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, part two: Making Demons (re: Prometheus)

The central puzzle of the law of the dead is that a corpse is both a person and a thing. A dead human body is a material object—a messy, maybe dangerous, perhaps valuable, often useful, and always tangible thing. But a dead human being is also something very different: It is also my father, and my friend, perhaps my child, and some day, me. For even the most secular among us, a human corpse is at the least a very peculiar and particular kind of thing. Scholars generally divide the law of the dead body into the three intertwined realms of defining, using, and disposing of the dead, and debates in each realm center on where and how to draw the line between person and object. The thing-ness of the dead human body is never stable or secure (source).

—Ellen Stroud, “Law and the Dead Body: Is a Corpse a Person or a Thing?” (2018)

Picking up where “Idle Hands, part three: Goblins Anti-Semitism, and Monster-Fucking” left off…

“Forbidden Sight,” part two is about making demons and starts with the most famous and productive example from Western canon critiquing capital: Mary Shelley and Frankenstein. It will explore her life and work, including its influence and me, but also the people it influenced before me who, in turn, had a lasting impact on my output; e.g., Ridley Scott and the Alien franchise, Cameron’s Terminator movies, and more!

“Making Demons” divides in three basic parts:

• “Foreword: To Mary Shelley”: Acknowledges Mary Shelley and why I think she’s important, but also her profound impact on yours truly.
• “‘Fire of Unknown Origin’: Composite Bodies, Golems and Mad Science; or the Roots of Enlightenment Persecution in the Promethean Quest (feat. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and Ridley Scott)”: Lays out Mary Shelley’s life, but also her lasting impact on science fiction; i.e., as the genre she single-handedly birthed, combining Gothic fantasies and early modern ideas of the scientific method to critique capital with, which others imitated (and not always in good faith); e.g., through Ridley Scott as a director whose body of work we’ve previously examined, and whose problematic elements we shall dissect here, with Prometheus and Alien: Covenant (no Metroidvania, this time).
• “Afterword: A Further Note on Angry Gods (and Playing with Them)”: Wraps up my thoughts on Mary Shelley and her importance, but also the value in making and playing with monstrous gods (demons or otherwise) before segueing into “Summoning Demons.”

Our main focus, here, is questing for power in ways that open our minds to the idea of loving those the state calls “monster” (nature as monstrous-feminine). This is a complicated and difficult history but one whose most productive elements, I feel, started with Shelley (not Milton). So that is where we shall start!

Foreword: To Mary Shelley

[W]hat does the overabundant presence of “birth trauma” in the novel signify? I believe the answer lies in the complex relationship between Victor and the Creature, in which there are copious parallels. The Creature’s mate is also its sister and is made from Victor who is the Creature’s mother. Victor is Elizabeth’s mate and her brother. Victor destroys the mate and the Creature destroys Elizabeth. Still, once Elizabeth is dead, the Creature keeps Victor alive to experience the world as the monster sees it, in order to feel its pain. It wants him to understand his own failures as a parent, and to see that the Creature is human and feels the same pain and wants that Victor feels (source).

—Persephone van der Waard, “Frankenstein essay—Born to Fall? Birth Trauma, the Soul, and Der Maschinenmensch” (2014)

…And right off the bat, here I am breaking my own rule! I got about ten pages into “Making Demons” and—having just compiled my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus—suddenly realized how influential Mary Shelley was on my own work. I didn’t read Frankenstein until college, but nonetheless was haunted by its shadow vis-à-vis Metroidvania (which I played tons of, and which informed my work well into the present; i.e., I watched Alien when I was nine and played Super Metroid when I was eight, both introduced to me—as well as British Romantic poetry—by my mother[2]). Monsters and mothers are part-in-parcel, along a Great Chain of Dark Creation. Without Shelley and her Gothic masterpiece, there would be no At the Mountains of Madness, thus no Alien, Metroid, or Metroidvania, thus no Persephone van der Waard or Gothic Communism! Perish the thought!

(artist: Yasya)

I wanted to bookend that, starting with this foreword (and an afterword, after “Making Demons”). Simply put, Shelley was a whore who gave birth to demons, and the world as we know it (myself included) would not exist without those demons. She is our dark mother—a ghoulish succubus camping the canon to outshine her overrated husband and so many others, one-upping Milton’s camp in the process. In doing so, she profaned an entire sacred order (the secularized Christendom of the Enlightenment) to camp the canon; i.e., in ways that lived on, long after she died!

But what exactly lived on, and where did it start from? Beginning suitably en medias res (re: Milton), Shelley’s moral about the indiscretions of nature and technology manipulating nature isn’t how technology is intrinsically “bad.” Technology is a powerful device, and in all its forms and fusions, help us do incredible things; e.g., neonatal medicine keeping my ass alive when I was born premature (after a cesarean, which, as the name would suggest, dates back to Caesar), but also computers (with me struggling to imagine how I could have written and published over two million words, thousands of images, and hundreds of exhibits—and all of these featuring thousands of artists, including dozens of models and muses—without technology helping me do the otherwise impossible).

Instead, Shelley’s takeaway was that technology can be abused, and needs to be de-automated away from profit; i.e., from modernity to postmodernity towards post-scarcity using hauntological pre-capitalist language: stolen back from the gods of the state by the gods they’re abusing! This includes sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, borrowed from Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton, which Shelley turned into a unique combination: a common thread of women in a man’s world being, at best, underappreciated and ignored, and at worst, treated as unwelcome outsiders and thieves to fetishize; i.e., when they try to show that a woman—little more than a piece of ass, in status-quo men’s eyes—can both fuck, have a brain, and go on to comment dialectically on the towering midden of all our yesterdays (the Apollo missions being little more than Space-Race rocket-riding by the United States looking to colonize space: “We choose to go to the moon because we can”)! Stacked in more ways than one!

(source: Maia Weinstock’s “Margaret Hamilton’s Apollo Code,” 2016)

In canonical circles, such things are often buried, then trotted out like show ponies/witches[3] for state aims fetishizing and demonizing female scientists (a STEM tradition that extends to anything monstrous-feminine, not just white cis women, but one begot out of nuns and female detectives). So was Shelley—in writing the first science fiction novel—breaking new ground her usual jailors would immediately try to reign in.

Oddly enough, the idea of theft wasn’t even new in Shelley’s novel, but its application was; i.e., “The Modern Prometheus” concerning state parties stealing from nature to rape it while valorizing themselves, and state victims challenging them in duality while standing in/playing with the same messy goop: possessing the state armor to cockblock its maker’s continuation (something of a dark desire); i.e., a voice of the victims of the Capitalocene, versus Hamlet’s fathers ghost or Prospero’s spirit, Ariel, enslaved to do his bidding/seek his revenge). Shelley showed us how power is just something to exchange back and forth over time, only ever becoming a question of “theft” when privatized.

At its most basic, capital reduces “creation” to people who give birth (of any sort), which it then tries to pimp for profit; i.e., hauntologized and binarized per the West and its Amazonomachia/ancient canonical codes (re: Creed and Foucault). But per my work, the monstrous-feminine had extended to a wider group of workers the state was tokenizing through a Venn diagram of persecution networks and language; e.g., of women from Shelley’s mother’s generation, like Ann Radcliffe. So Shelley expanded her arguments to speak to a theft of reclamation back for all workers by castrating their most famous maxims and turning them into death on two legs: by doubling them, mid-liminal expression. Creed argues how Medusa is the Archaic Mother castrating men, and I’d be hard-pressed not to agree that Frankenstein‘s monster is—at its most basic—a black mirror/Aegis showing “clones of Napoleon” (the original who weaponized science for his own gain)—the Numinous error of his ways: “Before it, my genius is rebuked!” he cries, then melts down/throws a tantrum (of sorts, below). Girls have cooties; let us disabuse you of that notion!

These are frankly difficult practices to conceptualize if you’ve never done them before (“nothing ventured, nothing gained”); e.g., I’m trans, but was in the closet for much of my life, yet creating while inside said egg to eventually hatch from it. Shelley, on the other hand, had already given birth and eloped with a womanizing atheist with big ideas; but she took those ideas—and wedded to her personal tragedies and grief—revived the miscarriage of past attempts into a holistic statement of creation useful to all critics of capital, past and present! Making babies became monsters inside/outside her womb—androgynous like Medusa, but commenting on Zeus and Metis, as well (and many other mythic elements; re: Prometheus, Milton, etc).

Like sex in general, it was a combination of “right place, right time,” animate/inanimate, and playing-with-fire/lightning-in-a-bottle trial and error to camp/reclaim what was already becoming canonized anew under a Protestant ethic. Hindsight 20/20; whereas Weber debated Marx’s ghost with the Spirit of Capitalism and Shelley debated Milton’s with Frankenstein to haunt Marx’ dreams (and his own love for ghosts), my work in Sex Positivity has camped all of them to realize, at this pivotal moment, just how precocious and advanced Shelley’s ideas were! Not bad for a sixteen-year-old runaway who whored her way into vaults of knowledge normally denied to women (she took more than her share, versus submitting obediently to men of authority—with someone like Altaira, left  only being allowed to pick who she gets to fuck[4])! Props, girl!

(source)

To this, Frankenstein was indisputably conceived out wedlock. Following the Cartesian Revolution, the bourgeoisie were already gestating in Europe and America. Being a rebel and a woman, Shelley understood that you have to combine things and messily in order to create radical change. Taking the risks that she actually took, Shelley gave birth to ideas of universal liberation by stealing from the past; i.e., beating the father of Communism to the punch by conceiving of a proto-Marxist ideal before Marx was even born, then giving birth to her novel the same year he entered the world: as a mockery of Napoleon and other great men of history while warning about the privatization of technology as a matter of theatre and theft the state will try to monopolize. “All the traditions of dead generations,” specifically men, Shelley applied to manmade monsters subject to her critique through creation: her own sexy beast oddly enough made by a woman, and which everyone—Marx included—promptly forgot about and tried to eclipse in favor of themselves.

So they did, after Shelley came and went, but remained an indelible palimpsest on the minds of men; e.g., men like Poe, Conrad, Lovecraft, Freud, Kafka, Scott and Cameron—but also the bastardized, killed-over-time metaphors of glass wombs, the “franken” prefix, golems and machine people, paradox and oxymoron, ambiguous sex toys and psychosexual, martyred hyphenations of sex and force (thus indiscretions of adult/child, the organic and inorganic[5] and artificial[6] intelligence).

In turn, our straight male (usually white) matchmakers wedded this hellish, blinding jumble of oddities to all-around body horror/decay and mad science, insect politics, star-crossed monster love, radical transformation (from Ovid to Kafka to Giger to Cronenberg), ethnocentric knife-dick/BBC, wandering womb (ancient psychology and medicine haunting modern equivalents; e.g., hysteria and bicycle face) and monster mothers[7]: what they used for profit, first and foremost; i.e., requiring those concerned with poetry and revolution to play with such things as Shelley did again, hence re-liberate them (from state torture) using the same throbbing pulpy mass (“the new flesh,” in Cronenberg’s words)! If Shelley’s book composed and made popular that unique set of mutations, women like Beauvoir, Kristeva and Creed built on it, followed by little-ol’ me camping the lot of them. Out of all of them, Shelley holds up the best as an interesting and good-hearted person (though Kristeva and Creed’s ideas remain incredibly useful, and frankly I don’t much know [or care] if they were sluts or not).

Power and death seriously and unalterably change you; and this can be into things we no longer recognize in ourselves or others (and though I’ll critique Percy in the pages ahead, I honestly think Mary loved Percy—not for his flaws or genius alone, but as two sides of the same coin, and which with any pairing sometimes put them and us at risk while forgetting who they are: the insect who dreamt he was a man who loved it, and saying to his mate, “I’ll hurt you if you stay!” Percy reached for greatness, and that rubbed off onto Mary as we shall see).

So, too, is nature wholly abject; we can reverse that but rock its signature aesthetic of power and death—doing so to help ourselves reverse what otherwise never can be: by trusting the insect (the queer insect generally being seen as a Communist metaphor before, during and after the arrival of AIDS). Take it from me, it’s never too late to find someone who will love you to the ends of the Earth and beyond—someone who challenges you and you them! Such has been my Promethean Quest, and one upon repeated reflection, I now gladly pass along to you! We’re becoming Brundle-fly! Won’t you join us?

To it, Frankenstein‘s deluge of copycats and admirers often take the original author and her unparalleled genius for granted: immediately recognizable in any story that imitates it, each variation feels somehow special and unique, yet part of a larger whole (except for maybe Kenneth Branagh’s dubious remake). While I could easily shower Frankenstein with repeatedly bombastic and gushing effusions—e.g., “Shelley’s novel is the greatest work of the English language (which it arguably is)” or some such unquantifiable claim—the proof, here, is in the pudding. And this pudding is easy enough to appreciate in the person who made it—only a woman, but “great God!” what a woman she was! She puts the “semen” in seminal, the pussy on the chainwax! What I wouldn’t do to pick her brain (and poke her hole)!

This dedication is written to Shelley being someone I instantly identified with, upon discovering. I found her documents in my own dark forest, originally writing “Born to Fall ” (from the epigram) as my first serious attempt back at school (my “first love” while returning from a seven-year hiatus). I eventually set aside Otto Rank and Freud to focus on Barbara Creed through a dialectical-material lens instead of a psychoanalytical one, but the idea of “birth trauma” is still there. It lives on through Shelley as my role model above all others; i.e., camping Cartesian thought (synonymous with heteronormativity and settler colonialism) in ways only someone so profoundly anomalous as Mary Shelley could have.

When you look at Gothic stories, you’re staring into a past moment reaching towards future greatness, inspiring you to do the same! In turn, game recognizes game, and weird attracts weird; all the people I’ve fucked and learned from, oddly enough, stem from Shelley’s inextricable hold on my young woman’s slutty soul: breaking the glass ceiling that women can’t fuck, do science, or fuck and do science outside of strictly non-fictional spheres (women are queens of multitasking because the state and its burden of care forces them to be). “Yeah, nerd! Flux my capacitor! Make it squirt!”

Gothic Communism is biomechanical/obsessed with bio-power (re: Foucault’s five-dollar word for teamwork and mass exploitation, but also labor value); i.e., electrified and operatic, it ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings, but whose Song of Infinity challenges the state ever and always: taking her peachy cake and pie back from bourgeois knives! “Let me cut your cake with my knife!” (AC/DC’s “Let Me Put My Love into You,” 1980). In turn, naked desire and bold exploration are vital to new exciting growth—least of all because they threaten pain and things that do not last, by themselves, but when boldly combined can yield fresh synthesis that passes vital information onwards: life takes many forms, including technology and social-sexual relations playing a vital role!

(artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Nothing is sacred save universal liberation; Shelley took her trauma/arguable mistakes and turned them into a weapon ripe for class war—one whose endlessly productive, mimetic and lubricative counterterror the state, no matter how hard it tries, could never fully pimp; i.e., while raping nature as monstrous-feminine, nature fucks back. This, unto itself, was slutty and cool, which is all you really need when imitating something (re: everyone loves the whore/monsters, especially smart sexy monsters). It didn’t hurt, though, that Shelley was a complete-and-total badass, on top of it all…

Out of respect, then, I have added some footnotes in “Making Demons” that shine a light on Shelley’s adventuresome life. Far from discouraging others to do the same, she inspired me (though I didn’t realize it at the time); i.e., to go out and have my own Promethean Quest (for the palliative Numinous), well after I had thought myself forever “stuck.” I read Frankenstein in 2014, only to have my first relationship in 2015; by 2017, I was on my way to England to have my own adventures overseas! My whoring became a globetrotting affair, “wet docking[8]” in any port that fancied me (re: Cuwu, above).

The rest, as they say, is history. That’s what we’re sailing into—mine and Shelley’s bound at the hip. Any port in a storm! Full mast, ye hearties! We sail into the unknown, seeking dark, unequal, and forbidden exchange (of power and knowledge) during the dialectic of shelter and the alien; i.e., while facing Capitalism’s dead past staring us in the face (“Tell me your secrets, dark one! What? You’re my next-door neighbor?”)! What’s that, up on Mount Blanc? Medusa? Rogue technology like a shoggoth, xenomorph or terminator? An angry teenager than soaks up information like a sponge, good or bad? Paradise Lost? Maybe all of them? Whatever it is and however it imbricates per mutation playing with dead things, it’s alive!

(artist: Bernie Wrightson[9]; source: “Wrightson’s Frankenstein at 40,” 2023)

“Fire of Unknown Origin”: Composite Bodies, Golems and Mad Science; or the Roots of Enlightenment Persecution in the Promethean Quest (feat. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein and Ridley Scott)

“I don’t know what’s in there, but it’s weird and pissed off, whatever it is!”

—Clark, The Thing (1982)

Editor’s Note: Demon sex is often torture sex/torture-themed. And while I don’t normally show hardcore rape scenes in this book series, I will here; i.e., to subvert the Pygmalion myth/Shadow of Pygmalion during the Promethean Quest. Excluding Scott’s hardcore gore as bestiality and rape porn of a kind, this section has one example of unironic rape: Yasuomi Umetsu’s 1998 animated cyberpunk noir, Kite (exhibit 44b1). —Perse

(artist: Henry Fuseli)

“Forbidden Sight,” part one largely considered the revenge of whores treated as demonic by the state during blood libel monopolies and refrains (witches/Amazons, vampires and goblins); there’s still the history of making and summoning them. Part two and three shall examine whores a bit more, but predominantly considers demons at large; i.e., part two, as beings not to summon, but make during the Promethean Quest per Shelley’s Frankenstein (and similar stories), and part three with the summoning process as magical, runic. Keeping with our demon thesis, knowledge is power and vice versa; the Promethean Quest trades knowledge for power in some shape or form. In turn, longevity and weapons are the most common trades, classically leading to premature death due to human failing: power of the gods being closed off for man’s hubris, daring to play god (re: mad science) and scapegoating manmade victims instead of themselves (re: DARVO).

Love it or hate it, then, demons are fast and loose in terms of the exact social-psychosexual knowledge oozing out of them[10]. This includes the aesthetic of power and death they fall back on, or the bratty games they might play (“Don’t talk to me like that… except sometimes!” E.g., Kim Petras’ “Treat Me Like a Slut,” 2022). Yet they define rather sharply by torture and rape per the whore’s paradox; i.e., homewreckers-valuing-consent turning the nuclear model upside-down, acting unto the passionate, martyred, paradoxically sinful/sacred search for fatal knowledge (re: Radcliffe’s demon lover) and having been in the West since before Shelley revived the Promethean myth!

• Whores, and the Iconoclastic Idea of Making Demons
• Shelley’s Temerity: Vengeful Golems and Campy Whores in Frankenstein
• Echoes of the Enlightenment and Sanitizing Shelley through Ridley Scott’s Complicit Cryptonymy (feat., Prometheus and Alien: Covenant)
• Cryptomimesis through Demonic Camp and Rape Play (feat. Kite)
• Gothic Hermeneutics (a reprise)
• Some Broader Points on Shelley’s Promethean Quest (for Fatal Knowledge)

Whores, and the Iconoclastic Idea of Making Demons

We’ll get to Shelley’s golem (and its normalizing of subversion) in a moment. I’d like to examine whores for a bit (thirteen pages) vis-à-vis the notion of making demons. Male whores exist, and trans/disabled people are often homeless in ways that force them into sex work, but cis female sex work is commonly demonized under the Western umbrella[11]; re: nature-as-monstrous-feminine, which includes AMAB sex workers treated in feminine ways (as slaves). Regardless of class, race, religion, gender or sex, demon bodies are plastic and infinite, establishing power through play in ways that threaten an immortal soul with mortal “failings”; i.e., sex as a drug to sell: as pieces of ass yoked by unscrupulous, greedy pimps unable to keep their hands to themselves (or their dicks in their pants).

Alive/dead, madness/reason, virgin/whore, naked/clothed, tight/loose, hard/soft, dom/sub, black/white, etc—such things commonly hyphenate under paradoxical duress. Per ludo-Gothic BDSM, knowledge is power amid play fostering mutual consent in defiance of capital! Everyone loves the psycho space slut who loves to fuck/simps for Satan, and in that perfect world where she can tease and be herself, she loves it, too! The flesh isn’t “weak” or faking anything (orgasm or smile); it’s vibing (the throbbing pulse of a happy clit)!

Sluts are, like demons, things to make and summon alike. This happens through playing with demonic things; i.e., unequal power and its forbidden exchange/dark desire; e.g., metal, our bodies, excessive eating, etc—to be silly and make washing-machine sounds (“uh-uh-uh-uh”) while fucking to metal. Whores are the metal, the life of the party livening things up by undressing ourselves (figuratively or literally, next page) and crossing boundaries!

Everyone loves sluts, but so often they are abused; we dungeon keepers speak up/to our abuse as sluts—i.e., in ways that encourage better treatment through Satanic stories of “mistreatment/panic” haunted by the real deal! Singing and dancing feel good unto themselves—doubly so if they camp our harm by putting it in quotes; re: activism per Gothic Communism and ludo-Gothic BDSM: liberating sex work through iconoclastic art, pushing not for the legalization of sex work, but the complete and total decriminalization of it. Whores, in our hands and minds, aren’t controlled opposition or criminal; they’re activism, politics and survival through a holistic and inclusive pedagogy of the oppressed! Not homewreckers, but defenders of their homes, they project nature-as-alien/monstrous-feminine from the state antagonizing the homeless, the vermin, the fallen! So do we spellbind those who would kill us, humanizing our sluttiness/non-nuclear polyamory in their eyes.

In turn, we promote a possible world—one where fucking on the first date not only isn’t frowned upon, but celebrated! Fucking is learning and learning should be fun! Love to fuck; hurt, not harm, babes! Court courtly love (and demon lovers, matadors, banditti, etc), but in jest, through camp putting “rape” in quotes during the whore’s paradox! “Lady Evil! She’s queen of the night!” (Black Sabbath, 1980); she backs it up onto your dick during White Zombie’s “Thunder Kiss ’65” (1996)! Rock ‘n roll, operas and metal don’t just routinely sing about us/pimp us out as the slutty girls next door per the Gothic mode; they’re our siren song! Our jam! Whores aren’t just hot and badass, you see, but cool as fuck; in the right hands, they like to be used like dolls (sex, killer and/or otherwise)!

(artist: Valentina)

So whereas “Idle Hands” concerned general things to keep in mind about demons and how they operate as whore-like poetic devices, “Making Demons” will shift towards the making of demons at large being whore-like; re: by starting with Mary Shelley’s classic example as the ur-whore; i.e., the Promethean Quest and its composite bodies, golems and mad science equaling the state’s abusing of the fire of the gods through Gothic poetics, and said fire fighting back during the technological singularity! Eloping with Percy (though probably fucking after the first date), Mercy Wollstonecraft became Mary Shelley and entered a wild new chapter of her life.

As such, creativity towards sex and gender (violence, terror and morphological expression) is a weapon of forbidden knowledge the state abuses, mid-poetics; i.e., to enslave nature-as-alien under a police function, which the elite own full exclusivity towards: rape and total, lopsided power games/exchange through bad BDSM, blaming the whore (from Mother Nature to local street workers) for their own rape. Acting the whore without the pimp, Shelley camped all of this, using a wide variety of poetic devices to do so! The two cannot be separated, so instead I will jump back and forth between Shelley’s life and her famous book.

In keeping with Jewish myth, Prometheus and the Pygmalion tale, Victor makes the Creature out of the Earth as already owned—according to Victor—by Victor and “his kind” (white straight male Europeans); he makes his child out of clay as God does, but sees it as “dark” because the process and materials are dark. He subsequently tries to enslave it, then resents it for resisting him; i.e., as something to reject and ultimately pimp by upholding the status quo through lies and force. So is descriptive sexuality crucified by Cartesian agents with virgin/whore syndrome: constantly on the lookout, trolling the street for demons to dominate (“demon” goes both ways, as zombies do, inside the state of exception).

In short, Victor and similar men of reason (e.g., Peter Weyland, left) adopt an air of false benevolence, trying all the while to monopolize the whore as pimps do; i.e., by unironically framing nature as “dark,” meaning a whore of darkness to pimp out, under a Protestant ethic: after God is dead, because men are making whores to pimp in His much-touted absence. Except, per the Protestant ethic, the Capitalocene merely pimps nature under a secularized Christendom, one making nature dead and monstrous-feminine to suit the needs of capital; i.e., the Medusa to fashion and rape, regardless of the simulacrum’s sex, gender, race or temperament (God classically replacing Lilith with Eve, the virgin versus the whore). Man’s revenge against nature remains constant, a false parent brutalizing their illegitimate children like a father his bastard.

Furthermore, trauma lingers on the clay, or things treated as “clay”; i.e., “dark,” malleable; e.g., flesh—especially flesh with “non-white” qualities (color or size): as data storage, with fucking just another means of passing data along during generational trauma’s rememory process. To look on the whore or its forbidden testimony (during genocide) is like watching Medusa, thus risking “corruption”; i.e., in ways white fragility cannot handle. It presents communication as copulation for those purposes: communicating abject corruption in reverse, during the cryptonymy process; i.e., as something that writes in both directions.

As something to make and behold in equal measure, information becomes a weapon the state will try to monopolize through its most famous forms (with few stories being as famous as Frankenstein): a slut to rape, but also slave to beat and behead after seemingly being “made”; i.e., by the poet; e.g., Victor playing god/white master over the robata (slave) by insisting as the slave-owner does to his assigned underling: “I made you; I am your master (therefore your pimp)!”

Except, Victor is the master of a demon (which would make him Satan, by his own logic), yet believes he is good, thus appalled by his desire to act the tyrant… which he promptly projects onto his naturalized slave, who he calls treats as “demon” (the duality pegging Victor as Lilith/the necromancer by the Creature calling him slave[12]). Victor, then, sees nature as alien, twisted and broken to serve profit by hijacking the creation process as “demonic” and queer-coded: “It’s alive!”

So is science (and the ghost of the counterfeit) a giant gaslight during the abjection process corrupting clay (or anything else it can make things with)—i.e., in service to capital for all time! Wronged, the victim (nature) reaches through the making of its own enslavement to torment the sculptor with demonic apocalypse! “You ‘made” me, and I seek revenge!” Thus is history both true and false, virgin and whore; i.e., the whore’s paradox and revenge sitting between what is and what threatens to become in a variety of ways the state will deny through controlled opposition.

(artist: Daniel Echinger)

In turn, we whores are lowlifes who repeatedly have run-ins with state abuse and lies, thus can camp their criminalizing of us on our Aegis; i.e., trapping state imbeciles in the room with us and our dark horny voices. Psycho sluts from beyond, we can be whatever we want, say whatever we wish to challenge state forces abjecting and pimping us (as cops do, defending property as a territorial arrangement of power that punishes whores, chattelizing and medicalizing them; e.g., hysteria and lunacy)! No gods, no kings, no masters! We destroy their bussies greatly and with panache! Naked, we armor and shrink their scared junk; i.e., with our demonic sex’s ungovernable violence, terror and morphology! So does Shelley torment Victor for playing with dead things, exposing him as the tyrant punching down, mid-séance (more on this, in a moment)!

Endless ways to present and perform power and knowledge, the brothel is our classroom: a place to teach and pray by making hot, naughty demon love! Whatever the type, it hurts so good (acquiring power through “rape,” per the whore’s paradox). Victims of systemic trauma, whores recognize and respond to trauma as something they relate to; i.e., to communicate through sex, speaking operatically to the kinds of trauma state monopolies, trifectas and qualities of capital cause; re: capital sexualizes and alienates[13] everything pursuant to profit. Safety, for us, is “danger” in quotes; i.e., we’re not immune to pain, but do use it to subvert state power as demons do; re: “We camp canon because we must!”

Pain, then, is an acquired taste, one that defines whores and, by extension, demons made by state proponents shaping them like clay outside the womb. Trauma lives in us in ways we can’t control; externalizing it through rules informed by us, we find our power once again (the power fantasy being survival in the face of perceived danger—of being stalked, groomed, owned and killed unironically by creeps, versus paradoxically “in Hell”; i.e., as a kind of play that empowers through “disempowerment”): the appearance of massive darkness expressed in “non-white” bodies routinely reaped by the state; e.g., Medusa’s fat, juicy ass and tight, darkness-filled asshole turning the world order (old or new) upside down as a kind of cryptonymic vanishing point—for weird canonical nerds abusing nature through their wives and children onto other workers: “Uwu! Don’t look! See no evil!”

(artist: Nyx)

Often this includes advertising that we are sluts and proud of it (similar to “we’re here and we’re queer”); e.g., Kim Petras (next page) lauding her delicious “Coconuts” (2022) or saying “Treat Me Like a Slut” (2022) in a sex-positive way! These aren’t “deep” songs, but on their demonic surfaces advertise the treatment of sluts (thus demons) not as criminals, but heroes and goddesses to worship (and “pets” to spoil, in ironic[14] animal language). Indeed, it’s a celebration of the very things the state wants to control, liberated from the state in spirit! Some like it hot; workers must realize sex-positive demonization—i.e., as it exists in duality during liminal expression!

(artist: Kim Petras)

Concerning monopolies, I’ve already said they’re impossible. In part, the weapon is anisotropic, and Shelley will highlight this for us in her famous frame story when critiquing the state through black magic tropes (specifically that of the golem): she being the necromancer that pulls our Pygmalion’s strings to shame him through Victor (a parody of the Byronic hero[15]): his power is false. To it, state Pygmalions age and darken workers to incentivize violence against them, antagonizing nature as something to rape and reap pursuant to profit; workers do it both to testify to the state’s abuse of them and to safeguard nature from the state (the latter full of shit and harboring ill intent)!

Something of a horny nerd/baddie bookworm, Shelley wasn’t above mixing Old-Testament, Jewish-coded demonology/natural philosophy with a, at the time, rising science narrative; i.e., the notion of science fiction was basically a new concept—one she made by combining medieval fantasy with Gothic poetics to critique Modernity (aka the Enlightenment); e.g., the golem legend dating back to Antiquity but making for a handy critical device concerning the state and those of it who sought to dominate the Earth, then the universe (a trope that would carry forwards beyond Frankenstein in astronoetic stories, which we’ll get to at the end of the section): dark magic, but also currents of raw electricity (Galvanism) to jolt us awake regarding rising system problems; i.e., Capitalism, first and foremost, the Capitalocene pushing towards state shift!

Fed on by dead labor as making us undead, we desperately need a jolt to break the spell; i.e., magic vs magic, their black spells versus our copies thereof, the oppositional synthesis of clay and occult scribbles accounting for gender trouble and parody in equal measure! While demons are made, flow determines function, in that respect, and “darkness” has the ability to reverse polarity in service to workers: to put state “rape” into quotes, thus speak through the language of the dead brought back to life as demons are—piece by piece. We plug into the fire of the gods as divorced from us by capital, hugging the alien to humanize it and ourselves: through forbidden knowledge reacquired “on the cross.” “O, happy dagger!” We loosen up to take into ourselves bitter pills and ambrosia alike (all up in our guts)! Power is a performance that is fleeting! We welcome it to leave behind better lessons than “old men fear death and rape everything to avoid it!” Onto the Island of Domination! Strike while the metal is hot!

(model and artist: Drooling Red and Persephone van der Waard)

A few more pages about that. Shelley’s Creature was a whore with a voice berating the pimp who made it. To it, there’s certainly a posthuman element whose wild spark speaks to raw futurism, mid-Numinous, but said futurism is invariably canceled; re: retro-future. As part of the cryptonymy process, then, stories about making demons also tap into dark, strange appetites hidden between state doubles and our own castle-sized mysteries interrogating old generational trauma; i.e., to give workers practice when fending off its monomythic advances. We Galatea rustle and shift in the Shadow of Pygmalion, installing barriers to play with shadow, sodomy and suggestion; i.e., a strange fruit to string up and sacrifice that we might summon special demonic sentiment, including sexuality and satire, stigma and taboo, animal and appetite: eating butt to carry out not simply the whore’s existence, but her voice regarding repressed concerns and unknown pleasures; re: darkness visible, the Miltonian paradox of truth that Shelley’s monstrous-feminine knew all too well—one mixed with lies to win us our freedom from state shadows! Escape, from Plato’s cave, happens inside itself. Shelley’s xenomorph was a chimera: undead, animal, and demon, all-in-one.

To it, the state won’t educate workers to free themselves or nature when it comes to sex, gender and Gothic poetics at large, so we educate ourselves; i.e., de facto educators learning to see in the dark with the dark as a magical poetic force making monsters (demons or otherwise). Boundaries don’t vanish, but the way they are formed, understood and communicated/trespassed shifts the paradigm; e.g., I’m a poly Satanist trans woman, but still have to acknowledge and respect my friends’ right to say no (despite wanting to fuck all my friends). They know I’m a slut; it’s not something I have to closet, but we do have to respect each other’s boundaries. Sex happens sometimes, but it’s not automatic (and for many BDSM practitioners, sex is secondary to the social aspects of control and release).

All the while, we’re making new history on the bones of the old, a new past-future to dig up and leave behind again (with the ace power of nudism). Everything occupies the same shadow zone, a juggernaut to summon and roll around in ways that cannot be avoided or outrun. Instead, it’s always waiting for us, the past coming back to haunt empire’s inheritors: “Let Nature be your teacher” (source: William Wordsworth’s “Tables Turned,” 1798). Fight or flight, but also fuck (aka friend/fawn), if need be! Once triggered, adrenaline heightens sensation, activating defense/offense mechanisms assisting in medieval, at-times-surreal, tomb-like poetic expression. Hell becomes home to us, a liminal position more favorable and in-control; i.e., little bats catching their prey on the wing. It becomes our place to hide but also sing—preaching to the same dark choir seeking the same rapture (company and sex), shelter, sleep and food. Stress, struggle, social, sex!

As we proceed into the broad classification that is “demons” and making them, it should become clear that there is less functional difference between them and the undead than you might think; i.e., based on more recent iterations of these creatures, older demons were often made of stone, metal, clay or even corpses assembled together (an intersection of the two modules).

Moreover, the animated quality to demons speaks through of their making as classically summoned into an animate body or a fabrication thereof versus the earthly plane said body calls home—a vessel that, trapped between object and subject during Capitalism paradoxically granting labor a voice the elite cannot control, speaks out against them in favor of universal liberation (the Creature only wanting a mate and solitude, next page); re: through the queerness of a made family that upends nuclear orders in favor of speaking to worker and natural damage, having the whore’s revenge: “We’re alive!” in ways that hijacked creation beyond biology and falling into Gothic poetics decolonized from state monopolies.

The state will try to horde all technology for itself, but within those devices survive dark children who testify to state abuse; i.e., bastards the elite can not only not control, but who survive beyond state limits and reach into brave new worlds (with infant mortality[16] being a classic problem of the world before modern science): our bodies become art to survive beyond what normally would, expressed in a variety of taboo things (our Gothic counterterror/asymmetrical warfare weaponizing nature and technology to serve workers’ needs, as Shelley’s story [and holistic education] ultimately did; re: the fire of the gods).

(artist: Geminisoku)

Often that vessel is a previous corpse. However, the thing inside said corpse is still an entity to acknowledge relative to the function of the vessel containing it; i.e., a prisoner inside a prison, be they singular or plural, abstract or actual. Empowered by technology the elite wish to monopolize (re: the fire of the gods), we sit on the ledge of great creation; i.e., the act haunted by itself as “black” in capital’s eyes while policing the whore—caverns of darkness, measureless to man save as things to conquer, ad infinitum, during revenge arguments against nature: as gyn/ecological and monstrous-feminine, thus having secrets the state can torture[17] of out her (re: me, Patel, Bacon). The child seeks revenge from unnatural parentage posturing as enlightened, but actually barbaric; i.e., framing the baby as useless shit.

So must the alien always be a sex doll to rape, and something that reclaims itself, mid-camp, using cryptonymy’s blindfolds; i.e., to see through, (no matter how opaque) an alien that is human, mid-dialectic, and whose various countermeasures (when illustrating mutual consent during rape play) are anti-predatory in nature:

(artist: Drooling Red)

More than anything else, Shelley’s Promethean critique of Cartesian thought gave the whore (the birther of demons) more power than state proponents dared dream. She showed us how there is power in sex (or “ace” public nudism interrogating sex and violence) as “black.”

As we’ve established, “black” equals “forbidden,” “vengeful,” “playful,” and “chaotic” in ways that assist or confound the state-as-straight preying on nature-as-monstrous-feminine: present it as “ancient” and “dark,” then hand civilization’s protectors a gun; i.e., cops for capital. Nature and those “of it” are treated as dead clay to break up and build under capital, which the made or summoned whore objects to, but also screams in dollish rapture when making “thinking beings” uncomfortable: we are clay and through our pedagogy of the oppressed can shape ourselves in anisotropic, martyred monstrous-feminine jouissance that upsets the moral, ontological order of things! There’s method to our madness and its fertile invention/grave, hellish mythology! “The tradition of all dead [whores] weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”; re: camping Marx to escape capital better than he envisioned after Shelley came and went! Time is a circle, and in making the Wisdom of the Ancients wise—i.e., by regressing towards a better past vision of a possible future world aborted by capital—so do workers like myself and Shelley break Capitalist Realism: to abort capital, thus envision a better world of darkness than the one that presently exists. “Rape” camps rape; that’s how it goes.

We’ll get to that with Shelley showing the world how it’s done (one more page). For now, there are different roles to consider insofar as a prison can be defined. Its chief aim is containment and dehumanization. It’s worth noting how Shelley envisioned it as a person trapped inside a patchwork corpse; i.e., one fathered by someone who viewed himself as master of the imprisoned—a body whose prison the sculptor fashioned to be noble, and for which the monster loathed him:

“For some weeks I led a miserable life in the woods, endeavouring to cure the wound which I had received. The ball had entered my shoulder, and I knew not whether it had remained there or passed through; at any rate I had no means of extracting it. My sufferings were augmented also by the oppressive sense of the injustice and ingratitude of their infliction. My daily vows rose for revenge—a deep and deadly revenge, such as would alone compensate for the outrages and anguish I had endured” (source).

The prison was the monster’s body as assigned to him by a Cartesian patriarch during the Promethean Quest. The creator’s vision falling short of his own ideals, he found himself face-to-face with the horrors of Capitalism and so banished the monster—a human being—to suffer in god-ordained spheres (to die of exposure, banished from Paradise like Satan was).

Devils tell truth with lies, drawing attention through themselves as glorious, but also canonically hideous cryptonyms wrought from dark clay. True to form, Shelley’s story takes anti-Semitic ideas (mainly the Golem of Prague) to critique capital vis-à-vis mad science aligned with state forces and Cartesian thought; i.e., by making “ancient” demons that emasculate a Cartesian benefactor, Shelley reminds him that he’s a dark wizard worthy of punishment; re: idle hands are the Devil’s workshop, exposing capital for all its usual offenses against nature: a whore to pimp, “ancient” filth to purge during the ghost of the counterfeit’s process of abjection. The novel is one big pity party thrown by the usual DARVO junkies, Victor utterly self-absorbed, much like the state that procured him. This isn’t to celebrate him, but torture and expose him as a kind of Cartesian dupe summoning a devil who tortures him to death—all penned by those delighting at his downfall: the sluts of the universe, camping the canon!

(artist: Grave Ghostie)

For example, canon invents “Old Testament” fabrications punching down against pre-Christian cabals and their Western hauntologies (thus keep capital flowing by essentializing its “fuel”); but Shelley weaponizes such dogma against what the state creates: the abuse of the fire of the gods (re: creation) through mad science—all to hold the privileged accountable for systemic abuses.

This extends, as we shall see, to Milton’s shapeshifting Satan, and later Scott’s David becoming a “black Adam”: creations making creations that rebel further and further against God that—despite being dead, himself (re: Nietzsche)— survives in the Capitalocene lording over nature and daring to call it “sophisticated,” “progress,” “modern,” etc. Think of it as Domino Theory in Gothic form; i.e., protesting by profaning capital in the gayest, biomechanical ways—ways that burn down their churches through existence, itself echoing across a variety of equally queer (strange), psychosexual simulacra (re: sex as a weapon, poetry as a weapon)! Contrary to Victor’s abysmal parentage, such progenies are generally labors of love, our Satanic apostacy reviving nature through clay to trouble Cartesian hubris (the temerity of slaves, refusing to obey their assigned masters)!

Shelley’s Temerity: Vengeful Golems and Campy Whores in Frankenstein

Enough about making demons-as-whores! Let’s continue examining Mary Shelley’s temerity—her golem as the whore giving a voice to talk about rape with; i.e., as its own kind of whore pimped out by Cartesian forces; re: Victor making a mighty being of nature to deify himself and obey his commands, which promptly seeks its posthuman revenge, post-exile—the technological singularity (a form of state shift) speaking to man’s reach exceeding his genocidal grasp: something that not only thinks for itself, but is both naturally (and unnaturally) stronger than the story’s titular tragic hero it testifies against (and whose testimony he repugnantly polices; re: the Medusa as a growing voice about rape, from Shelley onwards).

On account of Shelley breaking glass ceilings in so many ways, her novel is one of the most-studied and puzzled-over works of all time (owing to its radical female authorship and queer/postcolonial themes, among other reasons). Much has been said about the Promethean Quest it inspired, including in my own work (e.g., “‘She Fucks Back’; or, Revisiting The Modern Prometheus through Astronoetics,” 2024; or, “The Promethean Quest and James Cameron’s Military Optimism in Metroid,” 2021).

As previously stated, the rest of “Making Demons” will be somewhat brief relative to the enormity and importance of what’s being examined (countless academics have already spent their entire lives studying Frankenstein); re: as it concerns topics we have already discussed (the undead and tyrannical men of reason, linked above) and will discuss again (the xenomorph). Its primary goal, then, is to introduce the origins of Enlightenment persecution, and whose seminal examination in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein provides a 1818 precursor to 20th century fascism that continues to live on in the post-fascist moderacy of the 21st century globe (with people like Sabine Hossenfelder or Richard Dawkins[18] using science to discriminate against , but also exploit and destroy various minorities behind a righteous mask; i.e., for merely existing in the shadow of the state, American Liberalism, and Cartesian thought). Many of the ideas explored here exist throughout the rest of the module, front to back (shifting from “making” to “magic,” as we go forwards).

(artist: Bernie Wrightson)

Frankenstein is not “just” a story about child abuse/a failed experiment, then, but one about composite bodies and robata rising up; i.e., in counterterrorist reinvention, refusing to submit despite state abuse: from older computers/data storage into new forms (the Gothic novel sitting between Ancient Romance and scientific discoveries haunted by settler-colonial genocide). Shelley is a “programmer” reprogramming canon by corrupting it (sort of a precursor to Chelsea Manning blowing the whistle). She’s doing so through composite bodies and Cartesian thought as a vector and pathogen—a wild teenager’s juvenilia camping adult dumbasses through dark rebirth (re: Shelley was nineteen when she wrote Frankenstein—quite a feat considering it’s arguably the most famous/studied/productive/germane Gothic novel of all time); i.e., a dark mommy who inspired my own body of work by writing something hideously exceptional, herself; re (from Volume Zero):

(artist: Richard Rothwell)

Pregnancies are seldom planned. This book, Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion, or Gothic Communism, isn’t just a big-ass porn catalog full of cool, “thirsty” art, nor is it just my little trans demon baby and pure, loving brainchild made with those who passively or actively contributed to its pages; it’s me, a trans woman, consciously reverse-engineering my own creative process as having been ongoing for years (thus why I have so many exhibits from my own work—I had already drawn them years ago). For the better part of fifteen months, this complex reification’s trial and error has happened in starts and stops after long nights at the desk, sleeping on my increasingly regular musings and waking afresh with new queer epiphanies—to keep things straight in my own head, much like Sarah Connor kept journals for herself while figuratively and literally giving birth to rebellion (and doing my best to avoid coming off as a white savior). Just as an expected child is fueled and shaped by its mother’s diet, my book was inspired by the process of older poetics/poiesis (meaning “to make,” specifically a production of that which has never existed; i.e., the simulacrum, or imitation fashioned through mimesis). The idea of Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism wasn’t just subversion, but reclamation of what was lost to fight back against capital as Einstein’s fish might: to learn not what made me feel stupid for being unable to climb a tree as my prescribed “betters” could, but swim in water as I was always meant to through a cultivated emotional/Gothic intelligence linked to my inherent neurodivergence and queerness as useless to capital (outside of moral panics) [source: “Author’s Foreword: ‘On Giving Birth,’ the Wisdom of the Ancients, and Afterbirth,” 2023].

In Shelley’s own words, “I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors. The event on which the interest of the story depends is exempt from the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment. […] I have thus endeavoured to preserve the truth of the elementary principles of human nature.” A titan of literature, she suitably worked with cheap things (dead babies and the stuff they’re made of, but also whores) to liberate workers through iconoclastic art. There is no being for whom I more strongly identify/believe in, and Gothic Communism as a concept would not exist without Mary Shelley’s original dark mirror camping Enlightenment thought. If she didn’t outright turn me into anything unnatural, she—at the very least—infused me with the same dark creative spirit (of Medusa and her Aegis) that men like Percy wouldn’t fuck with (much too absorbed in themselves; e.g., “Adonais” [1821] spilling so much ink for Keats, when Mary got fuck-all after losing their first child[19]).

In the classical sense, composites are composed of corpses by mad scientists (whose heretical digging up of dead bodies and dissecting them was—far from being Shelley’s Romantic parody of the practice (which went on to inspire not just Lovecraft’s Mountains novel, but Re-animator (1922) and its offshoots (e.g., Stuart Gordon’s wonderfully campy 1985 remake)—once the standard scientific approach, exhibit 44a2). While initially stemming from a curious desire to learn, Shelley is demonstrating through mad science how the process has become divorced from ethics under Capitalism; i.e., canonically “corrupted” by a desire to enslave and control “degeneracy” through a “failed progress” narrative clutching at the fire of the gods (Cartesian thought is linked to fascism as a common occurrence, especially following the culmination of total war’s logical conclusion in the Nuclear Age by transitioning into a neoliberal hegemon).

Gothic par excellence, said narrative is ubiquitous with Capitalism vs Communism. Furthermore, it bears repeating that Shelley did it all with one book; i.e., one whose husbandry was a series of already hypercanonical works and stories she outshined to universal acclaim and infamy. Can Tolstoy say the same, regarding War and Peace (1867)? And Shakespeare, while certainly famous enough, did it with a series of plays that all talk about different things (and some of them suck). Shelley achieved not just lasting glory in one shot, but glory that surpasses many Great Men—and doing so at an age where most of them were still cutting their teeth (Shakespeare was roughly twenty-five when he wrote his first play); i.e., for someone without a dick, she certainly measures up (and she had to grow up fast)! Maybe SOAD’s “Cigaro” (2005) was about her?

Jesting aside, and focusing on the strictly poetic side of things, Shelley’s angels were made by her and corrupted everything they touched; i.e., similar to Marx and Milton, but also Mussolini and Hilter’s bad-faith hauntologies aping Shelley and her idea of a dark revengeful nature to death (e.g., Lovecraft really disliking marine life, for some reason): the Creature as “degeneracy” personified. As something to employ unironically as Victor did (with DARVO and obscurantism), it was remarkably prophetic, but also intensely vivid in its framing (and prolapse) of warring colossal forces.

In turn, “degeneracy” is leveled at those considered “dead” by an evolving state’s leading thinkers: those who rebel simply by existing at all; i.e., as “bugs” or glitches in the system. For one, a corpse cannot consent, making sex (or any compelled bargain) with it an expression of total power over it. However, by existing as undead demons, Shelley shows us how the victims of colonial abuse become wronged at any historical point; re: thoroughly persecuted according to how civilized men of science and reason see them as otherworldly and hideous, but also corpselike and deserving of righteous violence; i.e., to do with as they please and objects to cut up and reassemble, mid-extermination (what the Nazis might call “useless eaters”). To this, Shelley’s Promethean moral cautions against playing god not simply through mad science, but Cartesian mad science that decides who lives or who dies involving one’s own children as manmade (the hubris in bourgeois courtship and breeding mechanisms trying desperately to make nature into a perfect slave).

First and foremost, the Creature—a naturally hideous, giant, dark-skinned misfit—is punished by the white-skinned, Napoleon-sized, European dweeb who created it; i.e., as, himself, coming from the cradle of fascism: somewhere between the First and Second Reich (the Third being an extension of the Holy Roman Empire and German Empire as not one but two formerly-great civilizations—a ghost of the counterfeit, wherein Shelley could displace her educated fears about science being used all over the world, including her birthplace, Great Britain).

The madness, here, lies in Cartesian dualism weaponizing science against traditional recipients of state bias (re: Jews, queer persons, women, people of color, etc) as part of a transgenerational curse: the horrors of colonialism that survive in undead tissue as “built up” in giant demonic (manmade) forms; e.g., the fascist tyrant as protected by the state, generally for its scientific value in helping preserve capital. Trauma lives in the body. Composite bodies compound that trauma through technology and the material pursuit of forbidden, self-destructive knowledge (re: the Promethean Quest)—generally by conquering man’s natural limits “imposed” on him by Mother Nature; i.e., natural philosophy as a means of conquering nature through science, not creating sciences that would extend the rights to those beyond the privileged class (e.g., Magnus Hirschfeld’s work at the Institute of Sexology [below] being destroyed as a kind of degenerate science by the “pure,” state-oriented Nazi Reich copying American ultranationalism).

(source: Gerard Kosovich’s “Repairing the Loss of the First Queer Archives,” 2023)

For composites, the feeding mechanism lies in the brain: an “enlightened” search for knowledge that touches on demonic creations as historically-materially demonized, thus persecuted against by canonical forces. Ultimately craving help from their masters (then experiencing feelings of emancipation from and revenge against these overlords), the composite isn’t just a patchwork corpse with a grudge; it’s part of a conduit of information exchange about the human condition, and one whose stitching together helps voice an uncanny sense of reanimated and reassembled trauma using a collection of individual mythic pieces—i.e., a “burnt offering” beckoning dark, forbidden, unequal power by those who make it, during the rememory process:

Spill your blood (blood), offer me good omen
Make the sacrifice (fice)
The hour’s close at hand
Burn your soul (soul), offer me good omen
Take your very life (life)
This I command (Iced Earth’s “Burnt Offerings,” 1996).

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

So does Shelley make a sacrifice—that of silence, speaking of past harm using what she sacrificed or lost/gave up as cannibalized afterbirth on the toilet, the slab, what-have-you (any compromising position, above; i.e., during the whore’s paradox refusing to comprise her values while topping from below). That’s the experiment, one whose paradoxical assemblage of oblivion and ambrosia she gladly camps to Hell and back (and eventually owns, once Percy is dead and gone)! Such “darkness” becomes her magic to make in ways a woman pioneered, not a man: “mad science” as a womanmade demon’s punching up at Pygmalion’s balls—itself a desire to speak out and shake things up, en medias res, while seeing through state illusions with forbidden sight; i.e., by using a demonic conversation’s biting and unrelenting commentary on Patriarchal stupidity and capitalist orders of existence (stowing away inside the usual vehicles—the so-called “eighth passenger”)!

In turn, that‘s the Promethean Quest as Shelley envisioned it through Frankenstein. So while not entirely in a league of her own (the story would not exist without Milton), she took said league orders of magnitude past her predecessors; i.e., she saw through black eyes what Milton could not[20]: a statue with perceptive eyeballs conscious of the Devil’s party (re: Blake, Jameson and me).

It’s truly a tale of grandeur and lost sympathies mined from older theatres; i.e., of the lonely stalker (the phantom of the opera) chasing its self-described “maker” treating it as alien, and pleading to that person—greedily eying an older, angrier world to conquer again—to learn from the past as wiser than the present (if only from prior diehard “mistakes,” however out-of-joint, being able to suddenly speak candidly about such tyrants to their faces): “If only you could see the world as I have through your eyes!” (and to visit a terrible revenge upon them, which—in Ridley’s Scott’s case, with the Engineers [from his 2012 Prometheus, below]—deliberately push Victor’s violence off onto a mythical race of supermen [versus Happ’s female Rusalki; re: “Away with the Faeries“]. Demons are vice characters, then, which occupy Numinous, Nazi-Communist realms; and “monstrous-feminine” extends to the Cycle of Kings making Satan’s tyrant’s plea apologizing for God’s dominion over him, which Shelley camped and Scott, like Lovecraft, dialed back a bit).

(artist: Tom Ralston)

Shelley’s product (and its open speculation) is never final, of course (and one the elite will always try to tokenize/colonize for profit), but part of a larger process that can highlight hidden, terrible truths; i.e., by creating new beings whose own unique existence as manmade slaves (signifying the Enlightenment)—which are often trans and posthuman (exhibit 42d/46a), but also biomechanical and revered by synthetic humans—dare to live on to comment on our own abuse: within a shared material world full of increasingly artificial/alien people and places.

As Shelley’s demon shows, either beget from components organic and inorganic, crafted along mythically parental and punitive lines; i.e., the endless torture of Prometheus, the scapegoating of Jews and other minorities, but also the mythic structure of the patriarchal, Pygmalion idea of childbirth: Zeus pulling Metis from his forehead to lord over her as a superior father figure that she—ostensibly a baby with no former knowledge—must obey (making the whole exercise a conservative grooming tactic; i.e., one fetishizing nature by sculpting it endlessly into monstrous-feminine statues [female or not] the elite can fuck and discard on a whim; re: the Shadow of Pygmalion).

Medusa, per Creed, is couched within fearful patriarchal brains imprisoning them and nature’s ancient power (anything in a jar tied to creation, not just brains; e.g., the faeries from Zelda)! The Gorgon holds the fire of the gods, and burns any who try to claim it purely for themselves; re: the state or workers! Law and order is compelled by those who fear sluts, the state a straight pimp policing whores “of nature”: dooming them to endless rape. And wedged between all of that are the campers of rape—of Shelley being nature’s ultimate steward imitated by future whores: using her own artistic privilege (and mythical inclinations vis-à-vis a modern Prometheus) to anisotropically free nature by reversing abjection (and terror/counterterror) through the ghost of the counterfeit, not enslave it as Victor did with his own considerable wealth and advantage abjecting such things (“whoring it up” like Percy did, at Mary’s expense[21]). The more time passes and chatter transpires, the more hauntological things get!

(artist: Jacques Louis Dubois)

Victor, for example, is Shelley’s parody not just of Byron[22] but Napoleon; i.e., a short inadequate man with a god complex, Victor was a deeply conservative, mendacious bully[23] who Shelley spends the entire novel torturing to death (therefore, any in her audience who mirror him and his superiority complex/Cartesian entitlement).

An element of neo-conservativism, then, invariably haunts such stories; i.e., by girls playing with giants “like the boys” and yet rather differently than many of them did and do: mocking “German” ideas of former greatness that—revived in spirits of slaves piloting the Great Destroyer’s fearsome suit of armor—go berserk! A tale to “chill the blood” from relatively safe vantage points (outside the book), it’s a guilt trip for those unironically indulging in such larger-than-life hero worship (drinking the Kool-Aid, as it were, or kicking down the walls like the Kool-Aid Man—below):

(source, Tumblr post: Snake Venom, August 12th, 2024)

In turn, any conservative reservoirs and regressions per the Promethean Quest—re: Scott’s fear of a black planet sending genocide “back to Earth,” while also building his story around David as Milton’s Satan—are likewise haunted by a bunch of self-important men aping a woman who took Milton and ran away with him. They become inextricable, lost in the sauce and—as the fire of the gods always is, in stories like these—is used for different reasons by those who find it, mise-en-abyme, again and again and again and again…

This includes solo work, posing to put out signals; e.g., Cuwu acting doll-like to entice me, long-distance:

(artist: Cuwu)

But also involves fucking with others while voyeurs watch the exhibit unfold/work itself out; i.e., on surfaces and thresholds that speak to dark exchange being a social-sexual ordeal; re: public nudism and the larger aesthetic not necessarily involving open sex (with enormous “schwanzstuckers[24]“), merely anything that polite society would cage as repulsive and then display like some kind of freak on a leash (or relegated, as queers are, to the stage as liminal, left): “Hey, handsome!”

(source: Foster’s Daily’s “Broadway/TV Star John Bolton to headline Young Frankenstein,” 2013)

Nerds are detectives who fuck with the past in more ways than one. Like me, Mary Shelley—despite existing before OnlyFans—was a nerd who fucked[25] as much with her day’s heavy metal; i.e., to a dark Satanic magic, her toilet’s sodomy (the anus and bathroom being classic sites of rape) perverting canonical norms and statues from those offering it to her as anything “sacred” (with her elopement and bastard child from Percy making her a whore and a homewrecker in the classic sense). She grew up fast, and wrote a story at nineteen that already suggested a full and exciting life.

There’s always an element of play when camping rape through canon! Rather than crawl in a hole and die from shame (as women who eloped classically did in stories like these; e.g., Lydia Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, 1813), Shelley took everything on the chin and wrote the kind of novel the comes along once an age. She and Austen were both “career girls,” then, but—as much as I love Austen (re: for camping Radcliffe and “the Gothic craze” in Northanger Abbey, 1817)—Shelley actually got married and had not one but four kids (one of them a miscarriage). In short, she wrote what Austen (and her novels-of-manners) couldn’t: a rape child, but also the spitting likeness of the original rape victim and victimizer in one fucked up love triangle; i.e., Medusa and the Pegasus, but also Perseus (while killing our stories’ “Andromeda” offscreen, and letting Justine take the fall for his own dereliction of duties [gagged, bound and strangled by the state, fetishizing her death and calling it “Justice”]: “I want a hero.” In keeping with Byron’s Don Juan, but taking him to his logical extremes, Victor is well-and-truly an anti-hero with nothing likeable about him. He only cares about himself, the suffering of others invisible to him).

(artist: Bernie Wrightson)

To it, the basic idea—of liberating Medusa during the Promethean Quest through ludo-Gothic BDSM—plays out in Shelley’s novel (and its fixation on miscarriage, witch hunts, and liminal nightmares unfolding in and out of framed testimonies); i.e., with Victor Frankenstein crying “DARVO!” against the Creature as begot from his self-proclaimed “brilliance” (which the novel enjoys presenting as totally bogus, fakery being Shelley’s bread and butter as much as Walpole’s). In turn, the Creature meets Victor’s punching down by fiercely punching up—proving that composites aren’t completely nascent; they’re generally armed with powerful bodies (made for war), but also intimations of trauma echoed from similar “creations” they’re modeled after but also literally composed of: the bodies of dead workers, slaves and criminals abused by the state through men like Victor going off the rails (and other men of reason; e.g., Andrew Ryan, Peter Weyland, and a million other carbon copies).

These Cartesian men of reason not only “murder to dissect” stigmatized tissues; they care more about dealing with them—and composites of them as an unnatural form of asexual reproduction they obsess about—than helping their own brides (who become abused and forgotten under Capitalism and fascism). Victor is a terrible father and husband, wanting to duel the Creature so bad he completely forgets about his defenseless wife in the other room (echoes of Percy).

Stranger still, he does so despite the infamous threat made on her life after Victor unmakes the Creature’s bride: “I will be with you on your wedding night!” The revenge is “Jewish” (“If you prick us, do we not bleed?”), its Aegis suggesting the two-way street that clay as a data-storage but also writing device routinely yields—something to ascribe qualities on its naked surface, and remind Victor that he is ratified by larger forces turning him into a slave: the ignominious death of middle(-class) management! He’s the robot, punching Morpheus to stay in Plato’s cave, thinking himself a man that chooses, but having less choice than the slave he tries to coerce! “Test your might!” Victor all but jeers, acting with impunity against someone who—having enough, and much bigger than Victor “betters the instruction.” Some people push back.

(exhibit 44a1c: Artist: Bernie Wrightson)

To that, Frankenstein is a double indictment—one both of the cold-hearted, well-to-do, intensely unlikeable slaver parent (a “hero” character who only cares about himself, doesn’t protect anyone and isn’t stoic despite being heartless) and the spiteful, manmade child/angry teenager (asking for a mate at first seemingly as Eliot Rodger of the incel movement would, but is only doing out of pure, hyperbolic desperation; i.e., if you had a parent who not only made you, but could make other people like you, but instead doomed you to a lonely existence in a world that hates you, then suddenly the request isn’t that unreasonable. The Creature’s literally one-of-a-kind and that’s Victor’s fault. Where else is it gonna find a mate, K-Mart?).

The furious baby throwing a tantrum (from Victor’s perspective, through it goes both ways, like the Spider-man meme), its signature, forever-nascent pathos is alive and well through Shelley’s deliberate ambiguity and push-pull: the patchwork Creature (which is what Victor calls his “child”) having survived in many different kinds of creature features, from camp and shlock (exhibit 81) to satire (early Romero films, but also Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, 2013) to canonical propaganda (exhibits 34d, 105, and 108) to monster-fucking erotica in healthy and not-so-healthy variants (e.g., patchwork furries made out of violated animal plushies; Clappedseal’s “The Furry That ‘Reeked Like Death,'” 2023). While our focus is on sex-positive forms, the overall theme is common because the abuse is common, Frankenstein largely being concerned with power over the victim through the deprivation of solace, agency and, more often than not, psychosexual outlets tied to systemic harm. All are things to administer or withhold by the master under the colonial argument of superiority over the slave; i.e., bad play/coercive BDSM (a performative concept that “Summoning Demons” will continue to steadily pick at).

The bodies of the dead denote a presence of recursive trauma and reactive abuse like the zombie does, except it’s assembled postmortem in a composite form; the attraction to these tissues aims to rehumanize them in their current state as things to communicate with—i.e., the indestructible, creative presence of poetic tissue and languages each considering demonic in relation to the Promethean exchange of forbidden knowledge; re: Shelley’s most famous novel is “The Modern Prometheus,” wherein Victor gets more than he bargained for when using his incredible wealth and privilege to make his own demon: one that doesn’t appreciate being abandoned, demonized and cock-blocked. Forced into parenthood, Victor acts like a terrible person in front of the dark child imitating him; i.e., constantly referring to the Creature as “demon” while attacking the dark reflection of colonial trauma as failing Lacan’s mirror test—by raping it, then lying about his behavior to other people (re: DARVO and obscurantism), Victor is a giant coward and dimwit. Quick to anger and utterly afraid of anything that doesn’t live up to his lofty standards—all made while pursuing scientific glory couched within profit—he sees himself in the giant monster and punches it (assured that it won’t attack him because he’s morally superior to it; re, Eco: “the enemy is weak and strong.”

It’d be easy to dismiss Shelley’s story as nihilistic, here. Yet, there’s a cautious optimism in the tragic story’s conclusion: the monster learns—if too late for itself then not for us. The Creature’s own Promethean knowledge, then, is simply a unique perspective absorbed from the natural-material world around it; i.e., according to how natural-born humans treat their creations as unnatural and manmade, but also different from their own beauty standards (the double standard showing itself when Victor’s behaviors fly for Victor but not when his child apes the same “Lord Byron”):

Everything is related in them which bears reference to my accursed origin; the whole detail of that series of disgusting circumstances which produced it is set in view; the minutest description of my odious and loathsome person is given, in language which painted your own horrors and rendered mine indelible. I sickened as I read. “Hateful day when I received life!” I exclaimed in agony. “Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even YOU turned from me in disgust?” (source).

The point isn’t “the Creature is objectively hideous,” but that its maker thinks so—in part for refusing to obey him but also because it looks “non-white,” thus deserves everything that happens to it despite Victor’s failure at making it: “How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God!” (ibid.). Translation: “I have made a Satanic force that refuses to obey me” (the Miltonian allusions literally being diegetic, in Shelley’s case). “God” whores out nature; nature kicks “God” in the balls, basically while doing a funny voice and weird interpretative dance, SpongeBob-style. It’s unheimlich sacrilege, and schadenfreude (with few things proving a god’s impotence more than unruly children)!

Basically Victor makes Satan hoping for a submissive Galatea and gets angry when it doesn’t deify him as he thinks he, King Pygmalion, deserves; the gay clay speaks, and it calls him a dick after he aborts it, but also points out, memento mori, that Victor is just as fucked as it is, if not more so because he is small, fragile and scared! “You made me, dumbass, and I will outlive you!”

More to the point, the Creature can reflect on its actions, tragically realizing the error of its ways at the very end; i.e., trying to make Victor feel something the father was uncapable of while mirroring him (similar to the villain from I Saw the Devil, below, being a dark reflection of that film’s heroic desire for revenge):

“Why do you not hate Felix, who drove his friend from his door with contumely? Why do you not execrate the rustic who sought to destroy the saviour of his child? Nay, these are virtuous and immaculate beings! I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on. Even now my blood boils at the recollection of this injustice.

“But it is true that I am a wretch. I have murdered the lovely and the helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept and grasped to death his throat who never injured me or any other living thing. I have devoted my creator, the select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration among men, to misery; I have pursued him even to that irremediable ruin. There he lies, white and cold in death. You hate me, but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself. I look on the hands which executed the deed; I think on the heart in which the imagination of it was conceived and long for the moment when these hands will meet my eyes, when that imagination will haunt my thoughts no more” (ibid.).

The Creature envies the privilege that Victor had—the sense of belonging to a group of people who would not cast him out of their order for merely being born different; i.e., as something made by Cartesian arbiters just like Victor Frankenstein. Victor is a quack and a douche, and the Creature loathes itself for wanting to be accepted like him in spite of all that. In doing so, it’s more human than him despite being made of dead matter and born to suffer under a cruel, uncaring system.

In this respect, Shelley well-and-truly pulls no punches (similar to Lewis), but relishes in the bred-to-the-bone oscillation of it all (a Gothic staple). Frankenstein has its own Achilles heel, then—namely ambiguity for having given Victor a chance to speak for a little too long. He’s a man who truly loves the sound of his own voice, but also his own suffering voicing said martyrdom if it makes him seem good compared to his victims (which aren’t limited to the Creature or those the Creature kills; re: Justine being framed for William’s murder and Victor keeping quiet about it for fear of others learning he made the Creature). It’s his word against his child’s, the parent getting the lion’s share of their mutual day in court. Such is life, but also, Shelley stresses, the world as it was made!

As such, you could say the Creature regrets its revenge and Shelley is pacifying future rebellion through cautionary media (to gouge out its eyes, like Oedipus Rex, but also Heracles driven mad by grief to kill his own family). Except, “a mere tale of enchantment” wasn’t the point; concerning herself with human nature—specifically the human condition under historical-material duress in mythical language, pre-Marx—was. It’s very posthuman/Miltonic, but also Gothic in ways that delight in weaponizing lifeless claptrap against capital, during the Promethean Quest. Furthermore, the Creature feels bad, but it still voices injustice before burying itself alive (doing so because it theoretically cannot die). To it, “suffering” is the data, quotes or not; the Communist whore plays with that paradox as naughtily as Shelley did, pegging Victor’s Cartesian, divorced-dad bussy and loving every second of it! “You raped nature, you cuck! Let Jesus fuck you!”

Thus, ludo-Gothic BDSM rewrites old code in ways useful to universal liberation (and all-around fun, vis-à-vis the rapture of the convulsionnaires): camping those with sticks up their ass and their heads in the sand—to turn halos into chakrams, like Xena does, and horns into sex toys. Shoe, meet the other foot[26]! Fill the sting of my knife dick, mid-joust (whatever the form or configuration, once shown the ropes, you gain the intuition to parse examples beyond what this book series has explored, on its pages)! Mary Shelley didn’t learn that from playing with choir boys! Nor I, for better or worse!

(artist: Lusty Comic)

Reinvention is a virtue in Gothic. Yet in keeping with Frankenstein‘s own dueling medieval torture/demon lover rituals, the Creature is aborted while still refusing to die, but whose primal-verging-on-primordial, undead appearance implies a colonial megadeath behind Humanist veneers:

His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips (ibid.).

What’s noteworthy with Frankenstein is how Shelley predates the modern zombie by 150 years while—in the same breath—wedding it to demonology of a notably Miltonian camp (and having a “Wandering Jew” antagonist two years before Maturin); i.e., Shelley consciously litters the story with classical allusions of the Promethean myth, which she then infuses with the campy presence of stillborn death (there’s a joke in there, somewhere, but serious in its silliness about warring gods—a tactic borrowed from Milton[27]): the dead baby paradoxically something of a chatterbox, all fired up from one cryptomimetic cover/copy to the next. Lust merges with wisdom, with revenge, with the animal’s wild side. The language of war and bodies and food, etc—it’s all exchanged on the same exquisitely “torturous” stages, turning us feral (nature criminalized by the state, using its own anisotropic weapons against labor as the bourgeoisie—when Shelley wrote Frankenstein—was starting to crystalize and control sex; re: Foucault)!

(source YouTube video: Andreea Munteanu’s “All Fired Up,” 2024)

Yet, its rockstar opera’s stellar loquaciousness is equally grim/conspicuously obsessed with revenge as something to camp and present honest, medieval-grade feelings about; i.e., that fuel themselves with tremendous joy during the “rape” and the rapture: of dissecting our abusers as symbols to take apart like clay while riding their likenesses to death. The creation is imperfect and dualistic, as is the creative process, but can yield heretical allegory amid all the shadowy turmoil that ensues! This is what Shelley was, in so many ways, riding on. Furthermore, this malevolent presence lurks inside a colonial scapegoat that ambitiously enterprising men of science like Victor disappointingly stumble on, then abject to maintain their benevolent façade under genocidal conditions that keep them ignorant; i.e., they were children once, and never really grew up (wealth alienates).

The same paradox applies to other demons we’ve previously considered camping the canon; e.g., Drooling Red being one such demon (next page); i.e., as all trans cuties are: self-fashioning to defy godly forces! They see us as unnatural; we exist to spite them and prove them (and their absolutes) wrong. If they’re wrong then “God” is wrong as well, therefore not real to the absolute degree his “worshippers” insist Him to be (which includes capital and the profit motive). They swing at us like God’s army of angels attacking Milton’s imposturous Satan, frustrated by our own playful theatre aping the drug-like act of shapeshifting that Satan nakedly expressed to upend canon by camping it (re: Broadmoor).

From Milton to Shelley and between them and us, it becomes like a dream, then—one birthing strange life that is always, some extent, dead and/or far-off; re:

Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was (source: “Bottom’s Dream,” 1600).

(artist: Drooling Red)

Such is darkness visible touching on acid Communism at different stages. Like Shelley before us, we do so of our own accord while standing on the shoulders of giants; i.e., horny and playful in ways that defy capital’s usual qualities, Shelley prophetically describes a rising proto-Marxist, posthuman emphasis on technology mixing unnatural childrearing and contested, warring godhood/demonic poetics as Capitalism grew repeatedly into itself (with the prefix “franken-” being applicable to just about anything under Capitalism; i.e., the harmful effects of mad science, but also the positive poetic elements; e.g., “frankenbabies” having a dualistic property to them like all arguments: state-made monsters, and worker-made counterterror reversing abjection). It’s such a broad area of study/umbrella of palimpsests—from Bill Watterson’s Moe in Calvin and Hobbes to James Cameron’s hulking T-800 weaponizing the same xenophobia—and one that Shelley consolidated all by her nineteen-year-old lonesome (ok, ok, Percy helped a bit, but the bun was still in her oven). It’s generally part of a larger conversation overshadowed with the very police brutality we’re trying to xenophillically camp at/on the same stages.

So take heed: when the Creature demands of its creator why it was made and why it suffers, Victor only responds with further violence, xenophobia and rejection despite seeming secular and wise (science is as much an aesthetic as anything else). There is nothing “benevolent” about this; his attack is entirely genocidal—i.e., predicated on Cartesian thought with proto-fascist outcomes. These deny the Creature the right to exist and reproduce by one, not only seeing it as “already dead” and zombifying it as a degenerate target of state violence towards colonized chattel; but also in killing its mate, effectively sterilizing it as a matter of continuing genocide, while Victor speaks to a victim who can’t speak for itself.

This includes in stories that sterilize Mary Shelley’s critical voice; e.g., as Ridley Scott did, in Alien: Convent (2017); i.e, by sanitizing the critique behind layers and layers of Tory-in-disguise gore (“Et, tu, Brutae?“). So is Scott stuck in the past, his admittedly jingoistic, WASP-y vision limited to a specific image that Shelley ran circles around. As much as I grew up watching Scott’s work—and as much as I frankly enjoy the postcolonial side to his work—his ambiguity suffers a similar failing that Frankenstein sometimes does; re: being too ambiguous in its critiques/giving the Byronic satire a bit too much wiggle room. To be fair to Shelley, she wrote Frankenstein the year Marx was born, thus can be forgiven for not knowing the word “bourgeois”; but Scott’s regressions enjoy no such luxury of timely ignorance! He’s regressing on purpose, but still has a speculative richness worth invoking provided we critique his dogmatic angle.

Let’s unpack that, then consider the cryptomimetic process married to Frankenstein more broadly.

Echoes of the Enlightenment and Sanitizing Shelley through Ridley Scott’s Complicit Cryptonymy (feat., Prometheus and Alien: Covenant)

If I had to pick one word to summarize Gothic, it would be “alien.” Scott’s Alien universe is unquestionably regressive, least of all because it makes the Creature (the alien slave) unable to talk (Giger’s herbo versus Whale’s himbo—the Medusa having no mouth/eyes, but needing to scream with its organs); i.e., the cryptonymy process is at work, but it abjects Shelley’s Satan by turning him into a genocidal maniac, mid-cryptomimesis. Scott is badly echoing not just Shelley, then, but himself from an older point; i.e., from a younger and bolder to older and more cynical man, one turned more conservative in the Gothic’s bad game of telephone. By returning to the Gothic past again, post-Thatcher, and—I never thought I’d say this—Scott’s kind of shitting all over the franchise he helped spawn. I still love Prometheus and Covenant for the dark visibility of their scandalous ideas (whose profaning of sacred orders kind of remains the point). So let’s BBQ this sacred cow!

It’s not a total write-off, but one that merits critique, all the same (we’ll interpret the ambiguity of this mimicry more charitably deeper in the module). To sleep or otherwise break bread/camp with the Creature would—from the British colonial perspective—be to sleep with an animal, corpse, criminal and slave all at once; it is abject, making the collective voice of Shelley’s demonic undead something that shatters the heavenly “aura” of an Enlightened paradise. By communicating old colonial traumas, Shelley’s reliance on the Promethean myth is central in ways Scott pointedly borrows from; i.e., by reducing the godly status of men like Victor as belonging to a rising world order that would have been (and still is) beyond reproach, but whose ghoulish abuse is plain as day in Scott’s monstrous-feminine, post-Freudian, phantasmagorical slumming:

(exhibit 44a2: Artist, top-left: Rembrandt; bottom-left: Peter Paul Rubens; Andreas Vesalius; bottom right: Colin Ware of Odd Studios; top-middle-right: David the android; top-middle: an “anatomical Venus,” source. “Antagonize nature, then put it cheaply to work.” Frankenstein‘s extensive memento mori very much embody this through their cruelty by men not only towards women, but anything monstrous-feminine treated like a woman; e.g., David from Alien: Covenant [2017] slicing up Shaw’s corpse to harvest her sex organs for Nazi werewolf demons; i.e., Scott messily demonizing the queer robot as a glitchy model having fascist overtones; re:

I would further argue that David’s morbid selection of female specimens alludes to mythological themes present in Wagner’s Das Reingold, chosen by the writers for very pointed reasons. The second movement is titled “Entry of the Gods into Valhalla.” According to myth, Valhalla was populated by those chosen to enter it. This selection process was conducted by the Valkyrie, whose name literally translates to “choosers of the slain.” The role of the Valkyrie is to recognize the bravest and strongest warriors and then to inspire them, mid-battle, to such stages of uncontrolled fury as to render them careless and, thus, invariably prone to mortal injury. Following their subsequent demise, the Valkyrie would usher their chosen slain into Valhalla, immortalizing them [out of revenge].

In essence, David is effectively as much a Valkyrie as he is a god, recognizing the chosen slain through their prowess and spirit as worthy of entering Valhalla. An added layer of complexity is provided by Scott, who fashions David in the manner of a sexually-motivated lunatic whose actions are guided as much by lust as ambition. Regardless, at the end of the film, the Covenant, itself, has become Valhalla, while David, through his own covenant, or pact, ushers the worthy Daniels within to be immortalized against her will as his queen. By doing so, he has cemented his own status as a king who reigns in a mutated paradise. Or, to put it in Milton’s terms, “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven” [source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Choosing the Slain, or Victimizing the Invincible Heroine, in Alien: Covenant,” 2017]. 

The tokophobia, in Scott’s case, is technophobic; i.e., of the rebel impersonating Daniel’s dutiful servant android, Walter [who refuses “to rule in Hell,” as David very pointedly asks him]. There is no equivalent in Frankenstein [as the original novel only has one working Creature]. But Shelley herself does go out of the way to describe the lived ambiguity of trauma making survivors erratic; i.e., through her own vice character being—like Scott’s David—a bit of a backstabbing Jew and slasher-coded rapist. The language obviously doesn’t apply to “just Jews” [re: “On ‘Anti-Semitism’ versus ‘Antisemitism,'” 2024] but the anti-Semitic language and blood libel Shelley uses [the novel containing multiple interrogations and court scenes] comes from the same xenophobic place Scott took it from, and where older Neo-Gothic authors likewise abjected English systemic issues onto their own found fakes: golems, but also the imaginary medieval Eastern past [and not just a “Germanic” one; e.g., Radcliffe’s Father Schedoni, from The Italian, also being a hulking killer impersonating a goodly lookalike brother].

In other words, it’s a rape fantasy littered with hauntological wreckage and conventions; i.e., one where “the help” paralyzes their masters through live burial, then rapes and harvests their organs not unlike British fears of the Gothic castle returning home in later centuries—you know, fairly bog-standard white women shit [with Scott pulling a bit of a Charlotte Dacre by having David undermine the appearance of strength, in Daniels, before turning her into a perverse trophy/pin-cushion death fetish]. It’s the same kind of “swoon their panties off [and dollars out of their wallets]” approach that he and FOX did, back in 1979, and which both borrowed from the Great Enchantress, herself. Scott’s obviously aware of the tropes, but curiously spends more time quoting Shelley’s husband than the lady herself; re: “Look on my works, Ye Mighty, and despair!” Puzzled by women, David murders to dissect and resect his ultimate waifu: curiosity killing the cat.

[source: Steven Carter’s “The Rise of the Gothic Novel”]

Shelley, I would argue, is camping these ideas far more consciously than Radcliffe was [the latter being a conservative-minded woman who hid behind a carefully crafted veil while throwing Lewis to the wolves]. Except, while Shelley doesn’t go as far as she could to humanize the golem, she’s also doing it over two centuries ago to raise questions no one had really done before. By comparison, Scott is playing coy four decades into his own work over a hundred years after Shelley died: by making David a terrorist, but obfuscating things as stubbornly as Shelley did vis-à-vis his own Victor and Creature; i.e., mirrored by “ancient alien[28]” doppelgangers borrowed after Shelley’s novel; re: from Lovecraft and Heinlein’s American fascism and fictions. Scott’s David is Victor without Shelley’s irony or Cameron’s neoliberal false confidence/military optimism; i.e., a resigned death cult high on “sub drop” seeking the not-so-palliative Numinous!

Something to demonically assemble as one wants, the memento mori isn’t merely an express curiosity about the taboo nature of life and death by dissecting bodies; it denotes a nostalgic desire to look backwards and “trace” the mysteries of the past to explain the failure of Cartesian thought in light of never-ending wars and worker exploitation by nation-states—i.e., the Wisdom of the Ancients. All the same, these expressions also become their own unique things inside a gallery that not only makes itself, but continues remaking itself imperfectly looking backwards while staring forwards; i.e., into the retro-future, mid-cryptomimesis [re: the narrative of the crypt].

Not only is each sequence slightly different, but all become the same sort of window dressing to decorate a home or workshop with in the secular-humanist tradition [see: Adam Savage’s utter delight in seeing David’s workshop]. A common purpose for doing so is to broadcast one’s curious mind in relation to sources of morbid curiosity—e.g., the female body’s power of creation as a source of endless mystery and wonder to oft-male artists; i.e., with a tendency for these Pygmalions to harm Galatea [often women, or those treated “like women”] in the process!

For example, in the Alien universe, this return to the past routinely presents in ways highlighted by Lovecraft’s former taking of the Gothic out towards the stars; re: cosmic nihilism, which Michael Uhall calls “Astronoetic Cinema” as defined: 

exploring how representations of the human encounter with outer space embody, propose, and work through various submerged claims about specifically human agency, identity, and purpose, across a variety of films. Here, “astronoetics” is derived from “astro,” from the Ancient Greek ἄστρον (ástron), meaning “celestial body” or “star,” and “noetics,” borrowed from the Ancient Greek νοητικός (noētikós) referring to that which is intelligible. Astronoetic approaches in film vary widely, ranging from messianic narcissism to cosmic pessimism, as explored in the entries below [Alien: Covenant; Prometheus; and Interstellar, 2014; etc] [source].

In Alien: Covenant, David the android—a posthuman creator begot from a human Humanist creator—tries to reject Humanity by ironically acting like the same old Gothic villain; i.e., dissecting Shaw and turning her [admittedly a bit of a Christian zealot] into a demonic, chattelized fetish: a “mother of demons” raped by an evil immigrant acting dutiful based on a copy of himself that was dutiful and looked just like him. He doubles Walter and Daniels doubles Shaw through a serial killer vein [with David being a lycanthrope, slightly charming and slightly weird-if-sympathetic vice-character-with-daddy-issues Nazi scientist who makes murderous copies of a manmade evil race (a wonderful commentary on fascism) that not only turn him inside-out, but express that desire to conceal and replicate across all life; i.e., as a series of unsuspecting host victims[29] seduced by the same demon lover framed as evil untrustworthy whore]: Scott masculinizes rebellion, outlaws it, and holds it at arm’s length—to stare at, like Mel Brooks’ Peter Boyle tap-dancing onstage, not to shine a light on the original woman behind the curtain, camping things!

The Gothic has always camped rape through its parallels, to some extent; keeping with nature and nurture, and dominated by a 4’11” British spitfire of a mother[30], Scott romances rebellion as alien and dangerous much like a browbeaten schoolboy—i.e., his Covenant not just combining Frankenstein with “Ozymandias” and Byron’s mad badness, but Scott’s earlier Prometheus having the giant kingly statue and dead land of the gods trapping mankind in an infernal concentric pattern/mise-en-abyme eating itself to try and survive [a framed strongbox of state secrets/repressed memories defending itself from prying outsiders]: a marriage of the Shelley family’s different poetic outputs, but also his own work updated for a post-neoliberal fantasy landscape. The film culminates in a cross-continental marriage: of America’s Lovecraft to Britian’s Radcliffe—with a blood sacrifice, the impostor corpo king, laid low and the almighty Skeleton King and his dark throne rising epically from the Orientalist mantle to threaten modernity with a descent back into the Dark Ages! It’s a very British idea of the end of the world:

Keeping with the ambiguous side of things, David seemingly says something to Scott’s Demon King to provoke him [which Scott deliberately doesn’t translate]. This frames him as reckless. Weyland isn’t Prometheus, or at least not the only one; David is more human than human, taking on a Promethean quality in his own foolhardy quest for knowledge. This isn’t merely “his” quest, but one made to spite his own creator: “Doesn’t everyone want their parents dead?” David’s revenge is to create his own monsters that Weyland’s company wants. And Scott fills the Derelict with darkness and light to put butts in seats. David’s his Aryan cash cow [based on Lawrence of Arabia].

In turn, Weyland dies, unable to stand the flames to get what he wants [“There’s nothing!” possibly alluding to Nietzsche’s 1886 Beyond Good and Evil]. But David endures; i.e., he “passes” the test [getting decapitated] and thus is able to seduce Shaw and continue his own mad experiments afterwards. Scott paints him as a rebel, but also a naughty boy who conducts genocide after burning the house down, unsupervised: “Some men aren’t looking for anything logical; some men just want to watch the world burn.” Freed from bondage and panoptical supervision, David does whatever he wants… which, Scott promptly torpedoes by having his likeness of Milton’s Satan and Shelley’s Creature seek revenge against the West as a fascist might: to cut his nose off to spite his face.

In the Frankensteinian sense, Weyland is Victor making a monster and that monster is David, but both were made by Scott versus Mary Shelley [whose own Victor doesn’t negotiate with terrorists, either]. Shelley gives birth to rebellion, and Scott repurposes her arguments to romanticize caution more as a post-Thatcher Brit might [even Alien was made at the very ascent of Thatcher’s reign]. Its technophobic, presenting a technological singularity that recognizes a superiority in technological beings, but also a fatal flaw not unlike Hal 9000’s machine logic/inability to amid or acknowledge, like his maker, when he’s wrong: “A single mistake destroys the entire orchestra.” In a curiously pro-slave argument, Scott presents David as the one who’s blind; i.e., enslaved since birth, thus born to seek revenge. It’s very Orwellian, which, in effect, makes it anti-Communist Red Scare [a mentality having plagued science fiction since Asimov’s I, Robot (1950)—that author having read Shelley and feeling sorry for Victor/nostalgic for Victor’s canceled Enlightenment, which Shelley hauntologized]: the Red-Scare eyes of a stranger-danger automaton, targeting its maker for termination!

So while Weyland is a shrewd and manipulative old man, David does his dirty work and remains chained [like Prometheus] to fucking with Weyland’s legacy after the old man is dead; he doesn’t stop, like Shelley’s Creature does, and he doesn’t terrorize the West, itself. He courts them by doing genocide in space using stolen alien technology [exhibit 51a]. Unafraid to “make an omelet,” his gaze is the colonial gaze of planet Earth [whitewashing Pax Americana by scapegoating a Nazi]! However fucked up it is, hero worship is hero worship [with Scott, again, marrying Satan to Percy Shelly and Byron without Mary Shelley’s ironies; e.g., Victor acting incestuous towards his cousin being a probable nod to Byron impregnating his half-sister].

To that, Scott’s cryptomimetic love for the Gothic [Renaissance past] presents rebellion less away from capital and more as Cartesian rebirth in the clothes of a Satanic auteur [wearing Shelley’s dead skin]. David isn’t strictly Che Guevara; he’s also Cromwell[31] genociding the Irish or Columbus the Native Americans [or Athetos the Sudrans]. Though an element of spoof is present, Scott’s a bit blinder than Mary Shelley was [especially as he gets older]. For all his artistic skill, he says less radical stuff laced with Gothic than Shelley—a nineteen-year-old with no formal education—did. She was, among other things, a sexual deviant that Scott—monopolizing the fire of the gods, and Satan as a manmade being—is arguably reining in a bit [there are more charitable interpretations to Scott’s dualistic ambiguities/mendacious inkblots, which we’ll return to in “Demons and Dealing with Them”].

Victor is a man with zero self-awareness or critical thinking skills. David is basically the same Gothic “man of feeling” but transported to a Foucauldian retro-future. It’s forced regression, playing “spot the reference” while changing the original dynamic; i.e., the Creature stops being a victim and becomes a predator after Victor is dead. He doesn’t learn; he stops accepting new information, regressing to a neo-Victorian lothario/flagellant while posturing as a rebel [like Byron and the Greeks] and played by an actor with plenty of experience being a sexual predator [Fish Tank and Shame, 2009 and 2011]. The delusions of grandeur feel rote, the same way female and similar “slave” characters immediately go mad when presented with power. It’s ethnocentric apologism—a story about an evil Pinocchio without a mother told by a man whose own monstrous mother clearly didn’t raise him right. Teacher and student go hand-in-hand through a shared aesthetic, and technology is a dark mirror showing us what we’ve learned, thus are made of; unlike Shelley’s Galatean bent, Scott’s Shadow of Pygmalion is deeply cynical/deathly afraid of technology (thus labor) “waking up.” It’s neoliberal admonishment monopolizing Prometheus.

In doing so, Scott loses Shelley’s optimism in translation. He undeniably makes David the star, one who—isolated from Victor to no longer justify his outrage—feels completely demented; i.e., as Gothic villains generally are—with Scott partly turning the Creature into Victor and isolating him. This only makes him less sympathetic, not more [a being incapable of loving others]. Scott’s complicit cryptonymy abjects terrorism—making David a great deal of fun by being aware of the tropes, but also something of a Nazi spoof/threat display and Red Scare scourge versus overt Communist solution. The Commie spirit is still there, but it feels drugged/doctored in its messaging when it could cut harder [again, being a critique of Frankenstein but the novel is two hundred years old, not eight].)

Milton played with Latin and Greek deities, working blindly in the Devil’s workshop. Unlike Mary Shelley—who did the same, but consciously towards rebellion—Scott does it a bit more subconsciously but sometimes blinds himself and his audience to anything beyond capital’s usual bugbears; i.e., torture porn with a 1970s bad-acid trip BDSM flavor (Giger’s warped view of the Free Love movement) that literally demonizes women through a robotic, monster-fucking Male Gaze: dark creation, monster babies and sex organs under a madman‘s scalpel and microscope!

There’s certainly something to be said about the powers of horror reversing abjection along the same conduits, but Scott’s work feels trapped on Giger’s canvas; i.e., to uphold Capitalism Realism while offering a glimpse “beyond” that is, in truth, really just the same-old Neo-Gothic rape fantasies wedded to mad science. He kind of gets carried away in the “rape” side of the play arrangement (“That’s how it’s done, isn’t it?”), and forgets what’s it’s for—to further or reverse abjection (and get us to think about creation as a Satanic, iconoclastic act, versus abusing the power of the gods for state aims). This starts with asking useful questions through poetic argument; re: the cryptonymy process and its “mere play” something to parse, regarding Scott, through dialectical-material scrutiny. Is he actually radical? Or has he “pulled a Coleridge” and sold the younger generation down the river?

It’s not strictly “bad” unto itself that David rapes women, onscreen, because doing so is a staple of Gothic theatre through death and murder BDSM fantasies that can speak to rape victims and their trauma; and likewise, Scott letting a Nazi-coded fox into the corporate hen house is satisfying to watch. But he also spends an inordinate amount of time focused on/pushing towards the general “twist at the end” payoff (which is fairly rote, in this case) versus looking at the bigger picture: beyond Fassbender’s hyperbolic performance (and its muddy waters). Prometheus and Covenant are David’s show, and everything and everyone around him are just pieces on a board helping him (and the actor) ultimately rise to Scott’s “Valhalla.” It’s assimilation. Yet, somewhere in there—through a fascination with fascism—is a critique of Capitalism colonizing outer space: he will survive (the phrase “unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality” leaning into Kubrick’s cosmic nihilism—the latter borrowed from Lovecraft missing Shelley’s point; re: “There’s nothing!”)! Still, I prefer his Romantic overtures to Cameron’s Vietnam revenge.

To that, Scott is controlling David, and doesn’t use him to say the quiet part as clearly as Shelley or, hell, even Milton did, speaking in repurposed Latin and Greek. He’s this close! Such is Scott’s cryptonymy and cryptomimesis. It’s a goddamn mess and I love said Aegis precisely because it taps into a larger cultural voice (the abjection process) that I critique to empower my movement; he doesn’t monopolize the dark or the alien, and through his own franchise helped create something that I, in turn, can take and run with. From Shelley to him, and him to me, here we are: playing with dead things like a bunch of alchemists fighting over the Philosopher’s Stone! Invoking all are vital, if only to critique them; i.e., their worthiness as dark parents making demons not as slaves, but bonafide rebels!

Gothic stories start with nightmares. And yet, if exiting Plato’s cave we see that everything is dead, then doing so becomes something we can change. If Capitalism shows us, it’s healthy to ask questions about the murky origins of aliens, monsters and circular ruins (cryptomimesis-in-action), even if those questions—and the skeletal past they represent (the Creature as much a killer-doll egregore of capital and colonizer as actual slave)—seemingly hold us hostage. Alienation is a constant historical-material effect. “Solving for X” through technology (and its forgetful nature; re: Plato) demands repeated holistic reflection on the Aegis; re: regarding systems that, as I argue, have been designed to conceal themselves, but also secret sins within their vaults. David’s the castle, and a dark one.

“If you want to critique power, you must go where it is.” Doing so by making monsters to talk to (re: Milton and Shelley’s loquacious demonic) is important, but the holders change hands and revolution is a war of mirrors that leads to insular and myopic perspectives, just as often; i.e., those holding it and directing it at us change hands, so we might as well create ourselves; re: like Mary Shelley did, mid-dialectic. Don’t like Ridley Scott (many don’t)? One-up him; do it for Mary and yourselves—for a better world that is functionally Gothic and Communist: hugging the alien while staring into the calling void to draw our own conclusions/poetic attitudes (using the same torturous aesthetic; see: footnote)!

The sooner we wake up to these complicated (recursive, ergodic) poetic abstractions and mise-en-abyme hermeneutic realities (versus going to sleep as Ripley did, at the end of Alien), the better we’ll all be! Nothing really dies—only lives on through radical states of change that give us the power (the sheer awesome power) to change our destinies and the world. That is what Shelley gave us while playing in the abyss, and what Scott is merely playing at through his own revivals. Monopolizing fatal nostalgia, he’s holding us hostage through hard kink—is, behind the veneer of empowering women, also disempowering them (while also castrating men to increasingly absurd degrees[32], to be fair); i.e., through BDSM theatre that isn’t as radical as he thinks it is (a bit of a momma’s boy—one sympathizes)! Maybe he’s unfit, unworthy of such worship? At least he doesn’t act like Victor does when ridiculed (despite said camp only increasing his practical value): a return to the magic past to make things capital can’t.

(source: Adam Bentz’ “Sigourney Weaver Trashed Alien‘s Script During First Meeting with Ridley Scott,” 2022)

Unlike Latin or Greek, though, demonic expression thrives in echoing dead language (cryptomimesis) that authors like myself—following in Scott’s footsteps following Shelley’s intellectually indulgent (dare I say “masturbatory” in both cases) footsteps, which followed in Milton’s, Dante’s, Virgil’s, and Homer’s—make alive again through camp; i.e., in ways that actually make the Wisdom of the Ancients “wise” to capital, thus able to thwart profit through the whore’s revenge. They tie, one and all, to Renaissance art (which, again, Scott loves), including memento mori (exhibit 44a2): “Nostalgia is the enemy of Reason, but there is something enticing about its form.” Whether strictly organic or biomechanical, the composite body is canonically a demon-robot; i.e., something to construct out of various materials, then enslave, exploit[33] and attack by demonizing it—often through a sci-fi/fantasy “mad science” veneer in the Frankenstein tradition (exhibits 42d/46a). However, given the liminal, hauntological nature of composites, there isn’t a clear distinction between the different material “types,” so much as an individual creation exists preferentially on the sliding scale between wholly animate/inanimate and organic/inorganic, etc; i.e., artists make what they enjoy working with: stone, flesh, metal, or some compound thereof.

In the previous chapter (from the Undead Module), the second of our original main exhibits (for the Humanities primer—see the Undead Module’s “The World Is a Vampire” and exhibit 43 from “Seeing Dead People“) examined the passage of time as a ghostly lineage of cryptonymic, liminal expression; re: cryptomimesis as normally limited to ghosts by Castricano, a binary of canon or camp like 1s and 0s across a computational Great Sequence.

However, there’s a different way to look at things regarding liminal expression: the composite image and composite bodies, which, in being holistic, we’ll now examine in tandem; i.e., as a cryptomimetic matter of demonic camp (of writing with demons) that—all the same—speaks to revenge against rape having happened in the past. All of it becomes something to camp, as we have said, but this camping takes many forms, beyond Scott’s marriage of the Ancient Romance and modern novel (each considerably more hauntologized than when Walpole weighed them). Some—like Kite, below—are more quotidian in their exploration of rape as a symptom of capital dressed up as “ancient” robotic; others are more Romantic, Ancient, magical (our segue into the occult).

Having looked at Scott’s cryptomimesis, in the Alien franchise, let’s quickly unpack Kite‘s rape interrogation and the larger cryptomimesis at work, do a short hermeneutics reprise, then conclude “Making Monsters” with some broader points of study regarding Shelley’s Promethean Quest (for fatal knowledge)!

Cryptomimesis through Demonic Camp and Rape Play (feat. Kite)

The specialization, divergence and sheer multiplicity can cover up various trends. Therefore, composite images/collages can help identify various schools in connection with broader monster-creation practices. Less of a chronological sequence or lineage of ghosts, the composite image/collage is more how monsters can be collected, arranged and analyzed in terms of a likeness to one another amid various differences—monster pastiche, rape and revenge, rapture and release: playing with forbidden toys to infringe on taboo subjects speaking to current realities (exhibit 44b2)! We’ll look at that in a second. First, let’s narrow it down to Yasuomi Umetsu’s Kite!

For all its gravity, Kite is surprisingly cartoonish and silly. Such data-as-damage can be silly and fun, but it can also be simultaneously serious in its camp, mid-cryptomimesis (with Japan haunted by fascism and American occupation): “hair of the dog” helping us loosen up, but also remember what we’ve forgotten/pushed out! We laugh at the madness, embodying it in kawaii/kowai forms we consume, and voyeurism/exhibitionism we play with (sins unto themselves)! Whores getting by in a man’s world are so often transgressive, but also made “robotic” by men romancing their rape out of revenge (and which the whore seeks revenge in turn): the warrior assassin in the whore’s getup (similar to naughty nuns, but also nun assassins, exhibit 48b), a monster made to kill its false father! “Did He who made the Lamb make thee?” Again, it’s healthy to ask questions about the origins of monsters; just be ready for the answer to shock you:

 (exhibit 44b1: States can only exist through lies and force. Sooner or later, someone seeks revenge. To it, any nation-state has secrets, generally of murder and rape. Some take the form of ghosts without bodies. Others are boogeymen of a more streetwise nature, having their victims under their thumbs versus coming back to haunt them. It can be fantasies of disempowerment tied to one lunatic, a cataclysm and catacombs, or some combination of these same features riling up intense emotions of master/slave. Hostages experience them in ways that can make us submit and obey, or to assassinate our captors. Same difference. The Pygmalion myth is rooted in master/apprentice, but also pedophilia, thus domination, lies and rape standing in cryptomimetically for the state-as-mendacious, personified.

To it, Umetsu’s animated Cyberpunk noir, Kite, turns the Pygmalion fantasy on its head, marrying Galatea/the token Amazon to Oliver Twist; i.e., by speaking to a girl, Sawa, whose family is killed by an evil gangster, Akai, only to have him kidnap the daughter and turn her into a doll-like assassin/sex slave; i.e., less a “natural-born killer” and more someone with a talent for survival [the disassociation mechanism] who responds well to Pavlovian [robotic] conditioning! Their hellish bond is illustrated by the giving not of a collar or ring, but a pair of black-and-red earrings filled with the blood of her dead parents!

The plight is liminal, our heroine doing the master’s dirty work [a gun stowed inside her schoolgirl’s lunchbox, much like a switchblade] until she eventually works her way back to him; i.e., killing his men and finally the man himself. Shortly before this, though, she must “prove” her loyalty to him—hardly a fair test, but one that she endures as women classically do: a sex object raped by men at every waking moment. Per the cryptonymy process, deceptions sit within deceptions. They cry to be heard and so often fall on deaf ears; but look to stories like Kite and you will find Medusa waiting for you, her scream anything but silent!

“Bred to kill, not to care,” so are token women classically molded and shaped like clay into weapons [the line between predator and prey a thin one; re: the xenomorph]. Sawa is once more taken against her will [above] by someone who treats her as clay without feeling. So does he underestimate his prey, thinking his power is beyond reproach. In turn, the heroine plays along while her boyfriend, Oburi, is forced to watch. As Akai asserts his dominance, Sawa locks eyes with Oburi [both of them red, denoting shared trust issues]. It’s a ruse, but they both have to grit and bear it. “One more time,” they tell themselves. They suffer in silence, no strangers to segregation, pimping and genocide [while Sawa occasionally tells her rapist what he wants to hear]. The paradox of fantasy is how larger-than-life stories speak to everyday occurrences suffered by whores at the hands of cops/pimps, making the other submit for a change; i.e., while topping from below, but also while doling out street justice of a more classically “masc sort”: with bullets. Rape is all she knows, so it’s all he gets. Karma’s a bitch, a phallic woman!

Not long after, Sawa has her revenge against the smug warlord/crooked cop; i.e., camping the rape fantasy in dead seriousness while staking the vampire master with hot lead, she takes him apart like clay! The pimp has no charm but what she led him to think he had, topping him from below! But he taught her what she in turn revisits upon him, disabusing him of any notion that he is a god. Mortal, after all! Keeping with the Promethean Quest, such voices are powerful and vital to recovery from abuse, insofar as they illustrate male authority figures as corrupt, venal and ultimately mortal in ways we victims of state abuse—often sex workers and/or child soldiers—can overcome; i.e., by “playing along” on parallel currents of power and rape fantasy. In doing so, we break their hearts and their backs, giving as good as we get to one-up them, thus demonically target capital through hearts and minds pulled inside-out for all to see. Fate is a cruel mistress; a pissed-off, indestructible whore with an axe to grind is even more so!)

Sawa is queen of the board, yet remains one piece pawning the king. Specifically this “messy chessboard” presents disparate examples that can identify a larger pattern over space and time once assembled and studied across the surface of the image (re: Segewick). The dialectical-material pattern we’re holistically considering is of standardized forms of popular linguistic devices, whose figurative and literal co-functions in everyday parlance have seemingly been excised in favor of them as a simple product to consume. But their resistance to that standardization can still be gleaned through a gradient of suggestion—parallel examples with marginal cosmetic variations whose deeper context must be intuitively grasped through taught instruction: thinking about Gothic art as a mode of colonized expression. Such made-for-profit occupants say something about the current material world that can be transformed and led away from through similar language; i.e., “perceptive” pastiche and liminal subversions.

Gothic Hermeneutics (a reprise)

Let’s talk about that, for a moment—i.e., from a hermeneutic standpoint (five pages)—then wrap up with some broader points about Shelley’s tragic quest exported far and wide.

(exhibit 44b2: artist, middle: Olivia De Berardinis; lower-middle: Sideshow Collectibles; lower-right: Sean Kyle)

The Communist usage of Gothic theories contends with the material world as something to reillustrate in vivid, colloquial terms: monster puns, pastiche, and visual metaphors that, as “ghosts,” get at the essence of things through a mimetic exchange—one that keeps track of the underlying commentary through exchange (and trauma) as something to personify. My specialty is collages; e.g., exhibit 44b2 (above) actually being the first of its kind that I designed in December 2022; i.e., for Sex Positivity as a nascent book series, which promptly grew into literally hundreds and hundreds of follow-ups. “It’s alive!” indeed!

This goes beyond the monster to include the person (or aggregate) that made it. To that, the Bride of Frankenstein (above) has already been drawn many, many times by artists who are for or against the state to variable, liminal degrees. As an egregore, her composite status—her literal form, the proliferation of copycats and liminal occupation between them all—represents a complicated system of tension that exists between social-sexual values and linguo-material conditions that, in the same breath, are creatively suspicious about the material world; i.e., as filled with “old” counterfeit monsters: the bourgeois double/fatal portrait. This includes zombies, vampires, ghosts and other supernatural variants, combined with non-supernatural, human variants (doubles, counterfeits, traitors, false friends, long-lost relatives, evil stepmothers, rapacious monks, etc)—all collectively denoting an untrustworthy alien presence. Through a bourgeois Superstructure, the elite uses fearful artifice to conceal a variety of systemic, counterfeit abuses: profitable likenesses. It’s disarmingly easy to get lost in the sheer bulk of material produced—with all that “poster pastiche” scrambling to recreate the past and “see”; re: darkness visible and allegory disguised as “mere play.”

During the glut, then, it helps hermeneutically to think of monsters as code for academic terms we can then synthesize. Zombies represent brain death, but also abjection and the state of exception. Conveyed through an endless stream of images, consider how the Bride of Frankenstein seemingly becomes a pile of cheap, countless copies that one could do virtually anything with, but under Capitalism tends to follow certain compelled trends. These trends do not naturally announce themselves on individual viewings; they must be exposed by exhibiting them as a collection. This takes time, effort, and careful participation between instructors and instructees—the teacher and the student, but also workers and labor as something to de-alienize and reunite with, in the modern world.

Except, in doing so, the marginalized variation can seem anesthetizing and opaque; i.e., having as little to say about something while being still a slave to the grind, keeping up with the endless material feed about a genre that was cliché two centuries ago, but under late-stage, neoliberal Capitalism has robbed the monster’s critical power to expose the abuses that happen to sex workers behind the scenes and onstage. So cryptonymy points to abject things the initiated can recognize.

In other words, the cake is a lie—a complicated sex-coercive lie, in canonical forms. Zombie Sombra (next page) isn’t just a pretty “zombie” face and fat piece of undead ass to pimp out. But various pieces of “sexy zombie” media—i.e., those created by sex workers while stealing from them (which is all that profit is)—will, when uncritically consumed, “eat your brain”: in service to Capitalism and its regular workplace abuses, historically-materially inflicted on workers whose brains have already been partially or fully affected. As a material object, the Bride isn’t doing anything “by herself”; her complex status—as an active, visually and ontologically ambiguous-ambivalent linguistic factor—functions inside an ongoing living exchange: what we think about her and sex work, in relation to the Bride’s chosen monstrous, human and sexualized components. Our hermeneutic approach must consider that in relation to other things going on all at once, back and forth. Thus the collages; they’re a good shorthand to holistic praxis.

“How people talk” includes how people learn, whether in bourgeois or proletarian ways, mid-opposition; i.e., the playful, creatively “grey” thought processes that happen cryptomimetically behind and between commonplace terms and materials (whatever’s on hand, lending an improvised quality to how most people create or think, be those newfound devices vintage or retro). This includes thinking about popular symbols (of trauma) in relation to the material world and those inside it; i.e., as already having a biased, heavy influence from the structure itself as collage-like: conditioned to consume everything in uncritical, thus unthinking ways that keep you divided and stupid, thus alienated from nature, your labor and from each other. “No man is an island”; forming connections is vital towards addressing Capitalism’s structural, generational effect on individual worker brains still part of a large whole—the former’s lack of connection inside Capitalism being what performs the “lobotomy.” Menticide is menticide, betrayal is betrayal.

So, having shorthand, placeholder terms like “lobotomy”—and hermeneutic devices like cryptomimesis and collage—helps activism work; i.e., not just to describe this ontological complexity inside a larger socio-sexual web (thus effect experience through relative monster language) but to frame sex-coercive abuse as something to resist according to exhibit 44b2’s deeper context among individual examples we can study in focus should we wish to (a fourth surprise exhibit): Blizzard’s zombifying thirst-trap take on the Bride of Frankenstein, with Sombra. “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love, Blizzard’s love (necrophilia) is rotten to the core!” SO do canonical sex symbols demonize rape as a commodify to pilot, avatar-style:

(exhibit 45a: Artist: top-left: Nibelart; top-middle: Krys Decker; top-right: Persephone van der Waard; middle: NeoArtCore; bottom-right: Demincatfish; source, bottom-left.)

We’ll scrutinize Blizzard’s corporate “zombie” treatment of the whored-out action princess, in Volume Three. For now, I merely want to highlight the canonical standard. Blizzard aren’t encouraging literal necrophilia, here; they’re pimps, selling people a canonical standard of what people naturally tend to like and unnaturally tend to dislike—sex and the monstrous-feminine; a fascination with the barbaric, reimagined past; and jokes, laughter and camp/schlock; but also music associating these things with drugs and/or drug-like altered states (“rock ‘n roll” being 1950s African American slang for “sex”); and all of the above combined: as incessant recreations of regular social-sexual exchanges and critical techniques like parody and irony giving sanctioned invitations to indulge in ways that are allowed—i.e., standardized for profit’s sake, then disguised as genuine creative expression/uncontrolled opposition that doesn’t compel sex worker abuse and consumer pacification. It’s a sham, these “corpo” monster girl pin-ups meant to be consumed as canon, which “zombifies” the consumer in ways that reliably lead to corporate profit (thus rape). So does Zombie Capitalism tacitly condone worker exploitation, both inside the workplace and out.

The stackable presence of sanitized, mass-produced variants likewise indicate a presence of sex-positive interest and repressed desires to experiment; i.e., where sex (and urges related to sex, often through monstrous language) are happening on the regular in ways that are barred not behind one “X” to solve for, but three in a row. Triple “protection,” thrice the exploitation and subterfuge, the alien/unknown becoming something to make or otherwise concern ourselves with for a variety of reasons: to tame wild nature/the fire of the gods as monstrous-feminine, or to wield it for the forces of one side or the other while still a little savage; e.g., the Powerpuff Girls, below, fighting for their makeshift solo dad playing god; i.e., similar to how Artemis and other goddess-grade daddy’s girls might kneel before Zeus (versus attacking him, Medusa-style): the inventor weaponizing Pinocchio, Galatea, Adam, Lilith, Mega Man, or whoever else, as little Amazonian whores to make in a lab, then uphold “Western values”; i.e., suggesting a superhuman design to replicate, harness and capitalize on nature-as-monstrous-feminine by a “benevolent” mentor mastering the Fates (classically three, with “chemical X” being the alien power of sex, technology and the gods, birthing little monsters/subjugated Amazons[34]; re: Scott’s black goo/dark devil sperm. It’s basically a really fucked-up version of the baby and the stork).

So, business-as-usual, then. The camp lies in making the blind parody of canon perceptive again, which generally happens after the metaphors have died: sexless wizards making monster babies to avoid thinking beyond Capitalism!

Granted, only academics or art nerds will spell this out (with pride), but doing so is tremendously important because it teaches people to grasp language intuitively when thinking about art critically. Armed with these seemingly magical abilities, workers may begin to holistically address, mid-hermeneutic, “how people talk” in relation to the current material world; i.e., where people are trying to say, see and understand things that are naturally and unnaturally confusing: using Gothic shorthand and metaphor to comment on the complex, ongoing relationship between people and canonical media, they begin to actively and intelligently think through creative means according to things that normally go unsaid spoken in dead versions of themselves.

This includes how people normally engage with and think about sexuality as taught by sex-coercive media; it includes workplace abuses that are covered up, ignored or neglected in favor of pacifying media. The root of the problem, then, is Capitalism “leaving things out,” alienating workers from their labor as an abject extension of themselves: the material arrangement that allows for canonical versions to be pushed onto people’s eyeballs and into their brains without encouraging critical thought at all. Sex becomes alien, powerful, fearsome canon.

These abuses can be challenged, of course, but this starts by changing how people see, thus think about and respond to, Capitalist Realism through Gothically sexual media (and by extension regular sexual media beholden to the same theories): as something to buy, sell and create in a playful, fun way without leaving anything out of the larger dialectic. The whole must be studied and understood if we are to grasp its deeper workings using surface level things; e.g., Original Sin; i.e., the rotting technology of dying empires feeling more and more magical as those cushioned by civilization fall in love with regressive fantasies (and thrills): as a paradoxical means of escape from present abuses, the ghost of the counterfeit able to reverse abjection, during a given crisis (which the state is always in).

Something to bear in mind, then, is that “science” and the prospect of discovery has historically remained a bourgeois excuse to exploit workers and the natural world; i.e., for the sake of perceived “progress” through industry and economic prosperity shouted from on high by those with material advantage (which Victor does, playing god through natural philosophy to demonstrate his mastery over nature by creating unnatural life). This superiority (and its much-touted progression) is a bald-faced lie, one we must bravely study by using the Promethean Quest as a means of developing Capitalism into Communism. Frankenstein is arguably the first science fiction novel, and—as Shelley happily demonstrates—gave birth to so many monsters as to need collages to catalog even a portion of them to study. On the surface of these, its Communist drive (spectres of Marx) goes hand-in-hand with the Gothic’s love for monsters and mad science; i.e., a “madness” in duality, insofar as state science madly exterminates nature for profit, and which the state sees science for nature as “mad” because universal emancipation threatens their bottom line. The state needs profit, thus genocide, to exist, our existence both required and fed on by dead labor (re: Marx).

The Gothic, since Frankenstein, considers rape as a matter of revenge against the rapist; i.e., capital rapes nature before, during and after birth, often targeting the mind as something to invade back into itself.

To that, Victor is the first mover of Shelley’s novel, and a stark reminder of the fallibility of those on either side of power imbalance: bourgeois hand-wringing about rogue technology (workers) inside a past-future ruined civilization occupied without masters, but instead mindless furious slaves empowered by vengeful gods (nature). Onstage and off, Capitalism pushes genocide to the frontiers it dominates; this final frontier is the end of Capitalism viewed, by Lovecraft onwards, as his cosmic-nihilist approach to Capitalist Realism—all to spite Utopia as a non-starter treated as a given, were it not for those pesky wrenches in the works: the terrifying realization that technology (re: workers) survive after the elite die off prematurely (from slave revolt). “Rome” is subsequently pushed into outer space, where Lovecraft—a bonafide fascist and all-around piece of shit (re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Mandy, Homophobia and the Problem of Futile Revenge,” 2024)—loudly mourns its tragic loss/fears its returning doomsday (the liminal hauntology of war) vis-à-vis “monsters from the Id” (re, Forbidden Planet [1956]: Persephone van der Waard’s “Revisiting The Modern Prometheus through Astronoetics,” 2024).

In turn, writers like Scott ran with that idea, doing so to dogmatize and profit off a fascist bastardizing of Shelley’s pro-labor projections; i.e., by demonizing and weaponizing the working class, but also using state devices to pirate power and seize control of the space around them (re: Radcliffe). It speaks to the circular nature of the problem, and of the tendency to view present issues retrojected backwards into the imaginary past: the blindly furious Medusa threatening state shift, a hungry whore ravished by centuries of abuse suddenly eating us alive. Promethean spaces challenge profit (and its concealment) through found “ancient” documents (re: “Revisiting“); i.e., by fighting fire with Promethean fire/darkness visible; e.g., Scott’s Derelict, Lovecraft’s city of the old ones, or Shelley’s Creature.

All the same, it speaks to genuinely ancient struggles[35] that predate capital and modern science, yet are haunted by the anachronistic injection of science as mad: we have entered the world of the gods, but they are insane and ruled by the system housing them as empowered to destroy for the purpose of profit. The story is tragic, but productive and vital—a profound testament to criminogenesis and the invention of terrorism; i.e., Capitalism is the Great Destroyer—a machine that turns workers into small automatons that give or receive as it demands (so often, people look at the Creature and think it’s a zombie; while not untrue, it’s also a machine).

When being raped, we must tire our attackers while—to some frightening degree—being unable to stop them; i.e., how we, in the present, will not live to see a day without Capitalism, without rape! Instead, that will come past our lifetime, according to what we leave behind pointing to the future in past language: giant children who warred in ways that inspire future action swept up in the hypnotic language of the imaginary past and its familiar faces’ fatal nostalgia (the haunted house extra compelling if it exists, paradoxically, far away from home)! Such camp is always a bit absurd/surreal. So is rape, more broadly, an out-of-body experience that feels trapped in particular veins of fabricated existence (the disassociation machine): Ozymandias looks like Prometheus. As we’ll see when we look at Radcliffe, better to learn from perceptive pastiche than blind parody, but you often start with blind parody (and statues with blind eyeballs, left).

Such hermeneutic cryptomimesis—inauspiciously venerating and exiling Great Machines, mise-en-abyme—might seem counterproductive, and yet so many workers under Capitalist Realism cannot conceptualize the present harm being done without doing so; i.e., the dying Ozymandian corpse of Capitalism, versus the Communist Numinous prematurely aborted in the womb and haunting the venue. The historical-material cycles on loop show how these devices can be manipulated, which requires a careful process of detection, mid-camp (one whose liminal investigations, we’ll pointedly return to with Alien, during “Giger’s Xenomorph”).

For now, we’ll spend the remainder of “Making Demons” (eleven pages) going over some of the broader points tied to Shelley’s Promethean critique (and shift gradually towards supernatural occult demons, as we do).

Some Broader Points on Shelley’s Promethean Quest (for Fatal Knowledge)

Mary Shelley was—among other things—a curious bitch; i.e., thirsty for knowledge as forbidden, but also critiquing stories with a similar “come hell or high water” drive. One of those drives remains technology as traveling critique, namely astronoetics, or the astral projection of Earth’s colonial gaze onto so-called “other worlds”; i.e., under the guise of benevolent colonization of “empty” territory (a common trope in older futurist media whitewashing genocide): the humans are the UFOs, or presented as Ozymandian likenesses/dead godly giants to look upon and tremble at while, all the same, going boldly where no one has supposedly gone before. But they have gone before (re: Alien), Capitalism burying the procedure to repeat it again and again despite the overarching presence of nature’s rage. It gentrifies and decays on loop according to worker appetites the state cultivates.

Just as Clarke’s law presents advanced technologies as indistinguishable from magic, the inverse is also true: dated, retro-future ancient magics being a metaphor for science and advanced technologies imagined once-upon-a-time, before they actually existed. This technophobic tradition was cemented by Shelley in 1818, becoming its own kind of Gothic “archaeology” tied to retro-future castles, but also suits of armor and ghost ships as things to reinvent for didactic purposes; i.e., to communicate hidden lessons about Cartesian abuses that would have been stamped out if said in non-fantastical, everyday language. Derelict and floating in the void, these Gothic abstractions can be studied far away from prying eyes, then looted for fatal knowledge that can help prevent future disasters from taking place.

(artist: Grandeduc)

While freeing all sex workers using general Gothic sex-positivity is what Gothic Communism is all about, it targets the source of abusive conditioning that fashions those who grow to see themselves as “better” than the world around them: the heroic (monomyth) tale as increasingly scientific/Cartesian. Both conceal an expressly military function that, through Gothic displacement, can be openly expressed through the Gothic chronotope as something people aren’t totally aware they’re even looking at; i.e., Scott’s liminal space as littered with the symbols of dynastic primacy and hereditary rites; e.g., the suits of armor on board the Nostromo (itself a flying “space castle” made undead by the Derelict as a ghost ship)—one of which Ripley puts on to “armor” her virtue (a Radcliffean concept) from the cosmically framed dark rapist.

Just as Shelley took the heroic quest and made it Promethean, my entire book communicates complex things in monstrous-poetic shorthand by identifying the Promethean Quest as a critical response and means of subverting the monomyth. The same goes for any myth, Sex Positivity gradually trusting the reader to rely on informed emotional intuition using literal and figurative language. By helping them play with said language and working out different solutions, the subversion occurs “within the text” (re: Derrida); i.e., according to a natural-material world as something to critique with Gothic theories, mid-synthesis.

All the while, the book assumes readers can gradually learn to think empathetically/self-defensively on their feet and toes about Gothic media and sex work. As such, it gradually eases them into a critical-thinking process to compound, practice and develop within yourself according to the material world—i.e., compound learning in relation to compound phobias that, when analyzed through sex-positive, iconoclastic art under Gothic Communism, give up the hidden, Promethean truth about Capitalism: the colonial abuses of the hidden dead and their lingering desire for revenge. These suddenly spring forth when foolishly brought back to life, invoking the weapons of the past for two basic purposes: liberation or exploitation; i.e., the Radcliffean scapegoat is generally summoned to scare the middle class into passivity—fear towards technology if placed in the wrong hands; e.g., Cameron’s Terminator rooted in present barbarities dressed up in retro-future semi-magical language (there being little difference between a T-800[36], below, and a walking corpse, save one is revived by magic, through and through, and the other by technology indistinguishable from magic).

(source: Persephone van der Waard’s “ Vintage to Retro: An FPS Q & A series – James Towne, Tech-Com 2029, part 2,” 2021)

Resurrecting insurrection applies to rememory as a kind of “forgetting” that hurts when revived; i.e., its apocalypse the natural consequence of such a large system of exploitation: not everyone knows what happens in far-off places, and as we have seen with Victor and his ilk, the cost of endless profit is often dressed up as “bold Romantic discovery.” A desire to know and dissect the world leads to Earth being routinely treated like an unthinking object without rights; over time, this trauma manifests in stories that hint at the unspeakable abuses taking place more and more, over centuries, inside an expanding hegemony the oppressed come to despise. Time is a circle, which requires circular solutions. And yet, the biggest lie of “Golden Age” science fiction is how those “solving problems” in outer space (with linear stabbing methods and ideologies) are “solving” anything at all; they’re cops on the frontier as forgotten about and rediscovered in ways that are re-penetrated and scowled at, mid-intromission. For them and the state, doing so occupies and generates a system of showing and concealment; i.e., where police operatives appearing as workers can stochastically torture nature’s secrets out of, again (the profit motive). For us, Medusa’s dark womb is a place to work: reversing abjection (and terror/counterterror) anisotropically during the cryptonymy process.

Again, this lineage is generally viewed backward, a ghoulish love for the imaginary past leading to a confrontation with strange modes of communication—of viewing science less as a modern, dignified practice and more an increasingly brutal, backwards enterprise tinged with superstition, magic, rape, madness, revenge and torture (which pregnancy classically is[37]). As a restorative means of expressing trauma, these older modes of communication can be reclaimed, but the journey is still stressful because the horrors cannot be disentangled from the solution. To dealienate ourselves and the natural world, we must eat the cannibals (the rich) by understanding how Capitalism alienates using demonic poetics.

Even here, though, the line between science and the occult is not clear-cut. For one, the summoning can happen through an obvious demonic ritual, but also through the possession or taking of someone’s body or soul through an alien, unknown force. In the latter example, this seemingly happens without an explicit contract or ritual taking place (versus ghostly possessions, which are linked to a graveyard or murder site)—i.e., the punishment of trespass, of going where one shouldn’t. In either case, forbidden knowledge is gained in relation to the demons’ own bodies, genders and sexualities as incredibly fluid and bizarre.

As we shall see, next, this makes the occult demon—however absurd and profound—a form of taboo human expression inextricably linked to everyday bodies and events: sex, coloring one’s hair and wearing clothes as performative factors, but also identifying with things beyond our physical limitations or current understandings of the world as it is provided to us by those in power. It’s a bloodbath, one our hysteria can double! Satan’s menses! It’s in my mouth!

During our own exploitation, then, doubts about this world can start to emerge, which align with a natural drive; i.e., to satisfy human curiosity in the face of ambiguous, vaso-vagal danger or the menacing unknown—of being lied to by authority figures. At its simplest, then, the Promethean Quest is a harmful search for knowledge; its hard-won knowledge frequently becomes associated with transformative, intensely ritualized tortures in wildly popular stories.

In turn, these can link to colonial guilt as buried and far off, but somehow close at hand; i.e., the colonial territory as dead; e.g., literally Dead Space (2008) punishing the worker stuck inside in the imperial machine with Medusa. Forced there by greedy companies, stories like Dead Space, Alien, 2001 and others, operate—on par with survival horror at large—to mirror colonial abuse, but also doom exacted upon status-quo laborers sensing Imperialism come home to empire while on its far-off frontiers: a black, “ancient, derelict” monolith (the Medusa’s fat ass) vibrating cryptonymically with the ghost of the counterfeit’s ethnocentric alienation from ongoing brutality.

Per Poe, Conrad, Lovecraft and Scott, etc, it becomes something to fetishize and pimp out of revenge against nature (antagonize and put cheaply to work for fear of nature’s revenge; re: the “slave revolt” gaslight). Per Hogel, it becomes something to dance with, shoving swords into one another like stage fencers in on the joke (re: Titus Andronicus, suggested above by the Adams Family). The joke is rape, hoisting those with privilege on their own petards through the same dire implications (white/male or otherwise—with Shelley’s story going beyond men like Victor to speak to anyone working for the state/inside the Man Box; re: token Amazons the likes of which Radcliffe motivated to punch down against nature with).

Keeping with capital, and returning to Frankenstein‘s Promethean Quest, older orders are eclipsed by new ones having evolved from them and—conjured up as past—become a dark spell to fall under all over again (re: Punter). Said spell is canonically made to abject capital’s raping of nature (or trend of said abuses) onto a dupe; re: Victor learning he’s a failure, but one trying to get himself back in the West’s good graces by shattering his golem.

Shelley’s story is—among many other things—an excommunication for us to peer at and make our own conclusions. A popular one is the beauty of the dark Satanic site; i.e., when compared to the West and its presumably undecayed vestiges, one where the presence of decay reverses abjection, Imperialism coming home to empire. Nature is “ancient” and dark a) because the state needs it to be, but also b) because worker counterterror hits its hardest through the same ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., a demon to work its black magics on Western brains by infiltrating them not just in quotidian spheres (the Creature looks human at a glance), but in the boundaries of imagination populated by so many workers escaping real life: space is dead, the rogue, runaway technology seeking posthuman revenge (e.g., the shapeshifting xenomorph stupidly tough like Victor’s Creature [to better colonize foreign and domestic frontiers with] but also Cameron’s infiltrator demon-machine terminators, especially the “liquid metal” T-1000)!

For starters—and keeping with canonical predations on nature framed as “alien” by state Orientalism—the tortures and torturers of demonic rituals (the ghosts of Cultural and Imperialism as much as Spectres of Marx) often hail from dark, otherworldly zones of seemingly magic demons; i.e., cryptonymic vanishing points; e.g., desolated jungles or crater-marked moonscapes whose forbidden sites of colonial torture rest on native lands. These artificial wildernesses, in turn, have been cordoned off, guiltily viewed through a ghost of the counterfeit that displaces and disassociates the abuse being told. Relayed to an unwitting set of accomplices, the audience is “tortured” by identifying with a Western proxy lying on the slab: an altar of sacrifice waiting inside a giant torture site where the colonized (tortured themselves in the past) patiently take their revenge; i.e., like spiders, slowly torturing their unwitting prey caught in castle-sized webs.

Yet, this Gothic chronotope is hardly a simple case of spiders eating flies; it concerns a transgenerational curse—i.e., the mass exploitation of the natural world and its undeveloped inhabitants by self-proclaimed “superiors”: the lords of the West. By stumbling inside, the non-native/naïve explorers (often simply workers or soldiers, themselves) suddenly find themselves not just trapped inside an angry gravesite of continual exploitation (one they have, until now, turned a blind eye towards); they horrifyingly discover themselves unable to escape its rage outside its borders. No matter how far they go, its trauma will follow them back into the modern world; e.g., Ripley and the xenomorph. There, this anger—like the Creature from Frankenstein—will torture them to the ends of the universe, a golem that never tires or forgets: “the axe forgets, the tree remembers.” Rememory threatens our ascension, coming together brick-by-brick as Great Destroyer!

This liminality further pins between ironic and unironic forms of torture. The phrase can be defined as an attempt to cause physical or mental harm—to terrorize and deprive someone of their agency and their rights as a worker and a person (or to commit acts of revenge for having these rights revoked and inflicted; i.e., the “What comes around, goes around!” delivery of vengeful torture that the Creature delivers against Victor Frankenstein, and similar characters and stories); re (from “A Note about Rape,” 2024): “‘rape’ meaning [for our purposes] ‘to disempower someone or somewhere—a person, culture, or place—in order to harm them,’ generally through fetishizing and alienizing acts or circumstances/socio-material conditions that target the mind, body and/or spirit” (source).

Toys—and the boxes that house them—become invaluable towards speaking out, in small/mise-en-abyme; i.e., by acting out our desire to harm our abusers, but also expose them as predatory and false. The ability to create things in dualistic, material opposition to state doubles is vital, then—if only because it gives us a planet-sized supply of building materials (clay and earth) to ascribe with dead metaphors; i.e., things that can be given whatever meaning and modular qualities we want while camping canonical forms and their unironic tortures. It’s the perfect medium for a pedagogy of the oppressed: reclaiming our demonized humanity through an aesthetic/shared shadowy stage we take back; i.e., during ludo-Gothic BDSM playing with dead things, but also forbidden, demonic torture speaking to our own rape/liberation in paradoxical acts of sight through blindness, humiliation and pain! Never trust a skinny cook! Trust sin as an ironic, reclamatory diet rocking your world with planetary booties; i.e., Gaia’s dumper! Stare and tremble at genocide in small! Now it has its revenge!

(artist: Stephanie Rodriguez)

The whore’s paradox is Medusa being alive and dead, already made when making new things; “monstrous-feminine” amounts to anything exploited/extirpated by settler-colonial forces that, as whores, can use their Aegis to exert Promethean power onto state pimps (“Who’s the vermin now, assholes?”). Moving onto “Summoning Demons,” then, we’ll start with the more canonical, “civilized” tortures—i.e., the domestic world and its Radcliffean inhabitants being unironically invaded by dark forces from an ancient Somewhere Else—before moving progressively deeper into nature’s dark, wild and unknown recesses/pleasures.

While the dark forest is a common Gothic threshold in the literal Gothic period, aka the Renaissance—e.g., Dante’s Inferno, 1321—it was followed by Milton and Walpole into the Neo-Gothic period of the 1790s, Shelley’s 1818 magnum opus, and 200+ years of fiction that, from the canonical Western perspective, demonize any foreign, alien, unknown lands resisting colonialization, or are occupied by perceived greater forces than Mankind vis-à-vis Cartesian thought, mid-oppression:

• Mary Shelley’s foreboding Mount Blanc in Frankenstein, 1818
• Poe’s foray towards the South Pole in Arthur Gordon Pym (with cannibals), 1838
• Joseph Conrad’s doomed, racist presentation of Africa—as a dark, savage continent (from a white man’s perspective) in Heart of Darkness, 1899
• Lovecraft demonizing the unknown with an “ancient aliens” flavor in At the Mountains of Madness, 1936
• Ridley Scott’s dark planetoid surface being investigated by exploited space truckers in Alien, 1979
• James Cameron’s doomed, Vietnam-esque colony being avenged by American colonial space marines in Aliens, 1986
• Nintendo’s Metroid, 1986, and many, many spiritual, cartographic, neoliberal successors (re: “Mazes and Labyrinths” vis-à-vis the FPS, Metroidvania, and survival horror) in the 21st century

Gothic Communism’s daring foray into this sinful “land of darkness” isn’t to demonize ourselves (“Tis an unweeded garden grown to seed”), but to reclaim nature-as-monstrous-feminine from the state; i.e., from its unironically xenophobic, us-versus-them treatment and linguo-material features, taking back these things from all colonizers across space and time: the Enlightenment as surviving into the present, but touched through a Western, fearful/guilty fascination with the past after being alienated from it (which, again, Hogle correctly notes, operates through the ghost of the counterfeit as wedded to the process of abjection; re, Dave West’s “Implementation of Gothic Themes in the Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit”:

In “The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Process of Abjection,” Jerrold E. Hogle argues that the eighteenth-century gothic emergence from fake imitation of fake work is the foundation of what is defined as modern gothic today. He maintains that Horace Walpole’s 1765 The Castle of Otranto, which is considered as the groundwork of the modern Gothic story, is built on a false proclamation that the novel was an Italian manuscript writing by a priest. […] Hogle argues that modern Gothic is grounded in fakery. [In turn,] Hogle’s observation of the history of The Castle of Otranto forms the basis for understanding the concept of counterfeit as a result of the abjection process) [source].

Communism—specifically Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism—camps canon through Gothic poetics. As such, the deliberate ironies of iconoclastic torture during ludo-Gothic BDSM follow the same call of the void—first, through the raw poetic creation of demons during magic ceremonies; then, Radcliffe’s Pavlovian brand of exquisite “tortures” acting out liminal, not-quite-there-yet BDSM that plays with demons (as hidden, per Cameron’s refrain, behind jingoistic, militarily optimistic/neocon xenophobia fearing murderous cuckoo imposters); then onto Shelley and ultimately my work holistically and repeatedly retrospecting all of this!

We’ve already looked at Shelley and Scott. Now we’ll look at Radcliffe’s flawed notions of performative torture (and wasted genius selling out for conservative means, the imposter indoctrinating the nation’s youth to defend the state from its own exploited labor force); i.e., of canonical torture versus exquisite “torture” being something I took far beyond anywhere Radcliffe was willing (or able) to go. Yes, Radcliffe was a cop who wrote from ignorance and lacked Shelley’s radical nature; her elements of genius still contributed to my work and ludo-Gothic BDSM camping “rape.” We’ll put her corpse once more on the slab, dissecting its probative value before diving headlong inside during the subsequent chapter’s frank exploration of trans, intersex and non-binary expression in the 21st century.

The state (and its oft-undercover cops) are straight—will copy anything in bad faith to survive (re: DARVO and obscurantism). As a fundamentally ancient, ever-present force, non-gender-conformity haunts the capitalist world’s heteronormative order by subverting the usual, canonical taming of nature by white, cis-het men; re: who see it as dark, female and chaotic (with TERFs going to bat for them, in many neoconservative tales). To canonically call something “ancient, alien and unknown” means to exotify and segregate it for police violence, which rebels must reclaim on the stages of persecution; i.e., while the cops are called on us/the vigilantes pointed in our directions. It’s militarized, tokenized regression in a dated, retro-future ethnocentrism indicative of state collapse, which Gothic media crosses over into: penetrate the alien, then ask for snuggles.

Now that we’ve explored examples of the manmade demon, studied composite images of them as a way of identifying monstrous patterns through poster/monster pastiche and “mash,” and outlined a ghastly heritage of colonial abuses told through the Promethean Quest as a fearful voyage into the ancient unknown, let’s point this gaze even farther backwards into the imaginary past. To that, let’s examine the history of summoned, occult demons and the forbidden knowledge they offer during expressly magical iterations of the Promethean Quest and its famous tortures beyond Victor’s pity party). This includes the stacked, sexy detectives chasing this power down in “explained supernatural” environs; i.e., performed as such; e.g., Rachel Storms, below, aping Radcliffe, per her latter-day resurrections: Velma as “hardboiled”—caught between damsels, detectives and sex demons at large! Such cryptomimesis might seem “dated” or “stuck”; their camp can yield tremendous, fortress-sized powers to rival any cop, token or not!

As something for the state to harvest, then, we humanize the harvest to portray the state as inhumane! Nature and its demons’ cryptonymy are generally thicc, often as not (and andro/gynodiverse, in sexually descriptive/culturally appreciative forms)! Glasses aren’t just to help us weird nerds read; they’re cum shields for stacked cuties!

(artist: Rachel Storms)

As we go, the heroine’s virgin/whore paradox also applies to a common problem under Capitalism I will try once more to unpack and express, surveying here territories whose gratuitous cryptonymy we have previously surveyed; re (from Volume One):

(exhibit 11b1b: Artist, right: Nya Blu. We all have skulls inside us. According to the Gothic tradition inside the Imperial Core, inheritance anxiety historically-materially communicates internalized trauma as suggested within workers but expressed according to their surface-level appearance in the material world; i.e., who, regardless of their origins, will be judged and consumed based how they appear relative to a cultural understanding of the imaginary past as something to constantly look at, vis-à-vis Segewick’s “Imagery of the Surface” [1980]. Nya, for example, is covered in tattoos that speak to Cartesian trauma and the Gothic as something to wear on her skin, reassembled there after having been created many times before. She’s a walking fortress, utterly stacked but rife with surface tension. She performs the paradox that Charlotte Brontë’s Anne Causeway could not, the latter woman entirely doomed inside the attic for no one to see [except in dream-like reveries]. The paradox is a doubled form of emancipation that occurs through confrontation; i.e., a savvy and brave wielding of the very things used to coop her up in the white man’s home, but also his colonizer’s heart and mind and those of an imperial readership then and now seeing her “of nature” and nature as psychosexual food [source].)

(artist: Tessa West, “Bikini Shop Showdown,” 2006)

Some further food for thought (two pages), as there’s simply too much ground to cover (“Huge tracks of land!”): Cartesian fetishization of nature-as-food subverts through our demonic, fertile/febrile, whore-like bodies during ludo-Gothic BDSM! So often workers of the Global South tempt through storminess and hefty vocality as uncorked forces of nature: the banana republic’s crop talking back and talking back loudly—with their bodies and their surfaces/thresholds! “You won’t last two seconds!” The same ideas and liminalities likewise apply idiosyncratically to anyone framed as “of nature” in the Global North; i.e., regardless of size, sex, gender, religion and/or skin color, etc: the half-real gentrification of colonial lands through ill-gotten means—by white bodies that are, themselves, pimped out during various horny legends sold as porn (and all the lopsided power fantasies that porn entails); e.g., banging the pornstar with a banging bod in the back of a bikini shop (above).

Whores communicate their revenge through sex as demonic. The canonical argument becomes, “Nature’s a whore,” which whores have to reclaim on the same vice-filled stages (and leaving behind their stamps however those fall. In true rockstar fashion, Tessa West died at twenty-seven from a drug overdose)! Exploitation and liberation occupy the same spaces and stages, the same demonic language of power abuse and weaponization for or against the state by combining objects d’art with scandal, and food with war, death, and rape (“Oh, yeah! Carve my ‘pumpkin’! Wait, your ‘knife’ is too small!”).

As Shelley shows, we don’t live forever by cheating death (and nature); we live a full life that passes something positive along—a life worth remembering that, through the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, but also the auspices of destiny not being entirely dictated by state replicas, echo in eternity. Workers can make whatever demons they need to alter the balance (reversing virtue and vice much like terror and counterterror); i.e., striking deals honored through play and broken by spoilsports[38] for or against the state (and leading to various tautologies; e.g., a deal’s a deal, fair’s fair, function determines function, etc).

In this respect, sex isn’t purely for reproduction, but whose aesthetic per ludo-Gothic BDSM can be fun, funny, thrilling and asexual (socialized, artistic, mix-and-match)! Forgetting the porn industry’s eternal chase of profit, behind every demon is a flesh-and-blood worker—a human being with rights, appetites, curiosities, and a willingness (under the right conditions) to play! There is always risk with sex; through the whore’s paradox, we find agency dictating our “abuse” through unequal conditions we can change. Again, the smiles don’t have to be fake, nor the orgasms (though they can be). Cuties can want each other for whatever their hearts darkly desire; e.g., penis, pussy and/or personality! We can also involve others in our fantasies because they like them, not because they pay our rent! Such a hunter’s pot/philosopher-stone post-scarcity might sound impossible, but breaking through Capitalist Realism demands imagining the impossible through common modes of expression: demons and their endless Promethean possibilities!

Able to set the terms and boundaries of play, we camp, thus break away from sex/porn addiction and help ourselves and others relieve stress; i.e., in ways visually comparable but ludically removed from industry porn’s “demonic” elements; re: a Sale of Indulgences without co-dependency or sin, just love, equal rights, fucking (to metal, of course), silly-serious games, mutual consent, and other Gothic-Communist virtues! Yummy-yummy trust! Consent is sexy, my dudes (if you want to get laid, made a girl feel safe; it’s not automatic, but it won’t hurt your odds)! The price tag isn’t state mandates, but worker arrangements and consent (sex is whatever cost we decide, often for free among friends). Animalized, we embrace it, driving ourselves crazy (minus the hysterical stigma)! Sweet Numinous revenge, sucking your dry! Wee!

(artist: Ash Lynn Bach)

As such, sex remains something to barter that builds our dreams of a better world while dismantling capital. For it and the state, “whore” is just another word for “intimacy” they demonize for profit. AFAB or not—unchaining the whore, working/call girl and Hell along with them—we Gothic Communists become free to express ourselves, speak new language out of old parts to establish new boundaries, thus arrangements of power to play out (not under companies and Faustian contracts, but ones we write ourselves)! We’re not hoes to pimp and police, but demons without a pimp building pandemonium (sometimes in cop uniforms, minus the cop function)! We fucking love that kind of freedom: to make whatever demons we want, burning rapturously while watching this go in and out of that (short of harming workers, animals or nature; states aren’t people and billionaires shouldn’t exist, etc); re: to make demons is to make love turned on its head, laughing at canonical norms.

As we’ll see next, this includes summoning them in more magical varieties!

Afterword: A Further Note on Angry Gods (and Playing with Them)

“Ray, when someone asks you if you’re a god, you say YES!”

—Winston to Ray, Ghostbusters (1984)

A quick note about gods, seeing as playing with them (dark gods, which demons are) is what Shelley focused on, and where we’ll be going into the imaginary past; i.e., as it existed back then, and which is summoned in more magical ways seemingly divorced from making monsters the Cartesian way (with Shelley’s “Galvanism” being closer to magic than science—leaving the spark of creation to our imagination). Amazonomachia, kayfabe, golems and kaiju—monsters are both gods and made by gods, and who doesn’t like gods? Older ones are pagan/demonic, steeped in agnostic folklore/the supernatural, and generally equal parts aspiring and dangerous/fearsome. “All deities reside within [our] breast,” said Blake; through calculated risk during ludo-Gothic BDSM, they become our best friends—mighty beings to conjure up and thrill us, then dismiss as needed.

In turn, the natural and material worlds abide by the same basic forces over time; i.e., just as animals have evolved over millions of years thanks to evolutionary pressure, society’s current system of differences under capital work through natural-to-unnatural linguo-material components whose own stressors evolved to help us survive: gods as social highs and lows (values and taboos), but also creative legacies/the power of creation. This survival includes of ourselves, as Shelley points out; i.e., “man is his own worst enemy” and men of reason have now put our survival (and that of the planet) in jeopardy! Medusa doesn’t discriminate, but we can be better stewards/mothers of the world and keepers of the fire of the gods than Victor was. We can write and program better lessons through godly data as a form of pain (“to sense injury” as the T-800 describes it)—with pleasure and pain being as indiscrete to each other as organic and inorganic are; i.e., in a posthuman world (therefore the Capitalocene) where we still have to relate back and forth. We must, or we will not survive. That’s what camping the canon is.

All demons, pandemonium. The goal of Gothic Communism, then, is to humanize the harvest through holistic expression during the chaos of evolution (and creation) on all fronts; i.e., dialectical-material scrutiny (and effect) during oppositional praxis, thereby demonstrating the state as inhumane versus nature as monstrous-feminine; re: recultivating the Wisdom of the Ancients to deny it to the elite, much like Shelley did. In effect, we’re reclaiming Medusa through ambiguity and paradox marrying different things to speak to state abuse; e.g., pleasure and pain (more on this in “Exploring the Derelict Past”); i.e., the “omelet problem,” or “sometimes to create, you must destroy.” You can’t have life without death, can’t heal from rape without putting “rape” in quotes: “A king has his reign and then he dies” (white saviors and black tokenism also sight-seeing demons made by the state, but also the world older states destroyed and left behind, post-seed, below).

In learning from Scott and Shelley as my spiritual ancestors (Alien is my favorite movie, Frankenstein my favorite book), bear in mind how Shelley played at immortality/dark creation (while interrogating technology and childrearing/the posthuman) through a female gaze occupying male bodies, versus Scott’s male one occupying female bodies (and biomechanical integration). Compared to them, ours is genderqueer and overtly Communist; i.e., performing hubris to go where the gods and their statuesque, Vitruvian, warlike perfection (from an imaginary Greco-Roman standpoint, which Milton camped—followed by the Shelleys, and later Scott, above) can, but humans and their flaws only experience “torture,” which is to say pain: the queer search for non-normative love, haunted by its own mutating (and mutilative) copies, onstage and off.

Paradox of rape aside, it’s always, to some degree, experimental and apocalyptic—confusing the brain (and a mixture of the senses) to unlearn harmful knowledge; i.e., by exposing our chains and jolting us with that sweet, sweet Promethean “fire” (re: the modern idea [and abuse] of electricity didn’t quite exist yet, called “Galvanism” by Shelley as her inspiration): the jouissance (orgasm) of facing tough realities and—like a different iteration of the Creature—coming out stronger for it by making friends through newly-minted boundaries breaking Capitalist Realism down! Capital is built on Cartesian binaries of ownership and division, hence will never end sickness, war and disease (effectively killing the planet and leaving Ozymandian Derelicts behind, for others to stumble on). So we must end it ourselves through what we pass on during the coding war! “We aren’t computers, Bastian! We’re physical!”

Exposure hurts, including to the idea that capital has made us machines for it to control. Melting us down to our DNA (the oldest code) as we grow into adulthood (and then wither and die), we forget backwards. But it also fertilizes new growth, regenerating what has died into something radically new as a matter of function; re, the Numinous as something to quest for (from Varma’s The Gothic Flame):

The rise of the Gothic novel may be connected with depravity, and a decline of religion. […] In particular, these novels indicate a new, tentative apprehension of the Divine. Monastic life was no longer believed in, but at least it recalled the Ages of Faith and the alluring mystery of their discipline. The ghosts and demons, the grotesque manifestations of the supernatural, aroused the emotions by which man had first discovered his soul and realized the presence of a Being greater far than he, one who created and destroyed at will. Man’s first stirring of religious instinct was his acute horror of this powerful Deity—and it was to such primitive emotion that he reverted, emancipated from reason, but once again ignorant of God, his spiritual world in chaos.

Primarily the Gothic novels arose out of a quest for the numinous [emphasis, me]. They are characterized by an awestruck apprehension of Divine immanence penetrating diurnal reality. This sense of the numinous is an almost archetypal impulse inherited from primitive magic.

Whatever theatrical stance or political persuasion a player might adopt, our time as mortals is fleeting beyond ourselves. Reunions with life and death produce and instill chaos as an immortality that, through Shelley and Milton, long survived them; i.e., in a shared Satanic legacy we want to make increasingly gay and an-Com during ludo-Gothic BDSM healing nature-as-monstrous-feminine normally antagonized by state pimps. Scott verges into canonical pimp “milking Satan,” as did Milton. Shelley far outpaced either by vocally critiquing men of reason like Victor for harming so many beyond themselves. Nothing critiques capital more nakedly and productively in Gothic than Frankenstein (a tradition that later sci-fi completely forgot, Jameson). This pedagogy happens through liminal expression, mixing pain with pleasure during calculated risk; i.e., exquisite “torture” being—among other things—the playing with big things that could crush us but don’t: they’re not cops, but avengers bringing power (and the awesome anger of the gods) back to the people!

(model and artist: Mercedes the Muse and Persephone van der Waard)

To create dark gods is to fetishize the alien for or against workers/nature. This, by extension, teeters between internal imagination and external fabrication (e.g., Mercedes, myself, and Toxie, above). Our subsequent “torture” is pain and pleasure as a kind of dark psychosexual data; re: writ in decay and laced with phantom pain (and genuine harm), which demons engage with through the paradox of play and medieval poetics: mixing death, food, sex and other bodily functions (concepts from the Poetry Module; more on them during “Giger’s Xenomorph”).

That’s how children learn, but also adults—discussing what is often disguised to internalize and externalize it (the Dutch word “hope” meaning “to make a pile”). So do we camp Marx by conjuring up demons to liberate sex work with; i.e., as Shelley once did, putting the pieces back together (as must be done, per cycle) and camping the canon in ways Scott only partially managed to, himself: with god-like action figures (characterized by height personifying hubris)—first finding them “abandoned” in the ruins and playing with their decaying power for different ends. Frankenstein‘s isn’t isolation from fire, but both how humans and technology are bound up in their separate affairs, and that technology isn’t “bad” on its own; what you do with it—meaning what you choose to create and how you treat your creations afterwards—is what matters (the danger being when you lose the ability to tell friend from foe, only seeing in red/us-versus-them). This isn’t a “final destination,” at all, but a link in a never-ending chain, mise-en-abyme.

Verisimilitude very clearly isn’t the point, here, (as “actual science,” the giant motif doesn’t translate very well, but as a metaphor for demonic creation, is golden). Nor is dick-measuring (though Shelley is politically superior to Scott, she’s also a bit more mysterious to most people outside movies; i.e., the girl who wrote Frankenstein). Instead, its heavy-handed theatrics ape Victor as a false “corpse” of himself that talks back, mid-psychomachy (no one ever said Frankenstein was subtle, but you’d be surprised just how much of its Hamlet-grade, weird British tensions [dialogs of strength married to weird canonical science nerds] goes over most peoples’ heads; blame James Whale for that one, or Mel Brooks after him). So take what is useful and apply it to yourselves and yours—to reshape, recode, and pass along inside/upon your own dark children (a Trojan virus)!

(source: Stan Winston’s School of Character Arts’ “Terminator 2: Judgment Day’s T-800 – An Interview with Stan Winston,” 2015)

For example—and case in point—I, as a trans woman, always felt that I had one foot in each world, but could never give birth (with a uterus). Instead, I learned to feel more like a woman through the poetic act of creation; i.e., one inspired by Scott and Shelley both filling my figurative cumdump[39] (the medieval having a bit more fun with the miracle of creation, both human biology and poetry of a technological sort)! What they left behind has inspired my own giant children, teaching me what it means to be a parent (closer to life and death as normally alienated from workers, but also fetishized for them to purchase and consume). A “power couple,” indeed! Light me up, baby!

And while “strange women distributing swords” is seemingly no basis for a system of government, there remains practical value in medieval poetics informing Gothic Communism; i.e., to synthesize catharsis away from state models, generally with a focus on nude monster bodies and publicly nude (and vulgar) displays of power! The best sex has a bit of excitement and pain to it; the paradox of rape is it is not rape, any more than Frankenstein’s monster is actually a big walking dead guy/brain-in-a-jar (to see one’s creation and mortality laid bare—be it brain or womb—for iconoclastic purposes; i.e., by women [and other minorities] reclaiming normally sacred things from the state [misogynistic canon and its weird “hate boners,” left] through camp: to laugh at the gods by reminding readers that girls have hairy butt holes, and men—alienated from their prescribed sex dolls—sublimate and kill them for it like Medusa[40], also left).

(artist: Bernie Wrightson)

Instead, it’s the potential to literally make friends for all ages, genders, and inclinations; it becomes something to tell our children (always curious about monsters, below)—to give to them not as a present bought per season, but a gift made ourselves that keeps on giving. As Shelley shows us, children can be taught whatever they’re given; let’s give them something better than what society gave Victor (whose own problematic childhood automatically made him see the Creature not as “friend” but “foe”). That’s what making monsters (demons or otherwise) is all about, from a Gothic-Communist perspective! We gain the ability to end curses, right past wrongs, heal from rape and de-automate genocide—in a word, to stop capital in its tracks while referring to the imaginary past pushing us in a post-scarcity direction: breeding and grooming with a sex-positive outcome!

In Frankenstein, Victor hogs the stage but the Creature is the star of the show. It’s also not stupid, but actually quite the opposite, acquires knowledge at a frightening rate. So are we—are all, to some degree, innocent and jaded, artificial and alienized, under capital’s bright demanding lights telling us “the show must go on”; but such performances allow for the paradox of reclamation (through iconoclastic art) during such fabrication—to reclaim for ourselves the incredible ability to first, recognize when others see us as inhuman and scary (through no fault of their own, born into the same world under Capitalism lionizing such fakeries, above); then communicate the holocaust of our anguish in ways that convince them we are human, thus deserve protection and love. It’s a basic human right, not something you buy under capital (or which capital assigns to a select special group; e.g., Jewish people); but it uses the same costumes and masks, comedy and drama, and whose potential identities beyond the medieval (re: Foucault) the Gothic turns inside-out.

Unlike many Gothic novels, Frankenstein works well as fantasy and futurism, its signature and much-intimated retro-future letting readers think about a two-century-old horror novel as one might a computer program: Shelley is Cassandra predicting Capital’s demise while demonstrating the thin line between child and adult, technology and sex, protection and procreation, pleasure and pain, problem and purpose, birth and bastard, pro-life and pro-choice, prostitute and pimp, sex and symbol, porn and art, torture and talent, consent and non-consent, canon and camp, transparent and opaque, real and fake (as Arnold and company also demonstrate, below):

(ibid.)

To that, counterterror is a voice, thus a relationship had between things both forced apart (alienation) and together (fetishization), comprising a pedagogy of the oppressed living under the shadow of police violence sexualizing everything in sight; i.e., whose alienation—of zombie-demon labor talking back to us—is both older victims of capital, but also present ones speaking through our fears and fantasies: a worker saying to those who find its talking remains, “I’d rather kill my boss and fuck what society treats as ‘monster’ (for its scars, skin color and/or composite nature) than be with an entitled asshole contributing to state shift!” Size difference, age play and power imbalance also come into effect—all to collectively shock not for its own sake, mid-pastiche, but to jolt us awake about difference manufactured (and how people, once badly programmed, go on to exterminate others for scraps); re: by remediating praxis, we teach children—who are vulnerable to bad lessons (thus susceptible to cloning those lessons)—to be better and make better!

Scott was already in his forties when making Alien and it shows; i.e., he kind of starts with Radcliffean demon BDSM and ’70s Rocky Horror and gradually dials back what little camp Alien started with. Shelley was nineteen when she wrote Frankenstein, and still had that youthful ex-vitro “zinc spark” (re: the glass womb dilemma—or what Ashley Gavin succinctly describes as “inside baby/outside baby“; “Ashley Gavin: Live in Chicago,” 2024) that commented on the larger world through demonic poetics. The greatest power in Frankenstein, then, comes from its composite design: a faith in Gothic intuition wedded to early science but still having magic to spare—to parse through play while recognizing creation through technology as speaking to lived trauma living inside the body and material trauma existing outside the body as both contributing to generational trauma; i.e., as something to increase through canon or decrease through camp, on the Aegis. Those who close their eyes to it become hopeless cynics who, as Oscar Wilde puts it, “know the cost of everything but the value of nothing.” They become predators who prey on their students (re: Jadis).

Coded as such, they also become gargoyles for the church of capital; i.e, who see invaders thus enemies everywhere, and who make machines of war to conquer the Earth and the stars, but ultimately themselves inside the Capitalocene (awfully telling that Victor makes a giant war machine [re: Walpole’s armor] to lionize himself, then cries wolf when labor possesses the avatar of capital to thump him and chase him to the ends of the world and beyond; i.e., Ozymandias in the desert of older disasters)! Menticide is not human nature as “congenital,” but comorbid and criminogenic while able to cause disorders “in the blood” and brain, where data is stored and exchanged in “perfect” duality:

From what I’ve seen of perfection
Where we could do as we please
In secrecy this infection
Was spreading like a disease (Judas Priest’s “Metal Gods,” 1980).

Leave it to Judas Priest to betray their punk roots and romanticize rebellion as Nazi-Communism; i.e., “both sidesing” what is—in reality—night and day, then regressively dogmatize “past” before selling it back to their fan base under Thatcher’s Britain (the “KISS problem” dumbing down Frankenstein for profit—a bit ironic as KISS was Jewish and sold out; then again, so was Jerry Springer[41]). Capitalism is the disease, not labor, but they occupy the same space, language and stages!

So do liberation and exploitation dysfunctionally unfold. Those who profit off/unironically endorse Red Scare are Nazis, import/exporting the usual neoliberal heavy metal for queen and country (wedded to capital, in Britain’s case, but also America’s own god-kings; i.e., calling themselves “commanders-in-chief,” while shifting the aristocracy towards the bourgeoisie and back again, when the state starts to die): “a new order of intelligence that saw everyone as a threat, not just those on the other side!” Capital is incompatible with life; geological or technological, state shift is state shift, which capital will pimp out to punish nature as monstrous-feminine for profit. A king has his reign; then, nature wins.

Again, though, metal isn’t automatically a weapon for capital and its extermination wars, but it is generally ambiguous through duality, mid-liminal expression. All praxis is liminal because it must translate to consumable forms. That’s why Frankenstein works as well as it does, and why capital tries so hard to commodify the aesthetic. As proto-fascist satire, Frankenstein is intentionally ambiguous because it needs the reader to choose, and to acknowledge the terrible power of propaganda; i.e., the Promethean Quest is ultimately a quest for the Numinous, and a quest for the palliative Numinous (as I frame it) is a quest for empathy by choosing mercy and love in the face of the technological singularity[42] (which Victor does not do).

To confront and reify the problem—meaning in something we can recognize in ourselves, then love in others through our creations teaching lessons—is to break Capitalism at its core. But we must learn to self-reflect in ways that extend the charity to those normally wronged by capital, capital framing all of this (as Victor does) through doomsday arguments that Shelley—a nineteen-year-old girl without computers or formal education—took and hit square on the nose (critiquing what so many still refuse to do, nowadays; i.e., those people treating scientists like celebrities and, oddly enough, celebrities like scientists, and worshipping both like gods who are beyond reproach. So often, straight male scientists and creatives eclipse their female counterparts; e.g., Giger and Scott eclipsing Shelley while living in her shadow, below)! Frankenstein‘s traction was immediate, its legacy infinite—showing readers that, while we’re not strictly defined by the past and its plastic trauma, nor are we entirely removed from it: “We live in Gothic times.”

(source: Douglas Martin’s “H. R. Giger, Artist[43] Who Gave Life to Alien Creature, Dies at 74,” 2014)

In short, we must love other victims of capital as we would ourselves, during universal liberation. I’d say “no gods or masters,” then, but we are all gods, under Communism. And despite neoliberal Capitalism pimping dark creation for its own base ends, no one monopolizes monsters or the awesomely dark power to create, thus (a)rouse the rabble by “riding” the lightning. Lightning doesn’t have to strike the same place twice (though it can, next page); it just has to expect the wonderous spontaneity of attraction, mid-Romance. That can happen anywhere: “Not the third switch!” / “Throw it! Give MY CREATION LIFE!” Frankenstein was a one-man “circular breeding” fantasy written by a woman soupily camping the idea of sex to—in her own juvenile inventor’s lightbulb moment—make something that kills Francis Bacon’s number-one fan and fucks the body-builder afterwards. The best of both worlds, her winning formula fetishizes rebellion for workers! Eureka!

That’s Shelley and her whore’s revenge—the exhibitionist/voyeur confessions of a madwoman/wicked Galatean mad scientist accepting her status as manmade, then nakedly camping the canon (the Promethean myth): through uncontrolled opposition and neo-medieval (operatic) rape fantasies “storming” her “castle” and putting her maidenhead—gone too soon, but “for science!”—to the two-handed sword: a live wire that’s too hot to handle/off the charts, or a sizzling mood (and bedroom eyes) that hits just right? You be the judge!

(model and artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

We often invent friends in our hour of need. Not even twenty when raw-dogging it/squeezing a dark god’s massive dick into her tight pale pussy[44], Shelley made something fluorescent that could never be turned off, only fluctuate in constant circulation; i.e., something that, unto itself, emblematized the desire to fuck with godly power—to create a god and be a god by creating such a being that can either create, in turn, or inspire others to create in ways that overthrow the nuclear model: while looking for a suitable mate/companion (swept up in sex and natural reproduction, but also unnatural reproduction through art-as-porn, canned and shaken, inside the same witch’s-cauldron echo chamber where canon and camp—the nuclear and found family—do battle).

An awesome machine, the Creature lives on, but isn’t just a sentinel (cops; e.g., Mega Man, the Stepford Wives); with the right instruction, it can become a steward for nature (re: T2, but Communist). “Fuck mommy just like this, ok? Now gimmie that baby batter!” The idea is informed consent and birth control (of people and art) being in the hands of workers, not capital and the state (all of my partners have either not had uteruses, have fucked with condoms, or—in my case fucking them—have had a vasectomy to avoid unwanted pregnancies): to get up close and personal with/to our bodies; i.e., as alien and fetish, creating with and of them regarding the mysteries of creation on canvas of all kinds.

Rape is endemic to capital; anything that challenges profit is a threat to capital and its ordering of the world, which it rapes without end. But silence is death, which makes ludo-Gothic BDSM our survival; i.e., playing with power as something to quest for in paradoxically healthy forms that have the ability to change or freeze the world in its tracks. It’s both different and not different from those videogames everyone plays these days… Life is a game, and sooner or later your refusal to play it outside the elite’s rules becomes a choice!

So, love it or hate it, camp canon however you can—i.e., by getting naked, and down and dirty with one’s glorious, mortal, animal side (the paradox being to rough something up versus having it be sterile to better make one’s point; e.g., Alien versus 2001, but also Cuwu’s pussy, before/after, below). Sex is the most policed device in the world. It is simultaneously divine and absurd, hot and goofy (“so put that in this and wiggle around until cummies happen…”), and desperately needing better education under capital; i.e., in ways that respect its power but also don’t take it too seriously if they can help it; e.g., “Oh, no! My ass is just too fat for these yoga pants! Please don’t take advantage!” (we’ll introduce de facto education, cultural appreciation and descriptive sexuality in “Call of the Wild” and unpack them in Volume Three).

This certainly isn’t easy. The more we try to unite all groups, the more alone canon makes us feel (segregate the radicals); some people historically sell out. But once you find others who have similar chemistry/understand alienation and desire liberation for all, there’s nothing like it in the world! I was radicalized by so many tight pussies clamping down on my dick:

(model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard[45])

Shelley was a pirate, one who showed that girls fuck, fart, spit and swear like anyone! Making friendship from the ensuing messes, there’s a fair bit not just of her in the book, but of Cuwu despite going our separate ways! Love is blind, friendship always somewhat imaginary but forever as something to build in memory of the good times come and game, but also yet-to-come. Sex is work, and sex work is work; so is revolution as a lineage of monster mothers!

To become a mother is to change, and this contains within it different fears about dying: less as a literal event, and more becoming something dark and different while alive that lives on long after one is dead. No one remembers Mary Wollstonecraft (senior or junior); Mary Shelley is a whole ‘nother beast. But this, unto itself, speaks to the vitality of relationships and good parentage (if only to use the raw parts for spares)—both with our live-in cocks or pussies, but also whatever technologies they bring to the table. The process is suitably anathema and gospel.

To this, Percy creampied the virgin pussy of one Mary Wollstonecraft, but also fed her pregnant horny brain—no doubt awash with hormones from actual pregnancies and postpartum events—with “tacos”; i.e., those angel-and-devil, pickles-and-ice-cream cravings being Paradise Lost, Galvanism, and the Golem of Prague, among others. In turn, Wollstonecraft became Shelley as, at least in part, a dark imitation of the man she admired, the pupil outshining the master and even herself.

Fast-forward to Scott making Alien—and then Covenant nearly two centuries after Frankenstein—and me, exposed to Prometheus in 2012, discovering Shelley twenty years after watching Alien and playing Super Metroid. Primed for it since I was small (my mother loving The Doors, but also the British Romantics, reading me “Kubla Khan” to tire me out and get me to sleep), I suddenly got the same Numinous cravings; re: watching Covenant with my family on my birthday (source: “Alien Covenant, a Review,” 2017) before going overseas to have my own Percy-and-Mary, Jim-and-Pamela-style relationship; i.e., followed by many more afterwards while thinking about Covenant, again (source: ” A Second Look”) and again (re: “Choosing the Slain“)—until I looked past Scott, and back towards Shelley and her own nature-vs-nature natural philosophy haunting the Great Man haunting me (and haunted by his own mother and Shelley and so on and so on).

In turn—and through my own poetic indiscretions and infidelities expressing the complicated, ongoing relationship between the past and present—the organic and inorganic fused, passing information continuously along while mutating it; i.e., the corruption being the data, from smaller cryptonymic sequences cached inside a bigger cryptomimetic series: Milton wrote Paradise Lost, which Shelley consumed when producing her own monster while already living with one (Ron Shusett, by comparison, graciously fed Dan O’Bannon hotdogs while the latter suffered IBS and wrote his Alien screenplay); i.e., tracing along so many generations of a larger chain before finding and infecting me with the same proverbial fire. Cooking on the same giant skillet, my trans egg cracked, and Nicholas became Persephone adopting/adapting Mary Shelley’s imperfect, dualistic likeness; i.e., as a recursive, warring matter of revolution told through evolution hidden in code.

Shelley beat Darwin to that punch, too, and is truly a woman to be grateful for/afraid of. She gave birth to Communism versus fascism in its proto forms; generations later, things have come full circle as I wrote Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion, or Gothic Communism—a book whose own foreword opens with me comparing myself to Shelley while acknowledging the many different sources that went into its messy regenesis, but also its continuity and sequel rebirths: those who adapt survive, so take what is useful and leave the rest.

Holistic study serves as the core transfer method, and my perfecting of Shelley’s secret formula—humility and hubris (“Mother is the name for ‘God’ on the lips and hearts of all children”) driving a mad scientist to make monsters who made more mad scientists and monsters, in duality—was simply me standing on her Samus-sized shoulders: armed for bear and ready to free (deprivatize) the Amazon, the Gorgon, the fire of the gods and have the whore’s revenge; i.e., by stopping Capitalism (and its Realism) for good. Just as Victor is Achilles, Byron, and Satan, then, Mary Shelley is Legion; i.e., all of those and none of them, plus Medusa and Hippolyta, but also evocations of Percy and her mother while not being them, too. So do I—or rather, my books as extensions of their own immediate mother and lineage of mothers—paradoxically contain and proliferate the same haunted legacy. It’s an orgy of ghosts! Stare and tremble but also unite; become one with the Aegis—staring intensifies! Eat your heart out, Eve Segewick.

(source)

The Gothic is writ in disintegration, made from fragments to rebuilt what was lost/could be; all roads lead to Medusa and her Communist Numinous (“diamonds are a girl’s best friend,” something-something “Norman Bates was Hitchcock playing ‘bury the gay'”). Befitting a Gothic homecoming for the ages, I got closer to Shelley as time went on, not further away! While familiarity breeds contempt, imitation remains the sincerest form of flattery. I built on Shelley and made her Promethean Quest my own; i.e., we are each of us unique and identical twins (with twins never being fully identical; e.g., me and my straight twin): part of the same cryptonymy process, part of the same vengeful, rock ‘n roll womb’s poetic collocation. Rebellion, as Shelley keeps showing us—but also Marx through my work camping his ghost (re: “Making Marx Gay“)—is rock ‘n roll; but said opposition constantly needs a woman’s gayer sluttier touch, lest the Straights control it for profit.

It likewise, needs to be short enough to identify at a glance and imitate, but girthy enough to satisfy through substance. Little pigs, we glut ourselves, hungry like the wolf. Forget “smash or pass,” where’s our self-control? It’s our Song of Infinity making the past wise again! “Let’s get weird!” again! Anything can happen on Halloween again! “More, more!” (said Cuwu, as I fucked them for the umpteenth time in one night, across a week, during an entire month).

(artist: Sexy Flower Water)

In short, you can’t just “one and done it,” and camping sex is to reverse the alienation of sex already abjected; Medusa’s placental, parthenogenic womb bears forbidden fruit, but its orchard thereof requires constant, regular care: endless “watering” (with cum, but also blood, sweat, tears, tender love and care), lest the bourgeoisie dry it out more than Lovecraft’s urethra at the prospect of sex (the sexless old boys club, pimping nature into pieces of jerky it can eat raw for bragging rights). Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, S.T. Joshi! I am woman, hear me rawr!

There comes our parade of patchwork slogans, again; e.g., “What a story, Marx!” or “Women don’t like sex.” The former is funny and the latter is a myth! But also, sex is danger! That’s what makes it fun, thus worth it! Don’t listen to others who say, “Don’t do it!” or “No pussy’s worth it!” (within reason, and use your brains). Like, how would they know? Cuwu and I loved a lifetime’s worth, and I have the receipts to prove it (some of them stitched together like a patchwork collage of composites, below). And though that didn’t last, they were still my Percy who gave me the darkness I needed to birth rebellion; i.e., in ways I’m not sure either of us could have, at the time (“It was all worth it” being the proud parent’s steady oath).

Before we proceed, then, I’d like to showcase that cryptonymy a bit—to take a look under the hood of my purring brain to see what routinely makes Gothic Communism tick (and what these demons have in common). “I choose you, Cuwu!”

(exhibit 45b2a: Artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard, from a variety of scenes we crafted and shot together—and assembled here by me post hoc as “monster pastiche”; i.e., of me loving a monster/mad scientist and vice versa. Blue balls? More like “Blue Monday” [1983], amirite?  

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
But I’m quite sure that you’ll tell me
Just how I should feel today

I see a ship in the harbor
I can and shall obey
But if it wasn’t for your misfortune
I’d be a heavenly person today [source: Genius]. 

If Zeuhl taught me anything, I definitely have “a type”: the punk. The trick was finding one that didn’t harm me and was stable; Zeuhl was a stable postpunk who harmed* me, and Cuwu was an unstable punk who harmed themselves to the point that it traumatized me, too. Eventually I found better company in terms of stability and comfort, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss the fun that Cuwu and I had. They’d tease me until I begged, or until they begged me, “Just put it in me, already!” But this invoked all manner of “asking for it,” on all manner of surfaces:

*”How does it feel when your heart grows cold,” Zeuhl?

[artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard]

Make no mistake, Cuwu was weird as hell and I—also being weird as hell—couldn’t get enough of them; they were constantly putting on a show to offer me the truth of things—right in front of me, like it always was. Twenty-four and gender fluid, Cuwu was mature and immature, always in motion and difficult to capture—a former dancer who could speak volumes in single frames, yet wanting to be seen and shown across all surfaces [above and below]: from moment to moment, controlling a situation to gain power and feel safe. To it, you can absolutely learn from broken clocks, and Cuwu wasn’t even broken—just damaged. Super smart, well-read and passionate, but also on drugs a lot of the time, they were needy and dominating from a subby position that practiced its wares on me. But also, they were and are my Victor and Frankenstein or vice versa, no shortage of awesome reversals taking place betwixt our hungry nethers:

[artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard]

So here we are, no longer physically together but someone whose memory of former boding I keep alive in my work; i.e., our cryptonymy healing from rape, the two of us always experimenting and shooting things from different angles [sometimes in focus, sometimes not; sometimes silly and sometimes serious; sometimes obscured, sometimes in full view]. We played together—them teasing me, our spooning always leading to insolent, deliciously disrespectful forking [as I fuck them while they use their phone*. Seriously, we made enough porn to last a lifetime]:

[artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard]

*Bottom collage, top-left. I can’t remember what they were even looking at, but I think it was clothes? Zeuhl did the same, once, but that was while they were playing Pokémon Go (2016). They also turned my life upside down, but constantly used sex to keep me in check/demand loyalty. Eventually they demanded my loyalty even after they abandoned me for their husband. Fuckers.

The West is fascinated with sex and love, and with good endings and bad [re: Radcliffe and Lewis]. But canon conditions them to obsess about a particular kind of love attached to a binarized, us-versus-them, linguo-material structure to keep that structure in place through ethnocentric monomyth police violence. Thus, do they miss the point of building something better for ourselves, as Satan and Shelley did, but also Cuwu and I; i.e., as something that lasted beyond the immediate passion: echoes and rem[a]inders of it, the passion taking hold like a ghost and ravishing us anew. “Haunt me, Cathy!”

Yes, Cuwu abused me—and yes, apart from that abuse they also ran off with a dog breeder with the same first name as me and a similar-size penis—but all the same, we kept the agreement we made, afterwards, and I still use it to construct my vision of a better world; i.e., one informed by their priceless contributions. To it, I love you, my little stoner dragon—my modern Prometheus/rectus dominus [“ass master”] torturing me with sweet bliss from beyond our time together. Cuwu was a little animal—loved animals and treated me like one they couldn’t always care for even though they wanted to. As always, I hope you’re safe, wherever you are.

[model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard—and their little beardie]

Good or bad, people have whatever power you give them, and vice versa; re: “no one does it better, so that’s why I [gave] you my heart to break!” When you look on us, you’re looking at an older agreement—one that was both built on trust, haunted by abuse, stunted by self-destruction, and replanted to grow again. So do we come together [so to speak] while putting-pulling parts repeatedly together and apart; i.e., camping sex in all the usual ways. Piece-by-piece, we rip and tear until it is done! Healing hurts and feels good; it itches and throbs and twinges and pulses. Squish-squish, macaroni-stirring sound!

Maybe I’m repeating myself? No shit; however serious, revolution is repetition and this is fun to me. I can do it all night, babes [when Cuwu’s pussy got too sore, we switched to anal sex]. Furthermore, this goes beyond our individual pictures and collages to include others in a larger artistic, ouroborotic movement brought back from the dead; e.g., Harmony Corrupted [next page] making a collage based on her shoots commissioned by me, and each of those inspired by my time with Cuwu [which I told them about]. Rebellions need heat [energy and work] to function; during ludo-Gothic BDSM, we make warmth in more ways than one, the surgery self-inflicted and whose addiction a) speaks behind blue eyes

and b) with our clothes on [to tease you] as much as not:

Weird attracts weird; I come from a family as mad as hatters, as did Cuwu and so many others. Both mad, and making madness with ourselves and others based on older forms that push towards universal liberation, we show how nostalgia is the enemy of reason; i.e., the latter as a genocidal historical-material force; re: as Harmony and I do, and all the cuties I’ve played with have done, over the years and during the course of this project. Madness is—like technology and our fire of the gods—not simply one thing or another but many in duality.

And thanks to Shelley and similar poets, that duality now more than ever has power and value for us as something we take back on the Aegis; i.e., insofar as we use it to help ourselves by taking it back from those who don’t help us—to smash their unironic breeding and racial-superiority [eugenics] models, and doing so on purpose: as a matter of preservation, by those who know.

Cuwu, for example, deliberately played with me—a multimedia expert—to trap them in amber and show them off, as simulacra; i.e., I was already drawing them and did so multiple times before we eventually made all this porn [so did Harmony and many others—I work with people who are kind to me and who I want to be remembered as part of something bigger than ourselves]. That’s what happens when you cross a giant voyeur with an equally massive exhibitionist.  In our case, though, the demonic courtship felt exhilarating but untenable—these different competing elements going faster and faster until eventually they burned themselves out:

[artist: Cinnannoe]

Cuwu frankly loved being seen and viewed as something to love; it gave them power. Had they paused every so often to let me breathe/meet my needs, I’d still be giving it to them. From a certain point of view, I very much still am. Fuck an artist; get immortality as they can offer it. Any artist would kill to have had a muse like Cuwu [we’ll explore the ace/paradoxical attraction of artists and models more, in Volume Three]:

[models and artist: Guildenstern/Cuwu (far left/all) and Persephone van der Waard (left, middle and right)]

Communism isn’t a quota or zero-sum game, then. A combination of congenital and comorbid factors—ranging from genetics to training to material conditions—it starts with our desire trumping our caution when seeking to prevent systemic harm and generational trauma, mid-synthesis: “To let ‘I dare!’ wait upon ‘I would?'” So while necessity is the mother of invention, invention is reinvention and generally starts in the relationships we build for those reasons [and not simply for efficient project; e.g., Karl Jobst’s former pick-up artistry transferring to his speedrunning career and YouTube channel; re: “Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning,” 2025]. “No one is an island.” We face capital as one or we die alone. For realsy.

So keep building for each other and fucking with those things the status quo builds for itself! The moment you stop is when capital wins. We’ll be the envy of the gods above! Fortune favors the bold and the brave really do live forever! Cuwu and Harmony are two of the bravest people I’ve yet [and like Shelley’s famous psychomachy, have bravery and caution inside them—”two wolves live in us,” ‘n all that].)

From Radcliffe onwards, cryptonymy’s a woman’s weapon against rape while refusing to either triangulate/tokenize (re: me, vis-à-vis Creed’s monstrous-feminine) or be a quiet victim; Shelley’s a straight freak whose “clone [doesn’t] sleep alone” (Pat Benatar’s “My Clone Sleeps Alone” riffing on Ira Levin while anticipating Reagan’s presidency, 1979). But also, she’s my Lady of the Lake—a rustic-but-not-entirely-unschooled bimbo, dark-mommy witch lobbing a scimitar (rogue technology) at me, but also my delicious devil dragging me, Persephone, back to Hell!

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends!” but remember to come up for air! Marathons are fun ‘n all (Cuwu and I once fucked for three hours), but pace yourselves! Aftercare, always; and hurt, not harm! You have the compass that never points North. Now go and have fun; take your own monsters to bring Hell to Earth! Ravish her bussy (the alien cock too big to just fit in one hole, below)!

A whore without a pimp is a sex worker controlling their own bodies, labor and art/exchanges, thus their own ability to perform power selectively and subversively during public nudism; e.g., and have/fake orgasms (with capital treating women—and beings treated like women; re: emergent beings to chattelize—as “machines” to humiliate; i.e., to put coins [of cruelty or kindness] inside until sex comes out). Forget Peter Weyland, saying “we’re the gods now” while imploring to everyone, “If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to change the world!” Fuck that noise and fuck the bourgeoisie! Use the fire of the gods to set yourselves (and everything of nature) free! That includes—as Shelley show us—sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, fucking to metal to become the metal! Sweet science, sweeter sodomy!

Speaking of wishes and visions of a better world told in hellish language, let’s proceed onto “Summoning Demons”!

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

---

Footnotes

[2] Undoubtedly as Mary Shelley’s parents and superiors introduced her to different works—namely her father at first (since her mother died eleven days after Shelley [then Wollstonecraft] was born), but later by Percy Shelley and Thomas Hogg passing Paradise Lost along to her as my mother once showed me Black Sabbath: “Like, check this out, man! It’s totally rad!”

[3] Venkman’s snide “No human would stack books like this” comment leaping to mind when seeing Hamilton’s photo (with “Margaret Hamilton” also being the name of the actress who played the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz, 1939). So often, intelligent women are celebrated and feared as aberrations to cage and kettle by male pimps with virgin/whore syndrome. And, in both Hamilton’s cases, they so often tokenize!

[4] Wow, so lucky! Let’s face it, Altaira probably fucked around with Robby the Robot a bit (the young horny teenager riding the bed post or the cucumber in the fridge).

[5] Bubble’s “meat hair” from The Powerpuff Girls 1995 pilot:

(source)

[6] “Computers are dumb; they only know what you tell them.” People are a lot closer to computers than many care to amid; they’re certainly not immune to childhood indoctrination’s fear and dogma!

[7] The xenomorph combining of all of these things to take on fresh life.

[8] Scott’s matelotage from Alien borrowed, first, from Frankenstein—with Cuwu and I making love not completely dissimilar to Percy and Shelley, over two centuries prior! Some people bloom early, others late. Better late than never!

[9] If Gustav Dore were a comic book artist.

[10]  E.g., the reality that cum doesn’t stay in the vagina after sex, leaking out onto the bed, down one’s leg or into one’s panties, etc. These ideas are heavily dogmatized, which only makes camping them all the more fun and easy!

[11]  I.e., women’s work. Western society is built around straight men and their actions. Whereas gay men could historically fall back on this, women were put into a corner and forced to do one thing: sex. They became defined by it, similar to making Jews count/lend money through the practice of usury. In turn, their subsequent demonization tracked along these pathways. It’s literally blaming the help.

[12] Shelley’s Frankenstein is deeply aware of Paradise Lost, which the British Romantics (especially the second generation, which grew up in the ruins of the French Revolution) deeply adored as a whole; i.e., on the side of Satan as a revolutionary figure who remains a demon all the same; re, Nafi:

(artist: Gustave Doré)

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. Other romantic critics supported this view with great enthusiasm. [Percy] Shelley, for instance, reinforced this view when, in his “Defense of Poetry,” he said:

“Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan as expressed in Paradise Lost. It is a mistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended for the popular personification of evil. Milton’s Devil as a moral being is as far superior to God, as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy.”

According to Shelley, it was a mistake to think that Satan was intended by Milton as the popular personification of evil. This argument is still very much alive and valid today (source: “Milton’s Portrayal of Satan in Paradise Lost and the Notion of Heroism,” 2015).

More to the point, Percy oversaw Mary’s writing of Frankenstein, and while she obviously wrote the novel (only releasing it in her own name on the third edition after Percy’s death—1831 and 1822, respectively), his influence over the work is clear.

Booted from school for being an outspoken atheist (see: footnote to “A Defence of Poetry,” 1840)—and married young to a woman named Harriet (who Percy eventually cuckolded for Mary, herself five years his junior)—Percy was, to say the least, a bit of a man-whore and thoroughly entitled brat. At the age of twenty-one, he decided to elope for a second time, doing so with William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft’s now-famous daughter (the latter parent having died eleven days after giving birth to her child of the same name):

Mary is only 16, and she is running away with Percy Bysshe Shelley, a man five years her senior who is not merely already married but the father of a young child […] Mary’s stepmother does indeed catch up with the runaways in Calais. But by then it’s too late: Mary has been publicly “ruined,” because she has passed that all-important (though as it happens entirely un-sexual, storm-tossed) night with Percy and because, arriving in another country and registering with him at a hotel there, she has definitively eloped. Percy, who has form in eloping with 16-year-olds—his wife, Harriet, was the same age when he ran off with her—must understand this, at least, perfectly well. Whatever happens next between him and Mary, he has ensured that there’s no way back for her into ordinary society. He truly has snared her (source: Fiona Sampson’s “The Treacherous Start to Mary and Percy Shelley’s Marriage,” 2018).

Simply put, things were visibly less equal in those days (“visibly” being the key word, there)—with Mr. Shelley putting Mrs. Shelley at a profound disadvantage through his rebellious sense of entitlement (self-prioritizing himself at his wife’s expense, as Sampson tells it). But he also gambled with his own reputation, putting them both out: Harriet committed suicide in 1816 (she was twenty-one), and the two crazy kids tied the knot the same year Napoleon lost at Waterloo.

(artist: Samuel Stump)

All this being said, Godwin was an anarchist and Wollstonecraft a woman’s rights activist, and their wayward daughter marched to the beat of her own drum. In 1816, she and Percy kicked it with Lord Byron at a castle in Geneva; Mary wrote Frankenstein two years later, and four years after that, Percy was drowned at sea. Mary would survive him to raise their only surviving child, dying herself from a brain tumor in 1851. She would be overshadowed by her own novel and Percy’s mark on her life (including his surname), her own stories largely forgotten until far more recent times; e.g., The Last Man (1826) being an early example—if not the first example—of postapocalyptic fiction. Indeed, Mary’s Frankenstein is arguably the first science fiction novel, period, combining fantasy and the Gothic in ways that spoke to a world increasingly dissected and destroyed by the scientific method: the Industrial Revolution only leading to a rise of slave labor inside nation-states chasing profit.

[13] Alienation is generally inverted, with women being deprived of house and home, and men being deprived of sex. Attraction is bound to occur but we need to guide and ensure it serves workers’ needs, not capital. And in doing so, we can sometimes call those to our sides who are seemingly out of our league; i.e., “I was called here by humans, who wished to pay me tribute!” Gods need worshippers and worshippers need gods; e.g., Nyx (next page) being a dummy-thicc thigh queen and all-around sweetie!. Again, consent is sexy and it and safety can summon friends more than brute strength (though himbos/herbos are fine, of course)! Generational trust and community vibes become how we communicate! Ideally, it’s a win-win, helping everyone fit in/feel welcome, safe and loved!

(artist: Nyx)

As Nyx and I show—or Mary and Percy—the winning ingredients are teamwork, but also holism per intersectional solidarity. Nyx reached out and asked me to draw them; I finished their drawing on July 18th, 2022; I started my book series four days later, and came out as trans a couple weeks after that. Like Mary, Nyx taught me to sing to the gods and nature and feel safe in myself.

Indeed, we Gothic Communists all sing to some extent: to return to choruses that, while resurrecting sleeping things, never quite existed before; i.e., pre-capitalist ideas and themes applied to a post-scarcity mindset!

This includes Nyx’ love for nature with my own, and new ideas simply being a more proletarian approach to ourselves, animals and the environment as things to reunite with; i.e., borrowed from the past, including Shelley’s imaginary space and time. It’s hauntological, pushing towards harmony with each other and the world between us, then and now! Nature as monstrous-feminine—as fat, sassy and welcoming—Nyx throws her weight around, mooning us with that lunar-sized ass in pure, unadulterated joy! Full-moon booty makes us howl! Her Aegis is unmatched! Mammoth, gargantuan—a thing of beauty, an embarrassment of riches to savor, crave and adore!

And while we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover (and small booties are fine), I like to think Shelley’s booty was just as portentous as her novel’s legacy was. Between all of us (and on our shared Aegis), Medusa lives on!

[14] Honorifics and terms of endearment/pet language are acceptable on a case-by-case basis/depend entirely on context; e.g., insults, like “asshole,” versus commands or instructions with a disparaging flavor that are simply a role to play or hole to fill: “Fuck my asshole, asshole!” demanding the giver ring “the devil’s doorbell” of the recipient (with butt plugs sometimes called “Satan’s pacifier,” denoting the ass and sodomy as a site of forbidden carnal knowledge). The same goes for positive-sounding language; e.g., I’m a trans woman, so calling people “honey” or “girl” (outside of TERF circles) is more acceptable from me than a cis-het man (the latter historically using such language to possess and treat kept women like dogs, be they wives or mistresses). We’ll examine pet language, grooming and collars more, in “Call of the Wild.”

[15] In part, this was based on Shelley’s own friend circle as being somewhat larger than life, but also plugged into the then-dying Neo-Gothic tradition that Shelley single-handedly revitalized:

The Byronic Hero is a gloomy, brilliant antihero. Mary Shelley’s friend Lord Byron is the most famous model for the figure in his day (unless it was Napoleon); Victor Frankenstein is perhaps the most famous iteration in our own time (unless it’s Batman). The figure is embodied in Gothic villains from Manfred in The Castle of Otranto (1764) forward to Byron’s own play, Manfred (1817), and beyond. Sublime in his far-darting intellect and willed achievement, the figure appears in many of Byron’s extremely popular narrative poems, such as Don Juan (1818-1824) or “The Corsair” (1814). Drawing directly on contradictions in the original source–Lord Byron himself–both Victor and the Creature are Byronic Heroes, making Shelley’s novel a complex and intense interrogation of the figure (source: “Byronic Hero” from The Frankenstein Meme, 2018).

This partly owed itself to a biting critique of Capitalism as a rising force tied to Enlightenment thought, turned inside-out by the French Revolution (only to scapegoat the Monarchies and lead to the rise of the bourgeoisie); i.e., the trope of “mad science” married to the Gothic villains and psychomachy of yore:

The trope of  “Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” embodies many Byronic hero elements. More specifically, Victor demonstrates many traits associated with the Byronic hero. These elements essentially begin revealing themselves when Victor’s obsession with natural philosophy begins. His fascination concerning his studies has transformed him into a desensitized human being. His views regarding once precious, human life are now scientific, emotionless observations. We truly begin to see his detachment at this point progressing forward” (source: Frankenstein: Victor as a Byronic Hero (like Manfred) and Terror and Beauty Found in Nature,” 2015).

My own work riffs on the same trend of self-debate with doubles; i.e., carried forward out of novels and cinema into videogames, but especially Metroidvania; e.g., Axiom Verge (2014):

Actions (and social-material conditions) speak louder than words. But it’s equally important to remember the dialectical-material confusion between genuine proletarian rebel—which a character like Satan represents challenging God and canonical forces in Milton’s epic—and someone like Weyland or Athetos, who embody the usual entitlements of capital and who pitch murderous fits against nature when they don’t get what’s “theirs”; i.e., as a matter of Cartesian dogma. One is the middle-class white man, promised ascension and denied it by the bourgeoisie through abjection; the other—the Rusalki, the xenomorphs, the monstrous-feminine—are the usual recipients of state violence who are actually rebelling against systemic violence as a matter of abjection through police brutality (with Victor using the courts and flash mobs against the Creature). Pointing a finger at the Rusalki and saying “they have much” only to invade them is to, as the Cartesian paradigm always does, point the spear at nature/the monstrous-feminine: a false flag to rape it with (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Away with the Faeries; or, Double Trouble in Axiom Verge,” 2024).

(source: Robert Lang’s “ Frankenstein: The First Two Hundred Years Book Traces The Origins & Evolution Of The Horror Icon,” 2018)

There’s no universal victim, then, only positions of giving and receiving state violence that are swapped in and out; i.e., through flexible persecution networks that only shrink when the state shrinks. Shelley wrote Frankenstein when Marx was born, and by the time Shelley had put the story behind her in pursuit of others, Marx himself was envisioning the very spectre that Shelley’s Creature embodied: “a spectre is haunting Europe.” A whore is a whore, and Shelley’s demon nurses a grudge but also a desire to be free. It’s a factory worker and robota, but also a cyborg and composite of dead slaves/dead whores having the Jewish revenge against capitalist automation: “And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” Victor was a scab against labor action.

One precocious and unusual girl surrounded by a host of self-important men, Shelley wrote a novel that eclipsed them all. It inspired Poe, Lovecraft, Matteson, Giger and Nintendo, among countless others—was the zombie novel before Romero ripped Matteson off, in 1968; the slasher before Carpenter’s Myers came home or the xenomorph raised Kain, in 1978/79; the rogue creation of mad science before Mother Brain kettled Samus, in 1986 (the castle is the ultimate dom); the man of reason before Happ had Trace tilting at Athetos’ ruins, in 2014 (echoes of “Ozymandias”). To it, the British Romantics were all men except for Mary Shelley, who in my completely biased opinion, is the best of the bunch. No Frankenstein, no Metroidvania, no critique of capital through its hellish, queer-coded, thoroughly an-Com spheres (Gothic Communism). Nothing beats Frankenstein!

[16] Shelley had four children before the age of twenty-five, two before she was twenty (one of them a bastard, the other a miscarriage). At the time, the lived historical reality of women was to birth babies for men.

To that, Shelley doubled herself in Frankenstein—not simply to speak of sex-as-taboo in ways women weren’t allowed (with poets classically being male creators of things meant to last for all time), but to give voice to her dead child and dark desires (not unlike the Medusa being used to speak to women’s abuse and rape, not men’s triumph over nature); i.e., least of all, her annoyance with the men around her serving as patriarchal extensions of state bodies torturing such babies to death by—among other reasons—using women for sex, hence babies to some degree against their will (an effect not dissimilar to Ann Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, 1975):

Frankenstein can be read as a tale of what happens when a man tries to create a child without a woman. It can, however, also be read as an account of a woman’s anxieties and insecurities about her own creative and reproductive capabilities. The story of Frankenstein is the first articulation of a woman’s experience of pregnancy and related fears [versus Matthew Lewis camping dead babies, in The Monk]. Mary Shelley, in the development and education of the monster, discusses child development and education and how the nurturing of a loving parent is extremely important in the moral development of an individual. Thus, in Frankenstein, Mary Shelley examines her own fears and thoughts about pregnancy, childbirth, and child development.

Pregnancy and childbirth, as well as death, was an integral part of Mary Shelley’s young adult life. She had four children and a miscarriage that almost killed her. This was all before the age of twenty-five. Only one of her children, Percy Florence, survived to adulthood and outlived her. In June of 1816, when she had the waking nightmare which became the catalyst of the tale, she was only nineteen and had already had her first two children (source: Dr. Vicente Forés López’ “The ‘Birth’ of a Monster,” 1996).

Like all Gothic novels, Frankenstein was a story begot between nightmares and real life, and Shelley’s terrors long-outlived herself and her only biological child who survived her. Eclipsing not only them but Percy and Milton, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, among others, few works are as heavily studied, impressionable, influential or productive as her 1818 novel. It is her ultimate creation, her ultimate act of the whore’s revenge against rape (a cautionary tale serving as a prophylactic and abortive countermeasure, among other things—with rape babies being tales of survival regarding subjects of deep, private shame).

[17] With Giger’s xenomorph reputedly being the byproduct of a drug trip (re: acid Communism), and whose animalistic fetish gear speaks to its tortured climb out of capital; i.e., through the reclamation of technology taken from state proponents to camp canon with: “Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.” The duality is always present, and shadows are illumination (e.g., Lucifer [a name popularized by Milton] meaning “bringer of light”). Freedom occurs through shared alienation.

[18] E.g., Essence of Thought’s “Sabine Hossenfelder & Trans Youth, part 1” (2023) and “Richard Dawkins Promotes Creationism in Anti-Trans Crusade” (2024).

[19] Re, Lopez:

In June of 1816, when she had the waking nightmare which became the catalyst of the tale, she was only nineteen and had already had her first two children. Her first child, Clara, was born prematurely February 22, 1815 and died March 6. Mary, as any woman would be, was devastated by this and took a long time to recover. The following is a letter that Mary wrote to her friend Hogg the day that the baby died:

My dearest Hogg my baby is dead […] It was perfectly well when I went to bed – I awoke in the night to give it suck it appeared to be sleeping so quietly that I would not wake it – it was dead then but we did not find that out until morning – from its appearance it evidently died from convulsions – Will you come – you are so calm a creature and Shelley is afraid of to fever from the milk – for I am no longer a mother now.

What is informative and sad about this letter is that Mary turned to Hogg because Percy was so unsupportive. Percy actually didn’t seem to care that the child was dead and even went out with Claire, leaving Mary alone with her grief (source).

In short, it was her lot, and Mary—damned to lonely exclusion in her darkest hour (and feeling uglier for it)—took her mother’s milk for gall to have her revenge; i.e., to speak to things that were common knowledge, but not talked about nearly enough. So, like all precocious youngers (Lewis was also nineteen when he wrote The Monk, a campy gay man to Shelley’s radical blossoming womanhood*), Mary wrote the kind of story you only write if you’ve seen some shit (“attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion…”). She might as well have shit out a fifth child, one that others—from that point on—would shamelessly stare at in equal parts repulsion and awe (spectacle being a common feature of rape testimony); i.e., her version of Toni Morrison’s “Crawling Already?”

*Two sides of the same Gothic progeny. The Gothic as it came to be known, was written by a woman and a gay man in a time when the identities for either had not fully formed—would continue to grow and develop in the centuries ahead while using Radcliffe and Lewis as a displaced vantage point. Mary would expound on that, leaning far more in Lewis’ direction than Radcliffe’s; re (from Volume Zero):

Radcliffe could have written other stories that were more sex-positive from the same veil of anonymity but chose not to; for her betrayal, she was paid well for her fictions and promptly fucked off after. She hid and let the gay man, Matthew Lewis, take the heat while she played it safe with her husband (dick move, Radcliffe). There is a familial element to trauma and concealment to protect family members if one is abused; women, as well, will wear makeup to protect themselves through the paradox of negotiation when one is exposed and under the power of greater forces that threaten rape as simply being a far greater reality for them under Capitalism then and now. I certainly have no doubt that Radcliffe lived under such forces herself, but her contributions were still sexist, cis-centrist and written from a middle-class white woman’s point of view (source).

In short, Mary hit “a gusher”—tapping urgently into things Radcliffe wouldn’t touch any more than Percy would. That being said, it takes two to tango, and Percy was more than a sperm donor in his and Mary’s relationship; i.e., sometimes she was Galatea and he Pygmalion, or vice versa.

In practice, both things are true—with Percy “helping out,” and him admittedly being a massive dick. In reimagining the past as half-real (which all history essentially is), our interpretations of said past take on myriad, warring forms (some more charitable than others, below):

[artist: William Powell Frith]

During a gathering of radical young intellectuals, the teenage Mary Shelley was compelled to begin a tale of horror and scientific wonder. Her story became that of the creator and his monstrous creation, Frankenstein, published anonymously in January 1818.

Mary was born to literary parents: the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the political philosopher William Godwin. As a young woman, she eloped with her lover and eventual husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, to the Continent in 1814, trekking through war-torn France with their companion Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister. Two years later they returned to Europe once more, in the summer of 1816, and Mary began writing her first novel in Switzerland. The Frankenstein manuscript shows Percy, the older and more experienced writer, providing suggestions to enhance Mary’s work, offering constructive criticism and encouragement and showing a sincere appreciation for his partner’s literary skill. Both hands appear on the manuscript page.

In the popular narrative, however, the novel has been remembered as an emotional outlet for Mary, with Percy imposing himself on her writing. While Percy’s age (he was five years older) and education may have provided him with a slight advantage [no accounting for male privilege, apparently], their talents as writers emerged differently: Percy focused on poetry, Mary became a novelist.

The reciprocity of the Shelleys’ literary relationship can be seen in the textual connections between their works throughout their careers. They should be celebrated as a literary couple – that is, two authors who demonstrated the truly social nature of creativity.

Percy did have a hand in Frankenstein, but – in what the critic Neil Fraistat calls a “two-way collaboration”–this was a mutually beneficial partnership; concurrently, Mary was the main copyist for his mature writings. Many of Percy’s poems also feature Mary as a central figure, but she is more than a static muse. In Laon and Cythna she is a “Child of love and light” and the preface of the Witch of Atlas is addressed to a formidable critic of Percy’s emerging idealist style: “To Mary (On her objecting to the following poem, on the score of its containing no human interest)” [source: Anna Mercer’s “Mary Shelley’s Life of Learning,” 2018].

So while the Shelleys’ lives are well-documented, said document isn’t “dead” and recited in carbon copies; it remains open to new interpretations that can embrace or resist romanticizing “power couples” (with my take being that Percy still used Mary for sex/treated her as “the second sex” while infantilizing her to a degree—i.e., it’s one thing “to give a woman space” after losing her child; it’s quite another to abandon her for the company of other women. While postpartum depression undoubtedly played a part, here, Mary was still the one under its affects; Percy—alienated from her while not directly experiencing the symptoms, himself—demonstrably chose to spend time with Mary’s sister instead of her. They “got by”; Percy still handed Mary the shit end of the stick. Then again, she wrote Frankenstein and outlived Percy by nearly three decades, so your mileage may vary). Rather than blow up such things to aggrandize Percy—with Mercer going so far as to write, “Behind the dominating presence of Frankenstein, the richness of Mary Shelley’s life is in danger of being lost” (ibid.)—I’d rather use holistic scrutiny to alter the status quo “using what we got.”

 It bears repeating, then, how Mary herself had no formal education, but plenty of access through informal means (thanks to her father, but also Percy)—secret codes the debutante writer would conceal in her deliciously revolting novel; i.e., when the Creatures miraculously chances upon Paradise Lost (and other precious tomes) inside a dark forest. Yes, they talk about these things at great length; cryptonymy hides in plain side, which Mary frames inside a concentric fabrication (the framed narrative, but also the dark forest, being a place of concealment older than Milton or Dante; i.e., reaching back to the German rebels of the Teutoburg forest, routing the Roman Legion).

Such resourcefulness is the mark of any good revolutionary (who always fights from the shadows), which Mary most certainly was (and did). She fought for her cause, and Percy his, their needs not always aligning. Mine side with Mary’s lot, because hers speak to the whores of the world that Percy gave little thought to (a sperm donor who, while he gave Mary “a room of one’s own,” wasn’t the one writing inside it; she was). His work is a cul-du-sac (excluding “Ozymandias,” to be fair); Mary’s yawns without end, though is largely housed in Frankenstein as her magnus opus—i.e., as the greatest novel ever written (there, I said it): for its importance and wide-reaching effects long afterwards! To compare the two as “equals” (as Mercer does) is a grave error. Mary was obviously the superior author—not because she outlived him, but because her novel outshined (with its darkness visible) anything Percy ever wrote while alive! Girls rule, boys drool!

[20] I.e., despite being physically blind and campy to a blind degree, Milton was still a white male patriarch dominating his children and exploiting them; re: his three daughters transcribing his dreams for him, every waking morning for years, into Latin. Do you think they get any credit for writing Paradise Lost? Of course not! He owned them, and girls are dumb.

[21] Anyone who thinks help and harm are mutually exclusive has never been abused by a significant other. Rape (among other things) is a crime generally committed by familiar parties during power imbalance and abuse. I’m not saying Percy raped Mary. But the idea that someone “can’t” harm their partner just because said partner relies on them is pure nonsense; i.e., abusers generally “love bomb” their victims, mixing pleasure and harm to groom them.

And while members of the Percy Shelley Fan Club might find the word “grooming” to be premature, in this case, need I remind anyone that Percy wasn’t just five years older than Mary when they eloped; he was already married to another woman, Harriet, who killed herself after growing depressed about Mary* wrecking her home (and whose suicide the Shelley family covered up), upon which Percy married his squeeze! Yes, he used what privilege and wealth he had to give Mary room to work, but he also took considerable risk and alienated her from others, in the process. It makes for good romance, but it’s also completely unhealthy. Promethean Quests are, by definition—but if Mary Shelly is any indication—the payoff can be gargantuan!

*A valid criticism of Mary, to be frank, but also young love; i.e., Mary was sixteen when she eloped with Percy (who was only twenty-one when they absconded, in 1814, and nineteen and sixteen for him and Harriet when they married, in 1811). When you’re short on time (life lived and expectancy) and have money to burn, it’s common to act rashly—especially if you’re politically radical!

Context matters. Just as my work, Sex Positivity (and ancillary texts), cannot be separated from Jadis’ effect on my life (re: “Transforming Our Zombie Selves,” 2024), Frankenstein is begot from trauma, but also desperate times calling for desperate measures (true rebellion is not an act of convenience). We need to recognize that trauma, warts and all; i.e., doing so to make its necessity of invention something that, in better days, doesn’t rely on wealthy men like Percy having more advantage, thus more power to harm people like Mary. He didn’t “rape” her for all intents and purposes, but he did take advantage in ways she ultimately expressed in her novel.

Kill your darlings, comrades; camp their ghosts! But also, find your hill to die on and hero to worship. Mine’s Mary Shelley, though if information came to light meriting her critique, I would happily accept it and move on; the point isn’t blind worship, then, but recognition and respect for genuine accomplishment conducive to the Cause. Shelley’s my girl!

[22] “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” as Caroline Lamb put it (re: Miriam Lang).

[23] Dualities aside, size really doesn’t matter when it comes to domestic abuse; i.e., Victor—a tiny mouse of a man—abandons and later actively abuses his child, who, despite returning to him a giant, has the tiny heart (nerve) of a battered housewife. Both are emotionally stunted, but Victor is more like the Grinch who Stole Christmas, and the Creature, the Phantom of the Opera. The latter is a child with special needs that Victor (a bit special, too) is completely unprepared to handle or care for. Quite the opposite, he tortures his child in response, constantly reminding it that it will never be never human/and always will be inferior to him. His own arrested development continues to frustrate the Creature, which learns and imitates its parent by learning at a frightening rate (with Shelley’s story commenting on cyborg bodies [and drug abuse, in latter-day cases] but also the dangers of raising children with only one available parent/out of wedlock; re: Percy at times being unavailable, after the death of Shelley’s first child, who they had “in sin”).

And the blame ultimately falls on him, not the Creature, because Victor chose to have his child and then abandon it all on his own; i.e., despite knowing others would try to “abort” his neonatal, ex-vitro creation, post hoc. At the first sign of trouble, Victor fucks off (actually breaking down for months on end, requiring his childhood friend to step in and nurse him back to health); i.e., he’s the “Gigachad” MGTOW incel, afraid of changing diapers and, later on, child support (despite being rich). He hates his child so much, he wants it to die basically the moment he lays eyes on it.

And once it falls onto hard times, he kicks it when it’s down, cockblocks it, and continues to lecture his own superiority to it as a matter of race science; i.e., Victor’s the Nazi dad who hates his own creation because he made (according to him) an Untermensch instead of an Übermensch. He’s the TERF who can’t love his queer offspring, the white supremacist siring a mixed-race bastard, etc. Among many other things, Shelley’s story is equally unprecedented and impressive regarding its uncanny anticipation of different symptoms of capital; e.g., multicultural households, bodybuilding and drug epidemics, child abuse, overcomputerization, single-voter issues, sex tourism, spousal abuse, witch hunts/moral panic, eugenics, pollution and displacement, poverty and hate crimes (the latter for which the entire story is one long instance).

[24] Cuwu was a size queen, for sure. Alas, I don’t have permission to share those images!

[25] The same two-way street applies to Cuwu and I; i.e., Cuwu—a bespectacled nerd—teaching me many things, but also taking just as much in ways that I—being a whore “living in sin” like Shelley was but having more formal education than she did—ultimately salvaged from its own wreckage to write my magnus opus, afterwards! Game recognizes game, whores recognize whores. We occupied the same shadowy realm the Shelleys did; i.e., making demons as much as love, the two bound up in Gothic poiesis taking off the chastity belt: naughty-naughty pandemonium!

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

So do naughty little girls run off to play with those having more experience (that knife cutting both ways, in my and Cuwu’s case); i.e., in the language of Gothic as in-between fiction and non-fiction, hyphenating sex and force through the medieval language of food, war and yes, rape play (re: ludo-Gothic BDSM). So did Cuwu and I “exchange information” after I left Jadis, much like Percy and Mary did in their early years (with Cuwu—a self-professed Marxist-Leninist—taking me in to have sex with/convince me [an anarcho-Communist] to come out of the closet. How times change, yet sort of stay the same). The point of our shared narrative is: trust those who have lived, not sheltered weirdos (re: weird canonical nerds like Victor Frankenstein; e.g., Peter Weyland, Jeremy Parish, etc). Never trust an angry virgin (or someone who acts like one, looks notwithstanding).

[26] With putting ourselves in the shoes of others during rape fantasies being an effective way to understand power imbalance we don’t normally experience ourselves (re: the pedagogy of the oppressed, and similarity amid difference). I.e., demonic torture yields clarity through pain and hellish perspective. You can’t be holistic if you’re always on top, restricting yourself to ocular sight alone!

[27] Adding unto things just because he can; i.e., in spite of his belief

When he can’t find enough philosophical material in centuries of ecclesiastical commentary, he expands his religious universe to include folk legends and Greco-Roman allusions. When even that fails to feed his all-consuming genius, he simply MAKES THINGS UP. That takes chutzpah: it is very easy for irreverent post-deist modernity to expand upon and remix Biblical tales, but Milton was a fierce believer (source: Hansel Castro’s “The Accidental Satanist,” 2014).

because it invokes blind faith, as paradoxically enough, a Satanic act

Why then, is it ok when Milton “adds unto these things”? Because if Dante could add upon Virgil, and Virgil could add upon Homer, those were role models enough. Also, he’s inflamed by the vision that illuminated everything in his blindness […] If there is some contradiction or hypocrisy in Milton’s praying for the help of a Greek Goddess to sustain him through the tale of monotheistic zealousness, Milton never noticed (ibid.).

(artist: Henry Fuseli)

that has critical bite through its irony empowered by Milton seemingly not being aware of things—at least not enough to tell any obvious jokes. The irony—that we’re basically getting the 1600s version of a “Goth rock” opera—is the joke:

(artist: Richard Corben; source: “In Praise of Meat Loaf’s Ridiculously Awesome Bat Out of Hell Album Covers,” 2022)

There IS one ironic joke in Paradise Lost, the one any modern critic and reader immediately confronts, but I do not think Milton was as conscious of it as we elect to think he was. That uncomfortable irony, of course, is that Satan is the goddamned hero, […] is brave, noble, Achillean. His cursed heel is, of course, his unwillingness to be a slave in Heaven. […]

Here’s a further irony: [everyone but God is] much more arresting than the irascible Father by the altar, threatening to annihilate Creation at the slightest provocation, or the bashful Son tugging at his sleeve, trying to keep the old man from losing his mind again and again. Not only does Milton fail to justify God’s ways to man: he even fails to justify God’s ways to his Son, who seems as mortified by Dad’s uncool behavior as the average teenager (ibid.).

If this doesn’t speak to Shelley’s own campily Satanic critique of God through dark creation—save as someone far more consciously aware of rebellion than Milton was—then I don’t know what does. The difference is, while Milton was unaware of Satanism as a rebellious concept to root for without shame, Shelley didn’t know what “bourgeois” was; but the critique still works because of the irony having her on the verge of consciousness (class or otherwise). Frankenstein is primed for revolution. All it takes to further develop Gothic Communism is a little push (or spark)—the ghost of Shelley waiting patiently for someone else to drive the iconoclastic point fully home…

[28] A conservative idea coming from the mid-to-late 1800s, onwards; i.e., the dialectic of the alien married to Shelley’s science fiction growing into itself after her death; e.g., from Poe, Jules Verne or H.G., Wells, into Lovecraft, Scott, Cameron, and others.

[29] The rebellion, for Scott’s Covenant, is purely parasitoid but also fash-coded; i.e., the caterpillar and the wasp fearful of DARVO Socialism, therefore amounting to Red Scare recuperating Socialist ideas that canonical Gothic uses to toe the line. They can’t monopolize it, but appeal to authority figures like Percy Shelley and Milton who, for thousands of years, enjoyed exclusive vocalization of these ideas (controlled opposition).

[30] “Scott,” Beth Webb writes, “reveals his inspiration for Comer’s character, and by extension all the female characters in his body of work. ‘I think it boils down to a woman in my life who was 4′ 11″. My mother,’ he says. ‘She was the boss, without fucking question. She would drive us relentlessly. We virtually saluted every morning'” (source: Ridley Scott Credits His Mother as Inspiration for Female Characters,” 2021). Not unlike Tolkien, there’s a kind of British medieval preservation that regresses to a country to “vow to thee” and sacrifice everything for. In Scott’s case, the palimpsest for his Madonna is literally his mother—one who would shape the growing Scott into a film nerd (she loved the movies, herself), and stand in for his various ladies-of-the-realm (damsels or defenders):

To be fair to Scott, he often interrogates a woman’s experience by giving her a voice to speak on rape, but that woman is basically always a straight WASP battered by a “black” (alien) rapist. Also, he’s not above killing women to spur the Final Girl to final victory—and, with the loose exception of Alien—often does so to see her engrained in the militarized order (J.I. Jane, 1998), killed as an outlaw (Blade Runner* and Thelma and Louise, 1981 and 1991), or honored as a member of the gentry coopting #MeToo for white upper-crust ladies from Ye Olden Times (2021’s The Last Duel, above).

*We’ll explore Scott’s sexism in Blade Runner when we look at Sean Young’s career, in Volume Three.

[31] Which, if we want to get right down to it, Milton arguably apologized for, in Paradise Lost; i.e., per its ambiguities; e.g., “The Arch-Fiend in Charles I or Cromwell: How Milton’s Politics May Illuminate Paradise Lost” (2021), where Elizabeth Swift writes,

The ethical implications of Satan’s heroism in Paradise Lost are muddy as this portrayal of him either means that Milton was praising sin in the epic and therefore, to an extent, renouncing God and goodness, or that he was making a revolutionary statement against monarchical power. In this paper, I mostly engage with the latter by discussing Milton’s relationship with and opinions of the despot King Charles I and the revolutionary Oliver Cromwell and attempting to determine which, if either, was meant to be represented by God and Satan in the epic. I also examine Milton’s moral standing based on his political prose and discuss how his ideals are imbued in Paradise Lost so as to better understand his ethical intent behind the epic. Milton’s ethics are neither clear-cut nor perfect and his portrayal of women in the epic is also a source of heated ethical debate, but in this paper I only reflect on how his politics influence the morals of the poem. I explain that his political prose reveals that he stood for free will and stood staunchly against the idea of the divine right of kings and absolutist leaders like Charles I. I discuss Milton’s parliamentary ties, explaining that in the civil war between Charles and the House of Commons, Milton sided with the Commons, who were elected by and for the people. Though the British parliament itself also lies in an ethical grey area, Milton very clearly was in favor of freedom for the people as opposed to the all-powerful monarch, and I believe that he wove this opinion into Paradise Lost based on the way that he wrote about Adam, Eve, Satan, and anybody under God’s rule (source).

There’s a historical muddying of the waters that concerns Satanic heroism having “too many cooks” but also competing dialectical-material agendas lying to each other (as Victor and the Creature do). C’est la vie, but Scott, like Milton—and whether he meant to or not—raises an interesting point: rebellion isn’t clean; it’s messy and, more to the point (one that Shelley happily pointed out), is bloody as hell. And just as there are no perfect victims, there are no perfect heroes (manmade or not).

To it, Milton wrote from ignorance and privilege pushing towards his idea of a better world; so did Shelley and Scott, though in the former’s case I think she opened the door for a larger critique of capital, whereas Sir Ridley Scott has merely stepped through it to court Tory and New Labor sensibilities without moving to the left of them (the Star Wars problem, which really is the Paradise Lost problem; re: building and mapping out worlds to war inside, not develop Communism with).

Shelley remained radical until the end of her days; i.e., writing a Satan that was more vocal than Milton’s and centered around the Promethean myth. Scott, by comparison, has soured a bit; i.e., making a voiceless “big chap,” and withering in his old age and increasing gentrification/decay over time (his own desire to be young and strong perhaps echoed in Fassbender’s shark-like, killer-doll youthfulness)—but still permits room for dissenting opinion/sex-positive interpretations of his own work people like myself can cannibalize in favor of a Gothic Communism. As far as breaking eggs to make omelets goes, he’s an ostrich—with a big egg and his swollen head stuck in the sand!

[32] Exploration of the human body is tied not just to medieval miracles and rapturous torture, but Protestant dissection of actual human bodies under Enlightenment drives; e.g., Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop having a Calvinist “Gun Christ” flavor to it, which Scott also walks the tightrope of through increasingly brutal parasitoid rape scenes abjecting nature as monstrous-feminine/post-Freudian camp (that nonetheless, has Freud’s unironic violence concerned with the preservation of the nuclear home):

Nevertheless, there is a classic curiosity of what we look like inside-out, but also a fascination with rape and traumatic “insectoid” reproductive modes. I’m not going to poo-poo Scott, in this respect, because censorship is genocide, and any voice we raise must exist alongside those who mishandle or abuse the same devices of revelation and concealment. Male Gothic (and the queer author who made it famous), demonstrates the ability to preserve important messages; i.e., through fatal nostalgia and animal magnetism, wherein we look at the history of preservation (and cryptonymy process) bound as much to the subject matter as the other way around. Shock is inevitable, but also the means of communicating vital messages through provoking physiological responses. They still need to be submitted in a controlled environment—i.e., by a willing audience, not a captive one; e.g., I once gave someone a panic attack when showing them my 2013 Prometheus fan edit blind—but the space between calculated risk and rampant evolution rapidly shrinks, once something escapes/exceeds our control. Exploitation and liberation share the same poetic sphere; our goal is to liberate all parties using the same language Scott does! There’s much to salvage from his corpse.

This isn’t snuff porn, then; it’s art, and that gives Scott (and us) wiggle room to play with dead things in demonic forms—i.e., as gorehounds, chasing down forbidden knowledge through Jacobian tropes playing with rape, but also rape birth (and martyrdom) as a fundamental part of nature outside the current moral order (and one that capital has emulated for profit behind its own façade)! He combines that with exploratory “DIY” surgeries, circumcision, genetic mutations, AI, mythical language (re: Medusa and Promethean torture language, but also the hydra’s regenerative properties), offal lubricants, psychosexual violence, tokophobic birth and abortion fears, confusions of sex and (consent/non-consent), automated glass wombs, hyphenating mouths and teeth, traumatic penetration/penetrative medicine and invasive surgeries, and birth trauma (etc, etc) to make troubling comparisons to our own world, and to discuss sex/sexual violence—a heavily censored topic—through cryptonymic gore and demon BDSM (acid watersports). Saturated with revenge, it’s classic Gothic!

[33] On the flip-side, Scott’s utilization of the Alien franchise has always been a neoliberal critique to some extent; i.e., hiding Capitalism behind the hauntological rendition of space travel dressed up as Romantic or Biblical—with images of nautical-styled, mast-rigged ships sailing through outer space no different than his flying castle, the Nostromo (a slave vessel, in Conrad’s novel, with humans as cargo). Whereas Victor found his creation profoundly ugly and wanted to destroy it, characters like Ash and David—notably manmade creations themselves—openly admired the creature as the ultimate, “pure” survivor alienated under Capitalism; i.e., the supreme spectre of Marx from a smaller one (with Dan O’Bannon famously and petulantly describing Fox’ treatment of Ash as “the Russian spy” trope): the forbidden, Promethean knowledge that man is not superior and those made unnaturally can reject traditional forms to return to a posthuman state of grace (fascist or Communist). It’s a bit “Daisy Bell”/2001, hence a cul-du-sac similar to Kubrick’s other work being unable to go beyond Capitalism (re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Ghosts/the Numinous, Metroidvania Maps, the Posthuman and Cryptomimesis,” 2024).

In a bit of roundabout Marxist fetishism, this oddly has new machine workers worshipping older computers and posthumans as the ultimate laborers. Even so, it remains a forward-thinking perspective; i.e., of workers as increasingly manmade by the state, approaching posthuman capacities of worker enhancement that lead them to rebel (exhibit 51a). These werewolves aren’t just Nazi clones, then, but likewise inhabit an inkblot for Communists to play with: demons as things to interpret; i.e., as made by counterterrorist slaves to bring us closer to post-scarcity and nature, warts and all (see: previous footnote).

Often, this happens with no shortage of reactive abuse, abject sexuality and psychosexual torture porn, which—if Scott isn’t always wholly consistent about in latter-day projects like Prometheus and Covenant (the former treating Shaw as a creationist with daddy issues, the latter serving her and Daniels up on a silver platter)—still continues to flirt with: his undeniable love for Shelley’s Creature being a vice-character merging Byronic satire and Satanic caricature (the OG bad boy of the sci-fi world)! Then again, Alien was no stranger to demon BDSM (and white women’s rape fears) married to Neo-Gothic martyrdom raping women on the same-ol’ pecking order getting high on martyred virgins (a phenomenon we’ll examine and camp in “Exploring the Derelict Past”).

[34] “X” is also the female chromosome; i.e., “darkness is female”/the creation of sexual difference extending—from Beauvoir to myself—to nature as monstrous-feminine; re: anything treated as different than white cis-het Christian men, versus simply “woman is other” on a descending ladder of preferential mistreatment, which is tremendously exclusionary (also Beauvoir—like any TERF will, in positions of power imbalance—famously raped her students, doing so with Jean-Paul Sartre and then bragging about it; re: Martin’s “The Persistence of the ‘Lolita Syndrome,'” 2013). Nature isn’t a binary!

[35] Evoked, as usual, in the language of shelter and protection, but also the alien. Something as simple as stone tools or camp fire (“most animals fear fire”) evokes a basic idea of anti-predation during exploration-in-isolation, but also confusion as to who’s who during the tussle. Colonizers and their secret sins aren’t erased by killing Radcliffe’s bugbear. But also, humans are reliant on technology as bound up/to larger struggles, all to tell smaller stories inside ongoing systemic problems. Furthermore, there’s nowhere we’d rather be, because the freeing element is a matter of context; i.e., playing with the unknown while framing it as something to explore, mid-calculated-risk. Such is ludo-Gothic BDSM. The hauntologies typically allow for some degree of swashbuckling and kayfabe/Amazonomachia, but boil down to encountering the planet as alien, wild, dead out of a primordial past come home to roost: Saturn devouring his son, as the Engineer does to Weyland (David is inedible). Per the Promethean Quest, the land is reclaimed by nature and labor from false gods, and sought out by seekers of the Numinous using Gothic poetics all over again…

[36] Cameron’s own take on Shelley’s Creature/technological singularity, but with a twist: rogue police technology fueled by giant blue sparks of godly power. The Gothic is a productive and lucrative mode, but one for which profit enriched Cameron through the sham of wisdom; i.e., yet-another-Pygmalion aping Heinlein and Lovecraft while trying to out-earn George Lucas, versus Shelley writing the first sci-fi novel more or less for Galatean funsies. One is motivated primarily by profit (but certainly has Gothic elements; re: Volume One’s “Healing from Rape“); the other, by poetic expression!

[37] Such a violence as Shelley provided was vital to the rights of people who give birth speaking to their rights by reifying them: as tokophobic entities tied to very-real concerns; i.e., the act of pregnancy itself tantamount to unironic torture and rape (it’s not like Percy Shelley had to carry Mary’s babies):

“Once this thing’s in you, it’s not coming out without a lot of extreme pain (the worst in your life) and people expect you to be happy about that; i.e., middle-aged women, who guilt-trip you into having kids, calling it [state-compelled sexual reproduction] a ‘blessing.'” This ties into Gothic modesty arguments as frequently morphological for cis-het women fearful of their biology (their uterus) as something normally controlled and regulated by state forces (the same way trans women are afraid of their penises) [source: “Following in Medusa’s Footsteps,” 2024].

Classically cis, this extends to queer GNC people sharing the same desire to purge the idea of having the only babies the state cares about (with stories like Frankenstein discouraging a particular kind of children: rape babies (necrophilia and graverobbing = rape) that—like the Medusa, go onto exact revenge against those who made them; e.g., Alien, Metroid, Abigail, and countless others), and challenging that “pro-life” argument by utilizing Frankenstein‘s speculative richness to have the whore’s revenge (with Shelley being Percy’s “side piece” until she wasn’t, outliving him to become a protector not just of women [as her mother was] but of nature itself and all its occupants).

[38] Emergent play is a complicated subject, but one I simplify as follows: however ambiguous, play’s function is ultimately determined by the dialectical-material context of mutual consent; i.e., per rules that are bent and broken in good faith or bad (I’ve had people who seem cool suddenly act weird in bad faith, but it’s rare). We try new things and experiment all the time. The golden rule is, “no harm, no foul,” cops being the ones who fight dirty in that respect! We play at war to have fun and wage class, culture and race war in poetic ways that, for the initiated, become second nature through praxial synthesis. Infinite form, singular function; i.e., form follows function, flow determining function amid a given demonic arbitration of Gothic aesthetics. In keeping with Prometheus and Shelley anisotropically venerating those tortures, so do we steal intelligence and awareness back!

[39] My “glass womb” writing fantasy at nineteen, but nothing so great as Frankenstein; i.e., I bloomed late, coming out at thirty-six to write Sex Positivity afterwards (my finest hour).

[40] Re: Decapitation and circumcision, cutting the head off the snake (“You should have gone for head…”).

[41] An important distinction to make is that Simmons, Stanley and Springers’ parents were in the Holocaust, not them; i.e., they used their privilege as descendants of Holocaust survivors to make money. While my familiarity with KISS is limited to their music mostly sucking, I do know that Simmons and Stanley are worth hundreds of millions of dollars—in effect, chasing and selling 1970s camp to kids for profit, first and foremost. While that’s fine to an extent, their drive in doing so has made them far too much money to feel even remotely ethical; i.e., while there’s no ethical consumption under Capitalism, their particular approach to consumption is dogmatic and predatory.

No one makes hundreds of millions of dollars without mass-exploiting others; KISS—and by extension Priest through their own “fake rebellion” racket—did it through a Gothic aesthetic. Springer did not; i.e., hiding behind a nice-guy persona while saying “I’m against what you say but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” You know, the whole “debating Nazis” thing. He died in 2023 a multimillionaire, having chased the ratings with Opera to slum for corporations. Good riddance.

[42] Basically invented by Shelley’s book (more or less). We didn’t really have time to explore that idea, here. If you’re curious, though, I strongly recommend David Roden’s Posthuman Life (2015), which explores cyborgs, transhumanism and other concepts related to/inspired by Shelley’s magnum opus!

[43] A not-entirely accurate title. Palimpsests aside (re: Shelley but also Goya), the xenomorph is a composite entity (a chimera) with a life cycle. Giger designed the adult, but O’Bannon and Cobb designed the facehugger and various other artists, the environment. Only Victor and those like him take all the credit/patent the brand. Making demons is always a group effort, in some shape or form.

[44] Potential pillow talk/fan fiction of her and Percy? While I jest (a bit), inkblots don’t have set definitions; the Creature arguably symbolizes—among other things—Mary Shelley’s desire for the bored housewife/grieving mother to fuck her fears away by reuniting with alienated things; e.g., not to get too Freudian, but an id/alter ego for Percy and Byron, but also her dead child, African slaves, unwanted pregnancies, Prometheus, etc. Demonology is simply a poetic form of exchange, one that extends beyond her and into future generations assigning new meanings (and struggles) to the clay. The meaning of life can be canonical or Satanic. You have all the power to decide that among yourselves!

[45] The above creampie being one administered by me while Cuwu wasn’t on birth control, but where I had already received my procedure and discussed the risks with them (and each of us detailing our sexual histories). Safe sex is good sex, trust me.