This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). 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 “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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

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

Understanding Vampires: “What Is (Problematic) Love?”; or, Positions of Relative Ignorance to Relative Clarity (feat. Bad Empanada and Marxist-Leninism)

“Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.”

—Satan, Paradise Lost (1667).

 

Picking up from where “They Hunger (opening) and Eat Me Alive, part zero (vampire crash course)” left off…

If I could stay anything about queerness and vampirism, it’s that both started from ignorance, but also positions closer to nature that have become increasingly alien and closed-off: love, for the state, is both pure and problematic; it cannot separate them, because profit requires division to function. To study both, then, is to study knowledge in a state of dialectical-material flux, knowledge being different ideas about the same things; i.e., often from different schools of thought; e.g., Marxist-Leninism vs anarcho Communism. Such schools are classically at odds, effectively in disagreement about how to develop Communism in the present space and time.

As me and my work are an-Com (specifically Gothic [gay-anarcho] Communist), we’ll need a foil as I unpack my own approach to such things. The foil, in this case, is Bad Empanada (a YouTube video essayist) vs myself, Persephone van der Waard (a sex worker, writer, and BDSM doctor established through independent studies); i.e., Bad Empanada graciously reminding me why I’m not a Marxist-Leninist!

Note: “Understanding Vampires” is informed by interactions with people who, although they are correct about a great many things, lack much-needed nuance in others. In the past, this would have been Noam Chomsky (re: Bleacher). Here, though, we’re specifically talking about Bad Empanada, aka Yannis Stanopoulos, a person who—despite being correct in his persecution of actual sex pests and Zionist behaviors from sell-out “leftists” on the Internet—tends to throw the baby out with the bathwater regarding the value of social studies and literary analysis at large; i.e., what Marx himself would call the Superstructure, and which discounting media analysis at large is to regress to a level of Marxist action on par with Marx and Engel’s making of sodomy accusations (through sniveling private correspondence).

To it, Bad Empanada is a Marxist-Leninist, valuing the material element to Marxist analysis, but also state mechanisms; i.e., he doesn’t condone or support anarcho-Communism, treating its practitioners like hopeless hedonists and (as I shall explain) sex pests to lump in with genuine predators. Except, the state is straight, historically the ultimate and constant enemy selling out and wearing down to abuse its own people; i.e., as expressed by Bad Empanada himself towards me and others like me, the state—whether it calls itself Socialist or capitalist—always prioritizes us fags and sex workers when the state of exception narrows (consider this sentence the Gothic, queer and thoroughly anarchistic thesis argument for “Understanding Vampires”). We can’t afford to be strictly material in our investigations of capital, because much of praxis (and its synthesis in our daily lives) comes from the social component of media; i.e., that is produced as much by workers as corporations.

Furthermore, in regards to Bad Empanada discounting the social aspect of things, he’s “doing a Superstructure,” himself; i.e., by making videos of such things on YouTube, but also insisting that all “online leftists” are Contrapoints clones, thus centrists. He does this while, in the same breath, asking for donations and, at the same time, saying really dumb shit like “social studies don’t matter” and “BDSM doctors aren’t real[1].” He’s good on postcolonial theory and its argumentation in academic forms, but incredibly closeted and ignorant about how things work outside his narrow sphere; i.e., to the point that he makes incredibly regressive and ultimately transphobic arguments, himself (see: footnote). Such “problematic” insinuations are oddly suitable, coming from someone who—apart from being a white, cis-het Australian expat/Marxist-Leninist with Maoist tendencies—looks and acts like an Amish person (or medieval friar, next page): a straight person “in the closet” insofar as he remains terminally ignorant of monstrous poetics and their proletarian, ludo-Gothic BDSM function (versus a classic “closet case,” meaning a queer person in denial about themselves as queer); i.e., all while turning a blind eye to his own hypocrisies and knowledge gaps outside of postcolonial studies (e.g., Bad Empanada’s double standard—of vocally hating Americans regardless if they agree with their nation or not[2], while he himself comes from Australia). It’s all he knows, and he acts like gender studies and activism can’t merge with postcolonialism and Marxism in any meaningful sense (something that plenty of straight boys can do; he’s just a bad ally and historian, styling himself “inflammatory” but really enflamed like a hemorrhoid to infectiously attack more vulnerable parties: a used diaper full of shit).

(source: Fandom)

You don’t want to judge a book by its cover but instead should go after its arguments, and I generally avoid attacking Bad Empanada’s appearance because it’s usually not relevant to his arguments; his behavior towards me is—i.e., his good works and talented scholarship weighed against his sheer and total stupidity regarding sex work and an-Com activism. But given his total disdain towards an-Coms (and BDSM practitioners with academic backgrounds), I will gleefully point out that—as someone making Puritanical, fash-style SWERF arguments like he does (next page)—Bad Empanada certainly looks the part! My man has zero rizz!

Furthermore, he’s far less understanding about social topics that someone like Jessie Gender understands and practices on a daily basis—i.e., despite Jessie being wrong about Palestine and Bad Empanada being correct (re: “Jessie Gender Should Delete Her Zionist Propaganda Video Immediately,” 2024), those two things don’t cancel each other out; Jessie is still wrong about Palestine and right about gender issues, and Bad Empanada is still cloistered, never interacting with said persons except when they sell out, to then use that to discount everything that Jessie ever argued for while trumpeting his own work and Marxist-Leninism at large! He’s cherry-picking with a meat ax—rigid about postcolonialism (which is good), but also Puritanically about gender studies and sex work (which is bad); i.e., in ways that self-report on where he actually stands (with the state, thus against queerness). Needs more nuance, mate!

Also, I detect a lot of middle-class resentment on your end; but, if you detest Jessie for selling out to Israel, how is your calling for universal Puritanical censorship of discussions of sexuality any better? Two wrongs don’t make a right (nor does abstinence make you “holy” any more than Mao was celibate[3]). In short, it’s epic cringe, the virgin Marxist-Leninist (above) vs the Chad an-Com:

(artists: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu)

Responding to Bad Empanada’s arguments, I had to explain that, yes, I am real—am both a BDSM doctor, trans person and sex worker, but also practicing leftist (though not on YouTube, for the most part)—doing so in my initial response to our (thankfully short) exchange:

Bad Empanada: “People who talk about sex constantly and openly like it’s their main interest must be dealt with. Make it taboo again.”

Me: “As a sex worker, activist and BDSM doctor, I’m not sure how to feel, here. XD”

Bad Empanada: “‘BDSM doctor.’ That’s not a fucking thing. Jesus Christ.”

Me: “I’m an independent researcher, but wrote my postgraduate work on the Gothic, ludology, Marxism and BDSM. I have multiple books out about sex positivity and BDSM. Kind of an odd mix, but BDSM is absolutely a part of the work that I do. And you’re right, I don’t have an office or work at university, but I do come from an academic background that branched off into non-academic work that I’m trying to share with people to help make others more sex-positive and left-leaning in the fight towards liberation for different marginalized groups sexualized under capital.

I should add that I don’t engage with minors (no minors/minors DNI, per the usual sex worker style), and the vast majority of my work is on my 18+ website (which I can’t even link to on YouTube). I think your post is referring to sex pests on YouTube whose young audiences they prey off of while calling themselves leftists, which I agree, is entirely wrong. My work is basically entirely off-site, and while I view it as strictly educational and made for purposes of satire and critique based my academic and non-academic (extracurricular) work, it’s something I predominantly discuss with other sex workers” (source YouTube community post, Bad Empanada: August 15th, 2024).

This is all true; I have an 18+ website dedicated to an-Com theory and practice through Gothic poetics and labor exchanges, including currently three (soon to be four) books written on the subject. So, being told that I “wasn’t real” by a smug SWERF postcolonialist really stuck in my craw! Like, how would you know, dude? There are more things between Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy!

Simply put, my guy hit a nerve. His statement pissed me off for two reasons: one, it’s total horseshit on its face; and two, it was made in a thread where he was already calling for the taboo silence of all discussions about sex while talking with a bunch of weirdos who already agreed with him (the blind leading the blind, in this case). It’d be like if someone said, “People who talk about [Palestinians] constantly and openly like it’s their main interest must be dealt with. Make it taboo again,” only to have someone say in response, “as a [doctor of Palestinian studies], I’m not sure how to feel, here,” for him to end with, “[‘Palestinian studies doctor’] That’s not a fucking thing. Jesus Christ.”

First of all, go fuck yourself. Second, just because you have a huge fucking blind spot in your area of research doesn’t mean that something is “worthless”; it just means you have a knowledge gap and don’t know how to quantify or reconcile BDSM, sex work or gender studies with the Global South. Your ignorance feels pretty willful, all the more frustrating given that it (and your arrogance) come from someone who should know better but chooses to scapegoat, exploit and otherwise profit off a dehumanizing view of sex workers and BDSM. You know the motto for BDSM is “hurt, not harm,” right?

Third, Bad Empanada’s argument is unironic Stalinist rhetoric; i.e., “lock up the degenerate sex criminals,” meaning anyone who talks about sex (except him, calling for pogroms)—something he’s been dogwhistling and pedaling to his paying audience on his second channel. Put a pin in that for now. We’ll get back to it when we discuss Chelyabinsk-40 in “Leaving the Closet.”

Note: I’m trying to find a balance between fairness and firmness—being rough and soft in my criticism as needed (strict and gentle, in BDSM terms). Part of me feels like the fag tickling the straight monk with the pink feather duster while crying, “Have at you!” before turning heel and saying, “Now go away or I will taunt you a second time!” But regardless of how exactly I burst his smug, much-to-learn bubble, know that Bad Empanada’s methods concerning activism and gender studies remain, such as they are, clumsy at best and pernicious and exclusionary at worst. Just know that—concerning his massive ego, big mouth and colossal hypocrisy/academic blind spots—we’ll be taking our time with him (the polemic concentrating mostly in this opening and in part zero). —Perse

(model and artist: Blxxd Bunny and Persephone van der Waard)

To add to that, one thing that I or my work (Gothic [gay-anarcho] Communism) most definitely is not is Marxist-Leninism. Gotta yuck that yum, comrade (from Volume One):

Our liberation is meant to be gradual, occurring through a proletarian Gothic imagination that is grown over time, and whose careful cultivation stems from a collective intelligence/awareness that is explicitly developed to function as anarcho-Communist, not Marxist-Leninist (or other socio-political and -economic arrangements that remain prone to the historical abuses of state power as a vertical, thus harmful, configuration).

Though proletarian, Sex Positivity comes out of an abject past fraught with compromise, the “state Socialism” of Marxist-Leninism becoming increasingly nominal (and abusive) under Capitalism; obviously we want to avoid that as much as we can while developing [Gothic] Communism outside of establishment politics (source).

The idea—as per usual during revolution—is teamwork, with me and my numerous friends’ and collaborators’ collective approach (see: the Acknowledgements to my published volumes, located in the very back of a given PDF) choosing to illustrate mutual consent; i.e., as a matter of praxial context targeting the Superstructure (re: hearts and minds).

Furthermore, as someone who is for (and does) sex work but stands against profit, rape/genocide and the state (which is conducive to all of these things), I’ve worked incredibly hard to distinguish myself as such/delegate for my kind while being an ally to other oppressed through similarity amid difference. So I always try to understand and learn from other scholars, expanding my understanding of Marxism, postcolonialism and gender studies; i.e., by helping those less fortunate than myself; e.g., homeless or housing-challenged people, sex workers, and yes, native populations (the sort states treat as universally expendable). Indeed, my partner Bay constitutes all three—is a disabled person throttled by the New Zealand government, a sex worker and Māori. Granted, the former categories might not be as exotic and “sexy” as helping foreigners getting bombs dropped on them, but the end result is the same: domination, rape and genocide.  All victims are valuable, and all can be helped at the same time through social and material practices: to act out and call attention to problems the way we feel is best, pushing towards liberation for all peoples.

By comparison, Bad Empanada—despite being oddly quick to use words like “rape” and “pedophile” in his thumbnails (e.g., “Milei Sends Delegation to Take Selfies with Rapists, Murderers,” 2024)—lacks the ability to treat such subjects with respect, nuance or skill. Lacking anything akin to a discerning and judicial touch (to go hard or soft), he’s like a bad (functionally white, cis-het) dom—utterly unequipped but ringing the alarm bell as hard as he can, asking for cash while telling others who talk about sex to shut up about it. As such, he enjoys his own double standard (talking about sex), acting like he’s the sole savior to administer blame and reap the rewards (monetizing said channel in frankly insensitive and gross ways); i.e., gender studies are worthless, with Bad Empanada speaking not just for queer people, but also cis-het people effected by conservative policies on both sides of the globe.

One, activism isn’t a contest. But also, maybe sexually abused workers (sex or otherwise) don’t want the weird, straight, expat Maoist speaking for them? Homeless people (which queer people often are) exist all over, my dude, be this impoverished nations, cities, or communities; but one thing we don’t do is rape rank. By comparison, you—someone who as far as I can tell, doesn’t know the first thing about sex work or sex-positive BDSM—were pretty dismissive of even acknowledging that I and my work exist; re: stating that BDSM doctors “aren’t real” (which again, is absurd, given this includes academics, but also sex therapists professionally trained in BDSM; but even in unpaid, unofficial, and/or non-state-certified capacities, BDSM practitioners and pornographers generally amass a knowledge base about BDSM that rivals their official therapeutic counterparts).

 

In short, Bad Empanada is basically Peele from Key & Peele‘s 2013 “Pussy on the Chainwax” skit, telling the slutty, just-as-educated-as-he-is an-Com that I’m “trying to start a thing”; i.e., “You’re not real and the work you do has no value,” echoing this sentiment within his usual belittling of sex work and BDSM used by actual rape victims, including myself and my own survival of such things—doing so to find some sense of control and healing in our own lives while synthesizing an-Com praxis at the same time (anywhere in the world, not just America)! BDSM isn’t universally fake, and its prime function isn’t to harm, but hurt in ways that heal by virtue of calculated risk. Tell that to Bad Empanada and he’d insist it’s all bullshit.

          To quote the Dude, “That’s just, like, your opinion, man.”

It sucks to find out that Bad Empanada is a giant Puritanical dick who thinks that because he’s a postcolonialist, this somehow excuses his outmoded, ignorant, hypocritical behaviors elsewhere. All the same, his actions also inspired me to think and respond to his incredibly dumb arguments, making a lengthy video response detailing years’ worth of work that I do (from the video description):

A trans-woman, an-Com BDSM expert/doctor (with PhD levels [years’ worth] of independent, inter community research), here, talking about why I think @BadEmpanadaLive often lacks a serious, nuanced (or even, at times, basic) understanding of sex work and the discussion of such things. I often enjoy his no-prisoners approach to postcolonialism and investigating sex pests in the YouTube sphere, but sometimes his clunky, sardonic sense of humor is dismissive to the point of bad praxis (this isn’t made to defame him or discredit the legitimately valuable work that he does, but to talk about his blind spots/rough edges in good faith) [source: Persephone van der Waard’s “‘I, Sex Doctor’: About Me, Ludo-Gothic BDSM, and the Work that I Do,” 2024].

Keeping all of this in mind, extensive modifications—to my vampire section and its study and execution of “sodomy dialogs” per vampirism—have occurred in direct response to Bad Empanada’s callous, ignorant, and frankly lame dismissal of Gothic poetics and BDSM at large; i.e., regressing to a cynical, joyless position about “sodomy” and BDSM that Marx arguably would have held himself (or Stalin).

P.S., Not all leftists online are on YouTube, Bad Empanada, and even those on YouTube aren’t all slaves to profit. Think about that while you try and peddle your dated and narrow, punitive view of BDSM (and Communism, if I’m honest), trying as you do to rope so many people who “talk about sex like it’s their main interest” into the same category as legitimate sex pests like Ian Kochinski.

P.P.S., Academic rivals are really important, and I wanted to say thank you to Bad Empanada—for sucking enough that you lit a fire under my ass to critique you! It’s really made me examine Marxist-Leninism and dislike it more than I already did; but also, to yield some fun scholarship regarding vampire Capitalism queerphobically damaging the environment per the state as straight, and Marxist-Leninism being an example of that which led to its own queerphobic abusing of nature-as-monstrous feminine (e.g., Chelyabinsk-40)! Thanks for being a piece of shit! Your Benny Morris to my Norm Finkelstein (for relative suckiness, not because you’re a Zionist)! —Perse

As this subchapter concerns knowledge as a matter of praxis, mid-debate between different political groups that both know stuff (re: Bad Empanada and I both know things, but are at odds), what is knowledge, then? From a Marxist perspective, knowledge is historical-material; from a Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communist perspective, knowledge is encapsulated in poetic expression whose history is predicated on dialectical-material arguments with and about monsters, including vampires (we’ll needle Bad Empanada and Marxist-Leninism, throughout).

Think about this in terms of blood, then—where it’s stored, by whom and what it contains. Stronger vampires canonically feed their slaves with lesser/diluted blood. But they themselves cannot fully control what blood contains. As a matter of epistemology through queer narratives, the meta contents of public knowledge and discourse started to not only shift, but avalanche in the 1970s; i.e., through the Superstructure as inundated with new scholarship and terminologies progressing into the neoliberal era. In turn, new media began to appear speaking to things not always conducive to profit or queer burial, being absorbed through those queer persons hungry for things speaking to them as queer but stuck in the closet. The wealth of increasingly sex-positive allegory began, if not to totally outweigh the bad, then at least to meet it in socio-material opposition.

To this, anything that concerns flow of vitality can effectively be called vampiric; e.g., Tolkien’s Ringwraiths leeching the life out of living things, imagined by someone whose ideas and refrains were mostly allergic to the Neo-Gothic of 150 years’ worth of material, up to that point. But this generality involves canon more broadly as a state-compelled position of ignorance seeking liberation inside of itself. The state needs us, not the other way around; we are, like Stevie Nicks, the mistress of our fates, making far-off things possible by dreaming them up in spite of state forces telling us what to think. You can’t force Communism, like Marxist-Leninism does; it must become second-nature on a ground level (which anarcho Communism is all about)! Or, as I write in Volume Zero (combing an-Com practices with Gothic elements:

It’s possible to still enjoy material culture during nerd sex as an extension or reclaiming of said culture (with someone or their partner wearing a t-shirt [or some such article] to tout their nerdy Gothic status as one’s trendy object of desire: the big-titty Goth GF as a stamp of, or stamped with, consumer pride that also contains cryptomimetic echoes of generational trauma inside of itself.

Dark desire, then, becomes something to compile and compound within various bondage and discipline exercises that, for all intents and purposes, constitute as “edging”—not the releasing of passion, but its prolonged storage until such a time as release is permitted by the one holding the reins). Indeed, enjoyment isn’t divorced from capital and monetization, but we can develop and raise cultural awareness and interconnectivity in meaningful ways while still getting to be the fantasies that Capitalism normally alienates us from (the unicorn not as a manmade, sequestered entity but one that is hidden behind paywalls, the resultant manufactured scarcity granting it a rare, mythical appearance and appreciating value—compelled orgasms, aka “sad cum”); i.e., established through the artwork we make and games that we play as a second-nature mode of altered existence: self-definition as a basic human right that is quickly and readily understood at an intuitive level. It becomes a child-like curiosity and teaching that extends into adulthood, carrying Gothic Communism forward through workers [not the state] dictating the Gothic mode; i.e., their cultivating of emotional/Gothic intelligence (source).

(artist: The Maestro Noob)

Such is vampirism; i.e., a closeted, thoroughly queer position told through artistic, community positions of vulnerability and hunger that, themselves, have repeatedly evolved to survive under state duress. Changing constantly and drastically over the years (re: Lockhart, vis-à-vis Romero’s zombies—inspired by Matteson’s zombie-vampires—as comprising socio-material critiques of Capitalism through the Gothic mode), all have done so according to popular legends stuck in a tug-o’-war existence; i.e., routinely revisited according to new feelings of dissatisfaction with capital and its neoliberal ordering of things/failure to deliver on basic promises (extending to Marxist-Leninism and queer people). Thus new visits to older hauntological sites bring fresh knowledge regarding older post’s positions of ignorance while tumbling towards truth; e.g., Alien: Romulus (2024) following Alien: Isolation (2014) as traveling towards Alien‘s 1979 archaeology as more class-conscious than Aliens‘ was, in 1986 onwards; i.e., from Marxist-Leninism’s latent homophobia towards anarcho Communism as a far more sexual, Gothic and queer mode of praxis.

We’ll articulate this as follows:

• Part zero (included in this post) starts with a basic history primer on vampires from my chosen starting point—the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s with a combination of popular-to-academic works, vis-à-vis Halford, Rice, Foucault and Butler—to briefly examine the history of sodomy and queer love per the feeding mechanism of vampires; i.e., from homosexual men, to (oft-)female commercializations of said men, followed by GNC language having evolved parallel to binarized normative currents that gradually give rise to liberatory forms of camp taking it all back in more recent times: after such ideas were medicalized, made academic, and finally released into public spheres, to then disseminate and spread for or against the state. We’ll also critique latent queerphobia in Marxist-Leninism (re: Bad Empanada) and academic, queer shortcomings/tokenism through an an-Com lens, and consider some of the larger historical-material currents leading up to the 1970s and beyond.
• Once you have your sea legs, part one shall explore sodomy and queerness beyond that glittering historical period; i.e., through a trans woman’s quest for knowledge built on said bedrock, considering the ways in which understanding “sodomy” and “vampirism” formulated for me, and can develop and grow for you, too. Part one shall suitably provide some general poetic concepts to bear in mind; i.e., defining sodomy more closely while regarding the vampire’s seeking of prey and feeding on them through anisotropic “sodomy dialogs” of power flow and criminal application. After that, we examine some anecdotal examples between myself, my work and various experiences with and epiphanies concerning queer persecution I have experienced across my life; i.e., while closing various knowledge gaps regarding vampiric poetics and texts; e.g., Brotherhood of the Wolf, Wicked, postpunk, crazy exes, and of course, Interview with the Vampire and Anne Rice. Tokenized elements will be addressed, as well, and specialized scholarship I coined while coming out of the closet; i.e., while recently expanding on this portion; e.g., Capitalism’s abuse of the environment being queerphobic, including in Soviet Russia.
• All shall segue into our close-reads in part two, those of Alice in Borderland and The Darkest Dungeon tackling and interrogating Capitalism’s vampiric, prison-like predatory qualities through both stories.

There’s also the crash course that precedes “Understanding Vampires,” wherein “Undead Feeding Vectors, part one” talks about our research focus and history surrounding vampires, BDSM, and liberation through an-Com queer camp under persecutory conditions (with sodomy comparable to witch hunts in state eyes). Make sure you familiarize yourself with it so you have an idea of what vampires even are and how we’ll be tackling them going forwards. 

P.S., This piece was written deliberately without citing Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, despite her expertise. I’m doing this for reasons I’ve already written about, so I’ll just repeat them again, here; re (from “‘Monsters, Magic and Myth’: Modularity and Class,” 2024):

Furthermore, I have plenty of academics to refer to so I’m not going to cite Ní Fhlainn on principle! Per my friend Sandy Norton’s words (someone who actually treated me like a person and not an international student to grit their teeth at): “Rather than ‘needing to invoke’ Foucault, I choose to apply Foucault because of the speculative richness such application offers” (source: “The Imperialism of Theory: A Response to J. Russell Perkin,” 1994). I’m using the same mechanism to intentionally omit Ní Fhlainn and say my own piece about vampires (while invoking Foucault, of course); i.e., because a) my arguments are rich enough on their own with the sources I already have and artwork and muses already involved, and b) I find speaking for myself far more liberating instead of suffering Sorcha speaking for me through their own gentrified texts. To be blunt, my arguments straight up don’t need Ní Fhlainn for me to talk to my friends/associates about vampires in a class-conscious way that actually helps sex workers. Fuck ’em! (source).

This isn’t for fortune or fame, but to help people and enjoy the praxial heft of the vampire legend serving workers first—and for free, not for $145 like Ní Fhlainn’s overpriced book. Activism and scholarship isn’t something you paywall.

P.P.S., I won’t stress it too much moving forwards, but “monstrous-feminine” is synonymous with “sodomy,” “vampirism” and “problematic love,” and the canonical terror tactics that historically unfold preying on nature-as-monstrous-feminine through police/tokenized prison-to-gang violence serving profit, as always! —Perse

Understanding Vampires, part zero: A Vampire History Primer; or, a Latter-Day Conceptualization of Vampirism, from the 1970s Onwards (feat. Bad Empanada, Rob Halford, Anne Rice, Foucault, Judith Butler, and more)

“Time is on my side. In a century when you are dust I shall awake and call Lucy my queen from her grave. I have had many brides, Mr. Harker, but I shall set Lucy above them all!”

—Dracula (starring Frank Langella), Dracula (1979)

(artist: Robert Ingpen)

First up in “Understanding Vampires,” we arrive at our vampire history primer (not to be confused with the crash course, which tries to introduce the wide spectrum of what vampires [and witches] are, and how we’ll study and focus on them). This history considers aspects of queer/problematic (monstrous-feminine) love from the 1970s onwards (and bits and pieces before that point); i.e., “sodomy” being a witch-hunt accusation to hurl by state forces, but also an activity to camp during ludo-Gothic BDSM practiced by an-Coms. It’s merely the start of a position I would expect you to build on—a chance to get your wicks, toes (or anything else) wet regarding revolutionary positions of queerness; i.e., studying (and at times) obsessing over wild animal men, as well as their various female and intersex offshoots, but also their monstrous cousins (werewolves) that would be used in various socio-political dialogs rising to prominence in the 1980s (during the AIDs crisis) onwards: Satanic Panic. This is our starting point, one to explore a great many things that are built on it versus older aspects to vampiric poetic history that others have talked about in older times already (re: Matteson).

Note: I will summarize and reference these histories, moving forwards, so you needn’t pore over this portion too thoroughly. They’re provided merely as a good foundation, one we’ll build and expand on, ourselves. Also, my usual argument—of capital raping nature-as-monstrous-feminine per the dialectic of the alien to move money through nature—applies just as well to vampires and sodomy arguments made by state forces. —Perse

Top to bottom (so to speak), the vampire history primer leads off with a few pages of prep; then, examines homosexual men in the 1970s, followed by female/queer appropriation—and ultimately their expansion and acquisition of the same language around the same time—to allow for increasingly GNC voices camping/taking back the same stuff, ourselves, in the ’80s, ’90s, and beyond (and informed by the very things leading up to the 1970s, which we’ll also unpack, albeit to a lesser extent). It’s chronological, so you should be able to track it from topic change to topic change; it’s also fairly short (given its scope), so take what we discuss here and run with it, yourselves. Last but not least, a bit of a tangent occurs—about seven pages in the middle—concerning Marxist-Leninism’s ongoing and pervasive queerphobia[4a]; i.e., stuffed between Foucault and Creed while articulating the importance of holding past leaders and thinkers accountable; re: camping Marx’ ghost, thus Socialism and Communism’s spectres at large!

Furthermore, when cracking open these older ideas, try to remember how the availability of information about vampires (and those they poetically represent) is constantly updating and transforming under duress; i.e., as it pertains to the kinds of public knowledge that would color and inform media from the 1970s into the neoliberal period, thus my own work and interpretations parallel to all queer people and their enemies and allies (which part one will get to).

In short, proletarian vampirism is burdened with knowledge gaps, the latter powering its canonical, police-like function; i.e., bourgeois vampirism cannot work unless people are as ignorant about vampires as they are about sex, gender and BDSM history at large (re: Bad Empanada). By comparison, popular media refers to what we consume—not simply to offset what is publicly discouraged in academia, the sciences, and other official channels/discourse/capacities, but what extends the conversation into spheres the state cannot monopolize: the Superstructure.

As per our initial prep, then, I want spend several more pages articulating not just why we’re sticking with the 1970s onwards, but the overbearing elements of sex, gender and ancient history that routinely pop up when such monsters manifest at any historical point in time. Then—starting with Halford—we’ll jump into increasingly aware, sex-positive and language-rich centers for such conversations to unfold, leading into the current state of affairs!

The reason we’re focusing on/starting with the 1970s is saturation of knowledge, this decade being the flash point for when and where things really started to gel and, all at once, take off; i.e., from an academic standpoint married to ethical and medical, but also poetic debates, all of them happening in the public sphere (thus Superstructure). Everything teetered on the cusp of the neoliberal period, and set the stage for the sorts of sexualized, gendered and performative debates that would come to define the 21st century as we know it.

In turn, though, such debates remain haunted by ancient anchors of sexuality, gender, race and class pertaining to how such language is even applied and considered, mid-debate. Simply put, monsters collocate.

For instance (and for better or worse)—and outside of witches, Pagan elements and various historical exceptions (e.g., the ancient female poet, Sappho)—queer history in the West (and its Gothic dialogs for canon or camp) start predominantly with homosexual men being given the stage first; i.e., from the rhetors of Antiquity onto Shakespeare’s stage plays, followed by Walpole and Lewis onto Dracula. Yes, Le Fanu had Stoker beat by over twenty years, but this story (and its female vampire, Carmilla) was still informed by male homosexuals being medicalized by Carl Westphal in 1870 (finally upstaged by Rice, over a century later), and homosexual men generally being accused of sodomy by the prejudiced public because they could be attacked in court as legal subjects; i.e., as property owners[4b], whereas women were historically persecuted as witches, thus the disobedient property of men.

To it, witches historically tend to align with feminism reclaiming their lost histories and generations; vampires and werewolves, with queerness. We can certainly combine these performances and stances, but doing so (as we shall see) is something done well after the 1970s.

Of course, such distinctions might ultimately seem academic, insofar as witch hunts against witches for practicing “witchcraft,” pogroms against gay man for practicing “sodomy” (again, referred to as “sodomites” far more often than women), and trans people for doing both all unto themselves each and collectively yield the same disastrous and divisive effects (rape the monstrous-feminine/nature-as-alien). But they still historically have unfolded along monetary and other material lines that not only tokenize, but come with our aforementioned male historical bias; i.e., according to a straight man’s place in society taking precedent over women and gay men alike (say nothing of slaves, non-Christians; Indigenous people and those of color, disabled and/or GNC, etc).

As such, whereas the female (or at least straight) seductor has something of a “Mrs. Robinson” wish fulfillment/guilty pleasure vibe (a concept we’ll unpack much more in Volume Three, Chapter Two), the male seductor as queer (subversive or not) is pathologized much more harshly in medical and juridical spheres because he a) doesn’t have a vagina, ovaries or a uterus, thus isn’t worth the trouble of converting “back” into a straight man; b) would be considered a person long before AFAB parties were; and c) presented, among the courts, a rising threat to the heteronormative male image more directly by debasing its “sacred” function: something to penetrate others with righteously. All oppressed face oppression, and tokenization happens to every group, but the above qualities inform a pernicious and deeply entrenched historical distrust and expendability of male queers dogpiled by other oppressed parties. We’re men in dresses, serial killers, etc, and AFAB parties (cis or not) historically triangulate against us for the state.

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

Regarding the selective punishment that goes into canonical sodomy and vampirism at large, there’s a strange, heteronormative, Man-Box double standard/tolerance regarding vampirism and pornography. A biologically essential component exists that likewise links biology to gender and treats sex and gender as one-in-the-same. In turn, AMABs are historically treated with lethal force under the law, and AFABs are fetishized, imprisoned and raped. AFAB vampires are historically brides, lesbians and/or bisexual unicorn-like whores, whereas AMABs become “men in dresses” invading women’s spaces (though can certainly be feminized and whored out; e.g., twinks and femboys).

Both, in truth, involve the monstrous-feminine fetishization, rape and murder of the accused being chased by straight mobs hungry for blood (and tokenized layers following suit inside the same caramel union). But AFABs are seen as “more valuable” in a PIV sense—i.e., heteronormative sex objects to exploit for their so-called “positive” sexual value (something for cis-het men to masturbate to or literally fuck)—whereas AMAB treatment is more punitive, historically used when calling for violence against queer parties (usually male): to rape them prison-style with a foreign object (thus avoid accusations of queerness, oneself; e.g., “it’s not gay if it’s a stake”).

From a canonical standpoint, AFAB are “more valuable,” thus are fought over as such per the canonical laws—canonically reclaimed like mistresses or rescued in some perverse promotion/preservation of the nuclear family unit; AMAB are more expendable, thus put out down like dogs, cleansed like a disease, or otherwise blamed for the fall of civilization (female exceptions to this “apocalypse scapegoat rule” simply treat them like witches, not damsels; i.e., phallic women and Archaic Mother demons; e.g., the Whore of Babylon).

In short, bodies are policed and imprisoned in ways that pit many different groups against each other for the state. When reclaiming them by “flashing” the public (a misnomer given such nudity is generally made at controlled venues or established sites of protest), sex workers and queer people are both trying to survive, making a living and do praxis through artistic exhibitions! They’re not doing it to be excoriated and ostracized by other workers (re: Bad Empanada)! —Perse

(artist: Hiddend8)

While such a dialog is arguably as old as queer people at large—and we could look at the 1870s and rise of terms like “homosexual” into the public sphere—I want to skip ahead a hundred years; i.e., would like to apply the above historically sexualized and gendered elements to when queer activism crystalized vis-à-vis Gothic academia, second wave feminism and the rise of GNC-inclusive gender studies—all leading unto the popularizing of the vampire legend as it presently exists (and for which our close-reads in “Vampires, part two” shall hinge upon): the 1970s.

So while rape and queerness synonymize in the eyes of those who conflate the two, over time—and especially after the 1960s and into the ’70s when words like “transsexual,” “transvestite” and “transgender” had at long last appeared—the male vampire became increasingly stigmatic, Satanic-Panic code for the homosexual man (and by extension anything incorrectly female/feminine); i.e., as a destroyer of societal norms and spreader of disease, but also forbidden, closeted, xenophilic/guilty pleasure tied to rock ‘n roll, fast cars (the death race and its nostalgic musical fanfare; e.g., 1996’s Twisted Metal 2[5]), bad boys, easy girls, disco, musicals and British heavy metal Gothicism, etc.

Per the process of the abjection romancing the middle class through the ghost of the counterfeit, all of the above collapsed into the poetic forerunner for Satanic Panic and the AIDs crisis, in the 1980s; e.g., Dr. Frankenfurter and the Goth rock opera of 1975 (and Phantom of the Paradise, from 1974) as a then-latter-day Americana resurgence of rockabilly “dark” wish fulfillment imported from “elsewhere” and remade at home in lucrative, quasi-rebellious forms (with actual rebellious energies): from Meat Loaf to Pulp Fiction to Overwatch‘s D.va in her nostalgic car mech. The future is cancelled, regardless, and we an-Com queers must rise to the challenge on the same monstrous stages.

(artist: Bobcow)

Keeping such prep in mind, this brings us to the meat of the primer (so to speak)—starting off with homosexual men, wrapped in leather and rocking out alongside Curry’s Frankenfurter[6] (the “transsexual transvestite from Transylvania” using some of those aforementioned medical terms we talked about, married to Stoker’s Dracula and Shelley’s Frankenstein to give rise to [white] queer rage. Fighting to escape the closet, the 1970s were an angry time to be “here and queer,” only to have the same cruising peoples ignominiously spit-roasted; i.e., as a kind of awful neoliberal spectacle, enacted the state while that terrible disease ravished gay activists’ bodies[7])!

Starting with AMABs, then, those hauntologies outlined above also extend to Rob Halford; i.e., as a closeted gay man working in the burgeoning 1970s NWOBHM scene—specifically of the “leather daddy” type, codified by Tom of Finland (next page) as primarily a white man’s homoeroticism tied to gay club life, mil spec, and music culture (with such “disco dialogs” being a common place to hold court/masquerade at a public level concerning state abuse). While such striving—to reify male queer loneliness expressed paradoxically through “monster mash” party music and “boogie”-men (e.g., “the vampire musical” from Forgetting Sarah Marshall, 2009; or Brian David Gilbert’s Hee Bee Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive, Performed by a Vampire,” 2022)—is entirely valid, Lahti M. writing how the archetype/aesthetic is canonically tied to fascism; re:

the multiplicity of power and for ambivalent interaction of resistance and oppression in Tom’s drawings. Tom’s pictures draw attention to an idea, derived from Michel Foucault, that power and resistance are to be found in one and the same place. Although ways in which these images are used may give rise to subversive meanings they also circulate racist, sexist, and fascist discourses that contradict their potentially radical meanings. Indeed, the problem with the transgressive pleasures is that transgression may help to sustain the limits that are supposed to be crossed and deconstructed by a transgressor (source: Lahti M’s “Dressing Up in Power: Tom of Finland and Gay Male Body Politics,” 1998).

(source: The Art Newspaper’s “Tom of Finland’s Bulging Beefcake Drawings Unveiled in London,” 2020)

I mean, just look at the aesthetic: gay muscle with a mil spec ghost (the KISS-style sex police-rebel schtick) that can just as easily tokenize for the state in decay as not; i.e., queer sexiness as stylish and tied to a die-hard cult of death (that certainly had a self-hating/martyred flavor shortly before and during the AIDS crisis). Such things are anisotropic, of course, but the temptation (and historical precedence; e.g., the LBGA) for tokenization, faux-medievalism, remains!

In Rob’s case, he—as a leather daddy (dom or sub, I am not sure)—was wailing magnificently about alienation (“Beyond the Realms of Death,” 1978) and fearsome vampires and Jack the Ripper (with gay men classically being likened to serial killers) some twenty-odd years before Halford actually came out as gay (“The Ripper” released in 1976; Halford came out in 1998)!

According to Foucault’s A History of Sexuality, Volume One (1980), though, sex was generally attached to activities, not identities before the 19th century and didn’t even delineate to a separate concept, sexual orientation, until 1870 (common exceptions being the Amazon, hag and witch, and various other monsters [and the living people associated with them] as relegated to the dark, unspeakable imaginary space of the Gothic mode):

This new persecution of the peripheral sexualities entailed an incorporation of perversions and a new specification of individuals. As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. [… by Carl Westphal’s publication of Archiv für Neurologie in 1870, whereas the] sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species (source).

Taboo activities like sodomy became “crimes against nature” tied to a “new species” that, before this point, simply didn’t exist in terms of open medical discourse; after this point, these crimes (or rather, their hyperbolic, witch-hunt-style function when making allegations regardless of evidence) became increasingly visible in the medical field, but also in Gothic canon as open, synchronistic forms of public, discursive record: the homosexual[8] as dangerous to a middle-class audience, initially with Le Fanu’s lesbian-tinged Carmilla in 1872 (next page) onto Bram Stoker’s 1897 anti-Semitic[9] image of the male vampire standing over the maiden’s bed to threaten her boobies (and other parts) with unspeakable penetration! It’s a literally a morality-play argument through monster panic built on top of older forms!

This is classic abjection, of course, canonically projecting such things onto an ethnic minority and a later an openly queer-coded one; e.g., with Father Schedoni from Radcliffe’s Italian preparing to stab what’s-her-name in the boob while she slept, or Lewis’ Ambrosio camping the idea in The Monk with his “beauteous orb” scene, then proceeding onto Carmilla, Dracula and a million other copycats that lost all irony previously afforded to them; i.e., xenophobically threatening the state apparatus of women owned by men, including gay men in the closet (or not).

(artist: David Henry Friston)

To this, capital has defended itself in ways that routinely decay feminism and the monstrous-feminine (queerness and punk, etc) through ambiguously gay (or at least heteroflexible) thinkers that belong to societal positions bringing with them a fair degree of privilege—Foucault, of course, but also Angela Carter focusing on white women (similar to Beauvoir before her, vis-à-vis “woman is other” being a cis- and white supremacist device); i.e., “women” excluding anything else to treat the monstrous-feminine as a symbol of violence that Barbara Creed unironically attached to Freudian psychoanalysis (re: “Medusa’s Head,” 1922).

Like, girl… why? Freud, like Foucault, had some useful ideas, but the man himself was a giant homophobic quack (an Austrian cokehead that synonymized psychosexual development and the nuclear family [thus the home] with straight-up rape and violence).

We’ll return to Creed and her additions to vampiric scholarship in just a moment. Selective reading remains important to scholarly synthesis and an-Com praxis. I’d like to go on a (roughly seven-page—eleven if you include footnotes) tangent unpacking that, vis-à-vis my throwing in a critique of Marxist-Leninism (and Bad Empanada). —Perse

Oddly enough, so was Foucault, preying on his own group, homosexual men, while obviously synonymizing their shared orientation as something to weaponize against his assorted victims; i.e., his thinking placed him on a pedestal he then used to prey on less-advantaged members in the same larger communities (the student body and neighboring areas); re, Foucault’s posthumously published 1993 interview with Edmund White:

I wasn’t always smart; I was actually very stupid in school [T]here was a boy who was very attractive who was even stupider than I was. And in order to ingratiate myself with this boy who was very beautiful, I began to do his homework for him – and that’s how I became smart, I had to do all this work to just keep ahead of him a little bit, in order to help him. In a sense, all the rest of my life I’ve been trying to do intellectual things that would attract beautiful boys (source).

In short, Foucault decayed (and in more ways than one—bad joke), starting to feed on his own kind while selling them out; i.e., through a problematic legacy that would haunt the queer world for years to come (said world doing their best to camp their holocaust in the shadows: taking the language Foucault tainted back from his ghost and building on it to liberate themselves [all queer peoples, not just homosexual cis men] with).

The expression “don’t throw stones in glass houses” leaps to mind. As an intellectual celebrity and gay maverick dying of AIDS, Foucault (and his ghost) became free to s(t)ate his perverse, sex-coercive addictions in public, thus were archived as a form of discourse on the subject of queer expression; i.e., operating in ways he academically explored only so far as it benefited his predation: as the academic darling enjoying the maverick status so long as he left the state alone (re: Swain). He did so despite his various nuggets of truth and usual productive theories about prison abuse and queer (male-homosexual) alienation. They formed together, thus require careful effort when separating as a matter of praxis moving forwards.

So while Capitalism’s traumatizing of workers leads us to form or otherwise acquire strange appetites—i.e., that historically pushes workers of various kinds and creeds to prey on ourselves for profit (often encouraging pre-existing stereotypes that lead to police violence all over again)—we shouldn’t lean into those appetites in a sex-coercive way nor defend those who did! This is very much a case of practicing what you preach as, itself, being a work-in-progress, hence needing workers (which scholars are) to actually admit when they’re wrong.

Leading by example, I’ve spent the past three (soon to be four) books critiquing the monstrous-feminine as Amazonian in ways that must be liberated from such narrow utilizations of sex and force for the state; i.e., the revenge of women—narrowly defined as white and straight, in the mid-1970s into the present, by second wave feminists seeing queerness as yet-another threat to foist onto the dark xenomorphic entity called “sodomy”: as something to punch, not humanize.

In short, right around the time Carter, Rice and Moers were cutting their teeth, feminists started to raise their own moral panics, decaying into lobotomized versions of “state vampirism”; i.e., little vampires serving the Man per dualities of monstrous language and the terrorist/counterterrorist dichotomy the proletariat cannot cease, merely subvert; e.g., me camping people like Janice Raymond (more on them in a moment), but also academia’s less obviously problematic darlings from the 1970s onwards (as well as Marx and older bigoted nerds).

As such, Gothic Communists must camp our own rape through uphill dialogs with ghosts (of Freud, Marx, Foucault, etc), treating nothing as sacred but basic human rights for all oppressed groups (and those of animals and the environment); i.e., by anisotropically taking what is socio-materially useful from older forms, then building on that by camping their canonical iterations; i.e., to “make them gay” as an-Coms do as a matter of survival: to explain (to our critics) how turning a blind eye to vampires and older problematic theory about them is to turn a blind eye to much of the world and how it works beyond material analysis alone.

For example, Bad Empanada—a Marxist-Leninist with Maoist leanings—is pretty much stone blind to the social-sexual aspect of Communist development and monstrous-feminine dialogs; i.e., to the fact that GNC people exist in the Global South and that they use social media to express themselves as queer and/or sex workers, thus monstrous in ways comparable to their northern cousins.

In turn, he’s blind towards sense and sensibility as combined; i.e., with themselves and Gothic poetics, but also work with sex. Sex workers are historically raped by the state and discounted by other activists and schools thereof, including Marxist-Leninism (which historically focuses on factory workers, not sex work). He really needs to check his privilege/ego[10] and re-examine the queerphobic, “do gay stuff later/never” history of his own movement (which we’ll unpack in this tangent), but also locate a little more nuance when it comes to social studies, BDSM and his sex-negative stances on them; i.e., his inability to talk about these things with any degree of subtly or consideration for the victims.

I’m not blind to the realities of discussing genocide and sexualized police-style settler-colonial violence in a frank and straightforward manner—i.e., to raise funds for a valid and incredibly time-sensitive cause—but slapping “rape” in big cartoon letters on all of your thumbnails, and then acting like the smartest person in the room because you have the material side of things down pat, feels not just monumentally insensitive and crass, but also superior and full-of-yourself:

As someone who writes about rape therapy and treatment but also prevention all the time, herself, I get the paradox of needing to discuss taboo subjects in ways that get people’s attention (and no one, I think, has ever accused me of acting subtle about it); but Bad Empanada’s approach, again, feels incredibly tone deaf and white-savior to the actual victims being harmed—not middle-class people like me, but rape victims all around the world, North or South!

He might turn right back around and respond, “Does it matter? They’re being bombed and it needs to stop!” And I would agree, the bombing does need to stop (and Israel completely dismantled, America [and all nation-states] defanged, etc). But all the same, Bad Empanada’s words “People who talk about sex constantly and openly like it’s their main interest must be dealt with. Make it taboo again” is right there on the screen (above)—once more showing his double standards at play and prioritizing of quick-and-dirty money through blunt-force methods that champion a single group of people through his usual, take-no-prisoners style.

This unto itself feels thoroughly less offensive on its own, but it utterly withers on the vine once we take his callousness towards sex work and dismissal of queer rights (through open dialogs about sex, including rape/sex abuse) into consideration; re: “make it taboo again” unless he’s doing it for what he thinks is important; i.e., “my cause is valid” (even though he’s not Palestinian, female and/or queer) and “I can do this for one group, but you can’t speak for yourself or others.” In my opinion, such selection and superiority does far more harm than good. It’s a huge red flag (and one that Communist states historically have contributed towards; the state commits rape by design, especially against gay people).

Furthermore, from one perennially sarcastic, middle-class, over-educated person to another, babe, you can play at Edward Said[11] without stooping to such abrasiveness, calumny and canard, or in-fighting alienating yourself from other activists and victims; i.e., optics actually kind of matter when discussing rape/sexual assault, and we middle-class fags (also hailing from the Imperial Core, like you do) aren’t your enemy in this situation—the state is.

Banging on a drum and shouting “rape!” then—i.e., loudly and over and over while being quick to discredit others for largely cosmetic reasons you yourself share[12] while implying you aren’t of their ilk/aren’t queer thus overly concerned with “pure social issues” (as you yourself openly state). Yet in doing so, you write off, tone-police and otherwise dismiss others who demonstrably know more far more than you do in specific fields. It’s possible to do good work and bad in any expertise; your one-track mind just makes you seem vain and Icarian, but also like you really don’t understand what it’s like to be queer/raped, yourself.

I could be wrong in that respect—and if I am I thoroughly apologize, one queer person and rape victim to another—but you really don’t sound like one; you sound like a straight man on a high horse playing white savior through queerphobic Marxist obscurantism (with BDSM code for Communists, but also gay people and Nazis; i.e., the Russian state being infamously unfriendly to queer people from Tchaikovsky to Mikhail Kuzmin to Vladimir Nabokov, father and son). Moving to Argentina doesn’t change that, nor does citing Said, Mao or anyone else in the academic world (the latter using his librarian’s acquisition of older theories to apply them in ways I don’t think Marx would have signed off on). Alienation of your peers is likewise something you want to avoid, lest you keep putting your foot in your mouth. Indeed, you could learn from Said, himself (see: last footnote), but also Mao, Stalin, and many others of the Marxist-Leninist school; i.e., from their mistakes, including to tailor a less drab, more colorful, queer-friendly approach.

(artist: Yevgeny Fiks; source: “Outcasts: The Last Queer Soviet Generation,” 2024)

To that, try to understand that it is both possible to be right and wrong at the same time (as you often are); e.g., Beethoven was right, but not always (see: Napoleon; re: John Clubbe)—he was also a massive prick who alienated just about everyone around him. And Stalin, despite outlawing homosexuality in the Union, had a pedophile best friend who raped little girls for fun (Behind the Bastard’s “Part One: Beria: Stalin’s Pedophile Cop & the Soviet Oppenheimer,” 2024). In either case, denouncing or otherwise poo-pooing such critiques by focusing on what your political/academic rivals’ actual or perceived flaws are (attached to their queer character, as you so often do) is, itself, thoroughly bad praxis.

In other words, the less time we spend fighting each other to split hairs (with you being the proverbial bee in my bonnet), the more we can focus on more important things like development for all peoples—united, not divided and attacking ourselves. Simply put, while we fags like a good fight—humbling lone-wolf cis-het dickheads such as yourself while tearing you a new asshole (“Get ’em, girl!” says Ginger, watching from the sidelines)—it’s both incredibly tiresome and annoying to have to explain to someone in the Internet Age (who should know better) that we are not criminal or aligned with state forces. But such is activism, and I won’t call this wasted ink (one, you need to be checked, and two, this is a battle of pens, and I’m a far better writer than you).

Gay or not, an-Coms aren’t vampires, Bad Empanada. So kindly pull Mao’s dick out of your mouth, and quit treating queer creators and an-Com scholars like we’re some kind of inflatable, monolithic boxing clown you can punch until you get tired. Many approaches are valid, with rushing to the quickest (and angriest) only opening yourself up to a more patient and iron-clad/fortified approach. Your smugness or childish forum-style antics aren’t an invisibility cloak and your hubris, laziness and bigotry are showing.

All in all, someone like Bad Empanada doesn’t strike me as the kind of person to admit when he’s wrong and learn from it (to speak our language), but rather to dig himself into a hole, bunker down and stick to his guns. Broken clocks, ‘n all, but such things only serve to alienate him from the very people he professes to help. It becomes a curious repeating of Christopher Hitchens’ “Why Women Aren’t Funny” (2007), albeit relaid by a postcolonial know-it-all excluding queer voices to act like he’s the man with the one-and-only plan; re: speaking for others. It’s white moderacy with more steps; i.e., cutting your nose off to spite your face.

Intersectional solidarity matters, Bad Empanada, and no matter how right your cause is with the Palestinians (and commendable your aid to them is), your intensely unlikeable behavior towards queer people doesn’t help matters—not in the long run if you go around acting like you’re the only one who’s right and the rest of us can’t help them too; i.e., you, treating us, as mere “centrists in disguise.” Well, I’m Queen Shit of Fuck Mountain (no centrist), and you ain’t all that, dude; quit acting like a baby and grow up!

And in case anyone wants to argue in bad faith for my “wavering and unconditional support” of Foucault (or anyone else in this section), we’re purposefully inspecting the past to “kill its darlings” that we might progress towards a better, yet-to-exist possible world; re (from Volume One):

Foucault wasn’t just accommodated, you see; he was enabled and desired intellectual fame similar to what Sartre had achieved before him. It’s gross, queer-normative, TERF levels of nasty and needs to be abolished. Good play and sex-positive BDSM are all entirely possible (and something we’ll explore more in Volume Three, Chapters Two and Three). However, creepy Gay Uncle Fester ain’t it.

Rather, in a reconstructed, post-scarcity world, there is no systemic war and rape. To this, Gothic Communism is also not a regression back into the freed market like Gorbachev did to the U.S.S.R. in the 1980s, but instead a collective push towards universal degrowth (that means no “as good as it gets” moderates, too). Instead, this is to be an entirely different mode of undertaking development under Capitalism towards anarcho-Communism away from Capitalist Realism, but the basic ideas are still the same—re: Socialism’s “From each according to [their] ability, to each according to [their] work” to Communism’s “to each according to [their] need.” Anarcho- Communism simply means class solidarity and collective action performed directly by informed, intelligent workers of various sorts, aided by bourgeois and petit bourgeois (middle) class allies—not by establishment politicians, academics and state-corporate agents, whose politics/praxis are bourgeois in nature; they serve the state, not workers.

For us and Gothic Communism, worker safety is sacred and supersedes any icon who came before and iconoclasts absolutely shouldn’t hesitate to tear down/camp their harmful reputations [read on, in that volume, to see a list of old famous people we need to critique] (source).

To that, it’s not “Red Scare” to hold old rebels and revolutionaries accountable, because they were often exclusionary and incredibly harmful, themselves; i.e., the queer side of Marxism having an anarchist bent into the 1970s and beyond[13] that would have challenged said leaders; re: Stalin, but also Lenin and Marx’ homophobia[14] continuing into the Russian Federation under Putin, but also China (some places, like Vietnam or Thailand, afford protections for queer people, but these are hardly the norm; i.e., because they go against profit/the state model and, more often than not, date back centuries and exist alongside colonial exploitation: they’re state concessions or cultural relics, not a byproduct of Marxist-Leninism).

To it, my critique of Marxist-Leninism through Bad Empanada—essentially calling for queer nuance from him during postcolonial struggles—isn’t automatically “centrist,” nor is it me “siding with America” (or whatever stupid argument someone like Bad Empanada wants to snivel about). If anything, we should avoid such nostalgia purely to prevent Capitalist Realism; i.e., said Realism ironically occurring when trying to revive Communist states by not critiquing Marxist-Leninism enough. It’s not hard! Certainly there’s no love lost between those I critique, including Foucault, but also those they critiqued and built upon in their own work leading to mine; i.e., me wishing they were gayer than they actually were (with “gayness” speaking to an-Com liberation from state mechanisms and their own exceptions and tyrannies); re: Marx and those who carried out his work, the Bolsheviks, in queer-exclusionary ways.

Please bear in mind, we’ll look at Lenin’s refreshingly queer-friendly exceptions—but also his tragic failure to keep Stalin and Soviet regression (thus fascism) in check—when we examine Dr. Uncola’s tweets about early Soviet queer progressivism, in “Leaving the Closet”:

An important disclaimer, however, is that the national attitude towards gay and trans people wasn’t unanimously supportive. While many were sympathetic or ambivalent, there was a faction of the Bolsheviks who wanted it outlawed again. Among them was this guy. You might know him [shows photo of Stalin] (source tweet, Dr. Uncola: July 1st, 2023).

In short, there was no place for gay people in their view of the world when push came to shove (again, we’ll unpack this more when we look at Stalin). From Stalin onwards (and Mao, too, and all of their imitators), Marxist-Leninism decays under threat of force to sacrifice queer rights, thus spiral towards nominal Communist fragmentation and neoliberal Capitalism and Marxist Capitalist Realism; i.e., said states (and their cops) abusing the environment and nature at great expense of worker and animal life and contributing towards climate change as all states do. All States Are Bad! ASAB! Again, put a pin in that; we’ll come back to it, as well, in “Leaving the Closet.”

Including Bad Empanada’s unironically Stalinist rhetoric (“make it illegal again”), we need to meaningfully challenge all of these inherited confusions and misconceptions, lest we fall into the same dogmatic pitfalls (and academic, cis-het hubris) that people like Bad Empanada are currently doing in their own mixed work; i.e., using veiled sodomy argumentation (re: BDSM bans) to actively close their minds, punching down to help one group at the cost of another by demonizing the latter having its own equally valid concerns. Again, my criticism speaks not to Bad Empanada’s rightful treatment of Jessie Gender as Zionist, but to his weird dogwhistle calling “all discussions” of sex (except his) to be made taboo.

Well, “just a joke” or not, such behavior only seeks to divide and anger allies, making them feel unafraid because you don’t think they’re human, or otherwise worth considering. Calling yourself a Marxist-Leninist and postcolonialist doesn’t grant you blanket immunity to say what you like, Bad Empanada, because neither you nor Marx and the state are beyond reproach; and frankly dehumanizing your critics out-of-turn just because you disagree with them, or because you see all of us as “the same” kind of tracks with older cults of personality in love with Lenin’s approach to things: as spectral, nostalgic, something to chase. Whatever the reason, it’s a bit mechanical and controlling—manifesting in ways that really turn me off to the rest of your work (you’re not the only postcolonialist in existence, dude, and I can hear the same arguments without being belittled by a hypocrite with a chip on his shoulder).

In keeping with all this talk about ghosts, much of the abuse we queers suffer from the state is spectral; i.e., insofar as it’s made illegal and whispered about precisely because it’s taboo, thus not always documented (especially in the Soviet Period, but likewise after it). To be queer is to be raped by the state, which often enough, leaves behind a great gulf where something both is and isn’t; re, Hogle’s restless labyrinth: “standing on the ashes of something not quite present,” a vanishing point and a lonely grave!

(source: Julia Kenny’s “Stalin’s Cult of Personality: Its Origin and Progression,” 2015)

As such, knowledge and execution are built on themselves often being at odds for liberation as being a historically “for me, not for thee” proposition fielded by supremacists vs critics and activists of different things; i.e., from Freudian psychoanalysis being a ’70s, ’80s and ’90s academic go-to, becoming far more Marxist but also GNC-inclusive after the Fall of the Soviet Union; e.g., vis-à-vis my work and combination of Gothic theory with dialectical-material analysis, camping Freud and Marx, but also Creed! To do so requires being aware of such things to begin with, and having a willingness to change course while picking and choosing what works best towards universal liberation (re: Sandy Norton on Foucault’s speculative richness, in “The Imperialism of Theory,” 1994). Historically the state doesn’t—and given the kinds of willful (or hostile) ignorance levied by uptight Marxist-Leninists like Bad Empanada (who loves to administer ad hominens while going overboard; i.e., furiously attacking others for their position as much as their arguments, slinging mean-spirited shit until he’s alienated himself from allies in the process)—it will only continue to do so into the future! Revolution tops from below.

Ending our tangent on selective reading and Marxist-Leninism (and having paddled Bad Empanada and Marx’ naughty bottoms long enough), let’s return to Creed; i.e., as part of the same broad conversation, taking whatever to say whatever to achieve liberation; i.e., Gothic theory and poetics; e.g., vampires and Freud, but also the monstrous-feminine as she saw it during the ubiquitous misnomer, “the end of history.” Per Derrida, the spectres of Marx lived on, but these generally weren’t of the man or his state-happy followers. At least, not all of them were; voices would start to rise for a change in direction, if not overall plan.

Regarding vampirism, Creed wrote the Monstrous-Feminine in 1993; i.e., based on academics from the 1970s, but also Freud haunting third wave feminism. While standing on Freud’s shoulders and only expanding on The Monstrous-Feminine three decades down the road (re: Return of the Monstrous-Feminine, 2022), I can’t help but feel like she cited the old man for clout, back in ’93 (most academics did, to be fair). Certainly she could have focused more on other groups, but she also was a third wave feminist, not a GNC person. It only makes sense, then, that I would do so for her while tracing Creed’s footsteps towards a better outcome she herself could see even less well than I:

(exhibit 41g1a2: Artist, left: Cherry Mouse Street; source, top: Vampire Freaks. “Any free woman in an unfree society will be a monster.” While Angela Carter’s popular adage is a ringing sentiment on paper, in truth it smacks of cis voices speaking about cis women first and foremost; i.e., their imprisoned and “kept” status policing GNC elements by conflating them with state abuses [re: the Alien Queen and tokophobia, punched by Ripley, mid-Amazonomachia[15]]. While it was the ’70s and I can’t blame Carter for any active ill will, it didn’t take especially long [in the grand scheme of things] for female bigots to turn her message into dead dogma, a tokenized war-like platitude excluding trans women like myself from the revolutionary equation. Their carceral violence, anger and stigmatized “chaos-dragon” status were legitimate, not ours.

As if the monstrous-feminine pareidolia weren’t inscribed all over our essence-swallowing mouths, soft bodies and girl-cocks [the forbidden, potent objects of desire for many cis-het men]! Yet, the double standard is plain: cis-supremacist women see themselves as wrongly-accused, incarcerated and executed Medusas, whereas we trans folk are “false-women”; i.e., killer crossdressers putting on sodomy vaudeville in bad faith to try and score some “oppression points” in the bargain [stolen valor but for victims]. It’s completely ludicrous, but the vengeful honor killings/rape ranking remain quite real.

As for Creed, as much as I obviously liked her idea, “monstrous-feminine,” I still felt like I needed to expand on and push said idea away from the whole “castrating mother” thing—i.e., out of Freud’s big, dumb shadow and the nuclear family model but also away from biologically centered feminism [quaintly focused on—ah, yes, “film” as the hip new thing all the kids are consuming]

In almost all critical writings on the horror film, woman is conceptualized only as victim. In The Monstrous-Feminine, Barbara Creed challenges this patriarchal view by arguing that the prototype of all definitions of the monstrous is the female reproductive body (source). 

and towards an updated realm of cross-media discourse that could actually voice my concerns in the Internet Age: as a ludologist trans woman threatened as much by angry “biological” TERFs colonizing Medusa as cis-het men and -queers were. Any and all of them could, did, and will refuse to be victims by unironically razing Cain [that was a pun] while burning us at the stake; i.e., fascist chaos triangulating through tokenized violence.)

Compared to male vampires like Dracula or Rob Halford, which emerged in more visible ways for much of human history (as property-owning men versus female property acting out), the female vampire—and her orgasmic, wantonly xenophilic energies marrying raw lust with the owning of property over men by women—was generally something that couldn’t be conceived in the popular Western imagination until its Gothic side had expanded to account for such socio-material factors; i.e., not just enough to grant women the ability to even speak in public discourse (with women banned from acting as late as the Renaissance), but also to flaunt their possessions and their desires. Consider Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire—a homoerotic story written by a longtime LGBTQ ally from an admittedly conventional source: a closeted bisexual woman writing about homosexual men to eroticize them in monstrous, conventional ways; i.e., the Female Gaze, but one that consciously humanized them in monstrous language that others less principled (or queer[16]) than Rice would abjure, past, present and future (see: footnote).

And if you’re too lazy to read footnotes, the state—but also Marx and his ilk in the years that followed his and Engels’ work—have historically been asleep at the wheel following the death of these men; i.e., they are not culturally conscious/woke to nearly the degree required, because it reduces largely to laborers and factory work instead of the kinds of embarrassing positions and non-factory labor (re: women’s work) pushed off onto queer people by cis-het people (often women) punching down: the things that society treats like its toilet, out of sight and out of mind except to make a cruel, dehumanizing joke regarding or to pull out of the gutter and “make respectable” (to assimilate).

That’s what the abjection process is, and the state—being fundamentally straight—uses abjection to historically and categorically exclude its enemies. Chief among those excluded are queer folk, often alienated by tokenized cis-het women in the Gothic industry[17] since Radcliffe and certainly since Rice’s contemporaries; i.e., in the fictional, but also medical/academic world; e.g., Janice Raymond’s Transsexual Empire (1979): “I contend that the problem with transsexualism would best be served by morally mandating it out of existence.” Such “questions” are quackery “just asked” by the state and its proponents; e.g., the Jewish question; i.e., calling for genocide as simply something to put on the table, then take settler-colonial steps through fiction/non-fiction, medical documents and scholarship, as well as private correspondence (re: Marx and Engels) treating us as criminal aberrations, but also space aliens and manmade freaks of creature. It’s Frankenstein taken to its logical conclusion—one only the state has the power to enact to the degree that such pogroms historically require to play out. The history is depressingly bad-faith, but also out in the open for all to—celebrated for its own cartoonishly ominous (and dead-serious) presentation:

My point with Rice, here, is she didn’t abject/exclude queer people despite presenting them as vampires. Certainly a desire for her subjects was present in our closeted, bereaved[18] bisexual, but alienation, empathy and eroticism are not mutually exclusive (nuns and priests having been lusting after Christ for centuries). Until Rice, and indeed after these tricky conversations began through women like her in the same time period, women weren’t allowed to be lesbians or practice anal (with/for the husband or male clients) because they weren’t people who could rebel in the eyes of the state; i.e., they were only property and thus “couldn’t think for themselves.”

And in thinking for herself, Rice arguably contributed to a larger trend in ways that was ultimately sex-positive, even if many others chiming in most certainly were not. Funny how such vampirism (as a poetic device) only is accepted by the state when you ostensibly capitalize on tokenistic forms that adhere to the profit motive and punch down against someone; i.e., Rice, as I understand it, was in the closet for much of her life. But her material wasn’t—meaning in the poetic sense that people out of the closet could take and run with it:

(exhibit 41g1b: Artist: Devilhs. Per Creed, female vampirism links the female orgasm to psychoanalytical sites of darkness and trauma; i.e., the home as a den-like tomb for the woman haunted by ancient female power as orgasmic—female rage, but also hysteria [the wandering womb] as an endless, Sapphic eroticism and biology divorced from compelled sexual reproduction as much to spite/mess with patriarchal men as it is to merely have fun [the two activities are ultimately modular].

Unto itself, the “predicament” of female vampirism comments on female biology as different in relation to male biology regarding sex as a medical phenomenon:

Sex could kill you. Do you know what the human body goes through when you have sex? Pupils dilate, arteries constrict, core temperature rises, heart races, blood pressure skyrockets, respiration becomes rapid and shallow, the brain fires bursts of electrical impulses from nowhere to nowhere, and secretions spit out of every gland, and the muscles tense and spasm like you’re lifting three times your body weight. It’s violent. It’s ugly. And it’s messy. And if God hadn’t made it unbelievably fun, the human race would have died out eons ago. Men are lucky they can only have one orgasm. You know that women can have an hour-long orgasm? [Dr. Cameron from House, 2004; source]. 

While gender performance is something that be played around with, biology intersects in ways that are unique per individual. Male/female is not actually a binary at all, but complicated by intersex people existing who might, for all intents and purposes, appear male/female and/or masc and femme. During sex, their bodies might function in ways that go against common understandings [or misconceptions] about what’s “supposed” to happen.  

In turn, monstrous poetics from the 1970s have expanded during the Internet Age based on their most famous forms; i.e., to grant more and more violent, terrifying and morphological demonstrations subverting these harmful heteronormative expectations, while also commenting on the stigmas and biases that continually persist during vampirism and its notably liminal expression: psychosexual feminist, genderqueer and/or postcolonialist iterations. It’s literally “the sex is angry.” Formally a crime against God and “good nature,” gay nature [the Medusa] is churned out in alien replicas in corporate-friendly shooting galleries; i.e., a panopticon targeting leper/sodomy clichés framed as AIDS: a disease the straights simultaneously “can’t get” and act the most allergic towards. They’re alienated from things we experience at their and the state’s hands on a daily basis.

For example, despite not being wholly female, Giger’s xenomorph [above] has as much a monstrous-feminine [and vampiric] function as Vampirella [originally penned in 1969, last page] does, but also a biomechanical BDSM element its more human-looking counterparts also contribute to: a voice for monstrous-feminine rage. Such fury would parallel homosexual men’s anger in the 1970s, but also those even more marginalized who wouldn’t appear en masse until the Internet could present them as such; i.e., on graphs—with trans people, for instance, making up less than .004% of the total US population[19].  

Such a voice—apart from embodying classically female sexual desires out of the Western Gothic mode like Rice’s cute vampire boys—also presents monstrous-feminine rage and hysteria as physically imposing through different physical, psychosexual manifestations; i.e., through outwardly urbane or conveniently attractive forms like the “built” but “babelicious” Amazon, but also tethered to dark, less outwardly humanist-facing doubles turning those conventions, at times, literally inside-out. We queers often prefer the latter when looking to freeze Cartesian weird canonical nerds in their tracks; i.e., it speaks to our frustration but also our monomorphic tendencies, power and potential to take things in a new, terrifying [to the state] direction.)

As such, female-to-feminine forms of vampirism are as old as the Gorgon that Creed highlights in The Monstrous-Feminine, and themselves take on a thousand faces; re: to match the thousand implied by Joseph Campbell’s monomythic hero being sent by the state to rape nature-as-alien for the umpteenth time. It is both vital and cursed, anathema and outspoken. Banned things generally are, and were in America, the Soviet Union and elsewhere between out-and-out Capitalism and Marxist-Leninism embodying the state model.

Tying things to Rice and her less comely counterparts elsewhere in female-to-GNC-adjacent stories, it bears repeating how such a staging point in the 1970s really took time to arrive; i.e., the predatory and undead stigma of the “problematic lover” has applied predominantly to AMABs for much of canonical history (re: Brent Pickett of Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy writes on the Ancient Greeks, “Given that only free men had full status, women and male slaves were not problematic sexual partners. Sex between freemen, however, was problematic for status” source). In turn, the language of gender and sex had to update in ways that took just as long and yielded various exceptions, double standards and refrains that only doubled down the moment the public discourse (through monsters and sexual/gendered terms alike) caught up. The more rights people had, the more the state (and its proponents) would treat it as problematic.

To that, I’d like to conclude the history primer going over the morphological variety to such vampires (and similar monsters; e.g., Gorgons, werewolves, ghosts; exhibit 41g2), while likewise looking briefly at the availability of GNC terms that married to the medical, scholarly and Neo-Gothic renaissance in from the 1970s well into the present.

Note: This portion is more than a little messy insofar as it’s not made with much of a thesis in mind, other than stressing the dizzyingly chaotic convergence of different poetic forces, social movements and dialectical-material forms over a relatively short period of time; i.e., Capitalism (and the state as straight) struggling to defend itself, and the millions-upon-millions of people involved in that from laissez-faire to Bretton Woods to neoliberal Capitalism—all of these working parallel to scholarship and poetics from the 1870s and Westphal towards Dracula, the gay monster men and women from the 1930s, Matteson’s vampire-zombies in 1954, Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in 1968, Rice’s ’70s vampire revival followed by Giger’s and many others into the neoliberal period, then Creed and The Monstrous-Feminine in 1993 (and Derrida and Butler’s own works from that year), into the 2000s and rise of internet culture, landing eventually on my book project (and similar subversive works).

Sure, it might all be what Bad Empanada calls “pure wankery.” But he’s an insensitive, vituperative (and totally lame) philistine with an obnoxious superiority complex, the personality of drying paint mixed with nails on a chalkboard and a faulty toaster, and two left feet regarding BDSM—about as fun as a tooth ache, allergic to sex work/Gothic poetics, blind to allegory and quick to dismiss those aspects of critical thinking I enjoy the most: holistic analysis and play! —Perse

For one—and keeping with our ancient canonical anchor argument—monsters represent gendered ideas that canonically try to stress things in false binaries: male/female and man/woman. Such has always been the case, but in the 20th century began to double aggressively and smash into one another for different reasons. Across history such things have often been out of step, only to explode towards into a GNC presence from the 1970s onwards—one, I should add, the state has since tried to drown out with chaff; i.e., canonical, monomythic words and weapons recuperating all manner of things to keep to profit as preying vampirically on nature (and monstrous-feminine) elements, first and foremost. Such beings speak to a lack of agency and monstrous identity formation, which have something of a love/hate, “strange bedfellows” relationship between cis women and gay men in earlier creative periods (e.g., German Expressionism, left), but also the GNC queer voices they’d help give rise to in our aforementioned later decades.

This might seem kind of obvious in hindsight; i.e., when inspecting the 1970s now. But at the time, it came out of the Free Love movement, postmodernism, the Civil Rights movement, and so many important and exciting horror works, but also a surge of equally exciting (and mysterious) new GNC language, emerging in 1965[20] (four years before Night of the Living Dead and smack-dab in the middle of the Vietnam War). Said language sort of redescribed Westphal’s “new species” (re: Foucault); i.e., in ways that turned so many things on their head, but preserved themselves like amber inside the same monsters. Such beings were no longer, if ever, pure symbols of fear and dogma, but started to speak to a rising form of discourse that, more than ever, was alive and well in ways the state couldn’t fully control.

Except, leading up to that paradigm shift’s ejaculation in the 1970s, there was a male-heavy slant that feminism (and other social movements) were already starting to challenge the status quo with. They did so if only because Western women and slaves remained property until the 19th and 20th centuries, thus did not enjoy the same statuses and privileges through canonical law and patrilineal descent. In short, men—even gay men—could create in the 1930s much as they had been allowed to for hundreds and thousands of years.

This meant that AFAB parties couldn’t challenge or partition their own stations to nearly the same degree in cinema (the primary media form for much of the 20th century, especially concerning monsters) as men could theirs (queer or not), but all the same were generally snuck like odd cargo into vampire stories (conventional or otherwise); i.e., by male weird-nerd authors wanting monster women in their stories, but also female weird nerds who were helped by men into having creative voices way ahead of the curb about such topics; e.g., Mary Shelley being pushed by Percy Shelley to write a little story called Frankenstein in 1818, which had a monstrous-feminine component that would live on in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis[21] (crammed diegetically into her robot suit by a Jewish-coded mad scientist and overhung by a pentagram, last image), James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (next page) and many other stories treating women (and those “acting like women”) as alien, but also as monstrous-feminine commodities that men of science wanted to control and voyeuristically exhibit, borrowed from older genres; re, Roger Ebert’s observation: “to see Falconetti in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) is to look into eyes that will never leave you” (source).

Such a Male Gaze has often sought to classically martyr women (and bury gay people); i.e., not strictly to kill them, but keep them in pain/peril and film them as such (the Gothic heroine transplanted onto celluloid). By the 1930s, though, you had gay directors (or directors with gay sensibilities) working alongside women to camp the same patriarchal industry. By shoot something a bit different than female torture, it was more queer and—like Frankenstein’s infamous Creature—less easy to control/more (and more) morphologically diverse. Suddenly the biology began to meld and bounce around, swapping out clear polarized divides for things more in the uncomfortable (for the state) middle.

More to the point, labor-wise, you were left with AFAB actresses having common ground with other oppressed (queer men) who weren’t—unlike the cis-het director shouting “Lights! Camera! Action!” to his overworked team (with gay men classically being hair dressers, costume designers, cameramen and even, in Whale’s case, the director)—doing this for profit’s sake; it became a multicultural stage to camp such vampirism, the sodomy on display something of a “monster magnet” whose main attraction drew later directors, thespians, writers, what-have-you, to consider what they were looking at/working with in a GNC sense.

(source: American Cinematographer’s “The Bride of Frankenstein: A Gothic Masterpiece,” 1998)

So while women since ancient times could be readily portrayed as witches, Amazons and hags—all whose disobedience into the Middle Ages and beyond threatened their “natural” owners (with Hammer of Witches, 1478, stressing a rising desire to quell female dissidents, often portraying them as the eaters of babies)—they were still disobedient chattel who could always be converted through state force by men toeing the line (again, gay or not); i.e., the Amazonomachia and its modern forms; e.g., from Shelley’s Frankenstein breaking away from that to express an alien humanity tied to nature-as-monstrous-feminine and Promethean, only to be revived centuries later by Scott’s neoliberal critique that—surprise, surprise—was succeeded by Aliens and other neoliberal refrains designed to reel nature-as-monstrous-feminine (thus queer and hostile towards the state) back under state dominion.

To it, this mutating band of space vampires—fueled with a new terrorist stockpile of ideas about violence, terror and morphological language not exactly conducive to total Cartesian submission—had to become “canonically gay” again; i.e., in ways that dogmatically challenged not just the monsters, themselves but the iconoclastic sum of popularized language, scholarship and discourse at large: the state’s answer to a rising Gothic counterculture party to the same Superstructure that was no longer fully (or ever) in the elite’s court.

In short, Hollywood had to install the concept of cops and victims into something that was then threatening to expose them and their ordering of the universe as hitherto “under their control” (the 1970s being a hinge point, insofar as neoliberalism had yet to fully emerge and indeed, would not until 1979). Such us-versus-them (commonly “man vs nature”) orderings aren’t new, insofar as the state has forever concerned and relied on heteronormative ideas of men, women and patriarchy to further itself; i.e., in dominion over nature. But such things were rapidly becoming more and more problematic; i.e., as something to market and sell as such. The settler colony began to populate with monsters, the territory (and Capitalist Realism) decaying in ways that would call for their destruction.

Again, this delay constitutes something of a long-awaited party. Non-enslaved men, compared to women, have been legally human under the law since the dawn of recorded time, thus able to perform criminal acts that women and male slaves never openly could. These hypothetical crimes pertained to the many roles men had to perform in accordance with growing ideas of what manhood even meant under Capitalism, subjecting them to knee-jerk punishments by people frightened of another Foucauldian prophesy—the death of man. Foucault writes in The Order of Things (1966):

The epistemological field traversed by the human sciences was not laid down in advance: no philosophy, not political or moral option, no empirical science of any kind, no observation of the human body, no analysis of sensation, no imagination, or the passions, had ever encountered, in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, anything like man; for man did not exist (any more than life, or language, or labour); and the human sciences did not appear when, as a result of some pressing rationalism, some unresolved scientific problem, some practical concern, it was decided to include man (willy-nilly, and with a greater or lesser degree of success) among the objects of science (source, pages 344-45).

Such “deaths” were consequently encountered by their abject others: the scary things that aren’t them (according to fear and dogma)!

Of course, these monsters weren’t immune to tokenization. Like BDSM in general, such play sits between genuine submission and gingerly subversion that, unto itself, is routinely arbitrated by state forces vs workers they are trying to control who don’t always play but sometimes along (rather they play against the state with the same basic devices, selling out where desperate and/or convenient). All of this yielded a lot of morphological (thus sex and gender) variation in the 1970s. Grappling with the decay of free love spiraling towards neoliberalism and Satanic Panic, this included Rice’s (often male, but not always) vampires of 1976, of course, but also a great many others besides that—like Giger’s xenomorph—have non-standard, BDSM-themed, trans, non-binary and intersex forms; re: the likes of which gave rise out of stage plays, operas and yesterday’s rock ‘n roll onto new enraged queer and female voices that Creed herself took to speak about women refusing to be victims, in 1993, and which I have since attached to queer entities refusing to be cops or the victims of cops.

What Creed talked about concerned and composed a lot of monsters besides bog-standard vampires, but also those varieties of vampire-like entities; i.e., hinted at by the xenomorph of the same decade as Rice, but also ones that came from far earlier in time (and followed up with new increasingly queer revivals):

(exhibit 41g2: Artist, top-far-left: Jill the Succubus; top-left: Devilhs; top-right and far-right [top to bottom]: Blushing Yokai; bottom-far-left: unknown; bottom-left: Kukumomo; bottom-right: Vethrax. Within oppositional praxis, the undead aren’t simply instruments of gendered revenge for past wrongs—e.g., female: Sadako, as a matriarchal threat of an abused sub switching to a “strict” mommy dom; male: Pyramid Head as a masculine, patriarchal threat of “rape” [despite how Bernard Perron writes, “One of the most legendary and iconic monsters in scary games is a monster called Pyramid Head” in The World of Scary Games (2018), the thirst for sexy Pyramid Head is real and overrides his heteronormative function; i.e., as a simple, alien killer with a knife]. They’re darkness visible, and speak to things that otherwise might be pushed to the margins [the taboo sorts that Bad Empanada is calling for].

When camped, such entities convey the creative successes of proletarian praxis being the best revenge of all: a thriving delight at furthering sex positivity through xenophilic gender trouble and parody performed not just in monstrous language, but poetics. Said poiesis and its cryptomimetic attack embodies the queer self through struggle under the status quo. Trauma and pleasure climb out of the well as hidden truths [whose furious, female personification Jean-Léon Gérôme literally calls Truth[22]] but also power and resistance become things to chaotically express through multiple, dialectical-material incarnations/interpretations; these have morphological considerations, blending the undead with demons as anthropomorphic, uncanny entities concerned with shapeshifting as a genderqueer means of invading the home as colonized; i.e., to present normality as unhomely in the face of friendly monsters and ghosts being abjected by the home’s usual defenders: moderates and out-and-out fascists. Except, they cannot monopolize these various forms any more than the state can, raising thoughts and concerns that speak to oppressed pedagogies contributing to the same conversation out of forbidden refrains that keep coming back; i.e., returning to the home as laying itself to waste, but also seeking liberation from tyranny.

Such curios include the doll as an ontological expression of traumatic language that—under friendlier circumstances—simply makes for a cute toy to spend time with in various [a]sexual ways: from kawaii to kowai as a matter of size difference, knife play and doll-ish uncanny masks [the vampire’s pale complexion on an ageless face] reduced to knife-genitals for heads; re: echoes of the xenomorph and Freud’s abject view of the monstrous-feminine, itself later championed by Creed built on such 20th-century in-betweens like Scott’s Alien leading to Jacob’s Ladder and Silent Hill in the early-to-mid-’90s [exhibit 43a/b].)

Vampires are monsters that constitute arguments, which are themselves, not always obvious from a dialectical-material standpoint. This reality plays out through how they are used through context, with attempts to express and reinstall such voices through a state lens occurring through abjection. As usual, but in response to various state activities, 20th century vampires took on a lot of different forms, and those forms mirrored the things they wanted workers to fear and attack: Red Scare, worker uprisings, various other moral panics, and so on. So began the neoconservative corrections, thus overcorrections through Heinlein and similar weird canonical nerds trying very hard to “right the ship.” He was tired of all those motherfucking gay snakes on his motherfucking straight plane!

As a developing enterprise in the 20th century onwards, there emerged demands for a heteronormative, colonial binary within Capitalism that could meet the genderqueer xenophilia rising out of the shadows of public life since Shakespeare led to Walpole, to Lewis, all the way to Giger and Creed; i.e., a “correct” man versus vampires of many different kinds, but especially the monstrous-feminine as the chief alien threat. Post-WW2, vampires started to come more and more “from outer space”; i.e., alien species that didn’t come in peace, but as bugs and other stigmatized animals, planets and fungi; e.g., mushroom men, but also the “super carrot” vampire from 1951’s The Thing from Another World (the guy with the 1911 and bomber jacket protecting the damsel-in-distress from almost certain penetration).

Of course, such things were obviously ongoing at all points of the state’s existence (and across continents, between genres; e.g., Italy’s giallo); e.g., between the 1930s, into the 1950s and 1960s, followed by the 1970s and 1980s as different waves of terror (re: Meerloo); i.e., concerning vampires attacking the nuclear family model, upheld by brave men protecting damsels from many-a-latter-day-vampire aping Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) onto Mars Needs Cheerleaders (1968) and later still, Cameron’s Aliens cocooning many a colony wench for impregnation and painful, insectoid Commie birth: a position of forbidden or problematic love, us-versus-them orientation, and a threatening of exchanging various juices (or knowledge, whatever) to turn the modest maiden wild, hungry and whorish—a sodomy argument, in other words!

Keeping with William Blum[23], the elite would tie these growing problems of rape and sodomy to Communism—post WW2, but especially in the neoliberal era. To quote the promotional campaign for Cameron’s sequel: “This time, it’s war!” Due to previous concessions by the state regarding worker calls for equal rights, the former would simply recruit the latter to wage future wars for them (this included women like Ripley[24] and people of color like Frost and Vasquez). The copaganda began to pour out of the American Superstructure, leading to a proliferation of so many rape and sodomy arguments. From one xenomorph, suddenly all of America was “Vietnam” filled with the buggers (that was pun); i.e., a previous colony “gone to pot” taken back home and playing out differently this time around in American theatres (and on television screens, thanks to Metroid, and later Doom and their many clones acclimating future children to Pax Americana ad infinitum): nature-as-alien in ways that build and stack different cops-and-victims, us-versus-them bigotries on top of Cartesian thought—all to enforce Western supremacy in and out of astronoetic tales. Free market or not, such an order must be preserved through Capitalist Realism to maintain Capitalism and the state.

*Including Cameron’s Avatar literally being a videogame-style, American Liberal/tech bro treatment of the FPS, tokenizing Indigenous rebellion in a controlled opposition form with tokenized and imposturous appropriative vaudeville: African Americans playing Indigenous people, or Jennette Goldstein playing a Mexican woman; i.e., the “close enough” quality to acting.

Apart from the female entities we’ve looked at (as often being directed by gay men), the actual stigmas of queer identity (and the double standards therein) also took time to evolve into their current modernized versions: queer people as enemies of the state, which the state coercively ignores, dimorphizes and exploits in hauntological, doll-like threats of porcelain sodomy and dark ecclesiastical implements of eternal torture. As with Cameron, such abjection dogmatically scares the squeamish faithful through fetishized violence that informs future exchanges, mid-creature-feature; i.e., eternal threats of punishment and damnation by police agents pointing the finger at the middle class obsessed with such ghosts of the counterfeit: “lead or silver.” Hell and vampirism take many forms, but the basic argument is always the same. It would simply explode (like a chestburster)in the 1980s onwards.

To this, DARVO obscurantism marries bullshit to half-veiled threats of fear and lies, guilt and pleasure, predation and persecution being something to put somewhere other than the middle class, themselves; re: they abject it, then turn into gargoyles themselves—faithfully guarding the church as it currently stands (while built on top of older versions), protecting home during the dialectic of shelter from monstrous-feminine forces. Such canon would reliably manifest in phallic, barbarian forms of fear and dogma, but also token police violence. As state power looms over women, people of color and queer persons, etc, they betray their class, culture and/or race interests in bad faith; i.e., because it is convenient, and because such egregores become a form of currency that is, unto itself, worshipped (the equality of convenience historically met with more and more desperation by increasingly marginalized token parties looking to be feared, but also loved by everyone else).

Pyramid Head, for instance, must canonically remain the unironic slayer of women, not someone for them to lust after or embody in genderqueer ways (making said women performances of alternate identities or—God forbid—deciding they aren’t women anymore). Meanwhile, the vagina dentata—from a canonical standpoint—can be beheaded, defanged and fucked; the penis is merely something for men to cross swords with (something to keep in mind when we continue examining transphobia and Satanic Panic, from here on out: “any hole’s a goal, but fangs fence”). In turn, such neoliberalism was banking on invocations thereof, falling back on ancient and ingrained applications of sex and force, versus relatively brand-new terms like “transgender” that had yet to embed themselves in Western hearts and minds.

In fact, an extensive, queer-inclusive vocabulary for many of the words featured in this book didn’t widely develop until after the 1980s (e.g., Foucault, but also exhibit 3b: Michael Werner’s popularizing of the term, “heteronormativity,” in 1991[25])! The ’70s and ’80s were the transition from second-to-third wave feminism, Gothic thought and queer theory in academia, but took many more decades after that to disseminate among a larger trans counterculture across the Internet, who saw them less as torturous or dangerous/terrorist (re: Raymond’s Transsexual Empire) and more as radically empathetic, imagining a world without exclusive torture for the marginalized. In short, we revolutionary queers (especially younger queers) empathized with the monstrous human plight, its own torment and alienation speaking to ourselves in the closet (and framed as sodomites with a new coat of point).

It bears repeating that, while the Internet wasn’t widely available until the early 2000s, such language—already introduced in 1965, regarding an ongoing poetic trend that had been stewing for centuries (since 1764, as far as the Neo-Gothic period goes)—staged further assaults through important works after the 1970s; e.g., like Derrida’s Spectres of Marx and Butler’s Gender Trouble in 1993 giving rise to pro-(anarcho)-Communist ideas of genderqueer studies bleeding into future outcries and poetics; re (from Persephone van der Waard’s “About the Logo”):

When crafting my own symbol, I wanted to progress further beyond the Vaporware aesthetic (which emerged in roughly in 2011) than Laborwave had, which, in 2016, combined Vaporwave’s signature corporate mood/neoliberalism-in-decay with Marxist-Leninist icons divorced from their historical-material past. I wanted to not simply reflect on corporate/neoliberal fallibility and decay within dead/dystopian postpunk-tinged nostalgia, nor wax nostalgia on the undead pastiche of Marxist-Leninism, but inject a Gothic-queer presence to evoke an anarcho-Communist potential towards ending Capitalist Realism in the eternal drive towards developing Communism (source).

In decades minutes would happen, and then in minutes years would happen—slowly and then all at once, reaching boiling points. Mine was one, but many had preceded it in as many years.

As a matter of state mechanisms, such stopgaps also owe to queerness being constantly under attack in popular discourse; i.e., about sexuality and gender as a rising form of oppositional praxis: not fully understood within a modern context because it was constantly being challenged by the official histories whenever and wherever anyone bothered to look. This is especially salient in the Gothic tale as colonized by heteronormative forces since before the 1800s; i.e., previously and recursively associated with unhealthy forms of rebellion like the French Terror (re: Crawford) and various buried, whispered-about slave revolts of the 16th and 17th centuries, but also ancient female and queer (monstrous-feminine) agency as demonized, vampiric; e.g., the doomed, legendary Amazons of Ancient Greece and various classically female monsters like the mermaid, harpy or siren threatening classic Greek heroes, but also their canonical, androgynous modern-day hauntologies: Mother Brain, the Alien Queen, etc, as suitably correct-incorrect.

The whole point of abjection is to popularize and normalize open violence in society (foreign and domestic) and popular media against target groups, and that’s exactly what happened to queer people in the 1980s. They came out of the closet in force and the state invented a shadow army to attach to them and blame for/capitalize on imperial decline through militarized violence. Any nation-state could recognize and attack them, thus shame, rape, mutilate and kill them; society became sick in ways never before seen. Nowhere was safe for either side, Cartesian thought radicalized in service to profit under the neoliberal hegemon; i.e., through tokenized police violence against queerness during us-versus them copaganda. Already reprobate, we became grist for the mill—a new destiny to manifest by enterprising (and paranoid, avenging) young boys and girls of all colors and creeds (white Indians), lest they catch and transmit what we were carrying: Black-Death vermin to trap, cage and exterminate, but also sexual and yeast/fungal/viral (code-like, secretive) infections to cure told in retro-future revivals neither here nor there (a Foucauldian moral panic policing sex by treating us as an alien health crisis; i.e., as Communism, but especially gay Communism, as AIDS incarnate).

Out of nowhere, the future was abruptly and utterly canceled, and it was suddenly all us fags’ fault, what with our gay anarchist’s “Commie,” alien, abject biology and gender suddenly being everywhere; i.e., waiting insidiously and perilously to hatch and make the Earth queer and gay from outer space—all despite older proponents of Communism historically wanting little if anything to do with us; re: the state is straight and our survival is both antithetical to its own and something it needs to prey upon and extirpate to carry on—like a vampire, in other words. To quote Marx (who loved monstrous language; re: Castricano), specifically from Kapital, “Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like lives only by sucking living labor.” Our vampirism must camp canonical iterations, the state most of all, including all its heteronormative, cryptomimetic bid for power’s rape and death fantasies: our death and rape at their hands. This can be theft of power to cause harm, but also labor and wages, even bodies and blood itself (e.g., John Dooley and Emily Gallagher’s “Blood Money: Selling Plasma to Avoid High-Interest Loans,” 2024); and all existent in a half-real sense between history as alive and dead, material and social, imaginary and substantial, etc.

For all those asking for equal treatment, the buck stops for us—the prolific Big Evil, Grendel’s-mother-style cave to face, reject destroy for its intrinsically outsiders non-state signature, paradoxically “desired” for being undesirable and hideous in ways our killing gives state warriors (standard or token) their usual rush. Along with the other inhabitants of Omelas’ bowers and dungeons, we became the last sewer drain for them to swirl around and plunge down into, slumming our screaming innards. It’s a sugar high, false power as neoliberalism always trades in; but the deaths and rape are real enough, part of the same monomythic-to-Promethean power trip/fantasy.

Per Creed, I think Cameron’s murderous womb (and Archaic Mother, lurking just offscreen, inside the alien brothel/graveyard/factory/den) sums things up rather well (they haven’t changed much since then). The power in such places exists for us to submit or rebel using what we got: our bodies, know-how, labor and so on liberated from state control!

(artist: The Maestro Noob)

But perhaps you could think of others, too? Again, this whirl of scribblings and images—by me, for the primer’s conclusion—haven’t been to try and compile a total history of all that has occurred up to, among and after the 1970s; i.e., that might go holistically and completely towards our argument (which is impossible). Instead, it’s merely to give you an idea of a) the kinds of multilateral, chaotic forces at work, and b) the dualities and competing forces either trying to: unite workers against the state regardless of gender or sex through different Gothically poetic appeals, or pit them against each other through the same weaponized devices; i.e., less wholly unspooled and praxially inert (from a proletarian standpoint) and more something to crack like a whip against labor. Reclaim that kink, make it sex-positive, thus emotionally/Gothically intelligent, and class, culture and race conscious.

Before we move onto my coming out of the closet and making new theory based on such histories, I quickly want to consider what guided my doing so: subversion as met with tokenized counters by abusive agents, sharing the same spaces and devices with me.

Something to repeatedly keep in mind, then, is how the state will attack such language when given freely to the masses as a critical-thinking device (thus conducive to queer identities). Recent terms like “transgender” were founded on Magnus Hirschfield’s early-20th century work, which the Nazis attempted to erase; to think, had the Reich not invaded the Institute of Sexology in 1933, these terms may have emerged in popular discourse far sooner than 1965, thereby establishing themselves as a means of challenging queer repression under Capitalism well before the 1980s (re: Ellen Moers’ “Female Gothic” from her book, Literary Woman and Anne Rice’s Interview, both from 1976, and Foucault before, during and afterwards; etc).

Except, they didn’t (making Creed and, by extension, my life far more difficult) because queer politics are inherently iconoclastic, running countercurrent to the material interests of the elite and their heteronormative scheme preying on nature-as-alien since day one. This includes moderate/fascist forms of feminism; re: Raymond’s transphobic polemic, The Transsexual Empire. It and similar attempts exist as part of a systemic, concentric gatekeeping of ever-evolving language; i.e., from “transvestite,” to “transsexual” to “transgender” and similar labels barreling towards other contested codewords like “trap” or “twink,” “femboy,” etc (all terms whose reverse abjection we’ll explore more of in Volume Three, Chapters Three and Four): as easy prey for state forces, including token cops, but also something for iconoclasts to romanticize during liminal expression—somewhere in between reclamation and enslavement.

Queers love their preferential monster code. Believe it or not, though, but all these words were once slurs and/or medical terms. Per Derrida, Butler and Creed (and directors like Gregg Araki, or writers like Dennis Cooper in the ’90s), they became spectres of Marx injecting new gender trouble back into the monstrous-feminine equation. As part of the Gothic mode’s continuation under state control, all have become something to take back and hold onto despite such dogma’s tokenized, policing doubles; i.e., generally by embodying that which capital fears through complicated ontological statements: a solidarized labor force reclaiming abject language and its strawmen of rape (re: Pyramid Head and the xenomorph, but also vampires in general taking essence until their victims die, and emerge as undead slaves) to humanize themselves with!

In Araki and Cooper’s case (echoes of Foucault), this sometimes means “raping” ourselves during calculated risk through those we want to be, use or discard, in effect also reconciling feelings of control and release between ourselves and those we play with as psychosexually crossed at the wires. Disorder is a neoliberal symptom made to loop in on itself. Subversion, then, isn’t just to fuck with canon, but humanize ourselves precisely because and for our damage and alienation inside such straight-coded, medicalized hauntologies and modified canonical laws (you are useful, Foucault). That’s what queer survival is—surviving the state medicalizing us as the psychosexual alien disease; i.e., one they can fetishize and fuck, forbid and foment hate and violence towards.

Again, we camp canon because we must, including sodomy and the monstrous-feminine through vampire language that our abusers (even tokenized ones) will try and police by pegging us as diseased sex pets (rats)! Who ever said that survival had to be boring? Quite the contrary! Martyrdom is portrayed as “passionate” for a reason. To that, we gay an-Coms are already the treated like the bloodsucking scum of the universe; might as well live it up!

Furthermore, we want to change how workers collect or organize through their identities as monstrous, vampiric. As said during the opening, doing so is generally a group effort (not a solo one, Empanada), one conducted between artist and muse—friends singing to the same keynote of transformation into who we want to become, using such language as it belongs to and is operated by us: the gay Communist vampires (“the Reds”) we want to be, redesigning such ideas to be as sleek, abrasive, adorable or offensive shapely and delicious as we desire! To it, the language of war and sex suitably combine in all the usual medieval poetic ways, but also disease as it normally pertains to us. That’s how gender trouble/parody works (the heavy lifting accomplished by our second-nature interactions, playfully communicating humanity regarding normally abject things); i.e., to lock eyes with what you like/desire and think naughtily and hungrily to yourself, “I want that—to catch whatever they got” (with doctors historically framing hysteria as a female condition that needs medically assisted orgasms, and a male condition that needs execution).

In turn, this graduates to taking what is forbidden/alien in ways that, sex-positive or not, will be treated like a vampire’s disease, an infection to quarantine and purge less it infarct (not just a wart to remove, but a cancer). Such medievalized dualities and barbarism never left/only changed shape and focus slightly under neoliberal capital. And faced with it, we gay an-Coms campily respond (from relative safety): “Oh, yeah, daddy! Push us into the mattress while you pound us silly! Storm our fortress! Harder! Faster! Deeper!”

As such, “exit-only” becomes a myth, the vampiric castle-in-the-flesh remaining open (figuratively and literally) to different insertions per military campaign—not to rape, but gain agency, understanding and control through rape play, thus begin to heal. Give and take, we can drive ourselves to greater pleasure and pain under the vampiric mode of exchange (denial and desire, fluid exchange); i.e., in a non-harmful, indulgent and highly educational sense (and sometimes, as with Cuwu, it can drive the taster a bit insane; but all the while, opens their eyes to the lovely carnival—and its sweet, infectious, addictive lessons/scholarship—that eagerly await). Don’t abstain; we can go all night, so bottoms up (ace people, decide for yourselves if you want to partake)! Oral, anal and/or vaginal, but also intercrural, the tender tissue (and holes) beckon for you to try them! So rub your noses (and other sensory organs) in it!

(artist: Cuwu)

Lady or not, it’s rude to keep a cutie waiting. And also, such stimulants are empathizing. However, the more you interact with abject, repulsive things as human, the more you’ll learn; the more you learn, the luckier you’ll get pertaining to them because you’ll be less inclined to reject and discount their theories in praxis (sex is a radicalizing factor unto revolution, a way for freedom fighters to bond wherever they find themselves)! In turn, the owners of these parts become human, and praxis (as something to synthesize) becomes second-nature on the ground level: between workers doing what workers have done since time out of mind, but now as openly cummy comrades. Regardless of the exact outcome per exchange, the world’s our oyster to pry open and participate in; we socially and sexually network among a shared pedagogy finding similarity amid difference! Everything snowballs amongst larger conversation, movement, rebellion—our Aegis to bare against the state’s own mirrors (of false rebellion).

To that, having survived such things to experience the traumatic rewiring of different pleasurable and prey-like mechanisms, such do we camp our own state-threatened rapes and deaths. Whatever pull we boast (or booties we blast), rebellion doesn’t so much as “have a clock” (an appointed hour) or a small, visible win condition (a simple track and finishing line) but a primed set of socio-materials condition whose application unfolds under the usual factors geared towards praxial success but not guaranteed as such. No such guarantees exist, save that doing nothing and make politics (thus survival) criminal/allergic only consigns us to a slow and sorry fate. We camp canon because we must, doing so with people of different ages—youth not wasted on the young because the young and old can interact in fresh synthesis! As exhibitionists and voyeurs, what we do in life echoes in eternity as something less to farm (for profit) and more to set free! It’s not taught in school, but there are places to learn that will admit you if you’re willing and young-at-heart; i.e., not so jaded that you can’t rock ‘n roll (with the role of master and apprentice, teacher and student switching between two [or more] parties, per play session)!

In other words, watch and learn, but also, listen and understand: healing is system shock—where walking the tightrope yields untold feelings of many different kinds, and whose subsequent gushing we must interrogate, but also play and negotiate with. When doing so, there is always risk. In treading such choppy waters and in playing such dangerous games, then, always respect each other’s humanity through clear permission and informed consent (remember your safewords)! Otherwise, we’re just cops victimizing each other for the state. Provided you avoid such betrayals, though, go to town! If a pussy’s hungry for more—wants you to tear it up—oblige them! They’ll let you know if you’re being too rough (and if they can’t, then it’s time to stop)! Find the beat and pound that drum; fuck to metal; learn and become the best lover you can be, making each and every time the best adventure it can possibly be right now (afterlife is a conservative bargain; re: the cake is a lie): a precious and princely parting gift you’ll treasure until the end!

(artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Furthermore, by putting these things increasingly in quotes using ludo-Gothic BDSM, the word “rape” becomes not just utterable, but paradoxically medicinal and medieval (the best medicine being laughter but also sex, usually combining the two during calculated risk). “Poison” was the cure, strengthening us to speak out again police forces (which bad-faith allies, actors and players are) abusing the same devices in dated pernicious forms; i.e., for the state during its own settler and sodomy arguments. It will seek us out, only to find its instructions wonderfully confused; i.e., subverted for counterterrorist (rear)ends during as(s)ymetrical warfare by taking vampirism back in a GNC, thus Gothic an-com, green-eggs-and-harm kind of way! They’re a bit melty (and stinky) but boy are they exquisite (I’m riffing off the Poetry Module, in case you’re wondering)! Thus good BDSM becomes good praxis—not a closeted shameful deed, but a new way of life towards a better tomorrow! Spread it around, pay it forward; plant the seeds for something better that grows inside and outside of ourselves.

We’re called unicorns for a reason. Unlike straight people, we fags (and especially we non-cis fags) are intimately familiar with the ontological, closeted feelings and needing to show and hide them under oppressive conditions attached to state structures (religious or otherwise). Once inoculated or otherwise adjusted to state decay, disorder and hauntology-of-war lies, GNC workers become equally resistant but not immune to tokenization from coercion through dogma, torture, incarceration and indoctrination (especially the older we get but also vulnerable from a young age).

(artist: Ballard Zero)

In turn, such beings of the night can—per liminal expression—cryptonymically show to conceal and vice versa per all the usual gay codes, euphemisms and constantly updating courtship strategies; i.e., as revolution and survival from the state (as straight) demands we do. The more marginalized the victims, the more radical the solution regarding their liberation (which is why Marxist-Leninism won’t work—in short, it’s not radical enough). We get together (and down together) to inspire, share and lend each other inspiration, ideas, attention, drugs, fashion tips, money and, yes, sex—whatever we need to see revolution through (to “put ourselves together” and, as Kim Petras nicely explains, “give you my heart to break,” 2018). We insulate and protect, comfort and console, defend and supply.

For us, rebellion isn’t separate from daily life, but one-in-the-same old of dead things we establish to trust as something to build; i.e., bring back to life to weigh on the brains of the living: the ghost of gay Marx bombing the Brumaire! Thus, nothing is owned (privatized) and everything is shared to better help workers and nature endure and ultimately surpass the state as straight! We can fuck with them, including their holy ideas of the past; i.e., punk, rock and gay culture, etc, as alive and well, but like Milton’s Satan, undead in artistic opposition to state dualities (no matter what Marilyn Manson insists, in “Rock Is Dead,” 1998); e.g., by reminding Marxist-Leninists that Marx wasn’t above playing with monsters, thus having a gay potential those who long survived him could later use to camp his own work—to shock everyone awake with unholy pandemonic solidarity (while crooning like Morrison, moaning like Benatar, purring like Petras, and wailing like Halford, etc)! “Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light!” as Milton said; as I said (from Volume Zero), belong to the devil’s party and know it! You have only to lose you chains—from holding you down, but not for being used regarding other things! Out of the slaver’s control, we see ourselves free as liberated slaves; i.e., loving the aesthetic of domination, of power and death (the red-in-the-black flushing’s first-glance vaso vagal threatening blood and penetration through syringe-like injection). Fits like a glove!

To this, patience is a virtue, but the intense, resolute, and pent-up need remains; i.e., that fierce and unyielding hunger—to be free and able to eat, fuck, exist and relate to each other as simultaneously human and abject. Rebellion is required to avoid liquidation, but we make it a delight by “liquidating” all over them! Juicy fruit, we demand to be tasted, humanizing the harvest while serpentine-like and wiggling temptingly! Eat this apple, then revel in doing so: “We’re totally ‘eating from the Tree of Knowledge’ right now!” The “almost holy” is our church, and we want to prey for our sins!

(exhibit 41g3: Model and artist: Persephone van der Waard and Quinnvincible. Note the Mona-Lisa smile, the self-assured confidence about what he has mind. Quinn is a trans boy who, for this particular exhibit, desired to appear more masculine; i.e., as a xenophilic, gynodiverse, monstrous-feminine expression of how they regularly want to present and perform as masc. Before we started, they specifically told me they wanted their face and shoulders more masculine than they currently are; conversely they stated how they also feel content with the female aspects of their body—their pussy, curves and breasts. Such evolutions are idiosyncratic and vary per person, with some people wanting top and/or bottom surgeries and some people choosing to opt out of those procedures.

As a matter of sexually descriptive, andro/gynodiverse genderqueer expression, every vampire is unique, as is every negotiation between artist and model, etc. My subsequent attempts to masculinize Quinn apply to the “phallic,” campy medievalism of fangs and drinking blood, but also masc clothing loosely informed by older Gothic poetics; i.e., an imaginary past as continuously reinvented, “threatening” gender trouble through sodomy as a reclaimed action tied to the performer as subversive, themselves. Although Quinn’s actions are canonically “heretical,” their self-interpretation and sense of style is immediately friendly and harmless.

Angry transgression is entirely a strategy within oppressed pedagogies, but Quinn’s affable, seductive cuteness shows how threats of violent, open revenge aren’t the only path of resistance available to iconoclasts. Sometimes the best revenge is successfully making one’s enemies self-report against you, pulling their hair out at gender as something to [a]sexually parody and joyously play with in public, nudist displays; i.e., not welcome to my sad little world [sad cum], but my weird, happy [sometimes angry/sad, but not always] world—embodying the former realities of compelled personification as a living, sexually transmitted “disease” [queer people are AIDS] to then subvert its dogmatic, holocaust-by-bullet, settler-colonial elements amid new regeneration and praxial catharsis! Medusa’s rapture mixes pleasure and pain in ways signatory to queer experience always being liminal. In turn, no liberation exists without facing that music in a holistic sense.)

(source: Lucy Diavolo’s “The United States Government’s Anti-Gay Lavender Scare, Explained,” 2019)

Like the word “transgender,” “vampire”/”sodomy” evolved into itself through opposing forces that yielded pejorative, heteronormative labels/crises and genderqueer identities/struggles attached to the same language. For instance, the above image was shot in 1965, exactly when words like “homosexual” were nearly a century old, and “transgender” and “transsexual” were just being coined in a Western, medicalized sense. The recency of those new words cannot be said of vampires. Even by 1954, Matteson’s story was old hat, but new in focus; i.e., apply the vampire to what Romero would treat as “zombie apocalypse” some fifteen years later! Past present or (retro-)future, any vampire you see is caught in the same tug-of-war between state and worker concerns about sexual, gendered and performative agency—their swooping in through violent, terrifying and morphological sodomy dialogs about sex and force; i.e., as poetic levers laid with new knowledge build on old knowledge to further closet workers or, in some shape or form, help set them free during ludo-Gothic BDSM.

As something that has crystalized over centuries, though, the vampire’s feeding behaviors unfold during moments of active “torture” according to canonical fears of societal change brought on by queer persons merely trying to exist (thus demonstrate and protest, ipso facto, by actively resisting our segregation and eradication); i.e., by threatening the state, generally through reclaiming xenophobic symbols of the vampire, making them more party-like, sex-positive and fun (the disco vamp as tied to “the devil’s music” and cultural appropriation/demonization of people of color as chained to Americanized sites of sin for white consumers: “the creatures of the night, what sweet music they make!”; e.g., Paganini’s devilish fiddle; Cab Calloway’s 1933 Betty Boop rotoscope jaunt, “St. James Infirmary Blues,” or his tokenized Harlem Romance/sale’s pitch, “Hi-Di-Ho,” 1934; Squeezit the Moocher from Forbidden Zone, 1979; “Slam Shuffle” from Final Fantasy VI, 1994; or King Dice from Cuphead, 2017).

Taken as a whole, these combined, campy feelings of alienation speak to our martyred predation by the state; i.e., in ways we can enjoy and reclaim, reversing abjection through such vampire-style, campy vice characterization. As Asprey notes (and I build on), revolutions take terror back through counterterror challenging state monopolies through camp (those who opt out of doing so and discourage others from camp are generally sell-outs—a concept we’ll unpack more in part one of “Understanding Vampires,” next). Such revivals (and their dispersals) can, often enough, catch fire and spread just as quickly through the state (and its defenders): recoiling in disgust and scrambling to monopolize on the craze.

Concerning the vampire’s sudden neoliberal resurgence as queer and unwelcome, this heteronormative xenophobia manifests as a matter of degree. Indeed, the operation—of the human body and its behaviors during canonical vampire stories burying the gay—originally operate as a mixed metaphor tied to conservative social attitudes obsessed with racial, but also hereditarily “pure” bloodlines and PIV sex. Anal sex—and peoples associated with that and other forms of sodomy—are nigh unimaginable during moral panics (especially male sodomy as chased after, while female sodomy is more openly fetishized by these same chasers of incorrect men).

Instead, the “classic” Western vampire becomes a common fixture of unholy appetite and middle-class addiction, restored through the consumption of forbidden[26] sex, “virgin” vitality and, far from resenting its absence, utterly waste away without it (with “blood” being closer to its medieval, “humors” rubric than the literal stuff in human bodies). In other words, canonical treatments of the vampire vary further according to their biological sex and gender identity as recent, resisted developments of inclusive vampirism during the past half-century or so—i.e., embodying desire as forbidden to the point of fatal excess, including murderous, skulking impulses tied to raw, unbridled sexuality (a very Victorian fear): as having expanded to include trans, intersex and non-binary people camping all of that as “strung out” (or using it to cryptonymically blend in—beards and lavender weddings). Bitches in heat—and ones they’ll never tame—we rise from the heap to scream; stretched to the limit, overcome with defiant ecstasy and rapture, our bouncing bodies (and jiggly parts) give our disdainers butterflies: letting them know they’ll never own us! Wet at the thought, we melt into puddles and quiver! “Stare and tremble!” we sigh, and blast off yet again.

(artist: Nya Blu)

All the same, queerness is continuously moderated through an insistence on cis-gendered, pornographic anchor language and heteronormative concerns during popular vampire stories. Whereas xenophilic vampires reliably become incubi and succubae that challenge the heteronormative order by feeding on maidens, their queerness is generally repressed before corporeal punishment is even administered: state sanctioned banishment, but also “staking” for the crime of theft, a priori.

Wives, in particular, are seen as valuable property by the jilted husband, and the vampires who defile them do so through an extramarital exchange of essence that damns both to die by the sanctimonious owners of women (and, by extension, anything of nature, thus monstrous-feminine). In this sense, women are the ancient carriers for a disease that started more recently inside a queer male body. Exposed to it, their primordial, bleeding hysteria bleeds everywhere, rushing to the operatic surface/stage; i.e., to go a bit batty against patriarchal forces policing nature-as-monstrous-feminine, the act of doing so being a flexible gradient of persecution, dividing and conquering the usual groups amongst themselves, gentrifying and decaying through sodomy dialogs historically having gatekept themselves and omitting anyone else.

Such a tokenized, toe-the-lined trend started with feminism and white cis-het women, only to become increasingly racist, queerphobic, Orientalist, and ultimately assimilative across all parties through DARVO and obscurantism; e.g.,  having the Carmilla triangulate against other vampires—to take the cross, bearing her fangs, drool blood and say unto the trans woman, person of color and/or Indigenous element, etc, “The power of Christ compels you!” Either they betray their cause, or were bad faith from the start. Let it be said, no group is historically immune from this. Allies of all sorts become enemies, such malcontents undermining a shared struggle and entire poetic language, in the process. The ahegao/anguish loses its irony and inverts into fresh betrayal:

This genocidal heritage and fakery has a cryptonymic silencing affect in either spatial, temporal and cultural direction. The further back you go, the more exclusive, myopic, and wordless activism in the Gothic mode becomes. But during the expanding of sexual and gender discourse in later centuries, those being silenced go from less queer to more queer in a criminal, “problematic” sense policing alien love—from vampires as heteronormative to queernormative, from “buggery” to “lesbian” to “transgender” to “twink” as an updated dictionary of pejorative claims used by tokenized, recuperated elements. This includes sex workers punching down against themselves (“dandies” and “ladies of the night”); i.e., inside the same, half-real discipline-and-punish prisons; i.e., between fiction and non-fiction, Capitalist Realism during Satanic Panic into Red Scare punching down at GNC peoples as “vampires” through internalized bigotry!

Let it be said, the visual differences are virtually meaningless (male or female, trans man or trans woman), insofar as class, culture and race betrayal manifests to accomplish the same basic goal through these axes of oppression. There’s no rationalization for tokenization that can justify such betrayals; they’re simply wrong by virtue of settler colonialism (and all its symptoms and variations, including Marxist-Leninist queerphobia) being wrong! Capitalism is wrong. The state and cops are wrong regardless of where they come from (re: America or the U.S.S.R.), and regardless who’s policing the monstrous-feminine for practicing “sodomy.” The state always decays and always polices, smites, and imprisons its foes; capital does that for profit’s sake against nature-as-monstrous-feminine.

Trying this pointedly to sodomy and to classic vampires, the individual, updated treatment of male and female vampires exudes various monstrous-feminine double standards all by themselves (say nothing of intersex examples, which we’ll explore more in the Demon Module): the rakish tempter and sultry temptress as “lady-killer” and “man-eater” tied to the deep, dark thirst and shameless theft of blood, undermining the sanctity of marriage (and a dutiful wife) for a quick, messy one-night stand with a lothario or lady of the night.

With gender reduced to a simple us-vers-thus binary, the act of sex becomes canonically bad-faith—dangerous and perfidious, but also tied to a larger structure: the world as the vampire, exhibit 41h—specifically Capitalism as dissociated and displaced to a mythologized anytime, place and people (re: Federici); i.e., the Gothic masque and its dangerous game of love-making as emblematic to social-sexual interactions more broadly that present in demonized language; e.g., the heteronormative love triangle of the virgin/whore caught between the benign male hero and the rapacious demon lover as patently vampiric.

In other words, blood is canonically abject, but makes queerness unspoken in vampire stories by focusing more on the classic window-dressing of imperiled maidens and husbands; e.g., replicas of Jonathan Harker and his wife, Mina, by the pesky old Count as the go-to torturer/mask-wearing serial killer of women bodies and cis-het male pride. Under these circumstances, it becomes impossible to express xenophilic queerness through vampire stories without some xenophobic carryovers from the history of sexuality and gender as queer-repressed nostalgia.

This ongoing repression constitutes a “vanishing point” of queerness; the closer one tries to get, the more illusions imagined in defense of Capitalism’s struggle; i.e., to maintain heteronormativity by staving off a queer world whose stability and harmony with nature beyond Capitalism is “unimaginable,” leaving only the boxed-in reality that Capitalism is a vampire—one whose predatory and hypnotic illusions workers must canonically accept. So often, they’ll do so, punching down against anyone who ruffles their feathers by asking, “Why, Black Dynamite, why?” (the question the “hero” in that movie thinks he hears, but is actually a statement of defiance made by a Vietnamese child, saying to his not-to-bright destroyer, “Can’t kill me”).

People who live through pogroms are haunted by them, reaching up from abject Hell to chill their victims solid and, to some degree, paralyze themselves whilst staring on in hunger at yet-untouched forms still fresh and innocent: “Don’t be afraid.” Vampirism and sodomy classically involve medieval courtship and meeting new people as a matter of monsters and camp (with that delicious shock of adrenaline, doing what you shouldn’t and it tasting good all the more for it). To it, when Zeuhl showed me the ways of the vampire (through Foucault, who they said they “rode and died with”), they took my innocence; but I was born again, gifted with a heavy knowledge I’d never try to give back to them. Trading in queer love, they teased and woke something up inside me, taking me to faraway places that felt like home in ways home never quite was; having tasted of the forbidden fruit, I emerged a newborn queer—suitably strange and ready to go with the flow, wreaking a lovely gayness upon the world Zeuhl would probably blush at now in complete-and-utter chagrin! Reap the whirlwind, I guess.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Vampirism speaks to altered states of mind, unfolding with eerie grandeur and anticipation, but also remarkable fear and confusion, excitement and anticipation—land back, but also identities back in ways that have to wake up in new undead forms challenging older zombies (re: Foucault, Marxist-Leninism, etc). As such, these hauntologies yield different flavors, which we’ll consider next, in part one; i.e., where we talk about my coming out of the closest as building on this messy 1970s foundation onwards! After that, we’ll do our close-reads! Hunger City, humbly we power bottoms offer up our girthy tumescence! Drain us so that we may transcend to new orders of existence!

Onto “Understanding Vampires, part one: Leaving the Closet“!

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Footnotes

[1] Originally from a community post Bad Empanada made, saying “People who talk about sex constantly and openly like it’s their main interest must be dealt with. Make it taboo again,” followed by him responding to me, saying “BDSM doctors aren’t real” when I called myself one (which, I am); i.e., I—a BDSM doctor and trans woman—am not real (thus neither are sex therapists and paid/unpaid researchers, apparently).

It goes to show that people who are often right about a lot of things, just as often, are really fucking wrong when they are wrong. “Doctors,” for instance, didn’t originate from universities in the 20th-century style; for our purposes, they started off as clerics and scholars in monasteries during the Middle Ages—e.g., Leonardo da Vinci didn’t have a university degree and worked with media and materials, hand-in-hand (and was charged with sodomy* by a local town); i.e., his contributions aren’t something you can merely dismiss for him doing so (including the sodomy charge).

*As Catherine Fletcher writes, in “Leonardo da Vinci’s Private Relationships” (2021):

On 9 April 1476, Leonardo da Vinci was accused of sodomy in an anonymous report to the Florentine authorities.

Leonardo, then just short of his 24th birthday, was one of four men said to have had sex with the 17-year-old Jacopo Saltarelli. The denouncer claimed that Saltarelli “had been a party to many wretched affairs and consents to please those persons who exact certain evil pleasures from him” (source).

For the record, there would have pedophilic qualities to da Vinci’s life by modern standards, for which Catherine Fletcher goes on to add:

A sexual relationship between a 43-year-old man and his 15-year-old employee would be considered reprehensible today, all the more so if, as in the case of Leonardo and Salaì, the younger person had joined the elder’s household at the age of 10.

This pederastic model was, however, typical of same-sex relationships in Renaissance Florence, with the younger man often aged between 12 and 18. The 17-year-old Saltarelli also fits the pattern. Lomazzo suggested that through such relationships “out of a tender age come, at a manly age, worthier and closer friends.”

Renaissance attitudes tended to echo those of the ancient world and, as recent research by historian Rachel Hope Cleves on British author Norman Douglas has shown, tolerance of pederasty persisted in Europe into the 20th century. Age-gaps were not exclusive to same-sex relationships: girls might also be married very young (ibid.).

As such, people generally face the world and contribute to it in good and bad ways; i.e., talent and morality aren’t the same thing. It’s a mixture, those good things existing paradoxically with those bad.

To it, my whole argument with Sex Positivity is for workers to take what is useful from the past (re: the Wisdom of the Ancients) and leave the rest, reclaiming pre-Capitalist jewels to move towards a post-capitalist, hence post-scarcity world. Should we throw out everything da Vinci pioneered and discovered because he practiced sodomy? What about Foucault’s extended works on homosexual punishment and, by extension, carceral abuse in Discipline and Punish (1975)?

By that same logic, should we do the same for Stalin because he sent millions of people to the gulags or enabled Beria to prey on schoolyard girls in their tweens? What about Mao and his War of the Sparrows during the Great Leap Forwards causing millions to die, or his Cultural Revolution weaponizing children to kill his political enemies so he—an aging and paranoid dictator at this stage in his life—could stay in power? These were not people we should emulate exactly as they were, comrade. Marxist-Leninism is, in my opinion, antiquated precisely because the state historically decays, causing tremendous harm towards its citizens and others; e.g., the Russian Federation, the United States, and China. Whatever labor value any of them offered, they are now capitalist bodies competing industriously under Capitalism to out-capital each other. Such is the way of states; they will never let themselves progress—i.e., it has to happen democratically among the hearts and minds of workers united under a common humanizing banner that avoids Omelas-style exceptions.

As an aside, my friend Ginger points out, even if BDSM doctors “weren’t real,” as Bad Empanada argues, it doesn’t change the fact that he’s still spectacularly wrong about sex work and activism at large; i.e., by abstaining from them and claiming total ignorance on such things (which he does all the time), he’s basically falling out of the dreaded I’m Really Wrong Tree and hitting all the branches on the way down!

To it, people in the Global South experience oppression through sex work, and gender studies espoused by someone like Jessie Gender (or any other activist/content creator) are still true and applicable to said people’s lived reality even if the individuals involved sell out or otherwise do/say stupid shit in other areas. The same concept applies to myself and Bad Empanada; to err is human, and last I checked, neither one of us is a space alien.

[2] Re: Aaron Bushnell (from “Ode to a Martyr,” 2024)

Note: This piece was inspired by someone I respect, but whose apathy and myopia I wish to respond to: Bad Empanada and his video, “Americans Demand I Praise US Soldier Who Self-Immolated to Protest Gaza Genocide” (2024). I respond to it in his second channel’s community section: “I thought your refusal to say anything about Aaron Bushnell’s martyrdom at all, only to comment on American jingoism and all-importance is, I feel, incredibly myopic and apathetic; e.g., ‘I don’t care’ (which you’ve said as much); i.e., to overlook something vital merely to state the obvious, thereby avoiding solidarity with Americans who otherwise might agree with you during a shared struggle against larger forces at play. It’s not ‘praise’ to call Bushnell a martyr, it’s a fact. He was an anarcho-Communist, and this act wasn’t a spontaneous [one made] by a weekend warrior. He lived it, dude.”

Martyrdom is seldom agreed upon and often misunderstood. For proof, consider two YouTube channels that I follow, Bad Empanada and GPD. Bad Empanada cynically and prematurely described Bushnell’s death as “a waste of time,” condemning the Americans entering his channel for wanting him to discuss it by virtue of those persons “being unable to see things beyond their own noses.” Showing his own privilege (and nose), Bad Empanada went on to say that far better ways of devoting one’s time to class war exist than killing oneself, and that, likewise, there are far better ways to kill oneself for a cause than Bushnell’s; conversely, GPD commented quite differently, concluding, “The statement that [Bushnell] made, the way that he made it, the symbolism of the act, the uncomfortable truth of the act that makes reporting on it so awkward for Western mass media, makes this arguably one of the most important instances of protest in US history” (“I Watched the Uncensored Aaron Bushnell Video,” 2024).

I understand both points of view. Indeed, it is possible that both are essentially correct at the same time (this post will address several paradoxes, because liberation requires us doing so in order to liberate ourselves from the elite’s powerful illusions). Though somewhat cold and callous in his frank assessment, Bad Empanada’s candor is merited; many Americans are arrogant insofar as they value the lives and voices of those from home versus those from abroad making the same arguments on a daily basis. He wanted to say it and said so without shame, but his cynical, judgement-clouding anger did two things: a) clump all Americans together and b) miss a larger point that GDF did not. GDF is also right, then, insofar as Bushnell’s death is both highly unusual and persuasive: to be done by a member of the colonizing group—and not only that, a member within said group paid to actively participate in genocide as a structure—is intimidating to the elite precisely because the executioners are revealed to be human and have human feelings, which is just as important as humanizing the victims in the obvious colonized group (source).

but also the Kent State shootings. Are their lives worth less than Palestinians or any other victims of Pax Americana purely because they’re from America, you smug, Ozzy, virtue-signaling fuck? Many great activists started off as warmongers, only to blow the whistle afterwards; e.g., Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Howard Zinn, or Bob fucking Ross. Are people beyond redemption the moment they serve? Learn some nuance, dude!

[3] Jung Chang writes of Mao policies’ and hypocrisies,

His regime nailed everyone down to a place of residence, making it impossible for most people to move. Tens of millions of married couples posted to different parts of China couldn’t live together. Given 12 days a year to visit each other, they were condemned to almost year-round sexual abstinence. While his people endured such constraints, Mao indulged his every sexual caprice. The Communist Party and army procured young girls for him. These girls staffed his villas and served as dancing companions at leaders’ exclusive parties when such dancing was banned for ordinary Chinese (source: “Was Mao a Maoist?”).

Even if this were some kind of hit piece (Chang writes for the Washington Post), Mao doesn’t sound especially like someone I’d want to emulate, nor would I want to endorse the state model, per Marxist-Leninism. Undoubtedly his rule helped raise China out of grand poverty (after the Warlord Era)—but it’s still incredibly brutal and worse, ultimately pointless if China conducts similar atrocities and rivalries, regardless of scale or intent; i.e., the Sino-Soviet split and the Great Leap Forward. States are the enemy and historically kill a great many people to call doing so the Greater Good. Everything is expendable to the state, and I see no reason to apologize for their grim harvests, hence keep them and those around. We must humanize and intersectionally solidarize ourselves against them and their queerphobic history (more on this in “Understanding Vampires,” part zero).

[4a] Regardless of which form of queer biology, sexual orientation, and gender identity/performance one excludes, to exclude a subset is to exclude all of them regardless of the popular/clinical language available, known or otherwise used/favored; i.e., homophobia is a kind of queerphobia, and itself constitutes an attack on the entire queer and sex work* communities (at home and abroad, often in token forms).

*The two generally go hand-in hand.

For example, Marx and Engels lacked the language to express their bigotry against homosexual men (and perhaps lesbians, but who’s to say given the bias), going so far as to make up their own words (“Uranians”). Except, exclusion is exclusion, and regardless of how a queerphobe expresses or applies it, such behavior is never good for queerness at large; i.e., to segregate, silence and/or sell out about such things always leads/contributes to collective punishment and genocide; re: a faggot is just a faggot, and “When they abandoned us [back then], they abandoned all of us” (re: Vaspider).

To it, we queers, anarchists and sex workers have no nation or land tied to us (the state is the enemy); so our intersectional solidarity is our best defense. In turn, liberation is all-or-nothing and zero sum (insofar as we want to discourage such bigotry against all queer and sex worker groups because in the end, we are all the same to the Straights, capitalist and Marxist-Leninist alike). It behooves us to be aware of such histories because the negative consequences to said histories affect us disproportionately compared to straight people, who—for all intents and purposes—can afford/enjoy some degree of blindness (even if it ultimately harms them, too); e.g., Bad Empanada being socially blind/entirely unconcerned with literary analysis; i.e., because he is a cis-het straight man in love with the state, he thinks the state (the Marxist version of it) would never go and make him illegal for being straight. And this is essentially true. The state is fundamentally straight, thus will never affect him the same way it affects us, but refusing to adopt literary studies for that reason makes him a poor scholar/historian and even worse ally!

[4b] As Catherine Fletcher writes of da Vinci’s sodomy charge; re, “Leonardo da Vinci’s Private Relationships”: “Renaissance society did not have the concept of firm sexual orientation that exists today and many men were in practice bisexual. (We know less about the women, because prosecutions, the main source of records, generally targeted men.)” (source).

[5] 331Erock’s “Twisted Metal 2 – Holland (guitar cover)” (2023).

[6] Though Rocka Rolla actually debuted first, in 1974 (the title track aired on BBC), with Rocky Horror releasing a year later.

[7] Dr. Dana Rosenfeld writes in “The AIDS Epidemic’s Lasting Impact on Gay Men” (2018):

As I and colleagues established, the epidemic hit male baby boomers much harder than it did older and younger men, causing high numbers of premature deaths, especially among those aged 25-44 (and, in this age group, among those aged 35-44), with gay men suffering “the most AIDS deaths by  far at the epidemic’s height.” In the USA, by 1995, one gay man in nine had been diagnosed with AIDS, one in fifteen had died, and 10% of the 1,600,000 men aged 25-44 who identified as gay had died  – a literal decimation of this cohort of gay men born 1951-1970 (source).

For various reasons, but including a stigma surrounding men as sodomites that did not effect women to nearly the same extent, men historically paid a heavier price in the public’s eyes than women; but conversely, said women were the ones to care for and ultimately bury their male comrades.

As a 2019 editorial for The Foreword explains, this reality led to a changing of the queer acronym from GLBT to LGBTQ+:

The “L” in LGBTQ stands for lesbians. The “L” comes first in the acronym for a reason. In the starting stage of the gay rights movement, gay men were largely the ones running the show. There was a focus on men’s issues and lesbians (as well as trans people of both genders) were largely unrecognized, hence the common GLBT acronym.

The LGBT community despite being inherently inclusive, has always had pockets of sexism. From the fact that there has always been a lack of spaces catered to lesbians when compared to gay men. Gay bars are common spots in big cities, however lesbians are consistently not included in these spaces. There is a large amount of harassment that occurs in these bars. And this is not made up for with lesbian spaces. There are very few “lesbian bars.”

Lesbians are also historically underrepresented in media (though trans people probably have it even worse) when compared to gay men. Although the representation of gay men is often horribly stereotypical, lesbians, especially in the decades before this one, have hardly been represented at all. Where comical gay men, as poor as the representation may be, were fairly common in the 90s and the 2000s, lesbians aside from the occasional gal pals and Ellen, were few and far between and were never main characters.

The push to change the order came with the surge of feminist ideas that sprouted in the ’80s and ’90s. The AIDS crisis also factored into the “gay/lesbian solidarity” that led to lesbians being more recognized in the community. While a huge portion of gay men were suffering from AIDS, the lesbian community was largely unaffected. Lesbians were the ones helping gay men with medical care (source: “The ‘L’ In LGBT, And Why Order Matters”).

Intersectional solidarity matters, especially since the state historically will try to overlap panics—e.g., Lavender/Satanic Panic and Red Scare—to get people to in-fight, thus ignore the bourgeoisie. It’s possible to recognize the sacrifice for different groups, then, representing them without throwing anyone else under the bus or blindly taking the state’s poisoned “gifts.”

To it, I—a trans woman born in the AIDs crisis (1986) but living in it shadow—contracted Hep C in 2013. Unlike the HIV virus, Hep C is largely spread through blood-on-blood contact (typically from sharing needles). I don’t how I contracted it, but I did. While having a long incubation period/slow mortality rate (+20 years), medical treatment was not widely available at the time. Luckily I had insurance through the state (welfare), and while insurance companies could ignore personal requests for the medication, the U of M helped me find a loophole: supply a letter of financial hardship through the school; get denied, thus qualify by forcing these companies’ hands. They’d have to use my insurance!

This took several years, though, because no medication was presently available that had a high enough success rate (or zero side effects). Until then, I simply had to wait.

Eventually, in 2015 while finishing my BA, I received over $100k’s worth of then-experimental drugs by the medical company my school worked with. They mailed a box once a month to the efficiency I stayed at (I was a transfer, so I didn’t have to live on-campus at the overpriced dorms, like freshmen students legally had to). I took the drug religiously (as prescribed); once I’d exhausted treatment, I took a trip to the university hepatology clinic, where a subsequent blood test told me I was “cured” (the antibodies still and forever being in my system). Cool beans.

It was relatively straightforward, but still stressful because so much could’ve gone wrong (scheduling the medication was difficult, and given the efficiency shared one mailbox, theft of the pills wasn’t out of the question). There’s also those several years where I was simply told “to wait for a cure.” It wasn’t something I talked about with others at the time, and I did my best to handle it on my own as best I could. It felt weird having an illness that, if left untreated, could kill me (the disease had, point-in-fact, killed my friend Sandy Norton’s husband—a transgender professor—years prior).

All this being said, I was closeted at the time and only just starting to date; I can’t imagine what it would be like to contract HIV and develop AIDS in a time when Satanic Panic was at its peak and treatment for the disease was impossible. Many older queers—I recall, from the Pride episode of Sense8—remember Pride in the ’80s as a funeral; and I feel somewhat alienated from the deaths of the period only to live in fear after the 2014 election of Donald Trump, chased by a 2017 renaissance of token feminism and queer backpedaling. As much solidarity occurred in the same window into the present, but it’s still disheartening because—despite being a postcolonialist like Bad Empanada is—he (and other Marxist-Leninists like him) look down at me; i.e., see me (and those like me) as just the middle-class fag chasing dreams. I’d say, “pot, meet kettle,” but he’s not gay!

[8] I can understand Foucault lamenting this shift; i.e., as something that threatened his existence as a 20th-century homosexual man. Foucault ultimately died from AIDS in 1984, a disease that was blamed primarily on gay men while also being used to target and kill the gay community as political activists (with lesbian women usually being the ones to care for their dying male allies during the struggle; re: “Why Order Matters“).

Still, knowing what I know about his own pedophilic tendencies (and those of his idol, Jean-Paul Sartre), I feel rather queasy reading passages like those about an 1867 farm hand from the village of Lapcourt in defense of irrefutably pedophilic activities:

who […] living hand-to-mouth from a little charity or in exchange for the worst sort of labor, sleeping in barns and stables, was turned in to the authorities. At the border of a field, he had obtained a few caresses from a little girl, just as he had done before and seen done by the village urchins round about him; for, at the edge of the wood, or in the ditch by the road leading to Saint-Nicolas, they would play the familiar game called “curdled milk.” So he was pointed out by the girl’s parents to the mayor of the village, reported by the mayor to the gendarmes, led by the gendarmes to the judge, who indicted him and turned him over first to a doctor, then to two other experts who not only wrote their report but also had it published. What is the significant thing about this story? The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become, from a certain time, the object not only of a collective intolerance but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration (ibid.).

It’s incredibly dishonest for Foucault to even use the phrase “theoretical elaboration,” here. For one, it involves actual peoples—including but not limited to the man being “#Me-Too’d” for “playing” with the little girl. His grumbling has its own nostalgic theme, with Foucault seeing the ending of the pre-17th century’s frankness as a “twilight [that] soon fell upon this bright day, followed by the monotonous nights of the Victorian bourgeoisie. Sexuality was carefully confined; it moved into the home.”

To this, critiquing the home as a site of sexual abuse is valid (many Gothic stories do just that). However, Foucault isn’t isolating or critiquing sexual abuse; he’s lamenting the evolution of older sexual practices in the medieval past, before sexual orientation and gender identity were even established! As such, his fairytale regression in 1980—towards good, old-fashioned sodomy as unencumbered by modern rules—completely ignores the legitimate, moral arguments to be made in defense of those who are most prone to be sexually abused in the modern world; and in doing so, Foucault speaks to a time when these abusive practices could be done as he, himself, did them during his own lifetime; re: his predatory sex tourism, desire to abolish age of consent laws in France, and an addiction to self-destruction and (coercive) sadomasochist sex; i.e., humiliating sodomy being associated with the homosexual man as criminal from the perspective of the self-hating queer (and cis-het reactionaries).

Sexuality and gender are defined by the societies in which they form, and calling for a “tolerance” of abusive behaviors now just because “no one cared” back then is rape apologia, pure and simple; it’s not “speaking truth to power” but rather using one’s own power and privilege to get what one wants, and Foucault wanted to sexually “liberate” minors (an old cliché in the academic world; re: Beauvoir and Sartre waxing nostalgic about the Renaissance). Furthermore, he’s completely ignoring the power imbalances that he, not the bourgeoisie, would have had over these persons as a prominent, male French intellectual; i.e., the material conditions by which to manipulate them and the incredibly bad precedent this sets, mid-exploitation.

It’s entirely possible to critique institutional sexism, progress society towards post-scarcity using pre-capitalist language, and defend children/queer people at the same time, but Foucault doesn’t even try (to be fair, the language of inclusive queer theory was woefully underdeveloped when he wrote A History of Sexuality). He instead makes a regressive, predatory ultimatum, arguing for a return to an amoral time in order to benefit himself. That, taking the “theoretical” arguments and applying them to Foucault’s actions in the material world, we get to the truth of the man as a socio-material outcome: Foucault’s arguments about power could be used to critique material conditions when used by someone else, but ultimately were used by Foucault to cultivate power, prestige and material around himself; i.e., as a privileged, entitled thinker (Chomsky, despite having ties to sexual predator Jeffery Epstein [re: “Epstein’s Private Calendar Reveals Prominent Names”], once called Foucault the most amoral person he ever met [source: “On Human Nature,” 1971]. Pot, meet kettle).

As practicing Gothic Communists, we should take what was useful from Foucault (re: acknowledge homosexual existence and persecution under a Western juridical system medicalizing them as alien) and apply to this inclusively to all GNC peoples—all while acknowledging and leaving Foucault’s dated, medieval predation of underaged boys behind. Rape is rape, and there’s no place for it in a post-scarcity world except as something to camp (re: to put “rape” in quotes during ludo-Gothic BDSM).

[9] Re: Lynn Stuart Parramore writes in “Like QAnon’s Capitol Rioters, the Nashville Bomber’s Lizard People Theory Is Deadly Serious” (2021):

The notion of shape-shifting, blood-sucking reptilian humanoids invading Earth to control the human race sounds like a cheesy sci-fi plot. But it’s actually a very old trope with disturbing links to anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic hostilities dating to the 19th century. […] Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” the 1897 tale of a Romanian vampire who plans to take over London using his renowned shape-shifting abilities, also carries traces of this trope. The count possesses a number of reptilian qualities — from his association with the knightly Order of the Dragon, from which his name derives, to his cold-blooded nature and talent for shimmying down walls lizard-fashion. Dracula’s protruding teeth, pointed ears and blood-sucking habits mark him as a species apart, a motif of “othering” read by some critics as code for Jewishness. From this perspective, Stoker’s book is part of the British response to the increasing numbers of Jewish immigrants arriving from Eastern Europe. The vampire is a stealthy invader, passing as a proper citizen but secretly plotting domination and destruction (source).

As usual, such things were made “to defend” (white, straight, middle-class) women and children; i.e., from any bias or bigotry that, itself, could be recombined to antagonize nature and put it to work through sodomy arguments and witch hunts.

[10] I can’t speak to his age, but Bad Empanada looks (and acts) like he’s in his late twenties or early thirties; i.e., a sophomore, or “wise fool.” I was about the same age before I went “back to school”; i.e., both literally but also while coming out of the closet in ways that opened my eyes to queer struggles and the therapeutic qualities to BDSM—until I eventually coined “ludo-Gothic BDSM” as new scholarship in my PhD. But being 38 myself, I have probably ten years (or so) on Bad Empanada, thus have had more time to reflect on/alter my positions; i.e., by meeting people who would influence me to change, thus come out of the closet and build on queer scholarship being, like all scholarship, a cumulative enterprise (more on this in part one of “Understanding Vampires”). He’s arrogant, but half-baked—needing more time to learn and grow away from his harmful cloistering.

[11] Said made his own mistakes when critiquing famous media and personalities; e.g., Jane Austen vis-à-vis Culture and Imperialism (1993). As I write in the essay “Gothic Communism, a sample essay: “Cornholing the Corn Lady—Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Empire,” from Volume One:

Said riffed on Austen, “farting in Britain’s general direction” to say something larger about that country’s colonial guilt through their hypercanonical literature mom. That was new for the time (and useful to Gothic Communism for us). My essay does something similar in opposition to Gothic canon as something that is very much alive and well, and far less “quiet” than Austen’s Mansfield Park. Said is forced into, as John Sutherland puts it, “the awkward speculation, ‘Sir Thomas’s property in the Caribbean would have had to be a sugar plantation maintained by slave labour (not abolished until the 1830s)'” and the “dead silence [that] pretty well describes Mansfield Park’s dealing with Antigua” (ibid.); the Gothic is far louder because it’s working with a kind of language whose “silence” is anything but quiet.

Even with Said debating Austen’s “ghost” minus Gothic poetics, there’s considerable merit to arguing with spectres and the unspoken (re: Castricano’s cryptomimesis, or “writing with ghosts,” which I expanded to “writing with monsters”). Indeed, doing so is a time-honored activity that largely makes up what the Gothic is. And while Said’s dialogs are certainly not without weight, they’re also nearly two centuries further along than Austen’s. To that, it’s certainly true there’s a complete lack of urgency in Austen’s novel surrounding any kind of modern importance that Said assigns to postcolonial concerns. These would have been absent in Austen’s time, with her focusing entirely on the struggles of a rising class of property that was quickly becoming a class of people in a slave-owning society through a particular novelistic convention: white women inside the novel of manners. It shouldn’t really be surprising that she kept mum on certain topics; e.g., her pointedly roundabout and indirect conversation between Eleanor Dashwood and Colonel Brandon showcasing how neither can bring themselves to utter the word “duel” in polite company. But if her stories are any clue, she was profoundly apt at navigating the expanding-if-sequestered place of white women in an incredibly material world, and not without a considerable degree of irony (“It is a truth universally acknowledged…”) and dialectical-material analysis behind a veil that all women in her time were expected to wear by tone-policing white men; furthermore, as we have already explored in Volume Zero, Austen certainly wasn’t above critiquing the open, if deliberately moderate, bigotries of Ann Radcliffe’s own Gothic Orientalism (the further east you go, the darker it gets) when writing Northanger Abbey (written in 1803, published in 1817 after Austen’s death).

We shall press these Gothic voicings to our advantage in this essay. My point about Said is that I think he—ever in a hurry to outline the very-real and ever-pressing presence of American Imperialism in the Middle East—thoroughly underestimates/discounts the ubiquity (and degree) of the powerful forces that Austen was writing under as a white woman. It would be a mistake to lump Austen in with so many of her imitators and contemporaries, in part because her Mansfield protagonist, Sutherland rightly points out, “belongs to the Clapham Sect of evangelical Christianity, which hated plays and light morality only less slightly than it loathed slavery” (ibid.). Said’s overall conclusions certainly aren’t wrong about Imperialism, but his assertions about Austen are largely words put in her mouth by his pen (kinky), which he then argues with to make his point. The problem is, he assumes her silence to be indicative of a particular kind of guilt, when Austen’s shame at writing at all became a matter of legend after her death: “How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much Labour?” (source: Zoe Louca-Richards’ “Two Inches of Ivory: A New(ish) Jane Austen Acquisition,” 2020).

(artist: Touminnn)

That’s the problem with ghosts in regards to trauma writing and illustrations: they yield a fictitious, imaginary component to unspeakable systemic abuse supplied by the critic seeking to give said abuse voice, and Said’s invention (as with many invocations of Austen) is not entirely of the woman herself but her reputation and the spirit (and shackles) of the British Empire stretching into Pax Americana following the so-called “end of history” in 1991 (Culture and Imperialism and Spectres of Marx were both written in 1993). As with all Gothic histories, though, there’s a considerable amount of truth to had through a familiarity with what is being said, unsaid, or supplied through various cryptonymies that indicate a presence of trauma (source).

In short, when in Rome, you don’t want to assume you know everything about its inhabitants or that they, regardless if they don’t do activism like you do (which is to say, write novels versus banging on a trashcan and shouting “rape!” at the top of your lungs). There’s more than one way to skin a cat, my dude, different activists working at different speeds to accomplish the same goal of universal liberation.

[12] Specifically your being middle-class and of the Global North. By comparison, Edward Said was a US citizen; he also taught at Columbia, wore a three-piece suit and wrote from relative luxury about his fellow oppressed elsewhere, refusing to wear a bulletproof vest despite writing both about “the problem of representation and the necessity of a political critique that is also a cultural critique” (source: Ella Shohat’s “In Memory of Edward Said – The Bulletproof Intellectual,” 2014) earning him many unwarranted detractors and critics; re: Culture and Imperialism.

Simply to it, as Said enjoyed his pleasures of exile, so do you; i.e., despite your dual citizenship, you make a considerable amount of money (enough to be considered middle class, anyways). Should we just dismiss everything you say because of that, like many of Said’s critics did with him? I don’t think so, nor is your calling on the rejection of others valid for much the same reasons.

However, I also don’t think we should hang on your every word because you primarily reject the social-sexual aspect of revolution (unlike Edward Said, oddly enough, but also Marx, who loved to write with the language of ghosts, vampires and other undead monsters; re: Castricano), and use your myopic, rather carcinogenic and Puritanical approach towards activism to say whatever vitriol you want about others; e.g., attacking and discounting large numbers of creators for being “Contrapoints clones” isn’t good criticism on its face (and I don’t even like Natalie Wynn; re: “Inside the Hall of Mirrors“); i.e., it starts to sound more and more like a dogwhistle and blanket, filibuster approach to discourse, weighing your recent comments with past behaviors, your origins and your political leanings, et al. It’s really not a good look, my dude.

To it, Said’s combination of class and critique (and his distance/privilege) gave him added perspective, and enhanced his arguments through a willingness to play with cultural devices; your distance/willful omissions/refusal to play with such things yourself—alongside your complete, unfiltered lack of restraint—is hostile, alienating and at times, thoroughly childish, grating and apathetic. Call me sensitive and masturbatory if you wish; I’m still reeling by just how standoffish, dated and SWERF-y you feel, thus overly sheltered and hypersensitive, yourself. Unable to play with others, you feel exclusionary and one-note—come off as a lopsided, anemic, pale-and-pernicious imitation. Something human is desperately missing from your work, lending the entire corpus a stale, robotic, isolated, and at times classist/class-reductive signature. I respect your tooth-and-nail fight for the Palestinians greatly (and other exploited workers), but you needn’t do that and fall back on second wave feminist tropes and Marxist-Leninist tendencies!

[13] As I write in “Making Marx Gay”:

The idea isn’t exactly new—Mario Mieli’s Towards a Gay Communism established the basic idea in 1977 and the Revolutionary Communist Party’s admittedly incomplete 2001 “On the Position on Homosexuality in the New Draft Programme” discussed the idea towards homosexuals and women, first and foremost, while not having the most comprehensive understanding of trans people. My approach takes things much further through a holistic Gothic methodology meant towards ending Capitalist Realism (which hadn’t crystalized in 1977, let alone the 1800s). Sex Positivity camps canon by “making it gay” using monsters to consciously humanize, thus liberate, workers with; i.e., cooler, sexier and more fun, etc, and in ways that—unlike Foucault or Marx—actively and effectively diminish the state’s capacity to inflict harm in service to the profit motive through Gothic poetics.

(source: Pluto Press)

Anyone who shoves asides the rights of one group for another—as Bad Empanada does for GNC people in defense of the Palestinians—needs to be weighed by the queerphobic history of Marxist-Leninism they’re imitating in the present moment.

[14] Despite Sherry Wolf calling “Marxist homophobia” a myth, such things were founded on a considerable amount of truth. Not only was Marx and Engel’s silence about homosexuals telling as a historical byproduct of the times in which they lived, but it constitutes a double standard that well outlived them into future forms of apology concerning both thinkers:

Heteronormativity certainly has closeted men endlessly overcompensating for their perceived “lack” of straightness, to which we can only speculate about Marx being closeted or not. What matters is what he said or didn’t say regarding the liberation of GNC people from state control. His problem, as we shall see, lay less in how he focused primarily on class and material conditions instead of class and culture combined through socio-material conditions, but that the language hadn’t “caught up.” As Sherry Wolf points out in “The Myth of Marxist Homophobia” (2009): “It is insufficient, however, to argue that Marx and Engels were merely prisoners of the era in which they lived, though they were undoubtedly influenced by the dominant Victorian morals of the early Industrial Revolution” (source). Indeed, they fought progressively for the Cause regarding those scandals and crises-of-the-day that society published most openly and clearly. Among these, homosexuality had yet to emerge, and indeed would not until Oscar Wilde’s infamous trial (1895) twelve years after Marx had already kicked the bucket (1883).

Wolf raises concerns about American slavery and anti-Irish racism, to which Marx and Engels fought for the oppressed; what injustices they saw and had the language for, they fought for the side of workers on social issues:

All this refuses definitively the argument that Marxism is interested only in questions of class. Marx and Engels’ body of writings and life’s pursuit have influenced generations of revolutionaries who have fought for a better world, including a sexually liberated one. Yet there is no reason to defend every utterance and act as if they were infallible gods instead of living men, warts and all (source: “The Myth of Marxist Homophobia,” 2009).

I’m inclined to agree with Wolf, but won’t apologize for the societal ignorance that informed Marx and Engel’s private homophobia. Clearly there is room for improvement, which neither man lived to see, and this is best expressed through Gothic poetics; i.e., the open, popular language of monsters and aliens as fetishized by the state, but also workers for or against the state and the bourgeoisie (source: “Making Marx Gay”).

In other words, there was a blind spot in their work that neither man lived to correct. And frankly, there’s no guarantee that they would have. Certainly, plenty afterwards did not, including Lenin, Stalin and many other Soviets, Chinese and Americans alike. So no, Wolf, these men aren’t infallible gods, meaning we should criticize them; i.e., to camp their ghosts, not suck their dicks and ignore the lived reality of their movement’s effects on so many queer people (which extends to cis-het groups through lateral abuses)! Equality and liberation needs to be universal or it leads to the same kinds of problems that academics still apologize for in the present day—the state and Marxist-Leninism!

To perhaps belabor the point, fighting for one group does not guarantee you will fight for another (see: tokenism in the present); i.e., Marx and Engels, the men, fought for many groups, but turned a blind eye to others that carried into Marxist-Leninism over its entire lifespan. As such, the consequences of Marx’s buried dialogs with Engels (and exclusion of queerness at large) can be felt in nearly two centuries of arrested development, the state resisting changes away from heteronormativity on either side of the Iron Curtain!

[15] From “Solving Riddles; or, Following in Medusa’s Footsteps” (2024).

[16] Whereas Sherry Wolf apologizes for Marx a little bit too charitably in “The Myth of Marxist Homophobia,” I find it’s much easier to play defense for Anne Rice in my own writing. Unlike Marx, Rice was arguably practicing as gay in her work and her life (and her son certainly is); i.e., standing and being recognized during times of moral panic (which, while the first English trial directly against a man described as “homosexual” would happen with Oscar Wilde in 1895, trials for sodomy* actually preceded Marx’ birth in 1818 by decades, and living in England from 1849 onwards would have seen gay men as alien much like any other bigot of the time); e.g., Marlow Stern’s “Anne Rice Opens Up: ‘I Feel Like I’m Gay'” (2017):

I’ve never associated AIDS with vampires, myself. I’ve always been very much a champion of gay rights, and art produced by gay people—whether it was the early Frankenstein movies that had such a gay sensibility to them, or any art created by gay people. I’m highly sensitive to it. I have a gay sensibility. I get teased a lot by my gay friends because we have a rapport on things we find exciting or interesting. It’s very hard for me to remember that I have a gender, and that they’re treating me in a negative way because of that gender (Marlow Stern’s “Anne Rice Opens Up: ‘I Feel Like I’m Gay'” (source).

And certainly the vampiric poetic trends she played with and modified (while turning a buck) were made in ways she inherited and changed for others to abuse in turn, while she continually refused to.

*Re (from Colin Broadmoor’s “Camping the Canon,” 2021):

Victims of the law were ritually humiliated and then murdered in an extravagant and merciless display of state power. Around the middle of the 18th century, the British state initiated a long-running pogrom aimed specifically against gay men that exploded during the decades of The Monk‘s original release. As Louis Compton records in Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th-Century England: ‘By 1806 the number of executions had risen to an average of two a year and remained there for three decades, though executions for every other capital offense decreased dramatically.’ In the 1790s, when Lewis was writing The Monk, judicial anti-homosexual persecution was at its height in England. Gangs of undercover police officers from anti-homosexual task forces infiltrated queer spaces, sending scores of gay men to the gallows or pillory and creating a palpable sense of paranoia throughout England’s underground LGBT communities (source).

By comparison, Marx and Engels created ideas that other abused, which they a) eponymized and b) excluded queer people from. Marx wasn’t ignorant of queer people and their persecution (see: above). He and Engels simply chose (to the degree that anyone can, under accident of birth) to alienate them—an exclusionary quality that reflects in the queerphobic people and structures that survived and were built uncritically from both men’s body of work. Want to help cis women? Engels has you covered! Gay people and GNC? Crickets; re (from “Making Marx Gay”):

For [Marx] and Engels, queerness was “sodomy” and the third sex (a problematic term) was “Uranians,” but that view was informed by the present availability of information at the time. Even so, Engels—despite calling sodomy “abominable” in “Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” (1883) and lacking the ability to distinguish harmful forms from non-harmful forms—tries in the same essay to imagine a world beyond his own that speaks to our goals:

What we can now conjecture about the way in which sexual relations will be ordered after the impending overthrow of capitalist production is mainly of a negative character, limited for the most part to what will disappear. But what will there be new? That will be answered when a new generation has grown up: a generation of men who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a woman’s surrender with money or any other social instrument of power; a generation of women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any other considerations than real love or to refuse to give themselves to their lover from fear of the economic consequences. When these people are in the world, they will care precious little what anybody today thinks they ought to do; they will make their own practice and their corresponding public opinion of their practice of each individual—and that will be the end of it (source).

In response, Sherry Wolf writes in “The Myth of Marxist Homophobia,”

While here Engels is explicit about how heterosexual relations would undoubtedly be transformed by a socialist revolution, his broader point is that by removing the material obstacles to sexual freedom the ideological barriers can fall. This raises far-reaching possibilities for a genuine sexual revolution on all fronts (source).

Again, I am inclined to agree, but want to critique Engels a bit more than Wolf does. The people he’s discussing aren’t those born into a world where Capitalism simply “doesn’t exist” when the person is born. To posit that is to kick the can down the road and shrug one’s shoulders. Instead, the current generation must try to imagine a better future while developing Communism in the bargain. To that, hearts, minds and bodies can change while people are alive, and the trick, I would argue, is through Gothic poetics; I was in the closet once and have needed to work hard while alive to become a better, more authentic person. It’s certainly far too late to rescue Marx and Engels the historical figures from the embarrassing grave they admittedly dug for themselves, but we can transform their spectres as living entities inside society and ourselves. Take what is useful and leave the rest. Marx will understand. And if he doesn’t, to Hell with him! (source).

In short, we don’t want to apologize for the past and our cross our fingers. Capitalist or Marxist-Leninist, the state simply isn’t gay by function, putting us at the bottom while it fucks us in ways we don’t agree to or want.

As such, if the state isn’t gay enough, make something gayer that it! Your survival—and that of all queer people across space and time—depends on it (closeting in silence and silence is genocide):

Sex Positivity camps canon by “making it gay” using monsters to consciously humanize, thus liberate, workers with; i.e., cooler, sexier and more fun, etc, and in ways that—unlike Foucault or Marx—actively and effectively diminish the state’s capacity to inflict harm in service to the profit motive through Gothic poetics.

In other words, the state commodifies oppression through monsters, which we must challenge by making our own. Our “making it gay” includes Marx and his ghostly reputation as something to debate with (and improve on) in spectral forms that hold these once-living men accountable now for their bigotries back then (from my author’s foreword in the thesis volume):

Marx wasn’t gay enough for my tastes, thus could never camp canon to the amount required. In camping him, I’m obviously doing this through the Gothic mode, specifically its making of monsters—their lairs, battles, identities and struggles—through a reclaimed Wisdom of the Ancients that represents ourselves during shared dialectical-material struggles that take what Marx touched on before going further than he ever could

However private they may have kept them, it doubtless affected their ability to speak out loud concerning the rights of gender-non-conforming persons and their divergent sexualities. So we, by camping their ghosts, must not be silent like theirs were/are; we must use any means at our disposal to “cry out,” including novels and movies, but also videogames and their franchised material (ibid.).

Make everything gay where it is not; however irreversibly affixed to history at large, and/or ghostly and sacred, don’t be afraid to change it! Make Marx and Communism gayer than Marxist-Leninism dared! From the Base to the Superstructure, camp all aspects of it to account for all peoples then, now and in the future. This isn’t a trolley problem—i.e., where one side has to die—but a gradual and total freeing of all those involved from such raw deals, once and for all!

[17] And likewise other heteronormative elements of fantasy and science fiction, regardless of who authored them; i.e., the monomyth as rooted in socio-material aspects that the state, per the Base and Superstructure, has a vested interest in not subverting the status quo; e.g., Jack Fall’s “Knightfall” (timestamp: 14:12; 2023) pointing out how YouTuber Shadiversity (a white LARPer with fascist beliefs—surprise, surprise) can’t stand the new 2023 Mario movie because the male hero… doesn’t follow the same-old Hero’s Journey that millions of other male status-quo heroes have followed before and after Joseph Campbell pointed these things out in 1949 (or Jung before that).

[18] Re, Stern: Rice wrote Interview with the Vampire to cope with losing her daughter. In short, vampirism can be used as a poetic device to mount a variety of arguments and achieve a variety of effects, sex-positive or sex-coercive!

[19] According to the UCLA as of 2022 (source: “How Many Adults and Youth Identify as Transgender in the United States?”), 1.6 million people ages 13+ identify as trans in the US. Divide that by the US population in 2022 (~333 million), and .004% is the percentage we make up. That’s how marginalized we are, yet for which American conservative (and complicit moderacy through establishment politics) has devoted so much hate and anti-trans legislation towards (over 450 failed bills in 2024, 127 in effect from earlier years, and 45 new ones passed this year alone; source: Translegislation).

And while being trans (thus sparkly and covered in rainbows and glitter), I don’t want to encapsulate that hip virtue signal to for centrists to flag wave at the expense of those less well off (and populous) actively being bombed into the ground, denied asylum, starved to death, or otherwise preyed upon by the American state abroad; e.g., the Palestinians, but also other targeted groups abroad. We can call for the liberation of all parties involved, simultaneously!

[20] From David Suresh’s Transgenders Problems and Administrative Response (2016):

Origin of the Transgender Word

Psychiatrist John F. Oliven of Columbia University coined the term transgender in his 1965 reference work Sexual Hygiene and Pathology, writing that the term which had previously been used, Transsexualism, “is misleading; actually, transgenderism is meant, because sexuality is not a major factor in primary transvestism” (Oliven, John, F., 1965: 514). The term “transgender” was then popularized with varying definitions by various TG, transsexual and transvestite people, including Virginia Prince (Thomas, E. Bevan, 2014: 42), who used it in the December 1969 issue of Transvestia, a national magazine for cross dressers she 11 founded (Elikins, Richard, King, Dave, 2006: 13-14). By the mid-1970s both “transgender” and “trans people” were in use as umbrella terms, and “transgenderist” was used to describe people who wanted to live cross-gender without sex reassignment surgery (SRS) (Stryker, S., 2004). By 1976, ‘transgenderist’ was abbreviated as ‘transgender’ in educational materials (The Radio Times, 1979).

By 1984, the concept of a “transgender community” had developed, in which transgender was used as an umbrella term (Peo, 1984); in 1985, Richard Elkins established The Trans-Gender Archive at the University of Ulster (Elikins, Richard, King, Dave, 2006). By 1992, the International Conference on Transgender Law and Employment Policy defined transgender as an expansive umbrella term including “transsexuals,” “transgenderists,” “cross dressers” and anyone transitioning (ICTLEP, 1992) […]

Transsexual and its relationship to Transgender

The term transsexual was introduced to English in 1949 by David Oliver Cauldwell, and popularized by Harry Benjamin in 1966, around the same time “transgender” was coined and began to be popularized (Thomas E. Bevan, 2014). Since the 1990s, “transsexual” has generally been used to describe the subset of “transgender” people (Alegria, A.C., 2011: 175-182) who desire to transition permanently to the gender with which they identify and who seek medical assistance (for example, SRS) with this. However, the concerns of the two groups are sometimes different; for example, transsexual men and women who can pay for medical treatments (or who have institutional coverage for their treatment) are likely to be concerned with medical privacy and establishing a durable legal status as their gender later in life.

Distinctions between the terms “transgender” and “transsexual” are commonly based on distinctions between “gender” (psychological, social) and sex (physical) (Prince, Varginia Charles, 1969). Hence, transsexuality may be said to deal more with material aspects of one’s sex, while TG considerations deal more with one’s internal gender disposition or predisposition, as well as the related social expectations that may accompany a given gender role (Nova, A. Swanstrom 2006). Many TG people prefer the designation “transgender” and reject “transsexual” (Polly, R and J. Nicole, 2011). For example, Christine Jorgensen publicly rejected transsexual in 1979, and instead identified herself in newsprint as “transgender, saying, gender doesn’t have to do with bed partners; it has to do with identity” (Parker Jerry, 1978). This refers to the concern that transsexual implies something to do with sexuality, when it is actually about gender identity (source).

Keep these definitions in mind. The state generally excludes by medicalizing queerness—a quality that manifests not just in TERFs and biological essentialism, but NERFs and transmedicalists like Contrapoints and Buck Angel (whose tokenism we’ll explore in Volume Three); i.e., us-versus-them gatekeeping through medical privileges generally afforded by more affluent queers like those two (and many others, besides)!

[21] A director that, while for all intents and purposes, wasn’t himself above making some fairly queer-friendly material that, in the same breath, Hitler apparently loved. Henry Giardina writes in “Hitler’s Favorite Movie Was Super Gay, Actually” (wonderful title):

Lang had made one of Hitler’s favorite films of all time in 1924’s Siegfried, a technically-advanced adaptation of the 13th-century epic poem Die Nibelungenlied, which told the story of a brave (blonde, Aryan) hero who slays a dragon but is later killed by treachery.

Lang’s adaptation came in two parts: the first, Siegfried, focused on the Aryan hero of myth […] it was Siegfried that Hitler loved most: he picked up on the nascent nationalism that would come to define the film industry under Third Reich rule, made up of those tall tales about blood quantum and blonde purity that would make it easier for an entire nation to view Jews—as well as other “deviants” and “undesirables” such as queer people, people of color, and folks with disabilities—as objects for extermination.

There’s one little contradiction here: Siegfried happens to be extraordinarily gay. Like, very gay. As in: hours of watching a hot guy walk around without a shirt on gay. As in every character standing in pure worship of this random hot dude for no apparent reason gay [and all in a time when steroids didn’t exist, the best men could hope aping Eugene Sandow].

There’s also a canon lesbian character in Siegfried: the Amazon warrior Brunhilde. She refuses to give herself to any man who can’t best her in battle, and before she meets Siegfried, no such man exists. But when Siegfried disguises himself as his betrothed’s brother, King Gunther, to win Brunhilde’s hand for the cowardly king, she’s forced to marry him. When she learns the truth, of course, she’s pissed: and she sets in motion a plan to have Gunther kill Siegfried, despite Gunther’s obvious attraction to the young demigod (source).

To my readers (and queer people at large), all of this should really come as no surprise. It’s not exactly a well-kept secret how a) the state uses godly body language and militant theatrics conjured up anew (re: Marx), which b) queer forces classically camp on the same stages (as Sex Positivity constantly argues). Shelley would take this same basic “bodybuilder” idea and make Prometheus gay (the male scientist giving birth to an infernal son) and vengeful, but also in highly subversive, vampiric ways; i.e., whose trauma and sodomy rhetoric would handily survive up to the 1970s and well beyond!

[22] As Ariela Gittlen writes in “A Brief History of Female Rage in Art”:

Academic French painter Jean-Léon Gérôme’s take on the allegorical figure of Truth (specifically, the philosopher Democritus’s aphorism: “Of truth we know nothing, for truth is in a well”) differs from contemporary interpretations in a number of ways. A beautiful nude woman emerges from a well, an open-mouthed shout of anger on her face and a whip in her hand, rather than the usual mirror. Although she is nude (a blunt reference to “the naked truth”), she looks ready to charge straight for the viewer in a full-throated battle cry (source).

(artist: Jean-Léon Gérôme)

We’ll return to this concept in Volume Three, part one when we compare Sadako to Gérôme’s Truth (exhibit 96). For now, just know that monsters do not have set allegiances or authors, and that something seemingly as queerphobic as the xenomorph or Pyramid head can, in the right iconoclast’s subversive hands, speak easily enough to queer liberation through an-Com theatrics by destabilizing the moral order of the state (re: Aguirre); i.e., through spaces of terror but also the castle-like bodies associated with them (re: me) having queer monstrous-feminine rage and joy alike!

[23] Re: “For four years, numerous Americans, in high positions and obscure, sullenly harbored the conviction that World War II was ‘the wrong war against the wrong enemies.’ Communism, they knew, was the only genuine adversary on America’s historical agenda” (source: Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, 1995).

[24] Later on, token queer people would identify with Ripley and others. But revolutionary fags were just as likely to identify with the xenomorph as try to reclaim Ripley from her corporate, settler-colonial origins (she’s a bit second wave).

[25] Built, as Meg-Jon Barker explains in “What’s Wrong with Heteronormativity?” (2016) on two forebears: a) the 1984 essay, “Thinking Sex,” by Gayle Rubin and their arguments about sex hierarchies; and b) the 1980 essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” by Adrienne Rich and their arguments for the title topic. Such ideas started off more pulverized, working on popularized concepts that strove to get closer and closer to the heart of things; i.e., I would take Barker’s explanation and built on it, hence Rubin, Rich, Foucault, Creed, and many others, thus expand the multimedia ludo-Gothic BDSM web of inclusion to as many oppressed (and diverse) queers as I could. Hopefully it snowballs!

[26] In regards to forbidden fruit, the conservative argument/perspective extends to the closeted “chaser”—i.e., a person who outwardly rejects the pursuit of “sodomy” (in the medieval sense) but secretly pursues it in private in relation to various out-group types: the twink, femboy or ladyboy, or trans women more broadly as monstrous-feminine entities. Speaking as a trans woman who once identified as a femboy, our treatment by these chasers reduces us to a kind of “dangerous drug” or “bait” in a punitive hierarchy of abuse: the “prison sex” phenomenon. Inside it, our abusers brand us with in public with coded language, then pursue us in private. Conversely, while chasers are often white, cis-het men, they can include AFAB sex workers that police trans women as a smaller subset of AMAB sex worker “bait” within “women” as a larger minority category. These AFAB women “chase” us down and punish us as “bait” that steals their customers, in the process blaming us for being treated this way by cis-male chasers and by AFAB “chasers” as well. I have a small section in Volume Three, Chapter Four dedicated to this concept based on my own experiences.

This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). 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 “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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

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

They Hunger; or Reintroducing Liminal Expression through Undead Feeding Vectors: the Universal Feeding Mechanism of the Undead (opening)

“Mercy is a chimera. It can be defeated by the stomach rumbling its hunger, by the throat crying its thirst. You must always be hungry and thirsty.” The Baron caressed his bulges beneath the suspensors. “Like me.”

—the Baron Harkonnen to his nephew, the Beast Raban, Dune[1]

(artist: Draldede)

Picking up from where “Capitalism as a Great Zombie” left off…

Per the Gothic, history is always in motion (and decay/regeneration) through liminal spaces and states. Even so, the undead are defined by two basic things: giving (and receiving) trauma as pain or punishment of some kind, and eating. We’ve looked at trauma a great deal thus far in the module, and likewise have considered how the process of abjection can be reversed by pleasurably reclaiming the imperial language of trauma (and pain), per the monomyth; i.e., vis-à-vis the undead less as neighbors to humans and more equal tenants under the same oppressive system. The more time you spend with the undead as human, the more the process can reverse, but also become more visible insofar as we are normally exploited; re: the apocalypse.

Now we shall examine this uncovering through liminal expression per the undead feeding mechanism (and its various historical preferences and metaphors); i.e., trauma making people decay and feed in anisotropic ways, hyphenating the mouth and the fang (the vagina and the cock) that concern trauma and feeding as likewise hyphenated: the knife dick/vagina dentata as “sodomy.” It’s a bit messy (as liminality generally is) and that’s part of the fun, but also part of the spirit of Gothic poetics: the graveyard (and corpse) as a psychosexual space-to-occupant (residence-resident) of rape play whose irony is optional and generally regresses towards fascism per the state’s usual machinations (trifectas, monopolies, and capitalist qualities): anything that serves profit gentrifies and decays, thus rapes itself and everything around it as a matter of police violence.

We’ll examine feeding-as-liminal through two subchapters, one per vampires/witches (“Eat Me Alive”) and one per ghosts (“I See Dead People”); i.e., as complicated nocturnal feeders concerning rape trauma as part of the exchange, but in ways that often partially conceal and relegate to dark imaginary sites that transplant to and fro inside the colonial space: as overrun with degenerate, prurient forces; e.g., the male sexual-predator lothario, but also the sexually active and assertive monstrous-feminine (from cis-het women to various deviations from that group). Always out of sight, but not out of mind, such half-real, monomythic intimations recycle through the usual neoliberal refrains upholding Capitalist Realism, recruiting workers to play out genocide in small; i.e., profit is rape, which canonical media serves while fetishizing token elements per the Protestant ethic treating healthy appetites as sinful, wanton and undead—damned to death.

For example, the lily-white assassin from Diablo 2 (2000) declares “they’ll never see me coming” in ways that cannot ignore her rather loud, orgasmic battle cries as vampiric (“the creatures of the night, what sweet music they make!”); i.e., as part of an Orientalist witch’s phallic, poisoned (wasp-like) weapons: the heteronormative coding of poison being a woman’s weapon combined with the penetrative fang or stinger of various stigma animals (the snake, spider or again, wasp). In this policewoman’s fetishized form, she’s not the world-ending Medusa, but a token Amazon cop with vampiric, animalistic qualities policing state territories for the state, Radcliffe-style; i.e., something to “top” as an avatar that rapes the state’s usual targets/DARVO-assigned enemies like a lady of the night would: penetratively—a phallic woman (vagina dentata) ruthlessly and doggedly tracking and hunting state prey down.

Granted, there’s always an anisotropic function to such feeding as weaponizing sex, terror and force for or against the state, mid-kayfabe; i.e., as beings to feed in different ways that—like zombies in the state of exception—have psychosexual flavors that can be Numinously sex-positive per ludo-Gothic BDSM, but for which such subversions are far from automatic; they must be taught, and generally occur through all the usual taboo things—opera, heavy metal, witchcraft, hard drugs, Gothic spaces, monsters, and videogames, etc.

(source: Fandom)

For example, Judas Priest’s “Eat Me Alive” (1984), while enduring Thatcheristic censors, was really cashing in on the usual BDSM language made bare to a paying middle class “slumming” in homo-curious ways:

[Verse 1]
Wrapped tight around me like a second flesh hot skin
Cling to my body as the ecstasy begins
Your wild vibrations got me shooting from the hip
Crazed and insatiable, let rip

[Chorus]
And eat me alive
Eat me alive

[Verse 2]
Sounds like an animal, panting to the beat
Groan in the pleasure zone and gasping from the heat
Gut-wrenching frenzy that deranges every joint
I’m going to force you at gun point

[…]

[Verse 3]
Bound to deliver as you give and I collect
Squealing impassioned as the rod of steel injects
Lunge to the maximum, spread-eagled to the wall
You’re well equipped to take it all (source: Genius).

It’s basically a psychosexual camping of KISS’ “Love Gun” (1977). Such things are admittedly rather tame if you’ve lived and understand them in a sex-positive way. But the curious assimilation of Halford as a then-closeted gay man in Great Britain remains a vital element of critique insofar as we can critique him (and the other examples in this signpost); i.e., as someone who ultimately used queer rebellion’s synonymizing of sex and harm to make bank and garner fans through psychosexual dogma, first and foremost.

In short, we gotta hug Medusa as something dehumanized by capital (and for which they deflect blame back onto us); e.g., camp the Nazi fag as decaying into a Zionist shell of his older non-decayed self (re: “Judas Priest: Invincible Shield and Zionism,” 2024). We’ll examine Halford and others with vampires (and witches), in “Eat Me Alive,” then consider the Numinous, posthumanism, cryptomimesis and Metroidvania with ghosts in “Seeing Dead People”; i.e., as feeders of a less overtly sexual sort than vampires are, but nevertheless haunted by the same mechanisms that drive both to feed in a liminal sense.

Sex Positivity has repeatedly covered how liminal expression involves pastiche and doubles in opposition. This requires remediated praxis, a failure of sublimation, and conflict on the surface of the image—all concepts that occur in relation to the undead as something to see, thus recognize as proletarian, if indeed it even is; i.e., “friendly” to Gothic Communism. The “vector” is language itself, retaining a viral, abstracted quality told across the endless transfer of monstrous images speaking to undead essence exchange; i.e., associated with death and disease personified through different, harmfully sexualized[2] feeding behaviors:

• the vampire‘s regeneration of a corpse that regains/retains life-like components; i.e., the greedy sucking motions/wild drinking of blood, but also the canonical depiction as a powerful sexual predator/serial killer out of another time and place—their “Transylvanian” home an imaginary land of madness tied to whispered nighttime horrors, unchecked death/rape and vulgar, bloody displays of power they transfer unto fresh territories of predation
• the zombie‘s useless eating tied to a rotting corpse; i.e., of flesh or brains (or the absorption of colonial punishment from state bullets and knives)
• the ghost‘s feeding on lifeforce without needing a body so much as a likeness or suggestion of one; i.e., mimetic capturing of vitality or draining of essence, often tied to an ambiguous or ghastly site of murder trauma, and/or revenge
• and the composite‘s childhood craving of revenge against faulty parentage, humanity and Promethean knowledge

Information exchange happens by looking at and expressing with; i.e., to paint not just in blood, ectoplasm, or carrion, but the essence of these things as mimed code that gets the underlying point across: the liminal exchange of transformative information frequently viewed as alien, but also dated, “ancient” and brought back to life; e.g., the immateriality of ghosts, the replenished corpse flesh of vampires, and the patchwork assemblage of composite bodies, etc, as carriers of erotic data.

As canonical instruments of terror, the undead possess several commonalities useful to their collective feeding rituals. One is paralysis—to freeze their victims cold, often through a chilling gaze or undead countenance; i.e., a likeness of death on an animated form whose eyes (or facial expression) lacks the societally accepted notion of a human presence.

Furthermore, as a feeding class that often freezes their victims, the undead embody live burial through an aspect of monstrous expression we’ve examined previously with Metroidvania, castles, dolls, and haunted houses: the uncanny but also a mimetic tendency to mirror one another across space and time by consuming and disseminating media tied to the ghost of the counterfeit (again, the basic idea called echopraxis, or “the involuntary mirroring of an observed action,” which we’ll extend to haunted, cryptonymic material: cryptomimesis).

The uncanny warns viewers of something inside the domestic setting as haunted (with Freud’s word for uncanny, unheimlich, literally translating to “unhomely”); i.e., according to a transgenerational curse tied to a body and spaces within an operative membrane. Like zombies, vampires, ghosts and composites do more than express hidden trauma spilling out into the open; they denote a playful vector of exchange commonly associated with “feeding” in literal terms, but also figuratively through a creative process about the human condition—ludo-Gothic BDSM—as fed on the same kinds of poetic, paradoxical fuels within house and home (this “play” often attaches to queer people delighting at reactionaries clutching their pearls; e.g., at dildos and monsters with sexual agency and queer identity. Nothing is more fun than making a TERF or uptight cis person crap their pant at something as silly as the “dark scary dildo person from outer space”; i.e., the xenomorph).

As part of this larger poetic scheme, the ghost of the counterfeit is a canonical phenomenon that causes one to freeze between stages of disgust and fascination (adjacent to fight, flight and fawn) towards repressed abuses under the status quo persecuting fresh prey inside the normal policed territories; romantically dressed up as “past,” these injuries are tangibly felt within one’s living space as invaded, desecrated and enslaved by the feeding dead (sometimes literally invited inside, as the canonical vampire and their parasitic, predatory charm often are).

Something important to keep in mind are the usual “boundaries for me, not for thee” goings-on. Canonically we’re presented with an innocent Christian Europe (and America, later) under attack by corrupt degenerate versions of itself, or hostile alien forces invading home from “elsewhere.” Apart from the settler argument (re: “we were here first are our claim is the legitimate one”), the us-versus-them argument has old, pervasive double standards; e.g., ignoring Christian feeding rituals in Catholic dogma (the drinking of Christ’s blood and eating of Christ’s flesh) while presenting non-Christian elements as popular anti-Semitic tropes describing them as blood-drinking vampires, baby-killing witches, and/or flesh-eating goblins (all from Hey Alma’s “Anti-Semitic History of…” series; 2021, 2020, and 2023). Such activities are, in essence, interchangeable between monster types, themselves identified by act and accusation as much as outward appearance.

For example, there’s also werewolves, which combined with the above behaviors and charges—of wanton, improper and devilish consumption (“…of eating a meal, a succulent Chinese meal?”)—are subsequently used as similar xenophobic stereotypes; i.e., demonizing those outside the status quo, but especially anything threatening the nuclear family model from Hammer of Witches, onwards. There really isn’t some special prize for who is the biggest threat, simply because Pagan women (and other non-Christian dominions/Orientalist and anti-Semitic caricatures) will be treated basically the same as any idea of state degeneracy and corruption; i.e., as undead, demonic and/or animalistic threats that must be outed and destroyed by police forces in any capacity (official or vigilante). The same goes for homosexual men and other practitioners of “sodomy” (the love that dare not speak its name), non-white peoples, and anyone and anything else historically scapegoated for societal collapse (re: boom and bust). Concerning weaponized village persecution rhetoric taken to a systemic level, fear and dogma mobilize scared stupid people; i.e., to do the state’s dirty work for them, be that state the Church, mercantile capitalists, neoliberals, or some latter-day combination of these things (capital decays and regresses, remember).

In turn, abject qualities of an outwardly hideous (non-Western) physical appearance splice pick-and-choose systemic bigotries—a hellish salad of racism, anti-Semitism, Orientalism, queerphobia, etc—with degenerate undead feeding mechanisms to plant/play into false flag arguments; i.e., canonically blaming state victims for abusing the very things the state seeks to aim and control, DAVRO and obscurantism commonly presenting any of these monsters as cannibalistic and dark-skinned, or simply as “dark” rapists kidnapping women and children before “mishandling” them. Whatever synonymizing occurs serves the usual binaries at work, incensing and erupting public fervor against state victims by state victims:

(artist: The Sabu)

Unto itself, subsequent requests to “eat me alive” yield a variety of unironic, exploitation-style rape fantasies/calculated risks, one of the most common (and effective) being the captive scenario—specifically of white women wanting to sleep with wild savage rapists who drink blood, eat flesh, torture women and kill babies, in effect secretly and shamefully desiring this treatment versus having PIV missionary sex with their dutiful, good-boy husbands (who also rape them, and will coerce such fantasies out of their brides when it suits them).

Frankly you can swap out black men with any aspect of nature-as-alien, always bearing a monstrous-feminine flavor (anything that isn’t the status quo is monstrous-feminine). Whatever the form, the criminal element of pimping the plantation, kingdom or colony is the same: forbidden fruit, aka guilty pleasure, which upholds the usual double standards, punching down; i.e., husbands rape their wives; their wives have rape fantasies that commonly exploit foreigners, “the help” and other, even more vulnerable parties (e.g., Mrs. Epps from Twelve Years a Slave, 2013); and so on, inside the same basic “prison sex” mindset.

In turn, white middle-class women (and other tokenized forces on a descending ladder of preferential mistreatment) will gaslight, gatekeep girl boss for the elite; i.e., feminism decays, as does any fight for equality as a matter of convenience controlled through state concessions. Under capital, tokenized women will fetishize the state’s enemies while also cashing in on it through good-girl modesty arguments (re: “kissing up, punching down”) and white bad-girl double standards; meanwhile, fags will punch down against other fags, playing unironically into the “bury your gays” trope as they try to assimilate; and people of color will, per Fanon, put on white masks to police and segregate themselves, mid-assimilation—in effect playing the cannibals, rapists and vigilantes criminals the state wants them to be; etc. Any and all of this will hybridize as needed, but it serves the same historical-material purpose: bourgeois hegemony and control through police violence against workers and nature by the state, having the former divide-and-conquer themselves whenever and wherever possible.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Last but not least, all of this can be poetically subverted, but liberation and exploitation exist inside the same Gothic shadow zone; they must be parsed, there, through dialectical-material scrutiny when illustrating mutual consent through informed, intelligent forms of performance, poetry and play! As such, iconoclasm becomes sex-positive the moment it humanizes both sides of a labor exchange and reclaims the monstrous language being used (often in combinations; e.g., zombie unicorns with breeding kinks, above); i.e., using it to challenge profit, thus genocide, during systemic catharsis developing Communism, helping people let off steam while conversationally interrogating their trauma; re: the pedagogy of the oppressed, finding similarity amid difference to challenge state instruments and articles of self-imposed police violence and internalized bigotry.

To it, remember our modular thesis:

Capitalism achieves profit by moving money through nature; profit is built on trauma and division, wherein anything that serves profit gentrifies and decays, over and over while preying on nature. Trauma, then, cultivates strange appetites, which vary from group to group per the usual privileges and oppression as intersecting differently per case; i.e., psychosexual trauma (the regulation of state sex, terror and force) and feeding in decay as a matter of complicated (anisotropic) exchange unto itself, but also shapeshifting and knowledge exchange vis-à-vis nature as monstrous-feminine: something to destroy by the state or defend from it (and its trifectas, monopolies, etc) using the same threatening aesthetics of power and death, decay and rape (source).

You have to challenge canonical appetites by subverting them, which requires camping what’s already present:

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

In short, fuck whoever or whatever you want however you want as long as doing so is sex-positive/mutually consensual, thus good praxis. By extension, cultivate (synthesize) undead feeding habits that point out the usual state hypocrisies the elite foster and use against you (turning workers into cops inside the usual decaying persecution networks/states of exception, mid-crisis). Capitalism alienates workers through feeding mechanisms presenting nature-as-alien, but also workers alienated from nature and it from them by sexualizing and fetishizing everything in sight; i.e., to antagonize, gentrify and decay the same old feeding mechanisms, driving them forwards to move money through nature while dividing workers and owners through infinite growth and efficient profit (the neoliberal handle of the bourgeois trifectas). Liberation of sex workers (thus all workers) happens through iconoclastic art, which starts by building new socio-sexual connections that stall and short-circuit the same old predatory forces at work making workers undead! —Perse

Give how each reunion is invariably different than before, and denotes a different connection between essence as something to feed on—but also exist between the material/immaterial and animate/inanimate of the world as we know it—this section was originally prepared (nearly two years ago) with three specialized main exhibit types:

• ideal hermeneutic case study (feat. vampires): the Gothic, Marxism, queer studies and ludology (now “The World Is a Vampire”)
• cryptomimesis; i.e., liminal riffing and ghostly lineages (feat. ghosts)
• composite bodies/collages (feat. the Bride of Frankenstein)

I’ve since decided to discuss composites in a different chapter (“Forbidden Sight,” in the Demon Module), reserving parts one and two of this chapter for vampires and ghosts; i.e., as feeders who consume, and are consumed, differently than zombies do/are in Gothic media at large:

• Part one, “Eat Me Alive”:
  • “a Crash-Course Introduction to Vampires (and Witches)” (included in this post): Articulates what vampires basically are, and what about them we want to study and focus on; also considers the anti-Semitic, fascist, witch-hunt treatment of vampires in Gothic canon, and how we can recognize and subvert not just greedy authors, but various traitors (e.g., TERFs) abusing and policing the same vampire language we’re trying to reclaim!
  • “Understanding Vampires: ‘What Is (Problematic) Love?’; or, Positions of Relative Ignorance to Relative Clarity (feat. Bad Empanada and Marxist-Leninism)” (subdivision opening): A deeper dive into the struggle between not just total ignorance and knowledge, but warring schools of thought—i.e., Marxist-Leninism and anarcho Communism—and how vampirism manifests under an-Com principles that often, fall under fire when trying to escape the closet of state forces (and outmoded forms of Communism).
    • ” part zero, “A Vampire History Primer; or, a Latter-Day Conceptualization of Vampirism, from the 1970s Onwards (feat. Bad Empanada, Rob Halford, Anne Rice, Foucault, Judith Butler, and more)” (included with subdivision opening): Discusses a brief evolutionary history of the “problematic (monstrous-feminine) love” known as vampirism and sodomy from the 1970s onwards. Focuses initially on homosexual men like Rob Halford and Michel Foucault, before moving onto second-to-third wave feminists like Angela Carter and Barbara Creed, and finally an expanding of the lexicon and theory of gender studies (through Butler and others) to make room for GNC praxis using the same-old Gothic poetics (re: vampires, for our purposes)! We’ll also critique latent queerphobia in Marxist-Leninism (re: Bad Empanada) and academic, queer shortcomings/tokenism through an an-Com lens, and consider some of the larger historical-material currents leading up to the 1970s and beyond.
    • ” part one: “Leaving the Closet; or, a Trans Woman’s Scholarly Contributions to Older Histories of Sodomy and Queer Love (feat. Anne Rice, Chelyabinsk-40, Brotherhood of the Wolf, Castlevania, and more)“: Describes my journey towards self-discovery and new scholarship (e.g., Capitalism’s abuse of the environment being queerphobic, including in Soviet Russia) while slowly exploring relationships with older scholarship (from the 1970s, onwards)—but also GNC people who, despite hurting me, progressed away from obstacles and towards fresh opportunities to learn and love, cultivating Gothic Communism anew.
    • ” part two: “‘The World Is a Vampire’; or, Bloodsports and Prisons from Old World to New World, Archaic Mothers and the Monomyth to Bloodthirsty Capitalists (feat. The Darkest Dungeon and Alice in Borderland)“: Considers the bloodsport-and-prisons potential of vampires between The Darkest Dungeon and Alice in Borderland’s Old World and New World approaches (and bring up The Matrix and Foucault, where relevant).

• Part two, “Seeing Dead People“: Discusses ghosts in relation to Ghost in the Shell as a posthuman phenomenon, as well as cryptomimesis and ghostly feeding according to Tool and Silent Hill in response to Jacob’s Ladder (exhibit 43a); David Fincher’s Se7en in response to Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” (exhibit 43b); artwork between myself and an anonymous model in response to another artist (exhibit 43c); and a “rememory” of an old drawing of myself and my ex Jadis, who especially loved Tool, Silent Hill and Jacob’s Ladder (exhibit 43d).

Even so, this section will still discuss vampires, ghosts and composites somewhat interchangeably (focusing more on vampires and ghosts, of course); i.e., as spectres of pre-fascist, fascist and post-fascist trauma under Capitalism: spectres of Marx trapped in between the individual pieces of language, inside the poster pastiche of monster mash spread out over centuries across space and time. Witches, as the crash course will show us, are often vampiric and ghostly to varying imprecise, nefandous and speakable-unspeakable degrees: walking shadows, caricatures, simulacra!

(artist: Jenny Le)

Before we dig into part one, I wish to clarify our heightened focus regarding undead feeding and its history as something to study. Although we’re fixated on undead bodies and their ghoulish, messy feeding habits, both are linked to signature habitats; i.e., places where the undead call home as having (in theory) once belonged to them and where they presently refuse to surrender to the living disturbing their slumber above ground. We shall examine those places as we progress, but focus less on the haunting by things entirely unseen[3] inside a Gothic chronotope and more on psychosexual expression through humanoid forms that are, more or less, entirely visible when they feed. Plain to see, these beings become defined by how they “feed” as part of a conspicuous messaging device (we’ll focus on torture and persecution through vampires and witches, but also when we examine demons, later in the primer).

Gothic Communism, then, seeks to reintroduce liminal expression as a liberating process, slowly supplying the means to communicate dead ideas to living workers feeding on the past: how buried histories of worker struggles live on through the self-restoration of a given legend, granting the egregore “life” per exchange as something to revitalize through class-conscious recognition of, and participation with, the past as undead—not just the animate-inanimate as reanimated, but the curiously in-between (which is largely what many “pure” ghosts represent; they are not strictly human or made by humans, but appear as such through human history and language, making their explicit humanization far more tricky[4]).

Moreover, the undead—and their complicated, blood-pumping feeding habits—operate in relation to the living who have “replaced” them inside a shared living space; i.e., as something to move through and interact with those inside, be they alive, dead, or undead. By examining how and where the undead eat (their hunting grounds, territories of violence), we can reintroduce liminality to Gothic imagination as part of a larger subversive process—one that helps workers communicate their trauma and exploitation through various feeding metaphors tied to older victims of systemic abuse and scapegoating (with vampirism being crude, pejorative analogues for queer behaviors, but also whores, Jewish people, and—as we shall see—witches and persecution mania).

To that, the undead have a highly specific material function: as visible, human replicas whose eating is a mixed metaphor in both praxial directions. This becomes highly useful when seeking to expose canonical forms, which try their damnedest to blend in at a societal level through spaces where undead feeding is commonplace, but camouflaged; e.g., the corporate vampire and its stereotypical haunt as updated forms of older residence types, like the office building or parking structure, but also the “garage” or “castle” as a place to “spent the night”: a peachy grave that eats you, versus the other way around (“Pac-man booty”)!

(artist: Sephy Pink)

As often is the case, older forms of the vampire and any sexual-marital trauma associated with them (especially towards women and monstrous-feminine beings) become generally “kept-up” through the appearance of an old castle, tomb or crypt inhabited by a vengeful (or at the very least restless) female/queer spirit as something to commune with. Generally this happens through a kind of threshold/membrane of Gothic poetics, language and behaviors, of which feeding is paramount; i.e., generally through slutty wraiths conjured up out of revenge for having been murdered by the state, the consummation of a larger “sacrifice” ritual, in optional quotes; e.g., cops supercharged on mandated sex, or sex workers reversing the paradigm by camping it—with a witchy vampire’s alien ass/”full moon booty” that claps back, the prey’s “eye spots” paralyzing Puritanical police agents in place! “Stare and tremble!” but with what? Fear? Shame? Hunger? Joy? All of the above? Such is liminal expression’s usual in-betweens, holistic and intersections at play!

As our crash course on vampires and witches shall hopefully demonstrate, living with trauma generally becomes a forever process—one of reclamation and liberation through some degree of fun and play! Camping canon and sexual control, “flesh and the power it holds” extends to essence at large; i.e., traded vampirically and like witchcraft back and forth, Lewis’ naughty Matilda (a gay man profaning the Madonna to seduce a rapey Catholic monk) beckoning you to try it on for size!

Eat Me Alive; or Undead Feeding Vectors, part one: a Crash-Course Introduction to Vampires (and Witches)

“In those younger years my home was a hive of unbridled hedonism, a roiling apiary where instinct and impulse were indulged with wild abandon. A bewitching predator slipped in amidst the swarm of tittering sycophants. Though outwardly urbane, I could sense in her a mocking thirst. Driven half-mad by cloying vulgarity, I plotted to rid myself of this lurking threat, in a grand display of sadistic sport. But as the moment of murder drew nigh, the gibbous moon revealed her inhuman desires in all their stultifying hideousness” (source).

—The Ancestor, “The Crimson Court,” The Darkest Dungeon 

So far, the primer has examined the creative history behind the canonical zombie as something to rehumanize, dislocating their xenophilic expressions of sexual trauma—but also the dreamlike spaces and toys around them—from Capitalist Realism’s canonical trappings and false-rebel impostors. We want to extend this ravenous liminality to vampires (and ghosts, in the next subchapter); i.e., the zombie’s diet—bodies and brains—is part of their liminal expression when returning home to feed, but also their rotted, abused bodies as things to rage at, revisiting awful, indiscriminate violence as something to levy against the status quo through Athena’s Aegis.

The same goes for vampires, we shall see; i.e., as poetic devices to fight over according to the Gothic power of such beings, which proletarian forces try to reclaim in order to develop Communism with. They drink blood, to be sure—and tend to be more overtly erotic[5] (and lily-white, pale) in their theatrical psychosexuality than zombies are—but the blood means different things per these anisotropic exchanges; i.e., of power in vitalistic language that concerns sex, temptation and butting up against creatures (often ladies) of the night during ludo-Gothic BDSM and oppositional praxis: blood witches, aka vampires.

This opening shall nurture that anti-Semitic idea, offering a crash course on vampires (and to a lesser extent, witches), then end with some food for thought.

(artist: Tako)

Regardless of the undead type, though, things generally merge stigma with liberation, the act of feeding becoming a “gateway” drug unto itself that leads towards general indecency and things of the night, which are then abjected onto the usual Galatean suspects by the usual punishers and Pygmalions; i.e., pro-state workers claiming positions of righteous decency and kissing up to “God” (capitalists, instead of the Church) while punching down against the elite’s enemies as an abject matter of profit (capital hauntologically invading the imaginary past): witch hunts occurring through anti-Semitic, queerphobic fear-and dogma—such persecution mania and bias turning workers vampirically undead (whose punitive union, by police agents raping nature inside the state of exception, something that we’ll briefly examine during this crash course: the fate of witches and their eternal black revenge against empire).

(artist: Yamino)

While zombies and vampires both feed (often on “helpless” things, left), the context of their performances differ considerably. Compared to the indiscriminate, battering-ram apocalypse of zombies (the rising slaves’ colonized uproar), vampires are more lavish, sinful and sarcastically luxurious; i.e., the middle class conveniently threatened by wealthy interlopers (re: Jews) and Halloween-style, Christian DARVO arguments (“temptations,” witchcraft). Both concern sex and dominion by state enforcers, but the flavor and feel of the poetry diverges surrounding such things. Instead of total apocalypse, bedlam and mass rioting in the streets, vampires take on white-collar criminalities married to ecclesiastical metaphors, their combined histories overall concerned with assimilation and possession; i.e., ruining the lily-white merchandise (above), wherein the middle class clutch their pearls at the pesky Jewish/queer stereotypes stealing straight men’s owed maidens!

To this, feeding per vampires and the forbidden fruit they offer jives with the strange appetites of demons (with vampires able to shapeshift as well, generally into different animals), leading to witch hunts, but also “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” sentiments that, unto themselves, speak to feeding as a matter of proletarian knowledge and power exchange; i.e., dignity in struggle and death; e.g., Maegen McAuliffe O’Leary’s non-English, Celtic iconoclasm, “What I Would Tell Eve” (2024):

Eat the fucking apple.

They are going to blame you

regardless.

You might as well go to the gallows

with a full belly

knowing more than God (source).

“Eating” constitutes the same process of abjection as something to enforce or subvert, its poetic reversal dealing with the same consequences regardless; i.e., police violence against nature-as-monstrous-feminine, per the state as needing babies (and baby factories), but also virgins to celebrate (for their perceived “rarity”) and whores to abject (for their actual regularity), thus punish/shame the latter as witchy non-virgins threatening the former with the usual double standards that men/token agents control both sides of (re: punching Medusa).

In turn, this predation happens from city-states all the way up to nation-states, unfolding per Capitalist Realism’s usual co-dependent, predatory trifectas, monopolies, and qualities of capital informing the perpetuation of monstrous caricature; i.e., the ghost of the counterfeit’s fearful-fascinated, pull-pull coopting of medieval poetics/revolutionary language and tokenizing/factionalizing of said poetics with DARVO, obscurantism and us-versus-them dialectics (of shelter and the alien) while also “playing Omelas” against different witches to burn, vampires to stake, cops-and-victims-style, until they finally push back, smothering empire in the cradle (effectively making them eat shit, crow, placenta, etc).

A note about the rest of the chapter’s concern towards vampires and ghosts: Both are literally walking superstitions. However, we don’t have time to play Robert Neville and plot out each and every aspect of those superstitions; i.e., our focus for vampires and ghosts remains feeding in relation to police violence. Generally those two aspects synonymize, insofar as vampires feeding on others or killing others who feed is already an apt metaphor for the kinds of power exchange we’ll be looking into. But given the penetrative nature of sex and violence, we’ll also be focusing much more on a vampire’s puncturing feeding habits/methods of seduction than something altogether more asexual like a fatal allergy to sunlight (synonymizing righteous violence with the sun, per fascist arguments; re: “Praise the sun!”), an aversion to religious systems, or vampires being picky eaters.

For example, I could write a whole book just about daytime cremations being a vampiric metaphor for burning witches at the stake, another book about garlic being an old wives’ tale (an antibiotic that counteracts the vampire as a walking disease associated with the Black Death), and another book about why they don’t have reflections or like crosses, etc. But given our work is overtly erotic and holistic, I’d rather stick to the titillating bits merely than catalog churchly dogma and its pick-and-choose prescriptions (of which various rituals orbit around vampires, in particular). Go read I Am Legend if you want a deft (and succinct) survey of vampire symptoms and superstitions; we’re focusing on the cops/victims core of the legend: blood, penetration and resurrection/persecution touching on the vermin, spifflicating aspect of the settler-colonial premise, per vampires and blood libel, witches, insects and disease!

To that, here or elsewhere, anytime I have said, say or will say “vermin,” I’m referring to the signature extermination rhetoric per the settler-colonial argument; i.e., as a matter of territory working as capital per the usual criminogenic tensions. As iconoclasts, we’re reclaiming what we enjoy from our exterminators treating us like vermin they can repeatedly annihilate, invade, rape, mark, breed, and so on, unto profit inside these territories. We are simultaneously needed and not unwelcome, feared and loved, oddly familiar and wholly alien. The state antagonizes nature and puts it to work, pimped out in ways we, per Sarkeesian, can enjoy and critique. We must, or we will not survive.

Lastly, we’ve already discussed feeding and police violence at length in the apocalypse section; i.e., devoting much of that to the zombie as a matter of authorial preference (mine), but for which the same basic ideas largely apply to vampires/ghosts and their own rich poetic histories (and really any monster you could invent or combine when speaking to persecution; re: witches and vampires). So even if it seems like we’re leaving a ton out (we are), you should have a basic-if-sound idea concerning how those things go together during us-versus-them engagements, and can apply the same arguments I used with zombies to vampires/witches or ghosts yourselves; i.e., concerning survived trauma under state rule and its purity and modesty arguments; e.g., of sin and salvation, vice and virtue, murder and mercy, etc, as things to hunt down/with and police during moral panic. Cloaked in that earlier knowledge, we needn’t overstay our welcome this time around (and can always do close-reads in a future edition or follow-up volume); like a hunter’s stake or a vampire’s fangs, we’ll be going in and out! —Perse

Keeping the above limitations in mind, I want to paint you a picture of vampires to reference, moving forwards (not ghosts, which are a bit more ontologically vague). We won’t have time to explore all of the martyred minutiae (or fluids) expressed here; it’s simply a taste, one to reflect on (a canonical vampire’s inability to do so suggesting their paradoxically vain nature, always hypnotized by those who can self-reflect).

Exceptions, dualities and double standards aside, vampires are unquestionably the better dressers/more stylish, moneyed and urbane than zombies; i.e., outwardly more attractive and human in their appearance until the mask drops due to their addiction (which lets them regenerate, but intensifies their bloodlust): the irresistible combo of deathly black and powerful, vitalistic red speaking to BDSM antics and torturous rituals of exchange founded entirely on these banner-like schemes. Like a count’s cloak, vampires wear their hearts (and their decaying past) on their sleeves, turning church-ordained love inside-out, making it dark, forbidden, and diseased, but also openly feudalistic (at least cosmetically—for Communists playing dress up); i.e., as dogmatic, whispered manifestations of syphilis and venereal disease, which tend to conceal their symptoms/orbit around someone’s dubious, seedy reputation and status (class character) versus things that are more obvious, like skin color, or congenital, like gonads.

All in all, the Red Scare remains hauntological, dressed up as “past,” and quickly fallen in love with (a bourgeois love spell/potion quaffed by the usual cops acting out evil fantasies, versus a collective push; i.e., towards development by various intersecting and solidarized workers, courting Communism by challenging Capitalist Realism):

(source Facebook post, Coloring Books Home: October 2nd, 2023)

Genitals and skin color do factor in, of course (usually pale skin, whereas the hyphenations of mouths and teeth make actual “junk” less important than these monsters’ oral fixation). All the same, vampires live and die by their clothes, making them (and the “positively dreadful!” actions associated with them) something to own, wear and parade about for different reasons: painting the town red with their own special sauce. Anti-Semitic, witchy stereotypes (such as big teeth/noses, animal appearances, magical powers, servile treachery and so on) splice with tyrannical European beauty standards (and greedy also-cruel behaviors; e.g., Vlad the Impaler punishing his enemies or Elizabeth Bathory bathing in the blood of virgins). Indeed, vampires are stunningly gorgeous and aristocratic, yet profane, worldly and fallen (from a Christian perspective) for all the same reasons, which can then be unmasked or, like Melmoth, interrogated in Faustian and Promethean rituals: exposing the outsider as trying to fit in, then applying the usual double standards amid the death theater’s witch-hunt executions; i.e., eroticizing divine punishment and exhibitionism/voyeurism (the public execution) versus the duality of queer expression and healthy (“adult”) sexual appetites (with older historical queers, usually men, having castles to play around with; re: Walpole).

Grassroots or astroturf, blood in turn symbolizes general predation, social-sexual exchange, rowdy sex and mechanisms of capital, vampires having their affluent fingers (and fangs) on that particular pulse while they feed for different reasons (we’ll get to these). It becomes a media circus, the victims having means while facing mobs of adoring fans and vengeful cults of witch hunters alike; i.e., dressing up during acts of “thrill killing” and self-defense (and in both directions), restraint becoming something of a myth eclipsed by scandal, intrigue, and repressed, unbridled sexuality uncloaked (a common form of female rebellion—the daughter against the father—is to have extramarital[6] sex)!

(artist: Cuwu)

In turn, practitioners of blood magic (which is what vampirism basically is—a kind of anti-Semitic witchcraft) are steeped in conspiracy and lore as a matter of gossip-style confirmation bias, the latter confirmed through rumors and brute force regardless of class or cultural character (an accusation leveled and hurled at all walks). Surrounding forbidden things like casual, extramarital sex, but also pedophilia (which capital conflates on purpose), such unspeakable legends and salacious rumors effectively make vampires a walking cliché/fetish for courtly love and medieval tyrants/clergymen; i.e., as sadistic, hedonistic, and gluttonous, etc (such anti-Catholic dogma lending latter-day witch hunts a Puritanical fanaticism): as armed and dangerous, something to canonically duel while bewaring the fangs and black magic converting righteous forms into unholy (reprobate) equivalents “preaching to the choir”; e.g., Julian Sand’s titular warlock summoning the antichrist to undo Creation (another Capitalist Realism argument) by assembling a Black Bible (“service to Satan” conflating queerness with planetary apocalypse, Richard Ramirez [and other serial killers] and home invasion. Yawn)!

Something holistic to keep in mind, then, is the anti-Semitic nature of vampires being dogmatically wedded to witches, goblins, werewolves, orcs, xenomorphs robots, et al, as all existing inside the same, broad persecution network; i.e., one policing and monopolizing indecent consumption, which in turn carries with it a dowry of queerphobic tropes and double standards. “Witchcraft” becomes synonymous with “blood spells,” infanticide, cannibalism, “sodomy” and “black magic,” etc, as being punishment for the out-group by the in-group dogmatically appropriating such stereotypes—specifically the language of violence, terror and morphological expression policing sex and force—for them and their masters; i.e., selectively and for their own enjoyment and personal gain concomitant to abusive systems. Any excuse that historically works, the state will recombine, hybridize and sell back in different monomythic forms to educate new generations of workers; i.e., swapping out various elements as needed to encourage would-be traitors to assimilate, tokenize, gentrify and decay in service to profit; e.g., Jewish conspiracy and Red Scare argumentation under Capitalist Realism (re: Jews are hoarding gold and secretly destroying the world, not Capitalism vaulting all of these things) unironically manifesting as thicc gobbos to literally pimp out the aesthetic (which can people can satirize to different degrees, below).

To it, witches grow undead per vampire myths, then are sacrificed inside a fluctuating state of exception; i.e., rife with tokenism, crisis, panic and decay through various other monsters, thus unironic sickness, predation and betrayal concerning all of them!

(artist: Huffslove)

The same basic idea applies to goblins and werewolves, etc; i.e., as beings of nature that, more often than not, are demonized and subsequently pushed to undead extremes by capitalist forces abusing Gothic poetics in the usual DARVO, obscurantist forms: as accusations (e.g., of Jewish “greed,” above) but also as self-persecution arguments that feed into settler mentalities, including tokenized ones that hybridize this with that; i.e., a witch having green skin, being short and thicc, and attracted to bright shiny objects effectively describing a goblin in the same breath. Insofar as the canonical function is appropriated, easily enough, their canonical function is the same.

But try as they might, the state likewise cannot monopolize these things; there remains the dualistic function and context of Gothic poetics, one where such dialectical-material implementations move power (wealth, empathy and knowledge, etc) anisotropically in one direction or the other.

To that, green skin marks stigma as something to play around with during moral panics (and witch hunts) as endemic to oppressed existence; i.e., using the same old anti-Semitic stereotypes of robbery and conquest romanced by Tolkien’s refrain into more recent, neoliberal conceptualizations; e.g., of those burgling dwarves and their tokenized “expert treasure hunter” traditionally enacting queer-coded home-invasion power fantasies that, all the same, parallel settler-colonial arguments and behavior under capital. Playing with those becomes a campy opportunity to interrogate, subvert and negotiate power dressed up as such. We can indulge in the thicc little green bastards, sitting adjacent to exploitation as a means of speaking to our own abuse through the same “cruising” fantasy language: the finer things in life, the devil in the details.

(artist: Huffslove)

Sex work not only combines elements of safety and danger inside an avatar that, true enough, has “slumming” elements (with Huffslove’s goblin being an elven princess turned into a goblin); it plays with taboos and criminalized, stereotypical elements of consumption that hint to the lived reality of sex workers (and marginalized communities, which generally are sexualized by the status quo) living within capital. There’s always going to be a taboo element of exploitation, bias, and persecution; the iconoclastic idea is to subvert them, thus not culturally appropriate others, in the process. Camp canon, put “rape” in quotes per liminal expression; i.e., as a plastic means of transformation (“a Barbie in a Barbie world…”), not the usual game of selling out to your conquerors; e.g., the “X-Men problem,” below, showing that such liminalities afford subversive or subjugated rebellious/assimilative potential through the same monsters, heroes, Amazons, what-have-you: something becoming sexy or sexist by virtue of its relationship to labor, nature and profit—cop or victim, often a manner of secret identities and other such “out in the open” disguises discouraging or encouraging blind consumption.

(artist: Yora)

Per the duality of the cryptonymy process, any monster becomes a mask that can be used in good faith or bad faith in order to challenge or serve profit;; i.e., abused by those saying they’re the oppressed rebel, fascism decaying any language of rebellion (re: feminism, rock ‘n roll, queer liberation) as historically reclaimed by oppressed parties afterwards, then abused by standard-to-token state proponents playing the white Indian or wearing the white mask (white in function, green in appearance, if that makes sense); e.g., Ian Kochinski being caught with loli-style child porn on his computer during a live stream, then trying to say it was “goblin porn” (simultaneously appropriating other cultures and entire poetic artforms into a “pedo-jacket” DARVO his young and/or predatory[6a] fanbase can parrot for him; Bad Empanada’s “Vaush P*dophilia Controversy: Disgusting Fans & Orbiters MELT DOWN Defending Him,” 2024). It becomes a game inside a game, one filled with bluffs made by mad actors, players and educators; that’s how fascists work, hence Capitalism and its seemingly more moderate forms. It becomes a game inside a game, one filled with bluffs made by bad actors, players and educators; that’s how fascists work, hence Capitalism and its seemingly more moderate forms, but also oppressed people acting in bad faith against activists[6b] to trample liberatory nuance and surety of purpose.

Simply put, context matters. For example, my partner generally sees themselves as a “shortstack goblin” or dinky little gremlin, etc; but they’re also short, fat and Indigenous, using the spunky language of goblins to be sexually descriptive and culturally appreciative while acknowledging the playful side such plucky poetics equally afford. Small people exist, and such fictions speak to their lived realities as adults; and just as often, there’s a fantastical element to such media, speaking to possible worlds, peoples, and identities trying to intersect and solidarize, “Talkin’ About a Revolution” (e.g., as a trans woman, I often identify with Elphaba Thropp, despite not having green skin or female genitals; i.e., as a trans woman, I’m still a witch to burn at the proverbial stake). The beauty of struggle is the attempt, living and dying with those you love united radically against tyranny (not for it) as mundane as old white capitalists and as tragic as the middle class punching down. It’s possible to play with such language of domination and bondage, slavery and escape, and not be culturally appropriative; i.e., green skin is generally a xenophobic marker for “spectral blackface,” but historically concerns bias, stigmas and taboos that were simply “black” as a matter of the dialectic of shelter and the alien: made inside medieval Europe (and its hauntologies) concerning places and times when systemic racism and slavery didn’t exist but now does.

The praxial idea is to use pre-capitalist rhetoric to process  trauma while pushing towards a post-scarcity world in a xenophilic way that shirks tokenism and police infiltration/subterfuge. It’s not “edgy” or contrarian to want basic human rights, nor rights for animals and the environment argued for by stewards of nature (which workers are).

In any event, we really don’t have time to close-read these other monsters, here, but anything I say about vampiric appetites unto witches likewise applies to goblins, werewolves, ninjas, jinn, or anything other egregore you could possibly dream up and chimerize (we’ll explore goblins more in Volume Three, and werewolves more in the Demon Module and also in Volume Three). The Gothic is modular, thus friendly to hybrids! —Perse

Such doubles reverse the direction that right the flow of power and resources; i.e., the virgin lamb of God and the whore profaning said virgin, stealing such souls for themselves; e.g., the Belmonts and Dracula playing cops and victims per the usual Crusades righting the flow during a liminal hauntology of war blasting the castle, the church, the land and lord. In canonical terms, it’s DARVO, another settler argument defending the nuclear home from older occupants dressed up as decrepit foreign plots (then occupying that in bad faith). In ecclesiastical language, it’s a schism, the decaying Church desecrating and eating itself amid fresh factions cannibalizing older ones, mid-feeding-frenzy (reversing excommunication in the same territories).

Furthermore, such tooth-and-nail competitions of forged sovereignty have slowly evolved over the centuries into a Protestant ethic that routinely conjures up the Count (a queer, Catholic monstrous-feminine sex demon) to exorcize in bad-faith; i.e., abjecting state victims (the monstrous-feminine) into the same shadow zone as fascists and other state thugs/black penitents. During their eternal battles (a morality argument’s discipline threatened by dark temptation and desire), the usual hyphenations arise; e.g., the fang as a mouth, a dick, a knife/Cupid-style arrow shaft, and carpenter’s nail, but also a feeding tool of terror and violence no one side can monopolize during state crisis and decay’s changing of the guard.

More to the point, the states of today use such persecution mania to aggrandize themselves and alienate, then penetrate (discipline and punish) the usual victims attacked by tokenized forces spying on them (for some quick examples, read “Back to the Necropolis” and my Castlevania close-read on black Nazi vampires): as damned and wrongly accused, first likened to older forms of elite hegemony and then hung out to dry during the Imperial Boomerang (crucifixion being a “good, Roman” form of impalement versus an “evil, Transylvanian” one).

Canon or camp, vampires are basically clown zombies that prefer “blood” (sanguine); i.e., known not just for their supernatural good looks (offset, again, by anti-Semitic qualities; e.g., a vampire’s widow’s peak, rodent buck teeth and goblin big noses), but their hypnotic, Pagan powers of seduction—chiefly their bedroom eyes, staring you down while their dummy mouth hangs hungrily open, anticipating penetration when the carnal hunt out-of-bed goes to bed: “We’re gonna do it!” When that happens, “Come hither!” becomes “What are you waiting for? Take me, you fool!” becomes sleep sex (fertilizing “sleeping victims” during somno). The vampire feeds, on the top or the bottom, crucifying themselves in rapturous martyrdom (a witch “riding her broom”)!

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

As such, vampiric sex becomes increasingly charged, potent like a drug in controlled, calculated-risk environments that speak to larger things outside worker control; i.e., something to deliciously tease, spurt and indulge in, offered up by the body’s natural mechanisms and society’s larger persecution rituals and considerations spouting ejaculatory (fast, sudden and violent) obsessions about “happy endings” dressed up as paradoxically “bad.” It becomes like a carnival—a “Heaven in a wild flower” spectacle to witness, appreciate and behold; i.e., not as a Pale Horse bringer-of-doom, but as a survivor of the usual abuses capital promotes and affords in bad faith:

(exhibit 41f2a2: Artist: Cuwu. “Vampire, witch, or mermaid.” Call it what you want, but the female experience is an old and punished one under imperialism, feudalism, and capital’s early-to-modern forms. It is one that finds joy in broken, scarred vulnerability and exposure as much as covering up or turning away to hide this or that. Capital makes us sick, but also turns us into rare and beautiful things we can take back from the men that we learn to grow up and fear once we become “of age.” I have nightmares from “playing” with Jadis and Zeuhl, but not of Cuwu, in this respect. My dollish puppy and castle in the flesh—how they loved to play in ways that spoke to my own damage and confused, psychosexual prey mechanisms.)

Of course, it takes a carnival and a village; i.e., not just to heal, but survive profit as a structure preying on us while, at the same time, yielding such paradoxes (as Jadis did with me). Moon-sized, our subsequent lunacy conveys big feelings and multiple, dressed-to-bare and vast, immeasurable dimensions (a hellish Cubism Picasso postured at); i.e., felt in the vague-yet-awesome presence of such a structure: to feel pain and other things expressed as the Gothic does—holistically and repeatedly across generations felt in moments!

In turn, these account collectively and individually for the miracle of the human condition; i.e., through all the usual routes and pathways, but also unique poetic expressions you may (or may not) have heard before; e.g., mayhaps Pat Benatar’s “Anxiety” and a lady in a man’s world, the expression “bees inside a jar!” speaking to the multicultural, foot-in-both-worlds experience of Thin Lizzy’s black-and-Irish Lynott. The latter’s titular whiskey speaks to similar containers and feelings, but for hybrid joy and despair on dashing portraits of folklore. Told as well through the Jewish-penned KISS or Parsi in British lands, Freddy Mercury (crooning as only a bisexual man in the ’70s and ’80s trapped in the closet can), we’re left with a certain shrinking and expanding not unlike Radcliffe’s horror and terror for emotions; Lovecraft’s giant, ageless and citied Great Old Ones; “no moon, it’s a space station” reaching operatically towards you like Walpole’s giant armor (the Capitalocene): something to claim, like Lizzy’s glittering and sorrowful “Emerald” (1976) told in heavy metal, comic-book lingo (with all the usual sex, drugs and rollicking adventure thrown in).

All of the above might seem to be at odds—of different times, places and formats—but all speak to the same complicated, oxymoronic things that result; i.e., from living under something as awful as Capitalism and as vast as mighty as planet Earth. Anything else is inadequate, too small and too big—like Alice getting it backwards, out of joint, the white rabbit chasing its tail, trapped in a mirror, cell, or pane of glass:

(artists: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu)

Camping such mise-en-abyme ravings, a pedagogy of the oppressed feels “wrong” and right; i.e., navigated and performed by superfreak baddies for whom comedy and comorbidity overlap (vulnerable parties—including women, witches and Pagans, neurodivergent people, the mentally ill, queer folk, employees and/or rape victims—being continually preyed upon by sexual predators the system protects and enables pursuant to profit unto medicalized victims). You don’t generally walk away from trauma unscathed, and it’s quite common for those affected (with minds like carnivals, having confused pleasure and pain responses) to reestablish some sense of control; i.e., over their lived trauma by turning recollections of it into a ludo-Gothic BDSM performance letting them recontextualize and control their condition during the rememory process: camping our holocausts and survivals thereof; e.g., a standup routine. In turn, the bedroom becomes an apocalypse to revel in, reckoning with delicious forms of “death,” rape play and ecstasy!

To this, there are no perfect victims, and no easy victories; trauma needn’t define us, but does often break and freeze us in ways that make us undead, trapped inside ourselves in ways that don’t age (like the vampire). The victory is learning to live with that, and to stand up to bullies who want us to know our place as conquered people: “We don’t have to defeat them. Just fight them.” Rome wasn’t burned in a day and Communism is something that will take centuries to develop; i.e., we won’t live to see it, but we can contribute towards its inception by shifting a cultural understanding of the imaginary past in a sex-positive direction!

As far as that goes, sex-positive BDSM helps people who have been abused, who themselves tend to gravitate towards, if not abuse, then the weirdness that abuse brings (“hair of the dog that bit me”) that is often adjacent to abuse (with abuse turning people into cops or victims, generally as soft-to-hard fragmented surfaces and personalities). Per these comorbidities, they do so not to put themselves in hot water once again, but to seek and find control through calculated risk; e.g., telling someone trustworthy to fuck you harder (“More, more, more!”), knowing you’ll be sore but finding that paradoxically sweet spot; i.e., an oxymoronic safe space to experience erogenous pleasure and non-harmful pain to the degree that you need to paradoxically feel safe, thus in control again. But that’s what bodies and friends are for! “Hurt, not harm,” my dudes! Find someone you like and build on connections of exchange—of give and take, like a vampire, founding new pedagogies of the oppressed.

In fact, such vampirism agrees with rape survivors (for which cops rape everyone in service to profit), but also argues back and forth, pulling us thirstily into the medieval, grave-like “openings” above ground (more “live burial” puns, vaginal and/or phallic): noisily[7] swallowing rich creamy fluids/moist essence (“cake” and other yummy euphemisms) and giving back fatal, hard-earned wisdom during various, almost-holy sex parties. In short, it’s fun, playful, and cathartic, but also ubiquitous, ace and educational unto victims normally blamed by those canonically starved of a good, healthy education!

As such, vampirism and witchcraft constitute an ambiguous charge as much as a voluntary act, and vampires in particular (whatever the performer) are constantly taking things into themselves whether they want to or not. For instance, the elite feed while alienated from life through a system that preys on life, trying to stay young by exsanguinating the lower classes; said classes feed because a) the elite incentivize them to betray their own class interests, and b) because victims must camp their own survival as something to reify and pass onto others (to transfuse, from one exchange to the next).

Such imbibing and insertions combine to form a heady charm offensive thoroughly at odds with someone’s skin-deep beauty and undead appearance, their gaudy wealth and/or rich appetites belying an addict’s compulsions, pauper’s appetites and fugitive’s outlaw status (not all vampires are monetarily sound, the classic vampire being unhoused and seeking invitation to commit crimes against goodly property owners): the Judgement-Day quality of Christian miracles directed at state targets inside the prison, ghetto or settler colony’s state of exception, deliberately unable to enjoy the luxurious side such implements normally afford; e.g., churchly blood magic married to in-group double standards, whereupon transubstantiation (exhibit 41i) speaks to “tolerable,” dogmatic forms of vampirism and cannibalism the elite co-opt and recuperate through canonical monsters (which they project onto anyone they want to persecute, thus profit from).

Denied the pleasures of the flesh/gratuitous wealth they’re commonly associated with (as Jewish-coded slaves and wealthy sodomites, either being enabled merely to prey on Christian men and their wives), such beings are always to some degree “outside, incorrect, alien, monstrous-feminine,” etc; i.e., must be investigated/turned inside-out as one moral panic climbs and intensifies to the next; e.g., from witches to homosexual men to trans people becoming their epochs’ disease of the day for conservatives—literally turning on themselves—to purify and cull the unsuspecting herd and shepherd alike (as the more faithfully blind apparently are doing with Andrew Tate[8], above). When society is a little sick, it will eat itself through quarantines/panopticons; when those are breached, the doctors will pivot to eating themselves, turning everyone into “patients” carrying the same “disease” (the real “mind virus” being fascism as “asleep,” not social justice and equal rights’ “woke” tendencies).

Despite their signature, corpse-like paleness, fash-adjacent cosmetic, and dollish affect/obvious serial-killer qualities (something to unmask and confirm, apocalypse-style, as predatory and duplicitous), vampires commonly occupy the “black” side of the settler colony argument. From Jews to witches to female sex workers (mistresses/women of the night) to gay men, etc, some such “darkness visible” (the cross-dressing aberrant) is always blamed regarding societal collapse; i.e., assigning guilt onto state victims (with similarity amid difference) instead of the elite on a systemic level. Abjecting predation, mid-witch-hunt, this includes fascists bastardizing such positions to police the same unhappy groups (which moderates then apologize for); i.e., “degeneracy” and extramarital sex blaming capital’s victims for its built-in boom-and-bust cycles: a return to tradition and greatness while surrendering everyone’s rights and closeting healthy apostatic impulses in favor of predatory systems torturing people and surveilling them on all registers!

Checking for vermin—e.g., the vampire’s bats, reptiles, rats and wolves—God knows how you fuck and how you want to fuck! Vanilla vs Satanic pell-mell, the former outshined by hell-bent-for-leather “hurly burly” (again, a marriage of war and peace, Heaven and Hell, and other such forbidden unions)! It’s an old advertiser’s trick: show food, but classify it as “sinful,” then sell it back to workers as double-stuffed, extra-smoky guilty pleasure (forbidden fruit during manufactured scarcity’s feast-or-famine[9] socio-material conditions)! Talk about sex; get hungry for sin (which one, the state polices to justify its own existence, and two, the middle class enjoys [through stagey “corporal punishment” as a kind of terrible in-joke] while punching unironically downwards as colonizers do by design: aping the colonized to better rape them with)! Free love, counterculture drug use and fucking to metal, Black-Sabbath-style, tragically become just another witch hunt, except it’s by the practitioners (re: “Young Goodman Brown”); i.e., more canon to camp (as Lossow does, below): flying high as witches so often do (vampires usually turn into bats to gain the power of flight, drinking blood to do so; witches make flying potions out of baby fat, a Christian rumor started from Hammer of Witches, constantly used to justify violence against Pagan women, but really any monstrous-feminine practitioners of “witchcraft,” “blood spells” and “sodomy”).

(artist: Heinrich Lossow)

Whatever the form, the forbidden fruit becomes superstitiously fatal; i.e., the vampire’s cacophonous/diaphanously messy and sectarian vaudeville typically abjects gluttony (and the other cardinal sins) onto the underclass as something to “finish off” ad infinitum (to ride hard and put away wet during “prison sex” violence). When turned on its head, these weighty accusations shake and wiggle to showcase the hypocritical, glittering appetites of the holier-than-thou middle class (which the state will weaponize against said gatekeepers all over again, policing the blood bank): “God” amounting to the bourgeoisie mobilizing class traitors with cheap trinkets and Judas-grade love spells, turning them into sexual predators sucking the lower classes dry and transferring most of it upwards! “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,” indeed!

There’s no way to prevent such police division and brutality (cops and victims, victims policing victims) without “eating the apple,” as it were; i.e., drinking “blood” serving as a dualistic metaphor useful to knowledge and power exchange in any form poetry can conjure up and transform into whatever workers need versus Capitalism and the state (whatever its forms, alliances, and proponents require); e.g., handling our own trauma while interrogating and negotiating it with others, all whilst wearing and removing masks to feed for different reasons (who the state will try to turn against us by having us feed on, and contribute towards, each other’s trauma: enabling it mid-relationship while refusing to endorse those non-toxic qualities of us that make workers more emotionally/Gothically intelligent and aware of such matters during the loss, grief and catharsis of class, culture and race warfare).

Dualities aside, the vampire is canonically demasked as a serial adulterer or assassin (with Christopher Lee, below, having worked undercover for the S.A.S., to kill Germans[10]), but also people conflated with such things who don’t commit adultery or murder/police violence of any sort—are merely trying to survive while kettled inside penitentiaries of reactive abuse and, under mandated cloaks of darkness, forced to wear such dubious mantles; i.e., calling them “hungry like the wolf” minus Duran Duran’s disco charm, the creatures of the night gnawing at their own legs to get away from cops. It speaks to our oppression expressed in liberatory forms in on the violence; i.e., of camp subverting dominion (and the unsustainable farming of abject parties) as an ongoing problem to play with; e.g., our vermin, hell-spawn status seeing red at the accusation, then scurrying to safety after a good threat display (and again, being framed as sodomites for getting pink eye while eating ass[11]): stink eye from Hell!

Again, the usual dualities, silly-serious theatrics, and criminal visual ambiguities/paradoxes (e.g., Nazi-Communist, gay-straight, teeth-mouth, blood-witch, lips-vulva, penis-vagina) abound, and we don’t have time to break the Fourth Wall and point all these immunocompromisations out (e.g., AIDs, but also venereal appetites). Instead, try to keep the holistic, tangential, interconnected, and non-granular principles unpacked during the zombie chapter in mind; they’ll come up repeatedly here when talking about vampires/witches and ghosts, but also demons and animals in their respective module/chapters (all which grow shorter than the “Bad Dreams” chapter[12] because of it! Generally I tend to write nonstop, then establish boundaries; i.e., placing a bubble around the dialog after the dialog is written. Here, though, things are previously laid out—first through the Poetry Module and then through the “Bad Dreams” chapter of the Undead Module—so I don’t feel the need to overstress the holistic variables; i.e., limits I’m imposing partway through, just to keep things moving towards the current module’s end point).

In any case, the line between zombies and vampires, witches and ghosts inside the state of exception is a thin one; all concern rape and war trauma as something to endorse mid-feeding ritual as embellished during state decay as something to face: the state eats people, who eat each other when the state dies, devolving into sex bandits, but also dated cartoons of such piracy enjoying police protection (stochastic terrorism) versus those who look the same throwing such shackles off.

To that, zombies eat brains to put “trauma” in quotes, but also express its unironic forms that communicate anisotropically by much the same means (re: slavery through “lobotomy” as dogmatic). Here, we want to humanize other classes of undead (or things made undead, like witches) through their own viral feeding mechanisms as cryptomimetically tokenized; i.e., the eating with, and of, the dead more broadly that vampires and ghosts also represent. When returning to plague the living in ways that aren’t quite alive or dead (and to some extent, composite bodies and animalized monsters, which we’ll examine more closely in the next module), vampires become something to canonically “slay” and enjoy per a given witch hunt’s nostalgic “stranger danger”; i.e., when the language of war combines with that of food, death, superstition, and love, etc, but also power and criminality as dualistically arbitrated between dialectical-material agents: as policing or defending nature-as-monstrous-feminine!

Saying nothing about homosexual cis men (more on them in “A Brief History of Queer love”) or queer-coded straight guys from non-English countries[13], many token vampires/marginalized targets are actually female, GNC and/or some Paganized degree of “non-white” (often by body type, next page). Continuing our crash course on vampires and witches, let’s quickly unpack that in popular media, including pornography and videogames (as these will come up later when looking at Red Hook’s Countess, from The Darkest Dungeon)!

From a classically female standpoint, such witches are nocturnal feeders, rogues, and “ladies” of the night (female or not; re: men in dresses) married to modern notions of sin linked to “non-white” bodies “of nature”; i.e., not just witches, but “Gothic(c)’ witches (again, next page) yielding a popular aesthetic, one whose dialogs can be canonized or camped to varying violent, sexual, terrorist and morphological degrees (re: the bourgeois monopolies): the chonky drinkers of blood, animalistic defilers of “modest” women, levitating eaters of children and babies (all anti-Semitic tropes) overlapping or separating witches, goblins and vampires (etc) as state DARVO/obscurantism calls for per cycle. Such predation becomes a witch hunt holiday that blames the usual victims (e.g., women, Pagans, Jewish people, immigrants, non-whites, Indigenous populations, etc) by the usual predators (the elite and their standardized/tokenized defenders) abjecting their prey throughout the year in pursuit of a good harvest over many years: village scapegoat rituals fencing the usual holocausts under capital. That’s what videogames canonically are, but also canonical Gothic novels and cinema, etc.

Per the queenly idea of vampirism, “the lady doth protest too much” becomes a matter of crossdress and performatively wearing out stigmas; i.e., to deliberately camp the police using them sans irony. All the same, such genderqueer cries for help have ambiguous, “predatory” elements that travel and feed transiently on others as a matter of worker revenge; i.e., in ways that manifest dualistically as either sex-positive or sex-coercive; e.g., knock-knock-knock-knocking on chamber doors and seeking invitations inside to drain that warm essence in reptilian, cold-blooded fashion (re: Judas Priest’s “Love Bites,” 1984)! Again, performative context—of the vampiric, witchy (of nature) double entendre as confusing on purpose, paradoxically both dead serious and a complete joke, tasteful and profane; e.g., Always Sunny‘s creampie skit—is what matters during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., flow of power determining function through the arbitration and aesthetics of rape play and domination unto the destroyer’s would-be “victims” (the quotes determined by said theatre’s context).

To it, the stalwart policewoman/token dominatrix sex pirate shares the spotlight, but also the body with the rockstar Communist bugbear’s Jewish (Oriental, non-white, Satanic, queer) revenge. Mail-order bridal appearances and respective badassery aside, cops take for the elite, made to gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss the usual vermin, the latter forced to survive extermination while wearing the same witchy clothes (or lack of clothes, below); rebels redistribute power amongst workers in defense of nature (disguising the “ad unfriendly” character’s activism inside pornographic tolerances), using their sexually charged surfaces and hazardous thresholds to do so—i.e., the revenant’s hellish opera of fatal attraction and forbidden, criminal, problematic love (e.g., Near Dark, Dracula, Twilight, and a million other vampire stories): lust or love, “she wants what she’s never had, all the things that make a good girl bad!” (The Scorpions’ “Kicks after Six,” 1991). It’s not “slumming” if it speaks to one group’s oppression without appropriating and cannibalizing another’s out of pretty revenge. The proletariat needs to solidarize intersectionally but can still own the usual framings of power by reclaiming them:

(artist: Rushzilla)

My point, here, is that the undead make for odd contradictions marketed and sold under capital: classically horny, gay and angry, but also oddly pretty hot and tempting (the PAWG white girl that’s “too big” per a settler-colonial model, having the whore-like immodest body that’s seen as sexually aggressive and melon-like; i.e., “fat and sassy”). The virgin is seemingly the prize, but the monomyth hero is always out, “slaying” dark, queenly and utterly stacked whores; i.e., our resident castles in the flesh, quivering and groaning in psychosexual ecstasy (there’s also room for sex-positive interpretations; beware anyone who says otherwise)! It’s a mood.

To this, the pornographic qualities of Gothic hauntologies fetishize the alien as black-and-white simultaneously within an industry-grade body type: to oscillate towards the beautiful and repulsive as dogmatic, not factual, pimping the ghost of the counterfeit out in ways that harm all parties differently while pandering to all walks; e.g., white girls told to be skinny and fat to please different men in the same predatory scheme (the porn industry [and frankly Gothic canon at large] preying on female and GNC bodies any way it can, maximizing profit and minimizing [the value] of human labor as reprobate—suffering and exploitation made alien unto nature as such); i.e., devices to canonically trigger the usual incapacitating emotions (shame, guilt, impostor syndrome, etc) and infantilizing states of existence, mid-tokenization and assimilation (re: gas light, gatekeep, girl boss; repeat, but also oscillate as an abusive partner world to their victim):

(artist: Rushzilla)

There’s nothing wrong with being sexually descriptive, provided it’s sex-positive, thus challenges profit (and by extension, genocide). Per liminal expression, both exploitation and liberation, subversion and subjugation, salvation and sycophantism, retribution and resurrection, humility and hubris, agency and arrest, morality and mammon, etc, exist on the same vampire bodies and stages; the owners are like dolls, but also uncannily sympathetic (as vice characters often are) and repulsive (the latter fact something they disguise with tissue that cannot regenerate, thus must grow new flesh through addictive metaphors of psychosexual theft and revenge: stolen flesh, blood, brains, cum, whatever); i.e., carrots and sticks to pacify and scare workers, but also entice with various love language relayed as “meat” (e.g., sausage or fish).

To that, white witches are literally caregivers to men (and patriarchal forces); black witches start their service to Satan as young comely brides, only to grow old and withered, thus more invested in eating babies and castrating[14] men than cuckolding field hands and bridegrooms, or telling innocent Kansas farmgirls, “I’ll get you, and your little dog, too!” (re: hag horror).

(artist: Bayeuxman)

Remember that “undead” is a feeling tied to psychosexual exploitation: raping the Medusa as not having a set ethnicity or body shape, religion, or monster type, etc; e.g., witches and vampires; i.e, “black” as a binary half that merits the chasing and exploitation of dogmatically forbidden fruit; re: of nature-as-monstrous-feminine through capital dehumanizing the harvest while plumping its undead “melons” up (an Aphrodite’s fortress to fortify, storm and reclaim nature as “ripe for rape,” time and time again). Desperately wronged, it’s common for the vampire to aimlessly and furiously seek revenge (versus a more cheerful, positive-oriented sexual liberation, left); i.e., from beyond the graves of poorly contained holocausts betrayed by seemingly gentle-looking ladies (and other peaceful protestors) acting “uppity” in ways that will lead to them being policed. Except, settler colonialism marries racism and police violence to other tokenized bigotries in popular media at large, starting with gorgons and witches as comparable to vampires in function; i.e., women are space aliens to stare at, fear and fantasize about, but likewise tied to a territory and its population that can be dominated by scandal and stereotype (as all monstrous-feminine are): the aforementioned “cry of the carrots, and this is their holocaust!” Sooner or later, that castrates capital!

(exhibit 41f2a2: Source, top-left: The Art Fuse; bottom-left: Mubi. Witches are classically depicted in threes, like the Fates/Gorgons, pushed forwards into Shakespeare’s “three weird sisters” in Macbeth onto less numerically faithful versions like Roman Polanski’s baby-snatchers in Rosemary’s Baby onto that protracted mickey-the-chudwad bit from Midsommar having so much Rubenesque hag flesh [above, right] encouraging the young “couple” to fuck and further the cult’s infernal lifespan [“I am woman, hear me fuck!”].

Witches, like vampires, have youthful and aged visages that fluctuate based on their mood. Sometimes they’re younger and more attractive to those they hunt [often young, sexist, ageist, anti-Semitic dude bros]; sometimes they appear older [and not as attractive to the aforementioned group]. Just as often, though, a witch can—like a vampire—change her shape and wield familial power over nature in ways that terrify patriarchal rulers and their structures of patrilineal descent; i.e., their literal ability to reproduce; e.g., Midsommar‘s love spell made by the slutty redhead’s period blood[!] into a kind of sex potion that, as the film would have it, tells the future as a kind of code playing out, time and time again; re: the castration fantasy pointedly merged with cuckold fears, village persecution myth, forced parentage, and the vasovagal response.

Sexual predators commonly weaponize such Freudian dogma; i.e., hiding their own abuse behind monstrous stereotypes they can combine and splinter at will; e.g., while Shakespeare was a gay bigot who wrote Othello and The Merchant of Venice [neither story being especially kind to women, it must be said], Polanski is a literal pedophile who rapes underage women and fetishizes older women in the above witchy stereotypes.

To be fair to Shakespeare, though, his Lady Macbeth [Polanski adapted the film for Playboy in 1971, top-left] is at least a useful analog for female revenge aped by more recent feminist tokenisms; i.e., imploring the “phallic” desire for revenge, doing so in ways that speak to tokenization by emulating the men in charge:

Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,

And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full

Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood.

Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose [source].

Such myopic, unironically fascist feminism is best canonized in Angela Carter and Barbara Creed’s dated, singularly female, tokenized, Amazonian revenge fantasies and theories [exhibit 41g1a2]. To that, we have to do better than they and Shakespeare did; i.e., by both not treating [white cis] women as the universal victims of patriarchal systems, and simultaneously making sure the desire to not be a victim doesn’t lead oppressed peoples to triangulate, thus punch down against, themselves and those in the same proverbial boat!

 

Keeping with the witch-hunt framing, this extends to witches and vampires that corporations sell to potentially tokenized consumers, the latter devouring persecution for DARVO and obscurantist purposes; i.e., these shamelessly appropriative cartoons become co-opted and celebrated by women and other marginalized peoples for simply being female, of color and/or queer versions of “Caesar’s ghost”; e.g., Drolta Tzuentes from Castlevania: Nocturne [2023, above] as a black Nazi vampire [one we discussed previously, in “Back to the Necropolis,” 2024]. To it, former symbols of rebellion become Red Scare “Nazis” that righteous heroes can stand off against and put down; i.e., not Medusa or Dracula at all, but a witch cop who tokenizes to enjoy the brutalizer’s glove, then surrenders their neck as the script demands depleting “sodomy” of its proletarian energies. Unlike these Judas goats, liberation isn’t simply “to get mad,” but enrage in ways that constitute actual rebellion; re: fascism is a false rebellion, their revenge being to sell out, effectively betraying their own kind by playing into the elite’s most poisonous and pernicious stereotypes. It’s self-defeating and sad!

Frankly, the same goes for any token minority on a spectrum of relative privilege and punishment recuperating monstrous-feminine language for profit; i.e., the desire to fit in—to belong inside a prison-like environment—as gentrified and sold back to different oppressed groups orbiting Paganized cosmetics speaking to the very out-groups tempted with class betrayal. In the Gothic tradition since Radcliffe, usually this appeal is leveled at white middle-class girls [or those wearing white masks, above]. Furthermore, this recuperation of alien poetics as married to the middle class probably sounds like Harry Potter and the Hogwarts Wizarding School, but is actually as old as witch culture, itself. Except, you needn’t go back to Hammer of Witches to make that point; the 1980s will do just as well:

Stories like The Worst Witch sing, Elphaba-Thropp-style [“Growing up… isn’t easy!”], about the perils of growing up as a perceived outsider with some degree of actual insider status; i.e., in a world that is already ruled by powerful wizards, and where Halloween is everyday of the year among an established, settler-colonial system and its monomythic structure: a white, British, all-girls boarding school.

The whole point of the above example is for Margaret Hubble to uncover an internal conspiracy/foreign plot, save the school form said plot, and earn the respect of her teachers [Diana Rigg slaying it as Miss Constance, bottom-left, but most important of them being the Wizard, himself, played wonderfully by Tim Curry’s “Dracula,” top-left]. Sure, it’s campy and queer-coded to some extent, but goofy earworms like “Anything Can Happen on Halloween” [revisited by Mega64 in 2010] still relay the spirit of infinite possibility as commercialized; i.e., told from an exclusively white/tokenized, middle-class childhood sold back to fresh tweens [or regressing adults] in neoliberal fashion: false hope and personal responsibility rhetoric amid austerity politics and societal collapse! Blame Thatcher and Reagan for pimping Paganism, kids!

[artist Drew Struzan]

Furthermore, the made-for-TV movie is oddly faithful when installing a witch as the Dorothy-esque savior “rescuing Oz” from a “wicked” witch for a “good” witch and her male patriarch [the lead actress—the wonderfully incongruous Fairuza Balk—had already starred in Return to Oz from two years previous, and would be typecast to play different witches and social outcasts[15] throughout her career]. In turn, the language of rebellion and alienation have—like many older, pre-Western cultures—gone the way less of the dodo and more the Cherokee: “Kill the Indian, save the man.” In the end, these symbols become hollowed-out, thoroughly dead, sugary metaphors to sell to the middle class, who feel alienated inside Capitalism and the imperial, settler-colonial scheme.

Black, white, or somewhere in between, whatever the slave or out-group being targeted, conformity is the elite’s greatest weapon—the only way they keep holding onto power! To challenge that, we must take back Halloween [and vampires and witches, etc] in ways they can’t commodify/turn into a toothless, sing-song[16] holiday [which, as per tradition, will gentrify and decay as all capitalist territories and boundaries do, above—overshadowed by “Pagan” obscurantism and the Protestant ethic to go wild for the state and the state alone]! To it, the state splices various feelings and monstrous states to enlist them for its usual predation on workers and nature; e.g., witches and undeath through feelings of exclusive predation [white Indians, but also black skin, white masks, etc, playing at guerrillas during asymmetrical warfare (stochastic terrorism) for the state]. As such, we can’t let past trauma [ours or others] destroy us and turn us into gatekeepers; we must be able to laugh at our past while being honest about it in ways that don’t scare others off [regardless of their trauma]! Don’t fear the reaper; fear becoming the reaper for the state inside their prison-like systems and states of exception!

There’s no such thing as a perfect victim, though; all workers have some degree of trauma [and the elite and their charmed lives have been alienated and either don’t know it or lack the capacity to care]. Trauma attracts trauma; weird attracts weird as a matter of searching for kindred lost souls. The paradox of such liminality and entanglement, then, is feeling alien while in the closet, then coming out to feel more genuine according to destinies we make alongside those we feel privileged to lose ourselves around and inside; i.e., to go deep and last forever as we finish and come up for air—and gasping for breath, our “sex hair” a total mess—stinking with hot joy and delight, longing to dive desperately back through that underworldly membrane, plunging and raising up to heavenly delights! “Paradise” is a garden of paradoxes; the mind-body connection “its own place, [where one or more] can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

[artist: Bay]

My exes always treated me like a piece of meat, in that respect, all while acting more oppressed for it, themselves. It left me hating myself and searching for someone who wouldn’t prey on me, but rather take me to special worlds I’d heard about as a little girl, much little Dorothy did in black-and-white Kansas. For me, that’s Bay—someone I can play with and be myself without shame or fear of rejection or harm, but someone who labors alongside me to create this book series as it currently stands! They’re my witch, good and wicked, white and black, sweet and fierce, for workers one and all, sharing the perils of persecution and pleasure, hand-in-hand!

The paradox is, witches are wholly paramount to “colorizing our lives” [as Meatloaf puts it]: blood-red, vampires enacting Jewish revenge to “better the instruction”; i.e., as making workers more aware and less cruel, but still able to plea for witches and nature: “If you prick me, do I not bleed? If you wrong me, shall I not revenge?” Indeed, such muses and play are a constant, multi-staged and cross-media relationship that is vital to cultivate through praxis, taking all workers Over the Rainbow and into the magical land of Gothic Communism; i.e., as a world only waiting to be dreamt up and made real out of old dead things—as common as straw and stuffed into a scarecrow that sparked with the miracle of gay witchcraft, dances and springs to rare, precious life.)

Take this nature-is-a-witch problem to its logical conclusion regarding vampires, then: trauma warps us without changing how we look on the outside; i.e., some of the fiercest predators I’ve encountered having been originally preyed on for their looks, only to weaponize their profession (sex work) against future victims using said looks (re: Jadis, Jade, and various AFAB sex workers during my own brush with transmisogynistic sex workers). This reflects in stories concerned with apocalypse—of Imperialism coming home to empire.

To it, gore and carnage don’t stay inside during a grim harvest; they spill out everywhere, occupied by impostors for or against the state, the viewing of said offal freezing their victims helplessly in place (the vampire, ghost or composite feeding through disguises that, whether intentional, incidental or both, allow them to get close enough to feed on someone): raping the whore per the monomyth—and its phallic synonymizing of unironic sex and force (the gun/knife dick) to suit state aims—as something for us to camp to Hell and back inside the same ghastly spaces made available through popular media; i.e., maps of conquest; re: Tolkien and Cameron’s refrains.

Hell, as I’ve said, is always a place on Earth, generally in reference to neoliberal refrains (videogames) that attach to real-world places and witch-hunter politics linking back to said refrains; i.e., from “Transylvania” in quotes to Palestine and its neighboring territories of conquest defended by state forces even when the apocalypse denudes; e.g., the Rational National’s “Israel Strikes Sheltering Palestinians in Open Defiance of Recent ICJ Order” (2024). To this, the IDF bombs Rafah to the same degree as Gaza, disobeying the ICJ (no surprise, there) because that’s what the state does. American liberals and good-cop centrists elsewhere will ignore these realities until they can’t, then condemn them with meaningless lip service that “both sides” everything and sheds tears at the funerals of those presented as “undead,” hence doomed to die during state witch hunts: blaming black knights but calling their victims “terrorists,” too.

To that, witches and fags likewise decay into fascists! We cannot avoid or hide from state abuse and tokenization, then, but instead must go where power is to calculate and learn from it, mid-calculated risk, and prevent capital’s resurgence now and into the future; i.e., fucking with witches and vampires as our friends, but also speaking to state disguises posturing as such on shared stages. The fact remains, American Liberalism yields smiling cunts who rape Medusa (skinny or thicc) as violent pornography remediated through all kinds of power fantasies, including games (video other otherwise). Whatever the size, genre or shape, it’s all a dogmatic sham, pinning the blame on whomever the state requires during moral panics concerned with regression at home and overseas: “Ricky Butler says they’re nocturnal feeders!”

Jokes aside, this endless remediation quickly becomes a Whac-a-Mole game, targeting “Nazis”; i.e., campy forms thereof that are anything but fascist, and which practicing fascists dogwhistle with strawman arguments that encourage police violence against queer people (and other marginalized groups) reclaiming Gothic poetics—but especially the BDSM language known to vampires—from fascist Pax Americana forces: weird canonical nerds raised on such dreck as Puritanically nostalgic to them, playing videogames to defend the nuclear family (and maidens) from those pesky witches, whores and, yes, vampires!

Speaking of which, we’ve looked at zombies feeding horrifyingly in broad daylight; now let’s look at vampires of all shapes and sizes feeding as the undead commonly do—at night (sex with the lights off, in essence): “What a horrible night to have a curse!”

(source: Reddit)

While novels and cinema capture the sensation of a vampire (rape) epidemic, videogames like Castlevania III (1989) allow the player to embody the monomythic witch hunter hunting nature; i.e., by chasing the Medusa down and raping her to death (the hypermasculine, Jojo-style Belmonts commonly whipping Dracula—a male monstrous-feminine vamp—with their slavers’ whips during a bourgeois form of torture/demon BDSM: fascist leather daddies working for the state). In such cases, nature is still monstrous-feminine, witches and vampires treated as the devil’s cohort, thus needing to be collectively punished or cajoled into betraying nature for the Greater Good (the devil’s rejects, welcomed by the Church). To it, the good guys are war criminals posturing as the Greater Good under displaced American exceptionalism (that’s Japanese neoliberalism for you: exporting American xenophobia and Crusades-style violence back onto its own burgeoning youth).

Such argumentation, as a matter of playing things out onscreen, still constitutes witch hunter dogma in a half-real sense; i.e., its violent pornography plays out disproportionately offscreen, too. Plenty of super-dumb arguments have been made about videogames causing “actual violence,” but barring outright anti-videogame propaganda, the endorsement of canonical us-versus-them values in videogames historically translates to apathy by the colonizer group brutalizing the colonized by proxy through such stories; i.e., when literal genocides are going on, the usual benefactors of capital (white cis-het men and those aping them through Man Box attitudes) do their gold-star best to stay “apolitical”—all while grinding for their latest PB, tournament prize, dubious YouTube sponsorship, and having multiple, real-life Nazi friends; e.g., Karl Jobst; re: a literal pickup artist harassing flesh-and-blood women, then selling it in a now-discontinued grift he exchanged for speedrunner royalty status. Like all fascists, he’s a conman hiding in plain sight.

In turn, this historical-material apathy is encouraged by sexist, queerphobic and tokenized police violence bleeding into recent copaganda hauntologies—like videogames and Castlevania, of course, but also their offshoots borrowing from other stories ripped from Gothic canon centuries-old; i.e., police violence being committed by the good guys (who all happen to be straight or normative/tokenized to some degree) killing the bad guys as fash but also Communist-coded; re: a zombie apocalypse leveled at other forms of undead, including vampires, as victims to be returned to the Earth, post-invasion. Simply put, cop hearts don’t bleed for witches/gays because they’re raised from an early age to think we (their victims) aren’t human; we’re bugs to squash and push out of our homes, often by token neighbors turning a blind eye. Killing us is a mercy in their eyes, but also, distraction!

In other words, just like Gaza, Rwanda, Cambodia, the AIDS crisis, neoliberal shock therapy unto the former Soviet Union, CIA assassinations, and other such pro-American policies at home and abroad, their collective symptoms stem from the same problem: capital and copaganda; i.e., the sort celebrated in indie circuits chasing profit by selling canonical monster war (and its witch hunts’ anti-Semitic fatal nostalgia under Capitalism Realism) to kids yet again; e.g., with Red Hook’s Darkest Dungeon and Countess doing the same thing that Lovecraft did, a century ago! Nature is a whore, a vampire and witch all rolled into one:

(exhibit 41f2b1: Artist, left: Dieser Welt; right: Liyuw099. Per the anti-Semitic origins of vampire and witch myths, little vampires come abortively from big Numinous vampires as ravenous broodmares/sodomites; these vice characters [and the purity arguments used to enact blood libel against them by “good Christians”] merge with the pre-fascist elements to the Order of the Dragon’s great-warrior posturing covered in black and red; i.e., in ways seemingly removed from Catholic dogma, but still staking vampires as the game’s go-to witch.

This is classically gendered, like the Gothic. The Dragon Lord or Dracula is classically male under Western systems of oppression [the master/slave dynamic]. The female variation extends to nature-as-monstrous-feminine being furious in two basic forms[17]: a smaller “kawaii” disguise-type human form that belies a larger “kowai”/feral abject giantess [the Medusa] whose insectoid reproductive habits [fat like a termite queen] and paralytic BDSM elements [re: the wasp or spider’s poison] are recuperated to serve profit; e.g., Red Hook’s Countess another Red-Scare Alien Queen; i.e., Cameron and Tolkien’s refrains treating such reptilian, arachnid and/or wasp-like bug moms as Nazis bugbears to punch, but also Communists and any form of minority tokenizing to serve the role and dump it unironically onto others: the colonizer reinvading Indigenous lands to punch fresh state victims portrayed as invasive vermin to rape and exterminate by white Indians, mid-bug-hunt. Giant slaying/tower toppling [especially old giants; i.e., titans] makes for common neoliberal rites of passage; e.g., Bjorn the Bear’s “Can ANY Boss Survive 30 Level 1 Wretches? – Elden Ring” [2024]. The same goes for the Archaic Mother’s army of undead vermin slaves/offspring: the vampire hive/witch’s brew providing the state’s settler argument/false flag.

Again, this witch-hunter violence is fetishized in movies and videogames, such kayfabe-style Amazonomachia treating the poisonous, penetrative insect parasitoid [the xenomorph having acid blood (diseased fluids carrying AIDS) and an ovipositor] as something to—per Giger’s creation—stare at before ruthlessly killing it; i.e., as an abomination to Capitalism being male and good, the monstrous-feminine’s massive Archaic Mother a freak of nature-as-wild: a witch needing to be crushed during Goldilocks Imperialism abjecting parasitoids [and other stigma animals’ female-superior qualities] relative to patriarchal dogma attacking the monstrous-feminine with monstrous-feminine; e.g., Cameron’s Ripley but also Red Hook’s merry band of devil’s rejects: monster girls to pimp nature with its own, whores turning into waifu-style vampire cops!

[artist: The Maestro Noob]

Whatever the title, the name of the game remains unchanged: Red Scare, then exploit per extermination rhetoric as a settler-colonial project with neoliberal [videogame] extensions that reliably translate to stochastic, extratextual violence useful to state aims; i.e., profit as raw butchery and rape moving money through nature by abjecting and fetishizing vermin-class organisms both weak and strong while taking their big mythical powers by force. Thusly wronged, perceived Jewish, Pagan, non-white, female or otherwise marginalized revenge is common as a casus beli to maintain a cycle of reactive abuse, often by recruiting from the colonized [re: Zionism]: “kill the witch; bring peace to a land ‘fallen to darkness and ruin,’ breaking the curse like one might a fever.” It’s the euthanasia effect taken to its end-game conclusion.

[artist: Peter Paul Rubens]

As such, the Medusa cannot be tolerated or redeemed because she will always “castrate” men [a demonizing of monstrous-feminine liberation during the dialectic of the alien]. So state forces, faced with a rabid bitch, call for the headman’s axe: off with her head! Blood in, blood out.)

The proletarian point—in studying vampires’ being killed like any witch in videogames—is to learn from them in ways useful to workers employing the universal undead feeding mechanism against profit and witch hunter rhetoric; i.e., the latter inventing stupid but clearly deadly reasons to kill labor action after rolling different groups into one fearsome monolith the state can attack (a stake to thrust into different controlled populations by said populations).

Doing so, its proponents then divide and conquer us out of fear inside prison-like environments where they can triangulate at will, but also gaslight token enforcers with deliberately oscillating rhetoric during solitary confinement (a war crime) through cruel-and-unusual/collective punishment (also a war crime) during reactive abuse; i.e., jailors pushing and coercing victims with far less than them until they snap, thus merit execution inside a state of exception. Antagonize nature; put it to work and just as often, exhibit and showcase it in ways that ways that exotify and alienize the exploited all the more; e.g., Steve McCurry’s 1984 portrait of Sharbat Gula—an Afghan refugee during the Soviet-Afghan War—being used to sell issues of a magazine, National Geographic, that demonized Communism and exceptionalized America foreign policy, as usual:

(exhibit 41f2b1: McCurry’s famous photo was, at the time, simply called “Afghan girl,” used to pierce the viewer with a helpless foreigner’s mysterious gaze. It wasn’t used to enrich or aid Gula, the poor girl left nameless for decades by an expat photographer using poverty tourism to swoop in, safari-style, and espouse Cold-War platitudes. Don’t mistake me—it’s an exceptional photograph—but exploitation is exploitation, the class character plain enough in hindsight.)

What do you think these stories are canonically for? Someone all-too-young always pays the price to enrich someone all-too-old and powerful—not an accident, but a sacrifice the elder party gladly paid (and one for which the Salem witch trials’ Mayflower atrocities are but a footnote in a larger genocidal scheme): capital rapes not just strong manly adults, but women and children, taking their away power to intentionally cause them harm while treating them like unpaid slaves (as women and children historically are); i.e., capitalists are the cannibals—the cruel, overbearing and controlling bloodletters they accuse others of being!

They craft such dogma as persecution content and sell it to kids, much like a drug dealer would except the elite own the territories and medias at work! Racism (and other xenophobic elements of division) become a currency and bonding agent traded amongst, but also spliced with, weird culture; i.e., between owners those workers they condition and control pursuant to the raping and reaping of nature-as-monstrous-feminine. It becomes a bouquet of so many flowers—from homosexual men, trans women, young damsels, black and brown people working the fields, and kept brides—picked by enterprising patriarchs and their servants; i.e., the fall of one’s settler-colonial inheritance, Usher-style, haunted by ghostly male tyrants and pissed-off monstrous-feminine spirits; e.g., King Diamond’s Count and Seven Horsemen, from “Arrival,” but also the titular bastard baby herself that never fully was: the wandering womb/bicycle face by another name[18] speaking to too-young marriages and forced pregnancy through tokophobic cannibalism and the vampiric, at-times-hostile relationship between mother and child, woman and state, husband and bride, witches and nature, etc, leading to cops and victims!

Furthermore, excluding animals and young children, perfect victims are a myth. Under such absurd, predatory systems, vampires and witches present as one, both completely exposed and helpless before (and while) tied to the stake (or being staked in our sleep); and two, somehow such darkly powerful, undead practitioners of “witchcraft and blood magic” that we can suddenly transform into animals and fly over your heads to practice revenge (eating all the babies, of course)! While sadly the latter things aren’t true (wink-wink), there’s poetic license to them that isn’t completely useless to our counterterrorist aims: “Why yes, we can do those things! Buttsex can bring about the end of the world and destroy the nuclear family model (now tap your ruby slippers together three times, Dorothy Gale)!”

Except, it’s less about convincing useful idiots that we’ll turn them into newts (they already think that), and more about raising awareness towards state predation through bad-faith parties happy to brutalize us behind any Puritanical excuse (with Hawthorne’s Puritans thinking Hester Prynn’s daughter—the aptly dubbed Pearl—is a little demon). Through vampire and witch-like doubles, we can act out our own deaths by their callous hands; i.e., as linked to centuries of police abuse, including old-school DARVO arguments and home-grown obscurantism tokenizing our fellow persecuted, themselves martyred per Irigaray’s creation of sexual difference (the death of the mother to serve white, cis-het male individuation, treating women [and all monstrous-feminine, female or not] merely as sex objects to use and discard, over and over)! We want to short-circuit the dogmatic social networks that feed into hating us at the expense of all parties involved (“Satan” merely being a dogwhistle we challenge by reminding people of its Pagan, bastardized origins during Satanic Panic).

For all the humor and tongue-in-cheek, death-theatre functionality to the Gothic, on the other side of the fence (and inside your own houses), the violence, mania and rape are quite real. To it, we want to short-circuit the dogmatic social networks that feed into weaponizing scared stupid people hating us at the expense of all parties involved (“Satan” merely being a dogwhistle we challenge by reminding people of its Pagan, bastardized origins during Satanic Panic): to see us as human.

Sure, there’s a cottagecore, privileged, tits-out Burtonesque to such inklings/rising jouissance (with faeries/changelings being—you guessed it—another classic anti-Semitic symbol stealing children and replacing them with evil doubles). Except doing so isn’t simply to freeze our food, but specifically those with power who, paralyzed by Athena’s Aegis, allow us to transfer power away from the elite’s gigantic body and pass it out to all parties normally abused by state forces; re: in videogames like Castlevania or The Darkest Dungeon framing the vampire as a degenerate minion or boss to slay (through the usual ordering of power in monomythic stories, the smaller entity a military offshoot of the larger as its “castle” to besiege and raze during Gothic mise-en-abyme).

In doing so, we want to acknowledge past abuse (and present abuse dressed up as “past”) while preventing future abuse as something the elite can no longer foster and protect among vigilante class-traitor workers; i.e., cutting the giant down to size by gorging ourselves on things normally hoarded from us in reclaimed theatrical language; e.g., the teenage witch killing her whole insufferably Puritanical family before choosing to “live deliciously” (see: The Witch, 2014), or the vampire freezing their pray to suck blood and use it not for profit per the Protestant ethic, but ending Capitalist Realism by developing Gothic Communism (thus raising emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness during praxial synthesis and ultimately catharsis). Regardless of the subversive thread being pulled, the basic enemy isn’t sexy (old, white rich men and their power structures seldom are), so dressing it in somewhat abstract forms up can make our larger praxial goal a bit more relatable and fun! “Worship Satan, kids! Nature is gay as hell!”

This extends to characters like Red Hook’s Countess as dark and badass, but not exclusively fascist any more than Dracula is; i.e., the mouth and shaft hyphenate in bizarre, often biomechanical ways: abjecting nature to commodify its own butchery per reactive abuse conflating fascist TERFs with Communist ladies looking equally stylish, sexy and scary (the palliative Numinous, during calculated risk). These nuances mean nothing to the state, Medusa always a threat to the established order while integral to it per her routine summoning and butchering; i.e., as the whore wearing the dreaded Scarlet Letter! Until she dies, the fate of the world always hangs in the balance, and afterwards she’ll haunt the world again until she returns from the yawning toothy grave:

Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death,

Gorged with the dearest morsel of the earth,

Thus I enforce thy rotten jaws to open,

And in despite I’ll cram thee with more food (source: Romeo and Juliet).

“Don’t mind if I do!” Medusa replies, a Big Witch thoroughly used to the messiness of menstruation (re: period sex, what Jadis called “murder dick”), childbirth and stillbirths inside the same dark cradle (the secret burden and shame, but also perverse love of people who give birth). Atlas was a little bitch, especially when nature goes feral and euthanizes her would-be captors, cackling all the way to the blood bank. A witness to her own rape, she escapes to rape her captors by squealing on them (spilling her guts, as it were): an out-of-body embryonic attached paralytically by her umbilical proboscis inside a murderous womb space[18a] (a Westernized Quetzalcoatl, our de facto Whore of Babylon seeking out fresh blood to sate herself as giver of life and death)!

Per the neoliberal monomyth (videogames), it’s a cycle of war and rape meant to emotionally manipulate state soldiers (usually cis-het men) to kill for the state inside “dead embryonic cells.” By nostalgically raping nature (as a vampire does) before she rapes them, the witch hunters restore greatness through cyclical returns to a “better time” that repeatedly buries the kaiju-esque giantess during a liminal hauntology of war’s killing time/grim harvest; i.e., a canceled future’s strawman argument for us to invert through our Aegis humanizing the Archaic Mother’s paradoxical rape play as an “ancient” spectre of Marx—a xenomorphic “love letter” camping the Nazi (which exists onstage in unironic forms) through her wandering womb (a play on the wandering boss); e.g., the Countess’ hysterical, insect-witch biology belonging to a rape victim the state blames for the land’s darkness (not the Ancestor, exhibit 41f2c): a verminous blood witch, and a wealthy one, but locked up in solitary (no sunlight) waiting to die! Inside the infernal concentric pattern, the player is Ariadne’s executioner!

Another rape to camp, oxymorons abounded; i.e., confusions of pleasure and pain per the Gothic’s prey mechanisms told in queenly dominatrix: Mozart’s vengeful Night Queen, the operatically castled “fat lady” a dark mommy Medusa, singing her monstrous-feminine heart out, her salacious aria bringing the Man’s house orgasmically and incestuously down on his stupid head (and generally ravishing the maiden, Victoria-de-Loredani-style, too)!Singing for her supper (and blowing her own horn/magic flute), the Countess fills her glass the same way that capitalists do—except it’s cataclysmically with their blood! Scorched earth with a hint of strawberry, she’s the queen of the devils—Red Hook’s crooning and crowning achievement (taking much of the palimpsestuous backlog for granted, I think) and my all-time favorite boss encounter (re: Persephone van der Waard’s “The Countess,” 2019). War and sex told masturbatorily as operatic hard kink, Halford-style? Take me home, mommy!

(artist: pagong1)

Thus concludes our crash course on vampires (and to a lesser extent, witches)! Here’s a couple more pages’ food for thought (and time to digest) before we jump into “A Brief History of Queer Love“:

To that, it’s worth noting how the classic slave-like function between zombies, vampires, and ghosts is less immediately different than current Cartesian divisions would lead you to think. Simply put, they’re “dead,” usually pissed off to a wordless degree, and they eat, but this takes many forms even within one monster type. It can even apply to monsters that are treated like the dead without necessarily presenting as such; e.g., witches, the Medusa being someone who might eat you after they paralyze you and make you their slave (the draining of one’s essence serving both purposes)! Feeding always goes both ways, a vampire’s ability to feed and foist itself upon others a fascist fantasy and genderqueer apologia hogging the same operatic stage: the ability to play and perform trauma through feeding masquerades (the Countess’ human face being false, and her mosquito-like beak, despite resembling a traditional ball mask, actually being her true face).

Indeed, the constant puzzle of the undead (vampire or otherwise) lies in how they don’t just eat the living but resemble and act like them (as the Countess does, speaking to how women generally become predatory in Man-Box fashion to survive in a man’s world, which will scapegoat them to preserve the patriarchal status quo: map her home as “stolen,” then track her to the centre of the maze and kill her).

This liminality intimates dialectical-material relationships between opposing forces; i.e., compelled to attack one another under Capitalism, often in animalized ways; e.g., witches punching vampires, vampires punching werewolves, etc. The fascist refrain goes from “animals are brutal, uncivilized and cannibalistic” to “human degenerates are brutal, uncivilized and cannibalistic,” but who’s doing the eating for the state? The fascist, of course—the token queer or witch as often as the white cis-het man, either refusal to “be political” all but guaranteeing their mutual demise by state machinery: “What is life?” Hilter asked, after condemning General Paulus and the sixth army to die at Stalingrad rather than surrender. “Life is the nation. The individual must die anyway.” Don’t be another Roman fool, comrades! Either we all unite against the state, or it destroys us one by one (delegitimizing our cause when your TERF dumbasses sell out).

Luckily there isn’t a monopoly on these feeding mechanisms and their cannibalistic violence. Indeed, the inverse, mid-apocalypse, is literally “eat the rich” but also the middle class; i.e., as normally preying on the underclass and foreign victims through state dogma. What comes around goes around, suckers!

For example, Matteson’s hybridized zombie-vampires took a modularized, anti-Cartesian approach to the undead that inspired Romero’s infamous …of the Dead franchise. Lockhart’s “Braineaters“ thoroughly catalogues this nuts-and-bolts approach, arguing for how Romero stole readily from many different cultures and approaches to classic monsters that he might say something about America’s imperial feeding behaviors under Capitalism:

Romero openly admits that the earliest version of Night, a short story called “Night of Anubis,” “was basically a rip-off from Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend” (Dead Will Walk), and certainly Matheson’s vampire novel and its first film adaptation (the second, and better known, would be 1971’s Charlton Heston vehicle The Omega Man), 1964’s Italian-made Vincent Price thriller L’Ultimo uomo della Terra [The Last Man on Earth] can both be seen as major influences on the plot and style of Night of the Living Dead.

Night of the Living Dead was also influenced, explains Shawn Rider, “by the turbulent 1960s, events such as Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and rampant consumer culture” (3). Furthermore, Night of the Living Dead “is really concerned with looking at the monster within all of us. We watch as society turns in on itself in its bid to survive” (Engall 3). As Rider elaborates, “Night lays the groundwork for a series of cultural critiques. […] Romero takes on both the issues of his time, and larger issues, extrapolating the effects of capitalism and colonization of the mind” (3). It is this unflinching gaze towards the issues of its time that helps Night of the Living Dead remain a relevant and challenging piece of rhetoric some thirty-six years after its theatrical debut.

Night of the Living Dead “forever changed the face of fearfilm” (McCarty 117) by reinventing a staple of horror cinema, the lowly zombie. While previous film zombies typically relied upon the machinations of a diabolical Svengali such as Bela Lugosi’s “Murder” Legendre from 1932’s White Zombie (the first zombie horror film), the Romero zombie is “a cunning blend of elements from the classic Haitian zombie (returning from the grave, glassy-eyed and eerily silent), the vampire (its bite converts its victims to the undead), and the cannibal” (Horne 99).

So, whereas Castricano notes how Slavoj Zizek felt compelled to call the return of the living dead “the fundamental fantasy of contemporary mass culture,” the return of such monsters signifies state shift due to state collapse that harkens all the way back to Matthew Lewis’s pre-fascist, queer dialogs that Romero owes for his own proletarian necromancy!

As Steven Carver writes, “Hammer Films, EC Comics, Stephen King and George A. Romero would all be unthinkable without The Monk, and you can judge any scholar of the genre by what they have to say about both these Georgian pioneers of gothic fiction [re: Lewis and Radcliffe being famous rivals, the token cis-het housewife vs the gay revolutionary iconoclast]” (source: “The Rise of the Gothic Novel,” 2023). I would further argue this modularized, virus-style feeding is an undead staple intrinsic to their critical power—their “bite,” as it were, helping tell them apart amid the shameless chimerism.

This is because the undead can be scientifically produced, magically summoned, or otherwise symbolic of an escaping decay through an insectoid-parasitoid presence or suggestion of death, etc, as viral through its sheer feeder’s contagiousness. Vampires are undead, but so are witches burned at the stake and raped in their own homes, only to return from the murder site’s replica to plague the dreams of the living while they’re awake, eating them alive; e.g., like Sadako Yamamura does, or Dracula crawling out of the family portrait, etc. The motto for the Gothic might as well be, “Home sucks” (a trend that crystalized with Poe’s 1839 “The Fall of the House of Usher”):

(exhibit 41f2c: Artist: Chris Bourassa. Old homes, in Gothic stories, have old male tyrants that commonly abuse everything around them. Red Hook at least gets this right[19], their dickhead antagonist almost jeering as he writes a letter to his younger self: “Ruin has come to our family. You remember our venerable house, opulent and imperial, gazing proudly from its stoic perch above the moor?” Basically a capitalist metaphor in person, but told in true Lovecraftian fashion, the Ancestor is a Nazi vampire/wealthy backstabber retrojected to old, decayed worlds: a ruinous old codger arguing with himself and blaming a woman, just like Thanos [while recognizing the latter predator inside an adversarial equal he murders, and then feeds to his guests: Mother Nature having her deathly revenge by poisoning his land and peoples with hysteria showing them their own cannibalism on a global scale—again, topping from below]!

[artist: Thomas Holm]

In short, the Ancestor is a witch hunter and bourgeois vampire, eating his problematic lover only to have her—the ghost of the counterfeit—eat him back: by engorging his appetites until he quite literally chokes on them! From deathly lullabies bringing Imperialism home to empire, Medusa is well-and-truly at home with such things, herself; i.e., she is Galatea, the planetary Alpha and Omega getting the last laugh as counterterrorists [those of nature] so often do against Cartesian, Pygmalion know-it-alls: by burning “Rome” to the ground, the cruel tyrant’s bloodline doomed to eat itself until the very last! Payback’s a bitch; through calculated risk and schadenfreude punching up from the grave, how the mighty have fallen—a delicious vintage, indeed! The fatal portrait speaks to empire’s fleeting half-life, but also a warning as things spiral further and further out of elite control: Medusa—in her martyred throes of ecstasy and pain—will be fine; unless workers heed the Aegis’ dark reflections and promptly change the genocidal course the elite have chosen, though, she’ll simply eat all of us, go to sleep, and try again some other time [or not]! Remind abusers of their fallibility, mortality and lost, forgotten humanity before it’s too late!))

Onto “Understanding Vampires (opening and part zero: the vampire history primer)“!

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Footnotes

[1] With Frank Herbert, again, being a massive homophobe who abjects queerness onto a kind of Nazi vampire that’s somehow anti-Semitic (re: “Frank Herbert’s Dug-up Homophobia“); i.e., Nazis and Communists occupy the same theatrical shadow zone as BDSM and vampires, exploitation and liberation: the Harkonnens are basically a post-fascist regression to a cartoon, overly Freudian medieval. It’s tacky but par for the course, as far as the monomyth goes (which is heteronormative).

[2] Asexuality is something we will explore more fully in Volume Three.

[3] For example, the vampire-ghosts from King Diamond’s Them were tied to a physical location that is central to the ghost story as vampiric. However, while its author clearly has fun using non-corporeal blood magic as a kind of disembodied, ritualized vampire metaphor for child abuse (specifically by one’s matriarchal, witchy elders), its fixation on the larger space and lack of a personified feeding mechanism (re: the tea pot, Amon) makes it the kind we won’t be focusing on.

[4] Hence why the ghost subchapter is a bit of a one-off. Yes, ghosts are fun to think about—and I love the idea of the Numinous, especially when connected to physical scenarios; i.e., of people practicing ludo-Gothic BDSM—but I want to focus on more tangible and fleshy things, not cryptomimetic fragments and echoes that classically represents figments of the viewer’s fear-warped, vengeful imagination (re: Hamlet’s father’s ghost) as much as actual people!

[5] E.g., sucking and penetration as a mode of predatory vitality transfer but also general BDSM practices haunted by anti-Semitic and fascist bugbears; i.e., status-quo DARVO dreaming up the classical whorish temptresses/wealthy practitioners of sodomy (extramarital sex, Jewish hordes and blood libel, etc) to threaten modest virgins: with unknown, unsanctioned pleasures (moral panic), versus zombie revenge’s more raw, mutilative consumption of the colonizer group (re: slave revolts). It’s the same Red Scare DARVO as “Mars needs cheerleaders,” the real kidnappers being the status quo posturing as innocent, of the people, what-have-you, while blaming the usual suspects.

[6] “Premarital” suggesting that the marriage will eventually happen—a bit of a misnomer if it isn’t true!

[6a] A problem with so-called “leftist” spaces—being on platforms centered around profit like YouTube or Nebula—is that they are generally informed and shaped by profit and its usual pitfalls. As Kochinski and company demonstrate, people who aren’t left-leaning in praxis will ape various talking points and aesthetics in bad faith; i.e., doing so to be able to infiltrate leftist spaces to both prey on the people in those spaces and invalidate the movements and arguments of those persons, places, names, and communities, etc. Such predators generally posture as “progressive,” but function as moderate; i.e., insofar as they “debate” Nazis, but in reality function as fascist themselves.

A big clue is the falseness of rebellion, or inability to meaningfully challenge structures of oppression. Not only does moderacy decay into fascism, but it simply is fascism with more steps; re: “the white moderate problem,” as expressed by MLK, Malcolm X and their ilk. In the words of Gil Scott-Heron, “The revolution will not be televised“; but false leftists televise the appearance or façade of “the Left” without doing anything to function as such.

In short, it’s a grift, and a more hypocritical one than conservative con persons (who, to be clear, also suck—just, not as much insofar as they are openly bigoted and predatory versus bad-faith about it; re: Dr. Disrespect). Rape is endemic to platforms, regardless if they are open about it or not, because profit and rape are one in the same on a systemic level; i.e., access to fandoms of vulnerable young fans, abusing their trust on purpose; e.g., streamers, rockstars (e.g., Sting from The Police), cartoonists (re: John Kricfalusi), academic professors (re: Beauvoir’s “Lolita Syndrome“), etc. They are common because profit is common.

To this, Ian Kochinski is a sexual predator in open-secret fashion, but so is his community of fans and co-workers who, not only keep quiet about such things, they actively participate in them; e.g., Demonmama and her own group of friends preying on minors (Westside Tyler’s “Abuse, Exploitation, and Child Endangerment: @Demonmama’s Secrets Exposed,” 2024), but also Kochinski weaponizing a Zionist content creator (and various other members from Kochinski’s inner circle who likewise are Zionists) to defame Bad Empanada, a known postcolonialist, in the name of furthering Israeli, thus American settler-colonial hegemony (Bad Empanada’s “How a Zionist Defamed Me, How ‘Leftist’ Creators Helped Her Do It, and Why It Will Happen Again,” 2022).

These aren’t accidents or isolated incidents; both serve as charm offensives and false flags that engender the usual exploitations and arguments endemic to capital’s hateful etiology. Or, in other words, if someone says they’re a leftist and then does a bunch of shit that directly contradicts their advertised values and positions, they’re actually not on the Left; it’s a brand and they’re working for the state. This is more of a matter of ongoing praxis, hence will come up extensively in Volume Three, but I at least wanted to mention it here. Stay vigilante, comrades; murderers come to you with smiles, but blackmail, intimidate and coerce you well before the final blow is struck.

[6b] With JDPlaysMoth, for example, attacking me in bad faith after joining the project (source tweet, vanderWaardart: July 19th, 2024). However, they’re not the only one (re: “Transmisia Experience: 5/26/2023“); I’ve had other sex workers attack me in bad faith—i.e., after my completing of their respective piece per a given negotiated labor exchange, then telling me they had no interest in my work. Some cut and run; others accuse me of things I didn’t do; one even said they “only wanted my money and were trying to get it by lying to me.”

Abusers don’t like to be outed, nor associate with people who threaten their ability to harm others. For sex workers, often such behavior is a combination of desperation and convenience—with it admittedly being easier to attack people than systems—but that’s no excuse to be a shithead to me about it; i.e., sex workers (often trans sex workers in bad situations) punching down against a fellow sex worker and her work fighting for our mutual liberation. It’s sad and pathetic, but such is how class war often plays out.  Segregation is censorship and censorship is genocide. To that, appeasing and conceding your rights to the state won’t save you, comrades; they’ll closet you until capital decays, wherein they’ll throw you under the bus, rape you and eat your face.

[7] E.g., Zeuhl used to gulp down my cum during oral sex, in grad school. I didn’t normally like oral, but their constant eye contact while sucking my cock made it fun, as did them greedily gulping down my load. In short, they loved it, and I learned to love it, too, albeit receiving what is given in ways that remain genuine and eager for future similar encounters!

[8] The Humanist Report’s “Online Transvestigators Are Convinced Andrew Tate Is Secretly a Woman” (2024).

[9] A Malthusian class character that projects Capitalism into outer space; e.g., Thanos is a space Nazi who kills half the universe because he can’t imagine a world beyond Capitalism, thus defends capital and the elite through Capitalist Realism instead of exposing and challenging them by breaking said Realism (summarized neatly by TP Burrow’s “Brennan vs Thanos,” 2024): a purple people eater that eats his own kids. Scarcity and power imbalance reliably create such cartoons, but also the predatory systems of thought that bleed into real life’s weird-nerd culture; i.e., intellectually lazy white cis-het men writing really cringy stuff; e.g., fascist strongmen extinction bursts lusting after an Orientalist goth mom and basically monologuing to himself:

(source: Andrew Dyce’s “Thanos Finally DIES in His Last Comic Story,” 2018)

To that, the Marvel comics (originally pioneered by Jewish men) have a bit of a “Spielberg problem”; i.e., one that extends Red Scare; e.g., by having Thanos court Death as a literal female entity he’s sacrificing half the world for—and which she manipulates him to enact genocide and destabilize the world; re: blame Communism and nature-as-monstrous-feminine (the ultimate victim) for the fascist purge instead of Capitalism’s copaganda and unequal socio-material conditions (the ultimate abuser) that lead fascism to return, time and time again: a female Darth Vader conflating Communism with fascism per the horseshoe argument. Class betrayal is class betrayal, and one committed by its usual practitioners (and token elements; e.g., Zionism and Jewish Nazi vampires being literal monsters, but also industry sell-outs partitioning territory on and offstage).

[10] According to the man himself, “I was attached to the SAS from time to time but we are forbidden – former, present, or future – to discuss any specific operations. Let’s just say I was in Special Forces and leave it at that. People can read in to that what they like” (source: David Urban’s “From SAS and Gurkhas to Dracula and Saruman: The Unique Life of Sir* Christopher Lee,” 2024).

*Anyone who stresses the British “Sir” title unironically is an imperialist asshole.

[11] Generally not a thing. Just don’t fart in your partner’s face while they chow down.

[12] The “Bad Dreams” chapter was also longer to help me work through my own trauma; i.e., as something to play with and consume; re: “Per Zombie Capitalism, zombies (sexy or not) collectively speak to the problems of the system and its built-in predation-through-us-versus-them-trauma better than any other (vampires, while gay as fuck, tend to be gentrified, witches and Medusa tokenized, and ghosts a bit vague and diaphanous)! It’s baked into them.” For us. the zombie vein is well-and-truly done to death, but I’ll wanted to keep the remaining chapter on feeding somewhat abbreviated (so everything fits). Witches or vampires, we’ll sink our teeth into all the essential bits, I promise!

[13] While notable actors from the period were closeted, including James Whale and Boris Karloff (source IMDb post: imdb-25288’s “Classic Gays of the Universal Era,” 2018), Bela Lugosi does not—at least at a glance—appear to have been one of them. Born to a Catholic Hungarian family under the name Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó, he had many wives (several of them fans) and a drug addiction, but no mention, that I could find, of any whispered “sexual deviancy” normally taken for “homosexual activity” nowadays (there was certainly talk at the time about straight ladies thirsting after Lugosi—re: Gladys Hall’s 1931 interview with the actor—but generally because he excited them in ways that speak to queer love; i.e., the little death of straight bored housewives weak at the knees during funerals). In short, you can be straight and still be a queer icon!

As for Lugosi’s drug addiction, it was no joke. Mike Springer writes in “Bela Lugosi Discusses His Drug Habit as He Leaves the Hospital in 1955” (2012):

In 1955 Bela Lugosi was in a sad state. The once-handsome, Hungarian-born star of Dracula had seen his career degenerate over the previous two decades until at last he was reduced to playing a cruel parody of himself in some of the tackiest B horror films ever made. Along the way he picked up a drug habit. In late April of 1955 the 72-year-old actor, destitute and recently divorced from his fourth wife, checked himself into the psychopathic ward at Los Angeles General Hospital. A few days later, in a hearing held at the ward, Lugosi pleaded with a judge to commit him to a state hospital. A United Press article from April 23, 1955 describes the scene:

Although weighing only 125 pounds and only a shadow of his former self, Lugosi’s voice was clear and resonant as he told the court how shooting pains in his legs led him to start taking morphine injections in 1935. Without morphine, he couldn’t work, Lugosi said.

“I started using it under a doctor’s care,” he said. “I knew after a time it was getting out of control.”

“Seventeen years ago, on a trip to England, I heard of Methadone, a new drug. I brought a big box of it back home. I guess I brought a pound,” Lugosi said.

“Ever since I’ve used that, or Demerol. I just took the drugs. I didn’t eat. I got sicker and sicker.”

[…] Less than three weeks [after his release from the psych ward that August, Bela] married his fifth wife, an obsessed fan who reportedly sent him a letter every day he was in the hospital. The Ghoul Goes West never materialized, but Lugosi collaborated with Ed Wood on a couple of other projects, including a movie that some critics would eventually call “the worst film ever made,” Plan 9 From Outer Space. As his hope of a genuine comeback crumbled, Lugosi drank heavily. On August 16, 1956–barely over a year after his release from Metropolitan State Hospital–Lugosi died of a heart attack. He was buried in his Dracula costume. (source).

It might seem irrelevant to mention all that, here. However, such seemingly non-sexual things like drug use mirror symbols of decay not visually dissimilar to AIDs and other venereal diseases. Furthermore, they constitute a crisis of the wealthy as ignominiously fallen in ways that can be scapegoated; i.e., a crisis that would be blamed by the Straights on the Gays, going as far back as England’s homosexual pogroms unto Matthew Lewis (re: Broadmoor) and forwards unto post-Lugosi Hollywood men like Vincent Prince, Farley Granger and Roddy McDowall. As I write in Volume One (about different “Galatean queens of darkness” challenging Pygmalion forces):

It’s vital, then, to be unafraid to reexamine the past with fresh eyes and language that historical figures wouldn’t actually have used, but may have understood better than you might think. Oppression is oppression, and that certainly hasn’t changed much in the recent centuries. At the very least, we need recognize the cone of silence that then-and-now continues to linger over those who fear state punishment as not only refusing to die, but expanding horrifyingly in all directions.

Revolutionary cryptonymy offers a paradoxical means of challenging these monopolies (and subsequent brain drains). However, until the Internet Age—i.e., since Lewis wrote The Monk over two centuries ago—resisting the decay of fascism and moral panic was something few men of privilege actually tried to an extent that would threaten their established livelihoods; e.g., like Oscar Wilde. But revolution won’t work if we martyr ourselves en masse, and smaller efforts can add up over time (especially collectively during intersectional solidarity in the Internet Age).

While learning from past struggles bleeding into fresh ones, it’s [equally] vital to consider how—after more precise language cemented queerness as a cultural identity in the shadow of the state—such persons merely became a separate species, but also a social disease that was commonly recognized as male (rebellious women were generally cast as witches, Amazons or whores, but their method of disease-spreading was seen as whore-like; i.e., attached to prostitution and unruly merchandise [again, women] versus sodomy being a crime committed by persons under the law—men). As often was the case, such things were seldom discussed out in the open at all, but that certainly didn’t preclude political action being taken by those with privilege, generally those who waited until they were older and more secure; e.g., Vincent Price as someone who “didn’t broadcast his sexuality [or use the words that would have spelled it out, but still stood] up and was counted when it mattered—attacking Anita Bryant’s anti-gay crusade in the 1970s, joining PFLAG as an honorary board member, and shooting one of the first celebrity PSAs to allay public fears about AIDS” (source: Dan Avery’s “Vincent Price’s Daughter Confirms He Was Bisexual,” 2015).

It’s important to recognize these instances when they actually happened, but also to understand the class-based stigmas and cultural forces guiding these persons to behave how they did: our aforementioned trifectas and cultural stigmas tied to state monopolies during oppositional praxis as an uphill battle ringed with dreadful, often unseen struggles. This obviously extends to homonormativity and queer assimilation by embodying the very stereotypes that straight people expected once the queer community couldn’t be ignored, but it also preceded it through the actors whose behaviors shaped future generations. McDowall, for example, played many queer-coded characters, but not actual gay persons. But something of the closet continued to trap them even after gay people supposedly were “out.” Time and time again, queerness has become both highly legendary and as invisible as Dracula’s reflection. The sad joke is, Dracula wasn’t invisible; he felt that way as a queer-coded behavior reflected back at him that he was expected to carry forward by victimizing himself and others around him—i.e., the LGBA targeting trans people by making them invisible, preying on them exactly how the state wants (source).

Per Hammer of Witches, this applies to women, too (the same section also reads about Elvira actress, Cassandra Peterson, coming out of the closet in 2022*), but also queer intersectional solidarity at large; i.e., Galatea challenging Pygmalion visions of a divided, conquered world obsessed with profit and settler-colonial violence that automatically comes with it against nature-as-monstrous-feminine!

*Jazz Tangcay’s “Elvira, aka Cassandra Peterson, Opens Upon the Freedom of Coming Out” (2022).

[14] Such language is often, thanks to Freud, viewed literally. But castration can also mean AFAB parties (those forced to identify as women) refusing to have PIV sex with men to have their children. The effect, while not touching a man’s balls with a knife, has a similar outcome: no kids. To garner the most support, state DARVO will raise alarms through threats of rape defending male genitals from female witches (and GNC elements) by rally fascist feminists to their cause; re, from Porpentine’s “Hot Allostatic Load,” witch hunts rely on call-outs using “extremely vague and loaded with strong words designed to elicit vigilante justice” per “accusations of sexual menace” serving as “a key weapon used against marginalized people in feminist spaces, because it arouses people’s disgust like no other act”; i.e., “a way for the dominant people in the group to take us aside and say, you are not welcome here, or do this thing you don’t want to do or I’ll ruin your life. But frequently it happens without any particular thesis, just as a general tool to keep us destabilized and vulnerable. Don’t forget who you really are in the unspoken hierarchy” (source).

Furthermore, by playing cop as TERFs do, they sell out, only serving to erode the credibility and goodwill of genuine activism (a fascist tactic, generally capital in the process); re: Silvia Federici’s argument, “Witchcraft accusations, in fact, are the ultimate mechanism of alienation and estrangement as they turn the accused—still primarily women—into monstrous beings, dedicated to the destruction of their communities, therefore making them undeserving of any compassion and solidarity” (ibid.). Witches aren’t just AFAB, though, and worker solidarity needs to reflect that; re, as I write (earlier in this volume: In response to both authors, I would include that capital tokenizes all labor (not just female and non-white) as sexualized, fetish, alien; i.e., something to gentrify and decay inside of itself, moving money through nature to harvest nature-as-monstrous-feminine (thus having masculine elements; e.g., phallic women). Feminism decays for these purposes, as do genderqueer movements, sex work, and Gothic poetics.

[15] Including Nancy Downs, a mean-girl clique leader playing with magic in The Craft (1996), but also Edward Norton’s obedient, sexually feral Nazi girlfriend in American History X (next page, 1998).

Such performances generally bely an element of Radcliffean, white-girl artifice; i.e., Balk is an actress, one who—after buying an occult shop to preserve it, back in the ’90s (and to help her prepare for different acting roles)—sought to clear up rumors that she wasn’t a practicing witch:

Actress Fairuza Balk is undoubtedly most known for her show-stealing performance as Nancy Downs in 1996’s The Craft, a role that nabbed her a Saturn Award nomination for Best Actress. In fact, Balk was so good as the witchcraft-practicing teen that many still believe to this day that she actually is a witch in real life!

Balk set the record straight in a chat with EW, detailing her connection to an occult shop in the ’90s that furthered the rumors that she was practicing witchcraft at the time.

“The true story is I found this occult shop in L.A. and I used to go there to ask them questions and do my research,” Balk explained. “They were really lovely people. [The woman who owned it] wanted to retire. She couldn’t put the kind of money into it that it needed to keep it up and so it was going to be turned into a Chinese restaurant. I thought for the oldest occult shop in the country, that’s a tragedy. There was a man that used to work there and he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject and he was a sort of a teacher to me during [The Craft]. I thought, what a shame this is going to be turned into a Chinese restaurant. So I bought it and put some work into it and helped it survive.”

“But people of course were like, ‘She bought an occult shop and she’s fully into this and it’s all real.’ That has taken on its entire own mythology that’s essentially out of my hands,” Balk continued. “You can tell the truth and talk to people but they want to believe what they want to believe. What can you do? I’m not involved with that shop anymore. It was a very long time ago” (source: John Squire’s ” Fairuza Balk Wants You to Know That She Was Never Actually a Witch,” 2017)

Of course, the Gothic is classically a fake medium. And while it’s certainly good to be clear about what you practice versus what you perform, the confession highlights a clear divide concerning representation of witches and stories about them being a dead medium told by non-practicing persons; i.e., played by fakes who enjoy a bit of scandal and safety simultaneously as white middle-class women historically do: as privileged tokens with one foot in both worlds, but generally protected far more than other token elements are.

This betrayal’s “Harry Potter problem” isn’t exclusive to women; Iron Maiden made a career out of it (as did thousands of other white British and American male performers from the ’70s into the present, ripping off Jimi Hendrix like Elvis did to Chuck Berry, white American did to R&B, jazz and other genres in usual settler-colonial fashion). All the same, Satanic panic becomes a career that non-practicing “witches” can take on and off as one might a costume; i.e., they can pretend versus standing by anything they actually practice and believe, denying it when the water gets hot to dispel rumors: “And you are only a caricature of a witch,” indeed! Regardless, such persons have some oppression—e.g., domestic abuse, eating disorders, and persecution mania (which are no jokes, to clear)—but are generally in far less danger than their monopolies lead viewers to believe; i.e., during Rainbow Capitalism as enacted by those who benefit from the appearance of persecution, who then fall back on their relative class, culture and race privilege where convenient. It’s a luxury that plays into the same eating disorders letting white women reflexively gag and throw up the markers of oppression (a ladder of preferential mistreatment that extends to queer persecution networks; re: “Hot Allostatic Load“).

To it, acting goes into performing with Gothic poetics during oppositional praxis—actors of any age generally playing with dead things concerning colonized elements that can only be relayed in a half-real sense—but it’s not something that should be abandoned at, pardon the expression, the drop of a hat! Cryptonymy should serve raising an awareness towards ongoing societal issues, not feed into the very moral panics oppressing people merely to enrich the performers (and their bosses) in question!

[16] Not to discount the power of music(als), fantasy language, or Gothic camp, but blind camp is a thing. To that, we have to make sure our stories have critical bite without tumbling into the kinds of pitfalls and traps that adhere, conform to, and ultimately reinforce the harmful stereotypes normally leveled at queer people and other minorities; e.g., Tim Curry’s psychosexual frustration in Rocky Horror having historical validity but needing to update (similar to The Wizard of Oz) beyond the “bury your gays” gimmicks and Worst-Witch neoliberal staging.

[17] Aka “phases” of the Dark Souls sort. Shapeshifting is not unique to demons, but they generally can shapeshift in ways that don’t involve turning into something completely different (e.g., vampires and different stigma animals) as connected to their regular form and vice versa. In short, undead monsters constitute some limited degree of transformation, albeit to a decaying feeder body as having different stages that—the more radically these forms become—grow increasingly demonic and inhuman (usually from a lack or glut of food: an addiction where one’s humanity is threatened by alienation from lifeforce as something to hunt; re: blood libel against Jews, but also an accurate description of fascists). But again, these often cross and overlap in ways that portray the vampire as a lycanthrope and vice versa. The chimeric qualities, as such, external and internalize different stigmas and vices animalized inside the same creature.

[18] Abigail (1987) being written, like seemingly all Gothic stories, after the frontman had a nightmare:

King composed “75 percent of the storyline” after he was awoken one night by an unusually violent thunderstorm in Denmark. He says the creative spurt was “the only time that’s ever happened for me that so much was just done overnight.” He’d written down what he’d been dreaming about before the storm awoke him but, fearful he would forget the musical ideas the memories were inspiring, he brewed a pot of coffee and got back to work. Since his days in Mercyful Fate, King had repeatedly dreamed of 13 “cloak-dressed people” that surrounded a bed he was lying in, paralyzed and unable to scream for help. (The vision was so pervasive, in fact, that he turned it into the Mercyful Fate song “Nightmare.”) The figures reappeared in this dream, so for Abigail, he transformed them into the seven black horsemen. He also saw a horse-drawn coach and a child’s coffin in his dream — elements that worked their way into the story (source: Christa Titus’ “7 Things You Didn’t Know About King Diamond’s Landmark Abigail,” 2015).

As we shall see, such taboo, funerary conventions and theatrical clichés are commonly used to avenge nature and bury empire alive, but also come to grips with our own mortality amid such schemes!

[18a] From Creed’s Monstrous-Feminine (1993), but with us shucking off the dubious psychoanalytical side of things; i.e., to apply the psychosexual imagery of the Countess’ monstrous framework to a dialectical-material argument.

[19] Or did back in 2015; their sequel is much more optimistic, from a military standpoint.

This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). 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 “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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

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

The Monomyth, part three: “That Which Is Not Dead”; or, Capitalism as a Great Zombie(-Vampire)

Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for several among his mongrel prisoners[1] had repeated to him what older celebrants had told them the words meant. This text, as given, ran something like this: “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming” (source).

— Francis Wayland Thurston, “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926)

Picking up from where “Myth: the Fallen Lords, part two: Soulblighter” left off…

This short section concludes our exploration of the monomyth, ending with not just the biggest zombie of all, but vampire, too (the next chapter will discuss feeding at length, but we’ll start to introduce the lingo, here): Capitalism. To it, someone like Jadis raped me in emulation of monomythic characters, just as those characters rape their victims for much the same reasons. By extension, Capitalism is an undead monster that hides its gigantic, ever-growing hunger for profit through fantasies pushed to the margins; i.e., the decayed gentry (and their castles) from Gothic fiction’s monomythic refrains: futile revenge, Cartesian hubris during the Promethean Quest (as person and place), and crime lords/warlords as part of the same abject, scapegoating cycle under Capitalist Realism; re: “Capitalism achieves profit by moving money through nature; profit is built on trauma and division, wherein anything that serves profit gentrifies and decays, over and over while preying on nature.” Nazi or Commie, there’s always a scapegoat to pass capital’s foes off onto (a buck to pass, in queer language). In short, capital destroys people’s lives on so many levels—through comedy to drama to nostalgia and aesthetics—by raping and devouring them (anything monstrous-feminine) pursuant to profit.

Taking all of those factors holistically into account, this conclusion discusses the world and Capitalism as a zombie to keep track of; i.e., how the main Gothic devices (abjection, hauntology, chronotopes and cryptonymy) operate more broadly through the endless undead wars and decayed power fantasies (the monomyth and nuclear family unit) that, as cryptonyms of Capitalism eating nonstop, haunt Capitalist Realism revising itself, regardless of what form the tyrant takes: a bit like a bodybuilder hungrily putting on mass (a gentrified exercise if ever there were).

In other words, Capitalism decaying in these various fashions speaks not to purely imaginary genocides, exterminations and ultimately extinctions, but ongoing ones reflecting in popular media as part of the same ravenous hyperobject; re (from Volume two, part one):

the profit motive as not only Cartesian, settler-colonial and heteronormative, but something that reflects in the usual warrior performers who—per all of these things—serve the profit motive by treating nature as monstrous-feminine on any register and in any format: rape and kill Medusa, torturing her secrets out of her to consolidate power around the usual patriarchal nuclei buoyed by capital on top of older imperiums. Canonically the motive always reduces to a pyramid point scaled by standard (white)/tokenized people harvesting nature as monstrous-feminine (source).

In gaming terms, the “meta” or optimal form of play through capital is raping nature-as-monstrous-feminine to generate as much profit as possible as quickly as possible; i.e., speedrunning in ways that avoid emergent gameplay as an extratextual device that challenges profit. Anything that doesn’t assimilates, then invariably gentrifies and decays—from feminists to fags to speedrunners to Saiyan princes in kayfabe-style wrestling matches. Through the monomyth as baked into capital and its usual medieval regression, a bad guy shows up (usually a conqueror out of the imaginary past bearing a likeness to the present), followed by a powerful hero we must then surrender our rights to before, during and afterwards (the white knight): a pissing contest that drains/exsanguinates both sides of their essence for the state, for profit.

(exhibit 41e2: Kurosawa loves his world-ending hysteria [so do all capitalists, to be fair]. In this case, Capitalist Realism amounts to a Japanese Atlas holding up the fearsome heavens punching down on his head. Except this is a big ol’ lie! Neoconservative ideas of war are not good [versus class and culture war serving workers] and such enemies are fabricated to justify the state’s continuation through tokenized supermen offering up a false version of a perfected humanity that serves capital like usual; i.e., Goku is a foreigner looking to fit in by defending “his” planet. He’s a cop, one whose inevitable decay reflects in Vegeta as the heel per the usual kayfabe arrangement; the entire centrist production is bullshit, “solving” the world’s problems through shonen-style force; re: heteronormative, settler-colonial and Cartesian arbitrations of sex, terror and force. The saiyans are literally genocidal marauders for Freiza and cops for Planet Earth; i.e., taking the extermination rhetoric to its sad conclusion: playing the victim to someone even worse [also an alien] while working off the argument of giant-strength performances that posture as weak and strong per ongoing kayfabe-style momentum shifts. The size of the threat, scale of the conflict, and externalized power of the actors [their muscles and power beams] are exaggerated to motivate people [usually men] to be violent for the state/corporations in service to profit. In short, it’s incredibly self-serious, treating such neoliberal cycles [of profit] as holy [the Protestant ethic] and needing to—as usual—be camped to Hell and back; e.g., Mega64’s “The Saiyan Saga In 5 Minutes” [2024].)

Be they futile acts of revenge; castles, prisons, and panopticons; criminals or conquerors, such devices are useful insofar as their dialectical-material dialogs expose capital’s usual operations through the people who perform them for the state. Being against the state, our counterterrorist stewardship of nature must anisotropically reverse the flow of power as a matter of abjection, hauntology and other Gothic theories, liminal spaces, theatrics, aesthetics/medieval poetic devices, puns, doubles, etc; i.e., to develop our own doubles’ arguments to challenge capital’s monopolies, trifectas and harmful qualities, thus prevent its continuation (and ultimately state shift) through revolutionary cryptonymy (for example) by using Medusa and our own ludo-Gothic BSDM; re: Athena’s Aegis. It will certainly be a shock to the system, to be sure, but one that is required if we are to change the system (and its myopic, disastrous illusions), thus survive as undead entities inside a better world. The humanizing glare of nature-as-abject must freeze these heroes, thus Capitalism, in place so we can move in, then work our influence on their chilled brains; i.e., diminishing their capacity for police brutality and territorial harvests through asymmetrical warfare as a historically guerrilla maneuver.

(artist: ChuckART)

Thanks to capital, tyrants are the most sheltered, hence alienated and fragile; i.e., hiding behind “dragon lord” images of themselves as badass, but also threatened by dark sexy women they cannot monopolize (and anything else monstrous-feminine). As a result, they often have high opinions of themselves, somehow thinking they are beyond death or rebuke, thus somehow able to conquer death/fetishize it and rule over the land for all time. Show them otherwise—to that, show them their true destiny behind their false one as likewise written by them; i.e., the Roman fool self-deceived; e.g., Tolkien’s nine mortal men doomed to die—and they generally won’t like it, certainly long enough for us to do what we need to do: to cut off their head (usually in a theatrical sense) and take from them their illusion of power by exposing the ghost of Rome, not burying and digging it back up over and over (re: Bungie).

As such, the act of decapitation would seem to be occurring either way you slice it—the classic method of zombie disposal being to attack its head and remove the brain—but ours is a lesson meant to transform and educate the head as something to take back in theatrical aways that reclaim the Base and recultivate the Superstructure in unison. This all falls on the teaching of tyrants using intimations of death that reflect one’s mortality as evident and one’s god-like authority as insecure, fallible, and in question: “Nothing lasts forever and their destiny is the same as everyone else’s—eventual change and ultimately death, insofar as such a transformation leads to a surrendering of one’s power, privilege and position for the betterment of all.”

To that, lobotomy or decapitation certainly isn’t permanently harmful, in a poetic sense; rather, per Matteson’s own rebellious (counterterrorist) Communist zombie-vampires, systemic healing of the brain isn’t a loss of undead status at all, but using it as a clever, poetic means of adapting on the fly insofar as generational trauma, once experienced, never quite leaves us. Indeed, the horrors of Capitalism eating us are so extreme it would be premature and foolhardy to expect that. But we have to take canonical undeath seriously if we are to successfully subvert and replace its heads of state with our own Trojan maneuvers pushing for liberation.

Cryptonymy goes both ways, of course. Through fantasizes of violence against a mortal foe, the canonical zombie as a giver/receiver of fascist violence is valorized inside an ongoing relationship—us-versus-them police violence, token workers cannibalizing themselves and preying on nature—that is quietly covered up by corporate illusions doubling said decay (exhibit 41e1).

To this, such “power trips” are deliberately palliative, doing little if anything to address Capitalism as a structure; worse, they pimp out coercive sex as the only gig in town, yielding a bevy of “undead” war brides, damsels-in-distress, twinks-in-peril, femme fatales, token Amazons (witch cops), appropriative torture porn, and coercive BDSM, etc. Those treated as zombie or vampire scapegoats to eradicate aren’t strictly infected or cursed, but viewed accordingly a punitive status (often of guilt, shame or blame) that is applied to them by the state blaming the victim through police violence; i.e., in ways that dehumanize all parties, thus encourage the victims’ witch-hunt-style execution by cops, mid-DARVO: operating endlessly inside an expanding state of exception during moral panics encouraged by state defenders who, like the state itself, are functionally undead in ways that move power towards the elite.

Excluding overt examples that treat the lived condition of the state of exception like a literal disease or social contagion (“the woke mind virus”), sex coercion (of labor) is larger than single “Warning!” posters, which must be weighed in relation to other factors: who made them, who consumed them, how they’re being used presently and by whom.

In moderate canon, for instance, sex coercion is generally felt under a continuous “whitewash” that compels cursory consumption, not deeper analysis, of dream girls whose conspicuous presence deliberately conceals Imperial destruction during Capitalist Realism; e.g., Laura, from Street Fighter V, exhibit 41e1/41f, mirroring similar levels of corporate subterfuge that have existed since at least the 1970s (as far as neoliberalism goes, that is). It’s their continued, scared job/role to make American’s forget that racism, white supremacy and fascism existed in America first—i.e., before the Nazis existed, at the same time as the Nazi rise to power in Germany as inspired by America, and after the Nazis were defeated by the very American forces they coped; or as I write in “Military Optimism”:

Glorifying war through the creation of an idealized enemy remains firmly rooted in American culture, and for good reason. Fascism is rooted in racism, with Hitler borrowing his theories of medieval posturing and eugenics from the United States, not the other way around. Prior to WW2, America’s connection with fascism, Nazism and racial violence was no secret (the deliberately archaic titles of the KKK; the American Nazi bund; and Woodrow Wilson’s screening of Birth of a Nation [1915] at the White House); after the war, Nazis scientists were hired en masse to further US hegemony. As the Nazis were secretly assimilated, the fascist Reichsadler (“Imperial Eagle”) was absorbed by its “neutral” American variant. Said variant still covered everything in sight; it was just disguised by the flowery language of liberalism. Even so, the outcome of this imperial pageantry remains fascist. It’s just more neutral about it. “We’re not an empire, we’re united,” as Anansi’s Library puts it. As such, the Reich’s infamous blitzkrieg (“lightning war”) was eclipsed by something older than it: Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which embodied the spirit of American politics before, during and after Wilson, though especially the pursuit of property. Fast forward to Reagan, the former actor-turned-politician’s Christian-tinged, family-friendly patriotism was a sham for mean-spirited revenge (for Vietnam) while simultaneously conveying strength on the world stage; in 1986, Cameron carried this torch into American theatres, spreading Aliens fandom across the world while simultaneously discouraging “weaker” incarnations within the franchise (source).

Fascism isn’t “dead” because its source never died; it was only ever denied, discredited and obfuscated (re: the subterfuge trifecta) behind militarily optimistic fictions informing a bourgeois cultural understanding of the imaginary past (the Wisdom of the Ancients) bleeding into the canceled future!

As we continue discussing fascism (and tokenism) throughout this book series, please remember fascism’s staying power owes itself to capital’s built-in reliance on fascism; i.e., to survive workers fighting back against bourgeois control. To it, while Hitler’s actual Nazis might technically “be gone,” fascism never left. Imperialism (and its undead consumption) are always coming home to empire!

In other words, fascism is integral to capital—a copycat ideology based on bad-faith aesthetics (disguise pastiche, cryptofascists and compound DARVO/obscurantism) demanded by American auteurs having perfected older examples; i.e., of the state and its own Pax-Americana exports—those wherein liberal democracy and fascist “counterculture” and decay (re: false rebellion, Parenti) have invariably led into present-day neoliberalism built on older iterations and tools of empire; e.g., palingenesis, Manifest Destiny and old, white money/nepotism-in-action (Bad Empanada’s “How the USA Inspired the Nazis – From Manifest Destiny to Lebensraum,” 2022).

History—of Capitalism as something to uphold through capitalist dogma and lies (which is all that Capitalist Realism really is)—becomes Kissinger’s “memory of states” that, in turn, the state renders back into cannibalized feed that braindead workers re-ingest before going on to police, thus eat themselves for the elite again. The world is capital, and capital is a giant zombie-vampire ouroborotically eating itself on all registers while flowing power and knowledge, labor and resources always upwards! Trauma and feeding punch down, dividing and conquering the same-old territories and occupants; i.e., vis-à-vis the perpetual (re)invention of the same kinds of us-versus-them enemies and conflicts (re: the manufacture trifecta) that Capitalism demands—normally on frontiers far-removed from the middle-class:

For example, Henry Kissinger’s aiding of Jorge Videla would bleed into the 1980s, resulting in thousands of mass murders through Operation Condor via the actual[2] contras; re:

Operation Condor used [the Monroe Doctrine] for a slightly different purpose in the Cold War as a larger operation to recruit and use security forces in countries around Latin America. This was done to make sure these countries stayed friendly to US interests, and out of the orbit of Moscow. This work mostly happened with the help of the CIA. It began with ideas drawn up at the infamous School of the Americas. Declassified documents show a meeting occurred between different officials from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. The idea was to coordinate their efforts against “subversive targets.” It sounds like it’s trying to stop guerrilla fighters, but moreover it meant anyone who threatened these dictatorial regimes that took over all the countries listed earlier plus Brazil from 1954, to 1976. The first actions were for the support and direction of groups called death squads.

A death squad is an armed group that conducts extrajudicial killings or forced disappearances of persons for the purposes such as political repression, assassinations, torture, genocide, ethnic cleansing, or revolutionary terror. They’re about as nice as the name implies and are basically teams that execute extrajudicial killings, as an act of terrorism in order to repress a population or commit genocide just like many authoritarian regimes such as the Cheka in revolutionary Russia as a preamble to the gulag system. Their first targets were political exiles living in Argentina. Anyone associated with the old governments or anyone displaced for being socialists were now finding themselves victims of these squads. Estimates are as high as 80,000 people died in these killings [source: Rough Diplomacy’s “The Bloody Hand: Operation Condor,” 2019].

Moving forward, South America would be a testing ground for neoliberalism under Pinochet, 1973 (Bad Empanada’s “Johnny Harris: Shameless Propagandist Debunked,” timestamp: 51:45) while also being a famous hotbed for prominent WW2 defectors. In turn, Americans—even self-titled “Socialists” who should know better but play dumb—fall victim to the same police-and-prey tactics via horseshoe arguments: associating Peronist Leftism with German Nazism, thus something “corrupt” (alien) to police, rape and control as nature being monstrous-feminine as has historically unfolded for thousands of years (towards more globalized, dogmatized forms); i.e., the dialectic of shelter and the alien resulting in all the usual punching down by those who normally must grit and bear it; e.g., women being the ancient enemies of patriarchal power being expressed in a wider persecution network that jumps from different modernized versions of old historical targets; re (from Volume Zero):

[artist: A Baby Pinecone]

The historical-material reality of Grendel’s suspiciously Satanic-sounding mother is ordinary people being placed into the out-group by the in-group—i.e., less hag-horror in the sense of actual withered hags [the furies] and more the ancient mother goddess [the Archaic Mother] as embodied in AFAB persons and viewed fearfully by men as devious shapeshifters that could be anywhere, inside-outside anyone [a killer impostor that is instantly fatal upon encountering; e.g., the T-1000 disguised as an innocent housewife]. While the stigma applies to anything remotely female or incorrectly male, the redhead classically evokes the presence of pagan power and Sapphic energies. She embodies nature, and nature is something for Beowulf’s hauntologized clones to kettle/box-in, then rape and kill for “their own” God-given glory in bread-and-circus-type stories [with her predictable revenge—at becoming like them for the death of her family and loved ones—being seen as cowardly and illegitimate in the eyes of the state and its kayfabe monopoly of violence; i.e., the back-and-forth cycle of reactive abuse]. It’s not just “boys will be boys”; the pussy looks like a cave to conquer by men according to men during rites of passage that have been baked into our culture as fundamental to capital. It’s Manifest Destiny in action—challenged by the simple fact that God is an invention, a cruel joke to abuse others with through the rise of Capitalism’s Cartesian Revolution and resultant maps of conquest [exhibit 1a1a1h2a1]. It becomes not just a scribble of Old-English runes, but a harmful game spawned into endless copies of itself: the power fantasy as Warrior Jesus’ perennial resurrection, raping and killing the world as monstrous-feminine, “gendered at every turn” according to cartography as a technology of conquest that fits into the ludologized scheme: 

[Francis Bacon, the father of modern science,] argued that “science should as it were torture nature’s secrets out of her.” Further, the “empire of man” should penetrate and dominate the “womb of nature.” […] The invention of Nature and Society was gendered at every turn. The binaries of Man and Woman, Nature and Society, drank from the same cup. Nature, and its boundary with Society, was “gyn/ecological” from the outset [source: A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things]. 

The kingdom is threatened; call Beowulf [or the Ghostbusters] out of the mythical past to slay what ails the king and the land, the uncanny home as “rotten” [as Hamlet put it, in Shakespeare’s parody of the hero/murder mystery] and needing to be restored through great destruction [sold to the masses, of course] (source).

Misogynistic or otherwise, capital alienates and fetishizes everything through different stigmas and bigotries. It does so to cultivate the very perverse, traitorous appetites that lead to workers policing and preying on themselves, once internalized, as cops and victims recruiting from the same populations (antagonize nature, put it to work); i.e., the tired recycling of old clichés and fetishes to galvanize capital in its current evolutionary state. Such cycles are no fluke, nor are they recent; i.e., Zombie-Vampire Capitalism occurring thanks to the strange marriage of American popular media with state engines of ongoing subterfuge and denial (with Reagan’s Tower Commission finding “no fault” when investigating America’s involvement with the contras). My praxial focus often falls to videogames, but the universal policing of nature, the monstrous-feminine and sex work is far older than those. However, even if videogames are far more dominant nowadays at illustrating Capitalist Realism than novels or movies, bondage is bondage. Except, the usual dualities and doubles also persist during oppositional praxis!

To it, undead exploitation under Capitalism as a giant zombie-vampire takes many different forms, themselves stuck inside a gradient of psychosexual abuse workers relay during liminal expression’s surfaces and thresholds (whereupon pastiche remediates praxis regarding police activity monopolizing violence, terror and morphological expression for the state, versus proletarian counterterrorism concerning sex and force, bodies and labor). Per all the usual paradoxes, any sex-positive, liberatory form (of camp) occupies the same performative shadow zone as any sex-coercive, carceral form (of canon).

As usual, the functional difference to such cryptonymy is dialectical-material scrutiny and the anisotropic flow of power expressed through knowledge and wealth in one direction or the other (always as a matter of praxial tension, flowing in both directions and at cross purposes during our daily reifying of such egregores; re: oppositional synthesis). But visual ambiguities nevertheless persist, leading to the same kinds of historical-material contradictions, which themselves make up the bare bleeding heart of the queer laborer’s existence; i.e., surviving under capital’s inherently hostile and predatory sphere that simultaneously hates us and needs us to police with and unto, and which we must interrogate and negotiate inside of itself: the self-aware scapegoat camping their own rape.

(artist: Cursed Arachnid)

This performance’s many paradoxes likewise apply to Nazis and Communists, both shoved kayfabe-style into the American Liberalist boxing court; i.e., as something to canonize or camp to varying degrees, and which future interpretations fall on either side of the fence concerning. Few things are as readily camped or canonized as the Nazi, being used to justify the half-real existence of “corruption” that, recognized by state proponents, trigger to effectively maintain global US hegemony under neoliberal Capitalism; i.e., by conflating labor—but especially labor abroad, in colonial territories—with “fascism,” thus obscuring actual fascism’s ongoing role in defending capital for the elite!

For example, in “White Evil: Peronist Argentina in US Popular Imagination Since 1955” (2004), Victoria Allison writes:

In the absence of any open conflict between the two nations, the American media in the late 20th century concentrated, sometimes obsessively, on two ultimately related phenomena: Eva Peron and the existence of escaped Nazis in Argentina. This focus dwarfs all Argentine leaders subsequent to Peron as well as the compelling saga of Argentina’s ongoing, frequently violent struggle to define itself (source).

Within this struggle, Allison notes Eva Peron being established through manufactured American sentiment as a “Latin American Lady Macbeth” that shaped future depictions of her character such as 1979’s Evita: “The campaign waged by Ambassador Spruille Braden and the U.S. media in the immediate postwar clearly have succeeded in convincing successive generations of Americans that Peronismo was an unequivocally Nazi-fascist movement” (ibid.).

To this, Eva was seen as incredibly glamorous, treacherous and powerful in order to further Pax Americana through its canonical trauma and feeding elements. While sexiness from the region would continue to shift and alter in the following decades, the framing of female/monstrous-feminine strength would remain charged with lightning and trauma like the Bride of Frankenstein (exhibit 41f, below): as overshadowed by the presence of an evil German simulacrum’s imaginary past. Indeed, American elite proponents would treat the exploitation and demonization of the Global South as something to romantically portray while constantly hiding its ongoing neoliberal exploitation (Bad Empanada’s “Operation Car Wash,” 2023). Because sex-positive and sex-coercive art use the same basic language, they require additional context to separate them; re: context that only appears under dialectical-material scrutiny, which neoliberalism discourages. Instead, it promotes the free market as benign, furthered by a proliferation of canonical, oft-Gothic images that yield the usual banana republics farmed for different “crops” (and which, per Capitalist Realism, disguise the whole process all over again).

For example, Laura Matsuda might not seem terribly Gothic or zombie-like, at all; she nonetheless wields lightning on par with an Amazon or the Bride of Frankenstein while also hailing from a distant, fearsome land populated by the corrupt, but also bandits of one kind or another (the Italian banditti populating Ann Radcliffe’s own faraway lands to terrorize her white, cis-het heroines with):

(exhibit 41f1: Artist, right: Josef Axner; left: screenshots and assets taken directly from Capcom’s IP, Street Fighter V [source: Eden]. Whereas Eden showcases the zombifying nature of Laura as a stereotypically Brazilian pin-up model that Capcom is shamelessly banking on, Axner’s fanart pointedly presents Laura as the Bride of Frankenstein—wearing that specific persona in a critically blind, corporatized sense: the Halloween costume as a critically dead advertisement of Capcom’s Brazilian “waifu.” There’s nothing wrong with embracing sexuality in partylike ways that open one’s eyes to settler-colonial abuse; Capcom does the opposite, the allegory left for workers to produce and pass on.

The Bride is already a popular example of a popular kind of demon: the composite body. In its strictly undead form, such a body is less a singular zombie risen from the grave and more a collection of zombie parts assembled by a mad scientist [the Cartesian man of reason made into a Nazi-Communist cartoon]. During oppositional praxis, this can yield canonical or iconoclastic variants; both exhibited examples, here, are canonical, insofar as they conceal genocide by exploiting the Brazilian woman as fighting games and cheap Halloween costumes usually do: through cultural appropriation and Gothic recuperation useful to profit raping nature while dressing her up as the usual Medusa-style whore).

Despite the neoliberal whitewash, Capitalism is a kaleidoscopic graveyard of cheap Halloween costumes reaping on holiday cycles: row upon row of counterfeit copies “haunted” by a larger system of disguised, displaced police violence and state predation; or again, as Marx himself put it: “the tradition of all the dead generations.” This “ghost of the counterfeit” is historical-material, its harmful effects on workers including pacification, cruelty and stupidity of the zombifying “lobotomy” sort; i.e., controlled opposition more broadly occurring inside a continuous police state populated with cops and victims (more on this precise framing in Volume Three). Private sexual property has made people stupid about sex—about its labor and social-sexual interactions becoming “undead” in ways the elite can abuse to stay in control. By comparison, iconoclastic uses of Gothic theory can help break this spell through reverse abjection, but also gives the iconoclast a particular enchanting flavor that struggling workers can identify with and use to freeze capital in its tracks: ludo-Gothic BDSM and (as far as I prefer it) mommy doms.

(artist: Vintage Fantasy)

Regardless of gender or sex, orientation or performance, monsters reify Gothic poetics as an iconoclastic matter of class and culture war that seeks liberation through performative paradox, but challenges profit as a socio-material byproduct; i.e., through canonical ownership as a Faustian, Promethean arrangement deleterious to workers, which workers subvert to achieve liberation from bourgeois forces. Indeed, iconoclasm is more than reverse abjection, invoking hauntologies, chronotopes, and cryptonyms that yield the trademark intoxication of the Gothic mode’s modus operandi—fabricating transgenerational illusions from materials historically thought of as cheap, insubstantial, and “pulpy” but also magnetic, precious and capitalist-regulated means of educating workers: monsters, sex, drugs, music, food, etc.

These are all things that most people like, but which workers have been conditioned to consume a particular way tied to particular canonical personas; i.e., not just wizards, warriors, and monsters, but sexy “undead” versions. Canon often pimps theses “zombies” as abusive metaphors for shameful or guilty pleasures inside capital’s joy division; e.g., not the fucking of literal corpses, but a broader Gothic imagination whose theoretical underpinnings shackle honest sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll hedonism to coercive, pacifying language that results in all the usual police brutalities. Iconoclasm ties the same phenomena to an active, subversive mode of rebellion—not by burying the mind (as canon does) but freeing it through cryptonymic interactions with a reimagined past made sex-positive: a “dead,” sexy teacher come back to life, reversing abjection from the largest zombies (capital and the elite) to the smallest (workers and their individual creations)!

When humanized, zombies simultaneously belong to capital’s dead future while becoming collectively retooled for emancipatory purposes; i.e., sexy illusions that demystify through revolutionary subterfuge, a complicated process that borrows from (and blends in with) older examples that weren’t always sex-positive, themselves; e.g., Frank Herbert’s catchy maxim about facing fear from Dune, which we want to reclaim while ejecting Herbert’s pernicious homophobic dogma:

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain (source).

The goal of the iconoclastic Gorgon isn’t simply petrifying our enemies, showing them their own greed and mortality (thus eventual need to face the music) while also giving ourselves room to work, live and play with dead things; it’s to reduce states of exception and predation to zero (thus avoid an Omelas scapegoat), decloaking those vampires without reflections that hide their normally invisible, decayed and predatory selves behind the looking glass; re: always hungry and rotting and bloated, like the Skeksis (frankly an anti-Semitic trope [so-called “lizard people”] also fetishizing Eastern Europe), thus always needing an ever expanding amount (compounding appetites) to regenerate the same amount as before: the glutted leeches, resting and digesting in their castled coffins. The more they eat, the more they must lie to conceal themselves, thus continue ruling the world from beyond the grave (concentric veneers, but also Jewish conspiracies blaming Marxism instead of capitalists). The DARVO-style lies compound, fracture and reassemble.

In turn, our Aegis subverts both canonical monsters/weird nerds and their bourgeois tyrants (and stereotypes), but also the chronotope we all share. Doing so, we utilize sexuality and gender as driving forces that hold everything loosely together during distinct, visually ambivalent arrangements: unequal power exchange during the kinks and fetishes known to ludo-Gothic BDSM. Such exercises often court themselves amid visually “appropriate” locales historically criminalized and commercialized by the status quo in hauntological fashion. During reverse abjection, however, these old demonic places generally associate with pleasure and punishment as interwoven among palpable, “heavy” time—so thick it’s like wading through fog (a kind of opium den).

(artist: Soon2BSalty; modified by Persephone van der Waard)

As we’ve talked about already inside this module, there’s often a spatial element beyond the dolls, themselves; i.e., dollhouses; e.g., Metroidvania. Doll or dollhouse, Capitalism deliberately manufactures harmful iterations to blind us with, then feed on workers through the usual vampiric hyphenations, portals, personas (such spectres of Rome and Marx only begging for us to camp them using what we have; e.g., Gentlee Webb, below):

(artist: Herb Ritts)

Bit but not bled, the same standard/tokenized workers go on to stochastically assist in capital’s recursive trauma and consumption; i.e., assimilating as class, culture and/or race traitors (which, again, theatrically resemble their rebellious brethren, on and offstage). Regardless of the exact monstrous-feminine form(s), the house is the zombie and/or vampire (demon, animal, etc) as much as the person is (and they generally share these qualities in between each other as representing residence or resident; e.g., Dracula and his infamous castle [above] as something to uproot and transplant elsewhere pursuant to larger models).

Except, such feeding always goes in both directions, requiring times of relaxed control and vulnerability that capital might operate the way the elite want it to; i.e., feeding itself on itself: to eject the necessary foodstuffs, then claw profit back through the usual cycles of police violence unfolding inside colonized lands and populations that endlessly recolonize per new settler arguments (that benefit the usual groups), thus devour themselves (and their victims) anew as part of the same giant zombie-vampire. Things harden, soften, and harden again as part of the same peristalsis swallowing process: moving food round and round, in and out of the same holes, bodies, identities and struggles existing in perpetual duality! Like with sex, we need to be rigid at times in social situations (that often concern sex as something to enforce; i.e., through poetics onstage and off; e.g., with drugs and rock ‘n roll, prostitution, etc), but also flexible and fun in our dialectical-material opposition occupying the same contested arenas; re: we camp things because we must! Silence is genocide and cops are generally too dumb to tell the difference!

(artist: Gentlee Webb)

When developing Gothic Communism, then, emancipatory hauntologies/chronotopes—like cryptonymy and reversing abjection—become increasingly perceptive and loud, not blind and quiet, to what workers could enjoy when expressing our genderqueer/postcolonial selves through ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., versus canonical instances that merely extend the rot in perpetuity while hiding the elite’s reflections (which vampires do not have) and celebrating the capitalist tyrant: as an ultimate glutton billionaire we should eat and tax to hell and back, our zombie eyeballs extending to the spatial side of things—the corporal, temporal, social and political, etc—stewing in the same witch’s pot (an organism, in Bakhtin’s words).

Such is capital, our home waiting to be reclaimed. Unlike canonical death, though, which only leads to worker exploitation and unironic cannibalization, the signifiers of death in iconoclastic, sex-positive narratives liberate workers through the humanized worker zombie as terrifyingly alive: the thinking undead who see (with their perceptive eyeballs) who has made them desire, through praxial synthesis, a changing of things; i.e., to achieve catharsis as a wider healing process that chills solid the usual actors of Cartesian predation, of the monomyth, of ghettos and police stations, of rape and abjection as fundamental to capital, to profit. As we reverse-abject what the elite fear most, they become Matheson’s legend: to petrify with our Aegis, then leave behind to chill workers again through a culture that has become increasingly class conscious and emotionally/Gothically intelligent!

(artist: Emil Melmoth)

With that being said, capital is as vulnerable as any undead, the way to its heart through its stomach. To it, let’s move onto other forms of undead; i.e., besides zombies and their famous apocalypses, monomyths, what-have-you. Let’s examine ghosts, vampires and composites, considering how these egregores historically feed as undead beings! Onto “They Hunger (opening) and Eat Me Alive, part zero (vampire crash course)“; i.e., a summary of the whole feeding chapter, followed a crash course on vampires (and witches)!

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Footnotes

[1] Lovecraft speaking through his usual racism/xenophobia to Capitalism’s cannibalistic nature through the process of abjection—literally cannibals abjected onto non-Western races and ethnocentric evil lands; i.e., rather dated (but effective) settler-colonial arguments.

[2] And whose state-sanctioned death squads would horrifyingly inspire both Arnold’s Dutch from Predator and Bill Rizer and Lance Bean from the Contra videogame franchise; i.e., as half-real fascist “Rambos” defending the “free world” from “Communism” as thoroughly Giger-esque: Red Falcon’s endless army of cybernetic space demons. You see this fostering of a police mentality among the middle class through the process of abjection and ghost of the counterfeit; re (from earlier in this module, citing Volume Two, part one):

“Capital relies on dogma as something to internalize and serve profit on all registers—on and offstage, at home and abroad, by white male predators” (source). This extends to token agents (women acting like men, fags acting like straight people, etc), which is precisely what Jadis is and how they acted towards me. Moreover, harmful mentalities like theirs are informed by popular media such as videogames, which victims escape into only to be bombarded with the very ideas that drive their abusers at home and abroad. The effect is often one of recruitment (cops or victims). I continue,

Regarding videogames as a neoliberal form of dogma, from the early ’80s to the end of the Cold War and beyond, you went from public entertainment devices (arcades) that had a bunch of mostly young male clients cycling through them like a pimped-out sex worker… to the 1983 Atari Crash and subsequent 1985 smash-hit success of Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. encouraging the widespread sale of videogames in the Gothic’s usual haunt: among the middle class. Except this time, the elite wanted in through ways that didn’t exist during the Neo-Gothic revival: televisions as personal property that could funnel in their burgeoning ideology through the disguise of (expensive and highly recursive) games.

From the early days of Space Invaders (1978), Pac-Man (1980) or Donkey Kong (1981) to Mario, then (about seven years—twelve, if you start from 1973 when the elite began their first experiments with neoliberalism in South America), the usual place of neoliberal business and indoctrination transitioned from single arcade machines to larger amounts of money (from quarters to hundreds of dollars) per customer in each household (where there is more money to be had, and seasonally at that); i.e., a Stepford Wife, purchased for paychecks, not pocket change, and ready to implement the business model into the first generation of what would become the New World Order under neoliberal Capitalism: a world of us-versus-them enforced by neoliberal, monomythic copaganda’s harmful simulations of Amazonomachia to maintain the status quo at a socio-material level; re: the shadows of a new republic’s man-cave walls.

In turn, the American middle class (so called “gamer culture”) would gatekeep and safeguard the elite through videogames being an acclimating device to neo-feudal territories to defend in reality (outside of the game world[s] themselves) as capital starts to decay like usual (ibid.).

Capitalism is a structure that operates across space and time; i.e., inside the working public’s hearts and minds, but also through their labor extending into the physical world (and back into their hearts and minds; re: gargoyles). Those with relative privilege—white, middle-class straight men—prey and police everyone else, monomyth-style, leading to a concentric gradient of tokenization, gentrification and decay branching out from white women (the classic gatekeepers of Gothic fiction) towards more marginalized communities passing the Judas-style donation plate doubling as a police badge.

The same basic issues of extratextual police and predation outlined above (say nothing of the tiered “rungs” of tokenization and preferential mistreatment that result) continue to effect workers in new forms of media, including fictional and non-fictional worlds as a liminal position; i.e., interacting back and forth, on and offstage. Nothing is every truly separate in that respect, the liminal hauntology of war traveling back and forth across imperial territories foreign and domestic, real and imagined. Such half-real oscillation is not simply incidental, but required for capital to function at all!

This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). 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 “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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

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

“Hell Hath No Fury”; or, Soulblighter’s Token Gay Nazi Revenge (and Giants/Female Characters) in Myth II: Soulblighter

“I’ll get you, and your little dog, too!”

—The Wicked Witch of the West, The Wizard of Oz (1939)

(source)

Picking up from where “Myth: the Fallen the Lords (opening and part one: Balor)” left off…

Whereas “Hail, Caesar!” focused on Balor as Gay Caesar come home to roost, “Hell Hath No Fury” shall now explore the unshackled antics of his most fearsome and loyal servant, Soulblighter. We’ll do so per the Cycle of Kings’ circular approach to time (and fascism/genocide feeding on nature, workers and—to some degree—the state). Rather than simply detail Soulblighter’s abject, Melmoth-style, Wandering-Jew behaviors, though, my queer close-read aims to humanize our story’s Grim Reaper through medieval camp (while recognizing his role as a token zombie cop); then, we’ll wrap things up, concluding with some larger points about the Cycle of Kings and giants before surveying the female monstrous-feminine (which is largely absent in the franchise, but not entirely).

Before we start, I want to clarify (for about three pages) what I mean by Melmoth/the Wandering Jew per my usage of it: Our reading of Soulblighter is—like Maturin’s novel—a significant deviation from the original medieval trope of the Wandering Jew, the former device having mocked Christ en route to his Passion, and Maturin’s 1820 retelling presenting the character as vaguely cursed in a Faustian sense. His Melmoth the Wanderer returns to seek out those who are not cursed, but who through positions of disadvantage may bear witness to his reprobate state: a sign of the truth and of Christian hegemony where the sign of the cross (often in code) is borne witness towards.

To that, our treatment of “Melmoth/the Wandering Jew” will also deviate from Maturin when attached to Soulblighter’s vengeful ghost (and the other Fallen, who embody fascist stereotypes and stigmas), but this process of deviation didn’t start with us. Let’s outline that, then articulate our specific usage a bit more.

As Lisa Lampert-Weissig writes in “Sarah Perry’s Melmoth and the Implications of Gothic Form (2022): “The Wandering Jew’s actions at the Passion were traditionally regarded as another example of alleged Jewish cruelty toward Christ and Christians. The Wandering Jew’s legendary affront resonated with the charge that Jews are ‘Christ-killers,’ a calumny that informs anti-Semitic myths such as ritual murder accusation and the blood libel” (source). She adds,

The Wandering Jew tradition has been from its origins shaped by Christian supersessionism, the idea that Christianity is the true and rightful fulfillment of Jewish prophecy. As they adapt the Wandering Jew legend, Maturin and Perry both depart significantly from its original details (and from each other). In both novels, however, the dominant function of the Wandering Jew – to serve as sign of a Christian truth – still shapes the narratives (ibid.).

In other words, an overbearing and die-hard Christian bias haunts a partially imaginary presence that is, for lack of a better term, “blasted.”

Except, Gothic media doesn’t clearly define this characteristic or its terminology—save for how it varies in different usage over time. For example,

Maturin’s Melmoth has been cursed through some vaguely intimated Faustian bargain. In contrast, [Perry’s] Melmoth the Witness is cursed for refusing to affirm her eyewitness of Christ’s resurrection. As punishment for her cowardly failure, she is doomed to seek out “everything that’s most distressing and most wicked, in a world which is surpassingly wicked, and full of distress. In doing so she bears witness, where there is no witness, and hopes to achieve her salvation” (37). Because she denied her witness of Christ’s resurrection, Melmoth must bear eternal witness to the endless misery and suffering which human beings bring upon themselves and one another. As did her [wandering] counterpart in Maturin’s work, Melmoth the Witness seeks out those in despair, imploring them to join her in order to ease her endless loneliness (ibid.).

So while the Gothic first established Melmoth through Lewis’ The Monk—the character having a mark of Cain burned into his forehead (the sign of a vampire, though that mythology had yet to fully develop)—the witness of a curse through a ghost story is one of wrongfulness that speaks to the status quo it stands adjacent to: an outsider that personifies a predator/prey relationship to the thing punishing it, expressed in the usual Gothic ways; i.e., reversal and hyphenation; e.g., per the tale and found document of Gothic conventions, but also “the matryoshka-like structure of tales, which Perry connects using epistolary form, rhetorical address and shifting narrative point of view […] as well [the ways in which] ‘gothic conventions’ can be used to ‘exercise’ readers’ imaginations and emotions” (ibid.).

Indeed, we’ve looked at such things ourselves regarding the Metroidvania; i.e., as a ghost story told through the space itself as something to explore, tracking down Numinous signatures and triggering vital rememories during the Promethean Quest as a wandering castle. The same goes for personifications and our relations to them (again, often through Gothic chronotopes).

To summarize, Weissig describes Perry’s exercise of emotions as a study of the Gothic tradition that leads to what Perry calls a more “self-conscious” understanding of one’s creative process as a writer and of the “shared experience of the novel.” I call the same process/outcome “Gothic maturity.” Whatever the label, the idea is one of intimacy with a cursed being that links to a larger system of thought and unequal power exchange—one we (workers) can develop and utilize class-culture consciousness and emotional/Gothic intelligence though a closeness to an alien device that normally plays out through intense emotions and, just as often in videogames, systemic violence linked to Capitalism; i.e., the monomyth and Promethean Quest manifesting through very different forms of the same basic concept (the ghost of the counterfeit).

These, in turn, might seem far-removed from Maturin. Under Capitalism, though, the Christian tale of resurrection appears in Gothic stories, themselves occupied by an increasingly militarized and capitalistic presence of revenge haunted by echoes of Caesar and Marx; i.e., spectres of fascism and Communism through dark conqueror-ghost symbols, all whose ghastly alien reputations proceed them in older forms updated through present circumstances the middle class plays with; e.g., Street Fighter‘s M. Bison, forever cursed to wander the Earth and seek revenge; re: that character inspired by a neoliberal conversation that combines Maturin’s Melmoth with wrestler kayfabe theatre expressed through different worlds and cultures colliding under global Capitalism: Hiroshi Aramata’s Yasunori Kato.

(artist: Hiroshi Aramata)

As Timothy Blake Donohoo writes,

Bison was one of many villains inspired by Yasunori Kato, the main character from the Japanese novel, Teito Monogatari. […] A sort of take on Melmoth the Wanderer or the Wandering Jew, Kato is seemingly a former general in the Japanese army. In reality, he embodies centuries of lost Japanese history, with his malevolence representing the rage of those who had once stood against the Japanese.

A powerful onmyoji, he can summon and control demons to do his will, as well as use his powers to prolong his life. His ultimate goal is to utterly crush the Japanese Empire, beginning with Tokyo’s destruction. He conspires with rival countries in order to do so. His enemies include Yasumasa Hirai as well as several authors and even a physicist, intermingling ancient magic with advanced science and sociopolitical conflicts (source: “Street Fighter’s Greatest Villain Was Inspired by a Spooky Japanese Horror Novel,” 2022).

Where wandering ghosts like Melmoth are near, so is trouble as something to bear witness (and rock hauntologically out[1]) to; i.e., regarding buried truths about Capitalism and its own predatory relationship to Christianity and other religions (re: Weber) comported onto spectral medieval elements of war and the human power structures that “raise Cain.”

In the Radcliffean tradition, the summoning is done to dismiss them in terrifying “geometries” (re: Aguirre) that can’t harm you. More to the point, these recent, “safe space” hauntologies are more or less how we shall approach the character Soulblighter—hence don’t concern the Passion or Resurrection of Christ as something to witness through its Gothic embodiment.

Instead, my mention of “Melmoth” concerns the Christ-like resurrection of Caesar’s ghost, one told through positions of revenge that are overtly anti-Semitic (and Orientalist) vis-à-vis Capitalist Realism; i.e., as linked to Bungie’s Cycle of Kings, itself expressing through the neoliberal monomyth’s (videogame) tyrant as undead: a relationship towards power abjected onto alien expressions of itself coming home and viewed like Melmoth always is—as a painful symbol of truth built upon Christian dogma, which extends to wartime American xenophobia unto Capitalism as it presently exists (and those symbols inside of it).

No one ever said that truth (about Capitalism and the Protestant ethic) was good or easy to bear! For us, that’s Soulblighter—not just a lonesome spirit, but one deprived of a former friend that drives him, a token gay Nazi cop, to hideously self-destruct and, as a consequence of playing the game, be witnessed for it by the player. In seeing it, the system of empire that Soulblighter’s WW2 stereotypes ultimately represent expresses to a Promethean degree of resistance—one felt through a matrix of interwoven space-time across cultures that we often take for granted while their combined freight haunts and inspires us.

As we continue, then, remember that Soulblighter is, like all ghosts, a confirmation-bias caricature of stereotype and superstition, but also a repressed (cryptonymic) testimony to an imperfect survivor’s revenge by those who refuse to completely die; i.e., victims of genocide haunting the ruins of empire, outlasting their conquerors while embodying said conquerors’ worst fears, uniforms and tendencies (to “better the instruction,” as Shylock puts it). —Perse

First, while there are differences between the conquerors in Myth, it’s worth noting Balor and Soulblighter share obvious similarities, too. They were friends in life; in death, they return to plague the West, its defense staving off the barbarian unknown as ultimately the West’s own conquerors come home to roost: as fallen, “death knight” heroes; i.e., Caesar or Melmoth-style wraiths claiming Divine Right in the absence of a Christian dogma. It’s a return of the living dead, but also the return of the king and king’s men (a Second Coming in militarized feudal language) as undead, united tyrannically against the West as it presently stands.

From there, though, things only begin to change. In Myth II, the servant trope inverts, the Cycle of Kings swept up in Brutus’ guilt for killing Caesar by proxy of Caesar’s loyal right hand: “his closest friend,” one who spent a lot more time with Balor than Shiver (wink-wink). Normally, the pattern brings about/restores the return of an undead hungry “Rome” that supplants a Christian Capitalism for a Pagan, non-Western decay into feudalism[2] from Capitalism. Yet Soulblighter is more apocalyptic. Whereas Balor wanted to rule the world as undead, Soulblighter—his token sidekick/queer-coded[3] general and best friend—pushes it to the brink of total Promethean annihilation (the game, especially its cutscenes, are notably less funny than the original’s).

To it, if the Western hero is central to the monomyth, going into and coming back from Hell, then so is the monstrous-feminine slave/war criminal through the generals that codify service to Caesar as a matter of capital. Except the servant is always an outside “terrorist” threat to expose, a menace to police, a mystical occult ploy meant to hide the inherently violent, cannibalistic and coercive nature of the state functioning as normal. As a matter of double revenge (Connacht’s dream and death), Soulblighter aims to reverse the monomyth/Cycle of Kings, bringing about the end of the world through dark Jewish revenge bearing queer overtones (and counterterrorist energies)!

(source: Mythipedia)

As we’ll see, Soulblighter is inherently foreign (note the jinn pants)—Balor’s token friend who feels even more alien because of that; i.e., from a canonical perspective, Balor is still Caesar, thus has ancestral ties to the West per the settler argument, whereas Soulblighter is the tokenized outsider/monstrous-feminine race traitor (re: Melmoth, the Wandering Jew) first working for a fascist ruler to bring about dominion, followed by cataclysm after said ruler’s death. To it, Soulblighter’s not just a token Nazi, but a token gay Nazi warlord.

This might sound odd. However, canon treats such divide-and-conquer contradictions as completely fine provided they serve capital, and nothing is more useful to the elite than a token, Orientalist cop chasing “final victory” after Hitler is dead; few things are fiercer or better at policing a marginalized population, the cop-in-question compelled to love its conquerors and police its own kind: by playing hangman for the elite. To quote Daffy Duck, “he’s despicable!”

We’ll get to Soulblighter in a second. Given his monstrous-feminine elements, though, I’d like to stress some various, sympathy-for-the-devil points about the monstrous-feminine as we proceed—namely their intrinsic value in camping the sorts of things that Soulblighter crystalizes (something we haven’t talked about too much in this section, thus far, but will continue to going forwards). To it, if we want to overcome hatred as a canonical device tied to capital, we must understand how it works; simply abjecting such things (as Bungie does) will not do.

In short, we must empathize with the wretched, asking how someone like Soulblighter can become tokenized to such a profound, point-of-no-return degree that their subsequent alienation could arguably motivate them to commit police violence/genocide against other equally marginalized peoples, or conversely might seek revenge against empire to a suicidal degree that takes everyone down with the ship (“crossing the Rubicon,” to borrow from Caesar’s campaigns); i.e., while camping is not endorsement of reactionary violence, it does require a kind of intimacy that “pure evil” treatments discourage. Pure evil is pure alien, which characters like Soulblighter are depicted as; if we can imagine, thus understand what causes that alienation, we can start to reverse it, hence counteract the forces that turn people like Soulblighter (their real-world equivalents) into spiteful cops.

To this, I’d like to unpack/reiterate a few relevant ideas (about two pages), then give Soulblighter a closer look…

First, regarding heroes or harpies, “corruption” and decay are endemic/comorbid to the same monomyth’s royal cycle: the return of the skeleton king followed by the return of the noble king (and their servants) in a historical-material loop that universally treats Communism as zombie-like (doomed to death), but also conflates it with the ravenous death knights of fascism culling the Amazons, beheading Medusa (or anything else queer) and turning Melmoth into a wandering vampire, etc. White knight vs black knight—good cop, bad cop—both colonize workers as something to internalize; i.e., wrestling for control over the same territory in centrist, good-vs-evil language. The same goes for servants turned into cops, thus cannibals.

In this sense, Balor and Soulblighter make up two sides of the same infernal coin—one that is no different than Athena versus Medusa, or subjugated Hippolyta versus her evil twin; i.e., insofar as power aggregates against Communism written as capital’s bête noire that, in truth, has only manifested fairly recently (over the past several centuries) in response to Capitalism rising out of feudalism’s own mistreatment of serfs and the master/slave dynamic of Rome and other ancient empires. To escape the same “as good as it gets” trap Bungie entertains, workers must critique the value of war as a “great zombie” that cannot hide its own rot—of Capitalism and the nation-state as fundamentally spoiled, but ubiquitous and pervasive through the monomyth and nuclear family unit as fundamentally doomed by design.

Granted, we’ve previously discussed “Rome” as a hauntological façade that valorizes Capitalism’s rot; i.e., while nakedly consuming its own workers at differing speeds (said speeds often determined by racist variables) depending on the Imperial Boomerang’s current location—at home, or fixated on faraway lands like Cambodia, Africa, Gaza, and other such frontiers. Except, life can obviously exist without great manly heroes and kings in the canonical, monomythic sense. In short, it can exist without Capitalism and its military apocalypses, but workers must bravely reinvent what it means to be a hero and a villain (a tragic hero); i.e., by critiquing centrist heroics through camp as a matter of cultivating Gothic maturity per a proletarian Song of Infinity (versus Bungie’s immature, endless, blind parodies and pastiche standing by capital and profit). In broader terms, this means humanizing Medusa—and all sassy fat-bottomed girls (gays and people of color, etc, as colonized bodies)—for their hill-sized fannies’ cracks of doom harvested by capital and Cartesian forces “to the last syllable of recorded time”: an artificial wilderness unable to feed workers or animals because it has become of a means of siphoning everything out of the land and labor into the bourgeoisie’s greedy coffers.

(artist: VG Yum)

However, it also applies to characters like Soulblighter being monstrous-feminine, too; i.e., servants and slaves (which Jews historically are) that “go feral” and traitor in their own ways. To liberate ourselves, then, is to reverse the monomyth’s process of abjection (which normally serves state interests by raping Medusa as a terrorist); i.e., as it pertains to servants like Soulblighter likewise being bred for police violence. You must humanize the harvest Soulblighter belongs to, reuniting alien things to see your fellow tokenized workers as human—all while critiquing the structures that dehumanize victims and victimizers alike. As an instrument of mass torture and exploitation, the state is fallible but effective, purposely devised to exploit labor then lie about it in heroic stories featuring Melmoth as—like a wild animal without a master—trying to destroy Rome to avenge Caesar’s death. This starts by itself, then resurrects two of the other Fallen, the Deceiver and Shiver, to play into/out the same “degenerate” equation.

More than the first, Myth II is about chaos, insofar as Satan is dead and “order” threatened by these jackals unchained. Except, while Soulblighter remains a kind of Jewish gargoyle to scare workers stiff (the Watcher from the original Myth a BDSM cliché, Shiver a witch and the Deceiver a silver-tongued gay man inside the second game’s shared neoliberal gimmick), he’s still a byproduct of the environment that made him—of pain and conditioning shucked off onto a walking fetish. He’s the game’s central antagonist; i.e., literally the name of the game and discussed nonstop inside it—a shell of a man crippled with fear and rage that collectively reflect actual labor’s complicated, dogmatic regressions/repressions under the capitalist hegemon. For the good of ourselves, let’s dissect that.

The paradox of nuance is it can feel alienating unto itself, confusing. Doubles speak to that, invoking the need for both hard stances (e.g., postcolonialism and basic human rights) and flexibility (e.g., searching for allies among the colonizer group) at the same time; i.e., conventions to bend or break regarding different praxial objectives required, mid-opposition, under dialectical-material context. Characters like Damas and Soulblighter account for the usual abject divisions that occur, while forcing fascist and Communist aspects onto the same shadowy body.

The same nuance is an attempt to extricate what is thoroughly entangled to a, some degree, inextricable level, while acknowledging that both sides are, themselves, different warring ideologies. It’s not simple, nor are the feelings associated with it. What we want to avoid is conflation, while simultaneously humanizing what must be humanized to prevent further police violence in the future; I am acknowledging and disarming token stereotypes while occupying and interrogating them (and their power and trauma) through performance and play. That’s what subversion and ludo-Gothic BDSM are ultimately about, as viewpoints regarding a performance we’re both inhabiting and looking into; i.e., punching Nazis by camping them, which is to say, restoring their humanity by removing a capacity for police violence, wherever it is found and however it manifests during the rememory process as half-real, imaginary and historical.

I won’t lie: there will be pain, and facing Melmoth will haunt you. However, it won’t kill you (or I would have died long ago). But heroic transformation (systemic catharsis) only happens when the mirror is repeatedly re-examined and redesigned for workers’ collective benefit, mid-camp and ludo-Gothic BDSM. Channeling a new imaginary past, its social effects on the material world must transmit across space and time by us; re: using the Promethean Quest to camp, thus subvert the monomyth, as—like the black castle that houses the brutal, rapacious tyrant—something that passes to the servant as avenging such mastery to keep capital in line.

This is what Soulblighter embodies in Myth II, the game being his story after Caesar is dead; i.e., the tortured, queer-coded Asiatic Jew driven mad with revenge tied to different terrible things; e.g., black magic and torture, but also animals. To it, Marlowe’s “raven soliloquy” from The Jew of Malta (1590) leaps to mind:

Thus like the sad presaging Raven that tolls
The sicke mans passeport in her hollow beake,
And in the shadow of the silent night
Doth shake contagion from her sable wings (source).

Barbara’s monologue/parade of vengeful, cruel, and thoroughly anti-Semitic stigmas curiously mirrors Soulblighter’s abjection; i.e., as penned by Western Christian men, then and now (including gay ones like Shakespeare; re: Shylock). Soulblighter’s their DARVO punching bag just as Barbaras was, but wedded to “Caesar” and the Cycle of King’s Capitalist Realism. Keeping with the grim reaper shtick, Soulblighter’s bloodthirsty glaive (the knife dick, its fang thirsty for good men’s blood, fueling the owner’s wicked revenge) also bears an anti-Semitic, “backstabbing Jew” flavor (we’ll look at the Orientalist side of Soulblighter in a moment; e.g., his links to the Japanese side of the Axis Powers, exhibit 41c1).

Starting with Barbaras’ greed parable, the “evil Jew” trope comes out of the actual medieval period into future echoes felt inside capital; i.e., oscillating towards and away from itself vis-à-vis its muscled Orientalist harbingers (and other monstrous-feminine scapegoats): those standing in (under duress) as Bungie’s vaudeville, their Lord-Humongous-style Four Horsemen aping the same contagious virus borrowed less from the likes of Maturin and more from Hiroshi Aramata and a post-WW2 world. Soulblighter is the strawman Jew/stereotypical Asian made to count himself among Caesar’s four Fallen Lords; i.e., the token symbol for greed abjected onto an alien, easterly Semite that serves capital by emerging to scare the middle class into fighting him, thus preserve capital by eating themselves (a fiendishly clever reversal of the zombie—normally eating the middle class—suffering to be eaten by them, instead).

In reality, it’s all capital’s doing what capital always does: “rape workers and blame it on them to divide and conquer when capital decays and seeks revenge (revealing its own rapacious function as having existed before said decay sets in); put said zombies down and hand the keys of empire back to the usual white knights (cops) and lords (owners).” Dogwhistle, repeat. Clearly Myth II is aware of the cycle it illustrates, but it uses the expendability of its soldiers (and sprawling dogma of its built worlds) to crystalize the loop, hence the status quo as something Soulblighter the terrorist is ultimately against. He’s Shylock: “If you prick us, do we not bleed? […] If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”

Again, the monomyth is baked into capital, commonly inverting as a Promethean, undead cycle of rape, revenge and restoration serving profit; i.e., a zombie tyrant (often a vampire Nazi or Jew) to raise and blame when it feeds, not the system already in place exploiting and antagonizing nature before putting it cheaply to work: raising ethnostates and terrorist organizations (e.g., Israel and Hamas) stuck in the same abject torture loop moving power towards the state exploiting all parties involved. Whatever the destroyer’s form (not just the Metroidvania castle, vengeful husband or mad scientist), our speculative, subversive aim is regicidal and postcolonial; i.e., presenting the zombie as something to critique if it defends the state at workers’ expense: a fearful, muscular and undead golem, vampire, what-have-you, with motives that resist discovery upon examination.

However, if we remain persistent and creative, we can resist the typical fear mechanism or fascinated glory-seeker’s rebuild-the-kingdom antics (e.g., Metallica’s “Four Horsemen” [1983]: “Choose your fate and die!”) normally turning capital’s gears; i.e., choosing instead to inspect, understand and ultimately subvert Soulblighter’s trauma and undead feeding habits, working out what makes him tick, thus lay bare capital’s usual operations through such tokenized vaudeville: the evil child, the Pinocchio from Hell, the Golem of Prague that is both the Übermensch and the Untermensch, the harbinger and the testament to secret sin, open discord and selective memory fueling present struggles fascinated with Old-Testament violence, black magic, and rituals of blood sacrifice (re: Abraham).

(source: Mythipedia)

As Myth‘s Melmoth, Soulblighter looks scary enough—is literally the thing that haunts the bourgeoisie’ dreams, keeping Alric up at night as his extratextual parallels try and scare us with these same things (they fear worker revenge, so they transmute it into dogma). In technophobic terms, Soulblighter is a canonical goblin; i.e., a false mirror/double of reality projecting imaginary bourgeois fears onto his viewers, planted in the Earth and springing up from the clay while composed of it like Nappa’s cybermen. Keeping with Victor’s doomsday scenario, Soulblighter was birthed by the mad minds of those in power alongside his fellow creations—a crass, abject rainbow of disparate monstrous-feminine clichés that fearful middle-class men can LARP against in a fantasy world made, as the monomyth always is, just for them: WW2 in small. Such lies are planted and sown, then take root through assimilation and play.

As widespread and fearsome as Soulblighter sounds, he ultimately remains against empire for reasons that aren’t completely alien to our own counterterrorist cause, provided we camp it a little; i.e., “make it gay” in ways that speak to queer alienation as something that intersects with other forms; e.g., Orientalism and anti-Semitism becoming “Holocaust” in quotes—something that never quite existed, thus permits us speaking to our own survival through its fantasy battles and slaughters. This “rape play” isn’t something the elite can monopolize, meaning we can camp it, too; i.e., just enough to make Soulblighter feel pain, to humanize him (as a stereotypical tortured fag will do) to account for similarity amid difference, hence a pedagogy of the oppressed and its anisotropic qualities reversing abjection by flowing power towards workers through terrorist/counterterrorist binaries we can subvert, synthesize and reverse in defense of those normally policed and tokenized to police labor by state forces feeding through such violence.

For one, it’s a lot easier to understand Soulblighter’s potential love for Balor as a fellow gay man in a fascist regime than it is for him to simply be “pure evil.” People don’t do things simply to be evil unless it’s for propaganda purposes; e.g., the barbaric Jew (re: Barbaras) being evil to make the Christians look good—with Soulblighter being so cartoonishly evil, it defies reason:

If the dam were destroyed, the resulting deluge would kill everything in its path for miles. […] Still Shiver stands between us and Soulblighter, just as she did two days ago on the Ire River. The men who fought there faced an army of thrall meant more as an impediment than anything else. Did Soulblighter plan to wash both the Legion and Shiver out to sea? Truly there is no end to the fiend’s malfeasance” (source).

(source: Mythipedia)

While all’s fair in love and war, the game depicts Soulblighter as a terrorist. Basically he summons Shiver—a literal hellcat—and uses her as bait (all that the game allows her to be); in turn, the Deceiver—wielding a vain, silver-tongued worminess (all queer stereotypes) married to a Grinch-like smile and large nose (anti-Semitic tropes, himself a backstabbing Jew “in the flesh,” above)—is brought back to save the Legion from the battle at the dam; i.e., the good queer servant/dutiful Jew who used to be bad: “He goes to warn the Emperor—moving through odd angles; faster than any man, and if unobserved, much faster than that” (source).

To it, Soulblighter’s acts of terrorism always classify as tokenized Jewish/Oriental revenge, thus are depicted as extraordinary cruel (more cruel than Alric). When these routinely fail against all odds, Soulblighter spirals, picking a fight he cannot win so that he can lure his ancient enemies—literally empire, itself—to a desperate last battle. Soulblighter wants to die and has from the start, but he’s choosing to die by taking the Cycle of Kings with him (the volcano literally being a suicide bomb)! Apart from Shiver (who’s bait), Soulblighter largely does this alone; i.e., as the mastermind with an army of queer-coded Nazi slaves (again, the contradictions are fine provided they serve profit; and liberation and enslavement occupy the same shadow zone, as do Nazis and Communists).

(source: Mythipedia)

Except, Soulblighter can’t resurrect Balor to help out, so he chooses to bring back the Myrkridia—again, more golems, and queer-coded ones linked to sodomy and bad resurrection: a race of inferior-yet-superior (re: “the enemy is weak and strong”) creatures of so-called “Jewish magic” (mad science) and revenge:

The Tain was supposed to be the final resting place of the Myrkridia, but The Summoner has been inside the shattered artifact for five months now, slowly resurrecting their entire race [sort of an evil Genie’s bottle]. To think of it makes me shudder, and even now the Myrkridia spread across the Province like fire across a dry field, leaving death and blackened ruins in their wake. We must stop him now. […] The Deceiver has brought us here to kill The Summoner. The ruin he will bring about if allowed to remain alive is unconscionable. This alone dictates that he must die (source: Mythipedia).

In short, Soulblighter—the avenging Jew that raises the Nazis—finds an evil wizard, cutting ahead through the slower imperial mechanisms’ usual cycle to generate a race of werewolf supermen (a Nazi call to violence, towards the end of WW2, below) that, all the same, bears the tell-tale likeness of dwarvish mechanisms (re: the Tain), goblin phenotypes (an anti-Semitic symbol, above), Japanese Imperialism exhibit 41c1, and “sodomy” (unnatural, queer-coded reproduction). Thus, Bungie blames a Jew for the Nazis in Orientalist language, cramming everything messily into the same evil ghost that wanders the war-torn land; i.e., when the chickens come back sooner than expected (aftershocks).

Cliché though it is (verging on “true camp” in that Bungie have no irony to speak of, delivering the menace with a straight face), Myth II yields a much more involved and fleshed-out plot than Myth I does; i.e., the Summoner turning the bodies of Soulblighter’s myriad victims into what can only be described as “Nazi-Communist effigies”: a DARVO argument by Bungie, treating Soulblighter as Melmoth, and the Summoner as his vague, evil-wizard (director) Goebbels (the order of their deaths being different—the original minister of propaganda committing suicide outside the Führerbunker after Hitler shot himself—but I digress).

Furthermore, the obscurantist mixing of monster myths to conceal the fact that Alric and empire are actually the bourgeois forces, here (with Soulblighter nothing but a fascist mirage with Communist bastardizations), is simply fascism defending capital through the middle class. The Summoner might be the Nazi scientist, in-game, but the story remains a queer-tinged framed narrative comparable to Tolkien’s LotR (re: Ostertag) for which everything is contained in the Narrator’s journal, the latter written by Bungie serving the profit motive similar to Tolkien or Lovecraft (re: Imperialism with more steps). It’s an abject, adult-oriented playground for endless battle against gay Nazi, “degenerate” (foreign, poor and non-Christian, etc) forces, informed by history as half-real and cartoonish, strangely devoid of camp in its medieval, token, He-Man-grade revivals.

For example, after Soulblighter’s blitzkrieg fails, the werewolf legend he invokes unfolds in ways that pertain—ironically enough—to a creatively imaginary homeland aimed at frightened children borrowed from the actual Nazis:

It is said that “desperate times call for desperate measures,” and no one was more desperate than the members of the Third Reich in 1945 during the final months of World War II. Even Adolf Hitler knew the Allies were advancing on Berlin. The thought both terrified and enraged him. Hitler had always been a big believer in the occult, numerology, the zodiac, and more. But by the final months of the war, his belief morphed into a kind of obsession. His preoccupation with these matters was well known to his men. They catered to it by delving into subjects like the existence of the Holy Grail, witchcraft, and werewolves.

Hitler was fascinated by werewolves, but he believed in them the same way Germanic folklorists did, namely that werewolves were merely “flawed, but well-meaning characters who may be bestial, but are tied to the woods, the blood, the soil,” says Eric Kurlander, author of Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich. According to Kurland, Hitler used werewolves and wolves[4] as symbols of German strength and purity against those seeking to destroy them. Hitler co-opted the image of the creatures often. In one instance, he named a plan to destroy his enemy’s supply chain “Operation Werewolf.” He also created a group of paramilitary soldiers – werewolves – to confuse and frighten the advancing Allies and the Soviets, against whom he was losing badly on the Eastern Front.

[from source: “9 March 1945: Goebbels awards a 16-year-old Hitler Youth, Willi Hübner, the Iron Cross for the defense of Lauban. Photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-J31305 / CC-BY-SA 3.0”]

By late 1944, even Hitler and his top men, including Joseph Goebbels, knew the war would soon be over. They realized that they couldn’t pull victory from the jaws of defeat. Instead, they chose to delay the inevitable in the hope that they could devise a more favorable scenario for Germany. Historian Perry Biddiscombe explains in his book, Werewolf! The History of the National Socialist Guerrilla Movement, 1944-1946 that Goebbels came up with the idea to exploit the werewolf legend. In early 1945, Biddiscombe notes, broadcasts began nationwide urging citizens to join the “werewolf movement.” He describes one broadcast in which a woman, posing as a werewolf, says, “Lily the werewolf is my name. I bite, I eat, I am not tame. My werewolf teeth bite the enemy” (source: Ian Harvey’s “Nazi Werewolves? The Secret Nazi Guerrilla Organization,” 2018).

Such a dishonest, uneven, canonical weaponizing of myth—of treating specific, heteronormative/queernormative elements as transcendental signifieds—is not a new trick, and not one exclusive to the Axis Powers abusing child soldiers to refill their depleted slave ranks with fresh Hitler Youth; all empires do this, including America and its allies, but also British, American, and yes, German authors under their umbrellas (re: men like Marlowe, Tolkien and Lovecraft, but also Hitler inspiring companies like Bungie).

Why? Because it’s easy to manipulate, hence profitable! War—specifically war against a monstrous invented enemy (of nature)—historically sells through the abjection process touting the lie of Western supremacy (the ghost of the counterfeit): posture “strength” in opposition to the foe “of nature,” then siphon it out of state workers playing at Ragnarok (the state always takes, but lies to make you feel strong as it drains you). Keeping with the Nazi trick of DARVO and obscurantism, a given warmonger (not just the Nazis) frame themselves as the guerrillas, fighting on the backfoot while trying to convince people of their righteous cause through more and more false flags.

Hitler borrowed such things from America to radicalize American-style settler colonialism abroad (re: cowboys and Indians, with the frontiersmen playing as white Indians to serve the state, but also token Indians selling out their own peoples), as much as Bungie borrowed from the Nazis to enact Pax Americana, in-text; i.e., a Jewish-Nazi revival, whose medieval fantasy world looks suspiciously similar to Western Europe sold back to fearful Americans unused to war on the home front. Propaganda is propaganda, serving profit as usual.

To it, Myth II tells itself through records of old events, lionizing empire Tolkien-style by inventing a Jewish-coded megalomaniac to stereotypically justify its own endless war’s runaway tensions—i.e., occurring on and off the page abandoning workers to such remorseless predation. Keeping this in mind, it might seem easy to write Soulblighter off, treating him as Bungie does: a bad Nazi cartoon with Jewish, Orientalist and queer elements; i.e., “This is what happens when the blindly faithful lose their leader! They need a good parent to keep them in line!” To camp Soulblighter to a proletarian degree, we can’t ascribe the game’s theatrical motivations to him; i.e., the apprentice outperforming the master to be even more evil/unstable than Balor was (the Jewish cop “out-Nazi-ing” the Nazi, itself part of the same bourgeois witch hunt probing the witch’s guilt).

So while “death before dishonor” is entirely possible—with Soulblighter basically being one of “Hitler’s” faux-Caesar generals (ghosts of ghosts) playing out of the Nazi rulebook stolen from American volumes and passed off as “genuine” by Bungie (a canonical variant of Walpole’s Otranto)—the fact remains that it’s far from the only explanation. To it, the speculative variety unto Soulblighter’s internal conflict/old-fashioned moral dilemmas makes for a very different (and more interesting) plight than Balor’s jilted, one-off Caesar schtick; re: “I didn’t man the walls hard enough, thus became the zombie impostor!” By comparison, Soulblighter seems quite aware he’s undead. There’s an outrageous, Melmothian quality to him that demands he be camped (as Nazi ghosts generally do, onstage)!

Expect the usual dualities. On one hand, Damas is a one-note psychopath with zero nuance, which is exactly what pro-capitalist propaganda needs the Wandering Jew to be. On the other, his outsider’s motivations frankly make a lot more sense (removed from capitalist dogma) if there’s a human element. Given the operatic framework already in place, a jilted widower pining for his lost friend feels oddly accurate for Soulblighter (a bit “bros before hos,” but gay in the way that Tolkien is unto Frodo and Sam: Balor is Frodo and Soulblighter his Samwise Gamgee, reversing the monomyth and its ringbearer’s quest). It might not justify Soulblighter’s disastrous actions entirely. But it would explain them in ways that partially humanize him, which we can camp to whatever degree we want (Soulblighter musical, go)!

(source: Myth Journals)

Furthermore, being non-white and queer would automatically marginalize Damas, hounding him witch-hunter-style into a radical direction that normally would lean either to the Left or the Right, but here Bungie conflates “Jew” with “Nazi” to provide the Promethean (self-destructive) element it needs to continue the Cycle of Kings all over again: “Thou called’est me a dog before thou had a cause / But since I am a dog, beware my fangs[5]!” The state routinely hogs and weaponizes paradox through such Orientalist caricature as doubled, cloned, spit out like bullets to coax police-style escalation (reactive abuse) anywhere and everywhere.

Given the West’s complicity with fascism to purge Communism from existence[6], the best Bungie can do, in Myth II, is treat the volcano scene as Red Scare; i.e., through a fascist, ticking-timebomb purge, one speaking to reactive abuse and reactionary sentiment sandwiched together—this time with a real volcano instead of a giant hole in the ground.

Towards the end of the game, Soulblighter invokes the fire of the gods, Bungie meaning to gaslight, gatekeep girl boss Soulblighter until he first tries to take the world with him by summoning the volcano (waking it up); then plunges pathetically through futile, Promethean revenge into the lava like Icarus, but also Gollum (another anti-Semitic character—one whose name sounds like “Golem,” but also who Tolkien has Gandalf accuse of drinking blood and eating babies). Even so, the furious sentiment remains a valid one, insofar as someone queer and damaged might—having been abused enough by a toxic lover or authority figure—simply opt to end the cycle for good; i.e., extinguish the entire bloodline; re: Frankenstein. The villain in that story isn’t the Creature, it’s the man of reason, and the man of reason in Myth is Alric, not Soulblighter.

If you’ll recall, part of the overarching problem isn’t just Nazi pastiche, but the intellectual dominion of old nerdy white men; i.e., contributed to by earlier thinkers like Marx as much as by Bungie and other proponents of capital. Reassembled through our own labor, then, we can reshape the wider Gothic imagination—thus canon and the world—in pointedly sex-positive ways that holistically and inclusively guide future generations out of the Capitalist-Realist nightmare, all while camping Marx’ ghost, too (the original man being anti-Semitic and homophobic, thus exclusionary and prone to scapegoating others to some extent)! Gothic Communism does so by camping stories like Myth II through subversive interpretation, one that builds on imperfect theories while challenging canon at large. In doing so, iconoclasm becomes an intersectional, solidarized mode; i.e., a rebellious act of seeing systemic trauma through counterculture art, including dreamlike implements of ritualized violence that hurt, but do not harm.

That’s what Soulblighter does. He’s literally a wandering ghost, but also a walking wound, and a very angry and outrageous one that lends itself well to camp. This must heal, which requires humanizing the wound through camp. Only then will the true abusers of the world—Capitalism and its inherently unstable, Cartesian-coded Torment Nexus—vanish. Disappearing with it, the giant, Frankensteinian “Caesars” would cease returning from Hell to rape and cannibalize empire, kayfabe-style; i.e., as a matter of “sodomy”—with an unquenchable thirst for human blood and hauntologically big muscles pumped with said blood (whose builds couldn’t have existed “back then,” but did express in statuesque “antiquities” that ballooned under a heteronormative profit motive closer to the present; e.g., Eugene Sandow unto He-Man and Bungie’s good-vs-evil meat wizards and warlocks).

All evoke the same old sagas’ profitable recursions of death; re: their disposable heroes’ Abraham-style altars of sacrifice (“Bred to kill, not to care, the slaughter never ends!”), bearing fearsome tokenized queer elements that challenge Heaven as a matter of ghostly revenge from empire’s past victims married to such stereotypes (a bit like Lucifer in Paradise Lost, but less campy than Milton, or even Tolkien’s Morgoth/Sauron[7]). “Suffering to the conquered” becomes a worst-fear Jewish revenge married to an Asiatic one, each playing the bugbear’s part as a matter of canon-made-chimeric, but also ghostly and impossible: multiple ideas of revenge lurking inside the same spectral cartoon that—like a Radcliffean castle during the liminal hauntology of war—evokes the idea of the grim harvest to scare workers with! Summon ghost of the Axis Powers (and the West’s ideas of their stereotypes and revenge) during Red Scare; witness them; drum up moral panic during Capitalist Realism. Repeat!

(exhibit 41c1: Artist, bottom-left: John Bolton; bottom-right: source. Soulblighter, the chief antagonist to Myth II. Whereas Balor resembles Caesar fallen from grace, Soulblighter more closely embodies Jewish revenge for Hilter [“Caesar”]: “If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”

It’s the usual horseshoe-style Red Scare, conflating Communism with fascism while married to Yellow Peril and Islamophobia; i.e., the Orientalist element of a barbaric non-white savage intent on destroying the West out of revenge for a fellow half-alien, the Nazis [a visual motif echoed during the “Yellow Peril” propaganda in various American wars, but also during the fighting, itself; e.g., on the Pacific islands during WW2’s infamously brutal Pacific Theatre]. So whether it’s the Moors or Arabs, Mongols, Shogunate, Turks, Zulus, or some other barbarian, the same basic process employs DARVO to obscure and hybridize abjection-as-usual, committed by modernity projecting its own barbarism onto other cultures; i.e., Soulblighter renowned for his unusual cruelty among the Fallen, minus the tell-tale, Nazi-grade sadist outfits. Instead, it’s closer to the Rape of Nanking committed by the Japanese side of the Axis powers: 

By all accounts, Soulblighter butchered the entire population of Strand looking for The Summoner. How he knew where to look for him, or even how, is unclear. It is obvious that Soulblighter did not have access to the Total Codex. If he did, it would have led him right to the man. Instead, he tortured and killed nearly every living soul within three weeks travel of that ill-fated city before finding him [source: Mythipedia].

Part Nazi, part Shogunate, part “evil Jew,” Bungie constantly frames Soulblighter as a brute-force, East-meets-West destroyer of the West and more wicked than “builders of empire” like Alric standing in for American forces; e.g., “sixty years is nothing to the likes of a Fallen Lord, and while King Alric was restoring the Province to its former glory, Soulblighter was plotting its infinite ruin” [source: Mythipedia] or “Soulblighter, like Balor before him, seeks not to conquer but to destroy; to be master of the unthinking dead [extended beings] and their blasted lands” [source: Mythipedia]. In other words, Alric tames nature, making it “good”; Soulblighter is a force of nature to put down because it is like a mad dog that cannot be tamed. Corrupted by canonical essentialism to be viewed as “fallen,” Soulblighter is like an orc, witch, zombie, or some other monstrous-feminine; i.e., as inferior nature biding its time against superior Cartesian forces: the horrors of war from a Western perspective, equating their cartoonish enemies/victims’ queer love to “total destruction.”

[source, left: Reddit; right: Mythipedia]

Balor and Soulblighter are both fascists, but they’re not identical in that respect. Combined with a “non-Western,” Yellow-Menace brutality—one that makes a DARVO argument for the West as innocent—Soulblighter’s appearance is conspicuously muscular and Asian, but also skeletal; re: he mutilated his own body in anticipation to his zombie-esque “turning” as part of a larger dogmatic cycle. Forget “total eclipse of the heart,” Soulblighter literally has no heart; he cut it out of himself.

“And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn asks. Seemingly in response, Bungie makes Soulblighter—a resident friend-of-Caesar [similar to “a friend of Dorothy”] who becomes the tinman[8] in the flesh; i.e., achieving eternal life to seek short-sighted revenge while carrying a torch for Connacht.

Solzhenitsyn continues, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being”; i.e., by making someone so unduly heartless as Soulblighter—a being so enraged by the death of Balor that he cuts his own nose off [to spite his face]—Bungie “solves” the problem of appealing to humane peoples by forgetting Solzhenitsyn’s words on purpose. To it, Soulblighter is the tokenized undead witch; i.e., a mad dog seemingly beyond redemption, thus someone for which it is easy to ask others to “mercifully” destroy [and overlook the sins of empire in the process].

Both sadistic and masochistic, Soulblighter’s “zombie Orientalism” and its violence are always illegitimate, but especially when he tries to “end the cycle” by erupting a giant volcano, trying to destroy the world: “We have Soulblighter’s army caught between the Cloudspine, the Ire River, and Tharsis—the legendary forge of the Trow” [source: Myth Journals]. There’s also an element of secret-identity futile revenge to it, Soulblighter actually being Damas, former captain of the game’s “Heron guard” [basically a healer samurai unit]—literally the old guard of a formerly great far-east empire who seek redemption after the fall of their city centuries prior [itself a form of fascist Orientalism: the restoration of the “noble samurai” similar to the noble savage or noble Jew].

Every Fallen Lord has such an identity—generally some kind of nemesis to go with their current evil side out from older times. Apart from such double selves, such zombie warlords are presaged by ill omens in general. One is the comet from Myth announcing Balor’s return. However, there is also the wake of various stigma animals that canon commonly uses to devalue themselves and the non-Western cultures associated with them [re: Shylock being compared to different canine beasts by his Christian overlords].

To that, Soulblighter also has the ability to transform into a so-called “murder” of crows—a magical, shapeshifting act that unfairly associates those animals [exhibit 41c2] with his cartoonishly evil, tokenized crimes [and which anti-Semitism associates with the death of Christians relaid in Jewish vaudeville; re: Marlowe]. Indeed, corvids in general are intensely clever animals, but aren’t anymore cruel than other birds; i.e., certainly not the shrike, which impales its prey[9] on thorn bushes, or the toucan, which is surprisingly brutal despite its colorful, friendly appearance and latter-day transformation into a children’s breakfast cereal mascot: “Always follow your nose!” Like Gandalf to the hobbits, in Moria, I’d say the same regarding Soulblighter’s, but he cut his off already!)

Like Tolkien’s Sauron challenging the West’s sense of divine entitlement, Bungie marries Axis-flavored bugbears like Soulblighter (the game’s Sauron analogue) to a strange, now-alien relationship to nature; i.e., animals and magic that have become forgotten, abject, and cartoonish through the usual canonical arbitrations: Nazgul in small (“death from the skies”)!

To it, Soulblighter is literally composed of crows: “The Deceiver [the game’s gay wildcard; i.e., shaking up the action while shouting “Wildcard, bitches!” and putting on a cowboy hat, like Slim Pickens’ from Doctor Strangelove] boasted of his victory over Soulblighter, clutching a mangled crow and claiming to have captured ‘a part of the murder,’ crippling his former ally” (source). Soulblighter is Big Bird from Hell, a walking “murder” that essentializes nature as evil through medieval superstitions and prejudice (conspiracies) concerning corvids and Jewish people revived in neoliberal fearmongering: the usual cataclysms that Capitalism both threatens/materializes and brings about through its divisions and divided labor force (us-versus-them) forever delaying progress (a lie unto itself, “progress” being a cryptonym for “profit” pushing like Sisyphus towards an unreachable goal; e.g., Mount Olympus denied to normal humans; i.e., the fire of the gods).

(exhibit 41c2: Fable the raven and her pet human. As a stigma animal, ravens and crows are treated as harbingers of death. In part, this probably owes to their trademark black appearance, as magpies—despite being corvids—don’t get the same wholly bad rap; i.e., because their plumage is only partially black [“One for sorrow, Two for joy…” 1780]. However, Christian bigots [and by extension capitalists weaponizing Christian dogma] likewise associate stigma animals such as corvids with manmade sites [and personas] of death and decay.

Furthermore, while decomposers like insect larvae, dung beetles and fungus obviously fall into this group, the tell-tale “murder” of crows and “unkindness” of ravens associate with death through canonical collective nouns; i.e., as something they visibly feed off of as notorious scavenger animals; e.g., cities, but also the battlefield and its endless glut of corpses bringing groups of undesirables to the fore. It’s DARVO blaming animals while conflating Jews [and other out-groups] with their collective punishment in service to profit.

[source: Ben Jonson’s “Tower Ravens[10]“]

By extension, these birds have become canonically associated with tombs and prisons; i.e., as a Neo-Gothic matter of attracting paying customers, generally middle-class foreigners, drunk on the cartoonish idea of a British “medieval” [continuously romanced by writers like Christopher Marlowe and Edgar Allen Poe, but also featured at regal-themed animal rescues; e.g., those pet ravens kept at the fearsome Tower of London, above]. Like the black dog or cat, canon frames the corvid’s presence as an ill omen belonging to a “creature of the night[11]” that emblematizes death through buildings known for heavy atmosphere; i.e., one associated with witches and black magic as something to fear and attack by goodly God-fearing Christians “guarding the church” from barbarians at the gate. Indeed, the idea of corvids serving as dark familiars makes sense, as they are both tremendously misunderstood and extremely intelligent, adorable creatures. The same humane potential goes for their human associates, though the latter can tokenize.

To that, if we can humanize actual corvids and realize their victimization by Western dogma and Christianized persecution through Capitalism unto alien forces, why not Soulblighter?)

The reason for this delay in development is that canon is carceral, its hauntologies deliberately trapping worker minds inside disastrous, illusory and heteronormative lines of thought. Doing so alienates them from themselves and nature-as-monstrous-feminine (with ravens and crows being seen as witches’ familiars heralding dark godly forces[12], similar to black cats); i.e., stereotypical conflations that lead workers (from white cis-het men trickling down a tokenized grapevine) to be violent towards ravens and crows, but also Jews, Communists and queer people, etc. Like an ill omen, we become an Infernal Network to the middle class, a Jewish Conspiracy that—more than Soulblighter and the Summoner ever could—raises pro-state Legions to kill us time and time again (stochastic terrorism).

To it, power is a relationship to consumption through capital. All forms thereof constitute a Great Chain of Being’s nadir being wholly endemic to the same abject, bigoted equation. Whatever abjection’s current form, it’s the routine chase of unequal predatory power amid endless conflict under Capitalism; i.e., with older, mightier forms of the same undead belonging to the same rotting power structures the middle class gladly leverage against state victims during police violence. All constitute a bourgeois matter of calculated risk, one where zombie generals and sacrificial soldiers compete with present-day doubles, themselves budding debutantes directing power anisotropically towards the state and its rulers: Capitalism is the zombie, and a giant one at that (more on this during the conclusion)!

Bungie doesn’t camp any of this in Myth I or Myth II, but we can—doing so simply by acknowledging what the authors are canonically up to: demonizing nature (and the monstrous-feminine through labor) through all the usual tokenizing fetishes and clichés, backstabbing Jews included. Like Garfield the Cat, nature simply becomes something for the middle class to fear and feel suspicious about, thus police the ghost of the counterfeit with through confirmation bias; i.e., one that abjects capital’s appetites off onto small defenseless animals and vulnerable human parties turned into giant, ravenous undead, and more to the point, profitable caricatures of themselves (with Lumpy Touch taking an already lucrative commodity and making it Gothic for those very reasons) that the self-centered middle class can sweat bullets about, Lovecraft-style. It’s all very “woe is me,” the privileged group abjecting nature and extended beings to ease their own tormented status:

(artist: Lumpy Touch)

In turn, this is a multimedia ordeal, translating to novels, comics/cartoons, movies and videogames conversing back and forth. Men become afraid of animals just wanting to eat, persecuting them and those associated with them (what Maynard James Keenan calls “the cry of the carrots[13]“) through a village scapegoat mentality trapped inside Capitalist Realism; i.e., as something that is easier to do instead of face the thoroughly unattractive and unappetizing reality that Capitalism and profit-as-ravenous are to blame for such shortages and superstitions (re: the bourgeoise trifectas and monopolies). Like eugenics and Nazi dogma (which are simply Capitalism and Cartesian thought decaying into radicalized versions of themselves), such things transfuse and pass along like bad wisdom/religion through the middle class on settler colony lands. “It takes a village,” indeed!

Now that we’ve gone over Soulblighter and their abject role to nature, as well as the giant cruelty of normal-sized men, let’s rehash some broader points about the Cycle of Kings and actual giants, then conclude our Fallen Lords close-read by surveying the female monstrous-feminine.

As a tyrant, the canonical zombie warlord is only part of a larger harvesting practice: presenting the future as hopelessly dead, even when trapped in medievalized iterations like Myth: the Fallen Lords and Soulblighter. Unlike the retro-future cyberpunk, the modern-day zombie apocalypse, or the closed space of a Gothic castle, the future of what could be is flung ass-backwards into a new dark age on open ground; i.e., one where the kingdom of the Light is threatened by the forces of the Dark (what Gary Moore, in romantic terms, might call a return to “the Wild Frontier” [1989] the same way that heteronormative young men might excitedly dream about ninjas, pirates, Vikings, and knights, etc); e.g., Braveheart’s own ahistorical celebration of such battles coming out of Lord of the Rings and other settler-colonial propaganda: dressed up as “rebellion” and “home defense” against foreign invaders tied to internal plots of alien, vengeful usurpers (the elite scapegoating labor by tokenizing legitimate feelings of anger against the state, turning those feelings against workers to police themselves with). Whatever the form, all belong to the same dated territory as part of a future image that could easily come to pass and in some ways already has.

Overall, the fantasy genre does more than displace state violence; it dissociates it entirely by framing the fantasy world as “eternal,” divorced from time as a cycle altogether. One need only examine the fascist hauntology of America and Western Europe to know this isn’t true. Like Metroidvania, Bungie’s medieval boneyard is a black mirror of what could happen to our own world, but lies to audiences by portraying the player as the slayer of the Dark through state-sanctioned executioners: the fearsome Legion guided by a loose coalition of powerful manly wizards called the Nine. The Fallen, by comparisons, are heralded by a version of history that doesn’t make sense to its current benefactors, yet whose alternate visions—from an undead Pantheon of great military leaders working against them—belies the base function of Capitalism working as it always does: out-of-control, in crisis and decay as fueling the chaos of competing warlords rising from the grave.

To grapple with the zombie tyrant, a centrist author like Bungie must seek to quell their own inherited guilt/anxiety through police violence; i.e., the token cop Soulblighter policing his own as repressed like he was even when times “were good.” Fear and wonder become powerful levers to motivate the middle class to take part, becoming the very thing they revel in the wake of; i.e., the Second Coming of what they themselves hope to be: conquerors. In turn, the man of reason, crime lord and warrior king each account for some of the male-dominant positions under Capitalism, traumatizing the land through the creation of various undead dilemmas: hauntology as tied to Capitalist Realism, where Capitalism becomes a multicultural, cross-generational tomb for the living to inhabit from cradle to grave.

To it, Myth offers up the usual undead power fantasies, their futile revenge against nature wedded to symbols of cartoon danger you must recognize and attack. Simply put, it’s a trap—the effect of canonical hauntology carceral precisely because it traps consumers inside recuperated, locational markers of Capitalism’s generational abuse; i.e., echoing fascist images of the future as things to defeat through yet-another last-ditch defense of the state from the usual suspects in the past. Its dated, once-upon-a-time remediation, through blank parody and pastiche, yields canonical likenesses continuously devised in cryptonymic fashion; i.e., transformed into profitable, stupefying hypercanon, and whose neoliberal hauntology capitalizes on the “cracked mirrors” of dystopian retro-futures by treating everything as a splintered, repressed cultural mindset; e.g., Soulblighter and his “Nazi” mad scientist antics with a tokenized flavor to them, or Balor before him and a more gradual, less tokenized form of the Cycle of Kings (tokenization being an act of desperation): a sudden Promethean cataclysm, “the lesson in humility” comparable to a nuclear bomb (fire from the neoliberal gods’ “volcano”) to spook labor silent, reminding them who’s the boss.

(source)

Divorced from actual rebellion, the run-down parallel worlds Bungie contributes towards abuse myth for profit’s sake; i.e., Crusader and white-Indian heroism (which the game’s Light units reflect, left) wedded, per Umberto Eco, to the cult of death. In doing so, they have become increasingly mass-manufactured—carceral fakeries that, from the neoliberal point of view, are only meant for apathetic consumers to play around inside while posturing as sexy rebels playing war as usual; i.e., the canceled future and infernal concentric pattern, wherein lies the sanctioned killing of gangsters, bandits, authoritarian cops, rogue AI, mutants, Fallen Lords, and other placeholders that function identically to the out-and-out fascist zombie in postapocalypse scenarios. It’s fear and wonder serving profit, continuing zombie war inside and outside of fiction, galvanized by the process of abjection and ghost of the counterfeit—a red false flag to wave in front of the bull to get him to charge, then reap the whirlwind by destroying nature (versus being stewards to it) through all the usual dogwhistles.

In other words, canonical or not, the story of the zombie is always a black mirror—one whose Melmoth the Wanderer dangerously threatens undead apocalypse as a gigantic, looming threat waiting to feed on workers and nature through state mechanisms. Under these hostile conditions, canonical and iconoclastic variants exist in praxial opposition. However, the latter distinguishes itself by either camping earlier creations (as we have done here, largely by close-reading them), or offering new ones that pointedly uncover bourgeois hauntologies; i.e., they are not incentivized by profit and the inherent, built-in instabilities that state fabrications yield.

In either case, one must work through the catalog. With Bungie, they compile their own material, in-game and in paratexts; in turn, these—like all such built worlds—are cataloged again by their fans (who put such things online for easy access; re: Mythipedia, where I can pull such information up to interpret it in campy ways, which a queer reading essentially is). The fact remains, canon comports those in power as yielding up terrifying visions regarding state abuse (as something to uncover); i.e., the material reality continuously downplayed in favor of the canonical, decayed future and its stupid, easy fun: blow shit up, kick zombie ass—all during the apocalypse as “made for (white cis-het) men.”

As with Tolkien, Bungie and so many others, the complicit cryptonyms of the elite popularize in centrist war narratives (and other hauntological forms like the cyberpunk as a kind of “slumming yarn,” exhibit 41e); i.e., portraying yesterday’s heroes as gigantic and male, fed on yesterday’s corpses; re, the Capitalocene felt through Walpole’s giant armor, which in this case accounts for the stony golem’s flesh of the Trow and those unscrupulous sorcerers who summon them in whatever giant forms/combinations are useful to the state romancing the middle class while stupefying them, too:

(exhibit 41d: Keeping with the centrist, wrestler’s narrative, Bungie’s imaginary past is classically tied to the male body as statuesque, athletic and muscular [a trend we shall see whenever we revisit the game’s Pantheon]. For example, the franchise’s race of giants, the Trow, are tried-and-true mercenaries of the medieval sort; they originally serve the Dark, only to switch sides against Soulblighter[14] in the Second Great War [more Tolkien-style moral geography he passes off as “myth”]. While Soulblighter performs the game’s Melmoth-style vice character [one cutscene (above) granting him an almost baboon-like appearance], the Trow hybridize mythology for a Numinous effect; i.e., suffusing the myth of the Celtic giants with a Lovecraftian backstory releasing similar echoes of “Rome fallen”: the ancient city’s magical and alien statuesque parallel to At the Mountains of Madness [the patrolling Trow in the top-right image, above, storming towards the campfire to, if not eat the soldiers (as giants so often do to male heroes), then like Lovecraft’s scientist aliens, rip the trespassers limb from limb].

To it, the Trow combine the Ancient Romans with Lovecraft’s science-happy Old Ones, resulting in a slave-owning race with golem-like properties [echoes of Victor warning Walton about the Creature; i.e., a former slave being able to reproduce and harness science for a new posthuman race superior to mankind, bearing a grudge to boot]. A byproduct of mad science/Cartesian overreach, their “once-great” civilization has been reduced—as is tradition, per the Promethean Quest—by a massive slave revolt that left them proudly stranded in the snowy wastes of their former nation. To it, echoes of empire and scientific abuse extend beyond just that. Not only do the Trow speak what appears to be Latin—calling the Deceiver a being of “furor poeticus” [source: Mythipedia]—but they play Romanesque death sports, and announce themselves with great booming footsteps; i.e., not unlike the T-Rex from 1994’s Jurassic Park [except the cloned dinosaurs in that movie were all female].)

This brings us to giants. For now, I just want to consider the giant’s aesthetic in relation to the state and stories like Myth sold to workers; the conclusion will consider Capitalism itself as a giant zombie.

That being said, I don’t suppose I really need to explain what giants are—it’s in the name, after all. However, there is some additional context to impart: Myth‘s giants are all mercenaries—so-called “special units” who appear late in the game (suggesting the world-sized nature of the conflict as time goes on). These special units include the Trow as we just examined, but also the forest giants (from the first game, left) and giant Myrkridia (towards the end of the second game). Soulblighter concerns all three, the sort of person who invokes a war of giants as much as men.

(source: Mythipedia)

To it, the forest giants work for the Legion, mainly while defending their home, a giant forested area called Forest Heart, from Soulblighter (then under Balor’s employment); the giant Myrkridia work for Soulblighter after being summoned from elsewhere (another dimension, it would seem); and the Trow turn coat against Soulblighter thanks to the Deceiver’s interference. In short, giants are big and tough, but also somewhat indifferent to the politics of men and their enemies; i.e., they generally have a larger connection to the world itself, and only emerge when properly enticed (mercenaries are paid, and giants require substantial payment). Beyond that, they generally have a Numinous, elemental flavor that anthropomorphizes, speaking to the ways that nature is weaponized and made to fight for humankind in monomyth stories.

This enlarged anthropomorphism/token animism isn’t exclusive to Bungie; i.e., with Tolkien—doubtless inspired by Wagner and ancient myth—having featured the indifferent stone giants in The Hobbit, while also making nature into a goodly police force; e.g., the Great Eagles from the same book, but also with his Ents[15] from The Two Towers obediently breaking Saruman’s war machines before Aragorn and his friends arrive. Instead, Bungie more or less recycles the idea, their own not-so-friendly tree men kicking the everlasting shit out of the forces of darkness.

As for the giant Myrkridia, they’re basically “family-sized” versions of their “fun-sized” cousins. For all giants in such stories, though, they showcase the scope and scale of a conflict blown up to epic proportions; i.e., the epic poems of different ancient cultures often calling themselves home to literal giants of different kinds, but also ancient war machines[16] rising to giant heights; e.g., siege towers. Giants, by extension, embody war machines with a humanoid flavor as connected to nature being normally exploited by state forces.

Similar to dragons, witches or zombies (orcs, goblins and werewolves, etc), giants play a vital role in Capitalist Realism during the monomyth; i.e., as hyperbolic calls to police violence, letting the state feed as a giant might by gobbling everything up around it. Except, the bigger the state is, the more it can eat; the more it can eat, the more it will eat through bigger and bigger arguments of self-preservation against invented enemies—i.e., those the state brutalizes for profit, which bears out its own ladder of preferential mistreatment.

You’d think that Nazis would be low on the list. Except, Nazis generally receive special treatment because they commonly serve state interests; instead, Communists and past victims of enslavement and exploitation cap off the state’s hit list. In turn, the usual austerity politics’ boom-or-bust instability punishes those outside the bourgeoisie, weakening the structure as it tries to glut itself. The more in crisis the state grows/decays towards, more it must prey on workers and nature just to survive. It needs giant-sized arguments, hence giant-sized targets, but also giant-sized idiots to push victims into the state’s giant mouth.

It’s true, then, that fascists make popular scapegoats, provided they’re rabid. But if an out-of-control fascist is nowhere to attack, the state has loyal ones attack state enemies, instead. This escalation of violence happens in the usual police territories suddenly filled with “dangerous game”; i.e., passed off as criminal, but also likened to Bungie’s giant Fallen Lords and aforementioned special units; e.g., trans people, or Communists who use the same aesthetics of power and death as fascists do (not to be confused with flags or insignias, which generally are much harder to assimilate).

Keeping with this section’s central thesis, then, Capitalism will abject its giant abuses onto its victims—often with a queernormative, hyperbolic flavor merged with other forms of tokenization; i.e., teaching a privileged side (us) to blame, dehumanize and attack a monstrous side (them) while abusing DARVO and obscurantism in ubiquitous heroic language: the heroes acting increasingly like giant, entitled assholes against a perceived overblown menace they’re celebrated for committing massive acts of cruelty against; i.e., police brutality dressed up as “bravery”; e.g., Beowulf vs Grendel.

Furthermore, this sea change forces the alien side to adapt and reclaim such implements to survive their bullies. In doing so, many out-group members compromise. Frequently abandoning healthier forms of rape play (which are discouraged already by colonizing forces), the abused often become cops themselves; i.e., when they betray others out of convenience and desperation, puffing themselves up and acting tough. For a time, this renders them immune, seemingly beyond persecution provided their eat their own. But the middle class is always there, looking for new token Judases to fill the role of giant slayer (such sell-outs never last—are always the most expendable).

The whole abysmal process spawned from the canonical monomyth out of Antiquity (a time of giants and gods) into LotR, Star Wars, Harry Potter and Myth: the Fallen Lords (which, among countless other stories bearing the same settler-colonial markers, all contain disproportionately sexist, queerphobic, Orientalist and/or anti-Semitic monsters to prop up the usually smaller but still larger-than-life hero “chosen for greatness”).

Penned by opportunistic, white and politically moderate authors, such massive “threats” codify and catalyze Man Box and “prison sex” mentalities in poetic forms—their commercialized, menticidal dogma and refrains (maps or otherwise) turning the middle class (the usual cops) against domestic lower classes, but also entire foreign populations (the usual suspects) through frontier Capitalism finding the titanic scapegoats it needs to harvest nature-as-monstrous-feminine; re (from Volume Zero): “Hell is always a place that appears on Earth.” Said Hell is populated with “giant” enemies who, killed by posturing knights, suffer the embarrassment of witch-hunter violence against someone who is hardly so massive, powerful or dangerous being bullied by someone who is: the state loves DARVO (again, we’ll sporadically touch on the state as a giant cannibal, here, before focusing on said cannibalism during the conclusion).

By comparison, the Promethean Quest generally subverts the monomyth, but canonically still flows power towards the state when killing the hero (normally felled by a giant implication, if not an actual monster). To that, Bungie demonstrates how this can be done, populating “Hell come home” with fascist, queer-coded, tokenized stereotypes punching down against labor (as a giant might) and nature when the dead walk the Earth (another example being the Zodiac Braves from Final Fantasy Tactics, a game that sends the hero to die in Hell, fighting multiple giants-in-disguise leading to an imaginary Angel of Death without promise of reward, glory or recognition); i.e., peppering Hell/the Numinous with Red Scare elements among the horseshoe fascist overtones.

Be they larger-than-life men with Herculean strength, literal giant humanoids, or hyperobjects (capital, fascism/Communism and Mother Nature), the point isn’t the sacrifice by itself or our aforementioned gigantic forces. All generally connect through the same kayfabe’s distributions of power and status, wherein a given Amazonomachy serves and sends power as a matter of ongoing praxis. Liberation and enslavement, trauma and catharsis, mere men and giants—all exist in the same shadow zone’s contested aesthetics (often with an athletic component).

To it, expect the usual dialectical-material dualities when dealing with zombies, but especially giant zombies, generals and draconian vampires, etc. For one, the Gothic novel began as historical fiction; i.e., that reinvented history through myth surrounding such labels; re: Walpole’s giant suit of armor (an allusion to the French and Indian War, 1754-1763, concluding a year before Otranto was written). During oppositional praxis, then, said myths were plundered from a variety of sources working at cross purposes between authors; e.g., the post-Roman, pro-Christian elements to giants dating back to Beowulf (in written English), extending to an operatic cycle with anti-Semitic elements as old as the medieval period into Wagner’s des Nibelungen (which Tolkien bastardized, and later Bungie). And such language as “You shall not pass!” (from Tolkien) can be heard in praxial opposition through “No pasarán!” (and similar phrases: “Ils ne passeront pas!”) utilized as gatekeeper rhetoric to keep fascists out, but also imaginary “barbarians” kept curiously at bay by fascists aping the raised fist for capital; i.e., serving capital in faux-revolutionary language.

(artist: Nadezhda Tolokonnikova)

This being said, revolution is sexy from an actual rebel’s standpoint; i.e., sex positivity (and general liberation, insofar as Capitalism sexualizes all workers), which unfold during neo-medieval forms of rape play whose ambiguous, mythic theatrics demonstrably synthesize catharsis. All the same, this isn’t what actual practicing fascists[17] do when raising their own fists; e.g., Trump doing so after nearly getting shot by a disgruntled white conservative, but also white liberal authors playing the rebel against fascist elements while—in the same breath—callously punching down against labor movements who think Europe sucks:

When the anti-Putin activist Nadezhda Tolokonnikova [above], a member of the Pussy Riot punk group, was tried for blasphemy in Moscow in 2012, she wore a T-shirt emblazoned with a defiant raised fist and the Spanish slogan “no pasarán“: they shall not pass.

The phrase is associated with the Spanish civil war, which Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has made terrifyingly relevant – especially as volunteer fighters from across the world gather to defend the country from his attack. No pasarán became a slogan for the 35,000 volunteers of the International Brigades who travelled to Spain from more than 80 countries to defend its legal government from fascist-backed aggression. About 2,300 or more set out from Britain and Ireland. Another 2,800 left the US, forming the Abraham Lincoln Battalion – the first racially mixed US military unit led by a Black officer, Oliver Law.

The brigadiers chose the right side of history. Both Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini sent troops to fight alongside the violent rightwing reactionaries led by Spain’s future dictator, General Francisco Franco. Like Putin, they wanted to demolish democracy across Europe. In Ukraine, the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, also wants a volunteer “foreign legion” to join the war. “This is the beginning of a war against Europe, against European structures, against democracy, against basic human rights, against a global order of law, rules and peaceful coexistence,” he said. “Anyone who wants to join the defence of Ukraine, Europe and the world [emphasis, me] can come” (source: Giles Tremlett’s “Anti-Fascist Slogan Takes on New Significance in Ukraine Crisis,” 2022).

Anti-fascism often conflates Communism with fascism, in Western eyes. When raising our own fists, then, we must likewise remember that American liberals/servants of pax Americana (moderates, white in function if not in appearance) will hijack our language, or otherwise write about it in ways that serve capital, including fiction and non-fiction alike. If it serves the powers that be, liberal democracy loves it; if it becomes violent towards the elite, the label becomes a vague incendiary buzzword to hurl against rioters, signaling police forces (actual or vigilante) to attack workers protesting American genocide.

Bringing things back to our aforementioned fantasy giants, however campy and/or otherworldly these invented objects appear at first blush (re: Raimi, but also Bungie), they are ultimately blind and predatory unto others if they employ Capitalist Realism to conceal Capitalism’s predatory nature. Capitalism destroys everything around itself, and generally does so through Promethean hero fantasies in love with killing giants for the bourgeoisie! The enemy isn’t just fascism’s bastardizing of giants and dragons, zombies and witches, etc, to scapegoat Capitalism’s usual victims with (re: gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss)—it’s the elite behind them using liberal democracy/Pax Americana to maintain capital by demonizing Putin (a fascist, to be clear) while cannibalizing Gaza! It’s “boundaries for me, not for thee,” with The Guardian complicit in Gaza’s genocide; i.e., treating the locals and their home like Omelas while calling for Putin’s head (and celebrating themselves for it). Except total war makes, as it always does, for good distractions concerning who the real apex predators are. Hitler and Putin are both war criminals, to be sure, but their crimes against workers and nature pale in comparison to the American elite and their allies in journalism!

(source: Mythipedia)

Sound familiar? Stories like Myth: the Fallen Lords do the same, chopping Bungie’s “czar” down to size while sacrificing an absurd number of people to do so. This includes not just mighty warriors

I am not a coward. I think that my actions over the last seventeen years prove this. Yet I was relieved to not be among those chosen to die. In four hours, just after sunrise, the twenty-two hundred survivors of the Legion will attack Balor’s fortress. Those men will surely die. There are perhaps half a million of the enemy between here and the stronghold (ibid.).

but those presumably under Alric’s “protection”; i.e., both being replaceable provided they win: “Before he left, Alric told us that Madrigal had fallen” (ibid.).

In short, the state can kill whoever it wants, lottery-style, in order to justify its own existence; i.e., capital punishment dressed up as “heroism,” except many who die in our world don’t even get the “luxury” of a hero’s funeral (re: the Gazans massacred as “terrorists,” versus the Ukrainians being seen as valiant). Exploitation is exploitation, rape is rape regardless if you call the victim “hero,” “useless eater” or terrorist,” but some definitely get it worse; Bungie’s game of vengeance and victors obscures the same kinds of predation on helpless populations that Pax Americana does in our world (“Keep your eye on the tyrant…”).

However, apart from the genocidal triage involved, such pick-and-chose diplomacy further mirrors our world, insofar as Bungie presents Caesar’s endless war/rape of the world as a giant old boys’ club, its bread-and-circus scapegoating of the past one that invariably invades the present through renewed states of exception told in all manner of gigantic forms; i.e., kayfabe, undead, queer-coded, oft-tokenized heels that must be defeated again and again by sacrificing oneself all the while: the figurative death of one’s heroes after they fall to the Dark Side, or becoming the giant they were supposed to slay!

Becoming “corrupted” through the cult of death that fascist heroism amounts to, our de facto cops (the Jedi, wizards, warriors, Achilles, etc) transform into deathly almighty versions of themselves; i.e., the death lord necromancer/death dealer black knight and skeleton king or “heel” serving as fallen versions of their nobler selves, which must be frozen through echoes of their own lost humanity before cutting off their heads (with giants classically paralyzed, often drugged or tricked[18]; i.e., being attacked in their sleep during asymmetrical warfare; e.g., Jason and the Argonauts vs the cyclops Polyphemus[19]).

Except this brings us back to the classic problem of what to do with the  head, post-decapitation. Giants have the magical ability to be reassembled after death; the giants in Myth are described as literally taken apart like Osiris, dragged through Hell and revived in new forms that fight what is effectively the Imperial Boomerang coming back around, biting empire square in the ass (the ouroboros/Cycle of Kings). After the memory of fascism’s latest fall becomes distant and finally is forgotten, it returns again (and again) as undead, whereupon desperate times call for desperate measures against giant enemies:

After the Great War, the armies of the Dark collapsed and the Fallen Lords were swallowed up by history. We believed we had entered a golden age, a new era of peace, and our armies laid down their weapons to begin the long task of rebuilding the world. For sixty years we worked our fields and tended our cattle and did all the things that we had fought to defend, until the war became something that fathers told their sons and grandfathers their grandchildren. But sixty years is nothing to the likes of a Fallen Lord. And while King Alric was restoring the Province to its former glory, Soulblighter was plotting its infinite ruin.

The King has decided to fight fire with fire [the fire of the gods, Prometheus-style]. He seeks Myrdred[20], an avatara of the Wolf Age whom Balor renamed “The Deceiver” after bending him to his will. Although The Deceiver fought alongside Balor during the last war, he held no great love for the rest of The Fallen, nearly being killed by The Watcher in a legendary battle at Seven Gates. King Alric believes The Deceiver still lives and is counting on this old rivalry to lure him into joining our efforts to destroy Soulblighter and the Myrkridia (source: Mythipedia).

Like Frankenstein, Bungie’s narrative style is epistolary, dramatic, richly mythical, and well-delivered (the voice actor for the Narrator[21] deserves special praise); but it always defines the human condition as one trapped in endless, toy-like war—with no room for non-zombie queers, women, or other marginalized groups, and too much room for larger-than-life assholes who generally kill everything in sight (the “Tolkien problem,” in other words, but penned by an American studio).

Trapped between the warring gods of capital, then, Bungie only allows for the warrior’s death; i.e., looking super cool as you kick zombie ass, then go to “Valhalla” to sit with Crom, King Ulster or Zeus, etc, as part of the same fascist, Man-Box mishmash: the bad dream of the zombie apocalypse becoming the “last” chance for a “real” warrior’s death, Frankenstein’s monster robbed of its camp, but slave to the grind as robata-style grist for the mill, anyways. The real myth is camp/mutual consent (which I had to introduce through this queer close-read, putting my childhood heroes to the sword; i.e., anticipating and intercepting their canonical, bigoted elements, then making them gay for me to be able to survive the people they unironically represent).

However emotionally compelling it comes across, the prime narrative of Bungie’s centrism (and the monomyth, at large) remains a thoroughly doomed, macho (re: Eco) conflict between two jousting teams, one being morally superior as the Greater Good; i.e., white knights who “go savage” in a cartoonishly grand but also pulpy (re: Lovecraft) and faux-Celtic way (the archers in Myth called “fir bolg,” a race of Celtic giants the first game treats as the Light’s non-giant archer wood elves, a bit like Tolkien’s Legolas[22] but obscured by using different legendary elements and language than Tolkien, a philologist, chose; e.g., with Cu Chulainn, of Irish folklore, famously “hulking out” against his enemies, often against giants or seemingly indestructible foes, which giants often appear to be; i.e., like David and Goliath): the self-important and self-centered nature of fascism’s big-headed soldiers thinking they’re big deals, but also the good guys. They don’t know, understand and/or care that they’re evil!

An assemblage of gigantic myths on either side, then, the West confronts Capitalism in decay abjected onto equally bombastic, undead clichés of all the usual minority groups: giant “undeveloped” kayfabe, but also token cops policing the usual suspects. To it, the game’s berserks are a shameless nod to Braveheart, itself a film about historical revisionism to suit American conservatism and commerce; e.g., David Gemmell’s Rigante series commercializing oppression as wielded by colonizers playing “rebel,” weak and strong as a matter of imperial apologia (with Macbeth originally defeating a rebel faction for King Duncan, before killing Duncan and usurping the throne). It’s Pavlovian—a matter of conditioning that yields what the elite want: war and rape, workers killing each other on both sides, amounting to Macbeth without Shakespeare’s irony (or Rob Roy without the sex). Such big muscles are, themselves, then cut up by the state, ingested, and spit back out.

The trick, for such canon, is fooling the sacrifice into thinking it’s the hero. Vampirically crossing swords with evil barbarians (the mouth and fang hyphenating in all the usual ways, above), said good guys always face the end of the world as perpetually threatened by abject (non-Western) forces trying to “end the cycle” (re: Red Scare); i.e., the restoration of order as not corrupted or undead by endlessly duking it out, back and forth, with fascists who are. It’s the Star Wars problem, extending the conflict indefinitely per Capitalist Realism, then cashing in on it as undead and gigantic; i.e., Zombie Capitalism, reveling in the pointless bravery and cemetery fields of open, unburied gore: war is badass, is endless, is profitable.  Except, the cycle only remains profitable so long as workers dehumanize their enemies, which conversely must humanize to move past the whole police structure and its moderate ploys determining who is cop and who is victim.

For instance, while fascists serve capital, they are ultimately humans abused by the system using the same aesthetics iconoclasts camp Nazis with; i.e., to expose the system urging people to kill one another for the elite, as Soulblighter does out of revenge, and the West doing unto him because he is simply “pure evil” to them: an alien to punish by virtue of reactive violence making him the “pure token cop” (reducing his value to zero). But such absolutes are, themselves, impossible.

Instead, bourgeois dictation and its bloody outcomes under capital haunt the out-of-doors and its warriors there as much as any Gothic fortress; i.e., something to lament yet encourage by virtue of its profitability trapping the would-be-heroes inside a giant prison of the mind, hopelessly seeking glory and riches on and offstage while guarding nations against imaginary barbarians. Trapped in the belly of the beast, the process dehumanizes both sides—of real populations expressed in imaginary ones the elite turn against each other for profit: “Police yourselves! Tokenize! Betray each other! Lash out! Hulk out! Don’t camp it, don’t think about it! Just be violent in ways we can alienate, punish and fetishize, then scapegoat and capitalize on to consolidate our power!”

To it, Soulblighter and the volcano—but likewise any gigantic aspect to Bungie’s world—become a colossal deflection and projection, the real parties guilty of setting the world on fire not being something as exotic and fascinating as a Jewish Nazi or magical giant, but the elite’s banality of evil: doing it all for profit as described. For the elite, becoming rich isn’t something to strike suddenly like a vein of gold, but by exploiting other workers through a system designed to prey on people, animals and the land (wealth accumulation and generation through profit). Even if they’re simply born into the system on top of the pile of gold, acquiring the status and position of capital in the bargain, such material conditions are tremendously alienating because of the class gulf, alone.

The fact remains, ACAB and billionaires own cops, thus giant projections of cops. Billionaires, then, are predatory by design in ways that rival the most brutal warlord; i.e., using capital as installed through settler-colonial violence to continue said violence; e.g., through direct sponsorship of police action, like Thatcher did in Ireland, or by installing fresh Capitalist-Realist dogma in half-real ways—stuff like Myth, in other words, that shifts blame (and various debilitating emotions) onto the usual gaslit victims by the usual gaslighting victimizers in gigantic language.

Furthermore, settler-colonial arguments involve elements of occupation as legitimate vs vacant or invalid, decided ultimately by billionaire landlords. Shelly’s apartment in The Crow is invaded by thugs per Top Dollar’s say-so, and Myth‘s world—similar to Samus and the Chozo, pirates and Galactic Federation—is invaded by warriors who appear whenever the current residents are weak, opening the usual venues for fresh business, battle, and betrayal. It’s barter through manufactured conflict, the ensuing neoliberal shock therapies sanctioned by those with a finger on the big red button, threatening a final countdown, FOMO-style. Amid the usual dog whistles (e.g., “Caesar”), girls will get got, gays will be buried, dragons slain, witches hunted, giants felled, etc. The paradox of death incarnate, here, is its constitution as both reaper and rebel, the middle-class nerd playing the cop in either case.

Pursuant to such games like Bungie’s, land is always contested by arguments that keep war happening and ownership of those under the owner class in doubt, thus eager to bring down big game and prove their manhood anew. Repurposed for profit under capital, capital conjures up all of yesterday’s customs and dead traditions (re: Marx), raising with them faux-feudal arguments of rebellion and invasion, villainy and heroism—all for proving the current residents (the middle class) as “manly” and capable to the gods (the bourgeoisie) on the usual battlegrounds converted into homes, battlegrounds, and homes again, back and forth as a dialectic of the alien: killing the elite’s enemies (workers and nature) to keep profit moving.

As part of this dance of the knights, everything is for sale and all are expendable superstar death dealers made from different past versions (e.g., Hugo from SF3 = Andre the Giant + Frankenstein’s monster) except those not actually on the field (again, the bourgeoisie). Nobody likes the men behind the curtain, but they’re the only ones who win. Everyone else must die, be that heroes, villains, giants, virgins or whores. All are cut up eventually and left out in the cold, the heroes who survive mere straw dogs who will be forgotten after they are dead; i.e., the last war’s heroes replaced by those in the next, joining the same funerary throng. From Nazi Germany to the United States to Bungie’s nameless world aping them, Valhalla is a myth the state uses to keep itself alive!

(source)

Through the usual neoliberal methods of abuse[23] and regression, Myth romances inequity and frames Imperialism and its socio-material conditions as “good,” solely to lock them in place and keep them in place (re: the Cycle of Kings). The volcano, as well as Soulblighter and all of the massive monsters Myth conjures up, are a universal threat to workers, to scare and pit labor against itself; i.e., the middle class against the lower class, and the lower classes against each other and the middle class, while always treating the elite as benign, reaping nature until state shift. Yes, you can scapegoat the tyrant and his generals, servants and ostensible companions and lovers, but there is always a return to order that installs the same old men at the top to rule and control the world through likenesses that acclimate workers to the whole process, inside and out.

To it, everything described in Myth could gradually disappear and—like Rome and Caesar, himself—become a perpetual thing of the past via development protecting nature from the state’s usual cheapening of it; but the elite make sure said past keeps coming back in fresh forms that uphold Capitalist Realism, canonizing the process instead of camping it (which oddly enough, Kevin Smith was attempting to do in 2005’s Clerks 2, albeit badly and from a homophobic perspective that—while it exposes homophobia in the Tolkien camp [“Hey, faggot! They’re not gay, they’re hobbits!”]—is still a homophobic canard delivered spitefully by a straight man written by a straight man to belittle a fantasy story about gay men because it’s gayer than Star Wars is).

As such, the state is a giant that eats its citizens for profit; i.e., by making endless monster war that, through itself, embodies dogma (re: the Military Industrial Complex and copaganda). In turn, the giant puppeteer’s hands and their strings aren’t always visible (removed from the Metallica poster, below), but rest assured, they’re quite present; i.e., the socio-material factors that drive the same stories to play out by conjuring up Marx’ presaging of the same slogans, costumes, and actions of false rebellion. It might weigh on/eat at those on the safe side of the war market, but it sells anyways for exactly those reasons: the ghost of the counterfeit.

Keeping with that, it’s all smoke and mirrors, but somewhere, the consequences of policing said abjection (us versus them) are quite real and straightforward: life is cheap, as is its ending inside canceled worlds; i.e., that treat the end of the world, per Capitalist Realism, as Ragnarok—the final battle of giants that, oddly enough, never stops but also never comes. There must always be war and death, and giant, monomyth heroes to worship precisely because they’re undead, from Hell, seeking futile revenge as thoroughly mythical, larger-than-life, chasing the fire of the gods (Caesar never dies, but always comes back as a shell of the original conqueror). Such things are lionized under Cartesian thought, but also Pax Americana as a Promethean extension thereof reviving Caesar or Melmoth for the umpteenth time in order to let middle-class white men (and tokens) play emperor against labor and nature; i.e., scapegoated/tokenized as usual: genocide dressed up as “war” and hawked to the usual ministers becoming death merchants when empire begins to die and pay fealty to the same-old profit motive (e.g., Rathbone’s “SATANYAHU ADDRESSES CONGROSS! PART 2,” 2024).

In short, war is a seesaw cycle tied to profit, thus rape relayed in the usual zombie apocalypses’ jester-like villains; i.e., those which Myth II theatrically pushes to its logical endgame (from a marginalized viewpoint): the token Nazi burning the house down, said house demanding empire be vigilant against evil extending to marginalized communities who might seek revenge afterwards; re: the seeds of fascism all over again, planted through fortress mentality. There’s always someone to fight who’s more ruthless and powerful than you; the outcome is always self-defeating and alienating as a matter of police violence fetishizing its own servants until they snap. Our own theatricalities—however complex they might seem—must simply and directly confront state variants to anisotropically reverse the flow of power and knowledge, awareness and intelligence towards workers. This happens as much through a Galatean element camping the Cycle of King’s Pygmalion authors as it does monsters in general: weak and strong categorized not just through DARVO and obscurantism to achieve adversity in a theatrical sense, but through gendered language, as well.

Now that we’ve well and truly exhausted the giant side of things, let’s quickly consider the female aspect to Myth‘s monstrous-feminine.

That is, beyond the cycle’s usual male giants, there are non-male aspects to such canon and its subversion. In regards to said servants as scapegoats in the Myth franchise, we’ve primarily looked at cis[24] gay men like Balor, the Watcher and Soulblighter. But Shiver (who mainly appears in the second game, below) was also a character in that story Bungie chose to revive for the sequel! To be inclusive, then, let’s conclude with a few points about her and similar characters (six pages), then move onto to the “The Monomyth” conclusion (which discusses Capitalism itself in undead monomythic terms)!

(source: Mythipedia)

While witch hunts historically punch down against Jews, Arabs and other non-Europeans, the classic monstrous-feminine for the West is actually women (with racial minorities and anti-Semitic qualities emerging during the medieval and Enlightenment periods). As such women like Shiver essentialize to the same equation of profit abusing nature through mythical stories that Bungie riffs on and rips off; i.e., pitting token proponents against each other to further a canonical narrative; e.g., the Deceiver seeking revenge against the game’s resident fag hag: “The Deceiver has been screaming for Shiver’s blood all day [which sounds weird, given how soft-spoken their in-game conversation is]. Alric has chosen five men of unwavering courage to accompany The Deceiver into the labyrinth of ravines where she hides. There they will hunt her down and destroy her” (ibid.). As such, Shiver is basically Medusa having one last catfight with Loki-by-another-name.

Per the Archaic Mother (the Medusa) and the phallic woman (the Amazon), there is always Macbeth’s wild wife, asking to be unsexed. That’s what Shiver basically is, in the end—a giant ageing bitch needing to be put down, hag-horror style (and inside a maze, no less). But again, the monstrous-feminine is anything of nature capital needs one side to police, rape and destroy for profit to happen. Sawing through nature, Myth presents Capitalism as a cycle that never ends, and certainly not one that constitutes embracing nature and the monstrous-feminine as previously raped by the heroic position. Instead, it turns them—one and all—into fascist, horseshoe caricatures of Jewish revenge; per cryptofascists, it’s politically dumb/ahistorical on purpose, defending capital through these spectral abuses of the past made mythical.

This includes Mother Nature, whereupon the Medusa is someone to fetishize and harm—generally abusing nature by removing the agency of those associated with nature. In classical systemic terms, this happens less through Jews, queer men and non-white peoples, and more through AFAB workers (or intersex parties with female dominant characteristics) for heroes to “feed on”; i.e., to feed is to rape, which translates differently to female bodies versus Soulblighter’s male body (the latter a warlock consigned to the flames during an Amazonomachy‘s “bury your gays” witch hunt, not penetration like Shiver and other whorish, Medusa-style succubae; e.g., Lilith, camped by Red Panda, below). Weird attracts weird, trauma attracts trauma; under capital, sex and force synonymize for any recipients/markers of state harm through various “heavy metal” exceptions, nerdy double standards, and all-around stigmas under a straight Male Gaze. Simply put, whores get stabbed, and that’s all Bungie allows Shiver to experience.

(artist: Red Panda Waifu)

In short, hags are generally beheaded, not fucked (though again, their “conqueror” function is synonymous). Even so, while Shiver might not be conventionally sexy from a visual standpoint, she’s still sexualized to receive violence; i.e., by a story that sends a group of sexy heroes to put her down and her alone. In stories similar to Myth, then, Shiver is to Soulblighter what Medusa is to capital: a sidekick or psychosexual fantasy whose only purpose during police violence is to die; i.e., to further the story of the ostensibly straight men involved, who kill her without hesitation. She’s simply “pure evil,” amounting to a rather boring hag that’s given nothing to do but look and act bitchy. Turned on its head inside the same thresholds and on the same surfaces, nature and its fearsome, dark motherly characteristics certainly have the potential to heal through Gothic poetics and demon BDSM (above). In response, canon effectively sweeps these happier alternatives under the rug, always advocating for a police agent pimping nature, pretty or not.

To that, and vis-à-vis Tolkien or Lovecraft, Bungie’s women are entirely offscreen save as monstrous-feminine hags (comparable to the great spider Shelob or the old crone from “Dreams in the Witch House,” 1933). Shiver is Soulblighter’s Evil Lynn to batter—literally Damas’ wife, which the game reduces to a throwaway[25] dummy sacrificed during the Second Great War so Soulblighter (the queer underling trying to one-up a truant Skeletor) can have his final battle at Mount Doom with the boys: “Lay on, MacDuff! And damned be he who cries, ‘Hold, enough!'”

Penned by a gay man, Lady Macbeth fared no better than Shiver did! Instead, the adage “a ‘good story’ requires an effective villain” highlights the fascist’s central role to apologizing for the forces of good and their own genocides, Bungie’s collective abuse of nature eventually banished to the land of the dead after the male commander is killed. Shiver is merely a detour roadblock, a petty obstacle, a smaller objective en route to the man in charge. Comparable to someone like Zangya from the DBZ movie, Bojack Unchained (1993); i.e., a female member of a male dominant group of evil space mercenaries (which the wiki calls “galaxy warriors“), whose dark-skinned, Roma-coded leader gladly murders Zangya because he just has to fight the male hero man-to-man! Medusa is always a stepping step, in that respect—a pussy in a jousting match. Shiver’s fate basically no different.

(artist: Akira Toriyama)

Furthermore, nothing is normally done to stop the violence at its source (which only makes Soulblighter’s attempt with the volcano stand out more), Bungie’s canon displacing the systemic abuses that always occur under Capitalism regardless if any undead—female variants included—are visible or not. Such maneuvers patently aim to manipulate the audience to love and fear a cycle of reactive abusive and escalating violence; i.e., keeping them “oscillating” inside a wrestler’s bread-and-circus narrative that ultimately serves the state by torturing women who basically are only scary because they’re old, thus can’t bear children (the anti-Semitic trope being that they eat children, the Freudian argument of the Medusa being that she castrates men).

As such, the only canonical reason that characters like Shiver exist is to make the manly cis-het hero (for which age is less of a factor insofar as sexual reproduction goes) look good in the eyes of whomever’s watching (usually college frat boys, insofar as the Raimi palimpsest goes, below)—the irony being he’s actually a self-absorbed jerk tilting at windmills:

Regardless of which team one belongs in the monomyth, or the age of the female entities involved, Medusa always suffers the consequences; i.e., there is privilege to being male in these stories, with Soulblighter being the titular character and his lapdog Shiver—Bungie’s Bride of Dracula/Frankenstein—being much more throwaway than her husband is; re: virgins or whores. Despite her age, Shiver is definitely the whore—the object of fatal pursuit doomed to die in order to advance the story as it occurs between men. Soulblighter doesn’t have to beat his wife; his enemies, the Light (and their token homo slave), do it for him!

To it, the ghost of “Rome” and its nuclear family unit haunts everything—with a roster of physically impressive warrior-heroes, kings and one lone queen duking it out for gladiatorial supremacy. Whereas the fascist screams, “the enemy is both weak and strong!” the centrist turns them into a zombie to fight until the end of time. In doing so, they are fighting the buried atrocities of the state, but also its rhetoric as curiously flexible insofar as “strange bedfellows” are permitted; e.g., the Deceiver’s recruitment by the Light, and ruthless diplomatic qualities eventually helping them recruit the Trow (exhibit 41d) under King Alric; re: Alric’s imperial mechanism of fighting “fire with fire” told in heel and babyface, corrupted/uncorrupted language.

Indeed, it’s precisely this tokenized position that Shiver rubs in her enemy’s face, chiding the Deceiver for bending the knee to Alric, and which he rebukes her for in kind (a false equivalency but I digress):

“Well, if it isn’t Alric’s lapdog?” she jeers at him. “Will you bow to anyone who claims the throne of the Cath Bruig?” To which he replies, “The path for retribution does make for strange bedfellows [emphasis, me]. Would you not agree, Ravanna?” (source).

The gay man basically reminds Shiver that she’s working for her abusive ex-husband, to which Shiver responds by raising her snake-like hair and blasting him with magic; i.e., a reckless and ineffective strategy that ultimately backfires when the Deceiver convinces her pet shade to turn coat, letting him trap Shiver in a magical prison that sucks her dry (and whose subsequent explosion blows the Deceiver to pieces)!

And to this, a female character like Shiver is always “lower” than the boys (even the less manly ones, being the only Fallen Lord the player kills without paralyzing them, in either game); i.e., a witch summoned back to life by Soulblighter purely because the game needed a hag to hunt. It certainly reflects the domestic abuse of actual women treated like Shiver is, in-game, and Medusa as classically female. Personally I don’t like to limit such things to simply “female,” and think the game’s battle of the sexes feels binarized along with everything else, therefore dated. As for myself, I generally treat the monstrous-feminine as androgynous, thus male, female, and/or intersex; i.e., in opposition to Cartesian thought’s white, male, European hegemon and tokenized, descending rungs of decreasing privilege. It’s all part of the same heteronormative dogma, the usual stones being thrown in a (very fragile) glass house.

Be they fascist or neoliberal, such mind prisons depict and encourage heroic police violence against nature-as-monstrous-feminine; i.e., as utterly terrifying for its ancient female aspects; re: according to Barbara Creed, which I argue tends to overlook present atrocities by TERFs acting the universal victim while policing people who are even more marginalized. Female or not, such behaviors are critically inert for the state servant. Wrestler narratives, while interactive with the audience on par with Rome’s gladiatorial bouts, are not known for extensive nuance; their canonical zombie eyes, and those of unthinking consumers, have been wholly blinded by a false vision that conceals not just the ongoing militarization of the police, but formerly oppressed groups whose time as cop is rather limited—i.e., like Shiver’s destruction demonstrates, existing inside a pecking order whose tokenized totem pole puts women and effeminate gay at the bottom: the two killing each other to cut to the chase.

As we shall see throughout the rest of the primer and in Volume Three, canon does so not just by making labor fight among themselves, but specifically against any monster-feminine that threatens the status quo through marginalized discord; i.e., Gothic-Communism as something to attack, mid-tokenization (re: Shiver killed by a gay man and vice versa). This being said, unable to look into a black mirror that actually reveals a way out of Capitalism, the same exploitations that befell Shiver and her hysteria continue unabated; i.e., social-sexual trends that lead to worker abuse in everyday situations, announced by canon as something that—if not sexy or cool—is at least “powerful”: when Shiver dies, she explodes, taking the Deceiver with her (“killing two birds with one stone,” as it were).

Cops—including female/monstrous-feminine cops—are generally fetishized, decaying into undead forms working for the state; i.e., the black knight as something to seed with foul, nasty ideas. As the Radiance showed us, in Hollow Knight, this can be camped in ways that pointedly speak to female rape, but the canonical whore is blind in this respect; i.e., her rape theatre largely unironic; e.g., Shiver a throwaway cum dump  who used to be prettier than she is now—a fuckable whore (with giant parts like 2B’s “mommy milkers,” below) instead of a “grotesque crone”:

(artist EXGA)

The franchise is not without the usual consolation prizes. In the absence of a soft body to “till,” the monomyth hero will happily settle for a dragon to slay. Despite being constantly sacrificed, then, Bungie’s Legion are fondly touted as “the legendary army of the West,” the so-called “victorious dead” put through the D&D ringer while gunning for nature as hag-like, as Shiver is, and degenerate like Soulblighter and the other Fallen; i.e., to remain vigilant against them, thus try to survive long enough to tell others how manly they are, then maybe attract a mate: “I guess the worst thing about having a reputation for being a bunch of hardasses is that the Legion always finds itself where the fighting will be ugliest. So we’re up here as the first line of defense against an attack by The Deceiver” (source: Mythipedia). Likewise, Alric’s revival of empire at the end of Myth II is false hope—a kind of neoliberal assimilation fantasy presented by the same old bodies and warlike actions American Capitalism has sold for decades: the Greater Good as constantly recruiting fresh male soldiers into its ranks. Do it; bitches like soldiers!

The girl boss (next page) is a more recent phenomena towards that aim—the creation of a kind of female hero that serves the state in corporate, but also military fashion out of older mythical forms (which we’ll unpack even more in Volume Three, when we examine TERFs). In female terms, there’s little difference (save for cosmetics) between one monster girl versus another in canonical stories; from Amazons to bandit girls to damsels-in-distress, corporations replicate and sell zombifying dream girls, designed to help the consumer feel right at home in a retro-future’s hyperreal, resort-like space. The idea is less overtly undead than the generic rotting corpse, but so was Balor in his armored suit. Their effect on the mind is the same; i.e., to feel comfortable with the zombie apocalypse and what it uncovers about the present world in crisis by piloting powerful, sexy heroes that chase away colonial guilt as forever manifesting within the material world: subjugated Amazons (and their muscles and shapely bodies) distracting through hauntological bread and circus.

(exhibit 41e1: Artist, top-left: Alex Borsuk; bottom-left: unknown [source]; right: Persephone van der Waard.

Apocalyptic fantasies canon veil material condition and abuse with iconic “devastation.” Some provide the Western backdrop as something to return to, while others have a cyberpunk feel. Many more depict the Global South as enriched-but-immiserated under Capitalism as victorious [the “end of history” narrative]: a neo-colony disguised as a tropical paradise tied to a “better” image of the nostalgic, neoliberal past. Whatever applies to the West and the Global North during hauntological fantasies, then, is doubly true for the Global South in this respect. Parenti outlines in the 1986 lecture, “US Empire and Relations with the Soviet Union and Other Socialist States,” a process that is, itself, about four centuries old: “There are no poor nations, only exploited populations.” Likewise, the elite can only offer decayed illusions to hide these exploitations with: the hauntological slum as something to export and harvest, ad infinitum.

In the Western tradition, the slumming heroes would have historically been white and male—posturing less as an invading outsider and more as a defender of staked claims on Indigenous lands [e.g., Powers Booth in The Emerald Forest, 1985, before he turns coat, “going native”]. In the mid-20th century this expanded to allow white women in the second wave of feminism to enjoy the “Amazon” role in service of the state. However, moderate concessions in recent years have affected these rosters to include heroes who not only aren’t men; they aren’t white, either. To this, the hauntological slum of the Global South is forever occupied by the powerful, yet-ultimately servile bodies of various slave groups.

For example, Laura from Capcom’s Street Fighter V [above, right] is canonically tough-but-cute, operating entirely in the hands of the player as something to control in relation to a particular part of the world as something to cover up with a current generation of nation pastiche—i.e., the 2023 sort that treats the population of South America, specifically Brazil, as “bountiful” Amazons to subjugate and leer at, but also pilot in service of a centrist narrative. The decay, in this scenario, happens behind the image, on the actual streets of Brazil which Capcom deliberately conceals behind a false, pretty copy that nevertheless shouts the quiet part inside a ludic tableau: the cities of Capcom’s ageless Global South are perpetually run-down, their material conditions and coercively heroic arrangements fixed in place. It’s pure plantation fantasy—ruthlessly adapted for a neocolonial world by a giant corporate ally to the United States, pandering to the Global North with highly nostalgic, imported displacements of neoliberal hauntology: “Remember when Brazil [and by extension anywhere in South America] was cool; i.e., like Brian DePalma’s fictional Miami in Scarface [1983] as a Cuban drug hub for Americans to conflate with Brazil and South America in general after the Cuban Missile Crisis?”)

 (artist: Teradiam)

So while they clearly favor male varieties, Bungie’s war against nature-as-monstrous-feminine doesn’t preclude strictly female qualities, either. But enough about them and their sinister elements turning women, queer folk and ethnic/religious minorities, etc, into whorish trophies (or watery maidens arming them with swords, left). Whether a male hero or female/monstrous-feminine[26] villain, we’ll consider the larger problem of stalling Capitalist Realism (thus avoiding state shift) a bit more in the conclusion, next; i.e., Capitalism a Great Zombie-Vampire that never stops eating through its monomythic heroes hunting in disguised settler-colonial territories, harvesting some crop or another made abject.

Onto “The Monomyth, part four: “‘That Which Is Not Dead’; or, Capitalism as a Great Zombie(-Vampire)“!

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Footnotes

[1] One of the songs from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997) being “Wandering Ghosts.” Like Dracula himself, his castle is a creature of chaos that takes many incarnations; i.e., those borne from different parties entering and exiting its structure to deviate from past histories (a strategy borrowed from Walpole’s Strawberry Hill House). Just as the game’s music reflects that state of constant reinvention, addressing present allegories retold as “past,” the same goes for Melmoth the ghost as wandering and witnessed by those around him.

[2] The Romans being the famous enemies of Jews and Christians, and the Nazis replacing Christian dogma with Pagan dogma attacking Jews and Bolshevism while Capitalism and the Protestant ethic decays; but not all fascists are against Christendom; e.g., in the Americas, North or South.

[3] I.e., not quite having the same power dynamic as Batman and Robin, but Soulblighter nevertheless being Balor’s submissive, driven to avenge his fallen lover’s betrayal by the West—their eating of him.

[4] In typical British fashion, Tolkien stereotypically demonized wolves in his own stories, commonly presenting them as fodder, but also as wicked stigma animals with shapeshifting counterparts called “wargs” (another name for lycanthropes); i.e., giant evil monsters riding into battle with goblins on their backs during the Battle of the Five Armies, fulfilling Tolkien’s canonical essentialist/ethnocentric view of war in ways that would long outlast him.

[5] Shylock, from The Merchant of Venice.

[6] Re: William Blum, who writes in Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, (1995):

For four years, numerous Americans, in high positions and obscure, sullenly harbored the conviction that World War II was “the wrong war against the wrong enemies.” Communism, they knew, was the only genuine adversary on America’s historical agenda. Was that not why Hitler had been ignored/tolerated/appeased/aided? So that the Nazi war machine would turn East and wipe Bolshevism off the face of the earth once and for all? It was just unfortunate that Adolf turned out to be such a megalomaniac and turned West as well (source).

This animosity continues to uphold Capitalist Realism in stories like Myth II and beyond.

[7] Keeping with the Tolkien rip-off, Balor is Melkor/Morgoth and Soulblighter is Mairon/Sauron (a play on the idea, with Soulblighter being outwardly hideous, whereas Sauron was an outwardly comely diplomat who initially gave golden rings that bound others to him), but the Tolkien nods don’t stop there; e.g., “the Deceiver” was also a nickname for Sauron. Whilst all seem obvious in hindsight, I frankly never noticed them until just now!

[8] In The Wizard of Oz universe, the Tinman is a common metaphor for queer love. In the original 1900 story, it’s more homonormative; i.e., the Wicked Witch of the East curses a woodman after he falls in love with a girl, the axe chopping his body off bit by bit, while a nearby tin smith replaces all the parts, but forgets to give the Tinman a heart.

In comparison, Myth II reverses the anti-Semitic trope by having Soulblighter “eat his heart out,” his gay body ripped apart for losing the man he served with more devotion than the others did. Obviously it was a toxic relationship (as many gay relationships are under Capitalism), but one in which Soulblighter—having lost his master—conducts a batman’s extinction burst (re: the volcano). It’s bleakly romantic, the dutiful undead slave avenging his king-in-life by destroying the thing that killed Balor in death: empire.

The story—while still loaded with extermination sentiment and self-hating bigotry—yields a human-if-closeted monstrous-feminine element; i.e., one that—for this trans girl, at least—isn’t terribly difficult to understand from a Communist perspective despite its fascist aesthetic: tragic love. To it, Soulblighter escapes into Tharsis like Romeo steals into Juliet’s tomb, except he’s conducting a ritualistic murder-suicide against empire and capital for reasons only he seemingly knows! “Tempt not a dangerous man!”

Personally I think he’s doing it for his friend. Is it over the top? Sure. Is Soulblighter a war criminal? Yes, absolutely. But his revenge—no matter how twisted it might seem, at first glance—remains driven by a deep-seated hatred for the West betraying its soldiers and servants. Of them, Balor ranked highest in Soulblighter’s esteem. And while the game’s logic for Balor’s ire is a deep betrayal by the West forgetting Connacht’s sacrifice, Soulblighter’s motivations are tied to the man he served and probably loved (once upon a time, anyways). It’s not an endorsement of fascism to try to understand their motivations in ways we ourselves can relate to, then subvert.

Furthermore, it’s not exactly a stretch to see the gay elements to this particular Nazi—a human being despite his twisted will—having potential (if closeted) motivations that aren’t totally alien. It’s not any different than Melmoth or Dracula, meaning that—should we choose to—we could camp Soulblighter like any other monster in this book; i.e., like the Nazi or the Communist, on stage; e.g., like Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, what kind of story might Damas tell if given the chance to be more than simply “pure evil?” Makes you wonder…

[9] Not victims, because non-human animals cannot rape each other—at least not anywhere near how humans can; i.e., the latter knowing the consequences of their actions, but also having the capacity to torture instead of killing for shelter and food. In short, non-human animals might play with their food, but not through humans forms of sadism, cruelty and malice. They literally lack the faculties for it.

[10] Of the Tower’s infamous birds, Jonson writes, “It is not known when the ravens first came to the Tower of London, but their presence there is surrounded by myth and legend. Unusually for birds of ill omen, the future of both Country and Kingdom relies upon their continued residence, for according to legend, at least six ravens must remain lest both Tower and Monarchy fall” (source).

[11] Which is ironic, considering that corvids, unlike owls, are actually a diurnal species.

[12] For example, Odin classically kept two raven scouts: Huginn and Muninn, meaning “Thought” and “Memory.” They’re literally his eyes and ears (a concept for anti-Semitic, thus repressed heroic revenge that plays out in The Crow through Eric and his own pair of corvid eyes; i.e., the “foreign” agent hunting in the churchly ruins actually being a man of the West wearing a Halloween costume).

[13] Re: “Disgustipated” (1993).

[14] Maybe for his poor generalship; i.e., in one level from the first game, the player must assassinate four Trow lieutenants, after which Soulblighter traps the Legion in a magical “Chinese box” called the Tain (no relation to the China Miéville 2002 novella, but does combine closed space, giant spiders and Lovecraftian elements for a bit of a tone shift/scene change).

[15] Whose D&D alignment is generally “neutral,” but in truth is simply apologizing for empire by working for those who pollute the world as much as Saruman does.

[16] The irony of war machines is they generally got smaller over time; e.g., a catapult, trebuchet or canon versus a WW1 belt-fed machine gun. Then again, the carriers for such armaments remain as big as ever—an aircraft carrier or nuclear submarine amounting to a mobile fortress housing many weapons and men. Unlike Tolkien, Bungie limits the forays in Myth to guerilla warfare with human units. Hence, why we get giants to literally stand in for ancient war machines (or tools of deception, like the Trojan Horse, but the game has no use for such tactics).

[17]  Often appearing as moderate; e.g., The Guardian and similar organizations, but also George Orwell or Max Brooks, the latter writing World War Z, which used the anti-fascist phrase in French; re: “Ils ne passeront pas!” used against a worldwide plague of zombies. In doing so, Brooks—the Jewish son of famous satirist, Mel Brooks—fails to distinguish between fascism and Communism. Context matters, folks, but do praxial stances.

[18] The Trow, when weakened, turn to stone and shatter to dust.

[19] “Odysseus at length succeeded in making Polyphemus drunk, blinded him by plunging a burning stake into his eye while he lay asleep, and, with six of his friends (the others having been devoured by Polyphemus), made his escape by clinging to the bellies of the sheep let out to pasture” (source: Britannica).

[20] The gods are classically portrayed as giants; Myrdred—while being Jewish-coded, also possesses the ability to talk to giants, alluding to a trickster role comparable to Loki (with actual ravens being able to tug on the tails of predators to get them to fight each other):

Loki, in Norse mythology, a cunning trickster who had the ability to change his shape and sex. Although his father was the giant Fárbauti, he was included among the Aesir (a tribe of gods). Loki was represented as the companion of the great gods Odin and Thor, helping them with his clever plans but sometimes causing embarrassment and difficulty for them and himself. He also appeared as the enemy of the gods, entering their banquet uninvited and demanding their drink. He was the principal cause of the death of the god Balder. Loki was bound to a rock (by the entrails of one or more of his sons, according to some sources) as punishment, thus in many ways resembling the Greek figures Prometheus and Tantalus. Also like Prometheus, Loki is considered a god of fire (source: Britannica).

(source: Mythipedia)

In short, working with a cartoonishly vampish, short-statured, balding and effeminate “double of Loki” against Soulblighter amounts to Alric’s Promethean Quest by proxy, one the Deceiver does not survive. In the interim, though, his ability to negotiate with the Trow makes him the thief of the fire of the gods that ultimately kills him (Shiver’s death raining orbs of white fire down onto him, blowing the Deceiver to pieces); i.e., he “cheats,” and cheats—even if done for a good cause—get punished (also he’s gay and Jewish-coded, making the punishment more automatic).

[21] Bungie’s war narrative is collected as a volume—something traditionally sent to one’s widow or brethren after its owner dies. Here, the Narrator’s archive serves as a record comparable to Tolkien’s accounts of real war told through imaginary war as “ancient history”; re, Molly Ostertag’s “Queer Readings of The Lord of the Rings Are Not Accidents” (2021):

The frame story Tolkien created for The Lord of the Rings was that the tale was simply translated from a much older historical document [like Otranto, minus Walpole’s camp]. This is established in the book’s introduction, where the author describes how Bilbo’s private diary (i.e., The Hobbit) was preserved and expanded by Frodo (and later Sam), becoming an account of the War of the Ring. That volume, The Red Book of Westmarch, was preserved and transcribed, and passed down as ancient history — “those days […] are now long past, and the shape of all lands has been changed” — until it ended up in Tolkien’s hands (source).

The opening to Myth even mirrors Tolkien’s language:

In a time long past [emphasis, me], the armies of the Dark came again into the lands of men. Their leaders became known as The Fallen Lords, and their terrible sorcery was without equal in the West. In thirty years they reduced the civilized nations to carrion and ash, until the free city of Madrigal alone defied them. An army gathered there, and a desperate battle was joined against the Fallen. Heroes were born in the fire and bloodshed of the wars which followed, and their names and deeds will never be forgotten (source: Mythipedia).

The irony is precisely that Connacht is forgotten. Furthermore, the homosocial themes are somehow even more repressed than Tolkien, feeling like a Lovecraftian (hence homophobic) version of LotR, whose queer subtext is wholly abject vis-à-vis the Tolkien-style lore and built worlds. Many of my criticisms towards Tolkien and his refrain apply to Bungie’s landmark, if-somewhat-obscure computer game—indeed, if not more so because Capitalism in 1997 was neoliberal and globalized in a way that Tolkien’s own regressions were not (the author critiquing world war in The Hobbit only to essentialize it in LotR).

[22] The dwarves in Myth are entirely ranged fighters; unlike Gimli, they use traps and explosives instead of an axe. The men of the West, however, mirror Tolkien’s great swordsmen and magicians (the shades being the closest thing to Ringwraiths that Myth has): Crusader-like warriors, and the game’s berserks (above) combining a Scottish highlander with a Germanic phrase. It’s fascist soup.

[23] Akin to a bad lover/parent; e.g., like Dennis from Always Sunny—the D.E.N.N.I.S. system effectively being a parody of pickup artists (FX Network’s “Is Dennis a Psychopath? | It’s Always Sunny Running Gags,” 2022).

[24] Who the game all genders as he/him.

[25] To renovate Shiver, I took her namesake, Ravanna, and built my own trans self/alter ego, Revana, around it; i.e., as one of Gothic Communism’s mascots (another being Glenn the Goblin, who reclaims anti-Semitic qualities of the goblin in a sex-positive manner, below):

(artist: Autumn Anarchy and Persephone van der Waard)

To it, humanizing the witch as normally anti-Semitic and fash-coded requires doing what Maguire did with Elphaba, just as we presently did to Soulblighter and Damas; i.e., creating a human side that is haunted by the state’s accusations of the accused, mid-witch-hunt: “And you are only a caricature of a witch!” The trick is to take these variables and make them something the state (and its wizardly proponents) can monopolize to use for its own greedy ends; i.e., flow power towards the state and consolidate it there through police (us-versus-them) violence inside the state of exception.

[26] Remember that Medusa is undead and blamed for Capitalism destroying the world; e.g., the Countess from Castlevania, but also similar monstrous-feminine giving the hero the weapon to slay with; i.e., the conservative reward of sex as force, but also the Original Sin argument: “Strange women distributing swords is no basis for a system of government!”

This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). 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 “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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

“A Lesson in Humility”; or, Gay Zombie Caesar (and His Token Servants) When the Boomerang Comes Back Around (feat. Myth: the Fallen Lords)

They say Alric talked about The Head often, ridiculing The Nine’s belief that it was one of the avatara of Connacht. Connacht was the great hero of the Wind Age, who drove the evil Moagim from the earth, and The Head claims to have been one of Connacht’s closest advisors during this time. Once Alric even spoke of The Head’s defeat by Balor, where it lost its body. But I’ve begun to wonder how one of the avatara of the Wind Age outlived Connacht himself by hundreds of years, to fight Balor in a battle long before the West had even heard of The Fallen Lords.

I have been unable to reconcile this with what I know of history (source).

—The Narrator, “Out of the Barrier” from Myth: the Fallen Lords

Picking up from where “Criminals and Conquerors (opening and part one)” left off…

So far, we’ve explored different kinds of Promethean heroism, ranging from futile revenge, castles, and crime lords. Continuing our imaginary historical catalog brings us to our third example of the zombie monomyth tyrant: not the man-of-reason, or the crime boss, but the warlord master of the field—specifically queer readings of the Zombie Caesar in Bungie’s Myth: the Fallen Lords, as well as Caesar’s dutiful anti-Semitic/monstrous-feminine henchmen (and women) in its Melmoth-style sequel, Myth II: Soulblighter (1998). Each game subsequently has its own close-read:

• “‘Hail, Caesar!’; or, Balor the Leveler as Gay Zombie Caesar in Myth: the Fallen Lords” (included in this post): Explores the man himself in Myth: the Fallen Lords, including the game’s Promethean, fatal-warrior mythos reviving Zombie Caesar on loop (the Cycle of Kings) to uphold Capitalist Realism through the zombie monomyth.
• “‘Hell Hath No Fury’; or, Soulblighter’s Gay Nazi Revenge (and Giants/Female Characters) in Myth II: Soulblighter“: Further unpacks Bungie’s Cycle of Kings (and its various terrorist/counterterrorist double standards) by camping Myth II‘s titular character as a token gay Nazi cop; also considers the franchise’s giant and female elements, while linking everything to Capitalism and the zombie monomyth’s Promethean Quest.

In short, “Hail, Caesar!” introduces the Cycle of Kings per Bungie’s unironic usage of it; “No Fury” focuses more on camping the cycle of violence through our queer interpretation of the sequel’s camp potential (versus what Bungie actually does with said potential, in-game).

As previously stated, zombies denote the existence of repressed, generational trauma according to individuals or groups living through an expanding/shrinking state of exception. As we shall unpack here, recipients or givers of state abuse (“pitchers” and “catchers”) operate in Myth per a fascist, homoerotic cult of death and its zombie strongman aping Caesar’s ghost: Balor the Leveler first returning to empire in a bad-dream time of weakness to seek revenge against those who betrayed and forgot him (the Imperial Boomerang), followed by Soulblighter seeking revenge for his master after said master is dead (the Promethean Quest).

In other words, the zombie warlord can be an aggressor for the state-in-crisis as radicalized, then conjured up anytime the state needs to inspire police crackdowns in and out of monomyth fiction.

A common variant is the literal Nazi zombie, of course, but also the zombie fascist/tyrant coming out of the historical, partially imaginary past (“Rome”) to overwhelm the present as a heroic matter of rememory tied to nation-states’ own short, self-eclipsing narratives; re, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980):

“History is the memory of states,” wrote Henry Kissinger in his first book, A World Restored, in which he proceeded to tell the history of nineteenth-century Europe from the viewpoint of the leaders of Austria and England, ignoring the millions who suffered from those statesmen’s policies (source).

To that, Myth remembers the fallen heroes who suffered, laying down their lives for the perceived “Greater Good,” only to return and seek revenge(which, for our purposes, denotes a process of traumatized feeding and cannibalization—of workers by themselves for the state).

Simply put, Caesar’s revenge becomes “necessary” to “progress,” but remains stuck in a hellish death loop of endless (thoroughly gruesome) bloodshed; i.e., as capital demands profit to continue through such monomythic theatre disguising war as toy-like (cops and robbers, but also Americans and Nazis/Communists). Canon does so while, in the same breath, essentializing a Promethean Cycle of Kings (the finding of self-destructive power rooted in monarchic language). Though the Shadow of Pygmalion’s outdoor infernal concentric pattern, an unironic “Gish gallop” begins to emerge, its casus beli swapping out one tyrant for another as either good or bad; i.e., succeeding themselves through the usual gentrification and decay of Pax Americana putting nature (and soldiers) cheaply to work. Dogma presents the monstrous-feminine “prince(ss/x) in another castle” (next page) as ready-for-the-taking if only the day’s heroes rally for that one final push into home-as-alien.

To it, “taking things home” merely and tragically becomes a matter of dogmatically guiding police violence into all the usual ports, the owners of said ports forced to receive such entry by the victorious dead feeding on them as a predatory means of profit (and which subverting such doom during rape play is generally their only shot at liberation, below):

(artist: Noah Way Babe)

We’ll get to all of this. To spin a thesis statement for this particular seminar’s queer reading of the material, though (indented for emphasis):

Capitalism will always abject its abuses onto its victims. To best recuperate and nullify rebellious sentiment, though, it marries homonormative obscurantism and DARVO to other token elements as needed; e.g., anti-Semitism and Orientalism (with so-called “gay token Nazis” [false rebels] being a thread we’ll tug on throughout this section); i.e., capital decays into a degenerate, fascist, undead form that can be increasingly abjected, tokenized and scapegoated because it is false, illegitimate and reprobate (as gay men generally present as, in canon)—not “actually” Caesar’s ghost (a paradox, insofar as we’re dealing with an idealized, fantasy version) but a “queer” version fielded in the homosocial, ancient language of war hauntologized (“ancient” in quotes): “It’ll work next time, when capital’s Roman homecoming isn’t a gay Nazi-Communist zombie/token slave!”

Such feeding and decay is expected, making the entire appeal a false flag raised over and over. Bungie didn’t “invent” such tactics—are merely aping them somberly through their own morose altar of sacrifice. On it, statesmen make their arguments against perceived barbarians, motivating children of a given imperium to invade and occupy “foreign” lands at home; having no moral reason to do so, us-versus-them is used, instead.

In Myth, the game’s apocalyptic, cis-het vision of capital enriches the usual benefactors (white European men) onstage and off, which requires soldiers to operate, hence arguments like Bungie’s to send them to their deaths wherever they are. This yields the usual anti-war statements, sold repeatedly as rock ‘n roll (which, like Metallica themselves, decays unto profit like punk or anything else does):

Bodies fill the fields I see, hungry heroes end
No one to play soldier now, no one to pretend
Running blind through killing fields, bred to kill them all
Victim of what said should be
A servant ’til I fall (Metallica’s “Disposable Heroes,” 1986).

Rooted in imperial consumption, such things become holy (the Protestant ethic); i.e., speaking to abjection by those who, safe at home, eat their fill of the spoils of war while living on equally stolen, bloodstained land—all while making America’s “foreign” victims (e.g., Indigenous peoples and/or Communists) entirely invisible:

(artist: Don Brautigam)

That’s Pax Americana, for you—a heliocentric worldview inherited from the elite pulling the strings, then routinely passed down by white middle-class men (weird canonical nerds); i.e., like Bungie, stoically paving the way for future iterations of the same old, Man-Box fascination with settler-colonial violence. They’re war merchants weeping out of principle, but turning the meatgrinder’s handle all the same. From Caesar to modern-day warrior poets like James Hetfield, John Romero, Bungie, Mel Gibson, and Sam Raimi, war is for sale—good for always expressing itself as the place to “die like a man.” To die the Roman fool for one’s nation is heroic, even when it becomes undead, vengeful, or campily aware of itself in a blind sense. It’s all badass and cool, for Bungie—something to vampirically farm by conjuring it up as “past,” fueled by revenge and blown up to Atlas-grade levels of fatal hyperbole (e.g., “Achilles’ Last Stand,” 1976), then put repeatedly to work/to the sword as cheaply as possible (re: Patel and Moore).

“Hail, Caesar!”; or, Balor the Leveler as Gay Zombie Caesar in Myth: the Fallen Lords

“Son-of-a-bitch, ball! That’s your home! Your home! Why didn’t you just go home? What, are you too good for your home? SUCK MY WHITE ASS, BALL!”

—Happy Gilmore, Happy Gilmore (1996).

While the glory of Rome is a famous site of romance, comedy and satire (e.g., Monty Python, left: “Do you have a problem with my friend’s name, Biggus Dickus?”), the “Hail, Caesar!” close-read shall consider Myth‘s apocalyptic revival of the zombie warlord unto something a bit more grim: Capitalist Realism and the Cycle of Kings (or Caesars[1], in this case) abjecting queerness through homophobic Nazi revenge; i.e., the shared theatrical tradition of camping and punching Nazis, albeit as performed by white cis-het men whose notion of camp is thoroughly blind (such dweebs generally salivating at the return of “Rome” in some shape or form, extending to its medieval wreckage as a place to “dick ride Caesar”).

A few things before we proceed: First and foremost, Bungie’s franchise is definitely “of its time,” being predominantly cis-centric and heteronormative (re: “white people disease”). Feeling like it was made by a bunch of white cis-het history buffs and fantasy/horror nerds—and owing to the various parent texts it generously borrows from likewise having those qualities (especially Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s dated, closeted, oratory approach to homoromantic affairs in times of war)—the debatable, ambiguously gay elements to Myth‘s many heroes remain firmly rooted in a binarized concept of biology and gender roles; i.e., one sitting squarely between cis men and cis women (all predominantly white except for some of the villains).

With no room for trans, non-binary or intersex people, then, it’s a very cis-het, manly world—the many manly men playing out old, tired monomyth tropes regarding older warlike forms of same-sex attraction and homosocial behaviors linked to imperial forces. As a trans woman who played Myth while in the closet, back in the late ’90s, I shall focus on the homonormative queer elements that do exist, in-game, then provide outside perspective; i.e., when thinking past the game (and its problematic worldview) when looking towards more enlightened horizons.

Keeping with my holistic tendencies, though, I’ll want to mention as much as I can working back and forth; i.e., introducing the Cycle of Kings through Balor in Myth I, then camping it through a queer close-read of Soulblighter in Myth II while examining that games’ outlier/token elements; e.g., Asiatic and non-Christian themes, as well as giants and female monstrous-feminine. Despite accounting for outliers, Bungie still walks in Tolkien’s footsteps, their own warrior planet mostly populated by white cis-coded himbos; e.g., the game’s one woman—Shiver, below—being defeated three levels into the first game

“Shiver fell on the first night in a spectacular dream duel with Rabican, one of the Nine. No one expected this. We have never before challenged one of The Fallen and won” (source: Mythipedia).

only to appear again in the sequel as a Raimi-style hag for the heroes to hunt:

(ibid.)

Again, we’ll focus on what is present, analyzing the game’s queer textualities and themes through my critical models. Per the paradox of holistic analysis, though, there’s simply too much going on to realistically mention everything at work, here; i.e., even when you break everything down to its raw components and devices, Capitalism is still a hyperobject, a quality felt in its abstractions to some extent; re: Bungie’s himbo panoply sausage fest. Instead, I have a necklace or basket of critical elements I’ve chosen to prioritize and stress, this time around: establish the Cycle of Kings as Bungie presents it, then camp it. Ambiguities and dualities regarding Caesar and his men aside, my poetic focus should be clear enough, and should allow you to speculate yourselves towards proletarian outcomes when referencing my close-reads (and adjacent works) yourselves.

Also, seeing as we’re talking about fascism and its heroic cult of death—one that decays towards “Rome” under capital—I strongly recommend that you check out Umberto Eco’s “14 Points of Fascism” (from “Ur-Fascism,” 1995). —Perse

To that, we arrive at Bungie’s videogame series, Myth: The Fallen Lords. It’s an old, obscure RTS game that quaintly crosses Braveheart with H.P. Lovecraft and Lord of the Rings, which my queer reading pointedly considers through the Imperial Boomerang: the devil conqueror Balor the Leveler (and his wicked, degenerate generals, the Four Horsemen of the Gay Nazi Apocalypse) coming home to roost, mid-Cycle-of-Kings. Similar to Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, the shadow of world war (and Western ethnocentrism) hangs over the story—one told in solemn, archivist fashion by the game’s nameless soldier (the Narrator) conveniently keeping score (and lending each subsequent event an air of survivor’s gravitas to rival Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address,” 1863)::

In a time long past, the armies of the Dark came again into the lands of men [note: white, cis-het men; i.e., the status quo]. Their leaders became known as The Fallen Lords, and their terrible sorcery was without equal in the West. In thirty years they reduced the civilized nations to carrion and ash, until the free city of Madrigal alone defied them. An army gathered there, and a desperate battle was joined against the Fallen. (source: Mythipedia).

Bear in mind, such accounts are generally penned by war criminals whitewashing themselves; i.e., because their world was under attack by “evil forces,” thus allowing them to do whatever was necessary to defend the status quo: a tree of freedom, per American Liberalism, to water with the blood of the patriotic dead—sung sermons about afterwards by old powerful executives posturing as “magnanimous” (with Bungie’s Alric bearing disturbing likenesses to Lincoln, at times). Say what you will about individual exceptions, the system seeks only to continue the same bourgeois bloodletting of disposable heroes.

As we shall see, history and myth speak for themselves, in this respect. The whole premise is an apocalypse gimmick, one whose universal expendability (aggrandizing fallen heroes to apologize for war in defense of the state; re, Lincoln: “This nation, under God […] shall not perish from this earth!”) means to make the usual middle-class nerds pearl-clutch and rise to—already insecure from the abjection process—by further policing themselves (workers) for the state; i.e., by punching down at those the state normally exploits the most as “seeking revenge” through bad dreams. It’s DARVO, a strawman the elite have used for centuries to stay in power through the usual expendable (and gullible) buffers; e.g., Lincoln and his own generals freeing the slaves to promptly enlist them to fight for a country that would quickly stab said freed men in the back (meanwhile, women of color would have to fight for their own rights—generally against racist suffragettes—many decades later into Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement, whose own [mostly male] leaders were attacked and ultimately assassinated by state proponents, then mythologized after their deaths to suit state [white cis-het] aims).

The subsequent boomerang effect happens by threatening the Silent Majority with apocalypse-style bad dreams they can die gloriously inside, sans any irony or perceptive pastiche/camp; i.e., to monopolize pro-state arguments and trifectas per the usual qualities of capital—zombie generals and their greater leader strongman, in this case—but really anything and everything that abuses the terrorist/counterterrorist argument to flow power, wealth and knowledge, etc, anisotropically towards the elite in monomythic and Promethean narratives: a grim harvest led by yesterday’s heroes-turned-villains, reapers, cops-gone-bad vs good cops in the same Cycle of Kings (which, anytime I say “cycle” from here on out as a normal noun, I’m more or less referring to): “At my signal, unleash hell!”

Per Foucault, the Boomerang is simply Imperialism coming home to empire, specifically to crown one king after another according to Bungie (and similar authors, as we shall see). Fascism isn’t just Capitalism in decay but empire, which ironically is capital defending itself from labor by pitting them against a rising superman threatening empire (thus profit): Hell coming monomythically home. It requires the elite surrendering territory or position, only to claw it all back; i.e., by putting the Promethean, giant-ized tyrant down; e.g., Hitler or some other myopic, Dracula-grade echo of Caesar (which Balor essentially is). It’s always about moving money and other resources through nature as a matter of industry—a burning war machine pushed by competing forces militarily like Xenophon‘s us-versus-them death march. Spiraling back and forth ad infinitum, it becomes a bit like Prometheus and the eagle. Myth sums all of that up rather neatly—the internalized fear of empire going to seed and pouncing predatorily on itself, mid-revisionism.

(artist: Agnus McBride)

This “dead ringer” is what the villain of the game, Balor, represents (exhibit 39c); i.e., a formerly supreme commander crossing the Alps in reverse, Caesar “pulling a Hannibal” (a rebel commander from Antiquity whose legendary military campaigns against Rome remain celebrated by modern military commanders, including fascist ones). Seeking revenge for being sacrificed to save empire, as Caesar self-purports, Balor makes the tyrant’s plea through his invasion backwards—that he was actually saving the empire from within, from inwards barbarism importing impure (degenerate) external elements that must be purified when the zombie strongman/sins of the father come fearfully home: “We meet again!” to which those in the present are left a bit agape; e.g., Ashley William’s plea to his own medieval executioners, in Army of Darkness (below): “You gotta listen, man; I ain’t even seen these assholes before!” Fealty is a blind oath.

Per Caesar h(a)unting Brutus, Balor does so while accompanied by a fearsome, vengeful band of monster generals (the Fallen Lords, four mighty forces of nature) and the usual military structures descending further down to lieutenants, captains, champions and grunts/minions/fodder. In terms of knights and their heraldry, coat of arms, and castles (similar to Game of Thrones, or any such story with imaginary kingdoms, duchies, great houses, fiefdoms, etc), all serve as a poetic, doubled, half-real way of organizing and presenting power (and its unpeaceful transfer) in medieval, queer-coded language; per Walpole, it’s a popular imaginary exercise speaking to and with the usual myths of Gothic ancestry (“old blood”) inspired by Hannibal among others recuperating his attacks against Rome to be used by those seeking to revive Rome when capital decays: a Gothic double/evil twin of empire that appears, post-corruption, and must then be put down through us-versus-us-as-them apocalypse/spectacle (“fresh blood”). It’s a blood transfusion into the same always-dying tyrant (on a giant scale, or in smaller personified forms of castled bodies or body-like castles).

By extension, Balor’s legions of unthinking dead exist less to threaten the status quo than convert it into a dark, terrorist, rape-play version of itself that cannibalizes the bodies and minds of the local population. This nightmarish revelation is merely a taste of state abuse, normally committed in faraway lands now coming home to roost by way of undead revenge. In turn, a Pavlovian, menticidal desire to be the Good Citizen turns the citizens monstrous, who surrender their rights to the state and attack the state’s usual scapegoats with renewed bloodlust—all in defense of an “ancient,” idealized past (and competing warrior cultures) being party to the same basic problem: the return to a glorious empire’s conquering armies unto an alien Rome, hauntologically revived as unheimlich and drenched in the blood of everyone when a capitol doesn’t recognize its homecoming champion. The imposter is the conqueror reconquering home as pastoral, soft, ripe.

To it, this circular logic of empire translates from novels, to movies, to videogames under Capitalism—spanning from ­laissez-faire to Bretton Woods to neoliberalism to arrange power in all the usual ways; re (from Volume Zero):

Management of exploitation under Capitalism is tiered, pyramid-style—i.e., the top, middle and bottom; or lords, generals/lieutenants, and grunts according to corporate, militarized, and paramilitarized flavors (which often intersect through aesthetics and social-sexual clout). This “pecking order” translates remarkably well in neoliberal copaganda, whose bosses, minibosses, and minions deftly illustrate Zombie-Vampire Capitalism in action; e.g., Reinhardt Heydrich […] as “middle-management” desk murderers in a bureaucratic sense (which sits alongside the middle class, in a class sense—with both defending capital as a perpetually decaying structure that operates through wage/labor theft according to weaponized bureaucracy during crisis, class sentiment and Faustian bargains; i.e., harmful conditioning whose disguised ultimatums prey on various stigmas, biases and dogma riddled within canon to condition their employees to fight the good fight against the underclass as an advertised threat loaded with connotations of foreign/internal plots.

Erstwhile, as said “threats” are met with waves of terror, vice-character personas, and moral panics, they splash back into these same

paranoid workers; they are slowly convinced to surrender total power to the elite under perceived states of emergency against imaginary enemies, trading basic human rights for false power and genocidal legislation inside the zombie police state (neoliberal illusions of “hollow victory” and Quixotic moral superiority/exceptionalism). It’s a scam, a bad game with only one rigged winner: the owner class franchising war as copaganda and the Military Industrial Complex through war simulators. The illusion, like a franchise, becomes something to grow into and endorse more and more as time goes on; i.e., into adulthood (source).

It’s both business-as-usual and an apocalypse for the middle class to purchase and shudder about, on the usual cartographic refrains (exhibit 1a1a1h2a1).

Indeed, confrontation with “Caesar”—the living dead having access to militarized state positions of power—is generally a canonical worst-case scenario: a zombie police state that destroys everyone, including those tacitly assigned to benefit from its atrocities within the middle class. Viewed backwards, capital marches forwards to eat workers born and bred on neoliberal notions of false power and overcoming impossible odds during medieval regressions (which videogames are made to deliver inside their map-like spaces imitating extratextual examples of said regressions).

In Myth, the living in the present aren’t just invaded by the past, but by the opportunistic “fallen lords” of older victories outlined by their own, undead villainy as something that lives on in the absence of memory during state decay. You’re literally fighting the West’s older legendary past exposed in the present space-and-time as abominable; i.e., eager to colonize the pastoral map said territories have slowly become warlike towards. Unable to reconcile these zombie heroes with what they already know of history and its larger-than-life variants, Bungie’s West becomes ignominiously trapped inside an endless, cannibalistic cycle of war pitting army against army on open ground.

This includes their minds, hopelessly locked in a fragmenting loop that flows on historical-material lines towards the state: a never-ending cycle, shifting back and forth between good and evil kings (which the game describes as the Light and the Dark). As the Narrator explains during the sequel’s epilogue, the best the Light can hope for is inheritance—dominion passing “to men or to monsters,” shifting uncannily across the paradoxical image of their withered-yet-strong heroic bodies; their red-cloaked, Dracula-grade imperium’s zombie dictatorship (“Bad Ash” wearing such a cape when he sacks Arthur’s castle, below); their hags and their conspicuously muscular, hypermasculine giants. All generate echoes of Frankenstein, minus that novel’s Promethean satire or irony while fighting over the fire of the gods through futile heroic revenge: “The book is mine!” and “Do you want a little?” Such blindly campy squabbles (re: Raimi’s silliness conforming to the same basic quest) are no different than wars over rings and crowns, vampirism in this case being a fascist doppelganger vying for power and knowledge as normally locked up in Arthur’s castle, his war chest (Raimi’s, but also Bungie’s “Madrigal”).

As we shall see, all heroes are monsters—their status as good or bad under centrist dogma furthering the same process of abjection in service of empire; i.e., harvesting itself while seeking revenge as monstrous-feminine men (the killer himbo) classically do.

For example, the Watcher, one of Balor’s generals (exhibit 41a1), is a falchion-carrying necromancer obsessed with the Total Codex (nods to the Necronomicon—a book [according to Lovecraft] written by a mad Arab) to cheat death, thus outlive his enemies: the Sauron stratagem, with bits of Evil Dead, He-Man, the Ulster Cycle, Scandinavian mythology, and Hitler’s fragmented approach to bureaucracy all thrown into the same blender with a straight face.

In short, it’s what these older-upon-older dude bros—drunk on ghosts of empire and war—shamelessly read when they build their undead worlds on top of older “Roman” graveyards that never quite existed; i.e., a place to be king, but at what cost? It’s basically the straight, cis-het man’s thorough unhealthy idea of intimacy through demon BDSM/calculated risk reaping nature as usual: death by the sword, before dishonor, but no homo!

In short, Myth is chockful of spectres of Caesar, romancing the Nazi leadership (and Axis Powers) in queer-adjacent zombie language pointing to capital as defended by these jackals; i.e., male-centric doubles of the imaginary past akin to Sam Raimi’s aforementioned Army of Darkness, having zero camp or girls (though Shiver does appear in the second game as a hag):

Army of Darkness is sexist at heart. War is the province of man, and Ash can only be challenged by his medieval counterpart, the skeleton king. Virtually identical, these two rivals are divided by an arbitrary notion: the Necronomicon. They fight over the book and, more to the point, the girl. Yet, when the battle is won, she is forgotten. Ash saves the past, and returns to the present, full of himself (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Army of Darkness: Valorizing the Idiot Hero”).

To it, Myth is literally dead dogma—just the dudes, Quixotically duking it out with their eco-fascist, Lovecraft-grade JO crystals preying on “Europe”; i.e., like Hitler, it’s so much less formidable and more stupid than what those mantled with empire see themselves as, truth both stranger than fiction and somehow married to it to epitomize the shared absurdity (the JO crystal’s “magic” is about as real as the Fallen Lords’ occult practices, exhibit 41a1). It becomes a preponderance of perpetual embarrassment:

(source: Reddit)

In turn, the cryptomimetic cycle grinds its gears, leaving the audience with the usual middle-class, weird canonical nerd’s abject, Man-Box brainchildren, fawning homosocially over the ghost of the counterfeit as manly (or monstrous-feminine; e.g., Shiver or the Watcher) by virtue of Gothic history (real and imaginary) coming back around; re (from earlier in this volume):

Per the process of abjection, the canonical goal is always to kill the past as undead, hence save the future for different in-groups afraid of zombies. But they can’t monopolize the procedure (or its violence) inside the state of exception. Whether for witches, witch hunters, or one disguised as the other (undercover cops/rebels), it’s like a washing machine stuck on spin cycle; i.e., always spinning with us inside it, trying to get clean in the same soapy water as haunted by various inescapable ghosts (of the counterfeit, of Caesar or Marx) [source: “Bad Dreams, part two: Transforming Our Zombie Selves“].

While the genre of Nazi zombies (campy or not) is prolific unto itself, the 20th century is especially productive. Full of such shirtless, testosterone-fueled revivals, Bungie unironically synonymizes sex with war (the naked Greco-Roman wrestlers of yore) to constitute a moribund, wish fulfillment’s hauntological “return to (former, imaginary) greatness” that is functionally no different than Hitler’s or Mussolini’s, but also America and Great Britain’s. The same pro-state reality extends to any fascist or fash-adjacent form insofar as they all play with the same mythology defending capital through undead military revisionism. As something to reinvent inside of itself, the middle class routinely inherit the same basic power fantasy—one where you’re the daddy aping the zombie “original” that, per Plato’s simulacrum, never existed but, as a matter of cryptomimesis vis-à-vis capital’s usual horrors, carries on copying itself through profit!

The moral, here, is that war begets war in Capitalist Realism, thus rape unto profit unto “Caesar” as Satanic Panic and Red Scare (the conflating of Nazis with Communists as “gay”); i.e., the Cycle of Kings’ closeted queerness through open war prone to rejection, self-hatred, dishonesty, anguish, feelings of incorrectness, expendability, damage, frustration, instability, inadequacy and alienation, etc, as historical-material byproducts of capital and its own “stuck” loops: the rise and fall of “Rome” illustrating capital as it exists presently (whose subversion starts with camping the canonical freezing of the tyrant, exhibit 41a2).

Per Myth, the heady toxic masculinity and bigoted, Crusader-style heroism (generally over contested lands; e.g., Jerusalem or the Middle East at large) is literally an undead, old boys’ club tied to profit as a doomed cycle of monarchic fakery and lies (“war is a disease”); i.e., one that borrows from its own quarantine nostalgia’s “promiscuous” (warlike) histories to repeat them, hence the game and the profit motive for which it entails, as thoroughly “queer” in abject language; e.g., the Total Codex a wealth of singular knowledge, on par with Jack Torrance’s book (“All work and no play…”), referring to the game at large as chasing its own tail (the Promethean moral being the Codex contains future predictions about past events revived in present moments—Capitalism-in-small, in other words). Size difference denotes the capacity for infection, lubrication (unto capital and state mechanisms), and psychosexual, egregore-style curiosities about inversion fears/uneven playing fields and what those gigantic insertions feel like (“suffering to the conquered”), etc: “The Watcher has entered Covenant from the north, and his tireless undead are raping the old city a second time; tearing down what few structures stand in their way, and choking the sky with dust and smoke. That he wants the book which now rests at the bottom of my pack is clear” (source: Mythipedia). Said knowledge is already compiled and sought after.

Similar to misogyny and anti-Semitism (or any xenophobia), queerness and fascism are historically coerced as a matter of normative compulsion—to preview through war (“seeing how the other side lives”). War is sex, is rape, is conquest as a undead crime of opportunity speaking to the usual historical-material trends; conquest is “gay” (false, illegitimate, incorrect, imposturous) and straight (true, legitimate, correct, not imposturous) all at once, coming out of the same legendary past (the good and bad team) to repeat its own “himbo comorbidities”—i.e., necrophilic social-psychosexual rituals predicated on homophobic conditions that, per the usual heteronormative distributions of power and knowledge (the fire of the gods), yield a very particular pecking order so common to the monomyth, thus videogames and other popular media forms; re: leaders, officers, batmen/servants (controllable and non-controllable units) dating back to Alexander the Great’s own problematic but tolerated[2] double standards.

(exhibit 41a1: Source: Mythipedia. The Watcher, styling himself “the mad goat of the fens,” is an allusion to Lovecraft’s female entity, Shub-Niggurath [the n-word is literally inside the name, passed off as alien gibberish], aka “The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young” [source: Fandom]. In a story largely without women or feminine men, Myth I pits statuesque, queer-coded men like the Watcher as aping Lord Humongous; i.e., in a wasteland setting previously mapped out for war in all the usual “Roman” ways. Pitted against each other as the promised monstrous-feminine reward, there is always another gay ghost of Caesar to put out on the field, then chase down and challenge. While there are more varied monstrous-feminine in the sequel—e.g. Shiver, the Deceiver and Soulblighter, who we’ll examine in a bit—all the generals you see in the original Myth are jacked, athletic combatants: half-naked melee fighters, as are the barefoot, long-haired, witch-like necromancer units called “shades” [who, apart from their fearsome AoE magic, carry swords]: ass clowns in the same sodomy circus propping empire up!

[source: Mythipedia] 

In short, the fears of empire manifest milestone prey haunting the endless graveyards—a safari the player hunts inside, looking for mystical, big-game trophies to debride from empire to restore its straightness, mid-Satanic-Panic; i.e., dreams of Napoleon, fighting man-to-man per the game’s overarching “conquer the conqueror” fantasy “cleaning house”: search, seek and destroy human-sized “power targets” [with one of two exceptions, there are no destroyable buildings, in-game]. Not every level has such a target, but the biggest targets in Myth are always the Fallen Lords [or shades]. It’s nature turned unto empire as “an unweeded garden grown to seed,” but the usual natures [mostly workers, here] are still antagonized and put to work as cheaply as possible by capital; i.e., “pimped out” in order to perpetuate empire—a cycle the game calls “men or monsters”; re: men and non-men, but the non-men [queers] look suspiciously like straight men jacking it to Caesar’s ghost, or Alexander’s: gay meat wizards!

Bungie’s death theatre—dancing with these mighty abject corpses—is surprisingly fun [re: Sarkeesian]. Indeed, the game was one of my favorites, growing up, and as a trans woman, I can still attest to its intoxicating bouquet having seduced me as a child [the expansive, no-nonsense lore inspired my own faux-medieval fictions]. To it, I never questioned Bungie’s problematic mythos [or Lovecraft’s or Tolkien’s] until after I came out of the closet [and learned about Walpole’s rape castles]!

So play with these gay Nazis if you want, but we need to camp them with ludo-Gothic BDSM while doing so. Otherwise, canon simply lynches us fags by roping us in with said “Romans”; i.e., the latter defending America-in-disguise by playing the fall guys they project onto us: punch the Nazi, punch the Commie—same difference to capital.)

“Frailty, thy name is woman!” While a Promethean, monstrous-feminine aspect of death pervades Balor and those around him—i.e., his evil, motley-crew organization of gay meat wizards pursuing merciless vengeance against their good doubles (the ragtag Nine, good wizards called “avatara”)—Balor’s current conqueror status owes itself to a special force inside him/appointed to him: the spirit of the Leveler as something he arbitrarily “found,” which destroys him during Bungie’s nonstop race to the proverbial (and false) finish. Itself a moving goalpost, one designed to keep capital flowing through nature back towards the elite, the Cycle of Kings operates characteristically through black magic, heavy metal, and drug use (often going hand-in-hand as a pulpy [and popular] “brand”; e.g., Black Sabbath’s enduring legacy established by playing with old Gothic devices inside a fresh revival of them), as well as Dracula-style, no-holds-barred (or surrender) reciprocation.

(source: Mythipedia)

For instance, while the Watcher eats his victims and himself alive (a walking fetish/cliché embodying “death before dishonor” but honor is a myth), any such “Achilles egregore” is always strong in appearance, but weak in defeat as foregone; i.e., hiding a fatal flaw that makes him a reliable and easy sacrifice to the heroes exploiting him playing at false rebels. When you kill the Watcher towards the end of the game, he has been turned to stone, completely helpless:

We held Soulblighter at the Gjol long enough to let Alric spring his trap on the Watcher. Turned out I was right about those arrows: Alric had been working on them since we entered the marsh two weeks ago, and they were tipped with fragments of bone from the Watcher’s arm. I sure wouldn’t have wanted to get stuck with one, but apparently they turned the Watcher into stone, leaving him paralyzed and helpless. But he didn’t die. Thirty berserks chosen to accompany the archers tore through the enemy and piled the bodies of the dead at the Watcher’s feet, but all were killed before they could deliver the final blow (ibid.).

This “shrugging of Atlas” Voodoo doll illustrates “the Leveler” as a kayfabe process, unfolding through Caesar’s correct-incorrect likenesses (the general following the leader like Boromir follows Aragorn, only to get “feathered” with arrows, this time fired by the Legion’s “guerrillas” playing white Indians); i.e., aping the man-in-charge as thoroughly mortal, but also reprobate[3].

Like Hitler’s Reinhardt Heydrich, the Watcher’s ignominious killing is the assassination of an occupying army’s seemingly invincible hangman, making the Legion Bungie’s implied, good-guy liberators of “Prague” (from the “golem,” as it were). To it, the Watcher dies not a glorious death, but a pathetic one belonging a larger (and recursive) concentric copaganda scheme; i.e., our Frankensteinian male Medusa being raped as a matter of street justice between cops playing rebels on either side: frozen, then shattered with a taste of his own medicine fired back into him (to that, it’s actually quite satisfying to kick the Numinous statue in the balls while he can’t fight back, but also not very sporting of us[4])!

By extension, the same basic flaws apply to Balor falling unto Alric, whose dubious mantle actually stems from medieval thought—death being the great leveler of kings and peasants alike—but also the modern fascist idea of a historical-material cycle relaid in pre-fascist language (re: the Neo-Gothic). Trapped inside this language (which Bungie depicts on fragments of paper comparable to Hamlet’s commonplace book, itself a volume of revenge), the good guys must quickly pull down and deface all perceived dictators (after doing a double-take to account for their likeness-unlikeness to themselves).

Except, the true enemy (for the proletariat and nature) isn’t Balor and his generals, but Capitalism bombastically dressed up as “past” and projected forwards, again and again across the same “Gothic” wavelength, by rite of feudal succession—of dynastic primacy shoved out of the Gothic castle and onto the fields of endless war and death (which make up the same basic chronotope); i.e., by weird canonical nerds thinking they’re “Vikings” or “ancient Germanic tribes” fighting “Rome” (again, with no girls in sight). All unfold through Man Box “prison sex” rituals, Alric masterminding the latest foray against the echo of “Caesar” he, himself, will one day become (more on this, in “No Fury”).

In truth, fascism serves capital by acting out Rome’s tragic fall, projected onto various DARVO scapegoats (queer or otherwise) for our vigilantes to then seek out with righteous impunity (re: “burying the gay” letting gays be gay so long as they die in service to capital’s continuation: by putting on the zombie fetish gear and damned crown). It’s all castle doctrine—a dialectic of weak/strong shelter and aliens: “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.”

As mentioned at the start of “The Imperial Boomerang” subchapter, historian Bret Devereaux writes, “The quote, from a postapocalyptic novel by the author G. Michael Hopf, sums up a stunningly pervasive cyclical vision of history—one where Western strategists keep falling for myths of invincible barbarians” (source: “Hard Times Don’t Make Strong Soldiers,” 2020). Just as Caesar historically demonized those he conquered—i.e., as terrorist savages fighting dirty from the shadows[5] against the state (not for it as fascists do)—Bungie connects “terrorism” to the embarrassing destruction of what was built by “Caesar” as attacked by his vengeful ghost: senseless destruction, versus the usefully “glorious” propaganda battles of a vandalized past that, through various concentric myths, led and leads to Pax Imperium in its current, glorious (and capitalistic) forms.

All roads lead to Rome; those in Myth occupy both strategies at once, fueling capital in between reality and imagination through liminal expression flowing power towards the state. All throughout, the oscillating rhetoric of fascism’s weak/strong argument pervades Bungie’s gameworld, less hyphenating and more flipping on/off like a light switch (the momentum shift). The balloon-like inflation/deflation of the same basic devices’ hubris and self-esteem is shared between different warring parties (the Light and the Dark) over the same land and titles; i.e., like Macbeth’s own Cycle of Kings.

To that, the soldiers of Myth‘s temporally ambiguous “present day” must be strong by avoiding degenerate weakness this time, thus sacrificing themselves through a giant double implying their eventual doom; i.e., “the way of all flesh”; e.g., the Watcher laid low for the good of “pure” empire learned from hard-fought lessons that are, themselves, regularly forgotten and passed down in absentia/persona non grata (the absentee savior and unwelcome brutalizer one in the same); i.e., the past literally becoming gay to grapple with like Caesar’s ghost through copies of copies of copies trapped inside the same circle of violence (from Balor to Gwyn, Lord of Cinder to Smaug the Stupendous, etc).

The Watcher was merely a chip off the old block, though, Balor embodying said past as lacking the strength to remain vigilant at its highest level. This works as a cycle that never ends. As “true evil” first gains a foothold, then ultimately prevails by destroying Rome from within, Bungie effectively turns strength inside-out and outside-in (the appearance of genocide and rape—normally far-off, during the liminal hauntology of war—gets uncomfortably close to home through Balor). Hero worship is hero worship, though; even when the hero is tragic, fallen, and ambiguously gay (e.g., Count Dracula), killing them is the point, constituting the fascist cult of death the Watcher and Balor belong to, and which Bungie gets off on: war as a candy-like drug made by millionaires in service to billionaires and the profit motive, Willy-Wonka-style, but also rape tied to war per the process of abjection making such things—gargoyleish givers and receivers—ubiquitous.

(source: Mythipedia)

Of course, Bungie disassociates like all canonical authors, presenting this imaginary threat (the ghost of the counterfeit) as a Pygmalion’s shadow of its former self grappling with temptation; i.e., a desire to be recognized. Pride is Balor’s Achille’s heel, imperial death stalled by forcing the personification of death (the Übermensch) to recollect his former, human self before the fall; i.e., in opposition to a foreign, queer-coded menace: gay werewolves (Untermensch)!

“Antagonize nature; put it to work as cheaply as possible.” To it, the game’s lycanthropes are the Myrkridia, a horrific race of ancient, bestial flesh-eaters[6] known for making pyramids of their enemies’ skulls (a historical abjection onto imaginary beings that ancient conquerors have done regarding present atrocities; e.g., Tamerlane to the Pacific Theatre in WW2); i.e., the backstabbing Jews, in this case, being ancient barbarians that Balor’s vigilant past self, Connacht, grew lax about, pursuant to him being owed a prize for having fallen on his sword to save empire from these degenerate aliens to begin with (whose back-and-forth death in the same contested territory is, again, settler colonialism in action).

During their final confrontation, then, Alric has “set the table,” having killed the Watcher (who the Deceiver had previously nearly killed in a famous offscreen duel, before later being flung himself into an icy prison[7]); meanwhile, Shiver is out of the picture thanks to Rabican’s duel with her at Madrigal; and Soulblighter was turned back at the Gjol before the Watcher’s assassination, his present whereabouts unknown.

Having an exclusive audience with the tyrant, then, Alric plays his trump card: he plants the battle standard of the Leveler’s former enemies before Balor, forcing him to remember a time when he was more alive in service of the state and less corrupted by imperial power in a fascist, hauntological way. It’s the best Alric can hope for, his entire army devastated by the unstoppable warrior king (the vast majority sacrificed in front of Balor’s stolen fortress, letting Alric spring yet-another-trap, Gandalf-style, but actually coming from Odysseus against the Trojans [with Athena’s help] if you go back far enough).

The gambit is similar to Top Dollar’s, except it’s more of a stalling tactic, one that lets Alric show Balor a magic stone (exhibit 41a2) called “an Eblis.” Its exact nature is unknown and unexplained, in-game, but it functions similar to the lost seeing stones from Lord of the Rings (exhibit 41a): showing a king his own death, his own false status as undefeated, etc (this particular deus ex machina being omniscience).

But beyond the stone itself is another a clue: the aforementioned battle standard of the Myrkridia, a race of vampire-like werewolf beings that Balor has started to emulate; i.e., the great fortress of the Trow he lords over, Rhiannon (fairy Castle of Queen Maeb occupied by an evil king like what Maligant from First Knight would describe, or Monty Python call “Castle Anthrax”), circled by moats of fresh bloodspill—that of Alric’s sacrificial army! Thus, the story antagonizes empire and puts it to work against itself as cheaply as possible (re: the Battle of the Five Armies, a world war where  no heroes or victors exist, but Capitalism still happens, anyways)! When this happens, the land is redivided along fresh settler-colonial boundaries, colonizing itself through the same settler arguments on the same maps: “We were here first!” In the usual settler colonial fashion, the claimants fabricate their ties to the land, then defend said territories in bad faith against a necessary scapegoat (an indigenous element to said land that can be attacked by the colonizer playing the native). To it, state power is a myth that serves itself, not its figureheads!

As such, Alric—the story’s Gandalf—chastises the current tyrant in the Cycle of Kings, one whose head has grown too big in this bourgeois, predatory scheme: “Know your place in the cycle; surrender your crown, thus your head!” (spoke Dumbledore calmly). Balor’s recalcitrance is the entirely the point; he needs to be strong and unwilling so the harvest is plentiful (the plot to Monolith’s Blood, in other words, but inverted to serve the good-coded empire by eating the bad-coded empire as sharing the same space). No one wants to be Jesus (the King of the Jews), rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s; i.e., his just deserts, meaning “deserving reward or punishment” (source: Marriam-Webster).

Here, the punishment is the reward, which Balor balks at (a bit like Mr. Bean’s teddy bear before Rowan Atkinson shoves a paintbrush up its ass). He’s a dick, to be sure, but Alric the seer—the landlord spirit of Capitalism lecturing the gay ghost of revenge (fascism conflated with Communism just as Caesar is to Jesus, no less)—is arguably much worse: an enabler to the petty pace of endless bloodshed, all made in service to profit by hijacking the entire mythos to do so!

Like Caesar or Jesus, the doomed outcome puts brutality on top of brutality in service to capital and profit; i.e., “both sides” do it, but one is conspicuously undead (thus evil and queer), the other functionally undead through a goodly seer using the same witch hunter rhetoric to nobly purge land and home of fascism (and other undesirable elements). It’s a Crusade, one fought to keep empire strong while, in the same breath, excising Communism entirely!

To it, Myth romances the hell out of ritual sacrifice tied to war and empire, and its initial appeal admittedly lies in how seriously it treats the subject matter. There’s none of the semi-campy gallantry that Raimi supplies, nor Tolkien’s gay batman schtick/queer allegory with Frodo and Sam, nor peppy uplifting music to parade your accomplishments. What little music there is usually plays[8] during the narration scenes, sounding quaintly tragic, rueful and grave; e.g., the “Gate of Storms” narration describing what’s in essence a Nazi blitz through the Ardennes: “Soulblighter cannot be stopped. His armies foul the land south of us for half a thousand miles, and his search for The Summoner has left none alive within his reach. The cities of Scales, Covenant and Tyr have all fallen to him in the last three weeks. It seems that too many years of peace have softened the once legendary armies of the West. Rabican, Murgen and Maeldun have been dead sixty years, and today only Alric remains of the great leaders who defeated the Fallen Lords” (source: Mythipedia).

In other words, “I want a hero!” uttered ironically by Lord Byron, becomes “I need a hero!” per Bonnie Tyler without Byron’s irony. “Save us from the evil, gay barbarian foreign plot, King Arthur!” Ghosts of ghosts of ghosts haunt a shared chronotope between monomyth fictions, bearing a Promethean stamp we debate with through ludic interpretations of combat, succession and collapse.

Like He-Man‘s Prince Adam, these himbos of “yore” aren’t strong-thighed bargemen, but well-educated, properly fed princes of the universe. They’re luxurious and privileged—both strong and entitled enough to bend the fulcrum of guilt upon which Alric’s gambit depends, yet hardy and self-centered enough to weather the tree of woe that older weird authors hung Conan on. Assimilation is assimilation, the blood of Caesar no more “real” than Christ’s, yet spikes the context of the tasty Kool-Aid with poisonous circumstance: a Last Supper drip-fed via diminishing returns. Myth ferries such trickle-down ambrosia into players’ power-starved brains; i.e., by middle-class auteurs (re: Bungie) lobbying for the same chase of glory that eluded Lovecraft or Howard, a century ago:

(source: Mythipedia)

Bungie apes the same tyrannical desire; i.e., to be strong enough to die bravely to serve the state’s lies (re: Heinlein’s Competent Man). It’s warrior-Jesus bread-and-circus, cherry-picking the most manly (at times, questionably queer) elements of sacrificial heroism to uphold capital in a half-real, neoliberal sense: the lobotomized, dogmatic status quo turned into little bourgeois action figures. They become the body and blood of Christ, wafers and wine the middle class imbibe and inhabit like a Rabelaisian carnival—a secret-identity martyr grappling with an openly undead mutineer (re: Skeletor, but also Jojo and the Pillar Men), doubling Christ in either respect: “We’ve come to be the rulers of you all!

As such, Bungie really gives it to you straight: the world is fucked and our dying heroes must return just enough to push things out of the current slump (the second game is more politically complex, involving alliances and turncoats, but also token cops, golems and werewolves). It feels more like an endless return to tradition, yearning for the revival of revamped manly spellswords (re: sages and meat wizards, above) through guy-on-guy violence; i.e., so-called “real men” paradoxically being made up—amounting hilariously to “ancient” Nazi frottage the likes of which would make even Cockrub Warriors green with envy (and undoubtedly rub off on them)! Gay and/or Nazi, there’s no avoiding crucifixion (a classical punishment by the Romans); the best Bungie’s West can hope for is dignity in defeat, mid-stigmata:

(source: Mythipedia)

Aping Caesar and Jesus in and on the same surfaces and thresholds (the same bodies fighting on the same battlefields), Myth is simply Capitalism taken to its logical conclusion: a giant zombie eating itself (more on this idea specifically during “The Monomyth” conclusion).

Like Tolkien, there’s also a progression between world wars as Bungie presents them. In Myth I, life is repeatedly stressed as appallingly cheap, in-game (a fiscal strategy of nations trading resources through manpower as efficient profit); in Myth II, such sacrifices are demanded, presuming a miracle rescue unfolding, last-second, on the cusp of total destruction. Such strategies are less “new” and more translated by capital out of older forms hitting on the same cycles; i.e., into cartoon versions of the past with a hauntological flavor evoking capital operating as usual. Everything is solemn and funeral in a richly developed world—one laid to waste over and over through evocations of its own routine destruction illustrating capital in small, mapped out, told through ghosts of “Rome” and “Gay Caesar.” The game (and its palimpsests) are very consistent in this respect, and it’s here we see how things are portrayed from a hypercanonical, nigh-Biblical perspective.

From a dialectical-material standpoint, recall that monsters are poetic lenses that argue back and forth per the dualistic storage (and optional irony) of values, taboos and trauma; they share the same spaces as liberation and enslavement, exploitation and agency. Here, Myth‘s usage/reception is strictly canonical, but also divided in two perfect sides; i.e., Nietzsche’s dialectic of Apollo and Dionysus, unironically blaming degeneracy and ressentiment for the fall of civilization, while resorting to such methods to keep things the same: a hero must die.

Faced with the reality of how far he has fallen inside the fascist cult of death eating empire from within, Balor the former statesman and protector (still wearing his white armor) sees himself as a human that became a zombie—e.g., like He-Man realizing he’s Skeletor—but also a rat, a vampire, an “incorrect” outlaw not-man: queer vermin without prestige, but still a giant to topple/gang rape (exhibit 41a) during the Beowulf-style, master/apprentice’s undead kayfabe momentum shift; i.e., struck with Alric’s crystal logic as its own kind of mirror argument

For all the sorcery that we have told to thee
They call us demons from Hell […]
I’m not burning, look inside
Crystal Logic’s what you’ll find (Manilla Road’s “Crystal Logic,” 1983).

that, as it happened to all his generals, now awaits Balor, too! In short, Alric and the Nine are good doubles—Jedi-like witch cops given total power to police their fascist, wicked-witch, false-rebellious brethren through moderacy and guilt, but also anything associated with them; i.e., anything that isn’t aligned with Alric and the sacrosanct West. Shamed, Balor bowing his head, exposes his neck to Alric as Hitler does to his enemies: the Roman fool falling on his sword through ritual suicide. So does the crown (and its power) fall back into the usual owners’ hands.

It’s important to remember that canon equivocates Communism (and queerness) with such a downfall. These comparisons happen despite overtly Communist stereotypes not existing in the first game (the sequel, as we shall see, explores different avenues for bigotry in its evil, anti-Semitic generals). Instead, the latter is blamed for said decay by design. And why shouldn’t it? Inside a world divided as “the Light” and “the Dark,” nuance isn’t even a thing of the past; it arguably doesn’t exist! Communism takes nuance; Capitalism does not.

To it, the Nine are also tyrants, but “good” ones who gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss (making Balor our himbo girl boss/Wicked Witch of the West). The decay is treated as inevitable; i.e., a Cycle of Kings whose invariable heroes foist the same arguments onto the audience—of good times leading to weak men, to bad times (thanks to gay men giving into “darkness”), to strong men (who reject the darkness)—merely passing the mantle of power back and forth. Its “solution” is merely a circle-jerk, one disturbingly similar to Western liberal democracy under Pax Americana, “aping Rome” per its circular ruins but also its circular tyrants wearing the same crowns: war is bad, then good again (re: Howard Zinn’s “Private Ryan Saves War,” 1998).

(source: Mythipedia)

Bungie’s centrist treatment of war is a cycle, then, one meant to perpetuate itself (thus Capitalism) through tyrants good and bad. In short, no sacrifice is too great to maintain empire’s endless coronations; there is only pure good and pure bad committing atrocity after atrocity against themselves, Alric emerging among the goodly Nine to become a god-king haunted by Caesar as Brutus was: “Once we have recovered the Ibis Crown,” he declared, “Llancarfan will once more be the seat of the Cath Bruig Empire with myself as Emperor. The people will draw strength from me and we will go forth and strike down our enemies. Once they have been defeated we will rebuild the Empire to its former glory” (source: Mythipedia).

Bear in mind, this is from the second game, one where the wise old seer—having formerly chastised Darth Vader in service to empire and the elite—takes up the same mantle of empire; i.e., to overcome the guilt at killing his former friend: Balor a childhood hero out of Alric’s time as a boy that Soulblighter haunts the old man’s dreams with: “You killed my friend!”

To it, Alric the aging monarch lives unusually long like Beowulf or Aragorn do—though less long than Methuselah from the Bible, because Myth treats such lifespans as unnaturally gained; i.e., bad sacrifices, not good ones whose “proper magic[9]” lasts just long enough to let the hero live and die as good, then return from the grave as bad Fallen Lords, wielding evil magics (“and their terrible sorcery was without equal in the West,” source: Mythipedia). These mirror the good while being visibly stronger than them, thus threatening all the genocide Connacht (and his ilk) had to do, once upon a time. It’s imperial DARVO in action, dredging up the past to obfuscate, then rebury it. In time, Alric will return as the Leveler for some other Gandalf to sacrifice (with no attempt by Bungie to suggest state shift, the cycle optimistically going on forever—a blind critique hitting the nail on the head by illustrating Capitalism as well as Bungie does).

As part of the same apologia, this alternate, “legitimate” bloodline is, itself, “ripped off.” Aping Tolkien’s Return of the King by having Aragorn—once a nameless ranger wandering the wilds—miraculously return and restore Gondor and its “legitimate” bloodline[9a] to a former imaginary glory (to challenge Sauron, the ghost of the counterfeit), its inevitable collapse, post-Tolkien, is arguably what paralyzed Balor when looking into Alric’s magic stone: his future death, failure, or both suggested through a meta continuation of the same graveyard palimpsest (re: “all our yesterdays”).

Seeing the Vandals coming for “Rome” once again (with Alric resembling a Khan[10] in his sequel attire, above, and the white-Indian barbarians he sends for “Caesar” triggering the final boss into paralysis), said empire is the shameful result of Connacht’s secret weakness[11] laid bare. Exposed, the tyrant’s DARVO/obscurantist façade crumbles due to an internalized conflict of interest and, like a deer caught in headlights (re: Top Dollar with Eric), Balor momentarily freezes in place. Trapped helplessly inside his armor long enough for the remaining warriors of the Light to behead him, his Brutus-style murderers proceed to throw Balor’s severed head into a giant pit. Similar to the One Ring being tossed into Mount Doom, the volcano scapegoat (exhibit 41a2) constitutes an act of banishment, but also forgetting through live burial. The world is saved and balance restored… for a time.

In turn, whatever power the state presents as terrorist or counterterrorist flows back into “Rome,” the mother country a predatory matter of funneling resources towards its invisible rulers. Myth recuperates fascism, mid-crisis, through vampirism as queer-coded Red Scare, Capitalist Realism blaming Communism by conflating it with Balor’s feral terrorist antics; i.e., per the man and his armies’ Nazi-Communist pastiche: representing Communism by the West’s false, “horseshoe” equivalency with fascism. Thus fascism defends capital and profit/rape while colonizing empire as a profitable (repetitive) matter of centrism and praxial inertia—of balance maintained not just through cops and victims, but “good cop, bad cop” and fascism/Orientalism; i.e., ultimately playing ball for the elite behind the curtain.

To be sure, these uniforms exist in non-fascist varieties (e.g., so-called “gay Nazis” mirroring a “leather daddy” aesthetic). Here, though, Myth tokenizes Imperialism with more steps, leading to the usual historical-material doubles’ liminal, chiastic recursions and collocations echoing the same liminal hauntologies of war and their grim harvests (e.g., the German Reichsadler vs the American imperial eagle, but also Nazi outfits vs fetish-gear “mil spec” and “Scottish” warriors, below); i.e., inside a Cycle of Kings’ outdoor infernal concentric pattern, “I have begun to plant thee and will labor / To make thee full of growing” (source). Since Shakespeare, kings are routinely propped up, only to be cut down, watering the soil of the elite’s countryside with the blood of squashed mosquitoes.

As such, obscurantism’s inherited confusions borrow and combine strongmen from different mythological backgrounds to camouflage capital with. Myth‘s extensive dramatis personae—its four Fallen Lords (not including Balor, Satanic ruler of the Four Horsemen, in this case) and nine avatara (the latter mirroring Tolkien’s nine Ringwraiths, “doomed to die”)—are no different; i.e., both sides make up aging “boners” to grow courageously and “fall” ignominiously as Balor does, all while mirroring Macbeth on par with “shadows of Caesar.” It’s Capitalism with daddy issues and a hard-on for “Celtic” reinvention (re: Connacht, the province of Ireland; Mel Gibson’s Braveheart and imaginary Scotland; but also Macbeth through different performances, above). All operate through Capitalism as the ghost of “Rome” (re: fascism), one whose bugbears frightfully emerge out of an imaginary greatness that never quite existed.

In turn, Bungie’s cathartic, Radcliffean banishing—of the gay Nazi skeleton in the closet—stretches into yesterday coming back around; i.e., a canceled future relegated to the endless, regicidal treachery of an imaginary Scotland well at home in Shakespeare’s “Scottish Play” (and throwing in a smorgasbord of other warlike theatres; re: Tolkien and Lovecraft):

For brave Macbeth (well he deserves that name),
Disdaining Fortune, with his brandished steel,
Which smoked with bloody execution,
Like Valor’s minion, carved out his passage[12]
Till he faced the slave;
Which ne’er shook hands, nor bade farewell to him,
Till he unseamed him from the nave to th’ chops,
And fixed his head upon our battlements (source).

It’s very heteronormative and sadistic, but also flagellative—mortifying the flesh in ways just between “the boys” (no homo): evil Scottish Daddy ≈ Bungie’s doomed Connacht, the same candle to extinguish and castle on Plato’s cave wall (I write, in the dark, with Satie on and the only light coming from my monitor). It’s pervasive—an abusive, sports-style relationship, passing the baton, the crown, etc, where such embedded, convergent disorders (take your pick) express through the “generous,” addictive giving of strength that keeps the battered “housewives” (men) coming back for sloppy seconds: to kill whoever wears the crown, but also those who work with them, cannibalizing workers for the state and billionaires during the usual arterial spray’s formidable range (sanguine ejaculate).

Such doubles aren’t intrinsically “bad”; e.g., I can go walking with the rabbits around where I live to see that side of Zeuhl splintered off from the tyrant they eventually became (they loved rabbits); i.e., we can play with such things ourselves differently than Bungie does.

As for Bungie, their latent homoeroticism flavors a canonical usage of the zombie tyrant’s apocalypse; i.e., as someone to summon and tear apart again through the usual martyred hyphenations. Called to, “Caesar” the appointed sacrifice understandably throws a tantrum, Brutus and the boys wrestling the spontaneous paraplegic to the ground before completely dismembering him; e.g., not just Balor the Leveler but older stories like The Ronin Warriors (exhibit 41a2, next page) riffing on the same tyrant’s fascist rise and fall: evil Jesus (the Wandering Jew)/Lord Humongous linked to capital and to Capitalist Realism dipping the Black Veil to tease absolute ruin among the Gothic castle’s trembling vanishing point. Instead of an explained supernatural (re: Radcliffe), the supernatural (or draconic, vampiric) becomes dogmatic through Capitalist Realism’s undead zombie heroes and tyrants.

In turn, the neoliberal refrain imitates older ones: the fascist in-group’s eponymous solidarity uniting against an “outside” menace re-envisioned by Mussolini, then Hitler aping America’s Hollywood (the Nazis adored American media—inspired both by Charlie Chaplin, leatherstocking tales and cheap spy novels, but also Edward Bernays’ ministry of propaganda): “Unite, thus keep the money (and mythical, dogmatic merchandise) moving while capital enters crisis and decay!” Instead of conceptualizing Communism as an alternate, separate solution to capital’s waves of collapse, it’s easier for Bungie—those under the spell of Capitalist Realism—to immediately visualize the world ending because Caesar and his generals have come home, seeking revenge (think “Revelations” and rapture, except with less angels and more warlords; i.e., a Ragnarok variation of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse).

To it, “the myth of Gothic ancestry endured because it was useful” applies to the elite “culling the herd” through Bungie, the former relying on such banishing rituals by the latter to make children and young adults (usually boys) fall in love with magical warriors once more—the usual sort, sacrificing themselves to save the world from “evil”; i.e., fascism/ghosts of “Caesar” granted all manner of cultural elements that white (middle-class) saviors playing the white Indian fall back on, sold to different age brackets whiling punching spectres of Marx in the bargain.

Similar to Myth, all embody and conscript younger and younger recruits against a demon, Nazi-Communist foe; e.g., grizzled warriors or “teenagers with attitude”; i.e., outcasts during the monomyth having Promethean potential. Like Arthur’s magic coconuts, the Promethean name of the game is archaeological wish fulfillment: “find anachronistic, incongruous armor and weapon; fight evil, get girl.” Evil servants summon destruction, reviving Caesar or Medusa-as-Marx, etc, doubling state hegemons (e.g., Captain Planet vs Captain Pollution).

Then, as Dayman fights Nightman, canon prioritizes assimilation through misfits and in-group outsiders (the fascist recruiter targeting broken homes that still have in-group class and race privilege); i.e., through occult-tinged stories operating in defense of “Rome” from its perceived “evil” self; re: the Wandering Jew having Communist and fascist elements (more on this in “No Fury”). Villains are prolific through profit the same way that heroes are; i.e., comparable to Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces, we have per the Promethean Quest a Villain of a Thousand Faces. The heroes are usually Puritanical and bland; the villains are Nazi comfort food[13]—a buffer or drug to take the edge off.

(exhibit 41a2: The fate of Balor the Leveler and Emperor Tulpa[14] is essentially the same: bodily dismemberment by a team of allies, whose allegiance is not certain [with Tulpa having his own band of dark warlords using the same armor that the Ronin Warriors do—indeed, coming from the same emperor’s body as originally housing all of them]. Per Walpole’s Capitalocene/ghost of the counterfeit, Balor and Tulpa are undead tyrants haunting composite war machines; i.e., giant suits of armor delivering class commentaries on systemic issues/material conditions that speak to particular allegories the commentators [authors] might not be fully aware of, concerning the world around them. Regardless, each follows the myth of Osiris as Promethean, the giant to assemble through mad science [“magic”] and then disassembled through the same methods weaponized by false rebels “saving the world”; i.e., reversing power to a seemingly self-destructive degree, the pilots grow angry to a perceived slight, one that Caesar must pay for in blood, thus whitewash empire: “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!”

Similar to Count Dracula’s revival, the dead king is resurrected in pieces; only by taking him back apart can the curse be “ended.” In canonical narratives, this disassembly requires a military alliance and feats of legendary strength by a host of great warriors, surrounding and not just stabbing “Caesar” to death, but hacking him to pieces through the metaphor of gang rape. To achieve this, they must paralyze him, generally by showing him something he doesn’t want to see; re: his former greatness that he has forgotten, but also fallen from. Like Top Dollar, Balor confronts his humanity on the Aegis, only to realize that he’s lost it and, in effect, poisoned the land and all his friends. He freezes in shame and is beheaded, his armies collapsing as a result [versus Tulpa, who—after absorbing the hero, Ryo—is paralyzed by the spirit of virtue long enough for the other warriors to cleave him to pieces (temporarily embodying the fire of the gods to do so). Lifting the evil curse, the giant armor vanishes and the legendary ronin become ordinary boys once more, Ryo resurrected through the equally-deus-ex-machina power of the Jewel of Life].

By comparison, camping the freezing procedure reverses it in ways that don’t seek to scapegoat anyone; i.e., camp subverts what’s happening as a matter of dogma to expose the bourgeoisie manipulating everyone. Keep that in mind when we examine Balor’s loyal servant, Soulblighter.)

Speaking to the giant’s dismemberment, Myth‘s battles are incredibly violent. “Casualty,” states the battlefield announcer for one death, and “Casualties!” for two (or more). Meanwhile, powerful explosions and chain-reaction spells of fearsome black magic rock the countryside, ripping entire regiments apart (note: the mechanisms of dwarves and shades—Bungie’s appointed demolition experts and self-serving necromancers—have an anti-Semitic and fascist flavor to them). Post-detonation(s), heads soar like soccer balls and severed limbs (and guts) sail and spin through the air, raining blood before bouncing across the ground as shrapnel. And while that might not seem terribly impressive nowadays, back then the rudimentary physics and blood-spattered mayhem were positively ground-breaking (the developers would go onto revolutionize console FPS games [and ultimately eclipse Myth‘s sleeper-hit status] by making Halo: Combat Evolved, in 2001)!

Part of Myth‘s allure is how it puts the player at the helm when the stakes feel so high (thus allowing for feats of great bravery in the face of certain death as, itself, a performance—one reenacted from Beowulf to the Western, the villain generally more fun to watch while “David” beats “Goliath”; e.g., Allan Rickman upstaging Tom Selleck, in 1990’s Quigley Down Under, despite the script requiring that he lose the fight). Like a director and a general, you can view the action from any angle, slowing time down or speeding it up. It’s visceral, glorious and bleak—clearly inspired by Braveheart, two years previous, but also Tolkien and Lovecraft’s own fictions: an uphill battle against the forces of darkness, but presented as abject, gross, and medieval in ways that combine the best of all these authors and their playground worlds. Regular formations generally give way to herding your men into loose groups that adopt a more guerrilla-style approach to things. Leading your enemy into traps is preferable to frontal assaults, where mounting casualties are bound to happen (the trick to victory is avoiding the deaths of men you cannot afford to replace[15]).

To all of that, it’s truly a young (tom)boy’s dream come true (I was eleven when the game came out, playing it for hours-upon-hours); i.e., a chance to be like Mel Gibson or Peter Jackson (who had yet to emerge outside splatter-house circles): directing big-scale fantasy battles, only save the footage, viewing it later to your heart’s content!

The basic problem with Myth (or any such refrain ordering things in military language) is that its centrist conflict falls into Tolkien’s cartographic approach to war, thereby acclimating the player to the role of the general sacrificing his men (or hers—I daresay I spent as much time deliberately blowing up my own troops as I did beating the game): a story between good versus evil that is forever in conflict, dividing things into “pure” evil and good on open yawning battlefields that become bleakly entertaining on further retellings.

For example, Tolkien’s pure-evil goblins[16]—and their misuse of mad science to develop battlefield weapons that could kill a great many people at once—also describes the dwarves that the player controls in Myth; i.e., Tolkien’s abstraction of real-world horrors the author himself experienced during WW1 becoming rehashed first through LotR‘s WW2 allegory and then by Bungie’s own blind parodies of both world wars retold again. Stuffed with more and more fireworks for the crowd, the Battle of the Five Armies becomes Helm’s Deep becomes [insert Myth level, here]: the Promethean Quest becoming a morbid chase for the most glorious death(s) on the field.

Across all of them, though, the undead king—the fascist, now-corrupt skeleton lord—is always coming home, denoting a buried, systemic problem even when things were “good.” Restoring balance and returning things to normal through equal force is entirely the point; i.e., something to canonize and camp; e.g., Walpole’s crumbling of the dark castle like a bad dream to conveniently reveal the fair castle underneath: a fairytale restoration of the status quo to its proper rulers, per the West vs the Fallen Lords aping the Allies vs the Axis Powers carried into similar fictional echoes of past wars that Walpole tuned into, and Shakespeare, and so on, made entirely cartoonish in neoliberal forms; e.g., Castle Greyskull vs Snake Mountain, King Randor vs Skeletor, or the Belmonts vs Dracula, etc.

Like those examples, Bungie illustrates the status quo, in centrism, as being the spectacle of raw theatrical combat, itself endlessly occurring between good and evil’s notably unpeaceful transfer of power between rulers; i.e., the chase of endless profit abusing a finite web of life inside a romanticized, imaginary past—one that distracts viewers from ongoing state abuses occurring in the present. Within this ghost of the counterfeit, there are no moral actions, only moral teams that come from the same source: “good” empire and the ghost of the noble bloodline as something to defend from “bad” empire and the ghost of the tyrant in zombie form “cutting in line.”

This effectively makes centrist narratives like Myth genocide apologia, relegating war to an eternal struggle on faraway lands that curiously resemble Western Europe. It is not a solution, but a mapped form of tired, fatal military optimism that prolongs war by virtue of its mythical necessity and essentialism: “good or bad, war must continue.” So when evil ghosts of the haunted past rear their ugly heads, canonically dogwhistle to marshal the hounds, doing so to “cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war” (a line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, a historical play)!

Point in fact, Myth‘s centrist nature is exposed by it being diegetically aware of this destructive, empire-comes-home reaping—something the sequel expounds upon when “true victory” is threatened once again as it always must be:

There are laws that govern the workings of the universe that have remained immutable for countless aeons. According to these laws, the forces of light and dark hold dominion over the world successively, the land belonging in turn to men, or to monsters.

Each cycle would be presaged by the appearance of a great comet, foretelling the rise of saviour or destroyer. Each golden age would give way to one of darkness, when foul things would stir beneath the earth, and evil spirits would plague the land. In turn, each dark age would fall to one of light; the evil would pass from the land just as the comet from the sky.

The saviours of each golden age were men who had risen to face the Dark and never turned away. They were men of unflinching heroism who would not rest until they had loosened the bloodless grip of wicked things which had dominated their lands. Many of these heroes were doomed to return in the following age as Fallen Lords, destroying all they had fought so hard to preserve (source: Myth Journals).

Such imperial apologia is Capitalist Realism par excellence. Action for its own sake (re: Eco), Bungie—not without a twinge of dry gallows humor—showcases the target audience (white, middle-class men) having fun amid the carnage while dressed up; i.e., through their fantasy avatars celebrating the unlikely winning of every battle, throwing up their arms and cheering as Ash’s forces do in Army of Darkness, but also Monty Python’s after they’re forced to eat Robin’s minstrels: “There was much rejoicing!” followed by a lackluster “Yay…”

The whole ordeal feels like a blind parody—frozen-if-productive (thus lucrative) Gothic history that only lends itself to sequel enterprises with the same kinds of action figures; i.e., regressing to brutal methods of self-preservation, their gory sagas further expounding on the process of abjection, coronating a dark king and a light king per the ghost of the counterfeit as a matter of transcontinental exchange—of world war all over again. This tyranny and regression applies to both sides capital has set up to fight, whose complexities amid simplicity we’ll continue to unpack in Myth‘s sequel, Soulblighter.

Before we do, let’s summarize the Cycle of Kings per Myth‘s unironic execution: Good men must decay and resort to barbarism to fend off the barbarism of evil men; empire must rebuild, a good king chosen to lead the people invariably towards destruction again (the “last” battle, next page); good king must show the bad king the truth of the cycle, thus force him to face the music (re: it’s time for him, the sacrifice, to die) in “a lesson in humility”: “bend over and take it up the ass ‘for the team’; rinse and repeat, keeping power always at the top.” In the interim, workers are ground up like fodder but not before the more privileged nerds among them get to play the false rebel cop, the berserk cartoon being the good king’s dutiful lapdogs, thus “kings for a day” themselves while seizing the day for their chicken hawk liege and—like a prequel to Attack on Titan (a thoroughly fascist show in its own right, reflecting in its creator’s closeted fascist antics[17])—cutting the giant to bits by charging directly at him (the opposite of Tim the Enchanter and the Killer Rabbit[17a]): “Thundercats, ho!”

Now that we’ve dissected Balor himself in Myth: the Fallen Lords, and explored the game’s fatal warrior mythos reviving Zombie Caesar on loop to uphold Capitalist Realism, let’s unpack the above cycle (and its double standards) through the sequel; i.e., Myth II: Soulblighter, whose queer, monstrous-feminine elements are even more obvious (and problematic).

For starters, Balor had a lieutenant called Soulblighter who served with him in life under the human name, Damas. Before they turned to the Dark, both men actually knew of the inevitable corruption that awaited them, going from babyface to heel, kayfabe-style, as time went on:

Damas was Connacht’s lieutenant during the Wind Age and was his closest friend. Thus he was told of Connacht’s knowledge that he would be the next incarnation of the Leveler and so was asked to help destroy or hide away magical artifacts that may help him after he turns. Damas then found immortality through various rituals and other practices, notably removing his nose, lips, eyelids, and multiple things from inside his body (source: Mythipedia).

As we’ll see going forwards, Damas is Soulblighter the same way that Connacht is Balor through the monomyth and its reversal, during the Promethean Quest. But Soulblighter (and similar Conan-style caricatures, below) yield monstrous-feminine elements have their own racist, anti-Semitic/Orientalist flavor that Balor largely does not.

(artist: Dan Dos Santos)

Onto “Myth: the Fallen Lords, part two: Soulblighter“!

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Footnotes

[1] “Caesar” being a cryptonym/dogwhistle for “Nazi,” but also a false equivalency for “Communists”; i.e., the horseshoe argument, conflating “czars”—literally a respelling of “Caesar”—for complicated revolutionaries like Lenin and Stalin (men attached to state abuse, but also valid attempts at liberation from said abuse while pushing imperfectly towards development).

[2] As I write in Volume One:

The queerness of someone would have been permitted insofar as they were granted an exception as a person of means; e.g., a politician, general or aristocrat of some kind wouldn’t be taken to task for refusing to follow the canonical laws… provided they didn’t “pull an Oscar Wilde” and make their activities open to the public. For example, as Brent Pickett of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy writes on homosexuality and the ancient world (which involves the canonical codes we’re addressing in the modern world through reimagined forms), “Some persons were noted for their exclusive interests in persons of one gender. For example, Alexander the Great and the founder of Stoicism, Zeno of Citium, were known for their exclusive interest in boys and other men. Such persons, however, are generally portrayed as the exception. […] Given that only free men had full status, women and male slaves were not problematic sexual partners. Sex between freemen, however, was problematic for status” (source, 2020).

Per modern fantasy stories that capitalize on closeted things, Tolkien hinted at bondage, whereas someone like Terry Goodkind has openly pedophilic villains because the horrors of empire are extratextually out in the open; i.e., that openly violate the kinds of moral arbitrations that a global murderer like the Watcher wouldn’t pause to entertain! In the late 20th and 21st centuries, then, evil isn’t a black unspeakable shape; it’s ugly and rarefied in ways Tolkien wouldn’t dare to speak out loud (re: “the love that dare not speak its name!”). Bungie does the same thing as Goodkind, albeit in a videogame format singing praises (the tyrant’s plea) to such undead hedonists and their awful deeds.

[3] Case in point, Shakespeare would call such likenesses “walking shadows,” the heroic history’s routine rise and fall seemingly already written out and commented on rather glumly (to say the least) by Macbeth: “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (source). With Bungie, it’s all the same mixture of witchcraft, prophecy and murder—Hecate (the Fates, relaid as witches) reminding kings, but also “kings” (the middle class), that they’re rather fucked; i.e., dead and dickish: “something wicked!” The Watcher is wicked, but merely a dark reflection that suggests the Legion are, too, and will be again when they rise from the grave!

[4] I.e., by the audience, in general. While I’d say, “all’s fair in love and war” as far as killing the Watcher goes, the target audience (white straight men) is effectively killing themselves and theirs; i.e., on par with Arthur and Mordred, or some such “end times/Second Coming.”

[5] For an illuminating counterexample of such terrorist argumentation (re: counterterrorism reversing the binary in service to workers), consider Robert B. Asprey’s 1994 exhaustive and informative book, War in the Shadows: the Guerrilla in History.

[6] Comparable to werewolves in appearance, a medieval cryptonym for rape, sodomy and bestiality, but also raw, deviant, non-English sexuality as warlike; i.e., anti-Semitism in the flesh; e.g., Alcide from True Blood.

[7] These stories are expressed between the first game and the second. From the first, the Narrator writes,

The Watcher drove his army without rest through the fleeing remnants of Rabican’s forces and into Seven Gates. We are there now, inside the pass, where he then clashed with The Deceiver on his way east. The bodies of the undead are everywhere, melted and broken. It seems inconceivable that anything could have survived. I don’t know why he attacked The Deceiver, unless somehow he found out what was going on in Silvermines.

One of the veterans said that these two had it out after the battle for Tyr, twelve years ago, and that the Watcher barely survived. I have a feeling the real reasons for what happened today go back even farther than that. Whatever the case, while the battle raged only a few miles away and we thought the Watcher was coming for us next, I was glad nobody had asked me to carry his damned arm (source: Mythipedia).

From the second, the Narrator (different character, same voice actor) writes,

Twelve Motion Jeweled Skull says he was last here sixty years ago, fighting alongside the likes of Durak and Turgeis with Burning Steel. They caught The Deceiver and the remnants of his army in this very defile and here destroyed them. Today the Dramus River is frozen solid, but back then it was a muddy torrent of melted snow and ice brought on by the eruption of Tharsis. The Deceiver was plunged into the river and swept far downstream, his scepter sinking to the bottom. I asked Twelve Motion why King Alric believes The Deceiver will throw in with our lot. He explained how The Deceiver has been frozen in a half-death beneath the river, clinging to life through sorcery alone, with no power left to free himself. The King believes that if we were to revive him and return the scepter, the focus of his power, he would no doubt join our cause (source: Mythipedia).

and

Does Soulblighter seek to enlist the aid of yet another of his former allies? It seems unlikely once you consider the intense hatred the rest of the Fallen Lords had for The Deceiver. Only Balor seemed capable of holding them together, and even he was not always successful. Many stories from the Great War tell of open discord between the Fallen Lords. Now we will take advantage of it (source: Mythipedia).

Across titles and matches, the “enemy of my enemy” quality of these stories only compounds, insofar as all share the same space and time, and rely not just on the same characters doubled, but their social relationships marrying reality to legend (as the chronotope does); i.e., pertaining to old rivalries between them as a matter of cross-generational intrigue. It’ methodical backdrop likewise works to get more millage out of footnotes material; i.e., in ways that have it playing out on various in-game registers—the journal entries, but also on the battlefield as an extension of the developers’ imaginations and the players’ controlling the same avatars for their own reasons. They can change allegiance at the drop of a hat, doing so as a matter of history conveyed by us, as cruel gods, controlling them, and they us, in return.

In short, such stories-in-stories invite multimedia speculation by different groups consuming the same basic material; i.e., allowing me to return to it, years afterwards, to dissect and camp Bungie’s built world inside my own book project. Their canon is mine to camp, one author to another.

[8] Victory music does play after each level, but it always sounds like someone died—a dirge for the world’s saddest funeral, one aimed at incels and MGTOW types (who would eventually emerge, in force, to become endemic to internet discourse: during Gamergate, less than two decades later).

[9] It’s worth noting that the magic of the avatara and the shades are virtually identical, color-coded differently like the Jedi and Sith’s famous lightsabers (though in Myth‘s case it’s blue and green, mirroring the ancient Babylonian racing teams: “Bread and circuses, that’s all the common people want,” source).

[9a] Said lineage’s patrilineal descent is feted and restored through the usual medieval, racist, might-makes-might procession of cautionary violence Tolkien worshipped and reified in his own canon; re: Dr. Stephen Shapiro writing to Reddif.com in 2003 about Lord of the Rings, the movies:

Tolkien’s good guys are white and the bad guys are black, slant-eyed, unattractive, inarticulate and a psychologically undeveloped horde. In the trilogy, a small group, the fellowship, is pitted against a foreign horde and this reflects long-standing Anglo-European anxieties about being overwhelmed by non-Europeans. This is consistent with Tolkien’s Nordicist convictions. He thinks the Northern races had a culture and it was carried in the blood (source).

In openly fascist disputes, the status quo cannibalizing itself (usually through outliers); e.g., the Montagues and the Capulet’s “curse on both [their] houses”; i.e., the imposter is projected onto a “false” European, with the good side recruiting tokenized agents to take the pledge to fight to restore things to working order. Such hunger games are carried forward through capital’s hauntological (Gothic) fakeries reviving unironic forms in the present: dragons, kings, crowns, etc, as “legitimate ” yet thoroughly bastardized, forged, imaginary claims/assimilation fantasies unto power exchanged as it presently is arranged, but relaid in abject, cast-off forms.

Whatever the form, it’s a Russian-roulette-style death lottery during capital’s manufactured scarcity—a trial by fire/blood sacrifice when capital decays, enacted out of desperation and entitlement; i.e., a mad monarch through the usual blood oaths and tithes “gone bad”; e.g., House of the Dragon (2022) and Rhaenyra, the tokenized queen (above, channeling Elizabeth Bathory instead of Count Dracula), being a Nazi vampire regent (the scapegoat) tied to these legendary beasts’ superstitious symbolizing of persecution mania and raw displays of power, but also legendary mass/serial killers defending territory to absurd extremes. It’s a massive game of chicken, a regressive, reactionary metaphor for the state eating itself through the rarefied symbol of great houses, passed down as bastardized inheritance like a kind of dangerous pet imprinting onto new, arbitrarily “worthy” inheritance. Whoever wins, workers lose; i.e., “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss!” Same goes for Gondor and Aragorn, the Cath Bruig and Alric, or Omadon the Red Wizard and Sir Peter (re: The Flight of Dragons, another older story about taming dragons and riding to war in the king’s name of home defense), etc. Dragons or no dragons, zombies or no zombies, Man Box is Man Box, tyrants are tyrants, dogma is dogma.

[10] The second game uses “noble savage” Orientalism to tokenize itself; i.e., through a white savior wearing non-white attire (in this case, “Asian”) and calling themselves “avatara” to uphold “pure Western values.” It’s fascist on its face, but presents as moderate; i.e., fascism waiting to happen.

[11] This could technically be guilt at committing genocide, but the game is pro-genocide, instead shaming Connacht for a lack of vigilance.

[12] In this sense, good kings are just as brutal as bad ones, and generally to preserve the status quo as built upon past cruelty that has become known as “good” over time:

Soulblighter has done the unthinkable. With his army scattered in disarray, he fled up through the Eye of Tharsis and into the very bowels of the earth. I can hardly blame him. The sight of Alric hacking his way through the enemy, Balmung flashing in his hand, caused many of our own men to stand aside in awe (source: Mythipedia).

Alric the seer in Myth becomes the giga-Chad in Myth II, the slayer of demons who wakes up and remembers that he is Beowulf and our resident “Grendel” is no match for him: “Brutal, without mercy! But you, you will be worse… Rip and tear, until it is done!” It’s “might makes right,” committed by Pax Americana, Joe Biden projecting onto a fantasy world that looks and sounds like so many other fabrications; e.g., Aragorn and Sauron, Beowulf and Grendel, but also Arthur and Mordred, Henry V and Fortinbras, Paul Atreides and Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, and yes, Alric and Balor.

[13] With varying degrees of camp, vis-à-vis the jester in the king’s court doubling as his black knight/assassin; re: Bulgakov’s Satan and Begemot, Final Fantasy VI’s Emperor Gestahl and Kefka Palazzo, Star Wars‘ Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader, Myth‘s Balor and Soulblighter, Tolkien’s Morgoth and Sauron, Marlowe’s Satan and Mephistopheles, etc.

[14] The latter being Yokai tyrant, but also “tulpa” as a special kind of supernatural being; re (from the glossary):

egregore/tulpa (simulacrum)

An occult or monstrous concept representing a non-physical entity that arises from the collective thoughts of a distinct group of people (what Plato and other philosophers have called the simulacrum through various hair-splittings; e.g., “identical copies of that which never existed” being touched upon by Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality). The distinction between egregore and tulpa is largely etymological, with “egregore” stemming from French and Greek and “tulpa” being a Tibetan idea:

Since the 1970s, tulpas have been a feature of Western paranormal lore. In contemporary paranormal discourse, a tulpa is a being that begins in the imagination but acquires a tangible reality and sentience. Tulpas are created either through a deliberate act of individual will or unintentionally from the thoughts of numerous people. The tulpa was first described by Alexandra David-Néel (1868–1969) in Magic and Mystery in Tibet (1929) and is still regarded as a Tibetan concept. However, the idea of the tulpa is more indebted to Theosophy than to Tibetan Buddhism [source: Natasha L. Mikles and Joseph P. Laycock’s “Tracking the Tulpa: Exploring the “Tibetan” Origins of a Contemporary Paranormal Idea,” 2015].

The shared idea, here, is that monsters tend to represent social ideas begot from a public imagination according to fearful biases that are not always controlled or conscious in their cryptogenesis/-mimesis. In Gothic-Communist terms, this invokes historical-material warnings of codified power or trauma—including totems, effigies, fatal portraits, suits of armor, or gargoyles—projected back onto superstitious workers through ambiguous, cryptonymic illusions. For our purposes, these illusions are primarily fascist/neoliberal, as Capitalism encompasses the material world. It must be parsed/transmuted.

Infinite growth, infinite monsters; capital makes endless varieties to symbolize its usual exchanges!

[15] Troops survive into later battles, letting you rack up kills per unit; the more kills a unit has, the more powerful they become (while also being a possible nod to Gimli and Legolas’ kill count, at Helm’s Deep).

[16] Jadis hated the idea of playing D&D with me because I stated right of the bat, “This game is literally built on racial conflict—of good races, neutral races and bad races.” Saying this, I immediately wanted to play a pacifist, peace-loving Drow—the rare-and-elusive “good Drow.” Yet the rules didn’t really encourage it; the Drow had literally been made to be pure evil—more evil, indeed, than the orcs, which by that point had started to become good enough to ally with the traditional forces of good; i.e., the Men of the West (or some analogue compared to them). Simply put, their aesthetics were evil in a way similar to the post-WW2 depiction of Nazis had been popularized, but also disseminated through various forms of popular media. Instead of the black-and-red BDSM shtick of the torturous “vampire” warrior or something akin to that, you had black and purple, with an association with spiders, the underground, and dark and shady deeds connected to assassination, but also, oddly enough, sex appeal:

(exhibit 41b: Artist, top-left: Jonathan Torres; top-right: King of Undrock; mid-left: Vladimir Mineev; mid-right: source; bottom-left: Yeero; bottom right: Liang Xing.

Tolkien’s inconsistent fear of spiders stretch back to a childhood phobia of them. Nevertheless, he clearly disliked them enough to make two of the series only notable female antagonists [with any active presence in the narrative] female spiders: Ungolliant and Shelob. Both are abject examples of the Archaic Mother as a non-human, bug-like site of grotesque reproduction and Original Sin: the insect or spider broodmother. Yet, this ancient evil force is often personified in ways that has racialized flavors—e.g., the Drow as “evil, dark-skinned spider people” who stab you in the back, live in caves and practice ancient black magic.

Yet, the spider as a stigma animal is often tied to specific kinds of monsters inspired by the natural world. To that, it also could be argued that the concept of the vampire draws inspiration from the spider, which paralyzes its victims with venom before then drinking their life force while they are still alive [unlike many wasps, though, spiders are primarily hunters, not parasitoids; but the archetype is that of a “phallic woman” who tortures her male victims by eating them]. Nevertheless, the canonical idea of “dark skin equals evil” is often subverted in overtly sexual ways—or can be. Often, the granting of European-looking women dark skin, white hair [and fat asses; literally a PAWG—”phat ass white girl”] evokes a kind of “spectral blackface,” but also Fanon’s assimilation fantasy of “black skin, white masks” [e.g., the dark skin and pale hair of characters like Storm from X-Men or Elena from Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike, 1999]. There’s also an Amazonian “death mask” to the aesthetic in terms of a literal “war mask” being worn. Widowmaker’s spider visor helps her locate future victims: “Under the spider woman’s lurid gaze, there is literally nowhere for her prey to hide. She’s a widow-maker, a man-eater and a poisonous temptress dreamed up by horny, frightened men.”

[artist: Luis Salas]

Regardless of how you slice it, whenever dealing with personified stigma animals as weak or strong [the fascist framework], there’s a human connection that needs to be considered. In other words, you’ll need to rescue the animal from its abject bias of a current, ongoing struggle in order to humanize the person being assigned its canonically demonizing qualities. This goes for spiders, wolves, wasps, bats, leeches, snakes, etc; but also rabbits [exhibit 100a5] and prey animals as anglicized/demonized in always useful to the state. Under Gothic Communism, these animals are not sources of profit within a compelled centrist/good-vs-evil order of things; they symbolize a larger struggle against Capitalism’s mass exploitation of the entire living world. Sexual and gender-non-conforming anthropomorphism can recode how animals and humans are viewed in relation to each other—often through complicated satire, but also raw humor and pure, unadulterated cuteness. This ontological irony constitutes a parody of thought leaders, politicians and content creators who, in hindsight, look rather silly [and vindictive] trying to demonize animals simply existing as they normally do. Like queer people portraying themselves as demons that don’t actually harm anyone, the effect is functionally the same with the stigma animals they’re associated with.)

[17] Seldomusings’ “The Possible Disturbing Dissonance Between Hajime Isayama’s Beliefs and Attack on Titan‘s Themes” (2013). Certainly, anyone can point at the death and destruction Isayama depicts and say, “carnage is carnage.” The show still makes an appeal to fascism through carnage; e.g., the forlorn hope, charging stupidly and sadly into death; i.e., a heroic death cult made unironic through engagement with itself on different registers, but especially as a matter of interpretation between the audience and the show. There are characters in AoT who think that the hero, Eren Yeager, is correct, just as people outside the show think he is correct (or don’t care). In the end, Yeager conducts genocide, everything becoming a blood-soaked, thoroughly abject military campaign “debating with Nazis” sans camp. Sound familiar? Myth uses the same tragic sacrifices, siege mentality and kamikaze tactics to push towards a final solution that perpetuates itself. That’s not camp!

[17a] It’s DARVO obscuring things through an “oppression Olympics” that centers all the adversity around the usual side completing for the glory of self-sacrifice: weird canonical nerds. You see it in chess, the actual Olympics/competitive sports, e-sports, and any other field. Like a vampire, banks and other institutions/owners control such lifeblood as a matter of dogma, superstition and knowledge, but also material wealth and resources/employment positions and opportunities; i.e., as something to abject, medicalize and attack based on binarized, heteronormative (settler-colonial, Cartesian) profiles; e.g., intersex athletes (often of color) in the Olympics—with the actual ritual having eugenistic Nazi ties (Some More News’ “The Olympics Are Kinda Bad, Actually,” 2024) that lead to Red Scare and transphobia (Essence of Thought’s “Olympic Transphobia & The Red Scare,” 2024).

This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). 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 “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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

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

The Monomyth, part two: Beyond Castles; or, Criminals and Conquerors

“Et tu, Brutae?” (source).

—Julius Caesar to Brutus, Julius Caesar (c. 1601).

 

Picking up from where “Hollow Knight, part two” left off…

Continuing with the larger healing process (re: developing Gothic Communism) as viewed through perceptive zombie eyeballs, we’re now going to consider the fall of various heroes orating dogmatic sex, terror and force as undead. To that, until Capitalism evolves into something that doesn’t decay by design—and furthermore can hug Mother Nature instead of Capitalism and its Cartesian enforcers—a given cycle of decay is forever occupied by some dead-giveaway variant of the zombie tyrant preying on others; i.e., while returning from Hell to rape empire as a historical-material matter of unfinished business, of undead revenge inside a widening state of exception (not liberation): “A king has his reign and then he dies” is followed by “Behold, a pale horse!” To conquer death, they become it, then pursue a world already mapped from conquest they conquer again from the outside in (the foreign plot being a myth, of course—hence the name of the game we’ll look at with Myth: the Fallen Lords): Capitalism in decay.

“The Monomyth,” part two shall aim to examine that decay differently that we already have. So far we’ve already examined futile revenge per the heroic quest, followed by the man of reason through the monomyth, as well as tyrannical indoor spaces (castles) that serve a modern Promethean function (reversing power towards nature): Metroidvania closed space per the Archaic Mother. And while the Gothic castle is a formidable means of defense and assault, as well as cataloging older histories through motion, they’re far from the only ones.

For the rest of the “Monomyth” subchapter, then, we’ll consider several older (and less scientific) variants that emerge inside the circular ruin as less castle-like and more open; e.g., cities and battlefields (versus combat inside strictly closed spaces); i.e., Cartesian hubris is a bubble that, when the Imperial Boomerang comes back around to burst it in other forms of architecture, withers and exposes the illusory homestead as: currently (and always) in ruin, but also run by zombie versions of manly paragons having their revenge on Rome as having not only forgotten them, but abandoned them after a great sacrifice in the name of empire (Caesar’s ghost haunting Brutus).

The two reprobates we’ll consider are the crime lord and Zombie Caesar (and Caesar’s armies); i.e., as beings to paralyze by showing them the truth of their own blindness with our perceptive zombie eyeballs. In other words, when the Man comes around, don’t follow him; show him your Aegis!

We’ll examine one of each, starting with

• “‘Ruling the Slum’; or, Crime Lords, Police Tokenism and Sell-Outs (feat. The Crow and Steam Powered Giraffe)” (included in this post): Explores crime lords, in The Crow, as setting up the basic premise; i.e., of paralyzing the monomyth zombie tyrant as something to perform—by looking into the film, but also similar kinds of “punk” performances (e.g., cyber, steam, etc) that historically incur sell-out tokenism and police violence on and offstage, our example being Steam Powered Giraffe.
• “‘A Lesson in Humility’; or, Gay Zombie Caesars When the Boomerang Comes Back Around (feat. Myth: the Fallen Lords)“: Explores queer aspects to the undead warlord/Zombie Caesar in Myth: the Fallen Lords (and his token, anti-Semitic servant, in Myth II: Soulblighter); i.e., by diving into the game’s DARVO-style, empire apologia, effectively describing how empires-in-decay endlessly recolonize themselves in between monomyth fiction and non-fiction—not just with the raw mechanics of colonialism (chiefly armed conflict) stuck in a self-destructive loop, but spearheaded by past historical figures who, as current genocides committed by the good guys are abjected, return as fascist bogeymen to colonize empire from the outside in.

“Ruling the Slum”; or, Crime Lords, Police Tokenism and Sell-Outs (feat. The Crow and Steam Powered Giraffe)

“I did not hit her! It’s not true! It’s bullshit! I did not hit her! I did not! Oh, hi, Mark!” (source).

—Tommy, The Room (2004)

A legal notice about the historical, factual elements of this piece; i.e., those featuring both Steam Powered Giraffe and their own involvement in alleged pedophile Michael Reed: This piece falls under Fair Use according to statements of criticism, education and critique regarding literary material and matters of record about survived abuse; i.e., public statements the band has made about Michael, including claims of privately owned evidence to his indefensible actions—e.g., “The evidence presented to us in private is not something the band can turn a blind eye to. The band does not condone his actions” (source)—and testimony from anonymous sources involved with the abuse itself. None of these claims have been retracted, and you can find them easily online yourselves from the source links I provide.

To it, the point of this piece is not to say anything that is not already a matter of public record, nor it is to harm any of the parties involved purely for its own sake; it is to educate people about past historical events, prevent further abuse in the future, and educate my readers about the harms of Capitalism through Steam Powered Giraffe as a salient real-world example that ties into The Crow and my literary analysis of its own Gothic themes (rape, exploitation, murder, etc). This piece is not libel, meaning its statements have been written as true to the extent that I understand and have made them; it is neither unfounded, negligent in terms of research or information available, nor written in bad faith for the purposes of defamation, but rather serves pointedly and deliberately as literary criticism and activism made to raise awareness about sexual health and abuse in and out of fandom communities. —Perse

This section won’t just look at The Crow, but the relations of power orbiting about such characters (and their performances); i.e., as things that go beyond the larger themes expressed, in-text, bleeding into real life through the same kinds of costumes and architecture as half-real; e.g., the cyberpunk and steampunk decayed to become “the future of one moment that is now our own past” (source: “Progress versus Utopia; Or, Can We Imagine the Future?” 1982). To the latter, we’ll likewise look at sell-outs/tokenism here in regards to investigating conventions, theatre and fandoms to get to the bottom of sexual abuse as a matter of class character and activism stymied by profit: the case of Steam Powered Giraffe and Michael Reed. All of this occupies a shared performative space, one that connects between me, the band/Reed, and The Crow (exhibit 40k2).

(exhibit 40j2a: “He has power, but it is power you can take from him.” / “I like him, already!” Tokenism and police violence marry to rock ‘n roll counterculture, in The Crow. We’ll explore these recuperated [controlled opposition] elements not just with the film, itself, but the kinds of theatre it uses—namely Gothic poetics and music—to speak subversively about the regular abuse that workers [sex or otherwise] experience onstage and off.)

We’ll get to that. Keeping with zombie tyrants and the monomyth, our example for the crime lord is Top Dollar from The Crow, a man who—living in his ivory tower and passing down orders to his henchmen—burns Detroit to ashes year-after-year (the city seemingly never great, having been like all Gothic castles in decay “for too long” to remember such halcyon times). Doing so for his own sinister joy (the canceled future and death of the nuclear family unit), Top Dollar is very clear about this—making a speech about it, in fact: “The idea has become the institution; time to move on. […] I want you to light a fire so goddamn big the gods will notice us again, that’s what I’m sayin’! I want you boys to look me in the eyes one more time and say, ‘ARE WE HAVING FUN OR WHAT?'” He’s a gangster in a suit, lavishly adorned in the Gothic style of the day to entertain his guests going about their seedy business:

(exhibit 40j2b: In part, Top Dollar’s hideout stands for a demonic version of Trump Tower [which, itself, is simply a more boastful version of Capitalism in moderation—a vanity project advertising the owner]: the center of a dilapidated city bled dry. Detroit’s territories are divided up and policed, then fought over to coax money, drugs and weapons; i.e., towards the nucleus and through the giant structure’s vampiric throat, up and up to Top Dollar. It’s also a front, disguised as a club, whose musicians sport the countercultural façade of a latter-day speakeasy—the prohibited Satanic imagery and BDSM gear of a band playing with caged impunity on a stage ringed with security between them and the paying mob.

And directly upstairs, we’re shown the sprawling lifeblood of the city—converted into the usual merchandise and arranged along the same giant table like food. At the head of the table is a phone and Faustian business deals; i.e., the city’s central nervous system wired between its assigned underworld boss and his obvious-if-implied connections to City Hall and the police. The division between cops and robbers is a conservative myth, glorified by the movie’s nostalgic consumerism towards outlaw culture/music; i.e., as a school of disguise concealing the fact that all illustrate and serve capital until our titular vigilante—the movie’s outlaw folk hero, killer clown, Satanic musician—paralyzes the whole operation: by cutting the snake to ribbons with Top Dollar’s own supply [when the cops arrive, they threaten him in force: “That’s all she wrote! Move and we shoot!” Profit defends profit].)

In working for the state by climbing to the top of the trash heap, poor Top Dollar feels left behind. Marshalling the troops for another annual crusade (“The whole sky outta be red!”), he becomes caught up in his own DARVO-style mania and ability to outmaneuver his enemies, which eventually comes back to haunt him; i.e., destroying him through his own inability to confront and face the pain he’s caused: Eric.

(exhibit 40j2: To escape his pain, Eric struggles to return to the grave, only to be forced repeatedly back into the living world. At first eager for revenge, the act drains and tires him, making the climb towards Top Dollar more taxing and reluctant [facing predation a form of revictimization, one where Eric’s humanity makes him unable to fully handle Top Dollar’s apex-predator status]. The laying to rest of the wronged victim is a common Gothic trope, one predicated on the uncovering of systemic violence [usually aimed at women, in the classic novels]: criminogenic conditions, caused partly by Top Dollar [which is as far as the film goes with its critique of such things; i.e., the cops and he aren’t given an explicit connection—though they arrive rather fast when Top Dollar is under attack].)

From a dialectical-material standpoint, Top Dollar is a Gothic villain and Gothic villains represent capitalists or aspiring capitalists who are often blind to the true harm they cause others (and themselves) through the state; i.e., they, like the state, are functionally undead. The turning of displaced trauma back onto abusers, then, is incredibly traumatizing to them; i.e., reverse abjecting their own monstrous state of existence back at them, usually through sight.

For sex-positive workers, the black mirror is incredibly useful at transmitting messages that aren’t deadly for themselves, but turn their would-be killers to stone; i.e., “blinding” them with a lethal sense of iconoclastic shame they cannot recover from (or otherwise causing them to “glitch out” when seeing something that gives away their true intentions; e.g., cryptofascists). Once these villains’ mortality is exposed, a wider healing process can begin for the entire community affected by the villain’s widespread abuse through capital. Whether this abuse comes from fascists or neoliberals using capital, such mortality is often presented quite literally in Gothic morality arguments.

To that, The Crow presents its hero, Eric Draven, as a) an undead vigilante “painted up like a dead whore” who is hell-bent on avenging his fallen bride, and b) the hero who restores the devastated land around him by reversing the monomyth; i.e., coming out of Hell to avenge Persephone, then returning to her waiting for him at their gravesite. Despite the rampant destruction present in every direction, his (and our) ability to remember is incessantly compromised—fragmented, but also painful, like splinters. Simply put, Eric doesn’t remember what happened to him and his fiancé before he died (“I need you to tell me what happened to us!”), and much of what he retrieves is ultimately gathered in service of reviving those memories before moving on. Without meaning to, they serve as a kind of last-ditch weapon against the film’s final villain—the silver-bullet magic wish needed to retire Top Dollar for good and presumably return the city to a better time before the crime lord existed.

It’s important to remember that, while being an effective killer himself, Eric owes his avenger status to skills he lacked in life. Presumably given to him “on loan” by his crow overseer (a symbol of death and revenge), Eric’s guardian angel—its avatar, the bird—is wounded during the penultimate gun battle inside a ruined church. Weakening his own ties to the living world, Eric is then beaten in a rooftop duel with Top Dollar. True to form, the rogue backstabs Eric, who collapses while the other man brandishes a knife in his face (a fang to drain him with). Seemingly invincible, Top Dollar boasts “Every man’s got a devil, and you can’t rest until you find him,” going on to confess everything to the man who’s life he’s effectively ruined without having met or seen Eric before that night. He smiles, only happy when he’s hurting people, and—like Ledger’s Joker—he’s always smiling (a jester without the face paint, which he critiques Eric for using: “Nice outfit! Not sure about the face, though…”).

Furthermore, Top Dollar’s fang-like knife (above) reflects the light of the drawn blade back on the owner’s face, perhaps giving Eric an idea. To finally gain the upper hand, he hastily throws Top Dollar’s displaced abuse back at him: “Thirty hours of pain! I don’t want it anymore!” (next page, exhibit 40k1). Faced with a terrible trauma extending from himself in ways he normally needn’t confront, Top Dollar not only becomes blind; he bleeds from the eyes and mouth like a (soon-to-be) corpse (a parodic reversal of Catholic miracles/dogma, the vampire “throwing up” his food, his essence)! Stricken with grief, predator becomes prey and then falls from the chapel roof to his embarrassing doom.

By extension, workers in the real world can shame those in power by similar means; i.e., by using stories like The Crow to get their message across—an Aegis to turn against our enemies, forcing them to see the harm they normally cause being alienated from them by capital.

As they freeze, these banditti chiefs can be ignominiously absorbed into the cathedral stone, its gargoyles serving a grim, laughing reminder to their violent, stupid past spilling out of their bodies (“murder will out”); i.e., the bloodletting of the leech, releasing and redistributing their stolen power (and secrets) back into the community they harmed; e.g., like Father Schedoni’s grim confession, shortly before he dies, in The Italian. Let that be the bourgeoisie’s legacy as we move forward into a better future; i.e., their own abuses giving us the means to survive the material world (and canceled retro-futures) they rule from the shadows. In turn, our best revenge becomes our ability to develop Communism in spite of their doomed efforts to stop us. “You can’t kill the metal,” indeed!

(exhibit 40k1: Left: “Greed, chaos, anarchy. Now that’s fun!” announces the emotional stupidity of Top Dollar. “Just having fun,” he’s actually raping and killing people in person [“I think we broke her”] but also by proxy through his infantilized henchmen. On Top Dollar’s orders, the latter rape Shelly Webster and murder her fiancé, Eric, in cold blood on Devil’s Night [itself an aping of the Creature from Frankenstein being with Victor on his wedding night]. While this serves as a false flag for Eric to act on, his humanity prevents him from following through. By comparison, Capitalism has menticided Top Dollar so that he can’t help himself/can’t stop being stupid; i.e., driven vampirically by impulse through predatory positions of power until these inequities literally kill him: the drive for blood, for control, for rape. When he dies, it’s a relief, the laughing fool having killed and hurt so many people already in service of “the gods noticing him again” [the fascist appeal to the elite, in other words]. Of course, the movie frames the cops as the good guys, here; they’re not, and the basic principle of reverse abjection—the one that works so well on Top Dollar—also works on them, too. They’re not the invincible heroes they think they are!

Right: Metal lives on. BÜTCHER are a hybrid of many things that came before. As this reviewer from Osmose Productions puts it: 

Metal in the sense of the absolute riffing madness that ruled both the airwaves and the underground tape-trading scene during the late ’70s, through the genre-defining ’80s, and well into the early 90’s, BÜTCHER’s unique blend of metal music is certainly rooted in both German and US speed metal, but owes equally as much to proto-metal, hard rock, South-American and Australian black/thrash, NWOBHM […] and the Scandinavian cult from the early ’90s […] An acquired taste in these modern times then, but surely to be savored by the legion of metal maniacs that have an affection for everything that made the older eras of heavy music so magical in the first place [source]. 

The same troubadour holism applies to Eric, a rock ‘n roll musician whose own darkened output—his at-times humorous symphony of violence [“He winked at you? Musicians!”]—is generally set to music, in film. While his approach is generally of a dark ’90s revenge fantasy entertained by white middle-class men—i.e., the kind they either perform [e.g., in videogames] while listening to The Cure, Nirvana, and Bullet for My Valentine, or which they project onto media that demonizes crime by naturalizing it [the film’s dark impulses effectively a “tough on crime” narrative the original author, James O’Barr, wrote after his wife was killed by a drunk driver when he was 18]—the fact remains, these persons/auteurs don’t monopolize such theatrics; we can use them, too.

To that, the film doesn’t endorse blind revenge/revenge porn as nakedly as you might think. Yes, the movie is literally about revenge from beyond the grave: “People once believed that when someone dies, a crow carries their soul to the land of the dead. But sometimes, something so bad happens that a terrible sadness is carried with it, and the soul can’t rest. Then sometimes, just sometimes, the crow can bring that soul back to put the wrong things right.” Except, The Crow ultimately is about manifesting these feelings of revenge in a place where they can appear, before ultimately facing and letting them go: giving back through a kind of “charity vampirism.”

To that, Eric embodies O’Barr’s desire for revenge, but also his willingness to heal by processing grief as people so often do—by proxy and through monstrous scapegoats and personas. In an interview with Dike Blair, O’Barr explains the futility of revenge:

Basically, when I was 18, my fiancé was killed by a drunk driver. I was really hurt, frustrated, and angry. I thought that by putting some of this anger and hate down on paper that I could purge it from my system. But, in fact, all I was doing was intensifying it—I was focusing on all this negativity. As I worked on it, things just got worse and worse, darker and darker. So, it really didn’t have the desired effect—I was probably more fucked up afterwards than before I started. It was only after becoming friends with Brandon, experiencing his death, and seeing the film—perhaps 17 times now—that I finally reached what is currently called “closure” while visiting his grave in Seattle [source: “Shadows on the Wall,” 1994].

[source: Dan Heching’s “Eliza Hutton Breaks Silence 28 Years after Fiancé Brandon Lee’s Death,” 2021]

The best revenge—apart from acting out our abuse in ways we can taste and give voice to—is to remember the things we loved about ourselves as victims of capital [which Brandon Lee was, killed due to lax regulations (efficient profit) when working with blanks, on set: “There’s no such thing as a prop gun,” Eliza Hutton remarks, above]. Even if we don’t survive, these mementos will: “If the people we love are stolen from us, The way to have them live on is to never stop loving them. People die, buildings burn, but real love is forever.” That, not blind revenge, is the final message of the film. Closure is a choice when aiming for actions that help communities heal and expose their vampiric abusers [and systems] in the same breath.)

Such characters like Top Dollar are enabled by those around him—not just the henchmen, but also society at large when approaching the performance (and consumption) of such things. First, let’s unpack the dialectic-material realities present inside such stories that connect them to real-world conditions, then give an extratextual example (Steam Powered Giraffe, for our purposes).

In text, Eric defeats Top Dollar through the rememory process; i.e., a lost form of knowledge tied to death, trauma and the afterlife (re: “People once believed…”), but also a great sadness in the living world that survives him, once reassembled. Certainly the ghoulish goal of “re-excavating” the historical materials of the zombie/vampire (and other liminal gradients) is a worthy labor at all stages of development—its inception and execution.

This “corpse paint revival” starts with exposing our abuse as a matter of public knowledge known to Gothic stories that, just as well, give us room to confront our humanity from all angles—the good, the bad and the ugly. Feelings of vigilante revenge (the kind the elite want us to commit against each other) become something to disarm, while using our newfound vision to cultivate a more aware society critical of the actual bad guys; i.e., men like Top Dollar who look friendlier than he does (though nowhere near as cool as Michael Wincott, hamming it up in his vampire tower filled with swords): cops.

The sole purpose of the police is to defend capital, which leads to the kinds of criminogenic conditions (redlining) that Top Dollar only exploits after they’re in effect. This includes tokenism, which fascism relies on until it needn’t, any longer! Top Dollar’s the obvious dick (the incestuous nutjob who kills and tortures people for fun), but The Crow‘s true villain isn’t really the crime lord, but criminogenic conditions propping him up—especially those with a racialized character tied to profit, capital, and associate police structures (we’ll look at class and cultural betrayals with Steam Powered Giraffe, in a moment); i.e., people of color.

To it, the tokenism in the movie isn’t just Top Dollar flanked by cartoonishly evil sidekicks—i.e., his Zofloya-esque, black and towering right-hand man (a marvelously understated performance from Tony Todd) or wicked-witch, Orientalist-caricature sister—but Officer Albrecht as the token good cop. All are part of the same predatory system the movie, as copaganda, ultimately defends.

I’m saying this knowing that many people love The Crow for different reasons. But I also know said reasons include the white middle-class fantasy of false rebellion, of vigilantism; re: the state abuses workers through its own victims. To it, the socio-material reality of The Crow is that power centers often recruit from policed communities to divide and conquer them, making the movie’s glowing, tokenized endorsement of the police—while simultaneously overlooking the conditions that might lead a mother to abuse drugs instead of caring for her rebellious child—platitudinal and flimsy.

If I had to guess, people are more united on the vigilante folk hero (thanks, in part to Lee’s boundless charisma/pathos and martyred status), but are less in agreement on the director’s blasé treatment of the police as equally fallen, thus somehow redeemable:

Finally, there’s the big confrontation between Lee’s character and the arch-villain, Top Dollar. As is customary, the villain gets the upper hand and seems sure to triumph but our hero suddenly turns the tables—in this case by summoning the memories of his fiancée’s suffering and giving to the bad guy all at once.

What’s interesting here is that Eric does this only after Top Dollar has admitted that yes, he was ultimately responsible for the double murder. He may as well have said mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. In fact, the fact that Eric is able to obtain those memories at all is another Catholic “tell.” Officer Albrecht stayed with Shelly throughout her ordeal—a corporal act of mercy. Albrecht also looks after Sarah, buying her dinner when they meet, which is of course an act of charity (source: A.H. Loyd’s “The Crow Is a Profoundly Catholic Movie,” 2021).

If we wanted to get really Gothic, here, we could consider the film’s regression to Catholic tropes through the mode’s schools of criticism in decay (originally being used in the Neo-Gothic period as Protestant-paid, anti-Catholic propaganda).

More to the point, ACAB, my dudes, the worst abusers generally being community leaders, not crime lords; e.g., cops, but also landlords and tokenized sell-outs; i.e., the sacrificial lamb, Shelly Webster (a possible portmanteau between Mary Shelley and John Webster, the latter being the Jacobean author of The Duchess of Malfi, a story about a murderer widow), being killed for fighting tenet eviction—a fact the movie puts on her shoulders: “A big kick-me sign for a very nice [white] girl who found herself a cause. The cause got her killed.”

The look on the black policewoman’s face says it all (“White girls, amirite?”), though she isn’t exactly quiet about it: “She was fighting tenet eviction in that neighborhood?” The two black officer’s shared incredulity is both resigned to the myth that things cannot change, and viewing actual activism (Shelly’s housing petition) as folly that only white people do. It erases decades of black activism, essentializing Detroit as a warzone waged between the good citizens and the criminals; i.e., a thin blue line that needs more funding and honest token cops to “make things happen.” It’s race betrayal in service to the elite, as usual; they want the city as it is so they can exploit it through cop and criminal alike.

Such synthesis in opposition to state force is an uphill battle, then, one that will take centuries to accomplish, and requires a willingness to invert the usual idea of terrorism and criminality (the binary of good/evil and the flow of power) towards police agents; re: the anisotropic nature of reversing power away from them by exposing them as community jailers (thus rapists) delegitimizing us; i.e., with Gothic’s theatre’s playing with revenge and criminal action, both amounting to a rebellious mode of expression the state cannot monopolize. Such policing isn’t just done by official police agents or vigilantes in or out of the text. Its controlled opposition also extends to sell-outs; i.e., content creators who look friendly and posture as “one of us,” but who in truth defend profit through their actions covering up abuse (which is what cops ultimately do).

Recuperation aside, the proletarian value in such theatrical territories like The Crow, then, is they are commodified, which means people in service to profit will make decisions that betray their vested interests; i.e., when selling out through such masks and music during a cop-like vampirism.

This brings me to Steam Powered Giraffe and my experiences with the band; i.e., while dressed up as Eric Draven and pumping fists with the members (exhibit 40k2, below), only going on to employ the same issues of betrayal and healing The Crow‘s larger narrative encompasses between itself and real life. Police aren’t just actual cops, and villains aren’t just at odds with them; policing amounts to colonization happening by marginalized parties defending those they view as being good, but in truth are abusing the community around them—fans, in other words.

To it, we must make ourselves legitimate vs the state delegitimizing us, standing up to them and their fans; i.e., as a matter of class war through theatrical means that combines with culture and racial elements to help us intersectionally solidarize against police forces. As the below exhibit will hopefully demonstrate, such investigations include mingling with people in costume and out, and whose intentions are generally obscured by the dualistic, cryptonymic reality of the situation:

(exhibit 40k2: Artist, left: Persephone van der Waard, cosplaying as Eric Draven. At the time, I remained none-the-wiser about the person next to me and the sexual assaults they committed: Michael Red, former guitarist/keyboardist/songwriter still working for Steam Powered Giraffe at the time of the photo. Eleven years later, I would return to expose Michael in ways the band who hired him wouldn’t. Part of the Gothic’s proletarian utility, then, is suitably to dress up and mingle with people of interest, but also investigate them behind masks of different kinds [overt ones, but also general personas]. Doing so in order to hold celebrities like Reed accountable is, itself, an imperfect process.

For starters, at the time of meeting Reed, I didn’t know about his abuse at all, writing instead, “Awesome guy. Great guitar player!” I’d just met him and the band, but he seemed nice enough. Seven years later he would stop working with SPG and move to Europe, then be outted as a pedophile by fans of the band, not the band itself.

From what I understand, Reed’s departure wasn’t because he had been outted as a sex pest, but the truth of his sexual and racist abuse towards fans came to light shortly afterwards. While the original statements of abuse regarding Reed are still up on the band’s subreddit, r/steampoweredgiraffe, the extended details concerning Reed attached to the original Patreon post appear to have been removed [dead link]. Those statements appeared on July 10th, 2020, followed by a Tumblr blog post several days later detailing Reed’s abuses further than the band:

1. Michael is a pedophile who has a long history of actively and physically preying on minors and young women. Michael has preyed upon minors and young women, and has coerced minors (under the age of 17) into sexual activity—which is sexual assault and rape. He has calculatedly manipulated young women 5-10 years his junior to be his “friend,” often treating them and implying they were in a relationship, and lying to other people involved, creating an extremely toxic social circle of gaslighted young people being manipulated and abused. He cyclically pulled from this group of individuals one at a time and withheld attention from the others to maintain control and silence of the entire group. This is sexual abuse, in any context. He has used his fame and social capital and his brand of charming and kind dude to make excuses for his behavior and seem like he would never be the type to commit it. When called out on this—he directly lies. Lying about his behavior even when presented with evidence is frequent. 

2. Michael is racist. He has made multiple racist comments to people of color who were close to him; over a number of years, he has sought out emotional support for his white guilt without addressing how he should personally fight against racism and white supremacy. He has fetishized people of color and fixated on them. Those who have gotten close enough to Michael know that despite his kindhearted exterior, he can be shockingly cold and lash out in very cruel ways unexpectedly. He has done this to every single one of his victims that I’ve known, including myself, and his victims are anticipating the potential that he will retaliate in response to being called out for his actions. Private and informal testimonies from sexual partners and friends of a variety of ages, forms of relationship, and gender indicate severe emotional abuse [source Tumblr post, mprjanedoe: July 13th, 2020].

The poster goes onto to add, “This post is formed by input from victims, occasionally about each other, and occasionally through observations about themselves directly, that occurred over a span of roughly 10 years, informally through text and private messaging, as well as casual conversation at parties and during socializing. His victims should not be subject to more retraumatizing or identification due to fear of retaliation. Along this vein, I also do not wish to identify myself. Frequently his victims of abuse are non-romantic partners” [ibid.]. In short, discretion and optics are central to such investigations, walking the tightrope between outing ourselves and our abusers—an act that generally goes hand-in-hand. This isn’t just from the abusers, but those they work with also needing to be held accountable [with SPG hiring not just Reed, but Steven Negrete, who also took advantage of people through his position with the band].

To this, there’s a parasocial element to bands/theatre gigs, and values they brand vs values they stand by when profit is threatened [i.e., by us, grappling with them using the same aesthetics, above]. Throw in the desire of victims wanting to maintain some sense of control over their lives by handling things privately and you’re left with the sad, complicated reality that many won’t come forward for fear of reprisals; i.e., privacy is generally a casualty of those who do come forward, attacked by fans of the bands who hired the abusers. And while I can respect the band for wanting to maintain fans’ privacy in these matters—e.g., with the Spine [shown with me, above] saying in 2021, “Several months later people brought to us information about some of his actions in years past. They were creepy[1]; we made a public announcement distancing ourselves from [Reed], calling him out, and standing with the victims that came forward privately to us” [source]—the fact remains, there’s a world of difference between official statements and actual conduct that isn’t lip service.

What I mean by that is, since 2021, SPG has largely kept quiet despite having a larger platform that could raise awareness and keep things anonymous for their victims; and according to mprjanedoe, their own accountability is lacking insofar as their reticence to speak extensively on these matters [while turning a blind eye] goes: 

I’d also like to address the unfortunate situation that David and Bunny maintain they had no prior knowledge of Michael’s behavior. Here’s the thing: while I 100% believe they did not know all of the details of all of the harm Michael caused, there were definitive patterns and red flags and there needs to be actual accountability around this. Bunny said that the band gave Michael the benefit of doubt multiple times. She also said that Michael was caught and reprimanded for kissing a teenage fan in 2011. […] While I was young and being manipulated myself and not in a position to prevent harm – I am saying this to state that I witnessed the public visibility of Michael’s predatory behavior. I take issue with the claim that there were no signs and that no one could’ve prevented this sooner. I’ve seen some fans say that Michael would’ve “always been this way” and found ways to harm other people had he not been in Steam Powered Giraffe. While this could be true, it cannot be denied that being a part of a successful band like Steam Powered Giraffe that gained a cult status online and in the local scene and had a significant YEARS of DAILY exposure in a family setting to minors, cultivating a fandom of a significant amount of younger fans, giving Michael the upper hand of minor celebrity and influence, travel, etc, cannot be divorced from this situation. This is not inherently Bunny or David’s fault. But it is a factor in the breadth of harm Michael was able to do, and it is a factor in knowing there were opportunities for him to have had the resources he gained and used to cause harm pulled from him much sooner than now, when he has already removed himself from the band as it stands.

The past is the past. It cannot be changed. As David and Bunny both lamented that they’d go back and stop things if they could’ve, well yes, to a degree, there were opportunities to prevent further harm, but it’s too late now. Now is the time to make things right, and to prevent the potential for further harm.

Currently – there is absolutely not enough publicly visible and available information on the harm Michael has caused on Steam Powered Giraffe’s social media presence. This is made worse by the fact that consistent promo and every day band stuff creates a wider and wider gap between the leftover posts about Michael’s abuse on Twitter, Facebook, and Patreon. It is now becoming a game of chance whether a fan of Steam Powered Giraffe will know what Michael has done [source Tumblr post, mprjanedoe: July 20th, 2020]. 

As such, the giving of persons in power the benefit of the doubt extends not just to Reed, but those enabling him as having a lot to lose if they took more accountability than they actually did. Privacy, in this case, isn’t just protecting their abused fans, but themselves [complicit persons in their paying fandom growing into a police role; i.e., seeking revenge by punching down against critiques and other victims] by arguably sweeping this under the rug with some paltry lip service. Rape is difficult to prove, and doing so generally goes against the profit motive.

In short, by making sure the written accounts of what occurred get lost in the flow of business-as-usual, the usual benefactors are allowed to “keep the peace” and play the good guys, all while historically turning a blind eye because doing so was good for business. Frankly the usual moral gymnastics try to reconcile these maneuvers with “finding a balance,” but the simple truth is, sooner or later, workers have to unite against the profit motive as exemplified by this kind of pro-capitalistic interference. Otherwise, history will only continue to repeat itself.)

As the above exhibit shows us, betrayal (class or otherwise) isn’t just literal cops, but businesspeople (and their indoctrinated fans) acting like the police to achieve the same bourgeois vampire function—Capitalism going so far as to convert former victims who, time and time again, are coerced into silence by those controlling the flow of information (with Isabella Bennett, below, deleting her own statements of harm concerning Michael Reed—itself arguably a statement of guilt scrubbing the Internet of her and the band’s involvement; source Tumblr post, mprjanedoe: July 18th, 2020), but also their masked, nostalgic predation. Except, SPG aren’t the only mimes-with-a-platform in town. To it, there’s no time like the present to bring Communism’s construction about —to subvert our present exploitation by turning the elite’s weapons against them, reclaiming our Gothic imaginations, emotional intelligence, agency and labor in the process, followed by our dignity, identities, and power (re: me cosplaying as Eric Draven, back then, but embodying his pro-worker heroism now).

To encase the tyrant in glass, however, Gothic Communists must first remember what the state has made us forget—that a world exists beyond the illusion of profit; re: The Crow‘s dismal tide through an imaginary Detroit, but also SPG’s posthuman theatrics linked to the cyberpunk genre’s kissing cousin, steampunk. It’s literally in their name, but also their conduct as a matter of mime-like practice: masked, makeup-heavy conventions that, sure enough, showcase all too well what happens behind the scenes on the faces of those wearing the lipstick in bad faith—the death of actual people (re: Brandon Lee), but also of childhood innocence due to sexual abuse of a band’s fans (re: SPG), all in pursuit of profit staining the drinker’s lips red. It’s camouflage, the cop-like, sell-out vampire dressing like a vampire and playing the rebel. Such shameless endorsements of capitalism gives actual rebels (and their own clownish identities) a bad name.

(artist: Isabella Bennett)

Keeping with the Gothic mode, guilt and secret sins aren’t fully buried, but out in the open if you’re willing to look (case in point, mprjanedoe’s post is the first thing that comes up in Google); i.e., tokenism being a kind of disguise we have to look through to see what’s going on; e.g., Isabella “Bunny” Bennett being a trans woman (she transitioned in 2014, a year after I saw the band live), but one who remains actionably tokenized insofar as—according to public anonymous accounts of the band’s conduct, but also their own actions, ipso facto—she had more than a casual hand in enabling Reed’s behavior. Indeed, she was his employer and ignored the warning signs for at least ten years, only to effectively give him a slap on the wrist after they let him go for unrelated reasons (refusing to take things further than she and the other band members chose). And here I am, after all this time, feeling a bit like Eric: dredging up the past behind my own secret identity to put the wrong things right.

Except, that’s the paradox. I have my dead name, and who I am as a matter of fact. I wear it on my sleeve like Eric did his face paint, preferring to view my actions as speaking to open secrets done between different artists likewise performing on and offstage. Abuse isn’t just the primary actor, then, but those who—regardless of their professed reasons or intentions—run interference/cover things up while posturing as a GNC success story.

And that, in essence, is what Bunny and the rest of the band appears to have done. They’re not your friends; they’re content creators whose actions typically demonstrate how well representation translates to actual activism. Theirs is predominantly unironic, middle-class escapism devoid of traditional steampunk satire; i.e., something to sell to fans too young to remember said said—a comfort food we can purchase and say, “Good for them!” in the same breathe. Tokenism is tokenism, and I’d rather break the silence than have abuse continue under Capitalist Realism because the people with the most power in the situation chose to do as little as possible.

Regardless if it’s fiction, non-fiction, or somewhere in between, then, everything sits inside the same forever ruin having since been destroyed and replaced by a copy of its own devastated state as something to play inside; i.e., the canonical cyberpunk as a neoliberal hauntology that tries to cover up hypernormal trauma sensations with hypercanonical copies in order to make them hyperreal (a form of corporate gaslighting that covers up decay with futurist “decay”): more real and popular than reality, but still somehow “off.”

For one, this ties to me and my own journey through life—i.e., in 2013, I was in the closest and still processing my own abuse; in 2024, I am out, have written multiple books on sex positivity and surviving sexual abuse (including my own), and worked with the kinds of people who are generally taken advantage of in situations like the ones explored above. I’m nowhere near as financially successful as Bennett and SPG, but at least I can look myself in the mirror and know that I didn’t enable a sexual abuser for the sake of fame and fortune; i.e., a perpetually broke trans detective investigating tokenized behaviors the likes of SPG and their token trans woman playing rebel jesters, but again, functioning as capitalist predators in the king’s court. Girl, do better!

To this, the proposition that your childhood heroes are bought-and-paid for is, of course, deeply horrifying; i.e., the revival of the zombie within us and the sudden, unromantic death of said heroes (cops, musicians, etc) as a) fixtures of our own vigilante selves, but also b) the world as we know it thanks to bourgeois propaganda’s vampiric interventions/façades: the city as dead, the streets filled with lost children/dead souls to harvest and exploit as usual. However, change when utilized in a Marxist sense, is not death at all, but merely turning into something else. Like Matheson’s vampire-zombies, you’d be surprised what remains, but also what you can accomplish after things have started to change—in artistic terms, for individuals, but also at the geopolitical, economic level once the Cartesian Revolution is dead and buried.

To use a macroscopic, oft-demonized example, the Soviet economy’s state-regulated Socialism vastly outpaced the United States from a production standpoint relative to the immense internal and external pressures they faced; e.g., war on native soil a concept relatively alien to living Americans. As Mark Harrison writes in “The Soviet Union after 1945: Economic Recovery and Political Repression” (2010):

Salient features of the Soviet Union after World War II include rapid economic recovery and the consolidation of Stalin’s rule. […] On the eastern front, World War II was devastating. In four years, fought mostly on Soviet territory, the war killed one in eight Soviet citizens, and destroyed one third of their national wealth. The country was full of displaced people and torn families […] Although the human losses from World War II were on a wider scale, Soviet recovery after 1945 was also more rapid. The economy was in far better shape than in 1921. Both wars were followed by harvest failure and regional famine, but the famine of 1946 killed a fraction of the numbers that died of hunger at the end of the Civil War. Average Soviet incomes climbed back to their prewar (1938) levels as early as 1948.

Apart from the usual flaws of state mechanisms, much of the USSR’s instability comes from external sabotage, including capitalist forces seducing the Russian heads of state to honor a Faustian sell-out bargain; i.e., betraying the Union for the efficient profit of neoliberal shock therapy (Second Thought, 2022) that assimilated Russia into the New World Order under neoliberal Capitalism: as their Rocky IV-style punching bag (the neoliberal myth of the American underdog in a clearly lopsided conflict) recycled in centrist narratives well into 2023 (for more examples, consider Hakim’s 2023 “Why Did the Soviet Union Fall?“).

In the case of The Crow, SPG or the collapse of the Soviet Union, the vampiric curse—of a punitive, nostalgic Cartesian cycle of zombie violence—won’t end without some horrifying (thus traumatic) reflection. Reverse abjecting the state’s traumatic abuse must happen if workers are to instill class-cultural and race consciousness; i.e., resurrecting the working class’ collective inability to imagine a more stable world beyond Capitalism. Rape, war and genocide are endemic to Capitalism and won’t shock the elite; to end their perpetual rot/epidemics, the goal is not debridement and palliative care, but exposure of the disease at a systemic level, a so-called “attack of the dead” the elite will scramble madly away from (on par with the terrified Germans during the Battle of Osowiec Fortress in 1915, when the chlorine-gassed Russians rose in a vengeful, undead state to battle with the enemy one last time; Unknown 5, 2023). Doing so, workers can solve the very thing that so many great men of history could not, breaking the “fever” of its vast history as an endless nightmare that sends the Imperial Boomerang sailing back and forth like a reaper’s bloodthirsty sickle, flowing like Dracula’s cape (the imperator cloak, a ghost of “Rome” and of Caesar): profit laid bare.

We’ll examine this boomerang effect next, looking at the third-and-final zombie tyrant, Bungie’s Zombie Caesar in Myth: the Fallen Lords, Balor the Leveler! Onto “Myth: the Fallen Lords (opening and part one: Balor)“!

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Footnotes

[1] Spine, here, is both being vague (“creepy”) and playing dumb; i.e., “we had no idea until his victims—literally our own underage fans—told us about it.”

This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). 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 “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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

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

Sleeping Beauties: Policing the Whore; or, Topping from Below to Rise from the Ashes

She’s a very kinky girl!

The kind you don’t take home to mother!

—Rick James; “Superfreak” from Street Songs (1981)

Picking up from where “Hollow Knight (opening and part one)” left off…

Knowledge is generally something that sleeps in a medieval space waiting to wake back up. Policed into silence until then, such awakenings are seldom perfect. But they are required to reclaim nature (and the monstrous-feminine) from their usual policing through the monomyth as imperfectly camped. For this section, we’ll consider how through development as coming from such imperfections; i.e., the evolution out of Hollow Knight as a Promethean Quest—one whose mysterious-maze housing of the whore-to-rape gradually lead me to articulate worker liberation through a palliative variant. Ultimately this variant become a sex-positive system of thought I called “ludo-Gothic BDSM,” one which workers must revive in light of the Radiance’s seemingly unavoidable doom being one of many that we can learn from and perform ourselves; i.e., witch and witch hunt part of the same police violence we must beautifully survive, rising from the ashes of to challenge profit as a matter of dogma built on raping the whore (controlling sex and force, terror and morphological expression per capital’s trifectas, monopolies, and assorted qualities). However false the king decrees her status as “sun,” the Radiance’s hubris is still speaking to her rape by him as having a power he cannot so easily extinguish. Consider this section—the capstone to my Metroidvania work after my PhD and what I esteem to be my crowning achievement—a royal love letter to such sleeping beauties topping us from below! Hail to the queen!

(source: Materia Collective)

We’ll start with my theories on ludo-Gothic BDSM and how they evolved into themselves through Hollow Knight specifically (and the concepts we already laid out in part one); then, we’ll articulate the camping of rape per the whore as normally policed, the manner in which the Radiance must experience time and time again like Prometheus: the stubborn ghost to hunt down by those taught to do so in monomythic language—get sword, rape whore, which whore must subvert during rape play reversing what is effectively police training in witch hunter language.

To that, capital rapes nature-as-monstrous-feminine during the dialectic of shelter (the home) and the alien (the intruder/foreign plot) by invading female-coded spaces (caves, portals, gateways, caverns “measureless to man,” etc) with male-coded implements of revenge (swords, lances, arrows, etc): reconquering male spaces having been reclaimed by nature as—you guessed it—something to rape all over again (often set to badass music; e.g., Witch Hazel’s 2024 “Ride On” a perpetuation of the same-old monomyth passing the sword down).

Or investigate; e.g., Alien‘s derelict, which we’ll explore in “Giger’s Xenomorph.” Either action is the point because it’s profitable, moving money through nature and conditioning the next generation to keep all of this up, which we fags (all monstrous-feminine, not GNC people alone) must camp to subvert and survive as alien beings routinely harvested by nature: the fall of the male sovereign and its colonial space as gone to pot, which must be reclaimed from nature all over again (and again, and again).

In turn, the cycle is dogmatized under capital per the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection: to invade nature, to bring her back for study—to weaponize, generally against itself, as stolen by a bunch of canonical fakes mobilizing the self-worth of young men (or token workers) stuck in the Man Box’ artificial wilderness: proving their worth by being the hero, thus the rapist, the exterminator and the cop/witch hunter canonizing a forever war between good and evil, civilization and nature ,as essentialized per Cartesian edicts’ moral geographies/manifest destinies.

The fact remains, capital is inherently self-destructive and built on endless conquest/futile revenge against nature. Even if the hero harvested everything from the land once, they must do it again and again because there must always be profit, which means surrendering power to a perceived enemy (re: “Hell coming home”). But even if they did it a hundred times over and poured the whole of the universe into a bottle, it still wouldn’t prevent nature’s return, thus keep the king alive. The revenge is always pointless, then, save to further itself as a seasonal, holiday matter of routine profit, war and rape unto nature as the Great Pumpkin to carve up after she returns again and again. It becomes a perpetual game of one-upmanship, of manly quests for such violence to then show off: “Revenge? I will show you revenge!”

Furthermore, the entire process alienates said king (and king’s men) from nature as something that otherwise would enrich his life, had he not devoted his entire existence to a cycle (or two) of capital. He’s simply a cog in the machine, a replaceable part. All of this becomes a self-report through the castle as a dead ringer/giveaway for past failures, which again are built into the system. Nature can simply turn the procedure back on itself to show the king his doom: that Capitalism isn’t good for the givers of state force because it makes them hopelessly dependent on doing so, which has its limits. Repeat the cycle as many times as you want—criminalize nature to whatever degree you desire—the king will always die, and nature will bounce back in some shape or form. You can’t kill Medusa, but kings (and their cops and castles) are a dime-a-dozen. Their death gives them away.

We’ll get to all that when we look at the Radiance, in just a moment. First, let’s look at the process she uses against the hero as something we can repeat ourselves, and which I was taught by her side of the Promethean Quest subverting the monomyth and its unironic rape spaces chattelizing nature-as-monstrous-feminine: ludo-Gothic BDSM.

Tokenization has pushed down at queerness, forcing me make “monstrous-feminine” a GNC category that older scholars didn’t to nearly the same degree. “Nature-as-female” has a biologically essential sound to it (as does older Gothic scholarship from the 1970s; e.g., “female Gothic” and older works, still: “woman is other”). So as we carry on with Hollow Knight, let’s keep considering it (nature) and its castled spaces as monstrous-feminine, like my PhD did; i.e., upending traditional binaries designed to control nature-as-monstrous-feminine inside a colonial binary in order to harness her power over and life and death for the state (the harvesting of nature-as-alien).

Simply put, the womb of nature has already been raped, making it dark and vengeful, but also something that is forced to conform to a binary prescribed to it by state mandates; further abuse must be stalled within such spaces as therapeutic and under attack by those who, caring not for the “therapy” of the colonizer (rape), camp it as already “mapped out.” Alfred Korzybski writes in Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (1933):

A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness. If the map could be ideally correct, it would include, in a reduced scale, the map of the map; the map of the map, of the map; and so on, endlessly […] If we reflect upon our languages, we find that at best they must considered only as maps (source).

To look on maps, however unmappable (untraversable) they might seem, or however buried their secrets, we’re effectively looking at a system of rape expressed in royal Gothic language between land and lord—landlord over nature as alien, but also required to have something to lord over and seek revenge against (which conquest and profit require, always moving money through nature and back into capital’s coffers, post-rape; re, videogames as dogmatic tools of conquest through their maps educating these means: Tolkien and Cameron’s refrains): telling boys (or token parties) where to go and who to rape with what. Such behavior is not only expected but instructed per the monomyth. Simply put, it is correct.

(source: tuppkam1)

More to the point, this is where queerness as dead-and-buried waits to wake up and dance once more; i.e., in the hallowed halls of our rapists—their chronotopes and maps haunted with the Radcliffean spirit of rape as burned into the maps’ secret chambers, but also on its surfaces.

Our flirting with history as undead is, itself, a revisitation of something I’ve returned to many times already (always for fun); i.e., a process of scholarship that, in the process of tracing old maps (of maps, of maps…), somewhat feels different and familiar with each confounding and delightful passage through itself (very much in the larger exploratory traditional of such spaces). Weird attracts weird multiple times in both directions; i.e., coming back to haunt us and we coming back to haunt it (with queer people drawn to the places where they can be themselves, thus feel most at home as a site of trauma to subvert, thus heal from).

I acknowledge as much in Volume Zero, describing a “life-long process [that] started when I was young and continued into adulthood” through a particular videogame I enjoyed playing at various points in my life as a means of critical thought that can, when harnessed, change the world outside of itself as reflected inside the text (from Volume Zero):

We have to learn from the past by transforming its canonical depictions to avoid repeating Capitalism’s unironic genocides.

This brings us not just to my adulthood but my postgraduate work on ludo-Gothic BDSM, which in 2017 was met with its own barriers. Working under David Calonne, I was only just learning about the Numinous vis-à-vis Rudolph Otto and H.P. Lovecraft and came across an article by Lilia Melani, “Otto on the Numinous” (2003), citing the Gothic as the quest for the Numinous: “It has been suggested that Gothic fiction originated primarily as a quest for the mysterium tremendum” (source). Something about it appealed to my then-closeted kinkster as have previously been titillated by Cameron, Lovecraft and Nintendo (there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write), but also the videogames I was playing at the time: Metroidvania[1] (shortly because I went overseas, my best friend Ginger recommended Axiom Verge and Hollow Knight to me, which I eventually made the topic of my master’s thesis (source).

Such a procedure was a life-long quest grappling with powerful forces, insofar as it concerns the performance of power in ostensibly disempowering stages that, through Gothic theatrics, become a safe place to explore rape trauma by surviving ghosts of itself:

Before the thesis proper, my essay “Notes on Power” discussed the paradox as being the performative nature of power doubled, including monsters but also their decaying lairs as monumental sites of immense, god-like power dressed up through the Gothic language of the imaginary past; the Metroidvania is a Gothic castle full of Gothic monsters, but also Gothic ghosts (echoes) of older and older castles reaching out from novels and cinema into videogames. Regardless of the medium, though, Clint Hockings’ adage, “Seek power and you will progress” (source: “Ludonarrative Dissonance,” 2007) means something altogether different depending how you define power as something to seek, including unequal arrangements thereof. As a child, teenager and woman, I sought it through the palliative Numinous in Gothic castles of the Neo-Gothic tradition carried over into videogames (which I learned about in reverse: videogames, followed by the Numinous/mysterium tremendum as introduced to me by Dr. David Calonne^[2]). Of these, I explored their Numinous territories in response to my own lived trauma and subsequent hypersexuality—i.e., as things I both related to the counterfeit with and sought to reclaim the counterfeit from as a tool to understand, thus improve myself and the world by reclaiming the castle as a site of interpretative Gothic play (of kinks, fetishes, and BDSM); i.e., this book that you’re reading right now is a “castle” to wander around inside: a safe space of exquisite “torture” to ask questions about your own latent desires and guilty thoughts regarding the “barbaric” exhibits within as putting the ghosts out from my past on display (the Gothic castle and its intense, “heavy weather” theatrics generally being a medieval metaphor for the mind, body and soul, but also its extreme, buried and/or conflicting emotions and desires: a figurative or sometimes literal plurality depending on the person exploring the castle) [source].

The quest is a meta one, then, its essential idea—of upsetting the monomyth and its harmful illusions using the Promethean Quest—pointedly being to search for the non-male Numinous inside female/feminine-coded spaces; i.e., an exit to Capitalist Realism (and trauma) hidden inside the infernal concentric pattern being reached not by the straight line of empire’s arrows and swords, but the ergodic, non-linear line of the maze among the city of paradoxes (the chronotope yielding fatal portraits echoing dynastic primacy and hereditary rites by personifying them, below).

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

As stated earlier during “Monsters, Magic and Myth,” Capitalism must be escaped within itself; i.e., through cryptonymy as a circuitous route to healing the structure by changing the system, starting in small. Tracking with this well-trod vein, I’ll furnish you with something of a tangent—a four-page sample from Volume Zero to refresh you on the complexities of the quest—then segue into Aguirre’s geometries per our current discussion of upsetting monomythic power using Gothic space to achieve rape play inside the nucleus:

Processing my troubled academic past, my reflections on Metroidvania as a tomb-like, ludo-Gothic space/torture dungeon have become thoroughly enmeshed in my own sexuality and gender-formation beyond what was heteronormatively assigned to me at birth; i.e., what was naturally assigned and what I had to reclaim through my own work’s seeking and expressing of power as something to find inside particular performative arrangements: the “ludo-Gothic BDSM” of the Gothic castle as a powerful “female-coded” space. Its palliative Numinous expresses C.S. Lewis’ so-called “problem of pain” (1940) through mutual consent; i.e., as a kind of ludic contract that promises paradoxical thrills through the aesthetics of harmful power but also unequal power exchange in the contractual sense as rich food for thought: it changes how we think about the world. As I write in “Revisiting My Masters’ Thesis on Metroidvania—Our Ludic Masters: The Dominating Game Space”:

Metroidvania players consent to the game by adopting a submissive position. Most people sexualize BDSM, but power is exchanged in any scenario, sexual or otherwise. This being said, Gothic power exchanges are often sexualized [in appearance]. Samus is vulnerable when denuded, her naked body exposed to the hostile alien menace (re: the end scene from Alien). Metroidvania conjure [up] dominance and submission through a player that winds up “on the hip” (an old expression that means “to be at a disadvantage”). Another way to think of it is, the player is the bottom, and they’re being topped by the game.

[artist: Sarah Kate Forstner’s “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” (2017); source: Michael Uhall’s “A Specter, a Speaker: ‘Whistle and I’ll Come to You’ (1968)”]

With any power exchange there’s always an element of ambiguity and danger (doubly so in Gothic stories). The participants have to trust one another. In this sense, I trust the Metroidvania not to hurt me, but the castle is always somewhat uncanny. I know the gameworld can’t hurt me because it’s a videogame; it can no more kill me than a dream, or C. S. Lewis’ mighty spirit:

suppose that you were told simply “There is a mighty spirit in the room,” and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of danger [of the tiger]: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking — a sense of inadequacy to cope with such a visitant and of prostration before it — an emotion which might be expressed in Shakespeare’s words “Under it my genius is rebuked” (source).

Nevertheless, the paradox—of near-danger in videogames—mirrors the plight of the Neo-Gothic heroine. 18th century women read these stories to feel danger in a controlled sense, but they still submitted to its Numinous “perils.” By comparison, the Lovecraft junkie submits to cosmic nihilism[3], and the survival horror enthusiast seeks danger of a particular kind. So do Metroidvania players (source).

This power exchange through the palliative Numinous has always appealed to me amid Gothic aesthetics, spaces and cliché, fetishized thrills; i.e., inside castles when I have far less dominant power than one might think, but also more subby power in ways that feel asexually profound but never fully divorced from sexual peril’s aesthetics: the disempowered hero in a very Gothic sense, according to my unequal relationship to/negotiation with a female[4] “rapist” space that feels mightier than I am by virtue of the dungeon (rape) aesthetic, but also our power arrangement being stacked against me:

She’s mighty-mighty, just lettin’ it all hang out
She’s a brick house
That lady’s stacked and that’s a fact
Ain’t holding nothing back (source: The Commodores’ “Brick House,” 1977).

[Our resident lady, Lady Dimitrescu, is both tall as a matter of size difference, but also statuesque; i.e., “of the space-in-question” by virtue of the usual hyphenated interrogations of said space as like a person and vice versa: a bogeywoman to summon and put down, but also to pique particular submissive interests from the hero player—the rape fantasy.]

That’s the whole point. I seemingly “can’t win” because the space’s ergodic potential is fundamentally stronger than I am; but it still sits within that performance of unequal, harmful power as a paradox: the sub’s power through the pairing with a dominant whose power flows through them like heavy metal thunder. In that sense, I actually win and lose at the same time (what ludologists call a positive-sum zero-sum game: a win-win[5])! Replayability and endless backtracking amid dungeon aesthetics are a core part of the Metroidvania appeal: to feel mastered inside the ludic contract despite its inherent flexibility.

Furthermore, as I write in “Why I Submit: A Subby Gothicist’s Attitudes on Metroidvania, Mommy Doms, and Sexual Persecution” (2021), this doesn’t just stay in the gameworld; for me, it translates to how I live and think about my life relative to my abuse as survived but also played within in Metroidvania safe spaces:

I have male friends, but most of my friends are women or trans people. Most of my partners have been trans or gender-fluid. The same goes for the women in media I relate to or am inspired by. For me, a powerful woman or female space is captivating and educational, especially the “mommy dom” and Metroidvania.

I’ve always felt attracted to female power—be it in teachers, heroines, or videogame characters. But female power is usually androgynous, having pre-conceptions about male power mixed in. I admire Joan of Arc and Elphaba, but also Ellen Ripley and Samus Aran: tomboyish girls, female knights. I especially love the Metroidvania—a chaotic, “female” stronghold to lose myself inside, but also the focus of my PhD work. There, I can explore myself sexually in relation to power and trauma. This is why I submit. When I do submit, I submit to “mommy doms.”

In a BDSM framework, the mommy dom is a powerful female figure, one with the power to punish and nurture inside a consensual framework [of exquisite “torture”]. Just remember that I’m a switch; I’m not submissive all the time. However, when I am, I submit consensually. It’s not for everyone, and it shouldn’t be. That isn’t the argument that sexist men make, though. For them, only women can or should submit. Men who submit are weak, or impossible. Clearly they’re not impossible, but homosexual composer Tchaikovsky’s words on submission (towards a young servant) were nonetheless treated as impossible—his amorous words furiously repressed by the Russian state: “My God, what an angelic creature and how I long to be his slave, his plaything, his property!” (source).

Obviously my connection to the imaginary Dark Mother is tied to my own abuse, and led me down a very dark road: frustrated with academia and dumped by Zeuhl for their decade-long secret flame, I dated online; I encountered Jadis through Gothic roleplay on Fetlife; we hit it off and I quickly moved in; they worked their magic, abusing me emotionally during the pandemic (source).

In Cartesian thought, nature is both wild and a reward to reap. This goes back not only to the genocidal origins of settler colonialism and Divine Right, but the Covenant of the Rainbow and classical Antiquity. Apart from the ability to openly commit lethal force against nature, then be lauded for it, the monomyth usually rewards the hero with getting the girl, afterwards. In short, there’s an exhibitionist, binarized violence to monomyth stories; i.e., presenting two basic forms of monstrous-feminine for the hero to be violent towards or around: the virgin and the whore. Common synonyms are the angel and devil, black and white, leather and lace, good and evil, wife and witch, damsel and demon, etc. Whatever they’re called, the virgin is classically innocent, passive and vulnerable; the whore is guilty, active and dangerous. Both receive punishment in canonical stories because both belong to nature as needing to be dominated and harvested, treated like property in theatrical ways.

Inside this theatre, the virgin sits on a pedestal, being “kept” prisoner (regardless of where she is) while the whore is chased; i.e., hunted down (usually to Hell or hellish areas) and cleansed like a witch is by self-righteous forces ordained by God, the king and the state, more broadly (which translates to capital’s usual operations looping in on themselves): a criminal and a monster. In either case, this synonymizes pleasure and harm in psychosexual forms doubling as capital punishment, mid-harvest; e.g., the succubus is chained and whipped, Medusa is beheaded, etc, while the damsel or the princess is locked up, needing to be rescued again (re: Persephone).

Both types reify the abuses regularly committed against women and nature-as-monstrous-feminine—with violence against the damsel being more of a domestic flavor and violence against the whore lending itself to matters of open war, moral panic and foreign policy (e.g., Red Scare). Both are useful to capital, in that both are invoked to harvest nature-as-monstrous-feminine during the dialectic of shelter and the alien; i.e., nature is a whore; e.g., Beowulf, where Grendel’s mother invades the king’s home (first through her son, then going in herself to punish her son’s killers) to then be hounded to the underwater cave to be killed and presented as dead, allowing the hero to progress and law and order to return.

(artist: Kalinka Fox)

Something to keep in mind when looking at the Radiance, then, is how sex-positive dark mothers/mommy doms are de facto educators for good play using bad aesthetics: the girl to get by raping her for the Man and for capital dressed up in monomythic language. The ruin is a brothel and a warzone. Literally central to Promethean subversion of the monomyth, though, the whore generally waits at the center of the maze in order for the hero looking to progress to the epilogue of promised sex (and the next rape): to teach such children lessons besides the king’s.

Before they even meet, there’s the usual monomythic formula playing out. The hero is called to—generally by a male seer—then given a sword before venturing boldly into the space of doom (the home afflicted with hellish energies). It’s a military mission, a witch hunt that only “ends” when the hero rapes and slays the dragon, witch or Medusa at the end (their functions identical: the fascist/Communist scapegoat, a monstrous-feminine recipient of state force [revenge] by good or bad cops, including token vigilantes). Except there’s always another Medusa waiting for them in another castle, another rape to canonize or camp, another witch hunt to persecute/prosecute (there must, for profit needs to continue for as long as possible). The cats-and-dogs animus lingers, as does the undead matriarch’s hostility haunting the castle walls painted red with invisible blood after the wild goose chase: that of a rape survivor licking her wounds, but also blossoming into the world to stain its much-touted purity with fresh, decentralized uncertainty.

As such, the Medusa becomes something of a door-to-door saleswoman, teaching about rape through characteristic feelings that haunt the venue, post-survival, but also… enriching it? For instance, I didn’t even consider my abuse rape (rape ranking being a common rationalizing method of survivors) until I reflected on it through Gothic fictions like Resident Evil and Hollow Knight. Luckily I did, always comparing myself to the uncertainty I felt in Jadis’ presence; i.e., their toxic love (and furnished home) being like a Gothic castle, and I their Gothic captive.

In short, a dark mother can be played in bad faith, but also good; i.e., the cryptonymic umbra of the cosplayer aping Lady Dimitrescu with her eclipse-sized hat brim (the witch’s black halo, her body’s surface sexually charged with Promethean might, above). In defense of her dark womb as something to protect at all costs—re: freezing the hero as a rape prevention device—Mother Nature must become monstrous-feminine again, thus able to chill in stasis her patriarch-sent, state-ordained male (or token) killers working for the Man as a giant, seemingly inescapable force; i.e., the confronting of rape as popular and unchallenged in mythical, patriarch-centered stories; e.g., Daphne hounded by Zeus, turned into a tree to escape his ordinary rapacious advances. Rooting them in place among “an unweeded garden grown to seed,” a male space is a settler-colonial project on female-coded land reinvaded by a classification that feels female but really is GNC at large. This playing with death and power per ludo-Gothic BDSM has as much an architectural flavor as it does an overtly personified one, which brings us back to Aguirre.

Tying things to Aguirre’s geometries is the final room, or rather a room that conveys finality through the exhaustion of optimism in the face of an endless, yawning dead. As Aguirre writes in “Geometries of Terror”; re:

where the hero crosses a series of doors and spaces until he reaches a central chamber, there to witness the collapse of his hopes; [this infernal concentric pattern has] in Gothic one and the same function: to destabilize assumptions as to the physical, ontological or moral order of the cosmos [… It is like a Mandelbrot set:] finite, and yet from within we cannot reach its end; it is a labyrinth that delves “down” instead of pushing outwards. From the outside it looks simple enough: bounded, finite, closed; from the inside, however, it is inextricable. It is a very precise graphic replica of the Gothic space in The Italian […] Needless to say, the technique whereby physical or figurative space is endlessly fragmented and so seems both to repeat itself and to stall resolution is not restricted to The Italian: almost every major Gothic author (Walpole, Beckford, Lee, Lewis, Godwin, Mary Shelley, Maturin, Hogg) uses it in his or her own way. Nor does it die out with the metamorphosis of historical Gothic into other forms of fiction (source).

While Aguirre hints at videogames a fair bit (the piece is from 2008), I have obviously extended my research considerably to do nothing but explore the videogame’s partitioning of the Gothic’s hellish delights (from 2017 onwards) subverting traditional ideas of strength: confronting the Communist Numinous as haunted by equally enormous oppression (a giant prison for a giant queen).

To that, one does not simply get “raped” once, but over and over again as a matter of exquisite, paradoxically rapturous torture (“rape ironically”)! And if that seems odd, ask us why that might be! Ask the ghost why it was raped—not to get at the truth of what happened back then, but what is going on right now (cataloging history is fairly academic, but reenacting it says much more about current atrocities [with the ghost of the counterfeit] than former ones): marrying the language of sex and war as a matter of camp to bring out of the closet and into the wider world. Such things duel and coalesce in ways a medievalist not only wouldn’t mind, but indeed, would welcome and encourage. The keys to breaking Capitalist Realism lie in medieval theatrics “aping Chaucer, Shakespeare and Walpole,” etc; re: giants, and giant aspects of smaller beings.

(artist: Dream Pipe)

The Gothic has always been campy but invested in secret sins as out in the open (not quite incognito, not quite up front). From “ancient” Romance to ordinary novels, comedy to drama, artist and muse, seafaring adventure and earthbound sexual dungeon, there’s so many ways (and places) to “put it”; e.g., Sabs’ “Captain Turtledove and the Attack of the Terrible Octobussy,” 2024). So explore the taboos and cultural values of the imaginary past as rapacious (appropriative or not); don’t bury them (and their victims) because silence is genocide and genocide always leads to rape, to Rome, to bigger and bigger instances thereof. Ask why the whore is addicted to “rape,” then learn how to “rape” in quotes; listen to Medusa or Hippolyta whispering hungrily into your ear, “rape me!” (or “Take it like a good boy!”). Take the praise and debasement (whatever you both prefer, to whatever degree of aftercare you require); i.e., as a psychosexual, ludo-Gothic means of instruction whose BDSM (often through trial and error) synthesizes good praxis into the future: go big or go home (“rape” so often involves a dominant who looks and feels dominant[6]—the dragon lord or zombie master a fearsome monster-fucker [with a huge dick] that Medusa straight up craves. Mommy has needs).

So while kinky jouissance opens the eyes (so to speak), rape has a practical function: cryptonymy as a means of surviving the state’s usual beheadings (“the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads. Take it in what sense thou wilt[7]“). As a matter of survival and eventual liberation (the state survives by raping workers and nature per the process of abjection; e.g., white middle-class women exploiting cryptonyms to service profit; re: Radcliffe and her echoes), Medusa isn’t the only one who loves being “raped”; Persephone (the deity and me[8]) loves rape as something to camp, thus speak to abusive structures that try to otherwise shock you blind; e.g., the Metroidvania, per the monomythic heroic mechanisms, raping Medusa as a false flag: manifesting the unheimlich as her false castle, invading it and stabbing her in the “eyes” (the white, the pink, the brown—next page).

(artist: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu)

A survivor of rape myself, I love writing about rape play both because I’ve gained an appreciation for calculated risk, but also because I have helped others work through such dialogs, too; i.e., manifesting through play and performance as a matter of cryptonymy (showing and hiding trauma) during ludo-Gothic BDSM as a revolutionary device: a pedagogy of the oppressed resisting police violence. While Metroidvania has conveniently allowed me to reenact these in gigantic, dualistic pathways (the castle’s big rape/rapist), any survivor of rape can act out their abuse through the Gothic, during oppositional praxis. Dialectically-materially this theatre invokes mechanisms the state will police through bad actors, players, and instructors: sex and force, but also terror and bodily expression that just as often, actualize/tokenize in highly Pavlovian ways. It’s all the same masks, costumes and mirrors; so remember that flow determines function, as far as the aesthetics of power and death reliably go.

For example, the player’s quest for power in Hollow Knight suitably ends in the darkness of immeasurable death spilling in all directions, trapping the hero in Hell; i.e., the emptying of Hell through a final zombie apocalypse that buries the rapist alive. To this, the heroic quest is Promethean, tied to a space that promises combat; the combat misleads the player by offering power as tinged with a self-imposed decay and malice that ultimately triumphs against the hero upon the story’s conclusion (turning them heel in the process, but to a grand, self-destructive and world-destroying degree; i.e., the fascist notion of the hero’s bondage to the cult of death and rape as venerated by the status quo: an unholy marriage of the hero’s sword to the monstrous-feminine brain. It’s big rape minus any irony at all (“You fight like a young man: eager to begin, quick to finish[9]!”): skull-fucking her Majesty-in-chains on par with Odysseus blinding the cyclops; i.e., she shows herself in all her glory only to be extinguished for it (or so it seems).

Simply put, there’s no way to win, no matter how many treasures acquired or enemies vanquished, because the hero is always a male rapist death fetish (a “killer doll”) working for the state; i.e., a reversal of Axiom Verge. Trace, the useful idiot, kills the king when lied to by the Great Fairy mommy doms (who are good doms despite their strict, imperfect approach); the knight (also an idiot) kills the gay fairy queen haunting the veil. When lied to by the straight king through the ghostly space around him, the hero (thus the player) becomes a bad dom in the process: Radcliffe’s demon lover!

To that, such forces are always in flux behind the scenes and out in the space as interwoven, liminal, anisotropic, concentric, etc; the crypt, as a site of secret sin, oozes said sin (like a ruptured eyeball) all over the status of the self-professed “brave.” It’s censorship with a knife (an oracle speaks with her eyes), profit projecting through rape as a matter thereof; i.e., police violence, repression serving the king as a poetic extension of the nuclear family under capital: protect daddy by raping the madwomen in the attic (classically a woman of color, in Jane Eyre). It’s not exactly subtle, but there remains a cloaked, uncertain element of subversion—some grey area to what might seem like a black-and-white scene.

Indeed, the game is effectively the opposite of Axiom Verge, the white king’s lost boys hulking out/turning black to rape the white queen—a military target—instead of the black queen dismembering the dark father to protect the son from a militarized scientist genociding the land. Furthermore, the extinguishing of the hero’s hopes is literally that of the eyes of the oracle; the eyes of the female Numinous (exhibit 40g) are put out, blinding our poor Cassandra/oracle while turning a blind eye to the darkness that continues in the wake of her execution: the self-destructive rememory—that is, the maddening recollection and attempted reassembly—of an exhaustive tally of imperial destruction, now leaking from the long-dead corpse of empire (which revives to unironically rape Medusa again and again and again). The hole, as usual, is stuffed in ouroborotic fashion by the lance, the sword, as instructed by the game; re: police training through police training grounds, the youthful martyr trading places with the old sentinel to stand watch inside the empty space—blood in, blood out.

Like Moby Dick, the Radiance is canonically the game’s white whale to chase, stab and harvest; i.e., for proponents of Ahab and capital to go overboard and underwater with, putting out their ancient animal enemy’s eyes: “to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee!” It’s personal, a framed revenge for Ahab’s leg and his old man’s pride—all to render the whale into blubber and then oil.

Our resident Mothra is no different: something to kill to literally keep the lights on, but also restore the king’s good name against nature as daring to refuse the advance of his spearhead, his patriarch harpoon’s madness and obsession; i.e., all roads lead to Rome, to profit, to rape of nature-as-monstrous-feminine—a phallic sea monster in poetic forms, hailing from lands unknown as normally off-limits to man’s domain giving all the usual monomythic rewards as hellish, sumptuous: Neptune’s trove, its plunder dredged up and dragged back to land.

(exhibit 40h3: Artist: Bay. Nature is seen as the place that gives and takes away—a dark mother to fear and go into the territories thereof. In settler-colonial terms, such harvests are hauled monomythically back to the mother country in such stories, but also reduced to corporate fare sold on supermarket shelves. In Bay’s case, they are an Indigenous sex worker against Capitalism and for nature, doing much of their own cooking for their birthday [above]. But they still live in a place that was colonized [originally by the Dutch] and currently overseen by state-corporate influence.)

Whatever the dungeon, then, it’s a place of endless genderqueer potential (with gay themes present all throughout seafaring narratives, not just in outer space; i.e., matelotage; e.g., “Hey, sailor!” and “Any port in a storm!” etc) and value to harvest by enterprising landlubbers (the man of reason generally a seafarer from land who meets his end chasing the fire of the gods “out at sea”): the killing of the space whale. Whether for the bounty of food (which workers who aren’t against nature still must subsist on, above), pure dominion, or some combination under settler-colonial territories, Capitalism is Capitalism; i.e., relying on said animus in astronoetic narratives treating the whole thing as “heroic,” and for whom to the victor goes the spoils. In essence, the sea is badass and plentiful—a challenge to accept and overcome as historically tied to industry preying on nature from the land to the sea. Their deaths coincide, a hate crime against nature and a mind crime against the perpetrators forced to brave the waves for fat cats safe (and dry) on land (e.g., the invisible company executives, in Alien).

(artist: Michel Tole‘s “The Triumph of Venus and Galatea Over Moby Dick,” 2020)

Except, while she is seemingly hunted to extinction during a presumed war of extermination/tokenized exploitation thereof (similar to the sand worms and the power of the land, in Dune), the Radiance eventually returns for her revenge inside the used-up minds of the king’s loyal servants, who, infected with her influence—her testimony—must be isolated* from other knights and then killed to keep the king’s secret; i.e., while they are incarcerated inside the Black Egg. The madwoman lives rent-free in the attic of their traumatized brains: “art thou but / A dagger of the mind, a false creation, / Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?” they ask. “Can’t kill me, motherfuckers!” she replies.

*A tactic that real-life ants will do, when members of their nest are sick, except they carry the infected away from the nest to die. The Pale King has colonized everything, keeping the secret in-house to avoid it spreading (similar to Rian from The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, when the Skeksis convince other Gelfling that his mind is sick; i.e., so they won’t dream-fast with him and learn the truth).

This is effectively the subversion I’m talking about, here: the rapists’ comeuppance after doing what they were made to do against nature, in effect subverting state-sanctioned rape through the scene itself as something to act out at the center of the maze: by the Radiance having a role in said subversion as playfully veiled by the maze’s walls. The darkness seems to be the king’s will, but it also occupies her revenge afterwards, lending to an awkward and opaque duality. So, there’s a non-verbal element to what unfolds that’s even more subversive, arguably than, Axiom Verge, but also more contested. It is a rape we’re looking at, right? But the Radiance still wins. Can it be more than one thing at once?

Of course, this plays out as an act that is forgotten and concealed within its own artefacts; i.e., something to sing about as a far-off conquest to begin anew by fresh hearts and minds venturing into old dungeons and hunting down dragons like the days of old; e.g., Tolkien’s song of the dwarves, itself a fragment their culture: “and this is like a fragment of their song if it can be like their song without their music” (source) to

Far over misty mountains cold

To dungeons deep and caverns old

We must away ere break of day

To seek the pale enchanted to gold (ibid.)

to “our long-forgotten gold” to “our harps and gold” from unworthy pre-fascist usurpers (dragons) and abject anti-Semitic occupiers (orcs and goblins). The dwarves’ covetous memory becomes one of unbridled revenge, its call to war against nature sharpening to rekindle better times out of myth tied to artefacts that suggest it to start with: “He was witless and wandering, and had forgotten almost everything but the map and the key” (ibid.).

I’m not just someone who plays with rape through ludo-Gothic BDSM. I’m also a Tolkien scholar whose Gothic ludology was inspired by Tolkien’s work (mainly The Hobbit, but I digress). Far from being brainless in the current, neoliberal trend, games and the Gothic are classically a site for clever in-jokes regarding the same old material, in effect playing with it to camp it. As Tolkien speaks to the monomyth and secret things wrought with heroic violence, then, let’s take a few pages to unpack that and apply it to the Radiance’s death as camping such matters, herself (enjoyment is not endorsement); i.e., as something that subverts the usual monomythic abjection and reward (mercenary rape) per the Promethean Quest: raping the whore as the dragon to chase down and steal from (with Tolkien’s Smaug also being queer-coded and animalistic[10]). From there, we’ll wrap things up and proceed onto “The Monomyth,” part two!

To revive the memory of the king, Tolkien’s war-like dwarves (a whole mess of anti-Semitic clichés) embark on a goldrush through the usual business of burgling a stolen home back unto a mythology’s “timeless” ownership (echoes of Zionism): waging war against the monomyth’s usual enemies by unlikely heroes on a Journey thereof (Jewish-coded monsters and a closeted bachelor). In Tolkien’s opinion, only Tookish assholes have adventures, generally as a matter of conducting violence in dark, deep places while wishing for it: “to wear a sword instead of a walking stick” (ibid.). Like all these little quotes, the desire for adventure against the Numinous dragon is littered throughout Tolkien’s world: little things lead to big things, a covert military operation escalating to all-out war on all fronts (making Smaug this story’s Archduke Ferdinand, I suppose).

The home isn’t just guarded by the dragon, but by the dwarves’ secrecy towards the treasure pegging them as vice characters (“the fierce and jealous love of dwarves” amounting to “dragon sickness” later in the book). And in the interim, the map and key go hand-in-hand—as a matter of code that includes the map and its runes, hidden walls, moon letters, riddles, royal flattery and so on—as a business practice among them, an omerta of sorts. The treasure, already stolen through conquest, becomes a mystery unto itself, then; i.e., a trade secret in the usual medieval sort, one unlocked with the key that was, itself, secret: “the quest to the Lonely Mountain depended entirely on a single key and a secret door that the dragon didn’t know about. In fact, without the key, Bilbo wouldn’t have been able to get into the mountain” (source: A Hole in the Ground’s “The Strange History of Thror’s Key,” 2012).

Tolkien’s dwarves are a secretive bunch—homeless criminals with bling (“Thorin stroked the gold chain round his neck,” source) who do dark business in dark places (“Suddenly he found that the music and the singing had stopped, and they were all looking at him with eyes shining in the dark.” / “‘We like the dark,’ said all the dwarves. ‘Dark for dark business! There are many hours before dawn,'” ibid.). In short, they verge on being goblins themselves, operating through violence to take what’s theirs, the dragon a matter of calculus: “It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him” (ibid.).

In turn, such careful planning is tied to the monomyth—a matter of returning to tradition—pointedly encouraging violence against Tolkien’s ideological enemies, all of it sold as Goldilocks Imperialism to middle-class children playing war and robbery[11] for fun (as a matter of fact, he wrote the book for his son):

“That would be no good,” said the wizard, “not without a mighty Warrior, even a Hero. I tried to find one; but warriors are busy fighting one another in distant lands, and in this neighbourhood heroes are scarce, or simply not to be found. Swords in these parts are mostly blunt, and axes are used for trees, and shields as cradles or dish-covers; and dragons are comfortably far-off (and therefore legendary). That is why I settled on burglary—especially when I remembered the existence of a Side-door. And here is our little Bilbo Baggins, the burglar, the chosen and selected burglar (ibid.).

As such, stealing isn’t just cool, but a righteous cycle of revenge ordained by the author playing god; e.g., world-building and dogma; i.e., to restore a fallen people and land to proper working order after a former collapse: the dragon haunting a fallen kingdom—a symbol of sickness not unlike Medusa’s eventual, required return.

In the interim, Smaug is far-off and legendary because of it, becoming something to plan around: a dungeon crawl (whose cartographic refrain arguably inspired every D&D campaign ever run, and every roleplaying videogame you could think of—per the monomyth as something to canonize). Their return is as inevitable as the weather or the night following the day, because Tolkien treats humans (and monstrous stand-ins for humans) as naturally greedy.

To this, The Hobbit is a morality play whose conspicuously medieval language (and stereotypes) rarefy greed as, having inflicted harm against the status quo, become something to meet with harm: the cycle of revenge repaid in kind. In short, Tolkien abstracts nature into a fascist allegory and scapegoat; i.e., a dragon to slay as one might a witch—all done in order to keep money moving through nature in service to profit. As part of the same “rape farm,” the shadow of the dragon is always felt; its giant bones lie at the bottom of the lake; its spirit lies heavy on the hearts of men, dwarves, elves, and goblins all fighting over the dragon’s mountainous pile of gold; its hoard becomes theirs, turning them into dragons.

To it, the final boss of Capitalism isn’t the dragon and its castle-like body as something to invade, mise-en-abyme (the mountain containing the dragon, which houses the return of war outside of dragon and mountain); it’s greed, itself, as a Pavlovian, destabilizing system of exchange and code—also known as capital. Unto it, the recipe is always one of revenge spiraling towards disaster as precisely what the elite want; per the Protestant ethic, war is holy in their eyes, inventing whatever enemies they want/need and essentializing them as “ancient” through a poetry (and cryptomimesis) conducive to war out of good lands into bad, “there and back again”: good races raping bad ones in and out of game-like replicas. It’s Imperialism with more steps, the centrist arbitration of value judgements coinciding with whether you’re on the right side of the fence (the West) or not; i.e., Orientalism’s double standards per moral teams through good-vs-evil, us-versus-them copaganda; e.g., fat bodies celebrated or condemned simply because of which team you’re on as a matter of shame, guilt, revenge, etc. You can see this with Tolkien’s Bombur compared to the Great Goblin of the Misty Mountains—a double standard that also plays out in real life between men like Sammo Hung and Steven Segal (Accented Cinema’s “Let’s Not Fat-shame Steven Seagal,” 2024). It’s vaudeville, which includes the hobbit killing spiders (which extends to their babies, next page, through an extermination war that marks spiders as “pure evil” being killed by tokenized forces).

(artist: the Brothers Hildebrandt)

The point in dredging up Tolkien, here, is the knight in Hollow Knight is really no different: promised by the game some kind of gilded spectacle (rewards are generally promised through tiny markers of themselves, Thror’s key made of silver); i.e., to plunder through rapine (the act of taking by force) from an undeserving party by deserving ones through a casus beli. In this case, the “dragon” is Hallownest’s monstrous-feminine queen, the Radiance, and your reward—as the games little, hobbit-sized hero—is to rape her and take her spectral crown for the former now-dead king. Not so different from a ring around one’s finger, no (either type signifying the transfer and legitimacy of power, which Bilbo is not immune to, below)?

The Radiance’s death—like Smaug’s—is an honor killing met with armed robbery, but also an exorcism of something hidden to the same extent as that pale enchanted gold, Thror’s key or even the dragon: a mountainous glimmer that blinds the hero and fills them with unquenchable bloodlust; i.e., drunk on glory and death, but also their own heroic brand as inherited from the home’s forged, mythological sense of ownership as rooted in secrecy in deception; e.g., Samus and Zebes, but also Bilbo’s hand in a larger race war that cumulates in Thorin’s Viking-style last stand against Erebor’s forces of darkness (arguably the author’s token Jew defending an imperialist stronghold from the “ancient,” essentialized enemies of Britain: “the enemy is weak and strong”): Thorin bashing Bilbo, calling him “descendent of rats” (code for “Jew” but also “thief”), whereupon Bilbo does everything he can to prove he’s of the good’s side (while also, it must be said, trying to prevent all-out war). Antagonize nature and put it to work as cheaply as possible (which is what the Battle of the Fire Armies [a world war predicated on racial conflict] illustrates); assimilate, gentrify and decay.

Except, the context is more different, in Hollow Knight. For one, the Radiance isn’t just a vice character comparable to gold and conquest, but a tragic character whose rape fantasy is one of reversal after you’ve raped her to death more than once; re: “the fourth ending destroys the Absolute Radiance, but turns the knight into an even greater monster that Hornet must fight on her own.” This happens while the sky weeps blood and tentacles[12] (such black shit may as well be blood given the cataclysmic atmosphere). During state shift, then, the female sun goes black, coming home to end the king’s Cartesian madness—his endless line of toy soldiers marching to their doom—by shattering the dollhouse and the heliocentric stance it has; i.e., built around a false, decaying king (the conspiratorial fascist) eaten, in the end, when the raped, hungry womb of nature goes “om nom nom!” It’s simply the planet defending itself.

In turn, the colossal misogyny on display is actually a revelation about instructed rape that, until the grand unveiling thereof, was merely whisper and allegation: the true villain was the hero all along (in other words, the total opposite of stories like The Hobbit)!

(artist: Ashen Hare)

After all’s raped and done, the Radiance remains the most endearing character (“She’s mighty-mighty”) in the game precisely because she’s raped, but is also the wonderous object of pursuit with a secret to tell that lingers in undead fashion, postmortem. She’s the tragically Icarian/Luciferian (and phallic), but also hidden heroine; i.e., Hollow Knight‘s fat lady signing passionately about her rape in Bluebeard’s castle/geometry of terror (the stage being the GNC performer’s classic arena to summon and voice their abuse, their insecurities, their passion—not for the elite, but for themselves as a dark god worthy of tribute).

Emblematic of the unironic monomyth and medieval Romance, the hero is the talent, the Radiance his merchandise to capture and police by a knight errant given license to do so by divine providence: a one-man army campaigning against the barbarians at the gate, nature herself coming home to turn said home into hostile alien territories. Through the usual fetishes and clichés of sports, combat, and theatre, the knight is the Man with No Name (the American Western generally endorsing cowboys and Indians, pushing Indigenous people to the margins and focusing on white pioneer women/saviors); i.e., a killer-doll, blank-state, masking-wearing mercenary/vigilante without a kingdom fighting for a dead patriarch (echoes of Xenophon, whose poetic incursions grandstand against nature, ultimately yielding repeated, cannibalistic excursions [death by exposure] into fatal territories in defense of empire and its doomed, fearful enterprise; i.e., a repeat of the forced march and last stand, a death spiral’s grist-for-the-mill yielding profit for the elite, fear of nature being the motivating drive; e.g., The Terror‘s Sir John: “Show this beast the might of the British empire!”).

His mission? To extinguish Medusa’s grail beacon—her Archaic Mother’s hysteria—as aided by all the king’s men (shades) playing “barber” (the classic function being a bloodletter to cure an imbalance of the humors, generally tied to “wandering womb”): to perform female circumcision (of her “phallic” components) by the heroic barbarian posturing as “of the West,” all while stabbing Medusa’s bloodshot eyes with their heroic knife dick (which includes tokenized forms; e.g., Samus vs Mother Brain; re: “War Vaginas,” 2021). The Call to Adventure is a mating call, then—the sort that knights are feared for doing unto state enemies in state-claimed lands: a room to clear, a plate to finish, moving money through nature through the same-old process of abjection.

Rape is rape, but the game playfully tests your resolve by treating it as your final reward before ignominiously burying you alive, in effect punishing you—the triumphant detective—like Lot’s wife: for looking into things (re: Segewick). Playtime is over, the ending feeling like a game over. And while everyone arguably feels differently about historical events, the events themselves are still historical-material facts that theatrically repeat through such feelings fueling the chronotope; i.e., as dissenting voices coming from the oppressed marrying to the legends, the architecture, the opposing side’s resistance to the buried truth. Silence speaks for itself, as do the things that corrupt the masonry to immeasurable degrees. Something seems wrong and asks you, the hero, to solve it, as monomyth heroes always do: through unironic violence. His nail, her flesh—it’s the same carpentry.

Like all Metroidvania, then (and, by extension, any Gothic castle), Hollow Knight taunts you, first; it dares you to penetrate its domain and hunt down its ancient, monstrous-feminine secrets, a resident Medusa doing its best to isolate you and piss you off (as James Rolfe famously put it, “You’re angry and you want to beat the Nintendo, but the sad fact is, no one cares but you”).

Like Athetos, the Radiance is that thing to get mad at, but also to worship as the dead giveaway with Numinous, castled qualities (“Look upon my wonder!”); i.e., the dynamic is inverted: Athetos is the state gaslighter making the tyrant’s plea as a man of reason having raped Medusa; the Radiance is appearing before the state servant to paralyze her would-be-rapist in awe. Similar to the Alien Queen from Aliens, the Radiance is meant to be held down and raped by the state as Medusa and Communism—but she wins anyways, punishing capital’s libido (the drive towards profit, raping nature) by cursing them posthumously with live burial and state shift; high voltage, she turns it all back on the hero, thus the player, through her zombie eyeballs felt throughout the space, paralyzing zombie tyrants through zombie soldiers (the Alien Queen, meanwhile, sneaks an egg on board Ripley’s ship, avenging her children by killing Newt, the colony brat, and Hicks, the de facto husband—it’s Frankenstein‘s marital destruction visited upon the cop)!

Until things come to light, the Radiance stares at you defiantly through the eyes of the king’s men[13], screaming out of their mouths like a xenoglossic virus (specifically cordyceps): the voice of the dead, the damned, the raped yawping “I am woman, hear me roar!” She’s a fungus, a banshee, Princess Toadstool from Hell chaining Mario up in a very particular way—through lust and shame, but also voyeuristic/exhibitionist violence camping a shared god space and bodies; i.e., literally bloodlust unto the whore as unable to fight back in a moment of extended, legendary vulnerability and betrayal relayed through the monomyth: as a call to violence against the whore—to “breed” her (a euphemism for rape, but also “rape”) through vulgar poetry of courtly love, of Red Scare lusting after the whore to shackle and shame but also sell her red hair and blood!

(artist: Mika Dawn)

To it, the Radiance is a prisoner the hero tracks down and rapes in her jail cell. She’s raped by her “protectors” playing good cop, bad cop (the husk-like knight filled white spirit and black void as something to weaponize against her), but also experiences the pain and death of those she inhabits. In short, she sees the world through the eyes of the other prisoners, feeling their pain as the hero puts them down (often attacking his enemies while they sleep, invading their dreams to duel their corpses—witness tampering, essentially). His perspective is always one of cleansing the land and its memories through these mediums “leaking hysteria” (e.g., the hollow knight’s cracked mask spilling into the Black Egg and out into the kingdom); she, to cry out through the land in tomb-like agony expressing genocide as unable to be contained, thus repressed. There’s a sadistic and masochistic element between the two, the Radiance provoking attacks that always highlight the hero’s vengeful, police-like function; i.e., something to see, then speculate about, in dialectical-material ways concerning what is happening—in short, what we’re looking at as a point of view unto itself, one tied to rape and war of the land by its self-appointed owners: cops.

While reverse abjection yields the usual rape plays that big mommies give to their good little pets (“love taps”), abjection translates to the Radiance being blinded by her captors. Frankly this is rape all by itself—but also the whispers and societal looking away from someone (culture death) whose smiting of the king’s memory is arguably being done to a rapist by its jilted victim operating through the space. It’s “Young Goodman Brown” or The Scarlet Letter (1850) committed without Hawthorne’s critical bite, his irony. But it still gives that away through the raping of the dead whore as a kind of dance partner the game makes the player (and the audience[14]) party to—to show what is normally repressed by acting out cop and victim. As such, the Radiance is both dead and not dead by playing dead through rape play that speaks to monomythic abjection, turning community isolation inside-out; i.e., subverting it as a matter of Gothic paradox through ludo-Gothic BDSM during the Promethean Quest’s geometries of counterterror. She doesn’t escape her prison by leaving it; she escapes by making it a space to communicate buried woes to a wider audience: the fact that she even exists at all.

Us women, you see, historically aren’t “just angry”; we generally have good reason, as do the men who cover it all up breaking our trust (they don’t trust us to keep quiet, afterwards). We don’t tend to rape men for denying us sex (excluding tokenized, Man-Box examples), but we do become detectives speaking to our survival of rape, the latter something that traumatizes us into silence (or, in Tolkien’s case and ours, secretive fictions littered with clues, stitched together across them in ways his “Tookish” side wasn’t exempt from doing when it fancied him). It’s not a trend for its own sake that bored middle-class people buy into (during the process of abjection); it’s a historical-material fact felt in echoes in and out of Gothic media (which Tolkien very much is as much as Hollow Knight is; re: Volume One, but quoted earlier in “Jadis’ Dollhouse“): rape victims are seldom believed, but appear holistically across generations in and out of fiction regarding such abuse—as castle-like people or people-like castles attesting to secret sins and buried guilt. We fags dance in the ruins to camp their mapped-out rapes, their cartography leading to us and our liberation through “rape”: camping the monomyth as monomythic copaganda, instructing nature as something to rape to move money through nature inside the castle space.

As such, rape victims are forced to be their own advocates, appealing to the public by virtue of what the middle class will pay attention to—the victims’ own rape and murder as something to reify and sell, per the ghost of the counterfeit. This can be Pavlovian—electrocuting the bitch to induce a panic response—but the same actions also constitute a theatrical performance that looks the same, and yet differs through context: the irony of acting out one’s death (“O happy dagger!”) through an ambiguous, at-times-unreliable buffer (the plot to Rashomon, in other words): a secret key and plan to a dungeon (re: Thror’s map, key and mountain, but also dragon, inside) that must be explored. It’s that or not saying anything at all, and look what that gets you (unironic rape, genocide).

They say that dead men tell no tales, then, but few things are as loud, brutal and difficult to ignore as rape (especially gang rape or witch hunts that gang up on a rape victim; re: The Scarlet Letter). As we explored with my rape, emotional damage can cut like a knife in ways that are more subtle and diffuse, but also prolonged and, at times, Numinous compared to an over-and-done-with physical incident. A survivor might out-and-out say “I was raped.” I did, but I actually led off with art of the event, first (exhibit 39a1b). There isn’t a superior method because rape victims are always treated like they deserved it or it didn’t happen.

Furthermore, the fact remains that art is a common way to express one’s abuse at the hands of privileged men (e.g., Elisabetta Sirani’s “Timoclea Killing Her Rapist” [exhibit 35b] or “Portia Wounding her Thigh”). Regardless of the method, many people not only won’t believe you, they’ll attack you (even if they’re victims of rape, too). Welcome to being raped! It doesn’t stop with the event itself, but—like Hawthorne’s infamous Scarlet Letter—becomes a brand to stamp survivors with and then police them as whores[15] to serve profit. It’s compelled prostitution, lashing whistleblowers; i.e., marginalized workers seeking equal rights, thus a chance to be heard, by acting out their abuse.

Applying these complexities to Hollow Knight, I can’t prove that the Pale King raped the Radiance “back then”; but I can do the same thing I did with Athetos and ask you to look at the results: everyone who serves under the king is a trained killer working to please daddy to genocidal extremes (e.g., the Soul Master draining the City of Tears of its lifeforce in pursuit of a cure, exhibit 40i). Fucker’s whole court is straight psychopaths; nobody’s that blind, and if he somehow was, he should be removed and the system overhauled. Fuck the king and fuck his reputation. As a matter of capital attached to Cartesian thought, the Shadow of Pygmalion and Cycle of Kings is precisely the problem.

Medusa’s certainly on board with camping capital; she’s a total freak, one whose ghost of the counterfeit (and thunder-clapping pussy fart) all but begs, “What ails you?” Any Gothic creator loves investigating her own death as tied to societal issues, which she plays out through undead fictions tied loosely to taboo truths; i.e., a black rose to pick for Queen Maeb and croon through folklore and urban legend, rock ‘n roll, the chronotope’s restless geometries!

I’m one such detective, but I’m hardly the first or the best. Even so, it all becomes something to remember by passing it along through oral and written forms that speak to lost, incredible things—rape and revenge, reclamation and release—sure enough, having a spatial quality to them:

Tell me the legends of long ago
When the kings and queens would dance
In the realm of the Black Rose
Play me the melodies I want to know
So I can teach my children, oh (Thin Lizzy’s “Black Rose,” 1979).

A kind of murder ballad, then, the Gothic-Romance-as-space like Hallownest is such flower—a whorish “Alraune” that, hardly as censored as O’Keefe, drinks vengefully the blood of slain virgins and the essence of lusty virginial men (remembering both on either side of rape).

(artist: James Fitzpatrick)

As such, the Medusa once again sits between the “ancient” and the ordinary as trapped on and off the canvas, in between the walls, calling from the heart of the castle’s deepest, darkest prison cell. Darkness visible, she’s Jennifer Kent’s Nightingale as singing her suffering sweetly to those who know the signs, the code. Her expression is forbidden and commodified by colonizer forces, but there’s always a wild poetic joy they cannot fully tame or seize for themselves: to see it again (to hear it again in music) makes my skin tingle oh-so-naughtily. Finding it gives me release, but can’t undo what was done.

Liberation is always, to some degree, chained by ghosts of a settler-colonial past whose rememory aches and bristles with scarcely-contained rage: “I’m not English, I’m Ireland! [switching to Gaelic] To the devil’s house with all English people, every mother’s son of them! May the pox disfigure them! May the plague consume them! Long live Ireland!” (source). Something tells me that if we could translate the Radiance’s screams, they’d sound fairly alike. Indeed, the weapon she visits upon the king is a plague. As such, the Gothic—not just Hollow Knight—is a coping mechanism of martyred catharsis; i.e., through ludo-Gothic BDSM as a faux-medieval, concealed means of raising the dead of empire to let them speak, thus motivate a decaying hegemon to let go and change—to regenerate into something better than it previously was (treating the Radiance like a leper to lock up and abuse, mid-quarantine/segregation).

The larger mode uses stories like Hollow Knight to wrestle with unspeakable trauma in ways we can, to some extent, partially control and capture as psychosexually cathartic; i.e., the palliative Numinous expressed through Her Majesty’s sorry doom in godly (Promethean) forms: the castle, the goddess, the land of the black rose as raped by the king and all the king’s men (“Dayman, fighter of the night [wo]man!”) running a train (of draconian medieval succession, from father to son) on her corpse, censoring the rape for profit’s sake but proliferating it nonetheless through the space’s endless tourneys. Capital is built on rape as a matter of profit told in monomythic language hunting nature down; to show the rape by humanizing the whore (as Hollow Knight does) is to expose itself and give the game way in Promethean terms: the knight is hollow as a matter of power whose puppetry isn’t limited to the king at all, but also the queen.

Furthermore, peace cannot be attained in the interim, because such hidden abuses routinely yield disastrous socio-material effects whose ontological senescence manifests in the world itself as falling apart: state shift, climate change, and class consciousness all going hand in hand after much frustration (e.g., Charlie Day’s glorious refrain, “Why don’t I strap on my job helmet and squeeze down into a job cannon and fire off into Jobland where jobs grow on jobbies!”) to kick the king squarely in the bollocks. BOLLOCKS DESTROYED.

The paradox Hollow Knight exhibits lies in how it depicts rape; i.e., generally one of monstrous-feminine testimony (itself rather ironic, given the etymology[16] of that word): showing the world one’s rape in ways that cannot, like the space itself, be ignored. The Radiance’s pussy isn’t just a Chinese box pattern (aka the Russian doll, or concentric narrative); per Aguirre’s “Geometries,” which combines the Chinese box with the labyrinth and infernal concentric pattern to achieve an anisotropic effect (different effects in different directions), her fatal eye is a finger trap (“lips that grip”) that bites down on the rapist to trap them (a bit like Mars and Venus Aphrodite in Vulcan’s net), trapping the ordeal of rape for all to see: vagina dentata. It’s a trap, one where the ghost of the Radiance—literally an undead Numinous spirit plaguing the land—tops from below. From Hell as a place to inhabit and experience inside the kingdom, she cleverly baits the rapist (the knight) to expose their hidden rapacious side; i.e., one being a byproduct, similar to Lewis’ Matilda exposing Ambrosia for his Catholic passions: raping a corpse.

In the Radiance’s case, her appearance is the hypnotist’s stellar pussy flaring up to paralyze the knight in his tracks, jumping from one shell to another. But even if the current knight wins and she seemed banished for good without bringing forth the apocalypse (the third ending), the Radiance has still acted out her own death—her own swansong hijacking the prison intercom, its guards, to make them her playthings and her mouthpieces.

(artist: Heinrich Lossow)

From Chaucer’s Alisoun (“Thus, swyved was this carpenteris wyf”) to Ambrosio, to latter-day cops acting out courtly love as the knight in Hollow Knight does, classic villains not only appear righteous and good; they are outdone by their own lust as informed by carceral material conditions (a wife literally something to fuck under duress, but also take by force); rather than refrain from such theatrics, they become a useful way to express rape as going on right now. Per my PhD, Gothic maturity turns such things—normally a matter of spite—into a vulgar, transformative means of performance and play that interrogates power through trauma; i.e., as allowing one to have fun and expose abuse by acting such things out per calculated risk as built into the space and its motion (which is what ludo-Gothic BDSM aims to do). It denudes the king and his designs, disempowering them to give voice to the victim, empowered through her rape as “castrating” the patriarch and his bloodline; i.e., by matter of viewed scandal, per Black-Veil burlesque inside “the lovely room of death” (re: the center of the Radcliffean space generally being a site of explanation about rape)—a planned witness to a crime that, regardless of the lady’s hand in things, is still a crime committed by the knight as normally receiving state protection[17].

The catharsis to apocalyptic, come-and-see rape play like Hollow Knight roots in general, humorous, medieval-style exhibitionism and voyeurism the likes of Heinrich Lossow (above) or, later, Edward Hooper (whose own works inspired and speak to my consensual voyeurism, exhibit 39a1b). It becomes a codified, routine matter of brothel espionage and prostitute heroism—our resident whore baiting the creep, then outing him for the predator he is in service to the king (“The play’s the thing!”). Like lightning in a bottle, this poetic effect is still one of passion; i.e., what the Irish call a chuisle (“the pulse of my heart”)—something to tease like a clit, growing more sensitive between the world of the living and land of the dead (“undeath” being an orgasmic state of existence, of rapture) not exploiting rape but healing from it as a ghost of itself we summon to “ravish” us among the hallowed halls. The feelings intensify towards the vaginal center before the thrust, which mounts and explodes then like the castle itself, the hero and the whore dispersing and disappearing like a (wet) dream.

(source Tumblr post, Samurai Trooper fanzine: February 26th, 2021)

To it, playing with rape isn’t rape, but speaks to unironic forms that, unto themselves, have cathartic potential we can dance with to outperform in subversive, asexual ways; i.e., that can be harnessed to take power back from bourgeois elements pimping Medusa tied to a cultural fascination with the imaginary past (castle or occupant, including warriors and princesses, but also Amazonian hybrids of these, above). Again, they only have as much power as we give them, and through rape play can take it back as a matter of flowing such things back towards workers using Gothic space during ludo-Gothic BDSM. It’s a dangerous game regardless, so we might as well use what we got to take something of ours back from these pigs: “Come feel my hammer, little man!” As Mavis taught me (and for whom this section is dedicated), she absorbs power from those who generally don’t know the difference (men), waking up to describe what happened to Medusa classically in her sleep; i.e., when she was powerless and raped by the hero; e.g., like Theseus and the Minotaur (the former a cop to invade the home of the latter). Perseus hunted down the Medusa to “behead her”—to take her “maidenhead” and synonymize sex and force, but also replace consent with genuine harm. When camping these behaviors, there is always a vampiric exchange, which the space exemplifies in terrifying-yet-rapturous ways.

Except, in cases of genuine harm, it serves the whore to able to top from below to avoid or discourage harm and still take power back from one’s would-be abusers and their monomythic weapons. “Disempowerment” through the vice character is the classic means of subverting police violence by GNC folk—through theatre as a shared space, one that speaks to real-life examples. Actual predators project their own behaviors onto their victims, who they use DARVO to turn other members of the same marginalized community against the predator’s prey as a “threat” in order to prey on them; i.e., camouflage through aesthetics and argument, defined through dialectical-material engagement as a matter of canon vs camp, vice and virtue, behavior and cosmetics (through gender performance) going hand-and-hand with their biology, orientation, and politics, etc.

The Radiance’s bristles with phallic implements—her crown, legs and spiky projections to stab the hero to death with. Except. greatest power is her banshee-like voice, but also her scent as a kind of fairy glamor/magical perfume—one that turns her captors into her willing slaves, reversing the flow of power inside the prison while still visually playing the quest out. In turn, her announcement of rape is a subversive act, one never entirely divorced from genuine abuse by virtue of the player returning the system to working order by seeming laying her low—an act he does by clapping her in chains at the center of the maze: the scapegoat for the king’s crimes/madness already his prisoner.

(artist: Willow Wormwood)

Power and resistance occupy the same space, one whose dominant and submissive roles tend to either outright reverse, or maintain their appear while topping or bottoming changing as a matter of subtext that plays out through the same performance and aesthetics (re: bottoming from the top or vice versa). Keeping with the usual ambiguities—whose speculative qualities of play work off said ambiguities to speak to real life as not being cut and dry—such playtime speaks to the fact that we, in fact, aren’t knights and kings and queens and more than the Radiance is from planet Earth. And yet, we see her eagerly waiting at the door to greet her latest gentleman caller, not unlike a bored housewife playing the Duke of Burgundy (2014) out in real time—that naughty and eager desire to escape the prison-like qualities of middle-class existence, but also genuine abuse tied to the seemingly perfect existence of white American women in suburbia. The Radiance is something of a bored aging housewife, then, eagerly awaiting her next chance to give it to the knight, but also have her castle-space essayed into and ravished by him (the demon lover’s jizz running down her leg a lovely memory as fate comes knocking once more). She’s a freak because she likes to play to recover from trauma that sadly is all too common to women/monstrous-feminine at large; i.e., making such escapes something of a liminal, prison-like opera where liberation is—sadly and joyously—something to play at in order to reify (the story of our gay lives).

(artist: Shane Ballard)

Moreover, such calculated risk’s historical cruising can reduce to safer thrill-seeking that, all the same tends to get the old blood (and other fluids) pumping—in part, because you’re not always sure what’s going to happen or what someone is saying (e.g., body language, gags, and being restricted [for the sake of argument] to only making cute animal sounds), but all the same have a pretty good idea when working with someone you trust; i.e., who isn’t bad-faith, hence can actually follow commands (won’t bully/rape you and then stupidly fail up) and play the part of the dom or the sub regardless of aesthetic; e.g., the dragon master of the dark mommy dom using you the way that you want to be used, “raped,” what-have-you. That’s what makes it silly and fun, but also cathartic regarding actual abuse per the pedagogy of the oppressed; i.e., speaking theatrically to repressed actions routinely committed against the usual criminalized parties (the monstrous-feminine as sex demons, foreigners, sodomites [vampires] and other such “degenerates”) during state crisis advertising rape epidemics against marginalized peoples inside domestic war zones, aka prisons (cops and victims, witch hunts scapegoating nature for capital’s regulation predation, but also its boom-and-bust design)!

The fact that it’s a videogame aside, there’s always a BDSM element of play to stories like Hollow Knight. Except terror is always part of the historical equation, the disguise-like context of said play—the psychosexual excitement of release and incarceration—offset by acquiring new playmates to bask in the dom’s Numinous glow. She’s definitely a strict dom, playing it straight and only surrendering in the game’s final moments.

But in “dying” for all to see, the Radiance has her revenge/generally gains the upper hand over servants like the knight (similar to Portia’s ring game); i.e., those who themselves have been historically conditioned by the prison to prey on her to begin with. As a matter of exchange, they become her playthings, hypnotized in ways police agents often are, albeit in ways the Radiance uses to reverse the usual flow of violence and give Her Majesty a modicum of control: setting herself free inside the oubliette (a kind of prison that means “to forget”) as infernal schoolhouse to unruly children. The signature of choice begins to suggest mutual consent in ways that, on their face, seem wholly nonconsensual. Indeed, rape is as much the emotional abuse of isolation waiting to be fucked as it is the penetration, itself. The Radiance is paradoxically free, then, while still in chains (at least for now)—liberated from the embarrassment of total silence and bondage abuse, learning to enjoy its subversive power as a profound means of de facto education/reclamation: topping her captors, dominatrix-style, or at least making them work for their reward, then turning the sweet taste of victory to ashes in their mouths. She’s teaching them a lesson, one rooted in the humiliation of play where resolution is always found amid theatrical, but also dialectical-material tension.

As Jadis taught me, power becomes a vital means of play and performance while being imprisoned in some shape or form. Such hypnosis, then, has a canonical, settler-colonial function to it—a “prison sex” mentality the Radiance breaks by turning imprisonment back, boomerang-style, on her abusers, forcing them to remember the person they’re guarding as having value. She does so by using the dogmatic, vampiric nature of the prison against its employees; i.e., using her terrifying voice to infectiously travel through the guards and architecture, draining them of their essence and short-circuiting their brains. It’s a queer, iconoclastic metaphor of disease not unlike Foucault’s panopticon, one she—a skilled and unscrupulous survivor locked in her cell—uses to her advantage to speak to past wrongs against nature (and herself as “of nature”) through ludo-Gothic BDSM: a “rape” epidemic. Like any good example of the exercise, it’s even set to music—a song and dance to play out for the umpteenth time (with Radcliffe’s vaguely cursed spaces of terror often having hauntingly enchanting and spooky “mood music,” setting the signature gloomy tone by playing atmospheric from undiscovered locations; i.e., that, like the Pied Piper or sirens, lead you to your indeterminate but certain rape/doom; e.g., Azathoth’s flutes from “Dreams in the Witch House” or the spooky guitar music from 1996’s Diablo 1 “Tristram theme,” etc):

(source: Materia Collective)

In other words, such abuse is generally tokenized, the queen stuck in her closeted, isolating position because she was ostensibly betrayed; i.e., forgotten by her clan (the seer in the Burial Grounds, above) and left to rot inside the mind of the people abusing her for the king: sending the hero to rape and destroy their matriarch as a matter of pro-state penance, unburdening themselves but also unable to live the guilt and fading to dust. Such preferential mistreatment translates to real life and the ways a witch hunt normally play out: turning society against those who aren’t normally believed by other members of the prison population.

For example, JDPlaysMoth accused me of abuse based on my testimony of older transmisogyny committed against me (source tweet, vanderWaardart: July 19th 2024), doing so after refusing to transvestigate my own partner because I didn’t take Jade at their word that Crow was a Nazi “fake trans” preying on “real trans people”:

Crow is racist, lied about being trans to me and you, is abusive, steals money, intentionally asks trans people they’re acquainted with if they can write fiction of them detransitioned, and lies about being single and friendless to get new partners. They also aren’t trans. They lie about being trans because they have a fetish for trans women. They also are a chronic narcissist who uses abuse to try and control people who want to help them (source).

and then adding, “If you want to know more, that’s fine, but I’m out of the situation, and this is just information” before running a smear campaign on me because they were “just trying to help” and I refused to listen. They then deadnamed/misgendered Crow, saying that they didn’t “want to transition, doesn’t want surgery, and as another partner of hers has confirmed, she only does it because she thinks it’ll make trans women like her more” (ibid.). Jade’s actions—cloak-like though they are—still speak for themselves.

Furthermore, all of this is done by Jade while swanning and showing off their outward appearance to their fans (source tweet: June 26th, 2024)—in short, while kissing up and punching down as a byproduct of their own lived abuse. Acknowledging that abuse is valid, but more important is understanding that Jade is presently an abuser weaponizing their own lived experiences against others. They’re the impostor in love with themselves, a mirror that reflects their false nature onto their victims in order to makes others feel threatened; doing so is meant to alienate Jade’s victims, presenting them as false, illegitimate outsiders Jade’s flash mob can string up in association with their usual inequity under police rule: the scapegoat, witch whore inside more earthly and less fantastical prisons. Fantastical or not, there’s always some orc to lynch, some whole to fill through revenge; re: the givers and receivers of state violence inside the state of exception, moving money through nature.

Free from scrutiny and indeed, venerated for having exposed a perceived menace through the usual bigotries leveled at the marginalized struggling for in-group status, Jade is the fascist ringleader free to feed on her victims with impunity! She’s a witch hunter played by the witch—a feeding frenzy conducted by those commonly dehumanized by systemic abuse seeking empowerment through said system; i.e., the policing of others through a matter of dogma, fear and revenge, abjecting members of the same community by triangulating against them for the state: robots policing robots, slaves policing slaves, those of nature policing those of nature as monstrous-feminine with monstrous-feminine. Orcs police orcs, rats police rats (or rodents in general, but I digress) as givers and receivers of state abuse (often fetishized, knife-dick-style, through badass-looking weapons, below—less Excalibur and more an evil, “Soulreaver[18]” version of the same device), dividing and conquering territorially (the essence of settler-colonialism) when capital dies and regenerates through said witch hunts as hazing rituals:

(source)

This includes fiction speaking to non-fiction as married to each other. As Silvia Federici writes in Caliban and the Witch, Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004):

Witch-hunting did not disappear from the repertoire of the bourgeoisie with the abolition of slavery. On the contrary, the global expansion of capitalism through colonization and Christianization ensured that this persecution would be planted in the body of colonized societies, and, in time, would be carried out by the subjugated communities in their own name and against their own members (source).

only to add elsewhere (cited in “Hot Allostatic Load”):

One lesson we can draw from the return of witch-hunting is that this form of persecution is no longer bound to a specific historic time. It has taken a life of its own, so that the same mechanisms can be applied to different societies whenever there are people in them that have to be ostracized and dehumanized. Witchcraft accusations, in fact, are the ultimate mechanism of alienation and estrangement as they turn the accused—still primarily women—into monstrous beings, dedicated to the destruction of their communities, therefore making them undeserving of any compassion and solidarity (source).

In response, the author of “Allostatic” responds

The term witch hunt is thrown around a lot, but let’s look at what it really means. Witch hunts, as discussed by Silvia Federici, were responses to shifts in capital accumulation, as is slavery. To jury-rig the perpetually self-destructing machine of capitalism, huge amounts of violence are required to obtain captive labor (fem and non-white). The effect is to devalue our labor as much as possible, and to destroy the bonds between marginalized people (ibid.).

to argue for a cheapening of nature (re: Moore and Patel) through labor associated with it as recognized inside different marginalized populations conditioned to self-police, thus witch hunt in and out of fiction.

In response to both authors, I would include that capital tokenizes all labor (not just female and non-white) as sexualized, fetish, alien; i.e., something to gentrify and decay inside of itself, moving money through nature to harvest nature-as-monstrous-feminine (thus having masculine elements; e.g., phallic women). Feminism decays for these purposes, as do genderqueer movements, sex work, and Gothic poetics. Cops are also assassins, including vigilante ones recruited from the prison population expressed using such theatrics to embody by Man Box agents as “witch cops”; i.e., “prison sex” mentality selecting the whore and the cop to rape said whore who, regardless of sex or gender, is acting like the colonizer as something they have internalized and dressed up as. This includes whores acting as cops, “undercover” insofar as their tokenized police function is concealed by their marginalized origins worn on the outside in visibly fantastical forms: a robata romance, reduced to the nuts and bolts of class and culture betrayal. Rape is rape, betrayal is betrayal regardless of why you do it (e.g., “I was tired,” or “I was raped”)!

(artist: Monori Rogue)

All of this is Jade talking about themselves as projected onto their victims; people like Jade use DARVO, community isolation/obscurantism and police-grade hard-lining to bully their prey. In dialectical-material terms, it’s still Red Scare—pinkwashed by a predatory trans woman against another trans women (and trans man), pitting other GNC people (who often do sex work to survive) against Jade’s targets. Jade’s ugliness isn’t their outward appearance, but the predatory context of their actions. “Genuine transness,” then, becomes a matter of class action through culture as something to uphold, not betray through police violence (which is inherently fake). Such “boundaries for me, not for thee” predation is quite common in marginalized communities, essentially amounting to gang wars and tokenized policing instead of intersectional solidarity against all manners thereof.

Per the cryptonymy process, all of this self-reports and self-deceives, the complicit villain reduced to the useful idiot[18a] that gives themselves away by acting against their own kind inside the police state. Because they cannot monopolize the mirror as a cryptonymic device, we can use it to out and expose them through their own behaviors speaking for themselves: such traitors are cheap, worthless vampires that drain others for the state. Their value comes entirely from raping others, making them unironic leeches—parasitic hollow knights seeking their sorry prey like Slave Knight Gael blindly chasing the Blood of the Dark Soul until the end of time, or the king’s men walking into the Radiance’s willing clutches (a pathetic, pernicious, predatory quality we’ll explore even more in “The World is a Vampire” subchapter). This is a school for ants!

Ants are not known for their intelligence. Rather, such behaviors are taught through canon’s normal coded instructions denoting value by going to the center of the maze (the nucleus, which isn’t always the middle) to rape the witch, the dragon, the Medusa “just one more” time. Even if you make it to the Radiance’s cell—her home, as she preys on the hunters normally trying to house and harm her for the king—she is simply waiting for the killer with a variety of extensive and fatal weapons.

The Radiance own clever defiance is informed by police action as something to twist, making the experience more agonizing (and fun) for all parties involved. By camping the hero, she shows that to survive rape, we must camp its execution as endemic to capital, liberation being the continuous and mounting result of that on a cultural level that reclaims the Base and recultivates the Superstructure: through data that—like the Radiance’s cordyceps analog—freezes our abusers usefully in place. “Stay! Good boy!” Or, “Rape me! Good boy!” It denotes an inability for a superior side to exist, the state and workers locked in perpetual dispute. We want to expand our advantage to shrink the state (and its agents) to irrelevancy. This happens through the paradox of “disempowerment” to speak powerfully to our imprisonment under capital.

Furthermore, these disparities and harm play out between fiction and non-fiction, satire and canon, speaking to the same things being colonized and liberated to a holistic, half-real degree. This pedagogy of the oppressed is as much our bodies and their labor power as it is the Aegis a theatrical trampoline/mirror saying like an all-projecting panopticon, “Look, don’t touch!”

Either way, Medusa’s restless corpse and labyrinthine frontier fucks back through the space—using tricks that short circuit the usual heroic bullshit (“And your tricks won’t work at all!” as Lady Kayura [above] puts it) by reversing the usual flow of power that occurs in all caps: “FINISH HER!” Kiss, bite or slap, though, her vampire booty (and castle) is a vitalistic fetish whose charged surfaces and thresholds take power from the usual abusers in the usual genderqueer ways: rolling with the punches of courtly love as something to camp and subvert (the player telling the Radiance’s story by reaching and raping her per the game’s ludic contract: play Metroidvania, rape Medusa—again, it’s par for the course)!

(artist: TMFD)

Furthermore, sexual feelings don’t always go away after rape, but they do often get swept up in rape fantasies whose paradoxical fun remains tied to real-life abuse and power structures (so many divorced dads to out as creeps); that’s what Gothic fiction is!

Keeping with that, the player and the game’s ludic contract/geometries of rape play in Hollow Knight are ones where the game fucks the player after a perceived momentum shift from the assigned dominant (the knight) by the Medusa; i.e., topping from below, out of Hell, to haunt the player after the fact: exposing themselves as a witch hunter by completing a long series of “hits,” of which the Radiance is queen (a “power target”).

Such reversals of mastery are hardly a secret contained inside the gameworld; castles like Metroidvania advertise their raping of the player as a matter of power exchange similar to Radcliffe’s or Lewis’ readers; re (from “Our Ludic Masters”):

A person motivated by sex is hardly in control. Not to mention, the sex historically offered by Metroid is fraught with peril. The entire drive is illustrated by gameplay [space] conducive to speedrunning [rape] at a basic level. The same strategies employed by the best runners are executed by regular players. You play the game and begin to play it faster. In some sense, this “maze mastery” is involuntary. The player cannot help but play the game faster as they begin to re-remember the maze. The game exploits this, repeatedly leading the player towards self-destruction and domination.

These feelings are orgasmic, but differently than the Doom Slayer’s own attempts at conquest. They’re a Gothic orgasm, a kind of exquisite torture. I say “exquisite” because they occur within the realm of play. For Metroidvania, this jouissance is ludic (source).

But these, per the process of abjection, classically serve the state through the middle class doing the rape-in-question. There is always a psychosexual threat that motivates the player to be unironically violent with their avatar towards the monstrous-feminine (this includes Dracula in Castlevania, but more on that in the “Feeding” chapter); i.e., before the game eventually tops them (the warrior submitting to the game after a hard day’s work): rape Medusa, get pegged (the paradox to ludo-Gothic BDSM again being that no one is actually being harmed, onscreen).

All of this is standard-issue Amazonomachia. Per the Gothic Romance, though, the house is the monstrous-feminine, and it always wins by reminding players that the king—and by extension the man of reason—is dead, built on stolen land. But they think they’re not; they’re undead in service to the state as always hungry for more rape. It’s precisely this mechanism the Radiance uses to made herself and her abuse heard. She is the Numinous—something to acknowledge rape with (carceral violence through solidarity confinement, in her case) and play games that help us process our own abuses, in real life.

To it, the same invulnerable quality to BDSM, the inability to get raped, applies in either direction. The Radiance can’t be killed any more than Medusa can, and in being raped she always takes the hero’s power as a matter of performance (to have him, and him her, back and forth, per the usual Beowulf-style kayfabe and momentum changes and stances: cops and victims): his sword is useless to him no matter where he plunges it (the brain, belly or box), because he will always corrupt, the kingly godhead and colony will always die, and the Medusa—well and truly broken in (and not under the spell of their rapists’ penises, like the owners of these penises are)—will always return, playfully reminding people camping her rape that she was actually raped by king and countrymen alike. That is her revenge!

“Some power!” Dr. Christine Neufeld once scoffed at the topos of the power of women. Except, all power is performative, Dr. Neufeld. Furthermore, history is canonically predicated on men raping women, workers and nature, the latter of which are monstrous-feminine by virtue of their expected role: taking it inside the prison. Indeed, the Radiance’s pussy—her stolen land—is raw and inflamed with irritation, decay and fungus, the febrile yeast infection entering her insectoid rapists’ ant brains. Hysteria becomes something of a defense mechanism; i.e., akin to the xenomorph’s acid for blood, but an STD to discourage the warrior’s invading her realm. It’s not unnatural, but nature defending itself from manmade incursions essentializing themselves as “natural” (re: Divine Right and Manifest Destiny), only to fall into disarray as their usual Cartesian progress is denuded and reversed to develop a Communist opposite invading the space (the fungus grows over time): “Let nature be your teacher!” as Wordsworth puts it[19]—your dominatrix discouraging canonical violence through bad (campy) echoes of itself!

The monomyth delivers rape disguised as “heroism,” showing the player how to act (rape the whore); the Promethean, iconoclastic gag—its bread and butter—is subverting this exchange, taking the rapists power to unmask and dethrone the sovereign through the player aping them, and that’s exactly what the Radiance and castle do. Having hijacked the prison, she lures the player to his doom at the middle of it, showing him the truth of the Pale King despite said king having given him, the knight, amnesia. Working through the gameworld, its unmappable qualities to trauma can never be fully explored, thus raped enough; something of the Radiance always stays out of reach, the Pale King always exposed as futile, impotent, and wretched. He has no clothes and thought he could conquer death, his primrose path the road to Hell paved with bad intent doing him in!

Instead, death becomes him as something to look on in horror (and perceptive zombie eyeballs), the Radiance jeering liminally behind her sanctuary’s Aegis, her dominatrix’ panopticon fucking back against weird canonical nerds. A fatal parting gift that comes back round and round, she rises from the grave—its ashes, dung and corpses—to become reborn in the death and decay as paradoxically what returns her to life; i.e., that she may haunt her abusers’ value (the swordsmen’s “swords”) tied completely to raping her for the Man. You can’t kill or fully imprison Medusa, and the state will die trying (unable to regenerate in the face of something more flexible and prone to adapt—the king’s a lightweight, in other words)!

(photographer: Dennis Lowe)

To it, Medusa can take all comers, fucking back hard against any who take a swing but especially Cartesian men of reason (and their theatrical disguises)! Such bullies are weak cowards, accustomed to state protection, whereas Medusa has built herself up through adversity. She is strong and her bullies are not, which means they will only fear her more when her reunion with them—rising up from the depths like a ghost ship, or a hellish castle descending astronoetically from the stars—suddenly threatens to expose their shameful and pathetic actions during the usual heroic tests, the bloodsport of a given witch hunt suddenly achieving proletarian results; re: like Macbeth—slave to the same Cycle of Kings—seeing the murdered Banquo while awake, to Ashley Williams’ being exposed as a stupid, egotistical, and enabled charlatan (re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Valorizing the Idiot Hero,” 2020), to Castle Otranto’s mighty helmet crushing Manfred’s son to expose the entire Capitalocene. Such things are generally fabricated (above) to counteract state versions. Dragon or witch, fascist or Communist—all paradoxically occupy the same messy venue, the same shadow zone to sing our little hearts out. Power is always a performance.

Similar to Peter Weyland or Athetos, everything about the Pale King’s performance is deceitful and penetrative; e.g., the chair and crown of swords (next page), the lord’s many needles stabbing the world around it for a cure to death as simply being the cold hard truth: “A king has his reign and then he dies” (death being the Leveler of so-called great men of history—a theme we’ll look at next with Myth: the Fallen Lords).

Like all men of reason tied to cartesian thought, he becomes the ghost of rape seeking its revenge against nature having humbled him and his phallic, monumental posturing; and as we’ve hopefully established by now, revenge during the monomyth is always futile: Medusa’s power (sunshine or darkness, sword or spike) is bigger than any king’s, haunting the bad timeline to threaten new resurrection and growth towards Gothic Communism—all while our man of reason dies alone in his tomb-like throne room, his prison cell. This happens inside capital, regardless; the difference is dialectical-material context.

Sound familiar? The Radiance and Rusalki have that in common, too! They’re king-slayers, the thorny cunt that—once thrust into by the king’s lance—takes the lord’s power and kills his men like sacrifices that she exposes; i.e., not as philanthropists at all, but Charlie Day’s “full-on rapists.” Hoisted up on his own petard, the king is the sacrifice, capital reporting on itself as aided by the Radiance being raped as loudly as possible; i.e., our girl to get “gets got,” and she just won’t stop cumming (a true exhibitionist, walking the game’s tightrope just as the player does)! Regardless of exact intent, her rape exposes her rapist through emergent, psychosexual forms of play between hero and whore, hunter and witch; i.e., involving canonical rape (the monomyth) as something to camp, mid-torture: exquisite, half-veiled threats of calculated risk striking the king stone dead (the bully afraid of his own shadow, dying of fright). Instead of celebrating the whore as victim and nothing else, then, the Radiance beats him at his own game: “The king is dead; long live the king!” (or as David the android would say in Prometheus, “Mortal after all!”). Speaking the king’s language for workers, she invites the player to celebrate his demise, taking the whore’s side to spurn the tyrant’s shriveled corpse. Get that ass beat, old man!

This matters insofar as Capitalist Realism will incur the end of the world (the wrath of the gods) rather than imagine anything beyond Capitalism; re: the myopic, entitled delusion of a Quixotic idiot trapped in his dead dream of greatness. In turn, the banality of such evil’s looping threnodies is that those who know and have only care about one thing: holding onto power for as long as possible. Preventing state shift (cataclysm) was entirely possible in the king’s world, or Sudra, if only they would let go and spread power more evenly around. But they—like their earthly counterparts—would rather gas entire nations and send the ants marching off to their deaths if it meant they could only enjoy their usual glass of blood one more time. They’re not just complete and utter ghouls, but deeply cynical tyrants in suits who cannot make or enjoy anything except rape. They are the enemy of all things, both workers and nature; there’s not enough time in the world to express just how much they (and the state) suck (and how much fucking time they cry about it to the world, as Victor once did; i.e., DARVO and self-centeredness; e.g., Elon Musk insisting he is the victim, losing an heir instead of gaining a daughter[20]).

However imaginary such monsters and castles are, then, the DARVO-grade, victim-blaming language used to describe them (and the rape it causes) is very real. As a matter of returning to these embarrassing defeats, the hero travels deep inside worlds like Hallownest, confronting uncomfortable truths about the Cartesian rulers they serve; i.e., per monomythic exchanges baked into or otherwise tied to capital as having been displaced to make-belief spheres: there are no kings left, only bones that hunger for revenge, for closure, for awakening. The man of reason is a zombie, as is his good little soldier raping Medusa for him (the routine sacrifice made to keep Medusa in check, which doesn’t work). To bad he didn’t know she’s a necromancer camping the castle to lure the hero: “Come to mommy!”

This rebellious potential of the infernal concentric pattern is one that that we, as Gothic Communists, should welcome and capitalize on; i.e., when developing Capitalism away from patrilineal descent towards Communism as a monstrous-feminine dark womb, but it starts in the self-dug pit of kings and their used-up defenders: the mind space of the dead monarch (Zeus as braindead, creating things that rape nature’s “womb” as part of the world he tries and gloriously fails to dominate). The usual displaced intimations of capitalist instability (the process of abjection) becoming a death omen fir Gothic Communists to prevent, not bury and escape whenever capital rears its ugly head! They try to invoke Cartesian dualism; we drop a piano on their heads.

In short, all’s fair in love and class war. During it, we have to befriend the ghost of the counterfeit, talk to it and wake up (class and culture consciousness, emotional/Gothic intelligence), which means facing rape as a matter of profit recycling blinding apocalypses/rapes. If the legions of unburied death inside that wormy pit are any indication, we cannot afford to be blind:

(exhibit 40i: Intimations of genocide are commonplace before the final tragedy—e.g., the Soul Master’s charnel house, a secret resting place of his ghoulish experiments. To this the Abyss is a literal level in-game, commenting on mise-en-abyme as literal within ludo-Gothic, ergodic spaces: a “desert of the real,” abyss-like maze whose chronotope is chock-full of cryptonymic wreckage. Desiring to separate the spirit from the body as a weapon against hysteria, the Soul Master exemplifies Cartesian folly in the face of mature challenging male imperiums. More broadly the closed space is generally a site of trauma for the heroine looking at something nigh inexpressible: less a thing fully uncovered and more the protagonist being sent to a buried location where the unspeakable trauma can be found as too much to process [the protagonist being a genderless, monstrous-feminine variant of the Gothic hero/heroine in one uncanny ghost].

Unlike the rooms and tunnels, the presence of living death within them cannot be recorded on the knight’s trusty map; in other words, it cannot be openly acknowledged, let alone quantified by the cartographer as a cop, but is felt everywhere as something the dead walk you through in a liminal, architectural sense—both in the City of Tears, but also the entirety of Hallownest and in the parallel, concentric spaces of the ghosts and their sleeping minds [re: Aguirre’s “Geometries of Terror”]. Dreaming of trauma, these restless spirits are tied to the savaged land, both invaded by an ultimate killer [the player] who “avenges” them after absorbing their power in duels from beyond the grave. Taking their power for itself, the Pale King’s weapon uses them to root the Gorgon out, pinning all of the Kingdom’s federalist desolation [from the Soul Master and others] onto the Radiance as an ancient, monstrous-feminine scapegoat: Original Sin.)

Despite being presented as “female,” this irrational fear of looking at repressed trauma—and the coercive, duplicitous methods of engaging with it, in the blood-soaked, circular ruins—is actually heteronormative and patriarchal. Empire is inherently Cartesian, thus genocidal; forever haunted by the rapacious ghosts of kings and ancient Gorgons, but also their affiliate zombie hordes, its legions of dark, voiceless undead marking the general location, if not the exact manner in which these bodies were exploited by empire in the name of “progress” (following the leader). Rediscovery leads to further stabs at repression, but also redistribution through the paradox of terror, violence and anything else to serve workers thwarting state monopolies: the Aegis goes both ways, and fucks back through all the usual devices’ anisotropic (reversible) dualities, hyphenations, paradoxes, et al.

Let’s wrap everything up (four pages) before exiting the symposium and moving onto “Monomyth,” part two.

In The Hobbit, Bilbo is repeatedly concerned with the quest as a kind of suicide mission: will he make it back alive? The same applies to rape survivors, who generally aren’t the same when they “come back” from rape encounters; i.e., a part of them simply doesn’t, dying back at the crime scheme. But something new emerges, regardless, something strong in spite of that; e.g., the Radiance’s phallic elements thrusting and stabbing at the hero.

Liberation and exploitation, then, share the same spaces, the same terrifying bodies as castle-like and vice versa; re (from “the Origins of Ludo-Gothic BDSM as a Matter of Rememory”):

big power and trauma often lurk on the surface of gentler-looking (and smaller) bodies, their double operations showing and revealing different things useful to state or proletarian agency through Gothic reenactments of paradise lost; i.e., of shattered innocence, of childhood devastation confusing pleasure and harm through conflations of psychosexual pleasure-and-pain responses inviting the audience to consider an uneven pedagogy of the oppressed: look on those of us affected by rape and see how we cope with the trauma it forces us to live with (source).

Such rape-play, laugh-at-the-gods showmanship doesn’t just include the Radiance contained inside the hollow knight inside the castle grounds, as we have shown, but any monstrous-feminine, be they big and small, tall and short-stacked, young and old, kawaii and kowai, goblin and witch alike (or combinations; i.e., kids playing with dolls to achieve deeds worthy of remembrance; e.g., Hayao rocking Hugo at Evo 2024). All are criminals seeking liberation through what normally is policed: forbidden fruit to reclaim and deny our rapists using ludo-Gothic BDSM inside the state of exception and its persecution mania’s places and people, maps and monsters, etc.

We’re vampires, too, but we move power towards ourselves using what we got (re: Matteson): reversing abjection through our darkness visible; i.e., our Satanic camping not just of paradise (the castle or castle grounds), but its prophesied restoration through heroic violence cleverly upended during Promethean counterterrorist schemes topping from below.

Adversity isn’t just baked into capital, but class and culture war’s revenge against bourgeois forces’ notion of destiny through moral actions (witch hunts) and territories (maps, mazes). For the elite, then, the end of the world is when workers refuse to police themselves, but rather humanize each other using the same monstrous language’s stigmatic elements to organize labor action; e.g., orcs and goblins (medieval anti-Semitic symbols of greed similar to dwarves, but also eating children and raping women), dragons (medieval symbols of cruelty and power), witches (medieval symbols of children eaters), and other oppressed things clapping back, guerrilla-style, against state forces and their codified bigotries; i.e., with the very things the state cannot control, repress and ultimately abject: some combination of their monstrous-feminine bodies, their labor and genders, their sexualities’ sultry and inventive Gothic poetics, body language, and colorful swearwords, etc.

In rebel hands, these articles of desire, vice, struggle and sin collectively and joyously voice rebellion as a stubborn, intoxicatingly transgressive means of rocking out against false protectors: underdog agents of fortune—like immovable objects meeting an unstoppable force—reconciling fate by refusing to be dutiful pets while simultaneously rubbing their assigned owners’ noses in it. “Hell’s bells, Satan’s callin’ for you!”

(artist: Bottled Line Art)

So while it’s true that (re: our volume thesis)

Capitalism achieves profit by moving money through nature; [and that] profit is built on trauma and division, wherein anything that serves profit gentrifies and decays, over and over while preying on [nature, the fact remains that trauma] cultivates strange appetites, which vary from group to group per the usual privileges and oppression as intersecting differently per case; i.e., psychosexual trauma (the regulation of state sex, terror and force) and feeding in decay as a matter of complicated (anisotropic) exchange unto itself, but also shapeshifting and knowledge exchange vis-à-vis nature as monstrous-feminine: something to destroy by the state or defend from it (and its trifectas, monopolies, etc) using the same threatening aesthetics of power and death, decay and rape (source).

we must remember that (re: our Metroidvania symposium theses)

the Gothic is predicated on fakery through the process of abjection attacking nature vis-à-vis the ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., nature as alien/monstrous-feminine, colonized by the sovereign West through Cartesian thought. Historical materialism proliferates decay and deception through open secrets (casualties of empire, but also empire in decay expressed in medieval language; e.g., castles) that no one side can monopolize, but for which terror and obfuscation allow either side to partially conceal themselves with, using the cryptonymy process to operate in capital’s wake: to either defend the status quo while wearing its victims and symbols of oppression, or to undermine it through the same basic means (source).

and that’s

what the Promethean Quest effectively encapsulates and discourages, Medusa fucking back to reverse the flow of power and information the monomyth normally supplies in outright parental language, but also monomythic media exposed to middle-class children at a young age; i.e., standing in for absentee parents (videogames, for our purposes): the givers of Cartesian dogma, but also rebellious sentiment through Promethean allegory (the appearance of the black castle/fallen manmade paradise to begin with) [ibid.].

There is no monopoly on any of this, no set future relayed in the imaginary language of the past where Hell comes home. Capital rapes us, but we can always fuck back to reverse abjection; i.e., to take anything they have back from them through the same poetic allegories, illusory dialogs and medieval, at-times-crude (and fun) puns: where power is, and where trauma is interrogated through said power as exquisite “torture.”

As the Radiance shows, this happens through performance and play occurring for one side or the other in perpetual conflict—our existence, happiness and survival is a life-after-death threat display they will always fear/try to control through futile revenge and empty promises of power (the myth of the middle class, avenging their losses for the state by policing us, only to have their home collapse).

For us, then, “sleeping beauties” are when the witch wakes up to collectively fight class war through culture and race united with it; i.e., to raise a cumulative emotional/Gothic intelligence and awareness for all of these things during intersectional solidarity liberating sex workers through iconoclastic art—our castles in the flesh, but also our praxial necklaces and oppositional synthesis made by connecting the dots differently per outing (as this symposium has done, referencing my older works in ways that you can try yourselves). Sex Positivity is holistic, in that respect, summoning sluts to scare our foes; the enemy to Gothic Communism, workers and nature is the state and its police agents (token or otherwise) bastardizing our stolen power to police us with, keeping us oppressed and downtrodden, their pet-like sluts to shame and chattelize, raped without irony.

Ending on a curtain call to the symposium, let me conclude with an appropriate visual: the curtain, itself, as black. As such, either direction of power and knowledge as outlined above ties to the cryptonymy process (revolutionary or complicit) through a classic Gothic device: Radcliffe’s Black Veil, whose pulling back showcases the Medusa torturing herself (as the Radiance does, calling the hero to her) to achieve rapture of a palliative, generative sort. Such a charm school of Gothic hard knocks has elements of formal and informal training. Returning to Forbidden Planet from the start of the symposium, that film showcased a curious desire to look at the awesome mystery that was teased throughout the film, hidden behind a Black Veil that all but begs to be pulled aside: Medusa’s panties hiding her fearsome death cunt, her peach of torment hungering for fresh delicious peril.

For the Radiance, her lesson seems to say to us, “While I love you, [we] can never be free.” But there’s no place like home when restored to appreciate her survival and love for healthy psychosexual power exchange outing the original space and population as punitive, hypocritical, and undeserving (the vampire body and castle as having a shared vitalistic function). You don’t kill capital with it; you transform your enemy/cage into something that can’t rape you anymore—that won’t rape you no matter how compromising your position: mutual consent (established at a second-nature, societal level) makes that all but impossible! All that remains is the fantasy of “torture,” the ghost of agony (and nature) set free upon/with the thrusting Aegis! The moon is full, the prisoners breaking out to have their sweet revenge by teaching other workers, mid-exchange and mid-exhibitionism (of power and knowledge) to obey the hellish, queenly dominatrix topping from below. “Stare and tremble!” at all that speculative richness living deliciously!

(artist: Sephy Pink)

Tying that to Metroidvania and similar monstrous-feminine rape spaces, if Gothic canon monopolizes the Veil as an unironic threat (“Look and die!”) within formerly glorious spaces, then Gothic Communism‘s success lies is making Capitalism—literally the stuff of Gothic villains and their castles—inexorably fail to everyone’s benefit; i.e., to ironically subvert its canonical tools, thereby transforming the state (and the middle class) into something that doesn’t exploit workers, but still improves their material conditions through the Superstructure as modified: a world of infinite possibility except for the usual deceptions meant to conceal genocide behind monomythic tomb raiding—loot ‘n shoot, run ‘n gun, etc.

All heroes are monsters. Rather than flee/get away from such monsters per escapist, heteronormative fantasies that expose the cannibalistic nature of Capitalism (and its assorted cartographic refrains [either Tolkien or Cameron’s] populated with imaginary bugbears, below), we must play with power-as-marketed to subvert its settler-colonial (thus exploitative) character in Gothic ways; i.e., to humanize the ghost of the counterfeit by navigating the space of terror anisotropically—saying to our actual rapists (not the imaginary non-white ones, above), “We wouldn’t fuck you with a ten-foot pole!” (“once you go black…”):

(artist: Devilhs)

A large part in doing so is challenging the canonical, heteronormative past as something to dogmatically fall in love with (re: Dimitrescu, but really any Medusa as walking the tight rope; e.g., Lara Croft as yet-another-Amazon “white Indian” with a classist character we can camp and have fun with[21]); i.e., the ghost of the counterfeit as a kind of false, fatal memory that survives in the material world under Capitalist Realism (whose solution is always rape, because it can’t imagine anything better). This can merely be the echoes of a being or person that someone else has created years later—a narrative of a narrative of a narrative.

It’s certainly true that sex-positive art can remove the villain entirely in order to focus on sexual agency as something to appreciate during hauntological reinvention (as I have done with Ozymandias, exhibit 40a). However, the trope of the ignominious death under Numinous power remains a common teaching device inside the Gothic bag of tricks—not just the man-of-reason or “noble” king as we have just explored, but also the crime lord driven mad by their own abuse of systemic power until they go insane: to awaken from a sleep of death, returning home to destroy empire over and over again. We spit on their grave, basking in the sub drop of the palliative Numinous’ dream mushrooms, her pussy sunbeams.

Decay, of course, becomes something to leave behind and study. Better worlds are built on worse ones, deconstructing the former’s illusions anchoring us in place. Like Sudra or Hallownest, then, our funerary consignment is always part of a larger kingly crime site we can reclaim, camp and send back out against capital, leaving such tyrannies behind while decolonizing their homes. That’s what this subchapter is: my life’s work squeezed into a little over a hundred pages (technically 146, but who’s counting). It’s been real, but “so long, gay Bowser!”

There’s always a bourgeois double to the kinds of titanic rape iconoclasts revel in, when recording their own doom; i.e., actual rape always lies adjacent to psychosexual healing that, in the wrong hands, can lead to genuine exploitation. As curiously gigantic and rotting beings (re: Frankenstein), such tyrants revive in future stories begot from older castle commenting on a larger historical-material loop: intimating the Great Destroyer during the Imperial Boomerang’s homeward voyage (who always comes home, no matter how often you pass the buck). There’s a demonic, composite quality to tyrants we’ll return to in the Demon Module, when we look at Shelley’s novel; in part two of “The Monomyth,” though, we’ll specifically examine these revivals out-of-doors (versus closed space) through crime lords and Zombie Caesar!

Onto the opening and part one to “The Monomyth, part two: Criminals and Conquerors” (feat. The Crow and Steam Powered Giraffe)!

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Footnotes

[1] As I write in “Mazes and Labyrinths“: “[Unlike survival horror,] ‘Metroidvania’ was effectively the combination of two IPs owned by different Japanese companies. So the term was never printed in any official capacity. In fact, it wasn’t until the mid-2010s that ‘Metroidvania’ saw wider use in the indie market”: PC Gamer (“The Best Metroidvania on PC,” 2022), Engadget (“‘Metroidvania’ should actually be ‘Zeldavania,'” 2016), GamaSutra (“The undying allure of the Metroidvania,” 2015) Giant Bomb (“Metroidvania,” 2023), and Wired (“An Anime-Inspired Platformer That’s as Beautiful as It Is Mind-Bending,” 2015). Simply put, the genre exploded in popularity in the mid-2010s, becoming a smash indie success on Steam and continuing to be wildly popular to this day.

[2] Under whose independent tutelage (LING 499) at EMU, I wrote the paper, “Method in His Madness: Lovecraft, the Rock-and-Roll Iconoclast and Buoyant Lead Balloon” (2017), which inspired me to pursue the Numinous (as a subject of study) to the faraway, magical city Manchester, England.

[3] This idea was coined by a supremely bigoted white man—one whose tottering regressions towards fascism forever hang over the science-y heroes he constantly tortures in his stories; i.e., threatening them with insignificance in the face of mightier things:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little [speak for yourself, whitey]; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age (source: “The Call of Cthulhu,” 1928).

“Oh, no! I’m not the center of the universe?” I think old Lovecraft could have seriously done with some “flexibility training” insofar as acclimating himself to chaos, meaning there’s more to life than the myth of male power deflated. His empty outlook, in my opinion, is very much him projecting his own privileged shortcomings into the power vacuum of an impenetrable void (that isn’t, you should know by now, outer space). He’s basically Peter Weyland gazing solemnly into the abyss and seeing nothing because, for him, there is nothing worthwhile to acquire. It’s the trembling that he enjoys. He’s very much like a child afraid of the dark, whose prescribed unapproachability is a kind of “backtalking from the sub”: “You’re hideous, Cthulhu; now step on me.”

[4] The gendering of spaces is not usual; sailors would do it with ships, gendering them female as they cut through the equally female sea. A giant, hostile castle isn’t so odd, then—with Scott’s “space castle” (and its Gothic matelotage) sailing through the murky darkness like a ghost ship haunted by an older copy of itself.

[5] Versus a negative-sum game: a lose-lose; e.g., Capitalism (because the elite will lose in the end due to climate change).

[6] There’s plenty of exceptions to this; i.e., a whole can of worms (so to speak); e.g., femboys, whose curiously large dicks and slender bods (androdiversity) we have already examined in this series; e.g., exhibit 34a1b1b1 from Volume Two, part one:

The monstrous-feminine is very broad and dualistic. It would be impossible to cover all aspects of it here, because there are an infinite number between overlapping/intersecting gradients. In gender-studies fashion, I’ve isolated three gradients for your consideration: biology/sexuality, gender performance, and performance-as-identity. Though I could devote a book [or series of books] to each, I will merely supply one exhibit per gradient for you to keep in mind as we progress. As we do, remember that canon both divides and essentializes nature as discrete and fused; e.g., biology is essential under capital, and sex and gender are both discrete in terms of critical analysis and dogmatically fused insofar as canon treats them like one-in-the-same and chained to human biology serving the state [the challenging of which Judith Butler calls “gender trouble”] (source).

(artist, top-and-bottom- left/mid-right: My Emetophobia; top-right: Pancake Pornography; bottom right: Paladin Pleasure Sculptors)

The primer can only scratch the surface of such things; we will examine andro and gynodiversity even more in Volume Three (a sample):

(exhibit 91b2: Femboys demonstrate androdiversity with tremendous irony. For example, although undoubtedly there are plenty of femboys with smaller schlongs, plenty on the market advertise the slenderest of elfin bodies and the girthiest of members [contrary to heteronormative belief, big bodies—especially ones on inordinate amounts of synthetic testosterone—have shrinking genitals]; e.g., vacillating throbbers of cuties like Catboi Aoi, Rayray Sugarbutt, Olivia the Robin, Zay Zay, illiteracy4me, Hanyuu, Jaybaesun, etc.)

Simply put, Medusa isn’t strictly female (fuck off, TERFs); femboys and catboys (regardless of biological sex or gender in relation to that) are monstrous-feminine, too, thus fall into the same sodomy-style states of exception/critiques of capital. Secretly raped as open pornographic secrets, they become the secret weapons of rebellion through much the same cryptonymy reversing the flow of power—towards workers versus the state. So often porn chattelizes non-normative bodies (or honestly anything that isn’t a white, cis-het, Christian man); liberation is about reclaiming such things to serve our needs.

[7] From Romeo and Juliet, act one, scene one.

[8] I’d rather be raped and free, then still under my rapist’s “protection.”

[9] A throwaway line/role in an otherwise awful movie, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) at least gets the Nazi-Russian she-wolf right.

[10] For more examples of Tolkien’s animalistic language in relation to capital and greed, consider my essay on Tolkien’s Hobbit vis-à-vis Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: “‘Dragon Sickness’: The Problem of Greed” (2014).

[11] And, point in fact, dressing the heroes up as robbers, as rebels, where they’re policing the Good Lands of those pesky inhuman, blood-drinking and baby-eating goblins. Adventures like Tolkien’s conceal their bigotry through shadowy monsters that, often enough, are killed in plain sight; though tokenized (re: Jewish stereotypes and one gay wizard and hobbit), it’s still cops-and-robbers terrorism serving the state.

[12] Allusions not just to Lovecraft, but tentacle rape in reverse. Kinky!

[13] Normally the panopticon is a view piece for the king of his subjects through his subjects; i.e., a tower from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, specially a prison meant to house and monitor lepers (showing Foucault’s love for medieval comparisons). In short, workers in both texts are kept under lock and key per a constant state of surveillance—one they embody and report to the top on themselves (tattletales), even when said top ceases to exist. In the Radiance’s case, though, she has hijacked the hive, effectively seeing backwards through a collective disease that monitors and attacks the hero as the last knight/prison guard alive.

[14] I.e., through bread-and-circus kayfabe spectating rape.

[15] The policing is generally done through the state’s own victims triangulating against themselves through the mechanisms and language of domination under capital; i.e., of workers at large, but especially marginalized workers closer to the in-group than not. First and foremost, per Gothic canon, this is white middle-class straight women, who—while they are sex workers whether they like to admit it or not (the myth of the liberated second wave feminist, trading overt sex work for the role of the pimp)—will attack other marginalized groups doing sex work of a more openly extramarital sort: the virgin vs the whore. Often this has a racialized character to it, but also a transphobic one, too.

For example, as Porpentine writes in “Hot Allostatic Load” (2015):

I saw a queer black woman, struggling to survive by her art, falsely accused of rape by a white queer. The call-out post was extremely vague and loaded with strong words designed to elicit vigilante justice. Immediately, hundreds of other white queers jumped on the bandwagon. Many of them likely didn’t know either of the people involved.

Accusations of sexual menace are a key weapon used against marginalized people in feminist spaces, because it arouses people’s disgust like no other act—the threat of black skin on innocent white, of trans bone structures on ethereal cis skeletons. It’s as common for many of us as cat-calling or any other form of ubiquitous harassment that cis feminists talk about, except no one wants to talk about it. It’s a way for the dominant people in the group to take us aside and say, you are not welcome here, or do this thing you don’t want to do or I’ll ruin your life. But frequently it happens without any particular thesis, just as a general tool to keep us destabilized and vulnerable. Don’t forget who you really are in the unspoken hierarchy.

Mobbing uses these rumors to trade a vague suspicion for the actual reality of violence. It’s like turning the corner and watching someone on the street having their teeth kicked in by a mob who assures you that just before you appeared, this person had committed some mysterious act which justifies limitless brutality (source).

From my own experiences, some of my worst memories of abuse weren’t from cis-het white men, but other sex workers—especially white women pimping the venue as the exclusive sex workers, victims, cops (re: “Transmisia Experience: 5/26/2023“); i.e., third and forth wave feminism in decay, working the lynch mob setting the example. This isn’t truth, but punishment enforcing a hierarchy built on lies to haze those who challenge the established order. That’s what cops do, including vigilante sex workers throwing stones in glass houses.

The sad fact is, rape victims go on to either keep being victimized, or become functional cops who rape others for the state in prison-like environments; i.e., an act they dress up as self-defense through DARVO behaviors (re: from earlier in this volume):

Rape, then, is historically a power fantasy to enact upon others against their will […] Except no power fantasy should ever come at other people’s expense. When it does, it leads to a routine failing of memory and willpower in the face of trauma, but also to the classic dice roll: cop or victim, during service towards profit through the usual monomythic, hero-grade rape  fantasies/demon BDSM operating like demon lovers historically do; i.e., as controlled opposition policing the usual victims by their assigned masters

Like with Jadis and myself, it’s always a dice roll.

Of course, there are double standards that play out through intersecting axes of oppression; e.g., racism and transphobia in Alien being abjected onto an intersex rape demon by the white woman seeing genocide and chattel slavery through an “ancient alien” fetish (more on this when we look at such tokenization in “Derelicts, Medusa and Giger’s Xenomorph“). Whatever the form, just remember our footnote from earlier about “preferential mistreatment”

capital extends the abuser’s privileges (the coercion trifecta: gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss) to women and other marginalized groups provided they tokenize, hence betray their class, culture, and race interests in service to the elite; i.e., become cops […]. Like anything, the monstrous-feminine is susceptible to betrayal and decay; i.e., whose tokenized “onion” historically-materially fosters marginalized in-fighting as a matter of “prison sex” and fortress mentality: tokenized groups from increasing privilege (but less than those above them) kissing up and punching down towards groups more marginalized then they are. The global consequence is assimilation—of women, people of color or queer persons, Indigenous peoples, etc, acting like white, cis-het men as a matter of tokenized representation.

which is a concept we’ll unpack in Volume Three extensively when we look at current tokenization through TERFs and feminism-in-decay.

[16] Testimony something medieval men would given while using their testicles as collateral, but dates back further to Rome and beyond; i.e., to what Dr. Dario Maestripieri calls a “testicle ritual”:

In ancient Rome, two men taking an oath of allegiance held each other’s testicles, and men held their own testicles as a sign of truthfulness while bearing witness in a public forum. The Romans found a word to describe this practice but didn’t invent the practice itself. Other primates had already been doing this for millions of years. Two male baboons who cooperate with each other by forming aggressive alliances against other baboons frequently fondle each other’s genitalia. This behavior has nothing to do with sex but it’s a social ritual that primatologists call a “greeting.”

The behavior of ancient Romans and male baboons can be explained by the Handicap Principle, an evolutionary theory according to which the most effective way to obtain reliable information about a partner’s commitment in a relationship — whether a political alliance, a romantic relationship, or a business partnership — is to impose a cost on the partner and assess the partner’s willingness to pay it (source: “‘Testify’ Comes From the Latin Word for Testicle,” 2011).

Maestripieri further adds, “it’s important to remember that cooperative relationships between unrelated individuals are intrinsically unstable: One business partner may cooperate one moment and cheat in another, and one romantic partner may promise eternal commitment one day and end the relationship the next. Economists call this ‘the commitment problem'” (ibid.). Such instability is owed to Capitalism, whose murderous ups and downs portray quite vividly in operatic language like Hollow Knight‘s Gothic courtship rituals a circular raping of the queen (whose proposed vanity is just another form of Original Sin: “She asked for it, the siren!”).

[17] The state historically decides what is legal or not, the powers that be making rebellion illegal as a matter of preserving the status quo; i.e., we will always be criminal to them, any act of resistance or exposure (muckraking and whistleblowing) seen as violence against the state, which the state will always meet with automatic police force and illusions, under Capitalist Realism. In short, genocide is legal as a matter of enforcement, rebellion is illegal no matter what. But the ability to create stories that speak to these things in ways the state can’t—and furthermore, won’t if they think it serves them—police through brute force, is where Gothic poetics truly shines. Skilled theatrics and architecture can speak to state abuse, displaced and disguised through cryptonymy to serve rebellion, thus reverse abjection and liberate anything criminal. Liberation, my book series argues, begins with iconoclastic art, recultivating the Superstructure and Reclaiming the Base through proletarian praxis’ synthesis (thus catharsis).

[18] Silicon Knight’s 1996 allusion to Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” (1871):

One, two! One, two! And through and through

      The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

He left it dead, and with its head

      He went galumphing back (source).

The hero is always a cop, the monster always its victim in service to profit. Sometimes, the state relies on victims to victimize themselves.

[18a] Bear in mind, such idiotic utility also applies to Leftists ceding ground to fascists; i.e., problems of representation versus activism; e.g., Jessie Gender—a white, middle-class content creator concerned more with success and respecting everyone’s viewpoints—actively defending the IDF from postcolonial critics of Zionism in the middle of a genocide (Bad Empanada Live’s “Jessie Gender Should Delete Her Zionist Propaganda Video Immediately,” 2024; timestamp: 9:09). Calling for nuance is one thing. Calling for nuance against a position that is actually simple in terms of who has power and who doesn’t (thus, who is the abuser in that situation) is intensely problematic—especially when the person doing it falls into the tokenized category of white moderate incentivized by profit. Betrayal is betrayal, Jessie, even if you’re polite about it (or funny and tokenized; re: Jordan Peele). Hope, even radical hope, becomes another neoliberal weapon the elite use to have polite rationalizers like yourself tone-police activists challenging genocide in ways you won’t.

[19] From “The Tables Turned” (1798).

[20] The Humanist Report’s “Elon Musk Tells Jordan Peterson His Transgender Daughter is ‘Dead’ to Him” (2024).

[21] Though problematic, heroes like Lara Croft or Samus Aran are useful vehicles when interrogating power and rape as things to play with; i.e., they store value and trauma as a matter of Amazon-style bread-and-circus (the state raping workers and nature through its own tokenized labor force—TERFs), but also social-sexual elements of human beauty and attractiveness that butt up against rape tied to profit: as something to investigate and explore through an avatar in neoliberal forms (videogames). Per Sarkeesian, we can walk in the shoes of such a raider trapped inside such mazes and labyrinths of abject circumstance without endorsing her settler-colonial character (the white woman fending off domestic rape of an abjected sort)! Videogames make for an excellent form of ludo-Gothic BDSM, insofar as you can’t get raped during them; re: the castle is the perfect dom, but also the perfect cryptonym that we can reclaim from the state and its usual profiteers (from Radcliffe onwards).

This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). 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 “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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

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

Metroidvania, part two: “Look upon my Works, ye Mighty”; or, the Infernal Concentric Pattern and Rape Play in Hollow Knight and Metroidvania at Large (opening)

“Vegeta, Vegeta! Remember that bug planet?” (source).

—Nappa, “Dragon Ball Z Abridged: Episode 9″ (2009)

Picking up from where “Away with the Faeries; or, Double Trouble in Axiom Verge” left off…

Part zero of the “Metroidvania” symposium outlined the Freudian, parental character and dialectical-material elements to the Metroidvania, in effect exploring the Promethean reversal of said parentage (and power) relative to capital’s usual monomythic outings: Hell coming home, versus the hero leaving home to go into Hell. Part one considered such Ozymandian hubris and collapse by close-reading Axiom Verge (and its various parent texts—with Metroid, Alien, Forbidden Planet and At the Mountains of Madness reaching back to Frankenstein), exploring the rise and fall of its persons double-operating through cryptonymic deception to survive tyrannical elements (dead giveaways); i.e., overcoming a former great leader/de facto parent who succumbs to an indomitable monstrous-feminine power like those before him did, capital’s decay letting new iconoclastic stories take root inside the same venues: camping the medieval interplay to move power towards workers, nature, the Medusa (and her toothy tentacles, below), et al.

Part two now takes the spatial elements of a decaying gentry into consideration, examining the sleeping but restless tyrant’s castle in Hollow Knight as mysteriously fallen to ruin; i.e., records that partially survive, decaying in the presence of restless power as fought over by hidden forces during rape play (of a faux-medieval sort), and which regeneration through camouflage (the cryptonymy’s endless wreckage) whose base elements cannot be created or destroyed is the Promethean attempt to survive: what Capitalism ultimately is and what it sells—a mighty place occupied by dragons of some kind or another, which the centrist, corruptible hero must hunt down, face and cleanse.

In short, there’s a myth of greatness that’s forgotten itself, the urgency in finding the culprit—getting to the bottom of things, as it were—winding down inside a former paradise that’s clearly gone to pot (seemingly overnight, although it only feels that way because you’re visiting the ruins after the fact). Nature has won, but that doesn’t mean things are obvious. There’s just a ruin, one waiting for the knight to enter and explore.

Note: While both Axiom Verge and Hollow Knight were topics of study in my master’s thesis, Hollow Knight received more focus. This is my first time revisiting it since 2018, letting me really go wild. As a result, this is a longer section/close-read than the Axiom Verge close-read was, but stays fairly consistent in its pursuit and arrangement of the subject matter. Being something that grew into itself upon repeated reflection, we’ll talk about the history of my formulating ludo-Gothic BDSM as rape play (and furthermore what you can do with it as a subversive psychosexual device). Even so, everything stays tied to Hollow Knight (and Tolkien, simply to give a monomythic example that Hollow Knight camps). —Perse

“Metroidvania,” part two is divided in two:

• Part one, “Geometries in Terror; or, Traces of Aguirre and Bakhtin in Hollow Knight‘s Promethean Castle World” (including with this post): Outlines Bakhtin and Aguirre in relation to Team Cherry’s Numinous gameworld; i.e., its oddly homely and relaxing setting as something to explore and understand Gothically (through the chronotope and Promethean Quest) as both largely devoid of people while simultaneously being overridden with decay regenerating into different potential outcomes.
• Part two, “Policing the Whore; or, Topping from Below to Rise from the Ashes“: Articulates Aguirre and Bakhtin’s ideas per my evolution of ludo-Gothic BDSM after my master’s thesis and into my graduate work, then considers the Promethean Quest as something that presents the whore as normally hunted by police forces, only to escape their subjugation and imprisonment by acting out her own rape; i.e., as Hollow Knight‘s final boss, the Radiance, does.

Geometries in Terror; or, Traces of Aguirre and Bakhtin in Hollow Knight‘s Promethean Castle World

The realm of sensibility, passion, fear provides a major theme in Gothic, but clearly this theme is not just a matter of cognitive import to characters and readers. Rather, it wills itself a perlocutionary act; it aims no less than at changing them and us […] This is where “form” directly determines “meaning,” and spatial coordinates elicit mental states (source).

—Manuel Aguirre, “Geometries of Terror” (2008)

Unlike the Promethean Quest, the monomyth traditionally aims to restore the land or castle; re: Tolkien or Cameron’s refrain, either an outdoor or indoor paradise, per the dialectic of shelter and the alien, canonically falling apart (versus Milton’s camping of the sylvan scene and its artificial wilderness). Restoration is to a former glory after Hell returns home (a metaphor for pirates, but also monstrous-feminine rivals to a patriarchal status quo—Mother Brain and her dragon captains, Ridley and Kraid, but also the Radiance and her minibosses standing in for nature, Communism, and fascism per Red Scare): “Hell,” Volume Zero argues, “is always a place that appears on Earth,” the monomyth hero a merciless exterminator cleaning house through Americanized police violence (us-versus-them—stab, shoot, punch enemies inside stages, levels, rooms and worlds) dressed up in the usual Gothic forms to move money through nature. Life cheapens, the cycle repeating to serve capital during all the usual decay and regeneration of the state threatened by imaginary enemies tied to nature. It’s a power fantasy that offers up false power and hope in all the usual neoliberal forms (videogames).

(artist: Fabian Pineda)

Just as Samus reexplores old things to dance with dragons, back-and-forth, part two of “Metroidvania” peeks once more into the other primary text from my master’s thesis, Hollow Knight. We shall revisit this cute, psychosexual and frightening bug world to explore my grad school and postgrad research into Metroidvania; i.e., as a matter of navigable space, by applying Aguirre’s infernal concentric pattern to reverse abjection, such camp informing what eventually became ludo-Gothic BDSM as I devised it (a practice of rape-style roleplay that involves spaces and players inside those spaces, regardless of the media type). This isn’t so much to do with maps (mapping being a process of colonizing such spaces), but movement through space and its Gothic architecture and cosmetics yielding Promethean themes similar to the personable ones we looked at in part one with Axiom Verge; re, Bakhtin:

the traces of centuries and generations are arranged in it in visible form as various parts of its architecture […] and in particular human relationships involving dynastic primacy and the transfer of hereditary rights. […] legends and traditions animate every corner of the castle and its environs through their constant reminders of past events.

This past is one of open-secret power and trauma as something to exchange in cryptonymic ways (re: dead giveaways—the dead both unable to speak, but doing so through the space) that operate per the Promethean Quest’s “disempowerment,” not the monomyth’s “empowerment,” to ultimately expel old harmful ideas (“My uncle’s work was do-do!”) and replace them with fresh, altered copies that transcend profit and rape; i.e., by piloting capital’s dying shell.

(artist: Niall Skinner)

Simply put, it’s good praxis, but also good camp; i.e., Hollow Knight is full of cute bugs that, all the same, rape and eat each other as part of a larger dying organism inside another and another to mimic (double) capital and, like a zombie, survive all over again in tiny little pieces of a larger persona: an obliteration of the self, the human, the kingdom, the castle, in dark fairytale language (re: Kerascoët’s and Fabien Vehlmann’s 2014 The Beautiful Darkness, showcasing a presumed raping and open rotting of Alice in medievalized forms [the dispersed homunculi], but also William Golding’s wild-child apologia, Lord of the Flies, 1954). In the Promethean style, it suggests that all this decay and growth occurs from fighting gods warring behind the scenes, less poisoning the Cartesian home and more exposing its self-destructive qualities that, like Athetos did to Sudra, rape nature as usual. We’re the byproduct of that, making us—in effect—rape babies of mad science (many children of the gods in classic myth being the byproduct of rape; e.g., Heracles or Merlin).

Childhood ruined, right? Maybe, but maybe not; the paradox of nature is that life and death occupy the same Gothic’ spaces condensation of old death and hauntological decrepitude inside nostalgic pictures of home—as a paradoxical safe space that speaks to endless inherited anxieties tied to capital; i.e., the kind regularly immortalized in different media forms, including music:

Here in this prison of my own making
Year after day I have grown
Into a hero, but there’s no worship
Where have they hidden my throne? (Deep Purple’s “Pictures of Home,” 1972).

Gothic spaces revel in that decay as something to play with in order to communicate less-than-pleasant realities tied up in such comfort foods as both silly and tragic: “Is this a school for ants?”

In turn, Hollow Knight‘s little animals houses are cute, rapacious (insofar as we anthropomorphize them in lieu of our own trauma under Capitalism) and—like the xenomorph (an egregore based on parasitoid wasps)—is very, very gay in terms of exploring trauma in small, in Gothic abstract but also duality, juxtaposition and contrast: the “ancient” Romance and the modern novel (re: Walpole). To this, the Gothic is written in the disintegration of power redistributing itself (the kingdom is property that the knight, a cop, seemingly defends). The more access you have to differing perspectives, then, the more holistic, faithful (loving) and truthful the representation (with Hollow Knight containing inside its hollow shell two warring sides reduced to spectres haunting the concentric necrobiome: Capitalism and Communism). “Gothic maturity intensifies conflict as a matter of entropy,” contributing to a Song of Infinity speaking to such grappling forces.

Furthermore, our little hero’s form follows function, one of many beetles crawling among the dung and the dead (re: genocide’s fertilizer), breathing into them fresh life (one dies, then like Walpole’s empty suits of armor, gets up and walks around once more inside the dollhouse, the puzzle, the crypt as both incomplete and simply needing to be played with). It’s both a lovely poetic cycle and historical statement speaking to the natural and man-made as—like Athetos’ fallen kingdom—staked and claimed by he who called it “first,” slowly being reclaimed by a patient, almighty queen: murder will out, the criminalized faeries coming out on top against the cops robbing and victimizing them—eventually! Some things are so big they take forever to die—to transform—into other things (this can be fascism, yet again, regressing to a former medieval; or it can be Communism, provided intersectional solidarity is maintained against profit).

Whatever we find out will happen through ludo-Gothic BDSM as a matter of conceptualizing and navigating space to interrogate power. Per the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection (the West built on the lie of sovereignty), the motto of the Gothic might as well be, “Fake it till you make it.” So when I envisioned ludo-Gothic BDSM as a matter of scholarship and history that bucks Cartesian trends inside and outside of fictional worlds, I founded it on spaces mastering the player (re: “Our Ludic Masters“), but especially the Metroidvania. This, in turn, borrowed from Manuel Aguirre’s “Geometries of Terror”

[…the infernal concentric pattern has] in Gothic one and the same function: to destabilize assumptions as to the physical, ontological or moral order of the cosmos [… It is like a Mandelbrot set:] finite, and yet from within we cannot reach its end; it is a labyrinth that delves “down” instead of pushing outwards (source).

as something my supervisor, Paul Wake, recommended to me, and stuck with only to evolve into my work as it presently exists (which Paul refused to comment on or partake in because of its “contentious” nature—the words of an accommodated intellectual, if ever there were).

So while I had been flirting with these ideas in 2018 with my master’s thesis, “Lost in Necropolis,” said thesis was only the starting point; my understanding of them through a BDSM framework (whose holistic approach my British teachers hated/avoided like the plague) actually came years later in 2021 (again, “Our Ludic Masters“), of which I eventually formed ludo-Gothic BDSM to critique capital with, as a matter of Gothic Communism: a giant to challenge another giant, borrowing medieval thought to do so; e.g., Alice in Wonderland, Gulliver’s Travels, The Castle of Otranto, etc, which Hollow Knight plays on with its bug-sized ability to marry life and death, big and small (exaggeration is often seen as an increase in size, but the inverse is also true), with medieval poetics[1] and their reliably Numinous feelings attached to a palliative Gothic space that speaks psychosexually to capital’s abuses outside of itself felt inside of itself. Big feelings, big spaces, taboo yummy exchanges occur in between: a teacher of harsh truths and magical pleasures.

(artist: VG Yum)

To that, we’ll examine the source of my scholarly ideas as they started to lean in that direction with Hollow Knight—a game that truly took Bakhtin’s chronotope to heart: a castle space caught between reality and legend, insofar as time in the narrow sense of the word—that of the historical past—was thoroughly obsessed with hereditary rites and dynastic primacy as things to backtrack and endlessly explore (to do them as the Gothic lovingly does—backwards to go forwards); i.e., the dogma of Cartesian Revenge against nature (the Medusa, here, cast as the fearsome giantess Radiance—a Galatean force to challenge a Pygmalion fascist’s Apollonian status: “Praise the sun[2]!”) as bug-like in both directions: the insect as linked to death and decay, waste and nutrients (fertilizer) that, in the same breath, speaks to the brutality of Kafka-esque “insect politics”; mad science, queer love and irreversible transformation (on par with Cronenberg’s The Fly [1986] and Seth Brundle); cute and terrifying animals that illustrate Capitalism in small; and so on. All become something to reunite with, upending capital’s usual Cartesian, heteronormative, settler-colonial divisions and abuses: profit as rape dressed up.

(artist: Alaine Daigle)

Jadis was an entomologist and taught me to appreciate bugs, but we simply don’t have time to list and count such things. Keeping with space as something to explore, then, Hollow Knight—similar to Axiom Verge—puts multiple sentiments inside the dollish hero inside the doll house: the spirit of exploring different sides of the world as increasingly dark and hostile—not strictly to conquer it (though that is the hero’s built-in, monomythic purpose) but to appreciate and explore something that is dying and regenerating at the same time. It has, at times, an innocent, child-like, sing-song quality to it, but one whose fairytale world has (again, like Axiom Verge and all Metroidvania, more or less), two godly parents appealing to the child send by one to kill the other as a matter of capital: the Pale King and the Radiance. As we saw with Axiom Verge, sometimes the mother visibly wins during the final confrontation inside-outside the hero; here, the father “wins,” only to be bested by Mamma Bear anyways. Nature always wins.

As such, the Pale King is essentially a mad scientist by proxy waging a heteronormative proxy war against nature-as-monstrous-feminine (queer) and death; i.e., treating his people as disposable insects while slowly going mad inside his fallen castle, alienated from death and scapegoating Medusa for it. While funding others to conduct his awful experiments and conquer death as flooding his once-great city during state shift, the king and his men, but also the Radiance (the whore) are all alien dead of different sizes, classes (taxonomy and in Marxist terms) and positions (stances).

If you think about it, the senility of the king is not so different than Joe Biden currently losing his decrepit, overcooked mind on national television[3]; there’s always a real-world equivalent to a fictional one, and vice versa. The tyrant and their castle’s rise and fall stands in for Capitalism; i.e., its own historical-material gentrification and decay serving profit, per the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection. Decay and death simply denote change, whereupon the king’s cowardly refusal to change (and proliferation of violence inside the ruin) is simply him being stubborn and “bravely” running away from his problems, his secret sins: a “sundowning” King Lear refusing “to go to bed” and simply be worm food (thus release the secrets he’s been keeping inside himself and his monuments). There’s nothing preventing him from doing so other than his mind and belief in himself as a god. But the real sovereign is nature—the force he’s hijacked for his own purposes, forcing him to face the music through his death and that of his kingdom, his people, his legacy.

In turn, his entourage drags pathetically along with him, cravenly keeping the rose-colored memory of the king alive (thus burying his secrets alive) after he’s died; per the usual undeath and live burial, the labyrinth remains restless, those long-buried things equally stubborn as they crawl to the surface to—at times revoltingly—claw free and out from His Majesty’s rotting corpse. The hyperreality begins to fly apart, the sordid truth coming to light as a matter of rememory. The king has been gagging Medusa for so long, she’s a ghost, too (and maybe was never really alive; i.e., of the counterfeit). Relegated to the same spectral zone of Gothic performance and play, such revivals and reassemblies becomes poetic speculation, both half-real and imaginary to some extent.

Even so, such things remain vital as far as the pedagogy of the oppressed goes; i.e., as a matter of corroborating what historically is quite hard to prove in a court of law (which exists to uphold the status quo) but also of public opinion tied to capital[4]: rape and police abuse per the process of abjection.

The point of monomythic fantasy stories like Axion Verge and Hollow Knight is that eventually such things can’t be ignored, the victims of rape echoing a gossip-style chorus (re: the basics of oppositional synthesis being gossip/anger, monsters and camp) that builds and builds inside the usual kingly echo chambers speaking extratextually (a bad echo that speaks to the buried, ostensible truth of things). Either you believe rape victims while they’re alive, or the voice of them will rise from the alien grave to destroy the myopic legacy that you (and Capitalism) have worked so hard to build behind the usual heartless lies: the Pax Americana family as anchor but also dogma to hammer the witch, drown and rape her to death, burying the gay alive. As we shall see, systemic catharsis is at least, in part, cryptonymically bringing those atrocities to light; i.e., the hole as something to fill itself (a campiness we shall unpack through the Radiance’s own doing so): “Oh, god! You’re totally conquering my castle, right now!” Restless pussy of doom eats Excalibur and farts in Arthur’s face.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Apologetic, canonical illusions aside, rape play (and its cryptonymies) become a clever, ironic way of exploring history in our own daily lives; yes, it blurs the boundaries between pleasure and harm in the moment, but paradoxically never crosses over into genuine abuse—is only haunted by state atrocities while playing ironically with taboo subject matter as something to act out, thus raise awareness towards unironic forms (re: incest, murder, rape, etc). Conversely, the shock-and-awe of police abuse predicates through unironic enforcement, repressing play by making such things impossible to play with; the “rape” loses its quotes, the vampirism (exchange) going one way towards the state (and not both ways between workers)—all to flush bourgeois cheeks with stolen blood. The theft becomes an aphrodisiac for them and their defenders, a holy one to dress up in exceptionally good heraldry that decays over time: “Policemen are hiding behind the skirts of little girls. Their eyes have turned the color of frozen meat!” (Blue Öyster Cult’s “Joan Crawford,” 1981).

Amid the cheering of the self-appointed heroes lurks an uncomfortable quantum silence: that of the once-girl victims, Wicked, Bad, Naughty Zoot mischievously but also earnestly screaming on the surfaces and inside thresholds of such graveyard pastiche. Good or bad, such Gothic allusions and darkness-visible intimations of power (of allegations, of secret crimes) are a historical-material effect. They paradoxically never leave us, never stay dead; they become impossible to control, to police, to rape, because all deities reside within us (re: Blake), and it will take more than that to silence a god. As such, these stories are not “escapism”; not even Aguirre’s Mandelbrot can contain them, escaping the event horizon (and the knights buried alive there) to echo into the wider world like solar wind: the macaroni-stirring sound of a wet, squelching cunt. Medusa’s putting the silent scream on blast!

White or not, where there’s a castle, there’s a cop, a rape, a genocide (re: ACAB) as unfolding to conceal itself with the usual “medieval” vanishing points: feudalistic inheritance (“A hall to die in, and men to bury me!”). Said points need to be camped for workers to survive the abuse canonical workers (and extensions) regularly entail and repress: “Help, help! I’m being ‘repressed’ (code for ‘rape’)!” with or without quotes. Said quotes—and the dialectical-material scrutiny that comes with them during oppositional praxis—is the key to unlocking the door of praxial, thus cathartic, synthesis (which is illustrated, above, through added context: Harmony and I acting out a rape [specifically incest] for fun. Playful, silly sex [through calculated risk] is the best sex)! Belief, in turn, is illustrated through the context of action, through such poetics—the people, but also the spaces dressed up as “abusive” to speak to abuse in ways that grant closure and power while searching for secrets that, as the Gothic does, spill out everywhere.

To that, let’s go over some common (thus repetitive) elements to such spaces we can camp, then dive into Hollow Knight‘s own castle space.

To paraphrase Hawthorne, “Families are always rising and falling in America.” The same notion applies to Gothic counterfeits that speak to Capitalism-in-decay haunting its own canceled retro-futures; i.e., the rise and fall of a tyrant—his dynasty tied to a failing lineage whose own presumed greatness has long since been eclipsed by a restless labyrinth he cannot control, the illusions becoming see-through, tired, run-down (re: the desert of the real, the map of empire run bare). In effect, the castle as place—specifically a closed space to move through—becomes an ontological statement at war with itself: a psychomachy of different great powers rivaling and mirroring each other using the same contested puppetry and aesthetics for trials-by-combat and purification, but also liberation (not just clones, like with Trace, but the knight as an empty doll to pilot for different purposes, Trojan-Horse-style).

As such, the castle is an extension of the king and his systemic abuses as falling apart, promising the same reward to that one lucky knight who slays the dragon (the fairy queen). Inside it, the king’s undead men wrestle with Medusa, having internalized his dogma; also trapped inside, she rebels against said entourage through a revolutionary cryptonymy that shows and conceals her rape. In doing so, she subverts the monomyth, per the ghost of the counterfeit, to reverse abjection inside the king’s house of cards.

In turn, the decay conveys patriarchal revenge as foregone and futile, its message-in-a-bottle, trap-like iteration of the infernal concentric pattern something that—like Capitalism—goes ever on and on; i.e., rememory by virtue of recursive motion inside the Metroidvania space (to reshuffle the deck): castle-narrative, which occurs through reassembly of arrangements as a calculated risk to experience their history in motion, in small, as doubled, as mirrored. As the Rusalki show us, this can be to look at, but also look with; i.e., a one-sided mirror per the cryptonymy process: to confuse our enemies as potentially our friends, given the right push! “Watch and learn” becomes as much the context of the image—its covert, revolutionary cryptonymy (the double operation)—as it is the image, itself, and whatever likeness it purports at first glance/double take:

(artist: Gregory Manchess)

In Gothic stories, the nuclear family is a battleground of fear—a dead home of great-if-obscure power and alarm pushing past horrors (of rape, above) forwards again, into fresh tombs the living (usually the middle class) inherit from the dead. The subversive idea is to play with them, an ability that has existed since Otranto (a stage play warning of incest).

The Gothic castle, then, isn’t useless anymore than the past is. Imaginary or not, it becomes something to play with as a matter of preservation, interpretation and survival by its usual victims; i.e., “to play” in Gothic has an inherently sexual character through euphemism (“we played”), but also ludic descriptor vis-à-vis the means of sharing and interrogating power as a matter of history-in-the-making being an integral part of Gothic spaces. This always happens through play with those spaces, which generally has a cryptomimetic quality to its genesis, its hybridity and recursion: to pass along what has become forgotten as a commentary on its own forgetfulness (“They say this land was green and soft once, but the moment Haggard touched it, it became hard and grey!”) and navigating such spaces standing in for our own repressed abuse (and their degraded memories).

(artist: No Eye Yolk)

Like with Jadis’ dollhouse or Alien, kawaii or kowai (re: the postscript from “Meeting Medusa,” 2024), the area of play is a small (in this case, bug-sized) dream-like arena—of suddenly waking up as an adult, finding one’s former home viewed as nightmarishly imperfect, combative, and instructional (through the information on the walls around you, the heraldry and statues). This not only constitutes a naked regression towards childhood as flawed when viewed from an adult lens (requiring them to “armor up” to survive rape and murder promoted by the space); the parental figures become things to love and defend but also survive, feared for their dastardly lies and parasitoid, insect-like qualities (a childlike defense of the home as harmful, sick).

From Lord Manfred to Victor Frankenstein to that titular character from Mad Father (below), the king is a bad parent, but also a mad (scientist/conqueror) father who looks gigantic (from a child’s point of view) that harms his kids, then blames Medusa for it (“It’s your mother’s fault!”). Run as fast as you can and regress as much as you want, there is no escaping that abuse; like the chronotope, it only becomes a literal, historical part of the world—an installation that, like a secret renovation or occupant thereof, quietly invades your dreams bleeding into your waking moments. Per capital, the nuclear home is made to rape workers and nature by dividing the former into male and female variants with mythic-to-ordinary qualities seemingly breaking with convention only to endorse them all over again (on the state side of a dialectical-material struggle): Walpole’s campy rape castle a very genderqueer joke to lampoon the nuclear family and Western fabrications of superiority under capital now, regardless of what the old fag meant, two centuries ago (when capital was younger but still decaying by virtue of aesthetics)!

To that, abusive fathers aren’t scary only because they physically (b)eat their children, but because they rape the children’s mother as an extension of the child belonging to the same feudal owner holding onto power as folding in on itself: a foregone defeat, from one empire (of violence dressed up as Divine Right, but also reason, a cryptonymy for conquest) to the next. It becomes a war of dolls that extends into actual war as turning the child into the doll, the proverbial hollow knight haunted by both parents in a state of crisis, decay and moral panic leading paradoxically to a continuation of itself, mapped out through inward-facing conquests (the Mandelbrot) speaking to Capitalism’s boomerang effect.

In tokenized language (and per the incestuous histories of the castle), the king sends his next-in-line to fight a losing war in Hell against Medusa (during “the divorce”), to which the increasingly young child soldier grapples with a doll-like lack of memories and overabundance of mommy and daddy issues that, in totality, summarize the inner workings of capital/the monomyth; i.e., against nature-as-monstrous-feminine yielding ambiguous/ambivalent outcomes, but also appearances fighting as a matter of straight knights vs gay ones: canon and camp, capital vs Communism. Good to bad bleeds into the same mulch, grist for the mill as capital moves money (the knight) through nature (the space) and nature promptly resists the whole process. Built on a lie of a lie of a lie, playing Amazonian soldier (thus rapist) for the king as Prometheus, his children pay the price for his hubris: he’s a drain on them and the land around them, trying to keep himself and his legend/bloodline alive.

We’ll get to the Pale King and Radiance in a bit, talking about how the latter as a Promethean agent subverts the former as a monomythical agent (and even talk about Tolkien a little bit, in that respect). Now that we’ve covered some of the historical ideas fundamental when playing with/out Metroidvania space, let’s start with the city itself where the king’s presence is ultimately felt (the absentee father haunting the venue)…

Note: As we proceed, remember that this section is built on many older workers of  mine, including unreleased ones (re: Neoliberalism in Yesterdays’ Heroes) and things not included here (e.g., my Prometheus fan edit[5] or old YouTube essays like “Close-reading Gothic Theory in The Babadook,” 2018) that can still be felt in a continual nerdy love for the material and spirit thereof. Simply put, I’m a weird old queer medievalist that, like Walpole before me, likes to play with rape as a matter of telltale Gothic spaces. There will be fragments of many things coming together for new synthesis, new scholarship built on the past as my own and of a larger imaginary history that invites contradiction; i.e., as a matter of returning to old places to right old wrongs, through ludo-Gothic BDSM’s holistic ingredients, my formal and informal [de facto] education on such matters.

Consider this spate of play made in the spirit of fun, then; i.e., an inventive continuation of my Strawberry Hill being yet another tryst-like jaunt into the disinterred spaces of my sex-filled college days—all to dig up fresh wisdom as a cross-cultural, at-times silly exercise performed by a vulgar, campy whore (while Harmony and I are most recently attracted to each other for these reasons, the fact remains all of my lovers have enjoyed my Gothic nerdiness/randiness [and contributed to my work] in some capacity for those reasons). You might get lost, but that’s all part of the fun! —Perse

 

I want to start by stressing a previous point, mainly that a chronotope is a liminal space; re: designed to be moved through, but specifically to encounter time in Bakhtin’s “narrow sense of the word”: a marriage of the ordinary and legendary as a matter of architecture that speaks organically to the occupants’ states of mind as swept up in their dreadful inheritance. The trauma is written on the walls, but is still secretive (more on this when we look at Tolkien, towards the end of the section) and assembled and watched in secret (above) as a more-than-a-little nerdy act: the fake historian playing monastery scribe.

Part of the coin-flip’s secrecy and revelation, then, a Gothic space—a castle, generally—very much plays a vital role in the larger story’s moral, but also Gothic aesthetics that comment on said moral: a coverage that both comments and conceals, per cryptonymy as usual. It lies and tells the truth at the same time. It’s also a kind of rape game told in Gothic lingo—code, clichés, and bric-a-brac—as seemingly “empty” of substance:

Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto of 1764 is still accepted as the “father of the Gothic novel,” yet most observers of this novelette see it, with some justice, as a curiously empty and insubstantial originator of the mode it appears to have spawned. It is understandably regarded as thin in more ways than one, as a stagey manipulation of old and hollow stick-figures in which tired conventions from drama and romance are mixed in ways that emphasize their sheer antiquity and conventionality (source: Jerold Hogle’s “The Ghost of the Counterfeit in the Genesis of the Gothic,” 1994).

Hollow Knight is very literal, but also nature-themed, in this respect. Bakhtin likened the Gothic chronotope to an organism, its legends and realities of the historical past eliding as a kind of memory death; i.e., whose decay amounts to a collective and unequal struggle to remember what it was even all about. The experience is different per occupant depending on who, when and where they are. In Hollow Knight, the castle is an organism; there are many false knights, least of which is the avatar the player controls (who confronts a false knight mirroring his own emptiness and fake courage tied to a false king). All belong to the space housing them as animalistic, but also “fallen” as a matter of Gothic reinvention.

As I write in Volume One (speaking about Tolkien) “The paradox of the crumbling homestead (and its spoiled bloodline) is that familial decay is announced by its own crumbling markers of sovereignty within the chronotope” (source). I go on to add:

a creative desire to reinvent the past, one described by Mark Madoff in “The Useful Myth of Gothic Ancestry” (1979) as follows:

A myth of gothic ancestry did not simply mean bad history. Those who perpetuated the myth obeyed a stronger call than that of accuracy to historical evidence. The ancestry in question was a product of fantasy to serve specific political purposes. Established as popular belief, the idea of gothic ancestry offered a way of revising the features of the past in order to satisfy the imaginative needs of the present. It floured in response to current anxieties and desires, taking its mythic substance from their objects, its appeal from their urgency. By translating such powerful motives into otherworldly terms, gothic myth permitted a close approach to otherwise forbidden themes (source).

Madoff concludes, “The idea of gothic ancestry endured because it was useful,” and I’m inclined to agree. Except I would extend this utility to Gothic Communism as something to fashion through the same myths of ancestry found in the usual haunts; i.e., mirroring the unspoken but still advertised material conditions of Pax Americana that Tolkien’s “empire where the sun never sets” was suspiciously covered in shadows and bathed in blood (source).

The same, we shall see, applies to the Pale King’s kingdom as swept up in its own magnificent decay. A site for play, in-game, Hallownest is, frankly, a FUBAR shithole. A colossal wreck in a very material sense, it’s crumbling and infected with a strange orange fungus and perpetual banditry (think Where the Red Fern Grows, but hostile to the boy and his dogs). Things are bad now, so they must have been good back then, right? …Right?

Again, we’ll get to that. For now, said collapse illustrates the Cycle of Kings leading towards Promethean hyperreality quite well. The king actually sucks, and everything is fake (with everything beyond or behind the kingdom a vast uninhabitable desert that feeds back into the little oasis). Many portions are physically littered with the giant bodies of false gods—”false” because they are dead, and “god” because they appear mighty even in death: empty and somehow full at the same time (re: darkness visible).

Similar to a knight, a beetle dies to leave its armor behind. In connection with the dead giants’ suits littered about the place (a theme borrowed from Alien‘s Space Jockey scene, though it goes all the way back to Otranto‘s giant suit of armor), the kingdom denotes a historical regression to an imaginary time before the order of the king: ancient chaos, the time of the Titans. The space itself is eponymously “hallowed,” or sacred, but also a graveyard imbued with mighty death and heavy time: the spirit of the dead Pale King and the lurking, angry presence of a female “hysteria” that is mightier than civilization, but also covered up by the endless male effigies and semantic wreckage gone to pot.

In ludic terms, the world is fairly standard Metroidvania the same way that Gothic cinemas are standard:

Critics have often remarked on the choice of the exotic, the foreign, the barbaric as the background for and source of Gothic thrills. In other words, the Gothic castle is the world of the Numinous. As David Durant notes, “the ruined castles and abbeys are graphic symbols of the disintegration of a stable civilization; their underground reaches are the hiding places for all those forces which cannot stand the light of day” (source: Audronė Raškauskienė writes in Gothic Fiction: The Beginnings, 2017).

As we’ll see with Tolkien in a bit, such massive photophobes are a puzzle that appeals to the same monomyth; i.e., as haunted per the ghost of the counterfeit as abject, sold to children taught to war, lie and rape through exploration sating natural and great curiosities: “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Echoes of Ozymandias, then, promise that something big and mean (a mysterium tremendum, to borrow from Otto) killed these Numinous giants—and, by extension, laid low the mighty king—but the answer isn’t as clear as a dragon on a map (any more than it is in Alien, Axiom Verge, Forbidden Planet, At the Mountains of Madness, or Otranto). The short answer is war (among all of these works). Except, the narrative of the crypt, here, is always gargantuan and crowded, utterly loaded with moribund language covering things up, but also the presence of actual death as huge, building-sized, unheimlich (as intimated cryptomimetically across an imperfect, imitative series of Metroid-style Metroidvania such as King’s Field [1994] or the Dark Souls franchise, whose blacksmith/currency system made its way into Hollow Knight‘s maze-like graveyards).

Keeping with the Gothic, the Hollow Knight gameworld conveys Chris Baldrick’s “fearful sense of inheritance in a time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration” (source), which Caryn Coleman sums up as a definition of “Gothic” being “three things that inter-relate: 1) tyranny of the past 2) stifles the hopes of the present 3) within dead end physical incarnation” (source). In short, it makes for good BDSM, in the right hands, minds and spaces. As with Jadis, the memory of a dying bloodline becomes a means of salvation, of escape!

Per my conceptualization of the palliative Numinous, then, the Skeleton King’s tomb is something to bask in the rotting splendor of/rock out to, Castlevania-style as borrowing from older excessive models utilizing the Gothic chronotope as channeled into the future through constant bad echoes, spatial-temporal stamps (re: the Orientalism of the “black Egypt”; e.g., “The Black Reliquary” mod for The Darkest Dungeon) and tone-poem musical cues; e.g., Children of the Reptile’s “Halls of the Skeleton Lord,” 2017): “It is our time… regain what’s mine!” Big danger, big camp potential in the shadow of tremendous obscurity and cryptonymy (and all the usual hero-rapes-dungeon monomyth shenanigans). The Pale King extends that idea, except the king is dead and replaced with a rapturous avenger that survived him only to be imprisoned by his jailers inside the home converted into a tomb: the Black Egg and ritual sacrifice of boss keys[6] (themes of rot and cryptonymy tied to the space’s Freudian elements, thoroughly dating it): rape the dark womb of nature (the thing to map out a route to and eventually find a way inside—paradise as fallen, spurning the hero for their laborious, roundabout efforts, backtracking through the same maze).

Courtesy of a broader assemblage of palimpsests, Team Cherry’s Gothic ruin is also full of weapons and mad science, wherein it invites users to play among the ruins—to bask in their treachery and gloomth to find new significance and meaning among the graveyard as a reminder of tyrannical material conditions that haven’t gone anything (e.g., the post punk attitude under Thatcher’s neoliberalism). While the imagery of these giants is hollow—an illusion of power designed to affect the player—it can still attack the player. Piloting a hollow shell themselves, the player fights the false knight, who is the game’s first boss (the imposter in a stolen suit of armor evoking shared themes of parasitism and mimicry like the xenomorph in Alien, aka the eighth passenger). Over the course of the game, they fight many other shells, the skeletons of dead insects piloted by vengeful spirits leaking everywhere.

Eventually the player learns about their own monstrous origins: serving as a weapon meant to preserve the false power of the Pale King’s own vengeful ghost. As the Pale King dies, the memory of the city (the king’s giant, castled “body”) dies, but only partially. Instead of totally dead, it lingers in pieces, so many of which are dangerous or incomplete: the knight’s incomplete memory as the Pale King’s ultimate weapon[7]: the ghost of the counterfeit, which the knight—holding a shade inside itself—is.

Despite the concrete perseverance of the chronotope—its hauntology and cryptonyms—nothing in Hollow Knight is what it seems. On their own quest, the player re-remembers the past as something to discover in ways that invert the monomyth closer to the center of the puzzle. In doing so, they knock down walls, interrogate ghosts, and lay the dead to rest (the exorcism of Marxist spectres by a fascist ghost). But Team Cherry’s treatment of concentric space hides one ending behind another. The first ending is only a goal post that moves to the second and the third; and from there further trials emerge. Meant to display the hero as awesome, the pantheon of the gods is helmed by the ultimate foe, the Absolute Radiance. The ultimate version of this boss is hidden away inside the mind of a giant insect that is, itself, locked in a box; the box needs a key, and the key is squirrelled away on the opposite end of the kingdom. None of this is explained, and presents itself as a mystery to solve through equal parts wit and violence. Puzzles and combat serve as trials to the hero coming home; their return seems familiar, but in a hauntological manner (re: ghosts of Caesar). This isn’t Sudra or Zebes, but an uncanny resemblance cannot be denied.

And finally at dead center of it all, the horrible truth is revealed:

(exhibit 40h1: The game’s final, “ultimate ending” is the wish fulfillment of slaying the supreme female Numinous, opening her eyelids and blinding her petrifying gaze. And yet, per Capitalist Realism silencing the “madwoman in the attic” releases the agonizing shadow of a repressed, genocidal guilt, but also the looming spectre of fascism, back into the living world: the return of the zombie tyrant, their undead horde and all the chickens coming home to roost as brought about by the hero the entire time. The psychology of these fantasy lands might seem totally dislocated from our world, but is nevertheless bolstered by the real world as a parallel, liminal space told through the Gothic romance; i.e., as a kind of disguise that offers the player false, Promethean power. When Medusa is dead, Caesar will eat Rome; when he does, she—darkness visible, surviving amid decay as a kind of echo that never dies, but rather lives on as queers always do—will be smiling.

To that, once reframed on the global stage of planet Earth, colonial fears frequently manifest as vengeful ghosts in opposition to the Nazi zombie, but also the neoliberal powers that give rise to fascists, echoing Derrida’s Spectres of Marx; e.g., Ward Churchill’s thoughts on the September 11th counterattack into Iraq:

For instance, it may not have been [only] the ghosts of Iraqi children who made their appearance that day. It could as easily have been some or all of their butchered Palestinian cousins. […] One hears, too, the whispers of those lost on the Middle Passage, and of those whose very flesh was sold in the slave market outside the human kennel from whence Wall Street takes its name. […] The list is too long, too awful to go on. No matter what its eventual fate, America will have gotten off very, very cheap. The full measure of its guilt can never be fully balanced or atoned for (source: “Some People Push Back,” 2005).  

The more oppressed someone is, the more virulent and violent, but also seditious their pedagogy is framed by the status quo—impolite by centrists and a menace by reactionaries. Churchill is Native American; Fredrick Douglass was Black and Native American; Edward Said was Palestinian, etc.)

Hollow Knight’s gargantuan, shadowy outcome falls more on the Axiom Verge side of things than any pro-state outcome. It is Promethean, but with a Gothic twist—rape and live burial (which part two of this section shall explore the subversive elements to)! The churchly mise-en-abyme stretches into delicious, crumbling infinity through a smaller suggestion pool whose Numinous vibes can be enjoyed by persons of any political persuasion:

• The first ending traps the Radiance inside the protagonist, making them the next hollow knight (the concept of knights and insects denoting an insect politics approach to the cycle; i.e., an imprecise, unscientific series of “bug knights” covered in the hard outer shells of drone-like killers; e.g., Tarran Fiddler‘s evocation of Gwyn, Lord of Cinder [below] as a dung beetle on par with Team Cherry’s Dung Defender)

[exhibit 40h3, holding heaven in a wild flower]

• The second ending traps the knight and Hornet inside the same tomb together.
• The third ending destroys the Radiance and the knight, but spares Hornet.
• The fourth ending destroys the Absolute Radiance, but turns the knight into an even greater monster that Hornet must fight on her own.

All of these trials involve a melee weapon[8] told through a fatal quest for power and wisdom that stalls resolution as a symptom of capital abjected onto displaced, imaginary realms. To this, the heroic quest is tied to a monomythic space that promises combat; the combat misleads the player by offering power as tinged with decay and malice, that ultimately triumphs against the hero upon the story’s conclusion. There is no way to win, no matter how many power-ups are acquired, or how many upgrades the nail is given (which functions like a vampire’s fangs, stealing essence from the gameworld and its current, ghostly occupants to power the hero’s healing spells and magical attacks while simultaneously exorcizing the once-hallowed tomb of its unwelcome “guests”).

A similar, settler-colonial fatalism awaits Dark Souls players. Awash with gloomth, the hero’s quest traps them inside the world as part of a grander cycle; i.e., historical materialism and the return of fascism littered with small clues: the real-life Nazi SS (sun rune) and “Seig heil!” meaning “hail, victory!” but also “hail, the sun!” (the sun being a transcendental symbol of power in different imperial cultures; e.g., Ra and the Ancient Egyptians; Apollo in Greece; and the Shogunate and Shintoism [the fascist side of Buddhism] in Japan; etc) vis-à-vis Dark Souls‘ in-game phrase “Praise the Sun!” becoming code outside of it and back into it when the game space is colonized by weird canonical nerds.

This fascism in Dark Souls carries into a “death before dishonor” Gothic curse that mythically essentializes a rise and fall of sun-like greatness that thinks it will always return during fiery purification, warrior-Jesus rituals that worryingly ape the original problem; i.e., there is no god, just people killing each other on loop, mortifying their own flesh (and that of others) while shouting “Praise the Sun!” or “Deus Vult!” It’s a playground for them—a time in the sun during the dawn of the dead—but also a heroic death cult tied to profit; i.e., an excuse to rape, kill and otherwise harm others but also themselves as part of nature, mid-cataclysm. Except, there’s a limit to what the Earth will take, the soil souring when robbed of its nutrients; Medusa bides her time, but eventually pushes back, putting the predatory Patriarchy underground for good—proving as she does the illusory nature of state power (and its mimetic code) during state shift.

To that, Gwyn is a fallen strongman like the Pale King is, their kingdoms trapped in endless states of decay and dishonor around each ruler lying state; i.e., a fungal spectrality that never stops eating itself—is always restless, vengeful, doomed, blind, etc. The dishonor lingers, so the death lingers in a funeral pall, a Gothic curse of the castle and the land that an undead hero must lift by regaining their humanity inside the infernal concentric pattern. Per Aguirre, the monomyth begins and ends in Hell, upending Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces (1949). It becomes the tyrant’s plea, but one that Team Cherry (which came after Dark Souls) chooses to double with Medusa by virtue of troubling comparison: feeling sorry not for the king or his rapist undead soldiers, but a wronged queen visiting her revenge upon them in return!

The final conclusion is Ozymandias with amnesia. Inside the Painted World of Ariandel, the doomed quest of Slave Knight Gael is completed by the player-avatar, the Ashen One. At the end of the quest, the hero confronts Gael, who is inexplicably transformed. Sped up to the last syllable of recorded time, Gael and the hero fight inside an hourglass, surrounded by thunder, darkness and wind; but also sand.

The concentricity doesn’t end there. The entire climax sits inside the mind of a sleeping princess called Filianore, herself trapped inside the painting. Crypts within crypts; more cryptonyms along and within the same gross narrative. After a long series of violent quests, the hero’s crusade comes to Filianore and is seemingly presented with hidden power. The egg she holds falls apart, and the hero is transported to the end of all things. Here, the “truth” of the cycle is foretold: Through a fatal, ceaseless drive to attain power and wisdom, Gael has consumed the blood of the Dark Soul, which the hero takes from him by force; i.e., two vampires fighting over diminishing returns in the bone-dry crypt of Capitalism feudalized. Its transmutation is all but useless to the victor.

Nor does Gael’s death “beat” the game; it merely offers the hero with arguably their greatest trial by combat. But the ending of the game remains; the soul of cinder remains, as does the endless, kaleidoscopic city looping in on itself. And whatever challenge the player seeks is coded through violent, dream-like exchanges inside the ringed city as a kind of circular ruin, haunted by the viral pathogen staining the aesthetic: a looping Promethean Quest for greater glory and satisfaction inside the collapse of the feudal-capital order and subsequent desert of the real, the hero fighting the simulacrum to replace them inside the viral chain behind the illusion of a healthy and prosperous Imperium that, like a zombie apocalypse, is strangely devoid of non-zombie life. All that remains are empty suits of armor piloted by unseen forces.

In Dark Souls’ case, it is the death knight cannibalizing his greatest foe as undead and gigantic: himself as risen and fallen. Any pretense of greatness (nobility) has long been forgotten, replaced with limitless, rusted barbarism. He’s the senile old man, the rabid cop inside the police state attacking other cops:

I’m of course referring to Lodran proper, and the proximity the hero faces through the combat itself. Told through Numinous chants, hideous threnodies and sorrowful dirges, the “call-and-response” of combat (The Game Theorists’ “The SECRET Rhythms of DARK SOULS!” 2017) is one with depictions of fatal portraits, black knights, demons, and giant suits of armor. These and many other icons weren’t simply ripped from Walpole’s famous novella; they have survived across the years as a reliable form of tremendous feelings—what, in videogames like Dark Souls and Hollow Knight, evokes Percy Shelley’s bare and level sands beyond the ruins of Ozymandias through a “ludic sublime”: “a boundless expanse, suggestive of near-infinite possibilities for exploration and constituting a whole beyond” (source: Daniel Vella’s “No Mastery Without Mystery: Dark Souls and the Ludic Sublime,” 2015). This sense of the beyond and the quest for power inside it collides in the here-and-now just as the Romantics did with the Gothicists of that period, smashing a sense of sanitized greatness against the feudal tyrant as darkly romanticized, to which Aguirre’s latter-day calling of the phenomenon “geometries of terror” was what Bakhtin once described as “chronotope,” specifically the Gothic story of a hundred-and-seventy or so years previous.

Vital to this general sensation of decay is a slipping grasp of the imagination in the face of awesome power (what C.S. Lewis attributed to a “shrinking” feeling before the Numinous). The key to the closeness of such feelings is the sword in the player’s hand. A closeness with death—as something to paradoxically embrace and revitalize, even if the quest never ends—is attained through combat with the fringes of the sublime, the Numinous, the Gothic tyrant as replicated, on and on and on, inside the narrative of the crypt. Upon its mise-en-abyme, a swordfighter (or some other melee-to-ranged combatant), is invariably going to lock arms with the fatal past; it is their life force, chasing what all warriors in the crypt chase: essence through the replication of conflict in a Gothic aesthetic. But the spellcaster is someone who needs distance and time to prepare a response.

So while the ranged combatant is viable within the game, the truest practitioners of combat (especially in PvP circles) establish dominance as a kind of “fencing” for sporting purposes: to “dunk” or “clown” on their adversity as the holiest of sports maneuvers—the show of force during the usual bread and circus[9] (exhibited between underdogs, bullies, golden boys and goons, babyfaces and heels, etc). This “fighter’s distance” is not simply the correct, prescribed distance to attack and defend from; it is the place where combatants feel most powerful, most alive during the dance with death. It’s certainly possible to avoid combat (Happy Hop, “Dark Souls Trilogy – No Hit Run, 2918) but leads to increasingly obsessive and absurd levels of one-upmanship: a warrior corpse that does not know that it is dead, still trapped in Hell as something to rape.

Such is capital, displaced. To that, Hollow Knight and the Soulsbourne series are Promethean insofar as they both illustrate a similar fascination with the warrior’s path as fated inside a warrior’s cave; i.e., with no recourse for escape from the ghost of empire as “striking back” being a matter of capital (moving money through nature). But some keys to power are far less shady and far more glorious: a hero dies but once, only to live on forever (we’ll explore this problematic immortality for the rest of the subchapter)! It’s a militarily optimistic escape from the concentric pattern’s abyss; i.e., via the usual monomyth’s deus ex machina raping nature.

In the hands of the military optimist (the cop), melee weapons are the key to power as “theirs” by defeating nature encroaching on civilization as male, manly and brave. This power includes two basic types: combating evil and feats of strength. Part of this power is the promise of never-ending glory. Traditional heroes are immortalized by slaying the great evil or performing the strongest deed, and this, in turn, has a profound bubble effect on how they are viewed afterwards. With combating evil, the melee weapon serves a vital role: a means of fighting up close, thus having a higher risk of death. Sacrifice in the face of a dangerous enemy is encouraged through a myth of invincibility (re: the berserk). And if the hero falls in combat, and the countless bodies are strewn around all him, there is no graveyard; the victorious dead are generally burned, hailed as righteous in the never-ending struggle against evil before entering Valhalla (or some equivalent warrior pantheon at the presumed center of the sun).

We’ve laid out the players, spaces and ideals of the Modern Prometheus and its Cartesian/astronoetic devices. Per Aguirre, I next want to examine how the Gothic likes to dissolve this glory in an infernal concentric pattern that overwhelms the hero as someone rather full of themselves, putting the ball in Hell’s court: a home court advantage that buckles the champion’s knees in the presence of Mother Nature as monstrous-feminine; i.e., Creed’s notion of the ancient castrating mother inside a man cave that, prior to its clearing out by Beowulf, harbors an older female presence that haunts the space currently in decay after Beowulf the legend is replaced by the reality of old age, madness and death. Faced with the gorgon, the hero becomes eclipsed by an older power that dims the excellence of his male sovereign through ludo-Gothic BDSM as a matter of rape play. Schadenfreude is orgasmic, but so is liberation when the patriarch-of-the-day is proven wrong—by showing him to be a rapacious brutalizer whose empire won’t last. Delicious!

(artist: Wildragon)

Courtesy of Clint Hockings, a common mantra of videogames is ludonarrative dissonance: “Seek power and you will progress” (source). Promethean stories fuck with that, BDSM-style, by fucking with the hero’s ability to progress, mastering them inside Zimmerman’s magic circle as something that isn’t clear-cut, and whose mastering of the player can yield different outcomes in the future; re, me, vis-à-vis Seth Giddings and Helen Kennedy’s “Little Jesuses and *@#?-off Robots” (from the glossary):

In other words, the ludic contract is less a formal, rigid contract and more a negotiated compromise occurring between the two; i.e., where players have some sense of agency in deciding how they want to play the game even while adhering to its rules and, in effect, being mastered by it.

In Metroidvania, this mastery is theatrically conveyed between the player’s avatar and the persons and places he encounters as lying to him, but also dominating him to communicate difficult truths about heroism by reversing the monomyth (re: “Our Ludic Masters“); i.e., by giving him an embarrassing victory that seems to stall him in place, or undoes monomythic heroism altogether by subverting Cartesian ideas through the Promethean Quest, ipso facto.

Such campy instruction can frankly be a humbling experience, one whose ludo-Gothic BDSM speaks to the individualistic pride of Western canon that turns heroes into useful idiots but treats them like conquering emperors (so-called “made men/great men of history”). Such tutelage results in people who generally don’t like to be viewed as idiots, but also subs under a dominant’s power. But Medusa’s “exquisite torture” is paradoxically good instruction, insofar as it avoids the usual rapes committed in monomythic language pursuant to genocide under Cartesian paradigms (which is what neoliberalism [through videogames] is: the same old raping of nature-as-monstrous-feminine to serve profit. You have to short circuit the exchange inside of its usual spaces, with its usual instructions; re: The Merchant of Venice).

Also like an orgasm, then, “death” is overwhelming and not always entirely pleasant (delicate) or controlled; re: as the Rusalki show us, it can be thoroughly rough. Except, this isn’t simply the passage of time, nor an accident of the mode; overwhelming isn’t a failure to communicate, but a means of communicating that speaks to the cyclical truth of things and its effect on the human mind as tied to a generational space.

My expertise lies in the Metroidvania, so that is where our focus continues to lie; i.e., as we plumb the murky depths of the castle as a murderous womb that, stamped with “female/feminine” as a death sentence and curse by male brutalizers, seeks its revenge by humanizing those who might follow in Perseus’ footsteps; e.g., the more Trace follows in Athetos’ vengeful footsteps, the more he becomes vampiric, warlike, shooter—a fascist warrior seeking “greatness,” above—to which the same applies to the hollow knight filled “toe to top full of direst cruelty”: the middle class bred on such legends to reify them as an avatar’s conceptualization that bleeds into reality off of the page and into it (especially videogames, per Cameron’s refrain).

First, just as the Gothic overwhelms binaries and their boundaries, a Gothic space defies easy quantification to communicate difficult truths through questionable methods (again, parents lie to their kids—not to punish them, but teach them); i.e., meant to entrap and overwhelm the user to, through access to fatal knowledge and power, rip them apart. Sometimes this literally happens, but often its sensory and ontological (re: Trace the conqueror weaponized against his father by the battered housewife). In the Gothic-Communist tradition, though, it grants those already occupying a genocided position inside a settler colony’s state of exception a palliative, hauntological means of confronting and interrogating generational trauma; i.e., to reclaim monsters and their spaces, hence our power through ludo-Gothic BDSM: an end to the genocide behind the illusion making society sick and blind but still undead, unheimlich.

The ticket is the castle as a site of reclamation and forbidden operatic pleasure that, in unironic hands, is built to seriously torture those inside, pacifying them through fear of the outside/nature, of barbarism with the space, of decay and disintegration, etc. Get too close and one’s understanding of a perceived order of things is challenged, along with one’s sanity. Ironic “torture” exists in quotes, making an iconoclastic hauntology ethical through class and gender war as prosecuted in favor of workers to upset the status quo. To critique power, you must go where it is; i.e., the monomyth as something to subvert per the Metroidvania’s Promethean Quest, bathing in the Numinous as palliative (what Seth Brundle called “the plasma pool”). It’s a calculated risk that goes into Hell and stays there: Persephone, Satan’s wench, as becoming her own boss (she don’t need no man, especially a man of reason pimping her out, mid-witch-hunt)!

(artist: VG Yum)

Whereas Volume Zero has examined the palliative Numinous per the Metroidvania, and this section has already discussed the Metroidvania castle-narrative as something monstrous-feminine regarded fearfully by patriarchal colonizers (exhibits 40f/g), now we’re going to contribute to healing as scholars do: through contributions to knowledge banks that, when accessed, can assist in the subversion of, and deviation away from, Cartesian norms. You can’t kill these feelings through scapegoats (re: “Military Optimism“), only play with them in ways that synthesize catharsis by camping witch hunts.

In the interests of continued scholarship, then, I want to use the rest of the “Metroidvania” symposium to synthesize these points regarding castle-narrative and nature-as-monstrous-feminine; i.e., as tied to ludo-Gothic BDSM as I have since defined and expressed it throughout this book series. We’ll briefly go over the whole process’ evolution, next, before exploring rape play in Hollow Knight and Metroidvania: as policing the whore during unironic witch hunts, which she must liberate herself from during the Promethean Quest—by camping her own death (and rape) in ironic ways!

Lovecraft (and offshoots of him) denote such conclusions as comparable to Slave Knight Gael at the end of the world: confronting the pure meaninglessness of the larger space and its mechanisms as asleep, waiting like Cthulhu does, to awaken. But this needn’t be something for Beowulf to punch, proving his manhood by raping death as monstrous-feminine (slapping the bear per settler-colonial rites of passage that aggrandize him through acts of futile revenge playing out the Roman fool’s logic: a warrior’s death as infinitely useful to Capitalism); it can be tremendously joyous and healing. Such catharsis generally occurs through rape play as camping one’s rape, as well as the system (and fatal, medieval-grade manliness) attached to said rape as one of the Medusa and nature getting back at their abusers. Until then, she sleeps, buried in the black heart of a rape space whose beautiful dragon only waits to wake up, emerge and turn the patriarch’s world upside down.

Onto Hollow Knight, part two, “Sleeping Beauties: Policing the Whore; or, Topping from Below to Rise from the Ashes“!

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Footnotes

[1] Re: a confusion of the senses, selective absorption, magical assembly and a Song of Infinity. Hollow Knight does this all with Gothic architecture (the Promethean Quest), ludology and insects speaking to kingly decay (the state) as something to inherit then challenge or conform to profit as part of: “a stately pleasure dome” burst like a bubble, laid low by royal arrogance (again, a displaced metaphor for bourgeois forces).

[2] Re: Icarian grandeur as a matter of double standard. The king cannot stand being outshined, so he sends his soldiers to extinguish her glory as monomythically “unequal” to his.

[3] “He is mega cooked […] Any word you could come up with that denotes some form of cooking […] that’s what happened!” Kyle Kulinski puts it (“Breaking: Press Conference Disaster for Biden,” 2024).

[4] E.g., D’Angello Wallace’s “An Uncomfortable Conversation about Cody Ko” (2024). Such effects happen by virtue of the law and society until quite recently treating women as property. These monuments of Justice (and their societal extensions in everyday conversation and media) exude praxial inertia by virtue of serving profit, but also gender roles and sexuality, crime and punishment as historically-materially rigid. The elite don’t want them to change, so they abuse these structures to manipulate people into triangulating against the usual survivors: cops and victims.

[5] Persephone van der Waard’s “Maculate Conception: The Making of My Prometheus Fan Edit,” 2021).

[6] The usual heroic hitlist employed by white knights/white Indians like Samus Aran, which the knight to some degree emulates.

[7] A Gothic, Dracula-level twist imitated by Still Indigo’s medieval, (admittedly cis-)Sapphic Amazonomachia/fascist-flavored love story: “Scorched Earth” (2023)—an all-female Romeo and Juliet through the medieval language of the state, romanticized similar to a kettling of Queen Dany in Game of Thrones in that she doesn’t become the state’ bitch; she burns it all down through indiscriminate hysteria fanned by reactive abuse: the Patriarchy’s fulfilling of their own apologia by making a monstrous-feminine/rogue girl boss they can crucify.

[8] I.e., one generally overcompensating as a place or position—a vain, phallic monument—also does; e.g., “the emperor beetle stands in for my penis!” said the insecure man of reason, proudly and unironically reasoning his own place in the universe versus nature (and the monstrous-feminine’s own ability to “joust” back, mid-Amazonomachy).

[9] Conversely a proletarian allegory (which Star Wars is known for), will not simply bank on class sentiment, but foster it consciously. More franchised variants—the Lucas prequels—lack this allegory in favor of more campy (and dumb) theatrics, and others—like The Clone Wars (2008) or Andor (2022)—have it in spades, throwing their weight around insofar as class war is concerned..

This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). 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 “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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

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

Metroidvania, part one: Away with the Faeries; or, Double Trouble in Axiom Verge

“I’m going to the one place that hasn’t been corrupted by Capitalism!” [dramatic pause, tries not to laugh] “…Space!” (source).

—Tim Curry as Premier Anatoly Cherdenko, Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 (2008)

Picking up from where “‘She Fucks Back’; or, Metroidvania (opening and part zero)” left off…

Part one takes the canonical histories we unpacked during part zero and inverts them per the iconoclastic ones we also outlined (and are contributing to, here). First, we surveyed Freud and Forbidden Planet, as well as At the Mountains of Madness, and Shelley’s Victor and the Creature in Frankenstein, as all part of the same Promethean Quest. After that, we

• highlighted several key points surrounding Promethean narratives in terms of the performative spaces associated with them: the hero is summoned to the ruinous, dormant land of the gods, where they learn about their shitty parents, and then fights for one side against the other before scuttling the space-in-question.
• looked at the history of scholarship (re: my graduate and postgraduate work) and the stories connected to that scholarship as haunting capital out of the imaginary past splintered into copies, of copies, of copies regarding nature vs civilization, Cartesian men vs Medusa.

Last but not least, we discussed irony as something that can be removed or added in one iteration versus the next, giving Metroid as an unironic example of the Capitalocene that Axiom Verge subverts in a lot of campy, very gay ways: Trace is Shelley’s Adam turned against Victor by Mother Nature—gay space faeries!

(artist: Dejano23)

Now that you have all of that, part one is our close-read of Axiom Verge, exploring how its Promethean story about trouble in paradise (a hellish pastoral ain’t no picnic) treats the mission as one ironically delivered to a clone of the ultimate foe; i.e., the player as inheriting the larger Promethean scheme having already been subverted by our resident gay faeries. The game doubles Metroid, but also its own characters and spaces pointing to Capitalism/the Capitalocene normally disguised by doomsday narratives that Samus would shoot without a second thought. We’ll explore this “double trouble,” now, commenting on different apocalypse qualities of it before ending on a cathartic, sex-positive note.

Following the basic pattern of the Promethean Quest, Trace wakes up naked and alone. Trapped in a world that is falling apart (or ready to fall apart), the faeries have called Trace from sleep to brief him; i.e., telling him where to go, what to do—his mission objectives, essentially. Over time, he walks around, not exactly alone insofar as there is life present, just not human life. The place is a ghost town, lonely and plaintiff as Satie’s “Paris,” not Beethoven’s (the latter crossing Napoleon’s name out of the Emperor Concerto[1]). Keeping with the Metroidvania tone poem, eventually the music picks up; Trace fights monsters, and learns he’s not only created by a mad scientist called Athetos (whose name means “without place”), but he’s begot from the other man!

(artist: Wildragon)

That’s not usual in Promethean narratives. The problem is, Athetos isn’t like Morbius; he’s a genocidal maniac abusing the fire of the gods to aggrandize himself! To it, Trace is effectively this story’s Creature with a twist—there’s a bit of the inhumane patriarch inside him, giving him a human appearance tied to someone and something truly heinous. As we shall see, this is where the trouble starts. But it’s also where addressing Capitalism (and its disguises) begins to take shape; i.e., the mighty Rusalki being the faeries that Trace is away with: troubling comparison (through doubles) leads to irony critiquing and subverting what’s effectively an ironic version of the Metroid-style Metroidvania.

Athetos, then, is this stories’ copy of Hamlet’s father’s ghost; i.e., the catalyst for revenge against Mother Nature. Untrained in combat, the “hero” is actually Trace, the unwitting doppelganger/useful idiot cloned from Athetos and used against him by the Rusalki (a bit like Skynet and the terminators, which the resistance reprograms); i.e., to not act like Samus and her violent, militarily optimistic salvos attacking the planet and its occupants: as simple pirates and dragons to slay.

In other words, Trace is a clone of himself as less warlike (and self-righteous). Both he and Athetos are strangers to Sudra, the game’s alien homeworld. The difference is that Athetos is entirely foreign to Sudra and trying to colonize its ruins (which are that way because of what he did to the Sudrans), while Trace feels alienated in Sudra on account of the memories inside him that were written before his birth on Sudra; i.e., to defend from his conqueror side (the creepy old man/mad scientist who rapes everything around him): he is filled with revenge, only to discover it was authored by his mothers, not his genocidal dad (the two ideas at war inside Trace’s head). Is it embarrassing? Eh, sure, but pride is the root of the problem—one the Rusalki have no bones about solving by lying to Trace and, sometimes, spanking him a bit. The world is corrupted by hideous creations they expect him to “mop up” on his way to the Wizard of Oz. It’s still something of a purge, but the “corruption” is manmade; i.e., one of fascist science, versus Metroid’s X parasite simply being tied to the land, itself, as wild: needing to be colonized inside the state of exception, a priori.

The Gothic generally puts “harm” next to harm as felt, like a ghost, across generations (the chronotope and its various ghosts). For the rest of part one, then, I want to focus on the complex, imperiled, BDSM-style interactions Trace has with the Rusalki, the game’s Frankensteinian war machines as primarily telepathic and spectral. Not only do they arm him with (stolen) weapons in the guerrilla style; their veiled, “torturous” instructions compel him towards rebellious violence using deliberately faulty intelligence to survive Cartesian genocide.

Throughout the story, the Rusalki keep Trace in the dark. Guilty as charged. But also, theirs is an act of Amazonian desperation, one whose drive to survive a human menace leads them to act increasingly human against the spectral highwayman. Beyond the same, fourth-dimensional walls of sleep, the Great Faeries[2] prod Trace awake, sending him knowingly into “danger”; i.e., when he dies, the so-called “old machines” revive him. But he retains his memories each time, until confronting Athetos’ variants finally forces him to come to his own conclusions about what he really is in relation to his father as a likeness he embodies: the conqueror mad scientist, the Nazi quack.

These troubling revelations only compound further when Trace encounters a pathogen that makes him hallucinate: a bioweapon released by Athetos to genocide the Sudrans, ravage the environment and trap the Rusalki in a sleep of death (a very eco-fascist maneuver). This fever dream is also a crossover vision, one that reverses the role between him and the monsters he’s systematically slaying. While the resurrection pods provide an uncertain “cure,” Trace retains memories of the dream that his Amazonian bosses cannot see. Instead, their drones carry him to safety.

(exhibit 40e: Artist: Wildragon. Axiom Verge is effectively a Promethean narrative of fighting fire with fire. Athetos uses bio-weapons to kill the Sudrans and trap the Rusalki; the Rusalki use cloning as a means of weaponizing a clone of Athetos against himself; and Athetos tries to convince Trace at the end of the game that the Rusalki are not to be trusted despite making Trace from Athetos’ body. Instead of Frankenstein‘s singular parent-versus-child narrative, Axiom Verge gives Trace a scientist male father and host of Amazonian, biomechanical female mothers who made him from mad science to fight mad science; both are fearsome, commenting on the tyrannical nature of mad science as always having a human face—i.e., Prometheus, bottom-left. It’s like a really fucked-up custody battle—one where the parents pit the child against either side while reminding it that it comes from them: the human side, but also the alien side lurking beneath the surface as fundamentally human relative to nature.)

When Trace comes to, he witnesses two Athetos variations. Both are effectively mush, but one nonetheless resembles Trace (above). Horrified, Trace shoots it dead (exhibit 40e). This spurs an argument between him and the Rusalki, who begrudgingly tell Trace his origins. Their deliberate omissions anger him. When he refuses to cooperate, the Rusalki “kill” him; he respawns, only to find himself being chided for his foolish rebellion.

As such, this torturous, shared phenomenology makes for a very different story than Doom‘s or Metroid’s heroic refrain (shoot the alien inside the fallen colony space). Rather than ignore or overlook death, Trace’s demise is a fundamental part of the story Thomas Happ wants to tell: you can’t shoot Medusa to death because she’s your dominatrix, a guardian of nature using you for those ends through stories inside stories, lies inside and upon lies. Per Plato, the nature of allegory is that it isn’t outside the cave (or the text, as Derrida would insist).

For instance, a player normally remembers “dying” but their avatar does not. Trace is not only aware of death; it teaches him some sorry truths:

• He is being controlled by giant, powerful entities.
• These entities are alien, god-like bio-machines, but also masters of war.
• As masters of war, they continually lie to him, telling him only what is needed to complete their military objectives.
• These objectives involve the killing of the hero’s older, “wiser” self, leaving the younger survivor in a constant state of ignorance and confusion.

His experience uncannily mirrors the mind of the player going through the same ordeal, raising troubling queries. Is Athetos the villain or the seemingly-made Creatures (robata) that he seeks dominion over?

To that, we’re left asking the same questions Shelley raised, except it’s through the Promethean myth as punted into outer space; i.e., in a move similar to Alien, Forbidden Planet and At the Mountains of Madness—transplanting the fire of the gods, versus having Victor make it, “homebrew.” The point isn’t who makes the technology but what is done with it. The Rusalki use it to protect themselves; Athetos, to kill everyone in a genocidal tantrum because the big ladies won’t let him into their womb space. He’s the incel tyrant nerd, ipso facto, and it’s completely ok to lie to him spectacularly (re: the splendide mendax) and his baby-like clones (which Trace is) if it means preserving themselves to spite his rapey hubris (the killer doll being something Hollow Knight plays with, albeit in reverse: the knight killing Medusa to avenge the king by raping his monstrous-feminine foil, the Radiance).

Though never fully clear, Trace’s cloudy vision becomes comparatively more lucid as time goes on. He finds a series of cryptic journals. Some are literally gibberish the player must decode using cyphers. Some are from the Sudrans; others from the Rusalki, even Athetos (who signs the documents “—Trace”). So many elements of language fail to communicate anything at all, forcing the player to search for the truth, memento mori. But all the same, a deliberately oblique story seemingly bars the way.

Not entirely. Even Athetos hints at the truth: “If I tell you too much, your captors will have to kill you.” The fact—that both sides are lying about a struggle between themselves to a curious third party—mirrors Shelley’s framed narrative in Frankenstein (1818) giving rise to homicidal rhetoric: “DEMON. ATHETOS SAY, KILL.” Danger, Will Robinson! Danger disco!

(exhibit 40f: Artist, left: Wildragon; right: Bernie Wrightson. Promethean arguments of revenge concern capital vs nature. In these dream-like spaces, spectres of Marx and spectres of Caesar and “Rome” aim to control the same “dolls” [citizens, workers]. In the case of Enlightenment dogma, the female presence of nature and chaos historically-materially stands “in the way” of male leaders, but also makes them anxious of a phallic, enraged monstrous-feminine Numinous/nation; i.e., the Amazons versus King Theseus, Queen Jadis versus Aslan, Mr. Rochester vs Bertha, Morgana versus Arthur or Medusa versus the Greeks, etc. In many instances, the striking of the king blind with forbidden, female-exclusive wisdom is the Gorgon’s best weapon; in Axiom Verge, the Rusalki are more a class of warrior gatekeepers using the same brutal methods to keep Athetos, thus Humanity through Capitalism, from advancing to a position where they could do greater harm to nature: through their cryptonymy as a matter of war masks, deceptions, and ultimately fighting back against male tyrants through those outward-facing half-deceptions.)

Axiom Verge and Frankenstein, despite being centuries apart, touch on the same basic concepts through an ambiguous framed narrative about demons (we’ll return to the “demonic” aspect in the Demon Module): memory and knowledge as compromised by Promethean struggles to “advance.” In Shelley’s novel, the pursuit of knowledge was guarded by Victor, but also the Creature stalking and methodically torturing him (emulating his creator in that respect: the scientific method). And driven to the ends of the Earth, a dying Victor relays with utter conviction that his man-made creation is a “demon” to be slain; but the same animus is projected onto Victor by the Creature. Their mutual audience is left to decide who is right, but a case can be made for either side. Clearly Victor is a villain, but the Creature cannot be wholly redeemed, either. There’s innocent blood on his hands, spilled in futile revenge against capital’s daddy.

The same dilemma is present in Axiom Verge. Athetos did not create the Rusalki; he merely attracted them through his own pursuit of forbidden knowledge by genocidal means. However, machines also don’t evolve like organics; they are made, generally in the pursuit of power or wisdom. Just as Victor pursued the Wisdom of the Ancients as a “natural philosopher,” Athetos’ scientific endeavors led him down a similar road. On it, both men encounter a biomechanical humanoid race, their mutual confrontation instigating a merciless fight to the death: Humanity versus itself in a process of abjection against nature; i.e., demonic persecution divided dualistically in two and set upon itself.

To this, the relationship between the past and the present is the exploration of science in ways that do not die, but simply wait to be found and resurrected once more. While this stymies progress, so does the fear of the process itself. The Sudrans (according to Athetos) feared their technology and refused to invoke it. Instead they worshipped it (thus the Rusalki and nature). Athetos despised this worship and released a disease to kill them all, thus gaining access to the Breach. Beyond lay the path to true power, true wisdom. With it, Athetos could make disease, war, famine and death “things of the past” (again, according to him). But the past was waiting for him in Amazonian forms. As an instrument of nature designed to protect itself in war-like ways, Athetos would have to defeat its avatars. In turn, the Rusalki (a kind of water fairy in Slavic lore) would have to dig deep, drawing on their own worst impulses to prevent a deeply flawed and predatory man (and, in effect, Capitalism which he embodies and enjoys always leading to genocide according to profit) from entering paradise: king wants, the gods deny passage and ascension.

(source: James Jordan’s “The Met’s Stream of Wagner’s Ring,” 2020)

Despite the Frankensteinian ambiguities, things have class character that we can determine through dialectical-material scrutiny. To that, let me remind you of the dualities at work, here, of which the differing factor is one of class-and-cultural character, not appearance. For example, such denial of paradise by the gods is a common Promethean theme, the fascist element of false rebels clamoring to return to paradise (the good graces of the elite) since Wagner’s 1857 Ring Cycle opera (a composer who was notably anti-Semitic[3]).  But not all gods are Nazis, either.

So while this was a theme alluded to in At the Mountains of Madness, followed by Scott’s Prometheus—and later more clearly in Alien: Covenant, with David playing “Entry of the Gods into Valhalla,” returning to a superior position[4] while simultaneously pointing out that gods are both fake and used to justify and achiever power to create new beings with (the xenomorph being a Satanic tool of rebellion, but more on that in the Demon Module)—Happ in 2014 was riffing off the same denials of entry and seeking of power by those who have and those who don’t: Athetos vs nature-as-monstrous-feminine; i.e., the one “without place” being a king without a kingdom as a matter of capital under Cartesian thought raping nature as impressive, as big and fearsome, as having things to take (ultimately materials, but also power and forbidden knowledge as a social-material arrangement—the raw and nebulous essence of people, of class-to-race-to culture war, of Foucault’s bio-power, Francis Bacon the father of modern science [a palimpsest for Victor] appealing to rape nature, etc).

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

To cut through the Red Scare confusion, then, let me also remind you that the fascist, she-wolf (vampire) visual elements to the Rusalki cross a shared aesthetic of power and death over with the Communist elements occupying the same shadow zone that both inhabit. There is no singular interpretation, save what capital tries to colonize Gothic territories with. So call the Rusalki “Valkyries” or “space vampires” if you like; I see them as Grendel’s giant mother—big-ass Commie faeries more versed at warmaking, mimicry and all-around survival as actual rebels (counterterrorists) than Athetos was, a state terrorist playing the rebel (something to bear in mind when we take these historical lessons and apply them to our own lives, in Volume Three; i.e., learning from the imaginary past as informed by a historical one as equally half-real—the chronotope). Thus, they are able to get back at the Cartesian, Übermensch mega-nerd this time (touché, as it were).

Scott does the same to Weyland with his own dark angels, the Engineers ambiguously angry at a man whose own stabs at godhood are promptly smacked down by David’s disembodied head (an act of destroying maker and creation in one fell swoop): godly bonk, smiting the godhead with his little head (David being Weyland’s resigned servant for most of the film). It’s divine judgment, a gavel swung from the wrath of gods that, fake or not, have the power to wipe Humanity out. It’s a kind of guilt trip, a literal journey through and towards past wrongs against the natural world in the name of weaponized science. No one ever said the punishers of the proud were always fascist or Communist; it frankly depends on the critical voice being used!

To this, our resident big girls in Axiom Verge ruthlessly manipulate Trace, the useful idiot, in defense of a Communist paradise from the billionaire Nazi; i.e., the womb of nature (and its secrets that Cartesian men desire) being part of a forever war between Earth’s men of reason and otherworldly Amazonian forces, one they’re just getting started with all over again (forming a pretty pattern in the game that speaks to real life; re: like Miss Crawford’s cards, in Mansfield Park (re: Nabakov) but in matters of war, not love[5]). It’s mad science in both ways, nature radically using the same wonderous technology (the fire of the gods) against a fascist agent who is distanced from Earthly Capitalism but still remains a part of it; i.e., by taking him from Earth and putting him on Sudra to begin with.

In turn, Gothic castles are saturated with rape as a matter of investigation and materialization, hunting the hunter to avenge the abused from different points of contention: workers or the state. Axiom Verge has Pax Americana playing out on Sudra; in absence of an American flag or corporate logo (e.g., the Weyland-Yutani corporate merger from Alien), it is here the faeries and Athetos do battle through the child of the future taken to the ruins of a once-happy world laid low by Capitalism. In other words, it’s hauntological in terms of space; i.e., caught between past and present space-time.

To give Athetos his rude awakening inside the chronotope, the Rusalki condition the innocent child figure; i.e., cloning Trace through the resurrection machines to betray Athetos, his fatherly likeness[6], who is likewise trying to abuse the power of resurrection to conquer space. The Rusalki aren’t just better parents than Athetos, but scientists, too! It’s poetic justice, for sure, but a brutal one; i.e., “taking candy from a baby” according to an army of such enfants terrible (as the Heavy from TF2 says, “What sick man sends babies to fight me?”). This happens fighting fire with Promethean fire, babies with babies, masks with masks, mirrors with mirrors (e.g., Trace mirrors his father’s appearance but his mothers’ quest), cake with cake (re: charming lies to put in one’s cake holes to motivate revenge; e.g., poison to pour in Hamlet’s father’s ear and, by extension, his paranoid son).

As such, the Rusalki are framed as gods of nature by people like Weyland or Athetos; i.e., Cartesian men of reason playing god to lord over nature and take from it whatever they want, as a matter of Capitalism destroying as a matter of profit: the fire thereof. Any counterterrorist defense—no matter how rude it seems to bored middle-class folk snacking on such stories—is entirely justified, in that respect.

This being said, the Red Scare elements to Scott’s story (which Happ borrows from, the Rusalki being Slavic female vampires) project the fascist elements of capital onto an ancient-alien civilization (similar to Lovecraft) before threatening “the Earth” (now Westernized from top to bottom) with genocide as a fear of collapse: “It’s carrying death!” There’s an element of pearl-clutching present, one that happens through abjection forcing the Engineers and Rusalki into the same theatrical space: the city of the gods, a portentous ruin that precedes their return as fascist or Communist to threaten capital with. This happens the same way that it did with Victor, two centuries ago: through visions and dreams, and of dark, gigantic bodies twisted by mad science (the difference being the Engineers became cops, the Rusalki, rebels).

Apart from godhood, the chief difference between gods is the harm caused during oppositional praxis; i.e., the Rusalki, in a dialectical-material sense, are reprogramming the child soldier, Trace, to kill its abusive father as having harmed all parties (removing them like obstacles): killing him is a mercy to everyone, but is, like everything else in the game, always “in between,” liminal (whose operatic spaces are where fags always are, always call home despite being treated as fantastical, as incorrect: the fairy closet a prison we reclaim through Gothic hauntology from Shelley onwards).

Moreover, these are big problems tied to big persons and places as passed down, like a castle, from father to son, but also mother to child (depending on which side of the fence one falls on). Eventually the Rusalki win, probably knowing that Athetos will seek revenge against Trace. Except, the patriarch is a ghost, and ghosts can’t actually hurt you (re: C.S. Lewis). Rather, the true horror for Trace is that he’s a pawn in a bigger game, one whose victories are seldom clean; but also, that it’s all a dream, thus not real in ways that can actually harm him (the Gothic paradox). The silver lining is that, while being used, he is destroying the tyrant to prevent genocide against nature in the future—of the faeries, the older queers, having more experience and materiel to wage war against god-like forces, weaponizing Athetos’ Creature against capital (and maybe helping him out of the closet, a bit): by waking Trace up while inside Capitalist Realism (re: Plato’s cave, which Sudra stands in for).

(artist: Wildragon)

Rest assured, Medusa’s head haunts Sudra as a victim of Cartesian hubris, one whose Galatean element of Numinous energies lead to a Titania-grade worship by our resident Nick Bottom[7]. Said worship—of technology as god-like—originally kept the Sudrans inside an Indigenous state of grace that Athetos destroyed out of spite (their former greatness something hinted at when Elsenova seemingly[8] kills Athetos). “They barely remembered who they were,” Athetos recalls (our story’s Pygmalion, making Trace in his image and falling in love with himself: as master of the universe); i.e., the warriors he wanted them to be. Rooted in the past, then, what seems an interminable catastrophe that shut the Breach and robbed the Sudrans of their lives was all thanks to Athetos, not the Rusalki—a genocide he blames on them to convince the son that daddy is right.

(source: Fandom)

Of course, the Rusalki remembered, but they had previously left Sudra behind for undisclosed reasons (on par with Lovecraft’s ancient aliens, or Ridley Scott’s derelict, etc, piloting “ancient” castles doubling as giants, as ships, as avatars). Athetos made them return, but from a specific place: “the greatest nation ever envisioned.” They return from a Communist place of post-scarcity threatened by manufactured Cartesian scarcities, Athetos’ keeping the evil king alive and twisting the Rusalki into war machines to protect themselves from his weaponizing of nature against itself. Mid-Amazonomachia, they fight to a standstill, the Rusalki losing their bodies (above), and Athetos, his ability to walk on land. The fight continues inside Trace’s mind while exploring the ruins his parents made; i.e., Athetos’ inversion of “female castration” per the faeries’ severed heads haunting his dreams according his desire for a young body to pilot. As such, Medusa’s head chases the ghost of the father to Trace’s subconscious. Psychomachy or Amazonomachy—all happen for the same territories hitherto described: capital vs commune.

As for the nation, itself, it’s precisely such a place that Athetos wants to enter and destroy—to install himself in its place (and take all the credit while preying vampirically upon it) after forcing the Rusalki to return and protect their babies, who now are all dead and converted into zombie cyborgs remade to serve Athetos’ growing revenge and hubris: his towering folly!

Athetos’ mounting regression has its own conservatism during futile revenge: a better place, a nostalgia, to which any sacrifice is justified against the rebels (and by extension, nature). Trace is the Omelas goat, but his death and/or corruption is not guaranteed. Nonetheless, the Rusalki are protecting their own boarders (and avenging their slain children) from the opposite direction as having sent genocide towards them in Cartesian ways: through scientists. Superior in form (or at least size), the giant water witches are nearly destroyed by the biomechanical agent  they call a Pattern-Mind, or “someone with the ability to manipulate matter.” Athetos integrates the fire of the gods into himself to keep prosecuting his mad war against his eternal enemies (next page, exhibit 40g1); in turn, he forces them to.

Hardly an accidental tourist, Athetos does so ruthlessly to carry himself forward through the plague-ravaged maze; i.e., even after his actual body has become too frail to move around. His policeman’s brutal and cold-blooded colonizing of the land and its legends must occur through Trace, who—removed from the Rusalki’s careful watch—could easily fall victim to his evil father’s reasoned arguments; i.e., the tyrant in love with his own image as tied to capital’s dominion over nature as a manmade ordeal: Sudra turned into a prison for the Rusalki to try and escape through their adopted son as someone to liberate the mind of from their unwanted husband’s advances.

As such, Athetos’ boundaries to enjoy and impose on others (negative freedom, aka freedom from consequence) is, itself, no accident, and one that travels and lingers in future repetitions whose memories are starting to degrade; i.e., the ghost of the king haunting the carceral space through Trace being the one actually walking through it (as a ghost of Athetos, sharing fragments of his father’s memories, which he must reassemble from the wreckage around him). Trace becomes, to some extent, the vain wreaker of Cartesian havoc, which the Rusalki must turn back—Aegis-style—against the original captain. Seeking his owed home, Athetos is always rationalizing genocide (and the requirement of an enemy to rape, mutilate and pillage through Cartesian thought) by using the son as his revenge-by-proxy against the Rusalki and nature: as having not only dared to disobey him, but having denied him what’s his by royal decree dressed up as “scientific reason.”

Liberation is holistic, requiring us to consider how all these stories-in-stories (and stories that borrow this and that) collectively fit together on all registers. Athetos’ inherited hierarchy of values attaches to a capitalistic worldview that always alienates him from nature, including his own children (manmade for not); i.e., as tools for him, the divorced dad, to use and cast aside as needed. He sucks, but so does the ideology that turned him into an emotionally-fragile-yet-somehow-unfeeling monster working for the state. For all his contradictions, then, the man of reason’s self-centered policing of nature—from Victor to Weyland to Athetos—remains remarkably constant: a tyrant who always returns seeking revenge against women and children, but also the natural world!

(exhibit 40g1: Artist, top-left: Wildragon. Resembling the skeletal Immorton Joe from Fury Road [which came out a year before Axiom Verge] but also, oddly, Jacques Derrida, Athetos is Happ’s “writing with ghosts” by evoking the heteronormative spirit [and cartographic tools of conquest, exhibit 1a1a1h2a1] of the old, Enlightenment tyrant/con man Wizard-of-Oz, Peter Weyland. As the vain owner of everything around him, Weyland becomes desperate to cheat death, yet only discovers the Leveler on his own Promethean Quest: “A king has his reign, and then he dies,” his daughter, Mary Vickers, explains to him[9]. “That is the natural order of things.”

In defiance of this natural order, Peter lives in a glass shell, but also lies and exploits everyone around him in order to become a god. His leech’s rejection from paradise comments on Humanity as “unworthy” but also the gods, in this case, as false: lying to him because he sucks. Neither the Engineers nor the Rusalki are seemingly any better—a comment Weyland’s posthuman child, David, will make when he plays god in a fashion similar to the Rusalki. Except the dark mothers are stewards to nature, which Athetos—like Weyland with David—wants to invade through his children as slaves to his will [the tyrant’s plea being that if only they let him inside, sickness and death will end—more Capitalist Realism, blaming the whore]. Again, Athetos can’t love anything; he can only harvest or manufacture it for his own self-serving ends, because he embodies Capitalism peeled back to its Cartesian spearhead: the good weapon thrust into nature’s womb to tame it “for mankind.” To it, everything is expendable, including his children [or those he infantilizes and cuts up into zombie war machines—workers].)

Axiom Verge‘s warring liminalities (the verge of war) constantly present a curious kind of weapon to the player/audience: written language, specifically lies used in good faith and bad, that, unto themselves, contain things pursuant to different secret quests (a theme we’ll examine in “Metroidvania,” part two, when we compare Tolkien’s Hobbit [and Thror’s key and map] to the heroic quest in Hollow Knight). These fragments/traces also decay over time across larger systemic operations left behind (re: similar to Morbius the philologist poring over the derelict Krell language in Forbidden Planet that he might decipher its author’s mysterious disappearance); i.e., cryptic journal fragments written by increasingly delusional, Saturnine tyrants and desperate slaves, assembled afterwards (re: the mechanical Amazons and both parent’s tablets) and translated by Trace as he converses with different ghostly pieces.

Keeping with the Promethean theme of futile revenge, these reassemblies remain indicative, Hamlet-style, to the home and mind being not only destroyed as part of the same unit (with Hamlet lead by his “father’s” ghost to kill his whole family on a hunch), and linked mid-decay[10] to the same basic upheaval across space-time: “Something is rotten in Denmark!”

For example, the Rusalki lie to Trace, BDSM-style, to preserve his humanity to an imperfect degree while killing Athetos (and by extension, Capitalism-as-astronoetic); i.e., instead of Medusa inside-outside Trace (a reversal of the monomyth and its bad parentage on both registers). Such labels are cryptonyms of a repressed struggle between different, mighty forces: “Rusalki” and “old machines” and “Sudra,” but also “Athetos” as codewords during an ongoing war thereof. Simply put, the entire gameworld is a lie.

This lie unfolds on several levels. As the player follows the coded exchange borrowed from Metroid, Axiom Verge is telling an altogether different story. The player arms themselves by moving around; the Rusalki furtively arm Trace. Every victory the player earns weakens Athetos, seemingly trapping Humanity on Earth by letting Pandora out of her box. For all their posturing as great machines, the Rusalki appear to gatekeep Humanity through equal savagery. They lie, kill, and steal. The whole nebulous tragedy plays out like a waiting game—one where Athetos’ zombie agents mindlessly guard the corridors with outwardly ugly bodies; Trace embodies the body and mind of the player as controlled by alien machines that (according to Athetos) hold Humanity captive; i.e., keeping them in a dream-like, infantile state from beyond the Breach, thus unable to colonize space.

But the real villain isn’t Medusa defending herself—our Communist Galatea challenging yet-another Cartesian Pygmalion in a centrist, decaying Cycle of Kings—it’s capital defending itself through mad science decaying into fascist forms that apologize through the usual tyrant’s pleas dressed up as “rational”; i.e., the rockstar, too-radical man of reason trying to pimp Medusa through Trace, asking his own son to rape his mother (and her peoples) for the father as the father (akin to Luke and Vader) until the end of time.

The ensuring dialog occurs on a precipice—the usual great calamity having indeterminably befallen a paradise in the past (or rather a liminal space leading to paradise): the queendom of the Rusalki and nature, of which they are its fearsome stewards. Laid low by a male invader having its former greatness something to hint at, said invader has twisted the entire world to serve him and Capitalism, which he represents. Now when he is conquered, the old man is uncloaked but still dangerous, reasoning with Trace (there is nothing reasonable about genocide, but that’s still what capital does: reasoning with itself through its labor force).

To this, the game is the monomyth in small, telling a story that critiques it by virtue of disempowering the hero through what he sees, but also the faeries whispering in the ear of the king’s lineage warning them of such heroism as bad faith. Eventually, it becomes a matter of equalization—not of might makes right, but skillful, guerrilla-style maneuvering through the application of force as part of a larger struggle of liberation and resistance winding the clock back.

(exhibit 40g2: Forget “First do no harm”; Athetos does nothing else. First, he releases the plague; then, he clones himself to survive outside his glass jar in order to finish off the resident queens, forcing them to fight fire with fire just to survive—the literally broadsides of their weapon-like bodies, but also through the kid, Trace, who must watch the destruction of his state of innocence tied to the home finally disintegrate [the music that plays here is suitably titled “Apocalypse“]. Forced to come home and realize his dad’s a Nazi and his mom’s a Communist whore, Trace the inheritor remains caught between them [the game summed up as a Promethean custody battle, one where two gods—one of capital, fascism and mad science; the other of nature, rebellion and the Medusa—fight over the hearts and minds of workers at large: their “children”]. Then, he watches Mom kill Dad, Medusa getting her body back before putting the aging vampire down in front of the boy like Old Yeller… if Old Yeller were a crazed Nazi scientist obsessed with conquering the universe [no one ever said the gods were subtle]!

The prodigal son’s arrival takes time. In the interim, he explores the war-torn world as a child might, the Rusalki queendom appearing to Trace: one, as if for the first time [re: “It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being; all the events of that period appear confused and indistinct”] and two, corrupted by Nazi revenge [re: “If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends”]. Happ has reversed the position of the one making demands, the Creatures in a position of relative, unconquered advantage versus our fallen king having laid both parties low. He’s an abusive father having damaged the mother’s home, trying get at her through the children: Trace, the last, made from the bodies of the other dead kids. Brutal!

In turn, all mommy can do is try and survive along with the last surviving child; i.e., using her adopted son in reverse during the divorce from the alien dad, but ultimately seeking not to harm Trace: by teaching him that, yes, rebellion isn’t polite, and it’s ok to server bonds from your father if he’s a Nazi devouring his own lineage [re: Goya]. To that, the story has different morals playing out as a matter of dialectical-material argument: Shelley’s theatrical dialogs, mythic structure and aesthetic dualities [of power and death] warring inside framed narratives.

When the likeness of the father encounters the father’s first line of children, we see the first degrees of infiltration at work; i.e., force and total war, followed by assimilation; e.g., Skynet’s bare-bones terminators, followed by those with rubber skin, and ultimately “blood, hair, sweat—grown for the cyborgs.” As a matter of complicit vs revolutionary cryptonymy, the zombie children recognize the more refined and human Trace and see in their sibling an element of the mother, who they are supposed to destroy.

As such, the paradox of violence, terror and morphological expression is that Athetos cannot monopolize them; nor can he abuse technology in relation to nature as something to monopolize. In making Trace more human to blend in, Athetos makes a less-expendable child [an heir] who is able to see his mother’s side of things, sealing the wicked father [and Capitalism’s] fate. The battle with the flower tank [left] is simply a formality in that respect: exorcism to critique capital, not Communism!

Furthermore, if Athetos’ singular manufactured genocide against the Sudrans was cruel for an instant [which it wouldn’t have been, that many people dying hardly happening overnight, below], it was both an act of revenge for being unable to send “technological advancements” [with “progress” being a cryptonym for genocide] into space, and one informed by the countless genocides under Cartesian thought that predated Athetos on Earth [and feudalistic enterprises surviving inside Capitalism’s various fantasy worlds]: “Who’s the savage? Modern man!”

All bleed into this half-imaginary [dream-like] realm; i.e., one of the damned, where Trace—following in his father’s footsteps—climbs the mountain of unburied dead Athetos left in his wake. Trace climbs innocently towards paradise on the bones of daddy’s victims, only to run into older copies of the father’s twisted will, which his own seamless copy conceals [they literally compose him]. Regarding all of them, Athetos abused the technology of the Rusalki—in effect, the fire of the gods—to achieve godhood in a capitalist sense through those he created. Cannibalism and madness overlap into a sad tolerance for itself: echoing inside the same child’s head, mid-chronotope.

Shortly before Athetos’ death, he and Trace exchange words inside the old man’s robot womb, as much between a politician to a citizen [Caesar being a warlord and statesman] or corporate propagandist and consumer as it is between father and son. Except, there is no reasoning with such infantile, self-superior persons; they are simply wrong as a matter of basic human, animal and environmental rights [also, bear in mind, Athetos has been trying to kill Trace this entire time: “Athetos say kill”]. By recognizing that vicious entitled streak in Athetos, the Rusalki gatekeep him through the son, using him to buy time until they can swoop in and stake the fascist Dracula for good. They do so to keep capital [thus fascism and genocide hidden behind Cartesian arguments] out of the rest of the universe, returning Trace—heartbroken and confused—to a Sudran state of ignorance [the sleeping rebellion speaking to the allegory of Communism as hunted down and invaded by Capitalism].)

Meanwhile, the cruelty of the Rusalki only applies to any who wish to cross over into their “greatest nation,” keeping paradise “pure” by virtue of policing outsiders through themselves having no other choice. They’ve been hurt before, thus must stay on their toes (Cartesian men embody capital as a Cartesian, thus settler-colonial force)! Athetos gassing the Sudrans is him failing the test as a matter of impatience and bad faith; he was always a conqueror and the mask slipped (an act he later explains away to Trace, but only when Elsenova has him on the hip). To equivocate his deeds with that of the Rusalki is DARVO and obscurantism, two devices that reach back—as usual—to Shelley’s novel: “I’m not bad, just misunderstood! They’re the genocidal maniacs, the hairy wild things!” says the genocidal maniac.

(artist: Quinnvincible)

More to the point, it all stems from Capitalism as embodied by men like Victor as echoed by Weyland, Athetos, Trace, and anyone else (from Earth or not) attacking the monstrous-feminine (re: “wicked, bad, naughty Zoot” and her grail beacon). Beating everyone to the punch, Mary Shelley touched upon and critiqued capital as an operatic matter of oppositional, dualistic dialogs unfolding Gothically (as endless counterfeit “past,” echoes, ghosts) through framed narration (exhibit 40g2); i.e., stories inside stores across stories, which again, Axiom Verge ultimately is—Victor and the Creature extending to the rotting (fascist) Cartesian tyrant and rebellious, monstrous-feminine slave each playing a swan/siren song to lure Trace with: heroes in opposing, dialectical-material struggles experienced across history as half-real. It is one which Gothic expression—its cryptomimesis echoing trauma in between fragments with a medieval, earthly flavor (“hawk tua, spit on that thang[11]!”)—tells and retells such vast, opposing forces neatly enough (the young-at-heart getting it, the old and divorced-from-nature left not just scratching their heads, but attacking such youthful, slutty impudence to try and closet it once more: “Those kids and their pesky videogames[12]!”).

Shelley’s novel is several centuries older than Happ’s videogame (with Bakhtin, in the middle of them, introducing theories of the chronotope that Shelley perhaps intuitively grasped, but Happ had full access to). As such, hindsight is kind of 20/20. Rather, Gothic maturity intensifies conflict as a matter of entropy (whose perceptive zombie eyeballs parse the chaff that stirs up in the wake of such warring elements). All heroes are monsters, but canonical iterations always have the monomythic twat punching down against the monstrous-feminine Prometheus (re: not Victor). Pity the fool if these bitches decide to break bad (water nymphs or otherwise), freezing him in his tracks:

(source: Opera Australia, “The Ring Cycle,” 2023)

In Promethean fashion, then, our aforementioned themes of contested godhood remain present. That’s what creation is, both sides doing so at cross purposes (tyranny vs liberation, capital vs Communism). Compared to the Rusalki, then, Athetos executed those who were complacent under the rule of what he deemed “false gods” (re: to take what was theirs for himself and those like him). In rejecting them, Athetos not only incurs their motherly wrath (versus the Engineer’s paternal rage); he’s effectively playing god himself, but in a fascist sense. Or as Alex Holmes writes in “The Philosophy of Axiom Verge” (2019):

As we discussed at the start, axioms are not able to be proven. They are necessary to ground any rational system so that ideas within the system can be evaluated, but are never themselves provable even if it was empirical evidence that causes us to create a new system. […] So imagine Athetos’ frustration, his anger, when after an entire career of ridicule despite public notoriety, he finally achieves a functional way to demonstrate the usefulness of his [axioms: the] world of Sudra, existing in a state of liminality that enables one to breach into these other worlds. What he finds instead is a society that has abandoned this potential out of fear, precisely because it was dangerous […] Nothing could have been more slighting.

Still, committing total, biological genocide by weaponizing your own cells into a mutating virus just so he can say, “I told you so” to the nerds who bullied him is a little heavy handed [or a critique of fascist megalomania, perhaps]. The personal message to take away from this story: pursue your goals without being consumed by ego (source).

Notions of godhood and demonstrating “progress” aside, we’re left with unequal arrangements of power, the weak rebelling against the strong as parental (which, again, goes all the way back to Frankenstein—to appeal any argument to those under capital in easy-to-understand language: rebellion and critique, passed along as “corruption” from mother to child in opposition to patriarchal hubris, technology[13] and exploitation).

As we’ll see in the Demon Module, Weyland’s child, David, had a similar problem (“Who doesn’t want their parents dead?”), except he was never human. Even so, he loved “Ozymandias,” an 1818 poem about a mad king whose mad reach for power leaves behind a “colossal wreck.” No record of how it came to exist survives, or who Ozymandias really was. In continuation, this trend of civilization eating itself was exemplified in Scott’s other Alien movies, which, in turn, inspired Metroid and other Metroidvania like Axiom Verge (or crossovers); i.e., Promethean, inverted-monomythic stories about fathers conditioning their children to kill their mother as monstrous, making her an extension of nature dominated by Cartesian thought.

Characters in stories like Frankenstein represent more than just themselves. Axiom Verge is all at once a story about an evil father controlling his kid to kill his mother, but remains connected to all the others, in and out of fiction, speaking to The Modern Prometheus—less as a single work and more an ongoing theme, a mythic code that can be used by either side. The Gothic, through this myth, routinely predicts disaster by flinging the fatal, one-possible future into the fearsome past seeking revenge against nature-as-alien, as monstrous-feminine.

For example, as the clock winds back to the here-and-now for Trace, the faeries return him to a world where Pax Americana‘s presidents (and their abuse of mad science) bear a disturbing and frightening partial likeness to Athetos—Biden and Trump, but also America versus nature; i.e., as monstrous-feminine, as Communist, per anxious stories like Axiom Verge, The Dark Crystal, The Terminator and At the Mountains of Madness, but also confidently militaristic ones like Metroid, Aliens and Starship Troopers (whose ultimate solution is always nuclear war and planetary destruction—genocide).

To avert and avoid the crisis that happened in Sudra—a world that has already been destroyed by hidden powers decaying them—the righting of the ship must be done in our own place and time as part of the same larger Garden of the Forking Paths (which Sudra—and indeed, all Metroidvania—intimate inside themselves); i.e., as already mapped out and destroyed in likenesses of itself: the Rusalki having won, in the end, their world devastated similar to John Connor’s war-torn L.A. after the nuclear war in that film. Sudra’s genocide—its great decay—happens through power as obscured, but also buried into the world like a thorn, but also a radioactive bullet. It is a post-apocalypse vision, its doom given by the faeries (the oracles) to Trace as “chosen” by the gods—one that needs to be prevented in our world while already moving towards the same end game that befell Sudra; i.e., committed by the same powerful men of reason and the monomyth as something to camp through the Promethean myth: returning from Hell not with plunder but the predatory knowledge of one’s homeworld (under Capitalism) heading in a similar direction!

Fascist or Communist, the gods are hardly silent, then; they predominantly live inside-outside us, across media hybridizing fantasy and science, just as Shelley’s Gothic did, over two hundred years ago: on the walls of restless castles communicating time, devastation and revenge as a cryptonymic circle, looping in on itself through decay as something to recover power from, in order to regenerate out of the dead material. As we’ll see with Hollow Knight, Capitalism will take everything from the world; but no matter how destroyed a world appears, we’re not quite there yet.

That all probably sounds bleak, so let’s conclude part one by reflecting on the positive side to some of its parental creative themes—i.e., as a matter of praxial catharsis—before moving onto part two and Metroidvania space in decay and regrowth, rape and reclamation.

To this, the Gothic can seem like a bad dream stuck on loop (no one wants to be told “good luck” while reconciling with capital vs nature as fraught with mimicry and fabrication). Axiom Verge certainly feels this way. But it also shows that each time a story is told, the past grows, leaving behind artifacts that are increasingly begot from imagination (the cryptic writing crumbling to dust, the faeries moving in); i.e., as not only haunted by patriarchal ghosts, but spectral patriarchs anxious about the fragility of male power—its tendency to fragment into senility away from lucidity when threatened by nature and time categorized as an ancient, monstrous-feminine force: the Archaic Mother as an immortal, undead, and very pissed-off spectre of Marx. In short, such tyranny is fleeting and far from absolute. Writing decays, meaning canon does, too.

While memory is so often a casualty when such decay happens, it also lies in service to one side or the other when things, to some extent, regenerate inside the necrobiome’s fractal recursion (which Axiom Verge‘s jousting, Borges-style epistolary [ruins and mirrors] superbly demonstrates—the memories backtrack across the map, while the player more or less goes in a single, unicursal path); i.e., matter cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred and reshaped; e.g., like a flower tank echoing Eliot’s “Waste Land” (1922):

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain (source).

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

This yields unto us an awesome power—that of the gods as genderqueer and monstrous-feminine, holding heaven in a wild flower that can regrow in the face of Cartesian domination’s own false gods!

As nature’s current guardians, we can harness such curse-like gifts to banish Cartesian dickheads (and their raping of nature) from the Breach, making them an awful thing of the legendary past (to learn from, as the future waiting to happen yet again)! Hauntologized, rebellion becomes the ultimate genderqueer playground, one where our reclaimed labor (and Gothic stories’ mise-en-abyme) can truly set us free! It plays with the decay (the fertilizer of genocide) to enrich our reckoning and return: Don’t fear the reaper! Fuck them!

I suppose it is all a bit neurodivergent, gay and bellicose! I’d also say excuse the drenched messiness and vertiginous, tangential repetition of this particular symposium, but that’s how divorces (and history) generally go (with Axiom Verge a war between gods and their children sharing the data—indeed, consciousness itself—as written down, but also cloned inside a shared, fought-over chronotope goopy darkness).

The fact remains, we want to make rebellion joyous by acknowledging our place in its splendid lies/dead giveaways. Queer people exist in a perpetual state of change, thus decay and rebirth as hinted at in Metroidvania tied to Cartesian abuses. Sooner or later you can’t afford to be passive (or non-violent); the joy comes from finding our voice (one that is generally marginalized and discounted by STEM-field-types and other state proponents monopolizing Gothic poetics for themselves—gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss). Concerning liberation through revolutionary cryptonymy, there’s simply too many things to address[14] all of them, ourselves—but at least you’ll be spoilt for choice!

(artist: Bay)

As something to grow into out of contested stories, queer people built ourselves out of old dead parts to defend nature and progress towards “the greatest nation” (Communism), not abuse and rape it like Athetos does with Trace (who looks human, but is actually a Frankenstein’s monster made from genocided corpses). The game lies to the player to expose Athetos lying to Trace, to us, to workers! This rebellious lying continues through our labor and games, our playing with Gothic poetics to kill Nazis in-text in order to challenge fascism (thus moderates and profit) extratextually. In turn, love and genderqueer catharsis bloom on that battlefield, resisting capital while trapped inside its hellish marriage to the land it poisons and steals from (camouflage goes both ways, as does sex, force/violence, bodily expression, masks, mirrors, etc)! Axiom Verge‘s notably decayed language, memory and world (all one-in-the-same data as “cards to play”) transform because they are used under disproportionate stress (asymmetrical warfare), yet stay flexible in regards to said stress in ways that Capitalism historically is not.

To play Axiom Verge, then, is to both play inside a settler colony that is dying and a dying land that is trying to reclaim itself (with both memories stored inside-outside the same avatar experiencing them). Capitalism (and by extension, its paragons) are brittle, frail, and prone to flaking and fragmentation, but also paranoid hostility because of their weakness as something to feel; re, what Chris Baldrick writes in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales:

For the Gothic effect to be attained, a tale should combine a fearful sense of inheritance in a time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration (source).

As such, capital digs its own grave by making the land (and workers) unstable, who then emerge through the same player/play space to joyously overthrow Capitalism according to the very whirlwinds it cannot survive. All capital can try and do is wait Communism out until the world ends (as Athetos does in his sorry bubble), convincing itself it can somehow escape to other planets (e.g., Elon Musk in our world, and Weyland in Scott’s, etc).

Summarizing our symposium thesis argument through Axiom Verge, Happ showcases the popularity of the monomyth (re: Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces, 1949) and it’s “empowerment” (the knight rewarded with the damsel after slaying the dragon) as offset by the Promethean Quest’s “disempowerment” (the hero is cuckolded by the dragon, princess, Disney-style vice character, what-have-you); i.e., critiquing capital through the same spaces (and their abjection) in reverse: a fight to survive in spite of capital, camping the canonical medieval as it exists presently (e.g., Trace in a bikini, mothered by dragon fairy ladies).

Except, to merely call my developments “exciting” would betray the reality of discovering a fatal knowledge that is hard-won (as Promethean knowledge generally is): a) one’s home as displaced unto a territory that is discovered to be just that, but also one’s grave; and b) the home as built on genocide presenting itself as correct, righteous, all-knowing and so on (my father enjoyed universal acclaim simply for being my father). Faced with Athena’s Aegis, it’s not long before standard-issue military optimism exposes itself as the fool’s errand, tilting Quixotically at colossal, moribund windmills (dragons). Inside Trace, there’s a sense of Cartesian longing to dominate such things (taught to him by patriarchal forces in defense of Capitalism), but also submit to their power as weaker than a decayed greatness[15] starting to heal but still rotted (taught to him by matriarchal forces, in defense of Communism).

Even so, Elsenova’s dick is still bigger than his (giving an altogether different meaning to “size difference,” next page); she could crush Trace without a second thought! Indeed, she fucks back, the fabled Great Destroyer that every insecure patriarch fears: a spectre of Marx giving the fascist hypocrite a taste of their own medicine; i.e., by lying to his pupil, but also instructing him truthfully as a strict mommy dom, adopted parent/found family overcoming Cartesian family ties by camping them (“Whose mommy’s little destroyer? You are!”): a Satanic behemoth (what Mikhail Bulgakov would call “begemot,” the Satanic, hellcat servant [literally a giant talking cat] from his 1940 novel, The Master and Margarita).

Returned to working order as an act of waking up (the old gods return, “going woke” to challenge profit making workers broke[16]), Elsenova has evolved to brace herself against Athetos’ bullshit, literally taking up arms against him after emerging from her deathly chrysalid (from the corpse of empire). She does so, while Capitalism stays stuck in its inferior glass version (again, being too brittle to adapt and survive when Medusa topples it but also something of a sitting duck that becomes increasingly transparent during class war—a glass onion when workers rise up and break shit: they only have what power we give them). “Do you fear me?” she victoriously asks the hero, decked out in the clothes of gay class war while having the hero join her in a shared pedagogy of the oppressed; i.e., one resisting police violence (with Athetos’ hallway zombies serving as cops that attack Trace for his rebellious signature). This happens through ludo-Gothic BDSM teaching a vital lesson: life and death as part of the same rotting and growing equation, among the corpses and the shit (“They don’t sing about how they all shit themselves; they don’t put that part in the songs!”).

(source)

As “Bad Dreams” showed us with zombies, rebellion and apocalypse can be incredibly scary (a force of nature whose hurricane shakes shit up—more on this when we look at the Radiance). But they also represent the potential to be something great that, until this point, has been stunted by Cartesian forces. In Gothic BDSM language, the Rusalki offer a palliative-Numinous balm to capital’s deleterious effects, but also an ontological statement extending rebellion in and out of imagination: both who I want to be, and the found family I replaced my absentee parents with—someone strong and capable, but beautiful in ways that reflect their own bionic, genderqueer survival, liberation and cathartic enrichment. Before it, Trace the useful-idiot lab rat simpers dumbly as part of a death cult—one whose revolutionary cryptonymy robs him of his ability to rape Medusa, encouraging him to glaze (dick-ride) her, instead:

(artist: Wildragon)

Sort of. This happens without harming Trace. Only his foolish pride—tied to the nuclear family and its Hamlet-style tendency to decay while moving endlessly through the map—is wounded (which will recover in service to things better than weird canonical nerds); i.e., the Rusalki reborn embody a threat display (not unlike Princess Mononoke’s wolf mother from that film: a girl raised by wolves versus a boy raised by faeries) that signals the hero to bask in her campy glory (also like the Radiance). Doing so breaks canon to save nature from its usual monomythic destroyers and dogma: “the castle [as] the perfect dom,” person and place oscillating between both categories through the same-old Gothic mise-en-abyme, fairytales and ghost stories’ cryptomimesis (re: “po-tay-toh,” po-tah-toh”).

Axiom Verge is a story about a divorce the father loses, but where worlds still collide for the child. Except, the story of evil or questionable, Hamlet-grade parentage wasn’t new when Happ made Axiom Verge or even when Shelley wrote Frankenstein, nor are evil fathers dominating their children somehow restricted to “pure fiction”; i.e., playing god to one’s battered kids, passing oneself off as “God”; e.g., Shang Tsung’s “Low Tier God Is a DEADBEAT Dad to a BIOLOGICAL Daughter,” 2024); re: Victor and his ilk being low-tier, bargain-bin, absentee dads to their own kids (biological or not) and to nature as something to respect, not rape and harvest (what the kids call “divorced dad energy”). That being said, history is a document forever rewriting itself (re: Marx), dipping in and out of fiction and non-fiction, lucidity and oblivion, as game-like using maps (re: me).

As Axiom Verge and Frankenstein show, it can go either way. What matters is how you play with its lingering (and, at times, incredibly confusing) poetic instructions (which this book is very much a defense of—to develop Gothic Communism in ways more inclusive than Percy Shelley’s own 1821 “Defence of Poetry“); i.e., to move power and understanding in one direction (the state) or the other (workers and nature as monstrous-feminine) whilst inside the midden.

In short, the crux of the larger argument is intended play vs emergent, cowards following the leader by doing what they’re told, the bravely gay bending the rules to survive by outplaying the cop inside the trash heap. We empower workers by camping canon; re: making it not just gay but gay as fuck; e.g., gay space dragons[17] (above), observed by ordinary-looking queer people—as being in the closet or pushed towards it on the verge of things (as I was, once upon a time): a nerdy pirate roped into various, spacefaring adventures (Gothic matelotage) on the wild seas of outrageous fortune.

Grand poetics aside, it’s incredibly germane because our closeted nerd, son-of-Caesar is, through the resurrection machines, both born in the Caesarean style (“from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d”) and divorced from his father’s evil influence. Raised by the Amazonian wilderness, he becomes free to challenge the gods of capital to—however impertinently they might describe his actions—lay them on, allowing him to choose his own destiny as not set; i.e., as not monopolized by either side (rebellion is optional, as far as choices go, but so is submission). Instead, the Shelley-style ambiguity lingers as a matter of ongoing class and culture war during the Promethean Quest as an everyday event (Capitalism vs Communism)—one to navigate, interrogate and express the ambiguities thereof in abstract and in small: the fabulously gay camping of monomythic language and motion (castle-narrative) through the draconian opera; the infernal, inverted monomyth; the danger-disco Gothic castle, theatrics and cryptonymy (masks, mirrors, poetry and puppets, etc)! All become spells, but also dialogs to uphold or resist bourgeois arguments, hence illusions.

To that, if the princess is the Call to Adventure in monomythic stories (videogames or otherwise), then Elsenora is Trace’s princess playing parent to discourage the nuclear family model (re: campy themes of incest [so-called “Lolita syndrome” with irony, unlike Beauvoir raping her students] never being far off in Gothic spaces, any more than insanity or cannibalism are; re: Walpole’s Mysterious Mother and its double incest plot); but she’s not the only one: under the thirsty hero’s blood-red lab coat (vampire pirate “rizz”) is an equally sanguine bikini (crossdressing, in Western culture, dating back to Shakespeare, at least).

(artist: Wildragon)

To survive, then, is to preserve amid the chaos of capital destroying us, with queer forces—from Walpole to Happ—hijacking the language of war and sex through weird metaphors/medieval hybridity that speaks naturally to queer audiences rebelling against capital’s de facto, symbolic parentage; i.e., even if the authors of these stories weren’t actually gay! “Actually” is just an argument to deny us a voice through the same liminal mode of expression; what matters is function and flow using the same aesthetics—the same heroes and stories—interpreted by us (and our dance partners) through any manner of campy medieval rape play we want, parody or pastiche, to produce cathartic irony (which is what the Promethean Quest ultimately is: camping the monomyth-as-medieval in present times).

To that, Axiom Verge is actually pretty limited as a Metroidvania; i.e., the gameplay being linear in order to critique capital (say nothing of the clunky controls), versus non-linear to move money through nature, as Samus does (who controls excellently like the Big Bad Wolf: “Better to eat [nature] with!”). But as something to aesthetically interpret, its GNC potential for catharsis is virtually endless, making Happ’s odyssey one of my all-time favorite Gothic genderqueer stories (also, props to Wildragon for the amazing fanart); i.e., the ability to converse with gods in order to move mountains, thus liberate ourselves from capital’s Cartesian edicts: throwing us in chains and eating us, undressing us, making us seek out a big-sister or mommy-style Amazon to nurture us, but also embody our dark matriarchal revenge.

In other words, Axiom Verge is a story about the value of such monstrous mothers—not as TERFs uphold the status quo (re: Ripley and Samus) by triangulating against Communism in abject forms—but as protectors of the weak and vulnerable as prone to be robbed from by Cartesian dogma teaching them to both surrender their power to capital (re: “candy from a baby”) and punch down against labor as monstrous-feminine. To that, the Gothic is predicated on decay and deception through open secrets, laid bare like a sexy mommy to teach you naughty-naughty knowledge (the raw nudity or the unequal power arrangements of rape play—the charged surfaces, thresholds, etc): Eve challenging God, teaching other workers (male, female, or intersex) to do the same!

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Such things might seem too bold and overly exposed. In truth, we rebels are often quite shy in person; on the canvas, though, we can be bold, protected by barriers through our cryptonymy! To expose such things without fear of actual harm (castration, as Freud would insist), alienation and eternal punishment (re: the gods’ fate for Prometheus)? That’s the best revenge of all: more happy relationships working through our mommy and daddy issues to leave better patterns/fractals, less Cartesian knobs like Athetos (re: “Pattern-Mind”) aping Victor Frankenstein and Hamlet’s dad (and their likenesses) to try and pass both themselves—and their mapped, automatic predation of nature—along.

Shelley dreamt of such catharsis, swinging for the fences by stamping seemingly inexpressible things (a tramp stamp) in ready accessible language (a parental drama with monsters[18] who look and act human); so can we, in and out of transformation and lucidity as part of a shared dream: annihilation and reformation—rebirth.

Per the infernal concentric pattern (up next)—and really just queer existence under heteronormative control, in general—the above things as they manifest in Axiom Verge and other Metroidvania go beyond simple closure, catharsis and resolution for monstrous-feminine entities. Thwarted by an overhanging tension, strain, and confusion—i.e., the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, flung from those you think are all powerful, but aren’t (even when you want them to be)—such things are made and expressed in grand Shakespearean emotions: the hope of a better world, one free of Cartesian trauma for all gay bitches, developed inside allusory dollish copies of itself, of itself, of itself as overwritten (and decaying as it does, like a VCR tape, coming out of it like Sadako Yamamura to achieve tangible socio-material effects).

We’ll continue exploring the Cartesian function of playing god during the “Forbidden Sight” section, in the Demon Module. For now, we’ve merely laid out the gendered actors and their parental, Promethean actions (creation that destroys monomythic structures). For the rest of the symposium, we shall more deeply examine the castled stages all of this unfurls on; i.e., the maze, the labyrinth, as a ruin of Civilization full of itself, but also a particular arrangement of unequal power-as-parental and Promethean, a continuation of the same colossal struggle: the chronotope as home to giants, Amazons, fallen warring gods (those of capital and Communism), and all manner of Gothic “tortures” (the state in crisis, for which anything goes).

To that, before we can synthesize castle-narrative and Communism’s triumphantly matriarchal homecoming—one that concludes a current chase of the palliative Numinous as monstrous-feminine during ludo-Gothic BDSM—we shall explore the Promethean role inside the colossal wreck, insofar as heroic progression (re: weapons and power) is concerned: Hallownest and the Promethean hero’s journey into their own tomb, in Hollow Knight!

Onto the opening and part one for “‘Look upon my Works, ye Mighty’; or, the Infernal Concentric Pattern and Rape Play in Hollow Knight“!

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Footnotes

[1] John Clubbe writes, in “Beethoven, Bryon and Bonaparte”:

On May 18, 1804, the French council of State declared Napoleon Emperor of the French. Upon hearing the news, an angry Beethoven crossed off the Eroica‘s first inscription to Bonaparte. (11) “So he too is nothing more than an ordinary man,” he cried out. […] At the top of the first page of the completed work Beethoven wrote the name of the First Consul, “Sinfonia Grande / Intitulata Bonaparte.” Beethoven later crossed out these words. Near the middle of the page, he wrote his own name, Louis van Beethoven. Below it, he wrote in pencil “Geschrieben / auf Bonaparte,” “written for Bonaparte.” These words he never erased. […] It is “Bonaparte” here, not “Napoleon,” because for Beethoven, as for Byron, there was a difference. “Bonaparte” meant for Byron and Beethoven the young conqueror of Italy, the dazzling leader who scuttled monarchies and symbolized liberal hopes for a new order (source).

[2] Advanced technology being indistinguishable magic, Clarke’s Law brings Shelley’s myths and magic back around; i.e., of the 21st century thrust into a fantasy space once more.

[3] Deryck V. Cooke writes,

That Wagner harboured anti-Semitic sentiments is both well-known and uncontested within the realm of musicological inquiry. The composer openly articulated his views in a number of publications, most notably Judaism in Music (Das Judentum in der Musik; 1850), in which he identified Jewish musicians as the ultimate source of what he perceived as substanceless music and misplaced values in the arts as a whole. What has remained a controversy, however, is the extent to which Wagner’s anti-Semitism informed his musical compositions.

On the one hand, many have contended that Wagner’s anti-Semitism was no more significant to his musical creation than was any other peculiarity of his personality. Indeed, the composer regularly found a scapegoat—such as the Jewish population—to account for his personal and musical misfortunes. Moreover, because Wagner lived during an era of widespread resentment toward Jews in Europe, it is not unusual that his dramatic works would contain anti-Semitic nuances (source: Britannica).

To what exact degree Wagner’s anti-Semitism affected his music is a matter of debate, but the fascist elements he presented (using pre-fascist, mythological language) have a class character to them similar to Milton or Ridley Scott, albeit in a conservative direction; re: the false rebel, versus Scott’s David having a Communist element to his radical counterterrorism.

[4] Something of a Valkyrie himself, camping the invincible heroine; re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Choosing the Slain, or Victimizing the Invincible Heroine, in Alien: Covenant” (2017).

[5] Granted, the ideas generally are combined for monstrous-feminine; i.e., love is a matter of survival through love and war as combined to various poetic degrees; re: the language of sex and war, dalliances, food, knowledge, and whatever else synonymize during a given exchange between two castled essays into the same contested territories.

[6] A mimetic effect seen with all tyrants, grooming their own kids by making their sons (or their obedient labor force at large) in the father’s statuesque image (re: Pygmalion); e.g., Dracula and Alucard, to which Victor failed in Frankenstein, trying euthanize his child afterwards. In Trace’s case, he looks exactly like his dad, to which the other man tries to salvage him through reason (replacing Robert Walton with the Creature as being one in the same, for Happ).

[7] With the above illustration by Wildragon showing Trace prostrate before Ophelia, the name of Hamlet’s sister, who drowned (a fate shared by Shakespeare’s imaginary sister, “Judith*,” in A Room of One’s Own, 1929). In Jungian terms, allusions to water and darkness coincide with dreams that speak to patriarchal abuse through a pedagogy of the oppressed; e.g., Sadako Yamamura climbing out of a well to seek revenge against her death (and that of other monstrous-feminine) by men having killed and taken their essence—their life force—to begin with.

*As Woolf writes, “Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross-roads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here to-night, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed” (source).

[8] The story has multiple interwoven timelines, interacting with one another not unlike Borges’ “Garden of the Forking Paths” or Cameron’s Terminator films: across space-time in decay as a matter of Gothic drama.

[9] Their conversation occurs shortly before he goes to meet his maker—with Scott’s Engineers being as vain, fascist and genocidal as Weyland is; i.e., zombie tyrants, themselves, being further along than he is. When Weyland dies asking them for help—when he’s forced to confront what he hopes to aspire to as being as cruel and heartless as himself—he realizes that’s all his life was: “There’s nothing…” It’s basically Scrooge seeing his fellow bankers piss and moan at his own funeral.

Keeping with Dickens, the irony’s so thick you could cut it with a knife. It’s quite brilliant, if you ask me, because it highlights the futility of such cruelty—that it, Capitalism, was all for naught. For precisely that reason, stories like Prometheus don’t sell nearly as well to American audiences as Cameron’s neoliberal Red Scare nonsense does (see: Persephone van der Waard’s “Outlier Love: Enjoying Prometheus/Covenant in the Shadow of Aliens,” 2019)!

[10] This decay reflects in the game’s visual style, which is suitably glitchy by way of remembering those old NES cartridges being prone to “glitch out” to begin with (similar to Forbidden Planet being in 4:3 aspect ratio and Frankenstein published on paper); in revisiting that, it becomes a kind of fatal nostalgia that speaks to Capitalism in decay through an indie-developed gameworld revisiting the Metroidvania of the past. Rather than break down, queerness emerges from decay to thrive in a very liminal way (a state of becoming something new that Capitalism fears from of old stories). The Gothic—and by extension queerness as Gothic (from Walpole and Lewis onwards)—is written in disintegration as a means of fresh building blocks assembling away from tyranny (afraid of its own death).

[11] The domain of women/monstrous-feminine is generally of compelled prostitution, shoved unceremoniously into the gutter by patriarchal forces pimping nature; i.e., the world’s oldest job—one that is both incumbent on rape, and baked into Cartesian thought as a pro-Capitalist creation myth the modern Promethean Quest camps by design. Simply put, it’s a lived reality that defines us as much by the things we reclaim (sex, labor and force, etc), mid-struggle.

[12] No different than the rise of terrorist literature making the Victorians afraid (re: Crawford).

[13] With technology (writing and written accounts, especially maps) leading to forgetting (re: Plato) as a matter of Lear-style genocide to reassemble (re: Morrison); i.e., as a matter of playing with old dead things in Promethean forms (re: me) as Shelley once did: through journals, the likes of which Axiom Verge presents to the player as written by multiple monarchal parents lying to him (see, also: Myst and its blue and red pages) in order to achieve sex-positive or sex-coercive end goals: deny or gain entry unto power through deception and force (the pussy and the penis divorced from biological essentialism [and gender from sex, per Judith Butler] but paradoxically “fencing” during the usual battle of the sexes being one over gender and labor tied to people’s bodies).

[14] I.e., to acknowledge and localize them, like a haunted house pointing to its own abuse; re: the restless labyrinth’s cryptonymy further complicated by the duality of Gothic poetics, during oppositional praxis.

[15] Such dark, BDSM cybernetics suggests a fascist element of greatness to these biomechanical Amazons, not unlike Lovecraft’s aliens from Mountains or the Chozo from Metroid (e.g., Raven Beak, from Metroid: Dread, as basically Caesar Chozo).

[16] Profit isn’t just rape, but labor and wage theft that endorses rape as an abject commodity and comorbidity (criminogenic effect) under capital’s monopolies, trifectas and qualities.

[17] Spoke Prince Lear of the unicorn, “Unicorn, sorceress, mermaid—no name you give her could surprise or frighten me. I love whom I love.”

[18] Contrary to what you might have been led to believe by capitalists, the villain of the story is not the Creature; it is the maker of the Creature and the system for which all belong. Like Athetos and Trace, Victor tries to internalize this mentality into his childlike slave (though, in Trace’s case, to get him to help the evil father seek revenge, versus Victor trying to kill the Creature); the slave refuses to obey the evil nerd, listening to a maternal presence that admittedly was rather absent in Shelley’s original novel. Given a mother to listen to who isn’t tokenized/completely passive, Trace has the chance to grow up and not repeat the mistakes that Athetos, the capitalist, did before him: the sins of the father linked to a genocidal system (of material conditions)/system of thought.