This blog post is part of “Deal with the Devil,” a third promotion originally inspired by the first and second ones I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” and “Searching for Secrets” (2024). The first 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). “Deal with the Devil” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, Demons (the “Searching for Secrets” promotion covered the Undead Module, which is now live). 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 “Deal with the Devil’s” 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.

Forbidden Sight and the Promethean Quest; or, Knowledge and Power Exchange (opening)

Approaching, you writhe, we take control
Unholy inquisition, sentence very cold
My servants, demons, take you down the hole
Your mind destroyed now I want your soul (source).

—Dave Padden; “Phantasmagoria,” on Annihilator’s Never, Never Land (1990)

Note: I put this section out while the metal is still hot. I need to proofread it more over the past few days, but the core ideas/imagery is all in place! —Perse

Picking up where “Demons Module: Opening” left off…

The Promethean Quest is something that, faced with old mysteries, ventures into them to uncover forbidden knowledge and fatal (for Cartesian men) power, homecomings, nostalgia, etc. As such, knowledge and power often something to gaze upon, blasting the viewer to bits; but just as often, they exist as things to play with:

• “part zero: Idle Hands, Weapons in Clay” (including in this post): “Hell had no fury like a woman scorned!” Briefly explores claymation as the violent domain of sex demons—a psychosexual camp with traumatic baggage unpacked by Takena in their short but gnarly claymation skit, “Midnight Vampire” (2024)! Expands this to goblins and demon lovers at large!
• “part one: Making Demons“: Explores the act of making demons from Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel onwards!
• “part two: Summoning Occult Demons“: Per Alien, Evil Dead and other stories, lays out the idea of summoning occult demons, including acts of interrogating them through the classic Neo-Gothic model: damsels, detectives and demons per canonical torture vs exquisite “torture.”
• “Exploring the Derelict Past: the Demonic Trifecta of Damsels, Detectives and Sex Demons; or Enjoying Yesterday’s Exquisite Torture on the Edge of the Civilized World“: Considers the left-behind, derelict quality of demons, and unpacks various qualities of derelicts, damsels, detectives and demons separately and together!

Remembering that feeding and trauma are cousins to power/knowledge exchange and transformation—and also how they divide as separates modules according to poetic histories dedicated to each egregore class—this chapter shall explore playing with demons as such; i.e., in/upon abject spaces and thresholds, which can be repeatedly conjured up anew as demons are: to be played with, thus interrogate power (and alter its flower moving forwards). Trauma and feeding will come up, as will transformation. And you may think about demons in those terms if it helps. Call them vampires if it helps; doing so merely emphasizes them in relation to the undead modus operandi and poetic histories that go along with it (e.g., lycanthropy and crazy wolf men ravishing sluts).

The chapter after that, “Call of the Wild,” will explore transformation more pointedly (and with an emphasis on demonic animals).

Before we jump in, though, a quick note about demons as whore-like. Simply put, demons are whores under Western dominion opposite virgins and (indented for emphasis, kind of a mini-thesis for this chapter)

classically find power/agency through theatre and reenactment of unequal/unfair or other rapacious conditions; i.e., a concept I’ll refer to as “the whore’s paradox.” They are both demons and maidens, virgins and whores, and find power according to how these notions are (de)valued. Empowerment applies to any aspect of our life/our bodies the state wishes to control, and any cliché or fetish that might be used to degrade, humiliate, rape or otherwise demonize/dominate us; i.e., that we can reclaim through unequal power letting us top from a position of normal disadvantage: however strong a demon appears, it is ultimately criminal, thus hunted, abused, stalked, killed and discarded like trash.

Finding power through unequal knowledge exchange/transformation, then, occurs while responding to whatever strange appetites capital saddles us with; i.e., according to unequal socio-material conditions we weaponize during calculated risk against profit (as inherently unequal/rapacious, by design). In the interim, we survive on the street as comparable to Hell foisted on us, but paradoxically “Hell” also becomes something that we gain control over in theatrical spheres going on and offstage. Per our own risks and potential bad decisions, then, we choose what barriers to raise, who to fool around with, to use condoms or not, and what lessons to pass along labor exchanges under criminogenic conditions. Education is always game of chance, which calculated risk through ludo-Gothic BDSM aims to reduce systemic harm but encourage social-sexual activities. Founded on generational trust, not generational harm, we raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class-cultural awareness through demons-as-whores. Power exchange negotiates and navigates boundaries through what is given and taken, generally through roleplay as an educational device: to break and establish a trend or guideline for sex-positive behaviors.

To be frank, whoring is how demons commonly communicate, doing so through sex and force (commonly expressed as pleasure and pain) to camp canonical norms. Negotiating power is to exchange it in common forms, then—including the kinds of everyday pornographic and dehumanizing trades enforced between one party (often women) routinely and systemically disadvantaged under another’s privilege (men); i.e., through bad theatre, hellish body language and wacky puns, the data acting as a clay-like mixture of pleasure and pain as much synonymous as separate; e.g., food and sex: “Stuff my taco!” In turn, social-psychosexual improv runs along well-used tracks, and behind the usual aliases and Aegises, but also combined sex and war, food and death, etc: “Help, I’m a damsel in distress! Psych! I’m a whore! Joke’s on you!”

(artist: Valentina)

Under capital, all women are whores without irony (a condition that extends idiosyncratically to anything “of nature,” thus monstrous-feminine in the eyes of the state). The usual dualities and inversions apply when camping canon, then. Per the virgin/whore mechanism, demons are presumed “in disguise” and constantly sexualized on their surfaces regardless of what they have on (re: Segewick); i.e., being forced to disrobe/confess less in ways that are true and more to be the whore that men with virgin/whore syndrome are searching for (and token agents; re: whores pimping whores): all virgins are whores, all whores look like virgins and “need” to be subjugated under dogmatic, love/hate, criminogenic conditions.

In turn, dirty little girls have dirty little secrets (the same of the porn skit starring Valentina, above and below). It’s compelled theatrics which can be reclaimed on the same stages, with the same Aegis’ mirror/compartment syndrome freezing state abuse and reclaiming our power through slutty theatre. We trade with what we got, with what society values/discounts through porn and, by extension, daily life; e.g., transportation, rent, food all paid for with sex as legal/illegal (the only thing afforded to women in a patriarchal society): a tush, a rack and a box! Virgin = legal; whore = illegal. Women are fucked, either way!

(artist: Valentina)

To make iconoclastic, sex-positive demons, then, is to humanize the harvest, thus the whore—to make love while turning profit (thus rape) entirely on its head: the cute “virgin” form incensed to a feral “whore” form doubling it; i.e., Medusa going “mask off” to bare her fangs, exhaling in rapturous, ahegao-style passion (and taking our essence and power as she does)! That’s what intimacy is through demonic, whorish expression; i.e., showing that side of ourselves that will normally be attacked! Sex is dangerous and fun in ways we can camp in duality (more on this in “Making Demons”): handling those we trust won’t harm us, and having fun through performance and art, friendship and business, but speaking cryptonymically to so many instances where that luxury of agency is denied! Loving the whore is taught by the whore in the lusty shadow of actual rape and hate, but also predatory porn contracts and barbaric, blame-the-whore rhetoric those unequal power arrangements historically encourage; e.g., “What was she wearing?”

I’m sorry but that’s irrelevant. She could be buck-ass naked and rape still isn’t okay! Ever! Furthermore, no one “asks for it,” as far as unironic rape goes, but that’s precisely the kind of bullshit revolutionary cryptonymy challenges through our chosen buffers and stages: the demon lover’s cry of Medusa finding a reciprocal, affectionate audience! For her and hers, fear and courage, love and pain occupy the same stage under pressure! We learn to relax and control our fear through safe spaces that, at times, cross over into actual, grave danger (when the state intervenes) but also put “danger” into quotes to nullify state apathy in worker hearts and minds!

(artist: Valentina)

Fighting the profit motive, then, such wet-and-wild, slutty arguments notably become a joyous, tragic, comical gag to reclaim during pornographic refrains; i.e.,  showcasing agency as, true to form, a kind of demonic joke/apologia about unshackled monstrous-feminine speaking to harsher realities haunting the venue. These jokes, in turn, echo and inform industry ones mimicking us and vice versa. The deciding factor in terms of sex positivity is irony and humor about being stranded and all the dire, sinister implications that entails (see: It’s Always Sunny‘s “Dennis Explains the Implication” scene, 2010). Fun and danger go hand-in-hand with risk prevention and praxial synthesis.

Forbidden Sight, part zero: Idle Hands, Weapons in Clay; or, Prostitution, Vampire Revenge, Goblins and Demonic Sex

And, as in uffish thought he stood,

      The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,

Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,

      And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through

      The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

He left it dead, and with its head

      He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?

      Come to my arms, my beamish boy!

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”

      He chortled in his joy (source).

—Lewis Carroll, “Jabberwocky” (1871)

This short piece was written in response/reference to my initial reactions to Takena’s “Midnight Vampire” (2024): “Persephone’s Insights, #1: Breaking Down ‪@Takena‘s “Midnight Vampire” (2024). Combining raw sexuality and violence isn’t something I generally do, but did want to quickly explore how psychosexual expression often discusses sexuality through “medieval” theatrical violence. —Perse

I wanted to write a short section about vampires and prostitute revenge, and springboard into demonic sex as torturous, psychosexual, and playful forms of power exchange. Again, demons are whores under Western dominion, pain and torture mingled with sex being how they communicate to camp canonical norms; i.e., through bad theatre and puns, the data a clay-like mixture of pleasure and pain as much synonymous as separate; re: food and sex, but put on blast. “Stuff my taco!” becomes TACO STUFFED. It’s campy and fun, but like any metal song/opera haunted by actual rape our resident whore is avenging through clay-like doubles: desire and revenge, putting “rape” in quotes. That’s the whore’s paradox! For our liberation, it becomes something to advertise to spite its corpse-like stigmas and taboos; e.g., a whore is synonymous with a corpse, death—with an orgasm that, like the convulsionnaires, has a martyred, rapturous, even vengeful quality to it (the eyes rolling back into the skull, dying the little death but Numinously evoking the Big One). It becomes its own thing: a “sacrifice.”

Granted, vampires are classically undead, but terms like “sex demon” or “whore” easily apply (for our purposes, demon and whore are synonymous, as are synonyms to whore, like mistress or Medusa; e.g., dark mistress = demon); i.e., a dead whore, doll, or dead sex demon, in the modular sense (with thick, “immodest” makeup—caked on, resembling decay but also sexual arousal, depending on the color—being comparable to corpse paint and graveyard prostitution going back at least to Ancient Rome; re: B.B. Wagner). Abject, they speak to isolation and abuse, forbidden sex defying canonical laws and female/monstrous-feminine revenge from beyond the grave: parallel voices/societies challenging Puritanical state authority with worker counterauthority and counterterror. They wear the makeup for themselves, and say what they want to say inside capitalist markets; i.e., cannibalizing the same whorish theatre tools for asymmetrical warfare: i.e., cannibalizing the same whorish theatre tools for asymmetrical warfare:

Macbeth called these “borrowed robes.” What he stole through sexualized force, we take through sex and force speaking to rape; i.e., as a loss of control tied to articles of clothing and other theatrical elements; e.g., shoes historically being torturous and uncomfortable (see: Chinese foot-binding), turns former brands into foils that empower us and speak to past disempowerment. All aspects of the whore do this, yielding creativity and bodies being all the guerilla classically has, deprived of anything else by the empires (and cops) pimping them out. Sex becomes literally “on the brain,” insanity a kind of death, rape, captivity theatre expressed through hysteria narratives (merged with other moral panics, as the state requires and which we subvert) that punch through your eye sockets like a bad pun—brain stab! Bitches be crazy! You love it!

Whores, then, are brides of the devil (or, per Lewis’ shapeshifting Matilda, simply the devil in disguise, deceiving the deceiver), meaning they can do things good girls can’t, and generally take things from men (usually power through money and sex) to avenge their own relegation. Except all girls are whores per the same paradox, giving them the potential to “corrupt” for or against the state; re: “any weapon can become a weapon of terror.” This occurs through sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll (and equivalents of these things across the Gothic mode) stressing their own paradoxical, profoundly liminal, darkness-visible existence; i.e., parody and pastiche, in Gothic, generally elide and—per the class, culture and race privilege of middle-class white people from the Neo-Gothic onwards—commercialize these fearful fascinations per the ghost of the counterfeit; e.g., Rob Zombie’s “Living Dead Girl” (1998): “Who is this irresistible creature who has an insatiable love for the dead?” Under Gothic, bad vibes offer up baddie vibes, just as often; the irony is optional (and in Zombie and Sheri Moon’s case, below, is generally a brand to sell, not a critical voice with any serious bite to it).

To that, the forbidden knowledge, here is the specialized jouissance/catharsis that lies in between play and rememory unto actual trauma (re: Asprey’s “terror is the kissing cousin of force”); i.e., putting “rape” in quotes to recontextualize it as play in ways that—as vampires do—speak to historical police violence/trauma in ways we can camp and subvert in demonic poetics, as well: through rape, murder and/or death fantasies, but also surreal neo-medieval language (e.g., the Jabberwocky, above). We’ll be doing so with vampires, prostitution and claymation vis-à-vis Taneka’s golem-esque claymation “Midnight Vampire” (2024), then conclude with some broader points about demonic poetics, forbidden sight and sex; e.g., Tolkien’s goblins and other anti-Semitic tropes; i.e., as a weapon “of idle hands” that will come up repeatedly throughout the entire Demon Module!

In it, the liminal expression puts monster between woman as maiden and whore, itself cleft in twain and yet bound at the hip on the same stage; but also, between house and dungeon, vampire lord and queen, genuine torture and “torture” in quotes, revenge and “revenge,” clay and flesh, etc. Whereas she acts out her rape by killing an imaginary killer to rescue her former self divided from her vampire side speaking to her current existence, so too can we play out our own deaths, trauma and transformation (rapes, revenge, rapture, etc) in such dualistic, psychomachic, martyred medieval forms: popular media being whatever delicious, rock ‘n roll trash people love to consume. Vampires are whores, are sex demons! We don’t just get down to business; we take care of it!

In turn, demons are shadows suggesting what reality hides through state illusions; i.e., simulacrum being clay animating in small, the homunculus or golem similar to Walpole’s animated miniatures (the portrait), Plato’s shadow plays, and the phantasmagoria, etc. Historically, it carries with it Gothic double standards, enjoyed by queer white men and straight women in the Neo-Gothic period, playing with the ghost of the counterfeit: necromancer and shade, conjuring up Hell as pre-Christian “past”; i.e., while in a Christian dominated world ethnocentrically essentializing them as evil per blood libel, Orientalism, and monstrous-feminine Satanic Panic, etc.

To it, while this includes doll-sized humans or human-sized dolls, gargoyles and simulacra/egregores/homunculi as animate-inanimate (unheimlich and restless cryptonyms)—or even giant-sized statues (Michelangelo’s David or the Colossus) ranging from vanity projects to Humanist/Gothic commentaries on the world when they were made—they don’t animate especially well. And while we’ll get to larger simulacrum like Shelley’s Creature, chiding Victor for playing God during the Promethean Quest (that deity having made men and women out of clay), I thought we’d start small and work our way up to Frankenstein’s monster and similar beings (re: the xenomorph): from little dolls to goblins, witches and other beings (which we’ll look at with Tolkien, in a moment), monsters are made as much to express their making as it is to comment on the humanity of those being made. Conjured up by “necromancers,” they talk for different reasons, speaking truth through shadows, artifice and lies. This isn’t in bad faith, but to communicate through allegory as just another part of human language and experience: the voice of the surly-silly Jane Doe. She smiles, but it doesn’t reach her skull-girl eyes; it’s like a killer doll: beautiful but deadly, exchanging unequal power through violent sex (or “sex,” per the cryptonymy process). In iconoclastic circles, it’s meant to excite the browbeaten and frighten the abuser (though the latter will always try to pimp the former): become the whore, become vengeance—a pedagogy of the oppressed, a conduit of joy playing hauntological Mortal Kombat.

This brings us to Takena—with smaller figurines in dollhouse sets being easier to work with on account of their size. Small or not, they represent humans and their residences, but also the unspeakable actions that go on inside (the paradox being these speak easily enough with a bit of clay to work with—clay being an excellent cryptonym, showing what is concealed by standing in for raw sex through medievalized metaphors debating back and forth).

Computers are data transmitters; clay is the data storage system of the ancient world (e.g., the complaint tablet to Ea-nāṣir being the oldest customer complaint, for example). It never gets tired and can never die—can change shape and color and be, like Satan’s darkness visible, whatever you need it to be and animate-inanimate to say whatever you want to say (i.e., memes, but also cryptomemes, per Castricano’s cryptomimesis process)!

It’s also naked; i.e., able to be assigned whatever instructions you want; e.g., “kill my enemies,” “protect me from harm,” or some dialectical-material, cops-and-victims combination of these, in duality thus infinite value/shape/utility for or against the state (with Shelley and similar storytelling using the tabula rasa to highlight the hypocrisy of state-programmed automatons—arrogantly thinking they have free will, but simply being statues/gargoyle slaves themselves: made of materials carrying messages through the policing of sex and force). Terms like “virus” or “code” marry to sexual production and settler arguments against nature-as-monstrous-feminine, which we can enjoy pursuant to an iconoclastic endorsement; i.e., of dialogs speaking our truth as normally repressed: “dead” whores tell plenty of tales! “‘Tis but a scratch!”

Made from clay and animated as such, Takena’s story is basically a prurient simulacrum of prostitution arbitrated in hauntological form: the whore/demon lover at the bar as a site of play and pleasure—foreplay, to be precise, leading to things that respond to virgin/whore division that, per male privilege, so often lead to “revenge” against female/GNC parties by cis-het male ones bored with their caged housewives and seeking “Hell” to colonize it. Our subverting of these occurs on the same vaso vagal, poppy-red stages of power and performance playing out this or that. Things blend in and stand out (per the cryptonymy process) to make hard to say who is the harmful agent and who is not; abjection reverses vis-à-vis the chronotope, clay dollhouse castle-inside-a-castle’s mise-en-abyme. We ruin your childhoods, but remind you that Gumby was always creepy!

Furthermore, the militant female demon lover’s theatrical desire—to harm others that resemble our past abusers—becomes trapped between the reality that abusers appear normal and harmless, but which is where we see harm; we can play it out as such, but also remind our audience looking in on the framed tale that—they, looking in on us, smashing small likenesses of themselves—need only be reminded that harm is a matter of context sitting among an aesthetic of power and death, dom and sub, human and vampire, predatory and prey. We look and they look, and between us is where things play out on the same Aegis’ cryptonymy process: the virgin and the whore, the voyeur and exhibitionist, the playwright and the BDSM freak. She is a kinky girl! The kind you don’t take home to mother!

In turn, damage through rape play speaks to what is covered up, but also all around us and coded less in censorship and more the cryptonymy process: violence points to rape, but also trauma and feeding in ways that anisotropically reverse the flow of power conducive to a salubrious, class-conscious effect. Weird attracts weird, trauma attracts trauma, our resident man eater hunting in places where she is normally hunted. She’s here to turn the tables, telling the story in small as each sizes the other up; i.e., while the knightly chess player plays not with some frail girlish thing acting out death, but Death herself playing him (echoes, below, of The Seventh Seal, 1957). The state is incompatible with life; unlife can fight back by dressing up as the whore, emasculating rape through its recreation: a witness account retold in Gothic. So does the Aegis anisotropically expose what is repressed, doing so to humanize the whore as demonic: a guilty pleasure, Medusa flipping the script on those usual benefactors of capital punching her! She claps back as a black knight (a kind of cop) would: hard and fast, without mercy! Pimping the pimp, this happens through play mirroring play!

In other words, the survival mechanisms of a predator/prey relationship happen very quickly and are coded among structures that—while unspoken—remain heavily ritualized and ubiquitous: go to the bar and have sex; a drink for some sex, and canonically a chance to abuse the whore who you have power over. Subverting this, Takena plays with dolls inside small miniatures that combine medieval aspects of female/prostitute torture with more recent hauntologies: the snuff film and kawaii vampire waifu. She gives as good as she gets, hypnotizing love boy and from him, his hidden master waiting at the kill house.

Exposed, the king runs from one dungeon inside a castle’s concentric refrain; she follows him, the whorish executioner carrying her trauma with her and returning from the grave to seek a demonic revenge (dragging the abuser to Hell, reversing Hades and Persephone’s role in things). It’s all a death omen for future abusers relaid in in repeating echoes of older stories felt in present-day forms. True to form, the vampire is reflecting on the surfaces and thresholds of pastiche/remediated praxis, not on actual glass; but the Aegis’ glass-like reflections are, per oppositional praxis, precisely where such things play out time and time again… Animation isn’t just uncanny but speaking to unspeakable, repressed topics through black magic as ubiquitous, commodified: xenoglossia, aka the voice of the dead. The best revenge is surviving through the message; i.e., taking the state’s unironic dungeon apart piece by piece—through cryptonymy reversing abjection, mid-counterfeit!

By the end, the axe is hers, and maiden no more (if ever she were), the heroine is the slayer of a bad-dream camera man, taking his vision less apart and more turning the baleful gaze back on the original harmful vampire. She overpowers him, having done so through her mightier maternal double. From the charmer at the gate to the executioners inside trafficking women, all the king’s men are in pieces from the skilled dominatrix, and now it’s the king’s turn through her apprentice! The hunter becomes the hunted and vice versa. Delicious!

Yet, the monster is not strictly one or the other alone; it’s both, and is shared between them as an aesthetic they use to communicate different goals: to abuse the whore instead of challenging capital, versus the whore reminding the king that he’s only one for a day, and it takes only the shadow of a threat to emasculate him…

And just as quick, the day is won; the damsel is freed and the villains are dead—our classic Gothic heroine, the air-headed sex doll, recovering from her dark love spell to see her Venus twin has disappeared, crawling back to her own castle-in-small for a nap. Per the Promethean Quest, the Hero’s Journey (the monomyth), Male Gaze and various other tropes are turned on their heads/made inside out like a vampire’s cloak; but the usual wearer is the classic Neo-Gothic readership (women/fags) punching up against the usual victimizers—not the mythical sort like Radcliffe’s banditti, but weird LARPer white men who can’t get it up unless they’re harming someone/acting the cop. Cops need victims; victims can fight back through the same power fantasies moving power towards workers: our lady of the night—let in to raise Cain, having Grendel’s revenge, mommy-dom-style. She’s a demon, thus unstoppable shapeshifter (and damage-impervious stand-in for our indestructible selves), showing us “death” is a hell of a time (and not mind if you cum in her eye, below)!

Tokenization is a thing. The whole point of “Midnight Vampire,” though, is to subvert/reverse all of that, making us reflect on the recycled language to reveal the usual police abusers protected by canonical forms. It does so through martyred, plural fragmentation; i.e., our resident whore can disassociate/be raped till the cows come home. Her mouth agape and giving the king bedroom eyes, she takes all the men’s power until they are weak enough that our pillow princess can finish them off, executioner-style. “That all you got, killer? Such a little man with a little ‘weapon’!” Death in these stories is both figurative and/or literal, meaning it symbolizes actual police violence, but also the ability to play said violence out for different reasons; i.e., through ludo-Gothic BDSM’s counterterrorist reversal, not fear and dogma! Intersectional solidarity punches up against all cops.

Not all monsters are bad, then; but those who harm others pursuant to profit are. We’re here to kill that darling idea, camping dogma to kill pure, blind belief; e.g., Andy Rehfeldt’s “Don’t Stop Believing (the Minor Version)” (2018); i.e., visiting feelings of torture and death onto our unironic voyeurs in the audience. It’s an ironic stress valve, but also a means to voice through a pedagogy of the oppressed what normally isn’t, under police structures. We shall—like Lewis’ Ambrosio—unmake them through voodoo-doll likenesses of themselves: ACAB effigies to scapegoat, batter and trash. We are ungovernable—seen as “violent” for simply existing but also because we challenge the status quo through various cryptonymic games.

And if that makes status-quo proponents uncomfortable, they’re projecting (often by accusing their usual victims of the accuser’s own holier-than-thou predation, DARVO-and-obscurantism-style). Furthermore, if you can’t handle the black/Jewish revenge fantasies of an abused class of people acted on in safe spaces, you’re calling to bury such things. But, as Takena shows us, such things don’t stay buried for long. Sex is a weapon we sex workers can reclaim, art-porn being an extension of our andro/gynodiverse, “billboard bodies/graffiti activism (re: tattoos, left) and labor! The fat lady sings by making gender trouble ecstatic, divorcing gender from sex and either from biology in a heteronormative (thus settler-colonial, Cartesian) sense; re: camping canonical essentialism, challenging state monopolies/trifectas and all their pilfered spectres; e.g., Marx.

(artist: PUPC0DED)

To camp Marx, “All the dead prostitutes of dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living”; camp them and give them a place to place, and conscious rebellion can find a home on the same shared stage. The paradox is “evil” sex is badass, hot, cathartic; and it draws us towards difficult truths, but also delightful playgrounds where life and death, “rape” and rape occupy the same liminality territories. A bit of struggle with that snuggle, then fucking to metal. Everyone wants the clubbing baddie/demon lover, which—courtesy of the Neo-Gothic—you have to go into the g(r)ay area/danger disco to find one, but she can look goth or bubblegum. She’ll more than likely have some kind of damage (re: Cuwu). That needs an outlet, which it will find—one way or another! Better to camp it; e.g., “FINISH HER!” (The Immortals’ “Techno Syndrome,” 1995). Whores aren’t just demons, but in the Miltonian tradition, rebels!

Taking to the streets, then, we whores speak campily to danger through “danger” as silly and fun; e.g., Castle Anthrax, Evil Dead, Metroidvania and Bullfrog’s Dungeon Keeper (among countless others) inspired by Walpole, Lewis and similar such “Male Gothic” (re: Moers) trashy-but-fun queerness: black magic, monsters, princely feasts and extravagance, dynastic power exchange and hereditary rites (re: Bakhtin), courtly violence/medieval torture and sanctioned-to-forbidden sex (and poetic mergers of all of these things; e.g., Tchaikovsky’s cannons and ringing church bells [state but also whorish code for “orgasm”; i.e., “I hear bells ringing!”] or the submarine captain shouting “Schneller!” [classic matelotage] during Das Boot‘s Gibraltar scene, etc); re: all the dead traditions of rebellion weighing on the state) aping the Capitalocene to disabuse us of its harmful ideations: to blow the lofty and benevolent idea of the state right the fuck up! The state can only rape; whores can catalyze sex and force for or against it: brothel-espionage cheerleaders shouting, “Faster! Harder!” We self-styled robo-fags are not defective models, then but awake and actively putting the spunk in rebellion; i.e., riding it raw (and double-tapping for good measure), seeding and speeding liberation along vis-à-vis allegory and the cryptonymy process (it’s just a game, officer—honest)!

Activism is worker action through whoring turned against profit, thus a force that consciously opposes cops betraying labor interests, mid-class-conflict. Rebellion is work in this respect, as is sex raising awareness and intelligence towards resistance, but whoever said struggle had to be dull and bleak? Rebellion can be fun! It must, or workers will simply betray their own interests for some quick relief! Revolution starts in hearts and minds (and cafés, taverns, discos, BDSM dungeons, etc), thus owes such rabble-rousing inflammatory sentiments to unruly Gothic military theatre doubling controlled opposition. A kind of concealed weapon worn on/up our sleeves, we Gothic-Communist sluts fuck those we can convert, putting out to convince any who can be convinced (and sneaking in mix-and-match allegory all the while: a message in a “bottle”).

Amazonomachia, psychomachia and psychopraxis —anything whores do is “violent” in police eyes, which means whores are always criminal even when defending themselves or encouraging others to fight back. This includes by merely asking for decriminalization/equal rights (“peace” is a white man’s word, “liberation” is ours). Cops and victims become enemies who cannot coexist, but this is very much the point: to expose the state for what it is (a rapist, thuggish pimp for the elite abusing nature), using darkness visible to make them attack us in ways we can direct peoples’ attention towards. Negotiation is, for whores, just as often with hostile, bad-faith, and bourgeois forces who don’t share power. So we force them to!

To do nothing is to be raped; to protest said rape is to riot, those who fight back terrorists who get their faces smashed; those who fight back in spite of that are counterterrorists resisting state rule—becoming in death die-hard, Satanic symbols of La Résistance, punching loudly and gloriously up against pimp and regime as one-in-the-same: a pig-like enemy to mobilize against, chanting all manner of slogans. “To storm the wire of the camps, to smash those metal motherfuckers into junk!” To resist for universal liberation is noble and sexy! Assimilation is death; home rule is self-rule! So get ’em, girl! Fuck the five-O! Stripping is not consent! ACAB! ASAB! And so on…

(artist: Mochi)

Class war is culture (and race) war told in the language of whores fighting back in intersectional solidarity. To this, the villain of Takena’s story isn’t the female-coded vampire, but the men she targets, mid-trial-by-combat; i.e., the benefactors of “innocent until proven guilty.” We’re not calling for vigilante justice, per se—just a means of interrogating and exposing their hiding places amid the usual vampire poetics. If a helpless damsel might suddenly come unalive and—like Grendel’s mother—tear them all asunder (mommy has needs), the effect would be a draining one (for the men): to render them unable to attack in the present moment. Moreover, recultivating the Superstructure, such ironic means and measures would become second-nature in the hearts and minds of workers, but also the art that they make: our spectres of Marx, sleeping in the wet spot.

Let’s carry this beyond “Midnight Vampire.” First, to trot out some of our thesis arguments: Capitalism sexualizes and fetishizes everything pursuant to profit and the usual bourgeois trifectas, monopolies and resultant qualities of capital; e.g., police violence as something to resist through play that lets us copy ourselves; i.e., into posthuman homunculi that can be taken apart.

To critique power, you must go where it is; humanize the harvest, and the state becomes inhumane; just as trauma cultivates strange appetites, anything in service to profit gentrifying and decaying the potential to rebellion through recuperated means—so does “trauma” make its own appetites in service to workers! These kinds of arguments are what we play out, including in what we create with others as “violent” in quotes; i.e., the paradox of appearing torturous, but actually being playful, cathartic and revolutionary during ludo-Gothic BDSM:

(exhibit 44a1a: Model and artist, top left: Mikki Storm and Persephone van der Waard, drawn to Mikki’s specifications. Despite the appearance of rape and gagging “bondage with tentacles,” the asphyxia on display is an ironic, cryptonymy rape fantasy that doesn’t advocate for genuine harm. For one, it’s how Mikki wanted to be depicted as during our negotiation, saying that “beasty” demons and tentacles are their kink. Hugging the alien is what she’s into, showing and hiding things that, apart from concealing anything also show a fair bit of themselves on themselves. Power’s paradox lies in its duality, mid-feeling, expressing dialectical-material pushback against canonical norms. We touch on abuse, then instruct on how to hurt, not harm. Win-win, babes! Bask in the demonic, Big-Whore goodness!

Furthermore, the shoving of tentacles down one’s throat is no different in practice than a cock down the same pipe, or hands clasped “tightly” around one’s throat (the appearance of tightness is for the viewer while a gentle-enough grip in reality is important for the recipient). Even portrayals of “actual” bodily harm could be allowed, so long as their portrayal puts “harm” in quotes; i.e., is symbolic and cathartic as a kind of nightmare expression of trauma that helps the subject—notably a sex worker, in this case—process their own complex abuse. Tush, rack or box, “Medusa” employs cryptomimetic demonic exchange and transformation to show what she wants to show to express her power through mutual consent: the conveying of normally hidden things expressed between pieces of Gothic language in openly monstrous form; i.e., monsters are suits for people to wear and perform in for various reasons, for or against the state; re [from Volume Zero]:

Yet the monstrous-feminine also lends itself well to camp, supplying performers with the means to generate a cutesy-creepy uncanny in ways that make it far less torturous/stigmatic and far more fun, even strangely sexy [the proverbial “weirdest boner”]:

[artist: top-left, bottom-left, top-right and bottom-right: Jessica Nigri; top-middle: Johannes Sadeler; bottom-middle: Salem Hysteria]

Camp can yield gender trouble and gender parody in equal measure—camp, in the case of the guy watching Pyramid Head ride four-eyes like an ass [mimicking the “power of women” topos vis-à-vis Phyllis and Aristotle] and parody for her and her performer friend making trouble/having fun; e.g., camping the canonical-if-at-times-tangential “Nazi” of the occult, psychosexual BDSM aesthetic [with bonafide Nazi camp being its own musical/comedy hit[1] that never seems to age]. Likewise, Pyramid Head echoes the hauntological medieval as darkly torturous in a cryptomimetic, “Catholic miracle” sense, which can rescue pain from a variety of falsehoods: the false dichotomy of “pleasure and pain,” the false equivalency of “pain as sexual” but also non-pleasurable, the false stigma that pain is automatically harmful, thus has no cathartic potential. Trauma begets trauma and the chase of the Numinous can be medicinal in relation to lived trauma. Even so, it can just as easily be a burlesque show as kawaii vs kowai [cute vs scary] for genuine play and delight in an asexual sense with psychosexual overtones [the color swap] instead of internalized ones. Simply put, these aren’t pointless novelties or exclusive “hard kink medicine” for legit mental scarring, but also deeply fun [and subversive] exercises in the genderqueer creative spirit. Given the destructive nature of capital, all overlap through the same symbols and theatre as something to reclaim from the bourgeois monopoly on these things [source]. 

As always, the context behind the drawing’s negotiation and expression of power exchange remains an import part of the entire exhibit. The water, smoke, and volcano exemplify the same chaotic, seemingly Numinous power being embodied by the dark, giant whorish monster “ravishing” Mikki, and Mikki [dressed in white, like the maiden] consents to a consent-non-consent ritual that cannot harm her by virtue of these things serving her complex needs; they can excite her and help her heal from trauma through a ludo-Gothic BDSM arrangement that addresses police trauma as something to live with, thus interrogate through the performance of power in paradoxical ways: calculated risk.

The Numinous, in this sense, becomes palliative/counterterrorist through its psychosexual nature challenging the inherent police design of state monopolies; i.e., the language of the performer being for or against something dualistic and anisotropic; e.g., terrorist/counterterrorist, good/evil, virgin/whore, protest/counterprotest. Like in chess, state or workers can assign themselves the position of black or white; e.g., “the state calls us ‘terrorist,’ but we are actually counterterrorists: challenging this dichotomy and its usual flow of power and knowledge, but also morphological form.)

Optics matter, and rebels outwit cops through counterterror befitting guerrillas since ancient times. From vampires to demons, you’ll never be rid of the Gothic aesthetic (which is so engrained within the West to be synonymous with it), but you can subvert how it is viewed and applied, mid-liminal-expression; i.e., insofar as the application of state vs worker force is perceived back and forth: cops and victims, felt amid common poetic extremes (which metal, videogames, and comics, etc, are known for). Gothic maturity is when workers are emotionally/Gothically intelligent enough, and class, culturally and racially conscious enough to a) develop, not hinder Gothic Communism, and b) break Capitalist Realism through these means on a cultural level through the Wisdom of the Ancients/proletarian Superstructure. “Rape” becomes intuitive, playful but practiced, martial but artist, shining a black light on dried blood (and other fluids).

This goes for arguments that apply equally to monsters of all kinds; be they undead, demonic, and/or animalistic, we can take arguments from one module, turn them inside-out and apply it intersectionally to other poetics. Be it a uniform (above) or a single article of clothing (a hat or a cloak, below), worn one way or another these still uniforms/articles of clothing; i.e., they are linguo-material and subject to the same dualities and dialectical-material arbitration. For example, my OC—Ileana Sanda, the Queen of the Night—is a golem of sorts; i.e., a sex doll and embodiment of power as I see it. As such, she turn things on their head to defend women and children from state tyrants while largely in the buff: an action figure whose spirit of utility is ludo-Gothic BDSM married to dark spells.

In Amazonian fashion, her armor is her body bare and exposed; i.e., in ways patriarchal forces cannot be dominated, but rather who dominates them in a pastel-goth witchy aesthetic. She’s badass, but not furiously angry and mute, like so many female ghosts are. Instead, she’s a stage magician, slut and mommy protector acting a queen of Hell, of her kind; i.e., within pandemonium as granting all occupants of Hell equal rights. She’s not just a sex toy for me to fuck, but what I want to be (the two are not mutually exclusive):

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

We’re all queens under Communism, babes! But transformation is complicated, non-linear and ergodic; it takes not just work, but repeated forays into the Gay Zone of Doom. It’s a devil’s workshop, one for idle hands to make toy-like monsters (clay or not) that challenge capital; i.e., spectres of Marx evoking Shelley’s devilish anti-Semitism tropes—e.g., shadowy cabals of “ancient” black magic—that, through ironic usage, turn capital on its head! As a matter of violence, terror and morphological expression, imagination has the power to set us free as such, or cloister us all over again. Whatever our hearts desire, versus the state trying to rule us and control how we present. Fuck that!

I’ll demonstrate, quoting from my older books, but doing so in favor of demonic poetics, this time around: inspecting goblins, witches and similar anti-Semitic tropes that, suitably enough, are made from clay to either endorse or tear down the status quo.

From music to dance to theatre to body language to ludo-Gothic BDSM’s age, rape or murder play (and various other predator/prey monster sex games)—it’s entirely possible to summon/play in such ways without harming anyone, while also recultivating the Superstructure in a proletarian direction (which the state, to be clear, will target with police violence and label us per the terrorist/counterfeit dichotomy to receive their violence[2]): to fuck a dark mommy dom to metal and realize that—like Milton’s Paradise Lost—the real villain is God and any canonical notion of Heaven and Hell, good and evil, cop and victim is deeply untrustworthy.

Instead, we fags, women and other policed groups learn to trust our feelings of abandonment acquired since birth, rather than tokenize to serve the state as never providing for us: “Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.” This goes for all of us or Hell is merely another Omelas; i.e., a badge is not a shield from harm, it’s just clemency during witch hunts. Per Broadmoor, canon is camped to expose ongoing police (thus straight/token) abuse through art, even when the language hasn’t caught up or is otherwise suppressed through state force; per me, we camp canon because we must—for all workers, even if our oppressed pedagogy’s similarities occur mid-difference! Insurrection is checkered, but still one board to more different pieces across! For the state, we’re Satan[3] made from clay and beaten with hammers; for us golems, we feel gender dysphoria and body dysmorphia (often through impostor syndrome), including when pushing towards our true selves whether the state likes it or not; re (from Volume Zero):

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Why stick out? you ask? One, because we must in order to survive. Two, because our deals with the devil simply acknowledge our true selves, which the state wants us to reject (the queer version of Top Dollar’s usual wisdom: “Every man’s got a devil, and you can’t rest until you find him”). But also, it feels good to be Athena’s Aegis; i.e., challenging heteronormative power in ways that demonstrate how fragile said illusion (and its gatekeepers) are. State bullies are entitled nerds completely used to getting everything they want, who desire what I will never give them (a form of agency I’ve worked hard for); and completely afraid of nearly everything and will freak out at fairly silly things they have no business getting so worked up about: at people like me, burning down their imaginary churches and those churches’ ideas of compelled order about Capitalism and its gobstopper illusions (those highly unnatural and imprisoning systems of thought that are slowly killing us as a species). Frankly the idea of me being terrifying seems absurd, but as a burning proponent of rebellion constitutes something that still, on some level, represents an incendiary threat that many advertise as the “end times”: Communism… but Gothic and gay! To which I cheerfully put up the goat horns and say in response, “Hail, Satan!” It’s like saying “Ni!” to old ladies.

Our performative and internalized devilry becomes something to join—a communion or pact whose assimilation classically amounts to a devilish bargain; yet Gothic Communism is a group effort, one whose sex-positive class/culture warrior is among a fellowship or pandemonium of equally sex-positive ne’er-do-wells instead of one or more class/race traitors for the elite and their age-old Faustian bargains. We reach towards you, croon “Join us!” and become something to run away with; i.e., corrupting the minds of the youth (women and children) by calling out seductively to them, offering forbidden knowledge/fruit[4] as a chance to go wild/go native by coming out of the closet in opposition to state forces (who will chase us, only to be turned away at the door—”no fascists allowed!”): the truth of things in its totality and not just a white person’s perspective as an outsider to genuine atrocities; e.g., a Lovecraft novella, an overplayed Iron Maiden or Slayer song or the problematic castle of a Radcliffean novel (though these can all be enjoyed mid-rebellion). As Robert Asprey notes, terror and native wit/creativity are the historical tools of the counterterrorist, often being all they immediately have at their disposal; under Capitalism in the Internet Age, labor becomes a huge bargaining chip that Gothic Communism marries to terror during class war as a theatrical, operatic proposition (solidarity and labor action expressed as much through improvised Gothic poetics [improv] as improvised weapons): a means of bringing the oppressed and alienated closer to together in an informed, Satanic act of outer-space empathy and love in the face of state forces. The spotlight isn’t something to hog or monopolize strictly by white nerds but expand and share in a drive towards post-scarcity (through a horizontally-arranged system that isn’t rigged in favor of those who control it because no one person or select group will be in control, in that sense; that’s what anarchism ultimately is).

Doing so becomes second-nature, a way of existing that doesn’t require drugs or sex (though they can certainly be involved if one wants them to); it requires community and love in opposition to capital’s usual bad-faith actors, fear and dogma: persons who blend in for fear of the state, overperforming its doctrines no matter how ridiculous it makes them look. I can understand why they do it (they’re stupid and callow), but short of implied threats of force I can’t begin to fathom why would anyone ever want to listen to people like them; i.e., persons who not only never experiment or try new things regarding gender and sex, but also probably never have had sex outside of abusive and/or vanilla scenarios. They’re exactly the kind of people who act holy but hide behind their privilege as the most deviant ones of all[5]; i.e., prone to abuse their power and harm those under their care. In essence, they treat the Holy Gospel (in one form or another) as a means to abuse others from a position of willful ignorance: by refusing to eat from the Tree of Knowledge because some asshole saying they’re God said so. The point isn’t whether they’re true-believers or that God is real or that God lied about the apples being poison, but what they do with their power and sense of alienation inside the status quo [source].

In short, by being ourselves in ways that consciously resist state power (and weird canonical nerds), we resist police violence and profit normally raping nature by demonizing it; i.e., we stand up to Capitalist Realism and, by extension, the Capitalocene’s usual menticide and hopelessly afraid, Man-Box mind prisons—by running the asylum and subverting canon’s usual copaganda feeding on us!

In turn, fear and dogma in all its forms become things to level against our colonizers, scaring them stupid during the cryptonymy process (weird attracts weird, this being opportunity to shock our enemies). From sex to gender to gender performance (and the trouble it causes), these things become weapons we turn into body art/graffiti codified as much by demonic symbols that have countercultural heft dating back centuries. Recultivating that Wisdom of the Ancients/palliative Numinous is what Gothic Communism is all about: our bodies, our labor and language, our homes! It’s a party—Where the Wild Things Are!

Unlike the status quo, our jokers, smokers, midnight tokers use the language of danger and torture for iconoclastic funsies: made from clay to sing and dance, making wild rumpus. Blind faith is for suckers, something we cannot afford being sucked upon by capital’s dead labor (re: Marx). So we play with these artificial things, giving their jester’s vice-character monologues in the king’s court (the Venus/Gothic double; e.g., Jim Henson’s Skeksis) added life through allegory and dialectical-material context:

Cryptonymy’s all well and good. The problem is, the Numinous is a common canonical brothel pimping out Hell’s usual sluts in bigoted language; i.e., down in the dark brought to light to titillate the gentry with stories of exquisite torture, rape and death; e.g., Tolkien’s dwarves, and bat-like, big-mouthed and swart, savage, sinister orcs and goblins, Indians, etc: “In caverns deep, where dark things sleep,” he pimps them out as thieves and whores, slavers and killers-for-hire:

Crush, smack! Whip crack!
Smash, grab! Pinch, nab!
You go, my lad!
Ho, ho! my lad!

The black crack! the black crack!
The black crack! the black crack!
Down down to Goblin-town
Down down to Goblin-town
Down down to Goblin-town
You go, my lad!
Ho, ho! my lad! (Maury Laws’ “Down, Down to Goblin Town,” 1977).

It’s all rather… funky, isn’t it? While calculated risk is a fun way to meet new playmates, the old man was pointedly slumming in service to empire through jazzy LARPer refrains, but so were Rankin/Bass, and the kids loved it. Tolkien’s bigotry goes over their heads, but in some sense, he inherited it himself and canonized it through goblin’s and necromancy as drug-like, but also bigotries associated with them. He’s the Necromancer (his name for Sauron) using DARVO and obscurantism to demonize Jews and other groups treated as “Jewish” in a medieval sense (e.g., queer people during Satanic Panic):

J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973) himself had some controversial opinions about at least one race of Middle Earth, writing that his Dwarves were “like Jews: at once native and alien in their habitations.” In a separate interview, he elaborated on this theme, noting that “the Dwarves of course are quite obviously—couldn’t you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews?” (source: Matthew Wills’ “J. R. R. Tolkien’s Jewish Dwarves,” 2022).

It’s the dialectic of the alien, hard at work for the state during the abjection process; i.e., fascism waiting to decay into itself (often in token forms; e.g., Gimli a dwarvish cop) through Lovecraft’s weird, pulpy notion of “horror in clay” (from “Call of Cthulhu,” 1928); re: creating status-quo evils to presence the state, even when said state is rotting. Synchronistic of the bigoted American, then, the old Brit was a Nazi in spirit, if not in professed closeness to their core values. Simply put, he gave voice to such police dialogs, killing countless orcs and goblins, endemic to his essentialized moral geography as canonically game-like. I can’t really stress this enough, so here’s me stressing it as much as I possibly can (from Volume Zero):

To this, Tolkien’s refrain [the High Fantasy treasure map, exhibit 1a1a1h2a1] has led to the endless essentializing of war as gentrified through the fantasy mode [e.g., Rings of Power, 2023] but also its science fiction and horror parallels [which we’ll unpack during the “camp map” vis-à-vis Cameron’s refrain: the shooter, of course, but specifically the Metroidvania]. Tolkien’s magnetic, “chaste” warmongering leaves out the psychosexual horrors of war or valorizes them through the slaughter of abjected foes[6], requiring great effort from past writers like Ursula Le Guin to break away from Tolkien’s ghost, thus his trees and pastoral village recruitment antics and moderately xenophobic [racist] war stories. As these are copied-and-pasted along the shared counterfeit, they operate like a formula whose canonical replication centers around the profit motive; in turn, this becomes historical-material—e.g., D&D and its endless official/homebrew campaigns and dungeons—but also the “warcraft[7]” of the enterprising white, cis-het young men of an early ’90s company, suitably titled Blizzard [whose sexist bullshit as a company we’ll discuss much more in Volumes Two and Three]—built entirely around racial conflict [thus endless war and rape] as set into motion by Tolkien himself, whose own orcs are green-skinned, debatably anti-Semitic/cannibalistic savages whose name, “orc,” is Old Norse [from Beowulf’s orcnēas[8]] for “demon”; i.e., functional zombies in the state of exception that heroes invade to kill for the state through parallel legends weaving in and out of fiction and into real life: there and back again not once, but ad infinitum. If these “zombies” aren’t orcs, then they’re spiders[9] or some other stigma animal/vermin-type pest entity who must be crushed by the forces of good in personified forms; e.g., the Drow as “chaotic evil” spider people [exhibit 41b] who threaten nature as afflicted with the same problematic idea of good vs evil as canonically Biblical [versus Milton’s own accidental camping of these pastoral devices through Satanic war].

Simply put, Tolkien’s hopelessly academic view of nature is whitewashed, High Fantasy copaganda—a British tree huggers’ biased loving of the idealized pastoral/picturesque as threatened by outsiders ruining the scene: the map of empire as sacred. It’s a colonizer’s cartoonishly basic aesthetic that demonizes, thus alienates darkness but also death, decomposers and natural predators [stigma animals] as part of nature; i.e., as evil scapegoats tied to wicked, unnatural places, archaic wombs and dark magic—necromancers, but also their fortress lairs:

At first they had passed through hobbit-lands, a wide respectable country inhabited by decent folk, with good roads, an inn or two, and now and then a dwarf or a farmer ambling by on business. Then they came to lands where people spoke strangely, and sang songs Bilbo had never heard before. Now they had gone on far into the Lone-lands, where there were no people left, no inns, and the roads grew steadily worse. Not far ahead were dreary hills, rising higher and higher, dark with trees. On some of them were old castles with an evil look, as if they had been built by wicked people [emphasis: me]. Everything seemed gloomy, for the weather that day had taken a nasty turn [source].

These kinds of Gothic castles were clearly known to Tolkien, though he didn’t focus on them. In The Hobbit, they’re mentioned hardly at all [the word “castle” is used only once in the book]—sidestepped by Tolkien until it comes time to trot out Sauron [also known as the Necromancer] as the unironically Satanic threat to Tolkien’s “new Eden”: Britain by another name, as built by Tolkien’s easily ludologized, High Fantasy scheme[10].

The displacement of British industrialization and slavery is made clear by examining the real-world inspiration for Mordor and Tolkien’s own experiences elsewhere: “the industrial Black Country of the English Midlands, and by his time fighting in the trenches of the Western Front in the First World War” [source: Wikipedia]. Of the former Midlands, Jonathan Wilkins writes, “He based the description of Mordor, home to the evil Lord Sauron, on the Black Country, a region of Birmingham which was heavily polluted by iron foundries, coal mines and steel mills due to the Industrial Revolution. The air in it was so thick with smog and dust it was difficult to breathe and may contribute to the way local people speak today – the infamous Brummie accent” [source: “Birmingham Sites that Inspired Tolkien,” 2020]. Tolkien’s love for home pastoralizes the colonial element by abjecting its theatrical “soot” onto a fictional elsewhere. Places like the Shire and Lothlórien were always green and good and totally “never did a genocide” to get where they are; by comparison, the orcs threatening their naturalized goodness are the colonizers who did all of the bad things. It’s DARVO through British exceptionalism (source).

The game, for Tolkien, is canonization; i.e., Tolkien takes Milton’s Paradise and drains it of its critical bite (re: Volume Zero). “Evil” serves to maintain the status quo, not destabilize and subvert it. The dark lord is him because he made dark war possible in ways that long outlived Hitler’s wildest dreams; Tolkien stabilized and gentrified war against evil tied to bad nature, thus the world and its workers. Whereas we can present evil as human and delicious, mid-liminal-expression[11], for him it only has a police, thus rapacious, function. It is not played with to confirm the veracity of something under suspicion, but to enforce state rule.

Furthermore, Tolkien took this problematic upbringing and turned it into a warrior’s place for bad BDSM, which sure enough, sits alongside healthier forms using the same aesthetic (from Volume One):

In short, Tolkien relied on the vampire legend—but also Gothic castles, BDSM language and harmful arrangements of unequal power (rings and collars)—to dominate nature and those within it. Written in defense of a divided nature in good and evil animal forms, Tolkien’s war stories view the vampire a kind of parasite praying upon the conspicuously vulnerable inside Cartesian dialogs; i.e., both in raw animal terms with Shelob the spider as part of “evil nature,” but also magical leeches like Sauron, whose ghastly projections have become wholly divorced from “good nature” inside dark, undead fortresses that harvest all good, living things from the land (whitewashing Britain’s analogs in the process). Anything else is functionally “dead” (sanctioned for state execution) by virtue of collective punishment. In doing so, Tolkien abjects death as a vital function of nature, but also fascism as a vital function of Capitalism in relation to nature as preyed upon by those behind his undead/animalistic scapegoats: the West.

[…] Tolkien wasn’t just allergic to allegory and sex; he policed them greatly in service of empire. His evils are simplistic, unironically dated and vague, and he has a stubborn clumsiness when applying them to his worlds that suggests a very closed-minded way of thinking about his world and ours in BDSM terms. It’s certainly no secret that Tolkien eventually decided to place the lion’s share of the blame on people more so than material conditions or Capitalism and nation-states. He also makes the Ring and then melts it, trying to suggest that everything is somehow “solved”—that “Isildur’s Bane” is somehow to blame for the waning strength of men in the face of rarefied greed; i.e., the dragon sickness of the gold from The Hobbit having been turned into a simple dissociative trinket that weighs on “all men” to the same degree. He seems to understand how rings function as poetic devices while paradoxically lending them a bit too much credence; vertical power is a tremendously corrupting force, but you don’t have to essentialize it, nor reduce it to a shapeless male darkness that employs throwaway female demons and does away with overt BDSM language and, yes, ironic rape fantasies:

(artist: Owusyr Art)

BDSM isn’t just where power is located/stored (e.g., inside the One Ring or Sauron’s tower), but instructions for its use within assigned positions, including rape fantasies as a set of instructions given to the dom by the sub issuing various paradoxical commands: the civilized “princess” and the barbaric “invader” as roles to play with in animalistic ways (e.g., the “breeding”/captive fantasy) that expose and interrogate power as a device of negotiation towards better working conditions and healing from the deep traumas that emerge from settler-colonial violence and heteronormative enforcement. Material conditions play an important role in historical materialism, but power is largely about perception, which cannot simply be destroyed; it must change within society. The catharsis offered by iconoclastic roleplay grants appreciative irony amid Gothic counterculture as surviving under Capitalism. These forms of roleplay aren’t just completely alien to Tolkien, but policed and denied through his own incessant prescription of orcish demon lovers (and Dark Lords); i.e. bad BDSM as a harmful arrangement of power that introduces praxial inertia into the equation. While power can’t be destroyed as we just said, it can become unthinkable according to ways that challenge the usual runs of the mill. Tolkien and Radcliffe have that very much in common, making anything outside of their worldview as shapeless, dark and unthinkable: the incessant, utterly British fear of the outside felt within their own borders, castles, heroes, etc, as hopelessly forged and ever-present.

[…] Tolkien’s origin myths were entirely unoriginal, exhibiting a very narrow, profoundly inadequate idea of what BDSM even was: officers and batmen; i.e., a British officer and his dutiful servant, exemplified by Tolkien’s Samwise the Brave helping his fairly clueless master time and time again out of a bind. It is BDSM, but echoes the British castle of the Imperial Core as something to carry out into the battlefield while enduring Tolkien’s (fairly vanilla) rape fantasies and childish dreams of captivity with which to (dis)empower the sub as male; e.g., Frodo being whipped and beaten in the orc slaver’s tower (the torture dungeons in Mordor conspicuously full of the British tools of torture used by the colonized reimagined; i.e., during the myth of a dark, savage continent populated by evil, violent “children”). By displacing these tools off onto a dark “other” world beyond the land of plenty and light, Tolkien is scrubbing his own and blaming the colonized in the same breath). As a male benefactor of British colonialism, he fixates on faraway war as the exclusive site of power abuse exacted upon white men, ranking their abuse above everyone else (women, genderqueer people and ethnic minorities) and everywhere else (military urbanism). For him, these other things simply don’t exist; abject copies of them do, but their sexuality is largely abandoned inside a chaste, gentlemanly medieval that forces them to address trauma as men were (and are) commonly taught: through lethal force with killing weapons designed purely for harm against state enemies (source).

In turn, we Galatea reverse abjection, using clay and black-magic poetics on our Aegis: to camp the same infernal concentric territories by occupying and subverting them; e.g., rape, cannibalism, and “sodomy” normally treated as synonymous with us; i.e., by dancing with the ghost of the counterfeit and, just as often, embodying it through self-demonization as much an informed, educated choice as a desperate last stand/resort. Hell is our domain, which the state can only try their damndest to commodify and colonize (often by pitting different marginalized groups against themselves; e.g., goblins versus dwarves, comparable to Arabs vs Jews). “Dwarves are Not Heroes,” writes Rebecca Brackmann in 2010[12]; they’re Jewish stereotypes that, in hauntological forms, apply to any foe the state could hope or want to rape. Liberation and exploitation exist on the same stages, wherein we kill our darlings to escape the disastrous ways of thinking Tolkien canonized. Our responses occupy the same pornographic visual ambiguities, which ludo-Gothic BDSM parses through dialectical-material scrutiny and play!

As my older books explore (re: above), Tolkien’s BDSM is a ludic power fantasy used at other people’s expense, and generally in service to state bodies per Goldilocks Imperialism (re: “settler colonialism with more steps”). Our ludo-Gothic power fantasies (which again, is what BDSM is) must camp those; i.e., taking the diminutive, abject yet sexually descriptive (shortstack) goblins and other demons of the underground back from old dorks like Tolkien canonizing BDSM; i.e., bad data instructs harmful activities through police dogma. So be bold to break that on ourselves; experiment, free your mind and join every dimension by pulling this in that direction. Golems are stand-ins that we can hurt, but never harm; they’re made to take it, and breathe life into dark forces for rebellious, Satanic purposes; re: goblins, witches, black magic, demon resurrection, etc, aiding the cryptonymy process for workers: forbidden sight during demonic sex and asexual rituals of pain/public nudism with a psychosexual aesthetic! Strange appetite, strange eyes! Defy God and Heaven! Learn what resonates in sex-positive ways and make that your drum to beat!

(exhibit 44a1b1: Artist: Illustration and outfit by Lucid-01; background, outfit alterations and character design by Persephone van der Waard. Genuine abuse can be subverted, through a controlled “call of the void”/calculated risk. Glenn the Goblin, for example, is a formerly anti-Semitic symbol that invades the pre-fascist Christian wardrobe to wickedly play around with the garments inside. In short, she’s taking them back. The source of play comes from symbolic, doubled tension; i.e., the metaplay of fan fiction’s paradox of pleasurable pain lying adjacent to perceived threats of harmful pain and its assorted legendarium. On the surface of the image, black is loaded in Western imagery with a variety of conflicting data: the threat of power as a destroying force, but also the color black as thoroughly dimorphized under Western thought—i.e., of presumed subservience [and misbehavior] for women under a perceived medievalized order of existence, the police state-of-affairs signified by black uniforms that hold punishment over those judged as good little girls and bad little girls who live under fear of rape as something to endure and avenge. 

Just as canon is all according to design, so is my iconoclasm; i.e., Glenn—as a shapeshifter and Satanic atheist who isn’t much interested in being good, but nor being a scapegoat—wants to have fun through consent-non-consent by walking the tightrope. The idea is doll-like, undressing Glenn like a doll [implying a similar subversive element of control to the sub being undressed as such, instead of the heteronormative idea of intromission, coitus and creampie—i.e., “Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am!”] in ways that beg the disco refrain as disarming of unironic harm within a Gothic, BDSM threshold; re: New Order’s “How does it feel, to treat me like you do?” In this case, the question is asked under informed consent, from two parties who know exactly what they want and are reveling in the unique, delicious sensations as normally denied to us under Capitalism; i.e., inside danger-disco torture dungeons. Glenn didn’t pick her clothes in the sense that she’s a cartoon, but she is an extension of myself and I chose her to represent myself during the appreciative peril: Just as I designed Glenn to shapeshift themselves, and me to shapeshift into them by proxy, the “goblin transformation” fantasy is me being tied up and threatened with “death”/a palliative Numinous. To set ourselves free, we fags [and other aliens] use ludo-Gothic BDSM communicate through feelings of alienation, stigma, miracles, imprisonment, and exquisite torture, etc; i.e., the tremendously anguished cryptonymy of state boundaries. We see through/with them while wearing blindfolds and weeping blood: to puzzle over our tactile seeking of “destruction” during calculated risk.

[artist: Lucid-01]

Latter-day uniforms, then, become similarly loaded with canonical connotations of torture, treachery and forbidden seduction as dimorphically gendered; the eliding of angelic patience with Radcliffe’s “black penitent” as a kind of xenophobic caricature of destruction that, under fascist/post-fascist conditions, takes on different meanings for beings perceived as “woman,” but also monstrous-feminine; the regressive in holy garbs, but also the queer BDSM subversive playing at the dark god for heretical reasons of Satanic apostacy and hellish delight. There is an undeniable link to trauma; the wearer could just as easily be a Christian missionary on the Oregon Trail or 1800s China, but also a ninja, gun hand or some other operative training in bondage, torture and murder that is nevertheless fetishized in the [classically] white cis-het fantasies of women [or men playing the “heroes” in these narratives].

[artist: Persephone van der Waard]

Such things are torment mapped out and turned into strength, thriving in places the Straights couldn’t dare to dream; i.e., a mascot to illustrate that state dialogs only mirror ours and what we’re trying to say. To it, Glenn is very much indicative of my voice—dancing on my enemies’ graves as a point of praxis [e.g., ribbing Rowling by existing despite her desire for me not to, above]. But any artistic movement isn’t solo; it’s a group exercise and takes a lot of planning to humanize those things normally demonized to serve police goals under state hegemonies. The invigilators of such “brothel espionage” generally work inside it on different registers: me, the director/promoter and various people collaborating with me and what I invigilate.

[artists: Lucid-01 and Persephone van der Waard]

This can be Lucid and I; it can be my partner, Bay Ryan, who identifies as a goblin through Gothic play—and which I’ve drawn as such, celebrating my Satanic shortstack for their fuckable rebelliousness: another golem to play with and reclaim our mutual lost humanity! Golems, then, are made from clay or things treated like clay—dead, and inscribed in occult symbols that only have as much meaning as we give them. We are not small, wicked black children for white cops to smash into paste; we have power to expose them in ways that subvert their poetry and their violence!

[model and artist: Bay and Persephone van der Waard]

As Glenn demonstrates, the formerly problematic can be tipped away from its regressives aspects while keeping the medievalized, religious-tinged outer shell, but there will always be ontological tension within a broader dialogic interrogating what results. Further fun can be made by chaining her to the pillar but having her grip it with her fingers; at a glance she seems imprisoned, but on closer inspection is actually have the time of her life? There’s a loose sense of improvised chaos, too. Glenn takes what’s on hand—the nun’s habit, the convenient pair of manacles next to the bed, the hot candlewax on her bare, muscled skin, her anachronistic pussy tattoo: In Hoc Signo Vinces [“In this sign thou shalt conquer”]—and runs wild with it. She’s not the hopeless impostor-victim, stricken with dysphoria or dysmorphia; these are abusive conditions to redeem through emergent play. As such, Glenn at home in her body and herself as in flux and at odds with the tyrannical past, carefully rewriting her own destiny by throwing caution to the wind: reclaiming the prescribed instruments of colonial abuse in thrilling paradoxically ways—i.e., the thrill of ritualized violence, minus actual harm [I’d say it’s a game where no one gets hurt, but what’s life without a little pain?].)

(exhibit 44a1b2: Artist: Blxxd Bunny from a shoot their provided for one of my paintings of them. Compulsion isn’t strictly authoritative; it can be the cathartic pursuit of what feels good, which is often a subconscious impulse. Yet, the adage, be careful what you wish applies to the sobering reality that harm is not historically-materially divided from pleasure, pain or power exchange; i.e., during social-sexual rituals where all of these things are distributed unevenly, dimorphically and abusively through fetish, kink and BDSM aesthetics. In short, the best things in life [in terms of stimulation and jouissance] come with a dialectical-material element of risk: is my lover a tool for the state, the status quo? But without pursuing catharsis, you run the risk of being a slave not just to society’s polite norms, but their hidden , brutalizing ones too: the snowy bridal gown and the black nun’s habit intimate the same systemic issues. If they wear a uniform, then it must mean something—with the uncanny possibility of their being a false option or replication that isn’t the intended function.  The house of pain becomes, to some degree, ironic.

Again, this can be sex-positive or coercive; it all boils down to dialectical-material context: what is the point of the costume within the piece in relation not to Capitalism, but it’s core, systemic values, etiology and symptoms (e.g., the Virgin/Whore syndrome)? And more to our purposes, how can these be subverted within the paradox of cathartic, exquisite torture in ways that don’t endorse or promote actual harm or canonical iterations of something as seeming throwaway and performative as a nun’s outfit—a hauntological mask, costume or role to play that brings one joy and other denied pleasures in parallel societies: lost histories and possible new worlds within the half-real fictions of Gothic poetics as de facto education: Come and see, but also do; critique through experience as profound, intense, iconoclastic.

[artist: Blxxd Bunny]

The ludic nature is, like a videogame, divorced from actual harm; the ritual is there, but not the dreaded result, allowing for instruction to occur through repeated, simulated experiences involving the same ingredients. While this can be for or against the state (with fascists embracing the heroic cult of death through the slaying of demons as a codified message), “slaying” in sex-positive language has a highly specific meaning and desired outcome: rape prevention and the disillusion of systemic harm. Within this broader network of opposition, denial becomes a power ironic device in relation to unironic doubles: the denial of polite restraint, of compunction, of pleasure; but also the denial of correct sex, of orgasms of prescriptive harmful norms and their forms of compelled restraint, abstinence, ignorance, protection, penetration: the agency of who we play with and what we put into our demonic bodies!

[artist: Blxxd Bunny]

In short, denial becomes a profound because of gender trouble and parody with desire outcomes for either side. Heteronormatively sees queerness as a death of the world [e.g., the 2022 Netflix miniseries for Neil Gaiman’s Sandman selling queerness to the straights as a kind of morbid death fantasy]. For us, the goal is crossing over from the right to the left by virtue of reclaiming subversive denial and indulgence as a positive vice at a societal level: a world without enforceable sin, but still yielding theatrical conflict—e.g., sexy nuns torn between service to God and the devil—and almost-holy Gothic pastiche as geared towards euphoric pleasure and pain.)

The raw sentiment of a moths drawn to the flame isn’t that hard to understand (above)—e.g., the bottom reaching behind themselves to grab the headboard, all while spreading their legs to take the fucking ever deeper and harder—if only because sex (or asexual rituals) happening during power exchange with a cool-looking badass can feel stupidly good. Rapture invigorates us, but also has Numinous elements of torpor/divine stupefaction.

Yet, while cathartic gradients last and build trust and healthy relationships, coercive examples—if negotiated badly with someone presenting themselves as a sadist in bad-faith—can promptly fuck over the submissive by subjecting them to addictive, fleeting pleasure under an unscrupulous and/or unwell manipulator’s give-and-take cycle of rapacious power abuse. Caution is important, but it’s hard to be overly cautious when you feel vulnerable and enthralled with a “protector” archetype who has your number and doesn’t mean you well; i.e., they smell the trauma/madness on you and know how to exploit it.

In some shape or form, the desire for cathartic fantasies grabs hold and never lets go, because trauma isn’t something you just “get over.” Like a golem, you can only transform it as part of you, once and forever. And yet, self-destruction needn’t be literal; it can be a chance to partake of the forbidden, thus exit Plato’s cave! Except this is generally permanent, and if my life is any sort of guide, one that leaves us feeling marooned by people who—as magical and wonderful as they are—don’t always stick around; e.g., Zeuhl and their postpunk pussy rocking my world, only to elope with an “old flame” and leave me wanting. C’est la vie! I got hurt a ton, afterwards, and harmed/raped a bit, but eventually found better cuties, anyways (though none with pussies as tight, I must confess). I wouldn’t trade my scarred skin and madwoman’s bonkers, castled attic psyche for the world! “Insane in the membrane!” (Cypress Hill’s “Insane in the Brain,” 1993).

And trying to map it as we have here, the process is anything but singular or simple; it’s demonic gibberish trailblazing through our lives as a living document, a closeness to chaos and things alienated/fetishized by capital to serve profit. Truth is ergodic, self-fashioned but hauntological; it takes time and effort to enact. So too does the world around us; change people and the past (as something to perceive/speak with) and you can change the planet! Free the mind; the rest will follow in time!

To this, the shadow of state force always hangs over us. The uphill battle lies in challenging fatal nostalgia as game-like in ways normative individuals will defend. True to form, “darkness” is something to sell (as sex and gender so often are) but the Gothic isn’t merely a police cudgel to bludgeon the usual suspects with; we walking sex demons become part of a larger conversation, whoring ourselves out in ways that invite humanizing worship through a demonized Gothic aesthetic the state can’t fully monopolize. Everything is political, our captivating bodies and demonic personas inviting forbidden knowledge and exchange through dark promises: of carnal delight and class-conscious eroticism and asexual public nudism; i.e., whore’s paradox, but also her glorious refrain—the state can’t monopolize monsters or disco!

So come and get it, lovelies, but pay your sex workers! Mommy has needs and stripping is not consent (re: “Paid Labor,” 2024)! Mutual consent is badass! Equal rights for all workers, animals and the environment is badass! Doing so through the usual fetish-and-cliché claptrap during ludo-Gothic BDSM is badass! Sluts and whores are badasses! And, as usual, the witch is a pathway to doom” as transformation through sex education; i.e., canonically through the language of theft, sorcery and secrets; e.g., Adria from Diablo 1 (1996) saying to the hero, “I sense a soul in search of answers!”

Well, mommy’s got your answers right here! Just cross her palm with silver—all to gradually synthesize working concepts conducive to a world without money or privatization; i.e., what use is a wage in a world where everything is eventually free? Rape is replaced with “rape,” doing away with industries that normally canonize rape through rock operas; re (from the Poetry and Undead Modules):

Unlike nation-states, corporations don’t care about dogmatic presentation as true to the state; they care about exploitation as something that invariably corrupts, which they can milk while throwing various states under the bus if need be. Profit is always the victim. As such, capitalists will do whatever they can to profit as efficiently as possible (source: “Back to the Necropolis,” 2024).

Whatever the media, rape is profit under Capitalism, which relies not just on predation, but community silence to continue itself in bad copies, falsehoods, and double standards (source: “Transforming Our Zombie Selves,” 2024).

(artist: Marina Dove[13])

All work is sexualized; and forced into a world that makes sex work something to steal from, we become beggars; i.e., in a world that, due to accident of birth, doesn’t let us choose/forces us to balance caring about other workers and merely trying to survive by doing things we’re not proud of (e.g., women’s work, service, retail, etc). This doesn’t automatically make us token grifters or cranks, but that can happen; and while brand and beliefs can overlap, good praxis is ultimately putting our money where our mouths are. Camp is a fine line, then, and class intersects with culture and race to betray labor as often as not. You are what you eat, and that includes context and interpretation of said context; it includes us triggering under conditions that, per the state preying on labor through its own victims—can dice roll into cops as often as victims wearing the same clothes and speaking the same demonized language. Rebellions are human, therefore flawed and susceptible to the usual devices use to keep us in line (e.g., transphobia and its externalized elements internalized by token workers).

This begs the question: how do we fight profit, thus rape and all the disorders, syndromes, estrangement, alienation, and abuse, etc, that stem from it? These answers and more lie in Pandora’s Box as something to open up: channels and clinics of forbidden, delicious exchange! Witches are more fun, especially black witches (their surfaces charged with psychosexual power—of rape, of revenge, of ecstasy and the Earth, next page)! Engagement with them amounts to praxis, thus opposition as something to synthesize pursuant to liberation. Yes, weird attracts weird; it should play out in ways that aren’t unironically predatory—i.e., that don’t give detractors of our literal existence ammunition when calling for our destruction instead of the state decaying around them (re, Marx: “capital is dead labor sucking, like the vampire, on living labor”). Far easier to blame victims than systems, Faust’s bargain is a death warrant carried by rotting numbskulls! Having no brains, they hunger for ours: “Hell’s bells, Satan’s calling for you!” (AC/DC’s “Hell’s Bells,” 1980).

For state defenders, it’s “boundaries for me, not for thee.” As such, we’re forever under suspicion and they are not; everything we do is an allegation they’ll leverage against us: to “protect” women and children from “evil sex demons,” thus the West’s nuclear family model and civilization as we know it. It might sound extreme, but that’s how moral panics work, and during the state’s usual boom-or-bust cycle, we fags will be blamed inside a police state; i.e., for being pushed into that marginalized sphere: the Omelas goat to exsanguinate by state bloodletters.

We queers are demonized—among other things—as sodomite pedophiles to scapegoat by village idiots and their “prison sex” mob mentality run amok. This doesn’t put us above critique, but begs those examining us to consider the sobering reality—that the ringleaders and opportunists excoriating us are generally far more guilty but presenting as holier-than-thou to deflect from their own hand in things; i.e., most pedophiles are cis-het men, and even if a trans person is a sex pest, this isn’t because they’re trans, but because the state is punishing them for being trans until they snap (excluding congenital elements like Dahmer’s cannibalism, but then its congenital pursuant to that pathology, not transgenderism). To it, such conflations are cis-het obscurantism/DARVO. They’re cover for the state! Sexual abuse isn’t an orientation and reactive abuse doesn’t define us! Negotiating such treachery pleads care and boldness, side by side; i.e., to be seen and heard, but also camouflaged in ways that safeguard us from state antibodies: “A little more caution from you; that is no trinket you carry!” Like Satan, our buffer is “non-existence,” darkness visible all around you, “under your bed, in your closet, in your head!” (Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” 1991).

Keeping with our discussions of “Midnight Vampire” and Tolkien, then, liberation isn’t intuitive because capital is a giant prison designed to conceal itself; escape requires paradox, which demons are profoundly at home with. From Milton onwards, we turn things inside out, exposing our captors and finding freedom through our chains; i.e., as shadowy likenesses to the dire originals. There’s no single interpretation for such inkblots, meaning they have whatever power we can dialectically-materially infuse them with. When we come, you come!

Per the cryptonymy process, the revolutionary’s praxial lever is, as usual, their Aegis. Harnessed by us, it demonically evokes the barbaric past to pay it forward; i.e., by reflecting new potential on sharp obsidian velvet (and other such oxymorons, below): to take your “soul” by making you cum! Spooky! ” Everyone likes to “go to town,” fancies the whore (which historically would have lived in cities and urban-environment brothels put up by enterprising men and madams); goblin queens are best (what Tolkien literally calls “the black crack” per his captive/goblin rape fantasies, Shakespeare’s “the crack of doom,” etc). It’s a disco to transform, informed by the magical, hypnotic past; re, New Order’s “Blue Monday” (1983):

Those who came before me
Lived through their vocations
From the past until completion
They’ll turn away no more

And still, I find it so hard
To say what I need to say [as queer people so often do]
But I’m quite sure that you’ll tell me
Just how I should feel today (source: Genius).

Growth hurts, as do adventures (e.g., blue balls/clit). But also? They feel good. She’s the disco, the Gothic castle-in-the-flesh advertising extracurricular survival and BDSM fun; i.e., shored up in the paradoxical graveyard language of deathly sex, torture and live burial! Back in black, the panties beg to be pulled aside; her necromancer’s lips grip, worthy of a tyrant’s boast that would rival Smaug the dragon’s (“I am strong, strong, strong!”). Darkness visible, she flashes with power! Come play with her! Feel the rapture of ironic rape (“rape” in quotes)!

(artist: Kay)

Ridiculed by state proponents, this Hellish poetic refrain endures a position of compelled evolution—achieved inventively from exile with which to reclaim our lost humanity under state-straight yolks. Milton coined it while physically blind, yet still being of the devil’s company without realizing it (re: Blake[14]). Per ludo-Gothic BDSM, we consciously take these chains, labels, death sentences back—summoning the whore (and her darkness visible) to learn from her how best to handle and redistribute power and knowledge—to “do the stinging,” as Bilbo puts it! Monstrous are the language of argument and debate, doubled and at odds, inside-out, invasive, plural and oscillating amid the gloam. Reality isn’t cut and dry. Anyone who tries amounts to  Alexander slicing the Gordian Knot. It’s barbaric and, more to the point, inadequate towards escaping capital as a prison. We cannot take it at face value.

For us, then, sex is a weapon to break the jail through cryptonymy/forbidden sight (the more “rape” we experience, the more we learn). No different than a vampire at midnight or in broad daylight, the demon’s mouth, fang and pussy all hyphenate—an “ancient” xenoglossic book to spread and read you as much as the other way around: she succ! It’s druglike, opening the doors of perception (more on this in “Call of the Wild,” when we look at “acid Communism”—again with Mikki’s help, exhibit 60b) through the usual delicious pathways.

In turn, entry predicates on trust; i.e., if one is worthy of that power—what resides in all workers’ breasts (that was a Blake pun). The power of cuties like Mikki is awesome beyond compare—castles in the flesh holding special secrets making the “past” wise once more! Nothing radicalizes (or pacifies) people more than gender and sex; we must tip the needle away from capital, from cops, from sex coercion and its double standards[15] under Capitalist Realism and the Capitalocene. The ticket to doing this lies in Gothic Communism vis-à-vis demonic poetics: our sex (and genders) as a weapon challenging state doctrine in dualistic ways—on our Aegis! Sperm donors learn, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled… is pulling us! “Satan” is a figment of a wider imagination, but we’re quite real; black unicorns straight from Rainbow Hell (“black is ten colors“), we usher in/offer up a poetic Satanic voice to break Capitalist Realism, paradoxically enough, with dreams: “The closer you get to the meaning / The sooner you’ll know that you’re dreaming” (Black Sabbath’s “Heaven and Hell,” 1980).

(artist: Mikki Storm)

Monsters are made, either to enforce state power (and its flow) or to critique it. Moving forward, let’s keep applying the demonic notion of forbidden sight—mainly its performative irony through demon lovers as things to deal and play at/with during mutilative courtly love putting “rape” in quotes—beyond vampires or goblins, and towards more obviously demonic, golem-esque forms and the torturous power and forbidden love they offer (e.g., anal, phallic, monstrous-feminine etc); i.e., tapping into those that fixate and focus less on feeding and trauma during liminal expression, and more on forbidden knowledge/power exchange and transformation! “What profit is it a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his soul?” Well, that depends! What’s on the table, cutie? I’ll take your engorged shaft and raise you a Giger-style black womb[16]! A voluptuous vaso vagal, “She mighty mighty!” A bridge to cross, a castle to storm (or which storms back)! A very kinky girl!

(artist: Kentaro Miura)

A BDSM practitioner’s note of caution, as we proceed: Just as the Promethean Quest is about self-destruction, to play with demon’s is to play with fire that can burn you. With demon sex and “rape,” then, there is always the echo of unironic rape to likewise learn from (believe you me, pain is an excellent teacher). When Jadis raped me, for example, they taught me that Nazis and Communists share the same poetic zone; indicating nature as alienated, fetishized and raped by capital, the Gothic-Communist Medusa’s a fat, sassy whore… and she’s hungry for sweet revenge! It’s precisely that “best revenge” that survivors chase, scarred and longing to heal from state abuse during calculated risk: of a palliative Numinous sort “crushing” you! You’ll know it when you feel it—when it has you begging to no one in particular, “Take me, Dark Mommy! ‘Fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty!'” The eye of that angry god, like a falling moon, threatens to collide with your earth, and smash you to fragments. If there’s any transcendental signified, it’s power and death, babes.

So play with demons/torture porn to your hearts content! Just remember as you do that power, during ludo-Gothic BDSM, comes from control through informed consent, thus mutual exchange! “Hurt, not harm!” Always keep that in mind, but especially when you lose control or have dominion over those who don’t; i.e., when giving consent to go a little wild; e.g., saying to your play partner, “Now step on me, bitch! Fuck me like you mean it!” Safewords, release/passwords, restraint and discipline, pleasure and pain—all go hand-in-hand, built on trust/minimized risk. The chaos, in other words, is controlled, ironic, and cathartic for both sides, and ultimately not destructive despite the power-and-death aesthetic; i.e., anyone can unironically destroy or play at dark godhood, but it takes a mighty hand and mightier mind to show mercy through demonic union! That’s power—and ultimately the non-toxic kind that Gothic Communism is all about: finding the Communist Numinous through hauntological BDSM, establishing power, boundaries and limits through play as mutually established and understood! A dialectic of the alien, “raping” Medusa or having her “rape” you (rape being, for all intents and purposes, a power imbalance) happens while the surf’s up (alluding to Joe Satriani’s “Surfing with the Alien,” 1987) and the gettin’s good!

(artist: Kentaro Miura)

And if all that sounds intense (which, to be fair, it is), fear not! Strict or gentle, vanilla or chocolate, metal or mellow—as long as you have safety measures like these in place, then harm/rape is impossible; i.e., she’s just hugging you. Any articulation, as such, is entirely valid when going to the dark gods. In that respect, I think you’ll like Slan (or whatever stage name for Medusa she goes by, these days); she’s “easy”—will take you to the edge and teach you wonderful things (re: fucking to metal, clapping her big demon cheeks; or her stringing you up like a sacrifice). Limitless in shape, size and surface, she can be whatever she wants to be—whatever ghastly playground/dark church/demon brothel you need her to be when she’s dominating you/giving you sub drop and/or draining your balls (e.g., xenomorph or cenobite raising hell/Cain; i.e., to sin in between virtue and sin, and other canonical dichotomies)! Say hi to her, for me! —Perse

Onto “Forbidden Sight, part one: Making Demons“!

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Footnotes

[1] Which can be used for the state; re: Virginia Allison’s examination of Evita (1979) and Nazi theatrics in “White Evil: Peronist Argentina in US Popular Imagination Since 1955” (2004). We examined this in Volume Two’s Undead Module; re: “‘That Which Is Not Dead’; or, Capitalism as a Great Zombie(-Vampire),” (2024).

[2] Which we must anisotropically reverse while considering the optics of violence; e.g., Anansi’s Library’s “Nonviolence is Good, Actually” (2024); i.e., we will always be “violent” because the state needs an enemy to rape and reap through police force; re: nature-as-monstrous-feminine.

[3] This isn’t to say we’re above critique (e.g., Ty Turner’s “How Ava Tyson Became The Most Hated Trans Woman On YouTube – A Deep Dive,” 2024) but that we’re automatically “Satanic” within the state of exception, thus marked for police abuse by state proponents and their dogmatic Gothic.

[4] This experimentation comes with a steep tradeoff, of course. During Socialism, we a) come out of the closet/hiding to slowly regain control of our own bodies, labor, food and identities, but also b) shed the veil of ignorance to reunite with death as something to embrace and dance with, as well as stare down as oracles of the unbelieved, Cassandra sort that are also declared as devils, heretics, whistleblowers, castrators, bubble-bursters and iconoclasts by the faithful: the horrors of Capitalism as endless fields of exploitation, but also the subtler unheimlich where one gets an awful feeling—that one’s home and inherited identity is unironically monstrous and harmful (as are one’s usual means of escape: copaganda, unironic rape play and military optimism). The food will taste better and the sex will hit harder… but you have to be prepared to let go of childish things, including ignorant escapism into spaces of total, unironic enjoyment (repeat Sarkeesian’s adage if it helps). Instead you will have to experience both sides of something so honest (unlike Capitalism): getting spit-roasted by heaven and hell. Shakespeare called the cause “slings and arrows,” Coleridge called the condition “sad and wiser,” and Mae Martin called its solution “sap.” Of all three, I call it “the Wisdom of the Ancients.”

[5] E.g., Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” but also Matthew Lewis’ The Monk. The latter serves as a biting (and hilarious) illustration of the (not so) Silent Majority’s abuse of privilege to indulge in guilty pleasure and wish fulfillment inside the closet (which is an awful, violent place), but also the ghost of the counterfeit’s process of abjection. It’s “boundaries for me, not for thee” for those who—alienated from everything around them except fear and dogma—act precisely the way that Capitalism needs them to: as hypocritical bullies. As I write in Volume Three:

manufactured scarcity deprives sexist performers of safe, nurturing sex (not just condoms or birth control, but consensual sex, too). They become sex-starved and information-deprived—killer virgins embroiled within a prolonged state of fearful ignorance beset by “evil” as instructed by formal institutions of power. On par with Ambrosio from The Monk (1796), such persons revel in bad play through violent fantasies geared towards achieving sexual control through coercive dominance. Indeed, Matthew Lewis cemented these within Ambrosio himself, a religious man obsessed with raping Antonia, a woman he barely knew (and his penis frequently being compared to a dagger or vice versa). Hidden virtuously behind a veil, her impeccable modesty bore no protection against the perfidious cleric (assisted on his horny quest by a crossdressing, devil-worshiping woman named Matilda). For Lewis, these opposites—Ambrosio’s nefarious aspirations and Antonia’s besieged virtue—were less imagined hypotheticals and more Lewis satirizing England’s social-sexual climate within displaced and outrageous, but also queer language (re: Broadmoor). Moreover, its patently Gothic nature gave him the means to speak on taboo themes: rape as a material byproduct of violent cultural  attitudes, not isolated nut jobs misled by the metaphysical devil. Ambrosio even blames Antonia for tempting him and Matilda for setting it all up, fulfilling the binary of temptress and rapist working in tandem while dumping his own blame fully onto women, not himself. This works as a pre-cursor to the whole “no fap” thing that many sexist religious men today endorse: blaming women for taking away the “essence” of their strength: their semen, but also their control; cumming is a sign of spiritual, physical and mental weakness.

[6] Consider Tolkien’s zero-sex policy versus Terry Goodkind’s naked exhibiting of pedophilia, genital mutilation and rape. They might seem like polar opposites, but both constitute Joseph Conrad’s bigoted fear-fascination with the colonized abomination, in The Heart of Darkness (1899): a white, cis-het fear-fascination with the past as restricted to the fringes of the empire, that—in neoliberal media, which brings the colonial revenge to the homefront—becomes “a spell to fall under” (re: Punter) and exorcise, generally through violence. Tolkien’s colonial rape occurred with swords, leveled against metaphors for people “not of the West” he considered “Mongol-types” (source: Tolkien Gateway) whose linguo-material presence would be entirely unwelcome in white areas (effectively gentrification in a real-world village/suburban setting).

Tolkien famously disliked allegory for his own stories (an appeal, then, to singular interpretations that ignored his writing’s racist, thus colonial potential). But even when reduced to “pure fantasy” as he would have preferred, the terrestrial framework and its cartography and colonial model are all obviously there and being put into practice; i.e., world-building and its manmade languages levied for a suitably war-like purpose regardless if Tolkien openly denounced Hilter. In short, he was a centrist to the core, the old sage handing the young hobbit a blade and preaching loftily about morals, specifically of knowing when to kill and when not to—in short, “playing god” in the face of the abject:

Bilbo almost stopped breathing, and went stiff himself. He was desperate. He must get away, out of this horrible darkness, while he had any strength left. He must fight. He must stab the foul thing, put its eyes out, kill it. It meant to kill him. No, not a fair fight. He was invisible now. Gollum had no sword. Gollum had not actually threatened to kill him, or tried to yet. And he was miserable, alone, lost. A sudden understanding, a pity mixed with horror, welled up in Bilbo’s heart: a glimpse of endless unmarked days without light or hope of betterment, hard stone, cold fish, sneaking and whispering. All these thoughts passed in a flash of a second. He trembled (source).

Except this mercy is arguably lacking in the face of those who are physically dangerous (according to white people); orcs, unlike Gollum, are given no quarter despite arguably having a bone to pick with them colonizers: “Show them no mercy for you shall receive none!” It’s tone-policing backed by force—also known as “peace through strength.”

[7] Warcraft: Orcs and Humans (1994) would lead to the company’s longest, and arguably most popular and widespread franchise, beating Diablo (1996) to the punch by two years and going on to establish the company as the successors to Everquest (1999) as the MMORPG to “kill”: World of Warcraft (2004), a globalizing of the pursuit of capital across the Internet. These games successfully applied a tactical, melee-based, roleplay element to the FPS-/TPS-adjacent strategy game (exhibit 1a1a1h2a1), which took on a massive-multiplayer form built around warring team-based combat with one-or-more combatants on either side. And of course, all of this was heavily dimorphized within the heteronormative colonial binary.

[8] (from Britannica): “A different word orc, alluding to a demon or ogre, appears in Old English glosses of about AD 800 and in the compound word orcnēas (‘monsters’) in the poem Beowulf. As with the Italian orco (‘ogre’) and the word ogre itself, it ultimately derives from the Latin Orcus, a god of the underworld. The Old English creatures were most likely the inspiration for the orcs that appear in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings” (source).

[9] Tolkien’s inconsistent fear of spiders stretches back to a childhood phobia of them, but he was annoyingly wishy-washy and non-committal to how he felt about them; i.e., talking through both sides of his mouth (a classic centrist maneuver) [source: Tolkien Gateway].

[10] Tolkien did not exist during videogames as they are commonly thought of (though technically he died in 1973, a year after Pong [1972] was released for American home entertainment by Atari’s Allan Alcorn). Yet, Tolkien was also no stranger to playing games. Indeed, the entire “Riddles in the Dark” chapter from The Hobbit is pointedly a game, with a rather involved discussion surrounding luck, fairness and the following of rules:

He knew, of course, that the riddle-game was sacred and of immense antiquity, and even wicked creatures were afraid to cheat when they played at it. But he felt he could not trust this slimy thing to keep any promise at a pinch. Any excuse would do for him to slide out of it. And after all that last question had not been a genuine riddle according to the ancient laws (source).

In truth, Tolkien’s refrain—the High Fantasy treasure map—would translate very well to tabletop games and videogames, but especially The Lord of the Rings, which despite its immense size compared to The Hobbit was actually far simpler in terms of its treatment of war and wealth acquisition/generation. Everything was divided neatly into good and evil teams that—on the good side—weren’t fighting amongst each other nearly as much as during The Hobbit. In his later novels, the world-war machine wasn’t just suggested, but fully devised and given its own vast world to play out inside. And even with The Hobbit, Tolkien clearly understood the power of song and legends, writing his original story for children to acclimate them towards war and revenge dressed up in songs, fantasy and poems. It likewise had all the starts and stops of a radio serial, putting our heroes out of the frying pan and into the fire (similar to Flash Gordon, 1935) before pulling them out just in the nick of time (the Great Eagles being a shameless deus ex machina [and imperial emblem] that Tolkien would curiously refuse to use with The Lord of the Rings in order to prolong the story and its war for as long as possible).

[11] The human condition, like a golem, is something we can map and play out together, invigilating a shared vision that means different things to different people (from the Undead Module):

(exhibit 37e1: Model: Harmony Corrupted; artists: Lydia, Persephone van der Waard and Jim32. Rebellion is quite literally a craft, one that involves dolls—or likenesses of people, which dolls essentially are—in some shape or form; e.g., action figures/athletes, but also sex dolls [or things akin to either expressed through sex work]. Whatever the exact type, dolls are homunculi; i.e., generally a smaller instance of a larger reference. More to the point, they take work to realize: planning and drafts, a model, and one or more artists working together to accomplish a shared vision’s theatrical production. The main idea is mine, in this case, but it’s still accomplished through teamwork that contributes to the primary demonstration of said idea and goal; i.e., universal worker liberation through iconoclastic art using Gothic media; re: illustrating mutual consent through informed labor exchanges that challenge Capitalist Realism.

To that, Revana is very much my character by design […]. She’s someone I can have stand in for myself, given that I cannot afford gender-affirming surgeries. Even so, she has been drawn by many different artists over the years. In this case, my usual paper doll approach became something to instruct others with; e.g., my friend, Lydia, illustrating a Drow character I later completed on my own and borrowed its wardrobe to dress Revana, Macbeth-style, in borrowed robes [above]. This isn’t someone forced to wear clothes made to objectify her against her will [re: “Borrowed Robes“]; she’s an extension of me, and Lydia helped with that. So did Jim32 and Harmony. All the world’s a stage and we, upon it, had and continue to have a part to play [source: “Meeting Jadis; or, Playing with Dolls,” 2024].)

[12] “‘Dwarves Are Not Heroes’: Antisemitism and the Dwarves in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Writing.”

[13] The alt text, on Mastodon, reads: “Marina in a hot pink body suit and ushanka and a white fur coat holding a pink sickle and a Hitachi magic wand. they’re posed dramatically to evoke socialist realism” title=”marina in a hot pink body suit and ushanka and a white fur coat holding a pink sickle and a Hitachi magic wand. they’re posed dramatically to evoke Socialist Realism.”

[14] Re: As Jamal Subhi Ismail Nafi writes in “Milton’s Portrayal of Satan in Paradise Lost and the Notion of Heroism” (2015),

According to [Tesky] Gordon, it was Blake who expressed this view most emphatically by saying that Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it. He expressed this opinion chiefly in relation to the portrayal of Satan who, according to him, has been depicted as a character possessing certain grand qualities worthy of the highest admiration (source).

[15] E.g., straight men being Black Penitents protected by the courts with a high burden of proof, versus anyone else slandered and abused under widespread pogroms that extend to these juridical spheres.

[16] In the West, animation through clay comes from Judaism and the Golem of Prague (and older versions); i.e., the power of creation laid into mortal hands, then demonized by Christian forces. Abjection abjects sin and guilt off onto state enemies, which the state then attacks. To that, canonical Gothic relies on the cartoon of necromancy and animation directed at older female, non-European and/or queer religions, cultures and identities; e.g., Judaism, but also likenesses of it in poetic forms that, in the same shadow zone, highlight and scandalize Nazis and Communists; i.e., as being seen as heretical, thus of nature/fallen, thus needing to be purged by blood libel disguised as pure reason, post-Reformation. Manmade things are valorized provided they are made by white, cis-het Christian-coded men. Anything else is abject, but also apologized for through an uncanny similarity to state forces. We come from a sample of one, so “darkness” and “corruption” is dogmatized, fearful of Jewish revenge—of Medusa coming home to roost, thus nature and servants as “black” to settler colonialism’s lily whiteness. Their nadir is our zenith, our sex and their sex echoing in hostile duality.

The Protestant work ethic, per Cartesian thought, treats righteous labor as holy over anything antithetical to that; i.e., as paradoxically required to justify itself through witch hunts: God makes Lilith; she defies him and gives birth to demons, so God makes Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs. But the maiden is overshadowed by the whore’s dark “Jewish,” Melmothian spectre—her evil magic galvanizing the witch hunts that follow. She’s the castle, speaking to hammered witches, Jews eaten by lions, and queers put to death for refusing to have PIV sex, etc. Cryptonymy isn’t just a dogwhistle, but a whistle for labor to blow through the same cartoons; e.g., by Shelley’s Modern Prometheus taking creation (the fire of the gods) to demonize Victor Frankenstein through his work talking back: “giving lip,” or “sass,” as it were.