This blog post is part of “Deal with the Devil,” a third promotion originally inspired by the first and second ones I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” and “Searching for Secrets” (2024). The first promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Deal with the Devil” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, Demons (the “Searching for Secrets” promotion covered the Undead Module, which is now live). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.
Click here to see “Deal with the Devil’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!
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Concerning Buggy Images: Sometimes the images on my site don’t always load and you get a little white-and-green placeholder symbol, instead. Sometimes I use a plugin for loading multiple images in one spot, called Envira Gallery, and not all of the images will load (resulting in blank white squares you can still right-click on). I‘ve optimized most of the images on my site, so I think it’s a server issue? Not sure. You should still be able to access the unloaded image by clicking on the placeholder/right-clicking on the white square (sometimes you have to delete the “?ssl=1” bit at the end of the url). Barring that, completed volumes will always contain all of the images, whose PDFs you can always download on my 1-page promo.
“Damsels, Detectives and Sex Demons,” part zero: Derelicts, Medusa and H. R. Giger’s Xenomorph; i.e., the Puzzle of “Antiquity”
“Did IQs drop sharply while I was away? Ma’am, I already said that it was not Indigenous; it was a derelict spacecraft, it was an alien ship, it was not from there. Do you get it?”
—Ellen Ripley, Aliens (1986)
Picking up where “Exploring the Derelict Past (opening and ‘Radcliffe’s Refrain’)” left off…
This subchapter loosely considers the demonic trifecta—damsels, detectives and sex demons—by introducing a holistic, serial example of them: Medusa and the xenomorph (the latter practically synonymous with its maker, H. R. Giger). It does so through the Gothic refrain of found stories; i.e., so-called “derelicts” that, once “discovered,” present as historical evidence in the Gothic sense: as something to perform and play with in order to interrogate state trauma (war and rape) as a continual problem we escape through “peril” (the challenging of modesty with a “dark half”). We’ll return to Radcliffe—and her own self-righteous moral panics’ down-to-earth left-behinds—in a bit. First, I want to consider the idea of dereliction as “ancient” through something closer to the modern idea of sex demon vis-à-vis damsels and detectives; re: Giger’s brainchild (really being a group effort and lineage[1], but I digress).
Note: This piece is older. It’s one where I tried to make less changes throughout its entire makeup, and more to insert different extensions between parts of the main body. I try to note when I do, and talk about the entire history of doing so. The expanding of the piece has required me to organize it into headers, as well. —Perse
- Introducing Ripley
- I, Medusa
- White Predation in Alien (and Similar Works)
- Ripley’s Riddle: the Mystery of the Token Feminist
- Cartesian Hubris: the Girl Boss
- Amazonomachia, Cryptomimesis and Mise-en-Abyme
- The Other Side of the Coin: Camping These Things (reprise)
- From the Horse’s Mouth: Furries and Giger’s Puzzle of “Antiquity”
Introducing Ripley
A bit of additional context (a 2025 one-page addendum [and footnote] prefacing the original body of this 2024 piece). The paradox of palimpsests is that the mo recent generally eclipses older variants it “tops”; i.e., to become “the first”/”top dog”; e.g., Ripley as “the first” Amazon” (a patriarchal myth). But she is haunted by the past and those of it as vengeful, which she punches down against; re: the second wave feminist warrior Madonna policing nature as dark, ancient whore[2]. If Jadis was my first TERF “in the wild,” then Ripley was my first TERF in media; she’s the detective who tops for the state, and we top from below to punch up at her Radcliffean antics (carried over into Weaver’s own privilege as a white straight Broadway actress from a middle-class family, below).
(source: Strange Shapes’ “Casting Ripley” [2016]: “Sigourney on the Nostromo bridge with her father Sylvester ‘Pat’ Weaver and mother Elizabeth Weaver.”)
All of this is dualistic, and I want to look at the process holistically regarding its liminal, ludo-Gothic BDSM elements’ anisotropic qualities and performative latitudes. Some of this comes from what we’ve discussed already in this module; some, from the Poetry Module. We’re essentially talking about the whore’s paradox and revenge (reclaiming blood libel, sodomy and witch hunts), though I might not always say as much (this is an older piece, but it inspired my new thesis work on those topics; i.e. I wrote it around the same time as “The Caterpillar and the Wasp,” thus before my Poetry Module [which released May 5th, 2024; re: “Volume Two, part one (the Poetry Module) Is Out“] and then added elements of said module to “Giger’s Xenomorph,” afterwards): the relatively well-off white girl scared of functionally black/non-white and non-straight revenge, thus rape of the former by the latter and (displaced to outer space).
Again, it’s very second wave feminist, thus exclusionary in the rise of Thatcher’s England to impregnate and gut the Labour Party with New-Labor concessions; re: capital gentrifies and decays, leaving us with strange appetites we need to camp through the same damsels, detectives and demons. Except, Ridley was always a white-collar pimp with an art degree and classical education, and Ripley was always his blue-collar madame detective; i.e., Galatea asking the stowaway prostitute what it stole from Master’s cookie jar during her Pygmalion maker’s Promethean Quest, and its Numinous obscurity and decay’s infectious stamp brought back to her towing vessel: “In Space, No One Can Hear You Punch Down for the Elite then Blame It on Pirates.” Always kill your darlings!
I think that’s enough context for both monsters (the Amazon and the Medusa) and their cryptomimesis to proceed with our arguments. Let’s advance onto the original piece!
In the Gothic, “Antiquity” is forged through puzzling “ancient” monsters like Medusa in ways useful to the state (canon) or workers (camp). Unironic forms tokenize through settler-colonial damage control whose cryptonymy apologizes for the state and indeed, advances the goals of Cartesian hegemony endlessly across space and time; i.e., while tokenized women like Ellen Ripley write Man’s history for them in the usual native bloodbaths: fetishizing the alien before punching it, witch-cop-style. Our current “Medusa” is the xenomorph, a composite sex monster insofar as it features holistically and Numinously as undead, demonic and animalistic, but also embodies settler-colonial (ethnocentric) racism, environmental destruction, rape anxiety/disguised vaudeville (the first alien being a black man in a suit) and trans misogyny crammed into a 1970s gimp suit/astronoetic hauntology (canceled retro-future). Let’s give that qualification a closer look, shall we?
The poster girl for Creed’s Monstrous-Feminine, Medusa, is the classic “ancient” whore/enemy of the state in Western propaganda, and survives through Cartesian thought into Alien, the franchise. It’s the dialectic of the alien, mid-Amazonomachia, except when Ripley initially faces the xenomorph as a ghost of the counterfeit (the monster being a spectre of settler colonialism pushed into outer space, coming back to haunt the West), she becomes traumatized into thinking the creature as not “of the land” at all; it’s something to punch, not embrace, because it threatens her as an extension of the West: us versus them, maiden pimp vs abject whore. She becomes an endless detective protecting other damsels from a dreaded evil she nonetheless fetishizes by giving so much power in the first place. She’s a cautious skeptic in the first movie; by the second, she’s a battered housewife/true believer posturing as oracle for the Man. Gross TERF bullshit.
Convinced she is right to a colossal and insulting degree (see the epigram), our damaged heroine goes forth to astronoetically colonize “space” for Earth by finding the perceived Ancient Threat: punishing an alien mother for “having settled” corporate territories before blowing her[3] the fuck up. It’s a casus belli, a DARVO false flag waged by a “critic” of the company who ultimately does their dirty work for them; re: by weaponized shelter through capital as the same old rigged game against Ripley in order to make her afraid, thus transform into a demon against the state’s enemies: a subjugated-Hippolyta survivor of the fear of rape, not rape itself (versus Lambert or Kain, who very much do get raped because they actually have sex; i.e., Ripley is a warrior Madonna, and sex = death in Radcliffe’s work).
A mythical structure, when essentialized, can be quite telling. Singular interpretations are bad for workers and nature, especially when colonial binaries (us vs them) have manifested them as something to disseminate and put to practice. By abjecting the ghost of the counterfeit as men do, Ripley becomes the subjugated Amazon waging a monstrous war of extinction in space (the astronoetic Amazonomachy); i.e., against another monster whose sexualized violence (the popular language of war) has with Ripley one interpretation, thus one use/solution: genocide (“not to study, not to bring back, but to wipe them out”)—unironically raping the land, occupants and language in ways that speak to predatory sex and violence as synonymized for these chattelizing purposes. Killing vermin is still moving money through nature using the same old kayfabe revenge arguments.
Except, far from being a one-off, Aliens (and its forebears, which date back to Radcliffe conjuring up white straight female fears of a black rapist) would go on to inform military optimism through Cameron’s refrain as a perennial affair that upholds Capitalist Realism for all time in neoliberal power trips (re: the “End of History”). Ripley is part of that tragic destiny—a damsel-turned-cop who, once recruited, rides forever out into the cartographic territories; i.e., where murder is legal, chasing “death” down and hunting it room-by-room (re: shooters and Metroidvania during speedruns). Separating the wheat from the chaff, Ripley divides from other humans whoever the state needs dead within the same monomythic, theatrical device: nature as alien and fetishized, but also undead, demonic and animalistic—the Medusa!
I, Medusa
“Medusa” means different things depending on who’s looking at/with her. As such, she contains (and presents) unironic and ironic fears of rape, trans misogyny (and other praxial variables) within class conflict, on the Aegis, per outing. Parading the unknown as tangible[4] is the Gothic’s bread and butter!
Except, while the inherent duality of pre-capitalist expression might seem mysteriously commonplace, this is not without reason. It was generally peered into by people like Mary Shelley who, in 1818, were less divided from nature by capital than we are, thus more prone to combine nature with science, and to afford a medieval expression fixated on mythical devices, but especially ambrosia/the fire of the gods as “torturous” and Faustian. Shelley’s Modern Prometheus offered a unique perspective of “Ancient” that informed Giger and Ridley Scott using the alien poetic device to extrapolate on problems of capital per Gothic castles and monsters, in 1979; i.e, to a similar monstrous-feminine degree, during fatal nostalgia.
Monsters and castles are indiscreetly modular and evoke myths and magic as critical lenses to see through Capitalism’s universal alienation; Medusa (and by extension, the xenomorph and castle as extensions of her and themselves) abide by the usual fracturing of trauma to give those with trauma a safe space to explore (and endlessly reexplore) their abuse and discover a better world through a series of castles wrestling/warring/fucking with other castles, with monsters, etc, during concentric mise-en-abyme. In psychoanalytical terms, these generally announce a secret self to reject and attack, but also a borderline option regarding forbidden forms of love: a dark ritual regressively selected through the shadow of force …and which I completely dislike because it tends to suggest a lack of awareness towards unconscious[5] elements that apologize for the author’s omitting of an active dialogue; e.g., desire, bigotry or revenge. I’d rather focus on the material conditions that shape these prejudices and, at times, walking contradictions; i.e., what is the argument of “yet another castle” for in terms of where it’s going once its arguments are revived?
These are highly medieval ways of looking at things, and difficult to wrap our heads around; i.e., as people reared in a capitalist, post-medieval world. So, just as the Gothic castle perpetually returns in liminal, hauntology-of-war arguments debating to the Enlightenment and Capitalism’s failure to deliver on universal prosperity as promised, we’ll be returning to my Poetry Module—especially its Medieval portion (which starts with “The Medieval: Opening and Castles in the Flesh,” 2024) and concludes with the “one, two” capstone, “Modularity and Class” and “Facing Death: What I Learned Mastering Metroidvania,” 2024). Keep its entire statements in mind as we proceed once more into the Numinous medieval and its dead city of paradoxes; re: we’re getting lost in necropolis again!
First, during liminal expression and oppositional praxis, trauma diffuses; both imprecise and omnipresent, its doubles emerge like a doomy nebula from remediating praxis’ failure to sublimate state horrors during the cryptonymy process. If we’re going to get anywhere regarding those, we’ll have to familiarize ourselves with the alien, thus give the xenomorph a big ol’ hug—not to dehumanize what has become fetish, but humanize it as Medusa’s more recent disguise still having fetishized qualities: during ludo-Gothic BDSM chasing the palliative Numinous. As with Captain Dallas, death is presumed but not certain; indeed, doing so will only reverse the process of abjection inside the “antique” counterfeit as something to reclaim by us—defeating the fear of death through hugs, thus overriding state mechanisms of genocide that push people to attack others through tokenized us-versus-them copaganda (attacking stigma animalized workers): a position informed by dogma and fear merged with obscurity and distance.
The state, then, is a classic “false friend,” pointing the finger at Medusa and saying she’s a zombie who bites. The paradox, here, is that Medusa is a zombie, but she doesn’t bite provided you can show her you don’t mean any harm; i.e., that you can be friends. Though harmed in the past, Medusa won’t harm you if you approach her in good faith; but also, expect some degree of temperamentality—i.e., the occasional trigger, outburst and love tap.
Barring those automatic, knee-jerk defenses, Medusa will expect you not to side with the state against her. This requires abandoning the settler-colonial project on all fronts, respecting different healthy boundaries while punching up/through harmful ones by camping canon inside castles; i.e., as an ongoing dialog in dialectical-material tension, hence argument, revived hauntologically through medieval language as useful to workers; re (from the Poetry Module):
using the dialectic of the alien to pull down sick harmful barriers and install fresh healthy ones […] This “boundary selection” is not only useful for challenging the state’s “boundaries for me, not for thee” mantra during selective/collective punishment through the denial of shelter and other basic human rights (if that seems cruel, that’s because it is); but it happens through another Gothic staple: the scary room of death/Black Veil, but also the homunculus; i.e., the castle as something giant we live inside, and whose giant’s belly of the beast is concentric in both directions (anisotropic) and phenomenological/analogous of an organism during liminal expression […] Authenticity aside, systemic trauma is isolated and expressed in Gothic theatre, […] Ironic or not, castles are the most famous and camp-prone Gothic location (from Britain, anyways). It’s not just castles, though, but anything capable of operating in terms of any aspect of the Western home/nuclear family unit as compromised; i.e., as alien (doubled) and fetishized, especially in medieval, dated forms reflecting on societal decay as barbaric, torturous and regressive: the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection (unironic xenophobia) threatening an invader demanding access from outside (“Let me in!”). According to these criteria, our “torturous” camp can manifest through any location; i.e., to inherit and reenact shelter through as disintegrating thus dysfunctional, disempowering.
(source: The Darkest Dungeon II)
[…] in turn, Gothic empowerment is rooted in “disempowerment” as something to reenact through ironic fetishes; i.e., the aesthetics of death, unequal power and alienization (which the state wants to monopolize and ultimately prevent: our reclamation of their power): rape/death fantasies and play that, when ironic, actually empower the subject by making them feel in control through calculated risk; i.e., psychosexual theatre and ludo-Gothic BDSM; re (from our teaching section): “a dark freaky church where no one gets hurt and there’s lots of sex, it’s the Neo-Gothic in a nutshell.” Trauma manifests through the body and depictions of the body in “ancient,” castle-like forms, to which “rape,” “torture” and “sacrifice” are very different in quotes than without: a “prison” that sets you free, a “torture dungeon” that restores your passions and your health, a “dangerous” place (often a castle in some shape or form) fronting as Capitalism decayed that opens your mind once inside. / As a result, their “dangers” paradoxically become medicinal and empowering (re: the palliative Numinous) without harming others, thus able to heal a society that is sick with Capitalist Realism (source: “‘Welcome to the Fun Palace!’ part one: A Song Written in Decay”).
Here, we’ll expound on some variables that section could not; e.g., kayfabe, tightrope, fairytale hauntologies and the monomyth in Walpole’s haunted Capitalocene (which is what Ripley and Medusa [a giant suit of dark armor] represent, meeting the present and the past in the dangerous middle). Radcliffe always treats “darkness” and “demon lover” as “scapegoat pirate” to summon and banish for profit during courtly love hauntologies; when used in good faith (as this book does), said dialectic is meant to make us more discerning in terms of what we take in, but also paradoxically grow more bold once we become unafraid to use medieval poetics—less to unironically derange and confuse our senses, but use darkness visible to deftly address the state’s own attacks on our senses mid-cryptonymy (making us question them, thus exit Plato’s cave while inside it).
(source)
Armed with revived empowering confusions (or acclimated to disempowerment as something to subvert), we may confront nebulous, ungrounded despair with jouissance (a rapturous, secular appeal to a godly force: “Oh, my god!” as orgasmic); i.e., slice, hew and otherwise savagely claw through the canonical constraints of what we can and can’t do in a state of crisis. We do so as a means of sex-positive expression told in exquisitely “torturous” language; i.e., as haunted by generational, systemic trauma during the rememory process; e.g., “hungry like the wolf,” which the reaver-like xenomorph (and the castle it hunts inside) partially represents: raw animal lust—a feral hunger to fuck with reckless abandon (informed, as nymphomania generally is, by extreme trauma).
Beyond such a creature and looking at the general creative process, it’s a real witch’s cauldron, and one supplied piece-by-piece from anything and everything (sutured together or built like Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, my book, Scott’s Nostromo, Campbell’s monomyth, etc) that works to holistically and intersectionally weaponize our foes’ contributions against them. Fighting their madness with our “madness” amounts to mirrors with mirrors, wherein we challenge the state’s Aegis with our own: the “attitude” of our own calculated risk; i.e., back talk, dissident feedback, parroting with sass (the medieval puppet show with embarrassing interpretive dances), and so on.
To that, Medusa is not our enemy regardless of appearance, the state and its illusions are; and while the Gothic most certainly is a sham, it needn’t serve state interests insofar as Medusa (and the xenomorph, lycanthropes, vampires, etc) are concerned. If we are to cleave through and move past these complicit cryptonymies to then push into a better age—one whose Wisdom of the Ancients speaks to a healthy cultural understanding of the imaginary past (re: Gothic Maturity)—we must first confront these horrors (and their illusions) where they canonically call home, and per their residents normally being part of an ongoing concealment, rescue them from it: an intervention of the usual damsels and detectives convinced the xenomorph is bad, not the state.
Such a solving and banishing of the mystery as “just a dream” happens according to Radcliffe’s privilege of shelter as a) denying Civilization’s settler-colonial design through a veil of false modesty while b) triangulating state violence against the colonized dressed up as abject rapists; i.e., demon lovers to partake in sinful activities (guilty pleasures), but also to rape unironically by token agents triangulating against their prescribed “abusers” using blind acts of “love.” Per Capitalist Realism, their confused and tokenized barbarism classically synonymizes sex and violence through acts of psychosexual revenge directed at cartoon, fetishized versions of state enemies; i.e., middle-class ladies like Ripley becoming the indiscriminate Amazon[6]/white Indian, operating on par with male versions (e.g., Turok the Dinosaur Hunter) except marshalling primarily through threats of rape to punch the black person, Communist, Medusa, etc, as nature-to-rape. She does so without any irony or awareness—is just magnanimous/Goldilocks genocide infuriatingly administered by a self-righteous harridan exterminator (with again, Aliens depicting Ripley oxymoronically as a maverick counselor of force: “an advisor” alluding to the CIA’s role in Vietnam).
As such, complicit cryptonymy renders the flow of violence and its cultural markers simply as “cool.” Medusa is badass, but must die to save the (white) princess and little girl; i.e., the nuclear family model as a settler-colonial enterprise, its death race driving up costs to ensure profit through genocide.
In the heat of the moment, fear of death and rape aren’t so different, then. This partly happens through “alien” as the classic Gothic function of monstrous symbols in the present: the rapist with a knife dick, but also the Archaic Mother monstrous-feminine with an ovipositor (re: Gwen Pearson’s “stabby cock dagger“). Extreme trauma elides pleasure and pain, life and death, sex and violence. As a covetous dark cavalier operating during “cuffing season” (sexual envy during shortages), the xenomorphic demon lover is driven during canon by wild lust; i.e., to portray rape as sadly a gaslit fiction and lived reality for many people, not just women; i.e., cis-het men as the historic perpetrators and queer men (cis or trans) as the go-to scapegoats for middle-class cis women to attack once spooked and triggered by the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection’s Capitalist Realism.
To it, tokenism commonly uses prison guards recruited from local populations to police its too-giant “terror-tories”; i.e., Ripley is originally a space trucker but radicalizes as a token cop attacking black, queer Communist doubles tied to past abuse the company is to blame, regarding: the moderate-turned-Nazi she-wolf pouncing on her evil twin, and authored by yet-another-Pygmalion, James Cameron… who pimps the whore just as Scott and Lucas did, before him; i.e., the whore, for the canonical wizard, is always a business opportunity to enact through Gothic sex and force, and fear-and-dogma canonical essentialism: always a map, always a cop and a victim—whereupon daddy’s little girl puts his chattel to the sword for profit, but also for the revenge of white fragility posturing as “savior” during live burial/graveyard sex married out of Antiquity (re: Wagner) to modern war (e.g., Samus avenging her parents, and Ripley avenging her daughter through a “this time, it’s personal” gimmick speaking to neoliberal revenge against the Reds).
Breaking that barrier will require some very weird journeys regarding strange appetites pursuant to profit or breaking it—a school of “death” therapy embracing nature-as-alien back towards reunion, restoration and resurrection; i.e., ludo-Gothic BDSM meant to heal nature’s coercive undead status (a dead angry whore/Bleeding Nun’s wandering womb) using a sex-positive theatricality that doesn’t preclude demon lovers, including those of a more… animalistic persuasion (we’ll touch on the animality of such monsters here [exhibit 47b2] and in “Damsels and Detectives” [exhibit 48d2] before expanding on them [and monster-fucking] even more, in “Call of the Wild”).
To it, the xenomorph from Alien works as a colonial relic threatening the current miners of nature; i.e., as tokenized to include white women who, when threatened, proceed to fight, freeze, flop, fly or fawn[7] inside recent Gothic fantasies “left behind” as “ancient derelict”: Giger’s Frankensteinian monster as yet-another-forgery of the perceived primordial, and one that came together in the present as, itself, being just as much informed by said throwback as anything from the historical past outside of active, aggressive reinvention.
Yet the bridge between the two helps reunite us with hidden atrocities walking around like the xenomorph does, its own signature “primordial” simply cryptonymy working to conceal capital’s ongoing abuses since Walpole’s own poetic examination of the French and Indian war (which ended in 1763, the year before Walpole wrote Otranto and passed it off as “genuine”). If we are to escape Capitalist Realism and its ongoing abuse of us as damsels/detectives (of a dainty or burly posture, exhibit 47a2c), we must enrich the post-capitalist potential that the xenomorph demon promises while dodging Whitey and the Straights’ usual execution of it fearing rebel claws: the allegory of darkness visible being campier and more inclusive than Alien‘s narrow white worldview (sorry, Parker); i.e., when playing with the same-old clay’s dead Neo-Gothic metaphors, ourselves.
White Predation in Alien (and Similar Works)
Alien is very checkered in its Marxism, abused by the in-group cannibalizing the out-group with strong Gothic heroines; i.e., from Metroidvania to survival horror to shooters across the board. Keeping with kayfabe, then (and devoting seven new pages to that train of thought—until exhibit 47a2c), Nazis and Commies occupy the same shadow zone. As we have said. And yet, despite having a Communist element, said element had decayed by 1979 to make Alien far less radical than people remember. But we can romanticize it further to become more radical again (similar to Star Wars and Andor); i.e, by breaking any perceived eugenic ceiling Scott raised over four decades ago. Alien wasn’t the end or start of things, but merely a mutation in a larger ongoing chain—one whose praxial fluency and renewal, mid-dialectical, becomes second-nature/woke amid a rising intelligence and awareness healing broken circuits of dark galaxies: the more we inundate bad fakes with good, the more constellations form towards a better yet-to-exist world. Such is ludo-Gothic BDSM, hence Gothic maturity pursuant to Communism out of the “ancient” past.
In similar cryptomimetic fashion, the giving and taking of voices comes and goes across all Gothic media. Shelley gave the oppressed a voice through the Creature; Whale took the voice away and let Victor talk, as did Scott with Giger’s alien and Ripley’s maiden detective; Samus and Doomguy largely were silent protagonists whose worlds spoke through the cryptonymy of Numinous former colonies and gibbering demons, only for the post-Doom, mid-’90s Build games and Valve’s Half-Life franchise (1998, onwards) to respectively give the monomyth hero a voice and leave them mute (though Alex Vance, in 2004’s Half-Life 2, would speak for Gordon Freeman, a black girl romancing the white guy having the literal name of slaveholders the slave would take after the American Civil War).
(exhibit 47a2a: Artist, top-right: Andrew Russell; middle: unknown, 1996, the cover for Duke Nukem 3D inspired in-house by Don Ivan Punchatz [bottom-left] to the point of ripping off the 1993 forebear quite nakedly. Profit demonizes such things, but from a creative standpoint, echopraxis is classically seen as a sign of imitative respect; i.e., worthy enough not to steal but pay tribute to [because modern privatization didn’t exist in the Renaissance period—at least to nowhere near the same extent it does now.)
Whatever the voice or unheimlich, praxial quality always concerns what is being said; i.e., the Gothic speaks “unspeakable” things relative to profit as optional; e.g., the Creature fought for equal rights, whereas Duke Nukem was a notorious pig spouting blind pastiche/dead quotes (essentially Troma films without the satire) and whose own death Caleb celebrated in Blood, a year later (exhibit 47a2a, top-left). There is no “final form,” just a continuation that says whatever workers need to say while echoing other castle-in-the-flesh egregores, on and on. From “the traditions of all dead generations,” they use to pacify and we to mobilize; i.e., the vengeful dead whore—Medusa and her ilk—speaking through us as injecting irony back into what has been lost. In other words, knowledge is application through demonic creation as something to demonically act out, including through sex and public nudism speaking asexually about sexual harm:
(exhibit 47a2a1: Artist, top-left: Sabs; right: Owusyr. In Gothic, “consent” is both ambiguous and rape impossible, but intuitively characterized by different ideological standpoints; e.g., the paradox of performance and the sub’s begging of the dom to please, please not be ravished by them; i.e., something can be bigoted and still educational/non-harmful in the literal sense, while sex-positive elements still have harm in their “hurt, not harm ” message—that excitement requires some kind of risk, however calculated—while speaking to mutual consent: through ludo-Gothic BDSM’s CNC/rape play as informed consent that moral arbiters, suitably outraged, will abject but also dig up to destroy in public displays of white Man-Box superiority. Capital pimps what is different; we unite and humanize what is raped.
In short, morality is arbitrated through canonical binaries per Derrida’s system of differences, but these aren’t transcendental; they’re merely stances to adopt and fight for in the same old dialectic: the state vs nature as alien. Queer art is haunted by queer abuse; black art, black abuse; female art, female abuse; and this includes intersections of privilege/oppression, subject/object, and authorship. Different things mean different things at the same time and all at once.
For example, Mortal Kombat‘s [1993] Goro is a four-armed “dragon” who “finishes” the smaller damsel in ways that highlight the in-house history of women across all registers; i.e., in ways that Ed Boon camped to an extent, but also pimped out: through his arcade-era blockbuster’s dubious Orientalism, being aped by a legion of copycats not unlike Doom and the FPS [the so-called “Doom clones”]. Each clamors to be heard, speaking to abuse in ways that are being camped, but still transgressive/exploitative to unevenly experience abuse, onstage and off, according to societal roles and expectations thrust upon us as consumers and actors; re: hyphenating sex and force with various taboos that go either way [Schrodinger’s rape victim].
To that, Sabs’ work speaks to a ’90s out-of-the-closet-but-still-alien hauntology that fetishizes the twink as something to chase and ravish, but also savor and spoil [so-called “pretty privilege”] while all sides heal from rape/work out their differences during the dialectic of the alien; i.e., as something to literally fuck with. And last but not least, Alien is code for “rape,” meaning the rape hound as much as gorehound: “We found some dark rape, let’s go investigate!” Tom Skerritt is now Fred from Scooby Doo. That’s my head canon.
But also, “rape” can be in quotes or not to a liminal extent; i.e., during rebellion’s usual revenge being policed and scrutinized, much like Lewis’ seminal cryptonymy was, over two centuries ago; re: exploitation and liberation occupy the same spaces and there’s no way to extricate them save through performative context playing with dark power. In turn, size difference plays a part, as does fucking the alien; i.e., in ways that are haunted by genuine black-and-white trauma, from the past, as suggested by language of “the past” viewed in the present. Silly and/or serious, the performance as something to study and experience again and again is what communicates its holistic value in a sex-positive or sex-coercive sense. Through fatal attraction, rape victims seek out rape during calculated risk, which the Gothic historically offers in ironic and unironic forms on a similar complicated, dialectical-material gradient.)
(exhibit 47a2a2: Artist, left: Raff Grassetti; top-right: Reiq. To that, nudity or chastity is performatively fine so long as it doesn’t infantilize women [or anyone else] into a cop; i.e., who triangulates for a hauntological defense of the “ancient” Greco-Roman West during damsel/detective Amazon arguments of virgin/whore “good” monstrous-feminine against nature as “evil” monstrous-feminine; e.g., “Sparta,” “Athens” or “Rome” as something to defend from degeneracy come back through the usual us-versus-them home defense arguments. Through those, women are whatever cis-hit/token men want and need them to be; through us, we reclaim such things to speak to liberation during liminal expression.)
From Alien to Doom to Metroid and other Metroidvania/shooters—all of them built on movies in the neoliberal period out of novels during said period—so many consumers are afraid to critique their heroes and their homes, because they become our homes, too, thus feel sacred as a matter of residency melded to dogma; i.e., the paradox of allegory and apotropaic “armor condoms” is that escaping into other void-like worlds must open our eyes to the problems and presence of coercive illusions in our current time and place. And any who uncritically defend those illusions (re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning,” 2025) are “pulling an Omelas,” thus hiding from the reality those illusions conceal; i.e., in effect assimilating through the class nightmare of the Gothic that Jameson—with some justice—was talking about (while missing the point of rape play that Radcliffe and, hell, even Tolkien was touching on, however imperfectly[8]):
(artist: Frank Frazetta)
Nothing is neutral, but the appearance of neutrality through the consumption of clearly binarized and dogmatic canon (Tolkien in a nutshell, left) is precisely the kind of tactic bad actors use to indoctrinate other workers; i.e., to hunt their fellow victims down, like Ripley does. The act of doing so historically happens in defense of canon and blind escape, yet becomes Quixotic in ways that bounce between fiction and non-fiction, trash and picturesque—with those lauding Alien over 2001 “because it’s dirty” sort of missing the point: a black monolith is still a black monolith, a slum still a slum for the middle class to dive into, regardless of the sterility or grime. By comparison, we aliens of the status quo viewpoint can swim in the abyss as speaking to our normal everyday lives: Ripley’s nightmare is our Tuesday.
Ripley’s Riddle: the Mystery of the Token Feminist
Remember that nothing is sacred but our rights interlinked with the rights of those who came before, the collective wisdom of which we use to camp canon (thus profit) to death. By comparison, something that is conditioned to be violent for profit will be violent for profit; i.e., as a menticidal gargoyle serving in duality as part of the same mirrored expression’s kaleidoscopic madness; re: the xenomorph and the crew it threatens each having the potential for class, culture and race betrayals—meaning someone that activates predictably and ruthlessly during reactive abuse—but for which the seemingly human parties are just as violent and territorial as the inhuman ones (re: Black Swan, left).
In keeping with Frankenstein‘s own ambiguity and oscillation, there is no set meaning to such inkblots (though some explanations are far more likely than others). Instead, we must subvert any undesirable historical-material outcomes by showing our audiences that we demons—normally treated as things to unironically persecute—actually have the ability to not only survive, but overwhelm and deconstruct our innocuous-looking killers’ harmful sense of self; i.e., by anisotropically weaponizing their own tools of alienation against them: the villain in Alien isn’t the xenomorph, but profit (wealth alienates) leaning into a form of bio-power the elite can weaponize by pitting workers against workers (white on black), moving money through nature during the Promethean Quest!
To that, corporate workers colonize space in pursuit of intelligent life, but only do so contractually through a company that exploits all parties through preferential mistreatment (the rare-and-elusive “thinking slave” [versus extended object, per Cartesian thought] to put down/enslave from older empires promising “phat loot” to the finder). Divided, workers get dumber and meaner over time, the middle class essentializing as Faustian stopgaps for the bourgeoisie to trigger with Medusa; i.e., as a Black Pearl to tremble before (fragile savior syndrome; re, Marx: “capital has made us so stupid” extending to the defenders of church-like franchises and mediums, in the neoliberal era). It becomes a game; i.e., conjure up the black cosmic rapist once more to banish during mirror syndrome, simultaneously proving one’s monomythic worth and earning neoliberal false power/brownie points through applied harmful knowledge: “Make demon, then act outraged as you rape it.”
Sound familiar? It’s what Victor did, and by extension what Ripley does by playing her part in a man’s world: her spawn is natural and good, whereas the fascist-Communist egregore/chimera attached to a polity of tyrants and victims is, once-and-future, a total asshole—one where our cosmic Karen can not only call the cops on for revenge against the cops through those the cops victimize; she can be the cop and skip the middlemen (see: Aliens)! It’s pure bollocks.
In a sense, it’s the femme fatale; i.e., Zero Suit Samus as much an assassin for her government (the Galactic Federation) as Ripley was for hers. And despite appearances to the contrary (the “Rambo/white Indian” problem), many women act bereaved or oppressed to assimilate, only to lean into the very motherly tropes that men want while calling it rebellion. In doing so, they prostitute themselves per the whore’s paradox, both virginally and/or whorishly as Amazons to varying degrees of state revenge: “the jungle abused me (or I felt scared of it) so I leaned into whatever roles were expected of me thinking it would protect me from harm!” It’s scaring women into being sexually violent and visually appealing to men; i.e., in ways men can then control, itself one of the oldest tricks in the book attached to tokenism having updated from Ancient Athens into modern versions of “Rome,” on and offstage! The housewife slums, but out-of-joint.
(artist: Predator-Assassin)
As such, it bears repeating that white woman—until very recently in world history—were property for Western men, not people themselves, and for far longer than African Americans have been slaves/second-class citizens. But under present circumstances, such things have shifted to turn white women into gatekeepers for capital that, post-gaslight, became girl boss vanguards that led people of color to also tokenize, followed by the appearance of queer people in Western judicial dialogs (re: Foucault) and the repurposing of medieval persecution language to apply such things to a new order of alien, during the hauntologies at work (re: Zionism). #PickMe
Such “roiling” demands constant Gothic introspection. In Alien, for example, warrior nuns can do whatever they want if they fear for their modesty pursuant to profit (their virginity synonymous with their lives as male property extending to corporate ownership; re: “crew expendable”); i.e., they are the ultimate undeserving victims who, suddenly as cops to a lesser degree (e.g., Ripley as Warrant Officer of the Nostromo), enjoy the state’s usual tools provided they “play along” (with the monopolies, trifectas and qualities of capital; re: Cartesian, settler-colonial straight violence, terror and sex as not just invented, per Crawford, but reinvented and passed along). In turn, “space” is colonized through a white tokenized fear of black rape along the usual inventions we must subvert perceptively—by polishing our mirrors (no surface is 100% reflective)!
(source tweet, 3D Realms: May 26th, 2023)
Again, quoting is completely fine as long as it’s not canonical; i.e., provided you’re commenting on/with it to ultimately camp, thus prevent rape by challenging profit to have the whore’s revenge (Shelley Bombshell, for example, is having the pimp’s, above). Alien was ultimately a festooned cash-grab leaning into Lovecraft, Conrad and Poe to pimp out celibate pioneer whores; i.e., “phallic” violent/smart women (Cartwright’s Lambert wasn’t a scrapper but she was a navigator—a classically male position). These are sailors, first and foremost, but still burdened with Neo-Victorian expectations in a retro-future Britain, its neo-medieval panopticon invaded by an alien far worse than Giger’s: Margaret Thatcher!
This being said, the ambiguity gives it a certain viral/fungal power (the xenomorph is basically the precursor to the AIDS virus and the finger-pointing that would cause, only a two years later in 1981). History is a living document, then, and the Gothic is writ in transformation and decay!
To that, you can have white skin and still be an alien (as I have been, my whole life); you can be an alien and still be a cop (as Ripley is, next page)—i.e., attacking the alien as something to police because it is abject, the holier-than-thou generally acting the most modest while having the most unironic perversions: stuck in Capitalism gentrifying and decaying such things/adopting a grim air of flirting with disaster while playing meek and strong voyeurs exhibiting strength during neo-conservative warmongering.
To that, the canonical detective becomes more and more robotic/transhuman to pre-emptively attack nature defending itself from the colonizer[9], and whose own mutations are postcolonial; e.g., the Cyberdemon from Doom (exhibit 51d4a2); re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Postcolonialism in Doom” (2020), as featured in “Those Who Walk Away From Speedrunning” (20205) They become heartless shrews in ways that expend all sympathy from allies while betraying them, mid-witch hunt (re: Federici); i.e., while consuming the alien, on and offstage, in ways they cannot create, only destroy because they police what they think is cool: while turning off their brains except “shoot to kill” as a mindset wherever they are! Killing becomes a tremendous mystery unto itself, one to chase across Hell’s half-acre until the cows come home—from Earth, to the stars, and back again!
Think Eco, but for damsels finding their inner Spartan or “female Achilles” the Athenians whispered about; i.e., as Marston drooled over and Scott made in the image of his own hard-ass mom. It’s very British, but also Western; re: Irigaray’s creation of sexual difference whoring the mom out as a chaste TERF nevertheless chained to men and that burden of care: harbingers of the same fear and suspicion, but doubly so because they’re not men—will try all the harder to fit in where they’re never fully welcome. “We’re the victims!” they’ll cry.
No one punches down harder than token people do, because their betrayal has alienated themselves already from their own people in exchange for Judas gold (re: Federici). They “can never” go back, as they see it, having crossed the Rubicon “for good.” As Ripley shows us, they’ll even kill babies for bosses they don’t like (an extermination rhetoric that Neill Blomkamp would highlight much more nakedly vis-à-vis Apartheid, in District 9′s own white savior/Tonto and the Lone Ranger rehash):
And while this seems like a lovely metaphor of the Vietnam War on its face, war apologia laces itself with sympathy for the conqueror “suing for peace” in bad faith; i.e., while continuing to prosecute war during the same-old false flags and vae victis refrains fearful of the liberated, if avenged. “No, it’s the non-white children who are wrong!” Cameron isn’t a steward of nature, then, but its routine pimp/Greater Destroyer as all Great White Men of History (and subjugated women) have been: idle, class dormant minds, conjuring Mephistopheles to collar and torment the demon to death. It’s bad BDSM through the submissive shooting the dom.
As such, he and company took the wrong lessons from the Vietnam war and turned them into a profitable cryptomimetic refrain valorizing personal responsibility and Starship Troopers to replicate war copaganda in ways Lovecraft only hinted at; i.e., to have everyone see Ripley as the Good White Madonna and want to be “just like her” when pimp-slapping the fat-and-sassy Welfare Queen—in effect, whitewashing the Vietnam war and every conflict that came after it, onstage and off, through neoliberal media (videogames) during Cameron’s refrain, fostering peace through strength as, ever and always, a package deal with the New World Order announced by Bush Sr. in 1990: “This Time, It’s War!” and personal, to boot! And Cameron’s Aliens married a variety of cops-and-victims stigmas acquired over a very long career to make things hell for nature as monstrous-feminine—all so Cameron could profit off the past in badly disguised ethnocentric dogma, then sell it back to American liberals with his 2009 Avatar series!
But back in 1986, he helped spawn Metroid as imitating the same mutating canonical chain (alongside Tolkien’s own cartographic refrains; re: “A Note on Canonical Essentialism“)—from middle-of-the-20th century novels (Starship Troopers, 1959) to 1980s cinema (Aliens, 1986) and videogames (Metroid, also 1986) and later Doom and Quake (1993 and 1996) onto latter-day FPS like Call of Duty and Gears of War (2003 and 2006); i.e., as franchises that would go on and on and on, inside the neoliberal period’s end of history as build for extermination: “Final Victory” as ever elusive, creating a problem it could never solve because it was built on a lie that, nonetheless, created an endless supply of cops and victims to replicate—one side signing stupidly up to face a perceived and imaginary but half-real threat, and the other side colonized whether they want to be or not.
It’s a War on Terror that never ends, incited by James Cameron before 9/11 as a pimp and chicken hawk warmonger who doesn’t want peace; he wants to sell more and more Madonnas, the Shadow of Pygmalion (and his Galatean perversion, the subjugated Hippolyta) replicated like gospel to preach without end, perception becoming reality to serve profit: by raping the whore faster and faster onstage, doing so in conjunction with real-world geopolitics in the hopes that the nightmare will “suddenly end” if we just find one more power-up (torturing natures secret’s out from her dark womb, raiding Hell’s handbasket one more monomythic time). Except it won’t, because said military optimism, urbanism and Realism are merely the infernal concentric pattern as Aguirre highlighted, in 2008, but also Radcliffe back in the 1790s; i.e., accidentally warning about in her own conservative fictions’ monster behind the Black Veil: Capitalism growing into itself, “standing on the ashes of something not quite present” during the cryptonymy process.
Allegory is often what the authors aren’t fully aware of, but still putting in their stories for others to find, afterwards. Except, whereas Scott’s Alien had some irony and neoliberal critique among its own trembling prospector’s ethnocentrism, under Cameron’s disastrous notion of damsels, detectives and demons, the Prison-Military Industrial Complex completely exploded into a gold rush of Pax Deorum (“peace of the gods,” or more colloquially “golden age”); i.e., through him as Bringer of War pimping Ripley out on the Aegis (and Sigourney Weaver embracing the neo-conservative elements beyond her flagship character’s maiden voyage—a pirate vessel flying the American flag for decades afterwards). There is never “true peace in space,” at home or abroad, onstage or off, for Samus, Ripley or anyone else.
Expanding the blind parody of Beowulf and its praxial inertia into American households as something to “speedrun” from the ’90s onwards (re: me, vis-à-vis Eric Koziel), suddenly the whole world was entirely on fire—full of gay non-white Communist space bugs to blame, thus squash and burn by new generations pushing against Domino Theory dressed up; i.e., younger and younger witch hunter cowboys, repeatedly eager to plunge into the same-old frontier territories for endless glory and conquest: to recite the same old lines as they do with a smile on their faces (“Express elevator to Hell, goin’ down!” Bill Paxton says, above, presenting my entire graduation class (of ’04) with a likeness to unironically imitate, after 9/11 handed America its first domestic black eyes: “Goddamn bugs wacked us, Johnny!”) and then feeling sorry for themselves, afterwards, while nuking the site from orbit not once, but over and over again!
As such, Cameron’s signature Military Optimism helped sublimate the new normal; i.e., by reenacting the vengeful ghost of Saigon without irony to rape the world through the same old, us-versus-them cartography and jingoistic, Pax Americana heroism. The harder they punch, the more they deny and the guiltier their actions make them; but it’s always the whore’s fault.
In turn, the Shadow of Pygmalion haunts the Cycle of Kings during the narrative of the crypt. And to that, if Scott blindfolded the Amazon to scare her incestuously like Ferdinand did, in The Duchess of Malfi (1614), Cameron turned the damsel into a military recruiting tool he could pimp out as modest while fetishizing the same kayfabe-style cult of death; i.e., trading the torch for a gun (exhibit 48c1)—his Spartan hauntology of Marston’s Wonder Woman given flesh and pitted against Red Skull as Nazi-Communism, except now it was a black mirror to contend with Capitalist Realism and fascism ever and always festering endemically on the homefront: the ignominious death of older Americans sticking its own young populations into a Faustian meat grinder in pursuit of Promethean power!
Such is fascism, and America has always been a prison/settler colony (re: Zinn). Yes, Scott is bad, at times, but Cameron’s Don Quixote revival is a million, million times worse. He’s a white moderate whitewashing fascism and selling the War on Terror pre- and post-9/11 in ways that eclipsed Alien‘s haunted house argument (through merchandise, remediation and gross sales) on every level; re: his refrain the one that not only “stuck,” but best hit upon the present state of affairs, and settler-colonial groundwork underneath, orchestrating such things for centuries; or (from my PhD thesis argument on Tolkien and Cameron’s refrain):
Under Capitalist Realism, Hell is a place that always appears on Earth (or an Earth-like double)—a black fortress threatening state hegemony during the inevitable decay of a colonial body. Its widening state of exception must then be entered by the hero during the liminal hauntology of war as a repeatable, monomythic excursion—a franchise to subdue during military optimism sold as a childhood exercise towards “playing war” in fantastical forms; e.g., Castlevania or Metroid. Conjure a Radcliffean menace inside the Imperial Core, then meet it with American force [“outside” on the frontiers] (source).
In short, it’s a place to test one’s manhood/mettle as routinely needing to be tested—with Cameron’s Hippolyta girl boss being a clever whitewash and gender swap that shows the boys (and girls) how to act like men better than men (and the Brits):
This is hardly the first time I’ve discussed this. As I write in 2021’s “Outlier Love: Enjoying Prometheus/Covenant in the Shadow of Aliens” (an extended quote because all this is incredibly relevant):
Before Aliens there was Star Wars. Lucas’ original trilogy championed armed resistance against imperial colonizers by modeling the rebels after the Vietcong. Unfortunately Aliens‘ own Vietnam war allegory is far more ambiguous. Ellen Ripley becomes Rambo, slaying droves of alien creatures single-handedly (Cameron wrote the original screenplay for Rambo: First Blood Part II before handing it off to Sylvester Stallone). The aliens aren’t even remotely humanized. Instead, the movie’s dramatic elements focus on Ripley’s surrogate motherhood. She eradicates the aliens to save Newt, all thanks to Cameron’s “neutral” critical lens.
[artist: Gerald Brom]
And when I say eradicate, I mean it. “I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit” isn’t just a memorable quote; it’s also Ripley channeling the spirit of the American occupiers. Leave; bomb the Commies on your way out. JFK wasn’t keen on dropping bombs, but authorized the use of agent orange. Johnson loved his bombs; so did Nixon, but he banned agent orange. These ambivalent, indiscriminate attacks harmed the indigenous population. Aliens could have channeled civilian warfare like the Tet Offensive by having the xenomorphs resemble the former colonists. Instead, a bug is just a bug. With nothing human to stall her advance, Ripley unironically massacres the colonized; like Vietnam, Hadley’s Hope becomes a shooting gallery. In this respect, Aliens is quite literally xenophobic propaganda*.
*For more on this concept, consider reading my article, “The Promethean Quest and James Cameron’s Military Optimism in Metroid.”
Not convinced? Consider Aliens‘ literary influences: Sigourney Weaver cites Henry V as the inspiration for Ripley—a play about the reification of an English monarch through war (“Once more unto to breach, dear friends”). During Aliens‘ production, the entire cast also had to read Starship Troopers, a novel criticized for its propaganda-level glorification of the military. In other words, the critical slant, if there is one, is too neutral to effectively criticize the industrial-war machine. Do you speak out and risk being attacked for your politics (Good Morning Vietnam)? Or do you play it “straight,” vitalizing the military to mollify hawkish critics (see: Starship Troopers—the book or the movie)? The second message is pure allegory, hidden behind larger, louder themes.
Aliens has the latter problem, one it’s propelled into future movies and videogames: “This time it’s war,” the trailer announced. Cameron himself wasn’t above pandering to both sides, openly apologizing to the United States Marine Corps. for his unglamorous depiction of the military (see: his commentary track for Aliens in the Alien Quadrilogy edition). Cameron’s concession only muddies the waters further, as do future attempts by him to generate money through the energetic depiction of war (re: Avatar).
Guns are a big selling point for Aliens. This same concept applies to Cameron’s own franchise, The Terminator. To be fair, Terminator is far more critical of war (and rogue police states) than Aliens. Nevertheless, the movie still has a lot of guns in it. Some audience members even view Cameron’s “future war” as a glorious, nostalgic playground. Angry Joe, a right-leaning gamer, belligerently clamors for the “purple lasers!” (and loves his Aliens paraphernalia). Mr. H Reviews drools over Tech-com‘s faithful 1980s tableaux, while condemning feminists for ruining the franchise with Terminator Dark Fate. Their combined approval of “future war” and Aliens-inspired media isn’t a shock. But neither are the sexist, warlike attitudes they sneak in under the veneer of “neutral” entertainment.
Though left-leaning myself, I can still delight in Cameron’s artistic craft. I like purple lasers and big explosions; they’re pretty and visually stimulating. But honestly I enjoy them more when combined with Cameron’s Gothic elements: his Romance between Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese; his dark mirror with Ellen Ripley versus the Queen. Unfortunately those situations are shrouded by war. Maybe that’s the point: Gothic stories both fear and promote the return of a barbaric past, including war. War and guns are popular in America. So is Aliens which, moving forward, makes war and guns popular again. And again, and again…
I’m an American. Any declaration from me—that I enjoy Terminator or Aliens—feels like it must be clarified. Fans of the “good” Alien movies (the first two in particular) usually don’t clarify anything. When I was in my mid-20s, I worked at my family’s (now defunct) store. A [gay no-white male] banker would come down and talk movies with my mother and I. We got to talking about the Alien franchise. Suddenly he announced “Oh, Aliens is the best one!” before looking at me and smiling in mild, veiled provocation. He didn’t say why. He didn’t have to.
I heard the same thing in high school. Mike Worthington and I loved Alien and Aliens. We asked Mrs. Brown if we could show both movies in her science fiction class. She allowed it. After watching them, a popular, somewhat artsy student in a Greenday t-shirt declared, “It’s stupid.” He was talking about Alien. Our classmates chorused in agreement, saying that Aliens “was awesome” because it had guns.
The same kind of people say that Prometheus is “bad,” usually implying blame towards Scott for his “Quixotic” departure from Cameron’s reliable monopoly. They also provide double-standards—dumb scientists, plot holes, ropy dialogue—to justify their reasons. I say “double standards” because these reasons are not missing in the original pairing. More to the point, Alien and Aliens are generally considered “good” for oft-repeated, but understated reasons. “Good” usually means Aliens, primarily its guns.
The presence of war in Aliens is so ubiquitous that it usually goes without saying. It should be commented on, but isn’t because so many in the mainstream view it as “classic,” default, normal. Alien is classic too, but Aliens carries the American torch through its glorification of war. For nearly its entire existence, America has been at war, or made money as a “neutral” party selling guns to either side. Manifest destiny aka a “clear fate.” The “no fate” spiel from T2 suddenly sounds a little ironic, especially when compared to Ripley’s heroism in Aliens. Cameron says he uses violence to make a point. Perhaps people understand violence; they also glorify it, perpetuating war through their own creations.
The lengthy shadow of war applies to videogames inspired by Aliens. Aliens single-handedly cemented the FPS genre, inspiring id to make Doom. It also spawned a number of cinematic or cinematic-inspired imitators: Predator, as well as Metroid and Contra. And not just them, but numerous sequels and spin-offs. The best ones are constantly explosive, action-packed (though I prefer mine with a bit of spooky atmosphere and tension; re: Super Metroid, Dead Space, Alien: Isolation).
Make no mistake, I’m indebted to Aliens for its role in Metroid’s genesis (even if the first game is closer in spirit to Alien). However, the word “good” has far too much weight in casual discourse. This drives me up a wall. “Aliens is good” has little to do with the criticisms mentioned above (dumb characters, decisions, dialogue); it has everything to do with the understated components: the guns, the action, the jingoistic comraderie. These sit innocently on the screen, less propagandized than The Dirty Dozen. I say “less” because Horner’s music is still awash with military splendor and excitement (similar to John Williams bastardizing “Bringer of War” in A New Hope). It’s not just tolerated; it’s embraced, just with less zeal [or so it seems] (source).
This became a pissing match/forever war between Scott and Cameron’s bread-and-circus, but also their fans; i.e., using derelict Amazons vs Medusa in ways I grew up with—from the early ’90s, onwards—but desperately wanted to change, myself. As a closeted trans Communist, I was always against war but loved the GNC potential of the Gothic heroines being shown—so much so, in fact, that my early research into them at grad school, “What an Amazon Is, Standing in Athena’s Shadow” (2017), preceded my eventual 2018 master’s thesis about Metroidvania, and later research after that preceding my PhD (re: 2021’s “Why I Submit“).
The rememory process never stops—is one of constant holistic reengagement with what doesn’t die, anyways. We can’t be rid of such things; we can only camp and subvert them, even transgressively. The idea is to make such things actively rebellious, our own Satanic and “ancient” left-behinds raising emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness to prevent war and rape by not blaming the whore as monster girl waifu (the classic function of the Amazon vs Medusa, sadly):
(artist: Persephone van der Waard)
In short, I love Metroidvania and Amazons as things to subvert; all of my Metroidvania work concerns Amazons (re: Persephone’s 2025 Metroidvania Corpus), and I’ve written about Amazons—but also illustrated and performed solo/with others the idea of Amazons, Medusa and Amazonomachia—for my entire Sex Positivity book series (2022 to 2025). And furthermore, my academic ideas “the palliative Numinous” and “ludo-Gothic BDSM” (from Volume Zero, onwards) were deliberately coined in conscious, active attempts to get away from Cameron’s harmful dogma better than Kristeva or Creed had, but also Scott.
If Sex Positivity and my earlier work is any proof, then, I love camping the canon. It’s like sex to me (and often involves sex hyphenating art-porn to develop Gothic Communism, another of my creations). No one paid me; I just actually 100% enjoy it—Persephone “losing herself in Necropolis” again and again (to be “raped” there with reckless abandon)—and think we can do far better than Cameron ever bothered. He’s a cunt, and while Ridley is less of a cunt than him, he’s a cunt, too (the two men “docking” on and off, throughout the years). Don’t just kill your darlings, duckies; emancipate their whores during ludo-Gothic BDSM and glaze those on the Aegis in furtherance to effacing the heteronormative, settler-colonial, Cartesian legacy Pygmalions like Scott and Cameron both leave behind—i.e., with your own iconoclastic damsels, detectives and demons liberating sex work (therefore all work) from Capitalist Realism in duality! We’re going back to learn, not to destroy and forget!
That is my “found document” for you to discover and it won’t apologize for Pygmalions like Cameron raping the world by first raping our minds (re: taking Aristotle’s “give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man” and applying it to cis girls and black men, too)! Keeping with the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection furthered by the middle class, there is always a whore to fetishize/alienize and rape—a succubus “from beyond” to collar and cage by princes, but also by princesses savagely “sticking it” to the colonized to performatively “get back at” the real abusers (white men and their white systems of oppression): “The goddess you need can’t be me,” it’s a cruel angel’s thesis we have to subvert within our own strange appetites garnered, mid-abuse, to have the whore’s monstrous-feminine revenge, one day (and creation/rape) at a time—by thwarting profit, thus rape, by putting “rape” in quotes (re: “A Cruel Angel’s (Modular) Thesis“)! Take my Wisdom of the Ancients and carve your own destinies in defiance of the real pimps-in-disguise! Enjoy but do not endorse canon!
(artist: Bokuman, commissioned and modified by Persephone van der Waard in 2016)
Oscillation (and echoes of incest, live burial and rape; re: Neo Genesis Evangelion‘s whole fucked-up Neo-Gothic pastiche) aside, there’s a million-billion ways to do this. In keeping with duality and continuing to investigate neoliberalism in yesterday’s heroes beyond my older work and commissions[10], the world looks very different and practically identical after reentering Plato’s cave (the process often being called trans emasculation, for trans women); i.e., to critique men like Cameron vampirically sending power towards the elite on the Aegis (akin to Jim Henson’s Skeksis), whereas we reverse the flow of abjection anisotropically by also inverting terror/counterterror as Gothic counterculture nostalgia!
To that, Cameron is Skynet growing tissue for the cyborgs and the bullet farmers raping the grave-like ground (very Gothic); we bare it all to expose his folly while denying him our organs (of sex, but also thought married to sex and labor): “Can’t touch this” freaky girl! And doing such “push-ups” or “jumping jacks” might look silly from the outside/at a distance, but so does sex and/or public nudism if you’re not the one(s) doing it. What matters isn’t action for its own sake (re: Eco), but whose dialectical-material context upon further inspection aids in the development of Communism during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., in ways Cameron’s own praxial inertia didn’t, because it produced a lot more people not like me (eco-fascists) than like me and those like me (re: from Volume Zero): “Go forth, young boy, and you’ll become a legend!” meets “Go West, young man!” Lebensraum is Lebensraum, Manifest Destiny always the same game given a new coat of paint by men like Cameron (from slavers like Thomas Jefferson to Hilter) pimping the wild whore as seductive and delicious:
[artist: A Baby Pinecone]
The historical-material reality of Grendel’s suspiciously Satanic-sounding mother is ordinary people being placed into the out-group by the in-group—i.e., less hag-horror in the sense of actual withered hags [the furies] and more the ancient mother goddess [the Archaic Mother] as embodied in AFAB persons and viewed fearfully by men as devious shapeshifters that could be anywhere, inside-outside anyone [a killer impostor that is instantly fatal upon encountering; e.g., the T-1000 disguised as an innocent housewife]. While the stigma applies to anything remotely female or incorrectly male, the redhead classically evokes the presence of pagan power and Sapphic energies.
She embodies nature, and nature is something for Beowulf’s hauntologized clones to kettle/box-in, then rape and kill for “their own” God-given glory in bread-and-circus-type stories [with her predictable revenge—at becoming like them for the death of her family and loved ones—being seen as cowardly and illegitimate in the eyes of the state and its kayfabe monopoly of violence; i.e., the back-and-forth cycle of reactive abuse]. It’s not just “boys will be boys”; the pussy looks like a cave to conquer by men according to men during rites of passage that have been baked into our culture as fundamental to capital. It’s Manifest Destiny in action—challenged by the simple fact that God is an invention, a cruel joke to abuse others with through the rise of Capitalism’s Cartesian Revolution and resultant maps of conquest [exhibit 1a1a1h2a1]. It becomes not just a scribble of Old-English runes, but a harmful game spawned into endless copies of itself: the power fantasy as Warrior Jesus’ perennial resurrection, raping and killing the world as monstrous-feminine, “gendered at every turn” according to cartography as a technology of conquest that fits into the ludologized scheme:
[Francis Bacon, the father of modern science,] argued that “science should as it were torture nature’s secrets out of her.” Further, the “empire of man” should penetrate and dominate the “womb of nature.” […] The invention of Nature and Society was gendered at every turn. The binaries of Man and Woman, Nature and Society, drank from the same cup. Nature, and its boundary with Society, was “gyn/ecological” from the outset (source: A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things).
The kingdom is threatened; call Beowulf [or the Ghostbusters] out of the mythical past to slay what ails the king and the land, the uncanny home as “rotten” [as Hamlet put it, in Shakespeare’s parody of the hero/murder mystery] and needing to be restored through great destruction [sold to the masses, of course]: […]
To preserve the image of male hegemony, modern-day heroes will inject themselves with whatever serum they require to manufacture an edge over women as a false binary [e.g., the ghost of Eugene Sandow and his imaginary antiquity, exhibit 7a]. This mad science is what Robert Matheson and Mary Shelley mercilessly lampooned in Frankenstein and I am Legend [1954] as the fearsome and outdated legend of the rapist-murderer presented as a scientist of cold, “benevolent” reason [or infantile sports goon grown in a test tube; e.g., X-24 from Logan, 2017]—who is, in truth, just an entitled, cruel nerd. Manufactured conflict under Capitalism involves compelled performances of anything and everything [masks, uniforms, weapons, handcuffs and other binding implements, labels of power and its delivery from cops unto victims, etc] that weaponize weird canonical nerds through projection—i.e., onto various theatrical personas: sexy or profoundly hideous killers, detectives, warriors, or doctors… (source).
In short, we’re all “looking for Mother” as someone to occupy and enjoy for various reasons; i.e., while moving through the monomythic underworld/Promethean space as simply a dogmatic reflection of canon out into the external plane. In turn, monsters, violence, terror and virgin-whore damsels, detectives and sex demons during monstrous-feminine poetic expression aren’t automatically “bad”; it’s how their continuously reapplied in the present from the past in relation to the future (re: the Wisdom of the Ancients) that matters: an Omelas refrain, for Cameron’s Aliens—one that excludes what it abjects and rapes during mirror syndrome at its core, but already having raped the white aggressor’s entitled mind to see everything as a giant massive threat it is paradoxically superior to yet threatened by! “Must defend my pussy and Civilization’s ‘womb’ from the black rapist Archaic Mother’s stinging ovipositor!”
(exhibit 47a2c1: We’ve already discussed Cameron’s Black Queen and her role in settler-colonial worship as a kind of endless “whipping post” [re: “On Amazons, Good and Bad, part one: Always a Victim,” 2024]. All the same, Cameron’s Amazonomachia is very Freudian, dog-eat-dog [if the dogs were black and white] and concerned with monarchal regressions to embrace without irony [Cameron’s own tokenized, white-and-cis supremacist Numinous closer to any imaginary British Romanticism birthed in America than he probably cares to admit; i.e., the White Queen vs the Black Queen, Ripley playing fetch with a female T-Rex wearing an African tribal mask, above[11]]. Classical art generally relegates women to the status of virgin or whore. Yet, a cis woman in canonical Gothic fiction is usually a special kind of either type: a damsel or a demon; i.e., Lambert’s nerdy wallflower or the chaste battle-nun that is Ellen Ripley. In the case of the latter, she’s monstrous-feminine by virtue of being “man-like” but not a man, yet also not the demon hunting them [meanwhile, Lambert’s dainty swooning is the end of her]: the whore, she-warrior and female demon all part of the same monstrous-feminine equation.
To this, Ripley is also a fledging detective and warrior debutante—the “Battle of Britain” housekeeper carried into outer space, looking after the company’s chateau by investigating Ash the perfidious servant and not really in the mood for being fucked with by her bosses or the xenophobic caricature. She eventually blows up the castle because it threatens to eat her as much as the monster does, except she remains haunted by the possibility that she and it—the sodomite gargoyle—might be alike. Society demonizes both as monstrous-feminine, but Ripley is the blue-collar curios who doesn’t really fit in. She’s “just there to work” [the Protestant ethic] …until the pirate queen shows up and Ripley—sensing a promotion [in Aliens] takes personal responsibility to a whole new level [versus scuttling the craft and the cargo, in Alien, but ultimately having to tango at the end in that movie, anyways: abjecting settler colonialism in ways that are just as conservative as Cameron’s]. She also self-defends, the detective treating her inner damsel [or a nearby ward, like Jonesy or Newt] as precious cargo that must be defended at all costs; i.e., from her own abjected sins tied to empire. It’s regressive to a Pavlovian, hauntological degree: admiration for the superhuman “soccer mom” doing whatever it takes to defend Civilization from a Black Menace, mid-Red-Scare/Satanic Panic [all under the shadow of Zionism, but I digress].
The xenomorph, meanwhile, becomes the moving-target Creature to feature, who eventually leads Ripley to weaponize her survivor’s anger against an imaginary foe that could be inside anyone—in a phrase, persecution mania. Ripley becomes a monster cop, turned “undead” and “demonic” through her chasing of the skeletal black dragon as a biomechanical spectre of systemic trauma she can never kill: “Out, out! Damn spot!” But the “bury your gays” crusade carries on, rooting out corruption and the forces of darkness as potentially fascist and Communist [until future defense of capital redivides the stigmas, aggregating for the state against labor each and every time]. It makes for generational trauma that, sure enough, the elite will use to keep us divided, pitting different prison gangs of different privileges and oppressions against each other for profit; i.e., by denying Medusa cuddles, sex, and any other kind of intimacy humans take for granted, but also keeping Athena isolated and longing for love. It’s a dog’s breakfast, presented as “cuisine” [or the “Meow Mix” logo from Rob Cobb’s “Semiotic Standard[12]” alluding however accidently to Soylent Green (1961) but I digress].
Instead, the state monopolizes connection inside its own concentric prisons; i.e., you can have as much as you like as long as you police it “among your own kind” and war against other gangs. This means female biology as alien and token/target as a matter of demonic interrelation with other similar out-groups: non-white skin, Pagan religions, queer expression, neurodivergence and the mentally ill, sex workers, the elderly and disabled and anything else that can be criminally fetishized and exotified. It’s the opposite of intimacy but remains darkly buoyant/magnetic.)
In true Radcliffean fashion, the Alien franchisement of damsels and detectives are always white functioning (and generally white-appearing Final Girls unless tokenized by white men, or made by token directors, below). The archive is both fabricated, viral and haunted by actual fascism in various cartoons; i.e., which the elite will dangle in from of us during Medusa’s testimony leading not to reparations or land back, but assimilation fantasies from marginalized groups; e.g., AvP’s (2004) “Zulu Hotep” nonsense, or more recently with Fede Alvarez’ own Alien pastiche, Romulus (2024):
(exhibit 47a2c1: In a Marxist olive branch, Alvarez’ movie initially alludes to Mary Shelley’s earlier black survivor’s testimony… only to sweep it under the rug/deny genocide, past-and-present; i.e., through a Trojan Horse of Americanized Cartesian force, and whose forced ambiguity [a problem since Shelley] they further complicate using not one, but two questionable servants!
One, Rook, is a literal carbon copy of Ian Holm’s digitized likeness, Ash, and the other one, “Andy,” is a Tinman savior for the functionally white damsel in distress; i.e., when the movie forces her to play the role instead of the detective Amazon with a gun. All of this of course hints at oppression, but leans into killing Medusa when Medusa shoves her “eye of confusion” right up in our Ripley clone’s grill, telling her “girls shit” [spectres of Radcliffe]. Scar[r]ed for her life, the new debutante looks away in anticipation of intense rape and cannibalism… only for Andy to predictably swoop in, at the last second, using the White Man’s gun to save his chosen belle/beau from almost-certain Nazi-Communist/Indigenous conversion therapy [a black men punching a non-white non-man for trying to using the white drinking fountain instead of the “col*red” one, in the Jim Crow South]! “My hero,” indeed! How we want for one without tokenization!
However compelling or enticing the Amazonian drama seems through its emotional-sexual appeals, its praxial crux operates on keeping the detective functionally white with a token black male simulacrum’s help; i.e., will he betray his childhood “of the people” friend to help Ash’s duplicate achieve immortality for settler colonialism in space? No, he won’t! But by that same token [so to speak], Alvarez has Andy submit to the white girl as knowing better than him—the two of them bargaining for her to liberate him from corporate bondage… only to be returned to bondage under her care; i.e., as made that way by her father having salvaged Andy from older “corporate models” built for the frontiers.
In short, Andy’s a “house negro” and the heroine is literally his owner who chastises him through force [the ghost of the father literally occupying Andy’s mind/programmed to tell dad jokes]: female Gohan with Black Goku the Amazing Robo-Dad telling her to kamehameha wave Cell from Another Hell.
Humans are reflexively idiomatic. You’re welcome.
Of course, allusions to Asimov are bad enough all on their own, but the narrative arc—however emotionally sweet it seems on its face—is intensely problematic; i.e., as it abjects genocide through a neoliberal, corporate-owned damsel-to-detective bildungsroman concerned with the legend of Rome’s construction [which Romulus and Remus point to] as having a “litter of runts” fight over scraps: a pecking order within labor [slaves fighting slaves]. The outcome to such sibling rivalry’s controlled opposition is diegetically decided by Dr. Light’s “Roll” taking a “Black Rock”/Mr. Rochester under her wing [“Reader, I assimilated him”]. Doing so puts the heroic mantle back on her shoulders; i.e., to investigate, thus solve everyone’s problems, Nancy-Drew-style.
And while it’s admittedly fun to dissect such stories to find allegory we can use, we’re at a stage when we need active informed resistance among the cryptonymy process [and for anyone worried about that, the genie’s already out of the bottle, Pandora out of her Box. No? Just tell me how the state will counterprotest the Gothic’s sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll—by making it illegal? That would go against profit. And even if they did, how would they police it to any degree of efficacy?].)
“The idea has become the institution. Time to move on.” Having outlined the white female predatory angle, I’d like to proceed towards escape from them and Capitalist Realism through Medusa; i.e., as something to “puzzle over” regarding worker liberation using damsels, detectives and demons, ourselves. The rest of “Giger’s Xenomorph,” then, will consider the process of abjection through Neo-Gothic detectives as part of Cartesian thought, followed by Amazonomachia, cryptomimesis and mise-en-abyme before concluding with furries and ultimately Giger’s puzzle of “Antiquity” straight from the horse’s mouth. As we do, it remains vital to remember how the development of Gothic dialogs is not an automatic, instant process (reverse abjection or otherwise).
Note: The rest of this section is as I wrote it, in April 2024. No more close reads, just covering our bases (scoring for Communism)! —Perse
Cartesian Hubris: the Girl Boss
Warnings carry in echoing code, insofar as monopolies are impossible and the Gothic is always out-of-joint. To see that, you need only consider damsels, detectives and sex demons, their proliferation having taken centuries to arrive at where it currently is under Capitalism; i.e., a “pandemonium” of ritualized torture expressed in oppositional forms (the clichés and fetishes of the Gothic mode) for which the xenomorph is queen. Left behind during a praxial “seesaw” by those who make them, these derelicts (and their ontological role of exposing systemic trauma in a voyeuristic manner) still exist side-by-side in dialectical-material strife; that is, once abandoned, their shared language can be rediscovered, thus taken up by new oppositional forces during fresh Gothic poetics modeled partially off older structures and explorers, but—like synapses firing rapidly—communicate old issues that travel like lighting through oscillating dialectical-material (and social/collective) emotional/sexual tensions. It is not enough to call something “monstrous” or “alien,” then, but doing so regarding a Cartesian structure to describe in either direction: the state vs nature (thus workers) insofar as Medusa factors in.
Rape, including insertion of an unwanted foreign object—not a dildo by a friend, but bullets or knives during foreign holocausts (or something similar on the homefront; e.g., a rolled-up magazine by a false friend, below)—is a constant ubiquitous problem. It’s systemic; i.e., a dogmatic imbalance whose perennial abuses of power announce through the very mode that, while it has the potential to address Capitalism-as-rapacious, also commodifies it when Gothic poetics are put in the wrong hands (and even in the right ones, you can’t really speak to trauma without giving it a voice in some shape or form; e.g., Alien‘s own rape fantasies, while abject and brutal, still showcase a lot of persistent, unaddressed and ongoing British bigotries through a neoliberal critique that, while far from “perfect,” still hits close to home).
To prevent that, you must throw the doors of perception as wide as possible—as mouth-like, ingesting through a medieval framing of the senses (re: a confusion of the senses, where “the eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen…”); i.e., that speaks to extreme trauma as notorious for “crossing one’s wires.” State abuse weaves a coercive, blinding spell of undeath, one that demands tough cryptonymic medicine (various blindfolds, minus the harm—an act of gained trust, not blind faith): fighting madness with “madness” that parses through play. So close your eyes, open wide and come to Mommy (but remember your safewords, of course)…
Bear in mind, while male detectives and warriors are a staple of the genre, we’ll primarily be exploring how female and queer detectives survive male power while navigating it. This starts with the Gothic castle as Radcliffe envisioned it—a white, cis-het female idea of patriarchal menace to poke around inside, later explored and appreciated by other white, cis-het women in the 20th century and Internet Age that followed; e.g., Rachel Knowles, a self-confessed “committed Christian” who writes:
It has been said that every writer must first be a reader, and I have always loved reading. As a young girl, I was fascinated by tales of fantasy such as Enid Blyton’s Enchanted Wood and wrote my own magical adventures – always with a happy ending. When I was thirteen, I read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for the first time. I fell in love, not only with Mr Darcy [barf], but with the romance of the Regency age [double barf]. Over the years, I have devoured numerous Regency romances – some good, some bad – and half-written several of my own (source: “A Regency History Guide to The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe,” 2013).
Except, queer people—while obviously different from Knowles—can still revisit and rewrite the same Gothic environment centuries after Radcliffe designed her own dated traps; e.g., her scenes of imperiled heroines threatened by in-castle rape as repressed; i.e., leaving them behind as “ancient” derelicts for us to find, explore and renovate when interrogating our own trauma as paralleled by old systemic threats: the rise of fascism (and token feminism) as something foreshadowed by Radcliffe’s pre-fascist gloomth heralding 20th/21st century terrors (see: Nick Groom’s introduction to The Italian). Our matriarchal, femme-dom castles (and their pastiches’ remediated praxis per an ongoing and endless argument between workers and the state) can subvert those and critique patriarchal doubles (of doubles, of doubles…), but it must contend with them as part of a series of Borges-style projections into infinity (mirrors and labyrinths). That’s what historical materialism is: a repetition of variable likenesses that grapple in dialectical-material tension. To go against the grain, you have to stand out while blending in:
(artist: Miles Jonston)
It bears repeating that dogma is recursively cryptonymic and criminogenic; Cartesian dogma criminalizes nature, lynching it as fetishized alien chattel to repress genocide with; i.e., the run of the mill as paradoxically shown and hidden. The cryptonym “alien,” then, become whatever the state needs inside its colony’s state of exception. To that, recall how the same shadow zone is where Gothic theatre and poetics work for or against the state, oppositional praxis employing the usual paradoxes thereof; i.e., “total” power to perform with things existing in the same place at the same time, between binaries; e.g., the liminality of power and weakness, chastity and lust, salvation and damnation, light and darkness, Heaven and Hell, life and death[13], nerds and sex, bravery and cowardice, stoics and histrionics, knowledge and ignorance, darkness visible, the monstrous-feminine, the state and workers, cops and criminals, soldiers and slaves, babes and banditti, citizens and aliens, Artemis and Aphrodite, childbirth and death, mothers and Medusa.
It’s completely impossible, then, to reconcile and reclaim matricide through thoroughly liminal creatures like Medusa or the xenomorph—nor the damsels and detectives tied to them (and the complex, warring socio-material conditions that bring them about)—without keeping these various paradoxes (and profound, beauteous contrasts) in mind. Furthermore, just because death can be passionate doesn’t mean humans should be sacrificed automatically to achieve presumed “grace”; more in this case isn’t necessarily better and attempts to find meaning in suffering is certainly different than inviting it. One’s graceful, the other is a disorder compelled by those in power over those they rape in a variety of ways (re: “to disempower someone or somewhere—a person, culture, or place—in order to harm them”).
To this, trauma is an “antiquated” minefield whose exploration takes great work and care, but also persistent vigilance to thread: one, avoiding Cartesian dogma by expressing xenophobia as an honest interrogation of domestic bias (not an endorsement; i.e., being mindful of the people involved as having potentially experienced abuse themselves); and two, touching on xenophilia, ironic demon BDSM, and reverse abjection as taboo enterprises during ludo-Gothic BDSM, thus subject to reactionary reprisals arguing for violent repression: “Put away the torch from Alien (the British word for ‘flashlight,’ which the “improvised incinerator units” primarily function as) and pick up the gun in Aliens. ‘This time, it’s war!'”
Except Cartesian thought weaponizes women against nature (and the monstrous-feminine) while still treating them “of it”: “Rip and tear until it is done!” But it’s never done; matricide is a fool’s errand, an impossible task on par with killing death and one that never ends by design as required by capitalists—i.e., to move money through nature by having Ripley (or echoes of her) further subjugated, hence regressive Amazonomachia in their name. They want marginalized conflict, which is both profitable and useful (for them, mind you; everyone else suffers at their expense). So Ripley is always afraid under Patriarchal Capitalism, thus Realism; rape is always a threat, and Medusa always a victim[14] whose existence—per the process of abjection—is terminally mythologized: her touch poison, her serpentine gaze pure, instant “death.”
Amazonomachia, Cryptomimesis and Mise-en-Abyme
Thusly armed, Ripley becomes afraid to hug Medusa, thus nature, as divided from her. Per the Amazonomachia as a theatrical, staged ordeal, she and those like her become foils to a classic argument; i.e., one where Ripley does stochastic terrorism for the state (through fatal compromise, arguably protecting the company by scuttling the xenomorph for them). She looks at Stompy and sees death, an alien/dark reflection to ward off through violence (which fractures the glass when struck). As such, she becomes “unsexed” like Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth; i.e., a phallic woman, except Ripley’s case involves multiples of them, the so-called “good” Amazon dick-measuring against an evil double GNC BBC. Threatened, Ripley fights ignominiously for the ghost of her dead child, who she projects onto Newt while cannibalizing the Alien Queen’s brood for one of “hers” having falsely “killed[15]” Amanda: “…Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, / And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty!” Ripley suitably binarizes, defending the nuclear family model as the false original under attack by the Indigenous group (and their non-nuclear approach to social life) coded as outsiders, as alien, as inhuman bugs “from the stars,” Hell, beyond, the black lagoon. Instead of trying to love them, thus hug Medusa, “difference” becomes a death sentence: “Nature is other” as carried out by a token female war boss who the company displaces after she cleans house for them (re: the euthanasia effect).
Emboldened to “strike back,” Ripley picks up a state-issued repeater (some kind of rifle to treat enemy populations[16] as target practice) to dutifully enter Hell again (though she never entered the Derelict in the first movie, making her testimony to the board in Aliens hearsay); i.e., a token Persephone monomythically shooting at “Medusa” with relentless military optimism: a predatory cop with death in her eyes, and whose lack of empathy is second-nature, taught by deceitful mirrors. “Maybe if we kill enough of them, we’ll ‘win’ the war!” her actions seem to say. “Maybe then, ‘Medusa’ [code for the empire’s built-in disparities and collapses, translated into monstrous theatre] will disappear for good!” She’s a crack shot, better than the boys—Annie Oakley playing the Amazon. She’s also a dumbass, a vengeful herbo with hell to pay through a death wish. As a matter of childbirth (the classic site of war for women of Antiquity as a Western civilized venture; i.e., where canonical history starts and stops, the great thing for fascists to return to), Ripley’s war story is harmfully antiquated, in that it endlessly and concentrically leads to women’s enslavement, to genocide, to tokenism taking up fetishized, witch cop arms against those trying to live in peace: other witches.
You might have noticed a worrisome and disturbing likenesses of Ripley in adjacent media forms; re: Samus in the videogame, Metroid. This is because settler colonialism is built to spread its dogma across all the media it can, escalating towards extermination from an initial position of ostensibly “being wronged.” Be it a novel, movie or videogame, the exterminator then goes into Hell, monomyth-style, to right said wrong and defend Capitalism from the “end of the world” at the “end of the world”; i.e., Capitalist Realism; re: “Under Capitalist Realism, Hell is a place that always appears on Earth [or an Earth- like double]—a black fortress threatening state hegemony during the inevitable decay of a colonial body. Its widening state of exception must then be entered by the hero during the liminal hauntology of war as a repeatable, monomythic excursion—a franchise to subdue during military optimism sold as a childhood exercise towards “playing war” in fantastical forms […] Conjure a Radcliffean menace inside the Imperial Core, then meet it with American force…” (source). It’s meant to appear chaste, but make young boys’ “tails” wag like a puppy’s for a modest warrior mommy (and girls’ clits to throb with a similar second wave feminist power trip punching down at useless eaters[17]).
We’ve looked at this quote earlier in this section, but will return to it fully in “Call of the Wild,” part one; i.e., when we take a second look at the franchised videogames that Cameron’s refrain inspired to execute Cartesian rhetoric and uphold Capitalist Realism: Metroid and Metroidvania, but also Doom and the entire shooter genre. For now, just remember that Capitalism is a hyperobject that demands a holistic, inclusive and cryptonymic solution—mirrors and blindfolds being the source of the problem, which must be addressed in kind. We must mirror our problems in ways that sneak in Trojan counter code (drawing our own conclusions).
As such, try to remember nothing is wrong with wanting for heroes under settler-colonial conditions provided it doesn’t poach nature for profit. Doing that serves the state by making children afraid, who then grow up to commit atrocities for the state as instructed by its war simulators’ cartographic refrains: trophy rooms like the one described by Ace Ventura in When Nature Calls (1995) as “a lovely room of death.”
That film portrayed settler colonialism as a backwater relic attached to a cartoonishly evil (thus unserious) British throwback; Aliens did the same through a bad replica of Saigon in outer space showing and hiding Vietnam to further Capitalist Realism as a burgeoning videogame simulation type. Both show that settler colonialism survives well into the present through deliberately antiquated forms whose displacements generally apologize for ongoing genocides; i.e., the ghost of the counterfeit as something to meet with force, thus blame and kill Medusa for her own death by the state as a chilling matter of routine:
Ellen Ripley once said, “I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.” The words of a true madwoman, isn’t that what America has been doing for over seventy years now? Military optimism, as I envisioned it (“The Promethean Quest and James Cameron’s Military Optimism in Metroid,” 2021), is the idea that you can kill your problems, somehow “slaying Medusa.” But you can’t kill Medusa because her life-after-death persona represents things that aren’t people, alone; they’re structures and the genocide they cause seen in the final moments of the damned. Theirs isn’t a question of blind faith towards a self-righteous cause, but conscious conviction towards a cause that is just. […] Like Medusa and her immortal, severed head, Bushnell’s doom isn’t something the elite can ever hope to control because it reverses the function of terror and counterterror normally envisioned and entertained by Western dogma; i.e., vis-à-vis Weber’s monopoly of violence and Joseph Crawford’s invention of terrorism, but also Asprey’s paradox of terror as a proletarian weapon in a postcolonial age informed by past struggles surviving under modern empires (source: “Bushnell’s Requiem”).
So when Hippolyta beheads Medusa, the colonized are policing themselves through someone half-in, half-out of their world: a white woman faced with rape, but whose experiences invert the settler-colonial violence routinely happening around her sheltered bubble. War propaganda routinely disguises and abjects this fact by whitewashing genocide in a canonically essential conflict; i.e., by reducing genocide to “destiny” between two “ancient” perpetual foes: Ripley as the good mother beheading the bad, defending good nature from bad, good children from bad, etc (she doesn’t even kill the Queen, because the xenomorph can live in space).
In other words,
People in the Imperial Core like to think of themselves as just, forgetting what death is while being born into a system that encourages it through the very divisions [Cartesian thought lays out]. They don’t like to be reminded of those shadowy realities, which Medusa’s beheading shows to them beyond the cave-wall puppetry they’re used to. Turned back at them through Athena’s Aegis, and exacted on “one of their own,” they’re forced to see, thus process, the very horrors they spend their entire lives abjecting (ibid.).
To this, Ripley’s brute Americanization is both a matter of national pride[18] and one whose dated regression is the prime witch hunt we’ve been considering here as a multimedia pandemic. We need to scrutinize its retro-future neoconservatism (the return to war and peace through strength) to understand the New World Order as it presently exists; i.e., doing so as critics of the state by using Gothic counterterror to defend ourselves with; e.g., by dressing up as blindfolded monster mothers like the xenomorph. The proletarian function, here, is clemency before attack—to reclaim their value as not being a rapist, uniting arm-in-arm against state forces. This requires hugging Medusa to shield her during asymmetrical warfare; i.e., from a subjugated Hippolyta armed to the teeth—a TERF champion backed by TERF supporters, backed by TERF central command as part of a fascist federation: America as the harbinger thereof when Capitalism, always in crisis, starts to rot. The decay on the xenomorph anisotropically doubles Ripley’s own rotting brain (“the one you feed” fed on menticidal garbage).
Such “human tanks” are generally blind. So pertinent questions like “How reliable is their vision?” or “What privilege are they armed with?” become incredibly germane to Gothic-Communist aims when faced with echoes of Ripley in real life (re: Jadis telling me “They’re just bugs!” regarding Aliens’ self-confessed Vietnam allegory). To that, the examination of perilous worlds and closed space inevitably requires some degree of non-trivial/ergodic effort to overcome and survive; i.e., vis-à-vis Aarseth and me, regarding Metroidvania, through liminal, Gothic circumstances that perform the context of rape, bigotry and systemic fear/control, mid-castle-narrative; re: during ludo-Gothic BDSM considering things to interrogate “within the text” as a poetic extension of the natural-material world we (unlike speedrunners) take outside of itself to critique capital with.
Concepts like “familiar” and “foreign,” then, do not exist in a vacuum, but inform each other back and forth over time. Said extensions include the damsels, detectives and demons inside a Gothic space as produced by the knowledge or lack thereof contained within the author(s), which—as we’ve seen with Radcliffe and her refrain’s spiritual successors—were/are far from perfect in terms of highlighting worker abuse outside of white, cis-het women’s concerns voiced during rape pastiche. Indeed, some might prohibit effective investigations altogether (re: Ripley evolving into an automated killer for the state: the modern woman as savage, projecting her bigotry onto imaginary Indians, space bugs, what-have-you).
To this, the state’s monopoly on damsels, detectives and sex demons is, like all its overreaches, something to challenge through itself. Per Medusa, our reenactments must become increasingly sex-positive through iconoclastic, xenophilic means drafted by queer authors beyond cis queer men like Lewis; i.e., whose various cryptonyms reverse Hogle’s process of cryptonymy—its “double operation of revealing to conceal”—that consequently lays bare settler-colonial bigotry during a revolutionary masquerade designed to hide us: among those we can unmask, Velma-style, as not on our side (re: TERFs and other tokens). This happens by first showing them our masks as a means of reconnaissance and provocation—of class, culture and race war as guerrilla warfare waged with Gothic poetics (counterterror a famous “shadow weapon” of guerillas, vis-à-vis Asprey). Point in fact, we must; i.e., doing so to adequately serve all workers effectively and collectively through a mirror match’s shared canvas (or stage, screen, etc) as mirror-like. With it, we can help others see, if not permanently then at least for a second, what is useful to our survival of them; i.e., by putting something inside their blindfold that stuns them long enough for us to act: to “pants” them and tie their shoelaces together before we make like a tree and get the hell out.
Just as Ripley punches the mirror of her own dark reflection during mirror syndrome, the key to liberation lies in reflecting the right images back at our killers—themselves, acting like an emotionally/Gothically unintelligent dumbass, but posturing as “cultured” against other prisoners abstracted “in small”; i.e., the Amazon’s threat displays kettled[19] by state dogma until they explode, resulting in a never-ending crusade against “Medusa” during DARVO-grade obscurantism/reactive abuse (nature to rape with money expressed in military means). It might seem cute when animals do it (source tweet, pro824824824: September 6th, 2016); the state breeds bullies meant to kill their victims through Amazonomachia as mimetic[20] and inclusively divisive.
Once white-men-on-white-girl violence, then, the message has evolved to white-girl-on-black-girl violence, but also white-girl-on-trans violence (and other marginalized groups) where various token monsters join the fray to uphold normative status-quo structures and heteronormative ideals (the slave falling on the Roman sword):
(artist: Anselm Feuerbach)
Military service and its token normativities are always a betrayal because the state is straight/antithetical to life as we know it; i.e., is a bourgeois power structure whose cops destroy/rape nature for profit (or do so to protect itself from Western powers; e.g., Communist China and Soviet Russia; re: “Leaving the Closet“).
Per my expansion of Castricano’s definition, cryptomimesis is writing (or otherwise engaging with) the dead as expressed through art, demons included. The idea in doing so is to get at the cryptic, generational trauma buried inside Faustian bargains during Promethean Quests; i.e., as something to extract and use as workers demand. Yet “inside” is a bit of a misnomer, insofar as trauma carries across its surfaces, between its spaces, behind its masks, and on its pages, etc. Indeed, we can see the conflict as a visual pattern able to be levied by pro-state or pro-worker artists, authors, actors, etc; e.g., my book and its various collage-style exhibits (all starting with my Bride of Frankenstein collage, exhibit 44b2).
Except, workers must beware the state as a bad actor with a bad temper and army to carry out its petulant will. Like an unruly child breaking its toys, the state infantilizes mid-crisis to attack its perceived subjects; its legacy is one of total indifference and unironic madness, a prolonged and unnecessary suffering predicated on cruel, callous abuse made to serve profit through disingenuous illusions. In response to its crowning achievement of misery towards workers, women and nature/the monstrous-feminine, a mother’s work is never done. It carries on precisely because the future is always threatened by the state’s imaginary past: something that survives and which we must survive while blindfolded; i.e., surrounded by danger as “dressed up” in cryptonymic reenactments that a) elide trauma and b) help pass vital[21] messages of liberation theatrically along.
As per the natural world, the two are actually in competition; i.e., in Gothic stories per the puzzling “antiquity” of Alien, they involve two castles—one of metal and one of dead bones and flesh—that serve as giant, doubled, suspiciously humanoid habitats that mirror a larger transition between the colonial past in faraway lands and its zombie-demon rooster’s homecoming. Information, then, passes through giants, castles, humans, mirrors and monsters, their modules, etc, as poetically indiscrete.
Volume Zero writes, “To interrogate power and trauma, [we] must become second-nature” (source). Just as the Imperial Boomerang comes back around, then, so does the cryptomimetic language being for or against it as something to meet with violence or friendship. For us, the knee-jerk police agent’s chase of imperial scapegoats only leads to inequality and harm. Instead, empathy towards the alien must become second-nature on a collective societal level; i.e., through ludo-Gothic BDSM (from Volume Zero) as gleaned from medieval conflict in small: the mise-en-abyme, or concentric echo of the internal/external medieval.
(source: Bushcraft Buddy’s “How Did People Survive Castle Sieges?” 2017)
We’ve already discussed (and showed) how it’s acceptable to get swept up in and carried away by mise-en-abyme and its castles-in-the-flesh; i.e., as something to literally look at yourself as trapped inside. Like Walpole, Scott’s retro-future is full of dark infantile humor and medieval hauntologies they lose themselves in to find hidden truth. Except different fortresses take on different shapes, and I’ll show you how with an extra bit of academic flourish (nerd time, for the next seven pages. Then we’ll close things out with Giger).
For one, Scott and Giger’s biomechanical makes no qualms about introducing a medical, memento mori flavor into the proceedings. Such composite evocations of the ancient/medieval remain “novel” purely because they raise honest-if-haunted statements about oppositional praxis as violent on and off the page for various sides; i.e., the state colonizing itself and we, as colonized, “storming the castle” as a linguo-material device useful to emancipation. This war of illusions has a long and rich history going back centuries; i.e., back to our boy Horace Walpole and his Gothic shenanigans (castles, of course), which Scott and Giger riff on/rip off in their own 20th century take on the Neo-Gothic castle/chronotope.
Far from being modest or direct, a given chateau evokes Walpole’s campy rape space as paradoxically recent: a puzzling relic of “Antiquity” made from past legends and bandied about as discovery-after-the-fact. That’s largely what the Gothic is—a speaking to present barbarities with “past” ones disinterred—but its assorted reinventions and façades still use the language of war through body language that wages campy assaults into hostile territories; re (from Volume Zero):
The mise-en-abyme [“place in abyss”] is classically portrayed as heraldry—the coat of arms, as per Bakhtin’s “dynastic primacy and hereditary rites” of the Gothic chronotope—emblazoned on the knights’ shields, banners and killing implements belonging to the same “walking castles”: castle-narrative becomes something not just to walk around inside one castle, but between castles, outside of castles, inside the giant knight as a castle-in-a-castle; straight castles and gay castles, etc (source).
Viewed as workers (the monstrous-feminine) vs the state (the Man, Cartesian thought, law and order, the Man Box), the iconoclast must work within said abyss to develop Gothic Communism, thus end setter-colonialism; i.e., by using what we have as reclaimed power from canonical doubles to camp canon with: the nerdy language of rape and war (sex and force) as something to spoof and use to our weird nerds’ holistic advantage versus weird canonical nerds disadvantage!
The Other Side of the Coin: Camping These Things (reprise)
Canon and camp is a tricky process, and one that occurs inside itself. Per Sarkeesian, it’s possible to critique what we enjoy to consume. By extension, I think it’s perfectly valid something to kick ass and merit critique (which Aliens admittedly does); i.e., the thing that’s fun to critique but also consume, mid-critique, like, Egger’s 2022 The Northman, versus the thing that isn’t fun to critique or consume; e.g., Hitler’s 1925 Mein Kampf or something equally dry and terrible. So much race science is dry and terrible, but Aliens strikes the dangerous white-moderate balance of actually being fun to watch, making it more important (and fun) to critique, thus camp! And that’s not hard to do; i.e., you can camp offshoots of the same Numinous, me having camped a variety of gods and monsters through my own horny Samus and Amanda Ripley artwork. No bullshit, just draw an Amazon with a gun doing something sexy and sex-positive, and you’re golden:
(artist: Persephone van der Waard)
In the counterterrorist tradition, you create said advantages using what you got, resulting in bizarre combinations that—per people running around inside giant monsters chased by smaller monsters—feels suitably silly-serious. Per the Shakespearean stage, this means combining what is queer with what is medieval, thus warlike and gory in frankly intimate poetics indicative of a pre-capitalist world (also from Volume Zero):
It’s serious-yet-silly and that’s the point, but the point of the rainbows and glitter is proletarian praxis insofar as we function during oppositional praxis: to make the canonical language of war silly in a very gay way of interrogating pre-existing power and negotiating new variants during liminal expression; i.e., playing with power as a performative scenario to reinvent for various purposes:
“The straight castle was conquered by the fearsome gay warriors and everyone inside was made gay and had super butt sex. —the end!”
The above statement implies that murder, general mayhem and rape are functioning in ironic, playful forms instead of their presumed unironic-thus-literal ones: the rape of the princess, the burying of the gay (and other actual dead bodies—often “innocent, pure good” civilians and “guilty, pure evil” orcs on either side), and sacked castles razed to the ground, heads on spikes, cruel-and-unusual punishment, carceral violence, tilting at windmills, etc:
The townspeople had little hope
They were not ready for war
Fireballs make everybody die
And buildings collapse to the floor
The beautiful princess was raped
And taken to prison with cry
Angus McFife swears a mighty oath
“I will make Zargothrax die!” (source: Gloryhammer’s “The Unicorn Invasion of Dundee,” 2013)
There’s power in the “joke’s” ability to release tension. Except our praxis can’t be “blind” parody like Gloryhammer is (whose proud stupidity is a white, cis-het male privilege) because the marginalized are going to be in danger regardless if they are actively segregated or not (ibid.).
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
Overlap and confusion are inevitable, but also vital to liberation through the cultivation of perfect doms flexibly putting us (and our foes) “to the sword.” Viewed in terms of the castle personified, one could thus view warring castles like those in Alien—not merely as linguistic, ontological strife (doubles) grappling forcefully amid contested, troubled binaries, but something to express in literal kayfabe terms (again, “a form of ancient popular media that helps people historically relieve systemic stress through individualized forms of psychosexual violence”).
To that, the monsters Hippolyta and Medusa act akin to warring kaiju or the Titans of Greek myth; i.e., when the boundary to Hell is crossed on Earth, between the contestants, the stage(s) they share, etc; re: during liminal expression, onstage and off. Either entity use their assorted “arsenals” to do battle not unlike Gojira (1954) or Pacific Rim (2013), the latter two taking leaves from older Amazonomachia before commenting on (and wrestling with) Humanity’s messy and fatal relationship; i.e., to nature, but also technology abusing nature (vis-à-vis Shelley’s Frankenstein)—as something that responds in kind, but remains for the human detective or damsel something to demonically reckon with, prior to state shift: “History shows again and again / How nature points out the folly of men” (Blue Öyster Cult’s “Godzilla,” 1977).
Except our own castles-in-the-flesh are the monstrous-feminine body as a kind of perfect dom challenging the zombie of “Rome” resurrected; i.e., the gentle femme/mommy domme[22] for workers vs a strict state dom; re: the Metroidvania as something to personify and sing about, thus make matriarchal through function: “That lady’s stacked and that’s a fact!” In keeping with our previous adage, “when the Man comes around, show him your Aegis,” we’re speaking to something Bruce Lee might call “the art of fighting without fighting[23]” and which a murderous message disguised in comely-yet-potent packages does our talking for us: the booty as symbolic of the cryptonymic surrendering of power assigned to nature as both female and monstrous feminine extending to all bodies, genders, races, religions, and animals/nature-at-large exploited for profit by the state.
To that, sometimes, a butt is just a butt, but a butt can be beheld and take on new meaning anyways. Some stories resist interpretation on purpose—e.g., Coleridge, which is bad, or Lynch, which is also (sometimes) bad—but we can still camp them; i.e., however we want. However ambiguous The Northman might feel to Atun-Shei films, for examples, he presents breaking the Fourth Wall to quote Marx and spook the Nazis off as kind of silly (“I Didn’t Like The Northman Very Much,” 2024). I heard that and was like, “…Why?” It never stopped Shei from dressing up as a Nazi to then camp them and speak critically about Civil War history (while getting lost in the sauce a bit, sometimes). Why-oh-why not quote Marx by writing his campy echoes all over our own ass cheeks as an antidote to Eggers’ inability to do anything substantial with his own creative talents (similar to Scott and Cameron)?
(artist: Persephone van der Waard)
It likewise signifies a “cheeky” (meaning playfully-to-seriously “insincere,” as Harmony is, previous page and next page) “surrendering” of power that goes both ways per multiple actors working at cross purposes under different scenarios (consent or coercion), but also a single person’s psychomachic hesitation; e.g., by the usual conqueror seduced by nature, but also vis-à-vis Luce Irigary[24] as someone desiring both genuine nurturing and sincere surrender of one’s station(s) of power foisted onto them by state mechanisms; i.e., they are told to kill and destroy through “ancient” mandates, but cannot always bring themselves to “slay the pussy” as indicative of nature’s historically raped womb.
“Rape” camps rape as, so often, a duplicate of a duplicate of a duplicate; re: exploitation and liberation share the same shadow zones but work at cross purposes during liminal expression’s paradox of rape to have the whore’s revenge by reclaiming terror roleplay to liberate ourselves from Capitalist Realism; i.e., ogling “rape” or giving it, mid-voyeurism and -exhibitionism, is completely fine as long as there are quotes (and we fan ourselves, suddenly thirsty for a bit of pussy and/or pounding): “See how she leans her cheek upon her hand. / O, that I were a glove upon that hand / That I might touch that cheek!” (source).
(artist: Owusyr)
As such, power becomes like Medusa—a puzzle, meaning something to perceive and perform in ways that challenge its usual operations through willful paradox: the escape of rape through “rape” in highly theatrical forms abstracting “decapitation.” We’ve mentioned Alien, of course, but this applies equally to our own art as extensions of our bodily rights and labor autonomy regarding what Descartes would call “emergent,” hence abject. “Is that a booty I see before me?” This one claps back, a real power bottom; but like Medusa or any such collective or individual treated like her—e.g., orcs, lizardmen, “mud people”—she won’t bite unless you scare her or bite first (and even then, context matters; i.e., a testament to her own rape as healed and invulnerable through resistance, so keep resisting: the moment you stop is the moment they fleece and destroy you)!
So don’t scare her! Treat her like a person, not a sex object[25] to ultimately collect and unironically mistreat (which Cartesian thought logically pushes towards through its steady arguments for nature-as-monstrous). Fuck her how she likes, then offer her a hug (or whatever aftercare she’s comfortable with, so make sure to ask. She might surprise you). To replace genocide demands holistic understanding regarding unhealthy and healthy boundaries, alike; then, respecting the latter as a means of communication and mutual consent rewriting the former on the same old canvases cryptonymy process—not abjection as second-nature, time and time again! Reversing abjection, then, must become second-nature in its place; i.e., happening through praxial synthesis using ludo-Gothic BSDM’s dualistic double operation.
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
Easier said than done, of course. Settler colonialism relies on fear-and-dogma brain drains wrought through various cartographic, but also imperative refrains (like Radcliffe’s) dispersed far and wide: “You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it!” (so said Sovereign, in Mass Effect—the Reapers a displaced anxiety of settler colonialism at home). Its cruel penchants prescribe division to further states of ignorance the elite can manipulate to move money through nature in perpetuity!
The point of the “antique” puzzle box, then, isn’t what’s said, insofar as aesthetics are shared anisotropically between warring dialectical-material poles, but rather what they’re made to accomplish through use, thus play. Proletarian function serves to accomplish the liberation of nature, Medusa and workers from the state’s awful blindness/curse of death (class dormancy through stochastic terrorism); i.e., by using the human body during ludo-Gothic BDSM as a present appeal to power through damsels, detectives and demons. By speaking truth to its inherent, ongoing complexities in effective-yet-poetic forms, Medusa becomes a death and rape fantasy to playfully evoke whatever is required to pull down harmful barriers, teaching our would-be killers to see us as human and them as not; i.e., as equal to them while relieving stress as something that lives in and around the human body.
In acts of giddy and reckless triage, proponents for the equality of convenience love to plant flags and “win the war” in single, comfortable battles: propaganda victories (e.g., Ripley nuking Hadley’s Hope from orbit). Except, the individual elements of total solidarity don’t matter provided they’re total and made to holistically invoke radical change sooner rather than later. It’s a group effort and context matters, insofar as two actions—or symbols of those actions—can appear identical, but function for or against the state behind the immediate image and/or sound (and other senses). True liberation hinges on global contributions from all walks[26] through united subtext and steady follow-through; i.e., those whose cryptonymy (and other Gothic devices) collectively make the elite (and their proponents) decidedly uncomfortable when facing death as a settler-colonial result; e.g., furries (next page) as pervert, mega-faggot stewards of nature but also representatives of it haunting the colonizer, Banquo-style (a nymph of Dunsinane, left)!
(artist: Adam Cyrus)
From the Horse’s Mouth: Furries and Giger’s Puzzle of “Antiquity”
In essence, we’re forcing them to “hug death” through nature as monstrous-feminine—undead, demonic and animalistic as the xenomorph and Medusa are. Nebulously. As TERFs and their dogma demonstrate, doing so happens through the topos of the power of women reclaimed by a modern GNC movement in ways that second wave feminism will call “enslavement” in bad faith. Fuck them. If confidently showing our powerful “Aegis” (and her “fangs”) over the Internet (a buffer) causes the would-be colonizer to have a change of heart and consequently start treating us as human wherever we are, then honestly more power to us! But just as empowering is knowing who our friends and enemies are from a relatively safe vantage point. If they lash out, we’ll at least know who we’re dealing with before meeting face-to-face.
(artist: Bluefolf)
It’s worth noting that face-to-face interactions and expressions of sexual confidence are often kept separate; re: the buffer of exhibitionism as something of an iron wall (to borrow ironically from Ze’ev Jabotinsky—though it’s more bulletproof than glass) in defense of workers outing fascists behind masks of our own; i.e., by “flashing” an aspect of themselves to identify as-is in defiance to their colonizers (which we’ll discuss more in Volume Three, Chapter Five in “Transgressive Nudism; or, Flashing Those with Power”). But there is no “perfect” protection of those who identify with nature from those who see nature as alien, thus are conditioned to confront and destroy anything akin to Medusa.
For example, Bluefolf the furry was attacked by virtue of them being different (source tweet: March 6th, 2024). As their testimony shows, there is always some degree of exposure and risk by being out of the closet, even when separated by glass, a screen, space and time.
Furthermore, nude or not, workers communicate with some people up close in ways utilizing personas that often work as literal masks being part of their broader identity—furries.
(artist: Bay)
We’ll talk more about furries, in “Call of the Wild.” Just know, that praxial catharsis is had through confrontation of generational harm during calculated risk, often through animalized signs of dominance and submission that double as (a)sexual signs of theatrical friendship and hostility during class, culture and race warfare; i.e., “mooning” through one’s ass to show as a welcoming act of solidarity and defiance depending on the circumstances (the “flowering” vagina where men/tokens came out of and, in psychological models, will return to die when their power fails them; but also simply belonging to people who don’t even identify as women). Like trauma and stress, then, power is stored all over the body[27] but speaks to where tyrannical men’s “power” generally goes: to their head, above or below (the “crown” a symbol of such gaudy consolidations). “She mighty-mighty!” after all, and trauma and power both live in and around the human body as expressed in the Gothic castle; i.e., as a matter of abjection, chronotopes, cryptonymy and hauntology generally working in concert during praxial synthesis as something to personify through collective solidarity against the state.
“Valor pleases you, Crom! So grant me one request; grant me [the whore] revenge!” In the end, the only things that matter are what we leave behind, for that aim: the statuesque pedagogy of the oppressed and its creative successes, the butts (or otherwise, below) of damsels, detectives and demons; i.e., “what we [make or summon] in life echoes in eternity!” A photo is really no different than a statue—our own “dead poets” speaking forwards helpfully when viewed backwards by future yet-to-die poets: “What are you waiting for, killer? Seize the booty’s monstrous-feminine means of production (and clap my cheeks while you’re at it)!” Anyone who thinks that sex can’t help or hinder rebellion has never tried.
(artist: Maya Mochii)
Where there is trauma, aliens also exist. To it, the Gothic works inside the shadow zone through paradox, using the likes of “Antiquity”—its magics, myths and monsters—to speak to the state’s process of alienation as something to subvert and develop away from Capitalism during camp. To that, the state is not a universal proposition or monopoly thereof. In defense of workers against the state, I am a medievalist, arthouse nerd and freaky girl (“the kind you don’t take home to mother!”)—i.e., someone who loves words and wordy pulp like that of Everquest, Lovecraft and Bungie’s Myth franchise—and this is what I shall be leaving behind: the serial codex of a nerdy intersectional bitch, showing how the delicious language of the past—a diet paradoxically rich and fattening (e.g., “a succulent Chinese meal!”) but healthier because of the ingredients involved—as once used to liberate workers from tyranny. May it do so again, enriching monstrous expression through “ancient, medieval” forms of Radcliffe’s refrain, the demonic trifecta; i.e., ambrosia as something forbidden (unreachable) and guarded but also expressed in Numinous stories, ranging from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Marlowe’s Faustus, Radcliffe’s Italian, and Shelley’s Modern Prometheus into Alien into Metroidvania into my books and beyond (again, a concentric mirror).
As stated, humans are reflexively idiomatic, and anyone who tries to dictate this by trying to divide monsters from the sex and force they represent is doomed to be disappointed by harsh facts; e.g., girls shit, women aren’t always “biologically female” and interracial sex is far more common a sentiment than bigots like to think it is, etc. Whatever forms we encourage, we choose to invoke because of the speculative richness (re: Norton); i.e., to resist Sandy Norton’s
1994 “Imperialism of Theory” extending into what I’ll call “the Imperialism of Gothic Poetics and Sex Work.” There’s tremendous power in sex and force via monstrous-feminine expression; so de-colonize that by showcasing that monopolies are impossible—re: by outing bigoted weirdos through their own self-reporting moral outrage at seeing Medusa walking out and about, at the grocery store. Do it, and expose anything that becomes “holy” to the point that it tokenizes; e.g., write “Obama was a war criminal” on your ass cheeks, then get “back-shotted” by a 6’4″ trans woman while Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (1971) blares in the background. Outta sight!
Of course, this flourish probably seemed overly poetic and confounding for its own sake of skinning a cat multiple ways (to those who might whine as such, I direct you to please lick my hairy taint). Fret not; it serves to illustrate a historical-material fact: inherited confusion and negotiation with said confusion (“When in Rome…”). Confusing poetics aren’t impotent because workers and the state survive in conflict according to how they normally talk: through monsters, sex and unequal power exchange as poetic, borrowing from the imaginary past as a murky sphere of tremendous influence (and fun). To that, workers must poetically outlast and outwit the state’s idea of them as “structurally perfect” for purposes of settler-colonial exploitation coming from a combination of the street and the art studio (with bits of academia thrown in, to give things thesis)
This brings us back around to Giger, whose role in things I want close out the section named after him with; i.e., his ghostly obscene art surviving the man himself:
For one, this is Giger’s creature itself as evoking older things, still; re: “Antiquity.” The xenomorph is, on some level, absurd—a creature of vast darkness, former interconnectivity and total chaos; i.e., dynamic and alive yet slowly walking around like one of Walpole’s portraits or suits of armor might: not static and frozen, but impossibly “alive” and vast, productive, everywhere, a smaller castle inside a bigger castle primed to explode (denoting the home as a dying organism we’re trapped inside). Haunting the tableau (a remake of Strawberry Hill, with more industrial grime), it’s perfectly still yet in motion, coiled like a spring and hunting like a shark out for blood. But it just wants hugs, a past alien severed from the present world. To meet it halfway is to collide with the whole out-of-step, out-of-time; i.e., what Blake would call a “marriage of Heaven and Hell” as illustrated by the trippy expanding of the mind through profoundly dangerous reflections: the acid-Communist consumption of forbidden substances (ambrosia) that juxtapose awesome contrast, which many poets (and their ostensible drug use) have repeatedly reached for and performed in their work; re: those mentioned in our previous footnote, but also many more; e.g., Goethe’s Egmont (1788): “Himmelhoch jauchzend, zu(m) Tode betrübt” (source).
Again, it’s a classic Gothic puzzle borrowed from pre-capitalist/medieval thought reimagined in a serialized poetic trend that Giger was adding to with panache; i.e., looking backwards and proceeding forwards through a malleable, writeable Wisdom of the Ancients that takes everything into itself and makes something powerful (and honest) that cannot be dominated by state forces. That’s what the creature is/the castles are—spectral, deathly evocations of a world before Capitalism, thus possibly one after it; i.e., death-as-radical-change. We can reunite, thus use something so awesome (and forgotten) to help liberate our minds from Capitalism and its barriers towards a post-scarcity world; but, again, it will be a shock—medieval, foreign, alien, abject.
Just as a patient is like a corpse under the surgeon’s knife, the idea of the home and the human share this unsettling distinction. We must occupy it as a particular kind of surgeon and corpse: a love doctor whose wild surgeries—similar to Giger’s drug-fueled, psychosexual art—play passionately in a field where “death,” “rape” and echoes of their unironic forms haunt the theatrical landscape.
For the likes of Giger, Shelley or Lewis, then, the wasteland is an “artificial wilderness”; i.e., one replete with a bevy of influential markers: displaced religious artifacts and miracles, classic poetic devices (oxymorons, paradoxes, and metaphors; e.g., gloomth, “sad cum,” etc), wild sex (and rape) fantasies and porn clichés (naughty nuns, librarians, nurses) or action tropes (wagon chases, white weddings, duels at dawn), the same tired conventions[28] and fetishes speaking to anxieties, calls for heroism and desires for assimilation (abusive, sex or action-grade jailor/warrior nuns), axioms (“love is blind”), temptation narratives, sexual tensions and courtly love, Numinous evocations, revolting artifacts, country wisdom, superstition (old wives’ tales), sobering funerary transitional realities (“getting one’s affairs in order”), etc.
In turn, all are revived in Giger’s dystopic (admittedly art-house), Gothic-surrealist “lover boy” and other such revivals coming from what is, at the end of the day, a fairly medieval (and diverse) practice respected by poets, artists, theatre nerds, songwriters, film directors, burlesque dancers, staged wrestlers, videogame developers, and other assorted creatives, out of the past and well into the present (and frankly far too many to list). The Gothic, as a mode, is populous and rad!
Viewed in the present by those unaccustomed, it’s bound to upset, overwhelm, shock and disgust. This includes things that, when examined more nakedly, seem to have no cause for it, but historically-materially lead to systemic brutal violence; e.g., incels shitting their pants and frothing at the mouth regarding female, queer and or furry autonomy. Such a shuttered existence is cloistered on both ends, then packaged and sold in harmful forms. But these authors don’t hold a monopoly over such poetics. Those with “pull,” then, can speak to the same theatrics in sex-positive, “homebrew” ways; i.e., divorced from the profit motive and its harmful formulas to say something that thinks outside, thus beyond, capital using Giger’s xenomorph to be reflexively idiomatic in highly iconoclastic, Gothic-Communist ways.
For one, transformation, insects, buried guilt, queerness and death are core themes of the Gothic and the xenomorph encapsulates all of them; i.e., the becoming of something new tied to the imaginary past where things like rape, magic and systemic abuse are openly commonplace during calculated risk, but for which queer-positive language is always lagging behind in mainstream Western media (e.g., the moth, above: Silence of the Lambs, 1991).
Though initially puzzling and out-of-joint, Giger’s eternal, hellish and trauma-infused brainchild is prolific precisely because its revelation invaded and spread through what, point in fact, was already present and coming back around, like Marx’ spectres, to haunt us to no end: “Antiquity” as something to tap into and speak of in quintessential Gothic means that articulate messy difficult topics in profound shorthand; i.e., the abject, Numinous, unheimlich, terror and horror, etc, as established schools of expression, thought, and theatre that took quite a bit of time, energy and engagement to develop into themselves (from Plato’s cave to Radcliffe’s Black Veil and Baudrillard’s hyperreality, etc).
As such, Giger’s “Antiquity” is not unlike Medusa’s anti-rape narrative, revived in Shelley’s Modern Prometheus, except it speaks to something that also took time to become anti-rape in ways we currently take for granted; re: Elizabeth Hadley’s 2024 “More than a Monster: Medusa Misunderstood” speaking to a creature that—while essentially damned at birth—was what future authors like Shelley and Giger used to give the oppressed another famous voice (for the whore’s revenge) while commenting on deep-rooted patriarchal and eventually Cartesian paradoxes!
Part of this owes itself to death as a concept. Death changes people as something to face, thus enter and embody. Meanwhile, the xenomorph wears the aesthetic of death, but actually travels, communicates and reproduces like a virus; i.e., through psychosexual trauma as “built up.” As always, the central idea in doing so remains emotional manipulation of the middle class; the question is, what does this manipulation serve? Communism wants to use it to leverage public sentiment in a pro-worker direction that respects nature: for the rights of all (not just token sycophants and false friends) to humanize “Medusa” as a collective entity under attack; i.e., human culture and the profound ability to create having learning from the past being a mighty weapon—fire from the gods, per Shelley—to defeat Capitalism with. We must, for it is (and has been, for some time now) growing like a tumor in the present to devour everything in its wake, for all time. If nothing is done now to stop it, the future for Humanity is well-and-truly dead, and Medusa—beheaded, furious and agape—with have the last laugh during state shift!
Imperiled by the state, Medusa in small—whether a person or a nation—must unite against state dictates (with queer people able to bond more easily thanks to the Internet, and by extension all misfits). Regardless of the register or the oddities involved, Medusa is someone or something who can bite to cause harm but won’t if you befriend them, first (a trust-building exercise for those once bitten, twice shy). They may return the favor, using their body and mind’s various means to help keep you alive—sex, of course, but also blood, sweat and tears, etc—by maintaining a healthy bond with nature; but you must stand with them against the state (whose ceremonial liberal tears shed to mask a bloodthirst and apathy to make fascists blush). It is our Song of Infinity to take up, then, because the state and workers (thus nature) are always at odds!
As such, workers help each other as animal, as alien, in whatever form is required (the xenomorph able to adopt any shape). There is no shame[29] in parenting (to mother or father) in ways that have us working as stewards to Nature, and we sing to our needs (and hers) from moment to aching moment; i.e., as the struggle goes on, donating to it as much as we can give as negotiated by all parties, mid-duress. All go towards a community we find and make for ourselves as exiled people disillusioned from nation-state origin myths (re: Zionism); i.e., by the state-as-walled-off from the natural world through a nuclear family unit that dates back to Ancient Rome. Whereas “Rome” shames anything outside of its own divisions, my partner Bay represents a neat antithesis alongside the xenomorph as a kind of Satanic, hauntological totem animal (next page, exhibit 47a3): stability amid polyamory in ways my past partners did not, while challenging Capitalism as inherently unstable while pushing inexorably towards epidemics, climate change, and ultimately state shift.
Sharing is caring and doing so with Bay—a self-identified therian who identifies with natural species (again, next page)—makes me feel good; i.e., like I’m making a difference regarding someone I care very much about. We met through feral sex, communicating like animals and Gothicists to cruise and flash our loins and minds, then breed something special (and unique) together as a series of saucy creations: a veritable raising of flags, a bottomless cumdump whose pool we both gathered at to drink from and contribute to (taking from Giger what was useful and leaving the rest)! Delicious!
The xenomorph, then, is the Numinous/ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., an avatar that speaks, as the Gothic does, to a multicultural and multigenerational force viewed classically through a white lens on the Aegis as “dark”; e.g., the settler-colonial rape of nature by white female colonists who, staring down their ancestor’s past atrocities, pearl-clutch with extreme prejudice during inheritance anxiety being reminded to them: “your empire is built on ceaseless predation.” It’s very medieval, wholesome and freeing because to look on it is to see the whole of the universe in an instant (re: Blake)—the perfection of a dark god closer to life and death as one, and doing as all demons do: giving us more than we bargained for to, suitably enough, set us free from state edicts (faced with that, Victor promptly crapped his pants and wanted to go back inside Plato’s cave; i.e., to betray his own liberation; e.g., like Cipher from The Matrix, insisting “ignorance is bliss”)!
(exhibit 47a3: Top-middle, source: Wikimedia; bottom-middle, source: Marta Rusek’s “7 Dragons We Love to Watch Year-Round,” 2016; artist, everything else: Bay. Dogs, like dragons, are defined by their multiple performances and audience interacting back and forth; e.g., the dragon Smaug[30]. A dog is a symbol of fidelity and, combined with the Chinese dragon, of good health and luck [a black dog is a Celtic symbol of death]. Yet, a dog that is beaten and abused will become unpredictable and violent. “I know what an angry dog will do but never a scared one,” Bay tells me.
In turn, this applies to those living with trauma and identifying with nature as being “inside-out,” wearing it on their sleeves. This is generally a consequence of trauma, but can become a conscious identity to communicate with others who share our cause. It’s also a message of a better world, one felt through bodily autonomy and psychomachic accuracy during ludo-Gothic BDSM as conveyed through one’s own body [and labor] as the exhibit; i.e., informed by never-living examples like Giger’s biomechanical xenomorph that, nevertheless, spring to life and give us fresh power during our own pedagogies powered by the restless dead..
Fueled as such, Bay isn’t my “Great Destroyer” at all, but my luck dragon—pure dog and loving and sweet, but when cornered and threatened by state dickwads, their body and tongue will—suddenly like the xenomorph’s spear-like tail and mouth-inside-a-mouth—expertly and instinctually transform into weapons: a Māori golem’s beautifully dark kiss of death controlling the situation, and whose function is dual insofar as it wags to its friends and strikes its enemies stone dead. “Brain stab! But not before we hypnotize you! Smooch, smooch, smooch [what my mother used to call ‘the kissy mommy monster’ as she blew us kids kisses and chased us, squealing with delight, around the house]!”
As you can imagine, this oxymoron is both useful during legitimate self-defense from actual abusers—a prey animal shifting between displays of fight, flight, freeze, flop or fawn—but also a potent and delightful, psychosexual means of play and performance; i.e., between cuties that help the two of us heal together while interrogating generational trauma [thus relieving stress] as lovers, friends, and companions, using our natural “toys” [or sex toys mirroring them] as serving a dual cryptonymic type: classic BDSM symbols of power and resistance black and white halves seeking to reunite, Skeksis-and-Mystic-style.
As de facto educators, though, we also can decide what to exhibit as a means of good sex education through Gothic poetics, during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., what is safe and what isn’t through dialectical-material context, including what we like inserted into us and what objects of insertion we have to work with. The bashful and prudish might see our display as compromising and uncouth, except it isn’t insofar as we choose to reclaim the object of a hateful act by seeing it as liberating for us; re: “Art is love made public” and the xenomorph is basically Whitey’s idea of a pissed-off “lawn [space] jockey” come home to roost. But love is also a battlefield littered with Gothic potential that lives within us as shared with the external world: the horny horror story a song of our people to pass on for its Numinous effect!)
Regarding blindfolded love during the cryptonymy process, the xenomorph is blindly furious and erotic, but also speaks to an ongoing and confabulating amalgam: of statuesque, repressed bigotries (re: Radcliffe) frankly exposed inside recursive Gothic reinventions hauntologically celebrating genderqueer xenomorphic expression; re: the mysterious mother as monstrous-feminine, bound and gagged, yearning to be free, brandishing her obscene, penetrating tail and long phallic tongue as suffused with trauma, but also tough-love infusions of exquisite “torture” and gender trouble’s appreciative peril defying total control/obedience from colonizing forces: “Look upon your work and despair!” Thus are the wages of sin commodified and policed by the state!
By comparison, the power to hurt but not harm is BDSM (demon or otherwise) at its finest; i.e., the respecting of the sub by the dom, but also respecting the dom and sub in oneself and in others. Just as the mind, body and their historical-material markers are not discrete from each other or pure imagination, they rely on context to determine their half-real sex positivity or lack thereof in rape/”rape” as something to wrestle with and out of people during popularized dialogs; e.g., heavy metal revivals: prone to reanimate and decay!
(source: Bandcamp, 2024)
In short, it’s the usual Gothic tradition carrying Medusa into the future to liberate the oppressed as doubled by unironic state proponents; i.e., illustrating mutual consent through reclaimed devices like the xenomorph that once were (and still are) used to enslave them: “I’m in ‘danger’ and I like it.” Call it junk or pulp fiction, because that’s basically what it is; but its wicked semantic wreckage also is what people eat and enjoy as not automatically being tied to capital and profit. Instead, wicked communion with the Dark Mother (and her assorted Numinous spaces and personas) becomes an effective, time-tested means of containing and passing vital messages along. In short, we can reclaim our trash, too, and reanimate it to serve our needs when society becomes sick—junk food for the brain, microwaved chicken soup for the soul that isn’t some franchised corporate logo doubling as a cryptonym for widespread genocide and complete environmental destruction (e.g., McDonalds). Alien—like the monster that bears its name and lives in its titular, body-of-a-giant castle, is less concerned with quaint, cheap morality and more with exposing tough secrets through freezing as death-like and delicious: the sarcophagus (“eater of flesh”) and its hot allostatic load, palimpsestuously revived in chase of the Communist Numinous!
As we previously established, some Gothic outings fail to stick the landing. Alien does not; greater than the sum of its parts, its diffuse, abject commentary on monsters and motherhood, dreams and lullabies, strikes an excellent-if-nasty balance between the Ancient Romance and the ordinary novel, the real and the imagined, to highlight and isolate the mother as a historical familial-heroic unit complicated by generation trauma, mid-rememory; i.e., one that—as flesh (Ripley), circuitry (M.U.T.H.U.R. and her disembodied, sedating voice echoing the female radio workers of older American wars), and predatory combinations of those things (the xenomorph, but also Ripley preying on the Queen’s “bastard, illegitimate” children[31])—travels through the public imagination: to the living from the dead and back again. You not only can’t kill Medusa, but she never shuts up!
Such things speak cybernetically through trauma as undead, demonic, and chimeric/animalistic—all flowing across and through a series of texts all thinking about (monster) mothers; i.e., in ways that offer up/comment on Gothic poiesis (and taboo subjects like infanticide) across space and time: Freud’s 1922 “Medusa’s Head,” Otto Rank’s 1924 The Trauma of Birth, Scott’s 1979 Alien, Nintendo’s 1986 Metroid, Barbara Creed’s 1993 The Monstrous-Feminine, my 2021 “War Vaginas” and ultimately this book series, from 2023 onwards.
For all its violent posturing in heteronormative canon, then, the xenomorph’s fabrication and mystery of “found Antiquity” by Giger shares in this same scholarly lineage; i.e., its endless natural-material cycle of death and rebirth, embodying death-as-queer being something to face and puzzle over by others, but also proudly own, worship, and celebrate to reverse abjection by us from Radcliffe’s refrain as camped accordingly: as damsels, detectives and sex demons, inspiring them to do the same! “I have the weirdest boner right now!” speaks to “BDSM as ‘other’—but in space” (“some horrible dream about smothering[32]“): inviting rebellion by playing with rape in ways that evoke seriously awful things, then—as Shelley did over two centuries ago, and which Giger happily continues—lets us choose to make friends with the Creature… unless it’s the actual fash bad actor aping our own “alien mil spec fetish gear” pastiche (“trust but verify”)! Punch Nazis, kids!
As something GNC workers inherited, the xenomorph is our organism to decolonize since the 1970s; i.e., “perfect” for us because it’s not restricted to, or invested in, Freud and his dated, wacky psychosexual models seeing “chaos as female” (on par with Francis Bacon calling for the penetration of Nature’s womb a “worthy” goal of science). Because of this, the creature’s dereliction of “Antiquity” remains entirely unafraid to fuck with the likes of Freud or anyone else; i.e., doing so in order to better speak to the needs of queer people and their allies by camping Freud’s coke-addled ghost a bit more than Kristeva did (from Volume One);
Creed’s characterization of Medusa is post-Freudian to some extent. Again, Creed stresses the weapon-like power of the Aegis as a means of paralyzing men, but leaves much room for improvement (re: my thesis quote, exhibit 23a) insofar as Marxist, intersectional solidarity is concerned; i.e., seeking to explore cis women beyond their universal portrayal as victims in Western canon (source).
i.e., to win critical power through Gothic thrills that seem “empty” apart from scaring the fearful-fascinated (and hopelessly straight) middle class, but also give us Gothic-Communist revolutionaries a voice in the bargain: one to sue for peace but also, as we shall see, rebel against the state with. “You can’t challenge norms without angering folks,” says Beat. “Just gotta make sure the right people are getting angry”; i.e., the oppressed baring their fangs; re: “Thou called’est me a dog before thou had a cause / But since I am a dog, beware my fangs!” Medusa isn’t a little bitch; she’ll tear your face off and eat it for breakfast!
Sometimes threats displays are necessary to get your point across, Medusa using them to defend herself as the Gothic’s mysterious mother. In turn, rebellion (and cryptonymy as part of that) are required when society becomes sick (which it does when Capitalism routinely decays).
Then again, we’ve already discussed the concept of the home as sick per the unheimlich (another Freudian staple). Except in medieval thought, the house is also a metaphor of the mind and body as indiscrete—its rooms, halls, doors and windows—but also passed down as such, mise-en-abyme. Like a castle “in small,” it passes from one person to the next, each story’s castle-narrative piloted by a different hero blazing the same-old dualistic trail; i.e., the castle as a traveling “liminal hauntology of war” serving as data storage whose corruption, the ghost of the counterfeit, is something to bond with, not reject; re: by hugging Medusa as the data, a walking fetish golem speaking in Numinously demonic runes. It’s giving away state secrets and guarding colonized lands from colonizers (the gargoyle a classic guardian, similar to the Golem of Prague; i.e., the guardian of a dark church/forgotten city forbidden to trespassers… and leaving a trap less disguised as an S.O.S., and more the Indigenous luring the colonizer to their doom across the chronotope’s space and time; e.g., from the mining exhibition stumbling upon the old ones/shoggoth to the space truckers seeking out the Space Jockey and the xenomorphic cargo it hauled, once-upon-a-time; re: fire of the gods)!
In doing so, its ensuing and yawning entropy represents the hero’s mind and body while inside-outside the monster (the invasion of the Nostromo by the xenomorph turning the ship into the Derelict from earlier in the movie); i.e., the damsels and detectives confronting repressed external elements as, themselves, “ancient” and derelict demons: a disease also contracted through accident of birth, insofar as the thing that appears human (the resident and residence), but conveys occupation by something that isn’t what it should be and seems to say it; e.g., Howard the Duck slowly sitting up and saying to his petrified comrades, “I am not Howard anymore!”
In Gothic stories, this madness isn’t so much a purely psychological condition, but more a theatrical, dialectical-material one that accommodates a variety of sides to the human condition as ever unfolding across and into itself again; i.e., during the xenomorph’s biomechanical liminality as turning into a ghost version of itself across new encounters: the ghost castle, ghost ship, and ghost people. Their combination conveys itself in popular socio-material forms leaning into the sex demon’s reflexive exchange of said spirits; e.g., clothes, music, and various other dramatic devices (often romances but also comedies; re: Howard the Duck, 1986) that appear as regular social-sexual events; i.e., demons, the undead and animals as housed, for which a composite monster like the xenomorph makes up all three; re: the labyrinth, from Radcliffe onwards, as a classic cryptonymic storage site for such abominable otherings that speak worryingly to us about ourselves stamped with old repressed traumas that haunt the land—a process of endless re-exploration that never ends!
Per ergodic motion/castle-narrative as exemplified by novels, movies and videogames conducting the same basic safari—re: At the Mountains of Madness, Alien, and Metroidvania—the idea isn’t to escape the labyrinth at all, but to find radically transformative truths hidden inside the home as occupied by strange defenders; i.e., the xenomorph as concentric, sedimentary and parthenogenic per larger dialectical-material arguments about consent (with sex [and its universal alienation/fetishization] being a driving force—to liberate or enslave, mid-fetish). In written cultures, arguments are defined by what they leave behind as an extension of spoken words and lived realities. This happens like the human brain does, jumping around in segments using waypoints that avoid unicursal paths.
Like a mind in small, then, such places (and their doubles) relay complicated information, insofar as conflict is always part of the equation. They evoke the synapses firing in a masterful, inspired mind, yet is not paradoxically something for which we are always in control/without brain damage; i.e., chasing down private horrors, whose “secret sins” Walpole’s Mysterious Mother described as “[an] untold tale, that art cannot extract, nor penance cleanse.” But it can lead to fresh, astounding conclusions per cycle; i.e., whose powerful feelings joust back and forth[33] in acts of rememory concerning what is forgotten but can return as alien.
To it, each time is different, or can be, depending entirely on the visionaries involved and their states of mind when the thing is breathed once more into existence: Giger’s creature looks different each and every time, as do the damsels and detectives finding its “ancient” derelict and trembling before the horse’s mouth (a nightmare): “I saw a furry and swooned because I’m white and basic!”
(artist: Henry Fuseli)
Through conflict on the surface and within thresholds, the hero—be they damsels or walking suits of armor threatening to ravish them[34] during medieval evocations of courtly love—embodies the potential to serve the will of workers or the state. They aren’t something to get attached to, but change (shapeshift, like a demon) as required during class, culture and race war!
In short, we have to learn to evolve like the xenomorph does, which means admiring the very things that Ripley—a middle-class white woman with a relatively cushy job (within a neoliberal hauntology warning against what she would do to protect said job)—chose to abject and immediately attack; i.e., as an unironic TERF symbol acting as “a [state] survivor unclouded by conscience, remorse and delusions of morality” while attacking us “degenerates” as the dehumanized targets for her ancient warrior’s detective doggedness and wrath: the Karen who burned down her house—the labor camp built on the bones of dead lands—because she saw a demon, threw her lantern at it, and then tried to save her (admittedly awesome) cat (decisions, decisions…). Gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss (the company treating her like the madwoman in the attic, because she blew up their ship and said “the Devil made me do it”)!
To survive weird canonical nerds, we must learn from the same past according to the transfer of these historical-material markers; i.e., as carried forward into future duplicates aping the past imperfectly to capture its praxial realities. As Scott shows us, this echopraxis’ cryptomimesis needn’t be exact; indeed, it can critique itself—i.e., through self-sacrifice of a perceived invincible or righteous character (re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Choosing the Slain, or Victimizing the Invincible Heroine, in Alien: Covenant“). We can use this to our advantage provided we know what to look for and what to change to say something about our world in our own defense (as monsters like the xenomorph). Heroines are people, but they’re also icons, thus manifest the potential for unironic calls to violence in canonical Gothic stories and interpretations; re: during witch hunts.
Seeing David get the better of the white women in that story—while making a zombie-demon dog who won’t heel—isn’t “all bad”; i.e., insofar as it represents some admittedly complicated developments regarding poetic worker liberations that challenge Capitalist Realism through Gothic Romance; re: from the Superstructure to the Base and vice versa, art informs, shapes and imitates life and death less as separate and more as fetishized and alien when reunited with as the Gothic does: “Gee, look what ‘I’ found—dibs!” (the disaster at Hadley’s Hope also starting with a colony family finding a Promethean space and trying to loot it for a finder’s fee, but also being sent out there on company orders through a chain of command going all the way back to Earth; i.e., which Cameron scapegoats a Wall Street yuppy with instead of Capitalism).
Our poetic transplants and their Black Veils must bear a similar influence through what we leave behind, albeit like Giger did; i.e., as having a postcolonial (and posthuman) potential that pushes towards post-scarcity in pre-capitalist “ancient” Romances. As a community we might not connect the dots this time, but those in the future might if given the same opportunity and lineage; i.e., as something to prepare for over centuries, from Walpole, to Lewis, to Scott, to me, to the next in line and the next…
We’ll get to David and Daniels, in part two. In part one, we’ll keep examining damsels and detectives of the Radcliffean sort (as closer in spirit to her “explained supernatural” trope), then segue back into those potentially magical demons they frequently have in their sights beyond Radcliffe’s stories (either looking at them with a magnifying glass to scrutinize and “catch,” or a rifle to fire bullets from into the monster). Weird attracts weird, and not all rebels or auteurs are polite or entirely sane, let it be said (I’m one for two there, I like to think). But it’s precisely the strange temples[35] they build to old forgotten gods, one whose giant bodies we currently turn to and wander around inside; i.e., following the ruinous, shadowy echo (and its funerary narrative of the crypt’s wicked and delightful curse of dark heavy knowledge) to our own tremendous conclusions. All are writ among the same stars.
“Like Communism,” I write, “a Gothic castle is always incomplete, in continuum, but seems to suggest its full potential as a powerful, unmappable suggestion each and every visit” (re: “A Song Written in Decay“). Yet, this is hardly cause for concern; i.e., as Walpole or Giger’s puzzles of “Antiquity” show us, that which is not dead (Communism) lives on—inside us but also eventually what exits and survives us after we die: beautiful graveyards to dance nightmarishly inside, their surreal, horny occupants waiting as if to ask, “Won’t you join us? The night is still young!”
(source: Aja Romano’s “Alien Creator and Surrealist Painter H.R. Giger Dies,” 2014)
Onwards to “Non-Magical Damsels and Detectives (feat. Out of Sight, Nina Hartley, Velma, and Zeuhl)“!
Footnotes
[1] The monster is so famous, I almost opted for it needing no introduction. But in the interest of totality and holistic appreciation, let’s cover our bases; re: Ridley Scott’s outer space creature feature showcases Giger’s almost fungal, mushroom-headed* adult monster from the latter’s 1975 Necronomicon series (which Dan O’Bannon introduced to Scott when pitching the monster aspect of the movie). But Giger’s work also came from/build on older forebears; e.g., from Goya’s fourteen “Black Paintings” and anti-war art (“The Disasters of War,” 1810-1820), Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein, De Sade, Radcliffe and Lewis, and further back to Walpole, Marlowe and the Golem of Prague myth, and earlier with Ovid and the Archaic Mother of the Ancient Greeks predating the Hellenistic period. Giger was building on what repeatedly had come before.
*Scott would use this idea of cordyceps/killer mushroom men in Alien: Covenant‘s Neomorphs, combining mushroom men chimerically with goblin sharks (and entering parasitically/rapaciously through the ears/nose with spores; re: forced alien entry and possession, then transformation).
(artist: H. R. Giger)
Furthermore, the monster is chimeric; re: while the adult was designed by Giger as a phallic monstrous-feminine being of revenge (above, made by a white necromancer using acid Communism to prophesy nature’s revenge against the West), O’Bannon and Shusett designed the facehugger/ovomorph and came up with the “rape reproductive” element (also borrowed from parasitoid wasps; re: Persephone van der Waard’s “The Caterpillar and the Wasp,” 2024).
Scott, himself, designed a variety of “Ridleygrams” that included the monster (obviously based on Giger’s prior design): to pimp a black whore against white colonist laborers (space truckers).
(artist: Ridley Scott; source: user xeno_alpha_07’s “Alien Unseen Part One: Ridleygrams” (2016): “During Alien‘s pre-production, Ridley Scott drew up a storyboard presentation of Alien for 20th Century Fox. Impressed with what Ridley had presented they doubled the budget from $4.5 million to $8.5 million. These storyboards are known as ‘Ridleygrams.’ This storyboard presentation contains scenes and FX shots that were later re-written or dropped due to budgetary reasons. Here we are going to take a look at some of these early scenes and concepts Ridley envisioned for Alien at this early stage. [… The above scene shows] even though Lambert was killed earlier in the story, Ridley had drawn another version of her death alongside Parker. Both crew members have resorted to wearing oxygen masks as the air was low due to the decompression previously. Hunting for the Alien, it suddenly steps behind Parker. Picking him up and killing him, Lambert tries to burn the Alien with a flamethrower. The Alien uses Parker’s body as a shield and walks through the flames.”)
You essentially had a “Medusa’s Raft” (of mostly white male) artists, romancing a ghost ship/shipwreck matelotage/necrobiome vis-à-vis the ghost of the counterfeit (settler-colonial abuse) furthering abjection (white workers vs black rape) to make lots of money (which it did):
(source: Strange Shapes’ “Alien Reviews from Yesteryear,” 2016)
[2] Outlined by Angela Carter’s older work, Raymond’s Transsexual Empire, and highlighted by Creed, in 1993, only to be critiqued by me, in 2023, onwards; re: “Cops and Victims, part one: the Riddle of Steel; or, Confronting Past Wrongs” (2024); i.e., a white Final Girl versus black queer rape with a demon BDSM signature (see: “Casting Ripley” photo, above).
[3] Our mysterious mother, Ripley, rapes nature by becoming a defender of heteronormativity from other orderings of maternal power as alien, insectoid. To that, she presents herself as “good” but really is the inhumane monster killing other demons for the state; i.e., by dehumanizing its political enemies as Satanic, fearsome, and criminal, hence doomed: a subjugated Amazon pimping Medusa right before the AIDS epidemic.
[4] “Xeno + morph.” Always some degree familiar—you’ll know this alien when you see it.
[5] “Unconscious.” As an an-Com, I seriously hate that word (after all, we need class consciousness). Informing them of it, it ceases to be unconscious and becomes deliberate. Hot take: It’s an “out,” and poor scholarship at that! Fuck Freud and camp Marx!
[6] Certainly with the height and passion, but not the raw animal sex appeal and smirking camp, that someone Sandahl Bergman lent Valeria in Conan the Barbarian (1981). Amazons come in many forms, but Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley is thoroughly no-nonsense and mostly clothed until the end of the movie. She sees the xenomorph as animal, then triangulates and kills it and its race accordingly. Compared to Weaver’s tall, imposing she-bitch—who protects the small, meek, and white defenseless from black enemies: animals analogs for children who run and hide when threatened, going wherever they feel safest) and actual white children—Bergman’s snarky contributions to the body count notably duck Rob Howard’s tired Orientalism; i.e., by killing evil “snake cult” worshippers who, curiously enough are primarily white and led by a token black man (a vice character played wonderfully by James Earl Jones as having made a career out of doing so; re: Darth Vader).
[7] I.e., to please, regarding the fawning mechanism—often with steady and effusive praise. If the conditions are severe enough, they will encourage, if not the telling of outright falsehoods, then embellishments that seek to accomplish the same basic aim: conflict avoidance. The state, though, will lie to defend itself, to blend in, to infect its host workforce. Inside of it, we must disguise ourselves to avoid being attacked by its defenses; i.e., the pious vigil of nuns who, when push comes to shove, can be motivated to attack the state’s usual victims inside a decaying institution; e.g., the Nostromo as a nunnery company town whose hospital, work site and commons have all been projected into the imaginary past-future of outer space in decay. It’s the death of space-age glitz within a Neo-Gothic Romance dragged forward out of the imaginary past: an S.O.S. written in strange hieroglyphics… which incidentally appear throughout the movie; i.e., as part of the Nostromo’s corporate logos appropriating and imbricating ancient religious symbols (obscurantism) into a medievalized power structure at odds through division: a black castle and white castle speaking to the same settler-colonial project existing between them. Both operate, brick-by-brick, at the frontiers of company territory to where ancient/modern ideas (and functions) of castles overlap: the décor’s Numinous stamp!
[8] Re: Through medieval courtship not allowing “poor frail” women the right to theatrically do battle because rape, as a matter of total humiliation, suddenly becomes “possible” through such violence. But here’s a question to bake their noodles: If men are allowed to rape each other in sexualized forms of performative sparring and revenge, why can’t women get ravished in these stories if they like it (or anyone allowed to submit to their own holocaust*)? The paradox of rape certainly allows for it, but the moral outrage of white (male/token) moderates does not. And where there is outage, there is rape behind the superiority of moderacy as haunted by fascism segregating—among other marginalized groups—women (unless it needs a Dernhelm or two to maintain the white patriarchal ordering of things, above).
*The watching of other groups being “totally butchered” can be sex-positive, provided mutual consent is upheld and conveyed by the theatrical violence being shown. And even then, if you’re watching educational material speaking to historical bigotry or viewing unironic exploitative versions with irony—meaning that you’re trying to learn from them to prevent future abuse; e.g., honoring the memory of trans people by watching Boys Don’t Cry (1999) or African American slaves by watching Twelve Years a Slave (2013)—then doing so must be permitted; i.e., as a matter of perceptive education, not blind consumption: to relate to others through their experience as human by virtue of simply being human, not because of their appearance determining them as more or less valuable (and the performative reality of “black,” green or some other non-white color not being automatically racialized, but haunted by that, obviously complicating things). As always, such questions are determined on a case-by-case basis.
[9] Shielding itself from state women and children (damsels).
[10] E.g., my Hentai Foundry scraps from 2015 to 2021 becoming less and less appropriative and more and more appreciative/indicative of my conscious trans self playing with the same weapons of sex and force to wage active class war in favor of workers and nature, not the elite. Eventually this happened to such a degree that Hentai Foundry shadowbanned/refused to feature my work (from 2024 onwards).
[11] All designed from Cameron—first as “the Skraith” (next page), followed by multiple drafts of the Queen, then Avatar‘s “Thanator” (and African-American actress* voicing an Indigenous “Thundercat” [the Maze Gaze] during Cameron’s Pocahontas “leather stocking story” rehash) demonstrating a remarkable creative talent from Cameron (similar to Scott’s “Ridleygrams”) entirely wasted on universally bourgeois applications; re: he reinvents the problem, then passes himself off as white savior with his racist “white [and token black] Indian” movies and DIY submarine. He’s Victor Frankenstein without irony—is Christopher Columbus the white devil pākehā** building a giant effigial black monolith for his target audience (white/token people) to fear-fascinatedly rape by a white-functioning Athena!
*Tokenizing and impersonating other oppressed groups is not good stewardship!
**A Māori word used to describe non-Māori people, but generally in reference to white New Zealanders; it isn’t a slur any more than “gringo” is or “gaijin,” but white people don’t like to be “othered”—i.e., called “cis-het,” “white,” or otherwise not recognized as being of the in-group in some shape or form.
Like Alien before it and its own hauntology’s “Egyptology” lying in state, Cameron’s remediation is well-documented; i.e., Medusa was Cameron’s queen, too—one whose capture in clay was aided by his own team of white wizards (Stan Winston instead of Giger). So did Cameron collar Medusa just like Scott did, but went on to pointed a gun at her in the process: holocaust by bullet and trial by fire, fetishizing the process and making the Numinous “walk the plank” (a capitalist refrain), ad nauseam. They aren’t criticized for what they make, but celebrated for furthering the process of abjection through the Numinous/ghost of the counterfeit: quest, discover and dominate.
(source: Monster Legacy’s “Aliens, the Alien Queen,” 2015)
[12] A word of warning, Alien‘s symbol for hazard is, in our work, a symbol for Purina “Cat Chow” pointing out how the elite are the aliens alienating us; i.e., locking us in a box, and watching the hungry eat the fattened-up, for breakfast, onstage and off. This speaks to the duality (and black humor) of such things, mid-liminal-expression:
(source: Joe Blogs’ “Ron Cobb’s Semiotic Standards for Alien,” 2012)
In short, we can learn a lot from studying older artists’ derelict mysteries (trade secrets); i.e., not just how to make monsters, but to speak in code/inside jokes that switch/shake things up to our universal liberation, hence benefit. Few films are as universally celebrated for their artist craft as Alien—with Cameron paying his own tribute to not only try and one-up Scott in that department (and fail miserably ’cause he sucks), but also do his own spin on settler colonialism (the American way). We have to do better than both men, but also their legions of fans and imitators, mid-cryptomimesis.
[13] Life and death can mean different things depending on context. For example, “money” literally equals “life” and its absence equals “death.” This is a deliberate paradox forced upon people by capitalists to destabilize them and make them worship American virtues that uphold Capitalism as eternal, thus slip into apathy and disdain for anything else; i.e., Capitalist Realism.
[14] Despite Medusa’s loud refusal to be a victim, as Creed argues, I argue how the state will do its best to reduce her to one anyways—to can(n)on fodder and token biznatch sucking on Freud’s wang (as Creed kind of does: “Oh, Freud, you scuzzy otter, you!”).
[15] Amanda Ripley died while Ellen Ripley was in hypersleep. Ripley seems to blame the monster for her missing out on her kid’s death; i.e., not the evil company despite it forcing her to truck year-round through space and its predatory Faustian contract making her investigate the ruins of a decayed colony/dark chapel. I think Ripley doesn’t blame Weyland-Yutani nearly as much because it’s easier to attack a person than a structure, but it’s still disturbing how quick she becomes their hitwoman in Cameron’s story (and how Scott doesn’t criticize that nearly enough; re: docking).
[16] Which, per settler-colonial exchanges like Vietnam, work through collective punishment; i.e., all civilians are enemies; e.g., all Gazans are Hamas. These conduce genocide on purpose.
[17] Re: through animalized violence against nature; e.g., vampires as “rats” to exterminate out of the medieval period’s sublimated dogma; i.e., these days with Zionism and second wave feminism run amok and other tokenism, “rat” is just vermin to exterminate by in-group and in-group tokens, the former keeping the latter “on leads.” As such, vampires are both cis gay men, trans people, anyone non-white or non-Christian (e.g., “bad” Jewish people; i.e., non-Zionists), witches, and so on; i.e., “useless eaters” the state punishes while saying, “How dare they eat our cheese!”
[18] Beat puts it best: “Few countries wear the scars of colonialism quite so proudly as the United States. Australia’s no slouch, mind, but the government at least likes to pretend that they’re ashamed of our worst crimes.”
[19] This kettling takes many different forms; i.e., birth trauma, raped by the state taking control away from them. Rape, then, is abstracted to displace accountability away from institutions and onto scapegoats (which is also rape); re: Ripley is the scapegoat. The xenomorph can take these disparate factors and weave them onto the same punching bag. As I write in Volume One,
To this, Cameron’s Ripley was always a TERF Amazon, a phallic woman playing Brutus putting “Caesar” [corruption] down by abjecting white fears of medieval human childbirth [and the hysteria and humiliation of state-compelled birth trauma—of placental blood, amniotic fluid, slime and involuntary shit] onto alien bodies, biology and compelled reproduction metaphors forced away from Western powers and onto the Archaic Mother as a settler-colonial scapegoat (source).
[20] I.e., Amazon subjugation is mimetic. As “hoakley” of the Electric Light Company writes; re:
Unfortunately, there’s confusion as to just what the Amazonomachy was. Some associate it with the ninth labour of Heracles, others with the battle between the Greeks and Amazon forces led by Penthesilea during the Trojan War, and others with the Attic War resulting in Theseus abducting Hippolyta as his wife. I’ll consider those in tomorrow’s article, but today look at a more general war resulting in the deaths of many Amazons when they were defeated by a substantial Greek army, possibly long before the war against Troy. A reasonably popular theme in painting, even to the present, its most practiced exponent was Peter Paul Rubens, who is attributed two paintings on this theme (source: “Amazons at War,” 2023).
[21] Revolutionary cryptonymy as necessary because, as Volume One writes,
So, while “Rome” absolutely gargles non-consenting balls, it’s completely inadequate for Gothic Communists to say that “‘Rome’ sucks and so do Capitalism, neoliberalism and fascism.” That won’t work. Not only is it stating the obvious, but far too many workers defend marriage, war and the state itself as sacred (source).
As such, Hippolyta and Medusa (or modern doubles/copies of them like Ripley and the xenomorph) are canonically sacred, insofar as the latter’s ancient matricide is sanctioned in the present by the former working for state forces, mid-copaganda.
[22] The female gendering of “dom”; I’m trans and confess I use them interchangeably. You can bill me.
[23] From Enter the Dragon (1973).
[24] “Irigaray ultimately states that Western culture itself is founded upon a primary sacrifice of the mother, and all women through her […] men are subjects (e.g., self-conscious, self-same entities) and women are “the other” of these subjects (e.g., the non-subjective, supporting matter). Only one form of subjectivity exists in Western culture and it is male” (source: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
[25] Sex workers are human, having to deal with material concerns affecting their mental health. It’s often forgotten through double standards that people who meet traditional beauty standards are just as much disadvantaged by meeting them as not; i.e., they “can’t” be depressed or have worries because “pretty privilege” or “life on easy mode.” Such bad-faith arguments present a so-called “baddy” as unfairly and untruthfully “high-maintenance”; i.e., slaves to their own beauty and conventionally chased down to be slated for the usual enslavement: compelled marriage. It’s a gift and a curse, one that such persons and their SOs (significant others) must negotiate, working together to make love (and its educational symbols) less compelled/dogmatic and more empathetic.
[26] Meaning “cosmopolitan,” or in settings that encourage “worldly learning” as a means of establishing important social-sexual bonds; i.e, crossing boundaries during adventures that, in my experience, lead to potentially life-long connections but also sexual escapades; e.g., Zeuhl: giving me blankets when I had none, leading to sex; sexting with me until I told them to come inside, whereupon they came in wearing a black dress but no panties and we fucked; and another time where they walked in right as I was cumming (masturbating with the door open). They broke my heart for incredibly selfish reasons, but changed my life for the better while exiting it: as a ghost that haunts this book. Me letting it stay is what I call “forgiveness” (though Zeuhl might object). And me making friends with Crow, Bay and Harmony Corrupted, among numerous other muses and sex workers (re: “Acknowledgements“), is what I call “the best revenge.” Fuck you, Zeuhl!
[27] Power stores in the ass, but also between those who own and respond to the ass; i.e., the ancient tradition of artists and muses, humans and animals; e.g., Harmony and I making an ode to their ass (re: “Haunting the Chapel: A Cum Tribute to Harmony Corrupted,” 2024) that, per someone like Keats, speaks to an imaginary ancient goddess of nature reviving old forgotten bonds with life and death as alienated from us by capital. Glimpsing their ass, this footnote leapt to mind…
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
Whatever its form, the divine when glimpsed becomes something to live up to and quest for in future outings; i.e., like the Numinous—mighty and out of reach, but something immense and mysteriously tremendous to reconnect with, bringing us closer to a forgotten side of ourselves. This state of grace (what Rudolph Otto called torpor or “freezing” in the presence of the divine; i.e., the classic Gothic oscillation, trapped between a state of fight or flight, fear or fascination, dread and delight, etc) is difficult to reach, and falling short from it is disappointing and painful; e.g., my Clifford bag puppet in Mrs. Quilter’s third-grade classroom failing to turn into the actual Big Red Dog (I was traumatized). It is both deeply serious and absurd, something to relish and lampoon (“a deeply religious experience” accounted by someone profoundly unreligious, even back then). It’s also an idea to “get” and fuck with; i.e., as one desires, those being piloted by internal and external forces—less to escape life and more to find something transcendental inside our lives. It’s not like there’s a Heaven afterwards; these are things we live in now (operatically inside-outside danger discos).
Like a sudden thought to write down or fleeting burst of inspiration (a course that, like a spirit, flows through us, coming and going in an instant), such ideas become something to capture or lose (slipping away like a ruined orgasm). For something to be novel (fresh) requires capturing a sum beyond its parts in a given time period. The Romantics grasped towards nature as Sublime, and the Gothic seeking the Numinous as combined between nature and civilization as alien, exquisite—a vast, liminal, nebulous place to go and spend with mighty forces experienced uniquely there but, like a castle, is built and raised by us on Earth; i.e., across all media; e.g. Team Cherry’s City of Tears or Red Hook’s purple cosmic void as legitimate and effective as Kubla Khan’s “stately pleasure dome,” Radcliffe’s spectral castles or Scott’s Nostromo, etc. All came from dreams (or nightmares, per the Gothic) while awake—beyond the realms of death, of sleep, or any other barrier/membrane you could think/dream of.
And whereas gods exist in a place beyond humans, they’re still experienced through special mediums with one foot in both worlds: “walking castles,” fortresses in the flesh, but also artists who experience those bodies as fellow workers, artists, poets, and people, stacked without end. “The gods,” then, are not beings whose meaning is “set,” but reached for and decided by people together according to cultural standards enmeshed in larger artistic and social movements; i.e., current and borrowed from times that once were and could be, “back in the day”—an idea that springs from alter egos and secret identities, but also things wide out in the open for all to see. All constitute the weight of the universe whose proximity in an avatar of the divine overwhelms; i.e., makes us collapse, swoon, and yes, “die” (cum) to varying degrees.
Sex Positivity has been and is being written through these kind of surprise connections, each muse granting a thread to something bigger through their mind, body and soul as likewise connected to each other and things we make up ourselves—our combined pedagogy speaking to (and with) trauma, forbidden knowledge and power as, like the gods, profoundly unequal but shared if we let it. “I am a bearer, I am a dwelling!” Like Bay and my other muses/friends, meeting Harmony inspired me to create things I could have never imagined had I not met her first and basked in her magical (and tremendous) glow. It was like touching lightning or seeing color for the first time despite having done it many times before. “They’re all perfect.”
This book series, then, has seen many happy accidents, dares, risks, and chance delights, thus couldn’t have been written alone. This includes the indelible-if-unintentional contributions of those who broke my heart (e.g., Jadis’ immortal “put your mysterium tremendum in my Uncanny Valley!” and surprising helpful introducing of me to the Commodores’ “Brick House”). I owe it, then, to Jadis and all the cuties whose bodies and personalities inspire and move me in such predictable and unpredictable ways. Regarding all of them, I suppose there’s a medium in me, too: I see beauty and the gods in others, especially those Capitalism gentrifies and devalues for something where no gods live but immoral ones; i.e., greed; e.g., indifferent powerful doctors treating women like automatic mothers, thus automatic chattel who can be sacrificed spontaneously for the child as de facto property of the father, the hospital, the state as cancerous, terminal and yet still growing and devouring everything in sight.
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
I might seem mad* in this brief ramble, but perhaps that’s just my humanity and “magic” that others have lost; i.e., the ability to see and relate to others as I have through careful education, hard work and an open, expanding mind? Devendra Varma likened it to a “Gothic flame” (from his 1957 book of the same name); without fuel, effort, and proper conditions, it can go out. My book is a castle, as I have said, but inside it a vigil I light to honor the gods I see in people like Harmony adding their castle to mine. They’re delicious, to be sure, but remain so much more than pieces of meat!
*Mad, as in a failure to partake of Capitalism “successfully” per its terrible, dog-eat-dog rules. Is this an accurate measure of my value? The Romantics “were poor all their lives but rich in spirit,” Laura George once told me. And while I like to stay grounded these days in material reality and tend to be leery of those poets who don’t quite as much, it can still be fun to swim around the self-same waters as they do/did. I certainly don’t want to discount these older giants (or at least their shoulders I’m currently standing on). So while the Romantics and Gothic forked into wildly different paths, they did so while grasping at the same thing: liberation. And monsters are a place whose intersecting modules let you draw your own conclusions as needed, on and on, in repetition through variation, to author your own special destinies. Forward through solidarity is the idea of Gothic Communism, of course, but infinity fueled by profound human contact becomes actionable; like Percy’s “Ozymandias,” boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away. Dancing poetry trades arms with old turning ghosts out on the floor to varying degrees of structure and looseness. Per Scott, as we have seen, poetics and creation become a po(r)tent dialog to express the power of rebellion with; i.e, in an imaginary place of endless possibilities regressing to a binary pair of “what if?” that is neither here nor there. Creativity is a weapon when it becomes tied to a place where Capitalism was less strong than it is now, less capable of harm. “The mind is its own place”; so is inspiration, which—likened to a turbulent form—occupying mere moments, out from which we can change the world.
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
In the poetic tradition, though, Harmony’s ass does make me want to write a poem and this footnoted tangent is proof of that—a short, jumbled musing part of a larger castle showcasing what such exposure and inspiration can yield. It takes enormity and special perspective, but also inspiration to raise such spaces to be excellent. “I’m a Satanist,” I told Harmony. “So when I say you have the divine in you, it’s the weight and power of the universe.” To borrow from Archimedes, I might have added: “Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the Earth.” To borrow from my own book (from Volume Zero): “Indeed, that power can also be ours if we dare to write things down—to intentionally make monsters that camp canon and Capitalism to liberate sex work, thus all work, through iconoclastic art’s deliberately campy ‘darkness visible'” (source). It’s a legacy we make and share as one!
[28] Re: “[The Gothic novel] is understandably regarded as thin in more ways than one, as a stagey manipulation of old and hollow stick-figures in which tired conventions from drama and romance are mixed in ways that emphasize their sheer antiquity and conventionality (source: Jerold Hogle’s “The Ghost of the Counterfeit in the Genesis of the Gothic,” 1994).
[29] Those who shame the care of others, including caring for those who cannot fend for themselves, have arguably never loved anyone, and certainly have been conditioned to treat the out-group as alien, thus deserving of state punishment (as undead, demonic, and animalistic).
[30] When I was writing Volume Zero, Bay joyfully described Smaug to me as a “sassy little bitch.” Rusek’s hot take prefers a different kind, no doubt informed by a different time and flavor of nostalgia:
No disrespect to Benedict Cumberbatch and his take on Tolkien’s dragon, but the original Smaug from the 1977 Rankin/Bass production of The Hobbit is a far more frightening villain to behold. CGI Smaug is just too slick and sophisticated, not to mention way too talkative. Animated Smaug is terrifying, thanks to the vocal talents of actor Richard Boone and the dragon’s cat-like appearance, complete with pointed ears and long, sharp fangs. He also doesn’t beat around the bush or bore his victims to death with long monologues. In the 1977 version, Smaug is an intimidating businessman who, having spent centuries acquiring wealth and real estate, realizes what’s at stake when a crafty hobbit comes barging into his lair and moves quickly to eliminate his competitor. Cutthroat business dragon trumps suave manicured dragon every time (source).
Maybe they’re a dog person (so Bay, to be honest)? A stance remains something to identity with and around performances as of “their time” but also something to inject a queer reading/appreciation into.
[31] I.e., displaced infanticide, the mother betraying her sacred Western role as validated during settler-colonial projects when performed against state enemies.
[32] Giger’s xenomorph and its Gothic surrealism is for De Sade what Mary Shelley was to her husband and Lord Byron; his Lovecraftian homage (the 1975 Necronomicon alluding to that author) camps Nazis and fascinating fascism—i.e., by swindling the bigotry out of things and replacing them with a “Goya” counterfeit that is oddly freaky and loveable. In turn, Scott’s Alien returns some of the stolen Victorian terror antics, but includes bondage (choking from the facehugger), discipline (chain of command, through the ship’s officers), sadism (a ton of murder and gore, but also tokophobic rape), and masochism—everything previously discussed, and live burial, to exquisitely “torture” the middle class’ inner freak, but really any freaks from all walks of life (and death)! To be queer is to be what the fascist will try to infiltrate and assimilate as formerly taken from the Third Reich’s rotting corpse (e.g., Berlin’s gay bars built on top of the ashes of Hirschfeld’s Sexology Institute). So embrace chaos and punch up against all traitors (e.g., Zeuhl—more on them, in a bit)!
[33] Re: Radcliffe’s productive observation, “the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them” (source). She preferred terror and its exquisite “tortures,” to be sure, but her gay adversary Lewis showed us that horror and freezing are equally potent (a concept we explored extensively ourselves in “Paralyzing Zombie Tyrants“). Why not both?
[34] The real hero of Paradise Lost is Satan; the real hero of Frankenstein, Faustus and Alien, etc, is the state-assigned monster resisting state control through chaotic replication: through threats of rape that wake works up to attack their policers dead.
[35] A Capitalist would build one to self-aggrandize; a Gothic Communist would do it to achieve post-scarcity by breaking Capitalist Realism.