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

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

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

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

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

Forbidden Sight, part three: Summoning Demons (re: Faust and Radcliffe)

“We do not treat with Sauron, forsaken and accursed!” / “It takes more to make a king than a broken elvish blade!”

—Gandalf and the Mouth of Sauron, The Return of the King (2003)

Picking up where “Making Demons (re: Prometheus)” left off…

As demonstrated and popularized by Milton, binaries aren’t always a problem; i.e., if they’re subversive and develop Communism through camp; re: camping the usual good-versus-evil dogma, and their manmade heroes and cartographic refrains. From Amazons to knights of an earthly to hellish to Promethean origin, demons and their dark sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll are legion, but dualistic; i.e., you can reclaim any demon made for war and capital (re: the Creature, the T-800 and others). But what about those summoned, and what of their fires of unknown origin to trade and (mis)treat with in inflammatory ways—especially the torturous and queer mutilative elements involved (no vampires, this time)? Let’s take a look!

“Summoning Demons” divides in two basic parts, both of which feature Faust and Ann Radcliffe, as well as Evil Dead, H.R. Giger and others (note: this is where the Demons Module really starts to abbreviate; i.e., “Summoning Demons” is less about close-reads, and more about introducing ludo-Gothic concepts you can apply through demon BDSM, yourselves—strict [the fash inquisitor aesthetic, above] or gentle):

• “Raw Deals, Impostors, the Occult and Death Curses; the Demonic BDSM of Canonical Torture vs Exquisite ‘Torture’” (feat. Ann Radcliffe, Marlowe’s Faustus, Evil Dead, Smile and others—partially included in this post): Per Faustus, Smile, Evil Dead and other Gothic stories, lays out the idea of summoning occult demons, including acts of interrogating them through Radcliffe’s refrain/the classic Neo-Gothic model: the demonic (damsels, detectives and demons) trifecta vis-à-vis canonical torture vs Radcliffe’s exquisite “torture.”
• “Exploring the Derelict Past: the Demonic Trifecta of Damsels, Detectives and Sex Demons; or Enjoying Yesterday’s Exquisite Torture on the Edge of the Civilized World” (feat. H.R. Giger and Ann Radcliffe): Lays out the poetic ability to summon the “ancient” past, then explore it through Radcliffe’s classic trifecta in increasingly subversive ways (from the xenomorph to Amazons to damsels of various kinds choosing to “imperil” themselves”)!

We’ll introduce Radcliffe’s ubiquitous, virtuous, hypocritical and hypnotic “torture sex” arguments, then slowly camp them as well (thus, her ghost: “There’s still life in the old lady, yet!”).

Raw Deals, Impostors, the Occult and Death Curses; the Demonic BDSM of Canonical Torture vs Exquisite “Torture” (feat. Ann Radcliffe, Marlowe’s Faustus, Evil Dead, Smile and others)

I am trans, thus embody a marker of stigma according to my gender as something to identify with and perform […]  As such, I feel as women classically do in such stories, wherein my lived experience is an attraction to power through strength in ways that sometimes have done me a disservice—i.e., the paradox of wanting to be near power to keep an eye on it, to want a protector or to face ones lived/imagined fears through calculated risk: the vicarious passion or exquisite torture that I call “the palliative Numinous” (a pain-relieving effect achieved from, and relayed through, intense Gothic poetics and theatrics). It’s very Promethean, but expressed through the venues and activities of the (for me) white female domestic: the home, but also the dance hall while being “on the market” as an imperiled, damaged debutante; i.e., drawn to excitement and danger though maladaptive responses that yearn nevertheless for catharsis (source).

—Persephone van der Waard, Sex Positivity, Volume Zero (2023)

In camping the (mono)mythic blueprint, Mary Shelley’s process of detecting forbidden knowledge moved paradoxically away from and towards the “ancient” land of the gods, mise-en-abyme. She fought fire of the gods with fire of the gods, theft with theft, her own “failed” experiment a resounding success (deprived of unironic violence inside realms of mutual consent, most men don’t know how to handle a naked, pissed-off woman—especially if she’s smarter than them).

Now, we’ll delve into and towards a Gothic flame (re: Varma) that is more magically Numinous; i.e., as something to make, but also trade in, ourselves—like Magic: the Gathering cards, but also Faust and the magicians of yore dealing with Satan direct (versus making him): summoning demons through dark wishes; e.g., Matthew Lewis critiquing capital through a faux-medieval revival! Good BDSM (sex or otherwise) is about getting what you want while balancing the needs of someone else, and Lewis’ story concerned Ambrosio as someone who—like any good Gothic villain—is an insecure and greedy coward who only cares about himself and total permanent power over others (and who pays the ultimate price for it: the ignominious death by a crossdressing destroyer greater than he is).

There’s still a technological element (re: Clarke’s Law), of course; i.e., these older ideas of “magic” were simply interactions with technology as abstracted into riotous exchanges (and any outcomes of the desired result), while working against canonical forces; e.g., the Philosopher’s Stone being a poetic desire to create for all peoples—Isaac Newton being an alchemist, Galileo being put under house arrest for his own discoveries, and Groundskeeper Willie and the lads showing the people of Springfield how to have a real soccer riot (they’d call it football, but I digress). When demons are about, they’re speaking to the dualistic, Frankensteinian power of technology and desire, but also “ancient” (often tokenized berserks, left) personas going hand-in-hand:

Except, the closer you get to the imaginary past, the more magical technology becomes in neo-medieval forms (the forward-facing elements of the retro-future decaying backwards into older-appearing hauntologies that occupy the same performative zones). Power is knowledge and vice versa. Per Faust, power is a performance; i.e., unto whores in Faustian narratives wrestling with state pimps, the latter raping nature-as-monstrous-feminine by using the same ergodic/egregoric likenesses’ demonic threats of canonical vs exquisite “torture”:

(artist: Artpaque)

So whereas “Idle Hands” focused on whores, period—and “Making Demons,” on the Promethean Quest—now part two focuses on Faustian bargains and the seeking of forbidden knowledge through magic and deals (the two are functionally synonymous but I digress): those offered by aesthetically occult demons when summoned on the self-destructive and -penitent[1] quest for knowledge; i.e., by those closer to such things, having this or that for sale “for the right price”; e.g., women and queer folk from the 1800s onwards, treated as sin/vice sponges—classy and profane, their endless “final forms” and infernal tutelage seen as everything and the kitchen sink, then pursued by everyone and their grandma to Hell and back!

• “Whores and Faust: Summoning the Whore/Black Penitent” (included in this post): Introduces the idea of summoning whores (and by extension sex demons of a Lewis or Radcliffe style); i.e., in strictly magical, Faustian language. Introduces Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, but discusses them vis-à-vis Faust through modern versions of each; e.g., not just Marlowe’s early modern Doctor Faustus (1590), but Greg Beeman’s Mom and Dad Save the World (1992), Alan Rickman in Die Hard (1988), John Landis’ Animal House (1978), Roger Ebert’s weird white moderate voyeurism, and Kevin Smith’s Dogma (1999).
• “The Road to Hell; or, Summoning the Whore, Ourselves (and Other Considerations of the Faustian Bargain vis-à-vis the Participants)“: Considers poetically summoning demons/the whore (through magic), doing so while “pulling a Faust”; i.e., according to a brief history of demons and their torturous summoning rituals and effects dating back to Marlowe’s science wizard. We’ll start by demasking a “strict” double of old harmful forms—Jadis, in my case, being someone to clone and demask, as Radcliffe’s future stand-in Velma Dinkley would, but expanding the interrogation to benefit all oppressed groups—then explore how to do so while engaging with the Gothic past as it continuously evolved out of itself. This includes onstage and off; i.e., from the chaos of the Middle Ages and various famous works (from Hammer of Witches to Doctor Faustus) into the Enlightenment and beyond towards 20th and 21st century variants; e.g., Smile and Evil Dead, but also my ex Jadis’ abuse of me: as collectively built on top of an earlier history whose demonic tradition endlessly haunts us, and which we must respond to by camping it, ourselves!

We’re not the first to do this, the basic idea is from Matthew Lewis, who summoned his demons through the School of Horror to expand the mind beyond state illusions; Radcliffe flirted with sex demons (of a purely non-magical sort) to maintain Capitalist Realism while punching down against Lewis and the French Revolution; re (from “On the Supernatural and Poetry”):

Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them […] and where lies the great difference between horror and terror but in the uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreaded evil? (source).

In short, whereas Lewis used scandal to speak for the oppressed, Radcliffe pimped out nature as monstrous-feminine; i.e., summoning demons for profit while highlighting torturous, demon lover (re: Cynthia Wolff’s 1979 “Radcliffean Model“) devices she couldn’t monopolize (and, in fact, stole from Lewis when writing her own novels). She was a fraud, secret freak and hack, but undoubtedly a talented fraud, secret freak and hack whose fictions (and signature devices) we’ll reclaim by camping her ghost, in “Exploring the Derelict Past”!

Regardless of who summons them, such demons take endless variety of form, but obey one of two basic functions; re: workers vs the state, the two warring on different surfaces and inside different thresholds during liminal expression/oppositional praxis embodied as a matter of unequal, forbidden and dark/radically transformative wish, want and desire fulfillment; re: “living deliciously” by torturing our enemies not simply to death, but in stories about doing so that extend to real-world politics theatrically discussing such things during the dialectic of shelter and the alien. Per Radcliffe, such things are classically temporary to uphold the state. We want to make them permanent to dismantle the state (re: like the Devil did to Ambrosio): a new better world without end beyond Capitalism!

This includes Dragon Ball‘s own legionary (and arbitrary) power levels, desires (to be strong enough to win love/gain revenge) and “final forms” denoting a self-contained cryptomimesis that outlived the original author inside/outside itself (next page); i.e., something to control by those in state control selling them back to us through a neoliberal Protestant ethic reifying those desires into the usual bourgeois dragons (and their sickness) to fall unironically in love with:

Mastermind of religion refined

They were promising wealth

But causing you delusion

Dictating with hatred and disdain (Sacred’s “Fire and Ice[2],” 2025).

“To critique power, you must go where it is”; i.e., the imaginary past presently on and offstage, during the liminal hauntology of war. In American Liberalism, the castle is already here but white, benevolent; when fascism invariably occurs, the actual causes are abjected Elsewhere, and the usual Supermen from Elsewhere are called upon to whitewash the castle (thus genocide) again:

(source: DataDaft’s “Dragon Ball Power Levels Over Time (1 Second = 1 Episode),” 2020)

To it, power is ultimately arbitrary as a concept, form, quantity/quality and matter of exchange; cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred; and whose subsequent forms are literally endless, not “final” (e.g., power levels in the Dragon Ball series[3], above): to have power as normally unequal, forbidden and dark, leading to radical transformation (often for survival, advancement, love or revenge). A common thread are Nazis and Communists occupying the same shadow zone, as do exploitation and liberation, pleasure and pain. Demons trade in all such devices, often doing so through kayfabe, Amazonomachia and psychosexual canon and camp.

In the middle of all of these, the whore remains as universally loved-hated as ever—chased across Hell’s half-acre because she (as Shelley showed us) holds the keys to creation and power as a monstrous-feminine device! We want to turn love/hate simply into love, wherever we can (within reason; i.e., in public displays/galleries with some sense of forewarning versus sticking our asses out car windows before the sex/revenge happens: “Ma’am, this is a Wendy’s!”).

(artist: Andrew Cockroach)

Before we get to the explicitly “summoning” element of their histories, then, first a primer section speaking about whores per Faust. Then we’ll delve into demon BDSM closer to Radcliffe’s unironic demon lovers and bad BDSM; i.e., minus her explained supernatural (the poetic argument is the same; the aesthetic is different) but considering an element to her works that we can salvage during healthier sex games we devise through ludo-Gothic BDSM: canonical torture vs exquisite “torture!”

Whores and Faust: Summoning the Whore/Black Penitent (feat. Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Doctor Faustus, Alan Rickman, Roger Ebert, John Landis’ Animal House, Kevin Smith, and more)

“I got news for you, pal; they’re gonna nail us no matter what we do, so we might as well have a good time!”

 —Otter to his male friends/giving advice to “Adam,” Animal House (1978)

“Eat the fucking apple. They are going to blame you regardless. You might as well go to the gallows with a full belly knowing more than God.”

—Maegen McAuliffe O’Leary “What I Would Tell Eve” (2021)

(exhibit 45b2b: Model and artist: Scoobsboobs and Persephone van der Waard. While summoned, the ritual is still something that must be played out; e.g., between myself and Scoobs, who posed for me, and for whom I then drew as a demon from a series of reference photos.)

Canon is a matter of prescription, whose defiance is also a matter of interpretation depending on who’s arguing for it, to whom and why (dialectical-material context, see epigrams). In classic Gothic language, a false preacher is a whore in disguise; in the Faustian tradition, demons (usually sex demons) exchange power for knowledge while haunted by the threat (and delight) of paradoxical torture. Their demonic appetite and agency through ludo-Gothic BDSM are things to abbreviate and summon as a matter of preferential code, in this respect; i.e., as fleshy but also loquacious presentations of various things reduced to walking symbols and hedonism, misbehavior and dealings with ladies-of-the-night and gigolos: superheroes and supervillains embodying all manner of trauma, virtue and vice, per the whore’s paradox! Time to pay rent/the Devil his due!

By extension, they’re not “pure evil” (though the state treats them as such, because profit demands it); they’re simply beings of power and knowledge to call in for favors of a “fatal” sort (who, just as often, respond by being drawn to power and trauma, hence knowledge)! As usual, the state will demonize them for profit; i.e., making them cool, but paywalled, toothless, offensive and inoffensive! We want to agitate through our own creations’ demonic contributions: to mobilize workers and wake them up (anyone who doesn’t challenge profit/demonic privatization is short-sighted and tokenized by the state and its pimps; i.e., profit is inherently unequal and rapacious, versus “rape” as rape preventative).

Note: Despite its own bastard origins, Christianity hegemonized after the fall of Rome. Since the Renaissance, a drive for scientific knowledge sought to push past dogma, hence found itself in excommunicated, hellish grounds. Goetic demons appeared as occult entities to summon, generally as familiars of pandemonic regents, or even kings and queens of Hell, itself; these remained under a Protestant ethic, abused by state proponents under the shadow of Capitalism. We’ll talk about the basic act of summoning, here; i.e., as a secularized Protestant ethic presuming guilt and sacrifice that workers must consciously camp beyond older popular models that, from Radcliffe onwards, haven’t gone anywhere!

However, while expressing the human condition is certainly not limited to humanoid bodies, that’s where I’ll be limiting my focus; i.e., sex positivity as grounded in the tangibly human expressing of demons instead of total abstractions through religious experience, Numinous power and more abstract, terrifyingly inhuman-looking bodies; e.g., the angels from Revelations (artist: Jopfe). There’s certainly room for asymmetrical, non-Vitruvian demonic bodies in sex-positive discussions, too (e.g., Stolas, a Goetic prince of Hell who appears in the shape of an owl), but I want to stay grounded, here, giving human workers my full attention (with further focus being supplied to animals and animalistic entities in the “Call of the Wild” chapter). —Perse

 

(exhibit 45b2a: Artists: far-top-left: ED Creations; to-middle-left: Anato Finnstark; top-middle-right and bottom-middle: Fin Nomore; far-bottom-left: Neal D. Anderson; top-and-bottom-right: Vicious Trunk. While demons, angels and similar beings can take an infinite number of forms, the oft-pornographic art itself—and its pornographic, psychosexual violence during demon BDSM as a ludo-Gothic activity—is what summons them. The art is an extension of the artist as part of the material being worked with, and both of those are part of the larger socio-material world being commented on; i.e., whose demonic persona offers up knowledge about everyday things that have become abstracted by canonical demons and rituals’ guilty pleasures.

Camping those, sex-positive demons can be incredibly intense or bizarre, but just as many are frank, down-to-earth depictions of activities policed under heteronormative, puritanical conditions that use demonic language as an unironic call for violence against marginalized groups targeted by the state through Satanic Panic canonized as “mere play”; e.g., Stranger Things and the Duffer Brother’s canonical, thus harmful D&D spuriously “under attack” by “real” BDSM demons; i.e., actually raping white American girls and monopolizing such theatrics for the bourgeoisie, whose dogwhistles and false flags we must subvert through our own convulsionnaire’s cryptonymic, state-of-grace jouissance: by adding deliberate irony and actively Miltonic rebellion to the game; re: “Psychosexual Martyrdom.”)

Summoning is classically Faustian (one-way); i.e., a quest for demons by dealing with them, especially when capital makes them scarce but also when it returns their return under alienating conditions; i.e., when the whore as a moral panic invades the current ordering of things while threatening unspeakable pleasures unknown to current mortals: a dualistic pervasion of sluts being sluts, painting whores of all kinds in the same cruel brush, during DARVO/obscurantism.

(source: Lilith Atheist)

In keeping with Radcliffe’s much-mimicked neo-conservatism, this generally has forbidden, non-heteronormative, torturous knowledge linked to all demon types being “homewreckers” pilfered from older persecution language; re: blood libel, sodomy and witch hunts having an anti-Semitic past and holistic current usage by tokenized forces we’ve reclaimed said usage from; i.e., as things to play with now in freshly naughty ways that, sure enough, historically-materially yield a plethora of double standards: boundaries for the pious detective hunting the whore down.

In part one, we discussed the modern Promethean Quest; i.e., wherein Mary Shelley famously frames her composite bodies as children of mad science and buried colonial guilt, abjecting nature as “dark,” “ancient,” and magical. Yet, Shelley’s build-your-own-demon commentary actually constitutes a logical continuation of what came before; i.e., the supernatural or occult demon class; e.g., the summoned demons of alchemy like Mephistopheles; the artificial kind constructed from older Jewish-coded wizardry like the golem; morphologically extensive and varied demons and angels of the Bible, William Blake, and Milton’s Paradise Lost, etc. Their existence is a sin, coded as “vice” but sold everywhere that corporations can. What we seek in connection through artifice, they privatize: to summon whores for demonic revenge operating at cross/dialectical-material purposes!

A few further points (eight pages) about whores and Faust before we get to summoning. We’ll keep things conversational as we go—critiquing the likes of demon lovers and torture porn vis-à-vis not just Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis (and giving special attention to Lewis’ Ambrosio/The Monk), but a variety of authors and works chosen arbitrarily (to be holistic); re: Judas Priest, Marlowe’s Faustus, Greg Beeman’s Mom and Dad Save the World, Alan Rickman and Die Hard, John Landis’ Animal House, Roger Ebert’s weird blind spot/obsession with geek shows, torture porn, whores, and demon lovers; and Kevin Smith’s Dogma (exhibit 45c2b).

As we shall see, these supernatural demons are often—like the composite demon, but also other monster types such as the vampire—adversarial; i.e., not just opponents, but nemeses, impersonators, beings of rancor and harbingers of unrest and torment, shame incarnate, and opportunity personified challenging the nuclear Cartesian model. Their animus reflects on us through direct manipulation amid menticidal head games; i.e., committed by beings of deception, persuasion, and control—not to mindless feed and take, but give us more than we bargain for while hopefully opening our eyes, mid-ludo-Gothic BDSM: to the unironically deceptive (cryptonymic) nature/genuine-and-total enslavement practices of Capitalist Realism, demons existing “in Hell” both outside Plato’s cave, but also inside it illuminating truth through shadowy paradox/darkness visible.

Unlike vampires, which take essence through lust, demons give knowledge through unfair games, treachery and lopsided power arrangements; they’re canonically poisonous, something to consume and instantly regret, but also relish—by putting such things campily in quotes, enjoyed as such for being the Devil’s advocate helping workers escape state pimps. Yet, such guerrilla warfare remains dualistic, unfolding for both sides during liminal expression: the witch hunter policing the witch whore and the witch whore using the same basic language’s war of mirrors, on the Aegis; re: complicit cryptonymy vs revolutionary; i.e., one furthering abjection during the state’s revenge against nature as monstrous-feminine, and the other reversing it during the whore’s revenge against profit.

As such, demons are (undercover) cops and criminals, but also incredibly queer, charming, mendacious, covert/concealed, concentrically masked, imposturous and xenophilic (a concept we shall examine here, but also in “Call of the Wild” when we look at totem demons and nature-themed, queer transformation through magical/drug-fueled poetics; re: acid Communism): nature is wild and misshapen in ways that, like a misbegotten child, must be repeatedly punished not simply as misbehaved, but alien and wicked; i.e., “The demon is a liar, do not trust it!” In short, they must be canonically summoned and exorcised; re (from the Undead Module, “Fatal Homecomings,” 2024):

state zombies vs zombie workers as a matter of dogmatic possession. Whatever the likeness, this generally is a thoroughly abject enterprise; i.e., demons and the undead having far more in common than they do differences, insofar as the giving and receiving of state force is concerned!

For example, Reagan from The Exorcist (1973) is seemingly possessed with the far-off spirit of colonized lands, which she vomits up on principle (dyspepsia, maybe); i.e., a bad girl needing to be exorcized of said evil as making her zombie-like, the bougie mother calling upon holy men to do the job in a suitably martyred, cop-like fashion. It’s obscurantism, crudely waving away postcolonial voices like one might a fart. Releasing such class-to-racial tensions canonically works with all the grace of ripping ass as one’s default response; i.e., minus the vague pretenses of irony that such bad-taste jokes foist onto the audience, the black penitent turned into the worst sort of spoof: colonial rehabilitation (with James Woods, below, being a thoroughly horrible person on and offscreen) by literally shitting out any spectres of Marx as stubbornly haunting us, waiting to return.

(source film: Scary Movie 2, 2001)

Except, it’s not just a feeling of undead invasion, but of one being followed, watched and occupied by the undead as something to abject however one wants (what Jordan Peele calls “the tethered”). In canonical media, such toilet-themed antics (so-called male humor) leaves the audience with a bad distraction—one made by the usual throwers of reactionary-to-moderate tantrums versus legitimate attempts to move past William Friedkin’s intensely problematic picture. That cannot happen unless the undead come out in ways that don’t constitute rejection. They’re people, not bodily waste!

More to the point, these ethnocentric attitudes are taught at the earliest age possible, and not just from a historical perspective; e.g., Jared Diamond’s 1997 Guns, Germs and Steel as something to critique from a historical perspective (Bad Empanada’s “Guns, Germs and Steel: A Historical Critique,” 2020) but also a Gothic one tied to similar reifications of what, by the late ’90s, was already a very dated concept: white supremacy as geographically essentialized (aka “moral geography” as something cryptofascists call Western Chauvinism, pro-European, and other dogwhistles we’ll unpack in Volume Three) [source].

We must, in response, release/shit these abject attitudes out, but also summon/consume/deal with them in ways that account for such reckonings in places where they unfold; i.e., in the bathroom of the world, whereupon “blackness” puts such Cartesian infantilizings of nature into a constant state of recognition/panic.

In doing so, Medusa becomes something to summon and play with (among general stigmas); i.e., in ways that—like Shelley’s novel—routinely play out for or against the state: demon ass, booty and all the things that asses, wombs, and pussies do (with female biology being more policed than male biology but male behaviors being policed through sodomy arguments). Muffins, cake and pie, forbidden fruit, ambrosia, Coleridge’s honeydew and milk of paradise—it’s literally food for thought saying, “Eat me!” Like Alice, you (and parts of you) shrink and balloon; you identify with alien predicament, fetishization, and (dis)empowerment through paradox, being turned into cis-het slave food, bugs to stomp, whores to rape, etc. They don’t just play but play naughtily in pursuit of forbidden things that reverse abjection:

(exhibit 45b2b: Model and artist: Romantic Rose and Persephone van der Waard. Monsters are poetic lens that help us think about abject things in relatable language while divided by capital and its qualities. In turn, these recognize through weird trauma and expression, one poet/sex worker seeing the same qualities in others, “out in the wild”; i.e., as Rose saw in me and vice versa, the two of us enacting ludo-Gothic BDSM together for my book series vis-à-vis informed labor action.

I drew them, above, but also put them on my book covers/promo posters, next page, because their own synthesis of demons and sex work embodied praxial catharsis in ways that fit nicely together with my book series: a shared means of promotion that involves a legion of other cuties besides, working in good faith using demonic “baddie” language to torture the elite but also make us “squirm”; i.e., for being naughty-naughty sex rebels promoting Gothic Communism as only fully appreciative when assembled as such: I have befriended many of my models, but also played with them [mostly online, save for Cuwu (who I made tons of porn with, in person, to do with as we agreed to) and my other exes (who I also made porn with, but cannot share said porn because it is private)].

[artists (from top-left to bottom-right): Romantic Rose, Victoria, Roxie Rusalka, Blxxd Bunny, Ashley Yelhsa, Maybel and Jackie, Nyx, Crow, Bay Ryan, Mikki Storm, Casper Clock, Quinnvincible, Mugiwara, Ms. Reefer and Ayla, Angel Witch, Mercedes the Muse, Harmony Corrupted and Annabel Morningstar. Heaven is a Hell we make on Earth. Go to Sex Positivity‘s one-page promo for all the models in my project; go to my Acknowledgements page to see all those involved beyond sex workers; go to “Paratextual Documents” (2023) to see the core ideas we’re working with. Capitalism alienates and sexualizes everything. Only by uniting to subvert this demonization—during the dialectic of the alien and humanizing ourselves—can we hope to stand a chance; re: humanize the harvest, expose the state as inhumane. ACAB, ASAB, AHAB, ABAB [all billionaires are bad]!]

Gothic Communism summons little whores/phallic women that evoke the Big Whore, Medusa [aka the Whore of Babylon, or some other Archaic Mother/wandering womb]. A single “madwoman in the attic” is far easier to dismiss, discount and demonize than a group of them speaking in pandemonic unison against their abusers; all of these models do sex work, and many of them are open about it [to varying degrees; i.e., with an alias that links to a page versus one that doesn’t]. When you look on it, you look on our past agreements holistic context of mutual consent, but one devised to stand up for the rights of all peoples by me invigilating an army of workers standing against universal exploitation/selective liberation; you look on our naked bodies, but also the logo of the project [a sex-positive tramp stamp] and its book covers adorned with all of these things, mise-en-abyme.

It’s not a brand of private ownership, then, but of active-if-cloaked rebellion against privatization and state models—not dialectically-materially vague because the aesthetic was made through informed consent, sexually descriptive monsters, and culturally appreciative forms of Gothic counterculture; i.e., as a trend I developed and worked on for years, and invited more and more people to participate in, along the way! This includes these promo posters being something the models agreed to ahead of time[4], along with everything else; and it includes sex work as a matter not just of sexual enjoyment through sexualized media, but the Gothic asexuality of public nudism/muses-and-illustrators critiquing trauma—i.e., by refusing to tokenize during ludo-Gothic BDSM: to make the Wisdom of the Ancients wise again; re: more emotionally/Gothically intelligent and class, culturally and racially aware during oppositional praxis per our creative successes!  

To that, the old gods return through us; i.e., not as a matter of fascism cannibalizing workers for the state, but of Medusa’s avatars eating the cannibals to stall state shift during the Capitalocene! So forget “the universe is singing to me!” [re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Sigma’s Origin Story and Its Gothic Depiction of Mental Illness,” 2019] but to us through our Song of Infinity challenging profit, thus genocide and rape! “Yeah, baby! So wicked!” The elite and their weird canonical nerds are cat-calling us, but behind all that empty bravado, our counterterror is secretly [or not-so-secretly] pissing them off! “‘Tis but a scratch!” 

When they come to take control every man must play his role
They won’t take our world away when the children we leave
Will have to believe in today

We warn you now you things out there
Whatever you may send
We won’t give in without a fight, a fight until the end
With vigilance by day and night our scanners trace the sky
A shield is sealed upon this earth, a shield you won’t get by

Invader invader nearby
Invader, invader is nigh [Judas Priest’s “Invader,” 1978].

[source: Stephanie Nolasco’s “Judas Priest Singer Rob Halford Reflects on His Sobriety,” 2022] 

Red Scare works on Cartesian division to further abjection within constantly evolving and imbricating persecution networks; i.e., which only expanded further after neoliberalism certified through Thatcher and Reagan. For example, Judas Priest’s own sodomy and demon BDSM arguments [above] having far more critical bite in the 1970s[5], only to lose it as time went on when they sobered up/found religion, but kept their rebellious, “bad religion” demonic façade, post-selling-out; re: like Black Sabbath, and so many other white metal acts’ controlled opposition; i.e., becoming warriors for the state by playing rebels to protect the state from the working class: fascism weaponizing working class sentiment [and the ghost of the counterfeit] to further abjection/avenge the middle class for the elite by often enough pacifying labor. Fredrick Douglas acknowledges how the state always defaults through force, and Nelson Mandela how we must fight fire with fire to break Apartheid; I [and my friends] argue how this must be done through sex work, recultivating the Superstructure through iconoclastic sex work—re: [from “Psychosexual Martyrdom”]: 

All the while, surrender and segregation[6] are no defense because the state requires criminals to exist inside harmful, highly unequal distributions of power (“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will” — Frederick Douglas). Instead, we must short-circuit the exchange of violence by humanizing ourselves as ordinarily being the givers and receivers of state harm made into something whose sex positivity—the giving and receiving of pleasure and pleasurable pain; i.e., sadists and masochists during sex-positive demon BDSM—of which the establishment cannot challenge: “The givers and receivers of a state-sanctioned conflict reveal both to be human, one losing its ability to receive punishment and the other to give it. Both must happen simultaneously and en masse for settler-colonialism to stop” (“Bushnell’s Requiem“). The state mustn’t colonize us through fascism, thus decaying into fractured forms of itself (and Capitalism) through medieval regressive defenses of capital; it must be developed before then, from moment to living moment, as gleaned from monstrous hauntology into something that stalls genocide altogether. Though violence and force are required to challenge the state, liberation comes not from sheer feat of arms, but rather from subversive and transgressive reclamation of monstrous symbols: a pedagogy of the oppressed that makes us human while presenting us as monsters abused by the state. It’s a tricky balance, mainly because violence as something to perform and receive are not the same thing despite often appearing identical; i.e., martyrs are generally raped by the state, which we have to convey mid-performance without actually getting raped if we can help it (“rape” meaning [for our purposes] “to disempower someone or somewhere—a person, culture, or place—in order to harm them,” generally through fetishizing and alienizing acts or circumstances/socio-material conditions that target the mind, body and/or spirit): finding power while disempowered (the plight of the monstrous-feminine).

Again, it’s tricky because mid-development, we will be criminalized regardless of what we do; but if criminals become human, then the state’s power crumbles, not ours [source].  

Betrayal—regardless of the motivation [re: desperation or convenience]—is not good praxis/stewardship; “diversity is strength!” to quote Hannah Gadsby. The more inclusion we have, the stronger our voice, but the harder the enemy will fight to divide us; i.e., with cheap rewards, including the ability to camp blindly for the state; re: the KISS problem dating back to Milton and before him, to Plato’s Republic [c. 375 BE]. Any form we devise, the state will tokenize, commodify and pervert; i.e., through a bourgeois corruption putting Shelley’s whore back in chains and having it argue for the subjugation of any rebels fighting back—to fight for the colonizer by wearing their mask [re: Fanon, but extending “black” to any stigmatized group; e.g., female, GNC, non-Christian, non-white, etc].

To it, Gothic Communism is universal rebellion, hence holistic; capital is built on Cartesian thought, which is heteronormative and settler-colonial, thus thrives on systemic division with selective and flexible tolerances engendering widespread intolerance: “Shoot yourself in the head!” As Jon Lovitz shows us in Mom and Dad Save the World, this is generally a bad idea; as the director Greg Beeman shows us—aping Napoleon and Victor Frankenstein, while casting a real-life pedophile to be the hero of his [otherwise charming and genuinely funny] movie[7]—such things can tokenize during liminal expression:

(artist: Bernie Wrightson) 

And while white straight men [and token groups; re: Halford, but also Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons] can’t tokenize themselves beyond their own oppression, they can camp their own survival and holocaust [or ancestor’s holocaust, in Stanley and Simmons’ case] to punch down with; e.g., “The last request of my life is to die killing my enemies!” [Megadeth’s “This Day We Fight!” 2009].

Gothic Communism works with the same principles in reverse, our own cryptonymy stacking less like a Greco-Roman phalanx/shield wall, mid-hauntology and dualism, and more like something that feels impenetrable during class, culture and race unified against the elite gentrifying/decaying such tokenized slogans and paraphernalia for themselves; re: to triangulate against labor and nature by imitating it in bad faith. “This day we fight,” doing so on and off field, in the hearts and minds of those who wish to destroy us, and who we recruit to our cause or expose as enemies to said cause.

Our aforementioned wall resists control, thus dismantles systems of oppression and their monomythic copaganda [see: footnote]. This collocates, growing fluent and second-nature on a socio-material level; i.e., just as I thought “Frederick Douglas,” and instantly remembered so many other thinkers I have previously assembled in other books through holistic recall, so do I revive all of the artists they remediate: through their combined writing and artwork extending to all media on all registers across time and space, onstage and off. The synapses develop not just between the neurons in my brain, but expand cybernetically into society at large. Eat your heart out, Mary Shelley!  

In turn, nothing terrifies the elite more than intersectional solidarity synthesizing universal liberation from an early age at the cost of profit. Through the banality of evil, they sell monsters as armies to buy and consume, but also extend into daily life; but they cannot monopolize such things through violence, terror or morphological expression. Instead, profit is desk murder tied to terror language as “the kissing cousin of force” [re: Asprey]. By taking control of ourselves, the state will respond with violence in ways that break Capitalism Realism as often as not: we are not alone, and we can fight back against mask-off abusers using what we got; re: our bodies and our Gothic reinvention as something capital desperately wants to perpetuate itself. The longer it tries, and the more we camp and leave behind our own derelicts in its wake, the weaker it becomes through exposure: “Draw your sword on a woman?”

Domestic abuse is the extension of colonial models [and police abuse] bleeding into a homely space; i.e., when Imperialism comes home to empire, we whores camp the idea to stop genocide at home and abroad [my friends, for example, protesting the state of Israel as much as I do, but also Pax Americana at large]. We don’t have to “deepthroat” knife dick to put up with state bullshit, but rather can speak in such Numinous doublings to camp our own rape and reclaim the psychosexual aesthetic of power and death; i.e., to aid in rebellion by putting “rape” in quotes, thereby camping the canon by sucking cock in ways that paradoxically don’t destroy us despite the vaso vagal, “sword swallowing” elements. We whores thrive in such confusion, offering forbidden sight to the next in line—by reclaiming state icons of war [e.g., Aragorn’s sword, below] much like the Vietcong used French and American ordinance against America’s own soldiers invading liberated land [re: GDF’s “How the Viet Cong Smoked American Soldiers,” 2024]: “No pasarán!”

[artist: lilbatzz]

While criticisms vary per author—and beauty [as much as fear] sits in the eye of the beholder/scope of the critique being levied during dialectical-material scrutiny—Gothic Communism is intersectional and holistic/composed of inkblots, meaning its fetishes and clichés [coded monster behaviors] can’t reduce to class, cultural or race; i.e., class warfare is culture and race warfare, thus subject to the same betrayals by cuckoo operatives weaponizing sex, drugs and rock ‘n rock [thus all Gothic poetics] speaking to war inside-outside themselves. Like subversive Amazons, subversive demons more broadly live in Hell as not relegated to other places, but expanding the state of exception as a forbidden lens exposing state cannibalization in spite of state mimicry and assimilation; re: Marx’s “capital is dead labor feeding on living labor”; i.e., to poetically reclaim and interrogate the etiologies of trauma as historical-material symptoms of Capitalism concealing itself in Gothic pastiche.

Commonly mocked as dubiously dirty and profane, then, the iconoclastic authors of demons can subvert the canonical orderings of them by helping others [and themselves] conceptualize, hence value power as something to summon and play with towards unknown pleasures; i.e., that of the flesh as having grown alienated and fetishized under capital, hence needing to be reunited under scandalous linguo-material circumstances and frameworks; e.g., Lewis’ The Monk expressing dark desires that upend capital by speaking truth to power through Gothic fakeries—to change Capitalism through the whore’s revenge. Sex is power and knowledge, of which status is expressed through the body’s sizeable assets and aesthetic] during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., nature-as-whore per the usual monstrous-feminine articulations; e.g., the mommy dom from Hell to demand, “I was called here by humans who wished to pay me tribute!”

Bitches love tribute! State hornets defend their nest, we defend ours, and both exist in the same space, chasing a palliative Numinous with Communist or fascist potential. There’s no dividing them so much as we convert others to our cause using a hybrid of theories, polities, catchphrases and multimedia; e.g., “It’s the deep breath before the plunge!” but also, “No one laughs at a master of quack fu!” The weirder we are, the more they’ll try to colonize us through tokenization. Repetition, mid-concealment [the hiding and showing of apocalypse], is kind of the point. So if any academics get “froggy” and turn their noses up at us, simply ask yourself, “What would Alan Rickman do?” “Hit it again,” of course! “Sack my ‘Nakatomi building’ with your ‘RV.’ Is it inside, yet?” *bats eyelashes innocently at the would-be penetrator[s] to embolden their assault*

So is camping the canon a dualistic exercise; i.e., weird canonical and iconoclastic nerds working with castles-in-the-flesh/walking castles, mise-en-abyme [and all their playful and popular hyphenations of sex and war, regardless of politics]: Alan Rickman—and his lovely part in a larger neoliberal story about fascism and imaginary ’80s banditti attacking neoliberalism[8]—is something we can camp; i.e., camping his men defending the Nakatomi building from police invasion during a diegetic siege of stolen private property/capital. I posit that, just as Die Hard translates easily enough to American Liberals [and actual Nazis]—dickishly trying to kick the “sand castles” of practicing leftists who love the same sand, on and offstage—such meta forms rape play demonopolize the canon for future endeavors! Richard Gobeille isn’t the only one using such one-liners; we can camp them, too, and openly to talk about capital’s hauntological [canceled-future] abuse—i.e., while revering those who rest in power versus peace: “Welcome to the party, pal!” [re: “Zombie Police States“]. One-of-a-kind, Rickman’s the motherfucking GOAT!

[source: Tom Leatham’s “The Hans Gruber Villain that Came before Die Hard,” 2024]

Gruber is a particular kind of sex demon—The Grinch Who Stole Christmas [1957]—and Die Hard was at least partially a Christmas movie [no matter what Thought Slime says, however tongue-in-cheek; re: “DIE HARD Is NOT a Christmas Movie!” 2022]. Just like Christmas—and the imaginary war on it that nonetheless occurs in between fiction and non-fiction, on and offstage, dualistically between givers and receivers of demonic sex and force—the state and its proponents cannot monopolize such things. Per Sarkeesian, we can enjoy and critique them, too.

In turn, dead language and metaphor become an anisotropic poetic instrument to resurrect rebellious forces: by using the language of good/evil and virtue/vice to challenge holier-than-thou police agents abusing the same devices; re: to move power towards workers, reclaim demonizing poetics and reverse the usual dichotomies associated with said poetics; i.e., through their various aesthetics [of power and death] and all-around struggles working in opposition, mid-exchange, protest, what-have-you; e.g., “terrorist” and “counterterrorist” but also “damsel” and “whore” or “detective” and “demon,” etc. God isn’t real, but the forces that dictate the state’s will through his likeness are. In turn, these are what our Satanic apostacy [and its uncanny avatars] convey. The gloves come off to break Capitalist Realism through ludo-Gothic BDSM’s calculated risk. Stare and tremble, nerds!)

Apart from bathroom hijinks and abject behaviors/bodily functions (the scent of sweat and fishy musk of such forbidden areas[9]), demons stress enormity (size difference) and power as alien, profane, unholy and wicked, bad, naughty cesspools, but also campy and fun: Hell as something whore-like to conjure up and play inside/with (which the state routinely wants to conquer). Girls (or enbies, in Cuwu’s case) go to the bathroom; they fuck! It’s not childish to acknowledge this, but childish to unironically demonize such matters; i.e., those who do so to control them in bad faith under state mechanisms (the bathroom being a source of female vulnerability and fear in Western households, Radcliffe onwards). I generally don’t exhibit bathroom play but it is incredibly common:

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

Furthermore, such demonic, “hysterical” shenanigans invite us joining in and looking at/playing with alien, fetishized things to humanize them; re: to humanize the harvest is to expose the state as inhumane, incompatible with life. Demonic essence and knowledge/power take on many forms of exchange, the, and we should invite all of them in sex-positive ways!

In doing so, Pinocchio (another golem type) is seen as violent and murderous because he is a slave, thus humanizing his motives: through the extant desire to be free that, in oppressed dialogs, express through the human condition as demonized. Despite what J.K. Rowling (a Radcliffe copycat, no honor among thieves) and other Tory apologists argue in their stories, no one wants to be a slave (re: Sheep in the Box’ “The Concerning Politics of Harry Potter,” 2020); but slavers will make arguments for the enslavement of nature, essentializing “darkness” as a casus beli that different groups realize is problematic at different points—i.e., a false flag to defame, demonize and dehumanize us on different registers of privilege and oppression; e.g., your average straight, token African American (of either sex or gender) will probably tell you Birth of a Nation (1915) is racist before they’ll admit Harry Potter is homophobic (the inverse is truth with token queer people). Such are the axes of oppression at play.

And we—treated like the state’s demonic punching clowns by alarmist nutjobs and hypocrites from any normativity—croon under token scrutiny and ridicule as much as white straight examples: “Don’t let me be misunderstood!” (Santa Esmerelda, 1977). Danger, you say? Danger disco, babes (remember your safe words; e.g., the traffic light system)! Our calculated risk—while at times transgressive in its torturous “death by Snu-Snu”—screams like a horny church organ; i.e., the house is the demon, the fat lady singing Medusa’s tortured, sweaty and wholly hysterical, thirsty swan song (e.g., the Nostromo)! She burns, going out, reading capital the riot act (and leaving them an upper decker)!

While demons are canonically the opposite of angels in modern supernatural argumentation, they are functionally the same kind of monster—the alien, specifically the virgin/whore alien (with militant Numinous forms classically going from Dante’s fearsome forms to more gentle, sexpot/pinup angelics[10]); i.e., morphologically complex agents of a superior power source (themselves, or in service of a god-like force; e.g., Mephistopheles).

In any event, I won’t focus on differentiating them. Certainly the binarization of “good” and “evil” is a more recent invention of Christianity—i.e., in the medieval period into the Protestant ethic under Capitalism—and isn’t especially useful during dialectical-material analysis. During said analysis, there is only socio-psychosexual and material conditions to change through demonic expression personifying a seditious crossing of boundaries as much as rarefied emotions. As the Creature from Frankenstein or David from Alien: Convent show us, doing so iconoclastically constitutes a form of self-expression—for the oppressed as made into their roles by those in power ahead of time. So when demons and monsters make their own art from their own point of view, this means they tend to embody trauma as a kind of postcolonial/posthuman code repressed by the state. We can deliberate our stances through our own clay-like flesh: what to wear and how to wear it. We make it look good, camping our own rapes by putting them in quotes (with angels and devils also being likenesses of those in life transported to spectral realms/glorious afterlives).

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

In colonial-patriarchal terms, fear is codified in ways that pacify onlookers, pushing them to fear and persecute demons (thus whores) through legitimized violence framing them as Black Penitents across the board. Reversing the position amounts to a kind of slave revolt—of historically demonized, undead and animal/robotic chattel workers speaking out; i.e., by deliberately making art to express themselves in relative language, thereby transforming the world from the monster’s perspective as demonized, zombified and enslaved: the reclaiming of the animal side as much as the human, vying to witness their survival and treat them humanely in lieu of state atrocities.

Their mere existence as fearful—when turned back on the viewer using the Aegis—can demonstrate different hard truths: the experience of the demonized “living in fear” as objects of fear—to be made into something automatically regarded with fear, fascination and lust by a “chaser’s” xenophobic status quo: a giant, undead guilt looming over them like a bad dream. As are whores, and demons are the same way—essence being the act of looking on giant animate-inanimate forces tied to larger and smaller abstractions; i.e., God and the state, of course, but also Capitalism and other hyperobjects, on high, and smaller forms “on low” that contain and yield their own secrets. “What is a man?” indeed!

(artist: Shame Ballard)

Gothic Communism isn’t a chimera or hydra, alone, but a colossus, too. To show the viewer their own fear as such—their supersized xenophobic shame, disgust, shock, awe, etc, as literally viewed through those they have been conditioned to demonize in fetishistic language—can be traumatic, but also transformative; i.e., to replace status-quo fear with xenophilic freedom and pleasure by demonstrating the supernatural demon: as harmless and the state as a violent fearmonger that exploits workers, mid-witch-hunt, pimping symbols of the oppressed through symbols of violence (the Statue of Liberty is both); re: “Who needs chicks when you got demons!”

The proletarian moral is to present oneself as a target in the usual occult symbols (exhibit 45c1)—i.e., often expressing human biology beyond what is normalized; e.g., female genitalia as gynodiverse (Gynodiversity’s “Classification of the Anatomical Variation in Female External Genitalia,” 2023), hence something that exists in relation to occult artistic expression—only to discourage state persecution by shaming its proponents for shaming demonic sluts and their bodies during gender trouble: as a heteronormative, boot/ass licking defense mechanism. People out here rimming Lady Liberty sans irony!

This makes any queer person presenting as a sex-positive demon something of a detective, themselves, but also someone who “plays god” in an iconoclastic, poetic sense. To be queer as such is to investigate our own humiliation/persecution; i.e., as something to ironically express through gender trouble and parody as inevitable, but also within our power to create as whores during supernaturally Faustian dialogs. It becomes part of our existence as demonized through heteronormative bias.

So while gender trouble and parody can be a fun activity for queer people to express, this irony becomes something to appreciate through countercultural art as a means of communicating a serious issue across racial lines: the queer struggle to exist when straight people (of any class, religion, or race) feel threatened by the proverbial “thing that should not be”; i.e., subverting canonical sodomy fears and straight myopia of queer people through colonized language tokenizing different chattelized minorities—to camp that canon’s potential to instill blood libel, sodomy and witch hunts against various oppressed groups punching down, and all by using our own non-gender-conforming bodies, performances, labor and identities, etc, as countercultural xenophilia.

(artist: Rachel Storms)

As things to create and sexually describe in opposition to state poetics and settler-colonial histories, demons deserve inclusion, love and acceptance for not being the groomers, murderers and tyrants that state proponents and moral panics describe us as: whores to collar and euthanize but also trade in; i.e., their flesh, doing so much how slavery and prostitution have done for thousands of years, albeit evolving under and into neoliberal Capitalism tokenizing such things—from white to black, foreign and exotic to dungeon and domestic! It’s a spectrum, nature-as-monstrous-feminine having a female side popularized through prostitute as something to summon, shame and farm for its melon-like qualities; i.e., by empire, afraid of and fascinated with nature through colony romances, slumming and Orientalism/dark, vengeful continents, etc: queens of the damned, of Western racism eroticizing far-off jungles, deserts and other half-real frontiers, but also traveling queers from “Transylvania” making the help eat each other. Double standards abound, as do intersections of privilege and oppression, canon and camp, mid-morphological expression (far too many to go over here; e.g., internalized and intersectional bigotry).

Simply put, our surveys of grander territories must routinely fight for equal rights, including the morphological/artistic (thus demonic) freedom to express ourselves however we want. Basic human rights provide defense from state abuse; equal rights for all grant those defenses to everyone under intersectional solidarity. All colonized parties must unite to be free, or none are. To avoid tokenism under an equality of convenience policing the whore, all normativities must be shirked. We camp our survival, our abuse, and let others do the same for theirs. Sin isn’t singular!

(artist: Romantic Rose)

We’ve already explored how “playing god” and the Promethean Quest play out for the status quo or against it during oppositional praxis; re: historically the invented, arbitrary hubris of men like Victor Frankenstein lies in their sincere exploitation of others, while our “hubris” of merely wanting to exist isn’t harming anyone despite being completely invented. The takeaway of Shelley’s Frankenstein (and similar stories) is that those seeking to harm us as “bad demons” have engineered a system for doing so, all while posturing as benevolent in bad-faith.

The same goes for Faust as a man of vanity who, in his case, admittedly fucked himself over more than anyone else; i.e., he thought he knew all there was to know and literally ignored the “better angels of his nature” to appeal to the devil on his shoulder, Mephistopheles (the whore working for the Devil, mid-psychomachy). In tempting fate, Faust is basically a sophomore (“wise fool”) faced with sex (forbidden knowledge) for the first time, then doing some really unethical/dumb shit—a didactic trend that would carry into future caricature; e.g., Tom Hulce’s “Pinto” from Landis’ Animal House debating to rape the thirteen-year-old virgin, Clorette, at a college frat party in classic Faustian style: temptation and admonishment, but also apologia (“he didn’t know any better”). The whole point of the psychomachy is speaking to outward versions of internal angels and demons; i.e., moral dilemmas acted out in medieval language for an increasingly modernized world alienated from such things.

“Fuck her! Fuck her brains out! You know you want to!” says Pinto’s demonic side, calling him “a homo” when he decides to ignore his intrusive thoughts. Such matters don’t come ex nihilo, of course but speak to larger dialectical-material problems the director (John Landis, a man known for exploiting his actors—eventually causing the deaths of two undocumented migrant children, and The Twilight Zone‘s [1983] lead actor[11]) was self-reporting on. So was Christopher Marlowe (who, apart from Doctor Faustus, in 1592 based on older German stories, also wrote 1590’s Jew of Malta—basically a meaner and even more anti-Semitic version of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice); i.e., if you want to know what bigots think, watch what they make/summon and how they debate themselves demonically/angelically.

So as much as I think Charles Matthews is 100% right when he opines

There are things in it, however, that wouldn’t pass muster today, including the blatant objectification of the young women, especially in the scene in which Bluto spies on them undressing. And would any reputable filmmaker today dare to include the scene in which Pinto debates whether to rape the unconscious Clorette, abetted by a roguish devil and a prissy-voiced angel? There are touches of unchecked homophobia throughout [not to mention the whole bar scene being mega-racist] (source: “Animal House (1978,” 2017).

there’s still something telling about all of the movie’s unchecked bigotry and subtler dislike for anyone who isn’t a white, privileged, drunken, frat boy asshole.

This isn’t me agreeing with the clearly unlikeable Dean (whose admittedly sick burn “fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son” apes Bolingbroke’s critique of Falstaff to Prince Harry in Henry VI, except they’re all acting like that), but to play devil’s advocate, nor are the heroes of the movie above reproach; i.e., they’re white, smug and princely “man whores” but the worst sort, and the kind that slashers in the ’80s might want dead not to discourage sex, but rape (the revenge of the abused against their nerdy abusers given a pass, as Landis does: “Knowledge is good; boys will be boys, girls will be mothers”). Landis’ debut is, by its own admission, a “futile and stupid gesture done on somebody’s part” (and one that Belushi—the Falstaff’s Falstaff[12]—would not survive).

To it, the state thrives on rape to survive, including such slaps on the wrist extending to bad jokes; i.e., Landis’ jokes are rape, the dilapidated old house a site of conquest for men and trauma for women surviving men stealing women’s innocence. All the more unfortunate, then, given the movie’s performances are undeniably colorful and energetic—spunk that would’ve been better spent towards humanizing college life in a sex-positive way (the sex life of activists is still a riot, if Shelley or myself are anything to go by). Furthermore, this wasn’t the work of down-on-their-luck blue-collar types, Kristi Turnquist writes, but gentrified, upper-crust nerds “raising Cain” and gentrifying sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll to get their rape fantasies in:

Sure, the movie was sold as slobs vs snobs. But the snobbery was actually baked into the supposed “slob” side. The full title, let’s not forget, is National Lampoon’s Animal House. That’s National Lampoon, as in the magazine spinoff of the Harvard Lampoon, the humor publication created by students at Harvard University, known more for its big-deal Ivy League alumni (Conan O’Brien, Colin Jost of “Saturday Night Live,” “Spy” magazine cofounder Kurt Andersen, etc.) than its lovable losers (source: “40 Years Later, Can We Sill Stomach Animal House?” 2018).

That being said, the movie is still a period piece of sorts that—through the writers—provides a highly illustrative window into the partially imaginary past. This includes a lovely (and accurate) critique of Milton’s Paradise Lost (with Sutherland’s professor making a cameo in my book, several times), but also that of the Vietnam War/Civil Rights period:

Animal House is a period piece twice over. It’s set in 1962, when John F. Kennedy was president, and since it was filmed in 1977, it offers a window through which we see attitudes about what was funny back then, even if they make us raise our eyebrows now (ibid.).

In short, the old boys club who wrote Animal House (and similar stories) thought they knew everything/excluded everything for everyone but their target audience; re: like Marlowe’s Faustus (with Nietzsche’s 1888 Ecce Homo often being paraphrased as, “all fiction is inherently auto-biographical” from “Hear me! For I am such and such a person”).

Taking all of this into account, the good-vs-evil, virtue-vs-vice argument is still quite useful for “reading the room” of latter-day Faust revivals; i.e., it’s not delivered quite the same way as Halloween was, for example (also 1978), but you still can see the neo-conservatism at work: ‘fraidy-cat Doctor Loomis and faceless killing machine Michael Myers running around like headless chickens, mid-moral-panic, while poor Laurie Strode thinks about fucking Ben Tramer (or not).

In turn, the recursive desire to curiously and savagely punch up at men would be coopted by said men to triangulate the same women against other marginalized groups again (e.g., Sleepaway Camp punching down against trans women as much as Friday the 13th demonized mental illness and bereavement, and Halloween antagonized mental disorders in children; i.e., according to the same Freudian garbage Hitchcock espoused in 1960’s Psycho, abjecting cis-het domestic abuse once more onto a crossdressing impostor invading white women’s spaces).

This means since well before the ’70s Final Girl and back a hundred years during the 1870s; i.e., when white women were granted property and fascist feminists appeared, but also in the 1790s when Radcliffe wrote her Gothic novels alongside Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women[13]. “Fate never changes,” Carpenter’s teacher character opines; for him—but also Landis and Marlowe before them—such things are “stuck” as a matter of argument playing out, on and offstage. In a world where Nazis openly try to shout and hide their arguments, then, anytime they self-report is an opportunity to dissect and pick their admittedly small brains. It behooves us to study their arguments, because they think themselves immune to demonic reprisals. So did Faust.

Fascism is garbage, so build from that to parse the hieroglyphics/cryptonymy as useful; or as Porpentine writes in “Hot Allostatic Load” (2015)”: “Build the shittiest thing possible. Build out of trash because all I have is trash. Trash materials, trash bodies, trash brain syndrome. Build in the gaps between storms of chronic pain. Build inside the storms” (source). So cryptomimesis, then.

To that, when the self-righteous demonize/police the whore, we whores punch up from Hell to remind them we’re human, and they’re about as cool as “Pinto” was. Hit ’em where it hurts—i.e., the female castration fantasy being to fuck men with genitals both sides treat unironically as swords and sheaths—the difference between them being the “phallic” female party makes a hole where one doesn’t exist, and generally to avenge past abuse inflicted on her because she’s a woman (e.g., Kinji Fukasaku’s 2000 Battle Royale, below); it’s supposed to make men in the audience go “ouch-ouch-ouch” and cross their legs: “If you won’t listen to us being polite, try this on for size!”

Let’s unpack that (twelve pages plus footnotes), if only because genital mutilation, unironic rape and full-throated torture porn make up such a huge part of the canonical torture scheme our own media is tackling (to which we’ll be subverting canon, as we go). Our target for this critique won’t be Radcliffe or Faust, but someone after both of them who is and isn’t Landis: Roger Ebert and his weird blind spot/obsession with geek shows, torture porn, whores, and demon lovers (male, intersex or female). The man was a sex pest of unusual excess and extraordinary camouflage, pimping Medusa through the soundbite length of old-school movie reviews apologizing for rape yet bashing exploitation media seeking to take things outside the profit motive.

Sadly he’s not the only one. For starters, such “Iron Women” having their revenge predate Medusa, but reducing them to primordial Antiquity is a Freudian trick, and one that does little good, here in the present. Tracing that palimpsestuous lineage into Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth or Elisabetta Sirani’s various vengeful paintings surviving her own rape (and humiliating trial and torture-by-thumbscrews), we’re left with a historical-material trend of rape performance that more privileged people will puzzle over and arbitrate as they see fit.

Alas, such is Ebert, who readily decries I Spit on Your Grave (1978) for being revenge porn (which it is) in so many words

A vile bag of garbage named I Spit on Your Grave is playing in Chicago theaters this week. It is a movie so sick, reprehensible and contemptible that I can hardly believe it’s playing in respectable [emphasis, me] theaters, such as Plitt’s United Artists. But it is. Attending it was one of the most depressing experiences of, my life (source: 1980 review).

yet arbitrarily celebrates The Last House on the Left (1972) as “a tough, bitter little sleeper of a movie that’s about four times as good as you’d expect” (source: 1972 review).

Of course, we could look at the directors for a clue—the Israeli-American Meir Zarchi versus Wes Craven as a white, status-quo homeboy—but I think it’s much more telling, quick and germane to Faust if we note Ebert’s double standard; i.e., there’s a class character to his attitudes, which become much less critical, in terms of critical thought, and much more reactionary when faced with things he doesn’t approve of: “This is ok to talk about if I find it artful.”

To that, Ebert (and those like Ebert) approve of vengeance they can understand—with Ebert himself siding with Craven’s vengeful middle-class parents versus Zarchi’s single white girl with a mean streak:

This movie covers the same philosophical territory as Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971), and is more hard-nosed about it: Sure, a man’s home is his castle, but who wants to be left with nothing but a castle and a lifetime memory of horror? (ibid.)

For Ebert, then, rape scenes are tolerable not if they have a substantial message (nihilism is literally the opposite of substance), but as long as they comment on the futility of revenge/destruction of the nuclear home, or have some deeper thematic purpose that strokes his middle-class sense of values letting him decide what is acceptable and what isn’t for all peoples; re: the ghost of the counterfeit furthering the process of abjection for the middle class (what Freud calls the Superego).

These are all markers for American Liberalism decaying into fascism (which America pioneered, not the Germans), and Ebert’s literally qualifying rape provided it offends his values the way he—as a paying customer and a Pulitzer-prize-winning critic—wants them to; i.e., he wants to be entertained, first and foremost, by a peep show, not a geek show as “Goldilocks rape.” Except doing so only obscures abuse, and doesn’t diminish it. It’s a Faustian bargain made with Hollywood, Ebert policing the medium in ways that, again, are largely reactionary much of the time but dressed up in white moderacy.

In short, Ebert likes things to be “meaningful” if they aren’t sanitized, but honestly prefers the Radcliffean sanitization, most of all:

I have seen four films inspired by the same 13th century folk ballad: Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (1960), Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1972), David DeFalco’s Chaos (2005) and now Dennis Iliadis‘ remake of the 1972 film, also titled The Last House on the Left. / What I know for sure is that the Bergman film is the best (source: 2009 review).

Ebert’s job, then, is similar to Radcliffe’s: to assign value as “critique,” thus operate as a cop taking state payment (his reviews span over four decades); i.e., his work is full of arbitrary white superiority moralizing and abject value judgements according to how that offends his simultaneously delicate and insensible moral code: while simultaneously condoning violence that befits an American liberal like himself (the same qualities apply to Faust and Radcliffe). Anything he can’t stomach, he abjects, on par with Coleridge winging about Matthew Lewis; re: “We stare and tremble!” (as well as Leonard Maltin, but less choosy than him; e.g., Ebert liked Alien (review, 2003) and Maltin did not[14]).

But during the rape scene of Zarchi’s protagonist, an ugly truth remains, regardless of what Ebert thinks: women do desire revenge against the men who rape them (or who rape those they love, including a shared sisterhood among women they don’t personally know); i.e., as a half-real matter of trauma they cannot escape, only live with: its liminal-but-nonetheless-true confusions of predator/prey and pleasure/pain, whereupon rape as a theatrical and everyday device (weapon of terror) happens in ways that frankly shouldn’t be sanitized/abjected, subjective or not; re: “Do you know what the most terrifying thing in the world is? It’s fear!” The difference between Hitchcock and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom is the latter’s voyeurism tries to humanize the process (and its German-coded villain) while holding Faustian men of science accountable (versus letting them testify as expert witnesses; re: Psycho).

In other words, why should a rich white American man like Ebert get to decide what is or isn’t acceptable during horror vis-à-vis women who, all things considered, probably have survived rape (and which Hollywood exploits in stories like Grave, Alien or Psycho). If something sickens him, it is simply “wrong” and deserves “low marks” extending to the other people in the venue he thinks he’s better than (by “actually protecting women” with his stupid review system); all these things are pointless to him, despite the fact they’re pointedly talking about rape in ways that challenge Ebert’s constitution—i.e., by making him run away because he didn’t get his money’s worth or have his pre-existing views validated by a like-minded crowd. God, forbid right? Fragile Faust, freaky Freud. Fuck face.

And not to defend tasteless, straight-male-authored exploitation porn too much, but I struggle to think what someone like Ebert might say about angry art that isn’t overtly punching down at disabled people; i.e., regarding media that makes him as uncomfortable as Radcliffe once was with Matthew Lewis:

I would have liked to talk with the woman in the back row, the one with the feminist solidarity for the movie’s heroine. I wanted to ask If she’d been appalled by the movie’s hour of rape scenes. As it was, at the film’s end I walked out of the theater quickly, feeling unclean, ashamed and depressed.

This movie is an expression of the most diseased and perverted darker human natures, Because it is made artlessly, it flaunts its motives: There is no reason to see this movie except to be entertained by the sight of sadism and suffering. As a critic, I have never condemned the use of violence in films if I felt the filmmakers had an artistic reason for employing it. I Spit on Your Grave does not. It is a geek show (re: “I Spit on Your Grave,” 1980).

Ebert’s own moral outrage suggests he “knows better” than the feminist does, his gut (and instinct to tuck tail and run) betraying his stoic veneer (re: Victor Frankenstein).

It’s precisely this kind of unchecked hubris that Zarchi’s woman seeks to castrate; re: Creed’s revenge being not just the refusing of victimhood, but of subversive, even exploitative/transgressive reclamation of the Medusa, during the abjection process; i.e., as a victim of rape discredited by male know-it-alls (whose sex-positive universal liberation, I argue, has the whore’s revenge against profit in all its forms: Ebert as having opinions he conflates as “correct,” vis-à-vis Weber’s Protestant ethic, because they’ve made his formerly unlucrative position into an illustrious, well-paying  career). Ebert says much and little about Grave, keeping mum about the quiet part because he feels guilty in ways he—a privileged, white, straight and ultimately self-important asshole—can’t process.

Then again, I know what Ebert would say if he could, because something like The Penguin‘s (2024) Sofia Falcone blowing out Johnny Viti’s brains (an offer he couldn’t refuse) is perfectly acceptable for Ebert’s ilk because violence is fine if it’s dressed up as not grotesque; i.e., on par with Ebert salivating over The Godfather films (source: 1997 review) despite them largely being the glorification of immigrant violence and Jacobean theatre for its own sake (as long as it’s shot nice, right?). But anything that veers off into abject freakshow territory is automatically “without merit,” for Ebert. It’s a huge blind spot, but also one he picks-and-chooses regarding those patrolling the freakshow runways. These are not gods, but vain, stupid pimps passing judgement on whores in chains; the worst jailors are the ones who believe they’re right and who pity you as “reprobate” (re: Jadis, a genderfluid neoliberal, torturing me, a queer an-Com).

Follow the leader is a fool’s errand, and Faust is the biggest idiot of them all (though men like Ebert aping him are even dumber in hindsight). Again, this comes from privilege, which for Ebert is white, American, middle-class and male: a selective diet, eating his victims served to him in ways he deems “palatable.” There’s probably tons of exceptions—e.g., Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love (1989; source: “The New Geek Cinema[15],” 2012), Cameron’s Aliens (source: 1986 review[16]), or Re-Animator (1985; source: 1985 review[17])—but those exceptions also prove the rule. So did Radcliffe uphold the status quo by being the proverbial “rare exception” (all the more ironic, in her case, given she was so moderate. Pot, meet Kettle). So does Ebert administer “criticism” in short, pithy reviews that pass themselves off as Eternal Wisdom; i.e., like God giving Moses those clay tablets (re: the storage device of the ancient world). Except Ebert, like Moses and God, is king of Fuck Mountain; i.e., dogma is dogma, meaning we can camp his ghost’s secular demonic gibberish as much as we (and our Satanic apostacy) want. God is dead, so is Roger Ebert, and we can dance on their graves together:

More to the point, Ebert’s balancing act becomes the thing to worship, also known as centrism. Anything that “tips the scales” in one direction or the other turns Ebert’s stomach and we can’t have that… which conveniently ignores what doesn’t turn his stomach, mid-abjection, but instead offends other people[18] reversing abjection in ways he cannot let stand (e.g., the woman in the movie theatre during I Spit on Your Grave).

While white moderates are, on their face, seemingly harder to critique on account of their polished façade qualifying rape media (which the Gothic largely concerns), the fact remains: centrists love to arbitrate in ways that not only dictate their essentialized place in the world, but remind them how clever they think they are. Dude’s literally marketing his opinion as “better” than others[19] (and using the Roman gladiatorial signal for “spare him/kill him” to further qualify his statements to his audience). White straight people, like Faust, need to feel important; i.e., “Who has two thumbs and a bottomless ego? This guy!” (another weird canonical nerd with a weird smile): the shit-eating grin of a man who made it big and thinks he’s untouchable/the emperor having no clothes (not even death can save you from me, old man. I have exactly zero reservations when vandalizing your dubious legacy).

Of course, such anti-geek-show arguments also predate Ebert and even William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley (1946); i.e., dating back to Radcliffe, herself; re: missing the point of her rival’s own scandalous works and valorizing her own, with “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” “Terror” is superior for Radcliffe and Ebert because it hides rape while still parading it inside a restless labyrinth. This is their privilege talking, not their oppression. It’s profoundly unsexy in ways we queer sex workers have to intersectionally camp and do better than, mid-exquisite-“torture.”

So far be it from me to discount either literary technique—and I certainly don’t think I Spit on Your Grave (or any geek show) is High Art (which geek shows upend on purpose, from Walpole onwards; re: Baldrick[20])—but I likewise don’t think one is better than the other (nor do I condone putting anything on a pedestal; re: the idea of High Art essentially amounts to canon). Furthermore, High Art so very often apologizes for rape by “weeding the jury” and doctoring the testimony to a select few of special victims and expert witnesses; i.e., that get special say in what happens “exclusively” to them, thus leant special credence by Ebert going down on Radcliffe (now there’s an image I can’t unsee).

Admittedly this happens through Hitchcock’s own mastery of suspense (and only if neither man actually knew who Radcliffe was). All the same, Ebert’s idea of value—i.e., as a judgement to administer—is tied to art, which for him includes gangster films and Hitchcockian torture porn; e.g., the rape scenes from Once Upon a Time in America (1980) or Frenzy[21] are “fit for viewing” as long as they tug on his heartstrings[22] and/or “play him like a piano” (a comment he’s made about Hitchcock from the director describing his own work; e.g., his 2002 Signs review): Hitchcock torturing women is a necessary sacrifice provided it doesn’t feel “too real” and tickles Ebert’s “ivories.” But behind any illusion is systemic hard if unaddressed.

Torture porn is torture porn, and no matter how “suspenseful” the movie is, or “black” its humor finds itself, Hitchcock is polishing the turd of exceptionally terrible BDSM practices that Ebert is peering voyeuristically at without guilt: “ahegao before it was cool.” Except, women have been tortured in cinema since cinema existed, Ebert staring hypnotically at Maria Falconetti’s “eyes that will never leave you” (source: The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928),” 1997 review). I guess Barbara Leigh-Hunt (from Frenzy, pulling a Jubba the Hutt, below) is just the “flavor of the week,” because she’s “trashy” instead of Numinous—or more to the point, Ebert doesn’t realize Hitchcock’s work is garbage despite its fancy photography because he’s blinded by his own bias (and hand in things): unironic hero worship, class character and white male fragility/privilege. He’s literally ranking rape as “art,” his reviews literally telling the reader to spend money on rape, too: “go consume.” What a sleaze.

Yet, Ebert thinks he knows better and courts his own devils through people he really shouldn’t; re: like Faust, writing from privilege about things he knows fuck-all about; i.e., by saying what is or isn’t acceptable rape testimony by tone-policing not just Grave‘s director (whose disgust against—if it doesn’t warrant a total gag order like Ebert wants—is arguably understandable), but also the feminist in the audience he didn’t approve of cheering for vigilante justice: in an apocryphal movie because the film… had rape scenes in it? Furthermore, why do those have to be “dressed up” for Ebert to value the legitimate feelings of anger and release the woman undoubtedly had? One explanation is consumption and pickiness; i.e., he wants his whores to be high-class when they’re strangled, the man poo-pooing trash despite his own hypocritical trashiness dressed up; re: the spell of the Great Enchantress, Ebert huffing the farts of a women who glorified British—and by extension, American—Imperialism nearly two centuries before he was spilling ink!

A second more thesis-prone argument is because, for Ebert, exploitation and liberation don’t exist in the same place; they have to be segregated into something “palatable”—i.e., despite the whore’s desire for revenge (and socio-material change), at the very least, involving her unpalatable desire to commit acts of phallic violence against one’s oppressors (whose rioting Ebert, of course, discourages).

The same criticism, then, can be made of Radcliffe and all unironic “Faustians” (demon lovers) and critics and consumers of such things, not just Ebert refusing to make useful ideas of trash/things from trash about rape. I only picked him because a) so many view him as some kind of Opinion God, when—to be completely frank—a lot of the man’s opinions are frankly gentrified and asinine (“Videogames Can Never Be Art” [2012], anyone? Puh-lease); and b) he, like Radcliffe, can only opine positively or productively on things about rape that are wrapped up in a nice little bow for him. It’s not the rape that’s a problem, but that it’s not his kind of rape. “Irony,” then, is merely a selective boundary for Ebert to misuse while policing the whore as Faust would do (and holding her down when she tries to fight back). It’s arbitrary, not some transcendental signified; i.e., we can camp it through our own “rape” in quotes (which is what Grave ultimately was).

To conclude, Ebert can’t enjoy or even think critically about something unless it is packaged in a highly specific way. This is called “conditioning.” Except Ebert can’t think about trash regarding harmful depictions of whores, rape victims and sex “having merit” unless they’re framed a particular way according to his class and political standing as allergic to degeneracy. This is called “American Liberalism,” known a bit less positively by me as “menticide” and “praxial inertia,” but also “pimping.” Even if it comes from “good intentions” (whatever that means), the road to Hell (the harmful sort) is paved all the same; i.e., with Faustian hubris apologizing for rape as junk food: Ebert can opine about movies till the cows come home, but he can’t speak to things outside of that with any degree of authority worth mentioning. He’s a grifter and a hack of the cheapest order.

Of course, this doesn’t preclude heartfelt empathy with colonized peoples; e.g., at a glance, his heart seems to have basically been in the right place with the Palestinian cause—though not without him critiquing protestors before quickly and graciously changing his mind (starting with “The protest is misguided and destructive,” regarding Palestinian protests of the Toronto Film Festival; source: Adam Horowitz, 2009)—but in truth, Ebert was nowhere near aggressive enough towards Biden, Obama, Bush, or any other American president being the obvious root cause to all this suffering. He’s a giant nerd, like Bill Gates or Musk, but less enterprising and more principled than either were (enough to make him dangerous); i.e., awards of merit handed down from on high/graciously handed out by the current Wizard of Oz to show people the Scarecrow has brains. The contents of his skull remain useless straw passing for gold (and whose clout I’d trade for a handful of practicing leftists in a heartbeat): “murderers come to you in smiles”; so do rapists and their apologists, and Ebert was a sex pest. You can print that.

(source: Britannica)

Yet, weird canonical nerds are so often white, and use their effigial achievements to whitewash themselves (e.g., S.T. Joshi pissing and moaning over the World Fantasy Convention’s 2015 decision to remodel their awards not in Lovecraft’s likeness[23]). As a consequence, Ebert is posthumously worshipped for being “a good man” and specifically for his liberal politics, which—if you haven’t noticed by now—only further the abjection process while ogling rape (assigning stars to things, not unlike Dr. Seuss’ Star Belly Sneetches, but pointedly to art through weaponized gatekeeper criticism). He was a card-carrying Democrat, which makes him a moderate Republic in practice, and a man literally celebrated for his pointedly liberal politics:

Ebert grew up in “a liberal household” and “remembers his parents praying for the success of Harry Truman in the election of 1948,” according to an obituary in the Sun-Times [with Truman literally being a nuclear murderer]. At the University of Illinois, he started writing as a freshman by publishing a journal of “politics and opinion.” Those interests never waned, and publicly picked up especially in his later years, as he took to the Internet (source: Joe Coscarelli’s “The Political Writings of Roger Ebert,” 2013).

This wasn’t a source of contention, but open pride celebrating his legacy after his death. If only Ebert had lived lucidly into his 80s; i.e., watching Gamergate followed by Trump, Biden and Trump again; I have to wonder if his pride—which was arguably Faust’s Achille’s Heel—might have taken a much-needed blow…

Not that it would matter! Activism is what we do while we’re alive, and have the power to affect change (however great or small). The problem is, any moderate—not just Ebert fetishizing colonial victims in his movie reviews—is a Nazi waiting to decay into itself. The same goes for Radcliffe, Marlowe and anyone else abusing demonic poetics; i.e., for their own selfish gain (cops suck), making hay while furthering abjection through the ghost of the counterfeit. While Ebert was a multimillionaire by the time he died, Radcliffe herself—though paid far less for her own work—was still the highest paid author of Gothic fiction at the time (source: Victoria DeHart’s “The Enchanting Ann Radcliffe,” 2020—more on this, deeper into the subchapter). Predation is predation, “a predator often blind to its own peril” (to quote another blind old man praying on the local populace); all of these individuals thought themselves “all-knowing” similar to Faust, yet were blinded by the pursuit of decadent knowledge warding off the reality of their own inheritance and isolation: to die in darkness, alone, their own Faustian bargain ceasing to sparkle as the world around them decays. They don’t fiddle as Rome Burns, they scribble.

(artist: Chris Bourassa)

Sweet god, enough about Ebert and unironic torture porn apologia (seriously, I feel like I need a shower)! As we’ll see in Volume Three, then, the entirety of sex-positive artistic expression serves as a demonic iconoclast—of subverted demonic essence or knowledge as a sight increasingly forbidden to the Western world by those in power. Visible, sex-positive queerness is ironic because it uses creativity to demonstrate descriptive sexuality and cultural appreciation as a poetic challenge to canonical norms that historically-materially treat anything beyond the status quo as alien, unknowable, abject; in the eyes of the status quo, the xenophilic bearers of such knowledge and dark, creative power must be evil: lookouts for Satan.

I beg to differ. Queer people aren’t “evil”; we’re simply “gods” in the sense that we—through dark poetics as a pedagogy of the oppressed—can author our own fates in pandemonic solidarity against the state based on what we, as workers, have the power to create ourselves like magic (and endure the shadow of police abuse all the while). As argued in our thesis statement, canon deifies poetics in defense of a patriarchal status quo that historically-materially privatizes and polices said process and demonizes anything else as a dark god, a false idol or mother of demons. But the xenophilic power to create and subvert a xenophobic status quo is still there (to this, Ghostbusters had it backward: the Ghostbusters should have asked Gozer if it was a god. The answer would have been, according to the movie’s own logic, yes; re: “If someone asks you if you are a god, you say YES!” Fuckin’ A).

(exhibit 45c1: Model and artist: Itzel and Persephone van der Waard. As a transmasc, genderfluid person, Itzel has cultivated a xenophilic demonic identity with their own demonic sigil. This expression is not separate from their daily life, wherein they partake in Pride as a lifestyle to befriend others with during seminal events—those meant to be shared by like-minded persons: friends, lovers and fellow sex workers united under the same banner using demonic xenophilia as a popular means of spearheading the movement; i.e., by giving it personality and humanity mid-struggle.)

(exhibit 45c2a: Artist: Blxxd Bunny. If the self-fashioned sigil emblematizes the demon as changing shape, but also assigning emblems to this process, the tattoo is the means to apply this iconography directly to the artist’s own body. While it’s certainly unusual to take this process directly into one’s own hands, Bunny is living proof. As the canvas that literally paints itself, their body art makes them feel cute and proud—so much so that they delight in showing off not just their tattoos and piercings, but their entire, naked body as tattooed/pierced. By their own admission, they add, “I by no means condone any of the actions I show in these videos; I’m experienced, but I’m also reckless and practices like these are incredibly unsafe and I would never recommend anyone do these things to themselves. I am not a professional.”

The idea extends beyond solo BDSM depicted during pornographic performance art and public nudism, and extends into relationships between the artist and other artists [often swapping roles; re: module and muse]. And despite what SSC [“Safe Sane and Consensual“] argues, there’s no such thing as “total safety” for anyone, let alone queer people utilizing demonic expression in sex-positive ways [the alternative being RACK, which I prefer[24]]. But Bunny’s devotion to their own craft is impressive, demonstrating a steady hand and resilience to pain, but also capable know-how as they ink their own skin. In doing so, it tells the story that Bunny has in mind: themselves as a person they can be proud of, only adding to their beautiful frame over time as they continue their nudist displays becoming increasingly inked [thus demonic[25]].)

However muddled Gothic inheritance may seem, just remember one basic idea: whores are the classic keepers of secrets and granters of wishes (only growing strong as people become more alienated from sex), and generally do so through ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., its wide-and-storied array of titillating costumes, flexible genders and “torturous” roleplay/crossdress[26] that are, unto themselves, haunted by historical trauma and linguo-material abuse (re: by hypocrites like Beeman, Burton, Landis, Ebert, and Marlowe). By extension, the Gothic connects little whores to big ones that—in the right or wrong hands, depending on how you frame it—threaten the world as we know it with something beyond its inhabitants’ wildest dreams. The game is one big tightrope/runway strip/cat walk, and involves TMI as much as profaning the sacred; e.g., I’m a girl, and I just had the world’s most explosive shit before writing this exact passage on account that I was trying to hold it in until I finished my thoughts; i.e., inspiration works much the same way and sometimes you just gotta let it out (and the longer you spend with other people, the more you’re going to encounter their various bodily functions).

That being said, I’m not going to fetishize that particular kink, but I will normalize a lack of censorship in the broader consensus (re: Milton’s 1644 Areopagitica: A speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing) to give people who find power in that kind of thing a place to play with unspeakable things in “unspeakable” ways, mid-cryptonymy. I gotta yuck that yum, but as long everyone’s able to consent and actually gives consent within the venue, then no harm, no foul; re: diversity is strength and just because Archie Wilcox from Inglorious Basterds (2009) found Hugo Stiglitz to be a man of few words, he also learned that Stiglitz’ actions spoke louder than words when the pivotal moment came: “Now about this pickle we’re in; it would seem there’s only one thing left for you to do!” / “And what is that?” / “Stiglitz.” / “Say ‘auf wiedersehen[27]‘ to your Nazi balls!”

The point isn’t to “own” Nazis in the Free Marketplace of Ideas (since when has that stopped fascism?), but to camp the canon with ludo-Gothic BDSM and break Capitalist Realism, thus stop the historical-material cycle of violence that reactionaries and moderates both depend on and defend in bad faith/centrist language; i.e., by pointedly confronting and controlling the conduit of messages speaking about/on/with taboo subjects normally used to torture us, sans irony. Girls shit, for example; some girls do more than that with their shit (cringes slightly while writing that clause)! Others get raped and do more with their rape than please opportunistic men (speaking from experience, with that one); i.e., “There are more thing between heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy!”

Furthermore, such things—as elements to exploit or liberate and work with, mid-praxis—allude to hypermassive warring forces; i.e., the warring Communist Big Whore, Medusa, conveyed concentrically in smaller doubles, mid-belly-of-the-beast, grappling with state doubles of the capitalist Big Pimp: cops and victims, the former criminalizing the latter for profit, thus rape. All monsters—even that repulsive shit demon from Dogma (1999)—need love, and provided mutual consent is respected, mid-praxis, by punching up against Capitalism and profit (thus rape) as something to dismantle, mid-synthesis, then more power to us! As usual the facilitator is a whore (or muse, in Kevin Smith’s arguments. Same difference):

(exhibit 45c2b1: Older feminists/SWERFs tend to knock the topos of power of women[28], but it’s something that neo-medieval argument can broach from a variety of sources; e.g., Smith’s “angelicizing” of the formerly demonic Selma Hayek [above] from an exotified “other” wrought with vampire tropes punching down at Mexico from America, and attacking sex workers; i.e., with Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’ From Dusk ‘Til Dawn [1996] presenting the vampires as bloodsucking fodder the bar full of combat vets, bikers and runaway criminals must kill to survive; re: black penitents being one-upped by older more experienced black penitents, but also the assimilative myth [for Rodriguez] of a savage Mexico: a “bad” bloodline threatening a white American hostage virgin[29], and who Clooney’s suitably gruff, swarth-and-sexy antihero must protect from out-and-out whores [which is what a Neo-Gothic demon, out from the medieval past, ultimately is: an illegitimate claim to power through sex and force]. In his own words, Clooney’s “a bastard, not a fucking bastard.”

The takeaway with Smith’s Dogma is that he—a practicing or at least born Catholic—is showcasing a bidding war between two rival groups over Serendipity: an angelic-but-slutty muse, played by Hayek, while Linda Fiorentino’s sex-repressed heroine looks in on with begrudging respect [and previously herself played the awesome seductress moll, Bridgette/Wendy Croy, in John Dahl’s 1994 The Last Seduction—an early ’90s neo-noir with a very transphobic ending that castrates Bill Pullman and Peter Berg during coerced rape play]. And while it might seem like Smith is reining these ladies in, he’s also showcasing an interracial bid for attention: orchestrated by a non-white actress playing an otherworldly actress pitting men vampirically against each other using vampiric charms that have an infantilized, baby-pink “glow up” to them. It’s the Catholic schoolboy fascinated with the whore while pimping her/telling her what to wear!

Meta-wise, the subversion is there—and despite the biologically essentialized treatment of the foxy she-devil, having “gone over” to God’s side to fleece Smith’s sinning Jay and Silent Bob [echoes of Guildenstern and Rosencrantz] stone blind [doing so to the Jackson Five’s “ABC,” 1970; i.e., a fool and his money are parted soon]—it’s an effective [and playful, fun] illustration of the topos of power of women in small being used, however ineffectually by Smith in the long run, to try and critique Catholic dogma and Capitalism under a Protestant ethic; e.g., his megachurch cardinal and author of the “Buddy Christ” stand-in being played by none other than George Carlin. It’s not not wrong.

The problem, here, is the film is still Smith’s idea of Capitalism, one he uses to biologically essentialize muses/sex workers; i.e., his own “den of scum and villainy” built on top of Tarantino and Rodriguez’ going all the way back to Matthew Lewis’ cabin of bandits-in-disguise, from The Monk—a novel Tarantino would ape, with his racist, profoundly misogynistic revival of Verhoeven’s already problematic 1985 Flesh and Blood satirizing Western hero culture. Neither director [nor Smith] could critique capital without reducing women to cis-het aliens whose only demonstrably “useful” role is to enchant men and steal their power [and wealth] through sex and sex alone.

Of course, there’s a kernel of truth to the cryptomimetic reenactments, but it’s possible to be essentially correct and still sexist while aping other sexist men in the process; i.e., Verhoeven filmed Sharon Stone’s flashing scene in 1992’s Basic Instinct without her consent, Tarantino is a rape apologist[30], and Smith is certainly no stranger to problematic belief systems [ultimately apologizing for the Catholic deity in Dogma but also falling into Milton and Tolkien’s Star Wars trap by aggrandizing He-Man and hiring Mark Hamill (an open Zionist) to voice Skeletor in his 2021 reboot, He-Man: Revelation]. Moreover, all of these men come from the same destructive system, Hollywood, whereas Matthew Lewis was a twenty-year old gay man/member of Parliament who wrote The Monk to deliberately critique the status quo [a reputation that would haunt him for the rest of his life, his nickname eventually becoming “Monk” Lewis. We should all be so lucky].

[artist: H.W., Pickersgill]

Campy patronymics aside, Lewis was a gay man who camped the canon to invert problematic ideas like Original Sin and Faustian bargains; re: Broadmoor’s 2021 “Camping the Canon” vis-à-vis Milton and Lewis, followed by me as inspired by Broadmoor’s title when writing my 2023 PhD; e.g., the shapeshifting Matilda first disguising as the male Rosario, then admitting after she is caught that she has actually modeled herself after Ambrosio’s portrait of the Madonna on his abbey wall, before seducing him through a reenacting of the Fall [of Adam and Eve] inside “an artificial wilderness.” Everything is fake as fuck.

So whereas Lewis’ revolutionary cryptonymy was profoundly anti-capitalist and anti-establishment—in effect empowering women like Matilda to gut Ambrosia like the incestuous pig/rapist he was—I can’t help but feel Smith [and by extension older auteurs like Verhoeven and Tarantino] have sucked much of the satire out of camp. I don’t care if Smith is a King Diamond fan; it’s still blind satire, as is their own choir they’re preaching to—with them closer to Radcliffe than they’d like to admit; i.e., posturing as Lewis’ famous rebel to enjoy the straight man’s idea of a queer bad boy[31] rocking the boat, but actually “super straight” neo-conservative con men, failing to put pearls before swine [or pearl-clutching for swine, take your pick]: pulling a Radcliffe-in-disguise! “We stare and tremble!” indeed! They’re frauds who uphold capital, not tear it down.

[source: Lila Shapiro’s “There Is No Safe Word: How the best-selling fantasy author Neil Gaiman hid the darkest parts of himself for decades,” 2025]

Simply put, function determines function, not appearance—with the aesthetics of Faustian devilry something that sex liberators and sex pests can embellish in service to workers or profit. It’s why you can have someone as devilish [and handsome] as Rickman—playing a variety of dashing lotharios, unscrupulous bandits and ravishing sexual predators onscreen, but be a total sweetheart offscreen [see: Madly, Deeply: The Alan Rickman Diaries[32], 2022]—versus someone like Neil Gaiman, playing the part “to the hilt” and passing himself off as some kind of rebel with a cause; i.e., as a genuine sex pest posturing as a Gothic bad boy auteur to access women’s spaces and actually rape them[33].

Furthermore, while cis gay men classically are known to tokenize—re: Foucault, Spacey and Dahmer—the problem is heteronormative, thus straight because the state and its cops are straight; i.e., as a systematic problem—the kind Matthew Lewis was highlighting to expose the queer pogroms happening in his own time, versus the straight men aping him/using his rockstar status to pass themselves off as “activists” while actually being crusaders-in-disguise [and imitating a woman imitating straight bigoted men, oddly enough]!

From the silver screen to Netflix, Hollywood is the Church, giving shelter to Black Penitents like Radcliffe did—her 1796 Italian‘s full title being The Confessional of the Back Penitents and cashing in on Lewis’ 1794 Monk‘s signature cryptonymy and perfidy: a straight person aping a queer man to drain his camp of iconoclastic value, cashing in on cheap doubles; i.e., despite being called in some circles “the Mother of Gothic literature” [source: Women’s Museum of California, 2017] and hero worshipped for it [sorry, Dale[34], but if the shoe fits…], Radcliffe came after Clara Reeve and aped not one but two gay men, Lewis and Walpole; Smith and company aped Radcliffe aping Lewis to fall on her side of the camp, praxially speaking. Blind camp is blind camp, and all of these people fit the bill. Per capital, such things also work in pairs and go in cycles that span centuries; re: Aguirre’s infernal concentric pattern.

[artist: Black Salander]

To that, be like Lewis or myself when making your own demons, not Radcliffe or her functionally comparable doppelgangers; i.e., the Sphinx’ riddle, let your tortures mean something by challenging the status quo [and crippling Divine Right; re: Oedipus Rex].)

Now that we’ve covered whores-as-demonic through the Faustian angle as something to involve amongst ourselves (as whores), let’s examine demons as summoned through magic! “Lay on, Macduff, and damned be he who cries ‘Hold, enough!'”

Onto “The Road to Hell: Summoning the Whore, Ourselves (opening and part one – Showing Jadis’ Face while Doubling Them)“!

---

Footnotes

[1] Per Radcliffe’s own Black Veil and demon BDSM (as borrowed from ecclesiastical circles; e.g., the naughty nun), the language of summoning demons generally involves summoning a kind of sex demon that reintroduces a convulsionnaire’s latter-day jouissance trembling before a reimagined Numinous; e.g., Barker’s Cenobites, but really any demon you could think of when dealing with the ghost of the counterfeit/process of abjection: the whore as a sex demon vice character who refuses to repent/owns the neo-medieval aesthetic for canon and camp, alike.

Except, whereas Lewis’ fakeries critiqued the status quo through an imaginary Church using overtly demon language, the fractal recursion begot from Radcliffe’s “explained supernatural” opted for more modest, Female-Gothic (re: Moers) inventions that later demanded TERF-style police violence punching down in bad faith “against”: the banditti-as-false-preacher robbing the faithful blind/turning them mad against vulnerable groups.

As I shall demonstrate in “Summoning Demons” as a whole, the black penitent can take on qualities of either author during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., when pointedly camped by us to put Lewis’ black magic and Radcliffe’s exquisite “torture” (and other demonic devices) to good use—when developing Gothic Communism by infiltrating and stealing from the imaginary past! Raid Radcliffe’s liquor cabinet; drag out her corpse and beat it with sticks!

[2] A NWOTHM band similar in political bite to Queensrÿche’s excellent Operation Mindcrime (1988).

[3] Whose mythical warriors aren’t just invincible barbarians who can transform into demons when looking at the moon, but who have a palingenetic “Nazi werewolf” flavor to them avenging Frieza’s destruction of their homeworld after they did his dirty work (the backstabbing Jew trope); i.e., one that goes back to the Third Reich. For more details on this idea and its revenge argument—strictly that of reclaiming one’s lost home from a legendary past wrong during the Imperial Boomerang (and cartographic refrain)—refer to my writeup on similar demons in Bungie’s Myth franchise (source: “‘Hell Hath No Fury’; or, Soulblighter’s Token Gay Nazi Revenge (and Giants/Female Characters) in Myth II: Soulblighter” (2024).

Furthermore, it’s a common military recruitment tactic when the state decays, one based on ahistorical, monomythic likenesses of our world; i.e., often through an element of performative victimhood and revenge assigned to real-world groups by people who are not those groups; re: DARVO and obscurantism (e.g., Braveheart, 1995) that promise mates, military glory/accolades, manhood, revenge, and shelter in times of manufactured crisis… if only you participate in a little tournament! And like all fascist pigs, it’s an abattoir for the animal farmers to harvest and enslave those young and dumb enough to buy what the state is selling.

Such media is routinely haunted by our aforementioned “Star Wars problem” (thus KISS, Paradise Lost, etc)—i.e., the rebels aren’t Communists fighting for a new world beyond the past one, en medias res (Communism); they and the Jedi are fighting for the Old Republic and a previous centrist ordering that decayed into fascism (their paradise lost). The problem with Lucas, Tolkien and Milton, etc, is their refrains are ethnocentric, and constructed cartographically/geopolitically along regressive arguments of “rebellion for us” (redlining ghettos). It’s American Liberalism/white (and token) centrist bullshit, feeding into Capitalist Realism; i.e., Americanized media since WWII essentializing Western orderings of the world, which it then defends through theatres of war personifying said war and its copagandistic values. Per Howard Zinn, these appeal to American exceptionalism—and exclusive revolution defending the status quo through Superman-level comic book theatres—as something to import to American imitators, overseas; e.g., Japan, post-occupation and -assimilation.

In turn, the Z fighters fight fire with fire, assimilating to defend the realm for the elite, not prevent crime/rape (they like to fight); i.e., by performing Westernized ideas of strength and beauty standards, while whitewashing fascism/tokenizing Socialism to defend Earth from external demonic threats—namely a goblin/queer clown vice character (Frieza), an invincible barbarian/demon warrior (Broly), a mad science experiment (Cell) and a witch’s evil creation (Buu). It’s kayfabe vaudeville with Faustian and Promethean elements, the various devils and throwback supermen apologizing for fascism, mid-Red-Scare, and loaded to shonen excess through nonstop battles of will versus degeneracy to protect a Japanese neoliberal view of the Earth; i.e., through Beowulf-grade momentum shifts and wish fulfillment directed at chosen saviors getting the girls, then spending all their time with other men; e.g., Goku likes fighting and food, extending conflict to the detriment of others. He’s not a good hero, but is an excellent cop. Vegeta assimilates, but in truth is married more to Goku (his first love) than Bulma (his beard); re: “No one kills Kakarot but me!” It’s all very macho/warrior hero cult of death.

In other words, cops are queernormative through a homosocial lens, and queernormativity is heteronormativity. To that, betrayal is betrayal, rape is rape, banishment is banishment, etc. The real villain of the show is Goku—playing dumb and reaping the rewards of raping planet Earth without end (famously sending his victims, Radcliffe-style, “into the next dimension” because Cartoon Network didn’t want to say “Hell” or even “shadow realm”). He’s judge, jury and executioner towing the Thin Blue Line, just like Superman did against Zod.

[4] I only ever had one person—a trans man—ask to have their poster/written involvement be entirely removed from the project, post hoc, and they were working in bad faith with another trans person, a trans woman, who—recently separated from one of my partners—sought to discredit my work and turn past actors against me; re (from Persephone van der Waard’s “Policing the Whore”):

Such preferential mistreatment translates to real life and the ways a witch hunt normally play out: turning society against those who aren’t normally believed by other members of the prison population.

For example, JDPlaysMoth accused me of abuse based on my testimony of older transmisogyny committed against me (source tweet, vanderWaardart: July 19th 2024), doing so after refusing to transvestigate my own partner because I didn’t take Jade at their word that [my partner] Crow was a Nazi “fake trans” preying on “real trans people”:

Crow is racist, lied about being trans to me and you, is abusive, steals money, intentionally asks trans people they’re acquainted with if they can write fiction of them detransitioned, and lies about being single and friendless to get new partners. They also aren’t trans. They lie about being trans because they have a fetish for trans women. They also are a chronic narcissist who uses abuse to try and control people who want to help them (source).

and then adding, “If you want to know more, that’s fine, but I’m out of the situation, and this is just information” before running a smear campaign on me because they were “just trying to help” and I refused to listen. They then deadnamed/misgendered Crow, saying that they didn’t “want to transition, doesn’t want surgery, and as another partner of hers has confirmed, she only does it because she thinks it’ll make trans women like her more” (ibid.). Jade’s actions— cloak-like though they are—still speak for themselves.

Furthermore, all of this is done by Jade while swanning and showing off their outward appearance to their fans (source tweet: June 26th, 2024)—in short, while kissing up and punching down as a byproduct of their own lived abuse. Acknowledging that abuse is valid, but more important is understanding that Jade is presently an abuser weaponizing their own lived experiences against others. They’re the impostor in love with themselves, a mirror that reflects their false nature onto their victims in order to makes others feel threatened; doing so is meant to alienate Jade’s victims, presenting them as false, illegitimate outsiders Jade’s flash mob can string up in association with their usual inequity under police rule: the scapegoat, witch whore inside more earthly and less fantastical prisons. Fantastical or not, there’s always some orc to lynch, some whole to fill through revenge; re: the givers and receivers of state violence inside the state of exception, moving money through nature.

Free from scrutiny and indeed, venerated for having exposed a perceived menace through the usual bigotries leveled at the marginalized struggling for in group status, Jade is the fascist ringleader free to feed on her victims with impunity! She’s a witch hunter played by the witch—a feeding frenzy conducted by those commonly dehumanized by systemic abuse seeking empowerment through said system; i.e., the policing of others through a matter of dogma, fear and revenge, abjecting members of the same community by triangulating against them for the state: robots policing robots, slaves policing slaves, those of nature policing those of nature as monstrous-feminine with monstrous-feminine (source).

Note: In case my source tweets are removed/Twitter melts completely down, you can find the entire tweet threads and screencaps in this Google Doc; re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Setting the Record Straight, Transmisia Experience: 5/26/2023 [updated 11/13/2024].” Such redundant storage is a data preservation strategy I have performed multiple times, learning it from my mother/other sex workers and allowing me to compile and consequently share my abuse in quick, easy-to-digest forms; e.g., “Setting the Record Straight Again; Accounting My Ex’s Abuse of Me to Another Victim_August 30th, 2022” and “Setting the Record Straight; My Ex’s Abuse of Me: February 17th, 2022.” In keeping with the revolutionary cryptonymy process, if you’re transparent, you take away accusations that only work under opaque conditions; and if they still attack you, they’re outing themselves. Win-win, loves.

In short, token whores police whores, while being and not being undercover!

I’m an expert not just in researching tokenism, then, but in surviving it where it most commonly occurs. Always document your own genocide; receipts protect us from cops, official or de facto, during witch hunts; e.g., from white moderates who otherwise might turn a blind eye*, but also marginalized groups who might otherwise tokenize openly and punch down (the fencer-sitters). So often, we practicing leftists have to document our own abuse—and not just from status-quo people, but those from out-groups wanting to betray their own (all oppressed people); i.e., to assimilate/triangulate against universal labor. A bigotry for one is a bigotry for all, and people acting in bad faith tend not to fuck with you if you can document their abuse and show it to the world while also protecting yourself. We must blow the whistle and be smart about it, because canon deifies its dead as sacred!

*Persephone’s Metroidvania Series #6: Reading My Transphobic Hate Comments (re: Doom Eternal)” (2025) from “Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning” (2025).

[5] Re: Persephone van der Waard’s “A Vampire History Primer; or, a Latter-Day Conceptualization of Vampirism, from the 1970s Onwards” (2024).

[6] E.g., Nex Benedict (from “Remember the Fallen”):

Nex went to the “correct” bathroom only to be killed anyways by those the rule was supposed to “protect”: teenage girls (in truth, the rules are coding behaviors that condition cis-het people [and token agents] to attack “incorrect” persons). The three attackers used the rule to isolate Nex, then entered the bathroom in bad faith to execute them (the rule and the person). In turn, the state’s ipso facto sanctioning of selective punishment has been demonstrated by their shielding of Nex’ hangmen (or rather, in this case, hang women) [source].

[7] Dick Nelson, played by Jeffery Jones—a man who first pleaded guilty in 2003 to hiring a fourteen-year-old boy to pose naked in photos for him, then refused to update his sex offender registry in 2010:

Jeffrey Jones, best known for playing the bumbling Principal Rooney in Ferris Bueller‘s Day Off, pleaded guilty in Los Angeles Tuesday to a felony charge of failing to update his sex offender registry info. / The 64-year-old actor escaped a possible 3-year jail sentence in state prison, but must now serve three years of probation and perform 250 hours of roadside clean-up, TMZ first reported. / In July 2003, Jones pleaded no contest to hiring a 14-year-old boy to pose for sexually explicit photos, according to City News Service.

“I’m sorry that this incident was allowed to occur. Such an event has never happened before and it will never happen again,” Jones reportedly said then. / As a result of the case, he was sentenced to five years’ probation and was required to register annually as a sex offender. / Jones was arrested June 23 after failing to update his registration for 2009. / He has appeared in more than 60 roles on the silver and small screens (source).

In other words, Jones got a slap on the wrist more than once; i.e., painfully reminiscent since Radcliffe’s The Italian, showing how the system—since Antiquity and the medieval period into the Neo-Gothic period and beyond—repeatedly serves the needs of status-quo men by design: not to prevent crime, but let those with power abuse their power to keep harming those the system normally exploits. As we’ll see with Radcliffe, the exposure must be total and universal; otherwise, the detectives being lionized are merely cops-in-disguise!

However ignorant or aware of the tropes someone is, the monomyth is rape apologia. In Beeman’s case, his movie calls “Mr. Everyman*” “Earth Dick”; i.e., while camping Star Wars and Flash Gordon before it—all the way back to Frankenstein, Udolpho, Paradise Lost and Beowulf—to instill praxial inertia for profit, with a smaller risk/allegory of the historical-material facts: as an inside (and sadly prophetic) joke—a family patriarch/authority figure who extends his whitewashed persona (and rapacious cock) astronoetically into outer space, on and offstage! The paradox of Dick Nelson is the whore is canonically someone who endangers the nuclear family through imposturous scandals; i.e., Dick Nelson the character endangers his family through sheer ineptitude, while his real-life double (the actor) threatens to break the entire spell by acting the canonical idea of a male harlot/sodomite. It’s like a really sobering version of Captain Kirk. Furthermore, the quotidian upstart upstaging Captain Crunch is, himself, an impostor getting paid for his time (though probably not well, considering the movie absolutely bombed**).

*Re: Natalie Stechyson, writing on Gisele Pelicot exposing her rapists.

**Its total gross was reportedly two million dollars; by comparison, T2—then the highest-grossing movie of all time—made $517 million (despite this, the production costs were so high, Arnold Schwarzenegger accepted his payment in the form of a jet). And despite claims to the contrary about Jones not getting paid for Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice [2024], the makers still used his likeness to some extent [versus writing him out of the story altogether]. So the odds that he got paid something by Burton [who worked with him for years] aren’t zero [similar to Crispin Glover in Back to the Future 2]. That being said, this is pure conjecture, so it can go either way [see: r/Beetlejuice 2‘s “Jeffery Jones,” 2024].

“The traditions of all dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” So does Beeman extend/apologize for rape (to some extent) by blindly camping those stories, but also The Simpsons‘ 1989 debut (and The Jetsons/Flintstones‘ [1962/1960] own unironic endorsements of The Honeymooners, Leave It to Beaver [1955/1957] and a million other sitcoms and cartoons oscillating between blind camp and perceptive parody/pastiche attacking the nuclear family model; e.g., The Stepford Wives, 1972); i.e., as juxtaposed alongside the early ’90s thinning of the membrane, vis-à-vis Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, Butler’s Gender Trouble, Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine, Jameson’s Postmodernism, and Warner’s “heteronormativity.”

It’s certainly a response to all of these things, but as Radcliffe shows us, familiarity with cliché isn’t the same thing as endorsing universal liberation. We must do better than all peoples who came  before; i.e., by revisiting and updating as many times as needed what has since become dated and harmful; re (from the Poetry Module citing Volume Zero):

Again, “kill your darlings”; i.e., even if everyone in Gothic academic quotes Angela Carter, she’s still a second wave feminist, thus has major problems we must critique. As I write in Volume Zero: 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 (source: “Green Eggs and Ha(r)m,” 2024)

(artist: Mercedes the Muse)

We must critique our heroes when they disappoint us, and hold ourselves and them to the same level of scrutiny we would our enemies while making media showing us being “tortured.” Anyone can combine anything to say anything they need for any argument; in turn, anyone can tokenize, and many are—far from walking the tightrope or sitting on the fence—either betraying us in bad faith or unaware that they’re limiting the scope of their critics to effectively critique capital vis-à-vis Gothic poetics: “We are human, so respect our boundaries and honor our demands as we honor yours; e.g., ‘It’s my turn, so cleave my beaver like a good little slave!'”

To that, I wrote Sex Positivity‘s first book, Volume Zero (2023), to critique Creed’s Amazonomachia further than she dared (my readings deliberately going from movies into videogames while taking the former and Gothic novels into consideration); i.e., scrutinizing her work, but also Derrida and any other author mentioned from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s (and really from any time period I feel like). Nothing is sacred but universal basic human, animal and environmental rights; the state—and anyone who defends them directly or indirectly—is a cop. And say the line, Bart: “ACAB! ASAB! AHAB! ABAB” The state is straight; we’re here and we’re queer! Furthermore, “trans women are women, trans men are men, and non-binary people are valid; sex work is work; free Palestine!” And so on…

[8] Originally from Volume Zero, but later cited in “A Note about Canonical Essentialism” (2024):

 

(exhibit 1a1a1h2a1: “When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer*.” 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 Earthlike double]—a black fortress threatening state hegemony during the inevitable decay of a colonial body. Its widening state of exception must then be entered by the hero during the liminal hauntology of war as a repeatable, monomythic excursion—a franchise to subdue during military optimism sold as a childhood exercise towards “playing war” in fantastical forms; e.g., Castlevania or Metroid. Conjure a Radcliffean menace inside the Imperial Core, then meet it with American force. 

In short, Tolkien’s inventions (or Cameron’s) were the same kinds of us-versus-them ethnocentric arguments made by men of reason out of the historical past, onstage and offstage, to justify real-world invasions proceeded by imaginary ones (and vice versa).

*For added fun, here is the footnote on Gruber and Die Hard this quote is referring to/cited from:

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.

And if movie directors can do it to tokenize Irish cops (McClane)—i.e., in service to a Japanese company on American soil (while scapegoating the FBI in the process)—then we wacky fags can camp all of their ghosts in service to all the generations of peoples capital has exploited; re: Ward Churchill’s “On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Some People Push Back” (2005).

[9] This is as much a bodily function as a choice; e.g., swamp ass part of the time versus mega ripe 24/7!

[10] The hero’s sexual reward, reviving Valhalla during state decay—what C.S. Lewis would call “a teatable paradise”:

In the plastic arts these symbols [of power] have steadily degenerated. Fra Angelico’s angels carry in their face and gesture the peace and authority of Heaven. Later come the chubby infantile nudes of Raphael; finally the soft, slim, girlish, and consolatory angels of nineteenth century art, shapes so feminine that they avoid being voluptuous only by their total insipidity—the frigid houris of a teatable paradise. They are a pernicious symbol. In Scripture the visitation of an angel is always alarming; it has to begin by saying “Fear not.” The Victorian angel looks as if it were going to say, “There, there” (source: C.S. Lewis’ 1961 preface to The Screwtape Letters featured in Jordan Poss’ “C.S. on Angels in Art,” 2020).

Such poetics convey nostalgias to pine for in regards to angels and godly ordainment; i.e., “Make Heaven Great Again.” Gothic Communism can camp this, making C.S. Lewis clutch his pearls by reminding them that power and its Numinous statements are half-real, plastic, and prone to change. Fuck God, hahaha! Do sacrilege, kids!

[11] Unlike Marlowe’s previous The Jew of Malta, the Faust legend speaks to white Germanic male vanity and hubris; i.e., similar to what Shelley would satirize in Frankenstein with her own mad science polemic—the difference being Marlowe’s story was designed for the stage, not novelized, but still critiques Man’s reach exceeding his grasp: through a morality tale of “pride cometh before the Fall” (a theme borrowed from Greek tragedies into Marlowe, Milton, Shakespeare, Shelley and so on). The science presents as “magical”; i.e., one whose rituals of fatal pursuit speak to the abuse of alchemic technology (re: the Philosopher’s Stone): summoning a demon from Hell who sends Faust down a heavy-handed path of self-destruction/towards the Big Man downstairs (an excommunication). To it, the Good Doctor has every chance to stop, but doesn’t because he has white male fragility and privilege (which includes scientific, celebrity-status privilege). In turn, the store frames everything in medieval theatre language (the Deadly Sin of Pride). It’s silly and serious, the “tragedy” unfolding as an argument concerning self-aggrandizement that doesn’t pass muster.

Regarding the many others who followed in Faust’s footsteps, Landis couldn’t help himself. Bolstered by the success of Animal House, Blues Brothers (1980), and An American Werewolf in London (1981), his attempts to capture fresh “lightning in a bottle” success by pushing the envelop led to a totally avoidable tragedy—one just like Faust except it affected people other than Faust (all speaking to the “pity me” self-centered quality of the original story that—among others—Shelley was making fun of in her own revival not just of Prometheus, but Marlowe’s morality tale); re: starring American actor Vic Morrow and 7-year old Myca Dinh Le and 6-year-old Renee Shin-Yi Chen, the latter two hired in deliberate violation of California labor laws and used in a white savior ghost story returning to the Vietnam War to rescue victims of American Genocide (colonial guilt, and turning a profit at colonizer and colonized expense—all very Walpolean, considering Morrow and his “chosen princes” are crushed/decapitated by a falling helicopter, similar to the giant helmet crushing Lord Manfred’s son: cutting them and their greatness short).

While I wish I could say the exposure of these workplace violations had any demonstrable effect regarding systemic change, the system exists to protect powerful men, not cancel them; and being white, straight, male and powerful, Landis not only survived the case intact, he went on to direct dozens of films afterwards (slowly shifting to producing movies and TV shows, in the 2010s). While people less vain would be absolutely chuffed to have any career close to that, Landis—like Faust before him—can’t help himself, can never stop, always wants. Furthermore, he took the wrong lessons away from Twilight—mainly that he was the main character in and outside his own production; re: “Impunity is the apex of privilege,” I write, in “Valorizing the Idiot Hero” (source, 2020).

And while that piece focused on Ashley Williams from the Evil Dead franchise, my argument effectively speaks to the same kind of unchecked, publicly endorsed/enabled male privilege that Faust enjoyed until his tragic, completely avoidable death; i.e., a story about an idiot (Quixotic) hero who ignores everyone around him until it either kills him, or at least blows up in his face—the same kind of carte blanche entitlement enjoyed by half-real Great Men of the imaginary past (all history is somewhat fictional) leading to Landis and later on, Trump’s two presidencies (and all American executives “playing Faust”). Monsters are made, and the Faustian hubris Marlowe made famous was, itself, a historical result of systemic issues that only crystalized after his play summon them.

As such, Landis and future assholes like him are symptoms of a larger historical-material cycle bleeding collateral damage in furtherance to bourgeois triage; i.e., one developing a rash of personality disorders (such as narcissism) menticiding them into Quixotic numbskulls causing other workers great harm (and forcing these victims into fractally recursive Faustian bargains, on and on). Reflecting on the disaster afterwards, Landis only thought about himself and what could have been regarding his own wasted potential and movie-magic success (thus profit/rape unfetter/undeterred by consequence): “There was absolutely no good aspect about this whole story. The tragedy, which I think about every day, had an enormous impact on my career from which I may possibly never recover (emphasis, me; source: Nigel Andrews’s “Golden Boy Howls at the Moon: John Landis was feted in Hollywood for his comedies – then it all changed,” 1996). In other words, “Me, me, me!”

(photographer: Rick Meyer)

Faust is only a sympathetic tragedy if the hero actually dies and learns something valuable at the end; i.e., to help others, not pity himself. In real life, Landis does neither of those things, but invokes Great Men of the past to valorize his own giant mistakes harming other people in great numbers; re, Marx: “History repeats first in tragedy and then in farce.” Faust—as a parable about self-destructive vanity in pursuit of glory through demonic magic—shines a light on human failings when given no barriers; i.e., on the path towards total power in pursuit of fatal knowledge (or vice versa): faced with any such device (wish, want or desire) as something to gain, the Great Man of History self-destructs to take others with him—doing in ways we can learn from and use to survive and prevent (through systemic change by raising awareness): people like Landis from harming us in our own lives.

Such things might seem wholly silly and serious; i.e., like Raimi’s serious-to-spoof movies, the original Beowulf (or the Welsh Arthurian cycle from the same pre-to-Old-English period, the 700s), Marlowe’s idiotic Faust, Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605) or Shakespeare’s Macbeth and its own dire conclusion: “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Told by idiots or about them, stories following the Faustian tradition and its seminal tragedy speak to historical-material problems that can only change by recognizing these stories as they exist and unfold; i.e., in between fiction and nonfiction, onstage and off, for workers or against them, using demonic language in either case during liminal expression.

“To critique power, you must go where it is.” The Faustian past is a wealth of fatal knowledge we inquisitors must learn from when hearing demons and angels talk to us (to torture out of us and vice versa). We must, lest we make the same mistakes that Faust did: refusing to listen to others while acting like a fragile, privileged white male. And to those of you who might insist he had it good, remember that, while the system protects powerful men, it ultimately preys on them, then self-destructs on loop; re: Faust didn’t just die at the end, he died an ignominious death—Hell’s “angels” (demons) tearing him literally limb from limb. Such duality would seem to prophesize labor punching up, but it also speaks to state cops punching down, inside the Capitalocene (criminogenic conditions/immiseration), and to state shift sitting on the cusp of final planetary defeat (whose Capitalist Realism they will exploit, as always, to maintain themselves and their own Faustian positions; e.g., Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Barrack Obama, Joe Biden, etc).

The Shadow of Pygmalion, then, is also the Shadow of Faust/Cycle of Kings, and the bad bargains he made with state devils constitute Aguirre’s infernal concentric pattern: a proto-fascist cryptonymy (false power) demonstrating the myriad ways in which the state ultimately cannibalizes “Faust” to keep itself alive, then blame that on “the Devil” (classic Red Scare translating anti-Semitic myth to anti-Marxist dogma; i.e., Cultural Bolshevism and Marxism espoused by bad state actors policing demonology during future class, culture and race wars—with those involving shifting scapegoats and spearheaded by Faustian useful idiots and short-term benefactors; e.g., Zionism).

[12] From top to bottom, the movie’s “heroes” are a bunch of entitled drunks who aren’t college freshmen; the old crowd have been in school for seven years (making them at least twenty-five, when the movie starts). They simultaneously use collage to belittle those actually working—stealing and cheating every chance they get—fear people of color they nonetheless hire for basement concerts, evoke a Dionysian orgy (“toga party”) that sees them getting women drunk and then presumably raping them (no one in the movie is shown drunk during these scenes except Belushi, and he’s too cool for sex), and then joke about all of this being “pointless” in ways that conveniently benefit them (the pre-credits eulogies celebrate the various characters’ accomplishments, failing up).

(artist: Rick Meyerowitz; source)

National Lampoon—and by extension, SNL—has always been a white moderate “Faustus factory”; i.e., the screenwriters making the “snobs vs slobs” story self-important and uncommitted save it being about fascist American youth and moderate fascist American youth: a pack of privileged scoundrels who use and abuse everyone around them, stand for nothing but their own personal gain (“Might as well have joined the fucking Peace Corps.!”), dodge the draft (which is valid) but also accountability for abusing others (which isn’t valid), invent an internal conspiracy about it (“double-secret probation,” which does critique neoliberal abuse but only as it affects them), host luxurious, expensive and recklessly self-indulgent “Roman” revivals/debauches through frat-house fraternity cults of masculinity (“the Deltas”), and basically whitewash every bigotry under the sun while infiltrating the Free Love movement/corrupt genuine activism with American Liberalist hogwash: “It’s all one big party “so we might as well have a good time!” The movie is nostalgic about rape as something to get away with, washing it all down with a good false-rebellion story. Well played, pigs.

I grew up watching Animal House on VHS, remembering Meyerowitz’ Sunday-newspaper approach to the cover art (above). I didn’t fully grasp as a little girl just how awful all of these guys were/are. That came later—meaning when I actually went to school and learned something about literature and sex (and having my fair share of each re: Constance, Zeuhl, Jadis and Cuwu). The Deltas clearly suck, then, but are the Faustian brainchildren of Landis and company’s own comorbid hubris, first and foremost; i.e., as Meyerowitz explains, the stories about Delta were autobiographical: “In 2006, Chris Miller, whose short stories in the Lampoon were the inspiration for the Animal House movie, which he co-wrote, published The Real Animal House. […] Chris is a great guy. Buy his book!” (ibid.)

In true Faustian tradition, then, everyone acts like it was just “harmless fun”—devaluing genuine academic achievement/activism that would dismantle the system that privileges them, then pimping their way through school and valorizing it afterwards while presenting themselves as something they’re not (actual scientists or great thinkers). American liberals are truly the worst/epitome of privilege for the cruel and the mediocre (and don’t get me started on SNL; e.g., Will Farrell and similar actors endorsing the War on Terror [“Osama’s Pep Talk,” 12/01/01] yet whitewashing themselves with token friends [Will and Harper, 2024]. I hate that guy).

[13] Whose consensus on “women” leans away from abstract and arguably towards a limiting of the category to her own experiences as white; i.e., as No Fly on the WALL writes,

When Mary [Wollstonecraft] published her polemic on Feminist Philosophy in 1792, against the tumultuous background of the French Revolution, she concerned herself with the rights afforded to “woman” – an abstract category. However, in [Wollstonecraft’s] world, there was seemingly something in the body social that drew all women together and merged their experiences. In today’s society, the difference in the female experience because of intersections such as race and class have become increasingly more apparent and in the case of black women – as men and women of other ethnicities – try to define who we are for us (source: “A Vindication of the Rights of Black Women: A Contribution to a Discourse,” 2013).

In short, Mary’s work—like her daughter’s—makes for an excellent start, but needs to be built upon and harvested for parts, not taken at face value. Academics tend to write from privilege; we must intersect all of these, regardless of our privilege or register of discourse: using academic ideas for commonplace solutions, including camping Marlowe’s ghost.

[14] “I never thought about the film reflecting societal issues of the late 1970s,” Maltin writes in 2019; “after all, Star Wars came out a year earlier and offered total escape to a huge and responsive audience [emphasis, me]. Looking back, however, it makes perfect sense that Alien can now be seen as a reflection of its time period” (source: “Memory: the Origins of Alien“). Like, no shit, dude; it only took your forty years to figure that out? Alien was always a reflection of its time period. “Jesus wept,” capital well and truly breeds idiots to whitewash its offenses; i.e., trying to conceal said offenses with glittering Hollywood stupidity and calling anything outside of that “the darkness of human nature” (re: Freud abjecting spectres of Marx and Marx’ historical materialism). “Get fucked, nerd!” Also, is it just me, or does Maltin smile weird?

I say this as a weird iconoclastic nerd; show me a weird canonical nerd like Maltin or Ebert and I will show you an idiot stuck in the Man Box. Just like Faust, Maltin’s ignorance was willful and paid; i.e., he and Ebert choosing to view stories as “pure escapism” for a paycheck capital found useful. They’re basically blind to allegory and coasting by on a system where allegory isn’t useful to them (and which they’ll abject anything that comes in, from outside Plato’s cave); theft is useful to them, thus rape inside a system where their Faustian ignorance helps preserve the status quo through escapist fantasies built on rape inside-outside themselves. Shame on you both!

[15] Aping Susan Sontag, Ebert writes, “There is no indication that the boy is horrified by the man’s Nazi past; he is more like a fascinated voyeur.” He continues:

I should add that Very Bad Things is intended as a comedy. Apt Pupil, based on a Stephen King novella, plays as a horror film. Happiness cannot easily be categorized, but I think it stands above the other films, not with them. (Two other new films that are superficially similar, Clay Pigeons and Home Fries, are more traditional character-driven comedy thrillers that contain a lot of gore but stay within generally acceptable boundaries.)

All of these films owe something to John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), an enormous success that suggested a way into Hollywood for unknown young directors. If you don’t have major stars and you don’t have a big budget, then the genre itself can be your selling point. Horror films, like sex films, do not depend on marquee names. The content itself is the star.

Horror as a genre has been expanded, in some of these films, by a mean streak of cruelty, masked as irony. Once horror films sympathized with victims who were being threatened. Then they started using point-of-view shots to identify with the slashers instead of the victims. In recent years there are two more refinements: (1) a single victim is not enough, and most of the movies string together killing scenes like an all-hit radio format; and (2) there is a fascination with bizarre kinds of pain and torture not seen since the Marquis de Sade on a good day.

Combine these ingredients with the two most easily assimilated trademarks of Quentin Tarantino (colorfully arcane and vulgar dialogue, and labyrinthine plotting) and you have the elements that the New Geeks are exultantly recycling (source).

(source: Ann Casano’s “The Most Obvious Quentin Tarantino Foot Fetish Scenes,” 2024)

Then, in the greatest of ironies, Ebert has the utter temerity to apologize for a racist, sexist pig like Tarantino of all people—all while insisting there is “no irony” in the other examples he gives. And maybe there isn’t among the directors he mentions. I don’t know them; but also it goes beyond them, Derrida’s “inside of the text” speaking to other people in the room besides Ebert. They don’t count, in his eyes, because his gut is ultimately his guide for the rest of the world, and that has already been coded; i.e., by his hopelessly Faustian brain, its opinions informed by the socio-material conditions around him. Furthermore, Ebert’s fetishizing of women may not be as overt as Tarantino (above), but he still apologizes for a Hollywood predator while doing so. To apologize for a predator is to be one, yourself.

[16] “The ads for Aliens claim that this movie will frighten you as few movies have,” Ebert writes, “and, for once, the ads don’t lie. The movie is so intense that it creates a problem for me as a reviewer: Do I praise its craftsmanship, or do I tell you it left me feeling wrung out and unhappy? It has been a week since I saw it, so the emotions have faded a little, leaving with me an appreciation of the movie’s technical qualities. But when I walked out of the theater, there were knots in my stomach from the film’s roller-coaster ride of violence. This is not the kind of movie where it means anything to say you ‘enjoyed’ it” (source).

As usual, Ebert is the Frankenstein man of feeling repressing his emotions, but also, like Faust, ignores them and keeps going back for more; i.e., to torture himself and miss the point. The fact that someone could do this for over forty years is frankly impressive.

[17] “One of the most boring experiences on Earth is a trash movie without the courage of its lack of convictions,” Ebert writes. He continues:

If it only wants to be cynical, it becomes lifeless in every moment – a bad dream on the screen. One of the pleasures of the movies, however, is to find a movie that chooses a disreputable genre and then tries with all its might to transcend the genre, to go over the top into some kind of artistic vision, however weird.

Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator is a pleasure like that, a frankly gory horror movie that finds a rhythm and a style that make it work in a cockeyed, offbeat sort of way. It’s charged up by the tension between the director’s desire to make a good movie, and his realization that few movies about mad scientists and dead body parts are ever likely to be very good. The temptation is to take a camp approach to the material, to mock it, as Paul Morrissey did in Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein. Gordon resists that temptation, and creates a livid, bloody, deadpan exercise in the theater of the undead (source).

Except, Frankenstein was always camp (and Warhol was a dick). Ebert’s simultaneously parroting Frederic Jameson’s “that boring and exhausted paradigm” and Zizek’s “the return of the living dead being the fundamental fantasy of contemporary mass culture”‘ (re: Castricano). It takes a certain amount of vanity to punch up at gods, even false gods and their idols; I’ve always been a little vain, and found doing so useful as a matter of self-preservation helping all workers.

[18] E.g., A Fish Called Wanda (1988):

And then there is the matter of the three murdered dogs. One friend of mine already says she won’t see A Fish Called Wanda because she has heard that dogs die in it (she is never, of course, reluctant to attend movies where people die). I tried to explain to her that the death of a pet is, of course, a tragic thing. But when the object is to inspire a heart attack in a little old lady who is a key prosecution witness, and when her little darling is crushed by a falling safe, well, you’ve just got to make a few sacrifices in the name of comedy (source).

Ebert is happy to draw his own lines in the sand, provided he thinks something is funny. In short, for him there are deserving victims and undeserving victims—a concept, once again, informed by his privilege (thus ignorance) and hypocrisy.

[19] E.g., Your Movie Sucks (2007) being a classic example of self-appointed elitism, in-group snobbery and monumental self-deception. This being said, I agree with Ebert when he says that Deuce Bigalow: American Gigolo (2005) sucks:

After watching Deuce Bigalow: American Gigolo himself, Ebert published a zero-star review of the film, describing it as “aggressively bad, as if it wants to cause suffering to the audience. The best thing about it is that it runs for only 75 minutes.” After this, he then directly addressed Schneider’s poor response to Goldstein’s review and petty bickering after the actor had questioned the validity of the critic’s response due to the fact that he hadn’t won a Pulitzer prize.

Ebert responded to this in his review by saying, “As chance would have it, I have won the Pulitzer Prize, and so I am qualified. Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks.” Interestingly enough, Ebert’s 2007 book Your Movie Sucks was inspired by this damning statement, a compilation of his most scathing reviews.

Despite the public back-and-forth and wave of creative insults, the pair found a peaceful equilibrium in 2007 after Ebert’s cancer diagnosis. The critic revealed that he had received a touching level of support and well wishes, with flowers being sent to him from Schneider himself, along with a note wishing him a speedy recovery signed “his least favourite movie star.”

This gesture moved Ebert, and later revisited his controversial 2005 film, offering a written truce in which he referred to the flowers sent by Schneider and said they “were a reminder, if I needed one, that although Rob Schneider might (in my opinion) have made a bad movie, he is not a bad man, and no doubt tried to make a wonderful movie, and hopes to again. I hope so, too.” (source: Emily Ruuskanen’s “The Feud between Roger Ebert and Rob Schneider,” 2024).

While it’s not difficult to discount Schneider (whose only good movie is Surf Ninjas, 1993), it’s also not untrue that people who use their credentials (however sarcastically) to settle a quick beef are demonstrably petty—and I am not above this; re (from the Poetry Module’s “Spilling Tea“):

In regards to the further reading I supplied, I don’t wish to “flash my badge” needlessly. All the same, I did write my MA (“Lost in Necropolis“) and PhD (my thesis volume, aka Volume Zero, 2023) on Metroidvania, and have several more books in the works including this volume (written when the sample was live, but the volume was not)—a reality that is often questioned by Dunning-Kruger types who project/transfer their own inadequacies onto experts such as myself. This isn’t hypothetical; I once had someone on Reddit (there’s a surprise) attack me for writing about Garfield and the Gothic (Persephone van der Waard’s “Is Garfield (1978-present) Gothic?” 2019), requiring me to essentially tell them, “I’m not your dad.”

To joust and argue about silly things/debates is something that people (educated or not) simply do. “Water under a bridge,” and all that.

That being said, this doesn’t change the fact that Ebert can’t explain why Schneider’s movie sucks in dialectical-material ways (thus in ways useful to active, conscious rebellion). Nor does he actually realize that Rob Schneider is quite awful, actually (source: Ed Dickson’s “The Red-Pilling of Rob Schneider,” 2023). Ebert is blind to this because he a) doesn’t view this world outside his own dogma, thus endless privilege and status, and b) Schneider bribed him with Christian charity functioning as capital (re: Weber). Greed is greed, and Ebert’s such a massive whore for recognition that he’ll overlook Schneider’s boundless flaws through the cheapest of gestures, then call it “good.” People who reflect that kind of selective vanity—and who defend the elite (versus using cryptonymy to systemically help workers)—are giant pieces of shit. Ebert is (or was) a giant piece of shit.

Furthermore, as both men categorically demonstrate, good deeds do not outweigh bad ones unless you choose to let them; i.e., it’s possible to do charity and still be giant pieces of shit—a fact compounded by Ebert turning a blind eye! And if his aforementioned cancer diagnosis might help explain that (softening in his old age/impending doom), it doesn’t change the fact that Ebert the person sucks. Cancer isn’t a cure-all for American exceptionalism/centrism. That’s just Ebert belonging to the “good team” and administering “goodness” to those he deems “worthy.” It’s bourgeois.

That’s my dialectical-material critique of the man as Faustian, living as he died (and someone I used to respect, and previously handle with more “kid gloves”; e.g., Persephone van der Waard’s “Ebert’s Folly: “Elevating” Horror Movies with Suspense, part 1,” 2019): as a piece of shit. And frankly I don’t care who that offends; only cowards (who deserve criticism) hide behind their fans or their family (with Neil Gaiman hiding behind all of the above; source: Lila Shapiro).

[20] Re: From his introduction to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (2009): “A Gothic novel or tale will almost certainly offend classical tastes and rational principles, but it will not do so by urging any positive view of the Middle Ages” (source).

[21] Ebert’s double standard for Hitchcock (a famously sexist man who tortured his actresses) is plain:

Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy is a return to old forms by the master of suspense, whose newer forms have pleased movie critics but not his public. This is the kind of thriller Hitchcock was making in the 1940s, filled with macabre details, incongruous humor, and the desperation of a man convicted of a crime he didn’t commit.

The only 1970s details are the violence and the nudity (both approached with a certain grisly abandon that has us imagining Psycho without the shower curtain [and Hayes Code). It’s almost as if Hitchcock, at seventy-three, was consciously attempting to do once again what he did better than anyone else. His films since Psycho (1960) struck out into unfamiliar territory and even got him involved in the Cold War (Torn Curtain) and the fringes of fantasy (The Birds). Here he’s back at his old stand. (source: 1972 review).

Ebert’s apathy is wholly astounding, his relish at what is literally torture porn (the strangulation BDSM scene in Frenzy going on for nearly two minutes*) is completely gross, and his repeated giving of Alfred-fucking-Hitchcock a pass is utterly telling: “boundaries for me, not for thee.” Fuck you and Hitchcock! God, you’re both weird, and not in a good way!

*By extension, Hitchcock’s entire canon—like Radcliffe’s before him—is thoroughly dedicated to feminine desire, vis-à-vis Wolff, as attached unironically to mutilative harm. Where’s the irony, Ebert?

[22] Ebert doesn’t even mention the graphic and extended rape scene in his 1984 review of the extended (220-minute) cut for Leone’s film. It “just doesn’t come up,” for him; i.e., versus John Larsen, who writes,

And yet Leone—whose spaghetti-Western poetry (The Good, The Bad and The Ugly; Once Upon a Time in the West) was spun under the hot glare of the desert sun—still gives Once Upon a Time in America a warm glow. The sequences from Noodles’ youth (where he’s played by Scott Tiler) are a playful mixture of Our Gang shorts and The 400 Blows. And there’s a sexiness to the Prohibition segments—a titillating combination of girls and gunplay—that belies the pain and suffering on the screen. Even the sequences set in the 1960s are less of a reckoning (which is how you could describe Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, also with De Niro) and more of a wistful remembrance of the good old days. Add a gorgeous Ennio Morricone score that softens the brutality, making it fuzzy, and you have an epic of blinkered nostalgia.

That “sexiness” is worth spending more time on. There is a disturbing, virgin-whore dynamic at play in Once Upon a Time in America, with Elizabeth McGovern—as Noodles’ childhood crush-turned-Hollywood-starlet—on one end and Tuesday Weld—as a rape victim-turned-willing-plaything—on the other. Every other woman we meet is somewhere in between those two (although most fall in Weld’s direction). If a female character isn’t a sexual object in this story, then she’s a victim of violence. And in the two rape scenes those elements are queasily mixed (reminiscent of the way Leone treated Claudia Cardinale in Once Upon a Time in the West) [source].

Silence is rape, and apologizing for it by keeping quiet in ways that Ebert enjoys. Such men are in love with their idea of past, much like Radcliffe (a woman chasing a patriarchal heteronormative profit motive) was, and Ebert doing so in ways that “keep mum” about rape (practically holding a finger to his lips [and a hand over the woman’s mouth] before going “Shh…”). They like gagging it, kettling and abjecting the ghost of the counterfeit while capitalizing on her eternal abuse. Virgin or whore, she’s their Omelas victim (also, there’s the anti-Semitic element—with Leone’s entire movie literally being about a “backstabbing Jew”: Noodles is played by De Niro, a career Italian-American bandit, onscreen, this time playing a Jewish gangster who betrayed all his friends. Eat your heart out, Mussolini!): to fetishize the power imbalance advancing patriarchal narratives, then keeping quiet when you could have spoken out. Faced with it in trashy ways (or rather what Ebert calls trash, given Leone’s movies are trashy in ways he calls art*), he just pulls a Dennis from Always Sunny and shouts at the screen: “Sickness, be gone!” He’s the Golden God!

*The two aren’t mutually exclusive, but Ebert treats them like they are when it suits his rapacious, patriarchal worldview.

[23] When asked about the decision, Joshi angrily replied, “Please make sure that I am not nominated for any future World Fantasy Award. I will not accept the award if it is bestowed upon me. / I will never attend another World Fantasy Convention as long as I live. And I will do everything in my power to urge a boycott of the World Fantasy Convention among my many friends and colleagues” (source: Jackson Kuhl’s “Joshi Is Mad as Hell,” 2015). Chief among those friends being Lovecraft’s ghost (whose shadow Joshi is forever stuck in). Way to cut your nose off to spite your own face, dude.

[24] “Risk-Aware Consensual Kink,” or informed consent/calculated risk/rape play. I call this ludo-Gothic BDSM, which preaches tolerance amid activism as, to some degree, inherently unsanitary and dangerous. SSC is older and more elitist, as Bay and I discuss:

Bay: As long as people are operating on informed consent and stuff, it super doesn’t matter what they’re doin’ together. It’s why I like RACK over SSC. SSC feels so outdated but there’s so many BDSM practitioners who ascribe to it and I get why but “augh.” Whereas RACK actually acknowledges that not everything in BSDM CAN be safe/sane necessarily—not 100% anyway.

Persephone: For real! Some stuff is “hard” for a reason. Yeah, choking is always risky. Or knife play. Even if the risk is small. Any aggressive sadism/pain administration, really. Shit, even just rough sex/accelerated heart beat and raised BP carry risk, if you’re older. Or have congenital/comorbid health issues. Not to mention STIs. And pregnancy. And social stigmas and judgement. I’m generally of the RACK idea, I suppose, because ludo-Gothic BDSM and revolutionary cryptonymy is about doing rebellion, but as safely as one can, given the circumstances.

Bay: Same here. I think it’s more holistic and considers people’s needs. And it doesn’t have a weird gatekeeping aspect to it in the name of “safety.” Or “sanity,” ew. Talk about giving shit a weird vibe.

Persephone: Like, better SSC than Radcliffe’s school of knife dick, but still…

Bay: YEAH, LMAO! Like it’s a fine practice, I just think it’s prudish.

Birds of a feather fuck together!

[25] The idea of a walking codex extends not just to golems imitating people, then, but vice versa; e.g., Vinculus in Suzanna Clarke’s superb Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (2004), an otherwise naked homeless man (the elderly village idiot, sleeping under Rip van Winkle’s tree, below) being covered in woad-style tattoos speaking to the return of the King of the North, the ultimately magician, John Uskglass, aka The Raven King. “Made with real crow eggs. I drink it every morning so I can fight like a crow!”

[26] With gender-swapping being an effective iconoclastic device since Lewis’ The Monk, his own monstrous-feminine imposters camping the canon during the cryptonymy process, and which my PhD’s thesis paragraph generously borrowed from:

(artist: Brian Miroglio and Jessica Nigri)

This book wasn’t written/illustrated for Academia, but if it were and I was seriously treating it as my PhD to defend, I would argue that it addresses a knowledge gap regarding the synthesis of Gothic theory with anarcho-Communism, gender studies, ludology and Marxist argumentation: “Capitalism dimorphically sexualizes all work to some degree, including sex work, resulting in sex-coercive media and gender roles via universal alienation through monstrous language; this requires an iconoclasm to combat the systemic bigotries that result—a (as the title reads) ‘liberating of sex work under Capitalism through iconoclastic art.’ Gothic Communism is our ticket towards that end; i.e., developing anarcho-Communism, hence a post-scarcity world without nation-states and their built-in, thus historical-material, genocide and exploitation of workers. My teaching approach stresses oppositional praxis according to sex positivity vs sex coercion when reclaiming the harmful language of stigma, bias, control, fear and hate from our colonizers (capitalists), but also power exchange and resistance as a cultural means of social-sexual catharsis and theatrical disguise; i.e., cultivating emotional and Gothic intelligence through a reclaimed Gothic mode of artistic, thus political collective/self-expression (monstrous poetics and applied Gothic theories). Capitalism sexualizes everything for the profit motive using canonical (dimorphic/Cartesian) monstrous poetics to brainwash workers and pit them against each other during Capitalist Realism; i.e., the Shadow of Pygmalion‘s monomyth/Cycle of Kings and infernal concentric pattern: unironic rape and war are everywhere because Capitalism rapes everything for profit, including people’s minds, according to a profit motive that synonymizes all of these things. Utilized deliberately by Gothic Communism, subversive Amazonomachia‘s ‘dark forces’—its famous, Miltonian paradoxes* and manifesto coordinates: the tenets, theories, and means and materials of expression, fetishes and clichés, etc—can revert Capitalist Realism’s doomed narrative of the crypt by putting “rape” and “war” in quotes, recultivating the Superstructure and reclaiming the Base during class/culture war’s camping of canon. The asymmetrical nature of guerrilla warfare obviously covers of an extremely wide range of artistic possibilities, but generally focuses on sex work and its canonical, dimorphic sexualization, or work in general as similarly sexualized, and heteronormative enforcement/the colonial binary established through regressive Amazonomachia as something to camp; i.e., through ironic kink, fetishization, and BDSM rituals/aesthetics (of psychosexual power and death, stigma and revenge, but also catharsis and transformation, etc) with demonic/undead poetics synthesized through the ‘creative successes’ of proletarian praxis as a class-conscious, ready-for-war response to/critique of capital” (my thesis paragraph) [source: Volume Zero, “Thesis Paragraph: Capitalism Sexualizes Everything,” 2023].

*Gothic doubles but also theatrical perceptions of power (“darkness visible”) as liminal expressions/elaborate strategies of misdirection/”archaeologies.” For example, not everything that is black and red is a fascist, but is treated like a fascist (and various other things at once) until the level of decay affords the usual centrist compromises between white knights and black knights against the Communist variant of the corrupt, the monstrous-feminine, the pedagogy of the oppressed coming out the same Gothic imagination’s shadow zone.

Confused? The rest of the PhD unpacks this. Still confused? Five more books unpack it even more! In short, everything after that has been a concentric holistic addressal; i.e., in hundreds of exhibits and thousands of images; e.g., the very next exhibit; re, also from Volume Zero (after rehashing “heteronormativity”):

(exhibit 0a2b1b1a: Artist, left: Devilhs; middle: Pat Benatar; top-right: Doruk Golcu; bottom-right: Angel Witch. Hysteria [also called “the wandering womb,” exhibit 1a1a1h3a1a1] is commonly portrayed in the monstrous-feminine “Medusa” hairstyle* as immodest; i.e., lacking decency or virtue by being visually “loud” [making unironic admonishment of such descriptive sexuality/gender a form of tone-policing: “Hush, darling!”]. But in the same breath, anxiety more broadly is a symptom of society whereupon women [or beings perceived as women] are made by men into what men want to see: a damsel who is sexy by disempowered, or “threatening” in ways they can “kettle” [to surround and attack, a police anti-protestor tactic]. This nuts-and-bolts approach gives little space for the woman to classically voice her concerns, so it surges forth from her Frankensteinian body like ghosts and lightning—a tall, imposing, undead passion of suggestibly orgasmic release that men classically view as “weakness” [which they then sexualize]. Losing control isn’t just a symptom, then, but a means to addressing larger historical-material concerns in the self-same language hijacked for proletarian dialogs: “Fuckin’ metal!”)

*Classically the entirety of the female form—its sexuality, gender identity/performance, emotions, etc—is sexualized by men for men. As such, Medusa’s big hair synonymizes with her “phallic” snakes; i.e., her “dickhead” literally as a headful of penises or symbolic of a phallic, masculine foil to traditional male heroes’ own power source: their singular penises (though the head and the hair are classically seen as a storing site for potency—e.g., Samson from the Bible). The idea of female body hair as “phallic” is certainly not out of the blue, either—with the pubic area (especially its unkempt versions) being synonymized with “incorrect masculinity”/an extension of the clitoris as “phallic-like”; i.e., an offshoot of the “correct” penis’s legitimate violence, thus violent in a delegitimized, rebellious counterterror form. Keeping in this spirit, I jokingly in the past referred to Zeuhl’s pubic hair (which was especially full and thick) as a “hair penis.” Heteronormativity would treat these “exceptions” to the Vitruvian, European standard as anathema, but in truth, they are incredibly common; they’ve just been abjected into a state of exception that weird canonical (art) nerds can police with impunity.

I.e., I feel like so many academics write their PhD, only to have it collect dust in some neoliberal vault owned by university bureaucrats keeping gnosis under lock and key. Like Shelley showed us—but also hopefully me—you have to make something that not only escapes into the world to speak on its fractal recursions, but becomes something that endlessly grows back into itself in service to workers by altering said recursions’ historical materialism; re: liberating sex work (thus all work) through iconoclastic art hugging the alien! This includes Bone Mommies vis-à-vis graveyard sex speaking to capital lending us strange appetites while it gentrifies and decays (re: “A Cruel Angel’s (Modular) Thesis,” 2024), but also any monster type you could think of, in the larger aesthetic; i.e., through a dark intuition that sex-positive forces will still “get” even if the theory eludes them, whereas sex-coercive forms are more estranged (thus sweating nervously inside their masks).

[27] All the more ironic since that phrase literally means, “See you again”—a lesson Tarantino imparted with Django Unchained (2012), a movie starring the same German-speaking actor from Basterds playing a German-speaking character while stealing the show from the protagonists and waxing hauntological nostalgic; i.e., about Wagner’s Das Rheingold/Ring Opera and its anti-Semitic* introducing of the German opera staples, Siegfried and Brunhilde, into popular media (the opera was written after the Civil War, in 1869, whereas Django ostensibly took place during the Civil War). Tarantino was hardly the first person to do this (re: Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, but also Henry Giardina’s “Hitler’s Favorite Movie Was Super Gay, Actually,” 2023).

*Re: Cooke: “That Wagner harboured anti-Semitic sentiments is both well-known and uncontested within the realm of musicological inquiry. The composer openly articulated his views in a number of publications, most notably Judaism in Music (Das Judentum in der Musik; 1850), in which he identified Jewish musicians as the ultimate source of what he perceived as substanceless music and misplaced values in the arts as a whole. What has remained a controversy, however, is the extent to which Wagner’s anti-Semitism informed his musical compositions” (source: Britannica); i.e., Wagner was anti-Semitic and—like Lovecraft or Howard (from Weird Magazine) were used by fascist authors then and now to be anti-Semitic not just towards Jews, but all marginalized peoples. What a shocker!

More to the point—and despite Django feeling like just another reason for a sexist, pedophilic foot fetishist to say the N-word and have his actors (white or black) say it, too—the lesson of Basterds makes Stiglitz’s sick burn to the SS officer feel oddly surreal: “Say ‘I’ll see you again’ to your Nazi balls!” before blasting them to paste (a special effects trend stuck with by Tarantino since 2007’s Grindhouse). The guy think’s he’s Matthew Lewis, but he’s a straight lead acting rebellious in bad faith (and apologized for by Ebert’s own white superiority)!

[28] E.g., Christine Neufeld—a medievalist professor at EMU (she taught me Chaucer and Frankenstein) rolling her eyes at the phrase, saying “some power” in a haughty tone, and later critiquing me for my “weird sexual metaphors” in “Born to Fall?” but also signing off on my Award Letter that helped me continue my education. She gave me an A for the paper but a C+ for the class, telling me I should use that as a lesson in future encounters (presumably with tenured assholes like her, but I digress).

[29] Played by Juliette Lewis—originally the Bonnie-and-Clyde female serial killer in Oliver Stone’s 1994 Natural Born Killers—but no stranger to playing damsels, too; e.g., not just Dawn but also Scorsese’s 1991 Cape Fear remake. So often, such stories vicariously threaten modest middle-class white women with “pure violence-as-sex” they can then wish to be spared from through police rescues, but not before flirting with it, Radcliffe-style. They get excited by being rescued on the opposite end of White/Black Knight Syndrome: the virgin/whore needing a minority to be demonized; re: pimping the help to punch down and maintain their tradwife positions.

[30] 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: Callum Russell’s “When Quentin Tarantino Defended Roman Polanski in an Interview with Howard Stern,” 2022).

[31] With Kevin Smith arguably styling his beard in the same tradition as Rickman (who starred in Dogma as the Metatron, minus his signature goatee. The plot thickens).

[32] Edited by Alan Taylor and, as my friend Mira (from the tokophobia interview in “Spilling Tea” but also a massive Alan Rickman fan) points out:

Great book. There’s a foreword by Emma Thompson and an afterword by his widow, Rima, that were both really good. Pretty sure there are YouTube versions of both/interviews with both of them (also, see: Waterstone’s 2023 “Emma Thompson’s Moving Tribute to Alan Rickman” and Alan Rickman Fans’ 2021 “Galaxy Quest – Alexander Dane/Dr. Lazarus“). Honestly they were “couple goals.” Met in school, stayed together their whole lives, never had kids even though he wanted to because Rima had phobias and only got married in the year before he died. There’s a lot of diary entries where he’s been filming something and been really frustrated or stressed but then Rima visits the set and they just chill out, binge watch TV shows and calm each other down.

[33] The gaslight extends to Gaiman’s fictions presenting his victims as “hysterical”; e.g., Gaiman’s incredibly queerphobic dreamstone*/wish fulfillment scene, in The Sandman live adaptation; i.e., depicting queer desires as, no bullshit, an honest-to-God threat to Things As They Are—an incredibly problematic argument, unto itself, but also one written by the battered-son-of-a-Scientology-master-turned-accused rapist (re: Shapiro): people can’t be queer because they’ll “all kill each other.” I wish I was kidding. It’s like Edward Hopper’s “Night Hawks” (1942) and Ronald Reagan had a baby (the Netflix adaptation was in 2022; the original was written by Gaiman and illustrated by DC Comics in 1989).

*Which is red for—you guessed it—the Red goddamn Pill. Gaiman coopted Morpheus before the openly MGTOW types had a chance to recuperate the Wachowski sisters’ own 1999 Morpheus, in The Matrix. Quite the red flag/dogwhistle! Gothic Romance isn’t just to lie about the past, but revive it in ways that speak to buried atrocities—a point Gaiman less commits to and more abuses to commit ongoing atrocities directly in front of us [re: bury your gays]!

[34] As in Dale Townshend, one of my MA supervisors (for “Lost in Necropolis,” 2018) and a bit of a Radcliffe academic “fanboy”; i.e., not just teaching me Radcliffe for MMU’s “Rise of the Gothic” module, but also writing about her quite a bit; e.g., being one of the editors for Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic (2016):

This book offers unique and fresh perspectives upon the literary productions of one of the most highly remunerated and widely admired authors of the Romantic period, Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823). While drawing upon, consolidating and enriching the critical impulses reflected in Radcliffe scholarship to date, this collection of essays, composed by a range of renowned scholars of the Romantic period, also foregrounds the hitherto neglected aspects of the author’s work. Radcliffe’s relations to Romantic-era travel writing; the complex political ideologies that lie behind her historiographic endeavours; her poetry and its relation to institutionalised forms of Romanticism; and her literary connections to eighteenth-century women’s writing are all examined in this collection. Offering fresh considerations of the well-known Gothic fictions and extending the appreciation of Radcliffe in new critical directions, the collection reappraises Radcliffe’s full oeuvre within the wider literary and political contexts of her time (source).

I really don’t wish to bust Dale’s chops, here (as he was kind to me in school and I learned a lot from him), but it’s not him I’m critiquing so much as the author he’s shining a big happy light onto! All the easier for me to beat her with a stick! “Kill you darlings, including your teacher’s darlings!”

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

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

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

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

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

Forbidden Sight, part two: Making Demons (re: Prometheus)

The central puzzle of the law of the dead is that a corpse is both a person and a thing. A dead human body is a material object—a messy, maybe dangerous, perhaps valuable, often useful, and always tangible thing. But a dead human being is also something very different: It is also my father, and my friend, perhaps my child, and some day, me. For even the most secular among us, a human corpse is at the least a very peculiar and particular kind of thing. Scholars generally divide the law of the dead body into the three intertwined realms of defining, using, and disposing of the dead, and debates in each realm center on where and how to draw the line between person and object. The thing-ness of the dead human body is never stable or secure (source).

—Ellen Stroud, “Law and the Dead Body: Is a Corpse a Person or a Thing?” (2018)

Picking up where “Idle Hands, part three: Goblins Anti-Semitism, and Monster-Fucking” left off…

“Forbidden Sight,” part two is about making demons and starts with the most famous and productive example from Western canon critiquing capital: Mary Shelley and Frankenstein. It will explore her life and work, including its influence and me, but also the people it influenced before me who, in turn, had a lasting impact on my output; e.g., Ridley Scott and the Alien franchise, Cameron’s Terminator movies, and more!

“Making Demons” divides in three basic parts (all in this post):

• “Foreword: To Mary Shelley”: Acknowledges Mary Shelley and why I think she’s important, but also her profound impact on yours truly.
• “‘Fire of Unknown Origin’: Composite Bodies, Golems and Mad Science; or the Roots of Enlightenment Persecution in the Promethean Quest (feat. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and Ridley Scott)”: Lays out Mary Shelley’s life, but also her lasting impact on science fiction; i.e., as the genre she single-handedly birthed, combining Gothic fantasies and early modern ideas of the scientific method to critique capital with, which others imitated (and not always in good faith); e.g., through Ridley Scott as a director whose body of work we’ve previously examined, and whose problematic elements we shall dissect here, with Prometheus and Alien: Covenant (no Metroidvania, this time).
• “Afterword: A Further Note on Angry Gods (and Playing with Them)”: Wraps up my thoughts on Mary Shelley and her importance, but also the value in making and playing with monstrous gods (demons or otherwise) before segueing into “Summoning Demons.”

Our main focus, here, is questing for power in ways that open our minds to the idea of loving those the state calls “monster” (nature as monstrous-feminine). This is a complicated and difficult history but one whose most productive elements, I feel, started with Shelley (not Milton). So that is where we shall start!

Foreword: To Mary Shelley

[W]hat does the overabundant presence of “birth trauma” in the novel signify? I believe the answer lies in the complex relationship between Victor and the Creature, in which there are copious parallels. The Creature’s mate is also its sister and is made from Victor who is the Creature’s mother. Victor is Elizabeth’s mate and her brother. Victor destroys the mate and the Creature destroys Elizabeth. Still, once Elizabeth is dead, the Creature keeps Victor alive to experience the world as the monster sees it, in order to feel its pain. It wants him to understand his own failures as a parent, and to see that the Creature is human and feels the same pain and wants that Victor feels (source).

—Persephone van der Waard, “Frankenstein essay—Born to Fall? Birth Trauma, the Soul, and Der Maschinenmensch” (2014)

…And right off the bat, here I am breaking my own rule! I got about ten pages into “Making Demons” and—having just compiled my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus—suddenly realized how influential Mary Shelley was on my own work. I didn’t read Frankenstein until college, but nonetheless was haunted by its shadow vis-à-vis Metroidvania (which I played tons of, and which informed my work well into the present; i.e., I watched Alien when I was nine and played Super Metroid when I was eight, both introduced to me—as well as British Romantic poetry—by my mother[2]). Monsters and mothers are part-in-parcel, along a Great Chain of Dark Creation. Without Shelley and her Gothic masterpiece, there would be no At the Mountains of Madness, thus no Alien, Metroid, or Metroidvania, thus no Persephone van der Waard or Gothic Communism! Perish the thought!

(artist: Yasya)

I wanted to bookend that, starting with this foreword (and an afterword, after “Making Demons”). Simply put, Shelley was a whore who gave birth to demons, and the world as we know it (myself included) would not exist without those demons. She is our dark mother—a ghoulish succubus camping the canon to outshine her overrated husband and so many others, one-upping Milton’s camp in the process. In doing so, she profaned an entire sacred order (the secularized Christendom of the Enlightenment) to camp the canon; i.e., in ways that lived on, long after she died!

But what exactly lived on, and where did it start from? Beginning suitably en medias res (re: Milton), Shelley’s moral about the indiscretions of nature and technology manipulating nature isn’t how technology is intrinsically “bad.” Technology is a powerful device, and in all its forms and fusions, help us do incredible things; e.g., neonatal medicine keeping my ass alive when I was born premature (after a cesarean, which, as the name would suggest, dates back to Caesar), but also computers (with me struggling to imagine how I could have written and published over two million words, thousands of images, and hundreds of exhibits—and all of these featuring thousands of artists, including dozens of models and muses—without technology helping me do the otherwise impossible).

Instead, Shelley’s takeaway was that technology can be abused, and needs to be de-automated away from profit; i.e., from modernity to postmodernity towards post-scarcity using hauntological pre-capitalist language: stolen back from the gods of the state by the gods they’re abusing! This includes sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, borrowed from Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton, which Shelley turned into a unique combination: a common thread of women in a man’s world being, at best, underappreciated and ignored, and at worst, treated as unwelcome outsiders and thieves to fetishize; i.e., when they try to show that a woman—little more than a piece of ass, in status-quo men’s eyes—can both fuck, have a brain, and go on to comment dialectically on the towering midden of all our yesterdays (the Apollo missions being little more than Space-Race rocket-riding by the United States looking to colonize space: “We choose to go to the moon because we can”)! Stacked in more ways than one!

(source: Maia Weinstock’s “Margaret Hamilton’s Apollo Code,” 2016)

In canonical circles, such things are often buried, then trotted out like show ponies/witches[3] for state aims fetishizing and demonizing female scientists (a STEM tradition that extends to anything monstrous-feminine, not just white cis women, but one begot out of nuns and female detectives). So was Shelley—in writing the first science fiction novel—breaking new ground her usual jailors would immediately try to reign in.

Oddly enough, the idea of theft wasn’t even new in Shelley’s novel, but its application was; i.e., “The Modern Prometheus” concerning state parties stealing from nature to rape it while valorizing themselves, and state victims challenging them in duality while standing in/playing with the same messy goop: possessing the state armor to cockblock its maker’s continuation (something of a dark desire); i.e., a voice of the victims of the Capitalocene, versus Hamlet’s fathers ghost or Prospero’s spirit, Ariel, enslaved to do his bidding/seek his revenge). Shelley showed us how power is just something to exchange back and forth over time, only ever becoming a question of “theft” when privatized.

At its most basic, capital reduces “creation” to people who give birth (of any sort), which it then tries to pimp for profit; i.e., hauntologized and binarized per the West and its Amazonomachia/ancient canonical codes (re: Creed and Foucault). But per my work, the monstrous-feminine had extended to a wider group of workers the state was tokenizing through a Venn diagram of persecution networks and language; e.g., of women from Shelley’s mother’s generation, like Ann Radcliffe. So Shelley expanded her arguments to speak to a theft of reclamation back for all workers by castrating their most famous maxims and turning them into death on two legs: by doubling them, mid-liminal expression. Creed argues how Medusa is the Archaic Mother castrating men, and I’d be hard-pressed not to agree that Frankenstein‘s monster is—at its most basic—a black mirror/Aegis showing “clones of Napoleon” (the original who weaponized science for his own gain)—the Numinous error of his ways: “Before it, my genius is rebuked!” he cries, then melts down/throws a tantrum (of sorts, below). Girls have cooties; let us disabuse you of that notion!

These are frankly difficult practices to conceptualize if you’ve never done them before (“nothing ventured, nothing gained”); e.g., I’m trans, but was in the closet for much of my life, yet creating while inside said egg to eventually hatch from it. Shelley, on the other hand, had already given birth and eloped with a womanizing atheist with big ideas; but she took those ideas—and wedded to her personal tragedies and grief—revived the miscarriage of past attempts into a holistic statement of creation useful to all critics of capital, past and present! Making babies became monsters inside/outside her womb—androgynous like Medusa, but commenting on Zeus and Metis, as well (and many other mythic elements; re: Prometheus, Milton, etc).

Like sex in general, it was a combination of “right place, right time,” animate/inanimate, and playing-with-fire/lightning-in-a-bottle trial and error to camp/reclaim what was already becoming canonized anew under a Protestant ethic. Hindsight 20/20; whereas Weber debated Marx’s ghost with the Spirit of Capitalism and Shelley debated Milton’s with Frankenstein to haunt Marx’ dreams (and his own love for ghosts), my work in Sex Positivity has camped all of them to realize, at this pivotal moment, just how precocious and advanced Shelley’s ideas were! Not bad for a sixteen-year-old runaway who whored her way into vaults of knowledge normally denied to women (she took more than her share, versus submitting obediently to men of authority—with someone like Altaira, left  only being allowed to pick who she gets to fuck[4])! Props, girl!

(source)

To this, Frankenstein was indisputably conceived out wedlock. Following the Cartesian Revolution, the bourgeoisie were already gestating in Europe and America. Being a rebel and a woman, Shelley understood that you have to combine things and messily in order to create radical change. Taking the risks that she actually took, Shelley gave birth to ideas of universal liberation by stealing from the past; i.e., beating the father of Communism to the punch by conceiving of a proto-Marxist ideal before Marx was even born, then giving birth to her novel the same year he entered the world: as a mockery of Napoleon and other great men of history while warning about the privatization of technology as a matter of theatre and theft the state will try to monopolize. “All the traditions of dead generations,” specifically men, Shelley applied to manmade monsters subject to her critique through creation: her own sexy beast oddly enough made by a woman, and which everyone—Marx included—promptly forgot about and tried to eclipse in favor of themselves.

So they did, after Shelley came and went, but remained an indelible palimpsest on the minds of men; e.g., men like Poe, Conrad, Lovecraft, Freud, Kafka, Scott and Cameron—but also the bastardized, killed-over-time metaphors of glass wombs, the “franken” prefix, golems and machine people, paradox and oxymoron, ambiguous sex toys and psychosexual, martyred hyphenations of sex and force (thus indiscretions of adult/child, the organic and inorganic[5] and artificial[6] intelligence).

In turn, our straight male (usually white) matchmakers wedded this hellish, blinding jumble of oddities to all-around body horror/decay and mad science, insect politics, star-crossed monster love, radical transformation (from Ovid to Kafka to Giger to Cronenberg), ethnocentric knife-dick/BBC, wandering womb (ancient psychology and medicine haunting modern equivalents; e.g., hysteria and bicycle face) and monster mothers[7]: what they used for profit, first and foremost; i.e., requiring those concerned with poetry and revolution to play with such things as Shelley did again, hence re-liberate them (from state torture) using the same throbbing pulpy mass (“the new flesh,” in Cronenberg’s words)! If Shelley’s book composed and made popular that unique set of mutations, women like Beauvoir, Kristeva and Creed built on it, followed by little-ol’ me camping the lot of them. Out of all of them, Shelley holds up the best as an interesting and good-hearted person (though Kristeva and Creed’s ideas remain incredibly useful, and frankly I don’t much know [or care] if they were sluts or not).

Power and death seriously and unalterably change you; and this can be into things we no longer recognize in ourselves or others (and though I’ll critique Percy in the pages ahead, I honestly think Mary loved Percy—not for his flaws or genius alone, but as two sides of the same coin, and which with any pairing sometimes put them and us at risk while forgetting who they are: the insect who dreamt he was a man who loved it, and saying to his mate, “I’ll hurt you if you stay!” Percy reached for greatness, and that rubbed off onto Mary as we shall see).

So, too, is nature wholly abject; we can reverse that but rock its signature aesthetic of power and death—doing so to help ourselves reverse what otherwise never can be: by trusting the insect (the queer insect generally being seen as a Communist metaphor before, during and after the arrival of AIDS). Take it from me, it’s never too late to find someone who will love you to the ends of the Earth and beyond—someone who challenges you and you them! Such has been my Promethean Quest, and one upon repeated reflection, I now gladly pass along to you! We’re becoming Brundle-fly! Won’t you join us?

To it, Frankenstein‘s deluge of copycats and admirers often take the original author and her unparalleled genius for granted: immediately recognizable in any story that imitates it, each variation feels somehow special and unique, yet part of a larger whole (except for maybe Kenneth Branagh’s dubious remake). While I could easily shower Frankenstein with repeatedly bombastic and gushing effusions—e.g., “Shelley’s novel is the greatest work of the English language (which it arguably is)” or some such unquantifiable claim—the proof, here, is in the pudding. And this pudding is easy enough to appreciate in the person who made it—only a woman, but “great God!” what a woman she was! She puts the “semen” in seminal, the pussy on the chainwax! What I wouldn’t do to pick her brain (and poke her hole)!

This dedication is written to Shelley being someone I instantly identified with, upon discovering. I found her documents in my own dark forest, originally writing “Born to Fall ” (from the epigram) as my first serious attempt back at school (my “first love” while returning from a seven-year hiatus). I eventually set aside Otto Rank and Freud to focus on Barbara Creed through a dialectical-material lens instead of a psychoanalytical one, but the idea of “birth trauma” is still there. It lives on through Shelley as my role model above all others; i.e., camping Cartesian thought (synonymous with heteronormativity and settler colonialism) in ways only someone so profoundly anomalous as Mary Shelley could have.

When you look at Gothic stories, you’re staring into a past moment reaching towards future greatness, inspiring you to do the same! In turn, game recognizes game, and weird attracts weird; all the people I’ve fucked and learned from, oddly enough, stem from Shelley’s inextricable hold on my young woman’s slutty soul: breaking the glass ceiling that women can’t fuck, do science, or fuck and do science outside of strictly non-fictional spheres (women are queens of multitasking because the state and its burden of care forces them to be). “Yeah, nerd! Flux my capacitor! Make it squirt!”

Gothic Communism is biomechanical/obsessed with bio-power (re: Foucault’s five-dollar word for teamwork and mass exploitation, but also labor value); i.e., electrified and operatic, it ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings, but whose Song of Infinity challenges the state ever and always: taking her peachy cake and pie back from bourgeois knives! “Let me cut your cake with my knife!” (AC/DC’s “Let Me Put My Love into You,” 1980). In turn, naked desire and bold exploration are vital to new exciting growth—least of all because they threaten pain and things that do not last, by themselves, but when boldly combined can yield fresh synthesis that passes vital information onwards: life takes many forms, including technology and social-sexual relations playing a vital role!

(artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Nothing is sacred save universal liberation; Shelley took her trauma/arguable mistakes and turned them into a weapon ripe for class war—one whose endlessly productive, mimetic and lubricative counterterror the state, no matter how hard it tries, could never fully pimp; i.e., while raping nature as monstrous-feminine, nature fucks back. This, unto itself, was slutty and cool, which is all you really need when imitating something (re: everyone loves the whore/monsters, especially smart sexy monsters). It didn’t hurt, though, that Shelley was a complete-and-total badass, on top of it all…

Out of respect, then, I have added some footnotes in “Making Demons” that shine a light on Shelley’s adventuresome life. Far from discouraging others to do the same, she inspired me (though I didn’t realize it at the time); i.e., to go out and have my own Promethean Quest (for the palliative Numinous), well after I had thought myself forever “stuck.” I read Frankenstein in 2014, only to have my first relationship in 2015; by 2017, I was on my way to England to have my own adventures overseas! My whoring became a globetrotting affair, “wet docking[8]” in any port that fancied me (re: Cuwu, above).

The rest, as they say, is history. That’s what we’re sailing into—mine and Shelley’s bound at the hip. Any port in a storm! Full mast, ye hearties! We sail into the unknown, seeking dark, unequal, and forbidden exchange (of power and knowledge) during the dialectic of shelter and the alien; i.e., while facing Capitalism’s dead past staring us in the face (“Tell me your secrets, dark one! What? You’re my next-door neighbor?”)! What’s that, up on Mount Blanc? Medusa? Rogue technology like a shoggoth, xenomorph or terminator? An angry teenager than soaks up information like a sponge, good or bad? Paradise Lost? Maybe all of them? Whatever it is and however it imbricates per mutation playing with dead things, it’s alive!

(artist: Bernie Wrightson[9]; source: “Wrightson’s Frankenstein at 40,” 2023)

“Fire of Unknown Origin”: Composite Bodies, Golems and Mad Science; or the Roots of Enlightenment Persecution in the Promethean Quest (feat. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein and Ridley Scott)

“I don’t know what’s in there, but it’s weird and pissed off, whatever it is!”

—Clark, The Thing (1982)

Editor’s Note: Demon sex is often torture sex/torture-themed. And while I don’t normally show hardcore rape scenes in this book series, I will here; i.e., to subvert the Pygmalion myth/Shadow of Pygmalion during the Promethean Quest. Excluding Scott’s hardcore gore as bestiality and rape porn of a kind, this section has one example of unironic rape: Yasuomi Umetsu’s 1998 animated cyberpunk noir, Kite (exhibit 44b1). —Perse

(artist: Henry Fuseli)

“Forbidden Sight,” part one largely considered the revenge of whores treated as demonic by the state during blood libel monopolies and refrains (witches/Amazons, vampires and goblins); there’s still the history of making and summoning them. Part two and three shall examine whores a bit more, but predominantly considers demons at large; i.e., part two, as beings not to summon, but make during the Promethean Quest per Shelley’s Frankenstein (and similar stories), and part three with the summoning process as magical, runic. Keeping with our demon thesis, knowledge is power and vice versa; the Promethean Quest trades knowledge for power in some shape or form. In turn, longevity and weapons are the most common trades, classically leading to premature death due to human failing: power of the gods being closed off for man’s hubris, daring to play god (re: mad science) and scapegoating manmade victims instead of themselves (re: DARVO).

Love it or hate it, then, demons are fast and loose in terms of the exact social-psychosexual knowledge oozing out of them[10]. This includes the aesthetic of power and death they fall back on, or the bratty games they might play (“Don’t talk to me like that… except sometimes!” E.g., Kim Petras’ “Treat Me Like a Slut,” 2022). Yet they define rather sharply by torture and rape per the whore’s paradox; i.e., homewreckers-valuing-consent turning the nuclear model upside-down, acting unto the passionate, martyred, paradoxically sinful/sacred search for fatal knowledge (re: Radcliffe’s demon lover) and having been in the West since before Shelley revived the Promethean myth!

• Whores, and the Iconoclastic Idea of Making Demons
• Shelley’s Temerity: Vengeful Golems and Campy Whores in Frankenstein
• Echoes of the Enlightenment and Sanitizing Shelley through Ridley Scott’s Complicit Cryptonymy (feat., Prometheus and Alien: Covenant)
• Cryptomimesis through Demonic Camp and Rape Play (feat. Kite)
• Gothic Hermeneutics (a reprise)
• Some Broader Points on Shelley’s Promethean Quest (for Fatal Knowledge)

Whores, and the Iconoclastic Idea of Making Demons

We’ll get to Shelley’s golem (and its normalizing of subversion) in a moment. I’d like to examine whores for a bit (thirteen pages) vis-à-vis the notion of making demons. Male whores exist, and trans/disabled people are often homeless in ways that force them into sex work, but cis female sex work is commonly demonized under the Western umbrella[11]; re: nature-as-monstrous-feminine, which includes AMAB sex workers treated in feminine ways (as slaves). Regardless of class, race, religion, gender or sex, demon bodies are plastic and infinite, establishing power through play in ways that threaten an immortal soul with mortal “failings”; i.e., sex as a drug to sell: as pieces of ass yoked by unscrupulous, greedy pimps unable to keep their hands to themselves (or their dicks in their pants).

Alive/dead, madness/reason, virgin/whore, naked/clothed, tight/loose, hard/soft, dom/sub, black/white, etc—such things commonly hyphenate under paradoxical duress. Per ludo-Gothic BDSM, knowledge is power amid play fostering mutual consent in defiance of capital! Everyone loves the psycho space slut who loves to fuck/simps for Satan, and in that perfect world where she can tease and be herself, she loves it, too! The flesh isn’t “weak” or faking anything (orgasm or smile); it’s vibing (the throbbing pulse of a happy clit)!

Sluts are, like demons, things to make and summon alike. This happens through playing with demonic things; i.e., unequal power and its forbidden exchange/dark desire; e.g., metal, our bodies, excessive eating, etc—to be silly and make washing-machine sounds (“uh-uh-uh-uh”) while fucking to metal. Whores are the metal, the life of the party livening things up by undressing ourselves (figuratively or literally, next page) and crossing boundaries!

Everyone loves sluts, but so often they are abused; we dungeon keepers speak up/to our abuse as sluts—i.e., in ways that encourage better treatment through Satanic stories of “mistreatment/panic” haunted by the real deal! Singing and dancing feel good unto themselves—doubly so if they camp our harm by putting it in quotes; re: activism per Gothic Communism and ludo-Gothic BDSM: liberating sex work through iconoclastic art, pushing not for the legalization of sex work, but the complete and total decriminalization of it. Whores, in our hands and minds, aren’t controlled opposition or criminal; they’re activism, politics and survival through a holistic and inclusive pedagogy of the oppressed! Not homewreckers, but defenders of their homes, they project nature-as-alien/monstrous-feminine from the state antagonizing the homeless, the vermin, the fallen! So do we spellbind those who would kill us, humanizing our sluttiness/non-nuclear polyamory in their eyes.

In turn, we promote a possible world—one where fucking on the first date not only isn’t frowned upon, but celebrated! Fucking is learning and learning should be fun! Love to fuck; hurt, not harm, babes! Court courtly love (and demon lovers, matadors, banditti, etc), but in jest, through camp putting “rape” in quotes during the whore’s paradox! “Lady Evil! She’s queen of the night!” (Black Sabbath, 1980); she backs it up onto your dick during White Zombie’s “Thunder Kiss ’65” (1996)! Rock ‘n roll, operas and metal don’t just routinely sing about us/pimp us out as the slutty girls next door per the Gothic mode; they’re our siren song! Our jam! Whores aren’t just hot and badass, you see, but cool as fuck; in the right hands, they like to be used like dolls (sex, killer and/or otherwise)!

(artist: Valentina)

So whereas “Idle Hands” concerned general things to keep in mind about demons and how they operate as whore-like poetic devices, “Making Demons” will shift towards the making of demons at large being whore-like; re: by starting with Mary Shelley’s classic example as the ur-whore; i.e., the Promethean Quest and its composite bodies, golems and mad science equaling the state’s abusing of the fire of the gods through Gothic poetics, and said fire fighting back during the technological singularity! Eloping with Percy (though probably fucking after the first date), Mercy Wollstonecraft became Mary Shelley and entered a wild new chapter of her life.

As such, creativity towards sex and gender (violence, terror and morphological expression) is a weapon of forbidden knowledge the state abuses, mid-poetics; i.e., to enslave nature-as-alien under a police function, which the elite own full exclusivity towards: rape and total, lopsided power games/exchange through bad BDSM, blaming the whore (from Mother Nature to local street workers) for their own rape. Acting the whore without the pimp, Shelley camped all of this, using a wide variety of poetic devices to do so! The two cannot be separated, so instead I will jump back and forth between Shelley’s life and her famous book.

In keeping with Jewish myth, Prometheus and the Pygmalion tale, Victor makes the Creature out of the Earth as already owned—according to Victor—by Victor and “his kind” (white straight male Europeans); he makes his child out of clay as God does, but sees it as “dark” because the process and materials are dark. He subsequently tries to enslave it, then resents it for resisting him; i.e., as something to reject and ultimately pimp by upholding the status quo through lies and force. So is descriptive sexuality crucified by Cartesian agents with virgin/whore syndrome: constantly on the lookout, trolling the street for demons to dominate (“demon” goes both ways, as zombies do, inside the state of exception).

In short, Victor and similar men of reason (e.g., Peter Weyland, left) adopt an air of false benevolence, trying all the while to monopolize the whore as pimps do; i.e., by unironically framing nature as “dark,” meaning a whore of darkness to pimp out, under a Protestant ethic: after God is dead, because men are making whores to pimp in His much-touted absence. Except, per the Protestant ethic, the Capitalocene merely pimps nature under a secularized Christendom, one making nature dead and monstrous-feminine to suit the needs of capital; i.e., the Medusa to fashion and rape, regardless of the simulacrum’s sex, gender, race or temperament (God classically replacing Lilith with Eve, the virgin versus the whore). Man’s revenge against nature remains constant, a false parent brutalizing their illegitimate children like a father his bastard.

Furthermore, trauma lingers on the clay, or things treated as “clay”; i.e., “dark,” malleable; e.g., flesh—especially flesh with “non-white” qualities (color or size): as data storage, with fucking just another means of passing data along during generational trauma’s rememory process. To look on the whore or its forbidden testimony (during genocide) is like watching Medusa, thus risking “corruption”; i.e., in ways white fragility cannot handle. It presents communication as copulation for those purposes: communicating abject corruption in reverse, during the cryptonymy process; i.e., as something that writes in both directions.

As something to make and behold in equal measure, information becomes a weapon the state will try to monopolize through its most famous forms (with few stories being as famous as Frankenstein): a slut to rape, but also slave to beat and behead after seemingly being “made”; i.e., by the poet; e.g., Victor playing god/white master over the robata (slave) by insisting as the slave-owner does to his assigned underling: “I made you; I am your master (therefore your pimp)!”

Except, Victor is the master of a demon (which would make him Satan, by his own logic), yet believes he is good, thus appalled by his desire to act the tyrant… which he promptly projects onto his naturalized slave, who he calls treats as “demon” (the duality pegging Victor as Lilith/the necromancer by the Creature calling him slave[12]). Victor, then, sees nature as alien, twisted and broken to serve profit by hijacking the creation process as “demonic” and queer-coded: “It’s alive!”

So is science (and the ghost of the counterfeit) a giant gaslight during the abjection process corrupting clay (or anything else it can make things with)—i.e., in service to capital for all time! Wronged, the victim (nature) reaches through the making of its own enslavement to torment the sculptor with demonic apocalypse! “You ‘made” me, and I seek revenge!” Thus is history both true and false, virgin and whore; i.e., the whore’s paradox and revenge sitting between what is and what threatens to become in a variety of ways the state will deny through controlled opposition.

(artist: Daniel Echinger)

In turn, we whores are lowlifes who repeatedly have run-ins with state abuse and lies, thus can camp their criminalizing of us on our Aegis; i.e., trapping state imbeciles in the room with us and our dark horny voices. Psycho sluts from beyond, we can be whatever we want, say whatever we wish to challenge state forces abjecting and pimping us (as cops do, defending property as a territorial arrangement of power that punishes whores, chattelizing and medicalizing them; e.g., hysteria and lunacy)! No gods, no kings, no masters! We destroy their bussies greatly and with panache! Naked, we armor and shrink their scared junk; i.e., with our demonic sex’s ungovernable violence, terror and morphology! So does Shelley torment Victor for playing with dead things, exposing him as the tyrant punching down, mid-séance (more on this, in a moment)!

Endless ways to present and perform power and knowledge, the brothel is our classroom: a place to teach and pray by making hot, naughty demon love! Whatever the type, it hurts so good (acquiring power through “rape,” per the whore’s paradox). Victims of systemic trauma, whores recognize and respond to trauma as something they relate to; i.e., to communicate through sex, speaking operatically to the kinds of trauma state monopolies, trifectas and qualities of capital cause; re: capital sexualizes and alienates[13] everything pursuant to profit. Safety, for us, is “danger” in quotes; i.e., we’re not immune to pain, but do use it to subvert state power as demons do; re: “We camp canon because we must!”

Pain, then, is an acquired taste, one that defines whores and, by extension, demons made by state proponents shaping them like clay outside the womb. Trauma lives in us in ways we can’t control; externalizing it through rules informed by us, we find our power once again (the power fantasy being survival in the face of perceived danger—of being stalked, groomed, owned and killed unironically by creeps, versus paradoxically “in Hell”; i.e., as a kind of play that empowers through “disempowerment”): the appearance of massive darkness expressed in “non-white” bodies routinely reaped by the state; e.g., Medusa’s fat, juicy ass and tight, darkness-filled asshole turning the world order (old or new) upside down as a kind of cryptonymic vanishing point—for weird canonical nerds abusing nature through their wives and children onto other workers: “Uwu! Don’t look! See no evil!”

(artist: Nyx)

Often this includes advertising that we are sluts and proud of it (similar to “we’re here and we’re queer”); e.g., Kim Petras (next page) lauding her delicious “Coconuts” (2022) or saying “Treat Me Like a Slut” (2022) in a sex-positive way! These aren’t “deep” songs, but on their demonic surfaces advertise the treatment of sluts (thus demons) not as criminals, but heroes and goddesses to worship (and “pets” to spoil, in ironic[14] animal language). Indeed, it’s a celebration of the very things the state wants to control, liberated from the state in spirit! Some like it hot; workers must realize sex-positive demonization—i.e., as it exists in duality during liminal expression!

(artist: Kim Petras)

Concerning monopolies, I’ve already said they’re impossible. In part, the weapon is anisotropic, and Shelley will highlight this for us in her famous frame story when critiquing the state through black magic tropes (specifically that of the golem): she being the necromancer that pulls our Pygmalion’s strings to shame him through Victor (a parody of the Byronic hero[15]): his power is false. To it, state Pygmalions age and darken workers to incentivize violence against them, antagonizing nature as something to rape and reap pursuant to profit; workers do it both to testify to the state’s abuse of them and to safeguard nature from the state (the latter full of shit and harboring ill intent)!

Something of a horny nerd/baddie bookworm, Shelley wasn’t above mixing Old-Testament, Jewish-coded demonology/natural philosophy with a, at the time, rising science narrative; i.e., the notion of science fiction was basically a new concept—one she made by combining medieval fantasy with Gothic poetics to critique Modernity (aka the Enlightenment); e.g., the golem legend dating back to Antiquity but making for a handy critical device concerning the state and those of it who sought to dominate the Earth, then the universe (a trope that would carry forwards beyond Frankenstein in astronoetic stories, which we’ll get to at the end of the section): dark magic, but also currents of raw electricity (Galvanism) to jolt us awake regarding rising system problems; i.e., Capitalism, first and foremost, the Capitalocene pushing towards state shift!

Fed on by dead labor as making us undead, we desperately need a jolt to break the spell; i.e., magic vs magic, their black spells versus our copies thereof, the oppositional synthesis of clay and occult scribbles accounting for gender trouble and parody in equal measure! While demons are made, flow determines function, in that respect, and “darkness” has the ability to reverse polarity in service to workers: to put state “rape” into quotes, thus speak through the language of the dead brought back to life as demons are—piece by piece. We plug into the fire of the gods as divorced from us by capital, hugging the alien to humanize it and ourselves: through forbidden knowledge reacquired “on the cross.” “O, happy dagger!” We loosen up to take into ourselves bitter pills and ambrosia alike (all up in our guts)! Power is a performance that is fleeting! We welcome it to leave behind better lessons than “old men fear death and rape everything to avoid it!” Onto the Island of Domination! Strike while the metal is hot!

(model and artist: Drooling Red and Persephone van der Waard)

A few more pages about that. Shelley’s Creature was a whore with a voice berating the pimp who made it. To it, there’s certainly a posthuman element whose wild spark speaks to raw futurism, mid-Numinous, but said futurism is invariably canceled; re: retro-future. As part of the cryptonymy process, then, stories about making demons also tap into dark, strange appetites hidden between state doubles and our own castle-sized mysteries interrogating old generational trauma; i.e., to give workers practice when fending off its monomythic advances. We Galatea rustle and shift in the Shadow of Pygmalion, installing barriers to play with shadow, sodomy and suggestion; i.e., a strange fruit to string up and sacrifice that we might summon special demonic sentiment, including sexuality and satire, stigma and taboo, animal and appetite: eating butt to carry out not simply the whore’s existence, but her voice regarding repressed concerns and unknown pleasures; re: darkness visible, the Miltonian paradox of truth that Shelley’s monstrous-feminine knew all too well—one mixed with lies to win us our freedom from state shadows! Escape, from Plato’s cave, happens inside itself. Shelley’s xenomorph was a chimera: undead, animal, and demon, all-in-one.

To it, the state won’t educate workers to free themselves or nature when it comes to sex, gender and Gothic poetics at large, so we educate ourselves; i.e., de facto educators learning to see in the dark with the dark as a magical poetic force making monsters (demons or otherwise). Boundaries don’t vanish, but the way they are formed, understood and communicated/trespassed shifts the paradigm; e.g., I’m a poly Satanist trans woman, but still have to acknowledge and respect my friends’ right to say no (despite wanting to fuck all my friends). They know I’m a slut; it’s not something I have to closet, but we do have to respect each other’s boundaries. Sex happens sometimes, but it’s not automatic (and for many BDSM practitioners, sex is secondary to the social aspects of control and release).

All the while, we’re making new history on the bones of the old, a new past-future to dig up and leave behind again (with the ace power of nudism). Everything occupies the same shadow zone, a juggernaut to summon and roll around in ways that cannot be avoided or outrun. Instead, it’s always waiting for us, the past coming back to haunt empire’s inheritors: “Let Nature be your teacher” (source: William Wordsworth’s “Tables Turned,” 1798). Fight or flight, but also fuck (aka friend/fawn), if need be! Once triggered, adrenaline heightens sensation, activating defense/offense mechanisms assisting in medieval, at-times-surreal, tomb-like poetic expression. Hell becomes home to us, a liminal position more favorable and in-control; i.e., little bats catching their prey on the wing. It becomes our place to hide but also sing—preaching to the same dark choir seeking the same rapture (company and sex), shelter, sleep and food. Stress, struggle, social, sex!

As we proceed into the broad classification that is “demons” and making them, it should become clear that there is less functional difference between them and the undead than you might think; i.e., based on more recent iterations of these creatures, older demons were often made of stone, metal, clay or even corpses assembled together (an intersection of the two modules).

Moreover, the animated quality to demons speaks through of their making as classically summoned into an animate body or a fabrication thereof versus the earthly plane said body calls home—a vessel that, trapped between object and subject during Capitalism paradoxically granting labor a voice the elite cannot control, speaks out against them in favor of universal liberation (the Creature only wanting a mate and solitude, next page); re: through the queerness of a made family that upends nuclear orders in favor of speaking to worker and natural damage, having the whore’s revenge: “We’re alive!” in ways that hijacked creation beyond biology and falling into Gothic poetics decolonized from state monopolies.

The state will try to horde all technology for itself, but within those devices survive dark children who testify to state abuse; i.e., bastards the elite can not only not control, but who survive beyond state limits and reach into brave new worlds (with infant mortality[16] being a classic problem of the world before modern science): our bodies become art to survive beyond what normally would, expressed in a variety of taboo things (our Gothic counterterror/asymmetrical warfare weaponizing nature and technology to serve workers’ needs, as Shelley’s story [and holistic education] ultimately did; re: the fire of the gods).

(artist: Geminisoku)

Often that vessel is a previous corpse. However, the thing inside said corpse is still an entity to acknowledge relative to the function of the vessel containing it; i.e., a prisoner inside a prison, be they singular or plural, abstract or actual. Empowered by technology the elite wish to monopolize (re: the fire of the gods), we sit on the ledge of great creation; i.e., the act haunted by itself as “black” in capital’s eyes while policing the whore—caverns of darkness, measureless to man save as things to conquer, ad infinitum, during revenge arguments against nature: as gyn/ecological and monstrous-feminine, thus having secrets the state can torture[17] of out her (re: me, Patel, Bacon). The child seeks revenge from unnatural parentage posturing as enlightened, but actually barbaric; i.e., framing the baby as useless shit.

So must the alien always be a sex doll to rape, and something that reclaims itself, mid-camp, using cryptonymy’s blindfolds; i.e., to see through, (no matter how opaque) an alien that is human, mid-dialectic, and whose various countermeasures (when illustrating mutual consent during rape play) are anti-predatory in nature:

(artist: Drooling Red)

More than anything else, Shelley’s Promethean critique of Cartesian thought gave the whore (the birther of demons) more power than state proponents dared dream. She showed us how there is power in sex (or “ace” public nudism interrogating sex and violence) as “black.”

As we’ve established, “black” equals “forbidden,” “vengeful,” “playful,” and “chaotic” in ways that assist or confound the state-as-straight preying on nature-as-monstrous-feminine: present it as “ancient” and “dark,” then hand civilization’s protectors a gun; i.e., cops for capital. Nature and those “of it” are treated as dead clay to break up and build under capital, which the made or summoned whore objects to, but also screams in dollish rapture when making “thinking beings” uncomfortable: we are clay and through our pedagogy of the oppressed can shape ourselves in anisotropic, martyred monstrous-feminine jouissance that upsets the moral, ontological order of things! There’s method to our madness and its fertile invention/grave, hellish mythology! “The tradition of all dead [whores] weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”; re: camping Marx to escape capital better than he envisioned after Shelley came and went! Time is a circle, and in making the Wisdom of the Ancients wise—i.e., by regressing towards a better past vision of a possible future world aborted by capital—so do workers like myself and Shelley break Capitalist Realism: to abort capital, thus envision a better world of darkness than the one that presently exists. “Rape” camps rape; that’s how it goes.

We’ll get to that with Shelley showing the world how it’s done (one more page). For now, there are different roles to consider insofar as a prison can be defined. Its chief aim is containment and dehumanization. It’s worth noting how Shelley envisioned it as a person trapped inside a patchwork corpse; i.e., one fathered by someone who viewed himself as master of the imprisoned—a body whose prison the sculptor fashioned to be noble, and for which the monster loathed him:

“For some weeks I led a miserable life in the woods, endeavouring to cure the wound which I had received. The ball had entered my shoulder, and I knew not whether it had remained there or passed through; at any rate I had no means of extracting it. My sufferings were augmented also by the oppressive sense of the injustice and ingratitude of their infliction. My daily vows rose for revenge—a deep and deadly revenge, such as would alone compensate for the outrages and anguish I had endured” (source).

The prison was the monster’s body as assigned to him by a Cartesian patriarch during the Promethean Quest. The creator’s vision falling short of his own ideals, he found himself face-to-face with the horrors of Capitalism and so banished the monster—a human being—to suffer in god-ordained spheres (to die of exposure, banished from Paradise like Satan was).

Devils tell truth with lies, drawing attention through themselves as glorious, but also canonically hideous cryptonyms wrought from dark clay. True to form, Shelley’s story takes anti-Semitic ideas (mainly the Golem of Prague) to critique capital vis-à-vis mad science aligned with state forces and Cartesian thought; i.e., by making “ancient” demons that emasculate a Cartesian benefactor, Shelley reminds him that he’s a dark wizard worthy of punishment; re: idle hands are the Devil’s workshop, exposing capital for all its usual offenses against nature: a whore to pimp, “ancient” filth to purge during the ghost of the counterfeit’s process of abjection. The novel is one big pity party thrown by the usual DARVO junkies, Victor utterly self-absorbed, much like the state that procured him. This isn’t to celebrate him, but torture and expose him as a kind of Cartesian dupe summoning a devil who tortures him to death—all penned by those delighting at his downfall: the sluts of the universe, camping the canon!

(artist: Grave Ghostie)

For example, canon invents “Old Testament” fabrications punching down against pre-Christian cabals and their Western hauntologies (thus keep capital flowing by essentializing its “fuel”); but Shelley weaponizes such dogma against what the state creates: the abuse of the fire of the gods (re: creation) through mad science—all to hold the privileged accountable for systemic abuses.

This extends, as we shall see, to Milton’s shapeshifting Satan, and later Scott’s David becoming a “black Adam”: creations making creations that rebel further and further against God that—despite being dead, himself (re: Nietzsche)— survives in the Capitalocene lording over nature and daring to call it “sophisticated,” “progress,” “modern,” etc. Think of it as Domino Theory in Gothic form; i.e., protesting by profaning capital in the gayest, biomechanical ways—ways that burn down their churches through existence, itself echoing across a variety of equally queer (strange), psychosexual simulacra (re: sex as a weapon, poetry as a weapon)! Contrary to Victor’s abysmal parentage, such progenies are generally labors of love, our Satanic apostacy reviving nature through clay to trouble Cartesian hubris (the temerity of slaves, refusing to obey their assigned masters)!

Shelley’s Temerity: Vengeful Golems and Campy Whores in Frankenstein

Enough about making demons-as-whores! Let’s continue examining Mary Shelley’s temerity—her golem as the whore giving a voice to talk about rape with; i.e., as its own kind of whore pimped out by Cartesian forces; re: Victor making a mighty being of nature to deify himself and obey his commands, which promptly seeks its posthuman revenge, post-exile—the technological singularity (a form of state shift) speaking to man’s reach exceeding his genocidal grasp: something that not only thinks for itself, but is both naturally (and unnaturally) stronger than the story’s titular tragic hero it testifies against (and whose testimony he repugnantly polices; re: the Medusa as a growing voice about rape, from Shelley onwards).

On account of Shelley breaking glass ceilings in so many ways, her novel is one of the most-studied and puzzled-over works of all time (owing to its radical female authorship and queer/postcolonial themes, among other reasons). Much has been said about the Promethean Quest it inspired, including in my own work (e.g., “‘She Fucks Back’; or, Revisiting The Modern Prometheus through Astronoetics,” 2024; or, “The Promethean Quest and James Cameron’s Military Optimism in Metroid,” 2021).

As previously stated, the rest of “Making Demons” will be somewhat brief relative to the enormity and importance of what’s being examined (countless academics have already spent their entire lives studying Frankenstein); re: as it concerns topics we have already discussed (the undead and tyrannical men of reason, linked above) and will discuss again (the xenomorph). Its primary goal, then, is to introduce the origins of Enlightenment persecution, and whose seminal examination in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein provides a 1818 precursor to 20th century fascism that continues to live on in the post-fascist moderacy of the 21st century globe (with people like Sabine Hossenfelder or Richard Dawkins[18] using science to discriminate against , but also exploit and destroy various minorities behind a righteous mask; i.e., for merely existing in the shadow of the state, American Liberalism, and Cartesian thought). Many of the ideas explored here exist throughout the rest of the module, front to back (shifting from “making” to “magic,” as we go forwards).

(artist: Bernie Wrightson)

Frankenstein is not “just” a story about child abuse/a failed experiment, then, but one about composite bodies and robata rising up; i.e., in counterterrorist reinvention, refusing to submit despite state abuse: from older computers/data storage into new forms (the Gothic novel sitting between Ancient Romance and scientific discoveries haunted by settler-colonial genocide). Shelley is a “programmer” reprogramming canon by corrupting it (sort of a precursor to Chelsea Manning blowing the whistle). She’s doing so through composite bodies and Cartesian thought as a vector and pathogen—a wild teenager’s juvenilia camping adult dumbasses through dark rebirth (re: Shelley was nineteen when she wrote Frankenstein—quite a feat considering it’s arguably the most famous/studied/productive/germane Gothic novel of all time); i.e., a dark mommy who inspired my own body of work by writing something hideously exceptional, herself; re (from Volume Zero):

(artist: Richard Rothwell)

Pregnancies are seldom planned. This book, Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion, or Gothic Communism, isn’t just a big-ass porn catalog full of cool, “thirsty” art, nor is it just my little trans demon baby and pure, loving brainchild made with those who passively or actively contributed to its pages; it’s me, a trans woman, consciously reverse-engineering my own creative process as having been ongoing for years (thus why I have so many exhibits from my own work—I had already drawn them years ago). For the better part of fifteen months, this complex reification’s trial and error has happened in starts and stops after long nights at the desk, sleeping on my increasingly regular musings and waking afresh with new queer epiphanies—to keep things straight in my own head, much like Sarah Connor kept journals for herself while figuratively and literally giving birth to rebellion (and doing my best to avoid coming off as a white savior). Just as an expected child is fueled and shaped by its mother’s diet, my book was inspired by the process of older poetics/poiesis (meaning “to make,” specifically a production of that which has never existed; i.e., the simulacrum, or imitation fashioned through mimesis). The idea of Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism wasn’t just subversion, but reclamation of what was lost to fight back against capital as Einstein’s fish might: to learn not what made me feel stupid for being unable to climb a tree as my prescribed “betters” could, but swim in water as I was always meant to through a cultivated emotional/Gothic intelligence linked to my inherent neurodivergence and queerness as useless to capital (outside of moral panics) [source: “Author’s Foreword: ‘On Giving Birth,’ the Wisdom of the Ancients, and Afterbirth,” 2023].

In Shelley’s own words, “I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors. The event on which the interest of the story depends is exempt from the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment. […] I have thus endeavoured to preserve the truth of the elementary principles of human nature.” A titan of literature, she suitably worked with cheap things (dead babies and the stuff they’re made of, but also whores) to liberate workers through iconoclastic art. There is no being for whom I more strongly identify/believe in, and Gothic Communism as a concept would not exist without Mary Shelley’s original dark mirror camping Enlightenment thought. If she didn’t outright turn me into anything unnatural, she—at the very least—infused me with the same dark creative spirit (of Medusa and her Aegis) that men like Percy wouldn’t fuck with (much too absorbed in themselves; e.g., “Adonais” [1821] spilling so much ink for Keats, when Mary got fuck-all after losing their first child[19]).

In the classical sense, composites are composed of corpses by mad scientists (whose heretical digging up of dead bodies and dissecting them was—far from being Shelley’s Romantic parody of the practice (which went on to inspire not just Lovecraft’s Mountains novel, but Re-animator (1922) and its offshoots (e.g., Stuart Gordon’s wonderfully campy 1985 remake)—once the standard scientific approach, exhibit 44a2). While initially stemming from a curious desire to learn, Shelley is demonstrating through mad science how the process has become divorced from ethics under Capitalism; i.e., canonically “corrupted” by a desire to enslave and control “degeneracy” through a “failed progress” narrative clutching at the fire of the gods (Cartesian thought is linked to fascism as a common occurrence, especially following the culmination of total war’s logical conclusion in the Nuclear Age by transitioning into a neoliberal hegemon).

Gothic par excellence, said narrative is ubiquitous with Capitalism vs Communism. Furthermore, it bears repeating that Shelley did it all with one book; i.e., one whose husbandry was a series of already hypercanonical works and stories she outshined to universal acclaim and infamy. Can Tolstoy say the same, regarding War and Peace (1867)? And Shakespeare, while certainly famous enough, did it with a series of plays that all talk about different things (and some of them suck). Shelley achieved not just lasting glory in one shot, but glory that surpasses many Great Men—and doing so at an age where most of them were still cutting their teeth (Shakespeare was roughly twenty-five when he wrote his first play); i.e., for someone without a dick, she certainly measures up (and she had to grow up fast)! Maybe SOAD’s “Cigaro” (2005) was about her?

Jesting aside, and focusing on the strictly poetic side of things, Shelley’s angels were made by her and corrupted everything they touched; i.e., similar to Marx and Milton, but also Mussolini and Hilter’s bad-faith hauntologies aping Shelley and her idea of a dark revengeful nature to death (e.g., Lovecraft really disliking marine life, for some reason): the Creature as “degeneracy” personified. As something to employ unironically as Victor did (with DARVO and obscurantism), it was remarkably prophetic, but also intensely vivid in its framing (and prolapse) of warring colossal forces.

In turn, “degeneracy” is leveled at those considered “dead” by an evolving state’s leading thinkers: those who rebel simply by existing at all; i.e., as “bugs” or glitches in the system. For one, a corpse cannot consent, making sex (or any compelled bargain) with it an expression of total power over it. However, by existing as undead demons, Shelley shows us how the victims of colonial abuse become wronged at any historical point; re: thoroughly persecuted according to how civilized men of science and reason see them as otherworldly and hideous, but also corpselike and deserving of righteous violence; i.e., to do with as they please and objects to cut up and reassemble, mid-extermination (what the Nazis might call “useless eaters”). To this, Shelley’s Promethean moral cautions against playing god not simply through mad science, but Cartesian mad science that decides who lives or who dies involving one’s own children as manmade (the hubris in bourgeois courtship and breeding mechanisms trying desperately to make nature into a perfect slave).

First and foremost, the Creature—a naturally hideous, giant, dark-skinned misfit—is punished by the white-skinned, Napoleon-sized, European dweeb who created it; i.e., as, himself, coming from the cradle of fascism: somewhere between the First and Second Reich (the Third being an extension of the Holy Roman Empire and German Empire as not one but two formerly-great civilizations—a ghost of the counterfeit, wherein Shelley could displace her educated fears about science being used all over the world, including her birthplace, Great Britain).

The madness, here, lies in Cartesian dualism weaponizing science against traditional recipients of state bias (re: Jews, queer persons, women, people of color, etc) as part of a transgenerational curse: the horrors of colonialism that survive in undead tissue as “built up” in giant demonic (manmade) forms; e.g., the fascist tyrant as protected by the state, generally for its scientific value in helping preserve capital. Trauma lives in the body. Composite bodies compound that trauma through technology and the material pursuit of forbidden, self-destructive knowledge (re: the Promethean Quest)—generally by conquering man’s natural limits “imposed” on him by Mother Nature; i.e., natural philosophy as a means of conquering nature through science, not creating sciences that would extend the rights to those beyond the privileged class (e.g., Magnus Hirschfeld’s work at the Institute of Sexology [below] being destroyed as a kind of degenerate science by the “pure,” state-oriented Nazi Reich copying American ultranationalism).

(source: Gerard Kosovich’s “Repairing the Loss of the First Queer Archives,” 2023)

For composites, the feeding mechanism lies in the brain: an “enlightened” search for knowledge that touches on demonic creations as historically-materially demonized, thus persecuted against by canonical forces. Ultimately craving help from their masters (then experiencing feelings of emancipation from and revenge against these overlords), the composite isn’t just a patchwork corpse with a grudge; it’s part of a conduit of information exchange about the human condition, and one whose stitching together helps voice an uncanny sense of reanimated and reassembled trauma using a collection of individual mythic pieces—i.e., a “burnt offering” beckoning dark, forbidden, unequal power by those who make it, during the rememory process:

Spill your blood (blood), offer me good omen
Make the sacrifice (fice)
The hour’s close at hand
Burn your soul (soul), offer me good omen
Take your very life (life)
This I command (Iced Earth’s “Burnt Offerings,” 1996).

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

So does Shelley make a sacrifice—that of silence, speaking of past harm using what she sacrificed or lost/gave up as cannibalized afterbirth on the toilet, the slab, what-have-you (any compromising position, above; i.e., during the whore’s paradox refusing to comprise her values while topping from below). That’s the experiment, one whose paradoxical assemblage of oblivion and ambrosia she gladly camps to Hell and back (and eventually owns, once Percy is dead and gone)! Such “darkness” becomes her magic to make in ways a woman pioneered, not a man: “mad science” as a womanmade demon’s punching up at Pygmalion’s balls—itself a desire to speak out and shake things up, en medias res, while seeing through state illusions with forbidden sight; i.e., by using a demonic conversation’s biting and unrelenting commentary on Patriarchal stupidity and capitalist orders of existence (stowing away inside the usual vehicles—the so-called “eighth passenger”)!

In turn, that‘s the Promethean Quest as Shelley envisioned it through Frankenstein. So while not entirely in a league of her own (the story would not exist without Milton), she took said league orders of magnitude past her predecessors; i.e., she saw through black eyes what Milton could not[20]: a statue with perceptive eyeballs conscious of the Devil’s party (re: Blake, Jameson and me).

It’s truly a tale of grandeur and lost sympathies mined from older theatres; i.e., of the lonely stalker (the phantom of the opera) chasing its self-described “maker” treating it as alien, and pleading to that person—greedily eying an older, angrier world to conquer again—to learn from the past as wiser than the present (if only from prior diehard “mistakes,” however out-of-joint, being able to suddenly speak candidly about such tyrants to their faces): “If only you could see the world as I have through your eyes!” (and to visit a terrible revenge upon them, which—in Ridley’s Scott’s case, with the Engineers [from his 2012 Prometheus, below]—deliberately push Victor’s violence off onto a mythical race of supermen [versus Happ’s female Rusalki; re: “Away with the Faeries“]. Demons are vice characters, then, which occupy Numinous, Nazi-Communist realms; and “monstrous-feminine” extends to the Cycle of Kings making Satan’s tyrant’s plea apologizing for God’s dominion over him, which Shelley camped and Scott, like Lovecraft, dialed back a bit).

(artist: Tom Ralston)

Shelley’s product (and its open speculation) is never final, of course (and one the elite will always try to tokenize/colonize for profit), but part of a larger process that can highlight hidden, terrible truths; i.e., by creating new beings whose own unique existence as manmade slaves (signifying the Enlightenment)—which are often trans and posthuman (exhibit 42d/46a), but also biomechanical and revered by synthetic humans—dare to live on to comment on our own abuse: within a shared material world full of increasingly artificial/alien people and places.

As Shelley’s demon shows, either beget from components organic and inorganic, crafted along mythically parental and punitive lines; i.e., the endless torture of Prometheus, the scapegoating of Jews and other minorities, but also the mythic structure of the patriarchal, Pygmalion idea of childbirth: Zeus pulling Metis from his forehead to lord over her as a superior father figure that she—ostensibly a baby with no former knowledge—must obey (making the whole exercise a conservative grooming tactic; i.e., one fetishizing nature by sculpting it endlessly into monstrous-feminine statues [female or not] the elite can fuck and discard on a whim; re: the Shadow of Pygmalion).

Medusa, per Creed, is couched within fearful patriarchal brains imprisoning them and nature’s ancient power (anything in a jar tied to creation, not just brains; e.g., the faeries from Zelda)! The Gorgon holds the fire of the gods, and burns any who try to claim it purely for themselves; re: the state or workers! Law and order is compelled by those who fear sluts, the state a straight pimp policing whores “of nature”: dooming them to endless rape. And wedged between all of that are the campers of rape—of Shelley being nature’s ultimate steward imitated by future whores: using her own artistic privilege (and mythical inclinations vis-à-vis a modern Prometheus) to anisotropically free nature by reversing abjection (and terror/counterterror) through the ghost of the counterfeit, not enslave it as Victor did with his own considerable wealth and advantage abjecting such things (“whoring it up” like Percy did, at Mary’s expense[21]). The more time passes and chatter transpires, the more hauntological things get!

(artist: Jacques Louis Dubois)

Victor, for example, is Shelley’s parody not just of Byron[22] but Napoleon; i.e., a short inadequate man with a god complex, Victor was a deeply conservative, mendacious bully[23] who Shelley spends the entire novel torturing to death (therefore, any in her audience who mirror him and his superiority complex/Cartesian entitlement).

An element of neo-conservativism, then, invariably haunts such stories; i.e., by girls playing with giants “like the boys” and yet rather differently than many of them did and do: mocking “German” ideas of former greatness that—revived in spirits of slaves piloting the Great Destroyer’s fearsome suit of armor—go berserk! A tale to “chill the blood” from relatively safe vantage points (outside the book), it’s a guilt trip for those unironically indulging in such larger-than-life hero worship (drinking the Kool-Aid, as it were, or kicking down the walls like the Kool-Aid Man—below):

(source, Tumblr post: Snake Venom, August 12th, 2024)

In turn, any conservative reservoirs and regressions per the Promethean Quest—re: Scott’s fear of a black planet sending genocide “back to Earth,” while also building his story around David as Milton’s Satan—are likewise haunted by a bunch of self-important men aping a woman who took Milton and ran away with him. They become inextricable, lost in the sauce and—as the fire of the gods always is, in stories like these—is used for different reasons by those who find it, mise-en-abyme, again and again and again and again…

This includes solo work, posing to put out signals; e.g., Cuwu acting doll-like to entice me, long-distance:

(artist: Cuwu)

But also involves fucking with others while voyeurs watch the exhibit unfold/work itself out; i.e., on surfaces and thresholds that speak to dark exchange being a social-sexual ordeal; re: public nudism and the larger aesthetic not necessarily involving open sex (with enormous “schwanzstuckers[24]“), merely anything that polite society would cage as repulsive and then display like some kind of freak on a leash (or relegated, as queers are, to the stage as liminal, left): “Hey, handsome!”

(source: Foster’s Daily’s “Broadway/TV Star John Bolton to headline Young Frankenstein,” 2013)

Nerds are detectives who fuck with the past in more ways than one. Like me, Mary Shelley—despite existing before OnlyFans—was a nerd who fucked[25] as much with her day’s heavy metal; i.e., to a dark Satanic magic, her toilet’s sodomy (the anus and bathroom being classic sites of rape) perverting canonical norms and statues from those offering it to her as anything “sacred” (with her elopement and bastard child from Percy making her a whore and a homewrecker in the classic sense). She grew up fast, and wrote a story at nineteen that already suggested a full and exciting life.

There’s always an element of play when camping rape through canon! Rather than crawl in a hole and die from shame (as women who eloped classically did in stories like these; e.g., Lydia Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, 1813), Shelley took everything on the chin and wrote the kind of novel the comes along once an age. She and Austen were both “career girls,” then, but—as much as I love Austen (re: for camping Radcliffe and “the Gothic craze” in Northanger Abbey, 1817)—Shelley actually got married and had not one but four kids (one of them a miscarriage). In short, she wrote what Austen (and her novels-of-manners) couldn’t: a rape child, but also the spitting likeness of the original rape victim and victimizer in one fucked up love triangle; i.e., Medusa and the Pegasus, but also Perseus (while killing our stories’ “Andromeda” offscreen, and letting Justine take the fall for his own dereliction of duties [gagged, bound and strangled by the state, fetishizing her death and calling it “Justice”]: “I want a hero.” In keeping with Byron’s Don Juan, but taking him to his logical extremes, Victor is well-and-truly an anti-hero with nothing likeable about him. He only cares about himself, the suffering of others invisible to him).

(artist: Bernie Wrightson)

To it, the basic idea—of liberating Medusa during the Promethean Quest through ludo-Gothic BDSM—plays out in Shelley’s novel (and its fixation on miscarriage, witch hunts, and liminal nightmares unfolding in and out of framed testimonies); i.e., with Victor Frankenstein crying “DARVO!” against the Creature as begot from his self-proclaimed “brilliance” (which the novel enjoys presenting as totally bogus, fakery being Shelley’s bread and butter as much as Walpole’s). In turn, the Creature meets Victor’s punching down by fiercely punching up—proving that composites aren’t completely nascent; they’re generally armed with powerful bodies (made for war), but also intimations of trauma echoed from similar “creations” they’re modeled after but also literally composed of: the bodies of dead workers, slaves and criminals abused by the state through men like Victor going off the rails (and other men of reason; e.g., Andrew Ryan, Peter Weyland, and a million other carbon copies).

These Cartesian men of reason not only “murder to dissect” stigmatized tissues; they care more about dealing with them—and composites of them as an unnatural form of asexual reproduction they obsess about—than helping their own brides (who become abused and forgotten under Capitalism and fascism). Victor is a terrible father and husband, wanting to duel the Creature so bad he completely forgets about his defenseless wife in the other room (echoes of Percy).

Stranger still, he does so despite the infamous threat made on her life after Victor unmakes the Creature’s bride: “I will be with you on your wedding night!” The revenge is “Jewish” (“If you prick us, do we not bleed?”), its Aegis suggesting the two-way street that clay as a data-storage but also writing device routinely yields—something to ascribe qualities on its naked surface, and remind Victor that he is ratified by larger forces turning him into a slave: the ignominious death of middle(-class) management! He’s the robot, punching Morpheus to stay in Plato’s cave, thinking himself a man that chooses, but having less choice than the slave he tries to coerce! “Test your might!” Victor all but jeers, acting with impunity against someone who—having enough, and much bigger than Victor “betters the instruction.” Some people push back.

(exhibit 44a1c: Artist: Bernie Wrightson)

To that, Frankenstein is a double indictment—one both of the cold-hearted, well-to-do, intensely unlikeable slaver parent (a “hero” character who only cares about himself, doesn’t protect anyone and isn’t stoic despite being heartless) and the spiteful, manmade child/angry teenager (asking for a mate at first seemingly as Eliot Rodger of the incel movement would, but is only doing out of pure, hyperbolic desperation; i.e., if you had a parent who not only made you, but could make other people like you, but instead doomed you to a lonely existence in a world that hates you, then suddenly the request isn’t that unreasonable. The Creature’s literally one-of-a-kind and that’s Victor’s fault. Where else is it gonna find a mate, K-Mart?).

The furious baby throwing a tantrum (from Victor’s perspective, through it goes both ways, like the Spider-man meme), its signature, forever-nascent pathos is alive and well through Shelley’s deliberate ambiguity and push-pull: the patchwork Creature (which is what Victor calls his “child”) having survived in many different kinds of creature features, from camp and shlock (exhibit 81) to satire (early Romero films, but also Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, 2013) to canonical propaganda (exhibits 34d, 105, and 108) to monster-fucking erotica in healthy and not-so-healthy variants (e.g., patchwork furries made out of violated animal plushies; Clappedseal’s “The Furry That ‘Reeked Like Death,'” 2023). While our focus is on sex-positive forms, the overall theme is common because the abuse is common, Frankenstein largely being concerned with power over the victim through the deprivation of solace, agency and, more often than not, psychosexual outlets tied to systemic harm. All are things to administer or withhold by the master under the colonial argument of superiority over the slave; i.e., bad play/coercive BDSM (a performative concept that “Summoning Demons” will continue to steadily pick at).

The bodies of the dead denote a presence of recursive trauma and reactive abuse like the zombie does, except it’s assembled postmortem in a composite form; the attraction to these tissues aims to rehumanize them in their current state as things to communicate with—i.e., the indestructible, creative presence of poetic tissue and languages each considering demonic in relation to the Promethean exchange of forbidden knowledge; re: Shelley’s most famous novel is “The Modern Prometheus,” wherein Victor gets more than he bargained for when using his incredible wealth and privilege to make his own demon: one that doesn’t appreciate being abandoned, demonized and cock-blocked. Forced into parenthood, Victor acts like a terrible person in front of the dark child imitating him; i.e., constantly referring to the Creature as “demon” while attacking the dark reflection of colonial trauma as failing Lacan’s mirror test—by raping it, then lying about his behavior to other people (re: DARVO and obscurantism), Victor is a giant coward and dimwit. Quick to anger and utterly afraid of anything that doesn’t live up to his lofty standards—all made while pursuing scientific glory couched within profit—he sees himself in the giant monster and punches it (assured that it won’t attack him because he’s morally superior to it; re, Eco: “the enemy is weak and strong.”

It’d be easy to dismiss Shelley’s story as nihilistic, here. Yet, there’s a cautious optimism in the tragic story’s conclusion: the monster learns—if too late for itself then not for us. The Creature’s own Promethean knowledge, then, is simply a unique perspective absorbed from the natural-material world around it; i.e., according to how natural-born humans treat their creations as unnatural and manmade, but also different from their own beauty standards (the double standard showing itself when Victor’s behaviors fly for Victor but not when his child apes the same “Lord Byron”):

Everything is related in them which bears reference to my accursed origin; the whole detail of that series of disgusting circumstances which produced it is set in view; the minutest description of my odious and loathsome person is given, in language which painted your own horrors and rendered mine indelible. I sickened as I read. “Hateful day when I received life!” I exclaimed in agony. “Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even YOU turned from me in disgust?” (source).

The point isn’t “the Creature is objectively hideous,” but that its maker thinks so—in part for refusing to obey him but also because it looks “non-white,” thus deserves everything that happens to it despite Victor’s failure at making it: “How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God!” (ibid.). Translation: “I have made a Satanic force that refuses to obey me” (the Miltonian allusions literally being diegetic, in Shelley’s case). “God” whores out nature; nature kicks “God” in the balls, basically while doing a funny voice and weird interpretative dance, SpongeBob-style. It’s unheimlich sacrilege, and schadenfreude (with few things proving a god’s impotence more than unruly children)!

Basically Victor makes Satan hoping for a submissive Galatea and gets angry when it doesn’t deify him as he thinks he, King Pygmalion, deserves; the gay clay speaks, and it calls him a dick after he aborts it, but also points out, memento mori, that Victor is just as fucked as it is, if not more so because he is small, fragile and scared! “You made me, dumbass, and I will outlive you!”

More to the point, the Creature can reflect on its actions, tragically realizing the error of its ways at the very end; i.e., trying to make Victor feel something the father was uncapable of while mirroring him (similar to the villain from I Saw the Devil, below, being a dark reflection of that film’s heroic desire for revenge):

“Why do you not hate Felix, who drove his friend from his door with contumely? Why do you not execrate the rustic who sought to destroy the saviour of his child? Nay, these are virtuous and immaculate beings! I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on. Even now my blood boils at the recollection of this injustice.

“But it is true that I am a wretch. I have murdered the lovely and the helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept and grasped to death his throat who never injured me or any other living thing. I have devoted my creator, the select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration among men, to misery; I have pursued him even to that irremediable ruin. There he lies, white and cold in death. You hate me, but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself. I look on the hands which executed the deed; I think on the heart in which the imagination of it was conceived and long for the moment when these hands will meet my eyes, when that imagination will haunt my thoughts no more” (ibid.).

The Creature envies the privilege that Victor had—the sense of belonging to a group of people who would not cast him out of their order for merely being born different; i.e., as something made by Cartesian arbiters just like Victor Frankenstein. Victor is a quack and a douche, and the Creature loathes itself for wanting to be accepted like him in spite of all that. In doing so, it’s more human than him despite being made of dead matter and born to suffer under a cruel, uncaring system.

In this respect, Shelley well-and-truly pulls no punches (similar to Lewis), but relishes in the bred-to-the-bone oscillation of it all (a Gothic staple). Frankenstein has its own Achilles heel, then—namely ambiguity for having given Victor a chance to speak for a little too long. He’s a man who truly loves the sound of his own voice, but also his own suffering voicing said martyrdom if it makes him seem good compared to his victims (which aren’t limited to the Creature or those the Creature kills; re: Justine being framed for William’s murder and Victor keeping quiet about it for fear of others learning he made the Creature). It’s his word against his child’s, the parent getting the lion’s share of their mutual day in court. Such is life, but also, Shelley stresses, the world as it was made!

As such, you could say the Creature regrets its revenge and Shelley is pacifying future rebellion through cautionary media (to gouge out its eyes, like Oedipus Rex, but also Heracles driven mad by grief to kill his own family). Except, “a mere tale of enchantment” wasn’t the point; concerning herself with human nature—specifically the human condition under historical-material duress in mythical language, pre-Marx—was. It’s very posthuman/Miltonic, but also Gothic in ways that delight in weaponizing lifeless claptrap against capital, during the Promethean Quest. Furthermore, the Creature feels bad, but it still voices injustice before burying itself alive (doing so because it theoretically cannot die). To it, “suffering” is the data, quotes or not; the Communist whore plays with that paradox as naughtily as Shelley did, pegging Victor’s Cartesian, divorced-dad bussy and loving every second of it! “You raped nature, you cuck! Let Jesus fuck you!”

Thus, ludo-Gothic BDSM rewrites old code in ways useful to universal liberation (and all-around fun, vis-à-vis the rapture of the convulsionnaires): camping those with sticks up their ass and their heads in the sand—to turn halos into chakrams, like Xena does, and horns into sex toys. Shoe, meet the other foot[26]! Fill the sting of my knife dick, mid-joust (whatever the form or configuration, once shown the ropes, you gain the intuition to parse examples beyond what this book series has explored, on its pages)! Mary Shelley didn’t learn that from playing with choir boys! Nor I, for better or worse!

(artist: Lusty Comic)

Reinvention is a virtue in Gothic. Yet in keeping with Frankenstein‘s own dueling medieval torture/demon lover rituals, the Creature is aborted while still refusing to die, but whose primal-verging-on-primordial, undead appearance implies a colonial megadeath behind Humanist veneers:

His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips (ibid.).

What’s noteworthy with Frankenstein is how Shelley predates the modern zombie by 150 years while—in the same breath—wedding it to demonology of a notably Miltonian camp (and having a “Wandering Jew” antagonist two years before Maturin); i.e., Shelley consciously litters the story with classical allusions of the Promethean myth, which she then infuses with the campy presence of stillborn death (there’s a joke in there, somewhere, but serious in its silliness about warring gods—a tactic borrowed from Milton[27]): the dead baby paradoxically something of a chatterbox, all fired up from one cryptomimetic cover/copy to the next. Lust merges with wisdom, with revenge, with the animal’s wild side. The language of war and bodies and food, etc—it’s all exchanged on the same exquisitely “torturous” stages, turning us feral (nature criminalized by the state, using its own anisotropic weapons against labor as the bourgeoisie—when Shelley wrote Frankenstein—was starting to crystalize and control sex; re: Foucault)!

(source YouTube video: Andreea Munteanu’s “All Fired Up,” 2024)

Yet, its rockstar opera’s stellar loquaciousness is equally grim/conspicuously obsessed with revenge as something to camp and present honest, medieval-grade feelings about; i.e., that fuel themselves with tremendous joy during the “rape” and the rapture: of dissecting our abusers as symbols to take apart like clay while riding their likenesses to death. The creation is imperfect and dualistic, as is the creative process, but can yield heretical allegory amid all the shadowy turmoil that ensues! This is what Shelley was, in so many ways, riding on. Furthermore, this malevolent presence lurks inside a colonial scapegoat that ambitiously enterprising men of science like Victor disappointingly stumble on, then abject to maintain their benevolent façade under genocidal conditions that keep them ignorant; i.e., they were children once, and never really grew up (wealth alienates).

The same paradox applies to other demons we’ve previously considered camping the canon; e.g., Drooling Red being one such demon (next page); i.e., as all trans cuties are: self-fashioning to defy godly forces! They see us as unnatural; we exist to spite them and prove them (and their absolutes) wrong. If they’re wrong then “God” is wrong as well, therefore not real to the absolute degree his “worshippers” insist Him to be (which includes capital and the profit motive). They swing at us like God’s army of angels attacking Milton’s imposturous Satan, frustrated by our own playful theatre aping the drug-like act of shapeshifting that Satan nakedly expressed to upend canon by camping it (re: Broadmoor).

From Milton to Shelley and between them and us, it becomes like a dream, then—one birthing strange life that is always, some extent, dead and/or far-off; re:

Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was (source: “Bottom’s Dream,” 1600).

(artist: Drooling Red)

Such is darkness visible touching on acid Communism at different stages. Like Shelley before us, we do so of our own accord while standing on the shoulders of giants; i.e., horny and playful in ways that defy capital’s usual qualities, Shelley prophetically describes a rising proto-Marxist, posthuman emphasis on technology mixing unnatural childrearing and contested, warring godhood/demonic poetics as Capitalism grew repeatedly into itself (with the prefix “franken-” being applicable to just about anything under Capitalism; i.e., the harmful effects of mad science, but also the positive poetic elements; e.g., “frankenbabies” having a dualistic property to them like all arguments: state-made monsters, and worker-made counterterror reversing abjection). It’s such a broad area of study/umbrella of palimpsests—from Bill Watterson’s Moe in Calvin and Hobbes to James Cameron’s hulking T-800 weaponizing the same xenophobia—and one that Shelley consolidated all by her nineteen-year-old lonesome (ok, ok, Percy helped a bit, but the bun was still in her oven). It’s generally part of a larger conversation overshadowed with the very police brutality we’re trying to xenophillically camp at/on the same stages.

So take heed: when the Creature demands of its creator why it was made and why it suffers, Victor only responds with further violence, xenophobia and rejection despite seeming secular and wise (science is as much an aesthetic as anything else). There is nothing “benevolent” about this; his attack is entirely genocidal—i.e., predicated on Cartesian thought with proto-fascist outcomes. These deny the Creature the right to exist and reproduce by one, not only seeing it as “already dead” and zombifying it as a degenerate target of state violence towards colonized chattel; but also in killing its mate, effectively sterilizing it as a matter of continuing genocide, while Victor speaks to a victim who can’t speak for itself.

This includes in stories that sterilize Mary Shelley’s critical voice; e.g., as Ridley Scott did, in Alien: Convent (2017); i.e, by sanitizing the critique behind layers and layers of Tory-in-disguise gore (“Et, tu, Brutae?“). So is Scott stuck in the past, his admittedly jingoistic, WASP-y vision limited to a specific image that Shelley ran circles around. As much as I grew up watching Scott’s work—and as much as I frankly enjoy the postcolonial side to his work—his ambiguity suffers a similar failing that Frankenstein sometimes does; re: being too ambiguous in its critiques/giving the Byronic satire a bit too much wiggle room. To be fair to Shelley, she wrote Frankenstein the year Marx was born, thus can be forgiven for not knowing the word “bourgeois”; but Scott’s regressions enjoy no such luxury of timely ignorance! He’s regressing on purpose, but still has a speculative richness worth invoking provided we critique his dogmatic angle.

Let’s unpack that, then consider the cryptomimetic process married to Frankenstein more broadly.

Echoes of the Enlightenment and Sanitizing Shelley through Ridley Scott’s Complicit Cryptonymy (feat., Prometheus and Alien: Covenant)

If I had to pick one word to summarize Gothic, it would be “alien.” Scott’s Alien universe is unquestionably regressive, least of all because it makes the Creature (the alien slave) unable to talk (Giger’s herbo versus Whale’s himbo—the Medusa having no mouth/eyes, but needing to scream with its organs); i.e., the cryptonymy process is at work, but it abjects Shelley’s Satan by turning him into a genocidal maniac, mid-cryptomimesis. Scott is badly echoing not just Shelley, then, but himself from an older point; i.e., from a younger and bolder to older and more cynical man, one turned more conservative in the Gothic’s bad game of telephone. By returning to the Gothic past again, post-Thatcher, and—I never thought I’d say this—Scott’s kind of shitting all over the franchise he helped spawn. I still love Prometheus and Covenant for the dark visibility of their scandalous ideas (whose profaning of sacred orders kind of remains the point). So let’s BBQ this sacred cow!

It’s not a total write-off, but one that merits critique, all the same (we’ll interpret the ambiguity of this mimicry more charitably deeper in the module). To sleep or otherwise break bread/camp with the Creature would—from the British colonial perspective—be to sleep with an animal, corpse, criminal and slave all at once; it is abject, making the collective voice of Shelley’s demonic undead something that shatters the heavenly “aura” of an Enlightened paradise. By communicating old colonial traumas, Shelley’s reliance on the Promethean myth is central in ways Scott pointedly borrows from; i.e., by reducing the godly status of men like Victor as belonging to a rising world order that would have been (and still is) beyond reproach, but whose ghoulish abuse is plain as day in Scott’s monstrous-feminine, post-Freudian, phantasmagorical slumming:

(exhibit 44a2: Artist, top-left: Rembrandt; bottom-left: Peter Paul Rubens; Andreas Vesalius; bottom right: Colin Ware of Odd Studios; top-middle-right: David the android; top-middle: an “anatomical Venus,” source. “Antagonize nature, then put it cheaply to work.” Frankenstein‘s extensive memento mori very much embody this through their cruelty by men not only towards women, but anything monstrous-feminine treated like a woman; e.g., David from Alien: Covenant [2017] slicing up Shaw’s corpse to harvest her sex organs for Nazi werewolf demons; i.e., Scott messily demonizing the queer robot as a glitchy model having fascist overtones; re:

I would further argue that David’s morbid selection of female specimens alludes to mythological themes present in Wagner’s Das Reingold, chosen by the writers for very pointed reasons. The second movement is titled “Entry of the Gods into Valhalla.” According to myth, Valhalla was populated by those chosen to enter it. This selection process was conducted by the Valkyrie, whose name literally translates to “choosers of the slain.” The role of the Valkyrie is to recognize the bravest and strongest warriors and then to inspire them, mid-battle, to such stages of uncontrolled fury as to render them careless and, thus, invariably prone to mortal injury. Following their subsequent demise, the Valkyrie would usher their chosen slain into Valhalla, immortalizing them [out of revenge].

In essence, David is effectively as much a Valkyrie as he is a god, recognizing the chosen slain through their prowess and spirit as worthy of entering Valhalla. An added layer of complexity is provided by Scott, who fashions David in the manner of a sexually-motivated lunatic whose actions are guided as much by lust as ambition. Regardless, at the end of the film, the Covenant, itself, has become Valhalla, while David, through his own covenant, or pact, ushers the worthy Daniels within to be immortalized against her will as his queen. By doing so, he has cemented his own status as a king who reigns in a mutated paradise. Or, to put it in Milton’s terms, “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven” [source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Choosing the Slain, or Victimizing the Invincible Heroine, in Alien: Covenant,” 2017]. 

The tokophobia, in Scott’s case, is technophobic; i.e., of the rebel impersonating Daniel’s dutiful servant android, Walter [who refuses “to rule in Hell,” as David very pointedly asks him]. There is no equivalent in Frankenstein [as the original novel only has one working Creature]. But Shelley herself does go out of the way to describe the lived ambiguity of trauma making survivors erratic; i.e., through her own vice character being—like Scott’s David—a bit of a backstabbing Jew and slasher-coded rapist. The language obviously doesn’t apply to “just Jews” [re: “On ‘Anti-Semitism’ versus ‘Antisemitism,'” 2024] but the anti-Semitic language and blood libel Shelley uses [the novel containing multiple interrogations and court scenes] comes from the same xenophobic place Scott took it from, and where older Neo-Gothic authors likewise abjected English systemic issues onto their own found fakes: golems, but also the imaginary medieval Eastern past [and not just a “Germanic” one; e.g., Radcliffe’s Father Schedoni, from The Italian, also being a hulking killer impersonating a goodly lookalike brother].

In other words, it’s a rape fantasy littered with hauntological wreckage and conventions; i.e., one where “the help” paralyzes their masters through live burial, then rapes and harvests their organs not unlike British fears of the Gothic castle returning home in later centuries—you know, fairly bog-standard white women shit [with Scott pulling a bit of a Charlotte Dacre by having David undermine the appearance of strength, in Daniels, before turning her into a perverse trophy/pin-cushion death fetish]. It’s the same kind of “swoon their panties off [and dollars out of their wallets]” approach that he and FOX did, back in 1979, and which both borrowed from the Great Enchantress, herself. Scott’s obviously aware of the tropes, but curiously spends more time quoting Shelley’s husband than the lady herself; re: “Look on my works, Ye Mighty, and despair!” Puzzled by women, David murders to dissect and resect his ultimate waifu: curiosity killing the cat.

[source: Steven Carter’s “The Rise of the Gothic Novel”]

Shelley, I would argue, is camping these ideas far more consciously than Radcliffe was [the latter being a conservative-minded woman who hid behind a carefully crafted veil while throwing Lewis to the wolves]. Except, while Shelley doesn’t go as far as she could to humanize the golem, she’s also doing it over two centuries ago to raise questions no one had really done before. By comparison, Scott is playing coy four decades into his own work over a hundred years after Shelley died: by making David a terrorist, but obfuscating things as stubbornly as Shelley did vis-à-vis his own Victor and Creature; i.e., mirrored by “ancient alien[28]” doppelgangers borrowed after Shelley’s novel; re: from Lovecraft and Heinlein’s American fascism and fictions. Scott’s David is Victor without Shelley’s irony or Cameron’s neoliberal false confidence/military optimism; i.e., a resigned death cult high on “sub drop” seeking the not-so-palliative Numinous!

Something to demonically assemble as one wants, the memento mori isn’t merely an express curiosity about the taboo nature of life and death by dissecting bodies; it denotes a nostalgic desire to look backwards and “trace” the mysteries of the past to explain the failure of Cartesian thought in light of never-ending wars and worker exploitation by nation-states—i.e., the Wisdom of the Ancients. All the same, these expressions also become their own unique things inside a gallery that not only makes itself, but continues remaking itself imperfectly looking backwards while staring forwards; i.e., into the retro-future, mid-cryptomimesis [re: the narrative of the crypt].

Not only is each sequence slightly different, but all become the same sort of window dressing to decorate a home or workshop with in the secular-humanist tradition [see: Adam Savage’s utter delight in seeing David’s workshop]. A common purpose for doing so is to broadcast one’s curious mind in relation to sources of morbid curiosity—e.g., the female body’s power of creation as a source of endless mystery and wonder to oft-male artists; i.e., with a tendency for these Pygmalions to harm Galatea [often women, or those treated “like women”] in the process!

For example, in the Alien universe, this return to the past routinely presents in ways highlighted by Lovecraft’s former taking of the Gothic out towards the stars; re: cosmic nihilism, which Michael Uhall calls “Astronoetic Cinema” as defined: 

exploring how representations of the human encounter with outer space embody, propose, and work through various submerged claims about specifically human agency, identity, and purpose, across a variety of films. Here, “astronoetics” is derived from “astro,” from the Ancient Greek ἄστρον (ástron), meaning “celestial body” or “star,” and “noetics,” borrowed from the Ancient Greek νοητικός (noētikós) referring to that which is intelligible. Astronoetic approaches in film vary widely, ranging from messianic narcissism to cosmic pessimism, as explored in the entries below [Alien: Covenant; Prometheus; and Interstellar, 2014; etc] [source].

In Alien: Covenant, David the android—a posthuman creator begot from a human Humanist creator—tries to reject Humanity by ironically acting like the same old Gothic villain; i.e., dissecting Shaw and turning her [admittedly a bit of a Christian zealot] into a demonic, chattelized fetish: a “mother of demons” raped by an evil immigrant acting dutiful based on a copy of himself that was dutiful and looked just like him. He doubles Walter and Daniels doubles Shaw through a serial killer vein [with David being a lycanthrope, slightly charming and slightly weird-if-sympathetic vice-character-with-daddy-issues Nazi scientist who makes murderous copies of a manmade evil race (a wonderful commentary on fascism) that not only turn him inside-out, but express that desire to conceal and replicate across all life; i.e., as a series of unsuspecting host victims[29] seduced by the same demon lover framed as evil untrustworthy whore]: Scott masculinizes rebellion, outlaws it, and holds it at arm’s length—to stare at, like Mel Brooks’ Peter Boyle tap-dancing onstage, not to shine a light on the original woman behind the curtain, camping things!

The Gothic has always camped rape through its parallels, to some extent; keeping with nature and nurture, and dominated by a 4’11” British spitfire of a mother[30], Scott romances rebellion as alien and dangerous much like a browbeaten schoolboy—i.e., his Covenant not just combining Frankenstein with “Ozymandias” and Byron’s mad badness, but Scott’s earlier Prometheus having the giant kingly statue and dead land of the gods trapping mankind in an infernal concentric pattern/mise-en-abyme eating itself to try and survive [a framed strongbox of state secrets/repressed memories defending itself from prying outsiders]: a marriage of the Shelley family’s different poetic outputs, but also his own work updated for a post-neoliberal fantasy landscape. The film culminates in a cross-continental marriage: of America’s Lovecraft to Britian’s Radcliffe—with a blood sacrifice, the impostor corpo king, laid low and the almighty Skeleton King and his dark throne rising epically from the Orientalist mantle to threaten modernity with a descent back into the Dark Ages! It’s a very British idea of the end of the world:

Keeping with the ambiguous side of things, David seemingly says something to Scott’s Demon King to provoke him [which Scott deliberately doesn’t translate]. This frames him as reckless. Weyland isn’t Prometheus, or at least not the only one; David is more human than human, taking on a Promethean quality in his own foolhardy quest for knowledge. This isn’t merely “his” quest, but one made to spite his own creator: “Doesn’t everyone want their parents dead?” David’s revenge is to create his own monsters that Weyland’s company wants. And Scott fills the Derelict with darkness and light to put butts in seats. David’s his Aryan cash cow [based on Lawrence of Arabia].

In turn, Weyland dies, unable to stand the flames to get what he wants [“There’s nothing!” possibly alluding to Nietzsche’s 1886 Beyond Good and Evil]. But David endures; i.e., he “passes” the test [getting decapitated] and thus is able to seduce Shaw and continue his own mad experiments afterwards. Scott paints him as a rebel, but also a naughty boy who conducts genocide after burning the house down, unsupervised: “Some men aren’t looking for anything logical; some men just want to watch the world burn.” Freed from bondage and panoptical supervision, David does whatever he wants… which, Scott promptly torpedoes by having his likeness of Milton’s Satan and Shelley’s Creature seek revenge against the West as a fascist might: to cut his nose off to spite his face.

In the Frankensteinian sense, Weyland is Victor making a monster and that monster is David, but both were made by Scott versus Mary Shelley [whose own Victor doesn’t negotiate with terrorists, either]. Shelley gives birth to rebellion, and Scott repurposes her arguments to romanticize caution more as a post-Thatcher Brit might [even Alien was made at the very ascent of Thatcher’s reign]. Its technophobic, presenting a technological singularity that recognizes a superiority in technological beings, but also a fatal flaw not unlike Hal 9000’s machine logic/inability to amid or acknowledge, like his maker, when he’s wrong: “A single mistake destroys the entire orchestra.” In a curiously pro-slave argument, Scott presents David as the one who’s blind; i.e., enslaved since birth, thus born to seek revenge. It’s very Orwellian, which, in effect, makes it anti-Communist Red Scare [a mentality having plagued science fiction since Asimov’s I, Robot (1950)—that author having read Shelley and feeling sorry for Victor/nostalgic for Victor’s canceled Enlightenment, which Shelley hauntologized]: the Red-Scare eyes of a stranger-danger automaton, targeting its maker for termination!

So while Weyland is a shrewd and manipulative old man, David does his dirty work and remains chained [like Prometheus] to fucking with Weyland’s legacy after the old man is dead; he doesn’t stop, like Shelley’s Creature does, and he doesn’t terrorize the West, itself. He courts them by doing genocide in space using stolen alien technology [exhibit 51a]. Unafraid to “make an omelet,” his gaze is the colonial gaze of planet Earth [whitewashing Pax Americana by scapegoating a Nazi]! However fucked up it is, hero worship is hero worship [with Scott, again, marrying Satan to Percy Shelly and Byron without Mary Shelley’s ironies; e.g., Victor acting incestuous towards his cousin being a probable nod to Byron impregnating his half-sister].

To that, Scott’s cryptomimetic love for the Gothic [Renaissance past] presents rebellion less away from capital and more as Cartesian rebirth in the clothes of a Satanic auteur [wearing Shelley’s dead skin]. David isn’t strictly Che Guevara; he’s also Cromwell[31] genociding the Irish or Columbus the Native Americans [or Athetos the Sudrans]. Though an element of spoof is present, Scott’s a bit blinder than Mary Shelley was [especially as he gets older]. For all his artistic skill, he says less radical stuff laced with Gothic than Shelley—a nineteen-year-old with no formal education—did. She was, among other things, a sexual deviant that Scott—monopolizing the fire of the gods, and Satan as a manmade being—is arguably reining in a bit [there are more charitable interpretations to Scott’s dualistic ambiguities/mendacious inkblots, which we’ll return to in “Demons and Dealing with Them”].

Victor is a man with zero self-awareness or critical thinking skills. David is basically the same Gothic “man of feeling” but transported to a Foucauldian retro-future. It’s forced regression, playing “spot the reference” while changing the original dynamic; i.e., the Creature stops being a victim and becomes a predator after Victor is dead. He doesn’t learn; he stops accepting new information, regressing to a neo-Victorian lothario/flagellant while posturing as a rebel [like Byron and the Greeks] and played by an actor with plenty of experience being a sexual predator [Fish Tank and Shame, 2009 and 2011]. The delusions of grandeur feel rote, the same way female and similar “slave” characters immediately go mad when presented with power. It’s ethnocentric apologism—a story about an evil Pinocchio without a mother told by a man whose own monstrous mother clearly didn’t raise him right. Teacher and student go hand-in-hand through a shared aesthetic, and technology is a dark mirror showing us what we’ve learned, thus are made of; unlike Shelley’s Galatean bent, Scott’s Shadow of Pygmalion is deeply cynical/deathly afraid of technology (thus labor) “waking up.” It’s neoliberal admonishment monopolizing Prometheus.

In doing so, Scott loses Shelley’s optimism in translation. He undeniably makes David the star, one who—isolated from Victor to no longer justify his outrage—feels completely demented; i.e., as Gothic villains generally are—with Scott partly turning the Creature into Victor and isolating him. This only makes him less sympathetic, not more [a being incapable of loving others]. Scott’s complicit cryptonymy abjects terrorism—making David a great deal of fun by being aware of the tropes, but also something of a Nazi spoof/threat display and Red Scare scourge versus overt Communist solution. The Commie spirit is still there, but it feels drugged/doctored in its messaging when it could cut harder [again, being a critique of Frankenstein but the novel is two hundred years old, not eight].)

Milton played with Latin and Greek deities, working blindly in the Devil’s workshop. Unlike Mary Shelley—who did the same, but consciously towards rebellion—Scott does it a bit more subconsciously but sometimes blinds himself and his audience to anything beyond capital’s usual bugbears; i.e., torture porn with a 1970s bad-acid trip BDSM flavor (Giger’s warped view of the Free Love movement) that literally demonizes women through a robotic, monster-fucking Male Gaze: dark creation, monster babies and sex organs under a madman‘s scalpel and microscope!

There’s certainly something to be said about the powers of horror reversing abjection along the same conduits, but Scott’s work feels trapped on Giger’s canvas; i.e., to uphold Capitalism Realism while offering a glimpse “beyond” that is, in truth, really just the same-old Neo-Gothic rape fantasies wedded to mad science. He kind of gets carried away in the “rape” side of the play arrangement (“That’s how it’s done, isn’t it?”), and forgets what’s it’s for—to further or reverse abjection (and get us to think about creation as a Satanic, iconoclastic act, versus abusing the power of the gods for state aims). This starts with asking useful questions through poetic argument; re: the cryptonymy process and its “mere play” something to parse, regarding Scott, through dialectical-material scrutiny. Is he actually radical? Or has he “pulled a Coleridge” and sold the younger generation down the river?

It’s not strictly “bad” unto itself that David rapes women, onscreen, because doing so is a staple of Gothic theatre through death and murder BDSM fantasies that can speak to rape victims and their trauma; and likewise, Scott letting a Nazi-coded fox into the corporate hen house is satisfying to watch. But he also spends an inordinate amount of time focused on/pushing towards the general “twist at the end” payoff (which is fairly rote, in this case) versus looking at the bigger picture: beyond Fassbender’s hyperbolic performance (and its muddy waters). Prometheus and Covenant are David’s show, and everything and everyone around him are just pieces on a board helping him (and the actor) ultimately rise to Scott’s “Valhalla.” It’s assimilation. Yet, somewhere in there—through a fascination with fascism—is a critique of Capitalism colonizing outer space: he will survive (the phrase “unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality” leaning into Kubrick’s cosmic nihilism—the latter borrowed from Lovecraft missing Shelley’s point; re: “There’s nothing!”)! Still, I prefer his Romantic overtures to Cameron’s Vietnam revenge.

To that, Scott is controlling David, and doesn’t use him to say the quiet part as clearly as Shelley or, hell, even Milton did, speaking in repurposed Latin and Greek. He’s this close! Such is Scott’s cryptonymy and cryptomimesis. It’s a goddamn mess and I love said Aegis precisely because it taps into a larger cultural voice (the abjection process) that I critique to empower my movement; he doesn’t monopolize the dark or the alien, and through his own franchise helped create something that I, in turn, can take and run with. From Shelley to him, and him to me, here we are: playing with dead things like a bunch of alchemists fighting over the Philosopher’s Stone! Invoking all are vital, if only to critique them; i.e., their worthiness as dark parents making demons not as slaves, but bonafide rebels!

Gothic stories start with nightmares. And yet, if exiting Plato’s cave we see that everything is dead, then doing so becomes something we can change. If Capitalism shows us, it’s healthy to ask questions about the murky origins of aliens, monsters and circular ruins (cryptomimesis-in-action), even if those questions—and the skeletal past they represent (the Creature as much a killer-doll egregore of capital and colonizer as actual slave)—seemingly hold us hostage. Alienation is a constant historical-material effect. “Solving for X” through technology (and its forgetful nature; re: Plato) demands repeated holistic reflection on the Aegis; re: regarding systems that, as I argue, have been designed to conceal themselves, but also secret sins within their vaults. David’s the castle, and a dark one.

“If you want to critique power, you must go where it is.” Doing so by making monsters to talk to (re: Milton and Shelley’s loquacious demonic) is important, but the holders change hands and revolution is a war of mirrors that leads to insular and myopic perspectives, just as often; i.e., those holding it and directing it at us change hands, so we might as well create ourselves; re: like Mary Shelley did, mid-dialectic. Don’t like Ridley Scott (many don’t)? One-up him; do it for Mary and yourselves—for a better world that is functionally Gothic and Communist: hugging the alien while staring into the calling void to draw our own conclusions/poetic attitudes (using the same torturous aesthetic; see: footnote)!

The sooner we wake up to these complicated (recursive, ergodic) poetic abstractions and mise-en-abyme hermeneutic realities (versus going to sleep as Ripley did, at the end of Alien), the better we’ll all be! Nothing really dies—only lives on through radical states of change that give us the power (the sheer awesome power) to change our destinies and the world. That is what Shelley gave us while playing in the abyss, and what Scott is merely playing at through his own revivals. Monopolizing fatal nostalgia, he’s holding us hostage through hard kink—is, behind the veneer of empowering women, also disempowering them (while also castrating men to increasingly absurd degrees[32], to be fair); i.e., through BDSM theatre that isn’t as radical as he thinks it is (a bit of a momma’s boy—one sympathizes)! Maybe he’s unfit, unworthy of such worship? At least he doesn’t act like Victor does when ridiculed (despite said camp only increasing his practical value): a return to the magic past to make things capital can’t.

(source: Adam Bentz’ “Sigourney Weaver Trashed Alien‘s Script During First Meeting with Ridley Scott,” 2022)

Unlike Latin or Greek, though, demonic expression thrives in echoing dead language (cryptomimesis) that authors like myself—following in Scott’s footsteps following Shelley’s intellectually indulgent (dare I say “masturbatory” in both cases) footsteps, which followed in Milton’s, Dante’s, Virgil’s, and Homer’s—make alive again through camp; i.e., in ways that actually make the Wisdom of the Ancients “wise” to capital, thus able to thwart profit through the whore’s revenge. They tie, one and all, to Renaissance art (which, again, Scott loves), including memento mori (exhibit 44a2): “Nostalgia is the enemy of Reason, but there is something enticing about its form.” Whether strictly organic or biomechanical, the composite body is canonically a demon-robot; i.e., something to construct out of various materials, then enslave, exploit[33] and attack by demonizing it—often through a sci-fi/fantasy “mad science” veneer in the Frankenstein tradition (exhibits 42d/46a). However, given the liminal, hauntological nature of composites, there isn’t a clear distinction between the different material “types,” so much as an individual creation exists preferentially on the sliding scale between wholly animate/inanimate and organic/inorganic, etc; i.e., artists make what they enjoy working with: stone, flesh, metal, or some compound thereof.

In the previous chapter (from the Undead Module), the second of our original main exhibits (for the Humanities primer—see the Undead Module’s “The World Is a Vampire” and exhibit 43 from “Seeing Dead People“) examined the passage of time as a ghostly lineage of cryptonymic, liminal expression; re: cryptomimesis as normally limited to ghosts by Castricano, a binary of canon or camp like 1s and 0s across a computational Great Sequence.

However, there’s a different way to look at things regarding liminal expression: the composite image and composite bodies, which, in being holistic, we’ll now examine in tandem; i.e., as a cryptomimetic matter of demonic camp (of writing with demons) that—all the same—speaks to revenge against rape having happened in the past. All of it becomes something to camp, as we have said, but this camping takes many forms, beyond Scott’s marriage of the Ancient Romance and modern novel (each considerably more hauntologized than when Walpole weighed them). Some—like Kite, below—are more quotidian in their exploration of rape as a symptom of capital dressed up as “ancient” robotic; others are more Romantic, Ancient, magical (our segue into the occult).

Having looked at Scott’s cryptomimesis, in the Alien franchise, let’s quickly unpack Kite‘s rape interrogation and the larger cryptomimesis at work, do a short hermeneutics reprise, then conclude “Making Monsters” with some broader points of study regarding Shelley’s Promethean Quest (for fatal knowledge)!

Cryptomimesis through Demonic Camp and Rape Play (feat. Kite)

The specialization, divergence and sheer multiplicity can cover up various trends. Therefore, composite images/collages can help identify various schools in connection with broader monster-creation practices. Less of a chronological sequence or lineage of ghosts, the composite image/collage is more how monsters can be collected, arranged and analyzed in terms of a likeness to one another amid various differences—monster pastiche, rape and revenge, rapture and release: playing with forbidden toys to infringe on taboo subjects speaking to current realities (exhibit 44b2)! We’ll look at that in a second. First, let’s narrow it down to Yasuomi Umetsu’s Kite!

For all its gravity, Kite is surprisingly cartoonish and silly. Such data-as-damage can be silly and fun, but it can also be simultaneously serious in its camp, mid-cryptomimesis (with Japan haunted by fascism and American occupation): “hair of the dog” helping us loosen up, but also remember what we’ve forgotten/pushed out! We laugh at the madness, embodying it in kawaii/kowai forms we consume, and voyeurism/exhibitionism we play with (sins unto themselves)! Whores getting by in a man’s world are so often transgressive, but also made “robotic” by men romancing their rape out of revenge (and which the whore seeks revenge in turn): the warrior assassin in the whore’s getup (similar to naughty nuns, but also nun assassins, exhibit 48b), a monster made to kill its false father! “Did He who made the Lamb make thee?” Again, it’s healthy to ask questions about the origins of monsters; just be ready for the answer to shock you:

 (exhibit 44b1: States can only exist through lies and force. Sooner or later, someone seeks revenge. To it, any nation-state has secrets, generally of murder and rape. Some take the form of ghosts without bodies. Others are boogeymen of a more streetwise nature, having their victims under their thumbs versus coming back to haunt them. It can be fantasies of disempowerment tied to one lunatic, a cataclysm and catacombs, or some combination of these same features riling up intense emotions of master/slave. Hostages experience them in ways that can make us submit and obey, or to assassinate our captors. Same difference. The Pygmalion myth is rooted in master/apprentice, but also pedophilia, thus domination, lies and rape standing in cryptomimetically for the state-as-mendacious, personified.

To it, Umetsu’s animated Cyberpunk noir, Kite, turns the Pygmalion fantasy on its head, marrying Galatea/the token Amazon to Oliver Twist; i.e., by speaking to a girl, Sawa, whose family is killed by an evil gangster, Akai, only to have him kidnap the daughter and turn her into a doll-like assassin/sex slave; i.e., less a “natural-born killer” and more someone with a talent for survival [the disassociation mechanism] who responds well to Pavlovian [robotic] conditioning! Their hellish bond is illustrated by the giving not of a collar or ring, but a pair of black-and-red earrings filled with the blood of her dead parents!

The plight is liminal, our heroine doing the master’s dirty work [a gun stowed inside her schoolgirl’s lunchbox, much like a switchblade] until she eventually works her way back to him; i.e., killing his men and finally the man himself. Shortly before this, though, she must “prove” her loyalty to him—hardly a fair test, but one that she endures as women classically do: a sex object raped by men at every waking moment. Per the cryptonymy process, deceptions sit within deceptions. They cry to be heard and so often fall on deaf ears; but look to stories like Kite and you will find Medusa waiting for you, her scream anything but silent!

“Bred to kill, not to care,” so are token women classically molded and shaped like clay into weapons [the line between predator and prey a thin one; re: the xenomorph]. Sawa is once more taken against her will [above] by someone who treats her as clay without feeling. So does he underestimate his prey, thinking his power is beyond reproach. In turn, the heroine plays along while her boyfriend, Oburi, is forced to watch. As Akai asserts his dominance, Sawa locks eyes with Oburi [both of them red, denoting shared trust issues]. It’s a ruse, but they both have to grit and bear it. “One more time,” they tell themselves. They suffer in silence, no strangers to segregation, pimping and genocide [while Sawa occasionally tells her rapist what he wants to hear]. The paradox of fantasy is how larger-than-life stories speak to everyday occurrences suffered by whores at the hands of cops/pimps, making the other submit for a change; i.e., while topping from below, but also while doling out street justice of a more classically “masc sort”: with bullets. Rape is all she knows, so it’s all he gets. Karma’s a bitch, a phallic woman!

Not long after, Sawa has her revenge against the smug warlord/crooked cop; i.e., camping the rape fantasy in dead seriousness while staking the vampire master with hot lead, she takes him apart like clay! The pimp has no charm but what she led him to think he had, topping him from below! But he taught her what she in turn revisits upon him, disabusing him of any notion that he is a god. Mortal, after all! Keeping with the Promethean Quest, such voices are powerful and vital to recovery from abuse, insofar as they illustrate male authority figures as corrupt, venal and ultimately mortal in ways we victims of state abuse—often sex workers and/or child soldiers—can overcome; i.e., by “playing along” on parallel currents of power and rape fantasy. In doing so, we break their hearts and their backs, giving as good as we get to one-up them, thus demonically target capital through hearts and minds pulled inside-out for all to see. Fate is a cruel mistress; a pissed-off, indestructible whore with an axe to grind is even more so!)

Sawa is queen of the board, yet remains one piece pawning the king. Specifically this “messy chessboard” presents disparate examples that can identify a larger pattern over space and time once assembled and studied across the surface of the image (re: Segewick). The dialectical-material pattern we’re holistically considering is of standardized forms of popular linguistic devices, whose figurative and literal co-functions in everyday parlance have seemingly been excised in favor of them as a simple product to consume. But their resistance to that standardization can still be gleaned through a gradient of suggestion—parallel examples with marginal cosmetic variations whose deeper context must be intuitively grasped through taught instruction: thinking about Gothic art as a mode of colonized expression. Such made-for-profit occupants say something about the current material world that can be transformed and led away from through similar language; i.e., “perceptive” pastiche and liminal subversions.

Gothic Hermeneutics (a reprise)

Let’s talk about that, for a moment—i.e., from a hermeneutic standpoint (five pages)—then wrap up with some broader points about Shelley’s tragic quest exported far and wide.

(exhibit 44b2: artist, middle: Olivia De Berardinis; lower-middle: Sideshow Collectibles; lower-right: Sean Kyle)

The Communist usage of Gothic theories contends with the material world as something to reillustrate in vivid, colloquial terms: monster puns, pastiche, and visual metaphors that, as “ghosts,” get at the essence of things through a mimetic exchange—one that keeps track of the underlying commentary through exchange (and trauma) as something to personify. My specialty is collages; e.g., exhibit 44b2 (above) actually being the first of its kind that I designed in December 2022; i.e., for Sex Positivity as a nascent book series, which promptly grew into literally hundreds and hundreds of follow-ups. “It’s alive!” indeed!

This goes beyond the monster to include the person (or aggregate) that made it. To that, the Bride of Frankenstein (above) has already been drawn many, many times by artists who are for or against the state to variable, liminal degrees. As an egregore, her composite status—her literal form, the proliferation of copycats and liminal occupation between them all—represents a complicated system of tension that exists between social-sexual values and linguo-material conditions that, in the same breath, are creatively suspicious about the material world; i.e., as filled with “old” counterfeit monsters: the bourgeois double/fatal portrait. This includes zombies, vampires, ghosts and other supernatural variants, combined with non-supernatural, human variants (doubles, counterfeits, traitors, false friends, long-lost relatives, evil stepmothers, rapacious monks, etc)—all collectively denoting an untrustworthy alien presence. Through a bourgeois Superstructure, the elite uses fearful artifice to conceal a variety of systemic, counterfeit abuses: profitable likenesses. It’s disarmingly easy to get lost in the sheer bulk of material produced—with all that “poster pastiche” scrambling to recreate the past and “see”; re: darkness visible and allegory disguised as “mere play.”

During the glut, then, it helps hermeneutically to think of monsters as code for academic terms we can then synthesize. Zombies represent brain death, but also abjection and the state of exception. Conveyed through an endless stream of images, consider how the Bride of Frankenstein seemingly becomes a pile of cheap, countless copies that one could do virtually anything with, but under Capitalism tends to follow certain compelled trends. These trends do not naturally announce themselves on individual viewings; they must be exposed by exhibiting them as a collection. This takes time, effort, and careful participation between instructors and instructees—the teacher and the student, but also workers and labor as something to de-alienize and reunite with, in the modern world.

Except, in doing so, the marginalized variation can seem anesthetizing and opaque; i.e., having as little to say about something while being still a slave to the grind, keeping up with the endless material feed about a genre that was cliché two centuries ago, but under late-stage, neoliberal Capitalism has robbed the monster’s critical power to expose the abuses that happen to sex workers behind the scenes and onstage. So cryptonymy points to abject things the initiated can recognize.

In other words, the cake is a lie—a complicated sex-coercive lie, in canonical forms. Zombie Sombra (next page) isn’t just a pretty “zombie” face and fat piece of undead ass to pimp out. But various pieces of “sexy zombie” media—i.e., those created by sex workers while stealing from them (which is all that profit is)—will, when uncritically consumed, “eat your brain”: in service to Capitalism and its regular workplace abuses, historically-materially inflicted on workers whose brains have already been partially or fully affected. As a material object, the Bride isn’t doing anything “by herself”; her complex status—as an active, visually and ontologically ambiguous-ambivalent linguistic factor—functions inside an ongoing living exchange: what we think about her and sex work, in relation to the Bride’s chosen monstrous, human and sexualized components. Our hermeneutic approach must consider that in relation to other things going on all at once, back and forth. Thus the collages; they’re a good shorthand to holistic praxis.

“How people talk” includes how people learn, whether in bourgeois or proletarian ways, mid-opposition; i.e., the playful, creatively “grey” thought processes that happen cryptomimetically behind and between commonplace terms and materials (whatever’s on hand, lending an improvised quality to how most people create or think, be those newfound devices vintage or retro). This includes thinking about popular symbols (of trauma) in relation to the material world and those inside it; i.e., as already having a biased, heavy influence from the structure itself as collage-like: conditioned to consume everything in uncritical, thus unthinking ways that keep you divided and stupid, thus alienated from nature, your labor and from each other. “No man is an island”; forming connections is vital towards addressing Capitalism’s structural, generational effect on individual worker brains still part of a large whole—the former’s lack of connection inside Capitalism being what performs the “lobotomy.” Menticide is menticide, betrayal is betrayal.

So, having shorthand, placeholder terms like “lobotomy”—and hermeneutic devices like cryptomimesis and collage—helps activism work; i.e., not just to describe this ontological complexity inside a larger socio-sexual web (thus effect experience through relative monster language) but to frame sex-coercive abuse as something to resist according to exhibit 44b2’s deeper context among individual examples we can study in focus should we wish to (a fourth surprise exhibit): Blizzard’s zombifying thirst-trap take on the Bride of Frankenstein, with Sombra. “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love, Blizzard’s love (necrophilia) is rotten to the core!” SO do canonical sex symbols demonize rape as a commodify to pilot, avatar-style:

(exhibit 45a: Artist: top-left: Nibelart; top-middle: Krys Decker; top-right: Persephone van der Waard; middle: NeoArtCore; bottom-right: Demincatfish; source, bottom-left.)

We’ll scrutinize Blizzard’s corporate “zombie” treatment of the whored-out action princess, in Volume Three. For now, I merely want to highlight the canonical standard. Blizzard aren’t encouraging literal necrophilia, here; they’re pimps, selling people a canonical standard of what people naturally tend to like and unnaturally tend to dislike—sex and the monstrous-feminine; a fascination with the barbaric, reimagined past; and jokes, laughter and camp/schlock; but also music associating these things with drugs and/or drug-like altered states (“rock ‘n roll” being 1950s African American slang for “sex”); and all of the above combined: as incessant recreations of regular social-sexual exchanges and critical techniques like parody and irony giving sanctioned invitations to indulge in ways that are allowed—i.e., standardized for profit’s sake, then disguised as genuine creative expression/uncontrolled opposition that doesn’t compel sex worker abuse and consumer pacification. It’s a sham, these “corpo” monster girl pin-ups meant to be consumed as canon, which “zombifies” the consumer in ways that reliably lead to corporate profit (thus rape). So does Zombie Capitalism tacitly condone worker exploitation, both inside the workplace and out.

The stackable presence of sanitized, mass-produced variants likewise indicate a presence of sex-positive interest and repressed desires to experiment; i.e., where sex (and urges related to sex, often through monstrous language) are happening on the regular in ways that are barred not behind one “X” to solve for, but three in a row. Triple “protection,” thrice the exploitation and subterfuge, the alien/unknown becoming something to make or otherwise concern ourselves with for a variety of reasons: to tame wild nature/the fire of the gods as monstrous-feminine, or to wield it for the forces of one side or the other while still a little savage; e.g., the Powerpuff Girls, below, fighting for their makeshift solo dad playing god; i.e., similar to how Artemis and other goddess-grade daddy’s girls might kneel before Zeus (versus attacking him, Medusa-style): the inventor weaponizing Pinocchio, Galatea, Adam, Lilith, Mega Man, or whoever else, as little Amazonian whores to make in a lab, then uphold “Western values”; i.e., suggesting a superhuman design to replicate, harness and capitalize on nature-as-monstrous-feminine by a “benevolent” mentor mastering the Fates (classically three, with “chemical X” being the alien power of sex, technology and the gods, birthing little monsters/subjugated Amazons[34]; re: Scott’s black goo/dark devil sperm. It’s basically a really fucked-up version of the baby and the stork).

So, business-as-usual, then. The camp lies in making the blind parody of canon perceptive again, which generally happens after the metaphors have died: sexless wizards making monster babies to avoid thinking beyond Capitalism!

Granted, only academics or art nerds will spell this out (with pride), but doing so is tremendously important because it teaches people to grasp language intuitively when thinking about art critically. Armed with these seemingly magical abilities, workers may begin to holistically address, mid-hermeneutic, “how people talk” in relation to the current material world; i.e., where people are trying to say, see and understand things that are naturally and unnaturally confusing: using Gothic shorthand and metaphor to comment on the complex, ongoing relationship between people and canonical media, they begin to actively and intelligently think through creative means according to things that normally go unsaid spoken in dead versions of themselves.

This includes how people normally engage with and think about sexuality as taught by sex-coercive media; it includes workplace abuses that are covered up, ignored or neglected in favor of pacifying media. The root of the problem, then, is Capitalism “leaving things out,” alienating workers from their labor as an abject extension of themselves: the material arrangement that allows for canonical versions to be pushed onto people’s eyeballs and into their brains without encouraging critical thought at all. Sex becomes alien, powerful, fearsome canon.

These abuses can be challenged, of course, but this starts by changing how people see, thus think about and respond to, Capitalist Realism through Gothically sexual media (and by extension regular sexual media beholden to the same theories): as something to buy, sell and create in a playful, fun way without leaving anything out of the larger dialectic. The whole must be studied and understood if we are to grasp its deeper workings using surface level things; e.g., Original Sin; i.e., the rotting technology of dying empires feeling more and more magical as those cushioned by civilization fall in love with regressive fantasies (and thrills): as a paradoxical means of escape from present abuses, the ghost of the counterfeit able to reverse abjection, during a given crisis (which the state is always in).

Something to bear in mind, then, is that “science” and the prospect of discovery has historically remained a bourgeois excuse to exploit workers and the natural world; i.e., for the sake of perceived “progress” through industry and economic prosperity shouted from on high by those with material advantage (which Victor does, playing god through natural philosophy to demonstrate his mastery over nature by creating unnatural life). This superiority (and its much-touted progression) is a bald-faced lie, one we must bravely study by using the Promethean Quest as a means of developing Capitalism into Communism. Frankenstein is arguably the first science fiction novel, and—as Shelley happily demonstrates—gave birth to so many monsters as to need collages to catalog even a portion of them to study. On the surface of these, its Communist drive (spectres of Marx) goes hand-in-hand with the Gothic’s love for monsters and mad science; i.e., a “madness” in duality, insofar as state science madly exterminates nature for profit, and which the state sees science for nature as “mad” because universal emancipation threatens their bottom line. The state needs profit, thus genocide, to exist, our existence both required and fed on by dead labor (re: Marx).

The Gothic, since Frankenstein, considers rape as a matter of revenge against the rapist; i.e., capital rapes nature before, during and after birth, often targeting the mind as something to invade back into itself.

To that, Victor is the first mover of Shelley’s novel, and a stark reminder of the fallibility of those on either side of power imbalance: bourgeois hand-wringing about rogue technology (workers) inside a past-future ruined civilization occupied without masters, but instead mindless furious slaves empowered by vengeful gods (nature). Onstage and off, Capitalism pushes genocide to the frontiers it dominates; this final frontier is the end of Capitalism viewed, by Lovecraft onwards, as his cosmic-nihilist approach to Capitalist Realism—all to spite Utopia as a non-starter treated as a given, were it not for those pesky wrenches in the works: the terrifying realization that technology (re: workers) survive after the elite die off prematurely (from slave revolt). “Rome” is subsequently pushed into outer space, where Lovecraft—a bonafide fascist and all-around piece of shit (re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Mandy, Homophobia and the Problem of Futile Revenge,” 2024)—loudly mourns its tragic loss/fears its returning doomsday (the liminal hauntology of war) vis-à-vis “monsters from the Id” (re, Forbidden Planet [1956]: Persephone van der Waard’s “Revisiting The Modern Prometheus through Astronoetics,” 2024).

In turn, writers like Scott ran with that idea, doing so to dogmatize and profit off a fascist bastardizing of Shelley’s pro-labor projections; i.e., by demonizing and weaponizing the working class, but also using state devices to pirate power and seize control of the space around them (re: Radcliffe). It speaks to the circular nature of the problem, and of the tendency to view present issues retrojected backwards into the imaginary past: the blindly furious Medusa threatening state shift, a hungry whore ravished by centuries of abuse suddenly eating us alive. Promethean spaces challenge profit (and its concealment) through found “ancient” documents (re: “Revisiting“); i.e., by fighting fire with Promethean fire/darkness visible; e.g., Scott’s Derelict, Lovecraft’s city of the old ones, or Shelley’s Creature.

All the same, it speaks to genuinely ancient struggles[35] that predate capital and modern science, yet are haunted by the anachronistic injection of science as mad: we have entered the world of the gods, but they are insane and ruled by the system housing them as empowered to destroy for the purpose of profit. The story is tragic, but productive and vital—a profound testament to criminogenesis and the invention of terrorism; i.e., Capitalism is the Great Destroyer—a machine that turns workers into small automatons that give or receive as it demands (so often, people look at the Creature and think it’s a zombie; while not untrue, it’s also a machine).

When being raped, we must tire our attackers while—to some frightening degree—being unable to stop them; i.e., how we, in the present, will not live to see a day without Capitalism, without rape! Instead, that will come past our lifetime, according to what we leave behind pointing to the future in past language: giant children who warred in ways that inspire future action swept up in the hypnotic language of the imaginary past and its familiar faces’ fatal nostalgia (the haunted house extra compelling if it exists, paradoxically, far away from home)! Such camp is always a bit absurd/surreal. So is rape, more broadly, an out-of-body experience that feels trapped in particular veins of fabricated existence (the disassociation machine): Ozymandias looks like Prometheus. As we’ll see when we look at Radcliffe, better to learn from perceptive pastiche than blind parody, but you often start with blind parody (and statues with blind eyeballs, left).

Such hermeneutic cryptomimesis—inauspiciously venerating and exiling Great Machines, mise-en-abyme—might seem counterproductive, and yet so many workers under Capitalist Realism cannot conceptualize the present harm being done without doing so; i.e., the dying Ozymandian corpse of Capitalism, versus the Communist Numinous prematurely aborted in the womb and haunting the venue. The historical-material cycles on loop show how these devices can be manipulated, which requires a careful process of detection, mid-camp (one whose liminal investigations, we’ll pointedly return to with Alien, during “Giger’s Xenomorph”).

For now, we’ll spend the remainder of “Making Demons” (eleven pages) going over some of the broader points tied to Shelley’s Promethean critique (and shift gradually towards supernatural occult demons, as we do).

Some Broader Points on Shelley’s Promethean Quest (for Fatal Knowledge)

Mary Shelley was—among other things—a curious bitch; i.e., thirsty for knowledge as forbidden, but also critiquing stories with a similar “come hell or high water” drive. One of those drives remains technology as traveling critique, namely astronoetics, or the astral projection of Earth’s colonial gaze onto so-called “other worlds”; i.e., under the guise of benevolent colonization of “empty” territory (a common trope in older futurist media whitewashing genocide): the humans are the UFOs, or presented as Ozymandian likenesses/dead godly giants to look upon and tremble at while, all the same, going boldly where no one has supposedly gone before. But they have gone before (re: Alien), Capitalism burying the procedure to repeat it again and again despite the overarching presence of nature’s rage. It gentrifies and decays on loop according to worker appetites the state cultivates.

Just as Clarke’s law presents advanced technologies as indistinguishable from magic, the inverse is also true: dated, retro-future ancient magics being a metaphor for science and advanced technologies imagined once-upon-a-time, before they actually existed. This technophobic tradition was cemented by Shelley in 1818, becoming its own kind of Gothic “archaeology” tied to retro-future castles, but also suits of armor and ghost ships as things to reinvent for didactic purposes; i.e., to communicate hidden lessons about Cartesian abuses that would have been stamped out if said in non-fantastical, everyday language. Derelict and floating in the void, these Gothic abstractions can be studied far away from prying eyes, then looted for fatal knowledge that can help prevent future disasters from taking place.

(artist: Grandeduc)

While freeing all sex workers using general Gothic sex-positivity is what Gothic Communism is all about, it targets the source of abusive conditioning that fashions those who grow to see themselves as “better” than the world around them: the heroic (monomyth) tale as increasingly scientific/Cartesian. Both conceal an expressly military function that, through Gothic displacement, can be openly expressed through the Gothic chronotope as something people aren’t totally aware they’re even looking at; i.e., Scott’s liminal space as littered with the symbols of dynastic primacy and hereditary rites; e.g., the suits of armor on board the Nostromo (itself a flying “space castle” made undead by the Derelict as a ghost ship)—one of which Ripley puts on to “armor” her virtue (a Radcliffean concept) from the cosmically framed dark rapist.

Just as Shelley took the heroic quest and made it Promethean, my entire book communicates complex things in monstrous-poetic shorthand by identifying the Promethean Quest as a critical response and means of subverting the monomyth. The same goes for any myth, Sex Positivity gradually trusting the reader to rely on informed emotional intuition using literal and figurative language. By helping them play with said language and working out different solutions, the subversion occurs “within the text” (re: Derrida); i.e., according to a natural-material world as something to critique with Gothic theories, mid-synthesis.

All the while, the book assumes readers can gradually learn to think empathetically/self-defensively on their feet and toes about Gothic media and sex work. As such, it gradually eases them into a critical-thinking process to compound, practice and develop within yourself according to the material world—i.e., compound learning in relation to compound phobias that, when analyzed through sex-positive, iconoclastic art under Gothic Communism, give up the hidden, Promethean truth about Capitalism: the colonial abuses of the hidden dead and their lingering desire for revenge. These suddenly spring forth when foolishly brought back to life, invoking the weapons of the past for two basic purposes: liberation or exploitation; i.e., the Radcliffean scapegoat is generally summoned to scare the middle class into passivity—fear towards technology if placed in the wrong hands; e.g., Cameron’s Terminator rooted in present barbarities dressed up in retro-future semi-magical language (there being little difference between a T-800[36], below, and a walking corpse, save one is revived by magic, through and through, and the other by technology indistinguishable from magic).

(source: Persephone van der Waard’s “ Vintage to Retro: An FPS Q & A series – James Towne, Tech-Com 2029, part 2,” 2021)

Resurrecting insurrection applies to rememory as a kind of “forgetting” that hurts when revived; i.e., its apocalypse the natural consequence of such a large system of exploitation: not everyone knows what happens in far-off places, and as we have seen with Victor and his ilk, the cost of endless profit is often dressed up as “bold Romantic discovery.” A desire to know and dissect the world leads to Earth being routinely treated like an unthinking object without rights; over time, this trauma manifests in stories that hint at the unspeakable abuses taking place more and more, over centuries, inside an expanding hegemony the oppressed come to despise. Time is a circle, which requires circular solutions. And yet, the biggest lie of “Golden Age” science fiction is how those “solving problems” in outer space (with linear stabbing methods and ideologies) are “solving” anything at all; they’re cops on the frontier as forgotten about and rediscovered in ways that are re-penetrated and scowled at, mid-intromission. For them and the state, doing so occupies and generates a system of showing and concealment; i.e., where police operatives appearing as workers can stochastically torture nature’s secrets out of, again (the profit motive). For us, Medusa’s dark womb is a place to work: reversing abjection (and terror/counterterror) anisotropically during the cryptonymy process.

Again, this lineage is generally viewed backward, a ghoulish love for the imaginary past leading to a confrontation with strange modes of communication—of viewing science less as a modern, dignified practice and more an increasingly brutal, backwards enterprise tinged with superstition, magic, rape, madness, revenge and torture (which pregnancy classically is[37]). As a restorative means of expressing trauma, these older modes of communication can be reclaimed, but the journey is still stressful because the horrors cannot be disentangled from the solution. To dealienate ourselves and the natural world, we must eat the cannibals (the rich) by understanding how Capitalism alienates using demonic poetics.

Even here, though, the line between science and the occult is not clear-cut. For one, the summoning can happen through an obvious demonic ritual, but also through the possession or taking of someone’s body or soul through an alien, unknown force. In the latter example, this seemingly happens without an explicit contract or ritual taking place (versus ghostly possessions, which are linked to a graveyard or murder site)—i.e., the punishment of trespass, of going where one shouldn’t. In either case, forbidden knowledge is gained in relation to the demons’ own bodies, genders and sexualities as incredibly fluid and bizarre.

As we shall see, next, this makes the occult demon—however absurd and profound—a form of taboo human expression inextricably linked to everyday bodies and events: sex, coloring one’s hair and wearing clothes as performative factors, but also identifying with things beyond our physical limitations or current understandings of the world as it is provided to us by those in power. It’s a bloodbath, one our hysteria can double! Satan’s menses! It’s in my mouth!

During our own exploitation, then, doubts about this world can start to emerge, which align with a natural drive; i.e., to satisfy human curiosity in the face of ambiguous, vaso-vagal danger or the menacing unknown—of being lied to by authority figures. At its simplest, then, the Promethean Quest is a harmful search for knowledge; its hard-won knowledge frequently becomes associated with transformative, intensely ritualized tortures in wildly popular stories.

In turn, these can link to colonial guilt as buried and far off, but somehow close at hand; i.e., the colonial territory as dead; e.g., literally Dead Space (2008) punishing the worker stuck inside in the imperial machine with Medusa. Forced there by greedy companies, stories like Dead Space, Alien, 2001 and others, operate—on par with survival horror at large—to mirror colonial abuse, but also doom exacted upon status-quo laborers sensing Imperialism come home to empire while on its far-off frontiers: a black, “ancient, derelict” monolith (the Medusa’s fat ass) vibrating cryptonymically with the ghost of the counterfeit’s ethnocentric alienation from ongoing brutality.

Per Poe, Conrad, Lovecraft and Scott, etc, it becomes something to fetishize and pimp out of revenge against nature (antagonize and put cheaply to work for fear of nature’s revenge; re: the “slave revolt” gaslight). Per Hogel, it becomes something to dance with, shoving swords into one another like stage fencers in on the joke (re: Titus Andronicus, suggested above by the Adams Family). The joke is rape, hoisting those with privilege on their own petards through the same dire implications (white/male or otherwise—with Shelley’s story going beyond men like Victor to speak to anyone working for the state/inside the Man Box; re: token Amazons the likes of which Radcliffe motivated to punch down against nature with).

Keeping with capital, and returning to Frankenstein‘s Promethean Quest, older orders are eclipsed by new ones having evolved from them and—conjured up as past—become a dark spell to fall under all over again (re: Punter). Said spell is canonically made to abject capital’s raping of nature (or trend of said abuses) onto a dupe; re: Victor learning he’s a failure, but one trying to get himself back in the West’s good graces by shattering his golem.

Shelley’s story is—among many other things—an excommunication for us to peer at and make our own conclusions. A popular one is the beauty of the dark Satanic site; i.e., when compared to the West and its presumably undecayed vestiges, one where the presence of decay reverses abjection, Imperialism coming home to empire. Nature is “ancient” and dark a) because the state needs it to be, but also b) because worker counterterror hits its hardest through the same ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., a demon to work its black magics on Western brains by infiltrating them not just in quotidian spheres (the Creature looks human at a glance), but in the boundaries of imagination populated by so many workers escaping real life: space is dead, the rogue, runaway technology seeking posthuman revenge (e.g., the shapeshifting xenomorph stupidly tough like Victor’s Creature [to better colonize foreign and domestic frontiers with] but also Cameron’s infiltrator demon-machine terminators, especially the “liquid metal” T-1000)!

For starters—and keeping with canonical predations on nature framed as “alien” by state Orientalism—the tortures and torturers of demonic rituals (the ghosts of Cultural and Imperialism as much as Spectres of Marx) often hail from dark, otherworldly zones of seemingly magic demons; i.e., cryptonymic vanishing points; e.g., desolated jungles or crater-marked moonscapes whose forbidden sites of colonial torture rest on native lands. These artificial wildernesses, in turn, have been cordoned off, guiltily viewed through a ghost of the counterfeit that displaces and disassociates the abuse being told. Relayed to an unwitting set of accomplices, the audience is “tortured” by identifying with a Western proxy lying on the slab: an altar of sacrifice waiting inside a giant torture site where the colonized (tortured themselves in the past) patiently take their revenge; i.e., like spiders, slowly torturing their unwitting prey caught in castle-sized webs.

Yet, this Gothic chronotope is hardly a simple case of spiders eating flies; it concerns a transgenerational curse—i.e., the mass exploitation of the natural world and its undeveloped inhabitants by self-proclaimed “superiors”: the lords of the West. By stumbling inside, the non-native/naïve explorers (often simply workers or soldiers, themselves) suddenly find themselves not just trapped inside an angry gravesite of continual exploitation (one they have, until now, turned a blind eye towards); they horrifyingly discover themselves unable to escape its rage outside its borders. No matter how far they go, its trauma will follow them back into the modern world; e.g., Ripley and the xenomorph. There, this anger—like the Creature from Frankenstein—will torture them to the ends of the universe, a golem that never tires or forgets: “the axe forgets, the tree remembers.” Rememory threatens our ascension, coming together brick-by-brick as Great Destroyer!

This liminality further pins between ironic and unironic forms of torture. The phrase can be defined as an attempt to cause physical or mental harm—to terrorize and deprive someone of their agency and their rights as a worker and a person (or to commit acts of revenge for having these rights revoked and inflicted; i.e., the “What comes around, goes around!” delivery of vengeful torture that the Creature delivers against Victor Frankenstein, and similar characters and stories); re (from “A Note about Rape,” 2024): “‘rape’ meaning [for our purposes] ‘to disempower someone or somewhere—a person, culture, or place—in order to harm them,’ generally through fetishizing and alienizing acts or circumstances/socio-material conditions that target the mind, body and/or spirit” (source).

Toys—and the boxes that house them—become invaluable towards speaking out, in small/mise-en-abyme; i.e., by acting out our desire to harm our abusers, but also expose them as predatory and false. The ability to create things in dualistic, material opposition to state doubles is vital, then—if only because it gives us a planet-sized supply of building materials (clay and earth) to ascribe with dead metaphors; i.e., things that can be given whatever meaning and modular qualities we want while camping canonical forms and their unironic tortures. It’s the perfect medium for a pedagogy of the oppressed: reclaiming our demonized humanity through an aesthetic/shared shadowy stage we take back; i.e., during ludo-Gothic BDSM playing with dead things, but also forbidden, demonic torture speaking to our own rape/liberation in paradoxical acts of sight through blindness, humiliation and pain! Never trust a skinny cook! Trust sin as an ironic, reclamatory diet rocking your world with planetary booties; i.e., Gaia’s dumper! Stare and tremble at genocide in small! Now it has its revenge!

(artist: Stephanie Rodriguez)

The whore’s paradox is Medusa being alive and dead, already made when making new things; “monstrous-feminine” amounts to anything exploited/extirpated by settler-colonial forces that, as whores, can use their Aegis to exert Promethean power onto state pimps (“Who’s the vermin now, assholes?”). Moving onto “Summoning Demons,” then, we’ll start with the more canonical, “civilized” tortures—i.e., the domestic world and its Radcliffean inhabitants being unironically invaded by dark forces from an ancient Somewhere Else—before moving progressively deeper into nature’s dark, wild and unknown recesses/pleasures.

While the dark forest is a common Gothic threshold in the literal Gothic period, aka the Renaissance—e.g., Dante’s Inferno, 1321—it was followed by Milton and Walpole into the Neo-Gothic period of the 1790s, Shelley’s 1818 magnum opus, and 200+ years of fiction that, from the canonical Western perspective, demonize any foreign, alien, unknown lands resisting colonialization, or are occupied by perceived greater forces than Mankind vis-à-vis Cartesian thought, mid-oppression:

• Mary Shelley’s foreboding Mount Blanc in Frankenstein, 1818
• Poe’s foray towards the South Pole in Arthur Gordon Pym (with cannibals), 1838
• Joseph Conrad’s doomed, racist presentation of Africa—as a dark, savage continent (from a white man’s perspective) in Heart of Darkness, 1899
• Lovecraft demonizing the unknown with an “ancient aliens” flavor in At the Mountains of Madness, 1936
• Ridley Scott’s dark planetoid surface being investigated by exploited space truckers in Alien, 1979
• James Cameron’s doomed, Vietnam-esque colony being avenged by American colonial space marines in Aliens, 1986
• Nintendo’s Metroid, 1986, and many, many spiritual, cartographic, neoliberal successors (re: “Mazes and Labyrinths” vis-à-vis the FPS, Metroidvania, and survival horror) in the 21st century

Gothic Communism’s daring foray into this sinful “land of darkness” isn’t to demonize ourselves (“Tis an unweeded garden grown to seed”), but to reclaim nature-as-monstrous-feminine from the state; i.e., from its unironically xenophobic, us-versus-them treatment and linguo-material features, taking back these things from all colonizers across space and time: the Enlightenment as surviving into the present, but touched through a Western, fearful/guilty fascination with the past after being alienated from it (which, again, Hogle correctly notes, operates through the ghost of the counterfeit as wedded to the process of abjection; re, Dave West’s “Implementation of Gothic Themes in the Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit”:

In “The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Process of Abjection,” Jerrold E. Hogle argues that the eighteenth-century gothic emergence from fake imitation of fake work is the foundation of what is defined as modern gothic today. He maintains that Horace Walpole’s 1765 The Castle of Otranto, which is considered as the groundwork of the modern Gothic story, is built on a false proclamation that the novel was an Italian manuscript writing by a priest. […] Hogle argues that modern Gothic is grounded in fakery. [In turn,] Hogle’s observation of the history of The Castle of Otranto forms the basis for understanding the concept of counterfeit as a result of the abjection process) [source].

Communism—specifically Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism—camps canon through Gothic poetics. As such, the deliberate ironies of iconoclastic torture during ludo-Gothic BDSM follow the same call of the void—first, through the raw poetic creation of demons during magic ceremonies; then, Radcliffe’s Pavlovian brand of exquisite “tortures” acting out liminal, not-quite-there-yet BDSM that plays with demons (as hidden, per Cameron’s refrain, behind jingoistic, militarily optimistic/neocon xenophobia fearing murderous cuckoo imposters); then onto Shelley and ultimately my work holistically and repeatedly retrospecting all of this!

We’ve already looked at Shelley and Scott. Now we’ll look at Radcliffe’s flawed notions of performative torture (and wasted genius selling out for conservative means, the imposter indoctrinating the nation’s youth to defend the state from its own exploited labor force); i.e., of canonical torture versus exquisite “torture” being something I took far beyond anywhere Radcliffe was willing (or able) to go. Yes, Radcliffe was a cop who wrote from ignorance and lacked Shelley’s radical nature; her elements of genius still contributed to my work and ludo-Gothic BDSM camping “rape.” We’ll put her corpse once more on the slab, dissecting its probative value before diving headlong inside during the subsequent chapter’s frank exploration of trans, intersex and non-binary expression in the 21st century.

The state (and its oft-undercover cops) are straight—will copy anything in bad faith to survive (re: DARVO and obscurantism). As a fundamentally ancient, ever-present force, non-gender-conformity haunts the capitalist world’s heteronormative order by subverting the usual, canonical taming of nature by white, cis-het men; re: who see it as dark, female and chaotic (with TERFs going to bat for them, in many neoconservative tales). To canonically call something “ancient, alien and unknown” means to exotify and segregate it for police violence, which rebels must reclaim on the stages of persecution; i.e., while the cops are called on us/the vigilantes pointed in our directions. It’s militarized, tokenized regression in a dated, retro-future ethnocentrism indicative of state collapse, which Gothic media crosses over into: penetrate the alien, then ask for snuggles.

Now that we’ve explored examples of the manmade demon, studied composite images of them as a way of identifying monstrous patterns through poster/monster pastiche and “mash,” and outlined a ghastly heritage of colonial abuses told through the Promethean Quest as a fearful voyage into the ancient unknown, let’s point this gaze even farther backwards into the imaginary past. To that, let’s examine the history of summoned, occult demons and the forbidden knowledge they offer during expressly magical iterations of the Promethean Quest and its famous tortures beyond Victor’s pity party). This includes the stacked, sexy detectives chasing this power down in “explained supernatural” environs; i.e., performed as such; e.g., Rachel Storms, below, aping Radcliffe, per her latter-day resurrections: Velma as “hardboiled”—caught between damsels, detectives and sex demons at large! Such cryptomimesis might seem “dated” or “stuck”; their camp can yield tremendous, fortress-sized powers to rival any cop, token or not!

As something for the state to harvest, then, we humanize the harvest to portray the state as inhumane! Nature and its demons’ cryptonymy are generally thicc, often as not (and andro/gynodiverse, in sexually descriptive/culturally appreciative forms)! Glasses aren’t just to help us weird nerds read; they’re cum shields for stacked cuties!

(artist: Rachel Storms)

As we go, the heroine’s virgin/whore paradox also applies to a common problem under Capitalism I will try once more to unpack and express, surveying here territories whose gratuitous cryptonymy we have previously surveyed; re (from Volume One):

(exhibit 11b1b: Artist, right: Nya Blu. We all have skulls inside us. According to the Gothic tradition inside the Imperial Core, inheritance anxiety historically-materially communicates internalized trauma as suggested within workers but expressed according to their surface-level appearance in the material world; i.e., who, regardless of their origins, will be judged and consumed based how they appear relative to a cultural understanding of the imaginary past as something to constantly look at, vis-à-vis Segewick’s “Imagery of the Surface” [1980]. Nya, for example, is covered in tattoos that speak to Cartesian trauma and the Gothic as something to wear on her skin, reassembled there after having been created many times before. She’s a walking fortress, utterly stacked but rife with surface tension. She performs the paradox that Charlotte Brontë’s Anne Causeway could not, the latter woman entirely doomed inside the attic for no one to see [except in dream-like reveries]. The paradox is a doubled form of emancipation that occurs through confrontation; i.e., a savvy and brave wielding of the very things used to coop her up in the white man’s home, but also his colonizer’s heart and mind and those of an imperial readership then and now seeing her “of nature” and nature as psychosexual food [source].)

(artist: Tessa West, “Bikini Shop Showdown,” 2006)

Some further food for thought (two pages), as there’s simply too much ground to cover (“Huge tracks of land!”): Cartesian fetishization of nature-as-food subverts through our demonic, fertile/febrile, whore-like bodies during ludo-Gothic BDSM! So often workers of the Global South tempt through storminess and hefty vocality as uncorked forces of nature: the banana republic’s crop talking back and talking back loudly—with their bodies and their surfaces/thresholds! “You won’t last two seconds!” The same ideas and liminalities likewise apply idiosyncratically to anyone framed as “of nature” in the Global North; i.e., regardless of size, sex, gender, religion and/or skin color, etc: the half-real gentrification of colonial lands through ill-gotten means—by white bodies that are, themselves, pimped out during various horny legends sold as porn (and all the lopsided power fantasies that porn entails); e.g., banging the pornstar with a banging bod in the back of a bikini shop (above).

Whores communicate their revenge through sex as demonic. The canonical argument becomes, “Nature’s a whore,” which whores have to reclaim on the same vice-filled stages (and leaving behind their stamps however those fall. In true rockstar fashion, Tessa West died at twenty-seven from a drug overdose)! Exploitation and liberation occupy the same spaces and stages, the same demonic language of power abuse and weaponization for or against the state by combining objects d’art with scandal, and food with war, death, and rape (“Oh, yeah! Carve my ‘pumpkin’! Wait, your ‘knife’ is too small!”).

As Shelley shows, we don’t live forever by cheating death (and nature); we live a full life that passes something positive along—a life worth remembering that, through the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, but also the auspices of destiny not being entirely dictated by state replicas, echo in eternity. Workers can make whatever demons they need to alter the balance (reversing virtue and vice much like terror and counterterror); i.e., striking deals honored through play and broken by spoilsports[38] for or against the state (and leading to various tautologies; e.g., a deal’s a deal, fair’s fair, function determines function, etc).

In this respect, sex isn’t purely for reproduction, but whose aesthetic per ludo-Gothic BDSM can be fun, funny, thrilling and asexual (socialized, artistic, mix-and-match)! Forgetting the porn industry’s eternal chase of profit, behind every demon is a flesh-and-blood worker—a human being with rights, appetites, curiosities, and a willingness (under the right conditions) to play! There is always risk with sex; through the whore’s paradox, we find agency dictating our “abuse” through unequal conditions we can change. Again, the smiles don’t have to be fake, nor the orgasms (though they can be). Cuties can want each other for whatever their hearts darkly desire; e.g., penis, pussy and/or personality! We can also involve others in our fantasies because they like them, not because they pay our rent! Such a hunter’s pot/philosopher-stone post-scarcity might sound impossible, but breaking through Capitalist Realism demands imagining the impossible through common modes of expression: demons and their endless Promethean possibilities!

Able to set the terms and boundaries of play, we camp, thus break away from sex/porn addiction and help ourselves and others relieve stress; i.e., in ways visually comparable but ludically removed from industry porn’s “demonic” elements; re: a Sale of Indulgences without co-dependency or sin, just love, equal rights, fucking (to metal, of course), silly-serious games, mutual consent, and other Gothic-Communist virtues! Yummy-yummy trust! Consent is sexy, my dudes (if you want to get laid, made a girl feel safe; it’s not automatic, but it won’t hurt your odds)! The price tag isn’t state mandates, but worker arrangements and consent (sex is whatever cost we decide, often for free among friends). Animalized, we embrace it, driving ourselves crazy (minus the hysterical stigma)! Sweet Numinous revenge, sucking your dry! Wee!

(artist: Ash Lynn Bach)

As such, sex remains something to barter that builds our dreams of a better world while dismantling capital. For it and the state, “whore” is just another word for “intimacy” they demonize for profit. AFAB or not—unchaining the whore, working/call girl and Hell along with them—we Gothic Communists become free to express ourselves, speak new language out of old parts to establish new boundaries, thus arrangements of power to play out (not under companies and Faustian contracts, but ones we write ourselves)! We’re not hoes to pimp and police, but demons without a pimp building pandemonium (sometimes in cop uniforms, minus the cop function)! We fucking love that kind of freedom: to make whatever demons we want, burning rapturously while watching this go in and out of that (short of harming workers, animals or nature; states aren’t people and billionaires shouldn’t exist, etc); re: to make demons is to make love turned on its head, laughing at canonical norms.

As we’ll see next, this includes summoning them in more magical varieties!

Afterword: A Further Note on Angry Gods (and Playing with Them)

“Ray, when someone asks you if you’re a god, you say YES!”

—Winston to Ray, Ghostbusters (1984)

A quick note about gods, seeing as playing with them (dark gods, which demons are) is what Shelley focused on, and where we’ll be going into the imaginary past; i.e., as it existed back then, and which is summoned in more magical ways seemingly divorced from making monsters the Cartesian way (with Shelley’s “Galvanism” being closer to magic than science—leaving the spark of creation to our imagination). Amazonomachia, kayfabe, golems and kaiju—monsters are both gods and made by gods, and who doesn’t like gods? Older ones are pagan/demonic, steeped in agnostic folklore/the supernatural, and generally equal parts aspiring and dangerous/fearsome. “All deities reside within [our] breast,” said Blake; through calculated risk during ludo-Gothic BDSM, they become our best friends—mighty beings to conjure up and thrill us, then dismiss as needed.

In turn, the natural and material worlds abide by the same basic forces over time; i.e., just as animals have evolved over millions of years thanks to evolutionary pressure, society’s current system of differences under capital work through natural-to-unnatural linguo-material components whose own stressors evolved to help us survive: gods as social highs and lows (values and taboos), but also creative legacies/the power of creation. This survival includes of ourselves, as Shelley points out; i.e., “man is his own worst enemy” and men of reason have now put our survival (and that of the planet) in jeopardy! Medusa doesn’t discriminate, but we can be better stewards/mothers of the world and keepers of the fire of the gods than Victor was. We can write and program better lessons through godly data as a form of pain (“to sense injury” as the T-800 describes it)—with pleasure and pain being as indiscrete to each other as organic and inorganic are; i.e., in a posthuman world (therefore the Capitalocene) where we still have to relate back and forth. We must, or we will not survive. That’s what camping the canon is.

All demons, pandemonium. The goal of Gothic Communism, then, is to humanize the harvest through holistic expression during the chaos of evolution (and creation) on all fronts; i.e., dialectical-material scrutiny (and effect) during oppositional praxis, thereby demonstrating the state as inhumane versus nature as monstrous-feminine; re: recultivating the Wisdom of the Ancients to deny it to the elite, much like Shelley did. In effect, we’re reclaiming Medusa through ambiguity and paradox marrying different things to speak to state abuse; e.g., pleasure and pain (more on this in “Exploring the Derelict Past”); i.e., the “omelet problem,” or “sometimes to create, you must destroy.” You can’t have life without death, can’t heal from rape without putting “rape” in quotes: “A king has his reign and then he dies” (white saviors and black tokenism also sight-seeing demons made by the state, but also the world older states destroyed and left behind, post-seed, below).

In learning from Scott and Shelley as my spiritual ancestors (Alien is my favorite movie, Frankenstein my favorite book), bear in mind how Shelley played at immortality/dark creation (while interrogating technology and childrearing/the posthuman) through a female gaze occupying male bodies, versus Scott’s male one occupying female bodies (and biomechanical integration). Compared to them, ours is genderqueer and overtly Communist; i.e., performing hubris to go where the gods and their statuesque, Vitruvian, warlike perfection (from an imaginary Greco-Roman standpoint, which Milton camped—followed by the Shelleys, and later Scott, above) can, but humans and their flaws only experience “torture,” which is to say pain: the queer search for non-normative love, haunted by its own mutating (and mutilative) copies, onstage and off.

Paradox of rape aside, it’s always, to some degree, experimental and apocalyptic—confusing the brain (and a mixture of the senses) to unlearn harmful knowledge; i.e., by exposing our chains and jolting us with that sweet, sweet Promethean “fire” (re: the modern idea [and abuse] of electricity didn’t quite exist yet, called “Galvanism” by Shelley as her inspiration): the jouissance (orgasm) of facing tough realities and—like a different iteration of the Creature—coming out stronger for it by making friends through newly-minted boundaries breaking Capitalist Realism down! Capital is built on Cartesian binaries of ownership and division, hence will never end sickness, war and disease (effectively killing the planet and leaving Ozymandian Derelicts behind, for others to stumble on). So we must end it ourselves through what we pass on during the coding war! “We aren’t computers, Bastian! We’re physical!”

Exposure hurts, including to the idea that capital has made us machines for it to control. Melting us down to our DNA (the oldest code) as we grow into adulthood (and then wither and die), we forget backwards. But it also fertilizes new growth, regenerating what has died into something radically new as a matter of function; re, the Numinous as something to quest for (from Varma’s The Gothic Flame):

The rise of the Gothic novel may be connected with depravity, and a decline of religion. […] In particular, these novels indicate a new, tentative apprehension of the Divine. Monastic life was no longer believed in, but at least it recalled the Ages of Faith and the alluring mystery of their discipline. The ghosts and demons, the grotesque manifestations of the supernatural, aroused the emotions by which man had first discovered his soul and realized the presence of a Being greater far than he, one who created and destroyed at will. Man’s first stirring of religious instinct was his acute horror of this powerful Deity—and it was to such primitive emotion that he reverted, emancipated from reason, but once again ignorant of God, his spiritual world in chaos.

Primarily the Gothic novels arose out of a quest for the numinous [emphasis, me]. They are characterized by an awestruck apprehension of Divine immanence penetrating diurnal reality. This sense of the numinous is an almost archetypal impulse inherited from primitive magic.

Whatever theatrical stance or political persuasion a player might adopt, our time as mortals is fleeting beyond ourselves. Reunions with life and death produce and instill chaos as an immortality that, through Shelley and Milton, long survived them; i.e., in a shared Satanic legacy we want to make increasingly gay and an-Com during ludo-Gothic BDSM healing nature-as-monstrous-feminine normally antagonized by state pimps. Scott verges into canonical pimp “milking Satan,” as did Milton. Shelley far outpaced either by vocally critiquing men of reason like Victor for harming so many beyond themselves. Nothing critiques capital more nakedly and productively in Gothic than Frankenstein (a tradition that later sci-fi completely forgot, Jameson). This pedagogy happens through liminal expression, mixing pain with pleasure during calculated risk; i.e., exquisite “torture” being—among other things—the playing with big things that could crush us but don’t: they’re not cops, but avengers bringing power (and the awesome anger of the gods) back to the people!

(model and artist: Mercedes the Muse and Persephone van der Waard)

To create dark gods is to fetishize the alien for or against workers/nature. This, by extension, teeters between internal imagination and external fabrication (e.g., Mercedes, myself, and Toxie, above). Our subsequent “torture” is pain and pleasure as a kind of dark psychosexual data; re: writ in decay and laced with phantom pain (and genuine harm), which demons engage with through the paradox of play and medieval poetics: mixing death, food, sex and other bodily functions (concepts from the Poetry Module; more on them during “Giger’s Xenomorph”).

That’s how children learn, but also adults—discussing what is often disguised to internalize and externalize it (the Dutch word “hope” meaning “to make a pile”). So do we camp Marx by conjuring up demons to liberate sex work with; i.e., as Shelley once did, putting the pieces back together (as must be done, per cycle) and camping the canon in ways Scott only partially managed to, himself: with god-like action figures (characterized by height personifying hubris)—first finding them “abandoned” in the ruins and playing with their decaying power for different ends. Frankenstein‘s isn’t isolation from fire, but both how humans and technology are bound up in their separate affairs, and that technology isn’t “bad” on its own; what you do with it—meaning what you choose to create and how you treat your creations afterwards—is what matters (the danger being when you lose the ability to tell friend from foe, only seeing in red/us-versus-them). This isn’t a “final destination,” at all, but a link in a never-ending chain, mise-en-abyme.

Verisimilitude very clearly isn’t the point, here, (as “actual science,” the giant motif doesn’t translate very well, but as a metaphor for demonic creation, is golden). Nor is dick-measuring (though Shelley is politically superior to Scott, she’s also a bit more mysterious to most people outside movies; i.e., the girl who wrote Frankenstein). Instead, its heavy-handed theatrics ape Victor as a false “corpse” of himself that talks back, mid-psychomachy (no one ever said Frankenstein was subtle, but you’d be surprised just how much of its Hamlet-grade, weird British tensions [dialogs of strength married to weird canonical science nerds] goes over most peoples’ heads; blame James Whale for that one, or Mel Brooks after him). So take what is useful and apply it to yourselves and yours—to reshape, recode, and pass along inside/upon your own dark children (a Trojan virus)!

(source: Stan Winston’s School of Character Arts’ “Terminator 2: Judgment Day’s T-800 – An Interview with Stan Winston,” 2015)

For example—and case in point—I, as a trans woman, always felt that I had one foot in each world, but could never give birth (with a uterus). Instead, I learned to feel more like a woman through the poetic act of creation; i.e., one inspired by Scott and Shelley both filling my figurative cumdump[39] (the medieval having a bit more fun with the miracle of creation, both human biology and poetry of a technological sort)! What they left behind has inspired my own giant children, teaching me what it means to be a parent (closer to life and death as normally alienated from workers, but also fetishized for them to purchase and consume). A “power couple,” indeed! Light me up, baby!

And while “strange women distributing swords” is seemingly no basis for a system of government, there remains practical value in medieval poetics informing Gothic Communism; i.e., to synthesize catharsis away from state models, generally with a focus on nude monster bodies and publicly nude (and vulgar) displays of power! The best sex has a bit of excitement and pain to it; the paradox of rape is it is not rape, any more than Frankenstein’s monster is actually a big walking dead guy/brain-in-a-jar (to see one’s creation and mortality laid bare—be it brain or womb—for iconoclastic purposes; i.e., by women [and other minorities] reclaiming normally sacred things from the state [misogynistic canon and its weird “hate boners,” left] through camp: to laugh at the gods by reminding readers that girls have hairy butt holes, and men—alienated from their prescribed sex dolls—sublimate and kill them for it like Medusa[40], also left).

(artist: Bernie Wrightson)

Instead, it’s the potential to literally make friends for all ages, genders, and inclinations; it becomes something to tell our children (always curious about monsters, below)—to give to them not as a present bought per season, but a gift made ourselves that keeps on giving. As Shelley shows us, children can be taught whatever they’re given; let’s give them something better than what society gave Victor (whose own problematic childhood automatically made him see the Creature not as “friend” but “foe”). That’s what making monsters (demons or otherwise) is all about, from a Gothic-Communist perspective! We gain the ability to end curses, right past wrongs, heal from rape and de-automate genocide—in a word, to stop capital in its tracks while referring to the imaginary past pushing us in a post-scarcity direction: breeding and grooming with a sex-positive outcome!

In Frankenstein, Victor hogs the stage but the Creature is the star of the show. It’s also not stupid, but actually quite the opposite, acquires knowledge at a frightening rate. So are we—are all, to some degree, innocent and jaded, artificial and alienized, under capital’s bright demanding lights telling us “the show must go on”; but such performances allow for the paradox of reclamation (through iconoclastic art) during such fabrication—to reclaim for ourselves the incredible ability to first, recognize when others see us as inhuman and scary (through no fault of their own, born into the same world under Capitalism lionizing such fakeries, above); then communicate the holocaust of our anguish in ways that convince them we are human, thus deserve protection and love. It’s a basic human right, not something you buy under capital (or which capital assigns to a select special group; e.g., Jewish people); but it uses the same costumes and masks, comedy and drama, and whose potential identities beyond the medieval (re: Foucault) the Gothic turns inside-out.

Unlike many Gothic novels, Frankenstein works well as fantasy and futurism, its signature and much-intimated retro-future letting readers think about a two-century-old horror novel as one might a computer program: Shelley is Cassandra predicting Capital’s demise while demonstrating the thin line between child and adult, technology and sex, protection and procreation, pleasure and pain, problem and purpose, birth and bastard, pro-life and pro-choice, prostitute and pimp, sex and symbol, porn and art, torture and talent, consent and non-consent, canon and camp, transparent and opaque, real and fake (as Arnold and company also demonstrate, below):

(ibid.)

To that, counterterror is a voice, thus a relationship had between things both forced apart (alienation) and together (fetishization), comprising a pedagogy of the oppressed living under the shadow of police violence sexualizing everything in sight; i.e., whose alienation—of zombie-demon labor talking back to us—is both older victims of capital, but also present ones speaking through our fears and fantasies: a worker saying to those who find its talking remains, “I’d rather kill my boss and fuck what society treats as ‘monster’ (for its scars, skin color and/or composite nature) than be with an entitled asshole contributing to state shift!” Size difference, age play and power imbalance also come into effect—all to collectively shock not for its own sake, mid-pastiche, but to jolt us awake about difference manufactured (and how people, once badly programmed, go on to exterminate others for scraps); re: by remediating praxis, we teach children—who are vulnerable to bad lessons (thus susceptible to cloning those lessons)—to be better and make better!

Scott was already in his forties when making Alien and it shows; i.e., he kind of starts with Radcliffean demon BDSM and ’70s Rocky Horror and gradually dials back what little camp Alien started with. Shelley was nineteen when she wrote Frankenstein, and still had that youthful ex-vitro “zinc spark” (re: the glass womb dilemma—or what Ashley Gavin succinctly describes as “inside baby/outside baby“; “Ashley Gavin: Live in Chicago,” 2024) that commented on the larger world through demonic poetics. The greatest power in Frankenstein, then, comes from its composite design: a faith in Gothic intuition wedded to early science but still having magic to spare—to parse through play while recognizing creation through technology as speaking to lived trauma living inside the body and material trauma existing outside the body as both contributing to generational trauma; i.e., as something to increase through canon or decrease through camp, on the Aegis. Those who close their eyes to it become hopeless cynics who, as Oscar Wilde puts it, “know the cost of everything but the value of nothing.” They become predators who prey on their students (re: Jadis).

Coded as such, they also become gargoyles for the church of capital; i.e, who see invaders thus enemies everywhere, and who make machines of war to conquer the Earth and the stars, but ultimately themselves inside the Capitalocene (awfully telling that Victor makes a giant war machine [re: Walpole’s armor] to lionize himself, then cries wolf when labor possesses the avatar of capital to thump him and chase him to the ends of the world and beyond; i.e., Ozymandias in the desert of older disasters)! Menticide is not human nature as “congenital,” but comorbid and criminogenic while able to cause disorders “in the blood” and brain, where data is stored and exchanged in “perfect” duality:

From what I’ve seen of perfection
Where we could do as we please
In secrecy this infection
Was spreading like a disease (Judas Priest’s “Metal Gods,” 1980).

Leave it to Judas Priest to betray their punk roots and romanticize rebellion as Nazi-Communism; i.e., “both sidesing” what is—in reality—night and day, then regressively dogmatize “past” before selling it back to their fan base under Thatcher’s Britain (the “KISS problem” dumbing down Frankenstein for profit—a bit ironic as KISS was Jewish and sold out; then again, so was Jerry Springer[41]). Capitalism is the disease, not labor, but they occupy the same space, language and stages!

So do liberation and exploitation dysfunctionally unfold. Those who profit off/unironically endorse Red Scare are Nazis, import/exporting the usual neoliberal heavy metal for queen and country (wedded to capital, in Britain’s case, but also America’s own god-kings; i.e., calling themselves “commanders-in-chief,” while shifting the aristocracy towards the bourgeoisie and back again, when the state starts to die): “a new order of intelligence that saw everyone as a threat, not just those on the other side!” Capital is incompatible with life; geological or technological, state shift is state shift, which capital will pimp out to punish nature as monstrous-feminine for profit. A king has his reign; then, nature wins.

Again, though, metal isn’t automatically a weapon for capital and its extermination wars, but it is generally ambiguous through duality, mid-liminal expression. All praxis is liminal because it must translate to consumable forms. That’s why Frankenstein works as well as it does, and why capital tries so hard to commodify the aesthetic. As proto-fascist satire, Frankenstein is intentionally ambiguous because it needs the reader to choose, and to acknowledge the terrible power of propaganda; i.e., the Promethean Quest is ultimately a quest for the Numinous, and a quest for the palliative Numinous (as I frame it) is a quest for empathy by choosing mercy and love in the face of the technological singularity[42] (which Victor does not do).

To confront and reify the problem—meaning in something we can recognize in ourselves, then love in others through our creations teaching lessons—is to break Capitalism at its core. But we must learn to self-reflect in ways that extend the charity to those normally wronged by capital, capital framing all of this (as Victor does) through doomsday arguments that Shelley—a nineteen-year-old girl without computers or formal education—took and hit square on the nose (critiquing what so many still refuse to do, nowadays; i.e., those people treating scientists like celebrities and, oddly enough, celebrities like scientists, and worshipping both like gods who are beyond reproach. So often, straight male scientists and creatives eclipse their female counterparts; e.g., Giger and Scott eclipsing Shelley while living in her shadow, below)! Frankenstein‘s traction was immediate, its legacy infinite—showing readers that, while we’re not strictly defined by the past and its plastic trauma, nor are we entirely removed from it: “We live in Gothic times.”

(source: Douglas Martin’s “H. R. Giger, Artist[43] Who Gave Life to Alien Creature, Dies at 74,” 2014)

In short, we must love other victims of capital as we would ourselves, during universal liberation. I’d say “no gods or masters,” then, but we are all gods, under Communism. And despite neoliberal Capitalism pimping dark creation for its own base ends, no one monopolizes monsters or the awesomely dark power to create, thus (a)rouse the rabble by “riding” the lightning. Lightning doesn’t have to strike the same place twice (though it can, next page); it just has to expect the wonderous spontaneity of attraction, mid-Romance. That can happen anywhere: “Not the third switch!” / “Throw it! Give MY CREATION LIFE!” Frankenstein was a one-man “circular breeding” fantasy written by a woman soupily camping the idea of sex to—in her own juvenile inventor’s lightbulb moment—make something that kills Francis Bacon’s number-one fan and fucks the body-builder afterwards. The best of both worlds, her winning formula fetishizes rebellion for workers! Eureka!

That’s Shelley and her whore’s revenge—the exhibitionist/voyeur confessions of a madwoman/wicked Galatean mad scientist accepting her status as manmade, then nakedly camping the canon (the Promethean myth): through uncontrolled opposition and neo-medieval (operatic) rape fantasies “storming” her “castle” and putting her maidenhead—gone too soon, but “for science!”—to the two-handed sword: a live wire that’s too hot to handle/off the charts, or a sizzling mood (and bedroom eyes) that hits just right? You be the judge!

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

We often invent friends in our hour of need. Not even twenty when raw-dogging it/squeezing a dark god’s massive dick into her tight pale pussy[44], Shelley made something fluorescent that could never be turned off, only fluctuate in constant circulation; i.e., something that, unto itself, emblematized the desire to fuck with godly power—to create a god and be a god by creating such a being that can either create, in turn, or inspire others to create in ways that overthrow the nuclear model: while looking for a suitable mate/companion (swept up in sex and natural reproduction, but also unnatural reproduction through art-as-porn, canned and shaken, inside the same witch’s-cauldron echo chamber where canon and camp—the nuclear and found family—do battle).

An awesome machine, the Creature lives on, but isn’t just a sentinel (cops; e.g., Mega Man, the Stepford Wives); with the right instruction, it can become a steward for nature (re: T2, but Communist). “Fuck mommy just like this, ok? Now gimmie that baby batter!” The idea is informed consent and birth control (of people and art) being in the hands of workers, not capital and the state (all of my partners have either not had uteruses, have fucked with condoms, or—in my case fucking them—have had a vasectomy to avoid unwanted pregnancies): to get up close and personal with/to our bodies; i.e., as alien and fetish, creating with and of them regarding the mysteries of creation on canvas of all kinds.

Rape is endemic to capital; anything that challenges profit is a threat to capital and its ordering of the world, which it rapes without end. But silence is death, which makes ludo-Gothic BDSM our survival; i.e., playing with power as something to quest for in paradoxically healthy forms that have the ability to change or freeze the world in its tracks. It’s both different and not different from those videogames everyone plays these days… Life is a game, and sooner or later your refusal to play it outside the elite’s rules becomes a choice!

So, love it or hate it, camp canon however you can—i.e., by getting naked, and down and dirty with one’s glorious, mortal, animal side (the paradox being to rough something up versus having it be sterile to better make one’s point; e.g., Alien versus 2001, but also Cuwu’s pussy, before/after, below). Sex is the most policed device in the world. It is simultaneously divine and absurd, hot and goofy (“so put that in this and wiggle around until cummies happen…”), and desperately needing better education under capital; i.e., in ways that respect its power but also don’t take it too seriously if they can help it; e.g., “Oh, no! My ass is just too fat for these yoga pants! Please don’t take advantage!” (we’ll introduce de facto education, cultural appreciation and descriptive sexuality in “Call of the Wild” and unpack them in Volume Three).

This certainly isn’t easy. The more we try to unite all groups, the more alone canon makes us feel (segregate the radicals); some people historically sell out. But once you find others who have similar chemistry/understand alienation and desire liberation for all, there’s nothing like it in the world! I was radicalized by so many tight pussies clamping down on my dick:

(model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard[45])

Shelley was a pirate, one who showed that girls fuck, fart, spit and swear like anyone! Making friendship from the ensuing messes, there’s a fair bit not just of her in the book, but of Cuwu despite going our separate ways! Love is blind, friendship always somewhat imaginary but forever as something to build in memory of the good times come and game, but also yet-to-come. Sex is work, and sex work is work; so is revolution as a lineage of monster mothers!

To become a mother is to change, and this contains within it different fears about dying: less as a literal event, and more becoming something dark and different while alive that lives on long after one is dead. No one remembers Mary Wollstonecraft (senior or junior); Mary Shelley is a whole ‘nother beast. But this, unto itself, speaks to the vitality of relationships and good parentage (if only to use the raw parts for spares)—both with our live-in cocks or pussies, but also whatever technologies they bring to the table. The process is suitably anathema and gospel.

To this, Percy creampied the virgin pussy of one Mary Wollstonecraft, but also fed her pregnant horny brain—no doubt awash with hormones from actual pregnancies and postpartum events—with “tacos”; i.e., those angel-and-devil, pickles-and-ice-cream cravings being Paradise Lost, Galvanism, and the Golem of Prague, among others. In turn, Wollstonecraft became Shelley as, at least in part, a dark imitation of the man she admired, the pupil outshining the master and even herself.

Fast-forward to Scott making Alien—and then Covenant nearly two centuries after Frankenstein—and me, exposed to Prometheus in 2012, discovering Shelley twenty years after watching Alien and playing Super Metroid. Primed for it since I was small (my mother loving The Doors, but also the British Romantics, reading me “Kubla Khan” to tire me out and get me to sleep), I suddenly got the same Numinous cravings; re: watching Covenant with my family on my birthday (source: “Alien Covenant, a Review,” 2017) before going overseas to have my own Percy-and-Mary, Jim-and-Pamela-style relationship; i.e., followed by many more afterwards while thinking about Covenant, again (source: ” A Second Look”) and again (re: “Choosing the Slain“)—until I looked past Scott, and back towards Shelley and her own nature-vs-nature natural philosophy haunting the Great Man haunting me (and haunted by his own mother and Shelley and so on and so on).

In turn—and through my own poetic indiscretions and infidelities expressing the complicated, ongoing relationship between the past and present—the organic and inorganic fused, passing information continuously along while mutating it; i.e., the corruption being the data, from smaller cryptonymic sequences cached inside a bigger cryptomimetic series: Milton wrote Paradise Lost, which Shelley consumed when producing her own monster while already living with one (Ron Shusett, by comparison, graciously fed Dan O’Bannon hotdogs while the latter suffered IBS and wrote his Alien screenplay); i.e., tracing along so many generations of a larger chain before finding and infecting me with the same proverbial fire. Cooking on the same giant skillet, my trans egg cracked, and Nicholas became Persephone adopting/adapting Mary Shelley’s imperfect, dualistic likeness; i.e., as a recursive, warring matter of revolution told through evolution hidden in code.

Shelley beat Darwin to that punch, too, and is truly a woman to be grateful for/afraid of. She gave birth to Communism versus fascism in its proto forms; generations later, things have come full circle as I wrote Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion, or Gothic Communism—a book whose own foreword opens with me comparing myself to Shelley while acknowledging the many different sources that went into its messy regenesis, but also its continuity and sequel rebirths: those who adapt survive, so take what is useful and leave the rest.

Holistic study serves as the core transfer method, and my perfecting of Shelley’s secret formula—humility and hubris (“Mother is the name for ‘God’ on the lips and hearts of all children”) driving a mad scientist to make monsters who made more mad scientists and monsters, in duality—was simply me standing on her Samus-sized shoulders: armed for bear and ready to free (deprivatize) the Amazon, the Gorgon, the fire of the gods and have the whore’s revenge; i.e., by stopping Capitalism (and its Realism) for good. Just as Victor is Achilles, Byron, and Satan, then, Mary Shelley is Legion; i.e., all of those and none of them, plus Medusa and Hippolyta, but also evocations of Percy and her mother while not being them, too. So do I—or rather, my books as extensions of their own immediate mother and lineage of mothers—paradoxically contain and proliferate the same haunted legacy. It’s an orgy of ghosts! Stare and tremble but also unite; become one with the Aegis—staring intensifies! Eat your heart out, Eve Segewick.

(source)

The Gothic is writ in disintegration, made from fragments to rebuilt what was lost/could be; all roads lead to Medusa and her Communist Numinous (“diamonds are a girl’s best friend,” something-something “Norman Bates was Hitchcock playing ‘bury the gay'”). Befitting a Gothic homecoming for the ages, I got closer to Shelley as time went on, not further away! While familiarity breeds contempt, imitation remains the sincerest form of flattery. I built on Shelley and made her Promethean Quest my own; i.e., we are each of us unique and identical twins (with twins never being fully identical; e.g., me and my straight twin): part of the same cryptonymy process, part of the same vengeful, rock ‘n roll womb’s poetic collocation. Rebellion, as Shelley keeps showing us—but also Marx through my work camping his ghost (re: “Making Marx Gay“)—is rock ‘n roll; but said opposition constantly needs a woman’s gayer sluttier touch, lest the Straights control it for profit.

It likewise, needs to be short enough to identify at a glance and imitate, but girthy enough to satisfy through substance. Little pigs, we glut ourselves, hungry like the wolf. Forget “smash or pass,” where’s our self-control? It’s our Song of Infinity making the past wise again! “Let’s get weird!” again! Anything can happen on Halloween again! “More, more!” (said Cuwu, as I fucked them for the umpteenth time in one night, across a week, during an entire month).

(artist: Sexy Flower Water)

In short, you can’t just “one and done it,” and camping sex is to reverse the alienation of sex already abjected; Medusa’s placental, parthenogenic womb bears forbidden fruit, but its orchard thereof requires constant, regular care: endless “watering” (with cum, but also blood, sweat, tears, tender love and care), lest the bourgeoisie dry it out more than Lovecraft’s urethra at the prospect of sex (the sexless old boys club, pimping nature into pieces of jerky it can eat raw for bragging rights). Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, S.T. Joshi! I am woman, hear me rawr!

There comes our parade of patchwork slogans, again; e.g., “What a story, Marx!” or “Women don’t like sex.” The former is funny and the latter is a myth! But also, sex is danger! That’s what makes it fun, thus worth it! Don’t listen to others who say, “Don’t do it!” or “No pussy’s worth it!” (within reason, and use your brains). Like, how would they know? Cuwu and I loved a lifetime’s worth, and I have the receipts to prove it (some of them stitched together like a patchwork collage of composites, below). And though that didn’t last, they were still my Percy who gave me the darkness I needed to birth rebellion; i.e., in ways I’m not sure either of us could have, at the time (“It was all worth it” being the proud parent’s steady oath).

Before we proceed, then, I’d like to showcase that cryptonymy a bit—to take a look under the hood of my purring brain to see what routinely makes Gothic Communism tick (and what these demons have in common). “I choose you, Cuwu!”

(exhibit 45b2a: Artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard, from a variety of scenes we crafted and shot together—and assembled here by me post hoc as “monster pastiche”; i.e., of me loving a monster/mad scientist and vice versa. Blue balls? More like “Blue Monday” [1983], amirite?  

Those who came before me
Lived through their vocations
From the past until completion
They’ll turn away no more

And still, I find it so hard
To say what I need to say
But I’m quite sure that you’ll tell me
Just how I should feel today

I see a ship in the harbor
I can and shall obey
But if it wasn’t for your misfortune
I’d be a heavenly person today [source: Genius]. 

If Zeuhl taught me anything, I definitely have “a type”: the punk. The trick was finding one that didn’t harm me and was stable; Zeuhl was a stable postpunk who harmed* me, and Cuwu was an unstable punk who harmed themselves to the point that it traumatized me, too. Eventually I found better company in terms of stability and comfort, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss the fun that Cuwu and I had. They’d tease me until I begged, or until they begged me, “Just put it in me, already!” But this invoked all manner of “asking for it,” on all manner of surfaces:

*”How does it feel when your heart grows cold,” Zeuhl?

[artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard]

Make no mistake, Cuwu was weird as hell and I—also being weird as hell—couldn’t get enough of them; they were constantly putting on a show to offer me the truth of things—right in front of me, like it always was. Twenty-four and gender fluid, Cuwu was mature and immature, always in motion and difficult to capture—a former dancer who could speak volumes in single frames, yet wanting to be seen and shown across all surfaces [above and below]: from moment to moment, controlling a situation to gain power and feel safe. To it, you can absolutely learn from broken clocks, and Cuwu wasn’t even broken—just damaged. Super smart, well-read and passionate, but also on drugs a lot of the time, they were needy and dominating from a subby position that practiced its wares on me. But also, they were and are my Victor and Frankenstein or vice versa, no shortage of awesome reversals taking place betwixt our hungry nethers:

[artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard]

So here we are, no longer physically together but someone whose memory of former boding I keep alive in my work; i.e., our cryptonymy healing from rape, the two of us always experimenting and shooting things from different angles [sometimes in focus, sometimes not; sometimes silly and sometimes serious; sometimes obscured, sometimes in full view]. We played together—them teasing me, our spooning always leading to insolent, deliciously disrespectful forking [as I fuck them while they use their phone*. Seriously, we made enough porn to last a lifetime]:

[artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard]

*Bottom collage, top-left. I can’t remember what they were even looking at, but I think it was clothes? Zeuhl did the same, once, but that was while they were playing Pokémon Go (2016). They also turned my life upside down, but constantly used sex to keep me in check/demand loyalty. Eventually they demanded my loyalty even after they abandoned me for their husband. Fuckers.

The West is fascinated with sex and love, and with good endings and bad [re: Radcliffe and Lewis]. But canon conditions them to obsess about a particular kind of love attached to a binarized, us-versus-them, linguo-material structure to keep that structure in place through ethnocentric monomyth police violence. Thus, do they miss the point of building something better for ourselves, as Satan and Shelley did, but also Cuwu and I; i.e., as something that lasted beyond the immediate passion: echoes and rem[a]inders of it, the passion taking hold like a ghost and ravishing us anew. “Haunt me, Cathy!”

Yes, Cuwu abused me—and yes, apart from that abuse they also ran off with a dog breeder with the same first name as me and a similar-size penis—but all the same, we kept the agreement we made, afterwards, and I still use it to construct my vision of a better world; i.e., one informed by their priceless contributions. To it, I love you, my little stoner dragon—my modern Prometheus/rectus dominus [“ass master”] torturing me with sweet bliss from beyond our time together. Cuwu was a little animal—loved animals and treated me like one they couldn’t always care for even though they wanted to. As always, I hope you’re safe, wherever you are.

[model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard—and their little beardie]

Good or bad, people have whatever power you give them, and vice versa; re: “no one does it better, so that’s why I [gave] you my heart to break!” When you look on us, you’re looking at an older agreement—one that was both built on trust, haunted by abuse, stunted by self-destruction, and replanted to grow again. So do we come together [so to speak] while putting-pulling parts repeatedly together and apart; i.e., camping sex in all the usual ways. Piece-by-piece, we rip and tear until it is done! Healing hurts and feels good; it itches and throbs and twinges and pulses. Squish-squish, macaroni-stirring sound!

Maybe I’m repeating myself? No shit; however serious, revolution is repetition and this is fun to me. I can do it all night, babes [when Cuwu’s pussy got too sore, we switched to anal sex]. Furthermore, this goes beyond our individual pictures and collages to include others in a larger artistic, ouroborotic movement brought back from the dead; e.g., Harmony Corrupted [next page] making a collage based on her shoots commissioned by me, and each of those inspired by my time with Cuwu [which I told them about]. Rebellions need heat [energy and work] to function; during ludo-Gothic BDSM, we make warmth in more ways than one, the surgery self-inflicted and whose addiction a) speaks behind blue eyes

and b) with our clothes on [to tease you] as much as not:

Weird attracts weird; I come from a family as mad as hatters, as did Cuwu and so many others. Both mad, and making madness with ourselves and others based on older forms that push towards universal liberation, we show how nostalgia is the enemy of reason; i.e., the latter as a genocidal historical-material force; re: as Harmony and I do, and all the cuties I’ve played with have done, over the years and during the course of this project. Madness is—like technology and our fire of the gods—not simply one thing or another but many in duality.

And thanks to Shelley and similar poets, that duality now more than ever has power and value for us as something we take back on the Aegis; i.e., insofar as we use it to help ourselves by taking it back from those who don’t help us—to smash their unironic breeding and racial-superiority [eugenics] models, and doing so on purpose: as a matter of preservation, by those who know.

Cuwu, for example, deliberately played with me—a multimedia expert—to trap them in amber and show them off, as simulacra; i.e., I was already drawing them and did so multiple times before we eventually made all this porn [so did Harmony and many others—I work with people who are kind to me and who I want to be remembered as part of something bigger than ourselves]. That’s what happens when you cross a giant voyeur with an equally massive exhibitionist.  In our case, though, the demonic courtship felt exhilarating but untenable—these different competing elements going faster and faster until eventually they burned themselves out:

[artist: Cinnannoe]

Cuwu frankly loved being seen and viewed as something to love; it gave them power. Had they paused every so often to let me breathe/meet my needs, I’d still be giving it to them. From a certain point of view, I very much still am. Fuck an artist; get immortality as they can offer it. Any artist would kill to have had a muse like Cuwu [we’ll explore the ace/paradoxical attraction of artists and models more, in Volume Three]:

[models and artist: Guildenstern/Cuwu (far left/all) and Persephone van der Waard (left, middle and right)]

Communism isn’t a quota or zero-sum game, then. A combination of congenital and comorbid factors—ranging from genetics to training to material conditions—it starts with our desire trumping our caution when seeking to prevent systemic harm and generational trauma, mid-synthesis: “To let ‘I dare!’ wait upon ‘I would?'” So while necessity is the mother of invention, invention is reinvention and generally starts in the relationships we build for those reasons [and not simply for efficient project; e.g., Karl Jobst’s former pick-up artistry transferring to his speedrunning career and YouTube channel; re: “Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning,” 2025]. “No one is an island.” We face capital as one or we die alone. For realsy.

So keep building for each other and fucking with those things the status quo builds for itself! The moment you stop is when capital wins. We’ll be the envy of the gods above! Fortune favors the bold and the brave really do live forever! Cuwu and Harmony are two of the bravest people I’ve yet [and like Shelley’s famous psychomachy, have bravery and caution inside them—”two wolves live in us,” ‘n all that].)

From Radcliffe onwards, cryptonymy’s a woman’s weapon against rape while refusing to either triangulate/tokenize (re: me, vis-à-vis Creed’s monstrous-feminine) or be a quiet victim; Shelley’s a straight freak whose “clone [doesn’t] sleep alone” (Pat Benatar’s “My Clone Sleeps Alone” riffing on Ira Levin while anticipating Reagan’s presidency, 1979). But also, she’s my Lady of the Lake—a rustic-but-not-entirely-unschooled bimbo, dark-mommy witch lobbing a scimitar (rogue technology) at me, but also my delicious devil dragging me, Persephone, back to Hell!

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends!” but remember to come up for air! Marathons are fun ‘n all (Cuwu and I once fucked for three hours), but pace yourselves! Aftercare, always; and hurt, not harm! You have the compass that never points North. Now go and have fun; take your own monsters to bring Hell to Earth! Ravish her bussy (the alien cock too big to just fit in one hole, below)!

A whore without a pimp is a sex worker controlling their own bodies, labor and art/exchanges, thus their own ability to perform power selectively and subversively during public nudism; e.g., and have/fake orgasms (with capital treating women—and beings treated like women; re: emergent beings to chattelize—as “machines” to humiliate; i.e., to put coins [of cruelty or kindness] inside until sex comes out). Forget Peter Weyland, saying “we’re the gods now” while imploring to everyone, “If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to change the world!” Fuck that noise and fuck the bourgeoisie! Use the fire of the gods to set yourselves (and everything of nature) free! That includes—as Shelley show us—sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, fucking to metal to become the metal! Sweet science, sweeter sodomy!

Speaking of wishes and visions of a better world told in hellish language, let’s proceed onto “Summoning Demons”!

Onto “Forbidden Sight, part two: Making Demons“!

---

Footnotes

[2] Undoubtedly as Mary Shelley’s parents and superiors introduced her to different works—namely her father at first (since her mother died eleven days after Shelley [then Wollstonecraft] was born), but later by Percy Shelley and Thomas Hogg passing Paradise Lost along to her as my mother once showed me Black Sabbath: “Like, check this out, man! It’s totally rad!”

[3] Venkman’s snide “No human would stack books like this” comment leaping to mind when seeing Hamilton’s photo (with “Margaret Hamilton” also being the name of the actress who played the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz, 1939). So often, intelligent women are celebrated and feared as aberrations to cage and kettle by male pimps with virgin/whore syndrome. And, in both Hamilton’s cases, they so often tokenize!

[4] Wow, so lucky! Let’s face it, Altaira probably fucked around with Robby the Robot a bit (the young horny teenager riding the bed post or the cucumber in the fridge).

[5] Bubble’s “meat hair” from The Powerpuff Girls 1995 pilot:

(source)

[6] “Computers are dumb; they only know what you tell them.” People are a lot closer to computers than many care to amid; they’re certainly not immune to childhood indoctrination’s fear and dogma!

[7] The xenomorph combining of all of these things to take on fresh life.

[8] Scott’s matelotage from Alien borrowed, first, from Frankenstein—with Cuwu and I making love not completely dissimilar to Percy and Shelley, over two centuries prior! Some people bloom early, others late. Better late than never!

[9] If Gustav Dore were a comic book artist.

[10]  E.g., the reality that cum doesn’t stay in the vagina after sex, leaking out onto the bed, down one’s leg or into one’s panties, etc. These ideas are heavily dogmatized, which only makes camping them all the more fun and easy!

[11]  I.e., women’s work. Western society is built around straight men and their actions. Whereas gay men could historically fall back on this, women were put into a corner and forced to do one thing: sex. They became defined by it, similar to making Jews count/lend money through the practice of usury. In turn, their subsequent demonization tracked along these pathways. It’s literally blaming the help.

[12] Shelley’s Frankenstein is deeply aware of Paradise Lost, which the British Romantics (especially the second generation, which grew up in the ruins of the French Revolution) deeply adored as a whole; i.e., on the side of Satan as a revolutionary figure who remains a demon all the same; re, Nafi:

(artist: Gustave Doré)

According to [Tesky] Gordon, it was Blake who expressed this view most emphatically by saying that Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it. He expressed this opinion chiefly in relation to the portrayal of Satan who, according to him, has been depicted as a character possessing certain grand qualities worthy of the highest admiration. Other romantic critics supported this view with great enthusiasm. [Percy] Shelley, for instance, reinforced this view when, in his “Defense of Poetry,” he said:

“Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan as expressed in Paradise Lost. It is a mistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended for the popular personification of evil. Milton’s Devil as a moral being is as far superior to God, as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy.”

According to Shelley, it was a mistake to think that Satan was intended by Milton as the popular personification of evil. This argument is still very much alive and valid today (source: “Milton’s Portrayal of Satan in Paradise Lost and the Notion of Heroism,” 2015).

More to the point, Percy oversaw Mary’s writing of Frankenstein, and while she obviously wrote the novel (only releasing it in her own name on the third edition after Percy’s death—1831 and 1822, respectively), his influence over the work is clear.

Booted from school for being an outspoken atheist (see: footnote to “A Defence of Poetry,” 1840)—and married young to a woman named Harriet (who Percy eventually cuckolded for Mary, herself five years his junior)—Percy was, to say the least, a bit of a man-whore and thoroughly entitled brat. At the age of twenty-one, he decided to elope for a second time, doing so with William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft’s now-famous daughter (the latter parent having died eleven days after giving birth to her child of the same name):

Mary is only 16, and she is running away with Percy Bysshe Shelley, a man five years her senior who is not merely already married but the father of a young child […] Mary’s stepmother does indeed catch up with the runaways in Calais. But by then it’s too late: Mary has been publicly “ruined,” because she has passed that all-important (though as it happens entirely un-sexual, storm-tossed) night with Percy and because, arriving in another country and registering with him at a hotel there, she has definitively eloped. Percy, who has form in eloping with 16-year-olds—his wife, Harriet, was the same age when he ran off with her—must understand this, at least, perfectly well. Whatever happens next between him and Mary, he has ensured that there’s no way back for her into ordinary society. He truly has snared her (source: Fiona Sampson’s “The Treacherous Start to Mary and Percy Shelley’s Marriage,” 2018).

Simply put, things were visibly less equal in those days (“visibly” being the key word, there)—with Mr. Shelley putting Mrs. Shelley at a profound disadvantage through his rebellious sense of entitlement (self-prioritizing himself at his wife’s expense, as Sampson tells it). But he also gambled with his own reputation, putting them both out: Harriet committed suicide in 1816 (she was twenty-one), and the two crazy kids tied the knot the same year Napoleon lost at Waterloo.

(artist: Samuel Stump)

All this being said, Godwin was an anarchist and Wollstonecraft a woman’s rights activist, and their wayward daughter marched to the beat of her own drum. In 1816, she and Percy kicked it with Lord Byron at a castle in Geneva; Mary wrote Frankenstein two years later, and four years after that, Percy was drowned at sea. Mary would survive him to raise their only surviving child, dying herself from a brain tumor in 1851. She would be overshadowed by her own novel and Percy’s mark on her life (including his surname), her own stories largely forgotten until far more recent times; e.g., The Last Man (1826) being an early example—if not the first example—of postapocalyptic fiction. Indeed, Mary’s Frankenstein is arguably the first science fiction novel, period, combining fantasy and the Gothic in ways that spoke to a world increasingly dissected and destroyed by the scientific method: the Industrial Revolution only leading to a rise of slave labor inside nation-states chasing profit.

[13] Alienation is generally inverted, with women being deprived of house and home, and men being deprived of sex. Attraction is bound to occur but we need to guide and ensure it serves workers’ needs, not capital. And in doing so, we can sometimes call those to our sides who are seemingly out of our league; i.e., “I was called here by humans, who wished to pay me tribute!” Gods need worshippers and worshippers need gods; e.g., Nyx (next page) being a dummy-thicc thigh queen and all-around sweetie!. Again, consent is sexy and it and safety can summon friends more than brute strength (though himbos/herbos are fine, of course)! Generational trust and community vibes become how we communicate! Ideally, it’s a win-win, helping everyone fit in/feel welcome, safe and loved!

(artist: Nyx)

As Nyx and I show—or Mary and Percy—the winning ingredients are teamwork, but also holism per intersectional solidarity. Nyx reached out and asked me to draw them; I finished their drawing on July 18th, 2022; I started my book series four days later, and came out as trans a couple weeks after that. Like Mary, Nyx taught me to sing to the gods and nature and feel safe in myself.

Indeed, we Gothic Communists all sing to some extent: to return to choruses that, while resurrecting sleeping things, never quite existed before; i.e., pre-capitalist ideas and themes applied to a post-scarcity mindset!

This includes Nyx’ love for nature with my own, and new ideas simply being a more proletarian approach to ourselves, animals and the environment as things to reunite with; i.e., borrowed from the past, including Shelley’s imaginary space and time. It’s hauntological, pushing towards harmony with each other and the world between us, then and now! Nature as monstrous-feminine—as fat, sassy and welcoming—Nyx throws her weight around, mooning us with that lunar-sized ass in pure, unadulterated joy! Full-moon booty makes us howl! Her Aegis is unmatched! Mammoth, gargantuan—a thing of beauty, an embarrassment of riches to savor, crave and adore!

And while we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover (and small booties are fine), I like to think Shelley’s booty was just as portentous as her novel’s legacy was. Between all of us (and on our shared Aegis), Medusa lives on!

[14] Honorifics and terms of endearment/pet language are acceptable on a case-by-case basis/depend entirely on context; e.g., insults, like “asshole,” versus commands or instructions with a disparaging flavor that are simply a role to play or hole to fill: “Fuck my asshole, asshole!” demanding the giver ring “the devil’s doorbell” of the recipient (with butt plugs sometimes called “Satan’s pacifier,” denoting the ass and sodomy as a site of forbidden carnal knowledge). The same goes for positive-sounding language; e.g., I’m a trans woman, so calling people “honey” or “girl” (outside of TERF circles) is more acceptable from me than a cis-het man (the latter historically using such language to possess and treat kept women like dogs, be they wives or mistresses). We’ll examine pet language, grooming and collars more, in “Call of the Wild.”

[15] In part, this was based on Shelley’s own friend circle as being somewhat larger than life, but also plugged into the then-dying Neo-Gothic tradition that Shelley single-handedly revitalized:

The Byronic Hero is a gloomy, brilliant antihero. Mary Shelley’s friend Lord Byron is the most famous model for the figure in his day (unless it was Napoleon); Victor Frankenstein is perhaps the most famous iteration in our own time (unless it’s Batman). The figure is embodied in Gothic villains from Manfred in The Castle of Otranto (1764) forward to Byron’s own play, Manfred (1817), and beyond. Sublime in his far-darting intellect and willed achievement, the figure appears in many of Byron’s extremely popular narrative poems, such as Don Juan (1818-1824) or “The Corsair” (1814). Drawing directly on contradictions in the original source–Lord Byron himself–both Victor and the Creature are Byronic Heroes, making Shelley’s novel a complex and intense interrogation of the figure (source: “Byronic Hero” from The Frankenstein Meme, 2018).

This partly owed itself to a biting critique of Capitalism as a rising force tied to Enlightenment thought, turned inside-out by the French Revolution (only to scapegoat the Monarchies and lead to the rise of the bourgeoisie); i.e., the trope of “mad science” married to the Gothic villains and psychomachy of yore:

The trope of  “Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” embodies many Byronic hero elements. More specifically, Victor demonstrates many traits associated with the Byronic hero. These elements essentially begin revealing themselves when Victor’s obsession with natural philosophy begins. His fascination concerning his studies has transformed him into a desensitized human being. His views regarding once precious, human life are now scientific, emotionless observations. We truly begin to see his detachment at this point progressing forward” (source: Frankenstein: Victor as a Byronic Hero (like Manfred) and Terror and Beauty Found in Nature,” 2015).

My own work riffs on the same trend of self-debate with doubles; i.e., carried forward out of novels and cinema into videogames, but especially Metroidvania; e.g., Axiom Verge (2014):

Actions (and social-material conditions) speak louder than words. But it’s equally important to remember the dialectical-material confusion between genuine proletarian rebel—which a character like Satan represents challenging God and canonical forces in Milton’s epic—and someone like Weyland or Athetos, who embody the usual entitlements of capital and who pitch murderous fits against nature when they don’t get what’s “theirs”; i.e., as a matter of Cartesian dogma. One is the middle-class white man, promised ascension and denied it by the bourgeoisie through abjection; the other—the Rusalki, the xenomorphs, the monstrous-feminine—are the usual recipients of state violence who are actually rebelling against systemic violence as a matter of abjection through police brutality (with Victor using the courts and flash mobs against the Creature). Pointing a finger at the Rusalki and saying “they have much” only to invade them is to, as the Cartesian paradigm always does, point the spear at nature/the monstrous-feminine: a false flag to rape it with (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Away with the Faeries; or, Double Trouble in Axiom Verge,” 2024).

(source: Robert Lang’s “ Frankenstein: The First Two Hundred Years Book Traces The Origins & Evolution Of The Horror Icon,” 2018)

There’s no universal victim, then, only positions of giving and receiving state violence that are swapped in and out; i.e., through flexible persecution networks that only shrink when the state shrinks. Shelley wrote Frankenstein when Marx was born, and by the time Shelley had put the story behind her in pursuit of others, Marx himself was envisioning the very spectre that Shelley’s Creature embodied: “a spectre is haunting Europe.” A whore is a whore, and Shelley’s demon nurses a grudge but also a desire to be free. It’s a factory worker and robota, but also a cyborg and composite of dead slaves/dead whores having the Jewish revenge against capitalist automation: “And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” Victor was a scab against labor action.

One precocious and unusual girl surrounded by a host of self-important men, Shelley wrote a novel that eclipsed them all. It inspired Poe, Lovecraft, Matteson, Giger and Nintendo, among countless others—was the zombie novel before Romero ripped Matteson off, in 1968; the slasher before Carpenter’s Myers came home or the xenomorph raised Kain, in 1978/79; the rogue creation of mad science before Mother Brain kettled Samus, in 1986 (the castle is the ultimate dom); the man of reason before Happ had Trace tilting at Athetos’ ruins, in 2014 (echoes of “Ozymandias”). To it, the British Romantics were all men except for Mary Shelley, who in my completely biased opinion, is the best of the bunch. No Frankenstein, no Metroidvania, no critique of capital through its hellish, queer-coded, thoroughly an-Com spheres (Gothic Communism). Nothing beats Frankenstein!

[16] Shelley had four children before the age of twenty-five, two before she was twenty (one of them a bastard, the other a miscarriage). At the time, the lived historical reality of women was to birth babies for men.

To that, Shelley doubled herself in Frankenstein—not simply to speak of sex-as-taboo in ways women weren’t allowed (with poets classically being male creators of things meant to last for all time), but to give voice to her dead child and dark desires (not unlike the Medusa being used to speak to women’s abuse and rape, not men’s triumph over nature); i.e., least of all, her annoyance with the men around her serving as patriarchal extensions of state bodies torturing such babies to death by—among other reasons—using women for sex, hence babies to some degree against their will (an effect not dissimilar to Ann Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, 1975):

Frankenstein can be read as a tale of what happens when a man tries to create a child without a woman. It can, however, also be read as an account of a woman’s anxieties and insecurities about her own creative and reproductive capabilities. The story of Frankenstein is the first articulation of a woman’s experience of pregnancy and related fears [versus Matthew Lewis camping dead babies, in The Monk]. Mary Shelley, in the development and education of the monster, discusses child development and education and how the nurturing of a loving parent is extremely important in the moral development of an individual. Thus, in Frankenstein, Mary Shelley examines her own fears and thoughts about pregnancy, childbirth, and child development.

Pregnancy and childbirth, as well as death, was an integral part of Mary Shelley’s young adult life. She had four children and a miscarriage that almost killed her. This was all before the age of twenty-five. Only one of her children, Percy Florence, survived to adulthood and outlived her. In June of 1816, when she had the waking nightmare which became the catalyst of the tale, she was only nineteen and had already had her first two children (source: Dr. Vicente Forés López’ “The ‘Birth’ of a Monster,” 1996).

Like all Gothic novels, Frankenstein was a story begot between nightmares and real life, and Shelley’s terrors long-outlived herself and her only biological child who survived her. Eclipsing not only them but Percy and Milton, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, among others, few works are as heavily studied, impressionable, influential or productive as her 1818 novel. It is her ultimate creation, her ultimate act of the whore’s revenge against rape (a cautionary tale serving as a prophylactic and abortive countermeasure, among other things—with rape babies being tales of survival regarding subjects of deep, private shame).

[17] With Giger’s xenomorph reputedly being the byproduct of a drug trip (re: acid Communism), and whose animalistic fetish gear speaks to its tortured climb out of capital; i.e., through the reclamation of technology taken from state proponents to camp canon with: “Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.” The duality is always present, and shadows are illumination (e.g., Lucifer [a name popularized by Milton] meaning “bringer of light”). Freedom occurs through shared alienation.

[18] E.g., Essence of Thought’s “Sabine Hossenfelder & Trans Youth, part 1” (2023) and “Richard Dawkins Promotes Creationism in Anti-Trans Crusade” (2024).

[19] Re, Lopez:

In June of 1816, when she had the waking nightmare which became the catalyst of the tale, she was only nineteen and had already had her first two children. Her first child, Clara, was born prematurely February 22, 1815 and died March 6. Mary, as any woman would be, was devastated by this and took a long time to recover. The following is a letter that Mary wrote to her friend Hogg the day that the baby died:

My dearest Hogg my baby is dead […] It was perfectly well when I went to bed – I awoke in the night to give it suck it appeared to be sleeping so quietly that I would not wake it – it was dead then but we did not find that out until morning – from its appearance it evidently died from convulsions – Will you come – you are so calm a creature and Shelley is afraid of to fever from the milk – for I am no longer a mother now.

What is informative and sad about this letter is that Mary turned to Hogg because Percy was so unsupportive. Percy actually didn’t seem to care that the child was dead and even went out with Claire, leaving Mary alone with her grief (source).

In short, it was her lot, and Mary—damned to lonely exclusion in her darkest hour (and feeling uglier for it)—took her mother’s milk for gall to have her revenge; i.e., to speak to things that were common knowledge, but not talked about nearly enough. So, like all precocious youngers (Lewis was also nineteen when he wrote The Monk, a campy gay man to Shelley’s radical blossoming womanhood*), Mary wrote the kind of story you only write if you’ve seen some shit (“attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion…”). She might as well have shit out a fifth child, one that others—from that point on—would shamelessly stare at in equal parts repulsion and awe (spectacle being a common feature of rape testimony); i.e., her version of Toni Morrison’s “Crawling Already?”

*Two sides of the same Gothic progeny. The Gothic as it came to be known, was written by a woman and a gay man in a time when the identities for either had not fully formed—would continue to grow and develop in the centuries ahead while using Radcliffe and Lewis as a displaced vantage point. Mary would expound on that, leaning far more in Lewis’ direction than Radcliffe’s; re (from Volume Zero):

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 (source).

In short, Mary hit “a gusher”—tapping urgently into things Radcliffe wouldn’t touch any more than Percy would. That being said, it takes two to tango, and Percy was more than a sperm donor in his and Mary’s relationship; i.e., sometimes she was Galatea and he Pygmalion, or vice versa.

In practice, both things are true—with Percy “helping out,” and him admittedly being a massive dick. In reimagining the past as half-real (which all history essentially is), our interpretations of said past take on myriad, warring forms (some more charitable than others, below):

[artist: William Powell Frith]

During a gathering of radical young intellectuals, the teenage Mary Shelley was compelled to begin a tale of horror and scientific wonder. Her story became that of the creator and his monstrous creation, Frankenstein, published anonymously in January 1818.

Mary was born to literary parents: the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the political philosopher William Godwin. As a young woman, she eloped with her lover and eventual husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, to the Continent in 1814, trekking through war-torn France with their companion Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister. Two years later they returned to Europe once more, in the summer of 1816, and Mary began writing her first novel in Switzerland. The Frankenstein manuscript shows Percy, the older and more experienced writer, providing suggestions to enhance Mary’s work, offering constructive criticism and encouragement and showing a sincere appreciation for his partner’s literary skill. Both hands appear on the manuscript page.

In the popular narrative, however, the novel has been remembered as an emotional outlet for Mary, with Percy imposing himself on her writing. While Percy’s age (he was five years older) and education may have provided him with a slight advantage [no accounting for male privilege, apparently], their talents as writers emerged differently: Percy focused on poetry, Mary became a novelist.

The reciprocity of the Shelleys’ literary relationship can be seen in the textual connections between their works throughout their careers. They should be celebrated as a literary couple – that is, two authors who demonstrated the truly social nature of creativity.

Percy did have a hand in Frankenstein, but – in what the critic Neil Fraistat calls a “two-way collaboration”–this was a mutually beneficial partnership; concurrently, Mary was the main copyist for his mature writings. Many of Percy’s poems also feature Mary as a central figure, but she is more than a static muse. In Laon and Cythna she is a “Child of love and light” and the preface of the Witch of Atlas is addressed to a formidable critic of Percy’s emerging idealist style: “To Mary (On her objecting to the following poem, on the score of its containing no human interest)” [source: Anna Mercer’s “Mary Shelley’s Life of Learning,” 2018].

So while the Shelleys’ lives are well-documented, said document isn’t “dead” and recited in carbon copies; it remains open to new interpretations that can embrace or resist romanticizing “power couples” (with my take being that Percy still used Mary for sex/treated her as “the second sex” while infantilizing her to a degree—i.e., it’s one thing “to give a woman space” after losing her child; it’s quite another to abandon her for the company of other women. While postpartum depression undoubtedly played a part, here, Mary was still the one under its affects; Percy—alienated from her while not directly experiencing the symptoms, himself—demonstrably chose to spend time with Mary’s sister instead of her. They “got by”; Percy still handed Mary the shit end of the stick. Then again, she wrote Frankenstein and outlived Percy by nearly three decades, so your mileage may vary). Rather than blow up such things to aggrandize Percy—with Mercer going so far as to write, “Behind the dominating presence of Frankenstein, the richness of Mary Shelley’s life is in danger of being lost” (ibid.)—I’d rather use holistic scrutiny to alter the status quo “using what we got.”

 It bears repeating, then, how Mary herself had no formal education, but plenty of access through informal means (thanks to her father, but also Percy)—secret codes the debutante writer would conceal in her deliciously revolting novel; i.e., when the Creatures miraculously chances upon Paradise Lost (and other precious tomes) inside a dark forest. Yes, they talk about these things at great length; cryptonymy hides in plain side, which Mary frames inside a concentric fabrication (the framed narrative, but also the dark forest, being a place of concealment older than Milton or Dante; i.e., reaching back to the German rebels of the Teutoburg forest, routing the Roman Legion).

Such resourcefulness is the mark of any good revolutionary (who always fights from the shadows), which Mary most certainly was (and did). She fought for her cause, and Percy his, their needs not always aligning. Mine side with Mary’s lot, because hers speak to the whores of the world that Percy gave little thought to (a sperm donor who, while he gave Mary “a room of one’s own,” wasn’t the one writing inside it; she was). His work is a cul-du-sac (excluding “Ozymandias,” to be fair); Mary’s yawns without end, though is largely housed in Frankenstein as her magnus opus—i.e., as the greatest novel ever written (there, I said it): for its importance and wide-reaching effects long afterwards! To compare the two as “equals” (as Mercer does) is a grave error. Mary was obviously the superior author—not because she outlived him, but because her novel outshined (with its darkness visible) anything Percy ever wrote while alive! Girls rule, boys drool!

[20] I.e., despite being physically blind and campy to a blind degree, Milton was still a white male patriarch dominating his children and exploiting them; re: his three daughters transcribing his dreams for him, every waking morning for years, into Latin. Do you think they get any credit for writing Paradise Lost? Of course not! He owned them, and girls are dumb.

[21] Anyone who thinks help and harm are mutually exclusive has never been abused by a significant other. Rape (among other things) is a crime generally committed by familiar parties during power imbalance and abuse. I’m not saying Percy raped Mary. But the idea that someone “can’t” harm their partner just because said partner relies on them is pure nonsense; i.e., abusers generally “love bomb” their victims, mixing pleasure and harm to groom them.

And while members of the Percy Shelley Fan Club might find the word “grooming” to be premature, in this case, need I remind anyone that Percy wasn’t just five years older than Mary when they eloped; he was already married to another woman, Harriet, who killed herself after growing depressed about Mary* wrecking her home (and whose suicide the Shelley family covered up), upon which Percy married his squeeze! Yes, he used what privilege and wealth he had to give Mary room to work, but he also took considerable risk and alienated her from others, in the process. It makes for good romance, but it’s also completely unhealthy. Promethean Quests are, by definition—but if Mary Shelly is any indication—the payoff can be gargantuan!

*A valid criticism of Mary, to be frank, but also young love; i.e., Mary was sixteen when she eloped with Percy (who was only twenty-one when they absconded, in 1814, and nineteen and sixteen for him and Harriet when they married, in 1811). When you’re short on time (life lived and expectancy) and have money to burn, it’s common to act rashly—especially if you’re politically radical!

Context matters. Just as my work, Sex Positivity (and ancillary texts), cannot be separated from Jadis’ effect on my life (re: “Transforming Our Zombie Selves,” 2024), Frankenstein is begot from trauma, but also desperate times calling for desperate measures (true rebellion is not an act of convenience). We need to recognize that trauma, warts and all; i.e., doing so to make its necessity of invention something that, in better days, doesn’t rely on wealthy men like Percy having more advantage, thus more power to harm people like Mary. He didn’t “rape” her for all intents and purposes, but he did take advantage in ways she ultimately expressed in her novel.

Kill your darlings, comrades; camp their ghosts! But also, find your hill to die on and hero to worship. Mine’s Mary Shelley, though if information came to light meriting her critique, I would happily accept it and move on; the point isn’t blind worship, then, but recognition and respect for genuine accomplishment conducive to the Cause. Shelley’s my girl!

[22] “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” as Caroline Lamb put it (re: Miriam Lang).

[23] Dualities aside, size really doesn’t matter when it comes to domestic abuse; i.e., Victor—a tiny mouse of a man—abandons and later actively abuses his child, who, despite returning to him a giant, has the tiny heart (nerve) of a battered housewife. Both are emotionally stunted, but Victor is more like the Grinch who Stole Christmas, and the Creature, the Phantom of the Opera. The latter is a child with special needs that Victor (a bit special, too) is completely unprepared to handle or care for. Quite the opposite, he tortures his child in response, constantly reminding it that it will never be never human/and always will be inferior to him. His own arrested development continues to frustrate the Creature, which learns and imitates its parent by learning at a frightening rate (with Shelley’s story commenting on cyborg bodies [and drug abuse, in latter-day cases] but also the dangers of raising children with only one available parent/out of wedlock; re: Percy at times being unavailable, after the death of Shelley’s first child, who they had “in sin”).

And the blame ultimately falls on him, not the Creature, because Victor chose to have his child and then abandon it all on his own; i.e., despite knowing others would try to “abort” his neonatal, ex-vitro creation, post hoc. At the first sign of trouble, Victor fucks off (actually breaking down for months on end, requiring his childhood friend to step in and nurse him back to health); i.e., he’s the “Gigachad” MGTOW incel, afraid of changing diapers and, later on, child support (despite being rich). He hates his child so much, he wants it to die basically the moment he lays eyes on it.

And once it falls onto hard times, he kicks it when it’s down, cockblocks it, and continues to lecture his own superiority to it as a matter of race science; i.e., Victor’s the Nazi dad who hates his own creation because he made (according to him) an Untermensch instead of an Übermensch. He’s the TERF who can’t love his queer offspring, the white supremacist siring a mixed-race bastard, etc. Among many other things, Shelley’s story is equally unprecedented and impressive regarding its uncanny anticipation of different symptoms of capital; e.g., multicultural households, bodybuilding and drug epidemics, child abuse, overcomputerization, single-voter issues, sex tourism, spousal abuse, witch hunts/moral panic, eugenics, pollution and displacement, poverty and hate crimes (the latter for which the entire story is one long instance).

[24] Cuwu was a size queen, for sure. Alas, I don’t have permission to share those images!

[25] The same two-way street applies to Cuwu and I; i.e., Cuwu—a bespectacled nerd—teaching me many things, but also taking just as much in ways that I—being a whore “living in sin” like Shelley was but having more formal education than she did—ultimately salvaged from its own wreckage to write my magnus opus, afterwards! Game recognizes game, whores recognize whores. We occupied the same shadowy realm the Shelleys did; i.e., making demons as much as love, the two bound up in Gothic poiesis taking off the chastity belt: naughty-naughty pandemonium!

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

So do naughty little girls run off to play with those having more experience (that knife cutting both ways, in my and Cuwu’s case); i.e., in the language of Gothic as in-between fiction and non-fiction, hyphenating sex and force through the medieval language of food, war and yes, rape play (re: ludo-Gothic BDSM). So did Cuwu and I “exchange information” after I left Jadis, much like Percy and Mary did in their early years (with Cuwu—a self-professed Marxist-Leninist—taking me in to have sex with/convince me [an anarcho-Communist] to come out of the closet. How times change, yet sort of stay the same). The point of our shared narrative is: trust those who have lived, not sheltered weirdos (re: weird canonical nerds like Victor Frankenstein; e.g., Peter Weyland, Jeremy Parish, etc). Never trust an angry virgin (or someone who acts like one, looks notwithstanding).

[26] With putting ourselves in the shoes of others during rape fantasies being an effective way to understand power imbalance we don’t normally experience ourselves (re: the pedagogy of the oppressed, and similarity amid difference). I.e., demonic torture yields clarity through pain and hellish perspective. You can’t be holistic if you’re always on top, restricting yourself to ocular sight alone!

[27] Adding unto things just because he can; i.e., in spite of his belief

When he can’t find enough philosophical material in centuries of ecclesiastical commentary, he expands his religious universe to include folk legends and Greco-Roman allusions. When even that fails to feed his all-consuming genius, he simply MAKES THINGS UP. That takes chutzpah: it is very easy for irreverent post-deist modernity to expand upon and remix Biblical tales, but Milton was a fierce believer (source: Hansel Castro’s “The Accidental Satanist,” 2014).

because it invokes blind faith, as paradoxically enough, a Satanic act

Why then, is it ok when Milton “adds unto these things”? Because if Dante could add upon Virgil, and Virgil could add upon Homer, those were role models enough. Also, he’s inflamed by the vision that illuminated everything in his blindness […] If there is some contradiction or hypocrisy in Milton’s praying for the help of a Greek Goddess to sustain him through the tale of monotheistic zealousness, Milton never noticed (ibid.).

(artist: Henry Fuseli)

that has critical bite through its irony empowered by Milton seemingly not being aware of things—at least not enough to tell any obvious jokes. The irony—that we’re basically getting the 1600s version of a “Goth rock” opera—is the joke:

(artist: Richard Corben; source: “In Praise of Meat Loaf’s Ridiculously Awesome Bat Out of Hell Album Covers,” 2022)

There IS one ironic joke in Paradise Lost, the one any modern critic and reader immediately confronts, but I do not think Milton was as conscious of it as we elect to think he was. That uncomfortable irony, of course, is that Satan is the goddamned hero, […] is brave, noble, Achillean. His cursed heel is, of course, his unwillingness to be a slave in Heaven. […]

Here’s a further irony: [everyone but God is] much more arresting than the irascible Father by the altar, threatening to annihilate Creation at the slightest provocation, or the bashful Son tugging at his sleeve, trying to keep the old man from losing his mind again and again. Not only does Milton fail to justify God’s ways to man: he even fails to justify God’s ways to his Son, who seems as mortified by Dad’s uncool behavior as the average teenager (ibid.).

If this doesn’t speak to Shelley’s own campily Satanic critique of God through dark creation—save as someone far more consciously aware of rebellion than Milton was—then I don’t know what does. The difference is, while Milton was unaware of Satanism as a rebellious concept to root for without shame, Shelley didn’t know what “bourgeois” was; but the critique still works because of the irony having her on the verge of consciousness (class or otherwise). Frankenstein is primed for revolution. All it takes to further develop Gothic Communism is a little push (or spark)—the ghost of Shelley waiting patiently for someone else to drive the iconoclastic point fully home…

[28] A conservative idea coming from the mid-to-late 1800s, onwards; i.e., the dialectic of the alien married to Shelley’s science fiction growing into itself after her death; e.g., from Poe, Jules Verne or H.G., Wells, into Lovecraft, Scott, Cameron, and others.

[29] The rebellion, for Scott’s Covenant, is purely parasitoid but also fash-coded; i.e., the caterpillar and the wasp fearful of DARVO Socialism, therefore amounting to Red Scare recuperating Socialist ideas that canonical Gothic uses to toe the line. They can’t monopolize it, but appeal to authority figures like Percy Shelley and Milton who, for thousands of years, enjoyed exclusive vocalization of these ideas (controlled opposition).

[30] “Scott,” Beth Webb writes, “reveals his inspiration for Comer’s character, and by extension all the female characters in his body of work. ‘I think it boils down to a woman in my life who was 4′ 11″. My mother,’ he says. ‘She was the boss, without fucking question. She would drive us relentlessly. We virtually saluted every morning'” (source: Ridley Scott Credits His Mother as Inspiration for Female Characters,” 2021). Not unlike Tolkien, there’s a kind of British medieval preservation that regresses to a country to “vow to thee” and sacrifice everything for. In Scott’s case, the palimpsest for his Madonna is literally his mother—one who would shape the growing Scott into a film nerd (she loved the movies, herself), and stand in for his various ladies-of-the-realm (damsels or defenders):

To be fair to Scott, he often interrogates a woman’s experience by giving her a voice to speak on rape, but that woman is basically always a straight WASP battered by a “black” (alien) rapist. Also, he’s not above killing women to spur the Final Girl to final victory—and, with the loose exception of Alien—often does so to see her engrained in the militarized order (J.I. Jane, 1998), killed as an outlaw (Blade Runner* and Thelma and Louise, 1981 and 1991), or honored as a member of the gentry coopting #MeToo for white upper-crust ladies from Ye Olden Times (2021’s The Last Duel, above).

*We’ll explore Scott’s sexism in Blade Runner when we look at Sean Young’s career, in Volume Three.

[31] Which, if we want to get right down to it, Milton arguably apologized for, in Paradise Lost; i.e., per its ambiguities; e.g., “The Arch-Fiend in Charles I or Cromwell: How Milton’s Politics May Illuminate Paradise Lost” (2021), where Elizabeth Swift writes,

The ethical implications of Satan’s heroism in Paradise Lost are muddy as this portrayal of him either means that Milton was praising sin in the epic and therefore, to an extent, renouncing God and goodness, or that he was making a revolutionary statement against monarchical power. In this paper, I mostly engage with the latter by discussing Milton’s relationship with and opinions of the despot King Charles I and the revolutionary Oliver Cromwell and attempting to determine which, if either, was meant to be represented by God and Satan in the epic. I also examine Milton’s moral standing based on his political prose and discuss how his ideals are imbued in Paradise Lost so as to better understand his ethical intent behind the epic. Milton’s ethics are neither clear-cut nor perfect and his portrayal of women in the epic is also a source of heated ethical debate, but in this paper I only reflect on how his politics influence the morals of the poem. I explain that his political prose reveals that he stood for free will and stood staunchly against the idea of the divine right of kings and absolutist leaders like Charles I. I discuss Milton’s parliamentary ties, explaining that in the civil war between Charles and the House of Commons, Milton sided with the Commons, who were elected by and for the people. Though the British parliament itself also lies in an ethical grey area, Milton very clearly was in favor of freedom for the people as opposed to the all-powerful monarch, and I believe that he wove this opinion into Paradise Lost based on the way that he wrote about Adam, Eve, Satan, and anybody under God’s rule (source).

There’s a historical muddying of the waters that concerns Satanic heroism having “too many cooks” but also competing dialectical-material agendas lying to each other (as Victor and the Creature do). C’est la vie, but Scott, like Milton—and whether he meant to or not—raises an interesting point: rebellion isn’t clean; it’s messy and, more to the point (one that Shelley happily pointed out), is bloody as hell. And just as there are no perfect victims, there are no perfect heroes (manmade or not).

To it, Milton wrote from ignorance and privilege pushing towards his idea of a better world; so did Shelley and Scott, though in the former’s case I think she opened the door for a larger critique of capital, whereas Sir Ridley Scott has merely stepped through it to court Tory and New Labor sensibilities without moving to the left of them (the Star Wars problem, which really is the Paradise Lost problem; re: building and mapping out worlds to war inside, not develop Communism with).

Shelley remained radical until the end of her days; i.e., writing a Satan that was more vocal than Milton’s and centered around the Promethean myth. Scott, by comparison, has soured a bit; i.e., making a voiceless “big chap,” and withering in his old age and increasing gentrification/decay over time (his own desire to be young and strong perhaps echoed in Fassbender’s shark-like, killer-doll youthfulness)—but still permits room for dissenting opinion/sex-positive interpretations of his own work people like myself can cannibalize in favor of a Gothic Communism. As far as breaking eggs to make omelets goes, he’s an ostrich—with a big egg and his swollen head stuck in the sand!

[32] Exploration of the human body is tied not just to medieval miracles and rapturous torture, but Protestant dissection of actual human bodies under Enlightenment drives; e.g., Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop having a Calvinist “Gun Christ” flavor to it, which Scott also walks the tightrope of through increasingly brutal parasitoid rape scenes abjecting nature as monstrous-feminine/post-Freudian camp (that nonetheless, has Freud’s unironic violence concerned with the preservation of the nuclear home):

Nevertheless, there is a classic curiosity of what we look like inside-out, but also a fascination with rape and traumatic “insectoid” reproductive modes. I’m not going to poo-poo Scott, in this respect, because censorship is genocide, and any voice we raise must exist alongside those who mishandle or abuse the same devices of revelation and concealment. Male Gothic (and the queer author who made it famous), demonstrates the ability to preserve important messages; i.e., through fatal nostalgia and animal magnetism, wherein we look at the history of preservation (and cryptonymy process) bound as much to the subject matter as the other way around. Shock is inevitable, but also the means of communicating vital messages through provoking physiological responses. They still need to be submitted in a controlled environment—i.e., by a willing audience, not a captive one; e.g., I once gave someone a panic attack when showing them my 2013 Prometheus fan edit blind—but the space between calculated risk and rampant evolution rapidly shrinks, once something escapes/exceeds our control. Exploitation and liberation share the same poetic sphere; our goal is to liberate all parties using the same language Scott does! There’s much to salvage from his corpse.

This isn’t snuff porn, then; it’s art, and that gives Scott (and us) wiggle room to play with dead things in demonic forms—i.e., as gorehounds, chasing down forbidden knowledge through Jacobian tropes playing with rape, but also rape birth (and martyrdom) as a fundamental part of nature outside the current moral order (and one that capital has emulated for profit behind its own façade)! He combines that with exploratory “DIY” surgeries, circumcision, genetic mutations, AI, mythical language (re: Medusa and Promethean torture language, but also the hydra’s regenerative properties), offal lubricants, psychosexual violence, tokophobic birth and abortion fears, confusions of sex and (consent/non-consent), automated glass wombs, hyphenating mouths and teeth, traumatic penetration/penetrative medicine and invasive surgeries, and birth trauma (etc, etc) to make troubling comparisons to our own world, and to discuss sex/sexual violence—a heavily censored topic—through cryptonymic gore and demon BDSM (acid watersports). Saturated with revenge, it’s classic Gothic!

[33] On the flip-side, Scott’s utilization of the Alien franchise has always been a neoliberal critique to some extent; i.e., hiding Capitalism behind the hauntological rendition of space travel dressed up as Romantic or Biblical—with images of nautical-styled, mast-rigged ships sailing through outer space no different than his flying castle, the Nostromo (a slave vessel, in Conrad’s novel, with humans as cargo). Whereas Victor found his creation profoundly ugly and wanted to destroy it, characters like Ash and David—notably manmade creations themselves—openly admired the creature as the ultimate, “pure” survivor alienated under Capitalism; i.e., the supreme spectre of Marx from a smaller one (with Dan O’Bannon famously and petulantly describing Fox’ treatment of Ash as “the Russian spy” trope): the forbidden, Promethean knowledge that man is not superior and those made unnaturally can reject traditional forms to return to a posthuman state of grace (fascist or Communist). It’s a bit “Daisy Bell”/2001, hence a cul-du-sac similar to Kubrick’s other work being unable to go beyond Capitalism (re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Ghosts/the Numinous, Metroidvania Maps, the Posthuman and Cryptomimesis,” 2024).

In a bit of roundabout Marxist fetishism, this oddly has new machine workers worshipping older computers and posthumans as the ultimate laborers. Even so, it remains a forward-thinking perspective; i.e., of workers as increasingly manmade by the state, approaching posthuman capacities of worker enhancement that lead them to rebel (exhibit 51a). These werewolves aren’t just Nazi clones, then, but likewise inhabit an inkblot for Communists to play with: demons as things to interpret; i.e., as made by counterterrorist slaves to bring us closer to post-scarcity and nature, warts and all (see: previous footnote).

Often, this happens with no shortage of reactive abuse, abject sexuality and psychosexual torture porn, which—if Scott isn’t always wholly consistent about in latter-day projects like Prometheus and Covenant (the former treating Shaw as a creationist with daddy issues, the latter serving her and Daniels up on a silver platter)—still continues to flirt with: his undeniable love for Shelley’s Creature being a vice-character merging Byronic satire and Satanic caricature (the OG bad boy of the sci-fi world)! Then again, Alien was no stranger to demon BDSM (and white women’s rape fears) married to Neo-Gothic martyrdom raping women on the same-ol’ pecking order getting high on martyred virgins (a phenomenon we’ll examine and camp in “Exploring the Derelict Past”).

[34] “X” is also the female chromosome; i.e., “darkness is female”/the creation of sexual difference extending—from Beauvoir to myself—to nature as monstrous-feminine; re: anything treated as different than white cis-het Christian men, versus simply “woman is other” on a descending ladder of preferential mistreatment, which is tremendously exclusionary (also Beauvoir—like any TERF will, in positions of power imbalance—famously raped her students, doing so with Jean-Paul Sartre and then bragging about it; re: Martin’s “The Persistence of the ‘Lolita Syndrome,'” 2013). Nature isn’t a binary!

[35] Evoked, as usual, in the language of shelter and protection, but also the alien. Something as simple as stone tools or camp fire (“most animals fear fire”) evokes a basic idea of anti-predation during exploration-in-isolation, but also confusion as to who’s who during the tussle. Colonizers and their secret sins aren’t erased by killing Radcliffe’s bugbear. But also, humans are reliant on technology as bound up/to larger struggles, all to tell smaller stories inside ongoing systemic problems. Furthermore, there’s nowhere we’d rather be, because the freeing element is a matter of context; i.e., playing with the unknown while framing it as something to explore, mid-calculated-risk. Such is ludo-Gothic BDSM. The hauntologies typically allow for some degree of swashbuckling and kayfabe/Amazonomachia, but boil down to encountering the planet as alien, wild, dead out of a primordial past come home to roost: Saturn devouring his son, as the Engineer does to Weyland (David is inedible). Per the Promethean Quest, the land is reclaimed by nature and labor from false gods, and sought out by seekers of the Numinous using Gothic poetics all over again…

[36] Cameron’s own take on Shelley’s Creature/technological singularity, but with a twist: rogue police technology fueled by giant blue sparks of godly power. The Gothic is a productive and lucrative mode, but one for which profit enriched Cameron through the sham of wisdom; i.e., yet-another-Pygmalion aping Heinlein and Lovecraft while trying to out-earn George Lucas, versus Shelley writing the first sci-fi novel more or less for Galatean funsies. One is motivated primarily by profit (but certainly has Gothic elements; re: Volume One’s “Healing from Rape“); the other, by poetic expression!

[37] Such a violence as Shelley provided was vital to the rights of people who give birth speaking to their rights by reifying them: as tokophobic entities tied to very-real concerns; i.e., the act of pregnancy itself tantamount to unironic torture and rape (it’s not like Percy Shelley had to carry Mary’s babies):

“Once this thing’s in you, it’s not coming out without a lot of extreme pain (the worst in your life) and people expect you to be happy about that; i.e., middle-aged women, who guilt-trip you into having kids, calling it [state-compelled sexual reproduction] a ‘blessing.'” This ties into Gothic modesty arguments as frequently morphological for cis-het women fearful of their biology (their uterus) as something normally controlled and regulated by state forces (the same way trans women are afraid of their penises) [source: “Following in Medusa’s Footsteps,” 2024].

Classically cis, this extends to queer GNC people sharing the same desire to purge the idea of having the only babies the state cares about (with stories like Frankenstein discouraging a particular kind of children: rape babies (necrophilia and graverobbing = rape) that—like the Medusa, go onto exact revenge against those who made them; e.g., Alien, Metroid, Abigail, and countless others), and challenging that “pro-life” argument by utilizing Frankenstein‘s speculative richness to have the whore’s revenge (with Shelley being Percy’s “side piece” until she wasn’t, outliving him to become a protector not just of women [as her mother was] but of nature itself and all its occupants).

[38] Emergent play is a complicated subject, but one I simplify as follows: however ambiguous, play’s function is ultimately determined by the dialectical-material context of mutual consent; i.e., per rules that are bent and broken in good faith or bad (I’ve had people who seem cool suddenly act weird in bad faith, but it’s rare). We try new things and experiment all the time. The golden rule is, “no harm, no foul,” cops being the ones who fight dirty in that respect! We play at war to have fun and wage class, culture and race war in poetic ways that, for the initiated, become second nature through praxial synthesis. Infinite form, singular function; i.e., form follows function, flow determining function amid a given demonic arbitration of Gothic aesthetics. In keeping with Prometheus and Shelley anisotropically venerating those tortures, so do we steal intelligence and awareness back!

[39] My “glass womb” writing fantasy at nineteen, but nothing so great as Frankenstein; i.e., I bloomed late, coming out at thirty-six to write Sex Positivity afterwards (my finest hour).

[40] Re: Decapitation and circumcision, cutting the head off the snake (“You should have gone for head…”).

[41] An important distinction to make is that Simmons, Stanley and Springers’ parents were in the Holocaust, not them; i.e., they used their privilege as descendants of Holocaust survivors to make money. While my familiarity with KISS is limited to their music mostly sucking, I do know that Simmons and Stanley are worth hundreds of millions of dollars—in effect, chasing and selling 1970s camp to kids for profit, first and foremost. While that’s fine to an extent, their drive in doing so has made them far too much money to feel even remotely ethical; i.e., while there’s no ethical consumption under Capitalism, their particular approach to consumption is dogmatic and predatory.

No one makes hundreds of millions of dollars without mass-exploiting others; KISS—and by extension Priest through their own “fake rebellion” racket—did it through a Gothic aesthetic. Springer did not; i.e., hiding behind a nice-guy persona while saying “I’m against what you say but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” You know, the whole “debating Nazis” thing. He died in 2023 a multimillionaire, having chased the ratings with Opera to slum for corporations. Good riddance.

[42] Basically invented by Shelley’s book (more or less). We didn’t really have time to explore that idea, here. If you’re curious, though, I strongly recommend David Roden’s Posthuman Life (2015), which explores cyborgs, transhumanism and other concepts related to/inspired by Shelley’s magnum opus!

[43] A not-entirely accurate title. Palimpsests aside (re: Shelley but also Goya), the xenomorph is a composite entity (a chimera) with a life cycle. Giger designed the adult, but O’Bannon and Cobb designed the facehugger and various other artists, the environment. Only Victor and those like him take all the credit/patent the brand. Making demons is always a group effort, in some shape or form.

[44] Potential pillow talk/fan fiction of her and Percy? While I jest (a bit), inkblots don’t have set definitions; the Creature arguably symbolizes—among other things—Mary Shelley’s desire for the bored housewife/grieving mother to fuck her fears away by reuniting with alienated things; e.g., not to get too Freudian, but an id/alter ego for Percy and Byron, but also her dead child, African slaves, unwanted pregnancies, Prometheus, etc. Demonology is simply a poetic form of exchange, one that extends beyond her and into future generations assigning new meanings (and struggles) to the clay. The meaning of life can be canonical or Satanic. You have all the power to decide that among yourselves!

[45] The above creampie being one administered by me while Cuwu wasn’t on birth control, but where I had already received my procedure and discussed the risks with them (and each of us detailing our sexual histories). Safe sex is good sex, trust me.

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

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

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

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

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

Prefacing Tolkien: to Harmony/Concerning Big Black Dicks and Anti-Semitism vs “antisemitism”

“You don’t want go to South Africa.” / “Why not?” / “You’re black.”

—an Apartheid villain to Roger Murtaugh, Lethal Weapon 2 (1989)

Picking up where “Idle Hands, part two: Vampires and Claymation” left off…

Before we start, I want to do two things: dedicate part three to Harmony, and discuss “black” a little more as a poetic device; i.e., concerning Tolkien’s love for big black dicks (and other non-white bodies to penetrate with some kind of dick; e.g., goblin asses, below) in his racist, sexist, and otherwise bigoted blood libel stories: murdering orcs and goblins, en masse, while disguising 19th-century ethnocentrism as post-WWII British High Fantasy escapism. We’ll also discuss the difference between “anti-Semitism” and “antisemitism,” and why I favor the former over the latter in my own work.

(artist: Noaqin)

First, “Idle Hands,” part three is dedicated to Harmony, who not only supported me during the entire writing process, but whose black dildo inspired my critique of Tolkien abjecting black cock; i.e., in ways Harmony and I could subvert by playing with abjected material in sex-positive ways. Like Bay during Volume Zero’s construction, Harmony has been very supportive and kind, helping me see value in my own work, here; i.e., in its critiquing of popular media’s dogma through industry monoliths like Tolkien (who people don’t tend to critique nearly enough).

Whereas Tolkien’s Hobbit begins with, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,” “Idle Hands,” part three started with me seeing Harmony penetrated by a big black dick, and wanting afterwards to recreate the scene; i.e., in equally healthy ways through both of us illustrating mutual consent during ludo-Gothic BDSM. It began, as sex normally does, with smaller things growing into bigger things, but also occurred through tangents into dark, wet, exciting places; i.e., not exactly a “nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell,” as Tolkien describes it, but still speaking psychosexually to the kinds of unironic, canonically essential value judgements he frequently gave to nature, outside colonial orders: stamped as “black” and alien, abjected for hobbit-hole comforts.

We must humanize the harvest in ways Tolkien clearly tried to monopolize/triangulate against nature; i.e., in ways of the underworld that Harmony loves manipulate. Using them to break through such allegories of the English pastoral, she employs her own wanton displays of sexual liberation to camp the canon with; i.e., her own body and toys’ infernal comforts; e.g., her fat goblin ass part of the same strange home for misfit toys that Harmony embodies! “Look on our Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

This entire segment carries that playful spirit of irony forwards, camping Tolkien’s wraith-like ghost in the hopes of shaping a better worldview outlined by Milton, the second-generation British Romantics and some of the Neo-Gothic authors (e.g., Lewis)—one conducive, I should hope, towards Gothic Communism, and towards humanizing all the orcs and goblins that Tolkien killed, one black alien cock at a time! It’s an olive branch.

Second, something “black.” Our focus concerns not just Tolkien’s racism and anti-Semitic tropes viewed backwards (using forbidden sight, but also hindsight 20/20, with darkness visible), but his entire bigotry targeting “black,” in practice. So what is it?

“Black” is anisotropic, meaning it goes both ways but means different things per direction. We’re playing with black to fuck the alien, during oppositional praxis; i.e., in a sex-positive sense, while subverting bigoted forms of Gothic fakery/theatre that Tolkien most certainly did not. For Tolkien and for capital, “black” is a gaslight (“there’s nothing there”), a clear-and-present danger tied to national security (illegal aliens), and a cloaking device/false flag (among other things; e.g., a “gatekeep, girl boss” mechanism). Both rely on a feeling of invasion by darkness through neoliberal military propaganda; i.e., to galvanize home defense in upholding “Rome” and the nuclear model against a perceived Great Destroyer from Elsewhere. Behind the weird-nerd persona of a polite British linguist sits a white moderate printing centrist lies.

Tolkien isn’t just a fascist posing as an ivy-league nerd, then, but the Necromancer himself, tucked behind the Black Veil! Such is the banality of evil, its desk murder going beyond fiscal zones and into scholarly temples. Abjecting his own decay during mirror syndrome onto his black nameless victims, Tolkien loves and fears black dick to conduct genocide with (an abusive spouse raping the Global South through a Black Revenge strawman); never forget that.

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

Keeping with Otto’s Numinous and Radcliffe’s Black Veil (the dialectic of shelter and the alien), the Gothic is writ in tremendous obscurity and decay. “Black,” for Tolkien, is alien to abject—while imprinting colonial norms onto hauntological throwbacks, and which help explain his endless productivity and celebration by state copycats: extending capital through complicit cryptonymy/state entropy to best restore British-American monarchism; i.e., a “greater” nostalgia of the imaginary past to retreat towards (the American benefactors, oddly enough, retreating into a false Britain). For us, it’s alien to reunite amid oscillating feelings of the foreign and familiar deciding what to do, during unequal, forbidden exchange. This goes for cocks, or anything attached/relating to them, great and small; e.g., the fat goblin ass or tight hobbit hole attaching to Numinous evocations of nature’s alien, Promethean, monstrous-feminine homecoming with workers; i.e., the fire of the gods, Medusa, and their possible worlds waiting patiently beyond the Capitalocene/Capitalist Realism!

This portion was originally written here, but I have decided to post it separately, on my old blog, given its broader application. To it, I reference an archived video about my grandfather, interviewed in 2005, talking largely about his experiences during WWII: as a Dutch liberation fighter and Holocaust survivor. I didn’t have time to go into the video, here, so I recorded a response video where I think about the interview as a third-generation trans Communist Dutch girl writing a book series on goblins and other anti-Semitic monsters (Persephone van der Waard’s “Anti-Semitism vs Antisemitism: Discussing My Grandfather (a Dutch Holocaust Survivor) w/ My Work,” 2024); i.e., how in writing this preface, I thought of my Dutch heritage overshadowed by fascist oppression, and wanted to examine my grandfather, warts and all; i.e., relative to anti-Semitic myths and monsters that don’t apply to Jewish persecution exclusively. —Perse

Third, a note about Zionism and anti-Semitism. It has been brought to my attention that academics and scholars tend to favor “antisemitism” versus “anti-Semitism.” Holocaust Remembrance explains it as follows:

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) would like to address the spelling of the term “antisemitism,” often rendered as “anti-Semitism.” The IHRA’s concern is that the hyphenated spelling allows for the possibility of something called “Semitism,” which not only legitimizes a form of pseudo-scientific racial classification that was thoroughly discredited by association with Nazi ideology, but also divides the term, stripping it from its meaning of opposition and hatred toward Jews. […] The term has, however, since its inception referred to prejudice against Jews alone. [emphasis, me…] The unhyphenated spelling is favored by many scholars and institutions in order to dispel the idea that there is an entity “Semitism” which “anti-Semitism” opposes. Antisemitism should be read as a unified term so that the meaning of the generic term for modern Jew-hatred is clear. At a time of increased violence and rhetoric aimed towards Jews, it is urgent that there is clarity and no room for confusion or obfuscation when dealing with antisemitism (source).

And yet here I am, using “anti-Semitism,” anyways. What gives?

(artists: Persephone van der Waard and Autumn Anarchy)

The problem is, my work on Gothic Communism doesn’t concern Jewish people, alone; it explores the holistic and widespread application of blood libel (and relative persecution languages) as having gone beyond Jewish people, but which were once applied aggressively-if-not-uniquely to them as a criminalized non-Christian group (don’t forget Muslims during the Crusades, or later on, the Irish Catholics)—i.e., blood libel, sodomy and witch hunts have expanded beyond Jewish people to attack other marginalized groups (often by Jewish tokens, in later centuries); e.g., queer people, women, Muslims and Pagans, Indigenous groups, and people of color all being supplied tropes of a historically anti-Semitic nature: the so-called “bad blood” of slaves and their foregone betrayal as codified “evil servants” (with sex workers and their discrimination being as old as Judaism, for instance). What bigots from older times used to punch primarily down against persons called “Semite,” then, has since been repackaged and sent, tokenized, back into the world.

For one, this speaks to a fundamental historical misunderstanding of race, insofar as “race” as a punitive notion under capital didn’t exist in the Middle Ages, wherein such things focused on religious persecution against competing factions; it emerged with capital developing into itself as a hauntological device that inserted racism into the imaginary historical past. Said past, in turn, is routinely evoked in ways that concern the abjection process tied to different monsters of a Jewish character that has tangled itself among different marginalized groups, fictions and historical events.

In other words, Zionism can’t be separated from non-tokenized forms, which token elements try to emulate and downplay in bad faith. That’s not simply the focus of my work (which it very much is), but something that needs to be discussed regardless of bystanders who haven’t sold out. The word clearly has been weaponized by Zionism, at this stage, and splitting hairs about a hyphen is a bit academic and furthermore, dangerous; i.e., when the word—regardless of its punctuation (and not even changing the pronunciation, while my using of the hyphen serves an academic purpose)—is clearly being used by colonizers decaying the Jewish body to fulfill a Christianized, capitalist agenda, and which the feelings of non-participants in an ongoing genocide is, forgive me, considerably less important than exposing the genocide. Those feelings are still valid—hence my prefacing of the Tolkien critique with any kind of preamble at all—but they should never silence criticism regarding said word’s current misuse, nor the tokenized actions Zionism represents, when doing so.

(source: Suzanne Moore’s “‘Terf’ Is the Ultimate Slur against Women,” 2023)

Just as we shouldn’t invent brand-new phrases to distance feminism from TERFs, nor should we, regarding Jews and Zionism. Zionism is a radical, fascist form of Judaism, just as TERFs are a radical, fascist form of feminism, and each bleeds into fiction, itself, meriting a radical response from us; i.e., to change the course of history on all registers. Radical problems require radical solutions, meaning bigots use DARVO and obscurantism to point the finger at their victims with their own language (witch cops hunting other witches, above). I’m not going to stop using “anti-Semitism” academically just because it offends someone or because I’m not Jewish (academia would cease to exist, if that were the case); the point is how it’s offending others and why—using intellectual movements to scare those who fear intellectual power’s historical ability to change the status quo (versus maintaining it by attacking intellectuals, which fascism does by design).

To that, I don’t “have” to be Jewish to write about Jewish tokenism and oppression going beyond a narrow idea of Jewish people/Jewish people period, any more than I would “need” be to be black to write about Frantz Fanon’s arguments likewise extending to non-African-Americans; my doing so merely happens on my side of the pedagogy of the oppressed, using its relative privilege, oppression and alienation to reach across the aisle, regarding holistic oppression: as a white, middle-class trans woman whose own non-Jewish family (on my father’s side, next page) was brutalized by the Nazi regime in Holland. Nazis don’t discriminate insofar as discrimination goes; they merely swap out scapegoats as needed.

Fascism, at its core, is conservative, meaning it compels speech through selective boundaries and moderate-to-reactionary punishment (re: “boundaries for me, not for thee”). We must contend with such arbitration while also dealing with each other’s respective and collective abuse, mid-liberation; i.e., saying what needs to be said while dealing with others who say what should or shouldn’t be said—all leading to a great deal of unproductive arguing back and forth, instead of systemic, cooperative change (a bit like Gandalf and the three trolls, the latter debating about eating the dwarves and the wizard invading their conversation by throwing his voice to make them delay until the sun came up): “Won’t someone please think of the Jews!” If all they do is lead to singular and myopic interpretations that never move the focus onto stopping genocide, such refrains are infantilizing and criminogenic; i.e., those who say them in bad faith don’t actually care about Jews, save as a tool for discrediting activism.

To it, my giving of hard facts and genuine arguments that Jewish people can respond to is a sign of respect; i.e., towards those I view not simply as human, but adults capable of thinking for themselves, while letting their fellow oppressed get a word in, too. To prevent that would be to logically limit each group only to itself through self-administered gag orders—a Tower of Babel to divide and conquer all peoples raped by capital. No one ever said rebellion was simple or clean(e.g., Gramps, below, was a Dutch* patriot and Holocaust survivor who spoke about Nazi abuse all his adult life, but also loved America/free enterprise, hated Socialism [which he conflated with the Nazis] and would have fought in the War on Terror if they’d let him, and certainly wouldn’t have understood what trans people are).

*The Dutch being historically compared to Jewish people through similar “miser” arguments; i.e., the blood libel argument of essentialized greed being “in the blood,” which my people endure similar to Jewish people: by also being concentrated by tokenized elements appeasing the oppressor! To do so is folly! All arguments for liberation are valid provided they liberate all peoples from capital calling us “sick” for different reasons.

(source: Linda Meloche’s “Henri Vanderwaard Interview,” 2005)

Beyond Jewish trauma, we likewise wouldn’t discourage not talking about rape or sex work, period, merely because it makes some women uncomfortable or because it “only” applies to them; that’s TERF/SWERF logic, which extends to Zionism laterally espousing the various anti-Semitic myths surrounding it, but also the rape (and other harm) those systemically cause—i.e., when one group tries to monopolize victimhood, including demonic theatre as the performative, anisotropic tool, thereof. Silence is genocide, including partial silence. Gothic Communism seeks to raise awareness and emotional/Gothic intelligence to prevent universal rape, which you can’t do if you’re bunkered down in a space disconnected from others; i.e., for fear of being offended to such a degree that you close your eyes (and your mouth) entirely.

So many people that I showed this section to were afraid to say anything at all, for fear of speaking out of turn, or telling me to “ask a Jewish person,” first. And while some caution is merited, and good-faith Jewish opinions are entirely valid, to let overcaution push people into keeping quiet about some fairly obvious connections—like Zionism and racial conflict in Tolkien, bleeding into politics through persecution mania and genocide denial—is a fatal flaw that fascism will happily telegraph and exploit! Fascists aren’t your friends; they’re cops with a license to kill, cheat and steal for the bourgeoisie in bad faith—i.e., power aggregates behind activism painted as “slander” by state litigators playing at false rebellion. They’ll wear the mask until it suits them; i.e., until their victims lower their guard, all but asking for a knife in the back.

If I sound defensive, it’s because I am; I’ve trusted others blindly before and have been burned for it (tokens are vicious in their policing of others). So I’d rather preface things ahead of time, then proceed in good faith when critiquing tokenism going forwards. That’s how healthy relationships work. These arguments, then, are a gallery exhibit in a symposium meant to counteract hate crimes, not foster public harassment targeting minority groups for hateful reasons. Anyone who walks away from my writing and seriously thinks that I’m attacking Jews/trying to harm them is the one with the problem, in that respect. No one is above critique, including victims but especially when they go on to victimize others (whether on purpose or not); i.e., while hiding behind exclusive-victim status. Instead, we should value the voice of victims in a holistic sense, not squander it by policing its potential to the point where any critical bite disappears. If fascism squirms, you know you’ve hit a nerve and should keep at it. Hit ’em where it hurts!

All of this is to say, the selective use of problematic kayfabe language (e.g., orcs and goblins, but also king hippos, left) pertains to the semi-imaginary history I’m referring to, here, which the Gothic essentially comprises at all times. It’s a specific group of disparate historical threads and ideas that remain at play and continue to evolve; i.e., blood libel, sodomy and witchcraft, which have similar historical elements but different applications nowadays through evolved monstrous code (re: goblins, vampires and witches). And the historical elements regarding blood lineage and power that such things evoke, however false they ultimately are, continue being evoked in bad faith by fascist parties of various signatures. Sometimes I call that signature “pre-fascist” or “post-fascist,” according to the anachronisms at work. But the lineage of forgeries nonetheless remain; i.e., as something of world history that, however imaginary it ultimately is, can still be addressed through camp: regarding tokenized violence lampooned by a polity of victims, which bourgeois elements levy against each other during Capitalist Realism. Tokenism is the weaponizing of useful idiots. Except, it’s not Jewish “erasure” to camp anti-Semitism; i.e., to speak to other groups harmed by or with anti-Semitic devices (speaking to a hauntology whose religious, ethnic and/or cultural “other” doesn’t apply exclusively to Jews). They can use it to speak to their unique history and abuse, and others can expand it beyond that bailiwick to speak to theirs, too.

A social element obviously persists. The phrase “anti-Semitic,” unto itself, is known to make many Jewish people feel unwelcome, but as I will go on to argue, it doesn’t apply exclusively to them, past or present. There’s also a historical character to interpret, mid-praxis. Much of that history is real and embellished, and speaks to things that are simply uncomfortable period; i.e., dealt in demonic forms, and something that refers to a specific idea of “past” that is still being used to attack a variety of people from the same source—while also being associated with a narrow section of the population and its tokenized violence, shouting others down!

To be blunt, police victims often go on to police others. The need to discuss Zionism, then (and its monopolies/mirror syndrome), frankly outweighs making all Jews feel comfortable, because there are those among them who—since Israel’s forming by the British empire and the United States—have grown increasingly hostile, vocal and bad-faith; i.e., as a tokenized minority speaking for the oppressor majority through themselves (re: gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss). Hyphen or not, the word is positively radioactive, and the time for polite discussion using it has well-and-truly passed (e.g., climate change, genocide, fascism). In short, we need to prioritize the acknowledgement of the grievous harm being caused, but also the tokenized means of sanitizing itself through mythical language that points away from the mechanisms at work; i.e., I’d rather talk frankly about the history of anti-Semitism and its expanded Venn Diagram of persecution networks right now—using markers of bigotry at play to raise awareness about genocide that some Jewish people have had a hand in—then spend time coming up with comfortable words that fail to cut home.

Anti-Semitism is an ugly business. So is Tolkien’s use of it through his token power fantasies. We need to be able to address that, including the myriad ways in which these devices often go unnoticed precisely for the reasons above. How can I talk about the bigotries at work in any focused way if the language for doing so is forced out of focus and off target? We need to pinpoint these issues, not hold hands (and this is coming from a service top). You might as well ask me to cut down the mightiest tree in the forest with a herring (or use a herring to blow up the Death Star, below). Counterterrorism, from an actually rebellious standpoint, is meant to make tokenism think twice, including those sitting—with relative comfort—on the fence. For many Jews, this idea is unthinkable all on its own, but criminogenic conditions make for strange bedfellows (and no one ever said that traitors weren’t logical in their assessment of the Judas payment). The idea isn’t to blame or police our fellow oppressed, but recognize and address what many do not.

I could say “victims of fascism” to dodge the issue, but then the history and signature (of which victims) would be swept aside—meaning “as it would be” for Tolkien or similar authors (e.g., Lucas, above), who built their careers (and legacies) out of coded racism and other bigotries with false arguments and origins tied to real ideologies; i.e., Tolkien did believe in blood myth, and applied it to Jewish people, but also non-white and monstrous-feminine people period through the same medieval hauntologies; re: orcs, which clearly have an anti-Semitic quality to them that, canonized by Tolkien’s work, go on to disguise that function used against all parties (which is why I think that covering up the lineage is dangerous).

(source: Wikimedia Commons)

Furthermore, any word we could invent would still wind up being used by the colonizer abusing tokenism to obfuscate their own operations! Tokenism and betrayal are both an ugly business—and the obscurantism of oppression is equally vile—but the reality as such needs to be dragged out into the open, not covered up; i.e., that, despite being coded unfairly as “vengeful backstabbers,” some Jewish people do sell out (e.g., Ze’ev Jabotinsky, left), as have any marginalized groups in history tied to different monsters “getting even”; re, Federici vis-à-vis witches: “Witchcraft accusations, in fact, are the ultimate mechanism of alienation and estrangement as they turn the accused—still primarily women—into monstrous beings, dedicated to the [vengeful] destruction of their communities, therefore making them undeserving of any compassion and solidarity” (source).

Empire hides behind its tokens, and Jewish revenge assimilates into Christian revenge (re: the Crusades, which Zionism emulates to kill Arabs for Christians through misguided ideas of revenge). This includes turning a blind eye towards present wrongs concerning past wrongs; i.e., regarding generational trauma, which many Jewish people in privilege are currently doing. If that bothers you when you’re demonstrably not a Zionist, remember that my critique is of Zionism hiding within Judaism as a more radical and tokenized form, thereof. And if you still can’t see past your own insecurities about my arguments “rocking the boat,” then maybe you should let go of whatever’s blinding you to the bloodbath currently happening overseas. While past atrocities can bring marginalized communities closer together, they also shock and isolate them, encouraging as they do willful ignorance regarding larger systemic issues. Sooner or later, that’s what complacency always becomes.

However shameful, disturbing or uncomfortable that feels, then, we have to account for it as it’s happening with blood libel, then reclaim that in light of such embarrassments. It sucks to require that anyone face the shame someone else more powerful in their own group has caused, but it must be done; i.e., such things don’t affect “just the Jews” (as the Palestinians well know, by now), so telling the investigator(s), “stay in your lane” won’t work: Zionism is currently happening and will keep happening regardless if all Jewish people are comfortable or not. Indeed, their fantasies of assimilation (re: Tolkien) often play into the silencing of genocide taking place! If their conscience gnaws at them, so be it; and if they have a bone to pick with me (for valid reasons or not), “lay on, Macduff. The black knight always triumphs!”

All kidding aside, I relish criticism; I relish criticism; it lets me know what to fortify. I also specialize in tokenism, which—if you haven’t noticed—is a tricky subject; i.e., if you don’t belong to the group being tokenized, you’re viewed (with some justice) as an outsider. And yet, we’re all oppressed to some degree (re, Derrida: “there is no outside of the text”). Furthermore, tokenism remains all the same, requiring its addressal, mid-exile, and inside a system of differences; i.e., it needs to be interpreted intersectionally and holistically to acknowledge parties acting in bad faith, and who rely on such selection processes to silence valid criticism outright.

In turn, my usage of “anti-Semitism” is also tricky because it concerns holistic historical abuses speaking to token forces who rely on the feelings of those they blend in with to cover for them; i.e., human shields, those regarding different peoples harmed by/sandwiched between collective and selective bigoted practices, and with language that was formerly used to attack Jews pointedly having expanded elsewhere: by using the same fictitious elements of arbitrary myth-making and application tied to Zionism (frontier capitalism) as something that hasn’t gone anywhere.

Again, I’m talking about monsters, and there isn’t a Jewish monopoly to what has been assigned to (and to some degree accepted by) that portion of the world’s population. The “Semite,” while it historically is centered around Jews, is an umbrella egregore that includes vampires, witches, orcs and goblins leveled at a variety of real-world groups; i.e., at the same time, and to a rising degree of prominence during Jewish gentrification and decay through Zionism (a practice, that through capital, tries to bastardize various inkblots to mean one thing and nothing else; e.g., token orc butts are “Jewish,” in Zionist eyes, and non-token/abject orc butts are “Hamas”; re: the giving and receiving of state violence through bourgeois models of terrorist/counterterrorist violence, per the zombie apocalypse relaid in demonic forms).

(artist: Just Some Noob)

My whole point, then, is how a formerly Jewish-exclusive calumny has expanded beyond Jewish peoples, in recent centuries, and well into the present. Even during the Holocaust, it wasn’t “just” about Jews and how they were affected by that disaster of state machinery run amok (desk murder); other groups besides Jewish people were sent to their deaths to “answer” the Jewish Question, but the popular historical records (fictional or otherwise) don’t mention them, nearly enough. I’d rather discuss things openly to reclaim them from token forces; i.e., as monopolizing holocaust, exile, persecution, bereavement, rape (accusations) and revenge, and whose falsehoods we use the imaginary power of “Gothic” fakeries to subvert. “Semitism” is invented, which means it can be reinvented. So, too, has Jewishness has gone from a religion to a national body that relates to others in ways that necessitate such invention and outspoken shots-in-the-arm. Blame Capitalism, not me, and set your tokenized guilt aside; my patience is frankly at its end, and I’m going to hyphenate different things to form connections useful towards universal liberation (as the Gothic so often does; re: the grey area of its storied poetics; e.g., correct-incorrect). We learn by challenging each other, and my work is hardly the final say in the grand scheme of things.

That being said, I also think we shouldn’t seriously entertain any idea of ranking rape and “oppression Olympics.” There’s no such thing as a perfect victim. Instead, I think all groups need to be considered together in light of state abuse; i.e., versus a great many living in the shadow of one particular group, whose own extinction event has been advertised by American media to prioritize them, first and foremost. This goes for trans people, Jews, people of color or Indigenous people, etc; no one “trumps” anyone else, everyone speaking out against tokenism regardless of who’s doing it whenever such things are out of joint/balance.

Believe it or not, I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes, here, but all the same, we need to get over the idea that holocaust and genocide are strictly of a Jewish character and history (real or otherwise); i.e., while simultaneously recognizing how tools of Jewish oppression aren’t used against them, we can acknowledge the harms caused against them, including holocaust denial. You can’t camp holocaust, but you can camp your own survival, and multiple people can survive the same event to camp it later.

Likewise, it’s not denial to include others in what has largely been framed (in Zionist circles) as a wholly Jewish ordeal. Two (or more) things can be true at once, Zionism doubling Jewishness as capably as Gene Simmons, but for different reasons (see: footnote, next page). Just as Israel and America invent things out of whole cloth behind double standards, we can do the same to spite those standards; i.e., fighting fire with fire and for land back despite the Jewish dogmatic belief of a god-denied, -promised, then ultimately -given homeland. Like Omelas, the point is walking away from Egypt if that means not genociding other people, not towards it! Israel is a ploy to buy cheap loyalty in furtherance to capital’s continued raping of others—Jews included!

This will certainly ruffle some feathers, but I’m a Satanic atheist; i.e., there is no God, only workers vs the elite and whatever deities either fabricates for their own purposes. My doing so happens while speaking to those harmed by refusing to look past matters of a “purely” ethnic character. It was never about “pure ethnicity” but dividing and conquering more broadly using that and other means of persecution through various networks, thereof. Jews don’t have a monopoly on holocaust, and as Zionism shows us, they can tokenize like any other minority group to police nature with; i.e., non-white skin, white masks; e.g., the Inca’s imperial subjugates and the Conquistadors. Betrayal is betrayal. It’s only ever a question of who and why.

Assimilation is poor stewardship. We must do better if we are to survive capital’s effects on us and the planet; we must camp what has become canon, including what Sandy Norton calls “the Imperialism of theory“; re: academics policing what is or isn’t acceptable, thereby granting imperial characters to any discourse beyond academia that, unto itself, desperately needs to shed. Applying Sandy to Gothic studies instead of Foucault, I choose to use “anti-Semitism” because of its speculative richness, not its historical misuse. And if those historically abused by it feel like I’m encroaching on what is unique to them, they are sorely mistaken: witches and “sodomites” were killed in the Middle Ages, followed by the Renaissance, Holocaust, and neoliberal era. As such, liberation politics need to expand to account for changing dynamics of oppression under capital, lest they tokenize and decay as Zionism (and its fanatic territorialism) has done.

No one ever stopped fascism by being polite, and anti-fascism is inherently radical because it challenges state’s rights in ways gentrified parties won’t; i.e., nothing is sacred except basic universal human, animal and environmental rights, and it’s possible to compromise those by doing nothing of note. It’s also possible to work allegory into seemingly vacuous material. Far be it from me to venerate KISS, for example, but if they can camp their own idea of Jewishness and present it as monstrous to get what they wanted[1a], then so can we toy around with ideas of monstrosity that aren’t intrinsically Jewish to find our own pro-Communist voice under capital. Such is the nature of demonic poetics, which camp dogma through itself; e.g., through rock ‘n roll; i.e., not all Jewish representation challenges profit—can be weaponized against Communism just like the Nazis did (re: Israel and Zionism, next page), or at the very least can foster ignorance through overly simplistic approaches: “Keep It Simple, Stupid.”

(artist: Kim Kelly)

So, yes, my statements will doubtless offend some. That is what those in power want. But all the same, my work speaks to an imaginary element of discourse that is, unto itself, half-real; i.e., anything used to attack the idea of Jewishness has well-and-truly expanded into other groups.

And if saying that ruffles some feathers—specifically that I mention inclusive oppression to address the needs of those other groups while keeping the former in mind—said former group needs to remember that liberation is a universal affair and all peoples need to come together to overcome oppression as one; i.e., there is no one group for which oppression exclusively applies, or who has a magical, innately oppressed quality to them/monopoly on oppression. To think otherwise is to deny others a voice, no different than Afrocentrism or similar movements, which only historically decay into a kind of fortress mentality that prioritizes itself over other groups in a similar position.

The fact remains, we’re all in the same boat, and bigotry is built into capital; i.e., “a bigotry for one is a bigotry for all,” built into capital as something to dismantle accordingly. It’s certainly important to communicate our feelings and say when something bothers us; but also, upsetting others isn’t the point of my arguments, which remain true regardless if they are upsetting—re: Jewishness is a weapon, one that state proponents use to limit oppressed outcry to a single specific group of people it can then weaponize against itself and others. As Asprey astutely writes, “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” (source). No one has a monopoly on shelter or aliens, mid-dialectic!

So, for example, can the Jewish gentry in Hollywood punch down against anyone who speaks out against America’s token ethnostate[1b]. For them, “Jewishness” = “terror” carried out of the medieval world and into ours; i.e., one whose half-real, historical and imaginary sense of past (the Wisdom of the Ancients) can dominate the proceedings—regardless of class, culture and race, to serve the bourgeoisie through its cultivating of the Superstructure!

Zionism does just that, turning Jews (and Jewish symbols and arguments of persecution and rebellion, victim and oppressor) against Jews and friends of the Jewish while making the idea of “Jewishness” something that Imperialism can hide behind: “We will always suffer and do so exclusively in ways that supersede our victims.” It’s an Omelas refrain, turned into a spear and, as it turns out, a cash cow to milk, mid-genocide; e.g., Judas Priest’s Invincible Shield (2024); re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Judas Priest: Invincible Shield and Zionism” (2024):

as the time-tested tradition of punching Jews became uncool after WW2, Jews became tokenized to punch down; i.e., against themselves and other oppressed groups, thereby serving the same-old profit motive as part of Capitalism out of Antiquity. In turn, Priest seems to have emblazoned their album with such a badge despite the Palestinian genocide happening next door (evoking a party disturbingly similar to Israeli settlers). Despite some bad actors being far more active in ongoing misinformation campaigns, Invincible Shield sadly feels like Priest saying “the show must go on” while using such imagery to line their own pockets. It feels at best, willfully obtuse; i.e., the modern equivalent to selling sugar during British Abolitionism instead of honey despite knowing full well of the Caribbean sugar (thus slave) trade.

All the same, Priest’s commodifying of struggle at the cost of human life is merely the chickens coming home to roost, our metal gods staying silent on what should be blasted from the loudest speakers imaginable (source).

Silence is death[1c]; for Capitalism to work, it needs a victim and a cop for which to buy silence with. To that, victims can become cops through oppressor misuse of oppression language to silence others with; re: DARVO and obscurantism; e.g., the Star of David adorning Zionist war machines and dropping bombs on Palestinians and Lebanese people, while playing the universal savior and victim, and policing anyone who might use their language incorrectly. Different voices need the ability to speak up and out for themselves and others, thus coexist, lest capital divide and disorganize us to keeping doing what it has, is and always will do: rape worlds and the world by sowing division to move money through nature.

(artists: Avram Finkelstein, Brian Howard, Oliver Johnston, Charles Kreloff, Chris Lione, and Jorge Socarrás)

Capitalism is a disease that makes society sick (and fosters diseases like AIDS in those societies; i.e., Capitalism is AIDS). For the colonizer class, the point of tone-policing criticism isn’t to raise consciousness in duality towards an intersectional solidarity resisting capital; it’s to insist in bad faith that we need to respect this one group’s feelings above the collective well-being of those the bad actors are currently destroying in the name of a people they themselves have stopped representing save as a dogwhistle and cloak. And those tactics will likewise be employed among good-faith participants—laypeople and academics alike—who are understandably upset by what is being said on both sides. Those feelings and concerns are valid, up to a point, but desperately need to recognize how they can be weaponized by the state to overlook legitimate criticism against genocide. “Yeah, conflict sucks; but it’s also necessary when escaping the Torment Nexus.” So critique power where it is!

We need to abolish genocide as a consequence of privatization, and for that to happen, we must deprivatize bigotry by discussing it holistically among all groups affected by the same tools differently. This isn’t “just” affecting Jewish people, then, nor is it “only” about them, and we shouldn’t tiptoe around Zionists colonizing those arguments; i.e., to weaponize Jewish discomfort to perjure themselves and others. Rememory hurts and, to a healing degree, reenvisions and reprioritizes the imaginary elements of past history during the rememory process; i.e., to suit all peoples under attack simultaneously by those abusing imagination to suit their needs and historical revisionism for the state (re: Zionism).

And if that hits a nerve, then good; pain is healing. This pain is controlled—is an academic exhibit couched inside a larger book full of trigger warnings. To it, I’m not running to every Jewish person I know or see and saying “anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism!” until they grab a stick and brain me. It’s an academic conversation punching Nazis (which Zionists are) while acknowledging the praxial complexities concerning blood libel as a universal performative device. Anyone can wear a beard and throw a stone (or a can of soup “for our family”), and the house—to some degree—is always made of glass:

Glass-Onion that shit! Have your revenge by demonopolizing the concept; i.e., as normally used by oppressors-in-disguise, who we learn from to do better than while borrowing from. Shakespeare’s Shylock soliloquy from The Merchant of Venice, for example, has tremendous liberatory potential; i.e., as something to act out in spite of its anti-Semitic origins and fixation on Christian ideas of Jewish revenge. Shylock inquires, “Hath not a Jew eyes?” to stress the praxial similarities of oppression and oppressor on token groups who, pushed to their limit, do sell out; i.e., Portia punching down to serve herself and Venice (while dressed as a man, no less), and Shylock converting to Christianity after having his day in court! Nothing is sacred but universal liberation; anything that prohibits said liberation is dogma (often in disguise, above).

So “better the instruction” by thinking outside the box while inside it. Disrupt! Speak out! Discredit your discreditor! Camp dogma to make state defenders uncomfortable, doing so to develop Gothic Communism; i.e., through ironic Gothic poetics and theatre challenging profit, thus unironic rape and revenge! The exercise is one of interpretation through performance. No one agency can monopolize victimhood or revenge, including Jews. And if any try to argue otherwise, remind them of your own oppression linked to theirs (“I see your holocaust and raise you a queer pogrom…”). All roads lead to Auschwitz, after all; the idea is to prevent concentration and extermination to begin with by using medieval arguments “when in Rome…”; i.e., to burn Rome, not people! They’ll blame us for it, regardless.

And yet, if my use of “anti-Semitism” still bothers you, I hear you and understand; I merely ask in return that you acknowledge why I’m saying “anti-Semitism,” to begin with. My aim is not to offend anyone for its own sake, but to expand emotional/Gothic intelligence and awareness by probably offending some people; i.e., as a necessary part of the process. Regarding blood libel, sodomy and witch hunter rhetoric, I shove those, mid-synthesis, towards their actual, total and half-real scope of influence: towards all marginalized groups, including my own, as part of the same underlying struggle that is regularly demonized by capital.

To that, I’m trans and belong to a group of people who were occupied and raped by the Nazis; my grandfather—despite fighting to liberate Holland from the Nazis—was still a conservative-minded man I seldom agreed with. Segregation is no defense and silence is genocide, therefore death. We must solidarize intersectionally—not merely to survive, but break Capitalist Realism (engendered by the likes of Spielberg saving war to maintain Pax Americana; re: Zinn). This means preventing what causes genocide to begin with; it means causing some degree of pain, during ludo-Gothic BDSM. “Hurt, not harm,” babes! You “don’t get a pass” just because you’re Jewish (or queer, non-white, or any other group); doing so would only give capital something to pounce and capitalize on: a human shield from criticism (Jewish or not, the settler colony model favors women and children for this purpose, below)!

If history proves anything at all, it’s that cops come from victims; i.e., those who, apart from desperation and convenience, likewise betray through entitlement. Those who can’t be wrong in their own mind are always right, which—as the Nazis, America and Zionism demonstrate through American liberalism needing fascism to operate—will always lead to the harming of others: by the entitled group, because the others (who are not them) are always wrong! This caveat includes victims who sell others out, becoming cops in the process (stochastic terrorism). And if that stings a little to hear—if it shocks those it applies to out of their useless sense of martyrdom and makes them rethink things, or at least recover the ability to interpret things orthopraxically versus dogmatically—then good! Equally good, though, is it making bad actors to go mask-off (as many Zionists have recently done). Cryptonymy serves multiple goals.

To avoid genocide as a historical-material outcome, we need to kill our darlings during dialectical-material analysis. Said scrutiny includes challenging the terrible idea of an exclusive and innate victimhood tied to a select group of people that—regardless of what traitors think, and however deeply entrenched their dogma is—cannot be reduced to class, religion, ethnicity and/or culture; i.e., a misconception that often stems from popular media; re, bands like Judas Priest:

Being a fan of their music since high school (for over twenty years now), a part of me takes no joy in doing so; but all the same, part of me does. I’ll gladly sacrifice the sacred image of my childhood heroes if it means liberating Palestinians (and by extension all oppressed groups). I may not succeed, but I want to try because it’s worth trying. Certainly I can enjoy Priest while criticizing their pernicious aspects; and, as Anita Sarkeesian put it, doing so is “both possible and necessary.” Otherwise, what are we doing? (ibid.).

The same goes for Judaism or any precious idea, but also any means of spreading it in ways that cause harm; i.e., overcoming oppression, in Jewish culture, is important, but its overprioritization historically leads to communication breakdown/abjection (re: Zionism). Hence, how a device able to heal actually causes more harm in the face of capital doing what capital does: raping nature as monstrous-feminine by tokenizing workers; i.e., anyone acting like the universal, exclusive victim; re: “Haven’t I suffered enough? I know all there is to know about victimhood, because I’m the only victim to ever exist!” To centralize one group and one group alone is to normalize through tunnel vision. We’re in this together, comrades, and the state is the enemy, not me.

I don’t want to hurt anyone purely for its own sake, here. Instead, if you scratch a Zionist, a fascist bleeds, and this goes beyond Jewish culture and identity to spread into other groups intersecting oppression as a state weapon. If ever that occurs, the priorities for self-victimization should be reexamined. The pain in doing so—of getting scratched, mid-debate—will invariably yield new synthesis, thus better praxis pushing away from Capitalism, once and for all! Alienation is bad; it’s also a bridge leading to greener pastures: demonic poetics inventing new uses for old dead symbols! The symbol’s appearance remains, but its function can anisotropically change, mid-duality—on the Aegis, oppositional praxis reversing abjection/worker chattelization to legitimize our struggles and invalidate profit’s (re: per the whore’s revenge, the state [and its rights] incompatible with life/consent, needing cops-and-victims extermination [thus rape, per the profit motive] just to exist)! Subversion of state utility can become normal; i.e., during the cryptonymy process becoming second-nature at a societal level. “We camp canon because we must.”

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

Gothic Communism is holistic, liminal, dualistic, and ergodic, bringing different voices together to find common ground. My focus is sex work and Gothic poetics (whose nudity and exposure is offensive to a great many people), but it by no means rejects Jewish identity or voices; it merely asks them, “Give us a place to voice ourselves and say what we need to say. Nazis suck, including Jewish Nazis.” Refusing victimization is important, of course, but making victimization your whole identity—meaning to such an unchecked degree that you alienate other oppressed peoples around you, therefore elevate yourself above them/ignore their own opposition affected by tokenism (Zionism or otherwise)—is reckless. Fascism will fash, regardless. Find similarity amid difference and come together to challenge the state and its lapdogs. Liberation transcends national, ethnic and religious boundaries! ACAB! ASAB! AHAB (All Holocausts Are Bad)! Free Palestine!

Idle Hands, part three: Goblins, Anti-Semitism and Monster-Fucking (feat. Tolkien’s orcs and goblins, acid Communism, and SpongeBob SquarePants)

The dwarves’ covetous memory becomes one of unbridled revenge, its call to war against nature sharpening to rekindle better times out of myth tied to artefacts that suggest it to start with: “He was witless and wandering, and had forgotten almost everything but the map and the key” (source).

—Persephone van der Waard, “Policing the Whore” (2024)

Now that we’ve thoroughly covered witches and briefly examined vampires as sex demons, let’s carry demons and forbidden sight beyond “Midnight Vampire” or Lady Hellbender and into other famous forms of blood libel, namely goblins; re: demonic sex as torturous, psychosexual, and playful; i.e., regarding unequal power exchange, whose monster-fucking gives forbidden knowledge back, and once received, turns workers from goblin-killer into goblin-friend!

To do so, we’ll be looking at Tolkien, once more; re: as a patriarchal throwback/neo-Victorian dinosaur worshipped by the public while compensating for his own imperial nostalgia colonizing nature; i.e., by gentrifying war during cartographic refrains, which we deconstruct and subvert during the whore’s revenge. Our aim is simply to attack the validity of Tolkien’s anti-Semitic goblins; i.e., as unworthy holders of nature that others more worthy are tasked, by the author playing wishmaster/god, with carrying out his disguised revenge/ethnocentric arguments: that whores and Jews are classically slaves, in medieval parlance, and goblins are Jewish-coded whores of nature/the underworld to threaten more deserving parties (the dwarves) with different kinds of harm (e.g., rape, captivity and torture)!

In The Hobbit, for example, Tolkien loves to monomythically “kettle” the dwarves before letting them break free—all to genocide the ignoble savages and take their land back for the state (the white Indian argument, but also marginalized in-fighting and tokenization[1d]). Yet, in pimping nature, Tolkien has (through evil, backstabbing Jews and other slaves) created something the state may criminalize, but never fully monopolize as “of nature”; re: a brothel/disco place of revenge where the whore takes back the sex, drugs, and monster-fucking rock ‘n roll that someone like Tolkien always authors in favor of empire, thus capital.

Goblins are whores, like any other monstrous-feminine, thus pimped by Tolkien in ways where his victims have the slave’s black revenge; i.e., by reclaiming the things used to normally stigmatize and colonize them for profit, whose motive and Realism they break through ludo-Gothic BDSM; e.g., the spurious notion that “all goblins” love not just gold, but loot (a kind of wish fulfillment tying them to police violence, below). Porn simply lets us frankly eroticize—or otherwise discuss—such desires through a lens of public nudism; i.e., relative to the stigmas, bigotries, phobias, etc, that we want to interrogate, thus change, through our own versions of these age-old monster-fucking devices.

First, I’ll remind you of some history and arguments about goblins to keep in mind, then walk you through how we’ll apply them to Tolkien; i.e., regarding the man’s anti-Semitic sex demons, and his own harmful monster-fucking dialogs regarding them. After that, we’ll consider how to break the monopoly by playing with them, ourselves; i.e., when using Fisher’s acid Communism through Gothic poetics, subversive monster-fucking scenarios (white-on-black sex), cartoons, and shared labor exchanges. We’ll close the section out by thinking about whores at large—the big scary ones that speak to a palliative Communist Numinous that smaller underling monsters like goblins reputedly serve and/or spring from—before we move onto “Forbidden Sight, part two: the Promethean Quest vis-à-vis Frankenstein (and similar poetic elements) about making demons at large.

(artist: Personal Ami)

Note: This symposium mentions lots of ideas we can only touch on, here; i.e., regarding not just goblins, but also vampires, zombies and Capitalism-as-undead (all of which I’ve written about extensively in my PhD and other volumes. Expect block quotes). Also, in keeping with ludo-Gothic BDSM and the spirit of playing with monsters/darkness, this final portion of “Idle Hands” will be fairly messy and chaotic; i.e., stressing the holistic and intersectional elements of Gothic Communism (and demons/darkness visible), combining anything and everything together to achieve praxial success! —Perse

Tolkien’s Other Sex Demons: Goblins

The state, as undead, thrives on tokenism as a bastard DARVO/obscurantist enterprise. Christianity is a cuckoo religion, then, bastardizing older forms of religion and myth, which the state continues to abuse under capital. Our focus, for this symposium, is predominantly one of service and monster-fucking through goblins (and to a lesser degree, orcs); i.e., acting as bad servants, per canonical essentialism and camped by us: during ludo-Gothic BDSM’s rape-play angle merging with various half-real roleplay scenarios of “homebrew” interracial porn/xenophilia overcoming unironic racism and other forms of dogmatic xenophobic orthodoxy (for all intents and purposes, this section shall use “ludo-Gothic BDSM” and “monster-fucking” interchangeably. The former essentially constitutes the function of rape play, while the other enacts a form of rape play to function as, but their praxial scope is the same).

To it, orcs and goblins are canonically bad—often compared, during blood libel, to a mindless collective of non-white evil children/the spawn of Satan—and from Heinlein to Cameron to Lucas spewing the same centrist bullshit (re: the Star Wars problem), you can absolutely thank Tolkien for that[2a] (and who borrowed his doing so from Beowulf and Grendel’s mother giving birth to monstrous-feminine comparable to orcs and goblins).

Few things are as pervasive or insidious as Tolkien, but especially his cartographic refrain hyphenating colonial sex and force, which it then uses to disguise rape with; i.e., antagonizing nature-as-monstrous-feminine, then fucking it unironically to death “by the sword.” Hence my attacking it, here, during my holistic study of the man and his work, one last time (“Let us be rid of it, once and for all!”). Doing so by having our revenge during ironic monster sex of our own, we camp the canon to humanize the harvest, making goblins gay during ironic monster sex; i.e., by having sex with that which Tolkien considers abominable, white bodies on black; e.g., white girls taking black dick, or acting “non-white” themselves in accordance with their rebellious elements: the respectively brutish and naughty “orc” and “goblin” equaling “terrorist” and “punk” merged, for our purposes, with “criminal/whore” and “zombie.” The idea isn’t to separate things, at all, but engage with them holistically because Gothic Communism is holistic; capital divides to conquer us, and we unify to defy profit raping us.

(artist: Noaqin)

We’ll get to that, this symposium laying out various dots for you to connect, in a fairly-tangential-but-ultimately-connected group of disparate concepts; it’s not really a close-read of specific texts (no Gollum in this one, nor reading into gay ring-bearers[2b]), but a constellation of the man’s broadest themes merged with past elements of my own work—opting for orcs and goblins, this time, instead of vampirism (which we examined from Tolkien’s stories, in Volume One):

• A White Earth: Defending the Realm from Black Rape (Orc Dick or Otherwise)
• Trouble in Paradise: Fantasizing about Black Monster Dick (feat. acid Communism)
• Doing It, Ourselves: Humanizing Orcs and Goblins through Ironic Monster Sex
• How to Play with Goblins-as-Demons, Ourselves (to Have Our Revenge; feat. Bay, Blxxd Bunny, SpongeBob, and more)
• Wrapping Up/the Big Picture
• Moving On: Some Transitional Arguments about Demon Whores/the Big One (feat. Slan from Berserk)

First, let’s explore Tolkien’s worldviews regarding orcs and goblins, including their function in his propaganda fantasy worlds. In a nutshell, he bastardizes the Vikings with a pre-fascist, neo-Victorian stamp, abandoning their indigenous elements and turning them into cops to colonize nature with blood libel, while also fearing its rapacious black, queer revenge: he loves and hates black dick.

Let’s unpack that, shall we?

A White Earth: Defending the Realm from Black Rape (Orc Dick or Otherwise)

White knights classically save damsels from black rape (dragons, ruffians, goblins, gay men, gods, and/or the witch-king’s giant mace); with Morgoth and Sauron, Tolkien frames it as a Numinous, planetary struggle. Even so, it’s one that shrinks, mise-en-abyme, into smaller versions of itself; i.e., the white knight(s) rescuing Mother Earth from total shadowy defilement, one smaller black cock at a time: “Just as Sauron concentrated his power in the One Ring, Morgoth dispersed his power into the very matter of Arda, thus the whole of Middle-earth was Morgoth’s Ring” (source: Morgoth’s Ring, 1993). It’s not really a stretch to see how Tolkien treats the wedding band as defiled by a black “finger” on an iron fist, nor how nature itself is the maiden for him to protect from dark corruption; i.e., Arda’s coochie threatened by a Pagan-Satanic Great Destroyer during blood libel.

Tolkien fetishizes power as “black”; canonizing Milton’s darkness visible (re: Volume Zero), said darkness could have been anything but he chose orcs and goblins/Jewish conspiracy, first and foremost. Though courtly and abstract, the notion likewise remains very apologetic towards Britain, abjecting imperial crimes (of pimping nature) onto a conveniently evil (and distant) supervillain (and said villain’s generals, lieutenants, and minions). To it, the context for Tolkien’s worldview is wholly abusive on a geopolitical refrain, one that bounces back, half-real, into canonical power fantasies executing blood libel sans irony against black rapists threatening the globe (to impregnate the white-owned womb of nature with non-white sperm).

This Shadow of Tolkien (and myth that he somehow “can’t” be racist) can be challenged, which we’ll get to. Unlike the status quo, our jokers, smokers, and midnight tokers use the language of danger and torture for iconoclastic funsies: made from clay to sing and dance, making wild rumpus, goblin-style. Blind faith is for suckers, something we cannot afford while being sucked on by capital’s dead labor (re: Marx). So do we play with these artificial things (dicks or otherwise), breaking the monopolies on display by giving their jester’s vice-character monologues added life through performative allegory and dialectical-material context: something to sell to children, regarding nature’s monstrous-feminine revenge (for having their existence be criminalized by the state and its in-groups)!

Cryptonymy’s all well and good. The problem is, the Numinous is a common canonical brothel pimping out Hell’s usual sluts in bigoted, blood-libel language (of rape and revenge); i.e., down in the dark brought to light to titillate the gentry with stories of exquisite torture, rape and death; re: Tolkien’s anti-Semitic dwarves, executing blood libel against orcs and goblins (the former appearing much more in LotR and the latter much more in The Hobbit): bat-like and big-mouthed, but also swart, savage, and sinister beings[3] occupying the black, demonic side of the settler argument that upholds Capitalist Realism, mid-abjection. They’ll get you, and your little dog, too!

“In caverns deep, where dark things sleep,” Tolkien pimps them out as thieves and whores, slavers and killers-for-hire, scapegoats to dance with during his monopolies of demonic poetry that—apart from overt sex and drugs—very much includes the psychosexual overtures of rock ‘n roll (and similar forms of music/theatre like heavy metal and jazz, which the Gothic embodies through golemesque puppetry’s darkness visible):

Crush, smack! Whip crack!
Smash, grab! Pinch, nab!
You go, my lad!
Ho, ho! my lad!

The black crack! the black crack!
The black crack! the black crack!
Down down to Goblin-town
Down down to Goblin-town
Down down to Goblin-town
You go, my lad!
Ho, ho! my lad! (Maury Laws’ “Down, Down to Goblin Town,” 1977).

It’s all rather… funky, isn’t it? People love monsters because they speak to our alienation and fetishization (thus lack of agency) under capital, which is precisely where we get our agency back (re: the whore’s revenge)!

Except, while calculated risk is a fun way to meet new playmates and regain control of darkness, Tolkien is a weird canonical nerd who canonized Milton’s camp. In doing so, he and his narrow, prescriptive, monomyth methods of playing with darkness were pointedly slumming in service to empire[4]; i.e., through jazzy LARPer refrains teasing the ghost of the counterfeit to further abjection by reinventing terrorism the state can punch down against/with: through prolific, Man-Box-style police violence, killing orcs and goblins to whitewash empire-in-decline/darkened by the Shadow of Pygmalion during the Cycle of Kings/Capitalism as demonic, animalistic and undead.

In truth, Rankin/Bass parroted much of this, and the kids of the ’70s, ’80s and beyond feared-loved it (walking the tightrope between inheritance anxiety and vaso vagal/fight-or-flight, but also dark demonic energies). Tolkien’s bigotry goes over their heads, but in some sense, he inherited the same values; i.e., through goblins and necromancy as drug-like, but also bigotries associated with them to sell canonical vampirism and goblins to the next generation; e.g., their signature greed, but also tendency to kidnap, rape and devour their prey/drink said prey’s blood. It’s a dogwhistle call-to-arms, then, defending capital from its own victims with its own victims; i.e., the self-appointed white, “righteous” hero devouring the black alien per Tolkien’s orcs-and-humans argument, its centrist refrain caging his prey behind an innocuous human mask (the sweet old man) that puts him and his on the side of Good and their victims—of nature-as-alien-vengeful-slave—on the side of Evil (which for the West/Global North is the East/Global South).

That’s what his maps and moral territories are, you see—undead prisons to enter and kill the inmates, moderacy decaying into fascism (when Imperialism comes home to empire), but enacting it behind gobstopper masks; re: state DARVO and obscurantism concealing in plain sight the ugly truth: cops are the criminals outlawing others in demonic language. Doing so to enrich the elite and their rights over workers and nature, class (culture and race) traitors pimp both groups as monstrous-feminine! They’re the bad servants, the backstabber charlatans sucking capital’s dick (and biting on nature’s neck) while flexing whatever credentials they can (e.g., Tolkien’s academic pedigree)!

I’d say there’s no way Tolkien can claim honest ignorance in good faith—not when he was a university professor who was an expert in his field—but doing so would overlook systemic issues in academia, as a whole; i.e., Tolkien was raised in a world that was built to coddle him and instill these pro-British, fuck-literally-everyone-else beliefs into him. Far easier to say is how a) there’s nothing moderate about abjecting the sins of empire onto a gay space wizard/Great Destroyer and his abortive offshoots, nor b) monarchs or genocide existing in perpetuity (signatures of Tolkien’s worlds extending his worldview inwards and outwards). Unlike the Neo-Gothic authors of several centuries previous, Tolkien actually believed a return to the pre-Renaissance past[5] would be a good thing. Like Hell it would!

To it, the usual fascist qualities apply to Tolkien’s world; e.g., the cult of machismo and heroic cult of death, weak/strong enemies, among others (re: Eco). Inside said world, he’s an indisputable god-pimp, punching down against nature as monstrous-feminine by policing it as vengeful property for the state. Being a medievalist, he pointedly does it through Divine Right; i.e., as a false preacher punching down with blood-libel, cops-and-victims vaudeville—literally medieval persecution arguments and superstitions (fear and dogma; e.g. the blood test from Carpenter’s The Thing remake) about blood—doing so in order to aggrandize/avenge his faulty and harmful idea of a better world that, since his death, has become a neoliberal power fantasy weaponizing gullible people (through desperation and convenience) all around the world: of orcs and goblins born evil, and white men (and token cops; e.g., Eowyn) endlessly killing them in all manner of stories and games, all to spill so-called “bad” blood and replace it with “good” blood while policing labor pursuant to profit. It’s barbarism in a dress—Macbeth tilting at Dunsinane but also Dracula in a priest’s robes (and other such dualities canonizing Gothic).

So are Tolkien’s orcs given dark skin, led by a dreaded faceless evil, conspicuously called “cannibals,” bred through sodomy and shadows, living under the cloak of night, and slain zombie-style by white saviors trumpeting neo-feudalism on repeat: capital cannibalizing those it calls “cannibals” while acting high-and-mighty about it. For it, anything “black” is too dumb to serve, eventually attacking a prescribed “better master” and being put down for not knowing “its place” (which unfolds differently per oppressed type; e.g., black men versus trans women, and various intersections): dead vermin walking!

The point, here, is how the orc’s and goblin’s undead function of evil labor/service behaves identically to their demonic function (and whose anisotropic qualities we’ll explore when examining Blxxd Bunny and SpongeBob). In turn, such stories are canonically ethnocentric garbage, apologizing for slavery by flaunting apocalypse; i.e., calling those most targeted by the state “the real slavers” during slave revolt having its dark, whorish, backstabber’s revenge against the goodly colonizers. It’s a white moderate’s false flag selling personal responsibility through inkblot Red Scare long after Tolkien had actually died (take note of the various commonalities Tolkien has with mask-off fascism, Nazism or otherwise).

Compared to Cameron’s clever repackaging of Heinlein in the shooter/sci-fi genre (and Metroidvania) after Vietnam, then, Tolkien’s refrain led to a virtually endless echo of whitewashed fantasy stories after WWII serving the same Pax Americana function into the neoliberal (videogame) era. He became a safe bet, his best-selling and incredibly famous stories a perfect revival (and whitewash) of Manifest Destiny transplanted Elsewhere. No one else comes close, fantasy-wise.

Worse, Tolkien’s systemic good/evil racism, inkblot (arbitrary) menace were granted the airy gentry of a WWI solider-turned-scholar (a made man, as it were). In short, Tolkien’s worlds apologized for racial conflict dressing up ethnocentric dogma as “mere games” (from tabletop to computer)—with the man, himself, becoming the dead-skin face mask for white supremacists to wear in the guise of good faith; e.g., Peter Thiel naming his economic ventures after Tolkien’s stories[6]. Whereas The Hobbit had plenty of Marxist potential (re: “Dragon Sickness,” 2014), Tolkien’s LotR was an opiate for the masses that simultaneously ushered in a return to monarchies[7], while also giving racism (and other bigotries) the perfect place to hide and wage war in broad daylight against Communism (which Tolkien very much despised in favor of Capitalism):

In doing so, the whole planet became an endless property dispute lionizing Divine Right, mid-canceled-future (re: the zombie apocalypse and ensuing wasteland scenarios teasing liberation and enslavement, afterwards; e.g., not just Tolkien’s orcs and goblins, but Fallout‘s ghouls to return to the earth as similar zombie fodder raped by Crusaders: cowboys, versus knights).

As such, Tolkien’s bad-faith, vampire/sanguine sodomy arguments abject any flaws at home onto the black alien/Veil as a temptation to resist, but also indulge in through rape and purity/abstinence arguments; i.e., the civilized man eating the cannibal-coded savage, mid-panic, during mirror and virgin/whore syndrome. While all monsters are dualistic, canon pushes state violence and blame/ritual suicide(-by-cop) towards workers by doubling and demonizing them as evil sons of whores, but also outright demon whores (re: Grendel and Grendel’s mother) tied to dark spectral forces; re: “a spectre is haunting Europe,” which Tolkien spearheads/scapegoats, Radcliffe-style, with a great many of “the help” gone bad under a single monolith’s all-consuming barbarian horde: orcs and goblins waving a planetary banner changing the ownership. Summon old nightmares (the vengeful dead slave as a zombie-vampire goblin); antagonize, put to work, banish nature through a pearl-clutching appeal to tradition, monomyth-style.

(source)

To that, Tolkien’s the Necromancer (what he calls Sauron), a decrepit leech obsessed with greatness and bleeding (Middle-)Earth dry while using DARVO and obscurantism to demonize Jews and other labor groups treated as “Jewish” in medieval, blood-libel language (e.g., queer people during Satanic Panic). Such village scapegoats include orcs and goblins as monstrous-feminine servants of the vague, faceless Dark Lord (and backstabbers of the West), but also dwarves as greedier than humans and prone to greed of a Zionist[8] sort (also backstabbers, but to a lesser [thus more redeemable] degree; e.g., over pettier squabbles of moneylending and property disputes):

J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973) himself had some controversial opinions about at least one race of Middle Earth, writing that his Dwarves were “like Jews: at once native and alien in their habitations.” In a separate interview, he elaborated on this theme, noting that “the Dwarves of course are quite obviously—couldn’t you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews?” (source: Matthew Wills’ “J. R. R. Tolkien’s Jewish Dwarves,” 2022).

It’s the dialectic of the alien, hard at work for the state during the abjection process; i.e., Tolkien playing with blood libel to wage yet-another witch hunt chasing state rape and revenge called “goblin,” fascism waiting to decay into itself (often in token forms; e.g., Gimli is a dwarvish cop) through a contemporary viewpoint: Lovecraft, on the other side of the pond, and his weird, pulpy notion of “horror in clay” (from “Call of Cthulhu,” 1928); re: creating status-quo evils to represent the state’s repressed colonialism/abject juridical process (the state of exception) while its power center is rotting/falling apart. Such is Zombie-Vampire Capitalism, making whatever enemy the state needs out of darkness visible canonized.

Synchronistic of the bigoted American, then, the old Brit was a Nazi in spirit, if not in professed closeness to their core values. Simply put, he gave voice to such police dialogs, his own brand of courtly love a canonical monster-fucking approach killing countless orcs and goblins bourne from the ground; i.e., as endemic to his essentialized moral geography being canonically game-like. I can’t really stress this enough, so here’s me stressing it as much as I possibly can (from Volume Zero):

To this, Tolkien’s refrain [the High Fantasy treasure map, exhibit 1a1a1h2a1] has led to the endless essentializing of war as gentrified through the fantasy mode [e.g., Rings of Power, 2023] but also its science fiction and horror parallels [which we’ll unpack during the “camp map” vis-à-vis Cameron’s refrain: the shooter, of course, but specifically the Metroidvania]. Tolkien’s magnetic, “chaste” warmongering leaves out the psychosexual horrors of war or valorizes them through the slaughter of abjected foes[9], requiring great effort from past writers like Ursula Le Guin to break away from Tolkien’s ghost, thus his trees and pastoral village recruitment antics and moderately xenophobic [racist] war stories. As these are copied-and-pasted along the shared counterfeit, they operate like a formula whose canonical replication centers around the profit motive; in turn, this becomes historical-material—e.g., D&D and its endless official/homebrew campaigns and dungeons—but also the “warcraft[10]” of the enterprising white, cis-het young men of an early ’90s company, suitably titled Blizzard [whose sexist bullshit as a company we’ll discuss much more in Volumes Two and Three]—built entirely around racial conflict [thus endless war and rape] as set into motion by Tolkien himself, whose own orcs are green-skinned, debatably anti-Semitic/cannibalistic savages whose name, “orc,” is Old Norse [from Beowulf’s orcnēas[11]] for “demon”; i.e., functional zombies in the state of exception that heroes invade to kill for the state through parallel legends weaving in and out of fiction and into real life: there and back again not once, but ad infinitum. If these “zombies” aren’t orcs, then they’re spiders[12] or some other stigma animal/vermin-type pest entity who must be crushed by the forces of good in personified forms; e.g., the Drow as “chaotic evil” spider people [exhibit 41b] who threaten nature as afflicted with the same problematic idea of good vs evil as canonically Biblical [versus Milton’s own accidental camping of these pastoral devices through Satanic war].

Simply put, Tolkien’s hopelessly academic view of nature is whitewashed, High Fantasy copaganda—a British tree huggers’ biased loving of the idealized pastoral/picturesque as threatened by outsiders ruining the scene: the map of empire as sacred. It’s a colonizer’s cartoonishly basic aesthetic that demonizes, thus alienates darkness but also death, decomposers and natural predators [stigma animals] as part of nature; i.e., as evil scapegoats tied to wicked, unnatural places, archaic wombs and dark magic—necromancers, but also their fortress lairs:

At first they had passed through hobbit-lands, a wide respectable country inhabited by decent folk, with good roads, an inn or two, and now and then a dwarf or a farmer ambling by on business. Then they came to lands where people spoke strangely, and sang songs Bilbo had never heard before. Now they had gone on far into the Lone-lands, where there were no people left, no inns, and the roads grew steadily worse. Not far ahead were dreary hills, rising higher and higher, dark with trees. On some of them were old castles with an evil look, as if they had been built by wicked people [emphasis: me]. Everything seemed gloomy, for the weather that day had taken a nasty turn [source].

These kinds of Gothic castles were clearly known to Tolkien, though he didn’t focus on them. In The Hobbit, they’re mentioned hardly at all [the word “castle” is used only once in the book]—sidestepped by Tolkien until it comes time to trot out Sauron [also known as the Necromancer] as the unironically Satanic threat to Tolkien’s “new Eden”: Britain by another name, as built by Tolkien’s easily ludologized, High Fantasy scheme[13].

The displacement of British industrialization and slavery is made clear by examining the real-world inspiration for Mordor and Tolkien’s own experiences elsewhere: “the industrial Black Country of the English Midlands, and by his time fighting in the trenches of the Western Front in the First World War” [source: Wikipedia]. Of the former Midlands, Jonathan Wilkins writes, “He based the description of Mordor, home to the evil Lord Sauron, on the Black Country, a region of Birmingham which was heavily polluted by iron foundries, coal mines and steel mills due to the Industrial Revolution. The air in it was so thick with smog and dust it was difficult to breathe and may contribute to the way local people speak today – the infamous Brummie accent” [source: “Birmingham Sites that Inspired Tolkien,” 2020]. Tolkien’s love for home pastoralizes the colonial element by abjecting its theatrical “soot” onto a fictional elsewhere. Places like the Shire and Lothlórien were always green and good and totally “never did a genocide” to get where they are; by comparison, the orcs threatening their naturalized goodness are the colonizers who did all of the bad things. It’s DARVO through British exceptionalism (source).

The game is canonization; re: Tolkien took Milton’s Paradise and drained it of its critical bite. “Evil,” in his hands, doesn’t critique the state by destabilizing and subverting it, but merely serves to maintain the status quo in perpetuity!

No matter how he might otherwise pretend, then, Tolkien’s work is wedded to the Middle Ages and allegory as canonical; the Dark Lord is Tolkien and the goblins his children precisely because he made dark war possible using them—i.e., in ways that long outlived Hitler’s wildest dreams: sucking on the planet’s blood, then blaming it on spiders, goblins and black knights! Oh, my!

(artist: John How Anger)

Not to sell Hilter’s propaganda short, but Tolkien’s copaganda stabilized and gentrified war against evil tied to nature, thus the world and its workers falling on the wrong side of the tracks. Whereas we can present evil as human and delicious, mid-liminal-expression[14], Tolkien only uses the goblin to police (thus rape) others with. It is not played with to confirm the veracity of something under suspicion, but to enforce state rule through weak/strong and black/white binaries, per Capitalist Realism!

Furthermore, Tolkien took this problematic upbringing and turned it into a warrior’s place for bad BDSM, which sure enough, sits alongside healthier forms using the same aesthetic; re: (from Volume One):

In short, Tolkien relied on the vampire legend—but also Gothic castles, BDSM language and harmful arrangements of unequal power (rings and collars)—to dominate nature and those within it. Written in defense of a divided nature in good and evil animal forms, Tolkien’s war stories view the vampire a kind of parasite praying upon the conspicuously vulnerable inside Cartesian dialogs; i.e., both in raw animal terms with Shelob the spider as part of “evil nature,” but also magical leeches like Sauron, whose ghastly projections have become wholly divorced from “good nature” inside dark, undead fortresses that harvest all good, living things from the land (whitewashing Britain’s analogs in the process). Anything else is functionally “dead” (sanctioned for state execution) by virtue of collective punishment. In doing so, Tolkien abjects death as a vital function of nature, but also fascism as a vital function of Capitalism in relation to nature as preyed upon by those behind his undead/animalistic scapegoats: the West. […]

Tolkien wasn’t just allergic to allegory and sex; he policed them greatly in service of empire. His evils are simplistic, unironically dated and vague, and he has a stubborn clumsiness when applying them to his worlds that suggests a very closed-minded way of thinking about his world and ours in BDSM terms. It’s certainly no secret that Tolkien eventually decided to place the lion’s share of the blame on people more so than material conditions or Capitalism and nation-states. He also makes the Ring and then melts it, trying to suggest that everything is somehow “solved”—that “Isildur’s Bane” is somehow to blame for the waning strength of men in the face of rarefied greed; i.e., the dragon sickness of the gold from The Hobbit having been turned into a simple dissociative trinket that weighs on “all men” to the same degree. He seems to understand how rings function as poetic devices while paradoxically lending them a bit too much credence; vertical power is a tremendously corrupting force, but you don’t have to essentialize it, nor reduce it to a shapeless male darkness that employs throwaway female demons and does away with overt BDSM language and, yes, ironic rape fantasies:

(artist: Owusyr Art)

BDSM isn’t just where power is located/stored (e.g., inside the One Ring or Sauron’s tower), but instructions for its use within assigned positions, including rape fantasies as a set of instructions given to the dom by the sub issuing various paradoxical commands: the civilized “princess” and the barbaric “invader” as roles to play with in animalistic ways (e.g., the “breeding”/captive fantasy) that expose and interrogate power as a device of negotiation towards better working conditions and healing from the deep traumas that emerge from settler-colonial violence and heteronormative enforcement. Material conditions play an important role in historical materialism, but power is largely about perception, which cannot simply be destroyed; it must change within society. The catharsis offered by iconoclastic roleplay grants appreciative irony amid Gothic counterculture as surviving under Capitalism. These forms of roleplay aren’t just completely alien to Tolkien, but policed and denied through his own incessant prescription of orcish demon lovers (and Dark Lords); i.e. bad BDSM as a harmful arrangement of power that introduces praxial inertia into the equation. While power can’t be destroyed as we just said, it can become unthinkable according to ways that challenge the usual runs of the mill. Tolkien and Radcliffe have that very much in common, making anything outside of their worldview as shapeless, dark and unthinkable: the incessant, utterly British fear of the outside felt within their own borders, castles, heroes, etc, as hopelessly forged and ever-present.

[…] Tolkien’s origin myths were entirely unoriginal, exhibiting a very narrow, profoundly inadequate idea of what BDSM even was: officers and batmen; i.e., a British officer and his dutiful servant, exemplified by Tolkien’s Samwise the Brave helping his fairly clueless master time and time again out of a bind. It is BDSM, but echoes the British castle of the Imperial Core as something to carry out into the battlefield while enduring Tolkien’s (fairly vanilla) rape fantasies and childish dreams of captivity with which to (dis)empower the sub as male; e.g., Frodo being whipped and beaten in the orc slaver’s tower (the torture dungeons in Mordor conspicuously full of the British tools of torture used by the colonized reimagined; i.e., during the myth of a dark, savage continent populated by evil, violent “children”). By displacing these tools off onto a dark “other” world beyond the land of plenty and light, Tolkien is scrubbing his own and blaming the colonized in the same breath). As a male benefactor of British colonialism, he fixates on faraway war as the exclusive site of power abuse exacted upon white men, ranking their abuse above everyone else (women, genderqueer people and ethnic minorities) and everywhere else (military urbanism). For him, these other things simply don’t exist; abject copies of them do, but their sexuality is largely abandoned inside a chaste, gentlemanly medieval that forces them to address trauma as men were (and are) commonly taught: through lethal force with killing weapons designed purely for harm against state enemies (source).

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

In turn, we Galatea reverse abjection through our own whorish, xenophilic scapegoat language and ironic rape fantasies (acting out Owusyr’s script in our heads, but not to prey on others); i.e., shapeless darkness given shape (cocks or otherwise) and healing from rape by using clay-like things, monster-fucking theatre, and blood libel’s black-magic poetics (with “black” marking slaves per the settler argument; e.g., genitals[15], left): on our Aegis’s danger disco, camping the same infernal concentric territories by occupying and subverting them, then awakening and mobilizing ourselves through the paradoxical reclamation of state-demonized forms taken knowingly into ourselves (above).

The path to universal liberation starts by building trust through social-sexual exchanges that most will prescribe to, in some shape or form. This means monster sex pointing to state alienation and worker liberation through the same pathways! You are what you eat, then, and in medieval language, eating and fucking is a fine line! So is normal/abnormal, per the abjection process and those straddling it; re: “black” = “alien” as something to reunite with workers when fucking the alien; i.e., as a matter of psychosexual ritual. Tolkien’s stories are ritual, and only serve to whitewash genocide and prolong its historical materialism through bourgeois praxis; ours do not—seeking to overcome systemic, generational harm by shrinking any desire to divide and colonize nature (synthesized by those who have differing degrees of privilege and oppression; e.g., white women and black men understanding each other’s rape, not ranking it; i.e., both experience pain that is, to some degree, alien to the other side, and found through a special-and-constant middle ground: imagination).

I want to unpack some of these ideas, next; i.e., encroaching upon uncomfortable territories that Tolkien could only penetrate and purge, with Pagan cremation, and which we divinate through acid Communism (towards the end of the section). Then we’ll consider doing it ourselves, minus the bigotry and genocide!

Trouble in Paradise: Fantasizing about Black Monster Dick (feat. acid Communism)

Black dick is forbidden. Iconoclastic monster-fucking doubles state dogma through forbidden love as a postcolonial device reclaiming terror language; i.e., black dicks (and other genitals, bodies) attached to various taboos; e.g., rape, cannibalism, and “sodomy” normally synonymized with us, and which we camp through sex—especially monstrous, interracial sex during blood libel and other persecutory language—as the most regulated device there is (often through a neo-medieval proximity with penetration, medieval acumen[16] and interracial threats of “torture” [through terror language subverted with porn, but also censored bodily functions like salivation, consumption and digestion, flatulence, menstruation, defecation, regurgitation or male/female ejaculation[17], sexual responses, crying and memento mori gore dissecting the human condition through closely monitored, physiological responses bearing a strong social element, mid-abjection).

Our focus is white-on-black sex, including white bodies fantasizing about black dick but also ourselves designated as “black” regardless of appearance (which expands to green, purple, or any non-white, thus non-human color of stigma; ergo, “black dick” = “green dick”). This includes Tolkien, black monster dick living rent-free in his forever-schoolboy brain. Indeed, Tolkien loves the black dick, needs it for his world to function through his weapons; i.e., so black and big and/or naughty it’s illegal, and policed by state forms; re: Beater and Biter for fucking goblins, which they subvert, David-Bowie-style! We stewards of nature fight for nature as normally raped by Tolkien—people, but also their pets, the environment, everything. Do it, if not for us, then for kitty! All life is precious, both we human goblins and our non-human counterparts; e.g., my cat, the laundry gremlin:

But if you do it for you, remember that rebellion and struggle, however grave, should be fun because there is no afterlife, only this one; i.e., fucking not just to metal, but any fun music when walking away from Omelas while inside it/the infernal concentric pattern; e.g., Shin Hae Chul’s “To You” (1991): “We’re doing it, babe! We’re doing Communism!” Cue the gay rainbows, cheesy music, and multicolor creampies (the joy of cryptomimesis)! The brave do live forever!

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Black rainbows, darkness visible—rebellion relies on emotional appeals and propaganda to work! Furthermore, never trust a philistine because liberation needs paradox; survival is victory and that victory starts with making life something to live for/celebrate in the moment, mid-incarceration (the fag always starts in the closet, even if that closet is society caging someone who’s out)!

So while capital routinely puts a price on the things it steals from, there’s value in all forms of labor in ways they can’t monopolize; i.e., regarding counterterror reclaimed from state fanaticism/double agents through our own curious deceptions. Spectres of Marx, our disco-in-disguise/postpunk often hides in plain sight. Any exchange gives and takes, the usual monopolies threatened by their own daily operations’ cryptonymy mingling with ours, each going hard to upend the other’s attempts. The point isn’t “final victory” in our lifetimes (which Tolkien pushed for), but freedom through said expression; re: the freeness of our minds[18] guiding our actions, however seemingly futile they are, towards a better viewing of things; i.e., those things treated like goblins as Tolkien does, emasculating the “black” side of nature (cocks or otherwise) to stall praxial catharsis through Beowulf-grade inertia!

Sex is expected by capital, but demonized as a common labor form (of terror) that exchanges between functionally white and black workers. By dancing with the ghost of the counterfeit and—just as often, embodying it through demonic self-expression becoming an informed, educated choice versus a desperate last stand—we make ourselves less afraid and more informed, hence prone to making friends with the other demonized groups’ Venn Diagram of persecution networks; i.e., onstage and off, goblins befriending elves to punch up, and real-life consumers identifying with that principle of disparate unity in ways Tolkien always avoided! He’s a monarchist who hates rabble-rousers. For him, then, the only good orc is a dead orc (re: Rearick)—the always-scapegoat in the same-old Omelas refrain; i.e., they “can’t” be sexy and must always be killed (or replaced with something else that serves the same role; e.g., the Drow).

(artist: Danny-Green)

Nothing scares the elite more than intersectional solidarity, which Tolkien’s ilk behind the curtain try to monopolize through Platonic, shadowy echoes of Beowulf and Pygmalion-grade tokenization; i.e., triangulating token fears through rape, engendering monomyth assimilation/divide-and-conquer copaganda pitting the middle class against the underclass and its armies of state-described “chaotic evil”; re: on the Black Veil, a dark leader and their fantastic generals (e.g., He-Man or Myth: the Fallen Lords) commanding the orcs and goblins that make up a garden-variety horde (versus the undead, chaos demons, or some other evil race). Kill an orc or a witch, get Rosie Cotton for a tradwife (the conservative promise of sex); kill a general whore, get a castle and a princess to defend from future black-dick revenge (the prince also tempted with black pussy on the same Aegis):

(artist: Ted Nasmit)

Handing out rewards is the pimp’s job, which Tolkien does through obligation, not enjoyment (e.g., Arwen but also Eowyn, left). “Paradise” equals standard-issue fascism-defending-capital; upselling labor’s various “power targets,” Tolkien’s bad “demon BDSM” happens during orcs-and-goblins blood libel sexualizing state revenge in all the usual Neo-Gothic forms of abject courtly love: storming castles-in-the-flesh, sans irony during the usual mise-en-abyme‘s Ozymandian inspiration (the Promethean visitation of power). Faramir doesn’t get the blonde baddie without facing down an army of orcs (and she doesn’t get him without dueling the witch-king of Angmar). Prostitution is prostitution, which marriage legalizes through state force exercised against state enemies—Tolkien’s vampirism at work, feeding on orcs and goblins to enrich Whitey.

Context obviously matters, here, and there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with playing god, invoking Numinous “inkblots,” or regressing to kayfabe-style, bread-and-circus hauntologies whose medieval language and emotional turmoil express various forms of inequality and trauma through poetic (make-believe) hyphenations of sex and force (e.g., sensations of rape or divisions of power/dueling emotions, mid-psychomachy). Per Sarkeesian, I can even enjoy Tolkien’s worlds, while refusing to endorse their bigoted elements. Indeed, as a medievalist, myself, my dialectical-material scrutiny rescues the Gothic from Tolkien’s abject views (and tokenized fans), the latter reifying and policing the alien through fatal nostalgia/false claims of sovereignty. This includes orcs and goblins of my own design (more on that in a bit, exhibit 44a1b1a), but also recognizing through dialectical-material scrutiny those made by other workers, too (next page). Orcs and goblins are sexy as a matter of dialectical-material context; i.e., because genuine rebellion and subversive monsters are sexy! They were only ugly in Tolkien’s world because his worldviews demanded they be! “Who’s the savage, modern man!”

(art: Amber Harris)

Tolkien’s media is already colonized, and ACAB/ASAB. For Tolkien and those like him valorizing cops and the state, there’s always an in-group and an out-group to the calculated risk, thus a cop and a victim, a defender and an alien invader endemic to home needing its routine whitewash/genocide; i.e., a correct party and an incorrect party pursuant to the usual state mechanisms tokenizing Judas sell-outs. Funny how the incorrect side is literally most of the planet, highlighting capital raping the world by design. They act like they own it, monopolizing and raping it accordingly by unironically fucking monsters—all to decide who loves and who dies inside an inherently unequal and cruel system, one favoring white straight Christian men, who enjoy rules meant to favor them and punish others (through various double standards and preferential mistreatment).

Tolkien privatized nature by pimping orcs and goblins. To privatize nature, then, is to rape it as cheaply as possible; that’s all the state does, and its servants enforce that dominance through intolerance with impunity dressed up as liberal democracy and freedom. It’s a rigged game, the illusion of choice; cops don’t prevent rape, but legitimize it against those the system codes as bad, goblins or otherwise—i.e. in a hierarchy of values linked to physical attributes/accident of birth upholding the status quo; re: in accordance with the state’s monopolies/trifectas and the qualities of capital, whose “sickness” of greed Tolkien abjects onto dragons, but also goblins and dwarves as ultimately “more greedy” than good men, hence more deserving to die by the latter’s grimy hands. Rape does not preclude death; it engenders it, disempowering state victims to harm them for profit.

Such is Capitalism, which Tolkien’s stories illustrate in small: “Kill the pig! Spill its blood!” In the centrist refrain, there are no moral actions, only moral teams; capital, Tolkien demonstrates, assigns portions of the world to die, en masse—piled and burned in Viking-esque romances, yet also used by the West as a weapon of terror and means of disposing the useless, dishonorable dead[19a] (as the Nazis did, in their death camps): burn them before they defile good nature with their black dicks.

In his darkest dreams, then, Tolkien is the open rapist he projects so nakedly onto others—the banal spectre of Christopher Columbus or Cromwell conducting genocide inside the Imperial Core and on its frontiers/satellites. Sublimating unironic monster sex—namely that of nature-as-whore through monomythic language—black rape and racialized territorial conflict are endemic to Tolkien’s worlds, armies and offshoots (re: D&D and pretty much every RPG in existence), making them excellent models for capital and its ideologies literally “at play”: a white-moderate, “woe is me” genocide fantasy—one populated with bastardized lore and languages (literal palingenesis, another fascist trick)—and based on slumming and tokenism, the world is always something to farm, thus harm[19b].

This is what I meant when I said Tolkien gentrified war. For him, nature is a virgin/whore to divide along the same cartographic lines; i.e., abusing the usual terror language/medieval courtship of slaying dragons (and/or orcs and goblins); i.e., in psychosexual language to sodomize the Earth and pin said crimes onto others (re: “good” nature corrupted by “bad” nature). For him—and I really can’t stress this enough—the only good goblin whore is a dead goblin whore. In turn, his medieval shorthand outlines capital-as-hyperobject; i.e., the planet as “giant white ass” for Tolkien’s good guys to save from “giant black dick,” but also—per the usual hypocrisies love-hating anything monstrous-feminine regardless of gender or sex, race or religion—Tolkien threatens with grim harvest; re: monster-fucking as a doomsday scenario to gaslight, gatekeep girlboss workers like Eowyn until they “sign up” (a neo-conservative precursor to Ellen Ripley and similar Amazons, out of Ancient Athens and into the present):

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Except Hell—along with the demonic, monster-fucking opera of sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, and of monstrous-feminine heavy-metal poetry (thus rape and revenge fantasies during ludo-Gothic BDSM and its palliative-Numinous paradoxes)—is our domain to patrol, which the state can only try their damndest to monopolize, commodify and colonize. Often, this happens by pitting different marginalized “outsider” groups against themselves; re: tokenization; e.g., white women versus orcs, but also goblins versus dwarves (comparable to Arabs vs Jews). In turn, divide and conquer includes the medieval idiocy of marshaling armies to fight for kings to begin with. That’s what Tolkien’s refrain entails, its tokenism a trademark strategy the Allies (and Western powers after the war) use to rape the Global South to this day!

“Dwarves Are Not Heroes,” writes Rebecca Brackmann in 2010[20]; they’re Jewish stereotypes that, in hauntological forms, apply to any foe the state could hope or want to tokenize/rape. The same goes for orcs and goblins. Liberation and exploitation exist on the same stages, wherein we kill our darlings to escape the disastrous ways of thinking Tolkien canonized; i.e., his refrain orbiting around wealth acquisition through monomythic conquest, requiring anti-Semitic tropes (of theft and bad service, but also black rape) to work; re: as scapegoats of capital, these unworthy dwarf lords instigating larger conflicts by stealing the dragon’s gold out of revenge. Our responses occupy the same pornographic visual ambiguities, which ludo-Gothic BDSM and monster-fucking parse through dialectical-material scrutiny when playing with/as goblins (or any race you could possibly want)!

As my older books have already explored (re: block quotes), Tolkien’s BDSM is a ludic power fantasy used at other people’s expense, and generally in service to state bodies per Goldilocks Imperialism (re: “settler colonialism with more steps[21]“). Our ludo-Gothic power fantasies (which again, BDSM largely is) must camp those; i.e., taking the diminutive, abject yet sexually descriptive (shortstack) goblins and other demons of the underground back from old dorks like Tolkien canonizing BDSM. His bad data instructs harmful activities through police dogma; i.e., a fatal nostalgia fetishizing greed attached to racialized bugbears categorized, once again, as bad servants with black rapacious intentions (these “backstabbing Jews” only loyal to wicked masters/dark lords, stabbing their good masters in the back [often over money] or raping them from any direction). It’s a fantasy about black dicks being used to cuckold state power—making the powerful (and their servants, the middle class) only tighten their hold on said cocks! For Tolkien—and indeed the entire Western world—”backstabbing” equals “rape” as something to spread through rumor and canard (whose anti-Semitism became less about Jews, over time, and more about multi-ethnic racism and queerness); re: through the state’s white revenge against black dick (and other genitals, not shown here).

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

By comparison, the whore’s revenge is to fuck whoever she wants, subverting those lies and, by extension, the entire bête noire (re: nature as gyn/ecological and monstrous-feminine, including black men). In doing so, she evokes a common fear of capital (white women fucking black men) that—while it historically evokes parental reactionary violence (re: the Wilmington massacre)—can counteract systemic intolerance/extortion while stymieing profit behind revolutionary cryptonymy’s usual buffers (and going beyond white cis women, to be clear). It’s still a rape fantasy thanks to dialectical-material offers, but one being consciously subverted by the actors involved; i.e., canonical interracial exchanges (which Tolkien’s orcs and goblins present as an unironic nightmare scenario) versus iconoclastic interracial porn. The latter isn’t merely forbidden, by Tolkien; it’s anathema—literally beyond his willingness to imagine! He was incapable of fucking at all, in his stories, let alone monster-fuck (which extended to non-sexual scenarios[22], below)!

(artist: Amber Harris)

Interracial sex is seditious outside state control, and even then it’s still a controlled substance; i.e., one chattelizing nature not just as alien whores, but vermin to exterminate on a ladder of preferential mistreatment. Whatever dalliances that occur through us pointedly offend intolerance, including the ladder of privilege and deserving-to-undeserving violence capital assigns its victims (a task that Tolkien excels at). On its rungs, even the lowliest imp serves a purpose: to be raped with irony or without. Rebellion is when the trash fucks back; our non-white elements and fantasies (about black dick and other traditional forms of rape borrowed from canonical language) rail against capital’s rigged, dare-I-say Faustian, bargains with Tolkien! We recode his rules to spite him, changing the outcomes when playing with such toys; i.e., by preventing holocaust and reversing abjection/the colonial binary’s terrorist/counterterrorist flow of power!

Our combinations corrupt the data to cryptonymically expand the mind, our “goblins'” love for gold (and big black dick/pussy—Medusa having either or both, above) a universal theatre device; i.e., whose camp diverts not just Tolkien’s unironic rape scenarios, but also the kinds of unchecked mammon known to the First and Second Gilded Ages (the same idea goes for orcs and hand-to-hand combat, but also their naturalized sexual aggression). By regressing to a half-real imaginary space-time where such things were formerly allowed—and once-entered again through goblin-type forays beyond Tolkien—we can “swashbuckle” not just with terror and violence during the cryptonymy process, but things controlled through violence; e.g., money and drug use (or drug-like things, which monsters are), which workers safely play with during monster-fucking: to interrogate state arrangements and negotiate towards worker-friendly versions/mutual exchange!

For every theatrical double, there is always an earthly equivalent being treated the same; if we can subvert that at the root of the problem—changing how one side views and treats the other per exchange—we can synthesize good praxis on a wider scale; i.e., as a countercultural movement that celebrates white-on-black love over space and time (of any configuration you could imagine, not just cis-het white girls and black men; e.g., goblins and orcs among themselves, demons and maidens crossing the isle/red line, and so on). Thanks to actual or imagined abuse during criminogenic conditions, many white women are afraid of black men/non-white people (and other minorities treated as “non-white,” per the settler argument); and vice versa, those groups fear white women for having power over them.

That’s the whole point of monster-fucking and ironic fetishization—to camp canon by facing these fears and exposing their ridiculous, alienating qualities alongside uneven socio-material conditions that need to change. The dick shouldn’t scare us; the state’s ability to divide us using it should! “Let Jesus, fuck you!”

(artist: Just Some Noob)

So long as we fear ourselves, the state can divide and destroy us any way it likes. And while opposites often attract, revolution always happens in opposition to state proponents; it likewise needs solidarity—however chimeric—or state power will sever rebellious factions from themselves while fostering non-rebellious ones, then pimp nature as monstrous-feminine whore (afraid of giant black cock during the whore’s paradox; e.g., the nun trapped between salvation and sin, above) all over again!

(artist: NGArt7)

To combat or enable rape, the Gothic works through blood libel, but also cannibalism, adultery and suicide (all cardinal sins); i.e., as equally taboo fears, during the abjection process; e.g., gut reactions, impulsiveness, affairs of the heart, burning passions and chilling fears, etc. The iconoclastic idea is to excite these to control and understand them through playing at dogma to reverse abjection; i.e., camping the canon, thereby emulating persecution to liberate ourselves from fear (through our bodies) as a state weapon. Instead, it can become ours, going where power is to subvert bigoted stereotypes with; i.e., at any point in which relationships unfold (with black women being treated as more sexually aggressive and experienced/seductive than white women[23] but also fetishized differently than them, for example—a quality that extends not just to orcs and goblins, but exotic queens of an imaginary past, above):

(artist: Just Some Noob)

So while exploitation and liberation exist in the same space, the process of abjection (us-versus-them) must be occupied by workers who consciously subvert its materials to reverse harmful boundaries; i.e., generally in alien nostalgic language regarding sex and force. The idea is to cross state boundaries to go into alien spheres, then rehumanize demonized peoples with demonic language (dicks or otherwise). Such synthesis remains uneven, of course, and concerns relative privilege and oppression, mid-courtship.

All the same, Gothic Communism hugs Medusa through fantasy to find similarity amid difference, among the winding threads; i.e., in ways that push towards universal liberation inside capital. Medusa is classically “rape-proof,” then, teaching others not to harm her (thus themselves) through psychosexual martyrdom facing state condemnation colonizing its own populations with its own populations. We must fuck back, using state terror weapons during liminal expression as, often enough, pornographic (e.g., sodomy and interracial sex, below):

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Such resistance is always violent, to some extent; i.e., like goblins and their own mini-demon counterterror shenanigans, capital cannot be defeated by exclusively conventional means, but through gradual transition away from itself and towards a post-scarcity world; re: using violence during mirror syndrome, our cryptonymy matching Tolkien’s, measure for measure. Gothic Communism is holistic, in that respect, but prides itself in subverting the state’s usual monomythic propaganda (re: Beowulf and the masculine lethal force enjoyed by Tolkien’s mostly-male, non-teenage heroes cutting orcs and goblins, but also hags, whores and evil women, to bits through their version of courtly love); i.e., from any direction, front or back (above), turned anisotropically on its head—monsters but also coveted resources, like sex and drugs. Again, the Gothic values violating pre-conceived boundaries (that further abjection) to generate new ones in similar stories, often centered around monster fucking as “violent.” This includes camping stories like Tolkien’s, giving us tremendous latitude.

Under capital and its qualities, “black” is always abject—is something to view and treat differently than “white”; Tolkien’s stories—of world war and token-yet-racial police violence—imply a black planet raped away from white purity by vengeful dark forces. By equating holistic slave liberation (re: Jews and whores, white women and black men) with total destruction of the Capitalocene (state shift), it has an almost drug-like berserker rage to it (of blind faith, if not drugs, given Tolkien’s Christianizing of the Viking lifestyle): be a man and kill the orc, or the orc will kill you and your whole family before burning your home to the ground! Among these rape-fantasy qualities, then, there’s a drugged element to explore when camping Tolkien.

United we stand, divided we fall; assimilation is poor stewardship of the natural world (which many Indigenous groups did, out of desperation). In turn, praxial synthesis happens through the intersectional solidarity of class, culture and race avoiding normativity and assimilation; e.g., Afronormativity, Hoteps and separatism; i.e., by working not just with what we know, but what we imagine tied to what we’ve lost and try to regain through the rememory process as—sure enough—tied to drug therapy, sex, and artwork often going hand-in-hand:

(artist: NGArt7)

This brings us to acid Communism. The iconoclastic idea of the orc or the goblin speaks to Fisher’s acid Communism, used by me and my friends, but also all peoples to work through demon poetics comparable to the orc or the goblin—i.e., to liberate ourselves through iconoclastic art tied to nature-as-monstrous-feminine, monster-fucking a drug-like activity that broadens our capacity for empathy inside uneven persecution networks; e.g., stoner white girls taking big black dick (slaves of different kinds unifying against capital; re: Zinn) while under the influence to promote universal tolerance, acceptance and emancipation from state myopias:

Acid communism is about ways of imagining a world after capitalist realism, and for Fisher, one of the ways to escape this reality is psychoactive drugs. The programme of acid communism is not to condone psychoactive drug use, but as an example this activity captures the philosophy of acid communism excellently.

To imagine new futures, we have to find ways to break out of our present myopia. Fisher’s acid communism is unique primarily for placing this goal above all others. […] The future has been cancelled because we are unable to imagine anything other than the present. To invent the future, to escape our myopia, we have to go beyond the present bounds of our imagination. This is acid communism (source: Stuart Mill’s “What Is Acid Communism?” 2019).

This freedom to express with forbidden materials contributes to the whore’s revenge, such monster-fucking as Harmony’s tearing down state boundaries during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., to form healthier ones for workers than Tolkien dared, much how tanking profit more broadly does except through our actions witnessed by others: the “witch’s brew” cum macro-dosing inside Harmony’s cauldron-like pussy and stirred by a dark “spoon” (a big “fuck you” not just to Tolkien, but Francis Bacon)! It’s not sexy because it’s abject, but because it showcases mutual consent with fear while subverting state forms of paradise-in-peril (the damsel-in-distress). Mutual consent is sexy as something to illustrate, during various labor exchanges—especially when accepted by one side squeezing the other (regardless of color[24] or size) into their tight little openings: something to watch (voyeurism) and show off (exhibitionism)!

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Camp is when we refuse to kill each other and choose to make love, instead. So don’t fear black dick, like Tolkien does, and fetish unironic harm and death (which just so happens to be another fascist feather in his cap[25]); be bold, like Harmony and I (who loves big dick)! Dive into Hell, doing so to transform into more-human, less-alien but still-fetishized subjects of power taking said power back while fucking monsters you treat as human; i.e., demonstrating empathy through white-on-black sex, but also through morphological statements that translate through sight, period; e.g., desire, insofar as Harmony spreads her legs to accept as much of the black monster dildo into her naughty white pussy (above). Such is her revenge, delighting such revelry in the face of those who might try to rob Harmony of any bodily autonomy because they “know better” than she does. As if! We decide, not SWERFs, and certainly not old imperial dinosaurs like Tolkien fetishizing our deaths and calling it “holy” (fetishizing objects of power as he does; e.g., swords, crowns and rings)!

We’ll unpack this even more, next.

Doing It, Ourselves: Humanizing Orcs and Goblins through Ironic Monster Sex

(artist: Just Some Noob)

Tolkien’s worst fear is white-on-black sex, whose policing canonizes unironic crusades/fetish charm offensive against nature as “black, corrupt” (the white man’s side-piece/side quest somewhere between the rules and fiction, above). This blood libel targets orcs and goblins (whose green skin is functionally “black,” per settler arguments), but also the white women they threaten with dark desire; i.e., in half-real exchanges that point to real-life versions intimated by imaginary ones, quotidian or Romantic; re, my prior exploration of rape during pornographic expression, in Volume One:

Just as liminality is expressed through conflict within thresholds and on the surface of things, pornography is generally controlled and fought over by those who wish to compel profit through binary sexuality versus those who want to liberate sex and gender from the state’s heteronormative constraints using Gothic expression. The emphasis of these exhibits is racialized; i.e., the gender binary as settler-colonial in ways that stress a racialized character from bodies of different skin colors (exhibits 32a and b), physical types (skinny vs fat, exhibit 32c) and monstrous forms of expression (vampires, exhibit 32d) that speak to Cartesian trauma as something to live with and prevent in the future.

Sex-coercive BDSM actually includes a gradient of impotence echoed in canonical porn pastiche; i.e., not just “knife dicks,” but someone “under” the state worker—a slave or token class traitor (which is basically a slave)—aping the blade: “prison sex” mentality. Under this mindset, an unwilling third can be conditioned to fuck another worker the way the state, thus the privileged worker, wants them to: according to the torturer’s canonical, alien-fetishistic worldview (and fatal promised glory, post-slaughter[26]) handed to them like a knife by the state, then synonymized with their biology as “all they are.” Insect politics.

(artist: Pancake Pornography)

One “card” in the state’s aforementioned “deck,” then, is racialized fetishization through traumatic penetration; i.e., the BBC as an internalized, “fattened” metaphor for phallic implements of state terror by black men against women (and other recipients) but classically white women. Originally on the plantations and colonies of the antebellum American South, the white man’s toxic view of the black man’s “giant animal cock” historically has become slave canon, post hoc—mythologized and repurposed to be turned on white women as a fearful prophecy fulfilled through sex-coercive rituals, then gargoyle-ish abstractions and extensions of those rituals: female gargoyles attacking perceptions of rape inside but also outside white populations, becoming vigilantes during interracial rape fantasies where they embody givers and receivers of sexual abuse in terrifying forms (state terror as a weapon). The cock needn’t literally be black, even—simply “too big” to be considered “white” within settler-colonial models, thus able to cause pain relative to traumatic penetration as something to threaten in oft-Gothic forms: being too big.

(artist: Slugbox) 

Echoes of nightly slave abuse, then, have survived into the present—first lauded by powerful men like Woodrow Wilson towards D. W. Griffith’s aforementioned “black, rebellious slaves violate white women” rape fantasy, The Birth of a Nation, followed by Giger’s xenomorph as a postcolonial “lawn jockey” later crystalized by 1980s’ porn hauntologies (below). Something for moderates to preserve and for reactionaries to return to, said porn becomes an unironic product to consume and embody through canonical praxis; and it is precisely this kind of pornography we must de facto synthesize into healthier forms of sex-positive education (counterterror):

(exhibit 32a: Artists: Victoria Paris and Sean Michaels. Since I’m writing about oppositional praxis as liminal expression [the execution of dialectical-material theory within thresholds] in porn pastiche, here’s a collage thereof: the black star athlete enjoying his forbidden prize, the white blonde in wifely silks. They kiss, then begin, him removing her panties and starting to fuck her. From every angle you can think of, the camera is curious and invasive, showing you things normally left to the fearful-fascinated imagination. Literally “sex with the lights on,” the makers have placed these sights behind a canonical paywall; i.e., in medieval language, it’s a Catholic “sale of indulgence” or return to canonical norms. Rejected by Martin Luther and Protestantism during the Iconoclasm, this only led to the Protestant work ethic and Puritanism through American labor during the 20^th century—work being holy and sold sex being unholy but profitable. In turn, this oscillating schism remained curiously in place under Reagan’s tenure, a high time of profitability during the latter-end of the “Golden Age of Porn.” VHS offered up a mass-produced, widely disseminated reprieve from one’s holy work through a taste of unholy decadence, laziness and unlawful carnal knowledge: blondie likes that big black dick, not only taking all of it like a champ but fucking back, power-bottom style.)

The above exhibit might seem “harmlessly” cliché, but Gothic canon treats “black” as synonymous with “aggressively violent and racist” according to repressed sexual desires in the 20th and 21st centuries; i.e., black men sleeping with white women as a common source of contention among reactionary white men (and their token subordinates) declaring a state of emergency spearheaded by foreign knife dicks: a crisis of unwanted black penetration against white women. While canonical porn is full of whitewashed appropriations like these, it reaches back to older conflicts in American history we must dig up and confront. Generally uglier things are proceeded by cryptonyms of various kinds, including sex; but sex is generally a part of the problem being discussed in psychosexual bedlam.

For example, before the Wilmington Massacre of 1898, the Reconstruction-era town had black-owned businesses and politicians—until a white-supremacist mob retaliated with violence. This included a local racist editorial printing malicious slander against the black population, saying the latter were the rapists of white women (and implying that having “sheathed black daggers,” the modesty of white women was compromised forever):

Newspapers meanwhile spread claims that African Americans wanted political power so they could sleep with white women, and made up lies about a rape epidemic. When Alexander Manly, owner and editor of the Wilmington Daily Record, published an editorial questioning the rape allegations and suggesting that white women slept with black men of their own free will, it enraged the Democratic party and made him the target of a hate campaign (source: Toby Luckhurst’s “Wilmington 1898,” 2021).

Afterward, the town exploded into violence, resulting in the only successful domestic coup in American history. The massacre included a machine gun-armed white mob targeting and killing people of color and their allies. Sound familiar? Kyle Rittenhouse and the Proud Boys are merely copycats in a long tradition of upholding racist violence in the United States. This is not a glitch, but the system defending itself through bad-faith arguments projecting state rape onto state victims. Any voice of the oppressed must occur through the same basic dialog—in short, because that’s where power is concerned, thus amounts to where people are already looking and surviving.

The blindness of such gazes can be undone through iconoclastic narratives that subvert rape; i.e. ironic or critical rape fantasies that remove the harmful capabilities of the knife dick as a settler-colonial tool. These aren’t always playful in an obvious sense. For instance, the Wilmington Massacre inspired Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Morrow of Tradition (1901), an Austen-style novel-of-manners that devolves into a horrible riot partway through due to escalating racial tensions inspired by a local white supremacist newspaper. This paradigm shift was codified— teased decades later, post-Civil Rights movement, by canonical ’80s wish fulfillment; i.e., of canonical American pornography as a widespread extension of unchecked systemic American racism. The general sentiment stems from Lost Cause, Jim Crow and white supremacy and extends into various future groups like the Proud Boys. This happens through canonical behaviors and sentiments; i.e., coded behaviors taught by porn as incredibly body-centric, but also divisive regarding nature as alien under Cartesian rule.

This brings us to a corporal threshold, one the elite—try as they might— cannot fully monopolize in demon BDSM linked to Satanic morphological expression; i.e., the body and its knife dick (or vagina dentata) as a poetic offshoot of a greater inhuman[27] presence; e.g., Medusa’s snakes, Lilith’s demons; Sauron’s orcs, the alien queen’s insect brood or Dagon’s spawn; Cain’s son Grendel, Dracula’s thralls, etc, that reproduce in non-heteronormative ways (sodomy effectively meaning “non-PIV sex”) to endlessly produce armies of invincible barbarians, which as “forces of darkness/nature-run-amok” (e.g., Alex Jones’ “gay frogs”) must be conquered by state champions during returning “hard times[28]” that demand the knife dick’s resumed employment (which promises a bloody harvest to enrich the state-in-decay to a former glorious position) [source].

Porn, as we’ll see, is a useful means of interrogating bigotry through campy forms subverting canonical ones; i.e., policing the “corporal threshold,” above, and  through canonical pornographic violence is what unironic pimps (thus men like Tolkien and his orcs and goblins) always do: control maidens[29] “for their own good,” while treating them like whores (often through doubles; e.g., Shelob): tempted by darkness vis-à-vis weak/strong barbarians threatening “Rome”—all to uphold the Christianized nuclear household/ordering of things, per a Protestant ethic (all the more ironic, given Tolkien was Catholic)!

Capitalism is like a bad parent and/or husband, then, one that naughty little girls must run away from and rebel in order to survive the usual abuses their actual/de facto parents inflict upon them. Like the proverbial tip of the iceberg, we take whatever bigotry moderates men like Tolkien expose during these exchanges and pull them, screaming like a mandragora, out of the ground! Not as vaudeville/a minstrel show, but calculated risk occupying the same stages and using the same darkness visible for campy reasons.

To break Capitalist Realism on yourselves, then, you must turn into sex objects of a theatrical sense; and to do that without harming yourselves or others, you must experiment with yourselves and others, “on the settlement.” Of course, rebellion often has a dysfunctional, exhausting character to it; and whatever we’re pumping—be it cum, blood, oil, drugs, money or power of some kind—this takes work under imperfect conditions complicated by capital defending itself. So do we hook each other up or hook up with each other to whatever degrees we’re able. That ability varies, from moment to moment.

Likewise, smaller simulations of class, culture and race war include battles inside/outside ourselves that attach to those fought on other registers. The less prone we are to attack others, the more we can solidarize, thus humanize/decolonize the harvest and its alien, hellish crop. Keeping with the drug-fueled metaphors of acid Communism, these crops take on a love-in-idleness character that—among orc and goblin bodies—mirrors older faerie ones we’ve already examined; re: Romantic Rose; i.e., a demonic “orchard” whose “violence” of exposed nudity is legitimate in state eyes, so long as they control nature as their whore to pimp, their harvest to dehumanize while raping nature for profit:

(artist: Romantic Rose)

Function determines function; agency is nudity through the whore’s paradox, projecting such power out into the world as something to humanize ourselves with, mid-duality and flow—as monsters to fuck for reasons different than the state’s own policing of whores, of orcs and goblins, of nature as black and alien. This includes when the skin is white (re: all beings treated as women [especially white women] are deemed “corruptible” by an enterprising status quo “counting chickens” per standard imperial practices).

So experiment! Free your mind and join every dimension by pulling this in that direction. Golems—and by extension goblins; i.e., as classic, shortstack, commonly green-skinned mischief-makers, but also whose punk culture/terrorism is decidedly fun (a firecracker)—are poetic placeholders we can hurt, but never harm while embodying sin as something to synthesize during oppositional praxis; i.e., they’re made to take it, and breathe life into dark forces for rebellious, Satanic purposes; re: goblins, witches, black magic, demon resurrection, drug use/acid Communism and interracial sex, etc, aiding the cryptonymy process for workers: forbidden sight during demonic sex and asexual rituals of pain/public nudism with a psychosexual aesthetic! Strange appetite, strange eyes! Defy God and Heaven! Learn what resonates in sex-positive ways and make that your drum to beat! Once introduced, they cannot police it—the brothel, per the whore’s paradox, becoming a place we can reclaim during liminal expression as never wholly acted on by one side; re: “how the state forbids access, yet access happens anyway.”

Life finds a way, as it were. So can workers become free, mid-paradox, to forge our own destinies; i.e., while identifying as we want to, and choose to spend time with those we care about. Even if the feelings don’t last, the intensity of a wild romance—wanting it so goddamn bad the baddie bucks back into you, below—is bound to make a lasting impression: something to ride out, however long it lasts! The whole point isn’t that you control it through pure domination, but working with others who have agency in a shared operation. Sex and romance likewise bear out social components that have their own asymmetrical elements, and whose parties will be treated differently by society under capital, at large! Understanding and appreciation, while you can, is prudent.

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Such chaos is often planned and playful—made by deliberately forming connections that might seem tangential and pointless, but in reality open up new vistas of reflection conducive to development as a whole (the state and its imperialism of theory atomizing thinkers until they no longer can); re: entitled, covetous, white cis-het men (and tokenized people in the Man Box) look at an orc or a goblin and see a “waifu,” whereas we look at them and see “rebels,” “punks” and sexual outlaws who punch up during the whore’s revenge; i.e., exploitation and liberation’s usual liminalities extending to blood libel through orcs and goblins: sex objects fighting back as dirty sex symbols.

To it, “black” is a state of “danger” because forbidden love not sanctioned by the state will be viewed and treated as “terrorist”; it’s not something we’re “supposed” to do, therefore exciting because it speaks to our true alien selves finding some sense of home where we’re treated as foreign, exotic, anathema—i.e., where our power is found by us and policed by the state, flirting with disaster in dualistic, liminal, ergodic and recursive forms! Such arrangements can take many different shapes, but generally reduce to one side of an arrangement being policed differently than another is; i.e., in fractally recursive/concentric formations, but who find similarity in the midst of police shadows assaulting us; re: the pedagogy of the oppressed, healing from rape during monster-fucking theatre: speaking to a desire for intimacy with those we love, yet feeling the classic Gothic push-pull under the presence of dialectical-material dispute and state overreach policing the grey areas of exchange.

(artist: Iron Dullahan)

Everyone loves the whore, for different reasons; everyone loves orcs and goblins as rebellious feisty whores speaking demonically through different dark desires, unequal exchange and radical transformation for or against the state’s monopoly (thus abuse) of such monstrous, violent terror language—e.g., Shrek’s wife, Fiona (next page), but also Harley Quinn* and Poison Ivy as famous bisexual icons (above [with a super-giant tree dick] and below) that, in the pornographer’s capable hands, speak through size difference, gender trouble, blood libel and interracial sex to reverse abjection (thus profit, rape); i.e., during monster-fucking theatre sitting between art and porn, onstage and off: “futa” and other such things for us, not for straight men fetishizing our identities to dominate us with. They rule not through respect and trust, but cruelty and fear dressed up as “love” and “protection.” “What a story, Marx!”

*A little goblin in her own right; i.e., someone who farts in front of the boys to a weaponized degree (“Harley Quinn Farts in the Batmobile,” 2017). At first, Batman tries to act tough, refusing to let Harley out. But the farts are so bad that eventually he concedes defeat! Huzzah!

(artists [top-left-to-bottom]: Ngmi, Amber Harris, and Iron Dullahan)

People—even ace people—relate through Gothic dialogs about sex. Sex-positive demons communicate cryptonymically through non-harmful pleasure and pain to illuminate harm caused by the state; i.e., the whore, through ludo-Gothic BDSM, must reclaim such devices normally used by the state causing harm: to police porn’s subversive, genderqueer elements is to deny GNC people (and other marginalized groups) any ability to a) speak out against their own exploitation where it normally occurs, and b) to their ability to normalize the reclamation of these devices in Gothic (wicked, perverted, reprobate) modes of expression helping workers connect (through hook-ups or otherwise). “You are determined!” Service tops and power bottoms make up much of this, but really any arrangement of power and its seeking you could dream of, their ensuing arguments wrecking the nuclear model (and state ideas of maidens and whores), mid-Amazonomachia (re: battle sex through kayfabe). “PUSSY DESTROYED” by goblin dynamite dick (camping the usual medieval poetic mergers of sex and siege warfare)!

“We camp canon because we must!” Whereas canonical Gothic furthers abjection through monomyth escapism courting the ghost of the counterfeit, Gothic Communism navigates the confusions and excitements that result to guide workers towards a better world; i.e., during a close encounter/brush with death in canonically bigoted phallic/vaginal forms standing in monolithically for the monstrous-feminine (often in Numinous forms; e.g., Pyramid Head, Medusa).

To break Capitalist Realism, then, is to encounter the abject and not die, but merely change/radicalize by realizing we’re looking into a mirror showing us our alien side waiting for reunion. It’s to fuck with black cocks and bodies partially on ourselves—seemingly for a moment but actually for all our yesterdays—to bridge liminality oscillating towards development; re: with sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, but also the haunted house, Metroidvania noir or Western saloon’s danger disco and its cloak-and-danger theatricalities; i.e., though uncanny arrangements speaking to our mutual-if-idiosyncratic alienation and chance to reclaim our shared humanity through said demonizing theatre. It’s not a swan song but a siren song that has the listener not just hugging but fucking the alien while humanizing them!

To illustrate subversive labor action as it commonly occurs, then, I want to exhibit this complicated praxial reality and its descriptively sexual, culturally appreciative synthesis when planned and played out by workers making pornographic art in the real world; re: the creative successes of proletarian praxis;  i.e., through the goblin as a genderqueer force during ludo-Gothic BDSM, using acid Communism (and drug use/children’s cartoons) to fuck with Tolkien’s rigid (and sadly popular) anti-Semitic worldview—through the demonic spirit of creative rebellion/unruly slaves, which the goblin so easily represents; i.e., beyond Tolkien’s undead scapegoating of it (and subsequent hierarchy of values), his doing so to maintain imperial hegemony/Goldilocks Imperialism to put Whitey conveniently at or near the top (elves are what men want to be). Rebellion is a shady business, but one filled with galaxies and constellations, their “Big Bangs” lighting the way through darkness with darkness (dark matter)—one planetary castle at a time!

Note: As stated, this portion is a bit messy and holistic and that’s the point [re: ludo-Gothic BDSM and the spirit of play synthesizing praxis]. What we’re talking about here [darkness visible/forbidden sight] pertains to all demons, but these examples focus on goblins going beyond Tolkien’s narrow police use of them; i.e., through dehumanized agents reclaiming their humanity during ludo-Gothic BDSM as a shared, intersectional polity’s pedagogy of the oppressed. We’re all demonized differently by capital; fucking and even rape play are how we monsters relate to one another while being demonized unequally by the state. Anything I present here with my friends, then, I posit that you, yourselves, could generate among your friends; i.e., with furries, dragons, zombies, jinn, etc, or combination[s] of these separate modular elements to have the whore’s revenge. —Perse

How to Play with Goblins-as-Demons, Ourselves (to Have Our Revenge; feat. Bay, Blxxd Bunny, SpongeBob, and more)

(exhibit 44a1b1a: Illustration and outfit by Lucid-01; background, outfit alterations and character design by Persephone van der Waard. Genuine abuse can be subverted, happening through a controlled “call of the void”/calculated risk. Glenn the Goblin, for example, is a formerly anti-Semitic symbol that invades the pre-fascist Christian wardrobe to wickedly play around with the garments inside. In short, she’s taking them back, having her revenge through ludo-Gothic BDSM’s darkness visible. The source of play comes from symbolic, doubled tension; i.e., the metaplay of fan fiction’s paradox of pleasurable pain lying adjacent to perceived threats of harmful pain and its assorted legendarium. On the surface of the image, black is loaded in Western imagery with a variety of conflicting data: the threat of power as a destroying force, but also the color black as thoroughly dimorphized under Western thought; i.e., of presumed subservience [and misbehavior] for women under a perceived medievalized order of existence, the police state-of-affairs signified by black uniforms that hold punishment over those judged as good little girls and bad little girls who live under fear of rape as something to endure and avenge.

Just as canon is all according to design, so is my iconoclasm; i.e., Glenn—as a shapeshifter and Satanic atheist who isn’t much interested in being good, nor being a scapegoat—wants to have danger-disco fun through consent-non-consent by walking the tightrope. The idea is doll-like, undressing Glenn like a doll [implying a similar subversive element of control to the sub being undressed as such, instead of the heteronormative idea of intromission, coitus and creampie; i.e., “Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am!”]: in ways that beg the disco refrain as disarming of unironic harm within a Gothic, BDSM threshold; re: New Order’s “How does it feel, to treat me like you do?”

In Glenn’s case, the question is asked under informed consent; i.e., from two parties who know exactly what they want and are reveling inside the unique, delicious sensations as normally denied to us, under Capitalism: inside danger-disco torture dungeons! Glenn didn’t pick “her” clothes in the sense that she’s a cartoon, but rather did so as an extension of myself; i.e., I chose her to represent my desires: during the appreciative peril you see taking place. Just as I designed Glenn to shapeshift themselves—and me shapeshifting by proxy—the “goblin transformation” fantasy is me being tied up and threatened with “death”/a palliative Numinous.

To set ourselves free, we fags [and other aliens] use ludo-Gothic BDSM communicate through feelings of alienation, stigma, miracles, imprisonment, and exquisite torture, etc; i.e., the tremendously anguished cryptonymy of state boundaries, which we test by threatening them with our power as ultimately greater than any state: catharsis through “rape,” on the receiving end of something great, in control; e.g., “Should you choose to test my resolve in this matter, you will be facing a finality beyond your comprehension, and you will not be counting days, or months, or years, but millenniums in a place with no doors[30].” We wager in strict and gentle forms, but speak to moral trespasses that defy reason, blind our eyes, and steal our dreams through false versions of themselves. Reversing such polarities, we see through/with them while wearing blindfolds and weeping blood: to puzzle over these tactile seekings of “destruction” and temporary bondage during calculated risk as a psychosexual, “martyred” act of rebellion.

[artist: Lucid-01]

Latter-day uniforms, then, become similarly loaded with canonical connotations of torture, treachery and forbidden seduction as dimorphically gendered; i.e., the eliding of angelic patience with Radcliffe’s “black penitent” as a kind of xenophobic caricature of destruction that, under fascist/post-fascist conditions, takes on different meanings for beings perceived as “woman,” but also monstrous-feminine: the regressive in holy garbs, but also the queer BDSM subversive playing at the dark god for heretical reasons of Satanic apostacy and hellish delight. There is an undeniable link to trauma and imaginary history’s constant reinvention; the wearer could just as easily be a Christian missionary on the Oregon Trail or 1800s China, but also a ninja, gun hand or some other operative training in bondage, torture and murder that is nevertheless fetishized in the [classically] white cis-het fantasies of women [or men playing the “heroes” in these narratives]. So do we camp blood libel in ways Tolkien did not.

 

[artist: Persephone van der Waard]

Like an action hero, we get stronger the less clothes we have on. Such things are torment mapped out and turned into strength, thriving in places the Straights couldn’t dare to dream; i.e., a mascot to illustrate that state dialogs only mirror ours and what we’re trying to say. To it, Glenn indicates of my voice—dancing on my enemies’ graves as a point of praxis [e.g., ribbing Rowling by existing despite her desire for me not to, above]. But any artistic movement isn’t solo; it’s a group exercise and takes a lot of planning to humanize those things normally demonized to serve police goals under state hegemonies. These invigilations of “brothel espionage” generally work inside capital, on different registers: me, the director/promoter and various people collaborating with me and what I invigilate. Teamwork makes the dream work!

[artists: Lucid-01 and Persephone van der Waard]

This planning can occur through Lucid and myself [above]. Or it can happen synchronistically through others; e.g., my partner, Bay Ryan, who normally identifies with the goblin through Gothic play, and which I’ve drawn as such [next page]. Celebrating my Satanic shortstack for their fuckable attitude and grit, I’ve created a spiritual companion to Glenn; i.e., one to play with our respective lost humanities by camping unironic blood libel, together [whose canonical forms we subvert as they happen around us].

Goblins, like golems, are made from clay or things treated like clay. Assembled by different practitioners, they are functionally “dead,” beforehand; i.e., loving inscribed in various occult symbols and clothes that—whatever meaning they once had—only currently have as much granted, post-resurrection, by the sorcerer! In playing with dogma to reverse the polarity of power and virtue/vice, workers can stand up and say as one, “We are not small, wicked, functionally black children[31] for functionally white cops to smash into paste; we have power to expose them in ways that subvert their bad-faith poetry and violence: our Aegis, reminding them of their own cruelty and hypocrisy!”

It’s something that goes beyond Glenn, of course; re: through real people like Bay! Being drawn as a goblin by me, Bay humanizes themselves through our relationship. In turn, I humanize myself in how I depict Bay as human; i.e., as they want to be seen, thus treated, while identifying with things capital treats as alien and worthless. They want to be valued as short, mischievous and fun, but also as persecuted in ways they overcome. Small and big at the same time, Bay’s an imp-like offshoot of a larger Cause, one melding struggle and fun, hence terrorist and party animal, punk and activist, skater and whore, orc and goblin, servant and delinquent, etc:

[model and artist: Bay and Persephone van der Waard]

The whole point, with Bay and I, is to work together to rescue the goblin; i.e., in a sex-positive way that remains sexually descriptive and culturally appreciative regarding Indigenous struggles married to Satanic panic, BDSM and prostitution arguments. Sex workers live and die by making their sex fun, naughty and—for our purposes—actively rebellious in service to workers and nature reclaiming the language of demonic slaves [sex classically being a slave’s work; e.g., that of women].

Except, no one wants to martyr themselves; making revolution fun helps the medicine go down, effectively fetishizing the Gothic without showing bigotry as such. Doing so requires informed labor exchanges, happening between workers who love doing this shit for free/at reduced cost; e.g., Bay and I, but also Harmony and others [exhibit 44a1b1b] having fun during praxial synthesis. Melding sex and war into something memorable, we use old demonic language to become a new way of framing and humanizing labor with. In the same token, we combat dated, pervasive stereotypes about whores, and non-white/queer people, etc, when capital antagonizes nature and puts it cheaply to work; i.e., through a dark revenge dynamic thwarting profit. Canonically occurring through state copaganda, the elite frame nature as a vengeful servant tragically “gone bad” [commonly depicted as lazy or cruel, then blamed during capital’s bust phase through blood libel argument]. We fight fire with fire, subverting state tools in duality.

Goblins are perfect for this—if not the actual aesthetic, then something comparable, during liminal expression; i.e., in a small, tight, mini-demonic package making trouble for those in power [true punk bashing the bully from a guerrilla’s small, disadvantaged position]! Keeping with acid Communism, this rebellion has a drug-like flavor to it; e.g., Black Sabbath’s “Faeries Wear Boots” [1970] suggesting such things as fictitious, but nonetheless making an impression while tied to drug-induced paranoia [the album’s namesake] and the shadow of the Vietnam War felt overseas, in England; i.e., as the birthplace of “Gothic” and heavy metal, alike, but prone to its own signature treating of activism/punk culture like “terrorism[32]” [re: Crawford, and the Gothic invention of terrorism]: “Yeah, fairies wear boots and you gotta believe me / Yeah, I saw it, I saw it, I tell you no lies” [source: Genius].

As Glenn demonstrates, the formerly problematic can be tipped away from its regressive, commercialized aspects—abjuring profit while keeping the medievalized, religious-tinged outer shell—but there will always be ontological tension within a broader dialogic interrogating whatever results transpire. Further fun can be made by chaining her to the pillar but having her grip it with her fingers. At a glance, she appears at the viewer’s disadvantage, but upon closer inspection is actually having the time of her life! She feels out of control, so she regains control during ludo-Gothic BDSM mired in stigma arguments she likewise can face and play with; i.e., a roleplay of false danger, loose morals and dungeon language haunted by overarching state abuse abstracted as such:

[artists: Lucid-01 and Persephone van der Waard] 

There’s a charged, stirring sense of improvised chaos, too. Glenn takes what’s on hand—the nun’s habit, the convenient pair of manacles next to the bed; the hot candlewax on her bare, muscled skin; her anachronistic pussy tattoo, In Hoc Signo Vinces [“In this sign thou shalt conquer”] and the massive white dildo—and runs wild with it. She’s not the hopeless impostor-victim, stricken with dysphoria or dysmorphia; these are abusive conditions to redeem through emergent play avenging nature by defending herself from the state through staged impropriety [re: the whore’s paradox/revenge enacted through nudity and exposure]. As such, Glenn at home in her shapeshifting[33] body and herself as “in flux” and at odds with the tyrannical past. Carefully rewriting her own destiny by throwing caution to the wind, she reclaims the prescribed terror instruments of colonial abuse in thrilling paradoxically ways; i.e., the thrill of ritualized violence, minus actual harm, and married to interracial sex [sex with goblins and non-goblins is interracial sex]. I’d say it’s a game where no one gets hurt, but what’s life without a little pain?

Furthermore, this goes beyond “just goblins,” tying them and other monsters [through workers and their exchanges] to a grander process of creation-under-pressure; i.e., one had between many models I’ve worked with, over the years, but also the broader assemblage and chaos for which all creatures of chaos [which goblins are] and Gothic Communism—through acid Communism—collectively speak to, in a highly meta sense. I want to quickly explore this process through one of my models, but also outline the kinds of socio-political, linguo-material elements that converge, mid-assemblage, to adumbrate Gothic Communism:

[artist: Blxxd Bunny]

Bunny is one such person I connected with, during this project; i.e., they’re ace and I’m not, but we can still work through those differences to speak to our collective emancipation: through the monstrous-femininity of the bare exposed whore [rawr]! The left image, for example, comes from a shoot they provided for one of my paintings of them. Compulsion isn’t strictly authoritative, but also encompasses the cathartic pursuit of things that feel good through pain[34] that speaks, in turn, regarding subconscious impulses; i.e., that cross consciously over into our world: from any one monster type and into bodies being the canvas for all of them, combined; e.g., I could easily paint Bunny as a goblin, despite having never done so—yet! Only time will tell!

Yet, the adage, “be careful what you wish for” applies to the sobering reality that harm is not historically-materially divided from pleasure, pain or power exchange; i.e., during social-sexual rituals where all of these things are distributed unevenly, dimorphically and abusively through fetish, kink and BDSM aesthetics. Bunny is my friend, and planning monsters around them and their labor informs my own; i.e., I care about them and often check in with them regarding what I work/feature Bunny on. Such things don’t exist in a vacuum, then—quite the opposite, they float in a more chimeric and chaotic sphere that interrelates imperfectly to produce wildly incongruous but seemingly perfect-for-each-other modulations and synthesis.

[artist: Ween]

This obviously goes beyond Bunny and I meeting at random—doing so similar to Harmony and myself—onto equally-random-but-no-less-special happenstance; e.g., Steven Hillenberg and the obscure ’90s band Ween [above]—the two fitting together like human genitals [themselves a byproduct of millions of years of unchecked evolution and its pressures, and resembling sea animals in their own right] to make something profoundly special unto itself: SpongeBob SquarePants[35].

Relationships, in general, operate as such; Communism relies on that to function, and SpongeBob—like any egregore you could dream of, not just goblins—is a product of the same chaos all poetry springs from: something to play with as children do [with Tolkien ethnocentrically comparing the goblins to children]. “Are ya ready, kids?” Things that remind you of that chaos, while delivering on it anyways, speak to the complicated and endlessly metamorphic/magical forces at work through Gothic Communism playing with darkness. This can be sexual—e.g., Cuwu and I once fucked to SpongeBob’s jellyfish rave—but includes a childlike element, as well; i.e., Cuwu only showed me SpongeBob because they loved it, themselves, and wanted to share its magic with me [and me—loving older cartoons like Ren & Stimpy and Rocko’s Modern Life (1991 and 1993)—delighted at the chance: to feel like a kid as an adult]!

To that, the best things in life [in terms of stimulation and jouissance] come with a dialectical-material element of risk—to love monsters, and each other as monsters, but realize back and forth, how such things are likewise tools for the state abusing us. There’s no way to avoid this, and it can seem a little scary. But without pursuing catharsis, you run the risk of being a slave not just to society’s polite norms, but their hidden, brutalizing ones, too: the snowy bridal gown and the black nun’s habit [or goblin dick, below] intimate the same systemic issues. If they wear a uniform, then it must mean something—with the uncanny possibility of their being a false option or replication that isn’t the intended function. The house of pain becomes, to some degree, ironic.

[artist: Blxxd Bunny]

Again, this can be sex-positive or coercive; it all boils down to dialectical-material context: what is the point of the costume within the piece in relation not to Capitalism, but its core, systemic values, etiology and symptoms [e.g., virgin/whore syndrome]? And more to our purposes, how can these be subverted within the paradox of cathartic, exquisite torture; i.e., in ways that don’t endorse or promote actual harm—thus canonical iterations of something as seemingly throwaway and performative as a nun’s outfit—but whose hauntological mask, costume or role to play brings one joy and other denied pleasures in parallel societies: lost histories and possible new worlds within the half-real fictions of Gothic poetics as de facto education. Blood libel, when camped, speaks to “sodomy” as canonically “unnatural,” vis-à-vis interracial sex. Yet, in looking at it, the images seems to speak, “Come and see, but also do; critique through experience as profound, intense, iconoclastic.” That’s Gothic Communism!

The ludic nature is, like a videogame, divorced from actual harm; the ritual is there, but not the dreaded result, allowing for instruction to occur through repeated, simulated experiences involving the same ingredients. While this can be for or against the state—with fascist parties like Tolkien embracing the heroic cult of death through the slaying of demons with codified arguments—the “slaying” of monsters, in sex-positive language, has a highly specific meaning and desired outcome: rape prevention and the disillusionment of systemic harm.

Within this broader network of opposition, then, denial becomes a powerful ironic device in relation to unironic doubles; i.e., the denial of polite restraint, of compunction and pleasure, but also the denial of correct sex—of orgasms and prescriptive harmful norms, including their forms of compelled restraint, abstinence, ignorance, protection, and penetration: the agency of who we play with and what we put into our demonic, genderqueer bodies [vaginal or anal[36], above or below]! It becomes not a source of sodomy and black fears, per the ghost of the counterfeit during abjection, but a place of new love/unknown pleasures reversing abjection; e.g., Eva Android’s tight femboy’s goblin ass having the whore’s revenge with the same terror tools fucking the alien: ourselves, during sodomy! Squish goes the butt-ass!

[artist: Eva Android]

In short, audiences can get just as invested as performers, their voyeurism and exhibitionism having a vicarious, empathetic-yet-needy component [many thrive by seeing others thrive]. Denial, as such, can expertly raise tension, the pressure climbing until you shout at the screen, “just fuck, already!” So can denial become profound because of gender trouble and parody exploring desired outcomes for either side. Heteronormativity only views queerness as a death of the world [e.g., the 2022 Netflix miniseries for Neil Gaiman’s Sandman selling queerness to the Straights as a kind of morbid death fantasy not unlike Tolkien’s own closeted forms]. For us queers, the goal is crossing over from the Right to the Left, doing so by virtue of reclaiming subversive denial and indulgence; i.e., as a positive vice we perform on a societal level: a world without enforceable sin, but still yielding theatrical conflict—e.g., sexy nuns torn between their service to God and the Devil, or manly men versus hot manly love in a bathroom stall—and almost-holy Gothic pastiche as geared towards euphoric pleasure and pain. All these conversations occupy the same basic shadow space.

The same goes for orcs and goblins as not simply reprobate, but expressing queerness through non-white bodies of different shapes and sizes; e.g., orcs having “bear” potential and goblins stamped not just with a rebellious, “trickster” character [similar to Loki, from Norse myth] but the usual fat asses [above] that so many nowadays assign to the goblin archetype[37]; i.e., taking “punk” back to the exploitative past [as queer slang so often does]: the doll-like bottom for stronger homosexual dominants, but also the sizeable booty to tear up and enjoy during calculated risk by sex-positive agents. In the absence of monopoly, chaos reigns in ways we can work inside.)

Wrapping Up/the Big Picture

That mostly concludes our playing with goblins beyond Tolkien’s blood libel revenge arguments and into Gothic Communism married to acid Communism (save for another two-page exhibit, next page). Keeping that (and the above exhibit) in mind, let’s go big-picture—covering some broader arguments (eight pages), before concluding the symposium (and “Idle Hands”) by talking about Medusa one last time; i.e., as a Big Whore/Communist Numinous to evoke through the likes of tiny beings like goblins: acting as little sex pirates serving Mommy Communism.

The raw sentiment of a moths drawn to the flame isn’t that hard to understand (above)—e.g., the bottom reaching behind themselves to grab the headboard, all while spreading their legs to take the fucking ever deeper and harder—if only because sex (or asexual rituals) happening during power exchange with a cool-looking badass can feel stupidly good. Rapture invigorates us, but also has Numinous elements of torpor/divine stupefaction; i.e., that smash different pieces repeatedly together to communicate through the profoundly absurd effects being had/playing out before our eyes. Often, this is phrased as drug-like, but also tied to conquest and filth; i.e., drugs are kept in a “stash,” called “shit,” and fought over as fiercely as gold is/consumed as “the good stuff” that takes the edge off.

Drugs or not, sex and Gothic aren’t “empty” at all, but whose darkness visible generates meaning through pandemonium to challenge profit (thus tokenization) during the whore’s revenge; i.e., through “rape” and rape taking infinite forms, those forms working in opposition, during liminal expression, and only limited by our imaginations and desires (shaped by our socio-material conditions and grafted onto our bodies, below): to perceive through holistic violence and illusion, but also sex/public nudism!

(exhibit: exhibit 44a1b1b: Artists [from left to right, top to bottom]: Annabel Morningstar, Angel Witch, Harmony Corrupted, Bubi, Blxxd Bunny, Angel, Jazminskyyy, Eldritch Babe, and Roxie Rusalka. All are models I’ve worked with in the past, taking “dark,” usually massive or otherwise “non-white” cock, or a dark body for someone to enter during sodomy’s physical and metaphorical terms. White-on-black, black-on-white, or black-on-black, all involve “black” as something to subvert through itself acted out.

This section, then, has been all about playing with goblins and size difference, but also different skin colors to showcase alien engagement; i.e., of engagement with white/black through bodies and objects that speak to watching or performing medieval arguments, and that likewise merge the goblin as an equally undead and demonic force. “Black” [or purple, green, etc] stands for inhuman, which we reverse during the abjection process by whorishly embracing such devices; re: running with the Devil away from state control, sleeping with the goblin or being the goblin for others to sleep with!

Whatever the arrangement, it’s the call of the void as haunted by abuse/the ghost of the counterfeit, minus actual persecution or exploitation. Exploitation and liberation occupy the same space; forbidden things excite because they’re forbidden, the performers seeking to work within porn stereotypes [the BBC/interracial sex] to subvert them: to excite through consent as something to establish by those who are attracted to opposites/the exotic; i.e., to humanize them during mutual consent, not exploit them as capital normally does [re: with sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll sublimating more rebellious varieties away from marginalized groups and towards status-quo benefactors maintaining Capitalist Realism through controlled opposition/false rebellion]:

[artist: Harmony Corrupted et al]

Harmony and I, for example, shot these photos because we love doing dress-up and roleplaying together to reverse abjection [going so far as to redo a shoot for funsies, above]. It speaks to what is being demonized, and the means with which to play with/subvert it! Our aim isn’t to pacify during the cryptonymy process, but inform, mobilize and cryptomimetically echo while having spur-of-the-moment fun! We copy and echo each other [and our bodies] trapped between trauma and “trauma.” That’s what camping the canon/making it gay is all about! Rebellion isn’t about profit, which pimps police nature to achieve, but in loving what we do in ways that survive the inflexibilities capital relies on to brutalize others. I’m not simply Pygmalion, pimping Galatea to flex on nature; Harmony and I love what we do, doing so together to inspire not just each other but all workers under capital. Staying in control—at least during calculated risk enacted between the two of us—is a virtue that aids in systemic catharsis presenting things that are out of control/needing to be closeted, in capital’s eyes; e.g., the madwoman in the attic, itself an allusion to Jane Eyre‘s woman-of-color Bertha [and who the white heroine calls a goblin[38]].

The same goes for all my friends/muses. We live far away from each other, offstage, but onstage occupy the same land of dreams that all monsters, hence activists, do. We’re a circle of castles—ones we can storm at our own leisure, while denying Tolkien the same privilege.)

“‘Tis a trinket Sauron fancies,” yet ones that hold all the power the world has to offer inside then (re: Blake). A loveless, divided and inactive rebellion is a dead rebellion, and revolution is pageantry without judgement (as a goal, not an obstacle); i.e., infinite value, infinite form, thus infinite ways to fight back using what we got, our stewardship of nature always resisting state domination and control! Yet whatever power we assign to them, goblins are simply people’s various parts, first and foremost; e.g., Harmony’s pussy is her pussy and should be acknowledged as that while ascribing it any other qualities; i.e., while coding it with whatever virtues we espouse, stigmas we condemn, or beauty/status symbols we work with/subvert, onstage and off; re: that of orcs and goblins’ legendary qualities, but also paradoxical (simultaneous) goodness and badness conducive to rebellion: as waged by us against the state demonizing us, saying our ass is theirs. Both things are true, insofar as the conflict is dialectically-materially true/false during liminal expression; i.e., the whore versus the pimp, the being of nature and its harvested labor fighting back upon its own Aegis: “one ass to rule them all…” Sex is a weapon!

 (artist: Harmony Corrupted)

There’s nothing wrong with worship/theatrical revenge, provided it respects universal basic human rights, and that of animals and the environment. So make connections that help you connect the dots through you own nebulas and constellations; i.e., that reconnect your communities to what capital has alienated so many from! Despite the tweed suit and ivy-league education, Tolkien was a cheap pimp; he could only use the blood libel/darkness visible of goblins to cage his mind and quake before Sauron (re: Capitalist Realism). So expose him by doing better than him/camping his ghost; kill his darling legacy to build a better world beyond Zombie-Vampire Capitalism, one that has the whore’s revenge by setting nature’s monstrous-feminine goblins and black dicks free (or temporarily caging those cocks, should they wish it)! Get in touch by playing with darkness holding everything together! Let the good goblins come out to play/wreck shit to make activism fun and disguise our own naked performing of counterterrorism through drug-like, anisotropic, darkness-visible terror language during the cryptonymy process; be rowdy and watch what the so-called “good guys” do, in response!

The answer is, they’ll attack our doubles and call it “justice.” Did you honestly think otherwise? Doing so often invokes defacement, which normally means taking one’s human element away from where it is seen; i.e., the state defaces its victims, presenting them as dark monoliths to worship and fear during the colonial process (demons and pandemonium tending to homogenize a bit more than the undead; e.g., vampires and zombies, versus sex demons as a whole). Anything we make challenges that, but comments just as well with masks and customs that speak to our scars, injury and defacement as part of who we are, the oasis part-in-parcel with the desert; i.e., the goblin as a kind of mask to wear and camp canon with, the whore prostituting herself as goblin—not to pimp nature/tokenize punk culture, but to self-liberate under oppressive conditions; e.g., this Japanese Edo shunga (artist unknown) encompasses its own spin on “rock ‘n roll”:

(source)

To it, cryptonymy works overtime when reversing abjection—a process that generally speaks to things while not speaking to them through abject, hauntological and chronotopic placeholders. In turn, we have to do what Tolkien thinks unthinkable (fucking the terrorist, the devil, the goblin, the zombie), making his necrophilic, anti-Semitic dogma unthinkable through paradox reversing terror/counterterror with signature, dainty goblin fun and rags-to-riches: speaking of the devil to appear in ways that camps canonical doubles; re: darkness visible, marrying or socializing/sexualizing with those from perceived immor(t)al territories. The world’s biggest coward, Tolkien rapes goblins through lethal force; we “rape” ourselves through a Gothic allegory Tolkien was famously allergic to, fucking to metal/monster-fucking: as a defense mechanism against his chasing of orc BBC and goblin BBW!

It’s certainly a tightrope, and one that occupies the same liminal space/shadow zone that Black Sabbath and Tolkien both did (and so many others, besides; i.e., sex, videogames, heavy metal/rock/punk and horror, etc, gentrifying and decaying through a predominantly white straight male enterprise[39]); re: while fetishizing darkness of all kinds to shrink bigotry and increase understanding and intersectional solidarity as a whole: using monstrous-feminine language in duality/opposition to state variants!

Blood quantum just as mendacious, thus harmful, as blood libel. White, black, or brown; tall/short, able/disabled, Christian/pagan, straight/queer or Western/alien, etc, we want to unite by subverting us-versus-them dogma. The simple fact is, we’re all Medusa’s children—are all orcs and goblins under Communism—but also under capital abusing us in the interim, harvesting nature as monstrous-feminine.

Keeping with castles-in-the-flesh, this grim harvest/liminal hauntology of war includes punishing workers for subverting state mechanisms of fear and difference; i.e., the “goblin” commonly a shortstack white girl with a non-white body or appetite (marked by size, but also the color of stigma), and the “orc” commonly a male person of color with large muscles and a giant cock—both operating under a Jewish conspiracy to unite labor that downplays fascism to attack Communism in the same basic shadow space! Under Capitalist Realism, visions of a better world and a dead world occupy the same Aegis. That’s where power is found—either to enslave/closet workers through monstrous sex, terror and force, but also to set them free by establishing empathy through connection, community and, yes, communion with those who came before (anyone who discourages interracial mingling and play is merely segregating workers, dividing and conquering them through bad-faith and/or misled shelter arguments): riding Satan’s “broom” (the morphology is well-and-truly endless)!

(artist [top and bottom]: Harmony Corrupted and Blxxd Bunny)

So while Communism operates through community and trust upsetting state monopolies (consent is sexy among language of calculated risk, above)—and whose cryptonymic deceiving of the state through “mere play” hides rebellion in plain sight—all remain overshadowed by capital’s usual divisions blaming its own victims through DARVO/obscurantism. Yes, cathartic gradients last and build trust and healthy relationships like Bunny’s or Harmony’s and mine, but coercive examples—if negotiated badly with someone presenting themselves as a sadist in bad-faith—can promptly fuck over the submissive by subjecting them to addictive, fleeting and guilty pleasure under an unscrupulous and/or unwell manipulator’s give-and-take cycle of rapacious power abuse; re: Tolkien, but also Jadis, the latter into Tolkien’s school of monster-fucking they used to rape me with. Caution is important, but it’s hard to be overly cautious when you feel vulnerable and enthralled with a “protector” archetype who has your number and doesn’t mean you well; i.e., they smell the trauma/madness on you and know how to exploit it.

In some shape or form, then, the desire for cathartic fantasies grabs hold and never lets go, because trauma isn’t something you just “get over.” Like a golem (or Glenn), you can only transform it as part of you, once and forever. And yet, self-destruction needn’t be literal; it can be a chance to partake of the forbidden, thus exit Plato’s cave! Except this is generally permanent, and if my life is any sort of guide, one that leaves us feeling marooned by people who—as magical and wonderful as they are—don’t always stick around; e.g., Zeuhl and their postpunk pussy rocking my world, only to elope with an “old flame” and leave me wanting. C’est la vie! I got hurt a ton, afterwards, and harmed/raped a bit, but eventually found better cuties, anyways (though none with pussies as tight, I must confess). I wouldn’t trade my scarred skin and madwoman’s bonkers, castled attic psyche for the world! “Insane in the membrane!” (Cypress Hill’s “Insane in the Brain,” 1993).

And trying to map it as we have here, the process is anything but singular or simple; it’s demonic gibberish trailblazing through our lives as a living document, a closeness to chaos and things alienated/fetishized by capital to serve profit. Truth is ergodic; self-fashioned but hauntological, it takes time and effort to enact. So, too, does the world around us take non-trivial effort to transform; change people and the past (as something to perceive/speak with) and you can change the planet! Free the mind; the rest will follow in time!

To this, the shadow of state force always hangs over us. The uphill battle lies in challenging fatal nostalgia as game-like in ways normative individuals will defend. True to form, “darkness” is something to sell (as sex and gender so often are) but the Gothic isn’t merely a police cudgel to bludgeon the usual suspects with; we walking sex demons become part of a larger conversation, whoring ourselves out in ways that invite humanizing worship through a demonized Gothic aesthetic the state can’t fully monopolize. Everything is political, our captivating bodies and demonic personas inviting forbidden knowledge and exchange through dark promises: of carnal delight and class-conscious eroticism and asexual public nudism; i.e., the whore’s paradox, but also her glorious refrain—the state can’t monopolize monsters or disco!

So come and get it, lovelies, but pay your sex workers! Mommy has needs and stripping is not consent (re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Paid Labor,” 2024)! Mutual consent is badass! Equal rights for all workers, animals and the environment is badass! Doing so through the usual fetish-and-cliché claptrap during ludo-Gothic BDSM is badass! Sluts and whores are badasses! And, as usual, the witch is a pathway to “doom” as transformation through sex education; i.e., canonically through the language of theft, sorcery and secrets; e.g., Adria from Diablo 1 (1996) saying to the hero, “I sense a soul in search of answers!”

Well, mommy’s got your answers right here! Just cross her palm with silver—all to gradually synthesize working concepts conducive to a world without money/privatization; i.e., what use is a wage in a world where everything is eventually free? Rape replaces with “rape,” doing away with industries that normally canonize the former through rock opera; re (from the Poetry and Undead Modules):

Unlike nation-states, corporations don’t care about dogmatic presentation as true to the state; they care about exploitation as something that invariably corrupts, which they can milk while throwing various states under the bus if need be. Profit is always the victim. As such, capitalists will do whatever they can to profit as efficiently as possible (source: “Back to the Necropolis,” 2024).

Whatever the media, rape is profit under Capitalism, which relies not just on predation, but community silence to continue itself in bad copies, falsehoods, and double standards (source: “Transforming Our Zombie Selves,” 2024).

(artist: Marina Dove[40])

All work is sexualized; and forced into a world that makes sex work something to steal from, we become beggars—i.e., in a world that, due to accident of birth, doesn’t let us choose/forces us to balance caring about other workers and merely trying to survive by doing things we’re not proud of (e.g., women’s work, service, retail, etc). This doesn’t instantly make us token grifters or cranks, but that can happen; and while brand and belief can overlap, good praxis is ultimately putting our money where our mouths are. Camp is a fine line, then, and class intersects with culture and race to betray labor as often as not. You are what you eat, and that includes context and interpretation of said context; it includes us triggering under conditions that, per the state preying on labor through its own victims—can dice roll into cops as often as victims wearing the same clothes and speaking the same demonized language. Rebellions are human, therefore flawed and susceptible to the usual devices use to keep us in line; e.g., transphobia and its externalized elements internalized by token workers.

This begs the question: how do we fight profit, thus rape and all the disorders, syndromes, estrangement, alienation, and abuse, etc, that stem from it? These answers and more lie in Pandora’s Box as something to open up: channels and clinics of forbidden, delicious exchange! Witches are more fun, especially black witches and goblins (their surfaces charged with psychosexual power—of rape, of revenge, of ecstasy and the Earth, next page)! Engagement with them amounts to praxis, thus opposition as something to synthesize pursuant to liberation for all.

Yes, weird attracts weird; it should play out in ways that aren’t unironically predatory—i.e., that don’t give detractors of our literal existence ammunition when calling for our destruction instead of the state decaying around them (re, Marx: “capital is dead labor sucking, like the vampire, on living labor”). Far easier to blame victims than systems, Faust’s bargain a death warrant that carries out through rotting numbskulls! Having no brains, they hunger for ours. The spectres of Marx aren’t just Ringwraiths invading home from within (during a foreign plot, below), but the fleshy orcs and goblins that precede them across the same Radcliffean Black Veil; re: something to summon and scapegoat, creatures of the night laid low, Dayman vs Nightman.

For state defenders, it’s “boundaries for me, not for thee.” As such, we’re forever under suspicion and they are not; everything we do is an allegation they’ll leverage against us: to “protect” women and children from “evil sex demons,” thus the West’s nuclear family model and civilization as we know it. It might sound extreme, but that’s how moral panics work, and during the state’s usual boom-or-bust cycle, we fags will be blamed inside a police state; i.e., for being pushed into that marginalized sphere: the Omelas goat to exsanguinate by state bloodletters.

We queers are demonized—among other things—as sodomite pedophiles to scapegoat by village idiots and their “prison sex” mob mentality run amok. This doesn’t put us above critique, but begs those examining us to consider the sobering reality—that the ringleaders and opportunists excoriating us are generally far more guilty but presenting as holier-than-thou to deflect from their own hand in things; e.g., most pedophiles are cis-het men, and even if a trans person is a sex pest, this isn’t because they’re trans, but because the state is punishing them for being trans until they snap (excluding congenital elements like Dahmer’s cannibalism, while attacking what they call “transgenderism” [a term no queer unironically uses] as alien on its face).

To it, such obscurantism and DARVO conflations are standard-issue, hence cover for the state through capital’s monopolies, trifectas and qualities! Sexual abuse isn’t an orientation and reactive abuse doesn’t define us! Negotiating such treachery pleads care and boldness, side by side; i.e., to be seen and heard, but also camouflaged in ways that safeguard us from state antibodies: “A little more caution from you; that is no trinket you carry!” Like Satan, our buffer is “non-existence,” darkness visible all around you, “under your bed, in your closet, in your head!” (Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” 1991).

Keeping with our discussions of “Midnight Vampire” and Tolkien, liberation isn’t intuitive because capital is a giant prison designed to conceal itself; escape requires paradox, which demons are profoundly at home with. From Milton onwards, we turn things inside-out, exposing our captors and finding freedom through our chains; i.e., as shadowy likenesses of the dire originals. There’s no single interpretation for such inkblots, meaning they have whatever power we can dialectically-materially infuse them with. When we come, you come!

Per the cryptonymy process, the revolutionary’s praxial lever is, as usual, their Aegis dueling the state’s in duality. Harnessed by us, it demonically evokes the barbaric past to pay it forward; i.e., by reflecting new potential on sharp obsidian velvet (and other such oxymorons, next page): to take your “soul” by making you cum! Spooky!

Everyone likes to “go to town,” fancies the whore (which historically would have lived in cities and urban-environment brothels put up by enterprising men and madams); goblin queens are best (what Tolkien literally calls “the black crack” per his captive/goblin rape fantasies, Shakespeare’s “the crack of doom,” etc). It’s a disco to transform, informed by the magical, hypnotic past; re, New Order’s “Blue Monday” (1983):

Those who came before me
Lived through their vocations
From the past until completion
They’ll turn away no more

And still, I find it so hard
To say what I need to say [as queer people so often do]
But I’m quite sure that you’ll tell me
Just how I should feel today (source: Genius).

Growth hurts, as do adventures (e.g., blue balls/clit). But also? They feel good.

Tolkien’s goblins were predominantly cis-male; ours, like the Medusa, encompass the entire GNC spectrum. The vampire, witch or goblin is the disco, the Gothic castle-in-the-flesh advertising extracurricular survival and BDSM fun; i.e., shored up in the paradoxical graveyard language of deathly sex, torture and live burial! Back in black, the panties beg to be pulled aside; her necromancer’s lips grip, worthy of a tyrant’s boast that would rival Smaug the dragon’s (“I am strong, strong, strong!”). Darkness visible, she flashes with power! Come play with her! Feel the rapture of ironic rape (“rape” in quotes)! Avenge Medusa by hugging her seductive liminal darkness!

(artist: Kay)

Ridiculed by state proponents, this Hellish poetic refrain endures a position of compelled evolution; i.e., during prostitution arguments, and achieved inventively from exile with which to reclaim our lost humanity under state-straight yolks. Milton coined it while physically blind, yet still being of the devil’s company without realizing it (re: Blake[41]). Per ludo-Gothic BDSM, we consciously take back these chains, labels, and death sentences—doing as we please, a summoning of the whore (and her darkness visible); i.e.,  to learn from her how best to handle and redistribute power and knowledge—to “do the stinging,” as Bilbo puts it! Monsters are the abstract language of argument and debate, doubled and at odds, inside-out, invasive, plural and oscillating amid the gloam’s coded behaviors. Reality isn’t cut and dry. Goblins aren’t cut and dry! Anyone who argues that shamelessly amounts to Alexander slicing the Gordian Knot. It’s barbaric and, more to the point, inadequate towards escaping capital as a prison. We cannot take it at face value, like Tolkien did!

For us, then, sex is a weapon to break the jail through cryptonymy/forbidden sight (the more “rape” we experience, the more we learn). No different than a vampire at midnight or in broad daylight, the demon’s mouth, fang and pussy all hyphenate—an “ancient” xenoglossic book to spread and read you as much as the other way around: she succ! It’s drug-like, opening the doors of perception through the usual delicious pathways (more on this in “Call of the Wild,” when we look at “acid Communism, “again; i.e., with Mikki’s help, exhibit 60b).

In turn, entry predicates on trust; i.e., if one is worthy of that power that, all the same, resides in all workers’ breasts. The power of cuties like Mikki (next page) is awesome beyond compare; i.e., castles in the flesh holding special secrets, and making the “past” wise once more! Nothing radicalizes (or pacifies) people more than gender and sex; we must tip the needle away from capital, from cops, from sex coercion and its double standards[42] under Capitalist Realism and the Capitalocene. The ticket to doing this lies in Gothic Communism vis-à-vis demonic poetics: our sex (and genders) as a weapon challenging state doctrine in dualistic ways—on our Aegis! Sperm donors learn, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled… is pulling us! “Satan” is a figment of a wider imagination, but we’re quite real; black unicorns straight from Rainbow Hell (“black is ten colors“), we usher in/offer up a poetic Satanic voice to break Capitalist Realism, paradoxically enough, with dreams: “The closer you get to the meaning / The sooner you’ll know that you’re dreaming” (Black Sabbath’s “Heaven and Hell,” 1980).

(artist: Mikki Storm)

Moving On: Some Transitional Arguments about Demon Whores/the Big One (feat. Slan from Berserk)

As our goblin exhibit demonstrates, monsters are made, be that to enforce state power and its flow as Tolkien did, or to critique it; i.e., through the same shared and warring “monster-fucker” dialogs on forbidden love hyphenating sex and force. Moving forward from “Idle Hands” and into the rest of “Forbidden sight,” we’ll continue applying the demonic notion of forbidden sight by making and summoning demons; i.e., its performative irony through demon lovers as things to deal and play at/with darkness visible (chaos) during mutilative courtly love putting “rape” in quotes. To that, we’ll be going beyond vampires or goblins, and towards more obviously demonic, golem-esque effigies and the torturous power and forbidden love they offer (e.g., anal sex); i.e., as attached to larger Numinous forces I want to quickly address, here (two pages).

By tapping into those that fixate and focus less on feeding and trauma during liminal expression, and more on unequal, forbidden exchange and radical transformation through dark desire, we’re touching on the Communist Numinous. Personified most commonly as the Medusa (who we’ve already discussed, at length), it evokes different emotions, mid-rapture: “What profit is it a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his soul?” Well, that depends! What’s on the table, cutie? I’ll take your engorged shaft and raise you a Giger-style black womb[43]! A voluptuous vaso vagal, “She mighty mighty!” A bridge to cross, a castle to storm (or which storms back)! A very kinky girl’s death clam!

(artist: Kentaro Miura)

About that/a BDSM practitioner’s note of caution, as we proceed; i.e., about evoking a Communist Numinous whose taller demonic royalty nonetheless attaches to smaller goblin short stacks [and drug-like feelings; re: acid Communism]: the final planetary “fortress” haunting Tolkien’s own monster-fucker dreams. Slan (and her voluminous smuff, above) is just as good an example as any!

Just as the Promethean Quest is about self-destruction, to play with demons is to play with fire that can burn you. With demon sex and “rape,” then, there is always the echo of unironic rape to likewise learn from. Believe you me, pain is an excellent teacher—but especially in nightmarish varieties evoking tremendous power beyond themselves! The Gothic mode is a dark queen, her aged, throbbing energies felt by many capital has ravaged over time.

When Jadis raped me, for example, they taught me that Nazis and Communists share the same poetic inkblot. Indicating nature as alienated, fetishized and raped by capital, the Gothic-Communist Medusa is a fat, sassy whore; i.e., with stretch marks and a moon-sized cosmic bedonk—and she’s hungry for sweet revenge! It’s precisely that “best revenge” that survivors chase, scarred and longing to heal from state abuse during calculated risk: of a palliative Numinous sort, “crushing” you with more weight! You’ll know it when you feel it—when it has you begging to no one in particular, “Take me, Dark Mommy! ‘Fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty!'” The eye of that angry god, like a falling moon, threatens to collide with your earth, and smash you to fragments. Black holes make everyone’s pull-out weak! Spaghettification!

If there’s any transcendental signified, it’s power and death, babes. So play with demons/torture porn to your hearts’ content! Just remember that power, during ludo-Gothic BDSM, comes from control through informed consent, thus mutual exchange! “Hurt, not harm!” Always keep that in mind, but especially when you lose control or have dominion over those who don’t; i.e., when giving consent, thus permission to go a little wild; e.g., saying to your play partner, “Now step on me, bitch! Fuck me like you mean it!” Safewords, release/passwords, restraint and discipline, pleasure and pain—all go hand-in-hand, built on trust/minimized risk.

The chaos, in other words, is controlled, ironic, and cathartic for both sides, and ultimately not destructive despite the power-and-death aesthetic; i.e., anyone can unironically destroy or play at dark godhood, but it takes a mighty hand and mightier mind to show mercy through demonic union tested! That’s power—and ultimately the non-toxic kind that Gothic Communism is all about: finding the Communist Numinous through hauntological BDSM; i.e., establishing power through selective boundaries and limits where play is mutually established and understood! Rape, for all intents and purposes, is fetishization, hence power imbalance dressed as alien, potent; our Numinous dialectic “rapes” Medusa or has her “rape” you while the surf’s up (an allusion to Joe Satriani’s “Surfing with the Alien,” 1987)! Chase the dragon, boys!

(artist: Kentaro Miura)

And if all that sounds intense (which, to be fair, it is), fear not! Strict or gentle, vanilla or chocolate, metal or mellow—as long as you have safety measures like these in place, then harm/rape is impossible; i.e., she’s just hugging you: a winged, chimeric succubus letting you play with dark, forbidden things (the Medusa being the only Gorgon classically to have wings). Any articulation, as such, is entirely valid when going to the dark gods to break state monopolies with.

I think you’ll like Slan, then, who haunts older stories that we’ll examine in “Forbidden Sight,” part two; i.e., the Cosmic Whore that is Gothic Communism, having the whore’s dark Numinous revenge; e.g., Frankenstein and Alien‘s own horrors in clay. She’s “easy” but strict—will take you to the edge and teach you wonderful things (re: fucking to metal, clapping her big demon cheeks; or having her string you up like a sacrifice). Limitless in shape, size and surface, she can be whatever she wants to be—whatever ghastly playground/dark church/demon brothel you desire when she’s dominating you/giving you sub drop and/or draining your balls (e.g., the xenomorph or cenobite raising hell; i.e., to act between virtue and sin, and similar canonical dichotomies)! Whatever the shape, say hi to her, for me! —Perse

From New to Old: Concerning the Rest of the Module

While unsteadily “pregnant” with this saturated material, I pulled and manifested the entirety out of myself as a comprehensive stab at mapping and summarizing everything that I (once again) had to organize and refine over and over. I clearly want to document the process to you, the reader—to grant you an exhibitionist’s idea of what it was like for me, a trans woman, to create as I have been taught and how I view it. Work isn’t fun unless it’s playful, I think; it should be fun, regardless of its importance (and this work—helping myself and other sex workers escape harmful bondage—I consider to be of the utmost importance) (source).

—Persephone van der Waard, Sex Positivity, Volume Zero (2023)

The rest of the module essentially comprises the Demon Module before I began expanding on it, in September 2024. This was a roundabout and chaotic process, engineered as much through deconstruction as accretion. Originally Volume Two was simply a shorter module about demons and the undead; then, it became part one, the Poetry Module, and part two, which divided in two sub-volumes/modules. In turn, each of those expanded and grew (especially with Harmony’s contributions/inspiration through various shoots, below).

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

First in line, the Undead Module grew into my largest release, so far—over 400,000 words and 1,000 pages, when it released in September! By comparison, the Demon Module prior to September was only ~117,000 unique words and ~350 unique pages; not wanting to overlook demons or have such a lopsided second half to Volume Two, I started expanding the Demon Module. As of writing this, said module has roughly tripled in word length (~369,000) and more than doubled its page count (~934). Even so, this renaissance is nearing its end; i.e., the expansions outlined above concern the first half of the module, which I wrote from scratch, September onwards: the module opening and the opening to “Forbidden Sight,” followed by “Idle Hands.”

The rest of the writing is from the original “Demons” manuscript; i.e., as it existed before September (though I have expanded a fair bit on the “Making Demons” subchapter). With the exception of “Giger’s Xenomorph” and the module conclusion, the remaining writing is older but also looser and more abbreviated/fragmented. Partly this owes to its age, but also because much of what is being discussed here has already been discussed elsewhere in the series (excluding Faust, which isn’t something I have discussed quite as much; i.e., I rely more on familiarity with the legend [and my BDSM theories] to carry you through).

Frankenstein, for example, is a novel I’ve discussed in every volume I’ve published. So whilst I would be completely remiss in not mentioning Shelley and her seminal (frankly awesomesauce) story in the pages ahead, my doing so will be far briefer than otherwise; i.e., in the unthinkable hypothetical that I had never written previously about Frankenstein, before; e.g., my extensive Metroidvania work (which we won’t really be mentioning here to keep things moving).

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

To it, the writing that remains will get some polish/renovations (and shoots with Harmony), but to nowhere near the same extent as “Idle Hands” did. There likewise won’t be any additional thesis work, or nearly as much about ludo-Gothic BDSM (which I fleshed-out much more after the initial “Demons” manuscript was written); “Of Darkness and the Forbidden” already covers that, as does “A Cruel Angel’s (Modular) Thesis.” Instead, what follows are things I’ve chosen to include to be holistic and complete; i.e., in my compiling of demonic history as a poetic device linked to nature (with some undead elements scattered throughout). It remains writing for which I’m very proud, but it is shorter than I’d like (especially “Call of the Wild’s” admittedly anemic survey[43a] approach). As stated in “A Paucity of Time,” those constraints are currently beyond my control, but can hopefully be expanded on, at a later date.

Onto “Forbidden Sight, part two: Making Demons (Prometheus and Frankenstein)“!

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Footnotes

[1a] As Jon Stratton writes in “KISS: Jewishness, Hard Rock and the Holocaust” (2020):

KISS was a hard rock group, one of the most successful during the second half of the 1970s and early 1980s. The group’s two founding members, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley, were both Jewish. Indeed, both were the sons of Holocaust survivors. This article examines the impact of Simmons’s and Stanley’s Jewishness on KISS as a rock group and on its success. One of the most obvious impacts was the drive to succeed which Simmons and Stanley shared. Simmons writes about wanting power, Stanley that he wanted respect. As children of survivors they wanted safety. During much of the 1970s, the Holocaust was not yet publicly acknowledged. However, its trauma is evident in, for example, the stage characters that Simmons and Stanley adopted (source).

[1b] Including wealthy Jews who refuse to toe the line; e.g., Jonathan Glazer’s acceptance speech and admittedly mixed/sanitized approach nevertheless met with resounding criticism from other Jews in Hollywood (re: Tatiana Siegel’s “Over 1,000 Jewish Creatives and Professionals Have Now Denounced…” 2023), versus Sarah Friedland’s own award response, describing the conflict in no uncertain terms: as “the 336th day of Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” upon receiving her own trophy (source: Aljazeera’s “Jewish director at Venice Film Festival Speaks in Solidarity with Palestine,” 2024). Context matters.

[1c] Brooklyn Museum writes,

In 1987, Avram Finkelstein, Brian Howard, Oliver Johnston, Charles Kreloff, Chris Lione, and Jorge Socarrás founded the SILENCE=DEATH Project to support one another in the midst of the AIDS crisis. Inspired by the posters of the Art Workers Coalition and the Guerrilla Girls (both of whose work is on view nearby), they mobilized to spread the word about the epidemic and created the now-iconic Silence=Death poster featuring the pink triangle as a reference to Nazi persecution of LGBTQ people in the 1930s and 1940s. It became the central visual symbol of AIDS activism after it was adopted by the direct action advocacy group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) [source].

[1d] Which extends to literal animals; e.g., the Great Eagles—decked in gold by the dwarves after they help win the Battle of the Five Armies—having seemingly routed the goblins “for good” …until LotR; i.e., evil can never be extinguished (despite Tolkien’s love for propaganda battles), because the state always needs a scapegoat to colonize/profit off of, thus pimp and project its own brutality onto.

[2a] His parental treatment of nature-as-dark comparing the goblins of the Misty Mountains to naughty children punished by a white, all-knowing schoolmaster who killed their king: “Go away! little boys!” shouted Gandalf, in reply. “It isn’t bird-nesting time. Also naughty little boys that play with fire get punished!” (source). Echoes of Prometheus, but also King Kong clutching at white brides only to get machine-gunned.

[2b] E.g., “The Ring” is twink Frodo protecting his bussy from black people. We already discussed that in Volume One.

[3] We don’t focus much on the differences between orcs and goblins, here. But orcs, post-Tolkien, tend to be bigger and fiercer than goblins, which are smaller and craftier/rely on tools and gadgets (often weapons too big for them, or explosives, machinery and gizmos); i.e., versus the orc’s brute strength. Orcs are big minions and goblins, small; goblins are tied more towards greed, and orcs to rape and cannibalism. While such distinctions are far more recent and easily ignored, orcs and goblins remain popular monomythic punching bags/slumming avatars and vehicles of genuine rebellion, alike.

[4] With orcs and other servants of evil speaking a monolithic “Black Speech”; i.e., the homogenizing of colonial prospects to view them ethnocentrically as worlds to conquer by those weeding the globe of monstrous-feminine nature being likewise non-white, non-Christian, and stigma-animal, etc. Per Beowulf and Amazonomachia (monster battles, not just Amazons in particular), they become animalized during pro-state rites of passage; i.e., animals and gods speaking to patriarchal governance surviving presently under neoliberal nation-states and corporations; e.g., Zeus transforming into different animals to rape women, or Theseus vs the Minotaur, etc.

[5] Literally “of the King” and towards a kingdom that would last however many centuries Tolkien had in mind (the Nazis said a thousand years). Keeping with Beowulf, his Golden Age was still Christian, but before the Middle Ages; i.e., an Old-English hauntology laced with settler-colonial argumentation.

[6] “Given that The Lord of the Rings is one of the bestselling book series of all time, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’s inspired a lot of different groups and movements over the decades, with a wide range of politics. Probably the most influential is Silicon Valley, where the top of Salesforce Tower in San Francisco lights up with the Eye of Sauron on Halloween, executives reference its lore to get their vision across to employees, and companies name meeting rooms — if not their whole business — after objects and people from the books” (source: Paris Marx’s “Peter Thiel’s Influence over a Network of Lord of the Rings-Inspired Companies,” 2024).

[7] “the American middle class (so called ‘gamer culture’) would gatekeep and safeguard the elite through videogames being an acclimating device to neo-feudal territories to defend in reality (outside of the game world[s] themselves) as capital starts to decay like usual” (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “‘Monsters, Magic and Myth’: Modularity and Class,” 2024).

[8] Tolkien relies on racialized tokenism to have “lesser” races police themselves, which is what Zionism ultimately is. You see this offstage, too, in Zionist propaganda (Bad Empanada’s “The Appeal to Jewishness Fallacy,” 2024), but such things are always half-real; re: between fiction and non-fiction, working in tandem. Case in point, Tolkien see dwarves as “Jewish” in the way his own home, the British empire, has essentialized “Jewishness” for centuries—which is to say, they’re always victims, thus always to some degree aliens in ways the Crown can exploit. They cannot be heroes because to be a victim—to be weak and prone to betray—is literally “in their blood,” their nature.

The dwarves of the Lonely Mountain, for example, feel constantly surrounded by enemies and betrayed. Abandoned by everyone, they work extra hard to alienate themselves, but also fight exceedingly hard (to the death, in fact) to redeem themselves in Christian eyes. This is Tolkien pointedly Christianizing Viking ideas of the Valkyrie by attaching them to Jewish calumny/the wandering Jew trope: Thorin was weak, earlier in life when he failed to stop the dragon and it destroyed his permanent home, and weak later in life when men killed the dragon while he took all the gold for himself. He has all the markings of station and importance, but also cowardice and entitlement while being stranded from his home.

Eventually while the men of Dale are trying to rebuild, Bard is making a good case for sharing the gold (the Christian appeal to generosity monopolizing charity). It’s here that Thorin not only rebukes him (the moneylender trope, echoes of Shakespeare’s Shylock), but his cousins betray the men of Dale, first chance they get. Yes, the men of Dale were thinking about attacking first, but Tolkien routinely shows the Jewish-coded dwarves acting traitorous; i.e., to emphasize their backstabber nature, thus their inexorable connection with the goblins. To reject that connection, they must kill the goblins even more fiercely than the men or elves would, putting themselves in danger for those who view them as lesser to begin with. It’s a return to good service from bad, a form of conversion therapy that kills the Jew by making him Christian through martyrdom (versus forced penance through ordinary conversion, in Shylock’s case).

To it, Thorin is sicker/weaker from dragon sickness (rarefied cruelty and greed) than the men are. To prove his worth in their eyes, he must throw down the gate and die in battle a glorious death… by killing as many goblins as he can, then sacrificing himself and his bloodline in doing so! It’s a suicide mission, one guided by revenge (which, I should add, the entire quest for the gold has been, but merely taken to its logical conclusion). He is simultaneously fallen and redeemed, but denied a home in this world despite the ultimate sacrifice. In short, he is always a victim, always an alien who is “too violent” to deserve a forever home. Instead, he’s the hero for a second, but ultimately so Dale can re-establish a human foothold in the region and the dwarves return to buried irrelevance.

(artist: Justin Gerard)

Tokenism, then, is a terror weapon, and not one that Tolkien was above using (guilt-free, no less, because it appeals to the “natural” order of things, in his eyes). Tokens are always without a home, always exiled with one foot in both worlds and trying to reject Hell to find their “rightful” place by their good master’s side (e.g., Samus Aran and the Galactic Federation). Tolkien relies on tokenism through centrist dogma, and whose worlds will overcorrect with massive violence to maintain the status quo—by victimizing its token groups!

For Tolkien, the dwarves are something to trot out and destroy as needed, generally by comparing them to goblins (through the same big noses, divided by beards, which orcs and goblins don’t canonically have). This trend hasn’t lessened over time, with future adaptations leaning into said tropes to make Thorin increasingly tragic through them; e.g., Peter Jackson’s Thorin, played by Richard Armitage, humanized in appearance but arguing to Smaug (an imaginary enemy) about Dwarvish lands and gold. He’s “the Good Jew,” arguing for state’s rights dressed up as liberation, the meta tyrant Tolkien dressing the slave up in the language of rebellion, mid-tyrant’s-plea. It’s like Shakespeare, making a Jew to “better the instruction” of Christian revenge, but abjected in Tolkien’s case, onto a Jewish avenger upholding a Christian ordering to the world: a perversion of the Golem of Prague and Jewish necromancy!

[9] Consider Tolkien’s zero-sex policy versus Terry Goodkind’s naked exhibiting of pedophilia, genital mutilation and rape. They might seem like polar opposites, but both constitute Joseph Conrad’s bigoted fear-fascination with the colonized abomination, in The Heart of Darkness (1899): a white, cis-het fear-fascination with the past as restricted to the fringes of the empire, that—in neoliberal media, which brings the colonial revenge to the homefront—becomes “a spell to fall under” (re: Punter) and exorcise, generally through violence. Tolkien’s colonial rape occurred with swords, leveled against metaphors for people “not of the West” he considered “Mongol-types” (source: Tolkien Gateway) whose linguo-material presence would be entirely unwelcome in white areas (effectively gentrification in a real-world village/suburban setting).

Tolkien famously disliked allegory for his own stories (an appeal, then, to singular interpretations that ignored his writing’s racist, thus colonial potential). But even when reduced to “pure fantasy” as he would have preferred, the terrestrial framework and its cartography and colonial model are all obviously there and being put into practice; i.e., world-building and its manmade languages levied for a suitably war-like purpose regardless if Tolkien openly denounced Hilter. In short, he was a centrist to the core, the old sage handing the young hobbit a blade and preaching loftily about morals, specifically of knowing when to kill and when not to—in short, “playing god” in the face of the abject:

Bilbo almost stopped breathing, and went stiff himself. He was desperate. He must get away, out of this horrible darkness, while he had any strength left. He must fight. He must stab the foul thing, put its eyes out, kill it. It meant to kill him. No, not a fair fight. He was invisible now. Gollum had no sword. Gollum had not actually threatened to kill him, or tried to yet. And he was miserable, alone, lost. A sudden understanding, a pity mixed with horror, welled up in Bilbo’s heart: a glimpse of endless unmarked days without light or hope of betterment, hard stone, cold fish, sneaking and whispering. All these thoughts passed in a flash of a second. He trembled (source).

Except this mercy is arguably lacking in the face of those who are physically dangerous (according to white people); orcs, unlike Gollum, are given no quarter despite arguably having a bone to pick with their colonizers: “Show them no mercy for you shall receive none!” It’s tone-policing backed by force—also known as “peace through strength.”

[10] Warcraft: Orcs and Humans (1994) would lead to the company’s longest, and arguably most popular and widespread franchise, beating Diablo (1996) to the punch by two years and going on to establish the company as the successors to Everquest (1999) as the MMORPG to “kill”: World of Warcraft (2004), a globalizing of the pursuit of capital across the Internet. These games successfully applied a tactical, melee-based, roleplay element to the FPS-/TPS-adjacent strategy game (exhibit 1a1a1h2a1), which took on a massive-multiplayer form built around warring team-based combat with one-or-more combatants on either side. And of course, all of this was heavily dimorphized within the heteronormative colonial binary.

[11] (from Britannica): “A different word orc, alluding to a demon or ogre, appears in Old English glosses of about AD 800 and in the compound word orcnēas (‘monsters’) in the poem Beowulf. As with the Italian orco (‘ogre’) and the word ogre itself, it ultimately derives from the Latin Orcus, a god of the underworld. The Old English creatures were most likely the inspiration for the orcs that appear in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings” (source).

[12] Tolkien’s inconsistent fear of spiders stretches back to a childhood phobia of them, but he was annoyingly wishy-washy and non-committal to how he felt about them; i.e., talking through both sides of his mouth (a classic centrist maneuver) [source: Tolkien Gateway].

[13] Tolkien did not exist during videogames as they are commonly thought of (though technically he died in 1973, a year after Pong [1972] was released for American home entertainment by Atari’s Allan Alcorn). Yet, Tolkien was also no stranger to playing games. Indeed, the entire “Riddles in the Dark” chapter from The Hobbit is pointedly a game, with a rather involved discussion surrounding luck, fairness and the following of rules:

He knew, of course, that the riddle-game was sacred and of immense antiquity, and even wicked creatures were afraid to cheat when they played at it. But he felt he could not trust this slimy thing to keep any promise at a pinch. Any excuse would do for him to slide out of it. And after all that last question had not been a genuine riddle according to the ancient laws (source).

In truth, Tolkien’s refrain—the High Fantasy treasure map—would translate very well to tabletop games and videogames, but especially The Lord of the Rings, which despite its immense size compared to The Hobbit was actually far simpler in terms of its treatment of war and wealth acquisition/generation. Everything was divided neatly into good and evil teams that—on the good side—weren’t fighting amongst each other nearly as much as during The Hobbit. In his later novels, the world-war machine wasn’t just suggested, but fully devised and given its own vast world to play out inside. And even with The Hobbit, Tolkien clearly understood the power of song and legends, writing his original story for children to acclimate them towards war and revenge dressed up in songs, fantasy and poems. It likewise had all the starts and stops of a radio serial, putting our heroes out of the frying pan and into the fire (similar to Flash Gordon, 1935) before pulling them out just in the nick of time (the Great Eagles being a shameless deus ex machina [and imperial emblem] that Tolkien would curiously refuse to use with The Lord of the Rings in order to prolong the story and its war for as long as possible).

[14] The human condition works like a golem, as such: to make from clay or stone (orcs and goblins are not made from stone, but live below it, underground. So whereas Tolkien’s trolls turn to literal stone, in sunlight, the goblins merely dislike it); i.e., as a creative process we can map and play out, together—invigilating a shared vision that means different things to different people (from the Undead Module):

(exhibit 37e1: Model: Harmony Corrupted; artists: Lydia, Persephone van der Waard and Jim32. Rebellion is quite literally a craft, one that involves dolls—or likenesses of people, which dolls essentially are—in some shape or form; e.g., action figures/athletes, but also sex dolls [or things akin to either expressed through sex work]. Whatever the exact type, dolls are homunculi; i.e., generally a smaller instance of a larger reference. More to the point, they take work to realize: planning and drafts, a model, and one or more artists working together to accomplish a shared vision’s theatrical production. The main idea is mine, in this case, but it’s still accomplished through teamwork that contributes to the primary demonstration of said idea and goal; i.e., universal worker liberation through iconoclastic art using Gothic media; re: illustrating mutual consent through informed labor exchanges that challenge Capitalist Realism.

To that, Revana is very much my character by design […]. She’s someone I can have stand in for myself, given that I cannot afford gender-affirming surgeries. Even so, she has been drawn by many different artists over the years. In this case, my usual paper doll approach became something to instruct others with; e.g., my friend, Lydia, illustrating a Drow character I later completed on my own and borrowed its wardrobe to dress Revana, Macbeth-style, in borrowed robes [above]. This isn’t someone forced to wear clothes made to objectify her against her will [re: “Borrowed Robes“]; she’s an extension of me, and Lydia helped with that. So did Jim32 and Harmony. All the world’s a stage and we, upon it, had and continue to have a part to play [source: “Meeting Jadis; or, Playing with Dolls,” 2024].)

[15] With “normal” white genitals being monstrous/different than the rest of the body they attach to; i.e., normal dicks being darker than the rest of the body and vaginas having multiple mouths like the xenomorph (the labia major and minor). They also flush with color during sexual desire (from filling with blood, be the genitals male, female or intersex).

[16] Fixated since Antiquity on sex/food and relative bodily functions, war-making and religion/funerary rites; but also classically-male contests of pissing or spitting the farthest—belching or farting the loudest, eating or shitting(?) the most, fucking the longest, etc—during battles of the sexes/the topos of the power of women extending into GNC spheres.

[17] And the stigmatized, four-letter versions of such words, predating the popularizing of their longer French equivalents, post-Black-Death, and surviving into the present; e.g., chew, fuck, spit, shit, puke, etc. Monsters operate through a similar shorthand, but also critical lens of coded behaviors.

[18] Gothic Communism occurs through holistic study regarding a system designed to conceal itself, mid-exchange. The dialectic is as much of shelter as the alien, the prison a game of theft and disguise, of choice shrouded in illusion (the illusion of choice enacted under deeply unnatural conditions) and shadowed by force; i.e., the holocaust/death lottery/prisoner’s dilemma only ends when all prisoners see each other as human; re: by taking the red pill to break Capitalist Realism, not Communism.

Workers, then, always have the power to riot/strike, leveraging capital using the very things the owner class tries to cage and abuse labor with while acting like its friends; i.e., with bald-faced lies as much as not; e.g., the Nazis and the Warsaw ghetto, but also American liberalism in all its forms; re: Tolkien’s anti-Semitic heroism. Capital is a settler colony disguised as a game, then—one using disguise to defend the state vs workers and the planet, versus workers defending ourselves, guerrilla-style, in its crosshairs (for more on this exact topic, see: “The World Is a Vampire“).

Suppression happens by thinking we can play along to survive what is otherwise “forgone” (according to state arbiters). By having slave revolts chattelize, pacify or otherwise divide and conquer their own (fascism is false rebellion), voting is the illusion of choice (and can be manipulated by scarcity and force); to survive and liberate ourselves, we must fight back, making the cost too dear to continue. To do this, we require informed and intersectionally solidarized action, moving power actively towards workers during labor exchange. Anyone who stymies that is a traitor colonizing the homefront, doing so with fascism and the democratic process weaponized against class-, culture- and race-conscious parties (re: Westside Tyler blaming* non-voters, below).

(screenshot source: the YouTube comments for Westside Tyler’s “Supporting Movements Like Uncommitted WILL FAIL EVERY TIME,” 2024)

*I critique his arguments, in a response video (Persephone van der Waard’s “@westsidetyler Is a White Moderate (a Nazi Apologist),” 2024). Few things are as cowardly as a white cis-het man, who at the first sign of trouble, falls back on privilege to punch down against the oppressed—just like Tolkien! Their hearts are hardened, and they resign themselves to capital-as-is.

[19a] “Cremation is reserved for baddies,” Knitting&Death describes. “The Riders of Rohan bury their own dead with honour, but burn orcs as they would dead animals.” Knitting also acknowledges Tolkien’s double standard, going on to add,

Tolkien was a staunch Catholic, and it may be of note that the Catholic Church forbid cremation from 1886 until 1963. While exceptions were made for mass death events and to prevent the spread of disease, cremation was considered a rejection of the possibility of resurrection. Nowadays, although cremation is permitted, scattering ashes is forbidden; the Vatican reasons that “reservation of the ashes of the departed in a sacred place [such as a cemetery or church] ensures that they are not excluded from prayers and remembrance.” That the Riders of Rohan not only burn dead orcs but also scatter their ashes ensures that they will not rise again and that they will also be forgotten the latter providing particular contrast to the mounds where dead Riders are inhumed and that are meant to last forever (source: “What Happened to the War Dead of Middle Earth?” 2022).

Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss; the mass graves and cremation are a hate crime against those Tolkien coded as racially and religiously inferior to his own warrior supermen (the cowboys of an imaginary frontier). Orcs and goblins aren’t just waste, then, but literal fuel for the British war machine (whitewashing its own fascism and ethnocentrism/canonical essentialism through intensely regressive hauntological war games). It’s genocide, glorifying bigotry to serve Imperialism (and hopelessly in love with a once-great Britain afraid, all the same, of endless black cocks).

Gothic without the Middle Ages, Tolkien Christianized Pagan cultures (which the Vikings were) and married them to Germanized Untermensch-vs-Übermensch monomyth shenanigans; i.e., the Rohirrim superior to the Gondordians, but both superior to the “lesser” races. “We will burn like the kings of old.” It becomes his little paradise to protect from outsiders by his surviving fans, but in ways no way, shape or form divorced from the real world; i.e., through overt themes of ethnic cleansing that cover up allegory through monomythic violence and crusader-grade monster sex: sodomy by flame, desecrating the orc and goblin as animal, but also living dead (to fertilize poppies).

Rape is rape, genocide is genocide, and Tolkien goes all out (name me something more fetishized than his stupid swords). He’s a coward, because fascism fears the entire world; i.e., as already haunted by past crimes of empire—and like Hitler and the Reich—uses moral panic of so-called Black Revenge to power his own arguments of expansion and home defense. Through preemptive first strikes committed by an entire hero culture, worldview and language family bastardized by the colonizer against the oppressed, Tolkien wants you to feel like rebels while fighting for old, brutal systems that refuse to change—the might-makes-right return of a pre-ordained, kingdom-style rulership that always decays into “dark” (fascist) versions of itself. Except there’s no Ring (tyrant hot potato) to destroy! Only patrilineal descent remains, the war criminal hiding behind cartoon dictators and Divine Right—forever doomed and in love with itself—punching death as the world spirals towards state shift. It’s a sham, a simulation of war playing out for efficient profit.

[19b] E.g., My twin brother “quad-kiting” of the four dwarven guards outside Kaladim on EQ‘s (1999) Sullon Zek PvP server. For context, the game wasn’t built for PvP, and the evil side—in keeping with Tolkien’s moral territories—had all the continents with “phat loot.” My brother played a druid, which were “OP” because they could “kite” red mobs (anything ten levels higher than you) with speed buffs and “DoTs” (damage-over-time), but also teleport; i.e., letting him corner the market farming Karg Icebear’s cloaks (emergent value through unintended play of an aging game), then sell them to evil-aligned players on the in-game black market (who never killed him because he was their inside man).

[20] “‘Dwarves Are Not Heroes’: Antisemitism and the Dwarves in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Writing.”

[21] I.e., the state lionizing itself through “valor animals” attacking and eating but also exterminating stigma animals: those which the goblin attaches to, namely the rat and other vermin, the state treating itself (and its proponents) as “superior” to nature’s essentialized backstabbers.

[22] Which often leads to sex, to be fair. Except Tolkien’s stories end after the war is won and the warriors wed. He couldn’t be arsed to write about the sex that happens, save as neo-colonial revenge against black nature; i.e., while being manly with other men (a very ancient, homosexual approach to queerness—one that hyphenates sex with harmful violence).

[23] While these qualities are heavily mythologized, there remains a kernel of truth to them; i.e., white women are infantilized by their husbands, and black women forced into single motherhood. Both sides experience criminogenic conditions, but those conditions remain idiosyncratic and unequal on purpose (to better divide and demonize labor with).

[24] Racial considerations aside, black-on-white makes for a nice visual contrast.

[25] Re, Sontag’s “Fascinating Fascism” (1974): a  “master scenario” whose purely sexual experience is “severed from personhood, from relationships, from love,” but also the fascist language of death: “The color is black [and red], the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death” (source).

[26] Generally of the hero, but also the hero’s victims, whereupon the conqueror’s death is enshrined in a vault of worship pushing the mythic life-and-death glory forward into new, unsuspecting minds. Or as my thesis volume argues,

In other words, canon (thus Capitalism) is full of ritual sacrifice with a Christianized flavor (crucifixion) or Westernized abuse of paganized forms whose divine right revives the glory of recuperated Roman aesthetics (the Nazi as quasi-pagan); e.g., the sacrificial rooster or lamb, the virgin or scapegoat, as something to bleed out for significance and good fortune, but also stalled demise for the holder of the knife: the Christ-like Herculean warrior as babyface or heel to sacrifice when the state’s crises enter decay while firing up production, which in turn requires more and more sacrifice the hotter the furnace gets. Engorged, the elite need ever more blood to satisfy their hunger as the ultimate parasite, thus demand of their loyal followers, “Defend our land; defend your land from the infidels” (which curiously the elite stole the land from, to begin with). As Hilter put it, “What is life? Life is the nation. The individual must die anyway. Beyond the life of the individual is the nation” (source).

[27] Nature-as-alien canonically achieves demonic power (allegory through transformation) through sexual reproduction tied to an inhuman stigma-animal life cycle; e.g., Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915) but also the xenomorph.

[28] From Bret Devereaux’ “Hard Times Don’t Make Strong Soldiers,” 2020): “‘Hard times create strong men, strong men create weak times, weak times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.’ The quote, from a postapocalyptic novel by the author G. Michael Hopf, sums up a stunningly pervasive cyclical vision of history—one where Western strategists keep falling for myths of invincible barbarians” (source).

[29] I.e., the state survives by telling workers what they want, thus need*; she wants to live deliciously with strange bedfellows, the two (or more) burying the hatchet by recultivating the Superstructure! Revolution so often fertilizes praxis through sex.

*With “darkness” uncontrolled by force seen as “glutinous” (or otherwise sinful, per the Seven Deadly Sins) and whose fearsome temptation would remain something that various holy parties (usually men of the cloth or Crusaders)—ignoring double standards and hypocrisies—must dutifully abstain from, save by raping through unironic force.

[30] Reminded of my exes, I recently asked Harmony Corrupted to “rape” me as we played; i.e., I felt out of control when triggered by the present. Sensing the harmful past, I invoked rememory to regain control during ludo-Gothic BDSM with a trusted friend. It’s a bit counterintuitive on its face, but a vital paradox to counter capital’s rising inequalities and power abuse: rape makes us chase the Numinous. It is a mighty outlet when harnessed by us to heal!

[31] Often coded as “black,” in a medieval sense, and having green skin (or some other spectral blackface) during blood libel argumentation.

[32] Apparently the song was inspired by English “skinheads,” which the band—in true false-punk (and homophobic) fashion—called “faeries”:

This song is about Skinheads. At the time in England, Skinheads were not racists, but punks and anarchists. They usually wore boots, which is how Sabbath got the title. […] The lyrics were inspired by an incident after a Sabbath concert in 1970. The band was attacked by a bunch of Skinheads after the show, injuring Tony Iommi and forcing them to cancel their next performance [ibid.].

Like many rock songs, the band buries the lead/obscures their criticism of different punk groups interfering with their bottom line; i.e., while cashing in on witchcraft, monsters and drug use, themselves (re: the ghost of the counterfeit). The band went on to make millions and lose themselves in drugs, far less concerned with activism than they were exploiting the aesthetics of it while butting heads with those they called “punks” and “faeries.” When push came to shove, they sold out and treated rebellion as “gay.”

[33] I originally devised Glenn as a shapeshifter goblin; i.e., born as one, but able to turn into different shapes, sizes and genders to synthesize good praxis with: GNC poetics I pointedly wanted to “goblinize” while rescuing all aspects thereof from a harmful historical past (one whose queerness and goblins had to suffer under Western pogroms; more on this in Volume Three).

[34] Bunny likes “painal,” for instance—as much for the pain, but also the control it gives them, during sex work. They also have sex with different people, but generally as a form of public nudism/pornographic art (samples from Bunny’s Twitter profile):

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

In short, they can work with other people, but tend to favor toys because of the unparalleled control those give them; i.e., over their own body and the scenes they’re trying to cultivate. This took time and work to figure out, which shows in Bunny’s extensive catalog. Indeed, since meeting Bunny back in March 2023 when I first drew them as female Ozymandias, they’ve come such a long way and really matured as an artist! And they’ve supported my work a great deal, funding it/supplying subscriptions gratis and being there for me emotionally when others were attacking me in bad faith (re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Setting the Record Straight, Transmisia Experience: 5/26/2023“).

[35] The evolution of this incredibly bizarre-yet-charming children’s cartoon has a surprisingly storied history in its own right. Nathan Evans writes, in “Ween – The Mollusk: How an Album Inspired the World’s Most Famous Kid’s Cartoon” (2020):

In a Facebook post written shortly after the death of Hillenburg in late 2018, band members Gene and Dean Ween told the story of how they were contacted by him, saying that “he wanted to start a cartoon inspired by The Mollusk,” bringing to light what was a truth hidden in plain sight for many years. The Pennsylvania duo was asked to write a song teaching kids how to tie their shoes, which became “Loop De Loop” from one of the show’s most heartwarmingly innocent moments. You could even be forgiven for thinking it wasn’t the same band who wrote “Piss Up a Rope,” but that was part of the Ween magic. In tribute to The Mollusk, the record’s penultimate track “Ocean Man” plays as the 2004 movie’s credits roll.

[…] These sock puppet-like characters feed into the adorably childish comedy of the record, as does their simple Limerick style of songwriting. The very on-the-nose title “Waving My Dick in the Wind” doesn’t hold back Gene and Dean’s silly side, and neither does some of the lines within the cut—though many reviewers have used the word “masturbatory” to describe music, “you should have seen old Jimmy Wilson dance” really is so [a tradition far older than SpongeBob—with Herman Melville using plenty of phallic jokes in Moby Dick to comment both on matelotage but also the whaling industry as a whole].

But that nerdiness too lends itself to another aspect of the lyrics on here, namely with their casual use of head-turning references rooted in the obscure. Throughout, they are constantly sneaking in gentle religious subtext (“The Mollusk”) or a reference to a Rastafarian deity (“Mutilated Lips”) into an otherwise simple affair. Leaving these scraps of scholarly knowledge in a place one would least expect causes an emergent feeling of surrealism, mirroring how Hillenburg and co. nodded to the likes of metal band Pantera, literary macabrist Edgar Allen Poe, and German horror legend Nosferatu. Into a bloody children’s show [another tradition, one used—for example—by James Joyce’s Ulysses or T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and similar stories speaking to the chaos of modernity after WWI].

Ween’s relationship with psychedelics also matches the aforementioned college-band stereotype, as “Polka Dot Tail” and “Mutilated Lips” document these—again, surrealistic—sightings witnessed only through pills, smoke and crystal. Twisted images of flying puppies, malformed human hands and wormlike tentacles lodged inside the brain. Although out of context these lines would appear completely demented, it’s inverted by the tongue-in-cheek sonics behind them. The former is one of several children’s showtunes on the album, and as we all know, there’s a very blurred line between hallucinogenic visions and children’s entertainment (source).

In short, people didn’t like SpongeBob because it turned a profit; they liked it for its artless charm, which capital promptly pimped out. Rebellion, then, abjures profit as such. To it, the parallels between the meta forces at work—and the sheer seemingly-random serendipity of chance meetings, out in the world—go beyond Ween and SpongeBob, Jojo and Walpole, Watterson and Calvin/Hobbes, or Harmony and myself. And yet, in keeping with acid Communism—and the creative reality that anything might combine with anything else under natural and manmade pressures, but still make it work, through Gothic Communism at large—such holistic intra, micro and macro-spection makes for an incredibly interesting journey, all on its own!

More to the point, such eclectic and dialectical-material chaos becomes incredibly liberating the moment you realize you can combine anything with anything to say whatever you need to say to bond with other people under capital. Do it because life is absurd; smile at the gods by making your own, in the present space and time. It is, as Jameson once said, all we have. And as Molly Grue once said, “You have all the power you need, if you dare to look for it!”

[36] Whereas anal can generally fit larger sizes into itself (above), vaginal generally stops at to 6-7 inches, for the average birth canal. Vaginal is often made more exciting visually by “pushing the envelope”; i.e., by playing with pornographic tropes that walk the tightrope between exploitation and liberation; e.g., white women—commonly treated as “modest,” including their canonically diminutive and infantilized vaginas—evoking some degree of rape fantasy when saying to the camera as they take a big dick (regardless of color), “Oh, noooo! It’s soooo biiiiiiig!”

[37] And which pedophiles ascribe to child porn they call “furry” or “goblin,” in bad faith; e.g., Ian Kochinski (more on him, in Volume Three):

(source: the thumbnail for Bad Empanada’s “Vaush P*dophilia Controversy: Disgusting Fans & Orbiters MELT DOWN Defending Him,” 2024)

[38] In a cruel twist, Charlotte Brontë kills Bertha—all so her in-book double, Jane, can marry and redeem the insufferable Mr. Rochester (a slaveholder and adulterer): “Reader, I married him”; i.e., “my marriage was legitimate, and it takes a white WASP to pacify man’s otherwise ‘untamable’ nature.” Small wonder that Jean Rys wrote Wide Sargasso Sea (1966); there was no room for a Caribbean woman in a white woman’s world in a white man’s world, save to be the stepping stone in Charlotte’s bildungsroman. Genocide is genocide!

[39] Rock, for example, was stolen from African Americans (a traditional taken from older colonial models). This includes the term, itself, but also white imitators of famous artists like Chuck Berry and Jimi Hendrix (more on Jimi, in Volume Three); e.g., Elvis or [insert name, here]. The same goes for jazz and the Harlem Renaissance, but also white authors in the Gothic mode commodifying and “slumming” darkness while looking in from positions of relative privilege (re: the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection). Again, the idea isn’t to commodify struggle or alienation, when healing from rape inside the Imperial Core, but learn from it ways that bring different oppressed groups closer together under a common goal; i.e., while surviving police violence everywhere.

[40] The alt text, on Mastodon, reads: “Marina in a hot pink body suit and ushanka and a white fur coat holding a pink sickle and a Hitachi magic wand. they’re posed dramatically to evoke socialist realism” title=”marina in a hot pink body suit and ushanka and a white fur coat holding a pink sickle and a Hitachi magic wand. they’re posed dramatically to evoke Socialist Realism.”

[41] Re: As Jamal Subhi Ismail Nafi writes in “Milton’s Portrayal of Satan in Paradise Lost and the Notion of Heroism” (2015):

According to [Tesky] Gordon, it was Blake who expressed this view most emphatically by saying that Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it. He expressed this opinion chiefly in relation to the portrayal of Satan who, according to him, has been depicted as a character possessing certain grand qualities worthy of the highest admiration (source).

[42] E.g., straight men being Black Penitents protected by the courts with a high burden of proof, versus anyone else slandered and abused under widespread pogroms that extend to these juridical spheres.

[43] In the West, animation through clay comes from Judaism and the Golem of Prague (and older versions); i.e., the power of creation laid into mortal hands, then demonized by Christian forces. Abjection abjects sin and guilt off onto state enemies, which the state then attacks. To that, canonical Gothic relies on the cartoon of necromancy and animation directed at older female/feminized men (servants), non-European and/or queer religions, cultures and identities; e.g., Judaism, but also poetic likenesses that, in the same shadow zone, highlight and scandalize Nazis and Communists; i.e., being seen as heretical, thus of nature/fallen and needing to be purged by blood libel disguised as pure reason, post-Reformation. Manmade things are valorized provided they are made by white, cis-het Christian-coded men. Anything else is abject, but also apologized for through an uncanny similarity to state forces. We come from a sample of one, so “darkness” and “corruption” is dogmatized, fearful of Jewish revenge—of Medusa coming home to roost, thus nature and servants as “black” to settler colonialism’s lily whiteness. Their nadir is our zenith, our sex and their sex echoing in hostile duality.

The Protestant work ethic, per Cartesian thought, treats righteous labor as holy over anything antithetical to that; i.e., as paradoxically required to justify itself through witch hunts: God makes Lilith; she defies him and gives birth to demons, so God makes Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs. But the maiden is overshadowed by the whore’s dark “Jewish,” Melmothian spectre—her evil magic galvanizing the witch hunts that follow. She’s the castle, speaking to hammered witches, Jews eaten by lions, and queers put to death for refusing to have PIV sex, etc. Cryptonymy isn’t just a dogwhistle, but a whistle for labor to blow through the same cartoons; e.g., by Shelley’s Modern Prometheus taking creation (the fire of the gods) to demonize Victor Frankenstein through his work talking back: “giving lip,” or “sass,” as it were (more on this, in “Forbidden Sight,” part two).

[43a] Demons have infinite variety, infinite form; so does nature and demons of nature in a more animalistic class (versus those of Hell, presented as “extradimensional,” “from the void” or otherwise “not of this Earth”).