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.
A War Hauntology Primer—”What is a Witch?” part two: Nerdy Patriarchs, “Real Men” and So-Called Male “Witches,” including Liver King but also Shonen and Bishonen Pastiche (feat. Mega Man X, Liver King and Caleb Hart)
Where are these men? Asleep beneath their grounds:
And strangers, fond as they, their furrows plough.
Earth laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boys
Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs;
Who steer the plough, but cannot steer their feet
Clear of the grave (source).
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Hamatreya” (1904)
Picking up where “Praxis Volume Outline, part two + Chapter Four: Bad Faith (opening and “Ladies First; or, the Grift of False Rebellion”)” left off…
By getting this far, we’re already explored examples of good (proletarian) and bad (bourgeois) witches. Now I want to articulate what separates them more clearly so we can neatly distinguish the TERFs—both male and female—from the genuine, transformative revolutionaries they try to blend in with. TERFs are like terminators in that respect: They infiltrate in bad faith, then destroy in service of the state (often through war pastiche as mirrored, but also sublimated by the very media they consume as teaching them to act that way—dogma).
Note: I’ve written about mega Man a fair bit in this book series, but he only really appears in exhibits; e.g., exhibit 1a1a1a2 (re: “Thesis Body“), 1a1a1c4 (re: “Pieces of the Camp Map“) or exhibit 43e1 (re: “Seeing Dead People“). That tradition started here; i.e., with me killing my darling Mega Man: as a cop childhood hero, specifically a witch cop per Clarke’s Law and Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot. Incidentally Caleb Hart got his start in speedrunning with Mega Man, pushed around in-game and out by the Shadow of Pygmalion, Dr. Light; i.e., as much as the in-game robot boy was… until the Mega Man Leaderboards banned him for being bigoted (Alpha Gamer’s “Speedrun World Record REMOVED because of Political Opinions,” 2020). —Perse, 5/5/2025
We’ll start with the boys (re: Mega Man) and work towards the girls. After a summation of a few more ideas, this subchapter and the next, then, will focus on more male TERFs and centrists as they present in fantasy and science fiction, as well as in the flesh: the Liver King as a “war chief” being of the imaginary past literally on steroids, and the aforementioned Caleb Hart and his, Man Box ilk of weird canonical nerd as inspired by the shonen/bishonen pastiche exported by America’s neoliberal ally in the East, Japan (as inspired by Westerns; re: exhibit 27a2a, “War Culture“); i.e., war as a cultural export out of a formerly occupied nation that America “pacified” during WW2 and whose “real men” remain beholden to a particular kind of cultural export long afterward: nation pastiche (which we’ll examine more in Chapter Five) and war pastiche of various “magical,” neoliberal genre types that include women as badass, but generally “lesser” than male authorities; i.e., the Wicked Witch of the West sitting in Oz the Great and Terrible’s interminable shadow:
(exhibit 98a4: Artist: J. Scott Campbell. Witches and goblins are classic symbols of persecution, Elphaba the monstrous-feminine [witchcraft] merged with blood libel and sodomy tropes [the Maguire version, Wicked onwards, is trans; see: “Sexist Ire”]. The Wicked Witch of the West can be a symbol of proletarian revolt, but can just as easily be reduced to a neo-conservative sexpot who gets mired down in incremental, equality-through-convenience disputes—e.g., about nudism—instead of actually critiquing power. Just as power and resistance share the same space, the aesthetics of death and power as badass can be employed by bourgeois and proletarian forces in cryptonymic opposition; the context must be gleaned through dialectical-material scrutiny as a matter of “oppression disguise” to worn, in good faith and bad as Witch™ mid-Amazonomachia. Tokens look like the oppressed, green skin or not.
To that, “Who does our badass, war-boss queen [and her implements of power and resistance] serve?” and “What is the context of her doubling in relation to class, culture and race war?” become vital questions to ask. It’s fine to enjoy her “dark queen” schtick, but endorsing it unironically without understanding its class character leads to blind pastiche, thus genocide apologia and soldiers [winged monkeys hunting down our proverbial “friends of Dorothy”].)
To the summation: “Magic” and technology are practically synonymous in the fantasy and science fiction genres (which were born out of Gothic fiction with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein); it is also a form of visual shorthand to communicate various ideas quickly—often by sight. We’ve already examined “forbidden sight” and black magic extensively in Volume Two, and female witches in this volume—i.e., in relation to sex work as distributors of forbidden knowledge that a frequently demonized and must be reclaimed, mid-struggle.
To broaden the term, witches are any feminist/genderqueer person (male, female or intersex) who “who sticks out,” challenging mythic structure of the monomyth as sacred, but also rape, conquest and war stuck on repeat (copaganda and the Military Industrial Complex churning out waves of terror and sexy implements of war-as-fetishized). From a dialectical-material standpoint, then, good/proletarian witches are against Capitalism and all it produces: “good” war, genocide, worker exploitation, menticide, etc. Bad/bourgeois witches support the system and its sex-coercive “undead” effects; they lie, rape and kill however they can, then beg for scraps when the bone thrown to them isn’t enough (empty or false power). They abhor collective solidarity and equal rights/equal material conditions, choosing to submit to positions of power great than themselves on different generic registers; e.g., J. K. Rowling as the billionaire Queen of the TERFs, followed by princesses, knights, stableboys, etc, as part of a larger chain of colonized war boss language with girl bosses and burly girl subordinates (not unlike the Gothic variation out of the medievalized, Neo-Gothic past: a Mother Superior and her dutiful sycophant underlings serving the Church).
This includes the carceral-hauntological language that hides the problem: the Gothic castle and its hoard of good and bad guys, kings, estates. Castles, monsters, phobias with oft-BDSM flavors—the disinterred language is already ambivalent, loaded with older historical deceptions that mutate as Capitalism struggles to defend itself. The canonical sublimations become dark, sexy and cool, but also present as legitimate or authentic in comparison to the reclaimed variants—with DARVO being a classic means of counteracting activist reclamations of monstrous slurs; overtly terrestrial slurs can be discounted as “actual” racism, whereas something like “orc” or “witch” can be more readily co-opted by the oppressor class “neutral.” It’s Meerloo’s “verbocracy” as a weaponizing conditioner of fearful behaviors told in popular media during oppositional praxis.
The same goes for the reclaimed undead and demons as a form of recuperated rebellion—either defanged, corrupted or demonized to delegitimizing extremes. This process of discounting activism while colonizing their language involves lobotomized or vampiric consumers and creators who crave for trash or make it themselves without a revolutionary thought it their brains, but also those who posture as oppressed: the “good” witches wearing masks of false “revolution” as they reinforce the current socio-material structure; re: Autumn Ivy as a non-binary example of that.
(artist: Wolfhead at Night)
Anyone can be a cop, the same applying to all TERFs (most being cis) but also any fascist playing the victim; i.e., to varying degrees of victimhood and leader principle out of the purported struggle by scapegoating minorities through a kind of military optimism at the domestic level (the false hope being doubled: one, that these targets can be converted, disciplined or expelled from society through violence, thus returning things “to normal”; and two, that once normality is achieve that their anxieties will vanish and they will be safe forevermore).
I say “false revolution” like Parenti does because TERFs are “activists” who do not alter the status in any meaningful way. They’re not just state versions of the zombie, vampire and witch preying upon the weak while hiding inside a false image; they function as robotic, knee-jerk slaves for the state, attacking those perceived as aliens under state hegemony. This persecution structure includes deceptive “renovations” that fuse masculine qualities to the feminine; i.e., a monstrous-feminine label formerly assigned to female enemies of the state. Once fascism is exposed, the state must try to hide it; it makes a new kind of infiltrator to hunt labor with, using the impostor device in fascist ways that support the state’s continued existence.
In short, that’s what TERFs are, Skynet defending itself through evolved class infiltrators. They look human; their camera-like eyes glow red like live, recording cameras that constantly survey state enemies and feed that information back to Skynet. Instead of making their own fate, they’ve surrendered it to their far-off, owner-class overlords. As such, every look they give is a concealed report that betrays their class, their comrades. Worse, the closer they get to the state, the more inhuman it makes them, until rape, lies and violence are all they know and understand. They become Lady Macbeth’s un-sexed phallic woman—go from sex pests to sex fiends that, seemingly shark-like and ravenous, prey on others less as predators and more like parasites: in hiding but also in plain sight; e.g., the real parasites from Parasite (re: exhibit 42b, “The World Is a Vampire“) are the rich family with the Gothic household, one where they feed on the servants and the servants feeding off each other in order to survive under Capitalism; i.e., just like vampires in a castle do, those at the top feed on those under them while considering them weaker and less well-fed and -bred than themselves—inferior (re: exhibit 41j, ibid.).
This happens partly out of self-preservation by the soldiers, who do not wish to be exposed as corporate-state lackeys. But they still take on tolerable notions of masculinity as “non-toxic” but also non-degenerate—not literal shapeshifters who transform their physical bodies benignly using carefully controlled HRT treatments with full disclosure to the public about what they’re doing and why in clear, open language, but various deceptive forms of masculinity that uphold the status quo:
- linguo-material markers that stress the biological sex of the performers as appropriately male or female within the colonial binary.
- the taking of drugs to enforce the body image in ways that maintain the creation of sexual difference
We’ve already explored how intersex people and various other gender-ambiguous peoples are framed as hauntologically criminal: incorrect. Likewise, under the liminal hauntology of war as invoked by neoliberals and fascists, various token “alternatives” are allowed exist if only to flesh out the masculine ranks of fascism until it achieves formal power. This includes trans people (which we’ve already explored) and cis women (which we’ll explore throughout the chapter). Their monstrous-femininity is allowed to exist up to a point; i.e., until it becomes unwelcome.
However, before we delve into female TERFS, a few more note about the boys (in this section, the next, and part of one after that). Let’s discuss the action hero as a kind of “male ally” that presents as welcoming towards women, but whose welcoming posture is inherently deceptive: the male variant of a witch cop, a TERF.
Witches and feminists also include men, with “bad” variants offering deceitful, “undead” ideas of strength and masculinity who—while they loudly claim to love men and women and everyone else—achieve their ghoulish success through the same ill-gotten means as Caleb Hart: Patriarchal Capitalism. For male “witches,” this generally happens with hauntological “warrior” personas—ravenous abusers that literally gobble up everything around them, then lie about it:
(exhibit 98b1: Liver King isn’t just a fibber or mild imposter but a tremendous fraud whose power is hollow. Yet while he intentionally embodies the war chief of imaginary Patriarchs like Zeus or Conan, his bad-faith attempts at inclusivity under the yolk are quite fragile. As James Hale writes in “Raw Eater ‘Liver King’ Facing Backlash for Alleged Steroid Use” [2022]:
Liver King, a social media fitness guru and supplements hawker who preaches returning to an all-natural, raw meat-based “ancestral” diet, is facing backlash for alleged steroid use. For those who aren’t familiar, the Liver King (real name Brian Johnson) has gotten big on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok over the past couple years. He uses that platform to urge his millions of followers to embrace a “primal” lifestyle, aka a keto diet with a lot of raw meat–and raw liver, and testicles, and bone marrow–thrown in. He claims to operate by nine core “ancestral tenets,” most of which involve rejecting the “tremendous friction between modern environments and our biology” that he says is exacerbated by stuff like canola oil [source].
As we shall unpack below, these marketing tactics are fascist dogwhistles tied to man box culture; i.e., being a “real,” authentic man that is better than women or people like women: anyone who isn’t white, cis-het and visibly powerful in as a traditionally masculine way. Unlike Mark Greene and A Call to Men, authenticity for Liver King isn’t defined by treating others as equals with basic human rights; it’s by “living up” to a ridiculous performative beauty standard/self-made image for cis-het men to emulate and enforce, which generally requires Liver King to lie about his own pre-existing wealth but also his intentions more broadly. He’s the Alt-Right on Instagram, a cave man’s con man cryptofascist treating everything as a business while playing the himbo; in truth, he’s a physically augmented bully and liar that operates as fascists do: through deception, mad science, scarcity and surveillance in defense of the realm as forever insecure from outsider threats and insider conspirators that lead to degeneracy.)
The Liver King, for example, is a bad “witch.” He’s bad because he’s an already-wealthy man greedily lying to his audience about his mythical physique—how he gained it, his motto “nose-to-nail” a gross metaphor for the way in which he devours everything in sight to cultivate his perfidious body image; he’s a witch because he also uses it to preach sacred, hauntological notions of truth that are essentially completely invented out of an imaginary past threatened by degeneracy (no different than race science in that respect): the “ancestral tenets” of a fortress-mentality paganism (the Nazis weren’t Christians, they were pagans).
Liver King’s dogma involve a number of fairly innocuous activities blended with strangely prescriptive ones: “Sleep” is fairly self-explanatory. However, “Shield” is more insidious:
The fourth Ancestral Tenet is Shield because we need to avoid dangers just like our early ancestors did, but instead of running from lions, nowadays we run from seed oils, excessive wifi, EMFs, and manmade poisons (source).
Combined with the eating of raw liver (and other organs) to serve as fuel, the actual fuel of the movement is deception to reshape society in fascist (therefor decaying and falling apart) ways. Consider the King’s pledge:
The human body has been perfectly conditioned for an environment that no longer exists. It’s our responsibility to recreate that environment, if we wish to thrive in the modern world. By living ancestrally, we overcome obstacles between ourselves and true health and happiness. We rewrite the mismatch between who we are and the environment in which we live (ibid.).
For him, the rewriting of history is framed as good, but also “witch-like” in an “authentic” way. A seemingly ancient double of Zeus, Liver King is the “real man” who offers “helpful” education to today’s troubled men—specifically impressionable, young men: real men are primal, ancestral and buy Liver King’s products, listen to his advice but also preach it like gospel; i.e., multi-level marketing. As is generally the case, his entire MLM operation is demonstrably false and rotten: ubiquitous advertisement tied to bodily strength as a masculine/male virtue, as delivered by a Frankenstein strongman celebrity—a composite body image fabricated with the hopes of making even more money through sexist, dishonest means that still leaves room for plausible deniability. Sound familiar? Caleb Hart does the same thing, hiding behind the centrist, “neutral” pastiche of the Mega Man franchise; there, the Western’s “weeb-ish” fascination with a hauntological Orientalism—the byproduct of the American occupation of Japan yielding exotic forms of warfare in shonen/bishonen (“boys comics” and “pretty-boy comics”) fantasy and science fiction.
(exhibit 98b2a: Artist, top-right: ZELKnotos; top-mid: Pas; bottom-left: Napo. In neoliberal media, war is something to commodify and sell to children and teenagers through Zombie-Vampire Capitalism. Although the gender roles are canonical dimorphic, the “pretty boy” flavor to Asian theatre and media is something has become assimilated by neoliberal canon. As such, the “pretty boy” robot is a kind of regular hero in these sorts of stories. Pretty can be powerful, in the canonical sense, if it “gets the old job done.”
Just as common, though, are the usual, sexist “motherly” positions for female characters, or hypermasculine personas in the Mega Man universe—so common, in fact, that these generals and “Spartan-esque” Boba-Fett-style “centurions” are, in fact, replicated assembly-line style; the only reliably way to quickly tell apart is their color code. To that, the red-white-and-blue scheme should be a big clue to the kind of role these heroes play in their futurist, “utopian” worlds: world police, on an increasingly automated planet replete with a stockpile of mass-produced weaponry and toy-like soldiers [whose variety exudes the illusion of difference; they all serve the same purpose: policing the world through media]. The existence of order is a negative freedom for the machinery of the state to run as smoothly as possible—i.e., with the police repeatedly fighting and defeating evil [often purple and skull-emblazoned] robots in displays of successful military operations over and over. Simply put, it’s a playground that teaches children monomythic war in a futurist-centrist “false Utopian”; i.e., a neoconservative dystopia whose internal concentric pattern, narrative of the crypt, chronotope, Cycle of Kings, and all they entail combined, stretch on until the end of time/of the world.)
Caleb Hart and Liver King aren’t identical. Caleb’s cryptonymic function is more generalized, while Liver King’s is more Gothic/superhuman (the “gym bro” rhetoric versus “eat liver like Zeus does!”). However, their respective messaging as content creators has the same complicit purpose: sell a product or service through a “heroic” body that implies either man must be “good at everything” (including war and “dominance/defense” as synonymous with sex, despite growth hormones tending to negatively impact your sex drive and gonads) therefore trust them! If the book so far has been any indication, blindly trusting figurative or literal strongmen to keep you safe from systemic abuse is a really bad idea (re: zombie tyrants, exhibit 39c1 from “Escaping Jadis“).
Furthermore, even if they don’t rape you, they’ll sure as hell fleece you (and give you body dysmorphia; i.e., bigorexia). Though fascism is a conman’s game, it’s still a losing one for them, too. For one, nothing they say is true—hard times do not create strong men and there isn’t a worldwide conspiracy of invincible barbarians at the gates (re: Bret Devereaux) or evil Jewish billionaires bankrolling the apocalypse; and two, they’re literally afraid of—and want to kill/rape—anything and everything that isn’t a white, cis-het men. It’s a pretty miserable fragility and paranoia, but one that comes about from turning off their brains and following the leader.
What’s more, as complicit, generalized cryptonyms, weird canonical nerds like Caleb Hart and Liver King tacitly promote a Patriarchal system that abuses everyone under it by keeping young men “weak, strong and surrounded by enemies,” thus Quixotically braindead, bloodthirsty and menticidally sex-starved (also bad-faith, as thoroughly encapsulated not just by Eren Yeager, the profoundly fragile and fascist protagonist from the 2013 anime, Attack on Titan, but his fans; source: F.D. Signifier’s community post, 2023).
Getting “swole” won’t automatically get you fame, let alone women and love; it exists inside a shrinking circle of manufactured scarcity and conflict. Liver King’s offer has nothing to do with those things; instead, he’s pointing to his own body as pure snake oil, then selling it to you as sacred wisdom. He conceals pre-existing wealth behind this façade, much like Caleb Hart would ask you to ignore his daddy’s wall of law books in the background. There’s no way to hide it, but you can condition people to ignore it or worship it—as pacified servants who think there’s nothing better to be imagined or created by themselves. They’ve turned it all over to giant, killer machines.
(artist: Homare Works)
In the historic tradition of bad-faith de facto male “educators” (aka recruiters/con men), both men are surprisingly loquacious. Caleb never shuts up on stream (an occupational hazard, to be fair) and Liver King repeats the same bullshit over and over (and over). Both are useful to capital because their pastiche is blind, their “prison sex” gossip co-dependent, their anger is possessive and vindictive, and their quoting canonical. Furthermore, their gamer mentalities remain utterly concerned with applying a Cartesian, quantifiable metric towards dominating the world around them through coerced luck/odds; i.e., the JRPG idea of progressively “leveling up” through a colonial metric that can be charted, but also bragged about as a feat of strength that evolved alongside neoliberal Capitalism as an expression of it in hauntological form: epic, phat “looting.”
All the while, both men (and their offshoots) have physical bodies that not only look the part, but insecure young men connect the sexist slogans to like tattoos (a kind of perverse “tabloid realism”). So while they might seem rather different, the likes of Caleb and Liver King serve as unique fractals splintering off from a larger undead whole: Capitalism as a necromantic, predatory gentleman’s club. Through its top-down lessons, said club values masculinity as something to posture and sell, hating on non-cartoon/autonomous women while praising anti-intellectualism through a cult of strength and machismo that punishes conspirators who threaten Capitalism with Communist ideas (what Hitler called “Cultural Bolshevism,” known today as “Cultural Marxism, a Red Scare/anti-Semitic[1] tactic common among fascists, neoliberals and other pro-Capitalists). Even if only part of Umberto Eco’s entire list of fascist points (re: “Umberto Eco’s 14 Points of Fascism“) these are still fascist ideas. Like swapping out a turret for a machinegun or giving a tank a new coat of paint (or a zombie a new limb or turret arm), the differences denote a different type of the same basic war machine personified: warrior undead.
Rotting and falling apart, fascism is merely an abortive offshoot of Capitalism. Both thrives on obscuring themselves and their connections. Like the myths it promotes, however, the bodies of Caleb and Liver King are largely artificial—not “fake” so much as achieved through massive material advantages neither likes to advertise. In particular, Liver King (whose goofy “I Am Ninja” voice belies the smaller pilot inside the bigger “suit,” on par with Mike Tyson or if Adolf Hitler had Schwarzenegger’s body and no longer needed to shout) acknowledges his pre-existing wealth but insists have nothing to do with his current success. No, if you believe him, then we have the tenets to thank for him reportedly approaching billionaire status in the next ten years (Before They Were Famous’ “Is He Really Making $100 MILLION a Year?” 2022). Seemingly overnight, massive scandals about Liver King’s “fake natty” lie have erupted online (More Plates More Dates’ “The Liver King Lie,” 2023), involving—and I wish I were kidding—thousands of people (at least) saying “it was just a joke” and everyone was “in on it.” Meanwhile, as those reporting on him are milking the endless drama farm, Liver King himself insists that he lied and didn’t lie, but only changed the narrative after damning concrete evidence about him came to light.
None of this is new. It’s just Capitalism working much as it always has, just with better drugs, fancier graphics, and more abundant, seemingly innocuous cryptonyms to sublimate trauma. Speaking of which, this concept of infinite growth mirrors one of the core tenets of Capitalism manifest in neoliberalism war pastiche: bigger, better, upgraded. War sequelitis. Eventually the market gets saturated, but the games keep coming. And if they don’t, someone’s gonna spend ten years making a Mega Man X fan game because they love the franchise so much.
To be fair, I’m excited for Mega Man X: Corrupted (JKB Games’ “Intro Stage Speed Run,” 2021)… even if I think X is basically a centrist superhero cop with zero ability to stop and self-reflect—just dumbly listening to his Hamlet-style, ghost dad simulacrum[2] over and over. In short, he’s robot Pinocchio with daddy issues trying to be not just a real boy but a real man. Meanwhile, as the videogame war never seems to stop onscreen, the tragic male hero sadly commenting on this but carries on anyways (a shambling zombie cop, vampirically stealing powers of marginalized workers criminalized by the state: political dissidents, rebel [Maverick] factions, iconoclasts, the homeless).
The problem is, this centrist tragedy doesn’t solve shit—a centrist canonical power trip of false hope that cryptonymically conceals not just the real wars and genocide happening in the world, but the things that cause them in relation to bourgeois canon: the videogames and those who make them, extending to the petit-bourgeois and their decade-long lover letters. Sure, the game’s music bops just like it did in the ’80s (AC Lonn’s “Mega Man X: Corrupted – Submarine Ocean (Force Starfish Stage) Extended,” 2020). Cool nostalgic music, check.
You know what doesn’t bop, though? Endless war and genocide, then lying about it to kids! Turning the next line of workers to future war criminals, sleeper agents, weird canonical nerds, and orphans is seriously fucked up (and over time, you can’t even put the labor into doing a well-made game out of it; the workers you exploit have to make what you make better than you do! Gotta love internalized efficient profit): Mega Man is a witch cop incessantly upgraded for war as never-ending; i.e., inside a future canceled by Capitalism, whose owner class pimps this nostalgia back to children who go on to view state-compelled martyrdom and self-pity as “totally rad.” It’s the Protestant ethic in action—reprobate and sacred, with a “pick/pity me” mentality driving endless war into the retro-future.
Under Patriarchal Capitalism, men like Liver King and Caleb promote ideas that keep people harmfully binarized, but also dependent on various “snake oils” that lead them to feel inadequate in the face of perceived supermen: Caleb sells videogames, conflating them with his gym bro antics while constantly “upping his game” through a brand image inextricably tied to famous war toys (that self-upgrade, no less); Liver King sells bullshit that not only doesn’t work, it leads to drug-seeking behavior tied to body dysmorphia as not just false, but self-destructive (in the Faustian vein; i.e., offered by someone, versus found/stolen “from the gods” in the Promethean sense).
We’ve already examined Caleb’s brand of weird canonical nerd. As for Liver King’s, his customers will try the tenets and offal naturally before turning to lying like he does (taking drugs and then selling drugs) when neither actually works—i.e., doesn’t get them the bodies they want, the sex partners they want. To try and acquire these things, they’ll imitate Liver King, whose continued rising success has nothing to do with his ethical statements and everything to do with prior material advantage and a willingness to keep exploiting people by lying to them (and calling his critics “degenerate sub-primals,” a dogwhistle[3] if ever there were).
Like Caleb, Liver King’s lie extends to other material factors, but especially personal property—toys, anime, and other media tied to war as a zombifying commodity that enforces sex and gender role under Capitalism through the “metal” expression of war (Mega man and his sister were called Rock and Roll in Japan, with Roll being relegated to the sidelines as a perpetual “Stepford” Housewife). Currently these various methods occur through fascism without too much[4] open violence (only violence in the world of videogames where commodified war is stupidly common).
However, these sublimating variables can easily become openly violent/actively undead under crisis, generally crises announced by hauntological artwork tied to war. We’ll examine these symptoms for the remainder of the chapter, including how Patriarchal Capitalism-in-crisis leads to a proliferation of bad-faith witches and composite undead defending the system through hauntological war. For a brief moment, though, I want to outline war hauntology as something routinely produced by neoliberal/fascist outlets on a geopolitical scale.
(exhibit 98c1: The liminal hauntology of war is commonly expressed between dimensions as interlinked, threatened by the rise of fascism as something to overcome; i.e., in The Ronin Warriors by noble, beautiful, witch-cop boys defeating their centrist opposites through a bishonen theatre of staged war disguised actual war—a curtain of comely boy flesh touting their own empowerment as sexy. It’s very similar to Sailor Moon [re: exhibits 51b3, “In Measured Praise“] except it has more of a yaoi flavor at the end, the titular warriors disrobing to fight Tulpa in the buff: warrior detectives getting to the bottom of the Radcliffean menace exorcized through naked force.)
(exhibit 98c2: Model and artist, middle-right: Blxxd Bunny and Persephone van der Waard.
Empowered by the spirit of evil, Emperor Tulpa lets Kayura do so much more than the male warlords. The results are undeniably entertaining—with Kayura absolutely mopping the floor with our heroes for most of the show [in fact, she never loses a fight]. The catch is enslavement: Kayura is clearly under the emperor’s thrall, wearing a necklace that controls her on Tulpa’s behalf. Eventually the charm is shattered in battle, forcing Tulpa to invade Kayura’s mind more directly. For a bishonen anime in the late ’80s, Samurai Troopers actually provides a rare look into power abuse from the female perspective: Tulpa supplies Kayura with an empowered, girl boss position by which to control every aspect of her life: how she talks, dresses, fights, and thinks. But somewhere inside is a buried voice, one operating independently from this fabricated persona that Tulpa must hide; i.e., from someone who is always presented as more powerful than she is, but also whose strength is greater than what he can control.)
It’s fine to enjoy but not endorse sexy monsters; i.e., like any problematic media with enjoyable elements (re: Sarkeesian). In the carceral sense, though, war hauntology is the constant, cryptonymic re-envisioning of the future; i.e., by using outdated, cryptonymic depictions of war that essentialize conflict as vital to the manufactured drama. This pastiche includes the disquieting arrival of “quiet” invasions—not the aforementioned “killing time” of the fascist harvest, but fascism as primed to happen through Capitalism; ensured by consumers pacified by ubiquitous neoliberal war pastiche, the harvest is already here—it’s only become more visible during an ongoing nightmare. Suddenly everywhere, the liminal-hauntological appearance of “benign” war commodities denote genocide and other displaced atrocities as already-here, but normalized through useful centrist myths: Teenagers can defeat them, often through force, often with color-coded uniforms and the flashy magic of special moves, allying with strange bedfellows and defeating an obviously-evil tyrant in defense of the status as it currently exists. This “banal” process happens cross-generationally until future generations become acclimated to war as a good position. They look on it and its past combatants as old friends.
The popular phrase, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” has yielded many different interpretations (e.g., five from CCCB Lab’s Cultural Research and Innovation, 2018). Arthur C. Clarke originally coined the phrase in his 1962 book, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible, making Mega Man as witch-like as the Ronin Warriors/Samurai Troopers (exhibit 98c1); and their sequel enterprises even more magical and complicitly cryptonymic in centrist ways: good teams, bad teams, a playing field with two different sides, a boss, and a dainty, blue-haired girl who kicks everyone’s ass, Lady Kayura (exhibit 98c2).
Big battles, big explosions, big “false hope” mid-kayfabe with blind camp; i.e., to conceal the hidden atrocity of war behind a rescued, “good” fakery that’s wholesome enough for children to play with, while still preparing them for life’s inevitable “realities” (re: Capitalist Realism). A bigger and bigger lie that not only covers up the system, but adumbrates it, mimics it like a zombie plague or vampiric curse. Often, it contains with hints of it inside, like Kento’s temptations to the Dark Side (in true heel fashion) by Dais, Warlord of Illusion, through armor that Kento had inherited from past warriors—men pointedly described by Ghost Emperor Tulpa as “once having the will to conquer the universe!” aka Zombie Voltron.
As this example is ideally suited to exploring the entirety of our argumentation within itself, I want to dissect episode thirteen of The Ronin Warriors (a US syndication of the original 1988 show, redubbed for American audiences): “Fate of the Ronin Armor” (1995). I will summarize the episode, but more importantly break down the dream sequence contained inside in multiple exhibits that, explained by me in collage form, will highlight the broader liminal relationship experienced between audiences and war hauntology that the show expresses in complex audio-visual Gothic language—an older Gothic interrogation carried over to American like some relic and displayed to United States youngsters; i.e., whose minds have already been formed and shaped by the material world under Capitalism, acclimating them to future slaughter. Auto-genocide!
After this exhibit, we’ll move onto TERFs more generally before considering war pastiche (a kind of cryptonymy) as something to sublimate, thus disguise war’s systematic/propagandistic function as entirely disempowering.
Kento’s Dream: A Feast for Crows; or, Echoes of Fascism and Zombie Voltron within 1980s Neoliberal War Pastiche (feat. The Ronin Warriors)
Violence is a part of life. It should be remembered that violence and aggression is part of everyday life now. You see it over the TV. You can’t just pretend that it does not exist (source).
—Bruce Lee, Bruce Lee Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living (2002)
Thus, like the sad presaging raven, that tolls
The sick man’s passport in her hollow beak,
And in the shadow of the silent night
Doth shake contagion from her sable wings (source).
—Barbaras (on the raven’s ability to “predict” death), The Jew of Malta (c. 1589)
Note: Similar to Mega Man, The Ronin Warriors is a show I cite primarily in exhibits throughout the rest of the series; e.g., exhibit 39c1 (re: “Escaping Jadis“) and 51b3 (re: “In Measured Praise of the Great Enchantress“). Here, we actually have a close-read! —Perse, 5/5/2025
In episode thirteen of The Ronin Warriors, Kento learns the truth of his own armor’s bloodthirst. After a train wreck sends him hurling into a collapsed tunnel, he emerges as if from a deep to find himself alone on an ancient battlefield. There, two nameless warriors duel to the death while Kento looks on in horror (“horror” is the operative world, as the scene features spilled blood in an otherwise bloodless show meant for kids). Overseeing this forgotten, distant transaction is a lone raven, gazing into the funerary future with a single, all-seeing red eye: a harbinger of the proud warrior’s doom!
(exhibit 99a: As an eater of the dead with oft-anthropomorphized intelligence, corvids not only have special sight; they are known for eating the eyes of the ignominious dead: those fallen stupidly on the battlefield. They are assigned as de facto keepers of deathly knowledge and totems of extreme cruelty in ways that other animals sometimes aren’t: “The raven himself is hoarse / That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan / Under my battlements…” [re: Macbeth]. For example, while cats, like ravens, are marked to be witches’ familiars by association, cats do not [to my knowledge] tend to be historically found on battlefields, thus are not known for eating decaying human corpses. They are known as guardians of the underworld, but this mythology comes from an ancient civilization: the Ancient Egyptians. Conversely, ravens have been immortalized by Marlowe, Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe, etc, in much more recent poetry—i.e., Western Europe’s fascination with the deathly past through various ghosts of the counterfeit.)
The horror for Kento—the big, strong himbo of the group—is the ghost of the counterfeit showing through him in a dream supplied to him by someone else as a means of military recruit: Join us; come over to the dark side. It is your fate, your doom. Kento’s rejection of, and continued resistance towards these machinations of equal force, denotes an incessant failure to learn from the past and his part within it, but also a neoliberal “as-good-as-it-gets” false hope: a cycle of war through false copies of the West, wherein people are saved and fallen and saved again across the forever-young bodies of an expendable soldier youth: through cool-looking acts of violence levied against zombie corruptions of formerly good militarized heroes (as we explored in Volume Two, “corruption” is a concept prevalent in virtually all of Western canon, spanning from Star Wars to Myth: the Fallen Lords to Mega Man X and The Ronin Warriors, etc; i.e., the fascist zombie and its corruption of a former good hero, or babyface, turning them heel). “See nightmare; smash nightmare. Nightmare gone… right?”
Wrong! If Dias is an openly zombie-like, drug-addled, vampire-esque, undead super soldier—who dresses like Shedder with antlers, wears an eye patch, laughs like a James Bond villain, and keeps a pet raven (whose benign nature but Cartesian demonization we discussed in Volume Two; re: exhibit 41c2, “Hell Hath No Fury“)—then Kento and company are his furtively carceral undead, cute-boy opponents. They think they’re good cops/white knights, because they’re on the “good” team. That’s it.
In truth, they’re laden in flowers like revived Roman conquerors come home to roost, their homecoming broadcast on rock ‘n roll loudspeaker (quite literally flower-power-meets-arena-rock, but curiously blended with city pop, experimental electronica and horror music common from Japan in the 1980s). It’s a necromantic centrist scheme of neoliberal war where one is pitted against the other through the process of abject as “toned down” for kids (neoliberal “joy division” of collective worker action). The authors of these Saturday-morning illusions—the neoliberal necromancers themselves—deliberately trap people in a material structure of endless wars playing with two kinds of undead soldiers who collectively drain, drug and lobotomize the emotional and Gothic intelligence of unsuspecting laborers, who go on to assimilate or annihilate those who have yet to be converted. It’s most unfresh, a dastardly scheme that sights workers and their territories entirely for profit. That’s the banality of evil in action. It behaves like a bad dream—hijacking the way the human mind normally works, including how historically-materially extends into the real world.
(exhibit 99b: Faced with the false copy of the Westernized past, Kento abjects it by embodying “might makes right”: “Iron Rock Crusher!” his variant of “Hulk, smash!” or “I am the teeth in the night!” These slides were designed at the start of when I began to pioneer my exhibit style; re: exhibit 44b2, “Making Demons.” I’ve left them unfinished for historical purposes.)
As Kento is confronted by a disembodied voice that smugly introduces itself as “the master of his fate,” the blowhard Kento isn’t fooled; he calls the hidden manipulator by its name: Tulpa, the evil emperor ghost. That’s one temporary deception. But the half-lies is part of a grander violent scheme, whose awful procession of “wax schedules” and lifelike zombies would make John Webster green with envy. “Silence, little man—look!” And behold, a pale horse: the endless battlefields of the many unburied dead.
Faced with them, Kento—a Scooby-Doo-esque scaredy-cat (intimating the Gothic “dog-like” servant trope common to loyal fool as faithful yet animal-esque towards a central hero)—literally trembles in fear (and is literally sloganized by the show’s antihero, Anubis: “Quake with fear!). Then, zombies—specifically the Dark Warlords—spring from the heap, reanimated fakeries of their real variants to fool Kento with. He falls for it, quick to anger and ready to fight them all (the puncher’s chance an empty one on a fool’s errand). But, oh-ho-ho, Tulpa did not bring Kento to this dream to do battle, but show him the way! Don’t waste your strength, you’re doomed (adumbrating the structure itself, that old fox). Merely look and see the origin of the Legendary Nine Armors: worn by past boys to conquer the world again under similar subterfuge.
But herein are another four lies (and probably more but I can’t go over them all in this section): “These armors were made for one purpose:
- to destroy mankind
- In this battlefield lie the bodies of those who have fallen in battle against these armors.
- The armor when used makes the user more bloodthirsty.
- To destroy it is to destroy a part of oneself—i.e., what man can destroy a piece of his own heart?”
The truth is, the armors can be reclaimed and reused by us Communists as teaching tools that hammer swords into ploughshares with Gothic exhibits that forbid the fascist “harvest” of the liminal-hauntology of war as an endless witch hunt, “destined for massacres and vengeance, sent across the earth post-recruitment to install” (the false revolution of fascism scrambling for power amid the cyclical power vacuums that Capitalism engenders). Nor do the bodies of the dead simply amount the blind and foolish, hoodwinked into making war for Capitalist purposes; they are the bodies of comrades fighting fascism in the proverbial killing fields.
Remembering Sarkisian’s adage, enjoyment isn’t automatically endorsement provided said enjoyment isn’t critically blind; i.e., consuming war pastiche won’t automatically turn you into a killer, nor are you destroying yourself if you critique it. Doing so only transforms you and war into something else—a friendly variant of Zombie Voltron as alluded to all the way back during Volume One (re: exhibit 15b1, “Healing from Rape“). And maybe, just maybe, old Tulpa speaks truth to power when he wishes to break “Mankind” the only way he knows how—through violence and war. Then again, maybe not; without warriors there’d be no one left to fight, no living to add to his ever-growing armies of the undead, in the Nether World where the shadows lie—his Dark Warlords a bit like Sauron’s unlucky ring wraiths, duped into the sorry company of Balrogs, winged beasts, and diegetically manmade orcs and goblins that ultimately came from Tolkien’s brain to try and describe the material world he himself fought in… but bishonen in their regression:
(source)
Poor Kento can’t help it, though; he wants to fight as boys currently fight—to fight and die “like a man.” In a way he’s closer to the truth and actual wisdom than his more righteous, seemingly smarter buddies. Meanwhile, Dais—an agent of darkness and goaded by his boss—attacks Kento wearing various disguises, hazing him as he stands liminally transfixed: to win him to his greater harm—their greater harm—mixing lies with bits of truth. The Gothic-liminal chaos of the scene is tremendously complex: It simultaneously evokes this exchange happening between texts in the diegetic present space of time as connected to our own material world and its lateral occupants both standard and revolutionary (re: parallel spaces and occupants)—between liminal occupants and liminal objects through liminal hauntology and liminal education that oscillates between dialectical-material forces dressed up in the undead language of war (whose doll-like warriors embody virtue and vice, mid-kayfabe). It’s a really messy affair that only compounds over space and time.
Hence why complex trauma requires continual good education to pierce and glean from everything beyond the veil while shrouded within inside. There is no “outside” of the larger “text,” homeboys; we’re born into the natural-material world and it shapes how we think, but also how we react. Furthermore, the scene invites us to look in ways that are conspicuously undead and doubled—with deliberate, diegetic acts of looking mirrored by opportunities for us to compare what Dais and Kento are doing that denote them as equally doomed as the first soldiers of the dream (which neither is aware of as they fight but which we can see, watching horrified and unable to stop the fated carnage as both men kill each other in a cycle of dynastic power exchange and hereditary rites; re: Bakhtin + Marx).
(exhibit 99c: The first half of this this collage is the phenomenology of our Kento exhibit, illustrated by meme hieroglyphics. The second half is another example of Juul’s “half-real” concept explored in Chapter One and how people playfully combine different things together for seemingly random, linguistically-ludically indiscrete fun—as something to talk about for education and enrichment as a liminal proposition through “conversational play” [the same kind of “sixth sense” memeing also used by STEM-type YouTube personalities like Chubby Emu, Ze Frank, or Casual Geographic: a collective appeal to a “universal” sense of humor by code-switching from jargon and dry humor to slang that aims to ironically humanize those oppressed under the status quo—animals, of course, but also patients]. Instead of The Ronin Warriors, the exhibit about them [exhibit 99a] is something I can talk about or meme about, or I can do both, swapping out frames or words to communicate a similar message quickly but also in a different form of exhibit about the same overall content.
In turn, this is discussed not just by me, but to a friend of mine about this same subject matter in metatextual ways—where we communicate as people generally do about popular media in the Internet Age: with memes by also telling stories about each other in real spaces and times about fictional things that exist in the material world: The photo of me in coffin is literally at the Edgar Allan Poe museum in Florida; the cat, Pluto, lives at the museum; the memes—of Poe and making a song that combines Dolly Parton, Poe and a meme about Poe and Jules Verne—is just how language tends to function under half-real circumstances. More to the point, it’s in this strange liminal space that praxis is being naturally performed: in discussions about canon and counterculture.)
“When will you fools learn that there are no wars fought by heroes?” (exhibit 99a). If, like Kento, we must stand and stare helplessly as ambiguous doubles of the excavated past return, what can we do? Lucky for us, love can bloom on a battlefield despite the banality of evil, and we can change into something less war-like while still being knowledgeable about war in all of its forms, heroes included. When I was a still a boy and not the trans woman I grew into, I got into fights; I reacted to violence in response to my own trauma and to echoes of trauma I could sense in the material world around me.
My mind never, ever stopped working (nor has it). I used to think it was a curse, but it was actually a gift that, once given the proper instruction, helped me transform and, in turn, write this book as a messy compilement of my path so that you might take it yourselves: to grow up into undead doubles that fight for Communism by disarming Capitalism’s war machinery—its language and its peoples—by hammering them and the structure that houses them into implements of peace and love, a reclaiming of the six Rs lost to Capitalism: to form “Zombie-Vampire-Ninja-Samurai-Knight-Frankenstein Voltron” as a composite-liminal Creature friendly to Communism and its legion of sex-positive socio-material outcomes, versus a sexist endorsement of the ’80s neoliberal status quo, like how Cyber Shadow (2021) does it (Rubhen925’s “Cyber Shadow – Full Game Gameplay Walkthrough,” 2021) with its heteronormative robot boy/girl ninjas.
In turn, development happens by working in tandem for a better world beyond Capitalism, revitalizing the Gothic imagination towards those aims by literally embodying it within ourselves, our bodies, our labor, our wicked, sexy art. You can even enjoy Cyber Shadow (I bought a copy of it and appreciate its zealous attention to detail); but transmute it in ways that critique Capitalism using the Gothic mode as something to synthesize. Make your gossip interdependent, your praxis iconoclastic, your pastiche perceptive, your quotes transformative, your own creations enriching to the world; wield your anger in sex-positive defense of your communes and your comrades.
(exhibit 99d: The world of videogames has, since its inception on the cusp of neoliberal expansion, been marketed to men. This includes the classic games, like Contra, Mega Man, or Ninja Gaiden, but also the games that were nostalgically revived through latter-day hauntologies like Cyber Shadow. In short, this reflects in the makeup of the game’s characters and narrative, but also the social-sexual behaviors and business behind the players’ metanarrative that the games’ heteronormative bias informs.
Speedrunning is—like combat sports and videogames, in general—a sexist, heavily segregated enterprise. For one, speedrunning pays very little and demands tremendous devotion and practice from its competitors (with WR-holders putting in tens of thousands of hours of “grinding”/practice to have a small handful of chances to win); two, nearly all speedrunners are cis-het men/male [and some trans women] thanks to competitive sports aforementioned bias and the male, often-white competitor’s own privilege—with the practice reliably described as “domination” and “self-improvement” from [all-male] speedrunner documentarians gushing about male-runner-to-male-runner obsessive chasing glory for themselves and themselves alone; i.e., Summoning Salt’s “The Quest to Beat Jimmypoopins” [2023] for Ninja Gaiden 2 [1990]. It’s a highly competitive and lauded history with little reward beyond glory and empheral recognition through a crisis of value; the record is theirs, as are the glory and the labels and naming. It’s self-aggrandizement verging on Quixotic deification and Captain Ahab levels of obsession, which isn’t interested in anything but male capability and unequal dimorphism as something that’s just taken for granted. It simply is; anything that falls short is simply failure, nothing more. In short, all of this is merely business-as-usual; i.e., bigoted and harmful and built around the status quo as something to protect [re: “Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning“].
All the same, the ability to capitalize on the practice is highly difficult given its random nature. As I write in “Doom Eternal: Made for Speed… but Speedrunning?” [2022]:
Speedrunner-conscious developers isn’t wholly a bad thing. A byproduct of games being unintentionally speedrun is having to deal with things speedrunners hate. One such annoyance is Random Number Generation. Speedrunners hate RNG, in general; in Doom, they’ve had to work around RNG for decades. The original Doom games feature random weapon damage—a dice roll with every shot. Doom Eternal is less random, its variability provided by enemy placement and distance. That’s enough to keep things unpredictable, but also fun and challenging for the player. This theoretically owes itself to the game being designed with speedrunners in mind. But players themselves should be free to make their own categories. That’s part of the fun—the unpredictability in how a game is gradually played faster and faster. However, a company that pre-determines what categories players will make can reduce the experience to speedrun-by-numbers. Avoiding the temptation to tamper with a game to steer its speedrunners in a particular direction is advisable.
Purses are one alternative. Cash prizes could bolster competition; they would still fall outside the traditional professional sphere. Professional sports are generally watched live. In the same sense, speedrunning is watched live on Twitch. So much of it isn’t seen by most people, however. It’s not planned in that fashion. Professional gaming involves stages—for the players to game on, and crowds to watch them live. It has to be organized, and predictable to the extent that exciting things will occur. It’s one thing to have a race between speedrunners for fun; it’s quite another to expect runners to take a world record live. There’s no way to predict when this will occur, but as Cheese demonstrates, a big purse can inspire miracles.
A large purse can make players practice harder. Expecting them to do it predictably as a reliable draw is foolish. Most of the time, world records are a grind. Unless the game is relatively new or isn’t speedrun often, it will become optimized, allowing little room for error. The less room there is, the lower the odds that a record will occur. Easy records will occur quickly and get expensive; attempting difficult records is repetitive and will get boring. And if a record seems imminent, so is the possibility of failure. Reliable disappointment can turn all but the most dedicated away. This highlights another issue: Most records are not viewed “live” because they can’t be predicted to occur live. This means that unless you saw it when it actually transpired, it’s a pre-recorded video. This runs against the idea of professional sports, which need a “live draw” to reel in the crowd. If classic speedrunning can’t do it in its current state, then something needs to change. / And here, Doom Eternal presents a curious solution. Make a fast, brutal game that’s fun to watch, but can also be speedrun using classic movement strategies while also being a Doom game. Doom Eternal checks a lot of boxes, and it certainly will give players something to watch on Twitch. I just don’t think its biggest moneymakers will be speedrunners (source).
Simply put, speedrunning isn’t made for business in the classic sense, but falls back on the aesthetics of war as something to draw out competitions between men that showcase male dominance of the game as product; in turn, the domination as a historical tour de force becomes the product—with reliably sexist, but also settler-colonial results, onstage and off [re: “Nature vs the State“]. Twitch is a white structure of power, as is YouTube and videogames as a business; i.e., including speedrunning as built within these territories advertising themselves as “manly” using cliché masks, costumes, weapons, and tableaux: not just Doomguy’s blood and guts, but Mega Man, Link, and Samus, etc, as monomythic/male-centric in ways that are heteronormatively violent state apologia. Versus them, the monstrous-feminine is always passive and assimilated, or a “corrupt” enemy to kill during virgin/whore and mirror syndrome having the pimp’s revenge against Medusa.)
Whoever you are, reader, just know that it’s entirely possible to “wake up”—to enjoy war pastiche as a guilty pleasure without endorsing its carceral, curse-like effects. But doing so will have to contend with those who see canon as sacred—something to consume and quote like a modern-day war bible that colonizes everything around it—the language, but also its users (quoting Ghostbusters [1984] blindly without transformational power—i.e., verbatim but failing to recognize Dr. Venkman as a fictional sex pest played by real-life sex pest, Bill Murray—Charles’ Trepany’s “Dying from Shame,” 2022). Indeed, I’m living proof: In the past, I’ve written constantly about the centrist war pastiche from my own nostalgic past as something to reinvent, rethink, transmute into sex-positive forms (its own kind of magic indecipherable to the too-far converted undead—the zombie-vampire samurais, robots and other Capitalist legionnaires, but also those who make them on various registers of the Great Neoliberal Chain of Being—a carceral, coercive, complicit poiesis). Apart from Neoliberalism in Yesterday’s Heroes, I’ve specifically examined how Aliens and Doom acclimate new people to war multiple times; re: for my videogame research on Metroidvania, and in my reviews of Doom Eternal (a fan favorite, 2020) and anti-fascist polemic on Ion Fury (2019). I’ve also faced lifelong pushback in the shadow of neoliberal forms, like my love for Ridley Scott’s Gothic, antiwar polemic (and frankly giant, beautiful mess) Prometheus (2020) versus Aliens having colonized the franchise away from its anti-neoliberal origins, Alien (a bit like Star Wars in that respect). It’s a messy, ongoing process.
However, centrism and war pastiche aren’t just American; as Kento and The Ronin Warriors demonstrate, they (and other sentai-style shows, from the 1960s[5] onwards) extend to other forms of media from other countries that “ally” with America under constant geopolitical threats of military and economic force. Parallel fantasies converge along the same material lines, manifesting hauntologically through instances of retro-future war pastiche, generally with sci-fi- and fantasy-flavored subgenres: samurai warriors, mobile-suit gundams, and metal “mega men” (a false-Utopian, dated futurism; re: Jameson’s argument from “Progress versus Utopia” modified: “The future of one moment has now become our own undead past”), etc. Moreover, these ghostly arrivals—their sudden appearance and continued, nostalgic existence—are welcomed, ushered in by their victims like a canonical Trojan Horse. This isn’t just the obvious scapegoats, but the neoliberal/fascist soldiers inside the Horse who think they’re the good guys (or who think they’re safe from those in power).
Meanwhile, those who speak out aren’t just speaking to their critics, but the canonical forms they uphold as an extension of undead war as righteous: the disguises themselves. These multiple, surreptitious attempts to install war simultaneously deny its relationship as a counterfeit attached to real-world barbarities. Forget Tulpa’s tower of evil “finally” being brought into our world (exhibit 99e, below); the tower is already here, has been here since the beginning and only to evolve with the structure into something more and more nightmarish; re: invasion is a structure, Tulpa’s tower one of sin the Ronins must banish, Radcliffe-style!
(exhibit 99e: “Bring me the Earth, and join every dimension!” Emperor Tulpa demands, bringing the tower of evil into the human world. There, Tokyo’s population is ignominiously borne into the structure, forced to serve the evil Yokai forever [according to the Fu-Manchu ghost toadie].
Specifically this liminal hauntology of war—felt constantly during Capitalist Realism’s boom-and-bust [a return of the phantom tyrant]—is both neoliberal and [eco-]fascist. It elides fears of an imaginary barbaric past—specifically the romance of the Sengoku/warring states period—with various state deceptions and humiliations during and after WW2; e.g., the lies of the Imperial Japanese government and its rigid control of information, followed by the American bombings and subsequent occupation period. When the original show aired as Legendary Armor Samurai Troopers in 1988, the allegory concerned anxieties surrounding ongoing neoliberal boom: the late-1980s bubble economy in Japan.
To this, Samurai Troopers expressed displaced, dissociative fears of an imminent societal collapse, one that would have accompanied the guaranteed economic uncertainty hanging over Japan’s inflated, illusory successes. These lasted from 1986 until 1992; by the mid-’90s when the show was translated into English and being syndicated to American audiences, the market crash and historical-material record of vengeful warring spirits would rapidly have become a thing of the past; i.e., a product to export to youngsters concerned more with the centrist warrior’s romance than the deeper, historical-material context. In other words, they internalized the lie of false power while its deeper, troubling context reliably sailed over their heads.)
The great doom of Capitalism—which we will grapple with for the rest of this book—is how it destroys everything it touches, including those it professes to aid, through the protection of fascists by neoliberals. It does so by forgetting art-as history and trapping people inside fake histories where war and persecution mania aren’t simply everywhere; they teach bad sex education that clouds the brain, so that nothing beyond Capitalism can be imagined: the ghost of the counterfeit furthering the process of abjection, thus the monomyth and Cycle of Kings as a panoply of false power.
Furthermore, the engines that drive its continued genesis are Capitalism itself caught in a hauntological loop of self-defense that burns everyone to cinders, isolating men and women in ignominious ways that make them Gothically and emotionally unintelligent and monsters entirely sex-coercive. The greatest, loudest defenders, then, are centrists—those who posture as good “witches,” but align to everyone’s detriment with Zombie-Vampire Capitalism like a carceral, complicit, coercive (re: the Three Cs) undead Voltron: TERFS.
Now that we’ve examined an ideal example of what triple-C, Zombie-Vampire Voltron is, I’d like to pull back a bit and explore TERFs more broadly as the bad-faith witches and undead that try to disguise themselves as “friendlies” instead of “hostiles”; i.e., they aren’t working for the Man, they’re gender-critical[6] in ways that happen to triangulate against state enemies. They’re what we push back against using what we got, during ludo-Gothic BDSM, but per the cryptonymy process (as Chapter Five will explore) is always a calculated risk, mid-exposure.
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
Onto “Attack of the Bad-Faith, Pussyhat Feminist Undead/Demons“!
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] Anti-Semitic cryptonyms generally conceal Capitalism defending itself from alternate forms of wealth distribution. Seemingly linguistically unconnected to Nazi scapegoats, these dogwhistles nevertheless find themselves in the same conversational “company” as the usual scapegoating language: Nazis blame Jews and Communists; American Patriot Socialism, MAGA Communism and National Bolshevism (Non Compete’s “‘MAGA Communism’ is just Fascism,” 2022) blame “globalists”; and neoliberals blame Communists, socialists and anyone they feel like calling terrorists (code for revolutionaries and other states of exception).
Note: Refer to “On ‘Anti-Semitism’ versus ‘Antisemitism’” for further discussion on the term; i.e., as I use it in an intellectual sense. —Perse, 4/21/2025
[2] War simulation in all the usual hauntological monomyth ways; re: exhibit 43e1 (“Seeing Dead People“), exhibit 1a1a1a2 (“Thesis Body“) and exhibit 1a1a1c4 (“Pieces of the Camp Map“).
[3] A dogwhistle is still a dogwhistle even if Liver King doesn’t know it. Ignorantly parroting fascists makes you at the very least uninformed and apathetic, at worst openly complicit: dogwhistles conceal/reveal through cryptonymy.
[4] Make no mistake, stochastic terrorism and trans genocide are already happening. School and public shootings are normalized, including ones that target trans people. It’s just not state-sanctioned or industrialized yet (and god willing, never will be).
[5] When color televisions started to become more common.
[6] A TERF dogwhistle; i.e., TERFs are fascist, hence operate through DARVO and obscurantism (the decayed, false language of rebellion) to hide their cop-like function: during a complicit cryptonymy process.
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