This post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second book sample series originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact“ (2024). That series was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two’s assorted chapters and its twin modules, the Undead and Demons. As usual, this promo series (and all its posts) are written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Volume Two, part one (the Poetry Module) is out now (5/1/2024)! I wrote a preface for the module along with its debut announcement. Give that a look; then, go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the full module (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

Click here to see “Searching for Secrets'” 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 at the bottom of the page.

Picking up from where “Splendide Mendax/Herbos and Himbos, part one” left off…

“Death by Snu-Snu!”: From Herbos to Himbos, part two (feat. Ayla, Weaponlord and Savage Land Rogue; Autumn Ivy and Claire Max)

“My pardons if I disturbed you. You caught me chastising my wife.”

“Seemed to me she was doing the chastising.”

—Jaime Lannister and a bandit, A Storm of Swords (2000)

(artist: Erik Von Lehmann)

Part two of “From Herbos to Himbos” explores feminism and punk in decay through the subjugation of Amazons, but also where they call home under capital; i.e., a playground and stage to perform on by real-life actors.

Before we consider Ayla and Savage Land Rogue, though, we need to consider what drives their dualistic echopraxis. True to form, a monopoly of morphological expression doesn’t exist anymore than those of violence or terror do; i.e., from Jedi to Amazons to Conan-style “meat wizards” (the latter combining orgasmic, shonen-style energy blasts with American nuclear bombs), all become a nostalgic form of research through consumption and performance: chasing Numinous echoes in personified forms—to escape bondage and heal from it with “it.” The same applies to any cavegirl we could think of (and for which diametrically applies to cavemen, too, albeit through the usual double standards; e.g., Fred Flintstone having a “dad bod” vs his shapely Stepford Wife, Wilma).

By extension, and per an American Gothic lens exposing all the usual decaying radioactive elements to Pax Americana, Wonder Woman is something of a wunderwaffe and wunderkind mutant; i.e., a bomb-like super soldier defaulted to by capital at large, but still used in times of desperation and plenty alike. She’s as American as apple pie—cheap, disposable, built on the graves of dead Indians’ stolen land, a beauty-pageant-turned-cop, oscillating between the two. But while bombs and bombshells alike are propaganda weapons, they don’t historically convince colonized lands to ever give up; indeed, they historically become weaponized against capital by Indigenous forces destroying the occupying army from within!

Everything dies, especially police lies and power structures, but the decay goes from pleasantries to clothes to the flesh itself as necrotic. The pearly castles and their “protectors” are the worst, utterly rank with the stink of death. As we saw with Wonder Woman, feminism—like canon’s cops, castles, and wizards (re: Lo Pan)—historically decays into fascist, naked-but-bellicose forms that serve profit (mirror syndrome); i.e., inside a centrist cycle of good cop, bad cop kayfabe playing not just white knight (syndrome), but white Indian suffering from virgin/whore syndrome (and other such heroic dysfunction tied to profit): so-called “strongwomen” who refuse to be trad wives, yet still serve profit as sex symbols of empty rebellion. Their taut, war-like bodies posture strength amid societal collapse while their clothes disintegrate for the status quo as much as themselves: a bikini with a half-life, much like America’s legacy! It becomes something to pass around the blame (forcing workers to join in by virtue of the usual trifectas and monopolies). In turn, the elite take all of the power and none of the blame, and male/token Pygmalions from Radcliffe to R. L. Stine pat themselves on the back; i.e., as self-made doomsayers capitalizing on American cruelty and greed through the ghost of the counterfeit while not challenging the profit motive and its dogma in any meaningful sense. They further the process of abjection, cashing in on it as the white middle class is historically incentivized to always do by the elite: keep people scared but consuming their own bullshit and corpses (of them and their past-to-future victims) as toy-like.

(artist: Tim Jacobus)

Decayed or not, Amazons are toys. Per the duality of language and the double operation of cryptonymy as anisotropic, such playthings serve workers or the state during liminal expression. In psychosexual terms, it can be a snapshot (a quickie) or a grueling ordeal (a marathon), but the trauma is always present, needing to be played with. Furthermore, such decay does so not just on the surface of a given hero (or their clothes), but across the entire site of post-apocalyptic violence she/they/him (accounting for GNC AFAB) and their consumers regress into as capital decays (what I call “fash brain,” or a power fantasy where fash-minded [usually white] people go to whitewash marginalized struggles while also playing the exclusive victim and the hero: “Help, help! I’m being repressed!”). As Volume Two, part one discussed, heroes—like villains and monsters—aren’t discrete in this respect, and their bodies as much as their milieu/tableaux serve to store and engage with cultural values and taboos in equal theatrical measure. The idea obviously applies to herbos and himbos, but for the sake of time (and authorial preference) let’s specifically interrogate it with herbos a bit more, shall we?

(artist: Reiq)

“I am strong, strong, strong!” a fash will always shout before showing off their waistcoat of blood diamonds—their trim torso fed on the sorrow and misery of those they colonize. Whatever the venue, the skull-like imperator insignia will never be far off, nor the banality of evil (acting ownership and exploitation as their “God-given right”; i.e., no matter how hard workers work for the elite—including cops, studios, or anything else [e.g., Yong Yea’s “Microsoft & Xbox Baffle Internet after Shutting down Hi-Fi Rush Dev & Three Other Bethesda Studios,” 2024]—said elite will always claw back as much profit for themselves and then have the middle class blame the usual “suspects”: labor and marginalized groups) as just another neoliberal scheme populated by flesh merchants of all sorts (sorry, Reiq, but if the shoe fits…). State proponents are class dormant—are simply a corpse that doesn’t know it is dead, a public hazard weaponized by capital to repeat, rape, reap ad nauseam. The elite are chicken hawks, space aliens, cradle robbers, grave diggers all rolled into one; we shouldn’t trust them as far as we can throw their old, shriveled bodies!

Apart from convincing people they don’t exist, though, the elite lie through their forces as “skinny-fat,” skinny-dipping into the blood of the marginalized like Elizabeth Bathory did all those poor virgins; i.e., to cheat death, a relationship to nature that can only exist while preying on it to “enrich” the colonial addict in a drug-like way. “White people disease,” “boomer syndrome,” “the white Indian,” or whatever other pathological label you care to give it, Capitalism is radioactive, menticidal—a disease, self-cannibalizing and self-lobotomizing the usual groups to administer and receive state violence (consider this prep for the Undead Module). Corpses never get tired, but they aren’t monopolized by the state, either. So like a giant Caesar, they might seem invincible; but we can strip and sap them of their necromantic potency and swap it with ours. The more they fuck (stake) our rotten bodies, the more we “life tap” their asses, topping from the grave-like bottom! Per the Gothic, this has a postcolonial character but also a posthuman one; i.e., as adumbrated by the likes of Richard Matteson critiquing Victor Frankenstein’s double, Robert Neville; i.e., in a decaying Pax Americana defending itself against the undead as Commie zombie-vampires vs fash nerds playing the state’s judge, jury and executioner. But of course, this goes both ways. So aftercare, lovelies. Aftercare!

“Sure seems to be a lot of death, destruction and exploitation going around, eh?” Decay isn’t always as obvious as a rotting corpse, though; a police state will do just as well, and outwardly presents as comely and forceful. The Amazon, as a historical-material loop, is just another excuse for a) capitalists to undress and display militant/disobedient monstrous-feminine in a peep-show-style, compromising position (for easier access: the peach and both holes denuded, but also paywalled by capitalist veils and quasi-chastity butt plugs, below) during the “conquer the ‘conqueror'” fantasy foisted onto the marginalized barbarian; and b) for punks-in-decay to defect over to capital (or having never left, as America demonstrates); e.g., Lady Liberty turns green with class envy but also straight-up decay as she rots, is left to rot, is raped in all manner of voyeuristic displays turned into the biggest DARVO joke of all: the Fourth of July. It becomes an open secret to string up and tout imperial “invincibility” until the structure finally gives out under its own bloated corpse weight. Death by Snu-Snu, indeed!

(artist: Shane Ballard)

In turn, people respond to themselves in ghostly, often-giant (above) statuesque likeness as “dressed in power” in decay as part of the canonical, moribund image—the uniform-style clothes and muscles/curves, of course, but also positions of status and prestige (re: the Statue of Liberty) that, through the usual dialogs of gatekeeping and carried keys, save themselves from unironic predation as affairs of state in small. It becomes an abstracted game of teamwork, of psychosexual knowledge exchanged in both directions, a pedagogy of the oppressed and oppressor onstage simultaneously in four dimensions (the Gothic chronotope). Per ludo-Gothic BDSM, heroic roleplay becomes a theatrical means of talking about taboo subject matter with a) personas that tend not to be questioned (as heroes seldom are, especially “pretty” ones), and b) in an ostensibly asexual way (combat theatre) that doesn’t preclude sexuality or nudism. Point-in-fact, various stressors build up in ways that demand release; i.e., being “pent up” as a psychosexual “blue balls/clit” known to many people, ace or not. People want their psychosexual climax, conquest, and fireworks show—what System of a Down calls “Violent Pornography” (2001):

Everybody, everybody, everybody livin’ now
Everybody, everybody, everybody fucks [sucks, cries, dies …]

It’s a violent pornography
Chokin’ chicks and sodomy
The kinda shit you get on your TV (source: Genius)

Except, it’s not just a means of unironic exploitation, but a critical voice that puts “rape” in quotes through the usual showmanship turned on its gay little head. Again, we can reclaim such things, but our deathly “disco-in-disguise” (which reverses capital’s hiding of its own decay behind herbo veneers) must occur in the same graveyard of Pygmalion and Galatea’s assorted likenesses; i.e., inside the same the valley of swole, über-thicc dolls!

To that, a bare sword or sword-like body is all at once a sharpened metal bar and a two-sided proposition; i.e., the canonical sheathing in state prey versus a rebellious symbol of power and station unthinkable to those accustomed to total power on all registers: resistance, rebellion, self-determination and self-definition beyond canonical edicts. On either side of this Satanic equation, superheroes are meant to exude power as something to witness but also transfer and ritualize as a psychosexual educational device. It arbitrates as a performance, a plaything to toy with, a symbol that can assume any shape that one might pull out of a hat, in which—per the usual paradoxes and monopolies—becomes “sword-like” as a threat to state hegemons: a form of legitimacy by nature of its threat as terrifying to the elite in ways they can’t control; i.e., where terrorism is both the state and the rebel’s every action a weapon of terror (and vice versa) that challenges the usual flowing of power towards the state. Simply put, it fucks with the bourgeoisies’ fix. Everyone likes the Jester! They’re cool, kooky and probably an animal in the sack!

(artist: Santi-Ikari)

The state has countermeasures, their ability to transform going beyond shape; but the perception of value still weighs against an enemy (to workers) that is eternal, out of time and place: a fascist lord as the hauntological evocation of something that strives to conceal itself, but sticks out like a sore thumb (which moderacy is designed to conceal, like perfume on a corpse). In turn, we can recruit old symbols (crowns, scepters, weapons, bodies, weapon-like bodies, etc) to forge and argue through power’s usual paradoxes; i.e., as someone who has something to offer that tends to have value in societies from time immemorial: sex and force as coded in ways that can be rewritten, but also rewrite other things, reversing abjection through the counterfeit by evoking its vengeful ghost. On and on.

(artist: George Sellas)

This historically is spoiled by craven Judases and sell-outs aping their colonizers (re: Fanon), but also xenophobic scapegoats and superstitions that pit pro-terror against a population to control it through self-policing maneuvers of a stochastic sort; i.e., a gladiatorial, Conan-style refrain returning to a more savage time that never quite existed; e.g., Savage Land Rogue (next page, 1993), but also Weaponlord (above) and Overwatch 2’s (2021) Mad Max rip-off, Odessa Stone (the last of which we’ll talk about in Volume Three). All this variety aside, such prehistorical regressions only becomes a form of revolutionary wish fulfillment if the hero is both a wish fulfilled and granter of them in ways that challenge the paradigm; i.e., like a jinn to rub on her “lamp” and beckon orgasmic pleasure as potent, poetic, and at times, primal, but not fascist.

Fascists love to return to not only a time when things were “great,” but also when “true warriors” fought against mythological enemies: zombies, but also dinosaurs as older reptilian tyrants (as megafauna, some dinosaurs would have probably been warm-blooded, but still wouldn’t have been mammals); e.g., the Tyrannosaurus Rex a “tyrant lizard” evoked by the likes of a white cavegirl duking it out with a black, alien: the fascist “lizard person” (the quoted phrase being code for Jewish conspiracies/vampirism[12]) riding a black tyranno. It’s the usual white Indian narrative, forcing the Amazon to be both beauty and beast for white nerds, but still something with sex-positive potential:

(exhibit 34b3b2a2a1b2: Artist, left: Jim Lee recolor by spidey0318; top-middle: Claw0208; bottom-middle: Akira Toriyama; top-right: Persephone van der Waard; bottom-right: Hinomaru. Such borderline erotica are “wasteland fantasies” that, like the zombie apocalypse, anticipate colonial collapse into a savage place where white people [and those from token nations; i.e., Japan] must survive. Such power trips not only reduce women to Amazonian sex objects who are more wild [and sexually aggressive] than trad wives are allowed to be, but also are made and sold by family men capitalizing on such inventions; e.g., Toriyama, who left a note to his two children while making Chrono Trigger back in the ’90s: “Heeey! Sasuke! Kikka! Pop’s working on games like this! Hey are you guys watching? Isn’t this great?!” [source tweet: Rebecca Stone, March 7th, 2024]. It’s literally “the World’s Greatest Dad” award, self-administered by Toriyama blowing his own horn [a father being a hero figure his children will be less inclined to critique].

A similar code was left behind by a Super Metroid developer during the Draygon fight, Yasuhiko Fujii:

Before the fight with Draygon, the boss of Maridia, there’s a group of Evir enemies that do a little “dance.” Their movements actually trace out the letters of a phrase in English, “Keiko Love!” Keiko was the name of a girl I was dating at the time. I was busy with work all the time and couldn’t see her much, so at night while everyone at the office sleeping, I stole a moment and snuck that code in! [source: shmuplations].

These Amazonian survivor stories aren’t so different from Metroidvania and survival horror at large [re: Mazes and Labyrinths]. They are fun, as are their makers’ BTS shenanigans. Even so, their regressive power fantasies a) have fascist overtones to them, and b) are commonly sold to middle-class children who feel out-of-control thanks to a world that is made unstable to serve profit, per Capitalist Realism. Plenty to enjoy and critique, here!)

As Ayla and Savage Land Rogue demonstrate, Amazon habitats are far older than videogames, but have evolved into them out of older Pax Americana fantasies exported elsewhere (from America to Japan and back again); i.e., a revival of the “white jungle” populated with “big game”: a vacation-type resort for the usual anxious pearl-clutchers looking for Jane and Tarzan; i.e., to punch down at towards the dogmatic threat of a Black Planet: to ease their own inheritance anxieties and fear of a non-white revenge for empire as inherently genocidal, tokenizing colonial subjects like the Amazon to police its own group, mid-Holocaust.

As I write in Volume Zero, the poetic tradition of the Amazon is long and complicated, but also at war with itself in multiple ways:

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

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

(artist: Matt Groening)

This “waifu paradox” is the Amazon as war bride, trapped between dominant and submissive, and where we and TERFs must each go to perform. The difference is dialectical-material function. They police what is acceptable; i.e., how far we can go. Amazon is a fetish, doll, inanimate object to occupy and play with as one might a simulacrum, an imitation, a likeness of the past as fearsome: a “knight,” which is essentially what an Amazon is, but tied to an imaginary queendom tamed by patriarchal forces, their bondage. Like a doll, it becomes something to play with; like armor/the Destroyer, something to fill in and wear/dance with, often through “combat”: play-fighting relaid through prompts, cues, and stage instructions. Think of rape play as a joke, of which the Amazon excels at; i.e., “death by Snu-Snu” (above) as something that is both silly and serious, but also anisotropic; e.g., anal sex being the victim’s “death” that woman are forced to grit their teeth and bear for men, but for which men dread as perceived retribution: when faced with someone monstrous-feminine who is clearly stronger than them, but also sexy in ways that make them want to hug and submit to Medusa. In turn, this becomes a centrist game of compromise whose cosplays can please men, but also frighten them to varying degrees of canon and camp (COD: “crushed pelvises” denoting PIV sex, not pegging as Futurama‘s [1999] own latent homophobia); i.e., in sex-positive ways that challenge profit. This is less of a balancing act, by itself, and more a choosing of one’s battles, mid-balance, to speak as a death god that is, under capitalist schemes, still shacked to men and the profit motive—if not literally then figuratively to those who feel owed their sissy-like due by their martial-to-marital, monster-girl waifus:

(artist: Cutie Pie Sensei)

Per Imperialism and Capitalism, the monomyth has an exogamous character. It yields a variety of war brides that, per nature-as-monstrous-feminine, must be conquered in foreign lands, but remain tempting and siren-like. Some are… strange, like Zeuhl was, but showed me how to appreciate things differently through forms that deviated from the norm (re: The Doom Generation, Jojo). Others were more standard, more cliché, like Jadis wooing me with Battlefield Band’s “The Devil’s Courtship” (2001): the black cavalier to my maiden-in-white. All were divided, imperfect, waiting for reunion as all workers do; i.e., to reclaim what is lost through subversive forms of monstrous-feminine, of “torture,” of power through the paradox of performance and play as a unifying force; i.e., a ceremony to hold and alter (at the altar) as needed.

Whatever ritual is expended, the aim is to not just avoid harm, but prevent it as something to instruct in ironic forms conducive to systemic release, catharsis, and delight. This involves not just illusions and games, but ploys, gambits, bluffs, etc, that serve liberation just as well. Peace-in-chains is not the objective, for it is merely genocide uninterrupted. Subversive Amazons present the state with a lack of peace to unsettle and haunt them, becoming badass in their terrified recollections of us (which make the original heroes seem horrifying by comparison[13]); e.g., as Gays Against Groomers describe us, “Gender ideology isn’t just a neo-religious cult; it is biotechnological warfare in drag, like a multi-headed hydra with claws in every corporate sector” (source tweet: May 2nd, 2024); i.e., gay Nazi DARVO. The fact that such paradoxes are tolerated in fascist circles at all implies fascists haven’t corrupted the white chateau, which—while imperial as always—is held onto by establishment politicians as outwardly moderate, but no less cruel or bloodthirsty than their vigilante brethren.

In any event, Gothic-Communist development requires intersectional solidarity to achieve (the wider, the better); i.e., targeting the Superstructure, which maintains and shapes the Base. Gothic Communism camps these twin canonical trees, supplanting them with campy doubles. This starts with influencing how people think by what they take into themselves using what we got as normally commodified by capital into alien, fetish, sexualized forms: “meat wizards” with gay (thus rebellious) potential, but also police elements that historically-materially weaponize against labor (as herbos and himbos classically do); i.e., nature-as-monstrous-feminine subjugated to serve the state. Such propositions are always loaded with danger and chance; beware those who abstain (e.g., Jedi: “a Jedi craves not such things!” Bullshit).

(artist: Eric Martin)

Per the Amazon (regardless of sex), feats of strength are present in bodies that look curvy and capable (for male bodies, this is often called “the X frame/factor” and female bodies “the hourglass”)—that seem to suggest “the lift” without moving at all—but also upend gender norms that can serve workers or the state: the commodification and liberation of the monstrous-feminine in art as a beautiful, bountiful battlefield of sex and force, “rape” and “war” as things to put into quotes during ludo-Gothic BDSM’s liminal expression (again, regardless of biology). The clues are all present and accounted for, and we’ve looked at yet-another branch of the monstrous-feminine from my childhood: Toriyama’s meat wizards and Carpenter’s Fu Manchu pastiche as doubled by all the usual Amazons. Combined with your childhood’s go-to heroes as things to rescue from capital, we have to be smarter than the past such men fostered while learning from it, making our own future out of the past(retro)-future that Capitalism aborted to serve profit in future-canceling copycats: witch cops.

Where there’s a cop, there’s a victim, thus a potential rebel—sometimes on the surface of one person/archetype. We’ll consider that through in-person forms—actors—with one example of each: Autumn Ivy as the witch cop, and Claire Max as the rebel, or at least, not the cop. Let’s wrap up a few points on praxis before broaching them (three pages).

Amazons, like all monsters, have sex-positive potential that is “nipped in the bud” by capital and its proponents. To address that, we must abort capital and build a better world through ironic variants of so-called himbos like Gohan and Cell, and herbos like Wonder Woman, Ayla and Savage Land Rogue. Except all must actualize through the Gothic as revived for workers’ benefit, not the state; i.e., the totality of Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism—its Four Gs, Six Rs, Gothic-Communist Hermeneutic Quadfecta, mode of expression, and three iconoclastic doubles of oppositional praxis—all used to raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness to the highest and widest degree.

Once Capitalist Realism starts to fade, we can start to dismantle the state and rebuild/redistribute power inside itself, but we must reclaim the Base and recultivate the Superstructure through all possible means. My emphasis is theatre and poetic expression—of starting with the Superstructure to transform heroic, monstrous-feminine violence. It is the half of capital the elite cannot control, fence and capitalize; it is what we play with using ludo-Gothic BDSM, mid-ergodic-motion, to trick our foes and their actual unironic defense of the state. Factories tend to be boring from a theatrical standpoint; herbos and himbos (and their kayfabe) less so.

The capitalist is always fascist, always singular and rigidly dogmatic, vertical, and heteronormative; i.e., as something to retreat into an imaginary past thereof. We haunt that as a parallel society’s horizontal, consensual and humanizing application using the same linguo-material devices: to foster good social-sexual attitudes that lead to post-scarcity as stable, thus able to deal with nature’s usual mood swings far better than capital can. As Bruce Lee said, “The softest thing cannot be snapped. […] Water can flow or it can crash. Be like water, friend.” This can be physical, but also symbolic in ways that are witch-like as the Amazon is; i.e., between worlds, exotic, pulled from the depths of a murky ocean’s darkest wishes as paradoxically… soft, pale, and oh-so-shapely. Its crimson, guilty pleasure mixes with Red Scare, which is where liberation must occur—mid-performance, summoning something that you can relate to, not abject!

(artist: Knut Ekwall; source: Robert Lambert Jones III’s “Mythological Beasts and Spirits: Naiad,” 2016)

In turn, we mirror the state’s bad imitations to expose their limitations and widened capacity for harm. We meet their advances in ways they cannot force. However subjugated and complete the colonization might seem, it is a cycle that capital cannot do without. They must always lose control within oscillating rhetoric; there is always a lapse in agency or judgment (such as they define these things as), which means there is always a chance to escape. We are both thetical to profit and antithetical, meaning again there is always a chance to rebel and push capital’s antithesis as something to synthesize: a unity the likes of which Indigenous cultures did not historically have; i.e., a stewardship of nature that preserves her for all peoples, animals and things: a merging of written and oral forms of communication to serve such a development as monstrous-feminine. And so on. We are the canvas and the code, the data as “corrupt,” the ghost in the shell, the fatal portrait, the doubled castle-like body and body-like castle, a parallel mise-en-abyme, a Shadow of Galatea, a spectre of Marx.

Keep all that in mind as we proceed. You have all the theory (complex and simple) and poetic means to forge your own destiny! To be your own hero in your own pro-worker propaganda narrative (a gayer Star Wars), your own himbo or herbo that hurts, not harms (the colonizer, by comparison, can never rape and kill enough; e.g., The Nightingale, 2018)! This starts with learning from the past as something others have played with already. This includes me looking at my past self (this book was written backwards), and said self looking at older forms revived from older forms, on and on. I’ve played with and learned from so many himbos and herbos, including Marston’s, Toriyama’s, Lucas’ and Cameron’s. Male, female, or somewhere in between, all left something heroic behind that yielded pro-worker allegories. So will I, when the time comes.

For that, whenever I die, do not mourn my passing for I am with you, and together we can challenge the state doubling us; i.e., in all the usual kayfabe, monomyth battles of will staring down the Medusa’s Pygmalion-esque double. Except our Song of Infinity isn’t played to send the moon back to a position where it can fall again (re: Majora’s Mask, 2000), nor one where the proverbial conch shatters, William-Golding-style, and demands that force be relied on to make things right in a centrist manner (Tapion’s flute, above), but a total reversal of the counterfeit’s process of abjection—of weaponizing the Aegis to anisotropically send the state’s doom back to them: images of their own dragon sickness, Darkening and inevitable death felt on the surface/inside thresholds of liminal expression the likes of which Amazons and knights routinely perfect; i.e., personas turning the tables through a shared aesthetic of power and death the state will try to police through workers more marginalized to less. From the first and second waves, feminism and queer rights have always historically had a white-to-token fascist element that haunts the sex positivity and intersectionality of the third and fourth. The Amazon is no less yoked by older Judases, non-binary people just as capable of doing it (re: Zeuhl and Autumn Ivy) as any other marginalized sector.

Such likenesses might seem haunted by the same foregone conclusion: class and culture betrayal spelling the herbo or himbo’s orc-like assimilation and defeat; i.e., the yoking of the Amazon regardless of sex (male, intersex, or female) by capital’s heteronormative order—as something to eat, play at, and pretend in ways that police rebellious forms. To this, the Spartans were pre-fascist nutjobs (Unknown 5’s “How Sparta Manufactured Super-Soldiers – The Spartan Agoge,” 2023), meaning slavers in ways that fascists dreamed about, and which post-fascists (fascists-in-disguise) ape behind various veneers more disingenuous still; i.e., those whose imaginary past becomes something to regress into (re: “fash brain”). Beyond your usual lost boys looking for mother as a warrior maiden, tokenization remains a problem insofar as these men become low-hanging fruit to pick, pick, pick at the cost of good praxis.

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

As such, there’s the parasocial, predatory scheme of female sex workers more interested in milking cis-het men for money and punching down against would-be comrades than doing anything revolutionary (with false rebellion, again, being a fascist tactic); i.e., whoring the streets of Omelas, in uniform, versus walking away from Omelas (Pax Americana/the profit motive) altogether. I’ve crossed paths with such persons before, which brings us to Autumn Ivy as the picture-perfect class traitor dressed in herbo attire: a dumb-looking, thumper meathead deliberately siding with and working for the Man; i.e., another callous stripper aping Hippolyta to play the white Indian, punching down at other oppressed groups. Let’s interrogate the taboos and values of that aesthetic in-the-flesh, its poetry both in-motion and frozen in time. As we do, remember that capital loves plausible deniability and DARVO.

By extension, so do TERFs (cis or not) playing pick and choose, throwing their own Halloween-grade pity party with its own kernel of truth, mid-witch-hunt. Capitalist tokens find the same sweet spot, and speak out of both sides of their mouth, playing both sides having learned from the best to do so while acting more oppressed than they actually are and looking for revenge (as cops always do). Except they’re not Yojimbo, they’re sell-out white folk with an element of oppression turning coat whenever it suits them and they really need to check their privilege, wealth and status; it’s called “poisoning the well” and they (unlike actual Jewish victims) do it a lot: Jewish cops (and other such marginalized groups), witch cops, Amazon cops.

Whatever the sell-out, it’s all cut from the same hypocritical tree, fashioning into false masks of oppression given an air of reality by ostensibly recruiting from the colony streets (assimilation overlaps with generational tokenism: “bury your gays” and “kill the Indian, save the man” merging during class war as a cultural gauntlet of good and bad actors sharing the stage). Unbridled, combative critiques of the concentric veneers of persecution (and self-righteous police violence and ruthless opportunism) is simply required at this stage, but you gotta learn to a) not only not think with your dick (or taco), but b) kill your darlings presenting themselves as superhero cops, herbo or otherwise!

So by all means, beat that dead horse in matters of argument/discourse, which is what representation is/monsters are! Seriously, if someone’s complicit in genocide/playing both sides—from Mark Hamill to Joe Biden to Autumn Ivy—then let the fuckers have it! In a poetic sense, trash their funerals, spray paint their effigies, crash their weddings, to never know a moment’s peace! “Peace” is a white (wo)man’s word; liberation is ours. If they have the means to say something but don’t—not only keep mum, but have the temerity to try play the victim and the cop? Well, hit ’em with both barrels (again, as a matter of argument, of poetics, of monstrous debate and critique), again, again, and again! Let “Conan” contemplate that on the Tree of Woe! “Port to starboard, full broadsides! No prisoners! Make ’em walk the plank!” All’s fair in Fair Use, babes; i.e., in purposes of education, parody and critique, this is my pirate vessel and I don’t suffer fools or fakes!

(artist: Milo Manara)

I’d say I learned from the best, but my exes never ever could handle what they dished out. They didn’t fight fair, either. They took and they took, dominating me but getting the fuck out the moment I pushed back. So did Autumn, truth be told (expensive, but unable to handle a modicum of criticism with any degree of empathy or grace). To you bitches, this is my spice to give back: an object lesson in my usual, pull-no-punches polemic! I’ve been around people my whole life who were like addicts towards me as someone to punch, to use like the party favor or idiot (the twink). And in the past, I put up with it, covered for my own abusers by bailing them out! In any event, I’m not about to sit by and watch some diva who spurned me after my uncle died and Cuwu left me go on to act like they’re God’s gift to sex work. Like, fuck that noise! Fuck it stone dead!

What’s gotten under my theatre nerd’s skin, pray tell? Remember that Gothic Communism is queer-anarchist. So while the state very much is the enemy we need to check, so are cops and castles in disguise as GNC rebels, pirates, rockstars. No one likes a hypocrite flying a false flag. To that, function determines function; i.e., as a flow of power towards workers or the state. For all someone appears as powerful or oppressed, then, they are only as legitimate for rebellion insofar as they actually challenge the state. If they’re so closeted or self-serving that one muttering of the word “sex work” instantly turns them into a colossal diva, then they’re probably not as heroic as they’re posturing.

Furthermore, whatever the form the girl boss takes, one fact remains constant: “Scratch a moderate and a TERF bleeds (which is what trans misogyny is, lovelies); scratch a TERF and a predator bleeds (which is what cops are: liars, cheats, steals, abusers obsessed with their own image as “heroic,” “rebellious”). Queerness is classically closeted to a matter of degree—we are the domain of beards and lavender weddings, after all! Except while predation and pink-wash opportunism takes many forms, this isn’t a statement of Autumn’s actions as something to precisely qualify or prove, but critique from one theatre fag to another. They’re a sex worker and dom, but a bad one. Bitch don’t represent me, and they don’t monopolize Amazons! In my professional opinion and as someone who’s dealt with them as a client, they suck! Know your enemy but also your trade; I’m on them like a nun in a cucumber field!

A note about Autumn Ivy: They are a public figure who markets an image of themselves as “Amazonian,” which I am critiquing as having run-ins/worked with them in the past; as such, they’re a big enby and should be able to handle whatever criticism I throw at them, especially since their abuse of me in the past is true—is something I stand by and can back up. That being said… this isn’t me condoning violence or calls for violence against them. Unless they accelerate their trans misogyny (or any other fascist tendencies) in public—i.e., use their platform to spread active hate, Nazi-style—kindly leave them alone to figure things out on their own. —Perse

To that, Autumn is our resident witch cop playing the “jungle bunny” but functioning as the token (enby) colonizer/fascist strongwoman enby wearing the clothes of a white Indian (the aesthetics of oppression/rebellion): an ostensibly Texan (or similar state) herbo minus the praxial irony or charity of the fictional examples we’ve already examined, and far more enterprising as the usual sort of person who chased Indigenous peoples out of the territories before ratifying them as “secure” for white families on the Oregon Trail to move in. Now that GNC people are the targets of state violence and bad legislation all along the Bible Belt, I really have to wonder how much Autumn’s comic-book, T&A gym-rat fantasies will do anything other than line their own pockets before swanning charity and getting the hell outta Dodge (maybe they do things that further the Cause, but given their self-centered, one-foot-in-the-closet, one-foot-out-the-door approach to sex work, I seriously doubt it. Feel free to prove me wrong anytime, queen). Like Luc Besson’s Nikita, their Pygmalion fantasy is assimilative.

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

Except, unlike white straight people—e.g., Turkey Tom (D’Angelo Wallace’s “I’m Not Sorry,” 2020)—who feel surrounded by and afraid of all things alien while playing the victim/detective capitalizing on said dogma, token fash will generally internalize bigotry/self-hatred and triangulate against members of their own oppressed kind (though fascists will punch other oppressors); i.e., divide and conquer. They take the appearance of themselves as “oppressed” (which may even have some truth to it) and join the state in decay as their hill to die on; i.e., Uncle Toms on the plantation; e.g., Low Tier God (Don Ozzy’s “The Tragic Downfall of Low Tier God,” 2024). The same idea applies to enbies like Autumn and trans women like Natalie Wynn, etc. Moderacy is just another mask they wear to conceal the decay underneath during a disingenuous waiting game (which again, applies to straight white boys acting “reformed” in bad faith while using codewords/dogwhistles like “degenerate” when denigrating and infiltrating marginalized groups; re: Turkey Tom’s extensive “The Degenerates” series muckraking in the name of “edutainment”: putting up a “please don’t attack these groups” disclaimer while treating them as a degenerate monolith to hawk to his vindictive audience known for attacking minorities).

(artist: Bite Bunny)

On either side of the equation, monsters embody disordered thinking (madness) and identity (struggle) as a result of capital doing what capital does; e.g., BPD as something to expose and comment on (vis-à-vis, Bite Bunny, above) but also something I’ve known in past people (Cuwu) and present company as part of a larger dialectic (of the alien); i.e., as confusing us-versus-them by virtue of workers historically pitted against each other through icons revived for capital and labor over and over across space-time. Gothic Communism is based on DBT as poison-made-the-cure: “the dose makes the poison.” As such, there are good monsters and bad, and good monsters putting “bad” in quotes and vice versa (dialectical-material scrutiny tends to avoid moral judgements, but I digress). They portend to collapse and relapse, remission and escape, but the entire rodeo is overshadowed by the state being the biggest pig at the trough. It’s a cynic’s feast, a festival of servants backstabbing perceived runts in service to the kings of Capitalism-as-undead: vampires, zombies, werewolves, whatever.

Through capital, monsters are Elvis and his addiction as something to baby/capitalize on for long as possible; i.e., until the liability can be replaced with a fresh copy of itself, generally from the same vault of abused child stars. It’s a complicated smuggling route we can weaponize while being a victim of it: reoffenders and recidivism, “break a leg” less a quaint theatre superstition and more reifying our own trauma as something to witness, mid-crisis, mid-disintegration, onstage:

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Victims of capital are certifiable and fabulous, put together and falling apart. It’s like watching a toy fairy castle—already held together with duct tape—crash slowly and spectacularly into a rock candy mountain: to shatter into a million pieces, then reassemble like the T-one-fucking-thousand towards tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow… Rehabilitation is rock bottom for those of us rehumanizing ourselves (and our rocky-candy bottoms) already broken; i.e., into a shattered gumball machine spilling its sugary orbs everywhere. As such, we break like little, multi-colored triangles—a skittering of so many edible “billiard balls” across the tiles; i.e., as capital always does to sex workers, sexualizing everything as “monstrous” in all directions among the broken shards of glass (from Volume Zero/”What I Won’t Exhibit”): “Porn under Capitalism is always a liminal proposition, one where canon conflates gore, rape, and general harm with supposed acts of love.”

To that, porn is incredibly liminal, thus able to be camped and canonized within the Gothic to varying degrees of blindness and perceptiveness; e.g., Friday the 13th‘s cycling recursive collage of psychosexual, patently Freudian/unironically violent (re: knife dick) wish fulfillment: a stage of dated white-people Elizabethan/Jacobean theatre clichés concerned with more present (and heteronormative) abjections redoubled through capitalist veins of expression. These, in turn, have been recycled from Radcliffe to Scooby-Doo-style moral panics into what has become a neoliberal loop of fatal nostalgia: a never-quite-was time of instability and surveillance when the black castle (and the Reaper) come a-calling. The land darkens, occupied with reinventions of the man-in-black, the banditti as retroactively coded with racial animus and other colonial hazards during fresh nightmares of class anxiety/critique (of vampiric “old money”) invoking the dialectic of shelter (re: Jameson) versus that of the alien (re: me). Like Shakespeare, it’s often bloody and crude, but also surgical and necromantically poetic the way only gay theatre nerds can be!

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

True-to-form, this well-traveled, shamelessly trashy track manifests in varying degrees of irony or straightforward dogma regarding sex and force, death/rape anxieties as dimorphized, which the queer will always have to camp inside of itself as the main attraction: stuck next to Jason Voorhees, Freddy Kruger and Michael Myers (and other infantilized slashers with Germanic surnames, zero game and endless mommy-and-daddy issues); i.e., the giant, Frankensteinian, incel-grade pre-fascist, to fascist, to post-fascist passing the Oedipal curse along through sheer size difference and knife-play menace. Except we’re just as often the twinkish damsel or helpless slut (above) holding but also becoming the Radcliffean miniature, paralyzing the Destroyer as yet-another-moon to push up like Atlas, to bury alive like [insert Gothic heroine, here]. But such things always come back because capital decays and regenerates, a fascist revenant. Our struggle for liberation oscillates within the same space, its surfaces and scapegoat simulacra—classically a Neo-Gothic (white) fantasy reserved for cheap theatre that we, per ahegao-style calculated risk, can use to face our own demons’ disordered thinking; i.e., as stemming from the usual abject historical-material loop as cycling between (wo)man vs nature in some shape or form.

To this, Rogue’s Savage Land (as discussed earlier) extends to all manner of locales (and their wildlife, human or otherwise) playing an important role in the process of abjection; i.e., one that commonly occurs between the rural and the urban as alienated and fearful towards each other—from Radcliffe’s scary rustics, to the Irish Big-House drama of the fearsome Catholics in a post-Reformation world, to Sam Raimi’s evil cabins in the forest as ripped off from Matthew Lewis’ bandit house (several centuries earlier), to The Hateful Eight or Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (2015 and 2010). In short, the Amazon always relegates to wherever a given heroine finds herself located but also pitted against all manner of creepy-crawly or Jack-London-style, tooth-and-claw things: alienated from her as someone having a foot in each world. She’s not a knight (white or black), thus is always illegitimate, but nevertheless remains canonized in the copagandistic scheme. She’s the stranger and the savior—a “white Indian,” meaning the Pioneer wife-in-disguise, her Winchester Repeater exchanged for a flint spear and the prairie natives transformed into lizard people/dinosaurs or sabretooth tigers! As Metallica sings in “Of Wolf and Man” (1991): “Back to the meaning of life!”

(artist: Ronin Dude)

Regressive or subversive, the Amazon is always the center of attention; i.e., the rape fantasy voyeuristically framed between certain death and the paradox of performance treating her as a meal and maker of meals (out of the animalistic predators pegging her for a “free lunch”): the babe in the wilderness triumphing over “rape” abjected onto evil cartoon wolves, T-Rexes and other such outrageous codes exhibiting the damsel-in-distress as stripped down to her undies (or projections of those on the surface of more modest clothes) and threatened by something jungle-like all around her. Even when these things are not onscreen, she is always threatened by them as lurking nearby—i.e., by almost-certain penetration in ways that cavemen generally aren’t forced to suffer (not straight cis-het ones, anyways): vaginal, oral and anal. It’s the hauntology of rape as a modern business pushed into imaginary dated spheres. In canonical terms, any monstrous-feminine veneer of strength is a façade behind which ghosts of the counterfeit lurk: exploitation and rape through a Cartesian paradigm preying on nature. Both are essentialized as something to reify and survive no matter where you go.

Within that penetrated membrane, rape is a constant threat, but also “rape” in quotes. Except, the monster-fucking rape fantasy as a complicated, often-privileged one depending on who the target of violence is, and who’s the othered object of fear. For instance, white women are coded to classically fear anything that isn’t white, but also fear and submit to their husbands as violent and seeking Neo-Gothic fantasies that put the “violence” in quotes; re: Radcliffe’s demon lover as a historically exploitative fantasy that weaponized lived white cis-het female abuse to uphold the status quo per the usual Gothic readership: white women and their inherited psychosexual (and profoundly racist) dysfunctions triangulating against other groups. Rape fantasies are perfectly fine, even cathartic, provided a colonial effect is avoided.

Except the traditional Gothic readership still echoes Ann Radcliffe’s own half-real “true crime” hauntology getting her jollies at the cost of other exploited groups; re: “pick me” behavior tied to the profit motive while prioritizing and triangulating white cis women against other groups: as the usual victims, gatekeepers, girl bosses of said groups while fetishizing members of the colonizer group as torture-porn princes (a form of elevation, defending and worshipping the rapist/antagonizing the person of color as a de facto sex slave). It’s unironic bondage dressed up as “activism” and “play.” As such monster-fucking being hot/appealing in a sex-positive rape play/consent-non-consent sense because its appreciative peril/irony illustrates consent in Gothic counterculture (a topic for Volume Three) as often intimidating but nevertheless consensual during calculated risk—e.g., “I’d let a Balrog fuck me”—not submission to the usual, white-penned, settler-colonial demon lover tropes!

As such, the Gothic chronotope is a place for the woman (or anyone coded as “woman”) to suffer endlessly inside. It reliably extends the castle (or manor) to the castle grounds as increasingly prehistoric, but also ahistoric inside a monstrous-feminine Gothic imagination: the out-of-doors invading the imperial structure and vice versa; e.g., Faulkner’s cartographic refrain, Yoknapatawpha County, or Lovecraft’s haunted Providence-in-decay pushing synchronistically onto Tolkien’s Middle-earth, The Twilight Zone (1959), wherever Tales from the Crypt (1989) finds itself, etc. It’s an operatic rape space that scared white people deliberately populate with various bogey people; i.e., as scapegoats to stake, but also hunt the unfaithful depicted per the Gothic readership’s usual bunch: middle-class, naughty-and-curious white girls threatened by a faux “Transylvania” with varying degrees of irony and dogma.

A note about non-white tokenism: Afrocentrism is an issue of militant tokenism, too; i.e., slaves/underclass divided against other slaves inside America as a concentric prison colony through divide-and-conquer rhetoric; e.g. American blackness rape ranking Indigenous black culture in other counties facing white oppression through black skin, white masks as a globalized form of such division:

Dear the US, British Australia enforced a decades-long regime of raping Black women & stealing their babies to raise “white” in order to erase Blackness & Indigeneity from the continent Please stop acting like it worked (source tweet, Strewth: May 12, 2024).

Note: I’m currently looking for Indigenous and person-of-color models. If anyone is interested, click here to refer to the project details. —Perse, 5/14/2024

We’ll discuss afrocentrism/shadism more in Volume Three, but Volume Zero has discussed how the dark figure has classically been fetishized non-white since before the Enlightenment

(artist: Ary Sheffer)

Before the Enlightenment, Late Medieval stories and media from the Gothic/Renaissance period featured less persons of color because access to actual persons with dark or non-white skin was historically less common, thus more exotic (though it did happen; a pure-white medieval period is a fascist myth); as such, the pre-fascist destroyer persona was coded as black in relation to the “non-European” as Jewish, Germanic, or the broader “Eastern” (white-skinned: from Italy to Romania to Russia; non-white groups: China, the Middle East and Africa). Until the Enlightenment period began and started to orchestrate widespread settler colonialism (and modern nation-state formation), race-based slavery largely didn’t exist; so the biases were less about skin color and more about general ethnicity and religion; e.g., evil Italian counts, but also Jewish people as go-to scapegoats for the Romans and the Christians. Then and now, these devils were seen as threats to the heteronormative order of things; i.e., returning to nature, to hell and chaos. As such, the devil became something that actively corrupts the youth and women as always running off with them into the night (source).

has since gone onto gain a racialized character through Cartesian rhetoric turning minorities against one another through porn: as a dogmatic and predatory industry that must be reclaimed inside of itself; i.e., contending with a fetishized, often stigma-animalized Gothic dialog that generally has an assimilative character extending into fiction and politics at large as half-real (from Volume One):

(exhibit 10c4: Artist, top-left: Margo Draws; top-middle and top- and bottom-right: Oxcoxa; bottom-left, source tweet: Raw Porn Moments, 2023.)

Taarna runs the risk of chopping off workers’ heads who are normally presented as orcs/zombies, minus the threat i.e., labor movements and/or people of color being called “terrorists” by the state—but it’s arguably a step in the right direction provided we camp Tolkien more than Heavy Metal [1981] did.

More to the point, Taarna isn’t so far gone that you can’t reclaim her from total assimilation and decay [or demonic animalization; i.e., Tolkien’s spiders existing purely within female “chaotic evil” forms of nature as something to dominate by pure-white men upholding the profit motive within Capitalist Realism]. These kinds of Amazonian double standards and intersectional biases elide and roil on the surface of the female body as a) entirely mysterious to Tolkien, and b) a complicated billboard he never bothered with in his own stories: the variable undeath of a white-skinned Medusa as killed by men contrasted against the black-skinned Medusa as killed by men and women, both of them [and orcs] fetishized differently within the same punitive structure.

The genuine struggle—to holistically express body positivity during liberation as an ongoing event—becomes caught up in morphological double standards; i.e., the white-skinned “dark queen” either marketed as “black”—i.e., “PAWG” [“phat ass white girl,” exhibit 32b/41b] as a “Goth” collision that elides black clothing with the “black” body as having white skin: the “big [titty/booty] Goth GF”—or kept skinny to be drawn the way that “most bodies are” [code for Vitruvian enforcement, Oxcoxa]. Meanwhile, black female bodies that happen to be skinny and fairer skinned [shadism] are inevitably perceived as “white” [as if most of them “chose” how they were born]: similar to queerness, skin color synonymizes with body size as a false choice, which complicates fat acceptance and liberation in the eyes of those persons seeking representation as something to escape the shared, internalized shame of white/black female bodies as queer [and male bodies in relation to them, the two hailing from the same savage, imaginary place].

 

(artist: Jazminskyyy)

In turn, the trend of the Amazon or Medusa as a powerful warrior queen or Sapphic monarch can be taken into potentially exploitative spheres, wherein the “Bowsette” crown [also Oxcoxa] famously fetishizes the white girl with an “atypical” [nonwhite] princess body to be desirable for the pandered-to male fans; but also articulates the descriptive sexuality of white or non-white AFABs within Nintendo’s fandom—i.e., those who are simply born with bodies outside the settler-colonial standard, and who want to be celebrated for it via a class metaphor of power and status: the girly crown, suspiciously pink [re: Tirrrb’s “The Yassification Of Masculinity“] but tinged with sexy black “corruption” as a non-harmful aesthetic/function. Within this larger dialectic, a viral trend emerges using the same imagery operating at cross purposes, resulting in various amounts of nuance or lack thereof, as well as [un]irony and cultural appropriation/appreciation when the “Yass, Queen!” crown is worn.

To this, Tolkien becomes a funny hypothetical begging “what if?” in a larger conversation the original never bothered with. When we entertain ghosts of his work through Amazonomachia speaking to a lived experience he deliberately distanced himself from, we play with, thus learn from these misfit toys. Doing so, we uncover the potential for class warriors and traitors emerging in arbitration relative to the public’s use of a largely textual/oral tradition to support popular sentiment for or against the status quo: to let one or two minorities rule in a problematic light like Tolkien’s orcs and dwarves did, or for there to be no minorities and for everyone to be kings, queens and intersex/non-binary monarchs in a post-scarcity world Tolkien [thanks to Capitalist Realism] literally couldn’t imagine (source).

(artist: Nyx)

The point with the above quote is that such things reify and continue within popular culture as something to interrogate through those who consume, creation or patron new Cartesian iterations preying on nature-as-monstrous-feminine. You want to critique power? You must go where it is. As a status/sex symbol, Medusa is often “too big” as white or black bodies, hair and cosmetics, which each come with its own double standards per type that—through tokenization at large—erupt in frustrating forms of assimilation, marginalized in-fighting and fetishization. In turn, iconoclastic forms are thicc fire starters that make trouble using what they got: their sizeable, shapely weight as something to throw around. For further examples, Volume One explores this in the Gothic as pornographic per body types and parts—so-called “PAWGs,” “BBCs,” and “BBWs”—but also regarding canonical fiction as something gradually critiqued in a postcolonial sense that is not without fresh struggles: Jane Eyre to Wide Sargasso Sea to modern people of color all around the world. The only way forward is through intersectional solidarity! —Perse

It’s canonically a cautionary space of institutionalized moral panic, one whose almost-holy dogma regards Medusa or Dracula as both the predatory serial killer from beyond—the freak of nature hailing from a fearsome imaginary past—but also crude elements of sodomy and witchcraft as moral lessons delivered in medieval-style parables: what good little girls are expected avoid (or else) on the same confused surface; i.e., something whose curiosity is capitalized on to uphold the status quo with. As such, the Nazi and Communist spectres remain stuck on the same mirror said girl sees herself on, all parties redoubled in a fearsome, concentric echo. It’s not just a cave of darkness, as Plato would have it, but—per Borges—is a mirror cave trapping the hero in an endless Promethean curse: Aguirre’s infernal concentric pattern haunting the very monomyths Disney has utterly milked dry.

Again, this goes beyond buildings as owned by humanoid tyrants, extending to nature-as-monstrous-feminine (abject) forcing its way into the Imperial Core: a female boss animal or a tyrant lizard chasing down a white, Vitruvian girl even when she isn’t wearing a skimpy fur bikini (so-called “women’s clothes” are generally designed by men to sexualize woman in a dimorphic heteronormative scheme). The very word “bikini” was appropriated from the Bikini Islands and, in turn, has shifted into a commercialized kaiju-style fiction: Gojira (1954) originally critiquing American Imperialism only to be recuperated/gentrified into yet-another-spectacle to cash in on. They do so similar to King Kong (1933) and other captive fantasies sexualizing spaces/occupants outside the Imperial Core as rapacious and black; i.e., vengeful in ways that curiously target white women with rape: through American-to-Japanese neoliberalism as a cottage-grade content mill through how-to-draw-manga and comic book instruction manuals routinely passing off the usual stories as incredibly pulpy and formulaic. Canon fetishizes the statuesque as often Amazonian/pin-up. It’s both completely absurd, but also lucrative; i.e., abusing those white/tokenized folk afraid of capital’s inevitable collapse and the gators coming home to roost!

Regardless of where they originally hail from, such stories classically feature white (or token) women, mid-peril, inside a collapsing colonial home invaded by nature (and its abject reproductive methods) challenging the nuclear family model; e.g., 2019’s Crawl and the monster literally being a hurricane (classically gendered as female) and gators/the wilderness as something to rescue whitey from, but also confuse the two: who’s the swamp kitten, in this scenario? The savage? Whatever the creature being featured, the fiction is neoconservative, hence weaponizes white women as prey animals against nature-as-black, as monstrous-feminine, as invasive, displaced, and hostile to a false “native” human ordering of things; i.e., said girlies surviving cartoon, escalating and superhuman trials-of-Job whose comical mega-damage occurs inside the colonial home rejecting them. The house floods, grows teeth, chews said family up and spits them out; i.e., the imperial formula as something to decay and survive through the Gothic princess as final-girl-turned-presumed-broodmare: the bridling of the Amazon, post-adventure.

Maybe Jameson’s right in that it’s a tad boring and tired, but the old fart still doesn’t account for ironic forms that inject some much-needed fun (and cum) into the mix: weird iconoclastic nerds subverting the paradigm, however exhausted, into something far sluttier and potent in favor of all workers and nature versus canonical (Cartesian) Gothic apologia! The two exist side-by-side in the same mode of consumption; i.e., as something for people like myself and Cuwu to camp in our own homebrew, DYI porn!

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Notably the larger mode becomes something that attracts weird to weird, Cuwu drawn to my drawing of them being hunted, and the two of us hooking up (for a time, left) to make much more art! It helped them face their own survived trauma, and me overcome my trans-woman’s hate of my girl cock—by shoving it repeatedly into Cuwu’s wet-but-thirsty cunt! Before then, I had drawn Cuwu in orange socks (several images back: a colorful homage to Debra Louise Jackson) being stalked by Jason Voorhees; they got horny by the idea—and from our talks about all manner of things, which put them at ease, “scaring” the panties off them. It was incredibly sexually charged before we met, and only led to a lot of fun, kinky experiments (sleep sex, for example) afterwards. I met different sides of them sharing the same body and face—the fuck-puppy high and disassociating and asking for sex, and the little dragon in them taking me for all I was worth: all looking at me with those hazel gold-rimmed eyes. And I don’t regret a single second of it, even as funerary moments like these sometimes feel like I’m digging “Cuwu” up and burying them again. “Here’s to looking at you, kid!”

(source: Fandom)

Amazons or not, the monstrous-feminine repeats in ways we need to utilize as a palliative-Numinous medicine, but also ludo-Gothic BDSM as good praxis. Pastiche is remediated praxis. Repetition is important, then, because fascists (always in disguise—cryptofascists) want us to forget hypocritical things about them; i.e., class betrayals that happened often as briefly as several years ago. To build on Asprey’s paradox of terror, we need to consider the legitimate proletarian function such theatrical devices entertain; i.e., as a vital means of repeating refrains useful to Gothic Communism: to scare children, thus apprise them of actual threats; e.g., Duncan Regehr wonderfully camping the Nazi by playing the fash-coded Dracula (above): exposing those that lurk on the surface of/within costumes and masks worn  on opposite ends of a given iteration of the same-old village scapegoat conversations. As such, this Halloween-style rhetoric works as a collective and warring form of bad theatre (re: “a tale told by an idiot”). Gothic Communists use it during revolutionary cryptonymy—to warn others of fascists serving capital by attacking us behind the mask; i.e., as something to make theirs slip. By comparison, fascists will monopolize terror through complicit cryptonymy—as something to perform, hogging all theatrical devices for themselves and themselves alone; i.e., to an absurd degree as the logical conclusion of exposing their usual obscurantism; e.g., “woke fascism” (The Kavernacle’s “The Rise of WOKE Fascism,” 2024): denude and expose us to attack and kill, ridding the state of another enemy.

To survive, we must put on the mask and dance with other people wearing masks who may or may not want to kill us in service to the bourgeoisie. It’s not about it making “perfect” sense, but subversive workers challenging fascism and those serving its fash-brain regressions as a clever (and ruthless) means for our enemies to hide and still be able to prey on state victims for the state (which we want to stop); i.e., as the usual false-rebel watchdogs of capital acting the monstrous badass and victim simultaneously while spreading Imperialism behind a false flag—in bad faith, bad education, bad acting and bad play. Whatever the venue, they’re craven, sneaky bullies poisoning the well—witch hunters waiting for the next moral panic to put on their spook hats and play victim/cop in equal measure.

Fascists are cutthroat, false impostors. It’s always an opportunity for them: to make money and whip their followers into a lucrative frenzy while punching down as a means of squeezing the usual underclass more and more. They make the persecution gold rush and sell the shovels to dig our graves, so we must expose that ghoulish Capitalism with our own shovels and caskets’ dialectic of the alien: the undertakers of their cruel stupidity turning them upside down, shaking them down. We take what they normally abuse and, per the usual give-and-take of any exchange, weaponize it against them: exposing the killer hiding in plain sight as a pillar of the community (e.g., Salt Baker from Cuphead, below; also, from Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” to Joe Dante’s The ‘Burbs or Wes Craven’s The People under the Stairs, 1991).

Per Volume Zero, fascists will predictably respond with deception and violence; i.e., acting “oppressed” when we “break” (critique/revolutionize) their canonical masks and monstrous toys (all heroes are monsters). As such, weird canonical nerds will respond with Man Box/”prison sex” behaviors tied to the profit motive: open aggression, condescension, reactionary indignation and DARVO. This applies to film critics, speedrunners, cosplayers, and basically any form of content/media you could think of/up regarding consumption, creation or privatization. From straight white guys to queer TERFs, canon defends itself in decay versus iconoclasm as a rebellious means of giving the capitalist game away (in other words, we’re gay Dracula being staked by Van Helsing for breaking centrist icons of so-called “balance”; i.e., peace, law and order, etc): defend the nuclear family mode defend the nuclear[13a] family model by indoctrinating women and children through a forced reproductive order weaponizing family as a fascist spear to plunge shamelessly into genderqueer (other otherwise outsider) forces. Never let them forget by always reminding them by antagonizing them; i.e., segregation is no defense, so fuck with them and guard yourself against reprisals.

Nazis defend Nazis, and Nazis (token or not) defend capital. Listen to the stink they pitch and expose them as you do—with your Aegis! They won’t be able to resist tone-policing or otherwise attacking Medusa out in the open, but won’t be able to harm you if you flash behind buffers (which the Internet provides, sex work being so taboo and commercialized that it becomes hard for fascists [or sex workers] to talk about at all because bare-and-exposed forms aren’t “ad friendly” but, for us, become a place to congregate and confer); e.g., Fired Up Stilettos, below, fighting for the decriminalization of sex work (sloganizing “stripping doesn’t equal consent” and “tip me” through them using their bodies to advertise inclusive graffiti/billboard activism); i.e., actual guerrillas out-maneuvering the clumsy imperial pig playing “guerilla” themselves.

(artist: Fired Up Stilettos)

The latter always colonize from a position of luxury that alienates them from actually being hunted by state forces; we will always be more used to it, more nimble and quick on home turf as something to take back from these lying brutes. They’re about as inventive as Mr. Owl biting to the center of a Tootsie Roll pop after three licks. Per Umberto Eco, there’s a variety of modular aspects to fascists, but first and foremost, they’re anti-intellectual and prone to play with dead metaphors, or metaphors to make dead; i.e., to fashion and wear like hollowed-out masks of their victims (monsters being symbols of persecution and persecutor) they them use to blend in and abuse us; we, in turn, play dumb/dead, freezing them and feeding accordingly or shifting shape and exchanging forbidden knowledge (the core functions of undead and demonic egregores/Gothic poetics) to contend with them (and the state) hunting us (e.g., Jordan Peele’s animal metaphors in Get Out [2015] and his other works: fascists body snatching black people to get close to them as a popular game to hunt within capital by the usual capitalist parasites whitewashing Beaver and the Cleaver clan; i.e., including parodies; e.g., Malcom in the Middle, 2000).

They also posture as representatives thereof. It’s real “pick me” behavior, race traitor, class and cultural betrayal overlapping. Tokenization overlaps among scarcity as criminogenic; i.e., a pauper’s sport where “there can only be one,” sloganized into fatal, effacing nostalgia (the beginning and the end of time, erasing anything before white American history and treating after the ’80s as begot from the same immutable nucleus) vis-à-vis Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” (1982) into Japanese neoliberal nation pastiche per Street Fighter (1987) and fighting games fighting on the usual class/cultural struggles. This sell-out’s hierarchy extends across all marginalized groups, treating black men as race horses/thoroughbreds and gladiators, to butch lesbians and other monstrous-feminine brands tied to a “better time” under capitalist regressions to a free market; e.g., Survivor’s “hey, sailor!” matelotage (that gay little beret) versus the Village’s People’s “YMCA” (1978) having its own cultural appropriation (the Native American chief costume) through schlocky gay pastiche/peak disco and fetish camp. Like with feminism, the Gothic, punk, sex work, etc, such things gentrify and then decay/straighten under capital (e.g., The Correspondent’s “What’s Happened to Soho?” 2011: “Where will all the reprobates go?”), aping Poe’s most famous story and arguably Hawthorne’s: families are always rising and falling in America! For us fags, Halloween isn’t a place to spend dough and punch down, though, but punch up and camp the Straights (not all disco is in disguise)!

Such dogma is hermeneutic; e.g., through a canonical lens, Mike Tyson isn’t kid dynamite exploited by a predatory white system (stolen culture/generations and diasporic culture death) from Gus D’Amato and Don King, but the one black guy who “made it,” became champ, had his own videogame character, etc. Except Mike Tyson’s likeness became something to privatize by Japanese executives into infinity as something to likewise embody by token grifters all across the planet: M. Bison, or “Boxer.” Due to localization in the neoliberal deck, Capcom swapped names for him and the other two archetypes, “Claw” and “Dictator.” Claw became Vega instead of Balrog (a mutation of Zorro as a slasher preying on beautiful women), and Dictator became M. Bison instead of Vega (a fash version of Superman-meets-Francisco-Franco, marrying the real-world dictator with Yasunori Kato[14a] into a bizarre neoliberal hybrid). The same kayfabe BDSM could be seem in other fighting series demonizing BDSM in an abject theatrical sense; e.g., Voldo from the Soul Caliber franchise demonizing (and capitalizing on) the strict BDSM aesthetic like Giger’s xenomorph did or Clive Barker’s cenobites.

No matter how tired or aged the performers, the show must go on. In other words, it’s the usual pyramid-shaped, circus-grade, Red-Scare clichés fostering American exceptionalism—with the money flowing up through the usual assistants and updating of East-meets-West Orientalism: from Bruce Lee vs Chuck Norris to Daniel-san vs Johnny Lawrence onto Ryu vs Ken Masters (from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s) onto The Karate Kid 2018 remake as something we must critique (Persephone van der Waard’s “Class Warfare – Classism, Fascism and Whitewashing in Cobra Kai, season 4,” 2022), onto to Street Fighter 6 (2023), and so on and so on. It’s sex-and-force vaudeville evolving inside an increasingly neoliberal market’s growing profit motive (the trifectas and monopolies) to foster praxial inertia, not a valid pedagogy of the oppressed; i.e., as forever capitalizing on the imaginary past per the same old heteronormative, settler-colonial, Cartesian predation against nature as anti-American, anti-capital, anti-genocide (war and rape), etc. Anything that challenges that will be gagged, and censorship equals genocide dressed up as “peace (and quiet)” for the usual entrepreneurs: Anglicized capitalists aping the colonizer from Caesar to Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden.

The same goes for Marston’s Wonder Woman and Hippolyta, Medusa, and any monstrous-feminine, as “ad friendly”; i.e., that serves profit, not a pedagogy of the oppressed; e.g., sex worker likenesses being weaponized against and stolen from them. The more narrow the tokenization, the more niche the grifter serving the profit motive’s heteronormative hierarchy of power. Same goes for GNC people of any race, religion or gender identity/performance. Amazonian white enby? Eh, class betrayal is class betrayal. It’s kayfabe neoliberal vaudeville, my dudes. While there’s no such thing as a perfect victim (with reprobates [sinners pre-destined for damnation, per Calvinism] and forgiveness being allotted through the usual “boundaries for me, not for thee” schtick; i.e., an equality of convenience that pushes other minorities’ heads under the water but generally from a cis- or white-supremacist stance corrupting feminism and queer movements: bleeding from the usual gentrified/fascist venues into the usual ghettos), but policing and proletarian victimhood become mutually exclusive the moment a victim becomes an abuser for the state.

The problem with revolution and intersectional solidarity is that it isn’t modular to nearly the same degree as monsters/Gothic poetics are. You’re either for workers or the state, the latter of which is the perpetual cop/enemy to the former. Any aesthetic that you can pick and play with functions through unequal power in this respect towards one or the other, not both; e.g., the black Egyptian mommy dom as the usual victim of those who think “big mommy muscles and faux, campy Egyptology alone = rebellion.”

Sadly it takes a little more than that, my dudes (e.g., Marisa is a fash; i.e., Persephone van der Waard’s “Fascism in SF6: Marisa,” 2023)! Feminist and/or GNC, Amazons—like all monstrous-feminine—historically concede societal gains to enjoy policer positions under the Man’s so-called “protection” (to find the Nazi, observe anyone who gets mad/denies your arguments when you point out the obvious fascist presence in kayfabe, Amazonomachia, and/or the monomyth’s usual predatory bread-and-circus); they become unironic whores lusted-after for their subjugated dominatrix’ aesthetic and Amazonian performance, while exploiting and punching down at others less fortunate (and more principled) than themselves. All haunt the same basic herbo-to-himbo gradient, regardless of the exact appearance it adopts: aping the Amazon, the gypsy and/or Cleopatra (all poetics are made up, but those invented to serve the state do so through profit subjugating rebellion as a matter of controlled opposition). “Oh, rare Egyptian!” my ass!

(artist: Shardanic)

To that, my experience with Autumn was ultimately a negative one—someone GNC who looked the part, but functioned as a herbo witch cop; i.e., a person who loves DBZ (and similar pulpy heroism), but used its herbo, meathead aesthetic to police rebellious elements that speak out against capital (me); i.e., during their own centrist, SWERF-style sex work dressed up as “modest.” The usual nudity is very much implied on the surface of that tiny Triforce thong (several images back): the “gateway to Heaven” as Hyrulian, invented. It’s the hidden ham sandwich to sell on the surface of nerd monomythic emblems, while doing a very common SWERF[14] trick: attacking those who show more skin, denying them the right to exist by virtue of valorizing non-naked cosplays; i.e., that get “naked without nudity” while offering “gym mom” wisdom to the same old hopeless dweebs and acting better than those who do get naked to reclaim their bodies, genders and struggles with.

As such, Autumn and their skin-deep, “bare skin mil spec” approach to the mommy dom (the cave woman) is no different than AMAB versions of the same monstrous-feminine wizard class: a meat puppet gym mom passing off a queer subjugate’s dead dogma thereof while acting like a queen action figure (a diva, in Autumn’s case). Just as the female Amazon combines sex and force like the male variant does, it comes with its own female baggage/double standards that Autumn conveys through a dumb, unironic fulfillment of prostituting themselves; i.e., as the female cop-in-uniform made into an Amazonian token: naked and clothed, strong as the male-warrior-made-female in ways that “act the man” per female double standards—the virgin and the whore defending Omelas, the white Indian punching down at other tribes.

And this is me being nice! Either they’re a useful idiot, or know exactly what they’re doing and don’t care. Like all Marvel canon, Autumn does nothing to challenge the war machine/status quo abuse of a statuesque cryptonymy. They’re complicit, pumping iron and making hay as the poster herbo for the state. Yikes!

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

Such things are always object lessons in some shape or form. Regarding Autumn, a cop is a cop, and castles (ACAB) of a pearly “Omelas” sort always regress to rape of an unironic sort that bridles the Amazon (the euthanasia effect); i.e., while expanding the hidden Holocaust. You gotta do way more than flash some skin (and implied genitals) to convince me you’re good faith, my dude. Those tattoos, enby identity and stripper clothes/furry shtick mean fuck-all if you’re still a state proponent, thus an unironic toy for the elite; police work is sex work fetishizing the cop, including in blind parodies that make the cop an undercover agent working for vice in their underwear. That’s you, Autumn—threatening[15] me as such people always do; i.e., the white savior extending to the enby cop policing the AMAB trans woman with all the grace of an unironic cavewoman. Real classy!

(artist: Claire Max)

All the same, Autumn doesn’t have a monopoly on the weird nerd culture of such masculine-heavy monstrous-feminine; e.g., Claire Max is someone who’s frank about what she does, but isn’t a total SWERF and TERF (fash) about it. Her own statements on physical fitness provide a nice counterpoint to Autumn’s decayed, witch-cop antics, Claire’s own life updates overlapping with gym culture

Pretty happy about having a fat ass for the first time in my life, but months of constant lower body work because of my broken arm also mean it’s super plump and round? Good job, me (source tweet: May 1st, 2024)

albeit as something that isn’t regressive and fixated on making money over intersectional solidarity. More than her own reflections, though, Claire doesn’t seem to personify regressive triangulation by token Amazons against trans populations the way that Autumn did with me. She’s a model, but not pretending that she somehow doesn’t do sex work (something Autumn told me repeatedly not to advertise about them; i.e., telling me what to write, but not much appreciating it when I had my own requests. Face it, Autumn: you’re a sex worker and a cop).

To this, the degree to which someone’s skin (and heroic muscles) are showed, implying the genitals, isn’t even the point, nor are any theatrical regressions unto Amazonian spaces and personas like Savage Land or Wonder Woman; it’s whether someone who reaches celebrity status through such iconography starts acting like a class traitor behind the monstrous-feminine guise. Autumn did, and has decayed beneath the paintjob as something altogether rotten; Claire does not, has not. End of story!

Now, take the same idea and apply it to any monstrous-feminine performer under the sun; i.e., not just herbos or himbos (cis or GNC), but various combos of masculine, feminine and non-binary forms of sex work that, through ludo-Gothic BDSM, work within the language of (class) war as something to personify in popular cultural markers/codifiers like the herbo or himbo. Bodies aren’t just lifestyles or goals, then, but punkish class/cultural goals that pass along critical-thinking skills tied to the body as a theatrical uniform; i.e., the flesh as a symbol of strength that can challenge state hegemonies through psychosexual rape fantasies that sit next to trauma, but needn’t actually harm someone.

To that, Claire isn’t just a thuggish strength trainer like Autumn is. Autumn takes thirsty men’s money while “returning to greatness” through an imaginary past that chains the Amazon to the oldest cliché in the book: “acting like a man”; i.e., aping an unironic, Man-Box Goku gender swap, but still keeping a bit of dumb sluttiness to the brawny action figure (sluts are fine; cop sluts, not so much). By comparison, Claire uses what she has to pass healthier lessons along without feeling/acting like a literal, functional cop. It could always happen in the future, but as of right now that’s certainly not the vibe Claire gives off. As Claire’s Twitter bio reads, “Built like a steakhouse, handles like a bistro” (source); she caters, but doesn’t pander to fascist dudes by being the strict mommy dom the state loves (as Autumn does):

(artist: Claire Max)

Claire looks like she hits the gym, but isn’t trying to scam anyone or pander for her own sake:

Influencers who claim you can build an ass in 30 days (if you buy their program!) don’t want to tell you this, but if you want a bigger butt? You have to gain weight. And yes, some of that weight will be fat. And no, not all of it will be in your butt. That’s not how bodies work. You can’t choose where you gain fat and you can’t choose where you lose it from. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that you CAN choose where you build muscle, and with the right training and diet, you can get the results you want (ibid.).

We’re all looking for that special, capable someone to nurture us in different ways: the mad lass who brings a cake and “guns” to a gunfight. In turn, capital is a boomerang that must repeat, repeat, repeat. This time we can reject capital and embrace Medusa as someone to hug, fuck and take on the wider call for liberation from state monopolies and trifectas, but also their class traitors in disguise; i.e., not just Autumn being a dumb, diva-grade meathead, but older forms of Socialism that failed by virtue of an ability to corrupt; e.g., Marxist-Leninism as yet another state mechanism to woo with proverbial “gifts from the colonizer”; e.g., the Skeksis orrery given to Aughra, but also the Trojan Horse onto more recent Amazons that gender swap Achilles as something capitalize on, not challenge the state with. They aren’t avatars of/servants to Medusa, we are; and we, as such, liberate that which capital universally alienates, sexualizes and fetishizes to normally serve profit through the Cartesian paradigm—ourselves. We must learn to play with ourselves according to a power that, once harnessed, cannot be denied, destroyed or prevented, only challenged by those dependent on/accommodated by the state.

In short, there was never a moment when Autumn didn’t treat me like a threat (more on that in Volume One, if you’re curious). Except, we don’t have to keep defaulting to the same old Halloween regressions and progressions inside capital’s “comfort zone” (white moderacy and queer tokenization); i.e., controlled opposition’s predictable, DJ-style oscillations on the same vinyl: back-and-forth while not really going anywhere. That’s how centrism works! To foster actual rebellion, we can—to use a scary bedroom phrase—”take it to the next level” (aka “spicing things up”): to wake up Medusa by trying new forbidden things that, per the same fetishized, war-like language of superheroes, often translate to anal, Medusa, etc, as things to guiltily indulge in. Calculated risk maximizes sex appeal, gender invention and class/cultural character while minimizing the potential for actual harm (risk/rape reduction) behind our Aegis’ cryptonymic buffers.

Except, we’re trying such angles “on for size” to stand for something other than profit, hence better liberate workers (and their labor) from a capitalist mode(l) of domination. We’re not the sharks, though capital often reduces workers to bad caricatures of such things (re: Autumn); i.e., manufactured enemies, feeding greedily on a frenzy of chum. Made by Gothic Communists, such Amazonian statements—from Wonder Woman to Ayla to Gohan, to whatever slutty head canon pops into my head when I listen to the Skyrim (2011) main theme—can challenge the state through bad imitations of medieval “history” as counterfeit, meaning the kind envisioned by Lewis as overshadowed by actual rape, but per ludo-Gothic BDSM becomes a rebellious sex-positive cryptonym; i.e., “just” a sex game, but also more than that hidden in plain sight: during sex as a form of “superheroic” roleplay (so-called “action”) that normally upholds the nuclear family model as castle-esque, daddy’s home and daddy’s girl.

(source: Steam Workshop)

Forgetting Freud’s very repressed homophobia (the so-called “anal phase” something he codified into dogmatic quackery), the fact remains that the anus is a site of settler-colonial humiliation: something to enter and abuse. Except, just as anal is letting potentially harmful things into a very vulnerable and sensitive side of ourselves designed to push things out (talk about reversing abjection, eh, Kristeva?), challenging capital’s particular abjection reflex walks a very fine line indeed (think Skyrim‘s infamous “fus-ro-dah!” yawp, but tied to the fetishes of capital in ways that reduce the monstrous-feminine to an abject reversal, when camped: the thunder-clapping dummy-thicc booty suggested by whatever angle you view its owner from, whatever odor [vis-à-vis JomoKiN’s mod for Muscarine’s “Tusk Profligate” mod, above 2021] or sound, any of the senses)! Again, liberation and enslavement occupy the same space, the same monster-girl bodies, the same fantasies as “for profit” or “for workers.” There is no middle ground, but there is liminal expression per monster modules that frequently overlap!

(artist: Georgy Stacker)

To this, male forms of the monstrous-feminine are to sodomy what female forms are to Amazonomachia, the eroticizing of women (or those forced to identify as women) into a gradient of monstrous-feminine; i.e., the herbo and himbo historically-materially yielding infantilizing scenarios of exchange that—per BDSM in all its forms—must go where power is and playfully critique canon: in the same performative scenarios, uniforms, body language, markets, etc, reclaiming the instruments of rape, bondage, pain, and torture as married to the chronotope of sex through compelled arguments: dynastic primacy and hereditary rites (the virginal blood sacrifice dressed up as the whore to please the male monarch). Campy or not, such a theatre is always haunted, like the Gothic castle is, by old-to-recent historical regressions towards fascist variants from moderate, pearly ones under Pax Americana.

In short, unironic rape, decay and torture (which anal can easily become) are always close by during calculated risk, the token cop eventually forced to take part once closeted and/or shackled, their agency disintegrating like their skimpy underwear. This isn’t a threat made by me towards anyone in particular (may Autumn, for their own sake, eventually pull their head out of their ass) but simply a historical-material fact; tokenism doesn’t pay or last. It’s a shitty existence if you ask me, but what do I know? It’s not like I’ve been abused before and wrote my PhD about it in Gothic form… (obvious sarcasm). If it was good enough for Marston, it’s good enough for yours truly! Except, purging the Nazi Amazon is a bit like anal; i.e., it’s like taking a much-needed shit, only not! Something goes in, something goes out, and you feel better/oddly good afterwards (nothing is sacred when camping the canon)!

If there’s one thing I’ve learned through all of this, it’s that everyone needs a survivor/protector who’s lived it—so that such things become a part of their identity as de facto educator in sex-positive ways—but also who isn’t afraid to let someone else be strong for them (for each other) regardless of the relationship you and they share. This can be regarding live-in situations, but also long-distance/working relations, or even parasocial ones.

(artist: Asura)

To that, let’s go beyond people and media as parasocial, and consider history as toy-like in ways that extend to ourselves and our friends who play with such stories together! Onto “Into the Toy Chest!”

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Footnotes

[12] Lynn Stuart Parramore writes in “Like QAnon’s Capitol Rioters, the Nashville Bomber’s Lizard People Theory Is Deadly Serious” (2021):

The notion of shape-shifting, blood-sucking reptilian humanoids invading Earth to control the human race sounds like a cheesy sci-fi plot. But it’s actually a very old trope with disturbing links to anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic hostilities dating to the 19th century. […] Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” the 1897 tale of a Romanian vampire who plans to take over London using his renowned shape-shifting abilities, also carries traces of this trope. The count possesses a number of reptilian qualities — from his association with the knightly Order of the Dragon, from which his name derives, to his cold-blooded nature and talent for shimmying down walls lizard-fashion. Dracula’s protruding teeth, pointed ears and blood-sucking habits mark him as a species apart, a motif of “othering” read by some critics as code for Jewishness. From this perspective, Stoker’s book is part of the British response to the increasing numbers of Jewish immigrants arriving from Eastern Europe. The vampire is a stealthy invader, passing as a proper citizen but secretly plotting domination and destruction (source).

[13] E.g., Mario as monstrous to Princess Toadstool, from Giles Laurent’s “Mario from Hell” (2010).

[13a] From Rome to “Rome,” the capitalist imperative is constant: defend the nucleus from victims framed as impostors in service to profit, settler-colonialism, heteronormativity and Imperialism, et al. This includes recuperating female avengers punching up against powerful men they castrate as “good enough”; e.g., Lisbeth Salander as punk appropriation (sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll, piercings, tattoos, etc) and, as usual, decay mid-cryptomimesis: the grungy, dark ’90s revival, Industrial-grade vigilante bouncing between likenesses of The Crow, The Matrix, The Cell, Batman, Sense8 and similar monstrous-feminine graveyards pulling up killer dolls like mandragora with or without class/cultural ironies: dragon ladies in skintight catsuits, touched by fire and breathing flames in a perpetual, centrist cycle of trauma and revenge, rape and release.

Anything can be stolen for profit or reclaimed from it, but decay is ever-present. Medusa is a zombie, after all, one haunted by hauntologies of all the same-old fetishes and clichés: chase sequences, heroic vehicles (from nightmarish steeds to Meatloaf’s silver-black phantom bike), femme fatales, masked men/banditti, crime lords, black knights, hackers, spies, ninjas, Nazi Superman disguised as Clark Kent (sleeper agents), etc. Caricatures like Salander (a pun for “Salamander”) always walk a tightrope, threatening to plunge ignominiously into the abyss of class betrayal: gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss; i.e., she is always hunted/haunted by state doubles (“two snakes facing each other”).

In turn, the state always prohibits progressions away from mortification of the flesh, black penitents, gang violence, Pavlovian incest/menticide through rape—you know, the usual medieval gags trapped in a criminogenic, palingenetic historical-material loop in dialectical-material struggle; i.e., between state and labor copycats, returning to routine sites of childhood abuse/middle-class decay and indoctrination. Again, the elite can’t kill Medusa, only drag and subjugate her through daddy’s-girl doubles (the usual Red Scare conflating the Nazi and Communist, horseshoe-theory-style, above) versus the runaway escaping trauma as emblematic of state counterfeits and true rebellions: Red Scare as monstrous-feminine, the hysterical Mad Russian and her castle of nameless goons threatening the West with nuclear oblivion (called “mutually-assured destruction” in Cold War dialogs).

As such, likenesses of Salander are less an anti-hero and more “hero” vis-à-vis one side of the same half-real equation: state lapdogs/dogs of war on leads (a portmanteau of a Saxon and Accept tune) versus the folk hero echoed along likenesses of Robin Hood, Zorro, Che Guevara, Trinity, Chelsea Manning and so on challenging ties to king and country but also corporations. Salander’s a Swiss army knife, only anti-James-Bond when she actually decolonizes the racist/sexist areas of computers, espionage, acting, BDSM, games, etc. The 2018 movie, The Girl in the Spider’s Web, does not, only conflating Salander’s “punk” with her Venus twin’s equally bogus “Nazi-Communist” anti-West cartoon. Ludo-Gothic BDSM is always liminal, struggling between resistance and subjugation in artistic and pornographic forms; its erotic-to-ace skullduggery is always trapped between canon and camp: Salander’s androgynous, tramp-stamp dumper branded for treason, a “renegade maverick” with optional quotes facing her crimson Russian double. “Why did you help everyone but me?” “You chose to stay!” As such, Salander blames the victim to save the world from another spectre of Marx.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

We don’t have to abandon such stories and their tricky dualism, and can keep the architecture/archetypes (in the flesh or not), but the revolutionary class character must become active, not mired down in service to forced allegory and profit aiding the usual white, status-quo billionaires playing “rebel” (the Star Wars problem). We must reclaim the whore, the Medusa and her fat-and-sassy ass’ anisotropic decay to serve ourselves, not the elite framing “giving someone the D” as the universal, unironic, Man-Box solution (the silver bullet).

[14] Scratch a SWERF/moderate and a TERF/fascist bleeds: Autumn is a trans misogynist (from Volume One):

Autumn always acted like the boss, even when they had no grounds for it: a queer boss dressed like an Amazon, but also acting like one of a particular kind; i.e., a SWERF and a moderate strongarm/war boss pushing me around while shoving their own sloganized, superhero merchandise through the market. All the while, our trauma and its means of communicating through mommy-dom/thirst-trap Amazonomachia were competing against each other through monstrous language as something to negotiate: Autumn’s needs and wants trumping mine by virtue of their advertised superiority inside the same oppressed community discussing nerd culture.

For instance, Autumn strongly disliked the label “sex worker” being applied to them publicly because it could hurt their bottom line. It didn’t matter that they had an OnlyFans full of thirst-trap materials that very clearly constituted sex work; any mention of Autumn being a sex worker (calling it like it is) was something they were very forcefully against. And while this might sound okay unto itself, they were also a) only too happy to take my patronage for sex work, while b) stressing their own professional status and using that to tell me exactly how to advertise them in my own galleries and writing (which concerns sex worker rights). It honestly felt pretty bossy of them, but also dense; i.e., invalidating of me as a genderqueer artist/sex worker while constantly advertising themselves as a strong-looking enby who honestly was having their cake and eating it, too: showing less skin (no “ham sandwich,” in their words) and putting themselves on a pedestal above other sex workers while doing the same kind of work: talking dirty and showing off to make people cum; i.e., voice work first, with nudity as a pay-walled afterthought.

The problem here, isn’t selling sex, but that Autumn’s approach became prescriptive and self-important; i.e., a weird canonical nerd smiling their Hollywood smile, getting fake tits to emphasize their female attributes within the Amazon persona, and treating false modesty like a lucrative virtue exclusive to them and their brand: the bogus and incredibly harmful argument that partially-clothed bodies and implied nudity are somehow “worth more” than fully naked ones are. It wasn’t explicitly stated, but nevertheless showed in how Autumn treated me over time: they were always the victim, and I could never be one. Regardless of intent, their trauma, their rights, and their business—all trumped my voice in defense of capital (re: intent doesn’t matter, actions do, and function determines function) [source].

[14a] A Japanese take on Melmoth the Wanderer aka the Wandering Jew as seeking revenge against the Japanese empire: the fascist trope of the backstabbing Jew amounting to a dark shadow knight that occupies the same neoliberal kayfabe shadow zone as the Nazi does. As Timothy Donohoo writes in “Street Fighter‘s Greatest Villain Was Inspired by a Spooky Japanese Horror Novel” (2022):

Created by Hiroshi Aramata, Yasunori Kato debuted in the first volume of the novel, Teito Monogatari. This dark fantasy series tells a story in an alternate version of 20th century Japan. One of the many characters in the stories is protagonist Yasunori Kato, though he also acts as the series’ antagonist. A sort of take on Melmoth the Wanderer or the Wandering Jew, Kato is seemingly a former general in the Japanese army. In reality, he embodies centuries of lost Japanese history, with his malevolence representing the rage of those who had once stood against the Japanese. […]

The cinematic version of Kato went into designing Capcom’s villainous Vega, known as M. Bison outside Japan. A dictator with goals of world conquest, his ambitions are not too different from Kato’s. His costume is almost the exact same as Kato’s, albeit trading out the dark blue/black color scheme for a predominately red one. Even their creepy grins evoke the same imagery, making them both hauntingly demonic in appearance. His facial expression on arcade posters for a version of Street Fighter II specifically mirrors the poster of the animated Teito Monogatari adaptation, Doomed Megalopolis (source).

[15] As I write in Volume One,

Autumn’s abusive conduct [is] part of their selling point: the gun-toting, inspirational gym mom, enby aesthete throwing their weight around pretty fucking hard the moment a little femboy artist like me (still in the closet at the time) inconvenienced them, or talked about her rights or opinions for a change; i.e., trans misogyny.

To be honest, I had wanted to say more during our falling out to clear things up but Autumn was pissed and so was I. The fact remains, I didn’t mention my uncle to them because I didn’t know he was dead at the time; my abusive surviving uncle didn’t want me attending the hospital visit, so I was at home waiting to hear about the results of the incoming brain scan. I didn’t know it, but he was legally dead by the time Autumn and I had our fight. And perhaps it’s unfair of me to hold that against Autumn, so I technically won’t. I’ll just say that their video messages largely concerned them hurling the most thinly veiled insults imaginable at me (and not in a professional manner), informing me in no uncertain terms just how unreasonable I had been to voice my true feelings at all.

Perhaps there was no place for them in Autumn’s mind. Except that’s not how humans (or labor exchanges) work. My uncle was probably dead, I was losing my best friend, and still reeling from my last ex’s abuses. But Autumn? They just couldn’t be bothered to put up with me because their horse had been difficult that morning! Far be it from me to compare a temperamental horse to a dead uncle, or to expect Autumn to have known about Dave; but the fact remains that they were entirely concerned with themselves and I (and my trauma) were a nuisance. It became something to mute, treating me like a no-good AMAB dickhead while lionizing themselves and encouraging me to keep mum (something that all abusers do; e.g., Zeuhl and Cuwu).

Given the terrible timing of things and me admittedly nursing some bruised co-worker/client resentment (for Autumn’s unprofessional, one-sided conduct) on top of what I was going through, it was a perfect storm of self-centeredness from them and denied expectations from me. Shit happens, but there’s a still sex-positive lesson to be learned, here. Specifically I want us to reflect on what transpired between Autumn and I in relation to capital and Amazon aesthetics at large; i.e., as a countercultural means of interrogating trauma during the potential for labor and cultural disputes (source).

This post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second book sample series originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact“ (2024). That series was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two’s assorted chapters and its twin modules, the Undead and Demons. As usual, this promo series (and all its posts) are written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Volume Two, part one (the Poetry Module) is out now (5/1/2024)! I wrote a preface for the module along with its debut announcement. Give that a look; then, go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the full module (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

Click here to see “Searching for Secrets'” 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 at the bottom of the page.

Picking up from where “Digging Our Own Graves” left off…

Splendide Mendax: the Rise and Fall of “Rome” as Built-in(to Us)

Our struggle—to hug the Medusa as something to teach, to reclaim our bodies (our asses) as Aegis-like and disguise-worthy—sits inside a dangerous hall of mirrors. The state isn’t just a war machine, you see, but a war factory (of factories) whose own spinning room of kaleidoscopic reflections stretches in all directions, remediates during fractal recursion into/onto all media: a dividing of the natural-material world into linguo-material false binaries and boundaries the state’s servants can acquire, internalize from childhood, and raise then police into the future. To critique power as an illusion, you must go where its illusions—its masks, disguises and performers—collectively inhabit and interact in curious, veiled hostility (source).

—Persephone van der Waard, Sex Positivity, Volume Two, part one (2024)

 

“You have your sword, I have my tricks,” said Odysseus to Achilles. The latter dies during the fall of Troy from his Achilles Heel as acquired at birth. This subchapter considers nature vs nurture relative to Gothic poetics, insofar as this can be used to code humans to war against/rape nature; i.e., how for humans under Capitalism, nurture is currently tied to giant linguo-material structures called “capital” that weaponize the imaginary past’s splendid lies against workers and nature: Capitalist Realism dipping the hero into the river Styx. They do this to “gift” him (or her) with the aura of invulnerability but don’t bank on its being haunted by narcissistic echoes of other Roman fools having fallen on the same proverbial sword; e.g., the Skeksis are unicorn hunters on a drug war, addicted to what they are alienated from in rarefied form: cocaine, essence, as the blood of the Earth; i.e., Foucault’s biopower reduced to something the usual capitalist vampires render nature into before injecting greedily into their own veins. In turn, all their splendide mendax/elaborate strategies of misdirection—all their art and science, their Base and Superstructure—collectively aid in this ghoulish refueling process, including heroes as monsters, as elaborate lies that can serve or challenge profit; i.e., hinging on how workers utilize them in response.

The problem to face, then, is Capitalism; i.e., capital doing what capital always does: move money through nature as alien, abject—something to harvest and regress backwards and towards on a black-and-white chessboard of the same-old hauntological chateau guarded by the same-old hauntological watchdogs. Cartesian thought commodifies the monstrous-feminine into predatory herbo/himbo groups, turning such poetic devices into action-figure collectibles that can be bought and sold, but also played with, inhabited; i.e., during an intended gameplay’s dogmatic, copagandistic instruction: rape nature by policing it in tokenized forms of predator and prey. There’s also those who play the part the doll is based on, and the capitalists who run the show behind the curtain. Consumer, creator, capitalist—all are part of the same canonical war machine harvesting nature-as-monstrous-feminine, as alien, fetish, psychosexual slave valued for the usual imperial “goods” divided along heteronormative lines in a settler-colonial binary as “dressed up”; i.e., in the usual centrist gimmicks: sex and force as things to capitalize on and privatize for all the usual benefactors (capitalists) to the detriment of all the usual victims (cops and victims).

(artist: Emery EXP)

To that, “mommy” might be absolutely stacked (as Medusa generally is) and wet, making that pull-out game weak; she remains forced by capital to serve the usual gooners as a paradoxical waifu (the Amazonian war boss) playing strip-tease. Resistance—per Foucault (and me: ludo-Gothic BDSM)—occurs in the same place, the same stage to perform on; i.e., with one’s body as a playful, linguo-material extension of one’s labor value and struggle to reclaim it through iconoclastic Gothic poetics made material, obvious, tangible: Milton’s “darkness visible.” This is all fine and good, provided the performer doesn’t tokenize and colonize others in turn. Many do, some do not (we’ll look at both in just a moment), but who we are as people factors in through our bodies as part of ontological statements workers make all the time. We’re not always aware of it, even. “Damn girl! You shit with that ass?” my ex’s ex once asked me, regarding my dumper. Amazons, by extension, are cover-image material; i.e., the marquee to imitate through such body parts where exceptional.

In musical terms, this is called a cover. In comics, it’s a cover model, blown up for maximum, repetitive effect; i.e., profit, for capitalists, and critical power for Communists—the Aegis, the money maker, the fucking POW! blocks from Mario 2 (1988). It’s what more cynical grifters might label “an agenda,” but simply is reality as something to perform, thus to achieve something other than menticide, submission, enslavement, et al. Capital’s like a bad relationship, then. Fucking and fighting like a tornado is fun for a bit, but it gets old even when it is our choice. Equality and stability are so much better (e.g., Crash Hard’s “BeamNG Drive – Cars vs Stairs #11,” 2023), except Capitalism doesn’t give a toss about those! It’s a shark; as we’ll see with those who emulate it, they become sharks, too: glass-eyed killer dolls built like tanks. Jadis was one, Autumn was another (as we’ll see); some people have the equipment, but are kinder than either of those ghouls (as I’ll assume Kay is, below). Original Sin’s a persecution mechanic in that respect, but also a liberatory form of ironic BDSM, and people are walking canvases; i.e., it’s not the truck-like dumper that’s the problem, but what you do with it as a socio-political statement tied to your labor as often overshadowed by the body itself as fetishized. It’s not always overt/obvious, then; sometimes, a butt is just a butt, no matter how substantial/fine, but conversely there’s context to any photograph:

(artist: Kay)

When tokenization occurs, though, the problem historically snowballs. The more the state takes to try and cheat death, the more addicted they become, the more alienated, the more rotten—them, of course, but also the alien they dress up and rape, time and time again. Eventually Medusa wins (state shift). And those who play both sides/are high on their own legends of self-righteous do-goodery will pay the price like everyone else; i.e., billionaire Marxism and centrifying variants of the white Indian/savior narrative that erase Indigenous (and other marginalized struggles) by painting themselves as the universal victim, the Amazon of which there is only them; e.g., Star Wars (and its assorted counterfeits) furthering Red Scare by doing a common middle-class trick under American Liberalism: equality of convenience per men like Mark Hamill stuck in this centrist performance that defends the state by playing the white-knight variant of the false rebel.

Fascist or not, a cop is a cop; Mark Hamill isn’t just Don Quixote tilting at windmills, then, but a cop (as knights classically were) who thinks he’s a Marxist space wizard “keeping the peace” (what MLK called “negative peace” as the absence of tension versus “positive justice”); i.e., as white moderates (and their token agents) always do—not just him, but people acting like him in equal bad faith/measure; e.g., Ron Pearlman, Natalie Portman, and Madonna (source: Lauren Sarner’s “Celebrities Leading Support for Israel in the War Against Hamas,” 2023). Like the Nazi outfit, the white moderate becomes something they think they can “take off.” Except it’s not, because people don’t forget; Commies have minds like elephants, and you’ve left behind a mountain of evidence. You make hay during genocide; we take your folly as straw to spin gold out of—our liberation!

(source tweet: Spiderwarz, March 27th, 2024)

Achilles isn’t just doomed once, you see. It becomes a fatal hand-me-down, a counterfeit nostalgia where the warrior’s death is canonical code to embody through the young man or tomboy’s rite of passage becoming the very toys they play with in service to the state; i.e., of flowing power towards the state during the dialectic of the alien, harvesting nature-as-monstrous-feminine during Cartesian edicts. Under capital, these constantly sexualize, fetishize, and alienate everything during canonical essentialism’s us-versus-them. It is a historical-material byproduct that we, as Gothic Communists, must argue against with our own doubles of—e.g., costumes, masks, and other revolutionary cryptonyms; i.e., by using ludo-Gothic BDSM’s ergodic motion (castle-narrative) during the liminal hauntology of war (the appearance of the grim harvest, beckoning the usual victims towards the usual Call to Adventure as a copaganda exercise): oppositional praxis synthesized to achieve systemic catharsis when challenging the profit motive on all registers and modes of expression.

Our examination goes well beyond videogames and their cartographic refrains (re: Tolkien’s treasure map or Cameron’s urban warfare/shooter) to holistically apply this to all media as something to collectively and individually foster in an iconoclastic, sex-positive direction. Achilles’ cycle of rape and revenge (the murder-suicide) for profit can be broken, but we have to kill a lot of darlings to do so; i.e., break a lot of toys to engender emergent gameplay that develops Gothic Communism in a ludo-Gothic BDSM sense: camping canon, aka “making it gay/political” by announcing our own existence as ironic towards the profit motive unironically killing us through its toy-like dogma.

As luck would have it, the Gothic has done this since the days of Matthew Lewis—embodying rebellion as something that others less campy (and brave) would gentrify to line their own pockets with and fortify state arguments (re: Radcliffe). As such, Castlevania (1986) might seem like dead dogma, now, but the possibility always remains for such heroes to become ironic once more; e.g., from Nintendo’s beef-lord Belmonts to JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure (1987) as its own campy launchpad of future genderqueer icons. Our best revenge is to become voices they cannot silence, toys they cannot break left behind inside the same proverbial toy chest. To ask questions like “Where does Sir Thomas’ wealth come from?” and expose the state, regardless of the answer! Whereas fascists use straw man arguments as dog whistles to eventually become straw dogs, our game of chicken with the elite becomes an Aegis that traps them in amber.

History is an endless toy chest, and there’s only so many combinations and dialectical-material opposites before you start to get repetition and overlap. My book is an iconoclastic toy chest. First, we’ll have several sections I’d like to reexamine based on what we outlined: the idea of history as toy-like through action figures (the herbo and himbo) as both a) a clever means of replicating and interrogating the imaginary past as empowering through Promethean “disempowerment” (re: Aguirre), but also b) the monstrous-feminine as a ludo-Gothic BDSM historical device that operates in relation to ourselves and its various effects on us and our social-sex lives. After that, we’ll dive straight into the modules to look at the imaginary past: as something to historically learn from now and reapply differently in the future during proletarian praxis (which Volume Three will focus on).

Before we do, though, there’s toys to be played with! First, onto gay himbos and herbos!

“Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’!”: From Herbos to Himbos, part one (feat. Dragon Ball Z and Big Trouble in Little China; Wonder Woman)

“That’s like… super gay!”

—Even, Superbad (2007)

(artist: Silverjow)

Camping war is to make war gay in ways that challenge profit. To that, capital is criminogenic through action-figure echoes of Achilles that have gay potential for or against the state; i.e., Pride as an LGBA conclusion within Rainbow Capitalism that tries to colonize our flags again as previously reclaimed from the usual D&D nerds and metal cohorts, etc (e.g., Dio and Tolkien). I want to explore this in a form of the monstrous-feminine we haven’t looked at as much in the book, but certainly is one this bitch (me) grew up with: beef lords, himbos. We’ll look primarily at relics from my childhood we, as Gothic Communists, want to rescue from their canonical selves. Part one will, look at Akira Toriyama’s DBZ and contemporaries like John Carpenter from the neoliberal ’80s using stories like Big Trouble in Little China as showcasing the magical man-wizard dueling for recruitment purposes; then, to be holistic, we’ll of course look at Wonder Woman as the herbo equivalent. Part two, will account for double standards and copycats—e.g., Ayla from Chrono Trigger (1995) and Savage Land Rogue, among others—under Pax Americana; i.e., as something that canonically apes these blindly masculine, hetero-to-homonormative lugs, but which we can also camp and reclaim regardless of biological sex (Claire Max), but must still watch out for token police agents (Autumn Ivy)!

As we shall see, the herbo/himbo go hand-in-hand, and generally suffer the same tokenized war-bride problems all monstrous-feminine do—albeit on opposite ends of a heteronormative colonial binary. They become eyed by prospecting muscle to serve like King Kong does: in chains (the service varying per type, but always involving abuses of sex and force against marginalized groups).

To that, capital operates within war-as-a-business as predicated on the homosocial, psychosexually erotic domain of male soldiers that threatens to wildly veer off into very-gay territories (female or otherwise). In fact, as Volume Two, part one explored, the language of sex and force through war theatre is something to camp and canonize back and forth:

one look at the weirdness of war-bred child soldiers says it all: baby-brain numbskulls thirsty after “waifus” and howling at the vengeful moon (witnessed inside odd localizations of Japanese media; e.g., “Invitation of a Crazed Moon” from Portrait of Ruin [2006] cryptomimetically touching on total catastrophe as a Western invention embraced by eco-fascist Japanese fandoms [the return of the Shogunate] and tackled by infamous auteurs writing “A Cruel Angel’s Thesis” [1995] tied to a bigger production. From Castlevania to Neo-Genesis Evangelion, then, the Japanese consensus is kick-ass emulations of American rock ‘n roll as thoroughly campy [less so with Mega Man, but I digress]: “Neo-Gothic Bible rock.” Yes, they’re straight-up bops, but the liminality remains indefinitely fascinating inside a capitalist world order).

In other words, love is a battlefield, but also a stage in between reality and fiction; as should hopefully be obvious at this stage, combining sex, nudism and the language of war per ludo-Gothic BDSM (sex as art) is an endlessly productive-and-liminal operation, especially when funneled through the fetishes and clichés of the Gothic—its “Ancient” Romances (stories of high imagination) and real life (the novel: “truth is stranger than fiction”) yielding something special and new (“imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” but “familiarity breeds contempt”) when used in a consciously satirical, campy way. The Gothic, as we think of its earliest origins, was always campy and about queer sex in a partially ace way (re: Walpole and Lewis)—something whose dialectical-material push-pull survives well into Rocky Horror, Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2009) and beyond (source).

By extension, all language is dualistic, mid-opposition; i.e., workers vs the state (and its proponents).

Per the himbo or herbo, it’s like a teddy bear as more outwardly uncanny than such things might normally seem; i.e., ostensibly more capable to harm (as the hyperbolic muscles might suggest) and haunted by trauma, but nevertheless can present a special bargain that per such negotiated regressions between two or more people, becomes a clever means of pushing together towards catharsis and interrogation of one’s childhood as imperfect, monster-fucker-style; i.e., towards openly ridiculous, psychosexual, nostalgic warrior fantasies. Like Toriyama’s Ginyu force (below), a given outing should always get incrementally close to the violence without crossing over into unironic harm. In short, they’re absurd, but also easy to step into in ways that feel legitimately comforting: one’s childhood as silly and serious, campy! In gay bedroom parlance, they’re also “catchers”; i.e., the one’s that, when faced by Goku as the most violent of all, get absolutely trounced by Toriyama’s designated hitter punching gay Nazis.

(artist: Akira Toriyama)

As such, keep this thesis statement in mind as we go ahead (“green light,” babes): the profit motive is fascist, and always decays from more moderate or reasoned forms inside the Cartesian (settler-colonial, heteronormative) paradigm towards an “older” form; i.e., hauntologically evoking a time before the Black Death and “hiccups” of state shift that forced the elite of yore to make concessions (wages, which they try and steal back through profit). These translate in modern forms of pacification that, above all else, serve as so-called “empowerment” fantasies that—through the medieval trope of the dueling knight or wizard (usually a semi-naked hybrid; i.e., the fascist hauntology of the so-called “barbarian”) regresses to an imaginary fascist past that normally leads to regular rape of so many different kinds, but for us can easily be put into quotes: “rape” by the beef lord as something that is always ambiguously gay and which we can stress the gay qualities of in iconoclastic forms (often colorful, fruity and fabulous, but haunted by fascism—above) that ape the gayest qualities of such muscular male warriors; i.e., to camp and spread the cheeks of, partaking of sodomy as a ludo-Gothic device! Taste the rainbow!

And if you’re allergic to “rainbows” (assholes by another name), think of it simply as a “sausage fest” (many queer AMAB dislike anal sex[1]); i.e., the dick-measuring contest as an implied “sword fight” where the audience (the de facto judges) imagine the specimens involved “crossing swords”:

(artist: Sgt Crisis’ “Big Break: a Literal Dick Contest,” 2021)

Total power corrupts totally and those with the most power hoard resources through capital as privatization: the ability to generate profit through the dialectic of the alien harvesting nature as alien, sexual, and fetish through a paywalled privilege to view. It’s predatory but malnourishing for all sides. The elite in particular are “skinny fat,” having both the most and the least; i.e., are the most alien of all, the most decayed when trying to cheat death by weaponizing the Philosopher’s Stone as an Enlightenment corruption of Renaissance thought (re: the Skeksis darkening the Crystal of Truth). They use it to create cocaine-like essence for themselves, inside a dogmatic chain that fosters hunters they can reliably call upon and respond with against those who don’t answer to capital. Anyone who assists in this process—i.e., by whitewashing it or conceding with capital in any shape or form—is ultimately fascist, meaning they will decay or demask eventually to expose what they have been doing all along: running interference for the state while posturing as good (re: Hamill and company).

No one is immune from said decay as relaid through the structure that converts people into drugs the other cannot live without; i.e., becoming slaves to their own grift/grind. This is predicated on the same addictions—a summoning-through-sacrifice that all at once demands an obvious dupe and makes all others dupes despite what they might insist: the wild hunt as recuperated by fascists and neoliberals into something whose folly can be seen in The Dark Crystal to Mandy to Metroid to Ghostbusters and other such-variations of the muscled-to-brainy man/woman as a Cartesian relic. Embodiments of either virtue, when canonically invoked, work as two sides of male culture with tokenized elements; i.e., the egghead, the Amazon, the himbo or herbo, the muscular wizard/brainiac as a sword-and-sorcery type of gatekeeper pushed through a neoliberal lens. Through all the usual ways, “war” becomes personified through an imaginary Antiquity that is thoroughly Olympian, but classically heteronormative (with diminishing circles of other normativities), biologically essentialized and anchoring sex-to-gender to serve the profit motive’s Male Gaze/creation of sexual difference, etc. Such Amazons—including their bodies—are always dressed “for men.” Except, like with beef lords/muscle wizards at large, there is always a campy and very gay potential that haunts the straight prescriptions at work!

First, we’ll look at the action figure as male per Toriyama and his contemporaries like John Carpenter, then consider the fighting trim (that was a terrible pun) of curvy crusaders that take figure drawing to a pugilistic, kayfabe extreme. This can be art on the page (left), but also the human bodies that leap “off the page” and appear in the flesh as actually made of the stuff (re: Autumn and Claire).

(artists: Devmgf modified by Elee0228)

To that, such wonders of creation can bring untold joy to all, but once corrupted to serve the state, become a drug war that cannibalizes everyone to endlessly try a resurrection myth from old arts; i.e., copies of “Osiris” a rotten, insane giant that will inevitably die (echoes of Frankenstein). In the end, Medusa always wins. So we must reclaim the Crystal, the ritual, as a “sacrifice” in quotes we can perform to answer to a higher power and calling than the bourgeoisie. As Jadis taught me, I didn’t just see what I wanted to see, but glimpsed what could be/would have been on the surface of someone cracked, broken by echoes of Pygmalion—a gay Amazon aping her colonizers (any power fantasy having the potential to be unironic, in this respect—Faustian and Promethean in ways that not only disempower but also harm). We must heal the Crystal, end the hunt, mend what is broken by synthesizing praxis to push power mid-poiesis towards Communism; i.e., until it becomes second-nature on a grand scale: to become so robust that it never regresses again! Gozer is home and stays home!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

I love herbos (re: Revana, left), and we’ll talk about Wonder Woman/similar characters (and female embodiments of them through Autumn Ivy and Claire Max) in a second. But first, let’s consider this through the toy-like Amazonomachia of a male-centric canon: of Akira Toriyama’s Z fighters and John Carpenter’s dueling wizards as having a monstrous-feminine character with a penis, not a vagina.

Personally I prefer pie instead of strudel (to borrow a tired gag from Dwayne Johnson), but holistic praxis demands at least sampling the “salami” when playing “hide the salami,” ourselves. In truth, I’ve had many such specimens forced down my throat as an adult, but also a kid, and a part of me remembers and relishes the taste despite my preference for AFAB Amazons (which gay “Spartans” are effectively the AMAB variant; i.e., able to be fascist [e.g., 300, 2006] or gay [re: Jojo] on a liminal gradient of likenesses, of likenesses). I remember the music, the men, their muscles, and their battles as echoed across so many media types; and I recall copies of famous canonical works that, so often, lacked any irony at all. It became holy to me, which I eventually learned the Gothic will make “almost holy” to achieve as much irony as it possibly can.

As such, I had to escape something that, on some level, I still enjoy: the heel upstaging the babyface as something Vegeta (especially early Vegeta) did so well; i.e., he was a psychotic brat, but given understandable motives that spoke to my own childhood trauma. Goku, on the other hand, is so fucking boring! He’s strong and goody-goody because—like Superman—the script needs him to be. I don’t want to reduce him to just that, as there are elements to him that are quite campy. But all the same, at his worst he really is the white knight letting the black knight go to the detriment of millions. In this respect, he can’t afford to be so naïve, but does so precisely because it fits into a centrist scheme he can pass along to his son; i.e., Red Scare minus the overt Cold War language (exhibit 34b3b2a2a1, next page). Like Superman, he begs to be camped:

Think of camping the magical warrior himbo less as a reversal of Genesis, and a parody of it, a la Matthew Lewis unmaking the so-called Dark Adam, Ambrosio. Like Lewis, we’re using such a likeness to push power towards workers, not the state, one that includes female, intersex and GNC variants (the “Conan with a pussy” argument). This exists on the same stage as passed down from him to us; i.e., in the same kayfabe-style masks, costumes, stage music/names, and sets, etc. Capital haunts and occupies them, and so do we. Unlike them, we use all of these things to push towards equality and post-scarcity. But this is far easier said than done. We can’t just camp canon as a content, but as a game whose playful theatrics are a subversive hermeneutic that yields future iconoclasms that, combined, push towards Gothic Communism, not centrism. Take, DBZ’ best duel (for this argument): our boy wizard dueling the end-of-the-world as very gay and inhuman the way only a mad-science experiment can be!

(exhibit 34b3b2a2a1b1: In the show, we see the usual homosocial arguments against Communism per a Japanese imitation of American Liberalism/kayfabe. Cell is the vice character who both represents the Nazi and the Communist [the unnatural product of mad science that threatens state collapse towards naked genocide on the home front, but also state shift towards a perfect organism/polity haunted by state trauma]. As such, the duel is ultimately a proxy war—of Goku [the American] fighting Cell [the Nazi, the Communist] through his brainwashed son: Gohan, the gentle nerd pushed towards a confrontation he doesn’t believe in—all to prove his worth as a “real man,” a rite of passage forced onto him as the monomyth always is. This time, Hell comes to Earth, and he must push it back with the help of his dead father egging him on.

Again, Gohan cannot do it alone. His father stands over his shoulder like Hamlet’s father’s ghost, waiting for the former heel, Vegeta, to turn babyface and kick Cell square in the dragon balls; distracted, Cell turns his back on Gohan, who backstabs the “backing stabbing Jew” to get his revenge [a cycle parodied by Radcliffe of all people, presenting Count Montoni and his ilk as a den of self-stinging vipers]. Gohan unleashes the demon, going “beast mode” to remember all the people Cell’s hurt; i.e., emotional manipulation. Goku could have prevented all of those deaths, but chose not to because he wants to indoctrinate his son. The myth—of patrilineal descent vs a monstrous-feminine menace—is what matters.

Such centrist peddling is pandering to future fascists [which is what moderates functionally are] through chicken hawk bullshit; i.e., Amazonomachia delivered by the likes of those without strength or presence of arms, but have all the abilities of the wormy silver tongue profiting off the war of mythological competent men and women, of might-makes-right heroes punching down against future zombies of a rising labor force sick to death with/of exploitation. Fascism, remember, isn’t just the state in decay, but the state defending itself in displaced, externalized arguments; i.e., while synthesizing the monstrous-feminine as thetical and antithetical to its own existence. The state needs nature to sacrifice and weaponize and that nature is always, to some degree, monstrous-feminine. It doesn’t take a genius to play along [re: Goku] with such unequal power exchange, just a willing and useful idiot.

To this, Goku—and by extension Toriyama and those who parody him[2]—is tremendously successful, leading to reactive violence by a member of the colonizer group: a special youth secretly belonging to the warrior race of Aryans projected into the show’s mythos—the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Saiyans, per Nietzsche’s Übermensch, defending capital from would-be envious parties.

In short, Gohan rapes Cell as the perceived alien, fetish, psychosexual demon clown—a green-and-purple zombie, Hulk-like punching bag that Gohan imitates in ways the state through Goku et al want him to. It’s dogma, pushing the next generation to achieve their “greatest hour” in service to the state through a kayfabe battle of wills that save the world as we know it from state shift, from Communism; i.e., something perceived as the end of the world versus what it could be more nakedly expressed as, and something dealt with through a centrist balancing act of porcupines mating as such animals always do: very carefully in spite of the barbs and warrior theatrics.

My point, here, is there’s a method to the madness that serves the state as undead: a copy of the Olympics glorifying a new power built on empire, which is what capital is. Cell appears, prophesized as a vengeful act that brings Imperialism home to empire through a foreign plot as inside-outside, needing to be rooted out during the Cell Games [our zombie Olympics promising the usual reward of military conquest: glory and gold]. A false flag occurs, and through a series of prescriptive, dogmatic propaganda battles, leads to the big climax at the end of the Colosseum that unfertilizes the egg-like planet as could-have-been-Communist, if not for Gohan cock-blocking Cell’s Communist potential; i.e., by framing him as the Nazi to punch. It’s Red-Scare-in-disguise, but also a thoroughly unironic version of Matthew Lewis’ The Monk told in kayfabe theatre. Young, dumb and full-of-cum. Punch the clown, get fool’s gold. This is very dumb and has been parodied to death:

“I am perfect! I cannot be defeated!” Cell boasts, reducing class war to a mirror-image inversion of itself; i.e., as a xenomorph that—like Radcliffe’s black castle—can be conjured up and defeated with American force. In turn, this can be camped in ways that, while fun—e.g., Mega 64’s “The Cell Saga in 5 Minutes” [above, 2019]—need to do more than just play it for laughs. However funny these guys are, we gotta do them one better: camp the Nazi to reverse the flow of power, not camp the punching of the Nazi simply to make content! Furthermore, this begs introspection through origins of seeming arbitrary cryptomimesis. Mega 64 did what Team Four Star did according to what Toriyama did in response to what John Carpenter did in his own arcade: the two old sages dueling while surrounded by younger strapping men dueling for the honor of women everywhere; i.e., to be married to a good husband, not a bad one [the usual incrementalism, I confess]! Carpenter’s duel is kayfabe through two wizard “gamers”: one good, one bad, the heel pitching a fit, post-dogfall [a tie]. It’s surprisingly apt of rage-quit-style tantrums, nowadays, abiding by the usual mechanisms and positions of power: “You never could beat me, Egg Shen!” It’s a duel, mid-trouble-in-paradise.

An “arcadia” is “a place of simple pleasures and quiet,” which translates to Christo-fascist regressions—of the videoludic space as something to colonize by players who police the various territories of performance, paradox and play for the state again. Milton camped Eden; Tolkien canonized it through Middle-earth as a cartographic refrain that translated well to videogames from table-top versions of the same monomyths; per Cameron, this became a military optimism whose shooter’s refrain translated to profit across venues, from the box office to the arcade hall and into American family households; for videogames like Nintendo, such products became a slice of heaven to brand, then reward good little workers who uphold the status quo through the profit motive: as something to endorse and extend through videogames as the continuation of neoliberal dogma out of older media forms [cinema] into newer ones [videogames].

As I said in Volume Two, part one:

Neoliberalism and home entertainment didn’t really exist until the early 70s (with Atari’s 1972 release for Pong happening on the cusp of the 1973 Oil Crash, and Tolkien—the author of the fantasy cartographic refrain, as I call it—died in 1973, while the subsequence tabletop games of the 1970s would go onto to influence the game developers of the next decade, and the next, and the next…). Regarding videogames as a neoliberal form of dogma, from the early ’80s to the end of the Cold War and beyond, you went from public entertainment devices (arcades) that had a bunch of mostly young male clients cycling through them like a pimped-out sex worker… to the 1983 Atari Crash and subsequent 1985 smash-hit success of Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. encouraging the widespread sale of videogames in the Gothic’s usual haunt: among the middle class. Except this time, the elite wanted in through ways that didn’t exist during the Neo-Gothic revival: televisions as personal property that could funnel in their burgeoning ideology through the disguise of (expensive and highly recursive) games.

From the early days of Space Invaders (1978), Pac-Man (1980) or Donkey Kong (1981) to Mario, then (about seven years—twelve, if you start from 1973 when the elite began their first experiments with neoliberalism in South America), the usual place of neoliberal business and indoctrination transitioned from single arcade machines to larger amounts of money (from quarters to hundreds of dollars) per customer in each household (where there is more money to be had, and seasonally at that); i.e., a Stepford Wife, purchased for paychecks, not pocket change, and ready to implement the business model into the first generation of what would become the New World Order under neoliberal Capitalism: a world of us-versus-them enforced by neoliberal, monomythic copaganda’s harmful simulations of Amazonomachia to maintain the status quo at a socio-material level; re: the shadows of a new republic’s man-cave walls.

In turn, the American middle class (so called “gamer culture”) would gatekeep and safeguard the elite through videogames being an acclimating device to neo-feudal territories to defend in reality (outside of the game world[s] themselves) as capital starts to decay like usual. Meanwhile, the companies making these games have progressively privatized and digitized them to such a degree as to make it easier to pick the pockets of said middle class, leaving them brainwashed, broke and looking for someone to blame—all while being routinely desensitized to us-versus-them violence against a flexible scapegoat refrain; i.e., extending from some combination of open to closed space across numerous themes and genres: from “Mazes to Labyrinths,” “Out of Novels and into Cinema and Metroidvania“! Any counterattack should go beyond something to reference from older works into new ones. Mine are considerable, populous and consistently sex-positive, reclaiming the likes of Castlevania and Metroid to say something iconoclastic with them (versus merely compiling them as Parish largely does; i.e., he spends a lot more time compiling all the games that simply exist instead of making thesis statements that apply to multiple games. Sorcha, by comparison, has thesis arguments that are broader but limits them considerably by specializing in one monster and media type. There are pros and cons to either approach, but especially cons insofar as intersectional solidarity goes. You can’t afford to be critically vacuous or narrow to achieve conscious unity among workers. All forms and arguments must be accounted for) [source].)

Canon “fills us in” (so to speak) with codes that repeat for profit as self-destructive; i.e., to workers, but also capital as the ultimate fortress with the ultimate lit fuse: “Take what you can when you can!” When Shakespeare’s Macbeth famously called life “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” he was offering up a disguised critique of Achilles and the “Roman fool,” but also a displaced capitalist refrain (unto an imaginary “Scotland”) that was already beginning to develop through Christopher Columbus formulating the settler-colonial model in small; i.e., one that England, in the 1600s (re: Livia Gershon’s “Britain’s Blueprint for Colonialism: Made in Ireland,” 2022), would put to practice, followed by the American colonial elite and their descendants.

By the time Shakespeare was dead as a doornail, mercantile Capitalism was connected to the Cartesian Revolution as something that gradually evolved into total war through the nation-state of the 1700s and 1800s, followed by fascist imitations of American Manifest Destiny in the 1900s (re: Bad Empanada’s “How the USA Inspired the Nazis – From Manifest Destiny to Lebensraum,” 2022) followed by soft-power copaganda after the American elite chose to drop the nuclear bombs on Japan (re: GDF’s “No, We Didn’t Need to Nuke Japan,” 2023). Forget “filling us up,” this is capital “running a train” on our asses! That takes time, work, and careful repetition.

(artist: Drew Struzan)

To this, stories like DBZ and Big Trouble and Little China—but also their assorted himbo offshoots—exemplify a post-nuclear age, one whose statuesque/splendide-mendax neoliberal refrains (videogames) sure love big explosions, but also nuclear-grade himbos and herbos. Insofar as the unironic monomyth presently haunts all media forms, all feel and administer the curse of profit through exploitation—of nature-as-monstrous-feminine through unequal, oft-tokenized power fantasies that many people seek (the white Indian, for example). This quest for power imbalance—whatever dominant or submissive form you could think of as something to perform, just to feel in control again—happens under capital as a historically-materially unequal system. In turn, the unequal power fantasies that occur manifest by virtue of abuse as something to survive and administer in ways that aren’t always sex-positive; i.e., by all the usual Amazons and knights, the herbo and himbo meat wizards playing rebel but functioning as cop and dishing out damage the likes of a dying Death Star spread out liberally over its usual targets: the colonial territories and their theatrical, romanticized offshoots. It’s a (video)ludic contract, the ping-pong oscillation aptly suggested by 1972’s Pong felt moving among updated neoliberal forms promising the same bogus gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow: “One Ring to rule them all!” From speedrunning videogames, to intended gameplay forms, to anime weebs and otaku then and now, the form and interaction with state power is determined by where power flows; i.e., as canonical or iconoclastic, thus sex-positive/liberatory or sex-coercive/carceral ipso facto, by virtue of what future interpretations (and cryptomimetic exchanges) result. On and on it goes, like the One Ring passed from one patsy to the next.

Per Sarkeesian, canonical texts can be enjoyed, but critiqued in ways that, per Fischer, expose Capitalist Realism; per me, this happens through ludo-Gothic BDSM: what we create and leave behind based on older imperfect texts being used to give us a leg-up against weird canonical nerds (and the elite) now—i.e., as fascism waiting not to happen, but already having happened and waiting to strike from behind gentler, “benevolent” veneers/gobstopper masks. For every outwardly hostile fuck, you have masked dickheads like Karl Jobst, Caleb Hart, and Ian Kochinski, etc, who think they can outrun their bigoted past and pass themselves off as “good wizards”; in turn, for every an-Com Medusa like me, you have “progressive”/white moderates like Natalie Wynn who, frankly, are only a jump, hop and a skip away from being exactly like Mark Hamill. This is in appearance, mind you; functionally all of these fuckers are the same! From lowly stooge to all-powerful billionaire, they’re entitled fucks invoking smidges of privilege/charity theatrics to make the lie of capital/American Liberalism work. Conservatism 101; neoconservatism 101. As we’ll see, this applies to Amazons as yet-another-tightrope to walk!

With that being said, let’s examine the himbo’s flip-side: herbos.

(source)

The monomyth and Heracles are as old as Western civilization, as are their female counterparts for or against the state; e.g., Wonder Woman as walking the bondage-to-cop tightrope in ways that skirt the boundaries of canon and camp, of such a character as ever fitting successfully into a heteronormative scheme despite wearing the American colors. As Jesse Kinos-Goodin writes in “From a Sex Cult to the UN” (2017):

There are a lot of mixed feelings around Wonder Woman, mainly due to this feminist figure/male sexual fantasy dichotomy that has followed the character since her inception in 1941. This complexity has a lot to do with the character’s creator, psychologist William Marston, a self-described feminist who also lived in a polyamorous relationship with at least two women, his wife Elizabeth Holloway and Olive Byrne, who both bore children by him. Byrne was a direct inspiration for Wonder Woman’s physical appearance. Another woman, Marjorie W. Huntley, was also in a romantic relationship with the Marstons, and even helped with the inking and lettering of the Wonder Woman comics in the 1940s (source).

Like all Amazons, Wonder Woman is pinned between her dutiful place in a man’s world, the symbol of rebellion likewise defined through her body and gender identity/performance as “like a (straight) man’s” or not. The same problem extends to queer men and any other monstrous-feminine, of course, and frankly to any soldier period (e.g., Jubei from Ninja Scroll [1993] as upholding a dogmatic function or an iconoclastic one): to serve the state or serve workers (refer to Volume One for more on that character).

Wonder Woman works within an Amazonian pastiche that camps Superman’s iconography in ways that Marston imagined would replace men as the rulers of the world, but also remained haunted by Pax Americana and the myth of the good war. It’s the so-called Superman or Captain America problem[3], which as we’ll see with Wonder Woman and similar post-WW2 offshoots like Ayla and Savage Land Rogue, has a female equivalent to the usual male forms of violence against nature as monstrous-feminine: punch, stab and shoot, but also gag and tie up while shielding yourself from rebellious damage. Wonder Woman enacts multiples of these; i.e., wields a sword, a lasso, and her good-ol’-fashioned fists. Violence is sex for her in ways that yield that the same-old double standards against woman-as-monstrous-feminine: the weirdest boner a rape fantasy that’s oddly pleasurable, aka death by Snu-Snu; i.e., “She can ‘rape’ me anytime!'”

(artist: Dandonfuga)

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with rape fantasies provided they’re sex-positive. Except, those written to serve the profit motive are sex-coercive on principle. Such characters can be penned by immigrants or rebels, but they have generally been bought out (e.g., the original authors for Batman, Superman, or Ghost Rider) or otherwise revived to be recuperated by the state in a neoconservative, “peace through strength” way that valorizes the state; e.g., Gal Gadot serving in the IDF (the Israeli Defense Force) and playing Wonder Woman as a good-ol’-fashioned “punch the Nazi” romp that regresses to older problems that exclude marginalized groups to then brutalize them at home and abroad: white savior syndrome, aka white people/boomer disease. It affects Mad Max even at its most progressive, but also Star Wars and superheroes/the monomyth at large.

Any superhero risks becoming a weapon for the state; i.e., something that sells sex and force and can be sold to children; e.g., sex and force as often overlapping and having animalistic forms: the caveman or cavegirl in animal furs, the primal herbo/himbo who will bonk you—over the head with a club!  The same baton-like quality translates to a Greek hauntology that lends itself well to American pinup Imperialism eroticizing the sword while simultaneously making it chaste, “non-lethal” fisticuffs. Like punk, feminism decays; e.g., from Mary Wollstonecraft’s “hyena in a petticoat” to American, hawkish feminists championing Capitalism as something whose hegemony wasn’t as globally established in Mary Shelley’s day. Wonder Woman is a defender of Omelas—a civilized cavewoman/noble savage descended from when “‘the West’ was great.” Similar neoconservative echoes beget through the likes of Master Chief, Doomguy and Samus Aran (who all echoed Ellen Ripley as a female Rambo galvanized by James Cameron huffing on Heinlein’s hog in stories like Aliens, but also the screenplay he wrote for Rambo: First Blood part two, 1985):

(artist: LeanFoo)

I can’t lie; my iconoclastic work has always centered around Amazons[4]/monstrous-feminine of a particular female kind: the kind I’ve wanted to be and fuck as informed by such statues placed all around me since birth. As such, I’ve written about superheroes (male and female) post-grad starting with Neoliberalism in Yesterday’s Heroes as a discontinued book (the only chapter being “The Promethean Quest and James Cameron’s Military Optimism in Metroid,” 2021) that eventually became Sex Positivity in earnest: critiquing the monomyth and monstrous-feminine as my PhD’s primary focus.

Of course, male monstrous-feminine are really not so different from female monstrous-feminine, suffering from various double standards through intersecting axes of privilege and oppression: of service in chains to an Atlas-grade body whose muscles are turned into state dogma and weapons. But my own interests remain very much someone wedded sexually and asexually to these bonafide mommy doms being something I had to learn to divide from biological sex when making my own gender trouble. “With such a confederacy against her—with a knowledge so intimate of his goodness—with a conviction of his fond attachment to herself, which at last, though long after it was observable to everybody else—burst on her—what could she do?” writes Jane Austen[5] regarding Marianne Dashwood as forced when all’s said and done to marry Colonel Brandon.

Simply put, there’s always been an element of calculated risk and BDSM to the Amazon—doubly so under Pax Americana and Britannica. What’s a girl to do? Does she submit, or disobey her ostensible overlords and their psychosexual marital schemes?

All of this doubles and redoubles in pastiche that is, to some degree, blind or perceptive regarding these meta wars taking place. Like any woman/monstrous-feminine, Wonder Woman has always been the virgin and the whore, the slut and the maiden we can reclaim from older forms in recent conversations. She becomes something to canonize and camp, but also write editorials about, about, about. Humanization cannot occur without confronting the objectification that monstrous-feminine play at; i.e., through calculated risk as a liminal sphere that butts up against unironic forms that view sex work as “universal enslavement”; e.g., James Cameron’s second wave feminism bleeding into not just his own maternal, sexless Amazons (of which he married and divorced Linda Hamilton[6]) but also his Pygmalion’s opinions on other Amazons and how they should appear according to him:

(source: Noah Berlatsky’s “James Cameron’s Comments on Wonder Woman Completely Ignore Her History of Sex Appeal,” 2017)

Escape from state chains is generally an ironic performance while reclaiming them in performances that highlight state abuse. Except, this takes nuance and Cameron’s a boomer who suffers the same problem as Akira Toriyama, George Lucas, John Carpenter or George Miller regarding the Amazon; i.e., as something to commodify similar to the Indigenous person: marketing “struggle” as war allegory that commonly cleans out all but the white folk versus a given imaginary Railroad company (with The Terminator having one black side character) or forces an Indigenous group to be the shooting gallery target (Aliens) or be led by a former-cop white boy (Avatar). Cameron has white people disease real, real bad! There’s plenty to critique about Wonder Woman but he can’t get past the first hurdle!

Seriously, we’ve barely scratched the surface of just my own corpus. I’ve written about Amazons and BDSM a lot; e.g., from Volume Zero (for more, use Crtl+F):

There’s also assimilation fantasy vs legitimate rebellion through Amazonomachia/Amazon pastiche as symbolic of class struggle through subjugated/subversive doubles: the war mask, uniform, weapon and weapon-like, athletic (or at least capable/”built”) body as performances that, far from canceling each other out per the centrist axiom, continue in opposition for or against the state as something to wrestle out from under its iron thumb. Because the state historically personifies itself through hauntological bodies that express war, lies, death and rape in unironically fetishized forms that simultaneously perform all of the above, these variants exist to victimize the ironic monstrous-feminine during oppositional praxis. Simply put, a state fetish is a coercive device, one that frames iconoclasm not simply as “incorrect,” but jailed then abused for its sex-positive, thus anticapitalist heresy during “prison sex”/Man Box rituals. Said rituals are often performed by assimilated members of a given minority (source).

and from Volume One:

Some heroes are villainous; all are monstrous. Superheroes, like animals, are trapped between two worlds: the foreign and the domestic, the wild and the tame, but also the ancient and uncolonized versus civilization as a colonial ordeal. To that, their animal considerations stem from the ancient world as something to revive in the present under Capitalism, then hide these secret identities under acceptable-albeit-conspicuous personas; to that, superheroes—like the naked wrestlers of Antiquity—supply the performer with animal qualities during kayfabe theatre as a popular-if-disposable commodity [straw dogs] that includes wearing masks and other performative devices: their statuesque bodies. Some of these animals are so-called “good animals”; others are feared and stigmatized for their inhuman strength, speed or reflexes; e.g., Spiderman (source).

Male or not, why are these buff, wizard swordspeople’s kayfabe/staged wrestling duels (and their pedagogies of the oppressor) so popular/able to buoy the careers of so many sell-outs and blind satirists?

Why, indeed! Beyond my older books, we can look backward from Mega 64 and Team Four Star to DBZ to Big Trouble in Little China to see a shared patriarchal, military-optimist pattern exchanged across oceans, from East to West under a post-WW2 neoliberal hegemon: from cinema, heavy metal, cartoons and videogames (with Toriyama in particular expressed in movies, comics and adaptations of his manga/anime, but also videogames where he became art director like Dragon Warrior [1987] and Chrono Trigger) all communicating the unironic monomyth; i.e., as something to revive the blind legacy of and have faith towards in defense of capital through itself: an endless exchange of content, making more content, leading to profit, uncritical consumption, creation, external genocide, ever onwards. Per the Shadow of Pygmalion, it’s something to regurgitate as blank pastiche—the myth of the good war as obvious, a priori. Except it’s really not; it’s simply enforced.

As Gothic Communists, we very much need to inhabit the same mode as something to make perceptive inside of itself, exported to all registers and media forms; i.e., as a parallel trend that challenges capital’s profit motive and fetishes/clichés of sex and force, of dueling Herculean wizards and damsels to be rescued, demons to rape, etc, through easy-to-digest interpretations: media whose pro-Communist trend avoids the pitfalls of capital and leads workers away from such a praxial quagmire towards development using Gothic poetics; i.e., camping the canon to formulate a pedagogy of the oppressed: “making things political, gay” or whatever else the usual defenders of capital will accuse us of doing. We must be what they fear most—not merely a joke they will turn into a videogame boss to punch, but something they can never kill. Indeed, they cannot—must instead try to enslave the monstrous-feminine as needed for them to profit. This is where our revolutionary cryptonymy’s masks, costumes, bare bodies and virtuosity comes into play. Some people (e.g., Hannah-Freya Blake) bake literal cakes and write books about it[7]; others, like Nacoco Music, jam out with their clams out. So long as it reliably yields to a challenging of the profit motive while subsisting within capital, then go to town, queens!

(artist: Nacoco Music)

In turn, Gothic Communism will face capital’s proponents as such and make them lose all will to fight—by humanizing Medusa and exposing capital for what it is: a killing field to acclimate the usual benefactors (and tokens) of capital to defend its Imperial Core/monomythic profit motive ad infinitum. We must introduce an element of nausea towards that, making them prefer what we offer up, instead: our “cake” as something to eat and learn from through mutual consent as illustrated. This happens not once, but over and over and over…

Amazons, like all superheroes, are like time capsules that get up and move around, but also represent a chance to roleplay and experiment with symbols of power that mean different things depending on whose using or consuming them. Canon frames them as a line to toe (with limited wiggle room); iconoclasm allows for possible worlds known to potboilers the likes of Phillip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962): the Nazi as a time traveler connected to possible futures, not unlike Cameron’s alternate timelines haunted by spectres of state violence that, for the Global South (and non-white people), are a regular occurrence. There is also the spectre of Marx, albeit as something routinely bullied by the spectre of “Rome” reifying through offshoots of either Numinous.

In a similar fashion, then, the likes of Superman or Wonder Woman (and a million other statues to play with like dolls or wear like costumes/masks) become a fantasy we can chose to wear or have forced on us—like the Nazi uniform as skin-tight all on its own, a cartoon of superhuman torture and rape not unlike evil versions of our male and female monstrous-feminine; i.e., our himbos and herbos as guilty pleasures, wish fulfillment, pleasure principles and stress relief, but also domination fantasies of the Pax Americana sort: copied by Nazi Germany’s own palingenesis, not the other way around (the American establishment pioneered settler-colonialism as the Nazis tried it: the war of motion as a gas-powered bio-mechanical spearhead thrust into the heart of the Bolshevist nucleus).

Such roleplay and fantasy is canonically prescribed by nation-states. This travels on the human body as encased in a tomb-like uniform draped in the flag as limited to various color schemes (often white, black, and primary colors) evolved out of medieval war standards and heraldic schemes into modern day knights; i.e., as larger-than-life political statements doubled by superheroes. Both remain emblematic of each other in a copaganda campaign haunted by its own past, of past, of past; i.e., the goody-goody as always ready to turn heel, his or her various codifiers challenged by the presence of the fascist ghost on “nobler” semblances (fetish gear having a “mil spec” quality to it evolving out of WW2 to the 1970s onward, into comic books and other pulp fictions): PKD’s potboilers adopted nowadays to speak to the same fascist loop Pax Americana always yields. We’re trapped in a never-ending cycle that blends the usual BDSM mil spec together on the usual bodies:

Observe, then, a nebulous, back-and-forth quality to the imagery of the surface; i.e., the body points to the genitals as implied, and vice versa, as clothed or naked to varying degrees and context. It’s Frankensteinian, with built bodies that—through a Gothic, monstrous-feminine lens—yield postcolonial critiques amid paradoxes with undead potential.

To that, big muscles equal strength and virtue as subjective, but classically are gendered in ways that uphold differently now in a dialogic of the superhero as a given kind of alien; i.e., a traveling castle-like body whose fortress is very poetic, but also built on preference for different codes of regression and subversion; e.g., “buns of steel,” washboard abs, and Wonder Woman’s physique perpetually frozen in the 1940s starlet, wearing the American-flag corset; i.e., “Old Glory” maintaining that hourglass figure (and optional ’40s hairdo) for the Man (or then-closeted lesbian) to guiltily enjoy (craving the whore-like quality that such an Amazon portends relative to a model virgin-esque housewife).

Such an aesthetic is the usual military pinup sort: the sex cop fighting the good fight for the usual presidents and all their horny men. Though functionally “undead,” Wonder Woman doesn’t look like a traditional zombie or Creature, then; she looks outwardly comely—soft, but hard as steel. Like all American™ superheroes, she remains haunted by the spectre of fascism as having double standards that complicate the proceedings: the Amazon as anathema to Nazi Germany but also, just as often, fascist parts of America that try to cram Wonder Woman into the wedding dress her character would have fought tooth-and-nail against. It’s a bodice whose comic-book-style violence “cauterizes” the wounds of any victim of colonial force, similar to Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber (the 1977 original did not disguise the blood of the disarmed bar thug, I admit; but that movie was more rebellious than its kid-friendly sequels would become: cops and victims, the latter trapped between dueling Jedi and Sith).

Wonder Woman is something of a “gentle” dom, then. She draws no blood, but whose BDSM chassis is—like the Terminator’s—”fully armored, very tough,” covered in the usual disguises that a) not only liken her to past heroes, but b) make her appear human and welcoming to the next generation of soldiers for the state! “Grown for the cyborgs,” she’ll tie you up and fuck your brains out!

(Kotaku’s “Make Wonder Woman Buffer! | MultiVersus,” 2023)

At least, that’s the canonical promise, right? The bodice and briefs are something of a compromise—to please “the boys” of a bygone Americana drooling over a fascist, oxidized Statue of Liberty given a fresh coat of paint. Like the ageless vampire, though, it becomes unable to change—just frozen in time, feeding off the Oedipal fantasy as a roleplay that can transfer power and information in either direction depending on how one performs it. “Mods” like the one above recuperate the “thicc Amazon” to serve a Male Gaze, but can also appeal to girls (and GNC people) who want to feel strong as an aesthetic that isn’t strictly canonical; like makeup or clothing, props or jewelry, they can serve different performances that identify around struggle or police violence (which DARVO obscures). In turn, the sword can be “just for show” (a prop weapon) that symbolizes state force, or a reversal of the same cryptonym doubling as revolutionary praxis profaning the American flag: a theft of legitimacy regarding the sword as a theatrical device (re: Weber).

As usual, consent and context illustrate the difference, but this takes dialectical-material scrutiny as not normally taught through canonical stories. But said stores don’t monopolize Wonder Woman any more than Marston did. It can be fun to camp the Nazi-in-disguise (the American hauntological cop), but also fuck someone you know could crush your puny head between her thighs (a closeness to power) but won’t because you’re just that special (aw, shucks)! I don’t even like Wonder Woman’s look, per se, but the concept is not without its appeal (fucking what I want to be, but also what I want to change: taming a symbol of American Imperialism[8] to become a Commie Amazon camping Old Glory): fucking an alien who’s crossing boundaries and fornicating with the enemy to find common ground by misbehaving. What’s not to love about that?

(artist: Zirael Rem)

All of this is rather dated and fresh—a superhero hauntology that extends from color to size to elasticity to genitals (sticks and holes). All synonymize per sex and force through the body language of war as a literal/figurative uniform—back and forth in that respect, but also as a regression towards/progression away from fascist violence as forever out-of-focus (similar to Far Cry‘s 2004 Valerie Constantine, second image, aping so many older femme fatales): the rape castle (or some-such resort for bloodshed made into a herbo/himbo power trip) and its bondage, murder and disempowerment perpetually informed by preference as acquired/congenital; i.e., accident of birth and nature/nurture; e.g., Marvel’s ’90s male pinup series being published featuring two high-profile gay characters Northstar and Hector subverting a straight male readership’s expectations (over time, comics becoming more expensive and bigoted):

(artist: Jan Duursema)

Despite being a Gothic expert of Metroidvania and Amazons, I like herbos and vaginas, and tend to be far pickier with male bodies than female ones, enjoying femme male cuties (e.g., femboys) of a very narrow sort (the opposite of my father) and all manner of female monstrous-feminine. I have an ace attachment to male himbos (many people do) but a sexual, imitative one to female herbos. In turn, it’s certainly guided my research, but I still try to be holistic and make thesis arguments that are intersectionality productive and encouraging of solidarity against capital and tokenism. Enjoy these settler-colonial sex/rape fantasies, but only so you can critique them and their real-world counterparts:

In other words, any power fantasy can be reversed (switched, in BDSM parlance). Capitalism, to that, often swaps genders but does so while tokenizing the fetish topping the male/tokenized audience, mid-Orientalism. We need to do better than that, exploring the same old tombs being raided to interrogate them and the avatar alike as fascinatingly fascist: to interrogate the ghost of the counterfeit where it and its usual rape fantasies can be found, albeit in ways that rescue BDSM from its dated American origins, post-WW2. It’s a good idea to do so, if only because we might surprise ourselves when fashioning ludo-Gothic BDSM beyond De Sade, Sontag or Creed, but also the CIA; e.g., what I learned while writing this piece—that I actually like the idea of Wonder Woman as a sex-positive icon; i.e., one whose many sex-coercive functions I can pick up on through roleplay as praxial. Simply put, it caters to my favorite BDSM theatrical role (the mommy dom) and body part (the booty) while leading me down some fun new rabbit holes. What’s that, Heather Hogan, “Wonder Woman’s Star-Spangled Butt Has Always Been a Canvas for Feminist Hope and Male Misogyny” (2020)? Say more, queen!

How’d that bank robber feel when she slid along the floor in front of a group of hostages and pinged away all his bullets with her golden cuffs? Can’t say, but I know what her ass looked like right after. How did she feel when she was fighting a grizzled Bruce Wayne about assembling a league of superheroes? Not sure, but I know how her ass looked when she was arguing with him. How’d her strut compare to Batman’s, fully suited up? Don’t know, but I sure did see her ass while Batman was skulking away from the camera. In fact, nearly every time Diana of Themyscira, daughter of Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons and Zeus, the mightiest of the Gods of Olympus, entered a scene, she did so ass first, and the camera lingered and leered as it brought the men in the frame into focus.

Snyder and Whedon are not, of course, the first men to use Wonder Woman’s body—and especially her butt—as a blank page onto which they could project their feelings about Wonder Woman, specifically, and women, generally. Wonder Woman was conceived as an avatar. Tired of the “blood-curdling masculinity” of Golden Age Comics and endless real life wars waged by leaders of the Western world, William Moulton Marston designed Wonder Woman, in 1941, as his feminine standard bearer who would usher in matriarchal rule in the United States. He believed men needed to submit to women’s “loving authority,” in all ways, including sexually, which is why Wonder Woman’s weapon of choice is a Golden Lasso that she used during Marston’s days to tie up her enemies and friends almost constantly. […] Marston told anyone who would listen that his Wonder Woman represented all women, who could use the “charm, allure, oomph, and attraction” of their bodies to make men submit to them. Marston was a huge fan of bondage, and while his Wonder Woman embodied a lot of still progressive feminist ideals, there’s really no way to look at his comics without acknowledging that they are, in part, real-life bondage evangelism (source).

(ibid.)

Except, Hogan, there’s nothing wrong with preaching BDSM provided you can steer away from its cliché, harmful past! More than that, such dated forms don’t change the fact that ancient-to-medieval poetics, especially warrior poetics, believed that power was stored in different parts of the body that had a weapon-like function: the penis (the sword) or the vagina (the net), to be sure, or the head/mind (the crown), but also the ass as a warrior’s seat of power. And they would coalesce into other organs (the eyes, heart, etc) as connected to martial extensions of power like the sword or lasso as classically gendered: “phallic” and “vaginal.” Amatonormativity prescribes marrying off the rebel-as-war-bride; i.e., there always being something weapon-like about the monstrous-feminine, “nature” extending from female biology to gender performances that both challenge and operate under patriarchal force into capital building on said force; i.e., as something for us to subvert, thus challenge, the nuclear family structure as laden with war brides and their booties crammed into an American war chest far more recent than Ancient Athens, but regressing towards such a hauntology (“Athens” in quotes) to prescribe future war and rape fantasies with.

Seriously, there’s so much stuff to play around with, and Marston really broke the mold; i.e., in ways that yielded a productive power fantasy that could travel outside the bedroom (Foucault would approve) yet still yield subversive forms of play that would endlessly and productively subvert dogmatic thinking through a familiar face with a foreign function: speculative thought chosen in ways that go beyond mere “evangelicalism” into informed choices centered around sex-positivity as transgenerational roleplay—e.g., Sandy Norton and I, my own work informed by their 1994 polemic of Perkin (source: “The Imperialism of Theory: A Response to J. Russell Perkin”).

(artist: unknown)

Ironic or not, there always exist some stand-by arguments to default to. Even just among straight white people, a strong woman is so much more interesting than a strong man because she actually has to overcome adversity as the monstrous sex object men seek to take, objectify and dominate in harmful variations of Amazonomachia—a rich cultural heritage dating back thousands of years. For me, this is both a passing of the torch and opportunity to self-reflect—to learn from the past to synthesize good praxis in the present; i.e., in ways where I suddenly want to include Wonder Woman more than I did in the past. A status, sex and authority symbol, but also a bottom-heavy warrior and statuesque, classic feminist icon that yields myriad GNC potential to challenge modern-day impostors weaponizing the same aesthetic? In short, ol’ Diana grew on me. This extends to superheroes (male, female, or otherwise) as something to camp in dated, nigh-Freudian ways.

For example, while Kevin Smith points out (with Stan Lee’s help[9]) that sex organs are so often the topic of conversation, they generally are eclipsed by the body as statuesque/plastic: hard as stone or as soft and pliable as rubber, and often hugged in form-fitting briefs (echoes of Eugene Sandow’s imaginary antiquity and various strongwomen from the same period in time; e.g., Sandwina[10] as a circus attraction for much the same reasons [raw, brutal strength] married to female double standards trying to get by in a male-dominated America).

In turn, any hero is a monster (as I write), but any hero that deviates from the white, cis-het, Christian male is monstrous-feminine; i.e., as something for the war machine to enslave and assimilate per the Amazon as male or female (excluding intersex, of course) in service to the war machine and profit as its hauntologies/cryptonymies currently exist: the thing from another time, the secret identity that shows by hiding itself in plain sight; i.e., an iconic disguise doubling as a political statement marrying sex and force in oft-naked, androgynous forms: the open-secret identity and alter ego.

Himbos and herbos, like their gentler damsel-esque sacrifices, often reduce to centrist caricatures orbiting around home-defense/assimilation-fantasy action through sex and force tied to war personified; but as Lee, Marston or Smith demonstrate, there’s plenty of room for medieval (sometimes crude) nuance that, while historically limited to men, clearly has extended canonically and iconoclastically to performers regardless of sex and gender. In short, there’s certainly a heteronormative standard, and a gradient of normalizations and deviations that respectively work for or against said standard; but they all use the same basic ideas and tropes, fetishes and clichés. Not even something as wacky as Doom Patrol (1989) really “reinvents” the wheel (not to be confused with Gregg Araki’s excellent-if-sobering twink-murder-odyssey, The Doom Generation, above 1995—Zeuhl loved their twink murder); it just camps it[11].

(source: Creepy)

Through the body language of the statuesque power dynamic, sex is frequently a joke that—whether on purpose or not—seldom measures up and historically-materially translates to statues and statuesque bodies as standing for different things and being camped by nature and those with nature versus anything against either of those things. Except the state cannot corrupt if it doesn’t exist, but this is a long, slow process—one that camps the monstrous-feminine regardless of its biological sex (with big showy genitals, as Flashgitz shows us, classically not even being the point); i.e., the classic problem of gender parody in Amazonomachia regarding female bodies: is the Amazon “acting like a man?” or not? I tend to think of this in terms of class and culture warfare. “Acting like a man” is classically a Man Box idea, and Amazons like Ellen Ripley or Samus Aran classically punch down against Communists represented as space aliens… while still being otherworldly themselves. This arguably started with Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1806) and Victoria de Loredani, but it certainly didn’t stop there!

Power symbols become things to symbolize, to hunt, to claim as trophies (which, like sex toys, we can make “dark” in ways that camp their unironic function, but likewise showcase a Destroyer with a light, Liberalist guise). We do so in safe spaces of unequal exchange, acknowledging symbolic freight through the usual places to barter but also work through our biases, phobias, and kinks, inside and out: to push against sin, dogmatic boundaries, to learn not because one is told (through discipline and punish), but because one plays as learning for oneself; i.e., in a safe space that imitates the usual disempowering feelings of state abuse: all the language of the “Imperium” put into quotes.

This being said, American superheroes like Wonder Woman are frequently cops of a white-knight sort; i.e., acting besieged while sticking to trademark heroism as branded: to look and perform as crystalized, thus are much more about imitation with mild variation than anything radically different than the good-vs-evil, us-versus-them formula: aping the “Roman,” Vitruvian statuesque through imperial verisimilitude. It’s bonafide praxial inertia, but similar to the Gothic’s zombies or demons, there’s still room to work and play with these things to achieve proletarian results; i.e., the usual, psychomachic “corruption fantasy” (mirror syndrome, aka “the dark side”) as yet-another-thing to interrogate/play with.

For the rest of the subchapter—part two, as I’ve divided it—we’ll look at fictional examples with Weaponlord (1995), Chrono Trigger‘s Ayla and Savage Land Rogue, followed by real-life performers who can play the witch cop or the rebel as a matter of praxis: Autumn Ivy and Claire Max. To that, let’s look at some more fictional examples other than Wonder Woman; i.e., those that bring the imaginary past forward as a habit that houses a wild persona trying to survive in a world historically very unfriendly to it.

(artist: Norasuko)

Onto “From Herbos to Himbos, part two“!

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Footnotes

[1] From Bobby Box’s “These Gay Man Identify as Bottoms but Hate Anal Sex” (2020):

Can you really be a bottom if you don’t enjoy receptive anal intercourse?

When I initially requested to speak with bottoms on this topic, I wasn’t expecting many bites (this kind of information is sensitive!). But I couldn’t have been more wrong. A few hours after posting my request, messages poured in.

“I find anal sex more painful than enjoyable,” Chris, 23, says. “I know it’s only supposed to hurt for a bit, but even when it starts to feel good it’s still not satisfying. I find myself thinking: Okay, hurry up and finish so this can end.“

Though he doesn’t enjoy receiving anal sex, Chris still identifies as a bottom because he’s submissive, prefers giving oral sex rather than receiving, likes feeling protected, and his sexual fantasies often—if not always—depict him as the receptive partner. “It’s that stereotypical big burly guy doing what he wants to [do to] me and taking control,” he explains.

Chris blames this fantasy on the porn industry, which, in his opinion, romanticizes the ease of receptive anal intercourse. “The bottoms always look like they’re having the time of their lives and everything just slips in with no struggle at all,” he says. “The fantasy appeals to me more than the reality [emphasis, me].”

The same idea applies to rape, which sodomy codifies to under Cartesian schemes: butt-rape nature. Make it hurt. It’s a powerful dogmatic tool that crystalizes dominance and submission as patriarchal, but also an aphrodisiac that, under unironic Pavlovian conditions, reduces to synonymizing sex and harm as things to trigger actual harm: a dog whistle. We can subvert this by putting “rape” in quotes, but the ghost of the counterfeit is always there (as is the reality—and I’m speaking from experience, here—anal sex almost always hurts a little).

[2] From “Dragon Ball Z Abridged: Episode 60 – Part 1″ (2019), Team Four Star redubs the anime to say pretty much the same thing as Toriyama:

Gohan, grow up! You act like you are the only one suffering. But I believe Trunks has some stories for you, and I can assume they all end with, ‘And then he died, too.’ And before you start whining about your father, again—and I get it—take a moment to consider that my father made me to be a soulless killing machine to kill your father [oh, the irony]. And that doesn’t come close to the complete tragedy of fatherhood that is Vegeta. […] You think you’re better than everyone else, but there you stand, the good man doing nothing. And while evil triumphs, and your rigid pacifism crumbles into blood-stained dust, the only victory afforded to you is that you stuck true to your guns! You are a coward, to your last whimper! Of fear and love, I fear not that I will die but all that I’ve come to love—the birds, and the things that are not birds—will perish with me. So please, Gohan: stop holding back! (timestamp: 18:13).

It’s so manipulative in favor of the unironic monomyth/status quo at large—a cruel hazing ritual that essentializes good and evil not just within the current story, but all of them across space and time. Cell (a stand-in for Capitalism-in-decay and Communism-in-development) is simply “evil,” and “good” is nature as catalogued and dominated by the byproduct of a cartoon scientist; i.e., the Creature minus Shelley’s pathos or irony as made into a military recruiting device that makes him a liar in the spirit of the original Victor Frankenstein.

Toriyama’s refrain apes older refrains that, per future duplicates, reliably yield Goldilocks Imperialism; i.e., taming nature while repeatedly shooting oneself in the (self-righteous) foot. As such, Android 16 (and those voicing him, time and time again) is persuading Gohan (and by extension all those “like” him and his antiwar tendencies) to “put up or shut up”; i.e., not hold back against the Nazi-Communist monstrous-feminine to “save the world.” It’s a circular argument that reliably leads to profit through genocide by erasing the state’s role in things; i.e., a bourgeois call to violence/false flag turned into yet-another palingenetic/strongman nation creation myth delivered by the canonical posthuman in service of the profit motive: as a voice for the state instead of rebellion (on par with Bungie’s own talking head in Myth: the Fallen Lords versus Scott’s beheaded Ash the android celebrating David’s creation, the xenomorph, post hoc).

Clearly Team Four Star recognize the theme of Frankenstein in DBZ—tragedy of fatherhood through the Gothic (fantasy-meets-science-fiction) making of monsters per the Promethean myth: as an endless, Gothic dialog* to weaponize the usual middle-class nerds to fight for the state in yet-another-cycle-of-violence celebrating and capitalizing on the monomyth. In other words, Team Four Star lost their ironic comedic edge the more they sold out; i.e., blank parody par excellence, used to worship Toriyama and push merchandise tied to his brand through their own. It’s transactional and dogmatic. So, way to go, guys! You suck!

*One I have written about before, and which we’ll talk about more, later in the volume (exhibit 39c2): “Dragon Ball Super: Broly (2019) – Is it Gothic?” (2019).

[3] Captain America initially created the myth of the good war, writes R. Joseph Parrott in “Captain America: Changing [the] Conscience of a Nation” (2015):

In March 1941, the United States remained neutral while World War II raged in Europe and Asia, but the country was inching toward war. Newspapers announced policies to support the Allies like the Lend-Lease Act, even as isolationist sentiment earned space in opinion pages. Yet next to the adult fare at the newsstands was something far less ambiguous: a four-color spectacle featuring a red, white, and blue clad figure holding a shield in one hand and using the other to punch Adolf Hitler square in the jaw.

[…After Korea, Stan] Lee rejected the simplistic, perfect heroes that typified previous comics in favor of fantastical soap operas grounded in very human emotions, where heroes bickered and faced personal crises, punctuated by kinetic fights choreographed by Kirby. […] From his origins in World War II, Captain America waded into national debates with sometimes blunt force. Since the 1960s, his stories have reflected complex ideas about patriotism, recognizing national flaws while clinging stubbornly to an inherent, even exceptional belief in the United States (source).

And there it is—an attempt to balance the argument with give-and-take amid a universal tendency to capitalize on American exceptionalism. Stan Lee wasn’t above it, and nowadays anyone who unironically brandishes the red-white-and-blue is, on some level, relying on its immediate symbolism as something to a) immediately recognize as a brand, and try to whitewash (versus Troma films indicating its perfidiousness through the neoliberal presence of toxic waste).

The idea of the superhero is canonically to revive someone sexy and statuesque, but also quaintly ace to literally stand and fight for the image of war as good in defense of the nation-state model—an idea that Howard Zinn (a bomber pilot in WW2) would lament regarding Saving Private Ryan (1998):

I watched Private Ryan‘s extraordinarily photographed battle scenes, and I was thoroughly taken in. But when the movie was over, I realized that it was exactly that—I had been taken in. And I disliked the film intensely. I was angry at it because I did not want the suffering of men in war to be used—yes, exploited—in such a way as to revive what should be buried along with all those bodies in Arlington Cemetery: the glory of military heroism.

All that bloodshed, all that pain, all those torn limbs and exposed intestines will not deter a brave people from going to war. They just need to believe that the cause is just. They need to be told: It is a war to end all wars (Woodrow Wilson), or we need to stop Communism (Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon), or aggression must not go unpunished (Bush), or international terrorists have declared war on us (Clinton).

In Saving Private Ryan, there is never any doubt that the cause is just. This is the good war. There is no need to say the words explicitly. The heartrending crosses in Arlington National Cemetery get the message across, loud and clear. And a benign General Marshall, front and back of the movie, quotes Abraham Lincoln’s words of solace to a mother who has lost five sons in the Civil War. The audience is left with no choice but to conclude that this one—while it causes sorrow to a million mothers—is in a good cause.

Yes, getting rid of fascism was a good cause. But does that unquestionably make it a good war? The war corrupted us, did it not? The hate it engendered was not confined to Nazis. /We put Japanese families in concentration camps.

We killed huge numbers of innocent people—the word “atrocity” fits—in our bombings of Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo, and finally Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And when the war ended, we and our Allies began preparing for another war, this time with nuclear weapons, which, if used, would make Hitler’s Holocaust look puny.

We can argue endlessly over whether there was an alternative in the short run, whether fascism could have been resisted without fifty million dead. But the long-term effect of World War II on our thinking was pernicious and deep. It made war—so thoroughly discredited by the senseless slaughter of World War I—noble once again. It enabled political leaders—whatever miserable adventure they would take us into, whatever mayhem they would wreak on other people (two million dead in Korea, at least that many in Southeast Asia, hundreds of thousands in Iraq) and on our own—to invoke World War II as a model (source: “Private Ryan Saves War,” 1998).

In similar fashion, superheroes classically make war criticism blind and sexy—i.e., in ways that engender the policing of such venues: gargoyles that spring to life and attack labor as historically sex-positive, thus anti-war and anti-Nazi, which Capitalism is not. Such defenders of the state are always monsters and martyrs for the state, some (especially female and other token varieties) being more expendable than others, but also prone to regress to fascist forms (re: second wave feminism, TERFs).

[4] E.g., “What an Amazon Is, Standing in Athena’s Shadow” (2017).

[5] From Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811).

[6] Noah Berlatsky writes,

Wonder Woman is a feminist icon. She’s also a sex symbol. She’s a wish-fulfillment power fantasy and a sexual fantasy, which is part of why she’s had such lasting appeal to fans all over the gender spectrum. But her sex appeal has been a consistent cause of consternation for critics, fans, and casual passersby since her earliest days as a comic-book character.

Director James Cameron is the latest commenter to claim there’s a contradiction there, that feminism and sexiness are somehow at odds. In a furor-raising recent interview at the Guardian, he said that in Patty Jenkins’ new Wonder Woman film, the character is “just an objectified icon, and it’s just male Hollywood doing the same old thing!” He claimed it was a “step backwards” from his own Terminator franchise, starring Linda Hamilton, who he described as “not a beauty icon” [ouch]. That’s an odd thing to say. Hamilton’s Sarah Connor is a wonderful, powerful character, but she certainly didn’t challenge Hollywood standards of attractiveness.

Marston meant for his Wonder Woman to be sexually appealing to men and women. / Cameron’s evaluation of his own work is questionable. But he at least has a glimmer of a point about Wonder Woman. It’s just an old point that’s been made over and over for decades, largely by people with no sense of the character’s history. William Marston, her creator, believed that female sexual oomph could lead both men and women to matriarchal utopia. His version of Wonder Woman was meant to be sexually provocative, educational, and appealing to men and women alike. Marston lived with two bisexual women in a polyamorous relationship, so he was always very aware of Wonder Woman’s potential lesbian audience. He was also aware of how female sexuality could be empowering, not just objectifying.

Per my arguments, paradox is a performance regarding power as a theatrical, playful means; i.e., to interrogate itself and generational trauma through ludo-Gothic BDSM. Sex appeal is very much a part of this, as is rape play in asexual (artistic) forms.

[7] Re: Cake Craft (2024).

[8] As an an-Com, I don’t really think we should focus on rescuing American symbolism from its own hypocrisy, but there is something fun about the fantasy—not unlike fucking the cop, but more exotic, otherworldly. Furthermore, the fantasy of “changing the conqueror,” while seldom practical, is often fun! And because it’s imperial, we’re not slumming but fraternizing with the enemy as something to subvert and send over to our side—the symbol as well as the people(s) involved! The way to Communism, I’ve discovered, is often through sex and BDSM.

[9] From Mallrats (1995): “He seems to have an obsession with superhero sex organs…” / “He’ll grow out of it!”

[10] A famous strongwoman from the late 1800s I have written about before. From Volume One:

Collared by the state, the “queen bitch” is a war boss who ultimately fetishizes the state’s will, including its historical-material effects: the ubiquitous celebration and female personification of statuesque war, death, lies and rape in a fascinating but ultimately “lesser” form: a lady cop, gladiator and/or reaper in tokenized spaces.

[source]

This appropriation took time, starting with a literal circus persona that fixated on the strongwoman as a dated curios tied to an imaginary past not ruled by men; e.g., late- 1800s strongwoman Katie Brumbach.

Similar to rockstars, pornstars and various other “stage bunnies” of the 20th/21st centuries, she had a stage name: Sandwina, but also “Lady Hercules.” People tend to forget that heroes are monsters. Hercules was a monster that Sandwina combined with the woman as a classical monster type: the monstrous-feminine by virtue of having manly strength and female attributes. Her naturally strong female body dwarfed the men around her [thus threatening the heteronormative order and literally personifying the suffragette movement]. As such, people like Sandwina were regarded in their time as oddities but also potential threats; or, as Betsy Golden Kellem writes in “The ‘Trapeze Disrobing Act'” (2022):

for a long time, unusually strong women were regarded as aberrant curiosities, described with wonder in the same breath as bearded ladies and living skeletons.” They were literally circus acts—magnetic ones that, Kellem continues, “not only destabilized the white-male basis of physical culture, it challenged popular ideas about female ability, all while showing a discomfiting amount of skin and startling muscle mass (source).

Meanwhile, the likes of Eugen Sandow [future icon of the Mr. Olympia organization] would represent an “imaginary antiquity” that suspiciously came with the statuesque, rippling muscles of a patriarchal hauntological past—a historically sexist tradition carried forward by “Pygmalions” like Conan author, Robert E. Howard, and famous Conan illustrator, Frank Frazetta.

[11] From Noah Berlatsky’s “Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol: The Craziest Superhero Story Ever Told” (2014):

The journey from disjunction to order is only emphasized by the fact that the heroes are themselves often outsiders in some way. Superman is an immigrant; Batman has a traumatic childhood backstory; the X-Men are policed and persecuted mutants. Yet despite the fact that they are underdogs, the heroes nonetheless fight for the mainstream authorities. Thus superheroes are often fantasies of assimilation—a dream of outsiders being accepted by, or turning into, insiders. […] The Doom Patrol was initially invented in the early ’60s, around the same time as Marvel’s X-Men, which it resembled in a number of ways: It was a group of people seen by “normal” society as freaks, outcasts, and weirdos, led by a wheelchair-bound genius (the Chief, for the Doom Patrol). Morrison, a British writer just beginning his long and much-praised career in American superhero titles, took the basic concept and pushed it to places where mainstream comics had rarely ventured. The new members of the Doom Patrol who he introduced were not white guys marked, through various fantastic mechanisms, as marginal or persecuted. Rather, the members of the Doom Patrol were marginal in their world for much the same reason that they’d be marginal in ours (source).

Camp can be more liberatory and inclusive, per Morrison, but as Zack Snyder’s 2009 Watchmen adaptation shows us, routinely drops into fascist pitfalls per future adaptations that gravitate towards violence and sex of a particular vigilante kind: Nazi (stochastic terrorism).

This post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second book sample series originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact“ (2024). That series was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two’s assorted chapters and its twin modules, the Undead and Demons. As usual, this promo series (and all its posts) are written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Volume Two, part one (the Poetry Module) is out now (5/1/2024)! I wrote a preface for the module along with its debut announcement. Give that a look; then, go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the full module (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

Click here to see “Searching for Secrets'” 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 at the bottom of the page.

Picking up from where “Volume Two, part two: Opening and Outline” left off…

“In Search of the Secret Spell”: Digging Our Own Graves; or, Playing with Dead Things (the Imaginary Past) as Verboten and Carte-Blanche (feat. Samus Aran)!

First off, there’s nothing critically “redundant” about the Gothic in its more dated looking forms […] ignoring the paradox of the retrofuture’s own hopelessly outdated anachronisms, the wizard, knight, demon or damsel, etc, well as their various stages of performance: their castles, spaceships, graveyards, cathedrals, laboratories of mad science, and other cultural sites of phobias, stigmas and urban legends; i.e., haunts that can all yield creative successes (of proletarian praxis) through dialectical-material roles as determined by function (the aesthetics is just the allure and appeal of power/playing with dead things); in short, they can all be gay as fuck if done in good faith, thus sex-positive/iconoclastic by camping canon with seemingly wizardly power […] Indeed, the foxy flexibility of guerrilla war (emblematized by the fox, but also as thoroughly sexy in how we resist capital in animalized forms—more on that in a bit) isn’t mutually exclusive, as Capitalist Realism teaches the faithful (rewarding these Crusaders with damaging illusions and prophesies of a glorious afterlife). Instead, the guerilla can challenge the seemingly all-powerful, proving just how fragile the power of the elite is: their mighty fortress is a sandcastle, a house of cards (source).

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

 

(artist: ChuckART)

The Gothic loves excavating forgeries of old legends; this chapter considers the complex role of the Amazon as one such “dead” thing—dug up and played with like a circular ruin that springs paradoxically to life, its liberatory routes superimposing over the same track as covered in bloody footprints spilled for the state. The classic Gothic heroine is forever facing ignominious death from lack of military equipment or skill; i.e., when curiosity kills the cat. But we must be curious and play with dead things that deliver us from state illusions through the same moribund theatrics reclaimed for sex-positive reasons. Divorced from state control, they remain haunted by sex and force less as discrete agents (above), and more as a singular monstrous-feminine Valkyrie that “chooses” the slain for an ignominious death dressed up as “glorious”: oddly buff, equally magical spellswords of some kind or another to pass trade secrets along to an apprentice, a squire. Such naked (“in the buff”) “meat wizards” neatly encapsulate Freud’s idea of “Medusa’s Head” (1927): the male patriarch’s authority as something to simulate through war theatre and games as testament to such strength as proof of itself, ipso facto.

The meta/multimedia argument, here, is that men are stronger than women under an implied dimorphic scheme (“the battle of the sexes,” Amazonomachia) because it dates back to Antiquity as something imaginary under present schemes that weird canonical nerds, per neoliberal monomyths, will try to regress back into (the fascist return to a past greatness). Videogames are war simulators which invoke war hauntologies for different, often color-coded sides; i.e., copaganda with a deliberately antiquated, imaginary flavor symbolizing power as fought for/over between two group-like armies, two dueling one-person armies, or some variation of these two basic ideas; e.g., the Reds and the Blues, in “50x ICE GIANT vs EVERY GOD – Totally Accurate Battle Simulator TABS” (2023). Except, Freud argues, notions of ancient female goddesses ultimately precede and—per Creed—supersede males ones as fearsome-fascinating arbiters of sex and force against imperialist (and later, capitalist) supremacy during what I call the dialectic of the alien.

Such an idea, I argue, hasn’t really gone anywhere. As I write in “Doom Eternal (2020) Review: No Girls or Trans People Allowed” (2020):

Though technically well-made, Doom Eternal feels like a nostalgic old boys’ club. Everyone’s a male beefcake flexing at each other. To draw from Umberto Eco’s 14 features of fascism, it’s action—specifically strength—for the sake of itself. A perpetual casus beli that grants men total power in society and abroad. This imperium regulates everyone, though, including men (source).

Threatening the regular balance of power as maintained through the buying and selling of such war games will—if the backlash to my writing is any indication (read the comments)—be met with tremendous excoriation by status quo defenders. Any form of subjugated Amazonomachia really is the same old boys club, then, filled with all the usual double standards and token compromises. Just watch Cheyenne Lin’s “The Women of the Big Bang Theory” (2021) to get an idea: If you’re a girl, you belong to the club because you keep the usual white, nerdy benefactors at the top (and token lieutenants in parallel subservient structures aping the colonizer) and otherwise serve them as eye candy and mouthpieces; i.e., as inaccessible sex objects they can grumble about but still ogle at, or enjoy the sexual benefits thereof. Such is the lot of the conquered. Make your bed and sleep in it.

Unlike Freud or Creed, my arguments include the oppressed in a postcolonial, GNC scheme using the same aesthetics of monstrous-feminine power and death. As such, my Amazonian apologia amounts to ludo-Gothic BDSM that goes beyond Freud and (1993) Creed’s limited praxial scope to actually acknowledge and attach trans, intersex and enby peoples (and all oppressed groups) to the monstrous-feminine as a liberatory device; i.e., as likewise seeking liberation under Cartesian, neoliberal shackles in the Internet Age. After all, I took Shiver from Bungie’s 1997 Myth: the Fallen Lords and transformed her for a genderqueer purpose. Originally called, in the Dark-Souls-boss-style naming scheme, “Shiver, Loveless Child of the Unwed Dawn” (meaning “she an ice queen in need of a good humping!”), I instead made her Revana Mireille; i.e., my trans avatar who—hybridized between Joan of Arc and Red Sonya—was rescued from rape at the destruction of her home village, only to become a great warrior and savior of future children: a warrior mommy I wanted to be and enjoy the protection of on either side of a dom/sub relationship.

(exhibit 34b3b2a2a1a2: Artist, top-upper-left: Toroyo911; top-mid-side-left: Sparkie the Artist; upper-center: Harmony Corrupted; bottom-center: Dcoda; everything else, Persephone van der Waard. The monstrous-feminine is constantly trapped between enslavement and liberation, but also alienation, fetishization and sexualization as something to recognize as strong [and fruit-like] in ways that can be harvested through such propaganda battles, but also reclaimed: the juicy ass claps back. Classically the man or state proponent has—like Beowulf—the blessing of the gods and hurls their lightning-esque implements as an extension of his own body serving as an extension of the gods’ will. He always faces giant-like or siren-esque threats—i.e., echoes of Grendel and Grendel’s mother—but comes out on top for the state; but this desire to be nurtured and raised for war can be subverted in proletarian Amazonian forms that use the same palimpsests to foster an emancipatory-revolutionary character to their hauntologies/cryptonymies, thereby reversing the process of abjection inside a Communist chronotope’s staged battleground: the liminal hauntology of war where tricksy workers hunt for proletarian agency.

[source: Giant Bomb]

Per the usual mise-en-abyme as a framed narrative, the Amazon’s monstrous-feminine body becomes the “castle” as something to invade into and from, but also relay counterterrorist propaganda that aids in proletarian sentiment, mid-combat. Instead of the patriarchal proponent [male or female and GNC tokens] striking the state target dead, said target—similar to Deet from Age of Resistance—reverses the direction of the awesome spell; i.e., sending its destructive effects back at the hexer while vampirically siphoning the vitalistic energies anisotropically towards herself and all workers/nature: “She succ!” The usual dynastic primacies and hereditary rites of such a chronotope can become inclusively matriarchal as a matter of fresh history challenging the West’s New World Order.)

Per my PhD, all heroes are monsters, thus have the capacity to wage war through elements of terrifying sex and force as instructional/instrumental; i.e., during a toy-like theatre. This jives with Asprey’s paradox of terror as a guerrilla agent of asymmetrical warfare: “Not only can terror be employed as a weapon, but any weapon can become a weapon of terror: terror is a weapon, a weapon is terror, and no one agency monopolizes it” (source: War in the Shadows: the Guerrilla in History, 1994). From Achilles to John Wayne to Rabican of the Nine (above), all are echoes of Zeus, but also avatars of such authoritative gods warring in ways that have existed since war as a practice emerged; i.e., since battles over territory were codified by acephalous tribes, chiefdoms, and city-states, at least. Campbell really wasn’t kidding with his 1949 title, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Our focus remains the monstrous-feminine, so we’ll consider these mechanics as dogmatic and ironic, using Samus Aran as our trademark Hippolyta: the Metroidvania herbo we have to rescue from state teachings, but also ourselves; i.e., by digging a new grave-like site of Gothic play for us both to inhabit (we’ll examine Wonder Woman deeper in the chapter, followed by La Femme Nikita and others).

People love monsters and sex (drugs, and rock ‘n roll, etc); inheritance anxiety inside the Imperial Core yields the paradox of a particular call of the void—dancing with the dead, aka cryptomimesis (my generous and inclusive extension of Jody Castricano’s definition as originally “writing with ghosts,” vis-à-vis Derrida). The cliché of the white girl—a child playing with dead things, fearlessly peering over the likeness of the pyramid—is her glimpsing the decay of the empire she inhabits as displaced, per the ghost of the counterfeit, onto sites of past colonial abuse that remain in the present as equally far-off but felt close by. The canvassing of the imaginary pyramid is an Orientalist trope for good reason, but we can camp it to dance with the ghost of the counterfeit in a sex-positive sense: in search of the secret spell that liberates us with ludo-Gothic BDSM/ergodic motion as a sexy means of dancing (and fucking) with death through music, nudism, costumes (and other things) as classically asexual interrogations that, true enough, overlap with overtly erotic subject matter and performance.

(source: DarkStalker90Gaming)

Monster girls or not, capital treats nature-as-monstrous-feminine and monstrous-feminine as something whose infinite gradient of sex-to-gender expression the state cannot monopolize. It becomes camp-adjacent, at the very least, thus an extracurricular school of counterterrorist education in the same shared playground: to learn from those we see ourselves in as simultaneously human and monstrous, policed and liberated; i.e., “monstrous” as something to reclaim from its unironic master/slave argument and criminogenesis in the broader dialectic of the alien. This requires using what we got—our bodies, labor value and Gothic rebellious potential as veiled (cryptonymic)—as often playful, sexy and in control while seeming out of control; i.e., calculated risk during ludo-Gothic BDSM as a theatrical performance of/playing with state trauma as normally codified and sold to us: through toys, music, and games, etc, but also monstrous-feminine examples of these things by which to “better the instruction” for or against state forces.

The state values unironic punishment as the reward (raping the Medusa). Through a proletarian Aegis, sex as monstrous-feminine becomes a proverbial “wild thing,” a hell cat that a) the state can never fully control and b) sexualized workers can reclaim mid-exploitation as a psychosexual liberatory device: a rarefied drug-like being to paradoxically worship and give tribute towards as always partially exploited in criminal hauntological forms we must double and challenge, mid-cryptonymy—all while outing the state as the recruiter whitewashing such things (e.g., Nancy Drew, no matter how naughty or nice, is canonically a veil to conceal the state’s hand in things). Sometimes revenge isn’t just success within capital, but showing the scars of capital on one’s charged, hellish surface; i.e., as animalistic code for those who know—not to count the cost (necrometrics, per Cartesian rubrics and application) or sell out as past marginalized groups have historically done, but form transgressive and subversive exchanges of trauma and knowledge during liminal expression that yield powerful, pro-worker boundaries: the Amazon as a spirit of exchange that transmutes capital’s usual bullshit into an effective means not just of survival, but praxial, creative success as formidable, confident, full.

(artist: Amirah Dyme)

All this being said, the Gothic is historically very white, thus tends to struggle with canonization per “white people disease” and various associate syndromes and eating disorders, including white knight syndrome, but also white Indian; it tends to regress while offering up problematic hybrids of the warrior and the nurturing mother (who sell out due to concessions with colonial powers). Amazon or not, all monstrous-feminine have their feet in two worlds: the world of capital and the white man (and token police agents) and the world of the dark, the Satanic, the other as something of nature (“extended beings”) to conquer by Enlightenment chudwads (“thinking beings”). There’s so many possible forms and descriptions that can potentially reverse the flow of power away from state forces; e.g., a “cougar vampirism” to become the “beautiful death” that puts on her spotted robes to go a-huntin’ for scared Big Men with little hearts that break easy! It’s a complex idolatry with a settler-colonial past that, like the classic ’80s slasher, refuses to die, but instead chases the titular (so to speak) final girl to the final act.

This brings us to Metroidvania and Samus—my domain.

In the neoliberal spirit of things, this capitalist scheme has, since its inception, recruited liberally (so to speak) from feminism’s historically neoconservative side, pitting the vengeful white woman’s reactionary creed against the local Commies-in-disguise; i.e., a female Rambo displaced to a magical far-off land to play—as Star Wars did—the white rebel, Indian, what-have-you: “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away….” The profit motive always tokenizes just enough to rake in profits, warning against fascist regression and Communist development as one-in-the-same (a false equivalence). It does so while simultaneously recruiting from fascist elements of the local, domestic and gentrified populations; i.e., to play at being more marginalized than they often actually are: slumming as “two-world people,” with one foot on Earth and one in Hell. The promise of pastoral bliss is always-and-forever preceded by an endless monomythic game of “kill the Indian, save the Man.” This is what Samus fundamentally is: a white Indian.

Except Samus—the phallic, subjugated Hippolyta sent by the Man—answers to the Man by destroying the entire area she approaches as “lost”; i.e., denied to the American double in outer space (or anywhere else): “If my bosses can’t have it, you can’t either!” This foregone conclusion neatly adumbrates the limited lifespan of any colony, the castle-in-question literally a ticking timebomb that, per American copaganda, pushes its own exploitation onto imaginary pirates to then seek revenge against. It’s an exorcism haunted by the ecstasy of gold inside the counterfeit as equally gilded, a launderer of the usual blood monies tainted by a cycle of conquest, a wedding band and Faustian bargain as ring-like: “I have a poison of the soul of which only gold can cure!”

(artist: Josef Axner)

Samus demonstrates this ipso facto. She is the colony brat “raised by wolves” (or giant bird aliens, in this case—the Chozo aping a benevolent Indigenous waylaid by cruel pirates, but also their own Icarian hubris) seeking revenge against the same old dragon who killed her dad and adopted family, only to revive again and again as an undead/robot version of itself, mecha-kaiju-style. In turn, Samus plays with power as men so often do in these stories, serving the state in multiple ways; i.e, a tokenized Amazonian colonizer robbing the dragon of its hoard (similar to Tolkien weaponizing Semitic symbols in 1937 to illustrate dragon sickness in The Hobbit, ultimately a bigoted tactic that critiques capital but also upholds it, like Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice did—through a Protestant work ethic[1]) and stripper “robbing” men of their paychecks (from Volume One):

Volume Zero extensively explored how rape is a triangulation device employed by state forces in Gothic media; i.e., of Amazonian women raping state enemies/targets: the state’s chosen female war bosses giving police, “prison sex” violence to nature-as-alien. Biological similarities and differences aside, their xenophobic function is identical to men’s—an assortment of gun, war, and rape pastiche through a co-opted, centrist Amazon: the good monster woman, Ellen Ripley, furiously slaying her evil double, Medusa, in service of the state [who redirect her rage at their abuse of her in the first movie towards whatever target they want killed next: destructive anger]. The neoliberal, neoconservative “revenge fantasies” of Aliens and Predator [1986-87] are rape fantasy in that regard, as are their videogame offshoots: “Rape the Communist; kill the pig, spill its blood!”—all in service of the owner class back at home posturing as righteous, but also displaced by neoliberal “arms merchants” like James Cameron and John McTiernan […]

Just as the shared, us-versus-them rhetoric owes a symbolic debt to Beowulf’s post-Roman treatment of monsters inside a Christian hegemon that survived in future English forms, neoliberalism’s prime videogame mode—Cameron’s refrain, the shooter—owes its own abject warrior symbolism to earlier stories putting future ghosts of Beowulf in seemingly unusual environments like outer space [whose dark hostility emulates Grendel’s mother’s underwater cave]: Starship Troopers.

Beowulf’s various offshoots survived into a retro-future copaganda whose military optimism contributes to the ongoing myopia under Capitalist Realism in male and female videogame forms; i.e., “Conan with a gun” aping Rambo [the white savior playing guerrilla] and Amazonian, Hippolyta-in-spirit Beowulfs like Samus Aran doing the same. Both offer a de facto “good” parental role to challenge the bad parentage of corrupt and/or monstrous-feminine entities [the evil double of the hero’s homestead and its occupants]. Conjured up, Beowulf aborts the spawn of Cain and Grendel’s mother on their illegitimate home turf encroaching on colonized lands; Samus crushes her own tall, hideous enemies using her own armored body and superior “phallic” weaponry. He’s the Great Destroyer shooting Red Falcon’s biomechanical offshoots to dust; she’s the Medusa, as strong as the Earth as she cuts Mother Nature [and her draconian offspring] down to size [below].

Per the kayfabe clichés of wrestling monsters, it’s not long before both hero types get naked, reviving binaries from Antiquity stressed post-Renaissance—he, stripped down to stress his masculine “invulnerability” and she, her feminine “vulnerability” during a recent creation of sexual difference. Within this settler-colonial trend, they pointedly denude towards a native, “white savior” state, mid-combat, which then regresses back to nuclear family roles after the action lulls: Hippolyta, the if-not-bridal-then-at-least-maternal role, playing house/mother while Beowulf goes home to be a family man… until the fight begins anew [which it always will under Capitalism; if there’s no one left to fight, the elite will make new enemies to confront based on Cold War kayfabe archetypes: the Nazi or the Communist as a bad parent to the hero’s good parent] (source).

Samus armors up and then strips as she always does, becoming monstrous-feminine as something maternal-warrior to endure the Male Gaze while becoming synonymous with rapist and false Indigenous (from Volume Zero):

Under Capitalist Realism, Hell is a place that always appears on Earth (or an Earth-like double)—a black fortress threatening state hegemony during the inevitable decay of a colonial body. Its widening state of exception must then be entered by the hero during the liminal hauntology of war as a repeatable, monomythic excursion—a franchise to subdue during military optimism sold as a childhood exercise towards “playing war” in fantastical forms; e.g., Castlevania or Metroid. Conjure a Radcliffean menace inside the Imperial Core, then meet it with American force.

Threatened, the state always responds with violence before anything else. Male or female, then, the hero becomes the elite’s exterminator, destroyer and retrieval expert, infiltrating a territory of crisis to retrieve the state’s property (weapons, princesses, monarchic symbols of power, etc) while simultaneously chattelizing nature in reliably medieval ways: alienating and fetishizing its “wild” variants, crushing them like vermin to maintain Cartesian supremacy and heteronormative familial structures […] Neoliberalism merely commercializes the monomyth, using parental heroic videogame avatars like the knight or Amazon pitted against dark, evil-familial doubles—parents, siblings and castles (and other residents/residences)—in order to dogmatize the player (usually children) as a cop-like vehicle for state aims (often dressed up as a dated iteration thereof; e.g., an assassin, cowboy or bounty hunter, but also a lyncher, executioner, dragon slayer or witchfinder general “on the hunt,” etc): preserving settler-colonial dominance through Capitalist Realism by abusing Gothic language—the grim reaper and his harvest (source).

Samus is like Superman, then—the small-town girl surrounded by farmland (a space colony, in her case) owned by a small group of men stolen from the Indians, thinking she’ll go off and fight the evil empire, only to become said empire’s whitewashing girl boss: “Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound! What’s that in the sky? It’s a bird, it’s a plane? It’s Samus’ spacecraft given to her by the man to go play Cowboys and Indians!” As such, Samus has Superman’s strength, agility and super speed, but also his X-ray vision; she has to settle for a miraculous arm cannon that shoots missles and beams, but can roll up into a ball and lay bombs like a some kind of fucked-up bird robot! She even has the same S logo as Superman does, but is worryingly shaped like a lightning bolt (a Nazi dogwhistle: a single “Sieg” rune)! By the time she reaches her ultimate prey (the Medusa), Samus has killed everywhere on-site—is the skinny-thicc Amazon/white Indian having donned the European’s suit of medieval retro-future armor!

As the Amazon, Samus is the part-human, part-alien enforcer who plays the cop and the victim, but is always functionally white, aping the monomyth to skirt the line of the hidden princess made through Shakespearean violence (with Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley channeling Henry V in Aliens) to push the story forward, only to then bridal the Amazon and strip her of any sort of castle at the end. Even so, she will always try to fit in, pleasing daddy with bigger and bigger conquests. But she always is stripped of everything and starting from scratch, going from place to place as an unironic Traveler/Destructor (Gozer without the irony). She never promotes—is always a fledging recruit bossed around by men; i.e., chasing the dragon as a monarch-like status symbol the state will always keep from her (“no crown for you”).

Instead, they feed her crumbs while making her chase crumbs; i.e., a kill-list that takes on the form of the enemy she must destroy to progress (“seek power”) as Promethean, Faustian, colonial, horseshit:

Exploring Metroidvania is incredibly destructive. Forbidden areas often require sacrifice to access. Far-removed from the site of murder, the sacrificial altar is often the shape of the [victim.] Sated, the statue will either dissolve or physically move to open, reveal or create a door or bridge that the hero might use to progress, literally into the beyond, to face the Other. […] The returning hero is doomed to face the past again and again, a series of doubles. They can subvert old tyrannies by seizing control, but remain trapped or exiled, themselves.

For example, Samus is nomadic, without a home; so is Ellen Ripley from Aliens or Victoria, from Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya; or, the Moor (1806). […] For any [Metroidvania] hero, it is not simply a call to arms, but a rite of passage wherein the hero constantly infers whatever lies in store for them whilst inside; yet, it is always hidden, revealed too late: they were the destroyer all along (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Lost in Necropolis: The Continuation of Castle-Narrative beyond the Novel or Cinema, and into Metroidvania,” 2018).

Escape from Metroidvania is as mythical and performative as Samus’ power is. It’s a feeling that asks the player (usually a teenage boy) to ignore what’s going on while piloting the Amazonian avatar as his reward, mid-game and at the end: the speed and strength of Artemis, stripping her for a split second before she shoots you in the face!

Instead, the Golden Statue Room becomes a grim, haunting nod to idolatry and blood sacrifice, hinting at Samus’ thirty pieces of silver when turning the statue to stone. This chimeric totem’s bogus exorcism—built on the forged lie of Western sovereignty enacted through force (“the Galactic Federation” married to “Indigenous” revenge against an invented pirate that in real life, would be the Federation) happens, piece-by-piece, when she kills one miniboss at a time; i.e., the one-woman-army that targets a local population’s elements of resistance (so-called “power targets”). Once all of them are dead, Samus goes to the nucleus of the rebel fortress, the maternal brains of the operation, and strikes the proverbial Medusa dead, beheading her. Then, she takes off and nukes the site from orbit. She’s literally war fetishized, a walking bomb/starship trooper, the fucking Death Star in the flesh. It reduces to Cameron’s billionaire Marxism—the Liberal white man drooling over Heinlein, his own Competent Woman’s military optimism[2] making what didn’t happen during the Korean war a reality after Vietnam; i.e., in a fictional what-if world neither quite here nor there.

Similar to Volume Two, part one’s “Brace for Impact” (2024), Volume Two’s second half will also have a book sample series (“Searching for Secrets,” 2024) that releases one piece of the volume half at a time until, once the puzzle is complete, the way to the next adventure opens and the next! In Metroid, this is called “boss keys,” successfully implemented as a statuesque gate that cannot be crossed until all the “pirates” are dead; i.e., a casus beli (false flag) enacted by alien invaders calling a local Indigenous population “pirate” before sending in an infiltrator to blend in and destroy the locals from the inside, out. Such dogma is no way to live (and works out badly for Ripley and Samus), but we gotta subvert it within and/or from itself as a work-in-progress, much like workers (and Communism) are, from moment to moment. In the spirit of Gothic subversion, then, I want you think of part two’s table of contents as an inversion of the classic capitalist “hit list”; i.e., Samus’ golden statue as something to modularly cross off, one-by-one, until we proceed to Volume Three (where TERFs await).

This progress should intimate our critical-thinking abilities instead of our dogmatic faith in peace-through-strength. I have loved Castlevania since high school (especially the DS and GBA handhelds) and Metroid since 1994. I’ve made artwork that celebrated the Amazonomachia of our infamous heroine, battling statuesque beasties akin to a Theseus the minotaur (or any other dude-bro with magic and a sword killing for the ancient city-state):

(exhibit 34b3b2a2a1a: Artist: Persephone van der Waard. I drew these a year out of high school, identifying Samus as a human who sought down time and R&R in between the colosseum-style duels with walking animal statues. This didn’t just ape Greek myth—i.e., like the Japanese post-Cold-War neoliberal of the mid-90s—but mirrored my own life during the War on Terror as still ongoing back then and now [Biden wouldn’t pull out of Afghanistan until 2021, but the US isn’t leaving the Middle East anytime soon, and is still funding Israel as their foot-in-the-regional-door as of me writing this]. I listened to The Minibosses on CD[3], but also Grant Henry’s Metroid Metal [2003] as something to listen to online through the QuickTime plugin, and order over the mail by check. It seems both like yesterday and light years ago. I was nineteen, just writing characters like Revana, Ileana and Alyona in spiral notebooks with no.2 mechanical pencils and lined paper.

[artist: Edwin Huang]

So much time has passed since then. I would lose my virginity several years later, but wouldn’t have my first real-life partner until I went back to college the second time around, ten years later when I was twenty-nine. I wouldn’t meet Bay for another eight years after that, and would have multiple abusive partners in between. And even now, I remember Samus as the person young men could control—to be warriors, and then, if they were “good” enough and killed and explored and destroyed fast enough [speedrunning Rambo-style settler colonialism through CIA-style shindigs], she’s let them touch her boobies. It doesn’t take much to convince those in the Man Box to go and kill non-white people overseas; Samus, it turns out, was the perfect blend of masculine-feminine hawk: a monstrous-feminine recruiter/poster girl thrown into relief by an exploding planet—a pinup girl on the side of the Enola Gay and undressed by fallout, pushing down her billowing skirt like Marilyn Monroe [or as I originally wrote by accident, Marilyn “Manroe,” to which Ginger told me: “Best drag name ever!”] from The Seven-Year Itch. People hand-waive it all like it’s some cosmic coincidence, but it’s no more a gaff than Walpole’s giant falling helmet in Otranto or Hamlet’s father’s ghost: war as destiny by dressing the scene and guiding its action every step towards imperial hegemony.)

As someone who’s been there, done that, the children of today—to defeat Capitalism by breaking Capitalist Realism, thereby liberating sex workers (Capitalism sexualizes everything) with iconoclastic art—absolutely should play with dead things like Metroidvania and Amazons, albeit in a way the state doesn’t want us to! So hustle up, kiddies! Time to enter the Crypt of the Necrodancer (think Thriller-meets-DDR but extended to Castlevania, Metroid and so many other counterfeits whose playgrounds can be used to camp dogma with)! Exploitation and liberation occupy the same space, including its hauntologies and cryptonymies for or against the state. The state will perpetuate rape of colonized spaces into their hauntologies/cryptonymies to maximize profit and canonization. To that, such a “black Egypt” is an Orientalist counterfeit we must paradoxically use to free ourselves while strung up with (and out on) its mummy-like bandages:

(artist: Magion02)

Dancing feels good; so does confronting trauma during calculated risk as “cool,” familiar but foreign (Castlevania‘s “In Search of the Secret Spell” [2006] shamelessly sneaking in a disco beat to groove among the pyramids with). Per Matthew Lewis all the way up to me, it becomes the Gothic’s usual bad, musical game of telephone, celebrating monstrous-feminine sex and force while turning Imperialism (and its semantic wreckage) into a campy joke of itself. My own quest for a Numinous Commie Mommy isn’t so odd; capital makes us feel tired relative to the self-as-alien, both incumbent on the very things they rape to nurture them (re: Irigaray’s creation of sexual difference). I’m hardly the first person to notice this:

As Edward Said astutely notes in Culture and Imperialism, most societies project their fears on the unknown or the exotic other. This barren land, where the viewers are kept disorientated, is threatening. It is a place between the familiar and the foreign, like part of a dream or vision that one cannot remember clearly. There is always a sense of a lurking danger from which the viewers need protection. Nikita provides that sense of protection (source: Laura Ng’s “‘The Most Powerful Weapon You Have’: Warriors and Gender in La Femme Nikita,” 2003).

I am, however, a trans woman who has gone above and beyond women like Barbara Creed, Angela Carter, Luce Irigaray and Laura Ng, etc, in my pioneering of ludo-Gothic BDSM: as a holistic, “Commy-Mommy” means of synthesizing proletarian praxis inside the operatic danger disco(-in-disguise), the “rape” castle riffing on Walpole, Lewis, Radcliffe, Konami, Nintendo, and so many others.

I sign myself as such for a reason—not to be an edgy slut (though I am a slut who walks the edge). Rather, my pedagogic aim is to consider the monstrous-feminine not simply as a female monster avoiding revenge through violence, but a sex-positive force that doesn’t reduce to white women policing the same-old ghost of the counterfeit: to reverse what TERFs (and other sell-outs) further as normally being the process of abjection, vis-à-vis Cartesian thought tokenizing marginalized groups to harvest nature-as-usual during the dialectic of the alien. Like any good videogame OST, it repeats, throbbing and dancing orgasmically mid-live-burial: right in that little “garage” as simultaneously haunted but incredibly small and tight (claustrophobic/philic) and filled with a big present-like presence of Medusa; i.e., the drug mule, “packed and ready” as doubled by our orgasmic, passionate cries thereof: “Medusa” and her church-like melon-like orchard as yours for the taking. Clean those pipes!

Such fruit (and its forbidden knowledge) needn’t be denied, but its continued expression needs to be mutually consensual and otherwise sex-positive to thwart Capitalist Realism, thus save us from Medusa’s feral revenge (state shift). Doing a Gothic Communism is riddled with jouissance and camp—the sort where we stick our tongue out, mid-ahegao, at capital!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

To that, these books have been a continuation of my own struggles to quest for a palliative Numinous that can, with proper love and care, become a Communist one (from Volume Zero):

We have to learn from the past by transforming its canonical depictions to avoid repeating Capitalism’s unironic genocides.

This brings us not just to my adulthood but my postgraduate work on ludo-Gothic BDSM, which in 2017 was met with its own barriers. Working under David Calonne, I was only just learning about the Numinous vis-à-vis Rudolph Otto and H.P. Lovecraft and came across an article by Lilia Melani, “Otto on the Numinous” (2003), citing the Gothic as the quest for the Numinous: “It has been suggested that Gothic fiction originated primarily as a quest for the mysterium tremendum” (source). Something about it appealed to my then-closeted kinkster as having previously been titillated by Cameron, Lovecraft and Nintendo (there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write), but also the videogames I was playing at the time: Metroidvania (source).

Playing with the imaginary past can feel, at times, like chasing one’s own ghost as blended with the camp-to-serious ghosts of ghosts of ghosts during a shared mise-en-abyme. It’s all part of the fun, babes!

• “Splendide Mendax: the Rise and Fall of ‘Rome’ as Built-in(to Us)“: Outlines the problem of the Achilles Heel as built into any canonical heroism, including the tokenized monstrous-feminine, as meant to rape and harvest nature at the cost of one’s humanity and freedom; further divides into
  • “‘Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’!’: From Herbos to Himbos, part one (feat. Dragon Ball Z and Big Trouble in Little China; Wonder Woman)” (included with the “Splendide Mendax” post, above): Outlines the idea of history as toy-like through Gothic action figures: the herbo and himbo (aka the Amazon and the knight).
  • “‘Death by Snu-Snu!’: From Herbos to Himbos, part two (feat. Ayla, Weaponlord and Savage Land Rogue; Autumn Ivy and Claire Max)“: Explores further examples of the herbo as pro-state or pro-workers, and gives two real-life examples.
  • “Into the Toy Chest: Picking up Where We Left off; or, Gothic History as Toy-like Amongst Ourselves”: Considers the monstrous-feminine as a ludo-Gothic BDSM historical device that operates in relation to ourselves and its effect on us.

As Fishtopher and Friends eloquently puts it: “Untethered optimism is simply escapism. We must use our optimism to create realities we do not need to escape from” (source skeet: May 4th, 2024). To that, we must learn from the past in small—to learn to prevent rape-by-capital by camping rape as the Gothic does; i.e., by cryptonymically “crying wolf” (a Gothic mega-nerd pun: vis-à-vis Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s 1986 The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy) in quotes: “Help, help! I’m being ‘ravished’ and I’m a zombie!” People will definitely check out that “car crash”! Onto the graveyard of Pygmalion and Galatea, but also all of their zombies and zombie-like strudel, cake and pie, cream puffs and other treats! Put “necrophilia” (a kind of rape) into quotes; mix and match, but dive into it and see what you learn! Or, what you’ve learned from the Amazon mommy dom helping you dig your own (or someone else’s) grave!

Onto “Splendide Mendax: the Rise and Fall of ‘Rome’ as Built-in(to Us)“!

Note: I’ve gotten a little bolder showing myself off, lately! My past lovers (the ones I have permission to show) will appear in here, but so will my bare, exposed and hard junk, mid-coitus (lead by example ‘n all that). Think of it as a hidden boss inside the temple, dungeon, ruin, what-have you! Per Gothic poetics, the language of sex and force merge with the body language of war as something to camp; e.g., “Oh, yeah! Put your big fat torpedo in my tight little… tube?! Flooding! Prepare to fire! So much ‘sea men’!” —Perse

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

---

Footnote

[1] Re: Persephone van der Waard’s “‘Dragon Sickness’: The Problem of Greed” (2015).

[2] Re: Persephone van der Waard’s “The Promethean Quest and James Cameron’s Military Optimism in Metroid,” (2021).

[3] And even put my favorite version of “Kraid” by them, the 2000 version, up on my first YouTube account: Nicholas van der Waard’s “Kraid, Minibosses 2000” (2014).

This post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second book sample series originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact“ (2024). That series was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two’s assorted chapters and its twin modules, the Undead and Demons. As usual, this promo series (and all its posts) are written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Volume Two, part one (the Poetry Module) is out now (5/1/2024)! I wrote a preface for the module along with its debut announcement. Give that a look; then, go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the full module (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

Click here to see “Searching for Secrets'” 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 at the bottom of the page.

Volume Two, part two: Gothic Poetics, Their History (opening)

“But you’re dead! You can’t taste, can’t smell!”

“Ah, but I remember!”

—Schmendrick the Magician and the Skull, The Last Unicorn (1982)

(artist: Quinnvincible)

Volume Two’s poetry and monster modules encapsulate Gothic poetics from two different ends; i.e., that which collectively concerns the imaginary past as something to reclaim and cultivate for a more intelligent and empathic Wisdom of the Ancients, pedagogy of the oppressed, etc. As such, Gothicists fear the return of a barbaric past; the way to escape that under Capitalism is to break Capitalist Realism—i.e., by studying the imaginary past as something to learn from and create new liberatory forms of “enslavement” with. Part one explores the usage of medieval poetics (of monsters, magic and myth) when making new proletarian histories (the Gothic—of which the Neo-Gothic revives in the present); part two reverses the arrangement, examining the history of these monstrous poetics in two basic modules that future workers can learn from while thinking like Gothic poets—through monstrous creation that represents struggle through monstrous identity as paradoxically pleasurable, cathartic.

When there’s hell to pay and Medusa’s out for blood, neither oral nor written traditions are enough to avoid state shift by themselves; they must be combined and considered as such: a new combination of both to avoid disaster with—holistically pushing for post-scarcity as something whose slow-but-steady progression moves as quickly away from older harmful systems as it can. This includes the uncontrolled chaos of the natural world as enslaved by Cartesian forces. Capital is an old, brutal system that enslaves nature to profit from its cheapening (thus genocide). We want to be stewards of nature (thus ourselves) by transforming capital (and “Rome”) from within using Gothic poetics as oral and written, half-real.

Monster Volume Outline, part two

“Didn’t you just love the picture? I did! But I just felt so sorry for the creature at the end!”

“What’d you want, for him to marry the girl?”

“He was kind of scary looking, but he wasn’t really all bad! I think he just craved a little affection! You know—the sense of being loved, needed, wanted?”

—The Girl and Richard Sherman, The Sever-Year Itch (1955)

This is the volume outline for Volume Two. The first half will be the same for parts one and two, summarizing the goal of the whole volume; the second half will list and summarize the main chapters/modules per volume half.

Capitalism leads to universal alienation, sexualization and fetishization to serve profit, which has a functional opposite—worker liberation. This means that monsters speak to the evil in and around us as a historical-material consequence of those dialectical-material forces. They take infinite forms, but do fall into some fairly distinct classes.

To that, Volume Two is composed of various essays/chapters, but primarily three modules that divide the volume in two, before segueing into Volume Three: our Poetry Module and Monster Modules, which holistically invite readers to partake in all monsters to find what is useful between them. That is, rather than focus on one exclusively for the entire book, my focus is diversity-as-strength to contribute towards monstrous pedagogies of the oppressed; i.e., on holistic modularity with emphasis as needed to better illustrate (thus achieve) intersectional solidarity through oppositional praxis, mid-synthesis. To that, I implore you to try things out—to mix, match and combine rather than specialize in just one, when making your own. Most people have a preference, but most monsters are also quite flexible, walking the line between demon, undead and/or animal during the Gothic’s fatal nostalgia and “exploitation” put into quotes; the more flexible the monster, the more flexible the mind using it as a critical humanizing lens. I try to cover the classic monsters, here, but may leave something out:

(artist: Oh No Justino)

The state and workers are always at odds; the Gothic fixates on nature as fetishized and alien (monstrous-feminine) to better notify workers of the state in decay—i.e., as data that manifests linguo-materially as pain, stress and death in various half-real forms (meaning “between fiction and non-fiction”). The Poetry Module focuses on the poetic procedure regardless of the monster type; by comparison the Monster Modules consist of two primary halves—undead and demonic—of which animals (and other nature-themed beings) are included in the demonic side. This being said, there is an undead component to nature-as-alien being harvested by Cartesian forces, leading my thesis volume to argue (and my manifesto to both simplify and expound upon):

As a kind of deathly theatre mask, something else that’s equally important to consider about demons and the undead (and which we’ll bring up throughout the entire book) is that animals embody the canonical language of power and resistance as something to camp through demonic and undead forms; i.e., stigma animals relayed through demonic BDSM and rituals of power expression and exchange that embody hunters and hunted, predators and prey that play out through the ongoing battles and wars of culture, of the mind, of sexuality and praxis as traumatized: marked for trauma or by trauma that parallel our green and purple doubles onscreen.

So when I say “animalized” vis-à-vis Gothic aesthetics, this is predominantly what I mean (source).

All monsters are alien; Capitalism, Volume One argued, chattelizes workers to serve profit, making them (and those peoples and places in connection with them) alien and fetishized, thus ready to be abused in all the ways that Capitalism demands in order to profit. In turn, power and material flow towards the state through the ghost of the counterfeit’s process of abjection; i.e., by sexualizing everything to serve profit through Gothic poetics that flow power towards the state. As my thesis statement from Volume Zero argues:

Capitalism dimorphically sexualizes all work to some degree, including sex work, resulting in sex-coercive media and gender roles via universal alienation through monstrous language; this requires an iconoclasm to combat the systemic bigotries that result—a (as the title reads) ‘liberating of sex work under Capitalism through iconoclastic art.’ Gothic Communism is our ticket towards that end (source).

All in all, the Gothic plays with the past as monstrous. Put in more blunt language, the monstrous past becomes something to, at times, quite literally fuck with, mid-consumption; i.e., in ways that cross undead, demonic and animalistic forms during a social-sexual ritual of some kind or another as meant to humanize the dehumanized: the alien, the other as normally ripe for slaughter by Cartesian forces, but for us expresses in delicious, food-like forms of theatre that are quite old—the Comedy and the Drama, but also the Ancient Romance revived in Neo-Gothic forms. On the Internet, workers can take things further than historical forms have dared to. We can embody the imaginary past as something to recultivate in ways that change the flow of things by literally fucking with it ourselves:

(exhibit 33b1b: Model and artist: Jericho and Persephone van der Waard. Often, an effective way to humanize monsters is to romance them; e.g., Beauty and the Beast or The Creature from the Black Lagoon [1954]. However, those narratives “transform” the monster, either killing/banishing them [as with the Creature] or converting them into an acceptable human shape [the Beast]. The latter is as much a historical-material concession of the princess as it is the monster itself: the canonical “kissing of toads,” hoping they turn into princes [which isn’t really fair to actual toads or those who identify with them. Indeed, many monster-fuckers hope the monster stays exactly the way it is].)

These are the primary sections/chapters of part two of the volume. Modules are sections that concern multiple chapters (which divide into subchapters that I will not list/summarize here):

“‘In Search of the Secret Spell’: Digging Our Own Graves; or, Playing with Dead Things (the Imaginary Past) as Verboten and Carte-Blanche (feat. Samus Aran)” (chapter): “Sets the table” by transitioning from what Volume Two, part one outlined (using Gothic poetics to make new histories/a sex-positive Wisdom of the Ancients) to focus on the imaginary historical aspect of Gothic ancestry we’re always inheriting, playing with and subsequently learning from as a self-defining exercise. This chapter outlines the riddle of exploring said past as “half-real,” commonly as a member of the privileged group (the Anglo-American middle class) whose various privileges intersect with various axes of oppression (similarity amid difference) that allow us to play with the past and heal from its older rapes by putting “rape” in quotes; i.e., to cultivate a pedagogy of the oppressed that acknowledges power abuse (which is what rape is) dressed up as xenophilic ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., a complicated, multimedia and transgenerational means of liminal expression that can serve workers or the state, but for us is a potent means of interrogating trauma to prevent it again in the future.

The Undead (module): This module explores the undead as creatures driven less by active intelligence and more by a desire to freeze and feed in the buried presence of trauma and harmful conditions. It explores how the state’s monopolies lead to a state of exception within its sites of settler-colonial violence, which in turn create a violent upheaval/silent scream among the oppressed and oppressors alike; i.e., the voice of colonial trauma and the vengeful, desperate feeding on the living by the undead as the genocided dead, having come home to roost—zombies. However, the alienation and feeding also affect the ruler class, leading to vampirism as a canonical effect that must be personified in healthier forms of medieval nostalgia that, for their usual logical motions, become ghost-like, copied and imperfect. Reclaiming these modules requires embodying and subverting the very traumas the state relies on to control us by keeping us hungry and braindead (a process I call “lobotomization”)—to, as the undead generally do, paralyze our prey and feed on their frozen bodies, albeit in ways that pointedly develop Gothic Communism.

Demons (module): This module explores demons as actively cunning-yet-alien shapeshifters, presented canonically as treacherous within forbidden knowledge and power exchange; i.e., as untrustworthy beings made deceitful and torturous through the ghost of the counterfeit’s process of abjection. As such, they are manmade, presented as occult beings that are summoned, composite bodies that are built (cyborgs, golems and robots), or overtly natural totems that are hunted down within nature-as-alien in either case: something to present as demonic, then isolate, dehumanize and invade under Cartesian duress. Reclaiming them requires embodying and subversively humanizing the Satanic transformative power they provide, generally in defense of nature as made alien by state forces (the trifectas, monopolies and their proponents)—to imbue with transformative fatal power that, in some shape or form, targets us for state abuse, which we subvert mid-exchange away from Capitalism’s usual tortures and towards Gothic Communism’s unknown pleasures.

The Future is a Dead Mall (chapter): Monsters are classically devalued outside of canonical forms utilized by state forces, which leads to Capitalist Realism under the current order of things. To critique Capitalism, then, we must critique people’s devaluing of the Gothic or otherwise misusing/scapegoating it for Capitalism’s woes: Radcliffe, but also Coleridge and Jameson. Through a cultivated Wisdom of the Ancients (a cultural understanding of the imaginary past), we can confront Capitalist Realism through the monsters normally pitted against us instead of speaking for us and nature as exploited by the elite. It becomes something to synthesize through our creative successes—a concept we’ll explore entirely in Volume Three while reflecting on Volume Two’s monstrous histories.

“The Caterpillar”; or, What’s to Come (conclusion): A conclusion to the volume based on its contents, but highlighted through medieval expression and a coda (the caterpillar) to encapsulate everything the volume has discussed moving into Volume Three.

Capitalism treats bodies as monstrous to compel and enslave workers through set intended uses that serve the profit motive (thus genocide) through Cartesian thought; we, to liberate them using the same language—our bodies and poetic extensions of them and their sexualities, genders and orientations serving as a potent, emergently playful means: of storing and exchanging precious forbidden data per outing to challenge Capitalist Realism as a settler-colonial project. In this volume, then, we’ll be playing with monsters you’ll undoubtedly have seen before (often as little [sex] toys), but will be asked to think about now in ways that may seem new and strange to you and me (and I’ve been doing this awhile); re: “Returning and reflecting upon old points after assembling them is a powerful way to understand larger structures and patterns (especially if they’re designed to conceal themselves through subterfuge, valor and force). It’s what holistic study (the foundation of this book) is all about.” The shape doesn’t matter provided the function (and flow of power) is consistent—for and towards workers united in a Cause that is in-the-flesh, intuitive, second-nature. The continual idea, then, is a constellation to reassemble and reflect on trauma in a holistic manner using monsters to liberate workers (and their bodies) with; i.e., to illustrate mutual consent with Gothic poetics to break Capitalist Realism once and for all. “New vistas of reflection,” indeed!

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Onto “In Search of the Secret Spell“!

“Searching for Secrets*” is a second book sample series, originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact“ (2024). That series was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two’s assorted chapters and its twin modules, the Undead and Demons. As usual, this promo series is written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series. This specific promo post includes part two’s entire table of contents (and hyperlinks to each post when I finish proofreading them), followed by the usual book disclaimer.

*Inspired by one of my favorite Castlevania songs from Portrait of Ruin (2006). You gotta dance and play in the ruins to camp the counterfeit with its ghost, lovelies!

Note: “Searching for Secrets” is a work-in-progress and will be routinely updated as I publish new sample posts for Volume Two, part two. I anticipate the entire process to take at least two months (“seven vagánias, maybe more“).

Volume Two, part one (the Poetry Module) is out now (5/1/2024)! I wrote a preface for the module along with its debut announcement. Give that a look; then, go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the full module (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Contents (for Volume Two, part two) 

“Searching for Secrets” divides into two main modules bookended by two chapters. Unlike Volume Two, part one, part two of the volume is primarily written, so I will be able to list and summarize all of them at once. I will add hyperlinks as I release the posts, one at a time. For the sake of my sanity, none will be posted my old blog (meant for any audience); i.e., most feature explicit, pornographic nudity* and will post exclusively here on my website.

*My website is 18+ and contains full uncensored images of everything being discussed and exhibited. To that, “Angry Mothers,” “Solving Riddles,” “The Medieval” and “Facing Death” will all contain a variety of erotic nude images discussing psychosexual trauma. The purpose of their inclusion is art criticism, transformation and education regarding erotic Gothic media.

All in all, these are the primary sections/chapters of part two of the volume. Modules are sections that concern multiple chapters (which divide into subchapters that I will not list/summarize here). While the Poetry Module focused on Gothic poetics as a historical-material process whose history we contribute towards, the Monster Modules (and other chapters) shall focus on the history of Gothic poetics as something to learn from when poetically articulating our own pedagogy of the oppressed.

Note, 5/4/2024: Filling these out and posting them will take months. Right now, only the first chapter is fully outlined. I’ll expand on the others in the days ahead! —Perse 

Playing with Dead Things (opening and first chapter)

Summary

The opening to Volume Two, part two, as well as the first chapter, “In Search of the Secret Spell.”

Posts

• 0. “Searching for Secrets” series opening:  “Volume Two, part two: Opening and Outline“: Explains how Volume Two, part two is focused on the history of Gothic poetics as something that evolved into itself. Also provides a broad outlined to Volume Two, part two (chapter/module summaries and summation). Length: ~2 pages.
• 1. “‘In Search of the Secret Spell’: Digging Our Own Graves; or, Playing with Dead Things (the Imaginary Past) as Verboten and Carte-Blanche (feat. Samus Aran)” (chapter): “Sets the table” by transitioning from what Volume Two, part one outlined (using Gothic poetics to make new histories/a sex-positive Wisdom of the Ancients) to focus on the imaginary historical aspect of Gothic ancestry we’re always inheriting, playing with and subsequently learning from as a self-defining exercise. This chapter outlines the riddle of exploring said past as “half-real,” commonly as a member of the privileged group (the Anglo-American middle class) whose various privileges intersect with various axes of oppression (similarity amid difference) that allow us to play with the past and heal from its older rapes by putting “rape” in quotes; i.e., to cultivate a pedagogy of the oppressed that acknowledges power abuse (which is what rape is) dressed up as xenophilic ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., a complicated, multimedia and transgenerational means of liminal expression that can serve workers or the state, but for us is a potent means of interrogating trauma to prevent it again in the future. Total Length: ~119 pages.
  • 1a. “Splendide Mendax: the Rise and Fall of ‘Rome’ as Built-in(to Us)“: Considers nature vs nurture relative to Gothic poetics, insofar as this can be used to code humans to war against/rape nature; i.e., how for humans under Capitalism, nurture is currently tied to giant linguo-material structures called “capital” that weaponize the imaginary past’s splendid lies against workers and nature: Capitalist Realism dipping the hero into the river Styx to “gift” him with the aura of invulnerability as haunted by narcissistic echoes of other Roman fools having fallen on the same proverbial sword. Length: ~5 pages.
    • 1a1a. “‘Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’!’: From Herbos to Himbos, part one (feat. Dragon Ball Z and Big Trouble in Little China; Wonder Woman)” (included with the “Splendide Mendax” post, above): Outlines the idea of history as toy-like through Gothic action figures: the herbo and himbo (aka the Amazon and the knight). Length: ~35 pages.
    • 1a1b. “‘Death by Snu-Snu!’: From Herbos to Himbos, part two (feat. Ayla, Weaponlord and Savage Land Rogue; Autumn Ivy and Claire Max)“: Explores further examples of the herbo as pro-state or pro-workers, and gives two real-life examples. Length: ~46 pages.
    • 1a2. “Into the Toy Chest: Picking up Where We Left off; or, Gothic History as Toy-like Amongst Ourselves”: Considers the monstrous-feminine as a ludo-Gothic BDSM historical device that operates in relation to ourselves and its effect on us. Length: ~33 pages.

The Undead: Zombies, Vampires and Ghosts (module)

Summary

This module explores the undead as creatures driven less by active intelligence and more by a desire to freeze and feed in the buried presence of trauma and harmful conditions. It explores how the state’s monopolies lead to a state of exception within its sites of settler-colonial violence, which in turn create a violent upheaval/silent scream among the oppressed and oppressors alike; i.e., the voice of colonial trauma and the vengeful, desperate feeding on the living by the undead as the genocided dead, having come home to roost—zombies. However, the alienation and feeding also affect the ruler class, leading to vampirism as a canonical effect that must be personified in healthier forms of medieval nostalgia that, for their using logical motions, become ghost-like, copied and imperfect. Reclaiming these modules requires embodying and subverting the very traumas the state relies on to control us by keeping us hungry and braindead (a process I call “lobotomization”)—to, as the undead generally do, paralyze our prey and feed on their frozen bodies, albeit in ways that pointedly develop Gothic Communism.

Module Posts

Note: I’ll add the summaries, post numbers and page counts, etc, later. Right now, I just want to get the lists up!

• Bad Dreams, or Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse
  • part one: Police States, Foreign Atrocities and the Imperial Boomerang
  • part two: Transforming Our Zombie Selves (and Our War-like, Rapacious Toys) by Reflecting on the Wider World through the Rememory of Personal Trauma
  • part three: the Monomyth/Cycle of Kings; or, Paralyzing Zombie Tyrants with Reverse Abjection, Sex-Positive Hauntologies (Castle-narrative in Metroidvania) and Perceptive Zombie Eyeballs
• The Monomyth as Undead 
  • part zero: Mandy and the Problem of Futile Revenge
  • part one: “She Fucks Back”; or, Revisiting The Modern Prometheus through Astronoetics (the Man of Reason and Cartesian Hubris) versus the Womb of Nature in Metroidvania
  • part two: “Ruling the Slum”; or, Crime Lords and Zombie Caesars When the Boomerang Comes Back Around
  • part three: “That Which Is Not Dead”; or, Capitalism as a Great Zombie
  • • Eat Me Alive; or Reintroducing Liminal Expression through Undead Feeding Vectors, part one: A Brief History of Feeding, Queer Love and Vampires
    • Seeing Dead People; or, Reintroducing Liminal Expression through Undead Feeding Vectors, part two: Ghosts/the Numinous, Metroidvania, the Posthuman and Cryptomimesis

Demons: From Composites and the Occult to Totems and the Natural World (module)

Summary

This module explores demons as actively cunning-yet-alien shapeshifters, presented canonically as treacherous within forbidden knowledge and power exchange; i.e., as untrustworthy beings made deceitful and torturous through the ghost of the counterfeit’s process of abjection. As such, they are manmade, presented as occult beings that are summoned, composite bodies that are built (cyborgs, golems and robots), or overtly natural totems that are hunted down within nature-as-alien in either case: something to present as demonic, then isolate, dehumanize and invade under Cartesian duress. Reclaiming them requires embodying and subversively humanizing the Satanic transformative power they provide, generally in defense of nature as made alien by state forces (the trifectas, monopolies and their proponents)—to imbue with transformative fatal power that, in some shape or form, targets us for state abuse, which we subvert mid-exchange away from Capitalism’s usual tortures and towards Gothic Communism’s unknown pleasures.

Module Posts

• Forbidden Sight and the Promethean Quest
  • part one: Making Demons—Composite Bodies, Golems and Mad Science; or the Roots of Enlightenment Persecution
  • part two: Summoning Occult Demons—Imposters and Death Curses; the Demonic BDSM of Canonical Torture vs Exquisite “Torture”
• Exploring the Derelict Past: The Demonic Trifecta of Detectives, Damsels and Sex Demons; or Enjoying Yesterday’s Exquisite Torture on the Edge of the Civilized World
  • “Damsels, Detectives and Sex Demons,” part zero: Derelicts, Medusa and Giger’s Xenomorph; i.e., the Puzzle of “Antiquity”
  • “Damsels, Detectives and Sex Demons,” part one: Damsels and Detectives
  • “Damsels, Detectives and Sex Demons,” part two: Demons and Dealing with Them 
• Call of the Wild; or “Sex Education,” Trans-forming the World through the Trans, Intersex and Non-binary Mode of Being
  • part zero: Hunter and Hunted; or, Nature vs the State
  • part one: “Monster-Fucking” and Furry Panic, feat. Lycans, Chimeras, and Sentient Animals
  • part two: “Follow the White Rabbit”; or Magic, Drugs and Acid Communism, feat. the Monstrous-Feminine of Magic Girls, Unicorns and Xenomorphs

In Closing (final chapters and conclusion)

Summary

The closing chapter and conclusion to Volume Two, part two.

Chapters Posts

• 0. “The Future is a Dead Mall” (chapter): Monsters are classically devalued outside of canonical forms utilized by state forces, which leads to Capitalist Realism under the current order of things. To critique Capitalism, then, we must critique people’s devaluing of the Gothic or otherwise misusing/scapegoating it for Capitalism’s woes: Radcliffe, but also Coleridge and Jameson. Through a cultivated Wisdom of the Ancients (a cultural understanding of the imaginary past), we can confront Capitalist Realism through the monsters normally pitted against us instead of speaking for us and nature as exploited by the elite. It becomes something to synthesize through our creative successes—a concept we’ll explore entirely in Volume Three while reflecting on Volume Two’s monstrous histories.
• “‘The Caterpillar’; or, What’s to Come” (conclusion): A conclusion to the volume based on its contents, but highlighted through medieval expression and a coda (the caterpillar) to encapsulate everything the volume has discussed moving into Volume Three.

(disclaimer exhibit: Artist: Harmony Corrupted, who provided me with various materials from her Fansly account to use [with her permission] in my book, including cum photos. For those of legal age who enjoy Harmony’s work and want to see more than this website provides, consider subscribing to her Fansly account and then ordering a custom/tipping through her Ko-Fi. You won’t be disappointed!)

Disclaimer

“If it was not good, it was true; if it was not artistic, it was sincere; if it was in bad taste, it was on the side of life.”

—Henry Miller, on criticism and the Supreme-Court-level lawsuit he received for writing The Tropic of Cancer (1934)

Regarding This Book’s Artistic/Pornographic Nudity and Sexual Content: Sex Positivity thoroughly discusses sexuality in popular media, including fetishes, kinks, BDSM, Gothic material, and general sex work; the illustrations it contains have been carefully curated and designed to demonstrate my arguments. It also considers pornography to be art, examining the ways that sex-positive art makes iconoclastic statements against the state. As such, Sex Positivity contains visual examples of sex-positive/sex-coercive artistic nudity borrowed from publicly available sources to make its educational/critical arguments. Said nudity has been left entirely uncensored for those purposes. While explicitly criminal sexual acts, taboos and obscenities are discussed herein, no explicit illustrations thereof are shown, nor anything criminal; i.e., no snuff porn, child porn or revenge porn. It does examine things generally thought of as porn that are unironically violent. Examples of uncensored, erotic artwork and sex work are present, albeit inside exhibits that critique the obscene potential (from a legal standpoint) of their sexual content: “ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated, masturbation, excretory functions, lewd exhibition of the genitals, or sado-masochistic sexual abuse” (source: Justice.gov). For instance, there is an illustrated example of uncensored semen—a “breeding kink” exhibit with zombie unicorns and werewolves (exhibit 87a)—that I’ve included to illustrate a particular point, but its purposes are ultimately educational in nature.

The point of this book isn’t to be obscene for its own sake, but to educate the broader public (including teenagers*) about sex-positive artwork and labor historically treated as obscene by the state. For the material herein to be legally considered obscene it would have to simultaneously qualify in three distinct ways (aka the “Miller” test):

• appeal to prurient interests (i.e., an erotic, lascivious, abnormal, unhealthy, degrading, shameful, or morbid interest in nudity, sex, or excretion)
• attempt to depict or describe sexual conduct in a patently offensive way (i.e., ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated, masturbation, excretory functions, lewd exhibition of the genitals, or sado-masochistic sexual abuse)
• lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value

Taken as a whole, this book discusses debatably prurient material in an academic manner, depicting and describing sexual conduct in a non-offensive way for the express purpose of education vis-à-vis literary-artistic-political enrichment.

*While this book was written for adults—provided to them through my age-gated website—I don’t think it should be denied from curious teenagers through a supervising adult. The primary reason I say this (apart from the trauma-writing sections, which are suitably intense and grave) is that the academic material can only be simplified so far and teenagers probably won’t understand it entirely (which is fine; plenty of books are like that—take years to understand more completely). As for sexually-developing readers younger than 16 (ages 10-15), I honestly think there are far more accessible books that tackle the same basic subject matter more quickly at their reading level. All in all, this book examines erotic art and sex positivity as an alternative to the sex education currently taught (or deliberately not taught) in curricular/extracurricular spheres. It does so in the hopes of improving upon canonical tutelage through artistic, dialectical-material analysis. 

Fair Use: This book is non-profit, and its artwork is meant for education, transformation and critique. For those reasons, the borrowed materials contained herein fall under Fair Use. All sources come from popular media: movies, fantasy artist portfolios, cosplayer shoots, candid photographs, and sex worker catalogs intended for public viewing. Private material has only been used with a collaborating artist’s permission (for this book—e.g., Blxxd Bunny‘s OF material or custom shoots; or as featured in a review of their sex work on my website with their consent already given from having done past work together—e.g., Miss Misery).

Concerning the Exhibit Numbers and Parenthetical Dates: I originally wrote this book as one text, not four volumes. Normally I provide a publication year per primary text once per text—e.g., “Alien (1979)”—but this would mean having to redate various texts in Volumes One, Two and Three after Volume Zero. I have opted out of doing this. Likewise, the exhibit numbers are sequential for the entire book, not per volume; references to a given exhibit code [exhibit 11b2 or 87a] will often refer to exhibits not present in the current volume. I have not addressed this in the first edition of my book, but might assemble a future annotated list in a second edition down the road.

Concerning Hyperlinks: Those that make the source obvious or are preceded by the source author/title will simply be supplied “as is.” This includes artist or book names being links to themselves, but also mere statements of fact, basic events, or word definitions where the hyperlink is the word being defined. Links to sources where the title is not supplied in advance or whose content is otherwise not spelled out will be supplied next to the link in parentheses (excluding Wikipedia, save when directly quoting from the site). One, this will be especially common with YouTube essayists I cite to credit them for their work (though sometimes I will supply just the author’s name; or their name, the title of the essay and its creation year). Two, concerning YouTube links and the odds of videos being taken down, these are ultimately provided for supplementary purposes and do not actually need to be viewed to understand my basic arguments; I generally summarize their own content into a single sentence, but recommend you give any of the videos themselves a watch if you’re curious about the creators’ unique styles and perspectives about a given topic.

Concerning (the PDF) Exhibit Image Quality: This book contains over 1,000 different images, which—combined with the fact that Microsoft Word appears to compress images twice (first, in-document images and second, when converting to PDFs) along with the additional hassle that is WordPress’ limitations on accepting uploaded PDFs (which requires me to compress the PDF again—has resulted in sub-par image quality for the exhibit images themselves. To compensate, all of the hyperlinks link to the original sources where the source images can be found. Sometimes, it links to the individual images, other times to the entire collage, and I try to offer current working links; however, the ephemeral, aliased nature of sex work means that branded images do not always stay online, so some links (especially those to Twitter/X accounts) won’t always lead to a source if the original post is removed.

Concerning Aliases: Sex workers survive through the use of online aliases and the discussion of their trauma requires a degree of anonymity to protect victims from their actual/potential abusers. This book also contains trauma/sexual anecdotes from my own life; it discusses my friends, including sex workers and the alter egos/secret identities they adopt to survive “in the wild.” Keeping with that, all of the names in this book are code names (except for mine, my late Uncle Dave’s and his ex-wife Erica’s—who are only mentioned briefly by their first names). Models/artists desiring a further degree of anonymity (having since quit the business, for example) have been given a codename other than their former branded identity sans hyperlinks (e.g., Jericho).

Extended, Book-Wide Trigger Warning: This entire book thoroughly discusses xenophobia, harmful xenophilia (necrophilia, pedophilia, zoophilia, etc), homophobia, transphobia, enbyphobia, sexism, racism, race-/LGBTQ-related hate crimes/murder and domestic abuse; child abuse, spousal abuse, animal abuse, misogyny and sexual abuse towards all of these groups; power abuse, rape (date, marital, prison, etc), discrimination, war crimes, genocide, religious/secular indoctrination and persecution, conversion therapy, manmade ecological disasters, and fascism.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

This promo post is the epilogue/preface to Volume Two, part one, aka the Poetry Module. By extension, said announcement belongs to the promo series for said module called “Brace for Impact“ (2024). Originally part of an undivided volume—specifically Volume Two of my Sex Positivity (2023) book series—“Brace for Impact” went on to become its own completed module in Volume Two: the Poetry Module, aka Volume Two, part one. The module was primarily inspired by Harmony Corrupted and divides into over thirteen posts, whose collective chapters/subchapters compile one half of the larger total volume; i.e., Volume Two has three modules—one bigger module for part one (re: the Poetry Module), and two slightly smaller modules (the Monster Modules) for part two—for which the volume halves are roughly equal in size (subject to change).

Update, 5/4/2024: I’m starting a similar book sample series for Volume Two, part two: “Searching for Secrets“ (2024)!

Update, 5/1/2024: Volume Two, part one (the Poetry Module) is out! I wrote a preface for the module along with its debut announcement. Give that a look; then, go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the full module (which will contain additions/corrections these posts will not have)!

Click here to see “Brace for Impact’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).

The Poetry Module Is Out! A Preface Written Afterwards

I’m thought and rememory! Full of trauma, appetite and rage, my spells are orgasms! My hexes reek of power that can peel paint, strip peaches of their skin—to send your toenails growing inward, you mess with me! I shapeshift and impart fatal knowledge! I am Ileana, hear me roar! I am Revana, strong and brave! I am Persephone, daughter of Melody, granddaughter of Ellen, great-granddaughter of Mildred, the teeth in the night, the Queen of the Night, Titania and Tamora, and you do not scare me!

—Persephone van der Waard, Volume Two, part one (2024)

(model and artist: Harmony Corrupted and Persephone van der Waard)

First and foremost, the Poetry Module is out, babes! It is part one of Volume Two (with part two being the Monster Modules) and extensively features my muse and friend, Harmony Corrupted.

Second, in my usual style, I wrote the preface last and put it first (and it won’t be included in the volume PDF until after I update v1.0). As a whole, the Poetry Module concerns the poetic usage of Gothic poetics during the dialectic of the alien; i.e., nature-as-monstrous-feminine being something to humanize (for workers) during ludo-Gothic BDSM, or to harvest harmfully during the same oppositional praxis except for profit (for the state): during the ghost of the counterfeit’s process of abjection as a historical-material loop, a Torment Nexus. I wanted to comment on that mirrored concentrism by writing an impromptu preface the morning of the Poetry Module’s debut. However, this piece also contains a thank you to Harmony Corrupted and an About the Author tidbit (regarding me) at the very end.

Preface: Inside the Hall of Mirrors (feat. Jordan Peele’s Us and Natalie Wynn)

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction (source).

—Shylock, The Merchant of Venice (1605)

Our struggle—to hug the Medusa as something to teach, to reclaim our bodies (our asses) as Aegis-like and disguise-worthy—sits inside a dangerous hall of mirrors. The state isn’t just a war machine, you see, but a war factory (of factories) whose own spinning room of kaleidoscopic reflections stretches in all directions, remediates during fractal recursion into/onto all media: a dividing of the natural-material world into linguo-material false binaries and boundaries the state’s servants can acquire, internalize from childhood, and raise then police into the future. To critique power as an illusion, you must go where its illusions—its masks, disguises and performers—collectively inhabit and interact in curious, veiled hostility. We’ll refer repeatedly to Jordan Peele’s Us (2019), but also similar media we’ve talked about before (e.g., Tolkien’s refrain, Alex Garland’s Annihilation, 2018) to explore both sides of the cryptonymic exchange (revolutionary and cryptonymic) and people I’ve written about in volumes I have yet to publish: Natalie Wynn, aka Contrapoints.

We’ll get to Wynn (a queernormative defender of the state posing as “progressive”) after we talk about Peele’s Us. But first, a note about the state before we enter the hall of mirrors! The state are master manipulators and pride themselves in various trifectas and monopolies centered around profit according to centrist dogma as sheer dumb force by those with their hands on the levels of illusion, thus power as something to fake. As such, it’s all fun and games until the white worker’s family and friends start dying. But the state can turn that right back around and pin it on “the Reds”: “‘Stalin’ did it.” It’s the same idea works with token groups as well (above), triangulating them against different elements of labor fighting for liberation from capital at home and abroad; i.e., using disguises they both share to scare and communicate back and forth during the same fracas.

This reifies in material code as “corrupted” with ghosts of the counterfeit during the abjection process. From Imperialism without systemic racism to settler-colonial forms that crystalized Cartesian rhetoric unto Capitalism as we currently know it (neoliberalism), there has always a barbarian horde to rout, a dragon to slay, a slave to lynch, a virgin to own and whore to rape, a city (of victims) to conquer while calling them “enemy,” “terrorist” or some-such nonsense. It obscures the usual function (exploitation and genocide) behind all the recycled glories, tragedies and farce that, per Marx (re: “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” 1852), repeat over and over (as I argue) in wider imaginary histories; i.e., whose recurrent syndromes (mirror, compartment, virgin/whore, white knight, etc) parallel their non-fictional variants in the same half-real space’s liminal expression. Like videogames, the entirety of the exchange—its culture and materials—become something to colonize at greater and greater speeds, moving money through nature by raping nature as monstrous-feminine, and by extension, anything that isn’t a white, cis-het, Christian male.

Except, this always mirrors the struggle. In turn, this becomes a framed narrative, a story inside of a story I shall equally encapsulate by making the body of the preface an exhibit in my usual italicized, center-aligned, parenthetical format. Step inside and look around… if you dare!

(exhibit, post: “Does the line stretch onto the crack of doom?” The spectre of Zombie Caesar [the Shadow of Pygmalion] haunts the image and its cryptomimesis, a Cycle of Kings to an infernal concentric pattern that rots on its image, hiding the corpse of empire when Capitalism decays by design. Eventually, though, state shift will spiral out of their control, becoming something the entire theatre of good cop, bad cop [white knight, black knight] and their canonical castles [ACAB] cannot gentrify and commercialize anymore; it will fall apart and stay that way, the elite having dug their own grave [and ours]!

Until then, the mise-en-abyme [and its narrative of the crypt] yawns on and on, a trail of semiotic, ouroborotic wreckage that always leads to a localized and dispersed vanishing point [through Hogle’s double operation; re: “The Restless Labyrinth,” 1980] as something I encourage you to play with and reverse [to “start a thing, to put the pussy on the chainwax“]: show to reveal and vice versa as revolutionary cryptonymy needs you to—to survive and haunt our enemies until they lose the will [and bloodlust] required to rape us for the umpteenth time. The proof is in the “pudding” [the ass] as something to make war over and with. There is always another castle to storm, map to fill in, maiden to rout[e] and deflower, hag to behead, Amazon to bridle, barbarian horde to quell, treasure hoard to steal [through force] and so on. Conversely there is always a double of that same castle, Medusa, throng or damsel that is saved, converted, and restored in capitalist monomyths. But there and back again, said refrains oscillate through profit synthesizing the thesis and antithesis of capital to achieve profit through inequality, lies and death always being required: the holy unto the raped, alien, reprobate and doomed, and vice versa. Like a double helix, then, our own doubles challenge state centrism through theories at work “on the glass,” in small: revolutionary cryptonymies, emancipatory hauntologies, and Communist parallel societies [chronotopes] that reverse the process of abjection inside the mirror hall. But these, in turn, occupy the same liminal sphere, shadow zone, historical-material scroll written and writing through the spilling of dialectical-material blood. On its fractal recursions, you can see echoes of the Medusa grappling with Perseus, but also Hippolyta as subjugated [a class traitor I call “witch cop”]—of Galatea and with Pygmalion, of Capitalism with Communism’s hypermassive imprints felt on lesser ghosts pushing and pointing towards greater Numinous degrees: “Stare and tremble!”

From Coleridge and Lewis, to more recent foils, this is a cyclical dialog at war with itself on the surface and its palimpsests; i.e., as for or against the state during liminal expression; e.g., Coleridge cries like an absolute, pearl-clutching bitch at Lewis’ book: “Nor must it be forgotten that the author is a man of rank and fortune. Yes! the author of the Monk signs himself a LEGISLATOR! We stare and tremble” [source: Pressbooks’ “Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s review of The Monk“] and we become the thing that he—ever the moderate playing the rebel and stabilizer for the status quo [scratch a moderate and a fascist bleeds]—fears most: a Gothic he cannot gentrify through the looking glass. Fuck Coleridge! Make him squirm like the little worm he is! By showing him his own abject, stupid reflection. That man is dead, but we can camp the ghost of him on the same surface to chagrin the jackasses sucking his memory off by imitating it in bad faith [“imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”].

Firmly with workers in this respect, I’m nothing if not consistent in my threads [weaving them not to lead you out of the labyrinth, but transform it from within by befriending the minotaur [and all monstrous-feminine] as someone I lead you straight towards], but have had different things to say as I write these books. As I’ve said before and will say again, “If you want to critique power, you must go where it is”—must do so through performance and play as a potent, paradoxical means of camp [from Volume Zero]

Despite their poetic nature, performance and play are an absolutely potent means of expressing thus negotiating power through the Gothic mode (its castles, monsters and rape scenarios); a polity of proletarian poets can negotiate future interrogations of unequal power within the Gothic imagination as connected to our material conditions: one shapes and maintains the other and vice versa. As such, my own contributions to the Gothic are very much about making it sexual again, but also sex-positive in ways that Radcliffe (and her own venerated castle’s praxial inertia) were not [source].

per my conceptualization of ludo-Gothic BDSM [also from Volume Zero]

My combining of an older academic term, “ludic-Gothic” (Gothic videogames), with sex-positive BDSM theatrics as a potent means of camp. The emphasis is less about “how can videogames be Gothic” and more how the playfulness in videogames is commonly used to allow players to camp canon in and out of videogames as a form of fairly negotiated power exchange established in playful, game-like forms (which we’ll unpack during the “camp map” in our thesis volume) [source].

to the pedagogy of oppressed that ludo-Gothic BDSM entails [from Volume One]

As its most basic level, rape is a violation of basic human, animal and environmental rights enacted through Cartesian power abuse; this postscript concerns the complicated process that healing from rape entails— i.e., its corrupting presence through codified trauma, wherein the surviving of police abuse becomes something to relate to others through Gothic stories that constitute radical empathy as a thing forever out-of-joint: the attempt to empathize with alien experiences to gain new perspective. Such empathy needn’t concern both parties equally and its Gothic dialogs concern intense, poetic liminalities still bearing an intense potential for disguise that is haunted by the shadow of police forces. Even so, the postscript aims to showcase such a dialog and its phenomenological complexities; i.e., one held between two or more people relating through their interpretation of various texts they are either intimately familiar with or at the very least recognize the tell-tale arrangements of power and performance through traumatic markers [source].

onto Volume Two’s observations

As such, ludo-Gothic BDSM is a potent means of interrogating trauma by which to heal one’s home as sick with Capitalism. For me and my voyeurism, for instance, I love to observe the sexual gratification of others; i.e., mutually consensual voyeurism agreed between me and the people letting me watch them. I love being put in that headspace, that altered state of mind: someone else’s shoes; i.e., one where that person feels good. It feels good to occupy a role attached to a real person feeling good in ways that I want to feel, too. I think that speaks to what my book is really about. Healing through social-sexual exchanges like these, but also slipping into different roles to face difficult traumas [source].

and so on. The lot of it is just part of a grander castle-narrative in a bigger hall of mirrors—ours, staring back at you!

[artist: Asu Rocks]

“Gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss.” The state always sends its worst assassins first, including those that gentrify struggle and whitewash empire and rebellion as “already won” [the white castles are the worst, the moderate the biggest Judas]. Except something is always given up during the exchange; no matter how hard a state agent tries to conceal or divide through bald-faced lies, self-serving skullduggery and impudent displays of ostensible self-righteousness and sovereignty, they are Prospero during “The Masque of the Red Death” [1842] as much as Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” [1835]. In turn, they echo the fate and behavior of powerful historical figures; e.g., are both Abraham Lincoln the martyr and tyrant; i.e., the emperor both sitting in the opera chair taking a bullet to the back of the head by the backstabber muttering “sic semper tyrannis,” and the American executive ordering other men around him to die in wave-upon-wave as total war [and later, frontier Capitalism] always demands. Such persons purport themselves as the “real saviors of the world, the nation, the worker, the job,” etc; they profess to love but coerce through patriarchal domination and guile dressed up as “feminine,” “black,” “queer” and/or other such benevolence as a narcissistic mask for their true purpose—i.e., Goldilocks Imperialism being the literal worst because it disguises transgressions in plain sight, claims that activism is over and done with [e.g., second wave feminism] and hoarding the war chest of such equality of convenience for tokenized members of the same oppressor group, the white cis-het Christian European’s outer female margins infringing on marginalized groups further divorced from the standard to tokenize as well—to normalize them as mimicking their colonizers [re: Fanon].

We’ll examine this much more in Volume Three. For now, just remember that “white people disease” extends to “white woman disease” to “white black people disease”: a disguise the state approaches its enemies [us] with in bad faith. We need to recognize that and move past the tired hollow victories of Radcliffe, Dacre, and Brontë, as well as the incremental and imperfect observations of Carter and Creed, while also observing Rowling and other such TERFs exist among a polity that is, at all times, already infiltrated/TERF-adjacent [thus fascist]. They mirror us and we respond through disguises that, through human language as dualistic, operates mid-opposition in ways they will try to treat as yet another thing to gentrify. 

So we must always remember that and bear in mind; i.e., that while Capitalism sexualizes, fetishizes and alienates everything, there is still a direction that violence and power always flow towards: nature as terrorist, the state as good. We will always be alien in their eyes, and they will always be alien in ours. Except nature isn’t white, female and feminist; it’s monstrous-feminine, Indigenous, non-white, and non-Christian [often Pagan], first and foremost. Privileged groups that join serve as members of groups with intersecting privilige and oppression, whereupon they have more influence in middle-class circles, but also more potential as the middle class historically does; i.e., to harm as having been achieved time and time again inside unironic veins of the Gothic mode: the process of abjection to shackle, rape and behead their own kind as yet-another-Judas wearing concentric veneers. Often, they dress similar to historical figures they impersonate to silence rebellion in bad faith; e.g., MLK as evoked by Black Lives Matter once it became infiltrated and gentrified according to the same old false rebels [fascists] serving the same old-moneyed interests [re: Parenti] through masks on top of masks [me]: “In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” Even this is a paradox, the mirror full of motion and likenesses we must differentiate or die.

Such lying dickwads give cunts like us [avatars of a rebellious Medusa] a bad name. We’re not “sick,” “not imagining things”; they’re full of shit but resemble us and we them. It gets messy but can be navigated with the right degree of skill and invention. Per us, you might call it “poetry in motion,” a masked ball of class warriors versus class traitors using the same old masks’ aesthetics of power and death [of red and black, of rebellion and enslavement] given new context and meaning as something to disguise both our motives. Like Bruce Lee in the Mirror Room, we shall weaponize it to upstage such impostors: “An enemy has only images behind which he hides his true motives. Destroy the image and you break the enemy.”

So thanks to capital’s endless influence over the trees and fruit of the proverbial orchard, we have to quality control for such bad apples presenting as wholesome. To that, I carry on with my muses and friends as rebellious sex workers should—united in a playful, counterterrorist reversal: ergodic motion, mid-castle-narrative, inside the text as going outward in all directions/on all registers; i.e., of challenging the usual ordering of violence and language [the state’s binary of terror vs counterterror] through our upside-down castle-narrative’s alternate histories remediating praxis as collectively [and on the surface of/through thresholds] threatening liberation by realizing how mendacious, menticidal and downright cruel the state’s “empowering” fantasies are; e.g., Red-Scare-in-disguise, fascism-in-disguise. Through play, we learn to see their monopolies, trifectas, and agents for what they are, no matter the disguise type [or number] they have on, their own stink of alienation and Man-Box cruelty always betraying them; i.e., once our Aegis gl[ass] reliably unmasks them as cruel fraudsters, hopeless dorks, weird canonical nerds thirsting for Medusa as something to conquer throughout space-time. In turn, they’ll appeal to your ego as a pick-up scheme [which Karl Jobst once did more openly] to sell capitalistic dogma to you; e.g., “Hello, you absolute legends!”; i.e., in their own image as the half-real portrait of empire, of American Gothic, of assimilation and tokenization made nepotistic, polite, a bad joke [re: Jobst calling his son “Maximus Wong” as being an insult to both his own kid, but also an entire polity of disparate groups routinely colonized by the West: garden-variety Orientalism]. Combined, their dismal, hazardous effects are serious and widespread, but also hung like a fatal, serialized portrait on the castle walls [source: Doris Jobst]: the nuclear family haunted by the ghost of “Rome’s” genocides—by us!

The state always responds to worker demands with violence and lies. For every action, then, there is an equal-and-opposite reaction reclaiming the same aesthetics of power and death during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., they will literally kill ten of us and we figuratively one of them, but in the end, they will tire first during the optics’ tug-o’-war [the top generally does, especially when topped by the bottom]. We will break them of these old, savage and sinister habits by showing them that our asses belong to us, meaning “human, unafraid, ready to fight back until the end of time”: our “crack of doom,” the Medusa a likeness of itself whose “fat-bottomed girls [and boys, enbies, etc] make the rockin’ world go ’round!” So many asses, big and small, drawn and photographed, during artistic nudism [asexual expression] and sexual relations being a complex, negotiated illustration of mutual consent in opposition to the state; i.e., against the usual slavers of worker asses, said asses fucking back against the bourgeoisie aping them. Making art with ourselves/among ourselves, we take the booty back in all its forms: on what Segewick calls “the imagery of the surface”—on the glass or miniature as a photograph or illustration, but also a conversation, a livestream that isn’t strictly parasocial: “When you gaze into the booty, the booty gazes into you” as potentially pro-worker or pro-state.

As such, the ass is a class-war symbol of Medusa that, unto itself remains ambiguous, hence must be invigilated by context as something to glean on itself. As per my usual style, I can explain such consent after the fact as sex-positive: made by a variety of friends taking back our asses, but also the surfaces they appear on; i.e., to war against the state through reclaimed disguises, markers of trauma, of flesh and the power it holds. The only way to survive is to hold onto each other’s asses for dear life, lest the fascist pigs rip us away one by one for “reeducation” purposes. That can snowball, so we must become not just like stained glass windows, concentrically framed, but rabid widows to an indomitable church; i.e., “hydrophobic” to fascists like water off a duck’s ass [“slippery when wet,” as Bon Jovi put it]:

“Baby got back.” And not just me invigilating the booty as xenomorphic/xenophilic—but rather all of the booties announcing ironically as one against the state: enriched and masterful, emblematic of emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness; i.e., raising Hell as our pandemonium to maliciously erect such monuments, thumbing capital in the myopic/panoptic eye [of conquest] with our own pink and brown eyes’ paradoxical surveillance. We haunt the wider cathedral in cathedral-esque bodies that contribute to a parallel chain of eye-like structures: a monstrous-feminine gaze with uncanny “eyes” freezing you, but also feeding on you, teaching you, as the undead do: back and forth, through more than one colon [that was a pun, haha]. Such fertilization and dissemination starts with our bodies, our gender identities/performances as trouble to make by camping canon using what we got: “We master their asses and ocular ass games by taking our asses [and their awesome perceptive power] back!” This inverted, reflexively performative concept of “Rectus Dominus” [as Trey Parker and Matt Stone put it] oscillates between parody and pastiche, canon and camp as increasingly blind or perceptive on the same sliding gradient’s glass-like surface. But it becomes a hollow joke we can don like a disguise in the mirror hall, thus make perceptive based on things brought to our attention by people who cannot police our use of it, after the fact. We hide like chameleons using “their” camouflage!

For example, Jadis once introduced me to Sora The Troll, whose video “When Japanese Voice Actor Pronounces ‘The Earth’” [2022] sums up our own revolutionary sentiment well; i.e., through the informed camping of Japanese “true camp” [re: Sontag’s “seriousness that fails”] of American kayfabe gone wondrously wrong [subtitles, theirs; context: a Japanese man playing a Japanese executive telling a Japanese person (also him) who doesn’t speak English that they sound like they speak English, then making them play an English-speaking person despite the “actor” at first trying to insist they don’t speak English, then going with it and doing his best to read the English script neither one of them knows how to accurately pronounce]: “Ass braster! … Yuu aare… mai enemy!!! I wiru… kiru yuu!! Wizu arru my powah!!! Ass is whera I berongu to. I won’t gibu yuu ze ass!” 

The spectre of racism is there [so much so that it feels wrong to cite it, let alone read it aloud, badly imitating a bad imitation of a bad imitation]. But more to the point, it can become a post-colonial joke utilized by different groups to encourage speculative richness as something to reference and perform time and time again in spite of past abusers acting like they own everything they give to us, including our own inspiration and thoughts. There is no spoon, Jadis—no Dana, only Zeuhl! We must make the capitalist vampire afraid of their invisible reflection; i.e., the glass they haunt through their dutiful, more-visible servants, but also the eye-like bodies [asses or otherwise] they treat as equally mirror-like. Just as Harmony haunts the Poetry Module as my cathedral-in-a-cathedral, so does Bay, Crow and all my muses and friends. We get in their head through their eyes, living there rent-free as Imperialism comes home to empire, to discourse, to monsters in daily life; i.e., as things to embody in mirror-like ways that destroy the image of the enemy! We break them by exposing them inside a haunted hall of mirrors.)

Leaving the proverbial mirror hall (for now), you might feel like it follows you wherever you go. Keeping that in mind, I want to invite you to consider Shylock’s soliloquy from Peele’s perspective; i.e., consider “Hath not a Jew eyes?” relative to an imaginary double of the American world that someone like Shylock (an outcast) would call home, except it equally applies to an assimilation fantasy that is haunted by those who cannot escape the reality of American life as two-fold and out of joint; i.e., divided in multiple respects that Peele lovingly throws into hellish relief: a settler-colony run by white folk, and one where most of the underclass are relegated to the shadow world Red inhabits, one she describes to her above-ground double, “Adelaide Wilson” to remind her that none of them are really “free”: an escaped slave is still tethered, on some level, to a freed/escaped one. Their shadows standing on the Wilson’s lawn like Peter Pan and the Lost Boys (the former having had his own shadow duel in front of Wendy) is a clever inversion of the KKK reprisals of the Civil Rights Movement. Red and her own family “burn a cross” by simply existing—i.e., as a guilty reminder of middle-class black people crossing the white banker’s redlining to uphold the ghetto. Despite seemingly having escaped, the token cops remain chained to the colony they now police ipso facto: by acting white at all times in response! It’s a threat mechanism enacted in both directions through instilled division as a dogmatic show of force to behold and take into a revolutionary Aegis (re: the Darkening).

Once upon a time there was a girl and a shadow. They were connected…tethered together. When the girl ate, her food was given to her… warm and tasty. But when they shadow was hungry, she had to eat rabbit… raw and bloody. On Christmas, the girl received wonderful toys…soft and cushy. When the shadow’s toys was so sharp and gold (or cold) [that] it sliced through her fingers when she tried to play with them. The girl met a handsome prince and fell in love. But the shadow at that same time met Abraham. It didn’t matter if she loved him or not, he was a tethered to the girl’s prince after all. Then the girl had her first child—a beautiful baby girl But the shadow…she gave birth to a little monster. Umbrae, was born laughing. The girl had her second child—a boy this time. They had to cut her open and take him from her belly. The shadow had to do it all… by herself She named him Pluto. He was born to the fire. So you see the shadow hated the girl so much for so long. Until one day the shadow realized she was being tested by God! [from their “first” meeting].

In turn, anyone still “in the cave” (and faced with such shadowy, mirror-like confrontations as alien to Plato’s cave) will see the reflection as, like all mirrors, an unequal one; i.e., an oculus that shows the light side the dark and vice versa. Those in “Heaven” (a lie) look to Hell (also a lie) for answers—for social relief, generally—and Hell look to Heaven for material relief. Per the liar’s paradox, they are true and false at the same time; for our purposes (Communist development), they must marry to end the confusion, making such pro-state and pro-worker abjections and counterfeits eventually disappear—in short, to develop Communism as a Gothic poiesis, my dears. Except, those “who made” it will classically tokenize in ways that extend to any assimilated group as allergic to the idea, save as a narcissistic strawman they can use to deny the truth of class and culture warfare to the masses: dogma.

For example, Natalie Wynn aka Contrapoints’ “Envy” (2022) describes Peele’s nightmare as class envy to uphold the status quo, ignoring the reason why such a warring shadow dialog exists to begin with—not for someone like Nietzsche[1] making an unironic case for resentissment as helping to the elite; i.e., Wynn—a white, gentrified trans woman—projecting onto the Wilson family seeking revenge by proxy on their white straight neighbors. It’s “turtles all the way down,” the diegetic and metatextual pairs working a la Robert Reveille, except the class and race character are of an assimilated fantasy that both doesn’t fit in and punches down at members of their own kind who appear where they aren’t welcome.

For Wynn, the unwelcome group are enbies and their dialogs bothering the bougie bitch (Essence of Thoughts “Let’s Discuss ContraPoints’ Open Worship of Domestic Abuser, Buck Angel,” 2021). For the Wilsons, their gatekeeping also works for the middle class; i.e., by adopting a white, gentrified position between the elite and those they dominate and control: black skin, white masks. Back and forth, this is likewise felt on Wynn as a reflection/projection of class-dormant sentiments gleaned through her interpretation of the other group in Peele’s story—i.e., the hermeneutics of a given performance as speaking about other texts that, combined, make a meta statement. They’re both class traitors, but appear as rebels, as people who should know better. Such collisions challenge whatever copy that results—a fact felt as much in-text as ostensibly outside of itself (there is no outside of the text, but I digress); e.g., the true Adelaide—the one with humanity actually being Red, with the ravaged vocal chords—and the one that appears normal is the imposter having thrown her double under the bus to steal a tokenized family that wasn’t hers! She did it as a little girl, and later as an adult defending what’s “hers.”

Except shadows are inkblots that don’t yield singular interpretations. Dogma tries to force those; iconoclasm acknowledges revolutionary forms of cryptonymy amid complicit ones that a) exist on a gradient, and b) provide people like Wynn “gobstopper masks” (our aforementioned “concentric veneers”) to lure you with theatrical sweetness. We must expose it not just as a “caramel onion,” but a glass one to double and play with when beheading Baroness Von Bon Bon as queen of Candyland (1949): a sugary bad imitation of Monopoly becoming unironic in Wynn’s case. It’s bad drag! Bad(-faith) acting! Bad education. We have to challenge that “in kind”: as de facto sex-positive educators standing in intersectional solidarity as a function of power reversed towards workers, ipso facto. No gods or masters under Communism; no queens of a neoliberal, queer-boss, NERF[2] sort (we’ll unpack this all in Volume Three, I promise):

This duality and conflict amid fourth dimensional doubles (the chronotope as a meta castle to wander through), yields confusion across the mise-en-abyme at any part of it, about any part of it. As such, it could just as easily be argued that the inverse is also true—that Red and Adelaide are less discrete halves and more two sides of the same coin that, per a mirror, jump between subject and reflect during class war as a failed “mirror test” (re: Lacan): the inability to tell friend from foe in relation to one’s position as tested by factors that complicate through the existence of doubles; i.e., anything that invites troubling comparison amid agitated confusion that endures after the mirror is broken or seemingly put away/exited. As such, the presence of rebellion is complicated by religious indoctrination and class envy (a middle-class strawman) that muddies the waters during the mirror operation as a double operation doubled (on and on).

It gets messy and understandably confusing amid all the masks, costumes, and mirrors, et al. It also “tethers” (as Peele calls it) in ways that link us not just to one form of abject baggage, but palimpsests that fade and return; e.g., the Skeksis and the Mystics speaking to a divided whole whose dreadful synthesis is seen as literally Jim Henson’s version of the end of the world, his take on Capitalist Realism during the early ’80s that would survive him and briefly revive in 2019 (the show being Netflix’s queer puppetry one-off, camping the monomyth through Rainbow Capitalism as something to briefly free, then gag its good-faith jesters with):

(exhibit 33b2a1b2a: The fascist returns from death confident the hunt will never end; he speaks to a crowd of fearful onlookers, the strongman forcefully blinding the one among them who will protest/challenge his fearful dogma. And elsewhere, someone across space-time upstages him through scandal as something to see through shared eyes: “Now we will see what lies at the dream’s end.” In an act of ritualistic suicide, the Archer looses his Black Arrow against the dragon, piercing his “heart” through his eye to bypass any and all armors to show him his fate: the rapidly approaching Earth coming up to swallow him!

In that seminal moment, the divisions are made whole, transforming back into the androgynous steward of nature: the three-eyed Fate, the Medusa—Augra! Her eyes are no longer blinded by the false gifts of the splendid Skeksis, and she returns from a long holiday to have survived their draining of her powers to a) surpass them, and b) stand among the rebellious throng!

The idea, here, is cryptonymy regarding the trauma of capital being plain for all to see, mid-performance—its puppet-like divisions being merged in a double operation that pushes away from “the hunt” [profit] and towards unity and post-scarcity. This is ocular, mirrored, a mask or costume or some-such simulacrum to theatrically externalize and suggest through shadows of Communism; i.e., developing in spite of Capitalism forcing itself onto the spectre to quell it—to rape and kill Medusa time and time again!)

Such a splintered, symbiotic refrain probably seems absurd, insofar as people are not quite so tightly connected as Jeremy Irons playing twins in Dead Ringers (1988): to see one side of oneself dead is to die of fright. But (and I’m speaking as a) a critic and avid consumer of The Dark Crystal whose older work [e.g., “The Dark Crystal: AoR – Sexuality, Women, and Queer Identity,” 2019] has clearly evolved, and b) an identical twin with a straight double), there is an element of truth to such fantasy insofar as workers are conditioned to abject other members of their own class; i.e., amid racial, gendered, and/or religious intersecting tensions, etc, that lead to feelings of self-destruction, mid-apocalypse (the word meaning “to uncover”). As Deborah Christie writes, in “A Dead New World” (2011), this is the intended and unintended consequence of Cartesian dualism—a feeling of alienation relative to the other that, per the process of abjection, must hug Medusa as a zombie made partially putrid from capitalist abuse: fear and dogma taken into the flesh, the mind, the soul as something that stares back (re, Marx: “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”).

This idea is not without its police agents; i.e., not just Adelaide or Natalie Wynn, but others I have written about who take Shylock’s soliloquy as an unironic, unnuanced instrument of blunt force—an eye for an eye (from Volume One):

the elite want us to forget how all deities reside in our breast, that we are the devils of the world and the Gothic imagination is our workshop. The world, then, can become one where non-privatized dreams and nightmares come true— that have the collective power to liberate sex workers from bourgeois tyranny and avoid the repeating of older historical materialisms currently unfolding during Capitalist Realism as it presently exists: weird canonical nerds like Autumn, who maintain these structures as they currently function—scaring people through Hell as a monopolized threat of state violence, not creative empowerment. We can all be kings, queens and intersex/non-binary monarchs under a New Order where vertical power arrangements become an awful legend of the tyrannical past; i.e., on par with Richard Matheson’s Commie Zombie-Vampires finally(?) laying Cartesian dualism to rest in I am Legend, 1954 (according to Debora Christie, anyways; source: “A Dead New World: Richard Matheson and the Modern Zombie,” 2011).

In short, the idea isn’t “just” a duel with the sun in our eyes, turning us into warring shadows; it is like a virus insofar as it becomes a madness that isn’t restricted to one person or location, but a folie-a-deux and chez folie that can haunt those why try to assimilate with the reality that they will never be free from these haunting sensations unless Capitalism (the ultimate mirror) is broken and passed through into Communism. We gotta slug it out amongst that myopia and mise-en-abyme.

The problem (and one not aided by sell-outs like Wynn playing a queernormative Marie Antoinette) is that the existence of the zombie is seen as a threat to the status quo in all the usual ways; i.e., black and red seen as a vengeful devourer escaped from the slave camps that doubles as a government conspiracy to “clone” its own population to make them paranoid/complicit (an act of bourgeois zombification I call “lobotomy”). The paranoia is real; the cloning aspect is a metaphor that describes us-versus-them by virtue of the zombie paradigm: the giving and receiving of state violence being as much on the mind, a priori, as it in or on the body ipso facto/post hoc.

Think of it this way. Zombies aren’t “real”; their state of mind and dialectical-material tension is half-real. In turn, the Hands Across America initiative from Peele’s movie becomes a cruel joke in practice, but also a mirror speaking to how zombies are people who eat each in service to the elite or workers. Peele is critiquing a real event in a double that Wynn doubles through praxis as hermeneutic and performative, staged. This was a real event that happened, and which Peele and Wynn have written about in response to older forms. Wynn is playing the critic by misconstrues Peele’s arguments as someone with her own trauma and training (despite being the elite’s flying monkey “witch cop,” it would be a mistake to underestimate Wynn, if only because people see her as the queer Wizard of Oz, at this point). “We don’t have anything here; this is our summer home,” Mr. Wilson stammers. Like the Wilsons and their doubles, then, Wynn and Peele clearly have different ideas about what “nothing” is, but exist in a meta dialog (a concentric mirror hall inside-outside a mirror hall, relying class character and fascist sentiment); i.e., one that I can talk about regarding other people who have also talked about Peele’s work as an imaginary historical commentary on actual events.

(exhibit 33b2a1b2b: Such commentaries dip in and out of fiction as half-real, and Wynn and I aren’t the only ones who took notice and participated; i.e., with Peele in a larger dialog about the Gothic’s ongoing dialogic of the alien that Us put to praxis. As Tyler Coates writes,

While Red doesn’t explicitly reference Hands Across America in her third-act monologue, it’s clear that imagery from the event made a big impression on her in 1986 (which makes me think, at least, that the 1986 scenes take place after Memorial Day weekend—meaning that Adelaide/Red definitely saw and/or participated in Hands Across America). Red admits that her plan to bring the Tethered to the surface included a big symbolic act, which is how Us ends: with a long, haunting image of thousands of red-outfitted members of the Tethered holding hands across a mountain range. It brings new symbolism to Hands Across America, an event originally intended to raise awareness about homelessness and hunger across the world; in the final shot of Us, Jordan Peele reframes the awareness campaign to show that Americans often turn a blind eye to the social ills that exists—quite literally—just below our country’s surface [source: “Why Hands Across America Is So Vital to Jordan Peele’s Us,” 2019].

The same idea applies to all false acts of solidarity delivered by gentrified organizers [white or not] leeching off marginalized groups. Such likenesses don’t change how they factually materialize in reality as “half-real”; i.e., between fictional meta commentaries about them and meta commentaries about those meta commentaries, on and on. The common thread is, “beware of false friends during class and culture war as having multiple goals.” The people-in-question might even believe what they are doing is right, but intent matters not; function does, and function determines function: form follows function insofar as flow is anisotropic—i.e., power flows towards workers or the state, mid-performance.

Keeping that in mind, we can observe all of these rememories and redoublings in any part of the Russian-doll-like hall of mirrors to isolate and expose the capitalist divider as, commonly enough, a token agent defending the Judas-style “privilege” of the middle class: to be a token cop, a witch cop. Wynn demonstrates this with aplomb—a fact I take great pleasure in ironically beheading our false Medusa to harvest her useful elements towards liberation. Oddly enough, this includes her lies and confused ontology as object lessons we can learn to recognize and avoid in the future during our own cryptonymy. She’s a sex demon, alright—one serving capital as their useful idiot. It’s paradox, given her academic background as something I can challenge readily and gladly with my own: “Bitch, the proof is in the pudding. You spent you education, post-graduation, making fans to leech off of and spout harmful dogma amid useful lessons. You punched up at Rowling and down at enbies.

From one failed trans-woman academic of a similar age and demographic, then, but one who surpassed you as a real rebel: “bitch, you suck.” I could go on, but we’ll have to put a pin in that for later. To quote Ashley Williams, “I’ll get back to you!”)

The mirror can break and still function, or seem broken by showing us things we cannot normally see. For Adelaide and Red, it becomes something to punch in both directions (as Wynn does), but also something indicative of the Jewish Revenge as having extended to a racialized settler-colonial paradigm, post-Enlightenment (what academics would call a “postmodern” condition):

How it must have been to grow up with the sky. To feel the sun, the wind, the trees. But your people took it for granted We’re human too, you know Eyes; Feet; Hands; Blood…Exactly like you. And yet, it was humans… that built this place. I believe they figured out how to make a copy of the body, but not the soul. The soul remains one shared by two. They created a tether so they can use them to control the ones up above…like puppets. But they failed and they abandoned the tethered. For generation, the tethered continued without direction. They all went mad down here And then there was us. You remember…. We were born special God brought us together that night. I never stopped thinking about you…how things could have been…how you could’ve taken me with you. Years after we met…the miracle happened. That’s when I saw God and he showed me my path. You felt it too. The end of our dance, the tethered saw that I was different…that I would deliver them from this misery. I’ve found my faith and I began to prepare. It took years to plan. Everything had to be perfect I didn’t just need to kill you, I needed to make a statement that the whole world will see. It’s our time now…Our time up there. And to think, if it weren’t for you…I never would’ve danced at all [from their “final” duel].

(exhibit 33b2a1b2c: Note the various confused phenomenologies at work, here—at play! The white-wearing Adelaide sneaks up on the escaped slave [simply “Red,” in a prison-like outfit] to backstab her, but the other is waiting—has been waiting all her life [and all her yesterdays] for something that, like Borges’ “Circular Ruin” or “Garden of the Forking Paths” [the Argentinian author loved labyrinths and mirrors], speaks to the cyclical nature of history circling in on itself; i.e., as something to view like a mirror on its own materials serving as a gargoyle-like extension of ourselves divided by Cartesian thought: “Why can I not see myself in your eyes!”

Red has been waiting and, like the vampire with her concealed weapon, she wounds the “other” woman who appears normal and defending herself as actually defending capital. And Red, like Omadon the Red Wizard, infests the spirit of the class traitor to destroy herself and take her place: the Communist spy infiltrating through the duel as something to watch; i.e., the psychomachy, the Amazonomachy. Something is always given and exchanged. Adelaide’s white clothes turn red from loss of blood, injected with the essence of Red through the fang-like scissors [Shylock: “Thou called’est me a dog before thou had a cause / But since I am a dog, beware my fangs”]. She turns black in the shadows as Red also does, while the shadows of the dead look on from the space where they exist and do not exist [note the jump cuts that express this].

The two are scuffling when, somewhere in the tussle, they swap clothes but also identities in ways that “pass” post-duel as fatal to the copied party and the copycat: “Typically the subject being copied is terminated.” This particular “Merchant of Venice” is a parasitoid, a wasp eating the caterpillar while mimicking it. The trick, here, is Adelaide is “dead” by virtue of waking up something inside of herself as much as it being anything truly separate/external. She becomes a corpse that doesn’t know it is dead, an impregnated spirit of the dead—their unknowing vessel eaten from within of all Adelaide’s submissive elements. Whether or not this is the case doesn’t matter, either. All we can say for certain is that Medusa lives on inside the mirror of the person driving the family into a post-apocalyptic world.

Such a brutal “insect politics” [note the barb like “ovipositor” confusing who has who on the hip, above] goes both ways, of course. Just as Adelaide and Red duel and confuse during class war as gleaned from older clashes in similar liminal spaces, Natalie Wynn and I do. Except I know much more about liminal spaces and liminal performance [re: Metroidvania and ludo-Gothic BDSM] than Wynn does. Even so, I seriously doubt she is aware of me, and I very much don’t resemble her to the same degree as Peele’s doppelganger does Adelaide. To that, Peele is commenting on the historical-material confusions that do arise during class war of a racialized neoliberal character. I, on the other hand, am already “dead” like Matteson’s Commie Zombie-Vampires. I don’t pretend to be something I’m not; Wynn is “legend,” in that respect: the fabled “Merchant of Venice” something to assimilate and imitate capital while playing the rebel. Sometimes, her mask slips; others, its “slippage” is literally her costume: someone “from management” clearly got to Wynn along the way, souring her rebellious façade into a joke of itself. 

By flaunting her wealth and playing the victim, Wynn is blurring the line between herself and her character as part of her brand: Natalie Wynn, Marie Antoinette, Contrapoints. She’s having her cake and eating it, too—is pinkwashing class war to claim herself the token trans victim; i.e., speaking about her own class betrayal through Peele’s story as something to weaponize against impolite rebels [you know, us actual Communists and not whatever the fuck she’s calling herself these days]. She thinks she’s the Merchant of Venice—the Portia to castrate men, mid-exchange. Bitch, please—your victory is antiquated and overshadowed by my trans rebellion actually having teeth for capital as the ones to bite.

In true rebel fashion, I don’t need fancy equipment to upstage you, charlatan—just puppets, cut-outs, my body and my words. With them, I eclipse your joke of a “liberation” to expose your enbyphobia [more on this in Volume Three, part two] and token aspirations. You’re still in chains, Wynn; I escape mine by reclaiming them, making them sex-positive through ludo-Gothic BDSM as good scholarship and praxis [unlike you, I actually wrote my PhD, by the way].)

Be it Adelaide and Red or Wynn and I, the conclusions of these unsatisfying face offs (a face-like mask behind the mask) speaks to the continued uncertainty that such a duel entertains, post hoc. Are those in black and red fascist or Communist (the usual shadow-zone conflations that capital and its proponents [Contrapoints] excel at)? Wouldn’t you know it, Wynn, I’ve written about that, too (from Volume Zero):

Our revenge, as a simulacrum, only resembles that of those who wrong us and counterfeit our campy legends for their canonical gain (Tolkien’s refrain); our aesthetic is shared but our function is altogether different: class consciousness as uncontrollable opposition relayed in terrifying medieval language that is thoroughly more wise through hindsight; i.e., not just according to Robert Asprey’s paradox of terror (which we’ll consider in relation to state forces decrying labor as terrorists) but the hauntological paradox of “the Wisdom of the Ancients,” whereupon old forms of monstrous expression have been updated for the modern world and its challenges to accommodate our needs as workers being exploited by Capitalism and its propaganda. That is our revenge—slowly camping the canon, thus the Superstructure, and reclaiming the Base through our monstrous, ghostly theatre as something that once turned on, can never be shut down or destroyed; it can only be repressed in forms that always come back because the elite cannot kill all its workers (not on purpose, anyways).

Shadow theatre and its mythic structure are nothing new. It dates back to Plato’s infamous allegory of the cave and its mimesis as paradoxically haunted by the shadows of class struggle (the spectres of Marx, which in theory did not technically exist when Plato was alive, and yet whose struggles for emancipation include these older slaves that Marx alluded to in “The Eighteenth Brumaire”). Camus may have noted in The Myth of Sisyphus that canonical shadow theatre repeats to an absurd degree; i.e., Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill as punishment by the gods. To escape it, we can’t just smile at the gods like he proposed, but steal “their” fire on our own Promethean Quest! This means camping the canon, which requires repeated forays into Hell and putting the wrong things right at the source: our “darkness visible” and gods as stolen out from inside our breasts and put on the cave wall of Plato’s cave! Tolkien’s refrain/gentrification of war through High Fantasy is darkly echoed in stories just like The Flight of Dragons (which is especially treacherous because it argues moderately—i.e., as the voice of reason from a position of perceived disadvantage). We purposefully must camp the canonical nebula by camping the map as a source of class education through dialectical-material play (which we’ll elaborate on during the thesis statement and “camp map”): oppositional praxis as playing on in shadowy forms dancing on the same cave wall, our darkness deliberate fencing back and forth with the state’s blind canonical doubles like Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood dueling Basil Rathbone’s Guy of Gisbourne: (source).

Beyond yourself and I, this shadow duel applies to all kayfabe as dualistic; i.e., a doubled cryptonymy for workers dueling the state with shadow-like mirrors, masks and costumes as praxially synonymous and antagonistic on multiple registers. To be honest, I liked Wynn when Zeuhl first introduced me to them; I disliked them once Essence of Thought exposed Wynn’s enbyphobia; Zeuhl, an enby, tried to apologize for it and eventually stopped being my friend (“Red Bun,” indeed!); I went onto to speak truth to power anyways, undeterred by the cowardice of either—doing so in ways that remain, high in my counterfeit of Merlin’s Tower, me as the “Lady of Shallot—entirely unconcerned with making powerful enemies (“You have you sword, I have my tricks!”). As class warriors, we already have powerful enemies—the bourgeoisie. Exposing them—the vampire hiding invisible on the glass—starts with denuding their visible-yet-masked, lesser slaves recruited from our populace. To that, I don’t “owe” Wynn or Zeuhl shit. Get fucked, traitors! We have to threaten them like this to some extent, because they will see us as body snatchers devoid of irony themselves: “Where you gonna go, where you gonna hide? Because there’s no one like you left!” Okay! If that’s how you wanna play it, let’s dance, bitches! I’ve danced on this stage, before, and you don’t frighten me (I work fast, Zeuhl once remarked, but last long in bed; i.e., as a danger disco they ultimately bowed out from. Their loss)!

In other words, we can’t just prolong the duel, Star-Wars-style, but have to be less veiled than Peele (echoing Milton a bit) and less bad-faith than Wynn in our own redoubling: Oh, Wynn, “Much to learn you still have!” You’re Morgana crudely playing with things you don’t understand (I’m being generous in that assertion), the real Medusa (not Merlin) returning to show you what’s what. Me. Didn’t I already kick your ass? Sell-out bitch, poser! I’ll eat you like a cupcake (going “om nom nom” on “Baroness Von Bon Bon”) and fertilize my own book with what’s left! Anyways, “your spells don’t scare me; I have some incantations of my own!” / “Behold, the power of [my] Darkening!” Cryptonymy is a double operation with an anisotropic function, mid-duality. There will always be likeness and imitation of the sexualized alien fetish, under capital; we have to reverse the flow of power towards workers in a meaningful sense—to camp the twin trees of capital and replace them with our own parasitoids that destroy the nation-state and replace it (and its self-serving token cops/perfidious “representatives/gurus”) with something beautiful they could never kill (or really replace)! Medusa!

Though currently attached to profit, such a mirror mechanism is called “divide and conquer” and it’s a very old imperial tactic updated for soft-power and assimilation methods inside the Imperial Core now (a global, corporatized market returning to deregulation, thus eclipsing nation-states through corporate dominance on and across the same sphere of influence). The state was made for this purpose, and while admittedly blunt-force, it historically works rather well—too well, in fact. The bourgeoisie (and their proponents) are not constrained by morality but driven by profit. In a way, they and the xenomorph have this in common: the perfect enemies, doubling each other as pure survivors, “unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.” Except, this applies to all of us differently during class and culture war as mirrored, which is why intersectional solidarity is so important when camping canon ourselves. The elite generate monomythic copaganda (from Radcliffe’s novels to Nintendo’s videogames) to defend “lost” ideas of childhood (fatal nostalgia); i.e., from Communism during Capitalist Realism upholding the status quo. In response, we reverse that with ludo-Gothic BDSM during our own ergodic motion’s castle-narrative, the humanizing Medusa moving through the Gothic castle (the Metroidvania, or otherwise) as half-real during the liminal hauntology of war on all registers and media forms. Back and forth and in all directions, on all levels, we break the mirror to haunt its unbroken panes:

Doing so doesn’t have to make “perfect sense” provided we dazzle and expose our enemies while getting our own humanity across. To that, the Poetry Module teaches you to think (thus create) like a Gothic poet regarding the Wisdom of the Ancients (the cultural understanding of the imaginary past); i.e., as a historical-material process tied to class and culture warfare—of interrogating the ambiguous and recursive reflections of state trauma and power inside the mirror hall, thus reclaim our own poetics from older histories, regaining as we do our power in the process. In turn, the Monster Modules will reverse the emphasis, examining the history of said poetics to better understand what we’re up against: the poetic past as something to learn from when making new histories while synthesizing praxis to achieve systemic catharsis, camp canon, and reclaim the Base and recultivate the Superstructure, etc.

This volume, more than the others, couldn’t have been written without some risk on my part. That being said, it’s all in the butt, lovies—the power of the babe pushing capital out of all its holes and off its mirror-like surfaces!

Your Commie Mommy,

—Persephone van der Waard

About Harmony Corrupted

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

If any of this sounds fun, you can download the full module for free on my website’s one-page promo, and access the other available volumes, promo images, project history and more! Access individual samples of the module on my website’s blog (which has divided most of the module into separate posts). And please, please consider supporting Harmony’s work (on Fansly and Ko-Fi; follow her @harmonycorrupted@noods.fun on Mastodon); this module could not have been written without her inspiration, and she does awesome sex work while raising awareness for sex worker rights on Mastodon (see her whole portfolio, a review of her work, ways you can support her and more on her special promo page on my website)!

About the Author

Persephone van der Waard is the author of Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). She is a MtF trans woman, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster with two partners. Including her multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her thirteen muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. First and foremost, she is a sex work activist, fighting for sex worker liberation through iconoclastic/sex-positive artwork. To that, she is an anarcho-Communist writer, illustrator, BDSM educator, sex worker, genderqueer/environmental activist and Gothic ludologist—with her (independent) PhD having been written on Metroidvania combined with the above variables; i.e., to coin and articulate ludo-Gothic BDSM as a sex-positive poetic device. She sometimes writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog; or does continual independent research on Metroidvania and speedrunning every now and again. If you’re interested in her work or curious about illustrated or written commissions, please refer to her commissions page for more information.

Click here to see a condensed example of Persephone’s wide portfolio.

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Footnotes

[1] Which, in this case, is Wynn prescribing dogma as something she, on some level, sees the world through; i.e., “green-eyed” herself, regardless if her meta dialog would seem to deny it, ipso facto.

[2] Non-binary Exclusionary Radical Feminist; i.e., what I called Contrapoints back in 2022, vis-à-vis their “Envy” video. This was a video of theirs I originally critiqued back in 2022 after watching Essence of Thought’s video, “Let’s Discuss ContraPoints’ Open Worship of Domestic Abuser, Buck Angel” (2022). I had written it while looking for TERFs to critique, then came across what I decided to call “NERF” per Contrapoint’s enbyphobic behaviors. Except, I eventually removed said critique from my original 2022 blogpost, which stays up as “Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion, or Gothic Communism: Manifesto” but doesn’t include the section about Wynn anymore. I didn’t remove my critique of her because I changed my mind; I took that section down and converted it into a book manuscript, which wound up having a lot of stuff go in front of the Wynn critique: my PhD (Volume Zero), manifesto (Volume One) and Humanities primer (Volume Two, parts one and two). As such, the piece critiquing Wynn is actually towards the end of Sex Positivity as it presently exists: in Volume Three, part two, which I won’t be releasing until closer to the end of the year (though probably early 2025, if I’m being honest). Until then, it’s nice to include something of the Wynn polemic in a volume of Sex Positivity that is currently online (maybe I’ll release Wynn’s critique in a separate blogpost sometime soon).

Originally part of an undivided volume—specifically Volume Two of my Sex Positivity (2023) book series—this promo post now belongs to a large-but-redundant sample series called “Brace for Impact“ (2024); i.e., that went on to become its own completed module in Volume Two: the Poetry Module, aka Volume Two, part one. The module was primarily inspired by Harmony Corrupted and divides into over thirteen posts, whose collective chapters/subchapters compile one half of the larger total volume; i.e., Volume Two has three modules—one bigger module for part one (re: the Poetry Module), and two slightly smaller modules (the Monster Modules) for part two—for which the volume halves are roughly equal in size (subject to change).

Update, 5/4/2024: I’m starting a similar book sample series for Volume Two, part two: “Searching for Secrets“ (2024)!

Update, 5/1/2024: Volume Two, part one (the Poetry Module) is out! I wrote a preface for the module along with its debut announcement. Give that a look; then, go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the full module (which will contain additions/corrections these posts will not have)!

Click here to see “Brace for Impact’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 ally shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).

Picking up up from where “Halfway There: Between Modules” left off…

“That Ass Is a Higher Truth”: Leaving the Castle; or, Bookending Harmony Corrupted

“We ain’t outta here in ten minutes, we won’t need no rocket to fly through space!”

—Parker, Alien

As we leave Harmony’s Castle Black, we’re faced with yet another castle ahead of us:

(exhibit 34b2a1b: Artist, bottom: Ivan Aivazovsky. Concentric size difference in action. Per cosmic nihilism, there is always something bigger, more badass; per me, nature always trumps Capitalism and like an angry planet or dark hostile ocean, always dwarfs patriarchal industry with monstrous-feminine heft. The traveling destructor is both, then—capital trying to harvest nature, and nature smashing capital’s gluttonous hauler against its giant backside: “Harvest this!” To that, nature’s a big girl, she’s always wild and wet, and unlike “Lo Pan” saying “I bring the thunder and the lightning and I make it rain!” in “Lo Pan Style,” really can do these things. It’s a dick-measuring contest. Except, faced with state shift, the state always comes up short—is always swallowed by the pussy it tries to penetrate: “The Traveler has come; choose the form of the destructor!” It’s a shipwreck waiting to happen, and one that can’t be salvaged, post-scuttle, nor defeated with a salvo of missiles or bullets [the xenomorph is nature-in-small: regenerative, indomitable, furious, god-like]. So put the pussy on the chainwax, comrades! Silence is genocide; use it or lose it!)

And yet, we’re armed with a vital lesson Harmony was instrumental in relaying: power aggregates; Gothic Communism does, too. To that, I want to bookend my appreciation for Harmony as a muse and friend, and supply a backside to their frontside (during the initial dedication)—to say once more (unto the breach) how much I value her friendship and respect her work.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Harmony has an ass that doesn’t quit. It also imparts sex and force, reaching ironically (with camp) for greatness; i.e., going the distance, with a pussy made of steel that can take all comers (and which will tire far less quickly from the bottom than a dick/top). Again, and not for the last time, the language of sex and war elide during camp to synthesize praxis through ludo-Gothic BDSM: a back-and-forth, something to get the blood (and cum) pumping and—in true voyeuristic/exhibitionist fashion—to be near such greatness to absorb it. Not as bread-and-circus, first and foremost, but a lesson that plays with power and trauma to yield addictive and medicinal sex-positive lessons. Love is a battlefield—an assault to stage, prosecute and weather by both sides, and in more ways than one! In such scraps as to rival Arturo Gatti and Mickey Ward (BLTV Highlights’ “When Arturo Gatti Met His Worst Nightmare,” 2024) such nightmarish combinations of blood and sand, heart and skill amount to liminal expression between equals—is where mutual respect is won and mutual consent/action all take place: to speak to the human condition as fetish/alien while altering the socio-material conditions, mid-opposition, that lead to all the usual historical materialism: us, beat the fuck up, gasping for breath, unable to see.

No one in their right mind likes a lazy partner (even playing dead is a skill, in the bedroom, but it needs to be mutually consensual or it’s Pavlovian conditioning[1a]); Harmony and Volume Two, part one have been a unique case, as I wrote it from top to bottom while engaging routinely and over a relatively short period with someone who shared very similar interests (sex, metal, and the Gothic). It became a quick friendship and a quick novella, capping off my book (in the middle) with (in my opinion) the finest thing I’ve ever written: my moment of mastery putting ludo-Gothic BDSM to the test with the girl of my dreams. A good friend and tremendous power in her own right, Harmony’s mountainous ass has the power to move mountains—a delicious revenant that beats you to submission, a cosmic-nihilistic regulator in small, a walking thunderstorm/veritable tempest embroiled in delicious scandal, a world-class scrapper and intellectual that blends the maiden with the destroyer to achieve two Gothic classics in bed as something to help me bring to all of you: oscillation and the monstrous-feminine as an androgynous leveler. She delivers the goods, leaving you begging for more.

(exhibit 34b2a2a: Model and artist: Harmony Corrupted and Persephone van der Waard. Men fear what they don’t understand, and capital alienates and sexualizes everything relative to the grim harvesting of nature-as-alien for profit. The gears of such genocide and megadeath can be gleaned through the imaginary past as begot from actual history blending on a progressively Gothic gradient—one with various starting points leading to future invasions during the liminal hauntology of war’s fatal nostalgia: moral panics felt at home during state decay.

For example, Roman Imperialism was a primarily land-based affair, literally grounded and relaid through military conquest: land power and land battles. Sea battles happened, but they were tied fear closer to land than warring armadas would be, in later centuries. Under Cartesian influence, the master/slave dynamic was given a settler-colonial and seafaring character that crossed oceans. In turn, poor male sailors grew superstitiously fearful towards the ocean; i.e., as the maternal gateway to new worlds they were forced to enter and conquer for the first of a new class of socio-economic control: the bourgeoisie raping the womb of nature, Francis-Bacon-style, through the insertion of a foreign object—a torpedo filled with seamen [the historical-material character cryptonymically writes itself, denoting a collocative presence of trauma].

In turn, this hegemonic vanguard extended into 20th century science fiction as riffing off the likes of Shelley’s Frankenstein [1818], Poe’s The Narrative of Sir Arthur Gordon Pym [1838] and Melville’s Moby Dick [1851]: Lovecraft’s cosmic nihilism as a profoundly racist and sexist dogma, the monstrous-feminine “thing that should not be” given a gender swap in Cthulhu per fear-driven, chattelized boating industries [the whaling industry and Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade] commodified as pulp then pastiche [which Tolkien and Heinlein/Cameron gentrified through force as a neoliberal echo of maps, of maps, of maps; i.e., the cartographic narrative of the crypt]. These were followed by Gothic satire oscillating in terms of its perceptiveness—with Alien being a neoliberal critique, its fortress cryptonym, “space trucking,” a worrisome echo haunted by Conrad’s fear of a black continent enslaved by white Europe suddenly breaking free: escaped slaves pirating the West through stolen slave/warships. Cameron, by comparison, rejected the liberatory potential of such Satanic poetics, deliberately regressing to a neocon revenge fantasy—one utterly fearful of alien armies [“Aliens“] to reconquer through military optimism; i.e., while triangulating Hippolyta against Medusa during us-versus-them in service to profit: aping Beowulf’s ancestor, Rambo, TERF-style.

Melville’s curious penchant for white dick jokes aside[1], nature has always been monstrous-feminine/androgynous under Cartesian domination; the Medusa has always been female [or at least monstrous-feminine]—as a furious, non-white, anti-patriarchal force felt on bodies that are “too big/immodest,” especially white female bodies like Harmony’s: as something to therapeutically convert [through Pavlovian torture] into obedient, drone-like brides, and for the bitch-in-question to resist in kind; i.e., combative, unruly hysteria, not a “wandering womb” for patriarchal forces to rape [the tentacle belonging to Pygmalion, not Galatea] during Cartesian power theft as an antagonist ordeal: “With every fiber I stab at thee!” As such, the Kraken, Ursula, sirens, Mother Brain, etc, constitute the performative, phallic lure and barb as alien and fetish [the tentacle dick/ovipositor] through sex and war married to the sea: as charted and conquered by businessmen—not just a homewrecker but an Ozymandian colossal wreck/shipwrecker breaking powerful “masts” on her portentous “reef” [coitus interruptus] to humble weird canonical nerds following Cartesian orders: “Get wrecked, nerds!”

Per Queen, this can be sung about: “Fat-bottomed girls, you make the rockin’ world go ’round!” Per artists and ludo-Gothic BDSM, it can be toyed with—stressing non-Vitruvian andro/gynodiversity as something to dress up as conquest broken against an indominable entry point, a castle entrance too well fortified [giving chonky size queens a chance to play ahegao only with growers/showers, or from dildos wielded by smaller penis-havers during penetrative sex]. True to form, it’s a lot of fun, with me being “Goldilocks dick,” thus big enough to penetrate past Jadis’ hefty dumper and into their monster snatch [which was somewhat too big for my cock, but still felt nice]. As Glacier Clear shows us, this can lead to all kinds of pseudo-military failures: a modern-day Xenophon or Pyrrhus hoisted on his own petard while scaling the impenetrable fortress during a forlorn hope: “castration” from ironic size difference and gender roles [the twink vs the herbo, with the latter goading the topper to give it their all: “C’mon! Is that all you got, motherfucker! Fuck me like you mean it; tear this little pussy[2] up!”]. It can be a planned affair ahead of time, but also something that emerges during a comedy of errors. For example, when I initially met Jadis before she took me to Florida, I had gone for several walks in sequence to pass the time… except I hadn’t walked in forever because of Covid. So when we fucked at the hotel, I got really bad foot cramps as I topped her [a fact we often joked about, later]. All’s well that ends well!

[artist: Glacier Clear] 

Tragic or not, all exist as part of the Gothic’s dualistic animal lust, size difference, monster-fucking and black penitent kneeling on stone [as Harmony does]—all to playfully embody the counterfeit as an equal-and-opposite response to settler-colonial forces; i.e., as the Amazon, phallic woman, Archaic Mother, etc, as part of a gargantuan, ongoing holistic psychosis—an infernal, Mandelbrot upending of directions, boundaries, moralities, whose merger of psychomachy, Amazonomachy, psychopraxis, and psychosexuality verge on sanity damage [of the best sort] during ludo-Gothic BDSM’s palliative Numinous: “I admire its purity—a survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse or [Cartesian] delusions of morality.” In short, the xenomorph is Radcliffe’s Black Veil rippling with pirate-like potency—a queenly warrior refusing to be controlled while spreading across the Earth [displaced astronoetically to “the stars” in Scott’s cosmic, Gothic matelotage] like a counterterror virus challenging state dogma with the irrational argument: humans have rights, which aren’t up for rational debate.

“Madness” isn’t a stigma at all, then, but an awesome power to grow, show, harness and unleash [anisotropically] on one’s friends and enemies alike: weaponized hysteria, Carrie-style [minus Stephen King’s Pygmalion bent]. Alien toys with the framed narrative as a body and castle-like body inside a castle-like giant; i.e., the ship is the giant piloted by a smaller likeness of it housed inside a suit fused to the throne of the flight deck [a delicious concentrism aped by Mass Effect‘s ship, Sovereign, controlling Seren with telepathic mind control [the master/slave dichotomy—what the game calls “indoctrination”: “It’s not a ship; it’s an actual Reaper!”]: the fascist posthuman delivering an anti-capitalist commentary on Cartesian domination haunting the ghost of the counterfeit/process of abjection:

• “It’s carrying death” threatening the Imperial Boomerang as invasion by a stronger force than the current order [a future empire doing to capital what empire always does to others].
• “There is a world so far beyond your own that you cannot even imagine it.” Sovereign’s spitting of facts is the ghost of the counterfeit [note the red fash vibes in the dark room’s hologram] being a chatty bitch teasing the game’s matriarchal capitalism [the false Goddess] with tentacle gang rape [something taboo, but nevertheless commodified under the usual capitalist fetish-to-flesh markets; i.e., paywalled for white American families ignorantly (willfully or otherwise) spicing up their middle-class sex lives with echoes of conquest lived by the Global South from moment to moment]. 

In either case, the warlord inside the hull is plugged into the warship as controlling them like a cordyceps puppet; i.e., as part of a larger industry both steering them, zombie-like, through fear and dogma emblematized by its galle[r]y-like transportation: the galleon as a one-way, gangplank delivery system for military action [so called corsairs, destroyers, and battleships, etc] and copaganda, and made fearsome and godlike through the process of abjection making Cartesian spearheads alien to those at home: the pirate ship as sailing under a black flag as a ghost ship piloted by a tall, mighty ghost fetish; e.g., Davy Jones, but also Scott’s Space Jockey as statuesque, biomechanical—a fearsome butt pirate/sky daddy dom coming for your “booty”:

But this can equally be mocked; e.g., Shelley’s Modern Prometheus aping Cartesian domination to humiliate it [so-called “cock-shaming”] and point out as the dark jester does, the folly of human greed calling itself “science”: “I will infest the spirit of Man so that he uses his magic to destroy himself!”

There are so many ways to convey such inequalities through ludo-Gothic BDSM and ergodic motion’s castle-narrative. The Aegis, as I invigilate Harmony’s Numinous backside with, doubles one’s lived, internalized bigotry in copies of the fearful giver and receiver [of state force] used to subvert harmful structures: 

Great old one
Forbidden site
[She] searches
Hunter of the shadows is rising
Immortal
In madness you dwell [Metallica’s “The Thing that Should Not Be,” 1986].)

Such abject forces cannot be denied, the counterfeit always haunted by their ghost: Davy Jones’ locker, but also Medusa’ pussy a watery gravesite for enterprising Cartesian chudwads. Medusa always wins, but this needn’t be state shift. To prevent that, we must pacify her rage through ludo-Gothic BDSM on all registers; i.e., by invigilators and models, poets and muses; e.g., Harmony and I:

(exhibit 34b2a2b: Model and artist: Harmony Corrupted. We all pray at weird churches. Full or empty of cock, Harmony’s uncanny valley is mysterium tremendum—a flying castle/traveling circus/midnight Rabelaisian carnival whose “double-stuffed” affect is everywhere at once, from the head-to-toe topful of “direst cruelty.” Like Radcliffe’s terror except in quotes, her pussy “expands the [‘soul,’] and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life,” the proverbial flipside [“horror”] annihilating the viewer through the self-same castled-buttocks, hefty flesh and raunchy feast for the senses: fatal food belying wild hunger behind the veil of lost innocence, paradise lost [the poisoned apple], the feral lycanthrope’s mask-like visage and costumed body alluding to a secret self, an animal side ritualistically evoked not by a literal magic potion, but the power of sex-positive ritual and psychosexual healing.

“Hell is for children” extends to the monstrous-feminine as relegated to a desperate-and-inventive state of survival: Edward Said’s pleasures of exile, my ludo-Gothic BDSM. Such a veiled gaze, textured touch and exquisitely torturous aesthetic supply feelings that rival death itself [which is nefandous, nothing to us]. Milking the recipient to martyred extremes, she looks good, mid-“death,” but whose surface crackles with untold power and colossal weight, thrown around with the scope and scale of vacant planets. “Black as night, black as pitch, blacker than the foulest witch.” A very freaky girl, in other words, she confronts what she fears as something to reclaim: her own body and gender as something to play with through Gothic mechanisms of power exchange and forbidden knowledge.)

To that, please support Harmony’s work (on Fansly and Ko-Fi; follow her @harmonycorrupted@noods.fun on Mastodon). She’s seriously impeccable, a dark sovereign queen whose worship is otherworldly and delicious, push-pulling load after mother lode of power from you to them, back and forth. Enter her badass castle, open her naughty book covers and turn her tasty pages; but after you bask in her fat dumper’s hellish, church-like glory (“almost holy”), offer her tribute for profaning your ignorance to better things. Don’t keep a lady waiting!

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

With that, Volume Two, part one shall release eminently (probably tomorrow)! I’ll announce it when it happens, so stay tuned!

Update: Volume Two, part one (the Poetry Module) is out (5/1/2024)! I wrote a preface for the module along with its debut announcement. Give that a look; then, go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the full module (which will contain additions/corrections these posts will not have)!

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Footnotes

[1] Robert Shulman’s “The Serious Functions of Melville’s Phallic Jokes” (1961).

[1a] E.g., whoever this guy is (source skeet: Brett Butler Is Ok, 2024). Never act like him:

[2] Echoing Shane Black’s terrible joke: “You know I’d like a little pussy.” / “Me, too. Mine’s as big as a house!” But also per liminal expression, the historical trauma is literally in the language: “hit that.”

Originally part of an undivided volume—specifically Volume Two of my Sex Positivity (2023) book series—this promo post now belongs to a large-but-redundant sample series called “Brace for Impact“ (2024); i.e., that went on to become its own completed module in Volume Two: the Poetry Module, aka Volume Two, part one. The module was primarily inspired by Harmony Corrupted and divides into over thirteen posts, whose collective chapters/subchapters compile one half of the larger total volume; i.e., Volume Two has three modules—one bigger module for part one (re: the Poetry Module), and two slightly smaller modules (the Monster Modules) for part two—for which the volume halves are roughly equal in size (subject to change).

Update, 5/4/2024: I’m starting a similar book sample series for Volume Two, part two: “Searching for Secrets“ (2024)!

Update, 5/1/2024: Volume Two, part one (the Poetry Module) is out! I wrote a preface for the module along with its debut announcement. Give that a look; then, go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the full module (which will contain additions/corrections these posts will not have)!

Click here to see “Brace for Impact’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 ally shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).

Picking up up from where “Facing Death: What I Learned” left off…

Halfway There: Between Modules; or, Facing the Past to Move Forward

“Here I come, Ramza. Let me show you the power of evil!”

—Velius to Ramza,  Final Fantasy Tactics (1997)

(artist: unknown)

As something to use, the Gothic and its poetic expression is torn between commodity and camp, from clothed to nude, from artistic to pornographic. What capital divides into discrete uses, we hyphenate; i.e., a coalition of different practices yielding a practical magic speaking to our basic instincts and higher values as likewise fused; e.g., sex and art as two sides of the same coin. It’s the ebb and flow between collaborators—a strange horny tide under unequal conditions to achieve equalizing results: to pull it off no matter our age, and like another dance, song or some such performance, achieve the levels of pedagogic greatness (and, at times, subtlety and nuance) required to shift the public towards new values and degrees of empathy and wisdom, a past future pushing towards post-scarcity in terms of the all-giving and all-loving side of a mighty mother goddess.

Except, it’s not a tribute to the gods of capital—to make a fire so goddamn big such gods will notice us, take pity and bestow empty favors upon us—but to wake something up inside us, where all gods reside; i.e., inside the castles we raise on the campy ashes on the canonical ones we raze: our bodies and extensions of them and their values, their rights, their power as infinitely belongings to us. Every generation, the spell of capital must hide this fact, bolstering illusions that assist exploitation for profit; every generation, these membranes weaken, the beautiful undead waiting to greet us from beyond the veils of harmful perception. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and from that quintessence a great progeny can rise like a phoenix: either a ghostly Caesar to rule the universe from beyond the grave—and whose gentrifying, patriarchal and settler-colonial system yields a continuation of the same-old stereotypes and megadeath behind humanoid veils disguising present abuses as past tyrants walking spectrally among us during neoliberal refrains[1]—or a fearsome witch queen whose lover-fighter hybridity shocks capital and brings the state to its knees.

Forget the mighty arms of Atlas, holding the heavens from the Earth; give me a lever and ground to stand on, and I will move the Earth! If one voice can do that, produced by a small party of friends united in a common cause, then imagine what a nation of solidarized workers could do. Fortune favors the bold, so fuck those who say “don’t push your luck” in defense of capital; this is our world, our rights, our power to change natural/manufactured scarcity into a thing of the past: “Let us the take the world by the throat and make it give us what we desire!” Not by force, but together as friends united against those who enslave the planet for their own fell purposes; i.e., to hoard resources for themselves, depriving others of their basic needs then telling them someone among them is an alien fetish to harvest, bringing more and more to the kingly pile of stolen tribute. We can escape this barbaric past and Medusa’s wrath, but we must face it to move forward—in short, to learn from it in every form we can, camping canon every chance we get on every stage to get paid (not starve), be included (versus alienated, left out), and be ourselves (avoid impostor syndrome); i.e., “Putting the pussy on the chainwax!”; e.g., David Lo Pan style (wekejay’s “Lo Pan Style (Gangnam Style Parody) Official,” 2013)! We must, or we will not survive; the animals will not survive; the planet will become barren, Medusa’s womb of life a murderous womb instead, achieving the true Great Destroyer role as wrestled out of capital’s hands once and for all. Let’s… not do that, maybe?

(exhibit 34b2a1a2b: Artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard. I don’t normally show penetration for the sake of my platonic friends potentially seeing the work that I put in [so to speak]. However, I wish to make an exception to prove a point: you can show or hide something to communicates images that ultimately mean different things to different people, or the same people at different points in their lives; i.e., something dualistic relative to which direct power anisotropically flows towards. All happen regarding trauma as something to confront, and power as something to perform and play with as such during our pedagogy of the oppressed—screaming through “the gates of Hell” less of a Gothic metaphor in isolation [sex and the orgasm] and more a liminal performance that accounts for all forms inside of the same shadow zone. The table is set, the festivities about to take place.

Our enemies aren’t the only ones with combat training. We’re ready to fight. During the meta duel felt during smaller sex-positive exchanges, our framed narrative must reclaim what’s ours to show the world what the elite fear most: an inability to keep exploiting nature-as-alien, pure and simple. Through the dark membrane, then, our Satanic poetics manifest to do just that—to front a stronger side-in-vulnerability that says, “Take a break; I gotchu, babe.” But you’ve got “to get mad”—to fuck angry and, like Walpole-meets-the-Incredible-Hulk, ironically challenge boundaries through a poetic, psychosexual madness unique to/concomitant on rebellious workers seeking liberation in good faith: through trust, paradox, and mutual action hyphenating monstrous expression to expose real trauma and move past it. Whatever the playlist, whoever’s pussy [or bussy] you “tear up,” fuck with irony!)

On the cusp of disaster (state shift), the bell tolls for us; let’s “toll” back, fucking to a calculated risk’s Gothic aesthetic of power and death, of vulnerability and imperviousness, to—like any good metal song (e.g., Goat’s “Rancid Purgatory,” 2004)—make the food, sex and everything else hit just that much harder. Under capital, the monstrous-feminine is the regular victim; consider this alimony longer overdue.

We’ll explore the long and varied history of such poetic expression, in part two. Stay tuned! Until then, onto “Leaving the Castle; or, Bookending Harmony Corrupted“!

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Footnotes

[1] E.g., the Zodiac Braves (such as Velius, last page) from Final Fantasy Tactics (and frankly every game in that long-running franchise): “ancient,” rarefied forms of Malthusian treachery that—as the ghost of the counterfeit—must be suggested, summoned and finally killed for the “true kingdom” to rise and war in all its forms to finally end. Except capital scapegoats its own symptoms behind Faustian “empowering” illusions, which workers must apply in sex-positive ludo-Gothic forms of BDSM that, like the Promethean Quest, chase down empowering “disempowerment”; i.e., that actually go outside the text to give themselves the poetic ability to change things on all registers.

Originally part of an undivided volume—specifically Volume Two of my Sex Positivity (2023) book series—this promo post now belongs to a large-but-redundant sample series called “Brace for Impact“ (2024); i.e., that went on to become its own completed module in Volume Two: the Poetry Module, aka Volume Two, part one. The module was primarily inspired by Harmony Corrupted and divides into over thirteen posts, whose collective chapters/subchapters compile one half of the larger total volume; i.e., Volume Two has three modules—one bigger module for part one (re: the Poetry Module), and two slightly smaller modules (the Monster Modules) for part two—for which the volume halves are roughly equal in size (subject to change).

Update, 5/4/2024: I’m starting a similar book sample series for Volume Two, part two: “Searching for Secrets“ (2024)!

Update, 5/1/2024: Volume Two, part one (the Poetry Module) is out! I wrote a preface for the module along with its debut announcement. Give that a look; then, go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the full module (which will contain additions/corrections these posts will not have)!

Click here to see “Brace for Impact’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 ally shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).

Picking up up from where ““The Medieval: Modularity and Class” left off…

Facing Death: What I Learned Mastering Metroidvania, thus the Abject 90s (feat. Kirby, Marilyn Manson and Maynard James Keenan)

“‘Life is precious,’ Yanos discovered, as it was torn throbbing and bleeding from his own body.”

—Kain, Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen (1996)

The Gothic is queer and has been since day one. In the usual holistic manner, I wanted to revisit and reflect on this dark odyssey as it exists for me; i.e., the smaller journey I’ve been on for the past several months (the clerical slut in her latter-day abbey, dutifully engineering the Poetry Module like a machine listening to machines[1]), but also my entire life.

“We’re living in Gothic times.” Keeping with that dire track, we’ll look at critiquing power from one’s past as monstrous; i.e., in ways you can master using a sex-positive lens. We’ll start with my academic past, then use my current expertise to look further backwards. All in all, we’ll dissect my failed academic career and scholarly contributions, per Metroidvania, then turn right back around and apply them to two cadaver childhood friends: the final boss fight from Kirby’s Dream Land 2 (1995), and rock ‘n roll “rebellion” as it was being packaged and sold to the nation’s youth (me) around the same time; i.e., “childhood rebellion” as lucrative dogma vis-à-vis Maynard James Keenan and Marilyn Manson. The ’90s were darkly magical; they also sucked, but I had to “die” first and be reborn (as trans, Communist) before I could see that for what it was, for what I was—abject, alien, stupid.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

As Top Dollar said, “Childhood’s over the moment you know you’re gonna die.” Well, that side of me has been dying for years! From closeted maiden to mighty Medusa, I started off like Bilbo did—closeted; i.e., a spring chicken bred on music that made me feel invincible, but point in fact was just as much a curse (of blindness) as a gift: I look at me in 2014 and see such a spineless bimbo, a late-bloomer who would go on to conquer my fears and become Medusa.

“Death changes you,” I’ve discovered; my familial abuse and extrafamilial abuse—Zeuhl, Cuwu, and Jadis stuck in their ways of causing harm to others, the posers—you don’t just experience something like that and walk away unscathed. It stays with you, lives in you, including in the work that you do as challenging what has you in its grip—the experience, but also the socio-material conditions at large. Even so, I don’t think I’ve fully appreciated the significance of that in my work until diving in and playing with it myself; i.e., getting in touch with my teaching side, my medical side, and my medieval side to better understand my work’s poetic elements: as someone who survived heinous things, sees them everywhere, and chases their Numinous signature on the Neo-Gothic edge of existence—the fringes of reality and cusp of Hell as something to experience while alive.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

My blood pressure seems to go up higher when I write and reflect extensively on my past (but also haven’t actually orgasmed much these past several months). I feel buried alive, my chest tight like I was suffocating—less from a hand choking my throat and more a bodice around my heart. It feels, suitably enough, like someone who chases “death” and “stays under” for a bit too long—stuck there, unable to return home, or home no longer recognizable to them; i.e., haunted by their trauma as something to chase and recreate in pleasure and pain as confused, their crossed wires activated during psychosexual responses in a given place and name:

Skyrider, you supersonic flyer
Nightdriver, you demon of desire
Spinesnapper, you tried your best to break us
Throatchoker, you thought that you could take us

The fright of your life, the fright of your life
The fright of your life is here guaranteed
This is no illusion, confessing confusion you’re freed
Lashings of strappings with beatings competing to win

Oh, what a mess I am blessed, dominations set in

Now we are taken unto the island of domination (Judas Priest’s “Isle of Domination” (1976).

Everyone has their own form, their own name for Death; but like porn, you’ll know it when you see it if you’ve felt it before (it marks you for life, and only in death releases you). The presumption is that in the “Free World” we are free and no harm is caused, that we are protected.

Wrong! America is a settler colony and run by the Great Destroyers of the Earth, safe behind their illusions while the rest of us either feel invincible and beyond reproach (the status quo) or closeted, damned, beyond redemption in this Hell on Earth. Faced with its “new normal,” we become infused and forever obsessed/fascinated with death; i.e., an endless call of the void seeking its epitaphic medicine of sweet escape[2] again, and again, and again. 99 times it goes off without a hitch through respectable but ordinary attempts; then, on the 100th something goes awry… Or rather, something wakes up, speaking extraordinarily through a collective repressed desire: to be free felt psychosexually among differences, through a ghost of the counterfeit preparing to rebel. There for a moment and gone in the blink of an eye, it stays with us all our lives—something to chase into Hell as made right here on Earth: damnation as a nail to hit, square on the head—not once, of course, but over and over as one might the devil’s doorbell (“C’mon, Old Scratch! Pick up! Mommy wants to play!”).

(source)

“Death is where we feel most alive/see our loved ones again.” I know the music and the clichés; we all do, and recreate its tolling bell again and again (e.g., goth-oracle band Scavenger’s Beyond the Bells, 2024—”In the heat of the night, witches fly!” a fleshy parade of clichés and fetishes marrying sex and war to find beautiful release). But I didn’t understand its Gothic riddle maturely until I lived it, experienced it (fucked to metal, pounding Cuwu’s tight little pussy to Annihilator’s “Death in Your Eyes” [2008] or Jadis’ or Zeuhl’s to some similar, whiplash-inducing tune[3]), processed it, and then did all of that consciously through hindsight (“Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.”). Faced with that dark reflection, something woke up in me and I felt at home with death as something to embrace through the honest intimacy of other cuties also searching for denied connection and forbidden love—to be dying for it like a beggar of thirst, and begging for more until we’re satisfied. How long until that is depends entirely on us developing Communism to end scarcity once and for all. In short, “When it’s done!”

Believe it or not, this moment of clarity actually stems from monitoring my vitals and observing my body’s various reactions—almost outside, looking in at myself as a doctor does a patient, and all while writing this book and thinking about “death” as a tradition to perform: a call of the void (from Shakespeare to Ridley Scott to li’l ol’ me—a bit like speed balling minus the hard-drug crossfade); and all the while feeling the classic Gothic push-pull of “danger” as a paradox rooted in my actual body as not really in much danger but secretly telling my 37-year-old self to hold together while fucking around. Something might actually be wrong with me!

Newfound appreciation gleans through reflection on things I always enjoyed, including my life as something to reappraise. Yet, doing so has likewise shown me that I’m not entirely sure what ails me—if it’s psychosomatic or psychosexual posttraumatic stress, a more prominent and permanent medical condition. Probably a bit of both, but I recognize the feeling—the actual physical feeling—from before I started thinking actively about my health, and before I was able to go to the doctor and get checked out: when I returned to my mother’s, and experienced separation anxiety with Cuwu after Uncle Dave died. Doing so again, under more controlled and informed circumstances, has rekindled my drive but also a renewed interest in medicine: in regards to me as the test subject, experimenting literally on myself through the playfully scandalous Neo-Gothic fantasies of death, rape and murder. You know, the best kinds!

We become bred on such things, accustomed to death as medieval language we conjure up for the thrill and salve it provides us with; e.g., the devil dragon from Flight of Dragons (1982) the deliverer of all our paradoxical delights. Like a pizza for a bitch in heat, a mommy pregnant with lust (as fat as the dragons in that movie, but especially that fat fuck—an absolute unit of a death chonker):

I see the dragon in my mind and hear the sleeping princess’ line: “No, father, one dragon yet remains, Bryagh. Omadon’s hold on him is stronger than Lo Tae Zhao’s. He has death on his mind and can take them all!” I think in response, Good; now gimme, motherfucker! My command is gentle (the dragon is my childhood friend, someone I love), but it’s still a command: “Don’t stop until I tell you to stop! I shall rewrite you through my decree, a Queen to your King I challenge thee” (from Volume Zero, my fucking with Percy Shelley’s famous poem to immortalize Blxxd Bunny with my drawing of them:

And pillow lip, and smirk of warm delight,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that enjoyed them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, Queen of queens;
Look on my Ass, ye Mighty, and despair!”

As something to face beyond us in present forms that evoke the beyond, reflections on death can be healthy or unhealthy—can drive us mad or “mad.” Poets, who love the sound of their own voices (“one good turn deserves another—from one poet to another”), think by reflecting on things through creation (which is always expanding [cock-like] into delicious pussy-like new forms). In challenging capital, meticulous and informed, I’m a Renaissance girl who suddenly finds herself feeling like a naughty child playing with dead things; i.e., like Jeffery Combs’ Herbert West, dryly asking the other doctor with a straight face/flat affect, “What will they do, embalm us?” Talk about hard kink!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

In a way they already have, and as a zombie the likes of Richard Matteson’s, I find myself—having thrust into the void repeatedly—suddenly smiling with a new lease on life (the trans woman, turning as the fags always do, to Gothic media as a therapeutic, rape-play opera expressing the unspeakable as loud as we fucking can); i.e., like Barbaras’ omen from the Jew of Malta (c. 1590):

Thus like the sad presaging Raven that tolls
The sicke mans passeport in her hollow beake,
And in the shadow of the silent night
Doth shake contagion from her sable wings (source).

Though I am just a raven, behold my pretty plumage (weird, to be sure, but bitches like weird; it’s like they are)! Observe how I am at peace with myself and my trauma as something to show off the pain and pleasure of all my ghosts; i.e., with my queerness as beautifully tainted by capital, but burning urgently and hotly with a corpse-like desire that feels oddly fresh, revitalized, ready to take on the world (something to tentatively show and then, post-hesitation, open greater and greater “wounds” that flaunt it all with reckless abandon—my dick not in the book, but in a pussy): scrambling to express what I’ve learned about “death” before Death (the cruel, delicious, thick-thighed bitch) takes me at last. When it does, my tombstone—a fragment of all that remains—shall be peered at, and whose bizarre reply shall thrust, confounding and glorious, back at the same prying eyes: “Her tits were there.” My spirit has fled, but they’re not going anywhere. Remember that as you live and love those close to you!

The Great Tree bemoaned to Deet when passing her its knowledge, “Whether a gift or a curse I do not know!” Likewise touched by Death—to have felt for a second its sweet sting as melting into so many others—I don’t know how long I have. No one does, till suddenly our brief candle (and walking shadow) snuffs out, collapsing never to rise again. But I have questioned the value of my life until now with more fear of death than I currently have (“nothing ventured, nothing gained”). Now that said fear has been lessened by learning something new about myself, the ghost of Epicurus is rapping on my head to remind me: “Death is nothing to us!” Except, the idea of a “corpse” that experiences symptoms, a church of the dead that haunts us while we’re awake out from the imaginary past that returns to our world? It’s all just pretend… isn’t it? Then again, maybe not. You tell me, sweeties!

When someone fucks with you, document everything. But also, play/fuck with your abusers by putting their “ghosts” in quotes—to speak truth to (state) power by going where power is. I have been near power all my life; i.e., that which threatens “death” as a state of constant, painful change, often with alien components haunting familiar ones. Death, then, isn’t the end, but something to face regardless of whom you’re critiquing. Here’s what I learned in doing so—as a failed-academic-turned-Gothic-slut who weaponized her baggage and mastered Metroidvania at the same time (so, Contrapoints but without the trans gentrification, assimilation fantasies and veiled enbyphobia; more on her in Volume Three, part two)! As we proceed, remember as always to take modularity into account: Metroidvania are modular like monsters are, and the two go hand-in-hand; i.e., a castle has monsters in it and is monster-like, and monsters have castles in them/are castle-like, concentrically and dualistically and anisotropically. In other words, they are composite; i.e., you can remove elements of the Metroidvania/monster and it will continue to function/relate to these elements separately and/or together, mid-crisis onstage.

Under capital, Cartesian thought sexualizes, fetishizes and ultimately harvests nature-as-monstrous-feminine; videogames instruct this through neoliberal dogma—household war simulators, whose monomythic formulas must be reclaimed by the real stewards of nature (us) from the usual privateers (capitalists and their proponents). From Freddy Krueger to the final, hidden boss in Kirby’s Dream Land 2 (exhibit 34b2a1a1, 1995) to the Wind Fish in Link’s Awakening (1991) to Ripley rescuing Newt by scapegoating the black queen when the colony falls apart (shooting the Numinous ghost of settler colonialism’s vengeful victims) to the Radiance in Hollow Knight, we’re all Dokken’s dream warriors, masturbatorily punching Tim Curry’s demon clown. I say this while being completely silly and dead-serious at the same time, and this isn’t my first rodeo, my dudes; I’ve given symposiums as an undergrad[4] and written my thesis on this (“Lost in Necropolis“), and finally my PhD in independent form with Sex Positivity, Volume Zero (and if that devalues it in your eyes, remember that T.S., Joshi—one of the world’s foremost and most-cited contributors to independent Lovecraft scholarship—isn’t a professor, but a philosophy major dropout); I’ve lectured about this at the IGA multiple times, on multiple continents[5]; I’ve given talks in-person[6] and on video[7]; and I’ve used the symbols and methods of invigilation to talk about shared patterns and imagery in ways you’ll doubtless recognize from me and elsewhere. There’s gorgons to slay us and “gorgons” to “slay” with, babes; true to my arguments (since my thesis, no less), these exist in the same magic circle/shadow zone (the elite monopolizing darkness as a weapon[7a] against Her Majesty’s radiant numen):

Healing takes reflection and reflection hurts regarding a past that is always being buried or dug up. To that, I’d like to inspect my academic past (above) one more time to make my point; i.e., what I’ve learned facing the death of it (and rebirth). I’ve previously acknowledged which professors I like and which I don’t–you know who you are—but the fact remains that academia as a structure is a den of sycophants suckling the dicks of Reagan and Thatcher’s ghosts; i.e., a nest of shameless schmoozers and utter brownnosers by design (“the money flows up, the shit rolls down”). They have their own thin line to colonize students with, and take a certain pleasure closing ranks and flexing on them. So yeah, it’s personal for me; I have something to prove and don’t like bullies, especially established bullies acting like their shit don’t stink. As we shall see, reversing abjection is a shitty business—one as vast and rank as the single-day cleansing of the cattle stables of King Augeas of Elis (“the Labours of Heracles“; source: Britannica).

For instance, Lucy Burke once told me, “You couldn’t step on my toes if you tried [emphasis, mine].” The Brits really love their Austenian italics. Regardless, the school went onto delete my old email and account (demonstrating the empheral, predator/prey nature of our relationship). In the interim, Lucy went onto flunk half of my postgrad module for mentioning my undergrad pedigree as a point of reference, telling me it “had no bearing on the topic at hand” (though they magnanimously gave me an A for the transcribing element—damn straight); Lucy Burke was also a total cunt whose class sucked absolute donkey dick (and whose tenured helper told me to my face that the Gothic was a waste of life—he was a cunt, too). So fuck her (and fuck the peer-reviewed twats who arbitrarily rejected my paper proposals for being “too repetitive/conversational[8],” or—in several cases—for being too sexual. It’s one thing to be rejected by a romantic interest; in this case, rejection equals censorship, which speaks louder than words)!

As we proceed, my teaching moral is as follows: Don’t be afraid to speak your truth, even if that truth is angry with the establishment (and its settler-colonial profit motive)! Be loud! Wreck shit (if you’ve seen Glass Onion [2022] then you’ll know exactly what I mean)!

Maybe I’m onto something. Some of my instructors certainly thought so. As my teachers at undergrad wrote of me (from my original award letter, above),

Nicholas excels as an attentive and nuanced reader of literary texts and expert sleuth of textual histories. He has an impressive ability to synthesize disparate material, making surprising connections between wide-ranging ideas and experiences. Nicholas, one faculty remarks, “is not afraid to take tangents or draw comparisons that at first look random but end up opening up a new vista for reflection.” We have been equally delighted by the fine scholarly essays and research papers Nicholas has produced in our classes. Faculty describe his writing as “eloquent, carefully organized,” “astonishingly adroit,” comparing, for instance, Tolkien’s image of greed with Shakespeare’s reflection on Shylock’s materialism, via a close reading of Max Weber’s idea of rationality and modern notions of money as status [hi, Craig!].

We anticipate a bright future for Nicholas and wish him the best for his future scholarly exploits. Nicholas is most deserving of the Distinguished Student in Literature Award, and we are grateful to have him as a student in our department. We’ll be reading Nicholas’ writing one day, and probably teaching it [above, originally featured in Volume Zero].

I don’t know about that, my dudes; I messaged many of you for years and rarely heard a peep (a couple responded—to that, I give thanks)—certainly not to the degree of engagement such effusive praise would seem to suggest. Maybe I didn’t deserve all of this? Maybe I was just that dunce of a slut I always felt like?

Looking back, I still get echoes of that doubt. But true to form, I had to go elsewhere to find what I was looking for (the monomyth, but a gay Gothic one that turned me from “Nicholas” into Persephone: “It was I, Dio!”).

I felt that way at the time, too—was terribly depressed and told Christine Neufeld as much in her office, post-award-ceremony. She replied, “We don’t just give this award to anyone, you know! It’s a big deal! You struggled at first [she gave me a C+ in her English 300W course, saved by me writing “Frankenstein essay—Born to Fall? Birth Trauma, the Soul, and Der Maschinenmensch,” 2014] but you pulled through; with these grades and this letter of recommendation, you can go anywhere you want!”

There was some truth to that (others were more honest: “Don’t pursue grad school unless you want to be broke/are independently wealthy!”); I could go wherever I wanted, provided I found the school and the backing (a whole Byzantine circus to thread, which we’ve already gone over but I’ll cite again here[9] in case Quora takes a shit). I’m white and middle-class, so I had friends and means. Sandy Norton gave me a place to stay after my efficiency was canceled. In turn, I basically had to graduate twice; i.e., once in ceremony and once after I met the full, Faustian-grade[10] requirements for the school (which hounded me for overpriced graduation photos for years, afterwards).

If the above example (my Gothic past and quest for power/the Numinous by coining ludo-Gothic BDSM through my scholarly works and slutty adventures) is any proof, facing one’s past repeatedly is painful, but also vital to understanding our place is a wider world; re: “Returning and reflecting upon old points after assembling them is a powerful way to understand larger structures and patterns (especially if they’re designed to conceal themselves through subterfuge, valor and force). It’s what holistic study (the foundation of this book) is all about.” To that, glibly sloganize the skeletons of your past if it means liberation from tyranny (and if they aren’t tyrants, they’ll let you voice your grievances in public; i.e., the “free” marketplace of ideas). Fuck the king! Fuck Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan! Fuck the schools I went to if they get in my way! Antagonize them! Become the thing they fear most; become the ironic counterterrorist exposing them as frauds—with your Aegis (ass or otherwise): “And no one in all of Oz, no wizard that there is or was, is every gonna bring me down!”

Speaking of skeletons, let’s give it a shot; i.e., with something other than my failed academic career (but still bourne from it)! Kirby? You’re up, babe!

(exhibit 34b2a1a1: When playing this game as a little girl, in the fifth grade, I always noticed the patterns and they always struck me as odd. I felt the drive to conquer the darkness as the game taught me. Perhaps if I did, I thought, then my shitty real father would turn into the man I always wanted him to be [alas, that never happened]. A part of me also to wanted, like Hamlet and the freezing palace guards [“A part of him”], to explore the darkness as a presence to talk to—in short, to ask it why it’s there, to make friends.

In other words, why is the false king false, the sword always there to purify his “corruption,” and send the monstrous-feminine hellspawn back to the dark corners of the Western imagination?

As such, there’s always a priority/Great Chain of Being to neoliberal copaganda in videogames. The male hegemon is sick, possessed—a false king with a false claim [the counterfeit] that must corrected through the usual heteronormative “medicine” [usually force, in videogames, because sex is for adults who take it by force, post-indoctrination]. Tolkien [and his cartographic refrains] framed it as exorcism [Gandalf to Theoden, drawing Wormtongue out as “poison is drawn from a wound”—kinky!] and death by flames [Denethor: “We shall burn like the kings of old!”]. In turn, videogames like the Kirby franchise offer routine protagonists who function, like all language, in dualistic ways. Except the canonical embodiment of the avatar remains bourgeoisie; in turn, the monomythic concentrism, anisotropic motion, and climactic [violent, Promethean] revelation are swept aside in the usual Radcliffean fashion: the horrors of the “past” apologizing for the Divine Right of Kings as having evolved into modern forms that remained, post-nightmare [which Walpole ultimately suffered from, too—the white castle emerging from the black. ACAB, kids—except gay campy ones].

That is, King Dedede is possessed, you see—trying to smite you with his hammer because a dark vague force has “corrupted” him! This counterfeit is both the Western lie of sovereignty it uses to maintain its power structures, and the very thing antithetical to them that we must reclaim and synthesize. In Metroidvania fashion, once the hero collects some of the objects of conquest, he gets a partial prize; collect them all, and he receives Excalibur—the ostensibly noble blade haunted by dark, bloodthirsty revenge to do battle with the Russian doll. That is, inside the American monarch [a feudal displacement of the game’s empty critique of the wider world around it] lurks a shelled series of monsters common to neoliberal canon: the warlock/witch, vampire or goblin [all anti-Semitic tropes] indicative of the Nazi and the Communist in the same amalgam. Per American kayfabe as emulated by Japan, its cultural exports have Kirby [the babyface] whack the Nazi with his sword, the two dueling to expose why the Nazi “broke bad”: the shapeless void—Communism! Red corrupts red.

[source: Zelda Dungeon]

These warring artefacts remain dualistic, mid-duel, but the canonical side/function of their conversation remains clear enough: a witch hunt, one where the Nazi was the nation-state possessed by national Socialism! I.e., it’s always the Communist’s fault! Of course, we all know this to be an obscurantist lie—one furthered by neoliberals [and their pocket academics] profiting off Red Scare—but the fact remains, the so-called Pale King and “Hollow Knight” [see what I did, there?] are likenesses received in praxially-inert symbolic exchanges; e.g., Ganon vs the Hero of Time [above] to pacify workers with, regardless of the labor they put in; i.e., that which preserves a semiotic standard [from Ron Cobb] to uphold a capitalist dialog and its monetary value through Cartesian violence against nature-as-monstrous-feminine.

All of these tropes and contradictions are a historical-material byproduct of those state monopolies and trifectas warring against our doubling of them during counterterror dialogs, engaged in the meta dialog as dialectical-material; i.e., by virtue of me—burning the midnight oil [having done it many times at EMU and MMU]—able to artlessly summon up old ghosts [of Marx] to camp canon with. To that, my childhood locale remains haunted by the object of capitalist fears pushed into the usual myopic shadow zone by Capitalist Realism. The elite cannot hide genocide and police violence in totality after history purportedly “ended” within the established economic order as classic “New-World” shenanigans; so instead, like Radcliffe, they conjure up evil castles and kings to scapegoat. It’s modern-day blood libel, the price paid in all the oceans of children’s blood[11] Kirby’s Dream Land 2 leaves out, but lurks behind the rotting image on its surface. The darkness is the rot, and beyond its disintegrating veneer is the desert of the real.

Plato’s cave is full of those hopelessly reliant on the system’s dogmatic false hope, becoming agents of our and their destruction by maintaining the spell that cannot survive state shift. But boy, oh boy, they will fight like hell to resist that; i.e., by dismissing and attacking us through disguises that announce who they are: corporate cops in suits—spooks of a CIA sort, but internalized/externalized by state proponents; e.g., like The Matrix and its Agents touched upon, so aptly [“That is the sound of inevitability, Mr. Anderson; that is the sound of your death!”]! In that same shadow zone’s half-real space, then, we must use our own ludo-Gothic BDSM’s castle-narrative to infuse better habits; i.e., to synthesize praxis based on the things that were coded into us as children by videogames. “Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.” No one ever said it was easy to kill our darlings—both because it is dispiriting on some level, but also because it’s work! Topping is work! No cap, fuck-starting Kirby’s face has me dead tired, y’all!

In all seriousness, the takeaway here is the hero, after his final duel, has slain the fag, the Commie, the Medusa, the person of color—to fall from the sky at the shock of seeing himself in Athena’s Aegis [a black blob with a single eye to Kirby’s two—the singular panoptic/myopic gaze of conquest, but also the one-eyed monster capital frames Communism as; i.e., the cyclops giant to blind and kill, empowering patriarchal forces]. He descends from the heavens like a heroic star/constellation [Orion, perhaps] while a cleansed pastoral/Garden of Eden looks on [the artificial wilderness “cleansed,” America-style and mirrored in the Japanese neo-Shogunate, of so-called “impurities”; i.e., through a fascist/strongman return to “might makes right”; e.g., the way of the fist, of death by the sword, of Shintoism and bushido as “brutal” sold to Americanized kids drooling over Akuma representing who they want to be, but also the time they want to return to: the Sengoku Jidai or Warring States period’s return of the demon warrior/the black knight. In fascist thinking this is the “hard times” quadrant of the four-stage cycle; re, from Bret Devereaux’ “Hard Times Don’t Make Strong Soldiers,” 2020): “‘Hard times create strong men, strong men create weak times, weak times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.’ The quote, from a postapocalyptic novel by the author G. Michael Hopf, sums up a stunningly pervasive cyclical vision of history—one where Western strategists keep falling for myths of invincible barbarians” (source).

Whether it’s Akuma, Batman or Meta Knight, white male weebs want to become the Great Destroyer and kill weakness as “degenerate,” impure. It’s like sex to them—how they relate to each other—but it’s unironically harmful, destructive, sadistic, inhumane. There’s no “convincing” them through empathy because they argue through force, not consent—the way of the warrior as an endless battle for territory and dominance. They are quintessential xenophobic meatheads—anti-intellectual, obsessed with death, conspiracy and the remaining fourteen points Umberto Eco mentions. In short, they’re like American colonialism continues to be—self-righteous and macho, but paradoxically afraid of everything around them, which they rape because of it. Smart people scare them, women scare them, fags scare them, etc; yet they want to fuck us, are secretly incel cowards looking for mommy.

It’s all a lie, one that continues into Dream Land coming from older histories in and out of the text: Kirby—startled and scared from his dream—wakes up and finds himself with his monomythic treasures by his side. He has the power, per Joseph Campbell’s uncritical lens, to make the world in his image; i.e., by pacifying the current ordering of things by making nature orderly again. It’s standard-issue Goldilocks Imperialism/neoconservative, with Kirby’s foreshadowed by the sword spearheading the harbinger of capital falling to Earth like a comet, a fallen angel, an incubus of the state, a “gift” from the bourgeois gods [that, like Mega Man, steals its enemies powers and shape]: to make peace through strength, by bad-faith diplomacy, by the sword, Power-Rangers-style [the sentai rainbow]. This tracks. After all, the translation for “Nintendo” is “Heaven rewards hard work”—except “work,” in this case, is the same old ghost of the counterfeit being used to further Capitalist Realism via the process of abjection; re: “The myth of Gothic ancestry endured because it was useful,” leading to the same-old Jewish conspiracies, tokenization, and genocide. White knights become black, good cops become bad because ACAB—all [canonical] cops [and castles] are bad. They swords are bad. Their cute mascots are bad.

[model and artists: Blxxd Bunny and Marlon Trelie/Persephone van der Waard] 

Luckily for us, they ain’t got a monopoly on that shit, and there’s always one more square in the collage to fuck with and lead to a better sequence; i.e., inside the infernal concentric pattern [re: Aguirre] during ludo-Gothic BDSM [me; e.g., above, having collaborated with Bunny and hired Marlon to make our own collective statement; i.e., the Dark Magician Girl (my OC, in disguise) fucking “Medusa” as yet-another-performance]. Kirby’s false rainbow is something we fags can camp in earnest, giving its black-and-white some actual color and sparkles. The end of the world, according to the Bible, is when men hammer their swords into ploughshares; we must do this by challenging capital’s Cartesian treatment of labor during the monomyth and all its usual fear and dogma, medieval poetics, etc. The state will always default to lies and violence, policing sex and force through dead dogma dressed up as fatal nostalgia; we can camp all of this and turn it upside down and back around at them—paralyzing them but also making their masks slip. The more people are aware, the more conscious they become to class and culture war as something to wage; re: emotional/Gothic intelligence as something to synthesize through violent resistance fought on the streets of our childhoods, of the Gothic imagination, of a middle finger to academic shortcomings. We’re taking it back. Submit to our monstrous-feminine cenobites [not Barkers, the sell-out; come at me, Sorcha]—not to enslave your bodies, minds, labor and identities, mid-struggle, but to set them free from the usual capitalist [fascist] pigs.)

I am literally a monster and Metroidvania doctor (the monstrous-feminine, in particular)—a monster mom for whom exhibits like these are as easy for me to make as breathing is while fucking (that gets easier, the more you sexercise). I have a nose for bullshit, and can smell a Nazi/spot a TERF a mile away (no matter how many disguises they have on). As little Kirby shows me (and I show you), Communism and fascism sit in the same shadow zone (from Volume Zero, but also “With a Little Help from My Friends“). The difference, for Galatea vs Pygmalion, is the existence of performative irony and critical bite regarding any darkness visible (re: Milton vs Tolkien/Cameron, vis-à-vis me). For Gothic Communists, our bleak sardonic projections twist the knife and smile at the gods, our hellish Aegis upending the heroic narrative to replace it, mid-Mandelbrot. This isn’t a canceled future that, mid-crisis, decay and duel defends capital; we’re the clowns in the king’s court, the chaotic dwarf from Twin Peaks (1990), but the ghost of the counterfeit remains us, buried or not; i.e., that which waits for you, leering wickedly at the end of a black rainbow, coming forward and speaking the truth in dialectical-material language (throwing pure psychoanalysis and postmodernism in the bin): like Saturn devouring his son, capital is eating us. So we “eat” you during calculated risk, hopefully waking your stupid asses up! Eat ass, kids!

(artist, left: Franciso Goya; right: Jordan Peele)

Sometimes, this means eating your own bullshit (aka, eating shit, crow, humble pie, etc). The present is always remarked upon as haunted, grim. It’s all been said before, and cashed in on by hypocrites, too; i.e., those weaponizing your angry childhood as a product against you, a lucrative dogma enriching fascists playing at false rebels. I call this “white people disease,” and as such have looked at people like Radcliffe in the past. This time, I wanna stick to the ’90s; i.e., we’re gonna practice what we preach and hold my childhood accountable in a holistic sense; re, Xavi: “The ’80s weren’t a magical time!” Neither were the ’90s! Keeping that in mind, don’t get too attached to things; i.e., “never meet your heroes; they will always disappoint you,” except there’s a catch: heroism divorced from a capitalist idea of struggle and money value can rescue this conceit from itself. But you gotta be the bitch, the harridan, the angry oracle “no one likes” because they’re always calling out peoples’ heroes (Socrates had that problem; the state prescribed hemlock). Now let’s turn our Medusa’s masterful, withering gaze onto rockstars of a more musical sort: Marilyn Manson (and Maynard James Keenan, footnote)!

“Your world is an ashtray! We burn and crawl like cigarettes; the more you cry the more the ashes turn to mud!” sung shock jockey (and sex pest), Manson[12]. I (and many people my age) grew up on that shit. Like all splendide mendax, the profit motive doesn’t negate the allegory’s liberatory potential; it just capitalizes on it. Just because Manson was an abuser (or Jadis) doesn’t make me one; quite the opposite, rape prevention by exposing abusers during good praxis/synthesis (e.g., telling reactions to revolutionary cryptonymy) is my book’s raison-d’être, hypocrites and abusers (or their enablers, on all registers—e.g., bad-faith/accommodated intellectuals) my bête noire.

Let me rephrase. The way I see it, the world is a toilet, and little girls are made to fear the bathroom as a place to hold their urine, lest they get raped. Doing so is not protection, as Nex Benedict showed us (re: “An Ode to Nex Benedict,” 2024). There’s two takeaways I’ll provide, regarding that: a) view something as a toilet (covered in piss and shit, full of shit, etc) so you actually clean it, and b) we’re already in Hell, so bring the fury to them (our abusers, the elite) with all the piss and vinegar you can muster (we’re all monsters under capital; be an Amazon, warrior, mother, detective, Medusa for workers)! Take your time and make it memorable, too. Don’t “smile more” (“You found me beautiful once!” “Honey, you got real ugly!” Damn straight, you sexist pig!); skull-fuck them (I’m being figurative, of course: the mind fuck)! Freud might be a bad joke, little more than a trope at this stage; we monstrous-feminine, from cryptonym to cryptomime, pull a black rabbit out of a hat, the cat out of the bag—not to harm the rabbit or the cat (the poor things historically used as lab rats, now free to proliferate on Bunny Island or some such place), but expose capital’s usual illusions relegating us to the underworld. We’re the final (hidden) boss of Capitalist Realism each and every time. As Gamma Ray once said, “rabbit don’t come easy!” Well, we do (we got a wand and a rabbit) and our “hat” is our Pandora’s Box, pulling all manner of dark, hellish secrets out of itself.

(artist: John Keaveney)

Under Capitalism, childhood and innocence are lost at birth, replaced with harmful copycats. But fret not! Duality distinguishes “corruption” as defined through context, and a baddie is different than a bad cop; even if both are wearing the same witch costume, their function is determined by where their rhetoric/antics on and offstage send power a-flowing: towards workers or the state (which is why iconoclasts can camp Nazis and still be rebels in disguise, and why TERFs are still Nazis despite appearing as witches). The same goes for their lairs, their castles as slapped together and used to express largely systemic issues; i.e., on the classic site of queer angst (the stage) given voice among a pedagogy of the oppressed that can be used by all marginalized groups. I call it “Metroidvania,” but that is just one name among many for the Gothic castle as something to reclaim with ludo-Gothic BDSM—with revolutionary cryptonymy and castle-narrative (ergodic motion) during the liminal hauntology of war as something to survive. Cops are the enemy in that instance, as are their hungry fortresses; our bodies become ours reclaimed from them within these prisons’ danger discos. Or as Grendel’s mother basically said: “I’m not trapped in here with you, you’re trapped in here with me!”

The same goes for me and anyone who thinks they know more than me about Metroidvania! I am peerless in that respect, both a) the master of the field in a field where no experts exist (as of coining my work, anyways—British academia was allergic to portmanteaus and cross-media disciplines), and b) a holistic instructor who takes this knowledge and applies it through ludo-Gothic BDSM (my brainchild, my academic concept) to synthesize good Communist praxis outside academia, for the workers of the world to do in kind; i.e., in ergodic motion (my master’s thesis) as a pedagogic metaphor that both describes and aids the teaching process: to all workers (nature and the environment) sexualized, fetishized and alienated by capital (my PhD argument) and the profit motive’s harmful canon, its fatal nostalgia, its pocket experts hired in expert testimony for the state/the prosecution.

In short, Jedi mind tricks don’t work on me (e.g., Kirby and his cute animal friends aping Captain Planet, doing the little victory dance with neoliberal jingles anthemic of war against “darkness”; i.e., hardly a monolithic refrain, but a diverse polity administered by monomythic dogma—one that clumps Nazis and Communists together but always, always prioritizes the Communist), and I can break any dark (capitalistic) spell meant to stupefy its recipient(s)!

So forget Luke Skywalker boldly declaring to the Emperor, “I am a Jedi, like my father before me!” Bitch, please—I’m the Medusa (and “Jedi” are Sith[11a] waiting to happen) and I’ve worked too hard for too long and survived too much to just lay down and take any more of it! The Earth is my home; Hell is my home as something I design, and I will fight to defend it and my friends from the usual fear and dogma, cops and sell-out academics, et al.

Like Smaug, every sassy bitch has its boast, every dog its day. To that, hear mine: Jadis was an impostor who scared children (ate them, per the usual dogmas)—could only tap her foot or toss her head. I am the Queen of Charn:

“Stop,” said the Witch, just as he reached the door. “Do not dream of treachery. My eyes can see through walls and into the minds of men. They will be on you wherever you go. At the first sign of disobedience I will lay such spells on you that anything you sit down on will feel like red hot iron and whenever you lie in a bed there will be invisible blocks of ice at your feet. Now go.”

The old man went out, looking like a dog with its tail between its legs (source).

Not just of Charn, but the queen of my kind (we’re all queens under Communism, but I digress), the top dog making the magician my bitch (from that story’s uncle, to its author afraid of naughty girls who know what they want)!

As Bay shared with me, “Kiwis are bird rats”; i.e., Nature’s idea of Jewish revenge hunted by the likes of smug men like Karl Jobst or Christoph Waltz (the former sucks in real life, the latter sucks onstage):

Their steady song of the Earth is our Song of Infinity to take up ironically with Gothic poetics against the colonizer posturing as “benevolent” (which includes Jewish ethnostates and their proponents simultaneously denying the Holocaust and reenacting it; i.e., the establishment “Good Jew” instead of those like Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi as the mythical Jewish unicorn the state doesn’t want you to know about but cannot stop [because their power is a lie, an illusion]: a Socialist anti-Zionist Jew and journalist). Moderates, including token moderates (e.g., Obama) and their elitist, bought-and-paid-for yes men (The Humanist Reports’ “Politicians, Pundits, & Celebs Get a Brutal Reality Check at Elitist Circle Jerk,” 2024) try so hard to control the coverage and paint themselves as good, but they’re the biggest cunts of them all (re: MLK’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” 1963). Luckily there’s one thing that moderates (Jewish or otherwise) can never hide: which side they stood for—no, sung for—when the going got tough. We can’t afford to keep quiet or toe the line, because that’s what genocide is: dying in darkness alone, or ignoring those who do while kissing up to capital, to the elite. We’re together when we’re heard, warning predators off and organizing against them through intersectional solidarity (diversity is strength); i.e., kettling the cops, turning a kettling attempt on its heel (encirclement, but also a kayfabe pun); e.g., the American-Israeli ambilocal complex/academic establishment to sever ourselves from: “University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne protesters have encircled police using reinforced banners & signs” (source tweet: Escalate Network, 2024) is one, but also the students of Harvard (an establishment school if ever there was one):

(source tweet: Harvxrd Palestine Solidarity Committee)

Protests are always violent because the state always treats liberation with violence. To that, we must become a pandemic to the elite—united on every continent, a collective thorn in the side of empire-in-disguise. As such, I provide not just my book or this chapter, but my song as unbroken and unbowed, raising my fist with my friends all around the world (sung despite my fear mechanisms telling me not to, for fear of angering Jadis’ shadow haunting me)! Here goes:

Quoth the Raven (death from the skies, rebellion writ on napkins), “I’m thought and rememory! Full of trauma, appetite and rage, my spells are orgasms! My hexes reek of power that can peel paint, strip peaches of their skin—to send your toenails growing inward, you mess with me! I shapeshift and impart fatal knowledge! I am Ileana, hear me roar! I am Revana, strong and brave! I am Persephone, daughter of Melody, granddaughter of Ellen, great-granddaughter of Mildred, the teeth in the night, the Queen of the Night, Titania and Tamora, and you do not scare me! ‘I feel the universe within me; I am a part of the cosmos, its energy flows through me […] AND I AM THAT FORCE! I AM THAT POWER! KNEEL BEFORE YOUR MASTER!’ (Frank Langella ain’t got nothin’ on me, babes)! I eat capital, fart incense (cinnamon) and shit rainbows! My nipples are like weapons (that lactate ironically), my clothes are see-thru, my thong small (and cute), my legs hairy with Lilith’s “stockings.” I play with dolls and swords, make Zelda butch and Link gay! I am the femboy you wish you had! The pillow princess* you’ll never top! I have survived Majora’s moon and through it wield a power too great and terrible for you to imagine, cursing you with madness and confusion! I am the weirdest boner! The pain in the ass (that you like)! Touch me and I touch you back—become glass, darkness visible, a quagmire to envelope you and expose your greatest flaws (a lack of compassion, game, dress sense, etc)! I am the spectre of Gay Marx, a black swan getting you and your little dog, too! I’m disco-in-disguise, from The Beach Boys to Joy Division to yours truly! I’m rock ‘n roll, Satanism, Metroidvania, the pussy on the chainwax! You’ll never own me, never exterminate me, incels; I’ll never rule the universe with you, I’ll fuck your wife and make her gay! I’ll trans your kids and make them disobedient! You killed my mother, prepare to die! Wind, fire, all that kind of thing! Abra-fucking-kadabra, bitch! Get dunked on!”

*E.g., Zeuhl, in grad school—horny but wanting me to fuck them and lying back as I gently gave them a “medicinal injection (of hot sweet love”): “I was soooo sick!” they’d remember the event, “but I wanted you to fuck me anyways!

“There are only so many rhymes”; i.e., so many ways to say to a Nazi, “Fuck you, I’d rather be hunted for being myself than ‘safe’ like you and those of you that suck up to the state, Judas!” This rat-bird mischief manifests in the natural-material world—from Matthew Lewis to Ridley Scott to me, dunking on Kirby and saving the little fucker from people like Marilyn Manson, Maynard James Keenan and people who police their platforms and the world as exclusively their place to make art; i.e., as a socio-political statement upholding the status quo in small.

This includes the serious risk of standard-issue Liberals masquerading as “progressives” to hide their own fascist elements; e.g., Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posturing as “radical” to make her presence felt, but then rubbing elbows with Biden. She’s saying “eat the rich” but then eating with them: to have her cake and eat it, too. It dilutes movements, gentrifying radical politics the way that establishment politics always do (recuperation). But likewise, you don’t have to be a full-time activist who dies for the Cause (re: Che Guevara) to do a rebellion. You just have to call the President and his ilk for what they are: immoral, Israel-coddling imperialists—the irony of Biden getting elected being that Liberal-presenting power structures stalled rebellion as performed by American progressives on campus and elsewhere in the middle class.

As usual, it’s a proletarian Children’s Crusade—the wide-eyed college kids doing the work, not the adults[8a] in the room (e.g., these Poly Cal kids fighting shield-to-shield to with the cops, holding onto each other so the pigs don’t pull them away from the group [source tweet: Call Walsh, April 29th, 2024]. Its protection from the state’s zombie enforcers—an echo of the undead taking to the streets, from The Monk to Les Miserables to The Passion of Joan of Arc). The kids aren’t alright because mommy’s browbeaten and daddy’s a rapist, but also a cop who starves, imprisons, and beats his own children for “being naughty”: “They stand should to shoulder for as far as the eye can see. The very Earth must be crying out from the damnable weight of them!” It’s eugenics, of the Imperial Boomerang coming back around, dressed up as parent/schoolteacher played by undercover cop (de facto vigilantism except universities are official institutions with established socio-material ties to the state and the elite). They take and take and take, at the cost of those who serve them as much as those who don’t; e.g., Prince Vegeta’s dying declaration, “He said he would kill my father if I didn’t obey him; we did everything he asked and more, but he killed him anyway!” The state always takes from positions of extreme advantage—of ultimatum and lies. It is the abusive parent made hyperreal, a cruel god lording over the Earth. Sound familiar? The Greeks predicted the future with that one!

If this isn’t proof that the American government needs to be dismantled and replaced with an anarcho-Communist horizontally arranged form (“land back”), then what is? Saturn will devour his young—is devouring his young—so Medusa needs to come forward and kick the old fucker in the balls; i.e., to strike them where their power is consolidated: soft power and the Superstructure, which—wouldn’t you know it—is just my game! You want someone loquacious, or someone who’ll throw down for you and watch you back when it counts? I gotchu, babes!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Like Meatloaf, it’s all very bombastic, repetitive and loud—a rap battle of the sexes (and gender), no? But all the world’s a stage, and the half-real stage is where we always make our stand! Capital manufactures conflict through false binaries; humanizing monsters through ironic calls to arms remains an appeal to those who dehumanize us on a regular basis. To that, Capitalism isn’t something you can defeat through dumb force, lovelies, but clever transgression and subversion that looks and sounds “dumb” (I’m just a dumb Dutch girl, I don’t know nothin’! Right, Grandpa van der Waard?); i.e., changing how people see the world through yourself as a tremendous altering force.

We must remember that empathy is only radical—only a “myth”—because the state (and Capitalist Realism) treat it as such. The most vituperative, bloodthirsty and self-righteous/self-deceiving person isn’t the fascist, then; it’s the American Liberal as someone we must challenge with our own fire to fight theirs with. What are they silent about? We must expose and put that on blast, “to start a thing.” Our cake is moist and we go to Rebel Town (civil war splitting us into doubles against each other by state). We’re the sum of existence, wouldn’t change it if we could (the butterfly effect ‘n all that). We find our companions in the killing fields, speaking through torment, anguish and peril, but also twinkling glee and delight: to break the Torment Nexus as the state’s Precious Thing to smash to bits.

This includes hysteria as a teaching agent/chaotic source of pride and monstrous self-worth healing from patriarchal instruction: kill the alien; e.g., the cordyceps virus from Hollow Knight being both neoliberal dogma (a threat to overcome by monomythic force) and Mother Nature’s revenge (the Archaic Mother) against the Pale King (the Man) for conducting genocide against something that capital, by virtue of profit, cannot afford to understand. Per Cartesian edicts, nature is always monstrous-feminine, is always the zombie, is always furious; but the panicked system’s purging of any harmful waste (shit) is the planet trying to heal itself, aided by its symbols and stewards that canonizers will always try to colonize, and which per the infernal concentric pattern must be entered and faced by exposing the usual hero as the Great Destroyer’s little bitch, their blood sacrifice who thinks he’s bad. This “one simple trick” is the Aegis reclaimed by us, something the elite (and their proponents) can never monopolize: “You and your kind are dust, and you only have yourselves to blame!”

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

We can reclaim our childlike joy and connection to such things; i.e., from the heart, but through expertise, through/of the monstrous-feminine as nurturing towards our wounded/missing empathy and humanity (our impostor syndrome and piece-of-shit’s lack of value in all directions)! Forget me; there’s a dark slutty wizard in all of us, and the best magic is the practical, sexy kind (“the blackest magic, my soul swims in it”)—e.g., our bodies as abjected by others and which we reclaim (with our “dumpers”); i.e., liberation through iconoclasm a psychosexual act of mind games that titillate through sexy androgynous showmanship: the dark mistress, the detective, the Amazon, the whore, the Medusa, the mommy dom (my own character, Ileana Sanda, may have been Queen of the Night and specialized in spatial magics—in warping space-time—but she loved stage magic). And that, like everything else, becomes something old that we can reinvent (above) as the Gothic does: parthenogenically through backwards (retrospective) fertilization (fusion) and division (fission)—my writing style, in other words, synergizing sex, work and synthesis for funsies (fucking during a self-induced fugue state).

(artist: Noe-Leyva)

Keeping that in mind, let’s face a couple smaller reflections before Volume Two, part two opens grave-like before you (Shakespeare’s “maw of death”); i.e., when we dive into our first Monster Module: the Undead (good things come to those who wait)! In other words, let’s sleep on it (only a catnap, I promise)—ruminate, and then watch what dreams may come. To move forward, we must face the past again (we just did, but what’s next is a transitional segment, not a symposium, so calm your tits). Onto “Halfway There: Between Modules!”

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Footnotes

[1] With Zeuhl once waking up in the middle of the night, in England, to find me sitting at my laptop—in the dark with my back to them, staring at “ASMR – Alien: Isolation – Nap Time near a Computer Console” (2018); i.e., dreaming while awake, in-tune with a movement they helped introduce me (ASMR) to and would, at times, observe me as I slept, jotting down the weird things I said in my sleep: “And you have to be careful when you use it in the swamp, and there are warlocks!” To think how funny it is that something said by me in passing while I wasn’t even awake—after playing Hollow Knight on my laptop (which Zeuhl would accidently murder like Companion Cube, spilling Uncle Ben’s rice sauce on the old machine to thoroughly “brick” it)—would become a de facto slogan for a passage in my book (specifically in Volume Zero, I won’t say where). All our yesterdays…

[2] The call-and-response, rise and fall of queer-drenched ecstasy—as something to orgasmically croon, mid-rapture, then come down from and into the lonely grave that is life in America and Great Britain. Like a bath of hellfire, the call of the void becomes something to tempt through morbid curiosity and observation, mid-session.

[3] E.g., Constance and I fucked to Slayer’s “Black Magic” (1983).

[4] At my alma mater, Eastern Michigan University:  “EMU 2017 Symposium Script: Frederic Jameson and the Art of Lying.”

[5] For the 14th IGA conference, in Manchester, England: “IGA 2018 Script—All that We’re Told In the Eternal Shadow (within Shadows) of the Hypernormal, Worldwide“; for the 15th IGA Conference, in Chicago: “Always More: A History of Gothic Motion from the Metroidvania Speedrunner” (2019).

[6] For Sheffield Gothic’s Reimagining the Gothic with a Vengeance, Vol 5: Returns, Revenge, Reckonings, 2019: “More My Speed”: The Tempo of Gothic Affect in a Ludic Framework.”

[7] The video I scripted, recorded and edited for “More My Speed,” which Sheffield Gothic played in my stead.

[7a] In true settler-colonial fashion, the white savior is a badly disguised arms broker and fashion statement: “a family defending ‘his’ home from ‘alien’ forces” while aping videogames as a liminal enterprise; i.e., copaganda and the Military Industrial Complex inside a police state when the Imperial Boomerang sails home. It’s the false-flag casus beli for chudwads everywhere—a deception (and profit margin) for weird canonical nerds to aspire to, not critique: stochastic terrorism as an opportunistic product/content brand—one that apes the age-old monomythic, “might makes right” Imperialism to serve Patriarchal Capitalism by policing its Realism with violence (sex and force). Such kingly xenophobia is both dogmatized and very, very lethal.

(source: 1ShotTV’s “BEST Home Defense Shotgun Ammo??? (BIRDSHOT vs BUCKSHOT vs SLUG),” 2024)

I hate men like these guys but I hate the ideology (and Capitalism) more; i.e., profiting off moral panic and persecution mania by opportunistically selling guns during a gold rush, one of us-versus-them (again, we’re the gold: as recipients and givers of state violence, mid-collapse). As Helen Slater said in The Legend of Billie Jean (1985): “You’re a pig! You don’t even know what a pig you are!” Fuckin’ oath, sis!

[8] The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies and Dr. Niall Gillespie (dick): “Survival-Horror in Blood (1997): the Weaponized Affect of the Gothic FPS” (2019).

[8a] There are exceptions; e.g., Caitlin Johnstone’s April 28th tweet (abridged, 2024):

This world is so sick because nobody takes responsibility for the things that are happening in it. The rich and powerful shore up more and more wealth and power while offloading the responsibility for it onto others. They destroy the biosphere while offloading the consequences onto ordinary people, while telling us we just need to ride our bikes more and consume less in order to fix the problem. They start wars and back genocides abroad while refusing to provide for the needful at home, and if you complain they tell you you just need to vote harder next election. They take all of the power and none of the responsibility.

We can’t have a healthy world until we reverse this dynamic, and like all matters concerning responsibility that means it begins with the face in the mirror. We all need to step up to the plate and take responsibility for turning this catastrophe around, and in 2024 that means starting with the genocide our own governments are actively facilitating.

We need to unite arm-in-arm, internalizing not just the rhetoric, but the emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness such praxis synthesizes. Silence against genocide isn’t just self-destruction, but complacency leading to complicity in genocide.

[9] From a screencap, because I want an image of the webpage, for proof; re: Persephone van der Waard’s Quora answer to “How easy is it to get into Manchester Metropolitan University?” (2019). Access the original file on my Google Drive.

[10] From EMU milking me for more credits, forcing me to do an independent study by finding a free instructor (ol’ Neufeld turned me down, as did several others); i.e., with David Calonne that pointed me towards Rudolph Otto and The Idea of the Holy (1917) as eventually leading me to write “Method in His Madness: Lovecraft, the Rock and Roll Iconoclast and Buoyant Lead Balloon” (2017). In turn, the acquisition of a research supervision at an undergrad level—and the making of our own class rubric, research goal, and executing it—was actually a lesson unto itself: my graduate program in small, prep for grad school. None of this was structured in any logical, orderly way, of course. All the same, it led me down a long road I’ve already talked about in this book series (from Volume Zero):

This brings us not just to my adulthood but my postgraduate work on ludo- Gothic BDSM, which in 2017 was met with its own barriers. Working under David Calonne, I was only just learning about the Numinous vis-à-vis Rudolph Otto and H.P. Lovecraft and came across an article by Lilia Melani, “Otto on the Numinous” (2003), citing the Gothic as the quest for the Numinous: “It has been suggested that Gothic fiction originated primarily as a quest for the mysterium tremendum” (source). Something about it appealed to my then-closeted kinkster as have previously been titillated by Cameron, Lovecraft and Nintendo (there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write), but also the videogames I was playing at the time: Metroidvania (shortly because I went overseas, my best friend Ginger recommended Axiom Verge and Hollow Knight to me, which I eventually made the topic of my master’s thesis).

Eager to go to grad school and learn more about this exciting thing called “the Numinous,” I looked for places that taught “the Gothic” and was directed by various educators to MMU. Upon going overseas, I swiftly collided painfully against various cultural barriers when trying to express myself (and my inherited, lived trauma) through the Gothic mode as something to relay in academic language. The whole ordeal became counterproductive and traumatic in its own right, requiring me to voice my concerns regarding said baggage in connection to the larger systemic traumas I was seeking to express and overcome; i.e., by facing my own painful past in its totality. This meant coming up with a solution through ludo-Gothic BDSM, which in turn meant forming it into a teachable method for this book; but I first had to deal with my unprocessed trauma from my brief, invalidating stint in academia (four years, from 2014 to 2018, not including submitting to academic journals, attending conferences and applying for PhD programs, which lasted another year).

For me, Gothic media more broadly is cryptomimetic (writing about the ghosts between words), but also whose undead mode of expression is embroiled within academic areas of study that yield hermeneutic limitations due to recency biases and disdain for a holistic approach by academic bigwigs. For instance, I noticed these limitations myself when trying to marry the Gothic to videogames in my own graduate work as cutting-edge. It was a tactic my supervisors and academic superiors resisted, simply because videogames were either totally outside of their realm of experience, or “Metroidvania” wasn’t something that had been academically connected to games within their own fields. That is, speedrunning as a practice/documentary subject was just taking off online in 2018 (Twitch had only existed since 2011); likewise, “ludic-Gothic” wasn’t even a decade-old term at the time, was something that ambitious academics strove to stake new claims within while leaving much to be desired.

For example, the same year I wrote my thesis on Metroidvania, Bernard Perron would sum up the broader Gothic rush in videogame academia in The World of Scary Games: A Study in Videoludic Horror (2018) sans mentioning Metroidvania once:

Horror scholars such as Taylor, Kirkland, Niedenthal, and Krzywinska have therefor come to contextualize games in the older tradition of the Gothic fiction, “one of survival horror’s parents,” as Taylor states in “Gothic Bloodlines in Survival Horror Gaming” (2009). Furthermore, the latter even coined a new term to highlight this origin: “The ludic-gothic is created when the Gothic is transformed by the video game medium, and is a kindred genre to survival horror” […] Video games remediate many aspects of Gothic poetics: [the prevention of mastery, obscured or unreliable visions, scattering of written texts in typical Gothic locations and their lost histories, the encounter and use of anachronistic technologies, etc] (source).

Not only does Perron make no mention of Metroidvania at all, neither do any of the other scholars he cites; nor did my supervisors know what Metroidvania were when

I was researching it (nor I, with me finally settling on a concrete definition in 2021; re: the “Mazes and Labyrinths” abstract). Indeed, Metroidvania—despite being an older genre than survival horror—remains a thoroughly underrepresented area of Gothic videogame studies, and Gothic videogames remain ripe for continued study within our own lives. Indeed, I had to connect the two myself when recognizing a knowledge gap regarding Metroidvania as cryptomimetic media within videogame studies at large; and I have continued to do so as a postgrad writing about mazes and labyrinths in Metroidvania; i.e., as a niche area of study to expand upon within my own daily life beyond academia—by writing about or illustrating Metroidvania outside of conferences, but also interviewing Metroid speedrunners for fun in my “Mazes and Labyrinths” compendium (which we’ll give an example of a little deeper into the subchapter) [source].

In the end, as I shall demonstrate, here, I became more knowledgeable about Metroidvania in my thumb than Perron, Krzywinska, and Taylor, et al, were in their whole body of research. I am the Metroidvania master, motherfuckers! Is that arrogant of me to say? Fuck you, I’ve earned it, at this point! Anyone who says otherwise can kindly eat a dick.

[11] As Ward Churchill writes in “‘Some People Push Back’: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens” (2005):

The problem is that vengeance is usually framed in terms of “getting even,” a concept which is plainly inapplicable in this instance. As the above data indicate, it would require another 49,996 detonations killing 495,000 more Americans, for the “terrorists” to “break even” for the bombing of Baghdad/extermination of Iraqi children alone. And that’s to achieve “real number” parity. To attain an actual proportional parity of damage – the US is about 15 times as large as Iraq in terms of population, even more in terms of territory – they would, at a minimum, have to blow up about 300,000 more buildings and kill something on the order of 7.5 million people (source).

The establishment is centrist, meaning it perpetuates conflict as orderly. There must always be an American and a Nazi, a white knight and black, but also a Communist to conflate as a Nazi to obscure class war. There’s lots of syndromes at work, here—mirror and compartment, but also virgin/whore and white knight. In short, the state’s moderates introduce and arbitrate a paradox of politeness that offers empowerment fantasies that are unironically  violent and class dormant/traitorous. They uphold the status quo’s genocide, rescuing a false equivalency (a fallen paradise) from its own rape as something to routinely bring about, arrive too late and then redeem through revenge. It’s Marx’s tragedy and farce, our parody and pastiche oscillating between degrees of irony and faith.

[11a] In short, the moderate can speak the truth through hilarious gags, but must always reel things in; e.g., Dragnet‘s 1987 camping of police shows and moral panic (“P.A.G.A.N.S.! People Against Goodness and Normalcy!” doing the goat dance and having sex with the Virgin Connie Swail!) before regressing to copaganda itself (with a community scapegoat: the false preacher). This can become aware of its own empty loop, too—e.g., Gloryhammer’s “The Unicorn Invasion of Dundee” (2014)—but this merely outlines the same historical-material cycle inside one phase of itself:

Down from the mountains
And across the river Tay
An army of undead unicorns
Are riding into the fray

Fireballs and lightning are raining from the sky
Chaos and bloodshed while all the people die
In this epic battle begins the final war
Tragedy will strike this day, prepare thee for
The unicorn invasion of Dundee

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

The beautiful princess was raped
And taken to prison with cry
Angus McFife swears a mighty oath
“I will make Zargothrax die!”

The forces of darkness
Are invading proud Dundee
They must find a hero
To save its destiny

[…]

And an ominous shadow fell over the battlefield
As the evil wizard Zargothrax rode in the once mighty city of Dundee
Atop an undead unicorn of war
To enthrone himself as its new dark master! (source: Genius)

Instead of challenging the state, such blank theatrics become the myopic order of business—something to repeat and cash in on by de facto cops doing what cops always do: defend property for the elite; i.e., in all media forms utilizing the modern-day monomyth’s various cartographic, us-versus-them refrains to benefit the colonizer group playing the stage wizard, the critic, the victim. Again, it’s white boy disease, through and through. They let the princess get raped, then swoop in, “rescue” her (from their friend-in-disguise, playing the fascist) to marry her off. They all suck, but the paladin is the worst because he’s hypocritical and genocidal, rapacious—the false friend.

[12] From “The Reflecting God” off Antichrist Superstar (1996). Produced by Trent Reznor (to give the music its industrial sound). When Jadis and I listened to this, Tool’s Undertow (1993) and similar music, we looked on such nostalgia fondly. It’s possible to do both—proven by me and Jadis enjoying the high as children do, but also survivors of abuse: “Each thing I show you is a piece of my death!”

That being said, capitalizing on being a cynic, as Maynard from Tool does in “Ænema” (1996) should be wholly discouraged:

Some say the end is near
Some say we’ll see Armageddon soon
I certainly hope we will
I sure could use a vacation from this (source: Genius)

This is fascist rhetoric delivered by white priviliged men, seeing the “end times” as a “vacation” that is anything but a natural disaster (though Capitalism profits off manmade interference assisting in so-called “natural disasters”); it’s an apocalypse to shoot “zombies” with until things “go back to normal.” Except they won’t during state shift, and the fascists and moderates will eat each other (unable to farm or tend the land around them, much like the original American colonists/so-called “Pioneers” were unable to). The only imbeciles who would say this is a self-centered cunt who paradoxically thinks it doesn’t apply to them; i.e., a white boy’s charmed life posturing as doomsayer and preacher cashing in on their own Kool-Aid to sell to the kiddies:

Fret for your figure and
Fret for your latte and
Fret for your lawsuit and
Fret for your hairpiece and
Fret for your Prozac and
Fret for your pilot and
Fret for your contract and
Fret for your car […]

Fuck L. Ron Hubbard and
Fuck all his clones
Fuck all these gun-toting
Hip gangster wannabes […]

Fuck retro anything
Fuck your tattoos
Fuck all you junkies and
Fuck your short memories […]

Here in this hopeless fucking hole we call L.A.
The only way to fix it is to flush it all away
Any fucking time, any fucking day
Learn to swim, I’ll see you down in Arizona bay (ibid.)

For Maynard, the whole city is the same, no distinction between Ron Hubbard (a cult leader) and junkies (a condition, not a disease—generally one experienced by the poor). It’s an incredibly cynical and reductive baseline—not intellectual at all, but the sort of dreck pitched by Hubbard, of all people. The irony is very thick and lost entirely on Maynard (who didn’t know or didn’t care at the time): they’re singing about themselves. Straight white guy disease, I tell ya—now that’s a disease, alright. It’s menticide and apathy to the rotten, eugenicist core!

Case in point, Genius’ annotation writes,

The word Ænima is a portmanteau of the words Enema and Anima.

An enema is a procedure of introducing liquids into the rectum and colon via the anus. Metaphorically, it could refer to a cleansing of another type, such as the nationwide purging described in this song.

The anima refers to one of two primary anthropomorphic archetypes of the unconscious mind in Carl Jung’s school of analytical psychology. In the unconscious of the male, this archetype finds expression as a feminine inner personality: anima; equivalently, in the unconscious of the female it is expressed as a masculine inner personality: animus. It is an archetype of the collective unconscious and it is said to manifest itself by appearing in dreams. It also influences a man’s interactions with women and his attitudes toward them and vice versa for females and the animus (ibid.).

See that “could mean” bit? That’s called “plausible deniability.” Tool doesn’t teach people to read in between the lines; they dogwhistle—i.e., the problem with this is Jung was a quack who hit on a grain of truth that became dogma, all the more likely with such voices airing a very particular kind of dirty laundry in public: genocidal sentiment. Slapping “Jung” on it and vouching for him is a classic academic red herring/disguise, one that generally happens while saying “We’re just exploring our dark feelings”; i.e., as something to commodify and posture in equal measure. The way that Tool is doing it with this song is frankly incredibly reckless and opportunistic, but also gross. This is the epitome of privilege, of posing, of false rebellion (re, Parenti: fascism).

(source)

That moment when you realize that Tool are Nazis (a more recent version of Hawthorne’s Puritan polemic “Young Goodman Brown,” 1835). Fuck me, dead, but also—is it really so hard to believe? Like, for real. You see many black or gay rock bands in the American circuit (for a nice counter-example, listen to King’s X’ 1989 Gretchen Goes to Nebraska—an album with real critical bite and frankly better music)? Just a lot of white “rebels” doing “Roman” salutes, right? The same applies to Maynard (and whoever the other guy is).

I mean, just look at them: faux-intellectuals (I don’t wanna mention the bald head, but so-called “Nazi punks*” are a thing and very much need to be ousted from parallel societies being colonized/gentrified by middle-class white boys) cashing in on fash aesthetic/obscurantism as much as critical thought, calling it wisdom, and bashing their critics all at once (from another song off the same album, “Hooker with a Penis“):

I met a boy wearing Vans, 501s
And a dope Beastie tee, nipple rings
New tattoos that claimed that he
Was OGT, back from ’92, from the first EP

And in between sips of Coke
He told me that he thought we were sellin’ out
Layin’ down, suckin’ up to the man

Well now I’ve got some
Advice for you, little buddy
Before you point the finger
You should know that I’m the man
I’m the man and you’re the man
And he’s the man as well
So you can point that fuckin’ finger up your ass

All you know about me is what I’ve sold ya, dumb fuck
I sold out long before you’d ever even heard my name
I sold my soul to make a record, dip shit
And then you bought one (source: Genius).

Speak truth to those with fragile egos and sometimes the mask slips. In this case, it’s “prison sex”/DARVO mentality (that “boy wearing Vans” really hit the nail on the head, sheesh). Worse, it’s literally a couple hipsters dressing up homophobia (re: “Hooker with a Penis”) and Sodom-and-Gomorrah (re: “Ænima”) rhetoric they think their customers are too stupid to notice (Jadis** loved them, hahaha).

*According to Bay, and I agree, “Johnny Ramone is a boomer who cast off his punk status. Born into the post-war late 1940s, his punk pathos/veneer of world-weariness having none of the legitimacy of his punk brothers and sisters [shortly after 9/11, he said at his 2002 Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame acceptance speech: ‘God bless George Bush and God bless America!’]. To the credit of his wife, he was also a card-carrying Republican.” They go onto add, tangentially, “Russell Brand is apparently attempting to change his name, post-baptism, to escape public scrutiny for his alleged sex crimes; i.e., very similar to Marilyn Manson doing the same—which should speak volumes about what the Church historical does for men!” This, I would argue, includes rock stars as, oddly enough, modern-day versions of what’s known in the Gothic as the Black Penitent, or powerful male figure given protection by the Church as a means of the latter’s saving grace and the former saving face by taking in a powerful lost soul. “Let Jesus fuck you!” indeed.

Of course, the dogma has been subtly updated by Christo-fascists, the latter then and now “calling the cops” (the angel of death) on gay people—i.e., a Satanic-panic hauntology that reinvents the Bible and roll ‘n roll sophistry. These guys, like all fash, know exactly what they’re doing. They don’t say it in plain English, they code it; i.e., in dated psychobabble and thinking they’re clever while pandering to the lowest common denominator—themselves, dogs working for—you guessed it—the Man. I can’t speak to Tool in 2024, but in 1996? Sweet Jesus, they were total fucking posers straight deepthroating capital’s knob (that’s right, Jadis. You couldn’t save Tool from me, either)! Tool are tools without irony!

*The city was smote for refusing to stop idolatry and worship God, not because they had non-missionary sex (though the two are still related, 100%).

**They’re the ones who taught me about Tool to begin with, and the one who fucked off/regressed to their brutal, neoliberal side when they got their dad’s “fuck you” money (so-called “monetary reductionism”—spending money within capital is no more class warfare on its own than a boxing match is).

Don’t be afraid to critique your heroes, kids. Get mad and (always with class consciousness) straight up kill your darlings; kill ’em all (again, figuratively speaking and per Sarkeesian’s adage, of course)! Fuck their legacy and their image! Be forewarned, though: get ready to lose friends. You find out real quick who your friends are when breaking icons (as much through trepidation and angst as rage)! But if that happens, also fear not! Nazis are cunts and you don’t want them as friends anyways. When an abuser leaves you, it’s like taking a big shit: almost always a good thing (I’m channeling Kristeva—roll with it, haha). More to the point, when you stand up for yourself and have boundaries/respect for yourself and others, the real cuties will notice, start to trust and approach you/respond if you approach them. Trust me, babes; I learned from the nymphs!

This is the tenth (and final) part of “The Medieval; or, Monsters, Magic and Myth.” Originally part of an undivided volume—specifically Volume Two of my Sex Positivity (2023) book series—this promo post now belongs to a large-but-redundant sample series called “Brace for Impact“ (2024); i.e., that went on to become its own completed module in Volume Two: the Poetry Module, aka Volume Two, part one. The module was primarily inspired by Harmony Corrupted and divides into over thirteen posts, whose collective chapters/subchapters compile one half of the larger total volume; i.e., Volume Two has three modules—one bigger module for part one (re: the Poetry Module), and two slightly smaller modules (the Monster Modules) for part two—for which the volume halves are roughly equal in size (subject to change).

Update, 5/4/2024: I’m starting a similar book sample series for Volume Two, part two: “Searching for Secrets“ (2024)!

Update, 5/1/2024: Volume Two, part one (the Poetry Module) is out! I wrote a preface for the module along with its debut announcement. Give that a look; then, go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the full module (which will contain additions/corrections these posts will not have)!

Click here to see “Brace for Impact’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 ally shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).

Picking up up from where “Medieval Expression, part three/’Out of this World,’ part two” left off…

“Monsters, Magic and Myth”: Modularity and Class (feat. Jeremy Parish and Sorcha Ní Fhlainn)

There is a world just around the corner of your mind, where reality is an intruder and dreams come true. You may escape into it at will. You need no secret password, magic wand or Aladdin’s lamp; only your own imagination and curiosity… about the things that never were.

—Robert Ingpen and Michael Page, The Encyclopedia of Things That Never Were (1985)

This is the final subchapter of “Medieval Expression” and of the Poetry Module proper. Before we move onto the Monster Modules in Volume Two, part two, we’ll fittingly need to discuss modularity and monster classes more than we already have. Except, in true Gothic fashion, we’ll elide them to achieve more of an agitated, confused gradient—one populated by doubles amid oppositional praxis, thus propelled by dialectical-material strife as something to convey, mid-lesson: of ourselves compared, mirror-like, to others in the same larger professions.

(exhibit 34a1b2b: Artist, top-left: Jeremy Parish; top-right and bottom: Persephone van der Waard. One’s a slut, the other ostensibly ace, but these qualities apply to us both [with art and nudism being ace qualities to talk about sexual things with, and Clarke Kent taking off his cute little glasses to become “Superman”]. Such echoes of the past reflect on who we were/are going to be relative to “are” as a present paradox caught between the two. To that, I’m currently the Metroidvania doctor having fun with the likeness of an old peer I pin up on this proverbial wall [the page] to throw darts [of pure love, I promise] as the succubus might. “And if we shadows have offended, think but this and all is mended”: “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” Or as the succubus said to the priest, Matilda to Ambrosio, or I to Jeremy afterwards [the latter recipients all feeling like they need a cigarette, post-“coitus”]: “All in good fun, babe!” And if they react with violence, at least we went out with a bang!)

We’ll address these each in turn, starting with the Gothic’s lack of restrictions and resistance to canonization; i.e., addressing said canonization in white, straight nerd culture via Jeremy Parish as someone whose Metroidvania expertise first inspired me and who I have since eclipsed: as a queer sex worker’s academic/non-academic voice on Metroidvania in a straight world (videogame academia and weird-nerd culture as thoroughly colonized by now). From there, we’ll outline the dialectical-material arrangement of things, the modular nature of the struggle and its academic paywalls and neoliberal stopgaps with Sorcha Ní Fhlainn* (this subchapter takes no prisoners) the basic monster classes that result and proliferate across space and time, and finally a holistic unit that considers them as a holistic practical unit; i.e., one that proceeds towards Communism as something that never was, but with an unchained liberator-Gothic could still come to pass. This starts with something to take the edge off, a color of the rainbow whose fairylike charm and earthly combinations (of white-trash ho [Cuwu liked to “ho it up,” in their words] and little sophisticate) spices things up:

*Pronounced “Surka neh-lahn.”

(exhibit 34a1b2b: Left: Cuwu reading my copy of Mike Dixon-Kennedy’s Celtic Myth & Legend [1998], their pussy fucked for hours until it became too sore and we had to try anal [note: Before going home, I swapped Celtic Myth for Cuwu’s copy of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. Said swap was instrumental in writing Sex Positivity as it currently exists; i.e., Moore and Patel’s arguments were utterly vital in how I think of Cartesian thought relative to the monstrous-feminine as harvested by capitalistic forces]. Right: Cuwu inspecting my copy of Robert Ingpen and Michael Page’s Encyclopedia of Things That Never Were—one of my favorite books—along with old vintage porno mags Jadis’ father inherited from a friend as a joke, and which Jadis wanted nothing to do with after he died. So I gave them to Cuwu.)

A common paradox in the Gothic is to “write without restrictions” or inhibitions that hold us back, down, in place, and so on. But this is less something to pursue full-bore without any considerations to speak of and more something to apply your usual cautions while keeping an open mind. The Gothic is home to the Numinous and similar such tremendous feelings, but a castle is still a highly architectural place (which, you guessed it, is also a paradox; i.e., the unmappable is less easy to pull off—short of pulling a Finnegan’s Wake[1a] (1939)—than you might be lead to believe). So some structure and some openness are both needed to attain the right balance as fleeting[1] and rare. But it is useful, regardless of when it occurs.

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

The fact remains that if the Gothic didn’t have power then the state wouldn’t regulate illusions, including monsters, as things to play with and perform through paradox; they wouldn’t acknowledge it or waste their time with neoliberal cages (re: academia) sequestering such voices to a privileged few as hording knowledge: in a rat-race “fame game” first, helping people outside academia a distance second (or fourth). As such, people who attack the Gothic unironically (or restrict it to/only contribute towards hopelessly patrician discourse) likewise uphold Capitalism unironically, contributing to its defense (and often in bad faith). So forget Jameson’s quaint and pretty observation that we have “a constitutional inability to imagine Utopia” (from Archaeologies of the Future, 2009); he’s speaking for himself, not us (and snobbily values fantasy and science fiction, miraculously ignoring the fact that the medieval is classically rooted in fantasy and one of the most famous and critically potent Gothic novels is also the first sci-fi novel [re: Frankenstein]; more on Jameson and those like him at the end of the volume). The same goes for academic snobs shamelessly and arrogantly posturing as self-important know-it-alls (for once, I partly agree with something Jadis said: “Honey, they ain’t shit!” Fuckin’ oath, sister! Though we shouldn’t discount their arguments wholesale, however much these people as suck as human beings/communicators; e.g., Foucault’s “Imperial Boomerang” speech, “Il Faut Défendre la Société” made by a predatory sex tourist, plaintiff wanting to abolish age of consent laws in France, and addict to self-destruction and (coercive) sadomasochist sex).

Words are easy to find if you have imagination, especially if your imagination isn’t myopic because it actively resists Capitalist Realism’s usual bullshit. The way out is inside, using imagination through Gothic poetics to set ourselves free. This includes, for example, videogames and heavy metal. It becomes—once mastered—something to brush aside like cobwebs (I wrote this critique of Jeremy Parish and videogames after waking up from a dream—that’s how easy this is for me at this point; I’ve become a real magician at least—a unicorn magician!):

(Trippelgänger’s “Possessor (Official Audio),” 2024).

Videogames have, since the 1980s, been a propaganda mill and scam tied to capital. All media has—gentrified for these purposes in ways that include heavy metal as a means of false corruption; e.g., Ozzy Osbourne selling likenesses of “pure evil” to the nation’s youth, but also likenesses of Ozzy such as Trippelgänger, above. Note the usual similarities to Stranger Things‘ own copycat Red Scare and counterfeit’s usual process of, which we can bring to the fore by summoning the ghost of the counterfeit and letting it speak through us (xenoglossia) to reverse abjection with; i.e., through operatic, neo-medieval hybrids that combine heavy metal, monsters and sex as something to move around and play with: inside of itself mirroring the external world as half-real—something like Metroidvania, no?

This ergodic hermeneutic must take the installment and evolution of neoliberalism into account, and the educational power of games. This is older than video—with Monopoly originally being a critique of capitalism until it lost its irony, but our focus will be on videogames because that’s predominantly our focus group (so-called “gamer” culture) plays; fascists don’t play cards or board games (well, maybe D&D but I digress).

Neoliberalism and home entertainment didn’t really exist until the early 70s (with Atari’s 1972 release for Pong happening on the cusp of the 1973 Oil Crash, and Tolkien—the author of the fantasy cartographic refrain, as I call it—died in 1973, while the subsequence tabletop games of the 1970s would go onto to influence the game developers of the next decade, and the next, and the next…[2a]). Regarding videogames as a neoliberal form of dogma, from the early 80s to the end of the Cold War and beyond, you went from public entertainment devices (arcades) that had a bunch of mostly young male clients cycling through them like a pimped out sex worker… to the 1983 Atari crash and subsequent 1985 smash-shit success of Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. encouraging the widespread sale of videogames in the Gothic’s usual haunt: among middle class. Except this time, the elite wanted in through ways that didn’t exist during the Neo-Gothic revival: television’s as personal property that could funnel in their burgeoning ideology through the disguise of (expensive and highly recursive) games.

From the early days of Space Invaders (1978), Pac-Man (1980) or Donkey Kong (1981) to Mario, then (about seven years—about twelve, if you start from 1973 when the elite began their first experiments with neoliberalism in South America), the usual place of neoliberal business and indoctrination transitioned from single arcade machines to larger amounts of money (from quarters to hundreds of dollars) per customer in each household (where there is more money to be had, and seasonally at that); i.e., a Stepford Wife, purchased for paychecks, not pocket change, and ready to implement the business model into the first generation of what would become the New World Order under neoliberal Capitalism: a world of us-versus-them enforced by neoliberal, monomythic copaganda’s harmful simulations of Amazonomachia to maintain the status quo at a socio material level; re: the shadows of a new republic’s man-cave walls.

In turn, the American middle class (so called “gamer culture”) would gatekeep and safeguard the elite through videogames being an acclimating device to neo-feudal territories to defend in reality (outside of the game world[s] themselves) as capital starts to decay like usual. Meanwhile, the companies making these games have progressively privatized and digitized them to such a degree as to make it easier to pick the pockets of said middle class, leaving them brainwashed, broke and looking for someone to blame—all while being routinely desensitized to us-versus-them violence against a flexible scapegoat refrain; i.e., extending from some combination of open to closed space across numerous themes and genres: from “Mazes to Labyrinths,” “Out of Novels and into Cinema and Metroidvania“! Any counterattack should go beyond something to reference from older works into new ones. Mine are considerable, populous and consistently sex-positive, reclaiming the likes of Castlevania and Metroid to say something iconoclastic with them (versus merely compiling them as Parish largely does; i.e., he spends a lot more time compiling all the games that simply exist instead of making thesis statements that apply to multiple games. Sorcha, by comparison, has thesis arguments that are broader but limits them considerably by specializing in one monster and media type. There are pros and cons to either approach, but especially cons insofar as intersectional solidarity goes. You can’t afford to be critically vacuous or narrow to achieve conscious unity among workers. All forms and arguments must be accounted for).

Media tend to overlap more than stay separate, but we need to intersect and combine them in ways that yield conscious class and cultural characters; i.e., from physical arrangements that help us present them in different exhibits that playfully comment how different texts don’t just imbricate inside of themselves, but like a series of different display pieces, hang out side-by-side in ways that can be combined, given the chance. That’s why the elite want to reduce physical ownership while maximizing labor and wage theft through siphons of these things installed in every American home as prison-like. Once the system is installed, the elite will take as much as possible while giving back as little in return—all while relaying coded instructions that divide workers against each other through the usual us-versus-them fatal nostalgia; i.e., wanting to regress to a place where such a person can be hunted down, then shot with our ragtag band of (mostly white, straight) Radcliffean misfits. It’s a “lynch mob” character that applies to consumption and critique as equally melded and dualistic.

Any presence of such harm is the bigotries of a normalized Puritanism whose regular causalities push outwards to the margins; i.e., to harm people with the least rights, while protecting those who are always protected: white predatory men and their token imitators (a criminal hauntology classically assisted by white cis-het women as the middle-class gatekeepers for these men). Capital needs Nazis to save itself—as scapegoats, but also as witch hunters levying violence against the alien surface of the menace being haunted by good old-fashioned Red Scare. If you can scare and manipulate a gang of pesky kids into isolating and attacking someone, it’s capital punishment that historically prioritizes the myth of good war against labor to defend capital. These little shits are defending Hawkins as a replica hauntology of Pax Americana seen now relative to a Gothic ancestry that—per Hogle—is false but furthered through the process of abjection. Per my arguments, this delivers the usual videogame-style violence against the state’s enemies in a half-real sense; i.e., by alienating workers from the Gothic means to set themselves free, and all while letting the actual killers—white predators (with token offshoots) —free to run about, murdering and raping with impunity (selective punishment during reactive abuse): inside the Imperial Core as a domestic mirror for settler-colonial atrocities overseas. It’s what happened in Western Europe, once upon a time, and it’s what’s happening right now all over the world as capital once again decays (more on this in Volume Three).

“Evil,” then, is the nature of argument as something to wear like a skin, but also a dwarf in giant’s robes, borrowed for fresh purposes (re: Macbeth). We must extend this to theory as something to apply to things like metal, sex and videogames; e.g., from the singular and limited nature of psychoanalysis and what’s going on up in our skull-capped grey matter to something more holistic that accounts for/plays with material conditions outside of ourselves that get into our heads, that release again, and so on. Brains are idea factories that respond to bigger factories privatized by the casualties of dogma. The usual suspects tend to make things that are content and entertainment first and second, arguments third; i.e., a grain-of-sand, pearl-like configuration we need to reverse through what we produce as playful, but for which allegory isn’t so deeply buried as a matter of Gothic discourse: monsters as things to consume, but also wear and perform in ways that always double state forms—as oppositionally as possible on any register.

This brings us to my critique of Jeremy Parish—as someone who has eclipsed him in terms of me being a queer voice regarding Metroidvania; i.e., as the school of rock such liberators call home as much as the unironic jailors: as something to discuss in academic and non-academic terms, during oppositional praxis not just as a dialog but an argument relayed through a dialogic imagination. In true Gothic fashion, I am the dark sexy side to someone like Parish—a space alien from beyond the stars that, funnily enough also calls Earth home, and practices a similar magic, but far darker and gayer than Parish could imagine. I am Medusa’s best revenge: the past of settler colonialism come back to haunt itself by tormenting its potential champions towards a gayer direction than they might lean without my Aegis’ mirrored smile and hug! “Don’t fight it, boyo! I’ll be gentle!”

We can talk about videogames historically, for instance, but must acknowledge them outside of an “impartial” vacuum (re: Jeremy Parish’s many books of “pure history” being fairly indifferent to overt revolutionary politics, but clearly invested in the overall medium as something to house and express with love); i.e., as a living document that is colonized by lookalikes that, like Vecna, look normal on the outside but, point-in-fact, have the privilege and power to say and do the most good or harm: white America and physical published legitimacy as being a fatal portrait when pushing unironic fatal nostalgia into the market and crowding out self-published ironies (often non-physical works; e.g., Sex Positivity as an entirely digital affair you won’t find on Amazon or Goodreads, just my website). However funny it seems, ignorance should not be a dated point of pride to celebrate in the present space and time if you haven’t really changed all that much; i.e., in regards to ongoing societal issues harming people other than yourself. It begs the question: “What is the use of wizardry if it cannot save a unicorn?” My dude, that is what heroes are for! Are you a hero, or just a weird canonical nerd? Shots fired!

(artist: Jeremy Parish)

Likewise, we want to consider how the inevitable theoretical binary manifests on an actual gradient, meaning any monster has a theoretical fash-to-Commie polarity on which art and porn present; and things that seem separate like art and porn, pleasure and pain are less discrete than we care to admit, but ostensibly divide by a variety of factors—colonization, but also one being focused on (versus the other) in a given moment, etc. As such, we must holistically and intersectionally focus on a) producing non-harmful variants that critique harmful variants while b) giving those forced to cruise/exist in the closet a vital means of self-expression regarding their alienation, shame, impostor syndrome, sexual frustration, and desire to wear costumes—masks, suits, clothes—that speak to trauma and imitate others ostensibly “more normal”; i.e., as a means of camouflage, co-existence, cryptonymy and so on. No one is normal; normal is a façade where those benefitting from an abusive system use normality as a mask to defend themselves with—i.e., by attacking the usual victims during a moral panic, as the state routinely enters in and out of decay—in short, when the chickens come home to roost as a matter of opportunity and exploitation during the liminal hauntology of war usual complicit disguises (e.g., the KKK and their ghost hoods going after fags and [excuse the following expression; I’ve censored it to avoid using a slur that doesn’t apply to my lived reality] “sp**ks”).

Sooner or later you have to wake up and take a side… unless the consequences don’t affect you; e.g., both Jeremy and I work on Metroidvania, but unlike him as a white cis-het man, I embraced the term as a point of praxis while exiting the closet. It became a point of my academic expertise/contributions (re: ergodic castle-narrative and ludo-Gothic BDSM), area of study (speedrunning and Metroidvania) and identity as part of the same ongoing equation. In short, I changed—Parish never really did. I can put on a tux and roll with the homies, but I’ll always be a trans woman. To be fair, I was in the closet when this photo was taken (summer, 2019); closeted or not, even if you had someone as close to physically identical to me as you could get—an identical twin, let’s say—I’ll always be who I was, am and “was will be” (speaking to the past, present and future as one, like the Gandaharian mutants from Light Years): trans, thus prone to say things regarding the world as it affects me!

(models: Henri Albert van der Waard IV and Persephone [then Nicholas] van der Waard)

The inverse of the same principle applies to Parish as someone who, while he is a published expert in his field and did important work regarding Metroidvania (which I learned from and started with humble origins[2] before I honestly far eclipsed him in the academic and activist senses, if you ask me), remains largely untouched by the larger struggles as a member of the oppressor group: white, cis-het men. Allies need to be spokespersons in that respect—not just indifferent, dusty old museum curators, but of the group(s)-in-question; otherwise, they’ll always be on the outside, looking in (“It belongs in a museum!” being a white savior’s cry to salvage, collect and study the colonized, postmortem; e.g., the practice of Egyptology after Napoleon largely being one of grave robbery).

In Parish’s case, he even says as much in his Twitter bio: “Media Curator (but not spokesperson).” It’s all nice and tidy but doesn’t really speak to a reality lived in the trenches of conscious, active class and culture war (re: like Tolkien, Cameron, and Lucas, etc). For him, it’s cushy and safe—sterile, sanitary. He doesn’t get involved—is Switzerland, etc. All involve Metroidvania as something that’s largely still a joke to Parish because it combines different things in ways that are historically difficult to market and put one’s name on (or even invigilate; e.g., queer interpretations/representation in academia; i.e., which is why I wrote my PhD independently—to be able to say what I wanted without exclusion and censorship from the usual accommodated fat cats and their neoliberalized institutions hawking their own books over mine); or as Parish himself argues, “‘Metroidvania’ is a stupid word for a wonderful thing” (source). I don’t think the word is stupid at all, but freely admit that white straight dudes are generally allergic to such portmanteaus—a fact evidenced not just by Parish, but his peers; e.g., Scott Sharkey insisting he coined the term (source tweet: evilsharkey, June 1st[3] 2023) but being more embarrassed about it than anything else, years later. Such praxial inertia is not growth, my dudes.

In good faith, let me be crystal clear about these arguments (and also to anticipate the usual Gamergate types looking for yet-another-spectre of Anita Sarkeesian to dogpile): I’m not some jilted trans bitch saying “Parish is a Nazi” and nothing else; I’m recognizing how the image he puts forth—of the tidy-yet-indifferent scholar indexing games in a growing series of publications to puff up his own image/name (versus socialist archivists focusing on public access and labor value/human rights instead of individual brand recognition and monetary value—of catering to corporate, to investors, to police structures and dogma as a business that starts with archiving all of this through one’s practice as a point of praxis that unironically endorses all of these things)—will always be haunted by the potential for such things to denude themselves, overtime, as fash. When push comes to shove, will Parish remove his mask and announce to us fags, “I am one of you/with you, comrades!” Or will he remove it and declare, “You thought it was Jeremy but it was I, DIO!”

That remains to be seen. Trust is earned, in this case (“once-bitten, twice-shy” and all that).

A note to/about Jeremy Parish: We wizards don’t all “know each other.” Jeremy and I have spoken to each other, but only briefly and in a purely professional and passing setting. However, we’re not friends, and his aims and mine—while in the same broader field of study—I think are somewhat different in terms of research goals (which such Venn Diagrams generally allow for): he compiles and collects for its own sake, and I to liberate my comrades. Go figure. I don’t write any of these things about him as a sign of wanton hostility or unchecked revenge, but want to express valid criticism regarding an influential public figure who, like anyone else, is fallible and not above critique; i.e., another darling—one similar to Radcliffe, Tolkien, Cameron and all the rest—that we can figuratively string up, beat with a stick and see what shakes out.

“Figurative” is the operative world, here; don’t go and harass the guy or anything! Save that spice for actual Nazis and war criminals (e.g., J.K. Rowling or Joe Biden)! But all the same, he is the odd man out, and talk is cheap. If, during discourse you want to test the mettle of such persons to see if they’re “one of us,” by all means! They’ll live. If their sex-positive vocabulary during crisis is simply “no comment,” then maybe they’ve earned a few whacks—not to harm them, but wake them up from their class torpor and de-atomize them as having be pulverized by the myopic nature of classic academic and white nerd culture; i.e., relative to gaming as a medium, but also a way of life, a critical voice. —Persephone

 

P.S., Such “hostilities” don’t preclude companionship and romance—e.g., me flirting with Ayla as someone who shares a common interest about Metroidvania as another queer person would—but such workers flirting with each other as a point of practice needs to become a point of expertise through thinking critically about things we all enjoy and love to different degrees (complete with chagrin-inducing typos on my end, in hindsight). See what we do, straight white boys, and try it yourself:

As I say to Ayla afterward, “Doing Communism is such a turn-on and socially enriching!” Her response, “One of my favorite pastimes!” Such a gem (and with such a big dick; I wasn’t kidding about how big she is)! The Gothic is a mode of expression that—in iconoclastic forms—breaks through harmful boundaries and venues of exchange to double them in sex-positive forms. Sometimes, though, this takes a rather big “ram” when exchanging knowledge and essence, forming friendships through things whose discourse has been colonized by the usual suspects for centuries and must be reclaimed during the Internet Age through the free-and-willing partaking of things I’m sure Parish wouldn’t be caught dead doing in public: forbidden fruit of a substantial (and epistemologically nutritious) nature. Taking it back starts with such things as wedded to a fatal nostalgia we reclaim by sucking it anisotropically in the opposite direction—not as a weakness of exposure, but an empowering one that, unto itself, showing what “doing a Gothic Communism [the illustrating mutual consent during praxial synthesis]” is all about—as a joke, a last stand, a rapture, green eggs and ham, and a farce all at once: “Mmm, such delicious, tasty Communism! ‘Taste the Rainbow!'”

(artists: Ms. Reefer & Ayla)

Let’s leave Parish alone (aftercare, remember) and press on! As we do, just remember that, as something whose ironic forms resists canonization[4] and quantification (of the Cartesian sort), the Gothic is yet-another totality in our powerful means of navigating capital’s inherited confusions mid-play: swimming happily through the void not to escape it by going outside, but by transforming capital’s bad, prolific and completely lucrative forgeries into communes from within—to camp canon, thus “make it gay” through the same shared, reclaimed monsters made material (our creative means); i.e., devoting these things to something other than just capital (and profit) through moral panic and abjection.

Except, neither is there some actual outer space full of monsters, but merely the semantic wreckage of language that, through a particular surgical (selective) reassembly of old dead parts, achieves cryptomimesis to comment on the things normally hidden (and unreachable) there; i.e., as expressed by our activities with the dead: writing with them, dancing with them, eating or fucking with them as spectres of various classes and subclasses. Again, it’s a vapor trial, one whose paradoxical sight is felt through things pointedly built to evoke what cannot be expressed all at once, but pieces that must be assembled afterward (like one of my collages) until it clicks: within the narrative of the crypt’s vanishing point (the telltale heart in Poe’s infamous floorboards); i.e., our flagging reserves, but also our sanity (and cum) wavering regarding our place in things: among ancestors and descendants, impostors. These cannot be neatly separated, so the Gothic doesn’t try. Instead, it examines them as they exist—in confusion, disorder and apprehension, moving towards something better by confronting the alien as a historical-material consequence of dialectical-material forces that make us and society sick (sometimes to our actual stomachs).

Canon is sex-coercive, xenophobic and violent by design, presenting monsters as demonized personifications of “pure evil” to gentrify and scapegoat, thus persecute out-groups with using medievalized language during ongoing fascist regressions (moral panics). Historically-materially this attaches itself to punishment of the out-group by a hateful mascot in the eyes of the in-group; i.e., the creation of a counterfeit monster that serves to readily demonize in-group targets, while “outing” and branding them with immediately recognizable and marketable duplicates.

The outcome is routine exclusion, segregation and genocide, but also profit through the assignment and execution of these roles under Capitalism (e.g., academia; re: Parish). This, of course, is the entire point. Canon doesn’t explain evil; it assigns it, forcing a punitive, dogmatic binary upon those the state exploits as compelled outsiders of descending privilege according to various intersecting markers. White women, for example, have one foot on either side of the line—are punished most aggressively when they refuse to submit to male authority by bearing children for the state; on the other hand, people of color are exploited by default, as are disabled persons, non-Christians, the queer community and various ethnic minorities separate or together. Zombies, vampires, goblins and demons, et al, can represent them all to various degrees—in short, whatever fascism or neoliberalism demand through an enforced curriculum.

Conversely, iconoclastic monsters under Gothic Communism dissolve the dividing line by de facto, extracurricular educators: ipso facto voicing worker oppression in favor of their social-sexual rights through dislocated, xenophilic means (outside of hyperreal examples, a monster is generally a symbol of someone—a persona or caricature). But liminal expression occurs through conflict on the surface of and within thresholds. While the fight for basic human, animal and environmental rights is universally moral, thus correct (and the state immoral and incorrect), the complexities of monstrous expression (as we shall see) invite the paradox of doubled forms that fight for or against the state during Amazonomachia (“monster battle” but also monster “castles,” “armies,” “warriors,” “damsels,” etc, as dualistic and poetic in discrete-to-indiscrete forms [e.g., castle-like bodies inside body-like castles] of mise-en-abyme).

The state is the ultimate foe, the great enemy that cannot ever be sided with in order for Gothic Communism to exist; our planet’s bloody history of endless wars and deceptions fought to enrich the elite through nation-states (and other status-quo arrangements of power) should be enough to demonstrate how harmful nation-states (and their police agents) are. All choose the form of the destructor as something to rape Medusa and ultimately themselves during state sponsored Promethean Quests and Faustian bargains; i.e., in pursuit of the Communist, monstrous-feminine Numinous to rape her and slam shut her door, thus their own menticided brains as stuck in Capitalist Realism; e.g., Ghostbusters (above) rejecting Gozer’s Aegis to “save” New York (crossing streams emitting from their “swords” but not touching the swords themselves; that would be gay!): all to exorcise the spirit of queer expression as something that could “never ever possibly destroy [them]” but for which they long to return to and which Bill Murray (a sex pest on and offscreen) and company conflate as madness: “Ray’s gone bye-bye, Egon; what have you got left?” / “I’m sorry, Venkman! I’m terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought!” In short, they feel Gozer’s collectively genderqueer pull/call of the void as one towards liberation from New York as a settler-colonial symbol, Gozer (the whore) denuding the Statue of Liberty to expose a TERF charlatan enabled and encouraged by neoliberal men:

(artist: Axel Ross)

It’s not just that the Ghostbusters are cops who must go into Hell to fuck Medusa silent; they’re cops, whose fatal, police-state nostalgia is, of course, tied to a neoliberal “Golden Age” that never existed, and one where brainwashed people collective sigh as one, “Remember when times were good?” What? You mean before you were born, when the elite robbed people blind and use said illusions to do so more than ever? “Suffer the little children unto me,” indeed!

To that, praxis exists in opposition, using language as dualistic, dialectical material. Courtesy of my own Humanities education, Volume Two, part two will apply ludo-Gothic BDSM far beyond Ghostbusters—instead analyzing oppositional praxis as I was taught as much by my past mentors (this book is all your fault, haha) as myself while at MMU and afterward: through modules!

Volume Two, part two will contain two Humanities-themed modules, each dedicated to a specific monster group as something that goes from undead, demonic or anthropomorphic unto perverse (and delicious) hybrids of these things we can use to “pants” capital and look good doing it (to capital, we cry at them: “Eat my shorts!” before mooning them). That being said, I originally—as in, late 2022/early 2023—wanted to articulate a process of understanding information that involved monsters, but didn’t focus on them: dreams, reflection, vision, blindness, transformation and revival. I have since decided to focus more on the monsters themselves, but some fragments of the original blueprint still remain.

There are two main modules, Undead and Demon. Similar to the Poetry Module, each divides and subdivides, focusing on a particular monster type as liminal expression: zombies; ghosts, vampires and composite bodies; summoned demons; and animal-themed entities and magics (we’ll focus on adult-themed material for these expression types, but also child education later in the primer). All work as Athena’s Aegis does—through dark, potent, and yes, paradoxical reflections towards state trauma as something to face, interrogate and transform during praxial synthesis as a modular holistic exercise that includes official academic elements, but isn’t a slave[5] to them, either! This brings us to Sorcha Ní Fhlainn (see footnote, above). This next little bit (about two paragraphs) is gonna get a little bitter and heated. So strap yourselves in! *Takes a breathe to steady herself, then removes her metaphorical earrings, jewelry and glasses and puts on her knuckle dusters*

Sorcha’s bio on MMU’s website reads: “I foster a particular love of all things rooted in the 1980s (including its music and film scores!). As a history, politics and American Studies graduate I am acutely interested in current affairs, journalism, feminism, US culture and politics, US Presidential history – and I am an Oscars fanatic.” Furthermore, “My approach is to encourage, advise and most importantly impart a love of the subjects I teach” (source). In other words, their fascination with the 1980s verges on hauntological obsession. This isn’t a criticism by itself—in fact, I sympathize, finding my own thing to care about to a similar extent in Metroidvania. Shit, I’ll even go so far as to say that Sorcha’s main problem isn’t their academic work (though “postmodern” is such a dated and vague phrase that doesn’t go hard enough in an anti-capitalist direction)!

Their problem is that they’re an asshole who wants to make a name for themselves writing about a nostalgia/place they romanticize a little too much (to that, Xavi Reyes once pulled me aside and said regarding Sorcha’s uncritical nostalgic attitudes: “The ’80s weren’t this wonderful time!” I think he was talking about being queer vs Satanic Panic and the AIDs crisis, but I don’t want to presume). But I guess the school can’t put that on her webpage: “Loves the ’80s—is an asshole.” Definitely bad optics/a poor return on their investment (a MMU researchers’ job isn’t just to do research, then, but be a face for the school and welcoming element of authority [good cop, bad cop] to play nice for the local student undergrad body and local MAs—not the international students, because once we were at the school, this meant the school had our money and could revoke our visas if they wanted; i.e., our ability to complain, for all intents and purposes, being curtailed by sobering material factors the university definitely didn’t advertise).

Before I throw down the proverbial gauntlet, though, something that needs to be said about monsters classes that overlaps with the class character and analysis of such things on different registers, from different walks of life, countries, continents, generations, etc. In a nutshell, the alien/other is an egregore and egregores are occult simulacra—i.e., the copy of the thing that never existed touching upon ghastly allegories. They act as semi-abstracted, oft-playful expressions of systemic trauma and collective persecution emerging from a collective imagination; i.e., dead bodies, scapegoats, and codified, sublimated elements/effigies of torture, general violence and policed materials, as well as subversions of evil and exploitation through the same language: doubles, or the failure of sublimation during liminal expression—i.e., thresholds and surface tension. We’ll be focusing on two basic classes of egregores

• the undead as a consequence or expression of trauma, its nightmarish return to the living world, and various feeding behaviors that serve a liminal function between the living and the dead
• the sublimation or subversion of demonic, manmade monsters and their associate knowledge, tortures and persecution tied to mad science, the occult and nature (magic and drugs)

while examining how composites walk the tightrope as potentially undead, demonic or both. Whereas composite undead are made from the harvested, abject materials of dead slaves, criminals, and outcasts, composite demons constitute the transformation of bodies—with further distinction being made towards manmade/occult demons and a nature-oriented classification to all of the above: anthropomorphism and the wearing of animal skins/adoption of animalistic shapes as criminal (re: nature-as-monstrous-feminine under a Cartesian, capitalist hegemon). There’s also the magicians, natural philosophers, summoners, detectives et al associated with these egregores’ creation, embodiment, and investigation.

Per Weber, Asprey and I, such things—contrary to academic posturing and grandstanding (don’t make me laugh, Sorcha)—cannot be monopolized by any one institution. Indeed, they have no hope of doing so, are yet another thing that won’t survive state shift, as it approaches; their little monasterial haunts will go up in smoke, like everything else. Am I accelerating the blaze by fiddling like Nero on ghost of “Rome”? Eh, I’m simply a new order of existence and academic, self-important sticks-in-the-mud like Sorcha Ní Fhlainn are just Robert Neville playing the vampire: a legend to relegate to the ignominious annals of an older history/way of doing things (see what I did there, Sorcha?). I’ll be frank: There’s no love lost between me and my checkered academic past, but I seriously doubt Ní Fhlainn—thoroughly alienated/abducted by academia and taken to their little privileged planet, high up in the bourgeoisies’ ivory tower (compared to Jung’s, or hell, mine)—gives two flying fucks what I think; she’s too busy hearing herself talk (so I am, to be fair—the difference is, I actually include and talk to other people outside the halls of power)!

More power to them, I guess; but when asked “who pissed in your Cheerios?” it’s self-serving people like her that I always think of, and who I will happily burn an effigy of when communing with my own dark gods (raised with my friends to spite academia as a whole) regarding the wholesale (and delicious) abdication their legacy. In terms of their raw arguments, you could frankly do far worse than Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, but as a person and activist outside of academia having active class character on the side of students, of workers, the proletariat (all using terms that describe what they do, not shield it like Sorcha’s “postmodernism[5a]” does)? Personally I think they kind of suck, are part of the problem in how they can’t communicate their way out of a wet paper bag to anyone but academics. I can’t change the past (or Ní Fhlainn, for that matter) as far as that goes; but I can transmute and give away the useful things they taught me for free (and not for $145 like your overpriced book, Ní Fhlainn—now I know you’re a comedian). Unlike them, fame was never the point for me, nor preserving the past as a particular isolated hermeneutic (another flaw in academia, I think); helping people was, by any and all means.

(source: “Dr. Sorcha Ní Fhlainn in BBC2 Irish language documentary ‘I Lár an Aonaigh,'” 2019)

And if any of you see it as “just a catfight,” a jilted fag shouting at clouds, or some burnout who never made it, then you’ve missed the point. I’m not the one measuring dicks, here, and I clearly don’t want to be kept in power! For all Sorcha’s station as an academic, I can’t recall anything memorable about them except they couldn’t wait to be out of class, researching or talking with colleagues (oof, I still remember how they’d do that—sticks in my craw). I’m sure I could write a few nice words about some argument they said in some book they wrote, but it’s not my job to rescue them from their own unlikeable personality and air of superiority. I don’t think about them often, but when I do, I don’t like them; in fact, I find the memory of them insufferable. Can’t you tell? No point in lying about it!

Furthermore, I have plenty of academics to refer to so I’m not going to cite  Ní Fhlainn on principle! Per my friend Sandy Norton’s words (someone who actually treated me like a person and not an international student to grit their teeth at): “Rather than ‘needing to invoke’ Foucault, I choose to apply Foucault because of the speculative richness such application offers” (source: “The Imperialism of Theory: A Response to J. Russell Perkin,” 1994). I’m using the same mechanism to intentionally omit Ní Fhlainn and say my own piece about vampires (while invoking Foucault, of course); i.e., because a) my arguments are rich enough on their own with the sources I already have and artwork and muses already involved, and b) I find speaking for myself far more liberating instead of suffering Sorcha speaking for me through their own gentrified texts. To be blunt, my arguments straight up don’t need Ní Fhlainn for me to talk to my friends/associates about vampires in a class-conscious way that actually helps sex workers. Fuck ’em!

A note about Sorcha Ní Fhlainn: While I don’t like them as a person, I also don’t—similar to Jeremy Parish—condone harassing them or committing violence against them (the above image from There Will Be Blood [2007] is a joke, and I’m taking their 2017-2020 ghost to task, more than the person themselves, who I don’t follow anymore; but also, I’m willing to bet I’m still talking about someone who hasn’t changed all that much since I was at MMU). I’m sure plenty of people like Sorcha and want to, I don’t know, do vampire shit together (“Super! Then you’ll have lots to talk about!”).

My takeaway point with them is, you can’t just “be an academic” to synthesize praxis; you have to have friends, and Sorcha and I are not friends. All the same, it’s equally possible for me to dislike someone as much as I do Sorcha and for both of us to carry on much as we have without getting in each other’s way. That’s the nature of synchronicity. I.e., Coleridge was established and couldn’t stand Lewis, but this a) didn’t stop Lewis from looking better in hindsight, and b) for Coleridge’s poems to outlive the sorry politics of the man, himself. Conversely I’m the outsider in this situation, throwing shade Sorcha’s way because I think they’re a dick. Is it a little petty? Maybe, maybe not. But it doesn’t change the fact that catharsis includes airing grievances when oneself and one’s enemies become objects d’art. To that, Sorcha loves the 80s’ imaginary past and I don’t, and if that means we can’t be friends, then so be it; we’re foils in argument, then. Let this animus inspire me to remind the wacky Brit that America—in spite of their gushing opinions to its dated imaginary past—is a settler colony aided by said past’s Capitalist-Realist myopia. It’s all bullshit, my dude—has always been a vehicle for Western Imperialism and genocide used to pacify the middle class and turn them into state cops/content farmers (and if you scratch a moderate/SWERF, a fascist/TERF bleeds)—so kindly pull your head out of your ass. Sláinte!

Simply put, I’m human, babes, and not above communicating my own misgivings regarding academia if it encourages you to try new things (if someone sucks, don’t sweat it; just get new friends). Don’t take that shit to your grave; let it breathe! Everyone has that one teacher in school they can’t fucking stand, but even with Sorcha, they pointed me in the right direction, and more to the point, showed me how not to treat others while at school. So… thanks, I guess?

P.S. (and a long one, at that),

Like Marx’ Eighteenth Brumaire, let’s swivel from tragedy to farce (our ghosts no less polite) while still speaking in the language of ghosts and dreams. I had a dream after writing this section, and wanted to share it, here. As I do, try to think of the Gothic like the mind—extending materially into the visible, everyday world while not being separate from oneself and the things that shape and make up said self and others past-and-present as hopelessly tangled—like writhing orgies/snake balls and music, but also orchestras and their own tone-poem hauntologies reviving different factors of a Neo-Gothic sort; e.g., Uematso’s “Dancing Mad” (1994) as something to rehash through rock-opera pastiche (e.g., The Black Mage’s “Dancing Mad,” 2003): as something to export back and forth synchronistically over space-time, in endless echo and refrain, call and response; i.e., speaking of a grand psychomachy between the player as hero with their dark half, the dancing clown wanting to destroy the world in-text and loving it (a puppet of the emperor and eventually his master and, without a support group, spiraling out of control to fatal extremes). The Gothic is writ in disintegration inherited. Sometimes, these “self-destructive” reflections are furious; others, curiously “caked-out” (the two aren’t mutually exclusive, mind you): art about people with art, back and forth. “Baby got back,” indeed! Sometimes, a particular revival is someone’s favorite.

(artist: George Roux)

It’s like Bach’s Major/minor conversions (the angel and devil duking it out, fugue-style, through his baroque organ pipes) in a musical refrain; i.e., one felt on multiple registers regarding tremendous feelings (a Gothic staple) expressing warring forces relaid, as is tradition, through rape and war, but also sex and force with an operatic “rape” castle likeness (re: Lewis and Radcliffe’s oppositional gendered perspectives): “Toccata in d minor” in quotes. Such a “feel” is something to “cop” (a modern theft and revival of Bach’s most famous piece—at least, in horror cinema) as something Castlevania took to heart based on older circuits circulating the codified angst—of our resident “mad lad,” Kefka, delighting at the torture and enslavement of Terra (making her like him, under the thrall of the elite, but in a way Terra could ultimately escape—by removing the hypnotic headdress; i.e., much like I did Jadis’ collar and my little double, Alyona, did with Bane’s to help her mother Sigourney [an echo of my mother, of which Alyona also represented both of us] escape bondage, too: me freeing myself, my mother and all the dead-and-future generations from such bullshit). Clearly there’s a divided but nevertheless present presence of trauma that conveys through pastiche as half-real; e.g., the classic Japanese neoliberal refrain—the so-called “final fantasy”—exporting to and from America: a wild 20th century hauntology of fantasy and science fiction, but also Gothic rock operas, of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure [1987] and so-called “boss battles.”

In my case, I grew up on the game, and have my own childhood trauma regarding music as traumatic besides; i.e., both a prison and place to escape inside of itself (where, per Foucault, power and resistance exist in the same space*) that I took with me to MMU, then slammed into Sorcha and the school as a challenging hurdle (to say the least).

*I.e., as an aesthetic that speaks to all manner of performances; e.g., leather daddies:

the multiplicity of power and for ambivalent interaction of resistance and oppression in Tom’s drawings. Tom’s pictures draw attention to an idea, derived from Michel Foucault, that power and resistance are to be found in one and the same place. Although ways in which these images are used may give rise to subversive meanings they also circulate racist, sexist, and fascist discourses that contradict their potentially radical meanings. Indeed, the problem with the transgressive pleasures is that transgression may help to sustain the limits that are supposed to be crossed and deconstructed by a transgressor (source: “Dressing Up in Power: Tom of Finland and Gay Male Body Politics,” 1998).

We’ll apply this to vampires ourselves, in Volume Two, part two.

In short, such stories are fractally recursive, oscillating and multiplane interactions whose plastic-poetic memories constitute ludo-Gothic BDSM unto themselves—as mnemonically epistolary and hermeneutic, but ontological as well: pertaining to memory games/parceled engagement as a complex, at-times-befuddling means of study regarding existence as riddle, as “other”: something to reinvent and re-experience preexisting trauma with in new ouroborotic forms.

When I went to MMU, then, I brought all of this with me, would trigger and express myself openly [as a closeted trans women] regarding sexuality and gender in class as something that, through performative dialogs of rape, generally came up; e.g., Rosemary and Satan’s big cock, and Dr. Lonnie Blake commenting on that, but also the girls in class talking giddily about “crowning” (of giving birth as a cross-examination of sex with big dicks/dildos) to make the male members (all two of us) a little uneasy on the other side of the table, followed by my own commentary—i.e., on my own experiences with Zeuhl and how they were teaching me outside of class that, no, you don’t need a big dick to make someone cum, but also that a big dick can represent, as we have discussed in this book, size difference (which can take on other morphological, cryptomimetic forms of Gothic fetish and cliché—Harukawa, below). These generally execute per feelings of impotency in regards to memories of trauma as partially imaginary based on survived abuse: adjacent to lived experiences of rape that, per Gothic phenomenologies, become their own things to live through, but also discuss on multiple registers during a dialogic imagination; i.e., its intratextual, intertextual, para and meta elements, etc. In the words of Robin Williams, “That’s very deep!” But it’s also the gist (the desire for reversal, to turn the tables for once)! 

(artist: Namio Harukawa; source: Marijn Kruijff’s “Namio Harukawa and His Insatiable Buttocks Fetish,” 2019)

My teachers at MMU had very different reactions to me. Some loved my enthusiasm and said I wrote “like an angel” (Linnie—bless you, babe); others saw me as something of an enigma, one they lost patience with (Xavi, I think, talking about spanking with me [as a form of psychosexual play between partners] as we walked to the bus stop, but not entirely happy or visibly comfortable that I had mentioned it in class); some, like Sorcha, saw me as something control and clamp down on, per academic double standards (indicating, I would think, an element of projection on their part). The paradox was generally of power as allowing certain people—Linnie, as the person who could transgress because they were the head of the Gothic program—and others to control me as someone there to talk and not waste time; i.e., I hadn’t gone through so much planning and bullshit to be infantilized by a control freak playing vampire dress-up right in from of me while being lauded and celebrated for it by the university I had joined precisely not to be censored by! Like BDSM always is, the reality of such exchanges was different as advertised than in practice.

To that, Sorcha and I didn’t always fight, and this current dance is as much had by me of my frustrations with the whole experience as it was with them personally. But too many cooks in the kitchen spoil the broth, and in BDSM parlance, this translates to doms like them forcing a contract onto me I didn’t sign, thus agree to, up front (no, please don’t sit/step on me like that). How could they present it as something to market? And yet, here we are!

In other words, Sorcha didn’t excite my subby side, and my dominant side (as you can see) really doesn’t like them (or the neoliberal train wreck that is MMU’s grad exchange program). Per the Gothic dialogic, however, this isn’t a casualty of argument but merely its processing as I go from day to day in a safe space to work through my shit; i.e., all at once, and regarding multiple registers, mediums, memories and conversations. It’s simply how my mind works, but I haven’t always had the skill or know-how (or friends, proper tutelage) to voice that in ways I could teach as the master does to the pupil: as a system of thought. This is my lesson to Sorcha, from one master to another (“Only a master of evil, Darth!” Damn straight).

So after writing this I had a dream, which I relaid to Ginger as follows (indented for clarity):

I had a lovely dream with a secret twist. Charles Dance was my cello teacher. He played a cello teacher in Hillary and Jackie (1998). I think I was dreaming I was Jacqueline du Pré (the famous British cellist). I used to play cello when I was a little girl, and my teacher (an Alison Badger) taught me to sway as I did; i.e., the idea with the cello being you have to wiggle your body like a snake while sitting down. You’re basically dancing while seated. In the dream, I envisioned that I was abused by my father and Mr. Dance came into the room to scold me: “You have no rhythm to the music!” he chided, smartly (speaking in that curt little way that Charles Dance does). “What are you doing?” I looked up from my cello and said, “My father would touch me; I’m playing wildly to escape that.”

And Mr. Dance looked very sad/panicky and said (also curtly): “As you were, young man [I think I was in the closet, in the dream]” and turned to leave, to go cry in the upstairs bathroom in my grandparents’ house. And I stood, holding my cello and my bow and said to him. “No! Don’t go!” And followed in him to the hall to gaze at him imploringly, holding my cello by its neck, with its fat wooden body swiveling on its built-in stand, touching the ground at my feet. And he paused, hesitated, looked sidelong my way but not entirely at me, nodded and wordlessly spoke, then turned to collect himself in front of the bathroom mirror (rereading this, I’m suddenly thinking of D.H. Lawrence’s “Snake” [1923]: “For he seemed to me again like a king, / Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld, / Now due to be crowned again,” source).

The thing is—and as I said—I used to play cello as a little girl. My teacher said I was very talented, but I had no focus and couldn’t live up to their vision of me. But I could remember playing in the dream, my technique. I ignored the notes on the page and made my own music (which “Mr. Dance” scolded me for); I had experiences in real life like that, and I grew up watching Hillary and Jackie. Jacqueline was kind of rockstar/wild slut in real life, and her sister wrote about being in her shadow in her memoirs, which got turned into a movie, etc.

It feels very validating to have my trans self revision a past (re)memory as “Jackie” (also, I once cried in front of my cello teacher—the same one, Mrs. Badger—but it was because I was sexually frustrated with a girl I was in love with. She replied, “One day you’ll be fending them off with a stick!” How prophetic, Alison).

In turn, I relayed all of these things to Ginger like Milton did: speaking from dreams to process my own shadowy thoughts, taboo desires, repressed anxieties, and buried trauma, etc, to liberate a dark, secret side of myself that I, awake but not aware, was still party to (re: Jung without the sexist psychobabble, but also not the eugenics stuff Maynard James Keenan* didn’t do a good enough job critiquing in “Forty Six & 2,” 1996). Milton didn’t know he was of the devil’s party (re: Jamal Nafi‘), but at this point I most certainly do. But all the same, there’s still surprising elements that only emerge in frames of reference whose hindsight conjures up past memories in the present; i.e., as hauntological dance partners that assume a chimeric assemblage—one of surprisingly cogent and harmonious chaos (a bit like a Gothic castle, in that respect: the dialog not of one chateau, but a warring legion of them as actual and imagined simulacra).

*Which, like a Tool song, goes on forever! Obscurantism and duration, in the absence of direct statements that actually critique capital, become mere stalling tactics/praxial inertia centered around profit and (with Tool, in particular) a form of self-idolatry and marketing of such things as products; i.e., content as “criticism” drained of critical power (which must be reclaimed by those of us who enjoy Tool [and their sick music videos] but hold them, like anyone else, accountable).

The manifestations aren’t a strict prophecy but the mind working through trauma in ways for which I am not always in control. To that, I think said dream neatly conveys my baggage brought with me to England, which I worked through back then by consuming Gothic media: as relayed in modules to me by various instructors, but also by working through theory as something to master and acquire the agency to analyze my own thoughts and experiences; i.e., Sex Positivity regarding the traumas of capital as a historical-material consequence I had—like Nick Bottom—the confused perceptions, but not the skill or academic language to artfully express As such, let me insert this block quote as an argument-within-an-argument, a framed-narrative mise-en-abyme:

The profit motive is Cartesian and fractally recursive, turning men and women into faster, more efficient machines: the hunter as the universal clientele and the prey as the monstrous-feminine, the “gold”/monstrous-feminine bounty to harvest for labor theft disguised as games. It becomes a contest of one-upmanship where both sides throw away their labor value trying to beat each other. Both lose in terms of what the elite win. It’s standard-issue Man-Box purgatory (a school of “prison sex” mentalities). There’s no end to Hell not because it is infinite but because capital’s drive for profit is. This drive turns more things into mechanical puzzles to solve, through us-versus-them, at home and abroad, inside-outside, more enemies, bosses, levels—in short anything you can count or perform the dialectic of the alien sans irony. Forever.

There’s a method to the madness, though—to voicing the ostensibly inexpressible: If I, like Kefka, could destroy the world, how might I do it without harming anyone but communicating harm? In short, how might I poetically invoke what the Gothic has classically done for fags since Sophocles, Shakespeare, Lewis, and so on to Sorcha, Uematso and I, and past versions of my possible-future self: me as the little cello-playing girl in my dream, but also as clown goddess, as “Maria and Draco” (also Uematso), of Daily Doug hearing this stuff as if (similar to me) hearing it all for the first time, again. These sequences of simulacra and commentators commentate with/on half-real voicings trapped in space-time; i.e., as a liminal, hauntological procedure—one whose various dancers enter to join in, transform, take on new shapes, then come and go again as assisted by technology to express the world as it exists: in dialectical-material crisis through an Internet-era marriage of the oral and written tradition, of the Gothic, of the rock opera; e.g., the Algorithm, right on cue, sending me Doug Helvering’s “Classical Composer Reaction/Analysis to DANCING MAD from FINAL FANTASY by Nobuo Uematso | Ep. 766” (2024).

It goes on in tangents, tangles in Russian-doll insertions part of a larger holism that shifts and morphs over space time in my own Gothic chronotopes (these volumes) speaking to smaller and larger projections of castles, of castles, of castles; i.e., as complex, warring statements to myself, my experiences, and the world as something to perceive in ways that yield good praxis: to heal from rape as power abuse. This isn’t something that can be easily taught in a commercial sense, as it takes devotion and a willingness to face, confront and humanize trauma on multiple levels regarding what capital alienates; i.e., my professors seeing me as the alien they sometimes gossiped about (a fact I learned years later, from talking with Dr. Sam Hirst; turns out I had something of a reputation on campus, one the Brits saw as foreign and prurient, thus unwelcome… which I think is them [the Brits, to varying degrees] projecting their own disparate and tangled social-sexual hang-ups [and echoes of Thatcher] onto me. No, thank you!).

Like Borges, these concentric, anisotropic, ergodic, mobile, dancing reflections go on and go into infinity. Sometimes in that hall of mirrors, standing in the shadow of powerful people (female professors or otherwise), we identify with the trauma of others in ways we don’t actively recognize, but like prey marked for/by abuse, pick up on regardless (weird attracts weird, trauma begets trauma, prey recognizes prey amid predatory sensations through calculated risk); I want to project them back onto you: to show you my Aegis as a potent system of thought that gives you the same degree of critical power mid-reflection, -negotiation, -interrogation, etc—in short, as you play with madness as a persuasive dialog to put on the mask and start dancing yourselves for all the world to see:

(exhibit 34a2a1: Artist: Yoshitaka Amano. Terra doubles Kefka—clutched in the grip of empire like the queer man is, but refusing to follow his lead. In the end, he gains the power of a god, but paradoxically would seem to let her and her friends finally put him down [a bit like Stephen King’s It—the 1990 miniseries being fresh enough in public memory that it, like Bach and Gothic media, would have influenced Japanese artists under a neoliberal hegemon]. Capital, then, doesn’t prevent such discussions; but like the owner of a venue, it does force them to exist in nuclei centered within-and-around profit [videogames, but also academic institutions]. As this postscript shows, we often confront them in reflections of reflections—of me on Sorcha through a memory of a likeness of a Japanese composer responding to Stephen King with a “bad” imitation of Bach. Lewis would approve. So would I. The ghost—like Medusa—becomes rude, magnetic, something to punch like M.R. James’ haunted bedsheets but also pull close to you and embrace like a lover.)

In other words, lovelies, we’re all just Terra—a girl in a man’s world, dancing mad—but we’re just as clown-like as Kefka the way that Terra was; i.e., the way that I was relative to her, Kefka, and Sorcha, etc, as coming together in my verse: a personal contribution to the struggles grander Song of Infinity through my confusion of the senses, magical assembly and selective absorption. It won’t change the past, anymore than I can go back in time and speak to Sorcha again (not that I want to); but time is a circle and we can face these things again when they come back around. It’s like a toilet and someone’s left you an upper decker. You gotta recognize that roiling mess in the swirling waters, then find ways to live with it until the water clears; i.e., by virtue of changing the socio-material conditions to avoid such ignominious exploitation in the future. To that, the ghost of Sorcha—the one I’m camping to Hell and back—helped, just as “Jadis” did, or “Kefka,” “Jaqueline Du Pre,” “Mr. Dance,” and so on: by valuing the 80s myopia of Capitalism Realism as something for me—the Metroidvania doctor and resident ho bag—to crack wide open and shove, yolk-like, down “Sorcha’s” gaping throat (slurp it down, now). We see and express this in likenesses of likenesses about likenesses before and after likenesses of likenesses of likenesses—in people, places and things haunted by the spirit of rape, but also spectres of Marx we can feed, free and revive to become active rebellious forces; i.e., even if those we meet and know in life don’t live up to their own Satanic-rebel potential (Sorcha, but also Cuwu, below—someone I think of far more often than MMU’s resident vampire queen); i.e., like something of something exchanged and growing into its own dark spirit, those touched by darkness speaking in/with darkness; e.g., from Sorcha to me, to Jadis to me, to me from Cuwu reflecting back on the little girl I dreamed of earlier as jamming out, Jackie-style, to Tool’s odd, at times pretentious, esoteric prophecy:

(artist: Cuwu)

See my shadow changing
Stretching up and over me
Soften this old armor
Hoping I can clear the way by
Stepping through my shadow
Coming out the other side
Step into the shadow
Forty six and two are just ahead of me (source: Genius).

Or as GLaDOS puts it, “But there’s no sense crying over every mistake! / We just keep on trying until we run out of cake!” (“Still Alive,” 2007). You can’t kill Medusa, but her avatar’s “cake” does eventually (and often) “run out” (insofar as its class character—as a means of performance actively done by the holder of the cake—doesn’t always last/goes stale and, like Marx‘ ghost, must be camped again/made gay anew when gunning for the cake of capital: as something to reclaim from Marie Antoinette and her ilk).

(artist: Cuwu)

To that, I might—as the necromancer does—conjure up Cuwu’s formidable rump/punani to voice my concerns with, but I’m not hiding behind the skirts of little girls, here (I’m in the book plenty enough, as is); to that, this is my voice, Sorcha, and I think you’re a big enough girl that you can handle a little imaginary vendetta/personal argument about you more than directed at you (this isn’t mailed to your doorstep [not that I know where you live] attached to a flaming bag of dogshit, for example). I’m the homewrecker alien reclaiming my sense of agency by critiquing your position defending “home” from valid (and Communist) critiques of capital’s usual nostalgic veils: “Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered I have fought my way here to the castle beyond the Goblin City to take back the child you have stolen, for my will is as strong as yours and my kingdom as great. You have no power over me!”

I was the girl-in-secret ironically (as trans existence [for me] is: a heroine waiting to wake up) and you were “David Bowie” (no codpiece, of course) unironically hogging the stage (not calling you a TERF, but… I still have the shoe if you wanna try it on, Cinderella); yet also the other way around: I the goblin queen and you the sanctimonious white Irish girl (doubled by Connelly’s Irish-American roots) as something to colonize me and my Hellish voice/expertise (even then, my 80s American know-how revealed yours; i.e., you were foreign to my shores, my home—always on the outside, looking in). Are you living rent-free in my head, or like Pat Benatar’s wonderfully slutty crooning in “Prisoner of Love” (1980), something to escape and dunk on, in this one-girl show? It’s not like they could be arsed back then to actually treat me like a person, try as a I might to relay that through a bad, medieval-hand-puppet-style imitation of their own 80s craze (which I equally embody and enjoy as something to one-up them on—”I’m your huckleberry, Johnny Ringo!”):

Cold hard labor, it’s a labor of love
Convicted of crimes, the crimes of passion
Caught in a chain gang, the chain of fools
Solitary confinement, confined by the rules

[…]

Find an escape, a key to the door
I gotta get out, can’t take anymore
Make a clean break, to bury the past
I’ll shed these chains and be free at last (source: Genius).

All spells end (or go into new ones); no wizard can hold the witch in enthrall forever. So from one ’80s girl-wizard to another—from Elphaba to Glinda (you’re totally Glinda: playing “nice” but being the bitch): I think some part of you will get that, thus not want to gag me and my truth during these fireworks (“It takes a wizard to beat a wizard”; i.e., like Luke, a younger Jedi said to an older one: “There is still good in you, I feel it!”). And if you do not listen—want to say it’s “all in my head,” the girl boss gaslighting my truth—then, frankly, I don’t give a damn. “Crom laughs at your Four Winds!” (another reference, and one more for the road: “Choke on it”)! You ain’t got a monopoly on these devices (or their critical power/usage), biznatch!

(exhibit 34a2a2: Dark indulgence is dualistic, dialectical-material, historical-material, recursive, ergodic, castle-narrative, rock opera, Destroyer and maiden: exchanging power as a paradox to perform during class and culture war between likenesses of those who wrong and inspire us however wicked they are, with or without irony. It worked that way for Jadis and I, for Jareth and Sarah, for Maria and Draco—back around to a dragon queen I never cared for but must confess some likeness can be found in hindsight. I’ve tried to undress that scandal in public as gingerly and ace as I can—while still making an object lesson about ludo-Gothic BDSM as inspired partially by Sorcha whether she meant to or not: trauma and confrontation pressed together like panties and pussy, peanut butter and jelly, like theatre and metal as a dialog of doubles doubled by a given performer busking and looking good [e.g., Nacoco Music channeling Gothic fury through kawaii and kowai riffing on the usual endless import/export gradients of exchange—of rock ‘n roll, culture, and value—below].

[source: “X JAPAN[6b] – KURENAI (Twin Guitar Cover),” 2024]

Context matters, and performance always has context. Instead of punching Medusa, we can respond by putting her in quotes; i.e., like a vampiric whore working for the academia pimp, whose agent appears like magic at our doorstep. Their naughty bondage gear concealed by a black trench coat, “death” comes knocking wearing the same costumes and props, extending its hand as if to ask, “May I have this dance?” And I, ever the maiden and the slut, consenting for a moment of folie-a-deux: strutting and fretting an hour on the stage with a walking shadow’s walking shadow. “Do what it takes to step through!” “Don’t fear the reaper!” “Can I play with madness?” all messy assemblages of such refrains; all felt on the charged, dark surface of such royalty and their subjects—i.e., swapping power as people do in ways Foucault [ever the deviant] dreamed up inside and outside the bedroom. I’m taking it back and airing it proudly in public to “better the instruction” not for my own aborted, in-tatters academic pedigree, but for the workers of the world! Get it all out there as something to see, tearing down myopia, reputation and paywall alike.)

Well, that felt good to say! Enough about Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, though (I feel a bit like those guys from Kung Pow! [2002]: hilariously beating up on the obviously-a-mannequin double of the hero)! I think it’s all out of my system (the outing of my abuser my choice in this case and one gladly partook of, cackling as I do: “[Her] flesh blown to smithereens and grilled well done! Now [she’s] the queen of the devils!”) and I have, curiously enough, not been struct down by lightning (“Oh, look! I slapped a king! Did my hand fall from my wrist!” Cunt-punting Radcliffe was one thing but it feels so much better with a living icon having abused me that I can rip a new one. “Hurt, not harm,” haha)! Bitch is deader than Julius Caesar (or some-such catchphrase). So let’s carry on to frying bigger fish, then—by considering the application of such poetics’ power/trauma yourselves, and outline the different types of trauma (and power) at play before devoting the rest of the subchapter to holistic analysis regarding all of these separate things.

First, the Gothic isn’t owned by some fancy school (or professor); it’s yours, so do with it as you please to improve your lives (regardless of stature or origins, any bitch can be bad/the Destroyer onstage: Nacoco Music straight up owning “Painkiller” [1990] in a slutty outfit and Japanese theatre mask)! Print your own, and steal everything poetically that you can; i.e., because nothing under Communism is owned; e.g., like echoes of Seventh Heaven (of Cloud, Tifa and Barrett as our childhood friends) to evoke a nostalgia less fatal and more rebellious borrowed from old parts. Don’t wait for some authority figure to tell you to create, to revive, to rebel, to “Avalanche”: our “fake news,” just in—”‘Midgar’ will be free, is free in our hearts and minds!” No amnesty! No quarter asked (or given)!

(exhibit 34a2a2b: source, left: Seabass_Fiction’s “Thick as a Brick – Jethro Tull (Final Fantasy 7 soundfont),” 2024; right: Burning Realm’s “‘Face The Fire’ – EP 2024” showcasing this deathly senescence, debridement and magical assembly from places magical, real and in-between: from Midgard to Dublin. Haunt capital’s castle-narrative with your own! Make the world in your image during ludo-Gothic BDSM! Raise hell when synthesizing praxis, mid-catharsis!)

Originality and efficacy is as much about combination as it is raw materials (re: Sagan’s “apple pie from scratch”). During oppositional praxis, monsters can be bourgeois or proletarian; e.g., the state as undead versus workers as undead. Regardless of which, monsters under Gothic Communism denote a liminal presence or expression of state trauma; they serve as semi-abstracted, “placeholder” memories thereof, tied to specific, tell-tale metaphors about the state and its fearful, unspoken violence against workers, which it links to the legendary undead, supernatural and animal-fantastic offspring of various human minds. During Capitalist Realism, the mind can become “stuck,” myopically unable to imagine anything beyond the ghost of the counterfeit—the abject slum of a cartoonishly evil Hell for scared-fascinated white people to rock out to and parody back and forth; e.g., Slayer’s cartoonishly reprobate (and conservatively vile) variant, provided for 1980s consumers to peer into and wonder about (and make fun of: Moonic Productions’ “How to Make a BURGER, but It’s SLAYER,” 2023).

(artist: Larry W. Carroll)

“Creating my structure, now I shall reign in blood!” In short, nothing is done within this myopia to imagine a world beyond evil as binarized within colonial norms (such outmoded ideas are concerned with dark worship as something to unironically revel in, rather than as a legitimate activist force critical of capital through the Gothic mode; contrary to what others might tell you, “fun” isn’t mutually exclusive to political activism and critical thought). As such, Milton’s famous expression, “The mind is its own place,” concerns us far less than the iconoclastic egregore’s subversive commentaries on canonical socio-material conditions—as a kind of oft-angry or traumatized pedagogy of the oppressed: the monstrous voices of the unheard speaking out against abuse from beyond the grave or from some other dimension, the wild, etc.

From a dialectical-material standpoint, each monster class exists within a complicated, serialized[6] threshold, one whose various liminal expressions include traditional signifiers of power—i.e., the Numinous according to a king or queen monster followed by progressively “lesser” ranks, like princesses, lieutenants, minions, etc (which codify in ludo-Gothic terms during videogames as neoliberal, monomythic, Cartesian copaganda)—during BDSM activities where power is something to express, exchange and argument about.

Regardless of the potency or divinity of the egregore as an unequal distribution of power/trauma, each conveys a type of power/trauma that sets them apart is being either undead or demonic in the modular sense:

• Zombies (and more importantly their trauma) are targets of power abuse inside the state of exception, expanded by the state towards a select group by a select group (e.g., “zombie” citizens attacked by death squads, wherein the exchange dehumanizes both as givers and receivers of state force).
• Ghosts are either past, mighty conquerors or their victims, presenting as chronotopic markers of trauma and hauntological memories of closure and revenge (e.g., the ghost of the tyrannical king vs the ghost of the angry female victim and her hysteria).
• Composites are manmade “offspring” built to serve and be punished.
• Vampires and supernatural, occult demons are practitioners of abuse, addiction and torture, but also queer ecstasy and rapture (with demons being the infamous keepers and givers of forbidden, Promethean knowledge)
• And anthromorphs are ways of life different from the status quo, existing outside of civilization among nature (often through queer magics and drug use) as come home to roost.

Of course, liminal expression complicates these divisions during oppositional praxis, but the state will always push for legitimate violence, terror and morphological expression (separate and together) against an abject enemy within a colonial, heteronormative binary—i.e., that educates bad play through moral panic and rape culture as endemic to Capitalism.

As for the outwardly human classes that summon/face the monster from persecuted/privileged positions, their existence—whether for or against the state (their class character)—inevitably becomes threatened by the confrontation. Either the persecutor is actually deceiving themselves—is revealed to be an imposter or a victim (re: Autumn Ivy, Parish or Ní Fhlainn)—or the witch, magician, or natural philosopher aligns with the monster as an Indigenous class, marking both as recipients for further colonial violence.

During oppositional praxis, the deliberate humanization of monsters threatens the status quo, whose systemic violence against demonized parties will ramp up canonical propaganda to silence dissidents with. Reshaping the Gothic imagination can challenge these reprisals by redirecting state force in ways they cannot control, only cultivate—i.e., how monsters are viewed inside the Superstructure as continuously reshaped by liminal expression being a chaotic, impossible-to-control force. We don’t want them to control us during oppositional praxis because doing so will recuperate our struggles, defanging our means to express trauma thus prevent us from affecting material conditions for workers’ benefits.

(exhibit 34a2: Artist, top: Michelangelo; right: Lera PI; bottom-left, source: Shimoneta. Monsters—especially female monsters—are things the status quo “forbids” from viewing in daily life, yet conversely demands that people not only look at, but pay for the privilege. Capitalism privatizes this scheme, treating female/monstrous-feminine bodies as shameful, “forbidden fruit” that can simultaneously destroy the onlooker if they openly indulge or consume too much in private.)

For our purposes, Capitalism is a living system of undead-demonic symbolic exchange, one where labor is made into commodities—into labor, into commodities—for profit harvesting nature-as-monstrous-feminine, as alien. Subverting profit through degrowth requires worker solidarity during oppositional exchange; i.e., artists working in solidarity against the state during labor exchanges that synthesize Gothic Communism inside the linguo-material world. Challenging canonical symbols and their privatized forms of exchange challenges vertical power structures upheld by these markers of power and trauma in contested, monstrous language. We fags and sluts gotta kill the darlings of capital playing at rebels (re: Ní Fhlainn).

I want to devote the remainder of this section (eleven pages) to considering the medieval, dialectical-material and modular nature of monsters/the alien as a holistic unit; i.e., in regards to Gothic Communism as a recent proposition (mine) combined by me, and one that frankly has a long road ahead of it.

That is, it’s an uphill battle with the sun in our eyes. And if things devolve into farce while two space bitches shout at each other from vast chasms of space-time (and conflicting points of view), it will be entertaining or at least something to watch. Except, my critical salvos aren’t something to advertise a given approach by virtue of words alone, but a dialogic argument felt and seen as action performed about/with monsters; i.e., whose subsequent calling out of the current paradigm favors a new school of thought versus one that has gone on for decades and doesn’t historically yield much by virtue of its class and hermeneutic limitations (e.g., won’t be that useful, in Ní Fhlainn’s case, if one isn’t a university professor or movie aficionado). You can’t propose something new without having something old to transform, to invade, to convert. Bad-faith or not, such a cake can still be full of shit (“the cake is a lie”); the person who unironically cries, “There go the goddamn brownies!” when you make your own recipe is a cunt, ipso facto: defending the institutions that routinely enslave workers while puffing themselves up as “intellectuals” (full of hot air). As Molly Grue would respond, “Off with ya!”

To this, a poison cake is still poison regardless if you’re the little bride and groom on top, or one of the smaller-to-larger columns all the way down—is still in defense of the same out-of-touch weirdos a lackey comforts with hand puppets, hugs, or some such homosocial displays; i.e., the flying monkey to someone Capitalism has made alien to everyone else on Earth. Even if you don’t own a factory like Mr. Burns does, you’re still a cunt if you’re holding the puppet or (as the floor worker) otherwise remain unable to say a single word of criticism because you’re too scared, stupid and/or proud (with Smithers being the dutiful fag serving the factory-owning overlord as a queernormative Judas); i.e., to the Wizard of Oz having made you their little bitch. So find your own brains, heart and noive, you callow fucks (to whom it may concern)! Don’t wait for some fancy dickwad to hand it out as a reach-around consolation prize after they (or their boss) bends you over and fucks you!

Furthermore, it really doesn’t have to be a tried-and-true Leftist saying these things—e.g., not just my gay ass but Renegade Cut saying “Conservatives get into government, dismantle programs, and then use the now-dismantled programs to prove they don’t work! It’s a con!” (“Frank Grimes—the Cult of Work,” 2021)—but strange bedfellows who, possessing a higher degree of education but also self-interest, suddenly turn on billionaires; e.g., Thunderf00t—a smug pretentious knob towards queer folk in the past (donoteat01’s “Elon Musk’s ‘Loop’ – It’s Bad, Folks,” 2019; timestamp: 2:21)—finding out years later after getting his PhD, that Musk is the cunt who will sell people “like them” (white, American-adjacent [Thunderf00t is British] and straight) down the river to bail out his own shitty business practices.  This isn’t a trick; it’s the Wizard of Oz’ modus operandi under Capitalism (the wizard being endemic to the Emerald City and Oz at large).

It’s awfully rich to see weird canonical nerds like Thunderf00t hypocritically change their tune, forgetting that their own misogynistic baggage poisons the well. All the same, watching a former useful idiot (and insufferably smug twat) like Thunderf00t calling Musk out for his usual bullshit—including having an alt age-regression account on Twitter (“Elon Musk: 3 years to Bankruptcy,” 2024)—is fun to watch. Took you long enough to pull your head out of your ass, my dude! Maybe find another billionaire or Nazi to punch? Take a look at yourself and your old New Atheist friends (supposedly Richard Dawkins is calling himself a “cultural Christian[7]” now)? In other words, I don’t fucking trust you and with good reason, you goon! PhD or not, you’re still a cunt!

No one’s extreme from criticism—no one is safe from my biting Medusa’s tongue—if they fuck with liberation, with sex worker rights, with the world as something we’re supposed to be the stewards of. I don’t care if it’s a tenured university professor from my alma mater or a fellow peer in my raison-d’être, or your usual white, straight STEM nerd content farming a billionaire on YouTube. In other words, it’s the old “I can excuse racism” meme from Community (2009):

Memes exist for multiple reasons; so do sex work, monsters, Athena’s Aegis. For us, it’s to liberate sex workers through iconoclastic art (with Capitalism alienating and sexualizing everything for profit as a genocidal structure).

As always, our focus is sex work. Gothic Communism seeks to understand how Capitalism sexualizes all workers to some degree through canonical monsters, subverting coerced notions of necrophilia, vampiric lust, demonic hedonism and outright bestiality by transforming them into sex-positive forms of erotic art (which concern, not reenact the fucking of corpses, drinking of blood, metaphysical demons, or animals). The elite use monsters to alienate workers from their labor and themselves—their bodies and sexual expression, but also their trauma (which often has a sexual flavor). This impacts workers’ present and future ability to see the past as a liberatory device, which must be regained—i.e., lost ways of seeing what the monsters even are: something to look at in regard to trauma and catharsis, but also respond to with future copies that have a more sex-positive idea in mind.

To make consecutive iterations increasingly friendly to workers requires engaging with the past as depicted through relatable, everyday means: through what is commonly consumed and enjoyed by people as a whole (not just movies, Ní Fhlainn). The Gothic, in this regard, amounts to delicious “pulp” that presents language as it naturally exists: undivided and raw, full of frustratingly technological contradictions and passions that communicate the whole, often by playing with the concepts in various oscillating and profoundly transformative ways (which monsters are prone to invite).

It helps, then, to view egregores not as people who once lived, but what the now-deceased have left behind as potentially never having been alive but could be in the future (Communism). As a hauntological phenomenon, the author’s language/argumentation becomes separated from them at death—can be exhumed and exhibited after-the-fact, but nevertheless communicates things expressed individually as part of a larger interaction: the funerary markers and chronotopic symbols “waking up” for a stroll. In doing so, they intimate something beyond what they can fully express, but whose dialectical-material engagement is a deeper context generally not obvious at first glance.

Cryptomimesis generally causes the immediate visual resemblance to persist, demanding instructional exhibits across generations to differentiate simulacra as for or against the status quo. By identifying these larger, intersecting forces during remediated praxis, violent mistakes that happen through unguided communion with the dead—e.g., Hamlet and his “father’s” ghost leading to him annihilating his entire family, incel-style—can be avoided; this includes demonic persecution and witch hunts fostered by people having the platforms but not the panache to speak accessibly and intersectionally through a pedagogy of the oppressed.

Egregores are ontologically imprecise language that must nevertheless be spoken to, albeit in ways that avoid worker exploitation and genocide; i.e., by identifying hidden traumas that monsters (and their curators, interlocutors) imperfectly represent, versus furthering their associate colonial, heteronormative violence through gentrification (deliberate or not): a sick society and home (the unheimlich) that sees some of their number as monstrous in ways that merit their execution—monsters vs monsters amid oscillating internal-external tensions; e.g., the outsider expressed on the surface of an insider—a foreign plot coming from within during a liminal hauntology of war. Correct-incorrect, inside/outside, etc. The home and its occupants as undead, demonic, and/or animalistic (of nature) all come into play during oppositional praxis.

Development isn’t a zero-sum game with one clear path to emancipation. To this, I want to take my privileged, but hard-fought, formal education (exhibit 34b) and throw Communism into a sexier light—one that a wider audience of marginalized writers, artists and sex workers can use to liberate themselves in different ways without relying on people who aren’t up to the task or equipped for it (re: Paris, Ní Fhlainn, Thunderf00t, etc). I specifically want to introduce them to a secular-humanist style—one that takes colloquial things generally discouraged in modern academic writing (contractions, puns, slang and figures of speech, but also erotic art, social-sexual anecdotes, videogames, play-on-words and figures of speech) and combines them in ways that regular everyday people actually learn from; i.e., ludo-Gothic BDSM and ergodic castle-narrative: by consuming them through the Gothic mode, thus absorbing what it has to offer in whatever arrangements work best.

Doing so abjures conventional academic wisdom in favor of older, less-divided forms revived in a new practice that liberates the Wisdom of the Ancients. To this, I wrote the Monster Modules according to four areas of study present within my own body of work: the Gothic, Marxism, queer studies and ludology—i.e., the Hermeneutic Gothic-Communist Quadfecta. Applied to sex work using our aforementioned Six Rs and Four Gs, the primer cares less about addressing an academic knowledge gap in these fields (or dutifully keeping them separate); instead, it wants to inform a worldly audience of ways they can liberate sex workers through iconoclastic, Gothic-Communist art they themselves can make (without a PhD). The problems of study lie in their privatization and division. Generally hoarded by academics behind neoliberal paywalls (whose elusive, academic books are pricey and often out-of-print), the gnosis of Gothic academia has become frustratingly hidden away. The same division applies to game theory, which academia segregates from the Gothic while keeping both under lock and key (something I tried to undo with my own master’s thesis and which Sex Positivity continues that restorative trend).

Moving forward, I propose a humanist, monstrous-feminine jailbreak: the deliberate freeing and recombining of eclectic schools of thought to help non-accommodated workers respond to the organic, oscillating complexities of the natural-material world. Such was the way of older “Renaissance men,” whose once-ventured betterment of the planet was achieved by combining a variety of disciplines together when expressing themselves (recuperated by Cartesian chudwads, of course). Our approach is modular for the same reason, albeit adjusted for the revival of queer thought in the Internet Age. Like a game with many different moving parts and few clearly defined rules, there’s many different things to recognize from the remediated, transplanted trauma, and we’ll only have time to brush up against ideas that could easily fill up whole volumes on their own. Far from being a distraction, the chaos of this inclusive holism is precisely the point, seeking to acclimate users to an undivided approach to critical, dialectical-material analysis; i.e., one that recuses the alien from Cartesian-dualist predation.

Despite the veneer of order, life—even life under Communism—will be chaotic. Heteronormativity is already a coerced myth, little more than sanctioned violence structured historically around patrilineal descent, nepotism, and genocidal bias that one passes down from father to son (or token slave to token slave); and two, exploits all workers sexually by pushing sex workers, queer people and other marginalized groups into the margins, where it treats them like sexually deviant monsters for TERFs to curb stomp (or look the other way when that happens).

Something we shall see much of in this volume is that monsters are incredibly queer. Iconoclastic ones merely try to subvert the punishment that queer people normally receive for being themselves, often satirizing canonical norms in the process (whose overtly comedic methods we’ll look at more in Volume Three; i.e., parody and pastiche as part of liminal expression during oppositional praxis). Canonically queer existence is allowed, but only at the margins or under service to the elite (re: Smithers). As Ní Fhlainn shows us, enforced division/gentrification is entirely harmful, but also incredibly unproductive and dated when learning how to study the world through monsters in the Internet Age; there is generally more than one thing happening at once, especially within expressions of the human condition as diverse and liminal as class and culture struggle (war) Gothicized. There’s room for tragedy and farce among all the dead generations, but also comedic reflection, intense catharsis and genuine self-expression—i.e., a finding of one’s true voice during the transformative chaos.

And with that, I’ve taken an old superior and inspiration to task in the same breath! “The lesson endeth!”

(exhibit 34b1: Model and photographer: Persephone van der Waard and Zeuhl, in Manchester, 2018. Going to EMU was difficult—a four-hour commute and awful graduation scheme where the damn school tried to milk me for more money despite the English department telling me I had enough credits to graduate.

However, going to MMU for my master’s was a formidable quest all by itself. Before it even started, there were miles of red tape [source: Persephone van der Waard’s Quora answer to “How easy is it to get into Manchester Metropolitan University?” 2019]. But after traveling overseas, I—a Michigan “yank” in King Arthur’s proverbial court—found myself in a silly place where not only did no one use MLA; but articles were paywalled, took weeks to arrive, and had a short half-life! The best way to collect resources was to go to the library or talk with professors. However, most books only had one copy and these would often be checked out for an indeterminate period of time. As for the professors, trying to pin them down was like trying to corner a ghost—they’d pass right through me, glide away across the floor and disappear through the nearest wall to god-knows-where!)

Gothic Communism pointedly views the exploration of the Gothic past as a perpetual, modular dialogue. Happening between imaginations across space and time, it invokes a dialogic imagination where language and study are anything but discrete; they are liminal, with bourgeois and proletarian forms that engage back and forth in opposition. As we conduct our own investigation into the half-real, imaginary past, we’ll likewise oscillate between fields of study and monster types, generally in relation to one another. In doing so, I want you to consider how monstrous creativity can become your superpower in the present—one able to transform the world over time when utilized collectively by emotionally/Gothically intelligent workers united in solidarity against the state and its usual benefactors (white cis-het men and token professors). This can be incredibly empowering for people the state commonly targets, including those with disabilities, or any worker considered “disabled” or less valuable by the status quo while fighting for equality under it: any of these monsters as “made up,” invented and worn in ways that make workers feel self-empowered by using what we have in whatever way is successful, in creative-praxial terms.

For real-life examples of this, consider Beethoven, who was stone-deaf well before he wrote the Ninth, admittedly a bit of an asshole (artist: Kate Beaton) yet also a mere commoner whose most-famous symphony preached universal joy and brotherhood for all humankind[8]; Emily Brontë, forced to adopt a male penname—Ellis Bell—in order to publish Wuthering Heights (1847); or Christy Brown, an Irish writer and painter whose cerebral palsy limited the use of his body to his left foot. For a more recent example, though, look to Moonic Productions—a modern-day polymath whose birth defect, a deformed left hand, left them ostracized by other children growing up. As a teenager, they turned to creative activities, only to realize, in their own words, that “creativity was their superpower” (“My Left Hand,” 2021).

As we move into Volume Two, part two and these different monster personas (and their trauma) are explored per module and throughout Volume Three, I’ll also be applying my own experiences, education and trauma to Fischer’s idea of “Capitalist Realism”: as a creative means of articulating worker emancipation through a reclaimed Gothic imagination, one whose monstrous “rememory” is informed by personal traumas, but also spectres of Marx and oppressed pedagogies that challenge official history in incredibly subversive, exposed, and sometimes-terrifying language. The point isn’t to shock, but challenge and overthrow the historical-material myopia of Capitalist Realism: as the ultimate darkness of a self-imposed ignorance informed by the socio-material world; i.e, to change the material conditions of a bourgeois Base by recultivating the Superstructure through our creative successes and survival stories (re: camping the canon, and the canonizers).

In turn, subversion must happen through the oppressed telling their own stories through reclaimed monstrous language[9] as a humanizing tool, one that grants us the necessary room need to play with our bodies, sexual orientations, and gender identities/performances as separate, flexible categories liberated by the usual police agents and reactionary-to-moderate cops, sell-outs, rogues. Only in this way can we transform the state, the world, and ourselves, bringing workers closer and closer to a natural-material position of equality—a post-scarcity world where things like neoliberalism, fascism, Patriarchy and heteronormativity (and their monstrous, dehumanizing canon) are things of the past.

If capital’s historical materialism creates a gaping imaginary void—one whose myopic darkness and evil are extended into the future as forever decayed and undead—then Proletarian praxis subverts the graveyard by playing with the dead. Doing so is pioneered in smaller pieces and steps by visionary artists who die well before their work can be completed (knock on wood); regardless, the rediscovery of people like Ann Radcliffe or Matthew Lewis postmortem yields future, invented “archaeologies” that help the working public regain their imaginary powers by engaging with the dead of the past as darlings to kill. This constitutional ability—to imagine Utopia beyond Capitalism and its vast, neoliberal illusions—maximizes Jameson’s elaborate strategy of misdirection into a sex-positive, Gothic labor movement he’d ironically want nothing to do with (which we’ll focus on at the end of the primer once we’ve covered the central monster types).

The continued aim, here, is acquiring the Wisdom of the Ancients: to relearn from the past differently than before, transmuting the self-destructive, brain-rotting lessons of yesterday (that Jordan Peterson simultaneously drools over and cries like a baby about—a literal Baby Boomer and accommodated intellectual scared to death of cis-het women, let alone Gay Communists) in favor of a better world than has ever existed; i.e., one that we, as workers, can self-determine/-fashion by playing god in iconoclastic ways: the forgotten poetics of the so-called “dark gods” as a pedagogy of the oppressed, a xenophilic rememory or beautiful lie that presents us as splendidly non-heteronormative. To quote Seneca again, “I’m still learning”; when it comes to death, decay and power—as things to express, satirize and feel curious about, aren’t we all?

(exhibit 34b2a: Model and artist: Ashley Yelhsa as a death fairy surrounded by mushrooms, by Persephone van der Waard; design inspired by Xinaelle [mid-upper-left]. Death is often expressed with a “black” aesthetic, but also various decomposers from different kingdoms. Common ones include insects from the animal kingdom like the wasp, butterfly or scarab, but arguably one of the most famous [and innocent-looking] are mushrooms from the fungi kingdom [which gives the Mushroom Kingdom from Mario something of a pun-like quality—drugs, sex and the Numinous]. It’s also an apt metaphor for yet-another-ingredient to go into the pot that is our book:

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble.
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble [source: “Song of the Witches, from Macbeth].

Keeping with the nature theme, then, fairies are a class of monster that associate with the natural world as spellbinding and deathly. For one, the seats of a fairy circle—those where they’d host their supposed gatherings—were exclusively mushrooms [though not to my knowledge poisonous ones]. Furthermore, as we’ve established with A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Volume One, exhibit 8a/b, the potions of fairies were synonymous with sleep and hedonism; i.e., an ability to transport the consumer to hellish, dynastic spaces of forbidden desire and godly power. Many mushrooms are incredibly toxic to humans, and virtually all of them involve decay in some shape or form [several more famous species also prey on insects; e.g., the cordyceps fungus, which we’ll examine in Volume Two, part two, exhibit 35b]. However, some species of mushroom are hallucinogenic, leading to profound visions when consumed; i.e., visitations of otherworldly sensations upon the viewer having ingesting them—fairy visitors and boons of vitality [e.g., the fairy hearts from Zelda but also whatever else Link could collect in his four glass jars].

It can be rather tricky to say exactly what mushrooms signify at a glance, or the female/monstrous-feminine bodies often associated with them, but combining a fairy with a BDSM aesthetic, villainous color wheel [green and purple] and regal persona lends it a Numinous appearance—powerful, drug-like and fearsome/deathly according to an order of monsters tied to the natural world, but also mushrooms as fearsome in different ways. A queen does what she wants and gets what she wants—an idea alienated by the current order of things as hellish, alien and fetishized; i.e., the monstrous-feminine as simultaneously crowned and chattelized by capital. As discussed in Volume One’s synthesis symposium, Cartesian dualism requires such “coronations” to present nature as weak and strong while harvesting it. Anything outside of the status quo, then, is commercialized inside of it as a highly specific [and seductive] power fantasy whose Western forgeries remain haunted by the ghost of the counterfeit, mid-abjection. Such hauntings, per Capitalist Realism, become synonymous with the end of the world, thus demanding these queens—similar to historical female monarchs—either be yoked by patriarchal forces into fruit to slice up or girl-bossed by them into “think positive” slogans; e.g., “Yass, Queen!” To this, death as regressively symbolized by dark queens [of modern-day fantasy realms] remain something to be curious about and, more to the point, something to learn from and transmute. If you’re genuinely nice to a given “castle,” she’s more likely to open her “doors” and let you inside without anyone getting hurt. A win-win!

As someone who’s been there, trust me, babes: You can learn more from them than your entire time at academia with the queens you find there [through said persons often, like Gandalf, can at least hand you the right books to explore].)

 

(artist: Ashley Yelhsa)

Onto “Facing Death: What I Learned Mastering Metroidvania, thus the Abject 90s (feat. Kirby, Marilyn Manson and Maynard James Keenan)“!

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Footnotes

[1] Likewise, the forces you’re working with can often overstay their welcome; i.e., to be on a roll, but like Sisyphus. During my hypomania for this module, I experienced some familiar but unwelcome disorientation: “Everything sticks to me, my distraction overwhelming. It’s my rambling moment from Dead Poets Society that I always thought was fake. But here I am, doing it. Yet it does me no good if I can’t control it.” Indeed, the whole point of the Numinous is that it can’t be controlled; i.e., Shelley’s fire of the gods. I’m less inclined to essentialize myths and more inclined to think that said fire resists control according to hypermassive forces that, when pressured, apply unequal pressure back onto dissident/subversive elements. It’s destiny through canonical essentialization as a Promethean means of prolonged torture that maintains the status quo—something we have to smile (as Camus says) and take in stride; i.e., including stumbles and pratfalls when camping canon ourselves.

To this, balance is more about application in terms of timing and schedules: to know when to quit, to sleep it off and when to rest and achieve placid tranquility (so not everything I touch, like Midas, turns into words). Instead, we seek release as a means of letting out what builds up inside to overwhelm us. This can mean a great many things, often several at once; e.g., love’s “sweet sting” being of a pleasantly sore pussy after sex, or just as likely the Viking analog coming down after “sex” (rape), drunk on blood, actual drugs, Paganistic bliss, and war frenzy to observe his bloody work. It’s anisotropic in terms of the fact that the flow of power—while playing and performing with monsters, rape and war as combined—can go in either direction, praxially.

As such, ludo-Gothic BDSM is a potent means of interrogating trauma by which to heal one’s home as sick with Capitalism. For me and my voyeurism, for instance, I love to observe the sexual gratification of others; i.e., mutually consensual voyeurism agreed between me and the people letting me watch them. I love being put in that headspace, that altered state of mind: someone else’s shoes; i.e., one where that person feels good. It feels good to occupy a role attached to a real person feeling good in ways that I want to feel, too. I think that speaks to what my book is really about. Healing through social-sexual exchanges like these, but also slipping into different roles to face difficult traumas; i.e., the “rougher stuff” as something to take off the shelf only when absolutely required—to heal tremendously through a dedicated service (for an example of one, refer to exhibit 39a2 in “Transforming Our Zombie Selves,” when Volume Two, part two goes live). As we’ll see with Jadis, there’s certainly no shame in “getting got” with a seasoned pro used to preying on smaller vulnerable people—especially when they catch their flies with honey. It becomes something to recognize, accept and heal from: that we’re not just mortal, but able to fall for/victim to seductive agents who know our ins and outs (our trauma markers) better than we do.

[1a] “But what does it mean?” I asked Xavi Reyes in grad school, to which they replied, “Ah, if you can tell me that, you get a gold star!” Sassy bitch!

[2] My attempts to branch out originally being through YouTube (my account: @PersephonevanderWaard) as a place to make videos about Metroidvania—a practice I largely performed out of grad school alongside my old blog (which I still use), before switching over to erotic art and writing part-time, before devoting myself to my books and illustrations as one-in-the-same with me the author and largely abandoning YouTube due to repeating censorship issues. Still, the history remains, and I’m proud of that work I did, too; it all went towards my current understanding of things through Sex Positivity as a whole:

[2a] The boy-gets-girl formula is as old as the monomyth, but translates from D&D into videogames via the usual imperial language of sex and force—from Donkey Kong (where the hero, Jump Man, is actually the villain) to Jump King (2019), where it (and content [not criticism] about it; e.g., Karl Jobst’s “Jump King’s Biggest Barrier Was Finally Broken!” 2024) is suitably less ironic or critical of the media circuit it contributes towards. Instead, the developers (and speedrunning symbiosis) bank on the sexist headspace of Earthworm Jim (1994) or Dragon’s Lair (1983) to valorize male action; i.e., to conquer Hell as a place to enter then oust false dark kings or monstrous-feminine beings to restore balance to the “natural order” of things: by alienating and fetishizing nature as something to conquer by virtue of traditional male action (force) under Cartesian thought. It’s unironically something that wins the princess as a prize (who apparently is just lying in wait, dressed up like a bimbo* waiting to be taken back to the hero’s bed to be “lanced”).

*There’s nothing wrong with slutty outfits; there’s everything wrong when female/GNC agency is removed to choose outfits that cater to the Male Gaze (as classically white, cis-het) to serve profit like usual (re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Borrowed Robes: The Role of ‘Chosen’ Clothing — Part 1: Female Videogame Characters,” 2019). This does nothing at a systemic level but engender class dormancy and betrayal from the usual breeding grounds for fascism: the middle class, but especially the male middle class as having bought into the quest for mastery as literally “the quickest, straight-line path to sex by reducing nature to trad-wife slut (the virgin and the whore) and biologically essential/female.” It’s so gross!

(artist: Timbo the Champ)

In-game, Jump King literally calls said prize “Smoking Hot Babe”—ostensibly no different than Earth Worm Jim‘s “Princess What’s-Her-Name?” except it’s worse because the princess, this time around, is actually a princess and not a cow in a princess suit. This canonical prostitution doesn’t stay “in-text,” but reflects in how Karl Jobst (re: a man with former fascist ties, as well as being an honest-to-god pickup artist* in the not-too-distant past) valorizes raw manly execution to get to the titular babe as fast as humanly possible. It’s a game for straw dogs, investing so much energy at a hamster wheel that, in the same breath, is gentrifying the practice around heteronormative/monomythic gaming tropes. Simply put, it’s regressive and capitalistic, not satire, because it does absolutely nothing to meaningfully challenge capital—all while actively reducing its target audience to rats in a race chasing the same-old prizes (clones not just of Princess Toadstool, but Princess Peach made extra effusive, sleazy and demure not unlike Arnold’s dream girl in Total Recall… minus the satire), then making them king for a day!

Like Total Recall (the director of that movie loving to critique American culture, but especially power fantasies), the procedure isn’t just lobotomizing but a gold rush (and people like Jobst—the one’s selling the shovels—stand to make a lot of money for themselves). It’s why the kids from Stranger Things both unironically treat Sadie Sink like a piece of meat and support Israeli. It all connects because capital relies on dogma as something to internalize and serve profit on all registers—on and offstage, at home and abroad, by white male predators.

*From r/speedrun: The drama starts in 2021, when a person known as Tomato Anus (we’re off to a great start, I see) severed ties with Karl due to some company Karl kept; i.e., a Neo-Nazi named RWhiteGoose. There’s a lot of messages going back years regarding the server Goose was on, but those are from someone who’s own testimony isn’t the most reliable (a fash). Take a look at them if you want and decide for yourself what to think (Karl was friends with this person for years/frequented the server with other like-minded people). There’s also Karl’s explaining away of his own racist language (the following quote is from Emtech1, on Reddit):

The reason why I struggle to see Karl as a decent person is that some people would bring up their concerns afterwards and Karl would outright lie about the N word having any negative connotations in Australia. I’m Australian too, and this is absolutely not true. Karl is from Queensland by the way which is why that image references several places in that state that used to have or still have the N word in it. That word has historically been used against our natives, and a 30+ year old man, especially one who has an internet presence would know better.

Whatever you think about Goose, he has been very apologetic for the last 3 years and I think he’s made a genuine effort to move in a positive direction. I believe this to be a genuine change in character, and if it isn’t, I’d rather accept someone faking being a changed person than turn my back on a genuine one.

Karl on the other hand has never apologized and instead lied about it. Even worse, once on Discord he was ranting about people accusing him being racist and he brought up his Asian wife as his anti-racist shield. Do I need to mention that Derek Chauvin had an Asian wife? It’s really beyond me that the community continues to ignore this guy’s behavior.

EDIT: Here’s some more receipts of him justifying using the N word, bragging about sleeping with many women, his past of being a pickup artist, him bragging about his “massive cock” and wanting breast implants for his wife. He named his son “Maximus Wong.” I seriously can’t not think this is related to his penis/eggplant obsession.

Apart from all of that, though (which honestly is bad enough), I think the pickup video is the biggest red flag because it’s obviously Karl. Like, he made it and it’s garden-variety sleazy in all the worst, most stereotypical ways. Combine that with his crusader veneer and it doesn’t take long for it all to fall apart (fash disguises generally aren’t very good; they just surround themselves with people as scummy as they are).

I’ve seen the video and honestly it tracks rather well with Karl’s current streamlined (and slightly sanitized-but-still-sexist) approach to games; i.e., he—per the pickup artist approach—treats woman like games: as objectives, things to observe, learn and manipulate in a mechanical, knee-jerk fashion that can then be conquered. And of course, he capitalizes on it as a “free” scheme for which the video-in-question advertises his own book based on “beginner stuff” and having a stripper silhouette on the cover (real classy, dude)—”First one’s free,” in other words. I found it to be really odd, because he kept saying in the video, “Final step, get the hell out of there!” And I’m like, “Dude, that’s bad-faith. But two, why break the ice if you’re just gonna fuck off each and every time? That’s conditioning bad habits!” Maybe don’t take dating advice from a white supremacist who spent his teenage years and twenties speedrunning Goldeneye (1997)? Dude unironically thinks he’s James Bond or some shit.

More to the point, a relationship isn’t to perfect mechanical actions/routes like Jobst explains, thereby bouncing when things inevitably get rough/complicated; it’s to be flexible with someone that you want to relate to on an interpersonal level as equals. Your partner isn’t an adversary to conquer but a peer to treat as human. So Karl’s advice is actually terrible for dating reasons, too, because that’s not what it’s about; for him (and all pickup artists), it’s purely a “headcount” to pile up and use to brag about with other white, cis-het guys. It’s terribly cliché but also cruel. Also, again, his son’s name is apparently Maximus Wong? I can’t verify that, but I’ve seen the Maximus shirt, so at least half of that is true. Like, what the fuck, dude? People like him make the world in their image: through genocide and vanity projects at the expense of nature-as-monstrous-feminine. That’s how white supremacists work; i.e., what Andrew Tate calls “a genetic legacy” while in the same breath making an old sodomy argument that reduces sexuality to action: having sex for reasons other than sexual reproduction is “gay” (The Kavernacle’s “Andrew Tate and Conservative Men now say it is GAY to Like Women,” 2024). They think they’re oh-so-slick, but really they’re just gaming a system that’s made for them to do so. So congratulations, Karl, you are playing life on easy mode!

[3] And to which I respond to (source tweet: Persephone van der Waard, 2023):

Whatever exchanges take place, these are the whirlwind to reap, the chickens coming home to roost on Link’s twinkish head.

[4] The Gothic, like a parasitoid, survives through a dance with death (odd motion), but also an unnatural prolonging of its lifespan inside something that it eats alive and emerges from (waste not, want not). What a lovely metaphor for Gothic-Communist development (see: “The Caterpillar and the Wasp,” 2024).

[5] Sorcha Ní Fhlainn might feature Axel Ross’ iconoclastic painting on the cover of Postmodern Vampires: Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture (2019), but is fairly limited by wanting to be the first of a hopelessly narrow scope of study (much how Creed is—all the more ironic since Ní Fhlainn was the one who first recommend The Monstrous-Feminine to me when I was looking for a graduate supervisor at MMU):

Postmodern Vampires: Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture is the first major study to focus on American cultural history from the vampire’s point of view. Beginning in 1968, Ní Fhlainn argues that vampires move from the margins to the centre of popular culture as representatives of the anxieties and aspirations of their age. Mapping their literary and screen evolution on to the American Presidency, from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump, this essential critical study chronicles the vampire’s blood-ties to distinct socio-political movements and cultural decades in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (source: Amazon).

And while it’s all very fascinating, my dude, let me turn the tables: how can this intuitively translate to sex-positive struggles expressed in non-academic speak (while employing some of the theory)? No sex worker I know is going to refer to your book—not because its heart isn’t in the right place, but because it’s literally closed-off snobbery!

For example, Creed eventually wrote Return of the Monstrous-Feminine in 2022—thirty years after her original book, and one that expanded the critical lens to things other than movies (to actually account for multimedia expression on the Internet). But even then, her follow-up costs—sweet, Jesus—$144.99 in hardcover? What are you printing it on, Creed, solid gold? Both you and Ní Fhlainn have the same problem (with Postmodern Vampires costing $66-$166 on Kindle and $154 hardcover): gentrifying knowledge while simultaneously narrowing it into inaccessible, inapplicable, elitist gnosis squirrelled away in the usual neoliberal monasteries by the usual cognitive estrangement/dissonance, but also establishment. Just as Columbia University students are protesting genocide right now, students at large don’t just historically protest against the state elsewhere; they also protest their own faculty and power centers, too. Like, fuck neoliberals; supporting behavior like that reflects in social activities (Sorcha was a bit of a bully at conferences, too) and publication habits. Such persons literally are sitting on their ideas; i.e., making them hard to access on purpose while students riot! If them’s the breaks at academia, then why the fuck are professors often still there? No, no—don’t get up. Allow me. It’s because they’re accommodated, that’s why!

Excuse my own ríastrad, Sorcha, but I won’t apologize for what’s been a long time coming. That being said, I won’t say what you’re doing here is worthless, either—because I think a narrow, specialized lens is ultimately still part of the larger rainbow (one we shoot from our butts to wrestle, DBZ-style, with capital’s own during Rainbow Capitalism). But from one intellectual vamp to another (and someone who’s learned a lot since her time in your classroom; i.e., where you didn’t want me to openly acknowledge that it doesn’t take supernatural strength the likes of a vampire such as Edward Cullen to give a girl like Bella Swan a bruise during sex): Girl, you’re really behind the curve when it comes to holistic expression!

[6] Queerness generally conveys itself (and survives) through campy theatre, thus humor, as something to take in and take out per outing. With the horror genre—from the days of Lewis and Radcliffe—typically being a serial affair whose ascending numeration oscillates between canon and camp per issue, but in the days of film involves titular numbers (e.g., Halloween 4, 1988) and generally with a vague labeling of “the” + [noun] to grant said noun an air of menace and/or silliness to varying degrees: The Car (1977) as true camp, The Descent (2005) as serious, and The Babysitter (2017) as in on the joke; or in one franchise, Evil Dead 1, 2 and 3, etc (1981, 1987 and 1992).

[6a] No self-respecting (note: functioning) Communist calls themselves a postmodernist. It’s dated academic bullshit from the 1960s and 70s, insofar as people like Derrida put that before active rebellion (he made up for it a bit with Spectres of Marx—thirty years later!). Not to “hand it” to Peterson, then, but there is something ridiculous about academic labels (though failing through his own Red-Scare, “faceless fash” hysteria to describe us Commies in terms we actually use [e.g., “an-Com”]—opting for the usual dogwhistles made hyperbolic: “postmodern neo-Marxist” a malapropism and monolith to assign conspiracy and blame to, thus state violence as something to give and receive).

[6b] This relationship is as much between the critic-as-consumer as the guitar hero [and nudist] virtuosity on display. For example, I love X, my ex recommending them to me as something to review on Rate Your Music, which I dutifully at the time did:

What a fun album! Yes, there’s speed metal rhythm guitars and a roaring singer, but this isn’t Concerto Moon. Instead, the vintage nature of the music allows for battery of ’80s-style trademarks: twin harmonies, unison palm-muting; multiple, varied solos (“Endless Rain” evokes Brian May and Rudolph Schenker; other songs channel Tony MacAlpine, Steve Vai or Vinnie Moore), and ballad-ready steel strings/piano (straight out of a Savatage or Skid Row album). There’s loads of energy to spare, and a muscular, clear-sounding production that really lets the music rock out in all departments.

In this regard, the instrumentalists all pull their weight. “Kurenai,” for example, features busy, tornado drumming and energetic bass playing. The singer is a bit raw, sounding a bit like Doro Pesch (which is a nice switch from the bellowing sort of operatics I envisioned, going in). Equally enjoyable are the compositions, which put out tremendous amounts of energy amid the constant variety. Little repeats over the album, but there’s still plenty of room for a memorable, fist-pumping refrain per song. “Blue Blood,” “Week End” and “X” are all high-octane, chorus-heavy songs—with dozens of small, clever hooks expertly woven into the pummeling rhythm sections.

If you need some breathing room, there’s a couple looser, funner numbers, written more in the spirit of White Lion, Van Halen, or Great White (the album closer sounds like vintage Gamma Ray, but boasts a bit more swagger). “Xclaimation” adds some ethnic flair with world percussion, wind chimes, and obligatory harmonic minor melodies (and some excellent drums and bass). Under three minutes, “Orgasm” is pure, balls-to-the-wall thrash, full of manic fills, double-bass and wild guitars; like the best sex you’ve ever had, it rocks from start to finish.

I loved this album. There’s enough consistency to given the album an overall tone, but enough experimentation to keep things vital and fresh (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “A Time Machine of Rock Heroism,” 2019).

What matters isn’t that my ex sucked and ultimately fucked me over (boy, did they ever), but that they gave me things to constantly engage with, thus keep me sharp; i.e., potential ammunition that continues to be useful to current socio-political struggles they have largely exited the stage regarding. Styles make fights; class and cultural character define flow, form and function during a poetic engagement with the past—i.e., between and of two (or more) unlike things as likenesses (of likenesses) to reclaim through adept and flexible maneuvers: anything that accounts for good showmanship and public appetites, mid-critique, as yet-another performance of a Marxist marquee. To that, ours (Gothic Communism) poetically accounts for monsters, magic and myth—for music, Medusa, etc—as addictive, nostalgic, and medicinal improv as something to evolve into itself again and again; i.e., just what the doctor ordered.

[7] From Rebecca Watson’s ” Richard Dawkins: “Cultural Christian” or Supremacist Bigot?” (2024).

[8] Allison N. Zieg’s “Joyful, Joyful! The Musical Significance of Beethoven’s Ninth” (2022).

[9] Monsters are historically a colonizing device. Something important to consider, then, is how reclaimed language historically takes racial or sexual slurs, etc, and turns them into revolutionary language. Once this happens, the word in question cannot be reverted to its original usage, as this will out the individual; i.e., they will self-report as belonging to a colonizer mindset; e.g., a black person reclaiming the n-word versus a white person wanting to say the same word, or a queer person using the f-slur versus a cis-het person (or calling everything “gay” in a sex-positive sense); but also either oppressed group identifying with a particular monster type. Conversely, the Right and Capitalism more broadly will historically co-opt language of rebellion that was never used by the colonizer group; e.g., “woke.” Unlike reclaimed slurs or demonic language, a historically revolutionary term can be emptied of meaning by associating it as exclusively belonging to a harmful activist group “victimizing” the oppressor class.