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)!
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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.
Idle Hands, part two: Vampires and Claymation (feat. Takena’s “Midnight Vampire”)
“He swore he wasn’t going to kill you. He thought the humiliation of prison would be worse. The beatings. The rapes. The incessant fear for your life, but I told him, ‘No, John, you’re wrong. Dying would be worse.’ Because, well, honestly, it is, isn’t it? Dying is just worse. So do I pull the trigger or not?”
—Alice Morgan, Luther (2010)
Picking up where “Trial by Fire: Demon Muscle Mommies” left off…
Whereas part one of “Idle Hands” concerned the witch blood libel class—re: Amazons/the Medusa, and demons mommies of a dark or fiery type; i.e., as statuesque, seemingly made from clay and designed to fulfill different vengeful wishes (usually under a demon lover/protector dynamic)—part two considers the hunting mechanisms of those who are less gigantic, but no less kowai (fearsome) beneath their kawaii exterior—vampires, but specifically dainty lolita vampires dressed to kill (our focus, here, being on the classic female avenger as translating post hoc to other marginalized groups)!
That being said, there’s generally a “moll” criminal/femme fatale idea to such beings (e.g., Alice Morgan, above) but one that is as much informed by comorbid elements as congenital; i.e., generational trauma carried “in the blood,” so to speak, and relayed in theatrical forms that, sure enough, often use clay as much as costumes, actors and props: killing sprees made to avenge/right old wrongs, thus do what everyone in the audience is thinking (often a desire for bloody revenge). So many rape victims desire the ability to do so, even if they never act on it; i.e., the fantasizing of rape in reverse: “How does it feel, asshole!” Such outlets are important for a variety of reasons, giving our half-real abusers the poke!
Torture porn remains a complicated, ancient arena, one bound classically to women (white or not) as the perpetual victims of men. Out of patriarchal Antiquity into the present, such man-eaters can subversively manifest to reverse state violence (and other monopolies) onstage: the vengeful whore—equal to a one-man army dismantling a horde of thugs[1]—showing the rapist his own castration; i.e., for having abused someone vulnerable, often within exploitative stories fetishizing said abuse. It’s an anti-predation maneuver/terror weapon, one speaking—as the Gothic usually does—onstage towards things happening offstage: “Don’t fuck with us.” It’s supposed to make men, hence the state, uncomfortable!
As usual, demons play with power as something to theatrically arrange and argue one’s positions during courtly love. Continuing our examination of prostitute revenge—and going beyond Amazons and demons of shadow and fire—we arrive at vampire demon lovers. Typical of my work on vampires, it’s brief, but punchy.
Some Ground Rules: Vampire as Vengeful Whore/Sex Demon
We’ll get to Takena specifically in just a moment. First, some ground rules (three pages). Vampires are classically undead, but terms like “sex demon,” “demon lover” or “whore” easily apply to female vampires as a classic version of the monstrous-feminine (for our purposes, “demon” and “whore” are synonymous, as are synonyms to whore, like mistress or Medusa; e.g., dark mistress = demon, commonplace to Amazonian mommy demons having androgynous/phallic qualities per classically unorthodox[2] gendered power arrangements; re: Lady Hellbender and Karlach); i.e., a dead whore, doll, or undead sex demon, in the modular sense; e.g., Blxxd Bunny’s thick, messy or otherwise “immodest” makeup—caked on, resembling decay but also sexual arousal, depending on the color—being comparable to corpse paint (and with graveyard prostitution going back to Ancient Rome, at least; re: B.B. Wagner).
(artist: Blxxd Bunny)
Abject and theatrically arrested, vampires are sex demons that speak to isolation and abuse through undead trauma and feeding mechanisms; i.e., forbidden sex defying canonical laws to enact female/monstrous-feminine revenge from beyond the grave: parallel voices/societies challenging Puritanical state authority with worker counterauthority and counterterror breaking the monopoly. 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: the strict flavor of violence, whereupon the paradox of such things (whores and rape) determines by dialectical-material context; e.g., tickling and orgasms or pain consensual through said context, but also activating different nervous centers (and chemicals) that sure enough, overlap vaso vagal with erogenous responses and confused predator/prey mechanisms vis-à-vis different aesthetics of torture having irony (or not).
Macbeth called these “borrowed robes.” What he stole through sexualized force, we take through guerilla 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 but also high heels, above), but during camp can shape into foils that empower us and speak to past disempowerment. All aspects of the whore can do this, yielding creativity and bodies being all the female guerilla classically has to use; i.e., deprived of anything else by the empires (and cops) pimping them out, sex becomes their weapon of choice. It becomes literally “on the brain,” insanity a kind of death, rape, and 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!
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) while 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, left, is generally a brand to sell, not a critical voice with any serious bite to it).
To that, any resulting “forbidden sight” (darkness visible) grants a specialized jouissance whose systemic catharsis lies in between play and rememory unto actual trauma (re: Asprey’s “terror is the kissing cousin of force”); i.e., ludo-Gothic BDSM putting “rape” in quotes to recontextualize it: as “mere play” in ways that vampires use to speak cryptonymically regarding sexual violence, and in ways the Gothic iconoclast may camp and subvert synthesizing demonic poetics! These paradoxes suitably occur through rape, murder and/or death fantasies (dark desires for revenge), but also surreal, transformatory and excessive neo-medieval language (e.g., the Jabberwocky poem, from earlier). We’ll be doing so, here in part two, with vampires, prostitution and claymation vis-à-vis Taneka’s golem-esque, then conclude with Tolkien’s goblins and other anti-Semitic tropes, in part three; re: as the weapons “of idle hands” that will come up repeatedly throughout the entirety of the Demon Module!
To it, “vampire” puts monster between woman as maiden and whore, itself cleft in twain, yet bound at the hip on the same liminal, half-real 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 surreal and furious existence, so too can we play out our own deaths, trauma and transformation (rapes, revenge, rapture, etc); i.e., 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 criminalized by the state to maintain state control! We don’t just get down to business; we take care of it to debride them!
In turn, demons more broadly are “shadows” that suggest holistically whatever reality hides through state illusions/Capitalist Realism; i.e., simulacra being clay animating in small, the homunculus, golem or egregore’s function similar to Walpole’s animated miniatures (the fatal portrait), Plato’s shadow plays, and the phantasmagoria, etc. These historically transmit Gothic dualities and double standards through a “medieval” fake, received by playful “archaeologists” prodding the Capitalocene. A right historically enjoyed by queer white men and straight women, both played with the ghost of the counterfeit in the Neo-Gothic period: necromancer and shade, conjuring up “Hell” as allegorical, pre-Christian “past”; i.e., while in a Christian-dominated world, one whose Protestant ethic ethnocentrically essentialized the whore as “evil” per blood libel, Orientalism, and monstrous-feminine Satanic Panic, etc.
To it, we’re returning to the demonic/god-like idea of making monsters from clay. While this fabrication typically includes doll-sized humans or human-sized dolls—or even giant-sized statues (e.g., Michelangelo’s David, left), which historically range from ancient-to-modern vanity projects, to Humanist/Gothic commentaries on the world when they were made—they don’t animate especially well, in isolation. And though we’ll get to larger simulacra like Shelley’s Creature, chiding Victor for playing God during the Promethean Quest, I thought we’d start small and work our way up to Frankenstein’s monster and similar beings (re: the xenomorph); i.e., from Takena’s killer doll to goblins (which we’ll look at with Tolkien, in part three).
Both are made as much to express their maker’s humanity (or lack thereof, in Victor’s case) 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, then: 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 former will always try to pimp the latter): become the whore, become vengeance—a pedagogy of the oppressed whose conduit of joy plays at hauntological Mortal Kombat to break Capitalist Realism on its wheel!
Takena’s “Midnight Vampire” does this, in a nutshell. Vampires are commonly sex demons that communicate euphemistically through psychosexual pain, sodomy and murderous courtly love/torture porn; re: problematic love/the love that dare not speak its name, except Takena’s lover shouts it without making a sound (action speaking louder than words)—the shock scarcely registering until you’re already dead; i.e., revenge is reclamation to revolt, often through the Platonic suggestion of shadowy violence denoting a desire to change not just ourselves—and our dark, repressed reflection on the Aegis (the simulacrum)—but the world along with us!
As we shall see, so does Takena’s vampire; i.e., by having the whore’s revenge against profit, one undiscerning thug at a time…
Takena’s Revenge: “Midnight Vampire”
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 explore here how psychosexual expression often discusses sexuality through “medieval” theatrical violence. —Perse
(artist: Star Gureisu)
Gothic maturity is the ability to discuss taboo subjects in sex-positive ways; re: from cannibalism, to murder and rape, to bounty hunters and assassins, to menstruation and “wandering womb,” the Gothic loves to use medieval romance language it can force against workers, activating those survival mechanisms the West has seemingly abolished but, point in fact, manipulates for different reasons. This can be to maintain state order or break it, the state—when actual revolution decays its strongholds—trying to fetishize different scapegoat groups while simultaneously exploiting them for profit, and workers subverting that process (of abjection) during liminal expression: immaturity vs maturity. All happen inside calculated risk being as much people as place, the danger disco filled with demon-lover phallic women sinning for their own reasons (and visually intimidating men, all the while); i.e., versus madmen targeting non-demonic women, Takena’s clubber-meets-schoolgirl vampire gives state thugs a calculated, operatic taste of their own bitter medicine (not just murder or rape, but genocide)! Keeping with vampires, capital treats sex as a violent drug to contain, a disease to surveille (re: the panopticon). In trying to, they’ve only dug their own graves; i.e., she’s in here with them!
Any violence towards women, in Gothic, is always sexual or haunted by rape; i.e., forcing women to revert to trading with the only thing they could realistically trade in, any time before the present. The female avenger turns all of that on its head; i.e., a monstrous-feminine double trading in masculine violence (with a psychosexual bent)—not only while feminizing men the way they did to her, once upon a time, but doing them one better! She’s an off-limits warrior whore/dark castle-in-the-flesh, using excessive force (and subterfuge) to lay the gangsters[3] to eternal, ignominious rest!
This brings us to Takena’s vampire—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 occur inside, which the audience relates to vicariously through theatre (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). They also supply the weaponized means to survive by communicating such things to achieve systemic catharsis; i.e., by cultivating good social-sexual habits unto a pedagogy of the oppressed that we can inform/contribute to, among the sleeping fetishes and clichés: stuck on history’s endless carousel, waiting like the vampire to wake up and feed once more!
Takena’s skit is fairly standard graveyard sex—a doll-ish, splatterhouse miniature combining lover and killer (and frozen at the moment of “turning”/original trauma, as the undead always are), the protagonist anisotropically reversing the usual terrorist/counterterrorist ordering of sex, fear and force; i.e., someone dislocated from the land, and from whom the owner class now fears revenge: for originally stealing from and now who takes back in potent mixtures of seductive violence the elite cannot police, thus pimp! A huntress lone wolf, our vigilante—per the usual shorthand—hunts from a home-base lair with which to launch attacks against predatory men and their secluded torture-dungeons-in-disguise. It’s abbreviated, here, but has all the basic parts of a man-eater revenge fantasy (conducted for missing girls, en masse): an avenger and a crime boss, the latter’s henchmen, and a damsel.
In turn, any ironic harm is offset or haunted by unironic forms the killer is avenging not once, but night after night; i.e., as a matter of routine: a female vampire/serial killer patiently pimping male pimps during non-peaceful transfers of power speaking to unanswered crimes, real or imagined (castration fantasies lending vampirism a female “cruising” character versus a traditionally male one as normally valorizing said male[s] penetration[4]). They value weakness and pain as things to deal in and exchange, watching their prey while hiding in plain sight.
In a sense, the vampire and her prey aren’t so different—save that she moves power away from them, the exploiters, and towards the vulnerable; i.e., by illustrating self-defense when given consent[5] is absent. She does so by watching those who watch: “Since then, there has never been a moment that has not betrayed you—a glance, a turn of the head, the flash of your throat as you breathe! Even your way of standing perfectly still, they were all my spies!” In turn, she satisfies her thirst (for blood, the definitive aspect of vampirism): as a weapon of terror hyphenating sex and force, taking the husband, boyfriend or jealous coworker to task, and ultimately getting away with murder as the whore’s revenge!
In short, the protagonist premediates and embodies a rapist’s worst fears: a streetsweeper without compunction, clemency or remorse. Possessing an extended history of (and penchant for) barbaric ultraviolence, she deceives the deceiver and rapes the rapist. Doing so during a nightmarish return of said barbarity’s corporal punishment turned excessively violent against capital (capital punishment being execution), she’s a criminal judge, jury and executioner making a house call—the call girl castrator (resembling a prioress, in her black-and-white uniform), fighting fire with fire, to reverse the usual direction of violence/dark desire; i.e., that other criminals working for the state push towards helpless (usually white straight middle-class) women. In fetishizing herself and her bloody actions’ “cruisin’ for a bruisin’,” the vampire shows the rapist his doom. I’d say she spits on his grave while doing so, except she enjoys her knightly work (and wouldn’t want to waste any precious blood; re, Marx’ Kapital, with a twist: dead labor feeding on dead labor to help living labor)!
As such, Takena’s vampire is a deathless, retro-future avenger penetrating the hauntology (re: the canceled future, classically a Gothic castle but known more recently as the Western, noir or cyberpunk, etc): a strict dom/phallic woman “acting like a man” to avenge violence against women in medieval ways. She’s a demon lover “making love” during courtly love as something to bring to the kidnappers’ false home (after being invited inside); i.e., a small kawaii that, suitably enough, crosses over into furious kowai-style bloodbaths while still appearing cute, mid-unheimlich. She doesn’t shriek like a banshee might, but her dollish eyes speak volumes: revenge against rape through medieval violence, bathing in the blood of evil men to have the whore’s revenge (the assumption being she’s cracking down against profit, specifically snuff films). She’s a walking weapon, a bad bitch not to be fucked with exposing the brave as cowards, scared of crazy little girls with a tendency to fuck shit up; i.e., damaged goods not afraid of getting stabbed (re: the Radcliffean heroine) but having no one to stab (re: Dacre’s Victoria).
In turn, there’s room for all kinds of puns, many which leap to mind through the campy violence taking place; i.e., the usual hyphenations of sex and force that victims of abuse live with, and which they direct their hellish lust towards would-be abusers and victims occupying the same complicated space’s predator/prey confusions; re: the passion of martyrdom—of ravishing and release—reversing or redirecting harm through camp during ludo-Gothic BDSM. Despite those confusions, the liminality affords play as a matter of person and place liberated from single set outcomes. It becomes fun, but can speak to actual harm; i.e., by putting “rape” in quotes during rape play (not shown, below), the latter sitting alongside regular sex (shown, below). Commonly fixating on oral, vaginal (or anal, not shown, below), doing so frequently relies upon implied/actual penetration, said vampiric roleplay bleeding into daily social-sexual interactions; re: Cuwu, acting as “vampy fae” and gentle mommy dom in bed, having fun with me while persistently giving and taking through two sex workers’ paired synthesis:
(artist: Cuwu[6])
Cuwu’s borderline disorder certainly affected our interactions, as such, but they never removed consent (or fun) from the equation; i.e., while we played. They were certainly someone society would demonize for being trans and mentally ill/a rape victim; and yet, despite their subby abusing of me in the past, remained someone whose harm stemmed from their monstrous condition—i.e., as something they were trying to manage and didn’t always succeed, abuse leading them to harm others during calculated risk.
I won’t condone or otherwise apologize for the abuse they ultimately caused me/others, but likewise would never advocate for the harm that befell them, elsewhere in their life. That is my prerogative, my understanding shaped by both the severity of the abuse caused, and the fact that Cuwu—a sex worker and drug user—was ultimately steered to unravel by parties besides them or myself. In short, they were a victim who abused others, but often continued being abused; i.e., the whore’s paradox (and revenge) sit in the lived reality that many sex workers are rape victims, and many rape victims love pain during sex (or threats of “danger” in quotes) that give them some sense of release/control over their trauma: to synthesize during good praxis to reduce the possibility of rape, worldwide!
Yes, Cuwu made mistakes during this process—and they certainly had a dark “destroyer” side to them—but they absolutely deserve love, anyways; i.e., they belong in Gothic Communism’s vision of a better world, because they were trying to make the current world a better place. Doing so manifested through various contributions towards the Cause, the two of us healing from rape while living in the shadow of police violence; re: by seeking out safety and comfort as much for me as from me.
When Jadis had me at their beck and call, for example, Cuwu gave me sanctuary. They offered me sex, of course, but also understanding and love that Jadis did not. It did not last, but they did their best, and their failure—I like to believe—was influenced by others in their life twisting them back towards self-destructive behaviors. This makes it easier to forgive them, and my exhibits of them—used with permission, according to our agreement—are of someone I respect and love in spite of their harming me. Revolution is a messy affair. Yet, if Cuwu and I are any indication, it blooms inside the hearts (and holes) of those on the battlefield, opening themselves up while making love. Shared trauma be like that—making people horny or sex repulsed, depending on those taking part (Cuwu would often oscillate, both thirsty or tempered due to their personality disorder):
(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)
Despite the potential for harm, Cuwu’s monstrous nature had revolutionary value during the cryptonymy process. The same latitude should be given towards Takena’s vampire fantasy, then. Yes, Cuwu is AFAB and trans masc, and I am a trans woman, but our clay double speaks to a shared GNC desire for revenge against capital. For those viewed or otherwise treated as women, in general, the line between terrifying and cute is characteristically thin; i.e., by turning the safety of home, inside-out, to speak to nuclear hypocrisies.
Keeping with demons, this is the data, and Takena tells it through clay. If computers are modern data transmitters, clay is the data storage system of the ancient world (e.g., the clay tablet to Ea-nāṣir being the oldest customer complaint). It never gets tired and can never die—can change shape or color and be, like Satan’s darkness visible, whatever composition the user needs it to be, thus personify to say whatever the creator wants to say in the future from the past; i.e., memes, but also cryptomemes, per Castricano’s cryptomimesis dynamic! Clay is also naked, but clothed/opaque (re: Segewick’s imagery of the surface); i.e., able to be assigned whatever apotropaic 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 granting infinite value/shape/utility for or against the state.
For example, Mary Shelley used the tabula rasa to highlight the hypocrisy of state-programmed automatons—with men like Victor 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. So does Takena’s golem subvert this process; i.e., as a nude/clothed defender of an imaginary but nonetheless besieged “Prague,” an other world beset by fakes who she reminds of their own clay-like (de)construction (“ashes to ashes, dust to dust”).
In turn, phrases like “virus” or “code” marry cryptomimetically to sexual production and settler arguments against nature-as-monstrous-feminine; i.e., which we can enjoy pursuant to an iconoclastic endorsement. During live burial, such dialogs (and their neo-medieval refrains) speak our truth as normally repressed, helping us grow fluent in deception to point at truth: with funerary rites, duelist lingo and all-around cryptonymy slogans—i.e., “dead” whores tell plenty of tales; those versed in psychosexual violence and demonic theatre revive the black knight[7] to kick ass/wage war against the usual Crusaders! It’s a classic Neo-Gothic goading mechanism (“Chicken, chicken!”) but one that points the finger at the accused living in sin under capital’s present arrangements; e.g., Arthur literally holier-than-thou, and the black knight having none of it!
The point, here, isn’t that Arthur wins the fight, but how the black knight humiliates him, anyways. The same goes for Takena. Whichever mercenary being discussed, think of the basic idea as the talking dead as much the walking dead. Whereas Macbeth promptly crapped himself when seeing Banquo, post-execution (and fearing what the latter’s unwanted apocalypse might uncover to the misled members of that court), the same idea speaks through humor as hate—the kind borrowed from Shakespeare, but also Walpole and Lewis’ silly-serious mayhem, copied ever onwards: “‘Tis but a scratch!” “A scratch? Your arm’s off!” “I’ve had worse!” “You liar!”
Like a gargoyle, our undead heroine comes alive after sleep (death’s counterfeit) to seek revenge on living abusers who don’t value life; re: the ghost of the counterfeit exciting her viewers, doing so in campy ways that remain visually violent and non-violent through vaso vagal theatre. We summon her and watch her go berserk, avenging some hidden wrong during her labor of (courtly) love. Like all vampires, then, she embodies death as a paradoxical source of life, a murder ballad hyphenating both as much as mouth and fang!
Made from clay and animating as such, Takena’s story is basically a prurient, transhuman simulacrum of prostitution. Copied by Takena before arbitrating in hauntological form, the whore/demon lover works at the bar as the usual site of extramarital play and pleasure—foreplay, to be precise; i.e., leading to things that respond normally toward virgin/whore division: per male privilege, so often leading to “revenge” against female/GNC parties by cis-het male ones, the latter 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. During the cryptonymy process, things blend in and stand out—all to make it harder to say who is and isn’t the harmful agent (re: speaking to the lived reality that women experience). In turn, abjection inverts vis-à-vis the chronotope/clay dollhouse castle-inside-a-castle’s mise-en-abyme, doing so by playing with the usual monopolies of violence, terror and sex. We ruin your childhoods, but remind you that Gumby was always creepy! Takena’s vampire is cute, yet confuses her victims (who think her an easy target) precisely because she’s violent “like men” are/were—inside the Gothic’s plastic, half-real, legendary past!
Furthermore, the militant, female demon lover’s theatrical desire—to harm others that resemble our past abusers—becomes trapped between the reality that abusers historically appear normal and harmless, in bad faith, but on whose liminal, innocuous surfaces are where survivors see harm, anyways. In turn, survivors may play it out in good faith, but should remind our audience looking in (regardless of faith) that—for anyone viewing the killer doll, smashing or rescuing small likenesses of themselves per framed story—need only remember how harm is a matter of context; re: couched within an aesthetic of power and death, dom and sub, human and vampire, predator and prey during ludo-Gothic BDSM. 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, playwright and BDSM freak. She is a kinky girl, the kind you don’t take home to mother! Instilling fear and fascination is very much the point.
In turn, damage through rape play speaks to what is covered up, but also all around us and coded less in censorship and more in 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).
As always, the state is incompatible with life; unlife can fight back by dressing up as the whore— i.e., by emasculating rape through its recreation, a witness testimony retold in “Gothic” fakery. 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-turned-terrorist) 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 to pursue sex/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; i.e., the snuff film and kawaii vampire waifu. She gives as good as she gets, hypnotizing lover boy and from him, his hidden master waiting at the kill house (viewed almost peripherally because her hungry eyes on the men, inside).
Exposed, the king runs from one dungeon to another 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; i.e., relayed in Gothic, 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; i.e., through black magic as ubiquitous, commodified: xenoglossia, aka the voice of the dead. The best revenge is to help that voice survive through the message; i.e., when taking the state’s unironic dungeon (and torturers) apart, piece by piece—through revolutionary cryptonymy reversing abjection, on and within a partially ironic counterfeit haunted by rape!
In true Gothic fashion, then, Takena’s story includes a maiden, which the whore rescues from certain death before arming her with an axe (above)! So does the whore haunt the maiden. By the end, the axe is hers not just to grind, but swing to deflower the clubber through revenge: the Gothic heroine is the slayer of a bad-dream camera man, taking his vision less apart and more bouncing the baleful gaze back on the original, non-female vampire (and his army of disposable henchmen). The maiden overpowers him, having done so through her mightier maternal double making her an accomplice. 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, the female reaver slaying her former abuser’s likeness in regressive medieval language—live burial, hoisted on his own petard! Ker-splat!
Furthermore, Takena’s psychomachy shows the monster not as strictly one side, 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 only takes the shadow of a threat to emasculate him, above). Fetishes, at their simplest, are objects of power to give and receive; to fetishize something is, from a sex-positive standpoint, to give it power through dialogs about power as something to exchange either way. To it, the vampire is scary! But she can direct that terror away from the girl and towards the men looking to harm said girl; their tricks won’t work on the vampire, and she knows it:
By locking herself in with the bandits, the vampire cuts off the room’s only exit. Having no recourse for escape (and trapped inside a dungeon of their own design; re: the infernal concentric pattern), the men’s only option is to fight Death to the death. To that, the vampire certainly lives up to her fearful reputation. Tough-as-nails, dead as a doornail, and the final nail in these interlopers’ coffins (which the room becomes), she teaches them one last, brutal lesson before they die; i.e., that some people push back! She rips-and-tears until it is done! In doing so, she spares the maiden (a virgin no more) the vampire’s curse, Cupid’s devilish embodiment disappearing like smoke (which vampires are prone to do).
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 reverie to see her Venus twin has disappeared, the transplant evicting the riffraff before crawling back to her own castle-in-small for a much-needed dirt 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 demonic, nigh-unstoppable shapeshifter (and damage-impervious stand-in for our indestructible selves that survive rape), showing us “death” is a hell of a time (and doesn’t mind if you cum in her eye, left): a psychosexual, martyred state of grace.
Soon, the sun sets and the night falls, our feminist fearmonger back for seconds, making guilty men afraid, squirm or otherwise think twice—as she castrates their doubles, onstage! For her (and us), it’s sweet relief, but also returns to and from the beckoning grave! Whoever said chivalry was dead?
Tokenization (a reprise)—Subverting It through Demonic Poetics
Note: This conclusion touches briefly (six pages) not just on vampires, but zombies. Refer to the Undead Module to consider that monster class at length. —Perse
As we discussed with Amazons, tokenization is a thing. The whole point of “Midnight Vampire,” though, is to subvert/reverse all of that, its found document making us reflect on the recycled badass language to reveal the usual police abusers protected by canonical forms: the actual enemies. 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 state fear and dogma! Intersectional solidarity punches up against all cops: “Get thee to a nunnery!”
(artist: oxsidiancastle)
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 destroy 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 using 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 ironies; re: that they dug their own graves, rape not only not destroying their usual victims but turning said victims into ravenous, indestructible, Pac-Woman maws of death (the vagina dentata trapped between sex and force, a ransom fetish suing for peace through class war).
A kind of demon, the vampire—as undead, but also manmade in the intra and metatextual sense (a kind of walking weapon/terminator infiltrating the danger disco to rescue the princess)—provides apocalypse for their wish fulfillment’s special sight: to conceptualize things in imaginary medieval language, which those from the actual historical past would either have had no concept of, or a different understanding of regarding things we in the present wrestle with; i.e., while pushing towards post-scarcity by defacing modernity’s hired goons (the gore violent, but also censored by its own cartoonish-ness[8], below):
Faced with capital’s usual enforcers, Takena’s vampire is an exterminator purging them as the disease (re: Matteson’s I Am Legend inspiring what became Night of the Living Dead and the modern zombie)—a ritual to endlessly consummate as vampires do: through the eroticized violence of courtly love. It’s a survival mechanism—a way of adapting against Capitalism being the disease, versus capital lobotomizing its victims through siege mentality. The alienation and fetishization, but also the shuttered, fortress-style monitoring go both ways. In turn, she’s a disease the cops can’t quarantine, traveling from place to place to exact her revenge. She’s not just sodomy to persecute, but the Black Death revived and selective in its brutal, showy vengeance (turning homes into charnel houses)!
This isn’t just “for show.” Rape is everywhere under capital because capital rapes everything for profit. Systemic rape/rape propaganda is capital’s open secret/tool of revenge against nature (e.g., Gisele Pelicot; i.e., not just single unmarried women like Takena’s helpless clubber girl, but married women like Pelicot abused under their husband’s supposed “care,” and said husband’s virgin/whore syndrome leading them to pimp out their wife/gang rape them in their sleep and prey on their children[9]). Having incubated in capital’s breeding grounds, she’s merely returning the favor!
More to the point, the vampire disrupts the orderly disposal of nature (and its prostitution/chattelization) by reinfecting capital/society-as-sick under heightened conditions of survival-under-duress; i.e., by breaking quarantine and laying siege to capital-as-brothel, she can lift conditions through a healthier virus: compassion, acquired by demonizing the state as source to apathy burying everyone alive (through radical faith/persecution mania and mounting paranoia in times of crisis, which the state relies on to survive); re: the state is incompatible with life and consent, undeath being a useful poetic vector to challenge bourgeois hegemony by interrogating police brutality and suppression with theatrical violence. Rather than become something to censor without thought, said theatre touches on new orders of existence, ones that stem from older “pathologies” liberated from state utility and oppression. Rebellion is always, to some degree, violent, but also virulent. We use it not just to perform danger during calculated risk, but to spread and assess it!
Takena’s vampire, punching up at the elite’s usual pimps, spreads like wildfire, a succulent counterterrorist punishing the guilty and warning all rapists to beware; i.e., while relishing in the psychosexual violence unfolding on the streets, the state having made criminals it a) can’t tokenize, and b) who attack those who suddenly become vulnerable—not the homeless or the housewife as obedient, but such things turned, like the vampire, towards rebellious counterterror during the dialectic of the alien! Killing the scarecrows of the elite becomes an act of pure addictive bliss—one of revenge that merges violence with sex on the already-endless, half-real stage between imagination and material reality interacting back and forth: an unliving weapon forged in blood.
(artist: Jkappa)
Takena demonstrates how this alien commonly appears as female, onstage, but avengers are demons, thus can take any form workers, onstage or off; re: GNC, non-white, Pagan, etc, given a taste “for blood” as taking back what’s ours! Whatever the character and intersection of class, culture and race war, rebellion is rebellion, solidarity is solidarity (and like period sex, is famously messy and whispered about). Rebellion is a war as much fought with as in shadows, taking any shape darkness visible needs to foster the monstrous-feminine desire to fight back; i.e., through forbidden sight manifesting in the usual popular forms obsessed with death, rape and other taboo things: nature unleashed, mid-dialectic!
The state is playing with fire, then; the more it tries to monopolize terror language (and psychosexual violence through demonic morphological expression; re: making things to dominate or fetishize during such discourse), the more they demonstrate a capacity for ludo-Gothic BDSM to subvert such dualities: to radicalize for rebellion in ways the elite can’t control! In making whores to pimp, they make whores who pimp them!
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 outright. But, as Takena shows us, such things don’t stay buried for long! Sex is a weapon we sex workers can reclaim, hyphenating art and porn; i.e., as poetic extensions of our andro/gynodiverse morphologies 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 stolen spectres; e.g., Marx.
To camp Marx, “The [undead whores of all dead generations weigh] like a nightmare on the brains of the living” (re: “The Eighteenth Brumaire,” 1852); camp, thus give, these chatty corpses a much-needed place to fuck/fight back (the two are not mutually exclusive), helping conscious rebellion find a home—i.e., on the same stages among the living! The paradox, here, is that “evil” sex is somehow badass, hot, and cathartic for workers as much as cops; and it draws us towards difficult truths, but also delightful playgrounds where life and death, “rape” and rape occupy the same restless territories. Such is state shift scaring the elite (and their pimps) senseless.
A bit of “struggle with that snuggle,” then fucking to metal, everyone loves the whore, and wants the clubbing baddie/demon lover in ways that punch up as easily as down; i.e., that which—courtesy of the Neo-Gothic—you have to go slumming to find. “To critique power, you must go where it is.” Takena’s vampire haunts polite society with clay doubles, occupying a g(r)ay-area danger disco while looking goth and/or bubblegum. She’ll more than likely have internal damage, too—roiling on her dark surface and jumping from text-to-text, person-to-person, like lightning (re: Cuwu). Such emotional turmoil needs an outlet, which it will find, one way or another! Better to camp it; e.g., “FINISH HER!” (The Immortals’ “Techno Syndrome,” 1995).
We whores aren’t just demons, then, but rebels in the Miltonian tradition! Taking to the streets, we speak campily to danger through “danger” as silly and serious; e.g., Castle Anthrax, Evil Dead, Metroidvania and Takena’s “Midnight Vampire” (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, explosive mergers of all these things; e.g., Tchaikovsky’s cannons and ringing 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, below); re: all the dead traditions of rebellion weighing on the state, our clay aping the Capitalocene to disabuse workers of any harmful ideations: to blow the lofty and benevolent idea of the state right the fuck up!
So does Takena’s vampire do just that. The state can only rape; whores, on the other hand, may catalyze sex and force to uphold or destroy state mandates; i.e., brothel-espionage cheerleaders shouting at the top of their lungs, “Faster! Harder!” We self-styled robo-fags are not “defective models,” 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!
Activism is worker action through whoring turned against profit, thus a force that consciously opposes cops betraying labor interests, mid-conflict. Rebellion is work in this respect, as is monstrous sex (vampire or otherwise) raising awareness and intelligence towards resistance. Even so, 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, claymation studios, 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: the 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). By using darkness visible to make them attack us in ways we can direct peoples’ attention towards, negotiation—for whores—is just as often made with hostile, bad-faith, and bourgeois forces who don’t share power. So we force them to through all the usual paradoxes: one step forward, two steps back; hurry up, take your time; speak out, keep quiet. Rebellion is a balancing act.
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 holistic, monstrous 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, 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 breaking Capitalist Realism with.
To that, 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, but also the elite they work for): to render them unable to attack in the present moment. Moreover, in recultivating the Superstructure, such ironic means and measures would become second-nature in the hearts and minds of workers, but also the art they make: our spectres of Marx, sleeping in the wet spot, moist with rememory and rage.
If rape is the state’s ancient weapon against nature, the whore is an ancient, vivid-yet-obscure (cryptonymic) marker for state shift—the birthplace/site of rebirth and afterbirth whose murderous womb/monstrous-feminine survives in hauntological forms, refusing vis-à-vis Creed to be victims; extramarital sex, under capital, is automatically taboo, and zombie invasions originate with the vampire (re: Romero). Arousing the rabble, then, the man-eater makes violence (and its utility through the black/red aesthetic of power and death) something to turn against fascism and its abuse of such things; i.e., as already imprinting on those conditioned to submit (the princess) that, when dipped in Styx, emerge hungry for traitorous blood and revenge: through vigilante, pro-labor violence growing sexy in people’s minds.
That is where revolution begins! Takena’s hysterical, duelist baptism isn’t one of fire, as such, but Nazi blood engorging the strict Commie slut to resist tokenism! From beginning to end, the trespass ceases to be acceptable (for the elite); i.e., once it no longer upholds the nuclear model, but again, such cryptonymy is hard to police, and camouflages itself.
(artist: The Smutty Rogue)
This includes Takena’s fearsome vampire, but also other forms of vampirism that overlap with it, onstage and off. Some forms opt for a soft-and-cuddly doom; i.e., a Bonnie-and-Clyde element (star-crossed lovers) to the wretched bloodbath’s death by Snu-Snu, traded for actuals snuggles. Vae victis, indeed, but also… oddly hot and adorable? Romance and desire—at least of a Gothic, neo-medieval—are incredibly liminal. In turn, revolutions happen whenever and wherever they happen, blooming on the battlefield while watered by the blood of the fallen, the rough-and-tumble, the brave and daring clutching—however futile—at life everlasting during graveyard sex of all kinds!
The Gothic, as almost holy/silly-serious, works through comedy and drama to speak to Medusa (state shift), which sooner or later comes back around, eating the state for good as normally eating itself on repeat. “Faith no more, face the whore / Rape the past, make me laugh” (Anthrax’s “Make Me Laugh,” 1988); we’re all zombies rotting under state abuse, staring at our hungry selves on the Aegis; re: mirror syndrome. Said mirror is also a shield to fight back with. So “Fight ‘Em ‘Til You Can’t!” (Anthrax, 2011).
And if this sounds daunting or bogus, revolution relies on imaginary and fakery to work—both to disguise itself and paint a possible future to push towards. Never has “fake it till you make it” been more applicable, the Gothic steeped in such things/the explained supernatural; i.e., the Black Veil both hiding nothing particularly scary behind itself (a worm in a peach, if memory serves), while likewise intimating Great Destruction towards the narrative of the crypt: an occupation by those the state tries to contain butting up against ourselves as alien. The praxial idea is to see who can fake it better to best speak to worker rights and material conditions versus state rights and profit! So give it a shot!
Austen leaps to mind; e.g., “Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.” Except, now the pen is a sword, its passage a bloody one that carves towards a new historical epoch; i.e., through old materials held in the hands of women (and other targets of state violence), such dead queens reclaiming state terror devices to break their persecution monopolies (on blood libel, sodomy and witch hunts) and suck their jailors dry!
(artist: Dariusz Kieliszek)
Beyond Takena’s own torture-porn examples speaking to the inherent sexual qualities of porn[10], thereof (and zombies/the undead, as a whole), we’ll consider doing so with goblins as blood-libel devices; i.e., by camping Tolkien’s own class thereof, next!
Onto “Idle Hands, part three: Goblins, Anti-Semitism, and Monster-Fucking“!
Footnotes
[1] E.g., ninjas or nameless suits. The monstrous-feminine combines masculine and feminine theatre tropes—including the Western action hero, be that a gunslinger or martial artist—but also hyphenates black and white through medieval language: the woman-in-black, taking all comers!
[2] To try and reclaim them, as the state does, is to play with fire; i.e., to expose themselves as hypocrites and invite reflection on the whole nuclear model while, in the same breath, giving workers theatrical spaces vital towards playing against state aims!
[3] A famous scene from The Monk has a carriage stopping at a cabin in the woods. The passengers are greeted by the “host” of the cabin, who is actually a bandit in disguise. Aided by the bandit’s “wife” (a lady led astray by—you guessed it—a demon lover), the hero discovers the bedsheets upstairs stained with blood from the previous guests’ premature demise! To survive, the hero must lie to the bandits who are lying to him, and avoid drinking so much “sleepy potion” slipped into his dinner wine that he passes out. There’s more to the story in terms of action, but the basic idea is the home and hosts are “perfidious” and need to be dealt with through violence and lies. So, too, is Takena’s protagonist—an expert liar and killer lying in wait against those lying in wait—confronted with a false home that she intentionally infiltrates to rescue a damsel-in-distress.
[4] I.e., internalized male homophobia; e.g., Cockrub Warriors demonizing anal sex, blaming feminine male homosexuality for weakness (re: the AIDS pandemic): “For the last 35 years anal sex has dominated gay male life. It’s been a disaster. For 30 of those years our lives and the lives of the people we love have been consumed by an epidemic for which today there is still no cure and no vaccine” (source: “Founder’s Message,” 2000).
[5] Consent is sexy and there’s plenty of ways to illustrate that in art; e.g., a couple having adorable, plain-Jane sex and enjoying themselves:
(artist: The Smutty Rogue)
In short, they’re doing things that are alien to many but also completely non-violent; i.e., despite happening during BDSM (through the giving and receiving of commands, mid-pleasure, but also aftercare, top-right), and despite any descriptive sexuality and informed consent taking place, the events themselves remain fairly standard and non-Gothic in their presentation. It’s a cartoon, but quotidian.
For Takena’s vampire, she’s sexy because she has the ability to embody forbidden societal aspects—female revenge against male sex fiends, first and foremost. Furthermore, the descriptive elements portend to abuse and harm she addresses through violence; i.e., as paradoxically kawaii, mid-playtime. Consent is sexy. So is fighting back against slashers in genuine self-defense (the canonical Gothic equating female death with a loss of virtue, which Takena camps)!
[6] The screenshots were taken by me with Cuwu’s permission; originally featured in “Healing through “Rape,” or the Origins of Ludo-Gothic BDSM as a Matter of Rememory” (2024).
[7] A literal bastard/demon/terrorist/mercenary whore profaning his duties/the nuclear home for the highest bidder (who, in this case, was the Beatle’s George Harrison. Harrison funded several Monty Python films, out-of-pocket, including The Holy Grail, 1975, and Life of Brian, 1979).
[8] A common quality of claymation bringing demonic sex and violence to a wider audience, under Pax Americana‘s strict censorship laws (refer to my video breakdown for a longer history on this subject).
[9] Pelico bravely chose to face and name her abusers, the latter dubbed by the French media as “Mr. Every Man” (source: Natalie Stechyson, whose title, for her 2024 trial editorial, reads, “Gisele Pelicot wanted us to know her name. These are the names of the men convicted in her rape.” Both speak to Pelicot naming and shaming not just her abusers, but society’s everyday treatment of rapists normally protected by police and the system. Said system (and the men it protects) are quite fragile (with Pelicot’s abusers hiding behind masks to shield themselves from public uproar after the verdict).
[10] As Bay points out, revenge is classically sexually charged; i.e., a spurned or bereaved lover (which Shakespeare camped by having Romeo and Juliet commit suicide after destroying each other’s houses). Every aspect is romanticized, in Western culture, but especially the violence (and, in certain kinds of horror stories, gore).