This blog post is part of “All the World,” a sixth promotion originally inspired by the three I did in 2024 with Harmony Corrupted and Romantic Rose: “Brace for Impact,” “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil” (2024), as well as “Make It Real” for Volume One and “The Total Codex” for Volume Zero. Those promotions sought to promote and provide their respective volume’s individual pieces for easy public viewing in single-post form; re: for the Poetry Module, Undead Module and Demon Module, followed by my PhD and manifesto. “All the World,” by comparison, caps off my book series with a promotion for Volume Three; re: my Praxis Volume. As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.
Click here to see “All the World’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).
Concerning Buggy Images: Sometimes the images on my site don’t always load and you get a little white-and-green placeholder symbol, instead. Sometimes I use a plugin for loading multiple images in one spot, called Envira Gallery, and not all of the images will load (resulting in blank white squares you can still right-click on). I‘ve optimized most of the images on my site, so I think it’s a server issue? Not sure. You should still be able to access the unloaded image by clicking on the placeholder/right-clicking on the white square (sometimes you have to delete the “?ssl=1” bit at the end of the url). Barring that, completed volumes will always contain all of the images, whose PDFs you can always download on my 1-page promo.
Selling War as Sacred: Sublimated War Pastiche and Gender-critical War Bosses in Overwatch 2, the Heteronormative Myth of the “Good War” in Saving Private Ryan, New Order, and Stonewalling Genderqueer Alternatives
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage (source).
—Henry V, Henry V (c. 1599)
Picking up where “Attack of the Bad-Faith, Pussyhat Feminist Undead/Demons” left off…
Note: This section is a real Frankenstein’s Monster. For one, the idea of war as sacred—meaning through the monomyth and neoliberalism—is something Volume Zero explores at great length. Here is where I started the idea; i.e., as something to explore, which I would even revisit after Volume Zero was written, then cite elements of its argumentation back into this piece. I would even quote elements of my canceled book, Neoliberalism in Yesterday’s Heroes (re: the Saving Private Ryan bits)—inserting them into here roughly three years after halting that ill-fated book’s production. —Perse, 5/5/2025
Canonical war pastiche is monomythic or “true camp” in that its “seriousness that fails” punishes workers; it parallels political stances on actual war as something to parade in front of viewers in sublimated forms (who, in turn, parade their relative wealth by showing canonical media not as something to criticize, but to flaunt and endorse). Not all TERFs love sublimated war pastiche, but their general attitudes mid-cryptonymy mirror some of its most famous examples recuperated by the state; e.g., Medusa, Ellen Ripley or Victoria di Loredani, etc, as anisotropically postpunk: Amazon cryptonymy as famously naked (war predicated on deception, according to Sun Tzu)!
We’ll examine some more of these “queen bitches” now, including fantastical examples like war boss/dog Odessa Stone in Overwatch 2 as a gender-critical proxy, but also Saving Private Ryan and similarly grounded-yet-romanticized iterations of the neoliberal myth of “good war” that stymie genderqueer alternatives (and look at New Order’s “disco in disguise” during the cryptonymy process, for good holistic measure).
To quote our thesis statement; re: (from Volume Zero, exhibit 1a1a1c1):
All at once, the revenge fantasy of Pax Americana kayfabe is the source of the class traitor’s greatest strength/treasure as false/on loan, an Achilles Heel whose “dagger of the mind” puts them to sleep; i.e., a heteronormative killer on autopilot blinded by canonical “darkness visible,” wherein they deliberately or accidentally (usually a combination ruled through fear and dogma) cling to class-dormant illusions and sacrificial theatre whose imaginary “ancients” are continually not wise to greater and greater degrees of tragedy and farce; e.g., George Orwell’s highly unimaginable and callow “double-speak” from 1984 (1949) as a Red-Scare dogwhistle coined by “the son of a British colonial officer from a wealthy landed family who began his career as a British imperial official in South-East Asia—basically an imperial cop” (source: Hakim’s “George Orwell Was a Terrible Human Being,” 2023). As such, the class traitor cannot scrutinize dialectically-materially. They are also a gender/race traitor whose false power—their theatrical “sword”—is also their greatest weakness/castrating source of impotency for the Roman fool to promptly fall upon (indented for clarity):
The greatest weakness of a bourgeois-minded worker/class traitor is their collective inability to critique endless war as an acclimating force; i.e., of them, towards manufactured illusions where the chosen hero does one of two basic things: a) picks up the false (imaginary) sword, mask or death edict and fends off or an imaginary enemy of darkness, or b) where someone else picks up a real weapon and conducts state-sanctioned violence through military imperium and paramilitary stochastic terrorism (vigilantism against agents of the Left or perceived “Left” labeled as “terrorists[1]“). Either way, the end result is a class-dormant inability to critique the system’s alienation of ourselves from our true potential as workers. By virtue of a hypercorrect, biologically essential, sex-equals-gender approach, the ensuing knee-jerk reactionary’s violence becomes an ultimatum during the state’s decaying crises: Anything that isn’t correct must die/is a threat to the fortress they’ve build around themselves through the state’s supplied dogma. Yet, the half-real dagger works as Macbeth’s dagger of the mind would: also in his hand but something he does not own (“I clutch thee but have thee not”). Used unironically in copaganda and the Military Industrial Complex, such a weapon operates in conjunction with the meta-narrative as rigged, thus entirely out of the player’s control; i.e., through the ghost of the counterfeit to further the process of abjection as lucrative for people who aren’t us, playing by their own set of rules that leave us with as little power as possible: not paying their fair share, but taking as much for themselves as they can through a parallel ruleset that steals our labor and pacifies us through marginalized in-fighting. The exact nature of the illusion—a fatal vision or fatal deed—doesn’t really matter if the material consequences and bad intent are combined in ways that are good for business. It becomes a vicious cycle of tilting at windmills (as Don Quixote does); i.e., generating and slaying real victims thought of as dragons, or “averting one’s eyes” through escapist illusions that disguise the mirrored murders displaced to somewhere else. “Out of sight, out of mind,” except there is no outside-text; the illusion is always there, “the handle toward our hand.” The black knight is always there, lurking like a shadow. Tied to the class traitor’s body and actions—he is the ideologically rigid, notoriously cruel doppelganger they can never outrun, a dark reflection mirroring their own evil deeds/compliance as one class traitor of many inside the profit model. His eyes are blacked out, showcasing his lack of humanity through state-issued blinders: a dark warhorse (the color of death, the fetish, the weapon, the gun, the Nazi/zombie Roman) waiting to sacrifice them, too (source: “Thesis Body”).
TERFs and other fascists’ greatest weakness, then, is their collective inability to critique these ancient war-as-endless “empowerment” fantasies while wearing the bridle and prancing about for the state in tragic/farcical ways. They’re like killer babies, paradoxically the enemy as simultaneously being weak and strong but also correct and incorrect and transforming to meet them in battle. “As it should be” means assembly and pro-state soldiering without question—i.e., as sacrificed themselves under the giant gears of Capitalism in decay as forever ongoing thus needing more sleepwalking apprentices who think they’re up to the task. As Capitalism enters crisis, the question “Is war good?” can be reliably answered as many times as asked: with an affirmative by combating Nazis as the so-called “greater evils.” In truth, they’re just the bad team in a theatre of staged combat where the functional Greatest Evil is cosmetically banal: the cold, hard economics of boring, old, white men.
To this, canonical war pastiche exploded in the 1980s under Reagan. After the Cold War (itself a giant false advertisement; re: GDF’s ” There Was No ‘Cold’ War”), the Soviet Union collapsed after adopting neoliberal policies post-Destalinization: shock therapy (the torturous label should be a clue). Emerging the “clear victors,” America became free to remake history through the materialization of increasingly vague and cartoonish bad guys as part of an ongoing arms race to continue the usual drive towards infinite growth and efficient profits through the escalation of war proliferation: an endless chain of made-up villains that American civilians could fight at any age, acclimating new generations to future wars. As a concept, war became perpetually commodified and celebrated, presented by America as the reasonable course of action.
Furthermore, TERF mentalities grew alongside them, a moderate feminism forged through neoconservative war. Its nature is ultimately regressive; i.e., during crisis, these feminists TERF/SWERF gatekeepers will become straw dogs—tossed aside for a dimorphized order that pacifies men and women differently through a cis-lens (re: the euthanasia effect). Everyone is a man or a woman, wherein men become dumb, “Beowulfs” and vigilante de facto cops for the state—toxic workers; women emulate them, until they’re not allowed to anymore and are force become battered housewives inside the infernal concentric pattern. As Capitalism enters decay/its Zombie-Vampire period, so do its heroes (and their legendary weapons) become reapers to defend the structure; they appear undead and demonic, while the state eats itself to preserve the elite. The herd is culled in a highly medieval fashion, dressed up as undead war and fought by anti-heroes who, like Kain from Blood Omen, “care not for the fate of this world” (exhibit 1a1a1b, “Thesis Body“).
Moderate expansion owes much to neoliberal dogma, chiefly the binary of teamwork to enforce us-versus-them thinking enacted through monomyth violence; re: punch, stab and shoot, mid-monomyth, in Gamergate fashion (e.g., the Doom franchise, above, being classically trans exclusionary thus transphobic; re: “No Girls or Trans People Allowed,” 2020). Actions aren’t moral, teams are. This grants the good team free reign—to kill, enslave or otherwise abuse the bad team with impunity. Far from abstract, this ideology actively materializes through consumer goods: monomythic canon, which parallels larger material realities present within the status quo; i.e., the infernal concentric pattern/Cycle of Kings. TERFs genocide trans people by abjecting and attacking them, all while consuming media that promotes a similar genocidal mentality in fantastical stories that mirror the American revenge fantasy as part of Pax Americana. In other words, the videogame “story” (usually cheap, recycled pulp) lazily parallels American Imperialism and its geopolitics in order to turn a profit at home: copaganda and the Military Industrial Complex working in tandem.
For example, paramilitary agents monopolize violence to ensure state control, performed by police officers on domestic grounds or by mercenaries on foreign soil. In either case, the inhumane, illegal nature of their actions (except in police states, which legalize police abuse) “veil” the state of exception as shielded by valorous language as a glorious, exceptional lie: Manifest Destiny as “self-defense”; i.e., they drew “first blood” (the false flag operation). TERFs will celebrate this worldview, calling it “as good as it gets” with their wallets; iconoclasts will call it like it is—a monopoly they can expose, thus critique Capitalism’s perpetual sale of “good/badass” war on all fronts, including toys, TV shows and videogames.
These conversations occur through a gradient of political purchases. Fascist reactionaries lament moderate consumerism as the Liberal betrayal of traditions, while moderacy laments sex-positive emancipation as a betrayal of compromise. Both stances are canonical, materializing through mainstream consumer goods consumed uncritically. In seeing these goods take non-traditional shapes, however, fascists and moderates will respond with relative canonical indignation, announcing as loudly as they can that someone to the left of them is hypocritically consuming entertainment with war inside it(!): Fascists will shout, “Look at those moderates, playing soldier!” However, both they and moderates will collectively denounce iconoclasts: “Look at those doves, playing with soldiers!”
The problem is, neoliberalism injects war into most products, often to sexualized, dimorphic extremes. Yet even iconoclasts can privately and ironically enjoy war pastiche. This includes watching warrior barbarians or space pirate ladies kicking ass—either through out-and-out guilty pleasures, but also war allegory that humanizes sexy rebels: partially antiwar/-totalitarian stories like The Terminator or Star Wars. What iconoclasts will not do is unironically endorse canonical war, including girl bosses’ moderate, TERF function within said canon: as personifying military action levied against real-world groups deserving of colonial retribution.
(exhibit 100c3: There’s a big difference joining up to kill the enemy in a proxy war versus because the state is trying to kill you. Corporal Ferro in The Terminator [top] is a freedom fighter resisting the Imperial Boomerang in posthuman form; Ferro in Aliens [bottom] is the American bomber ace genociding an Indigenous population to serve corporate interests. First, the company weaponizes the trauma of women just like her—e.g., Ripley and Newt, but also Samus Aran—whose lived abuse occurs under domestic oppression; then, they pit it against those the state wishes to destroy while still posturing as good; i.e., the annihilation of the state scapegoat as xenomorphic is gender-critical discourse and always has been, committed as much by bourgeois-minded women against their gender-non-conforming/Communist allies as much as by cis-het men. The fascist feminist is yet another dupe. As the neo-conservative becomes increasingly fascist, she will remind herself that she is doing this “for women everywhere,” that she is a real activist kicking ass against her problems by literally shooting, stabbing or blowing them up. She’s merely another soldier making the elite money and preserving global US hegemony.)
That’s the difference between Corporal Ferro in The Terminator compared to Corporal Ferro in Aliens. Same name, same Vietnam helicopter pilot helmet, same director, and both are killed onscreen. However, the context for their struggle is radically different: One is a mute, desperate freedom fighter combating systemic oppression under totalitarianism (specifically a dystopian future doomsday scenario where the Imperial Boomerang is brought home by machines programmed to execute state directions sans human instruction; i.e., the technological singularity); the other is a snarky military pilot, spitting catchy one-liners while upholding neoliberal revenge on the fantasy plane. For sex-positive people, though, Aliens is a guilty pleasure because it’s tremendously exciting despite its poor disguise[2] (as Vietnam propaganda). Simply put, it’s fun to watch… provided you turn off your brain and don’t think too hard about what the characters actually represent.
Beyond guilty pleasures, TERFs and iconoclasts differ in what they consume/create as it ties to views on strength and sexuality. This includes historically fetishized war content, like sexy orc women. To be sex-positive, an artist will need to recognize and correct the historically racist trope behind[3] demonically sexualizing persons of color (which orcs represent; re: exhibit 37e, “Meeting Jadis“). They can do so by humanizing orcs and other go-to war villains (e.g., Drow; re: exhibit 41b, “A Lesson in Humility“), reverse-abjecting them through descriptive and appreciative language. This won’t take away the iconoclast’s ability to feel sexy or turn them into less of a person; it does make them less TERF-like, hence less racist, xenophobic and fascist (all qualities that unironic war pastiche helps encourage). By teaching them to love their assigned enemies, xenophilia turns the fascist Medusa or Hippolyta into an ally for the broader queer community
While these types of intersectional, antiwar analyses remain difficult for TERFs to stomach, their personas of strength can still outwardly “resist” coercion. This yields various ironies that set moderate examples apart from out-and-out fascists (their function is identical, but their appearance differs: good teams and bad teams; same game).
For example, while a TERF won’t enjoy being a pin-up-style “war Barbie,” she probably won’t think twice about being a classy swordswoman or badass orc. The reason owes itself to performative sexism, but also an assimilation fantasy that amounts to class elevation by becoming the man: an aristocratic woman-of-means with a killer hat-pin (Maris Fessenden’s “American Women in the 1900s Called Street Harassers ‘Mashers’ and Stabbed Them With Hatpins,” 2015) or rapier that acts actively and phallically violent towards criminals (the poor) or cartoonishly obvious sexists (old-timey oil barons, Marlon Brando, Don Draper, etc). Like Zofloya, she stabs them, thinking herself Brutus, the action her.
In other words, one sympathizes with traumatized cis-het women wanting to stab creepy male letches with their own “stabby cock daggers” to “pull a Brutus with” (re: “Knife Dicks“); just don’t be going and inserting those into groups you stupidly conflate with cis-het male rapists. Gender-non-conforming people are not demon lovers, groomers or serial killers; that misconception stems from heteronormativity’s action heroes and from TERFs who embody the action hero/police agent as defending the stability of the world as “as good as it gets.”
(artist: unknown)
However—and I know this from experience—TERFs can tolerate less gentrified personas with more sexualized components, too. They might not actively relish a strict pin-up of a traditionally sexy orc woman (above), but will happily embrace one that’s more “correct” according to their bellicose standards; i.e., if the orc (or redheaded, alcoholic, lusty barbarian: a racist Celtic trope perpetuated by the English) is unquestionably sexy-but-tough (but not too conventionally attractive—re: Jadis and orcs, exhibit 37e from “Meeting Jadis“).
Here, the TERF will mark her for a tomboy (or butch lesbian) and probably not complain—especially if she looks like a savage, brutal fighter whose deathly persona conveys masculine dominance. Jadis called this status “being capable,” a person who can handle their shit; in neoliberal language, this means enforcing US foreign policy (the money for all those toys has to come from somewhere) by becoming a harbinger of death (whose inability to imagine a world without war and genocide Jadis called “being realistic/the adult in the room”): aping the avatar. Doing so, however, doesn’t turn you into She-Hulk. It just makes you intolerant, superstitious and xenophobic.
For example, In war pastiche, TERFs love to endorse orcs because they reinforce the myth of the “violent savage” through a kind of middle-class slumming: normalizing police violence by performing as violent people of color who need policing (see: every Blizzard game ever). It maintains the status quo similar to Ripley vs the xenomorphs or Samus vs the space pirates. It’s literally cops-and-robbers or cowboys-and-Indians thinking dressed up as “pure” (meaning “dislocated”) fantasy (re: “Digging Our Own Graves“). Us-versus-them; cops and victims, but all orphans, all menticided workers bullied by the state.
I keep empathizing “us-versus-them,” here, because TERFs purchase appropriated feminism in bad faith. In doing so, they preach equality from an uncritical position as gatekeepers that use systemic conflict to maintain the status quo (and its material inequalities) everywhere. As centrist thinkers, TERFs “centralize” conflict by equalizing both sides—not in appearance, but as part of a rigged system they support through continuous purchases. Keeping in line with the TERF tradition of disguise, the free market becomes merely another lie—one told through war pastiche that invariably maintains order through conflict as something to sell.
Furthermore, these stories parallel state apologia, which conceals or downplays exploitation—outright genocide, for non-citizens, and a police state (to varying degrees) for citizens. As things worsen on the globe, war becomes badass through its propaganda as made directly by the state or by corporations. Heroes like Odessa start to appear—i.e., the ostensible “anti-hero” who fights dirty and is just a little bit racist/settler-colonist. She’s not just a cheerleader with pom-poms; she’s a dogged sports goon cracking skulls on the field, getting her hands dirty as a straw dog that is visibly dog-like; i.e., a bitch, un-lady-like and more like the Tramp in that respect.
To this, war pastiche seems to have good teams and bad teams. In truth, TERFs and fascists, despite appearing different, are actually on the same team, crammed into the same kennel: team bourgeoisie’s kennel as one of its “pack” (which takes all the power and wealth accumulation for itself—through labor theft, but also theft of our ability to think: a myopia). While TERFs hate their assigned enemies (fascists) performatively, they openly despise anyone who undermines their orderly view of conflict as a structure. This is why you see TERFs (usually middle-class white women) punching down at trans people for “playing god”; it’s effectively a form of tone-policing that admonishes the “hubris” of a legitimately oppressed group for trying to liberate themselves using what they got and what they try to reclaim: their bodies and monstrous stigmas as campy and reclaimed.
To this, the elite have instilled TERFs to divide and conquer through a deliberate, prescribed fear of the underclass. This “fear of the vandal” manifests inside popular centrist media (much in the same way racism works in America, the state; or how xenophobia works in American geopolitics the world over). While canon can be subverted, it isn’t automatically and must be reconfigured by workers in solidarity against state interests that will defend itself; i.e., through its lifeline, the Superstructure, to keep the operation of infinite growth and efficient profit (the Base) flowing smoothly.
As such, subverting Overwatch‘s Odessa is like lampooning the British Queen; it will be met with criticism from some, but the critiques will be variable, gradient. Some people might secretly approve of our guilty pleasure; others might join in, camping the canon (thus the Amazon) in all the usual cryptonymic, canon-vs-camp ways:
(exhibit 100c4: Artist: Persephone van der Waard. Originally I was excited to see Odessa come out, in Overwatch 2; I thought the “sequel” would introduce more characters, better graphics, and a longer story [the usual sequel-itis affair] to a game that I had already played quite a bit. Instead, Blizzard scrapped most of their planned content in specular fashion, sticking to the usual FOMA/microtransaction model. Meanwhile, Odessa’s glow diminished, having largely been “Amazon bait” for bigoted people, disappointingly containing a fair amount of sexist lines and a genocidal backstory. At the time I did this picture [July 4th, 2022], she had not been released outside of the beta, and I tried to create a sexy scenario that married clumsy antiwar sentiments [“Make love, not war”] to Blizzard’s centrist pantheon of strong-looking women. Obviously Odessa is just a white, settler-colonial version of Aunty Entity from Mad Max 3 [1985] but I wanted to play off the idea of power and resistance through a BDSM exchange that mildly subverted who was in control of who during two soldiers’ bedroom antics.
In hindsight, the fantasy feels stuck in the usual bigotries [the black servant/soldier appeasing Her Majesty by licking her white cunt] but revisiting this photo towards my book’s completion makes me feel happy to have realized I could have done better at the time; it shows my own progression towards a better state of mind. At the same time, a public exhibit of private behaviors mirrors the fetish outfit as wielded through monstrous roleplay that walks the tightrope when camping canon: “animals embody the canonical language of power and resistance as something to camp”; i.e., the role of the soldier as a tough “war bitch” whose boss persona is set aside in the bedroom and mounted by the service top servicing a “good dog!” in ways that can be camped. Speaking from experience, such “puppy play” feels good, but the context does not yield itself immediately at first glance; its animalized demonic BDSM and kink, and aesthetics of death and power must be explained, generally in exhibits like these during holistic study as an ongoing dialectical-material affair.)
Derrida summarized this effect with his own adage: “There is no outside of the text,” meaning the line between people, their creations, and the broader material world is less concrete than many care to admit. The dialogic is inconstant, in turmoil, and prone to change as the world turns, but also the gears of war beyond the hyperreal illusion. Indeed, centrism bounding from war pastiche amounts to a reactionary stance because it denies actual change in favor of perceived change even when the actual devastation is made known: hollow power offered by fake propaganda victories are preferable to some because they chase away Derrida’s pesky spectres of Marx. Disguise and ambiguity both ways, the state impersonating us and vice versa, mid-Amazonomachia.
For TERFs, these empty “victories” are enough, a game of pretend that’s preferable to doing any kind of legitimate activism (re: Jadis, in a nutshell). Sadly such “wins” are bogus: As the state passes policies that rob people of their human rights, capitalists paper over these abuses with neoliberal illusions that people can enjoy and bicker about: centrist myths that depict everything as “fine.” Like Plato’s shadows, they become the normal way to perceive things beyond our regular scope of vision. Tying into the Faustian bargain, canonical war pastiche presents their victories as somehow translating to real life, when really they just keep things the same by whitewashing societal inequalities perpetuated by the elite.
(artist: The Art Mage)
For example, Junker Queen—aka Odessa Stone—becomes queen of Junkertown by defeating its patriarch in gladiatorial combat, touting some kind of “special victory” that trickles down for everyone around her. It’s literally bread-and-circus pastiche, changing nothing at a systemic level: Odessa is queen of the arena and the arena isn’t going anywhere. Her tenure isn’t going to change anything because her desire to be violent through team-based gladiatorial sports is a defining part of her character. It’s literally her character’s ludic role in Overwatch 2. She’s a fascist feminist, a Dark Hippolyta who hides her submission to state power behind a veneer of rebellion/”doing an activism”; the mask hasn’t slipped yet, but the covert nature of its design is constant: fool the public into thinking their avatar presents the epitome of praxis while also being an ontological extension of the state told through war pastiche. She’s to Australia what Chun Li is to China or Cammy to the Union Jack: a standard-bearer but also, in her case, a white Indian—TERF Mad Max acting out “gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss” for a war boss.
Now that we’ve outlined war pastiche in relation to TERFs, let’s explore its nature further through Odessa—i.e., as a mechanism that leaps from Capitalism and its dominant ideologies: neoliberalism and fascism. Similar to Imperator Furiosa, Odessa is a girl war boss, except her tomboy blend of fascist and neoliberal ideas happens through appropriated feminism; a gender-critical herbo with a real mean streak. She’s a war dog who spits, farts and drools [and barks and bites in bed if you want her to]. She demonstrates the fact that, while TERFs tend to present as moderate, they will only do so until Capitalism enters crisis; this crisis happens through frontier/colonial war as the unstable venue of endless profit, exploiting vulnerable parties on the geopolitical stage. Brutal mercenaries like Odessa play a vital role in this process, recursively initiating war through vengeful origin stories: in crisis, she colonizes the wasteland for future people like her part of the same invasion structure beset by capital in decay (the disco in disguise a hauntological [retro-future] cryptonymy/apocalypse for such things). Amazons are the postpunk gatekeepers of apocalypse, which can go either way but for Blizzard is purely unironic: Odessa’s a white-Indian heel.
While Odessa embodies the contract killer with an axe to grind, she nevertheless postures as an inclusive feminist liberator uplifting Junkertown from patriarchal rule through Blizzard’s marketing of her. This liminal stance tracks with how neoliberals and fascists “argue” on how to articulate war, largely differing through presentation insofar as the disguise is concerned. Neoliberals favor the Greater Good argument, but also make Nazis; fascists fabricate betrayals and demand revenge, which neoliberals allow (only caring about profit and the freedom of expression towards profit during manufactured scarcity and conflict). Under Capitalism, each ideology mythologizes home defense against a variety of recursively manufactured enemies, often to absurd (and vague) extremes. This absurdity extends to the “defenders,” who walk the line between self-defense and pre-emptive aggression (so-called “false flag operations”). Defense of the nation will always lead to genocide through abjection of a total enemy—Communism, the oppressed, the Indigenous, trans folk, as replaced through a bad-faith double.
Odessa checks all of these boxes. First, she offers Junkertown a sacrifice, ousting the wicked king for the Greater Good. Becoming its much-touted white savior, she continues her revenge killings at and around Junkertown, wearing her “accomplishments” as war trophies—an act Blizzard deliberately whitewashes by having Odessa dress in abstract gore, cartoonish metal skulls that help disguise her genocidal nature: a violent killer who slaughters the wasteland’s indigenous population. Butchering “feral” people endemic to a foreign, “desolate” place, Odessa is an avatar of death who wears her victims’ bones. What’s more, she passes herself off as “one of them,” a “white Indian” strapped in leather, covered in spikes, and swinging knives and axes. Through this native persona, Odessa seeks to transform the land by developing it away from its natural state through an “improved” version of the Junker King’s arena: hers. “In place of a dark lord, you would have a queen!”
Not only is Odessa a caricature of racist, genocidal vaudeville; she’s explained to have had no choice in carrying it out. Exiled by the same evil king at a young age, Odessa takes to her newfound role as a willful, hungry scrapper. Eventually claiming the top dog rank (a gang hierarchy of power in prison systems; e.g., Wentworth) through brute force, she survives to avenge her exiled family’s death, killing the Wastelanders responsible and revenge-killing a great deal more through collective punishment (on par with John Brooder from Bone Tomahawk, 2015). She’s Medusa but blindly petrifying those more marginalized than herself even after she’s “made it”: the hatred and deception have internalized, hybridizing in a terrible icon that Blizzard sells, FOMO-style. Odessa was literally the poster girl for their “sequel” (several levels of false advertising happening at once).
While this violent past serves to explain her racialized bloodlust, the game displaces human racism by having Odessa discriminate against a robotic underclass inside a system of competitive persecution. When Odessa eventually triumphs, she replaces the king as the system’s top-performer. She inherits his arena and its bards, who praise her victory in ways not unlike Lord Humongous or Immorton Joe (but closer to Tina Turner’s villain, Aunty Entity, in Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome): through rock and roll. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss…” As such, Odessa triumphs in a world where only the strong survive. It also reflects the troubling existence of systemic bias in the real world. To that, the hero is a half-real canary in the mine; a bad omen shadow-on-the-wall dressed up as good, hearty and “empowering.”
This bogus power can be attractive for those looking to control others through the endorsement of fantasies. Jadis loved the Mad Max movies to some extent (Fury Road was their favorite). Out of the four, they disliked Thunderdome‘s second half/ending but absolutely loved the power that Entity had over Max. Indeed, she was a shrewd woman, one that George Miller openly admired in 2023 after Turner’s death:
When someone was such a life force, you don’t expect them to go. Of course it happens to everybody, but Tina was quite something.
When we made Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, I knew her music like everyone else, but it was her persona that drew me to her – particularly for the role [of Aunty Entity]. I knew where the music came from, where her power came from. In this Mad Max wasteland, anyone who survives, let alone becomes a dominant force, has had to survive a lot of things that would normally diminish a person. Every time we talked about Aunty Entity as we were writing, we’d say: “Oh, someone like Tina Turner.” She was the only person we could think of. And sure enough, she was the only person we ever asked.
She was the opposite of a diva. I had the privilege of working with her and getting to see just what made her so magnificent [Jadis loved Turner’s legs; indeed, I agree: she had a spectacular pair and maintained her stage body most of her life]. She was so sharp, mentally. She was acutely aware of the dynamics of every situation. She was very funny and playful, she loved to laugh a lot. She was a person of real substance. It wasn’t just the surface. I think that rises out of someone who endures so much in early life and uses it to become incredibly wise (source: “She Was the Opposite of a Diva”).
Neither Entity nor Odessa are liberators, though. Entity is the woman-of-color girl boss who exploits the town with backroom deals and bread-and-circus/strongwoman-as-a-circus-act (exhibit 7a; re: “The Nation-State“) “democracy.” Using these, she temporarily gets Max—our white savior—on the hip, then rides off into the sunset laughing at him like Baron Samedi. Odessa is white, but also victimized by a white patriarch. Her own origin story presents an imperial whitewash, the “colonist” having settled “empty” land (robots are not animals, let alone people); in doing so, she scapegoats anyone rightfully against the state, the colonized “omnics” presented as pure, “feral” evil that must be completely destroyed by someone who appears good (the Muslim and the crusader, the drow and the elf, the cowgirl and Indian, etc).
Except by proudly celebrating Odessa’s origin story as an unrivaled, genocidal slayer—one who is unapologetically racist—Blizzard appropriate girl-boss feminism, dressing up Australian settler colonialism as centrist science fiction: She “beats” her former master by becoming said master in the bargain. Again, it’s neoliberalism covering for fascism in defense of capital.
Loyal consumers—but especially the male side of the weird canonical nerd spectrum—worship this patent absurdity without question. However, Blizzard’s Ozzie rock opera pales in comparison to the utter bombast that is Gloryhammer’s “The Unicorn Invasion of Dundee” (2013). I want to examine the latter as it outlines the base mechanics of origin stories in incredibly simple and enjoyable rock ‘n roll language (a musical genre that was historically taken from people of color and appropriated to a white audience). In short, it can easily be enjoyed by just about anyone, but applies the universal adaptability of aesthetics within Zizek’s original framing: music.
Indeed, the war boss and her ludic kayfabe often go hand-in-hand with catchy music as an emotional appeal with an aesthetic moral focus (a concept we’ll apply to the parallel histories of Spielberg’s rescuing of “good war,” in just a moment); it becomes the self-pitying before-and-after ballad of the apocalypse unto a better time laid low as set to a rueful music box. As discussed in our thesis statement (re: exhibit 1a1a1a2, “Thesis Body“), this is the basic approach to the monomyth as centralized through videogames as franchised, neoliberal propaganda since the 1980s; e.g., Mega Man 4′s [1991] maudlin intro of an idealized peace beset by chaos; re: “Then one day, the industrial robots all over the world went on a total rampage”—a worker’s rebellion dressed up as total calamity and set to sad midi, the fall of the glorious utopia/futurist kingdom upset by a wily rabble rouser under Capitalist Realism sold to children (re: “Modularity and Class“):
All the while, the seminal monomythic plight is good versus evil as hegemonic, centrist. Rather than help workers or understand their plight, then, the male/traditionally masculine hero is “chosen” by said dogma to restore order through a heroic arming with stolen/prophesized weapons before embarking on a generic “fetch” quest that re-captures and return something stolen from the elite—the Triforce, a baby Metroid, Princess Zelda or Toadstool [whose marriage to the hero is a kind of “maiden tradwife” assimilation fantasy]—while putting down rebels or fascists in the process (space pirates, koopas, robot masters).
Like so many tools for the state, the monomyth protagonist’s anger is weaponized in an unhealthy way—i.e., that isn’t constructive towards developing Communism, but the same-old maintaining of capitalistic structures that exploit everyone except those at the very top. Fascists are put down like rabid dogs; Communists are chaos demons or feral zombies. Regardless of the hero’s affect—if they are innocent, jaded or edgy/pissed off—the material outcome is identical to the propaganda of Camelot hauntologized in a medieval of varying aesthetics of war and concealment; i.e., the futuristic paradise, decaying retro-future, or once-upon-a-time a post-apocalypse, mid-eco-fascism. The code being used is merely preferential in its cryptonymic arbitration, from Amazons to unicorns:
(artist: Simone Torcasio)
Note: “The Unicorn Invasion of Dundee” is such a great, campy number that I had to write it more than once—first, here, and then again in “Follow the Sign.” It might be blind pastiche at the end of the day, but I still love it anyways. —Perse, 5/5/2025
As such, the premise for Gloryhammer’s song is simple, stupid and violent, but also dogmatic: The good city of Dundee suddenly finds itself under attack by an invading outsider force, the evil wizard Zargothrax and his… *checks notes* …army of undead unicorns. Schlock aside, there’s no history to speak of, the good land deliberately emptied of anything that might suggest genocide and conquest committed by its noble rulers. Presentation-wise, we’re left with a clean, simple binary: a good team that did nothing wrong and a bad team that wrongs them in every way possible (the obsession with a foreign plot). This makes the hero’s mighty oath—”I will make Zargothrax die!”—something to enact with impunity. Palingenesis begins with a fictionalized nation death, followed by a return to greatness. It’s campy thus can be enjoyed, but the framework it follows is literally the false flag operation/American revenge fantasy. Knowing that can co-exist with enjoying the song and it won’t make us worse people or less cool; it will make us class conscious.
Such black-and-white, “blind” framings are not only possible in neoliberal/fascist stories; they’re normalized through this hauntological cycle of nation death and rebirth, again and again (re: the First, Second and Third Reich and all the neoliberal simulacra a Cycle of Kings in the larger narrative of the crypt). Their war pastiche pointedly dichotomizes relations between the oppressor and oppressed, flipping the script by constantly creating cartoonishly evil villains that simply appear ex nihilo. Fascists would treat Zargothrax as the scapegoat.
In neoliberal terms, though, Zargothrax is the fascist-from-somewhere-else, making the prince of Dundee functionally American (or South Vietnam). America needs cartoon villains like Zargothrax (or Red Falcon, Skeletor, Cobra, etc) to justify American totalitarianism on the global stage; moreover, America needs blackguards that act “worse” than America, generally announced by various normalized color schemes: purple for royalty, red for Communism, and black for fascism. The visible results don’t reject fascism; they depict fascism as a visible threat to do battle with forever.
Endless war makes legitimate rebellion against America impossible. Zargothrax can’t be a sympathetic villain, let alone a victim. War canon depicts evil’s relationship to good as inflexible, with zero room for nuance. However, to ensure that war also never stops, neoliberals also make war canon flexible. Teams can exchange members according to various military roles, personifying these roles under competing banners. Those under the good banner can even wear purple, black or red if they want; their team can ally with former enemies, including fascists, to defeat a common foe.
So long as “good” triumphs over “evil,” there is no cognitive dissonance when power aggregates; false power (illusions) coordinates workers against one another but also has them looking the other way as genocide escalates and eventually is carried out. Meanwhile, the Global South is being abused nonstop, its legends fueling the colonial guilt of the American psyche poured out onto paper, film and silicon; their crisis fuels the fear of revenge, thus making trans people the scapegoat chosen by conservative groups this time around. We enter the state of exception in the Global North, treated like orcs and goblins, but also drow, Medusa and xenomorphs (the former two anti-Semitic rape epidemics and blood libel; the latter threat each a stigma anthromorph: the spider, snake and wasp as enemies to squash). Like an arcade cabinet, the sensation is cheap and fast but “adds up,” demanding hordes of abject, zombie-level casualties to bring the high back around: a high score (Vietnam’s success was measured in kill count; re: “Military Optimism“). The whore’s revenge challenges said score by breaking the system leading to its endless tally (re: the structure of invasion, on and offstage).
Alongside commercialized or geopolitical examples, these moderate arrangements play out laterally through socio-political platforms like Twitter. For example, the LBG Alliance allies against trans and non-binary people, framing them as enemies of progress already achieved by moderate, centrist politics. Said “progress” is really a form of centralization tied to capital advertised through political pamphlets. Not only do its members use DARVO obscurantism against their political enemies (source tweet: Sophie Robinson’s defense from people basically shouting “We’re not Nazis, you’re the real Nazis!” 2022); they describe their own positions as “scientific” (code for “state-endorsed”) and under attack by ideologues from the Right and the Left, while also masquerading as a charity group to front their hostilities (Lily Wakefield’s “LGB Alliance Court Case to Decide Whether Anti-Trans Group Is Stripped of Charity Status,” 2022). These are fascist tactics, dyed-in-the-wool (which neoliberalism relies on to keep the market “free,” thus in the hands of those with total power).
Regardless of where and how these warlike activities transpire/materialize, any smaller offense becomes sanctionable provided it serves the Greater Good: furthering the profitable narrative that America is morally good, hence justified in its violent acts. This violence can be from America, or from allies of America (the West/Global North: Great Britain, France, Australia, etc) materially legitimized by the global superpower. Behind this chessboard of jingoistic façades lurk the bourgeoisie, whose hegemony remains unthreatened. By profiting from war and continuously selling it back to the public, they market “good war” as synonymous with prosperity for everyone; i.e., the LGBA fights the good fight, while trans people supposedly do not.
This, of course, is total bullshit/abjection. Capitalism is prosperous for the elite, who hoard their wealth through a top-down material system that justifies its own abuses by hiding them behind material illusions, including weaponized hauntology and carceral chronotopes. While neoliberals rely on fascists to survive, both ideologies create villains and heroes that obscure genocide as endemic to Capitalism. Enemies for neoliberals are simply evil, whereas enemies for fascists are fierce, dangerous and weak. Defeating either materially benefits the elite by deliberately altering people’s collective understanding of history—by funding the very stories the Base consumes. By using fantasy-as-Superstructure (a page taken from Tolkien’s fantasy canon, published after the establishment of the Western and Eastern Blocs), neoliberals erase or severely weaken allegory critical of the nation-state. In doing so, they validate the latter as sovereign, but also eternal.
(source: Bioshock: Infinite concept art, 2013)
Iconoclasts don’t simply expose how neoliberal stories obscure systemic abuse as coldly economic, the gears crushing all workers up like rendered corpses fed to the next line of chattel to fatten up (re: The Matrix); they reveal and condemn the poisonous, centrist ideologies that encourage direct abuse, its political endorsement, or apathy whenever and wherever it occurs. This includes TERFs, whose hatred for the patriarchy has become performatively insincere, all while hating trans people’s actual guts.
Apart from disguising fascism and endorsing actual war through war pastiche, TERFs emulate neoliberals in a third way: using their stonewalling rhetoric to enable trans genocide by rescuing the good name of war. Already afraid of the middle class, TERF anti-activism stems from the neoliberal’s other weapon of choice: words, but especially political incrementalism. Incrementalism is a deliberate, moderate hindering of emancipatory policies through a rhetoric of veiled threats—that barbaric regression will inevitably occur should attempts at more equal change be met. Whether through feet-dragging or downright stonewalling, neoliberals belittle emancipatory activists, claiming the latter “doesn’t understand politics.” All the while, they court their covert allies, fascists, for all to see.
Without changing anything material, neoliberals love to present reasoned arguments as being “automatically victorious,” a stating-of-the-obvious that renders evil obsolete inside a debate circle that anyone can attend. Historically this doesn’t track; the free marketplace of ideas, much like geopolitics, is merely a slippery slope fallacy that reverts to structures of power along material lines. Workers pay the price, suffering genocidal abuse under relapsing fascism while neoliberals go to war. Meanwhile on the debate stage, moderate superiority traps these same liberal hawks in a cycle of embarrassing rebuttals, telling the overt racist they’re wrong when the racist person is only there in bad faith. It’s all for show, a cycle of debate pastiche designed to make moderates appear reasoned against someone worse than them a priori.
This rhetoric whitewashes genocide as a present, ongoing event, rewriting oppressed histories into increasingly sanitized, lucrative forms. Those who challenge this process are defamed as morons or enemies of the state by those who are more moderate in their criticisms (e.g., Knowing Better vs Bad Empanada; re: “The Truth About Columbus“). In turn, endless consumerism upholds the neoliberal virtue of orderly conflict, which normalizes genocide by commercially translating it into good teams and bad teams of any sort—not just signature baddies, but nostalgic positions of war that individual consumers can emulate as vicarious champion units thereof, killing their evil counterparts in droves: nameless ninjas, karate dojos, power rangers, pirates, top gun graduates, etc. All the while, lateral political discussions unfold about war as something good that must occur. War is eternal, competing through moral positions tied to material conditions that do not change. Through this ceaseless back-and-forth, good defeats evil through two outlets: superior violence and dogma projected through the global consumerism already mentioned.
We’ve looked at war pastiche through the false power of pussyhat feminism and herbo war bosses (re: gaslight, gatekeep…). To be holistic, I’d like to spend the next several pages examining the myth from its male, Patriarchal source in a contemporary form: the good war through Saving Private Ryan, specifically its role as hypercanonical military propaganda galvanized by music as a driving force (this portion was written several years ago for my discontinued book, Neoliberal and Fascist Propaganda in Yesterday’s Heroes, when I was still living in Florida with Jadis). Then we’ll conclude the chapter section by looking at several other neoliberal tactics for stonewalling any form of activism that protests neoconservatism/renewed war fervor in canonical (thus heteronormative) war pastiche and nostalgia.
The reason I want to examine the past is that American transphobia is generally couched within Pax Americana through the myth of the good war as “good ol’-fashioned.” In this zeitgeist, non-cis queer people either do not exist, or become reduced to a regression of moderate “olive branches” towards cis-queer people that exclude their trans, intersex and non-binary comrades; and the cycle informing future videogames copying the same basic pattern while selling it to the usual suspects: white, cis-het boys and men (and those who emulate them).
To that, the theatre of endless war requires endless propaganda, which places a tremendous, constant need on music to invigorate war as an American franchise that is fundamentally heteronormative; i.e., not just the pageantry of Star Wars and xenophobia of Aliens, but any kind of media that pops up like toadstools whenever America invades someone else. I’m not just talking Freedom Fries, Nelson DeMille paperbacks, or cheesy 9/11 ballads; I’m talking about videogames like Doom, Metroid and Call of Duty that—like cartoons and cinema before them—all rely on various styles of anthemic music[4] to excite the consumer playing war as heteronormatively nostalgic.
For the rest of the section, we’ll focus on Saving Private Ryan, but there’s also plenty of videogame musics that personify war to maintain the destructive, myopic illusion of Capitalist Realism; e.g., the empowerment fantasies of Street Fighter through fighting as a sport (footnote, above) but also more openly sports-themed, team-based videogames.
Saving Private Ryan was a huge part of this nostalgia, whose waves of terror invoke Meerloo’s menticide as draped in the laurels of victory and American liberty. The same language used to divide the working classes of the American colonies, Howard Zinn points out, would be used in Saving Private Ryan to justify futures calls to battle, for glory and ultimately (for the elite) profit: the tireless recreation and simulation of the film’s own verisimilitude as “realistic.” Music is central to this aim. It conveys triumph and tragedy by appealing to our emotions, coding either outcome through a very particular goal: exploitation.
Regarding Saving Private Ryan as standing in a long line of American war apologia, this audiovisual attack deliberately mythologizes the individual. Placed in the hands of other men and consequently threatened with total annihilation, this person can try to make something of their lives. Such paradoxes are a goldmine for neoliberal politicians who want for soldiers. They need them to fight their proxy wars. Faced with this obvious contention, they will rehabilitate the present by regressing to nobler times.
Any good statesman can do this. Barrack Obama, for example, cites For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) as one of his favorite stories. So did John McCain. Both men love Hemmingway’s hero, Robert Jordan, who fights for a cause that is equally doomed, meaningless and brave: “They’re fierce political opponents, but John McCain and Barack Obama do agree on a literary matter. Each man has picked Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls as a favorite, inspirational even” (source: Renee Montagne’s “Robert Jordan, Hemingway’s Bipartisan Hero,” 2008). Jordan’s story results in zero accountability for those at the top, and a general lack of empathy all around. As Jordan is sacrificed for the greater good, neoliberal bipartisans exploit his death; they get to puff themselves up while peddling endless war as inevitable, but salvageable with the proper mindset: war can be good if you think of it as good—i.e., by remembering the images “from” good wars, not bad ones like Vietnam (another reason for war hawks on either side of the establishment aisle to love/hate Black Sabbath: the cryptonymy of sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll abused by white Western men, American or not).
This engineered mindset argues that “war is chaos” without questioning why. Instead, it offers the common worker two shitty choices: meaningless death or meaningful death. This approach is all too common in canonical war propaganda, whose narratives are deliberately engineered to offer ultimatums. But even this choice is illusory. While Captain Miller dies in Saving Private Ryan, for example, he did not choose his time and place; neither did their training help to keep his troopers alive. Despite the appearance of sound and fury, though, Captain Miller isn’t blasted to kingdom come; he is methodically sacrificed and honored as an advertisement of valor. Thus Spielberg only flirts with chaos. It remains a deliberately drafted message that humanizes the Americans, while demonizing their prescribed enemies.
Leading up to the final moment, Saving Private Ryan is incredibly nostalgic and deceptive. Awash with military pathos, it pointedly phrases the entire struggle as foregone, but also good (Kay and Skittles’ “How Enemy At The Gates Lies To You: Saving Private Ryan, Othering, And Cold War Narratives,” 2022; timestamp: 28:43) and decided by an out-of-touch general in love with Lincoln’s letter to a widow. This appeal to emotion is manipulative all on its own, his underlings hanging their heads in shame. In turn, the men they order to save Ryan bicker about their lot, weighing duty and personal responsibility against the desire to mutiny. It’s voiced as patently absurd. And yet, as their friends around them slowly die, these same critics abandon any form of resistance. They choose to save Ryan to feel better about themselves: “Maybe saving Private Ryan is the one good thing we did in this whole, godawful shitty mess; maybe if we save him, we can all get to go home.” This illusion of autonomy coincides with the ideal soldier as emotionally committed to their obvious function: the forlorn hope.
This tactic of suicide is dubiously endorsed by Spielberg’s cunning maneuvers. The sleight-of-hand occurs through the appearance of contradiction: Whereas the opening shows the men on Omaha Beach being cut to ribbons (invoking the Almighty as they die for a Christian[5] god they’re taught to worship and fear through staged combats, the scene set for sacrifice as thousands-upon-millions of patriots for the Great Good, then sold as propaganda decades later), the last scene in the film showcases an impossible last stand. The heroes kill unrealistic amounts of Germans, before being sacrificed by Spielberg. He kills them one by one, saving Captain Miller for last. Mortally wounded, Miller tells Ryan to “earn it.”
(source: National Guard, 2013)
At first, Miller’s order might seem bizarre or esoteric, until we see the effect on Ryan. Decades later, he hates himself in a very Christian way—i.e., thinking himself a “bad man” because someone “better” than him died to save him (making Spielberg the ironically Jewish drafter of a Christ-like sacrifice). Thus, what starts off as a documentary on the horrors of war transforms into war propaganda channeled through survivor’s guilt by a Jewish author of Christian dogma (a token reversal of the Christian defense: I have done good so I can do no wrong” becoming “I have survived wrong so we can do no wrong!”
What’s worse, Spielberg’s target is the next generation as having “survived” a war they never lived to see. He presents scene after scene of nameless dead boys eulogized by music. The heroes look on, but so do we. Their banter of resistance gradually relents. Spielberg guilt-trips the audience by presenting dutiful soldiers who appear to make their own choices. They babysit the clean-faced Ryan, then die to save him, leaving behind fields of marble crosses, but also songs that evoke the victorious dead (the obsession with victory being a common denominator between the Allied and Axis Powers, or indeed, any nation-state marching soldiers off to war).
Leading up to the sacrifice, these men are shown to be somewhat feminine by American standards. Schoolteachers, translates and dress-makers, they joined the war effort and survived countless battles only to die saving Ryan because they “chose” to. The last among them tasks Ryan with the impossible: to earn what no man can realistically hope to live up to (there is always someone stronger). To borrow (and twist) Jane Austen’s infamous, unhappy question about Marianne Dashwood, Ryan was born to an extraordinary fate:
With such a confederacy against him—with a knowledge so intimate of their goodness, and with a conviction of their fond attachment to himself—which at last, though long after it was observable to everybody else, burst on him—what could he do? (to riff on Austen’s Sense and Sensibility).
This shotgun “wedding to war” plays not just on Ryan, but anyone who didn’t serve. And even those most virtuous in Saving Private Ryan are compelled to violence—not just Miller, but his obvious foil, the translator. Keeping with the “false power” narrative, killing the enemies and/or dying on the front lines “makes a man out of them”—a perfect simulation for war-as-a-business, hence why it was adapted to the FPS as an already popular videogame genre.
Spielberg’s vengeful war epic is a far cry from Schindler’s List (1990). His visual arguments are intentionally set to music that play on overwrought emotions. Spielberg repeats ideas back to them using music, offering criticism that is outweighed by sheer emotional freight as the mask slowly comes off. By the time it has, we’re clearly meant to hate the Germans as pure evil. These bastards deserve to be shot, even by dweebs like us. This cycle of war pastiche is hopelessly recycled in ways that suck the life out of the material, but also its consumers through the zombification of war anthems.
Per Zinn, Spielberg is singing a very different tune about war than German Sherman did (an early “author” of so-called “total/modern war”) comparing closer to Eisenhower’s cheery “order of the day” from 1944: “I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.” Small wonder considering he was tasked within leading these “hard war” offenses on the field against his own countrymen:
The Vicksburg Campaign signaled the beginning of the Union’s hard war policy, permitting whatever was necessary including the destruction of civilian property to bring the conflict to an end. During the Vicksburg Campaign, Grant lived off the land for a time, allowing his army to take what it needed from civilians in its path. Approximately seven months after the fall of Vicksburg, Sherman applied the “hard hand of war” against central Mississippi during the Meridian operation.
This operation was different in that, for the first time, Sherman instructed Union troops to wage a war of destruction, leaving civilians with enough for survival but not enough to support military activity. The Meridian operation, which provided a blueprint for Sherman’s March to the Sea, was also an example of psychological warfare, meant to destroy any hope the people might have had of a Confederate victory (source: Bill of Rights Institute’s “William Tecumseh Sherman and Total War,” 2023).
The fact remains, war is a theatre and Sherman’s theatre was grim; 20th century war was grim until it wasn’t, becoming optimistic, forgotten, criminal, covert, then ultimately rescued by Spielberg. The barbarism and utter destruction of American-led war played into war fever as something to stoke in stages; deny, obfuscate and discredit was joined with the age-old narrative of American Liberalism, concealing the atrocities of war and selling war as something to ease people into states of subdued panic and alarm fatigue, over and over.
This can be the kayfabe of Vince McMahon’s ’90s wrestling during the Gulf War or the vigilante pastiche of neoliberal videogame streams like the Streets of Rage series or FPS across the board. A similar trend can be seen through the music that is used in war films, even if they’re not explicitly shot for “realism” (meaning they pertain to an attempt at historical accuracy regarding military regalia/army kit): Superhero movies the likes of which pushed America into WW2 in the minds of the middle-class public; team-based sports with monstrous-feminine herbos that make the men who run the show bank by playing the Nazi in-game, as well as symbolling TERF rhetoric and active violence in the streets; and the language of war as something to subvert, mid-entropy and state crisis.
In short, good music is catchy and lends itself well to any political movement as much as fetishized, Gothic aesthetics do. It can take hold of you, but this hold as affected by dialectical-material principles that shift. The context behind New Order’s “Blue Monday” (1983), then, was very different in its heyday than when used as an advertisement jingle for Wonder Woman: 1984 (2020).
(models: Zeuhl and Persephone van der Waard, taken by a wedding guest at my brother’s 2019 wedding)
For me, though, the context is idiosyncratic because of when, where and why I heard it: It was a song that Zeuhl especially loved and introduced to me in Manchester while we studied together at MMU. I loved it, at first. However, after they broke up with me and started telling me how I felt, I heard Peter Hook’s words (and postpunk) in an altogether different light. The cryptonymy was muddied by Zeuhl betraying me the way Hook and company eventually sold out, themselves (as much through incompetence as bad faith; re: The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club):
How does it feel
To treat me like you do? […]
I still 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 (source).
Note; Zeuhl’s a regular character in my book series; for more mention of them and our Manchester adventure, read “The Eyeball Zone” footnote detailing them at length (and “Non-Magical Detectives” to unmask them) —Perse, 5/5/2025
In turn, the same goes for Amazons and any other monstrous-feminine occupant of the Gothic as postpunk disguise; i.e., from oppositional cryptonymy as a matter of music combined with graffiti, bodies (superheroes operating as alter-egos that are, like Amazons, paradoxically exposed, on and offstage; re: “Prey as Liberators“):
(exhibit 100c5: Source: Jude Rodgers’ “A Watershed Moment in British Pop,” 2020. Jude writes:
“Blue Monday’s” reference points have been discussed by the band ever since. Its stuttering drum-machine beat mimicked one on Donna Summer’s 1979 track, “Our Love.” Its bassline was influenced by Sylvester’s disco hit, “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” and a twanging bass figure from Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack to For a Few Dollars More.
A robotic choir sound was sampled directly from Kraftwerk’s 1975 album track, “Uranium,” using a machine New Order had acquired, the Emulator. “Bernard and Stephen [Morris, fellow band member] had worked out how to use it by spending hours recording farts,” Gilbert explained in a 2013 Guardian interview.
The track was released only as a 12-inch, and its iconic sleeve was designed by artist Peter Saville to look like a computer floppy disc, complete with die-cut sections. It also featured coloured blocks and a key that spelt out the band’s name and tracks. Their label, Factory Records, sold the single at a retail price of £1, but each cost £1.10 to produce. It sold more than 500,000 in this version, a loss of £50,000 for Factory.)
Divorced from my personal context overseas in the late 2010s—but also the band’s patchwork creation of the work, Shaun of the Dead (2004) inside jokes, or HAL-9000 eyeball art (an imitation of Margaret Thatcher’s all-seeing eye) —the song simply amounts to the likes of a blind replica on par with “Zombie Simpsons” and so much undead pastiche: empty and replicated, missing the human element. Furthermore, any political bite has vanished; all that remains in the product hiding in plain sight (e.g., The Simpsons‘ El Barto or Capcom’s Kimberly as a recuperation of rap and graffiti art into merchandise to buy).
(exhibit 100c6: Artist, right: Reiq. A year after Blade Runner and a year before 1984 [and Ridley Scott’s Apple computer commercial; source: Retro Recipes, 2023]. The constant feeling of surveillance is canonized, contrasted against the street/graffiti artist as an unruly vandal whose activities must be reframed within a polite, middle-class aesthetic: the “kid-friendly” punk, not the radical kind that’s “bad for business” [e.g., Graffiti Radical’s media feed]. As Rudolf Rocker writes in Anarcho-Syndicalism [1938]:
Power operates only destructively, bent always on forcing every manifestation of life into the straitjacket of its laws. Its intellectual form of expression is dead dogma, its physical form brute force. And this unintelligence of its objectives sets its stamp on its supporters also and renders them stupid and brutal, even when they were originally endowed with the best of talents. One who is constantly striving to force everything into a mechanical order at last becomes a machine himself and loses all human feeling (source).
To be blunt, Kimberly is made for these purposes; i.e., a sexpot token street athlete who moonlights through an alter-ego because she chooses to, not out of necessity [e.g., Peter Parker syndrome—the weekend sleuth]. She’s a vigilante, commodified with a system that profits off her image as “cute,” “hip” and obsessed with nostalgia as something to hook youngsters on; in short, she’s false rebellion/controlled opposition as a total package—the sexy ninja girl bred on dumb comic books: “The idea has become the institution.”
[sources: Graffiti Radical, Bene Regoef, and Dywizjon 161]
Conversely the idea of radical graffiti treats the world like a canvas to convey systemic wrongs—i.e., people before property. Art becomes sloganized in ways that cannot be controlled and, indeed, are unconcerned with the way it goes about so long as the message is communicated without hurting workers. If private property/capital is repurposed for this aim, then all the better. As always, catchy-but-empty slogans like Blizzard’s “Hack the planet!” are AstroTurf gibberish and should be avoided [or at least repurposed]; but for every word emptied of meaning by capitalist shenanigans, the anti-capitalist sentiment is conveyed, in part through the destruction of actual corporate/state property mixed with ironic humor and, at times, absurdism: “Sex is cool but have you ever fucked the system?” [source tweet: Radical Graffiti]. Genuine revolution isn’t bought in franchised stores, simply to be a cool sticker for its own sake; it’s what the sticker is attached to and why—often single-copy emphera/snapshots working through the viral nature of human language to incorporate the universal adaptability of symbols, music, photographs and icons [often in concert] in ways that subvert and repurpose problematic elements, or reinstall gritty revolutionary sentiment as a legitimate symbol of activism and oppression [no Nazi punks, in other words, but also moderate/recuperated “punks”]; e.g., the picket sign as embodied by sex workers holding signs but also wearing and personifying them mid-struggle while holding the cameras themselves [the best defense/means of expose police abuse is photographing everything] exhibit 62a2.)
War music is no different in terms of how it can become blind pastiche, with Saving Private Ryan splintering into countless copycats. At first, the sets were the same; the guns were the same; the music was the same. From Medal of Honor (1999) came Call of Duty (2003), Battlefield and a veritable legion of online sequels that showed war in the past, present and future, at various places around the globe. They sold through a tacit argument—of “empowering” players through violence as part of a larger conflict, while furtively acclimating them for war as something to hear about, or even participate in themselves.
Furthermore, while the trend starts with “nobler” wars, Battlefield: 1942 (2002) gives way to Vietnam (2004), until games like Battlefield 2: Modern Combat (2005) and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007) approach modern war as neoliberal—not a defense from the Axis Powers, but simply foreign policy being business-as-usual. Music becomes a way to rehabilitate these proxy wars by occasionally re-invoking Spielberg’s musical arguments.
For instance, the music in Allied Assault (2002) is strikingly beautiful; e.g., the game’s main theme by Michael Giacchino. It nonetheless frames war
- on neutral ground
- in romantic language
- with pointed goals
The developers of Allied Assault carefully leveled this approach at the next generation, teaching them to “earn it.” This can be done as many times as needed. As public attitudes on war invariably become dovish, neoliberal politicians play their part. So do giant review mills like IGN, routinely awarding Call of Duty clones with reliably high marks in order to manipulate gullible consumers. In turn, consumers become fans; fans “do their part” at home, becoming reactionaries who attack SJWs (Thought Slime’s “How the Far-Right Weaponizes Nostalgia,” 2020) and other threats to the neoliberal war machine. Such persons are grifters on every register.
The biggest zombies, then, are the consumers themselves (evoking George Romero’s “braindead mall” from 1978, albeit in the 21st century’s online videogame market). Comments on YouTube videos like “Medal of Honor: Allied Assault | Full Soundtrack (OST)” (2020) present the music not simply as nostalgic, but tied to a digital homefront bearing equal freight: a time youngsters want to return to, where no queer people exist (the comments have since been removed; but when I originally wrote this section, several years ago, they were still available and hopelessly effusive towards Spielberg’s imaginary WW2 past).Regardless if it sounds serious or cheerful, any slice of this marketing device through music is designed to transport seasoned veterans and greenhorns alike to a “better time,” one inside videogames and the communities built around them. Consumers for war games are targeted young. Without realizing it, they become dependent on these poignantly emotional, parasocial/-textual connections.
Often, the consequence is consumer death, specifically of the text but also the market that produced it. In fact, there’s a whole genre on Alpha Beta Gamer dedicated to dead worlds and dead games (e.g., “No Players Online – Creepy PS1 Era Styled Horror Set in the Empty Servers of an Old FPS Game!” 2020). When those at the top inevitably move on, servers die and shut down; their players, like the veterans actual wars, are left feeling abandoned even betrayed.
Capital is undead; as a cycle of capital—and tied to various gameworlds whose glory has long since fled—these straw dogs become “undead,” desperately in search of new territories that can restore their dwindling lifeforce. They also view this as “normal” and present the cycle to the next in line, who become reliable consumers that don’t question the routine existence of a collapsing market. And so on. Zombie customers purchase music to capture the glory of a former time, a simpler era when men were men and women were women (and queer people didn’t exist). This demonstrates blind pastiche as useful to those who wish to preserve the status quo.
Think of Doom Eternal shamelessly riffing off Alan Silvestri’s Predator (1987) soundtrack, or Streets of Rage 4 shuffling through the franchise’s greatest hits (and visual style; re: exhibit 34c2, “Fatal Homecomings[6]“). This nostalgia can exist through tremendous feelings of manufactured joy. By selling it, neoliberals avoid accountability while capitalizing on a growing sense of apathy in their consumers.
The historical-material function (outcome) of this recycled dogma is systemic exploitation through Capitalism, aka genocide, as something to overlook through the power fantasy (regardless of its Faustian design). Ratified by Enlightenment thinkers, their abusive/coercive legacy produced a system of genocidal, Cartesian violence that neoliberals help conceal, mid-cryptonymy.
Much of this concealment is committed through an empty promise, swearing their abstract debate victories translate to the real world if the market decides it to be correct. This will never happen; the emancipatory nature of a liberalized capitalist market is the neoliberal’s biggest lie, weaving “waves of terror” into personal responsibility rhetoric sold back to the public through myths of good war that remain steadily dimorphic, Quixotic. Anyone who challenges this status quo is discredited, including the LGBTQ+ community. Non-cis queer persons and their allies will be deliberately framed as lunatics, liars, or doomed victims[7] of genocide who cannot be saved. Only the free market matters. The free market will change. Except it never, ever does.
Before we close out the subchapter and move onto NERFs, a few last-second points about neoliberals; i.e., the ideology of the (usually) men who run the show, the billion-dollar companies, industries and executives pushing the system to its limit. Neoliberals uphold the status quo with material advantage and rhetorical expertise. One, they press their considerable material means, preventing socio-material change through grand illusions: “An enemy that is out there, waiting to strike. Who will answer the call?” Think Professor X and his titular X-Men, waiting greedily to assimilate and pinkwash genocide. Magneto was the good guy in that story (exploitation and liberation share the same spaces, as do heroes and villains, humans and mutants)!
Two, neoliberals are white/token moderates, which means they belittle emancipatory politics (and its material offshoots created by iconoclasts) within a circuitous rhetoric of manners: Concession is polite, and it’s rude to ask for more than crumbs. Built on xenophobia, personal responsibility and canonical awe, neoliberals shame, hypnotize and divide workers, making a united stand against their bourgeois overlords impossible because work is not only good, it must be fought by white cis-het men and women. Doing so will “set you free,” as J.K. Rowling posits; it’s not its own reward, but the noose that will hang the TERF war boss where she stands, then call it “the cost of doing business/of war” (much like the German army was utterly brutalized at Stalingrad during the Eastern Front).
TERFs employ all of these rhetorical and material schemes in their own war on workers (e.g., Jadis shaming me for criticizing J.K. Rowling). Like neoliberals, TERFs also court fascists, helping disguise them not just by normalizing them, but through continual appeasement framed as honest debate. Through debate, TERFs use neoliberal illusions and incrementalism, making concessions that fascist dogma will tolerate.
This includes tolerating sexist media (or sexist interpretations of sexualized media) that fascists produce. Fascists will accept TERF aid in bad faith because they want to achieve official power. Once this happens, their generosity will vanish; they will betray their former allies by revoking TERF concessions and installing a fascist hierarchy in their stead. Odessa will vanish, replaced with a dutiful, soon-to-be-raped-and-battered trad wife (Novara Media’s “Ash Sarkar Debunks Tradwifes,” 2023); it’s the taming of the shrew, putting the tomboy in a wedding dress. In other words, its standard-issue cult behavior dressed up as palingenetic ultranationalism… trussed up in a feminist girdle that isn’t Communist—a real Jacob’s ladder in defense of the state, full of knots and inherent contradictions that agree that Leftism is the devil.
(source: Dazed’s “Pride Has Forgotten Its Truly Radical Roots,” 2018)
Courting fascists stonewalls activism by masking its greatest deterrents, calling these persons the neutralizing moderate language of “gender-critical” to hide what they really are: TERFs. By doing so, TERFs are fascist themselves, proudly calling themselves “not feminists” like Keen-Minshull does. To this, it’s important to view sexist media as potentially fascist, and fascist sexism as something to recognize in seemingly more moderate forms, each working at various speeds to keep things the same, thus guarantee fascism as internalized from an early age. Remember that preservations of the status quo variably lead to Capitalism-in-crisis. However, regardless of when that occurs, some groups are invariably imperiled before the boiling point. In other words, only white cis-het people are slow-boiled alive (as Three Arrows points out regarding the slow descent into fascism in the United States versus the Weimar Republic—source: “America’s Coming Weimar Moment,” 2021); trans, intersex and non-binary people are placed directly on the burner, feeling the heat from the start.
TERF moderates disguise this reality—and fascism’s endemic nature within Capitalism more broadly—through a variety of full- and half-masks. They can call themselves “gender-critical” if they want, but they have to show support to the elite; this means proudly displaying as girl-boss lesbians, swordswomen, and suffragettes, as well as using dogwhistles (re: the UK suffragette colors: purple, white, green). As such, their moderate veneer of outward good manners and activism-in-the-abstract becomes the perfect disguise for violent reactionaries to hide behind, endangering trans, intersex and non-binary people in the bargain. This is not an accident; TERFs intentionally target trans people to demonstrate their fealty to the powers that be, attacking the latter’s political targets in exchange for clemency (which is really just a brief reprieve) but also financial rewards. This includes sanctioning violence against trans allies, often through neurotypical “shower curtain” rhetoric (the traumatized woman afraid of being vulnerable in her own home, naked in the shower or taking a shit with her pants down, fearing the fag with a knife beyond the Black Veil—the transphobic defense of the safe space [the public/private restroom] a manufactured hysteria that echoing Radcliffe’s battered, xenophobic debutantes hearing voices in the walls of dark castle that has something dangerous inside; i.e., the weaponization of earned paranoia to fabricate imaginary enemies to benefit their abusers by turning the victim into a useful fool; its infantile conversion therapy—a factory of turning trad wives, but also potential activists, into adult child soldiers).
These mercenary tactics manifest within the queer community through paradoxical in-fighting and neurodivergent tokenism (queerness, especially gender-non-conforming examples, having a neurodivergent flavor): trans-on-trans violence and trans enbyphobia, specifically binary trans enbyphobes (discrimination against non-binary people by binary trans people).
(source tweet, Harmony Corrupted: July 20th, 2024)
Next, we’ll explore both forms of marginalized in-fighting in two parts. In part one, we’ll consider my own personal experiences: as a AMAB sex worker encountering transphobia from AFAB sex workers online, including trans men (whose betrayals Harmony helped resist through their supporting of me during these times, above). Part two will look at queer bosses like Natalie Wynn, Hunter Schafer and Buck Angel.
Onto “My Story of Trans-on-Trans Violence” and “Trans TERFs, NERFs, and Queer Bosses”!
About the Author
Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!
Footnote
[1] Something to keep in mind when we examine Joseph Crawford’s introduction to Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism (2013) during the “camp map”: the state’s agents of terror see themselves as the counterterrorists—with the state somehow being unable to turn them into monsters to do the elite’s bidding. In their own eyes, they’re pure and good, thus uncorruptible; in truth, they’re infantilized monsters, afraid of everything and conditioned to kill at the drop of a hat.
[2] Like Heinlein before him, James Cameron hides the Red Scare rhetoric by disguising the Communists as killer bugs from outer space. Cameron admittedly loved Star Wars but curiously excised its anti-totalitarian allegory (re: “George Lucas on Star Wars Being Anti-Authoritarian”). Top Gun: Maverick (2022) would repeat this formula 36-years later. Both films strip Communism of its real-world iconography (whose displacement I explore in “Military Optimism“).
[3] Oft-times, problematic historical markers are obscured through decades, if not centuries, of pastiche consumption. Again, the “ghost of the counterfeit” is that which haunts something that has largely become a series of increasingly neutral copies: Orcs are the historical targets of the state canonized in fictional media like D&D and LOTR.
[4] (another except from the same discontinued book section): This section explores the use of music in heroic narratives by the rich, or otherwise serving the needs of the rich in a neoliberal sense. It’s almost hard to attack them, because they were undeniably fun as a kid. And seeing how unromantic and bland the true menace that lurks behind this nostalgic veneer is, I can’t help but wish we were facing something extraordinary. Nothing so otherworldly as the killer Martians from Metal Slug 3 (2000), which conveniently unite the nations (and apologize for Nazis).
Returning to the idea of slow-boil, one of the devices pivotal to neoliberal is music. Yes, there’s “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “I Pledge Allegiance to the Flag.” However, music is historically tied up in stupidly popular hero narratives like Star Wars and Aliens that convey their own messages. In one chapter, I briefly explored their respective potential for allegory and propaganda; in another, I explored the role of action heroes as cops. In this chapter, I’d like to explore the role of music in videogames and media in relation to action heroes as cops.
Just keep in mind that I’m not dissecting fun purely for the sake of iconoclasm, nor saying these things can’t still be enjoyed (more of that in part 3); I’m merely analyzing the function of music when viewed by the capitalist as useful to their true aims: Not to be good people, but to reliably turn a profit through deplorable means, lie about it, and sit on the biggest pile of gold.
The rest of this section is divided into the following subsections:
- Saturday Morning Cartoons (“Go, Joe!!!”)
- Fighting Music; or, “Go Home and Be a Family Man!”
- Sports Anthems (aka Tolerating Sports and its Owners)
- War aka “The Danger Zone”
- Retro Glory
Saturday Morning Cartoons
As explored in my last chapter, action heroes further political ideals to children by presenting as neutral, family-friendly entertainment. Saturday morning cartoons accomplished this through their music. G.I. Joe and dozens of other cartoons had catchy themes set to deceptively well-animated intros. Amid that, they communicated the world in simple, violent terms. Captain Planet had its own neoliberal solution. Its beautifully wacky music reflects an equally goofy premise: “The power is yours!” Unfortunately recycling plastics is basically a con—products made from oil, lobbied for by big oil companies for decades. Recycling plastics is a lie, one advertised by the likes of Captain Planet and shows like it since the 1980s.
Look at me, heartlessly killing Captain Planet. But I’m not grumbling aimlessly by presenting those with power as a convenient scapegoat (what Nietzsche calls ressentiment). Their role in the planet’s impending demise is plain: Capitalism is everywhere, and is historically well-documented and researched. No, my feelings can be acted upon. Iconoclasm is only the first step in the departure from faith—faith in capitalism, in this case. For instance, labor movements are nothing new in America; they’ve merely been suppressed by capitalists. (re: Mark Fischer’s “capitalist realism“). The drive for meaningful worker action needs to replace the neoliberal yolk of personal responsibility. For this to happen, the myth of socialism needs to die.
This includes Red Scare tactics. These need to stop insofar as framing the Chinese and the Soviets as Communist. Rather, we need to adopt Marx’s critique of capitalism (in its modern forms) before we can gradually replace dismantle neoliberalism. For this, we need someone as effective as Captain Planet, but teaching realistic forms of resistance to neoliberal abuse. This might seem completely at odds, but neoliberal critiques generally emerged within media that resembles, on some level, its former self. Socialism is not antithetical to Saturday morning cartoons; it’s antithetical to the core tenets of capitalism that neoliberals have maximized since Reagan took office. If you think this is absurd, consider how North Korea—who are normally framed as enemies* of capitalism—using cartoons to educate the masses. I’m not advocating for propaganda; I’m arguing that cartoons (and their music) can serve as powerful tools within the system of capitalism to help it evolve into something better. Something more stable, that doesn’t threaten the entire planet by breeding neoliberals.
Fighting Music
Street Fighter II; The World Warrior delivered on both the gameplay and the music. Battle Arena Toshinden illustrated that good music is enough to be memorable, even if the gameplay stalls. Both titles were early releases for their generation’s platform. Guile’s theme “goes with everything” comments on the universal adaptability of a hopeful theme. In neoliberal terms, if a total enemy can be designed, the hope of defeating it becomes fungible; so many simulacra can be sold and exchanged as part of the same overall supply and demand. Hence, Guile’s theme goes with everything. It’s the perfect antithesis to the neoliberal’s fabricated enemies, the interaction between the two on a commercial level insulating their consumers to what’s really going on, geopolitically.
Fighting music also pertains to a sense of conservative, patriotic anthems and struggle: i.e., the Rhodesian anthem. A knight belongs to a nation; the nation and its creation myth and traditional values are under attack, to which the music spurs a defense of the nation. It’s important to remember this nation as fabricated as something to defend and protect in ways that primarily benefit the elite at the cost of so many ordinary lives.
Sports Anthems
Sports are a reliable sight for cathartic drama. But the myriad gears of the capitalist machine are also laid bare—a sobering reality that is overshadowed through admittedly badass music. Even if you don’t like sports, the spectacular music for NFL Gameday (1995) can make you forget how bafflingly dumb football is.
The amount of stupid shit that billionaire sports owners get away can sometimes break the spell (re: Secret Base); but they become associated with the music and the spectacle as the Providers of All That Is Fun. It certainly isn’t the charts. Then again, this so-called “chart porn” is all that remains after years of economic exploitation that would rival the bread and circus of the Roman Empire.
[5] The language of Christian superiority would be present over General (and future American President) Eisenhower’s 1944 “Order of the Day”:
Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!
You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hope and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.
Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.
But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!
I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory!
Good luck! And let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking (source).
Translation: “Go kill yourselves for us, lol!”
[6] Which also cites from Neoliberalism in Yesterday’s Heroes—specifically from a mostly-finished piece on Streets of Rage 4 (2020) that I never released, “Policing Bodies” (2021). Said piece was written alongside “Military Optimism” but never released. I’ve since decided to release the entire original script for “Policing Bodies”; i.e., on my old blog where I wrote it.
(source)
[7] Falling under the state of exception, this includes those whose exploitation from U.S. foreign policy is obvious, but whose clemency is denied because it is “impossible”; i.e., not actually impossible, but framed as such by smarty-pants neoliberals who gatekeep further change by calling it “impractical” (Bad Empanada 2’s “Liberal Zionism Dissected (Again!) – Loner Box BACKTRACKS, Adopts My Positions He Argued Against,” 2022; timestamp: 33:44). This gives them an out (taking the moral high ground) while also letting them “be realistic” in defense of U.S. Capitalism overseas; e.g., the Zionist centrist argument that Palestinians deserve a human Right of Return, not a physical one (Bad Empanada 2’s “How to Spot a Right-Wing Leftist: Justifying Liberal Outcomes With Leftist Language,” 2022; timestamp: 4:14).
