Book Sample: “Moe/Ahegao, Incest, and Eco-Fascism in Japanese Exports”

Posted on by Persephone van der Waard

This blog post is part of “All the World,” a sixth promotion originally inspired by the three I did in 2024 with Harmony Corrupted and Romantic Rose: “Brace for Impact,” “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil” (2024), as well as “Make It Real” for Volume One and “The Total Codex” for Volume Zero. Those promotions sought to promote and provide their respective volume’s individual pieces for easy public viewing in single-post form; re: for the Poetry Module, Undead Module and Demon Module, followed by my PhD and manifesto. “All the World,” by comparison, caps off my book series with a promotion for Volume Three; re: my Praxis Volume. 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 “All the World’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).

Concerning Buggy Images: Sometimes the images on my site don’t always load and you get a little white-and-green placeholder symbol, instead. Sometimes I use a plugin for loading multiple images in one spot, called Envira Gallery, and not all of the images will load (resulting in blank white squares you can still right-click on). I‘ve optimized most of the images on my site, so I think it’s a server issue? Not sure. You should still be able to access the unloaded image by clicking on the placeholder/right-clicking on the white square (sometimes you have to delete the “?ssl=1” bit at the end of the url). Barring that, completed volumes will always contain all of the images, whose PDFs you can always download on my 1-page promo.

“Borrowed Robes,” part two: Moe/Ahegao, Incest, and Eco-Fascism in Japanese Exports (feat. Street Fighter, Dragon Ball and Kubo and the Two Strings)

Wandering and wandering
What place to rest the search?
The mighty arms of Atlas
Hold the heavens from the earth (source).

—Robert Plant; “Achille’s Last Stand,” on Led Zeppelin’s Presence (1976)

Picking up where “Borrowed Robes (opening and part one, ‘Proletarian Warrior Moms and Breeding Kinks’)” left off…

Note: The moe/ahegao portion of this subchapter appears in my “Hailing Hellions” interview with Delilah Gallo. —Perse, 5/5/2025.

Now that we’ve examined nudism through the “flashing” of voyeurism/exhibitionism and the idea of the borrowed robe/costume, there remains the rapacious elements of the performance as heavily fetishized: the warrior and the waifu, during mirror syndrome. We examined the weird canonical nerd in Chapters Three and Four as predicated on manufactured scarcity and gender in crisis as instructed through Japanese cultural exports in the neoliberal age; i.e., videogames. Now we’ll examine these as culturally exported between nations, but especially Japanese culture; i.e., as a kind of eco-fascism preserved under Pax Americana that fosters unironic moe, ahegao, incest and rape culture in popular media: as tied cryptonymically to war trauma under America’s thumb/dubious influence (then, move onto rockstars as antiwar, followed by more overt antiwar pastiche); e.g., Street Fighter‘s Lily, Dragon Ball’s Bulma, the witches from Kubo and the Two Strings, and more!

(artist: Thuddleston)

Please note: While these factors tie into various other comorbidities, like skull shape, brain dimorphism, and race propaganda (Yugopnik’s “Honorary Aryans” Explained / Nazi Race Propaganda,” 2023). I’ve decided based on the book’s already swollen length not to discuss these ideas any more than we already have. This being said, they mostly certainly factor into the defining and executing of “pro-European” beauty standards (e.g., “correct” jawlines, body proportions, skeletal structures or skin color, etc) by weird canonical nerds, thus operate as things for them to subject potential “maidens” to; i.e., “She’s my zombie [monster girl/mother]” from Raleigh Theodore Saker v. Christine Gontarek: to capture, to extort, to dominate. —Perse, back in 2023

(exhibit 104b1: Source, top: Naoto Higuchi’s “The Transformation of the Far Right in Japan: From Fascism to anti-Korean Hate Crimes” [2021]; bottom: Katia Patin’s “The Rise of Eco-Fascism,” 2021. The Japanese Shogunate flag [with the sun rays] is a fascist symbol; it invokes the myth of former Japanese invincibility as overriding Japan’s total defeat at the hands of American forces; they had no allies by the end of the war and were surrounded by enemies and bombed into near oblivion, including two atomic bombs and the firebombing of Tokyo, a bombing run that, according to conservative estimates, killed 80,000-100,000 in a single night [and further exploitation of Asia during the Cold War, as well as South America, Africa and the Middle East before, during and after the “Cold” War “ended”]. These events have done little to curb Japan’s fascist leanings due to American interference after the war to serve global US hegemony as their indebted “ally” through force:

After World War II, the US government pardoned and recruited many of the fascists who had led imperial Japan, putting in power war criminals who had committed genocide in China, Korea, and Southeast Asia, carrying out biological warfare, human experimentation, and mass sexual slavery. […] Japan’s political system still today is a one-party right-wing regime run by descendants of these fascist war criminals” [source: Ben Norton’s “US-Backed Fascism in Japan: How Shinzo Abe Whitewashed Genocidal Imperial Crimes,” 2022].

Meanwhile, eco-fascism as I defined it in Volume Two 

In terms of maintaining capitalist control during the rapid-onset of destabilizing natural factors like a global pandemic, bombs actually make perfect sense; i.e., shock and awe, dispersing workers when the elite lose control due to ecological interference. […] That’s essentially eco-fascism in a nutshell; i.e., not enough room or resources (save for the elite and some of their stooges) thanks to the state’s own bullshit destroying the environment on all registers [source: “Pieces of the Dead”]. 

Equinox: Racial Justice Initiative further describes it as, “Equinox: Racial Justice Initiative Eco-fascism is the link between environmentalism and fascism. Combining white supremacy with environmentalism, eco-fascists push for controlling population, criminalizing migration and rejecting multiculturalism as #ClimateAction solutions for #ClimateCrisis” [source tweet, 2021] with three main points: “Overpopulation causes climate crisis” / “Human Beings are a virus to the planet” / “We don’t have enough resources to sustain all the people on Earth”—i.e., the coercion trifecta: manufactured scarcity, conflict and consent.)

In relation to nature as something to defend or claim by fascist death cults, the bourgeois Amazon and Medusa are suitably badass; i.e., “witch cop” symbols of Capitalism that operate as more or less radical depending on the circumstances. Reclaiming them mid-cryptonymy is more an embodiment of power transferred to a kind of class conscious resistance to patriarchal norms and taboos that, while not openly discussed, are nevertheless ubiquitous in popular media. Some symptoms are traumatic in a shared sense—i.e., less as things to automatically kept to ourselves and more a style of traumatizing performances within oppositional praxis. As such, canonical emblems of a taboo idea can be subverted to comment on worker trauma as stemming of popular forms of fascism being exported regularly around the globe. From Japan to American and back around, this means moe, ahegao, incest, and eco fascism as a kind of promising of war brides, of sanctioned sex, within culture war as forever besieged. In times of crisis, then, women aren’t simply hoarded; the monstrous-feminine are boxed in, raped, then wiped out in pursuit of “genuine brides” during virgin/whore syndrome: marrying off state daughters at an increasingly younger (thus more vulnerable) age. “Kept” = prisoner the world over.

These variables orient differently than the history of torture demons from Volume Two; or the demonic BDSM we explored in Chapter Two and Chapter Three, which focused on instruments of pain from a Western Gothic perspective: the pain master as a demon in a fetish outfit threatening bodily harm. This time around, the trauma we’re investigating is more concerned with disempowerment as performatively incestuous tied to ultra-national attitudes of exported war trauma. We’ll need to unpack them one at a time, acknowledging their guilty pleasure and where it comes from, then suggesting ways of subverting this rape pastiche in perceptive forms of rape prevention, not endorsement.

First, moe. Moe intimidates a worrying tendency to fetishize the body of those who tend to look young. It’s one thing if someone looks smaller and has Little tendencies in the age-play sense; that’s not unheard of and can be perfectly fine under negotiated circumstances. However, the commercialized look, as Mateusz Urbanowicz writes, “depicts female characters as just a cute, often sexual ‘treat’ for the viewer” (re: “The ‘moe’ style problem,” 2020)—i.e., a female, child-like or adolescent-looking treat for male viewers. In other words, it’s a sanitized form of pedophilia/ephebophilia. For an example of this, again, just look at Street Fighter 6 and its recent unveiling of Lily Hawk. Despite being small and young, she’s obviously sexualized (in ways not unlike Bulma or Chi-Chi from Dragon Ball, 1986):

(exhibit 104b2: Chi Chi is worringly sexualized far more as a child than an adult; so is Bulma, who “mellows out” far more once she’s an adult/married [canonically she’s 16 in the above scene; as of 2023, re: the age of consent in Japan (an incredibly fascist country known for killing left-leaning politicians and denying genocide) is 13]. Meanwhile, Lily Hawk is handled with the same grace as Ma-Ti from Captain Planet—i.e., reduced to a cartoonish, cliché [and accent] and coming from the same tribe as every other Indigenous Person as T. Hawk and Juli did: the fictional Thunderfoot tribe. Seriously, it’s like bad vaudeville, hauntologically codifying geopolitics by presenting the Global South [where Lily hails from] as canonically poor and run-down. In Lily’s case, she’s obviously been sexed up for the game’s largely male, shonen-fed audience, too; there’s not even a paratextual footnote reassuring us she’s at least 18, the game’s wiki page leaving her age out entirely. Gross.)

Again, the sexualization of the female body is certainly nothing new (re: as part of the exploitation of nature as monstrous-feminine under Capitalism, “Nature Is Food“). While canonical fetishization can be subverted, the starting point for the whore’s revenge remains the status quo pimp whores—through porn (a cryptonymy of “nude” power in literal commercial terms)!

(exhibit 104c: Top-left, model: Traci Lords in 2016; lower-outer-left and -right sides: Carla Fernandez; middle: Little Lupe; top: Tyler Faith. Each sports a particular way to fetishize the female body as “waifu”—i.e., the MILF [“mom I’d like to fuck”], “mom bod,” lady-in-black, or ever-so-dubious “teen.”)

As a visual style, moe isn’t pedophilia, thus can be sex-positive. However, the basic “look” still allows for sexualized, even eroticized forms that are quite at home in the status quo of American pornographic canon (exhibit 104c, above) and fascist Pax Americana; e.g., Little Lupe as a porn star who looks underage but works in the industry as a legal adult (and actually had to prove this in court to save a fan from being tried for pedophilia—Radar’s “Adult Film Star Verifies Her Age,” 2010); the website featuring her work, LittleLupe.com, markets “teen” models, but reads in the fine print, “All models on this site are 18 years of age or older.” The same unscrupulous industry historically exploits women; e.g., Traci Lords, one of America’s biggest porn stars of the 1980s, made most of her films when she was underage (Helen Vnuk’s “She Was Underage Her Entire Career,” 2020), she was also constantly raped and abused on- and off-set. As recently as 2020, Lords encourages awareness and kindness, writing in a now-deleted tweet,

This one is for the haters out there. Check yourselves. Kindness is king. Just because you’re sitting behind a screen doesn’t mean what you put out there is harmless. Be mindful. There’s enough ugliness in the world (ibid.).

Lord’s words mirror Urbanowicz’ writeup on moe: “The moe image does not stay in the picture; it spills into everyday life.”

To ultimately be sex-positive, then, there really needs to be more than paratextual footnotes amid a constant pandering to cis-het men as the universal clientele seeking ways to legally enjoy underage/rape fantasies. This happens alongside other ways of canonically organizing the female body into sexually objectifying categories—e.g., the “mom bod” of Tyler Faith, exhibit 104c. Something clear and obvious needs to be diegetically included, or it’s harmfully ambiguous. Granted, something like Dennis Cooper’s Frisk shows us that ambiguity can entirely be the point, but it still has to reliably land on the side of the oppressed—i.e., to critique the structure and its intended audience of consensually ambivalent male consumers with weaponized market language in a critical sense. Otherwise, the result is just blind, status quo pastiche—i.e., business-as-usual: “All our models are over 18,” but transformed into a monstrous likeness to sell fetishizingly to male consumers who, over time, forget what real women even are.

As we’ve established, porn is incredibly liminal. For sex-positive, iconoclastic examples of moe and other archetypes, consider the following exhibits:

  • the appreciative ravishing/rape fantasies and perceptive pastiche of Doki Doki Literature Club—exhibit 16, “Healing from Rape“
  • eroticized fan fiction and cosplay made by adult, sex-positive fans—exhibit 56b, “Follow the White-to-Black Rabbit“
  • moe-princess D.va’s flashing exhibitionism—exhibit 61b
  • furry mom Keighla Night’s furry mom bod—exhibit 65
  • the zombie-unicorn “breeding” kink, illustrated by me—exhibit 87a

Next, ahegao.

(exhibit 104d: Top: Bill Paxton in Near Dark, 1987; middle: Jennifer Jason Leigh in The Hateful Eight, 2015; bottom: Belle Delphine—a South African content creator known for carefully creating a dubious moe persona tied not just to the ahegao schtick, but literally rape exploitation media that she sold to young horny fans while also posting it without trigger warnings on Twitter [Sunny V2’s “Why Belle Delphine’s Career Died, 2022] and many instances of the ahegao face.)

A kind of “death face”—a theatrical “killed” expression, but generally tied to sexual “devastation,” including the “little death” (old slang for orgasm) as a loss-of-control. For AFAB persons, it’s harder to walk after cumming due to the intense, full-body nature of some female orgasms; e.g., having weak legs or sleepiness, post-climax, even when you’re the bottom (exhibit 87c). Intense passion often has religious significance (source: Averill Earls’ “La Petite Mort: Investigating the History of Orgasm, aka The Little Death,” 2019) as well as being intrinsic to rougher, more honest forms of sex. Ahegao can certainly be parodied in private, but public displays evoke a symbol tied to markers of sexual abuse (which we’re now going to explore).

To be fair, to make light of death is a popular stress valve and has its place in parallel spaces/perceptive pastiche; e.g., Monty Python’s “carving Aaargh!” skit (1975), the many faux suicides of Harold and Maude (1971) or even Jadis and I making light of so-called “murder dick” during period sex, etc. Regardless of where and how they manifest, memento mori serve as a kind of “spoof of death” ritual, making them potentially appreciative peril. The same “ravished” facial expressions can be plied to a variety of scenarios, ranging from Bill Paxton’s “choke face” in Near Dark (exhibit 104d) to your standard-issue ahegao face worn by adventuresome partners (when they were in a good mood, Jadis liked to do it and it admittedly could be fun) or transgressive sex workers with a dark sense of humor. The idea is mindfulness and good de facto education—to help people tell the difference and recognize the rapacious historical materialism tied to the theatrical gesture; otherwise, it’s just content “farming” with zero concern for the consequences (re: Belle Delphine).

Theo J Ellis’ 2021 write-up on ahegao, “The History of Ahegao: Is It Damaging to East Asian Women?” compiles research on the phenomenon in anime specifically. One example (and there are many in his article) writes,

The earliest known record I could find on ahegao was in the 1980s by an artist named Suehiro Maruo. He’s a ero guro artist. He wrote a comic called Shōjo Tsubaki which depicts gruesome acts of physical & sexual violence against a 12 y/o girl (source).

Ellis himself writes,

That fetishization has obviously extended and is now done by American white men, and white westerners in particular. […] There’s so little information on this that it makes the conversation weaker than it should be. Hardly anyone (in the East Asian community, especially Japan) is speaking out in mass numbers. But that’s normal because racism, fetishization, and stereotypes are kept in the dark.

People who deal with it don’t wanna feel like they’re complaining or they just think nobody gives a shit so why bother talking about it (ibid.).

In other words, this kind of whitewashed racism, xenophobia and chattel rape is rooted in the etiology of bad play and bourgeois, fascist parentage (which, as we explored in Volume One, applies historically-materially across different chattel groups fetishized and abused in similar ways; re: exhibit 31, “Knife Dicks“).

Beyond Street Fighter 6 or moe/ahegao, such mentalities haunt children’s stories with a nationalized flavor and location. Consider Kubo and the Two Strings: Our hero, Kubo, is threatened by his own mythical grandfather as damaging the nuclear family structure of the boy and his mother and father (the two strings to his third on their combined shamisen). Kubo’s mother explains, “Your grandfather doesn’t hate you; he wants to make you just like him: cold, hard and perfect”—i.e., blind to humanity in a very fascist way. Such blindness precludes healthy forms of love and enforces abnormal, coercive forms like incest.

In Japanese culture, these intimate through various hauntological forms that have survived through religion and the Japanese culture of war and rape going hand-in-hand. To that, a good way to trace their lineage is through popular stories, often of ghosts and dead warriors, but also women’s roles within broader (meta)narratives. Women not only must die within such stories, but generally transform themselves—their bodies, identities and gender roles—to supply male children with fascist forms of education; i.e., the raping of sons by their mothers or aunts or other matriarchal figures: “Come, Kubo, come to your aunties!”

It bears repeating that sexual abuse is not openly discussed in the film, but it is threatened by symbolic deliverers thereof towards the usual victim: a young boy as feeling the need to satisfy particular urges begot from material conditions unique to Japan’s history of fascism. These repressed anxieties reflect on emotional struggles for any hero that, in Japan (the site of the narrative), carry extra weight. But as we shall see, they do not stay there. Fascism is predicated on material conditions that encourage, if not out-and-out rape/incest around the clock, then at least the normalizing of rape phobias and anxieties through disempowerment on a globalized familial level (a return to the rapacious household as a family unit through the promise of compelled sex; i.e., the reward of rape for men to claim through war). Such a relationship goes hand-in-hand within child pornography and incest as tied to fascist Japanese laws, the latter upheld to zealous degrees by proponents of a post-fascist government; i.e., a ruling body’s desire to appear less fascist than before but beyond the surface level is arguably as fascist as ever beneath the façade.

For instance, Japan Powered writes on The Six-Foot Bonsai, a 2016 book by Stacy Gleiss about her abusive ex-husband and his attachment to Japanese material culture at large:

Japan has a problem with objectifying young girls. American culture worships the idol of youth, but Japan takes it to the extreme. Long time readers know that I loathe fan-service. I’ve also explained the origins of lolita culture and kawaii culture. In Gleiss’s life, she explains how lolita and kawaii culture shaped her abusive ex-husband’s views of sexuality and women. The access to prepubescent sexualized media–the upskirt shots and other sexual poses manga and anime peddle–encouraged his pedophile tendencies. Buddhism and Christianity warn that the messages we consume shape our thinking. Consuming prepubescent sexualized manga–okay, let’s not dodge the word anymore: child pornography–will shape a person’s view of sexuality (source).

Japan Powered goes further to remark on child pornography as connected to Japanese incest culture as exported through an intolerance towards human rights in favor of exploitative media as sacrosanct along several key points: child pornography and its normalization, but also incest between mothers and their sons.

First, the child pornography boom in ’90s-era Japan was begot from various legal loopholes that banned displays of pubic hair, not child bodies. While a 2015 law was passed to curb the consumption of such material in Japanese manga and anime, the idea of “fan service” was hardly stymied; the tropes had become sacred, entering debates of “free speech” in favor of communicating what amounts to pedophilic dogma regularly practiced in manga/anime consumerism within otaku culture—it’s normal, in other words.

Second, the normalization is a part of kawaii culture. Outright bans are resisted through bad-faith arguments supported by proponents of said culture as a highly capitalist enterprise. Lobbyists like Ken Akamatsu argue in favor of the status quo by downplaying abuse, calling such instances “imaginary, so unlike real child porn, no one was hurt. ‘Actual children suffering and crying is not acceptable. But manga doesn’t involve actual children. So there are no actual victims'” (ibid.). Unlike my example of mommy doms (exhibit 102), Akamatsu’s argument is bad-faith and geared towards capital/rape culture as something to uphold and defend. Japan Powered notes how Gleiss’ ex-husband echoes this reasoning:

[Gleiss] accounts how her ex-husband claimed to separate reality from fantasy. Many people claim fiction doesn’t affect behavior; however, for most of human history fiction–myths and folklore–taught morals, values, and cultural viewpoints. While some claim fiction lacks victims, the victims are the readers. Their consumption distorts their idea of reality. It does it gradually, in ways that evade notice. In turn, this can shape sexuality and make it difficult to bond with people on an intimate level. Yes, some claim to be unaffected and have happy and healthy relationships. As with everything, fictional relationships and interests can benefit people and their relationships. Obsessive behavior falls outside of these possible benefits (ibid.).

In other words, cultural obsession (and blindness regarding sexual health) happen through Japan’s socio-material exports that codify these abusive behaviors in fascist ways felt at home and abroad; i.e., according to an idealized past as something to defend through the consumption of popular narratives, but also media types. Incest, then, is something to further through otaku culture, whose cultural roots date back to religious canon that was, itself, commenting on historical-material factors present within in the real world; e.g., hiemaki for mother-in-law/son-in-law incest, imonoko for father/daughter, and so on (ibid.).

(artist: Suzuki Harunobu)

Third, while mother-son incest is not recognized as a common event, it still represents of a form of male insecurities that are incredibly common in Japan as a place that exports its fascist pathos to like-minded consumers overseas. I would also argue that while these events today are rare in real life outside of fiction, fiction does not exist in a vacuum; thus, they nevertheless exist as commonplace tropes in mange/anime as blind pastiche for audiences to consume and, if not emulate themselves, at least tolerate and cover up in defense of capital. The entire culture of silence orbits around overwhelmingly common tropes of incest between mother and son in Japan. The psychoanalytical models might seem quaint, but nevertheless can be commented on through tangible socio-material factors. As Terry McCarthy writes in “Out of Japan: Mother Love Puts a Nation in the Pouch” (1993) re:

Satoru Saito, head of the sociopathology department at the Psychiatric Research Institute of Tokyo, doubts that mother-son incest is any more common in Japan than elsewhere. But, he says, “emotional incest” between mothers and their sons is almost a defining feature of Japanese society – “the entire culture has this undertone” (source).

Clearly the concept of incest, while taboo, is felt about differently in Japanese culture as a defining part of its cultural psyche as present within the material world. It is whispered about or suggested through shadows of what actually goes on: a traditional past to pass on or revive as “fan service,” which is what fascism ultimately is (and a culture of aesthetics); i.e., the promise of great, even forbidden rewards with Paganized flavors.

Bringing things back to Kubo, then, his heritage—his birthright—is made up, thus imaginary in a dreamlike way that evokes threats of rape for him, the boy. They aren’t exclusively fascist, but the roots of sexual abuse, like fascism, lie in one’s childhood as corrupted by state hegemony in crisis: patrilineal descent and its bloodline is maintained through force, which is what incest is. While the Moon King covets his grandson as someone to manipulate through family as a perfected virtue, the king’s daughters play an equally vital role in the corruption of the youth as a kind of stochastic promise pulled from the hero’s surroundings: their stories as retold in ways that are ultimately harmful, but also a dialogic commentary on the historical-material factors along dialectical routes. Under fascism, the family unit and the state go hand-in-hand, putting all decisions under control of the parents as being a combination of the two (or husbands, in the case of underage marriages). It’s a regression that surrenders human rights in light of a perceived crisis that must be challenged to make the state return to a former imaginary greatness. Incest and pedophilia are deemed acceptable compromises when they happen through state sanctioned weddings in defense of the family unit; such are the costs of war because they will pay dividends in the long run. This is a lie.

In other words, fascist mentalities about incest in Japan are linked to traditional notions of the family structure as rigidly hierarchical to the point of genocide, but also Foucault’s Boomerang. Certainly the practice is condemned now in open discourse (echoes of Foucault), but it wasn’t always disallowed in the past, which is what fascism labors to return to: a “better” time, where children are controlled by their parental figures to unwholesome, abject degrees; incest is denied precisely because there is a historical framework for its existence that continues to exist in modern-day Japan and its media at large. Concerning these canaries in the mine, Alexie Juagdan writes:

While the prevalence of incestuous themes in Japanese media may raise eyebrows, it is important to note that these portrayals do not necessarily endorse or normalize incest. Instead, they often serve as vehicles for exploring complex human emotions, societal taboos, and moral dilemmas. The treatment of such themes can vary greatly, depending on the intentions of the creators and the overall narrative context. [Nevertheless … t]he portrayal of incestuous themes in Japanese literature, movies, and anime can have a significant impact on shaping societal perceptions. Media plays a powerful role in influencing cultural attitudes and values, as it has the ability to reflect, challenge, or reinforce societal norms.

When exploring sensitive topics like incest, media can provide a platform for examining the complexities of human relationships and societal boundaries. It prompts discussions on ethical dilemmas, psychological motivations, and the consequences of taboo desires. However, it is crucial to approach these portrayals critically and engage in meaningful discourse rather than accepting them at face value.

It is important to note that the portrayal of incestuous relationships in media should not be taken as an endorsement or validation of such behavior. Instead, it should be viewed as an exploration of complex human experiences within the framework of storytelling and artistic expression (source: “Exploring Incest in Japanese Society”).

To this, the markers of forced incest, war and rape can be spotted in Japanese children’s stories like Kubo and the Two Strings that echo uncomfortable dialogs within oppositional praxis in adjacent stories and their monstrous egregores and events. In Western culture, witches are often depicted as outsiders that steal and eat babies; but in Japanese culture, they denote a forbidden attraction that is both resisted and indulged through monstrous language like Kubo’s two frightening aunts; i.e., as rapacious ghosts of the counterfeit told through stop-motion. They aren’t threatening to rape him in the literal sense—just kidnap him, replace his parents and brainwash him: a rape of the mind, of the will, of the self. In the Gothic sense, especially from the female submissive perspective, this parallels Western ideas of the woman as “kept,” a beautiful princess surrounded by danger and whose own precious fragility ostensibly rings the dinner bell mid-investigation.

To it, time isn’t a straight line, but a circle to revisit in the revival of pre-fascist forms that emerge in fascist hauntologies and the liminal call to war: During Capitalism-in-crisis, what happened will happen again, including rape but also stories of rape to approach in legendary, occult spaces:

(source: Ivanir Ignacchitti’s “Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water Reveal the Bathing Suits We’ve All Been Waiting For,” 2021)

This Gothic myopia (cryptonymy) of menticide is betrayed by liminal intimations of disempowerment, which denote a connection beyond the onscreen narrative. Like breadcrumbs in a fable, it points to greater traumas that Japanese society is guilty of or feeling guilty about in ways it cannot collectively face, going so far as denying it outright; e.g., the Rape of Nanking as a taboo rememory. These can be seen in a necklace of stories, including ’90s Japanese OAVs like Ninja Scroll (re: exhibit 17b, “Healing from Rape“) as being incredibly violent and rapacious in ways sold to American consumers, the latter fascinated with a hauntological Japan of various temporal flavors begot from ’90s Japanese cryptomimesis stretching forwards and backwards:

In other words, Japan until recently was strongly isolationist, having many skeletons in its closet from the warring states period until the 19th century.

However, Japan’s national desire to emulate Western Imperialism has led it to create many more—not just moe/ahegao or incest, but merging Japanese Yokai with Western Gothicism and mad science (including giant suits of armor—mecha) as a response to war as a systemic, eco-fascist problem in the present that leaves behind much destruction or divorced signifiers thereof. These are symbolized by the country’s existence on a tectonic fault line between China and the Americas, no doubt further galvanized by the World Wars; and something to fear returning through a prophesized “great calamity” that treats fascism as a dreadful reunion with trauma while overlooking the root cause: Capitalism; e.g., Gojira, 1954; Neo-Genesis Evangelion (a Christofascist pastiche), 1995; or Netflix’s Japan Down. A disaster appears and the nation-state must struggle to deal with it alone or die. In the case of Japan Down, the sudden, targeted appearance of a super volcano/earthquake literally sinks the entire island region; afterward, Japan isn’t raised from the sea, but generously rebuilt by the rest of the world to be better than ever before. Yeah, right.

As Moore and Patel point out, Capitalism is intrinsically unstable by design, but also threatened by the very natural disasters it encourages; faced with its own collapse, various natural disasters (including disease; e.g., the Black Death, but also the Covid Pandemic and the Fukushima nuclear disaster) level the scales in Japan that Capitalism tries so hard to tip, becoming fascist opportunities to accrue further power and wealth that can no longer generate as easily if at all—re: “How Capitalism Exploits Natural Disasters” (and again, gold under fascism, is far less useful than food, bodies, and labor). To try and suggest a “bouncing back” of a sunken national state, like Japan Down does, is fairytale, neoliberal hubris; bombs—even nuclear bombs dropped from on high like Skynet’s gambit—are nothing compared to the state shift on an ecological scale (re: state shift).

The state is not a greater good deserving of genocidal sacrifice; no matter how maudlin or sentimental the argument, this needs to be remembered lest ecological disasters like Japan Down start to become the norm. If they do, nation states will not stand together as one; they will collapse and regress to an eco-fascist hellhole. The show presents people running away from volcanoes and earthquakes, but you can’t run away from rising oceans, climbing temperatures and mass starvation [or nuclear bombs, to be fair]. Rather than a supposition of being entirely unrelated to Capitalism, the show’s “volcano” is neither an isolated event nor something the Capitalism opposes, but rather something Capitalism causes and will be unable to prevent/reverse when climate change starts to worsen more and more. When the Global South is underwater due to rising sea levels, the Global North will be unable to exploit their usual targets: They will colonize their own populations, instead.

Just as easily, then, the Gothic-as-iconoclastic invites a proletarian “return” to a hauntological post-enlightenment, postcolonial oral traditions in the collapse of radio, television, the Internet; i.e., World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (emphasis, mine) to explain things that are often concealed or obscured by state powers, superstition, spirituality and the occult as perceptive pastiche, including the Japanese perspective as subjected to unique realities concerning death and exploitation; but also uncontrolled scarcity, conflict and consent under the rise of local warlords, pirates and the like divorced from state accountability and ethics, but not the apparatus as fully defeated in a fascist sense. In Brooks’ World War Z, Tomonaga—a survivor of the American atomic bombs—orally recounts:

In Japan, hibakusha, “survivors of the bomb,” occupied a unique rung in our nation’s social ladder. We were treated with sympathy and sorrow: victims and heroes and symbols for every political agenda. And yet, as human beings, we were little more than social outcasts. No family would allow their child to marry us. Hibakusha were unclean blood in Japan’s otherwise pristine genetic onsen. I felt this shame on a deeply personal level. Not only was I hibakusha, but my blindness also made me a burden. […]

The kami are the spirits that inhabit each and every facet of our existence. We pray to them, honor them, hope to please them and curry their favor. They are the same spirits that drive Japanese corporations to bless the site of a soon-to-be constructed factory, and the Japanese of my generation to worship the emperor as a god. The kami are the foundation of Shinto, literally “The Way of the Gods,” and worship of nature is one of its oldest, and most sacred principles. That is why I believed their will was at work that day. By exiling myself into the wilderness, I had polluted nature’s purity. After dishonoring myself, my family, my country, I had at last taken that final step and dishonored the gods. Now they had sent an assassin to do what I had been unable to for so long, to erase my stink. I thanked the gods for their mercy. I wept as I prepared myself for the blow.

[… Later,] I handed his sword back to him; its weight and balance felt familiar to the touch. I told him that we might be facing fifty million monsters, but those monsters would be facing the gods.

To this, these gods needn’t be fascist, but given the state of exception, a guilty and blind Japanese traditionalist isn’t likely to be able to tell the difference; it’s up to queer personas to subvert such narratives, self-determining in a gender-non-conforming thus non-fascist direction in relation to people, to zombies, to demons/Yokai, to nature by becoming the resilient, diverse dark gods we need to become in order to move beyond Capitalism and its eco-fascist bullshit. Fascists are afraid of everything the but the thing they fear most (apart from exposure [chasing] and denormalization) is us and our solidarity—an army of savvy “killer” rabbits who actually know how to use their brains, blending in, Trojan-style. Weathering their violence, hammering their swords into ploughshares, and changing “their” status quo will be our revenge.

In Volume Two, we examined Alice in Borderland as a metaphor for worker ludology within Japanese-corporate subterfuge under simulated impending disasters. Relative to eco-fascist uprisings, the events themselves are often overshadowed by, or conflated with, warlike catastrophes that volcanos or earthquakes emulate as natural events common to Japan in either form: Japan Down‘s city-wide death and destruction as “bomb-like” comparable to the atomic bombs and napalm runs committed by Americans against the Japanese mainland; e.g., Grave of the Fireflies, 1988; but also Lynda Chanwai-Earle’s “A Carpet of Dead Bodies: a Hiroshima Survivor’s Story” (2018)—the latter a story of Taeko Yoshioka Braid, a Japanese war bride who survived the dropping of Little Boy on Hiroshima by the American bomber, the Enola Gay. Whereas Oppenheimer (2023) glorifies the perspective of Western men and their drama and pathos, Taeko’s unspeakable story gives voice to the suffering of all peoples in ways men won’t speak of.

Likewise, songs like “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” (1961) or media like Come and See (1985) are far more bleak and frank to the victims of these men and their unbridled hubris. They become a rare, discouraged form of instruction on how to grieve collectively while gazing into the void of Capitalism’s interminable abuses: the millions of unburied, incinerated dead for nothing more than national pride and state control as a kind of mighty, religious-esque passion to face and empathize with; on the flipside, it becomes something for curious Westerners (or their emulators) to look in on from relative safety—i.e., the spectating of the privileged towards those being colonized more than themselves in the current moment, and the fascist refusal during so-called “state shifts” to look at all while dealing the killing blow towards their scapegoated victims: the Japanese towards themselves, but also the Middle East, the Global South, Indigenous Peoples, etc, as colonized by US global hegemony.

Furthermore, per the ghost of the counterfeit furthering abjection, the curiosity becomes rapt, voyeuristic: a watching of civilization reclaimed by nature as chaotic, death-like—i.e., a female Leveler to shatter the perceived invincibility of patriarchal forces and patrilineal descent, but also an apocalyptic revelation to demonstrate their treacherous, child-like vindictiveness with when they are threatened.

The Fascists MO is scapegoating and widespread government abuse, which they’ll double down on in order to stay in control after corporations have staved off responsibilities to such a degree that everyone around them pays the price; e.g., Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow (2014) or Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014): death lotteries and other bourgeois games (e.g., Squid Game), widespread banditry and rapine through out-of-control criminogenesis, state collapse, purity politics, masculinity-in-crisis, final solutions (including nuclear Armageddon/mutually-assured destruction) begot from hijacked state mechanisms, and infrastructure and information decline through immiserated material conditions for all but the most wealthy holed up in their vaults; for former corporations, it’s merely a masque of the Red Death, the vault-dwellers unable to care for themselves, thus doomed to die alone, but also eat those around them in order to survive: they’ve been doing it their whole lives. Meanwhile, those outside of the island fortress (Japan being a literal archipelago) will die with their families, murdered by the state and its leaders (re: Jim Jones) but also fascist proponents scapegoating the displaced and their nomadic flotillas and ghettos.

As we discussed in Volume Two, the real survivors of the zombie apocalypse during medieval/settler-colonial regressions are the zombies themselves (re: “Police States“); whether for or against the state, without corporations to supply them with food and resources, the undead will collectively have to relearn how to prepare their own meals, lest they eat each other (extreme hunger leads things not normally perceived as food to be become food, one’s own family suddenly tasting delicious); they must learn how to have sex, relationships and children, lest they rape each other (e.g., 28 Days Later, 2002). It’s a rotten game of luck, so ideally something should be done to prevents these circumstances (and their dismal ludologies/odds) from coming about.

Furthermore, survival narratives are eco-fascist (ibid.), tied to manmade disasters that force domestic populations’ face-first into death through the dwindling survivor’s loved ones and their bodies as infected, alive but rotting. Humanity may not be the virus, but the state is virulent, leading to its own collapse during eco-fascism as relayed through the historical materiality of zombie apocalypse narratives; those who do survive are haunted by the memories of those they outlast.

(exhibit 105e: Photos of the Rape of Nanking are well-documented and extremely graphic. Out of respect for the victims, I will not exhibit them here, but the links below can lead you to them. “Thousands of Chinese soldiers and civilians mark the 70th anniversary of the Nanking Massacre at the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders in Nanjing in 2007″ [source: “‘The Forgotten Holocaust’: 27 Tragic Photos from the Rape of Nanking,” 2023]. Another name for the massacre is “The Rape,” given how many of the victims of the assault were women. China News Digest writes of the Massacre and its megadeath,

Of all the hideous crimes committed by the Japanese, none were worse than those situations in which women, victims of the same killings as the men, were first forced to endure sexual assault and rape by the Japanese […] “the violent rapes … committed during the initial six week [sic] occupation and during the four weeks following Matsui and Muto’s entry into the city continued without abatement on a grand scale.” (“Verdicts of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East,” p.458.) During these times, “every day, twenty-four hours a day, there was not one hour when an innocent woman was not being dragged off somewhere by a Japanese soldier” (source).

Similar to Austen’s novel-of-manners, the ghosts of dead Chinese rape victims lurk behind the rape culture of Japan and its problems of rape and forced incest at large as tied to lost generations due to state abuse subsequently tied to the fascist familial unit [versus the accidental kind found in Neo-Gothic novels: “Whoops, I fucked my long-lost sibling!”]. Incest of this kind steals innocence within a single family that leads to pathological incest fantasies, post-trauma, but also an entire generation tied to unequal material conditions—often along racial, gendered and cultural-religious lines; it can also be weaponized against queer groups by leveling children against outsiders instead of their actual abusers; i.e., a “believe the children” scheme designed to scapegoat non-Christian behaviors.)

Regarding ahegao and moe, rape culture and its incestuous proponents, all are tied to an already-repackaged form of American occupational abuse and Japanese Imperialist crimes (conducting their own Imperialist, false-flag operations during WW2 against the Chinese, their own complex deceptions, extensive propaganda and ruthless “burn to ash policy” or the three Alls: “kill all, burn all, loot all”:

Japanese Devils is a documentary featuring 14 veterans of the Imperial Army testifying to their brutal participation in Japan’s 15-year war against China. Director Matsui Minoru presents a powerful historical record of these soldiers’ individual crimes, helping to break Japan’s long silence about its wartime atrocities in China. “Japanese Devils” is a literal translation of the film’s original title “Riben Guizi.” “Riben Guizi” was a phrase used by the Chinese in the ’30s and ’40s expressing hatred[1] of foreign oppressors. For many Japanese, this phrase and the facts about Japan’s war against China are unfamiliar. Japan’s war against China is often downplayed in comparison to the historical significance [for America] of the Pacific War, Pearl Harbor, and Hiroshima (source: Cindy Yoon’s “Filmmakers Matsui Minoru and Oguri Ken’ichi Discuss ‘Japanese Devils,'” 2023).

The Three Alls mirrors what Hitler had done against Russia, and what the post-WW2 US did against everyone else (but “getting that bag” more neoliberally than overt fascists had before them). Capcom might not have direct ties to a government that lies to deny its own genocide against the Chinese (the Rape of Nanking is not something Japan officially recognizes); they still offer up “blind” pastiche gobbled up by the FGC (some of whom think that fascism is a complete and utter myth, if the haughty and vituperative comments to my video about Marisa are any indication; re: “Fascism in SF6: Marisa”).

Speaking out against these “junk food” dangers—not just in anime, but recognizing wherever they present themselves (re: Belle Delphine and blind moe/ahegao and children’s stories like Kubo)—invites abuse in different forms on different registers: the aforementioned neglect, scorn, and ignorance in players’ social-sex lives; “our” lame-ass politicians; canonical defenders with their open aggression, condescension, reactionary indignation and DARVO. As bourgeois code-switchers, they care about negative freedom for the elite, not positive freedom for workers to not get exploited beyond the veil that Street Fighter 6 creates for the FGC (a similar veil fashioned by Blizzard’s own canon). Marisa fights “like a man” but also a Nazi in Western wrestling theatre narratives; she “donkey punches,” smashes and flexes. Manon fights “like a girl”; they twirl, spin, and adopt more sexualized poses. All of it appropriates descriptive genders for the same old goals: queer baiting and token “minority police” who settle for scraps. Normativity is always hetero during sublimation, literally “as it should be” while two queernormative monsters (the butch lesbian and the trans athlete) duke it out for a largely straight audience, Amazonomachia-style.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Yet, despite such things being predictably appropriated by a giant company in neoliberal fashion in 2023, the dialogic imagination exists in opposition and has for centuries (since the rise of Capital and discourse on sexuality and gender identity). For our purposes here, we can examine the culture of rock ‘n roll, concerts and heroes, but also the fans/partygoers who sport their own “rockin’ bods” for artists like myself to appreciate in sex-positive art; e.g., the Amazons and sex-positive  “mommy doms” we examined in part one as linked to Gothic media, but also more direct forms like horror movie F/X wizards (who always seemed to be “decked out” in metal t-shirts, piercings and badass tattoos, exhibits 45c2a [re: “Summoning the Whore“] and 105b2); re: Harmony loves sex and metal as something to play with through people and likenesses of people (their black dildo, above).

Let’s look at a real-life example next, with Jimi Hendrix! Onto “Rockstars: From Rock ‘n Roll Fans and Jimmi Hendrix’ Penis to Horror Movie Special Effects“!

About the Author

Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!

Footnote

[1] This goes both ways, Japanese hating foreigners with their own xenophobic label: gaijin—”foreigner.” The Chinese variant, gweilo, also pertains to foreigners, but especially Westerners. The usage isn’t automatically a slur any more than “gringo” is or “pākehā.”