much as it pains me to tell you all, died/retreated deep inside them the moment their father left his parting gift: the widower’s gold. In that moment, Jadis made the choice (as much as anyone can make choices with the past forever weighing on them): to become the destroyer sans irony once and for all.

To find some semblance of victory over their humiliating raping of me and throwing me aside, I have taken us both in totality to leave you, dear readers, with something to learn from as a matter of ludo-Gothic BDSM: as hammered into me by Jadis, belonging to part of a larger cycle of abuse—one tied to the land and its memories projected onto any kind of media you could dream of. I don’t wish to romance abuse, here—not to celebrate toxic love, but learn from the harm Jadis caused me, that befell me as something I have since returned to and acknowledged in dollish form; i.e., preserving its dark memory to behold for all time: an alien that I loved, but one who never really bonded with me through the experience; i.e., as one that always held me at arm’s length—never to let me heal each of us from the trauma that touched us both: “He shall never know how I love him […] because he is more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same” (source: Wuthering Heights, 1847).

(artist: unknown)

Weird attracts weird, trauma attracts trauma. I don’t wish to hide the fact that I loved and made allowances for my abuser because I most certainly did (and still am always reminded of that, through these rememories of them). Nor do I wish to change them, after the fact. That only happens when they decide to (and until then, they simply take and take, having no reason to change). To my most antagonistic abuser (the most Hurtful Abuser Award actually goes to Zeuhl, oddly enough), I merely wish to leave some parting words as we begin our segue into the sorts of monomythical forms you were doubtless inspired by when brutalizing me:

Jadis,

I don’t know where you are now, and I suspect Fate has given you no reason to change (capital not only creates people like yourself—victims who go onto gatekeep others—it incentivizes you to keep at it and perpetuate the cycle in service to profit). But if there is any good left in you at all, know that I saw that and did my best to capture it; i.e., as hopelessly fused with your dark side as the side that sadly won. But in winning as it seemingly did, you sent me away to learn from your lessons. Even if you never meant them to teach me anything, the crux of understanding lies on the student being able to learn anyways; i.e., as a matter of emergent play relative to the devices at hand. You couldn’t, but I could and did. Thank you for that.

I loved you as much as I could, my orc queen. Yes, I feared you and still very much do. Yet all the same, I adored the idea of what I saw in you: as something that could be better with only the right touch. Since I was mistaken about you, as a person, in that respect, I’ve since erected its Heathcliffean likeness here for others to learn from, including my own folly standing before. The paradox is that in escaping your person, I’ve found that you’ll always, to some extent, be with me. So I’ve made that part of you into something toy-like for which ludo-Gothic BDSM is possible.

You’re the doll to play with, my love—the dollhouse stripped of its harmful capacity but not its ghastly echo. You vibe to the ghosts of older tyrants you clearly seek to emulate; I, to the spectres of a Marx I’ve made—like you—quite a bit gayer than their historical figures could ever really be. However futile it might be, then, I would only ask that you do better towards others in the future, to try and match the spirit of play my little idea encompasses: as having a little bit of you inside it.

Farewell, my bug-loving black knight; you were a cunt, but I loved you enough to try and change you. Failing that, you have become my darkest object lesson, my Heathcliff on the moor that, whenever I look upon you, never fails to chill my blood and send me falling upwards, sailing far and wide on my own Numinous adventures. When I question the wisdom of reifying you as a matter of instruction, I sometimes pause regarding that quest, thinking of Charlotte Brontë’s wayward sister, Emily, making her own monument to such a being:

Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is. But this I know: the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master […] The statuary found a granite block on a solitary moor; gazing thereon, he saw how from the crag might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister; a form moulded with at least one element of grandeur — power. He wrought with a rude chisel, and from no model but the vision of his meditations. With time and labour, the crag took human shape; and there it stands colossal, dark, and frowning, half statue, half rock: in the former sense, terrible and goblin-like; in the latter, almost beautiful, for its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it; and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the giant’s foot [source: Nava Atlas’ “Charlotte Brontë is Preface to Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë,” 2014].

“No coward soul is mine,” said the girl, herself. And I was never one to shy away from nightmares. Had that been true, I would have never met you, my destroyer. The rest, as they say, is history—the kind of curiously pretty flowers with dark stems, which I’ve laid on your grave to remember what was best of you married to the worst of it, too (forgiveness comes at recognizing both, and my own hand in things). I’d say I’m laying you to rest, but the dead never stay dead, do they?

Himmelhoch jauchzend, zu(m) Tode betrübt[8],

—Persephone van der Waard

With that out of the way, lovelies, I wish to conclude this subchapter with some closing points (about ten pages, seven of which are exhibits). These won’t be terribly organized—will merely be arranged as I originally compiled them: as a manner of afterthoughts. Keep these in mind as we go from the rememory of my personal life’s traumas into the sorta of monomythical forms Jadis was emulating: camping rape as something to revisit a “childhood” that never quite happened, but sits between imagination and history as half-real and chronotopic, but also fun (re: Walpole); i.e., a dollhouse to go and camp rape as a matter of rememory concerning personal trauma as undead. To that, Jadis is my favorite toy to illustrate rape, but also one I don’t like to use often. In fact, I may never use them again. All the same, this is my home—has become my life as a matter of healing a broken place into a matter of balance with those things lying in the graveyard of my soul—but I shall, a sad and wiser woman, move onto greener pastures held inside the same castle grounds: “Never did I wanna be here again / And I don’t remember why I came” (Godsmack’s “Voodoo,” 1998). —Perse

Despite being my attempt to make these understandings public, sharing my childhood and post-childhood mistreatment with the world through Sex Positivity wasn’t always the obvious route precisely because it happened over time and in ways that horribly confused me. This remains true when summoning the ghost of the thing that harmed me, doing so to comment on the harm it caused being tied up in another earnest truth: that such things can be incredibly exciting and cathartic when harm is removed from them, but also per a means of catharsis that confronts the mind of a hostage; i.e., someone living in fear of the thing exciting all manner of emotions/psychosexual predicaments.

Anyone who says that such monsters aren’t, to some degree, exciting has never been through it. I’m not invoking that here to stress the escapist qualities of a hostage stuck in the hauntological past of their own rape; I’m doing to it emphasize that escaping the prison is a vital means of transforming it through likenesses of the very bait that led us into our captors’ hands. This involves a great deal of confusion, insofar as trauma warps our approach towards, and perception of, what excitement even is.

For example, one of the worst[9] effects Jadis had on me was being made to hate sex, specifically feeling ashamed of needing to cope with my own trauma: having sex with them. I didn’t think such a thing could be possible, so I blamed myself instead. Sex can certainly be good under the right conditions—and much of the sex with Jadis was amazing. It was like fucking a demon. Not only were they physically strong and built like a tank—able to take whatever I dished out while asking for more—but they demanded everything from me, their eyes turning black as they ordered me to go deeper and harder to fill them up.

Being into BDSM, Jadis also had the equipment; e.g., a throat collar that hooked to ankle shackles, rendering Jadis completely helpless (a human pretzel for me to fuck). They also had the body for it. Despite being a big girl (their weight tended to range from 240-270 pounds), they had unusually flexible hips and could put their legs behind their head without stretching. Once the shackles were in place, their legs pulled back and exposed their pussy to me, which they expected me to raw-dog like a good little girl. In that sense, they were like a vampire: able to command me with their eyes while being physically “helpless” (in truth, they had all the financial control, which undoubtedly gave their gaze and actions further weight against a woman who physically had no material agency and had been abused in the past).

(exhibit 39b: Source (AI “art”), top right: Xenodochium; artist, top-middle and -right: Isutoshi; bottom-middle and -right: Low-Polydragon. For an idea of what Jadis was like, the top-left image was their body-type; the bottom-left/top-middle and -right image were their initial effects on me, comedy[10] included; and the bottom-middle and -right images were a close approximation of the phenomenological experience of their increasingly baleful, demonic gaze.)

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t relish these rituals (and serving their chonky overseer) at first; Jadis tried harder in the beginning to impress me by actually being good in bed. I also think they were seeking a feeling of power in relation to their own abuse suffered at the hands of their narcissistic mother (again, swapping out a variety of masks to confuse me with; e.g., like Shang Tsung wearing the masks of his victims to act the hero with: “All these souls and you still don’t have one of your own!”). However, the context between us was reactively abusive and became more exploitative over time. Not only I am hypersexual and gravitate towards sex when stressed or scared; I’m also eager to please, meaning I would have sex with Jadis just to calm them down (they were constantly hyperviligent and said as much); i.e., to stop them from glowering at me with their pitch-black eyes. Simply put, I wanted to be a good girl that Jadis regarded with love, not hate—especially during sex!

Jadis’ arc was complex, as was mine and my scholarship in relationship to them. Long before I penned ludo-Gothic BDSM in a crystalized, doll-like form, they love-bombed me, pulling me close to them as quickly as they could; I participated, wanting to go to Florida (the reasons why having already been stated, here and during the manifesto). As time went on, Jadis not only abused me; they slowly pulled away and raped me from afar. Their estranged father had died roughly a month after Jadis turned 35, leaving them with a considerable amount of “fuck you” money and capital (dividends).

It was not a clean process. His ruined trailer had to be gutted, sorting the decades’ worth of old, dusty records hoarded inside. Much of that “homecoming” was left to me, as Jadis piled everything inside our duplex before hiding themselves away (retreating from their childhood instead of facing it). As my book has expanded, I have given voice to this oddity and others besides; re: about Jadis’ ex, Tim, who we were living with towards the end. Like sex, though, the build-up takes preparation, time and repeated execution to yield the best results (and is generally better with music, costumes and other “spices” that evoke feelings, memories and various other “spell-like,” hard-to-explain-but-easy-to-feel phenomena).

Since July 22nd, 2022, the feverish pitch of writing this book—night after night, assembling the dreamlike “bricks” of paragraphs and images frantically plucked from the void—has become an ongoing attempt to heal and educate, breaking the cycle of systemic exploitation for all workers under Capitalism. As I hope the primer has illustrated up to this point, proletarian praxis starts with excavating the past as already created; i.e., from our zombie-like dreams of war and violence about older material variants, which gradually yield a more guided analysis of posterior reassemblies. Begot from older traumatic memories—e.g., Jadis in Florida, grad school, my remaining uncle, my stepfather, my father, the stories of the past I have consumed at each of these points from different literary traditions with the same goal—all were Marx’ nightmare (of the dead generations) made material in and from my flesh.

As trauma lives inside me and around me, I have become like the zombie: a being that houses and expresses systemic trauma from childhood onwards (emulating Jonathan Harker’s journal that I, as child, used to read with voyeuristic delight; i.e., seeing my trauma and struggles in others, but also monster sex as something that I discovered was desirable to me from an early age). Accepting this role has opened my eyes; the point of this book, then, is to open your eyes, too. By yielding sex-positive expressions of trauma in the material world, you can expose the wider public to a Gothic imagination that liberates all workers from the state-corporate spell of neoliberal, hauntological brain death: Gothic-fueled class-to-cultural consciousness.

Of course, you might not live to see it, and it might show you how the world and those you care about aren’t so rosy as you’ve been led to believe (re: Jadis); but it can be part of something better that materially survives and aids your future family and friends after you die—but also while you live to smaller, incremental degrees through your own creative successes and social-sexual habits: “To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition” (source: Emerson’s “What Is Success?” 1908). Sometimes, that means digging up a zombie or two, laying a flower or two on the cold graves kept warm by the buzzing bumble bee butts, getting at the blossoms laid there:

(source, Facebook post, Gardening Soul: August 21st, 2021)

Convicting Capitalism is redemptive in this respect. Like Jadis’ awesome power over me, it wasn’t infinite but seemed that way. If it was, then surely any case for fighting back would be pointless. Such as it happened, I did fight back; I escaped Jadis and made my way back home, the bad dream less ending in totally and more me finding agency among the trauma in and around me by creating ludo-Gothic BDSM after surviving Jadis; i.e., as a means of understanding the world in ways that could shape and change it through future friends I would make as a result; e.g., Bay and Harmony as drawn to my work for these reasons: having something in common as sluts and weird nerds touched by death, but still alive and able to talk constructively and creatively about it—to toy with it in a productive manner conducive to developing Gothic Communism. Ours is an outpouring of raped zombies, vampires and ghosts coming forward to testify against capital!

We have now concluded the meat of the original zombie apocalypse section and its discussions about humanizing zombies and sex toys; i.e., reversing abjection through the rememory of personal trauma (childhood abuse) by returning to Gothic spaces (the zombie house, returning without moving) and playing with them: to interrogate power in order to challenge profit and Capitalism Realism (versus the usual fatal nostalgia in neoliberal refrains; e.g., Metroidvania).

(artist: William Blake)

Before we move onto ghosts and other forms of undead, though, I want to bridge the gap between dreams and sight (something of a poetic goal of the original manuscript I want to preserve here, in finalizing it). I want to include a part three to “Bad Dreams” concerning people similar to Jadis, but on a different poetic scale. To that, we’ll be examining the larger-than-life as a legendary sort; i.e., the undead tyrant as something to see in dream-like spaces that take our criticisms of capital to a common place of remediation—the monomyth, and the various, ghostly echoes of Caesar as someone who douchebags nowadays are still trying to revive, millennia after his infamous demise[11]. Such overlords are commonly shown as ghosts (e.g., Hamlet’s father’s), but we’ll be sticking to more corporal forms: Zombie Caesars (next page): “With Caesar dead, Rome had moved from one crisis to the next,” writes hoakley in “A History of Rome in Paintings” (2020). This includes Marx’s “Eighteenth Brumaire” alluding to that tradition all dead generations weighing on our brains; i.e., that cyclical, historical-material matter of tragedy and farce we must rescue from itself: through ludo-Gothic BDSM as camping such spectres and supplanting them with far gayer forms than the usual heteronormative, Cartesian idiots bother to try (always scapegoating Medusa instead of Caesar)!

Keeping with the original poetic flavor of the Humanities primer and its assorted key phrases I only partially stuck to while editing and expanding on things, we’ll explore “sight” as a critical poetic trope in the “Seeing Dead People” subchapter (when we examine the undead’s universal feeding mechanism beyond just zombies), and the notion of reviving the zombie future more fully at the end of the primer (and volume).

Here, though, I want to introduce both ideas—to flirt with them a little through another concept we’ll explore constantly throughout the rest of the book: reverse abjection as a process vital to Gothic Communism. Its subversion of zombie enterprises remains important, but especially the chronotope of undead war and its “fallen lords,” whose tyrannical, dynastic power exchange spawns endless zombie tyrants—e.g., generals, skeleton kings, masters of the universe, and ghostly “fathers,” etc—that help spread a blinding “false” vision of imaginary history.

To subvert Capitalist Realism, this history (and its fearful inheritance/failed memory of the decaying nation-state) must be challenged; those who cannot face, thus play and learn from history (and its Wisdom of the Ancients) are doomed to repeat it—i.e., as a matter of hauntology per the shadow of “Rome,” of “Caesar,” of “Pygmalion,” etc (from Volume One):

Canonical Rome absolutely sucks ass/is not to be trusted. For one, Rome is, by modern standards, hauntologized (utterly fake; re: the ghost of the counterfeit). The original lasted for centuries in various forms, but was effectively a city-state; nation-states, by comparison, emerged during the Renaissance formation of national identities, followed by the Enlightenment’s settler colonialism appealing to the pre-fascist (Neo-Gothic) hauntology of “Rome” as unified post-fascism—one nation, one army under “God,” or some other vertical bourgeois authority (secular or religious) that endures after the “defeat of the Nazi” (the details of their death have been greatly exaggerated; Nazis were copying American fascism, which is alive and well). Nation-states normalize Imperialism, thus genocide, rape, war and worker exploitation through canonical Gothic praxis. They compel sexual reproduction through heteronormative, amatonormative, Afronormative, and queernormative lenses, etc—are built on a settler-colonial binary that yields an imperial, dimorphic flavor in everyday language: good vs evil, black vs white, us vs them, “the creation of sexual difference” by Luce Irigaray and so on.

For our purposes, this binary is remediated within the Gothic mode to communicate Western glory as something to synthesize through pro-state propaganda as coercion personified: the fetishization of war, deception, rape and death linked to the hauntology of the state apparatus as a lionized conveyor of traditional Western virtues (source).

As we shall see with the monomyth, these virtues manifest in the zombie tyrant; i.e., as a likeness of Caesar being largely one of mythology that, while largely invented, still dovetails unto fascist goals in service to capital (and tokenism) nonetheless: through neoliberal media, but especially movies and videogames, as having exploded in that era. They become undead as a matter of history in the Gothic sense of the world—in ways that further the process of abjection to maintain Capitalist Realism through castles and tyrants (castle-narrative, vis-à-vis Bakhtin’s chronotope: dynastic primacy and hereditary rites) as monstrous, poetic, useful to the state as preserving itself through them and giving the game away as a matter of cryptonymy (the scapegoat and the symptom to a larger problem): Caesar’s ghost haunts capital as decaying towards a former time of invented greatest.

As we shall see, Capitalism is a Big Zombie that foists its own charge of cannibalism onto its victims, which it then polices through tokenization as a matter of criminogenic conditions: divide and conquer amongst empire eating itself, when the chickens come home to roost!

Concerning “ludo-Gothic BDSM”/medieval poetics after this point: Ludo-Gothic BDSM as I coined it remains utterly central to my work; i.e., having traced its evolution to where it presently exists, I’ve since tried very hard to mention different instructional points for you to consider moving forwards; e.g., dolls and rape play in the “Bad Dreams” chapter, so far, as well as the “Another Castle, Another Princess”/”Playing with Dead Things” chapter before that (in Volume Two, part one). Per the cryptonymy and hauntology processes—i.e., informing abjection as something to forward or reverse inside various spaces, including chronotopes like the Metroidvania—ludo-Gothic BDSM takes on many different shapes and sizes. Keeping all of this in mind, ludo-Gothic BDSM will still come up quite a bit; i.e., throughout the rest of the Undead Module and the entirety of the Demons Module.

(artist: Lil Wolfy 69)

As for the five medieval poetic terms from Volume Two, part one (selective absorption, magical assembly, Gothic maturity, confusion of the senses, and the Song of Infinity), they won’t come up very often. Simply put, you won’t need to know them to learn the rest of the primer’s historical elements, but you can take and use them yourselves when engaging with the history inside; i.e., by applying my more recent poetically instructional arguments to older monstrous histories, said arguments being founded on the principles of sex positivity and Gothic Communism that I’ve championed since the start of this project, nearly two years ago (and based on older research feeding into the present): the liberation of sex workers through iconoclastic art. However you want to synthesize that outcome, you’ll have plenty of toys with play with!

Last but not least, here are several additional exhibits to give you a taste of what we’ll explore in “Bad Dreams,” part three. —Perse

(exhibit 39c1: Top-left: Balor, the central villain from Bungie’s Myth: the Fallen Lords, 1997; bottom-left: Anubis, from The Ronin Warriors; top-right, artist: Michael Broussard, of the villainous Engineers from Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, 2012.

Neoliberalism crams fascism, Communism and queerness into the same poetic space. This being said, a common thread for all these canonical examples is decayed hauntology tied to the zombie tyrant, often a giant wearing armor and a helmet [e.g., Hamlet’s father’s beavered, medieval helm]. Balor is a kind of fascist, “Zombie Caesar” [zombie Nazis being a whole zombie sub-genre] that rises from the grave to destroy the degenerate West as its former “greatest champion.” He’s an action figure.

Removing his helmet, the greatest horror is that Balor is not rotted at all. Instead, his outward appearance is entirely human and he follows his own maxims to their logical conclusion: slay the enemy as a matter of coming home to empire. The same goes for Scott’s Engineers, their nightmarish armor concealing a worryingly human appearance. Not only were Scott’s story and monsters partially modeled after Lovecraft’s take on the Promethean quest, At the Mountains of Madness; both stories borrowed liberally from Shelley’s 1818 palimpsest, Frankenstein. Yet, Scott inverts the scheme somewhat, having the marbled, statuesque appearance of the classical-looking Engineers become gradually warped by a mad science buried deep in the cold reaches of outer space [versus Antarctica in Lovecraft or Shelley’s books]. Slowly the Promethean knowledge turns these false gods “mad,” technophobically represented by their bodies as darkly cybernetic—almost stitched together like Victor’s manmade Creature.

Apart from their bodies, both Balor and the Engineers have canonical zombie eyes, utterly blinded by an endless pursuit of “progress” that brings the Imperial Boomerang back home out of an uncertain past stitched crudely together [the more undead something is, the more “stuck” it is in a traumatized, corpse-like body; the more demonic, the more something can change its shape]. Anubis, meanwhile, serves an undead emperor out of an equally nebulous former time, bringing the warring states period into a Westernized, 1980s Japan: the return of the Shogunate again. Yet, the shock at realizing Anubis is human offers the protagonist fighting him hope: “You’re a man, a human being like us!”

For Anubis, though, the revelation is painful, his helmet being cut from around his head, revealing a surprisingly pretty face and girlish, red, long-flowing hair. The process of reverse abjection opens his eyes, turning him away from war and his undead master and placing him on a path of peace. Unfortunately he dies, as does Balor and the Engineers; regardless of their stations on the battlefield, the state reduces all of them to undead fodder.)

(exhibit 39c2: Dragon Ball has an absurd premise that is easily camped [dbzking541’s “The Funniest DBZ Dub I Have Ever Seen,” 2016]. Its canon still rolls The Modern Prometheus into The Iliad, presenting the zombie tyrant king as trapped between father-and-son according to man-made, unnatural husbandries: the Divine Right of Kings and the imperial relationship of master and slave, but also the cruelty of a bully patriarch-god towards his bizarre, man-made children: the archaic male baby as a killer child for state forces stemming from Beowulf into the present through hauntological regeneration; i.e., as undead/composite but also able to change its shape like Cú Chulainn’s ríastrad, aka “warp spasm”; or Milton’s Lucifer gradually shedding his angelic form to turn into a variety of animals—a demon, in other words.
The result, in this case, is canonical [unlike Milton]: a father-mother with delusions of grandeur, but also his child as an infantile slave with daddy issues rising to become a great warrior renowned for his inherited, informed cruelty [which would play out in real life with Reinhard Heydrich being known as “the young, evil god of death”; source: Behind the Bastards, 2023]. Just as the Nazi, the Communist and the queer are crammed together in the same shadow zone of centrist monomyths, the likes of Cell and Broly [above] are unthinking, childlike slaves taught to seek revenge by an absentee father figure: the scientist and the rival warlord seeking revenge. There is no mother in their lives and they are immediately and incredibly fragile creations desperately seeking fulfillment through patricidal revenge, but also combat against a cycle of warriors who are equally flawed.

In other words, the show’s much ado about nothing is built within and around a shonen-level crisis of masculinity for said crisis: to show and prove their strength for their fathers [“Look what I can do!”]. Even if they kill or otherwise hate their fathers, these lost boys are useless without them and driven by the taught seeking of bloodshed to appease their inherited idea of vampiric superhumanity. Deprived of the parent, “It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being; all the events of that period appear confused and indistinct” becomes, “If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends” [source]. Except the negotiation is made to a captive audience under duress, themselves trained to kill and fight as “less” genocidal variants of the Great Destroyer’s cataclysmic, hellish tantrums: Broly either killing his father in a self-destructive fit of rage or misled by Freiza to rise up out of Hell’s green fire like a loving and dutiful demonic son.

I originally decided when I wrote, “Dragon Ball Super: Broly – Is it Gothic?” that the film wasn’t Gothic, but I feel like I was overlooking the liminality of its situation:

Broly is a highly-weaponized survivor, not unlike older, murderous, Gothic villains. However, the similarities mostly stop there. He is not a slasher like Victor Frankenstein’s Creature was, or his various counterparts. While the Creature was physically hideous, Broly is, for all intents and purposes, handsome (a throwback to the likes of ‎Robert E. Howard’s titular Conan the Barbarian). The Creature was brilliant; while not an idiot, Broly isn’t a rocket scientist, either. There is parental strife, though. Remnants of the father are passed down the same bloodline, signified by the collar around Broly’s neck. Broly isn’t allowed to be himself, any more than Vegeta was under the yolk of Freiza. Is this like Frankenstein’s monster, or the xenomorph? Not quite. Unlike them, Broly isn’t simply made; he’s raised by his father to be violent. Except Paragus’ quest largely fails: Broly isn’t violent; his monstrous side is. And therein lies a clear divide. Broly is only a monster when driven to grief, when his father is killed. Furthermore, his own drama stems not from the bad parentage read about in Frankenstein (1818). Unlike the Creature, Broly is not begot from Promethean science, nor is he driven by petty revenge. He’s naturally strong, loves his father no matter what, and remains totally innocent post-abuse (thanks to amnesia)—effectively the opposite of the Creature [source].

I don’t think it’s a question of opposites altogether, though—with the Creature being similarly trapped by bad parentage to be violent according to his father as both his worst enemy and the one person he believed who could bring him salvation [even if it meant destroying him, a mistake that proved fatal for all those involved]. There are differences, but these variants aren’t mutually exclusive; they are agglutinative. Whether Broly kills Paragus outright or avenges him, Paragus was still a terrible father who—like Cus D’Amato with Mike Tyson—trained his son to do one thing: to fight for a perfidious, Faustian father figure’s benefit [or like Peter Weyland or Victor Frankenstein, created a robotic/cyborg slave entity to do his bidding]. This is bad parentage any way you slice it; i.e., “I’m your father, boy, and you’ll do as you’re told!”

 

[Artist, far-mid-left: Imbisibol; bottom-mid-left: Tonami Kanji]

The ghost of the tyrannical father is trapped somewhere in time, threatening like Skynet’s Herculean T-800/T-1000 to rip into the present out of another destroyed past-future: one possible future as a hauntological death omen. Amid this Gothic pastiche, the dead future is full of the imprecise echoes of the Modern Prometheus: test-tube babies, brains in jars, cyborgs, genetically engineered Supermen, children weaponized accidently or deliberately for or against their fathers by said fathers, and “retroactive abortions” of the animate-inanimate golem; i.e., the killing of the child by the father, Abraham-style, before he can grow old enough to seek revenge when coming home.

The idea of the archaic baby is quite popular in Toriyama’s work, but also seen in the work of similar Japanese artists riffing within the same East-meets-West mythic structure; i.e., Shigesato Itoi’s Giygas [exhibit 60e2], but also Akira Kitamura and Keiji Inafune’s Dr. Light/Wily as a conflation of the evil/grey-area/good German scientist [Operation Paperclips’ Wernher von Braun, Oppenheimer and Alfred Einstein, etc] as a pre-fascist/Catholicized scapegoat and anti-Semitic trope [note the purple and red, above, but also the cartoon skull codpiece] whose monstrous-feminine super soldier is both the vengeful ghost of the fascist child and that of Jewish revenge [re: “If you prick us do we not bleed? … And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?”] smashed together during the crossing space-time fabrics of half-real geopolitics: Protoman and Zero both being children of Cain as much as Sigma, our Zombie Caesar/Dracula [with his own flowing red cape] is; and Cell being an uncanny cross between the human and the insect, but also the goblin and the vampire as—like the xenomorph before him—a time-traveling, shape-shifting, undead menace composed of many different stigmas and biases, but also worship of non-Western/non-heteronormative power and resistance.

Just as with the Creature and Victor, the haunting by Marx is incessant; i.e., of Broly by Paragus or Cell by Dr. Gero’s “obey me!” mentality and Red Ribbon stigma [Toriyama’s neoliberal framing of anything “Red” as villainous to Japan’s post-Occupation emulation, above]. By extension, Red Scare is incessant, the son a pile of offal turned into Achilles [with a similar emotional temperament] or even Alucard by Lord Dracula in Netflix’ 2017 Castlevania. In turn, the father is symbolized through a gender-swap for a popular image of undeath normally reserved for Medusa, but also the dragon lord when slain: the disembodied head that can still talk into the “son’s” ear [placed in quotes due to the unnatural, unreliable relationship between the two; i.e., “I am your father!” as the tyrant’s plea made famous in the 20th century by Luke from Vader. It’s the Shadow of Pygmalion lurking within the shonen variant of the Cycle of Kings].

[artist, left and right: Bernie Wrightson]

In Frankenstein, the story is a murder-suicide, enacted by the zombie son shambling towards the father-mother in an act of childhood revenge the double-parent first dreams about before sculpting his child [re: Zeus pulling Metis from his forehead]. Alucard, by comparison, does not want to kill his father, Dracula, who had sex with Alucard’s mom to have a, by and large, natural birth tainted by blood libel and pre-fascist coding. But the reckoning felt during the fatal return to his childhood home [something he does repeatedly throughout the franchise] is always traumatic to Alucard. It’s also [as we shall see next and in the Demon Module] dangerous: sometimes the house wins.)

Onto “‘The Monomyth’ (opening and part zero)“!

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Footnotes

[1] Mavis explained it frankly and well (from Volume One):

Mavis is someone I haven’t mentioned until now, but will mention more throughout this book. They have had countless experiences with rape (dissociation makes you forget or “block out” the trauma, which makes it hard to remember). According to Mavis, rape is awful, but it’s also over quick and you can dissociate (something that plurality allows for); also, according to Mavis, they’d rather experience rape than prolonged mental abuse, the latter which can go on for years like a war of menticidal attrition—including threats of rape amid diminishing returns of genuine care after the initial “love-bombing” phase (say nothing of the historical-material variants if you’re living in someone’s family estate, or equally bad, being shamed, neglected or ignored by what Melissa McEwan calls “rape apologia” or “rape ranking” amid rape culture, 2013).

Speaking from my own experiences, it’s the kind of thing you can’t block out. Over time, this abuse can be “buried alive”—hidden in plain sight all around a “cursed” location littered with markers of power, but also illusions-of-illusions (crypt narrative) of normality that broadcast imprecise ambivalence. It’s precisely these iffy phenomenological disturbances and partial disconnections/connections that one relates to in continuum; i.e., being a part of the space-in-question, the broken home that is nevertheless one’s poisoned wellspring and haunted library of nostalgic storybooks. Trauma lives in the body but also the chronotope as something the body absorbs things from—the haunted house as returned to, feeling uncannily familiar and alien, but also already-occupied by something close-at hand during uncertain, liminal, feudalized ownership […]: the fear of inheritance; i.e., Walpole’s idea of a “secret sin; [an] untold tale, that art cannot extract, nor penance cleanse” from The Mysterious Mother (1768). Except incest isn’t a “pure myth” relegated to Gothic fiction, but precisely the kind of thing experienced by Mavis, Cuwu and people like them (who extrafamilial predators will mark as having survived, and try to exploit them in the future; i.e., trauma lives inside you, but also follows you like a curse) [source].

As such, I couldn’t disassociate from Jadis’ emotional abuse because it, unlike physical and sexual abuse, is interactive by design (to such a degree as Jadis could torture me without being inside the room); i.e., emotional requires a victim to respond to something from the abuser as supplied to them linguo-materially. But as we’ll, I was able to rely on the stories of the past (Gothic novels and my education about them) to navigate my own abuse in much the same way.

[2] Persephone van der Waard’s “Coming out as Trans”: August 7th, 2022.

[3] Re: Trauma attracts trauma, weird attracts weird. Jadis saw in me what I didn’t see in myself: a dupe who they—someone I loved—would unironically prey upon using my vices to hypocritically enslave me while saying they weren’t about that. It was disastrously potent and effective, just the right mix of pleasure and pain, isolation and abused trust.

[4] The first chapters (what became Volume Three) concerned TERF-style abuses that expanded to other forms of tokenism and Man Box thinking under Capitalism; re: “prison sex” mentalities.

[5] His mutilated, black-and-red body and fetish outfit evokes H.R. Giger’s xenomorph; his torture chamber evokes Stan Winston’s atmospheric processor from Alien—i.e., in a psychosexual, domestically xenophobic manner akin to Satanic panic from the 1980s and Catholic-to-anti-Catholic dogma across the centuries.

[6] We don’t have to ascribe gender towards a desire for protection, but in Beethoven’s case, the film’s director is patently noting the absentee mother in relation to Beethoven’s broken home and domineering father. In my case, my father was never around and I turned to my mother for succor in the darkness of the night; likewise, I found the night to be immensely comforting as a small child, teenager and adult, going for nightly strolls surrounded by the whispering trees, moon and stars. In the words of Blue Öyster Cult, “I love the night”; i.e., a little trans vampire who felt safer in the shadows of the forest where I could hide, not indoors where my father could claim me.

[7] Re: “Our Ludic Masters: The Dominating Game Space.” More on this when we talk about Metroidvania per the monomyth; i.e., as a matter of scholarly history I have since contributed to many times since.

[8] From Goethe’s Egmont (1788), translating to “Rejoicing to heaven, grieving to death” or “heavenly joy, deadly sorrow” (source). It’s a mood.

[9] Another abuse I really hated was being told not to quote things or make connections to different, seemingly unrelated things. Jadis hated that and constantly chided and scolded me for wanting to share my Humanities education with them, quotes included. I can hear them now, whining, “What does that have to do with anything!” I have since covered this entire book in quotes as a big “fuck you” to them. “Suck it, Trebek!”

[10] Slut Girl is a surprisingly funny-yet-biting satire of ’90s Japanese office culture. In the 2003 book, Manga: The Complete Guide, Derek Guder writes, “The storylines are played up for comedic payoff, and you can’t help but laugh [as] the characters’ facial expressions liven up otherwise boring sex scenes.” Other critics like Timothy Perper and Martha Cornog praise the expressive translation of the English edition, and describe Sayoko in “Eroticism for the Masses” [2002] as a “tsuya/yoen” woman, a complex figure with “voluptuous charm” and “bewitching beauty” who deals with sexual assault by weaponizing her slutty charms against her historical attackers. Perper and Cornog describe Slut Girl as being a satire on modern life, especially the role of women in the workplace, and a “long-enduring glass ceiling.”

[11] The Romans loved their numerals, but these extended into a numbered ordering of the universe under the cartographic language of conquest, per Cartesian thought; i.e., a returning to the stillness of “antiquity” as something the Enlightenment couldn’t account for in its brutalizing of the world. We’re left, then, with numerical extensions of the prime mover as the patriarch, the skeleton king in the same Cycle thereof: the ghost of “Rome,” the Shadow of Pygmalion. Per the narrative of the crypt and its infernal concentric pattern (more on this when we look at Metroidvania), it’s history stuck on loop; i.e., in material pursuit of glory as undead, eating itself. Except, time is a circle; when it comes back around, its might ghosts will there, waiting for us. We’ll examine those next, in part three!