This blog post is part of “All the World,” a sixth promotion originally inspired by the three I did in 2024 with Harmony Corrupted and Romantic Rose: “Brace for Impact,” “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil” (2024), as well as “Make It Real” for Volume One and “The Total Codex” for Volume Zero. Those promotions sought to promote and provide their respective volume’s individual pieces for easy public viewing in single-post form; re: for the Poetry Module, Undead Module and Demon Module, followed by my PhD and manifesto. “All the World,” by comparison, caps off my book series with a promotion for Volume Three; re: my Praxis Volume. As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.
Click here to see “All the World’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).
Concerning Buggy Images: Sometimes the images on my site don’t always load and you get a little white-and-green placeholder symbol, instead. Sometimes I use a plugin for loading multiple images in one spot, called Envira Gallery, and not all of the images will load (resulting in blank white squares you can still right-click on). I‘ve optimized most of the images on my site, so I think it’s a server issue? Not sure. You should still be able to access the unloaded image by clicking on the placeholder/right-clicking on the white square (sometimes you have to delete the “?ssl=1” bit at the end of the url). Barring that, completed volumes will always contain all of the images, whose PDFs you can always download on my 1-page promo.
(artist: Mercedes the Muse)
Toxic Schlock Syndrome; or, an Early Stab at Cryptonymy: the Fur(r)tive Rebellion of Amazons, Body Hair and Whistleblowers in Duality (feat. Mercedes the Muse, Mugiwara, Mercy from Overwatch, and Autumn Ivy)
“You think the wolf cares that you believe he’s real? Not if he finds you alone in the woods. […] He’s not out there, coming in; he’s already here.”
—the “preacher,” The Dark and the Wicked (2020)
Picking up where “Describing Sexuality vs Prescribing Sexual Modesty” left off…
Note: This section is composite in several ways. For one, it combines the earlier parts of Chapter One in relation to how I think about Gothic media. This includes citing and referencing past writings that I’ve done, but also including how I arrived at my conclusions by relating to art as a creative mode; i.e., one that doubles as an active mode of thought—of understanding the world through art as something to make, its creative process (and logical end result) being a socio-material extension of the world operating in perpetuity. Their arrival and continuum is difficult to demonstrate, demanding collages of various things interacting across the board. This includes artwork and the things that produce artwork, or otherwise contribute towards its production in ways single collages cannot fully express at first glance.
As such, the photos in this section will be multiple composites that I then explain further through dialectical-material analysis [as something I would go onto introduce and build upon; see: postscript]. —Perse, back in 2023
(artist: Mercedes the Muse)
P.S., “Toxic Schlock!” essentially disseminated, in early 2023, that which became my collage exhibit style from October 2023 onwards (re: Volume Zero). It didn’t start here, but actually in the Bride of Frankenstein “poster pastiche” exhibit (re: “Making Demons‘” exhibit 44b2, December 2022). While that is where I pioneered the approach, here is where I actively started to incorporate it; i.e., with specific models during a close-read style I would use throughout the remainder of the book series (six book promotions and over seventy models). The one featured here—in my first stab at revolutionary cryptonymy—is Mercedes the Muse (one of my earliest muses). And yet, substantial 2025 addendums have seen me expand on this specific subchapter a fair bit; i.e., to include Mugiwara and Autumn Ivy when talking about Amazons.
Lastly, the PDF has shrunk many to meet my page limit; those can be accessed here, full-size. —Perse, 4/28/2025
This section takes a preliminary stab at revolutionary cryptonymy to reverse abjection with; i.e., during a holistic symposium featuring specific models. Let’s set the table, then move onto the meat and bones of cryptonymy!
First, as “Toxic Schlock” is a symposium and not a close-read, it’s more conversational/fun and less thesis-driven (we’ll cite older book sections for thesis elements, however). Given its new 2025 length, I’ve also decided to signpost it:
- Setting the Table (feat. Mercedes the Muse): A Spoonful of (Toxic) Sugar
- Rebellious Furries (and Heavy Metal; feat. Nyx)
- Tucking In: “Shut Up and Eat Your Garbage” (feat. Mugiwara)
- Those Who Grow: Hairy Bitches and Where to Find Them (feat. Mugiwara)
- The Barbarism of State Barbers (re: Metroid, Autumn Ivy and Mugiwara)
- Little Shop of Horrors: Camping the Barbershop Whores (re: Autumn Ivy and Mugiwara)
- Chemical Lobotomy (feat. Blizzard, Mercy and Overwatch, AI Abuse, and The Simpsons)
- Doubling the Double, Ourselves (Conventions)
- Corporatizing the Shop (Blizzard reprise: Autumn Ivy)
- Toxicity Refrain: Finding Worth in Waste (while playing with it; re: Mercedes)
- Rock Operas: the Last Bastions of Camp
Setting the Table: A Spoonful of (Toxic) Sugar
(artists: Wolfhead at Night and Bishoujo Mom)
First and foremost, sex is a stimulant, one that—like blood or drugs (re: “The World Is a Vampire” and “Far Out, Dude!“)—can be discussed in different poetic ways. Here, though, we’ll touch on Amazons/the monstrous-feminine and chattelization through sex work as oxymoronic; i.e., specifically as toxic sugar foisted onto workers in crisis: under Capitalist Realism, experiencing death fears during inheritance anxiety (with sugar being something different authors have commented on—as a currency of the medieval period into global Capitalism making sugar cheap; re: Patel and Moore)! It’s nature vs nurture, pimping the whore as a monstrous alien nanny performing at strength in ways men classically do (re: Spartan women, Joshua Mark).
“Toxic sugar” includes things that either look sugary and/or have different toxic (thus poisonous) effects vis-à-vis the land and labor as things to reclaim through the appearance of poison (a metaphor for monstrous-feminine rage/the woman’s weapon); i.e., by embodying them; re: Amazons being the oldest token enforcers “of nature” for the state that, being largely mythological in origin (above), are nonetheless tied to workers using such mythologies in toxic-sugar approaches not far removed from any other drug-like device of violence, terror and monsters; e.g., anal sex and herbos (re: “Reclaiming Anal Rape” from “On Amazons, Good and Bad“); i.e., anal back = land back. The same basic idea works with any aesthetic the Amazon attaches to, including toxic waste, body hair and similar things, mid-cryptonymy reversing abjection in duality. Sugar becomes toxic, for example, when overconsumed; i.e., as an opiate to escape into and addict a consumer base to a demonstrably unhealthy diets (the paradox of super powers stemming from subversion into nuclear waste): the false rebel of subjugated Amazons—with Autumn Ivy’s rotting our brains and poisoning our blood while fleecing us for the status quo.
(artist: Wolfhead at Night)
Note: This symposium concerns heroes and monsters dating back to ancient kayfabe into more recent Amazonomachia (re: Aliens with Ripley vs the Queen, and Metroid with Samus vs Mother Brain). All in all, my Metroidvania, ludo-Gothic BDSM and Tolkien scholarship overlap with my extensive work on Amazons (the latter a subject for which I’ve written on/about probably more than anything else, prompting me to give said work its own compilation page on my website). I’ll cite various things here—e.g., “The Nation-State” vis-à-vis the enby sex worker Autumn Ivy and their hypocritical abusing of me, a sex worker trans woman, in the past—but kindly refer to the above lists for more content; i.e., than this symposium, however holistic, can effectively outline and explore.
Furthermore, this piece sheds further light on Autumn; i.e., since writing “The Nation-State” and “Death by Snu-Snu“; e.g., by me mentioning their “spicier” alter-ego Twitter account, Wolfhead at Night: where they advertise the very sex work they insisted to me they don’t do, in 2021 (re: attacking me for mentioning it/policing my speech regarding their sex work, making all of what they did unnecessary and pointless at this stage). So while we’ll address Autumn’s hypocrisy here, we won’t really discuss their actual abusing of me (for that, re-read “The Nation-State” or their bad review, up on my website’s Sex Work page).
(artist: Wolfhead at Night)
Regarding said abuse, however, just know that Autumn is a token Amazon and that is how I will be discussing them here; i.e., by juxtaposing them with Mercedes and Mugiwara, the latter two hairy sex workers who work in good faith: using the monstrous (and “toxic,” hairy) language of whores (Amazons or not) to actually embrace their profession as sex workers, thus achieve an effective (and demonstrable) means of activism Autumn only plays at!
(artists: Mercedes the Muse, Wolfhead at Night, and Mugiwara)
To it, Autumn is a massive poser and people like Autumn can betray the cause of Gothic Communism that Amazons have historically represented for thousands of years; those like Mugi and Mercedes can reclaim it, their respective “tromette fetish schlock” and “pussy mohawk” (above) granting emancipatory potential to revolutionary monstrous-feminine; i.e., whose cryptonymic hugging of the Medusa counteracts Autumn’s comely-if-bogus varieties punching the Gorgon. Cops and traitors look alike, as do whores and pimps via the Gothic mode of monsters, torture, rape, captivity and rapture; i.e., divided not by aesthetic (e.g., of actual hair or tattoos of animal patterns—Autumn embodying the subjugated Hippolyta bridled by Theseus, above), but by flow of power moving anisotropically towards or away from the state during the cryptonymy process; re: the dialectic of the alien, but also the ensuing dialectical-material scrutiny as a holistic, liminal procedure—going where power is by embodying its most classic uncanny forms in lieu of state lies, uncertainty and defeat/the unknown!
The Numinous, as such, embodies Gothically through smaller forms to seek out toxic origins; i.e., Amazons linked to Medusa as playthings through the obviously fake mode of grand adventure—one tied since Walpole to mythic lands, lost worlds, and nameless heavy time as dug back up. As I write in “Digging Our Own Graves” (2024):
Dancing feels good; so does confronting trauma during calculated risk as “cool,” familiar but foreign (Castlevania’s “In Search of the Secret Spell” [2006] shamelessly sneaking in a disco beat to groove among the pyramids with). Per Matthew Lewis all the way up to me, it becomes the Gothic’s usual bad, musical game of telephone, celebrating monstrous-feminine sex and force while turning Imperialism (and its semantic wreckage) into a campy joke of itself. My own quest for a Numinous Commie Mommy isn’t so odd; capital makes us feel tired relative to the self-as-alien, both incumbent on the very things they rape to nurture them (re: Irigaray’s creation of sexual difference). I’m hardly the first person to notice this:
As Edward Said astutely notes in Culture and Imperialism, most societies project their fears on the unknown or the exotic other. This barren land, where the viewers are kept disorientated, is threatening. It is a place between the familiar and the foreign, like part of a dream or vision that one cannot remember clearly. There is always a sense of a lurking danger from which the viewers need protection. Nikita provides that sense of protection (source: Laura Ng’s “‘The Most Powerful Weapon You Have’: Warriors and Gender in La Femme Nikita,” 2003).
I am, however, a trans woman who has gone above and beyond women like Barbara Creed, Angela Carter, Luce Irigaray and Laura Ng, etc, in my pioneering of ludo-Gothic BDSM: as a holistic, “Commy-Mommy” means of synthesizing proletarian praxis inside the operatic danger disco(-in-disguise), the “rape” castle riffing on Walpole, Lewis, Radcliffe, Konami, Nintendo, and so many others.
I sign myself as such for a reason—not to be an edgy slut (though I am a slut who walks the edge). Rather, my pedagogic aim is to consider the monstrous-feminine not simply as a female monster avoiding revenge through violence, but a sex-positive force that doesn’t reduce to white women policing the same-old ghost of the counterfeit: to reverse what TERFs (and other sell-outs) further as normally being the process of abjection, vis-à-vis Cartesian thought tokenizing marginalized groups to harvest nature-as-usual during the dialectic of the alien. Like any good videogame OST, it repeats, throbbing and dancing orgasmically mid-live-burial: right in that little “garage” as simultaneously haunted but incredibly small and tight (claustrophobic/philic) and filled with a big present-like presence of Medusa; i.e., the drug mule, “packed and ready” as doubled by our orgasmic, passionate cries thereof: “Medusa” and her church-like melon-like orchard as yours for the taking. Clean those pipes! (source).
While traditionally rediscovered in such stories being constantly remade, Amazons go beyond the “found relic” trope of the imaginary warrior past. Composed of derelict refuse, they’re trash golems compacted into monster mothers with toxic blood; i.e., protecting the children of the future for liberation or enslavement; re: the Shadow of Pygmalion and Galatea (re: “Paratextual Documents“). Made for either purpose, their toxicity speaks to drug-like feelings and trauma. This extends to the Gothic as couched squarely inside taboo fields, which Amazons are; i.e., as sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll to play with through poetry as a potentially rebellious act, mid-cryptonymy. In keeping with “Hot Allostatic Load” (2015): “Build the shittiest thing possible. Build out of trash because all i have is trash. Trash materials, trash bodies, trash brain syndrome. Build in the gaps between storms of chronic pain. Build inside the storms” (source).
Revolution is garbage, then; i.e., as something to build with according to monsters like Amazons (or witches, sirens, gorgons, etc) and their hairy animal bodies’ potently poetic and cryptomimetic means of enforcing state chattelization and pimping nature versus not; re: the whore’s revenge through the egregore’s toxic embodiment of the Medusa to punch up at state actors and aims: rebellion as “fur(r)tive” through cryptonymy as signaled using schlocky darkness visible.
Hairy or not, there will be puns—our aforementioned toxic sugar to wolf down and learn from while hyphenating sex and force, but also death, war and sickness with prostitution (whores being the oldest teachers, but just as often occurring through “past” as counterfeit, the Wisdom of the Ancients relayed across a variety of instructors young and old; e.g., between Cuwu and I, the younger teaching the older a thing or two with their own “sugar’s” noticeably hairy but also sweet-and-savory aesthetic)! The state is straight and historically male, survival predicating as much on the whore’s gut as it does official markers of patriarchal status and privilege policing the same verboten graveyards to tokenize/unironically toxify the workers inside; i.e., her animal instinct playing intuitively with forbidden things, endlessly camping them while trapped inside the shadow of state subterfuge and force.
(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)
P.S., Before we proceed, let me also provide my usual disclaimer for Autumn; re (from “Death by Snu-Snu”):
A note about Autumn Ivy: They are a public figure who markets an image of themselves as “Amazonian,” which I am critiquing as having run-ins/worked with them in the past; as such, they’re a big enby and should be able to handle whatever criticism I throw at them, especially since their abuse of me in the past is true—is something I stand by and can back up. That being said… this isn’t me condoning violence or calls for violence against them. Unless they accelerate their trans misogyny (or any other fascist tendencies) in public—i.e., use their platform to spread active hate, Nazi-style—kindly leave them alone to figure things out on their own (source).
This is the last time we’ll be writing extensively about Amazons in this series, to which I’ll be taking my sweet time (and exploring less-than-sweet acquire tastes through Mercedes; i.e., that I don’t normally explore, but here will push the envelope less through raw gross-out factor and more through oxymoron; re: exhibit -1b, “What I Won’t Exhibit“). Whatever I say in regards to Autumn’s toxic elements (or frankly anyone else’s), said disclaimer applies. —Perse, 4/25/2025
Our first main point was “sex is stimulant.” Second, cryptonymy is a process that—regardless of the media, performers or register(s) thereof—occurs in praxial opposition featuring toxicity as a potentially ironic device; e.g., drug wars are wars of territory and structures for policing said territory as a matter of capital reaping labor and land to glut the elite by starving workers plagued with Capitalist Realism and selling them back their own fantasies (re: Amazons); i.e., workers serving themselves or the state during the abjection process turning them toxic with irony or without. Any lesson that concerns Gothic-Communist development, then, illustrates best through dialectical-material scrutiny’s performative antagonism unabashedly having a class character to it we’ll also examine.
(exhibit 67: Model, top-left: Mercedes the Muse; artist, right: Persephone van der Waard. Mercedes specifically asked to drawn getting fucked by Toxie.)
To it, the original model featured is Mercedes the Muse; the three broader talking points I use vis-à-vis her and other examples (re: her and Mugiwara versus Autumn Ivy in the 2025 addendums) are body hair, a toxic aesthetic and whistleblower counterculture. As such. we’ll discuss the modular and hybrid elements that tokenize to police these somewhat interchangeable things (e.g., toxic candy werewolves vs dark Amazons vs radioactive zombies and gorgons, etc); i.e., by camping their fascist components, in literal and figurative reply.
Separation isn’t the point, then; conversation is—with us consciously highlighting settler-colonial replacement/extermination rhetoric alongside neoliberal toxic decay, industrial excess framed as “accidents,” subsequent radiation fears, and Gothic slut-shaming/monstrous-feminine pimp arguments being analogous to a zombie apocalypse or Jekyll’s potion, but also hard drugs, homophobia, and AAA videogame Barbie waifus, for example. Specifically we’re introducing and surveying the trash, camp and schlock subgenres (used interchangeably in this symposium) that Mercedes specializes in, but also rock operas and other stories that—for various thesis-driven reasons outlined in Volume Zero—one, have lots of zombies, monster sex and dirty girls with muscles and messy kayfabe-style props;
Archaic or phallic, either monster traditionally belongs to a heteronormative mythic structure/Symbolic Order, both of which Gothic-Communist poetics lampoon, of course (exhibit 1a1c): the hero-monster as something to fear and kill, but also to romance in a dated courtly sense—i.e., to worship, serve and fuck, but also belittle and mock through private/open schadenfreude (evoking taboo sex in the process: mythical rape, sodomy and incest, but also the enigmatic kink of torturous/exquisitely “torturous” sex during demonic BDSM rituals that can be camped during ludo-Gothic BDSM, but not by default; e.g., Ann Radcliffe’s “demon lover” as something originally devised for/mass-marketed to privileged white women; i.e., to puzzle over when navigating their own trauma as a protected class inside abject operatic spaces: the recycled fabrications of the musical castle and its paradoxical panoply of rape, forbidden desire, taboo sex and Certain Doom) [source: “Thesis Body”].
two, I’ve previously determined as “danger disco”;
The point isn’t simply to paint things black, nor is it to merely compare our world to the dark castle as “elsewhere,” but also to poke fun at whatever canonical lessons are imparted through our own creative responses camping the canon (and its Radcliffean Black Veils/demon lovers).
For example, we can see ourselves in Ripley while also camping her through our deviations from her warlike, TERF-y stances: vis-à-vis Numinous power as something for us to interrogate on our own Promethean Quests embodied; i.e., to turn the castle not simply into a white or black counterfeit in the Western, heteronormative model, but a functionally Communist (thus iconoclastic) castle’s highly figurative (and operatic) theatre space: played upon ourselves as the danger-disco maze to liberate inside-outside itself; re: during ludo-Gothic BDSM summoning such things through ourselves (source: “The Quest for Power”).
and three, classically have outlined those things to play with inside as such:
Regardless of the medium, though, Clint Hockings’ adage, “Seek power and you will progress” (source: “Ludonarrative Dissonance,” 2007) means something altogether different depending how you define power as something to seek, including unequal arrangements thereof. As a child, teenager and woman, I sought it through the palliative Numinous in Gothic castles of the Neo-Gothic tradition carried over into videogames (which I learned about in reverse: videogames, followed by the Numinous/mysterium tremendum as introduced to me by Dr. David Calonne). Of these, I explored their Numinous territories in response to my own lived trauma and subsequent hypersexuality—i.e., as things I both related to the counterfeit with and sought to reclaim the counterfeit from as a tool to understand, thus improve myself and the world by reclaiming the castle as a site of interpretative Gothic play (of kinks, fetishes, and BDSM); i.e., this book that you’re reading right now is a “castle” to wander around inside: a safe space of exquisite “torture” to ask questions about your own latent desires and guilty thoughts regarding the “barbaric” exhibits within as putting the ghosts out from my past on display (the Gothic castle and its intense, “heavy weather” theatrics generally being a medieval metaphor for the mind, body and soul, but also its extreme, buried and/or conflicting emotions and desires: a figurative or sometimes literal plurality
depending on the person exploring the castle) [ibid.].
Trash, then, is often devalued for being “trashy” hence “without” value in a canonical sense; i.e., as the waste byproduct of capital, which makes things radioactive to render them critically inert. The proletarian Gothic—I argue here and elsewhere—works within trash to weaponize its toxicity for different Numinous goals (to grant power to trash or things treated like trash). To it, the ideas “body hair” (synonymous with Amazons, gorgons and werewolves, or anything else in/from the state of exception) marry to “toxicity” and “whistleblower counterculture” as coming from my own body of work being concerned with such Gothic sugary junk (monsters and sex, sprinkled with rape per the ghost of the counterfeit); i.e., including the genres that I’ve studied and people I’ve worked with over the years, who collectively embody the focus of my post-college writing that funnels into this book series; re: sex, heavy metal and horror movies as things to catalog and understand (“Sex, Metal, and Videogames”), but also celebrate for being bad (re: “My Least Favorite Horror Movies?“).
(artist: Mercedes the Muse)
Alongside people like Mercedes as purposefully surrounded by such glorious, schlocky trash—using its poisoned honey to paradoxically conceal ourselves with and attack from—I’ve studied Gothic media as things that make up how I think pursuant to social and environmental activism as stewards of nature; i.e., as a cryptonymy process determined by poetic diet: oxymoronic imagery and words overlapping in my head, relating back and forth through a show/conceal approach.
In Gothic, nothing is separate. Staged outrage speaks to things inside/outside itself—a foul, sour, crunchy and soft, but also repellent and delicious combination masking various scents with various scents. Animals survive through deception, and humans are very much animals. As such, our underworld perfume has a complex, “from Hell” signature, communicating consent in the constant shadow of rape (state force): intuiting rejection and submission through various unspoken cues. Less invisible ink and more natural toxins the body produces and workers demanufacture, refine and rerelease, cryptonymy isn’t a thing to trip over but embrace for its Numinous utility.
Be these “ancient” hauntologies curios from the original Neo-Gothic, the “trash cinema” of the 1980s, or body hair as something to carefully grow and cultivate into a larger dripping-with-toxins message about descriptive sexuality in sex-positive art—all illustrate the larger argument I want to make according to artistic creations and how they tend to function during the cryptonymy process; i.e., in my own mind and work as extensions thereof, but also in artistic countercultural movements at large: as Satanically rebellious (re: Milton, but also “I, Satanist; Atheist“); re: that present “Medusa” as a composite egregore during the cryptonymy process: unified for those “who know” reversing abjection, but appearing ostensibly random (and inedible) for the elite who cursorily scan them (save in crisis, when their scrutiny intensifies). Green is the color of poisoned apples, the fruits of our labor allowing an indelible orchard of doubles’ troubling comparisons to convulse, thus deliver a at-times repulsive-yet-alluring means of passing vital data along! Code is code, rubbed in your face:
(artist: Mercedes the Muse)
Note: This section was originally written as I was hammering out/nailing down my cryptonymy elements, which I would finalize in “Introducing Revolutionary Cryptonymy” in Volume One. We’ll consider such things briefly with Mercedes, here, and later in Chapter Five. Simply know that revolutionary cryptonymy is super vital to developing Gothic Communism and something that Mercedes helped conceptualize through my work with them; re (from my review of Mercedes):
I wanted give Mercedes an extra-special thank you. They were the first model to reach out to me, asking me to draw them in 2022 [re: exhibit 67]. I had always loved to draw cuties based on monsters since high school, but it wasn’t something I had done in years; their inspiration and invitation inspired me to pursue Sex Positivity as it currently exists. So thank you, mommy, for giving me the chance to spread my wings and fly! (source).
Mercedes is a Gorgon in her own right, one who—flashing me with power as “toxic” in a variety of ways (e.g., literal tattoo ink, below)—gave me the idea of revolutionary cryptonymy that eventually became my brand; i.e., of the very proletarian praxis this volume speaks to more broadly. —Perse
(artist: Mercedes the Muse)
Likewise, while these cryptonyms often appear as junk food like Amazons, their contents enrich the mind through proletarian gossip and pastiche: communal rage, interdependent “girl talk” and perceptive pastiche/subversive quoting (re: “The Basics of Oppositional Synthesis“). The monster party and its prop-like girls become increasingly iconoclastic and trans, but retain their monstrous outer shell as a death rattle of nature-turned-undead: a toxic whistleblower that often looks like a monster cop (which the Amazon and its fetish gear tokenize to be become), but blows the whistle through said appearance in duality subverting such things as “toxic” (re: monstrous-feminine being gross, including their hairy slime holes[1]).
To that, the hauntological cliché of the 1980s disco being a “stupid throng” filled with “dumb unemployed party animals” (e.g., Animal House, 1978; re: “Summoning the Whore“) must be critiqued by attacking its formalized, canonical reinvention; i.e., as already having been strained through ’80s neoliberalism and viewed in reverse by those of us in the present. A corporate attempt to clamp down on Gothic counterculture by commodifying it in sloganized, mega-dumb ways, the end result neither says nor inspires anything critical about the world—Bon Jovi syndrome, basically. But as we’ve already covered, other bands like Joy Division showcased that punk wasn’t dead at the time (or now); it was merely “postpunk” aka disco-in-guise (the “danger disco” intimating larger issues in hauntological ways; re: exhibit 15b2, “Healing from Rape“).
The same cryptonymic idea applies to other bands and countercultural media, whose various forms of whistleblowing often intersect or jump from medium to medium; i.e., by using cheap, taboo, and “fake” things (a Gothic favorite) that nevertheless “catch on”: infectious counterculture as rock ‘n roll, heavy metal, horror movies, camp, shlock, Amazons, oxymorons (re: toxic sugar), and so on. In my opinion, this plasticity reflects how the human mind works in relation to media, at large—as constantly in flux, but also chaffing at the shackles of Capitalism luring us using poison-chalice T&A! The antidote is chaos as a dualistic means of play (thus fun) with such things; i.e., auteurs afford certain tolerances, hence buy themselves some much-needed time while living on borrowed amounts.
Also known as using one’s brain, asking questions through iconoclastic art is a form of investigating one’s canonical surroundings, especially if they seem suspicious. While clichés like tabloid reality or “perception is reality” comment on the real world as already-covered in images, these composites still reflect bigger things behind them (the Medusa lurking behind the warrior Madonna, or Matthew Lewis’ Matilda behind the regular one). For example, when the state inflicts a transgenerational curse upon the indigenous population and its workers, some image types can warn of the problem, but also conceal it for different aims; e.g., toxic waste a commodity to camp with (exhibit 77). For one, the images themselves are not hazard-proof; the problems they hide can “leak” through and hurt people. But those in power can try to cover up “trashy” counterculture, itself, doing their best to rebrand it as critically “empty”; i.e., in ways that make the wall opaque and “plug” the leak, stymying the public imagination through art in all its forms: something to behold, commission, buy or create as Toxic™.
Thereupon, Gothic counterculture sexualizing art—and asking where its myriad variations come from and why—inquires how people “actually talk” as a means of cryptonymy to subvert through itself: using regular socio-sexual, as well as often-musical exchanges in the material world that happen in response to larger structures and their driving forces. Said forces include the various tasty foodstuffs that speak to how people talk and what people like on a natural-material level; re: sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll, but also monsters that embody these trashy things as “toxic”; e.g., Amazons; i.e., whores as monsters, making their activities through art—classified between ace public nudism and sexual enjoyment—something monstrous to view during the cryptonym process:
(artist: Mercedes the Muse)
Oppositional praxis, then, is a battle of product placement, pushing for one to buy into their version of something criminal. The difference between Capitalism and Communism is what the products stand for and what is sacred. Neoliberalism and fascism valorize the status quo, including profit for the elite as “knowledge” sold to consumers as tasty toxins; it’s little more than disciplinary action through diminishing returns dressed up as “substance”: “Our women are the sexiest, but only adults can enjoy them in their pure, fully-undressed forms.” Universal enforcement (of the rules) takes a backseat to smoothly flowing profits and selective punishment; i.e., doing so to canonically keep abjection normalized, thus maintaining the colonial binary through bad doubles (re: Autumn).
However sugary it is, toxic waste is a drug to consume through sex to blow the whistle about, mid-subversion. Through the usual acid Communism that camp employs (re: Stuart Mills, vis-à-vis Fisher), iconoclastic praxis challenges unironic consumption’s canonical forms and flow aping rebellion (re: “controlled opposition,” which Autumn embodies). Generally camp works on a liminal canvas, then; i.e., masc and femme sex workers finding ways to subvert what they’re normally sold as while still performing the same basic function—to give people boners (of the dick or clit sort); e.g., chocolate is an aphrodisiac in part because it gives you energy (re: Valentine’s Day). It’s a bribe, but so are the monstrous anthromorphs that we need to reclaim during fur(r)tive rebellion’s toxic façade; i.e., as having not just Amazons and hairy animal women, but furries at large not being zero-sum/monopolized!
Rebellious Furries (and Heavy Metal)
(exhibit 68: Artist, middle: Simarglartist; top-middle-left: source; top-middle-right [and far-top-right and far-bottom-right]: Miles DF; bottom-middle-right: Legend of Nerd; bottom-middle: Taran Fiddler; far-bottom-left: Winter Nacht)
The body-as-canvas speaks liminally through the Gothic mode. For example, the werewolf is a egregore “of nature” that generally sexualizes to codify in different xenophobic/xenophilic ways (re: “Call of the Wild“). Under Capitalism and Cartesian thought pimping nature, heteronormative gender roles permit smaller, delicate “she-wolves”; i.e., the state allows them to exist “as is,” presenting the prurient bitch as conspicuously hairy and femme (above) and male variants that become big and “strong, strong, strong!” (re: old Smaug the dragon). However, iconoclastic praxis subverts such norms to make them resonate with old symbols of fertility and submission.
In turn, such lycanthropes (a medieval trope out of the ancient world, injected toxically into ours; e.g., Nazi werewolves; re: “Hell Hath no Fury“) historically combine with renovated forms of sex-positive monsters, music and videogames, etc, as made by campy agents—all to provide liminal expression as ludo-Gothic BDSM. Nazis and Communists occupy the same shadow zone (re: “Doubles, Dark Forces, and Paradox“). Such liminalities include the enlarged clit as a source of power mythologically tied to matriarchal animals (re: Medusa and Amazons, but also the female hyena suggested through pussy-havers with larger[2] clits, above); i.e., as generally expanded by hormone therapy as another kind of forbidden drug (re: acid Communism; e.g., “Follow the White-to-Black Rabbit“), which those in power deny workers because they don’t want them to experience, thus learn from, sexual pleasure: as tied to their bodies and linguo-material, but also monstrous-feminine, extensions of their bodies. The elite peddle dead-end drugs, which elevate toxicity as a blinding force society-wide!
Keeping these eclectic forces in mind, the mystery of the sexy singing werewolf[3] (and their hairy pussies, enlarged clits, and chimeric gender roles) become a lot less cryptic when you learn their hair isn’t an automatic prelude to rape and violence, but a humanizing reminder tied to coercively demonized, older and non-Western ways of thinking about sex through animals chemicals (re: “Call of the Wild“); i.e., that teach us—through steady consumption, echopraxis and cryptomimesis—how to update our thinking and language moving forward: as it pertains to demon BDSM, kink, and general stigma awareness (usually tied to any of these things) achieving ludo-Gothic BDSM across society!
Under Gothic Communism, these spectres of Marx are often cuddly floofers who just want some lovin’: putting the Marx in “floof max” and whose dog collars, kitty ears/paws, and jungle-like bushes redistribute monstrous affection in a postcolonial way—not jungle fever (which is racist) but an excitement of the passions that reunites workers with healthier ways of thinking about such language and events; i.e., as linked to colonial frontiers (and toxins) wherever they exist.
This includes music; e.g., songs like Trent Reznor’s “Closer” touching on the issue, openly and aggressively celebrating a desire to “fuck you like an animal” with “sex you can smell” (re: exhibit 43b, “Seeing Dead People“); i.e., an iconoclastic approach that purposefully breaks down “Enlightenment” dualism, doing so to unite sex workers (and by extension all workers) to nature as toxic: the animal self as liberated from bourgeois control of said toxins. Freed from capital’s canonical muzzles, collars and chattel rape, liberation can dualistically supply an emotionally and Gothically intelligent way of “barking at the moon” that makes workers aware these moon-like booties, but also respectful of the owners of said booties; i.e., the latter made to feel special and appreciated through whatever dosages they supply. All should unfold during proletarian praxis reclaiming vice in material forms already familiar to many consumers: dialogs of power in the flesh to exchange as deprivatized (the Medusa’s peach to harvest, or fuck back with, against abjection)!
(exhibit 69 [nice]: Artist: Nyx; modified by Persephone van der Waard. Women are generally regarded as products under Capitalism; i.e., branded a particular way unless another way sells. This means that canonical depictions can deviate away from modest, non-poisonous[4] forms if there’s a market for toxic ladies that capitalists can corner and exploit. This being said, sex workers can absolutely market themselves and their bodies, genders and emotional content as their own brand [the “toxin” a paradoxical means of self-defense and attraction]. At times, this includes leaning into slang that markets someone like Nyx as “PAWG” [Phat-Ass White Girl; re: exhibit 32b and exhibit 43e2c1 from “Knife Dicks” and “Always a Victim“]. Such words can get tossed around haphazardly. It is what it is, but pride in one’s body generally can co-exist with bigotry from one’s audience regarding you as animalistic or gross while also fetishizing you [as abject, but also excessive, which comes from the Protestant ethic translating into fatphobia and the racist conflation of big bodies or butts with demons, animals, laziness and/or spiritual emptiness as toxic/ripe].
To this, reclaiming a wild, “savage” body that’s going to be shamed into being skinny and modest requires those already in a liminal position [white women] to use historically pejorative language to describe themselves with; i.e., not just junk food from a canonical standpoint, but the sinful, toxic sugars of dark fuzzy peaches. To reclaim one’s body and the land simply requires reclaiming sin using the same fetish, alienizing language as labor terror weapons; re: “Reclaiming Anal Rape“; i.e., sinning feels good and it’s not evil to want revenge! This automatic grey area means appreciation or appropriation lies in praxis itself, including these toxic auras; i.e., is it pejorative or proud, accepting or abject? Dialectical-material analysis can tell the difference, but you have to be willing to have a “game” mind—to take the booty with the bigotry that others apply to it even while the booty’s owner remains an incredibly sweet and loving person; e.g., like Nyx, terms like PHAT and PWAG obviously applying to them in ways that aren’t strictly appropriative; i.e., because white women born with “sinful,” non-white bodies experience stigma due to matters of size, not skin color [racism arbitrary in all respects]: critical [m]ass go boom!
[artist: Nyx]
The nature of liminality lies in toxic things not being black-and-white. Sex Positivity and universal liberation encroach upon intersectional solidarity as a bittersweet display of such things; i.e., food personified another reclaimed device; e.g., by making dark chocolate exhibits of oneself if one wants to and it applies—to showcase the fat booty as a force of nature that empowers workers in a very “heavy metal” [toxic] way!)
In keeping with acid Communism, there’s an element of indulgence that, all the same, requires a modicum of control. So while I love Ozzy Osbourne, for example, he and his friends not only sold out very early on (re: exhibit 44a1b1a and exhibit 52g2 from “Goblins, Anti-Semitism and Monster-fucking” and “Furry Panic“), but took the partying and sell-out mentality just a little too hard. To this, Black Sabbath toxified through the major record label keeping them flush with hard drugs (similar to Elvis or any other rockstar)—meaning to be an effective revolutionary instructor is to consider such things in poetic/figurative ways, including through our bodies and sex/rock ‘n roll as having drug-like effects and revolutionarily cryptonymic labor value (re: me, vis-à-vis Stuart Mills and Fisher in “Follow the White-to-Black Rabbit“). So while Ozzy and company are a good starting point, their paywalled forbidden knowledge nonetheless remains a matter of fierce unproductive debate; i.e., something conservative families have tried so very desperately to steer their kids away from—all to keep them, as D. H. Lawrence once put it, from going to the dark gods (re: “Interrogating Power“). The shadow of racism looms.
If you’ve learned anything from this book series after six books, I hope it’s that God is incredibly lame (re: Milton), but also manipulative and blinding through capital’s “secular” façades pimping “Satan” out; i.e., no monsters allowed, save in ways that serve profit through the ghost of the counterfeit furthering abjection to rape nature with. Knowledge is something to experience in dialectical-material opposition. This praxial duality extends to monstrous activities; e.g., singing, fucking, dancing, painting, laughing, tripping, transforming, cooking, and frankly anything else the state sanctions for mass production; i.e., to cheapen nature out of the pimp’s revenge; re: as toxic sugar made by them and theirs. Such territorial saber-rattling classically facilitates through old patriarchs. And yet, policing the whore to keep her revenge in check also happens vis-à-vis younger-looking female whores serving Pygmalion (re: Autumn, who we’ll explore more of, in just a bit).
To that, these intense, hairy exchanges—conducted by liberatory artists seeking the whore’s toxic revenge against their reactionary/moderate counterparts in a shared space—serve a dual, concealed, iconoclastic purpose: the revolution’s proverbial cloak and dagger tucked cryptonymically over/under a given fur coat or gas mask; i.e., often as something to find among a gallery of cryptonyms begot from old, dead things. It becomes a recursively “Trojan BDSM” means of transformation (as outlined in Volume Zero; e.g., exhibit 1a1a1h3a1, “Interrogating Power“); i.e., what BÜTCHER (exhibit 40k1, “Ruling the Slum“) called “bestial fucking war machines,” our figurative, literal and liminal furry friends generally hide in plain sight, their incongruity concealed by a horror “camouflage” that pointedly begs the question (vis-à-vis animal magnetism): why is there a fuzzy tromette in the room and why is she dressed in a fetish outfit?
(artist: Mercedes the Muse)
You may as well ask why Dracula is gay (which we basically did, in Volume Two; re: “A Vampire History Primer“), where ghosts come from and why they’re pissed (re: “Seeing Dead People“), what roles witches serve while dead or alive (re: exhibit 41f2a2 from “Eat Me Alive” and which we’ll examine more in Chapter Two), or calmly walk up to Frankenstein’s monster (with quiet dignity and grace) while saying to them, “Hey, handsome!” (re: “Making Demons“). “How ’bout some fire, Scarecrow?” (combustion fueled by chemicals that, suitably enough, are also toxic; i.e., like the Wicked Witch’s envious green skin; re: exhibit 34a1b2b2a1a1b1, “With a Little Help from My Friends“).
That being said, those in power don’t want you to think about why monsters and their arbitrary dualities persist; they want you to buy their product and forget about Capitalism’s destructive effects, mid-consumption! To compromise thought as a critical tool, they’ll make their own critically-empty versions of the Medusa (or Amazons); i.e., as sweet, hairy and/or toxic. Except, bourgeoisie proponents are historically “bad” at art; i.e., opting towards automated variants geared towards profit, not critiquing the system that produces canonical art (and its toxic waste); re: Autumn Ivy (again, we’ll get to them in a moment).
Counterculture art is a kind of “concealed weapon” taken back; i.e., not used just in self-defense, but commune/comrade defense against state allies and their aggression and deception (class/culture/race traitors); re: by being more emotionally/Gothically nutritious, insofar as raising intelligence and awareness happen: through cryptonymy’s paradoxical vitality of undead poetic exchange alongside demonic (dark, vengeful, uneven) and animalistic modules presentation of “toxic.” However those modules schlockily diverge or converge, linguistic ambiguities remain during the cryptonymy process. Is art “art” in the sense of it being made to make an artistic—i.e., political—statement, or is it “just” something unto itself with no connection to anything else? Think Freud’s cigar but replace it with a peach or a “peach,” and so on…
(artist: Nyx)
In my experience, the former tends to be true, but the “consensus” of interrelating factors remains organic, even stochastic and seemingly unrelated. Capital deliberately promotes a stale, banal toxins: us-versus-them dogma to toxify rebellion; i.e., as something to control in bad faith, like lead in paint chips; e.g., Autumn Ivy as someone to meet onstage and off. Doing so happens through our own fur(r)tive rebellion’s revolutionary cryptonymy camping settler-colonial vaudeville! Sex sells; monster sex, even more so—i.e., as something to canonize (colonize) or camp (decolonize) in all the usual toxic lands, mid-consumption: as half-real (the Amazon coming from formerly devastated lands hungry for revenge and loaded with toxins analogous with hauntings, industrial devastation, and grave/dumpsite revenge)!
Monsters are like assholes, but also appetite; we all have one, and they deal in the passage of things through the body that are alien, fetish, toxic and taboo (we’re all full of shit, but use that shit for different purposes, including jizz and other abject body fluids; e.g., “Every Sperm Is Sacred“); re: body hair on a spectrum: “animal” non-white hair as “dark/curly” but also pubic hair as “censored” through shaving. Classically the monstrous-feminine is female (re: “Angry Mothers“) but holistically pertains to the alien inside/outside workers as “of nature” in many different ways; i.e., that hail from other worlds and, all the same, feel right at home. Sex and spending—as a mid-crisis means of control, then—are a powerful combination concerning appetite; i.e., one that goes different ways when exploring the alien: as something powerful (toxic) to play with, concerning trauma and feeding but also transformation and exchange pursuant to different toxic wishes. Commonly these concern revenge over what is controlled as something to hold onto or take away. While the state toxifies to hide its own rot, nature does so to announce/ defend itself from capital decay (re: fascism).
For the state and corporations (which fascism is, as Benito Mussolini[5] argued through Hollywood models), nature is something to cheapen and eat, but also antagonize and put cheaply to work, carrot-and-stick; re: as trash. Toxicity becomes a paradoxical means of addressal, then—one centered conspicuously around the Amazon being a vector to subvert: warriors and oral traditions of the ancient world treated as trash to abuse by the state now, which we must reclaim in all the usual animalistic ways to reunite with nature; i.e., hungry like the wolf, including wild sex, but also through a means of self-protection against domestic abuses regular to imperial-corporate life that, under Capitalism as a regular means of systemic rape, have been pushed away/abjected to the usual frontiers thereof; e.g., Ripley vs the Alien Queen as a hideously common means of triangulating white cis-het women against the usual state victims framed as smoggishly black (re: “The Puzzle of ‘Antiquity’“): raping the whore, business-as-usual, “carving the peach” in perpetuity with us-versus-them impunity.
Such abjection historically-materially only harms workers, animals and the environment (the planet’s finite web of live subjected to capital’s supposition of infinite growth; re: Patel and Moore); i.e., all life is precious and, great and small, should be treated as such by us relating to it—as its de facto stewards (e.g., Nyx, working out of Appalachia, West Virginia, left)! Erin Brockovich was a whore, and while fascist factories routinely wither the land with toxic waste, environmental activism and labor action speak on nature scapegoated by fascism: echoes of the Medusa, Her Majesty fighting fire with Promethean fire!
(artist: Nyx)
Furthermore, this routine “freeing of Omelas” happens using what we got as already all around us: our bodies and surroundings alike, leading to strange appetites made strange by our toxic environments; i.e., as a historical-material and subsequently dialectical-material process (re: “A Cruel Angel’s (Modular) Thesis“)—one where monsters theatrically thus poetically embody and arbitrate—argument through battle, onstage and off. Be that literal Amazons or just some kind of monstrous-feminine, mid-unheimlich, Amazonomachia is Amazonomachia, but few forms exemplify sex and force as nakedly as Amazons do. They’re fuel—a driving force loaded with trauma as exhaust, but also fertilizer for fresh synthesis through consumption. Playing with dreams (desire) made material (re: “Of Darkness and the Forbidden“), such demonic reifying routinely kidnaps us—stealing us away into new terrifying and therefore exciting courtship, captivity and extradition (re: dark faeries and demon mommies in “I’ll See You in Hell“)!
As such, what we have in us—what we’re literally made of—is what we eat taken from our environment as didactic; i.e., as a matter of argument composed of the same basic stuff driving us both as ordinary and Numinous beings, but parsed through dosage and context inside/outside ourselves. Trash is trash as form; the function occupies an uneven means of flow insofar as toxicity pushes power as a sugary cryptonymic means; i.e., of Amazonian stealth (animal-fur disguises; e.g., wolves playing at sheep) towards or away from the state craving nature reduced to raw essence and waste. However trashy nature as monstrous-feminine appears, the elite want such things purely for themselves; i.e., by pimping the alien with the alien to exterminate nature as a means of profit, thereby relying on capital’s usual division-and-chattelization mechanisms: through all the usual monopolies’ Faustian bargains and spurious, Promethean sovereignty arguments (re: “Summoning Demons” and “Making Demons“)! The state is straight and hungry for fresh tokens, the former expecting the latter to eat their own, then vomit garbage into their master’s mouths (fed from cheap sugar already puked into ours and shat out)!
Tucking In: “Shut Up and Eat Your Garbage”
We’ve set the table, as it were, and there’s already a lot to unpack here more than we already have (or will be able to). Doing so will be fairly messy and disjointed; i.e., zipping around like a squirrel on crack; re: featuring Amazons, videogames, and sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll insofar as body hair and whistleblower counterculture (through Gothic and Amazon) are concerned—but bear with me. We’ve shown Autumn and Mercedes already and will return to them; we’ll also exhibit Mugiwara (next page) for our cryptonymy object lesson, and look into examples of wild hairy women/the monstrous-feminine at large: as usefully toxic cryptonymy devices regardless of actual hair but treated as “hairy” anyways per a Nordic model of acceptable rebellion and sluttiness during the whore’s paradox (e.g., Mercy from Overwatch, and similar shaved-bare gamer waifus)!
(exhibit 70: Artist, top-left: Egghead; top-right: Pakola Papi; bottom-left: Revana, my alter ego, touched up here but originally drawn based on Anxiousprinc3ss, bottom-right.)
First, hairy women or those treated as “women.” Starting our examination, why do women choose to stay hairy? In a word, “counterculture.” Building on that idea, two of the “palimpsest bodies” of this composite are images taken of rebellious individuals, often presenting in relation to their body hair as something to descriptively and appreciatively express in society as toxic. Regarding the above exhibit, one is a model whose publicly available photo I took and used to illustrate my own, hairy trans persona, Revana (whose ass is featured on the cover of this book). In Egghead’s case, she posted the image of herself while vocalizing her rebellion: “my mom won’t speak to me until I shave my armpits. lol looks like I’m gonna be a hairy bitch 4eva.”
In the case of Pokola’s photo, she had posted it online to groan about the pains of getting waxed, only to be bullied by reactionaries until she took the original tweet down. In other words, images of people by people survive in fragments from a massive, ongoing conversation (cryptomimesis). These pieces can be picked up (or dug up, in some cases) and reassembled to form new identities to gather ’round—a concept I’ll return to in Chapter Three, but for now will examine in relation to more standardized hairy bodies; i.e., as a spectrum of “butch” muscular examples and traditionally cis-femme examples that don’t have body hair so much they do manly qualities—Amazons, but also the monstrous-feminine spectrum; re: anything not a white cis-het man, but also that man’s idea of woman/nature as something to pimp (female or not); e.g., Mugiwara being a trans man, selling sex as dipped in sugar and dripping wet: the promised bride shown as, cruelly enough, forever out of reach (as monomyth rewards and targets [the virgin and the whore] classically are)! Medusa was a party animal and slut, one who reclaimed their body after being raped and killed (re: Hadley’s “More than a Monster“).
(artist: Mugiwara)
Note: The rest of “Toxic Schlock” is a broad survey of such things; i.e., of the whore as offensively “hairy” (thus rebellious) against canonical norms, at least in concept if not actually having body hair to police (not everyone can grow it). This extends to trans people, of course; re: my 2025 addendums featuring Mugiwara as hairy and rebellious, here, but also the basic idea, which we’ll examine even more of, in Chapter Three. —Perse, 4/24/2025
Those Who Grow: Hairy Bitches and Where to Find Them
First, let’s examine those monstrous-feminine that do have/can grow body hair! General hairiness is often dismissed by reactionaries; i.e., for being seen as “ugly” and randomly chaotic, therefore grown by hysterical, disobedient bitches. By the same token, those in power will react however incompetently through a structure that affords them “overkill” retaliations to any perceived trespass. Often, they needn’t lift a finger themselves, but use the Superstructure to cultivate a pacified worker base that will keep ostensible rebellion in check; re: Amazons and taming them, straight or not (e.g., Samus serving a heteronormative model that TERFs absolutely love): barbers recruited from the slave/prison population. Meat becomes a prism-like sponge, reduced to slime food attacking itself.
At the same time, plausible deniability and not needing to lie—i.e., by virtue of following visual trends that encourage rebellion as a natural socio-linguistic process—remain things not exclusive to the elite. Indeed, such devices can be utilized by sex workers (or people forced to do sex work); i.e., in stochastic ways in response to Capitalism while using similar toxic language: “Pay this hairy bitch behind (or before) the curtain no mind.” Nope, it’s just us hairy fools, totally not connected to any larger revolutionary social movement (which Renegade Cut explains, are autonomous informal/formal collectives with no official state-corporate funding or support; source, re: “What Is (and Is Not) Anti-Fascism?” 2022). Such is cryptonymy because cryptonymy is inherently dualistic, therefore dialectic.
(artist: Mugiwara)
As part of a larger generalized process, the cryptonymic expression of furtive body hair continuously affords a composite assemblage; re: of toxic “sugar” shamed and sold (as sex generally is). This especially holds true as an artistic movement; i.e., by noting a variety of different historical-material factors that—interacting back and forth, in different directions, at different times, in different ways, separately or together in disjointed, but often semi-unified front that may or may not be aware of the other’s existence—can be revisited over and over again as needed. Liberatory artwork demonstrates “hairy” rebellion as an ironic toxic performance in highly conventional Gothic stories; i.e., that workers have subsequently camped, on and offstage, as “toxic.” A kind of juggling act—and one where sex workers may best cater to various acquired tastes while also setting limits on their own bodies—such toxicity functions cryptonymically to aid workers through the “jungle crotch” hairiness proudly on display (above). So while sex is a drug being sold to accomplish different effects, Mugi’s musk is pussy perfume for the proletariat!
Whatever hairy people decide, they’ll still want others to appreciate them for doing so; i.e., being valued, not condemned, for behaving in ironically empathetic and consensual ways: within historical-socio-material conventions that canonically treat the demonization and criminalization of sex work as normal. Workers like Mugi might even reclaim the notion of “jungle crotch” (re: curly hair) as monstrous; i.e., not just in Amazonian, cavewoman ways, but queerly Numinous ways that highlight the initial colonial bias—and its acutely toxic tokenized history—being challenged, mid-dialectic: by revolutionizing the general/Gothic cryptonymic function (re: “The Future Is a Dead Mall“) for comedic or even horrifying revolutionary effect. Doing so requires using already-ambivalent kinks, phobia-loaded imagery and fetishized performances (re: toxic waste metaphors) in ironic, reverse-abjecting ways. Common examples include Gothic media—artwork to sell or perform, as well as general lifestyles tied to descriptive sexuality (which art can imitate or vice versa); e.g., BDSM, kink and fetishization (which Amazons and monstrous-feminine more broadly denote). Such is ludo-Gothic BDSM, which state barbers (cops, token or not) famously cut short, delivering a painfully close shave, onstage and off!
The Barbarism of State Barbers
The Gothic canonically fears a return of the barbarian past (re: the “liminal hauntology of war” shown in Mugi’s exhibit [43e2a] from “Of Darkness and the Forbidden“), but also tokenizes/scapegoats it as “the toxic ones” (re: the euthanasia effect, described in “Overcoming Praxial Inertia“). In Gothic stories, zombies are dead things brought back to life, their current interview communicating a hidden message that cryptonymically and cryptomimetically reveals a past crime (usually requiring the hero to dispel a transgenerational curse by righting past wrongs, Radcliffe-style; re: “Radcliffe’s Refrain“): toxic blood on the brain.
Images like the Amazon or Medusa, then, are increasingly hauntological; they serve as “ghostly” reminders of the past—neither alive nor dead, but resurrected by artists for cross purposes in undead, demonic and animalistic language. Their “derelict” offshoots are often large and pissed off, and attack the hero on sight (who often responds with violence [re: “Military Optimism“] to their own Promethean detriment: the feeling of live burial actualized by ignominious death). ‘Tis a rotten peach, then, canonically begging for the knife per all the usual “blame the whore” arguments that Alien and Metroid made famous again (re: “The Puzzle of ‘Antiquity’“).
The classic barber of capital pruning nature/the Medusa isn’t men, as such, but Amazons per a femme fatale argument that—long after Athens, Rome and Sparta fell apart, haunting their own graveyards—ballooned from the 1500s onwards (re: “gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss” per Cameron’s Vietnam revenge, in “The Quest for Power“; also see: “Dark Shadows” for Evil Dead and Sam Raimi’s own franchised dark spirit of settler-colonial abuse and ethnocentric, DARVO-style obscurantism; i.e., abjecting Medusa in current-day monomyth ways):
(exhibit 71: Artist, left: Bo Kyung Park; middle: JUN Tran; right: Smolb. From left-to-right: Mother Brain, the “mother of dragons”; Samus, the warrior princess; the Metroids, spawn of Mother Brain but also bound to Samus’ own conflicted sense of motherhood [so the story goes; re: “War Vaginas“]. The three are bound up in the same space, ravaged by a capitalistic war for dominance—of us-versus-them, wherein woman is other but Samus acts like a man to benefit the state by slaying the Commie-coded dragon mom; i.e., the toxic monsters-feminine monarch of nature gone wild, threatening the patriarchal, Cartesian status quo; re [from Volume One]:
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).
(artist: Gerald Brom)
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: “Rape Culture”].
In that volume, I consider the most famous of all phallic women in our modern-day to be Ellen Ripley lionized by Cameron’s cartographic refrain [re: exhibit 1a1a1h2a1, “Scouting the Field“/”Canonical Essentialism“] but Samus effectively replicates [and fetishizes] the same Amazonian archetype in videogame form: chasing the Numinous, a warrior daughter and mother detective protecting heteronormative structures of power and patrilineal descent; i.e., being Daddy’s good girl while overcoming Jameson’s class nightmare of false home… by shooting it to death, then blowing up its ignominious corpse to bury the evidence [e.g., Phazon]. Or as my PhD puts it:
Under Capitalist Realism, Hell is a place that always appears on Earth [or an Earthlike 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. […]
[artist: Persephone van der Waard]
In neoliberal copaganda, canonical heroes are sent solo or in small groups, deployed as much like a bomb as a person; hired by the powerful, these “walking armies” destabilize target areas for the mother country to invade and bleed dry [a genocidal process the aggressor sanitizes with cryptonymic labels like “freedom” and “progress”]. To this, they are authorized, commissioned or otherwise sanctioned by those with the means of doing so; i.e., a governing body centered around elite supremacy at a socio-material level. After infiltration occurs, they work as a detective[6]/cop, or judge, jury and executioner—either on foreign or domestic soil, the place in question framed as loosened from elite control, thus requiring the hero [and their penchant for extreme violence] to begin with. This makes them an arbiter of material disputes wherever they are: through police violence for the state in its colonial territories at home and abroad. They always follow orders: “Shoot first, ask questions later and enslave what survives.” In stories like Aliens, Doom and Metroid, the fatal nostalgia of the “false” doubled homestead is used to incite genocide, thus conduct settler colonialism inside of itself; i.e., through standard-issue Imperialism but also military urbanism; e.g., Palestine abroad[7] versus the death of Nex Benedict at home[8]. This has several steps. First, 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: “Scouting the Field”].
My thesis argument in said PhD [re: “Capitalism sexualizes everything“] explains how this can be reversed by iconoclasts; i.e., camping the canon with ludo-Gothic BDSM “on the Aegis.” Prior to that, though, a cop is a cop, and fascists recruit from broken homes established criminogenically by a neoliberal map of conquest; re: Tolkien and Cameron’s refrain. “Conjure a Radcliffean menace inside the Imperial Core, then meet it with American force.”
To this Cameron’s refrain is also a race to such violence; i.e., per my master’s thesis, Samus enters into an arms race—an activity per the structure of invasion/replacement supported by the refrain’s meta narrative, speedrunning:
the notion, that space as continually explored and destroyed, is implied through ergodic narratives that undermine any sense of mastery or celebration. Samus’ victory is unsanitized, or incomplete; it is uncertain, and one must “pray for a true peace in space!” (fig.23, next page). The Knight is marked with the King’s Brand as part of an underlying structure, implying his success temporary by simply being the next in line; even if the Radiance is destroyed, it is done at cost of the Knight, himself. In either case, it is never over, but a cycle that goes on and on forever, a barbaric rite out of the past, a looping labyrinth. In Gothic media, one sees the pattern forwards and backwards in terms of which media appeared, first, and what came next. All of this is reflected by the terrifying affect of the space-in-question as contributing to an overall castle-narrative experienced between reader, interaction, and text, across all kinds of media; in Metroidvania, it lies between player, play style and game. In cinema or novels, these parameters shift; like suit one wears and moves around, inside, a space’s sense of enclosure remains.
Across Gothic media, there remains an excessive quality of time that cannot be mapped, or expressed in clear terms. Instead, it pools inside the space. The returning hero is doomed to face the past again and again, a series of doubles. They can subvert old tyrannies by seizing control, but remain trapped or exiled, themselves. For example, Samus is nomadic, without a home; so is Ellen Ripley from Aliens or Victoria, from Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya; or, the Moor (1806). Men experience it is as well, in terms of motion as gendered, but also said motion contested, within a given arc and across all of them. The Knight a wandering warrior, destroyed upon his return; Mather Lewis’ Ambrosio dies an ignominious death. For any hero, it is not simply a call to arms, but a rite of passage wherein the hero constantly infers whatever lies in store for them whilst inside; yet, it is always hidden, revealed too late: they were the destroyer all along. This can be of the space, others, or themselves, and there is no escape from that. One cannot avoid death, or concerns about death relative to growth established through motion; it and Other doubles collect within the space as historical byproducts of motion [source: “Lost in Necropolis”].
Figure 23. “Ending Screen and Samus Reveal” from Metroid
Home, in canonical Gothic, is always fucked in ways to fear and attack, but also blame on Medusa. The meta goal, for Metroidvania, ties to capital in small: to do token Rambo-style settler colonialism the fastest. Indeed, in the Metroidvania and FPS tradition, the shooter [Cameron’s refrain] is about maps and enemies to recolonize through urban combat; i.e., room-by-room; e.g., Super Metroid having names for literally every room that Samus obliterates.)
Amazons are classically tokenized. Beyond the literal jungle as source to old, Patriarchal fears, their relationship—to Gothic as hauntologically traumatic spaces that ensnare or jail the hero (re: “War Vaginas“)—anchors to such territories as suitably complex (re: dualistic). Often occupied by old wooly hags or “dragon ladies” the huntress must kill to escape, she must first detect her mark’s presence and hunt it (the ludic procedure called “boss keys,” in the Metroidvania formula); re: the Archaic Mother or “womb space” as something to “castrate,” providing one’s own manhood (“manhood” in Samus’ case, being cis-female). While these Gothic elements intimate a larger menace, they’re generally repurposed into a larger masculine scheme that conceals the true menace (settler colonialism) in exchange for an invented one: the female/monstrous-feminine bogeyman or “coven matriarch” as something to be killed; i.e., by appropriated “girl boss” Amazons, a one-woman-army war orphan/child soldier fighting for male power as a kind of colonial revenge (on non-bourgeois pirates, Mother Nature, Communists, queer folk, or all four rolled into one during mirror syndrome).
So yes, Samus is generally an animal woman, but a shaved one working for the man to shear off the Medusa’s head; i.e., through the Nordic model stamped by a subjugated Japanese authorship sold back to American customers while wearing a trademark baby-blue “zero suit” (re: “Borrowed Robes” but also below): a cop in a whore outfit. So does Samus (and those playing at Samus, below) police other more unruly whores per the usual monomyth assimilation fantasies scapegoating nature as toxic; i.e., to look like a whore but function like an undercover cop/cleaner. From hair to skin to clothes to props, the state will groom any aspect of an Amazon (or similar potentially hairy monstrous-feminine under the Shadow of Pygmalion); i.e., to pimp themselves (and nature at large) to serve profit, by policing Hell on Earth. Whereas revolutionary cryptonymy employs rock ‘n roll’s anti-war tendencies, Amazons embody the language of war as monstrous-feminine. The token Amazon bridles, pimped and converted into false power and empty hope attached to pro-war/settler-colonial abuse; e.g., Autumn Ivy’s enby gym-mom pandering borrowed from earlier franchises known for such things:
(artist: Autumn Ivy)
Betrayal is betrayal masked as tokenized, second wave “empowerment.” As such, military recruitment is a go-to state method (re: “Military Optimism“); i.e., one of fetishizing the Amazon as false rebel by presenting her as a protector for the infantilized while also defending the status quo from hairier examples to “shave” as she holds the blade. Female castration is often a female duty haunting the heroism.
To it, the Neo-Gothic classically crosses taboo violence with taboo aspects of one’s body dating back to Chaucer celebrating what would become alien out of the ancient past; i.e., as something to fear during capital as a process; re: from “The Miller’s Tale” (exhibit 37c2, “Back to Jadis’ Dollhouse“) into eroticized horror stories about the fearsome harpy or werewolf, etc, as something—like Medusa—to castrate (re: silver bullets) or at contain, thus pimp[10] (re: snakes for hair [re: “Always a Victim“] but also just hairiness as a statement about impudent autonomy that, cis or not, crosses over immediately into toxic, monstrous-feminine body language, above).
This being said, shaving whores to shame them is a classic canonical technique, but one generally concerned with stripping a body to gauge its hairiness as a hauntological practice: to expose one’s body in pubic. Doing so is classically what men do, or Spartan women, or whores, or women fetishizing persecution language (e.g., Angela Carter fetishizing queer people, “Confronting Past Wrongs“). Except the ancient canonical laws don’t account for trans people predating Western models, thus Amazons; i.e., those who have lived and loved, wanting not merely to be seen as human despite our hairiness, but loved for it by decriminalizing said hair with said hair as something to show off during ludo-Gothic BDSM’s public nudism as toxic. Amazons were classically naked, animalistic and GNC to terrify viewers!
Through that paradox, then, hairiness becomes a statement of fact and means of play onstage and off: a strip tease to show more and more, on the Aegis, thus outing the fury of those furious at our furriness, mid-abjection to reverse said abjection with hairy cryptonymy (through the usual morphological displays, but also neo-medieval/castled hyphenations of sex and force with food, death, war and disease, etc, as toxic sugars to treat with/deal in)! The whore’s revenge is exposure, granting them a warrior’s power on a monstrous-feminine gradient reclaiming home (the mother) as alien from bad(-faith) actors by good ones:
(artist: Mugiwara)
To it, body hair wasn’t always shamed, but the connecting of increasingly exposed and animal states of nudity as prostitution have been historically relegated, in the West, to graveyards (re: B.B. Wagner’s “The Graveyard Prostitutes of Rome and Beyond,” 2020) but also foreign imperial territories called “toxic” in bad faith (the Radcliffe bandit MO), while known for such nudity as a form of attack to attack in bad faith; e.g., with Athenian women fearful of their Spartan neighbors being “Amazonian” by virtue of their warrior-women nudity versus the femme fatales developed under Capitalism fascinated with such antiquity reimagined; re: Creed, Kristeva, Carter and me—with me camping those women, insofar as any terror language goes; re: “flashing” and “Our Sweet Revenge.” That section concerned anal rape and Amazons, but the same idea applies to body hair as, often enough, fetishized in anisotropic “either way” language: toxic sugar as ashes in one’s mouth, or oxymoronic sweetener with a semblance of ash (ashes to ashes, dust to dust).
As such, this policing of things by state barbers (which classically were bloodletters that have become currently tied to state extermination rhetoric) can be challenged during the cryptonymy process, but still come from a position of nostalgia that is difficult to entirely reject because it defines one’s childhood, hence sense of self as coded for them by the elite’s false flags; re: the police rape of nature as monstrous-feminine canonized as nostalgia to favor the profit motive, hence nuclear model, as reinvaded by Medusa’s hairy, toxic ilk.
Furthermore, all of this is morphologized as the Gothic does; re: through bodies and castles with chattelized vengeful elements, mise-en-abyme. Every labyrinth needs a minotaur to “slay,” thereby subverting such things with doubles of their harmful, canonical versions:
(artist: Persephone van der Waard)
In “Why I Submit,” for instance, I even spell this relationship out; i.e., in regards to myself as a trans woman in the closet:
When cis women/trans people play Metroidvania, they also face their fears. A common AFAB fear is rape. Another fear is change. As Samus Aran, the player is in a constant state of change. Eventually she/they become(s) a powerful monster, but needn’t be the total abuser that scared sexist men portray her as. Instead, she can literally seize control, using the videogame controller to become a mommy dom herself. This make the castle a teacher of sorts. The Metroidvania is the mommy dom—the Master—and Samus Aran is the apprentice.
So am I. Playing Super Metroid, I see a tall, fearsome Amazon—one I can submit to, but also embody through my attraction to her ambivalent aura and home. They’re literally why I pick up the controller. There’s always an uncanny element to Samus because she has power. Conversely Samus herself proves she isn’t the monster. She could be Mother Brain, but rejects the matriarch’s abject position, retaining her humanity. For me, this becomes another form of consent, one informed by sexual desire. I choose to interact with Samus and the castle because they teach, but also excite me. I want to fuck what I want to be: sexy. For me, that means a powerful woman like Samus.
Yes, Metroid spaces and heroines are “traumatic,” and echo trauma (re: child abuse) and “trauma” (re: watching Alien) from my childhood. They remain sexy because Samus chooses to protect me inside the space, the carrot to the castle’s stick. To quote Spike Spiegel, “I love the kind of woman who can kick my ass.” The Metroidvania castle lets me adopt a traditionally “female” stance: fear of physical abuse. Intimations of trauma are inevitable; framing them within boundaries of play grants me an element of control, according to a partner I can trust. I trust the Metroidvania to “imprison” me. Inside the castle, I control Samus, an avatar whose powerful persona chases my boogeymen, tyrants, away (source).
Note: I would go onto to trace this lineage in far greater detail; re: with Metroidvania and camping it, in my PhD’s “Origins and Lineage.” Here, the same tracing has come full-circle, regarding toxic Amazon body hair. —Perse, 4/24/2025
Obviously my feelings have changed further since coming out of the closet, in 2022. A vengeful girl boss like Samus unironically fights for the Galactic Federation—a menticided, “witch-like,” “sleeper agent” detective who faces the traumatic, “triggering” “monster past” as a canonical huntress huffing glue. She’s an infiltrator flown into the state of exception; i.e., under the radar and killing everything around her using their own materials—their own weapons—in phallic, rapacious displays of weaponized, pro-state violence (making Samus the “white Indian” savior of the self-colonizing ruin and its feudalized, conflicted ownership and colonial apologia: as reclaimed by a totem girl with a penis-shaped head[11]). Utterly convinced she must destroy the enemy’s “mother” (with slaying the dragon mother being a sexist, femicidal, Jungian archetype necessary for male individuation), Samus goes from planet to planet under similar war-torn conditions, gets triggered by toxic activators (through constant cop/victim propaganda), robotically “activates” during mirror syndrome, and “pulls a Rambo” whenever the Federation wants her to. She’s a terminator working for Skynet but raised among the natives after her colony is torched (not wolves, but birds; re: the Chozo)!
Real workers are no different, but walk the same half-real tightrope. Like witches and other monsters—and as we’ll see in just a moment with Autumn Ivy making a return (who we’ll camp with Mugi’s help)—Amazons are a liminal category that can go either way (re: “Death by Snu-Snu” and “Always a Victim“). By routinely “nuking the site from orbit” just like Ripley does, the canonical/colonial variant of either detective doesn’t really “solve” anything through force; colonizing force leads to bombs; bombs—as we learned from The Last of Us, part two during Volume Two—only engender regional instability by breaking things down and enforcing a fascist state of panic and fear comparable to Samus own fucked-up childhood (re: exhibit 35b, “Pieces of the Dead“). Nurture did her dirty.
“Only the dead have seen the end of war,” Plato supposedly asserts (source: Bernard Suzanne, 2002). I disagree, provided we de-subjugate the Amazon and deplore her toxic neoliberal recruitment (re: “Predators and Prey” and “Praxial Inertia,” but also a concept we’ll revisit in Chapter Five; e.g., “warrior mommies,” exhibit 102a4). To it, workers can teach children not to become war orphans by refusing to endorse, thus become, rabid straw-dog victims; i.e., of war as a cycle of reactive abuse towards state manufactured enemies. It’s our job to get creative and recultivate the Superstructure (re: “Twin Trees“). To fight fire with fire starts by camping the barber shop’s horrors, specifically its toxic whore-like war heroines[12]!
Little Shop of Horrors: Camping the Barbershop Whores
(exhibit 72a: “The children’s crusade on its way to the Holy Land, 1212”; source: Blakemore’s “The Disastrous Time Tens of Thousands of Children Tried to Start a Crusade” [2019]. Blakemore herself writes:
Though multiple accounts discuss Stephen and Nicholas, historians still disagree on many of the crusade’s particulars. In 1977, Peter Raedts reassessed the chronicles and concluded that participants in the Children’s Crusade had existed on the margins of society. They may have believed it was up to poor and marginalized people to take up the flag for Christianity after the first Crusades failed. Raedts concluded the crusaders were not really children, but poor people—an interpretation that calls the very name of the movement into question.
The slender accounts of the so-called Children’s Crusade make it hard to confirm or deny whether the participants were actual kids or just powerless peasants. But the ill-fated journey shows how the influence of just a few persuasive voices can incite a full-blown movement—even one that ends in humiliation and disaster [source].
Children get their ideas passed down from their parents and any heroic canon.)
Aside from the “witches” and other monstrous-feminine liminalities (female or not) already known to videogames like Metroid—and keeping with Medusa’s common role to be policed by subjugated Amazons less hairy than the Gorgon—the so-called “dragon lady” remains a common Patriarchal symbol for “hysterical” chaos; i.e., a toxic means of abjection supplied by early 20th century psychologists like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung as outlined by Irigary and Creed. Jung’s archetypes in particular outlines the monomyth as intimated by Freud’s pupil, Otto Rank; i.e., who personally described birth trauma as a separation from the womb and the hero’s quest entirely desirous with reunion (re: “Born to Fall?“), and whose feminist ideas (especially compared to Freud’s) would be challenged before and after by Joseph Campbell, Jordan Peterson, and many others (all the way back to Aristotle and Plato). Pygmalion casts a long shadow and in that shadow’s endless reach, psychoanalysis from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries obscure not just Marx but Mary Shelley and other revolutionaries; i.e., Medusa is always a victim to shave with cops holding the shears, including nerdy female ones (Creed’s murderous womb fucked by Francis Bacon’s spiritual successors; re: Patel and Moore).
Per the Man Box, all these various, replicated prescriptions from different authoritative (wo)men and their assorted “quirks” conceal a larger Patriarchal structure that routinely treats anything monstrous-feminine like objects to quarantine; i.e., whose symbolic “slaying” and submission conveniently advances men’s role in the world: a literal Bakhtinian rite-of-passage that women will tokenize to uphold, inside the chronotope as concentric, half-real; re: being hairy or at least muscular enough in the modern prescriptive sense (of men as hairier and burlier than women); e.g., Autumn Ivy having the usual, superhero-style[13] virgin/whore alter ego, suitably showing off what they/society considers an “acceptable” amount of skin, tattoos and pussy fur while punching down at those who dare point out that Autumn is, in fact, a sex worker (re: “The Nation-State“).
The fact remains, cops tokenize through some degree of desperation and convenience—Autumn having their cake and eating it, too. A toxic Sale of Indulgences serving the Protestant ethic, they’re a token whore “of nature” pimping whores, wherein nature polices nature as monstrous-feminine; re: through sex as a dirty drug—a sticky and delicious one—but Autumn’s wares serving the state through complicit cryptonymy during manufactured scarcity splashed with “ancient” Amazon goo. “The dose doth make the poison” (re: Paracelsus). So does the context (re: Drew Pinsky); i.e., as modular and dialectical-material, drugs being a poetic mode as much as anything literal (re: Mills and Fisher). Autumn’s a smiling brute; re: gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss, hypocritically selling pussy sludge and butt musk while abjecting it. It’s very “pick me,” punching down at other sex workers who are “more toxic” in Autumn’s eyes.
(artist: Wolfhead at Night)
Out of the ancient world’s kayfabe, demons and legendary warriors into the Renaissance and capital-centric monsters (the undead; e.g., zombies)—from Paradise Lost to Frankenstein to Lord of the Rings featuring statuesque bodies and, in Tolkien and similar stories, Amazons (e.g., Aliens, Metroidvania and shooters re: “Military Optimism“)—authors have used monstrous-feminine for canon versus camp (re: exhibit 0c, “Twin Trees“), and not just male authors (re: Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, “Making Demons“). Exact authorship aside, whores are monsters, and not only are monsters cool (re: “Concerning Monsters“), but everyone loves the whore for different reasons (e.g., “Policing the Whore“).
Except, cops canonize monsters to rape nature and Autumn is a cop, pinkwashing such things through subjugated Amazonomachia as unironically toxic. In doing so, Autumn effectively disguises police action as false guerrilla; i.e., with the stolen, abused language of guerillas, thereby helping conceal several things in the process: the pimp’s revenge as “whore,” the prosecution of actual whores being the oldest form of labor exploitation, said exploitation being tokenized through divide-and-conquer strategies. Those include recruiting from the very prison spaces whores are crammed inside, the state sending more privileged token examples back into these same concentric frontiers: to police out of revenge in bad faith (re: “The World Is a Vampire“).
At their most basic, then, the Medusa and their Aegis are revenge personified—meaning the awesome withering power to speak out/about rape through rape performed as “toxic.” As monstrous-feminine shows, power has infinite form (re: “Of Darkness and the Forbidden“); like music, it can be used for anything (re: Zizek, “universal application”). What matters, again, is how. Gothic, per the cryptonymy process, is made of fakery and lies being part of a basic human language (re: “The Future Is a Dead Mall“), whose subsequent comportment can further profit/abjection or reverse it. So while the Gothic commonly tells truth through falsehood, it can also lie through truth for different dialectical-material aims; re: what we’re made of as a neo-medieval means of liminal expression through blood, sweat and tears, but also toxic sugar and hairy whistleblowers demonized, cop/victim, as poetic arguments to become fluent in duality (doubles).
Doing so, it takes serious active work through the dialectic of the alien (and shelter) to challenge the very toxic stigmas, biases and phobias sex work suffers, and which the iconoclast works with to do so in a proletarian sense, through Gothic; e.g., Delilah Gallo and myself (source: “An Interview with Delilah Gallo,” 2025).
By comparison, Autumn doesn’t challenge anything about sex work, as canon; they further abjection for profit, full stop. To that, they’re Radcliffe’s banditti, robbing the castle for the baron; i.e., their aesthetic of strength—not just their muscles but their Amazonian garb and toxic fursona—do the heavy lifting. And heroically masculine women (or female/trans masc enbies, in Autumn’s case) who unironically don the armor of the dragonslayer are, whether they realize it or not, playing a complicit role in this endless cryptonymy. They’re a cop and ACAB.
Furthermore, even a seemingly “progressive” bad bitch like Samus (which Autumn has played before) canonizes through girl-boss cryptonymy that
- behaves at least as violently as the men[14], colonizing an ancestral space according to an uncertain, feudalistic bloodline; re: Bakhtin’s Gothic chronotope per hereditary rites and dynastic power exchange.
- serves as the captive sex object that men can fantasize about as they control her body (the avatar).
- presents her, thus the player’s victories, as fighting for “true peace in space”; i.e., as something to pay for the privilege, meaning a temporary end to the police state’s advertised disorder-in-the-abstract (the Medusa): as a toxic proxy/doxy scapegoat for all the world’s problems hidden in plain sight; re: genocide and war as things to hide, which in turn hide their deeper causation (Capitalism) as concealed and revealed cryptonymically and cryptomimetically by the game itself: as Capitalist Realism through “war pastiche” (a toxic concept we’ll return to in Chapter Four but which “War Culture” and “Rape Culture” from Volume One have already touched upon).
The whore’s revenge, then, is one of endless conflict against the state—the latter an entity that rapes nature by design (re: “A Cruel Angel’s Thesis“); i.e., doing so out of revenge as built into capital (re: “Rape Reprise“), and all to birth, maintain and revive the state, a priori and ipso facto. Profit is rape as a form of theft.
Of course, Barbara Creed asserts that one can resist these various concealments by using their monstrous avatars—the Amazon or the Gorgon—as terrifying symbols to scare the Patriarchy out of hiding. However, doing so will invariably criminalize either as “ancient,” cryptonymic, inhuman sources of fear that—as Federici points out and I agree (re: “Policing the Whore“)—will be manipulated by the state to serve the state and state’s rights. The whore can resist tokenization, but frankly makes for a poor disguise mid-cryptonymy while also being historically “mute” (or at least can’t converse with the people trying to kill it); i.e., animalized toxically as Medusa is—with inhuman life cycles associated with wasps, jellyfish and lampreys divorced from “civilized” factories but blamed for them (making it rare for them to represent protagonistic critiques of Capitalism[15]); re: stigma animals as toxic whore to pimp, harvest and sell.
That’s part of the whore’s paradox, and one we must navigate while reclaiming such things being abject in the state’s eyes; i.e., to make the bandit disappear by hugging Medusa in ways the bandit abjects. So must heroes target the shapeshifter acting in bad faith, demasking them through their lies; e.g., like Ernest P. Warrell kissing the troll in Ernest Scared Stupid (above, 1991); i.e., to make it explode (the fool exposing the liar through medieval playacting—blood libel and Chaucer’s “kiss and makeup” schtick from “The Pardoner’s Tale,” c. 1387). The lie is what destructs, and with it, the liar’s ability to manipulate others through paralysis, imitation and toxic projection.
This happens through repetition; re: parody and pastiche are remediated praxis during liminal expression in duality (no monopolies). Pastiche, for our purposes, must be perceptive and active, not blind and inert; i.e., camp is a form of play and play is a means of communication and learning through cryptonymy as paradox (e.g., the whore’s, liar’s, and many others; re: “Welcome to the Fun Place!“). I used to identify as a Gothic ludologist, whose ideas above eventually evolved into ludo-Gothic BDSM. That’s what this symposium has been speaking to, past and present (and what we’ll reconsider when we look at AI and corporations): toxic love as sold to us in tokenized monomyth language (the chaste naked herbo not just exterminating zombie snake ladies but hunting them down and decapitating them, grist-for-the-mill; i.e., zombies exist to be exterminated during orderly disposal by fascism, the latter happily scapegoating its own waste/genocide rhetoric and deeply unpopular polices DARVO-style, mid-crisis)! As with toxic love, you can’t “fix” fascism, whose predation serves capital: as anti-stewardship and worshipping the process of death itself (a death cult).
Whether Amazonian or Archaic, “ancient female rage at Patriarchal traumatizers” is entirely valid from a consensual performer’s iconoclastic standpoint (with the enjoyment of the role in private very different than publicly endorsing it as a de facto educator). However, it’s also not how every iconoclast even wants to be portrayed; i.e., as a giant, nefandous, female bullseye that men only want to kill (excluding monster-fuckers), but also huntress “war orphans” working for the state—as its JO material for “real” soldiers (cis-het men); re: nature not as female, but monstrous-feminine food and sex to police through bad actors like Autumn Ivy playing Malcom X’s cunning fox: the hypocritical white moderate in wolf furs, toxically playing at Animal Farm (1945)! It becomes maladaptive, an addiction to feed as “bad”; i.e., moralizing chemicals or things viewed/treated as chemical poison.
(artist: Wolfhead at Night)
Concerning toxic animals, the dread of “turning” goes both ways. On the proletarian, ACAB side of the coin, the poetic liberty of any monstrous-feminine extends the trans potential of so-called “phallic” women or parthenogenetic entities during proletarian praxis; i.e., those which aren’t exactly butterflies or wallflowers and more like murderflies and nightshade performing Amazonomachia for the workers of the world. That’s fine for some revolutionaries (or those playing at revolutionaries), but not everyone wants to be inherently “butch,” bellicose or beautiful-yet-baneful; i.e., “femme fatales” that cater to the cis-het Male Gaze performed historically by token women—the Medusa but also the white savior as subjugated Amazon versus Medusa: the herbo going beyond Samus; e.g., as Blizzard’s burly Sonya (exhibit 100c2b), or hourglass BDSM dames like Marston’s imperfect Wonder Woman (exhibit 102c3) likewise being just about everywhere and nowhere all at once (re: “Death by Snu-Snu“). Rape is ubiquitous under capital, as are its DARVO arguments in bad faith, existing in duality with our own.
But however ubiquitous they are as military-recruiter devices, the fact remains, “slaying Medusa” speaks to everyday life as something that crosses into fantasy and the sight of such battles; i.e., being acted out, onstage and off, through “playing war” in toxic language; re: Mugi and their partner fucking for me as something to exhibit outside the bedroom while inside the bedroom (re: Foucault). So does the whore’s revenge give home an alien fur coat (and pearl necklace the moral arbiters won’t clutch) by virtue of voyeur/exhibitionist context: the Commie slut from outer space raised on home soil; i.e., like Superman minus an actual alien planet or assimilation fantasy and feeding the same toxic appetites in ways conducive to proletarian undeath, demonology and anthropomorphism.
To that, Mugi and I have worked together for years—with me being drawn to their GNC-ness, hair and curves. In turn, our partnership communion with Medusa played out in stages, commissioned both for art and fun!
First, there’s foreplay on the cusp of penetration into alien spheres, chonky and hairy…
(artist: Mugiwara)
then the sex/ol’ in-and-out with adorable call-and-response commentary[16]…
(artist: Mugiwara)
…followed by the “money shot,” as it were—toxic sugar! Castle raided! Dragon slain! But it’s campy and sweet—a bit mundane with a heroic-monster veneer being the core of my art in 2020 (re: “My Art Website Is Live!“).
(artist: Mugiwara)
So despite humans being very hairy and animal through the act of “ravishing Medusa” as something to “toxically” perform (with eye contact, sweat, scent, protein/sugars, heavy breathing and so on), sex and public nudism aren’t discrete any more than art or porn are, mid-Amazonomachia (re: “monster battle,” but also psychosexuality and “battle sex”); i.e., Medusa a “mysterious mother” speaking to its own rape through fabrication (re: “Healing from Rape“) and cleansing through filth (re: Walpole, “Prey as Liberators“): a “secret sin; [an] untold tale, that art cannot extract, nor penance cleanse[17].” In other words, it’s a mud bath.
To play is to control, over whatever we want to control—hair and toxic sugars or otherwise, mid-cryptonymy! Forget Sophie’s Choice; it’s Sophocles’ Choice, amirite? Medusa’s caked-up dumper craves for thick monster cock—as materialized through various poetic devices (re: the Poetry Module’s magical assembly, selective absorption, confusion of the senses and a Song of Infinity) recultivating the Wisdom of the Ancients: evoking Medusa with one’s own cake as “castle in the flesh,” “heaven in a wild flower” and “fun palace,” etc! Let the Womb Wander!
(model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)
Furthermore, I would write in the Demon Module,
All monsters are, to some degree, imaginary thus fake, but likewise hinting at buried realities through their fakeness; the Gothic, as a dualistic means of calculated risk, is rooted in fakery to further or reverse abjection through the cryptonymy process—i.e., a fake made of clay or an authentic article made of clay are still, both of them, made of clay (re: the Gothic through camp, puts everything in quotes). As such, function trumps form as a hauntological matter of assigned legitimacy versus actual activism regardless of appearance. Gothic Communism takes said clay, then, and uses it to liberate workers from state golems and gargoyles, the owners of a church increasingly menticided by/alienated from its own counterfeit sense of “past”; re: the ghost of the counterfeit ours to weaponize against our jailors, mid-chronotope. The more they lie, the more room we have to work with, terrifying what they and their forgeries try to abject using the same borderline-to-outright pornographic poetic devices: the sacrifice and executioner housed in the same special place, the maiden/whore to conjure up achingly during Gothic’s liminal rape play and murder fantasy! “Oh, heavens! Just what have I gotten myself into!” Hot goss, indeed, girls talk—about that big Gothic “castle” to go to for a good time [Cuwu was a size queen]!
(artist: Owusyr)
Except whereas the middle class since Radcliffe might conjure up a castle or demon lover to assuage their bigoted fears (cold feet or shoulders, often with an alter ego—the secret identity man-of-mystery or Amazonian menace to warm things up/cool things down charming the panties off the [classically white, straight, female] audience during calculated risk), we do so to announce and combat systemic oppression: killing our darlings on the Aegis, but also calling them out for their entitlement, hence grab a tantrum-throwing slaver by the balls (re: cops—those whose profession is to torture and extort people more vulnerable than themselves in defense of private property).
So do we anisotropically defend ourselves from state fabrications; i.e., by making our own and fashioning an alternate, at-times-frank/streetwise but also exciting/swashbuckling voice to history through demons (e.g., Borges). We make room for reasonable doubt/craft an alibi tied to our identity and performance going hand-in-hand. The Gothic becomes a place to conveniently be naughty and put our ideas to practice that, in turn, aren’t fully removed from our habitat, thus bailiwick. So with sugar and spice, but also piss, vinegar and worse things (shit, blood, etc), we can win some degree of arbitration regarding sex and force, but also our basic human rights swept up in these things. There’s power in fiction, but especially when it’s mixed up with sex and force through demonic expression as pulpy and clay-like (source: “A Paucity of Time”).
Think of this with “toxic sugar” instead of clay and you have the same basic idea; re: fucking the alien. Exploitation and liberation overlap (the Gothic originally penned by closeted gay men and privileged white straight women).
Yet, for Gothic Communism, consent is cool, as are Amazons/the Medusa and the whore’s “rape” as something to put into quotes, but air the dirty laundry for fun. Time is a circle that Gothically feeds, like the ouroboros, concentrically into itself. That’s what makes cryptonymy fun, and describes the endlessly ergodic, liminal, dualistic and imaginary past littered with such things, on and offstage, mise-en-abyme! What Capital endlessly takes into itself as hot toxic garbage, the Medusa reclaims infinitely through duality into something curiously sweet amid the charnel house’s bitter tones! A gay to bury by the state, she’s nobody’s hero but ours! “Wicked bad naughty Zoot!” Everyone loves the whore because she’s dirty!
To it, there’s a bevy of dire lineages to explore and play out when chasing the dragon/getting to the bottom of the mystery that Medusa’s “toxic sugar” represents (representation. in Gothic. being a house built on very shaky grounds). Autumn Ivy doesn’t have a monopoly on muscles, body hair or sex (re: the aesthetic of power and death through sugar-as-toxic, but also what is targeted through said aesthetic; e.g., what Autumn calls “ham sandwich” [their pussy] actually betraying their own consumer-like approach to such things—still selling the ham, but being a coercively cryptonymic approach).
Toxic waste? Bread and circus? We’re all made of the same meat, sugars and waste; it’s what you do with it—and how you sell your labor as a poetic, educational matter of praxis concerning what capital treats as waste—that affects development through abjection as something to reverse (or not). Again, these aren’t zero-sum; re: liberation and exploitation share the same stages, whose castration versus our own uses the same toxic-themed devices (re: public nudism, body hair and a rebellious, sugary-toxic veneer); i.e., at the same time, voyeur/exhibit.
Chemical Lobotomy (feat. Blizzard, Mercy and Overwatch, AI Abuse, and The Simpsons)
Holistic study remains vital to penetrating power (the veil of cryptonymy to find utility thus value); i.e., as something to interrogate, as toxic; e.g., the Metroidvania and rock opera places where such fur(r)tive rebellion classically calls home, once dumped there like zombie corpses (re: the virgin and the whore, the whore being the hairy or at least “dark” toxic lycanthrope and the virgin being the modest, Neo-Gothic, non-toxic warrior maiden [virgin/whore] resisting such things through token police violence: tainted by waste/marked by Cain and triangulating for the state against nature as radioactive alien to prove her worth to them). The next twenty pages concern a broad holistic survey focusing on blindness and sight (similar to “Forbidden Sight“; re: as critical engagement).
Despite having outlined Autumn as a toxic Amazon who serves the state, and Mugi being a hairy boy pussy-haver that uses the same basic language for cryptonymy at cross purposes (re: revolutionary versus complicit), we’ve really just been scratching the surface of these hairy and toxic/radioactive, sugary things. Like the zombie, mid-crisis, there’s endless numbers to survey. I’d like to do a little more of that, here; i.e., with Blizzard, Mercy and Overwatch on different registers, discussing the value in such garbage even when corporatized (while critiquing AI abuse), then conclude with rock operas (a kind of “danger disco” similar to the Metroidvania stomping ground that Amazons commonly use when orbiting Numinous forces like the Medusa). Such is holistic expression, endlessly returning to Medusa’s toxic cafeteria (“Lunch Lady Land…“) for (sloppy) seconds!
As we do, remember how we’re the one’s camping canon during cryptonymy as a hairy ordeal; re: the Gothic outing the home as not just “alien,” but hypocritical. Such dualistic half-reality applies to the cryptonymy of centrist soldier roles (e.g., the healslut, not the tank—exhibit 73a), and therein lies further examples of monstrous-feminine that don’t necessarily have body hair so much as they exist to be controlled/played with in various toxic ways; i.e., that abide by the same broader rules of irony that flow of power towards/away from the elite; e.g., the combatant and noncombatant, to varying degrees of violent and “hard” or peaceful and “soft” (with body hair generally being left out, save the “bush” as a concealed grooming of the sexual site that entitled men/tokens view as theirs: a “garden” they cultivate through the woman as their property doing work to please them):
(exhibit 72b: Artist, top-left: unknown, top-middle: Fantscifi, top-right: Vashperado, bottom-left: Rodion Shaldo, bottom-middle: Koyorin, bottom-right: Kyoffie12.)
Having studied Amazons and their classic enemies, once tokenized, there’s a near-infinite variety of these monstrous-feminine body types and “pin-up girl” soldier roles; i.e., Amazonomachia operating through the imaginary past: as something to holistically and “gamely” learn from, or conversely cherish in the “blind,” unironic sense. This includes the humor and aesthetic, but also sexually dimorphic roles’ curiously repetitious mutations; i.e., proliferating heteronormatively within AI-generated replicas[18]. AI = abuse through theft, effectively through blind parody/pastiche.
Furthermore, the above approach has been “optimized” by the elite through their servants. Presenting as AI-sourced “artists,” any human(s) behind the account(s) doing the theft are pimps: passing “their creations” off as art while stealing it. Such complicit cryptonymy is a dead mall, one disguising how Capitalism normally markets itself through toxic fakes: like they’re not exploiting workers by stealing their labor and their bodies, including images of these things. Regardless, the endless variation and cryptomimetic replication includes the cryptonymic context behind the images in relation to what they’re referring to under Capitalism; i.e., franchised material with a sexist fanbase, authorship and meta/parasocial relationship with paratextual outcomes. There’s still room to work within this mess; i.e., to subvert its goop through praxis being synthesized by different peoples of different ages, times and places in different mediums to different degrees.
For example, consider the “non-combatant” medic class Amazon; i.e., whose “healslut” pejorative label has its own strange “flavor history.” One, “it’s just a canonical joke,” memeified from new games emulating older games with distinctly hauntological designs. Yet, a highly stylized, nostalgic, and sexually diverse team in Overwatch popularized the bad joke lifted directly from an earlier all-boys team, in Team Fortress 2 (2007). The older game treated “healslut” like a feminized insult for jealous or irritated players wanting a “pocket healer” or thinking their healer was bad (Know Your Meme, 2016), therefore became ignominiously implied-as-female to tease them; the subsequent game conspicuously eroticized the idea (Kotaku, 2016)—meaning while the notoriously toxic (mostly vocal, teenage/adult male) player base treated healers as forced-submissive, “feminine” roles that “real” men should avoid and all women were relegated to because they “lacked skill.” Medics aren’t just feminized, but monstrous-feminized through the whore’s paradox; i.e., the virgin-whore as something to shave, shape and dress up in ways that can be camped, afterwards:
(exhibit 73a: Source image. A game-within-a-game, the “meta guide” for being a heal-slut; source: Kyle Bohunicky and Jordan Youngblood’s 2019 “The Pro Strats of Healsluts: Overwatch, Sexuality, and Perverting the Mechanics of Play.”)
Not all of it was sexist. And yet the ludic metaplay was so extensive and complicated that the phenomenon of consensual BDSM has been seriously studied in academia (above); i.e., a half-real reclaiming of the term “heal-slut” from toxic fandoms chasing the whore (re: werewolves, Gorgons, zombies, etc, as queerness through suicide/disguise narratives’ toxic injections; e.g., Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde).
Sluts are canonically monstrous-feminine, but Amazons are a gradient therein. Said spectrum extends to any worker (female or not), including Amazonian variants like the healslut; but preferential mistreatment happens towards a more traditional, European-looking poster girl; e.g., Mercy (above) embodying the universal “vanilla” flavor/Occidental beauty standard as doll-like, thus campable as blonde bombshell (re: exhibit 9b0, “Prey as Liberators“). Whereas a surly war bitch like Zarya is more of an “acquired taste” (strawberry Russian weightlifter), she’s also not a healer but a tank slut who presumably tops/pegs (through the de facto sissy chaser fantasies’ “head canon”). But both equate to Amazons as classic military sexpots recruiters (re: “Borrowed Robes” and “Military Optimism“).
Mid-Amazonomachia, Mercy falls on the “soft gentle” side of that angel/devil, leather/lace prescription (see: footnote); i.e., the maiden bride as something to fuck in whore-like ways however the husband[19] decides through wish fulfillment. Be that missionary, doggy or cowgirl as meeting his needs, Mercy’s his waifu. As the patently Amazonian wheyfu, Zarya is fucked to be tamed or to service the man as a “lion tamer” of sorts: doggy like an animal, or someone who pegs the sissy chaser who surrenders their power for a moment inside a larger linguo-material exchange (re: “Reclaiming Anal Rape“); i.e., one that doesn’t change material conditions outside of said exchange. Both are whores and virgins, but Mercy is the airbrushed body that—no matter how you groom it—is always a particular kind of slut to rape/penetrate per the whore’s paradox: the witch, naughty nun and Valkyrie (all in-game costumes for her character/the player to wear). Zarya is the rapist brute.
Despite the Byzantine paratexts/metaplay (exhibit 73a/b) and diegetic elements of a holistic mise-en-abyme that also involves AI-generation, Overwatch and TF2 simultaneously accomplished this in real time; i.e., as the same trashy cryptonyms of older times that largely romanticized hauntological war in the unironic “naked pin-up girl on the side of an airplane” approach. Their corporate “girl with a prop” simulacra used the dizzying variety outlined above to conceal/downplay the sexist core rotting at the heart of their respective artistic inspirations (arguably Pixar’s Brad Bird, specifically the nuclear family style of The Incredibles, 2004; and Blizzard’s cookie-cutter, “Disney princess,” conspicuously groomed to chemotherapeutically lack any body hair): Patriarchal Capitalism as the concealed barber, dietician, tailor, etc, who forces ostensible AFABs to be women by shaping their bodies accordingly through digital likenesses in popular media (our canonical “junk food” is the “girl” with a prop, but also the cartoonishly masculine men and token appropriations). Not only that, but both series managed to produce their own musical metajoke and fan-made theme songs in the bargain, which later responded to one another in a franchise-friendly contest: the rap battle (JT Music’s “Sombra vs Spy,” 2018)! Business as usual under the Protestant ethic, right?
Sadly “business as usual” is also blind; i.e., including a childish, rapey take on homophobia that betrayed the ghost of the counterfeit (of appropriative peril/rape fantasies) fairly early on: “Surprise Buttsex” (MegaGFilms, 2011). This means three years before Gamergate and five before Overwatch, we had already experienced a music video that, by 2021 when the Blizzard lawsuits came about (Kotaku), actually came to pass—not as a joke, but something that real women (often minorities) in real workplaces had been saying seriously for years only to be ignored, neglected or harassed by their Patriarchal superiors. The situation was less “no one talked about it” and more that powerful employers refused to help these discussions progress beyond PR to challenged profit/the owner class—all while these same corporate elite erected in-game monuments of themselves (re: Blizzard World), named an in-game hero after an accused male sex offender employed and protected by the company for years (CBR, 2021) and treated in-game, cosplayer and employee women as one-in-the-same: disposable sex objects part of an toxic industry older than Blizzard itself, and present in companies that emerged around the same time like 3D Realms (whose own sexism had to reinvent and disguise itself facing modest-but-gradual pushback; re: “Zombie Police States“).
In turn, corporate brass covered up the endless trauma its female employees had experienced. More accurately they tried to contain it, burying the scandal inside a procession of outwardly smiling and scantily-clad cryptonyms whose surfaces slowly leaked toxic sludge; i.e., like a shiny plastic barrel whose containment had failed. It was an effect prefaced by my Ion Fury write up (above); i.e., whose larger canceled-future (and furious police blindness) I called “zombie police state.”
Such lobotomizing extends from Capitalism decaying into sludge, which—as this book’s companion glossary has already outlined—applies to fascism as “zombie Capitalism”: corporations melting down with states. A radioactive, Promethean structure felt through Blizzard’s power abuse, these sat inside Overwatch as a corporate e-sport; i.e., prone to the same abuses any other sport geared around profit undergoes, and felt through a toxic shockwave shuddering across its entire socio-material extensions. Once that failed, Blizzard’s banality of evil reared its ugly head, offering up meager consolation prizes to paper over the usual corporate abuses (and their embarrassing leaks): by hiding them in plain sight as “virtuous and magnanimous solutions” (taking all credit from the whistleblowers, of course).
Faced with widespread toxic shock, Blizzard didn’t “solve” anything but their own inconvenience; i.e., “rolling some heads” by swapping CEOs, handing out paltry concession fees, and promising—in that special, neoliberal way—to “Do Better™” (source: “Court to Approve Activision Agreement With EEOC,” 2022). But this bled into the groundwater and ultimately the brains of consumers and performers piloting the Amazons in questions. So if ghosts are a potential warning from the past, then zombification describes a present meltdown through toxic emblems; i.e., for parodies that have lost their brains, generational corporatizing having emptied them and turned their waste onto the viewer through the same franchised image: as a lobotomy of the revolutionary mindset that people like Autumn Ivy abuse through Amazons, gentle or not. There’s a time limit!
Meantime, the exchange of cryptonymy carries out on the surface of these images: braindead schlock pimped by a token Amazon whore for “Athens,” “Sparta,” “Rome,” etc, under Pax Americana. While AFAB people acclimate to state abuse (re: as Amazons classically do), an enby traitor is just a traitor who’s sold out while weaponizing popular media against the masses “for Rome”; re: bread and circus canonized. Despite the trashy aesthetic, then, flow determines function; i.e., the dialectical-material aim of Autumn’s toxic garbage is lobotomy. Unlike Mercedes’ ironic poster pastiche, Autumn’s is unironically toxic and harmful towards people; i.e., by being reductive towards critical thought at a societal level when consumed: chattel porn with a subjugated Amazonian stamp. Mercedes speaks to rot with “rot”; Autumn is the rot dressed up as sugary Amazon fun—a chilling effect on the brain[20] as we need it to rebel/conduct asymmetrical warfare for workers, not the state!
(artist: Wolfhead at Night)
For a popular example of the same kind of “brain drain” from a franchise standpoint outside videogames or Amazons, consider “Zombie Simpsons.” In “Zombie Simpsons: How the Best Show Ever Became the Broadcasting Undead” (2012), Dead Homer Society writes,
By almost any measurement, The Simpsons is the most influential television comedy ever created. It has been translated into every major language on Earth and dozens of minor ones; it has spawned entire genres of animation, and had more books written about it than all but a handful of American Presidents. Even its minor characters have become iconic, and the titular family is recognizable in almost every corner of the planet. It is a definitive and truly global cultural phenomenon, perhaps the biggest of the television age.
As of this writing, if you flip on FOX at 8pm on Sundays, you will see a program that bills itself as The Simpsons. It is not The Simpsons. That show, the landmark piece of American culture that debuted on 17 December 1989, went off the air more than a decade ago. The replacement is a hopelessly mediocre imitation that bears only a superficial resemblance to the original. It is the unwanted sequel, the stale spinoff, the creative dry hole that is kept pumping in the endless search for more money. It is Zombie Simpsons (source).
A once-celebrated and popular, biting critique of the American nuclear family broadcast on network television until it slowly became braindead, the show has become popular but radioactively stupid; i.e., not the friendly ghosts of yesterday warning against an uncertain future’s ghost of the counterfeit, but a slick, glossy repetition of the same undying message using canonical doppelgangers of formerly satirical characters made blind (thus mute) through for-profit pastiche.
To it, said motive leads to an industry standard—the creation of characters in later AAA outings who were never intended to be satirical to begin with, and viewers who are never exposed to satire at all. Just endless, “sacred” consumerism with visual stereotypes to memorize toxic catechisms for profit. So is Autumn’s Church of Amazon a person/place for workers like myself, Mugi and Mercedes to camp and decolonize, in and out of media; i.e., as something to perform in the same half-real territories toxic aesthetic. Capital and camping its monsters (and prostitution of said monsters during mirror syndrome) is a multimedia ordeal:
(exhibit 74: Artist, bottom-middle: Zeronis; top-middle: Bisart.)
Brought into a neoliberal world, young viewers become zombified at birth(!)—undead babies who grow up and pass the virus/radiation along. For example, I was raised on R. L. Stine and Christopher Pike, but also the I Am Legend offshoot, Zombies Ate My Neighbors (re: “Bad Dreams“). And while I love the nightmare nostalgia those YA hauntologies gave me, the mid-’90s initiative for parental guidance remained a stiff conservative campaign overhanging them; i.e., rolled out to attack television/videogames when I was in elementary school. So is YA media a gateway to the world of ironically Gothic stores; i.e., that many kids my age weren’t allowed to consume yet given corporate analogs to consume: the ghost of the counterfeit furthering abjection through middle-class guilty pleasures. “Toxic” escapism.
That was my childhood. Offsetting it, I’ve written this book series to critique Capitalism using corporate Gothic themes and subtext; i.e., alongside the adult horror movies that ZAMN alluded to, which it re-remembered through the same vein of “poster pastiche/monster nostalgia” (re: exhibit 44b2, “Making Demons“); e.g., Bobby Picket’s “The Monster Mash” (1962), The Adams Family (1964) and The Munsters (1964); i.e., as a kind of privileged material consumption that introduces children from consuming families to dead nostalgia through personal property that evokes the nuclear family model (often to make fun of it as “embalmed”). I loved it for its allegory opening my eyes, however emergent my playing—with such cheaply caustic sugar slime—was (ultimately two sides of the same coin). “Build with trash.”
Zombie toxicity emerged as a critique of capital (re: Lockhart’s “Bourgeoise Braineaters“); those from old retro-future videogames like ZAMN doubled Blizzard’s unironically “dead malls” braindead approach: from a game where you fight animated, digital simulacra of old monstrous legends formerly relegated to the silver screen of several different decades. Not only does it take the classic idea of the animated gargoyle/fatal portrait and grant it a child-like wonder tied to ’90s cartoons; the makers of the game clearly knew their audience and sold you that for a single “ticket” while plainly being a labor of love (the music utterly bops). All of these toxic variables show ZAMN representing older industry standards from a monetization standpoint: single-purchase endeavors. Infinite growth wasn’t quite on their radar but it loomed ominously on the horizon of future videogames like Blizzard. In 1993, it hadn’t “become half-life” yet (to quote Mad Max), the doubles simmering with prophecy informed by capital needing more profit, thus waste.
Doubling the Double, Ourselves (Conventions); re: Ludo-Gothic BDSM
Before we subvert Blizzard’s Amazons via a toxic shock refrain, a short note about doubles in relation to monstrous social events; i.e., as things to play with that reflect the waste we’re less swimming in and more brewing inside like amniotic fluid. In the spirit of monsters and music, videogames can also be praxially doubled in real spaces that serve as socio-ludic stages of performance and play. My PhD would establish this with ludo-Gothic BDSM (re: “The Quest for Power“). But “monster play” is more than just videogames; per ludo-Gothic BDSM, it’s the sum of a complex, ever-evolving polity of expressions, one whose exchanges relate back and forth in real time while playing with toxic waste as byproduct (the presence of decaying power under shrines of capital; re: fascism; e.g., Roadside Picnic).
For example, I once interviewed David Bennett from Steam-Powered Giraffe about Prometheus 2 (which never came out) while dressed as Eric Draven (exhibit 75a; Nicholas van der Waard, 2013). While a blast-from-the-past all on its own, the lively masquerade was housed at a convention where people could go and be their true selves; i.e., a dalliance performed through costumes and masks (often set to music, dancing and whispers of sex). The Promethean pursuit spoke to desires pimped out by capital that, doubled as “toxic,” suddenly became perceptive again.
All on its own, this became the sleepwalker’s rare chance; i.e., to commune with nature’s forgotten side—meaning in a “game-about-a-game” of monster exhibits dancing with a monstrous rediscovered “past” as something to put “on blast” (which Steam-Powered Giraffe very much did, below). However, it wasn’t on its own; everything else was there in some shape or form, albeit as liminal. While Juul calls this concept “half-real” in relation to the intended ludic space of the videogame screen and rules (re: the magic circle), I think it applies quite neatly to “game” thinkers; i.e., in the real world’s liminal totality letting workers treat artistic expression and its analysis as a composite learning social game: onscreen but also onstage and off—and thinking about these things in relation to each other but also aware of each other as undead while still being different and often at odds (the state-fashioned alien impostor something to divide workers through emotional manipulation; re; “Healing from Rape“).
Furthermore, the cryptonymic threshold that happens through play isn’t clearly defined, but the subject matter is pretty obvious (exhibit 75a); i.e., it can happen online between two people having similar discussions, albeit with images or videos chosen spontaneously to talk about a particular game. This includes play or analysis, but also humor as a learning tool (exhibit 75b); e.g., Jadis and I met through monsters (re: “Meeting Jadis“)—and related through them afterwards by consuming Monster Camp (what a pun) and making art about it to please them—but I had already been consuming and camping such dreck for years:
(exhibit 75a: Photos from Monster Camp throughout; mid-right: Dr. Kahl and his robot from Cuphead [2017]; far-top-left-to-middle-left: photos of yours truly, mingling with other attendees—with my photo of David Bennett [top-left] showing him how to do the handshake from Predator [1987] and of which he had no idea what I was referring to [alas, I would eventually investigate Bennett and his band, Steam-Powered Giraffe, for sex crimes; re: “Ruling the Slum“].)
The same liminality applies to literal videogames—with dating sim games like Monster Prom/Camp/Roadtrip (2018, 2020, 2023) continuously encouraging a social-sexual roleplay through monsters experienced in the present; i.e., with old symbols that take on new (often hilarious) life, thus significance through awkward, messy, self-aware exchanges: a jungle of energized past participles (a portmanteau of participant/particle and a linguistics pun). However, this socio-ludic reinvention starts with those games having already reclaimed the monsters to some extent; e.g., the Amazons, robots, and other oxymoronic Halloween beasties that players could study and develop Gothic Communism with, onstage and off; i.e., according to the games themselves as ongoing trends. Exposure turns people unpredictable, the toxic double paradoxically radioactive: as a glimmer of the Numinous to seek.
Of course, while the same idea of “seeking” can be applied in reverse (re: Jadis seeking me), many male/token gamers (a box of manufactured chocolates that tend to be rather predictable) remain braindead, hence unaware of various things the mythical monsters allude to, including basic social cues; e.g., menstruation. Many things obvious to people who menstruate are generally something most people who don’t won’t pick up on unless it comes from sources they trust; e.g., myself and all of my friends, but also monsters we all consume speaking about blood (re: Mira’s tokophobia, “Angry Mothers“). These conversations still occur between the gameworld and real world—between players talking about the games they want to play in relation to the monstrous avatars and adversaries inside as things to dress up as, at conventions anywhere. It’s like a big party worldwide—one where people learn in highly creative, organic ways that aren’t blind despite the ever-present profit motive. The party is perceptive.
This Gothic doubling can be felt in paratextual/meta conversations that people have while talking about the (often self-aware) texts themselves—not just consuming them, but preparing to, actually performing the game themselves like mad scientists: cackling wildly amid a life of reanimated junk, stolen from the discarded pile (often privatized by neoliberal corporations “freeing” the market” by hoarding all the junk for themselves, hence materials of the Earth: “Give my creation… LIFE!”). As discussed in Volume One, these aren’t just symbols, but a monstrous mode of expression (re: “Monster Modes“); i.e., one that can recreate itself while reclaiming the stolen; e.g., Daft Punk’s robo-disco. In these half-real conversations, emotional/Gothic intelligence comes in handy when negotiating new boundaries—to play the game, but also talk about it and share the gleaned insight and knowledge with other people publicly to raise class/culture/race awareness.
For example, a friend of mine was asking me about Bloodborne (2015); i.e., while also telling me of a non-binary robot character they wanted to make for their D&D campaign (exhibit 75b, next page). All at once, this made me think about Monster Camp and the non-binary robot (which corporations, to make another pun, tend to binarize[21]); i.e., from that game, which I suddenly felt I should try to include in the book—the aforementioned interview with SPG (exhibit 75a), but also scenes from the convention it happened in, and a couple other examples I intuited from recalling those bygone days in composite patchwork form!
That’s largely how (re)memory works; i.e., when you’re freed up to make connections (re: “The Roots of Trauma“). Likewise, this exchange—modifying “Toxic Schlock” with Mira back in 2024 and now in 2025—showcases the plastic, sleepwalking nature of undead (toxic) monstrous language, but also people who associate with these linguo-material extensions or write about either while having fairly regular social interactions with like-minded people. Be it Monster Prom/Camp or D&D, either game is a place to inhabit in a half-real sense for people who already identify with these characters; i.e., according to cultural values having already shifted and continuing to shift away from taboo (abject) burial sites:
(exhibit 75b: My friend Mira and I [the same Mira from “Meeting Medusa“].)
For example, us talking also gave Mira and I a chance to talk about the cryptonym of old blood in werewolf stories—its associate knowledge gaps tied to the heteronormative gender gap: “old blood” being what Mira called “period advice,” which people who menstruate would immediately pick up on (on account of having no choice, it being a natural function of their bodies); i.e., while cis-het men would generally have no idea (most of them being divided from nature as menstruation unless they received extra-curricular education in some shape or form; e.g., from a wife). To it, our short exchange highlights tangible gnosis gleaned through a public understanding of famous monsters figuratively tied to social-sexual situations about these things; re: playing with monsters, as monsters, about monsters, all at once. That kind of poetic insight can be tremendously useful; i.e., when you’re a marginalized person “reading the room” with toxic goggles: surrounded by others who think monsters are cool, and who might try to unironically gatekeep or manipulate you behind their masks; re: Autumn or similar people (re: Jadis), versus our ironic navigation, mid-cryptonymy!
Corporatizing the Shop (Blizzard reprise)
Unironic “slop worship” speaks to a school of abuse that companies like Blizzard promote; i.e., while enjoying the ambiguity that plays out, mid-duality. Monsters are played with and made through pieces (e.g., “Cryptomimesis,” “Transforming Our Zombie Selves” and “Making Demons“). Blizzard’s Overwatch represents a newer toxic standard, in the Internet age; i.e., one whose conspicuous “voiding” effect on intelligence/awareness permeates culture: through their smash-hit videogame Amazonomachia replacing social spaces, toxifying so many consumers, management and owners to worship capital’s hiding of waste.
Furthermore, this lobotomizing of the “friendly” neighborhood zombie—i.e., as a kind of a gateway towards more adult and critical horror narratives—decayed with Overwatch, the franchise sucking everything up like a giant black hole. Yet “the toxicity of our city” resists ownership through its own rebellious decay. The game’s dead soul and fixation on money reflects the broader gaming market and what it had gradually and geopolitically evolved into: a single corporate entity that favors blind Amazon parody. They pimp what resonates through disorder and disturbance, minus toxic shlock’s hairy and sugary (at times abject) critical bite.
In turn, Overwatch felt like more of an extension of Blizzard more than a completed game with anything critical or fun to say about or with zombie-like warrior maidens. Structurally it feels conspicuously unfinished, completed just enough to sell seasonal re-runs year-round, but especially Halloween costumes. It’s what a whore—classically relegated to the graveyard (re: B.B. Wagner)—is; it’s what Medusa is, but also her girlboss Amazon gatekeepers like Autumn Ivy are, during the cryptonymy process, and us challenging them through popular stories and icons like Blizzard’s corporate output as doubled, mid-vanishing-point.
Canon’s toxic candy sells sex through bad-faith copies of itself; re: like Autumn does, punching down while preserving themselves as Superhero Monster Slut™ (next page). It’s greedy and appropriative, but also vivid and ambiguous (re: “X marks the spot”): a whore’s a whore, but Autumn serves the state much how Blizzard’s sugary sexpots do. They play the toy-like candiness out in very visual ways, selling sex through sight offering up a feast for additional senses: “trick” or treat.” They’re a scam that—all the same—has immediate demonstrable effects (the Gothic sugar rush): as unironic opiates-for-the-masses to dumb their brains and empty their wallets. Peddled by a hot-but-perfidious, gentrified, horse-girl lunch lady moonlighting as whore, Autumn demonstrably is a whore acting in bad faith; i.e., a subjugated Amazon skillfully installing praxial inertia in her paying viewers by pandering to them (re: as a menticidal gargoyle, “The Nation-State“). They’re a pro white Indian/savior corpo mall cop—toxically-sans-irony advertising false stewardship of the land; i.e., with a hungry vision operating on par with Manifest Destiny and ranchers: fetishizing guns but pinkwashed as “furry” into toxic love (a Nazi werewolf whose centrist[22] veneer performs radioactive “strength”)!
(artist: Wolfhead at Night)
Under Capitalism, Halloween (a day of monsters and bad candy haunted by Imperialism; re: “Concerning Monsters” or “Cornholing the Corn Lady“) exists primarily to sell merchandise that also points to past genocide; any historical connection or satire in regards to its monsters must be inferred or separately applied by perceptive parties—i.e., they’re canonically “just for fun.” Apart from feeling tacked on, the complicit cryptonymy’s underhanded phrasing constantly implies
- satire and countercultural political thought “isn’t fun” and seemingly isn’t connected to the merchandise to begin with
- a somewhat odd “we’re totally not doing anything wrong!” insistence when using Halloween “party” skins (with clear sexual-dimorphic qualities tied to “T-for-Teen” sex) in drug-like ways; i.e., to push sales through gambling mechanisms—all inside a narratively bare-bones videogame that says nothing about the real-world, only presenting itself as a place to spend cash
Such attempts try to conceal and sever bonds that might highlight Capitalism as a perfidious structure; i.e., one tied to institutional greed reeking toxic lies. Capitalism, as it linguo-ludo-materially appears, is “totally fine.” Pay no attention to the man behind the Amazon; just pay him when Zombie Mercy (or Autumn) wears a slutty outfit. She/they doesn’t have to actually look like a zombie to be lobotomized or lobotomize the audience; she/they only has to come from a company whose marketing and treatment of its employees has that effect on society through the game: as a liminal space bleeding toxically into the world!
And since Blizzard does just that, Mercy is a zombie by default—disguised by her Disney Princess good looks and shaved body pimped out by her designers; i.e., hawking merchandise echoing the original simulacrum, but also policing the appearance of said simulacrum to sell, mid-power-exchange (re: sex and force, which Amazons embody until they turn toxic; re: Medusa). The end result is a routinely cheap, plastic doll with zero personality and backstory aimed at horny young men conditioned by society to drool over a blonde bombshell like her (with echoes of Pamela Anderson thrown in—exhibit 76, below); i.e., an empty promise backed up by threats (re: Autumn’s threats, “The Nation-State“).
Here, the ghost of the counterfeit breathes through the body like frog skin; i.e., the colonial body type, specifically the airbrushed beauty with an hourglass waist (or boxy muscles): a kind of “prize for Theseus ” that extends to pimp-like dominance of all monstrous-feminine, real or drawn. So is Mercy a bodily echo of Nina Hartley or Victoria Paris (re: exhibit 47b1a, “Non-Magical Damsels and Detectives“): a shapely ’80s pornstar physique as much as Autumn’s own tailored brawn, the person behind the image a corporate employee (or voice; i.e., accommodated celebrities who voice act; e.g., Autumn’s VA erotica, “Strange Bedfellows“). It can be reclaimed, but the corporate variety is canon to camp by us.
To it, such replication was hyperreal long before the AI boom exploded; i.e., pushing Mercy into the compelled virgin subspace with whore-like elements that all Amazon share as warrior maidens: the silken bride to seek and penetrate, Mercy lacking Zarya or Autumn’s “phallic” vaso vagal. Her power is classically a passive, white, prey-like (damsel-in-distress) seduction. We must humanize all varieties, exposing corporations as inhumane while valuing the gentle/femme nurturing elements of the Amazon as much as the strict/masc side to the same protectors.
(exhibit 76: All: Dandonfuga; other artist, bottom-right: unknown.)
Keep in mind, the state can only pimp nature, and blind us to any positive aspect their own toxic toys deliberately omit; i.e., by making us dependent on their variations while furthering abjection disguised as delicious. Control for corporations is total control for profit. Ergo, their abuse of nature towards apocalypse happened for the same precious dollars that forced Linnea Quigley into a “Barbie doll crotch”; i.e., while treating it as ordinary almost forty years ago (re: Mr. Skin)! But at least O’Bannon’s movie had something to say during and after the transaction; i.e., it was campy.
Overwatch, ever and always, reduces to a blank series of transactions without camp, but also zombies critically emptied by those transactions: Amazonian trash whose lack of useful dialogs through the audience reflects a far bigger problem on themselves and behind the scenes. Mute and stupid, these zombies brides have been silenced, failing to be “friendly” at all and more like complicit statues; i.e., standing idle while women and minorities at company headquarters were abused nonstop by the real monsters—corporate bureaucrats and middle management worshipping the harvest process as dehumanizing! Mercy’s peach is just another one to carve up on all registers, minus the irony of playful danger challenging praxial inertia/material conditions fomented by workers like Autumn.
The algorithm prods all creators to ape the Vitruvian scheme; e.g., pushing illustrators to rehash a particular character because legions of hungry fans eat it up and nothing else. As much as it can be fun to draw (as I used to, left), the larger effect is one of a suffocating panopticon; i.e., leering at nature from all sides to pimp it—a slippery slope to funnel money up towards the usual pimps: through canonical radiation’s glowing gargoyles, bouncing angler-fish decay towards hypnotized onlookers as already conditioned!
(artist: Persephone van der Waard)
Attempts at fun, aside, the profit motive is panoptic in its invasiveness; i.e., by pimping all of nature until nature tokenizes/dons the bridle without complaint (the actors internalizing the euthanasia effect; re: Autumn). The faithful among Blizzard’s consumer base doesn’t care; thoroughly lobotomized themselves, they already worship the company as an institution of prosperity announced by its own ceaseless procession of Disney-like castles (and radioactive waste). Only wanting to keep endorsing them through a material exchange, we’re left with an exchange of wages for personal property as “owned wisdom”; re: canon. Attacking canon becomes an attack on wisdom, itself—on Capitalism as a carefully managed system whose façade of order must be upheld. So does Autumn—a cop in witch’s clothes—pander to Gamergate zealots, rewarding them as they brand actual revolution as a witch to hunt; i.e., the free market’s scapegoat while the world melts down into actual toxic sludge, and whose DARVO phenomenon we’ll revisit several times: with “weird canonical nerds” in Chapter Three, and witch cops in Chapter Four!
The toxic-sugar variants of Amazons, among other cryptonymies, tend to be artistically emulative/commercially supportive of masculine war culture; i.e., which we’ll also investigate in Chapter Four. For now, just bear in mind that any seemingly unrelated thing serves the cryptonymy process. From double entendres to non-sequiturs, euphemisms, and white lies—all are things that distance, downplay or distract, generally through camouflaged attempts whose intent stays vague or unknown, but nevertheless naturally conceals their own severity as innocuous through material objects (and advantage) over time and space; i.e., hiding the toxic waste in plain sight and in plain language, its rot normalized.
Under Capitalism as Patriarchal (thus Cartesian, settler-colonial and heteronormative), this becomes a linguo-material echo of coerced appeasement whose cryptomimesis can stealthily present as naturally-occurring and unmanipulated to avoid consumer suspicion. This conceals less Amazons and more the instrumentality and interactability they (re)present; i.e., as used by the elite to influence how people think, but also conceal manipulations happening behind the scenes: the plying of useful servants with unfair advantage, and consumers with illusions that promise empty suggestions of these things; re: gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss (another focus of Chapter Four). Representation = assimilation.
Blame complicit cryptonymy. Under neoliberalism, any product is a general cryptonym if it linguistically frames Capitalism as “benign,” the free market “bloodless.” Forget the girl holding the prop; even a can of Coke is a cryptonym that hides genocide! Merely existing as is, it remains a damning testament to larger hidden atrocities beyond itself that it “fails” in spectacularly mundane fashion to convey (a reality useful to those profiting off seemingly innocuous things, saying the obvious to benefit themselves: “A can of Coke can’t lie, so why would we try?”).
Conversely any cryptonym is Gothic if it becomes cliché in a Gothic sense; e.g., if a can of Coke magically glows red, drips blood, flies around to the sound of a theremin—or somehow links in a half-obvious way to some kind of toxin as transgenerational curse; i.e., that is downplayed, concealed, or otherwise denied to the viewer despite active investigation of it. If it becomes a toxic barrel—or if a toxic barrel is cartoonishly scapegoated for larger social issues that weren’t directly caused by literal toxic barrels and nothing else—then that still reflects the paranoid mind as trying to assign a regular image of danger to a feeling of danger with no immediate source. Violence remains a way of life to interrogate through theatre.
To it, the actual marker may be wrong but still serves a purpose beyond blind profit and systemic waste. In short, it can be reclaimed by campy agents like Mercedes the Muse; i.e., recognizing superhero schlock as Amazons routinely yield up: as potentially hairy whistleblowers swimming in doubled waste.
Toxicity Refrain: Finding Worth in Waste (while playing with it)
To play is to double, during calculated risk. Whether that purpose is to ring genuine alarm bells or one that profits off a manufactured crisis (or one of these things happening in response to the other) depends entirely on context, which must be dialectically-materially examined—additionally in a Gothic mindset if Gothic symbols are present (which they often will be, seeing as they’re incredibly common):
(exhibit 77: Toxic waste appears as the classic marker for decay but one which capital sells; i.e., as a consumable that, per the cryptonymy process, remains demonstrably “edible” within media. It becomes a perverse intimacy with what has become alien waste; i.e., nature serving as capital’s toxic cumdump in ways workers can camp despite commodification: to utilize entropy for sight: toxic foresight through Marx’ dead generations. Green is the color of money, envy and decay as fake/not fake—the return of the living dead [and waste as profit death] rising up from where the bodies are buried to reckon with capital: as shocked awake through toxic irony bleeding chaos back into the vacuum, mid-rememory [re: “The Roots of Trauma“].)
This “cursing” is Radcliffean; i.e., corporations having grown aware of activists having spotted a larger problem, both sides writing songs that cryptonymically ring alarm bells. Warning of rising toxic levels, doing so warns the general population; i.e., in ways that won’t draw attention and censorship from the powerful but also not expose them, depending. The material interests at play conceal not just the leak, then, but the structure that holds it from said population as revealing through “noise pollution” safe to consume but speaking to what isn’t:
- System of a Down’s “B.Y.O.B.” deliberately contrasts “beer” with “bombs” and “party-time” with “fascism” and “war” to say the quiet part out: “We’re all living in a fascist nation,” one that “always sends the poor.”
- Rammstein’s “Amerika” highlights American cultural Imperialism through the seemingly mundane, commercialized things that announce it: “We’re all living in Amerika, Coca-Cola, sometimes war.”
- or Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s “America, Fuck Yeah!” doing something similar, but with a much longer list of objects that seemingly don’t belong together: “Liberty, Pop-eye, valium; Bed, Bath and Beyond(?),” etc.
In cloaked urgency (“a sort of scream” shouted in code), all announce conspicuous implications—of semi-hidden trauma as intimating a general failure or systemic disorder with Gothic elements: the home as alien, toxic, fallen. Foretold by Joy Division in 1979 Britain, and in 2001 America by System of a Down, neoliberal entropy catalyzed behind but also upon the illusion; e.g., the liminal hauntology of war that Amazons call home: the return of phantom warriors like Autumn or Virago to grapple with state crisis/rot; e.g., Andreas Marshall’s shadowy Sodom mascot.
To that, fear of neoliberal state-corporate repression all but demands elaborate strategies of misdirection (re: Jameson) whose splendid protest—in a more general, linguistic sense—touch riotously on poorly concealed entropy while also concealing themselves as revolutionary cryptonyms playing at generic, delicious garbage: metal songs, ghost stories, campy B-movies—all behaving and presenting as outrageous commodities sold by everyone and consumed by all, but whose “critical trash” elements highlight an old-but-useful function of the Gothic in recent times: to warn of genuine hidden danger in covert-yet-conspicuous popular stories, generally concerned with abject, ergo hedonistic, forbidden appetites.
Revelation and apocalypse stem from appetite as undead. From society made toxic through profit as a system of death (re: “Police States“), people love to eat, fuck, rock out, and do drugs (which are all toxic to some degree). Yet canon discourages inquiries beyond tolerated consumer models. Some people gorge to escape extermination by state bodies; revolutionaries, to defy state criminogenesis pimping nature until all are toxic in ways that can’t be ignored or recuperated: when the Imperial Boomerang sails home, that’s where agent orange burns (with genocide endemic to profit through settler-colonial models; see: Wolfe).
A fear of inheritance, then, concerns replacement by a dark double/abject impostor family that corrupts the nuclear model (e.g. Jeff Daniels vs the spider couple in Arachnophobia, 1990). And if Gothic classically deals in fear—to further abject by exposing and killing the alien during settler colonialism chattelizing the ghost of genocide—then reversing abjection reminds the anxious American (or any imperialist living in denial) that their home is false; i.e., invasion is a structure (re: Wolfe) haunted by Radcliffean fears of revenge for having replaced nature already. The Medusa is inseparable from her Aegis—a sexual agent whose doomsday weapon of terror and its grim reminder (of a black planet; re: Shapiro) assaults viewers during mirror syndrome; i.e., with some element of toxic glee and delight: resisting to the bitter end when others (re: token Amazons) did not.
To it, the sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll of Amazons become a revolutionary outlet—of “letting one’s hair down” (or growing out one’s bush). This includes living through artistic recreations of mind-opening activities; i.e., that cryptonymically return to toxic modes of art before punk was pacified; re: by neoliberalism into a dumb, unthinking mode, postpunk an altered state tied to an older time that flirts with reinvented symbols of danger and corruption (re: “Magic, Drugs and Acid Communism“). Waste isn’t just the presence of decaying whores, but their revenge when repurposed by rebels to avenge Medusa while shouting “choke on it!”
So whereas complicit “toxic waste” can turn people into brainless zombies that eat revolutionaries alive, revolutionary “toxic waste” can turn “normal girls” into toxic, sexy avengers(!); e.g., tromettes who detect and reject the systems disguised toxins by “shitting them out” through reverse abjection (while crudely reminding us how a massive dump can feel good sometimes—decolonizing so-called “male humor” in the process). Pick your poison, then pull a Zofloya!
In keeping with the cryptonymy process pointing to society as made toxic by capital, Mercedes is a vulgar display of power—one who makes proud trashy art and won’t take no shit (the puns never stop); reminds people that yes, girls shit (the revelation a creep deterrent); and whose gross superpowers absorb toxins to serve a critical, transformative role: to make people into activists, whose own iconoclastic media “avenges” the societal wrongs of America through the camp tradition of abject, mainstream “failure” and rejection (that still gets your attention, usually with crude sex). It’s a brand to recognize, but thanks to its reverse-abject flavor never really loses its noxious critical bite or (deeply crude) sense of humor among the sexy nostalgia:
(exhibit 78: Artist: Mercedes the Muse is less figuratively toxic [as much of this symposium has been] and more literal. For one, she fights for the right to hawk [tua] one’s content at venues that don’t exclude or gatekeep through expensive fees. They blow butt bubbles with radioactive sludge that—for all its ickiness—actually reverses abjection; i.e., versus Autumn’s tastier veneer furthering abjection as a matter of profit raping nature by pacifying worker brains; re: praxial inertia. Fetishes have power according to what is alien being controlled by state forces reclaimed by us: as commonplace fetishes; i.e., acquired tastes, but also mergers of appetite with nausea for an unheimlich flavor on purpose. It takes the gag reflex and subverts it into a thought response; it achieves value despite being worthless/recuperated by capital, something to “let out” versus escape into.)
In Volume Zero, I call this “dated” wisdom the Wisdom of the Ancients (re: “On Giving Birth“); and in Volume Two, examined William Blake’s “doors of perception” as acid-Communist (re: “Dissecting Radcliffe“). In this sense, trashy art conveys not just learning how to think, but thinking as trippy artistic expression: loaded with toxic paradoxes and cryptonyms—about the world in a socio-material way that opens the mind through individual creative expression tied to liberating communal energies that have fun through rebelling in iconoclastic ways. Its burns!
For us, these revelations occur relative to capital’s bourgeois Superstructure as closing people’s minds. To counteract Capitalism, emancipatory hauntology and revolutionary cryptonymy combine with popular modes of artistic expression and collaboration; i.e., that serve as a powerful Amazonian means of counteracting canon. Being artistically active means having to think for oneself, not being dependent on the hoarded power of neoliberal corporations to make your art and do your thinking for you. Whatever the exhibit, they want you blind while looking at it, but toxicity’s smokescreen serves different goals, Pygmalion’s or Galatea’s.
“Toxic Schlock” supports revolutionary cryptonymy as effectively using the power of art—including toxic, seemingly backwards art—as self-expression to help sex workers liberate themselves from exploitation under Capitalism! Despite the fetish gear Mercedes wears, she’s functionally the opposite of a cop; i.e., by anisotropically reversing the usual terror/counterterror flow of power during dialectical-material scrutiny when beholding her art (and ass) as iconoclastic: sloshing out apple-flavored dollops of toxic ooze! Your jizz is mine!
(artist: Mercedes the Muse)
Through this cryptonymic expression, workers like Mercedes and I can show the world separately and together that we are human—not things to be exploited and cast aside, but people to have fun with in canonically discouraged ways that nevertheless produce good material works. In turn, these creations—however trashy they seem—can demonstrably enrich, prepare and safeguard everyone; i.e., by helping them imagine worlds beyond Capitalism, a system forcing workers into rigid gender hierarchies before exploiting them for their labor out of punitive psychosexual revenge (re: the pimp’s).
Sometimes, escaping Capitalism requires transforming old clichés like the muse, where—instead of cis women being the keepers of denied sexual knowledge and inspiration—they become sex-positive de facto educators; re: gorgons. Thereupon, gender expression and sexuality might open up through idiosyncratic expressions of sexual preference that go in either direction. Meanwhile, the artist, producer and consumer can say broader important things about the material world—statements that sadly require parallel societies to exist inside; i.e., “freely sexual” = sexuality freed through an expression of mutual consent that appreciates the body of the sex worker and, by extension, their work “dancing in the ruins.”
Furthermore, this requires having access to trustworthy spaces where one feels safe existing inside; i.e., without fear of violent persecution or shame from other inhabitants thinking women’s bodies are essential sources of sin and disgust (extending to GNC people, which we’ll explore in Chapter Three). Sometimes, that connection starts with a simple flush of excitement, be that some mutually consensual nudes, a drawing of your favorite videogame character looking sexy and free, or some other sexual, “hairy cavegirl/cavegirl-in-furs” fantasy brought to life: nature as alien, therefore toxic to empire’s culmination of replacement; i.e., David’s “sometimes, to create, you must destroy” (re: “Dissecting Radcliffe“) versus Theodor Herzl (founding father of Zionism): “If I wish to substitute a new building for an old one, I must demolish before I construct” (source: “The Jewish State”); re, Wolfe: “settler colonialism destroys to replace” (source: “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 2006), which canonical building synonymizes with genocide. The hero, synonymous with rape, demands a whore to rape each and every time. Nothing else is sacred, so camp it!
(exhibit 79: Artist, top-left: Juliette Michelle; top-right: Monori Rogue; bottom-left: Quinnvincible; bottom-right: Quinnvincible.)
In this sense, art as active thought (through the generation of material markers that assist in emancipatory imagination) happens by creatively working with classically controlled and cryptonymic language to avoid replacement, hence destruction. These become an avenue that, once taken, helps one learn what they want through “corroding fires” (re: Blake); this happens in relation to love as something sold cryptonymically to people: as clients by corporations, who sell people’s actual urges to them dressed up as “love,” while also downplaying the systemic abuse that industrialized sex (and brains) on autopilot tend to produce; re: rape and the abuse of sexual trauma more broadly into toxic waste. Behind canon, people’s desires must be explored and investigated—generally through real life as informed by older popular stories, but also the distant worlds they invoke coming home to roost. True to Gothic, the deeper, hidden context of these “dumpsite spectres” confront viewers at the surface level; i.e., through “spectral” counterfeits of unknown origin and intent.
Often, the locational, cosmetic and performative tropes are plain to see (the BDSM dungeon or master/slave inside said dungeon), but still must be explored in relation to someone who is still figuring out what they want—who doesn’t know but wants to find out on the glowing trail. By using art as a means of social-sexual exchange (which porn is), the ambiguous, oft-ambivalent variations can become helpful or harmful to universal liberation: by uncannily getting our attention.
The trick with cryptonymy is actively engaging with the material on hand through open-minded caution; i.e., often by making it, yourself—by code-switching or otherwise being a living part of the thinking process that art (thus porn) embodies. As something to pursue and understand in relation to oneself and one’s desires, Sex Positivity allows for sex, but also romance and intimacy as “dark.” All can be fun and good depending on what someone needs, but the pursuit remains dangerous for all under state control: people who don’t think for themselves, and whose inflexibly “bad readings” of toxic things sold to them by state-corporate authors don’t care about the consequences. Indeed, they cover them up in pursuit of profit, leading to BDSM “horror stories” of the everyday sort: bad play and power abuse that may or may not be performed by accident; i.e., “he seemed cool” but either really didn’t know what he was doing or knew exactly what he was doing.
In other words, these “accidents” could occur through intentional trickery! All produce a kind of “Radcliffean chaff” under Capitalism, one whose collateral damage bleeds into the social-sexual world that screens and clouds people’s ability to think clearly or for themselves; and standing in the wings, corporations will peddle their poisonous drugs to “combat” the issue (re: “Healing from Rape” and fighting poison with poison; we’ll reexplore this in Chapters Two and Three).
Beyond Mercedes, Mugi, Mercy or Metroid, then, let’s quickly examine rock operas—i.e., as part of the same larger fur(r)tive, toxic rebellion—before moving on.
Rock Operas: the Last Bastions of Camp
(exhibit 80: Top- and middle-left: Blue Öyster Cult; middle-right: King Diamond and Ghost; bottom-left source; bottom-right source.)
Goth rock/rock operas, like Amazons, romance the gutter as a kind of “dark jungle” married to civilization in crisis with its own radioactive inheritance. As a kind of “ghost hunt” excavation, their cryptonymy involves the finding of things to display artistically afterward: “art house” performance art, but also the “live show” as a kind of rock opera[23] or “ghost rock” that lasts entire careers; i.e., by swapping out parts and players like the Ship of Theseus as people come and go (age and die), and spawning endless Frankensteinian “copycats” (Ghost vs King Diamond vs Blue Öyster Cult, etc—with King Diamond citing he didn’t feel Ghost copied him, but were spiritually closer to Blue Öyster Cult [Metal Hammer, 2022]—an effect, I would argue, stems from them making the hauntology “their own”). All are the promise of secret knowledge gleaned through activities either widely-accepted as fun (rock concerts) or a facetiously “toxic” place to learn new clandestine things about niche subjects (the art house); some combine the two (goth rock, Post Punk, Darkwave, etc), “Doing the Time Warp” to conjure up frank-but-wacky conversations about sex and the supernatural: “meatloaf” for the masses, medicine for the mad aware of civilization’s pendulum (recursive) Giger counter. It’s very Camus, smiling at the gods to camp what is historically-materially pre-determined.
At times, this involves the metaphor of parallel space (the chronotope); i.e., as something to not only return to, but already occupied by potentially hostile forces (the trope of the tyrant’s ghost concealed inside the buried closed space and all its chronotopic markers). King Diamond lives for that shit, but so does Meatloaf, Jim Sharman or anyone making their own haunted houses, survival horrors, Metroidvania, rock operas, etc (the idea being to conjure up the buried thing summoned from the collective wreckage with sinful music; e.g., “Fierce Battle” from FF6 effectively evoking the Medusa to banish, Radcliffe-style, after she rocks out… and which Blue Öyster Cult’s “The Alchemist” cryptomimetically evokes the same counterfeit’s ghost).
From a revolutionary standpoint, these various commodities become a liminal form of praxial compromise inside our currently toxic society—to avoid forced suicide when speaking truth to power (comparable to Socrates and hemlock; see: Existential Comics). Instead, counterculture artists tend to blow the whistle like Jonathan Swift; i.e., playing the role of splendide mendax, who tell their sexy lies for universal liberation while also getting paid: to live under Capitalism while breaking its Realism. While these elaborate strategies of misdirection help people see through the insulating bullshit capital installs, you still have to package it a particular way to get widespread distribution; e.g., like Lucas did with Stars Wars (re: “The Future Is a Dead Mall“): “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi; you’re my only hope!” was the ghost of a girl speaking to the audience through the hero inside a retro-future space Western, the antiwar allegory buried somewhere inside the same old rock operas pimped by Pygmalion’s anti-stewardship!
The conscious intent or total awareness of all of these things—while certainly good—is spottily achieved; i.e., by “hysterically” tracing the source while fumbling in blind terror at hidden, haunted things slowly choking society until liberation hopefully occurs (re: “Dissecting Radcliffe“). Beyond the original Neo-Gothic, it happened more recently with Black Sabbath as a geopolitical response to the Vietnam War—meaning when the state met protests with physical violence again (a fact hauntologized by the same band’s riotous nature in the ’80s; re: “The Mob Rules,” 1981). And once history repeated again, the return was also altered; the bourgeois response evolved, seeking to pacify the public in ways they recuperated—i.e., in the visually-immediate sense: canonical propaganda dressed up as “counterculture,” to better arrest the mind’s protective mechanisms by gradually lowering peoples’ guards; re: Amazon subjugation, from Samus to Ivy!
This wasn’t done through some totalitarian sense of “achieved omnipotence” or endless skill and guile. That would give those who run these structures too much credit. Indeed, as time goes on, the structures would make those who own them less required to even be clever at all. They could just default to brute-force power plays; i.e., by using media to control how people respond, then tracking that by watching the numbers. Moreover, the behavior of the state and its proponents routinely amounts to less cunning and more ruthlessness; i.e., an intuitive understanding of people and how they think, thus predict how they react through responses to language as something to keep tabs on through the marketing of automated art. Canon—and pacified people’s subservience to it as unthinking—is merely convenient those whose Superstructure controls their victims through media the elite design and distribute through the Base: the factories, giant studios, sports stadiums, rock arenas, but also television and phone networks, the Internet, etc, as pimping fear (which queer folk must camp to make gay life bearable).
(artists: Peter Corriston and Dave Heffernon)
In a modern response to songs like those listed earlier (themselves over two decades old by now), corporations will create their own “blinding archaeologies,” and often with the veiled threats of yesterday packaged inside nostalgia, inside nostalgia; i.e., snapshots of decimation whose box art (and side effects) announce power as protection through forced medicating ideas: a Nazi nurse holding you down to sterilize you. This final victory is a lie, the Amazon cop an “ancient discovery” (re)made to police capital-as-toxic!
To it, cops serve the state by canonizing the masses. The same way that America the nation-state and corporations once joined forces to reinvent the past of the Space Race (Renegade Cut’s “Who Won the Space Race?” 2022), their current reunion rejoins those linguo-material tactics within state cryptonymies, hauntologies and chronotopes furthering abjection. Dug up and reassembled to produce similar obfuscating means, these Venus twins counteract the flow of emancipatory ghost stories, countercultural political anthems, and various revolutionary cryptonyms; e.g., the American War on Terror as a threat of constant invasion from outside, in: as fought by the increasingly valorized and incredibly violent mercenaries—killers-for-hire with bad reputations, breaking the law and bragging about it while having their misdeeds advertised in ways that transform or otherwise downplay their severity. Politicians abbreviate dogma into mendacious soundbites that sanitize state barbarism; i.e., all at once; e.g., savagely “canoeing” Bin Laden—which happened through a covert military operation that openly violated international law and furthered an already-endless war in the Middle East—became pithily reduced to the polite, sanitized phrase of an urbane, neoliberal war merchant known for selling drones: “Ladies and gentleman, we got him.” Obama sucked—a token stooge relying on Seussian caricature to kill (re: “Green Eggs and Ha(r)m“).
Told through manufactured nostalgia, consent and lies, any president’s doing so parallels more fictionalized variants that, when combined, become just another fabled, dishonest way to depict the past as politically emptied versus charged via the same lies. Not all that glooms is Gothic, though. Brick by brick, the charnel houses lose the very critical power needed to announce tyrants; i.e., reduced commercially as linguistically dead, empty “Gothic” metaphors that cultivate the Superstructure into a giant prison. Housing revolutionary sentiment as toxic, the canonical aim concentrates revolution through menticide; i.e., as pacified, but also policed by a paranoid in-group. As a vital means of mental escape, parallel societies become impossible—or at the very least, heavily contested by state counterfeits and their defenders—the moment canon starts to sell its own decay as “normal”; it starts to crumble, followed by a terrible death knell: of children playing among the cheap toxic wreckage, scrambling through the hellish sugar piles: dumb-as-bricks, mendacious-for-the-elite gingerbread playgrounds—where no one actively resists or secretly imagines a world beyond Capitalism. Instead, the ruin becomes “enough,” anything that threatens said Realism wholly unwelcome, thus pimped.
(artist: Antoine Wiertz)
Such “accidents” historically-materially regularize, with suggestions to the contrary being gaslit. For instance, “to get it into one’s head” can cast guilt—i.e., they got it into their own head—or merely describe the consequence of something else. In response to a bourgeois Superstructure, the premature burial becomes ordinary and welcomed by ordinary people through a Trojan Horse they seemingly “got” themselves: a ghostly or demonic possession, a zombie or vampire bite, etc, mid-opera(tion). A constantly self-conditioning and perpetuating loop, those inside will not only bury themselves; they will bury others along with them who are trying to escape, but whose compelled internment (our focus being sex workers in particular) happens along reactionary and moderate routes. Traced by canon’s Amazonian copaganda and its hauntological/cryptonymic proponents fostering “personal responsibility” (a useful “Plan B” tactic when things start to collapse and neoliberals need a scapegoat to abject), the holocaust appears outside itself: during the liminal hauntology of war (often a castle), one that reflects the toxic shock of diabetic sugar levels and “rabid” moral panic. Once decay sets in, capital turns toxic, taking the Fat Lady to the streets for summary execution.
Yet, in the absence of total control, the elite rely on workers to self-police; re: Autumn’s Amazonomachia. Unfortunately the enforcers act as much in bad faith as hypnosis (more on this in Chapter Four). The effect is functionally the same, but thanks to cryptonymy’s monstrous duality (as fragmented; re: cryptomimesis), you never know quite who you’re dealing with, or to what severity. The masquerade becomes a hot mess, consigning the incarcerated to fiery oblivion; i.e., as the structure collapses, then catches on fire. To dodge the chemical blaze, liberation happens through cryptonymy reclaimed “on the Aegis” (re: Chapter Five).
Fascism sees society making sick things that become toxic. So while sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll are fine when used in moderation/divorced from profit, the bourgeois examples (and their complicit cryptonymies) must cease. Liberation (of the Medusa) happens by camping lobotomized Amazons, hence challenging Autumn Ivy (and similar bad actors functioning as cops); i.e., as I have done, but also Mercedes the Muse and Mugiwara working separately and together! We walk among our enemies, who look like us and vice versa—using the same hairy bodies, goth aesthetics, raw sugar and toxic schlock syndrome to further or reverse abjection (thus profit)!
(artists: Mercedes the Muse, Autumn Ivy/Wolfhead at Night, and Mugiwara)
As we have discussed, this includes hair as abject, but also things of the bathroom and bedroom we haven’t talked about here (e.g., poop and pee as something to hold and release through predator/prey fetishes and rough play interrogating trauma and confused safety/danger); i.e., combined with the Amazon’s masc/femme but also sex/war hyphenations, taboo theatrics, and pointedly fear-based animal mechanisms, etc. All become something to witness; i.e., in ways whose preceptive potential survives corporate environments bleeding toxic waste among workers already being social animals—who then relate through sex and force like that of Amazons (non-toxic virgin/whore with trace amounts), the Medusa (toxic whore) and their combined monstrous-feminine revenge during the rock opera: as half-real Amazonomachia comparable to Metroidvania (or any romanticized brothel scenario) as haunted by Patriarchal agents (undead or otherwise) poisoning the well!
So blow the whistle, not the bourgeoisie; be the hairy fairy or tasty junker queen that actively fertilizes critical thought (re: Mugi’s chonky ferret bod and Mercedes’ fat tromette ass, above). Through a toxic aesthetic that yields perceptive garbage, direct your anger and cryptonymy towards harmful varieties that harm us through unironic poison (re: Autumn’s Slurm-can pussy)! Indulge if you must (re: Anita Sarkeesian), but make the latter your cherry on top; i.e., critique what you consume to camp it. The body is a slogan whose power the state takes from us (re: sex and monsters). Luckily it’s where we take such things back. State guerrillas, Autumn Ivy? We’re the real deal, developing Communism paradoxically through fakes as the Gothic do—though the animality of written language evoking animal responses: vaso vagal fight-or-flight confusion as toxic joy during calculated risk!
So ends “Toxic Shlock” and Chapter One. Now that we’ve reached the end of Chapter One, and covered much of proletarian praxis at length, we’ve covered most of the basic tools and terms (of creative success) we’ll use for the rest of the volume. We’ll revisit Gothic counterculture. For now, it’s a canvas to paint yourselves with anything on hand; i.e., during as[s]ymetrical warfare: the whore coated in toxic “slime” (cum or otherwise, next page) to paradoxically empower her as the toxic cryptonym/ghost of the counterfeit. Poison was the cure! “My beautiful wickedness!” Play is power performing peril.
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
Except while everyone loves the whore (coated in various things), the state controls sex as play through force (the Imperium’s ancient language); i.e., to quell howling voices regarding rape; re: power happens while speaking out, meaning about rape while performing it to have the whore’s revenge—by playing with waste as a cryptonym of capital to wear on one’s skin. So-called “toxic” waste, for example, performs metaphorically to things comparable to raw chemicals; i.e., as biohazards; e.g., shit as waste, but also wasted cum (above) sugarcoating lies for different reasons, a kind of trigger through code. Reclaim these! Fuck to metal, thus hyphenate what is needed through ironically toxic sex; camp the sacred to set Medusa free while in chains—by taking the Aegis back upon its fat fleshy self; re:
Medusa’s weapon (and revenge) as dead whore is speaking out about her rape (re: “Policing the Whore“), exploitation and liberation on the same stage as things to parse […] Gothic is a space to be bold, then, but pointedly for those camping their own holocausts’ profound survival (source: “An Interview with Delilah Gallo”).
From Perseus slaying Medusa into American Amazons, Capitalism sexualizes everything while alienizing it (re: “Thesis Body“); i.e., as a fetish to attack and exterminate on loop. This grants the whore’s open sexuality a raw toxic veneer whose own Numinous might—by virtue of endless revenge—only enrages nature even more; i.e., in carrion-flower ways that, while caustic, bleeds onto our foes:
make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose (source).
Beyond toxic waste, Medusa’s monstrous-feminine blood grows comely and caustic; re: the caterpillar and the wasp yielding acid cudgels among the cum that curdles state bloodlines while preserving its own (“It’s got a wonderful defense mechanism; you don’t dare kill it!”); i.e., by embracing the push-pull poetry of such things. As capital decays, any pretense of positivity from the colonizer becomes coercion from the pimp, said pimp’s offshoots expected to infiltrate and slay Medusa’s hybrid proclivities. And while class animus goes both ways (a topic for Chapter Three, onwards), we’ll examine the opposite end of sex positivity next, in Chapter Two.
Love Is a Long Road: Summarizing the Rest of the Volume
“You’d be surprised at the things you find when you go looking.”
—Dr. Richard Powell, The Void (2016)
(artist: Gravillis Inc.)
Before we break on through into the rest of the volume, I want to summarize the flow of the four remaining chapters in relation to the first. Thus far, we’ve explored empathy, informed consumption, de facto education and descriptive sexuality as many of the praxial goals that Gothic Communism seeks to achieve through dialectical-material analysis and creative successes thereof. To highlight cultural appreciation’s function as the final element of Gothic Communism’s iconoclastic praxis, we’ll need to examine appreciative irony in Gothic counterculture. However, because these sex-positive ironies challenge coercive historical norms, we’ll need to outline what those norms are, first: canonical praxis. Canonical and iconoclastic praxis constitute the extreme, right-and-left poles to oppositional praxis, for which there is near-endless liminalities that exist in between.
Moving forward, then, Chapter Two sheds light on Gothic canon’s drug-like, unironic forms, including canonical actors who author, distribute or consume abjection, carceral hauntologies/cryptonyms and complicit cryptonyms within the status quo (which you got a taste of just now, with Autumn); from there, Chapter Three stresses the “grey area” of liminality through crossing past boundaries into uncertain, chaotic thresholds—i.e., how the appreciative irony of countercultural Gothic ambivalence and emancipatory hauntology counter the canonical weaponization of monsters, including its production of sexist, entitled men with small imaginations (re: “weird canonical nerds” but especially Caleb Hart); Chapter Four examines the genocidal “pushback” from canonical-praxial groups inside the fog of war and how to spot them incognito (fascist feminists wearing popular hauntological disguises and employing general/Gothic cryptonyms in bad-faith—i.e., bad-faith/zombie-vampire “witches” and undead warriors, etc; e.g., Ian Kochinski, The Liver King and Natalie Wynn, etc); and Chapter Five proposes further defensive/offensive measures when combating genocide during liminal expression, using the cryptonymic disguises of neoliberalism/fascism to achieve revolutionary outcomes (re: Trojan furries, witches, zombies, etc).
To hug the Medusa, we need to confront those who don’t; i.e., we’re on the cusp of a dark doorway into alien realms under attack by domestic forces pimping the ghost of the counterfeit to further abjection. Let’s step on through…
(model and artist [the black star is from Tangerine Dream’s 1970 Zeit album]: Mugiwara and Persephone van der Waard)
Onto “Chapter Two: Sex Coercion (opening and ‘Witch Cops and Victims’)“!
About the Author
Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!
Footnotes
[1] Come to think of it, that’s a great porn name: “Harry Slimehole’s my name and stank pussy’s my game!” Data is data, and animals communicate non-verbally through scent as a chemical translating symbolically through Gothic means: orthography and theatre.
[2] This can be congenital, but often induces through gender-affirming care: so-called “t-dick.”
[3] The title for a YA Gothic story if there were; e.g., as touched upon by Brian David Gilbert’s “Tragedy, Performed by a Werewolf” (2022). Camp is a zone of joy and lament, forbidden love singing “Get it, girl!” to the motherfucking rafters. We can’t wait for things to improve because camp is how they improve for us, mid-liminal-expression.
[4] I’m sure there’s a scientific difference between toxin and poison; i.e., to my knowledge, toxins are absorbed (e.g., radioactivity and heavy metals), poisons ingested, and venoms injected. Our usage of these words—to describe the monstrous-feminine—is more poetic and loose, hence interchangeable.
[5] Mussolini allegedly wrote “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power” but the exact origins of the quote are unknown (source: Chip Berlet’s “Mussolini on the Corporate State,” 2005).
[6] We examined the Gothic role of various (often female) detectives in science fiction more in Volume Two, including the sections “The Demonic Trifecta of Detectives, Damsels and Sex Demons” and “Call of the Wild, part one.”
[7] Which is generally something to deny (Noah Samsen’s “Genocide Denial Streamers,” 2024) or debate when, as the Youtuber Shaun points out, there is nothing to debate whatsoever—a genocide is occurring and it is wrong (“Palestine,” 2024).
[8] Persephone van der Waard’s “Remember the Fallen: An Ode to Nex Benedict” (2024).
[9] (from my Metroidvania definition):
Metroidvania are a location-based videogame genre that combines 2D, 2.5D, or 3D platforming [e.g., Dark Souls, 2009] and ranged/melee combat—usually in the 3rd person—inside a giant, closed space. This space communicates Gothic themes of various kinds; encourages exploration* depending on how non-linear the space is; includes progressive skill and item collection, mandatory boss keys, backtracking and variable gating mechanics (bosses, items, doors); and requires movement powerups in some shape or form, though these can be supplied through RPG elements as an optional alternative.
*Exploration pertains to the deliberate navigation of space beyond that of obvious, linear routes—to search for objects, objectives or secrets off the beaten path (source: “Mazes and Labyrinths,” 2019; refer to the Metroidvania page on my website for everything that I’ve written on Metroidvania).
Again, it’s very Pavlovian, and something that historically leads to the Amazon growing toxic, thus “rabid”,” then punished through the euthanasia effect (re: “Pieces of the Camp Map“).
[10] E.g., “Pelts” (2006) applying the settler-colonial argument to nature and wildlife; i.e., as something to fear for having skinned alive, in the past, and which it revisits its grisly revenge during the ghost of the counterfeit furthering the abjection process among the middle class (re: “Furry Panic“).
[11] Aping the xenomorph, Samus’ original suit was far more phallic in its in-game design.
[12] A common theme, on my part: decolonizing my own nostalgia despite wanting to fuck and wanting to be a Space Pirate as capable as ol’ Samus, just not genocidal or violent (re: “Why I Submit“). That’s the paradox of liminal expression in oppositional praxis. Expression isn’t endorsement as long as you can publicly explain the difference and try to convey that irony in your exhibits and teachings.
[13] From Peter Parker/Spider-man to Bruce Wayne/Batman (and their Freudian and queer-coded, whorish [abject] offshoots the Green Goblin and the Joker), alter egos classically wear a mask for the actor to slum, vigilante-style; i.e., in ways that assimilate/otherwise uphold the status quo, working from positions of relative privilege. Frankly Autumn’s no different; i.e., having a whorish side and a modest side, but essentially selling the same stuff through the cryptonymy process: monsters and sex (re: Amazons). Their pussy’s a Slurm can.
[14] Actually more violently than the men; i.e., punching down the hardest because she’s ostensibly betrayed her communities (re: Federici). In many cases, the traitor-in-question has been purposefully raised in captivity to fear those she betrayed by accident of birth: as “ancient” evils she fears regressing back towards (re: inheritance anxiety and the home as false married to internalized bigotry)! Such “kill the Indian, save the man” behavior is historically visited upon Indigenous Peoples, of course, but also any marginalized group, including women (cis or otherwise); i.e., per capital’s Cartesian, heteronormative and setter-colonial elements monopolizing violence, terror and monsters for profit! Whatever the module or intersection (e.g., goblin women), it can tokenize, thus toxify.
[15] Save as “power targets” of conquest, but those tend to be antagonistic; i.e., the whore is a classic villain that token Amazons dread becoming (and will punch down against, witch-hunter-style, to prove their own virgin-whore modesty in the eyes of state gawkers; i.e., they’re a good girl for master and master’s friends, but also a male power fantasy avatar disguised in feminist clothes).
[16] Indicative of the ancient Greek choruses; e.g., of Sophocles” Oedipus Rex (c. 429 BC): “Who’s my good boy?” / “Me!” and “You take dick so well, don’t you?” / “I do!” followed by “Fuck, I need this pussy!’ / “I need your cock!” until “I’m gonna cum!” ends with Mugi’s drawling “Perfect…” Such desperate and hungry affirmations of desire are haunted by state control as something to thwart; i.e., by virtue of workers like Mugi being queer as something to camp state toxins: the Sphinx’ Riddle against Oedipus, a blast from the “past” that never was (re: Plato’s simulacrum)!
[17] From The Mysterious Mother (1768), a double incest yarn; re (from Thomas Christensen’s 1993 introduction to the Mercury House edition of Walpole’s Hieroglyphic Tales):
Besides The Castle of Otranto, the other major literary work Walpole published during his lifetime was his tragedy in blank (at first I inadvertently wrote black) verse, The Mysterious Mother. Byron admired it, calling it “a tragedy of the highest order, and not a puling love-play.” It concerns a young man who, through a series of mistaken identities and unfortunate misunderstandings (no fault of his own), ends up marrying the daughter he has fathered by his mother (a bewildering set of relationships outdoing Bill Wyman). Dorothy Stuart, always charmingly sympathetic to Walpole, remarks, “It is, indeed, a little curious that his imagination—though in The Castle of Otranto he had toyed with the theme of incest—should have been allured by a story so sombre and so revolting.” In a contemporaneous review (1797), William Taylor rhapsodized that the play “has attained an excellence nearly unimpeachable” and that it “may fitly be compared with the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles.” Few modern readers would value it quite so highly (source).
Such things were begot from camp; i.e., as “finding” the ancient past as grounded in fakery (re: David West, vis-à-vis Hogle) to “Camp is rooted in fakery and privilege vis-à-vis homosexual men” (re: “Prey as Liberators“) onto other queer groups now (re: Mugi and I, camping the ghost of the Medusa).
[18] Which Fantscifi is; i.e., they have a premium DA account, linked to Esty with the usual off-site, paywalled NSFW model. Furthermore, said account is only two months old yet has 1,700 drawings on it (which has doubled, in 2025). It’s frankly hyperreal slop; i.e., with no workers behind it, but all the exploited labor stolen from workers flooding the market; re (from Volume One): “The horror of the hyperreal is that there are no humans behind the digitized simulacrum; they’re simply gone. The lived reality is far more bleak, with middle-class consumers being entirely divorced from creative labor as a critical-thinking skill while actively advocating for enslavement, neglect and genocide” (source: “The Nation-State”). Genocide is a system of theft, AI spearheading said theft online and off as slop decay.
[19] De facto husband, that is. Missionary sex is cliché just as doggy is cliché. While they can be performed on any monstrous-feminine entity in a pornographic sense, the snow-white submissive or dark femme fatale (the angel/devil binary) are just two of so many different “sleeves” for the male/token target customer living in the Max Box. Their toxic vibe/mood extends to sex-positive iterations, but Blizzard isn’t sex-positive; they’re sex-coercive—i.e., prescribing a traditional “lipstick” porn approach to their poster-style war pastiche. In other words, their sex-sells approach uses waifus (and wheyfus) as monster bait to target teenage American/Americanized boys: hooking them on sex as a “gambling mechanism” tied to loot boxes (a disguised “gacha” model from the Japanese videogame genre built around “whaling” paypigs through FOMO/microtransactional sex). Unlike their subversive counterparts—e.g., living latex (re: exhibit 60e1:, “Follow the…“)—the women in these coercive systems/discourse become coerced into a toxic doll-like aesthetic; i.e., the “Barbie Doll effect,” wherein they service the maximum number of infantilized, sex-hungry clients for the elite:
(exhibit 73b: Artist, top-left and mid-left: unknown; whole bottom half: EXGA; top-mid and -right: Non External; middle [Mercy]: Ange1 Witch; middle [Quistis Trepe]: unknown; mid-right [Brigitte]: unknown. The zombie-like appearance of these videogame models in porn is no coincidence, already being marketed towards sex work in shonen-style war narratives [sex work is replete with racist/sexist body tropes that endure in straight-up porn [re: exhibit 32b, “Knife Dicks“] but also pornographic/fetishized body types in heroic media besides videogames [exhibit 93b1b]; but there’s always the potential for fusion/crossover. You can remove the costume and the basic body “look” doesn’t really change. Furthermore, it’s often a Vitruvian pornographic standard that women are expected to cater to, wherein they fuck men for men while oscillating between virgin/whore body dynamics. In turn, everything unfolds inside canonical labor schemes that commonly treat subservient women as universal, “barely legal,” warrior maiden sex objects; i.e., neoliberal, franchised/corporate arrangements [and Amazons as beings to tame through canon’s toxic fetishization; re: exhibit 1a1a3, “Symposium: Aftercare“]. The envelop will always be pushed by the elite, whose banality of evil only cares about efficient profit and infinite growth: tokenize, then toxify sans irony to decay nature as monstrous-feminine to lobotomize it [gentrify/decay—re: “A Cruel…“].)
[20] To quote Helluva Boss, “[they’re] cotton candy!“; i.e., high on their own supply while pushing it onto other addicts. Such is Capitalism, decaying the injection site like Requiem for a Dream (2000).
[21] You can see this literal binarization in the Terminator franchise; i.e., whose fem-bots, under the Male Gaze, out-sex their manly counterparts (and other examples of dystopian war pastiche Chapter Four will examine; e.g., Mega Man and his decidedly not-so-mega sister policing the neoliberal ruins of Utopia). Geopolitically this parallels the colonization of women in the women’s industry by powerful men taking said field from them and industrializing then privatizing it through the likes of creepy friend-of-Jeffery-Epstein, the billionaire pedophile/child-sex trafficker, Bill Gates (Behind the Bastard’s “The Ballad of Bill Gates”). Not only is billionaire philanthropy a myth written by people “who just happen to have” the capital (the billionaire steals by design, or inherits through mass war/rape); its cryptonymy conceals the banality of evil whose material forces “drive” image production—i.e., with modern technology as a kind of “false hope engine” (the ultimate neoliberal weapon), one that hides bourgeois crimes behind their god-like means: as attached to systemic computer growth.
In 1965, Gordon Moore stated that roughly every two years, the number of transistors on microchips will double. Commonly referred to as Moore’s Law, this phenomenon suggests that computational progress will become significantly faster, smaller, and more efficient over time. However, it also belies a process hijacked by powerful capitalists whose atrocities are insidiously dress-up as “progress” (a cryptonym for genocide dressed up as “futurism”; e.g., Ray Kurzweil, whose shallow tech-bro transhumanism Jadis adored; re: “One Foot out the Door“). Billionaires should not exist/are a scourge on the planet the likes of which the Nazis could only dream of.
[22] Re: Centrism is fascism waiting to happen/fascism with more masks decaying into a toxic core.
[23] A genre that lends itself to camp, some wacky cinematic examples include The Phantom of the Paradise (about a zombie music producer, 1974), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (about a transsexual transvestite from Transylvania named after a penis-shaped food object, 1975), Lisztomania (features zombie Hitler and Nazi Wonder Women, 1975) and Hamlet 2 (features Christ, also a zombie, 2008). However, these kinds of productions don’t require actual songs—only a “zombie rock, Monster Mash” kind of attitude—compensating for their conspicuous lack of music with equally conspicuous, trashy monster sex; e.g., La Bête (features a white, good-girl-gone-bad “maiden” having doggystyle sex with a giant, black, well-endowed monster in a dark forest, 1975; re: exhibit 47b2: “Non-Magical Detectives“), The Toxic Avenger (features a deformed, muscle-bound monster who saves a blind girl who falls in love with him to camp Frankenstein, 1984), Return of the Living Dead (features a literal girl-named-Trash who wants to “be eaten alive by old men” and gets eaten by zombies instead, 1985). All are poking fun at sexual tropes, or dissecting them in abject ways that desire to explore forbidden sex; i.e., sex forbidden to them by capitalists (shown onscreen as evil patriarchs).
(exhibit 81: Artist, far-mid-right: Mark Bloodsworth.)
