This blog post is part of “Deal with the Devil,” a third promotion originally inspired by the first and second ones I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” and “Searching for Secrets” (2024). The first promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Deal with the Devil” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, Demons (the “Searching for Secrets” promotion covered the Undead Module, which is now live). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Click here to see “Deal with the Devil’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Demon Module) is out (2/14/2025)! 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.

Saying Goodbye: Onto Better Times Ahead (and Harder Ones) (opening)

Lastly, your paranoid vindication tells me you have learned nothing from our discussions, and it feels tremendously disheartening to work so hard at maintaining a friendship between us only for you to disappoint me so thoroughly at the end. Apparently yesterday was Mario Day, the day Super Mario Bros. (1985) released? It coinciding with the termination of our friendship feels incredibly strange and sad to me. But I am glad to be rid of you all the same; I am so very tired of trying to meet you halfway only to watch you pull away and insinuate, or transform and attack me like you are now. I regret to say that this is, in fact, the end. Farewell, [Zeuhl]. May you live the rest of your days in peace. I will be moving forward with the book. Please do not contact me again.

—Persephone van der Waard‘s last words to Zeuhl, March 11th, 2023

Picking up where “Dark Xenophilia, part two: Magic, Drugs and Acid Communism” left off…

To escape Capitalism, you must walk through the land of the dead and of demons. We’ve done that. Talking about rabbits, we were discussing xenophilic negotiations between workers occurring in good faith; i.e., reunion with idiosyncratic states of alienation to help reunite all workers with nature: as monstrous-feminine to cultivate dark radical empathy as half-real but pushing towards actualization—not fake bridges towards empty promises in the dark: the innocent party in the shower minding their own business while the guilty party is blowing out the proverbial shitter! A blast from the past ass, waffle/curb-stomping us! “Et tu, Brutae?”

(artist: Taiga15)

To that, seeing others as “animal” is to awaken ways of caring for animals that are anthropomorphic; i.e., not textbook profiling and suspicion, nor to apologize for a particular postpunk rogues’ roughness around the edges (and whose rebellion was over before it started; e.g. Zeuhl, Morrison, Byron, etc), but invite holistic inclusion through suitably therapeutic adrenaline-pumping regressions that push towards Communism: as lycanthropic engagements regarding friends and foes, but also threats both actual and perceived!

Times change, but historically-materially stay the same. In 1973, when pressed in an interview about whether he ascribes any political revolutionary implications to rock according to a narrow definition of “political” (cutting out sex and drugs), Frank Zappa initially responded with, “Well, what are you including?” Chagrined, the woman grilling him replied that ascribing political significance to rock is to fall victim to Hollywood trends; i.e., that radical change can’t occur without musical accompaniment. Um, Maple the drumming dog takes offense to that (Acoustic Trench’s “Star Wars Cantina Band w/ Maple on the Drums,” 2019)!

Ignoring the fact that music isn’t simply diegetic and that much of music and musicianship has military roots designed to mobilize troops and rally morale (re: Holst’s “Bringer of War“)—and with me agreeing that while a certain leeriness is required towards corporate output or those attached to it as rescuing damaging practices from their own flagging moral (re: Holst, vis-à-vis Heinlein, Lucas and Cameron, Romero/Carmack, etc, per Zizek’s universal application)—the fact remains that sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll are criminally underrated (so to speak); i.e., they make rebellion not just fun, but bearable and worthwhile, during cryptomimesis!

Faced with his young enthusiastic critic, ol’ Zappa replied, speaking to a certain pulse-taking utility to consumer trends: “Radio is controlled by how much money the sponsors can make by buying time on the air. And the station has to present ratings to the sponsor which show how they have the largest audience, and where they do the research that says that people want to listen to the Osmond Brothers or Jackson Five. That shows or tells you something about the audience” (Pauline Butcher Bird’s “Frank Zappa is persistently questioned by a female student“).

Indeed, it’s effectively putting our ears to the ground of a dying Earth through braindead workers tilting at windmills during Capitalist Realism. Said idea likewise exists now except inside social media; i.e., whose own half-real interactions between the state and its proponents follow the leader to their graves (and ultimately the leader’s). Fascism is a land of different kinds of strange fruit, requiring an orchard of protest. We gotta take our labor back through universal land back; i.e., as a matter of good holistic stewardship, not rape rankings. Gothic Communism is an art, not a science, but there’s still a few hard, fast rules.

In other words, we can’t wait for it to affect “just us” because by then it will be too late. We also can’t join those who say they’ll “keep us safe”; re: predation aside, people join cults to have their needs met, thinking they’ll be safe from harm. We need to give people a better option while exposing our foes, opening everyone’s doors and minds (drugs open pupils and other holes) to end state monopolies; i.e., on sex, drugs, and roll ‘n roll, thus the Base and the Superstructure on the Aegis!

Furthermore, we can’t hold back because our future has been canceled before we were born, but we can’t lie and use each other like Zeuhl did to me. They’re the bourgeois black bun, you see—someone who lies by having absolutely no idea what they did was wrong (or so they claim). Not even when they’re holding your bleeding heart in their hands, but also before that point when they weren’t who I thought I recognized; i.e., as someone I felt in love with as a shadow of a thought. That’s what the Medusa is, extending to Zeuhl as one of many black buns canonically bred for meat and mates, which mirrors the chattelization of people as scapegoats (e.g., black men and bucks, versus rabbits). Like a wild animal, they were incapable of actually loving others, save to get what they wanted using sex and force (a lie is just force through words). “Just a bun,” after all! I once found them dashing and cute; eh, they’ll always be cute to me, just more alien now. No regrets, there, but some sadness!

That being said, while Zeuhl used me as an easy mark, they also introduced me to acid Communism (whether in good faith or not, I can’t say for sure); i.e., shortly before the end of our friendship, when they pushed back on my book when it was only about 50,000 words long (versus over two million, now). Reasons asides, their challenging me helped turn Sex Positivity into what it is; i.e., by sending me on a long winding road—one where there is no Zeuhl waiting for me at the end, but which I’ve been trying to understand their gradient and tokenized actions for years (enby-on-trans violence versus shadism). I’m still falling from them versus for them, but I’m free of them. A Black Bun? “Keep it; I got a Pitbull, now!” Your pussy was the tightest in the world, Zeuhl, but it was the One Ring and I’m Tom Bombadil-ing that shit! “Sickness, BE GONE!” Rapscallion! Bay’s puppy trumps the bunny!

Quite the twist, eh? Now hop along, little shadow. Get lost, but stay safe out there. Don’t bite no one.

From Butler and Warner to us, sex and gender are separate from each other and from biology as the policing coordinates that marginalized in-fighting and abuse also fall back on, but whose concentric veneers apply to us versus any normativity you can think of; e.g., Monty Python’s Life of Brian having straight men playing women playing men versus Matthew Lewis’ the Devil playing Matilda playing Rosario. There’s also real-life examples; e.g., my partner Crow, a trans masc AFAB enby playing a drag king (versus a stripper); i.e., which isolates asexuality and gender performance from gender identity to get away from cis-het male drag queens like Ru Paul punching down against trans and other GNC drag kings and queens’ own varieties!

(artist: Crow)

In short, none are determined by biology save by straight weirdos who “made it,” but also token members of the LGBA and fascist feminism seeking validation through virtue and vice; i.e., as something to signal and farm as perpetual tourists who gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss themselves and those around them; e.g., the Mom from Landman taking the old folks to a strip club and giving them alcohol with their meds or Nicholson’s character kidnapping the mental patients in Cuckoo’s Nest, and so on; i.e., Whitey and the Straights unable to see beyond their own noses/role in settler colonialism; re: Landman and Taylor Sheridan’s weird, White Man’s view of the world: as trophies to collect, while Trump and Elon Musk destabilize, then blame the poor and marginalized.

Such social constructs are colonizer mentalities tied to Capitalist Realism, thus have to die; i.e., just like my attachment to Zeuhl had to expire for me to move on (their ghost always haunting me, of course). And even now, I still love that part of them I kept inside, all these years: the eternal black sunshine of my admittedly not-so-spotless mind (something to protect from the closeted coward who wanted it hidden in all its forms).

(models and photographer: Persephone van der Waard and Zeuhl, my brother Ben holding the camera at my twin’s wedding, in 2019.)

To it, Gothic Communism treats all workers as equal, but it’s not blind to privilege as it currently exists. Either we use what we have to help each other as one people to universally liberate, or we’re all doomed, lose-lose. We outnumber them and have the labor they need to rape us with; i.e., which we can deny them our keys to a once-and-future queendom (from drugs, to oil, to sex), starting now and right fucking now. Capital’s already dead; it’s just in its throes!

By extension, development’s a marathon, not a race or a business; i.e., capital is incompatible with life, thus can’t coexist with us; re: it rapes us by design, and tokenizes labor to police that fact. We have entered a time of monsters, hence of Zombie, Vampire and Demon Capitalism versus Communist versions on two sides of the same Numinous coin: workers and nature vs the state, thus sex positivity vs sex coercion: “The future, once so clear to me, had now become like a dark highway at night; we were in uncharted territory now, making up history as we went along.”

Except, keeping white cis-het men/tokens is frankly a giant pain in the ass, because the burden of care falls onto the caretakers (women or those treated like women, hence slaves/monstrous-feminine); i.e., men aren’t cool badasses that give it their all for the Cause, like Arnie’s T-800, but weird expensive pets looking for a second mother to baby them and fuck them; e.g., as vulgadrawings’ 2025 “The Burden of ‘Mankeeping’” explains the issue, minus a vital dialectical-material critique—meaning the corporatized dogma that shapes such things, and which older feminism tends to ignore/assist in by attacking “the Patriarchy” as a scapegoat. We can’t do that, going forwards. There must always be a material critique to go with the social one and vice versa, and we must always punch up, not blindly at self-deceiving spectres; i.e., at cops, versus low-hanging fruit, which includes tokens bought and paid for! My mentioning of them in Volume Three is to highlight the castle they come from/serve in perpetuity. They punch down, we punch up!

In historical-material terms, we’re left with a cryptomimetic chain whose fascist “force of will” strata translates endlessly into shonen, Amazonomachia and other psychosexual kayfabe; re: the monomyth monopoly and cartographic refrain. Nature’s alien returns; summon hero to defend through force of will during the Protestant ethic. Said ethic (and its silly ideas of afterlife) never pan out historically because it’s symptomatic of a dying socio-economic system on its way out (again); i.e., life imitates art (and vice versa); e.g., the Saiyans can’t self-reflect when colonizing themselves in a gobstopper ring colony boomerang model, but simply put up more expendable and bad faith buffers when making recursive golden (“Aryan”) revenge arguments: against a perceived external degenerate backstabber/tyrant’s enemy within/upon the Aegis. There’s no logic, save that someone stronger always emerges to challenge the rooster’s perch!

Same idea with Super Sonic vs Shadow. They can’t self-reflect, and instead self-report whenever they act high-and-mighty while punch-projecting their flaws onto others; i.e., during the abjection process attacking the holy ghost of the counterfeit. It’s folly Star Wars dreck—Milton or Frankenstein without the irony and all the hypocrisy (a Beowulf regression’s praxial inertia during the Cycle of Kings, in the Shadow of Pygmalion/infernal concentric pattern’s narrative of the crypt).

As Zeuhl showed, anyone who acts like that is a cop, thus an enemy to themselves and others; i.e., there is always an element of delusion, denial and antagonism to their traitorous actions; re: antagonize nature and put it cheaply to work according to those who—in their own minds—can never be wrong. They do it to themselves during mirror and virgin/whore syndrome: policing the whore outside themselves to hoist themselves on their own petards. Once someone corrupts, they become bad cops, then sacrifices during the euthanasia effect’s refrain during modular and intersectional persecution mania; i.e., nature is other and death must be brought to the barbarian traitor or suddenly outsider menace, Brutus or Hannibal: “I am nothing like you!” shouts Sonic at his own shadow, Peter-Pan-style, while Robotnik the evil Doc Brown tries to turn the moon into a wunderwaffe as the Marty-vs-Biff wunderkinds do battle outside (while the parent shoots themselves in the head from success fatigue).

Now where have we heard that before? Take your pick; history is littered with such copies and egregores pointing to their offstage Roman fools in similar Icarian-Promethean numerical sequences (re: Sonic 1, 2, and 3 vs WW1, WW2, and WW3). First in tragedy and then in farce, such things repeat because they’re built to repeat; i.e., as the elite want them to, harvesting the bloodspill by moving money through nature during the pimp’s revenge. Zeuhl simply sold out and found someone to spend their last days on Earth with; i.e., to cease rebelling is to slowly commit suicide inside-outside the danger disco opera. Very postpunk!

To have the whore’s revenge bursting the heroic death cult’s bubble, we must anisotropically reverse the flow on all registers; i.e., at the usual gravesites where capital has died and revived before. Rather than install self-defeating abject (us-versus-them) apotropaic barriers—doing so to alienate and fetishize nature as undead/demonic by chasing the shade/monstrous-feminine whore monomythically to Hell to sacrifice them (as Sonic does, chasing his evil half into outer space to banish Shadow and Robotnik [a play on peacenik and beatnik] to oblivion)—we must go to where the dead are and interrogate their trauma and token mistakes; i.e., to prevent a fresh, even-worse cycle of cyclical destruction resulting from the Promethean Quest and Faustian bargain tied to capital acting on loop.

Capital is recursively Promethean/Faustian, and neoliberal power is recursive false power and delusion; e.g., Superman, Super Saiyans, Super Sonic; i.e., all equaling personal responsibility and austerity politics alienating and fetishizing nature, thus workers colonizing themselves after God is dead (a secular dogma). Sex positivity vs sex coercion happen in the Capitalocene as fading towards state shift; i.e., we must revive increasingly Socialist, thus Communist forms using Gothic poetics to liberate all workers (sex or not) using iconoclastic art: to talk cutely to our pets in symbiotic stewardship, all of us in the same boat!

We’ll get back to that in Volume Three, but for a moment, let’s extricate ourselves from Zeuhl’s warren (and their fat wiggling ass/plump ham-sandwich pussy folds). Onto dead malls and the graveyards of capital; i.e., where Medusa waits for us, inside! We need to negotiate with ourselves, because she’ll walk away with everything Humanity has to offer! Gird your loins; the end is ‘nigh, but not secured!

(artist: Pereira Cartoon Studio)

The Future Is a Dead Mall; or Reviving the Zombie Future with Proletarian “Archaeologies”: Revolutionary Cryptonyms that Defy Snobbish Critics of the Gothic to Break Capitalist Realism

“If the concept [“metaverse”] is so broad as to be little more than a vague gesture at the future, if successful and popular things like Minecraft and Roblix and Fortnite get to be the nascent metaverse, then [Decentraland] does too. And if this is the future, then the future is a dead mall.”

—Folding Ideas, “The Future is a Dead Mall – Decentraland and the Metaverse” (2023)

(source: “Auctioning Off a Dead Mall,” by Jessica Testa, 2020: “The body parts come as a surprise, even if you expect them, when they’re the only things left behind.”)

Enough about rabbits. Volume Zero and One introduced revolutionary cryptonymy as a means of expressing and interrogating trauma in monstrous (especially animalistic) Gothic language that challenges state monopolies on violence, terror and monstrous expression during Capitalist Realism. In turn, Volume Two has focused on the Humanities as something to apply/historically learn from—by poetically using the Wisdom of the Ancients less as forgotten knowledge that once was and more as forgotten perspectives now to create new ways of existing in the present; i.e., to humanize workers as fetishized, psychosexual aliens through various xenophilic monster types: zombies, vampires, ghosts, composites, and supernatural demons, as well as lycans and other monsters tied to nature and the natural world. The idea is to shift our cultural understanding of the imaginary past in ways that challenge Capitalist Realism (thus profit), exposing the decay behind the illusion as often being integral to what the elite cannot conceal. They cannot, so they dogmatize the ghost of the counterfeit using the abjection process as dumping site: a Promethean ruin!

Because language and the material world are where these things presently exist (and have existed for some time), I wish to conclude Volume Two by looking at language itself—not at more monsters (whose praxial synthesis we’ll unpack in Volume Three) but at the assorted “crypts” that house their replicated, revolutionary forms: cryptonymy as a means of fighting against business-as-usual using the ghost of the counterfeit to reverse the process of abjection in hauntological, chronotopic spheres (“canceled futures” + castle).

This includes the dead mall as both a symptom of Capitalism’s manmade instability under its own xenophobic disasters echoed by Gothic doubles (the imaginary disinterment of potential/ongoing epidemics, societal and ecological collapse) but also a nostalgic, crumbling veil to conceal the disaster inside-outside itself—like a zombie, but specifically as a sublimation for what Capitalism is doing to workers, the environment, the entire world; re: Capitalist Realism. Through revolutionary cryptonymy as a counter process to state forms, said forms’ canonical, monomythic sublimation can fail to benefit workers, but requires dismantling the various cyclical aspects to said Realism; re: the Shadow Pygmalion, infernal concentric pattern/narrative of the crypt (and their canonical refrains), Cycle of Kings, etc.

Doing so faces several hurdles, mostly notably critics of the Gothic. In other words, as we workers must declare, “This is our mall!” as the call-and-response from accommodated intellectuals is very much the same phrase leveled against common people. In turn, the mall becomes a war zone during oppositional praxis amid war-like language; e.g., the zombie apocalypse as straining to bring about intense change: from Capitalism as an end of the world as we know it onto something better than has ever existed; i.e., something beyond the monomyth, Cycle of Kings and dead retro-future, etc.

Beyond just dead malls, then, I want to examine the larger creative space as liminal; i.e., both as haunted, but also criticized by those who won’t eat green eggs and ham: critics of the Gothic mode who turn their noses up at its sexualized cryptonymies and monstrous, supernatural language; e.g., Fredric Jameson[1] but also Coleridge. Never trust a skinny cook, but also any fiction snob who’s allergic to monsters and liminality but still bothers to write academic volumes about goddamn spaceships. Not only is denying monstrous expression to deny the humanity of those interrogating it—i.e., the pedagogy of the oppressed—but it occurs in the covert nature of human language that moderates demonstrate so well (and makes them more dangerous than overt reactionaries—a fact we will examine thoroughly in Volume Three).

First, when I said “crypt” and “haunted” a moment ago, I was referring to specific types of either—the process of cryptonymy itself, whose trail of semantic wreckage and endless narratives-of-narratives (the mise-en-abyme) remain occupied by something not fully present: a hauntological “ghost” beyond the immediate, material world and its crumbling linguistic devices the ephemerate mall demonstrates so well.

Capitalism deliberately encourages the recreation of profitable commodities, not artistic statements that challenge the system. Yet their erotic proliferation of sublimated war pastiche/monomythic junk food leads to a series of illusions built upon the structure itself as a concentric curse; i.e., one whose increasingly obvious decay during ergodic, liminal, anisotropic back-and-forth motion/castle-narrative outlives generations of owners and workers alike. Inside this desert of the real, the glory of Capitalism is burdened by the tangible spectres of Marx as gayer than the man himself, hence adumbrating the existence of a nightmare to such men without end. The exit strategy lies within oppositional praxis and dialectical-material function inside the text as reaching outside itself into larger half-real mazes and labyrinths, but also monsters (and their morphological architecture).

Specifically by covertly retooling the “bricks” that build the crypt, workers as monstrous-feminine may recultivate the Superstructure with new, proletarian “archaeologies” that bring out a rebellious, sex-positive xenophilia; re: undead, demonic and/or animalistic; i.e., to have the whore’s revenge through iconoclastic art touching on these decaying liminalities! The Gothic is writ in decay and regeneration happens out from the fertilized necrobiome graveyards ceasing to be holy in defense of capital. Hostile to capital, we can pilfer them and weave new spells friendlier towards Communism: by making/summoning monsters of/closer to nature, or befriending those already attuned to a Communist postapocalypse!

Since the 1970s, an iconic site of circular American decay has been the mall; i.e., a weird, seemingly self-contained place to consume, but also where canonical monsters go to die. Their likenesses are preserved as dolls and other chronotopic emphera, but eventually outlast the people who were meant to consume them. In other words, Capitalism encourages the harmful, xenophobic consumption of blind pastiche through efficient profit (a reoccurring theme in musical hauntologies like Vaporwave, whose own facing of decaying and reassembled nostalgia [“corporate mood”] is ultimately palliative when taken to palliative-Numinous extremes).

Fortunately for workers, language resists standardization, but also total concealment; i.e., the graveyard as a hauntological chronotope/p(a)lace of concealment for fresh visitors to walk through—no matter how rotted/nostalgic it appears—and behold the cryptonymic revelations of a decaying hyperreal: one we can sow new seeds in dead empire with (the plot to The Matrix)! Doing so might make you a xenophile or xenophobe; i.e., depending on which seeds you plant—a praxial outcome that relies on the allegory hiding with the code’s context; re: the seeds that you plant in furtherance to competing dialectical-material struggles and structures’ lattice-like scaffolds and fractals!

A good example is Satanic Panic, with “Satanic” being a cryptonym of repressed queer persecution that straight audiences, through the ghost of the counterfeit, are expected to look back at with fondness; i.e., a relishing of abject nostalgia and witch-hunter mania (e.g., Zionism). So often, real systemic trauma becomes repackaged as darkly nostalgic (exhibit 60c). Revisits happen not once, but like rain on a windshield, demand constant attempts to keep things clear and cloudy (from a praxial standpoint). These synthesized poetic forays, in turn, require special theories to get at the truth (our Four Gs from “Paratextual Documents“). Portrayed via informed exhibits through the repeated repainting of one’s canvas, these can help viewers pierce the Black Veil and break on through to the other side (Jim-Morrison-style, but without actual death, self-imposed suffering and bigoted destruction). Bit by bit, the mall can become ours minus the canonical violence used to colonize/gentrify its territories. Doing so is development in small.

We’ve already covered abjection/reverse abjection a great deal and will continue to explore it (and chronotopes) throughout Volume Three. I want to close out the module and Volume Two by focusing on cryptonymy (and to a lesser extent, hauntology); i.e., as a covert means of devising proletarian archaeologies—a kind of poetic conversation with ghosts/other monsters comparable to ghosts: that free the mind by refamiliarizing it with the xenophilic language buried by Capitalism, but also abandoned by critics of the Gothic like Jameson and Coleridge; re: the excessive, sexually-charged language of the Communist dead (and Gothic Communism’s inclusion of ace expression, of course).

These “paragons” draw the line at moved goalposts; i.e., something for Gothic Communists to ignore, thus reunite with what’s held away from us by these goons: something we make for ourselves over time to spite their gatekeeping tactics. Using hauntological variants of the past, rebellious cryptonymy contains, conceals and evokes trauma as something to face, but also embrace and subvert during xenophilia of our mad architecture. Doing so involves the creation of new ghosts and aquariums for ghosts—not an “end of history” at all, but a likeness of the traumatic past; i.e., as something to fearfully inherit, then express through rememory in ways that remain useful to our purposes and our enrichment; re: without enslaving us to the same old tyrants and their xenophobia towards us (exhibit 43d): “the future of one moment that has now become our own past” (re: Jameson)—to inherit!

(exhibit 60d: American hauntology isn’t restricted to malls; it can be any dead location under Capitalism. Case in point, Willy’s Wonderland [2021] swaps the Gothic castle and walking suits of armor for an undead theme park guarded by bloodthirsty mascots in fur suits [furry panic]. The park’s ghoulish residents are actually a mish-mash of various undead and demonic types dressed in animal furs. Contained inside biomechanical suits, the spirits of former employees forever seek the blood and souls of fresh victims [revenge for abandonment]. Having formerly murdered the middle-class families and their children as impostor employees, Willy’s lycanthrope animal demons continue to “threaten” Capitalism by h[a]unting the spirit of nostalgia itself.

Yet, this decaying idea of a “better time” is still nostalgic, cashing in on Five Nights at Freddy’s [2013] through a fairly shameless Nic Cage vehicle. All the while, the murderous shells continue their “Satanic” rampage, aided by local protection: a vindictive police force that desperately safeguards their village from their idea of evil using outsiders as bait [the scapegoat’s scapegoat]. A self-defeating lie that cryptomimetically echoes the colonial guilt from Hawthorne’s 1835 Young Goodman Brown and its Puritanical critique, the fantasy of ending the town’s curse co-opts the white knight/cowboy from its original colonizer role. Cage’s silent protagonist turns the violent ritual into a self-debasing joke: the chattelized sacrifice of demon and devil-worshipper alike, mid-abjection, while revering either as an ’80s sacred cash cow fallen on hard times. Instead of critiquing material conditions, the film sports the critical “balance” of a dumb popcorn movie—one made to patently capitalize on a recent, franchise hit: worshipping capital in decay as a latter-age Gothic castle!)

Beyond revolutionary cryptonymy as working in opposition to complicit state doubles, there are two forms of the basic cryptonymy process I wish to highlight, here, in relation to our own “archaeologies”; i.e., our own “dead malls” built in the shadowy decay of American infrastructure. The base function of cryptonyms, then, is to conceal and reveal (re: Hogle), which denotes a generalized process of cryptonymy separate from Gothic language; e.g. monsters, lairs/parallel space, and phobias, etc. By comparison, Gothic cryptonymy denotes a concealment happening through these devices that reveal; re: expressing the dislocated presence of trauma without showing its existence directly! Instead, like a canary in a coalmine, the unnatural quality of the concealer is the clue; e.g., the incongruity of the Gothic castle as a pre-fascist throwback that reaches forwards through dead-mall simulacra; i.e., the ostensible disconnect between the two insofar as a transgenerational curse/circular ruin (and nostalgia) is concerned; re: capital in decay alongside its concentric, sorry and left-behind illusions.

So while Gothic Communists aims to attack the bourgeois directly with xenophilic monstrous language “putting the pussy on the chainwax,” brevity isn’t our sole concern as workers; survival is equally important, lest the revolution be spotted and replicated by xenophobic copycats (fascists). An indirect route is beneficial, articulated by the users of rebellious forms of dialectical-material code; i.e., code-switchers in monstrous guise/fur suits. Revolutionary cryptonymy uses the natural aspects of dying language to camouflage ourselves, mise-en-abyme.

To it, we have already examined the history of cryptonymy and how it occurs beyond the obvious, corporate euphemisms and blind-vs-perceptive pastiche; but we’ve yet to apply this ourselves to the present world (which Volume Three will do, next). This being said, the basic, natural functions of human language also play an important role. In terms of our own artistic analysis that highlights sex worker abuse through Gothic theories, methods and art, we will examine some mundane linguistic effects that occur within canonical media, here. However, we’ll only do this as long as those linguistic effects connect back to the four Gothic theories we’ve chosen; i.e., provided they help expose sex worker abuse through sex worker activism (extending to all workers sexualized by Capitalism), meaning as gradual-yer-driven improvements on Gothic-Communism as something to perceive: more and more with as the Superstructure is steadily and progressively altered ASAP! Rome wasn’t burned in a day! Then again, its hyperreality (and burning behind the sparkly map) has already occurred!

The riotous aim during oppositional praxis is to develop Gothic counterculture (thus counterterror) through cumulative forms of iconoclastic art. Stacked on top of those that already exist, these expanded, versatile approaches to sex-positive sex work should teach better ways to prevent worker abuse in the Internet Age; e.g., puns, memes, digital art, PPV nudes, etc. Once developed, this plebian xenophilia can be put to use in covert ways; i.e., by using revolutionary cryptonymy to liberate sex work from the status quo by furtively liberating the language and popular subject matter sex workers use, generally in cryptonymic fashion: as a method of use, but also of recognition—code, in other words. To it, there’s a tremendously playful element (during ludo-Gothic BDSM) to human ingenuity and resistance, especially insofar as monsters can pass themselves off as “ordinary.” Their creation and sale—while already Numinously liminal—becomes a kind of disguise for other activities useful to Gothic Communism’s development. “Nothing to see here, folks! Just late-stage Capitalism in its usual death throes!” Sike!

Given the specialized Gothic theories we’re using—and the abjection process that we’re primary seeking to reverse through cryptonymy—our emphasis concerns the abuse spoken of/about in popular stories; i.e., that frequently deal with sex work as it historically-materially presents through Gothic stories and broader media attached hermeneutically to those stories. Such holism subsequently permits workers to discuss the Four Gs in relation to oppositional praxis, specifically while regarding the tokenized sex-coercive elements of different genres and styles, but also modes of delivery (videogames, short stories, stage plays, etc); i.e., canon we can camp inside itself while bewaring half-real imposters onstage and off. In short, we’ll use whatever is needed to reify our theories as thoroughly as we can; i.e., by exploring sex-positive and sex-coercive manifestations while focusing on the creative successes of proletarian praxis seizing the day!

This means the self-determination and Satanic self-expression of ourselves as alien but loveable (fuckable or otherwise); i.e., during the deterioration of any façade (ours or theirs), hence includes addressing workplace traumas—however they normally present in media normally designed to hide them—but also as it occurs behind-the-scenes: stories of a fantastical or sci-fi predisposition (re: Frankenstein or At the Mountains of Madness), retro-future dystopias (e.g., Blade Runner or Cyberpunk) and pointedly hyperreal futurist dystopias (re: The Matrix) ringing similar alarm bells for different reasons (for workers or the state).

Furthermore, this cryptonymy also extends to pin-up photos, action figures, music videos, rock-opera danger discos, Metroidvania, and so forth (all topics for Volume Three). The sticking point, but also the paradox, is that our lessons pertain to sex worker abuse tied to Gothic theories and monster puns, but also goals (the Six Rs); i.e., as a quick, relatable-thus-reliable way of connecting such diasporic chaff to magically address (through the wonders of technology—like my computer helping this Lady of Shallot weave her magic spells): the Numinous-sized problem all around us without giving the game away entirely! Through buffers that shield, hide and show us off on the same shared Aegis, revolution is a mirror game not unlike the dead mall’s usual Gothic heroism; i.e., one where the heroic survivors are faced with undead, demonic and/or animal menaces to bond with, I-Am-Legend-style (e.g., the mushroom men gargoyles from The Last of Us serving as Red Scare and eco-fascist watchdogs guarding the temple during [thus inside] the same shared fantasy space).

Clearly human language is wedded to nature as biomechanical, thus unreliable but also cagey and guarded; i.e., whose basic-to-Gothic cryptonymy makes revolution possible. Keeping in the Gothic tradition of investigating the deceitful past (code left behind for future rebels to find, mid-allegory inside Plato’s cave), all of this stems from investigating its assemblage of notorious, modular agents (which I acquired in literal “Gothic modules” at MMU); i.e., as superstitiously suspicious towards antiquated curios, but also intrigued with the uncanny self-same unheimlich and its make-believe past: a ghost of the counterfeit during the liminal hauntology of war’s debrided “senescence renaissance” leading us to a palliative Numinous to recultivate the Wisdom of the Ancients towards Communism out of Capitalism!

As such, any “unreliable principles of detection” have a cryptonymic element to them that conceals trauma for or against the elite’s benefit. Capitalism is a perfidious hyperobject; i.e., one concentrically filled with recursive, xenophobic illusions and counterfeits. Thus, it’s vital for workers to have doubled means of confirming the assortment of conflicted, messy feelings that historically-materially result from the same complicated situations that Capitalism generates in its death throes; i.e., a hyperobject that’s so big that you can’t directly observe it, and whose descriptions through simplistic metaphors are abstracting at best.

Even so, Gothic language (and its cryptonymy process) are already about as grey/gay an area as you can get, and remain tremendously useful when articulating Numinous—mysterious and tremendously fascinating—feelings with or against some of the usual suspects; i.e., that materialize under Capitalism during oppositional praxis as a process of decay and rebirth: witches, zombies, demons, werewolves, vampires and ghosts, goblins, golems, ninjas, et al. The stealth of a masque is to blend in with those around you working at dialectically-materially cross purposes. If they’re wearing monster outfits, it behooves one to do the same! The better coders will prevail (again, just like The Matrix)!

And no, it’s not “just” because I think monsters are cool, sexy and fun (they are); it’s because I think they’re cool, sexy and fun in relation to social-sexual activism as something to furtively “hook” you on xenophilia—meaning startlingly vivid cryptonyms that one can mix, match, and blend[2] in figurative-literal composite ways (and still retain their critical power and bite). Canon sells heteronormative monster girls and boys, their props and costumes manufactured to sell you a xenophobic idea you’re meant to embody and sublimate to varying degrees: heteronormative war and rape, but also moderately critical means of dismissal pertaining to Gothic emphera and praxial synthesis; i.e., which people like Jameson or Coleridge cannot conceive save as redundant (re: Botting) or devilish, dubious and abject! Beware the snob, because they benefit from being a snob!

Variations “friendly” to Gothic Communism and its development should work as satirical code, then—stealthy “magnifying glasses” swiftly and discretely administered to workers ASAP to avoid them physically and emotionally winding up like these monsters’ more tragic canonical counterparts: the zombie, ghost, vampire, rapist, accidental incestuous lover and necrophile and/or witch, etc, as indicative of more than a former human’s ignominious death; i.e., their sleepwalking life as informed by various grim foreshadowings that present the entire system itself as actually falling apart!

A common causation of ignominious death in Gothic stories, then, is blindness through Promethean Quests and Faustian bargains dressed up in monomyth poetics; i.e., feelings of heroic invincibility and self-deceptive hubris that come crashing down around us/down on our heads; i.e., for Promethean heroes, but also the doomed, Faustian, and currently neoliberal capitalist civilizations they call home or fight for spoken about by various critics “too cool for school”; re: Jameson and company selling others down the river by becoming abjectly “nose blind” or allergic to Gothic and its smell tests. Waking from the nightmare only to die still inside of it is a classic Gothic outcome; i.e., the “bad ending” live burial as illustrated by the proverbial “dead mall,” ghost town, and/or haunted castle, etc, as a home for monsters the xenophobe wants nothing to do with. They’re already dead but think they’re helping others survive by abstaining from tools of survival!

As if, Doctor Silberman! You’re Ozymandias, and we’re offshoots of the Medusa dancing on your stupid grave; re: “Look on our Works, Ye Mighty, and despair!”

Instead of advocating for a structure and language system historically doomed to fail, the ironic, rebellious usage of these tell-tale beings (friendly ghosts and xenophilic gargoyles) can help prepare people to defend against canonical possession and its “sleeper agents.” This includes what moderate state proponents further through canonical art and apologia dressed up as “radical criticism”: lobotomy and its consequent torpor but also rape, murder and war belonging to a half-real, historical-material outcome—one that emotional failures to learn from Capitalism and its artistic trickeries—reliably results in, time and time again; i.e., worker exploitation through a system that treats the owner class (and those who shield them from criticism) like gods, and stews workers in a menticidal culture of rape and war apologia’s endless waves of terror disguised as “cures” and knowing-better sophism; e.g., Jameson’s wholly inadequate Utopia apologia; re: Archaeologies of the Future: the Desire Called Utopia. Newsflash: “Utopia” is Omelas, and you’re Orwell with more masks, fucker!

Ozymandian engineers of their own “greatness,” such colossal pride, systemic abuse, and endless lies only lead to their (and our) extinction. We can’t directly attack them, but we can hit them where it hurts: their xenophobic propaganda, canon, and management structures’ chains of command. The Superstructure that leads to the final devastation of all life under the Capitalocene can be supplanted with spies useful to our sex-positive aims: ourselves and our own humanizing forms of monstrous xenophilia/revitalizing concentrations of older spirits and “essence”; i.e., any way you wish to quantify that, as long as it makes you more intelligent and aware of the world around you in a dialectical-material sense tied to nature as dark, hence needing dark empathy (and similar forces) to combat the state’s own cryptonymy process furthering abjection: in the usual chronotopes’ hauntological spheres (the liminal hauntologies of war), thus on the same Aegis and with the same fires of the gods. So is the Medusa fought over during Frankensteinian tug-o’-war!

(source)

Taking such credibility away from false prophets like Jameson and Coleridge, the dead mall becomes a place where idiosyncratically marginalized workers can show our ass in holistic ways; i.e., differently than the state does (and normally with less self-harm, above): the whore’s revenge castrating profit by showing the Cycle of Kings eating its own tail in the same dead contested kingdom space (another mall inside new variations that never fully extricate)!

While Volume Two has extensively explored monster poetics—i.e., as being something to Gothically foster through poetry and historically catalog and gauge through older (and newer) thesis work—it has hardly exhausted the endless and awesome power of Gothic that puny men like Jameson, Botting and Coleridge have historically run away from like little pathetic cretins. Instead, it has outlined our Four Gs through some of the most common monster examples; i.e., building on the undead, demons and totems of the natural world during three consequential monster modules (themselves built on my PhD and manifesto).

In seeking to learn from the reinvented past as populated with these monsters, I wish to return to the role these monsters play in Gothic Communism’s development across space-time: “re-excavating” the past in search of wisdom as something that Capitalism discourages in highly specific ways; i.e., iconoclastic “archaeologies” versus canonical dogma’s preaching to an increasingly embattled choir! If Capitalism leaves behind its own dead malls, so can we, and this is what Volume Three will focus on, when those archaeologies come to light!

Our focus, again, is ironic xenophilia—on monsters and humanoid expression that yield sex-positive, universally liberatory effects through parallel societies; e.g., Richard Matteson’s Communist vampire-zombies, but also the places these animal demons call home (re: Deborah Christie). Through a desire to habitually recreate the past as forever incomplete—but also fragmented and cloaked by class war as a cryptomimetic byproduct of Communism vs Capitalism—these satirical monsters emerge in parallel palimpsestuous “haunts”; i.e., a wild castle appears!

Like grave rubbings, their giddy recreations invite comparison to former monomythic versions and different monsters that warn of potential danger and trauma—and whose combined nostalgic iterations (from canon to camp) are what Jameson more broadly calls “archaeologies of the future” (which is what I meant by “re-excavation”); re: “the future of what is now our own past” that requires continuous “elaborate strategies of misdirection” to break through (re: Jameson’s 1982 “Progress versus Utopia; Or, Can We Imagine the Future?“); i.e., including monsters, but also spaces where monsters—both good and bad—call home: my camping of Jameson to walk away from Omelas as he envisioned it, thus return to home as Gothic in ways we can make more Communist than he dared dream. As Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communists, we’re the superior model, but nonetheless cannibalize his derelict wreckage for spare parts!

In short, Jameson’s Victor Frankenstein and we’re the Creature camping his (soon-)to-be ghost (never mind—his actual ghost; he died on September 22nd, 2024). Androids do dream of electric sheep, and we want more life, fucker! Enjoy Medusa’s snakes skull-fucking your dead sockets! Feel the camp flow through you! “Head Crusher!” (Megadeth, 2009). It’s quite the death rattle, your deadly headache our gift to your legacy married to our own; i.e., phrenology from Hell, making new lumps as we probe your globe for speculative and probative value! Vae victis, bitch! Learn to see with our Galatean eyes, not your Pygmalion peepers! “I’m the harvester of eyes!” (Blue Oyster Cult, 1974).

We sadly don’t have time to ravage Jameson’s freshly-dead corpse like we did Radcliffe’s less-fresh stiff, but you get the idea; re: stringing them up and beating them with sticks! Our doing so combats society’s “constitutional inability to imagine Utopia” (code for “Communism” as Jameson fumbled at during Capitalist Realism blinding him); i.e., by beating the gatekeeper’s effigies through dark empathy with the alien as something to generate and embrace again by revisiting old dead things that have been criminal but also exotic and worshipped under Capitalist Realism; re: Jameson’s weird temple. Yet another darling to kill!

To it, however “boring and exhausted” Jameson finds the Gothic, his famous inability to engage with it results from Gothic canon, which upholds the status quo through Jameson’s own notion of “blind parody” abjecting us. He’s thrown the baby out with the bathwater and become xenophobic himself. I don’t want to prescribe the Gothic to him, but its vast, integral nature to queer discourse needs to be recognized and appreciated by him if he’s to be an effective ally (too late—but I wrote this back in 2023). Otherwise, he’s just another Picasso arrogantly assuming he can speak for the marginalized. Time to splash paint on his priceless pedagogy!

Jameson clearly favors science fiction and fantasy hauntologies, exploring them far more intimately than he ever did the Gothic’s recursive neo-medieval. Yet, the Gothic is famously rooted in fantasy and science fiction; re: by offering up some of the latter’s earliest examples like the Shelleys; i.e., in ways far less alienated from nature and from labor than Jameson bothers to argue. Indeed, he goes so far as to dismiss the entire mode; re: Postmodernism and its own post-Freudian veilings of Marxist potential in workers older than Freud or Marx. The etiology of Jameson’s picky skepticism lies in the hauntological murkiness after our classic examples of Gothic fantasy-meets-science-fiction; i.e., the elite having long since obscured ironic, sex-positive forms by mimicking Shelley’s productive and potent xenophilia, post hoc. Jameson does the same thing by debriding (so to speak) science (and its Protestant ethic) from Gothic fiction; i.e., in pursuit of Omelas as something to shack up with! He’s the homewrecker saying to others more marginalized than he is, “It’s just too hard!” Like, get fucked, old man!

In doing so, homeboy’s offered up his own cryptonyms, dropping them inside a reinvented, bad-faith past: the dead mall as a complicit, sullen burial ground for neoliberal worship while Capitalism decays as usual. Far from being effective satire, the elite’s ghost of the counterfeit bandies about ritualistic trauma before burying it, thus prolonging Capitalism’s survival under Jameson’s dubious watch. When this burial fails, the elite rely on fascists to do their dirty work for them, Jameson conventionally sleeping on the job. We gotta wake him up; i.e., like David dissecting Shaw into a new Gothic-Communist effigy made from stolen parts!

Unfortunately for snobs like Jameson (and Coleridge, as we will see in just a moment), combating these requires “digging up” the traumatic past as something to reinvent[3] in opposition to state-corporate media and benefactors. Doing so means facing the black knights of fascism as very real (and very dangerous) obscurantists, but also the moderate/neoliberal obscurantism; i.e., of centrist gentries like TERFs and the girl boss persona, but also Jameson’s own strange DARVO (which, as we’ll see in Volume Three, generally translates to “boundaries for me, not for thee” during reactive abuse). Again, the primary difference between fascist and moderate is a matter of style and degree; i.e., working in relation to the same basic outcome: exploitation through the bending of words and monsters to empty them of their critical power (e.g., “woke”). Guilty as charged, Jameson!

Courtesy of the elite and their lapdogs, the collision of unironic vs ironic “archaeologies” often leads to confusing and fragmented disagreements (re: “Outlier Love”) but also material results complete with their own socio-political responses (this entire book series and sex work). More to the point, this messy convergence includes general cryptonymy and Gothic cryptonymy operating in socio-material conjunction under Capitalism; i.e., as something we subvert regarding Jameson and other Pygmalions’ usual collusions protecting Omelas as much as not! He’s Ash from Alien, protecting corporate models!

Note: This portion of the “Dead Mall” section is one of the oldest in the book; i.e., I actually wrote it when I was first grappling with cryptonymy (a concept newer to me at the time than Jameson was—with me exposed to the former [through Hogle’s “Restless Labyrinth[4]“] in 2018 versus the latter and Archaeologies of the Future in 2014). I want to preserve it, though; i.e., as a historical artefact similar to Walpole’s Otranto except minus the actual posturing of true discovery the 1764 cryptonymy (and its ghost of the counterfeit) teased at. I’m doing so because I touch on some linguistic points that you might find useful when reversing abjection during the cryptonymy process, yourselves! —Perse

General cryptonymy is defined in Punter’s Encyclopedia of the Gothic (2012) as

“words that hide,” by which is meant a word in the form of a “cryptonym” that has apparently no phonetic or semantic connection to the prohibited word it is disguising. Repression has been exercised upon the word itself, which means that the original word has been concealed.

This, for example, could be the general discussion of sex; i.e., as something to censor to varying degrees, but also white male privilege as part of the larger conversation being had, and women’s role in relation to them (and people of color and GNC individuals, non-Christians, the elderly and disabled, Indigenous cultures, and/or sex workers, etc). Cryptonyms are difficult to understand because they resist exposure to a natural and unnatural degree. Naturally they are a feature of language that simply occurs; unnaturally all exist in relation to others inside a material world having recursively evolved out of capital’s historical-material looping in on itself—i.e., as a structure existing over space-time, and one that uses hauntological descriptions of itself to prolong the lie. This includes general cryptonyms and Gothic cryptonyms, at once discrete and indiscrete!

First, an exhaustive (and hardly comprehensive) list of general cryptonyms, which highlight the cryptic nature of oral-to-written human language. These include but aren’t limited to: double entendres, non-sequiturs, euphemisms, white lies, concealed bribes, open secrets, patronizing admonishment, gaslighting; segregation, relegation or consignment; censorship, suppression, repression, and oppression; figurative or literal imprisonment; live burial, incarceration, compelled silence or speech (torture); misdirection (creative), embellishment, tall tales; misdirection (rhetoric), lies, “making nice,” false courage, false cowardice; myths, malapropisms, misnomers (necrophilia, pedophilia) or generalizations (necrophobia = superstitions, historical abuses, taboos, prejudice, misconceptions, etc); rumors, gossip, urban legends; allegory, metaphor, poetic license, lionization or otherwise self-aggrandizement, darkness visible; riddles, passwords, shibboleths (and songs), code, cryptic responses; synonyms, games of telephone, figures of speech, fake news, optical illusions, special/visual effects, shadow plays, sarcasm, false praise (and other linguistic pragmatic techniques); anonymous speech, pennames, alter egos, pseudonyms, noms des guerres, dead names, new names or a combination, like Charlotte Brontë’s Currer Bell (source: Sandro Jung’s “Currer Bell, Charlotte Brontë and the Construction of Authorial Identity,” 2014); perceived irrelevance (apophenia) and pareidolic danger, trauma or vaso vagal threats; veiled threats, disguised praise, friendly insults, “love taps,” deliberate contradictions, paradoxes; anathematic status, disorder, chaos, entropy, decay, senescence; treachery, unreliability, perfidiousness; replicas, imitations, simulacra, counterfeits, fakeries, deceptions, sleights of hand, tricks of the mind, Freudian slips of the tongue; guarded language, dubiousness, apprehension, caution, disassociation, hallucination, altered states, possession; rejection, abjection, displacement, doublespeak, Gothic doubles, obfuscation; recuperation, appropriation, appreciation; centrist, neoliberal and fascist vs Communist hauntologies and fencing political euphemisms, recuperation, sublimation, etc…

(artist: Charles Burns)

Furthermore, not only can the above list “mix and match” various general cryptonyms at the same time, Gothic cryptonymy combines monster poetics with general cryptonymy (take your pick); i.e., as a form of compound bias and concealed exposure!

To it, Gothic Communism uses general and Gothic cryptonymy (thus xenophilic monster poetics) against the state; i.e., by depicting state proponents and projects as fearful, bourgeois sources of past trauma: the wreckage of the infernal concentric pattern forming an endless train of megadeath, its centrist apologia sold to defend the monomyth, not the bodies of the working dead (while also hiding the men behind the Cycle-of-Kings curtain: the elite). While Capitalism threatens the present with its own cryptonyms, revolutionary cryptonymy becomes a fight to survive through linguistic concealment that “blends in” while also standing out; e.g., Wicked-Bad-Naughty Zoot leaving her grail beacon on at Castle Anthrax, or Count Fenring and his equally-crafty wife “speaking” non-vocally in code to fool the Harkonnens: in plain sight.

There’s considerable historical precedence for this approach. Punter and Hogle’s usage of the word “cryptonym” specifically articulates a transgenerational curse survived only by its own hauntological narrative: inadequate linguistic markers, concentric illusions, and semantic wreckage whose hidden trauma must be investigated but frustratingly resists discovery during the cryptonymy process on all sides; re: what Jerrold Hogle calls a “vanishing point”: “on ashes of something not quite present” acclimating to cryptonymy decades before Marx and over 150 years before Jameson sucked and wailed his first breath (and over two centuries before his last breath)!

Under Capitalism, then, you have the appearance of many seemingly unrelated things; i.e., the general discussion of sex as feared and fetishized in ways that Jameson callously and prematurely hand-waved: commodified, neoliberal horror stories that discuss Gothic sexuality while simultaneously trying to pacify revolutionary xenophilia (and older authors like Radcliffe) that interrogate the usual systemic, social-sexual abuses commonplace under Capitalism (thus Jameson’s watch); re: the ubiquity of rape and police surveillance leading to genocide/endless revenge against nature as monstrous-feminine. This bourgeois agenda produces cryptonyms meant to be used complicitly by men like Jameson; i.e. in support of capital’s systemic xenophobia/radical apathy versus our polar opposition during praxial synthesis engendering radical empathy—meaning towards whores and nature at large preyed upon by the state while Jameson turned a blind eye/walked towards Omelas as he spouted semi-useful nonsense we could reclaim.

The resultant “black hole” occurs relative to the public imagination not as totally emptied and more like “badly drugged” (see: Charles Burns, above); i.e., by past hauntological forms, themselves something to coercively conjure up and shoot into people’s veins whenever investigators start to notice more generalized cryptonyms tied to systemic abuse in Gothic forms: criminogenic conditions, social unrest, “disorder” (to borrow from Joy Division) and state-sanctioned/monopolized violence through various state proponents like fascists or neoliberals mucking about (the concealed word, here, continuously being “genocide” or some other hidden atrocity profit causes—what’s called “the quiet part” in common parlance, and Hogle marks per the ghost of the counterfeit as something to pimp and abject).

The ultimate canonical outcome isn’t a literal drug—at least, not by itself alone—but “bad hauntologies” like the alien dead mall assimilating workers into lobotomized, unironically zombie-like police states. While this can be reversed, it also takes generations to enact. Likewise, the same is true in reverse, and people will inevitably die before the curse noticeably starts to fade. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Let’s not stand on ceremony by sucking off old dead guys. We look postpunk, but we’re actually punk decaying towards future forms built on past language hugging the monster during the dialect of shelter and alien! This is our mall, Jameson, and meaning is made in monumental obscurity and proximity to titanic forces grappling for supremacy—workers vs the state! You rise up to eat our brains; we stand on your shoulders to elevate our own understandings of the world you apologized for in your own roundabout ways!

Capital gentrifies and decays to create strange appetites, but also strange methods pushing towards forbidden, unknown pleasures; e.g., cryptonymy and post-scarcity wedded like Persephone to Hades, hence the imaginary past as continuously reimagined as cryptonymic, thus cryptomimetic. By that same token, the cryptonymic devices being used by the state’s complicit parties are being simultaneously pilfered by revolutionary authors unafraid to “dive in” to the Aegis; i.e., by using said devices creatively in search of parallel, emancipatory hauntologies that lead people “out of the crypt” while simultaneously through cryptonymy disguising themselves from those with power (either having it, neoliberals; or aligning with it, fascists): as ghosts, demons, witches, zombies, furries, cyborgs, golems, aliens, etc. Jameson was a white privileged straight guy in academia, thus estranged from the need for such therapy and disguise! He sucked, and sucked on Utopia’s white-supremacist cock coming home to roost!!

Furthermore, the resulting senescence can still appear (or be) a drug-addled mess, hence a violent fever dream the likes of which Jameson’s total, snobbish dismissal is part of a longer chain of moderacy directed at the Gothic; i.e., as something to pimp during the same cryptonymic hogging since Coleridge of stages they policed, scrubbing of any dark whorish testimonies. Opposition is a liminal gradient, forcing its utility to be met by those who think they know better but are too good to play with dead things (or fuck demons). Otherwise, they might realize what Gothic iconoclasm is trying to imagine in relation to Capitalism and its Realism: not a run-down former paradise that failed, but a well-oiled, unethical system of worker exploitation working perfectly towards that aim by disguising its transgenerational trauma in linguistically cunning ways! Moderates be like that!

In Volume Three, I elucidate this chaos (and roosting chickens) as clearly as I can; i.e., by venerating Gothic hauntology and cryptonymy as I argue in favor of sex positivity and Gothic Communism (actually having done so first and published last; re: after the five proceeding book [sub]volumes)—the achievement of the latter through subversive xenophilia breaking down the “crypt” of Capitalism, thus replacing its tyrannical Superstructure with a post-scarcity variant (doubling for the old castle; i.e., a “Trojan fort,” below).

Before we cross volumes, though I want to close Volume Two with a final commentary about our aforementioned snobs; re: turning their noses up at sexuality and the Gothic in relation to dialectical materialism; i.e., as something to dance around (for them) not with/among the dead as fake, but not automatically in service of the state and its historical-material process of abjection; re: Jameson shivering before the Aegis, whose act of controlled opposition/functional obeisance towards capital was actually done first, by Coleridge!

(artist: Brian Froud)

As we’ve touched on, Coleridge liked his drugs. And we’ve already examined Stuart Mills accounting how Fisher himself offered various solutions in response to Capitalism; re: acid Communism as a trippy means of escaping Capitalist Realism (alluding—perhaps accidentally in his case, I think—to Blake’s aforementioned acids, or things that produce a similar drug-like effect).

Fisher seemingly divorces hauntology from the supernatural, but according to Castricano cannot escape the cryptomimetic language of ghosts that Marx relied upon (and which I attach to all monsters, thus all work as sexualized by the state into dead alien whores); I want to consider how the breakthrough can happen at different points through different means, focusing on sex (especially Gothic depictions of sex) as an elaborate, xenophilic strategy of misdirection that helpfully guides viewers out of capital’s shadow.

This, in turn, requires a great deal of optimism regarding the powers of imagination; i.e., as able to shift, but also their utility in sexualized forms as operative towards rebellion to furtive degrees (as we shall explore in Volume Three, kayfabe is the language of espionage within a grander monstrous-heroic discourse, including monstrous-feminine as tremendously common in either side of the praxial equation). Mills writes how “Capitalism constrains creativity and innovation,” but also, in my opinion, imagination. This is plain-as-day with Jameson’s dismissal of Gothic, but also Coleridge’s; re: his rabid attacking of gay iconoclast/rebel, Matthew Lewis: “Yes! the author of the Monk signs himself a LEGISLATOR! We stare and tremble” (source: Pressbooks’ “Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s review of The Monk”). Moral outrage/pearl-clutching is a witch hunter’s smokescreen for ethnocentric superiority and hypocrisy! ACAB!

So whereas Fisher saw hauntology as a prison that traps people inside Capitalism, I treat hauntology as something slightly different. My goal isn’t exodus at all, but poetic transformation; i.e., when Gothic imagination is liberated by a different kind of hauntology than what Fisher entirely envisioned: the emancipatory kind offered by Gothic Communism and sex positivity as not a whitewashing of the tyrannical Gothic castle and more an emancipatory double whose happy ending is the steady push towards equality and post-scarcity by reclaiming the symbol of the dark castle itself—indeed, its entire cast, construction and age as something heretofore undreamed of: a progression away from the monomyth and infernal concentric pattern by ironically using these same devices predicated towards a different outcome than what historical-materially offers up through canon like Coleridge onwards; e.g., the queer princess, dance hall, monster and castle, etc, as dressed up in the binarized Gothic aesthetic that, within and outside of its own text, is the metatext of oppositional praxis; re: doubles allowing for troubling comparison to break Capitalist Realism (and its monomythic violence against whores)!

(artist: Johannes Helgeson)

Compared to Coleridge, then, our contribution is subversive doubles that envision a post-scarcity world and out our abusers in their usual forms of disguise; e.g., Dark Link if they weren’t just a shadow puppet for Link to fence with but their own Gothic-Communist entity teaching emancipation through demonic exchange. But from Coleridge to us, there’s always a duality when fencing with monsters (demons or otherwise); i.e., the shadow housing our Gothic potential to liberate and exploit, as Coleridge himself did while anisotropically sparring with Matthew Lewis. In either case, hauntology works with outmoded, formerly fearsome liminalities (again, the xenomorph, but also its castled home and the princesses, detectives and soldiers who share these imperiled spaces with it, inside the castle as yesteryear’s corpse malls). To make their dated views of the future emancipatory requires earnest, good-faith, even covert engagement with common social-sexual material.

I say “common” because imagination, whether through canon or counterculture, is continuously educated by images—often of people; i.e., created by producers, artists and consumers working in tandem, hence coming from warring schools of thought, using similar sexualized imagery whose communication with is primarily viewed by sight but gleaned through subtext. Capitalism, though, limits imagination to a mode of thinking that supports itself; i.e., one leading to a complicit, cryptonymic continuum (say that three times fast) under those accommodated socio-material structures already in place; re: as used by Coleridge onwards. Standard canonical space, thought, bodies and sexuality—all counterfeits, lucrative and hegemonic, that bury the public imagination alive and keep it there with an army of bad-faith or otherwise unfriendly zombies, witches, ghosts and other monsters. Same goes for Coleridge and those aping him (and his unapologetic classism, anti-Gothic screed and drug-addled xenophobia)!

It would be a tremendous mistake, then, to assume all monsters are created equal, as Jameson does, or that they lack the critical power to reshape the public imagination. They instead require constant dialectical-material analysis, which he remains curiously unable to afford them, any more than Coleridge before him did; i.e., both men shivered at whores being ghosts of the Medusa pimped by capital raping said whores, thus nature as monstrous-feminine; re: as Ambrosio did when Matthew Lewis summoned the whore to testify to her own rape by his hand! Beware the policer of tones; they are cops, thus complicit in rape! Coleridge was a rapist by proxy and politique; i.e., his own reputation as a poet laureate and famous literary critic whitewashing and colonizing Gothic[5] was no different than Roger Ebert’s Pulitzer-winning rape apologia; re: DARVO obscurantism enacting “boundaries for me, not for thee!” White straight guys are the most privileged by the system, hence the biggest hypocrites.

As we’ve been hinting at, then, this fatal moderacy and consequent normalization stems from a heteronormative prudishness that Jameson borrowed from Coleridge (without the laudanum). That’s the point of my book—to collectively demonstrate the sex-positive/class-conscious potential of iconoclastic sex worker imageries; i.e., in spite of professed knowing-betters like Coleridge trying to stay sober/steer away from whores by segregating them during the abjection process. To reverse abjection, we must in effect “summon the whore.” This includes as a subject of study but also any who historically studied them with contempt; i.e., while dealing with accommodated intellectuals like Jameson having zero punk energies to begin with, xenophiles must do our collective best to manifest good praxis under Gothic Communism without decaying our punk selves!

Except, we’ve already spanked Jameson—and we’ll get to Coleridge in just a second—but first, what about those whores, again? How do we summon them, Ed Zachary?

To summon the whore as Lewis did is to summon the Medusa as echoes of a Communist Numinous raped by capital before it was fully conceived; i.e., through older undead, demonic and animals forms of policing nature that Coleridge and company aided and abetted. Through a combined, transgenerational effect on the public imagination, our archaeologies should work “in tune” against capital’s self-styled bards; i.e., by speaking to systemic trauma in ways Coleridge couldn’t monopolize; e.g., with his 1796 “Eolian Harp” gentrifying poetry as Britain’s rock ‘n roll of the times, effectively abjecting what Rudolph Otto’s 1917 The Idea of the Holy would call “the Numinous” 150+ years after Burke’s much-touted Sublime (from A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757) tried to hog the stage (source:  Simon Morley’s “A Short History of the Sublime,” 2021); re: as something to dismantle in opposition to Capitalism’s bad-faith copies, but also steal back those who are too prosy and chaste to get down in the trenches (so to speak) and tell beautiful, dark, sexy and splendid “lies” (as Walpole did, in 1764, and Matthew Lewis, in 1794).

Po-tay-toh, po-tah-toh. Application through hindsight trumps dry historical documentation, atomized theory and praxial inertia. The Numinous, then, is a decayed idea of the Sublime that speaks to capital back then and now as having decayed into hyperobject abstractions; i.e., what Coleridge tried to deny by pimping nature and the Numinous into what he preferred (the Romantics didn’t actually call themselves “the Romantics,” anymore than the Beats called themselves “the Beats”).

Yet, such succubean darkness visible also isn’t false or true, but both as half-real, onstage and off; i.e., xenophilic demons, undead and animal whores comprising a collective pedagogy of the oppressed—specifically that of sex workers (though Capitalism sexualizes all workers to some degree or another): as old friends who speak from us through a reimagined past that feels ready to change back into itself, like an exciting dream that never quite was but could someday be! Numinous is hauntological and, when summoning the demon slut, can hoist the champions of the Sublime on their puny petards!

Here’s an example, with Krispy and I:

(exhibit 60e1: Model and artist: Krispy Tofuuu and Persephone van der Waard. This piece explores subverting demonic summoning and torture during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., the succubus being identified from the Renaissance period well into the Romantic era as an Enlightenment continuation of what became the femme fatale of future times regressing harmfully backwards; re: the Great-Man pimp as threatened by their own outmoded ideas of nature-as-vengeful, hence the usual signature torturers of men of the cloth/reason: the whore’s non-white body tempting the Romantic stoic with naughty outlawed Numinous fun!

Numinous ≈ Sublime, then—our summoning of the chonky profligate fucking with rigid applications of these lofty notions like Coleridge’s, thus the latter’s singular canonizing of such ideological fortresses undermined with our own bodily ones’ flexible autonomy and cathartic synthesis; re: of what I call the palliative Numinous, breaking Norton’s Imperialism of Theory down versus not just Coleridge, but those unironically riding his dick! The future can’t change if our understanding and application of the past is frozen in defense of the state as Sublime, Numinous, whatever!

[artist: Krispy Tofuuu]

To it, Krispy’s another black rabbit to Numinously pursue in the wake of state prows and their historical-material disorders. Hairy and thicc, she chubbily pushes the pursuer as the black rabbit does; i.e., towards new understandings [and applications] of terms like the Numinous and Sublime [whose meaning is not set by white moderate historians playing cop]! If you’re not afraid to follow her and be taken for a ride, yourself, then you’ll emergence from state spells bearing out/carrying forth healthier means of illustrating Gothic than Coleridge policing the whore for his own gain did! Such is ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., as operating light years beyond Coleridge’s narrow lens of a shackled Gothic he could p[r]imp!

Specifically this collage depicts an expression of how Krispy wanted to be portrayed in demonic form, and which I have presented alongside photos of them from a normal sexting session had between us; i.e., I think the latter photos present a cuddly and sweet depiction of Krispy alongside their semi-innocent and non-threatening succubus self: one that dickwads like Jameson and Coleridge would shiver at and dismiss while imagining a preserved paradise bereaved of native, thus Indigenous demons testifying to whorish survival; re: pandemonium without the whore [abjected for a swept brothel converted into a Protestant church, as Coleridge very much argued for]. Genocide is genocide, the ensuing silence speaking volumes through cryptonymy we can reclaim! “She’s lost control again!” [Joy Division, 1979] and therein breaks Capitalist Realism on her Aegis! Such graveyards are only bereft if we make them bereft; to give them humanity is to give them space to shake and shout, mid-penetration!

[artist: Krispy Tofuuu] 

Specifically Krispy asked the succubus to appear somewhat innocent but also overtly demonic—a paradox, they admitted, but still what they pointedly desired. I think any straddling of the monster language fits with perfectly with canonical subversion; i.e., humanizing the colonized language of persecution against whores by divorcing demonic expression from state violence on the same grander Aegis; re: another rabbit, and a shapely and fuzzy one to boot!

[artist: Krispy Tofuuu]

Moreover, the animalistic expression, in this case, pointedly sees Krispy as a human worker through the demonic-human expression of their sexual labor—not as something to exploit, but to appreciate and understand; i.e., as human beyond Enlightenment constraints like Coleridge’s own Gothic pretensions. In other words, Krispy’s monster and human sides belong to the same worker and should be valued and appreciated accordingly.)

As something to summon to scare canon’s champions, Sex Positivity exhibits Gothic art unafraid of sexuality as something to reify in culture forms; i.e., any that reunite workers with what is lost—the dead, but also the natural world before exploitation as something to reimagine and speak about, mid-synthesis.

As stated during my PhD and manifesto, our aim isn’t a regression away from technology but a xenophilic means of rearranging material conditions through the Superstructure as plastic; i.e., my art combined with the art of others—be they separate drawings or drawings by me of models personifying various monstrous concepts and brands in iconoclastic ways—that celebrates sex positivity’s ability to generate “parallel” societies that, if not “outside the crypt” then at least leading in that direction; re: away from worker trauma through dark, radical empathy in older forms of drug-like poetics chronotopes, hauntologies and cryptonymies echoing trauma as something to cryptomimetically play with; e.g., Krispy’s delicious body filling that role nicely! “No, I’ve never seen anyone like you before—not while I was awake, anyway!” Matilda’s a thicc demon, and Cristobel’s got cushion for the pushin’! Summon whore; open “doors of perception” wider than the gates of Hell, green eggs and ham to chagrin Coleridge with! “Stare and tremble” at this, dickhead!

(artist: Krispy Tofuuu)

This chasing happens generally through spaces and occupants that—like a dead mall or Gothic castle—teach one to think differently about nature and sex as already-colonized, especially monstrous-feminine sexual labor (female or not) as something thoroughly ignored or dismissed by the sexually-estranged (which Coleridge totally was). When viewed, occupied or felt, parallel “archaeologies” reassemble the reimagined past changing through altered states of empathy as Numinous perception to a matter of degree; i.e., digging it up again and again and again, mid-live-burial, to better teach viewers to avoid Capitalism’s myriad mind traps, menticides, and ignominious deaths: summoning the whore to humanize her harvesting by men like Coleridge “calling dibs,” then thirsting after Cristobel’s peach behind Victorian buffers they anticipated and installed for their own delight.

Victory takes time, and exposed to the lessons we teach while camping the ghosts of cops like Coleridge dick-riding himself, the next generation can learn to imagine something better than any of us have; i.e., doing so to change how future individuals perceive/experience sex work, thus all work and how its various chronotopic intersections, hauntological variants and cryptonymic trauma markers paradoxically survive and exchange under Capitalism as something such illustrations of mutual consent aid in subverting: as a liminal position that can shift towards Communism through such summoning as phenomenological.

Rebellion, then is a constant hermeneutic means of freeing one’s emotions/mind through the very things that shape it inside the material world. In turn, breaking the mint starts with imagination as informed by past media as rerouted, moving away from harmful, dated counterfeits that alienate/divide in favor of sex-positive dated counterfeits; e.g., the futurist Utopia, the retro-future, the fantasy in outer space, but also the various uniforms and disguises found within them—the wizards, witches, Jedi, and so on compromising Wordsworth’s language of the Poet told to the common man, who, while “closer to nature by Wordsworth’s measure, tends to speak in the language of their class. Our Romantic friend, though he didn’t realize it, was inadvertently advocating for compound rebellion, allowing for middle-class revolutionaries to speak to the common person in modified language that nevertheless spoke to both differently.

To that, this chasing the whore brings us to Coleridge as something rather bitter to chase with sweeter tinctures. He lived to old age, and wrote about loftier things while Goya screamed about the horrors of war and Lewis giggled about gay Madonnas ripping evil monks apart:

(artist: Washington Allston)

Kathryn Kummer notes that Wordsworth’s partner in crime, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “believes that common language [did] not apply to all classes; and therefore, should not be practiced” (source: British Literature Wiki, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” 2018). Then again, Coleridge couldn’t write poetry after he stopped doing laudanum (a tincture of alcohol and cocaine) and—as we acknowledged in our thesis volume:

Coleridge achingly bemoaned the presence of Matthew Lewis’ The Monk having been written by a MP (Member of Parliament). He looked down on the Gothic as “cheap” and base, like spitting off a bridge to try and communicate grand ideas (as Dale Townshend once told me in class; “his Gothic cathedrals were envisioned as holy and filled with light”—to which I replied that Coleridge was merely pissing in the wind [relative to the rise of impolite forms of counterculture]. Dale merely shook his head and grumbled at my contribution). Or as London Skoffler writes,

Coleridge may have used Gothic elements in his writing, but he would have been vehemently opposed to this suggestion. He criticized Gothic literature, specifically the sexually charged story The Monk by Gregory Matthew Lewis, as corrupting and perverse (Townshend). So why was Christabel so sexual? Perhaps, as Ann Radcliffe says of terror and horror, it is because Coleridge did not graphically depict his characters’ actions. Instead, he only hinted at what may have happened. Coleridge leaves a lot of interpretation up to his readers, forcing them to use his beloved imagination, to decide for themselves (source: “Coleridge’s Gothic Romanticism,” 2019).

In other words, Coleridge was a privileged nerd who—like Jameson’s latter-day dismissal of the Gothic, but also Austen’s parody of it or Radcliffe’s “armoring” in more delicate novels—was heavily predisposed to prescribing proper modes of sexual expression: veils. Not only does doing so cater to the status quo (which will sexualize the veil anyways); it remains inadequate from a holistic, dialectical-material point-of-view (which Gothic Communism demands) [source].

To be frank, refusing to look at something “improper”—and by extension playing with and examining it—makes you increasingly ignorant and stupid; i.e., from Coleridge to Jameson to Botting about capital and the natural world and things “of nature” to whore out. They’re the statues with blind eyeballs, but nonetheless thinking they’re right, correct, noble, and good, etc (meaning on the side of the Patriarchy/God and capital-by-another name—the Sublime, Utopia[6] and so on)!

Call it what you want; a pimp is a pimp, a Pygmalion always looking to pimp (thus rape) Galatea/nature-as-monstrous-feminine for profit! ACAB, cops and capital; APAB, meaning pimps, Pygmalions, prudes and profit—i.e., they’ll invent whatever they like/summon whatever they want to have control over whatever they deem inferior to themselves, the whore’s revenge being to break that perceived superiority by developing Gothic Communism to emasculate such Cartesian, heteronormative and settler-colonial structures and temples, one and all! Fuck ’em and their prescriptions of wandering womb and bicycle face sullying Gothic: “Look, something I can pimp and control under my own tentative position!” Being prudish and sanctimonious in one’s colonizer position doesn’t erase what it functionally is!

(source)

Furthermore, doing so makes you liable to get hurt or deprives you of an enriched existence, the Gothic seemingly saying over and over to any who will heed the whore, “What was that? Maybe you should go and check…”; or “Try this out—it’s really fun!” or “Where do monsters come from and what are they for?” Beware the uncurious, but also those who prepare a myopic, “correct” way of looking at things that abjects everything else; i.e., the reactionary attacking you, the moderate speaking for you instead versus listening to you, or the corporate hack/academic bigwig selling you fake monster copies and passing them off as “doing their part and yours.” Pure, xenophobic claptrap. Per Castricano, playing with the dead as not infallible gods is how we learn from the past; i.e., by not denying our impulses, thus what makes us human: our empathy towards those policed together under the same shadowy crimes that white supremacists like Coleridge apologized bigotedly for without fail; re: gagging Medusa behind an English hyperreal façade.

Christ, enough about snobs! Let’s close out this short chapter with some food for thought (four pages), then segue into the Demon Module’s conclusion (thus that of the entire Monster Volume)!

First, rebellion is whorish, thus fun; i.e., as Catherine Spooner rightly points out in her 2017 book, Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic—meaning “fun with monsters.” Where all monsters operate as pimps or whores to some degree (as I argue), they can be consequently and performatively transformed through function; i.e., as things to play with and learn from in fresh xenophilic, even “necrophilic” ways; re: the Medusa, among other things, is a zombie, but looks can be deceiving on either side of a larger cryptomimetic refrain: slated for domination, but challenging that on the usual surfaces and buffered thresholds’ recursive returns to old graves (malls or otherwise!

(artist: Mari Sappho)

This often, I would add, happens musically and to mounting degrees of descriptive sexuality and all-around prurience (a concept we’ll explore more of in Volume Three, Chapter One); it can also be an operatic way of gradually bringing people out of state-imposed culture shock, thus pacification and xenophobia—i.e., doing so by waking them up like Morpheus did to Neo; re: regarding nature as already raped and dead behind the decaying illusions housing the latter’s caged brain as mall-like: by opening their minds, meaning to the possibility that the whore isn’t a figment of one’s imagination at all, but instead needs to be summoned repeatedly and heeded to break Capitalist Realism with!

“Once more unto the breach!” Even if that means about talking about impolite things or scary ideas (re: the mall is dead into the future), it must be done because our entire existence is impolite in state eyes pimp the monstrous-feminine whore of nature; i.e., once damning evidence comes to light about the falseness of state and state proponent alike—and “sets” the reluctant public’s assigned saviors’ reputations, at the very least, “on fire” for fun—it should nonetheless be done as many times as needed to raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and awareness to new states of maturity concerning profit, thus genocide. This goes above and beyond old dead dinosaurs like Coleridge or Jameson, and threatens more active and currently harmful people like Ian Kochinski; i.e., pimping the usual victims under capital that his forebears did (we’ll discuss the corrupting influence of perfidious “allies” like Kochinski and others, in Volume Three, Chapter Four).

However, I also think that (a)sexuality as liberated in revolutionary language interrogating the whore’s trauma to human the harvest (thus expose the state as inhumane) needs to be weighed and considered; i.e., through its surface level and deeper dialectical-material context as part of the same summoning cycle. What’s legit and what ain’t? Is it “politeness-trapping” if you mention sex in a seemingly private discussion weighed upon by commonplace public attitudes; i.e., even if that private place in a graduate-level classroom at MMU where your tenured professor is talking about the size of Satan’s cock according to Ira Levin, and a sudden mention of personal anecdotes in relation to one’s own sex life causes people to freeze like statues? Are these boobies being sold to you for profit tied to a famous franchise known for having them in cartoonish ways? Or are they opening up your mind provided you know how to think about them, sexually and asexually?

(artist: Blazbaros)

This conversation must happen dialectically according to opposing material forces that already exist punching down at the alien whore of nature; i.e., as something to preemptively attack again out of deliberately misguided state arguments for revenge (re: false flags). Regardless, a common enemy of effective sex-positive education isn’t just the powers-that-be (or lateral extensions of them and their influence), but also cognitive estrangement as a buffer created by moderate, cowardly and power-abusive academics; re: Foucault, Sartre and Beauvoir occupying the same problematic register as Coleridge and Jameson; i.e., any prospecting imperialist keen “to call dibs/plant flags,” but also open-to-the-public whiners like Coleridge clutching their pearls and wringing their hands. Bent on cataloging knowledge through safe, accommodated, monasterial formalities, this abstraction of ideas doesn’t actually challenge the status quo; it’s a failure of iconoclastic praxis on their part! One might even argue “on purpose,” insofar as results trump intent (the latter used to cloak bad actors with)! Just look around you at the dead malls we whores call home to see how wrong men like Coleridge are, regardless of intent. It literally doesn’t matter save as something to navigate during the cryptonymy process reversing abjection!

By defending their own reputations and positions as accommodated intellectuals, any so-called “auteur” can demonstrate how their current positions matter more to them than distributing useful knowledge to a larger working audience. Good praxis is less about teaching them to think for themselves—i.e., foregoing xenophilia through the suitably chaotic ways of synthesized praxis that help liberate worker minds—and more speaking as the whore does to the targets of dead dogma: in naked-not-naked ways that people actually think, feel, create, consume, and process information with. Whether intentional or not, this functionally amounts to class betrayal if such things are pimped. It also extends to canonical auteurs with revolutionary ideas—meaning those who sometimes need a little help from their employees to seemingly appear better than they actually are; i.e., from those they’re pimping or otherwise bossing around: a warlord canonizing his own half-real Pygmalion fantasies, onstage and off!

(source)

George Lucas, for example, explained how Star Wars famously took anti-totalitarian/anti-American ideas and communicated them to an American audience (re: AMC+’s “George Lucas on Star Wars Being Anti-Authoritarian,” 2018). What Lucas left out of the narrative is how Mark Hamill and company hated his original dialog—so much so, in fact, that they used to joke about tying Lucas up before forcing him to read his own lines at gunpoint: “George, who talks like this?” Hamill would exclaim, on Johnny Carson in 1977 (Game’s Radar, 2017). The lines were changed, saving the film (according to Hamill; the latter-day prequels did fairly well despite their ropey script, but also rode on the coattails of a billion-dollar franchise personally directed by Lucas at the helm—”billionaire Marxism,” in other words). Yet, there’s still “no underwear in space,” Lucas would argue; i.e., cultivating whatever double standards he tended to in his own canon’s pastoral (e.g., bikinis, above being curiously allowed because Carrie Fisher [echoes of Mark Fisher] was the director’s Galatea to groom, festoon and pimp as he chose, not her). But workers and their relationships nonetheless trumped singular men, mid-praxis! For good or ill, Lucas relied on his workers to tell whatever story all of them had in mind!

As such, there won’t be too much name-dropping in Volume Three (well, maybe a little bit). Instead, the arguments contained therein take academic ideas, communicating their gnosis as accessibly as possible without sacrificing the overall message. Doing so, said volume concerns praxis, thus marries academic ideas to sexually descriptive, xenophilic dialogs between real-world people synthesizing praxis; re: doing so how people actually talk and strut their stuff (the whore’s paradox). Such quests for the Communist Numinous include

• making Gothic art (thus arguments) about sex work; i.e., as a wonderful thing that has become loaded with systemic trauma (of class, culture and race betrayals), said liberation by us seeking not to separate them, but liberate sex work (thus all work): as a poetically enriching activity inside the dead mall of capital’s token frontiers—with us sharing said space with our foes while distancing ourselves from trauma, onstage and off, during the rememory and cryptonymy process’ calculated risk!
• responding to popular media (thus Gothic poetics) about sex and trauma in various creative ways; i.e., which then involve theatrically guerrilla (counterterrorist) exchanges of labor commonplace under Capitalism, and which recursively illustrate mutual consent during ludo-Gothic BDSM’s own dialectical-material context!
• less rehabilitating canonical monsters, and more rescuing their whore/pimp aesthetic from a colonized xenophobic; i.e., as Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism continues to develop, describing a kind of “monster war” occurring between Capitalist and Commie variants of the Numinous as dualistic.

As we said at the very start of the Monster Volume, monsters cannot be destroyed, only repurposed towards different aims. For the state, a particular arrangement will always come back, and for proletarian forms—the proverbial spectres of Marx—such arguments are equally die-hard. We must replace the former with the latter during our own cryptomimesis, thereby camping canon to challenge Capitalist Realism in our own daily lives; i.e., camping the twin trees of Capitalism during oppositional synthesis and its praxial catharsis, which confront and dismantle state trifectas, monopolies and trauma, but also bad echoes (e.g., skinheads originally being punks that decayed into Neo-Nazis). They echo us, and we echo them, our own cryptonymy opposing theirs in the same grander chambers thereof! A mall is just a castle to court however hauntologically we wish, doubling in liminal duality ever onwards through ergodic motion and labor tied to nature and the imaginary past!

(artist: Armored Elf)

So forget/forgoe monopolies; the elite and their servants (moderate or not) are dangerously cut off, beyond accommodated intellectuals and extending reactionarily through holistic tokenism through hard and soft power ranging from the CIA and World Economic Forum to a legion of apologists and not-far-enough dickheads like Jameson and Coleridge devaluing what Lewis, Radcliffe, Shelley and others touched upon before Marx and Engels blazed their own trail glazing Medusa’s asshole (while Freud and a ton of other white supremacists leading up to Jameson and others like him who turned a blind eye towards Medusa; re: prefaced by Coleridge and other gentrified fucks who could afford to willfully obtuse/morally superior to the whore’s they pimped in some shame or form): always hungry for tribute!

(artist: Lera)

When humanizing harvest, then, it ain’t over ’til it’s over! So when the Man comes around, show him your Aegis—meaning to whatever degree of show and conceal you prefer using your own restless labyrinths’ Xs marking the spot (to hit the castle-in-the-flesh where it hurts and/or feels good, above)! Regardless of the senses being invoked, the whore is always a martyr to camp martyrdom with playful psychosexual forms that reliably get people’s attention. Using ludo-Gothic BDSM, we experience more per sense than those “in the cave” can imagine with all five of them. For Coleridge and similar Pygmalions, anything that doesn’t match their previous Omelas is garbage. Fuck that noise (which we’ll get to, in Volume Three); better to be a scoundrel and die with one’s dignity intact—i.e., fighting for a worthy cause like universal liberation; e.g., Berlin from Money Heist (below, 2019)—than to be the state’s usual pimp or token whore (the classic antifascist vs fascist refrain)! No pasarán! Ciao, bella, ciao!

James Baldwin once said, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” To those who came before, those who are, or those of future generations exploited by Capitalism and its masters—this next volume is entirely for you. May it lead you out of the darkness of the crypt and into a better world, one you imagine for yourselves without worker trauma, abuse, or sexual exploitation; i.e., a parody not just of the Pygmalion legend but also Beauvoir’s lolita syndrome revived through Re-animator or Frankenstein‘s liminal, dualistic satire of the Renaissance man; e.g., from Hamlet to Faust to Da Vinci himself being a queer-coded deviant with some truth to it (from necrophile to pedophile, vis-à-vis mad science [and hate crimes, sexual assault] walking the tightrope between what is ethical and what gains entry to forbidden knowledge through notably unethical means; re: acquiring freshly-dead corpses in a time of religious hegemony and enforcement versus the master/apprentice argument being its own form of secularized Promethean-to-Faustian dogma to instill and enact against Humanity and nature for the state).

And as you imagine a post-scarcity planet through your own labor exchanges, remember that we—those who came before you and the ruins of our mighty nostalgic splendor (re: Krispy and their formidable Aegis/a nice Galatean bow to put on the present from the past we give to you)—are by your side; i.e., watching over you as you grow into the people you were always meant to be! As you follow us into Hell as ushered back into your home during the Imperial Boomerang bringing the bunny home to roost, fear no evil for we are with you; re: laying eggs like Yoshi the dragon to give you weird-ass superpowers, floating through the warm cold of space; i.e., with our “lunar orbs,” below, giving you extra 1-Ups, during ludo-Gothic BDSM! Pathological transubstantiation, from autopsy to rehabilitation, it’s a miracle! That’s no moon, it’s a space station, but one privateered by Medusa’s children and their Aegises felt on a traveling motherland: a boat of whores echoing the Big Whore! “Oh, what a time we had / Livin’ underground / I move to station number five / See you next time around!” [re: Montrose’s “Space Station No.5,” 1973]. Hell, as authored by us, awaits!

Your Commie Mommy,

—Persephone van der Waard

(artist, left: Krispy Tofuuu; right: Passion Peachy)

 

The Caterpillar and the Wasp; or, What’s to Come

“You are no longer butterflies. You. Are. MURDERFLIES!”

—Brock Samson, The Venture Bros. (2003)

 

I originally wrote this conclusion in April 2024; i.e., in the spirit of camping medieval poetics, and to cap this volume off with one that suits its unique (sui generis) Humanities flavor. A tip of the spear, the iceberg, the penis—I now want to close the book on the Monster Volume, doing so with a poetic apologia to whores. As part of that whole, I shall do so in defense of nature as monstrous-feminine (suitably written last in my usual backwards process: from Medusa to “Monsters, Magic and Myth” to this); i.e., from the egg-laying Hares of Easter (and Giger’s own surreal version) comes another hauntological throwback to evoke during ludo-Gothic BDSM: the caterpillar and the wasp as aliens to hug during said dialectic.

Earlier in this series, we discussed Gothic Communism and caterpillars; i.e., a wasp eating a caterpillar to develop Gothic Communism (re: “My Quest Began with a Riddle“). And if that seems totally gross, just imagine a big fat, super-cute caterpillar eating a leaf instead of a wasp eating a caterpillar (“Om nom nom!”). Yet even that is terrifying for the imagination-starved when it involves their home as something to permanently change. For them, any change is radical change, radical change death, and death nothing to them; i.e., they’re menticided, deprived of the medieval (thus Gothic) power needed to use their imaginations to liberate themselves with (re: Coleridge). Canonized as such, the Gothic merely becomes another means of raising harmful boundaries, caterpillars included.

Except, the inverse is true when the Gothic does what it historically has always done: resist canonization (“I am become death!” the little guy squeaks, “destroyer of worlds!”). Armed with proper vision, the way through the maze suddenly becomes clear as crystal: through intersectional solidarity—as devils writing our own fate (versus masters of the state, or moderates like Jameson tragically sealing worker fates to benefit the state while posing as rebels). To escape, we whores again have to imagine the future of a past that was tragically cut short by capital, thus making it a past-past; i.e., one that tragically never was but could be if we only opened our minds and, far from hauntologically canceling the future, instead used it to free our minds (as my arguments demonstrate, duality applying to all Four Gs; i.e., our oppositional doubles resonating with me as something to impart to future workers).

Of this whore’s revenge, two things:

One, the Gothic has power through creation as largely imaginary but still half-real. Again, I get furious when anyone says otherwise; i.e., that the Gothic has “no power” to “actually challenge” (meaning actually threaten) established canonical norms and material conditions; re (from “Modularity and Class”):

This is why I get really mad when anyone says the Gothic has “no power,” thus no way to “actually challenge”—meaning “actually threaten”—established canonical norms (or that only certain voices have the “right stuff” to speak to power—i.e., academics; e.g., Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, who we’ll discuss in a moment). Like, it’s only the power of creation as historically devoted to upending the status quo. No big deal, totally unrelated (sarcasm)!

The fact remains that if the Gothic didn’t have power then the state wouldn’t regulate illusions, including monsters, as things to play with and perform through paradox; they wouldn’t acknowledge it or waste their time with neoliberal cages (re: academia) sequestering such voices to a privileged few as hording knowledge: in a rat-race “fame game” first, helping people outside academia a distance second (or fourth). As such, people who attack the Gothic unironically (or restrict it to/only contribute towards hopelessly patrician discourse) likewise uphold Capitalism unironically, contributing to its defense (and often in bad faith). […] Words are easy to find if you have imagination, especially if your imagination isn’t myopic thanks to Capitalist Realism. The way out is inside, using imagination through Gothic poetics to set ourselves free (source).

The Gothic’s power stems and thrives from its historically dualistic ability to create things that question and upend canonical norms (and ostensibly immutable) godly positions ipso facto; i.e., through medieval poetics, hence imagination, as various critical lenses (and theories) working in service to workers, namely whores and their revenge. Whereas serfs formerly challenged the Divine Right of Kings, we whores can challenge the state now and all its defenders; i.e., by using the Gothic as a powerful option for universal liberation: by bursting bubbles as whores do, teaching others how to love with—you guessed it—caterpillars and wasps.

The idea, then, surely isn’t “vote with our wallets” because voting under Capitalism is a rigged problem; i.e., it’s bourgeois politics that serve profit through a) the commodifying of struggles in canonical media, and b) established systems rigged against the oppressed. Their advocacy is de facto. Also, contrary to what the commercialized monomyth might have taught you, the quest for a better world generally happens in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with profit at all; e.g., videogames can inspire us through home entertainment, but these are classically pacification devices geared towards the American middle class/nuclear model; i.e., the abject counterfeit, not its ghost! We have a right to do this because we, as workers, have a right to exist regardless of what the state thinks; i.e., to enact the whore’s revenge through reclaimed terror language they cannot monopolize, mid-paradox.

To it, the state is not all-powerful and it has no logical claim to our bodies, labor or lives; the poetics (and their infinite forms) used to describe these struggles and conditions likewise belong to us as struggling to be free—to transform from the state’s false chrysalises, thus become true to ourselves and our right as natural, unalienable monstrous-feminine fuck toys: the butterflies we’re meant to become by taking our habitat back from them; re (from “A Song Written in Decay”):

Re: our “Teaching” refrain, the caterpillar and the wasp. Jadis often had to explain to children about the short lifespan of butterflies—that they wake up, eat and eat and eat, take a dump and fall asleep, wake up as a butterfly and bone until they croak: “That’s not so bad, is it?” she’d ask them. But furthermore, they have the right to be butterflies, even if for a moment or never but trying to break free under false chrysalises arresting their development (which, for humans, is partly self-authored). The undead struggle—to survive and become what we’re meant to be in opposition to the state rotting us—is ultimately what matters (source).

However cute or silly a caterpillar may seem, then, its entire existence remains predicated on struggle as built into the natural world and the material world as informed by human struggles adopting natural ones to essentialize one of two things; re: workers or the state, ludo-Gothic BDSM designed to give workers power though playing with heavily controlled substances.

Regardless of monstrous type, there is no in-between; the state is always hungry for more than its fair share. By seeking cryptonymies to resist their options of raping us, we’re fighting back whether we want to or not. By fighting back at all, our existence becomes ironic to the state’s idealization of workers as completely alien and fetishized (for them to rape by design); i.e., our Halloween-candy alienation and fetishization as reclaimed, hence what terrifies the elite to no end: no more free food. They cry in anguish, “God forbid!” and short their circuits/shit their pants. Such is the Aegis in our hands (the page after next).

(artist: Cavity Colors)

Gothicists play with their food. Yet while this defense of caterpillars becoming murderflies might seem quaint, horrifying and bizarre, all of this fortunately means that—like The Last Unicorn‘s wayward magician—we have all the power we need if only we dare look for it; re: “There is no Robin Hood. Robin Hood is a myth; we are the reality!” To it, the magic chose the form, not us; but we are still the bearer, dwelling and messenger from whose tendrils it springs from. “Magic, do as you will!” then, becomes a merry-go-round statement of see-sawing clichés, fetishes, and delights in duality’s liminal expression: “That’s what heroes are for!”

For us, that means not just transforming to hide from power but dueling with our own weaponized whore’s potential for class, culture and race war leveled against state forms whilst on the beaches (above). We’re not just in it for ourselves as individual, atomized agents, then, but fighting while entrenched as an intersectional, solarized collective’s pedagogy of the oppressed living in the shadow of state violence; i.e., for those we love as harmed by the state and its insane, all-consuming greed—in short, by fighting back with all the irony and power of a pissed-off unicorn.

All history is writ in class struggle, Marx argued, which I extend to monster whores and pimps fighting for worker rights vs state’s rights. It’s essentially the basic same idea, but gayer and more inclusive, thus more sex-positive than Marx was; i.e., as determined by our bargains giving and taking while camping his ghost through various inclusions he seldom explored, himself. In doing so, we live in the long shadows that men like him cast, but camp said shadows with our own awesome tools; i.e., whatever the register or form, flow (of power) determines function, not aesthetic. Development concerns combative redistribution, one whose oscillating flow happens dualistically during a constant, tenebrous, liminal game of push-pull: the Gothic’s reclamation unfolding inside shared shadowy zones of performance; i.e., including of (and with) our monstrous-feminine bodies, labor and Gothic poetic expression taking power anisotropically back for us from the state, during ludo-Gothic BDSM!

This forbidden exchange/feeding and radically transformative trauma’s strange appetites extend to caterpillars and butterflies or some other such “harmless” thing (a grub-like cock, blow) taking its power back by refusing to be stepped on/cannibalized by wasps (except in the ways it wants; i.e., “rape/death” play as a reversal of the state’s harmful forms to empower ourselves with; e.g., size difference in terms of bodies, but also genitals—power to be near and seize for profound, often hilarious[7] contrast): a dog with a bone, a magician with a wand wielding great cryptonymy reversing abjection on the Aegis!

(artists: Bay and Beat)

So do we whores fight for and love each other because we’re all we’ve got; i.e., as whores, we keep each other’s secrets and give each other comfort during existence as fundamentally imperiled; e.g., as Indigenous, queer and/or disabled (all of which the state will pimp inside the same modular-but-intersecting persecution networks).

For us, life under capital equals a constant, ancient struggle of survival and brothel espionage under police duress inside state shadows; i.e., protection and shelter as things the state cannot give us, because its own advertised protectors of workers actually place property before people; re: there must always be a slave, thus a whore to pimp, the wasp side of the terrorist/counterterrorist exchange enslaving state prey to eat as such. Except, while canon speaks to wasps eating us alive, the anisotropic nature of duality also concerns the iconoclastic ability for “two can play at that game.” By swapping roles—which is easy enough to do, mid-cryptonymy—workers can cuckoo the state; i.e., as the wasp eating the latter’s grubs parasitically from within! Brutal.

As such, the whore having Medusa’s revenge against profit (thus the state and its brothels) speaks to workers as “mad, bad and dangerous to know” in the eyes of such bad actors! To it, we’re the creatures of the night unchained—the forces of darkness taking back what’s ours through cute terror and squeaky “doom” to joust in competition against its regular instruments of profit (token or not); i.e., with the state, not ourselves: agency as a right its armies and agents cannot permanently invade and coerce! Keeping with that, we’ll rob Churchill’s corpse blind and declare, “We will never surrender!”

Power then, is an illusion that, when harnessed by us through an iconoclastic Gothic’s paradoxes, oxymorons and mixed metaphors, collectively helps our shackles disappear (whores of the world, unite); i.e., a mind prison having raped our brains for so long (through Capitalist Realism) suddenly evaporating like Radcliffe’s veiled banditti. Because those mental chains fetter our ability to imagine anything better while we’re alive, we must target them deliberately whenever able; i.e., to lose those chains is to make the dream of a better world, mid-crisis, become lucid; re: insofar as Gothic poetics regularly manifest in day-to-day conversations and operations, all the time.

Suitably half-real, the mode’s monstrous-feminine arguments can be seen in the meta dialogs taking place. In turn, however silly or serious those are, they take hammers (force, below) to break and rebuild a harmful way of thinking (about nature, labor and sex) that—like a bone set wrong—will definitely hurt to reconfigure. Furthermore, it can affect how we think, thus see and experience the world as we’re born into its harmful, state-appointed roles. Equally terrifying—as we operate on ourselves—is the Gothic at large; i.e., writ in feelings of prolonged obscurity and disintegration inherited near Promethean power sources: the Imperial Core, whose operating on can feel a bit like do-it-yourself brain surgery (to attack the state is to attack a false and harmful sense of self inside-outside ourselves)!

(artist: Bob Camp)

And it kind of is (similar to how the Gothic is “almost holy”), except our procedures aren’t mutilative and invasive like actual lobotomies. They just feel that way because the state wants them to; i.e., how scared people view what we do as criminally and terminally insane. To this, pro-state workers can often still imagine; they just can’t imagine a better world than Capitalism because it forces them, through material things that affect their vision to work and work and work until they drop dead, and to see work and enslavement as “life” and liberation as “death,” unthinkable, nothing to them.

As if! High in my tower above the clouds, I’m the sassy Lady of Shallot—a cushy medievalist who has the option to imagine a better world. In turn, why not grant this option (thus vision) to others using what they have to wage counterterror purely by virtue of performing liberation; i.e., as already terrifying to the state? We have nothing to lose and everything to gain by making them shit their pants (thus ready to take our demands seriously and at face value). We tilt at vague ephemeral windmills, but are onto something big: two hyperobjects, thus two ouroborotic giants locked in perpetual argument, contest, a duel for supremacy! Communism and Capitalism never stop fighting!

By comparison, pro-state thinkers include moderates like Jameson (whose service to the state is fascism-in-disguise); i.e., menticided fools defending the state through DARVO by seeing it as the caterpillar[8] just eating the leaf and us as an evil wasp up to no good (ignoring the fact that wasps eat/are part of nature, too). Their compromises and lack of healthy vision put the chains back on themselves and us. The ticket, then, is emancipation of the mind and body together through Gothic. If one starts, the other will follow hand-in-hand (with polyamorous love unafraid to make friends of all sorts—for sex, but also general companionship and inspiration, ace or otherwise; all contribute towards a better future).

(artists: Bay)

Our focus is obviously the Superstructure. Let’s take what this volume has discussed, the monstrous past, and bring it into the future still yet to arrive: our own “ode to Psyche,” synthesizing praxis Gothic Communism is not a quick way out, because we are not trying to escape our home, but rather seek to transform it inside of itself (often in concentric, anisotropic miniature); but Gothic Communism is a way through Capitalism while inside it and using all the arrows of our proverbial quiver’s disposal, during revolution as historically ergodic. We want to speak to others, including straight allies, in language they are given as we are, thus more prone to understand from us transmuting dogma by camping it as queer people/whores do. There’s always a medieval element at play.

As such, I could quote acts of chivalric bravery in the face of dragons: “Still one more life of pain; cut well, old friend, and then farewell!” Except, Capitalism (and its Realism) are not so much a dragon to slay at all, but transform into our home, thus us and our surroundings with it; i.e., of our home as draconian and whose ownership/status is largely a matter of perception. Jameson was right, insofar the present space and time is the only place we have, except he was wrong as well; it’s one one to alter however we wish by using whatever we can however we can, including a people’s cultural understanding of the imaginary past as Gothic would have it. In turn, such slings and arrows of outrageous fortune routinely yield adventuresome roundabouts (ergodic, nonlinear routes) and strings of castles (of castles) that, like any conquest, occur territorially and in sequence; i.e., towards a serendipitous (and handsome) final goal: liberation as attained during class, culture and race conflict as eternal (workers vs the state).

The way forward clearly isn’t straightforward (why would it be when the elite use everything they can [always defaulting to violence] to lie, cheat and confuse us?) but the path to take is—the Gothic. Solidarity as monsters is the only would to rule in Hell, versus serve in Heaven. All lie on the same Aegis as contested; i.e., per the medieval, boundaries elide amid historical-material constants. “Death” can be expressed a priori as classically inert, inanimate, but per the Gothic reinvented takes on fresh iconoclastic life; i.e., as challenging the state’s canonical ordering of things to avenge ourselves at their loss. The problem with duality (as something to solve and live with, not to discount) is that it cannot be monopolized by anyone any more than violence, terror and morphological expression! Caterpillar and wasps are simply qualities to grant unto whores for a variety of aims, liberation included!

Instead of unironic submission, then, our use of such poetry is diametrically opposed to the state; i.e., by wiggling free of  their traps to frustrate them (as guerrillas historically have done, and to which I did with Jadis, arguing against their position with the state through the same basic language). They have their deathly monstrous Trojans and castled walls, as do we; but we’re the prisoners of the slave colony and the very alien force whose execution is routinely justified, our death warrant prompted issued by people monopolizing the same poetics for the state; i.e., in defense of it, pimping us one and all.

(artist: Keighla Knight)

Per the abjection process demonizing nature as us-versus-them, monstrous-feminine whore, Gothic canon views us as the alien inside their house; i.e., “the enemy at the gates” rattling Caesar’s progeny. So it’s time to marshal our forces to better show those pimping us out of revenge that this is our land, thus our bodies, labor and shelter/castles-in-the-flesh (and what is written on said flesh, above, Psyche taking many forms). The state is the ultimate foe, not workers (except traitors, of course, whores policing whores); and the ultimate eternal battle is waged as much in our minds from moment-to-living-moment: as things to project outwards into the material world, on and of our bodies. Whatever occurs/appears, function determines flow and form follows function, letting us play with whatever we want to reverse abjection provided it’s sex-positive. That’s how the Aegis and ludo-Gothic BDSM work: getting back whatever you put into it (monster love, in my case), love is our revenge, and I love all my friends shown here. They deserve all the hugs I can give!

(artist: Nyx)

And if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again! “Madness” is a method to repeat, generally built on older attempts[9] that, when reassembled through habit by creatures thereof, help us see differently regarding liberation as second-nature; i.e., an unchanging goal to move endlessly towards empathy as such. If you don’t “get it” in the present moment, you’re simply not there yet and might never be. But again, this is a group effort, and one that marshals the willing and eager but also the curious and capable (e.g., herbo Amazons, “chonk, stronk and ready to bonk,” as Nyx is): as able to dance with death during sex and war liquified into a class-conscious exchange, mid-duality—a butterfly or wasp inside the grub’s cocoon, but also on our grub-like bodies pleading for insertion; i.e., to put us out of our misery! Delicious devastation, see us free!

(artist: Nyx)

Because there isn’t a monopoly on such toys—nor their awesomely child-like potential to restore nature by challenging profit and the state to have the whore’s revenge—we’re dealing in a process that effectively never ends; i.e., in a great Ozymandian Work that less goes on forever unfinished in the bare and level sands, but rather like a breath of fresh air fuels us to keep at it pushing through the dunes: that we can wrestle such things out of bullies’ hands to speak for ourselves; re: with our bodies as weapons, thus our sex (and gender trouble) as a flexible social-sexual weapon that helps develop Gothic Communism (and love between workers) in opposition to pro-state forms!

Like Bottom’s Dream, the dream of Communism enshrines in us and our friends’ shared love; i.e., becoming a rare and fatal thing to drive us “mad,” but in ways useful to development in small; e.g., to say her ass looks fat as a compliment she wants to hear (versus a tool of shame) and educate future workers with: Queen Maeb’s stellar bedonk, a mirrored moon shining love for all things great and small!

So while a return to balance assisted by oral cultures and technology is hauntological, it isn’t centrism provided we cheat the pimp and break their ethnocentric, good/evil refrains tied to Capitalist Realism raping the land! To break said Realism is to free the imagination through love that frees us through those trying to unironically capture us for themselves; e.g., Nyx’ ass loving to reclaim anal as a terror weapon (re: “Reclaiming Anal“), but also PIV sex, too!

(artist: Nyx)

Deprivatization happens on the Aegis, Medusa’s peach/pie reversing abjection through “pull” towards “land back” as “bodies back,” too; i.e., attracting cuties, laying pipe, taking dick, etc, as we make footprints “in the sand” as a kind of delicious waiting for penetration (to savor it, below); re: dots for us to connect with and for others to all bind together because we collectively feel safe by our vision as one in good faith building towards a better tomorrow today looking at the past as Gothic poetry applied to future forms we leave behind: to give as well as receive, versus canon teaching us to fear all forms of exchange, save as taking endlessly from whores to give up to the elite pimping all of nature.

(artist: Nyx)

On and on, beyond our lives and what we can currently see while alive, such “ancient” dereliction bleeds into what others once-alive and alive-again in another world, another time have themselves passed on; i.e., fragments of the Medusa as a creature of chaos that yields many forms for those under solidarity as something to pick up the pieces of and reassemble together across time and space. Giving to a queenly nature feels good, because a nature treated well treats us in kind!

In turn, closeness with Her Majesty is a Numinous feeling and place we occupy together as a collective, holistic matter of conjoined inspiration (a very queer phenomenon): “We may meet in another life, but not again in this one!” Time is a circle, all the Medusa’s past forms shine gloriously through in her various avatars posing for the viewer on the Aegis! All our yesterdays become a wall built on trust and selective penetration, the Great Corruptor a healing force destroying that which destroys and imprisons nature-as-whore! The state is incompatible not just with life, but mutual consent as something to illustrate; i.e., the monomyth heroic is always a rapist, the whore always their that we subvert, mid-iconoclasm!

(exhibit 60e2: Models: top-far-left: Persephone van der Waard; top-mid-left: Harmony Corrupted; top-mid-right: Crow; right and bottom-far-left: Blxxd Bunny; bottom-mid-right: Bay; artist: top-far-right and bottom-far left: Persephone van der Waard; bottom-mid-left: For us, “too many cooks” don’t spoil the broth; i.e., solidarity means disagreement about smaller things [signposts, but also methodology[10]] while united on bigger things [goalposts, ethics]. Like a collective of cooks in a kitchen, then, there are many hands and bodies available to supply ingredients and inspiration as needed; i.e., it’s not about vertical arrangements of power but a group effort that continues to fight over and over against the state as the Great Destroyer of our age. Well, bully for them. In the Internet Age, we can make incredible and interconnected projects like this book to attain intersectional solidarity and, as night follows the day, a pedagogy of the oppressed that is always being added to; i.e., one that fosters universal empathy [for workers and nature, not the state] through praxial catharsis that reclaims whores through monster language: as a humanizing device taken away from Cartesian hegemons during oppositional praxis; re [from “A Song Written in Decay“]: “From most complex to most simple, good praxis requires a successful pedagogy of the oppressed, which requires synthesis, which requires the basics: anger/gossip, monsters and camp.”)

Like Henson’s fearsome Dark Crystal, such foreboding sight must be seen through strange cartoonish (abstracting) blindfolds that help us avoid, thus see through, Capitalist Realism; i.e., Capitalism alienates and sexualizes everything (re: Marx and I, dancing together). So total liberation, including the imaginary and the sexual, starts with using the “almost holy” paradoxes of the Gothic; re: to weaponize the sexual and the warlike as already canonized in everyday (secular) speech: the world as dying in ways we restore through empathy as equally radical! To stumble upon a whore and befriend is to stumble across a unicorn and suddenly release: they are real, and each once is special!

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

As such, it’s our demon castle and undead army to wage war with, doing so for (a)sexual reasons that include public nudism; i.e., as a classic weapon of the Medusa’s virgin/whore, thus caterpillar/wasp; re: Blxxd Bunny loving such abilities, insofar as it gives both them and me power to shape and work with: speaking to “rape” in ancient oral forms bleeding into written ones (this book series a weird hybrid of such exchanges). This, in turn, starts with a caterpillar and wasp (synonymous, for our purposes, with any animal; e.g., the rabbit or turtle, insofar as cryptonymy goes). So let’s make them ours by reclaiming the awesome power of the alien, thus of all ludo-Gothic BDSM and the palliative Numinous, and monsters as critical lenses that push capital towards post-scarcity with pre-capitalist nostalgia in demonstrably non-fatal forms; i.e., monsters—whether undead, demonic and/or animalistic—that don’t dehumanize (alienate and fetishize) workers the way capital historically-materially does: to land and occupant as monstrous-feminine, thus a trick to turn and build empires that fractally recursively extend the brothel outwards into the universe. From Columbus to Victor Frankenstein to Peter Weyland to Trump to Athetos, a pimp is a pimp, and whores set themselves free by spurning such advances!

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

These communal antipredation maneuvers include whatever sandcastles we build in the beachhead; i.e., each one extending in a dialectical-material series stepping towards something great—meaning asleep and “dead,” insofar as it is not truly dead, but a goddess of creation speaking asexually about life/death resurrection and transformative sex work through shared, informed labor exchange (the above video from a commission); i.e., waiting patiently to take shape and wake up—a possible future made through magical assembly, selective absorption, and a confusion of the senses that sing profoundly as a chorus of whores: all part of our Song of Infinity resonating across space and time.

For example, Bunny is ace, thus keen to show the Medusa as not just a dead queen/sexual being for the sake of sexual gratification at all, but likewise someone who has awesome nails, hair and ink while purposefully having surrounded themselves with cozy images of calculated-risk danger and safety (stuffed animals, like sharks and bears, and tattoos of daggers on their skin); i.e., a ludo-Gothic BDSM assemblage that speaks holistically to recovery and liberation—of whores and their liminal expression being part of nature, thus the land and its non-human occupants; re: all from a sample of one, and which our Aegis yields stewardship over the others we protect by taking away the killer’s desire to rape such things at all: “I was blind, but now I see!” Such is the Aegis in the proper hands!

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

But the whore out of the closet is still something many people will be unaccustomed to seeing or thinking about Cats will be confused, bussies will be stuffed, and all our dreams sit on the cusp of something truly awesome. That can be our doom as one of total destruction (state shift); or by putting the pussy on the chainwax (“trying to start a thing”), such Numinous forebears can also be our salvation from a damned “all our yesterdays” leading to “dusty death.” Fuck to metal, instead!

(artist: Jinedem)

Except for us, our “Jesus” is a Trojan agent fucking with Ambrosio: a “dummy thick” cock-warming demon slut who, like Matilda’s false Madonna, fails stealth checks because her booty cheeks always be clapping. Keeping it real through cultural appreciation as a streetwise vein, lets pursue this in classic Gothic fashion—deliciously! To that, let’s envision such delicacies through the language of the holy whore as secularized and class, culture and race conscious: a fatal (false) offering pleading “sacrifice” through a prostration of itself as “wicked, bad, and naughty” in the eyes of the state, but in the eyes of anyone not dead will say in response: “God damn!”  Not to pimp, but hug the Medusa as worthy of such treatment during the dialectic of the alien! She squish!

When in Rome, the alienation of dogma into critical thought requires speaking to the uncritical as one might in a church that is no longer theirs, but like Young Goodman Brown, is occupied by sinners of a Communist sort! Speaking to the uninitiated in the language shared by all peoples is effective through a) the feeling that it’s “their language,” b) the carnal power of persuasion, and c) good old-fashioned peer pressure. Apart from whores, everyone likes monsters and sex (which includes ace forms of public nudism and demon BDSM, of course), so take our hallowed transubstantiation as green eggs and ham to eat (said the “caterpillar” to the state). Try it, just once! It’s perfectly safe (won’t make you gay as fuck, pinky promise)… That’s how we wasps get you good!

Equally indicative of that army of the dead (and demon castle) I alluded to, several pages back, we (the monstrous-feminine) are the mothers of the future playfully expressed in “past forms” of exchange, feeding and trauma/transformation: our cute little badass alien caterpillar of death (which would definitely be a boss in a Final Fantasy game per Capitalist Realism) as profoundly symbolic; i.e., of a current inexorable leading to fresh life in the wondrous necrobiome that is Gothic Communism: Capitalism already dying and we making use of the corpse to contribute to something we won’t live to see but can imagine and experience in smaller pockets and pieces—a better world, a more sex-positive world, thus a god that lives in our breast, our wombs, our bussies, our animal side and small animal friends we’re stewards of (familiars and pets); i.e., each smuggling the familiar (not a pun) and the foreign into countries utterly moist with rebellion. All buzz and rattle, bark and bite, drool, wag and howl (“what sweet music they make”); i.e., excitedly for treats of the usual strange kinds (murder, rape and death fantasies, but also ironic empathy during those). So long as those treats enact worker liberation, then it’s all good, baby!

The undead shamble forward to outrun their prey and demons teleport into reality. Just as we return with Medusa and nature to the West as the living dead and demonic invaders generally do—to a threatened, grave-like homestead—the state will likewise tremble in fur(r)y at our “hubris” for wanting basic human rights, thus animal and environment through land back during Gothic redistribution. Through the liminal hauntology of war as something to raise against our own revolutionary cryptonyms, the state will desperately claw “its” fire of the gods back by sending its de facto armies after us (stochastic terrorism playing the guerilla).

To it, freeing Medusa is generally a civil conflict; i.e., one meant to upset the comfortable, but also measured in sad divisions (the whore and the queer generally isolated by all except others in the same boat). As such, we liberators will also be crucified for “politeness trapping” by the sexually repressed for talking about such things in public (ace people are valid, provided they don’t closet, thus colonize us for the state). So clearly development will be a test, and one that includes violence against us in many forms (doubles of our own monsters). But we must not concede or yield an inch to these tyrants and their braindead hordes. Despite our doubt, we must persevere and mix the metaphors—the monsters, magic and myth of medieval poetics—to press them to our Gothic advantage, mid-opposition:

Contrary to state copaganda, the Commie’s work is always unfinished; e.g., this volume and book series full to bursting (with cum and donors of all sorts); i.e., as part of a larger refrain towards liberation through Gothic paradox during ludo-Gothic BDSM liberating sex work through iconoclastic art, thus praxis. So remember your own training as, like mine in my tower high above, having led up to a defining moment as one in a series: a lullaby to lull the caterpillar to sleep and wake up Communist. Be that butterfly or wasp, radical empathy towards the whore’s revenge is what matters!

So gird you loins, little soldiers, and onto Volume Three and proletarian praxis proper! Or as the skeleton guy said in Army of Darkness, “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war!” Yes, we’re taking that back from Caesar and his stupid ghost, making it gay. Gay zombie war vs the Straights. Go.

This concludes the Demon Module and, by extension, Volume Two. I’ll be releasing Volume Three in the following month or so (aiming for the Ides of March)! Until then, Happy Valentine’s, you crazy kids! You can download the entire PDF for the Demons Module on my one-page book promo! —Perse

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About the Author

Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] Re: “that boring and exhausted paradigm,” quoted frequently in many sources; e.g., Alex Link’s “The Mysteries of Postmodernism, or, Fredric Jameson’s Gothic Plots” (2009):

In the midst, of its definitive arguments, Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) pauses to consider the Gothic just long enough to single it out as a hopelessly “boring and exhausted paradigm.” The Gothic, he declares, is a mere “class fantasy (or nightmare) in which the dialectic of privilege and shelter is exercised” and it should not be mistaken for a “protofeminist denunciation of patriarchy” nor “a protopolitical protest against rape” (source).

[2] Presenting as an audio-visual theme in the artwork itself to—intentionally or not—holistically communicate the ideas; i.e., on par with a Gothic portrait animating or a medieval work starting to bleed in miraculous fashion, illustrating the union in literal terms. The genius/Gothic maturity at work, here, is meta; i.e., that an emotionally and Gothically intelligent and class, culturally and racially aware person can generally tell the difference and not be confused by what “speaks” to them in a Gothic way!

[3] If the splendide mendax seems intellectually dishonest, remember that personal memory is already neuroplastic, especially in relation to dissociative trauma. Mnemonic images, then, are designed to assist in remembering things that are physically difficult to recollect—not from one’s own trauma, but also because those in power don’t want people to remember the unspeakable abuses the state and cops regularly commit in pursuit of material profit. To paraphrase Maarva from Andor, “the Empire wants you asleep”; i.e., unable to fight back because you’re drugged, lobotomized, and suitably undead in ways the powerful can enact (through critics like Jameson), then exploit.

[4] Written in 1980 versus Jameson’s “Progress versus Utopia” in 1982, the latter no doubt written to apologize for American scholarship (and abuse of scholarship) up to that point; i.e., while punching down at rising Gothic discourse out of the 1970s into the neoliberal period (a broken record/fiddle Jameson would continue sawing at in 1991’s Postmodernism and 2005’s Archaeologies).

[5] I.e., the British Romantics’ war with the Neo-Gothic hardly a quiet or singular event, but one its various proponents crowed much about; re: Coleridge’s “General Character of the Gothic Literature and Art” (1818): “…the Gothic art is sublime” (source). He fought for singular white-supremacist interpretations anticipating the rise of empire in Britain (Queen Victoria was born in 1819, a year after Marx). Coleridge was a cunt.

[6] With Jameson dogwhistling Tomas Moore’s own 1516 ethnocentric dogma before Cromwell screwed the pooch and Milton wrestled psychomachically with such errors before Coleridge frankly papered over them with his own poetic apologia.

[7] Re: This Is Spinal Tap—with the midgets and the model of Stonehenge failing Scott’s forced perspective trick in Alien (using his sons to make his “Space Jockey” seem bigger); but also the Game Grumps’ “John Boner”: “There’s no jizz but what we make for ourselves!” The medieval loves prurient, juvenile humor (dick jokes being a classic pun that hyphenates with so many poetic devices).

[8] “You’re not a leaf!” Jadis would cutely say about caterpillars, impersonating one that would try and nibble through her skin and then decide not to once it recognized what it was chewing through. They loved caterpillars, but also thought Ray Kurzweil was onto something. The technological singularity is wishful thinking and it struck me as profoundly odd that someone who championed nature also wanted to one day become a robot who would have no biology or feelings to speak of. They became a state-sanctioned executioner of nature less by working as an exterminator as a local job (animal control is humane, insofar as population control helps lessen animal suffering thanks to human interference).

To better protect nature and ourselves, the idea is to be active with what we have during asymmetrical warfare, synthesizing praxis by raising emotional/Gothic intelligence and class cultural awareness using paradox (“darkness visible”). The rest will fall into place, one generation at a time.

[9] More arrows in our quiver to loose and play with as needed.

[10] Often on protocol, to fight fire with fire, on decisions we can live with. Regarding these, diversity is strength, variety the spice of life!

This blog post is part of “Deal with the Devil,” a third promotion originally inspired by the first and second ones I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” and “Searching for Secrets” (2024). The first promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Deal with the Devil” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, Demons (the “Searching for Secrets” promotion covered the Undead Module, which is now live). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Click here to see “Deal with the Devil’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Demon Module) is out (2/14/2025)! 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.

Dark Xenophilia, part two: “Follow the White-to-Black Rabbit”; or Magic, Drugs and Acid Communism (feat. the Monstrous-Feminine of Magic Girls, Unicorns and Xenomorphs)

And if you go chasing rabbits
And you know you’re going to fall
Tell ’em a hookah-smoking caterpillar
Has given you the call

—Grace Wing Slick; “White Rabbit,” on Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow (1967)

Picking up where “Dark Xenophilia, part one: Monster-Fucking and Furry Panic” left off…

Part two continues our look at learning from nature in dark xenophilic terms of sexuality and gender as animalistic, gradient, anthropomorphic and fluid; i.e., from cradle to grave, childhood to adulthood and beyond. It explores drugs as a recursive, cyclical means of opening and expanding the mind to challenge Capitalist Realism (and its cancerous expansions): with acid Communism offering a dark Communist, Pagan and witchy/monstrous-feminine empathy to offset fascism’s radical apathy—the series of enchantments that only appear under the influence of otherworldly forces; i.e., called “drugs” nowadays, but also “poetry” and “art” having a similar liminal, often biomechanical (animate-inanimate) mind-opening affect! No one is immune when exposed to such forces, good or bad!

Our exposure of them (therefore ourselves) isn’t to seek desperately but by trusting in what we see that others mistake for chattel to tokenize and exploit; i.e., empathy is built at least partially on trust, which fascists destroy. We give and take fairly to develop what needs to develop for us to both survive and all-out thrive in a post-scarcity world: magic as xenophilic poetics, therefore radical labor changing how we think. In abjecting us, the state has made us powerful within their own system, which we can reclaim through our Aegis breaking theirs to dust, beckoning you follow us “rabbits” into Hell: “Hey, bunny!” as Jan Švankmajer’s titular Alice says. Follow the rabbit, white or black; follow the alien whore/profligate sinner as animalized and mystical drug dealer/dealer of drug-like sex and alterous factors!

(artist: Vana)

That is, using drugs per Stuart Mills (on Fisher) is—at least at first—a symbolic gesture; i.e., one that expands our minds away from the rigid, inflexible (thus intolerant) state of existence and thought that Capitalism forces on people vs whores/nature; re:

…part of acid communism is the means to fulfil Fisher’s desire to imagine the future. […] Acid communism is about ways of imagining a world after capitalist realism, and for Fisher, one of the ways to escape this reality is psychoactive drugs. The programme of acid communism is not to condone psychoactive drug use, but as an example this activity captures the philosophy of acid communism excellently.

To imagine new futures, we have to find ways to break out of our present myopia. Fisher’s acid communism is unique primarily for placing this goal above all others. […] The future has been cancelled because we are unable to imagine anything other than the present. To invent the future, to escape our myopia, we have to go beyond the present bounds of our imagination. This is acid communism (source).

We’ll confront acid Communism later in the subchapter—meaning after we’ve given some examples to follow (the rabbit); i.e., starting with general animal mascots (next page), but also Sailor Moon, The Last Unicorn, and Alien (among others; e.g., Brave and Nimona, exhibit 56d1/2): as whorish means of profound redistribution!

Our white-to-black rabbits and their “special medicine” extend to any animal and color you could think of; e.g., a blue fox (or combinations, below); i.e., fetishes partially obscured, but also showing during the cryptonymy process reversing abjection through the whore’s revenge. Said medicine educates monstrous-feminine alternatives to Cartesian dogma, thus challenging its built-in desires to dominate nature through fear of anything else; i.e., “drugs are bad for you unless you pay for legal versions” being a warlike anthem chanted by the guardians of Capitalism (and its cancerous War on/with Drugs) against nature as a whole; re: a whore to pimp, thus rape, for profit out of revenge (through the usual tools’ trifectas, monopolies and qualities built for those aims)! Anytime we speak to/about black rabbits, then, we’re talking about/with dark xenophilia as something to encourage; i.e., they’re synonymous!

(artist: Vana)

In short, we’ll be following increasingly black (whore-like, radical and alien) rabbits from white—first looking at magic girls and unicorns in children’s and YA fiction, before considering acid Communism and adult forms more directly through poetic, rock ‘n roll counterculture as tied to older rebellious movements; e.g., Jim Morrison, William Blake, and yes, xenomorphs and their surreal, angry and rebellious liminalities: the whore’s paradox and revenge being two sides of the same terror language (and dreams) to reclaim by playing with “rape” and sodomy during ludo-Gothic BDSM!

• Home Base: Teaching Children about Animals, Magic and Sex (Drugs and Rock ‘n Roll)
• Halcyon Days; the Idylls of the Magical Queens-to-Be (feat. Sailor Moon)
• Approaching Our Teens, or Portents of the Doom Bun before The Last Unicorn (feat. Nimona, Brave and Darby O’Gill)
• “Magic Do as You Will!”: On the Cusp of Adulthood; or, Teenage Unicorns Following Rabbits (feat. The Last Unicorn)
• Continuing the Easter Egg Hunt: Derelict “Antiquity” (reprise, and Neo-Gothic Orientalism as a Foreign, Irrational Exotic to Pimp)
• Paradise Lost; or, Chasing the Rabbit on a Promethean Quest/during a Faustian Bargain (acid Communism reprise; feat., Jim Morrison, Blake, Rimbaud, etc)
• The Return of the Black Rabbit (feat. Giger, Metroid, Medusa, Giygas)
• Approaching Catharsis; or, the Whore’s Revenge Where Said Wrongs Once Occurred
• Closing Thoughts: On the Justice of Roosting Rabbits (and onto Zombie Malls Where Rabbits Are Sold)

Home Base: On Teaching Children about Animals, Magic and Sex (Drugs and Rock ‘n Roll)

First and foremost, educating children about animals, magic and sex (drugs, and rock ‘n roll); i.e., as the starting point to chasing bunnies. While it might seem rather straightforward to separate totems and general “magic” from drugs, pornography and queer transformation (say nothing of the persecutory trauma that accompanies them), the act is easier said than done. For starters, the act of anthropomorphizing magic animals—specifically to teach children about the world around them—is a common facet of children’s literature (and oral cultures) as a whole: girls and children in general something to exploit by exposure to dogma in ways we camp inside of themselves; i.e., through reclaimed animals, nudism and educated peril and morals of an acid Communist sort, thus sex as something to communicate in ways that are healthy for children to absorb at a relatively young age: about life and death, consent and coercion, rape and rapture, etc, pushing towards Gothic maturity to see what others do not (I once sat on a day-long train ride next to a blind woman who raised wolves; it was an eye-opening conversation)!

(exhibit 56a2a: Artist, top left-and-right and bottom-right: Tohupo; bottom-left: Foxinajacket; bottom-middle: Kiu Wot. Animals commonly attach to children’s literature, lending them a didactic air with a slightly magical quality tied to nature [and implied drug use]. This is hardly sexual by itself, though there is room to suggest sexual content in the thin line between YA-material and more prurient suggestions; i.e., Tohupo’s Mrs. Neeba lending herself a strong “Mother Goose” vibe despite being sexually expressive to a lesser degree, compared to Kiu Wot’s illustration being more overtly sexual [mommy in the bedroom]. This “sliding scale” is regularly invoked through the poetic treatment of animals and magic in any educational work; i.e., including sex education as something being taught to some degree in many children’s stories: animal mommies don’t wear pants/do wear clothes that make them cryptonymically seem naked and anatomically correct/neutered, and animals flop cutely and listen to each other’s problems/show each other our butts. We do so to say hello/communicate love and trauma [re: Victoria, exhibit 52g1a] versus status-quo variants outing the colonizer doing the same basic gesture in bad faith: showing us their ass; i.e., as something that gives them away during the accidental [for them] code switch! The ass on the Aegis as the Aegis can hurt to feel good, or talk about pain with pain as a corrupt data of all different kinds!)

(exhibit 56a2b: Model and artist, left: Maybel Syrup and Persephone van der Waard; right: Tohupo. This piece concerns the value of human life expressed anthropomorphically via Don Bluth’s The Secret of Nimh‘s 1982[1] dark fantasy vis-à-vis Mrs. Brisby’s sexy-widow-meets-Little-Red-Riding-Hood schtick; i.e., how Capitalism makes us feel small and abused/assigns sexual values [and predator/prey elements] to us, and how we as marginalized workers might mix-and-match different positions of power [the dominant and the submissive] during ludo-Gothic BDSM: through animals of different sizes like the rat and mouse, but also kayfabe Red Scare themes on the same bodies trying to endure—by expressing chattelized/verminized survival in ancient animalized theatre forms [with the 1970 Secret of Nimh having a similar mad-science critique/rebellious undercurrent to 1972’s Watership Down—a story we’ll return to in Volume Three].

Such attempts include through drugs-and-sex hauntologies, but also parental themes that carry/cross over into a lycanthropic nature/nurture and predator/prey half-real game across media at large; re: Mrs. Brisby being a brave mommy to seek protection from, but also sex/comfort in liminal, drug-like ways! Such ideas [and two-spirit peoples—trans, intersex, and non-binary] go back not just hundreds of years, but to the literal dawn of time; i.e., to a time and headspace where such things like animals, food, rape and war weren’t separate but hauntologically reinvoke from the Middle and Early Modern English periods, onwards [re: Chaucer’s Miller]!

For example, when Robert Burns turned over a mouse’s burrow, he wrote a little poem for the creature empathizing with her plight; i.e., “On Turning her up in her Nest, with the Plough, November 1785” aka “Of Mine and Men”: 

I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion

Has broken Nature’s social union,

An’ justifies that ill opinion,

          Which makes thee startle,

At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,

          An’ fellow-mortal! [source]. 

The poem, far from preaching Humanity’s innate superiority, laments the damage its de facto stewardship cause other animals, of which—no matter how great or small those are—have value in Burns’ eyes [a common theme in British Romanticism].)

This animalized tutelage also extents to the children themselves and their developing bodies and identities (and desire for sex/comfort from parental/protector figures): as “magical,” invoking elements of queer expression tied to the natural world as increasingly drug-like and erotic; i.e., not with explicit drugs (though we’ll talk about that in a bit) but a “drug-like” means of activating queer expression that magically transforms one’s physical body and gender identity in fantastical, spell-like language and childlike imagination. The animal is an important part of this process; i.e., many children befriend animals and establish close bonds with them, expressing asexual relationships through artwork that says as much about themselves as it does the animal(s) they’re relating to. In other words, the totem, “furry” or chimera, etc, are expressions of the self as part of the natural world, which allows for (a)sexual expression of the artist in animalized ways (which is not the same thing as having sex with the animals they correspond with).

The larger process generally starts from an early age and continues into adulthood. In queer circles, authors transmute the kid-friendly approach of children’s literature by treating talking animals[2] and “magic” specifically as queer signifiers/de facto educators of sex positivity (and universal liberation) at large. While the notion of sexuality- and gender-as-identity have only materialized under Capitalism within the past two centuries or so, their current position within it nevertheless invokes magical legends and queer ideas of sexuality and gender that are much, much older than the modern world. While trans, intersex and non-binary people have existed since the dawn of time, only under Capitalism has their gender-non-conforming struggle had to be expressed linguo-materially on the receiving end of systemic exploitation and genocide!

(artist: Vana)

In turn, magic, drugs and transformation are useful towards expressing and subverting these xenophobic struggles in xenophilic language; i.e., without making them seem endlessly tormented and immiserate, through furry panic. In short, the goal of said magic is joy at becoming your true self over time; i.e., in a world—or in helping experience/develop a world—that won’t persecute you for being different; re: in ways closer to nature as something to love and respect, not rape for profit (not even if they seem dark and scary/suffused with Numinous energies, but also sluttier elements, above): “magic girl’ speaking to a position of power to regress to as much being an assigned vulnerability by the state, mid-witch-hunt!

While queer abuse is important to discuss and convey in undead-demonic language, it’s also vital to humanize nature itself as part of the equation; i.e., as something to treat humanely by human stewards of nature. Often this happens through a relationship with nature as queer-coded; i.e., happening through the eyes of a child simply being themselves within the natural-material world. While the image of Dorothy Gale leaps to mind—skipping cheerfully along the Yellow Brick Road with the Scarecrow, Tinman and Cowardly Lion—we want to express the importance in treating queerness as an iconoclastic mode of existence fueled by magic and drug use to chase rabbits we not only befriend, but become (to “go native”): to thwart the revenge of state pimps policing nature-as-whore.

After all, the “friends of Dorothy” (early LGBTQ symbols colonized by token fags) only helped the God-gifted Kansas farmgirl—already touched by magic but afraid of nature (“Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!”)—generously return home through monomythic force to her family’s farm; re: after killing a witch because the local patriarch “asked” them to (with laws being poorly-disguised threats administered by state rulers and carried out by state cops, including witch cops of all ages—more on this in Volume Three)! If the drug-addled fate of Judy Garland is any clue, we need to do far better—one, to honor her memory as someone hounded and abused by studio executives (re: forcing drugs into her system, breaking her body and mind alike); and two, to serve/save ourselves: as members of the Young-at-Heart becoming nature’s stewards standing against profit during the whore’s revenge chasing the rabbit. This “land back” approach happens through ludo-Gothic BDSM, which requires doing so in ways all workers historically have failed at (which includes Indigenous Peoples tokenizing under duress through treaties the White Man routinely breaks, and people of color selling out, too).

To avoid the pitfalls of menticide, then, we’ll start with magic girls who are closer to the mark, thus childhood; i.e., regarding queer-positive representation as openly stated within the narrative (unlike Hobbits or even vampires, which both tend to obscure queerness within medievalized ideas of courtly love [re: rings and giving them] or sodomy rhetoric): the magic-girl, monstrous-feminine heroines of Sailor Moon, aimed at educating children; re: about magic and genderqueer sex and identity through monstrous theatre with innate camp built in!

To it, queerness starts from innocence as something to regress to, and interrogate the rabbit (a lure). As damsel-and-detective sex demons, we’ll trace that circuitry on the usual golems and castles-in-the-flesh, going from witches to unicorns to aliens. First up, Sailor Scouts!

Halcyon Days; the Idylls of the Magical Queens-to-Be (feat. Sailor Moon)

Note: We looked at Sailor Moon earlier with Harmony and me. We’ll focus here on the making of the show and its utility when teaching kids how to be queer from an early age; i.e., when growing into emotional, Gothic and sexual maturity as a riddle not starting from adulthood looking backwards (we’ll get to that, too)! —Perse

(exhibit 56b: Top-right-to-top-left-to-bottom-left: samples from the “magical girl” anime, Pretty Cure! As provided by Angel [who runs a fanzine for the show called the Precure Forever Zine—a digital charity zine benefiting Voices of Children, available for preorders as of February 2023]; top middle and everything else: Sailor Moon. Sex education commonly happens through fantasy stories; i.e., about magic girls investigating their changing bodies and developing genders under crisis: policed by the world around them.)

Sailor Moon has been queer-coded since its inception and historically aims at young white-to-Japanese women (the manga originally penned by Naoko Takeuchi, a highly-educated[3] Japanese woman; i.e., educated outside of just being one of the most famous/accomplished manga artists of all time). Following this, the show has retained a strong genderqueer/questioning element and following all around the world; i.e., flourishing mid-struggle despite syndicated American localization censoring the queer elements by making Uranus and Neptune “cousins” (the preference of sanctioned incest and pedophilia being a common neo-conservative tactic). So while Sailor Moon targets tweens, its “puppy love” and childhood innocence material less steers readers towards a heteronormative existence and more explores feelings of “descriptive” sexuality and Satanic gender fluidity!

Furthermore, the show’s colossal popularity and seemingly endless longevity only leads to fanbases that go on to sexually mature and fantasize erotically about inhabiting and enjoying the show’s characters (next page)—not as teenagers to exploit by adults but as younger versions of their former selves that fans identify with over time as also having grown up!

To this, the erotic treatment of Sailor Moon and its magic-girl heroines isn’t limited to cis-het men in that respect. “Get ’em while they’re young” is certainly something that neoliberal privatization takes quite literally—surreptitiously effacing anything queer except the most homo-/queernormative elements to try and keep American consumers (and their overseas counterparts) cis-het from a young age onwards:

The first queer couple I encountered in anime was censored. Most kids who grew up in the ’90s are aware that in its original form, Sailor Moon‘s Sailor Neptune and Sailor Uranus aren’t actually cousins, but were instead a lesbian couple. The homophobic revision of these characters is so blatant it makes rewatches of the dub absolutely comical. This wasn’t the only revision the Sailor Moon dub made to the source material for the sake of censorship. Zoisite, an early villain who is an effeminate gay man in love with fellow villain Kunzite, is changed to a female character. Given Uranus’ butch persona, they may have wanted to do the same with her. Uranus is rarely if ever depicted in feminine clothing save for when she’s in her Sailor Scout form, rendering the possibility of portraying Neptune and Uranus as a straight couple nigh impossible (source: Austin Jones’ “Sailor Moon and the Complicated History of Queer Gender Expression in Anime for Girls,” 2020).

But the same is also true of sex-positive introductions to the magic girl trope (and various other nature-oriented egregores); i.e., to a young audience in an educational way that extends to adults whose own education is lacking about GNC people; e.g., Sailor Uranus was originally written as intersex—having both genitals and being able to swap them at will (ibid.).

Such sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll speak to animals in nature, but also appear in Gothic fiction—meaning with phallic women, Athena-androgyne (stereo)types and the Medusa “snake moms”/Archaic Mothers, etc; i.e., those similar to the Sailor Scouts having the whores’ revenge in less furious but no less transgressive ways (any trespass is unwelcome, thus attacked by state defenders upholding capital and its qualities, moderate or not). In canonical stories, their “horns” can always be monomythically severed, said castration taming the woman—as a magical object of man’s desire (extending to token parties, inside the Man Box)—whereas male entities “die” once castrated (no accounting for eunuchs, of course, nor intersex people; i.e., the latter often wrought with morphological trauma tied to their genitals as operated on: without their consent by over-corrective doctors; re: Victoria, exhibit 52g1a).

But a second opinion lingers—one cryptonymically showing and hiding things the state will try to tokenize and destroy when magic girls refuse to assimilate, thus not do as they’re told. Simply put, fans aren’t stupid; they learn from those they identify with, not wanting those beings to be censored at all and fearing/ridiculing proponents of censorship for doing just that (silence is genocide). For example, most cis-het or closeted/out lesbian girls are not only aware of the Sailor Moon queerness and censorship; they even make fun of the whole “cousins” thing (Farmer Smith’s “Sailor Uranus and Neptune: Gay Couple NOT Cousins,” 2020); re: we camp canon because we must!

Conversely most straight dudes (white or not) have no fucking clue—only make fun of the show or drool over its (originally teenage) cast like poster girls “made just for them.” To do so is to colonize Sailor Moon, treating its cast (and fandom) like chattel that exclusively serve heteronormativity in sex-coercive ways; re: not just the Man Box, but the Male Gaze extending to token parties (male or not). It’s prescriptive and that prescription must be challenged during oppositional praxis, including the liminality that pornographic expression reliably supplies; re: as fans grow up into these GNC franchises:

(exhibit 56c1: Middle, artist: Persephone van der Waard; everything around it from the top-middle-to-top-left-to-bottom-left-to-left-bottom-middle: Artnip; bottom-middle: Midna Ash; top-right and bottom-right: Soon2Bsalty. As usual, it’s possible for different groups to like the same thing at once for different reasons; e.g., cis-het men, teenage girls and queer people—all liking Sailor Scouts as boy-crazy magic-soldier alter egos navigating a city-pop hauntology and demonic rituals of monomythic courtship—but again, for different reasons on and off the same half-real stages: to either fight for universal liberation/walk away from Omelas, or install new children to torture and steal from into future models of capital pimping nature as monstrous-feminine whore; e.g., AI [and tech bros] being the Pirates of Silicon[e] Valley come home to goon [shaming and policing the slut for giving men boners]!

(exhibit 56c2: Model and artist: Mei Minato and Persephone van der Waard; left [AI generated]: Civit AI. While AI-generated “art” and porn reduces popular characters to a series of keywords and AI parameters, these personas can be “worn” by real persons with real bodies, passions, jobs and hobbies; e.g., Sailor Venus from Sailor Moon. Earlier exhibits showcased Harmony and I through this process, in “Measured Praise of the Great Enchantress.” Now we’ll look at Mei Minato casting a similar spell of profound liberatory power!

Packing a massive booty/meat-packing plant and even bigger heart, Mei is a foreign national veterinarian who loves animals, but also rocks her amazing body and makeup during brothel espionage; i.e., while doing alter-ego sex work online: the magic girl all grown up and kicking ass [reclaiming her means of production beyond factory nostalgias, which Marx and Socialist Realism mostly limited to larger mechanical factories/male labor versus working girls and women’s work].

All of these factors make up who Mei is without reducing her to a product/piece in a bigger commercial puzzle. Likewise, her amazing booty and tight, little “innie” coochie conveys a de facto “pornstar” bod whose “realism” is more an industry standard conducted through the creation of sexual difference that nevertheless can reflect holistically upon workers during liminal expression; i.e., with bodies that fall naturally within that standard to subvert it: the body of the nubile maiden, both infantilized and hyperbolically sexualized in ways that historically cater to white male chuds and token parties policing their betters’ avenues of appetite.

Furthermore, the notion of post-natal bottom surgery is a concept whose body dysmorphia/gender dysphoria can apply to different women across the board; i.e., in the porn industry’s frontier liminalities into YA media and back again: any whose crotches lack the “Barbie Doll” look/requisite female genitals, and wherein the “Barbie Doll effect” is labioplasty expected towards female workers pushed to surgically alter their bodies to cater to the status quo. Or conversely those who naturally fall into the status quo potentially feeling alienated from other workers: for being different from other pussy types, for example, hence placed onto a “pretty privilege” pedestal for having the Pussy of All Pussies [heavy lies the crown] or Ass to End All Asses [above]!

This, in turn, comes with its own double standards, assigning the owner “power” by virtue of cliché, harmful notions of feminine kinds; e.g., the dumb blonde, ideal tradwife, perfect girlfriend, catgirl, schoolgirl, and ostensibly tight virginal pussy during sex, etc; re: “We are all animals, my lady!”

[artist: Blxxd Bunny]

A similar manicuring of their crotch extends to clothing as often expected; i.e., wherein the basic idea is fine but historically-materially becomes shamed through deregulated commercial practices that treat the owner’s “lawn” [the front and the back/ass crack, left] as something to maintain by virtue of it being someone else‘s property/plumbing to police; i.e., God’s Paradise operating through fractal recursion—the customer extending to patron, director and shareholder as tyrannical entitlement on the same Great Chain of Being [which the Medusa and her rabbits level through Numinous offshoots, also left]. To combat this, “pussy verisimilitude” offers a different kind of realism than what’s enforced through Vitruvian industry standards; e.g., the gynodiversity of public hair on the pantied camel toe as a kind of artistic accessory that can be easily applied or removed like a merkin.

Together with Sailor Moon and the catgirl aesthetic, my subversion is liminal and composite among friends; i.e., not a raw fearful image of the catgirl from the moon[4] [Artemis being the virginal huntress associated with the moon to sight her prey with as much as its size and light being a symbol of female hysteria] but a child-friendlier variant experienced through Sailor Scouts; i.e., collectively reviving Medusa, onstage and off: the Leveler Dark Rabbit pulsing ominously behind white sparkly goodness and neoliberal hyperreality [and one whose overt sexuality and confident nudism will thoroughly ruffle the feathers of American Puritanism at home and on the world stage]. The shared goal, then, is to challenge the American-brand of “weeb” rape culture in the process, while also celebrating Mei [and all Sailor Scouts] for being an awesome person. She rocks!

To it, Mei Minato is a real person with real struggles inside-outside the porn industry—with her having been doxxed by “fans” for her daring to moonlight; i.e., as a sex worker [with women deduced to singular roles to limit their capacity while also pushing them towards financial dependency on men/tokens and the state]. She’s both incredibly kind—helping people and animals—and has feelings and stories about the work that she does on- and off-camera; i.e., her content helps pay for her tuition, but is “to also have fun, de-stress and build self-confidence” as she navigates and negotiates the larger world: as hostile to her endeavors, trying to cage her magic!

Meanwhile, the hyperreality of the pornstar body is that Capitalism shapes AFABs/GNC bodies into a Barbie Doll egregore it can enslave; re: to cater to male/token consumers inside Plato’s Man Box: as future soldiers and enforcers of the colonial binary who are owed sex of a particular type. With the flood of AI stealing labor to draft this likeness in perpetuity, the image of the Barbie Doll body has flooded the market with pirated imagery that includes the likeness of various models and artwork; i.e., as smashed together by software abused by entitled tech bros [white or not[5]]: the subsequent humanity and its rebellious potential/dialectical-material context having been sucked entirely from the image until it becomes a souless cartoon carbon copy meant to perfect the product, but only cheapen it further than the pre-internet, thus pre-AI porn industry was able. The elite steal from labor as “dead” to them—a process imitated by the middle class pimping magic girls to dance for their delight and coffers aping the elite’s.)

Per Foucault, power and resistance are to be found in one-and-the-same place; i.e., on the surface of the image as consensually ambiguous sans context. All the same, the tendency to make things “fucky” is a common source of humor in fandom circles (ProZD’s “peachette,” 2019). When broached through the language of magic girls animalized, sex education reflects upon the liminality and progression of the human body as something that matures central to the narrative unfolding!

Again, fans grow up; they experience mounting sexual desires through their bodies and identities as things to grow into, often through increasingly ace-to-erotic expressions thereof. A kind of sexual adventure that starts small, porn is prone to escalate as people discover and unlock their true potential as (a)sexual beings. It involves the very monsters sold to them since childhood; i.e., magic animal personas that “grow up” alongside them (exhibit 56c1/2)—less as things children shouldn’t become and more what they identify as despite heteronormativity’s canonizing camp. The rebellion becomes hermeneutically broad; i.e., occurring merely by workers expressing themselves in sex-positive ways, and whose synthesis the state will pimp, hence brand as subversively pornographic: to punish “its” naughty little girls (of any age) for making nature “untame” once more; re: on her Aegis as something to reflect the state’s supremacy onto itself through the dialectic of the alien self-reporting the usual weirdos! “Girls do get it done!” and there’s more than one way to skin a Nazi-to-white/token-moderate cat by flashing your own kitty’s Dark Aegis!

(artist: Mei Minato)

Let’s further unpack this; i.e., as the hybridity of porn and magic girls—as monstrous-feminine beings of nature with undead or hellish components—can become performatively complicated. Equally complex, then, is the trademarked expression of nature through neoliberal media pushing towards darkness and dark doubles (the black rabbit); i.e., as presenting children with a cartoon idea of what the world even is, all while exploiting the planet behind a smiling and kid-friendly façade; e.g., Disney and its own generational bigotry/whitewashes policing whores and apologizing for toxic love/rape culture as historical-material in its recursive fractals (more on that, in Volume Three)!

In keeping with Sailor Moon, though, this grandiose and globalized charade often dresses up in fantastical language tied to human bodies “of nature and the cosmos”; i.e.,  as things that grow and develop under enforced parental supervision as a metaphor for state power policing nature as gay alien. Any “gateways” that potentially delineates from state interests (the rebellion of magic sluts fighting state spectres in slutty drag, left) will be policed, their iconoclastic iterations discouraged through force; i.e., sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll—the magic girl as doorway to a Promethean mode of animalized existence beyond capital and its chattelizing aura’s awful Realism (which only weakens when the state sheds its disguises)!

(artist: Rae Moon)

First, the entire class of “magic girls” inhabits the natural world as alien—i.e., one to convey through magic-tinged, drug-addled “fairy dust” language being the very things to defend in the frankest of terms—but also by expressing the defenders, themselves, as honest, good-faith extensions thereof! Such meta actors belong to nature and uphold it from corrupting forces, but “corruption” means many different things during oppositional praxis; re: it’s not a bug but a function of code during the cryptonymy process; e.g., Sailor Moon’s mythical pubes (above)!

The basic, iconoclastic vein of Sailor Scouts, Bowser-Peaches and “thicc” unicorn furries, then, is not so different from the classic fawn, satyr or nymph (then or now): to subvert heteronormative prescription tied to “body policing” as administered by powerful, white men/tokens, Athens onwards. While the Patriarchy fears many things, they fear nature, most of all; i.e., as being outside of their control within their own slave markets. Defending those, they will dehumanize whatever bodies, genders and sexualities they associate with nature; i.e., as something to pimp on a spectrum: beings outside their vision of an orderly universe taming the wild whore and breeding her for that purpose.

This extends to whatever elements help form the bonds; i.e., any required to commune with nature as untame while being pimped in bad faith: magic or drugs as things to be “on” in ways to fear and shame. By comparison, the iconoclastic worker—often from an early age—favors natural-material expressions of universal body positivity and sex-positive BDSM, kinks and monsters conducive to ending Omelas for good. Doing so, they relate with natural demons, but also the magic or drugs that invoke them; i.e., as part of the natural-material arrangement of things to camp canon with. Under their influence, practitioners weave in other components that describe the human condition as it applies to them through fan favorites.

In other words, nature is a common starting point when introducing children to sex through media; i.e., the birds and the bees, if you will, which often involves material elements of a decidedly criminalized sort (which all work is; re: all work being universally sexualized, but whose liberatory dialogs speak with/to more overtly sexualized forms of work, like the Sailor Scouts own fabulous kayfabe).

Crime—as something articulate through state instruments pimping nature as monstrous-feminine—leaves an unnatural, Gothic footprint: the graveyards, castles, and other human structures that advertise the historical-material presence of a heteronormative order furthering abjection. Be it of the church/state or corporate bodies, this order survives beyond the natural lifespan of animals or plants by dominating nature inside its own ghosts of rape; i.e., as an idea to express in relation to itself, but also coming out of the civilized world: “Alice” going back into a hauntological idea of the dreaded anti-home’s neo-medieval imposter zone (with Caroline Jones following a black cat, below—same idea as a rabbit: chasing the witch’s familiar back to wild nature and the Gothic anti-home as reclaimed/turned into a wicked stepmother’s hunting grounds/bowels of the Earth and underworld conjoined, mid-unheimlich).

Simply put, canonical children’s media positions “nature” as threatened by corrupting forces dressed up in abject language “neither here nor there”: the riotous voices of the unheard, reduced to a dark, external wailing of the dead and of chaos to dialectically-materially canonize, thus reject the madness of a middle-class Don Quixote (re: Radcliffe’s heroism). Except, while magic and drugs can put you in touch with cute, talking animals or horny fawns (e.g., Pan’s Labyrinth, 2006) doubled by the state—meaning for liberals and sex pests to author and latch onto as much as curious children (re: Gaiman, above)—these can also send you magically to places where trauma has gathered and stayed: Hell, but also the underworld, or states of exception where the state’s victims are abused, then buried in the here-and-now’s hereafter come home!

The problem, here, is that canon doesn’t protect children or nature because the state is antithetical towards doing so. Therefore, it cannot acclimate children to consensual aspects of sexuality and gender through natural demons; re: Neil Gaiman, author of Coraline (above) is a sex pest protected by the system expecting him to appear in his own work for decades; i.e., Coraline‘s scapegoat usage of “Other Mother” demonology treating the categorization as an “adult” word—one that generally carries “evil” connotations in centrist language, and which spills into outright persecution in reactionary circles Gaiman (and his evil wife) contribute towards.

Genocide is half-real and dualistic, like an historical-material effect; during genocide, the state will deny involvement in favor of a given material arrangement supplied through fear and dogma like Gaiman’s: drugs and magic are bad because they turn you into monsters associated with unspeakable death, sexual degeneracy and violation of the vulnerable and the young. And yet, the witch is exposed through these, speaking to a double standard we fags subvert through our own apotropaic function anisotropically defending the black-rabbit witch in duality from Radcliffean DARVO obscurantism policing the whore by blaming the whore!

Such is ludo-Gothic BDSM chasing rabbits to learn from them, minus the prescribed harm. And yet, under these conditions, confronting death by merging it with the natural-material world is seen as entirely “unnatural”; i.e., unbefitting of a children’s “proper” education, the ghost of the counterfeit something to classically poo-poo by critics of the Gothic (more on this in “The Future Is a Dead Mall”). To it, parental forces will historically and swiftly relegate liminal positions of magic and drug-like sexuality and gender to “darker” monomyth spaces; i.e., whose unwilling occupants they associate with sin, the underworld and a vast “grey area” of degenerate factors; re: Coraline basically being told, “don’t be a whore!”

These prohibitions exclude, but also capitalize on, notions of adulthood as conceptually bound to criminalized activities; e.g., BDSM, porn, and controlled substances, but also scapegoated, anthropomorphized personas that express trauma in ways children are normally “spared” from: the sheer presence of death during linguo-material conflict; i.e., as fundamentally alien to heteronormative tolerance, yet still wedded to said alien’s placenta as the elite’s source of fresh blood the middle class police; re: aping their masters by attacking the ghost of the counterfeit. On either side of the Black Veil, the cop’s victim is always a whore.

Conversely, genderqueer expression seeks to reunite children through these devices gradually but inclusively. It does so, again, through consciously sex-positive attitudes in nature-themed furry art, magic girls and witchcraft chasing rabbits; i.e., in pure and hybrid forms that flow anisotropically against status-quo cultural norms (exhibit 56d2, below). But this uphill battle against the state—re: as a Cartesian, heteronormative and settler-colonial polity in its modular persecution rhetoric—still places the half-real protagonist in the crosshairs of the usual hunters; i.e., who are trained to kill the enemy by branding children as obviously dark and evil (exhibit 56d1, below): a death curse that—for us—takes many animalistic forms. Such “black rabbits” encapsulate female/monstrous-feminine death spirits (exhibit 56e, below), the iconoclast required to investigate and understand these while heading into their teenage years and beyond (towards death administered by the state, Coraline simply another Dorothy Gale)!

Approaching Our Teens, or Portents of the Doom Bun before The Last Unicorn (feat. Nimona, Brave and Darby O’Gill)

To be holistic, then, I want to give some more exhibits before we tackle The Last Unicorn (exhibit 57); i.e., regarding signs of fate (which doom is) that help bridge the gap between children’s magic animal stories and YA media similar to The Last Unicorn (a story about finding love, especially tragic star-crossed love); e.g., Nimona, Brave and Darby O’Gill speaking to the princess as not simply rebellious, but queer-tinged and fairy-like through their transformative power/wish fulfillment and descriptive histories outing state predators scapegoating nature.

In canonical circles, the introduction of overtly abject monsters is often something that “awaits” children as they grow up—less “instantly” transitioning from the seemingly innocent unicorn (and its earthly locales) to suddenly experimenting with drugs (exhibit 60a/60b) and finally pure nightmares like the utterly erotic and surreal xenomorph (exhibit 60e).

As children confusingly transition into adulthood, they will encounter these ideological challenges at the acceptable hour and then be expected to respond; i.e., by monomythically dismissing them outright (through tokenized force), or by guiltily indulging in them through the heteronormative order of purchasing forbidden fruit with stolen labor value (wages); re: we freaks of nature have our revenge by simply existing in visible ways that effect the next generation’s consumption, money or not—of what we produce melded to state doubles, with Alice given our Mad Hatter’s shapeshifting biscuits and tea but these taking the troubling form of the usual suspects: dark animal crackers speaking to obscured danger and proximities with power and power abuse during Halloween scapegoat denialism!

(exhibit 56d: Artist, left: Natesquatch. The black dog or bear is a common, shapeshifting symbol of death that has been co-opted by colonizing forces.

For example, Mor’du from Disney-owned Pixar’s Brave is an undead, cursed animal-king that must be slain; i.e.  by a great warrior to reclaim nature from dark, animalistic forces. Disney Villains: the Essential Guide [2020] describes Mor’du in unflattering and frankly villainizing language that justifies monomythic violence against him: “Once a vain and arrogant prince, Mor’du is now a bloodthirsty bear under a terrible spell. Standing over 13 feet tall, he is savage and fiercely strong. Everyone in the kingdom fears bears, but the deadly Mor’du is the most terrifying of all” [source]. The unkindness towards bears as stigma animals touches upon a Western bias commented on by authors like William Faulkner [whose own ancient bear, Old Ben, in “The Bear” (1942), represents a struggle for the hero to identify with nature after killing Ben] or Roger Ebert’s fear of wolves—the latter stoked by Joe Carnahan’s 2012 The Grey [which treats wolves as metaphors for depression within a heroic cult of death struggling against an impossible foe; e.g., Beowulf and the spear-Danes versus Grendel, over a thousand years ago]: “When I learned of Sarah Palin hunting wolves from a helicopter, my sensibilities were tested, but after this film, I was prepared to call in more helicopters” [source: 2012 review]. 

To that, the usual companies are de facto helicopter parents calling the cops on nature; i.e., as whore victim through their “own” kids crying wolf [or bear] to pimp nature accordingly. As such, Mor’du’s status is equally symbolic in a long tradition of dominating nature as savage barbarian—meaning the struggles of someone being kill-on-sight because that’s how they present in canon; i.e., within the state of exception per centrist, Faustian narratives that throw audiences backwards into a nostalgic fantasyland past: the black penitent bear whore of a gender-swapped Braveheart [an Amazonian Dorothy Gale].

To it, Brave treats untame nature as rapacious, black and corrupt, thus infringing on “civilized” borders defended by a chonky Scottish girl boss/fairy princess named Merida; i.e., whose own moral struggles in a man’s world constitutes her virtue [and encroaching fed-up womanhood viewing her own mother as a bear to poach like Jane Eye in the Red Room’s cryptonymic “Redrum,” above]. Further symbolized by fight or flight from the Radcliffean bear bandit, her underage but blossoming bodily autonomy as “princess” becomes something to preserve from Mor’du’s giant claws [the black death symbol being the usual Radcliffean demon lover threatening defilement of traditional female virtue during bloody murder]!

The usual dualities persist during dialectical-material critiques. And yet, as a damsel-in-distress facing off against Mor’du’s lost humanity post-Faustian bargain, Merida becomes the “brave” white Indian; i.e., by performing a cliché rite of passage normally assigned to men in older times: slapping bears. It’s a gendered Amazon performance geared towards young straight female adults; i.e., as something to achieve in relation to human primacy and hereditary rites by punishing animals to whitewash the chronotope; e.g., the berserk, or “bear coat,” as an anthropomorphic human symbol of “might makes right” status that is obviously bad for the bear as an animal and princess rejecting said animal symbol, but also as a shapeshifting anthromorph onstage and off: the lycanthrope taxidermized by a crossdressing cop!

Except, this can be camped. In the spirit of Star Wars camp, Nimona plays on medieval pageantry like Brave‘s; i.e., in corporatized shorthand to deliberately critique the monomyth’s defense-of-the-realm fervor as state propaganda taught to kids by big movie companies: Gloreth, the golden-haired, girl boss queen, can do no wrong [the statue, below]. Like Eowyn from LotR punching “witches,” mid-kayfabe, she’s a virginal shieldmaiden for a besieged kingdom whose self-righteous legend disguises the fascist nature of state defense; i.e., the police state secretly raping whores!

Inside a retro-future police state [complete with castles, red-eye cameras, and flying cars], Nimona‘s Orwellian political maneuverings play out through a cliché of the medieval tale that predates the science fiction renovations it camps: the duel. The white knight, Ambrosious Goldenloin, inevitably crosses swords with the black knight, Sir Allister Boldheart [the moor as a personified “wolf,” akin to Shylock from The Merchant of Venice and similar modernized hauntologies]. “Any of you should be able to hold the sword—if you earn it; i.e., “a new era of heroes” working for the state under an expanded recruitment umbrella. Within this hiring boom of knights-as-stormtroopers, Boldheart is framed for killing the girl boss of color by an outwardly serene, inwardly treacherous female director/minister of propaganda [a gender swap for Senator Palpatine, wearing Princess Lea’s clothes, next page]: “Gloreth kept the monsters out” and protected the kingdom from alien nature trespassers, white moderacy caving palingenetically to fascism… again.

To it, Nimona is disappointed that Boldheart isn’t a murderer because they want to be his evil sidekick! The film—made by a non-binary director [source: Laura Zornosa’s “The Deeper Meaning Behind Nimona‘s Shape-Shifting Story,” 2023]—presents lycanthropy as a form of gender-non-conformity and queer struggle using neo-medieval language: the queer werewolf/dark knight [“Knights don’t mope; we brood!”]. An Asian man, Ambrosious, is the homosocial, white-armored nemesis of Boldheart and his Darth Vader’s black-armor-and-robot-arm getup—the latter then galvanized, post-betrayal, by a snarky vice character who bashes cops with animalized, shapeshifter magic [while choosing not to murder them].

Sex and gender are a gradient to make gender trouble on; i.e., like my binary trans persona, Glenn the Goblin, Nimona can pick whatever form they want, but choose a shortstack, redheaded Pippi Longstocking with fangs and a penchant for all things “metal.” Whereas Nimona changes shape in a self-infantilized regression that speaks to their lived experiences and brutal kettling by state proponents—eventually morphing into something big and strong [a kaiju] in the face of childhood trauma—Boldheart calls Nimona a monster because they’re ostensibly a girl who not only can change shape but dislikes knights [cops] during reactive abuse: “she’s” supposed to die because knights kill monsters, including witchy queers “who don’t know their place.”

Turns out, Nimona and Gloreth were partners as children, divided by the latter’s fearful family at the sight of magic. The lesson of the narrative, then, is a sapphic, Pagan mistrust of Greater Good government by pushing against established institutions, not simply “corrupt” directors; i.e., the latter’s ability to use 1,000+ years’ worth of ancient misinformation and modern social media [in hauntological forms] to generate marginalized in-fighting by presenting queer rebels as instigating crisis, thus worthy of reprisals by marginalized children who grow into TERFs: taught to be a hero-for-the-state by driving a sword into the heart of anything different; i.e., good versus evil, us versus them. For Nimona, its suicide-by-cop! They lose the will to fight, thus live!

The real villain, then, is state power as a bourgeois shapeshifter demonizing proletarian shapeshifters by “kettling” them: Gloreth’s scapegoat as something to kill, thus return things “to normal.” Threatened with losing control, the director turns the giant, Death-Star-sized cannon against the kingdom, forcing Nimona to intervene—by throwing themselves in front of its salvo: “Go back to the shadow” invoking the abjection process to, sure enough, camp Tolkien! The biggest threat to the people of the kingdom isn’t Nimona, then, the openly queer and shapeshifting magic girl; it’s the functional heiress of a closeted lesbian enforcing state hegemony! The onstage director—being a fascist—rules through misdirection, crisis and fear as something that affects her worse than anyone: her dying words being a slogan that cements her ignominious death tied to state delusions, our resident nutjob tilting at windmills!

Such things are half-real; e.g., whereas Jadis saw diversity as a weakness in establishment politics, Nimona represents diversity as a form of strength: to change shape for more than just survival, but to alter the world around them through empathy as something to establish—not just for one type of queerness but all of them personified within Nimona as a plurality for gender-non-conformity and active rebellion against heteronormative tyranny [e.g., zombies]. Its oppressive, blinding walls and process of abjection become something to join together and riot against, kaiju-style: to let the “monsters” in to expose the true deceivers—our political leaders, but also Capitalism as built to foster their megalomaniacal self-delusions and inequities. Ours. In the end, these weaponized beliefs and blindnesses must, like the kingdom’s castle walls, be disarmed and deconstructed, lest Capitalist Realism and the Capitalocene have us dying like the director does [following in Goebbels footsteps]!)

And while we’ve now looked at magic girls like Sailor Moon, Nimona and Brave (and shortly will be looking at unicorns in YA media), this isn’t to say that one form of monstrous-feminine is “superior” to another when reversing abjection; i.e., in terms of fostering sex positivity and sympathy-for-the-devil education within a holistic Gothic mode: pushing towards death (and black rabbits) by personifying it as a vehicle thereof (the dreaded death coach, next page). However we try to humanize monsters, concerned parental groups aggressively restrict the increasingly abject, trauma-heavy types to specific activities and spaces tied to Nordic and nuclear models; i.e., sending the bizarre, seemingly necrophilic function of overtly undead monsters to “adult” graveyards and Promethean lands of the dead, while relegating the Faustian component of more “hellish,” otherworldly demons to places that children are likewise barred from accessing! A brothel is a brothel, thus full of guilty pleasures speaking to nature and death as alien; i.e., full of many kinds of revenges to be had, mid-harvest (to ring Hell’s bells, left)! Fruit plucked! Harvest humanized!

 (artist: Hotsumi)

Yet, the historical-material effect of this policing is segregative regardless if the demons of nature have partially undead and/or hellish qualities; i.e., the pandemonium of natural demons become underexplored and underrepresented in children’s fiction through concrete socio-material forces: reactionaries eradicating open “degeneracy” while colonizing the visually appropriate language they permit in “acceptable” public discourse. They learned it from corporations, parental guidance policing the whore to rape her witch-like status (from G-rated and above; e.g., Snow White)!

As such, terrifying children and horny superstitious middle-class women (re: danger sex with graveyards), Disney proves, is canonically fine if it’s in defense of the status quo[6]:

(exhibit 56e: Darby O’Gill and the Little People was a 1959 movie for children that is strangely terrifying. Then again, the terror is no accident; i.e., Disney uses their tremendous resources to appropriate cartoony versions of Celtic myths, preserving the heteronormative order through literal fear and dogma. The old man, Darby O’Gill, struggles to defend the young and innocent Katie from an imaginary past that is ancient and female—the bean sidhe and its death cries! By confronting and attacking said spirit, Darby faces a ghastly omen of death [a half-real hag to chase down like Don Quixote policing bicycle face]: the “ooooooo” of the demon very “they’re coming to get you, Barbara!” in its abjecting of nature/the druids.

In turn, their brief dance in the town square summons the “death coach,” which appropriately descends from the dark, rainy sky to spirit old Darby away to the land of the dead! It’s intentionally hauntological, reviving these old myths to hold Grampa hostage/superstitiously spook and instill children with a Protestant ethic demonizing Catholicism behind a Black Veil; i.e., in defense of heteronormative sex told through a Disney classic: the fairytale marriage used to fetishize Indigenous populations, but also assimilate them; re: not just the old-timers, but Peter Pan‘s 1954 Tiger Lily and 1995 Pocahontas doing the same exact thing: “kill the Indian, save the man” [or whore/virgin]. Also, I’m thoroughly convinced Disney do shitty remakes of their own canon so they can convince people that their old movies were “good”; they weren’t—the classics having always been racist, sexist and queerphobic—but can be camped!)

A huge part of this selective abuse occurs through active division—one creating and stretching a divide between pornography and art enforced through the insistence of evil, corrupting forces “from nature”; e.g., the bean sidhe or lycanthrope, despite their natural guise, remain dangerous because any dialogs about sex (and nature) from them promote Original Sin; i.e., anything the demon says is wrong because it’s queer by default, thus secretly dark, vile and deserving of total banishment (and death)! Indeed, canonical iterations relegate overt sexuality to adult stories outside of fantasy fictions meant for children, whose own forests are devoid of obvious sex: as something to describe outside the heteronormative, nuclear family model. Indeed, the canonical fairytale is usually quite chaste unless pointedly made “for adults”; i.e., making it a kind of cheap, speakeasy-bake porn with nothing much to do or say but pander in the laziest possible ways to the usual paying status-quo audience: cis-het parents.

Canon-wise, to encircle and ring up these purchases within a host of darker elements is allowed, provided it reasserts the heteronormative order through abject means. This tendency gatekeeps children, preventing them from exploring dualistically nostalgic notions of fairytale language that marry nature-themed creatures to erotic dialogs, but especially pornographic expressions of pain, loss, drug-use and death, as well as gender dysphoria, lurking persecution and exile.

As we’ve already explored, though, monsters are incredibly liminal; so is the queer experience, which often features monsters as contested, pornographic entities to chase—i.e., the presence of “nature” as a sacred, tamed, biblical site that becomes invaded by the forces of darkness through Original Sin, Satanic Panic, and other reactionary arguments’ self-authored black rabbits; re: exploitation and liberation occupy the same poetic spaces, hence the whore’s paradoxical revenge through exposure: the opposite of fetish obscura, nature and the Medusa as notably non-white/thicc PAWG to PHAT people of color! Such medicine cures the poison of capital as normally exploiting us and our peaches, pies and cakes; i.e., as things to reclaim by us through our non-harmful harvesting of them on the Aegis: suggesting degrowth through what we grow exposing the state as inhumane—pimps of nature from childhood to YA to adult stories alike! Any victim is a whore, to some extent, but can become a dark avenger as whore to have the whore’s revenge through paradox and cryptonymy advertising the eating of crackers (so to speak) in bed and out! So we do pull the Black Veil aside to showcase wicked bad naughty Zoot!

(artist: Hotsumi)

Rabbits are historically bred as pets but also for meat, in larger breeds; some rabbits are dark and thicc in ways that speak to their liberation while still enjoying the torment they cause their malnourished onlookers. Speaking to adolescent curiosities about changing bodies and what to expect of nubility (during puberty in terms of actual and idealized bodies in popular media), black rabbits do so in prescriptive and descriptive forms: puberty as scary but also exciting. To it, while material conditions shape social ones and vice versa, we congenital-to-comorbid sluts feel excited at being “born again”; i.e., as de facto witches reclaiming our bodies’ Satanic power from state pimps! All roads lead to Rome? Our heart-shaped landing strips lead to the palace of Queen Maeb!

In turn, the liminality of nubility classically has targets of sexual assault willing themselves to transform; i.e., into something unfuckable, which we can then flip on its head: to be something fuckable (above and below) that abusers can’t fuck, but whose cryptonymy—as behind and on the buffers we use—remain overshadowed by such desires (and buffers) to start with. Keeping with darkness visible, then, such portents of doom are meant to be followed into Hell (re: landing strips); and white or not, power’s power! On the Aegis, though, the chub becomes something to chase, rubbing our enemies raw (to suck their power through our vampiric holes/gaze without giving them what they want—total domination)!

To it, canonical polemics invalidate and ostracize Pagan rites and animalistic egregores, doing so by concentrating and collectively punishing them as “Satanic”; i.e., anything black (not just rabbits or cats), and operating alongside queerly “subversive” examples of natural demons: as lent an undead and/or hellish affect to stress their evil, outsider function; re: by the moral panickers: saying to any who will listen, “Please, think of the modest women and children!” Such corruption arguments tokenize, concerning the youth by “groomer” demons; i.e., poaching the black rabbit, rabbit-on-rabbit, mid-push-pull! Again, it’s very Watership Down.

In turn, all are placed outside the “natural” order of things—canonically being presented in ways that threaten the elite’s staple image of nature as imperiled and alien during virgin/whore mirror syndrome; i.e., by confusing agents whose closeness to the genuine natural world is branded as heretical, but also pornographic as “educational” in lateral, peripheral forms of canon: what your parents (and older, often male siblings) enjoy and keep from you/shelter you from… until you’re on the market, that is, when they pimp you in turn—to suddenly throw you in, head-first and blindfolded (as I was)!

Creating porn as a means of sex-positive expression/universal liberation amounts to the generation of societal boundaries that need to be respected by those establishing them; i.e., it is not an invitation to attack them or “claim” them. As outlined in the manifesto, not only is state-corporate hegemony a gateway to fascism (as Capitalism decays), but fascism is a gateway to assimilative, chattel rape fantasies and worker abuse committed by “heroic” agents: cis-het white men/token agents as false protectors! Often defended by battered housewives (who radicalized from their own abuse), these “husbando” and token “waifu” cops will never, ever have a healthy relationship; i.e., because they treat their partners like unironic masters or chattel slaves (thus food and sex toys). Simply put, they desire and resent them, seeing them as threats to state hegemony but also prizes to claim for being good little cops: mommy and daddy replacements!

(artist: Hotsumi)

So do cops become chasers; i.e., putting the Madonna on a pedestal while having affairs with the Whore’s Maculate Conception. Often, these dark mistresses (and lotharios) are codified in appropriative forms of genderqueer fantasy avatars: thicc women, “pixie dream girls,” femboys, unicorns, gorgons, etc, as bourgeois dogma dualized by proletarian likenesses using the same black-rabbit aesthetic (the sacrifice and the avenger). While these liminal forms of “bait” exist within the state of exception, they aren’t strictly mythical; they’re hiding from monstrous-femicidal forces like Amalthea did from King Haggard’s Red Bull (next page), onstage and off. The onscreen variant offers up demonic allusions to rapacious forms of courtly love: of classically chasing vulnerable women through the forest, forcing them to change into something else[7] to survive the patriarch’s lusty wrath. To it, the lycanthrope (again rabbit or not, female or not) has a topos of power that is as much their ability to transform as it is to attract an unwanted mate and go running scared through the dark forest!

Offstage, power and resistance meet at cross purposes during Pride events. Kink at Pride is a tricky subject, or public nudism in general; even so, they invite gender trouble from reactionaries as much as overt porn. Obviously it should be made available at appropriate ages and in stories that can teach sex and gender to children in language they’ll actually comprehend (exhibit 56a).

All the same, we shouldn’t treat children like fools; i.e., they are smarter than capital gives them credit, absorbing and internalizing ideas at a rapid pace (a common consensus is that children until puberty passively acquire language; they do not learn it). They also grow up and experiment with sex as they age and their bodies mature. They make their own gossip, perceptive pastiche and constructive anger to transform themselves and the natural-material world like Gay Wizards do—as bearers, dwellings and messengers of their own trauma. Of that, the poiesis of their “magic” chooses the form, not them: “Magic do as you will!”

“Magic Do as You Will!”: On the Cusp of Adulthood; or, Teenage Unicorns Following Rabbits

This brings us to the bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story and Young Adult fiction aimed at sexually developing teenagers. For men, this is classically the monomyth. For women, this applies to the Gothic novel out of older rape apologia or legends about rape and courtly love/escape (e.g., Persephone and Hades); i.e., commonly turning women into things a rapist (or their proxy) won’t care for, thus chase. In leaving the safety of Paradise, the Young-at-Heart—from Persephone to Hermia to Dorothy Gale to Madikken to Ripley to Amalthea—speak to the female/feminine side of things, save that Amalthea is monstrous-feminine in magical ways tied to nature-as-alien. She’s a GNC, phallic (“one-horned”) whore/force of nature to capture and turn into a princess—first sent on her way by a talking butterfly (versus a rabbit), and chased over Hell’s half-acre by a fiery Red Bull. This speaks to the fears of approaching nubility that women would classically fear and want to control in Neo-Gothic fantasies, except The Last Unicorn has the gift of queer inclusion, thus foresight: our Lady Amalthea (the bearer of the Horn of Plenty) is queer and alienated (the “last” of her kind, just as Schmendrick is the last of his, the Red-Hot Swamis—from Hindu: a religious ascetic or holy person).

Furthermore, the unicorn is only called “Amalthea” after Schmendrick (whose name is Yiddish for “fool”) turns her into a human girl of courting age; i.e., lending the story a hauntological air of gender trouble and dysphoria/body dysmorphia, mid-metamorphosis, but also jouissant cryptonymy and infiltration: “I’m alive!” while “the world is dying!” as the heroes go into the aging king’s crumbling castle (similar to the Skeksis from Jim Henson’s Dark Crystal of the same year). Hauntologies aside, Beagle’s activist-tinged neo-medieval—he wrote his novel (marketed as sci-fi; source: Baca) in 1968 and the screenplay for the film—is very bittersweet and ontologically trapped between childhood and adulthood; i.e., hiding, fighting and regressing during the cryptonymy process, and the many regrets/surprise joys that come from development and exposure:

(exhibit 57: Screencaps from The Last Unicorn. The unicorn is a creature that, when tamed, loses its horn, thus ability to fight but also be recognized for what it is; i.e., by virtue of “being beheaded,” but keeping its female body as automatically feminine within sexist eyes: “Love is slowing you down.” In short, the unicorn is a monstrous-feminine freakshow attraction, one generally sought out to be tamed and captured on all registers—first the farmer who mistakes her for a white mare, then the old witch who knows better but puts a false horn on her so paying folks can cryptonymically recognize what they’re even looking at, then ultimately held prisoner in the ocean under a haunted castle by a mad king. The last is done by Haggard constantly spying on her and her standing still to hide from him in human form; i.e., “all his spies” versus the classic female refrain that, when extending to the monstrous-feminine as a queer shapeshifting entity [the unicorn as “horned” beast] leads to Amazonomachia yet again: a duel on the beach, fencing with horns to foil the king’s rapacious and steady, Zeus-like advances [the burning abjection process]. As always, the mythic structure provides clues that spell out popularized ideas indicative of capital functioning as it usually does—doing so through the cryptonymy process, mid-chronotope: “to reach the Red Bull, you have to walk through [castle] time!” Very Bakhtinian!)

Though short on the pornographic side of things, The Last Unicorn is a perfectly fine-if-curious YA example of these ideas. Utterly enchanting but strangely bleak, it weds adult themes of death and queer existentialism to fantastical ideas of nature: the ivory image of the unicorn as a beacon of the natural world haunted with the absence of obvious trauma. She isn’t immediately under attack, but feels utterly alone. The animals of the forest are alright, but they aren’t like her. So when she innocently goes looking for what became of the others who are, she finds herself trapped in different ways—first, inside an empty land strangely depopulated of unicorns, then inside a greedy king’s castle as an unwilling fake princess.

If this sounds Gothic, it is, but with a suitably queer twist: not only is the castle is home to demons, the undead, and imprisoned queer folk; but our heroine—the story’s magic girl—is a traditionally queer monster locked inside a body she doesn’t want to inhabit; re: that of a human girl. She feels closer to nature and herself when she isn’t a princess, but having been human for a time misses the prince if not the castle he called home (despite the false father he clung to: “He is no son of mine. I found himself on a doorstep where some peasant had left him. It was pleasant enough, at first, but it died quickly.” The king is a drug lord/addict, addicted to queerness as something to see: “Why can I not see myself in your eyes!” His sickness drains the land, turning “green and soft” into “hard and grey” by a darker half of the king that keeps him prisoner).

Under attack, one will scramble desperately to defend oneself from power abuse. This humiliating desperation and defeat isn’t just from threats of physical death, but identity death. The Red Bull did not want to kill the unicorn, only drive her towards the king in his counting house. Schmendrick—bless him—invokes the awesome power of the Magic to transform the unicorn into an acceptable “beard” that the Red Bull, once-triggered, would not attack; it would deactivate and retreat, leaving the queer party in temporary peace to pursue their quest of gay rescue!

However, the disguise would not last, threatening to alter Amalthea irrevocably forever—to turn her straight, marry the prince, and live happily ever after (“Reader, I closeted myself.”)! In the end, she and the prince do not wed; the Red Bull kills the prince, who the unicorn resurrects. The “happy ending” is that they remember each other with fondness—that she “will remember his heart when men are fairytales and books written by rabbits” (similar to Cuwu and I, our regrets aside, such as those are). She’s the rabbit Schmendrick pulled out of a hat; i.e., in reverse, and—per a revolutionary cryptonymy—concealed inside a human girl who followed the rabbit back to her hutch (“I have done you evil and cannot undo it!”): a closeting of the queer, the rabbit going back into the hat/to Wonderland as an imperfect exile: “At the end of the film, the unicorn triumphs—but she still doesn’t find love?” / “There’s no happy ending. The love story is completely tragic” (source: Ricard Baca’s “Peter S. Beagle Recalls…” 2016). The idea isn’t doom, I would argue, but a curse to navigate as queer people do—in a traveling wardrobe/drag show!

The Last Unicorn, then, is ultimately a tale about trans emasculation and concealment towards liberation as elusive—about queer people being hunted by powerful men and having to hide in ways that invariably draw attention to themselves or make themselves feel dead inside (the subterfuges of which we can/will reclaim in Volume Three, Chapter Five); e.g., during the opening scene, two hunters spare the unicorn’s life and tell her she is the last. Amalthea declares, “What do men know? Just because they have seen no unicorns for a while does not mean that we have all vanished! We do not vanish! We live forever! We are as old as the sky, as old as the moon! We can be hunted, trapped—can even be killed if we leave our forests—but we do not vanish!”

And yet, segregation is no defense; re: her forest is strangely empty (a sexual pun). Men in this story do not know what they are looking at, but still exploit the unicorn as something to chattelize and pimp; i.e., they think she is a white mare versus a unicorn! To it, the most powerful of men hunt and trap unicorns for their delight, doing so by knowing what common men do not; i.e., the unicorns are useful to Haggard and make him happy when nothing else can; re: when he is using them for his delight, as one does a powerful drug but also virgin/whore: “Each time I see the unicorns […] it is like that morning in the woods, and I am truly young in spite of myself!” She’s the last card to collect, completing his collection. Is it any wonder this film is a queer kid’s calling card, there and back again?

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Everything Haggard touches dies, like a vampire. His servants are Faustian devils and the dry bones of old, drunken madmen (the skull that speaks a Gothic trope, on par with Hamlet: “To reach the Red Bull you have to walk through time. A clock isn’t time, it’s just numbers and springs. Pay it no mind—just walk right on through.” Again, very Bakhtinian). Infantile yet violent, the old king will capture what is his, or kill it if it resists: “The end will be the same.” Instead, the unicorn prevails and the mad old king plunges into the sea, swept away by the tide like mermaid foam.

A story of shattered innocence, The Last Unicorn reminds viewers to beware of those who want to “protect” children; i.e., their harmful lessons teaching men to become like Haggard, thus to colonize love, magic and all things sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll (the soundtrack performed by “Horse with No Name[8] [1971] legends, America)—in a heteronormative way that cages gay unicorns like Haggard did; re: by having “unicorns” dance for them the way that the Patriarchy taught them to, and which Beagle critiques by turning Radcliffe monomorphically on her head: by summoning the castle to dismiss Capitalism through Hamlet’s father’s ghost—killing Lir (a nod to King Lear) as Hamlet’s double, to then revive him after daddy Quixote’s dead and gone: to deny the younger squire/Sancho Panza a chance at love, but punishing him with sweet memories having nipped future Patriarchy/nepotism in the bud (“I will miss you; I never had any friends before”).

To it, heteronormativity is social-sexually dimorphic; it also sexualizes everything in coercive, imprisoning ways to enforce the pimp of nature as monstrous-feminine by bourgeois fans and class traitors (actual police, TERFs, weird canonical nerds, etc). As Aristotle once said, “Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man.” Likewise, a little girl in a Baptist family once damned me to Hell because I had long hair (“They grow up so fast!”). At the same time, my seven-year-old nephew—growing up in a trans-friendly household—didn’t miss a beat when he learned that I was trans: “Oh, so Grandma has a daughter now!” All we have to do is kill the covetous King Haggard in the next generation’s hearts, and maybe someday Amalthea and Lir can finally bone!

In other words, gender is a social construct tied to marriage in and out of the nuclear model, but one’s material surroundings inform the (de)construction; i.e., as an ongoing affair towards or away from said model. So if you’re surrounded by people who isolate and bombard you with fear and dogma, you’re going to grow up emotionally and Gothically stupid; you’re going to become the very thing capital want you to be—i.e., those who control the means of production and flow of information, but also regulate the Superstructure through cops; re: as zombified in a manner beholden to shareholders who want consumers to blindly consume predictably. The bourgeoisie want consumers to condition via canonical sex education that hide capitalist abuses around the world in fantasy language and canonical hermeneutics. In turn, fascists deliver naked displays of force in defense of Capitalism as something that decays by design: to defend through force, the Red Bulls to Haggard’s kingdom!

(exhibit 58: Top-left: source. A Nazi is a Nazi, including those who defend them.)

The first casualties in fascist coups are the intelligencia and artists; i.e., as unwilling victims of child-soldier violence. That makes the nature of Gothic Communism not only antifascist, thus fundamentally nonviolent vis-à-vis nature, but something made to defend sex-positive artists from state actors; i.e., from sex-coercive workers (artists or not) working for or endorsing the state through their own terrible art and shitty social movements’ false rebellion, hence violent enfants terribles who grow into stochastic terrorists: the bad-faith counterprotest delivered by violent cowards like Kyle Rittenhouse and the Proud Boys (exhibit 58, above). Beagle presents these rogues, in The Last Unicorn, as outlaws who—far from actually resisting King Haggard meaningfully—are actually conmen that Schmendrick accidently exposes/defeats with his own illusions of Robin Hood: “Robin Hood is a myth; we are the reality! […] That was a dangerous diversion, Sir Sorcerer!” To which Captain Cully and his right hand reward the fledgling wizard by tying him to a tree (“We’ll fill him; we’ll both be gentlemen of leisure in a month’s time!”) and which Schmendrick (our Sancho Panza making a false healing drought) escapes by accidently turning the tree back into a woman—specifically a big-titty grandma whore who tries to rape him (the blind whore’s revenge): “Oh, what have I done? Oh, God, I’m engaged to a Douglass fir! UNICORN, HELP ME!” His golem has wooden boobs, and those hurt! He’s the penis she’s titty-fucking with (echoes of Gulliver’s Travels)!

So don’t be fooled by false acts of contrition from violent LARPers (and token variants); they are the tears of crocodiles. To present oneself as different is to face their wrath—to become a potential target when Capitalism decays and enters crisis, producing zombie killers for the state and undead scapegoats for them to kill (whores policing whores, too: “She shall never have you, the hussy! We shall perish together!”). Likewise, be on your guard; i.e., like a shark waiting for blood, fascists and cryptofascists are waiting for those in power to slip, ready to pounce and take it all for themselves and blame/pimp you as the witch. They must not be normalized enough to feel comfortable; they must be challenged by workers uniting in solidarity against the source of fascism: Capitalism!

Like Beagle’s novel/screenplay about rebellious unicorns, the creative importance of Gothic Communism’s holistic approach is to encourage sex positivity (and asexual appreciation) along a well-used track towards liberation versus enslavement; i.e., one that includes—but does not endorse—the language of violence and war ubiquitous in popular media from the Gothic onwards: an addressal to the existence of anger as a legitimate, constructive force under duress during the cryptonymy process reversing abjection (thus profit) during our whore’s revenge! Rittenhouse is never getting any!

Through common material means of communicating ideas about sex, empathy and emotional intelligence—thus alienation and fetishization—ludo-Gothic BDSM includes a wide variety of “game” performers, students and teachers playing the white-to-black rabbit; i.e., everyday language and linguistic strategies like puns, clichés, metaphors and adages, but also sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll (thus harpies and unicorns), as well as Gothic theories by which to pick the lock in duality during liminal expression. So do we actual rebels—like Beagle before us—operate holistically inside veiled fantastical venues! A unicorn is a whore to set free.

In doing so, Gothic Communism desires to entice all working peoples to look through our cryptomimetic methodologies; i.e., our demonic-undead animal cryptonymy as applied poetics, onstage and off: learning from us as we teach within the crosshairs how to generate a social-sexual class consciousness wedded to the virgin/whore, thus culture and race fighting back as Amalthea and her misfit friends do—through naked disguise and prostitution. Everyone likes whores/sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, right? What about horror stories about these things, or art more broadly beyond Beagle or us chasing black rabbits?

You remember Alien, right? Nine Inch Nails? Se7en (re: “Seeing Dead People“)? This glorious phantasm of endless indulgence in forbidden, mind-altering “drugs” also includes queer allies looking at “trippy” stories like Beagle’s; i.e., where past mistakes can stochastically lead to the truth and surprise solutions—what Bob Ross calls “happy accidents” (or funny ones, from Cervantes to Beagle to us): men/tokens are so alienated from nature and whores, they no longer know what they’re looking at, which gives us true guerrillas an edge. Fascists are stupid, farming nature with malice; e.g., Everquest and every “mob” in that game’s own cartographic refrain. “If you listen to fools, the mob rules!” (Black Sabbath, 1981).

Keeping with Ross, anyone can imagine and “paint” a better world through the past as something to rediscover through tragedy and farce. As Giger shows us but also Beagle, the results can be incredibly transformative; i.e., regarding how we think about ourselves in relation to the historical-material world and nature: as something that is not writ in stone, but defined by a dialogic imagination forever in talks/decay and regeneration. To it, history can change through the human condition as something to evolve out of past forms!

This requires something I’ve described before as “learning from the past”; i.e., the Wisdoms of the Ancients as alive and happening within a world far more modernized than Radcliffe could have dreamed by touching upon forms of rebellion she famously shied away from: demons, but also the mentalities of demons as begot from altered states of mind to give back to others, mid-exchange. Indeed, Radcliffe and other Neo-Gothic authors made up (so to speak) an earlier rise of discourse; i.e., towards gender and sexual identity as starting to develop in resistance to older forms of capital similar what Beagle did in the ’80s (and us, in the 2020s). Don’t avoid the rabbit; fuck it to metal, on drugs, worshipping Satan!

As we’ve discussed, much has happened since Radcliffe—requiring current rebels to reconsider a rather old solution that feels quite novel in the present state of affairs: illicit drug use as something to symbolize or encourage through the likes of the unicorn (the white rabbit) or the harpy/xenomorph (the black rabbit); i.e., as a fever dream ode not just about rape and blind-parody sarcasm, but rape play during ludo-Gothic BDSM! To reverse abjection, said BDSM speaks hauntologically but also cryptonymically and chronotopically to sex, drugs and genderqueer rebellion/rock ‘n roll; i.e., as a happy uncontrollable ordeal—one that, sure enough, has a bit of pain thrown in to spice things up during the historical-material trauma loop: someone not to duel over but slay dragons with during the same-old weirdest boner being something to camp by embodying the boner’s symbolic cause!

Egads! The black rabbit strikes again, ravishing us in our dreams while awake; i.e., the Red Bull dropping down to taunt us, like Reptile’s Easter Egg from Mortal Kombat (1993), and just as cryptic: chasing the Numinous rabbit through many Black Veils, peeling these layers (of a black onion) back while the call comes from inside the house (re: the house is alien in ways that speak to predator/prey dualism, during liminal expression)! Let’s continue the hunt!

Continuing the Easter Egg Hunt: Derelict “Antiquity” (reprise, and Neo-Gothic Orientalism as a Foreign, Irrational Exotic to Pimp)

(artist: Kory Cromie)

Speaking of Mortal Kombat and Easter Egg hunts, the Medusa—a black rabbit or not—is concentrically framed; i.e., a Russian bun doll to get to the center of through changing skin (the xenomorph a kind of dark unicorn, but furious and blind, left; re: the harpy whore Celano to Amalthea’s virgin, but “two sides of the same magic” the white unicorn cannot stand to see caged: “She’ll kill you if you see her free!” So be it). I’ll apply this in just a moment to Fisher’s “acid Communism,” but the basic concept is actually a throwback to altered states of mind that hail from a shared imaginary antiquity studied by developing women and homosexual men; re: Radcliffe and Lewis referring to the imaginary “medieval” in regards to their young adult place in an increasingly capitalist world; i.e., where gender identity versus sexual action was becoming a thing the state was canonically policing (re: Broadmoor). With Beagle and beyond, this wasn’t just rabbits, but rabbit hybrids speaking of rape, revenge and necro-erotic fertility/fertilization through surreal chimeras; i.e., like Giger’s xenomorph linked to Orientalism as “dressing Aesop up,” a suit in a suit (with Said writing Orientalism in 1978—three years after Giger’s Necronomicon [of Lovecraft’s “mad Arab”] and a year before Alien, and three before The Last Unicorn).

We’ll get to Stompy in “Return of the Black Rabbit.” For now, let’s unpack Orientalism and similar exotic subspaces speaking to the rabbits enclosures by other names (a “pen” being both a cage and writing device for the bun-in-spirit egregore’s room of one’s own). Keeping with actual drug use flowing poetry on and off the page, prudes like Coleridge certainly imbibed laudanum to inspire themselves (and their habitats) with. But many other authors have done similar inspirational consumption with drug-like poetics and half-real virgin/whore muses.

Leaving a hazy “past” in their wake, we’re left with a surreal procession of pasts and their imperfect authors (re: Schmendrick’s Robin Hood echoing Hamlet’s father’s ghost, but also Titania’s fairy train) that we, as genderqueer people, can learn from; i.e., when finding our own non-exclusionary voices: liberating nature as alien, dead, monstrous-feminine whore, mid-exploitation—with Orientalism and Neo-Gothic as modular but often overlapping through cognitive dissonance: when the rubber meets the road and the road is rocky/the dark forest speaking to past crimes but also dark whores met with transformation and pain, mid-exchange. Illusions can trap or free the mind, just like Schmendrick!

This invariably involves encountering similar, but unique scenarios that cover up, imitate and parody even older scenarios; i.e., not just “fatal” portraits, but “dead poets” reciting the reinvented past through bits of poetry that go on to define our own struggles to be extraordinary under the self-same ticking of the clock: “Seize the day. Because, believe it or not, each and every one of us in this room is one day going to stop breathing, turn cold and die” (exhibit 59a, below).

Like Rimbaud’s infamous “derangement of all the senses,” there’s no time like the present to “do drugs” and transform into our true selves (and Rimbaud’s transgressive expanding of the senses in 1871 [“Je est un autre“] riding on the emergence, as Foucault puts it, of the homosexual as a new species in 1870; i.e., as queer discourse spearheaded/expressed by an expanding of the senses in literature, but also popular stories and everyday speech: a return to the queer as revived in the present in new retro-modern forms): as something to take with us on dangerous roads. America, for example, play Jimmy Webb’s excellent and haunting “Man’s Road“; i.e., speaking again to Bakhtin, but also German translations of the 1982 film (with Christopher Lee fluent in German) likewise alluding to German shadow novels and plays (re: Faustus) that inspired the British Neo-Gothic authors’ own Terror and Horror schools escaping Plato’s cave while inside it: “I can only show you the door; you’re the one who has to walk through it.”

(exhibit 59a: Model and artist, top-far-left: Matthew Lewis and George Lethbridge Saunders; top-mid-left [concealed]: Mary Shelley and Richard Rothwell; bottom-far-left: model and artist: Elizabeth Devonshire and Thomas Lawrence, as no “living” portrait of Radcliffe survives; meme, top-middle-left: source.)

Yet, while the spectres of Marx survive in ways still common today that workers can learn from, they can also be fooled by copycats. It’s the corporate copycats and proponents of capital you gotta beware; i.e., they’ll teach you that all people are the same, that the old ways are exclusively stupid and bad, then blind you with the reimagined past as seen through “their” eyes—the way they want you to see the world, thus buy their products and otherwise behave predictably for them (a concept we’ll explore for the rest of this book series): a false prophet insofar as their cryptonymy is bourgeois, thus false relative to worker class interests! Trojan animals, thus whores, work in duality!

(artist, left: PDD; right: Harmony Corrupted)

As such, fabled falsehood isn’t monopolized by the elite, as Lewis’ cryptonymy shows (and Beagle’s/ours). In keeping with his Matilda’s own black rabbit, demons give forbidden knowledge as something to chase into Hell on Earth (a bit like Dante’s Virgil, but gayer and sluttier): where they chattelize and brutalize nature, they will rape workers and fetishize said whore and rape it as alien. “Black” is given a bad rap, then; e.g., blackmail or Black Phillip. But it’s where power is stored, thus can be used by us to leverage our power as something to reverse abjection on the Aegis!

As a trans person, then, I have devised ludo-Gothic BDSM (and monstrous drug use as a mind-opening device) to cryptonymically reverse abjection, thus the rape of nature’s black rabbits similar to Said’s Orientalism (echoing those black rabbits my stepfather killed in front of me and forced me to eat); i.e., ones that, despite being coded as sinister per a Protestant ethic pimping nature at large as monstrous-feminine, magically “levels the playing field” for all sex workers—thus all work, past, present and future—having died prematurely while toiling under manufactured, exploited time: the cruel mechanized clock of Capitalism and ergonomic labor stolen for someone else’s profit based on your body and time, but also poetics! Sex and adventure go arm-in-arm, or rather dick-in-hole since the feudal ages into modern eras selling military conquest being “worthwhile”; i.e., for a breedable princess to steal from your rival and impregnate with your bloodline!

“To reach the Red Bull you have to walk through time!” Same idea with the black rabbit and its own Gothic fakeries oppositional cryptonymy (re: Gwynevere, Princess of Sunlight, below—a concentric hyperreal illusion inside an illusion inside an illusion, within the infernal concentric pattern’s ergodic, anisotropic, liminal, holistic mise-en-abyme)!

(model and artist: Isabelle Ryan and Persephone van der Waard)

As Beagle showed us, such “Ancient” Romances can be camped through sex work, well enough; i.e., to achieve a drug-like empathy during the cryptonymy process. As Said shows, this needn’t be literal drugs (though it can be), but a land associated with them. As someone who is habitually sober but has tried drugs, I propose “breaking the clock” by listening to the friendly past as “drug-like”; i.e., in places “out of time,” like the Metroidvania chronotope (which houses monstrous-feminine and black knight hybrids, such as Dark Souls‘ concentric illusions, above), but also the Orientalism (and black rabbits) such chronotopes invoke!

When taken, drugs distort one’s sense/placing of time, shaping the future in ways that keep the evil clock and its callous machinations from returning (and blinding people with false, reinvented, neoliberal time); i.e., by using my time as something to compile a driven, focused haze: a life’s work for future workers of the world to learn from—to give them, and their ancestors/future children a frankly much-needed voice and hermeneutic of perceiving they can emblematize and disseminate!

To it, I am not by doing anything remarkably “great” in the traditional sense (re: Prince Lir’s great deeds), but by doing something that few under Capitalism actually do, am still doing an extraordinary feat to contribute towards a larger movement, over space-time: one fighting with enhanced modes of perception (and existence) that supply hallucinatory acid-Communist potential to yield revolutionary demon-undead animal deities like the unicorn, xenomorph or 1,001 Arabian Nights from the Islamic Golden Age onwards; i.e., as a jinn-like mascot retranslated for genderqueer existence (e.g., exhibit 60d—with trans, intersex and non-binary persons making their own art tied to the half-real imaginary past): to make dark wishes come true that, per Said’s Orientalism, challenge the Protestant ethic pimping Islam and Africa as smushed into a single abject paradigm. “Sometimes a tree’s just a tree,” but beyond its usage per capital, can grow cryptonymically into something more; re: like Schmendrick’s “true magic” (“Did you see what I made? I had it—it had me—but it’s gone now!”) but like any witch hunt and subsequent liberation, isn’t rooted in any particular time and place (re: Federici)!

To that, I’m doing my own small part to fight Capitalism and help wake people up by leaving my own “torch” behind: this “trippy” book series (and my art married to my friends, which a friend described as being “the Bob Ross of vulvas”). Designed to illuminate with shadows, it can stay free from the drug-induced, paralyzing darkness of Capitalism’s “bad batches,” but still kind of works like drugs do. These can be unusual linguistic devices like “monster puns” or stories of exquisite “torture”; re: on the edge of the civilized (sober) world: Orientalism and its hauntologies long after “Ozymandias” started an admittedly tenebrous trend (cloaked in the Shadow not just of Pygmalion, but Napoleon aping Caesar).

Part of the essence of Gothic is its modular and patchwork nature; i.e., allowing you to make quick, rapid comparisons to seemingly unlike things across larger groups with people who might not have seen a given “rabbit” but recognize something similar somewhere else. The chaotic exercise amounts to “Hey, this is sort of like that” as tying to a massive checklist in the monster mode; you only have to check the boxes needed to address a particular issue under Capitalism, thus a particular monster to think about or with in regards to yourself as part of the larger material world. Drugs, then, become symbolic to an altered, discouraged way of thinking that can transform the world to help all workers tripping through the liminal space (and its hauntology of war):

(exhibit 59b: Model and artist: Jazminskyyy and Persephone van der Waard [with mixed media from album artist Ken Kelly‘s cover for Rainbow’s 1976 album, Rising]. A black rabbit tripping hard!

Just like with stigma animals, stigma substances must be reclaimed through the minorities [and cultures/religions] they’re associated with [and vice versa]. To this, Orientalism goes hand-in-hand with the stigmatizing of drugs, specifically as a cultural facet in non-Christian societies that “threaten” Western values; e.g., Islamophobia involving xenophobic hauntologies that fetishize abjected parties. In liminal forms of fantastical expression, queerness can intersect with this subversion, the rainbow as something to “go over” involving queerness and drug use; e.g., the poppy fields in The Wizard of Oz that Dorothy and her friends were skipping through; i.e., in the arduous task of reclaiming and rehumanizing of lost cultures and memories.

As something to reclaim, the use or theme of dark rainbows/drugs can combat a racist/xenophobic Gothic imagination through empathetic fantasies adjacent their Orientalist doubles; i.e., not just a castle, but a palace operated by a sultan—with harems, concubines, eunuchs and assassins! Inside this dialogic sphere, Western demons are replaced by fake jinn and Italian banditti are swapped out for desert nomads, etc [e.g., Lovecraft’s incredibly racist and xenophobic ghost of the counterfeit, “Under the Pyramids”—a 1924 short story where, I shit you not, Harry Houdini is kidnapped by Egyptian devil worshippers and lowered into a Gaza pyramid and forced to look upon ancient terrors]: a dark moth rabbit to turn into and inspire others with its bare exposed “terrors”! So scary!

[artist: Jazminskyyy]

Abjection fetishizes the whore as alien on a gradient, one where racism lingers as a hauntological entity haunting older empire in “older” empire’s cryptomimetic “currency.” In the usual morphological cartography-in-small, a black or brown body also stands in for continents or cities, but also what those yield as fetishized in both directions: a land of ancient warriors and exotic whores—thus their dark revenge and forbidden pleasures; i.e., as something to plunge into and relish, mid-conquest [sex being a chance to extend one’s bloodline through future attempts at expanding territory and development of one’s already-owned land and materials]! Canonically this is called “slumming” but exploitation and liberation occupy the same shadow zone/use the same dark forces [and rabbits] at cross dialectical-material purposes!

Similar to their overtly Western counterparts, then, sex-positive examples of the Middle Eastern romance highlight the magic castle—not to endorse the status quo, but quantify cultural value in general while inside the same shadow of police violence; i.e., a dark whore’s rarefied desire for universal class elevation and wealth redistribution in a singular [thus inadequate] body language haunted by tokenism/ostracization: as coming from a particular socio-material arrangement and ethnic group’s diaspora/cultural reinvention [e.g., the Hoteps] that encompasses holistic struggle in idiosyncratic forms: the nepotistic hoard attached to the whore the sultan sucked said gold from [capital turning nature into gold as a transactional predatory process]. All workers are princes, princesses and princexes under Communism—making the outdated, medieval notion of the princess, kingdom and castle symbolic of a former time to regress into Communism with; re: “Long and hard is the way…” speaking to BBCs and PHAT bodies, black or not [e.g., PAWGs]! The way out of the brothel is inside it, camping such devices in ways that encourage interracial subterfuge; e.g., like Jazmin and I did, working together to performatively speak to struggles not quite of ours but also not quite not!

Of course, one needn’t actually live in the castle—i.e., while ruling from a dogmatic, unfair position—for things to be “good.” Likewise, its cryptonymy can reflect a particular fantasy type played by adjacent oppressed groups in good faith: the storing and exchange of power under the Arabian Nights pastiche according to medievalized personas like the princess but also the mercenary from an imaginary world not “of the West”; i.e., a place closer to nature/the frontiers of current conquest dressed up xenophobically and xenophillically as religious-themed challenges to Christian hegemony with heretical suggestion: the Crusades having failed in rooting out all forms of opposition while minting new canonical ones that repeat the process.

Just as capital makes this eradication impossible—re: by demanding a scapegoat always be near and if one isn’t, that it be created out of thin air—we holistic oppressed can invent new subversions out of the same silk shawls; i.e., where those of us closer to the in-group stand in for out-groups that can’t speak for themselves; e.g., a white trans woman and black cis-het sex worker speaking to the oppressed in Palestine as inclusively as our faction in the larger fractured pedagogy allows. Weaponizing Orientalism for workers in a global world certainly involves a balancing act—i.e., because cultural appreciation and appropriation occupy the same siren-song choral chambers—but it can be done in sex-positive ways that dodge tokenism in the act!

[artist: Jazminskyyy] 

In Gothic, bandits are whores as part of the tableaux “sticking us up”; i.e., of a hauntological regression to the barbaric: as having a middle-class fascination with non-white cultures since the Crusades seeking to invade and colonize those areas. In turn, bandits are simply redistributors of wealth under criminogenic conditions, the whore being a kind of sex bandit that—for women, in classical scenarios—would “stealth steal” wealth from men; i.e., through labor that wasn’t always pimped [a whore without a pimp being a threat]. The femme fatale would be something that, from the Neo-Gothic period onwards, romanticized such paradigm shifts in ways that while not completely underheard of in actual history outside fantasy stories, usually fell on the side of pirate queens or royalty like the Queen of Sheba. Things then progressed beyond the usual cliques and began to globalize Orientalism as a terror weapon tied to drug and sex wars; i.e., as a neoliberal export meeting a rising middle-class demand for exotic princesses/infidel tyrants versus a medieval canard.

Xenophobia is generally rooted in half-legends, futile investigations and complete inventions, on the Aegis: what we’re working with, mid-subversion!

To this, domestic fears of the foreign assassin are not limited to the Orientalism of the Middle East [also being featured within the ninjas of medieval Japan, for instance]! Except these occur after the Mongol sacking of Baghdad, which forced the Golden Age of Islam to end, and echoed Cartesian pursuits, centuries afterwards; i.e., where much of actual Muslim recorded history and cultural achievements survive in echoes. Rather than being completely destroyed, though, they become the stuff of legends, leading cryptomimetically to a glut of popular misconceptions ushered in by future abusers and liberators [e.g., Frankenstein in Bagdad‘s 2013 response by Ahmed Saadawi to the War on Terror].

Such things canonically fetishize and alienize sex and force [re: policing the whore]. One example includes the word “assassin” as drug-themed, but also xenophobic and xenophilic. Hayden Chakra describes this group as 

The order of Hashashin, or also known as the middle eastern Assassins, were a medieval terror spreading gang that excelled in the professional killing of important people. Other names they were recognized by were Nizaris, Nizari Ismailis, Batini’s “people of the esoteric teachings” or Ta’limiyyah “people of the secret teachings.” They controlled the medieval Islamic world for more than 130 years. Their leader was called Hassan al-Sabbah [source: “The Deadliest Medieval Order Of Assassins – The Hashashins,” 2022].

 

[source: Bitplex’ “Original (1989) Prince of Persia Reimagined in 3D!” 2018]

Supposedly the group worked in secret from a dangerous fortress called Alamut, or “Death Mountain.” Furthermore, after Napoleon’s defeating of the Mamluks and conquering of Egypt, an 1809 talk by a French linguistic contributed to the rise of Egyptology in the process but also various harmful myths about the homogenized peoples and their conquered culture seeking revenge:

The talk, by the linguist and orientalist Silvestre de Sacy, was titled “Dynasty of the Hashishyun and the Etymology of Their Name.” Its gist was that the name of a Shi’ite sect known as the Hashishyun (“Assassins”) was derived from its members’ use of hashish, an intoxicant made of marijuana resin. Founded in 11th-century Persia by Hasan ibn al-Sabah, the Hashishyun sect, from the Ismaili branch of Shi’a Islam, was quite well known in France and throughout Europe. It had gained fame after being mentioned in Marco Polo’s widely read account of his travels, written in about 1300. According to Marco Polo, Al-Sabah, aka the “Old Man of the Mountain,” would give his followers an “intoxicating potion” to drink that turned them into cruel warriors, and would then dispatch them to dispose of his enemies. The extensive use of the sect’s members as hit men is a historical fact, but the potion Marco Polo described was apparently a legend. In any case, so well-known was the legend in Europe, that the French form of the sect’s name, assassin, became synonymous with “murderer,” and also passed into English as a noun and a verb [source: Elon Gilad’s “The Historic Mixup That Made People Fear Hashish,” 2019].

Though ultimately not founded in historical fact, the legend of the Middle East as synonymous with drugs, prostitution and murder demonstrates a popular mantra utilized by Napoleon into Orientalism; i.e., haunted by his ghost: as the shrewd and unscrupulous maker of history as “a set of lies that people have agreed upon” [source: PBS “Self-Made Myth”]. He leaves out his own role as head-of-state compelling these agreements through force, not unlike other Great Men of History before/after him except he was spearheading Western superiority and Cartesian exceptionalism during the rise of the nation-state through his own pioneering of modern war leading towards modern-day fascism and white savior rhetoric on the global stage in the 20th and 21st centuries [e.g., the Prince of Persia series, above, or The Legend of Zelda and its own curiously liminal (and genderqueer) subversions, below].

[artist, top-left: Persephone van der Waard; rest: Jazminskyyy]

Certainly there remains a dogmatic fear of the unknown the elite use to stoke Western fears of the East and their inexorable, prophesized revenge “from the shadows.” But a larger duality [and paradox] is equally present; i.e., the assassin and their mythical “magic potion” existing historically-materially as something to endorse [the American War on Drugs] or subvert [“Death Mountain[9]“]: reuniting alien things to benefit labor and nature, not the elite; re: mid-paradox, on the Aegis, challenging profit.

As something to subvert inside a xenophilic exhibit like mine and Jazmin’s, there is generally a danger in challenging the representations of powerful men like Napoleon, but also later Pygmalions like Frank Frazetta [the page after next]: a shared dialogic/stage tone-policed by reactionaries, white moderates, and token elements wanting exclusive authorship over “exclusive” oppression. Oppression is holistic. Ergo, whatever suspicions different groups nurse/arouse, we have to intersect, thus allow for shared performances inside the Valley of Amazons and Thieves [e.g., Link and Nabooru, above]—meaning those that account for asymmetrical and holistic axes of privilege and oppression alike! Nothing reduces during guerrilla warfare, because reducing select groups to singular voices speaking to their oppression is merely a divisive tactic whose Tower of Babel colonizes workers and media, Nintendo style: “Heaven rewards hard work.”

 [artist: Persephone van der Waard]

Overspecialize and you breed in weakness—not from Heinlein’s perspective, but that of rebels needing intersectional solidarity. Furthermore, silence is death. Therefore, we avoid the shame of canonical/token indignation [and ignominious death] while advancing one’s material position; i.e., with one’s own body to break Orientalism by faking it, thus Capitalist Realism, in good faith versus the state. The wearing of a mask also works to protect one’s actual identity through a secret identity/alter ego that publicizes a challenge to the established order of an imagined Orient/dead culture’s imaginary past—a place to cherish and “plunder” [with/without quotes] depending on who you work for/fight against; i.e., where power and resistance share the same language in oppositional praxis; e.g., a sexy Sheik to Ganon or Link’s Hero of Time. Oppressed groups can be kettled to reject help from educated allies with privilege [as Said was; re: Persephone van der Waard’s 2017 “Frederic Jameson and the Art of Lying” speaking to the paradox of telling truth with splendid lies/archaeologies of the future and elaborate strategies of misdirection]. We’re all part of the same Breakfast Club; i.e., to betray each other is doom ourselves to an Omelas refrain.)

So far, things have bore out some semblance of order and Paradise; i.e., as something to exclude and indulge in to camp the usual bigotries by “wanting to go to South Africa” (to camp it). Except, post-drug use, the monomyth heroine finds themselves suddenly approaching Hell in ways that continue to resemble home as fearful despite reversing abjection through a holistic pedagogy of the oppressed: the rapidly approaching brick wall, Black Veil or otherwise proverbial abyss rising up to swallow them whole, mise-en-abyme, into the infernal concentric pattern!

In short, this is where “the wheels fly off” and Paradise is subsequently Lost and found through paradox/darkness visible (which the bun and its “magic carpet” are). But the rabbit hasn’t shown itself yet—waiting somewhere close at hand as the teenage character finds themselves in a scary grown-up world doubling their perfect past while they have a sexually nubile heroic form to operatically brave the dangers with: hunting for our own “death” in quotes; i.e., during ludo-Gothic BDSM. That’s our immortality! With Paradise Lost, let’s tempt the Fates!

Paradise Lost; or, Chasing the Rabbit on a Promethean Quest/during a Faustian Bargain (acid Communism reprise; feat., Jim Morrison, Blake, Rimbaud, etc)

Canon h(a)unts its dreams with bugbears (or bugbuns, Bugs Bunnies); Gothic Communism uses the same basic approach to speak to the pedagogy pimped by capital and exotified from an early teenage point of conception and “breeding age” (e.g., Frazetta’s “Cleopatra” a pinup body by guarded by non-white harem guards and black panthers, below): growing up (too fast)/forced to by capital’s nuclear model!

Beyond Orientalism, I now want to employ Fisher’s acid Communism as a way of getting creative by following the black rabbit on a figurative (or literal) drug trip from adulthood onwards; i.e., within ways that reinvent what will likely be suppressed by using what’s on hand: to shapeshift, thus avoid capture but still get one’s point across, albeit in disguise/on drugs, and which include fatal regressions back into the dangerous childhood as close by insofar as adults are infantilized for their sexual labor! This tripping whore’s revenge includes when using art as a forbidden substance to open one’s eyes (or grow them anew). Already outlined by Radcliffe, Lewis and Otto as part of a larger synchronistic scheme, but similarly drawing upon the old, “dead” volumes already compiled by past users of the same method, Gothic Communism uses whatever works to help people see while concealing the drug as “just” entertainment.

(artist: Frank Frazetta)

Furthermore, this includes any “drug-like” or transformative experience historically offered by its famous caché of radical methods and infamous stories. This isn’t just a band of unlikely friends and certified misfits commenting on a similar socio-material arrangement with similar stories; they’re doing it in similar ways that continue to be used to cryptonymically represent themselves with—the helpful “ghost,” in this case, being the Wisdom of the Ancients as a “library” donated to workers by these now-dead people: Marx’s nightmare as a useful tool; i.e., not just any old curse, but a means of escaping the curse of Capitalism by playing with “curses” we can control; re: through ludo-Gothic BDSM doing “magic” to gain forbidden sight: to see, to speak, to scream (Daily Dose of Internet, Jan 16th 2023; timestamp: 0:23), thus sing and dance to gain taboo knowledge as the poetic ability to detect the human within the monster through various social-sexual exchanges. So do we keep chasing our adventurous, titular white-to-black rabbit into an uncanny adulthood that leaves us feeling stranded and free from Capitalist Realism’s usual marooning!

Our inspection of reclaiming the rabbit—and its drugs/adult behaviors and cycle of education back towards children, again—will include acid Communism from past revolutionaries like Jim Morrison, Rimbaud, Blake and Shakespeare, but also the Medusa “dragon” these emboldened men were historically chasing for various, not-always-noble-reasons: ghosts we workers of the present must also camp.

To it, demonic reclamation is not an overnight process; it carries on through a state of transition towards the state as something to reinvert—i.e., by redistributing power and reconfiguring socio-material conditions over time. This includes the joyous subverting of canonical forms through the code of identity as a cryptonymic means of concealment: for those performing queer existence with borrowed language (thus time); i.e., the camouflage of revolutionary cryptonyms (which we shall examine more thoroughly in the next chapter and in Volume Three) as a kind of covert identity working out in the open. This can be through occult demonic expression, nature-themed demons and drugs, or composite demons and critiques of capital that become disguised by virtue of their otherworldly “Gothic” qualities; re: the unreality of the infernal concentric pattern being something we can make real in spite of that: to break Capitalist Realism by developing Gothic Communism with its own stolen supply of drugs (and white-to-black rabbits)!

For example, whereas exhibit 60a shows workers with morphologically flexible demons, exhibit 60b places model cut-outs over Frank Frazetta’s original paintings. His older, hauntological images of women and nature are fundamentally violent and dehumanizing. By subverting those through fresh visions, the worker effectively reinvents the relationship between humans, sexuality and nature; i.e., through peaceful drug use and sex-positive hallucinations reversing abjection during the whore’s revenge; re: “putting the pussy on the chainwax!”

(exhibit 60a: Artist: Regalia for the Wicked: An Eldritch Fashion Zine. “Wicked,” in this case, denotes a class of individual monsters canonically associated with evil and the unknown; i.e., Lovecraft’s xenophobia, except here the magazine covertly humanizes the monsters. I say “covert” because the outward appearance is still abnormal, meaning humanized without sacrificing their phantasmagorical, morphologically inchoate qualities; i.e., there’s a sense of pride involved in preserving that aspect of themselves, denoting Fisher’s “acid Communism” as a drug-like means of escape into liberating plastic bodies.)

(exhibit 60b: Models: Nyx and Mikki Storm; artist: Persephone van der Waard.)

Workers require iconoclastic “drugs” to combat Capitalist Realism’s inability to imagine a future beyond the canonical, devastated hauntologies of neoliberal canon; i.e., a drug-like expansion of the mind—what Mark Fisher called “acid Communism.” Earlier, we looked at Stuart Mill’s “What Is Acid Communism?” As we further inspect the good-to-bad rebellious qualities of it (and not just innocent, child-like ones), I want you to have access to the full quote:

…part of acid communism is the means to fulfil Fisher’s desire to imagine the future. Of course, some people take a superficial view of this part, though I think Fisher choose acid communism partly for the advantage this superficiality provides. Acid communism is about ways of imagining a world after capitalist realism, and for Fisher, one of the ways to escape this reality is psychoactive drugs. The programme of acid communism is not to condone psychoactive drug use, but as an example this activity captures the philosophy of acid communism excellently.

To imagine new futures, we have to find ways to break out of our present myopia. Fisher’s acid communism is unique primarily for placing this goal above all others. For example, Marx’s call for class consciousness is a very acid communist idea, but the means of achieving class consciousness (the critiques and contradictions of capital) dominated much of Marx’s contribution. If Fisher had more time, perhaps this would have been the fate of acid communism too, attempting to imagine new ways of achieving acidic or post-capitalist realist thought. Instead, acid communism leaves us with a simple message. The future has been cancelled because we are unable to imagine anything other than the present. To invent the future, to escape our myopia, we have to go beyond the present bounds of our imagination. This is acid communism (source).

As we’ll see, such an idea isn’t restricted to drugs-in-abstract, though!

For example, not only were they a Marxist-Leninist, but Cuwu actually studied weed’s neoliberal recultivation; i.e., from an outlawed substance used to demonize minorities to a monocrop directed at white-owned businesses. According to Cuwu, the monopoly did little to change the persecution of black and brown people; i.e., for having these drugs in states where the practice hasn’t been legalized. Instead, the legalization is designed to privatize and gentrify the drug’s production within white systems of power—in effect, taking weed away from poor black and brown communities; i.e., as one of the few non-violent ways of making money to enrich white business owners and corporations without condemning the War on Drugs for the abusive Crusades happening against minorities as usual.

By that same logic, drug use must be decriminalized in a literal and figurative sense, including monsters of nature (and by extension, all monsters) as a powerful means of educating children (the future generation) not to exploit each other and the world around them for profit; i.e., monsters becoming rebellious stewards of nature that adults follow back into childhood’s sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll: as counterculture-with-a-face (or bunny ears). Except “counterculture,” like the human body and its history of psychosexual expression vis-à-vis nature, becomes something to dive into. Meanwhile, some are more famous than others, guiding our way through past history as possible differently in the future to achieve similar countercultural goals that are more inclusive and sex-positive than past versions!

This brings us to Jim Morrison, who frankly was a bit of a misogynistic dick; i.e., aping Percy Shelley’s common-law treatment of Mary Wollstonecraft junior but also Rimbaud’s privileged “derangement of the senses” to posture at rebellion by dying for one’s art until they either cried “Uncle!” or actually dropped dead: Rimbaud sold out/got wise and Morrison bought the farm in a Parisian bathtub (from a heroin overdose, if memory serves). Beatniks and peaceniks haunted by liberal concessions and betrayals behind the rebellious façade, pacification is pacification (no one likes a hypocrite poser except other hypocrite posers refusing to stay sober). C’est la vie!

Other drugs, like LSD, were originally weaponized (from naturally-occurring mescaline) by the CIA; i.e., to interrogate suspects by making them more suggestible and compliant. Conversely, these drugs were linked not just to 1960s counterculture (and its white, privileged irresponsibilities, above), but older modes of seeing the world before Red Scare dominated the scene; e.g., Jim Morrison’s The Doors being a nod to Aldous Huxley’s 1954, The Doors of Perception, whose documentation of mescaline work is eponymously linked to William Blake’s “doors of perception”; i.e., Blake’s pointed concern with “corroding fires” being the literal acids he used to make his infamous printing plates to defend the Devil as a mind-opening force; re: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Depending on their usage during oppositional praxis, psychoactive drugs (or drug-like media that induce similar effects or appeals) can open or close the mind during Capitalism Realism as something to encourage or defeat (with rabbits to chase, versus dragons)!

This being said, drug misuse can happen on either side of that equation. As a Byronic, misogynistic sage touched swiftly with rockstar success and meteoric plummeting[10] just as fast, Morrison’s crooning “I am the Lizard King, I can do anything!” from “Not to Touch the Earth” (1968) highlighted a tragic shortening of his own life as self-prophesized: “No one gets out of here alive.” More to the point, he accomplished this dark maxim in pursuit of forbidden truth and new, undiscovered senses/synesthesia-esque sensations through heavy drug use (not entirely unlike Rimbaud, except Rimbaud died a capitalist after quitting drugs); i.e., a dysfunctional misfit whose bucolic, fatal excess led to his own premature demise.

As such, the cliché of the artist suffering for his craft “to break on through” administers a cold hard truth: of vino veritas heralding Paracelsus’ adage, “All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison” (and context; re: Pinsky). Figurative and/or literal, drugs can be imbibed/expressed as a matter of degree (famously seen through functioning/non-functioning alcoholics like T.S. Eliot and Earnest Hemmingway abusing alcohol to get at the truth, but also to cope with reality as insufferably laden with madness and death—an addictive, Dionysian tradition that damaged them as much as it did Phil Lynott insisting “I Got to Give It Up” in 1979, while slowly drinking himself to death). To this, even Coleridge took just enough laudanum to open his mind, but survived to close it again and badger Matthew Lewis for writing The Monk. His work (according to Coleridge) was too close to death and the chaos of a queer existence that the older man desperately wanted to abolish once sober. You don’t need drugs to write in a drug-like way/speak to a desire for liberation that manifests differently per oppressed and privileged groups; without drugs, Coleridge became a cop.

The fact remains, Matthew Lewis didn’t have a reputation for doing hard drugs (as far as I can tell, anyways), yet features a drug-like character whose particular Gothic imagination was one many in public life detested! Beyond Coleridge, many saw Matilda and Lewis as a profane embarrassment, with Coleridge impeaching Lewis every chance he got. Yet, Lewis was arguably as sober as Coleridge was, albeit for far longer! Lewis didn’t do drugs; he merely lacked the inhibitions to silence his dreams from moment to waking moment (my own dedication for Volume Zero reading: “I swear I wrote this book sober!” despite me rarely doing drugs myself. Simply put, I didn’t need to).

(exhibit 60c: Artist: Unlovely Frankenstein. Mary Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft senior, wrote arguably the first modern feminist text in Great Britain, A Vindication of the Rights of Women [1792]. Shelley herself went onto write Frankenstein, which—as we’ve discussed in “Making Demons“—had a very anti-capitalist flavor amid its hauntological mix of Gothic horror, Byronic anti-heroics, framed perspectives and dark vengeful spectres.)

I’m emphasizing “drug use” in quotes here because the “usage” is at times symbolic, paratextual and/or literal; i.e., any of these methods working as a complicated means of rebellious poetic expression that dates back to at least the 1700s (in relation to the Enlightenment, anyways). Back then, it was ridiculed during the rising of genderqueer identities, only to continue on a pro-capitalist trend through the likes of privileged, megachurch grifter-televangelists like Pat Robertson (who only just died today as of me writing this; mark the date: 6/8/2023; Rebecca Watson, 2023). Of Robertson, Unlovely Frankenstein writes,

Pat Robertson said feminism “is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” Sure, it sounds profoundly stupid, but it doesn’t even rank on the 10 stupidest things Pat Robertson has ever said (source, 2023).

Clearly acid Communism’s drug-like expansion into new states of existence lies at the heart of Gothic critiques of capital and its violation of human rights; i.e., by the usual suspects during various Wars of Drugs pimping the egregore (white rabbit or not): white, cis-het, Christian men/token forces (whose own Protestant ethic under Capitalism—especially neoliberal Capitalism—we’ll continue to unpack in Volume Three when excoriating the Man Box). We must chase the Black Rabbit down; i.e., to get a quote for prosperity by turning into the Black Rabbit, ourselves (who still wants hugs during the dialectic of the alien: a mating porcupine).

From the Shelley clan’s precocious and anti-capitalist fictions—to Rimbaud’s subsequent “derangement” during the first Gilded Age versus Morrison’s ’70s-era debauchery leading up to the Second/second wave feminism well into Internet-era reclamations of contested monsters—the Gothic organ of queer liberation under Capitalism speaks to the figurative eyeballs of perceptive pastiche (versus Jameson’s statue with blind eyeballs attacking Gothic vision); i.e., as “drug-addled” without abusing said drugs (thus the rabbit) like these older magicians did.

These, in turn, are commonly embodied by a host of resources who creatively offer up new ways of understanding ourselves and the material world; i.e., through the Gothic imagination’s circular proximity with death and chaos as thoroughly codified in drug-like darkness. Doing so through their own modular and unreliable spyglasses into the past, older Gothic rebels equaled murky expressions of the self as plastic and malleable (the slow, incremental metamorphosis for many trans people being a kind of “creeping”; i.e., to avoid detection from those in power as immortal predators you don’t run from, especially if they have you surrounded; re: the harpy Celano from The Last Unicorn).

For example, sense and sensibility is, itself, an old idea. Through Gothic poetics, it merges through one’s nebulous sexual desires, class liberation fantasies and gender fluidity—not simply an abject bodily metaphor or criminal “branding” of so-called degenerates, but a sensitive rebellious mode of shapeshifting existence; re: the Romantics—but especially the young ones, per Nafi—generally thinking of Satan as a rebel figure; i.e., pointedly described by Milton as turning into different forms that were decidedly un-angelic (a toad, a snake—both stigma animals—but also other, more inchoate forms). Why not a rabbit, too?

Collected and (re)assembled into a dark, dreamy composite, then pulled back and viewed from a distance, these demons form a pattern on the surface of collages like those scattered through this series: transforming ontological freedom using language reclaimed from heteronormative societal constraints that really warp you brain (re: exhibit 60c; also, Pillow Pants from Clerks 2). Ignoring Robertson’s own malicious dogma as a theocratically fascist means of expanding on his already-vast fortunes, the sad fact remains that most straight folk (closeted or not) think openly GNC people are abject aliens to some degree (only having seen “representations” of them in horror movies); i.e., nature as something to steal from while riding out Medusa’s wrath (re: state shift). But these same transphobic persons also have very weird phobias tied to the penis, anus and pussy (whose constant mislabeling as “vagina” denotes a place to put the man’s penis for reproductive purposes while ignoring the clitoris to mythical extremes).

From a canonical standpoint under Capitalist Realism, men see women/the monstrous-feminine and “junk” as sites of alien violence, rape and hysteria[11]: “Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here,” “work will see you free!” (camping Dante and Auschwitz through our own skull-and-crossbones pirate pussies, below); i.e., death sex during ludo-Gothic BDSM!

(artist: My Pet Monster Girl)

Concerning canon, it’s like asking a small, ignorant child to describe childbirth and having them gleefully tell you that women shit the baby out. And you say we‘re on drugs! Also, you’re missing out, because dicks and anal are awesome if you can manage it (and if your partner is too “girthy” to enter you, then sex toys can reclaim the anus for everyone’s pleasure. Follow that rabbit).

Furthermore, these fears are very old, stemming from the earliest proponents of Western Civilization’s patriarchal phobias, the latter concerning the hysteria of a so-called wandering womb; re: the Archaic Mother as ancient and female, but categorized by Freud, Jung and other 20th century men (and their survivors) extending to nature as monstrous-feminine whore, period. And yet, the extreme phobias on display through these Pygmalion dweebs likewise denote their own drug-like ways of the viewing the world (e.g., Freud loved cocaine). This myopia must be reclaimed through the Archaic Mother/phallic woman as whore; i.e., as a mode of trans, intersex and enby rebellion through Galatea-esque monsters like the xenomorph, Sailor Scout or unicorn as valorized by queer culture as queen-like; re: the Numinous spirit of vengeance that ties to a lot of different oppressed cultures. The black rabbit comes back, out of the past retro-future!

The Return of the Black Rabbit (feat. Giger, Metroid, Medusa, Giygas)

A classic Gothic story eludes to the infernal concentric pattern/Promethean Quest’s closed space (or Faustian bargain summoning the black penitent/profligate alien whore): a concentric, recursive, liminal, anisotropic, ergodic time-space aiding in generational rememory and reclamation/regeneration. The conquering princess, after returning home, realizes the black bun has followed them back to Paradise; i.e., showcasing said place as never perfect in ways we can reclaim by pushing towards post-scarcity as the Gothic does—imperfectly while inside the labyrinth and its exploitative shadow zones (which house Nazis and Commies in duality)! A bunny shade can spell doom but also great radical change/endless possibility while freeing versus policing the whore (re: the Radiance, who we won’t inspect here because we already have; re: “Policing the Whore“)!

As such, I’d like to close this chapter by examining how that is; i.e., by considering a radical desire to transform not just to escape our enemies, but terrify them through Gothic-Communist counterterror as a form of radical empathy acknowledging the valid (and furious) emotions of abused cultures (essentially a dark version of LSD drug therapies); re: by returning to the fatal nostalgia of Giger, Metroid, Medusa, and Giygas, but also Scott’s Covenant as adults ourselves having a Second prodigal Coming/childhood and puberty as genderqueer detectives do: chasing an ouroborotic bunny round and round the chronotope run of Capitalist Realism during acid Communism’s live burial empathizing with said predicament to benefit labor and nature (versus Pygmalion like Morrison, or subjugated Galatea/gargoyle cops like Autumn Ivy, below).

(exhibit 60d: Artist, top-left: Benny Kusnoto; top-right: Autumn Ivy, who is non-binary but token; bottom-left: unknown; bottom-right: Just Some Noob.

The xenomorph is a nebulous inkblot, insofar as its avenger “walking castle” is occupied by a legion of older dead it demonically voices during castle-narrative; i.e., the wail of the damned, mid-dungeon. The interplay can be sexual, but the vein is classically ace.

The imperial refrain under capital sees GNC persons routinely treated as monstrous-feminine, thus gays to bury while framed as corrupt or degenerate, concentric/tangled scapegoats; i.e., Nazi-Communists with flavors of other bigotries and xenophobia mixed into the Gothic mode’s Red Scare soup: anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism, Orientalism, witch hunts, blood libel, sodomy rhetoric and various other compound/chimeric moral panics.  Said dungeon has become crowded not just with vampires, witches and goblins, then, but Communist ones linked directly to criminalized drug use bad “rabbit” sex [which until the 20th century wasn’t really criminalized, at all; re: Foucault, but also the War on Drugs being an American phenomenon meant to crystalize and prolong Capitalist Realism].)

Concentric stigma is something to be mindful of in Gothic fiction. The xenomorph is a classic “phallic woman” inside the womb space, but also a member of the forces of darkness, hence a black knight corruptor and cosmic rabbit rapist (re: Jennifer Shiman’s “Alien in 30 Seconds“); i.e., as curiously pre-fascist and Communist/queer until proven otherwise (and dissected by the female detective as often as the male one). In posthuman stories like Alien, the Medusa is generally respected by the android servants as the ultimate, “pure” form of queer existence; re: it is bio-mechanical, but also intersex, defined by something men do not have: eggs, but also female genitals with a masculine quality to them as something to imagine through a genderqueer imagination; i.e., reclaiming wandering womb (or bicycle face) from ancient misunderstandings about sex (with our species or other animals) but also drugs and biology warped under more recent hauntologies bastardizing the fact that animals don’t understand consent (That’s Why’s “Wild Rabbit makes love with my Giant Blue Rabbit,” 2012): to accuse chattelized people.

The ethnocentric chain of carnage lends an artificial wilderness that—much like the golem or gargoyle—mixes technology with parasitoidism and lots of implied unsafe drugs and sex; i.e., the Gothic’s tendency to speak to excessive force, psychosexual angst, and imminent penetration by showing you what’s gonna go in what: “That’s not a knife; this is a knife [next page]!” The black knightly mercenary’s harpoon conveys vaso vagal danger to swoon at, which is instantly if subtly offset with play as a matter of waiting inside the graveyard for the “rape” to happen; i.e., invaded by wild, Pagan forces corrupting the scared and the sacred with insect jousting and implied traumatic penetration; re: not just the whore, but ancient alien whore having her revenge by saying to her enemies, “Mine’s bigger!” Dick measuring is something women can do, too, because it concerns emotions like pride and social rituals with a funerary psychosexual element that can “go to war” like anything else. Intimidation is often the goal, but also satisfaction and excitement: “Take me down to the Paradise city!” (Guns ‘n Roses, 1989).

Some rabbits have bigger wands with weapon-like qualities! In nature, this ovipositor is a common feature among female-dominated, eusocial insects; Gothic canon famously attaches the “female penis” to the Archaic Mother archetype, forcing GNC people to live in the shadow of the state’s crusade against it. To be different is to live in fear because those around you want you dead, including members of your own family but also so-called “defenders” of the community you call home; i.e., the police. But improvised weapons—and symbiosis, the wasp eating the caterpillar to weaponize said grub against the state, thus protect smaller more vulnerable animals we caretake—work with stolen ordinance, too; it’s all about letting everyone play with such toys (e.g., Arnold’s M-79 grenade launcher from T2 versus Spoop’s dildo also being a terror weapon; re: as Asprey’s kissing cousin of force); i.e., to say one-and-all that we’re not just cookies in a jar to take from when Elon Musk gets peckish. “Peck this, fucker!”

(artist: Spoop)

To it, Archaic Mothers are ancient, anthropomorphic, phallic intersex demons that live inside deep, dark places—specifically womb-like lairs/parallel space. Here, they canonically pervert the heteronormative reproductive order by offering up monstrous-feminine forms of sexual reproduction; i.e., contained in monomyth spaces modeled externally after the sexually-dimorphic activities occurring within. Whereas the Skeleton King is found in his tomb, the dark queen is found inside her deathly womb’s mise-en-abyme. The classic example is Medusa, equipped with penis-like genitals and living in the darkness of the sea (which is generally regarded as the “cradle of the world” in many pre-Western mythologies, often serving as the birthplace of monsters). Other more recent examples include the “vaginal,” bio-mechanical “external wombs” of the alien queen from Aliens or Mother Brain from Metroid as potential friends on either side of an animalistic exchange (the black rabbits of a vengeful return to Wonderland)!

In “War Vaginas,” for example, I note the Archaic Mothers’ function through Mother Brain as a colonial foil meant to scare token women into sexist, transphobic violence; i.e., an abject catalyst to repress activist sentiments and rebellion:

Mother Brain, meanwhile, isn’t just Samus’ ancient foil; she’s arguably the Patriarchy’s boogeyman […] To face such a goddess amounts to a return, a completion of the cycle: birth, death, consumption. Animals eat their babies. For them, the mouth is a symbol of consumption, but also danger (teeth bite). The vagina symbolizes birth; for a mother goddess who births and eats disposable babies, bodily openings symbolically conflate. The vagina becomes a site of trauma attached to childbirth and… food. If Samus doesn’t fight back, Mother Brain’s giant mouth will literally gobble her up. She’s not Samus’ biological mother, she’s an impostor, but the feeling of cannibalistic infanticide cannot be totally ignored (source).

Despite being presented as the wronged party whose anger legitimately stems from colonial oppression, the Dark Mother and her children are famously hunted and killed by traditional applications of phallic violence; i.e., in modern, neoconservative stories with classical standards to install and offend during reactive abuse kettling nature the whore as monstrous-feminine; re: Doom and Contra being linked to real-world violence through the state (echoing Vietnam and Operation Condor) but also Metroid and its violent, female hero as raping the ancient womb with phallic violence (which, again, stems from Aliens, Starship Troopers, and older forms of Amazonomachia/Cartesian persecutions of nature as monstrous-feminine). It’s American exceptionalism; re: dressing up the Greater Evil as an Americanized avatar for children to fight the “good war” against, but one that speaks poetically to older forms of drug use that have become hauntologically white and straight (thus fascist). Like our smaller furry friends (e.g., Cookie the Calico’s “If not friend, why friend-shaped?” 2025), we’re all divided and scared; i.e., can feel things out when asking for food, hugs, sex and anything else! “Gimme shelter!”

“No one gives it to you; you have to take it.” Except beware any “historian” conflating the modern and ancient worlds, which they do through willful ignorance tied to state abuse of the usual tools and devices. Furthermore, the neoconservative revenge fantasy is always rapacious—a punitive, bloodthirsty invasion of the Womb whose subsequent “fucking” happens with stolen ordinance, taken away from rebels to restore state hegemony in the region; i.e., by raping the Dark Queen, but not before destroying her “illegitimate” bloodline with a subjugated Amazon, thus ensuring the legitimacy of an equally false replacement.

Not only is this colonial apologia; the very act is reactionary towards patriarchal fears of abject female/feminine regression—i.e., the woman seeing herself as demonized, her monstrous-feminine double’s unwelcome presence on the Aegis reverting the colonized space less towards a natural state and more into an unnatural condition of abject reproduction: a bio-mechanical womb. Inside said unheimlich, the queer bugbear is a Venus-twin Dark Medusa whose queenly ovipositor breeds with the colonists against their will, turning them into drone-like monsters that blindly spread the disease of their demon lover (the 20th century pitting a made-up, Red Scare/Satanic Panic “disease” against the state’s regular enemies in neoliberal canon: Communism. Except the plurality of the creature suggests a number of otherworldly voices speaking through the Dark Mother as a kind of clairvoyant channeler of undead/demonic animal tongues; re: xenoglossia).

The paradox remains the xenomorph’s andro/gynodiverse, “hermaphroditic” qualities often being “chased” like rabbit by sexist cis-het men and women; i.e., viewed by them with utter fascination and lust (a concept we’ll unpack more in Volume Three, Chapter Three); re: Ripley as the state’s subjugated Hippolyta, chasing the queer presence back to the ends of the Earth because it imperfectly resembles her trauma. The ensuing catfight is orchestrated by the Patriarchy to recruit TERFs into an imagined vital conflict between us-versus-them; i.e., token “good” Amazons and female rage versus dark, alien forms that must be destroyed. Ripley-as-Rambo has no empathy and is sober as a priest (or nun, whatever); she gets her high/sees “God” during Crusader-style purges that restore her faith through unironic slaughter. The call of the void is what she lives for—to pluck the lowest-hanging fruit, killing rabbits!

(model and artist: Itzel Sparrow and Persephone van der Waard)

For trans, non-binary and intersex people, though, the plight of the Alien Queen murdered by the state’s girl boss is merely us existing as we always have: a ground state, but also a “womb state” that’s evolved out of our childhoods into our adult selves as “standing out” in cis-het society (as Itzel does, having an ass of the gods, above ). Viewed through the TERF eyes of the state’s surveilling vigilante/travelling panopticon, the xenomorph—as a creative spectre of Marx and resident black rabbit—must die; i.e., at its posthuman heart, the xenomorph rejects empire and heteronormativity through a liminal, bio-mechanical return to nature through linguo-material, drug-like means: the Shadow of Galatea having a dark, non-white function regardless of sex, gender or ethnicity insofar as the Archaic Mother/alien nature evolved from the early city-states into Rome and hauntologically beyond; e.g., Medusa with curly hair expanding symbolically to include different functionally non-white groups (e.g., Irish women/PoC)!

That’s what trans, non-binary and intersex people represent: delineations from colonial-binarized standards within biology and language as creative towards non-heteronormative ends. We fully recognize that we’re “other” relative to heteronormative models’ intersecting persecution dialectics of the alien; we just don’t want to be killed for it, which requires changing the system from toe to top full of apathy being swapped out for our aforementioned dark empathy instead!

(exhibit 60e1: Artist, top-left and bottom-right: Hannibal Damage on Reflective Desire; top-middle: H.R. Giger; top-right: Hannibal Damage; bottom-left: Rubber Matt; bottom-middle-right: René Magritte. Magritte once said, “I want to create a mystery, not to solve it.” Charlie Skelton writes of him,

Magritte keeps the tension held within the image […] in perpetual and unresolved antagonism. It was Magritte’s genius to construct images that are awkwardly resilient to straightforward resolution, and he famously hated having his paintings psychoanalyzed or scoured for deeper meaning [source: “Why Magritte was like a standup comedian,” 2015].

Rabbit skins come in all kinds. Thoroughly xenophilic, the idea of “living latex” comments on the medieval idea of the animate/inanimate to convey the elusively mysterious sense of the human within the inhuman [or vice versa] as ontologically undead/demonic, thus surreal [e.g., Giger’s xenomorph, Donnie Darko or Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”]. In other words, reality is dehumanizing/xenophobic. And yet, inside this larger process, a humanely dehumanized inhuman side lurks that co-exists with its opposite: as liminal/uncanny on a surface level!

Like Segewick’s analysis of the Gothic in “Imagery of the Surface” as favoring the surface level over perceived “deeper truths,” living latex becomes a persona of various virtues or vices, but also a relinquishing of self-consciousness inside an alter-ego [a popular superhero trope with revolutionary potential, if not actual activists; e.g., Peter Parker or Clark Kent as moderate, outdated caricatures of American journalism passed off as legitimate criticality].

As a kind of suit of armor that shields one from the outside world, this occurs by dampening external forces figuratively and literally. It’s a blinder designed as much for xenophilic comfort and calm as it is xenophobic discomfort and anxiety [though both poles can be executed to whatever degrees all parties decide]: fear can be performed, its impulses resisted through discipline exercises that invariably require energy and effort from both parties during ludo-Gothic BDSM. Such a topic is incredibly synchronistic, spanning many different mediums that remain peripherally aware of one another—having been discussed, for instance, with equal parts fascination, reverence, curiosity and disgust in metal and horror for decades: thriving in the late ’70s countercultural whiplash to the emergence of neoliberalism; e.g., Judas Priest’s 1978 Stained Class and 1979 Hell Bent for Leather solidifying NWOBHM as infused with death and leather daddy biker culture!

In BDSM at large, though, the latex suit enforces a dehumanized, uncanny appearance, which the wearer can don but also perform inside to stress certain aspects of restraint, control, obedience and discipline. Furthermore, their suit can modify to include monstrous components [such as horns] but also a complete lack of identifying facial features to assume an uncanny doll-like affect. But within this, the human side can shine through something that serves to buffer the wearer for a body-language-and-leather-aesthetics-heavy performance; i.e., as forceful, transgressive commentary on daily life’s “smothering” qualities. Conversely, when the suit is removed, the human underneath can exhibit modifications, too; e.g., tattoos [exhibit 45c2a] but also gender-affirming surgeries. Such persons embody the things that heteronormative persons would outright reject and attack: queerness and BDSM as sinful and vice-driven, but also chaotic—a threat to order.)

“Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.” / “They must have wanted it for the weapon’s division.” A logical outcome of corporate weaponization, nature’s black-mirror formlessness mirrors in the xenomorph, but also shoggoth from At the Mountains of Madness or the T-1000 from T2 (all stemming from Frankenstein). While Scott originally envisioned the derelict ship as a “bomber” filled with advanced tools of warfare in space, his treatment of the xenomorph is progressively anti-capitalist/anti-patriarchal thus Galatean; re: David made it to spread and overwhelm the West from the outside-in; re: it’s literally the Imperial Boomerang: a reverse prescription and at-times surreal desecration of the usual Western values hauntologized from city-states into nation-states and corporations acting like the heroes of old; i.e., cowardly and unfairly towards nature as alien invader against bourgeois claims (re: the hero, Perseus, raped and murdered Medusa in her sleep by having had Athena’s help to overcome the Gorgon’s rape victim Aegis with the state’s: anti-predation maneuvers on both sides).

That’s what the “Goths” hauntologically were (re: Baldrick) and what Giger’s own drug-addled, BDSM-tinged Numinous sought to recapture while camping neoclassical canon: to show a dark and absurd side of nature that exists, hence invades the canonical imaginary in spite of the West and its self-lionization in an architectural-morphological imagination’s cryptomimetic mise-en-abyme: Picasso burning the psychosexual “bunny’s” portrait!

(artist, left: Doc Zenith; top-right: H.R. Giger; bottom-right: Benvenuto Cellini)

In short, the xenomorph is a black whore violating hauntology’s white supremacy arguments; re: those of the Cartesian revolution built on older patriarchies essentializing rape as justified. A byproduct of iconoclastic mad science turning nature into a weapon against the status quo, the xenomorph survives as pure, furious creation that spites David’s own creators as false gods. It’s not just a survivor of rape, but a death-god Galatea whose life after death makes the likes of the magically beheaded Ash pale in comparison; i.e., an ability to transform, but also escape through forbidden forms of extraterrestrial love liberating sex work on the Aegis! She hijacks the ship through mutinous subversion of its deepest circuitry (the brain)!

Meanwhile, the Oedipal nature of the language being used is figurative (unlike Hitchcock’s Norman Bates, which is spelled out literally); the phallic or vagina’ rabbit doesn’t have fixed, Cartesian prescriptions attached to it, but occupy uncertain positions outside orderly existence haunting its frontier models. Indeed, through the psychological model of one’s return to the Dark Mother and her “womb,” Alien‘s birth trauma can have much more of an Otto Rank interpretation than a Freudian one: a desire to end postnatal trauma by returning to the darkness and security of the womb, versus focusing on the brutality of exiting it. And upon gaining entry once more, to sleep perchance to dream! Time for nap-nap!

Moreover, the overt, death-infused sexuality in Alien has a 1970s BDSM flavor—one fixating on ambiguous consent and a “stricter” form of power-exchange that borders on corporal punishment. As something for the company to weaponize, the shapeless xenomorph is basically an “abject, latex gimp suit” (exhibit 60e1) with bones for laces and a “stabby cock dagger” for traumatic insemination, but also works as a handy metaphor for colonial trauma: hate-fucking your oppressors; i.e., the rape fantasy of the slave overpowering the master as messily intertwined with domination/submission fantasies of white women towards their servants, before and during Said’s Culture and Imperialism onwards; re: navigating double standards and rockstar power imbalances through holistic rebellion: a place to allow for half-real curiosities to commission ways to close the gap in the future of a past moment for all peoples and places dodging the “27 Club”; e.g., my mom asking me to draw her younger self with Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, along with a variety of other commissions she happily paid me: a hybrid of The Magician’s Nephew with Warhammer’s Britannica where my mom-as-Jadis’ good-witchy double (reclaiming C.S. Lewis’ ace, schoolboy BDSM) cheerfully saves her now-deceased boyfriend from a black knight, Star Wars and my newly-wed in-laws, and my then-newly-born in-law as Spider-baby!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

The whole spiel is revolutionary wish-fulfillment—a cryptonymic “safe space” for the oppressed to voice their legitimate, social-sexual anger against state oppression and xenophobia with uncivil ludo-Gothic BDSM’s fantasy love language. As an ontological statement reclaimed for and by queer people, the xenomorph was always going to be challenged, but also co-opted and turned against them (which, as we shall see in Volume Three, becomes part of the exhibit). All the while, the psychosexual sentiment of the monster elides colonial violence and Pagan eroticism with legitimate, rising forms of postcolonial discourse that rose to the fore with the emergence of neoliberal Capitalism. Unlike Norman Bates, the xenomorph wasn’t designed exclusively to demonize queer people any more than other black rabbits were on the Aegis; the palimpsest was a centuries-long lineage of postcolonial media with a Satanic protagonist rebelling against the status quo. 1979 was the year Margaret Thatcher—the world’s first elected neoliberal in the Global North, before Reagan—first assumed power.

To this, the monster’s patent inability to separate pleasure from pain denotes a queer escape from the closet that threatened to swallow them whole—one whose exposed “newness” allotted fresh voices the opportunity to complicate the Gothic Romance with Freudian clichés drenched in Neo-Gothic nostalgia. The paradox of xenophilia is that sexuality and trauma go hand-in-hand, queer people forced into the fearsome shadows (with authors like Dennis Cooper eventually commenting on queer expression as historically-materially looped, arm-in-arm, with the compelled rape of queer persons; e.g., his favorite commentary [and Zeuhl’s] being on twinks during a “trap/bait” arrangement, sex in bathrooms, and rape performance art).

But their morphologically diffuse language was overtly sexualized and gender-nonconformist, operating in ways typical of the aforementioned rising discourse; i.e., new forms of social-sexual identity attached to ritualized trauma as intensely cathartic for the oppressed, but also morphologically complex in a medievalized counterattack: the miraculous survival of queer rememory within the disassembled flesh and materials—of an unnatural newborn, one whose curse of oppression awakens the enslaved robotics centuries later during the twilight era of genocide. Doing so to advance mutely and furiously towards its de facto conquerors, the American middle class, the rabbit eats Saturn (this variant of the killer baby being different than Giygas, the “mighty idiot” conquer-baby-god from Mother 2/Earthbound, below, or Homelander from The Boys [who we’ll examine in Volume Three, Chapter Five] because the “killer child” archetype represents the oppressed as an infantilized tool or byproduct of oppression as a structure):

(exhibit 60e2: Artist, top-left: Jared Thompson; top-right: Porto881; bottom: anonymous, source. Giygas [“GEE-gis”] represents a kind of astral traveler that returns to conquer Earth; i.e., the plot to Prometheus but also its forbears: Satan’s coming home to undermine God’s paradise, or the Enlightenment’s “progress,” after waking from a long sleep of death. In doing so, Giygas is effectively dead when traveling through space, awakening in an ancient “Cave of the Past” womb, and where he is confronted by the heroes of the game and “aborted”; i.e., a neonatal, xenophobic confrontation on par with what Ashley Gavin calls “inside baby/outside baby” according to the argument if something is alive or dead from conservative minds [source: “Ashley Gavin: Live in Chicago,” 2023].

Indeed, “inside” in Gothic stories refers to the idea of inherence fantasy as womblike but also funeral, chaotic and undead; a cryptonymic inversion of the topography of inside/outside as burdened/initiated by colonial trauma [re: Abraham and Torok]. Clearly the myriad theories of this procedure’s literal or figurative nature remain open to debate [source: Reddit] and by persons like Grier from Super Famicon BS-X who default to “high-school level” Freudian tropes in the self-confessed absence of “Gothic expertise” [source: “Grasping the true form of Giygas’ attack,” 2009]. Instead of merely guessing at the inkblot using silly psychoanalytical models and moving endlessly in circles, it’s more productive—as an expert of the Humanities, Marxism and the Gothic—to interpret the nebulous, cartoonishly Freudian imagery in relation to what the Earth historically-materially represents and why a perceived alien force might wish to conquer it; i.e., from a dialectical-material standpoint, what does the traveling violence between competing material forces expressed in demonic pastiche actually signify?

The short answer is, labor as something that becomes wild, but also assimilated by fascist DARVO obscurantism through technological singularities maintaining Capitalist Realism [from Mary Shelley, onwards]. The time-traveling abortion—to kill one’s enemy before they’re even conceived—is a science fiction staple that dates back to Frankenstein [which Cameron took quite literally in The Terminator with his “retroactive abortion” line]. In Earthbound the act “nips” Communism “in the bud,” stopping the spread of dissident information that, when silenced, allows the status quo to miraculously remain intact. The bringers of this calamity are effectively weaponized children of a Radcliffean paradigm punching the Black Veil; i.e., their bodies turned to metal while they use the “power of friendship” as a personal responsibility deus ex machina to “save the world”: preserving the established order from a pareidolic lunar rabbit menace, except the ink is menstrual blood [or some such Freudian, body fluid paint-by-numbers].

Also, for what it’s worth: the presence of a numen or divinity is described through ghost stories as “abortive offshoots of the Numinous,” by Rudolph Otto. In that sense, Giygas is our “spectre of Marx” that implies an unimaginable greatness beyond Capitalism’s myopia during a ghost story that conveys doom with literal symbolism—its own elaborate strategy of misdirection in the neoliberal era, which is the only one that commercialized videogames have ever known [according to Ahoy’s 2020 “The First Videogame,” the earliest examples of “videogame” happened in 1973 during the same year as the Oil Crisis of the Arab-Israeli war—a conflict that would help the elite secure a steady shift away from Bretton Woods and the Embedded Liberalism approach of post-WW2; i.e., in favor of neoliberal Capitalism’s return to market deregulation through state power. For a lengthy analysis of this topic, consider Bad Empanada’s lengthy and scathing response to neoliberal propagandist and shill for the World Economic Forum, Johnny Harris].)

In Alien, xenophobia and xenophilia are not discreet, inhabiting a single demon lover’s surreal physique/district nine (echoes not just of Donnie Darko evil rabbit but the zombies-vampires from Plan Nine from Outer Space). There, the beautiful pain, confusion and—at times—violent, tremendously orgasmic/vaso vagal exertion of ambrosial renaissance goes beyond the chief monster. For example, the “milk” in Ash’s veins (below) is semen-like in a humors-esque degree, personifying his rapist-servant energies to track very much with Giger’s trippy portfolio eroticism; i.e., in the Gothic surrealist approach to things (the “walking penis” trope being a kind of gross, but also dated, hallucinatory pun: Macbeth’s fatal vision).

Yet, in pure BDSM terms, the phobic-philic power exchange favors the “mommy dom” as “strict”; i.e., her secret admirer, Ash, would happily submit to her paralyzing authority despite how she could and probably would bite his head off/fuck his literal guts out (exhibit 60e3). This treatment—of overblown, homicidal threats of violence against the willing servant—is very much part of the ’70s death fantasy that permeated the BDSM theatre of those times. However, Alien also comments phantasmagorically on buried colonial trauma as something whose raw, angry sexuality and gender trouble would be automatically abjected by the usual benefactors of colonialism chasing rabbits (sure enough, the fantasy would be met with lethal force in the mid-’80s during Cameron’s lionization of neoliberal hegemony worldwide).

(exhibit 60e3: A disembodied “O face” that takes advantage of the techno-occult wonders of Gothic pastiche: an out-of-body orgasm tied to a fearsome past. This can be through sodomy as something to invoke; i.e., unreproductive or non-legitimate sex, but also asexual expression that plays with traditionally sexualized language and gender to achieve genderqueer results: gender parody and trouble. Simply put, it’s fun and therapeutic, a kind of castration “stress art” for relating to others asexually through sexual language, humor and playful, even transgressive xenophilic degradation/revenge [a concept we’ve already examined with Blxxd Bunny in a previous chapter but will return to more extensively in Volume Three]. Cock shaming is a thing [I love it]!)

The ludo-Gothic rememory in this case is Scott’s BDSM reversal of the process of abjection: through his own, iconoclastic ghost of the counterfeit. It’s less that people “forget” that Percy Shelley loved Milton’s Satan as a rebel, for instance, and more that those who know died and the lesson wasn’t passed on/was repressed by those in power. So when Scott fully banked on Giger’s Gothic surrealism, those who know knew and those who didn’t saw the usual xenophobic threats of rape aimed at white women by dark forces; re: the usual counterterror cryptonymy saying to said women, “Join us!” as much as actually intended physical harm!

Beyond the ’70s inkblot, Scott would quote Percy Shelley in Covenant and Prometheus, which again were basically xenophilic love letters to Frankenstein as itself serving up a 19-year-old wunderkind’s love letter to Milton’s Paradise Lost; i.e., in a revolutionary vein whose counterterror path laid out Gothic reinvention that can never be stopped. These days, the usual criticisms to said imagination spell out in lateral terms. For every queer nerd reveling in Scott’s quirky Gothicism, you have ten weird Aliens nerds loudly clamoring for more guns and dead Commies; bourgeois servitude is their canon/praxis. Much to their chagrin and confusion, Scott would press on, making the city-bombing terrorist/vengeful queer robot the Hannibal Satanic hero of his latter-day apocalypse movies (exhibit 60e3)!

As something to reclaim, then, the chimeric, “opium dream” vibe of the abjectly furious, “death BDSM” of the xenomorph should be a hint. Apart from open rebellion, the curious desire to look at our lost histories, schadenfreude, ecology (e.g., the forest and kodama, from Princess Mononoke) and formerly hedonistic or sexually liberated cultures “rabbits” simply involves the eyes and the Aegis; i.e., as being a normal gateway for the average person to experience extraordinary events with an expectation to see the violence, the gory and the macabre (a nostalgic fascination with monsters inside-outside nature, exhibit 48d2; but also the body as inside-out, whose “anatomical Dark Venus” fringes on hauntological, exhibit 44a2).

Yet, the hallucinatory cryptonymy and confusion of the senses when faced with chaos causes them to overlap; re: much like Nick Bottom’s do during his own drug-fueled dream; i.e., a kind of erotic synesthesia or “experiencing together” of various senses to get at the truth of things; re: “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream [of dark rabbits] was.”

Just like Shakespeare’s dark, forbidden forest, this desire to know gnosis is also driven by ecstasy—to learn by having fun and playing at being ourselves in ways heteronormative society doesn’t approve of, but actively tries to demonize and exterminate; i.e., by targeting the sites of such Dionysian delights (a concept that applies quite readily to queer people and sex workers wishing to be left alone by weird reactionary straight people scapegoating furries). The Bacchanal transformation away from Cartesian norms/binaries invokes the sleeping death as cathartic; i.e., a form of rape play by fucking the sleeping-beauty doll-like sacrifice as thoroughly “stoned” in the hands of friends under conditions of informed consent. This can be assisted by altered sight, but also make rebellion something to attract people towards as “neurochemically pleasurable” through rituals of guilty pleasure during ludo-Gothic BDSM; e.g., school girls and ambiguous age regression scenarios; i.e., intimations not just of date rape, but ritual sacrifice tied to a ghost of the counterfeit using the most classic of imperiled damsels: the “virgin” (a watched pot never boils, unless you’re fucking it).

(artist: Spoop)

We’ll look even further into actual drugs in Volume Three when talking about parallel societies (e.g., Joy Division had many run-ins with coke, ecstasy and acid when trying to deal with Margaret Thatcher’s bullshit). For now, I want to focus on the natural kind—not smoking weed, even (exhibit 60b), but the so-called “religious” experience of communion with intense emotions mid-ritual: state sanctions against a Paganized illicit sexuality. I want to wrap things up regarding that, considering the whore’s revenge against profit (and places of profit; e.g., malls); i.e., where the black rabbit, once freed, testifies to its own bourgeois pimping and verminization haunting its freedom and xenoglossic voice seeking shelter and comfort during reclaimed sodomy dialogs (re: Ng and I, “Reclaiming Anal“): titillating people long-distance with educational aphrodisiacs, mid-cryptonymy on the Aegis (e.g., witch panties/Oedipal eye contact, above)!

Approaching Catharsis; or, the Whore’s Revenge Where Said Wrongs Once Occurred

Of course, the xenomorph remains our centerpiece—a bio-mechanical, queenly Numinous tied to real-world, GNC peoples and their artistic refrain during the usual social-sexual rituals and practices. Earlier I also mentioned Radcliffe’s frisson. In her own way, Radcliffe was exploring an altered reality through a natural response to perceived danger and stress of a particular kind—concealed rape tied to older legends expressed in statuesque, chronotopic ways: the hauntology of even having a voice to cry “rape” with (as Medusa was classically not humanized at all, in the archaic legends): zenith and nadir! Diabolical or divine? Maybe both!

(artist: Doc Zenith)

In turn, the usual double standards—of male nudity and armor versus female nudity and vulnerability (above) during sexual difference—bring forwards an ancient trope that was further dimorphized under Capitalism to offset the rising cries of “rape!” Patriarchy under capital, per Creed and Freud, assumes an ancient right/rite-of-passage: to rape not just whores, but all nature as monstrous-feminine; i.e., as classically being—among many other things—assigned female/non-white/non-Christian, etc, through tokenized police force. Such barbarity and entitlement springs forth a variety of revenge arguments, many revolving around castration.

But such things were, again, un-lady-like in ways that Radcliffe wouldn’t have been allowed to feel; re: “Methinks the lady doth protest too much!” Except, the Medusa paradoxically grows stronger after she’s circumstanced/the head severed from the body to recycle the rape cries in ways no Aegis could shield men/token agents from; re: because Athena was castrating men in the ancient world in ways that would carry over into ours; i.e., during class, culture and race war under neoliberal Capitalism and its nature-vs-the-state dogma (re: Cameron).

And though she was unreliable and timidly experimental, Radcliffe still yielded far better emancipatory results than the totally unreliable, prescribed way of seeing the world outlined above (Cartesian Dualism is a colonizing force). Obviously this investigation can occur differently depending on the flavor you’re seeking in your own work (the act of creating going hand-in-hand with searching for a particular style or message within the style’s heady aesthetic): “Come to mother!” or “Cum for/in mother!” Same difference; i.e., a body like a fertility god, beckoning you towards the imaginary past’s retro-future apocalypse and potential reckoning with capital away from harming rabbits (of any color)! “Eh, what’s up, doc? Your cock? Conquer my city/animal patch, little man!”

(artist: melkteeth)

As Gothic-Communists, these can also be used to make the escape not just an innocent yarn, but an erotic, artistic, clock-carrying rabbit’s drug experiment to make Radcliffe blush like an embarrassed schoolgirl; re: Giger’s unbridled, xenomorphic surrealism as linked to various, ancient totems, lycans, and chimeras that undoubtedly inspired his own biologically intersex, drug-fueled visions, but also the everyday human cross-sections thinly veiled by modernity (above). They inspire the lesson, but also embody it in ways that extend to us having rage to spare, but also love in ways, oddly enough, a bit alien to Giger’s beast: rape prevention through empathy-amid-exposure versus sheer “fuck off and die” vibes. To make a virgin/whore hero openly animalistic can stress an animal quality to bait the gooners trying to police nature as monstrous-feminine with.

Instead, “‘mother’ is the name for ‘God’ on the lips and hearts of all children”; i.e., in ways that yield a kind of Oedipal desire for the mother as something to worship and embody at the same time—a performance, in other words, and one that seeks nature and nurture as a matter of gender trouble versus sheer eroticism, lust or big/small regression. Again, they tend to go hand-in-hand as often as not during ludo-Gothic BDSM, and who doesn’t like a good dark mommy? There’s enough room for gentle and strict Amazons/Medusas, trust me!

Compared to Giger’s own portfolio, we each draw from life and nature, but I like to dress the alien and whore up through dialectical-material context and paradox; i.e., in ways that dictate such things through power flow, which again, I stress through sex positivity and the monstrous-feminine as queer and sparkly in its gayness on the same Aegis, not abject/animalistic torture. Different strokes, but I think enjoying sex without rape through mutual consent is very human, so I like to stress that versus regressing to a flight/flight primordial mentality!

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

“Going back to school” through xenophilic artistic expression is Gothic Communism’s entire aim; i.e., to have fun and play with monstrous-feminine language by fucking with tokens: raising a dark temple to worship at, including the god-like, genderqueer demon rabbits inside. Case in point, I’ve done it myself in my own work, piqued by the effect the Numinous played on my neurodivergent, chemically drug-free imagination (and something that I already related to through Lovecraft’s work, which was read to me as a youngster—I had weird grandparents). Doing so helped me reach my trans self in relation to the reimagined past as an ongoing mode, one that has the prolific and transformative potential to reveal cryptonymic functions of power through drug-like means, thus experience and critique it: fighting fire with fire, the fire of the gods as much about (and through) alienation as it is about rape; re: a naked, pissed-off woman is scary enough, but nudity of the whore in public speaks to rape in ways that are joyous just as often; i.e., during the cryptonymy process’s preferential roleplay loaded with quasi-medieval embellishment. That’s my jam, cuties!

This really isn’t “new,” though; re: Otto described the ghost story as an “abortive offshoot” tied to larger “Numinous” sensations, thus to a presence of the numen—of divinity and power—whose complex, ongoing relationship conspicuously involved religious language he figuratively supplied in an attempt to describe something beyond ordinary experience, but nevertheless attached to/contained inside smaller/more regular ghost stories: the awesome ghost (which C. S. Lewis, in response to Otto, called the uncanny or “mighty spirit” as greater than tigers).

Also like Radcliffe, Otto’s linguistic sleuthing was to try and grasp why these stories were so popular to begin with. Sure, they were being giant snobby nerds about it, but their own investigations yielded lucid and helpful information. According to both, sleuthing the mystery provides good, “impressive feelings”: thinking through art as an active process of engagement during a perceived exchange of unequal power frequently associated with “religious experience” in common lexicon (those big feelings for big trauma as something near us). Yet those of us in the BDSM community already know this effect by a different name: “sub drop,” which I initially likened in my own PhD research and graduate work to “ludo-Gothic BDSM” (“Our Ludic Masters”) and eventually started to apply to my own life (“Why I Submit”). Doing so led to me coming out as trans before writing this book, which was inspired by Radcliffe’s own “exquisite torture” but also my love for Alien and its own complex rape fantasies linked to liminal spaces, castle-narrative, and Numinous killer-rabbit occupants; i.e., as drug-like in ways I tended to imagine while—and I cannot stress this enough—not being on actual drugs!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Beyond the xenomorph as the obvious example, then, iconoclastic stories about drug-fueled sex demons more broadly can liberate the mind under Capitalist Realism by making new monsters inspired by older ones: hitting it from the front and back. They accomplish this “booty bump” by becoming forms of drug-seeking behavior that investigate older, non-Western ways of life as “drug-like” with genderqueer potential: a return to the womb of darkness and the poetic gods therein as dug-up “archaeologies.”

Furthermore, there’s a strict refusal to hide the imaginary anthropomorphic components, owing to a convergent sense of communion with the past per current communities that identify with nature through monsters and drugs as reclaimed; re: furries. Yet, the atypical experiences they offer aren’t (always) chemical drugs that, once injected, ravage your body and destroy your mind; they’re highly monstrous forms of self-expression that free the mind from Cartesian bias—the proverbial “good stuff” that helps people understand sex better, including sex work, by building new bonds associated with tried-and-true methods and their prolific and varied footprints; e.g., these mind-altering substances last through what Jen from The Dark Crystal (1982) called pictures: “Words that stay.” Few stay better than those that were crafted under the influence of some dissident Promethean force!

Likewise, few things make quite the impression as monster puns; i.e., you remember the things that scare you, but also make you feel like you’ve never felt before. That’s the sight-enhancing power of Gothic Communism, a kind of forbidden sensory enchantment or transformation depending on what you feel like you need to operate better—as an activist, but also merely to exist (existing for trans people automatically becomes activism under genocidal conditions, which capital fosters).

This includes experiencing revenge, rape, or other fantasies that help us cope with trauma as tailor-made for our bodies and descriptive roleplays (Sima’s “Your Hips Are Wider than Your Shoulders,” 2024)—perceived, imaginary and experienced in ways that cause them to bleed together as darkness visible. For the Gothic, that means fantasies that are hauntological, abject, cryptonymic, and chronotopic, but also phantasmagorical (dream-like); i.e., in relation to nature as policed, mid-panic (JayDaddy’s “You’re in a Slasher Movie,” 2025). Revolution is half-real/dualistic!

To this, fursonas become like suits of armor—offering the wearer and those around them a kind of safe space where no one gets hurt as we let off steam; i.e., expressing ourselves freely as we plan our next step when interacting with others: a secret identity to act out dark wish fulfillment as a means of cathartic revenge, of tackling a hunter or prey mechanism that has become maladaptive in our lives; re: Covenant and David, among other things, the Trojan rabbit bearing false gifts that, when opened, unleash Hell as something to see long after the maelstrom is spent!

Forbidden sight, lost sight, forgotten sight, monster vision, Commie vision and darkness visible—the point with all these various visual types (and sensory confusions) is that, like our previous collages, a sex-positive exhibit can display different experiences of the past that form a pattern among the purple mist. This bunny train includes marginally or vastly different “trippy” experiences: “Exquisite torture? The Numinous? Cosmic Nihilism? Eh, po-tay-toh, po-tah-toh!”

As part of a collective, communal exchange with the creative past made wiser than it currently is, these seminal methods can be conjoined to restore old connections that were lost, using them in ways to understand the world better under Capitalism; i.e., to see through capital’s lies with Gothic poetics as a discursive way of connecting with the former undivided self as “monstrous” in modern times (and whose so-called modern people are really nothing more than proponents of the colonial model of two different kinds of monsters: the hunters and the hunted—a concept we’ll return to in Volume Three, with witch cops).

As the material world begins to decay under Capitalism and produces demons of a different sort by delving into the fascist past, being able to adopt “old” ways of thinking tailor-made for our world can give marginalized people a means of a survival by countering the drug-like propaganda of fascists (the Nazis were not afraid to do drugs, including Hitler); i.e., not just trans people, but anyone who seeks to rebel against Capitalism as a system that historically exploits as many workers as it can; re: assigning relative privilege to a squad of violent watchmen outwards: from cis-white men, then cis-white women, then cis-people in general, and various other forms of tokenism punching down (re: token furries) decadently against nature as alien. Sooner or later, nature punches back, and hard, knocking “Rome’s” teeth out!

People forget the awesome power of rhetoric, but also of poetics; i.e., as spell-like relative to trauma, and gender trouble, parody and dysphoria/euphoria as profoundly intense (thus able to shape how we see the world around us through Numinous works). So often, transformation is how we see things that don’t physically change; their context does in a phenomenological sense—i.e., how it’s experienced, thus viewed and treated in future works, of works, of works…

To that, Gothic-Communist agency is merely a contribution to trails already well-blazed, and marks yet another step for us to grow and develop as we try and survive, but also cope with past abuse by healthily expressing ourselves through altered states of seeing the world during ludo-Gothic BDSM as 24/7. Fisher died before he could finish his own work on acid Communism, handing the reins over the next in line (as is tradition). Rather than fear us for having these dreams of violence built on older ones, consider how they are more apposite to who we are as people living within our own genocide as unresolved. Solve that case, Nancy Drew!

Keeping this in mind, genocide is precisely the thing we want to prevent by experimenting with “drugs” ourselves. Doing so involves the destruction of those things symbolic of genocide during oppositional praxis: the proponents of class struggle, but also the monstrous-feminine within class war against the state. Trans, intersex and non-binary people ain’t basic, y’all; but we also ain’t aliens the way the state decrees. A girl can certainly dream, though, picturing herself akin to something like a xenomorph; i.e., as the prophesied avenger of past wrongs in the present. This isn’t just psychological tension, mind you, but class struggle and unequal material conditions and conditions of power told through Gothic poetics.

To this, the iconoclastic revenge fantasy becomes a kind of “lucid dream,” one that regains a modicum of control from those who harm us and threaten us; i.e., with material reminders of trauma. The question for the nervous observer shouldn’t be, “Will she kill me?” but “Why does she feel this way? Why is her body biomechanical and fueled by dream-like, drug-fueled forays into the ‘past’?”

The devil, they say, is in the details, and dark empathy means giving different people a room of one’s own to play out difficult power fantasies about rape and other generational abuse/erasure; re: the xenomorph as a kind of traditionally female whore avenging past wrongs in Western and Japanese culture: “And if you wrong me, shall I not revenge?” So do holistic vermin come home to roost/reap the extirpator with oddly sexy rape revenge: the slow march of time versus the black rabbit’s race to the finish—a turtle rabbit!

(artist: Tomato Lover)

Love, Dead and Robots, for example, combines the Yokai spirit of vengeance with a tick-tock version of Shelley’s Creature (next page); i.e., East-meets-West, the be(a)st of both worlds turning hunter into hunted and vice versa: a killer Trojan rabbit’s splendide mendax; re: “That rabbit’s dynamite!” Fuck around and find out, assholes! A reaper of vengeance avenging past wrongs with a body of metal (re: like Sonic‘s Amazon rabbit character); i.e., concentric preferential code, the sideways smile of a vengeful black womb/whore ravishing Francis Bacon and company (re: Creed and me), thus reaping the Numinous whirlwind of a Great Bunny Destroyer punching up with vigor (and so on): the call isn’t coming from inside the house, but is the house—the At the Mountains of Madness eating Capitalism through the native’s reclaiming cannibalism against profit and its spearheads during “land back” on the Aegis: giving the prison/death sentence back during live burial! Such is Gothic maturity developing Gothic Communism during ludo-Gothic BDSM to tell (or rip) the Nazi and Commie apart!

Fluency illuminates darkness visible during dialectical-material scrutiny. As we move on to synthesize Gothic theory in Volume Three, it’s incredibly important to remember the focus of this book: sex worker rights through such scrutiny—not psychoanalysis as a jacket for Marx to conceal him! The whole point of Sex Positivity is stopping sex worker abuse through reclaimed Gothic poetics, which Gothic Communism achieves through successful proletarian praxis freeing black rabbits; i.e., exposing systemic abuse with Gothic theories by funneling them through monstrous puns, historical awareness and transformative experiences: as dialectical-material analysis, but also covert devices like cryptonomy and hauntology (which we’ll explore in dead malls, next).

To achieve praxial catharsis, these various, modular means and “mash-ups” become expanded, personified ways of seeing and communicating—a “monster mode” that all workers can use to transform material conditions through the Gothic imagination, not just trans people. Together, we can all express our personal journeys and subject matter to others; i.e., highlighting the various social-sexual symptoms of Capitalism that inexorably lead to sex worker abuse/exploitation: lobotomization, live burial, menticide, and war/rape culture, as well as their various canonical gargoyles and ignominious deaths; e.g., the coded and “little” deaths—of individual worker brains and actual lives, but also their sex and social lives tied to the hyperreal death of the future that leads to the Big Death of Promethean Capitalism: through its classic business site; re: as a place where fatal nostalgia (thus empathy) goes to die and be reborn: the mall as a cathedral where consumerism/privatization and pimping come to a head with the rabbits who turn such places into Bunny Island: the Revenge (a swarm, echoing Danny Glover’s excellent 2023 show about a woman-of-color sex worker serial killer—bee buns protecting the robo-rabbit hive) of the cooked cooking us (Master Necronic, 2021)!

Closing Thoughts: On the Justice of Roosting Rabbits (and onto Zombie Malls Where Rabbits Are Sold)

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

In times of crisis, people can change to anisotropically rebel for or against the state. So beware the Ides of March; i.e., the parthenogenetic egg-laying rabbit hatching the lunar-sized demise of the oppressor through self-served posthumanist, cybernetic revenge: a false Antiquity’s dark Aesop seizing the means of revenge production back from state pirates. Privateer bun deprivatizes capital; avast! We sail into Black Duality, cryptomimetically tempting Fate to undo the Puritan ethic to expose the pimp and camp Marx’s ghost! They push us into the putrid animal past; we bring it forwards in paradoxical forms of joy that not only can’t die, but help us regenerate as revenge! We are and aren’t what you paint us as: from lawn jockey to Space Jockey to bring the chickens (or rabbits) home to roost; i.e., the “past” is right now, currently at hand! The eye opens and the panopticon searches for prey as Hell comes to Earth. It’s very Watership Down  but also Terminator in ways we can reverse: the return of the proletariat assassin played by us furries!

(artist: Fox in a Jacket)

To it, we servants of a Dark Easter amortize the mortgage, showing you what’s in store! Death, libido, and dealing through public nudism and the duality and cryptonymic, intersectionally solidarized anisotropic labor exchange: the voice of Omelas’ holistic chattel breaking the monopoly and spell of Capitalist Realism! We become death, destroyer of worlds, and beautiful in our rapturous sermons; i.e., Zofloya handing Victoria a poisoned chalice! The beautiful death, putting on her spotted robe! Time for love bombs, straight from the ass; total eclipse of the heart!

And if those unaccustomed to flattery can’t spot fetishization in bad faith or the throes of assimilation, those who have lived it have likewise learned through experience; i.e., during calculated risk to reduce risk and better the instruction by passing on hard palliative-Numinous medicine (“the dose [and context] doth make the poison”): to the next in line playing with fetishes and taboos to apotropaically subvert the usual negative effects! Summon and spar your own demons until you can handle whatever the state throws at you. So is ludo-Gothic BDSM acid/Gothic Communism, in small; i.e., something that took many tries from me, failing at many things until I returned for the first time to my queer roots, mid-psychomachy!

Some people push back; we do it on the trail of death as oddly happy. To chase the Numinous as a mighty sex ghost we don’t want to vanish, it’s like a rapturous spell that can deny/kill the orgasm like a succubus just as much as summon it during calculated risk (chasing the ghost of rape). What dreams may cum indeed! Take one for the team: the jungle moon bun’s tramp stamp of doom, back in black, turning the noose on the executioner in her chimeric death coach’s nightcap: a poison drug putting a spell on you, a paralytic wasp embryo inside you, eating you up (the killer egg, in trans language, hatching a tokophobic dragon up in your guts).

So do we reify and spar with such demons to give them voice and shape, meaning as vehicles we can control extending into the world around us; i.e., like a lever that can move the Earth with; e.g., Sweetpea (above, 2024) murdering her enemies being impractical in real-life (classic codependency on murder victims) but therapeutic for workers in real life looking in; i.e., the fantasy of a knife very different through performative but also dialectical-material context achieving cathartic synthesis without harming other workers. Quite the opposite, we prevent systemic harm by changing what causes harm through “harm” during the whore’s paradox of rape: the ghost of the counterfeit, swapping terror and counterterror!

It’s half-real, delighting in discomfort and eustress disguised as genuine distress during ludo-Gothic BDSM; concentric illusions, deceptions, and mirages are the Gothic’s go-to place of concealment: in plain-sight (and often strict), oscillating between gentle and hard, black and white, virtue and vice, etc. So can we “rape” or otherwise fuck with each other in paradoxically Numinous forms developing Communism. Win-win! Fuck the Five-O!

“Remember the rep,” Rocky Balboa? “Crime doesn’t pay?” In short, we’re already criminal by existing and pimped into self-hatred, and if crime didn’t happen then the elite (and cops) wouldn’t exist. Yet here they are, playing hero like Rocky is. Self-love and self-care comes from getting angry at those who harm us in bad faith (as Stallone does). So save it for those who have it coming and who underestimate us; i.e., for being small, weak, and having all the power they want to take from us. Become the thing they’ve always feared and run with it; it’s literally poetic justice, and silence is genocide. Like Sweetpea, we’re literally investigating our own death—as something we survived and carried out. Allegedly.

So hit it and quit it? Bitch, please, we’re here to stay (and camping Zeuhl’s ghost, in the bargain)! Our home, Jameson’s nightmare of Marx’ ghost, is a Twilight Zone turning empire’s rot in on itself: you’re already dead; you just don’t know it! That is our revenge, and we’ll beat that drum till the End of Days; i.e., when Medusa comes to pick up/relieve her avatar and show us what’s coming to a head! When push comes to shove, she’s queen of her kind! First-world problems become end-world problems, our dead queen beating Saturn in a child-eating competition.

The trick to avoiding that sorry end (of our species) is dismantling capital, which requires dark empathy and teamwork to avoid Queen Death’s maw. The way out, then, is through Hell by mastering Her shadows before then; i.e., shirking what capital promises and conditions, meaning workers being made to think what is promised as “reward” (Jafar-style) but actually a curse we must break (and vice versa: the victim’s desire for power versus the state soldier afraid of everything and alienated from nature in all its wondrous forms; e.g., killer rabbits, next page)!

So Yoshi-style egg-laying mammals aren’t completely fictional, the seemingly chimeric convergence of the echidna or duck-billed platypus speaking to the imaginary sodomy terrors of yesteryear! We’re not just dragon bunnies but bunny bandits—a vanguard of tank rabbits preparing for Kursk 2.0! The victory and justice of our one people, one race racing to the finish like a slow shuffling slasher—the paradox of the hare as a turtle whore—is the eggs we lay as much serving as bombs, as well as clever bio-weapons inside-outside our hosts: survival, solidarity and speaking out! We do so through revolutionary cryptonymy!

And while killing is a power that translates poetically to activism—and there’s power in death as radical change—we’re not terrorists, but freedom fighters; i.e., the only thing we kill is profit, but can defend ourselves as they attack us: fighting fire with fire being anisotropic. So is our rape revenge fantasies taking sodomy back; i.e., through said fantasies that speak to activism as something to disguise what we’re talking about. When fascism comes home to roost, then, so do we. Scared of a killer rabbit sucking your blood for a change, King Arthur? Of changing into any shape we need (and size; i.e., kaiju bunnies)?

The fact remains, land back is a guerrilla enterprise, and we don’t owe the bourgeoisie shit. Godzilla Bun is here to eat capital, and rape fantasies putting the shoes on the other foot (a bit like Cinderella) are not mutually exclusive with good praxis: fantasizing about killing the elite is not the same as killing them. Don’t believe philistines who say that is worthless (e.g., Bad Empanada); from Marx to us, social change and justice go hand-in-hand with material change.

Perception-wise, there’s a thin line between victimizer and victim (e.g., Olurinatti’s “How Men Become Aziz Ansari,” 2025), as well as damsels, detectives and demons, but also rabbit and rapist (apart from humans, consent is virtually non-existent in the animal kingdom); the magic of revolutionary cryptonymy is its function yielding itself clear as crystal regardless of praxial ambiguity through dialectical-material scrutiny and worker/owner divisions (thus cats/dogs and other tokenized rivalries finding common ground under shared duress/cause for concern and trust issues/vice-character alter egos): “Feel the power of the Dark Crystal!”

Furthermore, per Asprey’s paradox, makeup is a weapon, and sex in art/porn is a weapon, our furry counterterror versus state dualism and its usual tools. Our attraction and portraits are fatal, as are theirs, but our demon-red vampire eyes give and take as undead-demonic animals having the whore’s torturously fake revenge during confused predator/prey and vaso vagal memento mori—all to grant curious shared wishes: dreams in fractured solidarity during ludo-Gothic BDSM of the hunted hunting the hunter and ravishing them, a common enemy and lubricant diptych, with a demon lover’s nasty and penetrative, impregnating parting gift—the caterpillar and the wasp laid by a magic March hare.

So does Communism grow inside the audience and change their vision through sex and force: our black Dracula, Lady-Macbeth, Great Destroyer’s hunting vibe a light bringer exposing the lily-white, banal bourgeois dragons like Elon Musk as Dracula in duality playing at Van Helsing’s man of reason; i.e., as “white knight” predators with their hands in the cookie jar whether onstage or off! Our cookie jar. A pimp’s a pimp, and you think you can get away with murder? Two can play at that game, and this one’s for Medusa!

The drug trip never ends—is a “perma” trip that, like Radcliffe’s spectral castles, stretch into the void, mise-en-abyme: the belly of the bun, buns all the way down, a Numinous ravishing by the bun of the Radcliffean cop to be its carrot, a darkness not to flee from but face and reconcile with by sodomizing capital’s corpse (re: the anal Amazon thesis applying to black bunnies buttfucking the palaces of a dying capital to transform them into safe brothel “stables”)!

Before the Demon Module’s conclusion, then, I want to briefly examine that vis-à-vis the sorts of dark empathy and Gothic poetic elements we’ve been discussing relative to the nature world; i.e., to reunite with as capital decays (versus lament and fantasize through Capitalist Realism, as Stranger Things does; re: avenging America [or a similar empire] that never was to keep scapegoating Capitalism as usual, above): a Morpheus-style wake-up call while dreaming (a night bunny versus a black dog or nightmare, etc), haunting places as carefree as the blissful neo-arcadia of Yoshi’s Island from Super Mario World (1990). A mall is a mall—both an emergent town square as much as state-sanctioned concentration camps!

Why the dead mall, though? Like a mining camp during a gold rush, the mall is a cryptonym for genocide tied to capital as dead. As a “ghost town” where the exploitation of workers sits eerily within the decayed illusion of the mall as nostalgic, this means the unfolding grand calamity is well-disguised: the fictional, concentric ruin as a neoliberal disguise to our own crumbling world! To prevent its logical endpoint, Capitalism’s zombie future must be revived into a new form of visible, critical undead—one whose life-saving emotional/Gothic intelligence; girl talk, love language; transformative, eye-opening pastiche; and all-around execution of proletarian praxis (the basics of oppositional synthesis) occurs at the new sites of media exchange and worker exploitation build on older bunny bazars!

And while physical malls might be dying or dead, their online iterations are certainly not. It is here where a new zombie future must emerge, a half-real proletarian “archaeology” that lives in the ruins of Capitalism while bearing out the p(r)osy chiding of critics far too good to participate; re: Jameson and similar fancy-pants thinkers and poets who act like nature’s stewards, but in a very gentrified white man’s way that is too good for acid Communism and the Gothic (someone who might turn their noses up at Gandalf’s smoke rings, for example). We’ll spank their little bottoms (or thump their buns/eat their fat juicy carrots, as the bunny power bottom does), next; i.e., where rabbits (thus whores) are sold!

Onwards to “The Future Is a Dead Mall (and Module Conclusion)“!

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About the Author

Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] The same year The Dark Crystal and The Last Unicorn likewise catered to YA in a Wizard-of-Oz “family film” approach: through spontaneous magic, queerness, violence and revenge going in all directions!

[2] Conversely the talking animal can also be a sign of rebellious property or chattel, suddenly speaking in hauntological forms that ooze xenophobia from the frightened, bigoted viewers; e.g., Red Hook’s The Darkest Dungeon II having a less-than-charitable view of talking animals, its denizens of the Sluice being a non-too-subtle, dislocated cross between George Orwell’s 1945 Animal Farm and Warhammer’s Skaven race of warrior rats: “There are rumours these rancorous beasts have some demoniac spark of… otherworldly intelligence.” It’s anti-Semitic and Red-Scare, a subterranean ghetto where cop-like heroes can go and clean house, mid-blood-libel policing the joy division.

[3] Naoko Takeuchi “graduated from Kyoritsu University of Pharmacy, where she received a degree in chemistry [and later] became a licensed pharmacist” (source: Women Who Kick Ass’ “Naoko Takeuchi: Why She Kicks Ass,” 2013]. Similar to Nina Hartley or Victoria Paris, Takeuchi is clearly educated/privileged, but also sex-positive in her work; i.e., as something that regularly faces colonization by neoliberal groups post hoc (and philistines; re: Bad Empanada).

[4] I.e., speaking to femme-fatale Nazi-Commie she-wolves; e.g., Cat-Women of the Moon (1953) being pure Red Scare that pimps the whore, mid-lunacy!

[5] E.g., Goldenbell Training as a black tech bro abusing AI to strip-mine Bruce Lee’s likeness for personal gain. A pimp is a pimp, dude, and art theft is bigotry disguised through labor as preyed upon during neoliberal abuse. In turn, a bigotry for one is a bigotry for all, and plenty of straight black guys are sexist, queerphobic pigs. You’re one of them!

[6] To which Nimona represents a recent delineation from a rival, smaller company in 2023; i.e., despite producing Andor (which is Marxist but not very queer), Disney canceled Nimona under Bluesky as a mainstream release because of its queer themes (source: Rohit Rajput’s “Why Was Nimona canceled by Disney?” 2023), Nimona then funded as an independent release by Annapurna Pictures acquired by Netflix. Corporate pimping and hot-potato aside, there’s only so much sublimation and recuperation you can do with ads before the allegory wins out! And Nimona‘s not subtle!

[7] I.e., often a tree (“There is no immortality but a tree’s love!”), but also monsters. Haggard is a trans chaser in that Beagle inverts the classic myth; i.e., of female transformation by turning the unicorn into something the king didn’t want: a naked human girl who remains queer (“She looks so strange; she has a newness…”). He’s Nick Fuentes, but less smitten with catboys and more horse girls of a more literal sort—something to monopolize and make scarce, regardless!

[8] Making Amalthea a fun subversion of Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name; re: from Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Western trilogy—a unicorn (not a horse), then a girl with no name until our unwilling Pygmalion turns her into a Galatea he calls “Amalthea”; re: the mysterious tease whispering plentiful salvation to the king who cares not for earthly “pleasures of the court”: too busy chasing not dragons to slay in his case (as his son does to impress the “princess”), but unicorns to capture. Everyone who tries to capture the unicorn dies, making Amalthea’s killing of the king her revenge; i.e., by setting the others free, making them brave enough to flee by fighting back in front of them, ending the Holocaust by cockblocking the creep: “I knew you were the last!” Good riddance, old man!

[9] Operating on par with Monty Python’s “Castle Anthrax”; i.e., as a hauntologically hypnotic site of forbidden sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll through Gothicized monomyth violence (sex and force): Ganon’s own brothel in “the desert of the real” hawking brown dope/sugar having a dualistic class, culture and race war function.

[10] I.e., similar to Lord Byron’s 1819 “Don Juan” antihero, penned by a rags-to-riches rockstar through a “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” persona: “I want a hero.” Fun fact: The former phrase comes from Lady Caroline Lamb—a woman who, according to Miriam Lang, far outpaced Byron’s excesses with her own whorish shenanigans drinking and fucking Byron under the table:

The statement that Byron was ”mad, bad and dangerous to know” comes from Lady Caroline Lamb after their first meeting, when the publication of ”Childe Harold” (1812) made him the literary and social lion of London at the age of 24. However, Lady Caroline was notoriously worse than he on all three counts, and when she threw herself at Byron, her irrationality and sexual excesses so appalled him that he terminated the affair after about six months. Later, her vengeance fueled the scandal that forced him to leave England.

Undeniably, Byron held most women in low esteem, but in the Regency period, it was the profligate Prince Regent who set the example society followed. Furthermore, Byron’s sexual attitudes and behavior were conditioned by early experiences: a dissolute father, who deserted wife and young child; a violent-tempered mother; a sexually abusive nursemaid and homosexual attachment to a college classmate; the agony and sense of inferiority over his crippled leg, and the spell his extraordinary good looks cast over women.

None of this justifies Byron’s promiscuity or makes him more acceptable by modern women’s standards. It was his one sincere attachment (1813-16), to his half-sister, Augusta Leigh, that led to his downfall in London society. That dangerous liaison, confirmed by Leslie Marchand’s biography, destroyed Byron’s brief marriage (1815-16) to Annabella Milbanke. While incest was not illegal in England, it was considered beyond the pale even in that licentious era. Thus, when rumors surfaced, Byron found himself ostracized (source: “How Lord Byron Became Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know,” 1989).

[11] E.g., watch Alien to see men with small positions thinking they’re smarter than nature, only to get disemboweled, face-fucked and impregnated by the xenomorph. Their comeuppance symbolizes the return of the past as traumatic for men, but also happening in their rapacious language; i.e., the chickens coming home to roost several generations later against the company workforce (exhibit 60e)!

This blog post is part of “Deal with the Devil,” a third promotion originally inspired by the first and second ones I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” and “Searching for Secrets” (2024). The first promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Deal with the Devil” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, Demons (the “Searching for Secrets” promotion covered the Undead Module, which is now live). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Click here to see “Deal with the Devil’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Demon Module) is out (2/14/2025)! 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.

Dark Xenophilia, part one: Monster-Fucking and Furry Panic, from Ace to Ass (feat. Lycans, Chimeras, and Sentient Animals; e.g., Cuwu, “Pelts,” Erika Eleniak, Sonic the Hedgehog and Pippi Longstocking)

Many of the negative stereotypes about the furry fandom were empirically tested and found to be unsubstantiated. When compared to a control group, furries were significantly more likely to have a history of being physically and verbally bullied, a difference particularly prominent during adolescence (61.7% vs. 37.1%). Our studies indicate that 65% of furries say that they have told almost no one in their family about their furry interests, and approximately 70% say that they have told almost no one they see in their day-to-day life (e.g., work). Approximately 60% of furries agreed that they felt prejudice against furries from society, while approximately 40% of furries felt that being a furry was not socially accepted. The more strongly a person identifies as a furry, the more likely they are to feel that they are treated worse by society for being furry (source).

—Fur Science, “What’s a Furry?” (2022)

Picking up where “Call of the Wild,” part two: Dark Xenophilia (opening)” left off…

For this subchapter, I want to make some additional “ace to ass” distinctions about totems, chimeras and sentient animals, et al, as a strictly natural class; i.e., before talking about lycan/furry stigmas and so-called “furry/groomer panic” when attempting to reclaim these variables—doing so for purposes of dark/radical xenophilic empathy and vengeful sex-positive education (e.g., Dario Argento’s 2006 “Pelts” and Erika Eleniak in Under Siege, but also Sonic the Hedgehog and Pippi Longstocking) when regarding sex and gender in totemic language, in part two: empathy as a “drug” to chase down and take, post-synthesis (and watch reactionaries moral panic/pearl clutch, like with the Green M&M; but also just any form of nature that’s out-of-hand insofar as the state determines such things).

(artist: Chorio Actis)

Note: When saying “xenophilia,” I am generally using it to refer to a sex-positive discourse unfolding vis-à-vis state abjections of nature; i.e., as something to reverse on and off the same stages, combatting their xenophobia and xoophilia with our love of nature while being part of it, ourselves. Technically these are dualistic, but collocate historically-materially to deliver certain connotations I’m falling back on; i.e., “dark xenophilia” is empathetic towards nature as normally pimped by the state for being alien, whorish, non-nuclear and so on, whereas “xenophobia” and “xoophilia” are things used more by the state during the abjection process. It’s ultimately a question of stewardship regarding the reclamation of things by workers from the state; i.e., some things being easier to reclaim than others, technicalities aside; e.g., furries and xenophilia in suitably haunted forms of porn-adjacent language that gives room for ace forms to thrive. Save for an ace-centric exhibit at the end of this section (and the one above), I primarily focus on erotic forms, but still wanted to include and distinguish the social-sexual gradient those belong to! —Perse

First thing’s first, this includes the awesome power of friends; e.g., Cuwu, Victoria, and Quinnvincible, who we’ll all talk about as suitably awesome people for their friendship as GNC people/furries. But it extends to people who weren’t furries, too. Some people are so amazing that meeting them feels sadly too brief—is like a magic spell or arguably hallucinatory opium dream that you want to last forever but doesn’t; e.g., Krispy Tofuuu someone who rocked my world, furry or not! And yet, while the dream arguably fades, their glory lives on in my heart and work, for as long as those last: “Come and see!” said one of the Four Beasts.

To show the tyrant the endless unburied dead in something other than a field, bird’s-eye, is to freeze them in place, the Medusa not a monster to slay but love! Buildings burn, and bodies fester and rot, but the shadows live on, the Gothic written in decay—on the cusp of sexuality penetrating the barrier as something to acclimate towards and occupy between shared excited states; i.e., through the asexuality of choice as something animals don’t naturally have, letting people build and cultivate something beyond capital or old natures seeking better stewardship towards all!

(model and artist, top-left: Krispy Tofuuu and Persephone van der Waard; everything else, artist: Krispy Tofuuu)

As stated, part two will extend this precarious education through magic girls—Sailor Scouts and the solar system, but other forms closer to home, which children are introduced to, then explore later on as sexually-maturing teenagers growing into adulthood: unicorns and other forms of magic/drug reclamation and sex education tied to the natural world; re: as policed, becoming infused with trauma, begetting liminal composites/chimeras like the xenomorph.

To it, eco-fascism is a problem, as well (as we’ll explore in Volume Three), meaning that oppositional synthesis regularly yields different groups identifying with/around nature as something to fortify for the state or for workers. We’re going to explore the basic idea of furry panic, here—meaning as tied to Cartesian thought at large, thus how to think about in ways that humanize monsters “of nature” the state and its proponents traditionally dehumanize, thus brutalize for profit as pimps thereof getting even with “bad” whores; i.e., neglect, ignorance and/or distance; e.g., Turkey Tom‘s 2023 (extremely problematic) “Degenerate[1]” series on Bronies and Five Nights at Freddy’s ghost of the counterfeit, or Lily Orchard’s pedophile escapades, hidden behind sexualized Brony fan fiction (Essence of Thought, 2021).

Unlike the demons we’ve examined thus far in this module, totems et al are not undead or occult by default. While manmade trauma can certainly be included (see: chimeras, below), these animal-themed egregores are essentially living creatures. This means they don’t tend to seek out humans for their essence (though they do sometimes eat, maul or stab them), nor are they strictly summoned from a supernatural world beyond Earth and its ecosystems. Instead, they inhabit an Earth-like area or range as part of its “sample of one,” often echoing qualities of Indigenous populations ranging from the Celtic peoples of Great Britain to the Native Peoples of the Americas, Middle East, Asia and elsewhere. Let’s unpack each, one by one.

Wherever they hail from, totems tend to be incredibly animalistic and, more to the point, primitively sexual (from a Cartesian standpoint) and wedded to nature; i.e., as beings of nature, including the spirits associated with them as of the forest, lunar cycle and various Pagan rites, etc—all packing power as a choice of various ways that humans as animals can uniquely social-sexually communicate regarding the liberatory paradox of nature! Contrary to Cartesian thought, we’re not just machine’s with one purpose, nor beasts of burden serving an ancient-to-modern fulfillment of that aim; i.e., to yoke and privatize for profit (sex or otherwise). Neither is any animal treated as such, human or not! Liberation is a holistic, cross-species affair! Our stewardship is total, looking out for animals as unable to deal with human treachery like humans can!

So do furries walk the edge, speaking to simultaneous alienation and fetishization not just of workers under capital, but nature and workers relating back and forth in social-sexual forms that can be sexual, but likewise until then merely advertise sexuality—meaning in ways that don’t actualize as sexual until both parties agree; i.e., ludo-Gothic BDSM as tied to a larger worldview making such stewardship and dark empathy second-nature: according to the usual xenophilia as holistically gradient, hence accounting for all reactions per mutual consent as something to illustrate vis-à-vis the nature world; i.e., as liberated from capital’s kennel-like brothels’ alienized-and-sexual tout le monde!

“Welcome to slavery”? As if, Quentin Tarantino! We tease a healthier symbiosis walking the necrobiome, our deliciously lost-in-necropolis dream pushing up ass-like “daisies” (or vice versa): towards fresh radiation and—if we actually need it—penetration, too; i.e., as a matter of good BDSM checking and subverting profit as normally and impulsively chasing profit, devil-may-care! But also, such feral pornography can just be appreciated as art, too! Porn is art, and it looks nice! For some, that’s more than enough! Freedom and exploitation occupy the same awesome realms:

(artist: Lumidetsu)

Entombed in time without decay! […]

The world is full of mysteries

That men have never seen before
Magik lives in all dynasties
The light of love shines ever more (Manilla Road’s “Lost in Necropolis“)

In other words, totems are not Western funerary beings by design, tending to be highly physical creatures developed as animals are: in terms of their senses (such as smell or taste)—with mystical shamanistic connections, spiritual projections, and/or hedonism and ritualized access-through-drugs also a possibility but not a given (whose magical associates we’ll explore more in part two of this subchapter). If they are magical, their magic comes from the Earth itself and the natural world, not the underworld or spirits associated strictly with the land of the dead or a parallel dimension beyond nature (though this can certainly be a factor when intersecting with other monster modules; re: the xenomorph).

Chimeras are essentially composites, albeit tending to be demonic combinations of different stigma animals instead of undead parts. Chimeras aren’t simply common monsters in underworld stories—e.g., Cerberus or Amit—but are combined from the minds of different artists expressing nature in deathly ways. To this, the potential for hybridization lends itself well to compound expression; re: the xenomorph. Giger’s chimera/composite was itself several things at once: a dark, “ancient” monster but also a perverse brainchild begot from a host of artists, while also surviving inside technology and people as a biomechanical death curse that kills one person at a time. In doing so, it transforms its victims in ways not fully divorced from the white colonizer’s perspective: the non-white/trans person as a leftover from the ancient world, thus terrifying during the abjection process.

A large part of the canonical fear being invoked is the xenomorph as a rapacious and parasitoid monster-fucker (or rather, a monster who fucks out of revenge). But colonial guilt and fear of transformation isn’t something that strictly must inhabit the ritual. Simply put, monster-fucking is rape play but can focus on sex positivity as restorative expression unto itself—to be enjoyed by not focusing on the xenophobic rapes of yesterday and more on what could be if workers were allowed to be sexual with the same demonic monster language; i.e., dark xenophilia during ludo-Gothic BDSM—with non-human animals unable to consent to sex, but anthromorphs being human entities that don’t naturally exist: they’re byproducts of technology coming out of oral cultures into written ones, and hauling a great deal of baggage, thus desire for revenge against the state via the usual routes of challenging profit/anti-predation speaking for itself (“Who’s a good puppy slut? You are!”).

(artist: Lumidetsu)

Who might they fuck, given the choice? What hellish forms might they take, themselves? In short, just about whatever you can imagine! As long as it’s mutually consensual, then no harm, no foul; i.e., no children, non-sentient animals or dead bodies (none of which can consent to sexual activities, or BDSM at large). Monster sex, then, is commonly animalized, and just as empathetic for it in drug-like magical ways during dark xenophilia (with drugs also being a potent aphrodisiac):

(exhibit 52d: Model and artist: Krispy Tofuuu and Persephone van der Waard. As Krispy and I demonstrate, if you can’t get away from monsters, you can at least make ones that won’t harm you during sex. Their excessive, alien forms often look scary and dangerous, but in practice are perfectly safe.)

During the dialectic of the alien, non-sentient animals intimate another exploited group: pets, livestock and chattel, that serve as a non-anthropocentric, asexual aspect to nature that humans can bond with; i.e., in regards to seeing the natural world differently by identifying with it under Cartesian duress (called therians, for animals that have and do exist; versus “otherkin[2]” tying to mythical/extraterrestrial, non-human creatures). As part of this altered perspective, sentient versions of animals do exist in fantasy stories; i.e., those able to magically communicate with humans through a kind of universal language. A common example of the sentient animal include witch’s familiars like the talking cats from Sailor Moon, but also enchanted, cognizant animals like the unicorn, Amalthea, from The Last Unicorn. “Sentience” generally denotes an anthropomorphic connection with nature as something to respect and communicate through complicated dramas like the stories we just mentioned. We’ll get back to those in part two.

A moment ago, I mentioned accessing lycans, chimeras and sentient animals through magic theatre and/or drugs as metaphor or actual; i.e., the interaction with nature by proxy through rituals, practitioners, spells and mind-altering substances (again, actual or implied[3]) tied to anthropomorphic animals.

For example, ambrosia in Ancient Greek means “immortality.” It was denied to mortals, and historically framed by Mary Shelley as “fire of the gods.” Biblically denied to Mankind, people become binarized as men and women, its “theft” by the privatizing gods of a Protestant ethic under capital denying any ability to “die” in a “little” way—to transform and live on in ways that not only reshape how people think in rebellious modes of discourse; they live on through the spectral, orgasmic, nightmarish, drug-like attempt itself. They don’t have to be literal drugs (though they certainly can be); they just have to transform the mind enough to make a difference against Capitalist Realism; re: like Blake’s devilish “acids” did: a figurative deal with the Devil (in the Milton-Byronic Satanic sense).

We’ll also unpack this concept more in part two, when we consider various non-Christian pacts with nature, but also composite demons infused with trauma like the xenomorph; i.e., as something natural-material to arrive at through magic, drugs and a queer-inclusive Wisdom of the Ancients’ dark xenophilia. For now, just remember that magic and drugs are historically criminalized to exploit various groups demonized differently for the same purpose (rape and profit) under the status quo; i.e., the War on Drugs something of a hauntological regression that polices the present world in past language, specifically past holocausts dressed up as home defense in bad faith: DARVO obscurantism pimping the alien to dehumanize the harvest, thus having the state’s pre-emptive revenge against nature as monstrous-feminine, chattelizing its whores and putting them cheaply to work by criminalizing them as sexual deviant chattel-vermin!

This brings us to lycanthropes, aka shapeshifter demons (often into stigma animals, but arguably fungi and plants, too; re: the xenomorph) that are often called “furries,” nowadays. Though furries—along with chimeras and sentient animals—are not historically prone to criminal behaviors, they are criminalized, alienized and fetishized for being sexually “demonic” in association with a drug-like or alien perception of the world around them; i.e., conflated with bestiality and general depravity from damaged, dangerous minds that may as well be on drugs.

On some level, then, the ableism and abjection of furries and their erotic animalization is symbolic of settler-colonial fears tied to non-European societies and organizations of labor/bio-power beyond capital; i.e., nature as black taking on a variety of meanings in overlapping persecution networks and language, thus interpretation and application of said captive fantasies; e.g., through the myth of the black male rapist as not only “one of most dangerous and prevalent narratives in American history” (sidhu-s82’s “The Myth of the Black Rapist,” 2021) but something connected to America and Capitalism

In the U.S. and other capitalist countries, rape laws were originally framed for the protection of men of the upper classes, whose women ran the risk of being assaulted. What happens to working class women has always been of little concern to the courts. As a result, appalling few rapists have ever been prosecuted—appalling few, that is, if black men are exempted from consideration. While the rapists of working-class women have so rarely been brought to justice, the rape charge as been indiscriminately aimed at black men, the guilty and innocent alike (source: Angela Davis’ “Rape, Racism and the Capitalist Setting,” 1978).

that endures into the present despite rape statistically being an intraracial crime (the kernel of truth to rape myths being criminogenic, thus manufactured in their origins; i.e., as tied to capital and the state as police bodies for the elite).

Indeed, according to the National Alliance to End Sexual Violence:

Popular media in [America] continue[s] to perpetuate racial stereotypes, particularly about women of color. Portraying black women and Latinas as promiscuous, American Indian and Asian women as submissive, and all women of color as inferior legitimates their sexual abuse. Portraying men of color as sexually voracious and preying on innocent white women reinforces a cultural obsession with black-on-white stranger rape, at the expense of the vastly more common intra-racial acquaintance rape (source: “Racism and Rape,” 2017).

The problematic male myths outlined above poetically collide with the spurious argument of women of color as savage and promiscuous, but also acts of dark magic further distanced from the West than white Pagans are:

(exhibit 52e1: Artist, left: NgArt7; top-right: Frank Frazetta; mid-right: Mati Klarwein; bottom-to-mid-left: F.B.W.; bottom-right: Aliya Will. The rape of white women by black men/monstrous-feminine runs rampant throughout nearly all of Frazetta’s work [carried over from the colonial oppression in Ron Howard’s Conan novels]. The black agent, apart from being seen as a rapist of white women, is reduced to a “brave”—a guardian/warrior of the village and the women, who have been reduced to stereotypes, themselves: the voodoo priest, witch doctor or sexually deviant, “hungry” woman of color as a temptress of white men, the latter fantasizing about, pardon the expression, “jungle fever” [even in tamer variants not linked to a stereotypically “wild setting”; e.g., Aliya Will’s 2B cosplay]. The psychedelic components of this have survived as a visual trend well into the present; e.g., NgArt7 riffing on Klarwein’s cover art for Miles Davis’ famously confusing Bitches Brew, 1970.)

Of course, visually white Indigenous people exist, as do non-white functioning people who aren’t ethnically Indigenous—with Bay being Māori but visually appearing “white” in the eyes of non-white “shadist” practitioners, and me being ethnically half-Dutch/quarter-Hungarian and leftover Mayflower Puritan mutt, but identifying as non-white insofar as I am a practicing Pagan/Satanist sex worker and witch determined to end capital for all the dead generations into living ones. Bay and I are united in this aim, thunder buddies for life! “Fuckin’ right!”

(artists: Bay and Persephone van der Waard)

Yet, these phobias are largely sensationalized through current scapegoats/token cops that remain composed of many different ethnicities, genders and/or religions, theatres, etc, in the material world; i.e., fear towards these persons coming from a warped, abject understanding of what furries even are; re: nature is other/monstrous-feminine alien to pimp and rape for profit out of revenge against the colonized by the colonizers during inheritance anxiety inside the Imperial Core (what Doctor Robotnik calls “the Death Egg” in Sonic 2, 1992); e.g., Paradise/Greenhill Zone something to defend from Indigenous Peoples dressed up as evil Nazi scientists (echoes of Operation Paperclip), which Communist furries have to reclaim from Nazi DARVO/obscurantist scapegoats, and fascist/white moderate wolves and foxes (re: Malcom X), at large!

(exhibit 52e2: Source: Eric Killela’s “Does the Furry Community Have a Nazi Problem?” 2017—the same year TERFs began to emerge, post-Gamergate, assimilating in response to fascism rising on the global stage; i.e., the liminal hauntology of war historically-materially yields tokenism and strange bedfellows.)

The Ark is a bit crowded, then, but we cannot simply reject nature, for then we abandon it to the current “stewards” preying on it/our communities; i.e., through monomythic neoliberalism (re: Sonic descending into a “bad future” to prevent the apocalypse, Terminator-style)—one whose omnipresent Capitalist Realism and bad-faith environmental “activism” we subvert on the Aegis during Promethean and Faustian subversions of said dogma: the animal sluts of the world, punching up from their kennels—fighting not just for the preservation of nature already owned/privatized by Whitey/tokens (as Sonic canonically does), but for land back. Doing so requires demasking the cop as a furry like Sonic (actual Sonic, but also Bunny from The First Descendants, exhibit 56a1a1); i.e., while still loving nature ourselves (as Blxxd Bunny and Nyx do, but also Pippy Longstocking …and the actress who played her in the ’80s straight-to-VHS movie, said actress making a sex tape and reclaiming it from her ex formerly releasing it as revenge porn, exhibit 56a1a2).

Stemming from non-Western, non-Christian ways of life that strive hauntologically to reharmonize with nature (which Indigenous cultures didn’t always do; re: treaties with the White Man), the anthropomorphic counterculture tradition suggested above conveys an idealized animal representation the West has since abjected (unable to tokenize furries as easily as Amazons, for example): a “totem” animal for humans and nature as connected through the spirit of demonic creativity and kinship, hence dark xenophilia tied to nature as whore!

Being a kind of demon, then, furries are similar to other magic totem groups. Like witches, they’re an out-group. This can be seen in how they transform/present as egregores—peacefully “wearing” the skins of animals to relate to nature versus harvesting the skins for profit/status; e.g., berserks; i.e., exploiting nature and using the skin as a disguise to perform various crimes the state invents, during undercover police work (more on this in Volume Three; re: witch cops/vigilantism).

From Disney’s own prince/princess offshoots—or Sega’s skater punk gentrification and decay of said punk with Sonic—false rebellions are never rebellions, but haunt and plague said rebellions in duality (and vice versa). Similar to canonical demons and witches, then, animalistic demons and monsters are universally regarded as sexual deviants/degenerates who must be collectively punished under broad, vague (fascist) legislation pimping anthropomorphic sex; i.e., said sexuality (and public nudism) tied to nature as monstrous-feminine. In turn, these laws are meant to be selectively applied, thereby used in bad faith to attack conservative scapegoats tied to common conservative phobias, fetishes and double standards; i.e., focus points for hate groups to levy a bias against, namely “in defense” of women, children and moral decency through moral panics targeting trans people as “radical groomers” (and linked to other marginalized groups less politically unwise to attack mask-off, like Indigenous Peoples).

We’ll examine this tactic far more in Volume Three. For now, merely keep in mind that such accusations don’t tend to match up with the data, with

• most forms of child sexual abuse happening from heterosexual persons (Zero Abuse Project, 2023)
• most violent crimes/rapes being committed by men against women (Cal Poly / Humboldt’s “Sexualized Violence Statistics”)
• most domestic rapes and murders/murder-suicides happening from one’s intimate partner (the NCADV’s “Facts about Domestic Violence and Physical Abuse,” 2015)
• a self-reported, 40% climb being attributed to domestic abuse cases involving police officers abusing their own families (National Center for Women & Policing’s “Police Family Violence Fact Sheet, 2013), who go on to underreport rapes in general—re: the Marshall Project

Nevertheless, lycanthropy the accusation can be attributed to canonical, propagandized sex crimes for centuries; i.e., since at least Monarchy of Demons and Faustus, the complicit cryptonymy process reaching out of the Early Modern period; e.g., Count Ferdinand from John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi eventually going insane from lycanthropy and committing various acts of murder (and this being after he wanted to marry and rape his own sister):

(source: Stéphanie Mercier’s “The Duchess of Malfi, John Webster, Directed by Dominic Dromgoole,” 2014)

In keeping with Gothic and Matthew Lewis, as much as Milton, such stories are as much critiques of systems that will deny their own hand in things and push them off onto their victims; re: exploitation and liberation exist in the same place, on and off the same stages in the larger mode of discourse—what Mercier herself calls “sharing space” (an idea basically synonymous with Radcliffean closed space and Bakhtin’s chronotope/castle-narrative I’ve embellished on, using danger discos):

The visual effects are audibly accompanied by the rounded sound of the cello, the three different types of lute and the harpsichord, which requires regular re-tuning as if to underline the necessary reunion of the otherwise disrespectful handling of traditional neo-classical unities of time and space, or bodily and spiritual orthodoxy, throughout Webster’s plot.

The play’s script immediately points to this multifaceted doubling as the widowed Duchess, her twin brother Ferdinand (David Dawson) and the older sibling Cardinal (James Garnon) metaphorically become “three fair medals, / Cast in one figure, of so different temper” (I.1.179-180). The comparison, apart from underlining the different personalities of the characters, establishes a diptych of corporality and materiality that will underscore the action and hint to how the Duchess’ passionate marriage with her adoring, yet socially inferior, steward will inevitably encourage disaster. With similar numismatic imagery, the Cardinal offers Bosola (Sean Gilder) gold coins to become a spy (and murderer) at the Duchess’ court whilst the actors eat symbolically charged strawberries off circle-shaped pewter platters in a hint to the curvaceous nature of the Duchess’ soon-to-be rounded pregnant belly. In fact, the tragic nature of what should be happy events to come is also pointed to by the premonitory dagger on stage; an appropriate metaphor for the particular “variety of courtship” (I.1.329) that characterizes the play and that is immediately transferred to the quill that the steward, Antonio (Alex Waldmann), uses to write what turns out to be the Duchess’ gloomily foreboding will. This, before she presumptuously oversteps moral, legal and social boundaries (here signified by the fact that the two are initially separated by the flaming lowered candles while they court) and gives him her wedding ring as a token of betrothal – yet another circle, and, more importantly, a pointer to the rope that will finally encircle her neck (ibid.).

Except while the West fabricates and testifies to its own abuses—doing so in cryptonymic ways that perjure domestic decay through historical-material doubles and nostalgia from Shakespeare and Webster onwards (re: Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s 1986 The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy alluding to Webster and Renaissance appropriations of the skin-changer legend in Western canon)—the undeniable fact remains: most furries aren’t sex criminals any more than most queer people, non-Christians, non-white people, and/or demons are; they’re a fandom that, according to Fur Science, runs countercurrent to “the very stereotypes that portray [them] as being simply a fetish, the most-cited drawn to the furry fandom is its sense of belongingness, recreation, and escape from the mundaneness of daily life, as well as its appreciation of anthropomorphic art and stories” (source: “What’s a Furry?” 2022). What a piece of work is furry! The paragon of animals pimped by Hamlet-style dickheads!

Furthermore, this explanation isn’t baseless or unfounded/apophenic conspiracy to dismiss; it’s academically grounded, produced by professors of furries (who aren’t always furries themselves); i.e., describing their target of research as a fandom after years of prolonged study in good faith. The aim in doing so, then, is to dispel many harmful myths, not confirm and exploit them as they normally occur under capital during witch-hunt DARVO obscurantism pimping nature; i.e., as Radcliffean fuckwads like Turkey Tom do (and who apologize for fascism by pinning degeneracy on fascist victims they can conflate with fascism as “degenerate”; re: cops and victims, pimps and whores).

This includes, for example, standing together in false-rebellious solidarity against “soy boy” leftists they—as loud-and-proud centrists (and those like them, such as Brandon Buckingham, oompaville, ShoeOnHead, and SomeOrdinaryGamers, etc)—can unite in bad faith against criticism they universally decry as “slander” and “woke”; i.e., dogwhistling while vice signaling and acting morally outraged/clutching their pearls to defend one of their own/someone ostensibly adjacent to them in the Free Marketplace of Ideas (Capitalism): something they can defend from outsiders who threaten to break Capitalist Realism with their “Cultural Marxism” (or whatever the reactive-abuse antagonizers want to call it, but that’s what they’re doing with these kinds of pogroms, furry or not).

And not to get too off track, but basically In Praise of Shadows went to battle with his guns half-loaded; i.e., kicking the hornet’s nest and getting dogpiled by a bunch of people defending Wendigoon from said “assailant,” treating the former like the Whore of Babylon and the latter like Jesus Christ:

Answer: This was asked a few days ago, and at the time I had no idea who IPoS even was, but recently, Mutahar put out a decent video about the situation.

From what I can tell, the guy’s catching flak for making wildly broad strokes such as “He’s from Appalachia so he’s a racist” and stuff like that. Given that Wendigoon is a fairly popular personality on YouTube, this likely aggravated his fan base and led to something of a proxy war in the two channel’s comments, subreddits, forums, etc.

He also apparently took some shots at various other people, including SomeOrdinaryGamers, which is probably why the video above was made in the first place (source: DoubleClickMouse, r/OutOfTheLoop’s “What is going on with In Praise of Shadows and Wendigoon?” 2024).

I can’t seem to find the original video, but in a nutshell, there’s a lot of weird virtue/vice signaling and fascist pipeline apologetics (which lubricate and reinforce said pipeline while capitalizing on it during the cryptonymy/abjection processes); e.g., ” IPOS lost me as a fan. I am a literal Catholic Monarchist from Appalachia and I despise racism. He has insulted me and every, White, Black, Latino, Asian and Native person in the entire region” (ibid.). Okay, then.

More to the point, there seems to be a whole lot of people who aren’t oppressed acting oppressed in bad faith against dark xenophilia; i.e., allergic to criticism to such a degree that they make a meal out/ton of hay with it, grifting and bullying their critics to silence in typical “debate bro” fashion (and token fashion; re: ShoeOnHead having a lot of Nazi friends, the shameless bitch). There’s a lot of chaff during the dust-up and that’s the point; i.e., make noise to distract from the obvious: that they hide and feed in plain sight during a complicit cryptonymy process furthering abjection on stages we must survive inside; i.e., from bad-faith cunts like Turkey Tom and his ilk’s dogmatic “edutainment.” It worked for Obama and Joe Biden; i.e., a cop is a cop and doesn’t prevent crime, American Liberal “justice” being slavery-in-disguise hiding in plain sight (note the noose, echoing Jim Crow and Lost Cause behind a literal Monster commercial by two white straight Nazi assholes: America, the Land of the Free and home of the Fascist, left):

(artist: Rusty Cage, 2022)

To it, they’re all Nazis because they’re in bed with Nazis (and love guns/being tough on crime/acting superior to everyone else while downplaying their own privilege and America’s settler-colonial design, below); i.e., working from the same compounds as militias to push out from, home-base-style, and attack the enemies of the state/the Protestant ethic and Cartesian thought; re: the state is straight and anyone who challenges them is a sicko Commie “fur faggot” these “maverick hunters” will happily poach, therefore making human, animal and environmental rights/dark xenophilia “up for debate”: a lynch mob kettling “useless eaters” (the former massive cowards who hide behind privilege and fear their latter chosen prey fighting back, below)!

(exhibit 52e3: Source: right, Instagram: Tombutdark; left: Volume One’s exhibit 10c2:

Artist, top-left: Undead Clown; top-right: Defiant Drills, commissioned by Barnowlren; bottom-left and -right: Bay’s fursona, by Tofu Froth and Buns Like a Truck. Gothic-Communist struggle is defined in its poetic context—of whom commissioned the artist and why— as something that is challenged during paratextual dialogs concerning the pieces and what they stand for or rather, what they should stand for. For example, in posting his piece, “hit them nazi punks” in 2020, Undead Clown writes,

largely inspired by CRASHprez’s song “Fascists Don’t Cry” which is a really great song lmao

but ya imma knock ya out if you come up to me spoutin white supremacist or

transphobic shit

human rights aint up for debate [source].

Bigots are cops and hate being reminded of that; i.e., while they play dress up in bad-faith cryptonymy versus our own revolutionary deceptions punching up against capital from parallel societies: exposing them as cowards on and offstage, upon the Aegis. We lie and perform to protect ourselves/the natural world; they lie to pimp and rape such things for the establishment. Gross, sad fuckers, you’re traitors and rapists stuck in Plato’s cave! Your time will come!)

By bullet or not, such holocausts routinely happen by the usual suspects perpetrating them; i.e., anyone colonizing these spaces (token or not) during the Imperial Boomerang as a brutal historical-material cycle—one reaving the usual prisons by the usual ladders of preferential mistreatment/overlapping persecution “joy division” language that cops and vigilantes selectively and collectively groom/mark their prey with! Anyone who breaks the illusion, mid-purge, is the enemy of those most fragile, privileged and guilty of doing crimes for the state against the vulnerable and the marginalized; re: on capital’s frontiers, thus inside its states of exception: controlled opposition policing uncontrolled opposition, pimps (and token whores) policing unruly whores through all labor/nature as sexualized and alienized by the state and its mechanisms—doing so to serve profit (thus rape) by punching and killing Medusa. Bursting their bubble is our revenge; i.e., by exposing and shaming them while always taking away their toys: us.

As we keep exploring furries—i.e., as things to investigate as/with—recall that white moderates are Nazis with more masks (concentric veneers being something we’ll return to, in Volume Three); e.g., Turkey Tom effectively operating as an open-to-cloaked racist in ways people more broadly forget because of the confusion outlined above (re: D’Angelo Wallace’s “I’m Not Sorry” calling Turkey Tom out, back in 2019). It’s a war of endurance, our darkness visible versus theirs during a, suitably enough, Miltonic war of angels and demons, but also furries and dark xenophilia. Nazis and Communists occupy that self-same space, too!

To it, furries are scapegoats in ways that play out very similarly to the events described above; i.e., pimp and police them in ways white moderates (and their reactionary brethren) love to do: a harvest to dehumanize and treat strictly as criminal and nothing else; re: Turkey Tom’s “degenerate” series being a massive dogwhistle several steps removed from him and his own racism. But function betrays any aesthetic; i.e., if someone has Nazi friends in their orbit/wheelhouse, they’re a Nazi by association because that’s how fascism works.

Every witch hunt has a hunter to either apologize for or upend by viewing the oppressed in a better light. To it, associate professor Sharon E. Roberts tries to undo these dangerous (and deliberate, profitable) misconceptions about “furry panic” by writing in “What are ‘furries?'”:

Furries are people who have an interest in anthropomorphism, which specifically refers to giving human characteristics to animals. In its most distilled form, furries are a group of people who formed a community—or fandom—because they have a common interest in anthropomorphic media, friendships and social inclusion. […] Furries don’t identify as animals; they identify with animals. In the same way that cosplayers typically don’t believe they are actually Spiderman, furries don’t think they are their fursonas (source).

In other words, furries are not an illness or inherently criminal institution; they’re a small minority group (about 1.4-2.8 million, worldwide, International Furry Survey: Summer 2011); i.e., like the queer community is, thus targeted by reactionaries and white moderates/tokens during moral panics made to defend capital as always in crisis (to enforce and motivate profit through manufactured scarcity).

So just as LGBTQ people tend to receive violence (UCLA William Institute, 2021), furries are far more likely to have crimes committed against them by hate groups (whose own activities either go unreported or are protected by those in power acting in bad faith; re: Turkey Tom); i.e., are more likey to experience police abuse than they are to actually “do a crime,” themselves (“Furry-tales: The organized hate effort against LGBTQ+ young people,” 2021).

Note, I do put “do a crime” in quotes because furries, and those associated with them to varying degrees—such as sex workers and Indigenous Peoples more broadly—are criminalized for existing as sex workers and Indigenous people do, but receive additional confusion surrounding them due to being animals in hauntological ways; i.e., that are harder for the modern West to unironically fetishize/tokenize. In the tradition of stigma animals, werewolves are shot, most animals are hunted, most hunters are men, and most murders and violent sexual crimes are committed by men (which extends to token men trying to assimilate by eating the dead; e.g., Henry Emory from Them [2021] trying to choke down the homemade pie at the dinner table, and blend in at work: with his aggressively white supremacist co-workers not welcoming assimilative co-habitation).

(exhibit 52f: Artist, top-left: Frank Frazetta; top-right: Ichan-desu; bottom: Wlop. Even in classic pin-up art, the presence of nudity and animals doesn’t traditionally denote a sexual connection between the human and animal[s] portrayed. Rather, the effect is closer to public nudism and simply being naked around animals to make a larger symbolic point. Another role the animal plays, then, is a protector for the oft-naked woman; i.e., as a totem that ascribes qualities onto the woman as a kind of “panther lady” with an increased, feral sexuality tied to nature: a desire to fight back against her rapists trying to possess her/project their fetishizes onto her [or any preyed-upon gender].)

Another way of looking at this problem, then, is to see the fate of animals/nature under Capitalism as inherently divisive and unstable; i.e., the “native” party (the colonizer) seeing their inherited settler-colonial home as invaded by the ghost of the counterfeit, which it scapegoats instead of attacking Capitalism as a structure. In other words, Capitalism causes pain as an abject byproduct of ongoing exploitation; i.e., as half-real, meaning between fiction and non-fiction. The Gothic imagination, then, is like the T-800, who coldly states, “I sense injuries; the data could be called pain.” Except the better developed these pathways are, the better our ability to cry out in pain, thus issue warnings regarding oncoming/ongoing disasters against bad-faith impostors. We furries will find ways not just to relieve stress and pain, then, but prevent them in the future. In response to a perceived “white genocide,” a Cartesian man or Radcliffean Gothicist/token will summon and dismiss these anxieties, exorcising them from the home as divorced from nature/nature’s revenge (which includes flashing the pimp on the Aegis, below): “We didn’t destroy ourselves; you attacked us!”

The problem is, Capitalism is historically-materially unstable and cheapens nature to push for infinite growth within a finite web of life. Per state shift, it will not survive its own disasters, but decay into older hauntological (token) models of brutality like fascism, including eco-fascism. Those arrangements of capital and the state’s enforcers historically-materially offer up linguo-material byproducts serving as holistic data; i.e., cryptomimetically suggesting a decaying society and nation, but also Humanity and the planet as sick of capital that eventually to leads to total mass extinction: an unmaking or reversal of Genesis not unlike Matthew Lewis’ ending to The Monk, over two centuries ago; re: self-deception as self-authored and carried out.

To it, I’d rather fight for our survival as open stewards of nature weaponizing dark xenophilia in our favor, than speak little in relative comfort; i.e., while genocide leads to our destruction through a land without food, but also full of people who cannot eat (making the colonialists asking of the alien “what did you eat?[4]” a tragic refrain; re: men cannot eat gold, but also starve: when Indigenous Peoples won’t give them food to enable colonization, effectively disabling it).

Divorced from nature, Whitey cannot see what ails their own dying colony. Instead, they burn their own house down and kill things that “do not belong”; re: anything they monomythically and cartographically describe as “degenerate” or “monstrous-feminine,” hence treat differently than them/the status quo as morally thus ethnocentrically superior to their routine victims; e.g., a witch to burn, but also a whore to pimp and a pet to own while acting as the oppressed wearing witch-cop costumes (and ironically doomsaying their own slaughter when the state dies). Chattel is chattel, and pedophiles and zoophiles go hand-in-hand with unironic porn addicts sharing the same poetic space as furry actors and art:

(artist: Lumidetsu)

Furries, then, are stewards of nature preyed upon by those taught to own and dominate nature-as-alien/monstrous-feminine, colonizing furry porn in ways seen as strange because the undercover costume is essentially a compound clown/fetish outfit; i.e., it sticks out like a sore thumb; e.g., Four Lions taking the idea and pearl-clutching during the War on Terror as something to apologize for with British snark:

(source: Time Out 2010 review)

To that, our usual suspects remain white cis-het chuds/weird canonical nerds and token sell-outs, who try doggedly to operate as undercover stewards of profit canonizing false colonial binaries like “male/female” (steer clear of anyone who says “a male” or “a female” as a noun phrase; e.g., “I dated a female”). Their education and its distinctions/categories’ harmful sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll (what they poetically endorse) are bad; i.e., a poison for their brains that fuels the metastasizing of Capitalism—its cancer-like growth—as something to guard to their own eventual downfall.

Worse, they will push it onto us, meaning “we” (a broader intersectional collective that includes furries) must challenge that by guarding nature but also the means of communing with nature through the above Gothic poetics; i.e., the “furry” as a revolutionary function, during acid Communism as, itself, dualistic in practice (which we’ll get to at the end of part two); re: our land, drugs, and sex education (collars, animal monsters, breeding displays, etc), but also whatever leaps to mind when using them, provided its revolutionary function is constant during ludo-Gothic BDSM’s cryptonymy process reversing abjection using dark xenophilia. If workers refuse to assimilate, tokenization and colonization become impossible:

(artist: Lumidetsu)

Think of it as a praxial “stress test,” then, one whose revolutionary cryptonymy—when exposed to our potential allies (thus potential enemies); i.e., “flashing those with power” as a game to enjoy as we do it, above—make the latter either want to hug or kill us (after embarrassingly shitting their pants, of course). In terms of re(t)con, establishing either is vital to our survival and the overall war effort as fighting for our lives; i.e., our right to exist versus extinction being the outcome of Capitalism censoring us and our education to enrich the elite and their proponents; re: Turkey Tom, Andrew Tate, and the Critical Drinker, etc, showing that anything not against the state is with it, including all manner of radical/reactionary and moderate forms bearing a white, cis-het male face (or tokens wearing such masks, the assimilator and assimilated inverting the mask’s flow of assimilation: the colonizer playing the white Indian, and the assimilator playing the actual Indian who thinks they’ve “made it,” but have only killed the Indian to “save” the [wo]man for last: the casino brothelized under canonical duress).

To this, Cartesian dualism more broadly treats anything “of nature” as “outside” of civilization and nature, thus meriting exploitation or reformation/conversion of “bad” nature to “good.: The colonial rhetoric is of course dressed up in the rhetoric of liberty and equality to sound as good as possible (re: Zinn), but is also supplied primarily to the enforcers of the American middle class since Bacon’s Rebellion: cis-het white men, followed by cis-het white women, then other Russian-doll dog-eat-dog/big-fish-eat-little-fish pecking orders.

As such, it’s precisely this group and its assimilative offshoots (the capitalist Numinous) that hatefully (with bias[5]) declare all demons anathema, including totems, chimeras and sentient animals more commonly portrayed as furries or as magical beings associated with furries; re: witches by the same modular persecution logic and arbitrary double standards, Communist variants muddied vis-à-vis state DARVO and obscurantism (re: Nazi werewolves are historically a thing Hitler actually used towards the end of the war, as I discuss in “‘Hell Hath No Fury’; or, Soulblighter’s Token Gay Nazi Revenge“): our uphill push towards the city of the gods and our own Communist Numinous (the Medusa) being something to break into and reclaim from Puritanical forces and capital, whose Omelas we seek to dismantle as Trojan whores do (on the prow of a slutty Ark):

(artist: Lumidetsu)

In effect, the elite outlaw iconoclastic media that attempts to depict these groups in a positive light; i.e., showing such entities as capable of giving and receiving empathetic treatment (above), thus deserving of basic human rights (the same rights afforded to animals and the environment, to be fair). The state’s war on nature and sex education is one on Pagan and dark xenophilia; i.e., making for a liminal proposition—one where many individuals grapple with the call of the wild and their own genders, identities and sexualities: as either in the closet already or being forced back inside such kennels through state courtship pimping puppy courtesans to monopolize chattelized sex work (thus furries and dark xenophilia)!

Regarding such liminality as anisotropically progress-versus-regression, if Ann Radcliffe was an imperfect detective out of the past—one whose own relative attempts at grasping beyond her reach live on in her books (and offshoots of said books)—the same concept applies to trans, intersex, enby and/or ace detectives today reaching for equality towards Communism; i.e., in demonic language that Radcliffe would never have dared touch: on the edge of the civilized world, through a transformative experience decidedly more genderqueer than she was and, by extension, Matthew Lewis as some to embrace and make even gayer than he arguably was (some big shoes to fill, but we fags love “filling” things)! Necessity is the mother of invention (e.g., Small Goblin’s “Cantina Theme” played by a pencil and a girl with too much time on her hands,” 2018); never let them take credit for your work, thus colonize it and you with said theft!

(source: YesterWeird’s The Monk by Matthew Lewis, Chapters 6 & 7,” 2015)

This brings us to andro-/gynodiversity as something I want to unpack/denude as dark xenophilia; i.e., relative to a furry counterculture and general stewardship of nature; re: through Lewis’ The Monk, but also my past work with Cuwu combined with Dario Argento’s “Pelts,” Erika Eleniak, and furry porn (there’s an odd combo) loaded with a bit of worker/nature revenge: as something to protect with iconoclastic art from the usual betrayals. So do we pee out such moral superiority/outrage (as something to perform; e.g., from Turkey Tom to Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa): a waste to void that, unto itself, feels rather good (and exits the body similar to cum as something the Catholics might sing about as “waste,” yet actually comes out of the usual Protestant gentry playing at paupers suitably making fun of the colonized yet thinking they’re Jonathan Swift; re: Monty Python courting Protestant spectres of Cromwell having genocided the Irish as racially inferior to English false rebellions: The Life of Brian serving anti-Catholic dogma furthering the Protestant ethic out of the 18th and 19th centuries into a new neoliberal period’s Second Gilded Age).

This includes feminism being a classic site of divide-and-conquer that, operating through the usual strange appetites garnered under capital, has tokenized from decaying gentries; re: from white women being chattelized as property (under city-states) far longer than people of color have been—a trend that would aggressively target the latter by the former under Capitalism from Radcliffe onwards; re: gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss—who then collectively go on to police the bodies of anyone not “of them”: their own, but also a “pussy phrenology/eugenics” that can be measured and analyzed during the usual exclusionary measures that tokens will embarrassingly cater to (forgetting how few people even have that “Vitruvian pussy” to begin with, let alone the entire monomorphic gradient of trans, intersex and non-binary people). What they canonize, we camp on the same Aegis:

(exhibit 52g1a: Artist: Victoria, directed by Persephone van der Waard. The canonical historical purpose of such exhibits was to display and dehumanize the freak; our reclamations give us gradient misfits a chance to exhibit, and voyeuristically peer in at, willing subjects of study we can play with/out, for a change! Victoria, for instance, is a rape survivor and intersex person, and one I—as a trans rape survivor and researcher seeking to heal from rape with others; i.e., doing so by speaking out in a diverse polity thereof—orchestrated a time to shoot and play with Vic. We both were eager to learn together and give each other power as demons do; i.e., through crossdress and undress alike, mid-exchange [re: Matilda’s concentric veneers used to expose Ambrosio‘s bullshit, thus that story’s evil prioress tied to capital: “Antonia will perceive her dishonor, but be unaware of her ravisher” bleeding into the violator being misled by promises of future rape the demonic queer shapeshifter uses to hoist the closeted rapist on his own petard; i.e., during a Satanic Panic of older days, The Monk operating essentially as vintage torture porn, but anisotropically directing queer anger at the status quo in ways they self-report through their outrage; e.g., Coleridge protesting The Monk by colonizing Gothic as straight]!

In doing so, I had Vic pose in ways that stressed their body as intersex/pear-shaped; e.g., their “hip dips” reminding me of Cuwu’s [above, middle] but also Vic storing fat differently than typically AMAB assignments do under state scalpels—a reality their own literal intersex scars testify to, and which our ludo-Gothic BDSM’s instruction and invigilation attest to: as something to resist state abuse while funding and finding our power onstage and off!)

Over time, women’s studies have gradually become decolonized from token cis-het white women (e.g., Radcliffe, Dacre, the Brontë sisters, Carter, Beauvoir, Moers, and Creed, etc); i.e., by nakedly sex-positive queer voices after Lewis (e.g., Cuwu, Victoria and me from Judith Butler and Michael Warner unto us). As such, it is now known more broadly as “gender studies” or “intersectional feminism”; but the performative and praxial liminality of doing so likewise has iconoclasts learning from older activist movements; i.e., in order to challenge authorities within current manifestations of those former groups. That’s what ludo-Gothic BDSM boils down to (as I coined it, anyways); re: camping the canon, putting “rape” in quotes to hug the alien sex worker while outing the pimp as perfidious towards the whore.

Ergo, revisiting the errors of the token past and tackling their regressions includes competing with male and female academics, but also cis-queer/token academics, public intellectuals and celebrities (tokenism knows no bounds); i.e., to allow GNC persons to say things about the same material world as it pertains to all oppressed groups under idiosyncratic axes of oppression/privilege, but also past, monstrous versions of ourselves; re: those that include the entire totemic demon class: as something that is routinely hunted by members of our own groups playing the conquistador’s pet, hence hauntological Roman fool!

Such testimony happens with our diversely inclusive bodies during the pedagogy of the oppressed; i.e., as something to solidarize and study unto itself. When dealing with bad(-faith) dragons, we good(-faith) dragons must expose their weak points while paradoxically showcasing our own vulnerability in ways that resist exploitation, on the Aegis; re: not just Victoria, but Cuwu as someone whose forbidden-fruit “apple” and its subsequent temptation I have revisited many times: a little shapeshifting dragon who fed on me a bit, but which I didn’t always dislike!

(exhibit 52g1b: Artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard. So who’s the Devil and who’s Faust, again? So did Cuwu and I make off like bandits in more ways than one—booty bandits! Making mischief is only blackmail through context, Cuwu the Matilda of a 21st century whore taking me out of the closet/to the ball game that they might turn me gayer than I ever dared dream, up until that point. “Let my hand see not the wound it makes” became sex with the lights on cushion-pushing towards a fearsome-fun ostinato of our bringer of class war unto others of different oppressions also rising to the challenge; re: fucking to metal, the Medusa something you cannot kill!

It was Jack Black’s 2001 “Fuck Her Gently,” in our case, but the idea is the same across all rock ‘n roll spinoffs; e.g., with Holst and Venture Bros. or anyone else predating/proceeding such cases, mid-crisis [Star Wars leaps to mind, or Paradise Lost and Frankenstein wiggling sinfully on the same holistic timeline]! “We are so back, my dude[s]!” Tomorrow, tomorrow, and tomorrow, furries and acid Communism are transformative but also cryptonymic, speaking cryptomimetically to Shakespeare’s petty pace: “a tale full of sound and fury,” signifying whatever meaning we give it!

Would it surprise you very much to know, then, that Cuwu and I both practiced, each of us gay little furry idiots? Furries are shadow warriors, “the beasts under your bed, in your closet, in your head“; i.e., to “enter sandman,” Metallica style—administering “dreams of [class] war, dreams of dragon’s fi-re [those dactyls] and of things that will bite”; re: during the dialectic of shelter and the alien as dualistically reclaimed by us. We demand HUGS, and give as good as we get! Fucking is metal, but as Beethoven did; re: by shaking his fist [or our asses] at Napoleon!

[artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard]

But also, look on us neurodivergent-if-not-terribly-morphologically-diverse [that being said, my Cuban friend Jackie did say about Cuwu’s ass, “Damn! They have a nice ass for a white girl!”]: showing you our asses while having fun in duality versus those who would pimp us having divorced themselves from such things! The Judas is always lonesome.

So did we GNC cuties mock such unironic weirdos while weird attracts weird, Cuwu and I having fun/acting bad while looking good[6]; i.e., as something to pass along for others to learn from: to make love like you make rebellion, babes—wildly [Cuwu needing lots of “Scooby snacks,” making a meal out of a dog bone]! They were always high, but able to negotiate just fine by navigating their illness with their Marxist-Leninist way of life! I call chicanery!

“That’s no moon; it’s a space station!” Whatever moon-sized horrors the state throws at us, like Jadis did, we revolutionaries can turn back on Aegises of our own: “Turtle power!” The Numinous is dualistic and stacks rebels upon rebels; i.e., our stacked fortresses-in-the-flesh going all the way down/mise-en-abyme! “FIRE EVERYTHING!” [calm yourself, Chaucer]:

[model and photographer, top-right: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard; the other artists and their butts (from top-right, left-to-right, downwards): Sinead, Harmony Corrupted, Angel, Nyx, Ebonnyy, Crow (a different Crow than my Crow), Angel Witch, and Mugiwara]

In short, there has to be something to encapsulate and suggest the enormity of the state and scale of things at stake; i.e., it’s like Braveheart but not fascist/culturally appropriative: “This is our army—to join it, you give homage!” / “I give homage to [Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism]! And if this is your army, why does it go?” / “We didn’t come here to fight for them!”

So fight for yourselves and each other beyond state boundaries and hauntologies; break them, thus capital and its dreadful Realism; i.e., on your stupidly awesome Aegises that—united and strong as a phalanx of cuties can only be [above]—make the witch hunters tuck tail and run! Solidarity and mutual consent are poison to them because they cannot stand for nature as monstrous-feminine set free: “back to the wild frontier” as something they can’t ignore; i.e., during our holistic collective’s Song of Infinity farting in our enemies faces [or fucking while they watch—same difference]! 

I remember the old country
They call the emerald land.
And I remember my home town
Before the wars began.

Now we’re riding on a sea of rage,
The victims you have seen.
You’ll never hear them sing again
The Forty Shades Of Green.

[…] I remember my city streets
Before the soldiers came.
Now armoured cars and barricades
Remind us of our shame.

We are drowning in a sea of blood,
The victims you have seen.
Never more to sing again
The Forty Shades Of Green [source: Genius]. 

The old folk heroes speak to current struggles co-opted and abused by white moderates and other class traitors; re: Clare—the white female protagonist from The Nightingale [2018]—bristling furiously when called “English” by the film’s Aboriginal protagonist: “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]. Fuckin’ oath, sis’! Long live Ireland, and all oppressed peoples united as one against tyranny’s bad actors! Kill ’em with kindness towards each other!

Furthermore, rape is a terror weapon as much as any weaponized disease or monstrous-feminine is; i.e., testifying as we do, through ludo-Gothic BDSM putting “rape” in quotes, makes an indelible but elusive line in the sand—one the enemy cannot cross without outing themselves as Judas colonizers taking Roman pay. “Fear the Reaper” if that reaper is the state! Death and rebirth occupy the same icons; use ’em to your advantage! Mobilize and disrupt the state apparatus [of rape and theft] using what you got and what you make: friendship and love! May yours lay their hatred and structures to waste!

[artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard]

Do such things last, on the cusp of greatness? And can we always afford them to? No, but what does, state or worker? Cuwu and I had a whirlwind romance, and one that only lasted six months in life, but in death, lives on through my work honoring them; i.e., we loved a lifetime’s worth, and made plenty of demonic love on the Aegis that I—ever the dutiful invigilator and chronicler/archivist of our dark xenophilia—can now proudly pass onto you, dear readers; re:

Making fake friends trying to get by.

Nobody knows the feelings are the low and you’re trying to stay high!

Sweet Serenity, I can’t fight when the night

Comes calling me! [Black Absinthe’s “Nobody Knows,” 2024].

The fact remains, any jealous parties can tell me to “touch grass” lest I amount to fuck all; but I’ve already chased the dragon and caught a little fuck-puppy variant by the tail [and have much to show/be grateful for it]: baby’s first rebellion/cream pie [echoes of Always Sunny‘s ambiguous creampie skit from 2015 being one of their best]! And furthermore, any great deed accomplished or position worth having is worth restating during such struggles; i.e., the pain of genuine loss something to recursively process [anyone who doesn’t is a wackjob exploiter who didn’t value what they had [re: Zeuhl abandoning me at pretty much the drop of a fucking hat]. Behind every Athena, then, is a Medusa, every Medusa a rape victim/genocide, every victim a chance to refuse victimization/tokenization while still having fun! So did we, for a time, heal from our own rape! Learn from it, warts and all! Become your own bosses! Tell the usual farmers, “We are not crops to dust and reave, nor peaches to carve up like all the usual territories! We will become unruly and inedible to you, but not each other!”)

In the Gothic tradition, this eulogy is an uphill battle, especially when challenging Capitalism through sex education using animalized language that features our bodies as different from the status quo. To this, witches and totems have much in common, xenophilia-wise, and constitute a common fixture in said education; i.e., both denote a strong bond to nature as alienated from society by Cartesian dualism and its statuesque Nordic model harming anything else.

Furthermore, this ongoing struggle towards liberation from exploitation through “exploitation” can also be seen in the struggles of current-day trans people like Quinnvincible and Price, below. As people who menstruate, their reeducation of the world as straight involves what they’re teaching with: their own gynodiverse vaginas, girl-cock clitorises, body hair and associate art as belonging to them and celebrated by me for those reasons; i.e., as things effected by HRT and transition therapies, which they can teach us about; re: simply by being different and expressing said difference in a sex-positive furry lesson told in self-affirming body language (and whose “fu[r]ry rebellion” we’ll examine more, in Volume Three):

(exhibit 52g2: Model, middle: Quinnvincible, a “breedable” trans boy by themselves responding to HRT/doing puppy play with me; left: Price, pretty, trans femboy. Model and artist, far-right: Quinnvincible and Persephone van der Waard. Feel the magic and the wonder! Come to the Sabbath! Similar to neurodivergence and androdiversity as part of the same [w]hole, gynodiversity demonstrates as much by what diverges from canonical [thus eugenic, Christofascist] beauty standards; e.g., the non-heteronormative amounts of external labia and body hair owned, groomed and exhibited by people like Quinn and Price: a passage to Bang[coc]k [double sex/drug pun] taking the Midnight Express [and its Orientalist, Ayn Rand phase] out of weird canonical nerds’ hands masturbating to their own oppression as largely Red Scare nonsense[7].

Indeed, the presence of either variation can be intersex and congenital, but nowadays becomes increasing post-natal with the inclusion of gender-affirming care as something to dangle, carrot-and-stick, in front of people the state wants to tokenize. Except, trans people are reliant on this care to exist, meaning the transphobic/interphobic witch hunts waged against them manifest in direct attacks against said care; i.e., as something that will radicalize in both directions when growing disenfranchised with Black Excellence or any other token myth.

Witch hunters aren’t just overt reactionaries, then, but self-appointed “normal” people like particle physicist and practicing TERF, Sabine Hossenfelder [re: Essence of Thought’s “Sabine Hossenfelder & Trans Youth, part 1,” 2023]. Indeed, Hossenfelder’s moderacy not only contains fascist talking points [Essence of Thought, “part 2,” 2023] per the American tradition of weaponizing mad science during and after Operation Paperclip; it’s par for the course among well-established scientists in the 21st century [with many of them—like Richard Dawkins or Neal DeGrasse Tyson—being completely unafraid of the conservative grift: something we’ll explore more of in Volume Three when we examine TERFs at length].

[source: “What It’s Like Being Married to Neil deGrasse Tyson,” 2015]

In the Cartesian tradition, these STEM variants of the accommodated intellectual tone-police anyone they associate with the natural world; e.g., treating trans personalities and “furry” culture/dark xenophilia as part of said world to map out and progress through as capital does; re: as something to dominate in the interests of Capitalism and “progress,” during the cryptonymy process furthering abjection. So whereas overt TERF reactionaries deem GNC people/furries as dishonest, fiendishly taking away women’s rights, moderacy takes a more polite stance in the same bad-faith practice; either approach leads to the policing and material harming of queer people during furry panic, denying them the basic necessities of life—e.g., health care as vital towards expressing their gender expression, atypical body acceptance and culture in their own eyes, but also their culture as treating them like gods worthy of worship, love and praise, not self-hatred and shame! Furries, then, are gods to deify in a sex-positive, all-inclusive and universally liberatory disco[ourse]. Settle for nothing less!)

 

Per Medusa, but also loose extensions “of her” during selective and collective punishment, Capitalism abjects the bodies of revolutionary praxis based on old legends designed to control those who are born different inside the colonial binary. For example, vaginas and anuses are canonically demonized as monstrous, but the social-sexual code for doing so with furries (next page) treats the female body as something to shame differently than male bodies. To it, baby steps towards liberation occur according to whatever feet we have to step with as furries!

Queer persons extend this shameful logic as being “incorrect” according to their sexualities—hence genders and relative identities and performances—thus become automatically iconoclastic to heteronormative coding and dogma at large. Their non-standard, often fuzzy bodies instantly become liminal as a result; i.e., monstrous expressions of furious-and-fury transition/xenophilia developing forever towards something different than what is allowed by state pimps. The canonical whore always threatens the virgin, but has needed to sublimate since ancient times towards tokenized forms.

By extension, their anuses, vaginas, penises, excess body hair and unaverage height/weight variation, etc, become condemned wholesale; re: as things to literally dress up. Not only do queer people’s “degenerate” piercings and colored hair ruffle reactionary feathers to no end; the bigots who attack them will dictate what queer people can do with their bodies in performance art and nudist displays—in short, how they can exist as queens of the Communist Reich! It’s shameless tone-policing that less shoves the fur fag back in the closet and more puts her inside-outside the barrier as Radcliffe did: to rile up the Straights and make them pearl-clutch to surrender their wages (and their brains) during the abjection process; e.g., like the weird butler guy from Transylvania 6-5000 (1986):

It’s a dangerous game, because the rapidity of state collapse during crisis will become a “boundaries for me, right?” promise the state can make but not keep for less marginalized groups onto more privileged traitors; e.g., demanding loyalty from white straight women while trying to closet and control them/take away their trashy sex novels. God forbid, right?

To it, these lopsided mandates affect pornographic media; i.e., as highly controlled displays that can’t be expected to facilitate genocide alone, but also class, culture and race solidarity for us telling potential tokens what awaits them, should they take the pimp’s bait! No good comes from that, but we have special treats for good boys, girls and enbies of all walks! Our beauteous orbs!

We do so as GNC whores who communicate through our body language as being the very things the Straights (male or not) have fetishized for centuries; i.e., since Radcliffe’s less bigoted calculated risk devolved into Rowling or Anita Blakes’ more bigoted calculated risk: people pimp through sex, afraid of/fascinated with the whore (a female Brutus, but also Hannibal sacking Rome) and yet, can also learn through such countermeasures; e.g., “Do the rock dance, Animala!” The straights can’t resist when Velma-yet-not-Velma invades their labyrinthine brothels! “Fight fire with fire” before “our lungs fill with the hot winds of death!” (Metallica, 1984): “Rawr! Always agree!” But do we agree? Or are we merely playing you for fools?

(artist: Quinnvincible)

That depends who’s playing! Regardless of whom, straight people are pretty vanilla/freaky in their own ways, and you can’t judge an ally by their cover alone! And yet, it’s easy enough during oppositional cryptonymy to expose frauds, too! For example, simply having a queer person rest their hands on or around their own anus or vagina (above) provokes a patriarchal, knee-jerk response from white moderate women as much as men. “Ah, ah, ah! That’s close enough!” these reactionaries will snap—as if touching and playing with or slapping the vulva equals literally opening the hole (which is both expected and condemned if not done “correctly”). The precursor to doing so becomes forbidden, let alone the act itself as tied to sexual education infused with animal-demonic language/xenophilia! Catwomen of the Moon, transing your kids and turning your women into whores! Why be a whore when you can pimp others, instead?

Such is the usual Faustian bargain offered to straight white women (and token offshoots). The broader canonical idea, then—however insane its mirror syndrome comes across (which is quite insane)—nevertheless can also be taught by dead dogma in furry canon; i.e., werewolf movies prescribing not just silver bullets to the heart, but sexual villainy being a thing that the Straights can wear in bad faith when dealing death out to us fags: to dress up as their idea of the fur fag to then go and rape their usual victims (their wives and girlfriends, prospective or not)! Rape isn’t just of the flesh, but the mind—with said rapists then pinning their own crimes onto more marginalized groups that force Single White Female to make Sophie’s Choice with extreme prejudice!

From a poetic standpoint, the “prison sex” taking place serves a further silencing role; i.e., doing it socially-materially discourages workers from playing with their own bodies, thus prohibiting creative success during oppositional praxis; re: illustrating informed/mutual consent, descriptive sexuality and cultural appreciation: as happening either in personal artwork or through collaborations with other artists who draw the model(s) how they are/want to be seen. Instead, any menticided workers become gargoyle pimps; i.e., punching down at those they can abuse concentrically in the same awful Man Box’s pecking order!

As something to silence, the pedagogy of the oppressed extends to the body itself, separated from the mind according labor at large “put to sleep” regarding the natural world: the whole pussy (vulva, labia, clitoris and vagina) or penis (and all its medical terms), anus, body and person/person’s identity collectively becoming a pathway to forbidden knowledge that is normally restricted to status-quo men dominating nature; i.e., who enjoy and own their wives, the latter toiling at the husband’s pleasure (while said husbands superstitiously reject anything normally coming out of the pussy other than one’s own spent semen; e.g., slime, blood, dead babies, living babies, afterbirth, yeast infections, etc). But this “shit rolls downhill” approach likewise leads straight women (white or non-white) to tokenize, and intersections of female/(monstrous-)feminine groups/whores to tokenize; i.e., to diminishing amounts among increasingly marginalized groups (some of my fiercest critics aren’t TERFs, but trans people [male or female] having sold out/taken the bait from state peddlers, usually TERFs).

We’ll return to the idea of creative successes in Volume Three; i.e., when we explore proletarian praxis at length. For now, just remember that proletarian praxis aims for collective intersectional solidarity against worker exploitation through betrayal-proof forms of nonetheless token-discouraged sex-gender education. By resisting Patriarchal Capitalism during ludo-Gothic furry BDSM, proponents of sex positive education about monsters and sex (furries or not) subsequently (re)present the human body and its genitals, genders and gender roles in iconoclastic, darkly xenophilic ways; i.e., to become something that is heavily controlled in canonical art beyond pornography and extending into myths that affect media (and consumers of media) at large: to duel over alien mates during mirror syndrome extending the policing of sex work to virgin/whore syndrome as, itself, tokenized, thus having had to subsist and bargain with bad dogs we don’t want to breed with! In doing so, we come to know what other animals generally don’t have: shame, but also self-respect and awareness towards said animals (and children) teaching us to loosen up when interacting with other humans; i.e., the former as beings to protect from the usual abusers of us all, doing so using what we human animals have to distract said tyrants with! Shame, sin and vice are taught, as is Pavlovian submission!

(artist: Vince_AI)

In particular, the female/feminized orifices—e.g., the vaginas of any AFAB person treated unironically like a monstrous whore/bitch (above), or the anuses of queer AMAB persons similarly emasculated by any abuser—become collectively demonized, shamed and shunned as “eyes” of confusion, chaos, and darkness. Anthro- and bio-diverse as a matter of campy religion and Paganism—thus a thoroughly non-Christian practice at being “Satanic,” queer and so on—furries become hauntologically associated with abject demons and the undead as vengeful whores of nature needing to be collared, but also skinned and worn like trophies; i.e., tied to bodies, witches, dark queens and monster mothers, which—once spotted by prospecting opportunists—are then hunted by those unscrupulous agents for animalistic coats of fur inside perceived lands where such goods can be xenophobically and xoophilicly harvested, guilt-free!

(artists: Eva Android and SmallBallz)

For straight (white) women, it’s admittedly more distant because they tokenized sooner than other groups; for those other groups, it’s closer to “Tuesday” than not, and speaks to token betrayals having wanted to assimilate based on the harvesting of magic racoons (or some such ghost of the counterfeit, racoons being from Dario Argento’s 2006 Masters of Horror episode, “Pelts,” below): nature’s gratuitous and indiscriminate revenge being a ping-pong ball of doom that, true to form, doesn’t have a singular interpretation!

The monkey’s paw shrivels as the last wish is spoken. The last couple didn’t go so well. Still, you’re confident that asking for a mainstream piece of media that explores some of the historically noted eroticism of fur fashion is a simple wish. What could go wrong? The Pelts Blu-ray smacks you in the face.

This is the tale of what happens when you make a coat out of magic raccoons. (Good story hook, I would have gone in a different direction.) Things get messy, particularly with renowned Giallo director Dario Argento at the helm. There is, of course, a decent amount of commentary around this film being “anti-fur,” but big daddy Dario doesn’t care:

“No, there is no message. I am not with the fur or anti-fur people. I describe the reality – something happens to people. People are all disgusting. There is something that is very black and very pale about pelts” (source: Blake’s “Time to Scream Your Lungs Out – A Brief Interview with Dario Argento,” 2007).

So, plot-wise, the coat does not show up until the last act, about 45 minutes in. That is after the magical pelts have left some bodies in their wake. The one responsible for this is Jake Feldman. Meat Loaf plays him, and I assume he got this role thanks to his tour-de-force performance in To Catch a Yeti. […] He’s got the hots for local stripper Shanna and thinks the only he can get into her pants is with the coat. This is the most realistic part of the entire film.

Shanna puts on the coat in a sequence that calls back to many a shot from cinema history. In this case, you’re supposed to assume her sensual response to the coat is due to magic, pissed-off raccoon spirits. Yet this extract scene exists in many movies with no supernatural influence. Jake’s plan works, and the most horrific part of this horror movie plays out: a love scene with Meat Loaf. […] Suffice it to say; the pissed-off magic raccoons get their vengeance, which involves a lot of red food coloring and corn syrup (source: glamorinfurs’ “Furs on TV – Pelts,” 2022).

As the above author’s snarky editorial shows, it’s easy for the rape-and-death theatre memento mori to devolve into gratuitous shock to poke fun at, mid-performance and -consumerism (which Argento serves up, and not for the first time); i.e., in ways that admittedly miss out on Lewis’ genderqueer cryptonymy and fakery concealing profound critical bite. But allegory can still do a fair amount of the legwork the original author didn’t care about; i.e., a show from nearly two decades past cheerfully romances the neo-noir as caught between an aging “Goth rock” stalwart (“Meat Loaf again?”) and a non-white working girl’s assimilation opera speaking out as the spaghetti Western has done since Kurosawa and Leone: turning everyone’s flaws inside out (up in our guts)! Admittedly the whore in the show has less power than Meat Loaf does, but nonetheless speaks/ties to a larger process of exploitation; i.e., one that sees her making callous sacrifices insofar as she doesn’t lose sleep over the dead racoons, either (the latter slayed rather ignominiously by John Saxon, of Enter the Dragon [1973] fame). Business-as-usual bites her in the ass!

Weaponized guilt, fatal nostalgia and ignominious death are the Gothic name-of-the-game, and everyone’s kind of fucked/guilty here except the racoons’ indiscriminate spirit of revenge cynically making everyone basically commit suicide: a mass hysteria narrative, tilting less at windmills and more smol, silver furry gods of death (coats of money that turn people into the same products, below)! Rather than call it Lacan’s Real or something equally stupid for not being Marxist, I’ll just say that the dialectical-material critique well-and-truly spreads the blame around; i.e., “This is what Capitalism does to your face!” basically turning the trap on the trapper! In keeping with Meat Loaf, its excessive gore is about as subtle and cool as a rock opera historically tends to be; i.e., while singing about rape and death as much as dark desire (with Argento rubbing everyone’s faces in it, above)! It’s dumb, fun and problematic when done wrong! So is dark xenophilia a trap to tip-toe!

More to the point of such mayhem from a pro-nature standpoint, then, the canonical rhetoric of exploitation in such fetishize-alienize stories replaces good education with fear and dogma regarding the protection of women and children; i.e., from a vague and nebulous animalistic threat tied to animal exploitation since the French and Indian War’s romanticizing of the fur trapper industry in more modern hauntings of the medium outside of anything Masters of Horror dared: “groomers.” Bourgeois propaganda keeps the workers scared stupid about their own bodies, sexualities and genders, but also of furries and other nature-themed monsters, whose own iconoclastic extracurricular praxis challenges the curriculum of state propaganda—by dancing on their graves before they die (a death curse, Pagan-style, but glamourous in its sidhe charms)!

As something to reclaim through transgressive camp, such iconoclasms invert fears of the hunter and hunted during exchanges like Argento’s; i.e., the hunters chase what they hate as different from what canon allows. Thus the hunted, though not always, can be taught to hate their own bodies, genders and identifies for being different, hence “responsible” for the violence inflicted upon them by the state as extending to nature being something to attack (as the sex worker in “Pelts” does; re: manufactured apathy when trying to save her own skin).

To encourage cooperation from some women or tokenized groups, then, the Patriarchy will divide and conquer labor and nature by punishing GNC people/furries more than cis-het women; i.e., by calling them (usually male or at least male-presenting trans, intersex or enby workers) “groomers,” and all while making straight women and children more vulnerable to actual sex pests who pimp such xenophilia in bad faith (which tend to be white, cis-het men, especially religious authority figures, coaches and cops, who use various degrees and styles of conversion therapy to groom future victims with; i.e., false shepherds; e.g., Genetically Modified Skeptic’s “How Conservative Christianity ‘Groomed’ Us,” 2023).

Under such orchestrated division dividing natures against natures to police themselves (thus prepare different sides for the same brothel/abattoir), the death of playful, actually-fun-and-informative monster language is a quick and reliable result, but also a slow, painful rape of the mind and one’s dignity. Common casualties not only include words like “breedable” that seek to reclaim workers’ reproductive rights, bodies and expressions of themselves (and their rape trauma) through anthropomorphic art; they also include people from areas of the world who are more regulated in the present space and time, regardless of where they call home); e.g., Arab-presenting (or confused for) women, regardless if said women are Muslim or even Arab (e.g., Iranians commonly being mistaken for Iraqis by ignorant hateful Americans during the War on Terror): Orientalism is xenophobia and xenophilia as something to camp out of canonical forms chattelizing exotic prey!

(exhibit 53a: Artist: Nishakatani. Their exhibit of sexy rebellion shows how women in ultraconservative countries—or people forced to identify as women, in these places—often go to other countries as foreign exchange students, then find ways of escaping the literal revenge killings waiting for them back at home. Such brutality is not performed by extremist terrorists, but by literal members of their own families upholding the values of an ecclesiastical state emboldened by neoliberal Capitalism [exploiting war in the Middle East, framing the genocides—when they actually choose to opportunistically acknowledge them—as “sad,” but the “natural” order of things to police, nonetheless]. In the West, a Gothic princess gains control inside larger castles whose impolite society encases whatever paltry dynasties have been promised to her as dreams for her to make real; i.e., under half-real circumstances, as much happening through play helping her relax and focus on her larger task at hand—something transplants quickly learn to work with through the self-same paradoxes; re: of the whore and of rape reclaiming terror to give her power back!

There’s no shame, then, in weaponizing vanity and self-interest to motivate a collective well-being that former abusers/victims are walking away from [re: Omelas, but also “Amazing Grace”: “I was blind but now I see!” being a former slaver’s subsequent confession, remorse and celebration]. Except, time waits for no one, and genocides are like a ticking FOMO clock; i.e., those under genocide as a matter of staged extermination chattelizing vermin, which suddenly cannot afford to wait on the time of American moderates/tokens leaving Capitalist Realism and its denials [the final stage of genocide, below] behind, let alone neoconservatives and dyed-in-the-wool war hawks and white moderate “foxes” facilitating genocide at home and abroad;

[source: Holocaust Memorial Day Trust]

re: because “animals embody the canonical language of power and resistance as something to camp through demonic and undead forms,” targets of genocide—as a selectively punitive and globalized ordeal—must solidarize while reclaiming their bodies, genders, emotions and labor now-and-from tokenized traitors; i.e., the latter poisoning the well and not just as witch cops, but furry cops. We must stand against them as whore rebels fighting whore cops; i.e., doing so to exact the whore of nature’s stewardship-as-revenge: iconoclastic expressions of critical power through furry-made or at least -themed and -adjacent sex-positive dark xenophilia that are often discrete, furtive and careful [a kind of “flashing” we’ll return to in Volume Three, Chapter Five]: the ungroomed pussy hair contrasted with their carefully maintained clothed appearances, a counterterrorist resisting honor killings in state-controlled territories [e.g., Saudi Arabia] abusing women for an infidel’s Western paradigm. Money talks and sex sells, a pimp a pimp anywhere in the world!)

As Gothic Communists, then, our educational goal is social-sexual—using sex education to liberate all workers in reclaimed furry monstrous-monstrous expressions of nature as something that Capitalism historically-materially exploits to the hilt; i.e., a Grover’s Mill/Miller’s Grove War-of-the-Worlds-scale hauntology that articulates what’s happening when the fascists go mask-off! So must we, to some extent, make ourselves paradoxically known during the cryptonymy process’ ludo-Gothic BDSM: when the Nazi werewolves come out to play and howl xenophobically at the moon, we must howl back xenophillically to ironically challenge their lunacy with our own!

So do we fur fags get down-and-dirty for the Cause—not to sleep with Nazis during brothel-espionage Amazonomachia, but fuck with them from afar behind our usual buffers: “You want some of this cake?” TA-DAAA! The cake is a lie (this, in BDSM circles, is called being a brat; i.e., the usual victims of “rape” taunting the usual “ravishers” by putting both in quotes)!

 (artist, left: Persephone van der Waard; right: Harry Partridge)

To that—and speaking of cakes as things to make however we want—the werewolf is classically a shapeshifter who doesn’t need the moon to change (an astrology allegory tied to capital that demonizes the astral bodies and Pagan solstices; e.g., Halloween, but also Easter under a Protestant ethic pimping witches by turning them into cops and keeping the werewolf costume as much as the witch).

The fact remains, whatever the form a furry (or their cake) takes, our pedagogies of the oppressed aim to encourage emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness “taking the cake” back; re: during dark xenophilic as something to ironically express through our bodies not just as undead or demonic, but animalized in poetically tasty ways that are inherently GNC and animalistic (which Cartesian thought abjures; i.e., it “tames” nature by dimorphizing it, which always promotes [and disguises] a degree of colonial violence): “She’s got a whole bakery back there!” Of stolen baked goods we make ourselves, so do we whores rob the pimp blind (some people like to watch others eat, but watching’s no fun if you want to “eat” the “cake”): cake cryptonymy! Huge cake ahead, an iceberg sitting on your cake/sinking your battleship! Ok, I’ll stop!

(exhibit 53b1: Comments about Steven Segal running weird aside, Under Siege [1989] offers a surprisingly frank look at heteronormativity “at sea” with its own famous [fake] cake scene; i.e., “straightwashing” the sailor’s matelotage of yore with Erika Eleniak—a 1989 Playboy bunny and ’80s scream queen doing a strip tease for a now-dead admiral acting as his stowaway whore: Taylor Jordan. Except, our smuggled-in Gothic heroine/de facto big-titty Goth GF doesn’t realize her audience is dead because she’s on autopilot; i.e., doing the one-glove Michael Jackson thing less in mil spec fetish gear and more in actually-commandeered officer’s gear intended for the aged head of the ship to watch being profaned: fucking the ship in a Sapphic xenophilia. “Like, Zoiks, Scoob! I think I took one-too-many Scooby snacks!”

It’s the usual chastity narrative teasing the audience, but speaks to how “Taylor” felt “seasick” for the drugs; i.e., as code for her not wanting to do the job [airsick, too, from the helicopter]. If memory serves, the makers of the film played into Eleniak’s real-life porn giving a meta commentary on how showbiz isn’t always glamorous; re: the show must go on! Except, the cake isn’t real, her role is acted/fake, and the ship has been hijacked by pirates that our “Prince Hamlet” must break the titular siege of and get the girl [and her pillow princess’ mammoth mommy milkers] by the end! How Gothic!

Also Gothic is how such things don’t always reflect what the actresses are commenting on; i.e., from Jane Austen’s Catherine Moorland to Eleniak, herself, having a ball of it:

GJG: Did being part of such a big movie bring lots of offers for future films? 

EE: I was very fortunate in that my Mom was the complete opposite of what a typical “stage mother” is. She made sure that I had a normal childhood and stayed in school. I had worked a couple of jobs a year on average but as far as getting roles based on E.T: there were none that I am aware of.

GJG: I loved your role as Jordan Tate in Under Siege. Was there a reason why you didn’t appear in the sequel?

EE: Under Siege was a great film and a fantastic project to be a part of. The role of Jordan Tate was pure FUN to play. I am often asked why I was not cast in the sequel. From what I understand, they wanted to make a completely different theme and therefore a new cast.

 

GJG: What was it like working with Tommy Lee Jones in that movie?

EE: Working with Tommy Lee Jones was an honor for me. He is one of my favorite actors of all time. Watching him work with Gary Busey was also inspiring. They wrote, re-wrote, created, improvised. It was amazing to watch (source: goJimmygo’s “A Conversation With Erika Eleniak,” 2012).

(artist: Erika Eleniak)

In other words, Eleniak was something of a mystery to the boys and their world, and they to hers during the usual manufactured divisions and scarcities extending to and offstage! But also, Eleniak was a smoke-show actress on the big screen, little screen, and softcore porno mag centerfold [above] that translated on and offstage to a Gothic meta commentary about “danger” as therapeutic for those lucky and unlucky through accident of birth!

Consider Eleniak’s starlet-style landing strip but also the asymmetrical power divisions and exchange markets concerning sex trafficking fears and places for such tortures, Radcliffe onwards. Yes, Eleniak’s Taylor is a sexual reward for the underserving hero—with Segal being a famous sex pest known for abusing women and aggrandizing himself—but still has fun/the ability to covey different xenophilic feelings, during the photoplay’s usual T&A swashbuckling: in ways Eleniak found fun by making fun; i.e., in a mostly for-the-boys action romp mistrustful of women/their furry parts, but especially catching feelings for them as heartless sea monsters [as seaman historically treated women, mermaids or not]. That’s her whore’s revenge! Any port in a storm, boys?)

All kidding aside, furries, Communism and Gothic morphology/adventure stories and porn are not separate ideas during dark xenophilia; i.e., any more than “cake” and “death” are during neo-medieval camp (eat your heart out, Tamora, Queen of the Goths). Such things go hand-in-hand to stress the liminality of a given performance’s biological, mechanical and/or instinctual elements: towards ourselves, celebrated for a closeness to natural as “primal.” They become their own kind of nostalgia to regress xenophillically to, then, if only for a small window of play and time in safe “danger” spaces; i.e., the same ones that all kinks use, hard or not, during ludo-Gothic BDSM, and ones promoted by the aesthetic of the whore cosmetic as commonly dressed in black velvet leather or furs; re: as “alien” thus signifying various things said whores will do that a husband’s Madonna won’t: during virgin/whore syndrome wounding their pride in our capable hands! “Shiver me timbers!” TIMBERS SHIVERED!

(exhibit 53b2: The Rotten Tomato’s synopsis for Dennis’ Hopper’s 1994 Chasers reads, “Military men Rock Reilly (Tom Berenger) and Eddie Devane (William McNamara) are tasked with taking a prisoner, blonde bombshell Toni Johnson (Erika Eleniak), on what becomes an unforgettable road trip. Toni, an enlistee who’s in trouble for deserting her unit, soon proves that she’s craftier than most inmates. She tries to escape via a restroom, a theme-park ride and a convertible. But, when Rock and Eddie find they’re impressed by Toni’s pluck, the nature of their task changes.” It’s reads like trash, and it is trash, but Eleniak’s always having fun with it, because luck aside, she was good at her job in ways sex workers need to be: reading the room, onstage and off, but also between those things whiling camping canon xenophilia as whore getting lucky while not getting raped during rape play! “She is Lady Luck!” Tit for tat! The whore—whether fucking or not—navigations the performance one way or another!

Whatever socio-material class, culture and race privilege/oppression exist offstage, they bleed onstage, too; i.e., the cryptonymic paradox of power lurks on the surface of the Aegis bouncing back and forth like a drum; re: as a hauntological space of concealment that shows and hides simultaneously through controlled play! Through said play’s improved, sex-positive evolution, the vulnerable princess trope has power unto itself; i.e., before it evolves or changes into a queen, if ever that happens! The point is, it doesn’t need to, provided sex positivity occurs, hence Gothic-Communist development, mid-synthesis; i.e., as socio-material context during ludo-Gothic BDSM. It’s haunted by slumming and rape in a danger disco, but the princess is free to be “ravished” and transform/transport us through her slutty exchanges, revenge and xenophilic revelations: research, release, rescue, rape and relationship swirling wonderfully on the same stained-glass episodic’s white-hot plasma; re: the whore, policed, pimps the ghost of abuse!

Furthermore, each time we return to knead its potential, the bread basket gives up more and more yummy treats: with a special friend we cannot fuck or be with, in person, yet something profoundly made-to-order as ace and erotic, happy to please! We raid the castle and the traveling fortress/pirate ship in small boards us; i.e., the longer humans have had access to writing and games, the more these and their camp have become increasingly haunted by ghosts inside-outside themselves; re: the usual mise-en-abyme hyphenations of sex and force, shelter and exposure, unfolding per the dialectic of the alien!

As such, humans are ontologically messy and sit, one and all, hermeneutically in between language as oral/written, but also played out between and on recursive and reflective stages’ usual cryptonymies’ playtime and recess/aftercare: to regress magically towards a childlike theatricality’s special ability to exchange that, unto itself, has been forgotten, and sits between what is being exchanged while the rememory process welcomes an adult-child return to innocence after experience shapes and evokes said nostalgia into a terrifying boomerang double threatening boom and bust.

Seemingly at odds, both forms of power historically-materially interrogate and dialectically-materially negotiate with themselves and the audience looking in, if any—meaning simultaneously and on the stormy seas of spectacular battle and delicious hoax; i.e., sex in a nutshell something to assign further significance towards and in the usual playfulness embracing a silly-serious cryptomimetic echo! All our yesterdays, summoned to our fresh service, making Marx gayer with each foray into the wild frontier’s unknown discoveries? Medusa’s avatar was a dummy-thicc nerd with glasses, sweater kittens and a fat ass? FULL BROADSIDE! DISCHARGE AND SPREAD THE MUNITIONS ALL OVER HER PROW! SHE’S OURS FOR THE TAKING! RAMMING SPEED!

[artist: Harmony Corrupted]

Fun is often a nice surprise, but also the entire point; i.e., it’s how humans learn and pass information along. However unintended a given side effect is—and regardless of what [a]sexual elements we get out of it when fetishizing class war in the shadow of state exploitation and war for profit that we’re camping—that’s the magic of roleplay and ludo-Gothic BDSM! To give our actions and roles power as an identity formation and exchange network embodied between us, meaning one we can exchange through the usual performative language of cyclical and monomythic, gyn-ecological conquest as something to perform—not to further abjection, but reverse it to have the whore’s revenge; re: mid-ravishing whatever value and vice we assign to whatever we want, minus actual harm as we make a pass at you; i.e., a military drill in disguise, but also fun and games; e.g., the Blue Gemstone of Star Sapphire Power wedged between Harmony’s fat cheeks and deep into her tight butthole: “This is the work of an enemy Stand!”

[artist: Harmony Corrupted]

enjoyment of “rape” doesn’t endorse rape, function determined as usual by function, regardless of aesthetic; i.e., lost in your necropolis, neither fully dead nor alive while aping the looting of Rome [re: Jameson’s class nightmare of the Gothic given conscious utility]! A grapeshot ensemble, littering the halls with fresh dead, and haunting the fall of the princess with the spirit of a little rebel faking her own death [and hinting at the systemic deaths of the bourgeoisie]! Roast her squishy, marshmallow, crackerjack[-in-a-box] ass; get a cereal decoder ring! CASTLE RAIDED!)

Capital busies pimps; pimps or not, workers are so busy chasing whores/feeling sorry for them, they forget we can handle ourselves to some extent. In any event, such syndromes need to be negotiated and subverted through ourselves and our work having a humorous side; i.e., through social interactions that speak a social species that is both alienized and made fetish by the state, but also designing returns to more vivid and intense forms of dark xenophilic poetic expression. These can be down-and-dirty “breeder” scenarios/piece-of-ass schtick, but just as often, they’re quite tender and intimate; i.e., in ways whose immediate animality is uncanny in—for the uninitiated—a surprisingly nurturing and welcome fursona nevertheless closer to life and death as some than your average worker is: a piece of cake/princess of the twilight realms dodging state guillotines!

(artist: Vana)

This “good play” and pedagogy of the oppressed can involve many different teaching methods through art—to insert things into you not just as drugs to imbibe, but food to eat, Alice-in-Wonderland-style; i.e., literal objects in your body as a form of dark xenophilic art; e.g., dildos as material extensions of the body but also carnal appendages like limbs, digits or unusual extensions into forbidden holes (evoking Tool’s “Stinkfist”) and liminal expressions of these things: the biomechanical expression of the human form, but also the decolonization of its bodily functions, biology and gender roles away from Cartesian dualism and heteronormative canon!

In this sense, the cake is still cake, but is and isn’t what the state bakes it to be; i.e., liminal expressions of the human body through erotic Gothic art represents cultural fears and fascinations with taboo things like nature; re: that we’ve since become divided from in the modern capitalist world: the animal side as something that calls to us and promotes healthy (ex)change and openings of the mind as closed by capital settler-colonial police-the-furry-slut ghetto-brothel pogroms!

To it, I want to spend the rest of part one setting up/exploring the premise of interactive education generating dark empathy/nature and the whore’s xenophilic revenge; i.e., as communicated/prepared between artist/muse creatives (thirteen pages, plus some extra exhibits), and then spent part two unpacking educating dark xenophilia in full: giving it back to the next generation, from children onwards!

Muses, then, can teach the artist about all sorts of things. Take anal, for example; i.e., I was scared of anal for many years, the anus being an abject site of disgust for me going in and something I recognized as a site of rape and coerced entry from unwanted male forces; e.g., humiliating sodomy. In other words, I hated the thought of invading it based on its reputation as a site for coercive, unironic tortures historically committed by men, usually against women but also feminized subjects within rape culture more broadly (which I experienced with Jadis abusing me—not during the sex, itself, but from the financial abuse attached to it).

Personally I learned to stop worrying and like anal sex more by experimenting with various de facto educators—monstrous-feminine owners of anuses who taught me that anal as an act of giving and receiving can be pretty fun, once ventured; i.e., it can be something you never try—or eventually try but never like—and that’s ok! Same goes with furries, too! The idea is to figuratively and literally play with yourself and others, learning from these xenophilic experiences and passing that information along—not just with our literal bodies, but “Satanic” forms that, under the status quo, have become chattelized and demonized extensions of neoliberal/fascist fear and dogma; e.g., demonized forms of Paganistic, thus notably pre-Christian religions or ways of life as being closer to nature: as “untame,” wild and dark, thus whore-like in ways that nuclear proponents treat with hostility as a matter of thinking chattel/slaves!

(artist: Vince_AI)

However aberrant canon frames furries, the medicinal idea of sex-positive monster-fucking and natural magics can break these modernized myths; i.e., by offering proletarian forms of sex/gender education and good play based on personal experiences defined by a bond with nature as something to identify with through shared oppression; e.g., catharsis, euphoria and lived trauma, etc, tied to furry panic. Singular anecdotes remain vital because they help form a larger web whose interlinked connections’ empathy through xenophilia can not only be felt and expressed in liminal, surreal forms, but sensed dualistically among peoples whose minds are still fully or partially divided: a Gothic, animalized surrealism evoked famously by the likes of Giger and Beksiński over decades, but whose hellish and oft-erotic “pathways” can be taken during xenophilia as artistically embodied by new artists in similar surreal-yet-refreshing ways.

This includes living latex (e.g., below, but also exhibit 60e1), but also furries begetting revolutionarily cryptonymic ideas of dark radical (ex)change: to witness among our friends (e.g., Angel, exhibit 54) and associates various dark boundaries and paradoxes to install and act out; re: chasing dark buddies down while haunted by colonial trauma (the skinned animal worn as a suit [often synthetically made] to reclaim nature with/from capital, below); i.e., as we “hug the alien” in multiplicity and liminal anisotropic duality! The suit isn’t strictly a prophylactic, then, but dark aphrodisiac and sensory dampener dispensing with the pleasantries! She squirts more than a grapefruit! Consent, play and fun are hot! So is provocation!

(artist: Zero Brain Pow)

Yet, corporations and other bourgeois forces will strive not just to impeach these educators’ infernal gravity and magnetism, but rob their animalistic teaching methods of any critical power and iconoclastic potential to advertise with. To this, the nature of rebellious furries is communal in ways that don’t stress profit above the community—an anti-capitalist trading of goods and bartering that corporations don’t endorse or practice themselves; i.e., empowering artists, but also donating generously to philanthropic causes while using their xenophilic fursonas as educator personalities developed between smaller collaborations dedicated to a larger cause (above and below):

(exhibit 54: Model and artist: Angel and Persephone van der Waard’s “Transformation, Collage: A Mermaid’s Exhibit” [2023]. My first collage. Most of these photos are “dark matter photos”—”dark matter of the visual world” [Thomas Keenan’s “What is a Document?” 2014] being a term-of-phrase that Zeuhl introduced me to, referring to the colossal number of digital images [millions upon millions, I’d wager] taken every day online that no one will ever see because the taker keeps them in an archive that is private and/or otherwise inaccessible through the sheer volume of material. This shoot includes photos taken that the model chose for the 45 poses I paid them for—45 poses with multiple shots per pose and “the good ones” being cherry-picked and sent to me.

I, in turn, took the ones I liked best and put them into a collage, but one of which I later planned to select from to illustrate. However, in terms of showcasing the model’s body in art, these images are anathema according to the Symbolic Order/mythic structure endorsed through Capitalism; i.e., bodies with external labia and excessive body hair having cryptonymically become darkness invisible because their owners are discouraged from showing themselves—shamed, prohibited, or presented coercively as sex monsters through a punitive-prescriptive production model built on/around preferential mistreatment: good girls may be seen but not heard; bad girls get punished with image death, job death, social death or actual death in passive and proactive ways save when tokenizing as whores the state can pimp. The relationship Angel and I had changes that by treating and showing them as simultaneously human-yet-monstrous; i.e., through the context of mutual consent/negotiation [a prime factor of ludo-Gothic BDSM, thus Gothic Communism]!)

For example, aside from Zero Brain Pow and her compatriot, the above collage was taken from a larger shoot between Angel and myself. It was taken by them (and a friend of theirs holding the camera) to be part of this book, used inside it with their permission. Angel became familiar with my work by responding to a Reddit ad where I was looking for models to draw in a fantasy style (source: Chozogirl86’s “[for hire] looking for pin-up models to collab in fantasy art projects. Art worth $80+ in exchange for modeling services!” on r/starvingartrists, October 29th, 2022). They chose a mermaid and we eventually prepared for the shoot. I think it was $120 for 45 photos (roughly $2.5 per photo)? Thereabouts!

[model and artist, top-left: Angel and Persephone van der Waard; artist, top-middle and bottom-right: Hirohiko Araki]

Eventually I may draw Angel as a mermaid, like in exhibit 54; i.e., for funsies outside of our agreement. Per our agreement, though, I paid for the photos, and used them to draw Angel as a vampire; re: from Volume Zero (exhibit 1a1a1h5, left), the exhibit thereof actually based on Dio from Jo-Jo because Angel loves that show. And yet, the deeper context behind our collaboration embodies the continuum of xenophilic praxis surrounding Gothic Communism; i.e., as dark xenophilia stretching cryptomimetically across space and time, onstage and off, backwards and forwards. as something to communicate prior to me actually drawing anything—merely it as assembled with nuts and bolts that have nevertheless become their own art exhibit (unintentionally but very much in the spirit of this book): a historical-material transaction between two parties inspired by other parties to meet different xenophilic goals of universal liberation chased by all.

In turn, these collectively-if-stochastically operate as part of a larger s mode of nature-themed whorish apologia; i.e., for Angel to learn about themselves by expressing and showing off who they’re becoming as something to teach me (and teaching me about Jo-Jo but also shunga media), and for me to teach and convey my ideas to them and to the world we’re both adding towards: on the same umbral/umbilical lattice, passing dark xenophilia along in all directions!

And furthermore, in doing so, everything goes into the same sex-educational pot—each educator getting something useful and enriching out of a mutually beneficial, anisotropic lesson plan: playing with furry poetics in “ancient” forms of poetry that deal—like Walpole did before us—in and with fairly quotidian struggles trafficking magical qualities of GNC existence, expression, exchange and ultimately transformation being uniformly “dark.” That struggle means different things for both of us, but contributes towards a larger goal that, like Communism and helping liberate nature from capital, is forever ongoing in holistic and populous ways that intersect and diverge; e.g., we’ve both changed a ton since making our mutual deal with the Devil, as have any of the artists featured in this book!

(artist: Angel)

The lesson isn’t just “for us,” then; it’s for the world—to teach people through these dark xenophilic connections and emphera to be more emotionally intelligent and aware about nature and the Gothic, thus enriching the lives of workers by making them less stupid; i.e., in a deprivatized sense, which ludo-Gothic BDSM helps accomplish through furries, among other monsters (with Angel again liking vampires; re: Jo-Jo). As such, doing so is a process of continual improvement in opposition to state abuse stupefying its labor force for profit: an abject “pill” to consume in a variety of ways—not in privately owned factories, but made between two (or more) workers relying on the awesome power of the body and mind reunited with each other and nature through mutual consent as an artistic movement: illustrated as labor action by turning into magical animals symbolic of profound transformation in Western culture since Ovid!

To help workers get what they want—sex, companionship, improved material conditions, legislative rights, shelter and so on—they must be taught to fight back by seeing themselves as human-yet-chattelized in ways they can reclaim; i.e., to relate to one another as animalize beings in drug-like poetics cultivated to defend the vulnerable from legitimate xoophilic threats. This happens by not being creepy weirdos who have no earthly idea how to talk to women (and other mates); i.e., those beings forced to identify as women, non-binary people, asexual people, and other marginalized groups (even non-human pets) who are often sexualized against their will in dehumanizing modes of chattel stripped of their reverse-abject magic.

In short, the entire social process must be rehumanized, including the magical language of nature and its non-human animal demons; re: as something to reclaim from capital’s neoliberal illusions; i.e., the spell of a secular world that nevertheless remains haunted by Puritanical dogma and Cartesian domination verminizing the weak (again, human or not) to turn a buck behind Capitalist Realism. Small wonder we whores seek revenge (the monstrous-feminine “born dead” in different ways, depending on who you’re talking about/dealing with): for ourselves as small invulnerable parties raped, like any animal, “on the slab.”

Keeping with acid Communism and trauma, I’m largely referring to the red pill as stolen from The Matrix directors (modern-day Mercutios, going to Queen Maeb); i.e., the left from them done by Manosphere pigs who proudly wear their sexism and ignorance on their sleeves like a badge of honor (fascists love playing dumb to please master). Except, bigotries tend to overlap with second-hand abuse, and said sexism of direct abusers extends to so-called “normal folk”; i.e., who also have a lot to learn about people (and other animals) outside their normal range of experience/abjection (and who look the other way when hate crimes against GNC  persons happen, or any minority under the sun).

Keeping with the pill analogy as a dark xenophilic acid-Communist metaphor/refrain, I liken the effects of Gothic Communism’s pedagogy through ludo-Gothic BDSM as a social-sexual “drug” that has wide-reaching linguo-material effects. “Taken,” said drug displays a startlingly vivid portrayal of neuroplasticity on the canvas—one’s body and gender but also symbols and themes of these interwoven and roiling-writhing across society like a menacing snake ball. You can literally watch people’s views and art change magically before your very eyes (with danger and adrenaline making for a powerful aphrodisiac during calculated risk, but also general societal inspiration, too): if we can change into the dark GNC furries/furry-adjacent people we turned into, then maybe others can, thus the world! It beats the xenophobic abattoir we currently subsist inside!

Alas, sexuality and gender—even when divorced from monstrous-feminine animal themes, stigma and language as part of a sex-educational exhibit—often are banned even when attempting to normalize diversity with kid-friendly animal mascots; i.e., in books written (and drawn) for children; e.g., It’s Perfectly Normal attempting to normalize sex and learning about it through anthropomorphism, versus steeping such things in ignorance to the detrimental of all—with powerful men becoming inadequate save when they’re torturing women-as-animal, as well as non-human animals and anything else they fetish-feminize: to feel like men, yet alienate themselves from everything in pursuit of such nonsense!

(exhibit 55a: Originally published in 1994, Robie Harris and Michael Emberley’s It’s Perfectly Normal didn’t include gender—not until a new edition came out in 2019, twenty-five years later! Until then, the book was banned for many years and continues to be banned and challenged to this day! At the time, it gave teenage me a better understanding of my pubescent sexuality as a young artist; i.e., as wanting to express myself in the mid ’90s in relatively limited animal monster language: Harris and Emberley’s Bird and Bee my first brush with furry art [not being exposed to DBZ and Saiyans until 1996]!

Now, I’m delighted to see it includes a section—if not on furries, then at least on gender studies—which I’ve included in my own book for the purposes of study and critique [the full image can be accessed on my site]. Suffice to say, the writing and illustrations indicate an expanded audience; i.e., with more people of color and other ethnic minorities, as well as the entire LGBTQ+ spectrum, including ace people! That being said the book isn’t curricular—it is extracurricular but remains an excellent example of morphologically sex-and-gender education meant for children ten-and-up that allows for holistic xenophilic artistic expression; i.e., of these things married to talking animals: something to consider and emulate in our own work as de facto educators stressing sexual and asexual appreciation of nudity and gender in sexualized media—a concept we’ll return to, in Volume Three!

For now, just remember that Matt Walsh hates Harris and Emberley’s book because it represents something he fears and loathes: educated children and universal acceptance and love. Such things are antithetical to profit, which must always be raping nature as alien animal whore!)

To that, Gothic Communism demonstrably produces sex-positive results in the art itself; i.e., as something to exhibit and explain the history of, but also improve upon over time: with new editions that expand to include increasingly marginalized groups, my series doing the same thing as Harris and Emberley did (a conscious attempt at diversity and voluntary representation for those working with me in increasingly xenophilic ways Harris and Emberley couldn’t, given their target audience not being teenage or 18+). And while our target audience is all peoples, there’s a particular emphasis on educating children, teenagers and young adults—to educate them through our own artistic expressions; re: to become more emotionally and Gothically intelligent/aware in regards to nature, animals, magic and drugs as vital xenophilic components thereof: to decrease ignorance regarding and reducing the risk of rape by diminishing profit as a dogmatic structure. No offense, but simply talking about the birds and the bees will not cut it!

Speaking for myself in that regard, books only get you so far in affairs of sex and love; i.e., despite having an overabundance on puberty and how to make babies, said glut of media actually did almost nothing to prepare me for the complexities of relationships (sexual or not) growing up! So while I had sex when I was in my early twenties, and wrote a great deal of fantasy stories/drew much in terms of trans fiction with magical-animal shapeshifters (re: Glenn the Goblin, exhibit 44a1b1a), I didn’t start having regular social-sexual relationships until I was 29, and didn’t have my first relatively healthy one (with Cuwu) until I was 35; I didn’t meet Bay—my life partner and husband—until I was almost 37 (“I’m 37!“). It might seem like a drag to learn all of this so late; then again, some people never learn, and I’ve learned a lot/met some truly awesome people doing this book! Growing hurts, and I wouldn’t change a thing!

Furthermore, not talking about sex and gender at all and asking kids to abstain from sex (despite it being sold to them in animalized forms) is frankly a historical-material recipe for disaster punishing furries and other objects of natural exploitation; i.e., one deliberately made by those in power to keep youngsters ignorant and afraid, thus easier to control. By abolishing state schooling and making extracurricular materials scarce, book-banning and -burning always follow with people-banning and -burning as vermin to exterminate; i.e., we can’t afford to be innocent this time! This includes regarding how the state manipulates children into adulthood through the fears they’ll invariably have pertaining to their own bodies as animalistic; i.e., in relation to the natural-material world around them coded with signs promising punishment and control they can triangulate onto state scapegoats: bigots will fear animals and nature as needing to be tamed, thus will look the other way or even participate directly in hate crimes against “evil” totems and other natural demons (think Lord of the Flies and you have the right idea, left).

Simply put, there’s always someone stronger to exploit someone weaker in their system, and guess which one you’re gonna be!

In relation to this fascist apathy as something to survive and challenge with empathy as, itself, darkly xenophilic and vengeful (through creative success), queer-coding is a sign for those who know—often by blending it in liminal ways that walk the tightrope: hiding ourselves but also making ourselves visible; i.e., as we trespass cryptonymically into reclaimed territories in search of better parentage to “dole out,” hence impart unto the young as starved for good sex education; e.g., like the Bat Signal, except it’s an act of subversive education through reclaimed objects of animal fear (the bat and other creatures of the night) that dismantle billionaires and Bruce-Wayne-style police violence while combating criminogenic etiologies, not symptoms (save to punch fascists and expose cops as traitors).

In turn, the latter unfolds during what, for many queer people, is a second childhood; i.e., not just through experimental drug use—be that puberty blockers, HRT or similar gender-affirming care—but a state of mind that reflects on exiting the closet while looking back into said closet as an adult: a dog having left its cage but embracing its dog-like liberation from slavery during ludo-Gothic BDSM (anthromorph sex, but also social courtship practices, below)!

Such “trips” (so to speak) head down memory lane in a very Gothic way and one that queer groups in particular tend to experience more by virtue of them realizing they were always gay and looking back on a formerly “straight” childhood puppy love; i.e., with fresh eyes, drugs or no drugs. Children’s cartoons makes for good places to start, then, because they routinely concern a time when the brain is still rapidly growing/the hemispheres haven’t fused yet, and experimental drug use/self-medication generally isn’t occurring (one can hope); e.g., with me revisiting Sailor Moon, but my friend Angel considering Revolutionary Girl Utena (1999) through a similar developing queer lens (and fanzine they help run):

(exhibit 55b: Revolutionary Girl Utena applies the “prince” style of crossdress to female-centric heroism; i.e., working inside a reimagined historicism/mil spec: the female officer of the novel-of-manners as traditionally male. Yet, the bildungsroman speaks to a hauntological coming-of-age that isn’t tied strictly to biology and teenage adolescence; i.e., a second adolescence experienced by trans people, said GNC persons addressing Gothic maturities hinted at in earlier fictions less versed in GNC/furry diction, but not material struggles surrounding courtship and its tell-tale lycanthropes’ jousting maneuvers during demonic courtly love [an Amazon no different than a furry insofar as both belong to nature as something to assimilate or annihilate]!

In Austen’s Persuasion, for example, Captain Harville represents a new rising class of “made man” through soldiery on the tides: the naval officer as able to socially elevate and offer himself as a particular catch to heroine’s like Anne Elliot. Utena bends this dichotomy as more than simply reversed; i.e., during cis-gendered, drag “king” theatrics, but rather as queer love happening entirely between AFAB characters that translate to those who aren’t female feeling/relating to female/feminine existence in animal-like ways: as GNC monstrous-feminine, themselves; e.g., me feeling chattelized in ways that women historically have been, and wanting to grow strong without assimilating but instead acclimating myself with the classic threatres of assimilation to subvert it as Utena does.)

As part one of this subchapter has shown, sex education often works within totemic and natural-demonic language; i.e., as policed and persecuted, regarding the education of child and adults, and whose dark xenophilia extends to defenders of nature belonging to, or identifying with, nature; re: through monster-fucking as a magical, iconoclastic act with drug-like animal elements. These heretical educations can involve anthropomorphic animals, of course, but also symbols of nature as potentiating dark drugs to take that are frequently associated with natural “magics”; e.g., like astrology or Paganism as things to poetic convey to children at the correct age; i.e., those in the midst of sexually maturing into adults, but also grappling with performative and identifying notions of gender mid-struggle as whore-like, animalized, and ultimately alien.

Indeed, a common form of integrating natural demonology into sex education is through children’s literature—with the stars of many-a-children’s book being anthropomorphized animals (exhibit 55/56a) but also magic girls as cute protectors of nature; re: Sailor Scouts, aka witches by another name as sex-positive, soldierly expression having its own navy girl aesthetic: Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon (the female soldier gender-bend also being present within Utena).

Sailing is just a chance for discover new life and leases thereof through assimilation, but charting a course through the veins of capital out into realms of exciting possibility that can change capital at the same time. Out of 17th, 18th and 19th century matelotage or seamanship, then, emerged the sailor (scout or not); i.e., as a pirate-adjacent symbol of “queer” discourse in fantasy stories aimed at children, but also adults; e.g., “Hey, sailor!” “booty” and sodomy on the high seas among pirates as a countercultural tradition that was challenged by Cartesian thought pimping animalized workers and chattelized animals through the same unironic xenophilia, thus phobia. As the Closet Professor writes,

In Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition, historian B. R. Burg investigates the social and sexual world of these sea rovers, a tightly bound brotherhood of men engaged in almost constant warfare. What, he asks, did these men, often on the high seas for years at a time, do for sexual fulfillment? Buccaneer sexuality differed widely from that of other all-male institutions such as prisons, for it existed not within a regimented structure of rule, regulations, and oppressive supervision, but instead operated in a society in which widespread toleration of homosexuality was the norm and conditions encouraged its practice (source: “Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth Century Caribbean,” 2010).

Moving into part two of “Dark Xenophilia,” we’ll continue our investigations into nature-themed sex/gender education—first, by examining some of these magic girls next, as well as the larger sex-educational, genderqueer/and acid-Communist xenophilic trends they’re associated with; re: chasing the black rabbit as an ongoing motif. We’ll also examine the historical-material struggles (and political enemies) that sex-positive educators have faced while touching hearts and opening minds through increasingly pornographic, drug-like, and even surreal means!

Before we do, though, here’s a few more exhibits to bridge the gap; i.e., which cover the ace-to-erotic/social-sexual gradient of xenophilic expression that furries inhabit alongside other monsters of the natural class. One broader cryptonymic categorization is Trojan animals, known more colloquially as Aesopian fables. In Volume Zero, we even talked about Trojan animals, but especially the black rabbit as divided further in two camps: the class-dormant, traitorous sort and the conscious double. Often these play out in videogames and neoliberal franchised material as something to hook kids on, Animal-Farm-style: kid-friendly ace kinds of “puppy love” that are expected to escalated sexually in monomythic ways!

(exhibit 56a1a1: Artist, top-mid-left: source; top-middle: source; top-right: Mobian Monster; bottom-left: xHimikox; bottom-middle: CNN Sally Acorn; bottom-right: Wild Blur. Sonic the Hedgehog the videogame is neoliberalism par excellence; i.e., its story is pure nonsense, dressed up in the theatre of “freedom fighter” animals that push back against a black-and-red Egghead/evil nerd who wrecks the environment and imprisons nature. All well and good, on its surface. Yet, the simulations for fighting against such cartoon villainy are themselves escapist power trips loaded with the usual false-hope clichés: the hero, heel, and damsel, the latter needing rescuing at the fastest possible speed through the aesthetics, but not the function of rebellion; i.e., neoliberal furry porn sold to kids, who grow up in to policing the monomythic refrain through its usual double standards: monopolizing xenophilia through a phobic abjection mentality taming magic-animal husbandry!

To that, nostalgia and fandoms commonly grow into “fan fic[tion]” head canon that prolongs the life of a franchise: fleecing the fantasy hero avatar through a femme fatale whore/moll and by extension the player base! As Rouge the Ghost Bat shows, fast [and unscrupulous] girls pick pockets with their pussies [or other holes]! Whores charge not just expensive, but exorbitant prices, their own named rates as pricey as exogamous dowries and far-off pastorals: sexy thieves making do by paying rent using their own classic modes of transaction under capital’s usual tricks [so to speak]!

The fact remains, men are dumb but also, animals [or those reduced to animal means of survival as something to master] communicate through their butts; i.e., often through sense, touch and other non-verbal, instinctual methods of data/goods exchange: “Thank you! Come again!” So is survival a compelled service industry that pimps whores canonically through the topos of power of women; i.e., made to serve the usual dumbasses thinking they’re owed much by “saving the world.” But it’s exceptionally educational in campier forms that enrich the whore; i.e., as more than a piece of ass treated as “tricksy” by weak-willed incels.

[artist: Hoovesart]

Rouge, for example, is a straight-up pro who takes Sonic for all he’s worth [two pages down]! Watch and learn, girls! The point of the fantasy is catharsis as much as it is telling monstrous-feminine workers to leverage their position with sex. Yet, they can in and out of art should they choose to! Power is power and nothing commands attention like a whore dancing and/or fucking to metal! The power fantasy is anisotropic, insofar as men—the privileged group—dream constantly of different ways to be the conqueror paying the “easy/dangerous” whore in gold, during virgin/whore syndrome; and she, to manipulate these men for various reasons using tools not permitted to gentle, delicate, and otherwise prim-and-proper maidens.

There’s a lot to play with, and it cuts both ways in different flavors per direction and role, but generally through the exchange of power symbolizing as different goods during the theatre of sex and force; re: Rouge—ready to throw down as much as get down—the holistic interplay ranging from poor white trash to redlined ghetto occupants seeing how the other side lives during a poetic spectrum of courtly love scenarios; i.e., whose social-sexual elements and Romantic-to-quotidian code [of sex and force, per folkways, mores, and taboos, but also prices paid and honor exacted by whomever]!

Furthermore, whatever the avatars, “humanity” is a battle for human rights under state comorbidities pimping nature as monstrous-feminine. As things to chase, enact or avoid, then, rape and respect occupy the same space; i.e., during education through ludo-Gothic BDSM as being good or bad [for workers or profit] to varying degrees. A whore wants respect, but also her rights respected, while she fights to survive as whores do [controlling the situation, above]. To it, there are endless ways to slum/play court; i.e., from a variety of registers and double standards, and regardless of one’s age, color, class and/or creed. Modular genres intersect, combining the medieval romance with the modern noir and Western from the whore’s perspective: the classic givers of sex, thus “luck” as something to get with, arbitrating through poetic performance and exchange—a farting and belching slut, guzzling cum and counting gold [a sex goblin]!

In turn, men and Man-Box tokens are coded to mark, then prey upon such persons, and those persons to respond in kind defensively [re: Kagero, keeping her guard up]. We punch up and down from wherever accident of birth finds us! Whores are born in brothels, and brothels—like casinos and suburbs as architectural divisions during Cartesian us-versus them—are man-made [or penned by token authors; re: Radcliffe’s Udolpho chastising Vallencourt, man-whoring it up in city-of-sin, Paris, tempting him with scarlet, non-English women of the night with loose morals]! She’s “got Stockholm real bad!” pulling off the heist of a lifetime with her tight little pussy [and/or asshole, mouth, cleavage, thigh gap, etc]!

[artist: Hoovesart]

As such, Rouge is the whore to play out a variety of anisotropic power fantasies, be those assimilation, escape, or revenge, etc, and however temporary or returned to; i.e., from adults treating such animals and [a]sexualities/genders differently than children might: settling old scores by “running it back”! What sexphobes call “gooner” and “slut,” for the whore is simply a day at the office, giving out bad-girl-to-GNC-sodomy rewards beyond basic vanilla maidens and prudes! And if that seems like a raw deal, we can camp and make it better onstage and off, doing so through Gothic poetics like Rouge the Bat; i.e., as someone to camp canon with as a member of the weird canonical nerd’s usual stable [of token whores] colonizing nature per the usual mantras and axioms! Everyone likes the whore, if only to canonically exploit her [re: Radcliffe, but also similar stories fearing the whore as acting like a rapacious, functionally non-white man of nature/the streets; e.g., Zofloya‘s Victoria during the dialectic of shelter/the alien]!

And if that seems unfair and/or loaded to anyone wondering about the educational or exploitative values and vices worked with, ask why that might be from a historical-material standpoint; re: the criminogenic chattelizing of such liminal expression as taken by fans to do whatever they want with [often fantasizing about sex, but I digress]! A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do—getting dummies to overplay their hands while she takes the prize during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., when reduced seemingly to a disadvantaged position of survival, she’s always thinking two moves ahead but ready for whatever comes [so to speak] in the present moment!

Rouge is a rogue[7a] in more ways than one, her chameleon sexuality violent and intense—simultaneously guilty as sin and carefree [while having maidenesque elements/desires to be treated well: as a slut during the whore’s paradox, thereby navigating one’s confused/mixed feelings while nature/nurture takes its dialectical-material course]! Camping our own survival is fun—not ranking rape to act superior/punch down, but speaking to others through shared trauma during idiosyncratic privilege and oppression’s sexually descriptive and culturally appreciative pedagogy of the oppressed! Whores need to look out for each other because other people classically don’t [e.g., whorephobia in cop shows making us out to be the self-same whores Radcliffe’s bad-faith maidenesque dehumanized for profit]!

[artist: Schpicy]

Canon-wise, though, the nostalgia of the racing platformer [a race to sex: “Gotta go fast”] as controlled opposition is deftly brought to a new generation of kids by parents who were raised on the same stuff, except this time it’s a run-‘n-gun concerned with pugilistic forays alongside the shooter [similar to Sonic and Doom in the early ’90s, I suppose]. First, it was Sonic’s “shadow,” Shadow, as the pissed-off false rebellion sold to kids, in 2005; i.e., swapping the Sonic-Adventure-level Fonz hand signals for the middle-finger and pistol held sideways, and remade into a new post-Covid trilogy starring—I shit you not—Keanu-fucking-Reaves as Shadow [and Jim Carrey having turned from ’90s pet detective to 2020s mad scientist reviving his career for the umpteenth time]. I can’t hate it, at least not entirely!

More to the point, nature remains a common selling point through xenophilic exploitation media; i.e., through monomyth theatrics leveling up with the kids chasing power and sex through such horny animal pipedreams; i.e., Sonic‘s Japanese neoliberal schtick aping bigoted Pax Americana and selling it back to the states through their own gun porn: John Wick and Akira-style bike chases both strip-teasing and strip-mining the cyberpunk; i.e., as the “bad future” Sonic warned about, and which these and other furry avatars [with ace potential, if not always fandom expertise, above] are running around inside. Like a bat outta Hell, this translates easily enough to similar simulations also sold to teenagers and adults in parallel media pimping the same basic refrains [next page].

The rabbit, as a Paganized xenophilic symbol, is always fetishized under capital; re: including the kid-friendly “Sonic” type, which then extends to Sonic clones “all growed up.” In the case of Bunny from The First Descendant hero-shooter hybrid, it’s basically a 2023 Destiny offshoot pimping “fetish Sonic with guns”; i.e., she’s the original party animal Sonic was supposed to be [a rabbit] tied up in black fetish gear and electro-shocked with blue bolts of lightning while she sprints to and fro. It’s ace as much as not, because BDSM is public nudism in paradoxical forms of nudity on the surface. But it’s also fetishized militarism tied to social tiers of elevation and assimilation swapping the rabbit and Elmer Fudd to hunt the state’s foes; re: courtly love, thus rape, leading its own kind of mercenary token xoophilia! A pimp is a pimp, a whore a whore that can pimp nature as an undercover cop whoring for the Man!

As such, Bunny’s a corporate mercenary sold to Gen Z [and the next generation after that] as “merc merch”: pure, appropriated sex appeal and brawn dimorphized in all the social-sexual usual ways: sex pot, smart, unavailable and dangerous [as the monstrous-feminine always is]. This means, if we want to camp canon, we’ll be following her black tail/trail, not just the white rabbit’s, through whatever drugs or drug-like poetics blazing happily through capital; i.e., in our own art/sex work, of course, but also our social-sex lives that synthesize our art as wrapped up in the general, messy scheme’s public nudism: acts of sex and force to varying degrees of modularity and overlap. To that, roleplay often invites people to play out their fantasies in whatever costumes they choose, including psychosexually regressive childhood crushes: from videogames being the juvenilia’s locus, yet one that works well enough for our little rebellions in and out of the bedroom, on and offscreen and stage alike.)

Forgetting Zeuhl (who fleeced me with their pussy easily enough), the rabbit isn’t always bait, though—at least, not for us. If the “fash” rabbit is something that weaponizes the language of the harvest and witch hunt against the usual suspects under Capitalism (often by token police), then it’s clearly something we may camp through the iconoclastic function of animalized power and resistance having simultaneously ace and erotic elements; re: freedom fighters and cyborg rabbits surviving biomechanically between green pastoral and robot Hell not being something the state can monopolize, from us back to Shelley and Milton and ultimately Shakespeare and Ovid. All owe something to cybernetics, totem animals, and hybrids of these things’ drug-like mad technology run amok (the plans of mice and men didn’t account for women and rabbits, but also guerrilla reinvention making furries something more than mere intended, control-opposition consumption for profit and nothing else)!

Yet doing so also isn’t stuck within videogames or their paratexts; i.e., it can be with any art that we make with our bodies and the world around us—often, I would add, fueled by trippy imagery that, if not strictly an acid trip, still figuratively tumbles down the same rabbit hole with social-sexual potential: beef and porked up, but not for state harvests to exploit through public nudism and enforced chattel sexuality as usual! We pork among ourselves, a cryptonymy that feeds revolution!

(exhibit 56a1a2: Artist: Blxxd Bunny. As stated earlier in the series, Bunny is quite ace, themselves, exposing their own public nudity out among nature while of it. Such socialized displays of sensuality through Sublime exposure isn’t unique to us in the present.

For the British Romantics, that is, communion with nature varied per generation, those of the first seeing nature as more motherly and nurturing. With the rise of Napoleon devastating Europe following the French Terror and subsequent purges, though, second-generation Romantic depictions of nature became more ominous, rapacious, vengeful and fearful; i.e., radicals like Byron and the Shelleys clashing with social-sexually conservative forebears like Wordsworth and Coleridge.

According to Stephanie Forward, second-generation Romantics also regarded their first-generation elders with criticism and mistrust: 

Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge were first-generation Romantics, writing against a backdrop of war. Wordsworth, however, became increasingly conservative in his outlook: indeed, second-generation Romantics, such as Byron, Shelley and Keats, felt that he had ‘sold out’ to the Establishment (source: “The Romantics,” 2014).

But the demonizing and dominion over the natural world by capital had already been occurring for centuries; re: following the emergence of Cartesian thought and its Revolution as pioneered not just by Descartes and Bacon, but Columbus butchering his own target groups; i.e., in acts of Christian-fueled savagery over those he deemed inferior enough to pimp—an act other similar Protestant sects would emulate in the self-same epidemic of sickness-inducing abjection hiding/showing itself through capitalist cryptonyms: statues not of heroes, to the Indigenous, but a brutal tyrant they’d have to suffer the songs of “progress” being sung at their expense for centuries:

Indigenous communities have been persecuted in the Americas since Christopher Columbus first came ashore on the island of Guanahani in the present-day Bahamas 528 years ago. They have had their land stolen, people slaughtered, enslaved, and infected with diseases, women raped, children kidnapped, treaties broken, and possessions and goods plundered and looted. There were between 5 million and 15 million Indigenous people living in North America in 1492. By the late 1800s, there were fewer than 238,000 left. The so-called “Age of Discovery” has begot centuries of genocide [source: Penn Today’s “Indigenous Views of Christopher Columbus,” 2020].

Along with furries and drug use, such mentalities must be reclaimed by demonstrating nature in social-sexual forms; i.e., as something to reunite with, but also embody in ways that depict nature as something lush that needs to be protected, revered and preserved, during land back: a deep-rooted place of procreation and love, symbolized as such since Antiquity into the Internet Age [the bacchanal orgy or tryst, commonly set to music while on drugs]. But those making art aren’t doing so in the abstract; it represents their homes as a part of who they are and vice versa. As Nyx writes in regards to coming home:

“I love coming back home and exploring the woods I grew up in. It’s such a refreshing experience and cleansing to my soul. These WV woods will always have my heart, no matter how far away I stray 🤍” [source tweet, 2023].

 

Whores of nature have an ace element, then, insofar as the things they love that “grow” aren’t just genitals, but the greenery of plants that fauna feed upon [and take us home when we die]! This threshold and proximity with the divine in nature is both intense, but also oddly nurturing and protecting in ways that eroticize nature as optionally orgiastic: a potential bacchanal that lets people enjoy the same current aliens pushing towards reunion however all parties agree to—a wishing well where sex for one person is a handshake [as animals saying hello to one another] and for others more sexually responsive an orgasm of erotic bliss, insofar as that’s how they respond to such displays “in the wild!”

As such, the sex isn’t enforced to appease merely one side for profit through force, thus becomes negotiated fairly towards mutual consent—my dark dream attached to Gothic Communism, but one of infinite possibility and lucky titillating voyeur/exhibitionist splendor relayed on the Aegis; i.e., of cuties like Bunny and Nyx, each having portentous booties to relay such data with at all: dat ass, amirite? It’s not a capitalist Bringer of War [and other Malthusian nonsense] but all the usual post-scarcity joys known to happy rabbits on Bunny Island, and sung about through the usual paradisiacal longing: Sublime and Numinous thirst traps enjoying Stravinsky but not endorsing his abject views of nature’s bare-and-exposed terrifying Big Whores’ heavy artillery! There is no one who needs to be cannibalized [except the bourgeoisie class positions]—no one pigeonholed into the essential victim. Simply us using what Medusa gave us: a bit [or a lot] of strange!

[artists: Nyx and Blxxd Bunny]

“West Virginia, mountain mama. Take me home, country roads.” Personified by the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, nature conservationism is a theme of conservative Americana and written by those who profit from it, versus land back; re: John Denver’s music, arguably romancing the nostalgia of the highly destructive coal industry [and parodied by Ridley Scott, who used it as David’s siren song for Alien: Covenant with Shaw’s pre-recorded voice]. But Denver’s “Mountain Mama” is as much being Mother Nature and its empathetic inhabitants; i.e., who legitimately have a strong bond to nature and are recognized by society as “of nature”: in a very Cartesian sense our own social-sexualities can subvert the ensuing abjection and pimping with a whore’s often asexual public nudism; re: the freedom to walk among Paradise as ours to decolonize through such displays: “You’re safe, here; i.e., as animals of the Earth who won’t rape each other because that desire has been taught out of us on the Aegis!”

Furthermore, within these liminal positions, the thicc, tattooed bodies of cuties like Nyx and Blxxd Bunny are ample, fruit-like and covered in their own “Odes to Psyche” butterfly tattoos—the butterfly as a hauntological symbol of transformation, death and stigma [the skull and the snake] signifying their body as a welcoming site of currently forbidden pleasures [ace or not] denoting xenophilic harmony with the natural world we all belong to! Beyond Keats and his cult of Dionysus, though, there’s likewise other places of natural avatars and fantasies to retreat into using ace-to-not-so-ace cryptonymies; e.g., Pippy Longstocking!

[artist: top-left side: Inger Nelson; top-middle and middle-left side: Tami Erin; bottom-left: Dani Starwyn; lower-bottom-left, -mid and the whole right side: Blxxd Bunny]

For starters, the aesthetic of the furry speaks to animal women with Amazonian flavors aimed at kids; i.e., can also be reclaimed through the “hunter’s look,” hence the olive-and-brown camouflage of the American Army historically used in the usual settler-colonial schemes: ones where white hunters try to bond with the land their ancestors stole from Native Americans; i.e., it becomes their land after the genocide is complete, the history of the former people forgotten, but also imitated in good faith or bad. This liminality can be embodied through the non-Indigenous by virtue of those who are white belonging to a colonizing polity whose wider policies they reject, while still rocking the camo look [camo is nowhere near as problematic as, say, the Swastika or the Confederate flag].

So of course, there’s certainly nothing wrong with being “country” or rustic provided the class character is embodied within the critique—i.e., the art itself as being deliberately sex-positive, thus discouraging genocide on principle. Indeed, the country girl as a practicing witch, Amazon or general-practice magical huntress can be eroticized through common fetishizing markers: the glasses, pigtails, or freckles—a kind of latter-day Pippy Longstocking:

Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman when society needed a hero to battle bullies like Hitler and the Nazis. Pippi came along a decade or so later to take on a few bullies of her own: institutions that demand conformity; societies that over-regulate children; and anyone who’s ever used the phrase throw like a girl as an insult instead of a compliment [source: Schmoop’s “Pippi Longstocking Strength and Skill,” 2023].

The ginger farmgirl is a kind of good-sized, Norse-tinged rustic [“Pippi” meaning “lover of horse” in Norse] who’s no stranger to honest work; i.e., someone Pippi personifies and who Blxxd Bunny channels a certain essence of in her own performance as tied to the Earth around her [even when she’s indoors]. This spirit of strength and sexuality is not unusual even within Pippi’s legacy—with the actress who played Pippi in the 1988 film, Tami Erin, making her own sex tape: 

Former Pippi Longstocking star Tami Erin is selling her own sex tape. The 39-year-old has decided to let a porn company release the explicit video before her ex-boyfriend beats her to it. Tami believes that if the tape is going to see the light of day, she may as well get paid for it [source: the Daily Mail’s “Former Pippi Longstocking Star Tami Erin Decides to Release Her Own Sex Tape,” 2013]. 

While it was released under the threat of revenge porn, Tami decided to own the film and regain control by releasing it herself. Good on you, Tami! It can’t be blackmail if you get out in front of it, and you might as well get paid for your trouble!)

Now that we’ve examined furries and other erotic, monster-fucking forms of the natural demon class persecuted under Capitalism during furry panic (and Red Scare through acid Communism)—as well as covered some social-sexual examples with ace tolerances—let’s set upon our aforementioned path towards queer magic transformation; i.e., out of the simplicity of childhood towards a life of chaos, painful transformation and death, but also erotic expression as something to “grow into” when expressing ourselves as magically part of nature and the great outdoors: being something to look into, but also inhabit and express with our bodies and nudism (re: exhibit 56a1a2, above).

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

As such, we’ll examine the magic girl, a shapeshifter unicorn and Giger’s xenomorph as increasingly transgressive and gender-troubled modes of GNC poetics bound up with the nature world; i.e., as hunted, hence something to express in often policed ways: magic and drugs, but also sex demons (whores) tied to them as things to face, even duel and chase down like Alice chasing the white-to-black rabbit into Hell as much as Wonderland! To it we don’t take drugs to literally see the future, but help our minds process the complicated emotions and memories that already spell historical materialism (and its dualities) out; i.e., if Capitalism is a cancer that grows to devour the world through workers, then these drugs (and the muses tied to nature who evoke/use them in furry-like ways) are the medicine to shrink its influence and kill the tumor with! We’re the nymphs the old poets wrote about, into the present state-of-affairs!

To that, oppositional praxis is fractally recursive, meaning smaller forms reflect larger functions and structures; e.g., Nazis poetics, apathy and thoroughly settler-colonial expansion/persecution mania. The magical element is the power to shapeshift through the aesthetic; i.e., as a matter of context and appearance that, through a variety of the latter as ludo-Gothically flexible in its BDSM, conveniently helps the former flow power towards us through dark empathy/xenophilia with style! Nature is alien, and she wants hugs, but only if we can catch her! The terror of the chase, and Beethoven’s-Fifth-style codas, highlight the predator/prey thrill of such things; i.e., during a palliative Numinous and—apart from the usual hyphenations—stress the sheer flight aspects to said exchanges. Far from bleak nihilism, then, it becomes what it was meant to be: a drive towards liberation from capital’s usual pimps whoring us out!

So white or black, follow the rabbit, babes! “The woods are dreary, dark and deep, and she has many promises to keep,” carrying the heavy time of old clocks racing towards through capital counting down! To avoid state shift, we look on our own Aegis showing Medusa in ways others might be repulsed by if not for the social-sexual latitudes hinted above: a sight of danger but also communion with the dark gods and their socially fluent and sexually potent, dashing animal-avatar pirate guise (where kittens and tigers occupy the same framework); i.e., letting us cryptonymically outmaneuver our foes better than Caesar could ever hope to kettle us, during guerrilla war!

Good things (treats) come to those who wait (versus simply wolfing down what capital craves to dominate while stigmatizing the usual abject scapegoats); i.e., this is our land and capital isn’t welcome here, the sun, moon and stars—hell, the whole fucking universe—not something that orbits around them, and certainly not us and our desires (sexual or not)! Tiger bunny go rawr! Our guerrilla’s “ancient” spirit of dark xenophilia—thus reinvention/road to redemption while reclaiming our self-to-societal respect as sex workers through iconoclastic art/mutual labor action—lives on; i.e., saying to all of you, “Tip your sex workers while playing with them; don’t exploit them!” and testifying all the while to our own abuse/survival onstage and off; re: during such playtime’s liminal expression: the black rabbit to follow!

The oldest heroes escaping exploitation are whores. By comparison, pimps are the oldest villains policing said whores. They operate through abuse as a matter of—among other things—scarcity and drug use, which new victims must skirt seeking liberation through ancient theatre tropes; e.g., the old doxy a monster detective dodging Athenian-to-Spartan women as much as men. Under capital and its hauntologies, the whore is always the Omelas scapegoat, because the state demands rape to exist (which it controls through force, destitution and drugs, among other things): something to pimp nature with, whatever the form; i.e., something to tame and own, during insect politics; e.g., honeybees, but also elderly people: “Well, now your backs gonna hurt, ’cause you just pulled landscaping duty!”

Exploitation, though endless (stealing from labor’s infinite value), has its usual classic symbols among the myriad offshoots demons and nature portend (through undead trauma). From the Archaic Mother’s Gorgon, winged, pre-Christian fallen angels to modern Satanic forms, nature is a whore to pimp by modern enterprising cops and their police states decaying within capital; e.g., 2019’s Fate/Grand Order: Absolute Demonic Front – Babylonia‘s Medusa vs Leonidas (the eternal whore vs the hauntological Nazi Spartan leader of strongmen returning to greatness, above). In turn, a whore’s pimp is always cryptomimetically close at hand (or vice versa); i.e., looks can be deceiving but also speak truth through deception as open, naked: “Give me a boy until he is seven, and I will” dogmatize him six ways from Sunday! It’s Paradise Lost without the camp, aka the Bible. We must camp it, or suffer the usual rape and neglect supplied to whores of all kinds!

Mind or otherwise, we’re sex-demon detectives investigating our own rapes; i.e., every word/flash of skin a forbidden testimony the state, who—along with its cops (token or not, the latter making Sophie’s Choice)—desperately want to silence but can’t; re: because there must always be a whore to pimp by the usual cops playing kayfabe Amazonomachia dress up. It’s always the happiest ones, faking it ’til they make it, then punching down the hardest to those they’re tethered to (re: Federici)! Meanwhile, state apologia is rape apologia. Subverting that, the revenge of we out-and-out, loud-and-proud whores breaks with tradition, thus segregation and genocide during the abjection and cryptonymy processes setting nature free; i.e., as monstrous-feminine by breaking profit on our Aegises; re: through the usual testifying that occurs along chronotopic architectural/forensic morphology puns, mise-en-abyme! Whatever Capitalist Realism portends, money is theft—freedom and meeting our basic needs (until development occurs) not mutually exclusive, insofar as we steal back what the state taxes for itself! Whatever canceled future you find them in, then (cyberpunk or Gothic castle), sex work is work, onstage and off. So pay your sex workers, survival sex work or not; either way it’s still a basic human right (re: “Paid Labor“)!

Except, the whore can’t have an alibi when she’s on the rabbits trail; i.e., threatening profit, meaning we’re the canonical “homewreckers”: shitting like the homeless or housing challenged where the middle-class personal property owners live (the latter being the classic villains of the Radcliffean refrain, gatekeeping capital for the state): showing the complicit and the holier-than-thou our normal everyday survival on the Aegis speaking offstage as much as on. “Hop like little bunnies,” as Mom used to say to us kids; beware the poachers while looking for love/answers! Love is a battlefield! Show them no quarter using Cupid’s Shaft; i.e., when making it the dialectical-material context of your illustration of mutual consent, doing so on your confessional’s wicked canvas! Ace to anal, the Aegis is yours to reverse abjection with, cowgirl or otherwise!

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

Onwards to “Dark Xenophilia, part two: Magic, Drugs and Acid Communism“!

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About the Author

Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] A Nazi dogwhistle, oddly enough. Turkey Tom is a fucking chud who, like all chuds, passes himself off as the most educated person in the room; i.e., the most correct/least criminal. These knee-jerk distinctions merely reflect the socio-material factors (settler-colonial divisions) at play. The likes of Turkey Tom immediately benefit from a system that turns them into sexual predators and opportunists preying on racial, ethnic and gender minorities, etc, for their own gain. It’s sad and gross, and not limited to the likes of Tom; i.e., he’s one of many and fails up to punch down.

For example, in genre-specific channels, horror is visited by white centrists who play defense for capital by both-sidesing radical politics on either pole, aka the horseshoe approach; i.e., conflating Communism with fascism, despite them being historically at odds. Kayfabe conflates them in the same post-WW2 shadow zones, and such persons are more likely to defend really awful conservative rapists, too; e.g., Cody Leach defending a recent horror event “graced” by pedophile Kevin Spacy (In Praise of Shadow’s “Bad Conservative Horror Movies,” 2024; timestamp: 11:31).

[2] Whereas “kinning” is a deep sense of empathy tied to human or at least humanoid characters/monsters—usually in fiction—otherkin ties to non-human fictional elements.

[3] A trippy take on Clarke’s Law, insofar as advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but also “ancient” technology being like drug use and shadow play! Two sides of the same coin!

[4] From Alex Garland’s 2018 adaptation to Jeff Vander Meer’s Annihilation (2014).

[5] Regarding hate crimes, “The term ‘hate’ can be misleading. When used in hate crime law, the word ‘hate’ does not mean rage, anger, or general dislike. In this context ‘hate’ means bias against people or groups with specific characteristics that are defined by the law” (source: United States Department of Justice).

[6] Well Cuwu did; my trans woman’s fat ass/dad bod leaves a lot to be desired, I feel (thanks to Jadis adding a bit of “love bomb” weight to my poor skeleton). Then again, Cuwu didn’t complain, and that’s all that matters! Enjoy ’em to the hilt, bitches!

[7] I.e., hard-boiled, having no reproach nor remorse, but working instead to challenge manipulators with their own levers and facades/false pretenses of wisdom, goodness and health. A demon gives as good as she gets, taking like a vampire (specifically a ghost bat, in Rouge’s case); i.e., to teach the usual bad-faith thieves a lesson. An open alien whose existence and trades are incessantly taboo doesn’t have to keep up appearances by assimilating/can get the impostor on the hip through greater fluencies with such exchange; i.e., an open secrecy that their foe is less prepared to administer when pressured: keeping them close but at arm’s length, the ace with the ass of the gods, working her usual pickpocket charms to take stolen goods won fairly to the local fence.

Such stories canonically blame the whore by fetishizing her even when she owns it; i.e., damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t. Professional or personal, ace or ass, revenge is its own best success/revenge against profit; i.e., the usual detectives chasing with their own tails versus her solving the case with hers; re: between acting and not acting onstage and off; e.g., Katie Dickie solving her own son’s murder by chasing the culprit through sex—an act that simultaneously repulses and excites her but also bores her to death—in ways that highlight her own loss and alienation, but also mistaken sense of justice when she discovers the killer already went to jail for the crime: drunk driving. He’d already atoned (or tried to), leading her to have to face her child’s death in a new light:

[7] Sorry, Rush, but the shoe really fits, here. “We are the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx!” but not in ways that you could have imagined; i.e., while writing love letters to Rand, Bernays, Orwell, and Tolkien, in the 1970s (oddly enough, your best period, but also one where you aped Led Zeppelin’s fash-adjacent and wholly problematic love for runes while saying little of worth to people who weren’t like yourselves with said runes: white and middle-class platitudes that, to be fair to you, still have their moments (e.g., “Free Will“). In any event, I don’t measure someone’s success by how much money they can make while posturing as more rebellious than they actually are!

That being said, can I enjoy Rush, anyways? Absolutely! I grow up with them in high school, and Marilyn Roxie even featured my review of 2112 to commemorate Neil Peart’s death, in 2020:

2112 is one of Rush’s most endearing albums, and certainly there’s a lot to enjoy about it. However, its greatest strength—accessibility and refinement—is also its Achilles Heel. They rarely if ever buck the trend of checkered incohesion, almost making this album a blueprint for failure in that regard: The lengthier tendencies of their older works remain, albeit with less errant unpredictability and flashiness. As a result, 2112‘s rambles feel almost empty and blank in spots—a problem that bleeds into several shorter songs (source: Persephone van der Waard’s Rating94544799; Jan 11th, 2020).

Revisiting that review after five eventful years, I can safely say I flat-out love the music (which still straight-up slaps [da bass] after all these years)! 10/10, would fuck to, again!

Even so, my Communist convictions remain unfazed by such hero worship; i.e., I will happily skewer Rush’s underlying lyrical content/political message the old pros smuggled, then and now, through their gentrified rock ‘n roll commercialism; i.e., their dogmatic elements—specifically Rand’s repackaged dystopian objectivism—is, to be brutally frank to our Canadian meganerds, shameless Red-Scare bullshit; re: written first by a Russian sell-out (and aped by Orwell, an imperial cop), only to be enshrined into the halls of the (white straight) rock gods by the usual authors of the ghost of the counterfeit. Fear-fascinated with Communism as rock ‘n roll “black magic” obscurantism. weird canonical nerds gonna weird canonical nerd:

(source)

Like, God help me, you’re such monumental dorks (a fact emblematized by my Catholic, sexless and gun-nut roomie, “Beavis” from Volume One, who loved Rush). And even if I wasn’t a former diehard paying fan (which I was, in the iTunes era), you’re not gods; i.e., I can still critique you and enjoy you for it—meaning in the neoliberal era you doomsayed all the way to the bank… and which the 2012 Funny or Die skit, “Jason Seigel & Paul Rudd Meet Rush,” happily makes fun of; i.e., ribbing “the Holy Trinity” in ways that I can’t help but chuckle at; e.g., “I have a jerk off station!” says Seigel, only for Geddy Lee to not bat an eyelash/miss a beat (I’m sure he’s heard far worse from more effusive [and sexually forward/available] roadies)!

To it, fandoms betray the complicit cryptonymies their authors use; i.e., if your material is full of Nazis, chances are, there’s a problem with the parent source material acting pimp-like (re: Tolkien, Rowling, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath and so many others; e.g., Ozzy and company largely used the late 1960s and early-to-mid-1970s as a chance to party and enrich themselves opportunistically: on the backs of suffering minorities they aped and pandered with to white straight paying customers). In the big picture, then, Rush weren’t rebels but businessmen on the right side of the fence!

I.e., hard-boiled, having no reproach nor remorse, but working instead to challenge manipulators with their own levers and facades/false pretenses of wisdom, goodness and health. A demon gives as good as she gets, taking like a vampire (specifically a ghost bat, in Rouge’s case); i.e., to teach the usual bad-faith thieves a lesson. An open alien whose existence and trades are incessantly taboo doesn’t have to keep up appearances by assimilating/can get the impostor on the hip through greater fluencies with such exchange; i.e., an open secrecy that their foe is less prepared to administer when pressured: keeping them close but at arm’s length, the ace with the ass of the gods, working her usual pickpocket charms to take stolen goods won fairly to the local fence.

Such stories canonically blame the whore by fetishizing her even when she owns it; i.e., damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t. Professional or personal, ace or ass, revenge is its own best success/revenge against profit; i.e., the usual detectives chasing with their own tails versus her solving the case with hers; re: between acting and not acting onstage and off; e.g., Katie Dickie solving her own son’s murder by chasing the culprit through sex—an act that simultaneously repulses and excites her but also bores her to death—in ways that highlight her own loss and alienation, but also mistaken sense of justice when she discovers the killer already went to jail for the crime: drunk driving. He’d already atoned (or tried to), leading her to have to face her child’s death in a new light:

This blog post is part of “Deal with the Devil,” a third promotion originally inspired by the first and second ones I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” and “Searching for Secrets” (2024). The first promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Deal with the Devil” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, Demons (the “Searching for Secrets” promotion covered the Undead Module, which is now live). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Click here to see “Deal with the Devil’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Demon Module) is out (2/14/2025)! 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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“Call of the Wild,” part two: Dark Xenophilia; or, “Far Out, Dude!” Monster-fucking and Magic Girls Helping Foster Dark Radical (Communist) Empathy During Healthy Sex Education (for Children and Young Adults into Adulthood) [opening]

“She’s not like other girls, Booger!” / “Why, does she have a penis?” [maybe, you stupid creep]

—Harold and Booger, Revenge of the Nerds (1984)

Picking up where “Call of the Wild; or “Sex Education,” Trans-forming the World (opening and part zero)” left off…

The remainder of this chapter is composed of two parts, each concerned with a particular aspect of totemic demonology as a dark xenophilic means of relating to nature or expressing it in a queer fashion tied to nature; i.e., as being “like a good (or bad, depending on the drugs/trauma) acid trip,” permanently altering us by taking us outside Plato’s cave; re: Communism’s dark radical empathy versus capital’s dark radical apathy during good vs bad sex education with monsters: monster-fucking and magical affinity wielded by the traditional and hauntological guardians of nature reclaiming these devices from the guardians of Capitalism, Cartesian thought and profit. It matters because without the Earth as our home, we’re ultimately colonizing and destroying the very place (and people, flora and fauna) that make up what we need to live. Men cannot eat gold, or digest what they treat like gold.

(exhibit 52c2: Poltergeist II: the Other Side [1987] pits the same white family against a ghost of colonialism—this time played by Father Kane/the Beast that manages to abject said sins onto Indigenous cultures and Pagan belief systems during a War on Drugs with all the usual double standards/exceptions for the White Man; i.e., Father Kane—an allusion to Cain and Able from the Bible and Beowulf—speaks seemingly to Mormonism, the Jehovah’s Witnesses and other “radical’s racial” forms of Puritanism [an American religion; re: the Mayflower Puritans]. Except, the movie treats the false preacher as a witch-in-preacher’s clothing [an inversion of Matthew Lewis’ Monk subterfuge]: an infiltrator of the normal American family’s home, drawn to their Christ-like child’s “pure spirit” as something to forcefully invade/rape [who would die in real life in 1988 from cardiac arrest caused by septic shock due to a congenital birth defect of the intestines. By comparison, the actor playing Kane was already dying of cancer when the film was shot—diagnosed in 1983 with stomach cancer and dying in 1985 before shooting was finished].

To survive, the white family find “common ground” with a Native American; i.e., the latter who basically serves as White Man’s Yoda during Red Skin, White Masks. It’s very appropriative, turning the Indigenous character into “the help” and the false preacher into a witch to whitewash Puritanism, and speaking through mysticism, drug use and vision quests that apologize for the Protestant ethic and Manifest Destiny as a whole. It’s horrid, but the monster is the best part of the movie; i.e., doubling for Vampire Capitalism’s dead labor feeding on living labor to turn the little girl into an old man without getting physically bigger—it’s frankly great!)

But also, we desperately need to shy away from cultural appropriation and nuclear superiority (above) by treating drug use and Indigenous cultures not simply as things to imbibe during Capitalist Realism—i.e., as upheld by the process, which furthers abjection when chasing the usual dragons of the counterfeit; re: Poltergeist II’s continuation of Spielberg’s tokenized run, crystallizing Capitalist Realism under a Protestant ethic (with Giger being hired to design the Freudian reverse-Genesis scene because of course he fucking was)—but to consume in ways that see beyond said Realism, and in ways demonstrably conducive to Gothic-Communist development: by reversing said abjection through the same surreal pathways conjuring up relationships of power that are friendly to us and those we summon; e.g., Puff the magic dragon (from 1978, below) someone to befriend in more ways than one (often through regressive states of mind under the influence of excited emotions and drugs)…

Such heroic/monstrous things “of the gods” are haunted by drug abuse tied to war trauma, Paganism (mysticism/shamanism) and child abuse/disassociation and imaginary friends, which we won’t have time to explore, save by expressing a desire to use drugs (and sex, monsters) as a responsible conduit of acclimating children to the Gothic; i.e., as sex education that, in the wrong hands, easily becomes fear-and-dogma propaganda that rapes nature (and those of it) all over again, thus alienates/fetishizes workers in all the usual ways from an early age: leading to the above criminogenic factors.

Note: I’m also not a habitual drug-user but have dated my fair share (e.g., Jadis used to drink, Cuwu smoked weed like a chimney and Bay’s a wizard when it comes to that shit). I’ve also studied the British Romantics and similar poets/artists, who happily abused drugs (e.g., Blake, Coleridge, Rimbaud and Jim Morrison, who we’ll look at here), as well as anti-war art either implied (re: Walpole’s Capitalocene) or overt (re: Goya) during Gothic surrealism; i.e., informed by ancient-to-medieval drug users, such as Ovid and Shakespeare. We’ll only have time to briefly outline them, here, and I’ll be sticking to more prominent examples to save time. —Perse

• Part one: “Monster-Fucking and Furry Panic, from Ace to Ass”: Delves further into undead qualities of natural monsters, expressing “monster-fucking” and dark xenophilia as a potentially ace-yet-pornographic form of sex-positive education through public nudism: featuring lycans, chimeras, and sentient animals to cope with trauma that is often something to live with; e.g., furry panic; e.g., Dario Argento’s “Pelts” (2006), Erika Eleniak from Under Siege (1989), Sonic the Hedgehog (1991) and Pippi Longstocking.

(artist: TMFD)

• Part two: “‘Follow the White-to-Black Rabbit’; or Magic, Drugs and Acid Communism” (feat. the Monstrous-Feminine of Magic Girls, Unicorns and Xenomorphs): Applies the same dark xenophilic logic to explore sex(-positive) education (from children to adults) through demons and acid Communism; i.e., spells and drugs, featuring the transformative monstrous-feminine of magic girls, unicorns and xenomorphs; e.g., Sailor Moon, The Last Unicorn, Nimona and Alien (among others). A witch is a witch, but which witch will you be? We’ll consider this question, too, vis-à-vis GNC ideologies from an ideological and morphological standpoint; re: “the trans, intersex and non-binary mode of being” as tied to older dead cultures and andro/gynodiversity in Gothic art, before closing things out with an exploration of radical drug use and revolution per Mark Fisher’s acid Communism inside capitalist hauntologies (which then segues into the rebirth of the Communist mind in dead capitalist retro-future spaces, figuratively the shopping mall of the zombie apocalypse).

“Good sex education through monster sex and drugs?” you say? Fret not; we’ll unpack things during this opening before diving in, but will be conversational as we go—i.e., covering a wide swath of patchwork elements; e.g., Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Matrix, The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, etc; i.e., with a central theme of dark empathy amid theatres of trauma and rejection, tying everything together as a matter of performance.

Note: When discussing Jonestown, we will be showing footage stills from the 2006 Life and Death documentary, which contains images of actual dead people. —Perse

So while “monster-fucking” is the mutually consensual act of fucking monsters of any type, part one frankly considers monster-fucking as an erotic enterprise; i.e., happening through totemic demons like lycanthropes (aka furries), chimeras and sentient animals, but also magical spirits like fairies that exist in relation to nature, sexuality and gender expression as fundamentally queer (we’ll explore their ace side in Volume Three). Communism is queer because its radical empathy challenges heteronormativity thus Patriarchal Capitalism’s established order through anisotropic drug use (and sex/ancient theatre emulating drug use).

Queerness, though not inherently pornographic, tends to be closer to sexuality (re: Reznor); i.e., as something that is openly expressed without shame, thus liberated from heteronormativity’s rigid, colonial binary and the state’s abject treatment of gender and sex: outside of state-ordained marriage, hence its valorizing of war/rape and the sexually dimorphic gender roles associated with these interlinked activities’ reactive abuse. In particular, part one will explore furries as a criminalized class of natural demons living under the status quo; i.e., inside its usual states of exception, which drug use exposes; re: furry panic and those who suffer under/escape from its exploitation all the time (as theatre nerds do, on and offstage, in weirdly iconoclastic nerdy acts of such things versus their canonical doubles)!

In doing so, we’ll be touching on the state’s deliberate tendency to associate its own victims “of nature” with hard drugs and sex abuse/work, mid-DARVO, which we disassociate from trauma with drugs as having a 1-to-1 comparison: hard drugs means hard emotions tied to hard trauma and time, etc; e.g., like Nic Cage chasing a bigger and bigger high in Mandy after his wife is killed by the biker cult (re: “Mandy, Homophobia and the Problem of Futile Revenge,” 2024); i.e., echoes of middle-class pearl-clutching from Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (1972) and Charlie Manson’s warping of the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter” (1968), themselves being a fascist inversion of revolutionary action—one whose apathy during class war punches up in admittedly cult-like, thus predatory ways: turning to cults, drugs and orderly prison-like places of concealment to escape capital’s usual systems of inequity and harm. People don’t join cults to get raped; they do so to escape rape and rape finds them afterwards, far away from home (re: “Magic Man“)!

In short, we’re abused in situations where drug use is criminogenic, and turn to drugs (or poetry as drug-like) in ways that romantically and cryptonymically subvert our own harm during acid Communism; i.e., as a forever process of chasing our own tails, thus seeking a way out of Capitalist Realism while, in the same breath, chasing our collective generational trauma (and sexual predators) down, solo or as a pack: the revenge of the abused—already gaslit and infantilized by their abusers’ army of enablers keeping up appearances—cutting the abuser off from future prey inside a particular hunting grounds dancing with monsters.

This larger cryptomimetic process occupies the usual half-real, dialectical-material gradient. The Radcliffean children from It or Stranger Things, for example, have a signature revival of neo-conservative elements, but also Tarantino’s (surprise, surprise) Hollywood whitewash romancing of the usual white sexist men/spaghetti-Western Orientalism—the latter doing so not only to demonize Bruce Lee while celebrating Brad Pitt (the former a relatively privileged Asian actor who fought for worker rights in Hollywood/taught martial arts to people outside his own ethnic group, the latter a gentrified leading white man for Tarantino since Basterds), but also to attack Free Love as, fair enough, not totally without need of criticism; re: its selling out from positions of relative privilege (re: Tom Taylor’s “Steely Dan vs John Lennon” but also Jim Morrison, the latter who we’ll examine more in part two), as well as discount its own predation on vulnerable parties while recruiting from/slumming drugs and sex to expand their own spheres of influence, onstage and off.

To it, white moderacy apologizes for systemic rape by scapegoating criminogenic elements, which is what fascism and Communism are; i.e., recipients of American kayfabe’s moral superiority/panic sweeping its own complicit, guilty role in genocide: through centrist violence/persecution mania presenting and preserving the very side that enjoys such benefits to begin with, then going on to abject real-life examples by cryptonymically replicating them.

Tarantino, then, was and is a rape apologist who other rape apologists apologized for while ranking rape themselves (re: Ebert, “Summoning the Whore“). Rape apologia more broadly attempts to separate the art from the artist, or vice versa; e.g., people cried for Sharon Tate—the kept Madonna of child rapist Roman Polanski (re: Dreading), and who didn’t deserve to get murdered—while she and they ignored the class character of these crimes before Tate’s preventable death; i.e., capital causes rape by design because its divisions feed off rape as something to perpetuate into fiction as a gaslight/whitewash during the cryptonymy process furthering abjection; re: Polanski making a meal out of Tate’s death with his own X-rated Macbeth (1971) carrying the idiot’s tale into fiction, followed by Jane Fonda’s onscreen death in Chinatown (1974) likewise being a film that self-reports—one where the guilty investigate themselves by proxy: “She should have died hereafter”! Cops defend capital and present themselves as “of the people,” but they’re not; they cannibalize them from centrist veneers/rape pastiche.

To it, innocence is the first casualty of rape, but it is not the last and doesn’t die with one set/cycle of victims; it cryptomimetically goes on and on, the proof in the pudding! So while a whitewash is a whitewash, Polanski used Nicholson (a famous Hollywood womanizer) to whitewash his own abuse, onscreen and off (re: his 1973 rape of Samantha Geimer happening at Nicholson’s own house before the two men even made Chinatown); i.e., both men were the Pygmalion molding an underage Galatea into their dutiful apologist through a Radcliffean whitewash (the cops essentially investigating themselves). They suck, and however petty it is to root for Ozymandias buying the farm, I happily await their imminent deaths (Nicholson is 87 and Polanski is 91); i.e., I’ll drag both your shriveled pathetic corpses like Mussolini in the streets! You both suck and deserve nothing short of total exposure!

And while there’s a general power imbalance that needs to be recognized, here, the moment a victim shields a victimizer from criticism and consequence (or partakes of rape, themselves, through “prison sex” rituals), they become complicit, too; re: Polanski was a Holocaust survivor (source: “Mateusz Szczepaniak’s “How Roman Polanski Hid during the Holocaust,” 2019); i.e., in a larger system that has protected powerful men like him through their own victims since Black Penitents and the Middle Ages into second wave feminism, Zionism and similar tokenized betrayals.

I’d say to these jackals, “shame on you,” but such women think they’re the only victims in the world (as do the man they’re protecting/exploiting for his power as angels of mercy circling a corpse). They suck, and being victims of rape doesn’t make you exempt from raping others by enabling your rapist boss (the allure of the Manson gang being a devilish wish fulfillment where the rich are eaten by proxy revenge): these are not gods, but boy do they sure act like it! Security trumps long-term wellness, for such cops, and the worst offenders of rape apologia are white women policing the whore for the pimp. Witch cops! Traitors! I hope you never know a moment’s rest, the lot of you! A pox on you to rival Metallica’s (admittedly awesome) “Creeping Death” (1984)! “So let it be written, so let it be done! Let my people go!” you vultures! The pharaohs had nothing on TERFs and the bourgeoisie; e.g., not just Tilda Swinton—the androgynous muse of gay postpunk, Derek Jarman—but Eva Greene, below, sullying her own memory by protecting the old rapey grandpa. Gross!

(source: Sky News’ “Roman Polanski sex assault victim Samantha Geimer urges judge to end 40-year case,” 2017)

That’s the smoke and mirrors of showbiz selling itself as such. Jonestown, by comparison, becomes a place where the oppressed mysteriously went to, and were consequently led astray by a false preacher/missionary (the showbiz of the ancient world surviving out of the medieval under a Protestant ethic); i.e., a self-righteous lothario-in-disguise who preyed on them after those in power had already turned their backs on these same people: the disposed and homeless/housing challenged, who Jim Jones murdered through his infamous murder-suicide pact, in 1978; re: “drinking the Kool-Aid” to play at Socrates (they used cyanide instead of hemlock, but the effect was the same), then calling it “revolution,” postmortem, and which the media would paint with a Red-Scare brush. All to demonize a desire for rebellion while apologizing for and continuing state hegemony/abuse afterwards, white/token moderates would lament the cries of the dead: “Let all the tales of this People’s Temple be told.” From Lewis’ Bleeding Nun to said gospel of corpses, they reach forwards to speak of the hypnotic and seductive modes of discourse that push-pulled them together and apart. They united seemingly together but, at the same time, were alienated and frightened in their final hours on Earth.

And that includes the cries of their dead and dying (source: Jonestown: The Life and Death of People’s Temple, 2006; timestamp: 1:14:50). Why might they have gone to the ends of the Earth/fallen victim to a white conman who preyed on the weak and vulnerable; e.g., women and people of color as political radicals having offshot and held over from the Free Love/Civil Rights period, driven to seclusion and suicide after Vietnam as a matter of predation in South America as the usual frontier for such things? Bear in mind, they killed the children first so the adults would follow without storming the gunmen. Shit’s heavy.

And their dying screams will haunt you, but you should listen to them, anyways, because one day if we do not, our cries will mirror theirs when Elon Musk marches us off to the camps. Capital cannibalizes through tiered revenge arguments; i.e., those closer to the fires helping burn nature to ashes to warm the bourgeoisie: by scrambling to first avoid it, and them give into the purifying blaze after they’ve betrayed their friends. One of the worst casualties of abuse is questioning empathy—my own empathy something I question during the gaslight as stuck inside me; i.e., why was I not more like those raping me; re: put into a position of self-harm, we rape our own minds: “suffer the little children unto me!”

I don’t normally show actual corpses in my own work, but for witnessing and understanding their trauma and struggle to be heard, I will make an exception: “Remember that you have to die!” So learn from the dead to prevent what they were fighting against, to start with. Let it become a thing of the past to learn from; i.e., unburied testimonies that more cowardly and apathetic souls will scapegoat others to avoid gazing upon (the Medusa): comorbid or congenital, the results of capital are always the same! This is not unusual, but an everyday event that—even in small fragments thereof—threatens to drive us mad, mid-rapture. The mind, to protect itself, will shut out the killing fields’ unburied dead; so does Capitalist Realism do the same to pervert its laborers until they are chosen to die. To survive, we must operate unintuitively through emergent observation, the dead exacting a heavy toll that, for me, gives me strength to help those harmed from any crusade, children’s or otherwise! Empathy for/as the alien is our superpower! And I draw strength from the wretched:

So why did Jonestown happen? Because capital and its rape apologia, which is something I investigate through a palliative Numinous that doesn’t preclude madness and pain. To empathize is to feel pain; i.e., with the world as slowly dying en masse. The fact remains, women (and other vulnerable groups) historically-materially sleep with powerful men to survive (for food, shelter and cash, but also positions of power over other women and marginalized groups; re: Carter). Jones merely capitalized on it to deify himself as a Second Coming.

Except, those with more privilege inside a prison will blame the whore for sleeping with the suspicious individuals—as if the women themselves didn’t know what they were doing! While repressed guilt and awareness do happen, survival is generally a Faustian bargain where you consciously have no other options. Indeed, it’s a circuitous blame game—one where centrism and its moral teams/failings selectively employ DARVO obscurantism to hide the fact that America was, and has always been, a settler colony/police state. Under it, rapists can only fail up (re: canceling is a myth), women more prone to fight exposure because they’ve betrayed their fellow oppressed during spurious rape allegations (re: Federici). Such is the Holocaust as simply being profit at work on multiple registers.

So while assimilation is poor stewardship, rape is the opposite of stewardship; i.e., which, under historical-material cycles of reactive abuse, those who seem good/call themselves good to avoid criticism seldom are, and those who seem oppressed can be oppressed and still prey on others (the church of so-called “law and order” being its own mind prison/menticide factory on which to feast on workers, as cops do, above): the false Morpheus or Hades less kidnapping Persephone, outright, and more installing a neon-lit “Come and Get It” sign during perfidious sanctuary (re: Lewis’ cabin in the woods, but those bandits among the refugees targeting the poor instead of the well-to-do, the former easier to abuse).

So while all monsters are made by capital the system’s historical-material divisions/fractal recursion, the whole point of acid Communism is to reclaim such devices for development demasking cops—including token cops and charlatans—as class, culture and race traitors poisoning the well (rape as a terror weapon, but also monsters and drugs; e.g., the lycanthrope as a sexual deviant). Empathy doesn’t preclude persecution turned on its head, but we must challenge profit or suffer the consequences like those at Jonestown. Tarantino and Green “cry” for them daily!

Even so, the fact remains that we practicing witches (and similar marginalized groups on intersectional rungs of mistreatment) can’t get close to nature without broaching to what made it alien and furious to begin with: drugs, but also paradoxically places of play installed for drug use and regressively Paganized sex during ludo-Gothic BDSM investigating our abusers acting in bad faith; i.e., where no obvious trauma currently is, but cryptonymically serves up a kind of “dead supper” to where trauma previously was—meaning in a chronotopic, fourth-dimensional and trippy/phantasmagorical sense: riding out nightmares like a witch on her broom, communing with the Great Mother (someone furious, who we love and feel a great sadness for when she is raped by the colonizer); e.g., myself and Bay communing across vast gulfs of space-time to find empathy and connection while battling for the fate of the planet through rape victims’ uncovered testimony married to our own! Consider this our take on Tchaikovsky’s already super-gay and drug-infused “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy” (1892) cracking deez nuts!

(artist: Winton Kidd)

Anyone who apologizes for rape—any rape at all—is a bigot/cop raping an Omelas child; anyone who clutches their pearls at reading The Monk (and similar veins of exposure) is also a cop, thus a rapist by proxy apologizing for said rape (re: Coleridge)! Puritans gonna Puritan, the pilgrims/pioneers of an endless holocaust we must escape nerdily through sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll’s transformative frontier jouissance during persecution mania and subterfuge!

The Wisdom of the Ancients, then, is always of a space of play hauntologized for “ancient” animal theatre; i.e., with medieval and intersectional persecution language to escape capital by camping its canon; e.g., Link and the Triforce, chasing the whore (the Twilight Princess, below) and using Zelda as a beard to a frankly much-more-fun imp, Midna (and her oscillating betwixt transient and final forms for which no ideal version exists). Cryptonymy is dualistic, hence goes both ways: communicating through the paradox of escape haunted by shadows of rape, alienation and fetishized sacrifice (surrender) giving us power in the real world: “She tall! She thicc!”

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

To it, the idea walks as much a tightrope between predator/prey half-real media between or of two (or more) worlds, but also addiction (of sex, music, theatre and/or drugs); i.e., as something to foster/speak to in animalized forms of danger and delight: we don’t owe our captors squat, and can make the illustration of mutual consent during praxial synthesis supplying an addictive hermeneutic that engenders good education as dialogic; i.e., when addressing overtly chemical addiction versus porn and social addiction (towards power), these being the dialectic of shelter and the alien’s carrot-and-stick as dangled in front of us by white moderates as much as reactionaries; re: Malcolm X’s wolf much less concerned with appearing good than foxes (centrists) do, and both reactionaries and moderates being just as hungry in their shared voracious weaponization of cryptonymy—always of such things abused against workers “of nature” within the colonial binary’s various exceptions and double standards!

Camping that absolutely matters, and it happens where canon does; i.e., during holistic liminal expression anisotropically reversing terror/counterterror to empower workers during dialectical-material struggle invested in such things: we’re the avatar who can be for capital or not using the same basic aesthetics of power and death, hero and whore, rape and “rape” (above)!

That’s part one, in a nutshell and unpacked; part two explores some of the “magic girl” personas attached to natural demons/acid Communism, but also the trauma they face as queer educators working with policed materials; i.e., canonical magic, music, sex and drugs that transform those who are queer into increasingly suitable forms of sacrifice that capital can/will market and sell; re: antagonizing nature as monstrous-feminine by putting it (and its bio-power) cheaply to work through prostitute/pimp refrains (where the best revenge is the whore subverting the pimp’s dreams, mid-paradox-of-terror and -rape)!

To be clear in my intention, the “magic” class obviously includes a panoply of male, female, and intersex wizards and witches of various genders and anthropomorphism—all interacting with nature through a wide performative array of fantastical beings, playful roles and illicit substances: fairies, furries, and unicorns as nature-oriented, magical forms of genderqueer “perpetual bachelor/spinster” expression per Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism; but also the undead-occult variants enraged by or suffering from colonial traumas. There’s just no conceivable way to list them all (or their revolutionary chatter), requiring some degree of generalization (thus abstraction) to talk about two warring hyperobjects; re: Capitalism and Communism chasing a dualistic Numinous while ranking rape (what Bacon, Descartes and their cartography divided between Nature vs Society as a means of conquering the former by the latter and calling it “progress”).

The state is straight, nature a queer whore for it to pimp, and one whose pimping we must camp (during the whore’s dark revenge); i.e., to thrive and survive on such staged (cryptonymic) artificial wilderness, from Matthew Lewis onwards! Behold the sweet, sweaty terror of a false Madonna exposing the state as inhumane: mighty Alruna’s Venus fly-snatch, loaded with honey to catch prey to play with and eat for different hauntological, animal-masquerade reasons (a “trap” in more ways than one, if you feel me; i.e., bourgeois prey versus proletarian “prey” in the same overarching predation dialogs masking rebellion in animal prostitution)!

(artist: Winton Kidd)

On an increasingly darkening path/Promethean Quest subverting the monomyth, then, part two will progress from total innocence, leading into experiences that become increasingly animalized and drug-like. It will begin with the bright, sparkling “magic girl” genre in Sailor Moon (which is centralized in an urban, “city pop” environment). From there, we’ll move onto other monstrous-feminine’s own dark powers of forbidden love speaking to rape differently than Sailor Moon does—Lady Amalthea’s complicated journey as a non-human, shapeshifting animal in The Last Unicorn, before ending on the most transgressive, undead and drug-like of the three sex demons; re: the xenomorph being an Archaic Mother demon lover/killer baby but also a GNC mode of trans(gressive), intersex, and non-binary ancient animal theatre masks, kayfabe, and Amazonomachia mid-courtship/calculated risk during ludo-Gothic BDSM’s own frontier revolutionary cryptonymy reversing abjection/profit as an anisotropic rape process (the Sphinx dooming Oedipus Rex)!

In both sections, then, we’ll also identify the patriarchal, “orderly” forces that hunt and tame nature’s historically female/monstrous-feminine persona; i.e., using colonial, thus prosecutorial violence (re: blood libel, sodomy and witch hunts) through Man Box heroes/tokens who hammer its dark outliers into increasingly acceptable, “useful” forms of submission: pimping the mysterious mother!

To that, we’ll consider how

• these hunters demonize the drug-like, transformative effects that beings of or aligned with nature manifest as a kind of “double method”: queer representation and sex-positive education. The status quo will repress both through violence by demonizing drug-users and animalized practitioners of magic as chattel/vermin to tame, hunt and kill (thus concentrate and exterminate through tokenized, fish-in-a-barrel farming methods).
• the hunted components of nature and how they—including their injured, angry and black, undead-supernatural variants like the xenomorph, but also more strictly organic and animalistic demons like the furry as equally stigmatized—must be reclaimed and subverted from the tamers of nature (token or not); i.e., to restore our holistic bond with nature, moving forward.

Part one will examine the furry as demonized/fetishized by the state; part two, will explore the canonical demonization of queer sex education through natural rituals and magic-/drug-themed heroes; re: ranging from the magic girls previously mentioned—witches and the unicorn, but also the xenomorph as hunted and killed by the status quo’s idea of virgin/whore nature: a subservient, purified “natural” order whipped into shape by weird canonical nerds chasing darkness.

Revolution isn’t clean, then, but a spectacular mess. Chaos, as something to subsequently define, becomes bottled up, twisted by agony during a naturalized process—that of violence during the Hero’s Journey as commodified in defense of the state; it’s only released through unironic violence in canonical forms, and subverted during empathetic rituals—of workers bound up with nature through humanizing procedures of social acceptance and love (sex)—in iconoclastic forms hugging or fucking the alien: a wild animal cannot be tamed in captivity/crossing into civilized life out of the jungle, but merely fetishized as wild in ways that speak as much to liberation and exploitation from a young age onwards! My heart was always young and free, thus goes out to the whores of the world. Born slutty! Represent!

(artist: Lumidetsu)

To that, we’ll also examine the gradual push towards eroticism (e.g., above); i.e., through children’s literature as linked to animal signifiers of virtue and vice (children’s books* often featuring an anthropomorphic, talkative animal with access to magic powers; e.g., Mother Goose, exhibit 56a) that become increasingly erotic, but also Gothically ace/publicly nudist interrogations of power and trauma as children age. So as fandoms “grow up” alongside material written around them, they gradually experience exposure to rape, abuse and death as it presents to them, in the natural-material world; i.e., as a dark radicalism and empathy to cryptonymically chase the usual hard stuff through acid Communism, on the Aegis. Such is our revenge; i.e., when we become fluent in the art of cryptonymy’s shadow war with such demons: on the surface of the image and inside its dualistic thresholds, remediating praxis!

To it, such monkey business can be deliberately introduced back into the wild while in captivity for those exposed to such things; i.e., unto children curious about what many are actually currently living through, thus helping them acclimate to the natural side of the struggle against the state: without feeling hopeless/turning to harmful sex and drug use (though acid Communism doesn’t preclude sex and drug use at large) but also Paganized aesthetics and therapy animals (re: a hauntological “Rite of Spring”) while riding the proverbial lighting in whatever forms we want those “thunderbolts” to take (e.g., Smaug’s boast): a death sentence for indulging in what is forbidden, doing so in ways that free the bridled through a recultivating of the Superstructure as a matter of dark empathy with ludo-Gothic BDSM go-tos! Vice characters dug up and played with like animal bones to rock and roll!

So do we pull a Peter Gabriel and “shock the monkey“; i.e., to subvert Pygmalion’s Pavlovian conditionings and dogma—said socio-material structure blossoming phallically (or whatever it’s called that mushrooms do) into our aforementioned Alruna avenger (spectres of the Medusa having the whore’s revenge in BDSM forms of exchange and transformation)! Capital is dead labor feeding on living labor in ways we exchange/transform and feed vis-à-vis trauma to escape through poetic cryptonymy paradoxically concealing/exposing through a dialectic of the alien friendly to said alien. Now the shoe’s on the other foot!

This being said, it’s a work-in-progress under constant changing factors while flying “straight on till morning” to Never, Neverland (a balancing act)! You’re close and you wanna race to the finish (towards Communism), but also don’t want to ejaculate prematurely. You wanna finish strong and give the Dark Queen you’re topping a nice big cum tribute (the paradox of sex being you want it to last but marathons/the drug high/furry suit and sex brain chemicals [e.g., Macbeth tripping on his own guilt towards the path to killing King Duncan; re: “O fatal vision”] overstaying their welcome)! Obscuring fetishes under high-control systems doesn’t negate the rebellion taking place; we just want to make it uncontrolled in its “ancient” subterfuge” toking on the “fire of the gods,” during a shared and at times unreliable pedagogy of the oppressed healing freakily (as the theatre nerd does) from rape as a shadow of itself, of itself, of itself…

A few extra exhibits (for fun) before we proceed onto part one!

*Regarding children’s books, the same idea applies to cartoons; e.g., Bugs Bunny and company being increasingly sexualized in ways that actually predate the character (the animals in Bambi featuring a tremendous amount of heteronormative sexualizing in a coming-of-age story); but also furry art as predominantly cartoonish, as well as various fantastical BDSM scenarios that invite cartoonish forms of “Pavlovian” subversion. We won’t have time to go into all of these, here; but I wanted to give a good few examples before proceeding onto part one. —Perse

(exhibit 51c: Artist, top-right: Catjira; mid-left: M_D00dles; middle: Pucchixo [AI-generated]; mid-right: Alex Su Sama.

There’s often a satirical element to radical empathy and theatre; e.g., Bugs Bunny and drag go hand-in-hand [seducing the hunter] and have for over eighty years [with men being historically allowed to cross-dress for the status quo during theatre since ancient times, whereas women could not; i.e., Loony Toons‘ numerous allusions to Shakespeare, and classical music, which extends to demonic/”Satanic” poetics]. However, the rabbit is also an ancient symbol of fertility that maintains its erotic Paganized function well into the present space and time: the hares of March making Caesar and his Ides anxious.

This being said, the revival and persistence of this Paganized imagery is generally policed within modular and tokenized double standards; i.e., that furiously treat sexuality and strength as wholly discrete, yet animalized all the same. Just as the virgin and the whore archetypes are segregated to control both female and monstrous-feminine bodies, the myth of the rabbit woman becomes that of a smart-and-sexy or sexy-and-strong straight woman/token Sapphic worshipping Marston and Beauvoir [the Amazon] dressed up in anthropomorphic language [which can also apply to feminized AMAB persons and GNC individuals at large]. Yet, the debate also argues for sexiness as a virtue of animal strength unto itself: that sexiness and strength are not mutually exclusive and that it is possible to depict an animal’s body [female or not] as “strong” through its sexiness or least public nudism; i.e., as an animalistic expression of its athleticism and vice versa being not in conflict, but holistic coordination tying to ancient Greco-Roman ideas of nude anthromorph bodies competing for godly favors [the wish fulfillment of a Promethean neoliberal aping the Ancients’ giving of fame and fortune, thus empty promises of immortality for all but the smallest of select special earners; e.g., Space Jam‘s tokenized athletes, including Michael Jordan]!

Such Omelas debates and their poetry are regularly conducted in relation to popular media as something to sell to children by corporations. Through canon, the elite teach customers how to perform and identify in standardized ways geared towards corporate profit, while also giving future artists the means to rebel against capital with reclaimed language. As nature-themed symbols of eroticism, anthropomorphic rabbits and their nudism become a profound means of genderqueer empowerment for the iconoclast; i.e., as something to subvert heteronormative gender roles and sexuality with in ways that resist worker exploitation: a rabbit to chase. The uniform and the “rabbit” inside it aren’t “just for men” as the universal clientele, to which “sexy” becomes entirely relative, thus decided as much by the artist creating their own representations thereof. We give and receive as ring-bearers “sharing the load” [versus carrying it alone; e.g., Lois Lowry’s god-awful 1993 The Giver little more than Red-Scare screed kicking Socialism while it was down]!)

(exhibit 51d1: Artist: Bassenji. Trauma and resistance to abusive power are commonly conveyed in animalistic expressions of anthropomorphic BDSM [and demonic power exchange] that just as quickly yield trans, non-binary and intersex sentiment and identity through a struggle to self-express by these policed means. In doing so, these groups become monster-fuckers in the eyes of those demonizing them; i.e., by using or encouraging state violence during moral panics against so-called “groomers.”

Except under these xenophobic conditions, power isn’t exclusive to the elite. Instead, state power becomes something to resist by reclaiming our own xenophilic sense of autonomy through demonic poetics as essential to proletarian praxis; i.e., the ludo-Gothic BDSM umbrella extending to a kingdom of anthropomorphized BDSM, kink and transgression: as didactic fantasies to realize with responsible, caring parties. Such parties include the infamous theatrical humiliation of orgasm denial, dick-shaming and -worship, cock-and-ball torture/cock cages, humans dolls, fur suits you can’t put on or remove yourself [similar to a lady’s corset] and various forms of chattelized play emblematic to BDSM, such as age play or pony/puppy play with “parental” elements [daddy/mommy doms] and so on and so forth!

In fact, the number of ways one can play in BDSM is so myriad, endless and complex that I could easily write an entire book on one type alone, let alone try to catalog all of them [with my own bias leaning towards mommy doms/Amazons, Gothic castles/Metroidvania and the Numinous having power over me, for example: exhibit 51d2, below]! To seek power is to seek arrangements of power to perform; i.e., with other people, ours using animalized warriors to abjure fascism [with Nazis furies being a thing sadly].

Through such iconoclastic countermeasures, we workers can illustrate mutual consent through the establishing of trust via negotiated, ironic power exchange; i.e., in pointedly sex-positive monster-fucking exhibits that showcase intersex persons as a lived, physical reality and trans and cis people working with disempowerment as both ironic to them, but also supplied by animal “gods” that project our audience backwards: to a reimagined, xenophilic Antiquity the likes of Ancient Egypt minus the pharaohs. Wherever we go, it becomes an Other Place where the animalized GNC peoples speaking to it dare to suggest its arrival on Earth; i.e., through performative dreams and drug-like threatres breaking Capitalist Realism as a liminal matter of seeing the Medusa as human: a mighty being that wouldn’t have been abject at all, but loved, worshipped and bowed before by their legions of adoring fans [or at least people who don’t want to impound and euthanize us]! A world without sin, thus profit and rape! One can dream!

 In turn, the fluid gender performances that transpire during these rituals are divorced from heteronormative standards; i.e., becoming something to play with, not around, by queer agents and straights allies accommodating the needs of both parties, mid-performance. Ideally the chaser doesn’t harm the chased, even during instances of negotiated humiliation and cathartic objectification/CNC, etc—doing so to allow the cis person to enjoy the fantasy of fucking a queer monster like a doll/fetish without actually dehumanizing them, because negotiation prevents that by design: by decreasing the risk of harm.)

(exhibit 51d2: Artist, top-left: Raspbearyart; top-mid: Morry Evans; top-right/bottom-right: Oda Non; bottom-mid: Kukumomo; bottom-left: Bamuth Chen.

Fantastical gender roles and play during ludo-Gothic BDSM can oscillate between what is classically expected as something to subvert. For example, the female knight is often assigned animalistic qualities that can just as easily be expressed through sheer height, brawn or equipment, but also social positions; e.g., Urbosa from 2017’s Breath of the Wild [bottom-middle/right] as a “big sister” deflowering cliché [the “incest” trope] that more broadly translates to a protector archetype that reverses the role of protector and ward, but can be reversed again while keeping the Amazonian aesthetic for fun!

For example, Link tops the formidable-looking Urbosa as someone to “tame” in the classical scheme of “conquering Hippolyta,” including her “death by Snu-Snu,” albeit with the added irony of a blushing and, physically diminutive and femme male top who is being “steered” from below by a gentle mommy dom. It strikes a good balance between feeling wrong and right in ways that—upon closer examination—fall on the side of right; i.e., during dialectical-material scrutiny and context: “rape” isn’t rape during ludo-Gothic BDSM any more than doggystyle is bestiality [though sodomy laws will treat it as such—meaning in more Puritanical forms of guilty pleasure and wish fulfillment double standards that capital always decays towards, which we’ll examine more in Volume Three]!  

[artist: Oda Non]

So does the wearing of mask-like costumes shield us from criticism and give us a cryptonymic means to camp what is policed; re: the uncanny thrill of friend/foe masks, but also the equally ambiguous predator/prey confusions of the calculated-risk Amazon or knight; i.e., making themselves sexy by giving us the ability to play when we feel like we need to: in order to regain control and have fun in times of crisis and confusion! Play = play as something to rely on during crisis; i.e., when synthesizing praxis. Sluttiness and invention aren’t a source of shame, here, but dark empathy recultivating old ancient pathways towards dark empathy using the corruption of trauma as something to address and heal with at the same time.

As such, it’s both a canonical vice and Communist virtue during the same larger war for territory and value, on the Aegis! So while rape hasn’t gone anywhere, we can always camp it to synthesize catharsis and convert capital into a post-scarcity [thus rape] device! We condition such things to become easily enough a second-nature game; e.g., not just Amazons, but pussy pirates camping the canon, the whore coming for your booty [very 1960s slutty Sapphic, below]!

[artist: Mandy Frizzle]

While this irony works easily enough in cis-gendered, Radcliffean fantasies calculating risk for second wave feminists [who would view the kind of nudity on the left as atrocious, because they’re SWERFs]—and which promote gender swappings with a binary structure of power—GNC cuties’ gender trouble and parody campily expand the realms of play within the same archetypes geared towards intersectional feminism, gender studies and liberated sex work; i.e., as divorced from oppressive binaries and said binaries’ compelled rulesets: the crossdressing double standard that prevents women from acting like men in good faith, but also men from behaving like sweet little brides should they earnestly want to. We ration such indulgence as something to give into through selective performance and mating rituals; i.e., as spiced up with “rape” in quotes during ace public nudism just as often [much of ludo-Gothic BDSM is ace, insofar as it focuses on informed labor exchange as a de facto educational device]! The ghost of the counterfeit, then, becomes a furry slut to empathize with, yielding ironically non-violent forms of ghost-hunting in search of the Medusa’s mythical mutual consent!

With these restrictions further and further eliminated, male performers can likewise adopt the pale satin, bound-and-gagged bride-under-duress with a physically stronger partner they trust not to harm them during a ritual of exquisite “torture,” power exchange, and forbidden knowledge; i.e., as monomorphic according to the “dom/sub” parent dichotomy as something to switch, merge and fiddle with absent of canonical gender trouble and abuse: demons as potentially dominant/submissive, but also knights, tomboys, and palace guards, pillow princesses, etc. All of this can be easily animalized, and indeed would have readily been by the likes of Chaucer during his infamously bawdy and layered Canterbury Tales‘; i.e., “The Miller’s Tale,” in particular, celebrating humans as deliciously animalistic.

Inside increasingly sex-positive iterations, these instructional games of discipline and obedience would be “Pavlovian” in quotes; i.e., minus the threat of actual violence, and meant to reward “good behavior” with “treats” negotiated by both parties in advance, during ludo-Gothic BDSM. As certain animals, but especially dogs, would have been historically conditioned to serve men, “good play” variants made by game-and-intelligent players automatically subvert the historical norms during emergent play while preserving the imagery of a happy groomed dog with its bone [cats and other domesticated animals come with their own clichés, which Volume Zero explores a fair bit].)

(exhibit 51d3: Artist, top-left: Blxxd Bunny; top-middle/bottom-middle-and-bottom-right: Quinnvincible; top-right: Dani Is Online; bottom-left: Bay. The imagery of the happy puppy during puppy play becomes its own form of animalized submission that lends itself surprisingly well to any gender [as well as gender swaps and irony]. It can be campy or canonical, embracing the animal as structured accordingly per ludo-Gothic BDSM as a matter of performative context.

For example, a white cis-het man is normally expected to be strong and iron-willed like a ferocious war dog would, but a male puppy can be someone’s pet—their guardian and/or small, cute delight to tease, train and reward by a given handler/owner/what-have-you; i.e., “grooming” through the language of permission and denial as instructed through the ritualized wearing of collars and use of animal kennels/cages and chew toys [useful for neurodivergent “stimming”] but also adorable, animalized body language. “Melting” for master into a pile of wiggles and wagging tails is par for the course regardless of the performers’ genders, and anthropomorphizing a human subject means supplying them with animalistic qualities that can be ethically sexualized. In other words, they have a humane, descriptively sexual application; i.e., one conducive to liberation as avoiding exploitation while walking the tightrope: to show us how to pull off such gimmicks and not harm ourselves/others, humanizing the harvest!

As our thesis volume argues, animals embody the canonical language of power and resistance as something to camp; e.g., Odessa Stone from Overwatch 2 [with Sojourn, on her knees, next page] as a “war boss” with a kayfabe rival; i.e., whose “queen bitch” status is undermined by fairly standard bedroom reversals [out of the public eye, except our cryptonymy shows the hidden escapades unfolding through transparent places of voyeuristic concealment]: the black soldier putting down her mantle to play in ways normally denied to both of them, literally swallowing her enemy’s pride!

Keeping with ludo-Gothic BDSM, the two sworn enemies playing together can be made campy again, and in ways more inclusive than the palimpsest movies were; i.e., through play as a form of study in its ludo-Gothic BDSM interpretations during creation, critique and consumption—with us making the ghosts of Mel Gibson and Tina Turner gayer than either historically was [more on this in Volume Three]!

[artist: Persephone van der Waard]

 With Amazons or knights as soldiers, this classically happens through animal shells bearing various cat-and-dog [antagonistic] value statements to paradoxically quell and tempt audiences with; i.e., in paradoxical turns of phrase; e.g., “be still, my beating heart [or pulsing clit]!”

Whereas the cat, for example, is feminized in ways that are harder to condition but nevertheless ubiquitous, the dog is linked to Pavlovian conditioning through service as “man’s best friend.” It’s very KISS/”Keep It Simple Stupid.” These canine linguo-material antics are often historically-materially tied to labor and food production, providing playfully apt metaphors for “work, then reward” that many workers will readily understand: milk as the fruits of their labor as, unto itself, something to fantasize about, thus fetishize; re: Sojourn and Odessa stopping the cops-and-robbers gimmick to lap on particular “bowls of milk” [of paradise]: Odessa’s pussy and its cream!

Medieval puns aside, this can be real breast milk, which implies a fatty fertility function to the ritual. At the same time, “milk” during sex games often comes from ironic motherly sources; e.g., a male organ, which lends itself a fair amount of absurdist comedic potential; i.e., being symbolic of “reward” in ways not unlike the vampire’s sanguine and sodomy practices [which overlap with anthropomorphic sex with “animals” hyphenating tooth-and-claw with fang-and-mouth poetry performance games]. It also allows doubles of an ancient kayfabe sort—of dueling with dark copies since Antiquity’s shadow plays and colosseum into Hamlet and the chronotope of the Neo-Gothic’s anti-home bleeding hauntologically into neoliberal ’80s action heroes doubling those through corporatized Orientalism; e.g., Brandon Lee essentially fighting an evil, Fu Manchu double of his own real-life father in Rapid Fire‘s Al Leong the stuntman; i.e., before “Jake” can heroically progress and catch the evil [non-American] drug lord: “Seek power and you shall progress” unfolding among the same shadows to summon and banish; re: that Radcliffe worked with, among so many others, before and after her time in the underworld!

So forget about Star Wars and the monomyth’s own endless [and manipulative] cave of shadows; all simulacra reliably translate poetically into/allow for animalistic forms of self-righteous-vs-nihilistic as polar extremes we want to avoid in either case—i.e., Goldilocks Communism that, through the usual operatic highs and lows, can bite, kick, lick and fuck with/from us as needed: inside the danger disco as a liminal, hot-button, backdoor solution for facetious/sarcastic self-critique going a little nuts for fun but also revolution! Work is holy in a dualistic matter of context; i.e., giving us structure as a dialectical-material means of play and distraction, but also voice to cryptonymically fight back with: fostering empathy for the alien as something capital has a vested interest in dehumanizing. Such is our murder ballad, singing before we shuffle off this mortal coil. “The swans, they swim so bonny o!” [Loreena Mckennitt, 1994]. Pain is data to process, ingested as Moore and Patel’s “antidote to forgetting.”

Furthermore, it’s not centrism by our hand, because centrism doesn’t monopolize balancing acts, and ours upend the bourgeoisie and their cops-and-victims moral code/power games/stochastic terrorism. The basic idea—of doll-like bondage and discipline within chattel poetics—lends itself to many different animal clichés that can either be parodied or revived through earnest pastiche as doll-like, too. Indeed, the likes of animal transformation and ludo-Gothic BDSM—in relation to magic, sleep-inducing or mind-altering drugs, and power exchange—was something Shakespeare revived from Ovid; i.e., to present a dark, hedonistic critique of royal bondage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Come, wait upon him. Lead him to my bower.
The moon, methinks, looks with a wat’ry eye,
And when she weeps, weeps every little flower,
Lamenting some enforcèd chastity.
Tie up my lover’s tongue. Bring him silently [source]. 

This wasn’t just any faerie that Bottom was with; it was a queen fae—with Titania gagging him by royal decree while under the influence of the self-same, sleep-inducing drug: love-in-idleness as vampiric but also demonic and closer to nature as royal, thus Numinous. Her commands of enforced silence and chastity constituted a medieval BDSM—its lush, ludo-Gothic animalized theatrics revived upon a Renaissance stage: Paganistic “incarceration” and servitude tied to a train of fairy-like servants reducing Nick, the rude mechanical, to that of an ass for her to play with and dote on. Come give Mommy a hug! “What dreams may come,” indeed!)

(artist: Henry Fuseli)

Onwards to “Dark Xenophilia, part one: Monster-Fucking and Furry Panic“!

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About the Author

Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

This blog post is part of “Deal with the Devil,” a third promotion originally inspired by the first and second ones I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” and “Searching for Secrets” (2024). The first promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Deal with the Devil” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, Demons (the “Searching for Secrets” promotion covered the Undead Module, which is now live). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Click here to see “Deal with the Devil’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Demon Module) is out (2/14/2025)! 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.

Picking up where “In Measured Praise of the Great Enchantress” left off…

Call of the Wild; or Sex Education: Trans-forming the World through the Trans, Intersex and Non-binary Mode of Being

[the xenomorph is] a classic Gothic puzzle borrowed from medieval thought reimagined in a serialized poetic trend; i.e., looking backwards and proceeding forwards through a malleable, writeable Wisdom of the Ancients. That’s what the creature is/the castles are—spectral, deathly evocations of a world before Capitalism, thus possibly one after it; i.e., death-as-radical-change […] We can reunite, thus use something so awesome (and forgotten) to help liberate our minds from Capitalism and its barriers; but, again, it will be a shock—medieval, foreign, alien, abject (source). 

—Persephone van der Waard, “Derelicts, Medusa and H.R. Giger’s Xenomorph” (2024)

(artist: Jérémy Pailler)

Last chapter, we looked at composite or occult demons and playing with them; i.e., during unequal exchange through manmade and summoned demons: interrogating state trauma and its strange appetites, during the Faustian bargain/Promethean Quest! Now I wish to examine transformation serving a similar poetic purpose as the outcome/goal of said pursuit; i.e., a demonic return to what is alien: per a more natural, totemic and chattelized sort that (thanks to Cartesian interference) often has undead flavors (frozen in torment, being fed on) versus demonic (giving and receiving unequal, forbidden, and dark-and-alien power).

The natural egregore is often anthropomorphic, though, which is why I’m including it in the “Demons” section of the volume; i.e., tied to magical, drug-like factors that convey nature and the material world as interacting back and forth, often erotically and to transformative extremes concerned with changing the identity but also the shape of the human body as demonic with undead potential. I don’t think the distinctions are clearly made and I don’t want to stress them too much. Instead, I want to provide them somewhat loosely to keep things organized; i.e., inside a book portion that remains a loosely anemic, truncated and nebulous survey of what we don’t have time to do more than scratch the surface of. I’ll write that chapter on little mushroom men, someday—just not today!

Under capital, nature is part of human parlance as abject; i.e., “call of the wild” and “nature calls” disguising taboo subjects made unspeakable by Capitalism but also speaking to things that are quite common[1] and difficult to control: equating human anatomy (often sex organs) to animal organs as a form of religion; e.g., “horse cock” as divine or monstrous[2] but also something to identify as such, then own and dominate (“A horse, am I? A horse, indeed!”). Everyone likes and responds to animals and sex, but these are dominated by the state through its bad (Cartesian) education; i.e., towards regular human behaviors that combine the two through ancient theatre and more recent persecution language (re: blood libel, sodomy and witch hunts): animal costumes and sex, aka anthromorphs and anthropomorphism as an aphrodisiac, state of grace, and educational device we must liberate in drug-like ways/struggles; i.e., the state is straight, antagonizing nature as queer to pimp, thus put it to work in police, us-versus-them models.

So if “Forbidden Sight” concerned the Faustian bargain and Promethean Quest—i.e., where home is alien calling to us alienated from nature and from ourselves as afraid in all directions—then “Call of the Wild” concerns said call back to reunion with the alien as something to hug as a matter of shelter and exchange: when nature pushes back against the colonizer in ways that transform them!

And if “Forbidden Sight” also focused on exchange to upset the sense of abject (us-versus-them) vision the state needs to profit off of/pimp nature, then transformation is what we’re focusing on, here; i.e., to have the whore’s revenge as an alien mode of existence—not as something to punish during live burial, but to propose a question before crossing over in new orders of existence tied to older ones: “to be or not to be. That is the question.” It camps Radcliffe’s fear of the Black Veil as something to cross, but also what lies beyond it (and Capitalist Realism) as inside the chronotope, mid-cryptonymy (with “black” representing the alien whore per state rhetoric); re: “on the ashes of something not quite present.”

Things only become more hauntologized as time goes on; i.e., any pulling of the veil aside meant to calm the colonizer and tell themselves there is no Medusa on the other side! Doing so only “works” because they can’t see her/have blocked her out to exorcize their sense of division and possession of nature, abjecting it through DARVO obscurantism. But the classic Gothic moral is that Medusa is still there at the end, waiting patiently for reunion or (for you) to literally die should you continue to block her out. Yet “death,” being dualistic, is also a fulfillment of deep, dark desires that constitute—as always—a sanctifying of things the West tries, ever and always, to pimp: “You’d be surprised what you find out there if you go looking.” I did, and have brought Hell and its Numinous pleasures back with me, to Earth; i.e., during the liminal hauntology of war (the revenge of the Medusa)! This nightmare is just beginning! “I saw the booty on the Aegis and thought, ‘Chick’s got an ass like an onion!’ [next page]” To set the whore free is to release something the state can never fully control: men (or anyone in the Man Box) are weak/fear what they don’t understand through unironic domination, and if you want to critique power, you must go where it is stored. “Your Majesty! Hail to the Queen,” Avenged Sevenfold! I got your “Man Box” restraining order, right here! “Nice fuckin’ model!” We take the cake and back it up, fucking to metal!

(artist: Cheekie)

This chapter will be far more fragmented than the others—layered with thick clumps of exhibits that survey possible examples of the natural class of monsters; i.e., a bestiary whose compendium demands additions. Nature is far too complex to list entirely across multiple surveys, let alone all at one. Instead, this penultimate chapter offers a thorough-but-incomplete survey of something whose diversity we suggest as much by what’s left out as not; i.e., nature as something awesome and massive to commune with through “past” visions of itself grappling with Capitalism as equally hypermassive.

Specifically keep the modular thesis in mind, as I won’t have time to set it up and stress it neatly per monster type as either undead or demonic animals; 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. 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 using the same aesthetics (source).

As such, bearing pain and feeding or transformation and knowledge/power exchange is anisotropic in animalized forms of monstrous-feminine body language.

In turn, the traumas of capital make workers decay/corrupt into Communist or fascist (token or not), albeit in ways that cause said transformers to develop undead/demonic feeding habits that are, to some degree, sex-positive and/or sex-coercive. It’s seldom clean; i.e., lurking in the odd “Twilight Zone” grey area of the theatre stage, and inside the monster costume, on and off said stage. Nor are these forces unique to neoliberal Capitalism—with past poets closer to death, rape and raw sexuality in ways modern (usually middle-class) workers have been alienated from; i.e., owing to technological advances/estrangement and different degrees of intersecting axes of privilege and persecution (save in fetishized forms that serve profit). Hauntology lets us brush up with the past as nostalgic in ways that never existed and push towards Communism as aborted by capital/the project of abjection (and other Gothic theories).

You’ve probably noticed the expanding of said thesis to include undead and demonic elements over the course of the volume. This trend will only continue when we look at the creative successes of proletarian praxis (and sex, gender and identity-as-performance in Volume Three when combating tokenism).

Our general focus, here, is learning from nature about violence, terror and sexual morphologies; i.e., as controlled by state monopolies silencing proletarian ones (censorship equals extinction); i.e., queer-transformative elements that feel magical, xenophilic and drug-like (during acid Communism) but also controlled, forbidden, and chattelized: as a potent and hauntological, sex-educational means of escaping Capitalist Realism to become better stewards of nature than Capitalism is (which only rapes nature). “We murder to dissect,” Wordsworth declares, in “Tables Turned” (1798). “Let Nature be your teacher” (source). Our stewards must challenge the state’s, including whatever drugs and magic (actual and/or poetic) we put into our bodies (“You are what you eat” confusing the sex/senses regarding sex in a highly medieval way—i.e., “eating” = sex in undead circles, which can jump over to demonic and/or animal ones; e.g., Bowser, below) to encourage healthy appetites versus canonically alienating ones.

Again, power is performance, mid-praxis, and everyone loves the whore (female or not; re: Bowser is a man-whore to Peach’s wifely and canonically female one) and prostitution goes both ways; i.e., moves state terror language back towards police terrorizers when taking such things back, ourselves—land, laborer and work—the guerrilla turning kingdom anisotropically upside-down, mid-duality during liminal expression: you can’t exist without raping us; we can thrive without you, terraforming the colony into a Hellish space that idiomatically chokes our colonizers dead/summons friends (up like mushrooms) to our side on the Aegis! Sweet sodomy, humanizing the harvest while it claps back! “That all you got, motherfucker? Can’t kill me! All shall worship and fear me. Ahegao or not, HERE’S TRUE POWER!” To be someone’s pet but not be owned by them; or vice versa, to master someone you cannot own, chattelize or harm. Such is ludo-Gothic BDSM:

(artist: Justino)

The idea is revenge against profit while eating their treats to subvert them, our “going to pound town” and enjoying ourselves just icing on a fat, tasty cake (or whose frosting is the cake? Take your pick)! In any event, revolution is relative as a matter of time and application; i.e., while a watched pot never boils, eventually it happens very slowly and then all at once. Like an orgasm, then, revolutions concern sex discussed in quotidian forces that have ancient healing properties per the Gothic Romance speaking to the reclamation of old lost things; e.g., monsters, cooking and sex, but also poetic hyphenations of those things celebrating the haunted process being something to reclaim: exchange back and forth is power in ways that enrich workers versus state weirdos, the latter trying to send everything up to the Man while raping their own minds to do so!

(exhibit 51b4a1a: Far-top-left: snoozedboi on r/okbuddychicanery[3]; far-bottom-left: Persephone van der Waard’s cooking pot; left: Dr. Pepper Vixen; middle: Delanie; right: Patrick Gañas; far-top-right: Moon; far-bottom-right: Medusa. The Gothic admits happily that “death” is funny during live burial “punishing” the wicked, who restlessly dig up powerful bone[r]s during graveyard sex. Good sex often sounds like bloody murder but isn’t. Yet such things tie to the home as historically loaded with trauma and exploitation; i.e., as paradoxically liberating when camped; e.g., my cooking pot glows red, this little pot-stirrer stirring up trouble [and making chicken stock, but I digress]. Doing so combines with sex, food and class, culture and race war raising awareness and emotional/Gothic intelligence towards universal liberation; i.e., leading to payoffs that are as much the journey [showing ourselves off during the cryptonymy process] as the penetration/destination [reversing abjection]!)

To it, there’s no argument the state could make that would make us voluntarily surrender that power once we’re conscious of it; i.e., in ways that expose their chicanery (and our delight in doing so)! Mortal after all!

As such, the chapter divides into three parts:

• Part one: “Hunter and Hunted; or, Nature vs the State” (included in this post): Will outline the different animal types (separate from undead and demonic) and revisit their broader settler-colonial relationship to the state as something to challenge; it then provides some examples of medieval sexualized expression/poetic devices (from the Poetry Module) and labor that, while fun, we won’t have time to explore beyond briefly exhibiting them (nature is simply too diverse[4]).
• Part two: “Dark Xenophilia; or, ‘Far Out, Dude!’ Monster-fucking and Magic Girls Helping Foster Dark Radical (Communist) Empathy During Healthy Sex Education (for Children and Young Adults into Adulthood)”: A subchapter that divides in two, each half roughly weighing the undead “ace to ass” side of the animal monster equation (furries and furry panic) and the demonic side (drugs and acid Communism, but also children’s sex education going from young adults into adulthood; e.g., Sailor Moon, The Last Unicorn and Giger’s xenomorph) i.e., when raising dark empathy tied to the natural world as alien under capital, and reunited through Communism’s good sex education tied to dark xenophilic monsters and drug use: as a poetic, awareness- and intelligence-raising device versus fascism and capital’s polar opposite of that (re: the state is incompatible with life, thus empathy and consent, pimping nature as monstrous-feminine).
• Part three: “Saying Goodbye: Onto Better Times Ahead (and Harder Ones)”: A small antechamber/liminal space between “Call of the Wild” (included with that chapter) and the closing section of the module; i.e., where we say goodbye to the black rabbit and prepare to face what’s ahead without them: heading into the known-unknown cryptonymy of dead capital (malls or otherwise)!

So carry on, my wayward children! Our target is fostering radical empathy through dark, drug-themed sex education tied to nature-as-alien; i.e., Medusa’s calling for you! Nature is monstrous-feminine, and historical materialism’s a bitch, but “I knew right from the start, you’d put an arrow through my heart!” (Ratt’s “Round and Round,” 1984). “I’m gonna make you mine!” Topping’s hard work; so’s being a mother! Time to pay the Devil her due, and her fatal nostalgia as something to return to! Let’s get blasted!

(exhibit 51b4a1b: Artist, far-left [all commissioned by Odie of their OC, Donni]: ; far-left: Persephone van der Waard; left-top:; left-bottom: Roe Mesquita; right-bottom: Gabo Caricaturas; right-top: Sensaux; right: Lucy Fidelis. Medusa is the classic power bottom topping from below. So while it classically sucks royal ass to be the snake the state hauntologically wants to pimp and behead during the abjection process, we canonically essentialized whores can reclaim what has since been used to disempower us to reclaim our power and poetry, mid-exposure: a strip tease that fosters mutual consent, making rape impossible but speaking to past histories of it haunting the cryptomimetic collage. The above theme is flexibility/yoga, non-white black skin and snakes. Pick your own and go wild restoring empathy as whores do—through their bodies! Reap the whirlwind!)

“Call of the Wild,” part one: Hunter and Hunted; or, Nature vs the State

“Revenge! The King under the Mountain is dead and where are his kin that dare seek revenge? Girion Lord of Dale is dead, and I have eaten his people like a wolf among sheep, and where are his sons’ sons that dare approach me? I kill where I wish and none dare resist. I laid low the warriors of old and their like is not in the world today. Then I was but young and tender. Now I am old and strong, strong, strong, Thief in the Shadows!” he gloated. “My armour is like tenfold shields, my teeth are swords, my claws spears, the shock of my tail a thunderbolt, my wings a hurricane, and my breath death!”

—Smaug the Stupendous, The Hobbit

(artist: Kardie)

Whereas Volume Zero encapsulates a variety of theories regarding Cartesian domination (re, and not for the last time: “Animals embody the canonical language of power and resistance as something to camp through demonic and undead forms,” source), and Volume One’s “Predator and Prey” considered “the theory of revolutionary cryptonymy through morphological expression when using animalized Gothic aesthetics” (source), part zero of Volume Two’s “Damsels, Detectives and Sex Demons” has already examined the natural world (and by extension, workers); i.e., as defended through the Medusa cryptonym and dualistic revenge’s death-and-rape theatre (for us/for the state) with memento mori stand-ins.

Now I want to outline the natural class of monsters, explain their educational role in relation to the state at large (and the whore’s transformative revenge against it; i.e., by effectively turning into a castrating “Valkyrie” avenger, above), and intersperse/conclude part zero of this chapter with some extraneous (but fun) exhibits (our aforementioned fragments being breadcrumbs on a fable I expect you beautiful queens to finish).

Reversing Fred Dekker’s weird principal guy (“I smell like the ’40s!” next page) from The Monster Squad, “I used to think science was cool—and well, I guess I’m just a big kid because, my dear readers, I think monsters (whores, and nature) are cool; I DIG IT, MAN!” Monsters (of mad science/weird magic) are real and cool; i.e., because they live within us and represent our struggles in ways we can recreate and decolonize from state cryptonymies and abjection: tied to the natural world being victimized by Cartesian madmen of reason, including us becoming cops and/or victims! Trauma and assimilation are always a dice roll, and weird attracts weird in ways we can challenge (re: Socrates questioning authority versus Plato’s cave speaking to Aristotle cementing authority as a mirror problem).

To it, kids aren’t stupid, and while my audience isn’t strictly children, there’s a child-like glee and open-mindedness I want to speak to, as we proceed. I don’t want you to tell me what you think I want to hear from you; I want you to learn how to think for yourselves in order to set your minds and bodies free—by reuniting both, as monsters do, and doing so as to make new monsters yourselves that speak to those in power abusing you (re: the principal being the principle [so to speak] abuser, above)! Motivate through ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., as a poetic means of universal emancipation while playing with the past, not selective endorsement, conversion therapy and bigotry that—through the usual process of abjection and cryptonymy visiting blindness historically-materially on the middle class, during boom-and-bust—only yields Omelas orphans, in some shape or form (eat your heart out, Oliver Twist)! Con men suck, and no one’s more predatory (and false, self-righteous) than high school principals (a continuation of priestly predation [on young boys and other children] into a Protestant ethic, under neoliberal Capitalism’s New World Order). Surviving them and abjuring profit is our revenge!

The problem is, there’s just so many monsters to work with (re: “So Many Monsters, So Little Time”); i.e., we can only outline them, here, and point all of you—workers of all ages—in the right direction and let you take it from there. “But thou must!”

First the natural class’ various distinctions:

• totems: “a natural object or animal that is believed by a particular society to have spiritual significance and that is adopted by it as an emblem.” In other words, the animal reifies a particular quality associated with human society and virtues/vices; e.g., the dragon as a symbol of cruelty and strength.
• lycanthropes/furries: a shifting class of animal demon; this transformation can be total, but generally is anthropomorphic, thus in-between totally human and totally animal. While “furry” is the common term and generally refers to hairy animals, it also involves non-mammalian animals such as reptiles (e.g., the Argonians from The Elder Scrolls franchise, exhibit 84b), insects, and fish. Rule of thumb: the less pleasurable the reproductive cycle, the more abject or “strict” the BDSM for this furry type will be; e.g., parasitoid wasps or lampreys (so-called vagina dentata) or “feral” furries that feature animal genitals other than human (which is common with monster dildos bearing out fantastical/animalized qualities; i.e., that feature “a ghost of the” counterfeit flavor—exhibits 37b1 from “Healing through Rape,'” 37c1b from “Transforming Our Zombie Selves,” and 38a, from “Playing with Dolls“).
• chimeras: a blend of different stigma animals into a single monster, either through composite mad science or magical forces.
• sentient animals: animal[5] demons or familiars, often associated with a practitioner or embodiment of magic attuned with the natural world; e.g., the witch’s cat, but also a bond with nature that is biomechanical (e.g., the brim of a mushroom hat, below, as much a part of the witch’s body as she is a part of the world she stewards/is the dark virgin/whore mommy of what the state only wants to pimp, police and rape for profit; re: capital merely a system of patriarchal control combined with various persecution languages and token Man Box/”prison sex” elements abused by weird canonical nerds and challenged by weird iconoclastic nerds synthesizing catharsis).

(artist: Jessica Nigri)

First, let’s remember what I said in “Damsels, Detectives, and Sex Demons,” part zero:

settler colonialism is built to spread its dogma across all the media it can, escalating towards extermination from an initial position of ostensibly being wronged. Be it a novel, movie or videogame, the exterminator then goes into Hell, monomyth-style, to right said wrong and defend Capitalism from the “end of the world” at the “end of the world”; i.e., Capitalist Realism… (source).

Such dereliction versus the discharging of expected duties (the abjection process) requires seeing “Hell [as] a place on Earth…” through franchised material that jumps from medium to medium.

Except, we’ve already looked at Medusa and wars of extinction (and their more moderate Neo-Gothic bigotries). So now we’ll briefly return to, and look at, the franchised videogames Cameron’s refrain inspired (nine pages); re: to execute Cartesian rhetoric and uphold Capitalist Realism regarding all the natural world as something to possess and repossess in dialectical-material opposition—in drug-like nightmare scenarios sold to children into adulthood: the apocalypse of Metroid and Metroidvania, but also Doom and the entire shooter genre as extending to reinsert itself into and out of videogames, at large; i.e., those texts that want for a policeman/token hero under settler-colonial conditions, yet poach nature for profit to serve the state by making children afraid of nature (who, as we said, grow up to commit atrocities for the state; re: the Monster Squad loves monsters so it can selectively punish and kill them during moral panics; e.g., exhibit 34c1a2a2a:, from “Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse“). From there, we’ll expand this dichotomy to nature at large; i.e., something for us to reclaim and liberate through dark empathy on the same drugged, acid-Communist stages of performative monstrous exploitation (whose poetic mode of thought—and sex education for children conducive to dark empathy—part two will explore).

Simply put, our doing so raises a question of reeducation relative to Nature as something to defend from Society per the Cartesian mode and vice versa; i.e., good education (for workers) vs bad vis-à-vis canonical (thus Cartesian) essentialism relative to a pair of warring Numinous hyperobjects and their smaller extensions and abstractions. Time and time again, Capitalism maps out nature to conquer it; i.e., through a Manifest Destiny argument extending to those defending nature from capital through various divisions they must survive and reclaim, under fire; e.g., male and female (a false binary given how world biology monomorphic). This goes beyond overt, vivid examples of settler colonialism “back then” (the Indian Wars, which are still going on) or “elsewhere” (e.g., Palestine) and applies to day-to-day life inside America; re: as a settler colony whose project thereof extends neoconservative dogma into official educational sectors (schoolteachers) and de facto ones (monomyth stories, including videogames, next page).

Regardless, those defending the profit motive will act said motive out; i.e., against those who challenge the mechanism in and out of itself, meaning the state is classically by definition against workers and nature, but also any Gothic poetic expression it abuses to further profit during mirror and virgin/whore syndrome: nature is alien whore raped back into a maiden (for a time); rinse and repeat during the Capitalocene until the sun goes out (state shift)! Such is capital expressed faithfully through dogma of all kinds!

Anything that challenges the state is criminal, then; i.e., a dragon to be slain (thus uphold Capitalist Realism) by hunting them to extinction while silencing their pedagogy in favor of state voices. Doing so becomes classy and cool, the baroque raping of the abject (often set to Bach as much as ’80s rock songs’ recuperated sex, drugs and rock ‘ n roll—thus writ in Latin, or some such pompous-and-divisive bastion of the West embarking on carving things up and naming[6] them); i.e., becoming what weird chudwads “need” to survive, to get laid, to give their sad little lives meaning: “I wanna go home/there’s no place like home” as the state envisions it, provided you play along with their bullshit!

Such heroes condition as much like Pavlov’s cats (or Schrodinger’s, I suppose) versus his dogs, the bourgeois fat cats starving the middle class’ bulimic quacks, then shining a laser pointer while directing them/herding cats into the usual kennels to feed, feast-or-famine; i.e., to devour fresh monstrous-feminine food during half-real escapist power fantasies, which they then carry in their stomachs back to the motherland for subsequent regurgitation: to nourish the elite in a neoliberal escapist racket that goes on and on and on, from one generation to the next, until the end times!

In short cops must always be raping something (re: “taking away its power to harm it”). Nature becomes something to harvest and—because it is alien and criminal—guiltily spit out in disgust for the elite to siphon into themselves. It’s a very disgusting affair—unhealthy appetites that are taught by what is offered ad nauseam, and anything unwelcome being viewed as shit, vomit or some such discharge to reject yet guiltily seek out (the world is a toilet during Zombie, Vampire and/or Demon Capitalism). Clearly workers must change the predator/prey dynamic at large; i.e., what is made and how it is consumed and digested (thus ruminated on): war simulators canonically essentialized as monomythic, which we have explored extensively already with videogames throughout this series:

(exhibit 51b4a2a: Per Tolkien’s hauntological medieval/refrain, dragons reify cruelty and greed, but also monomythic reward; i.e., to steel one’s nerves and steal back from [for the state turning you into its heroic assassins]. In the unironic quest for mastery during videogames, the monstrous-feminine is something to stab; re: the proverbial dragon to slay as one of the many “forces of darkness” that has tremendous queer potential/drug-like references to older American anti-war counterculture, when camped. Any who canonically support this illusory refrain will be welcomed like “Caesar” into “Rome”; any who challenge it will always be victims of Capitalist Realism by its usual enactors framing such iconoclasts as unwelcome invaders thereof. DARVO is DARVO; from Anita Sarkeesian to us, Gamergate is Gamergate inside a larger fortress mentality gamers defend from whores.)

In this respect, my area of expertise is videogames. For example, Squaresoft’s 1987 Dragon Warrior (above), features an early example of the JRPG system being set to the violent mapping of a given space; i.e., mapping and invading it, then plundering the area of its contested resources by stealing those from the most powerful of its enemies: “hoarders” framed as unrightful claimants to a stolen or false castle, thus taking the kidnapped princess from the evil dragon “boss” to restore Patrilineal Descent through the Divine Right of “Good” Kings.

Historically this ordeal tends to be very “grindy”—with the hero “leveling up” by “farming” these resources many, many times over during a single quest, but also multiple quests and sagas; i.e., a series of level-like crusades meant to conceal neoliberal exploitation during present structures through a ghost of the counterfeit; re: one that acclimates state youngsters towards a heteronormative path of war and exploitation as thoroughly nostalgic, but also numerical and topographical (re: exhibit 1a1a1h2a1, from Volume Zero/”A Note About Canonical Essentialism“).

Per the map of conquest as Columbus framed it—and which Tolkien revived in his own uber-racist worlds (as noted by China Mieville and later by me as far more critical of Tolkien than Mieville was[7])—each outing can be logged, charted and competed against for higher and increasingly lauded “arcade-style” numbers (the map being fundamentally unmappable insofar as its castle-narrative is a meta enterprise tied to profit; re: “Lost in Necropolis” and Volume Zero). Levels, minions, lieutenants (mini-bosses), and bosses; rape the scapegoated Nazi-Commie whore rocking out at the center of the maze (the Dragon Lord or Archaic Mother), then rinse and repeat; i.e., a manhood to prove not once, but over and over ASAP for the pick-up artist cryptonymically half-disguised as a wolfwhistling and dogwhistling “gamer bro”: a chronotopic, now-tokenized rite of passage and succession that Tolkien helped canonize/apologize for with—among other things—abject racism, rampant sexism, bad BDSM, and Zionism-in-disguise (re: “Goblins, Anti-Semitism and Monster-Fucking“)! He’s a cunt cop, and anyone who doesn’t acknowledge that immediately and aggressively (re: Melville) is also a cunt cop!

(exhibit 51b4a2a: Artist, left: c:\user\elaine; everything else by Persephone van der Waard. Harmony Corrupted as model, top-right; ink for middle and bottom-middle by Dacoda. The avatar is, in canonically monomythic terms, always an Amazon to subjugate vengeful whores to destroy by following their siren song on the Promethean Quest, and maiden-in peril from some monstrous-feminine. But per Creed and myself, our revenge can be during the same abjection process reversed against Pygmalion’s avatars grooming Galatea to be his pedophilic master/slave. What the colonizer can’t restrain and manipulate, they’ll resent having the same genitals rubbed in their faces in ways they can’t use for profit; i.e., “Here comes the airplane…” 9/11-style [and before anyone American acts morally outraged, how many tears did you shed for the Iraqis, Afghanis, or any other victims of American Imperialism, before, during or after that point?]!)

As always, the hero triangulates against nature, becoming the elite’s chosen champion—their exterminator, destroyer and retrieval expert dutifully bringing lost territory and property back to them by playing “guerrilla” during the monomyth; i.e., Tolkien and Cameron’s refrain as a Faustian bargain with Promethean results. Money moves through nature, and nature is alienated and fetishized to serve profit in an endless cycle of settler-colonial, Cartesian, heteronormative violence; i.e., Capitalism is a cancer that grows inside people, teaching them to devour nature for the elite until the world as we know it dies (which, per Capitalist Realism) is easier for them to imagine than a world without Capitalism. In turn, the post-capitalist potential of pre-capitalist poetics is emptied for a simple ludic refrain: the monomyth as half-real, discouraging the likes of critical expression by reaching for a pre-capitalist nostalgia; i.e., Cameron fans hating on Scott’s latter-day films (re: my “Outlier Love: Enjoying Prometheus/Covenant in the Shadow of Aliens,” 2021), thus allergic to ambrosia as a poetic means of transforming capital to help workers.

This intended gameplay isn’t limited to fantasy JRPGs, but any neoliberal fantasy that displaces neocolonial violence through Capitalist Realism limits where the imagination can even go through cliché, lucrative theatrics; i.e., Final Fantasy never being final, any more than Halloween, Metroid or LotR were.

In the 20th century, this co-opting of science fiction arguably started with Heinlein’s Starship Troopers or Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, which provided the ideological bedrock for Cameron’s Aliens, and which, as I remark in “Military Optimism” (and cite in our thesis statement):

(artist: Adam Hughes)

A widely successful and canonical work, Aliens‘ influence on the videogame industry is profound, inspiring the entire shooter genre. This includes:

• • FPS (first-person shooters) like Doom (1993)
  • TPS (third-person shooters) like Metroid
  • RTS (real-time strategy games) like StarCraft (1996)
  • turn-based strategy games like X-COM: UFO Defense(1994)
  • hybrids (for these, refer to my FPS interview series, but also my Metroidvania PhD research and interview series with Metroid speedrunners, “Mazes and Labyrinths“)

Most shooters are sci-fi, but even fantasy outliers like Heretic (1995) were inspired by Doom. Shooters generally give the player guns to use against “alien” enemies—either from outer space, hell, or underground (aliens, demons, zombies). Strategy games are a bit more niche, and don’t focus on tactical reflexes, but the sentiment—of shooting bugs with guns—remains the same: “Die, monster! You don’t belong in this world!”

The idea—that anyone can shoot their problems—is a soldier’s fantasy. Although videogames shrink them into human-sized demons, we can’t kill our problems in reality. But a great many people seem happy with the fantasy because it feels empowering. Alas, this attitude doesn’t stay inside videogames. Fans of the shooter genre are often fans of real-world guns, and of war (source).

Before we proceed, a word about the oppressor mindset and modular nature of survivor trauma living in the shadow of state violence; i.e., regardless of monster type or media. Per Marx, “dead labor feeds on living labor”—with the undead stuck in the middle, and demons classified as scientific failures; e.g., composites or robots of “mad science,” or existing entirely outside of civilization as part of nature or an occult, supernatural plane. Either type must be destroyed according to Cartesian thought making players feel like champions; i.e., even speedrunners, when they treat the puzzle-solving as pure escapism, but also places to crow their own accomplishments inside puzzles made for them by capital[8]: the maze, shooting gallery and ancient, marathon-style race merged with kayfabe, the monomyth, Amazonomachia and the dialectic of the alien to move money through nature using the monstrous(-feminine) hero as the avatar to make this possible; re: the centrist cop/undercover operative in neoliberal refrains, onstage and off!

(artist: Moonshen)

There is, however, a third option that also communicates state trauma as something to face in popular media, but especially videogames: a demonic-undead option tied to the natural world; i.e., as John Carmack envisioned it when he and John Romero made Doom in 1993: “demons versus [mankind’s] technology” as a spiritual successor to Aliens (source: Fandom) and the abject, undead, bio-mechanical rage of that franchise’s “xenomorphs.” In Doom, the undead factor is ever-present during an imperial scheme; i.e., as the 1994 sequel, Doom II: Hell on Earth, sees the Imperial Boomerang returning to its settler-colonial origins: home base (exhibit 51d4a2, four pages down). Under such echopraxial circumstances, the desire to solve one’s material problems, phobias and pent-up emotions through undead-demonic slaying metaphors can be cathartic in the abstract; just remember what you’re “shooting” at, mid-apocalypse/-invasion and to prevent the persecution of those habitually demonized during moral panics, outside the text—i.e., anyone marginalized by capital through those who tend to benefit from it; re: Samus is Boba Fetta working for the Evil Empire!

(exhibit 51d4a2b: Artists: CScottyW, Behemoth87, Shiny Zeni; source: Persephone van der Waard’s 2021 “‘Mazes and Labyrinths’ Q&A, Interview Compendium!” Pilots of Samus. You don’t have to be a massive twat to be a member of the colonizer class. All three men are of said class, and likewise have white, male privilege, to boot. Having interviewed each of these Metroid franchise WR holders for why they run these games, it’s largely in-text and about competition for/with other gamers; i.e., which historically-materially means other gamers “like them.” It’s not to raise awareness—nor demonstrably help anyone oppressed systemically by capital—but to aggrandize themselves and themselves alone by competing endlessly for personal glory and wealth, thus bragging rights, per game.

And these ostensibly chill dudes might not appreciate my academic conclusions about them, four years after the interview series petered off [similar to Jeremy Parish pitching a fit about what I wrote about him; re: “Modularity and Class” and “From Master’s to PhD“] but them’s the breaks; i.e., they’re white, middle-class straight boys making money and only making money during an open genocide inside a system designed to cater to their needs since its inception: from the tabletop games of the ’60s and ’70s, to videogames from 1973 onwards, ’86s Metroid and ’93s Doom pioneered by Cameron and id Studios using Gates’ computers, into an Internet privatized after the early 2000s around the same kinds of men; re: Twitch being a platform run by a Yale graduate entrepreneur/venture capitalist and known for protecting men who fail up/conduct pedophilia; e.g., Doctor Disrespect, who the system protected for as long as it possibly could; re: burying his reports and paying him out in 2020, banning him, then letting him return a month later and sitting on the case for years.

The usual benefactors tend to “forget” this, but courts and companies exist to protect the powerful and the in-group [white straight men] and always have; i.e., despite Joon the King insisting “There Is No Comeback” for Doctor Disrespect in 2024, he’s already been remonetized [Cyprian(Cyps)Draku’s “DOC Gets Monetization BACK!” 2025]. Canceling is a myth for straight white boys doing what they always have done under capital, and which they accuse others of doing through DARVO arguments; i.e., exploiting vulnerable parties from positions of power and privilege since at least Catholic priests; e.g., “the trans women are pedophiles, not us!”

To that, Doctor Disrespect is a black penitent literally wearing rapist glasses[9] and a porn ‘stache—and who straight up admits to having “inappropriate messages with a minor” [Double Toasted, 2024] while also cheating on his wife [who protects him because he’s the breadwinner]—yet continues to thrive in a system that has only expanded to/tokenized through other venues of conquest; i.e., per the Protestant ethic and neoliberal Capitalism during the Internet Age under Capitalist Realism. Protecting people like Disrespect is literally protecting capital, and extends to Mel Gibson, Bill Gates, Bill Cosby and anyone else seemingly made of Teflon. They’re not “correct”; they’re protected by a system that literally lets them get away with rape, murder and any other crime for anyone but them! Trump pardoned the January 6th insurrectionists; what’s another rapist/adulterer like himself?

In turn, white male privilege carries with it white male fragility but also golden handcuffs, and not once have I seen any of these people [the speedrunners above and their friends] discuss anything but games; i.e., as things to play “without politics.” As such, Gamers™ who stream and speedrun [for the reasons listed above] are the heroes in a tale told by/for idiots; i.e., activism/political action doesn’t tie to their existence, because their existence is already secure provided they toe the line! That’s what “fair and balanced” means to them: intended play/emergent play so long as it upholds the status quo. This includes an omerta [cone of silence] regarding open industry abuse, but silence is genocide and golden as a matter of genocide; i.e., they’re complicit!)

To that, speedrunners reflect the settler colony model, hence tend to be white, straight and male; and the dark whore they’re constantly kettling is both a false flag that presents the state’s victims as stronger than they actually are (weak/strong with castles to invade), desires genocidal revenge more than they actually do (re: DARVO obscurantism), and needs to be policed in fetishized ways that justify endless war on the homefront out into the stars, onstage and off: dark whore makes Lieutenant Gorman’s pullout game weak (“37, simulated!”)!

This becomes a question, then, of changing course before it’s too late. Much of the world (outside or inside the Imperial Core) has already become a dated hellish thing to “solve” through nostalgic force policing nature and sex: to shoot (stab or club) as various offshoots of classic heroes and how they would, from Hercules to Beowulf to Doomguy. All have been recruited during the Neoliberal Age to serve profit; i.e. Capitalist-Realism-meets-military-optimism, or the childish, brutal confidence that occurs when gamers take on the state’s problems (the creation of enemies), then shoot them with immunity from prosecution to move money through nature: a license to print money by raping and killing.

Videogames simulate war perfectly for these aims; re: recruiting children (especially straight white boys) to take on the killer’s mantle as something to acclimate them towards future wars and rape, thus profit as a settler-colonial enterprise waged from the mother country outwards; i.e., “Hell is always a place that appears on Earth,” and there is always a whore to fuck and murder at the end of the adventure: “rape the whore; go back to princess what’s-her-name.” Furthermore, as my extensive work on Metroidvania and speedrunning and its systemic bigotries show, there is no end to this process; there is merely an endless accelerating Arms Race between functionally white/token moderates and r(e)aping the whore faster and faster for profit!

(source: Shiny Zeni’s “[WORLD RECORD] Super Metroid – Any% Speedrun in 40:22,” 2025; timestamp: 40:31)

For example, Shiny Zeni just got Super Metroid‘s Any% WR (40:22, 2/1/2025), but this process will never stop because there’s no logical endpoint to capital exploiting nature—with him piloting Samus to rape Mother Brain and then go home to his wife, offstage; re: Samus is a white Indian/savior commonly performed/embodied by white cis-het men fighting for the nuclear family (re: Zeni is friends with Oatsngoats, who apologizes for Caleb Hart—a transphobe and sex pest; re: “Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning“).

To it, Zeni’s the whore[10]/black-penitent acting as white knight; i.e., a soldier-of-fortune killer-for-hire practicing dogma as something to insulate his audience to the cruelties of the wider global practice inside the Imperial Core’s foreign and domestic states of exception (an idea we’ll unpack in Volume Three when we inspect Caleb Hart under a microscope): settler colonists using themselves—their entire family model, in fact—as human shields to penetrate the land around them during the cryptonymy process furthering abjection; i.e., not to walk away from Omelas, but enjoy its perverse rewards, Heinlein-style, until climate change burns “Rome” to the ground! It’s suicide!

(source: “Super Metroid Speedruns – Any% World Record Attempts,” 1/31/2025; timestamp: 9:09:33)

And more to the point, this is what Zeni chooses to do, onstage and off: facilitate genocide while ignoring it by escaping repeatedly into a likeness of it that disguises what is happening all around him. Don’t be fooled by his media training and nice-guy demeanor/silly “Oh, you betcha!” act (which Oatsngoats and Caleb Hart also do, unironically imitating William H. Macy’s villain, Mr. Lundergard, from Fargo, 1996); it’s Capitalist Realism 101, and he’s a cop in that respect: always trying to make as much money as he can, while saying as little about actual genocides at home and abroad as he can!

In short, the canonical Gothic victim is always a witch/monstrous-feminine whore scapegoat of some kind or another challenging profit (female or not, Federici), and the villain is always a cop (token or not), thus is always an impostor acting in bad faith; i.e., by abjecting their victims through DARVO obscurantism triangulating state force to police nature and sex, thus labor at large! But this is still dualistic, prostitution an older form of emasculation that reverses abjection (thus power) like trans emasculation does; re: with monstrous-feminine avatars saying to our enemies: “Oh, sweetie, I don’t like you because you’re smart; I like you because you make me look good by comparison!” In capital’s eyes, Communism is always hard kink—one whose yum they fuck and then yuck after fleecing the dark queen without paying!

The Gothic’s classic questing for the Numinous, then, is also dualistic, in this respect; and while the axe always forgets, the tree always remembers: the Numinous ghost haunting the counterfeit (from Antiquity into the posthuman era—echoes of S.H.O.D.A.N., left)! Time for your medicine (re: cancelling is a myth, under Capitalism, but closeting and lynching is not)!

(artist: c:\user\elaine)

In turn, monsters of all kinds are produced in factories, onstage and off; i.e., laid low by white Indians to produce kill counts, Vietnam-style, these necrometrics (embraced by the Doom franchise) repeating—literally a system for killing attached to the veneer of American Liberalism seeking revenge against a seemingly infinite number and form (from Giger to Sophocles to Baptist fire-and-brimstone to John Romero and company’s infamous cyberdemon, exhibit 51d4a2b2). But there are only two basic functions—for or against the state—and only a finite web of life treated as monstrous-feminine to endure such grim harvests; i.e., by the usual Cartesian rapists colonizing imaginary territories to whitewash their doing so towards actual ones; e.g., Palestine, Darfur or Cambodia as laid low to child friendly songs (chip tunes aping American rock ‘n roll pastiche), all of the above making the whole grotesque practice comforting: “The disposal units ran night and day. We were that close to going out forever!”

Eventually, though, Medusa will simply snap, and no amount of displaced imperial abuse (obscurantism and DARVO rhetoric), guns (or similar boyish killing toys) and wacky obstacle courses will save the soldier from himself; i.e., from the state cannibalizing him and the world through divide-and-conquer dogma: effectively pulling on the tiger’s tail, guerrilla-style, to antagonize him against his brethren (thus assist in colonization[11]), only for capital to eat them and for the world to eventually eat capital. When the chickens come home to roost for good, Medusa will take the Aegis away from its abusers; i.e., using her Kegel-esque pussy tremors to send her evil killers to Hell once-and-for-all (returning the favor per Creed’s murderous womb, getting even for Francis Bacon’s Cartesian Revolution many times over)! Just like Metroid, “true peace in space” is a myth, and the dark whore always wins, in the end (re: “Ozymandias,” Frankenstein, Axiom Verge, etc)!

In short, nothing lasts forever and such wanton bloodshed becomes something than cannot be atoned for (save as total annihilation during state shift). Eventually the fascist spectre of “Rome” just “runs out of lives” and Medusa has her way with him; i.e., clapping back as such people always do (re: Ward Churchill). Game over! Death by Snu-snu, the ghosts of all Medusa’s children have their revenge when the middle class furthers abjection for too long. So perhaps we should listen to those who are closer nature and suffering under it—not my cat, guarding my potatoes from some unforeseen menace, but something akin to that who, like Medusa being policed and raped, those eager to learn from may turn to and plead in total submission to Her Excellence: “What do your monster eyes see, great one? Are you a potato warding off the police? TELL ME YOUR SECRETS!”

(exhibit 51d4a2b1: Model and photographer: Baby the Great Potato, One with All Other Potatoes; and Her humble and faithful servant, Persephone van der Waard. Garfield is a second-rate Great Destroyer compared to you, Ms. Kaiju!)

It’s like a puzzle, then, and you can’t solve it with state-sanctioned deception, ignorance, apathy and force; its solution instead demands our cryptonymy and Aegis moving power towards workers and nature before everything falls apart for good—with Medusa, the planet, either regenerating afterwards, or going to sleep for good; but whatever happens, we will not survive. So let’s consider the in-text pieces thereof as the usual Promethean warning signs, in advance; i.e., as a ludo-Gothic BDSM means of subverting bigotry and crisis, onstage and off: doing so to prevent the seminal catastrophe as an entirely Cartesian, manmade one!

In turn, every demon killed on Earth (during mirror syndrome) only sends our heroes closer towards their own self-destruction; i.e., the monomyth is, well, a myth, but one (of neoliberal false power) that can be speedrun by the usual (wannabe) Pirates of Silicon Valley! Except, there’s no Mars to go to (and if there is, it’s literally drawing straws/a death lottery because people policed the whore until she snapped and killed all life on planet Earth)! All of this is entirely preventable, but history repeats itself thanks to Capitalist Realism and the middle class since Columbus onwards: “kill the Indian, don’t save the man!”

(exhibit 51d4a2b2: Artist: Gerald Brom. In the unironic quest for mastery against nature as demonic, Doom portrays its own Communist monstrous-feminine [the game was an Aliens reskin, remember] as something to shoot for its brazen, hideous “nature”; re: thinking beings vs extended beings, cops vs victims.)

Beyond videogames like shooters and Metroidvania, then, Imperialism is made at home and has been since Ancient Athens, Sparta and Rome; i.e., home base as the state nucleus, the hauntological center of the Cartesian Revolution’s domination of nature during Red Scare; re: chasing spectres of Medusa/Marx from a localized source—one that evolved into itself as eventually under attack (“home” as sick) and needing American Liberalism/fascism to defend itself; or as Jason Moore and Raj Patel write in A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things:

The second law of capitalist ecology, domination over nature, owed much to Francis Bacon (1561-1626), a philosopher generally credited as the father of modern science. Bacon was also a prominent member of England’s political establishment, at different times a member of Parliament and the attorney general of England and Wales. He 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. Through this radically new mode of organizing life and thought, Nature became not a thing but a strategy that for the ethical and economic cheapening of life […] a normative statement of how best to organize power and hierarchy, Humanity and Nature, Man and Woman, Colonizer and Colonized.

In other words, natural demons/undead are classically female and monstrous-feminine-coded beings that canonically hide on the edge of the world; i.e., by subsisting at the frontier as guerrilla warriors besieged paradoxically on home turf. Yet, as so often is the case, these resistance fighters—like those in Vietnam (GDF’s “How the Viet Cong Smoked American Soldiers,” 2023)—are canonically demonized by the West; re: as “beings of darkness” (with guerrilla warfare being something that historically has been waged in the shadows of Imperialism; re: Asprey’s War in the Shadows). As such, they evoke a supernatural aura tied to Hell and damnation (from the Western perspective) in neoliberal copaganda (videogames); i.e., fear and dogma as a copagandistic means of provoking American soldiers on the front line, onstage and off, to kill the enemy with extreme prejudice wherever they show themselves—or where the elite choose to have them appear while incentivizing the same settler-colonial violence[12] anew!

In equal measure, what exists in videogames extends to nature as demonized (for good or for profit) across all media forms and stages of performance; i.e., the “demons” fight fire with fire, but anisotropically as revolutionaries (re: Nelson Mandela). Grafting the oppressor’s stolen ordinance to their bodies, they become cybernetic to the point of self-flagellation (a new class of alien barbarian/”soldiers of Hannibal or Medusa” that capital will recuperate: obscuring its own abjection through canon’s bad telephone game/the Mandela effect). Not only does the bio-mechanical, coercive-BDSM metaphor echo Giger’s xenomorph—as a kind of cybernetic, zombie-demon chimera tied to transgenerational trauma—but it exudes the historical-material tendency of American foreign policy to overarm its assigned enemies as part of a weaponized cycle of endless exploitation; i.e., even during the displaced revenge fantasies of the usual half-real make-believe in Pygmalion’s Shadow (re: Aliens, Metroid, and Doom). A factory of death’s panopticon will work until the end of the world.

Furthermore, supplied by the colonizers through an Imperial Boomerang whose flight always starts from home, the myth of a technologically superior demon hoard is incredibly dissociative; i.e., obscuring the giant role played by American arms manufacturers and war contractors. These privatizers continuously supply both sides with the means to wage war forever—always asymmetrically and perpetually corrupting nature through the a(nta)gonizing presence of human weaponry fused to demonic organics becoming bait; i.e., “It’s a trap!” and “60% of the time, it works every time!” Facing the weird canonical nerd with virgin/whore syndrome, Medusa chews off their dick with a woodchipper pussy! “Joan Crawford’s risen from the grave!” (Blue Oyster Cult, 1981). So eat up, you little monsters!

(artist: Magic Moon Arts)

Black Veil or not, the usual brutalities and moral panic/superiority that result are symptomatic of a project that invades media to spread its dogma across all mediums; i.e., Aliens and similar works operate through the Cartesian model, which unfortunately goes beyond videogames and back into a half-real position: one between fiction and non-fiction, alike, governed by parallel standards and rules of play shared between the two (re: the infernal concentric pattern/narrative of the crypt, and similar devices)!

Cartesian thought, then (and Gothic narration devices, thus rules of play from Radcliffe onwards), globally demonize nature through mad science, but also discourage any creative alternatives, from an egregoric standpoint; i.e., beyond the orderly binary of the Western world, any scapegoats normally sought out by the usual Radcliffean heroines (and male variants) testifying to their own slaughter by said actors.

For example, the minotaur and similar monsters of the Greek imaginary past work “by extension” and association; i.e., linking Humanity to the natural world in “magical” or drug-like ways they have in common with more recent hauntologies (such as blue cat people, below)—not to a Christian Hell (or otherwise carceral, manmade space that traps humans inside), but something and somewhere that we can decolonize through our own stories featuring monsters trapped in here with us and vice versa: as written using reclaimed technology (fire of the gods) and Gothic poetry to subvert monomythic action; re: the anal Amazon thesis having the whore’s revenge to fuck the alien in a healthy way (without harming either side) during ludo-Gothic BDSM. Both sides are alienated and restored through camp.

To that, the classical labyrinth historically and deliberately serves as a manmade prison from the original Greek legends; i.e., a spatial didactic role that carries over into videogames like the Metroidvania or FPS (and their own mazes and labyrinths‘ empowering to disempowering effects): the home of the kept enemy monster as something to survive in redlined ghettos—often through combat, but just as often courtly love, thus kidnap/captive and rape fantasies (re: camping Cameron’s Avatar series, left, therefor its racist white savior narrative)! The castle—including the chattelized castle-in-the-flesh—is historically the perfect dom, and the hero is historically the perfect sub receiving that Numinous gift from the demon:

(artist: D8)

However palliative, the Numinous and fear go hand-in-hand with psychosexual catharsis and athletics, during calculated risk. In short, there’s always a fear of the alien/outdoors for those alienated from nature, but also a guilty surrendering to it; i.e., to have “its turn” in ways that bring both sides closer (re: Reznor) amid an ongoing and multi-tiered system of differences’ unequal privileges and oppression. Often demonized as wild, unsophisticated and barbaric, but also animalistically rapacious and mind-altering through controlled substances (above), we and our ludo-Gothic BDSM seek to one, dispel the many violent, sex-coercive myths orbiting these groups in their “evil,” canonical forms; and two, stress the various playful ways in which iconoclastic totems operate: as a poetic “ambrosia” that can transform the world directly through monstrous self-expression relating between two or more parties (also above)!

Artistic and drug-like, this naturalized, magical class works to further good Gothic sex education; i.e., one where fairies, furries and “magical girls,” etc, represent sex positivity as a kind of forbidden knowledge and aphrodisiac drug tied to nature, but also historical-material fears orbiting performative capture and rape: alien expressions of sex and gender education, but also identity formation through the poetic struggle of the animal side of the Cartesian model; re: formalized as a puzzle of “Antiquity” like what we wrote about earlier with Giger’s xenomorph:

[a] writeable Wisdom of the Ancients. That’s what the creature is/the castles are—spectral, deathly evocations of a world before Capitalism, thus possibly one after it; i.e., death-as-radical-change […] We can reunite, thus use something so awesome (and forgotten) to help liberate our minds from Capitalism and its barriers; but, again, it will be a shock—medieval, foreign, alien, abject.

Just as a patient is like a corpse under the surgeon’s knife, the idea of the home and the human share this unsettling distinction. We must occupy it as a particular kind of surgeon and corpse: a love doctor whose wild surgeries—similar to Giger’s drug-fueled, psychosexual art—play passionately in a field where “death,” “rape” and echoes of their unironic forms haunt the theatrical landscape. (source: “Giger’s Xenomorph”).

Except, it’s not just “the xenomorph” pimped by Whitey at all—with the Na’vi being Cameron’s shameless, hyperreal/digitally simulated and Afronormalized vaudeville, commodifying the just-as-old Indigenous struggles inside a functionally white-savior underage power fantasy as tokenizing multiple assimilated groups against nature and those of it: both the Irish (Jake Sully) and people of color to literally speak for/play in Cameron’s AI, tech and gamer bro “leather stocking” simulacrum (itself merely a repeat of the French and Indian Wars passing for “activism with amnesia”; i.e., technological asymmetricity is baked into setter colonialism, so nothing about Avatar is impressive, any more than with Aliens‘ own Rambo pastiche).

Ergo, the double standards seen on and off those stages likewise extend to any popular form of Gothic poetic expression; i.e., in regards to a stewardship of nature that, as we’ve shown, historically aims through ludo-Gothic BDSM to reunite and bond with nature as alienated from us by capital’s regular power trips (with Cameron’s Avatar taking a videogame approach to cinema, and all to paint himself as a god/Omega Man performed by Jake as his avatar to those he deems ethnocentrically inferior to him—what a knob, and everyone who works with him is also a knob).

We’ll see as we proceed, then, how this cryptomimetic subversion actually has a drug-like, acid Communist flavor that, all the same, combines demonically with mad science and occult magic; i.e., per the Promethean Quest and Faustian bargain regarding nature as chattelized, but also the various undead elements (of generational trauma) that crop up during the rememory process, too: reversing abjection (thus profit) during revolutionary cryptonymy’s holistic modularity!

To that, remember Radcliffe and the others: When the British Romantics and Neo-Gothic revival were active, nature was closer at hand but being pulled away by a burgeoning system already several centuries old. Now that alienation is further along but not complete, the Gothic’s fixations with expressing alienation by bypassing boundaries is invaluable. As such, we may use any poetic distinctions, creative instruments and schools of thought (whatever works) to make ourselves felt, seen and heard as human stewards of nature: “There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves”; i.e., to make Capitalism something more stable than it is, but also returning to nature as something we can inhabit in ways that improve the quality of life for all (workers, animals, the environment): the use of technology in ways that didn’t exist in the past as a predominantly oral society.

Beyond more recent scientific technologies (re: Shelley’s “Modern Prometheus”), this applies to pre-capitalist examples to poetically write down for post-capitalist reasons. This includes Giger’s pet monster hauntology but also the various ones he took and made (more) surreal; re: Blake’s devilish acids (“corroding fires”) for his printing blocks, and Marlowe’s Faustus speaking hauntologically to times before mercantile capital. Using Gothic poetics at large, we can play around with these ideas ourselves provided it serves to defend nature from capital and its own bad education’s fatal nostalgia: a Valley of the Satanic Dolls!

Per Blake (or Giger), every attempt is unique/sui generis (“in a class by itself”). Yet diversity is strength insofar as all of them contribute endlessly towards the whole’s Song of Infinity across space-time; i.e., as something to suggest at an obscured glance: one that takes on “madness” as a mythical life of its own we are not totally masters of; re: the forgotten, seemingly magical ability[13] to move through barriers and distinctions that might otherwise hold us in place through acid Communism’s oubliette’s of mist while in defense of what we hold dear as threatened by impending catastrophe. The ground around us turned to eggshells, magical assembly (more on the other medieval poetics devices, in a couple pages) lets us stitch or madly assemble whatever we need or want to further the Cause; i.e., including what friends provide, but also frenemies (re: Cuwu) and enemies (re: Zeuhl and Jadis) we know and political friends and foes we don’t. The Enemy has many spies; so do we! Ours give back fatal-yet-vital knowledge on the Aegis as shared between both sides!

This concludes outlining nature versus the state as a dialectic, by and large. That being said, I’d like to spend the remainder of part zero going over some medieval poetic countermeasures/supply some fun extra exhibits, at the end!

For starters, there’s no “perfect” approach to developing Gothic Communism. Just that, once you have a knack for it, you won’t need to solidarize those eggshells, but instead can walk on clouds (soaring through the hair like an eagle or sky-bound witch). Able to move through boundaries at will (or make our own), workers can freely embrace calculated risk as something to embellish and erect. Homo erectus, “it’s pronounced win-gar-dium levi-O-SA!” (“STAHP IT, RON! STAHP…“).

(artist: Oney Cartoons)

In turn, jouissance and its constructive frenzies yield impossible things that should not stand but do. Gay as Hell, they defy reason as a social-sexual contract/construct, but can be made by anyone “primed” for it. Under the right conditions, then, you might be surprised what campy cathedrals your orgasmic tornados can raise on the bones of canon (and who will show up afterward; re: “weird attracts weird”): gargantuan castles-in-the-flesh making your mo(i)st beautiful, succubean nightmares come true, mise-en-abyme! So when the Man comes around, show him your Aegis, Galatea; better yet, come out swinging (so to speak)! “If you built it, they will cum!”

(artist, left: Magic Moon Arts; right: Zdzisław Beksiński)

Like any orgy or church, though, it’s a group effort, and one geared towards our collective survival instead of deifying the state; i.e., in all its historical-material forms; re: corporations, churches, and nations-states, etc. This involves working together to respond to the holistic poetic value harbored in and across each other’s bodies (and bodies’ labor) to do together what is impossible alone/divided.

As a pornographic invigilator and historian, I cannot stress enough, then, how utterly important inspiration and collective solidarity are to labor action as a group exercise; i.e., one that routinely faces state predation tempting workers with assimilation (re: bourgeois Faustian bargains), thus how utterly unable I would have been to write this book without the likes of older works (and workers) to inspire me, but also the friends drawn to it who took interest in what I was doing tied to a shared past. This took time; re (from the Poetry Module):

To this, a director is precisely fuck-all without a muse to blow up, and a model often needs a platform to work their magic. As such, Sex Positivity was and always will be a group effort, its total collective statement on/with artwork and sex work entirely impossible if not for all my muses, models, partners (currently friendly or antagonistic) and friends (sexual or platonic) working in concert. Nor is ours the first. Like the patchwork group of (mostly cis-het male) art nerds who made Alien, celebrating the monstrous-feminine in Gothic panache, my cuties and I don’t own each other while raising temples to our own dark gods.

Instead, we’ve worked together to contribute to a diverse, inclusive labor of love that we can all feel proud of; i.e., a dark progeny begot from enthusiastic, heartfelt teamwork. It’s an orgiastic journey to document and leave behind, a procession of memories to learn from (as Alien very much is). Or as Scott himself put it: “It takes an army of dedicated people to make a feature film—and on Alien we had a marvelous army” (source: American Cinematographer’s “The Filming of Alien,” 2017). So did I (source).

Ridley and Ripley together and separate, I walked in the footsteps of Pygmalion and Galatea, realizing I was praxially gayer than either of my forebears.

Furthermore, without my aforementioned army of muses’ incredible booties pushing me to begin—and their ongoing friendships’ challenging of my privileged biases’ understanding of stigma and bigotry as a whole inspiring me to keep at it (as part of a back-and-forth process)—I would never have bothered to lay the first brick! My Gothic maturity (such as it is) merely sits in the middle of a long and winding stretch of Yellow Brick road; i.e., occupied by friends of all walks and dispositions, it’s a real Canterbury Tales—a rough-yet-colorful stretch, yawning ever onwards through a medieval “past,” made in the present space and time, anticipating future attempts concerned with older ones; re (from the same section):

Per the Humanities, such marbled dialog is not set-in-stone, then, but sculpted in our own caring gestures cheering others up and looking out for them; e.g., wagging “tails” manifesting as a simple “How are you doing?” (capital makes us forget to breathe, thus ask, thus think—waves of terror—so we must regain a prompt ability to think on the fly less as “total recall” and more as being quick on the draw). The more they learn, the more they can change the world provided they learn things that allow them to. In turn, this requires someone who will seek answers out, not take things at face value, including with things that interest them. They’ll enjoy them, but call them out if they’re pernicious, and invent curious solutions to hornswoggle/trick the state and its proponents (e.g., my older brother’s Mr. Kazakhstan; i.e., [Madoff’s] useful myth of Gothic ancestry) [ibid.].

Whatever its form and ingredients, though, Gothic poetics (and the Wisdom of the Ancients as a whole—a poison to pick and make your own ancestry as you see fit) is a powerful voice we cannot afford to discount. Diversity is strength, so diversify!

To quote one of my favorite problematic films, The Flight of Dragons (1982): “If mankind is to surmount the insurmountable, there must always be magic to inspire him; magic cannot die!” Except, I would deliberately extend the Green Wizard’s neoliberal pipedream beyond straight men/tokenism to “Medusa cannot die,” and whose die-hard longevity inspires monsters and GNC people (thus all minorities), at large, to punch up at the state’s weak point: its lack of empathy. Yet, between all of them, wild incessant creativity is nothing but a good thing when it flourishes; i.e., a creative mind is healthy insofar as it develops creations that support nature, thus workers, as adapting against the state: as the Great Destroyer of the Earth! Capital always eats, more and more, until it dies from eating the world, effectively cannibalizing itself!

In short, the state is sickness, is what the canonical Gothic announces vaguely as “trauma” in ways our ludo-Gothic BDSM and its cryptonymy cryptomimetically fuck with; i.e., doing so to whisper loudly and scream softly (and similar such oxymorons and paradoxes) to perform power in medieval poetic forms; re: as alienated in ways that rebels can return to through said performances under unique current conditions: primed for release from older bondage and harm as something to camp, during holistic and universally liberating calculated risk. Navigating the usual dualities, mid-performance, “It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations if you live near him,” and capital as a process of propaganda is full of dragons that our roles—from tops and bottoms to doms and subs—must continually subvert to defend nature from; i.e., those who pimp and police nature as monstrous-feminine, thus alien. We must, or we will not survive, because capital will rape us to death; re: segregation is no defense (and silence is death). So let’s get this party started!

(artist: Xiao Tong)

Of course, a mind is its own place; and sometimes to prevent rape, you have to tap into your animal side during psychosexual theatre (the side your abusers can’t monopolize); i.e., as extending from onstage to off and vice versa. As always, dialectical-material context (and flow) are key to development, without which, we’re back to the harmful nostalgia of unironic rape/wifely duties to canonize, except now these divisions have been hauntologized to serve profit under capital; i.e., it will be worse this time, because profit will demand it happen over and over while gaslighting the usual virgin/whores to assimilate and keep up appearances; re: gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss. No one “wins” under capital except those behind the curtain, and even then, they’ll lose too when Medusa kills them all! Exploitation and liberation exist on the same stages, capital disguising the former as the latter to perpetuate said cannibalizing for everyone it alienates from (and fetishizes for) everyone else.

As described in the entire “Medieval” section from the Poetry Module, those who contribute unto capital and its sickness through the usual performative tools are profoundly uncreative in that respect; i.e., only able to devise tools of actual, unironic torture and enslavement—of scared, closed minds shrinking during Capitalist Realism, the latter having menticided the former into gargoyles for the church of capital and the Protestant ethic. Innovation disappears, replaced with blind faith in a brutal system that survives through “prison sex” mentality (re: Plato’s cave, known today more casually as the Man Box). Canon is canon, the illusory effects the same; re: “The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim” (source: Gustav Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, 1895).

Capital is a glass onion, and it’s a grave mistake to see said onion and think its Aegises are wholly transparent. Instead, these mirrors operate in reflective ways (the albedo measurement of a given surface, during remediated praxis); i.e., that serve a dualistic (anisotropic) role. To it, such prisons—and their myopic insulation under canon—are recursively concentric and fractal in their neoliberal divisions; i.e., a prison in a prison in a prison, hiding the truth in fabrications of “the truth”; re: the ghost of the counterfeit, abjecting “dead labor feeding on living labor” into the usual states of exception (the half-real frontiers of Gothic theatre, on and offstage).

While liberation is a game of mirrors, our elaborate strategies of misdirection (as splendide mendax) are asymmetrical alongside those who think themselves besieged by us; i.e., those they prey on during mirror syndrome. Faced with oubliettes as they see and utilize them during the cryptonymy process, agents of capital hoist up on their own petards to use them as intend by capital; i.e., to fear a perceived world where capital is gone, thus unable to give them the hyperreal structure of solid prison walls (re: the canceled future). Canon becomes Jameson’s class nightmare; i.e., when the Black Veil is pulled aside, and one which—when threated with the destruction of its walls—our class traitors all but lose the necessary devices to operate in any healthy way without. They live in a bubble and fear its bursting to the point of easy betrayals, and freeze, clam up and sit in anticipation; i.e., for the usual, historical-material boom-and-bust patterns that, for them, is the new normal to return to, from time out of mind, into echoes of echoes of echoes on the same old cave wall shadows!

Deprived of those shadows, the usual proponents of capital police reality while pining for revenge; i.e., to reachieve said normal (the Gamergate refrain extending into all canon, mid-moral-panic); e.g., from The Republic to Toy Story to The Matrix (“to infinity and beyond!”). Bursting such monomyth bubbles by reversing abjection during revolutionary cryptonymy is our King of Dreams’ chief and steady aim: “You’re not the One, Ne(r)o! Now put away that fiddle and help us dismantle the state!”

Workers versus the state, then, is a battle that never ends (the state is always the enemy) but giving up is not an option short of suicide; i.e., to betray is to concede defeat to our overlords; re: the state is incompatible with life, and mutual consent is a learned activity that pushes back against systemic rape as also taught: from an older and more barbaric model of exploitation built on male, then white, racial supremacy and other modular bigotries swapped in and out as needed!

To avoid that fate, I would happily use my active, awake brain however much is required to penetrate the seemingly impenetrable; i.e., to become that “monster from the Id” and burn through the doors of minds who try, try, try as they might to shut me out: “I am the Medusa, and you not only raped me, but raped yourself as well!” As Matthew Lewis shows us, a rapist always destroys a piece of their own heart in the process; i.e., closing their mind and their body to the very sorts of empathy we seek to rebuild among the Ozymandian wreckage!

To that, I’ve gone on to write nearly two million words (at this point), as well as make hundreds of collages and dozens upon dozens of illustrations (well into the triple digits, too); i.e., happily doing so in conscious-and-willing defense of the planet (as a sustainable home) than say however many with a sleeping greedy brain that leads to its inevitable destruction. Indeed, I would happily revisit the same book (and ouroborotic fugue state) for the rest of my foreseeable life under house arrest, letting it bleed me dry if it adds to the Cause by enriching monsters; i.e., no matter how maddening that might feel (a part of me loves it, of course—again, see my foreword to Volume Zero) or how many estranged weirdos tell me to “touch grass.”

Okay, but what is grass? How do you define grass? Welcome to the desert of the Real, motherfuckers! “Anywhere in the galaxy this is a nightmare!” Yes, but one with the power (on the Aegis) to set us free! Liberation always starts with the mind, a door to walk through that—unless you’ve seen it for yourself, faced with your own Great Destroyer turning you into a battered housewife for capital, in small—there’s really no way to conceptualize that horror and make total sense while doing so. How could it? Easy solutions, explanations and nostalgia are the stuff of unironic chattel, idiots and Don Quixote.

Instead, there is always a buffer between us and the wheel of fire—a shadow on the cave wall to help us process what we’re currently surviving under duress; i.e., capital is a problem to solve before it kills us, and that is something to—far from lose hope regarding alien vampires eating us—instead becomes a paradoxical source of excitement when chasing the (magic) dragon/ Numinous; re: through creation as something to canonically fear during the Promethean Quest, but for us is the fire of the gods to liberate ourselves (starting with our minds) through iconoclastic art breaking canon inside canon: “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!”

Verily, the whore’s revenge speaks through fabrication—the taking of pills (red or not), in keeping with acid Communism, actually being a freeing of the mind through trance-like illusions of druggedness; i.e., as something to bend reality (and its prescribed owner class) to our will! It is fundamentally unpoliceable, hence why I stress applying knowledge through game-like modes of expression! Not for making us “the dupe” (re: Gloggin), but to expose those calling us the dupe being dupes themselves, and the ones acting in bad faith for the elite (e.g., Cipher from The Matrix, below, or Andrew Tate passing himself off as “woke” to grift a select group of white, straight, male, middle-class idiots while fleecing and mobilizing them against actual oppressed peoples)!

 (source: “Why Cypher Made the Right Choice in The Matrix According to Joe Pantoliano[14])

I live to teach, but also recognize the so-called worse and best students depend entirely on context, mid-struggle; i.e., who question reality as a criminogenic premise to grapple with: the allure of class, culture and race betrayal as tempting (see: footnote). Murderers come to you in smiles, and traitors are recruited from their own populations to maintain the panopticon as the world decays behind the illusion (with Baudrillard’s hyperreal being a concept the makers—two trans women—were very aware of when camping the monomyth during the Promethean Quest/Faustian bargain; re: Morpheus’ famous pill problem for “Neo” to recursively solve; i.e., an appeal to the Straights by two directors working within the system to subvert it).

As such, cryptonymy remains dualistic/prone to liberate/tokenize, as do all the main Gothic theories and facets of oppositional praxis on the Manifesto Tree (which I wrote to allow for said dualities, during dialectical-material struggle as something to perform and account for in iconoclastic art; re: “Paratextual Documents“). Like all modes of praxis synthesized in opposition, they can go either way—and The Matrix has, as much as Plato or the word “woke” (Pissed-off Bartender’s “Let’s talk about the word ‘woke’ and why I hate it,” 2025). Rebellion and regression occupy the same mirror games’ linguo-material tug-o’-war as simply being a matter of repeating in ways we must anticipate, mid-cryptomimesis.

Medusa’s testimony (and by extension, ours) speaks through the infernal concentric pattern; i.e., in ways that challenge capital and its profit motive, thus its raping of the mind as part of nature to rape during the Cycle of Kings, inside the Shadow of Pygmalion, part of the narrative of the crypt, and so on. It’s—for lack of a better term—a long game, and a zero-sum puzzle that is (at least for me) far more interesting than simple military optimism leading to brain death and, by extension, rape and death, period. The more you deny them as real, the stronger they become; same goes for us!

By extension, birthing monsters and renovating castles in the Gothic style[15] is my passion, my raison d’être because Capitalism is my bête noire, my dragon to slay and replace with my own; i.e., the former is unstable by design, thus unsustainable—must be put down and replaced with something that will last that doesn’t cheapen life through settler-colonial fear and cartographically monomythic dogma; re: a peach to harvest on and across all registers!

In other words, sex-positive education concerns a constant-and-vigilant defending by us of the things that Capitalism attacks; i.e., which it seeks to dominate by closing them off by design—nature, but also as inextricable from nature thus “of it.” Be they peoples, places or things (food, clothes, contraceptives and other items), any poetic license or device employed by them that you could possibly imagine will canonically become a means of enslaving nature, thus workers and sex, through a heteronormative, settler-colonial scheme; i.e., a means of denial-of-access by raising disastrous barriers to defend itself while punching through our safeguards to kill us by any and all means necessary (evoking the Krell’s “Monsters from the Id”: “your machine will supply that monster with whatever power it needs to reach us!”).

In keeping with the usual persecution devices and qualities of capital dividing workers, it’s the state vs workers, male vs female, the Straights vs the Gays, etc; e.g., faeries, werewolves, ambrosia, collars, magical forests, mushroom kingdoms, etc; i.e., in at-times-transgressive forms of cuckold/possession-and-relinquish fantasies that intersect with various marginalized groups who hypnotize out of necessity as much as revenge, but likewise camp such things within liminal expression’s transgressive elements owing to that transgressiveness as a matter of compelled and inevitable alienation that must be reclaimed from the same system to reverse abjection, thus hug the alien while enjoying the bursting of any aforementioned bubbles: “Glory to the Hypnotoads!”

(artist: Magic Moon Arts)

Few things are as confused/confusing or brutal as token cops, who cannot see beyond their own bubble as made through acts of bad will (and faith) towards those they betray inside/outside their own gated communities. To it, our collective and holistic function must challenge those bad forms of sex education with dialectical-material opposites, generally on the Internet (whose rapid-fire search engines can parallel our brains, but also be used when our brains are working overtime to solve complex problems; e.g., speedrunners). So build your own cathedrals; size doesn’t matter if you nail the combo and make something that lasts throughout the ages to lead onto better things. Barring that, there’s no shame in contributing to the Cause at a meta level; i.e., one brick in a larger wall, one star in a grand constellation, all charting a collective, concentric path: one where you can freeze the enemy or have them scratch “cuckoo” their heads (all so long as it inspires them to think critically for once).

(source: Caroline Kee’s “This Guy Is ‘Protecting’ Graffiti Penises With Condoms,” 2017)

Keeping with The Matrix, the state maintains control through monomyth (cop) threats of violence that, once imposed, destabilize to a vertiginous extreme; i.e., Capitalist Realism as a systemic, all-encompassing means of throwing people phenomenologically off-balance. Yet if the state imposes madness to disempower us through traitors (re: Cipher), our subsequent (and subversive) empowerment lies in ironically acclimating to their withering spells; i.e., during ludo-Gothic BDSM, “doing it raw” as places to reclaim and swim around inside without fear or effort; re: Neo flying through the sky at the end of that film. “Rock Is Dead” (Marilyn Manson gaslighting his audience and profiting off them) but Rage Against the Machine, anyways! Futility is part of the struggle, Sisyphus smiling at the gods through Numinous rapture (making the rock he’s chained to his bitch like Prometheus did the gods’ hungry eagle).

Is this spurious or special? Both, because revolution is a city of paradoxes. Like Neo as the newly-crowned King of the Underworld having been paradoxically liberated by Morpheus the same way Hades might liberate Persephone and then Persephone (me) liberating you through echoes of those characters/the Medusa, the sinking pit in one’s stomach can magically replace with sheer joyous euphoria; i.e., as one takes to the abyss/mise-en-abyme like a fish to water (or the skies). Despite seeming well-and-truly out of our element, we adjust and acclimate to what is normally weaponized against us—taking monsters back, thereby taking Hell and making it our domain, not the state’s:

Flight is something we humans dream of. It represents a conquering of earth’s gravity, and a release from our confinement to earth’s surface. In the moment when Neo is shown to have superpowers, the writers chose flight as the best embodiment of this. It goes to show how powerful verticality is for us, and what we think of when we consider a character to be superhuman (source: James Botham’s “The Matrix and Verticality,” 2020).

Doing so is always a tightrope to walk, because Neo is using the same monomythic power fantasies the movie diegetically affords to the Agents’ own spurious monopolies; i.e., as working against these interests inside the same system, but partially estranged/unplugged from said system to—like 2011’s Sense8 (a text we’ll examine more, in Volume Three)—eventually reunite those the system has pulled apart: ourselves and nature as something rebuild while dancing in the ruins of nostalgia as canceled (the one cancelling myth that is true). This happens through illusions of false gravity that, nonetheless, speak to dialectical-material forces that are anything but false, and who the elite can sell back to us: in forms of controlled opposition we can then subvert through performances of wizardly power and knowledge; i.e., if we choose to understand an aesthetic (coded, argumentative) means of enjoying but not endorsing the feelings that go along with canonical varieties; re: “I know kung fu!” Show me, young padawan!

The only difference, as usual, is dialectical-material scrutiny as a part of praxis, synthesized for catharsis; re: gods are cool, as are monsters more broadly during Amazonomachia being things to dig up, summon or otherwise fashion: speaking to the same old Modern Prometheus showcasing the Creature emblematized between simulacra of simulacra; e.g., Icarus, Medusa, Elphaba and Mercy melded together by me (next page), existing in a similar struggle that fights illusory fire with illusory fire: the exposure of her superheroic body not one of tragedy alone, but glory for defying the gods of the state to resurrect the Medusa as the only thing the state wants/fears, thus pimps! What they pimp, we clap back with. Short of a bullet to the head, how can they stop us? And even then, you can’t kill Medusa; Elphaba lives, motherfuckers (a raised fist evocative for its symbolic social value tied to material resistance; re: reclaiming the Base by recultivating the Superstructure)!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

That being said, what is the difference between witch rebels and witch cops? Dialectical-material function, of course (re: flow determines function, which we’ll examine more alongside witch cops in Volume Three, Chapter Four); i.e., sex positivity as unfolding during informed consumption, descriptive sexuality and cultural appreciation vis-à-vis Gothic counterculture poetically serving those aims! Praxis is merely mind over matter, babes! Let it take you over the rainbow (of Gothic [gay-anarcho] Communism), making your dreams (and everyone else’s but the elite’s because fuck them) come true! Set Medusa free, thus your mind through what you create representing a freer world than the state’s one-and-done map of empire! Make Mark Fisher proud (and avenge his death)!

Our combined (re)education, then, must address a tricky paradox: fighting fire with “fire,” madness with “madness”; i.e., establishing healthy boundaries and lowering harmful ones, deciding through selective absorption, magical assembly and a confusion of the senses (all from our various Gothic/medieval bag of tricks we talked about in the Poetry Module’s “Medieval” portion): our own calculated risk, and by extension what we eat during ludo-Gothic BDSM, in order to survive by raising not just ourselves, but emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness for all workers; i.e., to prevent rape as a matter of performative risk, thereby embodying ourselves as monsters that will be attacked and eaten; re: our Song of Infinity becoming holistic and fourth-dimensional labor shared with all class, culture and race warriors recultivating the Wisdom of the Ancients‘ complicated dualism! Shazam!

To this, “good education” means sex positivity as an eagerly liberatory device; i.e., utilizing popular linguo-material devices to re-teach workers not to feel afraid, first and foremost (“to let ‘I dare!’ wait upon ‘I would?'” As if!). As The Matrix shows, fear can drive workers to cage, brutalize and collar other workers “of (thus with) nature” for the state; they require assorted barriers that we set up once we’re able to move on unstable ground, ourselves. Such buffers can be the poetic ones we’ve mentioned comprising our emotional/Gothic intelligence, but it can also be more literal, physical and exact; e.g., condoms (three pages back), which the state will deny as fascism rises to crack down on nature (eco-fascism).

Whatever form it states, the state is a cop, not your friend; it will kill you to protect itself, but like a cancer will eventually die as all empires do—of its own sickness. Until then, it will make absurd Capitalist-Realist arguments projecting genocide onto others; i.e., those fighting to prevent it again; e.g., “They’re coming for your women, your cheeseburgers, your comfort, your rights (etc)!” States rights attack worker rights through “scab” workers arguing for the bourgeoisie (Cipher was an undercover cop). All are arguments of scarcity that double as threats against labor fending for itself; i.e., to achieve post-scarcity using pre-capitalist (feudalistic) poetics in a Neo-Gothic fashion (as Neo does—Superman but also the Creature in ways that go far beyond Keanu Reeves’ loveable otter).

Take it from me, capitalists hate that shit; i.e., as do their proponents (re: Jadis), greedily hoarding the ambrosia less for themselves (to free their minds) and more to cynically prevent others from eating it and escaping the mind prisons that capital affords; e.g., Jadis loved being in the cave—in effect, taking Cipher’s blue pill before my very eyes, yet passing themselves off as “wise” and “rebellious” when, point-in-fact, they were just another GNC TERF punching down at me/tilting at pharmaceutical windmills (re: Cervantes’ metaphor for dragons, but also the mechanisms of capital to thrust at: through our own dangerous delusions punching the membrane on the Aegis like a drum). Here, the Gothic castle (and its Numinously trippy sensations, below) is, again, an odd paradox: a “prison” that frees your mind to envision better worlds than Capitalism allows, but will allow if they think your harbor for rebellion is “just another castle” (whose princess is, per Mario, in another castle elsewhere, elsewhere, elsewhere…). Beyond Jadis, as someone like Elon Musk shows, the number-one fear the elite have is being left behind!

(artist, bottom: Departedart)

Death-as-memory is a paradox, per the Gothic; i.e., insofar as its endless warring castles and monsters-in-writing repeat with disturbingly chimeric variations bleeding into each other over time: the trauma of struggling to be heard, those that struggle to remember themselves correctly during cryptomimesis, let alone the Numinous as something grander (and monstrous) to suggest! Except therein lies the difference: what the state reproduces through compelled reproduction as something that eerily and hungrily watches us[16], GNC people (and other oppressed rebels) do through what they build from older buildings; re: as a community to leave behind and inspire others towards: first a castle, a stage, a song or a Metroidvania, etc, as paradoxically “empty” and full of not-so-quiet secrets that—as a constellation of worrisome and ambiguous signposts—become our aforementioned Song of Infinity leading us on towards Communism through “bad echo”; i.e, by letting us know each and every time that we are not alone/that Hell is all around us, its monsters becoming our friends to keep us company (and warm/full of cum, below) mid-struggle against the state’s ravenously Cartesian ones (above):

(artist: NOBM666)

This company (and struggle) routinely changes shape into familiar-foreign forms, and takes back what the state uses to hide itself; e.g., Chernobog from Fantasia (1940) complementing this transfusion: both us playing with our toys, and a ghost of the counterfeit the state abjects. Thus, when threatened with the titanic unseen forces we’ve described throughout this volume, monsters like Chernobog-as-doubled and his poiesis doubled yield a plethora of myriads[17]. For us, they conjure up to reunite in defiance of the state; i.e., assembling and changing shape through each ritual, thus cathedral, as a one-time affair that shows up and sputters out again per attempt—from fire girls to animals or anything else that’s required. Is there anything more Romantic and Gothic than that?

Monsters are merely poetic devices arguing through preferential code and instruction. Vis-à-vis the state and us, such threats (and their rejoinders) are incredibly common; re: everyone loves the whore/monstrous-feminine, and people learn through popular things because popular works (to commodify or defend nature) and is tied to our survival on a daily basis; i.e., what we eat as monstrous, magical, mythic, etc. So we must go where that power is and critique our diet as normally controlled, then reclaim it on the Internet (and elsewhere) for our own liberatory purposes by taking it into ourselves (sexually and/or otherwise; e.g., going to Queen Maeb, below); i.e., we must go to nature as a vivid, delicious commodity to liberate monsters of nature from their settler-colonial role, thereby returning it to an older one before Capitalism that could be again under Gothic Communism; re: as a unique, stronger (note: less cancerous) development than Capitalism (which is cancerous by design).

The pleasures of nature and its poetic extensions won’t be denied to us; they’ll remain in delightful (and silly, below) forms that speak to workers’ shared and uneven desires for connection—i.e., by using “what they got” as counterterror does to, through guerrilla warfare, liberate itself as much through humor and camp as strict, psychosexual rage and angst (of the xenomorphic sort): an exchange of essence in medieval language to make a modern point with preferential bias towards the language of the past as something to perform; e.g., some people would prefer to be the blueberry princess, and others the gnome. All are valid provided they yield praxial catharsis during the whore’s revenge; i.e., by campily reclaiming the terror of underworld sex by making it fun through land back pastiche as ludo-Gothic BDSM: taken from behind and ravished by a mighty midget!

(artist: Steven Stahlberg)

“All the world’s a stage!” and such monumental endeavors afford lackadaisical nonchalance (the idylls of the Fairy Queen) during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., they involve nature as something to express its own endlessness beyond gnomes and nymphs as notorious spirits of the earth and the forest, but also Pagan fertility Rites of Spring that can become unironically like Stravinsky’s strident offerings: “Glorification of the Chosen One” (1913) both making your hairs stand on end and your lips twist in Grinch-like smirk with the above image in your head (essentially This Is Spinal Tap‘s Stonehenge scene decades before 1984[18]).

The fairy monarch, for instance, remains a common method of gendering as an alternative to the heteronormative standard; i.e., the fae, faer, and faers neopronouns as something linguistically new (the trans movement of the 20th/21st centuries) tied to something quite old associated with drug-fueled methods of expanding[19] the mind tied to the imaginary past: the dark, drug-fueled forests of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but also Keats “Ode to Psyche”

“Yet even in these days so far retir’d

From happy pieties, thy lucent fans,

Fluttering among the faint Olympians,

I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspir’d.

So let me be thy choir, and make a moan

Upon the midnight hours;

Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet

From swinged censer teeming;

Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat

Of pale-mouth’d prophet dreaming.

Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane

In some untrodden region of my mind,

Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,

Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind:

Far, far around shall those dark-cluster’d trees

Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep;

And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees,

The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull’d to sleep;” (source).

being something to carry into the present through new hauntologies; e.g., “The Cult of Dionysus” (2006)

Yesterday I heard you say
Your lust for life has gone away
It got me thinking, I think I feel a similar way
And that’s sad (that’s sad)
That’s sad

So let’s make a decision, start a new religion
Yeah, we’re gonna build a temple to our love
Orgiastic dances, nymphs in trances
Yeah, we’ll be the envy of the gods above

I’m feeling devious
You’re looking glamorous
Let’s get mischievous
And polyamorous
Wine and women and wonderful vices
Welcome to the cult of Dionysus

We could take a Holiday in the month of May
Run free and play in fields of flowers
Pass the hours, making love is how we’ll pray (source)

likewise being neither here nor there, but something in between/without set place resurrected in the Internet Age; i.e., by using old, repurposed language for fresh, nuanced purposes: a “zombie fairy” if you will (or demon, ghost, whatever).

In keeping with the battles for such devices during the banality of evil/desk murder (re: Coleridge, footnote), such creative prurience might seem “excessive” relative to traditional, Western (Cartesian, settler-colonial and heteronormative) conventions; i.e., about sin and vice relayed as “ancient” derelicts to leave behind and find again (druids all the way down). But it isn’t self-destructive the way the state commonly portrays inside the sphere of Capitalism’s harmful influence; i.e., their idea of the silly kid’s sex party until “reality sets in” (a false “waking up” that kills conscious class character in favor of “acting like an adult woman or man according to the WASP/nuclear family model as something to restore). Instead, it’s the envy of the “gods above,” meaning the elite, who can only feel human when drinking more and more blood siphoned from workers against their will. So often, the traitor is a cuckoo assimilator raised in human captivity and reintroduced back into the wild (as Cipher was, among many others).

To that, let’s provide some extra exhibits (six pages’ worth) before giving sex education a deeper look: from the Aegis to the Medusa, neither came first but evolved into themselves and their current echopraxis!

(exhibit 52a: Artist, left: Persephone van der Waard. The model wishes to remain anonymous. I’ll call them Brutus. Fairies had a variety of spellings, such as “fairy” as much as “faerie,” but also ties to a group of peoples and beliefs constantly under attack; i.e., struggling to survive genocide or resurrect themselves as zombies from it. From its earliest days of empire well into the present, then, the West has attacked and assimilated Celtic cultures [which includes their Paganized, Bacchanal pleasures; i.e., their festival variant of the disco, party or orgy]. The Romans raided Britain and fought the Picts; the English demonized the Irish; and the remainders of Celtic mythology survived in popular forms that were canonized or reinvented by English-speaking authors after the native languages and cultures were destroyed in their natural forms. In short, they became romanticized, either through pure sexual escapism aimed uncritically at an endlessly consuming middle-class audience, or displacing it to a faraway fairyland to critique the actions of evil kings against a group of nature-dwelling peoples with magical powers [re: abjection].

During oppositional praxis, though, faeries also retain a “tricksy” nature; i.e., one assigned to them by the colonizers for being poorly behaved, but also vengeful; re: for not killing home rule with kindness. “Changelings” steal English babies and replace them with poorly behaved imposters that assimilate the conquering group out of desperation and spite. Some—like the bean sidhe “fairy woman”—are generally feared as a specific type of hag: a death omen to rehearse, then seduce/scare our enemies shitless [or at least enough that they don’t rape us]!

[source: Christian Death’s Catastrophe Ballet, 1988]

Such omens generally pervade Western canon through a canonical imagination that workers must reimagine inside of itself; i.e., from the fear-blinded eyes of terrified white straight women, onto trans versions and other intersections of privilege and oppression [Brutus was a trans man who stabbed me in the back]. Fascinated with the dark, savage past of an imaginary island that isn’t strictly “theirs,” these women see “their” home as occupied instead by dark animal spirits also popularized by men in a collective xenophobic effort; e.g., Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1902 “The Hound of the Baskervilles” or Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 invention—through her famous protagonist, Jane Eyre—of the fictional “Gytrash.” The “black dog” is an archetypal death omen; in regards to Brontë’s dog demon, Mimi Matthews writes, the Gytrash is “a goblin or spirit which takes the form of a horse, mule, or large dog. Typically found in the North of England, the Gytrash ‘haunted solitary ways’ and often surprised unwary travelers as they journeyed alone in the dusk” [source: “Jane Eyre and the Legendary Gytrash,” 2015]. Similar ideas of the “lycanthrope” roadman can be found in Indigenous Cultures of Turtle Island/the Americas; i.e., with “dog soldiers” becoming a demonized source of fear for American colonizers, then and now.

In other words, the spirit of death, magic and vengeance characteristically haunts the frontiers of the “civilized” world from the Western perspective. This abject tradition certainly wasn’t “new” by the time Brontë adopted it; Shakespeare had already demonized the Welsh enemies of Henry IV in his first [of many] historical play of the same name—i.e., infusing those outside the rapidly-forming English national identity as old, magical and dangerous, but also superstitious and backward, during us-versus-them; re: Harry kills his Welsh double.

In turn, the poetic duty of anyone subverting those mythologies remains the same: to avoid the ghost of the counterfeit’s canonical usage; re: as an alluring fear of the imaginary past, while presenting nature to the modern world—not as something utterly alien or fearsome, but a liminal kind of self-expression with a variety of linguo-material forms speaking to alienation and fetishization serving worker interests during the whore’s revenge. During ludo-Gothic BDSM, these can subsequently present as neopronouns, art, or both—and include myriad ways of seeing the world; i.e., as something to transform using older things that have since been reinvented in service of the oppressed or the oppressor dialectically-materially back and forth.

(exhibit 52b: Artist, top-left: Miles DF; top-middle: Temporal Wolf; top-right: Olexy Oleg; middle-left: unknown; middle: unknown; middle-right and bottom-right: Art Vagabonda; bottom-left: Abigail Larson.
The various styles of furries is infinitely broad, diverse, and ancient. Even in the Western world, legends the likes of chimeras, centaurs, satyrs and fawns date back to Ancient Greece—with “nymphomania” being tied to female sexuality as pathologized by Western men of reason [similar to “wandering womb” as a means of infantilizing female desire; re: by tying it to abject bodies, hysterical minds and fickle emotions]. These ongoing oppressor mentalities [and their ancient canonical codes] may be reclaimed, commonly serving as a mode of existence and “Satanic,” thus Paganized self-expression; i.e., that identify one-and-all with nature in visibly anthropomorphized ways: as its gay Gothic stewards!

Such rainbow flavors are thoroughly hybridized—can be militarized, fantastical, cutesy and/or alien. Indeed, many white women—trapped between the role of dutiful servant and benefactor of colonialism—will quickly turn to the nearest form of nature-as-alien to perform acts of rebellion against, as subjugated Amazons always do; i.e., the Christian devil actually being an abjecting of the alien colonized; e.g., Black Phillip from The Witch [2015, below]: “What dost thou want?” [re: “Darkness Visible: Dark Faeries“]. Again, demons are the classic granters of dark wishes, including a desire for revenge by living deliciously that liberates marginalized groups “of nature” from their overlords[20] by reclaiming sodomy as a weapon of terror that their self-appointed rulers cannot govern the ungovernable with. To bear our Aegis as whores do is to riot against them—its call of the wild as a gloriously uneven gesture of veiled-to-unveiled compatibility!

[artist: Persephone van der Waard. The model wishes to remain anonymous; I’ll call them Siobhan]

As yet another hauntological Cartesian boogey[wo]man of the Western frontiers, more moderate forms of feminism have straight white women using demonic imagery to piss off their male overlords, versus trying to venerate or clear the names of the usual symbols/recipients of stigma; i.e., defending their virtue from, or surrendering to, the idealized form of evil during a conventionally sinful exchange [which translates to secularized forms during the Protestant ethic].

Yet, by simply existing in the material world, these same “suspects” invariably threaten Christendom and the West, thus can be specifically reclaimed as such by gender queer movements; i.e., transgressive as well as subversive, and patently designed to make the “good Christian, American” uncomfortable during their own moral panic. By making bigots “self-report” while overriding canonical stigma and bias, we read the room; i.e., by asking an audience we’re seducing according to their own idea of rebellion as reclaimed by us, mid-seduction: “What dost thou want?” In turn, we respond to them, “To be the thing that my enemies fear while also enjoying myself as something dark, sexy and badass.” Such is Bottom’s Dream, and it paradoxically has and has not a bottom!

[artist: Siobhan]

To it, when I first approached Siobhan for my “Black Phillip” rendition, we played as one might in a grove with the fawn. Then I—struck with the fawn’s dark love spell, afterwards—built a temple to their generous loving of me: to a dark god I didn’t know but felt connected to, anyways! The model unfortunately disappeared shortly after the shoot, but they gave themselves willingly at the time; i.e., towards a cause I am proud to feature them inside, “as is.” Truly their ass and pussy are the envy of the gods above! So fuzzy and wicked, we make Marx gayer and consciously visible by shedding Freud and his ilk [re: Lacan, Zizek, Creed, etc]!

[artist: Siobhan]

In other word, natural demons—as well as their secularized, so-called “Satanic” proponents—are GNC devices of sin, vice and guilt; i.e., that, in our campable hands similar to Matthew Lewis’ own Matilda camping the canon—can threaten the heteronormative order to varying degrees of camp!)

(exhibit 52c1: Model and artist: Drooling Red and Persephone van der Waard. Dark forests also include swamps or lagoons [Grendel’s mother living in an underwater cave beneath a lake] with which to engage with forbidden, oft-female or at least monstrous-feminine water spirits/nymphs. The habitats are dark and forsaken by God and God’s cops, but also granting forbidden knowledge and pleasure offered up by nature-themed demons facing the cop and controlling them through sex: something that is invaded, chased and hunted by Cartesian agents looking for the sh[l]ock of that tight Numinous squeeze.)

Body horror is a horror of nature and change in ways the state conditions people to dread. But through experiencing that change myself as concurrent with others I have played with undergoing similar events, I can attest to the joy of such things; i.e., to be a god and know it, as Siobhan and Red showcase so happily. But also, we do it to have boundaries; i.e., setting those up during the cryptonymy process: as suitably revolutionary in our gay Satanic hands, a play-within-a-play (camped since Shakespeare’s rude mechanicals, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream).

I’d say Percy Shelley would approve, but I’m not sure he’s gay enough! The fact remains, Satan is cool, and all who fear us also love us in bad faith; i.e., in ways we can rub in their faces, meaning behind barriers they can never cross: flashing those in power with power as they try to pimp the devil they’re dancing with! Except, if you can’t empathize with us, at least we can fleece you before returning to outer space after cruising for sex (or food, money and other things)!

To rebel, then, is to showcase mutual consent when giving up a piece of the pie; i.e., doing so in ways they can’t actually taste or take, save in ways that sex workers control behind barriers that give them the ability to play and have fun: while getting what they need to survive! All are sexy when challenging profit during the whore’s revenge in spite of persecution mania! “If we spirits have offended,” then good; fuck you, hahaha! Furthermore, such things speak to development as a liminal task, one whose work is never done! Gods have to fight for their recognition, and they love tributes (cum or otherwise), mid-transformation and -exchange!

(artist: Siobhan)

To summarize Cartesian revolution and nature vs the state as we have covered it here, the entire natural class of monsters—furries, chimeras, and fairies, etc—can teach us forbidden or denied ways of thinking about sex that don’t harm anyone, but are invariably framed as “dangerous” by the status quo; re: “sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll”; i.e., according to their queer/pornographic elements as sexually animal-like, primitive/transgressive, undead and/or demonic, and drug-themed opiate bread-and-circus for the masses:

• mutually consensual “breeding” (the threat of impregnation without the consequence, but also with forbidden mates)
• “flashing” (to show that which is taboo, thus dangerous to expose)
• and HRT (exhibit 52g) as a kind of “potency boost” to the body/mind and the sex it has as animalistic

To play with fire, in the Faustian or Promethean sense, then, is to canonically threaten getting burned unto the demonized, thus blaming the whore as they’re policed for Original Sin (“sex is perditious, but also, humans are reprobate and supposed to deny gratuitous excess; i.e., in pursuit of a Puritan ethic,” which the whore’s “almost holy” temple severs the bond between man and God to liberate by communion with dark forces that transform us back into what capital stole from us). Yet, play as a riotous element can paradoxically induce/control labor (so to speak): as something to regain orgasmically through the same anisotropic mode’s epidural. Such is ludo-Gothic BDSM minus the big fucking needle to the back!

Whatever the form, all speak to/with that primal, Numinously rough stuff that can make the sex absolutely out-of-this-world; i.e., anatomy lessons tied to our animalized selves haunted by medicalized trauma, including our body and bodily fluids—our cum, saliva and lubrication, etc—but also our body hair and sex organs as innate parts of our biological selves theatrically worshipped in “monster parties” set to rock ‘n roll/metal: as something to fuck to, Salem’s lot abjected by Cartesian thought save as ghosts of the counterfeit (most men have no idea where the clitoris is or how to stimulate it, for example; e.g., in grad school when I was still in the closet, Zeuhl literally had to grab my hand and “stab” their clit with my fingers like a fucking treasure map: “This is where my clit is. Right. Here!” How seditious).

Now that we’ve looked at some extra examples of animalizing sex work, remember that our focus remains on humanizing sex workers through the Gothic mode’s decidedly queer lens. This chapter addresses trans, non-binary and intersex chattel stigmas during oppositional praxis—pointedly its sex education as good and/or bad relative to nature as something to damn or rescue; i.e., “groomer” panic as something to defend ourselves from while identifying with various stigma animal combinations like the snake, wasp, spider and bat, but also the minotaur (or something akin to a minotaur) as something for manly heroes to canonically slay during a warrior’s rite of passage we subvert, onstage and off (exhibit 51d, next section): mid-furry-panic.

As such, we shall also consider how trauma can subvert the heteronormative mythic structure when expressed by demons of the natural world; i.e., as walking castle-in-the-flesh elements of chaos—especially when merging totems with undead and demon language: as a chaotic force, death being a part of nature, but also having an expressly material function in human culture as aligned with or against nature; re: in hauntological, drug-like forms during acid Communism fostering radical empathy as a matter of dark reclamation towards what has been lost. If fascism is radical apathy through its own Gothic poetics (monsters, magic and drug use), then Communism is radical empathy (towards the alien) upending such devices by reversing abjection—all to reclaim everything capital takes from us in the bargain by stressing an animal connection from start to finish!

Furries, for example, are a recent attempt by those in the modern world to find a sense of shared togetherness, humanity and common aims; i.e., inside a material existence expressing the natural world as something to reunite with based on older animal mythological standards that, for all intents and purposes, are functionally extinct in their native forms.

(artist: Evul)

In turn, the same reunion with, and revival of, the past as bound to nature as a monstrous-feminine alien fairy whore—which already includes space aliens (e.g., the Twi’lek from Return of the Jedi, left, being something to fuck after Luke kills the monster and for which she takes his power)—also includes all the totemic demon forms we shall outline/examine moving forwards. Just as the elite transform the natural world, animals and chattelized workers to suit their class material interests, human workers can reclaim this power of animalistic expression and transformation to move beyond Capitalism; i.e., as the Great Destroyer not just of workers, but of the natural world and everything inside it (no classic reductionism, Marx).

To it, Capitalism is unstable by design; it decays and rapes by design, sexualizing and alienating everything. We challenge that on the Aegis, having our monstrous-feminine revenge, including its violent, terrifying sex and shapes forcing capital’s hand, in the bargain; i.e., it can’t compete with our labor if we take said labor back from them. They obscure their fetishes as a means of prolonging capital, covering up what translates in feudal language to impostor syndrome haunting the family tree; we expose those in ways that thwart profit and validate us independent of such structures: no assimilation. Instead, the trauma they give us becomes a weapon we give back; i.e., like the Skeksis and Deet, Kagero and the tornado golem, or Victor and the Creature, and many others. Issuing hot discharge/Santorum, only to abscond with their vanity/diminish their capacity to cause harm and leave them with a hot mess to clean up!

For something the state rejects, then, Hell is what they need as a matter of argument; i.e., as something to reject yet claim while rejecting it in a subjugated state of grace. Requiring their students play in it to pimp it, they go into our traps eager and blind, and that is where we get them good (with pussies like steel traps, below). She succ, the green fairy woman clapping back to drink your milkshake, Captain Kirk! “You’re terminated, fucker!” But also, so veiny in its tumescent vacillation! A palliative Numinous to impulsively plunge into! Macaroni in a pot!

(artist: Evul)

Onwards to “Call of the Wild,” part two: Dark Xenophilia (opening)“!

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About the Author

Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] Meaning “anecdotal”; i.e., BDSM as common; e.g., Cuwu responding to pet play and ultimately running away with a dog trainer at work (tragic and sad, but also hilarious).

[2] We already discussed this in the Undead Module (exhibit 37b).

[3] Who writes, “Due to the existence of this scene it is my working theory that Hank is uncircumcised. Without foreskin it would be quite difficult for Marie to masturbate him the way she did without lubricant, and it would be much harder for Hank to achieve an erection in the state he was in.” The plot thickens/therein lies the rub! (ibid.).

[4] Diversity is strength, beating singular perceptions of strength that, through Cartesian domination, try to hold onto power to everyone’s detriment.

[5] These various groupings can be extended to plants or fungi (e.g., dryads or mushroom men), but our focus in this section will remain on fauna, not flora. We also won’t be focusing on the traditional gay male language of otters or bears, for instance, but I freely admit (and encourage) that such mentalities could easily work within that framework—e.g., “bears” and “cubs” in a figurative sense, describing a male dom with a burly, hair body (versus their smaller, subby counterpart); or, the same idea but the parties are presented in fursona language: a bear and his cub from a visual, animalized standpoint. Similar to femboys (exhibit 91a), the notion can also be non-binarized; i.e., with enby AFABs calling themselves “bears” if they feel particularly masc (versus the lesbian gradient, between the butch and femme pole, with “futch” in the middle), etc. Point in fact, I mention this precisely because I don’t personally have a lot of cis-queer friends, and the history of the language is frankly cis. It’s still available and valid; I just won’t be using it or focusing on it.

[6] E.g., Hannah Gadsby’s skit about the Pouch of Douglas; per Cartesian thought and Capitalism, science at large catalogs nature to immortalize enterprising men of science (which mirror Cartesian men of reason, in Metroidvania, but also subjugated Galatea/Amazons like Samus).

[7] As Mieville responds when interviewed by Mark Bould:

MB: Since the 1960s fantasy has inevitably been cast in the shadow of J.R.R. Tolkien, and consequently there has been a widespread perception that fantasy is engaged in a nostalgic embrace of the idiocy of rural, hobbit life. But your novels are resolutely urban fantasies: both King Rat and The Tain offer vividly imagined versions of London; London is also visible through the sprawling city of New Crobuzon in Perdido Street Station; and despite setting The Scar almost entirely at sea most of the action takes place in a vast floating city called the Armada. What is the attraction of the city, and of London in particular?

CM: The nostalgia for rural life in Tolkien and all his innumerable grandchildren is politically very problematic. There are two things I’d want to say about that, though. First, although I’m on record at tedious length about how much I don’t particularly like Tolkien and have all sorts of problems with him, we should not dis Tolkien for the crimes of his epigones [emphasis, me], who came after and are immeasurably worse and less interesting and more straightforwardly reactionary than he. And second, the fact that a reactionary—contradictorily but, I think, broadly reactionary—impulse is evident in his writing, his aesthetic, is not of course a reason to dismiss him. There are plenty of writers whose politics do not stand in the way of their creating brilliant literature –most famously Balzac for Marx, but also Louis-Ferdinand Céline or, within genre fantasy, Gene Wolfe—and their politics is so embedded in their prose that you cannot simply get away from it either, you have to engage with it. The problem with Tolkien is that the prose itself, the form of the writing, intersects with his reactionary aesthetic so as to create what is, for me, very flat literature (source: “‘Appropriate Means’: An Interview with China Miéville,” 2003).

As I insist, twenty years later (and know I’m right, because Tolkien was taken and replicated unironically in hundreds of thousands [at least] of videogames, films and printed media [novels, short stories and comic books] after China’s interview):

First, power’s interrogation happens through class war in popular media; for the Gothic, class/culture war is monster war—a battle of the mind, the monster and the method as codified beliefs and behaviors during a shared stage: the “shadow zone’s” map and various environments, but especially the castle as a sex dungeon, my own extensive and ever-evolving research in Metroidvania examined how cross-media mimetic patterns are shared between Tolkien’s refrain and Cameron’s as ludologized. Their relationship is actually cryptomimetic, involving and describing a ludic meta-pattern/contract shared across a variety of genres out from older mediums and into videogames (“beyond the novel or cinema and into Metroidvania”): whether from Tolkien’s built world or Cameron’s it’s all from the same basic legends, but the aesthetic, context and function during class war (as something to adopt) is different when we examine and camp these authors ourselves; i.e., canon and camp of a suitably “Gothic” kind that announces itself (or forgets to).

It’s all drawn off the same basic map and theatrical function of the map, albeit at cross purposes relative to class function: Gothic doubles that challenge the pure, aching goodness of Tolkien’s gentrified war and Cameron’s white-savior variant of the cis-het Amazon. The Metroidvania map might be a lie wrought from similar legends as Cameron’s ordinance-heavy updating of the Tolkien refrain, but its cartography needn’t serve the state if the double is iconoclastic, thus campy in ways that Tolkien was allergic to (re: allegory and apocalypse) and which various accommodated intellectuals are in no hurry to express in their own work, especially in relation to their own lives; re: “the infamous discretions of academia waste a surprising amount of time commenting on all of these matters as separate from each other (source).

The example I gave after that quote was actually my MMU professors, but I think Mieville is going way too easy on Tolkien; i.e., “Tolkien sucks, but he was still an intellectual and not reactionary ‘enough!'” Bitch, please, he built a hypercanonical ludo-narrative model aped by legions of copycats built on racial conflict designed to uphold Capitalist Realism in perpetuity! As Malcolm X put it, the fox is more hypocritical and dangerous than the wolf, and Tolkien was most definitely a fox. You shouldn’t apologize for genocide, Mieville, and are a bad Marxist if you can’t stop glazing Tolkien’s asshole; i.e., we should “dis” Tolkien for the crimes of his epigones, because they were imitating him, you stupid fuck!

[8] We’ve discussed the importance of taking speedrunning invention outside of the text and into extratextual spheres; i.e., in order to apply speedrunning ingenuity to larger systemic issues. That being said, while the expectations of the shooter hero as classically being a racecar loaded for bear*, this liminality can still be enjoyed as an entertainment vehicle per Sarkeesian’s adage. But this doesn’t change the fact that the monomythic framework and neoliberal refrain are incredibly pernicious; re: Tolkien’s High Fantasy treasure map as followed by the shooter being inspired by Cameron’s Aliens having ripped off Starship Troopers and LotR‘s own “spectres of Beowulf” to make a female war boss in the neoliberal era (with Cameron basically aping Eowyn vs the Witch-King of Angmar in Return of the King [1956]—the white Amazon versus Darth Vader before Darth Vader appeared, twenty years later and was then pimped by Cameron, nine years after that); i.e., military copaganda meant to acclimate children to future war amid Capitalist Realism: “kill all enemies, become the strongest, and advance to future stages that encourage and repeat infinite military conquest in defense of home in-decay and threatened from within by a foreign plot that turns Indigenous occupants into demon zombies” (givers/receivers of state force per nature as fetishized and alien)! Rinse, repeat!

*Whose weapons click on other beings, like a laser-guided bomb drop: maximum damage, minimum effort. And bombs = money for the elite to pitch at states relying on imaginary enemies. The same idea applies to guns as sold in real forms treated like toys (e.g., 1ShotTV’s “How LETHAL is a 12 Gauge Mini Shell??? (Shockwave 590s vs Human Torso),” 2024) and vice versa (copaganda) through a shared constant: treat anyone who isn’t white cis-het and male as game to kill as quickly and machine-like as possible (the hunter’s paradox: infinite growth in a finite web of life).

[9] Re: Jon Lajoie: “Ladies love the bad boy look, and you can’t get much worse than a rapist.”

[10] If you doubt me, watch a stripper hang around tipping Johns, and compare that to the effusive praise that videogame streamers give their donators; i.e., all work is sexualized per a division of labor that treats male work as more worthy of pay/unworthy of stigma versus women’s work in the same professions. Such double standards are endless because labor division and exploitation are endless; i.e., inside capital monopolizing violence, terror and sex per the Gothic mode.

[11] In-fighting is built into Doom‘s gameplay loop, so much so that it becomes a means of solving special emergent puzzles; i.e., in fan-made gauntlets putting players to the test; e.g., Coincident’s “Okuplok. Ultra-Violence. 1 Save“ (2024).

[12] Re, my thesis argument regarding Tolkien and Cameron’s refrain:

Under Capitalist Realism, Hell is a place that always appears on Earth (or an Earth-like double)—a black fortress threatening state hegemony during the inevitable decay of a colonial body. Its widening state of exception must then be entered by the hero during the liminal hauntology of war as a repeatable, monomythic excursion—a franchise to subdue during military optimism sold as a childhood exercise towards “playing war” in fantastical forms; e.g., Castlevania or Metroid. Conjure a Radcliffean menace inside the Imperial Core, then meet it with American force.

Threatened, the state always responds with violence before anything else. Male or female, then, the hero becomes the elite’s exterminator, destroyer and retrieval expert, infiltrating a territory of crisis to retrieve the state’s property (weapons, princesses, monarchic symbols of power, etc] while simultaneously chattelizing nature in reliably medieval ways: alienating and fetishizing its “wild” variants, crushing them like vermin to maintain Cartesian supremacy and heteronormative familial structures […] Neoliberalism merely commercializes the monomyth, using parental heroic videogame avatars like the knight or Amazon pitted against dark, evil-familial doubles—parents, siblings and castles (and other residents/residences)—in order to dogmatize the player (usually children) as a cop-like vehicle for state aims (often dressed up as a dated iteration thereof; e.g., an assassin, cowboy or bounty hunter, but also a lyncher, executioner, dragon slayer or witchfinder general “on the hunt,” etc): preserving settler-colonial dominance through Capitalist Realism by abusing Gothic language—the grim reaper and his harvest. [… I.e.,] convince the hero that a place away from home is home-like; i.e., the thing they do not actually own being “theirs” (the ghost of the counterfeit) but “infested” (the process of abjection). Then, give them a map and have them “clean house”—an atrocious “fixer” out of the imaginary past who repairs the “broken” home room-by-room by first cleansing it of abject things “attacking it from within,” then disappearing with the nightmare they constitute (source).

and my follow-up Volume-One argument:

Canonical heroes triangulate against state targets, then, becoming the necessary exterminator of the settler-colonial model, but also the sexy destroyer and superheroic retrieval expert during the monomythic fetch quest (hyperbole and state heroism go hand-in-hand, exaggerating the menace, emergency and rescue to equal measure); i.e., a budding flower of war and larger-than-life tempter-of-fate (and the audience) walking the tightrope between Heaven and Hell, life and death, protector and aggressor, child and parent, but also wild and tame, pleasure and pain, black and white, strong and weak, invincible and vulnerable, good and evil—all while delivering state subjects (and the nuclear family unit) from evil, chaos, death, darkness, Hell, etc: the dark chronotope as a false copy whose hellish architecture and monarchy (the medieval bloodline) threatens the perceived legitimacy of the West’s own forgeries (while also haunting them). A school of canonical violence, then, the liminal hauntology of war predictably emerges, summoning the hero to occupy then suppress a prescribed “disorder” during an orderly chaos/Amazonomachia that breaks and repairs the symbolic home; i.e., over and over (a narrative of the crypt, circular ruin, infernal concentric pattern, Cycle of Kings, etc).

And since we’re focusing on the monstrous-feminine, here, I consider the most famous of all modern phallic women to be Hippolyta-married-to-Theseus: James Cameron’s neoconservative, “feral mother” take on Ellen Ripley serving as a warlike, parent-themed mentor for the children of the present (or those who, thanks to waves of terror, regress to child-like states). She’s the housemaid with a gun, facing the barbaric imagery of the imaginary past mirrored by actual colonial abuses, upholding the latter by banishing the former to benefit the elite—in short, by playing out a heroic story much in the same way that modern versions of Beowulf would: through sex and force, rape and war expressed in theatrical language that maintains Capitalist Realism (source).

To escape Hell, you must subvert its regular joy divisions while inside them; i.e., during ludo-Gothic BDSM’s liminal expression—with art through sex work being incredibly liminal; re: exploitation and liberation share the same spaces (e.g., the same cruiser’s bathroom stall, above).

[13] This kind of distinction can be made by either side of a dialectical-material struggle; e.g., Myth II and the Deceiver fighting like hell to save the West from sudden destruction (the Fallen, per Bungie’s arguments, known to instigate “natural” catastrophes like volcanoes or floods—thereby foisting other woes of Capitalism’s onto an imaginary scapegoat):

The scouts told us that Alric and nearly three thousand men from the Legion have come from Muirthemne to face Soulblighter. Unfortunately, they were met by Shiver and her army in the valley about two hours downstream from the dam. If the dam were destroyed, the resulting deluge would kill everything in its path for miles.

Upon hearing this, The Deceiver shook his head, his face twisting in anger. He moved slowly through the crowd, commanding all those present to defend the dam, insisting that he would punish those who allowed it to fall. Without another word, he headed downstream.

I asked one of the Black Robes why The Deceiver had not stayed to help us and he tersely replied, “he goes to warn the Emperor – moving through odd angles; faster than any man, and if unobserved, much faster than that” (source: Bungie).

Unlike the Deceiver’s token assimilation, we don’t work for the emperor in defense of the West. Yet, our powers inside Capitalism’s shadow zone will prove just as useful defending us from Capitalism; i.e., by letting us—through the Gothic—intimate and critique grappling hyperobjects using poetic abstractions: great, powerful Destroyers manifesting as giants, castles, suits of armor and so on!

[14] Playing devil’s advocate (I mean, just look at that goatee), the actor for the character (who historically plays the sell-out) makes a compelling point; i.e., not to justify it, but highlight—me playing defense for him, a bit—that the state’s unfair advantages do make people sell out, and furthermore, is a historical-material fact. We need to recognize and portray said fact when going up against the state and its proponents’ lies, ourselves, in real life; i.e., the useful idiot as someone to challenge when challenging us—doing so according to deceptions being half-real on both sides, each going back and forth between fabrication and reality (a bit like the characters in the movie):

The Matrix is now back on everybody’s radar thanks to the upcoming sequel, and with that brings forth the questions that have plagued all of our minds ever since we first gazed into the artificial world way back in 1999. One such question regards actor Joe Pantoliano’s character Cypher, a member of the heroic crew who betrayed the rest for another chance at being “plugged in”. However, that is not exactly how Pantoliano sees things, with the actor having recently defended Cypher’s actions.

“I always have arguments with fans of that movie because they look at Cypher and they say ‘You were a traitor.’ And I, being years in show business and having to dissect and having liberal vision of the character I’m portraying, I’m always arguing on his behalf. On Cypher’s behalf. Like, who wouldn’t take that deal? If you were given an opportunity and a choice and then you decided you made the wrong choice. “You take the red pill, the girl that you love is in love with somebody else.”

“You’ve gone through six or seven ‘Ones’; Neo is just another guy that’s gonna get his ass killed. And he’s going, ‘I’ve made a terrible mistake! Ignorance IS bliss. Why shouldn’t I go back to a world and pick the person I want to be. Pick the career I want to have and have no memory [re: Plato’s “writing is the death of memory” argument]. I’d betray anybody, I’d kill anybody.'”

So, much like everything else in the world of The Matrix, things are a lot more complicated as they initially seem. Joe Pantoliano reasons that Cypher is so unhappy with his choice to wake up in the real world that he has no other choice than to make a deal and return to a world of blissful ignorance (ibid.).

Cipher’s the jester-pimp in the king’s court. Having already duped himself, he speaks to the audience in ways that let them realize how—after Cipher is ignominiously dead—still remains a man (or echo of a man) that made the wrong choice… yet also remains sympathetic insofar as we’re facing the same Faustian dilemma he once did; i.e., versus a shadow of a devil that was once a man and still might be: as something to learn from according to his caged rhetoric being part of the film’s central lesson. However “stacked” the deck seems, then, said choice historically-materially predicates on the same criminogenic conditions conjured to our service in duality (not just for the state, Marx, but workers, too)! A mirror (and its arguments) can always go both ways!

[15] Meaning “in the dark, with set Gothic-Marxist tenets but not a hard plan” (again, as I did with this whole book). This might seem less-than-conducive but “form follows function” really applies, here; i.e., trying to build something that, like a Metroidvania or Gothic castle, builds itself in a meta sense using ergodic motion: as a statement of longevity through application. Trying to stay lose and flexible enough to replace and encourage those post-scarcity results is all part of the fun; i.e., an adventure partially obscured; re: “Like Communism, a Gothic castle is always incomplete, in continuum but seems to suggest its full potential as a powerful, unmappable suggestion each and every visit” (re: “A Song Written in Decay“). In short, you can pick a spot to build Gothic Communism, but you can’t have a set plan because it needs to be flexible, hence creatively inventive enough to survive and subvert Capitalism ipso facto, occupying the same space. Once you’re primed, you’ll know how and learn to recognize the feeling. You’ll respect it, letting it work until what’s done is done. Let Medusa cook.

[16] Privacy and intimacy as we know it

Will be a memory

Among many to be passed down

To those who never knew (Death’s “1,000 Eyes,” 1995).

[17] The Gothic is serialized, and creatures of chaos yield many interpretations per moment and over space and time as looping back around. For example, as NOBM666 (above) writes,

The personalities for me can go two ways. First they are anew, fire [succubae] with one sole purpose, to please Chernabog. The second, they remember what they were before but they focus on what they are now as their purpose is surely the same, to please Chernabog. The latter point holds a richness of torture to the original forms of these creatures forced into something new and to the forms they hold now, tainted by their ugly past self’s and all the profane acts they have done. There is richness to this point also regarding the sex change and admittance to the cause, where ugly male demons are made beautiful females, where all they can do is just accept or risk destruction, where they are forced to act sensual and shame themselves in an erotic show to please their master. This humiliation and confusion adds a depravity to it all, one I imagine Chernabog relishes.

Now I can get carried away with the many themes and ideas suggested but I will end on a bonus thought. The demons made the fire which shapes into alluring maidens but when their fire is put out by Chernabog are they changed into to a pig, wolf and goat OR are they just revealing what was beneath the flame all along? As the flame burns out revealing bestial feet working up the body in a grotesque way, it makes you wonder were those dumb barnyard animals the fire maidens all along, gifted the forms to express their purpose to their master who cruelly took back the gift? (source).

My own interpretations of any monsters (and their masters) are a bit more dialectical-material, but the spirit of the discourse is very much the same: the chaos of interpretation, versus canonical order squashing the pedagogy of the oppressed haunting the shadow of police violence (and vice versa).

[18] “An ancient race of people… the Druids… No one knows… who they were… or what they were doing… but their legacy remains!” (source). Camping not just the Gothic, but Marx, this 1984 tour-de-farce repeats past tragedies in ways we can camp; i.e., with the same ghosts of the counterfeit, coaxing these Marxist spirits out of their hiding place like Disney’s own Paganistic lord, on Bald Mountain. But it can be very funny as we do it!

All the same, humor and rebellion aren’t mutually exclusive. Instead, they separately or together speak to an alienation with nature through the imaginary past we’re questing for Numinous reunion with; re (from “Composites to the Occult to Totems of the Natural World”):

demons embody poetic exchange—as unequal/forbidden, and with transformative linguo-material devices (re: power, darkness, knowledge; if I mention a particular noun in this module, it’s because I’m stressing it). As such, they are classically made, summoned or found, and argue dualistically (through doubles) along these circuits of poetic discourse; i.e., by creating something out of clay or summoning it into a clay-like substance (or dead flesh, possessed victim, graveyard soil, etc): to deal/treat with power in all its forms, including of nature and death as old, haunted, anathema and ubiquitous. Knowledge is power and vice versa during such exchanges; i.e., as dark, anisotropic.

Couched in “darkness visible” as a poetic, xenoglossic device, we can make not just voices, but also bodies that speak cryptonymically to taboo, illusory and paradoxical things, injecting them with fresh poetic life (trans people are poets of identity and the flesh, above); i.e., a half-real, checkered combination of violent, terrifying and hellish morphological freedom of expression, existing in andro/gynodiverse defiance of state monopolies, trifectas and qualities of capital, hence Vitruvian medicalization and genocidal apathies (re: the Shadow of Pygmalion as white/xenophobic, fearing things not of the West [“not of this Earth!”] and bastardizing them as abject, alien evil, forgotten; i.e., reimagined with asymmetrical/guerilla powers exploited by the state but not monopolized by them)!

(source: Testament’s Dark Roots of the Earth, 2012; artist: Eliran Kantor)

Per Hogle, the ghost of the counterfeit furthers abjection through the middle class upholding status-quo arrangements of power and knowledge through Gothic fakeries; i.e., viewing colonized land as dark and alien, vis-à-vis Cartesian thought and heteronormative language demonizing older forms of culture connected to nature, life and death, having become alien in ways that uphold capital (and its black/white colonial binary argument). Under Capitalist Realism, something is “dark” if it ostensibly moves anything of value (re: power and knowledge) away from the status quo. Generally this darkness is associated with the vengeful imaginary past based on buried historical atrocities, the latter paradoxically twisted by the former to keep control right where it is (among the elite). Anything that challenges this paradigm is canonically framed as dark, evil, profligate; i.e., nature as vengeful whore, which capital takes revenge on through DARVO-style police violence/obscurantism, witch hunts, tokenism and moral panic […]

Rebel power/knowledge, then, becomes ontological in highly dark, Satanic, and “archaically” poetic ways; i.e., through iconoclastic abstraction and impression, but also hefty substance, sensitivity and savory deliciousness regarding the natural world as funerary and wild (as forbidden fruit generally is): “death” as an extant state of constant radical change, made by those “of nature” the forces of light deem ethnocentrically “lesser” or “accursed” while conveniently abusing the same language of the imaginary past’s priestly and funerary necrobiome, themselves (always in service to profit/a Cartesian paradigm raping nature as whore, Pagan, black, the latter closer to life and death through reimagined death gods, post-genocide—above). And yet, all monsters are linguo-material devices, hence exist in anisotropic duality during oppositional praxis; i.e., in dialectical-material struggle, moving power towards workers or the state. This further complicates by a give-and-take approach to what is being exchanged. Whereas the undead take essence when they feed in relation to trauma, demons give knowledge to transform themselves and others into demons when they teach (source).

True to form, then, the Gothic (and its kissing cousin, the Romantics) routinely wrestled/wrestle with Numinous/Sublime size difference, mid-fetish and convention/cliché; i.e., doing so in ways that people respond to as a conscious (to not-so-conscious) recognition of its own silliness and seriousness likewise forever being at war!

To it, the music in Spinal Tap‘s “Stonehenge” actually sounds—in this old metalhead’s opinion, anyways—pretty fucking great instrumentally alongside fairly rote (on purpose) lyrics:

Stonehenge! Where the demons dwell
Where the banshees live and they do live well
Stonehenge! Where a man’s a man
And the children dance to the Pipes of Pan

Hey!

Stonehenge! ‘Tis a magic place
Where the moon doth rise with a dragon’s face
Stonehenge! Where the virgins lie
And the prayers of devils fill the midnight sky

And you my love, won’t you take my hand?
We’ll go back in time to that mystic land
Where the dew drops cry and the cats meow [mew goes the void kitty]
I will take you there, I will show you how (source: Genius).

It’s not so different from Rush’s “Xanadu” or Witchfynde’s “Leaving Nadir” save that it’s pointedly camping—”into the living rock,” mid-Satanic-Panic—Coleridge’s 1816 xenophobic-philic “Kubla Khan” (the latter romancing the conqueror and fetishizing nature while seemingly disavowing the Gothic as Coleridge loved to do). But also, the entire glorious mess can be enjoyed for the “true camp” of the dancing little people around the Lucky-Charms-sized monolith; i.e., one that both shrinks said Numinous per the usual liminal hauntologies at war and expands them through a different force than earnest worship (or horror/terror): a sincere ribbing of the whole counterfeit that still flirts with the ghost of said counterfeit as something to tease. “I think that the problem may have been that there was a Stonehenge monument on the stage that was in danger of being crushed by a dwarf, alright? That tended to understate the hugeness of the object!” Or, as Terry Gilliam once said, “It’s only a model!”

Yet, like “Ozymandias,” such things don’t cancel each other out during the call of the void/wild (and its various interpretations; e.g., Lovecraft’s fascist xenophobia)—can, in the same breath, be enjoyed separately and together in ways that don’t worship the usual altars that self-serving men like Poe, Conrad, Lovecraft, or Scott, etc, did; i.e., the fearing of “druids” by knocking on wood to keep them at bay… or to invoke their ghostly memory and dance with them in the present space and time (those treated like druids right now). All part of the fun, kids! But also, there’s a science behind it to appreciate, too:

Stonehenge might have not actually been an arena to watch guys in hooded robes and glitter eyeshadow act all otherworldly, but it did have killer acoustics. At least the way it was recently found to have been configured to amplify sound but still keep it inside defies the notion that no one knew how to achieve special effects during the Stone Age. University of Salford professor Trevor Cox and his research team worked backwards — instead of building a scale model of a future concert hall, they used the prehistoric gathering place to create such a model. The Spinal Tap-size Stonehenge they created could literally speak (or sing) of its secrets (source: Elisabeth Rayne’s ” Stonehenge’s Unreal, Real-Life Acoustics Would Have Impressed the Guys of Spinal Tap,” 2020).

(ibid.)

Huh, no shit! “Yeah, science, bitch!”

In any event, canon retreats from the present to resist the learning of new things as detrimental to its canonical value; i.e., its ability to control workers. But for the iconoclast, this only enhances the experience, thus praxial potential we can work with, in the future! “Sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll,” babes! It’s our Trojan Horse mirroring theirs save in function! Engagement and application to synthesize praxis are what matter! We’re literally playing with the past to camp it, working with dead symbols, nerdy pretensions of grandeur and metaphor (“to break my fast on honeydew” speaking as much to sex and drugs as separate versus together); i.e., to achieve the only things that are sacred: universal human, animal and environmental rights! Give ‘Em Hell, indeed, we’re walking away from Omelas and into a stately pleasure dome Coleridge couldn’t envision, no matter how much laudanum he took!

[19] Coleridge took laudanum; I get high on people, friendship, and sex. The virgin loser versus the Stacy trans an-Com!

[20] The film releases the daughter from Puritan bondage; i.e., by destroying the nuclear family model, but all while fearful of and fascinated towards the witch of the forest as a profoundly abject being: kill your family first, then live deliciously out in the dark forest beyond Capitalist Realism/Lacan’s Real treating Marxism as contained in a post-Freudian Black Bubble!