This blog post is part of “Make It Real,” a fifth 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.” The first promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Make It Real” shall do the same, but with Volume One/the manifesto (versus “The Total Codex” promoting Volume Zero/the thesis 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 “Make It Real’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume One is already written/was released on Valentine’s 2024! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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

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

Volume One: Manifesto and Instruction

Before I learned the art, a punch was just a punch, and a kick just a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick no longer a kick. Now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a kick.

—Bruce Lee, The Tao of Jeet Kune Do (1975)

Picking up where “A 2025 Foreword” left off…

(exhibit 6b1: Artist: Autumn Anarchy and Persephone van der Waard. Gothic Communism is a group effort. Glenn the Goblin and Revana Mireille are two mascots for Gothic Communism; I commissioned Autumn to draw them specifically for this volume, then applied a background and painted additional details.)

Up until now, the thesis volume and paratextual documents have discussed sex positivity and Gothic Communism on a mostly theoretical level; Volume One is concerned with manifesto—or the simplifying of theory—and its subsequent instruction through application and poiesis: praxis and synthesis. The preface serves as the bridge between Volumes Zero and One; it will extrapolate further on the anarcho-Communist devices present within Gothic-Communist application during ludo-Gothic BDSM, then articulate on the synthesis of said application; i.e., the cultivation of the daily social-sexual habits needed to achieve praxis through Gothic poetics. From there, the manifesto gradually segues into the synthesis roadmap, focusing more and more on trauma writing and artwork (and eventually targeting Cartesian abuses of workers and nature); i.e., as forms of synthesis that rely on simplified theory as intuitively understood between worker collectives achieving praxis through shared poetic activities.

Returning to Volume One, Two Years Later (give or take) after Five Books; or, Cuwu’s Hand in Forming Ludo-Gothic BDSM

“You just keep getting better and better!”

—Cuwu, to me, upon first meeting each other (January 2022)

 

As someone I met in January 2022—until and after our parting as friends in June 2023—Cuwu remains someone tremendously important regarding what eventually became ludo-Gothic BDSM. I wanted to address that, here; i.e., with a small addendum kicking Volume One’s second edition off; re: one similar to Volume Zero’s “Two Years Later (give or take): Returning to My Thesis Argument after Five Books.”

(artist: Cuwu)

First, Cuwu was my friend and abuser—specifically an abusive sub demanding I care for them. Furthermore, they have borderline personality disorder and are in therapy/on medication for that (e.g., weed and Klonopin). Any mention of these things isn’t to fetishize them for its own sake, nor to shame them, but to talk about Cuwu’s relationship to me, part-in-parcel. Their education, mental illness, sexuality and gender-non-conformity all went hand-in-hand, so I will discuss them hand-in-hand; i.e., according to the development of Gothic Communism as it formed into itself through Cuwu’s help (regarding ludo-Gothic BDSM) onto other people I met after them who they accidently helped prepare me for. So whereas Zeuhl led me to Jadis (my rapist) and Cuwu helped me escape Jadis, Cuwu went on to prepare me for what came next: to meet Blxxd Bunny, Nyx, Bay and countless others while leaving Zeuhl behind; i.e., Cuwu set a far better example than Zeuhl or Jadis did, yet displayed similar paradoxes in their own actions that hindered me, too:

(exhibit 6b2a1: My exes and I: Zeuhl [top] and Jadis [bottom]. I’ve written about both extensively in this book series, but each has their own respective exposé: “Non-Magical Detectives” and “Showing Jadis’ Face.” As explained in those pieces, Zeuhl’s face continues to be mildly censored because they’re more neurotic, vindictive and marginalized than Jadis. Both harmed me greatly but through said harm inspired me; i.e., to write and illustrate Sex Positivity to heal from said harm, thus ultimately meet Cuwu [and those who came after Cuwu]. For every useful idiot, you have accidental allies!)

Second—and to be absolutely clear about this—any mention of Cuwu in the pages ahead, but also the entire series, is informed by an agreement between us; i.e., I have written permission to share the porn we made separately and together provided I leave their real name out of it. In regards to the exact nature of the details, consider this conversation between myself and a curious reader… who I suspect may have been a bot. Even so, the question—however nosy it comes across—is a valid one, and I will cite our conversation here; i.e., to be as thorough and transparent as I feel comfortable:

Hippymccrankface: You state that Cuwu abused you and that you have separated yourself from them, but also there are numerous images of them nude and having sex with you. Are they aware of the use of their images in this book which has been published since separating?

Me: I have Cuwu’s express written permission to use these images for different purposes, including on OnlyFans and for different creative purposes (their NSFW sex work is still available online, as is our material together, though I generally don’t advertise it). The only thing Cuwu ever asked of me was to leave their actual, real-life name out of things, which I’ve done in accordance to their wishes.

As for my writings about the abuse I experienced from them, they are not involved with that/supervising it, no. The material is part of a portfolio we generated together as sex workers, which I am using independently to write about my experiences with them, good and bad (source Tumblr post, vanderWaardart: December 18, 2024).

That’s the gist of things between us. Cuwu’s still online and, while on hiatus (the last time I checked, anyways), so is their sex work. Said work is arbitrated as much post hoc as not—meaning that like eating a Reese’s, saying “Splunge!” or putting the pussy on the chainwax, there’s endless ways to develop Gothic Communism through monstrous-feminine language in duality; re: by having the whore’s revenge through ludo-Gothic BDSM camping past attempts; i.e., the whore as a poetic device to camp and camp with. This is how Cuwu and I did it, back then.

Third, the 2025 second edition to Volume Zero took the term, “ludo-Gothic BDSM”—which the 2023 first edition introduced with my coining of it—and expanded the involvement of it in that manuscript retrospectively. By comparison, I would actually write the manuscript for my manifesto back in early 2023, whereupon I would write Volume Zero in late 2023 and introduce ludo-Gothic BDSM as a term—only to return to, and finalize, Volume One on Valentine’s 2024 after injecting ludo-Gothic BDSM into its pages (~40, versus Volume Zero’s original 30). Now after releasing Volume Zero‘s second edition, I find myself returning to Volume One to do the same, and inevitably mention ludo-Gothic BDSM (and Cuwu’s involvement) more in its manuscript than I did previously. For the historically curious, all of these changes are cataloged in my full series changelog, which you can find on my website’s one-page promo.

(artist: Cuwu—one of the first images they sent me, before I left Florida)

The fact remains, the idea was roughly conceived in 2021 (re: “Our Ludic Masters“); i.e., before I met Cuwu in early 2022 (re: the epigram). From there, our meeting and separation led to me eventually writing “Healing from Rape” (which Cuwu—a person with borderline personality disorder who relied on DBT to survive—helped me do, regarding Jadis abusing me; re: “Leaving Jadis; or, Running Up that Hill“); i.e., in mid-2023. By late 2023, I was crystalizing ludo-Gothic BDSM vis-à-vis Metroidvania for future use; re: “The Quest for Power” in theory, and the “camp map” finale with Blxxd Bunny in practice. Two years later, in 2025, I would release a corpus for Metroidvania and another for ludo-Gothic BDSM, then commemorate Blxxd Bunny’s hand in things; re: with the second edition of Volume Zero.

Regardless, Cuwu still remains the precursor to Bunny and someone who, while we weren’t dating in title, had agreed to be friends with benefits from the offset—in function having tons of sex, making plenty of porn, and caring for each other in numerous ways that went beyond the initially-agreed-upon FWBs status we supposed shared (many of which this volume and Volume Two will explore). In short, we were comrades (what Cuwu called “cumrag comrades” or “cummy Commies”): a cum dumpster to my cum dumper yet trading in both directions!

(artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Some of those ways informed what, in my opinion, is some of my best work in this series, including what ludo-Gothic BDSM became in widespread practice after Volume Zero had essentially coined it—ostensibly with Bunny’s help, but also Cuwu’s before Bunny and I had actually met! Now that Volume Zero’s second edition has credited Bunny for their hand in things, I shall be revisiting Cuwu’s; i.e., I couldn’t have written Sex Positivity as it exists without their help! Showing how here isn’t revenge; it’s an act of continual love from me towards Cuwu—a sign of respect from one sex worker towards another! You changed my life, kid, and only for the better!

That being said, I won’t be expounding on Cuwu too much, here, as one, this volume is already cited heavily in my later books but especially its manifesto postscript, “Healing from Rape” (which, I think, is one of my book series’ finest accomplishments).

Furthermore, Cuwu likewise already makes numerous cameos in my later volumes, being cited dozens of times; e.g., in the Poetry Module’s “Castles in the Flesh,” “Red Scare,” and “My Experiences,” as well as “Healing through ‘Rape’” in the Undead Module and “Making Demons” in the Demon Module (the latter which I would dedicated to Cuwu). Frankly there’s plenty more specific examples I can’t easily list, here; e.g., exhibit 37b1a[1] from “Healing“; i.e., I don’t always announce Cuwu’s presence before a (sub)chapter starts, and have lost count regarding the exact number of exhibits featuring them—be that solo or with me alongside them. Even Volume One flirted with showing Cuwu off, exhibiting their photobashed body in exhibit 16 (wearing a mask—one the Poetry Module would remove, followed by having Cuwu’s face being entirely uncensored[2]).

Regarding Cuwu and ludo-Gothic BDSM, I will merely try to keep things short and let this volume segue into ludo-Gothic BDSM (and Cuwu); i.e., as a liminal space, transitioning from Volume Zero into Volume Two. I’ll signpost “ludo-Gothic BDSM” a little, here; i.e., which I would inject into the manuscript, back in 2024, with “Predators and Prey” and “Concerning Rings,” as well reformatting the volume to divide in two; re: Manifesto and Instruction. The former is effectively taking the manifesto tree from Volume Zero and further synthesizing and simplifying it (along with producing several essays), while the latter leans into “application”; i.e., regarding the universal liberation of workers and nature as monstrous-feminine during the dialectic of the alien, hence, ludo-Gothic BDSM, and being for all intents and purposes synonymous with ludo-Gothic BDSM. Synthesis is development, which requires ludo-Gothic BDSM through the cultivation of good daily social-sexual habits that, once synthesized, apply theory between people making content. In short, we embody Gothic Communism during ludo-Gothic BDSM, which we also represent (with our cakes, below).

We’ll get to that. When we do, though, I won’t always stress the interchangeability between application, camp and ludo-Gothic BDSM having the whore’s revenge against profit (re: humanizing the harvest, therefore nature as monstrous-feminine). Even so, I still want you to keep it in mind, increasing the word’s usage from the original ~40 to roughly 200 (similar to Volume Zero’s second edition); i.e., Volume One is simpler in part because I wrote much of it before my PhD. And while I would return to it afterwards to inject ludo-Gothic BDSM into it (doing so to clarify the subject matter that was already present), these injections were originally somewhat “doughy” and few-and-far-between. I have since tried to rectify that with the second edition, here; i.e., by consciously acknowledging ludo-Gothic BDSM as a vital means of camp whose process started closer to Cuwu than not, and still had a ways to go “in the oven” after Cuwu exited my life; re: before I would really start to take advantage of it in Volume Two.

Note: The increase for “ludo-Gothic BDSM” in the manifesto is largely for comparative purposes—i.e., the count in the manifesto is technically “more” than the Poetry Module and similar to the Undead Module’s first editions (180 and 293), but also isn’t steelmanned, this time around; it’s more tacked-on/annotative. The feel, then, is more checkered, and not synthesized more thoroughly. Instead, it’s to remind you of a point of comparison; i.e., one to make between granular terms like “oppositional praxis,” “playful Gothic” and “demon BDSM” versus me simply synthesizing them with “ludo-Gothic BDSM”; re: from Volume Zero’s prototype after Volume One’s first draft back into Volume One’s final draft leading into Volume Two synthesizing everything post hoc, during holistic study. My not doing so here, with Volume One’s second edition, is to preserve the manifesto’s historical and simplified nature, and to allow you a unique chance to see ludo-Gothic BDSM “unspooled” and discussed in a manner you might actually encounter outside these books. 

Think of it, then, as a de-evolution viewed backwards, one used to morphologically expressed—in circuitous, non-linear and ergodic terms—the path I took to get here; i.e., a castle inside a castle, or as I write in “Meeting Rebels” (from the Poetry Module):

An echoing dislocation—nay, an echolocation of dislocated castles, of ruins (the narrative of the crypt)—their string of ghost towns write with/written in disintegration (death, vis-à-vis cryptomimesis) as roads only ostensibly to nowhere; i.e., building sand castles standing in for Communism as the elusive “princess in another castle” but also Capitalism as the intimidating dragon holding her prisoner (or the white woman collaring the dragon, but I digress) as a synthetic (thesis-to-antithesis) plurality of conflict that yields different forms and functions in the same sand: a “collective something-something” that, no matter how far we run, walks (shambles) faster than we do: the return of the living dead as speaking for itself regarding the colossal wreck before, during and after its decay (source).

Exploitation and liberation share the same space, on and offstage; the way out of the labyrinth is inside it, regardless of when and where you find yourself.

—Perse, 4/3/2025

Nevertheless, ludo-Gothic BDSM will come into play much more often, here (and in less doughy forms), and especially later in the book series—from Volume Two into Volume Three (which is even older than the manifesto, hence doesn’t have the term in it at all). People communicate through sex (and gender) to heal from trauma; i.e., doing so ways that build cumulatively towards what—for Gothic Communism—is a holistic enterprise. It’s what Cuwu and I did, working on a system of camp that neither of us realized would go on to become Sex Positivity‘s praxial bedrock: of my work’s applied theory and into our pedagogy of the oppressed (and subsequent gender trouble and parody—terms to explore in Volume Three). In the interim, here’s a face to go with the name; i.e., whose ur-camp (and bangin’ PAWG-level bod) fueled what ludo-Gothic BDSM became in my and Bunny’s later prototype—Cuwu’s vital clay (and dark hungry energies) that helped give Galatea shape, thus a voice to liberate Medusa with! Not once, but over and over and over again, passion is a refrain to repeatedly embark on when pursuing universal liberation; i.e., the Communist Numinous trapped inside a little baddie with a fat succulent ass!

(artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Miss ya, kid; stay safe out there!

Love,

—Persephone

(exhibit 6b2a2: Artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard—with Cuwu blowing Persephone in her sleep without express permission [to be fair I absolutely didn’t mind, in hindsight, and Cuwu confessed it seemed like a safe bet, at the time; it was].

That being said, the sleep sex Cuwu and I would have later on was fully negotiated; i.e., without any assumptions; re:

[model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard; source: “Dark Shadows”] 

Ideally, illustrating mutual consent during ludo-Gothic BDSM should always be fully and clearly negotiated; i.e., because that’s what goes into any dialectical-material context that people can glean from our artwork [and its lessons]! To it, nothing is discrete in Gothic; learn from our mistakes, but also our creative successes putting the pussy on the chainwax! Love is a battlefield and revolution is a place for love to bloom. Learn from us while making love to help revolution take root in peoples’ hearts and minds, but also their bodies’ various holes [a hyphenation of technology and tissue]! As such, take risks that calculate more safely afterward, but be as safe as you can while doing so at the time! Fortune favors the bold, but consent above all else [a balancing act between caution and courage].

[artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard]

Whatever happens, make something that lasts. Even if that’s only in your memories—and be those in the flesh or passed on through media into flesh, there and back again—we will be waiting for you future rebels; i.e., when you go looking through castles, onstage and off, for spectres to dance with! You wanna camp something? Make it gay! In turn, time is a circle, and “what we do in life echoes in eternity!” Come be gay with us!)

Manifesto/Instruction Volume Outline

“DEMON, ATHETOS SAY, KILL.”

—Athetos’ variants, Axiom Verge (2014)

Volume One is functionally divided in two: our manifesto, and the exploration of trauma as a powerful means of instruction during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., the application of power through the campy aesthetics of inequality and death during calculated risk: camping bread and circus inside the circus through our baked goods (cake or otherwise). To that, it contains my original preface, manifesto, sample essay and synthesis roadmap, which we shall now outline in this brief section.

Before we do, I quickly (over the next one-and-a-half pages) want to consider the nature of the exhibit style of this volume compared to my thesis. More so than Volume Zero, Volume One invites the reader to consider investigating power and trauma through theory and praxis as things to synthesize and express; i.e., through active, informed, collective participation; e.g., through shared exhibits like the one below. Said exhibit was created between Roxie Rusalka and myself, with Roxie being informed of my project ahead of time and agreeing to take part. It was deliberate/planned, and took time, money and work to pull off, but also mutual/informed consent:

Note: This exhibit is cited in “‘She Fucks Back’; or, Metroidvania” in the Undead Module; go there to see me expand on its ideas. —Perse, 4/2/2025

(exhibit 6b2b: Model and artist: Roxie Rusalka and Persephone van der Waard. Instruction occurs through the interrogation of trauma, wherein power is perceived and performed; i.e., through ludo-Gothic BDSM/general Gothic poetics and simplified theories that incorporate a fair amount of former worker history pushing towards liberation. Said history is typically “lost” under state operations and must be repeatedly reclaimed through a liminal pedagogy—the act of reimagining systemic abuse received by workers from state forces. This reclamation very much includes monsters that are historically regarded as treacherous to status-quo agents, but especially regarding men under the Cartesian model; e.g., the nymph or siren as a regular emasculator of traditional stations of male agency and authority. To that, Roxie’s handle, “Rusalka,” refers to a type of Slavic water siren, which Roxie suggested I use as inspiration for depicting her in my book. Seeing as I already recognized the mythology from Thomas Happ’s 2014 Metroidvania, I drew Roxie as a Rusalki from Axiom Verge to instruct viewers with.

My and Roxie’s pedagogy of the oppressed, then, constitutes something that you might recognize from elsewhere; i.e., as having threatened male figures and institutions from earlier hauntologies: the Rusalki from Axiom Verge serving as titanic war machines who—in the style of a framed narrative ripped from Frankenstein—instruct and dominate Trace as an avatar/unwitting extension of the game’s chief male antagonist, Athetos. None of this is strictly “new” insofar as it has already appeared in fiction in some shape or form, but its present resurrection constitutes unique elements amid ongoing struggles.

The game’s narrative installs a psychomachic, psychosexual dialog between all parties, established through play and felt through various positions of ignorance, knowledge and power imbalance. The women of the game are its primary instructors, and teach Trace from a place of darkness: the hellish wellspring of oblivion imparting fatal wisdom and traumatic rememory as much through pain, unequal power exchange and outright lies/subterfuge as they do through open communication. The takeaway isn’t that Amazonian women are inherently treacherous, but survivors of immense trauma working with potential allies who, at times, have no idea who they’re serving: Trace embodies Athetos, whose desire to conquer space/the universe through the colonial gaze of planet Earth [astronoetics] is initiated, embodied and explored through a position of ignorance; i.e., one that thrives through ergodic, monomythic motion and the shadow of Pygmalion/the Cycle of Kings as something to routinely bring about at the cost of all things.

[artist: Wildragon]

Within this overarching structure, canon classically challenges the ancient female as an Archaic Mother to behead; to reverse this is to foster a counterfeit of Athena’s Aegis that freezes state potential in its tracks: female power as something to behold and learn from through the death of an internalized bigotry and desire to conquer that is often, at first blush, framed as “self-defense,” “progress,” and “empowerment.”)

The entirety of the volume contains dozens of exhibits like the one above, arranged inside the preface, sample essay and two volume halves:

• The preface explains how Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism differs from older Gothic and Marxist academia/praxis that I wish to modify and borrow from (Marxist-Leninism, postmodernism, psychoanalysis) in order to proceed beyond the myopia of Capitalist Realism using a unique synthesis of Gothic theories, Marxist concepts, and various other factors presented with commonplace language as freighted, liminal and already-colonized, but also potentially freeing when used by workers to open up their minds in dated, pulpy ways: the proletarian Gothic imagination.
• “Manifesto” simplifies the complex theory of our thesis volume by providing our manifesto in full; the manifesto gives our mission statement, as well as a variety of signposts and core ideas I’ve coined/retooled from older thinkers: the six Gothic-Marxist tenets of Gothic Communism (the Six Rs), four main Gothic academic theories (the Four Gs); its essays/essay groups (“The Nation State,” “An Uphill Battle,” and “Monster Modes“) also explore the topics of the Gothic mode we’ll continue to cover through the rest of the book—its monsters, lairs/parallel space, Hermeneutic Gothic-Communist Quadfecta, and phobias—as well as the Six Doubles of Creative/Oppositional Praxis and their synthetic oppositional groupings through which to synthesize, thus interrogate state abuses using trauma writing and artwork.
• “Instruction“ focuses on instructing theory once simplified by using trauma writing and artwork as a synthetic, educational means of Gothic poetic expression (re: ludo-Gothic BDSM). The manifesto postscript tackles generational trauma and police abuse by seeing it in others through their pedagogy of the oppressed; the sample essay uses every key idea in my book to analyze a primary text at full speed; “Paid Labor“ stresses the value of paying workers when synthesizing praxis; and the synthesis symposium covers how to use the synthetic oppositional groupings to synthesize our general terms and academic ideas, processing them (and our trauma) into idiosyncratic, emotionally and Gothically intelligent social-sexual habits within our own lives; it covers more at length what we illustrated during the camp map finale in Volume Zero, focusing on Cartesian trauma and how its profit motive unironically treats nature as food: (rape and war that harvest nature through monstrous-feminine dialogs).

(artist: Roxie Rusalka)

Preface: Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism; or, Synthesizing Emotional/Gothic Intelligence through a Sex-Positive Gothic Mode

“You know nothing, Jon Snow.” 

—Ygritte, A Storm of Swords (2000)

Synthesis is vital to good praxis. For our purposes, synthesis can be adequately summarized as “the cultivation of emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural/racial awareness; i.e., the deliberate utilization of Gothic poetics during the practical application of simplified theory had between activist workers: formulating healthy social-sexual habits to deal with state trauma.” But there’s still plenty of theory that goes into these habits and their collective instruction/de facto education during ludo-Gothic BDSM. To that, Gothic Communism is “picky” in terms of what it incorporates. I want to run these habits down during the preface, then conclude said preface by touching on praxial synthesis (and catharsis) before moving into the manifesto proper!

First, a few things Gothic Communism tends to avoid, theory-wise. Gothic Communism strongly dislikes pure poststructuralist/psychoanalytical (e.g., Freud, Jung and Lacan) and Marxist-Leninist models (though it employs many of their ideas in an-Com ways); i.e., not only do these models tend to be dated, vaguely abstracting and sexist/queerphobic (as Stalin and Freud both were, above), but they are far more common in Gothic academia than I would like (especially Freud in remnants of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, when second wave feminism and post-Freudian analysis were all the rage, and which I would critique in my own work; re: “A Trans Woman’s Scholarly Contributions to Older Histories of Sodomy and Queer Love“).

Instead, I wrote Sex Positivity to marry Gothic/queer theory with Marxist, dialectical-material analysis/oppositional praxis, a process I have decided to call Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism. While both sides of it (and ludo-Gothic BDSM, to a lesser extent) will be thoroughly explained in the Manifesto and Instruction portions of this volume, let’s quickly run down this book’s Communist and Gothic aims to summarize what Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism is according to me and why.

Note: I wrote the manifesto before my PhD, and this preface attempts to—among other things—explain why Gothic Communism is anarcho-Communist is scope versus Marxist-Leninist (which Cuwu was, oddly enough; i.e., Gothic Communism was the accidental byproduct of a copulating an-Com and self-described “Marxist-Leninist”—the latter inspired by Castro, if memory serves).

To be as thorough as I can, then, here is my definition for “Marxist-Leninism” alongside the abridged definition of “Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism)” and “anarcho-Communism”:

Marxist-Leninism/”tankies”

An embryonic form of Socialism that, past and present, favors state models and nostalgia; i.e., one that hybridizes Marx and Engels with 20th century thinkers and leaders—most notably Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, but also Mao, Castro and other state leaders/schools going into the 21st: through “tankie” apologia whitewashing the crimes of said leaders and their states as beings to worship and compromise with (Bad Mouse’s “On Hakim’s Nuance,” 2025).

anarcho-Communism

The gradual disillusion and transmutation of Capitalism into Socialism and finally Communism through direct worker solidarity and collective action versus through state mechanism and argument; i.e., whereupon power is horizontally restructured away from state models and Marxism Leninism (and state power/state-regulated Capitalism).

Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism (abridged, full definition in “The Terms I Coined”)

the titular term of my book series, so I’ll quote the whole thing, here—expanded and updated substantially since 2023, in 2025, to account for my writing of four books after Volume Zero): Coined by me, Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism is the deliberate, pointed critique of capital/Capitalism and the state using a unique marriage of Gothic/queer/game theory and semi-Marxist (an-Com) ideas synthesized campily by sex-positive workers during proletarian praxis: developing systemic catharsis, mid-liminal expression during praxial opposition, using ludo-Gothic BDSM and palliative-Numinous dialogs (e.g., Metroidvania).

(source)

Beyond my understanding of the term, “Marxist-Leninist” was actually coined by Stalin around or after Lenin died, in the 1920s (from Wikipedia): “Marxism–Leninism was developed from Bolshevism by Joseph Stalin in the 1920s based on his understanding and synthesis of classical Marxism and Leninism. Marxism–Leninism holds that a two-stage communist revolution is needed to replace capitalism” (source). And Stalin, let’s not forget, was a total-and-massive cunt who—among many other things, besides—enabled pedophilia in his own inner circle (re: Behind the Bastards’ “Beria: Stalin’s Pedophile Cop & the Soviet Oppenheimer”), made homosexuality illegal[3] in 1933 (the same year Hilter burned down Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institution of Sexology) and, all in all, killed/displaced a shitload of people (millions) to reinforce his own cult of personality (e.g., Stalingrad—arguably the biggest battle in modern or medieval history—was strategically worthless to the Russians or the Germans; i.e., Stalin wanted the city defended and Hilter to conquer it [costing over a million soldiers on both sides] because it had “Stalin” in the name. If that’s not vanity then I don’t know what is). These men were not gods, nor should we treat them as such; they were the ruling class, and one whose state Capitalism [on Stalin’s side] was largely nominal in its historical execution of Communism (and yes, the West undercut it, but Stalin and the Politburo that survived him still held the stickle during the harvest).

This being said, Stalinist Bolshevism isn’t identical to Hilter’s National Socialism, but both men were dictators, nonetheless (as was Mao, and by extension, American presidents, British Monarchs, and so on). In doing ludo-Gothic BDSM to develop Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism, we’re not here to worship these darlings, but kill their legacies by camping their ghosts (and that of their offshoots; e.g., Creed, Kristeva, Butler, Foucault, Bad Empanada, etc); re: “the state is straight” and ASAB (from the Undead Module’s “Understanding Vampires”):

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

Furthermore, when camping Marx‘ ghost (and his followers’ compelled stupidity/willful ignorance), we can still borrow from Marx (the “broken clock” mantra/Sarkeesian’s adage); i.e., blood in, blood out:

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

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

In short, where knowledge gaps exist, fill them with whatever proves dialectically-materially and socially-sexually useful towards universal liberation; i.e., one that routinely has the whore’s revenge against profit during ludo-Gothic BDSM camping the canon. Leave the rest; its garbage. —Perse, 4/2/2025

(exhibit 6b2c: Model and artist: Blxxd Bunny and Persephone van der Waard—from “My Logo for Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism!” I designed the logo on August 26th, 2025; i.e., right around when I began writing my PhD in earnest [which released on October 8th]. After Cuwu, Bunny was central in helping me prototype ludo-Gothic BDSM as the vector for develop Gothic Communism; re: “The Quest for Power” in theory, and the “camp map” finale in application.)

The Communist aims of this Gothic book series (and its ludo-Gothic BDSM) are anarcho-Communist in scope—a combination of Communism and anarchism (there are other combinations, but these are either excluded [anarcho-Capitalism] or fall under anarcho-Communism in my opinion; e.g., queer/feminist Communism). So, not only does Sex Positivity seek to abolish private property in pursuit of post-scarcity beyond Capitalism; its chief desire is to end the worker exploitations that reliably happen through privatization—occurring through the nation-state as the chief monopolizer of violence and terror in ways that neoliberal corporations spearhead as their partners-in-crime (neoliberalism being a return to the “freeing” of the market, consolidating wealth in the pockets of the bourgeoisie through state-corporate abuses of power and personal responsibility rhetoric disseminated by centrist media; neoliberals also disguise, aid and abet fascism, a concept we will explore much more thoroughly in Volume Three).

Everything I propose operates in service of deprivatization and dismantling the nation-state, corporations included. The vertical consolidation of materials and power in state-corporate echelons is horribly alienating and destructive. Both must be gradually replaced by anarcho-syndicalist communes as horizontal arrangements thereof. Doing so amounts to Gothic Communism’s chief aim: a Gothic (monstrous) mode of expression that is productive, constructive and creatively sex-positive, liberating workers by utilizing the democratization of sexualized labor as something found and fostered among class- and culture-conscious workers, not the state (which historically privatizes labor [and Gothic poetics] for the elite in fundamentally undemocratic ways, including Marxist-Leninism’s various missteps; i.e., a “kettling” of state powers by capitalist forces into headspaces of paranoia and ultimately the settling of old scores).

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

In other words, there’s to be no cults of personality nominally declaring themselves “Communists” or “National Socialists” in Gothic Communism, nor genocidal great leaders nor pyramid schemes; no Pol Pot, Chairman Mao, nor Stalin as Marxist-Leninist heads of state; no neoliberal, corporate-born billionaires like Bill Gates or their establishment-politician/corporate-Americanized executives quietly assisting the billionaire class as the great destroyers of the planet (these various heads to the state of affairs are synonymous with “the state/the elite” insofar as I use those terms); no popes nor cult leaders; no venerate, accommodated copycats of various “fathers of [insert academic field, here]” like Jacques Derrida and his god-awful prose (ditch said dreck, but keep his genuinely productive and useful Deconstructionist ideas; e.g., “There is no transcendental signified” [obviously paraphrased, because Derrida couldn’t write a straightforward sentence to save his life] from his 1966 essay, “Structure, Sign and Play“) nor the post-Freudians who followed in Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung’s footsteps only to have their psychoanalytical models updated by the likes of Slavoj Zizek and Jordan Peterson alike, either man presented as annoyingly sacred and lame (to be fair, Zizek can be a lot fun when picking low-hanging fruit, but he’s still not Marxist, anarcho-Communist or queer enough for my taste; e.g., his defending of a two-state solution[4] vis-à-vis the Palestinian genocide).

The idea of Gothic Communism is to avoid the Foucauldian “torture loop” of a hauntologized, abject disgust mill; i.e., the expectation of medieval, rapey violence post-deconstruction, but also the chickenshit, exploitative power imbalances in academic circles; e.g., Simone Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre working as a team to routinely “deflower” a (much) younger third. As Andy Martin writes in “The Persistence of the ‘Lolita Syndrome'” (2013):

It has to be said that Beauvoir’s interest in these matters was not purely theoretical (in fact, it is hard to conceive of any philosopher’s thoughts being purely theoretical). As a diligent investigator, I am obliged to say that she was dismissed from her teaching job in 1943 for “behavior leading to the corruption of a minor.” The minor in question was one of her pupils at a Paris lycée. It is well established that she and Jean-Paul Sartre developed a pattern, which they called the “trio,” in which Beauvoir would seduce her students and then pass them on to Sartre. (See, for example, “A Disgraceful Affair,” by Bianca Lamblin, in which she recalls being infatuated with Beauvoir, but romanced systematically by Sartre, who cheerfully remarks, on the way to a consummation, that “the hotel chambermaid will be really surprised, because she caught me taking another girl’s virginity only yesterday.”)

Beauvoir’s “Lolita Syndrome” (her personal favorite, she said, among her essays) offers an evangelical defence of the sexual emancipation of the young (source).

Double standards aside, both intellectuals shamelessly exploited the unequal power structures of academia, but enjoyed a constant postmortem, reverential emblematizing as the intellectuals with the final say on feminist matters. Equally gross, in hindsight, is Michel Foucault’s 1993 interview with Edmund White, whereupon he delivers a self-confessed and seemingly innocent admission to the chasing of cute boys his entire academic career (echoing Dennis Cooper’s twink-in-peril schtick, but in real life minus the ironic/liberatory meta):

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

Zeuhl said they “ride and die” with Foucault (not having much to say in reply when I mentioned he was a pedophile, learning that about him several years after Zeuhl and I broke up). More to the point, the above quote is something Zeuhl would use to seduce me with (re: “Leaving the Closet“). —Perse, 4/2/2025

All seemingly innocent until you learn about his predatory sex tourism (Bad Empanada 2, 2022), desire to abolish age of consent laws in France (The Living Philosophy’s “Why French Postmodernists were Pro-Paedophilia in the 1970s,” 2021), and what James Miller in The Passion of Michel Foucault (1993) called an addiction to self-destruction and sadomasochist sex (the coercive sort). Likewise, Elliot Swain in 2021 remarks in utter frustration how Foucault tended to avoid Marxist language altogether. Foucault wasn’t just accommodated, you see; he was enabled and desired intellectual fame similar to what Sartre had achieved before him. It’s gross, queer-normative, TERF levels of nasty and needs to be abolished. Good play and sex-positive BDSM are all entirely possible (and something we’ll explore more in Volume Three, Chapters Two and Three). However, creepy Gay Uncle Fester ain’t it.

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

For us and Gothic Communism, worker safety is sacred and supersedes any icon who came before and iconoclasts absolutely shouldn’t hesitate to tear down/camp their harmful reputations. To give some further examples:

• Milton was patriarchal (Lapham’s Quarterly’s “Misspent Youth”)
• Tolkien was racist (Anderson Rearick’s “Why Is the Only Good Orc a Dead Orc,” 2004).
• Marx wasn’t overtly a Gothicist (certainly not by current, iconoclastic standards, anyways; he loved ghosts, but these had to be “unpacked” by people like Derrida, Castricano and other Gothic theorists whose work emerged nearly [and after] a century after Marx’ death); also, he was anti-Semitic (“Karl Marx in the Ludwig Rosenberger Library of Judaica,” 2006) and homophobic (see “Making Marx Gay“).
• Oscar Wilde was anti-Semitic (Christopher Nassar’s “The Problem of the Jewish Manager in The Picture of Dorian Gray,” 2005).
• Simone Beauvoir was not only a rapist, but cis-centric (“woman is other”).
• Pablo Picasso was a rapist and misogynist (Marta’s “The Women of Picasso,” 2023), as was Roman Polanski (Dreading’s “The Case of Roman Polanski,” 2022).
• Lovecraft was mega-racist: “China Miéville says, ‘There is nothing epiphenomenal about racism in Lovecraft.’ Put differently, Lovecraft’s race thinking cannot be separated from his body of work” (Brown University’s “The Racial Imaginaries of H.  Lovecraft”).
• Coleridge was an apologist for the state, scapegoating Matthew Lewis as “terrorist[5]” from a white, straight man’s cis-supremacist, classist and racist position; i.e., “equality of convenience” dressed up as a conspicuous boner for the West using the flowery (and sober, at this point) language of a Poet Laureate:

The Romans slowly conquered the more southerly portion of their tribes, and succeeded only by their superior arts, their policy, and better discipline. After a time, when the Goths, ­to use the name of the noblest and most historical of the Teutonic tribes, ­had acquired some knowledge of these arts from mixing with their conquerors, they invaded the Roman territories. The hardy habits, the steady perseverance, the better faith of the enduring Goth rendered him too formidable an enemy for the corrupt Roman, who was more inclined to purchase the subjection of his enemy, than to go through the suffering necessary to secure it. The conquest of the Romans gave to the Goths the Christian religion as it was then existing in Italy; and the light and graceful building of Grecian, or Roman-Greek order, became singularly combined with the massy architecture of the Goths, as wild and varied as the forest vegetation which it resembled. The Greek art is beautiful (source: “General Character in the Gothic Literature and Art”).

• (from my thesis volume): Fred Botting and Frederic Jameson were/are apologists of science fiction as somehow “not Gothic” (re: Botting’s silly arguments of “Gothic redundancy” as I tackle them [exhibit 1a1a1h2a3] and Jameson’s very-dumb 1991 declaration in Postmodernism, calling the Gothic “that boring and exhausted paradigm[6]“).
• George Orwell was anti-Communist (despite knowing virtually nothing about Russia and the USSR) and a fascist apologist (re: Hakim, 2023).
• Renowned geneticist Richard Dawkins is a eugenics (Gaia Vince’s “Eugenics Would Not Work in Humans,” 2020) and rape apologist (Melissia McEwan’s “Dawkins Defends Himself with More Rape Apologia,” 2013) and Islamophobe, extending his anti-intellectual, bought-and-paid for bigotry to trans people (Essence of Thought’s “Richard Dawkins Promotes Creationism in Anti-Trans Crusade,” 2023).
• Bill Gates is a soulless vampire who—along with those who support his utterly draconian privatization of the computer market and gutting of public education, as well as his bogus, parasitic and thoroughly disingenuous “philanthropy” (source: Another Slice’s “Bill Gates: King Of Neoliberalism,” 2020)—has ties to child sex trafficker Jeffery Epstein (Behind the Bastards’ “Part One: The Ballad of Bill Gates,” 2023). Billionaires not only personify the elite; they’re a complete and utter scourge on the planet and should not exist—i.e., they’re not useful to developing Communism; they’re lying parasites begot from the Second Gilded Age courtesy of neoliberal hegemony and systemic lies, surveillance, privatization, and genocide dressed up as the banality of evil. Fuck the lot of ’em.
• Noam Chomsky had ties to then-outed pedophile and sex trafficker, Jeffery Epstein (“Epstein’s Private Calendar Reveals Prominent Names,” 2023).

We not only have to be better than the West; we have to be better than all these persons and avoid what my friend Sandy Norton lovingly calls the “Imperialism of Theory” (coined when she was sparring with a fellow academic about William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1848 novel, Vanity Fair):

At its best, theory offers us models that encourage speculative thinking. Many critics assume, however, that the application of theoretical discourses to literature necessarily entails a particular, and limited, set of interpretive practices: reference to a theorist’s ideas, for instance, may too easily be taken to mean that a critic subscribes to all the tenets of that theorist’s position as well as to those of the better-known practitioners of the theory. This constraining movement unnecessarily forecloses speculative thought and seeks, in a way that mirrors imperialist discourses, to conserve the authority and power of those who have accumulated intellectual and academic capital through association with a theory.

This sort of theoretical imperialism is also methodological: the repeated application of a theory in a particular way quickly comes to constitute an authority which dictates that it should only be applied in that way. Although he may not do so intentionally, Perkin employs theory as a constraining force when he takes me to task for using Foucault’s work but failing to adopt a strictly New Historicist methodology: “Foucault leads one to New Historicism, which requires that one read a text as part of a world of discourses, whereas Norton’s article is really a close reading of some strands of a single text” (165; my emphasis). The semantic slippage in this sentence is telling, I think. It is, on an overt level, “New Historicism” or presumably its practitioners that “require” the use of this method. But because “Foucault leads one to New Historicism,” the implication of the sentence is that Foucauldian theory itself “require[s]” this method. This I would deny. Although his work provides a model for some of the methods of New Historicism, neither Foucault nor any New Historicist would claim that his work which is used across a broad range of disciplines may only be appropriately applied using those methods.

I do not believe that I am required to demonstrate “a need to invoke Foucault” (and the diction here is interesting precisely why does Perkin use the word “invoke”?). Like Marx or Freud, Foucault is himself an example of what he calls in the essay, “What Is an Author?,” “founders of discursivity,” figures who have “established an endless possibility of discourse” (154). “To expand a type of discursivity,” he proposes, is precisely “to open it up to a certain number of possible applications” (156). Rather than “needing to invoke” Foucault, I choose to apply Foucault because of the speculative richness such application offers (source: “The Imperialism of Theory: A Response to J. Russell Perkin,” 1994).

Simply put, singular and enforced interpretations are dangerous, and we need to be choosy in ways that prolifically and flexibly enrich our arguments, not simply dot them with the fancy patriarchal ornaments of accommodated intellectuals. Meanwhile, our ruffling of their collective feathers needs to hit a collective nerve: their sell-out, privileged status; i.e., sitting in their ivory towers and basically talking amongst themselves in a highly privatized sense. This requires a certain sense of detachment from positions of comfort that historically are used to divide and conquer workers. As Said writes in “Reflections on Exile” (1984):

Because exile, unlike nationalism, is fundamentally a discontinuous state of being. Exiles are cut off from their roots, their land, their past. They generally do not have armies or states, although they are often in search of them. Exiles feel, therefore, an urgent need to reconstitute their broken lives, usually by choosing to see themselves as part of a triumphant ideology or a restored people. […] Exile is predicated on the existence of, love for, and bond with, one’s native place; what is true of all exile is not that home and love of home are lost, but that loss is inherent in the very existence of both.

Regard experiences as if they were about to disappear. What is it that anchors them in reality? What would you save of them? What would you give up? Only someone who has achieved independence and detachment, someone whose homeland is “sweet” but whose circumstances makes it impossible to recapture that sweetness, can answer those questions. (Such a person would also find it impossible to derive satisfaction from substitutes furnished by illusion or dogma.)

This may seem like a prescription for an unrelieved grimness of outlook and, with it, a permanently sullen disapproval of all enthusiasm or buoyancy of spirit. Not necessarily. While it perhaps seems peculiar to speak of the pleasures of exile, there are some positive things to be said for a few of its conditions. Seeing “the entire world as a foreign land” makes possible originality of vision. Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that – to borrow a phrase from music – is contrapuntal.

For an exile, habits of life, expression or activity in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment. Thus both the new and the old environments are vivid, actual, occurring together contrapuntally. There is a unique pleasure in this sort of apprehension, especially if the exile is conscious of other contrapuntal juxtapositions that diminish orthodox judgement and elevate appreciative sympathy. There is also a particular sense of achievement in acting as if one were at home wherever one happens to be (source).

Exiting Plato’s cave can feel brutal, insofar as its new-felt unheimlich is irreversible. From our own “pleasures of exile,” though, home is something to cultivate through alienation as a forced consequence under Capitalism. It, like trauma in general, becomes something to live with, often through rituals of theatrical distress:

(artist: Coey Kuhn)

Liberation from the illusions of capital means our prescribed homeland becomes foreign in ways that allow for startling new appreciations; i.e., in terms of how we identify using Gothic language during fresh struggles under old, systemic problems: as monsters. Doing so helps us better voice the chaos inherent to our daily lives under capital, once the game is up. Yes, we can be “ostracized” by people who frankly care little for our well-being at an institutional level (accommodated intellectuals); but as their cool dismissal of us exposes the apathy and bigotry behind their “soft” arguments, their hard, inflexible stances can be denuded by Gothic Communism’s chief weapon: poetics. Canon’s combined, “sacred” memories—of powerful men, women and token minorities—need to be expunged[7] and criticized, preserving the exhibits of what was while utilizing what is as useful towards development towards a better world than has ever existed; i.e., to be indebted, but not enslaved, towards an imaginary past: the Wisdom of the Ancients as a living document to learn from, but also rewrite as needed.

Said document—and by extension the public imagination/understanding associated with it—is something that workers can actively contribute towards for their own betterment. As such, these borrowed concepts’ flexible application works well beyond their original, intended prescription while we make our own monsters (thus historical materialism). Time is of the essence, though; we need to critique power dialectically-materially yesterday and now in the kinds of language that the vast majority of workers actively recognize and consume voraciously—monsters, but also sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll as “Gothic.” Capitalism commodifies worker struggles through Gothic language as popular but policed, something that we must reclaim from state forces styling themselves (and canon) as genuine and exclusive, but also “safe.” Intended readers for the ghost of the counterfeit are habitually its greatest abusers through the process of abjection; i.e., inside a heteronormative, setter-colonial system that has, since its very inception, been designed to exploit, demonize and control others for profit—to rape them through an elaborate series of mind games and lies that have them fearful of, and fascinated with, the imaginary past as a dependable tool of menticide. To this, rape is more than physical/sexual violence; it’s the flagrant abuse of power that leads to worker exploitation on physical, mental, sexual and/or emotional levels over time: the mind as something to rape according to stations and stances within Capitalism that reflect harmful positions of unfair status, privilege and authority.

Our Gothic-Communist emphasis, then, is the class and cultural solidarity of Gothicized sex work in worker hearts and minds—its monstrous artistic output constituting collective labor action as a liberatory teaching device; i.e., proletarian praxis operating through internalized class/culture consciousness, emotional/Gothic intelligence, and trauma awareness and expression; and whose subsequent appreciative irony—of xenophilic camp through praxial catharsis—opposes bourgeois praxis and state propaganda’s heteronormative canon. “Monsters are real” becomes a labor dispute, insofar as they express through theatrical means how all workers, but especially gender-non-conforming workers, have the right to exist and not be exploited by capital; i.e., the same right deserving to all humans, animals, and the Earth: the satisfaction of our basic material needs and the ability to pursue our own happiness within these material systems under post-scarcity.

(artist: La Patte)

Said praxis, when synthesized, aims to “rewire” a fundamentally bourgeois Superstructure: by transforming said canon, affecting the Base through daily habits that, when cultivated, express a rebellious class and cultural character (re: camping the twin trees of Capitalism). While the Base and Superstructure originate from Marx’s own work, the Superstructure interests us because—as stated during the thesis volume—it normally “grows out of the Base and reflects the ruling class’ interests” (re: Rana Indrajit Singh). As sex-positive workers, we want to denormalize worker abuse and alienation by shifting away from generational trauma as a systemic effect; i.e., by transforming the state’s capacity to deliver such things, attacking worker minds with sex-coercive canon and unironic, harmful xenophobia and xenophilia. We must directly challenge said education and synthesis according to our own sex-positive, hence iconoclastic, Gothic poetics: recultivating the twin trees by supplying our own in their place. Our liberation is meant to be gradual, occurring through a proletarian Gothic imagination that is grown over time, and whose careful cultivation stems from a collective intelligence/awareness that is explicitly developed to function as anarcho-Communist, not Marxist-Leninist (or other socio-political and -economic arrangements that remain prone to the historical abuses of state power as a vertical, thus harmful, configuration).

Though proletarian, Sex Positivity comes out of an abject past fraught with compromise, the “state Socialism” of Marxist-Leninism becoming increasingly nominal (and abusive) under Capitalism; obviously we want to avoid that as much as we can while developing Communism outside of establishment politics; i.e., through ludo-Gothic BDSM according to our central tenets; e.g., through ironic Amazonomachia, emancipatory castle-narrative and the palliative Numinous, etc.

(original artist: William Kurelek)

The state and oppositional praxis have many moving parts that complicate the latter’s execution, especially since its working often generates friction amid praxial inertia. We’ll consider performing proletarian praxis under live, total conditions in Volume Three (first adumbrating its complicated Gothic histories in Volume Two). For Volume One, just understand that that my manifesto tenets, Gothic academic theories, mode of expression, oppositional-praxial model and synthesis roadmap (explained in that order) are all designed to function through Gothic-Communist iconoclasts re-cultivating a bourgeois Superstructure, which is what praxial synthesis ultimately is: thesis vs antithesis, canon vs iconoclasm; i.e., iconoclastic poiesis as a dark poetics/pedagogy of the oppressed intended to make workers more emotionally/Gothically intelligent, sex-positive and capable in terms of recognizing but also interrogating/negotiating power and trauma while instructing good play vs bad play during their own lives. This liminal, ongoing procedure occurs through their own creative output, which helps prevent future abuses by changing the socio-material conditions that lead to systemic harm; i.e., by telling beautiful lies that speak truth to power in “Satanic” ways, but also formulate and embody an active and unified front against state powers (and their monstrous, fetishized media, often with pornographic qualities) abusing all workers: sex-positive monsters that express worker identities attached to ongoing struggles, unresolved under capital and pinned by the boot of state enforcers. In short, we learn from the voiced oppression and lived trauma of others.

This abuse happens to varying degrees, but our monstrous empowerment demands intersectional, solidarized resistance; i.e., praxial synthesis amounts to the cultivated intuition that executes practical theory out of daily habits. Through what we make ourselves between ourselves, we achieve praxial catharsis through monstrous theatre as second-nature. Guided by sound theory as an instructional path leading away from systemic oppression, it’s something discussed less in Volume Zero because Volume Zero was primarily theory (though the camp map finale gave a brief example of camping canon between Blxxd Bunny and myself regarding systemic trauma; re: the ludo-Gothic BDSM prototype). Volume One aims to reduce said theories to a practical degree, upon which the synthesis roadmap will thoroughly consider trauma writing and artwork as things to synthesize through our bodies as monstrous-feminine (flesh is semantically loaded with fearful-dogmatic qualities that we can instruct workers away from using said bodies in a sex-positive manner). We’ll work towards praxial synthesis as we thread the manifesto, after which the volume’s second half considers its instruction towards catharsis); i.e., how praxial synthesis executes practical theory by cultivating good social-sexual habits that simplify and execute theory during oppositional praxis.

This extracurricular instruction/de facto education generally requires a “dance partner” to move with in harmonized theory before systemic catharsis can be realistically attained: while wearing costumes that express what we have in mind. The goblin is one such example, with sex-positive versions reclaiming anti-Semitic tropes and stigmatic language through complex social-sexual labor exchanges: between my partner Bay and I during our own attempts at praxial synthesis/catharsis with ludo-Gothic BDSM.

(exhibit 6b3: Model and artist: Bay and Persephone van der Waard. Bay is my partner and we make art together to express and interrogate trauma, rendering it visible during ludo-Gothic BDSM according to how we identify and self-determine. The goblin, then, is both my mascot monster for Gothic Communism, and the way that Bay identifies with as a monstrous entity that serves their pedagogy of the oppressed: the means to voice their trauma and their power with. Everything occupies the same space, including resistance and power but also class/cultural character in the presence of state abuse’s generational trauma; i.e., as something to overcome through mutual, informed consent and instructional love.)

Oppositional praxis during development reliably leads to liminal conflict and transition—especially in Gothic stories when oscillation and ludo-Gothic BDSM are expected. Part of the cliché is how a monster or parallel space’s praxial role in Gothic fiction becomes ontologically ambiguous during oppositional praxis; e.g., class allies/traitors and bourgeois/proletarian monsters, witches, zombies, etc. As Gothic Communists, we’ll have to learn to tell ’em all apart, but also relate to them from moment to living moment. While historical materialism remains a common introduction for separating traitors and co-conspirators—i.e., the dialectical-material study of monsters across the Gothic mode over space and time—these warring factors cannot and should not be separate from their social-sexual elements. To that, monstrous language remains utterly essential as we synthesize praxis within our own friendships.

This often has a Satanic function. As the “Notes on Power” essay from Volume Zero argues, the Satanic rebel speaks truth to power by telling beautiful, paradoxical and doubled lies that resist state control; re: to be “of the devil’s party” like Milton was (according to William Blake) but consciously so; i.e., conducting what the elite would consider thought crimes through dark poetics that are often more interesting (and fun/gender parodic) than blindly submitting to pre-existing authorities: facing one’s undead sensations and animalistic hunger while demonically shifting one’s shape, effectively offering up forbidden knowledge (of pleasure and trauma) when confronting one’s true self as anathema to the status quo under Capitalism. Utilized in this sense, Gothic poetics teach workers how to self-fashion and self-determine through subversive/dissident identities that, far from being controlled opposition, furtively educate audiences on how to question authority whilst forming out of oppressive, gender-troubled struggles against them; i.e., through trauma writing and artwork as a mode of survival and reclamation of one’s power through darkness visible reminding prudes that “Medusa lives!”

As my thesis also argues, “Despite their poetic nature, performance and play are an absolutely potent means of expressing thus negotiating power through the Gothic mode” (re: “The Quest for Power“). Bay embodies that as someone I love and want to depict the way that makes them feel most authentic, but also heard and seen relative to how they feel from day to day as an oppressed person who lives a highly Satanic life. A neurodivergent, non-binary and Indigenous cutie, they treat the term “shapeshifter” as something a paradox—less of something to turn into what never was, and more a revelation of their true self waiting to be shown to others who normally don’t have the eyes for it: a possible self tied to a possible world that loves and worships them as a god. “Playing god” includes playing with gods, and Bay is my god to worship, appreciate and love as equals in a highly plastic world. We constantly learn from each other while having fun together, our shared performance and play operating through Gothic poetics as an (a)sexual voice; delight and appreciation amid (for us) profound erotic euphoria. Doing so during ludo-Gothic BDSM constitutes an effective means of interrogating trauma mid-synthesis, but also negotiating with it; i.e., to teach workers confidence by using their bodies to learn with, but also demonize and play with inside immensely cathartic thresholds. They’re someone to dive into and enjoy while synthesizing praxis towards a better world one step (and delicious fuck) at a time.

(artist: Bay)

Onto “Mission Statement and Remediating Modern-day ‘Rome’“!

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About the Author

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

Footnotes

[1] Originally Sex Positivity was a single volume, thus would cite its own exhibits in parenthesis. As the books grew, however, exhibits were dispersed into different separate volumes, thereby making said system moot. Now that most of my book series is online, though, I can effectively cite an exhibit and its accompanying post; e.g., “(exhibit 43e2c1 from ‘Always a Victim‘).” This is a brand-new trend, and not one that will happen in my later books until I get around to their second additions.

[2] The agreement between Cuwu and I, which we struck in mid-2022, was that I could exhibit our material on my OnlyFans*—and by extension, promote it online and make money off it—provided I kept their real name out of it. To this day, I have honored our agreement, choosing to call them by their alias, “Cuwu,” instead (a nickname I gave them).

*I only ever posted one video of Cuwu on my OnlyFans, and generally don’t advertise it, but here’s a screencap:

(artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

[3] A reactionary element haunting Marxism since Marx and Engels; re (from “Making Marx Gay”):

Fascists tend to say, “make something great again,” arguing as they do for a return to greatness that is inextricably tied to a conservative imaginary past. Conversely, Marx and his ilk tended to look to the future to escape the ghosts of the past, except their banishment under Capitalist Realism has led them—as Derrida pointed out—to haunt language through spectres of the man himself: his nebulous, shapeshifting reputation. It is this version of Marx that we must contend with, because it is the one that we can transform out of the actual man himself as a complicated fixture of history.

To that, this brief reminder stresses something that my thesis discusses repeatedly and should likewise be kept in mind throughout the entire book: Marx wasn’t gay in the functional sense; he was to some degree homophobic, and bigoted in ways his epistolary correspondence with Engels reveals. And while I think it’s entirely worth noting that homosexuality and its formative history merit valid criticism insofar as men with power have often sexually abused children (which Foucault dubiously called “everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality [and] inconsequential bucolic pleasures,” notably lamenting their ending of, following the rise of the bourgeoisie), we must also remember that until the late 1800s gender-non-conformity was entirely synonymous with criminal activity (for men, because women and slaves weren’t legally considered people at this point) (source).

To it, Marx’ signature homophobia and anti-queer tendencies haven’t gone anywhere; they continue to haunt liberatory discourse among Marxist-Leninists punching down queerphobically against people—i.e., those who know more about these matters than they do; re: Bad Empanada making Stalinist arguments against me and my kind because of Marxist-Leninist nostalgia:

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

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

While pre-capitalist ideas do occupy Gothic-Communist pushes towards a post-scarcity world (re: the Wisdom of the Ancients recultivating the Superstructure), nostalgia towards said half-real past should never trump human rights, thus undercut development during ludo-Gothic BDSM; it should assist in development by undercutting the power of the state and its proponents—anisotropically reversing abjection during a revolutionary cryptonymy!

[4] When Zizek writes, “We can and should unconditionally support Israel’s right to defend itself against terrorist attacks” (source: “The Real Dividing Line in Israel-Palestine,” 2023), he’s essentially apologizing for the state model and its time-tested monopolies on terror and violence; specifically by endorsing Israel, he’s defending a fundamentally settler-colonial project, akin to supporting the Nazi regime’s right to exist while invading Poland but updated through modern-day proxy-war maneuvers (though the WW2-era US certainly expected Nazi Germany to abolish the elite’s enemies in Russia). The two-state solution is untenable because Israel is built on infinite military conquest; they decide who the “terrorists” are, then destroy them with extreme prejudice and impunity (thanks to American geopolitical support); e.g., GDF’s “It’s Official” (2023): “We are essentially seeing one of the worst bombing campaigns in human history. This is the crime of the century” and it’s being committed by the Israeli state and supported by privileged, puffed-up dickwads like Zizek (and politicians like Bernie Sanders or content creators like Natalie Wynn, aka Contrapoints [Bad Empanada’s “He Just Can’t Help Himself” and “Why Liberals Claim to Be Leftists“]).

[5] “Nor must it be forgotten that the author is a man of rank and fortune. Yes! the author of the Monk signs himself a LEGISLATOR! We stare and tremble” (source: Pressbooks’ “Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s review of The Monk“).

[6] The quote is ubiquitous, but consider the opening page for Alex Link’s “The Mysteries of Postmodernism, or, Fredric Jameson’s Gothic Plots” (2009) for a summary of it:

In the midst, of its definitive arguments, Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) pauses to consider the Gothic just long enough to single it out as a hopelessly “boring and exhausted paradigm.” The Gothic, he declares, is a mere “class fantasy (or nightmare) in which the dialectic of privilege and shelter is exercised” and it should not be mistaken for a “protofeminist denunciation of patriarchy” nor “a protopolitical protest against rape.” Although surprising at first, this condemnation is strategic in that it establishes the Gothic as Jameson’s critical other; the Gothic becomes an object of ritual sacrifice, imbued with those qualities in Jameson’s argument which are most discomfiting. […] If one regards Postmodernism as telling a story about postmodernity, its plot, taken as a whole, is curiously Radcliffean, in that it routinely presents the reader with postmodern objects meant to inspire anxiety before explaining them away. Jameson’s dismissal of the Gothic, in other words, resembles nothing so much as his own description of the Gothic, in “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” (1979), as a means of raising and exorcising an object of anxiety (source).

In other words, Jameson writes like Coleridge does—like a scared white boy but even more allergic to the Gothic mode, oddly emulating one of its most famous (and white) female authors (we’ll return to critiquing Jameson [and Coleridge] in the Demon Module’s “The Future Is a Dead Mall“).

[7] When I tried taking Lovecraft to task (“Method in His Madness: Lovecraft, the Rock and Roll Iconoclast and Buoyant Lead Balloon,” 2017), renowned Lovecraft scholar T.S. Joshi had a fit/refused to publish my work in his annual Lovecraft journal. Joshi seemed to dislike the mere suggestion that Lovecraft wasn’t somehow perfect as is—conveniently equipped to do what he did (according to Joshi) for his target audience, and that we pesky kids of today are just ignorant of his sublime genius. Puh-lease! If Lovecraft was “perfect,” you wouldn’t have New Weird/Next Weird authors like Thomas Ligotti, Jeff Vandermeer and China Miéville; producers like Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions and Lovecraft Country (2020); or developers like Red Hook Studios chewing Lovecraft up and routinely spitting out his racist, useless bones. Take what’s useful and leave the rest (without forgetting it).

This blog post (not a joke, even though it’s April Fool’s) is part of “The Total Codex,” a fourth 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.” The first promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “The Total Codex” shall do the same, but with Volume Zero/the thesis volume (versus “Make It Real” promoting Volume One/the manifesto, which I will release after “The Total Context” completes). 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 “The Total Codex’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Zero is already written/was released on October 2023! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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

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

Picking up where “Thesis Conclusion, Symposium and Segue” left off…

Written to mark the completion of “The Total Codex” promotion and release of Volume Zero’s 2025 re-release: with a second edition, this new foreword detailing my thought process editing version 2.0—i.e., tying ludo-Gothic BDSM to my entire book series starting with Volume Zero having coined the phrase—as well as listing many of the changes inside. —Perse

 

A 2025 Foreword: On Volume Zero’s New Edition Focusing on Ludo-Gothic BDSM

Marx argued that Capitalism alienates everything (and sometimes invoked the language of monsters); I argue it sexualizes everything as alien through the language of monsters. Per Hogle’s ghost of the counterfeit, the elite use capital to further the abjection process; i.e., to further profit through the constant Gothic fakery as haunted by a ghost of the counterfeit to attack: spectres of genocide, thus cop/victim. From the original into Pax Americana, “Rome” is full of dead whores and their pimps. Pushed off onto state victims “of nature” by so-called “thinking beings,” the usual benefactors enjoy their status quo’s heteronormative, Cartesian, and settler-colonial paradigm while capital persecutes whores like vermin chattel in and out of fiction, on and offstage; i.e., in between it and non-fiction, during liminal expression. On its surfaces and inside its thresholds, Medusa is always a victim under capital.

(artist: Romantic Rose)

The Earth, then, is a peach for the elite to carve, beat, mark and claim until the end of time, but every Numinous forebear yields smaller offshoots; i.e., a Medusa “in small” who personifies the abuser of the larger suffered by the smaller (and vice versa); re: a castle in the flesh to enact, be it body-like castles the size of moons or castle-like bodies mooning to gain a similar hypnotic effect. The Gothic, through castles, speaks using body language anisotropically and in duality during liminal expression; i.e., to meet different goals, including profit: as a cold and calculating matter of exploiting labor simply for being “of nature,” hence existing as something monstrous-feminine to arbitrate, then pimp (which goes beyond “female,” alone, to include anything not a white cis-het Christian European man to modular and intersectional degrees).

The oldest form of labor is prostitution, making the oldest labor struggle that of the whore versus the pimp as a theatrical exercise (with white straight women selling out during the Neo-Gothic period, from Radcliffe onwards): power is performed on the Aegis, including its paradoxes! And yet, monsters aren’t automatically good or bad; their function—of whether they serve workers or the state—determines by the flow of power (and similar variables) towards or away from workers. This, in turn, results in a dichotomy during oppositional praxis: as a dialectical-material exchange, one where canon versus iconoclasm/camp (or sex positivity versus sex coercion) routinely sees monsters existing inside-outside a given venue. From performance to half-real performance, and per the Protestant ethic, a whore is a monster and all heroes are monsters; the whore’s paradox is to have revenge against profit, achieving universal liberation (no Omelas) while the state pimps them as virgin/whore using varying degrees of monstrous language (the whore being the monomyth hero’s classic foe; re: the Medusa, but also her spawn, female or otherwise).

(artist: Nyx)

In short—be it a witch, vampire, goblin, or some other kind of monster attached to imbricating and arbitrary persecution networks (re: blood libel, sodomy and witch hunts)—the state’s moral panics (and their pogroms) canonically move money through nature, glutting the elite at nature’s expense by whoring it out during the Capitalocene; re: “Antagonize nature as monstrous-feminine and put it cheaply to work through bad-faith revenge arguments (reactionary or moderate).”

In turn, workers living in the Imperial Core’s shadow garner strange appetites (re: “A Cruel Angel’s (Modular) Thesis“): weird attracts weird and trauma begets trauma in monomythic recursion; re: the Cycle of Kings and Shadow of Pygmalion pimping Galatea until she either pimps herself (on a spectrum of preferential mistreatment and tokenized betrayals chasing different normativities), or must suffer those who take state pay to do state work (the Judas silver and ensuing crucifixions); i.e., divide and conquer nature with nature. Traitors are stupid, but they also look and sound like us: alien, albeit as undercover cops recruited from the home country more often than not!

Deception is a powerful tool, as are fear and dogma making “Roman” fools fall on their swords; i.e., including token examples; e.g., black skin, white masks. This includes inmates acting as guards! As such, assimilation is historically poor stewardship, and pushing into post-scarcity with pre-capitalist language requires recultivating a second-nature, society-wide degree of emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness (re: the Wisdom of the Ancients); i.e., to have the whore’s revenge against profit with ludo-Gothic BDSM through ancient forms of theatre (masks, shadows, and costumes, often of animals) revived in “ancient” doubles, thereby reversing abjection as a dialectical-material process with plastic social-sexual elements (re: the Base and the Superstructure)!

(artist: Pokkuti)

To it, these aforementioned appetites aren’t strictly a weakness, insofar as critiquing and shaping popular media (the vector for de facto [re]education) goes. Despite how trauma lives inside the body and all around us—and despite the Medusa canonically being a dark whore to punish by subjugating labor into state proponents during Amazonomachia till the cows come home (e.g., stories like Metroid, above, featuring the Amazon as the West’s oldest class traitor)—liberation and exploitation occupy the same space; i.e., a zone of darkness and play where canon can paradoxically be camped by subverting it through the self-same monster language: as not belonging to any one group. This is ludo-Gothic BDSM as I describe it (and the whore’s revenge; re: “Rape Reprise“), whose informed labor exchanges—from Frankenstein to Alien to Metroid to this book series and beyond—illustrate mutual consent by camping canon’s rapacious language to varying degrees; i.e., doing so consciously to develop Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism with! When defenders of capital look upon us, they look upon the desert of their own Ozymandian grave waiting to swallow them whole! From labor to land back, that is our whore’s revenge; i.e., by reclaiming violence, terror and monsters where they are normally used to harm us, subverting them with ludo-Gothic BDSM “when in Rome” to make empire stateless, classless, moneyless and raceless!

(artist: Bernie Wrightson)

On the Aegis, then, said devices become something to take away from state monopolies trying to exclusively extort nature upon said Aegis and its concentric veneers. They cannot (at least not forever), which means we can take what the middle class (and other state actors) project off onto their victims during abjection; i.e., an alien, fetishized “other” status (the dark criminal scapegoat; re: the Medusa) giving us power because they fear us and our bodies’ labor (sexuality or otherwise). To that, this volume writes, “returning and reflecting upon old points after assembling them is a powerful way to understand larger structures and patterns (especially if they’re designed to conceal themselves through subterfuge, valor and force). It’s what holistic study (the foundation of this book) is all about.”

Such is development; it’s ergodic, meaning Gothic Communism takes constant careful work (“non-trivial effort,” according to Aarseth) amid confusion to succeed—i.e., by synthesizing catharsis with various creative successes warping scapegoats into useful bogey(wo)men: to cultivate good daily habits, mid-praxis, that liberate sex workers (thereby all workers) under Capitalism through iconoclastic art (re: Gothic poetics)! We master theatre to recultivate what the elite can never fully control: the language of mastery and darkness, itself!

In turn, the Gothic is historically obsessed with fatal returns and dark reflection—not once, even, but endlessly and through disintegration and torturous effort (the rapturous, psychosexual embodiment of power and confusion, mise-en-abyme, to navigate): “to interrogate power, you must go where it is.” That is what the new edition for this thesis volume is trying to accomplish! By following its arguments into my newer books—and beyond them, into real life connected to said books—workers can humanize what the state tries to harvest in perpetuity without consequence: exposing the elite’s inhumane treatment of us through their shameless proxies; e.g., us demasking TERFs versus them demasking us; i.e., by reversing abjection through the revolutionary cryptonymy process (and friendlier hauntologies and chronotopes) during an endless chain of such things; re: the narrative of the crypt and cryptomimesis as much being rebels in disguise—playing with monsters to anisotropically liberate themselves in duality—as it is cops acting in bad faith to punch down with against those they demonize. Cops stab us; we “stab” ourselves in ways that showcase our own liberation putting “rape” in quotes (all the better to punch up against cop with, topping from below): “That all you got, little man?”

(artist: Nyx)

“When the Man comes around, show him your Aegis!” I envision this reversal as a matter of developing Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism; re: camping the canon through ludo-Gothic BDSM, which I introduce here alongside my extensive Metroidvania work but not limited to said work; re: it has its own body of work to consider alongside my usual playgrounds (which Metroidvania and Amazons/mommy dommes are).

As such, and in accordance with my 2025 rollout of a new promo series for Volume Zero (called “The Total Codex“), I’ve gone over Volume Zero from top to bottom; i.e., to inject numerous mentions and addendums regarding not just ludo-Gothic BDSM (expanding from 30 to nearly 200 mentions), but many other changes besides! Several of these addendums are substantial, including

• “Concerning Keywords/the Volume’s Age“
• “Two Years Later (give or take): Returning to My Thesis Argument after Five Books“
• “Concerning Rape Play: a 2025 Note on My Development of Ludo-Gothic BDSM“
• “Rage Over a Lost Penny” (aka the glossary of terms I coined for Sex Positivity as I wrote it; re: copied from “Paratextual Documents“)

Apart from those, however, I’ve also updated the series abstract and rear glossary. Besides those, various other changes have been made to Volume Zero’s entire manuscript—far too many to list here (totaling ~20,000 extra words and ~200 extra images), but often being mentioned and dated whenever and wherever they occur so you can observe them, nonetheless (e.g., a ton of changes/additions being made to the “camp map” finale, thanking Blxxd Bunny for their help).

And for anything I cannot mention in this book volume, I cite inside it pointing to my later volumes, instead. Each one has its own promotion series

• “The Total Codex“: The book promotion for Volume Zero/my thesis volume, which contains my series’ thesis argument (re: “Capitalism sexualizes everything”) and introduces/unpacks its complex theory.
• “Make It Real“: The book promotion for Volume One/my manifesto, which takes Volume Zero’s complex theory and simplifies it; i.e., as something to synthesize and instruct among ourselves.
• “Brace for Impact“: The book promotion for Volume Two, part one, aka the Poetry Module, which concerns the poetic application of monsters (with some historical elements).
• “Searching for Secrets“: The book promotion for Volume Two, part two/the Monster Module’s Undead Module, which concerns the poetic history of undead monsters (with some applicative elements).
• “Deal with the Devil“: The book promotion for Volume Two, part two/the Monster Module’s Demon Module, which concerns the poetic history of demonic/natural monsters (with some applicative elements).
• “All the World” (to be released): The book promotion for Volume Three, aka the Praxis Volume, which combines Volume Zero’s complex theory, Volume One’s simplified theory/synthetic model, and Volume Two’s monster history and application; i.e., as something foster our own creative successes of proletarian praxis with versus the state, which boils down to sex positivity (and liberation) versus sex coercion while developing Gothic Communism (with a huge focus on resisting tokenization; e.g., TERFs).

making citing them (and their individual book segments) a piece of cake! Online, they also exist on a separate Book Promotions page that includes: model interviews (re: “Hailing Hellions“) and all of the purple-and-green posters for my book series’ promo poster program! Here’s one example:

(artist: Angel Witch)

That being said, the full-size PDFs will remain on my website’s one-page promo for Sex Positivity (which includes a wide variety of promotional elements I have heavily expanded on and branched off from, since October 2023); the PDFs don’t update nearly as often, but still remain a good way to possess the bulk of my published material in one spot (and which you can easily navigate with Adobe’s bookmark system).

All this being said, I hope you enjoy this new second edition of Volume Zero; like Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, it was satisfying to return to, take apart and put back together after several years!

Your Commie Mommy,

—Persephone van der Waard, 4/1/2025

P.S., Yes, I know I released the new edition for Volume Zero on April Fool’s! To be honest, I tried to release it yesterday but midnight came and went (that and I think having it debut on April Fool’s is kinda fun)!

Onto Volume One’s promo series, “Make It Real“!

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About the Author

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

This blog post is part of “The Total Codex,” a fourth 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.” The first promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “The Total Codex” shall do the same, but with Volume Zero/the thesis volume (versus “Make It Real” promoting Volume One/the manifesto, which I will release after “The Total Context” completes). 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 “The Total Codex’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Zero is already written/was released on October 2023! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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

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

Follow the Sign: Thesis Conclusion, or “Death by Snu-Snu”

Inside his castle
There was a glorious feast
But inside his mind
Hides a secret beast
Is he mad? The King seems to laugh
And the bard still sings
And plays his harp (source)

— Daniel Heiman; “The Mad King,” Warrior Path’s The Mad King (2021)

(source)

Picking up where “‘Camp Map,’ the Finale” left off…

The Vikings of legend really liked to get drunk and fuck shit up (as do their ghosts of the counterfeit, now), especially when their king has his reign and then dies: blame the monstrous-feminine as “corrupt” and degenerate, then bury your gays (and other minorities). Our feted second half of oppositional praxis, iconoclastic/proletarian praxis (which is sex-positive) is the unacceptable rebellion’s uncontrollable opposition disguised as controlled opposition: the neatness of theatrical, thus scripted foils—the “jester” in the king’s court (which straight folk wear and trumpet like bad vaudeville). We’re the queer agent among you, but also the gay zombie rising from the grave (making everything just a little more fun)!

Like canonical praxis, iconoclasm uses the same aesthetics, bodies, linguistic tricks[1] (cryptonyms) and color codes, but interrogates power and negotiates its reclamation through irony and subversion, not brute force as the automatic approach (though rioting is “the language of the unheard[2]” and remains vital to developing Communism): collective labor action/worker solidarity but also gender parody as a powerful, oft-oral (thus difficult-to-suppress) means of using our bodies, labor and creativity to subvert the harmful gender norms prescribed against those who openly rebel; i.e., ironic action narratives that perpetually push back against canon’s unironic calls to violence, rape and war by transforming the bullseye into something the class traitor doesn’t want to shoot when rioting and other collective labor movements begin to solidarize and occur (making the cop no longer a cop, hence a class, culture and race ally): the figurative zombie apocalypse (more on this in the Undead Module’s “Bad Dreams; or, Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse“).

To this, Gothic Communists use their labor, creativity and bodies to create monstrous music, dance, play and sex that covertly and openly fight for basic human rights (and that of nature); i.e., oral and written contracts that weaponize Gothic counterculture to foster emergent gameplay/good play (descriptive and de-facto-educated abuse-prevention patterns). To summarize the “camp map,” we reverse the process of abjection and camp the ghost of the counterfeit, altering it into copies of hidden truths, not falsehoods, visible on the demonized surface of themselves: our lost histories and culture as previously destroyed by the state and its male action heroes/subordinates’ copaganda and material conditions working in concert to commodify our expression through porn and rock ‘n roll.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Note: Thought “death by Snu-Snu” is mentioned here in passing, we’ll talk about it more pointedly vis-à-vis Amazons in Volume One and Two (e.g., “Predators as Amazons” and “From Herbos to Himbos, part two“). There will also be more terms we introduce here, which we will unpack or talk about later in the book series across multiple modules and (sub)volumes; e.g., panopticon (which I discuss, on and off, in “Understanding Vampires“). —Perse, 3/31/2025

As our “camp map” also showed, our subversive Amazonomachia is “death by Snu-Snu” as camp, thus amounts to an emotionally/Gothically intelligent and active pedagogy of the oppressed often told through jokes to start movements (re: “a thing” such as “pussy on the chainwax”). It’s serious-yet-silly and that’s the point, but the point of the rainbows and glitter is proletarian praxis insofar as we function during oppositional praxis: to make the canonical language of war silly in a very gay way of interrogating pre-existing power and negotiating new variants during liminal expression; i.e., playing with power as a performative scenario to reinvent for various purposes:

“The straight castle was conquered by the fearsome gay warriors and everyone inside was made gay and had super butt sex. —the end!”

The above statement implies that murder, general mayhem and rape are functioning in ironic, playful forms instead of their presumed unironic-thus-literal ones: the rape of the princess, the burying of the gay (and other actual dead bodies—often “innocent, pure good” civilians and “guilty, pure evil” orcs on either side), and sacked castles razed to the ground, heads on spikes, cruel-and-unusual punishment, carceral violence, tilting at windmills, etc:

The townspeople had little hope
They were not ready for war
Fireballs make everybody die
And buildings collapse to the floor

The beautiful princess was raped
And taken to prison with cry
Angus McFife swears a mighty oath
“I will make Zargothrax die!” (source: Gloryhammer’s “The Unicorn Invasion of Dundee,” 2013)

There’s power in the “joke’s” ability to release tension. Except our praxis can’t be “blind” parody like Gloryhammer is (whose proud stupidity is a white, cis-het male privilege) because the marginalized are going to be in danger regardless if they are actively segregated or not (Jim Crow segregation vs Redlining[3]). Gothic Communism must endorse sex positivity at a systemic level, which requires making things as gay as possible within ironic gender trouble/parody and “perceptive” pastiche; i.e., the intersection of class-conscious character with genderqueer theatrics that rescue canonical bombast from the Straights colonizing us (thus themselves). This includes allegory and apocalypse within Gothic poetics.

One subverts canon with rainbow-themed “sound and fury” (above) as evocative perceptive pastiche/parody that is tremendously memorable and fun (who doesn’t remember “Time Warp” or Tim Curry from Rocky Horror?). It’s not just dialectical-material brawn, either (though it can be muscular) but the awakened and liberated Galatea dancing in the ruins of a decidedly “rockin'” castle of darkness (re: the danger disco) and whose rebellious re-seizing of the means of monstrous production amounts to stigmatized identities that evoke various proletarian ideals and tactics; i.e., our aforementioned Four Gs, or four main Gothic theories in their proletarian forms (which are essentially iconoclastic reversals to the same nouns during canonical/bourgeois praxis); as well the gender trouble and gender parody produced during “perceptive” camp (not “true camp,” which is blind) using genderqueer, often non-binarized (a)sexual orientation and gender identity/performance (-as-identity). All happen during our likewise aforementioned “creative successes” of proletarian praxis, specifically their subversive/transgressive liminal expressions’ Gothic-Marxist tenets.

From art to porn, all collectively demonstrate how Gothic Communism, when correctly performed, cultivates empathy under Capitalism as something to develop towards a better system; i.e, through and towards our “creative successes” and their proletarian outcomes (which the manifesto shall explore, but also Volume Three’s entirety). All become things to materially imagine as Satan or Galatea making their own sex-positive, culturally appreciative creations during Gothic counterculture. As spectres of Marx, these shadows of Galatea and their cryptomimesis cannot fully be ignored or destroyed by the state; nor can it be recuperated to serve capital and nothing else because counterterror is the power of the dark gods that resides within all our breasts, but especially the neurodivergent, disabled, and marginalized the elite forever want to exploit.

Nobody wants to be enslaved; you have to compel that through force, by raping the mind over time and en masse. For that to happen, the elite need apathetic/complicit soldiers, which the underclass can disarm by cultivating empathy towards the oppressed in the eyes of their would-be, often middle-class oppressors; i.e., as splendide mendax telling beautiful lies for proletarian purposes from our pandemonium reclaiming the monstrously canonical, monomythic language of stigma, bias, control, fear and hate, operating through cathartic power exchange and resistance to the status quo’s current harmful norms; e.g., black people reclaiming the n-word; women, the word “woman,” but also “bitch,” “whore” and many other sexist slurs; and queer people the word “faggot,” etc. Reclaimed, they can be expunged of harm as a prescriptive device, used instead to rewrite the “dead futures” of Capitalist Realism with “archaeologies of the future.” In turn, these “elaborate strategies of misdirection” help us escape the closet and create a collective rememory whose Wisdom of the Ancients aims to terrify crueler and less wise proponents of the canonical imaginary past. What monopolies they fabricate, we upset; i.e., by rising from the grave, dystopia, dark forest, sex dungeon, operating table, wiccan pentacle, torture chamber, conquered land, ghetto, flames of hell, corpse pile/offal, or infinite void.

A few closing points before we dive into the symposium: We will invariably discuss cis-het, male proponents (exhibit 63b) of the status quo throughout the book, but our transformative interest really lies more so in TERFs and other heteronormative cross-sections within tokenized canon; i.e., the class traitor’s assimilation fantasy that maintains the colonial binary by emulating white supremacy and toxic masculinity through internalized bigotry and self-hatred as a discipline-and-punish panopticon[4], one that perpetuates the status quo of dominating the monstrous-feminine—i.e., the rebellious slave or barbarian, effeminate meathead or thinking/feeling soldier, worker, athlete or statue essentially being property-come-alive and thinking for itself—through the rape culture of “prison sex”: acting like a man as something to perpetually watch over everyone else within and remind them of it. Not only are the terms “prison sex” and “Man Box” synonymous in this book; they’re performed by token minorities, including women but really anything that “isn’t a white, cis-het, Christian man” wanting to assimilate, thus occupy the guard tower. All functionally become a double minority relative to the power of their voice for the status quo, but also against the status quo in proletarian discourse.

White cis-het men are often, then, the Silent Majority precisely because the system does not require them to speak in order to give them relative privilege while also fucking them over. Meanwhile, cis women, gender-conforming queer people and other minorities are often duped into conflating colonial violence with “being heard” thus “doing an activism”; i.e., acting like white, cis-het, Christian men by lying to or otherwise misleading and brutalizing the underclass (making cis-queer people potential allies to gender-non-conforming persons when personifying war but just as likely their jailors).

This fascist ruse dupes potential allies into betraying thus alienating themselves from their comrades, then turning into monstrous impostors that blend back into the prison population to be able to kill for the state as needed (union breakers/strikebreakers); meanwhile their victims feel like impostors themselves for not fitting in/receiving violence from actual or de facto, patriarchal authority figures (traditionally fathers, husbands, grandparents, siblings, boyfriends and coaches, teachers, cops, war heroes, movie stars, rockstars, etc; but female/token abusers historically harm others after having been harmed themselves to prevent future abuse—e.g., the patriarchal matriarch or Uncle Tom, exhibit 38b2). The basic outcome is impostor syndrome, which gender-non-conforming persons pointedly call gender dysphoria and body dysmorphia—i.e., the guilt, shame or self-hatred of feeling like an alien, impostor or unironic monster according to one’s heteronormatively assigned body and gender and naturally assigned biology and skin color as stigmatized things to reclaim from fascists/neoliberals as deliberate obfuscators who, themselves, operate through bad-faith mimicry and systemic privilege, thus abuse.

(artist: Crow Perch)

Clearly these things must be challenged during oppositional praxis, and we’ll try and do so through engagement with the binary of class war and its parent dichotomies as simultaneously black-and-white (for didactic purposes, simplification) and gradient/grey-area (for nuance). However, because this book focuses on the pedagogy of the oppressed, I’ll be focusing far more on trans, intersex, non-binary and drag queen/king (crossdress) forms of subversion and regression (and their intersections with other forms of marginalization; e.g., people of color, Indigenous Peoples, religious minorities, the disabled, and ace/neurodivergent persons, etc) than cis/neurotypical allies or class traitors.

Furthermore, our nuanced and complicated subversions during ludo-Gothic BDSM aren’t something I expect to go down without a fight; indeed, we’re often blamed for taking the loudspeaker away from the “real biological women” of first wave and second wave feminist movements (which have fascist/centrist ties), Afrocentrists, or the LGBA‘s “real queers”; i.e., the steadfast treat nuance as apocryphal, as Bay puts it, having an almost knee-jerk response to new information that threatens the way they’ve been taught to see the world. But fools should not be suffered because doing so is segregation, which leads to their destruction and ours. If only it were so simple as waiting for fascists to self-destruct by following the leader into their own graves, harming no one else in the process; i.e., the fascist approach to herd mentality marching themselves off a cliff like scapegoats while the idea behind sheep “herding” is, according to Bay (who loves behavioral ecology), evolution from a natural-social process, not a capitalist one; i.e., meant as safety-through-solidarity by putting the young and vulnerable in the middle.

Like Matthew Lewis’ cottage of bandits-in-disguise, this isn’t a waiting game against polite opponents; it’s one of life and death, pitting us against the ruthless skullduggery and cloak-and-dagger fog of war produced by a cruel and perfidious foe—one who would like nothing better than destroy us all for self-promotion and personal gain driven by cold, hard economics. Catharsis demands systemic change, not the scapegoating of the bandits and their overlords (or the individual authors of these things). This being said, they should absolutely be outed at every possible opportunity lest they become normalized, thus free to kill us with impunity behind rainbows (which we must grab back, below): “An enemy has only images behind which he hides his true motives; destroy the image and you break the enemy.”

This concludes my thesis argument and argumentation through camping canon with ludo-Gothic BDSM. The last fifty-or-so pages of the volume are more conversational, meant to unpack and provide additional explanations and/or definitions I wasn’t able to include or fully unpack in the thesis proper/”camp map.” I’m doing so because, while they aren’t in the companion glossary (or the preface or manifesto from Volume One), I still feel these remain incredibly important to examine, but it shall be more laid back; i.e., not essential reading but still worth your time. —Perse, back in 2023

(artist: Ken Kelly)

Symposium: Aftercare; What Is the Gothic?

“I am the lizard king. I can do anything” (source).

—Jim Morrison; “Celebration of the Lizard: Not to Touch the Earth,” on The Door’s Waiting for the Sun (1968)

Note: I originally wrote this symposium to be an extension of a much-smaller thesis statement (which now constitutes the lion’s share of the volume). I have left the writing largely as-is, and it may seem redundant; but this tracks with the symposium as I originally envisioned it: to unpack and embellish complex ideas that I wasn’t able to fully explore in my thesis statement (essentially marking the start of what we will be doing throughout the rest of the book), except now there’s even more of a cooldown period. Put simply, there’s more to recover from and reflect upon as we ornament and extrapolate. I had thought about leaving the symposium out, but I honestly think including it will be a fun experiment. While its ideas have since been hashed out more concretely in the thesis argument, here, they will be more scattered and fanciful; this should allow you to apply my thesis argument to their “soupier” conversational format: to visit the symposium after having read the volume based on its more dialogic argumentation (which is a good test for the kinds of brushes with praxis you’ll experience “in the wild”).

In essence, putting the symposium at the end is a reversal of the usual approach—”write symposium, then book,” instead being “read book, then symposium.” As you recover yourselves, I suggest trying to reflect on the idea of power as paradox and performance, wherein said performance’s games, rules and play remain incredibly potent ways of interrogating and negotiating power yourselves; i.e., through liminal expression’s doubles thereof, existing inside the Gothic mode’s shadow zone: its monsters, castles and BDSM. Power and resistance occupy the same space during oppositional praxis. Use them to question what is present and recreate the world through your own identities and struggles to be free from Capitalism, Capitalist Realism, and its numerous proponents and enforcers (and remember that words and images carry power. If they didn’t, the elite [and class traitors] wouldn’t police and abuse them like they do). —Perse, back in 2023

With my thesis proper and “camp map” concluded, the hardest labors are done, and I hope the various “holes” of your psyche aren’t too sore. Now we can let our hair down like Medusa and play in the gayest of fashions: with our cocks and clams out. Time for some aftercare! What is Gothic (consider this food-for-thought as we proceed into the next volume)?

As such, this symposium is a series of seminars (about five if you divide the ~17,500 words into ~20-minute parts: or 150 words/minute). As a disorganized tangent, it will be unpacking various ideas further than my thesis argument could—e.g., “What is Gothic beyond just the making of monsters?” (we’ll get to that when we discuss Chris Baldrick and Tanya Krzywinska). The rest of the volume, then, is dirty and cluttered like an attic, so I can’t really explain its progression as I usually would in this book’s chapters and subchapters. Instead, I will simply try to prioritize things that feel most relevant or important that also happen to exist between my thesis argument and the preface/manifesto from Volume One. So let’s reexamine something vital to its execution that also strikes my fancy: poetics.

(artist: Jean-Baptiste Regnault)

To be clear, as I am a ludologist, Gothicist, anarcho-Communist, and genderqueer trans woman, poiesis wasn’t simply a structure for my pedagogic narrative, like Mikhail Nabokov thought of Jane Austen’s novel, Mansfield Park (1814), in Lectures on Literature (1980):

all talk of marriage is artistically interlinked with the game of cards they are playing, Speculation, and Miss Crawford, as she bids, speculates whether or not she should marry […] This re-echoing of the game by her thoughts recalls the same interplay between fiction and reality […] Card games form a very pretty pattern in the novel.

Nor was it echopraxis (“the involuntary mirroring of an observed action”) according to the kind of “blind” pastiche[5] that plagues canonical thought and proponents of capital; i.e., an empty kind of “just playing” sans parody that stems from what Joyce Gloggin in “Play and Games in Fiction and Theory” (2020) calls “a ‘traditional’ understanding of mimesis” (which we repeatedly eluded to earlier when we mentioned Plato’s cave/shadow play during the thesis argument):

Mimesis or imitation therefore, as one form of play, is an essential element of poiesis, or the “making” of art, which in turn is instrumental in creating what some now refer to as possible or imaginary worlds, that is, fiction.

This traditional understanding of mimesis as an essential element of poiesis places mimetic play at a more distant remove from reality than even the shadows in Plato’s famous allegory of the cave from book VII of The Republic. Related in the form of a dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon, book VII allegorizes the human perception of reality, likening our reality to shadows projected on a cave wall. These shadows are perceived by human subjects, shackled around the ankles and neck and unable to turn their heads to see the puppeteers who cast shadows on the cave wall before them, which they mistake for reality. In other words, what mortals see and know is merely shadow, and this is what mimesis mimics — not reality.

Importantly, this version of mimesis and reality has long informed the marginalization or trivialization of mimetic arts as “mere play,” “just games,” or insignificant ludic imitations of reality. Likewise, the marginalization of play and its rejection as a serious object of study are motivated by the suspicion that play and ludic cultural forms are treacherous and capable of rendering us the dupe (source).

My own mimesis challenged these traditions. As I consumed and learned from older artists/thinkers (and their odes and homages), my own Galatean creations started to change, as did my way of thinking about the process of making them; my countless allusions and allegory became a far less traditional and far more subversively and transgressively playful mode of engagement with others—not just my family in the world of the living but also those long gone, echoing their arguments from beyond the grave: cryptomimesis, or the playing with the dead through perceptive pastiche and reclaimed monstrous language that is then used in place of the original context; e.g., queer people calling everything “gay” (space Communism) or black people using the n-word for everything versus white people wanting to do the same thing in an ignorant or hateful context.

The same basic idea applies to monstrous language and materials as things to reclaim from their original carceral/persecutory monomythic functions (which we will thoroughly examine in Volume Two) or from covert/dishonest regression towards this old medieval sense of compelled BDSM and lack of consent/trust; e.g., witches as traditional scapegoats (exhibit 83a) versus regressive “cop-like” variants (exhibit 98a3) that iconoclasts subvert through various sex-positive BDSM rituals, ironic peril and Gothic counterculture (exhibit 98a1a); i.e., as a general practice that turns the death fetish or state officer/thug into something other than a fascist-in-disguise through transformative context (e.g., subversions of Shelly Bombshell or Zarya, exhibits 100c2b and 111b). This Gothic-Communist paradigm shift reclaims the unironic imagery at all levels of itself—of actual, non-consenting and uninformed enslavement, torture and rape through their associate handcuffs, leather uniforms, whips or collars; but also insignias and color codes: green and purple as the colors of envy and stigma (exhibits 41b, 94a3) but also black-and-red as pre-fascist (the Roman master/slave dynamic), anti-Catholic dogma (exhibit 11b5) eventually applied to 20th century fascists and Communists during and after WW2 in videogames (exhibit 41i/j) and other neoliberal propaganda (Vecna’s D&D Red Scare schtick: exhibit 39a2). All exist together in the Internet Age along with their assigned roles—as subverted in liminal, transgressive, formerly exploitative ways (exhibits 9b2, 101c2) that often yield a campy (exhibits 10a) or schlocky flavor married to whatever unironic forms they’re lampooning (exhibit 47b2). This exists in duality and opposition as a rhetorical device—a conversation, but also an argument.

For example, you’ve probably noticed said duality in how I alternate between labels or play around or within them when it suits me (which is often). The reason is to accommodate their natural-material functions. Language is fluid in its natural, uncoerced state; there is no “natural order” of the state’s design, no “transcendental signified” that “just happens” to favor the profit motive. That is installed and enforced through a particular belief system and portioning of codified space and behaviors useful to the elite. Instead things flow in and out of each other quite organically.

Regarding this organic relationship, I’ve made a little heads-up guide. It includes a few useful reading-comprehension pointers when exploring my work, which I’ll also include in Volumes One, Two and Three (indented for clarity):

We’ll be code-switching a lot throughout this volume when talking about some very chaotic things. So try to remember that function determines function, not aesthetics. Also remember your parent dichotomies—bourgeois/canon/sex-coercive vs proletariat/iconoclasm/sex-positive—as well as your various synonyms/antonyms, orbiting factors and related terminologies that follow in and out of each other during oppositional praxis; i.e., the productive idea of power as paradox and performance, wherein said performance’s games, rules and play remain incredibly potent ways of interrogating and negotiating power yourselves; i.e., through liminal expression’s doubles thereof, existing inside the Gothic mode’s shadow zone: (sequenced here in no particular order):

the essentialized connecting of biology (sex organs and skin color) to gender and both of these things to the mythic structure as heteronormative/dimorphic, thus alienizing (to weird canonical nerds and everyone else) in service of the state/profit motive > a lack of dialectical-material analysis > willful ignorance/”rose-tinted glasses” to achieve class dormancy through blind “darkness visible” > Capitalism’s monomyth/good war > Beowulf, Rambo > the infernal concentric pattern/Cycle of Kings and Shadow of Pygmalion > carceral hauntology/dystopia (myopic chronotopes/Capitalist Realism) > good cop, bad cop or cops and victims > assimilation > class traitor/weird canonical nerd > Man Box/rape culture > state espionage and surveillance/complicit cryptonomy > babyface/heel kayfabe > war hauntology > subjugated Amazon/mythical copaganda (female Beowulf, Rambo) > TERF > unironic ghosts of the counterfeit and the process of abjection’s symbols of harm > profit, rinse and repeat

versus

the separation of gender and sexuality from each other and both of these things from the heteronormative mythic structure; i.e., Gothic Communism’s monomorphic subversion of all of the things listed above through class war as enacted by our own weird iconoclastic nerds > spectres of Marx > deliberately active, class-conscious/campy “darkness visible” and dialectical-material scrutiny > shadow of Galatea > pro-labor espionage, revolutionary cryptonomy, emancipatory hauntology/parallel societies and chronotopes > reverse abjection > the pedagogy of the oppressed > reclaimed symbols of harm > post-scarcity

As a point of principle, I’ve left out some stuff and these lists in the heads-up are asymmetrical; also, I’m not going to try and include or string everything into a grand necklace/dichotomy that I then trot out each and every time a given topic comes up; i.e., the oppositional praxis of canon vs iconoclasm (as explored during the body of the thesis volume). Instead, I’m using them from a position of internalized intuition that I expect readers to learn, including relating them to parallel parent dichotomies like sex-positive vs sex-coercive, canon vs iconoclasm, bourgeois vs proletarian, as well as their orbiting factors—e.g., iconoclasm emphasizing mutual consent, informed consumption, de facto education, descriptive sexuality and cultural appreciation as things to materially imagine (often through ironic parody and “perceptive” pastiche) in subversive/transgressive Gothic poetics that challenge their canonical doubles during oppositional praxis.

If you can’t parse all of this intuitively then I suggest you familiarize yourself with the thesis proper and “camp map” from the thesis volume (which is available on my website; click here to access my website’s 1-page promo, which contains all relevant download links/information regarding my book).

The above heads-up guide should be useful, I think, as the organic nature of existence and human society and language is aptly symbolized and demonstrated by chaos. It also, in Gothic circles, elides the organic and inorganic in ways that confound the Cartesian Revolution’s chief aim: divide and conquer, map and plunder the land and its inhabits, all while quaking at the witch as an object of revenge (in both directions) or the pumpkin rotting after the harvest as intimations of Capitalism’s own superstitious mortality. The occupying army is both weak and strong.

(exhibit 1a1a2b: Artist: Karl Kopinski. “Insect politics” isn’t just society treating people like bugs to optimistically squash in favor of the state. However, this is something I write about in “Military Optimism” so I wanted to share it, here:

“Specialization is for insects,” Heinlein famously wrote, and his characters weren’t always military. But they could do anything asked of them because they were competent. Competency isn’t just a mindset, or a character’s natural ability. More often than not, Heinlein’s heroes had access to better equipment—weapons, to be sure, but also the power suit, which served as an extension of their organic bodies (which, in turn, were a hive-like extension of the state). Heinlein canonized the power suit in 1959 with Starship Troopers, which Cameron required his actors to read when filming Aliens. By doing so, Cameron was emulating the US military, which had already added the book to their reading list. Hardly surprising considering Heinlein’s novel preached military values as essentialized, spearheading them through the mind of competent soldier narrator, Juan Rico. 

In this future, there is no room for messy human politics. Just “insect politics.” While so-called “actual” bugs are demonized as something to attack, the desire to openly emulate them is societal. Occasionally this desire rises to the surface. In Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915), Gregor Samsa turns into a “monstrous vermin” only because his family and friends are primed to scapegoat him. Society has already made them insects. Likewise, Heinlein’s Mobile Infantry is a giant military machine, operated smoothly by competent men who can’t think for themselves. All according to plan.

And yet, while competency is a headspace, the suit makes the soldier. Otherwise, they wouldn’t use it. Cameron illustrated both points—competency and weaponry—by having Ripley use her power loader as an improvised weapon to defeat the Alien Queen. The irony of Aliens is that Ripley and the marines are just as bug-like, from a military standpoint, as the xenomorphs. But Cameron’s military optimism—injecting Heinlein into Ridley Scott’s Promethean, astronoetic[6] universe—is a kind of cognitive dissonance that ignores the comparison. Undeniably attractive, this myth of the realized individual is used by the state to trick the next generation: You can succeed where others have failed. In truth, these recruits are expendable assets serving the will of the state—a state whose eventual collapse is inevitable.

In the meantime, Ripley will do anything to survive. She puts on the suit and evolves, becoming a bug to fight a bug. But she was already a “bug,” attacking the xenomorphs with unparalleled hostility. It’s worth noting that she wasn’t a soldier (“I’m not a soldier”); she’s a civilian whose hawkish attitudes mirror the desire for revenge fostered by Americans under Reagan’s rule (source). 

Hollow Knight takes an even more heretical position than Ripley [or Samus] do; re: as Competent Women versus Competent Men, in the monomyth [supercops]. Pax Americana is half-real, in this respect; i.e., whitewashing genocide on and offstage through centrist pearl-clutching claiming self-righteousness, itself occurring through the usual white Indian and white savior arguments within the Shadow of Pygmalion’s Cycle of Kings and infernal concentric pattern punching Medusa during mirror syndrome [which translate into the Rambo and Star Wars problems’ inability to solve Capitalism’s inherent, built-in flaws by scapegoating them; e.g., “Policing the Whore].

The state is not automatically good during Metroidvania, then; if anything, its touted “superiority” is checked by madness and decay during the return to a natural order following the king’s death: the hideous flagellation and bondage of the king’s greatest knight when faced with the wrath of the secret Medusa, the Radiance operating as the Madwoman in the Attic; i.e., of the patriarch’s mind, but also the kingdom as an extension of their mind having decayed and spilling out of itself in smaller offshoots[7]: the spirit of revenge inside a rotting corpse proliferating the necrobiome in smaller fragmentations of itself—i.e., the kingly insects disperse and are invaded by the queenly fungus viewed as unwelcome, deathly and parasitoid [the Archaic Mother treatment not dissimilar to the Alien Queen or Ungoliant]. Like a glowing mushroom, her deathly blossoms spill out everywhere in profound, eerie splendor that the king’s gambit seeks to contain and deny like the lepers from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish—i.e., the tower of the watcher hammering into the earth like a spike, encapsulating the queenly infection as a kind of female disease/wandering womb: “Girls have cooties!” Again, it’s honestly rather fun being Athena’s Aegis, seeing men lose their minds over something as regular and trivial as death.)

Escape from abuse goes hand-in-hand with transformation, but follows a kind of mythic structure in oral traditions carried over into written and/or theatrical forms. For example, in classical Greek myth Apollo pursuits Daphne to rape her and she, to escape his rude courtship, turns into a tree. Escape, for the Gothic Communist, is to transform less into a stupid tree (which can be chopped down) and more into something that terrifies our foes beyond the capacity for rational thought, thus losing the capacity for enslavement (of themselves and us to the same system); to “make things gay” is to follow a basic function of language in the natural-material world, one that spreads an idea through chaos and symbols of chaos: death, decay and continuation that together represent “transformation” mid-senescence and postmortem.

As a necrobiome full of decomposers, metamorphs and state-supplied stigma, our goal is to make others like us, who embody, practice and represent what we stand/fight for—i.e., to turn other people into monsters sympathetic to/emblematic of our plight and lost/imperiled humanity through context first and foremost, not raw aesthetics. “Become one with the mushroom and the insect,” my dudes. It’s all from a sample of one; we’re all workers from the same clade; i.e., “butterflies and crustaceans with a common ancestor grouping us in the same clade, pancrustacea” (Clint’s Reptiles’ “Butterflies Are Crustaceans, But It Gets Worse…” 2023). As usual, the dividing factor is class/culture war. Cartesian stigma, phobia and bias are meant to demonize one side to feed the profit motive, but the nightmare for Communists can take on a joyous function divorced from said motive: the “death” of metamorphosis, of changing shape into something new relative to our oppression challenging, thus incentivizing us to do so. In turn, when divorced from overt, functional morality and value judgements, organisms enter a stage of constant evolution—of change from one thing into something else. To this, general-place protagonism vs antagonism codifies (for humans) in all the usual canonical visual language (black and white) of violent theatre.

However, in the hands of Gothic Communism, the same theatre enters a different realm than one of prescribed morality onstage; i.e., subverting state-mandated action—of force and might-makes-right—through theatrical appeals toward equality that undermine their perceived sovereignty. Nothing is superior unto itself over anything else. While the question invokes longevity and the health of an overall ecosystem, environment or society that connects us to each other and the rest of the natural-material world, the deciding factor is still violence, but of a particular kind: class war and struggle. Here, the pen can be as mighty if not mightier than the sword in this respect. In turn, the duality of nightmare offers up a counterterrorist antagonism of nightmare and protagonism to either side of a dialectical-material struggle: workers pushing back against us-versus-them simply by existing and expressing ourselves as an identity defined and shaped by state interference and its imposed failure on workers’ manufactured inability to understand how things work as a unit in opposition to state forms. This entire dialog operates at cross purposes with the state, who opposes our mere existence to satisfy the superorganism’s profit motive; the structure and division aren’t simply prioritized, but valorized.

Whether through general language, monstrous gender identities/performances, slurs, BDSM, fetishes, and kink, sex positivity is defined through informed, mutually consenting power exchange/informed consent, appreciative irony and liminal struggle within systemic abuse—i.e., to combat alienation/imposter syndrome by reclaiming the hammer and chisel from the patriarchal sculptor, but also the emblems of state abuse conveyed through various Gothicized poetics: chains, hate labels, put-downs; batons, knives and other killing/subjugating implements; and unequal positions of power from our “heroic” conquerors through negotiated, informed consent; but also to protect us from regressive torturers in disguise: the badass, “strict” death fetish or mommy dom (strict or gentle; “good” or “bad”; black or white in roleplay language) presenting as a safe liberator but really just a centrist, thus fascist TERF (service to capital is fascism, which centrism regresses to in crisis) wearing a mask on a mask on a mask through the same language/aesthetics used by us.

The dialectical-material context is different, but not self-explanatory. It must be taught and this happens through revived oral traditions, music, dance and other performance art (which are historically far harder to control than written documents) indicating a “lost time” or culture that “used to exist”—the paradox being this culture, if it did exist is long gone and being revived into something not-quite-the-same, and towards a new state of existence that has yet to exist on this Earth: Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism. It won’t be a perfect world, but it will be one without systemic violence: no sin, dysphoria/dysmorphia, or scapegoats, no harmful Jedi or Sith thus no dead younglings, just monsters (Nietzsche was wrong—when fighting monsters, you must become one yourself: a gay-anarcho Commie double of the state monster). We’ll all be queens making our own monsters and media in ways that won’t lead to systemic harm (unlike the state, which harms everything by design); i.e., acclimated to chaos and revived, sex-positive medieval language as things to skillfully swim around inside, being well-adjusted towards doing so through taught behaviors that recognize just how Gothic Capitalism is (in a sex-coercive, concealed-genocide sense) and how Gothic queer revolution can be in (a sex-positive) response. The language is there because the medieval power and struggle never left; this includes camp as an effective foil then and now. We have always been here and we aren’t going anywhere without a fight.

(exhibit 1a1a2b: Artist: Xenokun. Heteronormative war and rape are everywhere in monomythic canon, whose canonical xenophobia/xenophilia is useful to the state; i.e., through the creation of a perpetual enemy to slay in the drive for profit through power fantasies geared towards the soldier class [cis-het men]. The classic scapegoat of the West is monstrous-feminine in some shape or form, meaning Beauvoir’s “woman is other” can easily be non-binarized and applied to AMAB [assigned male at birth] persons through the Pygmalion effect [the chain-like creating of a colonial binary through canonical art]. If this sounds weird and nerdy, it is, but weird canonical nerds will defend their canon nonetheless; in turn, weird iconoclastic nerds must defend our own devilish creations that invariably challenge the status quo through irony as a creative chain: the Galatea effect—i.e., of a rebellious genderqueer queen embodied through Gothic counterculture. Such an idea is death to canon, meaning “death as something to execute” against what is different from the heteronormative standard’s chase of profit by funneling endless war, rape, and genocide through nature [money is privatized theft].

Simply put, the vice character is queer-coded[8] and the riddle of the Sphinx is implacable death; i.e., there is always a womanly [non-manly thus fearsome and ignominious] death waiting at the end of the patriarch’s road. An inability to cheat/conquer death becomes spiteful, with the king’s vengeance marking the monstrous-feminine as the ultimate ancient enemy that must be hunted, trapped and killed. Meanwhile, Capitalism sexualizes everything to harmful, dimorphic extremes. Those known to do sex work [or sexualized work] are chained to it like Prometheus his rock, defined by sexual labor as a marker of difference, of classical punishment in this sense. They are not men, but non-men that potentially embody Medusa’s vengeance; i.e., as dream-like, drugged, and nocturnal/chthonic symbols of death, chaos, and confusion that threaten the status quo of powerful men who haunt the hypermasculine after death as fatherless failures whipping themselves inside the guard tower [e.g., the hollow knight]. These monstrous-feminine spectres must not only be contained, but dealt with—normally through genocide dressed up in moral panics, rape epidemics and drug wars [except leave it to male thinkers to either code the beyond as awesomely male, like Edmund Burke and Lovecraft tend to do with the Sublime and cosmic nihilism; or as female, thus warranting death from male forces. Either fantasy is male-centric].

Medusa was Barbara Creed’s chosen source of female fear in The Monstrous-Feminine. Catalyzed by Freud’s essay “Medusa’s Head” [1922] writing about the Patriarchal bogeywoman, the Archaic Mother is Creed’s characterization of Medusa as post-Freudian, seeking to comment on women beyond their universal portrayal as victims in Western canon: their monstrous, ancient function. Obviously we want to comment on queer liberation and Communist development during our own poetic Amazonomachia. So while sodomy and the monstrous-feminine are to be surveilled, fought and assimilated/killed, they each come with a variety of double standards regarding these treatments that we can subvert in campy ways. For example, whereas the female Amazon or Medusa can be “beheaded,” tamed and bred/made to feminize war in ways useful to the state, the beheading of the male sodomite is seen as “instant death” [a very cliché male fear] under Capitalism: the societal death of the eunuchized slave as someone who has less-and-less rights under Cartesian dominance. Male “breeders” are expendable, but also overt threats that inseminate the woman with “evil babies” that must be euthanized through the male parent as someone to duel. While the vagina dentata can always be beheaded/defanged then fucked, there is nothing to be done with the male sodomite except cross swords with them.

Yet the monstrous-feminine also lends itself well to camp, supplying performers with the means to generate a cutesy-creepy uncanny in ways that make it far less torturous/stigmatic and far more fun, even strangely sexy [the proverbial “weirdest boner”]:

[artist: top-left, bottom-left, top-right and bottom-right: Jessica Nigri; top-middle: Johannes Sadeler; bottom-middle: Salem Hysteria]

Camp can yield gender trouble and gender parody in equal measure—camp, in the case of the guy watching Pyramid Head ride four-eyes like an ass [mimicking the “power of women” topos vis-à-vis Phyllis and Aristotle] and parody for her and her performer friend making trouble/having fun; e.g., camping the canonical-if-at-times-tangential “Nazi” of the occult, psychosexual BDSM aesthetic [with bonafide Nazi camp being its own musical/comedy hit[9] that never seems to age]. Likewise, Pyramid Head echoes the hauntological medieval as darkly torturous in a cryptomimetic, “Catholic miracle” sense, which can rescue pain from a variety of falsehoods: the false dichotomy of “pleasure and pain,” the false equivalency of “pain as sexual” but also non-pleasurable, the false stigma that pain is automatically harmful, thus has no cathartic potential. Trauma begets trauma and the chase of the Numinous can be medicinal in relation to lived trauma. Even so, it can just as easily be a burlesque show as kawaii vs kowai [cute vs scary] for genuine play and delight in an asexual sense with psychosexual overtones [the color swap] instead of internalized ones. Simply put, these aren’t pointless novelties or exclusive “hard kink medicine” for legit mental scarring, but also deeply fun [and subversive] exercises in the genderqueer creative spirit. Given the destructive nature of capital, all overlap through the same symbols and theatre as something to reclaim from the bourgeois monopoly on these things.)

A world without sin realized through Gothic poetics might seem novel or sui generis to many (and to an extent it is, in relation to what the elite encourage us to engage with) but Jodey Castricano’s Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing is decades old (2001), Derrida’s Spectres of Marx even older (1993) and Marx’s eponymous writings on spectres predating them by over a hundred years: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living” (1852). And the allegory of the Gothic as a class of beautiful lies whose “archaeologies”/elaborate strategies of misdirection are not simply decades older than Marx; when Horace Walpole anonymously wrote the first Gothic novel during the start of the Neo-Gothic period (1764), his deliberate combination of the Ancient Romance and the novel as a story of everyday experience are, themselves, inspired by the paradox of allegory through Milton’s “darkness visible” (nearly another century back in time, to 1667), while the broader idea of allegory and the hidden truths behind shadowy illusions dates back to Plato (375 BCE).

To that, the recent telling of the Gothic lie—one that adumbrates a hidden, tenebrous truth beyond the illusions of the cave—has an important lesson that is equally old (e.g., Ridley Scott, whose own lies we’ll cover in Volume Two, exhibit 51a): those within the cave, thus chained to its illusions, will attack and kill outsiders for being disruptors to a perceived order of things. This shadow of fascism, Pygmalion, and patriarchal tyranny is monomythic, the skeleton king exclusively competing with the noble king by pitting their combined soldiers against Communism inside a destructive, deceptive loop my thesis argument calls “the Cycle of Kings*/monomyth (again, the two operate in tandem, promising younger men/tomboys the chance to not just assimilate but become kings themselves through violent conquest). This aggregate hostility behooves the Satanic rebel of the Miltonian tradition, then, to possess a cunning and “game” ability to weave beautiful, xenophilic lies (disguise pastiche) that can be seen as “just games,” pulp fiction/rock ‘n roll** or “mere play” by one’s potential murderers (much of which constitutes Gothic media as an emerging countercultural force/spirit contained inside a widely consumed mode since its inception under Capitalism as a rising force on the global stage); i.e., with demonic poetics as ostensibly “empty” or “neutral” to avoid not just being criticized, but attacked on sight and executed for actually being in opposition to the state’s xenophobic status quo and tendency to aggregate against symbolic shows of solidarity from labor forces perceived as monstrous-feminine; e.g., the hysterical woman, the black male rapist, the back-stabbing Jew and man-in-a-dress as infantilized offshoots of a dark non-patriarch: the spawn not just of Satan as a feminine chaos resisting Heaven’s sovereign, but Lilith as the demonic broodmother whose literal or figurative womb exemplifies the classical double standard, “woman is other.”

(source: Stephen Coles’ “‘U.S.A. Surpasses All The Genocide Records!’ Poster and Fact Sheet,” 2016)

*Some added notes on the Cycle of Kings: While this pertains to Western canon and dogma at large, I should hope that the parallels to America’s establishment politics are obvious; i.e., good versus evil framed as Democrats versus Republicans—with fascists, centrists and neoliberals conveniently united against the big bad: Communism (conveniently forgetting their ally “Uncle Joe” from WW2, aka Stalin and his cutthroat brand of Marxist-Leninism; since the formation of the CIA in 1947, working with Communists on the global stage has been anathema because it goes directly against elite interests; re: William Blum’s Killing Hope.

We’ll look into Gothic-Communist methods for combatting their aims and how both sides have evolved during the Internet Age (e.g., David Michael Smith’s Endless Holocausts: Mass Death in the History of the United States Empire, 2023—which we’ll examine in Volume One). For an exhaustive look into this anti-Communist hegemony from Bretton Woods to early neoliberalism in the pre-Internet Age, though, please consider Blum’s book, which covers the history of CIA interventions from 1945 to 1994! Something else to keep in mind is that, while the Cold War was sold to Americans as ongoing and relatively bloodless, this was a lie (GDF’s “There Was No ‘Cold’ War,” 2023); “cold war,” then, became a theatre into neoliberal Pax Americana that hid the brutalization of the Global South through America-vs-the-world kayfabe, displacing violence to personifications of war that disassociated the entire bloodletting behind a series of exchanges between cartoonishly archaic pugilists (all for profit on every conceivable register, of course)—an arms race whose sanitization of monomythic war is all that most (white, cis-het) Americans know. The so-called “real thing” becomes its own kind of myth that they cannot see, yet is glorified as “real” nonetheless (whereas Communism is a myth that could never be).

Meanwhile, the whistleblower’s “effeminate” pushing away from war (and infinite military expansion) often starts as a military figure themselves: Edward Snowden, George Lee Butler, Howard Zinn, etc. Weapons of state terror like the nuclear bomb, spies and other methods of controlled strikes and coercion against an American target is historically complicated by weapons of terror used at cross purposes; i.e., for the elite to break up, thus prepare target areas for invasion, occupation and exploitation, and for the oppressed to hit back with stolen ordinance, but also their own theatrical agents of counterterror. Behind the romance and the perfect portrait of the white, hopeful and loving family—the American flag as a pearly castle—is, in truth, an irredeemable site of state power and exploitation, around which are littered the endless fields of outsider corpses and blood. Consider how, in one war alone, post-WW2 America outpaced the Nazis at “their own game” during Vietnam (above) when in fact, the Nazis were inspired by the Americans doing it, if not first (e.g., Great Britain’s Irish experiment leading into the revival of Rome being a continuous project since its oft-marketed but greatly exaggerated “fall,” the horrors of the modern nation-state being foreshadowed by Neo-Gothic fiction displaced by the British author to the imaginary 15th century) then at least far better at past settler colonialists at maintaining a genocidal system: one where money flows through nature. This American outpacing of past imperial powers has only continued to be the case; i.e., with shadow war/total war exploding under the neoliberal state-of-affairs to cannibalize much of the planet for the elite.

In truth, the American and European Enlightenment shared ideas and practices, including Cartesian thought as the genocidal domination of nature as something to kill, cut up and name after capitalizing on it: mad science. The Founding Fathers genocided the Indigenous Americans and documented everything about them through a white perspective, then celebrated themselves as gods to be worshipped by white Americans moving forward; Napoleon invaded Egypt, after which he founded the Institute of Egyptology… and murdered everyone for France, but more importantly, for Napoleon as de facto god-king. Either case was a project of vanity that Mary Shelley lampooned with her “Modern Prometheus,” Frankenstein. It was a rare and vital voice from the oppressor group as not aggrandizing the cause of genocidal “progress.” For example, Christopher Nolan’s masturbatory Oppenheimer (2023) continues the embarrassing trend of apologizing for the Great Men of Science (a trope illustrated by Heinlein’s Competent Man trope); and TERFs are just feminists acting “like men” in respect to that patriarchal system; etc.

**Some more notes on the pulpy, rock ‘n roll nature of the Gothic: Gothic counterculture is generally “buried alive” inside the ghost of the counterfeit (again, the false copy of the imaginary barbaric past; something Dale Townshend insisted to me that Jerrold Hogle should have written a whole book about but never did, so I guess I’ll be doing it for him) as something to reclaim through the Westerner’s attraction to it despite its abject framework (which presents sex as not just unironically violent, but combative, torturous and married [the war bride] to the fascist aesthetic of death; i.e., through uncanny depictions of sexualized battle with a monstrous-feminine “other”: the Amazonomachia as I have previously defined and shall expound upon further, exhibit 1a1b). Try to keep this in mind whenever we discuss popular modes of “devilish” media like rock ‘n roll/heavy metal, but also myths and legends retold in Gothic novels, pulp magazines and “cheap” pleasures obsessed with “Satanic” cartoons/monsters as the embodiment of moral panic (e.g., goblins as little mischief-makers that are often paradoxically celebrated and fetishized for their musical mayhem); all are tied to the Cycle of Kings/Shadow of Pygmalion as a fight to keep the public’s Gothic imagination both asleep and dumbly consuming the same old dreck.

By intoxicating said public with potent mixtures of abject xenophobia and xenophilia that serve the elite, the state dupes workers into fearing Pygmalion’s foil, Galatea, as monstrous-feminine chaos that must die purely because it threatens the authority and hegemony of the “king” (and his agents) as an essentialized ruling body. The trick isn’t to abstain from these linguo-material devices at all, but to use their incredibly commonplace paradoxes and theatrical depictions to make new connections that assist in our gradual emancipation and continued liberation by copying old proletarian context; i.e., the slave rebellions of a former time. This happens by staying awake and alert through our rock ‘n roll/monsters et al as “perceptive” in ways that, while certainly not new, are applied in new situations that echo old ones within an ongoing system (the LGBTQ+ movement in the Internet Age under neoliberal Capitalism vs the slave rebellions of previous centuries before the Internet). Doing so will always be perceived as monstrous-feminine “terrorism” because it is not with the Man and the West (which is manly and “enteral”); it is against them and all they stand for and must be destroyed: beheaded, but also assimilated, thus genocided against through segregative triangulation arguments and procedures (divide and conquer).

 

(exhibit 1a1a3: Artist: Smz-69. “Well ain’t that cute—but it’s wrong!” Traditional female strength, even in hauntologized forms, is generally sexualized in ways “correct” male iterations are not: the genitals and sex organs are stressed in a pin-up style that, when irony is not present, becomes yet another endorsement of the status quo: “Beings who identify as women must appear strong in a particular way—as soldiers for the status quo who appeal to the Male Gaze in semi-correct forms: the poster girl of war who either looks soft and feminine, but carries a gun, sword or heavenly mandate; or looks, thus acts like a man against the state’s enemies; i.e., the she-Rambo as a fulfillment of nerd sex.” This concession weaponizes the incorrectly masculine, “butch” body as something that, if it doesn’t look like a woman, can at least do a man’s job to protect women who actually fit the damsel appearance; but Amazons within the 20th and 21st centuries often do look partially like damsels—i.e., the partially feminized broodmare/pretty princess. In heteronormative circles, this “pornstar” schtick is commonly ephebophilic, or constitutes a kind “courtly love” law of attraction towards the teenage body that is sexually nubile but emotionally immature, thus exploitable [though pedophilic examples of forced maidenhood are compelled by fascist regression—something to consider when we example moe, ahegao and incest in Volume Three, Chapter Five].

Likewise, even if her personality doesn’t match the “Barbie doll”/cheerleader look that her body conveys, it’s still traditionally cultivated to serve men who demand the woman play dumb as the sexy Valkyrie [with the doll look meant to convey but also encourage passivity and, at times, literal immobility and vapidity]. Within irony and gender parody such concepts can be subverted, but quickly moves away from gender-conformity and cisness is general. Sex positivity is also defined by mutual consent as not being visually immediate nine times out of ten. The context of any monstrous-feminine image, then, must be interrogated through dialectical-material scrutiny. This goes for cis allies, be they straight or queer themselves [cis-queer “bears,” exhibit 21a2a], but also our own content as gender-non-conforming persons [non-binarized femboys, exhibit 91c].

[artist: Top-left, middle-left-side and top-right: Nat the Lich; top-mid-left and far-bottom-left: Didi Lune Studio; mid-bottom-left: Lewdlings; mid-bottom-right: The Unclean; Lucid-01. “Death” is popular code for the female servant as “asleep”—both dead to the world but also fetishized with an aesthetic of death, the medieval and the inanimate as a potent means of subverting a coerced “virgin/whore” position into a cathartic one.]

To be crystal clear, the pornstar/”doll” look isn’t automatically a bad thing. Indeed, enjoying the look or subverting its harmful history through ironic BDSM is perfectly serviceable among iconoclasts: deliberately performing like a doll, puppet or sleeping/unthinking “victim” in figurative or literal ways, exhibit 41g2; puppy play as doll-like, exhibit 51d3; creating consent-non-consent in our own art, exhibit 98a1a; or otherwise emulating the “swooning” function of vampirism in ways that aren’t immediately harmful, exhibit 87d; or exhibiting the Goth doll look, mood or vibe [exhibit 9b2] through thematic rape play performed by couples wearing masks and outfits of a particular look that evoke death and rape as things to subvert, exhibit 101c2 [we Gay Communists like sex, including the guilty pleasures, fetishes and clichés that make up the Gothic mode]. However, if it doesn’t express mutual consent in a visually obvious manner, then it’s ontologically “ambiguous” in that respect. Keep this in mind as we explore liminal expression throughout the book.)

While we do spend a great deal of time reclaiming psychosexual things in this book, the reclamation of “torturer” linguo-material devices is somewhat arbitrary. For example, I could theoretically try to reclaim “Pygmalion” as an embodiment of cis allyship. That’s technically what I’m doing but the label is still a flagship device that should, in my humble opinion, put its chief aim/persona front and center. Mine is the liberation of the monstrous-feminine from its TERF retooling as an instrument of settler-colonial self-hatred—my self-hatred. As something to reclaim, it’s a battle standard within class war that prioritizes what I think is most valuable: humanizing the abject, the wretched, the female/feminine and their sex-positive potential from a strictly reprobate, subservient existence. So while I could treat “the Shadow of Pygmalion” as maybe someday yielding that hypothetical good king that Aragorn and Luke Skywalker never lived up to, this is a centrist trap I’d prefer to avoid.

Also, while we do discuss genuine allies that critique Man Box culture, I’m not terribly concerned with rescuing the image of the Patriarchy from its own colonializing history. I would not do so any more than I would trumpet my status as an atheist, Marxist-Leninist and feminist to whitewash those movement’s failures. Even though I am an atheist and feminist in function, I’d rather be called a Satanist/Gothic-Communist because one, it sounds way cooler and two, it falls on the side of those who are routinely persecuted by the righteous: the monstrous-feminine as a rebellious Galatean Hippolyta, Athena and Medusa, etc (atheism is historically moderate, thus bigoted against minority groups and feminism has fascist roots, etc).

In doing so, I’ve taken a hard stance, not a half-measure; there’s no whitewashing or apologia to be given towards older forms of activism that, to be frank, tend to “play ball” with state power, thus invariably regress back towards them (“Ever do you desire to appear noble, like the kings of old.”). This being said, the assimilated sit within the monstrous-feminine as enslaved, thus forced to adopt a Patriarchal worldview of themselves. I’m far more interested in dismantling their doubling of the Man, de-assimilating the monstrous-feminine as “brainwashed” before setting it once more on its proper course: towards Communism, albeit through the Gothic mode as a democratic, grassroots movement (with help from the middle class and unlikely allies. Tip your sex workers, my dudes; stripping is not consent and fuck the frat-boy/chudwad adage, “No means yes, yes means anal”; i.e., the only yes to exist is “yes” from both sides). —Perse, back in 2023

In other words, no matter how vague they seem, our spectres of Marx utilize viral, monstrous-feminine aesthetics during remediated praxis to offer a subversive, even transgressive hauntology and cryptonymy that reconciles with the status quo’s illusory past and tumultuous gradient of coded stigmas

• the outright “sex is dirty” argument
• “some sex is dirty [e.g., ‘church tongue’ vs ‘porno tongue’]”
• “the image of dark sex is used to exploit workers”
• “the dark sex object/death fetish can be reclaimed, subverting canonical dogma about sex”

that produces our nightmare whose rememory of all the lost dead generations weighs on the brains of the living. The state cannot tolerate this, will aggregate with whomever they can to prevent slave rebellion wherever it occurs; pound-for-pound, the solidarity of a given labor movement is always met with hyperbolic violence, state solidarity and draconian countermeasures.

This can be outright police violence, but also assimilation through age-old compromises in the shadow of police violence (thus rape as something to heal from; re: Volume One’s “Healing from Rape”); i.e., that make champions of the cause turn heel or lose heart in the face of overwhelming adversity and division: the exorcism of the spirit of rebellion in favor of a Capitalist possession achieving class subjugation, fatal (fascist) compromise and centrist perpetuations of never-ending conflict. It’s the satisfaction of appropriative tension as a useful theatrical device the elite can use to disarm the appreciative tension of slave and labor revolts fighting for equality within their pedagogy of the oppressed: reaching spectrally out of the ancient past into “ancient” forms (from Medusa, onwards) that are constantly “rediscovered” per Hogle’s ghost of the counterfeit to further or reverse abjection (thus profit vs nature as monstrous-feminine). “Caesar” vs Medusa, Mary Shelley and Marx, it’s a real ghost battle (re: Amazonomachia but also cryptomimesis—fighting with the dead and, by extension, all monster types)! Silence is genocide and sometimes the only voice (and violence) we have to send back at our enemies is the one we leave behind in their wake. Haunt them!

(artist: Chin Likhui)

Beyond ghosts and other monsters, Sex Positivity was also written and illustrated based on many lengthy—and dare I say perennial—arguments and discussions between friends, family and enemies. Indeed, their collaboration (whether intentional or not) was essential to many of this book’s ideas. Teamwork, mindful consumption and reclamation is very much the point of good proletarian praxis. Through Gothic Communism, we workers can be mothers to the world that raise good boys and girls; trans, intersex and enby persons—our little class/culture warriors who bring the struggle and the fight to the streets of Gothic imagination: an ongoing creative process that uses xenophilic artistic expression to critique (thus restructure) capital during linguo-material labor exchanges between workers operating in conscious solidarity against state xenophobia.

There are four points I wish to make about this last sentence, as they pertain to phrases that will come up repeatedly throughout Sex Positivity‘s remaining three volumes. First point: while the word “Gothic” requires some clarification, I will not attempt to reduce it to a singular type (this book is holistic, remember). We’ll elucidate “Gothic” in our second point, but first I want to discuss iconoclastic monstrous invigilation as subversive or transgressive. Like “Gothic,” the words “art/porn” are something that—while difficult to define in clear, uncertain terms—nevertheless have a tenacious brand image attached to them that is often Gothicized: you’ll know it when you see it (so familiar am I with both that I completely forgot my own idiosyncratic expertise, choosing near the very-end of this book’s generation to actually define them for other people); the same goes for monsters and what people like/dislike as a challenging means of “inkblot interpretations”—i.e., regarding sexuality and gender as policed but also challenged within competing dialogs about power and resistance, but also pleasure and pain (a false dichotomy given pain can be pleasurable unto itself, but also victims rewired to experience physical pain—even outright abuse—as “pleasurable”; e.g., the rape victim’s orgasm), dominance and submission, as liminal forms of dialectical-material monster art/porn.

As such, vague and confusing labels like “good monster” and “bad monster” pop up everywhere, occurring relative to the “demon lover” as an ambiguous performative threat—i.e., of rape play according to the idea of “acceptable forms of discourse” as also being in conflict, happening in relation to oppositional forces that either uphold the status quo as xenophobic or attempt to alter it by xenophilic means (humanizing the scapegoat). Arguments, then, about what is acceptable to show in one’s own exhibit invariably come into conflict with the artist’s desire to express their own message and heal from their own trauma. Doing so does not disrespect or otherwise disregard the trauma of others provided the gallery is curated and labeled; i.e., “There be dragons” or some such disclaimer/trigger warning.

For example, Baldur’s Gate 3 actually has “vulva options[10]” in its character creation screen (an idea borrowed from Cyberpunk: 2077 the videogame [2022] and its Rainbow Capitalist approach, which borrowed it from Skyrim mods [2011, exhibit 84b] which borrowed it from Second Life [2003] which borrowed it from Shadowrun, Mage: the Ascension and Cyberpunk: 2077 and other cyberpunk-themed TTRPGs, and so on…). The idea is marketed, thus patently sold both as adult and divisive, suggesting a line drawn between videogames, sex education and conservative values as challenged by “pretty orcs” (which goes against the Tolkien power fantasy of a racialized other for heroes to destroy on their settler-colonial quests disguised as fulfillment, power tripping and all-around escapism). As Jon Ramuz notes, the debate is nothing new relative to videogames as an ongoing exhibit for monstrous, anthropomorphic bodies that a divided public is constantly expected to curate, but also enjoy/endorse in different ways:

If your interest in Baldur’s Gate 3 derives from a general interest in fantasy RPGs then you might be surprised at how adult the game is […] But if you’re coming to this game as a player of Dungeons & Dragons, who wants a digital simulation of their favorite TTRPG, then it will be completely unsurprising to you that the game features adult themes (source: “Baldur’s Gate 3 Genital Options,” 2023).

In response to people asking questions/framing the studio’s approach as “liberal” (ibid.), the developers replied to Kotaku:

You can choose between a penis or a vagina, as well as pubic hair options. According to Dubrovina, the decision to add this option didn’t stem from the inclusion of sex scenes in romance subplots, but rather because the team decided to make underwear a piece of equipment you would obtain throughout the game, customize, and wear. She explained that underwear is an extension of the character customization as a form of in-universe expression.

“The question arose, ‘what happens when you take it off?'” she said. “At first we were like, ‘you know, maybe nothing’s gonna happen. Maybe we’re gonna have another underwear mesh under it. Who cares? But then I started thinking about it, talking about it, and we realized that for some players, it’s just another way to represent their identity” (source: Kenneth Shepherd’s “Baldur’s Gate 3 Aims For RPG Fans’ Ultimate Character Creator,” 2023).

(Meanwhile, the game’s bear sex scene is, I guess, the unspoken “elephant in the room”; it’s not zoophilia—the “bear” is actually a druid—but the cheeky animism in-game does brush up against an uncomfortable current reality: the word “zoophile” has the added social definition as defined by real-world criminal behaviors against non-shapeshifting bears and other equally non-sentient creatures that zoophiles abuse. The joke in Baldur’s Gate 3 is not an endorsement of that, but poking fun at the whole ludic-paramour system …and possibly being an obscure allusion to the Canadian bear-sex novel, The Bear—Marian Engel’s 1976 controversial capitalization on Canadian-Indigenous animism involving ritualistic [and highly figurative] sex with bear-shaped gods; this idea can be seen around the world and comes up in Gothic fiction from a Western perspective: Tuunbaq from The Terror [2018] as a xenophobic, mish-mash embodiment [exhibit 48d2] regarding misunderstood, but also lost Indigenous perspectives—i.e., relating to animals and nature in a sexual way without the settler-colonial shame, guilt and cultural baggage of Cartesian thought. To be clear, the Indigenous approach wasn’t prescribing actual sex with bears, but illustrating a human tendency to compare animals and their partially humanized virtues to human-animalistic behaviors: “You fuck like a bear!” [exhibit 52]. This idea of the animal and human as interlinked isn’t even exclusive to the West’s colonies; even Chaucer’s Miller did this in The Canterbury Tales [whereas centuries later Super Troopers (2001) made fun of the idea of bear-fucking quite thoroughly].)

(source: Maijin Obama’s “The Doogie Fight Club – SF6 Avatar Battles,” 2023)

Furthermore, the developers wanted their bodies to look attractive (in a pin-up sense), or at least semi-natural (a paradox, I know):

“My personal experience with most [slider-based character creators] is you kind of customize it, it takes you a lot of time and effort, and then a lot of times it kind of looks the same in the end,” she said. “So we wanted to avoid that. And if we would make sliders, we needed to make it into something that would be truly unique and wouldn’t look the same.”

According to Dubrovina, Larian isn’t married to taking this approach for all of its games, but they felt the approach worked well for Baldur’s Gate 3 and, she said, it kept custom characters from looking “mediocre.” / That crafted look for each race, hairstyle, and accessory means that there aren’t really “ugly” custom characters. This isn’t Street Fighter 6 where players are making a bunch of weirdos. And indeed, even as Dubrovina repeatedly clicked the randomize option in the character creator, each hero with different accessories, colors, and other options looked believable (ibid.).

There’s something to be said about “realism” enforcing a settler-colonial standard (history is written by the conquerors) that engenders body dysmorphia/gender dysphoria as a kind of “impostor syndrome” for the oppressed and oppressors alike (re: white women and eating disorders); but also gender parody as non-Vitruvian (re: Street Fighter 6, 2023), which then dovetails into broader conversations about gynodiversity (exhibits 52f and 68), androdiversity (exhibit 91b2) and intersexuality (the xenomorph, exhibit 51a); but the fact remains that the public’s beauty standards exist within avatar creations that are tooled by developer expectations (which are informed by their own ideas about beauty as supplied by the natural-material world around them).

Even so, this doesn’t stop sex-repulsed people from responding with a gratingly sex-negative question: “Why, though?” So, I’ll call that like it is: standard-issue gender trouble and (often) white fragility. This begs the Socratic response, “Why not?” as a means of establishing gender trouble and parody as legitimate activist stratagems (not an invitation to be force-drunk hemlock[11]). As this supposed hypothetical is, in truth, based on a real exchange that I had about the game, I decided to not treat it as rhetorical, but in true neurodivergent fashion wanted to give it an honest answer (with my partner Bay’s help; thank you, muffin):

(source: Kotaku’s “11 Minutes with Baldur’s Gate 3‘s Character Creator,” 2023)

To be clear, it’s fine if the exposed vagina in art/porn isn’t someone’s cup of tea, but videogames—especially those in the Internet Age—are a public space, a forum/galley to some extent. This means the rules of such places also apply to videogames (and other mediums); i.e., they’re an exhibit that isn’t curated to cater to a single group’s vision. If someone is sex-repulsed, that’s a valid consideration, but it should always be raised in ways that aren’t sex-negative. To that, sex-positive galleries shouldn’t have to compromise their sex-positive, xenophilic vision to meet a smaller group’s needs if the exhibit is about showcasing naked monster bodies in a sex-positive way.

Furthermore, putting the vagina in the closet when male genitalia are plastered all over everything is a modesty argument, often used by moderate individuals conflating their own sex repulsion as transcendental; they feel vulnerable when they see someone else’s vagina, but are probably acclimated to the cock as everywhere or the breasts as a commonly adjustable feature of avatar cosmetics. To include one but not the other is arbitrary and harmful, especially when the precedent of the game invokes sexual and gender expression to begin with. To exclude a particular morphological identity from the game is segregation, which generally will have a cis bias; players should be able to represent themselves however they want: Big Titty Goth GFs or Big Booty Goth GF with a girl cock! So I ask people who would want to prevent that, “Why do you care if that’s in-game?”

Applying this concept to Baldur’s Gate, if someone doesn’t want to use the genitals option in-game, that’s perfectly fine, but discouraging its inclusion as an option altogether—just because Baldur’s Gate is a popular game that plays around with private parts ontology despite them being a highly regulated site of trauma for many ace people—is frankly regressive (and also ignores the sexual nature of the Baldur’s Gate series since its inception; e.g., paramour options). Yes, sex-repulsed people being triggered by exposed genitals is understandable; but their feelings about their own genitals doesn’t extend to other players within a shared world any more than it does in real life (the relationship, here, is half-real). This isn’t John Lajoie’s “Show Me You Genitals” (2008, below—the vicious historical-material cycle of tragedy and farce oscillating in public discourse at large); gender expression through the human body isn’t even automatically sexual. So no, people having the option to express themselves in a nudist sense with their Baldur’s Gate 3 avatars isn’t you being forced to also “play doctor” or look upon someone who wants to have sex with you.

Put differently and in regards to Sex Positivity as a whole, it’s not up to the invigilator to manage their gallery to meet regressive, sex-negative standards; if the game-in-question provides inclusive options that represent a change in the paradigm shift troubling to creepy reactionaries fantasizing power abuse

Beat a woman to death with a mace so I could steal her valuables. Used a revive scroll and them gaslit her into thinking I was the hero who saved her life so now she is indebted to me… (source: Reddit, “The Steam Reviews for this Game Are Something Else,” 2023).

or even ace people, frankly that’s their problem (the option towards being ace, or at least not having genitals in videogames, is certainly nothing new); it’s not being done to offend others and even ace people need—and I promise this is coming from a place of love, my ace comrades—to manage their expectations while realizing that monster identities, especially genderqueer ones often are sexual and conveyed through nudism. Love it or hate it, them’s the breaks (although this book is largely about sex-positive Gothic expression, this doesn’t preclude asexuality at all. We will thoroughly explore ace options in Gothic media, too). Nudity and monsters have always been political, but this has to occur on our time, not that of moderates (versus overt reactions) telling us how to do our activism for us; we’re not doing this for just ourselves, but fighting for a better world for all—a post-scarcity world where nudity isn’t automatically a sexual act, sin doesn’t exist, and people can be more open about their sexuality and gender without feeling vulnerable, fake, criminal and/or exposed in fear of reactionaries killing them and aloof, smug moderates turning a blind eye or prioritizing their own victim complexes. This requires imagining that world ahead of time, which requires having thoughts that will be considered sinful and anathema by the elite and their proponents. Depending on what identity is being imagined, the nature of such imagination amounts to the committing of thought crimes and heresy (secular or theistic): the imagining of rebellion as something to reach and instill in the nation’s youth by poetically reifying it within the material world.

As you can expect, confusions, concerns and disputes invariably abound (especially for all you “boomers” out there who don’t play videogames), which brings us to our second point: the “Gothic” being a common point of contention as something that historically remains difficult to define that nevertheless is plastered over everything and used off-hand for centuries according to aesthetics whose ownership is equally imperiled among different media types. In orthographic literature, for example, Chris Baldrick writes in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (2009):

The term “Gothic” has become firmly established as the name for one sinister corner of the modern Western imagination, but it seeks to work by intuitive suggestion rather than by any agreed precision of reference. There are several difficulties of usage involved in the term itself, of which the obvious today is the incompatibility between the literary and architectural senses: whereas “Gothic” in architectural contexts refers to a style of European architecture and ornament that flourished from the later twelfth to the fifteenth century, it is used in its literary and cinematic senses to describe works that appeared in an entirely different medium several hundreds of years later. A term thus applied simultaneously to the products of two such widely differing ages (to say nothing of the cultural gulf between Chartres cathedral and a sensationalist magazine story) would seem to require some qualification attached to it; and, indeed, it is the sensible practice architectural historians use to distinguish from the Gothic of the late Middle Ages the Neo-Gothic or Gothic Revival style of the nineteenth century. In a more logical world, we might have learned to adopt a clearer designation of this kind for the “Gothic” of modern literature and cinema; but of course, it is far too late to undo our inherited confusions, and even if we were able to do so, we would only run up against further difficulties that render “Neo-Gothic fiction” or some such nomenclature just as unsatisfactory” (source: my printout copy given to me by Dale Townshend at MMU, complete with grad-student notes scribbled all over it).

In videogames’ far more recent insertion into the conversation, Tanya Krzywinska determines in “The Gamification of Gothic Coordinates in Videogames” (2015):

I began this work with an intuitive sense that there are vast variations in the effective, and indeed affective, uses of Gothic in games, and as work for this study progressed, that sense has intensified. Definition is therefore no simple task, especially considering that Gothic has spanned such a breadth of mood, time and location. As Fred Botting notes “[t]he diffusion of Gothic forms and figures […] makes the definition of a homogeneous generic category very difficult” (1996, 14). In his discussion of the uncertainty in scholarly definitions of the Gothic, David Punter writes that there is a “significant resistance to canonization” (2000, ix), suggesting that there is no one text that substantiates Gothic. It is therefore largely agreed within recent scholarship on the topic that Gothic is brimful of vertiginous, acute tangents and perplexing ambiguities (source).

My own commentaries on “Gothic” per my Metroidvania work and coining of ludo-Gothic BDSM focus on camping canonical spaces (castles) and monsters; both expand on ideas neither author bothered with in their own overspecialized commentaries.

Dedications aside, Baldrick and Krzywinska (and other Gothic or ludic scholars I cite throughout the book) are predominantly white accommodated intellectuals who remain utterly unequipped to write about the inherent queer struggle of the Gothic as something to constantly reclaim from the status quo as a fascist-neoliberal entity from the late 1970s onward—i.e., through my own diverse area of studies that fused the Gothic together within videogames as an extended conversation between novels or cinema, but also beyond* what intellectuals were, are and will be still be saying about the former regarding the latter as “Gothic” among digital, Internet-Age media; e.g., Medusa or Amazons doubled within oppositional praxis, to be used by queer agents on a gradient of resistance against, and oppression by, bourgeois proponents—so-called “TERF Amazons” or “TERF Medusas**” like Victoria de Loredani (an Italian TERF—eat your heart out, Giorgia Meloni[12]) from Charlotte Dacre’s 1806 Zofloya (exhibit 100b2) or James Cameron’s Ellen Ripley (exhibit 30a): war bitches whose “rabid, feral” nature is on a shorter leash/timer (due to the euthanasia effect requiring they be put down faster once Capitalism enters decay). Including sex work, all inhabit a poetic whole within a larger subversive conflict I wish to comment on, and contribute towards, in meaningful ways that go far beyond academic flag-planting by actually educating and helping workers directly (to alter linguo-material conditions and relevant social-sexual attitudes through dialectical-material poetics). Worker solidarity is a holistic enterprise conducted by workers, first and foremost. Try to keep that in mind moving forward.

*Alluding to the title of my 2018 master’s thesis: “beyond the Novel or Cinema, and into Metroidvania” (source), which includes reinvestigating my own research years later (exhibit 1a1a1h2a3b).

**More than my thesis argument already has, we’ll return to TERF monsters and the monstrous-feminine (as regressive and subversively progressive) often. Both elide with hauntological ideas like “phallic woman” and “demon lover” (in coercive, unironic demon BDSM vs ludo-Gothic BDSM, which the Demon Module shall return to and unpack; re: “Summoning Demons“); i.e., as things to subvert, then endorse within the Gothic mode in new, harmless forms; e.g., with mommy doms, monster-fucking and consent-non-consent as married to labor[13a] vs canonical rape pastiche. There’s also assimilation fantasy vs legitimate rebellion through Amazonomachia/Amazon pastiche as symbolic of class struggle through subjugated/subversive doubles: the war mask, uniform, weapon and weapon-like, athletic (or at least capable/”built”) body as performances that, far from canceling each other out per the centrist axiom, continue in opposition for or against the state as something to wrestle out from under its iron thumb. Because the state historically personifies itself through hauntological bodies that express war, lies, death and rape in unironically fetishized forms that simultaneously perform all of the above, these variants exist to victimize the ironic monstrous-feminine during oppositional praxis. Simply put, a state fetish is a coercive device, one that frames iconoclasm not simply as “incorrect,” but jailed then abused for its sex-positive, thus anticapitalist heresy during “prison sex”/Man Box rituals. Said rituals are often performed by assimilated members of a given minority (e.g., the Medusa is not simply overtly furious and demonic, but undead—its ontologically ambiguous trauma complicated by her as a symbol often operating at cross purposes).

While progressing away from the state’s harmful apparatus and its linguo-material past is desirable, it is liminal relative to pornographic and artistic expression as historically-materially controlled by the state and its proponents (with Perseus famously using the beheaded Medusa’s “blind rage” to destroy his enemies by making them hers—i.e., triangulation). Yet the truth is, pornography and demonic/undead language won’t disappear at all under Gothic Communism; they simply won’t be couched within current disguised trauma, but rather operate as savvy means of negotiating emotional/Gothic intelligence through informed consent in the present to prevent future trauma; i.e., the state’s harmful return through regressive rhetorical devices: the regressive Amazon’s blind rage, “waifu” status, foregone demise and coercive BDSM.

As we shall explore in Volume One’s “Synthesis Symposium” discussing the Basics of opposition synthesis, constructive anger and rioting is a healthy social mechanism tied to labor movements. Conversely, canonically destructive anger—i.e., appeasing the state’s executioner just so you can send some other bastard to the guillotine or enslave a fellow worker as their “better”—is not; it is merely triangulation (turning one person against another), then clemency and reprieve to a greater calamity/seminal tragedy that cannot be avoided—not in wars, but also on a grander scale in relation to the end of the Capitalocene via Promethean cataclysm if something isn’t done now. Cops don’t prevent crime, they enforce it. So the world needs more subversive Amazons, not subjugated ones scapegoating nature as monstrous-feminine with ethnocentric dogma surging moral panic through the Protestant ethic; re: the Archaic Mother punished by witch cops to instill Red Scare, Orientalism, Black Revenge, Satanic Panic, etc, on and offstage [re: “Policing the Whore“]. Hoist them on their own petards to have the whore’s revenge against profit—on the Aegis!

(exhibit 1a1b: Artist, top-far-left: Michel Dinel; top-mid-left: Jiyu-Kaze; top-middle: Viviana Vixen; right: Edu Souza; bottom-middle: Nunchaku; bottom-mid-left: Edwin Huang; bottom-far-left: Frederico Escorsin.

A kind of Galatea traditionally sculpted by Pygmalion and his imitators, Amazons and their complicated pastiche embody social-sexual conflict during oppositional praxis, hence come in a variety of shapes and sizes. They are canonically war dogs of a binarized character. Most notably is the noble Athena versus the dark Medusa from the female legends of Antiquity [also, Queen Hippolyta]: the doubling of the hunter persona, a white and black wolf. Such war-boss, queen bitches canonically offer good behavior and bad behavior as our proverbial “teeth in the night” meant to serve as man’s best friend in centrist theatre [and whose true rebellion goes against the elite’s profit motive].  

However, the lineage stretches backwards and forwards hauntologically through post-Renaissance revivals. For one, there’s the pre-fascist, Neo-Gothic “phallic women-in-black” such as Victoria de Loredani, and the Victorian “madwoman in the attic,” Bertha Mason; the post-Victorian, hatpin-stabbing suffragettes of the early 20th century [e.g., Leoti Baker]; the comic book/action hero treatment starting with William Marsden’s bondage-themed Wonder Woman in the 1940s [or Rosie the Riveter] followed by the feral, bikini-wearing sexpots of the 1960s and 1970s [Coffy], as well Ripley and similar “female Rambos” of the 1980s [a neoliberal response to the “final girl” trope of the slasher genre]; various catsuit regressions—sexy spies, detectives, doctors, and BDSM-tinged femme fatales—in the ’90s, 2000s and 2010s; then, an increasingly queer presence regarding the rise of trans, intersex, non-binary and other forms of queer discourse online. If the 20th century constitutes the continuation of first wave, second wave and third wave feminism, then fourth wave feminism’s rise has seen a regression towards the older forms using the same language in oppositional praxis: regressive Amazonomachia and post-fascist[13b] gender trouble [the “gender critical” movement] veering backward at fascist* and pre-fascist* palimpsests versus subversive Amazonomachia and transgressive gender parody. It’s less a question of stolen valor and more of older groups fighting for the equality of convenience by pitting their versions of the “Amazon-as-waifu” [a promised war bride, whose more muscular variants are called “wheyfus” for supposedly being “gym maidens” that consume whey but also can dominate the chaser sissy as a result] against genderqueer variants; i.e., a “mirror match,” in fighting game parlance.

Regarding all of these black-and-white variants, there’s the moral qualification of “good and evil.” Our concerns are dialectical-material, going beyond administering binarized value judgements to critique the underlying cause-and-effect of culture as materially coded through informed, hauntological [thus grey] aesthetics operating at cross purposes; i.e., “TERF” is synonymous with “fascist,” in this respect, as a heteronormative defender of the status quo through Man Box culture as contributing to Capitalist Realism, whereas “Light/good-looking vs Dark/evil-looking” is a universally adaptable aesthetic [exhibits 50b, 60e1, 101c2, etc] that lends itself well to fascist, neoliberal/centrist and Gothic-Communist iterations of ostensibly cis and overtly gender-non-conforming Medusas and Amazons [whose sexual/gender function and BDSM aesthetics are fluid, variable and often figurative].

 In truth, the adaptability really applies to any warring persona as the body language of wrestler’s kayfabe being the conspicuous staging of espionage-as-combat for or against the state [the stage-like arena having all eyes on it, which follow the performer-as-celebrity into the arena of everyday life; i.e., a kind of forced reality/performance within war as personified by the Amazon as a gladiatorial combatant operating inside culture war as an extension of class war within popular media as war-like]. Just as war is not, in truth, romantic but often conveyed in romantic language that sits between the fiction and the rules [re: Jesper Juul], the language of culture exists in dialectical-material opposition according to conveyors or consumers of these monstrous-feminine heroes becoming masked, costumed and/or muscular operatives to some passive or active degree: the drop-dead gorgeous, sexpot femme-fatale as a heavily codified cop, spy or prize fighter. Often, it’s all three; i.e., a resistance collaborator/spy-turned-whore/vice versa [exhibit 4a] or a fascist double agent during “brothel espionage” married to the fighting ring. Such personas function as secret identities but also alter egos on par with James Bond’s [whose Red-Scare, state-sanctioned violence represents the legitimacy of state espionage in actual or romanticized forms, versus the forever-illegitimate counterterrorist violence of rebel factions seeking to dismantle state hegemony and develop a post-scarcity world]. Like any monster during oppositional praxis, this theatricality’s jouissance sits between intended play and emergent play as decided by the play inside the meta-narrative; i.e., to play around with through pastiche [accuracy] and parody [inaccuracy, often ironic] as archetypally carried across various mediums: the Amazon and Medusa, for example, having survived out of Antiquity into plays, novels, cinema and videogames that cannot be monopolized.

[artist: Mika Dawn 3D] 

War has been rooted in tremendous theatre and deception since the time of the Caesars [whose hauntology 20th/21st century totalitarianism wishes to revive]. These deceptions have complicated under the neoliberal sphere. That is, the business of combat sports emulates the historically deceptive nature of actual war brought out of the imaginary ancient past into the modern world as a culture war fought with war-like aesthetics: the monomyth, also called the Hero’s Journey, as a kind of orderly antidote to chaos as female. To this, class war unfurls via the battle of the sexes through sports as “man’s domain,” thus something to bar women from competing in against men for reasons of “fairness”: women are hysterical beings of chaos and allowing them to compete would upset the delicate order of the universe, threatening their virtue and male egos [and profits]! This obviously effects gender-non-conforming people, going so far as to ban trans women from playing competitive chess as of 2023 [Caelan Conrad’s “Were Trans Women Banned from Chess?!”]. In turn, the anomaly becomes costumed and fetishized as exceptional; i.e., “in a league of their own,” one where the Sapphic lancer obliterates everyone in her own little cage. It’s infantilizing.

Throughout the book, we’ll revisit the monomyth and its deceptions in relation to class and culture war as “sport-like.” For the moment, merely consider how the heteronormative segregation of sports mentality brings out some rather novel regressions that simply haven’t existed before in Western politics or canon. One of these groups are TERFs, but also their disguise in the world of combat sports in the Internet Age through the waifu or wheyfu as a “girl boss/war boss” kind of puppet for the state; i.e., something to play out class betrayal and free market apologia during garden-variety war games. Whatever their form, the execution of these games treats female strength—even monstrous-feminine variants—as wrought with multiple double standards. “Strong is sexy” translates to highly particular body types within fighting parlance: “built” within a Vitruvian, hourglass bod and the Amazon as materialized through the Male Gaze; i.e., to serve men by looking and acting a particular way within the theatre of war as indiscrete, globalized and sacred.

This extends to the virginal nerd as non-athletic in a physical sense, instead challenging the perceived dominance of men through the die-hard cliché of the female detective as having a “muscular” brain: the Nancy-Drew-type lesbian/ace person stemming from older tropes of a middle-class white girl undressed by the eyes of cis-het men while she gets to the bottom of the myth of male superiority through her domain: inside thinking-based games championed as yet-another-front for male dominance in culture war. This rebellious exchange is, itself, historically flawed—i.e., having bigoted roots by the men, but also the women doing the sleuthing as exceptional white sleuths. It’s the shadow of fascism in feminism’s bigoted past, dressed up as the underdog in a battle that reduces non-white/non-cis minorities to total invisibility or token status. Simply put, it becomes the white woman’s “pick me” vibe/parade of old-school suffragettes billboarding their oppression; i.e., conveniently forgetting everyone else while being marketed not just as exceptional through manufactured [male] supremacy, scarcity and conflict, but nostalgic within the Gothic displacement of once-upon-a-time; e.g., Netflix’ much-touted second-wave feminist pastiche in The Queen’s Gambit [2020]: the hard-fought queen in the man’s game, the prodigal child or pin-up doll whose exception proves the rule by fetishizing nature as monstrous-feminine, as usual [as “woman” in second wave feminism hauntologies].

[artist, top-left: Blouson; bottom-left: Allie-Reol; bottom-right: East Sea Monster]

Regardless of their exact muscles or general look/vibe, I sometimes also call TERFs “TERF Amazons,” “TERF Medusas,” or “subjugated Hippolyta” through a poetic attempt to make the monstrous-feminine the Virgin or the Whore in service of state hegemony—i.e., the “monster mom” as fetishized during the monomyth [the succubus Slan, exhibit 51b1, or the xenomorph as a rapist ghost of the counterfeit who must die or be escaped from but also stared at and chased by bigots/privileged colonizers].

Whereas Capitalism fosters a myopia that makes it difficult, if not impossible for people to imagine anything beyond Capitalism, Gothic Communism seeks to correct this cultural blindness in favor of imagining a better world through xenophilic monsters, rape play and all-around consent-non-consent, voyeuristic peril and various other transgressive liminalities; e.g., the monster mom as something to subvert through a gradient of gender parody propositions, my favorite being “Imagine Conan with a pussy” [and someone who wasn’t a bigot]—i.e., non-binary gender trouble with a gradient of Amazon “monster moms” that are tough but nurturing while not endorsing the status quo: my OCs Ileana, Revana, Siobhan and Virago in exhibits 7d, 37f, 37g, 61a2, 84, etc; classical myths like the Medusa, 23b; and in subversive fanart like Corporal Ferro, Marisa, Chun Li and Zarya in exhibits 85, 104a2, 111b; etc.)

Also, beyond the duality of oppositional praxis/workers-versus-the state is plurality when you dive into the gradient between the two larger points. For us, “Gothic” is defined as oppositional praxis; i.e., during (anarcho-gay) Communist struggles against the state within a proletarian Gothic imagination, one whose liminal expressions consistently push and argue for equal human rights (and the rights of animals and the environment) for all workers expressed in any media type: gay Communist monsters (e.g., “fur fags,” exhibit 10c2).

Third point: whenever I say “the state” in this book, I am referring to the state as both a current mechanism for capital, but also the status quo more broadly—a state of affairs that has evolved into its current form (including the Gothic castle as a hauntological advertisement for state hegemonic displacement and dissociation): nation-states, whose sense of national identity in relation to capital had to evolve into itself from the Cartesian Revolution onwards (bringing with them modern war and globalization as they currently exist). In the here and now, the status quo involves corporations and religious institutions that operate with the state, the elite uniting them to serve their material interests. “The state” is an umbrella term, then, one that highlights a relationship between all of these factors. In the past, the status quo would have been the Church, or church-and-state as undivided—i.e., feudal enterprises and city states prior to the rise of nation-states that raised wealth through tithes or conquest (the Crusades). Conversely, the state as a traditional vector of exploitation by neoliberal agents/corporate bodies (taxes and commodities) can also be entirely bypassed by them—i.e., anarcho Capitalism and the accumulation of wealth through the creation and sale of privatized commodities (military and domestic) controlled entirely by corporations.

While these distinctions are important when explaining the past as it once existed or what the future could ultimately become, the elite have progressively sought to utilize everything in their power to achieve their goal: profit and global hegemony for profit, above all else. The foundational barbarism that post-fascism regresses towards (exploitation, genocide, fascist mercenaries, constant surveillance, torture, rape, drug abuse, lies, bribes, murder and pedophilia) is still there; it’s just veiled, dressed up as “the market” in ways that glorify corporations and remove their accountability (which must be met with labor action, including unions; e.g., Unscripted Casting Advocacy Network, 2023). Polities, corporations and churches—these factors are always working in concert to achieve profit; i.e., in some combination of state, corporation and church. Be this hybrid increasingly corporate/technocratic, fascist (a partial regression towards feudalism in defense of capital), theocratic, or some other bourgeois flavor, the outcome is always the same towards workers: exploitation, because that is what Capitalism is designed to do. Crisis and decay are both the functional gears of profit and part of the larger theatrical tableau.

As part of this masquerade, the black-and-blood-red ghost of fascism is constantly revived in pre-/current/post- flavors to combat the spectres of Marx within the psyches of the privileged; i.e., centrist media commonly reviving the Nazi as something to “protect” Americans and their emulators from—e.g., Skeletor (exhibit 40a1a/112a), Zombie Caesar (exhibit 39c) or Count Dracula (exhibit 41j) as a pre-/post-fascist, dark master emblem—while also keeping the same citizenry safe from the ghosts of Communism as a mutual enemy within the state at large. Indeed, fascists are either commonly summoned and scapegoated or dressed up in the antiquated, pre-fascist “vampy” aesthetic (“vamp” meaning “wielding the qualities of a confident, monstrous-feminine seductress”) whose signifiers are to be blasted apart by monomythical, status-quo heroes, thus saving the world from the Greater of Two Evils: fascist “corruption” as conflated with Marxist-Leninists and anarcho-Communists in the same breath, but differentiated when it suits the elite, inviting fascists to defend capital from agents of post-scarcity (making the false rebellion of fascists a useful brand of idiocy for the state):

(exhibit 1a1c: Artist, top: ChuckARTT; bottom-left: Arvalis; bottom-middle: Flyland; bottom-right: Pagong1.

Fascism and Communism occupy the same space as “bad omens” in centrist monomyths until crisis demands a clear distinction be made by Pygmalions that defends capital beyond a shared persecution; i.e., fascism is the lesser of two evils because its perennial dark castle routinely crumbles to reveal a shiny white castle underneath, whereas the troubling presence of Communism threatens all of normalized existence: through a dark truth that cannot be cleansed because it denotes the castle [symbolic of the West, of Cartesian thought, of Capitalism] as harmful by design, not because it is “corrupt”: ACAB. Indeed, the so-called shadow of “corruption” is common capitalist apologia, often relayed through a “vice character” scapegoat in neoliberal propaganda stemming from early-modern forms [e.g., The Merchant of Venice]. Videogames constitute a popular majority in this field, wherein the boss archetype is a fascist or Communist scapegoat in the same general aesthetic. As such, there remains plenty of room for variation and double standards, enacted and remediated by weird canonical nerds in the Shadow of Pygmalion.

For example, the canonical “phallic” woman is “like a man” in that she is dark, mysterious and penetrative with her fangs and unquenchable desire, but remains the bride of a male, “Dark Father/Dragon Lord” tyrant [an allusion to the historical figure Vlad “the Impaler” Dracul and his patrilineal Order of the Dragon out of Eastern Europe] who holds her under his boss-like thrall; the canonical myth of the female equivalent, on the other hand, is the female-Beowulf who enters Archaic Mother territory—e.g., the place where the Countess [exhibit 41h] or Alien Queen/Mother Brain breed inside a site for abject sexual reproduction: the awesome majesty of her Numinous power offset by a voracious, vagina-dentata maw [what Barbara Creed calls the murderous womb] that both angrily spawns dragons and devours its own “children” blindly who, in turn, are forced to put her down in favor of a male hegemon; i.e., the Jungian slaying of the female chaos dragon to further the male questors “individuation” [itself a myth, given the genocidal commonality of all heroes in heteronormative canon: the knight defends property and the state, often by killing someone else and taking it from a fascist double after said double takes it from labor and minorities—capitalist DARVO in other words: “You’re the gaping, always-hungry, self-cannibalizing maw, not us!”].

[artist: Mizugi Buns]

This being said, I don’t want to focus on vagina dentata or literal breeding crises in the classical, Neo-Gothic sense; my book aims to go thoroughly beyond Barbara Creed’s somewhat dated and limited, biological-/cis-centric view of the monstrous-feminine/”woman as other” [to be fair, she wrote The Monstrous-Feminine thirty years ago, so maybe she wrote something more recently[14] and I’m just late to the party]. So while it’s true that the phrase “phallic woman” traditionally denotes a war-like woman, huntress or vengeful monstrous-feminine, I want to stress how subjugated Amazons aren’t just aggressively and physically violent towards cis-het, sexist men; they’ve radicalized inside a “prison sex” mentality to become hostile towards “outsider” groups, including trans people, while seeing themselves as the universal victims that tacitly yield to their conquerors by emulating their worst habits [exhibit 41g1a2].

As such, I want to expand on how the monstrous-feminine can also non-binarize to illustrate the gender-non-conforming idea of a non-violent trans, intersex or enby person; i.e., someone who refuses to be a victim without embodying the standard-issue implements of violence and war from conventional stories [including TERF examples: the blind, indiscriminate Medusa]. Instead, they can be nymph-like and soft, their penis a reclaimed source of shame/codified rape [mine was] and their monomorphic body offering up other gender-non-conforming surprises to boot. They become a dark being of chaos to sincerely-but-ironically worship relative to how they camp current heteronormative standards that abject such beings; i.e., as would have been the case before Cartesian thought came and binarized everything: a drug-like, magic-themed “Ode to Psyche” [or Pan, Dionysus, Queen Maeb, Satan, the xenomorph, Medusa, etc] as wise in ancient, forgotten, “dark” ways; i.e., lost to Capitalism save in reimagined rebellious festivals [often with fairy-like flavors, exhibit 52a] that take black magic back as a culturally appreciative phenomenon. The “magic” stems from being different in morphological/gendered ways whose chimeric andro/gynodiversity [exhibit 9b1] would have been worshipped in ancient and non-Western cultures in absence of unironic gender trouble; e.g., the “two-spirit” person, shaman or witch, but also the satyr or fawn of the ancient Western world [exhibit 52b] or the angel or demon of the non-Vitruvian model [exhibit 45b] as thoroughly Numinous.

Even so, contemporary examples of “magic” also include the “sorcery” of gender-affirming care [from synthetic hormones to nail polish, ring lights and queer-coded hair dye] and its gynodiversity/androdiversity as heretical under the heteronormative/queernormative status quo, which merges with the celebration of the ancient, pagan and Sapphic [exhibit 41g1a1] as hauntologized in a sex-positive sense; i.e, to spread acceptance of, and adoration towards, the intersex as marginalized, as well as trans, non-binary and cross-dressing individuals. The penis becomes something to allow to exist alongside the vulva, labia and vagina, but also the breasts and other biological markers as decorated with various forms of demonic/undead/animalized code that camp the penis as a canonical symbol of rape: xenophilic genitals like the dragon dong [exhibit 37c] or zombie monster cock/”BBC” [exhibit 37b] but the wielder also decked out in various clothing and makeup whose general look/vibes actually fight queer panic/male stigma and show off the monstrous-feminine cock as both erect and often massive [exhibit 89b2b, 91b2] but also not toxically masculine/invasive:

 

[artist: Galaad]

Regardless of the size or usage—or even if the person is naked or not [exhibits 89b2a/2b]—the ludic-Gothic-BDSM goal stays the same: a chance between two [or more] parties to theatrically interrogate and negotiate, thus regain stolen worship and love that has been denied by Cartesian thought/scientists and their radicalized victims-turned-bad-faith activists; e.g., TERFs having been abused by a cis-het man and repeatedly conflating their former rapist with a trans woman through dogmatic propaganda they help write—i.e., destabilizing gossip/punching down. In response, punching up is generally done against a “Cotton Ceiling” [from Drew DeVeaux; source: Cassie Brighter’s “The Often Misunderstood Premise of the Cotton Ceiling” 2019]. And such rioting absolutely should be allowed; calling it a “stone in a glass house” is to put property before people. The penis is generally associated with war-like brutality [“Till he unseam’d him from the nave to the chaps…”] and advertised as monuments that are much larger than actual erect penises that promote violence [“…And fix’d his head upon our battlements”]. Pornographic depictions of penises [as erect] are generally censored because they are indecent, but also because they expose the man’s penis as a source of shame for failing to be “big enough.”

As such, they are canonically presented as threatening and violent, transferring male stigma from person to person through the penis as implying the entire body and person as dangerous in criminal-hauntological forms; i.e., the serial killer’s dagger penis [which we discuss in Volume One‘s “A Problem of ‘Knife Dicks,’ or Humanizing the Harvest”] but also the “incorrect” man as a cross-dressing killer advertised during Satanic panic; re: Matthew Lewis camping said panic in The Monk [1796] by having the male devil shapeshift into a female witch called Matilda, then crossdress as a nun crossdressing as a monk named Rosario before tempting Ambrosio with her “Satanic” body—all to place the false “woman” in the place of “biological” women’s “real imprisonment” and fuck over the rapey priest. The class character residing in Lewis’ queer voice, however nascent his 21-year-old self may have been, wasn’t “just psychological” but campy par excellence in order to critique the resultant stigmas begot from material conditions; e.g., satire comparable to Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus or George Romero’s zombie films! Comparatively his cis-het, WASP female “fencing partner,” Ann Radcliffe, wrote The Italian having the heroine locked up in a convent with other AFAB nuns. Nary a demon faggot in sight:

[artist: Cute Femboy Faye]

The point being, apart from Radcliffe’s cloistered, naïve sexualizing of the surface of images [usually clothes; e.g., the nun’s veil or the priest’s robes] as she usually would, the sighting of male balls [above] is a dead giveaway—i.e., a gendered “wrongness” with the picture, which strangely echoes in Matthew Lewis’ hilarious description of Ambrosio apparently seeing a boob for the first time: 

“His eye dwelt with insatiable avidity upon the beauteous orb. A sensation till then unknown filled his heart with a mixture of anxiety and delight: a raging fire shot through every limb; the blood boiled in his veins, and a thousand wild wishes bewildered his imagination” [source].

Taken a step further, the exposed “bodkin” would have been unthinkable for the Neo-Gothic period [and in some ways still very much is]. Lewis calls Ambrosio’s boner “the full vigor of manhood” owned by a knife-wielding incel. Like a such dagger, then, the penis becomes something to hide not just out of shame, but in presumed bad faith while conflating sex with harm, leading many queer AMAB owners to a) guiltily conflate their penis with a weapon they cannot easily or safely remove [as I have felt] while b) also thinking their “bussy” is simply a hole filled with shit [as I have felt].

Conversely, the AFAB vagina-owners they encounter often live with their own psychosexual trauma or are otherwise taught to “clam up” to protect their modesty/virtue when they see a masculine threat: “no touch kitty!” To this, the female party might see Faye’s balls [above] and envision penetration by the implied gender-non-conforming penis as automatically harmful and non-consensual, but also “false” in ways the dark lothario is not; his black garb, mask and rapier is absurdly viewed as more honest and safe. In other words, it is “correctly” dangerous in ways advertised through queernormative fiction, Gothic romances and “true crime/murder mysteries”; e.g., Ann Rice’s Interview with the Vampire [1976] as the Female Gaze offering up the disposable queer man as a dark, sexy treat that either could rip your head off but doesn’t or does rip “your” head off, albeit vicariously [which isn’t automatically problematic, I should add; the paradox of Gothic fiction is that it allows for cartoonish, Mortal-Kombat levels of camp. But queer people need to be treated as more than abject toys by straight women writing about queer people as commodities; i.e., mutilation needs to be handled with irony and care, lest it fall into Radcliffe’s trap of automatic, unironic mutilation for/of a xenophobic “demon”].)

If this categorical approach to “the state” (and its theatre) sounds too liquid, try to understand how single terms not only have multiple definitions; these definitions co-exist mid-discussion, when words are being contested—i.e., by colonizers forcing singular definitions on others despite enjoying multiple definitions when it suits them (“boundaries for me, not for thee”) and reclaimers working with multiple definitions and code-switching to suit their revolutionary needs. A certain degree of intuition and good faith is vital if you want to make it through this book, which focuses on various ways to subvert and reclaim canon—especially canonical monster language—in defense of workers exploited by the state.

As we proceed into the later volumes (and modules), some ideas will be mentioned far more than others. Some, like abjection or chronotope (and the rest of the Four Gs), will come up a lot; some, like cryptomimesis will have specialized chapters, but be less frequent overall; some, like “magic circle” or “ludic contract” are mentioned more “for flavor” and whose adjacent suggestions are meant to invite you, the reader, to form your own connections/constellations beyond the ones I decide to focus on. This book is full of stars, so make your own shapes in the sky using the tools and keywords I supply. As long as the journey and outcome are sex-positive within a broad ergodic sphere, the exact routes you take to get there don’t really matter. So chart your own sequences.

To that, revolution needs to be more than holistic; it needs to be internalized in its practitioners by exposing them to radical ideas and praxis as soon as possible, thus at as young an age as can be allowed (rest assured that fascists and centrists are doing the same thing). Whatever monopoly the state tries to enforce to uphold profit with, we rebellious whores can punch up in cryptonymic duality against these pimps (token or not); i.e., to anisotropically reverse the usual flowings of power and material (more on this in Volume One‘s “An Uphill Battle (with the Sun in Your Eyes): Operational Difficulties”).

Medusa cannot be killed, only ever being an idea to cross over into our own identities; i.e., one to terrify the state through us—into submission, thereby liberating all workers (and nature) from them and theirs Judas agents: re (from “Bushnell’s Requiem”):

Ellen Ripley once said, “I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.” The words of a true madwoman, isn’t that what America has been doing for over seventy years now? Military optimism, as I envisioned it (“The Promethean Quest and James Cameron’s Military Optimism in Metroid,” 2021), is the idea that you can kill your problems, somehow “slaying Medusa.” But you can’t kill Medusa because her life-after-death persona represents things that aren’t people, alone; they’re structures and the genocide they cause seen in the final moments of the damned. Theirs isn’t a question of blind faith towards a self-righteous cause, but conscious conviction towards a cause that is just (source).

Fourth point: I say “linguo-material” (or socio-material when stressing the social, interactive components) because language is a natural feature of humans that distinguishes them socially-sexually from other species through complicated, Gothic expressions that manifest inside the material world; i.e., the creation of egregores, but also their sublimation and subversion during oppositional praxis under Capitalism. In other words, this process is liminal, again meaning re:

both “a threshold to move through,” in spatial terms, and “a conflict on the surface of the image of,” in linguistic/ontological terms (the word can also denote to being “in between,” insofar as a monster is canonical versus iconoclastic—with a particular spatial/personalized expression moving towards one pole or the other from its de facto starting point).

Our propaganda is iconoclastic sex work that develops Gothic Communism as the next stage of human development; our sex work is proletarian praxis, teamworking in opposition to Patriarchal Capitalism as the historical-material harbinger of death, slavery, war and rape in whatever form its canon may take—including bad-faith/moderate forms like tokenism, weird canonical nerds and/or TERFs, but also liminal gradients on a grand sliding scale of interrelated pairs during dialectical-material analysis: sex positivity vs sex coercion, the proletariat (workers) vs the bourgeoisie (the elite), iconoclasm vs canon, good play vs bad play, and manufactured us-versus-them vs collective worker action/slave cooperation against a common master, etc.

Though often presented as “discrete” by those in or siding with power, these categories generally intersect. To it, the rest of this book series holistically explores these oscillating intersections in the Gothic mode; i.e., as a living thing (Capitalism) that can develop into gay-anarcho Communism through monsters reclaiming sex work and sex workers commonly do—with legions of iconic monsters, castles and perilous scenarios that must be collectively altered into Communism by direct worker action and solidarity through iconoclastic art. Playfully geared towards that aim, it’s a dicey proposition and not without risk; i.e., fascists kill activists, but so does the state and its proponents more broadly. And yet, silence is segregation, which will not do; to stand by and do nothing is too keep silent, and silence is genocide. To survive genocide by reversing abjection, we have to speak out against it; i.e., doing so through revolutionary cryptonymy’s usual buffers and barriers showing and hiding us simultaneously (we’ll unpack revolutionary cryptonymy more in Volume One‘s “Introducing Revolutionary Cryptonymy”)!

So when the Man comes around, show him your Aegis… loudly and proudly into a gay new world! Make it a tempting proposition, combining old and new exhibits—a legion of derrières/wagons “in heat” the elite can never encircle:

(artists [top-left to bottom-right]: Vera Dominus, Monster Lover, Moxxy Sting and Cuwu)

Apart from the sex work I do with other sex workers to raise awareness (over sixty at this point), I also: interview my models (through the Q&A series, “Hailing Hellions“) and promote their material through my book series’ purple-and-green promo poster program. Refer to my Book Promotions page for everything paratextual that Sex Positivity offers! —Perse, 3/31/2025

In Closing: A Gay New World

It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world
I don’t wanna be a boy, I don’t wanna be a girl
Breaking the rules as I sway and swirl
Shining like a diamond in glitter and pearl
So let’s go out on the town (yeah)
Light a fire, burn it down (source)

—Orion Simprini and Linda Horwatt; “All Dolled Up” on The Orion Experience’s Fever Dream (2021)

(artist: Pear)

This conclusion was originally written as a segue/introduction to my manifesto in Volume One. Seeing as that volume now has its own preface, I decided to move its former introduction here, to serve as my thesis volume’s closing thoughts. —Perse, back in 2023

There is also a genderqueer paradox of sorts we’ll need to acknowledge before we proceed into Volume One. Heteronormativity divides us from nature and ourselves, exploiting us in the process by forcing the human body, sexual orientation, and gender identity/performance together—i.e., canonizing worker division and sex-gender homogeny as biologically essentialized and sexually dimorphic. Conversely, Gothic Communism uses 4th wave feminism, genderqueer theory, ludic studies and Marxist thought to dismantle the heteronormative standards of the state—i.e., to bring workers closer to nature through the material world as something to subvert by iconoclastic means. Our aim in doing so is to demonstrate that the assorted factors mentioned above are actually distinct and separate categories that can, but do not necessarily, hold undue influence over the others. For example, if someone is AFAB (assigned female at birth), they can gender-non-conform and present/perform as femme regardless if they have a natal penis or a girl-cock (which can still be a natal penis depending on how you look at it). Taken a step further, if someone is AFAB and femme and presents as a vampire, their gender role within society is not exclusively to be punished provided we subvert the canonical role of the vampire during oppositional praxis. To humanize traditionally persecuted monsters (on the receiving end of state violence) is to allow queer people to exist outside of the heteronormative binary.

We’ll get to all of that. Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion, Or Gothic Communism is not a short book (this thesis volume just by itself is ~785 pages). Funnily enough, it was originally intended as a chapter within my now-discontinued book, Neoliberal and Fascist Propaganda in Yesterday’s Heroes (which explored notions of “heroic” body representation in popular American media; the first-now-only chapter was the aforementioned “Military Optimism” blogpost I’ve repeatedly cited so far). Over time, Sex Positivity’s length ballooned, leading me to treat it as a book unto itself. Alongside its written content, I have also revisited old pieces of my own artwork to feature within, as well as collaborate with various sex worker and model friends to create brand-new artworks for this project. Combined with publicly available sources, this book contains over 1,000 different worker-produced images (1,086 as of publishing this volume) to make its pro-worker arguments, hundreds of which are “exhibit-style” (often two or more images/collages meant to be viewed together to make a larger argument; or one “visual aid” image that I break down in relation to the arguments around it).

Beyond the thesis argument and its symposium, Sex Positivity takes its time—gradually launching into its complex (ergodic) arguments through concentric, staged roadmaps. Imagine a rocket launch into space: This requires multiple stages and “boosters,” meaning there’s always time to abort the launch if things get hairy. This book, then, has been divided into four volumes, including this one. Their combined content aims to revive past revolutionaries whose rage was anathema, thus buried; now coming to light through us—the current generation—their own forbidden praxis can be imbibed and repurposed by future generations in improvised, informed succession.

(artist: Elisabetta Sirani)

However, while my emphasis is on artistic expression through the Gothic mode, there remains elements of dialectical-material verisimilitude that I want to convey through this book’s academically discouraged content; i.e., “how people actually talk” as a means of combatting cognitive estrangement—not just using movie quotes, YouTube videos, music lyrics, bad jokes, whakataukī/proverbs, four letter Germanic swearwords (and their lengthier conjugations/gerunds), and (one or two) meme images (a literal, popularized form of mimesis), but also touches of me as a trans person and former “professional student” with an extensive Humanities education centered around the Gothic as something I (and many others) have consumed since childhood.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

This education includes my formal (read: financially exploited by neoliberal institutions) education: a BA in “English: Language, Literature and Writing” from Eastern Michigan University in 2016 and an MA in “English Studies (the Gothic)” from Manchester Metropolitan University in 2018. However, it also includes my informal education and touches of me: personal anecdotes, “weird sexual metaphors” (re: Christine Neufeld, regarding my undergrad work), trans epiphanies, British Romantic poems, epigrams (a staple of Neo-Gothic novels), sexual/gender preferences (with my “type” leaning more towards the femme side of things [for boys] and allowing for a lot more total variety with female/intersex cuties) and just all-around nods to myself and my life’s work/(a)sexual-gender exploration in art. Moving forward, all of this is delivered in a seminar-like style meant to convey ideas (and people) as works-in-progress relating back and forth over space and time.

In other words, Sex Positivity is my “total codex.” Like a medieval scriptorium or Renaissance commonplace book (e.g., Prince Hamlet’s), it

• monastically and extensively compiles the Humanities as I know them through the work I’ve done with other people, my comrades and how I wish to cite ideas to them or from them to future comrades without too much academic de rigueur or straight-up torture porn (this being said, I signposted the absolute shit out of this fucker, organizing it into volumes, sections, chapters, and sub-chapters, but also providing as many bookmarks and exhibit markers as I could; you should be able to lose yourself in its arguments without feeling lost). As an international MA who tried her best to combine two different schools of thought into her own unique ideas, I find the notion of academic citation (and dealing with image copyright issues through official publishers) frankly traumatic. Having had four or five different citation methods foisted onto me in grad school (and being fairly certain MLA will mean absolutely nothing to a non-academic audience), I’ve decided to drop formal citations and an annotated bibliography and instead rely more on hyperlinks/footnotes inside an ordinary book that contains extraordinary ideas; a broad, holistic understanding of the Gothic and its modular components (no offense to you specialists out there, but I prefer to hybridize my monsters; that’s how natural language and the material world do it, but also what I think works best as a teaching device—a flexible “monster mode”). Also: pictures, lots of those—with as many links to the artists as I can supply (barring the odd example when an original source remains elusive, which I will comment on).
• invokes things that I have grappled with for many years. Monsters, Satanism, Romantic poetry and sex/gender fluidity have interested me since childhood (my lullaby as a child was Coleridge’s “Kubla Kahn,” 1816); Marxism has since undergrad; chronotopes, hauntology and cryptonymy have since grad school. None are easy to understand; despite acknowledging my lifelong fascination with “Sex, Metal, and Videogames” in 2021, I’ve continued to write about them over and over precisely because I want to try and understand how they coexist inside a material world. Now, this book—as an extension of my general approach to life—is shining a holistic, liminal flashlight on old things that evolve to survive Capitalism operating as intended, defending itself through neoliberalism/fascism; war, rape, national subterfuge, etc. Trans/non-binary people are not new, nor are our struggles; nor are the struggles of cis women, people of color, and other ethnic minorities, and the struggles of all workers intersecting and interacting back and forth under Capitalism. We have always been people (Step Back, 2023) and Capitalism has always exploited us according to how it deems us useful/not useful, thus superior/inferior inside the colonial binary and its heteronormative rubric/moderately normative offshoots.
• illustrates this complex reality through what I’ve learned, reassembling it for you as a kind of monster compilation to play around with. As you play, experiment and learn, think about your own modes of monstrous self-expression and what you put back into the world: your poiesis and creative successes. In the end, we’re all defined by what we leave behind. Wherever this book finds you, know it contains our stories as left for you to discover and learn from: our struggles to self-express through art that gives our traumas and oppression a voice. Life is short, so don’t be afraid to take chances with sex, love and companionship. Yes, they’re inherently risky but also modular activities that intersect with class warfare as a powerful, playful means of changing luck through altered material conditions. Emergent playfulness is a sign of intelligence, of being able to learn through creativity, language and games that challenge unironic abuse and enslavement (this book being predicated on equal parts disaster and serendipity through its inception).

So give it a shot! You’ll never know what you might learn about yourself in the process, or who you might befriend along the way: 

(exhibit 1c: Top left: Mike Jittlov—an animation pioneer, special effects wizard and very creative person. I—like other artists have in the past—once had the pleasure of speaking to Mike. Not only is his classic film The Wizard of Speed and Time [1988] available on YouTube for free; it once dared to critique Hollywood only to be buried by the producer after a delayed production and laughably small distribution [made from 1983-1986, it was only ever released on VHS and Laserdisc]. Still, it lives on inside those of us who continue to critique the system in our own iconoclastic work [as does Mike’s original, very-’90s-looking website]!

Top right: Amouranth—a sex worker abused by her own boyfriend, who coerced her into making privatized content for him. Now she is finally free of his awful influence while using her face and her voice to talk about hidden, ubiquitous exploitation present within the sex worker industry.

[update, 3/31/2025: Despite posturing as being pro-sex-work, Amouranth is actually a TERF Nazi girlboss token whore [cop] punching down against trans people affected by climate change (source: Connor Reid’s “Amouranth’s Controversial Statement: She Wishes LA’s LGBT Community Had Burned in the Fires,” 2025). She has also become the poster girl for Kick, a platform known for giving pedophile streamers asylum (Hasan Abi’s “Kick Is Falling Apart,” 2024). A bigotry for one is a bigotry for all, and she’s as bad-faith as one gets!]

Bottom: Persephone van der Waard in grad school with a Mancunian cutie called Zeuhl [their alias]—once lovers and friends, but now just a bittersweet, censored memory of me standing next to an emotionally abusive ex; i.e., someone who—after the slow breakup in 2019 followed by disillusion of our post-breakup friendship, in 2023—decided rather abruptly that they wanted nothing to do with me or this book in any official, unmasked capacity. It’s the cliché of them asking me to tear up the polaroid. So, yeah, fuck them [I eventually go on to expose Zeuhl a bit more, in the Demon Module’s “Non-Magical Damsels and Detectives“].)

This concludes the thesis volume. The other volumes—the full manifesto, Humanities primer and volume on proletarian praxis—have slowly released over the remainder of 2023 and all of 2024 and 2025. I have released them one at a time, announcing each when it becomes available on my website. —Perse, 3/31/2025

(model and photographer: Persephone van der Waard and Zeuhl)

Onto Volume One’s promo series, “A 2025 Foreword: On Volume Zero’s New Edition Focusing on Ludo-Gothic BDSM“!

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About the Author

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

Footnotes

[1] Transparency is fine in good faith, but when dealing with persons who are acting in bad faith, we do not owe them honest or “fair” behaviors; in short, we can lie, cheat and steal whatever and whenever we need to (“all’s fair in love and war”) as long as our asymmetrical guerrilla war is universally ethical/conducive to developing Communism while upholding basic human rights (and the health of nature) to the best of our ability for all class, culture and race allies as oppressed workers (which fascists and neoliberals do not do, thus should not be respected as people until they atone in good faith; i.e., they are chicken hawks, murderers, liars and war criminals/profiteers, and we don’t owe them shit). We have beards, friends of Dorothy and lavender weddings for a reason; they will copy them to blend in and attack us through token betrayals/normativities (e.g., Afronormativity, homo/queernormativity, etc). So we shouldn’t just dance in front of them and martyr ourselves, but outplay them using the same basic code (an idea we will unpack at length in Volume Three, Chapter Five).

[2] Source: Peter Weber’s “‘A riot is the language of the unheard,’ Martin Luther King Jr. Explained 53 Years Ago” (2020).

[3] Gentrification through liberal-executed banking maneuvers, deliberately denying loans and mortgages to force non-white people into poor neighborhoods (these maneuvers can be openly denied, but the maps speak for themselves—literally through the red lines that can be drawn across them highlighting the very-real and sanctioned divides). To this, gentrification has its roots in basic material disputes sanctioned within white power structures:

gentrification

The process whereby the character of a poor urban area is changed by wealthier people moving in, improving housing, and attracting new businesses, typically displacing current inhabitants in the process; from a social standpoint, gentrification is the process of making someone or something more refined, polite, or respectable; e.g., Jane Eyre and Adèle (exhibit 21c1). For example, housing crises are instigated by gentrification as the “invention” of exploitable housing arrangements between owners and workers: apartments. The larger socio-material process generally intersects racial tensions in impoverished, redlined neighborhoods shared between intraracial in-fighting (Boyz n the Hood, 1991); or between different racial groups encouraged to divide by the elite through fascist/moderate, good cop/bad cop “peacekeepers” (Lonestar, 1996): the disillusionment of police culture as being functionally no different than highway bandits, accidental incest (stolen generations), and a border romance (it’s practically a Gothic novel, minus the aesthetic).

Stamped centuries ago by Radcliffe’s moderate approach to the Gothic, the mode at large is no stranger to material arbitration; its own disputes play out in Gothic dialogs that appropriate or appreciate the struggles felt within the ghost of the counterfeit—e.g., Candyman‘s 1992 breaking of standard-issue (white) conventions to interrogate the liminal spaces of an actual location, Cabrini-Green (Cold Crash Pictures’ “Candyman: Breaking all the Rules of Horror,” 2019), itself haunted by an old boogeyman who frightens the endemic population (and white visitors) as equally unwelcome-if-functionally-lopsided trespassers: the dismembered black corpse with a hook for a hand and a body filled with bees (a crude allusion to the sugar trade having dismembered so many slaves, and now which has become the cheap “slave food” for middle-class workers policing their underclass brethren: white terrorism).

Similar to Alien and Aliens‘ white Gothicizing of the savage continent myth, the Candyman is a vengeful embodiment of settler-colonial trauma envisioned by a white author. Candyman was based off Clive Barker’s short fiction, specifically “The Forbidden” from the collection Books of Blood (1985); Barker’s ghost of the counterfeit tells the legend “of the ‘Candyman,’ the ghost of an artist and son of a slave who was murdered in the late 19th century” (source: Wikipedia). Written by white/white-adjacent authors, such dialogs’ rebellious sentiment can quickly be recuperated, expressing feelings of assimilation fantasy that lead to aspiring members of the black community to feel alienated from their own trauma when trying to play the white man’s game; i.e., a dialog that plays out through a return to the settler-colonizer’s rules and conventions that have become so familiar as to turn into our aforementioned guess-the-cliché; e.g., Scream, season three (2019) as adapting to a game of survival inside of itself by adopting the clichés during a fatal masque (which Wes Craven helped popularize in his own franchise built around the idea; and certainly was no stranger to cultural appropriation of the postcolonial voice: his white-savior schtick in The Serpent and the Rainbow [1988] lionizing white-boy Bill Pullman to beat up an evil witch doctor and exorcise the colonial territory of a black scapegoat).

[4] From Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975):

The panopticon induces a sense of permanent visibility that ensures the functioning of power [… It] represents the way in which discipline and punishment work in modern society [and] is a diagram of power in action because by looking at a plan of the panopticon, one realizes how the processes of observation and examination operate.

Foucault applies the panopticon to prisons, specifically medieval ones as a tower-like, prison-guard metaphor for the society in which he wrote; but it can be applied to any form of state surveillance; e.g., the Eye of Sauron.

[5] Pastiche is simply remediated praxis (the application of theory) during oppositional forms. This book covers many different kinds of pastiche types under the Gothic umbrella as canonical or iconoclastic: Gothic pastiche, of course, but also blind and perceptive forms of war pastiche, rape pastiche, poster pastiche, monster pastiche, disguise pastiche, Amazon pastiche, and nation pastiche, etc.

[6] From Michael Uhall, whose concept of “astronoetics” is a celestial, intelligible presence [“Astronoetic Cinema,” 2019]. Lovecraft would liken it to cosmic nihilism, or the cosmos’ disinterest in the settler-colonial gaze of planet Earth/the human conquest of space according to aspiring capitalists tied to scientific communities; e.g., Trace and Athetos from Axiom Verge. As I write in Volume Two, exhibit 40c: “Unlike Samus, who is a tall, strong girl boss in a suit of space armor, Trace is a callow, physically awkward nerd. Moreover, he is continuously dwarfed by his alien surroundings—much like the Romantic facing the fog of the increasingly alien world beyond civilization, except it’s a patently human cruelty projected into outer space” (source: “She Fucks Back”).

[7] Think Fabien Vehlmann and Kerascoët’s Beautiful Darkness (2014): A young girl dies in a forest, and out of her brain spill little homunculi. In the Gothic tradition, it’s very much an anti-fairytale or heroic quest. The girl dies at the start, and all her little selves are subsequently consumed by nature in an utterly brutal marriage between Lord of the Flies (1954) and Alice in Wonderland (1865). It’s super fucked up, but for visual samples, consider Chris Gavaler’s “It’s Rare to Find Horror Executed so Perfectly in Graphic Fiction,” 2019).

[8] With queer coding, there are expectations and implications far more than explicit statements. Keep this in mind when we examine vice characters, but also scapegoats at large, including the monster as a boss character in videogames (exhibit 1a1c).

[9] Which can be used for the state; e.g., Victoria Allison’s examination of Evita (1979) and Nazi theatrics in “White Evil: Peronist Argentina in US Popular Imagination Since 1955” (2004). We will examine this more in the Undead Module’s “Capitalism as a Great Zombie(-Vampire).”

[10] In hindsight, these are merely “bald” or “pubic hair,” which is not the vulva.

[11] The famous fate of Socrates after telling the Sophists they were not wise, but practitioners of sophistry: “In short, the difference between Socrates and his sophistic contemporaries, as Xenophon suggests, is the difference between a lover and a prostitute. The sophists, for Xenophon’s Socrates, are prostitutes of wisdom because they sell their wares to anyone with the capacity to pay” (source: George Duke’s “The Sophists (Ancient Greek)” in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy). I should add that Xenophon is being incredibly unfair to prostitutes, as they would have been “pimped out,” thus forced to sell their wares, by men controlling their bodies.

[12] The current white, female prime minister of Italy known for her fascist argumentation.

[13a] The idea that Amazons don’t wed or have sex is a heteronormative/cis-gendered myth, but its subversion is often non-binary and figurative.

[13b] As I conceive it, pre-fascism is the imaginary medieval-as-tyrannical being felt within the state of affairs during the Neo-Gothic period and its future evocations while the nation-state and modern war were first forming; fascism alludes to 20th-century revivals of an imaginary Rome revived through the black knights and similar Greater Evils of capitalist kayfabe defending the status quo during total war in Europe; and post-fascism is an attempt during Bretton Woods and British/American neoliberalism to conceal the fact that fascism not only wasn’t started in Italy or Germany but continues to thrive in the neoliberal hegemon (the fascist being a popular scapegoat in centrist media, but one that teams up with the American hero against Communism codified as chaos, queer, non-white, or alien; i.e., by trying to monopolize monsters—and by extension sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll [the monopolies of violence and terror]—for those aims, and which gentrify and decay to serve them; re: “A Cruel Angel’s (Modular) Thesis“).

[14] She did! The Return of the Monstrous-Feminine (2022) is a

follow-up to the classic text of The Monstrous-Feminine analyses those contemporary films which explore social justice issues such as women’s equality, violence against women, queer relationships, race and the plight of the planet and its multi-species. Examining a new movement – termed by Creed as Feminist New Wave Cinema […] Creed looks at a range of diverse films including The Babadook, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Nomadland, Carol, Raw, Revenge, and the television series The Handmaid’s Tale. These films center on different forms of revolt, from inner revolt to social, supernatural and violent revolt, which appear in Feminist New Wave Cinema. These relate in the main to the emergence of a range of social protest movements that have gathered momentum in the new millennium and given voice to new theoretical and critical discourses. These include: third and fourth wave feminism, the #MeToo movement, queer theory, race theory, the critique of anthropocentrism and human animal theory (source: Routledge).

Surprise, surprise, Creed’s still focused on films and “white girl shit” (white feminism co-opted #MeToo from women of color), but she does include work from queer theory and fourth wave feminism and not just Freud! Well, that’s great ‘n all, but I still have a bone to pick with her older “classic” self and her dance partner, Freud!

This blog post is part of “The Total Codex,” a fourth 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.” The first promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “The Total Codex” shall do the same, but with Volume Zero/the thesis volume (versus “Make It Real” promoting Volume One/the manifesto, which I will release after “The Total Context” completes). 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 “The Total Codex’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Zero is already written/was released on October 2023! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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

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

“Make it Gay,” part four: the Finale; or “Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n Roll!” (Ludo-Gothic BDSM in practice, feat. Blxxd Bunny and The Scorpions)

You can always trust your inner feelings
‘Cause they always tell the truth
Where did it get you, then your analyzing
Just do what feels right for you

If you take life as a crazy gamble
Throw your dice take your chance
You will see it from the different angle
And you too can join the dance (source)

—Klaus Meine; “Make It Real,” on The Scorpion’s Animal Magnetism (1980)

Picking up where “Book Sample: Shining a Light on Things, or How to Make Monsters” left off…

At long last, we arrive at the finale to our “camp map.” We’ve had to travel through Tolkien’s treasure maps and Cameron’s space colonies to get here, but also Radcliffe’s spectral, operatic castles and various psychosexual, “demon-castle” monstrosities (re: the Metroidvania) evoking the potential “to put the pussy on the chainwax”: to camp the canon with ludo-Gothic BDSM in practice and among friends who embody the virgin/whore as monstrous-feminine. Canon is propaganda that normally “grows out of the base and the ruling class’ interests [to justify] how the base operates and defends the power of the elite” (exhibit 0b); camp is propaganda through roleplay as Gothicized, wherein our “camp map” camps canon by replacing its harmful castles, knights, and monstrous, operatic throwbacks with harmless counterfeits during ludo-Gothic BDSM. This bait-and-switch extends to emergent thoughts, guilty pleasures and wish fulfillment as maps to explore upon our own sticky surfaces (above): regarding nature as monstrous-feminine (female or not) to subvert through itself according to what we control and leave behind. Our “treasure map” is drawn over older historical maps of conquest, effacing the linguo-material structure brick-by-brick with brick by brick. Gay bricks. Like language, their meaning is largely arbitrary and dictated by dialectical-material context, including that of class, culture and race war as informed by its own phenomenological (and pendulous) back-and-forth: between people and things made by people (about either of those things).

We’ll look at two seemingly at random and framed concentrically inside/outside of themselves (next page)—the Scorpions, followed by Blxxd Bunny and I pioneering ludo-Gothic BDSM out of whatever’s on hand; i.e., as it would continue to be used for this entire book series’ illustrating solidarity with (which we’ll conclude on before closing the volume out and heading into its aftercare)! Language isn’t harmful or healing on its own; how it’s used is, which requires rediscovering things again through prior returns to past attempts: to camp what has already been camped, been camped, been camped… The echo is “bad,” but that’s also kind of the point? Nothing lives forever but things can survive cryptomimetically between pieces of language adjacent to trauma. It’s silly-serious and “almost holy” (re: “A Song Written in Decay“); i.e., while writing and otherwise interacting with the dead as once-alive and yet miraculously alive-again through us subjected to the same humiliating forces we escape from inside of themselves. Let that be your optimism, however ouroborotic. Now carpe diem! The night is young!

(source)

As such, the “camp map” finale is both a destination and invitation to continue through ludo-Gothic BDSM as a profound means of rebellious fun; i.e., as an informed exercise of past reflections built and building on older forms thereof to have fun by inheriting the plastic past (and its danger discos, above). Through the Gothic’s playing with the taboo (usually through sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, above) to achieve controlled and uncontrolled opposition, alike, the latter are assembled from, and according to, our Gothic-Marxist tenets (and other pieces of the manifesto tree); re: making Communism just a little sexier and gayer through the Gothic’s cryptomimetic chain; i.e., of actively and intelligently (through informed[1] play) camping the canon but also the ghost of Marx to recultivate the Superstructure and reseize the Base through oppositional praxis: the proverbial twin trees we’ve sought to corrupt like Morgoth did, in Valinor (or Satan unto Paradise). This is not a singular event, but one that occurs through many collaborative acts; i.e., of worker solidarity developing Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism in opposition to state power over years, decades, and centuries of a collective ludo-Gothic BDSM! It goes on and on, and that’s a good thing—is a place of play to build whatever we need inside Plato’s cave, thus “Make It Real” through all the usual forces of nature and attraction waiting behind the camera lens.

This book’s finale, then, is merely a demonstration of one link inside that grand chain of events; i.e., as made by me with one of my muses (re: Blxxd Bunny). It’s not my making of monsters but our making of monsters; i.e., where we pull a Spinal Tap and “crank it up to eleven,” having the whore’s monstrous-feminine revenge against profit: through the very labor the state tries to control and antagonize workers with! Ours is not mere force of will (the fascist argument, when capital decays) but the force of our Aegis when brought to bare (so to speak), mid-performance; i.e., of power as something to see being performed: Medusa and hers looking back at you!

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

Note: Bunny is a good friend and cover model who kindly has supported my work over the years (re: despite them being ace and me very much not being ace). While a few illustrated exhibits feature sex workers collaborating as models for me in 2022 and early 2023 in Volume Zero (re: Itzel, from the dedication illustration), Bunny is a special case; i.e., because the finale of the “camp map” features them exclusively as the prototype—meaning for what became common practice in my later volumes, but especially Volume Two (the largest of my volumes by far)!

To that, while Volume Zero has the “camp map” with Bunny in it—illustrating mutual consent with me through ludo-Gothic BDSM—and Volume One has a handful of exhibits with different models doing the same basic action, Volume Two has dozens upon dozens of collabs. Camping canon, then, is an incredibly important idea vis-à-vis portraying ludo-Gothic BDSM as actionable; i.e., beyond simple rape play “for funsies” and more by healing from state abuse through intersectional labor exchanges that make monsters for illustrating mutual consent ipso facto. To it, Bunny broke the proverbial mold—said idea (and its execution) specifically pioneered here with them as my first cover model. They’re a very special bun (the best bun), and while I feature them extensively in my book series, I have pointedly updated this finale in 2025 to exhibit more of their work. Go support them!

That being said, this specialness includes our aforementioned process, which is still going on as I write this addendum; e.g., with Vera Dominus and I:

(artist: Vera Dominus)

In short, Bunny and I started the beginning of something in 2023 that is still going on with exciting new cuties. Just as Bunny is ace but partakes in public nudism to celebrate such things, sexuality and asexuality are a gradient; i.e., workers react differently separately-and-together about the same things, including sex and gender as things to identity around and perform with in a poetic state of death, change and rebirth: constant evolution from dead things turning radically back into living things. C’est la vie.

In keeping with activism and exhibitionism/voyeurism, some people love to share and show off; others love to do it for a larger cause. Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism is a holistic enterprise, in this respect; i.e., it deals in, with and through informed inclusion, acceptance and love to address duality through Gothic aesthetics: with bad actors, players and faith challenged in duality during oppositional praxis. Both we and our enemies commit stochastic terrorism; the only difference between us is our goals (and outcomes to said goals)—with them to keep us (and sex work, at large) illegal, and us to free ourselves from those state proponents pimping us! We become a rift in time-space, a dark church to turn the world completely upside-down, and whose shake down shakes out labor and land to give back to those it was stolen from by the elite!

Furthermore, through cryptonymy’s restless enormity and alien, febrile darkness, it becomes a thread we pull back on during ludo-Gothic BDSM. To reverse such abuse on a systemic level (which is all that capital really is; re: raping nature for profit), the liminal hauntology of war (and its morphological extensions’ dark side of the moon laid bare) cuts both ways. Plunging into the Medusa’s mighty bottom and its bottomless void to reverse the only thing capital cares about, we humanize the harvest to expose the state as inhumane (a concept which “Nature Is Food” from Volume One will inspect)!

Even so, each case remains memorable and idiosyncratic. Vera, for example, loves to share and I love to receive (each concept being highly reversible, of course); i.e., while making content together (above), as of me writing this addendum. Subsequently playing with taboo things as the Gothic does, we do so in liberating ways conducive to Gothic-Communist development; re: by pushing towards universal liberation vis-à-vis emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness during intersectional solidarity’s holistic pedagogy of the oppressed; i.e., healing from rape as a matter of systemic, thus widespread generational trauma (wherein we tip on its cusp of oppressive darkness merged with our own visible sort, below)—with, in our case, the gentle mommy domme’s own fabulous revolutionary cryptonymy reversing abjection (thus profit) during the whore’s dialectical-material revenge! Not everyone enjoys the way that I operate, but Vera does, and working together with her as Bunny I once pioneered has been tremendously rewarding! Sooner or later, education trumps making money but the two commonly go hand-in-hand until Communism actualizes; re: Socialism, which Gothic Communism is until society becomes stateless, classless and moneyless (we’ll talk about the anarchist, horizontal elements to Gothic Communism in the preface to Volume One). In other words, Socialism is fun; i.e., it doesn’t preclude sex (and power through sexuality’s asexual elements; re: public nudism as “porn art”)!

To that, find what fits together comfortably (though some friction paradoxically doesn’t hurt) and—once lubricated—make revolution happen, yourselves! Among ace and non-ace folk alike, united labor action (and tolerance for allies) are what ludo-Gothic BDSM is all about (thus its calculated risk developing Gothic Communism). Mommy dommes or otherwise, show them your Aegis; use its pearly surface (and assorted thresholds) to reflect a larger battle cry upon! Forget chainwax, slap that ass like a bass guitar! Mosh-pit that pussy till it begs for mercy! The Metroidvania are a perfect dom, but they aren’t people; castle to Gothic castle, the love shack is a Numinous torture dungeon of people and place alike—one for its students to experience dark-and-forbidden desires on the edge of the civilized world (re: “Exploring the Derelict Past“)! So edge your little hearts out! Howl at the moon! —Perse, 3/29/2025

(artist: Vera Dominus)

Before we get to Bunny and I doing that ourselves on their Aegis, let’s go over a few odds and ends that concern camping canon, thus ludo-Gothic BDSM (about eight pages)—how to do it, but also some examples that inspired my work you can learn from…

We’ll get to the Scorpions in a second (exhibit 1a1a1i1). First, let’s canvas the process that camping canon entails; i.e., the sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll that Gothic works with, thus Bunny and myself. Doing so is not just a sexy wiggling and silly-serious act of one-upping others; there’s a—you guessed it—Gothic function to such excessive numeration. Manuel Aguirre writes on excessive numbers, “Wherever four is the number of completeness […] a fifth element will suggest transcendence, or else disruption, of the human order […] the third of two, the fifth of four, the eighth of seven.” Silly or serious, a number beyond an intended amount denotes a hidden space or monstrous function; or as I write in “Survival-Horror in Blood (1997): the Weaponized Affect of the Gothic FPS” (2019): “Super secrets do more than numerically exceed the player’s understanding of the space; they go beyond Blood’s ability to quantify its own content, its own past.”

Furthermore, while that paper argued for campiness in videogames—specifically with the phrase “However, Blood affects through an FPS framework; furthermore, its response from the player is not driven by fear for fear’s sake. It is nostalgic and fun in ways that go beyond fear-and-nothing-else” (source)—the same idea of the “super secret” as something to “find” (to make and call it “archaeology”) applies to any source of hidden power in any Gothic space and its ludo-Gothic BDSM becoming ours. As such, it includes our own campy creations camping older “castles” and their monstrous denizens in and out of canonical media; i.e., by using whatever is left behind, generally presented as Gothic fantasy in some shape or form and often concerned with the selling (or interrogation) of power and sex; re: “to interrogate power, you must go where it is.”

As Key and Peele demonstrate, this interrogation can be directed at all manner of things in a playful sense to remake; i.e., to laugh at our would-be colonizers and all they hold dear by enjoying their tantrums as rope to hang themselves with. The proper way to disarm a Nazi (thus capitalist), then, is to fuck with, thus expose them as false (versus the perfidious bloodthirst of centrist neoliberal illusions); e.g., this absolute chudwad having a complete shit-fit over pronoun inclusion in Starfield (The Kavernacle’s “INSANE Anti-SJW MELTDOWN Over Starfield,” 2023). He’s precisely the kind of entitled, grifting bad actor/reactionary (with white moderate orbiters/defenders) that people like Bunny and I are challenging through our own collabs:

Ergo, laughing at dumbasses like him is perfectly fine and good, but there’s also the cathartic joy of playing with what makes them so dumb to begin with, during ludo-Gothic BDSM: canonical symbols of stigma, discipline and punishment (codified beliefs, behaviors and sets of rules/instructions) that we can reclaim from their carceral-punitive function via performative irony inside amatonormativity (e.g., “Reader, I married him.”) and various other heteronormative trails. Said irony unfolds by pushing back against/making fun of traditional sex operating as compelled labor for AFAB people, genderqueer persons, and other minorities. This happens through camp (thus class/culture war) personified in Gothic art; i.e., challenging heteronormativity during gender trouble and gender parody as liminal, monstrous expression: the monstrous-feminine and “corrupt,” correct-incorrect as existing between different media types and genres simultaneously: a Paganized hauntological made clown-ish/gay through the act of making as one simultaneously of finding through re-creation! The past comes alive, born again in ways not exactly the same (the invader is always alien and ally in Gothic scenarios)!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

For example, my drawing of Amanda Ripley camps Rip’ far beyond the developer’s original, intended vision, making her sex-positive inside the same operatic space, wherein our crafty heroine survives colonial trauma using stolen guns and improvised weapons; i.e., against an invincible ghost of the counterfeit (the alien, lovingly called “Stompy” by the fans) as interwoven with corporate subterfuge exposing the so-called “Russian spy[2]” that Dan O’Bannon disliked so much: a deliberately uncanny class of mindless working robots called “Working Joes” that Amanda must also fend off, lest they choke her to death like Frankenstein’s monster does Victor’s bride.

It should be obvious at this stage that I am predominantly a pin-up artist; as a rule of thumb, pin-up art focuses primarily on a subject, not a space. This means that while I draw spaces to contain my subjects within (and generally spend a fair amount of time inside Metroidvania and other castles for inspiration), I actually spend most of my time drawing monsters while listening to music. And yet, as I am a creature of chaos, I’m also drawn to past “castles” that contain my monsters, making my own through bricks that are, themselves, full of castles (and deep, dark desires written all over their surfaces and subjects); as such, my chaotic personality is drawn to the power of sex in Gothic forms, to which compelled binaries are generally a hindrance.

Simply put, I do what feels good to me according to how I think and according to the modes I haunt; i.e., the campy art/porn that I make with various other persons who inspire me. It’s where I feel most at home; it’s what feels right when making my own castle to roost from and populate with, assisted by monstrous code, music, humanoid representations and actual, living friends who put these devices and theories to praxis in their own lives.

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

To that, I find the Gothic—like sex—to work best when at least somewhat silly and transgressive[3]. The finale, then, is a collaboration between myself and one of my muses; re: Blxxd Bunny—the two of us demonstrating just how Gothic and silly camping the canon can be using a variety of styles, including rock ‘n roll as part of Gothic counterculture: something to fabricate as a sex-positive, quasi-operatic force; i.e., a “creative success” of proletarian praxis (and all that entails). In short, Bunny and I will effectively be doing ludo-Gothic BDSM across a variety of media forms, but also our bodies and the labor attached to them.

Note: I’ve consciously determined, with this 2025 edition of Volume Zero, to mention “ludo-Gothic BDSM” more (~200 times versus the original 30); i.e., by introducing it more into the manuscript. That being said, I won’t be calling anything inside or after this point in the finale, “ludo-Gothic BDSM,” save for a few examples; i.e., I won’t go crazy with it because my later books already do that. Even so, “ludo-Gothic BDSM,” as a poetic means of negotiating and expressing labor as monstrous, is essentially what Gothic Communism is founded on, albeit somewhat retroactively. It’s what Bunny and I were doing here and, by extension, elsewhere in my book series; i.e., after I had crystallized the term but before I had started using it to a wider degree. From the Poetry Module onwards, I would focus more on “ludo-Gothic BDSM” as rape play and catharsis versus the labor negotiation and expression side of things. Yet, the latter are just as fundamental and, furthermore, things that will continue to come up between this finale, Volume One and Volume Two.

To it, unless stated otherwise, consider this end of the addendums for this volume. —Perse, 3/29/2025

In Gothic stories’ poiesis/cryptomimesis, the heroine is classically a prisoner inside a procession of illusions that promote guilty pleasure, often set to music within theatre as sinful: sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll commodified as displaced and enchanting within the ghost of the counterfeit as a continual process of fakery canonically bound up with the process of abjection. Inside this parading galaxy of damaging nostalgia, her trapped ghost echoes across space and time as felt through, and gliding across, the surface of the image, but also inside the threshold of Gothic poetics’ liminal expression. She is sexualized even before the clothes come off (re: Sedgewick), but Americanized in ways that yield these fantasies through neoliberal forms that have, themselves, become nostalgia that we can reclaim through our own figurative (or literal) “rock ‘n roll” (originally an African American euphemism for sex): as learning from the past by transforming it using the same fractal recursion—i.e., its theatrical devices as deprivatized within the same mechanisms of capital. Capitalism will sell back to us what it alienates us from through Gothic theatre, which we can take, turn right back around, and transform right then and there: a reversal of the abjection process, humanizing monsters and sex work as interrelated affairs inside the ghost of the counterfeit.

Before we get to Blxxd Bunny and deprivatization, let me give you a quick, fun example of what I mean by “privatization.” I could pick any rock ‘n roll to camp, thus deprivatize, but I’m going with actual music, specifically the music video. I choose the Scorpions because—despite their breakout success and flirting with disaster using questionable (read: clearly ephebophilic; see: Bobbie Johnson’s “Wikipedia Falls Foul of British Censors,” 2008) album art with Virgin Killer (1976), much of their music is decidedly camp-adjacent with a Gothic aesthetic updated for the neoliberalizing of the rock ‘n roll craze of the ’80s. This helps explain the unquestionably German band’s popularity in far-off places like Japan; it was carted back and forth as a product: sin, sex, and rock as packaged, sold and performed in the Elvis school of “porn” through music hinting at the skin trade going on elsewhere in the same larger market; i.e., by a bunch of white dudes for a bunch of white dudes (the middle class):

(exhibit 1a1a1i1: There was nothing strictly “new” about the mise-en-abyme of the 1980s mimesis of a commodified desire sold as “terrorist literature.” Its own controlled opposition was packaged and presented through age-old art techniques that creators then-and-now use for the profit motive, but also to make art that is profoundly anti-capitalist/sex-positive but still “of its time and place.” Indeed, “artistic statements,” “medieval expression,” and “capitalist action” are far from mutually exclusive—a delightful fact illustrated wonderfully by Andrew Blake’s superbly dreamlike Night Trips [1989]. “Vaporwave before Vaporwave existed,” Blake’s marriage of the medieval image was “joined at the hip” [so to speak] with the neoliberal variation of the “Sale of Indulgences” expertly presenting the woman as trapped inside and outside of herself. We see her bare body clinging to electrodes that monitor her vitals, with persons standing next to her looking in, as she looks down at herself, looking in at other people fucking her and each other while she fucks them. Its concentric phantasm is profoundly decayed and euphoric, but also unquestionably ’80s. You’ll know it when you see it.

Regardless of its chief aim, Blake’s film won a silver medal at the 1989 WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival, specifically in the “Non-Theatrical Release” category. This makes it the first porn movie to win a medal at a major international film festival [source: Violet Blue’s “The Helmut Newton of Porn,” 2008]. It was porn and art-as-porn that made a statement that was clearly predicated on material conditions, but also love for the raw materials themselves as “dark,” forbidden fruit tied to music, drugs and disintegration.

The Scorpion’s “Rhythm of Love” [1988] relays a similar savage amusement through the commodification of said fruit, first and foremost. It relays the woman and eponymous scorpion as fused like a chimera. Onscreen, its main product is music, but that music is relayed through Gothic retro-future pastiche. Amid the canceled future, our Teutonic knights fly in from outer space on their spaceship, hauling special “cargo”: the Star Trek starlet in a leather catsuit! They appear like shadowy ghosts, taking to the stage while ghostly women dance and writhe all around them—behind the screen, “inside” the drumkit, upon and within the mirror. Like a Gothic castle, these sexy gargoyles squirm like animated stone. Of course, the band’s bill of sale conflates sex with music as a silly-yet-serious promise: rock ‘n roll as “sex music” deliberately fused inside a drug-like medieval portrait. Its recursion has been recuperated to serve the profit motive within a campy pastiche that undoubtedly moved monomythic merchandise in a great many forms—e.g., guitars, porn, videogames, movies, Scorpions paraphernalia. It’s all connected, but debatably far more concerned with selling out by “rocking us” with counterfeit cargo [containing ghostly stowaways] than making any kind of statement directly and openly themselves. And yet that’s the beauty of media; we can take what they did for a profit and weaponize it for class war while also having fun!

The whole meta-conversation occurs between not just the Scorpions and Blake from their respective doubled “castles”; it occurs between us on the shared wavelength, deciding what kind of art [thus monsters] we want to make while vibing within the same nostalgic, Gothic headspace and aesthetics [think Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp” (1796) but less lame]. To camp or not to camp? That is the question; but also: to what degree? Allegory or apocalypse? Missionary or doggy? Vaginal or anal? Maybe a bit of both while we listen to Emerald Web’s The Stargate Tapes [1978-1982] [4]? Maybe just a bit of teasing while we sit around eating questionably-shaped food objects? The sky’s the limit, really.)

Despite all their demonstrable flaws, I love the Scorpions because their nostalgia lends itself well to camp as living in the same shadow space as a particular kind of Gothic: the love zone. I wanna rock, baby, and fuck demon mommies to metal in my castle (effectively campy recreations of Castle Anthrax [below] and its train of “wicked, bad naughty things,” all hailed by naughty nuns and false grail beacons; like, it’s made up, but I didn’t make that up). In their music video for “The Rhythm of Love” (1988), the Scorpions offer Cold-War comfort food (which would culminate with “Wind of Change,” in 1990) adjacent to, thus crossing over (if by accident) into the art-camp erotica of Andrew Blake’s porn world they were clearly peddling themselves. And if they were of the (revolutionary) devil’s party and didn’t know it, we can take their sleeping potential and wake it the fuck up with our own monstrous creations. So let’s do that now, shall we?

(exhibit 1a1a1i2: There’s nothing “gentle” about canonical knights; their courtly “love” is rotten to the core [the greatest danger is a serious “knight” (cop) who feels “in fear for his life” and is protected by the system in ways that allow him to kill and rape with impunity]. Also, we don’t see it, but Castle Anthrax is presumably the “evil” double of wherever Sir Galahad came from. Its “wicked” residents represent “almost certain temptation,” which real-life bigot and massive chudwad, John Cleese, must “save” Michael Palin from; it’s very “bros before hoes,” the kind of toxic homosociality that Monty Python was making fun of in-text about older legends manifesting in their own culture, but also their own cast; and later on, “TERF Island” would play out through the rise of “Radcliffe’s ghost” [mirroring her xenophobia while also not being her] in total fucking psychos like J.K. Rowling’s male and female, straight and queer fans baying for our blood.)

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

The rest of the finale is a collaboration between Blxxd Bunny and myself. We’ll start with camping the pussy but especially the birth canal, the vagina and its biological-reproductive function, as demonized by “both sides” (in the traditional, binary sense) for different, often pareidolic reasons: for men, “vagina = woman and woman is other”; for (many) women, “vagina = rape and unwanted baby (which under the best of circumstances, can still kill the mother or drive her mad; i.e., the Madwoman in the Attic).” They see less what they want to see and more what they have been conditioned to see. The ensuing rhetoric becomes weak/strong and correct-incorrect at the same time; i.e., “as it should be” in relation to the classic Gothic “push-pull” (oscillation) as conducive to the same-old historical materialism being structurally preserved through play as practice; re: as a military detail/exercise that, as usual, is largely forged out of spare parts taken from all over empire as inherited!

For our revolutionary purposes, “the devil is in the details.” As a fixture of rebellion, “Satan” is out there waiting for us, calling for workers to rise up and take back what’s rightfully ours: our bodies, our labor, our dignity in our own devilish deals. “Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven,” but also: “the mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” We can do so consciously—to be of the devil’s party and know it (unlike Milton) while “rockin’ out” at the same time: to “ring hell’s bells” and call others to do the same; e.g., to ring “Satan’s (door)bell” as a metaphor/mayhap-happy-accidental pun for anal sex. Regardless, it’s “the call of the void,” baby—not of actual self-destruction, but of a canonical prescription’s harmful “self” (the ghost of the counterfeit) threatened by its paradoxical relationship to codified objects of abjection: canonical sin, strength and gender roles, etc, encompassing the paradox of terror sex-positive workers run wild with. In short, the world may be a shitty place, but we can do our part to make it a better one than has ever existed according to what we create as camping what came before. Pokémon evolve, right? I choose you, Blxxd Bunny!

(exhibit 1a1a1i3: Artist: Blxxd Bunny. Bunny’s bum/pussy, a book, and ACDC [all walk into a bar…]

When dealing with canonical vaginas, the asshole is always nearby [the actual body part but also its colonizer/colonized regarding said part]. The asshole, pussy and owner’s body constitute the wandering womb as ancient hysteria, which canonizes into “pussy,” “demon,” and “Nazi” as combined into some such silliness as part of the elite’s bad-faith “joke”: a “pussy demon nazi,” “vagina-dentata necrobiome, “womb cave” or whatever else is monstrous-feminine enough to correctly-incorrectly convey and execute canonical praxis by closeting the representee and killing the representative [and vice versa]. The way to reclaim the joke, thus the process, is to camp the pussy, demon, asshole, and Nazi separately and together [and with the asshole—the “devil’s doorbell”—being so close to the pussy as to be conflated with it during the process of abjection, the vagina becoming a conveyer of shit and the asshole of afterbirth, blood, yeast infections, etc; but also terrifying truths: girls shit—or as an admirer of my ass playfully asked me once, “Damn, girl, you shit with that ass?” “Coprophilia” in quotes]. Generally this is done in ways that people normally communicate as a social-sexual species: through sex, but also parties, operatic theatre [drama and comedy] and music—e.g., rock ‘n roll as countercultural, but also oral and folklore-driven, thus something the elite never fully have a grip on [a potential for uncontrolled opposition]:

“Moonlight is thought to transform some people
Into strange creatures to drive others mad […]
Does the moon [ass] actually possess such strange powers?
Or is it all just lunacy?” [“Moon Baby,” 1997]. 

Regardless of how they come about, the adjectives and their nouns, when combined, will go from being seen as unironic, stigmatized sites of trauma, sin, darkness and torture, to having these things put into quotes; i.e., to be camped. Through our synthetic oppositional devices they become a joyous playground of constructive anger, stabilizing gossip, perceptive pastiche, ironic quoting and gender trouble/parody, and good-faith egregores—a revolutionary Grendel/Grendel’s mom and their figurative and literal cave/home as poetically elided while remaining aware of its own previous, fatal historical materialism: as already colonized, thus something to subvert and reclaim through “perceptive” camp. In a dialectical-material sense, the mother is no longer a site of unironic, incestuous rape, castration and infantile vengeance, but neither is her “child.” Instead, the mother becomes her own subject, and the relationship between mother and “child” improves well beyond any literal, familial terms: it becomes a pornographic jest with happy/non-harmful variants of “correct-incorrect” and “weak/strong” results [this treatment of “happy” again being lifted from Catherine Spooner’s Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic]: as played with by the performers who pass their lessons along to consumer students through iconoclastic art as entertainment and education [an American paradox]. In short, it’s a “stepson/stepbrother, what are you doing?” scenario minus the exploitation; as with all ironic, sex-positive BDSM, the “rape” is placed in quotes during subversive rape play. It becomes informed, invited—a means of combating its harmful, manufactured forms [manufactured consent, rape culture, Max Box/”prison sex,” etc; in fact, all of the bourgeois trifectas] during a “creative success” towards proletarian praxis.

Canonical synthetic stratagems [destructive anger, destabilizing gossip, “blind” pastiche/parody and its endorsement, unironic gender trouble/parody and bad-faith egregores] must be checked in ways that cultivate emotional/Gothic intelligence at a social-sexual level, thus recultivate the Superstructure to incentivize degrowth [away from canonical war in all its forms and disguises] through the Gothic mode as employed by our own costumes, uniforms, masks and weapons as disguise-like but also functional: the de facto proletarian teacher, lover, dominatrix, soldier and spy all rolled into one. In doing so, the operative regains control/the ability to negotiate boundaries and experience catharsis; i.e., through submission within boundaries of mutual consent, drawn up by teaching others control/negotiation [discipline] and by playing with herself and inviting them to watch in ways that respect [thus illustrate] mutual consent through campy demon BDSM, kink and appreciative “peril”/psychosexuality as an invited voyeurism/exhibitionist nudism: “Come and see” [or see and come].

[artist: Blxxd Bunny]

Under such liminal conditions, the exposed body isn’t exclusively vulnerable; it’s a descriptively sexual, culturally appreciative place for [a]sexual artistry and gender-non-conforming appreciation, play and catharsis of many different kinds—e.g., Bunny is ace and should be appreciated, worshipped and loved[5] as a being to empathize with/relate to: as a fellow worker under the same proletarian struggle; i.e., to revive our combined pedagogy of the oppressed through what makes it delicious and fun, thus relatable, to begin with; and something whose comforting, nurturing qualities make trauma—be it outside or inside the body through rape, war and mass exploitation/genocide—easier to talk about and heal from.

The paradox of catharsis and trauma lies in how these lucid dreams and beautiful, psychosexual nightmares are always good for a laugh, a cry and/or an orgasm as added benefits that can help us relate to ourselves, society and our comrades in vivid, cathartically medieval, and yes, [self-]indulgent/masturbatory ways. You don’t have to marry a comrade; someone can help you masturbate as a friend, and in a variety of friendly ways: with their hand, their words, or their photos supplied as sexual participation, or as artistic extensions of themselves they know other people enjoy with in those ways [even if they do not]. And unlike the Gothic heroine—who literally has to go to hell and back just to get some implied dick at the end—our “happy endings” can happen from moment to moment; i.e., in the same aesthetics of power, weakness and death divorced entirely from harm and enjoyed “to the hilt.” Under these felicitous circumstances, what was advertised as “mere fantasy yet better than real life” becomes half-real: A “Oh, God, is this really happening?” fairytale, storybook, dream-come-true [and not a boring one, either—it has whips and chains whose “death by Snu-Snu” follows the BDSM motto: “hurt, not harm”] that helps comrades heal through shared struggle as cathartic; i.e., trauma bonding. That’s another aspect to ludo-Gothic BDSM—one that Bunny plays out solo as much as with me invigilating their work, afterward:

[artist: Blxxd Bunny, who plays around with their body as historically-materially fetishized in fun, campy ways, including the bathroom (a classic site of rape/power abuse in horror films) as an image of ironic, appreciative peril/cathartic rape play. In the larger “bathroom” scenario, they film their body and its parts from a variety of angles and positions, all while covered in [self-installed] tattoos and “on fleek” (source: Max Kutner, 2015) makeup. Like that curious and enigmatic phrase, they’re “starting a thing”; re: Key and Peele’s timeless and immortal (according to me) “putting the pussy on the chainwax!“]

In turn, this sex-positive trauma-bonding struggle and identity during ludo-Gothic BDSM can be dressed up as needed; i.e., viewed from any angle or context one requires to synthesize, thus relay, the counterterror message as part of the larger action plan—of worker solidarity reified through the connections we establish and produce.

For workers like Bunny and I, this concerns normalized social-[a]sexual transactions of exchanged sex-as-labor in artistic forms that we take back from the paradox of elite omnipotence and their menticided thugs’ double standards [e.g., “God’s Loophole[6]” for white, Christian girls having anal sex to avoiding sinning before marriage—the idea of sin largely an arbitrary one arbitrated by the arbiters]. Though our Six Rs, or Gothic-Marxist tenets of Gothic Communism, oppositional praxis becomes “creatively successful”: sex-positive instead of sex-coercive. In turn, Marxism becomes more fun and funnier/sexier than Marx; it becomes “succulent” by “living deliciously” to regain what is lost, repressed, or denied to us by Capitalism’s myopic, future-cancelling amnesia, including our humanity, dignity and power—to organize, reassemble and fight back with: as workers aggregating in solidarity [through riots and strikes, but also camp] against tyrants mobilizing their aggregate power against us. “‘This is our mall,’ motherfuckers! Our Black Mesa, companion cube, and ‘cake!'” We start things/put the pussy on the chainwax, not you!” Power is stored on the Aegis as something to camp canon with during ludo-Gothic BDSM:

[artist: Blxxd Bunny]

In short, the state’s monopoly on violence, terror and monsters is not total; we have room to conduct counterterrorism as a vital, necessary process to our own survival through ludo-Gothic BDSM camping the canon by any and all means at our disposal! Power is in things the state wants to pimp; re: like Bunny’s fat succulent ass!

The same collective and complicated pragmatics[7] applies to any monstrous-feminine symbol presented as abject, “terrorist,” corrupt and/or stigma-animal. The individual parts must be reclaimed, but also how they interrelate back and forth with/within themselves, their owner and their would-be colonizers as reconditioned by the revolutionary [thus transformative] cryptonymy of the worker-as-instructor’s powerful, “torturous” code: “come here and get fucked, but in a non-harmful and, at-times-surreal, sense that contributes to sex worker rights/the rights of all workers sexualized under Capitalism”; i.e., “wake up/exit Plato’s cave by paradoxically addressing bodies, genders and labor more broadly inside the cave as having been harmfully sexualized, dimorphized and fetishized under Capitalism.” The fear and fascination with an imagined emancipatory hauntology can drive the reverse process of abjection through a Galatea whose dark poetics—through their body and artistic expression/pedagogy of the oppressed—combats Capitalist Realism’s verisimilitude/myopia; i.e., Capitalism’s harmful narrative of the crypt stemming from the unironic monomyth, Cycle of Kings, and infernal concentric pattern as unironically consumed, thus endorsed and reproduced without irony through future, unironic forgeries. Our combatting of said forgeries occurs by dancing with the figurative dead, but also fucking them [a sex-positive camping of “necrophilia” placed in quotes as a kind of “rape,” or sex-positive rape play with “undead” flavors]. Against bad[-faith] dance partners, our “danse macabre” can sweep ’em off their feet!

 

[artist: Maurice Sendak]

The “wild rumpus” of the liberated Galatea’s sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll engenders the “creative successes” of proletarian praxis: mutual consent, descriptive sexuality and informed, ironic and culturally appreciative consumption during Gothic counterculture—kink, fetishization and demonic BDSM—as iconoclastically poetic. As such, they recultivate the Superstructure and the demonized image: of workers and of Communism, but also of the elite not being in charge and genocide not happening as a profoundly sex-positive thing. “Making it gay” becomes not “the end of the world” as a terrible event, but a ridding of the awful double standards surrounding “the end of history” as exclusively enjoyed by the elite [and their proponents; e.g., Coleridge tut-tutting Matthew Lewis while writing “Christabel” (1797-1800)[8]] but not by us; re: “boundaries for me, not for thee.”

In turn, this seminal and tremendous subversion becomes a thoroughly enjoyable thing told through the Gothic mode of creative expression in highly playful language that people actually speak, exchange and consume from an early age: through monsters, music and myths—the oral traditional carried over into written form [and those “in-between things”; e.g., drawings and performance art] as Gothically apocryphal. Good [sex-positive, healthy] sex-and-gender education and good play are things taught to children through said apocrypha, as are their bad [sex-coercive, harmful] forms. Historically-materially the parent dichotomy [and its sub-categories and orbiting factors] all exist in dialectical-material conflict—i.e., in material renditions of the Gothic psychomachy’s psychosexual psychopraxis, wherein punching up and down theatrically express through subversive and subordinate forms: the Amazonomachia as class/culture war during art and porn as thoroughly monstrous [undead/demonic] forms of liminal expression warring with one another in paradoxical, doubled performances of power but also interrogations. Don’t be afraid to scrutinize, thus learn from it, in a dialectical-material sense.)

To conclude this finale and the “camp map,” canon isn’t hard to camp; it just takes subtext and a drive to be oneself as part of a larger tradition of questioning canon. You have to be willing to realize that nothing is sacred (except human rights and the health of ecosystems and the humane treatment of animals), then be unafraid to be loud, campy and silly with your own ludo-Gothic BDSM; re: similar to what Bunny and I have gleefully demonstrated here. Power is wherever you find it:

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

Before we segue into the “camp map” conclusion, let’s reflect on what Bunny and I have done; i.e., the big picture that ludo-Gothic BDSM attaches to, in small (nine pages), and some closing points about solidarity as a juggling act: being “up in the air” with many moving parts, all of these falling into place insofar as Gothic Communism ultimately does—messily and with some degree of risk whose calculations can only go so far!

As the “camp map” shows us—and what Bunny and activism is taught through participation as playful: by having fun at canon’s expense, “making it gay” wherever we can, from positions of relative privilege and oppression; i.e., by drawing graffiti-style rainbows all over it with glitter and crayons, but also embodying it through what makes us beautiful: the sum of ourselves reclaiming stolen culture, but also weaponizing stolen stigmas twisted out from the robber’s vault of abused folklore.

The vampire, for example, is as much a Jewish voice (through Mel Brooks) as it is an anti-Semitic trope and pre-fascist marker/Catholic “kick me” sign (more on this in Volume Two’s “They Hunger” chapter [on vampires], and in the Demon Module; re: “‘Anti-Semitism’ vs ‘antisemitism’“). The pedagogy of the oppressed, then, rises up out of comedy as much as drama insofar as satire is concerned—but often occurs through Gothic reminders that comedy is as much happiness and joy on- and offstage as it is a straight-up joke told for laughs. As Hannah Gadsby might put it, a “joke is tension and release” (and humor is utterly vital to camping canon; i.e., through its art history, which Gadsby specializes in through staged comedy shows). I think comedy abides by that in relation to sex and gender told through the joke of sacred things that, given to us straight (that was a pun), lead to great harm.

While the concept isn’t foolproof, the delicious irony of camp is that it can fail and still work. If memory serves, Dracula, Dead and Loving It (1995) fell flat—felt like the Count going through the motions after a very long career (which, for Leslie Nielsen and Mel Books, was the case). Maybe it just doesn’t “work” compared to Young Frankenstein (1974) according to some people:

Did you happen to read the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly? Mel Brooks said: “There’s a great quote: ‘Critics are like eunuchs at an orgy—they just don’t get it.’ I ran into Roger Ebert. He didn’t like Dracula. He made no bones about it—thumbs, pinkies, every digit that he had. And I said to him: ‘Listen, you, I made 21 movies. I’m very talented. I’ll live in history. I have a body of work. You only have a body'” (source: Roger Ebert, “Movie Answer Man (07/21/1996)”).

And yet, it does work because it’s making fun of canon! That’s the point! Bella Lugosi’s 1931 Dracula might be queer-coded, but it’s pretty damn straight-laced in terms of executing said code; i.e., its unironic treatment of queerness (the gay man threatening to make the ladies all lesbians: the “Carmilla-esque” bride of Dracula). The key to transformation is the attempt at camp, not the ability to cash in and “succeed” in the capitalist sense. Even if the joke doesn’t land because the comedic timing is off, I’d still rather someone fail to tell a funny joke with good intent than land a wickedly funny one with bad.

I don’t want to apologize for an unfunny vamp camp, but the myth of camp is that it’s always funny. It’s not; you can be completely off your game and still camp canon. For example, “true camp” is seriousness that fails, but as I point out in “My Least Favorite Horror Movies?” (2020), even this is a spectrum:

For me, the most egregious movies are the ones not worth rating at all. Alas, these fall into the bin—a giant midden of forgotten trash, with little distinguishing one from the next. I find it far more productive to seek out movies others might slap a number on to qualify. Myself, on the other hand, will simply be content in saying something about them, whatever that may be. If a movie cannot get me to write about it save to say how woefully boring it is—or lacking to some other degree, instead of supplying me with any sort of positive reaction—then I might relegate it to the pile and simply move on (source).

Sometimes you get duds. More to the point, class war demands gender trouble and gender parody with an active eye for empathy first and foremost, not a stellar punchline. Even if the story is good, it’s no guarantee of critical acclaim. To this, The Monk was not well received by (white, cis-het male) critics like Coleridge, who petulantly whined: “Nor must it be forgotten that the author is a man of rank and fortune. Yes! the author of the Monk signs himself a LEGISLATOR! We stare and tremble!” (source). Like, fuck that guy. Yes, fuck you, Coleridge; the unwelcome appearance of campy monsters meant that you—as the most privileged group (white, cis-het men)—finally had to say something of your ruined ideal of the world. Awfully telling that you took the conservative stance by bashing the fag instead of “the Great Enchantress” by recognizing her as serving the profit motive through controlled, thus commodified opposition (the ensuing chaos being blamed on gay terrorism, of course—story of our life). You’re not a god and neither was she; I can prove that right now by barbequing both of your sacred cows (and dancing with your ghosts—as Tom Cruise’s Lestat puts it, “There’s still life in the old lady yet!”).

In short, empathy constitutes making fun of legit assholes, even if the joke sucks (e.g., Brick Tamland when sticking up for his pals with this gem: “Where did you get your clothes, the toilet store?”) or the person you’re telling it to doesn’t appreciate it (the stuttering Irish bartender from Boondock Saints [1999]: “Why don’t you make like a tree and get the fuck outta here?”). Moreover, camp can be whatever canon you wish to fuck with. Our danger disco can be an obvious example (re: the rock ‘n roll vampire castle); or it can be scrawled over Tolkien’s refrain (the hopelessly fake-but-popular treasure map bastardized from a bunch of self-aggrandizing Spear Danes by a British Oxford nerd/war veteran who, while racist and far from perfect in his own privileged voice, at least gave people the option to be gay through the medieval romance).

So many things can enact ludo-Gothic BDSM to camp canon with. What matters is that it’s camp and that’s a pretty broad canvas to paint your “masterpiece” on; better a sex-positive stick figure or a cute, unscary monster (whatever floats your boat) speaking in a valley girl/surfer dude accent than a sexist, rapey Picasso, academic or frat boy who thinks “green light” should be interpreted as “no means yes, yes means anal”; i.e., “green means automatic anal whether the receiving party consents or not.” If their eyes are souless and dead behind the mask, blame Capitalism because it does that to men (and tokens) inside the Man Box’ dark fortress/siege mentality fearing the ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., during the abjection process’ dialect of the alien: nature invades home and makes it alien, requiring state crackdowns from the middle class (more on Hogle’s seminal idea throughout the entire series). In terms of capital pimping nature, it’s the hand that turns the handle of the meat grinder!

Before we conclude the “camp map” and move on to our thesis conclusion, I have some closing notes to address; i.e., about language, including its usage and policing of swearing and sex positivity as something to raise like a fist (often as a raised fist) against our perceived, “untouchable” betters. First, in relation to the traffic light system and Man Box culture: these things are all connected to larger socio-material issues informing these behaviors as instructed either way. So, while the universally ethical usage of the traffic light system might seem intuitive, the frat boys and chudwads of dude-bro culture[9] would abuse and dogmatize its canonical misuse.

Second, the same effects in language can be seen in things like vocal fry and upspeak; i.e., the lack of direct assertive aggression being seen as feminine/weak in a traditional, thus conservative and heteronormative sense. “Perceptive” camp, then, becomes an ironic lack of traditional male/masculine assertiveness; it’s automatically camp by virtue of not being these things through function. The same goes for swearing and aggressive displays that can have competing communication goals, including but not limited to, videogames:

There are many attitudes surrounding swearing and why people do it and who is supposed to and who is not. For instance, Timothy Jay writes “swearing and aggressive behaviors are a substitute for physical aggression.” Building on that idea, I would like to additionally posit that, with people who play videogames—who henceforth, I shall refer to as gamers—such aggression can manifest itself in [any gender … Because common] options for aggressive behavior online are [verbal, but] performed anonymously due to “[e-community solidarity being] facilitated by [an] anonymity [that also] guarantees online equality” (Dynel 38). Yet such aggressive behavior can be radically motivated by [competing sexual and gender] dynamics once said anonymity is removed and equality disturbed (modified from the original source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Swearing Communication Goals: Social Aggression in Homo-Social Bonding vs Sexual Aggression,” 2016).

Beyond videogames, the same idea of competing communication goals applies to other forms of violent (usually Gothic) theatre and gender performance that videogames are built upon (and vice versa); i.e., in relation to parallel media forms and consumption.

By extension, these performances (and their goals) happen in-text, as well as during the meta of the text as something to perform on various registers in ways that can be reclaimed—i.e., not just by cis-het people (which the above paper primarily focused on because I was still in the closet when I wrote it) but by any minority/underclass group who doesn’t want to be colonized/tone-policed according to intersecting degrees of privilege and oppression. Ludo-Gothic BDSM can camp canon solo; it can also do it with friends/toys helping us make art: a mystery to reunite with through a process that’s difficult to standardize.

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

Unto that, our third point is solidarity. My relative privilege as a trans white woman stands in solidarity with other oppressed groups against capital; even if it’s from my modern-day version of Merlin’s tower (as my foreword mentions), my friends still cheer “Get ’em!” as I take Radcliffe, Tolkien or Natalie Wynn to task. It’s simply not worth it to venerate such people like they’re beyond rebuke, thus compromising with the state and halting any attempt at being politically active.

And to our potential allies, I say this: If you’re really on our side, you’ll join us or at least support our—like Monty Python’s Frenchman viciously taunting Arthur and his knights—collective swearing or violation of boundaries inside our safe-space exhibits as allowed to exist in the same public market (vis-à-vis Milton’s 1644 “Areopagitica”[10]); i.e., regardless of how badly it upsets or bores fancy-pants critics like Coleridge or Jameson (the former much happier with those he “allowed” to write; e.g., Radcliffe, because her romances upheld the status quo, hence its material conditions) or bothers official police defending private property before people, including sex workers as privatized by the elite:

(source: Fired Up Stilettos)

So don’t be meek[11] about it, comrades! Swear! Be bold in your art! Raise your fist! The idea isn’t even to fight back as the state does; instead of apathy regarding police brutality (military urbanism) and settler-colonial violence, sex-positive artists promote Gothic Communism as universal basic human/worker rights (and the rights and health of animals and the environment) while discouraging sexism and other bigotries with their own playful disguises. They raise their fists to “punch” Nazis and neoliberals—not literally in the face (not always, anyways), but up into their dogmatic, canonical propaganda.

In turn, this raising-of-the-fist (and other body parts) occurs by retooling war as an act of rebellion against bourgeois tyranny. The difference between us and fraidy-cats like Radcliffe is that iconoclasts own the act of punching (up, in our case) as a conscious form of informed political action; i.e., directing worker solidarity (often through billboard/graffiti[12] approaches tied to their actual bodies, above) against normalized violence and those who encourage or perpetuate said abuse—to show the world what fascists and neoliberals really are: complicit abusers who try to divide and discourage the love that holds rebellions together (across space and time, the ghosts of Marx [including Marx] channeled through us).

Fourth, as to the provocation of the raised fist itself, Nicola Green demonstrates how there are many, many variants of the raised fist in art (“Struggle, Solidarity, Power: The History of the Iconic Raised Fist,” 2021). Its historical purpose is antifascist—pitting true rebellion against “fake rebellion” by reifying an emancipatory cause as something to sloganize: “punching up” through body language:

The fist was used by the United Workers of the World labor union in 1917 and by anti-fascists in the 1930s during the Spanish Civil War. Students raised the fist in Paris in 1968 in mass protests against French President Charles de Gaulle. If you’ve seen an image of the fist on a sign or a shirt, it’s almost certainly an uncredited version of a design by Frank Cieciorka, whose woodcut print of a disembodied black fist on a white background adorned posters for Stop the Draft Week in 1967. Cieciorka had seen the fist while participating in a socialist rally in San Francisco (source: Christopher Spata’s “What does a raised fist mean in 2020?”).

Nonviolent resistance articulates that which the elite historically frame as violent: worker solidarity, but also countercultural displays of active, prolonged resistance. Art prolongs resistance by holding up better than fleshy bodies do. More to the point, when treated as acts of rebellious strength, they lift people out of violent ways of thinking while still living inside oppressive systems that encourage mental imprisonment. This includes neglect and class betrayal at large as violent through the support of the system in sacrifice of worker rights; e.g., Radcliffe’s own political moderacy and longevity through her novels/School of Terror.

(exhibit 1a1a1i4: Source: ibid.. Picket iconography is something that can emblazon protest and counterprotest for or against the state; those who use these symbols need to reclaim them from state proponents by committing their usage to movements that ultimately do not become recuperated, thus ineffective at inducing genuine socio-material change; e.g., Che Guevara on a t-shirt [exhibit 8b] doesn’t automatically equal rebellion; it has to leverage collective worker action/solidarity against the state in ways that do not automatically preclude violence: striking and rioting. They’re not safe, but they historically work, which is why the elite use neoliberalism indirectly and military urbanism directly to quell rebellious sentiment; i.e., Thatcher’s proud, shameless declaration: “Economics are the method: the object is to change the soul.”)

Using de facto reeducation to punch up, sex-positive artists bridge gaps to achieve universal liberation with ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., seeking to change indoctrinated people’s hearts and minds: by bringing them over towards a more humane and egalitarian way of thinking about sex, including its Gothic, infamously campy forms.

And of course, all of this is rather easy for me to say, right? I’m just a white middle-class American woman and have relative privilege. Obviously, I expect workers to do activism to whatever degree they feel safe and comfortable, but also want to remind them: it doesn’t take much effort to raise a fist (white people should do it, arm-in-arm with their fellow workers, and use their positions of privilege to speak out in ways many people in the world can’t). And to all workers of the world: Remember that we’re doing this for all workers, not purely for our own comfort; re: post-scarcity vs “equality of convenience.” Everything dies and the state and its proponents are going to police you no matter what—to take more and more for themselves while alienating you from everything around you.

So provided it’s genuine and aware of its effects, any endorsement—no matter how small—helps counteract Capitalism carrying on as it always does. Your assistance needn’t amount to “going native”/fully assimilating and joining us on the Satanic front lines (there is a price to that, a bell you can’t unring… but also, we have snacks so come hang out); in fact, it can simply be getting out of our way (many class traitors undercut the legs of rebellion by actively recuperating[13] or betraying its slogans and symbols in service of cheap, escapist fantasies). Whatever you choose to do, just know that a hellish chorus of whispers and speaking and/or raised voices appearing in conscious, organized solidarity with those symbols will hit far harder together against the state and the establishment than one person shouting the truth of Capitalism as loudly as they can from the top of their lungs. Labor action is a group effort, including camp! It’s what Bunny and I did, and you can do, too! Go wild, loves)! Don’t just raise your fist; show ’em your Aegis, and once more with feeling! Become the mountain for others to travel to!

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

Like Satan, camp at large is very much tone-policed; i.e., treated by proponents of capital as, “This old, not new, not something that’s sold as ‘fresh,'” all while ignoring old theatrical devices like medieval puppet shows and bad voices, swearing and colorful metaphors, asides/speaking to the audience, Greek Choruses and Jojo’s “tension” katakana, offshoots of Blue Beard/Medusa, etc. Capital is always trying to commodify, thus colonize the antiquated oral traditions of theatre, but through the drive of capital these invariably become outmoded, and we can reclaim them from canon as it crumbles, possessing the body when the spirit has fled (“the flesh is weak”). Ideally the message should convey even when inebriated (a kind of xenoglossia, if you will, to summon through ritualized instances of teaching exercises about sexuality, bodily autonomy and worker rights doubling as art).

From the Scorpions to Blxxd Bunny to Vera and myself, canon can always be camped, and furthermore, relies on controlled chaos to account for the systemic mayhem capital foists on workers; i.e., old theatrical stratagems and Gothic hauntologies, but also “talking funny” or incorrectly to achieve its campy Jester’s affect: combining this with that, as ludo-Gothic BDSM demonstrably does. Use its dark gravity to pull your own baddies!

In short, daily synthesis and catharsis means using whatever works; fuck to Tangerine Dream if it makes you happy/cultivates good daily habits (as Zeuhl and I once tried, though it’s not good sex music. Stick to metal [or anything with a steady beat; e.g., Susumu Yokota’s “Tambarin“] for that). Likewise, kill any darlings you need to; re: as much shit as I’ve given Radcliffe (whose “cow” hasn’t just been cooked well done, but beaten, stabbed, shot, set on fire, ripped open, farted on, and doodled over with crayons, glitter and clown makeup; forget tearing her a new grave-sized asshole, she’s nothing but asshole now—or, if you want to be less Matthew-Lewis about it, I’ve camped her ghost), I’ve also looted her castle bare, pinching everything I can to make my point. Thanks for the leg up, Annie (we’ll get back to you, in Volume Two; re: “Summoning Demons“)!

As something to learn and perform through others (not just myself and Blxxd Bunny but any sex-positive worker), activist statements/uncontrolled opposition’s “punching up” are often demonstrated by simply existing through identity politics as subversive/cathartic roleplay. A monster, after all, is a form of identity mid-struggle under oppressive, prescriptive conditions. Gothic Communism, then, seeks to alter our current material conditions (and their “stuck” pastiche) by recoding the Superstructure during canon vs iconoclasm as “sexier than Marx” (who, again, was always a bit dry) “but also funnier” (re: “chainwax”); i.e., sexy meaning funny if it respects consent by challenging things that don’t respect consent. This means working in praxial opposition to the status-quo factors whose comorbidities under Capitalism lead to genocide and us being undead/demonized and—unlike Leslie Nielsen—are not loving our roles in heroic canon; e.g., Scott Marks’ “Day of the Animals: Leslie Nielsen Meets the Preston Sturges of ’70s Schlock” (2022).

(artist, left: Henry Fuseli; right: source)

All this being said, let’s wrap things up with a short thesis conclusion (for my argument and its argumentation, written back in 2023), then move onto the symposium! Onto “Thesis Conclusion, Symposium and Segue“!

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About the Author

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

Footnotes

[1] Again, some camp is blind; we have to make sure ours isn’t, lest the ludo-Gothic BDSM that results become Sontag’s ignominious “true camp”: “seriousness that fails” in ways that harm us. We must be aware of what we’re doing. The exact destination is less important than the historical materialism of things falling into place as society grows more and more sex-positive over time.

[2] O’Bannon’s fussy term for Ash the Android, in Alien; i.e., Red Scare (a concept we’ll explore more at length in the Poetry Module; re: “Red Scare; or, Out in the World“).

[3] I’ve always been drawn to tattoos and piercings on other people. When Zeuhl and I first had sex, we were initially watching Forbidden Planet. They insisted their legs “were hot” and asked if they could take off their pants. I complied, but kept glancing over at their crotch because I couldn’t tell if they were wearing see-through panties, had a really hairy pussy or both. Turns out, it was both—a fact I learned shortly thereafter when I looked over at Zeuhl to discover them watching me, waiting to see how I would respond. Intrigued by their septum piercing, I thought of a way in: I asked them if they had any other piercings. They said they had pierced nipples, to which I asked if I could see them; they obliged, whereupon I asked if I could suck on them. Zeuhl smiled enthusiastically and said, “If you want!” (for a deeper chronicling of all my sexcapades with Zeuhl, refer to “The Eyeball Zone“).

While a little bittersweet now, the scene is still a happy memory for me—not least of all because it was a silly inside joke between us for years: Before starting the movie, I had propositioned Zeuhl, to which they said, “I’m not for closing any doors”; to which their joking addendum to the original answer would be followed up with “…fucks three hours later!” Even if they were only playing around to abide by the college fantasy of temporary rebellion and experimentation (whose principles they largely abandoned after graduation), Zeuhl—or at least my rememory of them—is a ghostly half-muse of sorts. Despite me wanting to, we never made any art together—just sex tapes and naughty photos. None of that is contained in this book, of course; but I did use the memories of them absolutely rocking my world to create the artwork and passages you see in this book. In short, what I loved about them lives on in my cloaked, campy reenactments.

[4] Something Zeuhl and I tried once; frankly fucking to metal/videogame music (e.g., Metaltool’s “Mega Man X3 – Opening Stage,” 2012) is a lot more effective: it at least carries the necessary energy and beat, even if it often sounds rather goofy in its own right (Zeuhl and I both smiled like total dumbasses while we fucked to Turrican II’s “Traps,” 1991. But much to my delight, they especially loved Amiga chiptunes regardless of what we were up to, and for good or ill, I cannot listen to that music now without their beautiful, silly ghost haunting me and the music).

[5] Bunny is demi-pan and generally asexual when performing sex work. I have ace components when working with them and our mutual participation is ultimately asexual relative to our negotiated boundaries illustrating mutual consent. They have known from the start that my girl-cock gets hard at seeing their naked body (I told them as much) but we do not play together. Any orgasms I have while looking at them occur in private without their participation. Any information that I bring to their attention relates to how awesome they are as a friend, one I love to draw and appreciate in my writing as ludo-Gothic BDSM (re: Bunny loves rape play and monstrous themes in their work/on their Aegis, below).

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

This is not “a wasted opportunity.” I can get sexual participation from other friends during ludo-Gothic BDSM, and my friendship with Bunny is absolutely perfect as is. I love them very much and have nothing but the utmost respect for their work/play as an extension of who they are; it’s what makes them so awesome and fun to work with and precisely why I write about, draw and otherwise feature them in my book as much as I have. As with my other muses, Sex Positivity is an ode, an apologia, to Bunny and people like them doing ludo-Gothic BDSM: “Including your work, all of you have value and worth and deserve happiness, safety and love.”

[6] Deliciously camped by Garfunkel and Oates’ “God’s Loophole” (2013): “Fuck me in the ass if you love Jesus!” To it, anal is classically a state terror weapon whose sodomy accusations/morphologies we can camp (re: “Our Sweet Revenge“), and Bunny loves to exhibit anal without lube (what they call “painal,” often crying during it; i.e., as part of the exhibit blurring fiction and non-fiction, and enjoying that liminality as part of the performance, aka “method acting”).

[7] From linguistics: “meaning established through voice and subtext”; e.g., sarcasm and irony.

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

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

In other words, Coleridge was a privileged nerd who—like Jameson’s latter-day dismissal of the Gothic, but also Austen’s parody of it or Radcliffe’s “armoring” in more delicate novels—was heavily predisposed to prescribing proper modes of sexual expression: veils. Not only does doing so cater to the status quo (which will sexualize the veil anyways, or titillate themselves with guilty desires they can later deny but privately enjoy); it remains inadequate from a holistic, dialectical-material point-of-view (which Gothic Communism demands. More on Coleridge in “The Future Is a Dead Mall“).

[9] Man Box has transformed into itself using an appropriation of surfer and hippie culture, the college Max Box of rapey (mostly white, cis-het male) students proliferating through the unaddressed rape culture in academic faculties; e.g., Foucault, Beauvoir and Sartre, etc.

[10] Originally written to the Parliament of England opposing licensing and censorship.

[11] I.e., like George McFly from Back to the Future: “Do you really think I ought to swear?” George asks his son. “Yes, definitely!” the other replies, “Goddammit, George, swear!”

[12] The same idea applies critiquing the seemingly peerless reputations of famous authors like Tolkien, Radcliffe or any of the others we’ve looked at in this volume; camping them will be seen as defacement, its own sort of “graffiti” applied to cultural monuments that, if ever they even did, have long ceased helping workers on their own (outside of camping them).

[13] As per Thatcher’s refrain. This includes putting one’s faith entirely in Capitalism actually solving our problems. It made our problems.

This blog post is part of “The Total Codex,” a fourth 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.” The first promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “The Total Codex” shall do the same, but with Volume Zero/the thesis volume (versus “Make It Real” promoting Volume One/the manifesto, which I will release after “The Total Context” completes). 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 “The Total Codex’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Zero is already written/was released on October 2023! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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

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

“Make it Gay,” part three: Shining a Light on Things, or How to Make Monsters: Reclaiming Our Lost Power by Putting the Pussy on the Chainwax

“You’re trying to start a thing, aren’t you? A thing.”

—Jordan Peele, “Pussy on the Chainwax”

Picking up where “Metroidvania and the Quest for Power, part two: Interrogating Power through Camp” left off…

“Interrogating Power through Your Own Camp” explored how silly the angers of those who fear us are, yet nevertheless make up the things we must camp in order to be ourselves (anything less is segregation, because our identities are defined by struggles against the state’s profit motive); we specifically examined camp in relation to the mapping of war in ludologized forms, and how we could camp that cartography through our ludo-Gothic BDSM negotiations and palliative-Numinous interrogations inside the Gothic castle’s closed space out into open battlefields (re: Tolkien and Cameron’s refrains).

Except that was merely one option; there are many more and all are valid insofar as they challenge heteronormativity’s essentializing of the Base and Superstructure as currently owned and cultivated by the elite or their proponents. I want to shine a light on how we can corrupt these twin towers by making monsters, or “putting the pussy on the chainwax” any way we can with ludo-Gothic BDSM to develop Gothic Communism: not just clearing space and theatre to play around in, but making monsters that speak for us—i.e., not purely to the sexual confusion of our enemies (e.g., Kevin Smith’s Pillow Pants[1]) but to our own desire to self-define and be free of state abuse. Doing so is not simple, a fact we’ve already hinted at by making iconoclastic monsters (sex workers) within canonical monstrous language (cops); re: Samus and Shelly (the monstrous-feminine).

To this, it might seem ridiculous to even try subverting such things wherever we go, but we must because these expressions will always be liminal to some extent; the point is to develop monsters that aren’t sex-coercive, thus don’t serve the state and its profit motive.

However ridiculous an expression might seem, it can take on life of its own in ways that assist labor. Jordan Peele’s “pussy on the chainwax” (source tweet: Jordan Peele, 2013) is one such example. It was provided to me as a joke by an abusive ex (Jadis, of all people); I took it and made it “a thing” by writing a book with it in mind. My whole idea of rebellion is built around Communism as this nominal thing that’s never been done—i.e., like Key in the skit, who coins the phrase after he loses his wife and his job and just wants to have some fun with his friends. And while I don’t think they intended it directly as a Communist metaphor (though if they did it wouldn’t surprise me, given their body of work), the sentiment is certainly easy enough to implement; i.e., more so than, say, Mien Kampf (1925, which would need to be camped pretty hard before I’d sloganize it) and certainly enough for me to feel compelled to grab it and make it a slogan for my book. Key and Peele are funny and class-conscious, Hitler isn’t.

So now that we’ve mapped out canon and why its Superstructure’s Cartesian, settler-colonial, and heteronormative elements need to be camped—re: within Tolkien’s refrain (and rotted contemporaries revived into the present day with Cameron)—let us now discuss how to go about that; i.e., while keeping the earlier parts of my “camp map” (and thesis statement) in mind. Recultivate the Superstructure and you gain whatever bargaining power you need to reclaim the Base with through hearts and minds: labor as humanized through ironic monstrous-feminine language. Marx is dead, and people have forgotten what he himself only imperfectly touched upon; they need reminders, camping his spectres (which point to older revolutionaries and victims, like Mary Shelley and Medusa, among others). Camping canon, then,  starts within canon as something to transform through our labor expressing ourselves (and our identities), mid-persecution, and nothing is older in terms of persecution than the whore (female or not; re: the ancient canonical codes upholding the nuclear model, per Foucault)!

To it, poison is the cure; i.e., you take something sacred to capital—a popular commodity like the whore that, when abused, sublimates violence and recuperates struggle and critique—and turn that promptly on its head; re: making it gay by camping it with ludo-Gothic BDSM, which we’re going to reiterate, here, with the virgin/whore as monstrous-feminine before Blxxd Bunny and I put it to practice, during the finale:

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

The Gothic, then, is a valley of contrast—an Ozymandian desert stacked on top of itself, and one where empathy becomes something to recultivate away from unironic fight-or-flight (and the other predator/prey mechanisms: freeze, flop and fawn); i.e., from dualistic, alienized positions, mid-liminal-expression: those which capital has installed and reinforced, fetishizing them in cops/victims perpetuity (endless rape).

In turn, nature—as something to exploit or liberate anisotropically inside performative spaces (castles or castle-like bodies)—is “scary cute” (above); i.e., in ways that lend themselves well to camp breaking the state’s “fetish monopoly” (sexualizing everything for profit as a privatized scheme). So while workers are whores pimped by capital, whores communicate their revenge through sex (and force): universal liberation putting “rape” in quotes (adjacent to historical harm). This occurs during the whore’s paradox (re: virgin/whore as monstrous-feminine), including the pick-and-choose neo-medieval language that regularly comes with these poetic territories: “I have no mouth and I must scream,” and Medusa was a power-bottom homewrecker who fucks back (often in oxymoronic language, embodying paradox to upend state orders, thus police violence; re: the Poetry Module in the flesh)!

So often, camp projects onto the performance, playfully bouncing such eyes of confusion (the gaze of the Medusa, including butt plugs with jeweled eyes, below) back at our would-be assailants: to freeze any potential harm that might befall us, were we otherwise less prepared to stop it. Often through song and dance, but also the soft, oft-cute (though sometimes strict) bodies that wiggle hypnotically along to said music, all occupy the same modal territory’s liminal spaces (consider “In Measured Praise of the Great Enchantress” for more fun examples; e.g., Sailor Moon and teenage detective girls fightin’ demons with their sexy bods and cute “Space Amazon” outfits). Let’s flesh that out, now, but also pull aside the veil while putting the pussy on the chainwax to abjure profit during the whore’s revenge (to disrupt the status quo pimping us)! Yoink!

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

Note: I’ve revisited these closing elements to pad their bones a bit; re: with my thesis vector “ludo-Gothic BDSM” vis-à-vis the monstrous-feminine as something to camp (subvert) profit through cryptomimesis. It’s not the changing of any of my arguments, from 2023—merely a bit of signposting to ornament the underlying chateau and material (the tools of the trade)! This isn’t just our mall, but castle, too, and the raven himself is hoarse, announcing the fatal entrance of the bourgeoisie unto our battlements! You wrecked our home first, dickwads! Have a taste of your own medicine during as(s)ymetrical warfare! Our “dummy thicc” Great Enchantments clamor in protest for revenge! How riotous a strain! How Numinous its decree! Not a disease, but a survivor in constant (r)evolution, punching rapturously up from Hell!

The point is, if sex and gender through Gothic didn’t work, they wouldn’t use it to enslave us. Except, nobody’s immune to propaganda in either direction. So make an informed choice; get down with our sickness—by hugging a hot, nerdy and irresistible Medusa-in-small during the dialectic of the alien! “Solve” the mystery of capital (and its Realism) by transforming it through yourselves, one castle (and naughty princess) at a time! Whereas canon appoints knowledge as a status (owned by men/token agents), camp trusts the expert, not the virgin; it eats from the Tree of our “orchards” and learns how to love the monster in all of us by camping the canon with ludo-Gothic BDSM! No gods, no masters; only stewards of nature, including us as beings of nature.

So kill your darlings (those that capital prescribes to you, per the Protestant ethic) and use what’s useful of their corpses flip the elite the bird (an idea we’ll return to in “Double Standards and Challenging Them (Killing Your Darlings, feat. Angela Carter)” from the Demon Module’s “Cops and Victims, part one: the Riddle of Steel; or, Confronting Past Wrongs“)! Work not just through darkness, wishes and exchange (the language of demons), nor trauma and feeding (the undead vector), nor through vibes and mood, like the Gothic classically does! Instead, try to recognize that we’ve all canvases tied to that of the world as a larger one (a stage to play upon, marking our place in history’s shadows). Whether from makeup and photos to cartoons and videogames to woodcarving and pastels, use any media type (and medium) to get the point across; explore monstrous creation as a rebellious, Miltonically Satanic act. Question blind faith through darkness visible! Buns and boobies; square and round at the same time (employing Senan Berne’s dreaded helium balloons, thereby sending us on what Tolkien might dare call “an Adventure”: “No, it’s too late; we’re flyin’ away!“)!

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

To revive Medusa as such, be like the Pokémon, except of a more actively ironic sort; i.e., one that consciously enjoys what it critiques but doesn’t endorse it while exposing profit as dangerous (re: Anita Sarkeesian)! Complement and compliment; make whole and be wholesome (to love language as a means of expressing love-as-controlled substance—a slippery notion the Poetry Module will extensively explore; e.g., “Green Eggs and Ha(r)m“)! In turn, history is a splendid lie, using cakes and pies to tell all manner of things true and false. As splendide mendax wreaking havoc/raising Cain/fashioning pandemonium on Earth, evolve into not just harmless bunny rabbits, but tank rabbits (of death) weaponizing lunacy against the state through your own bakery feeding the hungry masses (re: “Follow the White-and-Black Rabbit,” “From Ace to Ass” and similar discussions of “Trojan” animals, throughout this book series; e.g., Volume One’s “Predator and Prey” sections)! —Perse, 3/30/2025

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

“The Quest for Power” covered these ideas through Metroidvania and the old castle; re: as something to map and conquer by the dashing hero/gun nut, which we’re camping here through our own monsters following familiar-yet-alien formulae chasing the Numinous in small. Keeping that spatial focus (and recursive modification) in mind, we’re now going to take the quest for power and shift it to the Left; i.e., to develop Gothic Communism using monsters, thereby basing such cryptomimesis (and its assorted fragmentation) off something that’s less neo-conservative than Castlevania but still famous (similar to when Key and Peele were while starting their own thing); e.g., Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure (1987) as based off Castlevania, having come out a year later than it (and some examples tied to Radcliffe’s Neo-Gothic, after that, which helped inspire Jojo as it became—almost to the year [1789 vs 1987]—two centuries after Radcliffe wrote her first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne):

(exhibit 1a1a1h5: Source: bottom-left; source tweet [2020]: top-left. Artist, right: Frank Frazetta.

Castlevania was released in 1986. The artwork and imagery are very hypermasculine, full of manly heroes, unironically violent and homoerotic/-phobic BDSM iconography [the whip, a slaver’s tool in the hands of a bad dom] and unironic dragon lords based off Frazetta’s 1973 Norseman. It’s the Japanese neoliberals’ take on the Western heroic quest in Neo-Gothic forms—a knotty and disjointed mess of various legends, clichés and fetishes slapped together and ripped apart, then painted over and over and over [in the tradition of the mode, except now globalized and sold back and forth between nation-states]. It’s traced like a gravestone, but also worn like a theatre mask. The hero is invincible and threatened at the same time, trapped between enormous, palimpsestuous tensions that all come together to support the status quo.

[Artist, top-left: Persephone van der Waard; bottom-left: Michelangelo; right side: Hirohiko Araki, his Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure manga/anime [1987/2012] inspired by a variety of real-life musicians and clothing brands.]

This entirety can be camped not just through mimesis, but cryptomimesis to varying degrees of straight face and irony [Jojo/pieta]: the palimpsest surfaces are sexualized even before the clothes come off; i.e., the lie on the lie as traced, but also played with in campy ways mid-sediment:

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

Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure is an excellent example of camp in the re-revived Neo-Gothic, applying the replication and cohabitation of operatic music, fairytale imagery and the vampire narrative in a very pastiche-oriented manner—a campy approach to queer material expression by crossing boundaries for fun, thoroughly ribbing the “rock opera”/wrestler’s theatre by propping it up with numerous rock ‘n roll allusions purely for their own sake, not because they add anything musical[2] to the show. Rather than fail, Jojo’s aptly-titled “bizarre adventure” becomes uniquely memorable [and hilarious] for making the seemingly-out-of-place, anachronistic musical references the show’s defining trait [followed up by a highly expressive variety of cosmetic styles]. Its tailored, composed mimesis appears to copy Castlevania [which came out the year previous]—albeit with ironic shonen himbos [and lite on monster girls] inside post-Occupation Japan as thoroughly fascinated with the West, but especially its Gothic tradition of operatic music, monstrous bestiary and dated tableau of hypermasculine wrestler heroes, corrupt effigies and monstrous-feminine men: an odd coupling that is mirrored in a variety of Japanese paranormal media that haunts the Japanese side of neoliberalism; e.g., Perfect Blue, Fatal Frame [2001] or the Shin Megami Tensei franchise.)

Jojo isn’t perfect, mind you; it was a product of its times and doesn’t go nearly far enough, but is still closer to Tim Curry than Tolkien was by a mile, and even Curry’s character wasn’t perfect (not his performance, which was sublime): he’s buried at the end. Hence why our above example with my friend Angel as Dio works within older camp to make newer camp that preserves the spirit of rebellion before it was commodified while getting people’s attention with what’s trendy. Jojo is campy and trendy but so is queerness and the Gothic as things that have a very wide appeal. Vampires, rock ‘n roll and old hauntological castles never go out of style; they just change the décor and keep on rocking. Perfect for allegory! As stated in part two, “ACAB,” or “All (Canonical) Castles Are Bad,” but some can be played with to hide our allegory inside: less Star Wars and more Castle Wars (despite the former being a fairytale set in outer space[3]), with the appeal of the monsters and their combat a Shakespeare-level allure to the wider bloodbath through staged bloodsport. It’s a tale as old as time (or at least Shakespeare’s plays)!

Yet, allegory sits within the usual ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection. That is, in today’s day and age, Castle Wars becomes the place to set up the female demon lover as someone for the effeminate Japanized male bishonen hero/monstrous-feminine to bravely stab to death; i.e., just as Ellen Ripley’s phallic Amazon faced the Archaic Mother and pumped her womb full of lead, the latest Belmont boy can stake our naughty “mother of dragons” to death with his own phallic implements (from what I can tell, the new Castlevania basically frames the French Revolution as an attack on the French Monarchy by scapegoating them though ‘Marie Antionette’s revenge!’; i.e., as putting a stop to the revolution—instead of, you know, the elite at large doing so in far less romantic terms: dogma, legislation and economics)!

Seeing as there’s no shortage of fortresses (or vampires) in the police state, I’ve devised the finale of our “camp map” (which we’ll get to very shortly) to chart the synthetic process according to how it relates to us as actively rebellious sex workers/workers who are dimorphically sexualized in the Pygmalion shadow of these heteronormative castles; i.e., how to camp canon through Gothic Communism’s entire assembly and production of monsters as a gay double of the castle: a sassy fag-master’s Communist lair/parallel space being invaded by the Straights’ interpretation of what is correct and what is not, meaning they colonize us but also our reclaimed, monstrous language.

To it—and because Gothic Communism (and ludo-Gothic BDSM) are a holistic discipline whose enterprise aims for intersectional solidarity when pushing towards universal liberation away from profit—our current charting shall involve examining the larger process; i.e., of making monsters being a campy process, and one that dates back to Radcliffe. To learn how to camp, we must look at camp as an imperfect and oscillating affair when relating to the imaginary past—one we’ll consider subverting through more recent female monsters (re: the virgin/whore monstrous-feminine, exhibit 1a1a1h6a) and phallic women (evil nurses and xenomorphs in two separate exhibits) before getting to Radcliffe, herself; i.e., as someone to camp by a later generation remaking said author’s Gothic pastiche themselves: Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817—but written in 1803)!

The praxial vector, as usual, is selective lineage tracing whatever family trees (and surrounding factors) to get to the bottom of things. In essence, then, the “camp map”—as something to execute by workers making monsters from monsters from monsters—is actually a rather small, self-contained introduction to camp and ludo-Gothic BDSM (which Volume Two will expanded on exponentially when we go over as many monster types as we can); i.e., as the iconoclastic counterweight to unironic war as heteronormative and spanning the entire globe (that part one and two of the “camp map” did their best to outline as succinctly as possible). Even if we never see a real battlefield, our fiction ties into the mechanisms that reach those points and back around, thus teach people we do see and engage with to act hostile towards us if we stick out (evoking the corrupt, the monstrous-feminine, the barbarian or backstabbing impostor, etc); i.e., camping the canon through its “seriousness that fails” by our design.

For example: camping Beowulf, the Amazon or Nazi as Americanized, and the heteronormative idea of war as monomythic, centrist and fake. Fakery is something we can reclaim; re: from state monopolies on the self-same Aegis.

Doing so starts with checking the unironic worship of Beowulf and his echoes of pursued power from “Scouting the Field” and “The Quest for Power,” but also “Overcoming Praxial Inertia,” before that. Regardless of the various comorbidities, canonical war personifies to look and sound a particular way. Whereas the ghost of the counterfeit refers to the false copy as the basic legend driving the process of abjection on a larger map, the Shadow of Pygmalion focuses on the creative process as made by the status quo, which results in the Cycle of Kings (the centrist monomyth) as a particular kind of simulacrum—one tied to human locales and bodies, thus work that are dimorphically sexualized relative to war and one’s role inside it: as heteronormative throughout the larger counterfeit scheme of map and castle like (the lie of the West and its endless crises) filled with endless monsters.

To that, the Shadow of Pygmalion is recursively fractal, as is Galatea’s. Everything has to look like the manly statue—its likeness, including a compelled physique and façade of good war as defined by the damsels always being saved by always-gentlemanly knights from always-bad knights and a disturbing lack of anyone who isn’t any of those things (re: “No [non-token] Girls or Trans People Allowed”); the perceived lack of empathy occupied by the theatrical shadow fencer (the death knight) as haunted by the shadow of the oppressed occupying that same aesthetic, but also the shadow of the hero as an unironic death knight themselves: their deceitful shadow stretched across the floor and wall, following them around and returning at inconvenient times to break the illusion of their false goodness and power with our own counterfeits (the monstrous-feminine ghosts of the counterfeit).

In other words, Pygmalion is the crafter of the shadow as a prescriptive and dishonest theatrical device that serves the state through monsters that go the state’s way during the general bloodspill, battlefield rape, and sanctioned sex. Power is largely invented—a fiction writing over itself as forged, designed to perceive shows of force that arbitrarily insist on patriarchal hegemony. Men are strong but need a wife to nurture them, to show her off; they are bare muscled but can crossdress in bad faith (usually to make fun of women or the monstrous-feminine at large); etc.

(exhibit 1a1a1h6a: Top-left: AyyaSAP; top-mid-left and bottom-right: Flower XI; top-middle and bottom-middle: Cyan Capsule; top-mid-right: DSloogie; top-right: Angel Witch; bottom-left: Blue the Bone.

More examples of the female monster and how it takes many different shapes in Gothic media. “Women is other” is traditionally dimorphic, mind you, but can easily be non-binarized and camped by the Galatea playing the role [of any of these characters/peoples] or illustrating it [as various artists do]. So while the Jedi and the Sith are basically “sword porn” when it comes to female knights [a military-style pinup comparable to any other service weapon] in blind pastiche, that idea can be camped in far more perceptive and sex-positive forms. To this, the softer body can have the look of the war bride, but convey autonomy through the agency of the owner and their body as iconoclastic; i.e., having ownership over herself through her self-expression as tied to her body during demonic, sex-positive BDSM [the sword isn’t always just for show]. Likewise, the herbo military-looking body can be turned away from canonical war’s Pavlovian conditioning by “teaching an old dog new tricks” instead of euthanizing her as the state would: the “euthanasia effect” as something to disarm by embracing the muscle mommy as something that isn’t chained to the profit motive.

Regardless of the waifu/wheyfu, the heroine’s performative context—her function as a class warrior illustrating empathy through mutual consent—is generally subtext: it doesn’t tend to announce itself at first glance, but instead often relies on allegory. Uncovering said allegory requires dialectical-material analysis. This might seem like an ineffective messaging system, but it actually constitutes as code-switching and appeals to a shared interest in aesthetics; i.e., the very thing that can help humanize us in the eyes of our would-be colonizers. Divorced from the canonical scheme, allegory can make them see us as human without changing our appearance at all.)

Compared to Pygmalion, the Galatea (the author and the creation) is normally made to suffer inside the same staged gimmick. It’s canon to be corrupt and monstrous-feminine in ways the status quo expects, either group a punching bag (to varying degrees) in order to “play along.” The resultant theatricalities—and the decayed, thus harmful realities behind those unironic fictions—all co-exist on- and offstage as canon. Canon is the endorsement, but also tolerance and acceptance of, the status quo as “the way things are,” thus unalienable.

The truth is, alienation is central to the lie, to the prescribed monster’s destruction at the hands of the hero working for capital. White knights and black knights function identically in regards to what canon is, in this respect: the shadow of good and bad kings, and their respective good cops and bad cops, as always coming back to harm—separately and together—the oppressed as the perpetual state of exception (our zombies and demons, furries and chimeras, exhibit 1a1a1h3) which are harder to canonize that the more ordinary looking monster boys and monster girls (exhibit 1a1a1h1); though as Angel demonstrates with our Dio exhibit, you can do it within a spectrum of tolerance—i.e., through a shared love of something that has allegorical power that can be turned towards revolutionary aims, hence “putting the pussy back on the chainwax” (e.g., from Star Wars the franchise focusing on labor with Andor, 2022).

In rare times of compromise (wherein the state grants false-gift olive branches to labor), the oppressed are even invited to join in on the fun—to assimilate; i.e., the woman-in-black becoming not just a corrupted whore, but the dark/feral Medusa or virginal/dutiful Hippolyta whose tokenized service (and marriage) to Theseus belies the same Shadow of Pygmalion chasing them around.

Trauma lives inside and outside of the body as fetishized according to structured exchanges of power that are valued through their use: the profit motive and its trickle-down incentives (cops and criminals, aka cops and victims). Their hard boundaries are drawn up, then pathologize and become accommodated within the same “prison sex” mentality: the hiding of the rapist/murderer in plain sight as a sterling/good fixture of society that can conduct violence against the usual codified villains and victims.

Furthermore, doing so tends to ignore the adage that “a few bad apples spoil the bunch” but also that they’re “fruit from the poisoned tree.” This, in turn, is canonically prioritized over the victims, whose own seeking of power (subby or dominant) is generally made in pursuit of agency when living in fear, post-trauma; i.e., psychosexuality. Seeing as this subchapter is about monsters and making them, here’s an extended exhibit tracking psychosexual expression through various monstrous-feminine types—the demon lover and the whore in art and porn, but specifically the nurse and the xenomorph’s “phallus” and “semen” metaphors that cross over into militarized and domesticated forms of eroticized violence:

(exhibit 1a1a1h6b1: Artist, right: ringoripple; bottom-middle: Jorgo Photography. Canonical Gothic is unironically psychosexual, thus violent on or regarding its surface imagery and props. It might seem random, but there are actually some rock-solid dialectical-material reasons for their continued historical-material generation. For one, nurses are like mothers; i.e., they are fetishized as virgin/whore for the Male Gaze/profit motive, but also damsel/demonic caretakers who—through the accumulation/accretion of medievalized systemic distrust as transmitted via various bad-faith and good-faith recollections of the medical system as capitalist/patriarchal—have led to the nurse symbol as a complicated monster archetype: angry expressions of power and revenge.

The syringe, for example, exemplifies a common fear of needles that conflates medicine with harm through phallic metaphors of unequal power exchange during positions of disadvantage relative to the bed-ridden patient; they are under the nurse’s power. At the same time, the nurse is a site for resentment and trauma, but also fetishization of either relative to the psychosexual adjacency they share with legitimate harm and grievances towards it. A fear-fascination of/with the nurse is a fear-fascination of/with unequal and unfair power exchange that might bear a grudge for concealed or otherwise unapologetic abuse committed at the hands of powerful doctors with awful bedside manner also mistreating their staff [the topic of many a soap opera]. Such a phobia/philia extends to concerns about the impostor in the hospital ward, but also someone who might be triggered precisely for those reasons; i.e., trauma that lives within the “ghost” of the body wrapped in uniforms that date back to the nuns of the medieval period as “sisters of mercy” that were both angels of death and givers and takers of life that looked the part; e.g., Ambrosio’s brush with “Rosario” as really Matilda in disguise.

On the surface of the nun/nurse image, the angelic/demonic collides with the soft and the nurturing as expected gender behaviors of women from men/entitled patients, who might suddenly feel quite uneasy if and when the tables are turned. In canonical circles, the nurse is often fetishized as a serial killer who, either wronged by someone or “born different,” doesn’t discriminate between genuine abusers and helpless victims. Often, there is a kernel of truth to an otherwise systemic problem [Dreading’s “The Red Surge: the Case of Elizabeth Wettlaufer,” 2023]. All the while, the syringe is “phallic” in the sense of a harmful, unwanted injection that causes pain, not unlike the standard-issue male penis as “knife-like” [more on this, in Volume One and Two—exhibits 11b2/3 for the vampire’s fangs as bladed; exhibit 31, the serial killer’s eponymous MO, “Jack the Knife”; exhibit 37a, dreamlike male variants of the same urban legend like Freddy Krueger’s infamous knife fingers; exhibit 49, featuring female “phallic” demons with knife hands; as well as totemic “dickheads” like Pyramid Head and the xenomorph as not simply gender-swapped (exhibit 1a1a2b) but profoundly intersex (exhibit 60d), etc]. Of course this can be camped, “ejaculating” the needles’ contents or inserting and injecting them with another paradox: the hard kink of needles being medicinal, but easily able to kill someone if performed incorrectly [air bubbles in the solution].

[Artist, top-far-left: unknown; middle-far-left: Mandy Muse; bottom-far-left: Gloss; top-mid-left: unknown; middle-left: Sabs; bottom-mid-left: Grand Sage; top-right: unknown; bottom-right: unknown. Continuing our examination of psychosexual metaphors, if the knife is foreplay then the “money” shot is the fireworks, the payoff, the release of tension during theatre and sex; in canonical porn, it is the “claiming” of the (female) object by the (male) subject. Yet, the psychosexuality of Gothic aesthetics with canonical war and porn create some strong divides that contrast bizarrely when they overlap (which the profit motive forces them, too; i.e., both are heteronormative businesses predicated on state dominance and abuse of particular victims): bullet porn as levied against things that go splat by treating the “cumshot” as an unironically violent marking procedure towards the colonized (who must either swallow or accept the colonizer’s load during “sex” of an insect-political sort [exhibit 1a1a2b]: traumatic insemination via rape and unwanted, harmful penetration). In Cameron’s response to Lucas’ own space Western, his white-savior treatment of cowboys-and-Indians loses the Marxist critique; instead, it makes the classic monster battle tremendously exciting from a visual standpoint, but also highly prescriptive in a white man’s medicinal sense: military optimism against an abject foe within the ghost of the counterfeit (I love the battles’ for their sheer craftsmanship, but if I think about their context for more than two sections, I get very angry).

The xenomorph’s “medicine,” then, is “just what the doctor/soldier-playing-doctor ordered”: the Amazon’s “wad” of ordinance, which—delivered in pure alarm and fright at a perceived Great Destroyer—embarrassingly bounces back onto Drake (friendly fire) through an “acid bukkake” that reverses abjection by melting his face off. The xenomorph is ripped apart, but has her counterterrorist revenge by redirecting the attack (through a wonderful defense mechanism during asymmetrical warfare)—effectively throwing it back in her attacker’s face. It’s an abject war metaphor for “sex-as-violence” that mirrors cis-het male fears at home and abroad about being on the receiving end of their own brand of hypermasculine violence in literal terms—i.e., settler-colonial violence through state bullets, and bastardized bullets, bombs and knives—but also figuratively through a psychosexual eroticism that brokers a different kind of revenge; i.e., one tied to poor bedroom etiquette/psychosexual domination in sex work as privatized in the studio and translated to domesticated forms. Viewed as such, Drake’s ignominious death becomes a highly funny and satisfying revenge of the genderqueer/female-monstrous sort: “Here’s jizz in your eye, for once! Burns doesn’t it, asshole?”]

But regardless of the praxial stance, everything shares the same stage and aesthetics. There’s room for paradoxical/guilty pleasure and endorsement, but should be used by us to deliver messages of a class/culturally appreciative and aware character—i.e., looking at Aliens in this manner, I feel like Athena’s Aegis, bouncing Perseus’ weaponized Male Gaze back at himself: I can enjoy the movie again by looking at it in ways that aren’t simply realizing the state and its propaganda suck; I can weaponize and apply it towards my aims. The unironic, “apolitical” satisfaction of monster war and rape is ubiquitous and desperately needs to be criticized through “perceptive” pastiche/camp and gender trouble/parody but is generally not, in canonical, thus heteronormative spheres. In fact, quite the opposite.)

Again, trauma lives in the body and the canonical nurse who poisons/imprisons their patient or the cop who beats their spouse (all of this is traditionally dimorphically gendered, of course) was either abused themselves according to systemic flaws, not reprobate human nature (which, under the Protestant ethic, can confuse the pleasure mechanisms to respond physically to death fantasies in abusive or hard-kink, psychosexual forms); i.e., conditioned to abuse others (which people forget, is a form of abuse) or born with congenital factors that pathologize within society as coded to valorize them as unrecognized, thus untreated: the useful psychopath, “made of sterner stuff.” The promise of power through the false hope that things will get better via the same-old action clichés as industry-grade cryptonymy: the cheerleader/damsel-in-distress, the star quarterback/white knight flattening the goon/black knight, the last-second touchdown/victory, the fireworks, the happy ending after “murder will out.”

Regarding the sports metaphor overlapping with war personified and all of its euphemisms for sublimating genocide but also its recuperating root cause: Capitalism’s promise of sanctioned sex operates in exchange for services rendered, including aiding and abetting to murder, theft, lies, and rape within copaganda and the world stage interacting back and forth, on and on. It’s all a stalling process meant to compel willful ignorance regarding the fact that the skeleton king (or Archaic Mother) will return, and with him greater and greater Malthusian tragedies spilling over into places and populations largely unused and unprepared for self-colonization (the Global North).

It’s equally important to remember that the Gothic is apocryphal on either side of the praxial equation, but also rife with paradox (with power and resistance sharing the same space). While, the heroic, villainous and victimized fictions all come out of the same chaotic, operatic soup, the difference lies in context and function within a half-real theatre; i.e., the chaos is something to acclimate to within false copies of itself: the white woman officer from the mothership stuck in the smaller life raft with the escaped slave, both boats named after works from Joseph Conrad’s own canon[4]: The Nostromo (1904) and “The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897). In such close proximity with the monster, it’s time for Radcliffe’s unironic rape fantasy/exquisite to play out in operatic panache: even the monster’s kiss is fatal; i.e., a black statue/lawn jockey with the capacity for sexual violence!

(exhibit 1a1a1h6b2: In the finale of Alien, the slave analog blends into the bio-mechanical space[5] around it; realizing she is not alone, Ripley initially panics and makes herself as small as possible, also blending into her surroundings. But she observes the monster through her stained-glass window, seeing the proverbial rapist she [and so many other white women like her] have heard so much about. Its tail is a knife penis, but so is its mouth—containing a “dick with teeth” and lubed up in 1970s, drug-fueled, psychosexual hysteria. So our white Hippolyta, facing the dark Medusa, puts on her chastity belt/anti-predation device [a “body condom,” essentially] and goes to work.

During her own battle with the monstrous-feminine, Ripley reinvokes the settler-colonial spirit of the vessel by using a harpoon to launch the space whale[6] back into the void—re-abjecting it from “her” womb [still owned by the elite, who will come to collect, 57 years later] and debriding the snow-white Nostromo offshoot [and persona] of its pitch-black ghost of the counterfeit—all in patently Freudian birth-trauma argumentation, too: the dark child trying to return to its “mother’s” womb and Ripley utterly rejecting it by aborting the creature, the afterbirth symbolized by her harpoon gun attached to the monster baby she ejects from herself as one might a piece of shit: with a fart from the vessel’s engines. Afterward, Ripley’s post-dyspeptic relief is obvious.

Like Aliens’ own finale, the duel scene from Alien is tremendously exciting and climactic, but also settler-colonial in its utter dehumanizing of the slave while humanizing the struggles of the white woman utterly enraptured with the spell of displaced colonial trauma: the myth of the black male rapist as “incorrectly male,” thus monstrous-feminine; its sodomy actually enables it to breed in hideously violent, unnatural [from a Cartesian human vantage point] ways: through wasp-like, parasitoid rape and marriage to the metal hull of the ship, making it like the underground, hellish dark castle once more [we’ll examine the latent transphobia/racism of Alien—and its intersex, rebellious potential—more in Volume Two]. This fear of rape is something that white women paradoxically recreate in their own unironic rape fantasies—a problematic trend that, if not started with Ann Radcliffe, certainly was codified by her famous School of Terror as something to emulate, then simulate centuries down the road.)

As with Ripley in 1979, armor was Radcliffe’s antidote to chaos as fabricated and sprung up all around her to then comment on as she did. Except for Radcliffe, the mask as laid bare within the performance as largely without physical armor: the heroine’s white dress and exposed breast ripe for knifely plunging (as opposed to for herself and her right to flash her tits without being harmed for it, or judged; telling a woman to “cover up” is not going to make her feel safe because it both blames the victim and implies that she’s going to be victimized if she doesn’t comply because she’s surrounded by sex pests).

Physical or emotional, though, canonical armor is sex-coercive and camp is sex-positive, but Radcliffe’s cryptonymy (as we’ll see in Volume Two) was complicit within her own gentile fabrications as limited to negotiating for a narrow group of people that demonized a great deal of others xenophobically for cash (not unlike Scott’s ending (though he’s much more genderqueer and Satanic about what he leaves room for). Radcliffe could have written other stories that were more sex-positive from the same veil of anonymity but chose not to; for her betrayal, she was paid well for her fictions and promptly fucked off after. She hid and let the gay man, Matthew Lewis, take the heat while she played it safe with her husband (dick move, Radcliffe).

There is a familial element to trauma and concealment to protect family members if one is abused; women, as well, will wear makeup to protect themselves through the paradox of negotiation when one is exposed and under the power of greater forces that threaten rape as simply being a far greater reality for them under Capitalism then and now. I certainly have no doubt that Radcliffe lived under such forces herself, but her contributions were still sexist, cis-centrist and written from a middle-class white woman’s point of view (the privileged author’s ghost of the counterfeit furthering the process of abjection within her own white woman’s fakeries and unironic rape fantasies/demon lovers: “I’m going to rape you,” sings Blue Beard [or some such double of that character]. “Oh, no! Please don’t rape me!” sings the heroine, crossing her legs; then thinks about it, uncrosses them slightly and adds, “Well, maybe just a little!”).

Radcliffe could have written differently than she did (a topic for Volume Two; re: “Exploring the Derelict Past“), but chose to profit from it and hide clues of a larger problem in her entitled, liminal fictions; these Gothic, operatic “derelicts” and their exquisite “torture”/demon lovers, as we shall see in Volume Two, are still profoundly useful to us. That is, we can learn from them and apply them to the complexities of the Internet Age: Father Schedoni, as much as he was a caricature of a caricature, denotes a performative reality to oppositional praxis—that those who mean to harm us do so in bad faith, hide in plain sight, and have systemic help. The serial killer of criminal hauntology/the murder-mystery has friends of friends of friends, and the convoluted nature of their interactions combined nature and nurture to yield something supremely awful, of which the killer and victim is only a piece of the puzzle: the whole damn mess as complicit to capital as a voyeuristic, leering circus starring at the legendary monster as all at once animal-coded and undead/demonic; i.e., a wild, hungry and “feral” apex predator but also a zombie, vampire, werewolf, demon, succubus/incubus, etc (of which, we’d see come to pass with Ted Bundy in the 20th century).

(source: “‘Black Narcissus’ Trailer: Gemma Arterton Stars in FX’s Remake of the Classic Film,” 2020)

This circus of pure, easily-camped artifice includes more than just the rapist; it includes white women looking in at endless, cheap copies of themselves frozen like dolls and then killed or nearly killed over and over again in disposable pulp fiction with highly formulaic and repetitive cover art (Gary Pullman’s “The Covers of Gothic Romance Pulp Fiction Novels: Advertising a Genre,” 2018). Indeed, a huge problem with detective stories (and other Gothic fictions: fairytales, novels, Westerns, etc) written by white cis-het women is that they’re full of outdated, operatic clichés that reinforce the status quo’s usual process of abjection. For example, the Gothic heroine is always conventionally pretty and threatened with rape because of it; i.e., they have to be threatened with rape, thus must look pretty, and “pretty privilege” = rape according symbols of rape and raped; e.g., the penis and the panties (the former of which isn’t a universal symbol of rape and the latter of which—like makeup or a nice dress—can be worn for the wearer regardless of their sex, gender or performance). Except these devices become theatrically coded in canonical entertainment that demands the threatening to happen, specifically the princess be threatened by virtue of her theatrical status as “pretty” according to killers who are conventionally handsome, themselves.

Bare panties or flashy makeup = vulnerable or hysterical; penis = rape. It’s unironically psychosexual and instructive towards such a mentality’s semiotics inside of the same market. The problem with these interpretations is they become legitimatized artifices that ignore much more complicated realities: that you can be raped even when you aren’t conventionally attractive: cis-het women, but also minorities, children, the elderly or really anyone who is rendered vulnerable by the system. Rape, then, isn’t merely the silly fictions of a bored housewife exciting herself through problematic, commodified rape fantasies (re: Radcliffe), but her bullshit as generally prioritizing the struggles of white women by conflating queer persons/persons of color with sodomy and interracial sex as automatically rapacious; e.g., the theatrical metaphor of queer persons between compared to Ed Gein or his cinematic counterpart, Norman Bates; or to Jeffery Dahmer’s own pathological compulsions (murder is not a sexual orientation) in bad faith—i.e., to keep selling copies of fiction, like overt porn, that fetishizes criminal depictions of queer people (especially queer AMAB persons as active deviants) and bad play/unironic demon BDSM[7] despite the comparison being patently absurd (similar to Tolkien’s orcs, the female author needs the blackguard, unironic banditti or rapey “man in a dress” to exist in order to threaten the storybook princess with unironic exquisite torture).

Combined, such unironic fictions feed a larger cultural habit of guilty pleasure to enrich a small number of predominantly white, cis-het female authors allowed by those in power to build their own castles and walk around inside them; i.e., those who want their abusers and victims to look as sexy as possible, but also cartoonishly bigoted in sexist, queerphobic, and racist ways; e.g., Radcliffe’s problematic enchantments refusing to take hard political stances, thus stray off into dangerous waters. Everything is built on a kernel of truth, but very quickly spirals into self-indulgent, Anglicized/Americanized vaudeville: sizzling with a highly controlled, vetted sexiness that is anything but the truth. Quite the contrary, it misinforms the public in ways that refuse to change how they think; i.e., by giving rape culture what it wants because the story (and its expectations) have become essentialized (virgin/whore and white knight syndrome).

Like a battered housewife giving her husband what he wants (wearing makeup or covering up), such approaches merely preserve the status quo. We have to stop doing that and try to change things by threatening the profit motive as privileging a specific group of workers (white people). We can still have sexy women wearing red (below), but our renditions need to use these theatrical markers to negotiation for our own rights; i.e., to challenge the status quo’s punitive, sex-coercive devices (versus endorsing them as Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell’s Black Narcissus [1947] does) precisely because they affect us but also those united with us in solidarity facing oppression.

(artist: Cutesexyrobutts)

As such, we must continue to be mindful of how a gradient of individuals—largely unaffected by struggle—are constantly pedaling controlled opposition or rote entertainment disguised as class-conscious: Radcliffe’s naughty novels and that of the usual white women profiting off murder fiction to brick over real atrocities with, but also the assorted nerdy stock of white cis-het men; e.g., Iron Maiden, Tolkien, or Blizzard’s ideas of Satan and rebellion, as previously mentioned, but also the “polite ones” like Rush—effectively weird nerds who, through their own products and services, caution for “balance” or “order” as an absence of tension instead of a presence of justice.

To that, Rush got a little too cozy with Ayn Rand with “2112” (1976) but also were dismissive of Dionysus as a poetic device; i.e., “Cygnus X-1 Book II: Hemispheres” (1978) effectively being the Nietzschean dialogic[8] of Apollon versus Dionysius, which is rooted in a highly classist argument vis-à-vis Nietzsche’s ressentiment, aka class envy. This isn’t some dead, outdated idea, but one that can be revived in socio-political circles that have no business entertaining it: women, including trans women who, often enough, are white; e.g., Natalie Wynn’s lengthy and self-indulgent polemic on class envy (“Envy,” 2022) as something that adopts a I-clearly-know-better-than-you-do, centrist attitude towards her fellow queer persons, while simultaneously punching down at the poor [who tend not to be white] and non-binary people.

We’ll unpack Wynn’s enbyphobia in Volume Three, Chapter Four when we look at her and other NERFs in greater detail. For now, merely watch Essence of Thought’s video, “Let’s Discuss ContraPoints’ Open Worship of Domestic Abuser, Buck Angel” (2021) and consider how, when I showed Zeuhl—a non-binary person themselves—the same video, they merely shrugged and remarked that Wynn had introduced people at large to the notion of trans rights; except, we still have to critique what Wynn is teaching us.

Doing so isn’t mutually exclusive, any more than camping canon in general is. At the very least, we have to hold such persons—white men and women, and tokenized gradients of them—accountable for their own bigotry and shitty behavior (which Zeuhl couldn’t do with Foucault or Ian Kochinski, either) in our own creative responses. Indeed, not doing that historically-materially does us no favors; it all but requires (vis-à-vis Sarkeesian) asking tough, even sacrilegious questions[9] that challenge the shortcomings of authors generally celebrated/deified in their own times as “progressive” (when, in truth, their own fakeries spearhead oppression against minorities by excluding or demonizing them, the spear expanding on and on like Pinocchio’s nose).

This includes camping recent fabricators and their castled, operatic throwbacks, but also famous, super-dead authors like Radcliffe; i.e., someone whose privileged, bigoted works weren’t “just” silly novels (any more than Tolkien’s stories or Cameron’s were “just” High Fantasy or cowboys-and-Indians), but continue through their perceived wackiness and/or veneration to teach society various stigmas, biases and dogma within the capitalist model of dissemination; i.e., the problematic conventions of the canonical Gothic novel (and other true crime/murder mystery mediums) clearly spending a lot more time in suspense than it does actually getting to the bottom of things in ways that help other workers at large. Doing so reflects the kept stillness of these woman’s lives while the readers of such stories gossip about it quite cheerfully (when they’re not turning pages, or pushing play or holding a controller nowadays). Austen really was on the money when making fun of “the Gothic craze” in Northanger Abbey (1803):

“But, my dearest Catherine, what have you been doing with yourself all this morning? Have you gone on with Udolpho?”

“Yes, I have been reading it ever since I work; and I am got to the black veil.”

“Are you, indeed?” How delightful! Oh! I would not tell you what is behind the black veil for the world! Are not you wild to know?”

“Oh! Yes, quite; what can it be? But do not tell me—I would not be told upon any account. I know it must be a skeleton, I am sure it is Laurentina’s skeleton. Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it. I assure you, if it had not been to meet you, I would not have come away from it for all the world.”

“Dear creature! How much I am obliged to you; and when you have finished Udolpho, we will read the Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you.”

“Have you, indeed! How glad I am! What are they all?”

“I will read you their names directly; here they are in my pocketbook. Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Those will last us some time.”

“Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?”

“Yes, quite sure; for a particular friend of mine, a Miss Andrews, a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the world, has read everyone one of them” (source).

Obviously the dialog isn’t realistic (I asked my professor who taught me Austen, Laura George, if people actually talked like Austen’s novels back when she wrote them; she replied, probably not) but its operatic, otherworldly sensibilities do match the zealous hunger of white women to read about other people’s suffering in adherence to Gothic conventions abiding the profit motive (trust me; I grew up in a household full of reading ladies born and bred on murder mysteries). In short, Austen’s Isabella and Catherine are written to sound kinda basic as a critique of Radcliffe’s exact readership, including how they ward off boredom as middle-class ladies do: devouring the so-called “horrid” as a viral and proliferate commodity to ravenously tear through, not as “terrorist” literature in any active revolutionary sense (vaudeville, in other words, which Radcliffe’s Gothic essentially is)!

Furthermore, if Austen could do this to Radcliffe (in an admittedly limited, novel-of-manners approach, to be clear), then so can we critique the same champions of the Gothic fictions (today’s and yesterdays’) drawing a line of compromise in the sand while profiting off it: A soft-spoken stance of genuine rebuke is better than staying silent and making money through the same Gothic poetics: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends”; or, the wacky novels of 18th century sell-outs.

To this, Radcliffe—a seasoned pro, at this point—chose to stay utterly silent for decades; then, at the time of her death, she further distanced herself from the French Revolution and Lewis while handing the next generation her recipe to terror and horror as she saw them in her own “terrorist literature”:

As Nick Groom writes (again, from the Oxford World’s Classics of The Italian):

As to risibility, a notorious letter condemning ‘Terrorist Novel Writing’ accused [Radcliffe] of provoking a fashion:

To make terror the order of the day, by confining the heroes and heroines in old gloomy castles, full of spectres, apparitions, ghosts, and dead men’s bones […] If a curtain is withdrawn, there is a bleeding body behind it; if a chest is open, it contains a skeleton; if a noise is heard, somebody is receiving a deadly blow; and if a candle goes out, its place is sure to be supplied by a flash of lightning.

Groom notes how the letter in question explicitly attacks Radcliffe’s “system of terror” for being monotonous, ignorant, and “contaminated” by “Monk” Lewis’ horror writings—to which Radcliffe herself would never write another novel, but whose 1826 posthumous appearance with “On the Supernatural in Poetry” distances herself from the French Revolution (and its terrors), radicalism and Lewis.

In short, she expected future “terrorist literature” to be respectable and gentrified as hers were, effectively tone-policing everyone else’s counterterrorism (including Lewis’) in the process, but from the veil of anonymity and from the safety of writing beyond the grave. Very Gothic, Radcliffe, and very safe; i.e., exactly as a white cis-het woman would play her hand, getting her xenophobic jollies while basking the limelight of the British status quo and throwing sex positivity under the bus.

As for Radcliffe’s uncritical fans, armor played a large role in what was being wolfed down. Like a debutante in a foreboding, lair-like chateau, Radcliffe wasn’t really about camp as an active demonic intentionally stirring up class/gender trouble through “darkness visible” (for that you’ll have to read Lewis); she drafted canonical feminine armor as soft, delicate and exposed, and masculine armor as that of classical strength; assertive, egotistical intellect; and direct, unwavering force (which allows for crossdress and makeup as something that man have parodied, but also celebrated and embraced in different cultures for millennia; e.g., Japanese theatre’s genderqueer culture parallel to its heteronormative, warlike forms: Jojo‘s beef-lord Pillar Men camping its maker’s idea of Western canon, but specifically the West’s musical stars imported as action heroes with completely made-up magical powers). Radcliffe’s concept of strength and masks is generally left behind in derelict, “archaeological” romances of itself that the author “found”; re: like King Arthur’s coconuts from Monty Python. It seems unlikely but here they are being presented to us anyways! Like a Gothic castle that never existed, we peer inside their armories to see they’re full of empty suits that might get up and walk around without a body inside: dresses or suits of mail, piloted by the viral ghost of the counterfeit to serve a warlike purpose (the process of abjection). Rape! Threatened modesty! Time to swoon!

Radcliffe, like Tolkien, in involves the “archaeological” creation of xenophobically stereotypical myths; they’re written and then found, justifying “timeless” stigma and bias as mere historical materialism driven by profit, first and foremost; e.g., orcs or evil Italians as things to fear and kill in connection to the other side of the metaphor: people of color or actual non-British people (immigrants). Like Tolkien, her myth is created, “found” and then solved (through violence or detective work) to essentialize it as “the truth.” It becomes a blind game to repeat for capital, a Murder Mystery™ of guess-the-cliché filled with superhuman foils made for the night’s entertainment first, allegory second: sexy monsters, detects, damsels, demons; rape and murder as staged affairs/problematic comfort food for pampered/terrified white women (first and foremost) to salivate over (a kept/”protected” class) as polite/vicarious hunters of scapegoats presented as “worthy opponents.”

Fake or not, and with or without a pilot, masculine armor looks and behaves “hard,” weaponized, and built for physical combat in the ancient sense; i.e., a knight’s suit of plate mail and his materiel, his squire, and train of killing implements. But the performative truth is even more complicated: the serial killer (“the modern-day apex predator”) as arrested, development-wise; or worshipped, adored and commodified in a modern-day freakshow designed to perpetuate the older spectacle of power as cryptomimetic—copied from the dead in order to look at and feel fascination and fear in the same breath. “True crime” and “true power,” then, are perceived through largely staged affairs where nothing is new under the sun. Shuttled into the present by Gothic poetics, their rote patterns collectively reinforce systemic inequality through sex coercion as foundational to negative freedom for the elite (thus something they police through their agents): stalled resolutions and gimmicky twists that can be subverted in a million ways through sex-positive people’s identifying as such; i.e., yielding positive freedom for workers to do what they like unmolested by the bourgeoisie.

The trick is masks (re: the cryptonymy process). To this, Nick Groom (ibid.) says Radcliffe wore no mask, that her non-Jacobinical fiction (a Jacobin being a revolutionary republican of the times) painted an unmasked portrait of the tyrannies of the later centuries, but also bore no love for rebellion. I agree with the second part, but not the first. While Radcliffe was politically a giant wuss, her fictions—much like the rest of her—were mask-like in a variety of ways. She hid much and said much on what she hid with, but certainly made compromises passing as just a woman-of-letters. She showed how “words that hide” aren’t merely blockers of information, but conveyors that communicate hidden truths through the paradox of exposure/concealment, inside/outside, correct-incorrect, etc; e.g., the oni mask that gives the devil away but suggests something behind the mask through the flavor of the wearer’s performance. The meta-nature of staged allegory also serves to complicate the surface of the body as sexualized during class/culture war’s endless fragmentations; i.e., of gender and its monomorphic roles breaking away from canonical norms and dimorphic, heteronormative enforcement of “correct” power for all those concerned. It is what William Blake called “the narrow chinks of [man’s] being”: the narrow slit of one’s metal visor, perhaps (or Clint Eastwood’s squinting eyes)?

Luckily for Galatea, then, service to Pygmalion’s shadow play can be upstaged in a variety of campy ways that throw the Doors of Perception wide during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., the rape play as cathartic in relation to those performing it and why. Unlike Radcliffe’s exquisite, murderous “tortures” and unironic, xenophobic “demon lovers,” an aware Galatea can camp these same devices as conveniently left behind by Radcliffe herself: her milquetoast “terrorist literature.” In short, we can build upon them, developing a better world expressed in the same basic language Radcliffe used, but differently in terms of praxis; i.e., as performatively awake to the false nature of theatre as oppositional praxis that can be tweaked to serve worker needs consciously through counterterror (versus fucking off for the last 26 years of one’s life; re: Radcliffe).

By extension, the rebellious Galatea’s physical body and labyrinthine body of work becomes openly cathartic in a historical-material left-behind: as an incisive Gothic performance/critical tool whose corpus camps the canon of the status-quo heroes they expose by doubling them, in and out of singular pieces of media (which bleed into others); i.e., of writers like Radcliffe as being part of a shadowy process whose own falseness benefits the status quo. We don’t have to “go down on Radcliffe” because she’s an auteur of the highest order. In pursuit of Gothic, nothing is sacred, including her lily-white ass.

In other words, auteurs like Radcliffe produce heroes (male and female) whose bodies, power and righteousness are false but also harmful or otherwise tied to a harmful process: the shadow on the wall being the shadow cast by “their” body as actually the Shadow of Pygmalion that always comes back! It’s an evil double, a phantasmagoria. The comparative falseness of the rebellious Galatea, then, “breaks the play” through her own campy theatricalities and subversive deceptions; i.e., by often “playing along” just enough to surreptitiously occupy the role while simultaneously haunting it with hidden rebellious truths that find their way to the surface as shadows on the self-same wall: “We are not your slaves though you want us to be; everything you made is a lie and we are living proof, standing before you as the pedagogy of the oppressed as resurrected: demons and undead who don’t exist to aggrandize your false image, your (mono)mythic structure, your Cycle of Kings. That’s been done to death.”

I’m continuing to use so many shadow metaphors here because one, they’re vivid and consistent with my arguments, but also germane to the notion of theatre and dangerous falsehoods that allow us to play games in much the same methods as they would have been done thousands of years ago: with our bodies, but also with light, shadows and costumes on a largely bare stage. It also highlights Plato’s infamous allegory of the cave as canonical and subversive simulacra to mimic for dialectical-material purposes.

So whereas state shadows deceive to perpetuate state hegemony through unironic participation, the likenesses of class-conscious workers can denote countercultural fictions that, on the same stage, highlight a better world through seemingly inanimate things that spring to life in ways they ostensibly shouldn’t. This happens through shadows, but also egregores at large as having all been done before in some shape or form; i.e., of the victims’ creations foreshadowing the state’s lies, collapse and transformation—of worker solidarity collectively rising up to spoil the fun of those “inside the cave” having bought into the canonical interpretation of a shared illusion.

To it, our doing so during ludo-Gothic BDSM is to be done in an informed, intelligent way—i.e., in a manner that whose movement builds towards the setting of these harmful fakeries aside in favor of worshipping new, healthier ones instead: to “start a thing” that doesn’t lead to mass exploitation and genocide behind the shadows dancing on the wall. We gotta—again, using the words of Key and Peele—”put the pussy on the chainwax!”

The entire “camp map” is instructional towards these aims, but the finale tries to illustrate the revolution as a lived-and-breathed attempt by making our own sex-positive monsters. This means it doesn’t perfectly encapsulate the entirety of my thesis, manifesto or their orbiting arguments and theories (from the “camp map”); instead, the finale takes the manifesto terms that we laid out earlier in the manifesto map/thesis statement and returns to them—i.e., after having discussed canon’s making of monsters through the canonical quest for power (as tied to Tolkien’s map and Metroidvania) and camping them through a variety of counterexamples: our jokes, “swords,” “slings and arrows,” “rape” and “murder,” etc. Returning and reflecting upon old points after assembling them is a powerful way to understand larger structures and patterns (especially if they’re designed to conceal themselves through subterfuge, valor and force). It’s what holistic study (the foundation of this book) is all about. As such, I’ve reduced the manifesto tree list as a trio of paragraphs before the finale. I will also introduce even more terms as we go into the finale after the list. Just know that if it ever seems like overkill, you will be seeing them plenty throughout the book as you learn to camp canon yourselves during ludo-Gothic BDSM (which is what Blxxd Bunny and I will be doing during the finale!

Crank it up to eleven!

(source: Robert Kolker’s “This Lawsuit Goes to 11,” 2017)

Onto the finale!

Note: The “camp map” finale aims to camp canon through ludo-Gothic BDSM; re: per Tolkien and Cameron’s refrains, while making monsters ourselves/putting the pussy on the chainwax as outlined and discussed through the prior elements of said map mapping out my thesis argument; i.e., as something to argue through our own labor versus labor theft; e.g., AI (source tweet, Shad M. Brooks: March 28, 2025). Challenging profit’s monopolization and abuse of monsters is what Blxxd Bunny and I will—by disrobing the Medusa to whatever degree we decide (a Numinous strip tease, below)—effectively be demonstrating in the finale with our ludo-Gothic BDSM, so keep these ideas handy (and refer to all the Paratextual Documents if you feel the need to)! —Perse, 3/29/2025

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

From the manifesto tree (as a refresher):

Camp’s assembly and production of cultural empathy under Capitalism happens according along the manifesto tree: the “creative successes” of proletarian praxis as things to materially imagine and induce (often through ironic parody and “perceptive” pastiche) through Gothic poetics; re:

• mutual consent
• informed consumption and informed consent
• sex-positive de facto education (social-sexual education; i.e., iconoclastic/good sex education and taught gender roles), good play/emergent gameplay and cathartic wish fulfillment/guilty pleasure (abuse prevention/risk reduction patterns) meant to teach good discipline and impulse control (valuing consent, permission, mutual attraction, etc); e.g., appreciative peril (the ironic damsel-in-distress/rape fantasy)
• descriptive sexuality

during ludo-Gothic BDSM as things to materially imagine and induce (often through ironic parody and “perceptive” pastiche) through Gothic poetics; i.e., inside the “grey area” of cultural appreciation in countercultural forms that, when executed by emotionally/Gothically intelligent workers, uses camp to cultivate empathy through Gothic counterculture; i.e., by synthesizing Gothic Communism during oppositional praxis (canon vs iconoclasm) according to our manifesto terminology and structure—in short, its various tenets and theories, mode of expression (and assorted mediums: novels, short stories, movies, videogames, etc); creative, oppositional praxis, and their various synthetic oppositional groupings to ultimately foster empathy and emotional/Gothic intelligence by reversing the canonical, unironic function of the Four Gs.

On the flip-side, our would-be killers collectively lack emotional and Gothic intelligence; they do not respect, represent or otherwise practice our “creative successes.” As we’ve already established by looking at the definition of weird canonical nerds, their conduct is quite the opposite; weird canonical nerds don’t practice mutual consent; they endorse the canonical variant of “creative success” through their own synthetic toolkits during oppositional praxis. They endorse

• the process of abjection
• the carceral hauntology/parallel space as a capitalist chronotope
• the complicit (thus bad-faith, bourgeois) cryptonymy

to further Capitalism’s crises-by-design, hence its expected decay, according to a variety of bourgeois trifectas that lead to the banality of evil; its vertical, pyramid-scheme arrangements of power and subsequent tiers and punitive exchanges thereof

• top, middle, bottom
• lords, generals/lieutenants, and grunts
• corporate, militarized and paramilitarized flavors

arranged in neoliberal forms inside and outside of the text

• bosses, mini-bosses, and minions
• executives, middle management/content creators, customers/consumers
• waves of terror and vice characters (menticide)

which leads to a surrender of total power during states of emergency that are always in crisis and decay. Empathy is the casualty of the middle class, who are taught to see the underclass as lacking basic human rights during moral panics.

In summation, Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism ensures that empathy/apathy and class character (unconscious/conscious) occur in oppositional praxis as a dialectical-material exchange. For workers, the empathy accrued is established during these creative successes, whose solidarized and active, intelligent poetics (a manifestation of reclaimed labor and working-class sentiment/counterterror) cultivate the Superstructure in ways useful to proletarian praxis: helping all workers by reversing the process of abjection and its canonical historical materialism (the narrative of the crypt, or echo of ruins). This happens by camping the ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., the barbaric lie of the West told through the monomyth, Cycle of Kings and infernal concentric pattern that drive the process of abjection currently used to exploit workers, resulting in myopic exploitation and genocide under Capitalist Realism while the elite’s endlessly engineered crises enter into, and out of, decayed states of emergency and exception. Rewrite how people respond to elite propaganda and you can rewrite how people think, thus rewrite history by changing its well-trod, profitable (for the elite) and bloody (for us) historical-material track; in short you can take the state’s propaganda apart, ending Capitalist Realism as you start to develop towards a post-scarcity world (the kind that is wholly antithetical to modern nation-states and their vertical arrangements of power).

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

Onto “‘Camp Map,’ the Finale“!

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About the Author

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

Footnotes

[1] “Pillow Pants is her pussy troll? Duh!” From Kevin Smith’s Clerks 2. It’s funny as hell, but also low-hanging fruit (“Christian fundamentalists don’t know how sex works!”).

[2] Not all Japanese hauntologies take the same approach. For example, Nobuo Uematsu’s literal opera, “The Dream Oath Opera – Maria and Draco” (1994), has been written to play out in-game as a faithful staged performance of the star-crossed lovers, possessive love, captive fantasy and duel. And to its credit, such operas are not strictly negative; as Blue Öyster Cult says, “Aeroplanes make strangers of us all,” and the great gulf produced by Capitalism can lead people to feel horribly divided, seeking refuse in popular fictions that communicate our human condition vividly. A woman’s theatrical voice, then, becomes as much her trying to exist in a man’s world that pulls her in multiple directions at once. Relegated to an abstract stage of theatrical conventions, she simultaneously wields tremendous influence, but feels powerless to stop those she cares about (or detests) from trying to own her or fight over her honor while loving one more than the other (the love triangle). It might seem like it fails to represent “reality” but contains within itself the ability to parody extensions of reality that have become heavily codified and dogmatic, while also giving someone a chance to relate to the intense feelings onscreen. Despite “the Dream Oath’s” fictional and bombastic nature, I can certainly relate to Maria’s intense operatic longing; the same goes for Jojo and its campiness. Been there, done that.

[3] The Death Star wasn’t a moon or a space station, Obi Wan; it was a castle.

[4] Cameron would continue this trend, calling his own gunship the Sulaco (an allusion to The Nostromo). The name game is a rather blind one, seemingly if only to credit Conrad and leave the ghosts of colonialism trapped inside the ghost of the counterfeit.

[5] Evoking Foucault’s bio-power in a Gothic shipping narrative; the cargo isn’t just ore—it’s the alien as a ghost of old slaves that, in the eyes of the capitalist, are no different and continues to be smuggled into the Global North through the eyes of the ghost of the counterfeit; re, Hogle: “as David Punter has shown, ‘the middle class’ often does what we have just seen Leroux do in Le Fantôme: it ‘displaces the hidden violence of present social structures, conjures them up again as past, and falls promptly under their spell’ with feelings of both fear and attraction towards the phantasms of what is displaced (Punter, 418)” (source).

[6] A colonial metaphor/stowaway that Jeff van Dyck—captivated with the original sound design of Alien—would allude to in his work on Alien: Isolation:

“To help make a game that was as close to the first movie as possible, 20th Century Fox gave The Creative Assembly [team] access to the original sound effects, taken from eight-track and dumped to a single ProTools session of the entire film. The audio quality wasn’t high enough to simply copy sounds across, but it gave them a base to faithfully re-build from using modern technology. “That article comparing the visual in the game to the visual in the movie? We were doing the audio equivalent of that.”

A sound that did make the transition was one of the first things you hear as the camera pans across the stars. “I used it in the main menu music,” says van Dyck, “what we dubbed the ‘space whale.’ It’s this weird bending WOOO sound right at the very beginning.” He wanted to let players know from the start they were in for a genuine Alien experience. “It’s so authentic it’s actually got a piece of the movie in it. To me it sounds fantastic, and then we did a surround mix with it. Rather than it being echoey we have it spinning around all the speakers” (source: Jody Macgregor’s “Seeing with Your Ears — the Audio of Alien: Isolation” (2015).

The structural perfection [counterterrorism] of Alien is only matched by its hostility towards colonizing forces: Ripley, without realizing it, is a colonial foil to the usual recipients of the “savage dark continent myth” projected into the stars; i.e., Uhall’s astronoetics, or the settler-colonial gaze of planet Earth.

[7] Specifically the written BDSM contract demonized as Faustian vis-à-vis 50 Shades of Gray or the Cenobites from Hellraiser, etc. Often these implements are hauntologically criminalized and disseminated in mythic, harmful forms—a phenomena we will discuss even more in Volume Three, Chapter Two.

[8] “According to Nietzsche, the Apollonian attributes are reason, culture, harmony, and restraint. These are opposed to the Dionysian characteristics of excess, irrationality, lack of discipline, and unbridled passion” (source: Britannica).

[9] Just what is a woman, Angela Carter, when you write in The Sadeian Woman (1979) “A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster”? Of course, Matt Walsh’s hideous refrain is normally bad-faith nonsense directed at us, but it becomes quite important when defining what a woman is (and a monster) when regarding the likes of Carter’s platitude, but also Simone Beauvoir, Cynthia Wolff, Ellen Moers, or hell, Janice-fucking-Raymond (author of The Transsexual Empire, 1979—more on them in Volume Two). Second-wave feminism was (and still is) infamously cis-supremacist and white, and we can’t just rely on a bunch of fancy (and highly problematic) white, cis-het female academics to accomplish the sum of all activism for all workers. Even if Carter wouldn’t have been caught dead in Rowling’s company today, she still died in 1992—one year after Michael Warner introduced “heteronormativity” to academic circuits, two years after Judith Butler wrote Gender Trouble and one year before Derrida wrote Spectres of Marx.

To be blunt, Carter’s most famous works feel oddly dated in terms of what they either completely leave out or fail to define, and thereby supply clues to the vengeance of proto-TERFs like Dacre’s Victoria de Loredani that Carter doesn’t strictly condemn. As Brittany Sauvé-Bonin writes in “How Angela Carter Challenges Myths of Sexuality and Power in ‘The Bloody Chamber’ & ‘The Company of Wolves'” (2020):

The men in de Sade’s stories exercise sexual perversions which enforce annihilation. However, it is the women in de Sade’s stories that are seen as even more cruel as once they get the rare opportunity to exercise power, they begin to use this power to seek retaliation over the submissiveness they were forced to endure in society (The Sadeian Woman 27). Carter bluntly concludes that “a free woman in an unfree society will be a monster” (27). Due to women being oppressed for so long, when they get the opportunity, they can retaliate in the most extreme ways (27).

According to Henstra, this has resulted in critique by other feminists including Andrea Dworkin, who have concluded that The Sadeian Woman displays a “complete disregard for the actual suffering endured by Sade’s – and pornography’s – victims” (113). Carter chooses to focus more on how women had an outlet to retaliate that de Sade had openly introduced. While some of his women suffered, some of his women indeed inflicted the pain. Hence, Carter rationalizes de Sade’s work by saying “pornography [is] in the service of women, or, perhaps, allowed it to be invaded by an ideology not inimical [harmful] to women” (The Sadeian Woman 37) [source].

Again, what is a woman, Carter? And what did they do with this outlet? The vast majority turned it against other minorities more disadvantaged than themselves—i.e., from 1979 into the present (we’ll revisit this footnote in “The Riddle of Steel“).

This blog post is part of “The Total Codex,” a fourth 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.” The first promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “The Total Codex” shall do the same, but with Volume Zero/the thesis volume (versus “Make It Real” promoting Volume One/the manifesto, which I will release after “The Total Context” completes). 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 “The Total Codex’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Zero is already written/was released on October 2023! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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

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

“The Map Is a Lie: the Quest for Power inside Cameron’s Closed Space—Interrogating Power through Your Own Camp

“Theatricality and deception are powerful agents to the uninitiated.”

—Bane, The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Picking up where “The Map is a Lie; or, Metroidvania and the Quest for Power (opening and part one: ‘Origins and Lineage’)” left off…

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

Note: If “Origins and Lineage” set the table for applying theory to camp the canon with Metroidvania and ludo-Gothic BDSM, “Interrogating Power” gets down to business; i.e., it’s 74 pages, making it the longest book section in my entire book series! Its extended girth owes to how it examines Metroidvania, but also shooters, in general; e.g., Ion Fury (with extended paragraphs coming from keeping word count down, the same idea applying to extended [sub]chapters). This subsection includes further keywords, as well (which will come in handy when camping canon ourselves; i.e., as Blxxd Bunny [above] and I will demonstrate, during the finale).

To make it more legible (due to its length), I’ve also decided to arrange it into loose, conversational sub-headers; i.e., in the style borrowed from Volume Two onwards, regarding a series of talking points you should be able to glean from the titles alone:

• Interrogating Power (and Reflecting on Past Attempts) during Ludo-Gothic BDSM
• Metroidvania (reprise)
• Camping Canon through Art (some personal and non-personal examples in popular media)
• Further Gothic Devices to Revisit when Camping Canon, Ourselves (re: playing god, the Promethean Quest and Amazons, and more)
• Mise-en-Abyme: Echoes of the Neo-Medieval
• Galatea’s Ilk; or, “Chimeras, Monster Girls and Wheyfus, Oh My!”
• Shadows of Freud (feat. Homelander) and Assorted Terms (e.g., the Male Gaze, exhibitionism/voyeurism, hysteria/wandering womb and bicycle face, etc)
• Back to Tolkien (and Gay Hobbits)
• Pulling a Galatea (when Making Monsters, Ourselves)
• Shooters within Cameron’s Refrain (and Camping Them); re: Ion Fury
• Camp Is Half-Real: Out of Metroidvania and into Real Life as Intertwined with Such Things

It’s argumentative, per my thesis, but holistic, liminal and ergodic much how Metroidvania are; i.e., taking the concept outside such games and into real life connected to said games per ludo-Gothic BDSM. —Perse, 3/28/2025

Now that we’ve unpacked my real-life quest to understand Numinous power as something to map, reassemble and interrogate inside castles, you should have a fairly good idea of my thought process’s journey when doing it yourselves on your own journeys. I now want to walk you through the basic process in relation to Metroidvania (and other shooters, primarily Ion Fury at the end of the subchapter); i.e., as stemming from Cameron, who himself stemmed from Tolkien (we’ll expand this idea to any kind of canonical theatre and monster-making when we discuss “putting the pussy on the chainwax” in the next subchapter). For us and Gothic Communism, interrogation of power and its mapped-out performance is as much a critique of the protagonist within Cameron’s refrain as it is the castle or the monsters inside; we will apply this playing with power to our poetic camping of the Promethean Quest in our own lives, our own creations that interrogate power on maps that resemble Tolkien or Cameron’s (on paper) but play out very differently in practice when we recreate elements of them, ourselves:

(artist: ChuckARTT)

Interrogating Power (and Reflecting on Past Attempts) during Ludo-Gothic BDSM

First, power’s interrogation happens through class war in popular media; for the Gothic, class/culture war is monster war—a battle of the mind, the monster and the method as codified beliefs and behaviors during a shared stage: the “shadow zone’s” map and various environments, but especially the castle as a sex dungeon, a closed space that imperils the heroine in ways that aren’t strictly negative in a theatrical sense (they have cathartic applications).

As “Origins and Lineage” showed, my own extensive and ever-evolving research in Metroidvania examined how cross-media mimetic patterns are shared between Tolkien’s refrain and Cameron’s as ludologized. Their relationship is actually cryptomimetic, involving and describing a ludic meta-pattern/contract shared across a variety of genres out from older mediums and into videogames (“beyond the novel or cinema and into Metroidvania”): whether from Tolkien’s built world or Cameron’s it’s all from the same basic legends, but the aesthetic, context and function during class war (as something to adopt) is different when we examine and camp these authors ourselves; i.e., canon and camp of a suitably “Gothic” kind that announces itself (or forgets to).

Regardless of form, it’s all drawn off the same basic map and theatrical function of the map, albeit at cross purposes relative to class function: Gothic doubles that challenge the pure, aching goodness of Tolkien’s gentrified war and Cameron’s white-savior variant of the cis-het Amazon. The Metroidvania map might be a lie wrought from similar legends as Cameron’s ordinance-heavy updating of the Tolkien refrain, but its cartography needn’t serve the state if the double is iconoclastic, thus campy in ways that Tolkien was allergic to (re: allegory and apocalypse) and which various accommodated intellectuals are in no hurry to express in their own work, especially in relation to their own lives; re: “the infamous discretions of academia waste a surprising amount of time commenting on all of these matters as separate from each other.”

For example, the accommodated faculty at MMU (which, I must remind you, was part of the center for Gothic studies, a network of scholarship)—but also people like Krzywinska, Perron, and other scholars I didn’t meet in person—all hoarded this vital and useful information behind surprisingly archaic and capitalistic paywalls (not unique to the British academic system by any stretch, but in my opinion felt more intensely gnostic and mysterious/trade-secret than my time in American academia; in truth, they all kind of suck). The tragedy of this hoarding is that it was done not to disseminate information, but conceal and contain it in pursuit of their own glory and reputations, first and foremost—the school, then the school’s representatives.

There was a time when I wanted to be one of them, but clearly that is not the case anymore. Back then, it was easy enough to ignore me outside of school, grade my assignments from anonymity and swan about during conferences applauding one another. And maybe I just lacked “the mettle” for such a highly competitive and manufactured world; or maybe I was “too American,” too indiscrete and happy to talk, during seminar modules, about my own social-sex life and its negotiated interrogations of unequal power exchange in relation to the Gothic mode (you know, actually trying to apply the theory in the real world instead of relegating it to the page, screen, or stage). Frankly I don’t care what such a world thinks of me, and will happily die on the hill of this next statement: The point of academia should not be “to be intellectuals” for its own sake (as Christine Neufeld told me once[1]), “discovering” things and putting your names on it; it should be to make workers’ lives better! Anything short of that is complicit in some shape or form. And if my sore words seem to carry a grudge, I can at least be honest and say that yeah, I’m angry with how grad school went; I’m frustrated with how I was treated. But it wasn’t all bad, and I learned something from all of my professors (and many of them, especially at the undergraduate level, were kind to me and supportive[2a] in some shape or form); my critiques are leveled more at the institution itself, which was a business first, a school second.

For the bourgeoisie at large, ideas like “ludo-Gothic BDSM” are doubly useless—the proverbial speaking of Greek, to them, but also not profitable. Instead, the cartographic refrain exists not to teach the means of combating Capitalism, but preserving it; i.e., to revive canonical sentiments of a particular kind during ergodic/recursive (repetitive) motion; i.e., inside videogame spaces of a particular kind with particular heroes against particular monsters: the constant resurrection of the undead, war-like closed spaces and their threats of rape/power abuse. This applies to Tolkien, of course, but Tolkien’s valorizing of the triumphant military hero and death of the Necromancer, Sauron, kind of sidesteps the whole conversation (or tries to, anyways). He also didn’t exist during the neoliberal period, which requires us to look at some kind of videogame castle to apply our arguments to the Internet Age—especially if they are informed by Tolkien’s canon; he much preferred hiking and the outdoors, but still hinted at “old castles with an evil look, as if they had been built by wicked people” as the pre-fascist Gothic having returned to corrupt his land of plenty as occupied by good men, women, animals, nature, etc: Moria, Mirkwood, the Misty Mountains, and Mordor (all the dark places start with M, apparently). But the refrain—his treasure map—patently sublimates war by always starting from the idea of the West as besieged, threatened by a dark evil force coming from somewhere else—from outside.

For us, the closed space, ludo-Gothic BDSM, and ergodic motion all tie to the Metroidvania (and its mappable space) as something to overwrite Tolkien’s refrain with using an iconoclastic version of Cameron’s. Tolkien’s open map of conquest always put the castle far away from one’s homeland, the land itself treated as one’s own and under attack by outside forces. By comparison, the Metroidvania is entirely self-contained, with little if no outdoors to speak of; i.e., no overworld, like in Zelda (which operates closer to Tolkien’s nature-centric romp). Instead of a lush, green overworld and war on open ground, the wicked castle is abandoned, then found while the hero is already inside of it—i.e., like waking up inside the castle as both the scenario and location of a bad dream. Doing so entirely skips the pastoral, sunny introduction of a boyish Call to Adventure, instead beginning in darkness visible like Paradise Lost did; i.e., as prisoners en medias res, chained to the bottom of a burning lake. In turn, we find ourselves trapped inside a maze-like, all-encompassing unheimlich whose seemingly mappable space conveys some stubbornly unmappable[2b] qualities, but also the Gothic derelict being conveniently left behind as a bourgeois counterfeit meant to close our eyes behind canceled retro-futures: there is no escape, no sunshine, just a narrative of the crypt and its infernal concentric pattern. This is our playground, a dialogic means of teaching sex positivity through the Gothic mode’s chief attraction: the Gothic castle and the Numinous. Including the palliative Numinous as achieved through multimedia BDSM theatrics, this castle ignores the colonized territory (the outdoors) as a place to “save” from “orcs,” and focuses more on the root of the problem: the seat of empire as conspicuously shadowy and fortress-like, but also overrun.

Our praxial aim is overwriting Tolkien’s refrain with a reclaimed, BDSM-centric version of Cameron’s, thus making iconoclastic “war” in the process; but for that I want to go beyond Botting’s critical vacuity and Jameson’s own fantasy/sci-fi bias to emphasize things neither they nor Tolkien could seemingly be arsed to touch: castles, Amazons and BDSM dungeon aesthetics! My aim in doing so is to explain unequal power as something to seek, summon and express: to reel in and study the summoning of power in its routine forms; through anachronistic castles that serve as perennial playgrounds for workers to lose themselves inside and acclimate themselves to future class war as close to home. Furthermore, acclimation needn’t be an endorsement of the status quo, but an iconoclastic process whose understanding concerns traditional navigations of power that generally involve the same language: Tolkien’s “There’s a dark castle over there! Let’s kill it and take its stuff!” which, for the iconoclast, is code for “I want to go to the dark castle of sin and ‘kill’ stuff; i.e., practice consent-non-consent, sodomy and other sex-positive BDSM!”

Note: This portion of the volume touches on ideas we’ve hinted at, up to this point, but which I realize upon checking I haven’t exactly uttered in this volume a particular phrase (which would come later): “To critique power, you must go where it is.” Or more to the point, you must go, during ludo-Gothic BDSM, where power is summoned and stored; i.e., like the Gothic castle as manifestations of capital as a neo-medieval abstraction of itself: a rarefaction (of greed and other virtues/vices) writ in stone and/or flesh (among other things). In turn, the same basic principle works for all manner of morphologies—ranging from castle-like bodies and body-like castles; re: castles in the flesh” (from the Poetry Module). I won’t say the exact sentence, quoted above, in the followed pages, but that’s what I’ve been talking about up to this point (and will continue talking about in what follows being a past moment that flowed into future older moments leading up to me writing this sentence; e.g., Volume One’s “to interrogate power, you must go where it is” or “If you want to critique the state and stop the cycle, go where its heroic power is centered: nostalgic spaces.” —Perse, 3/22/2025

Instead of going somewhere else to commit genocide—vis-à-vis Tolkien’s boyish escapism through the pastoral-to-hell-to-paradise rite of passage and its conquest of the treasure map—we interrogate the castle-like prisons that we’re born inside using operatic language and Gothic poetics having been updated since Tolkien’s time. The idea is to liberate ourselves with fairly negotiated, thus cathartic, dungeon fantasies that camp canon through counterterrorist theatre to whatever degree feels correct to us; e.g., me in a haunted castle, wandering through the dark, menacing halls while wearing a sexy dress (and nothing under it, my bare body molested by the breeze and the fabric): a hopelessly vulnerable Gothic heroine feeling pretty and desired, hungrily and desperately interrogating the musical, cobwebbed gloomth[3] while scarcely having anything between me and certain “doom.” As usual, the Gothic paradox allows for intense, oxymoronic dualities to coexist at the same time in the same space (e.g., “sad cum” or “gloomth” or similar and confused degrees of “verklempt” during the castle’s psychosexual, emotional “storm”). Simply put, I want to feel naked and exposed, thus paradoxically most alive in ways that I have negotiated through the contract between me and the media I’m working with (wherein the Metroidvania castle, as far as I’m concerned, is the perfect dom); i.e., while being “hunted” and covered in rebellious “kick me” symbols and clothing that advertises my true self[4] as naked, colorful and dark, as if to tease the viewer in the shadows to try something (and also showing my ass to my academic dominators: “I fart in your general direction!”). As the kids say, that’s a mood.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Why stick out? you ask? One, because we must in order to survive. Two, because our deals with the devil simply acknowledge our true selves, which the state wants us to reject (the queer version of Top Dollar’s usual wisdom: “Every man’s got a devil, and you can’t rest until you find him”). But also, it feels good to be Athena’s Aegis; i.e., challenging heteronormative power in ways that demonstrate how fragile said illusion (and its gatekeepers) are. State bullies are entitled nerds completely used to getting everything they want, who desire what I will never give them (a form of agency I’ve worked hard for); and completely afraid of nearly everything and will freak out at fairly silly things they have no business getting so worked up about: at people like me, burning down their imaginary churches and those churches’ ideas of compelled order about Capitalism and its gobstopper illusions (those highly unnatural and imprisoning systems of thought that are slowly killing us as a species). Frankly the idea of me being terrifying seems absurd, but as a burning proponent of rebellion constitutes something that still, on some level, represents an incendiary threat that many advertise as the “end times”: Communism… but Gothic and gay! To which I cheerfully put up the goat horns and say in response, “Hail, Satan!” It’s like saying “Ni!” to old ladies.

Our performative and internalized devilry becomes something to join—a communion or pact whose assimilation classically amounts to a devilish bargain; yet Gothic Communism is a group effort, one whose sex-positive class/culture warrior is among a fellowship or pandemonium of equally sex-positive ne’er-do-wells instead of one or more class/race traitors for the elite and their age-old Faustian bargains. We reach towards you, croon “Join us!” and become something to run away with; i.e., corrupting the minds of the youth (women and children) by calling out seductively to them, offering forbidden knowledge/fruit[5] as a chance to go wild/go native by coming out of the closet in opposition to state forces (who will chase us, only to be turned away at the door—”no fascists allowed!”): the truth of things in its totality and not just a white person’s perspective as an outsider to genuine atrocities; e.g., a Lovecraft novella, an overplayed Iron Maiden or Slayer song or the problematic castle of a Radcliffean novel (though these can all be enjoyed mid-rebellion). As Robert Asprey notes, terror and native wit/creativity are the historical tools of the counterterrorist, often being all they immediately have at their disposal; under Capitalism in the Internet Age, labor becomes a huge bargaining chip that Gothic Communism marries to terror during class war as a theatrical, operatic proposition (solidarity and labor action expressed as much through improvised Gothic poetics [improv] as improvised weapons): a means of bringing the oppressed and alienated closer to together in an informed, Satanic act of outer-space empathy and love in the face of state forces. The spotlight isn’t something to hog or monopolize strictly by white nerds but expand and share in a drive towards post-scarcity (through a horizontally-arranged system that isn’t rigged in favor of those who control it because no one person or select group will be in control, in that sense; that’s what anarchism ultimately is).

Doing so becomes second-nature, a way of existing that doesn’t require drugs or sex (though they can certainly be involved if one wants them to); it requires community and love in opposition to capital’s usual bad-faith actors, fear and dogma: persons who blend in for fear of the state, overperforming its doctrines no matter how ridiculous it makes them look. I can understand why they do it (they’re stupid and callow), but short of implied threats of force I can’t begin to fathom why would anyone ever want to listen to people like them; i.e., persons who not only never experiment or try new things regarding gender and sex, but also probably never have had sex outside of abusive and/or vanilla scenarios. They’re exactly the kind of people who act holy but hide behind their privilege as the most deviant ones of all[6]; i.e., prone to abuse their power and harm those under their care. In essence, they treat the Holy Gospel (in one form or another) as a means to abuse others from a position of willful ignorance: by refusing to eat from the Tree of Knowledge because some asshole saying they’re God said so. The point isn’t whether they’re true-believers or that God is real or that God lied about the apples being poison, but what they do with their power and sense of alienation inside the status quo.

For instance, I’m a highly privileged person and have, in the past, felt tremendously alone and alienated. But I’ve worked hard on myself to question the world as it presently exists and appears. In doing so, I’ve learned what I like not because it was handed to me but because I discovered it through years of honest reflection, mid-cognitive dissonance and hard work after to become a better person—not the person the system wants me to be! It’s precisely the kind of self-discovery that high-control groups like the Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t want you to do, but also Capitalism in general within the Capitalocene:

the Capitalocene

Regardless of what humans decide to do, the twenty-first century will be a time of “abrupt and irreversible” changes in the web of life. Earth system scientists have a rather dry term for such a fundamental turning point in the life of a biospheric system: state shift. Unfortunately, the ecology from which this geological change has emerged has also produced humans who are ill-equipped to receive news of this state shift. Nietzsche’s madman announcing the death of god was met in a similar fashion: although industrial Europe had reduced divine influence to the semicompulsory Sunday-morning church attendance, nineteenth-century society couldn’t image a world without god. The twenty-first century has an analogue: it’s easier for most people to imagine the end of the planet than to imagine the end of capitalism. […] Today’s human activity isn’t exterminating mammoths through centuries of overhunting. Some humans are currently killing everything, from megafauna to microbiota, at speeds one hundred times higher than the background rate. We argue what changed is capitalism, that modern history has, since the 1400s, unfolded in what is better termed the Capitalocene [than the Anthropocene] (source: A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things).

This leads to a variety of counterpoints that emerge in protest to the status quo—a reclaimed language of religion, to be sure, but what I like to think of as “Satanic apostacy[7]” (Satanism isn’t, for all intents and purposes, a religion, but a system of rules[8] designed to teach humane critical-thinking skills): Gothic poetics, fantasy and science fiction that—as transhuman/posthuman[9] forms of expression—have evolved beyond Humanist forms to pointedly and loudly challenge our rationalized/moralized position as the dominant species on the planet (similar to the infernal concentric pattern), including our relationship to each other and to nature as canonically anthropocentric.

In turn, these principles manifest efficiently in music, art and culture not as “lesser forms of media” but as an open, quick and honest way that people express themselves regarding the truth of things (which the usual benefactors of Capitalism will cover up by acting like the Enlightenment and Pax Americana is either somehow good for everyone, or neutered forms of futurism that can be envisioned by white men who speak for everyone else; e.g., Asimov or Jameson). It’s hard, at first, to “put on the glasses.” Eventually you don’t need them at all—communicating effortlessly with others who see the way you do because it’s become a part of your culture, the Superstructure. That becomes a powerful bond—in part because it’s saturated through an entire polity versus simply being restricted to a single-dose product.

For instance, whenever Bay and I spend time together online, doing so makes us feel close together even though we live on different parts of the planet. But when we have sex, we’re not doing it to meet some desperate, lonely need (re: “sad cum”); we’re doing it because we enjoy each other’s company and contribute towards a stable, healthy relationship. Our tails wag when we see each other. Within that nurtured, loving bond, we live out each other’s fantasies as those fantasies; and when we do so, we share Gothicized music, traditions, or clothing styles. During all of this, I suddenly feel their presence in a shared space and time: of all those who came before—the weight of the universe and the cathedral of something noble and great the likes of which Coleridge’s touted Gothic art and sublimity is but spitting off a bridge. He doesn’t have the language (not even when he used laudanum) to express our grandeur and might. Stare and tremble, motherfucker!

(artist: The Maestro Noob)

As such, terror through labor action is my weapon, but specifically counterterror by pointing out rather nakedly the stupid things the state fears (for so many of them challenge the profit motive: party music, free love, gender-non-conformance, androgynous M&M candies, etc) and how fallible the mightiest nations truly are in the face of active resistance even when arms aren’t involved; e.g., American landmines and bombs used against American colonizers during Vietnam, but also incredibly inexpensive homemade IEDs forcing the United States to waste hundreds of millions of dollars during the second Iraq war trying to armor its tanks, only to be met with casualties during the usual war of optics[10] (GDF’s “How Iraqis Got So Good at Smoking American Soldiers,” 2023).

The paradox continues insofar as I learned what, how and why through a harmful, abusive emulation of rape fantasy while living with Jadis, which I then turned into cathartic forms having at least partially learned (by accident) the method from my humiliation endured inside an academic setting. MMU’s power imbalance (and research topics) had acclimated me to Jadis’ nefarious bullshit, giving me a leg up by “letting” me stand on their gigantic shoulders (as in, I was going to regardless) but also on the massive, rotting corpse of Radcliffe (which I’ve suddenly realized, in a moment of academic bloodlust, is actually quite fun/empowering[11] to wail on—if only because a) I had to read her long-ass, bigoted books and hear/read the academic praise heaped at her feet constantly while in school and after I left, and b) her zombie [and castles] have started to decay and need to be dealt with).

Simply put, Jadis didn’t have a monopoly on violence, on terror as something only they could use. Rather, I took Asprey’s maxim to heart (“Not only can terror be employed as a weapon, but any weapon can become a weapon of terror: terror is a weapon, a weapon is terror, and no one agency monopolizes it”); I fought back with my own counterterrorist fantasies that Jadis couldn’t control short of raw violence. But due to their overwhelming desire to appear good (ever the centrist), wouldn’t resort to the role of the brutal thug and suddenly I could negotiate my exit (not that it was easy—but we’ll get to that, in Volume Two). In the end, they despised the sound of my voice but also what it said about things we both were interested in; i.e., as the breaker of the spell they’ve woven around themselves when interpreting said things. It got to the point that they—like Beatrice, the annoying blue bird from Over the Garden Wall (2014)—were always asking me to walk in silence whenever we went for a walk despite me wanting to talk about things, of things, of things (odd, considering they loved that show but not how I loved it; i.e., they didn’t want to actually do what Greg was determined to try himself—to actually make the world a better place than how Beatrice saw it: “The world is a miserable place, Greg! Life isn’t fun!” In short, Jadis not only wanted to be in control at all times; they wanted to be right about that horrible supposition—that life sucks—more than they wanted to admit they could be wrong and happily discover that things could change and improve. Isn’t that fucked up?):

(source: “Schooltown Follies”)

Entirely by accident, then, I discovered through bad play (enacted against me by a bad actor/player) that good play amounts to Gothic poetics as a potent means of regaining control through reclaimed implements of terror (the manacle, castle, rapist, slur or baton, etc) but also being that which terrifies the state and its proponents to no end: a refusal to conform or obey (which forces the state’s hand, relying on the veneer of not being the tyrants they’ve spent decades projecting onto Nazis, nominal Communists, and other theatrical scapegoats). Haunted by the ghosts of my youth, I could dance with them and make versions of themselves that could never harm me. I would be in control in ways I never felt before, feeling a presence of “danger” that triggered my prey mechanisms just enough to make the exercise therapeutic; i.e., while showing myself off as a trust-building exercise behind a buffer that stood between me and the world. The whole performance/thought experiment nursed my wounds and made me feel safe without pushing me into the arms of future abusers; instead, I could transform myself and my environment using my education as a negotiation device, the theatre and its effect enhanced by years of academic and lived experience. Suddenly my years of costly and time-extensive Gothic education felt profoundly useful—not just to me, but something I could give back to the workers of the world; i.e., those who had already given me much to think about in relation to their own work as part of a movement I could join through Gothic poetics:

(artist: ikerellatab)

Despite their poetic nature, performance and play are an absolutely potent means of expressing thus negotiating power through the Gothic mode (its castles, monsters and rape scenarios); a polity of proletarian poets can negotiate future interrogations of unequal power within the Gothic imagination as connected to our material conditions: one shapes and maintains the other and vice versa. As such, my own contributions to the Gothic are very much about making it sexual again, but also sex-positive in ways that Radcliffe (and her own venerated castle’s praxial inertia) were not; i.e., tearing her (and her Faustian contracts, castles and various harmful BDSM scenarios) “a new college-debt-sized asshole” while, in the same breathe, addressing my deeply personal, trans woman’s fears of my own penis (e.g., Zeuhl) but also trying anal and other things in a monstrous context (e.g., Cuwu’s choking and rape play and Jadis’ “put your mysterium tremendum in my uncanny valley!”). In short, my playing with new things—activities, roleplays and identity scenarios—had transformative potential relative to my sexuality and gender as highly idiosyncratic. We’re all idiosyncratic[12] in ways Capitalism wants you to forget, so try anal, “chains and torture,” and the Numinous as something to reassemble yourself in some shape or form during liminal expression; the paradox of being free while still “in chains” is a sex-positive kind of theater that is incredibly intense, but harmless (and it’s more fun as a group activity—we are a social species). As the conveyor of these complicated fantasies, my book is a castle with castles inside of itself—built for the reader to wander around inside while asking questions about: to play with, making mistakes that will undoubtedly hurt, but not harm them, and which they can take and apply to their own social-sex lives.

We can use this to camp not just Radcliffe as the end-all-be-all of the castled stage, but also Tolkien’s former interrogations of power presented in poetic language. For example, he saw the fulfillment of the boy becoming a man as swept up in the wish fulfillment of “good war”; i.e., as attained by a return of the imaginary past and its legendary rites of passage: war is something to play at until it becomes real. His boyish naiveté couples the usual defense of home as built on a lie—that the land is both green and good (as opposed to irreversibly ravaged by Capitalism, then covered up by digital fakeries and mapped abstractions of them touted as “eternal”), but also naturalized as “theirs[13]“—paradoxically framed as a battle against boredom and desiring to escape through adventure as a “natural” process (another lie): boys will be boys. This process naturalizes the dark territories the boy walks towards, only to discover that war kind of sucks when one arrives. But Tolkien still essentialized war as a “white man’s burden”/martyr complex—of the colonizer feeling sorry for themselves while still committing mass, industrial-scale genocides against native populations (“the only good orc is a dead orc”). Worse, they routinely dress their victims up in the alienized, settler-colonial language of death (of the dark, savage continent) and view darkness as something to unironically fear and attack (or unironically embody for the state’s benefit). For us, persons and places of war need to be camped, so we might as well start at the heart of the warzone; i.e., to play inside the abandoned castle using its reclaimed language of terror to achieve psychosexual catharsis by camping the source of genocide: echoes of empire as endemic to our own homesteads. Radcliffe’s castles were bad, but so were Tolkien’s and Cameron’s white-saviorisms because they (and their maps) were canonical.

Metroidvania (reprise)

To this, the Metroidvania chronotope is far less green from the outset, but also something full of dark doubles to bring back into the real world and make it a better place with: with iconoclastic lessons of “war” and “rape” that break canon on the same stage using the same theatrical markers and floorplans. In short, a post-scarcity world can only be achieved by facing the darkness at home as something to transmute and inhabit: Tolkien’s fairytale being tragically as much the majestic landscapes he cared so much about as slipping into myth (what Matthew Lewis might call “an artificial wilderness[14]“). As something to play with, Metroidvania’s shadow of war becomes our ally in defense of nature—like Bane except campier and more driven to out Batman as the story’s true villain and phony: “You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, molded by it.” In the interim, the parallel space is a kind of nightmare nursery where you can safely fuck up and play around with instruments of torture and death in campy language: the unmappable space of confusion as phenomenological but also architectural; i.e., in ways that don’t make immediate structural sense but whose sites of torture, confinement, and various traps are designed to disorient, overwhelm and subdue in order to evoke the medieval rape fantasy as crossing over into the patently mundane (e.g., Annie’s compromising position in the mysterious laundry room from Halloween [1978] as inexplicably designed to lock people inside as they enter it). It’s a calculated risk.

The varied wreckage of the Metroidvania actually takes many forms, which I call the “Metroidvania Spectrum” (from “Mazes and Labyrinths“; refer to it for examples of each):

Castlevania — Castlevania-style — cross-franchise hybrids — Metroid-style — Metroid

The Metroidvania’s canonical propagandistic function is ludic in a particular sense; i.e., as ergodic in ways that novels aren’t, but traditionally pilfered by a Neo-Gothic hero/token Amazon through violent force or a female detective through non-violent detection, and whose gendered actions are informed by the traditional gendering of such spaces as advertised per medium—their monarchs, monsters, heroes, etc—but also forever updating through gradual, incremental concessions with the middle class; e.g., the girl boss, the subjugated Amazon as a phallic woman/Archaic Mother who serves the state’s profit motive; i.e., as always changing just enough to accommodate the profit motive of the free market, but not actually interfere with the same old ludic scheme and its offer of false power and false hope as profitable (thus useful) to capital.

Male or female, the canonical hero-warrior/detective is a cop, thus class (culture and race) traitor whose actions seek to restore order/the colonial binary by “solving” the awesome mystery through dumb, platitudinal force: property before people, including stories that keep capital operating as it always does when unchallenged by workers (the whitewashed restoration of the formerly glorious and rightful castle at the end of the classic Gothic story). Within this hauntological copaganda, the centrist hero does not fear death; they punch it to whatever degree the ludo-Gothic arrangement allows (summarized from “Mazes and Labyrinths“): the shooter as FPS or run-‘n-gun, the platformer hack-‘n-slash, the Metroidvania’s spatial relationship with the maze or labyrinth according to the Castlevania or Metroid treatment of space (male hero + melee attacks or female hero with ranged attacks, usually). This is a huge problem when Capitalism is in crisis/decay (less “when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail” and more “the ‘nails’ are zombies and I’m going to hammer all of them on the head!”): terror becomes a state refrain pitted DARVO-style against labor through “counterterrorism” in bad faith. Again, we’re the terrorists, including our seditious identities as having formed primarily in response to state atrocities that we’re trying to interrogate through the same theatrical devices Radcliffe used (to much less success because she upheld the canonical norms through her castles’ happy endings). It becomes a canonical game of gaslight, gatekeep, girl-boss—with Radcliffe at the top.

As the Neo-Gothic girl boss, Radcliffe (and her castles) argued for a feminine trembling to interrogate power with, not masculine force. So when Radcliffe wrote in The Italian, “What are bodily pains in comparison with the subtle, the exquisite tortures of the mind!” she is, according to Kim Ian Michasiw, treating the presence of sublime power as “as a signal to sigh and feel exalted” (source: “Ann Radcliffe and the Terrors of Power,” 1994). Simply put, there’s a dealing with power exchange being had that’s ironic, its symptoms of ritualized pain neatly divorced from actual damage but suitably demonic all the same. Even if Radcliffe would never stoop like Matthew Lewis to actually play with literal demons, she is still summoning her own “demons” to play with through rape pastiche: bandits, Italian counts, and pirates pretending to be ghosts (with the armed and confident Ludovico boldly investigating the “haunted” room because he doubts Emily St. Aubert’s testimony and represents the cliché, plucky energy of a male protagonist bent on facing evil, but also defeating it through raw, physical force)—i.e., violent liars that prey upon the imagination of susceptible maidens, threatening them with sexual violence. As a woman, she was making demons she shouldn’t play with that illustrated her own fears, but also privilege as someone fascinated with the barbaric, faraway past. As Cynthia Wolff points out, Radcliffe’s xenophilia and demon lovers are always partially murderous and mutilating in ways that regress towards the status quo: the demon lover as the white, cis-het woman’s thrill of rape that is ultimately replaced by the fairytale wedding. To be blunt, it’s basic and colonial.

Camping Canon through Art (some personal and non-personal examples in popular media)

In the canonical sense, the narrative of the castle’s exploration through masculine violence is a “band-aid”; i.e., one that reliably plays out like Alexander the Great smugly cutting the Gordian Knot with his sword. It’s the same approach Cameron took with his Amazonian Pygmalion fantasies (the white nerd’s wet dream, similar to Sir Peter and Princess Melisandre), except in Capitalism’s case he’s also shearing through Radcliffe’s Black Veil; i.e., dispelling its terror and horror the way a military leader (despot) would: from inside the shadow space filled with all the usual suspects and debates.

In turn, the “playing out” of military optimism inside the Metroidvania narrative historically-materially links war to commerce through Gothicized propaganda that makes us-versus-them not just bearable, but “the only way to be sure”—i.e., through Satanism and other moral panics solved through military optimism: the dark castle is a demon zone to invade, but the invasion comes from within our own domestic sphere as something to ultimately nuke from orbit. It’s the triumph-in-defeat of “the Fall of Saigon,” stuck on loop to disguise neo-colonialism happening right this second everywhere in the Global South; i.e., the disguised revenge fantasy of Pax Americana, pushed into the videogame world (which largely has never been without neoliberalism) and celebrated there as “rebellion.”

This is both a waste of stolen firepower and Radcliffe’s devices to expose the dog-eat-dog[15] nature of Capitalism and Imperialism through the Gothic mode. Mimesis, or pastiche, is simply remediated praxis, wherein we have the ability to transform into whatever we want; function determines what we stand for in relation to capital. As such, traditional femininity and vulnerability can be married to the Amazon as a masculine, violent force, her beauty and brawn a suitably Athenian (androgynous) embodiment of our camping of the canonical castle and Gothic heroine in the same breath (and not simply something for canonical proponents, male or female, to hoard for themselves during equality-of-convenience refrains—”we’re the victims, not you! Stop stealing our spotlight! That’s erasure[16]!”):

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

With Metroidvania (and other shooters), their allegory of class war for workers is generally confined to the same bodies and spaces as canonical interpretations, and their ludo-Gothic BDSM serves as a kind of “flexible praxis.” That is, the exact nature of what they stand for is ambiguous, not set in stone. As such, their liminal interrogations of unequal power manifestation and exchange express as castles, heroes and monsters that can, during iconoclastic interpretations, help acclimate us towards endless war as something to critique but not endorse through enjoyment (with enjoyment being a form of negotiation); i.e., the paradox of the rape fantasy that as much involves us playing the rapist victimizing the world as it does us being “raped” by the threatening sphere of influence between the white castle of the living world, heaven, and light; and the dark castle of the underground, hell, and darkness: Samus is the cop, but I can reclaim her in my own work (above) without compromising the theatrical role or its scenery and props; she looks like a cop but an undercover one that could just as easily not be a cop at all—a “cop” who “rapes” and “kills.” It’s essentially the same argument I made with Ion Fury‘s Shelly Bombshell, in “‘Neutral’ Politics: Feminism, the Gothic, and Zombie Police States in Ion Fury”

The politics in Ion Fury are hardly neutral. This being said, there’s room to enjoy the heroine as a nerd playing a cop, versus a cop whose actions reinforce the game’s underlying police state. The outcome is performative, but at least I have the option—to hold my nightstick like Sarah Connor instead of Judge Dredd (source).

and which I subvert further in my retooled artwork of that character:

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

What is that gun for? Is my version of Shelly a cop disguised as a sex worker (really “committing to the bit” with those tattoos she presumably can’t remove), or a former-cop turncoat advertising sex worker rights while working undercover, or just a dead ringer to Shelly (a double) using Shelly’s likeness to make a point about sex worker rights while infiltrating and subverting the highly fetishized theatre of police work/copaganda in the cyberpunk aesthetic (where cops and “cops” are stationed and deploy from various castles: an occupying army versus a local population that must rely on counterterror, subterfuge and native wit to survive their conquerors)?

Obviously I aim to be sex-positive, but whatever I say will be challenged by people who aren’t sex-positive. They will colonize my performance with the only interpretation that makes sense to them (thus supports their allegiance to state power): my “Shelly” must either be a cop, or not the real Shelly thus a deviant impostor up to no good (attempting through their own metatheatre to impeach/discredit the rebellious legitimacy/class character of words like “woke,” “punk,” or “anarchist” in the process; this might seem daunting to parse, but them doing so actually makes it quite easy for us to spot them: through their moderate condescension [the refusal to publicly take hard stances] and openly reactionary behaviors that “slip the mask” as many times as needed to expose their base class function). Similar to how Hugo Stiglitz puts on the Nazi uniform in Inglorious Basterds (2009) to kill Nazis, the performative complexity becomes a deadly game of disguise, theatre and show-and-tell on various stages simultaneously compelled by various sets of rules; or how a dominatrix wears fetish gear to reclaim the implements of terror and torture from their original historical-material purpose and theatrical function. In either case, the idea is largely games and theatre, but not divorced from the larger socio-political proceedings and meta context. Indeed, it can get quite messy and confusing.

Consider the fabulous Basterds card game scene (whose own sexist/racist director[17] requires us to reclaim the performance from him): The scene in question has Frau von Hammersmark potentially lying to her British/German Ally spies, including Stiglitz but also Archie Hicox (a British officer specializing in German Hollywood films who also happens to speak German) dressed up as “Nazis” to infiltrate a bar to meet their contact. Except there’s a party going on (that Hammersmark neglected to mention), wherein everyone must place a card on their forehead of a famous media personality (many of them movie directors, films, or monsters) that they have to try and guess. They must do so while staying in character as “Nazi officers,” which is then questioned by a real Nazi officer who also just so happens to outrank them (that Hammersmark also neglected to mention): Major Hellström. During the complicated, onion-like subterfuge, every move is a potential tell, and the whole complicated theatre becomes a game-within-a-game-within-a-game. Not everyone knows the same information, and the players (unbeknownst to us) have guns trained on each other under the table (themselves reflecting the nationalized personality of the rude-looking German luger versus the “sexier” Walter PPK—Bond’s gun).

Amid the ceremony of polite playing along and respecting officer’s decorum in bad faith, Hellström notices Fassbender’s unusual accent, which the other man has a backstory for (fun fact: in real life, Fassbender’s German accent sounds Irish due to his mixed parentage: an Irish mother and German father). Yet the thing that seemingly gives the game away (according to Hammersmark, who confesses while being interrogated/tortured afterwards) is a quaint German custom: “the German three,” held up with the thumb, and the pointer and middle fingers:

(source: Weronika Edmund’s “Gestures Loaded with History That You Should Best Avoid,” 2022)

In theory, Archie—due to his failure to mimic this gesture—was hoisted on his own petard, not knowing the local customs (thus the rules of that particular game). Except it’s entirely possible that the Basterds obvious opponent “playing along” was in cahoots with Hammersmark the entire time (she’s a squirrelly fuck, but also a girl in a man’s world). We never know exactly why Hellström decides to play his hand the way he does, nor Hammersmark. The fun (and verisimilitude) lies in their poker faces and refusal to be entirely transparent even when threatened with lethal force by their “own team.” For all these examples, psychomachy, psychosexuality, Amazonomachia and psychopraxis all play out on the same stage, on which we are the players performing certain archetypal roles over and over (“When in Rome…”); the Trojan method likewise goes both ways, hiding and revealing what the performer of the role wants the other players/audience to see.

Just as rape play can put “rape” in quotes, then, Gothic Communists can play along inside the ludic scheme of the videogame during ludo-Gothic BDSM, but inform its studying through things that we create on the outside: my drawings of Samus and Shelly follow the usual femme fatale schtick, but the visuals go beyond the usual uncertainty to provide some telling clues (the tattoo in particular); i.e, revolutionaries who, at first glance, mostly look like their girl-boss doubles, in-game (or in the usual pin-up style fanart). Except, they’re not (a more concrete revelation can be supplied by dialectical-material scrutiny and good-faith dialogs, except good faith and bad faith also occupy the same stage: through actors thereof, adorned insignias, uniforms, weapons, props, etc). In turn, these subversive/transgressive transformations can help lead us to reflect on the bigger violences committed in-text; i.e., as things to give us pause despite being perceived as the “great victory” moment/cinematic payoff so often emulated by videogames, including Metroidvania and other shooters. They become things to question, not quote and endorse in blind faith/pastiche:

(exhibit 1a1a1h2b: Antiwar is allegory wrapped up in war stories with a sci-fi/Gothic flavor. Some of the most popular and endearing revenge fantasies in videogame canon were based on a cinematic Gothic war narrative “in space!” [Aliens] that came from an older variant [Star Wars]. As we shall explore in Volume Two, sci-fi has its roots in the Gothic and revenge; i.e., Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein [1818]. Even Star Wars, which was built around rebellion and surviving fascist revenge, became a Disney commodity franchised for endless conflict, but again with all the bombast of a military parade trumpeted through world-building for the purposes of expanding war. Cameron fell prey to the trap of world-building and “sequelitis” as much as Lucas did before him, “Building better worlds” being the diegetic corporate refrain that Cameron would use to expand Scott’s world for a mock Vietnam reinvasion, but also build Pandora as his white Indians stomping ground.

Tolkien wasn’t exempt, either. In my academic and casual opinion, his best work was The Hobbit because it’s able [despite its racism overtones] to argue some fairly sophisticated anti-capitalist points—all in a fraction of the time that Lord of Rings spends inside of itself doing… not much. The latter story is much bigger and simpler in its refrain; and there’s more characters, places and items to be sure. Everything is steeped in its own lore: including personalized weapons and cosmetics meant to help us easily tell the good team from the bad. But everything is built around war as a basic ludic device, and there are multiple battles, sieges and duels inside all three volumes [capped off with the erupting of Mount Doom]. Also, the story is much shorter on mercy compared to the pity of Bilbo, and humor. In short, by playing god, Tolkien was unable to imagine a world outside of Capitalism; he merely became—like Cameron—a god, thus merchant, of war.)

Popular media is full of monomythic elements to camp ourselves, during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., in Promethean ways. Next, I’ll introduce a series of terms we’ve either not touched on, yet (the Male Gaze), or will reiterate here (re: the Promethean Quest, Amazonomachia, the creation of sexual difference, etc). There’s a lot of them to unpack, and given the fairly conversational delivery of this book section, won’t be doing so in any particular order. Try to keep up (consider it an exercise that will come in handy later in the series, when things become more conversational, not less)!

Further Gothic Devices to Revisit when Camping Canon, Ourselves (re: playing god, the Promethean Quest and Amazons, and more)

Allegory and revelation go both ways during class/culture/race war. Canon-wise, the despot’s canonical stratagem isn’t just a sword stroke, in that respect, but what guides its endless mimesis as something to promote in ways useful to the state: the profit motive. The explosions and medievalized violence intimate a Pavlovian urge conditioned through dark desires, vice and sin as instructed; i.e., behaviors whose recognition and punishment are conditioned through fear and dogma as personified by monster girls, chimeras and neo-classical forms (which we’ll examine in “Furry Panic“). All are used and discarded for profit in canonical iterations of the Metroidvania; e.g., monster-fucking and -slaying (exhibit 1a1a1h3) elided through the Gothic dialogic of imagined power exchange told during unironic demon BDSM: the heroine killing the dragon at the center of the “sex” dungeon (Samus is classically a dragon-slayer).

In the case of the Metroidvania, canon’s harmful xenophilia, then, has the colonizer fetishizing the colonized in an Amazonian form trapped between the two: the white woman with a dark shadow. Not only is her monstrous-feminine status blamed for the hero’s moment of weakness (the failure to slay evil forever), but also the fall of the colony and of Civilization at large during giant, orgasmic explosions. In short, the woman is always the monstrous target of state violence in some shape or form, either the unstable heroine or the Archaic Mother “final boss” she rapes for the state. The basic, canonical refrain remains unchanged: “slay the pussy, the weak, the other for the glory of empire, of Man, of the status quo; conquer nature”; re: antagonize nature as monstrous-feminine and put it cheaply to work.

As such, the performer and the avatar are literally and figuratively buried alive in dogma as a closed space, chiefly a prescribed dark libido tied forcefully to the state’s profit motive; the connect between the two’s historical-materialism becomes a sharp disconnect—i.e., forever out-of-joint, displaced from the former cause in the narrative of the crypt during cryptonymy as an act of participation in the false copy’s meta-narrative: invading the imaginary past to conceal present atrocities. Except unlike Tolkien’s refrain, Cameron’s refrain happens according to the Promethean Quest as an awesome mystery to “solve” by meeting it with/meting out colonial violence ad infinitum in hyperbolic, female forms (the destruction of planets, the arrival of flying castles that swallow nature whole, as committed by Amazonian forces).

The iconoclast, then, must express and embody themselves through subversions of the same Amazonian violence and its canonical horrors: the quest for the Numinous as something to weaponize for workers; i.e., class warrior mommies (e.g., Sarah Conor, exhibit 8b; or ones we make ourselves, exhibit 102a4). But doing so first requires understanding the problems tied to canonical power on display. For one, the canonical horror for heroes like Ripley or Samus is how, like King Midas, they destroy everything they touch; as Great Destroyers, they are the corrupt, feral war boss the state must betray and destroy according to the same-old, failed solution. By getting to the bottom of the mystery, the hero acquires god-like power… and is promptly punished for it; i.e., made into the “bottom” and “topped” by the state in bad faith.

the Promethean Quest/awesome mystery

Gothic stories enjoy a sense of awesome power tied to the chronotope or awesome ruin (what Percy Shelley calls “the colossal Wreck,” exhibit 5e, 64c, etc). In the wake of a great calamity is the presence of intimations of power that must be uncovered in pursuit of the truth—i.e., the Promethean (self-destructive) Quest. We’ll examine several in the Humanities primer, including Edmund Burke’s Sublime, Mary Shelley’s “playing god,” Rudolph Otto’s Numinous/mysterium tremendum, and Lovecraft’s cosmic nihilism, etc. All indicate the Gothic pursuit of a big power that blasts the finder to bits; or, in Radcliffe’s case, is explained away during the conclusion of an explained supernatural/rationalized event; i.e., the explained supernatural (exhibit 22, Scooby Doo and Velma).

“playing god”

In canonical language, the hero is crushed for their hubris; in iconoclastic terms, “playing god” is the ability to self-fashion (aka “self-determination” in geopolitics). It is generally resented by the status quo, or demonized for being too dangerous; e.g., Satan from Paradise Lost as a self-fashioning terrorist moving away from God’s heteronormative, colonial-binarized image.

(exhibit 5c [from the glossary]: Two examples of the Promethean Quest/awesome mystery—from Event Horizon [top and bottom, 1997] and Alien [middle, 1979].)

Per ludo-Gothic BDSM, Gothic Communism uses the Promethean Quest (and Faustian bargain, which the Demon Module will introduce and unpack; re: “Summoning Demons“) to interrogate capital—but specifically the punitive role of the infernal concentric pattern as a maze or monster of some kind or another—by looking at canonical examples to subvert them; i.e., examining the playing at god as manly and monstrous-feminine heroes do, and seeking to understand the avatar of power—as a would-be Zeus or Hippolyta that infantilizes for profit—as exploring a kind of “lost childhood” that was simultaneously theirs and never theirs; re: the pimp’s refrain, hence argument, pimping Medusa in all her forms out of revenge for the state. For as much as having one’s full ass out, or as little as a nip slip being equally punished/pimped by said state, anything perceived as female (or feminine)—meaning in monstrous ways that violate the usual order of things—will fall into the state of exception/shadow zone to tokenize/decay and be policed accordingly. Similar to exploitation, this is where liberations exists and occurs; i.e., during ludo-Gothic BDSM as made solo and together (the top image being taken by Bunny independently of our work, the bottom one made in a shoot I commissioned them for): camping the canon on our Aegis!

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

Such things diverge not through morphology or aesthetic, but dialectical-material context. As such, the “euthanasia effect” operates on a double standard during canon through the same Aegis (a place to show things in and on during liminal expression); i.e., like a rabid dog being put down, a feral cur whose wild hysteria threatens the status quo of men being in charge. The “rabid bitch in heat” is a convenient scapegoat (which extends to other token scapegoats during the expanding state of exception under state decay). It’s also like a toy chest on loan, which the state reclaims to rinse and reuse after the blood is sprayed off; on and on.

Furthermore, as part of this capitalist scheme, the neoliberal Gothic heroine—even when she evolves or becomes “phallic”—remains hopelessly trapped in Macbeth’s doom. Despite the hope of final victory offered by works like Metroid or Aliens, the heroine—like Macbeth—cannot escape from inside a larger meta-narrative that seems to describe and envelope everything in hopeless gloom. Such gloom, like the Numinous at large, can become palliative under the right circumstances.

Our campy interrogations of castle and heroine double the simulations canonical clichés and fetishes, but also praxial slogans adjacent to the theatres we’re playing around with: Cameron’s heroine is, per the ’80s standard, nothing if not full of memorable quotes (the catchphrase). We embody the Amazon as a contested object of power in a perilous space where the seeking of immense power (the Numinous) is self-destructive; i.e., as something to seek, reclaim and transform during class/culture war as stuck within the nightmare of Capitalism, it’s myopic, virgin/whore historical materialism (and paradoxes/revenges):

(exhibit 1a1a1h3a1: Artist, top-left: Amy Ginger Hart [who take advantage of me in a collab; re: the Demon Module’s “Our Sweet Revenge“]; top- and bottom-right: Just Some Noob; bottom-left: unknown. There’s an ancient struggle to Amazonomachia that’s often coded as primal, primitive, even primordial; “I am woman, hear me roar!” through a colonized aesthetic/aesthete that renders the political standing and explicit motives of the invigilated yawper as something of a mystery. That must be interrogated through dialectical-material scrutiny, which requires tremendous context, time and devotion. In the interim, the symbol of power is also an interrogator of power that is generally exposing systemic abuse/trauma in and upon themselves; i.e., while interrogating and exposing power as something that responds to them and their performance as something to side with as for or against the state [whether they want to, or not]: the side of the state and its acts of terror against workers, and Joseph Crawford’s acute assertion of a convenient “terrorism” whose accusation by state they could waggle at bad monsters that don’t serve their material ends.

Again, “class/culture/race war is monster war” is something to portray and perform under Capitalism through counterterrorist depictions of proletarian monsters; i.e., those having a settler-colonial axe to grind with the state speaking their mind; e.g., Clare, from The Nightingale: “I’m not English, I’m Ireland! [switching to Gaelic] To the devil’s house with all English people, every mother’s son of them! May the pox disfigure them! May the plague consume them! Long live Ireland!” (source). The paradox of Gothic expression is that class warriors and their acts of war tend to, at least a glance, look pretty similar to class traitors [excluding the “billboard”/”graffiti” approach that outs the rebel through more open declarations and symbols, exhibit 1a1a1h3a1a]. The devil is in the details in a militarized sense: a repeated action to execute mid-struggle, often to instill a sense of discipline, but also to relieve stress during combat and its waves of terror before, during and after the expected clash [something is always clashing]. In turn, these actions are generally weaponized against us, so it only makes sense to weaponize them back; terror is art and art isn’t something the state can ever fully control.

The same basic visual idea applies to theatrical renditions of actual class/culture war relayed in war-like depictions of sex, monsters, and heroes that can, and should, look familiar but feel different through our aforementioned dialectical-material context. Some variants of the orc, xenomorph or jungle bunny are sex-positive, thus functional guerrillas fighting asymmetrical war against the same; some are false rebels playing at “rebellion” in service of the state during moderate concessions that afford them particular costumes during various stages of crisis: muscles, body hair, bikinis, etc—all as long as their wearing [and surrendering after] ultimately defends the profit motive. We’re not interested in policing them, but utilizing our own “Trojan bunnies” [white or black, damsel or devil, but also in between] to recultivate the Superstructure and reclaim the Base through Gothic poetics; i.e., from our own imaginary stockpiles of monster ass:

[Artist, top-left and –right: Persephone van der Waard. Kurosawa’s marriage of Japanese theatre with Western ideas provided tremendous allegory in terms of war as something to exhibit to Americanized audiences. Lucas would take a page from his book [especially The Hidden Fortress, 1958]. In turn, we should take pages from each other and show off whatever we can using allegory and apocalypse to take Kurosawa and Lucas’ class critique (thus character) further and further—as far as needed to develop anarcho-Communism through the queer-Gothic mode.]

The material and its procurement/usage are all a bit like Toshiro Mifune’s stockpile of swords and Takashi Shimura’s bow and arrow, except the holistic armaments of our banditti‘s uncontrollable resistance are brandished make the elite [and their proponents/apologists; re: Coleridge, Botting and Jameson] froth at their mouths and crap their collective drawers: symbolic and literal armed resistance to whatever forms of tension and expression Whitey is comfortable with. Real weapons have power but so do images of weapons, of solidarity and armed resistance relayed through art; i.e., the performance of organized resistance and rebellion to state forces and their vigilante elements [warlords and bandits] conveyed through capable-looking members of the Communist movement. Whether through force or terror as a means of resistance, both are legitimate and often overlap.)

The Amazon is central to the Metroidvania formula. As something to reclaim, they can be performed through ironic ludo-Gothic BDSM inside Metroidvania; i.e., the theatrical role of the Great Destroyer as monstrous-feminine expressed as a legitimate struggle against oppression, but also a vulnerable party experiencing Numinous, psychosexual feelings of appreciative peril: to understand, interrogate and value the lived reality that women—or beings forced to identify as women/”incorrect men”—have been traditionally victimized for centuries. In short, it’s not harmful to express vulnerability within the castle because the castle is a place designed for such things; even if these same women seemingly act “like men,” it’s fine as long as they’re not acting as the Man Box does in its standard male/tokenized variants.

In short, it’s possible to be a himbo without acting like a TERF and that’s okay. Equally okay is the added gender trouble of complicating performances by mixing masc and femme aesthetics or performative elements. Doing so lies at the heart of what an Amazon is: neither strictly one nor the other. And if it ever seems “stuck” within the aesthetics of the game screen (the castle space), remember that the screen is merely a stage whose performance can be colored by the player on- and off-screen through their various metatextual and paratextual contributions: smaller negotiations/demonstrations of desired unequal power like player commentary and fanart, but also larger projects like this book or even new Metroidvania (which is an indie genre that, like a Gothic castle, can be made anew by even a single person[18a]).

Contributing to the procession of castle-narrative, Team Cherry’s motto is true to the Metroidvania spirit: “Our mission is to build crazy, exciting worlds for you to explore and conquer” (source: TeamCherry.com). While conquering the castle is to conquer one’s fears, these fears are tied to the historical materialism at work; the knight in Hollow Knight is revealed (in the game’s secret ending) to be the Great Destroyer—one who threatens our BDSM-themed warrior princess with tremendous penetration and presumed death (with Silksong still not being out as of 2025, despite me talking excitedly about it in 2019[18b]):

Having conquered the entire gameworld, the hero is possessed with the spirit of the Pale King’s conqueror past: Zombie Caesar! The game’s “final victory,” then, ignominiously possesses the player’s avatar, causing them to lose control (literally—the player cannot control them any longer) and transform (the knight’s gender is never stated; they are coded as male, but Hornet merely calls them “little ghost”). The knight’s hideous transformation leads them to act like a fascist man—i.e., to go feral, but also release the apocalyptic spirit of genocide throughout the land. Embodying that spirit, he brandishes his “weapon” at Hornet (twisting it menacingly into the ground like a knife into someone’s back). She is smaller than him, but so is her needle; she braces for a combat in which she is sorely outmatched: less Mothra vs Godzilla and more Eowyn vs the Witch-king of Angmar, if said king were both possessed by Godzilla and the size of the Creature from Frankenstein (not titan-sized, but big enough to tower over her).

As such, our avatar’s eyes serve as the proverbial magnifying glass to hold over the canonical narrative’s cycle (of Kings) emblematized by the castle; as it passes out of one life and into the next, we reflect on how the mysterious role of the pyrrhic victory/ignominious death is always one of self-deception, self-destruction and live burial; i.e., it happens through reactive abuse that—like the Imperial Boomerang—comes back around to bite the hero in the ass—our ass. There is no transcendental signified but also no outside-text; instead, the hero’s robes are like a giant’s draped over someone too small (re: Macbeth) but also a person who might normally be the target of state violence, mid-cryptonymy. So while iconoclastic/emergent players can feel the same basic pain as the useful idiot’s (for the elite) during the infernal concentric pattern, it is a tale of sound and fury in which the significance of that pain is highly anisotropic, thus reversible during ludo-Gothic BDSM. Like the classic white-versus-black yielding entropy at every register in and between them, the shared narrative of the canonizer and iconoclast is profoundly unreliable/unsafe in self-deceptive ways designed, through space and monsters, to manipulate the audience by inviting them to play along/with false power and hope. That’s what players camp, Metroidvania or not, onstage or off.

As we’ve already established, Gothic heroines struggle within Gothic narratives, whose narrators, spaces and speakers inside a Gothic castle are regularly unreliable/conflicting artificers and impostors, but also involve the patriarchal bloodline or castle as invented; i.e., a series of concentric, sedimentary palimpsests (maps of maps of maps, stacked on top of each other). In the canonical sense, everything is fetishized, valorized and disseminated, then spread far and wide to cover up the ghost of the counterfeit with more ghosts that further the lie of the West. Iconoclastic variants challenge this fatal myopia with their own counterfeits’ opposing class character—which unfortunately must be told onstage or at least in relation to the violent theatre it projects outward: inside the castle as something to camp by interrogating it in all the usual ways.

As such, our exploring of unequal, deceptive power is a palliative Numinous that requires aftercare and serious reflection, before returning to the same castled hells to interrogate them some more. Canon’s conversely “bad aftercare” makes its unquestioning parties the dupe, in a ludic sense, but also the accomplice to the elite’s fetishizing schemes during class/culture war—i.e., “the Roman fool” who thinks it was all “just a dream” as they stain their hands with the blood of the innocent and destroy the entire world: “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” After the Promethean flash, they scream and bolt upright in their beds, telling themselves it wasn’t real, that these visions of desolation must have come from somewhere else (another world, another time):

But they feel profoundly uncanny—linked to the dreamer’s own home, body and mind; the sensation becomes liminal, like a sleepwalker who dreams while awake but isn’t sure what is what. They function, then, as Macbeth’s poor player does, strutting and fretting their hour upon the stage until they are heard no more. The story and its daggers of the mind (from the knight’s nail in Hollow Knight, to Ripley’s M41A pulse rifle in Aliens) survive them and the whole cycle begins anew. Each seminal tragedy is preceded by older ones and eclipsed by even greater ones as Capitalism yawns, stretching wide its maw of death for more and more profit at the expense of chattelized workers. No victory is great enough to stop it because all canonical victories are made to feed it, and its hunger knows no bounds; it will eat every hero it comes across, or drive them mad until they become like it: a terrifying monster that—undead and demonic—devours vampirically for the state’s continued, parasitic survival.

As we shall continue to see, the schemes we embark on when camping canon are equally perilous because they occupy the same space, the same language, the same stage and shared performance fighting over stigmas and what their purpose is: to enforce or reclaim; i.e., being drawn to power like a moth to the flame or a live wire to clutch it and burn up/ride the lightning. All workers play with the dead during mimesis, but the iconoclast’s aim with cryptomimesis is to “play god” inside the narrative of the crypt/with cryptonymy (and the other main Gothic theories) to attain a dark rememory for revolutionary purposes—i.e., to regain what was lost during Capitalism’s grand engines pulling people apart and exploiting them for centuries.

Ghosts

Ghosts are ontologically complicated, thus can be a variety of things all at once: a sentient ghost of something or someone, a ghostly memory or their own unique entity that resembles the original as a historical-material coincidence (the chronotope), a friendly/unfriendly disguise, or creative egregore. E.g., Hamlet’s dad, Hamlet’s memory of his dad as triggered by the space around him; or someone painting Hamlet’s dad as its own thing that isn’t Shakespeare’s version despite the likeness. This applies to other famous ghosts in media—e.g., King Boo from Mario, the monster from It Follows, 2014; or my own friendly ghost of Jadis from exhibit 43c—i.e., Derrida’s Marxist spectres.

In short, we must dodge Cameron’s errors when adding bullets (and Amazons) to Tolkien’s refrain (thus ghost)  and do what Milton, Matthew Lewis and Ridley Scott did when making our own imaginary past—what Colin Broadmoor previously described as “camping the canon”: of playing god as Lewis did (a process we’ll further adumbrate here before “shining a light on it” in part three); i.e., a deliberate camping of the “darkness visible” within its usual parallels, paradoxes and aesthetics as “at war” within the castle, with monsters, within praxis as doubled according to appearance, but also to which side each belongs and fights for as cryptomimetically stretching in all directions.

Mise-en-Abyme: Echoes of the Neo-Medieval

“The Gothic is writ in disintegration,” but especially neo-medieval forms (a concept the Poetry unpacks during the entire Medieval section, as well as the Demon Module’s “The Puzzle of ‘Antiquity’“). The mise-en-abyme is classically portrayed as heraldry—the coat of arms, as per Bakhtin’s “dynastic primacy and hereditary rites” of the Gothic chronotope—emblazoned on the knights’ shields, banners and killing implements belonging to the same “walking castles”: castle-narrative becomes something not just to walk around inside one castle, but between castles, outside of castles, inside the giant knight as a castle-in-a-castle; straight castles and gay castles, etc. Derrida’s adage, “there is no outside of the text” rings true, and it is here where class war and culture war are waged in a series of competing lies about the West and its much-touted heteronormative supremacy. Meeting them in open combat is a mistake, but we can challenge them within the dialogic imagination as a much more level playing field: Gothic poetics’ paradox of terror for which the state cannot fully monopolize.

(artist: Angus McBride)

In other words, the classical notion of “playing god” was and continues to be punishment for acting out of line (which invariably happens when doing the state’s dirty work); but “playing god” in camp is rewarded by “ruling in hell” as a wonderful metaphor—liberation not by fighting with the dead as Victor Frankenstein did (trying his damndest to punch his composite child-zombie in the face) but a class-, gender- and race-conscious pedagogy of the oppressed whose postcolonial, LGBTQ-friendly cryptomimesis pointedly dances with our folklore, ancestry and culture as reclaimed from the state’s colonizing double (the elite’s bad idea of a “joke”). As is tradition, those “in the cave” will try to destroy us to avoid facing the horrors of Capitalism uncloaked; re: open aggression, condescension, reactionary indignation, and DARVO in defense of the Shadow of Pygmalion as “kingly” thus sacred; e.g., Hamlet’s father’s ghost.

In relation to Tolkien’s refrain as a map of and for conquest, Metroidvania’s awesome mystery/Promethean Quest survives in hypercanonical authors other than Cameron that also endure as ghosts of themselves; e.g., Lovecraft’s cosmic nihilism revived in videogames like Amnesia: the Dark Descent, (2010) or The Darkest Dungeon (2017), and Radcliffe’s exquisite torture echoed in various “survival horror” titles like the Resident Evil or Silent Hill franchises. To this, Tolkien’s own themes of adventure and conquest are revived in games (thus maps) built top of each other but informed by canonical Gothic poetics and interpretation that go beyond Cameron’s shooter-heavy approach; e.g., D&D, but also seemingly unrelated works like Myth, Everquest, or Mario 64[19] as bent on raising the past before razing it just as fast: find the dragon (the source of worrisome power) inside the castle and slay it. For canon, we’re the dragon to slay through sublimated genocide (“So long, gay Bowser!“); for us, our dragon to unironically slay is Capitalism (while doing our best to reclaim the word “dragon” as an abusive call to violence towards an out-group by an in-group).

To this, Tolkien’s treasure map seems wholly original because so much has spawned from it, but in truth, I think people give him too much credit as “the father of High Fantasy.” I’m not questioning his stamp on things, and acknowledge that he certainly built the ideal, codified world for such nonstop conquering to take place; I’m questioning the value of his work as based off the mimesis of old legends repurposed under Capitalism to feed an increasingly globalized cycle of war—i.e., by blindly mirroring it across a variety of sources (which simply did not exist as we know it when Beowulf was first written). Luckily said pastiche occurs not just on the map, but through its cryptomimesis across many maps (of maps, of maps); i.e., a confusing and myriad bestiary of oddly nurturing monsters that reify absurd, surrealist sentiments and conflicting codes insofar as power’s interrogation is concerned: the Gothic castle (and its occupants) a site/sight of increasing entropy between all parties and offshoots amid the might (and weight) of Numinous spirits utterly unconcerned with any particular allegiance.

This all might seem like a bad joke, but there’s tremendous, god-like critical power in humor and jokes (thus worthy of our seeking of them), and—quite paradoxically—both rape and murder are simultaneously “no laughing matter” and precisely what we should joke about when playing with theatrical variations of such things; i.e., to reclaim whatever language we want when talking about systemic, interpersonal trauma as a sex-positive kind of “gallows humor” with crude, direct Anglo-Saxon (four-letter) flavors of ironic monstrous-heroic rape and murder thrown in to “spice things up” (in and out of the bedroom, on- and offstage): making sex-positive meaning from chaos while dancing with the dead as something that helps us accept that we are ultimately out of control (death always wins in the end; imitators of Caesar or Alexander the Great are always trying—forever in vain—to conquer death by making battles so big they will never be forgotten[20]). While the Gothic-Communist aim is comedy and drama through camp that puts the ritual sacrifice of “kill” and “rape” in quotes, canonical variations ditch the quotations and tell bad jokes in bad faith. In those versions, the monster and its lair must be embodied as unironic variants of itself founded on harmful bullshit; i.e., state apologetics and enforcement through regular sacrifices dressed up in the language of an imaginary past: the sublimation (normalization) of unironic sacrifice (“The rest of your Legion has been destroyed, Alric! What more can you hope to do with this handful of men[21]?”).

The victims of said praxis must be killed and fucked by the heroic warrior-monster… who’s also a closeted sissy “looking for mommy” by fucking “monster mom” (or some other member of that hellish family unit): monster-fucking as an incestuous, settler-colonial scheme that really fucks up everyone involved (these definitely didn’t come from Tolkien, whose closest monstrous-feminine is Eowyn or Shelob). This is our chance not to appease the tyrant, but appeal to their soldiers in ways that bring them over to our cause—i.e., by humanizing ourselves through the liminal position as “their” object of pursuit and conquest that paradoxically can wrap them around our little finger during the prescribed pursuit of power. A friend of mine, Alecandstuff (who I interview in my FPS series: “From Vintage to Retro,” 2021), once jokingly said: “There’s more to life-fu than your waifu.” And yet the fact remains that so-called “waifus” are integral not just to navigating power in Metroidvania (and other Gothic videogames and their meta/paratexts) but also embodying power as a semi-serious/semi-humorous performance. Sex and jokes are incredibly persuasive and can turn the wildest zealot into an anarcho-Communist (case study: me).

Galatea’s Ilk; or, “Chimeras, Monster Girls and Wheyfus, Oh My!”

If that somehow feels difficult to imagine, consider not just my book, but all of the many monstrous-feminine kinds of nerd sex that it catalogs. Here is but a taste; or, in the alleged words of D.H. Lawrence: “Let’s go to the dark gods[22]!”

(exhibit 1a1a1h3a2: This exhibit is two exhibits from the glossary—”monster girls” and “chimeras/furries.”

Top-far-left: Muscarine’s “Profligates” from the Darkest Dungeon [2016] mod workshop. The “Great Waifu Renaissance” of The Darkest Dungeon portrays the monstrous-feminine as waifus to control and embody as much during an ontological power trip as simply being a proverbial dragon to “slay.” Often, they walk the tightrope between the cutesy and the profane, subverting stereotypes while simultaneously being chased after by weird canonical nerds: waifu/wheyfu monster-girl war brides. Procured and dressed[23] by powerful greedy companies [e.g., Blizzard’s “thirst-trap” catalog of Amazon gradients] and given to apolitical consumers, the latter fight the culture war for the former as tied to the state through capital. And yet weird iconoclastic nerds can weaponize these self-same monstrous-feminine to our purposes.

The Tusk, for example, is a sexy cavegirl who iconoclastically stinks—i.e., with body odor being historically-materially denied to women despite their armpits smelling just as much as guys’ do, let alone their vaginas, which guys do not have and can have all sorts of smells: e.g., Zeuhl once asked me to smell their panties, saying incredulously, “Isn’t that crazy?” because their cootchie smelled rather strong [and to which my look of shock, post-smelling it, utterly betrayed me. To be fair, it was rather pungent from us simply walking around my hometown. All the same, bodies smell because they’re designed to; e.g., that same night, we had doggystyle sex and for the first time I could suddenly smell the natural “musk” from Zeuhl’s asshole: a vestigial throwback to a time when humans communicated more by smells than with words]. Apart from the Tusk, the Hood is a slutty Red Riding Hood, and the Fawn is a patchwork animal-girl ninja, etc.

Lower-top-left: nude mods for Muscarine’s Profligates, by JOMO=1. Fan mods operate as “fan fiction,” thus tend to be far hornier [see: Black Reliquary‘s (2023) many Amazon thirst traps, bottom-left] than official canon does[24]. Generally the official art/content for the main game or “faithful” fan art tends to be less overtly sexualized, but no less canonical or sexually dimorphic; e.g., the Countess [exhibit 1a1c] as an Archaic Bug Mom slain by the bad-faith Ancestor [who is frankly a giant dick for the whole game].

Top-right: Persephone van der Waard’s illustrations of four monster girls from Castlevania (a franchise with a whole bestiary of female monsters; source: Fandom). These four are all from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night—Alraune, Succubus, Scylla and Amphisbaena.

Bottom-left: Promo art [source tweet: Reliquary Mod, 2021] for The Darkest Dungeon overhaul, The Black Reliquary].

Bottom-right: Fan art for The Darkest Dungeon by Maestro Noob, depicting what are basically heroic female monsters: the virgin/whore, but also the damsel/demon and the Amazon with a BDSM flavor.

[Artist, left: William Mai; artist, right: Blush Brush. Examples of furries. “Furry” is an incredibly diverse art style. For more examples, consider Volume Two’s “Call of the Wild” chapter, as well as exhibits 65 or 68 from Volume Three.] 

A chimera isn’t simply the Greek monster, but any kind of composite body or entity, often with elements of multiplicity or plurality [e.g., the Gerasene demon]. Conversely, furries are humanoid [commonly called “anthro”] personas that tend to have humanoid bodies, but semi-animalistic limbs and intersex components tied to ancient rituals of fertility but also gender expression relating to/identifying with nature. While Greek myths are commonly more animalistic, the [mainstream] furries of today are often closer to the Ancient Egyptian variety: an animal “headdress” or mask over a mostly-human body. There’s plenty of morphological gradients, of course—with “feral” or “bestial” variants being more and more animalistic; and the “Giger variety” being more xenomorphic and Gothically surreal [the xenomorph (exhibit 51a/60c) being one of the most famous, if contested, chimeras in modern times]. A general rule of thumb, however, is the genitals tend to be human; however, “monster-fucker” variants very quickly move away from humanoid bodies [and/or genitals] altogether, often with abject, stigma animals like the insect, leech, reptile, or worm. Likewise, while “fursonas” [furry personas] tend to be sexualized, they aren’t always; in fact, they primarily function as alter-egos with many different functions: the political [see: alt-right furries as well as “furry panic“], the dramatic [Fredrik Knudsen, 2019], the horror genre [see: pretty much anything by Junji Ito, but also Five Nights at Freddy’s, 2014; or its various wacky clones, source: Space Ice, 2023] and also for general fandom purposes; i.e., furries are not automatically fetishes [Vice, 2018] but are criminalized similar to Bronies [though any popular fandom that has a large underage audience is going to attract sexual predators and outsider bias; see: Turkey Tom’s 2023 (admittedly problematic) “Degenerate” series on Bronies or Five Nights at Freddy’s; or Lily Orchard’s pedophile escapades, hidden behind sexualized Brony fan fiction—Essence of Thought, 2021].)

Regarding monster girls and chimeras (above)—as well as their parallel spaces/lairs inside Metroidvania, “dungeon crawlers,” FPS, and other ludic spheres—their canonized performances/staging all follow a similar bourgeois take on the infernal concentric pattern vis-à-vis Cameron as imitating Tolkien’s famous treasure map/sanitized variant of Cartesian dualism (Tolkien’s odyssey through a Biblical nature being an elaborate distraction from the West’s imperial scheme): crawl the dungeon, kill the monster and take what’s “yours.” A monster girl is also a popular trope in Japanese shonen media, whose war culture ludologizes the monomyth in ways that illustrate the Cycle of Kings as passed back and forth along the infernal concentric pattern. Along with their castles, the evil king and queen always come back (exhibit 1a1c) and they and theirs must be met by the crumbling forces of good to restore their declining greatness. The monster girl or chimera, then, is an anything-girl monster made for men to unironically kill, but also to rape/undress-with their eyes; i.e., a war-bride “waifu/wheyfu” reified in the global market as built around frontier war and infinite growth (with ties to the Amazon as a kind of war bride; re: after she kills the Medusa):

waifu/wheyfu

The waifu is a war bride in shonen media; i.e., the promise of sex, generally through marriage as emblematized in Japanese cultural exports that fuse with Western bigotries to make similar promises to entitled, young male consumers (and older bigots and tokens). While the “waifu,” then, is any bride you want—be she big and strong, short and stacked, skinny-thicc, tall and slender, or some other “monster girl” combination dressed up as a pin-up Hippolyta, Medusa or some other hauntological trope—the “wheyfu” is conspicuously burly and chased after by entitled fans (this relationship can get performatively complicated, but the basic difference is coercion versus mutual consent). Within oppositional praxis, then, the waifu/wheyfu becomes yet another disguise within class war for operatives on either basic side to utilize.

Of the two, the “wheyfu” alteration is essentially a burlier example designed for your more “sissified” Japanese heroes; i.e., the bishonen genre effectively a symptom of Japanese subjugation by Western forces, traditional Japanese crossdress and theatre—e.g., Funeral Parade of Roses (1969)—living inside the Japanese variant of Bretton Woods and Neoliberalism.

In this strange zone, Irigaray’s creation of sexual difference

the creation of sexual difference

Popularized by Luce Irigaray, her flagship concept is summarized by Sarah K. Donovan as follows,

In other words, while women are not considered full subjects, society itself could not function without their contributions. Irigaray ultimately states that Western culture itself is founded upon a primary sacrifice of the mother, and all women through her.

Based on this analysis, Irigaray says that sexual difference does not exist. True sexual difference would require that men and women are equally able to achieve subjectivity. As is, Irigaray believes that men are subjects (e.g., self-conscious, self-same entities) and women are “the other” of these subjects (e.g., the non-subjective, supporting matter). Only one form of subjectivity exists in Western culture and it is male (source: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

collides with the Japanese soldier/male worker as wanting to regress towards childhood, but also being an adult who is told they cannot and furthermore, lacks the means to do so in a healthy sense (we’ll examine how this zone expands in between countries, in Volume Three—i.e., TERFs, in Chapter Four, but also in Chapter Five as we examine how shonen anime and manga are exported back and forth, perpetuating their harmful, incestuous stereotypes like moe and ahegao as things to unironically internalize, embody and endorse/despise).

Shadows of Freud (feat. Homelander) and Assorted Terms (e.g., the Male Gaze, exhibitionism/voyeurism, hysteria/wandering womb and bicycle face, etc)

As the following exhibit and additional keywords will demonstrate, this commonly plays out in superhero media (which the Amazon and Metroidvania belong to) as exported back and forth in the global market; i.e., during an incessant exchange of unhealthy Freudian embodiments of power and theatrical relations: to unequal power exchange vis-à-vis exhibitionism/voyeurism, but also hysteria/the wandering womb as something not just to stare at but utterly destroy using an incestuous Male Gaze:

(exhibit 1a1a1h3a1a1: Model, top-middle-to-right: Tyler Faith [whose “mom bod” also makes an appearance when we critique the “mother” archetype as something to subvert through revolutionary cryptonymy—exhibit 104c]. Any AFAB person is monstrous-feminine under heteronormative power schemes. Inside these stages and their performances, the hypermasculine/monstrous-masculine’s toxicity—of decaying masculinity during crises thereof—will prove his “superiority” against the mother archetype as “false”; i.e., failing to live up to his incestuous standards of motherhood. In turn, she is “kept,” forced to babysit the killer baby as an infantilized adult who can rip her apart with his gaze [Shue was right; babysitting is dangerous[25b]!]. Worse, she is forced to compete for the “privilege” within bourgeois [state/corporate] power structures that figuratively [and sometimes literally] strap a bomb to her chest and force her to negotiate with her “false child” while under duress; i.e., as a captive audience.)

the Male Gaze (appropriative voyeurism/exhibitionism)

Popularized by Laura Mulvey in her 1973 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” the Male Gaze goes well beyond cinema; according to Sarah Vanbuskirk in “What Is the Male Gaze?” (2022), it deals with female objectification under Capitalism:

The male gaze describes a way of portraying and looking at women that empowers men while sexualizing and diminishing women. […] first popularized in relation to the depiction of female characters in film as inactive, often overtly sexualized objects of male desire. However, the influence of the male gaze is not limited to how women and girls are featured in the movies. Rather, it extends to the experience of being seen in this way, both for the female figures on screen, the viewers, and by extension, to all girls and women at large. Naturally, the influence of the male gaze seeps into female self-perception and self-esteem. It’s as much about the impact of seeing other women relegated to these supporting roles as it is about the way women are conditioned to fill them in real life. The pressure to conform to this patriarchal view (or to simply accept or humor it) and endure being seen in this way shapes how women think about their own bodies, capabilities, and place in the world—and that of other women.

In essence, the male gaze discourages female empowerment and self-advocacy while encouraging self-objectification and deference to men and the patriarchy at large (source).

Appropriative performances of voyeurism/exhibitionism (watching or showing sexual activities) that cater to this Gaze uphold the status quo. Those that do not are appreciative (thus sex-positive) in nature, but generally remain liminal and ambivalent.

exhibitionism/voyeurism

A desire to show off or to look, generally tied to kink and BDSM. As with those, these activities can be sex-positive or -coercive; i.e., rebellious/furious flashing (exhibit 53, 62c, 89a, 101a1, etc) vs cat-calling/scopophilia from a totally unwanted audience (Norman Bates and Marion Crane) vs the liminal, half-invited Peeping Tom (Jimmy Stuart and Miss Torso from Rear Window, 1954; George McFly and Loraine Bates from Back to the Future, 1985; or these two tennis guys [above] and an anonymous female streaker—source tweet: Peach Crush, 2023) vs the transphobic flasher (exhibit 62c) vs fully consensual voyeurism/exhibitionism (exhibit 101c2).

Unlike our horny tennis players (above), Homelander‘s Male Gaze is both femicidal, but authenticated through its legitimizing relationship to the state’s perceived monopoly of violence (and terror); under it, the female “top-dog” is—as usual—at his mercy while being viewed as the scapegoat to all his woes: the chaos dragon/wandering womb as a thoroughly stupid but nevertheless internalized idea:

(source: Joseph Stromberg’s “‘Bicycle face’: A 19th-Century Health Problem Made Up to Scare Women away from Biking,” 2021)

 

hysteria/the wandering womb

Hysteria is a form of moderate condescension/reactionary control tied to Cartesian dualism, but also the gaslight, gatekeep and girl-boss trifecta that argues women are “less rational” than men; it tends to diagnose them with bizarre, completely absurd medical conditions to keep them inactive and scared, but also under men’s power (e.g., bicycle face is one [above] but here’s a whole list of odd disorders/female causes of ignominious death invented by male “Pygmalions,” including “night brain” and “drawing-room anguish”; source tweet: Dr. Daniel Cook, 2021). However, it also tends to frame women as mythical monsters/mothers that need to be killed for men to “progress”: Medusas, Archaic Mothers, Amazons, etc.

Silly or not, Homelander feels he must rape the wandering womb in increasingly brutal ways; i.e., to blind Medusa in the classical sense: skull-fucking her (obviously) to death with his lethal Male Gaze. And yet the carcinogenic conclusion to this veiled ultimatum is foreshadowed in power fantasies that, under neoliberalism, are packaged and sold as “mommy fantasies” of the domestic, ordinary sort married the otherworldly kind that are well at home in Gothic fiction, including comic books: state versions of the man-made monster that women (or beings coded as women, or at least inferior on a sliding scale to white, cis-het Christian men) are forced to babysit/nurture; i.e., insane brutes nursed and fucked by unwilling mothers of Grendel. As such, the monster mother becomes the domestic abuser’s de facto sex toy and punching bag.

In other words, the archetypal mother is canonically someone to kill by so-called Supermen protecting the image of themselves as useful to the state’s heraldry and “walking castles.” This unironically psychosexual, psychomachic Amazonomachia of art/porn oscillates within the global market by young (or infantile) men who internalize the matricidal refrain (which Metroidvania canonize thanks to Cameron’s pillaging of the womb of nature). They (and tokens of them) frustrate easily inside the Man Box and act out through intensely childish and violent outbursts when they don’t get what they want. Indeed, Homelander’s faithful imitators (and token groups) are taught to want and not want at the same time. In Gothic-Communist praxis, sex-positive workers can push back against all of this through the counterterror of Athena’s Aegis, challenging the status quo through the monster mom as wheyfu warrior (exhibit 102a4) or dark mistress (exhibit 102b) as often subverted from videogames’ profit motive to be nurturing in an active, class-conscious “mommy warrior” sense (exhibit 111b). Forget “make love, not war”; making absurd love to/with our self-fashioned “dark mommies” while we smile at the gods (vis-à-vis Camus) is (class/culture) war! Nerdy and kinky (my friends and I are all like gay wizards in our towers, having naughty-naughty demon-wizard nerd sex; “stare and tremble” at that, Coleridge)!

Faced with such psychopraxial weirdness that Freud festooned, I imagine that future fancy-pants critics like Jameson, Botting and Coleridge have about as much to say about it as they do about Metroidvania, or the Gothic’s puppy play and war chiefs being collared and “raped” by Hippolyta or vice versa when she’s collared by a man and forced to wed: “that boring and exhausted paradigm,” at whose “Gothic redundancy” “we stare and tremble!” As accommodated intellectuals, they’re simply not equipped to handle or discuss the material, hence glean the psychopraxial patterns that emerge out from its endless bedlam (a shortcoming we’ll address more in the symposium and preface, and at the end of Volume Two); they pray at different alters. Yet, “all deities reside in the breast” rings true to what Gothic Communism can contribute to: by speaking up for ourselves as monstrous-feminine, and whose opposing praxis challenges the status quo upon cartographic spaces just like Cameron’s refrain (the Metroidvania). This generally happens by making our own gods when drawn to their power as stemming from older variants we then interrogate by making our own monsters and castles/theatrical space—i.e., by first looking at total weirdo fuck-ups like Homelander from The Boys (2019, a killer baby if ever there were one; the Creature as the colonizer instead of the colonized, but still fathered by Cartesian hubris) before camping it.

From there, Gothic Communism places “rape” and “kill” in quotes, reversing the process of abjection within the narrative of the crypt as per our cryptomimesis deliberately flowing countercurrent to the status quo’s own class-dormant/traitorous “darkness visible.” We can confuse and rewire the state’s canonical trauma response by being dark mommies to those who have partially (or fully) been conditioned to harm us and themselves. We don’t have to date creeps or try to “fix” them by catering to their idea of a perfect fantasy (in short, giving them what they want); we can merely dress up and perform in ways that get inside their heads—that freeze them in place while living our best naughty social-sex lives with the people we do care about (and who care about us) making and expressing ourselves through sex-positive art.

Whether putting makeup on for ourselves, wearing pretty clothes, or having anal sex with a mommy dom and dressing it up as art to sell as pedaled wares, we’re doing all of this for us as weird iconoclastic nerds, not the weird canonical nerds who—given the chance—would rape and kill us for real if they don’t get what they want. Power aggregates; canonical power aggregates to defend its useful, mighty idiots, so we must aggregate and mobilize to defend ourselves against them when recultivating the Superstructure. This includes exposing its own supermen as infantile babies. The paradox uses their own logic against them: a god cannot be a super manly-man and a baby[26] at the same time, right? It becomes something they cannot openly acknowledge, defend or even begin to explain (which helps us not just keep tabs on the usual bad-faith people, but openly and routinely[27] demonize them as hopelessly pathetic and hypocritical chasers who clearly aren’t getting their needs met by Capitalism).

The “man(made) baby” argument is dualistic, and goes back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). We don’t have time to go into it (and posthumanism), here, but the Demon Module’s “Making Demons (re: Prometheus)” chapter unpacks the idea at length. —Perse, 3/29/2025

Canon deifies poetics in defense of a patriarchal status quo that historically-materially privatizes said process and demonizes anything else as a dark degenerate god, a false idol or mother of demons; the Satanic rebel of the Miltonian tradition challenges all of that by questioning Heaven as a fictional idea of Hell—not God’s, but a pandemonium of our own making wherein dark, Gothic poetics are a literal, counterterrorist act of war waged against the status quo (and whose “rape” and “killing” are also an interrogation/reclamation of our own psychosexuality inside the psychosexual fortress as something to raise our flag within). Making our own psychosexual monsters (and ludo-Gothic BDSM castles vis-à-vis Metroidvania and similar narratives) is vital because it gives us a voice, a human face through which our labor is reclaimed by us through our own creative negotiations: to be as gods are by creating whatever we want to become/come about; i.e., fashioning traumatic representations outside of ourselves (effigies[28], but also maps) that spit in the state’s eye and call it a liar without saying the exact words.

Furthermore, our mere existence says the quiet part out loud through Gothic theatre. While canonical heroes transform all the time (re: Beowulf or Ripley), they’re ostensibly allowed to turn back into their former selves, thus receive a human(e) reception. For the marginalized, coercive demonization amounts to perpetual states of exception according to the monopoly of violence and terror; i.e., our slaying by “good” monsters like Beowulf, whose taking of our “goods” extends to token proponents of rape culture during the Call to Adventure as concentrically mapped out. Class betrayal intersects with heteronormativity and race betrayal during the colonial struggle as ongoing. As such, the Call itself is a blood oath/feud mirrored in real life by its false, imaginary copies fueling the fiction (the crisis, scarcity and competition).

Back to Tolkien (and Gay Hobbits)

This goes back to Tolkien, who—despite his allergy to constant darkness—can still be critiqued the way we’ve critiqued Cameron’s refrain in Metroidvania; i.e., his monsters (which travel out from the darkness to trouble Tolkien’s “new Eden”). Tolkien’s 1937 revival of wealth-through-conquest (in his children’s book, no less) spawned more and more fictional war foreshadowed by a canonized “second conflict” (The Lord of the Rings) whose implied historical materialism predicted a real second world war that, in turn, prompted the return of the Necromancer out of the East; i.e., the Barbarian Horde but also the Deceiver as a betrayer of all that was good and bright in the free world: a dark lord on his dark throne in the land of Mordor where the shadows lie.

This wasn’t a coincidence; the Nazis of the Third Reich were expanding their own version of Manifest Destiny through a radicalized call to war informed by Americanized fiction, which Tolkien capitalized on through his own mythology as pilfered from Beowulf and various other legends built around the Western idea of war and conquest as Old English: a reimagined British past as yet another false copy. In either case, the ones spearheading the continuous blueprint were the American elite because they had the capital to do so—i.e., enough to put out the false-copy copaganda stories (the Superstructure) but also to sell both sides their guns from afar (the Base) that made the wars that added to the narrative of the crypt’s process of abjection (the person who benefits from a gold rush or a war mania is the person selling the tools but also the propaganda).

As a centrist bigot, Tolkien critiqued war as a white cis-het British man in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s would—someone who certainly wasn’t immune to the colonial standards of the British Empire; he stories are riddled with racial stigma—e.g., Anderson Rearick’s “Why Is the Only Good Orc a Dead Orc” (2004) being a question I asked myself when I wrote “Dragon Sickness: the Problem of Greed”: Where are all the good goblins?

Even though the races of Middle-Earth are distinct, they remain connected with common threads. The calling of elves as Good People feels quite similar to the Shakespearean Venetians considering themselves “merciful” Christians (at the same time, the rare and elusive “good goblin” is never described in The Hobbit) [source].

This would be a question I would try to answer years later but—in fact, already had—as a weird iconoclastic nerd: You have to make them, generally in relation to your own trauma as congenital/inherited (the same idea applies to Cameron’s xenomorphs, of course):

(exhibit 1a1a1h3a1a: Artist, left: Persephone van der Waard; right: Lucid-01. Here, Glenn has been patently devised as a sex worker’s approach to billboard/graffiti activism [exhibit 62a2/exhibit 100c6] but also stripping and invigilating an exhibitionist’s psychosexual exploration of exquisite torture [exhibit 98a1a] to illustrate sex positivity in action through my “creative successes,” but also art commissioned by other artists for the project. To this, Lucid was drawn to my work because they liked Glenn, and their style appealed to me enough that I commissioned them to draw a piece for me [creatively directed by me but executed by them] to be a part of this book.)

As Galateas challenging Pygmalion, the language of terror is something we have to reclaim during our own Gothic poetics. I realized this when looking back on my shapeshifting, sex-changing and gender-swapping goblin, Glenn (above, one of the mascots for this book and coming from older juvenilia left incomplete, exhibits 0a1b1 and 94c1). I had made them as a sex fantasy of sorts, but realized it was really me acting out my desire to be trans (and strong and green)! As I write in Volume Three, “I used to think people became trans. Only when I recently thought about Glenn again did I realize that I was and always would be trans; teenage me just didn’t have the language to describe how she felt!” I made do. However, once I did have the language, I wrote a whole book and drew lots of pictures. Just like Tolkien (and Cameron, an accomplished screenwriter and illustrator in his own right)!

So far I’ve been quite critical of Tolkien and Cameron, but honestly could be harsher if I wanted, but I want to avoid a subtle trap: punching the bigot until I get carried away and my argument is nothing but ad hominens. While the American elite shoulder much of the blame, it’s far easier to blame the obvious-looking villain or exceptional asshole that proves the state’s “innocence.” Simply put, I have bigger fish to try and Tolkien and Cameron hardly are the worst of the individual cases out there. Indeed, they birthed stories with tremendous centrism at their hearts, but also queer potential. It doesn’t take much to revert Cameron’s alterations of Ellen Ripley back to Scott’s neoliberal critique (re: my art of Amanda Ripley, celebrating her vulnerable status as an imperiled-yet-capable worker trapped inside a Gothic space). Likewise, the hobbits can be gay if I want them to be, if I make them to be. And I’m not the only one who thinks so; e.g., Molly Ostertag’s “Queer Readings of The Lord of the Rings Are Not Accidents,” 2021, and lovely artwork, below. Her own Galatean work takes a symbol of stigma—a hobbit, basically an Englishman’s quaint, early-20th century whitewashing of a leprechaun—and makes it gay through a sexually descriptive interpretation:

(artist: Molly Ostertag)

So while I could keep pounding on the “Tolkien is a bigot” drum, the larger problem isn’t really Tolkien because he’s dead and we can just camp his canon if we want[29] (and far better than Kevin Smith did in Clerks 2 [2006]—his moderate homophobia being used to out the fascist LotR fan while somehow conflating queerness with eating shit: “After the Sam-and-Frodo suck-fest, Sam flat out bricks in Frodo’s mouth”). The state and its defenders are the problem: centrists and fascists tied to copaganda and the Military Industrial Complex as a heteronormative loop of monomythic canon (and all its historical-material effects). These are broad categories that we will have to unpack later in the book more than we already have up to this point.

For now, just know that centrists are the smug, milquetoast types who “debate” fascists with theatrical variations of their own; fascists look, sound and act crazy—will say and do anything to acquire power, then hold onto it afterward. Both copy Tolkien and Cameron’s blueprints in service of capital, but fascists play more aggressively when radicalizing the blueprint and pitching a fit: This includes gay hobbits being anathema of course (or Amazons to drool over and closet), but also black actors fighting for their right to be in a neoliberal product profiting off what is basically the undying ghost of the Tolkien estate:

For the past week, I’ve been bombarded with messages of hate, called the N-word, told to go back to Africa, and called on to be executed. The reason? The Lord of the Rings. It would almost be laughable if it wasn’t so profoundly sad. A wealth of stories, and a willingness to believe in wizards, Balrogs, [evil] giant spiders and magical swords. But allow people of color to exist in Middle-earth? Well, that is an affront to all that’s good and decent. At least that’s the primary argument for those ruinous trolls apparently review bombing and harassing fans of color over Amazon’s Rings of Power series (source: Richard Newby’s “A Racist Backlash to Rings of Power Puts Tolkien’s Legacy Into Focus,” 2022).

The above debate seems reasonable, but it misses the larger issue by a mile. Fascists aren’t just random weirdos to be challenged with finger-waving and a shrug. They come from companies like Amazon existing in the first place, whereupon the middle class radicalizes to defend capital. You can’t stop them by being polite, like Tolkien was (whose treatment of people of color in his stories is dubious at best, and doesn’t indicate he’d treat real-world non-WASP persons any better). Hell, even if you punch them, the etiology remains intact. You have to go after the source: capital (which is what Amazon is; a trillion-dollar mega-company that makes Sauron’s devastation look like an absolute joke).

The real problem, then, is the commodified moderacy of men like Tolkien’s “good war” and Cameron’s “military optimism.” At a glance, no one put it better than Martin Luther King:

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection (source: “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” 1963).

But since King’s literal assassination (and death of his ghost’s class character vis-à-vis neoliberal appropriation), the “good will” that King attributes to the white moderate has revealed itself to be a performance made in bad-faith by men like Cameron (whose own white savior antics and Conrad-level racism project dated antiquations onto future fictional worlds filled with his white man’s idea of a solution: white Indians[30]). The larger issue, then, is a refusal to put down the rose-tinted glasses, stop kissing up to canon, and actually acknowledge the source of moderate and fascist rhetoric having their “civilized debate.”

Pulling a Galatea (when Making Monsters, Ourselves)

In short, we have to “pull a Galatea,” making sex-positive demons and embodying them not accidentally as Milton’s Satan did, but on purpose vis-à-vis Matthew Lewis, Mary Shelley, H.R. Giger and Ridley Scott[31]—all hugging Medusa during the dialectic of the alien (re: “Brace for Impact: Some Prep When Hugging the Alien“). Refusing to do that only allows things to go on as they reliably do; i.e., with the usual interlocutors largely ignoring our plight as monstrous-feminine “of nature” (extended beings) pimped by the state (and thinking beings): while simultaneously commodifying our struggles and resistance in the very language we reclaim from canon as demonizing us to begin with. Nothing else will do, lest Capitalism go (as it always does) from crisis into swift decline—whose current, short-lived and unstable form of Capitalism (neoliberalism) regresses towards the hauntologized versions of privatized war (mercenaries and privateers), dogma and persecution mania dressed up in videogames/neoliberal canon since the 1980s: functional/performative cannibalization, necromancy and the ancient blood magic of the vampire; i.e., of the Catholics and the Western view of pagan culture, including the Romans: blood sacrifice and blood libel (tied to sodomy and witch hunts, which the Demon Module will unpack at length; re: “Idle Hands“).

In this department, I will say that fascists are far flashier than their holy cousins. But unlike sex-positive demons who shapeshift to survive the state, fascists shapeshift to enter the halls of a weakened bureaucracy to possess and occupy its instruments for their own gain. Their MO is the same, just cranked up to eleven: waves of terror and vice characters (menticide and death theatrics) in order to steal wealth through subterfuge and violence. It’s schoolyard bully tactics with a knack for dark, over-the-top and unironically vengeful theatre—specifically the bully’s own xenophobic and occult-obsessed pathos; i.e., the ghost of the counterfeit/process of abjection as also radicalized until it becomes a Promethean Quest for power that invokes theft from the powerful, not a shitty bargain (which is what fascism is). The fascist might not believe their own lies at first, but eventually their tenuous hold on power demands a megalomania in order to sell such expanding performance-based deceptions and outright falsehoods. Before long the mania becomes terminal, by virtue of the thief stealing from the elite and not just the Communists and the marginalized the elite brand as “terrorists.” Doing so is a death sentence, leading the elite to mark fascists as “mad dogs” whose centrist counterparts (the paladins) must not only put down, but cut down in holy kayfabe (thus reestablish the elite’s hold on things through a gentler variant of the same Crusade-like counterfeit; e.g., Jedi who [according to themselves, of course] don’t crave excitement or adventure).

(exhibit 1a1a1h4a: Just because centrist theatre demands a bad guy for the good guy to punch doesn’t mean we, as workers, should just unironically embrace this role [and the historical materialism/punching down that results from it]. We can punch up and still enjoy being ironic “heels,” who love our big, bearded, ostensibly gay himbo and protector-of-Russian-skies, Zangief.)

Note: Below is a deluge of additional holistic terminology that unfolds interdependently during capital’s historical-material boom-and-bust; i.e., that which workers more broadly must camp the canon of to dialectically-materially have the whore’s revenge against profit: by achieving universal liberation through the same Gothic aesthetic reversing abjection (doing so with Metroidvania, Amazons, and/or anything else they possibly can). To it, these are big ideas, and ones far too big to unpack here. We can only introduce or reiterate them, returning later multiple times for fresh synthesis; re: holistic expression demanding repeated reflection on past reflections, on and on; i.e., from Volume One’s manifesto to Volume Two’s modular Humanities primer to Volume Three’s proletarian praxis, and back around again. —Perse, 3/29/2025

Within these crises and their haunted, bogus treasure maps, the consequences are anything but false. For one, the monster is very much real as a codified belief system and target of state violence. Both the killer for the state and the target of said killer’s violence, canon informs the sexual orientation, gender identity/gender performance and performance-as-identity (which synonymize under the false dichotomy of man/woman and male/female under the colonial binary) that exist between predator and prey as a liminal performance; i.e., one that can be adapted by any worker the state needs to manipulate thus profit from. Both positions are sexed, gendered and expected to perform and identify in highly specific gender roles that are lucrative for the elite: according to heteronormative assignment as starting at birth funneled towards war-as-a-business.

In turn, their monstrous legion is binarized, reflecting in its sex-coercive language as part of the Superstructure allowing room for controlled opposite; i.e., that which the elite cannot own, but can cultivate to shape how people think, thus react to perceived threats (worker action) towards the careful cultivation of copaganda and nation/war pastiche in popular media made through what they do own: the means of production, the Base. Their palingenesis drives capital as “a system for exploiting workers, nature and the world, whose resultant genocide and vampiric devastation is synonymous with profit for capitalists” (from the glossary) as something whose unequal material conditions/privatization of property is built around endless war as a holy business in secular/non-secular forms. The entire enterprise, as the ghost of the counterfeit/narrative of the crypt, becomes hyperreal: one, a map of imaginary desolation to hide the actual desolation currently happening all around us, whose decaying surface eventually shows glimpses of an endless ruin behind the map; but also to cloak the devastating “brainwashing” effect Capitalist Realism has on our minds: menticide (the raping of the mind by propaganda, which Volume One will unpack; re: “The Nation-State: Remediating Modern-day “Rome,” Gargoyles, and the Bourgeois Trifectas”). Point out the decay behind the map and you’ll be shot for ruining the picture (re: Le Bon).

As part of this scheme, the police of canon include the witch cop/war boss as the policer of Gothic media on- and offstage within culture war as part of class war—fighting over the former significance, but also the current/future interpretation and production of such stories: Metroidvania’s castles and monstrous-feminine, psychosexual torture; as well as Cameron’s other shooters, and before those Tolkien’s naturalized colonialism[32] out on the open battlefield, overshadowed by dark castles. Regardless of the genre, canon’s fear and dogma become things that weigh on the minds of dutiful consumers, artists and patrons, making them ignore worsening living conditions and individual lives by colonizing media to keep it canon (thus preserve the canonical image of the author no matter the cost).

The biggest casualties, then, are basic human rights and positive freedom (freedom to act) for workers, whose sex-positive potential is sacrificed in favor of negative freedom (freedom from consequence) for the elite as historically-materially sex-coercive. Yet, amid this broader dialogic imagination (re: Bakhtin), genocide is sublimated, dressed up as fun, harmless, and cool; legitimate critiques are recuperated into “defanged” forms of controlled opposition that lack conscious class character/utility during class war (the struggle to achieve class consciousness), and by extension, intersections of culture and race. Rainbow Capitalism will even attempt to “whitewash war with rainbows,” recruiting token minorities (starting with white cis-het women) from the underclass as a kind of assimilation fantasy (which is then sold back to nerd culture: the Amazon war bride, exhibit 1a1a3)—i.e., one where they punch down against themselves inside cyberpunks, Metroidvania, and similar canceled-future dystopias during marginalized in-fighting/internalized bigotry instead of punching up against the elite, aka divide and conquer via conversion therapy by promoting material advancement and societal climbing through class, culture and race betrayal through assimilation fantasies imitating the colonizer (e.g., Franz Fanon’s “black skin, white masks” or Shakespeare’s Shylock). It’s very “pick me,” Judas levels of selling out for scarce little in return, considering all that was lost: connection, dignity, humanity and trust—and all for a false copy of a treasure map whose ensuing gold rush wasn’t for workers at all, but the elite carefully manipulating them to fight amongst themselves.

Next, I’ll give a quick example of this I’ve already written about that isn’t Metroidvania, but ties into the same shooter model per Cameron’s refrain: Ion Fury.

Shooters within Cameron’s Refrain (and Camping Them); re: Ion Fury

As the Nazis spilled into Western Europe (due to American isolation, arms sales and economic interference through lend-lease and the Marshall Plan), Americans read the stories and newspapers and volunteered to fight; the elite sold them “their” shovels, helmets, and guns (real or imaginary). The American soldiers’ bargain was Faustian, the German quest Promethean, and a lot of people died so the elite could carve up the globe and its map yet again based on lies, of lies, of lies (as nation-states always do). From here, Tolkien and Cameron (and their defenders) cut their authorial teeth through cartographic refrains defended by current-day TERFs and other mask-off bigots, the latter apologized for by men just like Tolkien and Cameron in the 21st century. 3D Realms, for instance, have brought their own nostalgic-heavy approach to war pastiche as its own recursive, unironic lie: the Build engine FPS of the late ’90s. Acting as its own refrain parallel to Doom or Metroid’s direct link to Cameron, 3D Realms swapped out the Metroidvania operatic Gothic castle for a different locale, music and fetishized violence: police brutality during military urbanism.

Speaking of lies, heteronormativity lies at the center of all this manufacture, coercion and subterfuge; i.e., an ongoing and accelerating problem (the Imperial Boomerang and military urbanism/the police state) whose endless synthesis occurs through the canonical relationship between fiction and reality as something to perceive, first and foremost as Capitalist Realism yawning into infinity. Cities function as castles, being presented as increasingly hostile, concrete graveyards occupied by two distinct groups flooded with guns (criminogenesis): the fetishized armory of police weaponry being leveled by the usual givers of state violence against the usual receivers (who make do with stolen or improvised weapons—i.e., the paradox of terror). During the advertised war on crime, both sides are dressed up as cartoon zombies and demons. And in the middle, the Amazon plays a similar role that Ripley or Eowyn did: being a humanizing face (and piece of ass) to whitewash the ensuing massacre, thus make death seem noble but also rewarded with a Valkyrie orgy in the afterlife. All business as usual, leading the state to not simply eat itself, but shoot itself in the foot and chew up its labor force (which again, is expendable by design):

Life planned out before my birth, nothing could I say
Had no chance to see myself, molded day by day
Looking back I realize, nothing have I done
Left to die with only friend, alone, I clench my gun (Metallica’s “Disposable Heroes“).

Like a small child, the soldier is utterly terrified of an imaginary enemy the gun cannot destroy; like an obscene pillow, the gun gives no comfort and the soldier will probably die (or be scarred for life), but within capital they will have served their purpose either way: profit for the elite.

Being a canonical process, though, all of this can be camped, which is where our “camp map” comes into question beyond just the Metroidvania ludo-Gothic BDSM negotiations we’ve examined up to this point. Indeed, now’s the time to make things gay at large; i.e., by camping all canon as ours to interrogate, then reclaim and recreate though proletarian Gothic poetics: making our own monsters, maps and labor action plans, vis-à-vis Shelly’s catchphrase, “Imagine the future, ’cause you’re not in it!” taken as a challenge to overcome; i.e., seizing control as much as we can and populating the critically empty and desolate gameworlds of Ion Fury, Metroid and Doom with sex-positive, anti-police sentiment—the kind that challenges the very sort of public sentiment that I write about in “Zombie Police States in Ion Fury” (an extended quote, because it’s relevant to what we’re up against):

Ion Fury‘s exploitative representations of power matter because their symbols are tied to public sentiment; this includes all persons relative to power as something to exploit and express: the abusers or the abused. Historically the police abuse, because they have the power and state-expressed permission to do so; minorities, the perpetual underclass, are forever on the receiving end. It stands to reason that symbols detailing abuse or targets will remain ambiguous as long as power disparities remain, or threaten to return: As something to kill, the police state, like a zombie, rises from the dead; in turn, it transforms people into zombies—cops into heartless, mindless killing machines, and civilians into dead men walking (whose immediate termination requires no explanation).

Ion Fury openly glorifies lethal force to justify permanent martial law (the sort prophesized and critiqued by James Cameron’s Terminator films). This feels highly questionable in a time where protests against police brutality in America are at an all-time high; equally dubious is Ion Fury‘s presentation of a halcyon police state—the peaceful point whose equilibrium is interrupted by a rebellious martial power, Heskel the mad scientist. Neo D.C. is a “shithole” headed further down the drain, this symptomatic regression encouraged by those already in power. The heads of state encourage their city’s decay through smaller, rival gangs they can persecute; the mass incarceration and slaughter of these violent minorities becomes ritualized, celebrated (an unironic homage to the War on Drugs, hinted at [by the game’s problematic Read Me: or as Bay aptly says, “‘Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girl-Boss,’ the Game!”]

through the racist statement “cracked out,” which refers to the state-enforced assignment of crack as the black person’s Drug of Choice). There’s no attempt to humanize these factions in Ion Fury. Through a monstrous lens, Ion Fury reminds me of Night of the Living Dead, and how George Romero demonized the civil [disputes] that followed the Civil Rights movement. Alas, the further you move away from a specific historical moment, the less its monsters represent actual people; the undead become “just zombies,” floating signifiers to blast apart. I love zombie pastiche—a playful literacy of pop culture undead interpreted through games like Left 4 Dead. There’s certainly fun to be had, even if the critical power of the zombie is gone. They’re simply targets in a cinematic hall of mirrors.

If anyone’s to blame for this shooting gallery approach, it’s Aliens. Cameron’s movie formed the FPS blueprint (and premise) adopted by Doom, which so many “clones” afterwards also copied. The xenomorphs were supposed to represent the Vietcong—the biggest casualties of the Vietnam War. Instead, they’re simply targets for Ripley to lay waste to. Similarly the mutants and cultists in Ion Fury are monsters for Shelly to blow away. Not only are they trapped in a crumbling necropolis; they’re relegated to the sewers, the city’s dumping ground. The cultists can at least speak, but fare no better than their voiceless counterparts. Faced with these pitiful wretches, I can’t help but think of Giorgio Agamben’s state of exception. To summarize, “constitutional rights can be diminished, superseded and rejected in the process of claiming an extension of power by the government during a state of emergency.” That’s literally what martial law is, and what Shelly’s fighting for. She’s the arm of the law, an extension of a military government whose chokehold on the city’s denizens dehumanizes everyone involved—the zombies, but also Shelly (whose uniform, in practice, turns her into a faceless, expendable cop).

Under the city’s power, the mutants do not die; they linger unhappily between life and death. They scream as Shelly sets them ablaze, evoking the voiceless wails heard in Death’s “Suicide Machine” [1991]:

Controlling their lives

Deciding when and how they will die

A victim of someone else’s choice

The ones who suffer have no voice

Manipulating destiny

When it comes to living, no one seems to care

But when it comes to wanting out

Those with power, will be there.

“Those with power,” in this case, are “there” through Shelly (someone with power—i.e., associated with or on the side of those in power). The cast of Ion Fury are either cops or criminals, and cops punish criminals. It’s the totalitarian, concrete jungle realized by Judge Dredd, another Ion Fury palimpsest. Dredd’s not a vigilante; he’s a champion of the state, a paragon of force praised for his lack of empathy towards those he plugs. So is Shelly. An expendable captain of the GDF’s Domestic Task Force, she literally heads homeland security. She serves the state, not the people—is literally the game’s judge, jury and executioner.

If all this sounds a bit doomsday, Ion Fury doesn’t preach this stuff; it passively advertises it. This isn’t wholly positive, though. Noam Chomsky refers to advertising in Manufactured Consent as “de facto licensing authority”: “Media outlets are not commercially viable without the support of advertisers. News media must therefore cater to the political prejudices and economic desires of their advertisers.” Those with money have the power to influence others in a capitalist system, including the media. Media isn’t neutral. Videogames are media; videogames aren’t neutral, either.

In this respect, Ion Fury tries to be “just a game” (no politics here, bro); except it’s a form of advertising whose parodic images complement its central Read Me message. Like the preface to a novel, the Read Me message is the imprimatur that colors the action moving forward. As testified by my naïve playthrough, a person can easily enjoy the game separately from its inner politics—to enjoy nostalgic action for its own sake. Nevertheless, the shadow of the ’80s weighed a little heavier on me the second time around.

(exhibit 1a1a1h4b: Artist: Blur Squid Art. “The cake is a lie.” Gun porn is commonly tied to gun sentiment granted a nurturing quality while pressuring for its continued sales and usage everywhere and on everyone [the Dirty Harry effect]. Women, then, are commonly used to fetishize and whitewash the climbing sale of weapons in an ever-growing market that—more and more and more—conflates women with guns in the cliché maxim: “Your rifle is your girl.” These are not “peacekeepers,” but tyrants at home and genocidal implementers abroad working in concert. For the women involved, even if they never see live duty or combat, they are still propagandists by virtue of what they’re contributing towards.)

We clearly can’t just play games “apolitically”; we need to act out to expose those who act in bad faith so they won’t kill us (the people who show up to college campuses with assault rifles, and who look at Ion Fury with rose-tinted glasses, but also treat it as rose-tinted glasses with which to view the world around them: a killing ground of us-versus-them). This makes our function as iconoclasts somewhat complicated and unsafe: the Gothic princess-faggot and the rodeo clown waving a big red flag at the bull acting tough in his bailiwick! But it needs to be done because otherwise we’re dead meat. We’re not dead yet, but Capitalism will surely make us that way if we stand idly by and put our faith in white, cis-het (functionally Christian) men like Tolkien and Cameron, but also their Cycle of Kings expressed in future authors like 3D Realms continuing the nostalgic, bloodthirsty refrain unaltered (and whose every sequel enterprise/revolution of good vs evil is profit for them and death to us).

With Metroidvania, by extension, we can camp what they made through a palliative Numinous inside our own castles; but to fully corrupt the twin trees of oppositional praxis, we also need to go beyond Tolkien and Cameron and camp all of canon, on and offstage, using ludo-Gothic BDSM—in short, “starting a thing” however we can, or “putting the pussy on the chainwax” (which the next subchapter will hopefully make a little more clear): the shooters of the world, and their cinematic and novelized equivalents’ copaganda informing the Military Industrial Complex abroad and military urbanism’s de facto deputies/stochastic terrorism and widening net of state abuse in all directions, inwards and outwards. In short, camp is half-real, as is ludo-Gothic BDSM.

Camp Is Half-Real: Out of Metroidvania and into Real Life as Intertwined with Such Things during Ludo-Gothic BDSM

(source: Volker Janssen’s “Why Was Dresden So Heavily Bombed?” 2020)

During WW2, the Nazis didn’t try to exterminate the Jews instantly any more than the American colonist did the Native Americans; it started with propaganda that gradually hinted at, then reached, the final solution—of putting them into concentration camps then death camps—near the end of the war (and radicalized in the face of certain defeat while harboring an utmost certitude of final victory while still [more or less] having total control over Germany’s armed forces—a position solidified by a real state of emergency where one did not exist before: “Desperate times call for desperate measures”). In short, the Nazis were excellent propagandists but bad capitalists; as a bad copy of American propaganda/public relations, they had bought into their own poorly copied grandeur and, like Icarus’ wings, were suddenly coming apart at the seams. But they live on in American copaganda like Ion Fury (and its multiple sequels), whose endless war for territory oscillates on the ludologized cartography of Tolkien and Cameron sublimating real-world atrocities. Genocide is half-real, making its chronotopic subversion through cryptonymy and hauntology to reverse abjection (thus profit pimping nature as monstrous-feminine) all but required when camping any Pygmalion’s refrains.

Within their outdoor/indoor refrains, the colonial marines butcher the xenomorphs as “pure evil,” and Tolkien’s forces of good annihilate the orcs in similar settler-fashion (exterminating the local population) through the likes of D&D and Blizzard’s Warcraft franchise, etc); and Shelly Bombshell does the same thing seemingly far closer to home during military urbanism. We, as Gothic Communists, must interrogate said power (and its paradoxes/doubles) through our ironic reclamation of an oft-Numinous affect, vis-à-vis the unironic torture dungeon/psychosexual vaudeville as something to reassemble in our own artwork, pornography and performances of various kinds (the shooter being closer to George Miller’s Gothic Western). Our counterterrorist iconoclasm will be policed by other members of the public who see our doing so as a threat to the Base and the Superstructure beyond a particular army or castle; i.e., the twin trees whose Symbolic Order/mythic structure is ultimately the Shadow of Pygmalion: the enemy of Satan as a rebel force during oppositional praxis.

Note: I mention Lacan’s “Symbolic Order” a few times in this book volume, and never really go back to it; i.e., while Gothic Communism stresses dialectical materialism (with anarchistic, social-psychosexual elements)—emphasizing them throughout its varied hermeneutics—said Gothic mode and means of study still push collectively away from psychoanalytical models; re: Freud, but also shadows of Freud haunting Kristeva, Creed, and others. We’ll still mention these authors in the pages (and book volumes), ahead—and obviously stress Kristeva’s process of abjection and Creed’s monstrous-feminine as we do—but nonetheless shall strive to remind people that Freud and his ilk, the psychoanalytical school, were largely used as 20th century buffers that purposefully screened Marx/concealed him cryptonymically from view!

While Gothic Communism wants to camp Marx (re: “Making Marx Gay“), to do so requires cutting through the bullshit; i.e., which psychoanalysis largely is; re: Lacan, but also Jung, Rank, Zizek, Peterson, and many, many others. We’ll touch on camping Kristeva and Creed during the Symposium, then lay into Freud and his tacit/overt supporters (and their signature queerphobia, which Marx and Engels shared) throughout the rest of the book series. —Perse. 3/29/2025

(artist: Nasta Doll)

This largely concludes our two-part examination of Metroidvania (and shooters) in relation to Tolkien’s refrain and vice versa, and how videogame canon is neoliberal, thus heteronormative through the ludic scheme of monomythic war and its liminal, BDSM hauntologies as fractally recursive in a cartographic sense; re: the endlessly concentric offering of false power/hope through the Faustian ludic contract as map-like, but also a Promethean Quest (re: stealing “fire” from the gods) that obliterates the hero once followed to its fearsome and all-consuming central conclusion.

We’re now very near at the final stage of our “camp map” (exhibit 1a1a1i), which will connect to a) the manifesto building blocks (and trees) that we laid out in the thesis statement and b) the arguments we’ve made regarding the importance of finding our own voices within the narrative of the crypt as something to reclaim for our own rebellions; re: camping Metroidvania or things like Metroidvania with ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., in defense of the proletariat by going after capital and its pimp’s propaganda policing nature as monstrous-feminine at large: the Superstructure and the Base as things to camp and reclaim/recultivate inside themselves “by starting a thing” (which Gothic Communism most certainly is). We must flesh it out (so to speak)—to tease the viewer-as-student by stripping and dressing things up again, as needed!

That’s essentially what we’ve been talking about but now I want to shine a light on it, next; i.e., what good proletarian praxis looks like in opposition to state forces while cannibalizing their language to form our own voices, rememories, and muster in whatever space we choose—as monsters, putting the pussy on the chainwax!

Onto “Shining a Light on Things, or How to Make Monsters“!

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About the Author

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

Footnotes

[1] “What do you do when you get tenure?” I asked. “You become an intellectual,” they replied with a shrug.

[2a] Virtually all of the faculty at EMU were angels, and if not outright nurturing at least gave me the time of day (Sandy Norton went above and beyond and really encouraged me to pursue my work: “You’re a tremendous intellectual, Nicholas, and you have a great heart.” I don’t know if I lived up to what you saw in me, Sandy, but I hope my book helps convey the difference you made in my life). The faculty at MMU, on the hand, tended to act like they were living on borrowed time and threw the book at me whenever I tried to schedule time with them (“we’re not required to meet with you except…”); they could be disarmingly polite to your face (especially when the initial introductions were made, and in class), but generally gave off the impression they’d rather be somewhere else than speaking to some asshole exchange student from America: researching. To that, the college itself really liked to advertise the specialists per module as Gothic experts in their respective fields of study—it was a selling point for the school (the one that convinced me to go). At times, they felt like show ponies being forced to trot in front of the student body for the school’s benefit, and they always seemed tired, overworked; but they also seemed self-absorbed and prepared to do the bare minimum for when they actually had to teach (they were professors at a fancy school, after all).

All the same, the researchers were incredibly passionate about their special topics. They really knew their stuff and I generally respected their work a great deal, but felt almost immediately like there was something generally missing from the student-teacher equation: a human element tucked away behind their suits of armor under a neoliberal scheme that seemed to say, “We don’t owe you anything” (the usual university-as-a-business bullshit, wherein I felt discouragingly trapped between the formidable logistics of traveling overseas and studying abroad for an entire year [re: Quora] and the uncanny politeness of seemingly apathetic instructors who all had better things to do). All the same, Linnie Blake was an exception. I appreciated her willingness to meet with me outside of class, as well as her effusive praise; it felt measured and fair and I welcomed it. Thesis-wise, my supervisors could be a little distant (especially in e-mails). Paul Wake was more pragmatic but affable enough, putting in what was required; Dale Townshend who, despite his ball-busting approach (and confession that he’d never played “a computer game” in his life), was actually willing to sit and listen to me about my personal troubles while at school (thank you for that, Dale). To both of you, I appreciate how you pointed me towards some excellent scholarship; e.g., Bakhtin and Juul. It made a big difference in my future work.

[2b] When I approached Dale Townshend to be my thesis supervisor and told him about Metroidvania as a mappable gameworld, he recommended considering the idea of Radcliffe’s spaces as fundamentally unmappable; i.e., their trauma, but also their recollection after the movement through them had been completed. In Metroidvania, especially on the Metroid side of the spatial equation (the maze), the Gothic heroine is both masculine and feminine in the traditional sense; i.e., is a princess and a knight, but also a banditti in the Radcliffean story (which, per the outlaw stigma, has pro-state and pro-labor forms). And yet, movement through a Gothic castle for a feminine heroine always threatens rape in some shape or form, which Samus famously checks by acting like a man traditionally would towards the monstrous-feminine; i.e., by stealing its shit and shooting it in the face with its own (stolen) guns.

[3] Gloomth is the gloom and warmth attributed to Horace Walpole’s gothic villa, Strawberry Hill, and by extension his novel. As Dale Townshend writes in Gothic Antiquity:

Rejecting Mann’s suggestions of a Gothic garden at Strawberry Hill, Walpole claims that “Gothic is merely architecture,” and resides in the “satisfaction” that one derives from “imprinting the gloomth of abbeys and cathedrals on one’s house.” The letter proceeds to illustrate the “venerable barbarism” of the Gothic style through another telling description of the Paraclete: “my house is so monastic,” Walpole claims, “that I have a little hall decked with long saints in lean arched windows and with taper columns, which we call the Paraclete, in memory of Eloisa’s cloister.” It is thus through the oxymoronic categories of “venerable gloom,” “venerable barbarism,” and “gloomth”—a compound word formed of “gloom” and “warmth”—that Walpole was able to negotiate the discursive impasse at the heart of eighteenth-century perceptions of Gothic architecture: though undoubtedly an example of Evelyn’s and Wren’s “monkish piles” or Middleton’s “nurseries of superstition,” the ecclesiastical Gothic could be retrieved as “venerable barbarism” when it was enlisted in the service of modern Protestant domesticity (source).

[4] As my true self, I didn’t have to change who I was to fit in, and I could wear whatever I wanted to be myself in the process—if only onstage or on the canvas at first, to slowly acclimate myself to the idea that I wasn’t “asking for it” while paradoxically invoking these inherited anxieties onstage; nor was I a threat to society as I saw it—i.e., I wasn’t a fraudulent “man-in-a-dress” worming my way into “real women’s” spaces (classic impostor syndrome); I was a real woman, and my art and medievalist education slowly bonded more and more to become a way of tangibly presenting that idea to the world.

[5] This experimentation comes with a steep tradeoff, of course. During Socialism, we a) come out of the closet/hiding to slowly regain control of our own bodies, labor, food and identities, but also b) shed the veil of ignorance to reunite with death as something to embrace and dance with, as well as stare down as oracles of the unbelieved, Cassandra sort that are also declared as devils, heretics, whistleblowers, castrators, bubble-bursters and iconoclasts by the faithful: the horrors of Capitalism as endless fields of exploitation, but also the subtler unheimlich where one gets an awful feeling—that one’s home and inherited identity is unironically monstrous and harmful (as are one’s usual means of escape: copaganda, unironic rape play and military optimism). The food will taste better and the sex will hit harder… but you have to be prepared to let go of childish things, including ignorant escapism into spaces of total, unironic enjoyment (repeat Sarkeesian’s adage if it helps). Instead you will have to experience both sides of something so honest (unlike Capitalism): getting spit-roasted by heaven and hell. Shakespeare called the cause “slings and arrows,” Coleridge called the condition “sad and wiser,” and Mae Martin called its solution “sap.” Of all three, I call it “the Wisdom of the Ancients” (I hesitate to call this one of my terms; i.e., I picked it up in grad school and it’s also an allusion to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and “natural philosophy” as it appears in that text).

[6] E.g., Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” but also Matthew Lewis’ The Monk. The latter serves as a biting (and hilarious) illustration of the (not so) Silent Majority’s abuse of privilege to indulge in guilty pleasure and wish fulfillment inside the closet (which is an awful, violent place), but also the ghost of the counterfeit’s process of abjection. It’s “boundaries for me, not for thee” for those who—alienated from everything around them except fear and dogma—act precisely the way that Capitalism needs them to: as hypocritical bullies. As I write in Volume Three:

manufactured scarcity deprives sexist performers of safe, nurturing sex (not just condoms or birth control, but consensual sex, too). They become sex-starved and information-deprived—killer virgins embroiled within a prolonged state of fearful ignorance beset by “evil” as instructed by formal institutions of power. On par with Ambrosio from The Monk (1796), such persons revel in bad play through violent fantasies geared towards achieving sexual control through coercive dominance. Indeed, Matthew Lewis cemented these within Ambrosio himself, a religious man obsessed with raping Antonia, a woman he barely knew (and his penis frequently being compared to a dagger or vice versa). Hidden virtuously behind a veil, her impeccable modesty bore no protection against the perfidious cleric (assisted on his horny quest by a crossdressing, devil-worshiping woman named Matilda). For Lewis, these opposites—Ambrosio’s nefarious aspirations and Antonia’s besieged virtue—were less imagined hypotheticals and more Lewis satirizing England’s social-sexual climate within displaced and outrageous, but also queer language (re: Broadmoor). Moreover, its patently Gothic nature gave him the means to speak on taboo themes: rape as a material byproduct of violent cultural attitudes, not isolated nut jobs misled by the metaphysical devil. Ambrosio even blames Antonia for tempting him and Matilda for setting it all up, fulfilling the binary of temptress and rapist working in tandem while dumping his own blame fully onto women, not himself. This works as a pre-cursor to the whole “no fap” thing that many sexist religious men today endorse: blaming women for taking away the “essence” of their strength: their semen, but also their control; cumming is a sign of spiritual, physical and mental weakness.

[7] A phrase I coined in “I, Satanist; Atheist” (2021) to describe the Numinous as I pursued and envisioned—not as gendered, but merely a desired response to any who summon it:

In short, Otto sees ghost stories as an offshoot of the Numinous, aka the Mysterium Tremendum or divine wrath. There needn’t be a god for this sensation to work. For me, enjoyment of this “presence” amounts to Satanic apostacy. My cultivation of “exquisite torture” is wholly cultivated, prepared by me with the expectation of a desired response. Similar to the uncanny as being predictable, this doesn’t denote the presence of a Christian [male] god (or any other); it simply means that certain thoughts excite me, but not at other peoples’ expense (source).

[8] E.g., the Satanic Temple “About Us” reads: “The Mission Of The Satanic Temple Is To Encourage Benevolence And Empathy, Reject Tyrannical Authority, Advocate Practical Common Sense, Oppose Injustice, And Undertake Noble Pursuits” (source). Similar to Gothic Communism, they have seven noble tenets (one more tenet, and probably as foils to the Seven Deadly Sins) and focus on humane ways of existing and presenting themselves. I describe Satanism as follows (abridged, from the glossary):

Like furries, Satanism is generally treated as a regular scapegoat during moral panic (with “Satanic” historically being used to scapegoat members of the LGBTQ community as “groomers” during the 1980s into the present; source: Caelan Conrad, 2022). However, Satan is a complex figure and can personify different forms of persecution and rebellion. For example, I have explored Satanism before—in my own past time (“Dreadful Discourse, ep. 7: Satan“) as well as my own living experiences: “I, Satanist; Atheist: A Gothicist’s Thoughts on Atheism, Religion, and Sex” (2021). Satanic churches aren’t ecclesiastical in the traditional sense, but their implementation in Western culture isn’t always implemented well. Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan is a bit overly hedonistic and dated, sounding painfully cliché and sexist. The Satanic Temple, on the other hand, is far more accessible, while ostensibly refusing to compromise on the humanitarian issues they seek to confront in society as structured around organized religion (America wasn’t simply founded by the Puritans, but founded on their awful principles, too). This being said, the Temple isn’t fallible, and its leader Lucien Greaves isn’t exempt from using the Temple as a for-profit money funnel while punching down against marginalized, non-profit forms of Satanism; e.g., four queer members of its own Washington state chapter, which it sued using money raised by the church, itself (source Tumblr post, Queer Satanic: October 24th, 2024); i.e., the Temple is registered as a church for monetary and legal reasons—an act meant to protect it from the state, except Greaves then used it to attack its own members in a cult-like way.

[9] From Roden’s Posthuman Life:

Self-fashioning through culture and education is to be supplemented by technology. For this reason, transhumanists believe that we should add morphological freedom—the freedom of physical and mental form—to the traditional liberal rights of freedom of movement and freedom of expression […] to discover new forms of embodiment in order to improve on the results on traditional humanism [and according to the World Transhumanist Association, 1999] “to use technology to extend their mental and physical (including reproductive) capacities and to improve their control over their own lives” (source).

[10] Which only works if the state population is indoctrinated and/or kept in the dark.

[11] At first I hesitated, only making shallow hesitation wounds, but soon I got into it and really went to town. It’s not like Radcliffe’s gonna fight back, and her rotting ideas/castles need to be challenged; i.e., cleansed of their stupidity and bigotry. Doing so makes my work, here, feel not only useful, but therapeutic: my discovery that I actually really dislike Radcliffe and that’s okay! Lewis > Radcliffe.

[12] Case in point, I’m incredibly different from my three brothers; they were all right-handed straight dudes, and I’m the left-handed girl-faggot (with pride, muthafuckas). This includes my identical twin. We call ourselves “mirror-imaged,” but I still feel that “identical twin” is a giant misnomer. Apparently opposing orientations for twins is not unheard of—e.g., Laverne Cox and her brother, M Lamar (source: Mey Rude’s “Laverne Cox’s Brother Tearfully Explains How Much She Means to Him,” 2022)—but is more common, from what I understand, than twins who share the same exact orientations (who aren’t straight); e.g., the Canadian pop-duo twins, Tegan and Sara, openly identifying as butch lesbians.

[13] The Western lie of “our land” as actually stolen land the invaders colonized after stealing it from someone else; i.e., the so-called good guys chosen by God as “having always been there.” “We were here first and there’s no more room.”

[14] From The Monk (1796):

In all Madrid there was no spot more beautiful or better regulated. It was laid out with the most exquisite taste. The choicest flowers adorned it in the height of luxuriance, and though artfully arranged, seemed only planted by the hand of Nature: Fountains, springing from basons of white Marble, cooled the air with perpetual showers; and the Walls were entirely covered by Jessamine, vines, and Honeysuckles. The hour now added to the beauty of the scene. The full Moon, ranging through a blue and cloudless sky, shed upon the trees a trembling lustre, and the waters of the fountains sparkled in the silver beam: A gentle breeze breathed the fragrance of Orange-blossoms along the Alleys; and the Nightingale poured forth her melodious murmur from the shelter of an artificial wilderness (source).

[15] Per settler colonialism, big nations eat little nations.

[16] Moderacy generally argues from a position of limited aid; i.e., there’s only so much help to go around and we have to “be realistic” and help the biggest groups first (usually white women), then kick the can down the road for everyone else. Token normativity generally tries to expand this site of privilege to include their group, but not others; but again, in times of decay such token agents will be demoted and excluded once more.

[17] Quentin Tarantino once defended Roman Polanski in 2003: “He didn’t rape a 13-year-old. It was statutory rape… he had sex with a minor. That’s not rape” (source: “When Quentin Tarantino Defended Roman Polanski in an Interview with Howard Stern,” 2022). In truth, many actors did, including ones you might not expect. Tilda Swinton, for example, publicly defended Polanski in 2009. When interviewed by Variety in 2021, she upheld her decision, saying it was “just” for Polanski’s extradition from a “neutral country.” In other words, she refused to take a hard stance and reject the industry giant for his notorious and long-known crimes of rape (Dreading’s “The Case of Roman Polanski, 2022”).

A such, when reclaiming the Nazi or the cop, we have to do it through other art that we’re responding to as a “ghost” of something—an echo of someone’s name, likeness or reputation that likewise must be reclaimed by separating it from the original, unreliable artist; i.e., by generally working against institutions of power defended by said artist as a director, writer or actor whose personal reputation conjoins with Hollywood and its royal class: guilds of privileged workers that preserve the reputations of royalty (and themselves by association) instead of having our interests at heart. When pressured, people like Swinton and Tarantino close ranks and look after their own, and by extension help protect the institution of the rich and powerful they and their actions represent. It makes them seem hollow and disingenuous, which is important to expose insofar as we can stop seeing the world through the rose-tinted glasses they supply us with.

Also, Tarantino regularly pimps marginalized groups for his movies; i.e., by monetizing and fetishizing their perfectly valid revenge fantasies for his—a straight white man’s—gain (and all while actively searching for opportunities to say racial slurs, onscreen, and fetishizing women’s bodies [mainly their feet] every chance he gets, and demonizing the poor and other racial minorities in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood; re: the Demon Module’s “Dark Xenophilia“)! Tarantino flat-out sucks (so does American Hollywood in general, to be fair).

[18a] Thomas Happ designed Axiom Verge entirely by himself; Team Cherry (the makers of Hollow Knight) originally consisted of two men, Ari Gibson and William Pellen (though they have since brought on an additional coder, Jack Vine, to help with Silksong).

[18b] Persephone van der Waard’s “Hollow Knight: Silksong – As a Metroidvania, Will It Be Gothic?” (2019).

[19] The idea of speedrunning as “magic” is not an unusual concept. But in already weird games like Mario 64, the deconstruction of the gameworld is eerie on multiple levels—the aesthetic, of course, but also the player-invented game-inside-a-game: escaping the space through the solving of incredibly difficult, seemingly impossible puzzles (Bismuth’s “The Complete History of the A Button Challenge,” 2023). These are not simply uncanny to witness, but founded on arcane, esoteric mysteries on the level of a Renaissance trade guild. It’s all very hush-hush and competitive, even more so because the gameworld itself does not audio-visually teach or support such adventures. You have to seriously break the game open, and even here, it will fight you every step of the way. Such abilities evoke White Wolf’s Mage: the Ascension or Shadowrun through a kind of “cyber spell” dressed up as magic, and functionally no different; e.g., “the devil’s spell” trick from The Lost Levels, 5-2 (Summoning Salt’s “Mario: The Infamous History of Level 5-2,” 2023).

And if all of this sounds self-serious, it pays to remember that some of the most fun to be had lies in challenges that we, as players, invent for ourselves—not what Capitalism sells to us through intended play but as “spoilsports” who make our own meaning. For a lovely example of this idea, consider CirclMastr’s solemn testimony upon hitting level 99 before the reactor boss in Final Fantasy 7 (1997):

Life does not have inherent meaning; to say that our lives are pointless and our achievements meaningless is to state the obvious. No matter how grand our achievements or how broad their scope, time turns all to dust and death destroys all memory. But that does not mean we cannot ascribe our own meaning to what we do. It is because nothing has meaning unto itself that we are free to create meaning, to make metaphor, and in doing so reflect on ourselves and our world. Leveling to 99 in the first reactor is pointless and meaningless. So why do I do it? I do it to express my hatred, and more importantly my disdain, for Dick Tree. I do it to express the camaraderie I feel for those of us who have followed this topic for years only to be disappointed by [Dick Tree]. I do it to prove to myself that I can persevere. The act is meaningless; I give it meaning (source: James Vincent’s “Final Fantasy VII Player Gives Life Meaning by Hitting Level 99 before First Boss,” 2017).

It’s very Sisyphean/For Whom the Bell Tolls, thus apt for the kind of invention that all workers need to employ during the struggle to develop Communism in our own daily lives. Use Gothic poetics to make Capitalism your Dick Tree (there’s a sentence I never thought I’d see).

[20] Or as the Narrator from Myth: the Fallen Lords puts it, “In a time long past, the armies of the Dark came again into the lands of men. Their leaders became known as The Fallen Lords, and their terrible sorcery was without equal in the West. In thirty years they reduced the civilized nations to carrion and ash, until the free city of Madrigal alone defied them. An army gathered there, and a desperate battle was joined against the Fallen. Heroes were born in the fire and bloodshed of the wars which followed, and their names and deeds will never be forgotten” (source: Fandom).

[21] Said Balor the Leveler to Alric, one of the Nine (a group of good wizards called Avatara, representing the West) in Myth: the Fallen Lords (we’ll examine Bungie’s Myth franchise extensively in the Undead Module’s “A Lesson in Humility“).

[22] An allusion to Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) from Sophie’s Choice (1982):

Leslie Lapidus: Have you ever read D.H. Lawrence, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”?

Stingo: No.

Leslie Lapidus: He has the answer. He knows so much about fucking. He says – he says that when you fuck you go to the Dark Gods. Stingo, I really mean it. To fuck is to go to the Dark Gods.

Stingo: Let’s go to the Dark Gods! (source: IMDb).

[23] These “women” do not choose their own clothes; as I write in “Borrowed Robes: The Role of ‘Chosen’ Clothing — Part 1: Female Videogame Characters” (2020), videogame women, even active avatars the player can control, are historically “dressed” in skimpy outfits chosen by men or at least in the service of men. We will return to this idea repeatedly in Volume Three.

[24] We will explore the paradoxical horniness of fan fiction (when written by [a]sexual authors) much more in Volume Three, Chapter Three.

An interesting film in its own right. As I write in “Room for Both: Horror and Social Commentary in 3 Japanese Classics” (2018):

[25a] An interesting and intensely GNC film in its own right. As I write in “Room for Both: Horror and Social Commentary in 3 Japanese Classics” (2018):

In Funeral Parade of Roses, we are presented with something altogether different: a “queen,” or man who dresses and acts a woman, including sleeping with men—in 1960s Japan. This seemed largely to involve performances—makeup, body language, upspeak—rather than surgical procedures. Needless to say these persons aren’t always accepted: they skirmish with surly women, whilst their own male lovers uselessly fawn over them from a distance.

Wanting to be different, the protagonist, Peter, walks around, troubled, not simply because he is a queen, but how he became one. Towards the end of the movie, his past is shown, with his mother scolding him fiercely for wearing makeup like a girl. The son explodes, killing his mother—along with an unfamiliar man whilst the two adults are about to have sex. It’s a very violent ordeal, brought to life with terrific blood effects. Peter’s tendency to explode builds, eventually leading him to gouge out his own eyes, like Sophocles’ Oedipus. The gore, here, is equally fabulous, using makeup and prosthetics to rival the sort of digital visual effects showcased in much newer movies.

Being shot in black-and-white, Roses reminded me of a much bloodier version of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). In that movie, Hitchcock used chocolate syrup for its famous kill. I’m pretty sure Matsumoto didn’t, with his actors. Blood is hard to get right (while far from the greatest movie ever filmed, Brian O’Malley’s Let Us Prey [2014] at least manages to). In particular, fake blood in older movies generally looks pretty shoddy. For example, in William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971) it looked way too thick, like ketchup; then again, in newer movies, like Tarantino’s latter-day output Django Unchained (2013) or The Hateful Eight (2015) the blood looks oddly like paint (this is a stylistic choice, not a technical limitation, however). Whatever the reason or method, Matsumoto’s blood looks fabulous; his characters wear white, and their pure clothes are coated in black blood that stains, runs and ruins (source).

[25b] From Adventures in Babysitting (1987).

[26] Phillip Pullman argued this nicely in His Dark Materials (1995-2000) novels. In them, God is an infantilized old man, and the Metatron is a brutal, Zeus-like bully riding around on a chariot. Two sides of the same patriarchal coin: the bully and the enabled, exclusive regressive.

[27] This can’t be a singular event; it needs to target all aspects of society’s heteronormative canon at the same time. It’s not a simple game of tag or one-time exposure (the scapegoat), but a stress test that forces the entire system to change. Doing so is a coordinated balancing act between the destruction of icons and property and labor action internalized at a socio-material level; it is too big a process to ever fully control or supervise so it must be, to some degree, internalized and second-nature.

[28] Think Calvin’s homicidal, memento mori snowmen (source: Thayer Preece Parker’s “15 Best Calvin and Hobbes Snowman Comic Strips,” 2023).

[29] An author doesn’t literally have to be dead for this to happen, either; i.e., the proverbial “death of the author” when we critique and camp Cameron’s canon for sex-positive reasons while Cameron is still physically alive. In relation to the ludo-Gothic BDSM of castles and monsters, this basic idea can be called Gothic counterculture (which Volume Three will continue to explore in relation to living sex workers making their own money and art).

[30] This problem applies to “Hollywood Marxists” who generally profit off their own bigoted monster canon; i.e., Tolkien’s estate, but also Steven King and James Cameron. As I write about King and Cameron in Volume Three:

Yes, Steven King is a weird canonical nerd—profoundly “weird,” but generally playing it safe and not very Marxist-Leninist (let alone anarcho-Communist). Hollywood just loves his monsters, but he profits off them far too much and says far too little in Marxist language to be considered a useful ally. The same goes for Cameron. Even at his most critical (when he was poor) he still pushed the girls around and called the shots; now he’s just a billionaire Marxist franchising “war” as activism but having no shortage of racism against Indigenous Peoples following the 2009 original and its 2022 sequel, The Shape of Water. Much of this has to do with Cameron’s blue-washed, white savior/Indian mentality for his own endless “war,” which ultimately lacks critical bite but makes white-owned companies billions of dollars:

In 2010 Cameron said something that did not exactly help his cause. He had been protesting against the building of the giant Belo Monte hydroelectric dam in the Amazon. The dam’s construction threatened the way of life of the Brazilian Xingu people. While speaking to The Guardian, he said, “A real-life Avatar confrontation is in progress. I felt like I was 130 years back in time watching what the Lakota Sioux might have been saying at a point when they were being pushed and they were being killed and they were being asked to displace and they were being given some form of compensation. This was a driving force for me in the writing of Avatar – I couldn’t help but think that if they [the Lakota Sioux] had had a time-window and they could see the future… and they could see their kids committing suicide at the highest suicide rates in the nation… because they were hopeless and they were a dead-end society – which is what is happening now – they would have fought a lot harder.” Many took that to mean that he was suggesting that the Lakota should have fought their colonizers harder (source: Kshitij Mohan Rawat’s “Native Americans Boycott James Cameron,” 2022).

In short, Pygmalions like Tolkien and Cameron can’t say the quiet part out loud; they just overcompensate with lots and lots of centrist war theatre.

[31] Whose own counterterrorism in Alien: Covenant (above) is something we will continue to examine in Volume Two’s Demon Module; e.g., “Making Demons.”

[32] The men, elves, dwarves and wizards of the West are its guardians, its self-absorbed cops; e.g., Thorin Oakenshield (which Tolkien nicely camps):

“We are met to discuss our plans, our ways, means, policy and devices. We shall soon before the break of day start on our long journey, a journey from which some of us, or perhaps all of us (except our friend and counsellor, the ingenious wizard Gandalf) may never return. It is a solemn moment. Our object is, I take it, well known to us all. To the estimable Mr. Baggins, and perhaps to one or two of the younger dwarves (I think I should be right in naming Kili and Fili, for instance), the exact situation at the moment may require a little brief explanation—” This was Thorin’s style. He was an important dwarf. If he had been allowed, he would probably have gone on like this until he was out of breath, without telling any one there anything that was not known already. But he was rudely interrupted. Poor Bilbo couldn’t bear it any longer. At may never return he began to feel a shriek coming up inside, and very soon it burst out like the whistle of an engine coming out of a tunnel (source).

Conversely Thorin and the dwarves are definitely anti-Semitic caricature; re (the Demon Module’s): “‘Anti-Semitism’ vs ‘antisemitism.’“

This blog post is part of “The Total Codex,” a fourth 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.” The first promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “The Total Codex” shall do the same, but with Volume Zero/the thesis volume (versus “Make It Real” promoting Volume One/the manifesto, which I will release after “The Total Context” completes). 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 “The Total Codex’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Zero is already written/was released on October 2023! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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

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

Picking up where “The ‘Camp Map’: Camping the Canon (opening and part one)” left off…

“Make it Gay,” part two: Camping Tolkien’s Refrain using Metroidvania, or the Map is a Lie: the Quest for Power inside Cameron’s Closed Space (and other shooters) [opening]

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—”Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away” (source).

—the speaker of the poem, “Ozymandias” (1818)

(model and artist: Blxxd Bunny and Persephone van der Waard[1])

First, a six-page 2025 addendum: This portion of the thesis volume is about the argumentation of my thesis argument’s, well, arguments. Think “Metroidvania” as something to apply in a praxial sense; i.e., to history as a living document inside-outside these troubling texts (versus the dead compiling of history, as someone like Jeremy Parish would do). The point of the “camp map,” then, is to camp canon, thus use Metroidvania to escape the historical-material myopia of Capitalist Realism from within; i.e., during the annihilation of the endless desert sands from “Ozymandias” not by sweeping them (and their hypnotic illusions) aside, but from turning them on their head to serve us (workers and nature) using our own levers and peachy globes to do so (re: Archimedes)! Except we can’t really camp the infernal concentric pattern—that of the monomyth/Cycle of Kings resulting from Tolkien’s refrain as having carried over into Cameron’s echo of the Gothic castle (the narrative of the crypt)—until we illustrate Metroidvania as a more consistently Gothic variety of treasure map; i.e., a counterfeit that deliberately puts the map (a technology of conquest) over a double of the good castle explored by a Gothic heroine: the dreaded black castle as the now-lost territory to reclaim through monomythic settler-colonial force (and all the state’s tools) camped by us and ours.

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

Campy or not, the Gothic loves fakes, thus communicates through the ghost of the counterfeit (which the Medusa is); it also loves golems and animation of the inanimate (or vice versa) as uncanny and built palimpsestuously on top of each other during live burial (re: the giant suit of armor). This copycat ruin isn’t the site of some faraway Dark Lord, then; it’s a double of our own home being exposed as imperial, but decayed: a ruin of a ruin of a ruin, often told in flesh as much as stone (above). 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.

So do we become the method, form following function but function determining the flow of power through a corporal aesthetic speaking to castles in the flesh serving as better stewards of nature than past workers demonstrably have: heaven in wildflowers to exhibit the monstrous-feminine upon our own surfaces and within their poetic thresholds, mid-liminal expression; re: “Exhibiting the Monstrous-Feminine Ourselves” (there’s a lot of poetic ideas being tossed around in this addendum, so I recommend checking out the Poetry Module)!

(artist: Crow)

Note: This subchapter is the birthplace of “ludo-Gothic BDSM” as I conceived it, in 2023; i.e., vis-à-vis Metroidvania, the palliative Numinous and similar terms useful to camping the canon (with so much of Western media being about pimping nature as alien during the dialectic of the alien). Here is a starting point we have led back around to, from what became my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus. —Perse, 3/28/2025

The above drawing with Bunny makes for a quick, fun example; i.e., by showing how ludo, or “game,” isn’t restricted to videogames, yet applies a similar “game mentality” (and entropic “pull”) that is nevertheless informed by what make up videogames: their aesthetics and rules of play (with control established through play as something to grant and dress up—meaning during informed labor exchanges calculating risk to illustrate mutual consent, mid-Gothic). As things to negotiate in the material world, these can be adopted outside of the actual game screen; i.e., used for our social-sexual, dialectical-material purposes (re: cultivating the Superstructure, mid-synthesis, during oppositional praxis) by workers employing Goetic poetics wherever the magic circle can be determined: in duality and mid-oscillation (through doubles) to better critique Capitalism vis-à-vis these smaller videogame castles tied to human bodies (and their surrounding territories, from time to time; e.g., the overworld from Zelda, left).

Just as they came from non-videogames, retro-future castles like Metroidvania can be influenced by the artwork we create as interacting back and forth over space-time on multiple registers; i.e., with the imaginary past as half-real. As campy and dungeon-like, unto ourselves, all are informed by past ideas of the retro-future (which Metroidvania have become, on and offstage). Per these holistic bodies, a great deal of poetic (re)invention and transference occur when taking something from a particular visit to a particular place and putting it in one’s own exhibit; i.e., dressed up as a place unto itself (re: the unheimlich) through Gothic placeholders/dead metaphors. Such hauntological borrowings provide a cryptomimetic methodology that is commonplace in the Gothic mode—with Gothic novels being inspired by actual Gothic castles, but also novels inspiring real-life buildings in the same tradition as reversed (e.g., Walpole’s Strawberry Hill and Otranto). So we’ll definitely do the same when camping canon ourselves: from Metroidvania to our own bodies’ emblematizing ludo-Gothic BDSM “on the Aegis.”

Simply put, all the world’s a stage, including the bodies of the workers of the world. We camp canon/make something gay because we must, and doing so remains easy enough to do when necessity mothers invention; i.e., to camp canon, make a porno—or at least what the modern world would consider “pornographic,” despite ancient/medieval standards being arguably far different than our own. Rape and disempowerment are likewise common themes, in ancient art (or art evoking “ancient” times). So the best way to challenge profit (thus have the whore’s revenge) is to put “rape” in quotes, playing with it (often with some degree of comedy, however dry). But in keeping with darkness visible, exploitation and liberation sit cryptomimetically inside the same sphere’s larger cryptonymy process, thus hauntology and chronotope informing abjection as something to further or reverse, mid-kayfabe; e.g., Giambologna’s “Rape of Sabine” statue (1540): quite the dumper on that damsel (Gaia’s giga ass)! Wrestle this!

(source)

Our focus, here, will be on Metroidvania, but such biomechanical morphology is not discrete between resident and residence (or media types concerning such matters). Such subversion, then, extends to any media (and monomythic qualities to said media) you could think of; i.e., heroes are monsters and men are typically rapists in classical art; re: versus nature as monstrous-feminine being something to embrace or reject in ironic and unironic voices: the state is straight, and blames women (or those treated as women) like “dark” and chaotic, corruptible whores to subjugate into dutiful virgins through force (re: the pimp’s controlling of sex through force to maintain the state as a patriarchal body with female elements, which capital as a concentric structure literally builds over).

Furthermore, Metroidvania (and most media) include some element of Amazonomachia as being a classic blame game versus the Medusa; re: kettling the whore and blaming her for her own rape. Regarding said gaslight, Amazonian propaganda (or really any copaganda) relies on displaced rape threats to codify state cops/victims through DARVO and obscurantism pacifying the populace (often women and children, but generally the state’s middle class as it would have existed inside different historical periods and between them; re: gentrify and decay rebellion through strange appetites tokenizing such beings and their causes for concern). Reversing abjection involves cryptonymy highlighting rape; i.e., as being common knowledge since ancient times, but repressed in ways that—per the Medusa into her present-day offshoots—have only recently started to come to light regarding monomyth apologia for rape without quotes (re: Elizabeth Hadley’s 2024 “More than a Monster: Medusa Misunderstood,” which I cite in “Always a Victim“). The whore’s paradox is exposure; i.e., to speak out against genocide while armored through theatre as a voice that reduces the societal risk of rape over time (with canonical versions of the whore being things to catch, cage and kill by the hero as much as villain: the alien novelty to rape for propaganda purposes).

So when the Man (and his Box) come around, show him your Aegis! Testify to rape through fabrications thereof; re (from Volume One’s “Healing from Rape”):

The Western world is generally a place that testifies to its own traumas by fabricating them; i.e., as markers of sovereignty that remain historically unkind to specific groups that nevertheless survive within them as ghosts of unspeakable events linked to systemic abuse. Trauma, in turn, survives through stories corrupted by the presence of said abuse. There is a home resembling a castle, where a ghost—often of a woman—lurks inside having been met with a sorry fate (source).

Become the thing that cannot be raped—a symbol that, per Creed’s terrifying Gorgon, strikes fear into the hearts of men and, per me, pushes during revolutionary cryptonymy (and its buffers; e.g., phone screens/camera lenses, next page) into the hearts of token forces imitating said men in bad faith: vis-à-vis the Protestant ethic, demonizing the marginalized in pursuit of profit across all modular territories; e.g., Jade Retrograde, a cis woman, attacking me, a trans woman, in bad faith (source skeet, vanderWaardart: March 28th, 2025)! So did I have to call for aid, which answered from people I’ve worked with before:

(source skeet, reupload, vanderWaardart: March 28th, 2025)

In short, it’s harder to attack us when we’re united against bad actors (and their spurious monopolies). So use your labor and poetry to your advantage, having learned from older forms (re: the Wisdom of the Ancients); turn that anger into something didactic, mid-liminal-expression; turn it into a Pandora’s fortress that reverses state terror/counterterror! Medusa cannot be killed, only transformed (re: “Psychosexual Martyrdom“), and her Communist Numinous regularly reflects in paradoxically smaller avatars: Galatea punching up into Pygmalion’s balls! “Put your mysterium tremendum in my Uncanny Valley?” BALLS DESTROYED! (set to music; e.g., “331Erock’s “Robin Hood | Prince of Thieves Meets Metal,” 2025). The paradox is to be “ravished” by something stupendously awesome, but not actually dangerous; re: our de facto education teaching mutual consent through its playful temptation and paradoxical “breaking” of rules made to be broken, mid-illustration (a highly productive idea evoked playfully from Burke’s Sublime onto Otto’s Numinous, Lovecraft’s Weird, Camus’ Absurd, and so on)! Medusa lives, choking canon blue through a reclaimed body language of mastery! Take such things back; make it your power by making it using what you got: Medusa’s orchard the state wants to harvest by dehumanizing you through the language of monsters! Don’t let them; map out such “lands” to conquer them (or be conquered) as thou wilt! The Earth is yours to transform back into Hell! Don’t tempt the Fates; become them, giving Medusa hugs!

(artist: Melkteeth)

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First, we should probably define what Metroidvania are more than we already have. At their most basic level, Metroidvania are Gothic castles that you map out and conquer not simply through Faustian bargains, but in search of Promethean power that has little good to say about power in the classical, heroic sense (which makes them an excellent place to search for iconoclastic potential/reversals). And yet they are also famously misunderstood and ubiquitous, a label to slap onto nothing or everything and then fuss about while getting lost inside. Before we do the same, I’d like to go over some specialized research terms, so you’re not just relying on personal anecdotes (and images of muses and friends, above and below).

(artist: Temptress Vera Dominus)

The volume has already supplied the definition for ergodic (“nontrivial effort being required to traverse the text”; i.e., “more than one route, or way to traverse well-trod paths”). Here are some more terms besides, including the full definition for Metroidvania (and various interrelated terms already introduced in “Essential Terms”):

ludo-Gothic BDSM

My 2023 combining of an older academic term, “ludic-Gothic” (Gothic videogames), with sex-positive BDSM theatrics as a potent means of camp. The emphasis is less about “how can videogames be Gothic” and more how the playfulness in videogames is commonly used to allow players to camp canon in and out of videogames as a form of negotiated power exchange established in playful, game-like forms (theatre and rules). Commonly gleaned through Metroidvania as I envision it, but frankly performed with any kind of Gothic poetics, ludo-Gothic BDSM playfully attains what I call “the palliative Numinous,” or the Gothic quest for self-destructive power as something to camp (the Numinous, per Rudolph Otto, being a divine force or numen tied less to the natural world [the Sublime] and more to civilization as derelict, dead and alien; re: the mysterium tremendum): a Communist Numinous/the Medusa per Barbara Creed, but not tokenized (re: the Amazon) while dancing with Hogle’s ghost of the counterfeit to reverse abjection (thus profit) and shrink the state!

ludic-Gothic

Gothic videogames. “The ludic-gothic is created when the Gothic is transformed by the video game medium, and is a kindred genre to survival horror” (source: Laurie Taylor’s “Gothic Bloodlines in Survival Horror Gaming,” 2009).

Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism (abridged)

Coined by me, Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism is the deliberate, pointed critique of capital/Capitalism and the state using a unique marriage of Gothic/queer/game theory and semi-Marxist (an-Com) ideas synthesized campily by sex-positive workers during proletarian praxis: developing systemic catharsis, mid-liminal expression during praxial opposition, using ludo-Gothic BDSM and palliative-Numinous dialogs (e.g., Metroidvania) [refer to “Paratextual Documents” for the full definition, as well as all of the core Gothic theories I use].

the palliative Numinous

A term I designed to describe the pain-/stress-relieving effect achieved from, and relayed through, intense Gothic poetics and theatrics of various kinds (my preference being Metroidvania castle-narrative vis-à-vis Bakhtin’s chronotope applied to videogames out from novels and cinema and into Metroidvania; re: my master’s thesis).

the closed space

A self-contained, claustrophobic, Gothic parallel space—generally a site of seemingly awesome power, age and danger (usually occupied by something sinister, if only the viewer’s piqued curiosity/imperiled imagination): churches, abbeys, monasteries, castles, mad laboratories, (war/urban crime scenes), insane asylums, etc.

The term is reworked from Cynthia Griffin Wolff’s concept of “enclosed space” from her 1979 essay, “The Radcliffean Gothic Model: A Form for Feminine Sexuality”

Now a Gothic novel presents us with a different kind of situation. It is but a partially realized piece of fiction: it is formulaic (a moderately sophisticated reader already knows more or less exactly what to expect in its plot); it has little or no sense of particularized “place,” and it offers a heroine with whom only a very few would wish to identify. Its fascination lies in the predictable interaction between the heroine and the other main characters. The reader identifies (broadly and loosely) with the predicament as a totality: the ritualized conflict that takes place among the major figures of a Gothic fiction (within the significant boundaries of that “enclosed space”) represents in externalized form the conflict any single woman might experience (source).

in that I’ve extended it beyond the purely psychological models (and psyches) of a traditional Gothic readership (white, cis-het women) and now-outmoded school of thought (the Female Gothic of the 1970s). I do so in connection to how the Gothic mode generally employs deeply confusing and overwhelming time-spaces (chronotopes)—what Manuel Aguirre, in 2008, referred to as “Geometries of Terror” (exhibit 64b/64c)—that, along with their ambiguous, perplexing inhabitants (exhibit 64a), phenomenologically disrupt the monomyth in pointedly deconstructive, hauntological ways: the Promethean (self-destructive) hero’s quest as something that undermines patrilineal descent and dynastic power exchange/hereditary rites in a never-ending cycle of war crimes, lies and blood sacrifice (a fearful critique of medieval feudalism).

(source)

Metroidvania[2] (abridged)

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,” 2021).

Our basic aim for this subchapter is to camp canon as a mapped-out space for simulating war in a theatrical sense. This includes Tolkien’s refrain as having gentrified war through a “new Eden,” and Cameron’s refrain inside the Metroidvania, modeled directly after Aliens in Metroid. Seeing as both maps translated quite well to videogames, we’ll be focusing primarily on videogames ourselves as an iconoclastic space with which to do (or at least inspire) our work. We’ll also highlight some differences between the two types when deciding what to investigate and what to leave alone.

For example, Tolkien’s refrain was generally an open world mapped for conquest, usually treating the dungeon as the final step towards the quest for power as something to acquire. Except we want to start inside the castle dungeon and focus on the quest for power as something to interrogate through the seeking of performative trauma. Our means of interrogation is camp; i.e., camping the monomyth/Cycle of Kings that emerged from Tolkien’s refrain in the classic Gothic tradition: the castle. Serving as parallel space/capitalist chronotope, canonical castles are filled with rape play that we camp through our own performances and recreations. As such, we’ll be using the closed space of Gothic castles that split off with Cameron’s refrain from Tolkien’s: a particular kind of abortive offshoot[3a]—the ergodic, closed space of the Metroidvania, but also what it contains—to play at rape (and war) through ludo-Gothic BDSM, castle-narrative and the palliative Numinous; i.e., in campy ways that translate back and forth to any medium as a healthy means of negotiating unequal power exchange while also interrogating its historical-material forms. We’re camping the canonical performance (thus function) of the castle, making it gay from within; i.e., by going where power when summoning it in castle-like ways; re: castles in the flesh being as much castle-like bodies versus body-like castles, mise-en-abyme. Either can be camped, letting us interrogate power through the Metroidvania as a simulation of a Gothic castle (the Medusa and her utterly stacked and delicious body takes many forms, next page)!

(artist: Rae of Sunshine)

To interrogate power and trauma, you either must go where it is, or bring the mountain to Muhammad by personifying it in a Gothic, palliative-Numinous sense to then interrogate (re: the mommy dom, but also her cake and pie[3b], above). So we must first give it shape, however that may be: “She might mighty.” Once personified or otherwise morphologized in castled anisotropic body language, the critique must become second-nature—a way of existing through the most direct and human (thus efficient) ways of communicating the powers that be: (a)sexuality, gender, music, theatre, and so on, during ludo-Gothic BDSM. We’ll be camping the quest for power where power is centralized, which Tolkien largely tried to sidestep on his own questing formulas and maps and which Cameron jumped headlong into. As previously stated, this will take two parts to accomplish: one to unpack my own real-life quest to understand power as something to map, reassemble and interrogate (so you can understand my thought process and what guided it towards where we are now), and the other to apply this playing with power to our poetic camping of the quest in our own lives, our own creations/performances that interrogate power on maps/castles that resemble Tolkien’s or Cameron’s (on paper) but play out very differently in practice.

Onto part one!

“The Map Is a Lie”: the Quest for Power inside Cameron’s Closed Space—Origins and Lineage

“Ah, you think darkness is your ally? You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, molded by it. I didn’t see the light until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but blinding!”

—Bane, The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Similar to other heroic adventures, the Metroidvania is about exploring powerful spaces and their monsters, but the similarities begin to diverge insofar as the Metroidvania is less a shooter strictly about killing monsters and more of an interrogation—of unequal power exchange as something to perform by a female hero inside a futile, decaying proposition of itself—that lacks any sense of certain victory normally achieved through a run-of-the-mill male rite of passage. Obviously we’re aiming to camp Metroidvania, too, but we need to be aware of what makes Cameron’s closed space unique: less outdoors and Sublime and more indoors and Numinous. There can be a wide shot establishing the castle exterior and location (normally at the very beginning before braving its interior), but most of the story takes place inside the castle walls:

(artist: François Baranger)

Before the thesis proper, my essay “Notes on Power” discussed the paradox as being the performative nature of power doubled, including monsters but also their decaying lairs as monumental sites of immense, god-like power dressed up through the Gothic language of the imaginary past; the Metroidvania is a Gothic castle full of Gothic monsters, but also Gothic ghosts (echoes) of older and older castles reaching out from novels and cinema into videogames. Regardless of the medium, though, Clint Hockings’ adage, “Seek power and you will progress” (source: “Ludonarrative Dissonance,” 2007) means something altogether different depending how you define power as something to seek, including unequal arrangements thereof. As a child, teenager and woman, I sought it through the palliative Numinous in Gothic castles of the Neo-Gothic tradition carried over into videogames (which I learned about in reverse: videogames, followed by the Numinous/mysterium tremendum as introduced to me by Dr. David Calonne[4]). 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).

This intense, life-long process started when I was young and continued into adulthood. So I’d like to chronicle it as such before we dive into Metroidvania themselves (whose application of this academic theory and history I’ll be responding to in part two of the subchapter):

Before we proceed, take heed: This portion of the book is written in defense of my own studies, but also to voice the academic struggles and frustrations I faced while trying to combine the Gothic, speedrunning and Metroidvania—a then-cutting-edge proposition hindered by academic big-wigs[5] living in their own little worlds and interested more in carving out a name for themselves (through “their own” ideas and theories) than giving me a leg up. Surrounded by the shadow of these self-interested giants and their all-important work, I found academia—especially at the graduate level, on the British side of the pond—to be a thoroughly lonesome, smothering affair: not a friendly place of shared ideas, but of guarded, medieval competition. In short, I absolutely loved the research and subject matter, but increasingly came to hate where it took place (thus, why I wrote this book in a room of one’s own). Take that as you will.

Also, this “instructional detour” contains some lengthier quotes from my undergraduate/graduate/postgraduate work; with them, I broke Craig Dionne’s rule about long-ass block quotes, but I’m also citing books that a) most people outside of academia probably do not own, and b) include sections that are incredibly germane to the entirety of Sex Positivity. —Perse, back in 2023

First, childhood. Our journey started when I was small. I watched Alien when I was nine and fell in love with the heroine in the castle alongside the monster, the alarms, the smoke, the figurative and literal chaos of it all. Its Numinous spoke to the hidden girl inside my closeted childhood self as “on a ledge” (re: the “call of the void”): paradoxically most alive, most in control during a theatrical case of calculated risk-reduction (versus actually suffering for my art or standing on a cliff in real life) that lies adjacent to personal suicide ideation and revenge/rape fantasies stemming from childhood abuse. Therein lies the tightrope of medicine and dogma that Gothic spaces and monsters provide in equal measure (a bit like Zofloya’s poison). Classically the diegetic heroine’s perfect past is doubled by the Gothic castle as an expression of power beyond just her or her sense of self and home. As Audronė Raškauskienė writes in Gothic Fiction: The Beginnings:

The castle, Bakhtin remarks, as a literary reminder of an ancestral or Gothic past of “dynastic primacy and transfer of heroic rights” [actually, it’s “hereditary rites,” though I do the same thing in this book, too] is overlaid or criss-crossed with meanings from legend, fairy-tale, history, architecture, and an eighteenth-century aesthetizing discourse of the sublime. Montague Summers’s note that the real protagonist of the Gothic novel is the castle emphasizes a very special feature of that structure: in a sense, the Gothic castle is ‘alive’ with a power that perplexes its visitors. It tends to have an irregular shape, its lay-out is very complex and mysterious, whether because of an actual distortion of the whole structure or because a part of it remains unknown. In Manuel Aguirre’s words, “this basic distortion yields mystery, precludes human control and endows the building with a power beyond its strictly physical structure: the irregular mysterious house is, like the vampire, a product of the vitalistic conception of nature.”

In addition to this, Radcliffe’s setting (the castle) derives its claim to sublimity also from its being “not-here, not-now, an Other place, an Other time.” Critics have often remarked on the choice of the exotic, the foreign, the barbaric as the background for and source of Gothic thrills. In other words, the Gothic castle is the world of the Numinous. As David Durant notes, “the ruined castles and abbeys are graphic symbols of the disintegration of a stable civilization; their underground reaches are the hiding places for all those forces which cannot stand the light of day.”

In Radcliffe’s novels the Gothic castle is in the first place an anti-home, a nightmare version of the heroine’s perfect past, in which many of the elements of her home are exaggerated and replayed in a Gothic form. The Gothic space, which provides a scene for the most dramatic events in the novel, is totally different from the other spaces – indicating heroine’s home. The gigantic size of the castle is opposed to smallness of heroine’s home, its labyrinthine confusion stands in opposition to the elegant and tasteful arrangement of her home, dark and dim castles replace cheerful and full of sunshine homes, the feeling of constant danger and lack of security in the castles is contrasted with the feeling of safety in heroine’s home, etc. The heroine’s parents are replaced by Gothic substitutes or Gothic opposites. The castle hides some family secret the revelation of which usually helps the heroine to disclose her own identity. At the same time, the Gothic castle is the place of confinement in a literal and figurative sense. Moreover, the castle may be interpreted as the image of the body and, eventually, as the heroine’s secret self (source)

but Alien never shows us the Radcliffean perfect home because its retro-future is canceled in a suitably antiquated Gothic unlike Radcliffe’s: the flying castle as the revived palimpsest for the imaginary past of the Utopian sci-fi it is eclipsing. Its dark sphere is a suitably neoliberal critique/allegory of workers being fucked over by the company. Ridley’s impactful movie wasn’t a videogame, but its castle-narrative would become a popular-if-recuperated refrain in the general Metroidvania corpus:

(exhibit 1a1a1h2a3: There’s a Gothic academic critic I was forced to read at MMU who wrote a piece called “Future Horror (the Redundancy of Gothic)” [1999] that argues for the “redundancy” of older Gothic forms because he has a fear-boner for futurist ones. By his wacky logic [and complete misunderstanding of the Gothic and especially its (gay-anarcho) Communist applications] Alien should be completely “redundant” [god, just reading that word next to Alien pisses me off]. Except, the movie hasn’t aged a day. Indeed, in spite of its seemingly Freudian pastiche, it is suitably “timeless” as a Gothic-Communist work because its tremendous Satanic potential [of the campy, Miltonian sort] has only continued to appreciate in value during the Internet Age; e.g., the xenomorph not as a cosmic rapist, but as a thoroughly trans, intersex, non-binary deity announced by the doubled castle itself as a tremendous allegory and revelation for genderqueer sentiment [something we will return to incessantly in Volume Two and somewhat in Volume Three; e.g., exhibits 38b4, 51a, 51b2, and 64c]—i.e., our existence as “sinful” in the eyes of the very people conditioned by Cartesian dualism to fear and kill us, but also present us as dehumanized, unironic sex demons.)

To be entirely honest, I loved Alien and Aliens’ operative, Gothic spaces, as a child (and their Metroidvania doubles), but as I grew and matured, I decidedly fell out of love with Cameron’s unironic adoration for the TERF-y, cop-like double of Ripley (and white-savior “worshipping” of the dark monarch/Medusa-esque Alien Queen as her evil double—two mothers on the operative stage forced by Cameron to catfight in defense of a cis-het woman’s God-given right: not to have romance or sex, but to have surrogate “good babies” for the state) and decidedly camped myself within Scott’s far more Communist/Satanic variant. Because 1979 Ripley emerged on the neoliberal edge and not in its dead center (when videogames were experiencing a renaissance post-1983’s Atari Crash), that variant always had more potential to critique neoliberalism by creating its heroine as doubled in future Gothic spaces (videogames[6] or otherwise): our revolutionary doubles (who have the same dislike for the company as being like a giant bank of stolen profit, thus more inclined to rob it, Robin-Hood-style; i.e., the Western or the detective-story allegory* of unsanctioned redistributions of wealth from the elite to the poor). My focus is Metroidvania because it’s what I grew up with and mastered/wrote this book adjacent to/partially around: the immense and powerful lie of revolutionary doubles (versus Orwell’s harmful, pejorative double-speak, written by a fascist apologist who betrayed members of the British Communist party in service of the Imperium; in short, he was a government snitch, mole and cop).

*Akin to the hero with pathos but revolutionary class character and culture—e.g., Liam Neeson’s soliloquy from Honest Thief (2020): “Something to fight for, not for money or an adrenaline rush, but a desire for love”; except, it’s framed in the Gothic at large as an evocation of reality as tremendous, over-the-top. Neeson himself continues, “I lied (about the bank jobs) but not about what I did for you, for us.” Something of a Gothic antique himself, he’s like a throwback from another time that was and wasn’t; i.e., like Walpole’s simulacrum castle of the marriage between the Ancient Romance and novel (a story of everyday events):

As Walter Scott pointed out in the critical introduction that he wrote for James Ballantyne’s 1811 edition of the novel, the connections between Otranto as narrative and Strawberry Hill as building are manifold: in the former, “Mr Walpole resolved to give the public a specimen of the Gothic style adapted to modern literature, as he had already exhibited its application to modern architecture.” Just as Walpole the architect had taken care to combine the requirements of modern convenience with “the rich, varied, and complicated tracery and carving of the ancient cathedral,” so, in Otranto, it was his aim to combine the “imposing tone of chivalry” and “marvellous turn of incident” of the ancient romance with the “accurate exhibition of human character” to be found in the modern novel. To read Otranto, Scott concluded, was to experience the same degree of supernatural awe and terror that one felt when spending a solitary night in an old, tapestry-strewn Gothic mansion. Walpole’s ingenuity lay in his extracting in Otranto the sensations of melancholy and supernatural awe that, though easily elicited in truly ancient piles, were “almost impossible” to evoke in “such a modern Gothic structure” as Strawberry Hill, thus “attaining in composition, what, as an architect, he must have felt beyond the power of his art” (source: Dale Townshend’s “Horace Walpole’s Enchanted Castles” from Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance and the Architectural Imagination, 1760-1840, 2019).

Such Gothic in-betweens aren’t restricted to a particular genre/subgenre; it echoes well into the present; e.g., not just Liam Neeson’s many alter-egos that, somehow I think, reflect his streetwise life, but also James Cameron’s Terminator (and Metroidvania, which I promise we’ll get into shortly). His self-titled “tech-noir” is a Gothic Western, which combines Spielberg’s truck chase from Duel (1971)/non-stop killing machine from Jaws (1975) with the John Ford Western, Stagecoach (1939), and the damsel-in-stress-turned-hardboiled-detective inside the 1980s version of a Grimm fairytale, “black detective story”/”black novel’s” masked ball; the danger disco of the Tech-Noir dance floor occupied by the white damsel, the Germanized demon lover and the dashing-but-slightly-rugged banditti hero (exhibit 15b1); i.e., as a renovated, technophobic opera, updated for the present space and time (the fear of nuclear war and post-WW2 inheritance anxiety experienced by white people as the most privileged class worked within the ghost of the counterfeit).

In other words, it’s your usual Gothic “timelessness” that swaps out aesthetic and musical styles, borrowing from the larger Gothic tradition to emulate[7] similar architectural and praxial liminalities in the author’s idea of a musical, thoroughly dramatic and dream-like Gothic space: for Cameron, a double of 1984 Los Angeles interacting with it until the two become hopelessly mixed (vis-à-vis with themselves, but also older reflections like Alien [exhibit 1a1a1h2a3, above] as having gone into the same melting pot). Power is summoned and interrogated in the usual Walpolean sense: its seeking inside of itself as cobbled together out of old parts to evoke the Numinous.

(exhibit 1a1a1h2a3a: I don’t really care what Fred Botting says. The Terminator is Gothic par excellence, and evokes a profoundly transformative and critical power within Cameron’s nightmare zone while punching through the membrane to inform other mediums. As I write in my critical review of Botting’s “Future Horror” [footnotes from the original essay]:

Botting confidently asserts that, in modern times, ‘the terrors of the night are replaced by the terrors of the light’^[8]—as though this is an idea exclusive to that temporal region. Yet, Lewis or McCarthy both seem perfectly happy exploring those naked realities Bottling attributes exclusively to our own present.

In The Monk, Sister Agnes and Father Ambrosio exemplify this. The former describes the unveiled horror of a present moment, not some obscurity of the long-dead past, when she says, ‘…often have I at waking found my fingers ringed with the long worms which bred in the corrupted flesh of my infant’^[9] Likewise, the latter, tortured by the Inquisition, tries to deny the existence of a God, but laments, ‘those truths, once [my] comfort, now presented themselves before [me] in the clearest light’.^[10] Manifest in said light, there is always some present horror for any writer to explore. These respective anxieties aren’t in the future. There’s no linear progression leading to a bright, over-exposed annihilation. Gothic fiction isn’t redundant because the past and future are in the present, and always have been.

Thus, I can hardly agree with Botting when he writes, ‘the future produced in the void of the present [is] both horrifying and thrilling. But it is far from Gothic’.^[11] In her book, The Rise of the Gothic Novel (1995), Maggie Kilgour writes, ‘the gothic is thus a nightmare vision of a modern world made up of detached individuals [… where] “normal” human relationships are defamiliarized and critiqued by being pushed to destructive extremes’.^[12] By calling Gothic redundant, yet championing the skeleton under the endlessly exchanged ‘skin suits’, Botting simultaneously abjures and evokes the same Gothic tenets recognized by Kilgour.

Furthermore, the Gothic mode has always addressed present anxieties with ‘timeless’ aesthetics. It’s not as though corpses, skeletons and ghosts are confined to a specific century or retrospectively-defined era. Ghosts exist in our minds, and thus can plague us from any direction; whether hailing from the past or future, this fear will be felt in the present, regardless. Afraid of the skin-trading skeleton, Botting is like Lewis’ Sister Agnes ‘Shuddering at the past, anguished by the present, and dreading the future’.^[13] She has her potion to swallow. So does he: ‘…peel off the artificial skin and there is no organic substance [nor history] to the sexy killing machine from the bright light of the future’.^[14] Yet, his metal, terminator skeleton is still a skeleton, and ‘[falls] into the region of time and suffering’.^[15]

Since both past and future live together in the present, and always do, it’s a gross misstep for Botting to extricate necrophobia from the so-called ‘redundant’ past of conventional Gothic fiction. After all, one could just as easily interpret a skeleton to be an omen, suggesting what Fredric Jameson might describe as ‘merely the future of one moment of what is now our own past [… yet whose] multiple mock futures [transform] our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come’.^[16] Whatever the future is, it certainly doesn’t exclusively constitute Botting’s idea of the conventional past he desires, in order to make his point. Real or imagined, skeletons—ghosts or otherwise—aren’t readily consigned to man-made realms; they ignore boundaries [source].

Similar to Frederic Jameson but even more so, Botting seeks to discount the “boring and exhausted paradigm” of older fictions in favor of something seemingly glitzier. For one, did he ever watch The Terminator? It’s not exactly shiny and bright [courtesy of Adam Greenberg’s dark and gritty night photography]. Botting has always irked me because his arguments as an accommodated Gothicist seem oddly married to Jameson’s boner for de-Gothicized science fiction; i.e., divorced from their critical power by excising a huge amount of the aesthetic/nostalgia, thus its critical power in proletarian forms. This obviously includes Metroidvania’s crumbling castles and their palimpsests, the Krell’s abode from Forbidden Planet [1955], Hadley’s Hope from Aliens [1986] or the Luminoth’s Sanctuary Fortress from Metroid Prime Two[17] [2007] as previously inspired; i.e., by the same creative, operatic mode whose musical, fairytale-meets-mad-science “rape castles” Ridley Scott, Ann Radcliffe or Horace Walpole worked within:

Much of what Botting would try and colonize through his own academic claptrap just so happens to be my expertise. So yeah, no, dude. I think you’re dead fucking wrong about “Gothic redundancy.”)

The Terminator, Metroid, Alien(s) or any of the above stories (and their mediums) might seem “unoriginal,” except originality really isn’t the point because the problem nor its potential solution (Capitalism/the Gothic) isn’t original. Despite its explosive and apparent falsehoods, the Gothic at large is more honest this way than dividing them to tell doubled, canonical variants, whose class character is passively and actively dormant. And like the explicitly Gothic variant of the Western or noir, none of this is clean inside our own praxis and poetics; i.e., our own lives remain full of fictional stories that rub off on us (and our own work) but also speak to our inherited and lived trauma as something to express through borrowed conventions, locations and aesthetics: their twists and turns, double crosses, ambushes, dying of shame, true love, black pearls (toxic wealth), big explosions, and tremendous, fortress-sized/-shaped fabrications (e.g., the corrupt FBI agent from Honest Thief is a big clue to the rotten structures of their time relayed in theatrical form, just as Radcliffe’s Father Schedoni was a clue to her status quo’s corruption: the intentionally displaced corruption of an authority figure—i.e., he wasn’t a “real priest, a real cop”; he was from “Italy[18]“). Somewhere in this Gothic mess is the truth, meaning “a poetic way out of the bourgeois’ nightmare myopia”: its fictional extensions of real-world Capitalism’s scarcity and death, harmful lies, unironic war and rape. If we want to escape Capitalism, we have to alter our material conditions (reclaim the Base); this starts with the Superstructure as something to recultivate through our own Gothic poetics—their iconoclastic, multimedia expressions of unequal power as sex-positive and class-conscious. This means we can’t just to go into Gothic castles for pure, escapist fun, but must do so to retrieve/reify what is useful when synthesizing proletarian praxis as something to disseminate back into Gothic Communism, the movement; i.e., anything useful to camping canon stolen from Metroidvania and its cinematic and novelized forebears (re: Aliens and The Hobbit, Otranto). We have to learn from the past by transforming its canonical depictions to avoid repeating Capitalism’s unironic genocides.

This brings us not just to my adulthood but my postgraduate work on ludo-Gothic BDSM, which in 2017 was met with its own barriers. Working under David Calonne, I was only just learning about the Numinous vis-à-vis Rudolph Otto and H.P. Lovecraft and came across an article by Lilia Melani, “Otto on the Numinous” (2003), citing the Gothic as the quest for the Numinous: “It has been suggested that Gothic fiction originated primarily as a quest for the mysterium tremendum” (source). Something about it appealed to my then-closeted kinkster as have previously been titillated by Cameron, Lovecraft and Nintendo (there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write), but also the videogames I was playing at the time: Metroidvania[19] (shortly before I went overseas, my best friend Ginger recommended Axiom Verge and Hollow Knight to me, which I eventually made the topic of my master’s thesis). Eager to go to grad school and learn more about this exciting thing called “the Numinous,” I looked for places that taught “the Gothic” and was directed by various educators to MMU. Upon going overseas, I swiftly collided painfully against various cultural barriers when trying to express myself (and my inherited, lived trauma) through the Gothic mode as something to relay in academic language. The whole ordeal became counterproductive and traumatic in its own right, requiring me to voice my concerns regarding said baggage in connection to the larger systemic traumas I was seeking to express and overcome; i.e., by facing my own painful past in its totality. This meant coming up with a solution through ludo-Gothic BDSM, which in turn meant forming it into a teachable method for this book; but I first had to deal with my unprocessed trauma from my brief, invalidating stint in academia (four years, from 2014 to 2018, not including submitting to academic journals, attending conferences and applying for PhD programs, which lasted another year).

For me, Gothic media more broadly is cryptomimetic (writing about the ghosts between words), but also whose undead mode of expression is embroiled within academic areas of study that yield hermeneutic limitations due to recency biases and disdain for a holistic approach by academic bigwigs. For instance, I noticed these limitations myself when trying to marry the Gothic to videogames in my own graduate work as cutting-edge. It was a tactic my supervisors and academic superiors resisted, simply because videogames were either totally outside of their realm of experience, or “Metroidvania” wasn’t something that had been academically connected to games within their own fields. That is, speedrunning as a practice/documentary subject was just taking off online in 2018 (Twitch had only existed since 2011); likewise, “ludic-Gothic” wasn’t even a decade-old term at the time, was something that ambitious academics strove to stake new claims within while leaving much to be desired.

For example, the same year I wrote my thesis on Metroidvania, Bernard Perron would sum up the broader Gothic rush in videogame academia in The World of Scary Games: A Study in Videoludic Horror (2019) sans mentioning Metroidvania once:

Horror scholars such as Taylor, Kirkland, Niedenthal, and Krzywinska have therefor come to contextualize videogames in the older tradition of the Gothic fiction, “one of survival horror’s parents,” as Taylor states in “Gothic Bloodlines in Survival Horror Gaming” (2009). Furthermore, the latter even coined a new term to highlight this origin: “The ludic-gothic is created when the Gothic is transformed by the video game medium, and is a kindred genre to survival horror” […] Video games remediate many aspects of Gothic poetics: [the prevention of mastery, obscured or unreliable visions, scattering of written texts in typical Gothic locations and their lost histories, the encounter and use of anachronistic technologies, etc] (source).

Not only does Perron make no mention of Metroidvania at all, neither do any of the other scholars he cites; nor did my supervisors know what Metroidvania were when I was researching it (nor I, with me finally settling on a concrete definition in 2021; re: the “Mazes and Labyrinths” abstract). Indeed, Metroidvania—despite being an older genre than survival horror[20]—remains a thoroughly underrepresented area of Gothic videogame studies, and Gothic videogames remain ripe for continued study within our own lives. Indeed, I had to connect the two myself when recognizing a knowledge gap regarding Metroidvania as cryptomimetic media within videogame studies at large; and I have continued to do so as a postgrad writing about mazes and labyrinths in Metroidvania; i.e., as a niche area of study to expand upon within my own daily life beyond academia—by writing about or illustrating Metroidvania outside of conferences, but also interviewing Metroid speedrunners for fun in my “Mazes and Labyrinths” compendium (which we’ll give an example of a little deeper into the subchapter).

Note; re: For a full, up-to-date history of Metroidvania and my formulation of it after Covid’s lockdown period, refer to my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus. —Perse, 3/28/2025

(exhibit 1a1a1h2a3b: Artist, top-right: Alessandro Constantini. Bo Burnham [top-right] demonstrates how reflections on the world involve an endless creative process, one whose mise-en-abyme fits comfortably within cryptomimesis as a meta-reflection on Gothic poetics and its narrative of the crypt: my undergrad/graduate/postgraduate academic work as something to revisit, think about, and reapply to the real world beyond just conferences [bottom-left and -right: papers for Sheffield Gothic and the International Gothic Association] but also interacting with Metroidvania themselves being remade by artists like Constantini—i.e., older “ghosts” to chase down and interrogate, including ghost of ourselves.

For example, when writing this exhibit, my partner and I watched the video presentation for a 2019 conference paper I wrote and recorded for Sheffield Gothic’s Reimagining the Gothic with a Vengeance, Vol 5: Returns, Revenge, Reckonings: “‘More My Speed’: The Tempo of Gothic Affect in a Ludic Framework.” I hadn’t watched the video since I uploaded it, but doing so reminded me of some useful ideas I hadn’t thought about in a long time. It was also like beholding a younger-looking but ultimately older version of myself:

[source: Me in the accompanying video to “More My Speed,” which I sent to Sheffield Gothic because I couldn’t fly overseas.] 

As I haven’t written academically for years, it felt a bit surreal [and fun] to investigate a “ghost” of my former self and listen what it had to say: 

Inside the gameworld, on-screen, different speeds are displayed by player motion relative to the gameworld and its creatures. There is speed of confrontation (horror) and speed of the reveal (terror) […] There is speed of action, which includes exploration, combat, and escape; these are tied to the style of the game’s design. There is also speed of death: As Raškauskienė writes, “for Burke, terror – fear of pain – was a terror mixed with a paradoxical delight. Ostensibly, this was because the sublime observer is not actually threatened. Safety in the midst of danger produces a thrilling pleasure” (18). Survival is a question not of actually dying in Metroid or Castlevania; the player cannot die. What matters is being in the presence of simulated “near-death” for as long as possible. This can be monsters, like Ridley and Kraid, in Metroid; or Dracula, the Mummy or Medusa’s head, in Castlevania. The player is next to them, or “near” them by being inside a world that promotes them. Kraid’s Lair advertises Kraid; Castlevania promotes Dracula through a series of monsters. Whether any are onscreen or not, the player anticipates them non-stop [source].)

Processing my troubled academic past, my reflections on Metroidvania as a tomb-like, ludo-Gothic space/torture dungeon have become thoroughly enmeshed in my own sexuality and gender-formation beyond what was heteronormatively assigned to me at birth; i.e., what was naturally assigned and what I had to reclaim through my own work’s seeking and expressing of power as something to find inside particular performative arrangements: the “ludo-Gothic BDSM” of the Gothic castle as a powerful “female-coded” space (which Volume One would extent to nature as monstrous-feminine; i.e., anything not a white cis-het Christian Western European man). Its palliative Numinous expresses C.S. Lewis’ so-called “problem of pain” (1940) through mutual consent; i.e., as a kind of ludic contract that promises paradoxical thrills through the aesthetics of harmful power but also unequal power exchange in the contractual sense as rich food for thought: it changes how we think about the world. As I write in “Revisiting My Masters’ Thesis on Metroidvania—Our Ludic Masters: The Dominating Game Space”:

Metroidvania players consent to the game by adopting a submissive position. Most people sexualize BDSM, but power is exchanged in any scenario, sexual or otherwise. This being said, Gothic power exchanges are often sexualized [in appearance]. Samus is vulnerable when denuded, her naked body exposed to the hostile alien menace (re: the end scene from Alien). Metroidvania conjure [up] dominance and submission through a player that winds up “on the hip” (an old expression that means “to be at a disadvantage”). Another way to think of it is, the player is the bottom, and they’re being topped by the game.

[artist: Sarah Kate Forstner’s “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” (2017); source: Michael Uhall’s “A Specter, a Speaker: ‘Whistle and I’ll Come to You’ (1968)”]

With any power exchange there’s always an element of ambiguity and danger (doubly so in Gothic stories). The participants have to trust one another. In this sense, I trust the Metroidvania not to hurt me, but the castle is always somewhat uncanny. I know the gameworld can’t hurt me because it’s a videogame; it can no more kill me than a dream, or C. S. Lewis’ mighty spirit:

suppose that you were told simply “There is a mighty spirit in the room,” and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of danger [of the tiger]: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking — a sense of inadequacy to cope with such a visitant and of prostration before it — an emotion which might be expressed in Shakespeare’s words “Under it my genius is rebuked” (The Problem of Pain).

Nevertheless, the paradox—of near-danger in videogames—mirrors the plight of the Neo-Gothic heroine. 18th century women read these stories to feel danger in a controlled sense, but they still submitted to its Numinous “perils.” By comparison, the Lovecraft junkie submits to cosmic nihilism[21], and the survival horror enthusiast seeks danger of a particular kind. So do Metroidvania players (source).

This power exchange through the palliative Numinous has always appealed to me amid Gothic aesthetics, spaces and cliché, fetishized thrills; i.e., inside castles when I have far less dominant power than one might think, but also more subby power in ways that feel asexually profound but never fully divorced from sexual peril’s aesthetics: the disempowered hero in a very Gothic sense, according to my unequal relationship to/negotiation with a female[22] “rapist” space that feels mightier than I am by virtue of the dungeon (rape) aesthetic, but also our power arrangement being stacked against me:

She’s mighty-mighty, just lettin’ it all hang out
She’s a brick house
That lady’s stacked and that’s a fact
Ain’t holding nothing back (source: The Commodores’ “Brick House,” 1977).

That’s the whole point. I seemingly “can’t win” because the space’s ergodic potential is fundamentally stronger than I am; but it still sits within that performance of unequal, harmful power as a paradox: the sub’s power through the pairing with a dominant whose power flows through them like heavy metal thunder. In that sense, I actually win and lose at the same time (what ludologists call a positive-sum zero-sum game: a win-win[23])! Replayability and endless backtracking amid dungeon aesthetics are a core part of the Metroidvania appeal: to feel mastered inside the ludic contract despite its inherent flexibility.

Furthermore, as I write in “Why I Submit: A Subby Gothicist’s Attitudes on Metroidvania, Mommy Doms, and Sexual Persecution” (2021), this doesn’t just stay in the gameworld; for me, it translates to how I live and think about my life relative to my abuse as survived but also played within in Metroidvania safe spaces:

I have male friends, but most of my friends are women or trans people. Most of my partners have been trans or gender-fluid. The same goes for the women in media I relate to or am inspired by. For me, a powerful woman or female space is captivating and educational, especially the “mommy dom” and Metroidvania.

I’ve always felt attracted to female power—be it in teachers, heroines, or videogame characters. But female power is usually androgynous, having pre-conceptions about male power mixed in. I admire Joan of Arc and Elphaba, but also Ellen Ripley and Samus Aran: tomboyish girls, female knights. I especially love the Metroidvania—a chaotic, “female” stronghold to lose myself inside, but also the focus of my PhD work. There, I can explore myself sexually in relation to power and trauma. This is why I submit. When I do submit, I submit to “mommy doms.”

In a BDSM framework, the mommy dom is a powerful female figure, one with the power to punish and nurture inside a consensual framework [of exquisite “torture”]. Just remember that I’m a switch; I’m not submissive all the time. However, when I am, I submit consensually. It’s not for everyone, and it shouldn’t be. That isn’t the argument that sexist men make, though. For them, only women can or should submit. Men who submit are weak, or impossible. Clearly they’re not impossible, but homosexual composer Tchaikovsky’s words on submission (towards a young servant) were nonetheless treated as impossible—his amorous words furiously repressed by the Russian state: “My God, what an angelic creature and how I long to be his slave, his plaything, his property!” (source).

Obviously my connection to the imaginary Dark Mother “ravishing” me (through ludo-Gothic BDSM camping rape) is tied to my own abuse, and led me down a very dark road: frustrated with academia and dumped by Zeuhl for their decade-long secret flame, I dated online; I encountered Jadis through Gothic roleplay on Fetlife; we hit it off and I quickly moved in; they worked their magic, abusing me emotionally during the pandemic, and raping me through total financial control, as well (re: “Escaping Jadis; or, Running Up that Hill“).

All of that might seem like a mistake/panic attack waiting to happen upon revisitation in small—a bit like my own deal with the devil (running off with a devil-in-disguise in the harmful, self-destructive sense of that phrase). Except I not only survived; I learned some important lessons that school would never have taught me (and which I could pass on through this book as my own sex-positive castle of sin). One such lesson was that I inadvertently realized how much I enjoy the ironic rape fantasy[24a] of sitting at the foot of the dark queen’s throne, “trapped” in her castle and “kept for sport.” Such a lady is the teeth in the night and might “slash me to ribbons” if I’m not careful; but vis-à-vis Wolff, she’s also a part of my divided self (a less extreme, operatic/phenomenological version of an actual plurality)—the ghost of myself and my counterfeits that I’m debating with right now as I revisit these older writings of mine (all my yesterdays) to say something bigger and more definitive about Metroidvania (and by extension, Capitalism). It’s like looking into a window of the past and seeing my younger self, but also not my younger self at the same time (Castor Troy from Face/Off [1997] put it best: “It’s like looking into a mirror, only not”).

There’s always a bit of our parents and their congenital/inherited pasts in ourselves (or counterfeit “parents”), and there’s always a bit of us and ours in our own babies. As part of this book (which is my baby), we can take my experiences, congenital inheritance and compound education to convert Tolkien’s refrain (and Cameron’s) through iconoclastic refrains of our own: castle-narrative of a particular kind—sex-positive castle BDSM (an alternative name for ludo-Gothic BDSM that didn’t stick) that allows us to inhabit but also critique, thus reclaim and negotiation the future role of the Gothic heroine’s more “Amazonian” doubling in ways that we can also rescue from TERF praxis by re-raiding the tomb/rereading the tome ourselves (the italicized bit isn’t so much a keyword as a phrase I invented just now that combines a variety of keywords we’ve already discussed and whose assemblage[24b] we will be discussing now). It can be an exhilarating way to camp the bigoted past of white saviors and profiteers, albeit inside a sexy avatar surrounded by “peril”: the Gothic heroine stuck inside her own sexy body “asking for it” (through the Male Gaze), but also the Gothic’s inheritance anxiety boiling over amid a circular state of return to past trauma/fatal nostalgia revived in joyously hauntological forms (“Lost in Necropolis” as my master’s thesis would call it—a phrase I actually borrowed from Mark Shelton’s 1983 song of the same name)! There’s no place like “home” turned upside-down, paradoxical salvation occurring mid-exposure!

(artist: Devilhs)

Note, 3/28/2025: I would go onto comment on this idea many times (from the Demon Module, no italics): 

Intratextual messages speak to extratextual solutions; a house of cards is a place to hide, wait, and bide one’s time while seemingly stripped bare, the visuals seeming to support a narrative of peril, but also feel and play out of joint with its instructions inside a safe space’s revolutionary cryptonymy. Whore and rape go hand-in-hand, then, but lend the verb quotes easily enough. There, we whores relieve stress for other workers and ourselves, playing out our own deaths and rapes per all the usual sexist, or otherwise storied, bigoted fetishes and clichés on and offstage: little deaths, but also just deaths, period; re (from the Poetry Module):

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 (source: “In Search of the Secret Spell,” 2024).

It’s a bit ghoulish and Numinous, demons generally oscillating between such earthly-to-divine qualities inside a given shadow zone/danger disco (commonly a white woman’s idea of castle or ballroom; i.e., authored for those fearful of the nuclear model’s sexual marketplace, reifying and playing with the Gothic’s operatic rape castle doubling domestic abuse and, by extension, colonial abuse).

All in all, fear spaces (and bodies) are informed by pre-existing biases, phobias and stigmas, which means they exist as much to announce/expose a given comorbidity as to relieve stress resulting from it. If we summon these spaces and their fears ourselves (often concerning our bodies), we can learn of repressed feelings attached to their likenesses and begin to counteract them through our own constructions (source: “Rape Reprise”).

(artist: Devilhs)

Furthermore, such simulative castles like Metroidvania evoke greater feelings inside-outside themselves; i.e., as castles in small—with hyphenated elements of the flesh and not-flesh (a gargoyle appearing fleshy but made of stone); i.e., as spaces to evoke Radcliffean and Lewis-style feelings of terror and horror rape fantasies we, inundated with capital’s criminogenic conditions for such bad dreams, in and out of sleep/on and offstage, become palliative spaces of play across different registers reaching hermeneutically for systemic catharsis (re: the Gothic-Communist Quadfecta: Marxism, ludology, gender studies and Gothic theory). More on hermeneutics and oppositional synthesis, in Volume One. For examinations of the castle/capital in small, consider “Back to Jadis’ Dollhouse” in “Transforming Our Zombie Selves (and Our War-like, Rapacious Toys) by Reflecting on the Wider World through the Rememory of Personal Trauma” from Volume Two’s Undead Module! —Perse, 3/28/2025

For all its ergodic, liminal, anisotropic, concentric recursion housing Medusa, the Metroidvania is merely one such construction—not just a haunted house, but one—in keeping with Walpole—populated with “ancient” warriors whose disturbing (and wonderous) presence, mid-chronotope, excites signature “Gothic” emotions increasingly hauntological and alien in modernity’s atomized present space-and-time.

Whatever the form—i.e., Amazon/Medusa or not, and their protective and nurturing feelings amid ambiguous “inkblot” ones of danger—the aesthetics of danger can certainly be thrilling in a variety of ways. So can our tearing up of the usual ludic contract in search of different forms of mastery than what the game codes players to do, but still reliably “has its way” with us by accounting for these emergent forms inside of itself. Contained inside the aesthetics of ruinous, exotic death, the ludic function of the Metroidvania supplies a cathartic “punishment” that at times verges on endless madness; i.e., the recursive motion of the player chasing the record for that better and better time, while the power exchange of a thoroughly vampiric and Gothic-coded space sucks the runner of their sanity and lifeforce; but also doubles them. This complicated relationship on- and offstage becomes something to interrogate not just of the castle by the player but by spectators interviewing “runners” of a particular castle. Each is going to have their own feelings about what they’re exploring and contributing historically towards.

For example, during my interview[25] with CScottyW (a WR holder for all categories in Metroid Fusion [2001] and many in Metroid: Zero Mission [2004]—source: Speedrun.com), I had a chance to pick his brain about what I called the “Quest for Mastery” (which the Gothic’s Numinous and Prometheus Quest generally try for):

Persephone: The speedrunner’s challenge is a kind of metaplay informed by the gameworld’s coded instructions. The more runners move, the more they record; the more they record, the more history the space accrues.

Despite instructing the player to map them, there’s an ostensibly “unmappable” quality to Metroid gameworlds. Do you feel like there always one more map to fill in? For example, you’ve played Zero Mission for hundreds of hours and are still surprised by it. Does this sense of elusive mastery ever make you feel disempowered because always one more map to fill in? Or do you enjoy it for precisely that reason?

CScottyW: I enjoy being able to keep improving, even when it’s difficult. Others have responded differently and would say things such as “no matter how good your time is, you will never be satisfied.” I may agree with this to some extent, but I don’t think the sentiment is necessarily negative either!

So I suppose, yes, I do enjoy it because I can just keep playing the game, and I enjoy playing the game.

Persephone: Do you feel constantly drawn back to the maze, thus unable to escape, because it’s somehow “greater” than you are? For example, speedrunners dissect games, but games give them the tools to do so. Metroid in particular introduced many staples to the speedrunning practice: a maze-like, deconstructible world, and hidden, time-based reward system helped lay the groundwork for speedrunning as a practice.

CScottyW: The game rewards you for playing fast, and it is internally rewarding to play fast. That seems like a pretty deadly combination to me to keep someone doing something. I have taken a break from running these games many times, but I do always return for some reason or another. Sometimes it’s to participate in a tourney and other times it’s just because I feel like playing the game. Maybe the latter occurs when I’m simply drawn back into the maze. I wouldn’t personally say that it’s because the game is “‘greater’ than me” or because it has some power over me, but does an addict say that their addiction has some power over them if they are not trying to quit?

(artist: u/mr_merns)

Persephone: Is the past you’re struggling to defeat essentially yourself, mainly your personal best? Do you ever visualize this former, past record as being represented by Mother Brain or the SA-X? Effectively a historical marker to run against, that only grows more and more powerful over time?

CScottyW: Yeah, I’d agree with that. I’m always trying to overcome myself at my best. I certainly may have different stress levels fighting these bosses as a result of my personal best, or what my pace is going into those fights, but I don’t consciously refer to them as a representative of it (source).

CScottyW’s answers were unique to him, of course, but clearly the space between life and death is a fine line to walk in Metroidvania. As doubled by the player and the gameworld as interacting back and forth, the proximity to power but not quite having it is what makes Metroidvania players—despite the live burial’s constant procession—feel most alive: the chase of power and closeness to death as not entirely one’s own inside a Numinous space built from older maps, conventions and aesthetics that parallel the larger futile gesture. CScottyW certainly has his own feelings on the subject, and in the speedrunning tradition treats it more like a sport (specifically the race), but so do I as a casual[26] player of these same games:

As a Metroidvania enthusiast [to say the least], I submit to the game’s castle-narrative. Like a Faustian bargain, this exchange is part of the game’s ludic contract. This is not quite how Clint Hockings describes it, in “Ludonarrative Dissonance“: “seek power and you will progress.” Rather, on some level, the player plays Metroidvania to be dominated. Progression may appear to conquer the space. In reality the space conquers back, and fairly often. I experience these sensations when I control the avatar. However, the vicarious nature of this relationship can become even more framed (concentric): I can watch other people try to master the game, and watch them be dominated by the space. Not even speedrunners can escape this embarrassment, their blushing faces conjoined with the statues already screaming on the walls. How fleeting a victory like Shiny Zeni’s is, when it will eventually be bested. Or buried.

These symptoms and the choices they inform are endemic to Metroidvania. The space is comorbid, boasting a variety of disempowering symptoms. All result from the way the game is played. This play is deconstructive, the player not only invited, but tacitly instructed (there are no explicit tutorials) to blast the world apart: bomb walls, missile doors, and [mini-bosses to kill] for even bigger keys. Not only this; the hidden functions of the gameworld include a reward system: Beat the game quickly enough and you get to see some space booty.

(artist: Urbanator)

A person motivated by sex is hardly in control. Not to mention, the sex historically offered by Metroid is fraught with peril. The entire drive is illustrated by gameplay conducive to speedrunning at a basic level. The same strategies employed by the best runners are executed by regular players. You play the game and begin to play it faster. In some sense, this “maze mastery” is involuntary. The player cannot help but play the game faster as they begin to re-remember the maze. The game exploits this, repeatedly leading the player towards self-destruction and domination.

These feelings are orgasmic, but differently than the Doom Slayer’s own attempts at conquest. They’re a Gothic orgasm, a kind of exquisite torture. I say “exquisite” because they occur within the realm of play [as partially emergent]. For Metroidvania, this jouissance is ludic. But sometimes a game can blur the lines. [… Be this in Metroidvania, or similarly “strict” spaces, players] are expected to revel in the game’s sadism, deriving pleasure from “punishment” while the game, for lack of a better term, bends them over and fucks them (source: “Our Ludic Masters”).

My specific approach isn’t purely because the race through a give space was something to partake in, full-throttle, but a “death race” inside a particular kind of track where speed, though important, sometimes takes a backseat to the scenic route: death theatre as something to soak in and play around with.

Simply put, if you’ve been abused in real life, it can be tremendously medicinal to be held down by a seasoned pro and taken to that edge without ever being in harm’s way. The same goes for a dungeon that keeps you inside of itself while threatening you with exquisite “torture” of a profound, Numinous sort. It’s hard to explain, other than the paradoxical threat feels vital to achieving catharsis because of the trauma that lives inside me as normally making me feel out of control. Working with Metroidvania in this negotiated capacity, then, is like working with the best dom on the planet because it cannot, by design, harm me; and I cannot harm those I request to be “imperiled” who occupy the same space (non-playable characters that I “kill”). Like knife play done well, they look “in danger” which can be tremendously exciting to watch, but it’s, for all intents and purposes, completely risk-free. Sometimes, you have to fight fire with “fire”; or in the words of David the android quoting Peter O’Toole in Prometheus (2012): “The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts” (except for us, the trick is inverted: not minding that actual harm is completely impossible but feels on the cusp of actualizing at any given moment; e.g., acquiring literal “sanity damage” when playing a Lovecraft-themed horror game). The appeal of Metroidvania is feeling “at home” in the dark castle as our pandemonium that we negotiate for ourselves: a “wicked” place whose “safe space” is wreathed and wrought with the fascinating markers of the imaginary medieval past (and retro-future) brought into the present to critique the present’s harmful illusions (not preserve them through the same old unironic rape fantasies and stereotypes).

I’ve clearly thought about this subject a lot over the years, and my feelings about ludo-Gothic BDSM haven’t really changed. If anything I feel like the argument of my master’s thesis—that the deconstructive, speedrunning nature of Metroidvania synergizes neatly with the Gothic aesthetics’ meta-narrative—has only been reinforced by further investigations like these. Explorations of an angry and traumatized gameworld can be immensely cathartic in ways that confront the trauma in our own lives, giving us the means to address systemic abuse present in seemingly empowering fantasies[27]; i.e., maps and spaces that resemble Metroidvania in aesthetics, but not function. That’s largely the problem with Tolkien’s refrain but also Cameron’s: they treat unironic war as a means to an end, not as something that’s actually part of the problem. In short, war is forever, naturalized as empowerment while doing the state’s dirty work.

All the same, while Metroidvania aren’t perfect—indeed, can often fall into the trap of surviving and killing monsters just like Tolkien’s heroes do—their tenuous arrangement of power during liminal expression is far less optimistic and far more openly Promethean than Tolkien’s fantasies tended to be. War is not good, in Metroidvania, nor are its monarchs or castles places to defend. Instead, their combined mirror is black, which it very much needs to be insofar as class consciousness is concerned; you have to see things in ways that are honest about trauma’s manifestations within and outside of ourselves, and in naked dialectical-material language: the yawning dead expressed in potent nightmares that yield clarity instead of abject confusion beyond the realms of death (as Judas Priest might put it). The world is a vampire now but it needn’t always be—not if we work towards a solution that calls for the humanization of orcs (not their heads) and the unmasking of the state’s killers (and their dungeons) as inhumane: ACAB (castles and cops). It’s not something to be meek about, but to take further and further towards sex positivity through iconoclasm as a happy result; i.e., whose visible excitement stems from the proverbial tightrope as something to shrink during dark indulgence, but also “expand” through jouissance (a potential asexual intellectual ecstasy tied to artistic nudity[28] as an oft-asexual undertaking with an sexual visual element) as a mutually consensual enterprise: “the first expands the ‘soul,’ and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life,” amounting to an exquisite “torture” minus Radcliffe’s (or Tolkien’s) operatic bigotries and harmful stereotypes. Now that’s what I call a win-win!

(artist: Thirstastic)

Gothic-Communist development isn’t zero-sum, but established through play, mid-opposition. Concluding part one’s rather hauntological and uber-nerdy trip down memory lane, we’re arrived at our next destination: part two, or the Metroidvania as a closed space for us to reclaim, and use to reclaim, class character from Tolkien’s refrain using the ludo-Gothic BDSM and other devices from Cameron’s refrain to interrogate power’s assembly and performance, expressing it ourselves in iconoclastic variations.

Per Lilia Melani, the Gothic is classically viewed as the quest for the Numinous. We’ll be doing so inside the Metroidvania’s shadow zone as more than just a game to play but a theatrical space to play on whose chaotic gameplay can radically shape how we think about our own lives in a Gothic-Communist sense; i.e., in relation to power and its complicates symbols according to castles and monsters as flexible theatrical devices whose sites/citing of power can be camped in the Gothic tradition: not strictly the Monty Python approach[29] (though there’s a place for that; e.g., the Black Knight, the Bridge of Death, the Rabbit of Caerbannog [“that rabbit’s dynamite!”] and Castle Anthrax, etc), but just as often a semi-serious death theatre whose gradient of camp allows for outright silliness but also a fair amount of gravity onstage even when things aren’t pitch black (a Gothic castle can be composed entirely of Tim Allen’s face from Home Improvement[30] [1991] if the effect is still Gothic in some shape or form). We’re also fighting to reclaim the symbolism of all monsters inside these castles, after all:

(artist: Renthony)

Onto “Metroidvania and the Quest for Power, part two: Interrogating Power through Camp“!

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About the Author

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

Footnotes

[1] The above drawing was inspired by a photo of Blxxd Bunny. Their booty made me think of Percy Shelley’s famous poem, so I decided to have fun with it. I based the drawing off “Ozymandias,” but also the aspiring conqueror’s desire to appear mighty (e.g., “Bonaparte before the Sphinx” [1886] echoing the Western tyrant’s desire to be like the conquerors of old—refer to exhibit 40a4 for all the visual materials). I wanted to play around with this idea, subverting the canonical warlord’s refrain as echoed through the historical-material world: the mighty ass of a good friend that I was simply in awe of. In my iconoclastic game of telephone, I even fucked with the poem for funsies:

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—”Two vast and shapely buns of stone

Thrust up in the desert. … Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a peerless visage sighs, whose smile,

And pillow lip, and smirk of warm delight,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that enjoyed them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

‘My name is Ozymandias, Queen of queens;

Look on my Ass, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away” (originally altered 3/16/2023).

[2] Similar to ludo-Gothic BDSM, my work on Metroidvania has expanded considerably since October 2023; re: to see the entirety of it, refer to the full glossary definition, my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus, or the Metroidvania page on my website.

[3a] Rudolph Otto, in The Idea of the Holy (1917), described the ghost story’s appeal as denoting an inferior intimation of the numen, or presence of God, which he described as the mysterium tremendum; i.e., divine wrath as something to seek out for the purposes of religious experience: the sensation of self-destruction in the face of something greater than oneself. Compared to the Sublime, which focuses on the awesome power of nature, the Numinous is more urban, civilized and manmade; i.e., found in man’s domain through the presence of the Gothic castle as abandoned and occupied by a divine, otherworldly presence that parallels the awesome might of nature but ultimately is its own kind of supreme force.

[3b] Something I will continue to stress throughout this series is the medieval’s hyphenation of sex, food, death and war (among other things). The same goes for the Neo-Gothic, including Metroidvania and things evocative of the same overarching mentalities and poetry in motion/the flesh. Infinite power, infinite form (a concept the Demon Module will return to; re: “Of Darkness and the Forbidden“).

[4] Under whose independent tutelage (LING 499) at EMU, I wrote the paper, “Method in His Madness: Lovecraft, the Rock-and-Roll Iconoclast and Buoyant Lead Balloon” (2017), which inspired me to pursue the Numinous (as a subject of study) to the faraway, magical city Manchester, England.

[5] E.g., Bernard Perron, Ewan Kirkland, Catherine Spooner, Tanya Krzywinska, etc. Some of these persons I have already mentioned; some I will mention later—during the symposium, but also in Volume Two’s subchapters “Bad Dreams, part 3” and “Seeing Dead People.”

[6] E.g., Alien: Isolation (2014), which told Ripley’s neoliberal odyssey through her daughter’s eyes: Amanda (who Cameron merely used as an excuse for the mother’s revenge 28 years prior in the real world, but somewhere between 57 years before Ellen Ripley’s reawakening after Amanda’s death, in Aliens).

[7] Which videogames would simulate through player-controlled avatars that, in turn, spill back out into the real world, affecting the Gothic imagination as a continual oscillating process: through any poetic device a worker might express themselves with informing other devices, on and on.

^[8] Botting, p.140.

^[9] Lewis, p.303.

^[10] ibid., p.311.

^[11] Botting, p.153.

^[12] Maggie Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel, (London: Routledge, 1995), p.12.

^[13] Lewis, p.309.

^[14] Botting, p.153.

^[15] Ann Radcliffe, The Italian, ed. by Frederick Garber, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 32.

^[16] Fredric Jameson, ‘Progress Versus Utopia; Or, Can We Imagine the Future?’, Science Fiction Studies, 9.2 (1982), pp.151-152.

[17] Whose own gameworld was doubled inside of itself: the light and dark world duality borrowed from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1991).

[18] Having about as much understanding of the actual place as Tolkien did of “the East.”

[19] As I write in “Mazes and Labyrinths“:

“Metroidvania” was effectively the combination of two IPs owned by different Japanese companies, Nintendo and Konami. For that reason, the term was almost never printed in any official capacity during the 1990s and early 2000s; it was purely a grassroots term. In fact, it wasn’t until the mid-2010s that “Metroidvania” saw wider use in the Internet’s indie market: PC Gamer (Tom Senior’s “The Best Metroidvania Games on PC, 2022), Engadget (Richard Mitchell’s “‘Metroidvania’ Should Actually Be ‘Zeldavania,'” 2014), Game Developer (Christian Nutt’s “The Undying Allure of the Metroidvania,” 2015), Giant Bomb (“Search Action*,” 2024) and Wired (Bo Moore’s “An Anime-Inspired Platformer…” 2015).

*The Japanese term for “Metroidvania,” demonstrating how—even in 2024 (the last time Giant Bomb updated their post)—Japanese audiences and authors avoid using the term.

Simply put, the genre exploded in popularity in the mid-2010s, becoming a smash indie success on Steam and continuing to be wildly popular to this day.

[20] Metroid and Castlevania are both older than Sweet Home (1989).

[21] This idea was coined by a supremely bigoted white man—one whose tottering regressions towards fascism forever hang over the science-y heroes he constantly tortures in his stories; i.e., threatening them with insignificance in the face of mightier things:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little [speak for yourself, whitey]; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age (source: “The Call of Cthulhu,” 1928).

“Oh, no! I’m not the center of the universe?” I think old Lovecraft could have seriously done with some “flexibility training” insofar as acclimating himself to chaos, meaning there’s more to life than the myth of male power deflated. His empty outlook, in my opinion, is very much him projecting his own privileged shortcomings into the power vacuum of an impenetrable void (that isn’t, you should know by now, outer space). He’s basically Peter Weyland gazing solemnly into the abyss and seeing nothing because, for him, there is nothing worthwhile to acquire. It’s the trembling that he enjoys. He’s very much like a child afraid of the dark, whose prescribed unapproachability is a kind of “backtalking from the sub”: “You’re hideous, Cthulhu; now step on me.”

[22] Or intersex, but also classically “woman is other” in Western society (which has alienated GNC elements outside of a dimorphic approach). The gendering of spaces is not usual; sailors would do it with ships, gendering them female as they cut through the equally female sea. A giant, hostile castle isn’t so odd, then—with Scott’s “space castle” (and its Gothic matelotage) sailing through the murky darkness like a ghost ship haunted by an older copy of itself.

[23] Versus a negative-sum game: a lose-lose; e.g., Capitalism (because the elite will lose in the end due to climate change).

[24a] Jadis used to buy me nice clothes and underwear to highlight my physical features, and make me appear more feminine and desirable to them (a genderfluid person who identified and performed as “masc”): skirts, fancy shirts and corsets, but also skin-tight briefs. I loved wearing these—loved feeling feminine during my fantasy as the Gothic heroine; feeling out of control being with Jadis, the fantasy became something I could weaponize: a means of controlling the abuse they inflicted through lucid dreams I was well-versed in. As we shall explore in Volume Two, these ludic-Gothic BDSM fantasies became the very means of my escape. In turn, I hypothesized that if they could help me escape Jadis (a loud and proud neoliberal girl boss), then maybe I could retailor them to help others escape Capitalist Realism through the Gothic mode.

[24b] Which, again, crystallized into ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., as a potent means of camping rape through such dolls (the trauma side being unpacked extensively in Volume Two’s Undead Module; e.g., “One Foot out the Door; or, Playing with Dolls to Express One’s Feeling Undead“).

[25] From our 2021 interview, “Mazes and Labyrinths: Speedrunning Metroidvania – CScottyW,” which was conducted as part of my then-PhD research on Metroidvania, “Series Abstract: ‘Mazes and Labyrinths: Disempowerment in Metroidvania and Survival Horror.’”

[26] As per my master’s thesis, all Metroidvania players are conditioned to map a Gothic castle

Metroid introduced numerous staples for the subgenre, including exploration in an [isolated scenario]: the Gothic heroine lost in the castle. As Samus Aran, the player must navigate the hostile Zebeth underground, hunting the Metroids (an indigenous species of vampiric jellyfish) using relics found inside the ruins. […] Limitations are determined by the player’s equipment. However, few items are needed to explore the entire map. The game is not timed, has no in-game map system. Its world is a giant map that can be explored, in-game, but also charted out-of-game by the player. In Super Metroid (1994), an “automap” feature would be introduced. However, from a narrative standpoint, this merely illustrated what the player was already doing themselves (source: “Lost in Necropolis”).

but also speedrun it to greater or lesser degrees:

Narrative in a Gothic text cannot be divorced from the exploration of space; however, Metroidvania spaces are so conducive to speedrunning as to make avoiding it an arduous task. Simply put, speedrunning is playing fast as possible. At its core, however, the exercise requires continual exploration and repetitive motion. This cannot be separated from space, provided to the player as maps, strategy guides or instruction booklets. The player is always mapping in some sense, because the space forces them to. Some kind of map will always be consulted, if only the space, itself, as memorized. […] Whether wending or sprinting through it, a player will still map the space. […]

Mastery is indicated not by items, but the player’s mnemonic agility inside a space as a series of ever-changing routes towards the same end. Maps and items become increasingly useless, the less a player relies on them. Even if a particular route is mastered, endless alternatives reveal themselves through experimentation. Regardless, the basic objective remains unaltered no matter which items or maps are used; this potential has always existed, allowing for hybrids without compromising the core functions of the subgenre. Despite being designed to evolve, Metroidvania have not, over the course of thirty-two years, really changed all that much. Instead, the feeling—that more remains to explore and record, hence master—remains (ibid.).

[27] The sex-positive paradox of disempowerment is it can open our eyes to our Pavlovian condition as killers for the state through Metroidvania aping Cameron’s “peace through strength” tack: “Eat this, and grow up big and ‘strong’ like Ellen Ripley!”

[28] A complicated asexual relationship between artist and model making art with nudity that encapsulates (for them) an asexual relationship (something we will unpack at length in Volume Three, Chapter Three).

[29] Peter Jackson’s An Unexpected Journey (2012) has a strangely Python-esque feel to it, camping Tolkien a fair bit, but also having scenes of boyish innocence; i.e., where Bilbo runs through Hobbiton trailing the dwarves’ contract behind him like a kite while a) gayly shouting, “I’m going to have an adventure!” and b) relying on the old sage to impart wisdom upon him (war is a foregone conclusion, Tolkien argues, but one where you can still learn from the past of former soldiers). Jackson, like Tolkien, also suffers from an islander’s fortress ignorance of anything beyond his shores, their two bigotries combining to make for a very poor view of goblins as suspiciously cannibal-like captors; it reads like a bad 1800s potboiler.

[30] I’m not making this up. From my thesis:

Another implication—that the space is the monster in which one is effectively trapped—is terrifying, and one seen in other titles, like The Darkest Dungeon (2016); or, an Ultimate DOOM (1995) mod (a modified version of the original software) where everything about the game, including the player’s weapons and items, has been replaced with Tim Allen’s face and voice (fig.17). The affect is unsettlingly kaleidoscopic, and one’s sense of self obliterates—a horror in how the Other is not only potentially human, but also oneself (source).

Figure 17. “Aeuhhh???” by Marisa Kirisame (2016), from Tom Hall’s Ultimate DOOM, (MS-DOS, 1995)

This blog post is part of “The Total Codex,” a fourth 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.” The first promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “The Total Codex” shall do the same, but with Volume Zero/the thesis volume (versus “Make It Real” promoting Volume One/the manifesto, which I will release after “The Total Context” completes). 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 “The Total Codex’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Zero is already written/was released on October 2023! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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

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

The “Camp Map”: Camping the Canon (opening)

A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness. If the map could be ideally correct, it would include, in a reduced scale, the map of the map; the map of the map, of the map; and so on, endlessly […] If we reflect upon our languages, we find that at best they must considered only as maps.

—Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (1933)

Picking up where “Overcoming Praxial Inertia” left off…

(exhibit 1a1a1g4: Source: “ORIGINAL Vtg 1982 MERCYFUL FATE Album S/T Record 2ND PRESSING Vinyl RAVE ON EX!!” [2023]. Internal/external crises of morals just as often invoke crises of trauma; these involve repressed desires compelled by state wish fulfillment as something to challenge by walking a tightrope during our own Gothic poetics’ liminal [imperfect] expressions. As the above eBay exhibit demonstrates, the historical-material counterpoint survives in bartered emphera that carry the allegory of resistance within the larger profit motive. In other words, counterculture is communicated through the sale of older goods that have become antiquated but by and large retain their original message: “Think for yourself, push boundaries, play with the taboo and canonically forsaken in ways that lead to a better world.” You have to start somewhere, but it needn’t stay there; it’s a progression built on older relics of the imaginary past.)

With the conclusion of our thesis statement, we’ve laid out the various pieces of the manifesto tree, which forms the map for our twin trees of proletarian praxis; but we still have to pour in our fuel and run the fucker (thus corrupt the canonical site we’re invading: canon’s twin trees, the bourgeois-owned Base and bourgeois-cultivated Super Structure). As we do, keep the thesis paragraph and thesis body in mind, as well as the roots of camp and various hero types to subvert, and the manifesto terms that served to make up the “camp map,” itself. Assembled, the camp map will now discuss camp in four stages—our fuel and running of the siege machine:

• One, “Scouting the Field” (included in this post): Explores camp as a counterterrorist activity in relation to state terrorism, and outlines various monster types featured in its exhibits (e.g., femboys, catgirls, himbos, Amazons, etc). It also outlines the Gothic argumentation of oppositional rhetoric for or against the state when making its own monsters to kill, or kill with, normally in defense of capital but for us through a means of performative resistance; i.e., a variety of reclaimed scapegoats within the process of abjection’s canonical reactions, which reify along the Cartesian Revolution’s criminogenesis of said monsters, but especially within the cartographic ludologizing of Tolkien’s refrain: the treasure map.
• Two, “The Quest for Power inside Closed (Gothic) Space”: Part one and part two explore the interrogation of power in relation to Gothic space (castles) but especially in videogames (shooters, High Fantasy and Metroidvania). It also interrogates Tolkien’s refrain through the conceptualization of Cameron’s refrain (the shooter); i.e., not through the FPS, but the Metroidvania—a particular kind of third-person shooter (TPS)/castle space that (along with the monsters inside) can be camped, but also achieves immense catharsis through honest and profound theatrical evocations of psychosexual trauma: a palliative Numinous and fairly negotiated (thus sex-positive) ludo-Gothic BDSM achieved by remaking Gothic castles, thus negotiating the unequal power lurking inside an iconoclastic castle or castle-like space.
• Three, “Making Monsters“: Considers the making of monsters and goes over more monster types (nurses, xenomorphs and other phallic women) as a creative foil to Ann Radcliffe’s usual unironic rape fantasies. It also explores how to personify labor action through the making of monsters as a reversal of abjection; i.e., through a Satanic poetics whose infernal polity challenges the authority of a heavenly or otherwise sacred establishment, but often in incredibly funny ways; e.g., Key and Peele’s immortal phrase: “Put the pussy on the chainwax!” (Key & Peele’s “Pussy on the Chainwax,” 2013).
• Four, the finale: Puts all of these ideas to the test, executed by my friend Blxxd Bunny and I; i.e., using our bodies, labor and Satanic apostacy to camp the canon, effectively making it gay and Gothic (while keeping the first three sections of the “camp map” in mind).

Similar to the thesis statement, this chapter covers smaller terms lifted from the glossary regarding Gothic academia. They’re more niche and myriad than the Four Gs, so I wanted to take the opportunity to define them here; the “big ones” we can take our time with (and will confront repeatedly throughout the rest of the book).

As Bay says, “Don’t knock the cringe, knock the part of you that cringes.” In that sense, this map (and by extension, the entire book) attempts to reclaim the Gothic mode as deliberately campy since Matthew Lewis (Milton did it by accident, remember); rejecting it because it’s “outmoded” is a paradox and hypocritical because the Gothic has always been outmoded on purpose, employing hauntology and cryptonomy while placing things in quotes that either advance or reverse the process of abjection inside the chronotope. Distancing ourselves from “perceptive” pastiche/parody (camp) is to remove a powerful critical device from our arsenal during proletarian praxis, and instead amounts to us using whatever is given to us by moderates/centrists and the elite: controlled opposition. This is critically inert and will kill things before they start. There must be a chaotic, uncontrollable, impolite quality to what we do or it merely becomes another piece of capital in service of the profit motive.

With that being said, let’s mosey!

Note: As of now, the vast majority of the keywords have been introduced. A few remain, which I will highlight as usual in bold and color code. But the vast majority I have already introduced, meaning I’ll refrain from altering their font any further (apart from emphasizing a given talking point); i.e., because at this point, when originally writing the “camp map,” I decided not to keep doing so (owing to the fact that I was already moving away from said system while segueing into the Aftercare Symposium and Volume One). —Perse, 3/28/2025

(artist: Chin Likhui)

“Camp Map”; or “Make it Gay,” part one: Scouting the Field

“It seems a pretty big hole,” piped Bilbo. He loved maps, and in the hall there was a large one of the Country Round (where he lived), with all his favourite walks marked on it in red ink. He was so interested he forgot to be shy and keep his mouth shut. “How could such an enormous door” (he was a hobbit, remember) “be secret?”

—Bilbo Baggins, The Hobbit

(artist: Victora Matosa)

As we have established, canon is heteronormative; camp camps canon, therefore sex, as “written on the map.” Simply put, sex is the “pot of gold” at the end of the rainbow.

As canon frames anything against the state as worthy of capital violence (summary execution), it’s important to recognize the nature of Gothic camp/iconoclasm as “terrorist” actions the state will put down with extreme prejudice. The draconian nature is disguised in the visual “hurly burly” as summoned from the past and celebrated for its badass, throwback qualities—a retrojection into the imaginary past in search of power according to Tolkien’s infamous treasure map as a continuation of the ghost of the counterfeit leading into more castles, maps, castles, shadow zones and so forth. The canonical search for power is made in light of Capitalism disguising its own exploitive model: a Faustian bargain and Promethean quest to varying degrees for differing purposes depending on the arrangement’s praxis. In canonical arrangements, the elite hand the less-marginalized a weapon and tell them where to put it: in us. It’s a little more complicated than that, but the outcome is brutal enough: tried-and-true “divide and conquer” tactics where the middle class quash rebellions before they can take root, then pat themselves on the back for being “the good guys”; i.e., White Knight Syndrome.

On the receiving end of the white knight’s lance is labor, which incentivizes the various oppressed groups to aggregate against by virtue of them being more prone to rebel: the state’s prerequisite victims for its police to abuse, thus profit from. As part of this marginalized sphere, the queer is shoved into the same dark zone with the “corrupt” and the monstrous-feminine’s animalized undead and demonic renditions thereof. We’ll consider other marginalized groups throughout the book; I’m starting with, and focusing on, queerness to camp canon with because there’s a tremendous genderqueer stamp on the historical process as one of genuine resistance; i.e., ever since Matthew Lewis “pulled a Milton” when making his own Satan to demonize canon with, “playing god” in the process. As Colin Broadmoor writes in “Camping the Canon: Matthew Lewis, Milton, & The Monk” (2021):

In 1796, against a backdrop of deadly state violence targeting LGBT people, a gay teenager anonymously published what has since become one of the best-known examples of the English Gothic Horror. His name was Matthew Lewis and his book is The Monk. Lewis’s graphic depictions of incest, rape, murder, gender-bending, and illegal same-sex desire violated every major taboo of British society and drew immediate calls for censorship and criminal prosecution. Not bad for a debut novel.

[artist: William-Adolphe Bouguereau]

These days, it’s not unusual to find the words “subversive” or “transgressive” nestled within glowing ad-copy or on the back cover of the latest franchise installment. Resistance will, after all, always be commodified—but if we allow transgression to become a mere buzzword, we undermine the revolutionary potential of art, especially art by marginalized members of society.

The Monk represents Lewis’s personal struggle against the sexual politics and constraints of the English literary tradition. As Michel Foucault observed in The History of Sexuality vol. I, sexuality-as-identity did not really exist as a cultural concept throughout most of the eighteenth century, however, by the time of Lewis’s birth those social and legal constructions of sexuality were shifting:

As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life… Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality (Foucault 42).

This transition at the turn of the 19th century from act-as-homosexual to person-as-homosexual was preceded by a dramatic increase in homophobic violence perpetrated by the state (source).

Queer discourse has obviously evolved and come (more) out of the closet since Lewis’ time. Unfortunately so have the monsters as a canonical discourse whose power is largely made-up but enforced regardless. Short of converting and going into the closet, the only canonical recourse we’re given is blame and death: a court of public opinion canonized to be our judge, jury and execution. To avoid the codified abuse that regularly befalls us on- and offstage, we gotta “make it gay” to expose the largely arbitrary nature of patrilineal descent (“Why you gotta make it gay/political?” being the chudwad’s classic refrain). To do this, we have to “camp the canon,” which needs a map all on its own, one we’ve already outlined piece by piece: the manifesto tree terms/map pieces explored during the thesis statement. They constitute the holistic entirety of what we’re working with: the pieces of the canonical castle as something to infiltrate, thus infect the twin trees of capital it guards. You wouldn’t want to invade a castle without having a map of its entire structure, would you? To form the “camp map,” this subchapter will not only assemble the map pieces formerly laid, but outline the whole process through various other germane keywords, and walk through a “siege” of the castle in warlike language (it’s something Capitalism acclimates us to through canon; in short, we all speak it). It’s time to do battle!

(artist: Max Prodanov)

“Why camp canon?” you ask? Because we have to! Canon is heteronormative, thus foundational to our persecution as built into capital out of antiquity’s Drama and Comedy into more recent inventions of the staged gimmick; i.e., of the back-and-forth wrestling match versus the Greek play’s chorus and musical numbers, but also the opera and castle as an operatic site of forbidden, extreme desire, guilty pleasure and possessive love. Capitalism needs enemies to fight who are different from the status quo and we fit the bill. In short, we fags “make it gay” for our own survival. This book’s praxial focus leans into canonical/regressive aka subjugated Amazonomachia as already “mapped out,” meaning if we want to camp canon/”make it gay” we have to recognize how canon functions through its heteronormative assembly as reassembled and ironically performed by us while wearing revolutionary cryptonyms (war masks that hide what we’re up to within the theatre as something that can give our attackers away when we break with tradition): subversive Amazonomachia. To this, canon is the false copy of the castle as threatened by terrorist forces daring to “make it gay”; i.e., a corruption of their “pure, benevolent fortress” into what they consider to be an unironic castle of sin, murder and all-around degeneration (in psychology, this is called projection; e.g., possessive love as something to project onto a racialized other inside a castle of madness). While standard-issue proponents (white, cis-het men and women) will automatically reject this proposition, token forces will often come over to their side, as well; i.e., as straight assimilators who unite under the state’s banner despite posturing as rebels. They unite with their colonizers against a common foe: themselves.

Such concessions are hardly unusual. As Joseph Crawford writes in his introduction to Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism (2013), “terrorist literature” in the late 18th century (the peak of the Neo-Gothic novel in Britain) developed in connection with state fears of worker rebellions labeled as “terrorism”:

The idea of a single Gothic literature of terror, stretching continuously from the 1760s to the present day, imposes a false unity on these early works, which were referred to as “Gothic stories” only because they were set in the “Gothic ages” (i.e. the medieval or early modern period) rather than the present day, and were more likely to be sentimental romances than tales of terror; the preoccupation with evil, fear, and violence, which is the defining characteristic of later Gothic literature, did not become a prominent part of the genre until the success of Radcliffe’s later novels in the 1790s. I thus became increasingly convinced that, although works referring to themselves as “Gothic” had existed since the 1760s, the true roots of the Gothicised rhetoric I had observed in the nineteenth century were to be found not in the anxieties of the mid-eighteenth-century middle classes, but a generation later; in the fearful decade at the century’s end.

It was in the 1790s that Gothic fiction and rhetoric first became truly popular in Britain; it was also in these years that Britain, like the rest of Europe, was struggling with the consequences of the French Revolution. Correlation does not equal causation; but it did not seem accidental that this new literary fascination with fear and violence should have arisen in the same decade that witnessed the Reign of Terror, and the consequent adoption of the words “terrorist” and “terrorism” into English. Several critics, such as Ronald Paulson, Robert Miles, and Leslie Fiedler, have already written on the relationship between the French Revolution and the rise of Gothic fiction, but they have tended to articulate this relationship in terms of an already-existing genre of Gothic terror fiction gaining new relevance and popularity due to its resonances with the events of the Revolution. It is my contention, however, that the relationship between Gothic fiction and the Revolution, “terrorist novel writing” and “terrorist” politics, is more fundamental than that described by Paulson and Fiedler. Gothic fiction did exist in the decades before the Revolution, but its character changed markedly over the course of the 1790s, with the Reign of Terror itself constituting a major watershed in the development of “terror fiction”; and I take seriously Kilgour’s suggestion that Gothic fiction could easily have remained a minor and little-read sub-genre of English literature, or even have dwindled away entirely, had it not been seized upon by writers eager to find new vocabularies of evil in the years following the revolutionary Terror.

In a very real sense, the Revolution created Gothic, transforming a marginal form of historical fiction chiefly concerned with aristocratic legitimacy into a major cultural discourse devoted to the exploration of violence and fear (source)

but also, I would argue, on account that it would potentially condition women to disobey their husbands (the classic Neo-Gothic readership was female) and workers to stop working for the state’s benefit. Those who stop get wacked. To this, recipients of the usual battery can, if not be condoned, at least be understood for their deals with the devil (the state). They’re tired of being the state’s punching bag, and if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

(artist: David Roberts)

Conversely, rebellious attacks are universally framed as “unthinkable” for an obvious double-standard; they don’t serve the elite, thus are demonized for it. As Robert Asprey writes in War in the Shadows (1975):

Terror is the kissing cousin of force and, real or implied, is never far removed from the pages of history. To define (and condemn) terror from a peculiar social, economic, political, and emotional plane is to display a self-righteous attitude that, totally unrealistic, is doomed to be disappointed by harsh facts.

The paradox of terror, so conveniently ignored by English public opinion, particularly middle- and upper-middle-class opinion during the Irish rebellion, is ages old. Celtiberian slaves working New Carthage silver mines must have regarded Roman legionaries as objects “of dread” inducing “extreme fear.” To enslaved minds, the legionaries were weapons of terror designed to keep the slaves in the mines-and apparently they worked very efficiently toward this end. From time to time, these and other slaves secretly rose to attack the Romans, who, upon seeing a sentry assassinated or a detachment ambushed and annihilated, no doubt spoke feelingly about the use of terrorist tactics.

But who had introduced this particular terror to this particular environment? The Romans. Had they other options? Certainly: they could have kept their hands off the Iberian Peninsula, or they could have governed it justly and wisely (as a few officials tried to do). Instead, they came as conquerors ruled by greed, and, in turn, they ruled by oppression maintained by terror. What options did the natives hold either to rid themselves of the Roman presence or to convert it to a more salutary form? Only one: force. What kind of force? That which was limited to what their minds could evoke. Lacking arms, training, and organization, they had to rely on wits, on surprise raids, ambushes, massacres. Was this terror or was it counterterror?

The paradox survived the Roman Empire. The king’s soldiers frequently became weapons of terror, just as did the rack and the gibbet. Feudal government of the Middle Ages rested on force (as opposed to the people’s consent), often on terror exercised through the man-made will of God reinforced by hangman’s noose or executioner’s ax. No student of the period can seriously condemn the protesting peasant as a terrorist, for here, as in the case of Romans in Spain and indeed of most governments, European monarchs and ruling nobility held options of rule ranging from the most benevolent to the most despotic. Their subjects, however, held limited options: submit or rebel. If they chose rebellion, the options were again limited, the main reliance being placed on native wit. But since native wit was often sharply circumscribed, most rebellions were doomed to expensive failure. Whatever the effort, whether a single peasant who in the fury of frustration picked up a scythe and severed the tax-collecting bailiff’s head from his body, or the group of peasants who grabbed pitchforks to stand against the king’s soldiers—the effort, more often than not, was not terror but, rather, counterterror (source).

Divide-and-conquer is a common state trick, generally by pitting workers against terrorist clichés of themselves: zombies and demons who not only refuse to work, but devote their labor towards violent resistance. Yet, the punching down is emotional as well as physical and effects all parties differently, including white cis-het people. More than anyone, they fear a lack of the structure whose genocidal history is known to them and who they consciously benefit from; i.e., inheritance anxiety in the face of the rabble as “getting’ froggy.” In their minds, the apocalypse plays out as Capitalist Realism always does: “Without the heteronormative structure and its sense of us-versus-them, man/woman, and inside/outside, the Cartesian Revolution would utterly unravel and with it the entire fabric of the space-time continuum!” It’s “catastrophizing” according to Capitalist Realism as “dressed up,” which our own costumed campy theatre and bodies walk the tightrope inside; re: subversive Amazonomachia. It gets crowded, fast, and when there’s no more room in Hell, the dead will march out from the state of exception and walk the Earth. Yet, this apocalyptic revelation is merely the breaking of the spell. The state of exception and the state’s boundaries haven’t actually come “from somewhere else”; they’ve been here the whole time (which Capitalism will profit on/recuperate through cancelled futures that simultaneously hide the profit game within its own worlds and violent theatre). To this, here’s a variety of implements that can work for the system or against it:

(exhibit 1a1a1h1: An assortment of collages/collage mise-en-abyme from throughout the book/companion glossary that features various gender roles in the Gothic creative mode. This is only a small taste. For more gender-non-conforming keywords, refer to the glossary’s definitions of “femboys, ladyboys, catboys; catgirls or really [anything] girls; bears, otters, hunks/twunks/twinks; butch/”futch”/femme lesbians; himbos, herbos. Note that cats are generally feminized in a traditional, European sense; i.e., as divorced from the Pavlovian conditioning and language of obedience/disobedience that dogs are known for. Puppy play of the iconoclastic sort fights class war by upending the idea of what a war dog is for [and other animals].

Middle, exhibit 21a2a [abridged from Volume One]: Artist, top left: Silverjow; top-middle: Jan Rockitnik; top-mid-right: elee0228; everything else: Ichan-desu. The athlete is a common physical marker of war personified through the imaginary past as something to evoke in popular media. By extension, social-sexual notions of warrior and strength interlock and “argue” through cross purposes: the body of the Amazon, bear or twunk as ripe for political discourse within the human form as a hauntological expression of power tied to combat sports and military culture. Subversions of this culture include the open fetishizing of muscular bodies with various masc/femme flavors that grapple with and otherwise interrogate double standards concerning the monstrous-feminine; i.e., in the militarized world of contact sports [which extends to the cryptonymy of “adventure” through the sublimation of war and rape].

Top-left, exhibit 5d1[from the companion glossary’s “monstrous-feminine“]: Artist, top-left: Gabriele Dell’Otto; artist, top-left and bottom: Persephone van der Waard and a model who wishes to remain anonymous; I’ll henceforth refer to them as Jericho. When healing from trauma, queerness is often symbolized as abjectly insect-like/uncanny as something queer people are forced into—i.e., a psychosexual, “corrupt,” medievalized ontology whose canonical role they don’t want to play but also desire to escape from using the same language: the queer/sodomite whose gender-non-conformity is synonymized with the “rape” of heteronormativity by the monstrous-feminine and whose beauty is feared by fearful-fascinated straight people conflating queerness as a universal symbol of unironic rape and madness. We do sometimes want to express our own trauma in relation to what we’re made out to be by our abusers, but ultimately we desire to be butterflies unto ourselves: free from trauma, from judgement, from harm.

Top-right: exhibit 5d2 [from the companion glossary’s “chaser/bait“]: Artist, top: Olivia Robin; bottom-left: Kyu Yong Eom; bottom-right: Claire Max. The feminine cock as something to show and hide becomes a dangerous game of undress for many traps; the masculine-feminine becomes an advertisement of “incorrect,” monstrous-feminine masculinity on the surface of female-appearing bodies before the clothes come off [although such bodies are habitually undressed by the Male Gaze; said gaze can be emulated by TERFs policing male and female bodies[1]]. Either liminality is dangerous for gender-non-conforming AMAB/AFAB sex workers, but also workers in general seeking to express themselves as different from, thus in resistance to, the canonical standard and its Symbolic Order/mythic structure. 

Bottom-left [from the glossary’s “Archaic Mothers (and vaginal spaces)“]: […] Artist: Patrick Brown.

Bottom-right: Excerpt from exhibit 56a1a [from Volume Two]: “West Virginia, mountain mama. Take me home, country roads.” Personified by the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, nature conservationism is a theme of conservative Americana, written by those who profit from it; i.e., John Denver’s music, arguably romancing the nostalgia of the highly destructive coal-mining industry. But Denver’s “Mountain Mama” is as much Mother Nature and its empathetic inhabitants who legitimately have a strong bond to nature and are recognized by society as “of nature” in a very Cartesian sense. Within these liminal positions, the thicc, tattooed bodies of cuties like Nyx and Blxxd Bunny are ample, fruit-like and covered in their own “Odes to Psyche[2]“—the butterfly as a hauntological symbol of transformation, death and stigma [the skull and the snake] signifying their body as a welcoming site of currently forbidden pleasures and harmony with the natural world.)

To this, our dangerous game—of making monsters by being ourselves—seeks to rewrite the boundaries and rules of power exchange/pleasure and pain; i.e., within pre-established/already-negotiated versions that do not serve working interests. We’re essentially “behind enemy lines,” effectively skirting the territories of canon’s shadow zone and shadow plays, which have routinely treated the monstrous-feminine as an Amazon “Nazi” (or some such scapegoat) nightmare to summon, battle and conquer (through physical or sexual violence) by a male action hero or subordinate inside Amazon pastiche; re: canonical/regressive Amazonomachia. These Gothic (hence unreliable/unsafe) narrators/narratives are routinely romanced in a very courtly sense through historical-material live burial of one being trapped within enforced theatrical schemes and their compelled gender roles’ harmful, unironic xenophobia/xenophilia towards the monstrous-feminine; i.e., as something to fetishize, pimp and rape as embodiments of the Destroyer persona and its equally cliché and fetishized victim counterpart.

Canon, then, features unironic theatrical violence in a half-real sense, pinned between the fiction, rules and real world as mimicking one another through the profit motive (see Ash, above: caught between the windmill door and the outside world as he tilts at the windmill; i.e., in the belly of the “dragon”). The canonical hero, including its compromises with power, becomes trapped (thus caught) in the act of killing a manufactured enemy forever let they risk becoming one themselves: the damsel or the whore, the detective or the demon, etc. This is less an idle threat and more a crisis-of-masculinity where those who “pass” try harder to blend even more in, thus avoid persecution when the state begins to eat itself. In this nightmare, you don’t wake up, but the canonically indoctrinated at least partially think they can provided they kill, survive or avoid becoming the monster. But like Doctor Morbius’ Monster from the Id, it always comes back, “sly and irresistible, only waiting to be reinvoked for murder![3]”

Luckily this “bad game’s” canonical praxis can be camped—i.e., its harmful/unironic fetishes, kink and demon BDSM rituals, aesthetics, and “strict/gentle” operators—but doing so exists within the same shadow zone, on- and offstage in a half-real kayfabe: to teach good play and ironic/healthy fetishization, kink and demonic BDSM rituals, aesthetics, and “strict/gentle” operators. Canon and iconoclasm operate within the same discursive space; i.e., capital as (when left to its own devices) forever colonizing itself through the state’s profit motive. Our “creative successes” don’t just perform, thus illustrate

• mutual consent
• informed consumption and informed consent
• sex-positive de facto education (social-sexual education; i.e., iconoclastic/good sex education and taught gender roles), good play/emergent gameplay and cathartic wish fulfillment/guilty pleasure (abuse prevention patterns) meant to teach good discipline and impulse control (valuing consent, permission, mutual attraction, etc); e.g., appreciative peril (the ironic damsel-in-distress/rape fantasy), invited voyeurism
• descriptive sexuality

They also supply de facto education as a kind of salubrious regression—of us traveling to sites of imaginary trauma that are not entirely fictional or divorced from our lived pasts as inherited from older times, but also have been dolled up as “fun” by current power structures and their propaganda mills: canceled futures, aka hauntologies (re: Fisher). In a sense, we’re chasing the dragon ourselves, seeking to camp its unironic forms, often through subversive roleplay that engages in cathartic consent-non-consent; re: calculated risk during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., through the conveying of informed negotiation (through the illustrating of mutual consent/the other praxial factors, above), safewords, fair (non-Faustian) contracts and boundary-forming exercises designed to help us heal from trauma; i.e., when seeing state-sanctioned markers of trauma/gargoyles during state crisis (which is perpetual and pandemic/endemic[4a]). It’s aftercare[4b] from an initial devastation stemming from greater devastations that, for us, weaponizes for class war against the state (whose own aftercare is harmful, thus dangerous).

There are dangers to us “acting out” inside this hellish territory but there is no “outside of the text” for us. As mentioned previously, we will be prosecuted for damaging canon, but also blamed for the systemic issues before, during and after breaking its godawful spell: those inside Plato’s cave attacking us rather than the canonical puppeteers duping them. In short, they’re crying “DAVRO!” for the elite in defense of the allegory of the cave’s canonical shadows on the wall—the state’s shadows, not ours.  And yet, the rewards in destroying canonical theatre and its shadowy deceptions far outweigh the risks; i.e., it’s far more dangerous to play along (to do nothing in an activist sense) because Capitalism incentivizes our routine destruction through the profit motive as built around genocide of an imaginary threat: us. We’re already locked into a scheme that renders us into meat for the soldiers to eat, monsters for them to kill and fuck (and often not immune to these same canonical spells and their harmful escape fantasies)—the proverbial chopping block, wedding bed and sacrificial altar as horrifyingly elided to serve one purpose: exploitation through bad instruction.

This includes the treatment of Gothic poetics more broadly as “drug-like,” which I’d briefly like to unpack. First, the privatized sex worker is a “one-in-a-million” beauty to trot out in front of audiences by canonical pimps (or bankers acting like de facto “pimps of pimps[5]“). As such, she appears like an angel descended from Heaven (or ascended from Hell, in a demonic form) to make all your dreams come true and your pain go away. Just don’t fall in love:

You can say anything you like
But you can’t touch the merchandise
She’ll give you every penny’s worth
But it will cost you a dollar first

You can step outside your little world
(Step outside your world)
You can talk to a pretty girl
She’s everything you dream about

[…]

But don’t fall in love
‘Cause if you do, you’d find out she don’t love you
(She’s one in a million girl)
One in a million girl
(Why would I lie?)
Now, why would I lie? (The Tube’s “She’s a Beauty” 1983).

(artist: Kristen Hanes)

Under the rise of neoliberalism, such music and imagery might look and sound cheerful, but something is amiss inside the heteronormative scheme: exploitation. Canonical media is historically-materially vindictive towards, and exploitative of, sex workers who don’t have control over their own bodies (which obviously has shifted somewhat in the Internet Age—a fact we will interrogate much more in Volume Three). During canonical instruction (we’ll consider iconoclastic sex work too, of course), the expected victims are targeted, marked and yoked ahead of time—like a lamb to the slaughter but treated as a kind of opiate for the masses. A “tasty cake” from head to toe and bound with invisible bonds (dogma and material conditions), the sex worker is fetishized against their will to cater to market forces dehumanizing them, or the worker as sexualized for similar dimorphic reasons that suit the state’s profit motive. As we shall see, any attempt to change the structure must occur within it (an absence of material conditions amounting to praxial invisibility).

Beyond normalized sex work through basic, off-canvas prostitution, monsters fulfill a canonical role as sexualized “punching bags”; i.e., under normal circumstances, everything unfolds inside a counterfeit, monomythic action plan—a frequently non-binarized, sometimes-furry homewrecker (re: Volume Two’s “Furry Panic“) and criminal Whore of Babylon (re: the Medusa, also in Volume Two [e.g., “Always a Victim“] but also the entire series). It is one whose routine appearance inside neoliberal (thus heteronormative) copaganda becomes war-like in Fisher’s sense of the hauntological; re: the entire cycle trapped in a “cancelled future,” which I call “dead futures” while synthesizing the idea in Volume Two’s “The Future Is a Dead Mall“: vis-à-vis Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism and hauntological dystopia as conspicuously decayed, thus trapped in Hogle’s conceptualization of “the narrative of the crypt.” This will literally play out in Metroidvania, when we examine that operatic plane (and its history and camp) in “The Map Is a Lie.”

Note: Originally Volume One and Volume Two were part of the same smaller manuscript; i.e., they were much shorter several years ago than they currently are—with Volume Two dividing into three modules totaling nearly one million words all on its own(!). Because of that massive (and previously unforeseen) jump in size, what these sentences refer to, here, would seem to imply closely neighboring ideas. I suppose that’s technically still true, insofar as all belong to the same grand web. Nonetheless, under present circumstances all belong to a constellation reaching across wider gulfs of written (and drawn) material. —Perse, 3/27/2025

(artist: Noah)

Metroidvania or not, such monotonous destruction must be escaped through itself; e.g., the Labyrinth of Crete and its own poor Minotaur hunted to extinction by Theseus being something for us to camp (often through ironically “heroic” bodies that cause gender trouble to develop Gothic Communism with by camping the monomyth, left); i.e., as transmuted from within (cyberpunks are conspicuously populated with ostentatiously dehumanized sex work: the sex robot). Often this “jail break” happens in drug-like ways; i.e., communicated through iconoclastic media as “drug-like” but not necessarily “on drugs” (remember, I wrote this entire book stone-cold sober). As Stuart Miller writes in “What is Acid Communism?”:

acid Communism/canceled futures

Acid communism is not a doctrine of hippy-esque communal living and psychoactive drugs. The commune, and psychoactive substances, have a role to play in the philosophy of acid communism, but acid communism is not a valorization of a hedonistic, hallucinogenic culture. In my opinion, acid communism is an evolution of thought, following from Fisher’s work on the hauntology of culture and capitalist realism. […]

Hauntology [for Fisher] is the belief that the future has been cancelled. Capitalist realism is the belief that there is no alternative to capitalism. […] What does it mean to say that the future is cancelled? For Fisher, it meant an inability to imagine anything new. His work on cyberpunk is a testament to this. The cyberpunk aesthetic we all understand is one that meshes advanced technology with late-stage capitalism. But to build that aesthetic, the familiar yet alien are transposed into the scene: the Japanese culture of Blade Runner, for example, may adorn the futuristic scenery, but its presence is a product of 1970s/1980s American xenophobia of the Japanese economic miracle subsuming their own. The great pyramids, skyscrapers and flying cars are all futuristic, but it’s retro-futuristic. It is how we used to imagine the future [lifted from Frederic Jameson’s “Progress versus Utopia; Or, Can We Imagine the Future?” 1982].

This is hauntology. In a world where the future has been cancelled, where we are unable to imagine new futures (we will get onto why shortly), society and culture is forced to look back onto the imaginings of previous generations (source).

To be a little more bold than Miller is, the recreational use of mind-expanding drugs and communal living is, in my opinion, absolutely fine (and in fact, vital to the process provided they are utilized in a non-harmful or self-destructive manner). Regardless, their experimental nature’s literal or figurative usage will be targeted for expected violence by powerful state forces concerned with a foreign/internal plot: drugs are used as an excuse for the state to police its population through drug wars of various kinds (including sex in general and the Gothic poiesis of monster sex). As John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs, declared in 1994:

You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. […] We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did (source: Vera’s “Drug War Confessional”).

This policing extends to subjugated Amazons; e.g., the TERF acting like a man historically does by becoming the token cop concerned with the foreign plot, thus checking the Amazon’s vagina to make sure it’s natal, thus not “on drugs”[6]; i.e., that she’s a “real, biological” woman and not some stinkin’ trans infiltrator stealing the valor of a real suffragette. This is a sentiment obviously held by TERFs acting besieged, thus requiring us to interrogate Barbara Creed’s observation of female, monstrous-feminine “non-victims” (mostly in cinema, no less) as potentially “TERF-grade,” meaning they’re perhaps a just little too fixated on biology and universal victimhood (exhibit 41g1a2) when deciding who threatens them (exhibit 1a1c) and who they compromise with—e.g., J.K. Rowling or Matt Walsh—when tag-teaming us/locking our asses up for being too “free” and open regarding our identities and self-expression; i.e., as sometimes involving actual drugs, but also just appearing drug-like: anthropomorphism (whose oft-sexualized, talking-animal “fursonas” we’ll unpack at great length in Volume Two’s “Call of the Wild” chapter):

(artist: Miles DF)

The dystopia of the “cancelled future” isn’t just personified on- and off-canvas; it’s summoned and lead to by a canonical (thus heteronormative) treasure map inside of itself, denoting an unironic gender trouble whose equally routine vanquishing (via the termination of the rebellious Amazon, fascist or black castle) is pure heteronormative copaganda engineered inside the Shadow of Pygmalion as a state-sanctioned creative process: the use of the treasure map to reach the Gothic castle as the lair/parallel space of the dragon lord, dragon and mother of dragons before slaying them in one fell swoop. The map also summons them through drug-like[7] ways to appear conveniently as fascist, Communist, non-white/non-Christian and/or queer scapegoats whenever and wherever Capitalism’s crises shift towards decay (fascism being Capitalism-in-decay; centrism being the normalizing of this procedure through moderacy/tone-policing, creeping gentrification, incrementalism, white savior antics, and American Liberalism/exceptionalism; and “Communism” being the universal scapegoat regardless of how nominal or functional it is; i.e., Domino Theory during Red Scare and other moral panics). The appearance of the monster is often proceeded by an ill omen that mirrors the residence as doubled in an uncanny sense: the return of the Gothic castle as a dark reflection of the heroic space having been corrupted by a foreign plot, a backstabber (the “bad servant” trope something we’ll examine during “Goblins, Anti-Semitism, and Monster-Fucking“).

Regarding space, power and theatre’s art/porn and heroes (monsters), the whole affair is liminal insofar as actors for or against the state utilize the same basic language. Within canon, the hauntologized castle suddenly appears, as does its mighty occupant and host of generals and legionaries. However, so does the old sage with the map that conveniently leads the heroes inside to take back what’s rightfully theirs. Everything is counterfeit, the parallel space of the castle, and its reaching the center of, using the map a liminal hauntology of war occupied by the projection of male/token insecurity and masculinity-in-crisis onto a perpetual corrupt/monstrous-feminine scapegoat as coming from somewhere else that looks just like home; i.e., a monstrous liminal expression as forever policed through monomythic copaganda and token gradients: Sting glows blue, meaning the home is under attack and must be defended by brave warriors and holy men to preserve its boundaries, its property (including women) from unholy thieves-in-disguise. The surface of him oozes stigmatized sexual dominance as unironically xenophobic/xenophilic. Through this singular staging and interpretation, our modern-day Count is basically a fish out of water/might as well have flown in from outer space to suction our damsel away with his tractor beam: He comes, he sees, he conquers; everyone else “suffers” in ways that lead to actual suffering:

 

Singular interpretations are dangerous[8] because they enforce the colonial binary through open endorsement and willful ignorance: killing orcs is fine and should never be questioned. The canonical reaction to ironic camp is hostile, reliably leading to our four basic behaviors:

• open aggression, expressing gender trouble as a means of open, aggressive attack (disguised as “self-defense” reactive abuse): “We’re upset and punching down is free speech” (“free speech” being code for “negative freedom for bigots who want to say bigoted things” to defend the elite’s profit motive).
• condescension, expressing a moderate, centrist position that smarmily perpetuates the current status quo as immutable, but also optimal: “This is as good as it gets” but also which can never decay.
• reactionary indignation, using sex-coercive symbols (argumentation) to defend their unethical positions: “They’re out to destroy your heroes, your fun, all you hold dear (code for ‘the current power structure’).”
• DARVO (“Deny, Accuse, Reverse, Victim, Offender”), defending the status quo by defending the people who enslave them (the elite) by going after the elite’s enemies, thereby defending Capitalism during decay. When it decays, these “gamers” see “their” games in decay and will defend those, seeing human rights as an affordable compromise in the bargain. They see themselves (and the elite) as “victims,” and class warriors as monsters “ruining everything” (like Satan).

Shouted with a toxic “well, if I’m angry it’s your fault!” the fantasy—of tilting at prescribed windmills to ward off difficult truths—is precious to uncritical consumers. As something to worship and uphold, sanctioned violence extends to token forms within and outside of the text (the subjugated Amazon; e.g., Ellen Ripley or Samus Aran) as killing the big daddy of fascism (Count Dracula, exhibit 1a1c) but also the big bad bitch of Communism (Archaic Mothers like Grendel’s Mother, exhibit 1a1a1f1; but also the Alien Queen and Mother Brain, exhibit 1a1c) and various moral-panic, usual-target representations, such as the witchdoctor/necromancer or barbarian chief: not just canonical Amazonomachia but regressive forms, whose bloody vaudeville is forever caught up in us-versus-them disputes for the state’s benefit (whose reactionary cultural forms denote the imagery as used during class/culture war as visually war-like [for canon] and camp as an unwelcome act of war that demands a canonical response; i.e., iconoclastic monsters are recuperated inside a canonical casus beli, aka a false flag operation[9]). Simply put, it’s practice for anti-labor sentiment—a military drill relayed through neoliberal simulations of canonical war’s “adventure story” and tactical combat (the videogame, but especially the shooter).

Token or not, “history” whether conceived as “fiction” or “non-fiction” have much in common, including the binaries that emerge during crisis and decay. The vampire never seems to the die, the damsel is always in the distress, and the hero is always primed to white-knight her. “I can’t save you until you’re in danger,” his actions seem to suggest, which intimates the structure at work/play. It enforces itself through intended performances that prescribe meaning through adherence to traditional standards: rewarding those with faith. Yet, historically the biggest criminals are those with faith under the status quo shielding themselves from the foreign menace—say nothing of those plotting revenge by crying “DAVRO!” to project their scheme onto someone else. Both tell tall tales to justify the abuse going on; i.e., the urban militarism and tales of far-off slaughter and devastation (which Tolkien gentrified by removing torture dungeons and open, gratuitous sex from his stories, instead populating his worlds with seemingly “chaste” orcs and men duking it out on the open battlefield).

I know we’ve covered a lot of ground up to this point, but we have a ways to go before reaching the “camp map” finale (exhibit 1a1a1i). Moving forward, I want to cover the reflection of Cartesian dualism/sexual dimorphism in heteronormative language as warlike and divided, as well as the banality of evil tied to this broader legendary process as “map-like” in its own right, inviting all manner of people to chase after its contents while denying the oppressed a chance to speak (silence and denial being a core function of genocide).

First, faith or not, the dialectical-material relationship is ongoing during oppositional praxis, and generates a variety of harmful binaries during work as sexualized/sex work to bring this enforcement about: the virgin/whore, angel/devil, doctor/nurse, damsel/detective/demon, missionary/sodomite, savior/saboteur, colonist/colonized, cowboys/Indians, cops/criminals (victims), forgiven/unforgiven, saved/damned, black-to-white persons and other ethnic minorities, Christian/heretic, skinny/fat, horny/chaste, slutty/modest, fuckable/marriage material, able/disabled, hellcat/shrew, black knight/white knight, predator/prey, the kayfabe of the babyface/heel, cat/dog (neurodivergent/neurotypical, introvert/extravert)—but also monstrous, tokenized iterations of these things that can be used for or against the state; re: Amazon pastiche (a monumental fixture of this book’s praxis; more examples: exhibit 1a1b) through the centrist or abject kayfabe of codified versions battling it out for “supremacy” (code for profit) versus the Satanic, anticapitalistic (thus anti-neoliberal/antifascist) iterations of the same base visuals informing the public mindset through Gothic aesthetics, over and over and over again; re: ACAB, meaning “All Cops Are Bad” but also, as I see it, “All (Canonical) Castles Are Bad” (or capital, but that’s a singular non—ACIB): all canonical castles need kings, cops, and victims (which the elite prey upon through state tools of violence privatizing land and labor until the sun burns out; re: the state is straight, ergo ASAB, APAB, ABAB and so on).

Contrary to canonical depictions (which often pit the criminal against a spectrum of cops), the descriptive sexuality and gender parody of iconoclastic monsters/ironic monster-fucking (and their castles and other lairs) actually yield many different interpretations simultaneously. So while the status quo’s singular and restrictive interpretations are Legion, so are the flexible, chaotic interpretations that Gothic Communists provide; and unlike the state’s singular, braindead tune, our darkness is “visible”/class, culture and race conscious, but unafraid to camp the ghosts of men like Milton and Marx, but also Tolkien and James Cameron’s varied treatments of the monomyth (and its castles) as literally mapped out. In other words, we look after our own by subverting thus transmuting any structures (castles, ghosts, maps or otherwise) designed or recuperated by the elite to parasitically grip, then render us into emotionally and Gothically unintelligent mulch; i.e., “correct” symbols useful to profit, into actual corpses the state uses, discards, or targets during moral panics of various kinds inside the state’s monopoly of violence/state of exception (e.g., the zombie apocalypse). All exist to promote the banality of evil. The greatest lie of centrist propaganda is that Great Evil is one, cool and two, actually the Nazis or some such cartoon scapegoat. The Great Destroyer wasn’t a dragon or a Nazi for the white knight to slay. Nor was Communism the much-touted end of the world (whose development is held hostage by the “mutually-assured destruction” of the elite’s ever-expanding nuclear arsenal and war market[10]). Instead, the Greater of Two Evils is actually powerful, old, white men—men known not for their intelligence, good looks or brawn, but merely their positions within capital.

The elite are the owner class, thus steal wealth behind impressive theatrics; i.e., the false copy as sold to workers who buy into the myth of crisis as “adventure” put on a map. Each time adventure calls, the elite throw the levers of power with a disturbing lack of scruples—i.e., to profit from, thus get their daily dose of blood via wage/labor theft (and other colonizing behaviors). In turn, the system alienates us from them and them from us and us from our labor and each other. War and rape flourish, but also synonymize with heteronormative sex under the profit motive. Meanwhile, the elite roost on systems of wealth generation and accumulation-through-exploitation, letting fascists kill and steal from labor movements, thus hoard their own draconian piles of stolen, non-generated wealth: Tolkien’s Lonely Mountain and the King Under the Mountain’s “pale, enchanted gold” inside a castle disguised as a mountain, but also Dracula’s “Castlevania” as the fearsome, operatic home of the proverbial dragon lord. As these exist, they—like Tolkien’s twin trees from earlier (exhibit 0b)—canonize camp using the theatrical language of war as a treasure map to explore then conquer relative to castles as far away or near. The map is of the castle or leads to it inside of itself. Doing so waters Valinor’s illustrious[11] two towers (oh, the irony) with fresh, perennial blood: the Base and Superstructure as clutched in the elite’s iron grip, but also their Pygmalions; e.g., men like Tolkien mapping war out in a never-ending refrain that defends the white castle, thus Capitalism, from a black-castle scapegoat. Before we can execute our own “camp map”—one that camps the manifesto trees, thus corrupts them towards our purposes—we will have to understand the original as something to transmute back towards developing Communism; i.e., we will have to camp the canonical map (and castle) as a simulator (thus educator) of war that has taken many forms since Tolkien’s heyday.

“There be dragons” is borrowed foreshadowing as resting over a legendary hoard exchanged between those sickened by it: a militarized gold rush charted by a map/”fetch quest” whose empowerment is false (doesn’t change your material conditions; in fact, it endorses the status quo, which worsens them) and whose consequences of blindly endorsing (versus the enjoyment of informed consumption) are felt all around the world as imitated by the copy of the copy of the copy—wars of extermination. Tolkien’s Middle Earth was basically Western/Eastern Europe, which was emulated by virtually all of fantasy canon; i.e., the monomyth as ludologized by Wizards of the Coast with D&D as a tabletop, head-in-the-sand response—canonically speaking—to 1960s counterculture selectively celebrating Tolkien’s novels while also playing around inside copies of them. This “shadow zone” is, itself, Grendel’s cave as a castle to invade and plunder while proving one’s manliness by confronting “corruption,” the monstrous-feminine, and various awesome mysteries that you deny through military optimism/the return of the king and “good war” to scapegoat the fascist tyrant; i.e., as the Greater Good does, defending capital by following the canonical map even when it transforms beyond what Tolkien would have been comfortable with: into an actual castle located on home turf or connected to one’s home turf through indisputable settler-colonial ties.

(exhibit 1a1a1h2a1: “When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer[12].” Videogames are war simulators; in them, maps are built not merely to be charted and explored, but conquered through war simulations. The land is an endless site of conquest, war, rape and profit carefully dressed up as “treasure,” “liberation” and “adventure,” but in truth, brutalizing nature during endless wars of extermination borrowed from the historical and imaginary past as presently intertwined:

• top-left: Tolkien’s refrain, “Thror’s Map” from The Hobbit, 1937

—source: Weta Workshop

• top-right: Thomas Happ’s map of Sudra from Axiom Verge, 2015

—source: magicofgames

• bottom-left: Team Cherry’s map of Hallownest, from Hollow Knight 2017

—source: tuppkam1

• bottom-right: Bungie’s map of the West from Myth: the Fallen Lords, 1997

—source: Ben’s Nerdery

Though certainly not unique to Tolkien, and popularized in the shooter genre vis-à-vis Cameron, Tolkien near-single-handedly popularized the idea of “world-building” in fantasy by making a mappable world full of languages he invented, but which he tied to the larger process of world war that has been replicated countless times since; i.e., the idea of the map as a space for conquest that paralleled the elite raping Earth repeatedly as translated to the videogame format; e.g., Myth, Axiom Verge, Hollow Knight, above [our focus, in the next subchapter, will be on Metroidvania, not the RTS].

Under Capitalist Realism, Hell is a place that always appears on Earth [or an Earth-like double]—a black fortress threatening state hegemony during the inevitable decay of a colonial body. Its widening state of exception must then be entered by the hero during the liminal hauntology of war as a repeatable, monomythic excursion—a franchise to subdue during military optimism sold as a childhood exercise towards “playing war” in fantastical forms; e.g., Castlevania or Metroid. Conjure a Radcliffean menace inside the Imperial Core, then meet it with American force.

Threatened, the state always responds with violence before anything else Male or female, then, the hero becomes the elite’s exterminator, destroyer and retrieval expert, infiltrating a territory of crisis to retrieve the state’s property [weapons, princesses, monarchic symbols of power, etc] while simultaneously chattelizing nature in reliably medieval ways: alienating and fetishizing its “wild” variants, crushing them like vermin to maintain Cartesian supremacy and heteronormative familial structures [a concept we’ll return to in Volume One’s synthesis symposium, “Nature Is Food,” including exhibit 30a]. Neoliberalism merely commercializes the monomyth, using parental heroic videogame avatars like the knight or Amazon pitted against dark, evil-familial doubles—parents, siblings and castles [and other residents/residences]—in order to dogmatize the player [usually children] as a cop-like vehicle for state aims [often dressed up as a dated iteration thereof; e.g., an assassin, cowboy or bounty hunter, but also a lyncher, executioner, dragon slayer or witchfinder general “on the hunt,” etc]: preserving settler-colonial dominance through Capitalist Realism by abusing Gothic language—the grim reaper and his harvest. Doing so helps disguise, or at least romanticize [thus downplay, normalize and dismiss] state abuses through their regular trifectas and monopolies; i.e., the CIA and other shadowy arms of state mercenary violence fronted by myopic copies—pacifying the wider public by mendaciously framing these doubles as [often seductive] “empowerment” fantasies.

All the while, dogma becomes “home entertainment” as a palliative means of weaponizing the idea of “home” against those the state seeks to control and exploit on either side of a settler-colonial engagement: the cop or the cop’s victims. Either is sacrificed for the state through its usual operations; i.e., for the Greater Good, except heroes are glorified as monstrous sacrifices serving “the gods” [the status quo] out of Antiquity into capital, whereas their victims are demonized as evil, thus deserving of whatever holy [thus righteous] retribution comes their way. Both are chewed up and spit out, the state’s requisite “grist for the mill” as it uses its own citizens to move money through nature: by defending itself from an imaginary darkness “From Elsewhere.” A fortress’ sovereignty is forged, as are its manufactured crises and saviors, but the outcome is still profit; the castle remains haunted by the ghost of genocide, suggesting the unthinkable reality that the hero is false.

[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, the agents work as a detective[13]/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[14] versus the death of Nex Benedict at home[15]. 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; i.e., purging these alien forces through blood sacrifice or even total destruction of the home itself. The iconoclast can reverse this two-step process, but must protect those queenly things of nature normally persecuted by Cartesian forces and their cartographic schools of violence; i.e., by using counterterrorist language and ironic roles of violence, terror and monsters redirected towards the state: Athena’s Aegis and the dark queen’s chaotic stare of doom, but also literal, manmade weapons illustrated during performative shows of force against state invaders attacking Galatea.)

As we shall see, the map-like aesthetics and centralization of the castle did transform a great deal (vis-à-vis Cameron), but its basic function as a conquerable space did not. The capitalist idea is obviously older than Tolkien, but not as old as Beowulf (though Imperialism and the Master/slave dynamic more broadly dates back to Rome). Somewhere in between, the Cartesian Revolution occurred and introduced the map as the ruthless European’s desire to conquer and profit from nature-as-female through a system of thought (Cartesian dualism) coupled with the map as a settler-colonial technology of conquest that would carry over from Tolkien into Cameron and countless copies of his version of the same basic map:

Cartesian dualism/the Cartesian Revolution

The rising of a dividing system of thought by René Descartes that led to settler colonialism. As Raj Patel and Jason Moore write in A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things:

The inventors of Nature were philosophers as well as conquerors and profiteers. In 1641, Descartes offered what would become the first two laws of capitalist ecology. The first is seemingly innocent. Descartes distinguished between mind and body, using the Latin res cogitans and res extensa to refer to them. Reality, in this view, is composed of discrete “thinking things” and “extended things.” Humans (but not all humans) were thinking things; Nature was full of extended things. The era’s ruling classes saw most human beings—women, peoples of color, Indigenous Peoples—as extended, not thinking, beings. This means that Descartes’ philosophical abstractions were practical instruments of domination: they were real abstractions with tremendous material force. And this leads us to Descartes’ second law of capitalist ecology: European civilization (or “we,” in Descartes’ word) must become “the masters and possessors of nature.” Society and Nature were not just existentially separate; Nature was something to be controlled and dominated by Society. The Cartesian outlook, in other words, shaped modern logics of power as well as thought.

[…] The invention of Nature and Society was gendered at every turn. The binaries of Man and Woman, Nature and Society, drank from the same cup. Nature, and its boundary with Society, was “gyn/ecological” from the outset. Through this radically new mode of organizing life and thought, Nature became not a thing but a strategy that allowed for the ethical and economic cheapening of life. Cartesian dualism was and remains far more than a descriptive statement: it is a normative statement of how to best organize power and hierarchy, Humanity and Nature, Man and Woman, Colonizer and Colonized. Although the credit (and blame) is shared by many, it makes sense to call this a Cartesian revolution. Here was an intellectual movement that shaped not only ways of thinking but also ways of conquering, commodifying and living [… that] made thinking, and doable, the colonial project of mapping and domination.

Finally, the Cartesian revolution was made thinkable, and doable, the colonial project of mapping and domination. […] Cartesian rationalism is predicated on the distinction between the inner reality of the mind and the outer reality of objects; the latter could be brought into the former only through a neutral, disembodied gazed situated outside of space and time. That gaze always belonged to the Enlightened European colonist—and the empires that backed him. Descartes’ cogito funneled vision and thought into a spectator’s view of the world, one that rendered the emerging surfaces of modernity visible and measurable and the viewer bodiless and placeless. Medieval multiple vantage points in art and literature were displaced by a single, disembodied, omniscient and panoptic eye. In geometry, Renaissance painting, and especially cartography, the new thinking represented reality as if one were standing outside of it. As the social critic Lewis Mumford noted, the Renaissance perspective “turned the symbolic relation of objects into a visual relation: the visual in turn became a quantitative relation. In the new picture of the world, size meant not human or divine importance, but distance.” And that distance could be measured, catalogued, mapped, and owned.

The modern map did not merely describe the world; it was a technology of conquest (source).

Tolkien’s quaint treasure map is no accident, then, but a hauntological cryptonym of settler colonialism’s dread function of the map displaced to a faraway “other world/castle” that curiously looks (and functions) a whole lot like Earth does now: “All roads lead to Rome.” In short, the Cartesian function of cartography has become ludologized, and the progenitor for that great disguise was Tolkien and his gentrification of war on a naturalized good-vs-evil: England is naturalized and its nature is good but under attack by unnatural things spilling out from foreign castles, caverns, and the underworld into Tolkien’s “new Eden” (dressed up in elvish reinventions of an imaginary Britain). Being infamously allergic to allegory, Tolkien didn’t want his readers to look too closely during these “baths in Styx.” Instead, the current order and perception of the world (the Cycle of Kings) must be preserved by throwing all of the blame Capitalism deserves onto a far-off double. Yet, his monomythic, warlike refrain, “stab the orc, spill his blood!” was seconded by Cameron’s Aliens as a far more openly Promethean story—one whose weaponized nostalgia presents the slippery nature of power as stolen (and unrightfully so) by imperial forces passing themselves off as “the good guys” inside a hyperreal crypt set in outer space.

In defense of the status quo, Cameron takes Tolkien’s refrain (the treasure map set mostly in nature) and patently applies it to an American revenge fantasy whose monomyth is an infernal concentric pattern relayed through the inclusion of women as heroic (thus monstrous) inside a local castle. For Tolkien, war is the province of man and fought to defend the white castle from the black; inside Cameron’s “shadow zone” of monstrous theatre, his Gothic war story supplies bullets[16] and Amazonian protagonists in defense of a fallen colony from nature (the Archaic Mother) as coming home to roost; i.e., Man vs Nature-as-monstrous-feminine funneled through the transportation of Heinlein’s bombing of “space bugs” of the Bretton Woods era (a chilling and gross metaphor for bombing China, Korea and Japan) to neoliberal politics remediated unto videogames. Like Tolkien, though, Cameron’s use of the treasure map would easily yield a videogame form: the entire shooter genre as a war simulator that echoed Tolkien’s cartographic refrain inside Cameron’s closed space relying on the same codified belief systems and behavioral instructions—one updated for a whole new generation of children via a variety of conqueror strategies styled as “fantasy,” “sci-fi,” and “horror,” but generally a combination during Cameron’s brand of what I call “military optimism“:

A widely successful and canonical work, Aliens‘ influence on the videogame industry is profound, inspiring the entire shooter genre. This includes:

• • FPS (first-person shooters) like Doom (1993)
  • TPS (third-person shooters) like Metroid (1986)
  • RTS (real-time strategy games) like StarCraft (1996)
  • turn-based strategy games like X-COM: UFO Defense (1994)
  • hybrids (for these, refer to my FPS interview series, but also my Metroidvania PhD research and interview series with Metroid speedrunners, “Mazes and Labyrinths“)

[This research has since me writing “Military Optimism” back in 2021, culminated in my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus. —Perse, 3/27/2025]

Most shooters are sci-fi, but even fantasy outliers like Heretic (1995) were inspired by Doom. Shooters generally give the player guns to use against “alien” enemies—either from outer space, hell, or underground (aliens, demons, zombies). Strategy games are a bit more niche, and don’t focus on tactical reflexes, but the sentiment—of shooting bugs with guns—remains the same: “Die, monster! You don’t belong in this world!”

The idea—that anyone can shoot their problems—is a soldier’s fantasy. Although videogames shrink them into human-sized demons, we can’t kill our problems in reality. But a great many people seem happy with the fantasy because it feels empowering. Alas, this attitude doesn’t stay inside videogames. Fans of the shooter genre are often fans of real-world guns, and of war (source).

(exhibit 1a1a1h2a2: Cameron’s xenomorph’s take the alien’s acid blood [a defense mechanism] from the first film, and applies it to a creature called a xenomorph that demonizes the Communist stand-ins entirely and presents the marines as the fully-humanized military relief on par with Douglas Hickox’ racist settler-colonial apologia, Zulu Dawn [1979]:

We set out to make a different type of film, not just retell the same story in a different way. The Aliens are terrifying in their overwhelming force of numbers. The dramatic situations emerging from characters under stress can work just as well in an Alamo or Zulu Dawn as they can in a Friday the 13th, with its antagonist [source: Aliens Collection’s transcription of “James Cameron’s responses to Aliens critics” from Starlog Magazine, Issue #184, November 1992].)

 

Whereas Tolkien’s refrain is the High Fantasy treasure map—a false copy of the Earth as something to dominate through the centrist argumentation of so-called “home defense” during the classic monomyth—Cameron’s refrain is pretty much the entire shooter genre set in some kind of castle colony floorplan. But we want to examine Metroidvania, not Doom—in part because Metroid came far earlier and is an obvious videogame double of Aliens (with a warlike, female protagonist and villain, unlike Castlevania) that also happens to be much more about disempowerment than Doom is; but through the tradition of the opera, treats the castle as a physical, emotional and sexual extension of the mind: an exotic, oxymoronic, psychosexual place of madness, passion and music* to an imperiled heroine who suddenly can fight back much more than she was able to during Radcliffe’s day (the Great Enchantress often featuring music in her own castles, though often an eerie, far-off sort threatening to lure the heroine to certain doom). As we shall see, this “Gothic therapy” isn’t a net positive, and generally remains caught between the dampening constraints of societal expectations, stigmas and standards as things to canonize or camp by the heroine; generally her actions remain torn between two sides of herself at war inside the liminal space: being up to no good because a sexually repressed (and toxic) society thinks you are, versus actually doing anything that’s demonstrably harmful. It becomes something to acknowledge and relish in: “We’re totally being so wicked and bad right now!”

*Our focus in this subchapter isn’t strictly the music in Metroidvania, but I heartily invite you to consider its Gothic castle—the performative lands of madness and dark desire [compared to thunder and lightning, darkness and mist] but also duels and possessive, even obsessive, criminal love[17]—as something that is classically rather dance-like, often set to music of a dark and immodest sort (from a white, cis-het perspective; i.e., the appropriation of rock ‘n roll and jazz in Gothic environments (vis-à-vis Castlevania), operating as a kind of cautionary and tempting tone poem (e.g., “Night on Bald Mountain,” 1867) relayed through musical motion[18] inside said space. As with theatre, sex, and all-around BDSM activities of various sorts, there’s a genuine, albeit staged accuracy to how these things play out in our own lives; i.e., music literally sets the tone, tempo, and table, telling us how hard and fast to go when playing in whatever ways we decide; e.g., Trent Reznor’s “Closer” (1989, exhibit 43b): “You tear down my reason / It’s your sex I can smell […] I wanna fuck you like an animal […] You bring me closer to God!”

(artist: The Maestro Noob)

Beyond NIN, such “ludo-Gothic BDSM” applies to fucking, roleplay and/or dancing echoed through paraphernalia (and adult variants: sex toys) of assorted franchises that—unlike Radcliffe—actively help privileged people in the Global North (e.g., white girls) process survivor’s guilt/inheritance anxiety while still learning to think about the world differently through sex-positive kink, fetish and BDSM as “perceptive” Gothic counterfeits/counterculture, not blind enjoyment centered around themselves and their nerdy white fragility as something to buffer. It’s possible to still enjoy material culture during nerd sex as an extension or reclaiming of said culture (with someone or their partner wearing a t-shirt [or some such article] to tout their nerdy Gothic status as one’s trendy object of desire: the big-titty Goth GF as a stamp of, or stamped with, consumer pride that also contains cryptomimetic echoes of generational trauma inside of itself.

Dark desire, then, becomes something to compile and compound within various bondage and discipline exercises that, for all intents and purposes, constitute as “edging”—not the releasing of passion, but its prolonged storage until such a time as release is permitted by the one holding the reins). Indeed, enjoyment isn’t divorced from capital and monetization, but we can develop and raise cultural awareness and interconnectivity in meaningful ways while still getting to be the fantasies that Capitalism normally alienates us from (the unicorn not as a manmade, sequestered entity but one that is hidden behind paywalls, the resultant manufactured scarcity[19] granting it a rare, mythical appearance and appreciating value—compelled orgasms, aka “sad cum”); i.e., established through the artwork we make and games that we play as a second-nature mode of altered existence: self-definition as a basic human right, one that is quickly and readily understood at an intuitive level. It becomes a child-like curiosity and teaching that extends into adulthood, carrying Gothic Communism forward through workers [not the state] dictating the Gothic mode; i.e., their cultivating of emotional/Gothic intelligence with ludo-Gothic BDSM’s praxial synthesis and catharsis (the cultivation of daily habits—a topic for Volume One).

Note: As previously stated, when I originally wrote this volume, “ludo-Gothic BDSM” was only just being formed; i.e., the first deliberate appearance of the term that I can remember is in “The Map is a Lie’s” “Origins and Lineage” subsection (coming up, next). Any usage until that point in this volume is essentially a revision I included after the volume originally went live (many of those revisions actually happening for “The Total Codex” roll out, in March 2025). —Perse, 3/27/2025

Regardless of which shooter type, though, Cameron’s imaginary “Saigon” is the false copy of Tolkien’s refrain with a decayed imperial flavor from the start: a hyperreal site of endless war swept up in recent legends of the Gothic castle as something abandoned to walk around amongst/encounter through staged, quasi-operatic reenactments; i.e., going from good castle to bad castle (with no nature in between). Cameron’s displaced Saigon after the Fall is nuked into dust—if not from orbit the way that Heinlein always wanted (and robbing Star Wars of all its critical power in the process, exhibit 1a1a1h2b)—then from within a colony that was literally built to scuttle/self-destruct the way the company would want if they lost control to the guerrillas fighting them according to asymmetrical warfare. Before the blast, these chronotopes are full of enemies to kill, and take a variety of tiered forms that fit the regimented order of the material world under Capitalism: the lord, the knight, the peasant to the king, the general, the soldier to the boss, the mini-boss, the minion. The hero tracks down these threats; sees, kills and makes a violent example/trophy of them; and returns home with “his” war booty in tow.

Unlike Tolkien, Cameron’s world of warmaking isn’t a boys-only club. Outside of Doom (which has no women anywhere), the monstrous-feminine remains a core component of the shooter’s core design. For starters, Samus Aran and Mother Brain clearly were modeled after Ripley and the Alien Queen. Indeed, Samus follows up Ripley as the aloof, no-nonsense sex object that Scott originally disrobed and Cameron handed an assault rifle; this makes her Nintendo’s archetypal Amazon, a monster girl (exhibit 1a1a1h3a2) of the neoliberal Japanese hauntology that Nintendo would run with—literally. With Metroid, they took Cameron’s refrain six years before Doom and built a (for the time) spatially-unique TPS (the non-linear maze design being foundational to what Metroid-style Metroidvania are). Despite the side-scroller viewpoint, the game is just much a race as Doom is. Yes, the spaces are far less straightforward or focused on the pure killing of enemies, but the game also wasn’t aimed at young men the same way that Doom was. After the hero’s identity was revealed, the game’s military operation yielded a second, hidden function: foreplay and roleplay with a feminine slant. Samus’ actual mission became something of a runner-up to the world’s longest striptease imperiled by Gothic aesthetics and music[20]: the Amazon in a man’s world/montage, and disempowered as much as she was empowered (seriously, the first 1986 Metroid is hard and not user-friendly like the later games are).

(source)

Whether fantasy, horror and/or sci-fi, maps are central to war as something to navigate, thus educate through theatrical instruction. This obviously didn’t start with Cameron; it started (in the 20th century) with Tolkien’s popular use of the map as a disguise for war functioning as usual. Tolkien was also more overtly Biblical and patriarchal than Cameron, his sylvan Valinor giving us a convenient model for the twin trees of oppositional praxis (the Biblical rendition of the Base and the Superstructure being the roots of Capitalism’s typical commodifying of war). In general, we want to camp the trees by pulling a “Satan,” which can either mean making monsters or making places for monsters to exist. As this subchapter focuses on the navigation and interrogation of canonical Gothic space, this means we’ll have to camp the duplicates of our aforementioned treasure map representing the trees in praxis; i.e., what constitutes the Base and the Superstructure within the technology of conquest—its locations and embodiments of power (the castle) expressed in theatrical language when following the map inside of itself to a pandemonium-esque “shadow zone.” Games and theatre aren’t just powerful educational tools unto themselves; they teach us how to communicate as people generally do: through games, play and various staged performances and deceptions that can rewrite belief systems and codified behaviors—i.e., fear and dogma as something to play with on- and offstage during the same basic conversations.

To this, I’m focusing on Cameron (and shooters) for a reason. One, I’m an expert in shooters and Metroidvania. Two, whereas Tolkien’s maps generally require a lengthy trek to somewhere else, interrogating torturous power at the end of a long journey (with smaller, shadowy pockets of Gothic, Numinous power scattered throughout: barrow-downs, Moria, Old Man Willow, etc), Cameron’s war theatre places the Promethean element directly inside the “shadow zone”—right on a colonial site that uncannily resembles home: the castle—the imperial site of power—not just as faded, but abandoned and overrun with ghosts who have a bone to pick with us. In short, we’re already in “Rome” and there’s a much higher concentration of vengeful ghosts to interrogate in a Numinous sense, thus more chances to camp war and rape represented through a pedagogy of the oppressed that reflects on home (albeit through a double of itself, explored onstage). To this Cameron’s use of the black castle acknowledges its updated settler-colonial function both tied to a white castle at home, and the colony being reclaimed by nature in ways that Tolkien is completely hostile towards. For Tolkien, nature is simply good, “of the home” in ways that project colonialism onto a faraway evil site; nature has nothing to say about the West doing these things/acting like Rome. The Ents punish Saruman for his excessive industries, but not the elves, Hobbits, Rohan or Gondor—they conduct “Goldilocks Imperialism”/Bretton Woods; e.g. the wood elf king locking up Thorin and company in his dungeons versus Sauron “taking it too far” (thus being the perfect one to blame when the trees start to die. As usual, Tolkien blames everyone but the state).

So, while we want to camp Tolkien’s refrain, I think the best route in doing that is to make it Gothic the way that Cameron did and then critique that: a site of war that makes much more room for warrior women and monstrous-feminine entities and spaces akin to Grendel and Grendel’s mother haunting the castle, but also its liminal hauntology of war as ping-ponged between a white castle and a black castle superimposed over each other. This is where “Cameron’s” redeployments come in—in part because war involves less walking than it did in Tolkien’s day, but also because Cameron’s infamous story had a female-centric, Promethean element that Tolkien largely did not (Eowyn was the exception that proved the rule; i.e., she had to crossdress as “Dernhelm” to act like a man in secret to defend her lord and her kin, King Theoden[21]). We’re going focus, then, on the Metroidvania as stemming from Cameron’s approach to the treasure map—i.e., critiquing power as centralized in a Gothic sense around the monstrous-feminine castle, not its surrounding countryside: a doubled, liminal space full of Numinous concentrations of power and violence, and whose spirits and monsters are far more Promethean to engage with than Tolkien’s manly heroes and necromancers (shoving poor old Shelob into a pit somewhere). In short, the map as a space to actually explore is far more decayed and troubled by the shadow of war as bound up in whatever the heroes are fighting for being worthy of critique, thus camp. Even so, when executed by Cameron for its intended purpose, or by players of the Metroidvania that followed, the basic function of the treasure map is intact and plays out like Tolkien’s does. Keeping this in mind, we can reflect on Tolkien’s refrain while examining videogames inspired by Cameron’s neoliberal call to war through female soldiers battling against monstrous-feminine Indigenous enemies.

Another reason to focus on Cameron versus Tolkien is his canceled futures (and their ubiquitous offshoots) are tied directly to war as an openly settler-colonial process. Including the shooter genre he single-handled inspired by ripping off Tolkien’s refrain, videogame canon more broadly is neoliberal, thus heteronormative through the ludic scheme of war and its liminal hauntologies; i.e., as fractally recursive in a cartographic sense that feels hyperreal (the real world behind the canonical map of empire as destroyed, which in turn requires the in-text map to decay to hide the systemic exploitation through dead futures). Cameron’s retro-future space world (war in space) is utterly primed to be interrogated for these reasons. Within his complicated mirage, the endlessly concentric offerings of false power and false hope[22] occur through the neoliberal’s Faustian ludic contract as map-like, but also a Promethean Quest (stealing “fire” from the gods) that obliterates the hero once followed to its fearsome and all-consuming central conclusion; re: the infernal concentric pattern (which again, Tolkien shies away from by having the lands of darkness be a temporary stopping point). My master’s thesis and postgraduate writing serve to illustrate that point within Metroidvania; i.e., as closed space, but also a palliative Numinous whose lured “victims” may play around with in a broader sense of ludo-Gothic BDSM—i.e., not restricted purely to videogame play trapped inside digital gameworlds, but informed by them and their torturous content as expanded to the half-real space between the fiction and the rules: Zimmerman’s “magic circle” as expanding outside of the television or computer screen to account for the complexities and indiscretions of games executed/negotiated in practice, not in theory.

This flexibility of theory and play allows workers to playfully comment on larger issues present within their own social-sex lives that are themselves informed by bigger things and counterfeits of those things: castles of castles, maps of maps of maps, across all medium and life imitating said media and vice versa. The next subchapter will divide into two parts that unpack these heady concepts more through the Metroidvania as a germane example of performing power that we can iconoclastically apply to Tolkien’s refrain through Cameron’s echoing of said refrain; i.e., as a parallel, urbanized map/castle floorplan to his own open-world territory of conquest that interrogates power and trauma directly inside a closed space: a castle with an imperial history tied to the so-called “good place.” Unlike Tolkien, Metroidvania are thoroughly Gothic in their liminalities (technically Tolkien’s world is designed to be moved through, but I digress) but need to be camped based on all the argumentation that we’ve already laid out concerning our aforementioned “shadow zone” (the Superstructure): ACAB, thus requiring the canonical variants of a castle (and its arrangements of power) to be camped. Our third subchapter will consider this shadow space as already recultivated/camped by Gothic Communists “putting the pussy on the chainwax” (reclaiming the Base): camping the castle monsters. Finally, the fourth and final stage of our “camp map” (exhibit 1a1a1i) will give a short demonstration, effectively taking our manifesto-tree building blocks (already laid out in the thesis statement behind us, before having assembled them here, in the “camp map”) as leading forward by example into the symposium.

Got all that? Good! Now let’s keep following/assembling the yellow brick road and see where it leads, laying down more steps as we progress using the steps behind us to do so (using canonical bricks to build a campy castle, brick by stolen brick). Onto part two and the Metroidvania as something to outline and camp…

Onto “The Map is a Lie; or, Metroidvania and the Quest for Power (opening and part one: ‘Origins and Lineage’)“!

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About the Author

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

Footnotes

[1] In TERF circles, male gender-non-conforming bodies are classically seen as active; i.e., as “men in dresses” invading “real women’s” spaces, versus gender-non-conforming AFAB persons; the latter are treated as passive—merely “confused,” generally by a Jewish conspiracy that has convinced them not to reproduce for the state.

[2] Allusions to John Keats’ “Ode to Psyche” (1819):

And in the midst of this wide quietness

A rosy sanctuary will I dress

   With the wreath’d trellis of a working brain,

         With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,

With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign,

         Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same:

And there shall be for thee all soft delight

         That shadowy thought can win,

A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,

         To let the warm Love in! (source).

[3] From Forbidden Planet (1956), a sci-fi/horror film about a magic machine inside an ancient, abandoned, alien civilization that once accessed, releases the inner demons of a wizard-like scientist (the film was based loosely off Shakespeare’s The Tempest, 1611—a story about a wizard named Prospero whose magical books lead him to seek revenge against the military men who wronged him).

[4a] Pandemic meaning “spreading to/spanning all land masses/the entire globe,” endemic meaning “native to a given area, or becoming native or naturalized to said area over time.”

[4b] I’m being rather playful with my terminology, here. “Aftercare” generally refers to the “wind-down” or relaxation period following intense BDSM. It’s meant to give the triggered or aggravated party time to destress after a stressful activity that releases the lion’s share of said stress. But in situations of endless crisis, waves of terror are met with canonical violence to try and end the stress causing them. Except they become “bad aftercare” by existing within crises and without trying to end them; they just kick the can down the road and call it “leveling up” (the gaming term for “progress”). For us, “leveling up” is surviving trauma, but also contributing to the Cause by ending crisis as a perceived reality the state forces onto its workers to pit them against each other for the profit motive. Said motive reliably turns people into cops and victims, colonizers and colonized. Those inside the in-group are “the haves” and are lauded for their conquests; those in the out-group are “the have-nots” and are forsaken for being weak, pagan, doomed, etc.

[5] Banks exert tremendous control over sex workers, but also the companies that employ them. As Eloise Berry writes in “Why OnlyFans Suddenly Reversed Its Decision to Ban Sexual Content,” 2021):

So why did OnlyFans (briefly) decide to ban the kind of content which had come to characterize its platform? “The short answer is banks,” said Tim Stokely, the site’s British founder and chief executive. Banks, he claimed, are refusing to process payments associated with adult content. In an interview with the FT, Stokely singled out BNY Mellon, Metro Bank, and JPMorgan Chase for blocking intermediary payments, preventing sex workers from receiving their earnings, and penalizing businesses which support sex workers. He declined to reveal OnlyFans’ current banking partners. This follows similar behavior by payment service providers which have begun to dissociate from the porn industry. After a New York Times investigation found images of rape and child sex abuse on Pornhub, Mastercard and Visa prohibited the use of their cards on the site in Dec. 2020.

In response, Pornhub removed all content produced by unverified partners and implemented a verification program for users. In April this year, Mastercard announced tighter control on transactions of adult content to clamp down on illegal material. The requirements included that platforms verify ages and identities of their users (source).

While the banks’ reason might sound genuine and sex-positive on its face, the material reality is bankers are punishing sex workers for the corporate deregulation of their own labor—i.e., the usual fat cats protecting their own image after the consequences of deregulation’s criminogenic conditions invariably come to light. Meanwhile, the incidental criminality of bad-faith actors within said conditions are not punished; they are sex traffickers and sex pests who already operate anonymously from the shadows. Instead, sex workers are punished when they are denied (often for many) the only means at their disposal for financial independence.

[6] Gender-affirming care includes the injection of synthetic testosterone as a controlled substance (whose usage is selectively policed by those who maintain the heteronormative standard; i.e., looking the other way when cis-het male athletes [and tokens] use performance-enhancing drugs, but cracking down on trans athletes [usually trans women] attempting to transition in the field of sports. “Think of the women!” is argued to abuse trans people and cis-het women for the benefit of the status quo—men).

[7] The Vikings loved their drugs before going on raids, going berserk and killing for the gods by slaying the gods’ enemies; re: Grendel and Grendel’s mother, but really anyone comparable to them using drugs or drug-like poetics in ways that break canon’s kayfabe.

[8] In the words of my friend and mentor, Dr. Sandy Norton, if anyone tells you there’s only one correct interpretation of something, run.

[9] A “special military operation” built on false pretenses; i.e., “they fired first,” to which the “offended” party hits them with everything they have, using that as an excuse to invade and colonize their land. It’s not simply a Nazi tactic, but Imperialism-in-action regardless of who the aggressor is; e.g., America’s “special military operation” into Iraq and its surrounding countries during the so-called War on Terror (a poorly disguised excuse to conduct Imperialism as usual under the façade of “the end of history” by bringing “Democracy” to the rest of the world, aka proxy war or neo-colonialism: they’re the “terrorists” and we’re conducting “counterterrorism.” It’s the usual black-and-white antics of the colonial binary in action).

[10] Re: GDF’s “There Was No ‘Cold’ War,” “NATO Is Risking Nuclear War for Money,” and “No, We Didn’t Need to Nuke Japan.”

[11] Beware any white castle touted as “exceptional”; e.g., Coleridge’s notion of a Gothic cathedral. To camp them, you first have to view them without rose-tinted glasses.

[12] A canonical misunderstanding/misquoting of Plutarch written by neoliberals needing an evil bad guy to chew the fat. As Anthony Madrid writes in “And Alexander Wept” (2020):

Remember Die Hard? I don’t. I saw it right around the time it came out, and all I remember is Bruce Willis, barefoot, running through broken glass. That, for me, was a metaphor for watching the movie. Fans of the film, however, will recall its dapper German villain, Hans Gruber, smacking his silly lips and gloating at some private victory. He puts his fingertips together and says in facetiously tragic tones (clearly quoting something from High Culture and referring with cozy irony to himself): “And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer” [that’s a misquote]. Then he smiles with evil-genius self-satisfaction and says: “Benefits of a classical education.” / Yeah. Except that quote would never come up in the context of a classical education, unless the instructor happened to be taking a jolly detour, nose in the air, to attack a piece of legendary crap that no student of his must ever traffic in. […]

A few facts. The monkeys who wrote Die Hard did not invent that quote. […] It comes up in certain classic English poems from the seventeenth century [e.g., Edmund Waller addressing Oliver Cromwell in 1655 …] The quote is a hash of three passages in Plutarch, first century CE. Two of the passages were made available to English speakers (most notably Shakespeare) in 1579, in the translation by Thomas North. […] Look at this rather nicer version [of Plutarch’s “On Tranquillity of Mind”] by everybody’s favorite courtier, Sir Thomas Wyatt [for Catherine of Aragon]:

Alexander, whan he herde Anaxarchus argue that there were infynite worldes, it is said that he wept. And whan his frendes asked hym what thing had happened him to be wept for: “Is it nat to be wept for,” quod he, “syns they say there be infynite worldes, and we are nat yet lorde of one?”

[…] Alexander is not weeping in sorrow that there are no more throats to cut. This is not a picture of a man at the end of a career of world conquest; he’s at the beginning. “Look at all these throats—and I haven’t even cut one!”

[…] And therfore, seing that his fathers dominions and Empire increased dayly more and more, perceiving all occasion taken from him to do any great attempt: he desired no riches nor pleasure but warres and battells, and aspired to a signory, where he might win honor.

Now that’s from Plutarch’s Life of Alexander. No tears, but definitely the guy Gruber had in mind, the Godzilla he’d heard about in German day camp. Here’s a prince who wants to conquer for the sake of conquering; he doesn’t care whether Macedon comes out on top or not, except insofar as it’s compatible with his personal glory (source).

In short, Gruber’s misquoting of classical history is a kind of bad education that invites the fash-coded baddie in a neoliberal copaganda to steal from the fictional elite, while the real-world elite rewrite the past along these historical-material lines; i.e., neoliberal apologia regarding war as essentialized through men just like Gruber.

[13] We’ll examine 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.”

[14] 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).

[15] Persephone van der Waard’s “Remember the Fallen: An Ode to Nex Benedict” (2024).

[16] As per the Military Industrial Complex and copaganda, thanks to Cameron we had yet another genocide on a “savage continent” being led by firearms: the “holocaust by bullet” oscillating between Western forces executing settler-colonial against the usual targets being enacted by a superior righteous force against a primarily melee-implemented or non-Western target of colonial violence; i.e., “kill the Indian, save the man” to gentrify the territories by lethal force. Except now it was projected onto the pure imaginary as something to replicate by anxious colonial inheritors/guilty benefactors being acclimated to war stuck on loop during the end of economic history (Capitalist Realism). Not only was Doom (1993) already a clone of Aliens, but it went on to spawn countless clones of itself associated with young white men and “gamer” culture predominantly told through personal computers (see: Michael Hitchen’s “A Survey of First-person Shooters and their Avatars,” 2011). During its heyday Doom had more copies of itself installed on personal computers than the Microsoft Windows operating system (quite a feat considering Bill Gates’ monopolist approach to computer software):

In late 1995, Doom was estimated to be installed on more computers worldwide than Microsoft’s new operating system Windows 95, despite million-dollar advertising campaigns for the latter. The game’s popularity prompted Bill Gates to briefly consider buying id Software, and led Microsoft to repurpose their Doom porting project into a promotion of the new operating system as a gaming platform. One related presentation, created to promote Windows 95 as part of Microsoft’s Judgment Day event, had Bill Gates digitally superimposed into the game, killing zombies with a shotgun (source: “Doom95,” Doom Wiki).

Doom apes the plot to Rambo: First Blood (1982) without irony—i.e., the AstroTurf guerrilla planted in the jungle and killing every “demon” in sight. Decades after the original game released, the sentiment of trying to escape hell by killing as many demons as possible was stamped in the gamification of the Vietnam War necrometric: victory as literally determined and advertised by kill counts. This is very much the arcade-style points system Rune Klevjer says Doom didn’t have: “Doom had done away with the score-points and player lives from Wolfenstein 3-D, and thereby erased two of the most distinctive characteristics of the arcade. Still, the arcade aesthetic dominated in terms of movement, characters and combat. Over-sized guns and hordes of spectacular enemies went hand-in-hand with a fast-paced, frantic and almost balletic style of play” (source: “Way of the Gun“).

Even as I write this, though, Karl Jobst says in his latest video, “In Doom, there is simply nothing more “alpha” or satisfying than finishing a level and seeing a big beautiful 100% next to kills. There’s just something cathartic about knowing there was literally no more pain you could have inflicted; you are a beast, and every 100% you deliver should serve as a warning to every other demon out there that you’re coming for them and you will not stop until every last one is dead” (source: Karl Jobst’s “Impossible Doom Challenge FINALLY Completed After 30 Years!” 2023). In a word, it’s disheartening because the so-called “gamer mindset” applies victory and winning to everything that qualifies as a demon, including women, minorities or anything else that tries to be political, which that you can simply win against through force or by virtue of the fact that you’re a man, thus always right. Raw numbers is ok if you’re doing it; e.g., the “37 cocks” double standard from Clerks (1994): Dante is simply livid when his girlfriend tells him (under duress) that she sucked 36 dicks before him, but his fucking of 12 girls before her is “no big deal.”

[17] Such romances arguably taken to toxic, theatrical extremes by bored white women—e.g., Wuthering Heights—while also saying something about the awful, highly controlling nature of institutional marriage. I think this duality is often something that is overlooked by white women who consume and expect things of what they call “literature” and “romance”:

The main thing that irritates me about romance in literature is the unfortunate tendency to glamourize adultery.  Interestingly, people in films or television who are adulterous tend not to fare too well – soaps etc are very keen on giving people their comeuppance.  Literature tends to get a bit caught up on the beauty of it all and loses sight of the fact that adultery tends to boil down to an inability to keep your pants on even though you’ve promised that you would (source: Girl with her Head in a Book’s “Top Ten Dysfunctional Couples in Literature,” 2015).

For one, their idea of “literature” and “romance” seem to be highly prescriptive: love has to be amatonormative and healthy as a means of entertainment, first or foremost. But satire can be staged, highly theatrical and ironic. Romeo and Juliet, for example, is a parody of precisely the kinds of stories that were being written in Shakespeare’s day—it’s literally a joke told with a straight face.

In the Gothic spaces we’re examining with Metroidvania, the operative function is Gothic insofar as it is liminal—trapped inside the castle, but also conflicting notions of what is correct and incorrect regarding agency and desire, sexuality and power for persons who generally would have been denied all of these things. They become doubled inside of themselves, arguing not just onstage but in the minds of the audience interpreting them. Keep this in mind when we examine Castlevania and Jojo in part three of the “camp map.”

[18] For a fun example (and personal favorite), consider Metroid’s fan music: “When I think of Metroid 1, I specifically recall its dark foreboding atmosphere. You could hear this in 2000s cover bands like the NESkimoes and the Minibosses. This dark recollection has been erased by Nintendo’s reimagining of Metroid’s past. The threat of war is no longer a shadow that darkens the mood; it’s like riding a bike, only waiting to be picked up. To this, I can’t imagine future generations producing anything as dark as “Norfair Tenement Blues” (2004) or “Kraid” (2000). The caution is gone, replaced with bravado [of a post-9/11 word]” (source: “Military Optimism”). “Norfair Tenement Blues” is a great song—a cross between Nine Inch Nails and Metroid, it really nails the mood, but with a trademark ’90s gloom: war is something to fear.

[19] Whereas Sir Peter’s deal with Antiquity denied all magic by locking it away inside a vault, Peter S. Beagle’s 1982 adaptation presented the folly of this arrangement by having the old king go mad because the only thing that made him happy were the unicorns held prisoner at his castle—not one or two, but literally all of them. Freeing them was a mercy to him and the unicorns, but also proof that sexy monsters don’t disappear after Capitalism is transformed into Socialism and finally Communism; they’re simply spread out and are shared in a system that doesn’t turn you into King Haggard (the ultimate crook/chaser)—i.e., by dismantling the systemic power imbalances that create perceived advantages through unequal, coercive arrangements of power and material conditions; e.g., the ability to “game the system” through its usual methodology of extortion, insider-trading, monopolies, tax evasion, fraud, etc.

[20] The opening music, vis-à-vis the Minibosses’ 2000 version, channels the dark Romanticism of Alien‘s own musical pedigree; e.g., Howard Hanson’s Symphony No. 2 – “Romantic” (1930) as both uplifting and sad, showing a dark side to the cosmos framed within a human drama inside a castle in 1979 relegated to some unknown retro-future date. And let me tell you what, I listened the absolute shit out of the Minibosses (on bootleg CDs, back when I was in high school and they were still playing in bars), but also the Alien soundtrack (especially the 2007 Intrada two-disc set); it just spoke to me and my own life—i.e., the beauty in the dark, gritty side of things as a kind of calculated risk/theatre to make me feel heard but also paradoxically in control while piloting a disempowered heroine who, along with the castle, mirrored my own complex life, feelings and medieval education. Rilke’s poem, “Ich liebe meines Wesens Dunkelstunden” (1899) sums it up well:

I love the dark hours of my being
in which my senses drop into the deep.
I have found in them, as in old letters,
my daily life that is already lived through,
and become wide and powerful, like legends.
Then I know that there is room in me
for a second large and timeless life (source).

[21] A mad king himself, but Tolkien scapegoats the horse: “Snowmane, also referred to as Théoden’s Bane and Master’s Bane, was buried in the hollow where he fell which became known as Snowmane’s Howe” (source: Tolkien Gateway); i.e., a possible allusion to Shakespeare’s Richard the III (1633): “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!” (source).

[22] I.e., the problem of Cameron’s centrist feminism is that it “empowers” the female warrior to uphold the status quo, dooming women at large (say nothing of everyone Ripley attacks to “save the world” by paradoxically blowing it up; or as Metroid put it: “Pray for a truce peace in space!”).